Once they were past, Blays gave a low whistle of relief. Dante grunted in general disapproval. The next time they passed a trio of Blighted, he remembered to make the reanimated woman kick her feet a bit to look less obviously dead.
They wound around a long arm of stone, vines dangling down the sides of the short cliff. Ahead, more Blighted trudged along with living captives of their own, one of whom was moaning, another bleeding down the undead's back. Dante ordered the four zombies to quicken their pace, catching up a bit and arriving at the dim, cave-like heart a few seconds behind the other Blighted.
He dawdled then, letting the lich's troops filter in first and draw whatever attention was due them. Which seemed to be zero. As the other group walked forward to deliver their charges, Dante directed the zombies to divert around a formation of rock and into the alcove where Winden was being held.
As they entered, she glanced up, dull-eyed yet suspicious. Dante tilted his face toward her and winked.
Winden exhaled sharply, belly jerking inward. Dante bulged his eyes. She kept quiet. There were a few normal Blighted nearby and Dante had the undead bearing him, Blays, and Gladdic form a wall between the enemy and Winden. The fourth zombie moved toward Winden, then stumbled. As it fell, it lay the dead woman (somewhat clumsily) on the floor, collected itself, and picked up Winden.
No one seemed to be looking their way. Dante instructed the zombies to swing about, away from the lesser lich who was presently inspecting the captives the first group of Blighted had delivered. Their feet crunched over the bare ground. They moved behind a blade of rock, then to the northern path out from the enclosure, which Dante had scouted with his fly.
To their right, two Blighted arose from their crouch against a wall of rock. They moved to block the zombies' path, heads bobbing and swaying from side to side, necks extended as if they were sniffing.
Dante froze. So did the zombies. Blays made a choked sound. The Blighted leaned closer to the zombies, their red eyes wide with hate. Dante instructed the zombies to bare their teeth in a snarl and walk onward. The two Blighted fell back a step, watching with blank faces.
Then one began to shriek.
Gladdic knocked them both dead with a pulse of light. Dante ordered the zombies into a jog, side aching as he was jounced up and down. They were being carried so that they were facing backward, and thus had a clear view as a pack of Blighted bounded around the blade of rock that had been shielding them from view—accompanied by the lesser lich.
"Time to run," Blays said.
He rolled off his zombie's shoulder, shucking off the cords wrapped around his wrists and ankles. Dante did the same, ordering Winden's zombie to set her down.
Yet her bonds were real. She collapsed to the ground. Blays swooped over her, a knife materializing in his hands. He cut the cords and stood, pulling her up with him.
Dante and Gladdic slung a volley of black and white darts toward the charging Blighted. The lesser lich flicked its hands forward, intercepting the attacks with shadows of its own, but other darts twisted past to slam into the Blighted, felling five.
"Go!" Dante yelled. "Before we're surrounded!"
Winden and Gladdic took the lead. Blays drew his swords, holding the rear. Dante killed two more Blighted, then two more, ordering his zombies to engage and clog the way. The lesser lich hung back, screened by his foot soldiers and apparently content to sacrifice them relentlessly. Which was fine with Dante: getting in a fight with another sorcerer would only slow them down at a time when they most needed to move.
They curled around a broad pillar of stone, putting it between them and the lesser lich. A short cliff closed in on them from the left, tightening the pathway to where no more than two people could walk side by side—but that only squeezed the Blighted down, allowing Blays to hold them off by himself. This slowed him down, though. Ahead, the ground sloped up through the grass. They would be out of the Pits within the minute, but if they couldn't shake the Blighted before then, a running street battle would only draw more enemies.
Dante drove his mind into the ground Blays was currently running across. The dirt fell away the instant he lifted his foot, opening a chasm, tumbling the Blighted down into it. Blays shouted in surprise. The chasm followed him for ten feet, then twenty. Only then did Dante cease. The Blighted gathered on the far side, hissing and clawing at the air.
