"The Western Kingdoms? You don't think we're in the Mists anymore?"
"We can't be. There's no nether to draw on in the Mists. And during the fight, we were able to hurt each other."
"Well, that's interesting." Blays let the words hang in the air. "Because if we're back in our world, then how is Adaine here when he's dead?"
Gladdic examined the distant hamlets. "Could this be the Worldsea?"
"We'd better hope not," Dante said. "Otherwise, I don't think we can leave. But I don't think it is. This isn't anything like what Winden and the islanders said about the Worldsea. First of all, the living can't visit it, and I'm pretty sure we're still alive. Second, when you join it, you don't really exist anymore. You somehow become merged with everyone else. I don't feel merged at all. I feel like me."
"That must be very rough on you," Blays said. "So where in the world are we? Other than a cozy little valley that's only accessible via freakish tree?"
At the moment, they were walking alongside a steep decline that rolled hundreds of feet downhill. As the realization struck him like a club, Dante had to lean in to the hillside to stop himself from falling down it.
"We're not in the Mists or the Worldsea," he said. "And we're not in our world, either. We're in the Realm of Nine Kings."
25
The others stopped in their tracks. For a moment, the birds in the boughs were the only ones doing any talking.
"You think we're in the Realm of Nine Kings," Blays said slowly. "Why do you think that? Did one of the snow monsters jam an icicle in your ear?"
In contrast to Blays, Dante could hardly speak fast enough, as if he feared he'd lose his thoughts before he could get them out. "We know this isn't the Mists, because there's nether here and we can hurt each other. Just to prove it, let's try to will ourselves back to the ravine."
They resumed crunching through the snow. Dante bowed his head, imposing himself on the world to speed himself across it.
"Nope," Blays said. "It appears that we're walking at the speed of normal walking."
"To put the final nail in the coffin, you might notice there are no actual mists here, even out in the wilderness where there's no one to will the land intact."
"Okay, consider the point proven. That still doesn't in any way prove this is the Realm."
"I'm still eliminating alternate possibilities. We've just ruled out the Mists. We can also rule out our world, because unless the White Lich resurrected Adaine mere minutes before we found him, he can't be in the land of the living by virtue of the fact that he's dead. Even if the lich can bring back the dead—and he didn't have that power when I was enslaved to him—it would be hard for Adaine to open a portal to our world when he's in our world."
"You're that positive the dead can't visit our world? After all, we can visit theirs."
"If they could, I think we'd know by now. Especially if they could come back and murder us with sorcery. So what's left? The Worldsea? Can't be. The living can't go there and I doubt it's even possible to fight there. The Pastlands? Okay, that one's not impossible. The Pastlands seem capable of tricking you into thinking they're anything. But in that case, we have to proceed on the assumption this isn't the Pastlands, or else we'll screw ourselves over thinking that nothing we're doing here will wind up mattering, which will get everyone killed if we're wrong.
"Now think about how we got here. In the Book of What Lies Beyond, Gent led Sabel on a long, long journey. But I think that was just to confuse Sabel about where they were going. Or maybe he had to find the place in his world that corresponded with where he wanted to go. I'm not sure.
"I do know that near the end of the journey, Gent fed Sabel a bowl of soup so spicy it gave him bad dreams. I think the soup might have been something like the dreamflowers, which sent them to the Pastlands, which Sabel mistook for a nightmare. Then Sabel 'woke up.' At that point he was in the Mists, he even mentions it was foggy and hazy. From there, Gent led him through a canyon and into an underground tunnel. They crossed the tunnel without incident. And when they emerged, it was in the Realm of Nine Kings."
Gladdic grasped his chin in thought. "That is in many ways a mirror of the path we took to this place. And just as in Sabel's story, we find ourselves on the side of a mountain overlooking a beautiful vale."
"This also explains why the Drakebane's sorcerer Palo couldn't find the Realm even though he traveled all the way to Cal Avin and spent two years there hunting for it. It's just like Gent told Sabel: Palo could have searched for fifty years and never found it. Because it wasn't in Cal Avin. It was somewhere beyond."
Gladdic began to chuckle, happy yet spiteful. "If you are right, this is the sweetest irony I have yet lived to see. For in seeking to use the powers of this realm to destroy us, the lich might have led us to the one thing that can destroy him."
"We'll get to that, but we've got to deal with the portals first. Here's what I'm thinking. The Split Crypt is a navel. A portal of some kind. The ones the White Lich is opening might even be based on it."
Blays frowned. "And they leave a doorway that important just lying around in the Mists?"
"It's hardly lying around. We probably couldn't even have gotten to it if we hadn't had Adaine's tracks to follow. And opening it requires not just sorcery, but a source of nether. Which basically means knowing about traces and remnants—in other words, the only way to pass through is to know the secrets of the soul. How many people knew about these things before we worked it out? Zero? Or just almost zero?"
"All right, all of this is plausible enough. I suppose we could find out for sure by wandering down to one of those towns and asking them. But if this place is such a big secret, then how did the White Lich know about it?"
"No idea. Maybe he was in the same situation we were. He could have learned about it at some point in the past but couldn't figure out how to get here until Adaine told him about the afterworlds."
