Gladdic tapped his long nose with his index finger. "For this raw matter here is no more than possibility; it is only when it is shaped by the wants and will of minds that it becomes fixed and navigable. A farm is 'willed' into being by the man or family that lives upon it, just as the city is willed into being by those groups that live within it. And just as we are attempting to will ourselves toward the Tanarians."
All of this had the feel of a great revelation, yet at the same time, Dante had no idea what to do with it. They walked through the white clouds of ether, detouring around the occasional boulder, wading through cool streams. At all times, Dante occupied his mind with thoughts of Tanar Atain and its people, sometimes one-eyed Palo himself, although he had the suspicion it was more effective to focus on the people as a whole, since they were a much larger target and he was, in these matters, a rather sloppy marksman.
They seemed to be going uphill for a while, then downhill for a while longer, although it was strangely hard to tell in these lands, where your muscles told you one thing but your eyes told you another. There wasn't a sun per se, but the light brightened for a while, peaked, then turned wan, not dissimilar to a dawdling afternoon.
A dim pressure arose in Dante's solar plexus. It felt oddly similar to the pressure he felt in his head when he was tracking someone through their blood. As they walked onward, moving unnaturally fast due to the exertion of their will, the pressure grew, although it remained light overall.
They came to a hill and climbed up to a ridge. An enormous city lay beneath them. Dante clapped his hands, then stopped, letting them fall to his side.
"What the hell?" Blays wandered another step forward. "That's the same city we came from!"
It was true: it had the same walls, the same green farms outside them, the same quilt of districts and neighborhoods, the same towers and church spires. Dante hunted for anything different to prove they'd found a different place, but everyting appeared identical.
He punched his thigh. "What happened? We were getting closer to them. I could feel it."
"I did as well," Gladdic said. "There was a sense of fulfillment, of achievement. I do not believe I was imagining it."
"Maybe we did something wrong. Willing your way through the Mists can be tricky. It's like trying to follow a road buried deep under the snow."
"We might try again. Yet why do I feel so certain we would end up right back at this city once more?"
"Same here." Blays waved at a bit of mist that had drifted into his face. "What if the Mists did bring us to the Tanarians?"
Dante gave him a look. "Then we would be at a city full of lots of Tanarians instead of a city full of zero Tanarians. We searched the streets for a full day without seeing or hearing about a single one of them."
"Do you remember the first time we traveled to the Mists and that Dresh woman kept dumping us into the ocean? And when we asked if she could kill us, she admitted she couldn't, but warned us that if she really wanted, she could will us into a burning volcano and keep us there forever?"
"She also said that would take the constant willpower of every person in the village."
"How many people lived in that village? A few hundred? There might be a few hundred thousand people in this city. More than enough to send a group of hated foes off to hell."
"That might explain why every Mallish person we spoke to claimed they'd never heard of the Tanarians, but the Collener at the pub claimed they'd been here briefly."
Gladdic motioned to the city. "Imagine the rage the Mallish must have felt upon being inundated with the dead of those who had just conquered their descendants. Do you truly believe they would happily share their city with such people?"
"If they'd done this to Narashtovik, I'd want to build a new spire as high as I could, then hang them all from it. So if the Tanarians are here after all, how do we find them?"
"Everything's made of ether, isn't it?" Blays said. "Why don't one of you wise and clever sorcerers take a look at it and see if the Mallishers' will has left any markers in it? Or if anything's out of sorts?"
Startled by the question, which was so obvious in hindsight, Dante emptied his mind, letting the light leak into it. Next to him, he could feel Gladdic shooting into the substrate of the Mists.
Gladdic chuckled. "Blays is correct. There is another city beneath the city."
He started downhill, robes tousling about his shins. Dante followed after him, still working his way through the ether. From the vision provided by the light, the city was translucent and shining, its houses and towers more like suggestions or ideals than physical objects.
