"Then why do you not answer it for us?"
Adaine grew serious, gazing down into the green valley. Dante was tempted to hit the man with everything he had, but he suddenly wished to hear what he had to say.
"How did you find me?" Adaine said.
"They found your body in Bressel," Dante said. "When the lich opened the portals, I recognized the Mists on the other side. It wasn't hard to figure out your involvement."
"Not that. I mean how did you find me here?"
"I can see why you'd be confused. It's not like you're doing the sort of thing that attracts notice, like ripping massive holes in the underpinnings of the Mists."
"But how did that bring you to this mountain?"
"You left a link. Between here and your work in the plaza."
Adaine raised an eyebrow. "No I didn't."
"Then how did—?"
"You saw this link yourself? What was it?"
"Ah," Dante said.
"I want you to think on this. Specifically, to think on who might have wanted to pass you this information while disguising their own role in doing so. And then I want you to walk away."
"Where should we go? The world you're helping the lich to conquer? Or the one you're helping him to destroy?"
Adaine delivered a short and testy sigh. "You don't know what's going on here. You don't understand the who or the why. In short, you know nothing. So how can you be sure you're doing good?"
"It's pretty easy," Dante said. "You see, we're not the ones who got dissatisfied with killing everyone alive and decided to start killing everyone dead as well."
He gathered and loosed the nether in one smooth, snake-quick motion. Adaine rolled behind the same rock he'd emerged from, light sparking forth from his hand. It was enough to dash Dante's attack apart before it could curve around the boulder.
Dante muttered to himself and jogged forward, swinging wide of the rock. "I have the feeling stopping him will stop the portals. Bring him down. Hard and fast."
A rope of ether arced toward him from behind the boulders. It scintillated like a cut gem, beautiful and frightening, as intense as the cold of the mountain air. He drew up a spear of nether. It felt unusually light in his hand, like a strange new metal. He cast it against the strike of light. The two powers hit with the boom of a battering ram pounding into a gate, shaking more snow from the trees.
The vehemence of it puzzled Dante, even troubled him, but another white beam was already racing toward him. He parried it into a rock, sending chips of stone flying.
Adaine ran to the west, skipping over the rocky outcrops as lightly as a goat. Gladdic sprayed nether past Dante, enough to clobber a tower, but as if inspired by Dante's last defense, Adaine deflected the shadows into the shelf of stone he was running past. The slope creaked and gave way, collapsing over the path Adaine had just taken.
"Oh, well done!" Dante said.
"And you are doing so much better?" Gladdic launched a blade of light at a tall pine. It snapped and toppled toward Adaine.
The priest, still running full-bore, thrust his palm up behind him, using the nether to blast a gap through the branches. The hole created by this came down right on top of him. Unscathed, he barred his arm over his face and barreled forward through the needles and twigs.
Dante moved into the jumbled, unsteady rockslide. Rather than clearing it away, he smoothed a path across its surface as neat as a norren road. They dashed to the other side and around the fallen tree. Blays angled uphill, slowly outgaining them. Potentially dangerous, if Adaine swerved toward him, but it would soon position him to shepherd the priest into the other two.
Adaine glanced back, grimacing as he batted down an attack from Dante and another from Gladdic. His eyes darted about, calculating. He had been running across the face of the slope but now broke downhill, windmilling his arms as he fought to keep from spilling forward, rocks sliding around his feet, snow roostertailing behind him.
He launched a rod of ether into the air. Dante collected the shadows, preparing to knock it aside, but the light continued to rise. Once it had cleared the treetops by fifty feet, it exploded into twinkling splinters.
Dante crunched through an open patch of snow. Thirty feet ahead, the white surface rippled with multiple shades of blue. A giant's fist seemed to punch up from the ground beneath the snow. Dante skidded into a crouch, lashing at the unknown attack.
The nether hit it with a muffled thud, shooting snow into the air. The fist only rose higher on a stalk of snow, momentarily phallic; then it parted from the ground, a pair of legs separating from its base, arms pulling free from its sides. The top flowed into the oval of a man's head. Its eyes were as blank and its beard as stiff as a stone statue.
