Dante grinned, hurrying through his breakfast of sausage, tomatoes, and oats. Done, he picked up his staff from next to the door and jogged into the woods. His legs felt light, like he might be able to keep on running forever if he wanted to.
But running made the birds go quiet, and he liked the birds. He slowed to a walk, dewy ferns dampening the legs of his trousers. Mice scampered across the disused trail. In time, he came to a pool fed by a small but strong waterfall. Dragonflies flitted above the water. A soft mist hovered around the falls.
He waded into the shallows, which he was allowed to do, but stopped before the water went past his knees, which was what Tod limited him to when he was alone. The minnows and tadpoles fled from his motion, but once he'd stood still for a while, they drifted toward him again.
A red-winged blackbird trilled from the falls. Dante glanced toward it. For a moment, the slant of the sunlight seemed to cut through the falling water and into a cave behind it. He felt the sudden urge to explore it, but he didn't have time. Not if he was going to be back by noon. Anyway, he would have to swim to it, and if Tod found out he'd been swimming by himself, the monk would ban him from exploring for a whole month.
The morning went fast, faster than it should have. Dante had to run back to the cabin to get there by noon. They studied until supper, then ate. Feeling suddenly tired, Dante went to bed.
He woke early in the morning. The little room felt like somewhere he'd visited before. But that was because it was his home now, wasn't it? He went out to the porch, where Tod sat in his chair, and the moon hung like a pale ornament against the washed-out blue of the sky.
Most mornings, he was free to roam through the woods. Afternoons were spent studying works from Tod's library, which never seemed to run out of books even though it wasn't very large.
After a week, Dante looked up from the Tale of Jimothy Collins and frowned. "Tod, I forget. Why is it that I'm doing so much reading again?"
The monk frowned back. His close-cropped iron gray hair looked like a helmet. "Because it's good for you. What more reason do you need?"
Dante tapped the corner of the book. He was sure he was missing something, but the memory of what it was wouldn't come back to him. He shook his head to clear it and went back to reading.
He spent a few days exploring the quiet meadow to the south, then the birch forest to the west. One morning, running back to return to the cabin by noon, he splashed through a puddle and disturbed a veritable swarm of tiny little frogs, sending them hopping in all directions.
He'd forgotten all about the waterfall! How? It was his favorite place in all the woods. He kept it in mind as he ran home, then thought about it as he read, cementing it in his head. He feared he'd forget it overnight, so before he went to bed, he scratched a crude picture of it into the wood of the wall behind the chest he kept his things in, then set his shoes beneath the drawing so he'd be sure to see it when he put them on.
In the morning, the marks were still there. For some reason this surprised him. He dressed and ate, then ran north to the falls, the full moon watching him from above. He reached the pool and stood on its bank. There was a cave behind the waterfall, he was sure of it. With his certainty came a memory: he was waiting for his father to come back; that's why he was doing so much reading, to put his dad's absence to good use. Why didn't Tod want him to know that?
He unlaced his leather shoes, took off his shirt, and emptied his pockets. He waded into the water. It felt much colder than before. Like it didn't want him in it. He made himself wade on, careful not to bang his toes on the mossy, slippery rocks underfoot. Once the water neared his waist, he dived forward.
The water was so cold he inhaled in shock. He rose, sputtering, coughing for a long time. He waited until he was calm and ready, then pushed off and swam forward.
But no matter how well he swam, the rear of the pool barely got any closer, as if there was a current working against him. Clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering, he swam harder yet.
He shuddered hard—not from the cold, but like a giant dog had picked him up in its jaws and given him a shake. He treaded water a moment, collecting himself. The mist from the falls thickened until he couldn't have told what way he was facing without the roar of the falling water to guide him.
He was jostled again, knocked below the surface. He tried to swim upward, but the water had somehow gone thin, and he could no longer pull himself up through it any more than he could pull himself up through the air.
