"Except for the fact my body's convinced it's about to die. I'll have it convinced otherwise in a minute."
He slicked back his hair, stuck the bamboo pipe in his mouth, and lowered his face into the water. He didn't try to swim yet, just stood there breathing until the experience didn't feel quite so insane. Waves rocked past him on a rush of bubbles and sand. During the lulls, he had an incredibly clear view of the bottom, which was nothing but sandy ridges, twirling seaweed, tiny white shells, and the occasional chunk of pumice. Once he was acclimated, he gave Minn the thumbs up, pushed forward, and swam.
The ground sloped gently away until it was too deep to stand. Within the space of a few kicks of his fins, it suddenly dropped to ten feet deep, becoming a mixture of pale sand, black rock, and gray coral. A school of finger-length fish flashed in the sunlight. As soon as he came within reach, they turned as one and zipped away. He laughed, bubbles tickling his ears, the noise echoing hollowly up the tube.
Now that they'd hit interesting territory, Minn hooked a sharp left, swimming parallel to the shore and toward the long spur of rock that sheltered the bay. The waves were even gentler than along the shore, but hidden currents tugged him in every direction. Once, water sloshed into the top of his tube. He tipped his head the wrong way and sucked down a mouthful of saltwater. He thrust above the surface, sputtering and hacking.
"Water in your pipe?" Minn said, fifteen feet away.
"My lungs, mostly."
"When you feel it getting clogged, just blow out as hard as you can."
"That's scandalous, milady."
Her eyes rolled behind her goggles. "Still warm enough?"
"You're a miracle worker."
They got back to swimming. The sandy floor beneath the surf had been as barren of life as the sands of a desert, but amongst the rocks and coral, creatures sprouted as abundantly as at the tide pools: fish, crabs, anemones, starfish, snails, mussels and all manner of bivalves. And while the fish at the pools of Pocket Cove were largely minnows and fry, those here swam in full schools, multiple species of which were longer than his hand. Eels gulped from crevices. Once, a two-foot gray fish sped below him with a single flick of its tail, sleek as an arrow. He got so caught up watching it he forgot to look for kellevurts.
Minn reminded him of the task at hand by breaking from the surface and plunging straight down. Once she reached the bottom, she picked up a small round object, examined it, and let it fall back to the shelf of coral.
As it turned out, the ocean was absolutely filled with bits of things that were white, black, or somewhere in between; not only were they searching for something exceedingly rare, they were doing so among thousands of false positives. Blays swam up and down, investigating one sighting after another, bringing any snail or shell that remotely resembled the drawings to Minn for inspection. Each time, she shook her head.
They swam all the way to the arm of rock shielding the bay, then turned around and kicked the other direction, positioning themselves further from shore to cover new ground. Or water, as it were. They weren't too concerned about the spacing. Didn't need to cover every square inch. A kellevurt could be anywhere.
Minn's blood-warming trick seemed to fade every hour and a half or so. As soon as Blays began to shiver, he signaled her and they returned to the beach so she could dose them up with another round of nether. When they came in early that afternoon, he found he was ravenous. They stoked up the scented kindling that remained in Ro's firepit and cooked the fish they'd caught that morning.
"How are you feeling?" Minn asked, picking bones from the flaky white flesh.
"A bit tired and a lot salty," he said. "But all in all, in good spirits."
"Good. We've got a lot of days ahead of us. Even if we can't find you one, this won't be the end of your path."
The sun was out, and they agreed they could use a few more minutes to rest their limbs and lungs, so she had him do a quick run through the Seasons and then attempt to manipulate the resulting nether. As usual, he could push the shadows outward when they expanded, but as soon as they contracted, they shrank back to resting size.
Before he could get frustrated, she strapped on her fishfeet, cut her biceps, and refreshed the warmth in their skin. They returned to the waves. She swam past the surf, then stroked out to sea to continue the search. As her left arm rose from the water, diluted blood slipped down her biceps. She'd forgotten to heal it. But it probably looked worse than it was. Water always made a little blood look like a great big mess.