Dante yelled out in surprise and drew his sword. A spike pricked the base of his spine as his trace ignited the steel with shadows. The apparition moved toward him, seeming more to float than to walk. Its right hand extended into a long triangular blade while its left flattened into a broad circular shield.
"Gladdic," Dante called through the trees. "Do you have any idea what the hell is going on?"
"No, but I fear I am about to learn."
As the avatar of ice advanced on him, he shot a glance Gladdic's way. Through the trees, the old man stood tall as a second avatar, seemingly identical to the one Dante faced, slid toward him over the surface of the snow.
Dante's foe lunged at him. He intercepted it with the tip of his sword. Its blade was pure ice, compacted to almost perfect transparency, and where the two weapons met, the icy one turned white, scuffed by the churning nether. Dante fell back a step and called the nether to life. It roared forward in a pole of fire.
The thing swung its shield to block the flames, but the burning nether punched through it like a lance through parchment. It carried on to burn through the chest of the icy figure, filling the air with steam.
The thing reared back, bear-like—then regained its footing and plunged forward, sword cleaving down toward Dante's neck.
He ducked, spinning away, and sent a second pole of fire directly into the attacker's icy head. It hissed like a quenched blade. Steam coursed into Dante's face and he had to turn away. The being was stymied for little more than a moment before it came at him yet again. A circular hole gaped from the middle of its face, the ice melted smooth at the edges, but the hole through its chest was already freezing back together seamlessly.
To Dante's left, Gladdic scrambled back from his own icy opponent. Ether glinted from his hands, shattering the attacker's bladed arm to the elbow, but the thing merely swooped to the ground, snow streaming to its stump and rebuilding its weapon as if it hadn't been touched.
"Do you understand yet?" Adaine stood on a rock not far downhill. "Do you see how little you know?"
"I'll admit to being a bit confused by everything else," said Blays, angling toward Dante. "But I am starting to get a very good idea of how crazy you are."
Adaine smiled and flicked his wrist as if he were sowing seeds in a field. Ether shot toward Gladdic. The ice-being pressed closer, jabbing at him. Gladdic grunted and gestured. The ground beneath his foe glowed blue. Ice crackled up from the snow, hitching to the thing and freezing it in place. Gladdic ran backwards, calling up a wave of nether and dashing it into Adaine's strike moments before it would have ripped him apart.
Blays arrived beside Dante, circling to the attackers' flank. "Any idea what these things are?"
"Lumps of ice," Dante said. "And they seem very angry about it."
"Any idea how to be rid of them?"
"Not fire." From the corner of his eye, he watched the other creature break free of Gladdic's ice and storm after him. "Not ice, either."
"Have you tried the decapitation classic?"
Without waiting for an answer, Blays bore down on the enemy, battering aside its shield with a frozen clink, then backhanding his blade into its neck. The clang was loud enough that Dante suspected a normal sword wouldn't have done more than chip it, bu
t the Odo Sein steel wouldn't be denied, severing the neck with a puff of snow.
Its head plopped to the ground. The body stumbled toward Blays, waving the blade of its arm around cluelessly but hardly less dangerously. Dante used another fiery spear to hit it where its heart ought to be. Ice boiled away from it, but its neck and upper chest were already shifting upward into a new head while it drew more snow from the ground into its body in replacement.
The snow behind it rippled like a lake beneath a stiff wind. Another frozen golem climbed into being, extending a sword and a shield of its own.
"How many of these things are there?" Dante said.
"Surely not much more." Blays lunged to engage the first of them, which was already intact despite the damage Dante had dealt it less than thirty seconds earlier. "After all, how much snow can there possibly be on a mountain?"
"Gah!" Gladdic cried. He fell to one knee. Ether glared from his hand, pounding into the construct before it could strike him again, but it began to recover at once—and a second one was arising from the snows beside it.