"Well done." Blays sheathed his swords. "But can I get a little warning next time? For the sake of the seat of my trousers?"
Dante ducked under a shrub reaching from a notch in the cliff. "Here's your warning: I'm going to do things like that again in the future, without warning."
Winden had been limping earlier as the blood returned to her extremities, but she was running hard now. The edge of the Pits appeared ahead.
Light glared across their backs. Behind them, a signal rose high in the sky: a brilliant diamond, hanging over them like a curse.
"That's a signal for aid," Dante said, drawing on his knowledge from his own time among them. "Every Blighted in a mile radius is going to come for it."
With a scowl, Gladdic thrust back his hand, launching a beam of ether into the diamond. It wavered and burst apart. A second later, the lesser lich replaced it in the sky.
They dashed up the path, coming to the rim of the Pits and crossing into the flat, grassy ground beyond. Dante had hoped to have a minute to find somewhere to hide, but the Blighted were already galloping toward them through the empty field.
Empty-handed, Blays ran past them to take the lead, veering toward where the enemy was thinnest. The Blighted converged on him, hissing from high in their throats. At the last moment, Blays drew both Odo Sein swords, whirling in a circle and snapping the blades through the undead. Dante unsheathed his sword and followed at Blays' right side. Ether sparked from Gladdic's hand and nether from Winden's.
They carved an easy road through the opposition. But there were still more to either side—who now began to shriek, piercing and unearthly, unwavering even as they ran to catch up.
Blays put away his weapons with a steely click. "Where do we go?"
"Away!" Dante said.
"Which away?"
"Toward the tunnel," Gladdic said. "It is the only exit from the city that will not be filled with his armies."
"The tunnel that's on the other side of the river?"
"The river that will prove more of a trouble for the Blighted to cross than for us, yes."
Dante wasn't sure about that, but it was a plan, which he didn't otherwise have. He took them east toward the Chanset. The Blighted ran after them, gaining slowly—and instead of throwing themselves at the humans one by one, who would have been able to kill them without breaking stride, they hung back, gathering in numbers before making their assault. Dante, Gladdic, and Winden put the attack down without receiving a scratch, but Dante's stores of nether were continuing to dwindle, and his efforts felt like lowering a bucket into a well that was beginning to run dry.
Dante turned down an alley, hoping to slow the Blighted by funneling them. A few of the residences had little balconies holding herbs and flowers. Winden reached up as if she was about to catch a ball. A screen of branches and thorns erupted across the alley, sealing it off.
"You've gotten better," Dante said.
"Your teaching," Winden said. "I put it to use."
This maneuver bought them several minutes of isolation. Using his flying eyes, Dante routed them through an empty stretch of land on their way to the Chanset. The lesser lich remained somewhere behind them, projecting the diamond signal hundreds of feet into the air.
Even so, they reached the greenery at the shoreline without immediate pursuit. Dante had already located their rowboat and they hurried to it. Gladdic disguised them like the water—it wasn't perfect, but Dante suspected it would be enough to fool the Blighted—and they pushed off.
They were all but silent as Blays' oars pulled them across the current. On the western shore, Blighted entered the shallo
ws and vanished into the depths. On the eastern shore, others roamed up and down, ripping at the grass and hooting to each other, far more talkative than Dante had ever seen them.
He instructed Blays to put them in beneath a stand of trees on the east bank. They hopped out into the mud and crept south before breaking east, then curled north toward the palace and the tunnel that lay beneath it. There hadn't been any thunder yet, but its smell was heavy in the air, which was darkening as the sun neared its rest in the western hills.
They had to kill a handful of Blighted along the way, but through a combination of stealth, luck, and the blessings of the gods, at last they came to the ground above the tunnel. Dante opened a tube from the surface down toward the earthy corridor. He entered last, closing the way behind them.
He blew on his torchstone, which he thought would last them for another half an hour. They came to the tunnel and crouched there, catching their breath and sweating heavily.