Everything felt gauzy. The crash of the falls dimmed until it might have been a mile away. For a moment he felt like he was falling, but then it was like something gripped him, tight as a vice, and tugged him like a tooth being pulled out by the roots.
He woke. But even before he was conscious, he could tell he was in a different place. Instead of old wood and cool mornings, the room smelled like stone and a humid summer.
He opened his eyes. He was back in the tower. They'd eaten the dreamflowers in the morning, but it was now dark outside. Gladdic crouched over him, shaking him hard, looking as mad and disheveled as a half-drowned cat.
"Dante!" Gladdic's voice was hoarse. "You must awaken!"
"I'm up," Dante said. "What's—"
"The Eiden Rane has come. The city is under siege."
13
Dante sat straight up. Blays' bedroll was empty. He and Gladdic were the only ones inside the tower room. Light flashed outside the window. It had the color of lightning, but rather than the boom of thunder, the noise that came with it was the cracking of stone—and the screams of men and women.
"The lich is here?" Dante scrambled to his feet, bringing the nether to him. "How is that possible?"
"I do not know," Gladdic said. "Perhaps we were—"
The light flashed again; the tower shook so hard Dante fell to one knee. Stone burst apart somewhere below, clattering to the courtyard. The tower swayed beneath them. It felt as though it would soon hit the apogee of its swing and then tilt back like a young tree bent by the wind, but it continued to slide, the floor visibly askew beneath them.
"The building is falling," Gladdic said. "We must get out!"
Dante took one step toward the stairwell, but they were eighty feet up. There was no chance the tower would hold on long enough for them to take the stairs. He dashed toward the window instead. Seeing what lay below, his breath caught in his throat.
Milk-white bodies thronged the streets by the thousand. The Blighted surged inside buildings like a tsunami of the undead. Wails followed them wherever they went.
And outside the palace gates, a glowing figure stood twelve feet tall, like a statue of a god—or perhaps the avatar of one.
The tower leaned harder. Loose objects were now rolling across the floor. Dante bit the inside of his cheek, tasting coppery blood. He meant to craft a slide onto the side of the tower the same way they'd done when they were freeing Sorrowen from Adaine, but the way that broken rocks were raining down from above, Dante didn't think the structure was going to hold together more than a few seconds longer.
The tower slipped another few degrees. Dante had to brace himself to stop from being tossed out the window.
"Jump!" Gladdic implored. "It is our only hope!"
Dante ignored him, reaching into both the cobbled ground and the stones tumbling down from the point near the roof where the tower had been struck. Both became liquid, the cobbles flowing up while the rocks flowed down; the latter swept past the window as a broad plane. Dante flung himself out on it. Gladdic thumped down behind him.
He slid downward, but he barely had any speed: at the moment, the upper part of the ramp was falling as well, although not quite as fast as he was, since he was still making it flow at an angle toward the other ramp rising up from the ground. The two halves met with a hard clack. Dante wasn't entirely sure what would happen at that point—unanchored at the top, the whole thing might snap in half like a stick—but somehow, it held. He gained speed, zipping towa
rd the courtyard.
The ramp shook; rocks were striking its upper end. With a great crack and groan, the tower broke wholesale, smashing through the ramp and tumbling toward the ground. Dante reached the bottom, skidding over the cobbles and scraping his hands. Gladdic came right after him, grunting in pain as he landed awkwardly. Ether lit his hand and flowed to his right ankle, healing it. Dante stood and ran from the falling rubble, dust blowing past him, holding his arms over his head.
"What now?" Gladdic said.
"I'm thinking we run in whatever direction is away from the lich." Dante took off across the courtyard. There wasn't a gate in the wall he was headed toward, but he'd simply open a doorway through it.
Behind them, archers screamed from the walls. Dante glanced back in time to see the front gates vanish in a blinding strike of ether. The debris was still falling as the Blighted poured into the courtyard.
He reached the wall, opening a hole to the other side. The two of them ran through and he sealed it behind them.
"The city is lost," Gladdic croaked. "We must get out before the lich finds us!"