"Back!" Dante barked at Blays.
Blays stabbed the enemy he was engaging in the upper arm, momentarily disabling its sword, then darted backward.
Dante gestured as if bowing, hand outstretched. A line of fire erupted in front of the two frozen soldiers. He turned and ran uphill, countering Adaine's latest attack as it arced over the flames, then sprinted toward Gladdic, who was stumbling back from his opponents. Blood dripped from a deep cut on his forearm.
"They are relentless," he grated. "In the face of a relentless foe, there can be wisdom in choosing to be the one who relents instead."
"Sometimes," Dante said. "But sometimes there is greater wisdom in choosing to send them to hell."
He sank his mind into the thin soil and the ancient rock beneath it. Drawing it upward, he yanked it over the closest warrior as if he was pulling a bed sheet over an unruly spouse.
He turned on the other, locking it within a stony shell as well. Gladdic laughed and pummeled Adaine with ether, forcing him back through the trees. The two icy constructs that Dante had delayed with the wall of fire had circled around it and were now coming toward them with their eerie glide. Dante lowered his focus back into the bedrock, preparing to lock them up like the others.
Blays clashed his swords together. "These things are such cheaters!"
Steam was gouting from the two lumps of rock. Another moment, and the rocks seamed with cracks, spilling water to the ground. This was already freezing—and rising into legs and a body. Uphill, a new warrior, the fifth of them now, popped from the snow and lifted its sword-arm high.
"All right," Dante said. "Now is the time for us to relent."
Blays moved to intercept the pair of constructs coming at them from the fire. "Which direction looks most relentable?"
"The ravine. It's narrow enough to fight them one at a time. If we can't figure out a way to kill them, we can retreat to Barsil."
They took off eastward, heading back to where they'd emerged onto the mountainside. The warriors of the ice pursued them closely, but Dante and Gladdic kept them at bay with spouts of fire.
Ether flew overhead, cracking into tree trunks and toppling pines into their path. They stopped, throwing their hands over their heads to protect themselves from the broken branches falling to all sides. The five warriors neared, spreading out in a semicircle to hem them in.
Blays took one step toward the nearest figure, then vanished. Dante felt him running through the shadows. He materialized behind the warrior he'd been heading toward, sword raised high above his head. With a bloody yell, he hacked down as hard as he could. Purple light flared from the blade as it entered the warrior's head and continued downward until it finally emerged from the construct's featureless crotch.
The two halves toppled in opposite directions.
Blays waggled his sword. "Didn't you ever heard the old nursery rhyme about how when you back a man into a corner, you shouldn't be surprised when he cuts you completely in half?"
The two sides were already lifting from the ground, a mist forming between them as they began to reform. Yet something winked within the guts of the left half. A glow of ether just behind where its belly button would be. Dante grabbed at it with his mind. It didn't budge—meaning it wasn't a remnant, or else the construct had full control of it—so he slung a spear of shadows at it instead.
The light exploded like lamp oil tossed onto a fire. The halved warrior burst apart, smearing snow and ice across the ground.
Blays twirled his sword. "As usual, cleaving your foes in twain is always the answer. Shall we tend to the others?"
He blinked away, slipping through the shadows toward his next target. Adaine, trailing behind his warriors, launched a blistering salvo of light and shadow toward Dante, obliging Gladdic to step forward and meet it with everything he had. Sparks popped through the trees. Blays appeared behind another of the constructs. His sword whooshed downward, smashing through the thing's head and carrying onward. The warrior fell in half.
Just as it had been with the previous warrior, a light gleamed from its belly. Dante smited it and the construct dashed across the ground like a white shadow of itself.
The others charged him, prompting him to scamper away. Gladdic moved downhill to avoid the attack, still tangled in ferocious battle with Adaine, nether and ether booming through the trees, knocking down snow and branches. Blays emerged from the shadows at a dead run, cleaving a third of the figures, then merged back into the netherworld. Dante lobbed three black bolts over his shoulder. The first one struck home, killing the wounded warrior.