"Now I wish we'd kept the horses," Blays said. "And brought them down to the tunnel. And done everything else differently, too."
"Just a few more miles." Dante wiped his forehead against his upper arm. "Once we're out of here, we'll steal the first horses, mules, or suitably spry cows we can find."
He felt the urge to get up and get going, but he was starting to wear down. And with no nether to spare, the only way to recuperate was the boring way. They passed around flasks of water and the bread and dried meat they'd been carrying around ever since the siege began. Knowing that if he stayed sitting for too much longer he'd begin to fall asleep, Dante got to his feet and trudged north down the tunnel.
Blays kicked a stray pebble. It bounced ahead into the darkness. "Well, this has been a hell of a day. You know, for a while there, I thought we were finally going to beat him."
"It looked that way," Dante said. "But then time happened."
"Not time," Gladdic said, his voice deeper, tired, "but space. The portals. Without them, the Eiden Rane might never have found a way inside the city. And we might, in time, have found a way to slay him."
"Yes, we worked that part out already. That's why we just risked our asses to go grab the dreamflowers. And Winden, of course."
"There is still something you fail to grasp. What if the only reason the Eiden Rane knew about the afterworld, and was thus able to make use of these portals, was because we were talking about the afterworld?"
"That can't be true," Blays said. "Because if it was, it would make me feel very stupid."
"We have assumed knowledge of the three realms beyond this one had simply been lost, or perhaps that it was concealed in order to better manipulate us. Yet what if the reason this knowledge was hidden was that, if it was widely known, it could be used to cause great calamity, just as the lich has done now?"
Dante squeezed the bridge of his nose. "We thought telling the people the truth would help unite them. But instead, you're suggesting it destroyed Bressel."
"That is how it looks to me."
Dante closed his mouth, as if he had to literally chew this thought over. The tunnel still smelled earthy, but there was now an odd tang to it, too, possibly from the thunderstorm that had been threatening to break all day. Just as Dante thought he was about to recall where he'd smelled it before, the light of his torchstone gleamed across something in the darkness.
Breath catching in his throat, Dante brought forth the ether, lighting the tunnel ahead. The harsh light glared across the white faces of scores of Blighted.
"Now this is just unsporting!" Blays' swords seemed to snap into his hands, adding their purplish light to that of the ether.
The Blighted surged forward. Dante, Gladdic, and Winden tore into them with bolt after bolt, showering the smooth floor with gore, but the enemy kept coming, the front ranks ghastly clear figures, those behind them dim and half-shadowed, and those in the rear little more than the gleam of their eyes and teeth. Dante suspected there were others yet behind them, unseen in the total blackness of the tunnel.
Blays danced forward to engage the horde. In the span of two seconds, he gutted one, swept the head from a second, and severed both outstretched arms from a third. But replacements came forward faster than he could swing his swords. One gouged its claws down his cheek before he impaled it.
"Mind killing them?" he called back.
"We are!" Dante yelled.
"Well, kill more!"
Dante gathered a heap of nether, blasting a dozen of them back from Blays. But before he could take a step forward, others launched themselves at him, falling over each other to try to rip into his flesh.
"My powers," Winden said. "They grow small."
Dante glanced at Gladdic, who was attacking steadily but not nearly in the quantity necessary to keep the Blighted at bay. "Fall back!"
Blays clenched his teeth. "Have you forgotten they're faster than we are?"
"I said do it!"
Blays lurched forward, slashing through four more foes, then sprung backwards as agilely as a lynx chasing a rabbit that's just changed course. Dante sank the shadows into the ground and threw it upward, slamming it against the ceiling to form a solid wall. The arms, heads, and legs of trapped Blighted protruded from the wall's face, wriggling and snarling.
Dante could already hear them digging and clawing at the other side of the wall, much of which was hard-packed dirt. "Back to the way we came in. We'll have to find another way out of the city."