"He'll find us a hell of a lot faster if we try to run through the tens of thousands of Blighted everywhere!"
"Then we will use the river. I saw no sign of fighting at the docks. We will find a ship there and sail away."
Dante wanted to scream. He wanted to find Blays—Naran and Winden would be with him, he knew it—but there was no possible way to do so in the midst of such chaos. He would have to trust that they had gotten away and try to find them later.
He and Gladdic ran toward the river. The streets were filled with screams and smoke, with bodies and blood. Behind them, the lich tore down the palace piece by piece, the light of the ether shooting up to illuminate the clouds.
They came to the river. Its banks were quiet. They ran through the grass as the city fell to flames, sorcery, and Blighted.
"Do you know where the others went?" Dante said. "What happened?"
"I awoke just a few minutes before you did. Everyone was already gone. I was only able to rouse you through a surge of ether to your brain, which I believe restored it to its original state prior to the consumption of the dreamflower."
Dante reached out into the nether, as if that might help him make sense of the attack. He found nothing there. Had he and Gladdic been trapped in the Pastlands that long? Or had the lich deceived them, finding a way to transport his army to the city in a matter of hours—either through some magical haste, or a portal of some kind?
They came to the docks. These were almost empty. Everyone else had already chosen to flee. A single crewed boat remained—but it was already unmoored, heading to sea. Dante waved his arms and yelled, but it showed no sign of stopping.
"They're moving faster than we can swim," Gladdic said. "Pray that I am not about to get us drowned."
He dropped to one knee. Ether shined from his hand. He placed it on the water. The surface shimmered, then froze solid, steam wafting from its edges. A trail of ice unspooled toward the departing ship. They ran across it, slipping as they went. Somehow, they reached the boat without falling into the water. Dante used the nether to cut a rope from the stern so it dangled down where he could reach it. He and Gladdic hauled themselves up over the top.
They hid there, crouching against the railing. The ship was miles out to sea before they could no longer hear the screams on the wind.
~
After they made themselves known to the captain, they argued for a long time over what to do. Yet in the end, two things were perfectly clear.
Bressel had fallen, taking all of their defenses with it. And there was now no hope of stopping the White Lich—not with anything less than the Spear of Stars.
They would sail to Cal Avin. No matter how long it took, they would find the route to the Realm of Nine Kings. Once they had the spear, they would return to make their final stand.
The ship sailed southeast, keeping out of sight of land—and, hopefully, the lich's spies. Dante stared behind them. There was no chance they would return with the spear before the lich came for Narashtovik. He tried to loon Nak and his spies, but the connections were dead.
He found Gladdic belowdecks, where the priest had gone looking for reading material from the crew. Gladdic looked dismayed with the results, which were largely illustrated, and illegal in most places other than the open sea.
"They couldn't wake us up, could they?" Dante said. "So they left us in the tower while they left to fight the lich."
"That is likely so. But how could the Eiden Rane have arrived so quickly?"
"The only thing I can figure is that he made his march out of the swamps at the same time we did. When I sent our spies to watch him, they didn't really see his army. They saw an illusion meant to trick us. His army was already marching through the sea toward Bressel."
Gladdic nodded at the waves. "We have made so many mistakes. I wonder if this new journey of ours is merely the latest of them."
"Look on the bright side. If it is a mistake, at least it'll be the last one we get to make."
They sailed on, the weather growing a little warmer with each day. To keep himself busy, Dante treated the sailors' diseases, which they seemed to collect like woodsmen collected antlers. He also fooled about with the small stock of potatoes and squash they had among their provisions, attempting to harvest more of them. They wouldn't grow from thin air, but they would grow somewhat from water. He thought about asking the captain to have the sailors save their soil, then reflected on what he'd seen of their illnesses, and made no such request.
The shores of Tanar Atain lay long behind them; they now voyaged through waters Dante had only seen in old maps. They passed a lush island, but the captain gazed at it darkly, muttering words of protection.