They kicked around, scanning and diving. They'd hardly been out five minutes when Blays glanced to his right, out to open ocean, and saw the shark cruising through the water in perfect silence.
17
As they passed the glaciers, ravines, crags, escarpments, talus fields, and snowfields of the Eastern Woduns, Dante allowed himself to daydream. He still didn't understand how Cellen worked, but to date, everyone had been in universal agreement as to what it did. And that was to grant you a wish.
His own wish, as he'd explained to the Hanassans, was to become immortal.
He had no way to know whether this was in the scope of Cellen's power. But he had reason to believe so. For one thing, Cally had crossed the century mark without slowing down. Yes, he was old, but his mind and body hadn't been nearly as decrepit as they should have been. Dante had taken Cally's agelessness for granted, assuming he'd last another thirty to fifty years. And perhaps he would have. It had taken a Gaskan assassin to finally put him to rest.
Cally had accomplished this with no more than normal nether and mortal skills (if highly honed ones). Was it that hard to believe Cellen would grant its owner much more? Even if the true immortality of the gods was out of reach, it seemed plausible—probable, even—that it could grant him centuries of life. In fact, there was some (questionable, granted) historical support for the idea. A figure from the early pages of the Cycle was said to have lived to be 1080 years old. Maybe he'd pulled that trick off with a little help from the Black Star.
Surely an object of such divine power could allow him to live to be at least three hundred years old. With that as a minimum, infinity as a maximum, and say five hundred to a thousand years as a conservative median, what would the course of his long life allow him to see? With a millennium of uninterrupted prosperity, how grand would Narashtovik become? With Dante steady at its helm, steering it away from all pitfalls with his ancient wisdom, it seemed only a matter of time until the city turned the tables on Setteven and conquered Gask for itself.
If that was what Dante wanted. Just because he could conquer the northern half of the known world didn't mean he'd want to. There were advantages to staying small. You were more nimble. He'd be more able to directly oversee all aspects of Narashtovik's course and thus ensure it fulfilled its potential greatness. Anyway, he didn't want to fall victim to hubris.
A more modest expansion made sense. He could (peacefully) absorb Tantonnen to ensure Narashtovik never wanted for grain. Given their recent history together, it would be no problem to forge a permanent alliance with the norren, uniting their rolling hills with the city. Then he could grow west into Gask. Through Dollendun, he thought. That would establish a nice buffer between Narashtovik and Setteven without overreaching.
This would mean rearranging Narashtovik's political structure. The farmer-barons of Tantonnen and the chieftains of the Norren Territories deserved a voice in this hypothetical nation. A new, second council ought to do it. The Council of Narashtovik could remain the governors of the city and the arbiters of Arawn's will on earth, while a separate secular council would see to the administration of the confederacy.
He liked the thought of this very much. Hell, once he carved off the slice of Gask his new empire required, Narashtovik and Setteven wouldn't even have to be enemies. Their enmity could be buried whenever King Moddegan kicked the bucket.
Beyond all this, however, he wondered what would become of himself.
This was where his walking
dreams took flight. He knew a talent like his was incredibly rare. He was the youngest ever to be named to the Council. By far the youngest to be named its leader. Some of this was due to a regrettably high turnover rate during the last decade, but plenty of more experienced candidates had survived the turmoil. No, it wasn't just a matter of right place, right time. It was that he was already one of the most powerful nethermancers to walk the earth.
If he stood this tall at age 26, how much higher could he climb by age 526? For that matter, what if he lived long enough to see Cellen emerge again? What if Arawn and Taim and Carvahal and all the gods of the Celeset had started life as simple humans? And through skill, chance, opportunity, and will, they had built themselves into beings beyond comprehension? Climbed from the earth to the stars?
That was getting a little out there. Highly speculative. It was fun to ponder, however, during the long, tedious walk through the snows and rocks. Even if true immortality was out of the question, he felt fairly confident that he'd have a very long and supremely interesting life ahead of him—assuming he found Cellen, and made it his.