Beneath it, the plane of ether that made the ground was bent and warped. Its structure was difficult to make out, but there was no mistaking the pit beneath the warping—or the simple structures that lay within it.
"I see it!" Dante said. "But how do we get to it?"
Gladdic smiled. "And I thought you would be my guide through this land."
Gladdic lifted his hand. Before them, the ether bent and warped just as it appeared to be doing beneath the city. A doorway opened from thin air—or, more accurately, from the ether that formed everything. They stepped through.
They found themselves in a watery clearing. Ahead, humble houses rose on stilts, canoes resting beside them in the slack water.
14
Blays lifted one foot from the water. "I don't suppose there are any ziki oko down here?"
Dante delved his mind into the shallow swamp. "There are some fish here, but they don't seem very interested in us. If they do show up, just will them to go eat someone else's legs down to the bone."
They waded toward the Tanarian village. The water looked clean enough, much cleaner than the swamps had, yet the air smelled vaguely of waste. A woman emerged from the nearest house—though really, it was more of a hut, and the closest thing to squalor Dante had ever seen in the Mists. Her black hair was long on top and shaved at the sides and she wore a light yellow jabat that hung to mid-thigh. Seeing them, surprise hit her face first, twisting quickly to horror.
"Hallo!" Blays called. "We're friends of Drakebane Yoto, and we're here to see a man named Palo. I don't suppose he's around?"
The woman vanished into the hut without a word. Dante stopped, hardening his will to remain in this place should they try to cast him out.
It was only a few moments before an older Tanarian man appeared. He wore a jabat, along with a broad banana leaf wrapped over his head, as if this was perfectly normal.
He looked them up and down, then beckoned them forward. "I have seen your face in Dara Bode, Gladdic of Bressel. This way."
He led them through the quiet water to another hut set off from the village and enclosed by a ring of banana trees, their smooth trunks packed tightly against each other. They climbed the wooden steps to the porch outside the hut's entrance. The Tanarian man pulled aside a skin hanging over the door and spoke softly to someone inside.
"Enter," a man called.
The three of them walked into the single room. It was dark and notably cooler than the air outside, which was quite a bit warmer and swampier than it had been in the city above them. A man was seated on a wad of pillows near the rear. He held a long, thin object that appeared to be a cut reed, but he was smoking from it, producing a scent like earthy citrus.
He fixed them with his one eye. "So you found us."
"Banish you, did they?" Blays said. "I've always meant to get banished from somewhere."
"It felt like I was having a strange dream that lasted for days: and then at last I woke up, and I found myself in their city." Palo lifted his index finger and pointed up. "And I knew that I was dead. Bit of a shock, but I got used to it in no more than an hour. The bigger shock came to the Mallish. At first they didn't quite know what to make of us. But as more of us showed up, their mood began to turn. That's when they stuck us down here."
"Are you actually stuck here?" Dante said. "Have you tried willing yourselves out? That's how a lot of thi
ngs are done here. You just sort of want them to happen until they do."
Palo laughed and sucked on his reed, squinting his eye against its smoke. "Oh, all we need to do is want to leave? No, not a single one of us has thought of that, wanting to leave. It is good to have such a wise foreigner at hand to help us!"
"I wasn't going to insult you by asking if you'd tried to just walk away, but now I think I will ask that."
"Now that is actually a funny thing. At first, we could wander around some—we were trying to find our homeland's part of this place, our people, if it's here and can be reached—but it's like it's gotten tighter. Can't go far before you end up right back here."
Something thudded hard into the grass roof. Blays looked up.
"Don't mind that," Palo said. "It's just the shit."
"The what?"
"The shit. The Mallish drop it on us from their city. When you go back outside, you might want to cover your head with a banana leaf."
"If it's raining shit, I think I'll borrow the entire tree."
Palo puffed on his reed and motioned them to sit. "Do you know what the irony of it is? During the time we were allowed to stay in the city, do you know what I saw? No one here has to work, if they don't wish. In fact, it is relatively easy to just will yourself to have all that you might want.