Gladdic made a sound that could have been a grunt or a laugh. "Which he learned about due to our own scheme to speak to a dead sorcerer about the spear. I wonder if we might have won had we simply fought the lich in honest combat, and not pursued so many machinations instead."
"Yes, it's all very ironic," Blays said. "Remind me to appreciate it when we're not staring down the end of the world. So let's assume this is the Realm of Nine Kings. What does that mean? What is this place?"
"It could be a world just like ours, but separate," Dante said. "But I don't think that's true. I think it's something more. It could even be something divine."
"Like the house of the gods?"
"I think we're going to find out."
They were quiet for a few moments. The heat of the battle was fading from their limbs and Dante was growing cold again.
"Like you said, we still have to stop the portals first," Blays decided. "If we don't, the White Lich wins, and nobody's really in favor of that. But if we make it that far…"
Dante nodded. "Then we find the spear. And we win."
They came to the ravine. They made a quick search for tracks in case Adaine had survived the blast and retreated to the doorway to escape back into the Mists, but saw no evidence of visitors besides themselves. Either Adaine had taken off into the wilds, or he'd died in the burst after all.
They headed to the boulder where Adaine had ambushed them. He had left hasty tracks in the snow to it. They followed these backwards, coming to a small trail through the rocks and trees. This passed behind a knife-like ridge of rock before ending in a shelf of snowy ground that ran for a hundred feet along the face of the mountain and extended as much as eighty feet from it. Its edges were sheer cliffs and it was speckled with pine trees.
"First things first," Blays said. "Let's make sure we're not about to be stabbed in the back, shall we?"
They made a tour of the grounds, which turned out to be deserted of people, icy soldiers, or anything else obviously threatening. But they did discover four waist-high crystal-clear statues of winged, imp-like c
reatures. Two were intact, but two were shattered into hundreds of pieces.
Gladdic crouched before one of the ruined piles, tilting his head. "I suspect he sacrificed these in order to better channel the ether for the summoning of the portals."
"Don't you normally use little figurines?" Dante said. "That's an awful lot of glass."
"No it isn't." Blays fished a shard from the snow and popped it in his mouth, crunching it between his teeth. "See? It's ice."
"What if it hadn't been?!"
"Then I would have punched my hand for telling me it felt like ice."
Gladdic picked up a shard for himself, turning it in the sunlight. "A neat trick. Use the ether to shape the snow into delicate statues, then use the breaking of those same statues to better command even more light. I must pass this on to our monasteries in the mountains where snow is plentiful."
Gladdic stood, opening his hand. Ether radiated to his palm in thin lines. He sent it back out into the air, making it shimmer and ripple. "There is some damage here. But it is subtle, and seems to me as though it is already repairing."
Dante raised an eyebrow. "Damage like from the opening of a portal?"
"It matches what we have seen elsewhere."
Dante froze, looking into the ether as well. As Gladdic had said, there were some scratches and stretching, but nothing close to calamitous. "I'm thinking the Mists get ripped up so badly by this because they're made of pure ether. Whereas our world, and this one, hold together, because they're made of stuff."
"Good ol' stuff," Blays said. "Where would we be without it? Torn to flinders by sorcerers, no doubt."
"Stuff. Matter. Rocks and dirt and water and ice. Bones and trunks and sap and blood. All of these things contain some light and shadow within them, but they aren't made of it. That makes them a lot hardier. The stuff holds together, letting the ether trickle back in, restoring itself. But if the whole place is ether, punching a big enough hole into it seems to threaten the entire structure."
"Then I wonder if the Mists are much younger than the realms of matter," Gladdic mused. "For anything so fragile could not seem to endure for as long as our world has."
Dante scanned the grounds, hands on his hips. "I'm trying to understand the logistics of how this works. The White Lich opened a doorway—or maybe two of them—for his troops in the eastern woods outside Bressel. This allowed the Blighted to step through that doorway and walk out from another. One of these outlets was inside the eastern walls and the other was in the Gods' Plaza.
"That's straightforward enough, if seemingly completely impossible based on what I know of both sorcery and the world. Then again, what I know of sorcery and the world has been proven completely wrong about nine hundred times over at this point, so if anything, it seeming wrong to me would raise the strong possibility that it is in fact right."
"Sure," Blays said. "Or we know it's possible because it literally happened."
"Back to logistics. In our world, you have Portal One and Portal Two. You step through one and you come out the other. But apparently that also requires a detour through the Mists—and that doorway, or maybe all of them, has to be opened from this place! Gladdic, does any of this make sense to you?"
"No." Gladdic didn't sound at all concerned about this. "But the matter's complexity may be to our benefit. If it is in fact a chain of events as you describe, we can break it by targeting whichever link we choose."
Dante paced through the snow, hugging his arms to his chest to stay warm. "Right now, the easiest way to break a link is to break Adaine's skull. Unless you already did that. But even if you did, I expect the lich to send another agent here soon enough. Either way, the question for us is whether Adaine can only open the doorways at this particular spot? Or was he just using this place because it was conveniently close to the doorway through the ravine?"