When he wasn't daydreaming, he was being tutored by Ast. Learning as much of the local language as he could absorb. Though Ast warned that his own vocabulary was rudimentary, Dante didn't care. Knowing anything would be a huge advantage. Their group was going to draw too much attention as it was. If only one of them spoke the language, they'd look like exactly what they were: a party of foreigners being led around by a guide. But if even two of them could converse in the tongue of the land, they would look like...well, like something else. Merchants who'd hired foreign bodyguards, or pilgrims who'd fallen in with strangers. Infinitely less conspicuous.
Additionally, knowing the language would be crucial to learning about the object of their desire. Dante didn't like the idea of relying on a single person to get them around. If they lost Ast, finding a Weslean who spoke Gaskan was going to be difficult and attention-drawing. Nor would they have any idea whether they could trust this hypothetical local linguist.
So Dante paid close attention. Somburr joined the lessons too, picking up the grammar and conjugations as easily as Dante would pick up a snowball. Lew asked if he could listen, too. Dante had the perverse impulse to deny him (why would he need permission?), but gave him the okay. To his mild surprise, Cee began to participate as well. He was not at all surprised that she was good at it. She was the resourceful type and had been making a go of it alone for some time.
Other than not dying of weather, they had little else to do. Within a few days, they were able to have halting, poorly-accented conversations in Weslean. More accurately, in Third (Weslean): according to Ast, the nation's main tongues all branched from the same tree, but there were significant differences in dialect. After growing up in the monoglot culture of Mallon, then migrating to the equally monolithic tongue of Gask, Dante had a hard time understanding why the same people would speak different languages. As with everything about Weslee that made no apparent sense, he chalked it up to the eccentricities of an alien land.
A full week after crossing the divide into the Eastern Woduns, each of them could understand enough Third to order a meal or ask directions. Somburr could even speak it without pausing to cast around for vocabulary. Dante wasn't quite there yet, but he knew his own learning habits well enough to think he'd take a big leap forward as soon as he was around native speakers.
And on that seventh day since the divide, he got his chance.
For the two days prior to that, they'd finally descended from the glaciers and snowfields into forests. The first trees they encountered were pines that looked more or less the same as those in the Western Woduns. But as the steep mountains drew down to softer hills, the woods became the likes of which Dante'd never imagined.
Over the span of no more than a mile, the pines gave way to towering trees that looked like the warped cousins of mangroves. Rather than standing with their trunks seated firmly in the ground, their roots forked down to earth like a river delta. Some of these were as thick as a keg while others were as spindly as a child's wrist. And as the trees grew taller and taller, the roots thickened disproportionately, with some as sturdy as the pylons of a bridge.
Stranger yet were the branches. Many looked like your average branch, but the largest ones weren't round; rather, they were flattened like the end of a paddle, with a small spar growing along their underside for added support. This left them much wider than normal. Many were broad enough to dance on without fear of falling. The largest, you could drive a team of oxen down, provided you could hoist the beasts up in the first place. Along with the oddity of their branches, each tree sprouted two distinct varieties of leaf: one star-shaped and hand-sized, the other fan-like and large enough to wear as a cape.
"Loren trees," Ast said. "You can eat the fruit, or the mushrooms on the boughs. Use the leaves for whatever you like. But on your life, do not cut one down."
"Why's that?" Dante said.
"Or the Minister will take an axe to your legs as well."
Lew craned back his head at the canopy two hundred feet above. "Are they sacred?"
"They probably belong to the king," Cee said.
"They belong to everyone," Ast gestured sweepingly. "So when you cut one down, you steal from every single person in Weslee."
Cee stared at the flattened branches. "Then cutting off your legs is a modest sentence."
"After you've been cut down, they peel off your bark, too."
Lew frowned. "And we came here on purpose?"
Dante sighed, breath hanging in the damp air. "Refrain from cutting down any holy trees and we'll be fine."