Gladdic's white brows drew together. "Could you not route another tunnel past them, then connect it to the main passage?"
"Not when I have no idea how much of the tunnel they're in. Now come on!"
Dante turned and ran. They'd advanced less than half a mile from the access tube he'd extended to the tunnel and could be back out on the street in as little as five minutes. Just two minutes later, their footsteps seemed to echo back at them from ahead. Gladdic cast a ball of light down the tunnel. A second force of Blighted had been jogging toward them—and now broke into a run.
"Into the wall!" Dante commanded.
His mind shook as he reached into the side of the tunnel, slanting a new exit upward. He windmilled his arms, ushering the others inside. He was the last in, closing the entry behind them just as the faces of the Blighted flashed in front of it.
He turned his focus back to the end of his new tunnel, boring upward. The nether oozed sluggishly toward his call, clinging to the dirt and rocks as stubbornly as pine sap. With the passage still many feet from the surface, the nether came to a stop.
"Hey," Blays said, his voice stuffy and tight in the constricted space. "Take a break once we're in a place where we're less prone to suffocating to death, will you?"
"Just a second."
Dante called to the nether, shouting at it, pleading with it, but it didn't so much as quiver. He was exhausted, and for all his skill, at that moment he could do no more with the shadows than a turnip farmer could.
His heart began to beat harder than when the Blighted had been chasing them. They were trapped. Rats in a wall. And long before his power could return to him, they would run out of air, just as they had almost done in the Woduns when they'd been hiding from the monstrous kappers and their enemies while hunting for Cellen. The tunnel walls seemed to close in on him; the blood rushed from his head, narrowing his sight to pinholes.
Something stirred in the part of his mind that wasn't lost to panic. He breathed. And reached down into the very center of his being.
It took some time to find it. When he did, he grabbed hold of it so tightly it felt as though he was squeezing his own liver. He reeled out his trace and sent its shadows into the dirt at the upward end of the tunnel. It climbed upward, opening at last to the twilit sky.
Water pattered into the tunnel. It had started to rain. The scent of it against the dirt was the best thing Dante had ever smelled.
They pulled themselves above ground. Dante hadn't been able to spare the energy to determine the best spot for their exit and they wer
e presently right in the middle of the street. He was lucky they hadn't gotten stuck beneath the foundation of a building.
Blays looked up and down the road. "Which way?"
"Don't know," Dante said. "My scouts dropped dead a minute ago."
"Off the street," Gladdic said. "We can take time to think once we are not in danger of being spotted by the Blighted."
As it turned out, they were less than half a block from the Chenney, the imposing blocky prison tower that Dante had intended to use as one of their internal fortifications if the outer walls were breached. They ran to it and entered the front doors, securing them with a heavy wooden bar.
"Here's how I see it." Blays pressed his back to the doors. "We're trapped inside a city full of things that want to kill us. Well, what I propose is that we leave the city."
Dante shook his head. "We can't do that."
"There are other ways out of here besides the tunnel. For instance, you could point yourself in any direction you like and start walking, and eventually the city will come to an end, meaning you're outside it."
"But it's like you just said. The city is completely full of things that want us dead. And I'm out of nether."
"Out? As in out out?"
"I had to expend most of my trace just to finish the last tunnel."
"My nether, it is also at its last drops," Winden said.
Gladdic looked as though he were trying to smile. "Then you are in good company, for I am also all but drained of lightness and dark."
"What I'm getting from this," Blays said, "is that it would be suicide to try to leave now. How long do you all need to recover before you're worth a damn again?"
Dante looked up into the dark recesses of the high main hall. "I won't have anything back for the first few hours. Then for a few hours after that, it will start returning to me as a trickle. A few hours after that, the rest will come much faster. Ideally, I'd like to wait a full day, but as long as I'm dreaming, I'd also like some of those flying horses you mentioned earlier."
The Spear of Stars Page 38