"My gut tells me it is the latter. It would be a coincidence beyond all credulity for the place he had to open the portal from to be mere yards away from the one entrance to this realm."
"I'm afraid you're right. Which is bad news for us, since that means he or his replacement could go anywhere else to do it." Dante lowered his brows. "Speaking of the entrance to this place…as far as we know, you can only get here through the Mists, right? Are we sure the lich's destruction of Barsil and the Mists is an accident?"
"You believe it may be intentional?" Gladdic swung back his head. "For if the Mists were destroyed, then no one could enter the Realm of Nine Kings—and thus no one could retrieve the spear."
"Letting him take two birds with one stone. The portals let him smash the last major resistance he may face while eliminating our last hope of stopping him."
"This raises a second question. A person may only reach this land through the Mists. If the Mists are destroyed while we are here, there is a chance we might be trapped here forever."
Blays knocked his boot against a rock to dislodge the snow. "The absolute fool! If he's about to erase our world, trapping us here would be doing us a favor!"
"So what's our next move? Lie here in wait to ambush Adaine or his replacement?"
"If he is still alive, I do not think Adaine will return here," Gladdic said. "He will certainly suspect that we have found this spot and it is thus compromised."
"Then it feels like we're stuck. I think it's time to activate Isa's token and tell her what we've found. It might be enough to point her—or us—in the right direction."
Blays packed a snowball and threw it over the edge of the cliff. "You're sure we can trust her? Adaine talked like he knew about her. And that she might be playing us."
"It's pretty clear she wasn't telling us everything she knew," Dante said. "But I think if she meant to hurt us, she would have just stabbed us with that glowing sword of hers."
Gladdic nodded. "I see no other path for us from here. Let us see if Isa can clarify the way forward."
Dante dug the silver token from his pocket and flipped it to Gladdic. Gladdic brought the ether to him and sank it into the coin-like object.
He snorted in surprise. "The moment the ether touched it, it grew quite warm."
"Let me see it," Blays said. "I'm freezing here."
Uncertain how long it might be before Isa replied or appeared, they hiked up to a vantage overlooking the shelf of land where Adaine had done his work. As soon as they found a snowless patch of ground under some trees, Dante bent his head and activated his loon. Unlike in the Mists, he could feel the nether flowing through it. Even so, he didn't know if it would work until the moment Nak answered with an excited hello.
"I've tried to reach you a dozen times," Nak said. "Does that mean you've returned from the Mists?"
"Not exactly. If anything, we're further from home than we've ever been."
"In a land where the people speak only in riddles?"
"The truth is that we're not sure where we are. But I believe we've stumbled into the Realm of Nine Kings."
Nak was shocked into silence by this, so Dante took the liberty of filling the silence with the story of what they had encountered and experienced since entering the Mists.
"We have a lead on the portals," he said. "And we may have killed Adaine, whatever that means in this place. But that doesn't mean we've eliminated the threat. Are you seeing any activity in Bressel?"
"That we are, in the sense the White Lich has stopped all activity and become inactive. It seems as though he's finished Blighting his captives and is now resting."
"Which means that as soon as he's recovered, he'll come for you."
"That was my fear. Sometimes I hate being right."
"Well, the good news is we're at what seems to be the source of these doorways. And you and I can communicate again. The instant you see the lich working on a new portal, I want to hear about it. We may be able to track it and put a stop to it. Anything else?"
"No," Nak said. "Wait, yes! You're in the Realm of Nine Kings? How sure are you?"
"Pretty sure. But we can't wast
e our loon time if the lich might soon be on the move."
"But Dante—"
"Yes. This means the spear could be real after all—and we might be able to win it. But we can't focus on that now. I'll let you know if we make more progress here. Oh, Nak, one last thing. What time is it there?"
"What time..? About three thirty. In the afternoon."
"Interesting. Thank you."
He shut down the loon and settled in against the trunk, crouching rather than sitting to avoid contact with the frozen ground. The day inched onward. Dante kept one eye on the snowy shelf below them and the other on the toppled trees where they'd fought Adaine, but there was no movement at either site.
"The day's getting on," he said.
Blays glanced up at the sun. "Days have a way of doing that. That's why they're called days and not years."
"It's the same time here as it is in our world. When you're in the Mists, you have much more time, but I'm almost certain it passes at the same rate here as it does where we're from. The lich will be on the move again soon. We can't sit here forever."
Gladdic reached into one of his pockets. "I shall attempt to summon Isa once more."
Ether drew itself to his hand. He directed it into the token. The metal glowed briefly, then faded.
"Hey Gladdic," Blays said. "Do that again."
Gladdic looked puzzled, but obliged, sending another dose of ether into the coin.
Blays smiled. "One more time."
"I have already activated it twice. Either she saw the summons or she did not. A third effort would be either useless or rude."
"Do it anyway." Blays pointed downhill to one of the closer burgs. "And watch this."
Gladdic muttered something that may have been profane, then brought the ether into the coin for a third time.
"Hang on," Dante said. "Did that spire down there just…wink at us?"
Blays stood. "It did the same thing both times before, too."
"What does that mean? Are we supposed to go down to it?"
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