As they continued down the hills, a canyon gaped to their right, hundreds of feet deep. A creek ran through its bottom. Beside it, the land continued to rise and fall, but the path of the little river continued in a straight line dead east.
With their supplies of dried food dwindling, they broke pace to forage in the lorens. The trees were easy to climb. The roots made natural ladders, and once the trunk cohered into a solid column, Dante found them spotted with hollows. In the larger trees, these depressions were deep enough to house a person. Or, as they discovered, legions of raccoons, squirrels, birds, and a bear-like, dog-sized creature with the tail of a fox, the eyes of a cat, and—quite disturbingly—the hands of a human.
The wide, flat branches made reaching the fruits a snap. These were round and pink, with rinds thicker than an orange, and they grew plentifully despite the season. The pulp was thick and cohesive, almost more like a well-cooked porridge than a fruit, in both consistency and flavor. Ast claimed you could live on lorbell fruit alone, but mushrooms grew just about everywhere, too, and they harvested these as well.
Through two days of travel, the lorens grew higher and higher. Two hundred feet. Three hundred. The above-ground root systems flared like norren yurts built to house an entire clan. Just as Dante was about to ask Ast whether he knew where they were going, distant laughter sounded from ahead. Everyone but Ast reached for their weapons. Ast merely pointed.
They walked a few hundred feet before the object in question resolved from the trees occluding it. It was the largest loren they'd seen. Creatures moved in its branches. Smoke snaked from the leaves in white columns. For a moment, Dante thought the forest was on fire, but each trickle was discrete, contained. They were fireplaces. He was looking at a house. Strike that: he was looking at a village.
"We should make camp out of sight." Ast turned to Dante. "You'll come with me to the village. We need new clothes. Ours out us too clearly."
"Not fans of foreigners?" Dante said.
"Is anyone?"
"I should be the one to go," Somburr said. "I speak Third better than anyone."
"Then it sounds like I need more practice," Dante said. "Anyway, this isn't a vote."
The spymaster smiled wryly. "It was worth a try."
They turned the ponies around and set up in a draw a short ways from the towering loren. Da
nte and Ast hiked toward the tree. Both carried their swords.
"I would prefer to talk, if you don't mind," Ast said.
"Considering you're the one who knows how to talk, that sounds like a good plan. Have you been to this tree before?"
"When I was very young. I doubt if much has changed."
Wooden hammers rapped from the boughs, muffled by whatever fibrous matter they were smashing. To their left, an irregular circle of dirt was bare and reeking. Ast glanced up and gave it a wide berth. The village wasn't entirely contained within the loren—a number of huts sprinkled the grounds around the tree—but its sprawling roots had been walled up and converted into a hive of houses and shops, with people bustling in and out. A few of the locals watched Ast and Dante approach, but no cries or horns were sounded.
Ast stepped through a high, triangular gap in the root-walls. The inside was dimmer than the canopied forest, but the people had left enough open spaces in the roots for sunlight to filter through. It smelled overwhelmingly of loam. The streets, such as they were, were designed around the root structures, and rarely ran straight for more than a few feet at a time. It would have been beyond confusing if not for the regular presence of wooden stairs leading to observation platforms where one could have a look around (and take shortcuts across the winding structures).
Ast wanted nothing to do with exposure like that, though. He approached a vendor who sold mushrooms fried in garlic, onions, and oil. After a short conversation, the woman minding the stall pointed across the market/village, twitching her finger around a bit. Ast nodded, exchanged a few more words, then rejoined Dante and moved on.
After a few dead ends and turnabouts, Ast found the tailor's. A tarp shielded the front of the shop from any rain that might make it through the roots spoked overhead. The back of the shop was enclosed to allow prospective buyers a measure of privacy. A portly man engaged them, speaking too fast for Dante to follow. As Ast conversed with him, Dante wandered the racks. In general, the clothing was nothing too exotic: you had your standard shirts, trousers, cloaks, overcoats, etc.
The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy Page 132