"But people reject that! They find that wealth without work is wealth without meaning. So they find work, even if it's simple. They earn their place. Many former idlers discover they want to have families, to pass on their accumulated trades and belongings and knowledge and love. From this process, everyone around them benefits, too."
He grew more animated, his reed drawing lines of smoke through the air as he gestured. "Don't you see? Their behavior supports our belief in the Body! We all have our place, our piece within the greater whole. These people throw us out, but the heavens reflect the Tanarian belief!"
Dante shrugged. "This place, as far as I can tell, is here to give people the chance to live out peaceful and meaningful lives. To make up for anything they missed out on and thus prepare to leave everything behind. Through the Body, you Tanarians have just formalized a way of being that we all know on some level to be true."
Palo sank back. In the gloom of the hut, his one eye was like a silver coin reflecting the sunlight. "You said the Drakebane sent you to find me. Presumably, getting here would require committing suicide. But I'm going to guess that even if you've found a way to pass messages from the land of the dead back to the living, there was no need for three of you to off yourselves. So have you instead found a way for the living to reach the dead?"
"The people of the Plagued Islands came up with it," Blays said. "We just recognized it as a very useful trick, and stole it accordingly."
"And you used it to come and see me. Let me think. You're here either to hear about the mola ras, or the Spear of Stars."
"The latter." Dante got out the book and explained the story that lay within it. "The Drakebane says that you yourself traveled to Cal Avin to try to find the spear, but couldn't find your way to the Realm of Nine Kings. It was my hope that, by comparing what you learned to what I've got here, we could find the way to the Realm—or better year, that I could figure out how to forge a second spear without the need for a long quest."
Palo chuckled, shooting streams of smoke from his nostrils. "I know exactly why I couldn't find the Realm of Nine Kings. It's a very good reason indeed. You see, you can't get to the Realm because the Realm doesn't exist."
Gladdic laughed, crow-like. "That should have been our very first guess. For why else would the warriors of Tanar Atain not have found the spear many ages ago?"
"This can't be true," Dante said. "I know it's easy to forget, since I showed you close to an entire minute ago, but I have a book that chronicles two men's travels to the Realm."
Palo tapped on his reed, knocking loose some dottle. "I searched Cal Avin and its surroundings for two years. No one there had even heard of the Realm."
"I have news that might startle you: people lie. Especially to foreigners. We just had every Mallisher in the city trying to convince us they'd never seen you or your compatriots."
"But to be lied to day after day, in town after town, by hundreds of people young and old, wealthy and poor, from both the rebels and the loyalists who were currently engaged in civil war to destroy each other? Why would so many different people all tell the same lie?"
"Because to them you look funny and talk like a fool? How should I know why people half the world away do the things they do?"
"What is more likely, you dumb northern ice-eater? That hundreds of different people across the entire sprawl of Cal Avin conspired to individually lie to me? Or that your book—your only source—is lying to you?"
"I don't know what you're trying to say."
"The book is a fiction! A story! Picaroon adventures of wars and shipwrecks and strange, faraway lands. Here, let me see it." Still seated, he held up his hand. Resentfully, Dante gave him the book. Palo paged through it, sniffed it, then snorted. "Is this really how it looks?"
"Yes. What about it?"
"It's brand new! You can still smell the ink!"
"It only looks that way because it's sealed in ether to protect it from aging. The woman who gave it to me got it from someone who'd had it in their library for at least a century. There's no telling how much longer it had been around before that."
"And this sorcerer who wrote it, this Sabel, who claims he ventured to the mystical Realm of Nine Kings. Where was he supposed to be from?"
"I believe he's from Alebolgia."
"Alebolgia? How interesting. Does Sabel sound like an Alebolgian name to you?"
Dante shrugged. "It was old Alebolgia. I don't think they even called it that then. Besides, he was a sorcerer. We have an honored tradition of choosing ridiculous names for ourselves."