One night, Dante woke to the thump of hurried boots. Men called back and forth abovedecks. Gladdic's hammock was empty. Dante rubbed his eyes and climbed the stairs.
On deck, sailors climbed and wrestled with the rigging, moving with a haste born of panic.
"Faster, you sons of bitches!" the captain bawled from the forecastle. "Don't you dare slow down until we've got dirt beneath our feet!"
Dante jogged up the steps. "Captain, what on earth—"
The captain looked past Dante's shoulder, eyes flying wide. He uttered a strangled cry and threw himself to the deck.
Dante spun. There was only half a moon to light the waves, but the night was brightened by an eldritch light pulsing from the gigantic eyes of something climbing from the water just thirty feet to port. A tentacle rose, taller and thicker than the mast. It cocked back, then whipped toward the boat.
Dante scooped up all the nether he could get hold of and flung it at the enormous limb, hammering the shadows into a bent blade. They hit the tentacle right in its middle. It should have been enough to cut it into bloody ribbons, but the nether burst apart instead, showering into the choppy waves.
Dante ran toward the bow. The tentacle slashed through the rigging, dragging sails behind it, and hit the deck so hard it broke the hull in half, driving the center down into the water and jolting the bow and stern sharply upward. Dante was flung into the air.
He got one good look at it: those two glowing eyes, each the size of a carriage; slitted nostrils or gills; and then the mouth, a heaving canyon filled with rows of teeth like bladed tombstones, its breath as foul as the bodies that would lay beneath such graves. It was too dark to know, but he got the impression that for as large as it looked, the portion of the leviathan he could see was only a small part of what hung beneath the surface.
Still tumbling through the air, broken boards slammed into Dante from the side. Something struck his head. His body went warm. He blacked out before he landed.
If he dreamed, he didn't remember it.
Then: someone was calling his name.
Light flared behind his eyes. He opened them; he was in the water, draped over a chunk of splintered wood. The ship was gone, at l
east as a ship. Barrels, sails, and flotsam bobbed in the moonlight. He swiveled his head, but the leviathan seemed to have vanished.
Something splashed into the water behind him. Dante jerked back with a shriek, grasping feebly at the nether.
"Grab hold!" Gladdic kneeled in a rowboat, holding fast to a rope.
The other end swayed in the water next to Dante. He grabbed for it, but he lacked the strength to pull himself toward the rowboat. Gladdic reeled him in hand-over-hand. Dante rolled over the gunwale.
They sat in the boat, bobbing on the now-gentle waves. There was no sign of any other survivors.
"The ship is lost," Gladdic said. "We will have to strike eastward in search of land. But even if we find it, these realms are foreign to us. I fear our path will be treacherous and long."
"Of course it will be."
Gladdic folded his hands in prayer. "Yet we must not give up. If we persevere, I am certain that, in time, with the blessings of the gods, we can once more find ourselves on the way to Cal Avin."
"Gladdic," Dante said softly. "Since when did you have two hands?"
The priest gave him a quizzical look. "Since the day that I was born."
"Yeah. And then you lost one of them at the Riya Lase. I remember it quite well, because I was the one who cut it off."
"Look, you are bleeding! You have suffered a blow to the head. It has caused you to become delusional!"
"No, Gladdic. You're trying to delude me. You're not even real. None of this is."
Gladdic stared at him. The old man opened his mouth to speak, but then his eyes went dark, receding into his head. Gladdic withered and collapsed on himself, hardening into a small stalagmite of papery matter like dried-up algae at the edge of a pond.
The rowboat rocked. The flotsam sloshed about. Dante's stomach lurched as though he were falling. His ears felt it, too. It was several seconds until he understood: the ocean itself was draining.
Down and down he went. With no land around to provide prospective, he had no idea how far the water sank. A soughing sound arose, climbing quickly to a great sucking roar. Small islands broke the surface like the backs of whales. With a bump, the rowboat came to a rest on the ocean floor.
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