The two remaining constructs stopped and stood back to back, turning in a circle to ward off Blays' next attack. Gladdic raised his hand high and hurled a blinding strike of lightning at Adaine. It struck just above Adaine's head, detonating with a crash as loud as real thunder. Light consumed the forest floor. Trees snapped apart and tumbled to the ground. Snow and dirt rained to all sides. When the debris settled, Adaine was nowhere to be seen.
The icy warriors turned and gazed at Dante with their blank, stone-like eyes. They lowered their swords and tumbled into two loose heaps of snow.
Blays returned from the nether, weapons in hand. "Er, where did they go?"
Dante peered through the trees. "Where did Adaine go?"
"I believe," Gladdic said, "that he combusted."
Dante jogged toward the wreck of broken trees where Gladdic's lightning had struck home. Blays put away his swords and followed. The air smelled of scorched resin, pine needles, and churned-up earth. The area was a complete mess: downed trees, broken ground, blasted snow. Dante gathered nether in his hands and swept it across the rubble.
"I'm not sensing any remains," he said.
"Nor I." Gladdic picked his way forward. "But it was a very large combustion. I believe I struck him just as he was prepared to launch a similar assault against me, releasing a vastly potent blast."
"But I'm not even seeing any blood. In my experience with these things, when somebody gets blown apart that hard, you're going to see some blood."
Blays rubbed the back of his head. "Could he have opened a doorway for himself and escaped?"
Gladdic beckoned the ether to him, tipping back his head as he sent it into his surroundings. "I do not think so. I see no damage to the ether to suggest it."
"Then maybe he went old school and escaped by using his feet."
"In that case, he would have left tracks in both ether and snow."
Gladdic moved about the perimeter of the blasted trees, shining ether across the ground. As he searched for footprints, Dante picked his way toward the middle of the zone of impact, keeping the nether in his hand in case of ambush. He saw no blood, no hunks of flesh, no burned scraps of robes.
Gladdic stopped, having made a complete circle of the site. "I see no tracks of any kind."
"And I see no gobbets of any kind," Dante said. "We can't assume he's dead.
He could have seen the tide was turning and decided to make a run for it."
"If he has used some form of portal, we have no way to track him. Until we are certain that he is dead, we must assume he remains alive. Yet how can we guess which direction he fled?"
"Easy," Blays said. "The ravine."
"To escape back to Barsil?"
"Could be. But did you notice how he and his killer snowmen started coming for us twice as hard as soon as we turned back toward the ravine? Come to think of it, why was he so close to it in the first place?"
Dante kicked at a curl of bark. "He could have come through it right before us."
"That cannot be so," Gladdic said. "For the footprints to the doorway through the Split Crypt were already some minutes old before we came to it, and it took us several minutes after that to open the way. That would have allowed him the time to get at least half a mile from this place."
Blays motioned back to the east. "So why was he there? If he had these half invincible troops to throw at us, why did he run away—and what made him go this direction?"
"You think he was misleading us." Dante gazed across the wreckage. "We'll head back to the ravine and look around. But I'm going to leave a scout here just in case."
He hunted about for moths or flies or any of his preferred spies, but the elevation seemed too high and cold for insects. Just as he was about to give up, he spooked a mouse from hiding, knocked it dead, and reanimated it, instructing it to circle around the area and follow anyone it saw.
This done, they hiked east, following their footprints back toward the ravine. Dante's mouse was giving him a curious amount of trouble; if his mind became too distant from it, the connection flickered off and on, as if threatening to give out altogether. He had to put much more focus on it than usual. This was strange, if not quite alarming. Yet other than this, the mountain seemed suddenly very peaceful, as did the green valley below.
"So," Blays said. "Have you figured out where we are yet?"
Dante eyed the distant fortresses, trying to get a read on the architecture, but they were too far away to see any level of detail. "Nowhere I've ever seen. This could be somewhere in the Western Kingdoms. Or somewhere much stranger. There's no telling."
The Spear of Stars Page 46