Palo tossed the book onto the wooden floor with a flat whomp. "You came here for my wisdom. Well, my wisdom is that you've been sold a farce. I was there. For two years of my life I chased after the Realm. But it's no more than a fantasy."
Dante glanced to the others for help, but they were carefully looking away. "Then what did you find in Cal Avin? Is the whole story nothing but lies?"
Palo, who had been almost delirious with scorn, sobered abruptly. "Oh no. The spear is probably real. Or at least it was real. The Avinians spoke of what they called the 'Rhobous Doresh,' which is what your book calls the Vampire of Light, and what you call the White Lich, and what we call the Eiden Rane. Although it was almost certainly a different one, since according to them he was slain by the Spear of Stars."
"So the spear is real!"
"Sure, it was. But it broke when it killed him. Shattered into nothing when it absorbed the vast ether the Rhobous Doresh had stolen from his many victims. Hasn't been another spear since. Or any need for it, for they haven't seen another Rhobous Doresh again."
Dante clasped his hands behind his back and paced across the shadowy room. "So you believe the spear was real. But that it was destroyed in the act of killing the lich of Cal Avin. Do you know if there were any other spears prior to that? Or in other lands?"
"If so, don't you think I would have brought it back here to gore the Eiden Rane with?"
"Did you ever hear anything about where the original spear came from?"
"No one seemed to know. The most they could say was that it was forged from the metal of stars brought to earth."
"Shooting stars?" Gladdic touched his chin. "I have seen their metal. I have even seen swords forged from it. The blades were dark and beautiful, rippled with strange patterns, but I saw no special signs of ether within them, nor powers that might slay one such as lich."
Palo waved a hand. "Surely it was enchanted or the like. But as for the nature of those enchantments, or whatever else it was that made the spear the spear, I couldn't say, because nobody in Cal Avin knew."
"That's all you know about it?" Dante said. "That's as mu
ch as you can tell us?"
"No, I can tell you one more thing. In all, I spent three years traveling to Cal Avin, exploring its lands in search of the spear, and then traveling home. And all three of those years were wasted."
The three of them stood there with nothing to say. Palo fished herbs from a pouch and unhurriedly tamped them into his reed.
"Well, this wasn't what I was hoping for," Dante said. "But if what you're saying is true, at least we know it would be a waste of time to travel to Cal Avin. If we're going to defeat the lich, it's going to have to be through conventional means."
Palo puffed his reed, examining the thin quantity of smoke it produced. "Is he coming for Bressel?"
"He's already on the move. He could arrive in less than a week."
"I almost hope you lose. Because that will mean the people of Bressel will die as well."
Dante watched him a moment, then turned to go.
"Wait." Palo stood at last, hurrying after them. "You're returning to the land of the living?"
Blays glanced at the ceiling. "It seems preferable to hanging around a place where it rains shit."
Dante turned. "Have you remembered something?"
"Yes," Palo said. "That my son is still alive, and in the Drakebane's employment. Will you tell him that I'm fine? That I love him. And that one day, we'll see each other again."
"We'll do that. And I'll let the Drakebane know you did all you could to help."
Palo stared at him, as if trying to decide whether this was an insult, then nodded and returned to his cushions.
The exited the hut. Outside, ether glared from the sky, hurting their eyes. Holding one hand over his head, Blays drew his sword and cleaved through the thick stalk of a banana leaf, catching it before it hit the water. He tossed it to Gladdic, then chopped one for Dante and a third for himself.
"I don't think there's anything more for us here," Dante said, frowning at his banana leaf, which was smaller and much more raggedy than the other two Blays had cut. "Time to go home and return to our preparations."
They waded through the swamp. Dante willed no unwelcome surprises to fall on his head. As soon as the village was behind them, they made for a little island, climbing onto it to lie down, fall asleep, and return to the land of the living.
The Spear of Stars Page 21