"Again, sir, this is beyond my ability to follow. However, it seems to me that such an act of fabrication, if true, could put everything she stands for in danger."
"Then it would be incumbent on her fellows to not let her risk have been taken in vain."
"Perhaps so."
Dante tried to work through the implications of all this, then shook his head. "Why, though? Why would the lords here want to see the Mists destroyed?"
"If any of them had ever spoken out in favor of such a desire, certainly none have openly said why. I imagine that a great many of them just don't consider it any of their business."
"But some must approve of it. Otherwise, those who don't approve wouldn't be prevented from helping to put a stop to it. Why do they want to see the Mists gone? To close off all access to this place?"
Elenna leaned forward, resting her chin on her fist. "If they witnessed too much chaos in the outlands, they might wish to seal themselves away from it, and prevent that chaos from taking root here. That's how I might feel, if I were a lord entrusted with the safety of my people."
"Which then becomes the unofficial policy of the realm. While officially, it's no one else's concern to get involved in one way or the other. But what about those who oppose it? Hypothetically speaking, why might they conspire to save the Mists?"
"If such groups existed, I imagine they would be rather small. Perhaps so small as to be hopeless. To make one wonder if it is worth destroying themselves for such a minuscule chance." She thought for a moment. "No. As small as that chance might be, it would only become smaller if it were discussed openly—especially with foreigners."
"Maybe we don't need to know. In the end, it isn't important. But if we are to stop this, we do need help. In two forms. First, we found the location where the lich has been activating the portals. But we tipped off his agent to our presence. We have to find him again. That means we need to know if there's a second site he might move to instead. If there's no particular place they might go, and they can open the doorways from anywhere, that means we need to know if there's some other way to track down the agent."
Elenna smoothed the back of her left-hand glove. "You will be pleased to learn this can only be done at specific sites. Knowledge of their locations isn't common, but it isn't rare, either. I see no harm in telling you where else this agent might have gone."
"How far is it from here?"
"Before I tell you that, I would ask you about the second form of help you'd need."
"Stopping the lich here would likely be a temporary measure," Dante said. "The only way to stop him from ever destroying the Mists in the future is to kill him. Well, we've been trying very hard to do that for quite some time now. Since we're here, and not back home drinking overflowing mugs of victory ale, I think you can tell how well that's gone so far."
"It sounds like it must be quite the tale of woe and heroism, sir. I would beg you to hear it, but I know how little time you have."
"Right. Then I'll cut to the chase. We know he can be killed with the Spear of Stars. We believe the weapon is here. Is that true?"
"Where did you hear of such a thing?"
"Is it true?"
She smiled vaguely at his vehemence. "Yes."
"If we stop the lich for now, can your order get us the spear so that we can stop him for good?"
"That would seem to be in our interest."
"That is not a yes," Gladdic said.
"Forgive me for my unclarity, sir. Yes. Stop this now, and we will help you stop it for good."
Dante was seated and hadn't been working anything except his jaw for several minutes, but his heart began to pound. "Then tell us where to go to stop the next portal."
Elenna ducked her head. "Forgive me once again, sirs, but I know very little of the customs of your land. Have you heard the saying 'As above, so below'?"
"Yes. As a matter of fact, it seems to be haunting us lately."
"There are certain places here where the land and the two energies can be manipulated to reshape the worlds below it. Which is to say the Mists, and your world. One of these places is just outside the passage you took to enter this realm. If he has abandoned this site, I would expect that your enemy will head to the only other one that isn't far from here. Follow me, please."
She stood from the table and crossed the courtyard, which had warmed significantly as the summer sun hauled itself into the sky. She came to a freestanding wall of black granite polished as smooth as a mirror. It stood twelve feet tall and twenty wide. White lines and symbols were carved in its face, marking rivers, roads, mountains, and other features beyond Dante's knowledge.
"This is where we are now." A hint of ether twirled from Elenna's finger, lighting up a spot in the western mountains. "And here is where you came in, isn't it?" The light shifted further west, higher into the mountains, until it settled on an hourglass-shaped symbol. "I imagine the agent of the lich was working close to here?"
"Within two hundred yards," Dante said.
"The same will be true of wherever else he goes. His portals will never be more than a bowshot away from one of the rifts."
"That's what you call the passages? Where's the next-closest rift?"
"Here." She lifted her finger. The light on the stone traveled north-northwest, highlighting a second hourglass that appeared to be situated in forested land in the foothills. "In Talassa."
"How far is that from here?"
"About twelve rowlands."
"Twelve rowlands? Are those like miles?"
"Your pardon," Elenna said, touching her clavicle. "I forgot you use another measure. In miles, it will be closer to forty."
"Oh damn it. We'll need horses. Do you have any we can borrow, or will we have to steal them?"
She gave him an aggrievedly disappointed look. "There would be no stealing even if you required them. Which, happily, you won't. The way to Talassa is too treacherous for horses."
"Oh, happily indeed. So we're crossing forty miles of bad terrain on foot?"
"Don't be such a crank," Blays said. "If that's where Adaine's headed, he'll have to cross all the same stuff."
"With a day's head start. What is Talassa, anyway?"
"A cavern," Elenna said.
"So was the one we came in through."
She shook her head. "The rifts do take the shape of underground passages, but Talassa is much larger in scope, and the rift lies deep within it."
"Where does that rift lead?"
"It does not matter, so I will not tell you. But let me warn you that when you enter Talassa, you must be very careful. Each rift is protected by its own guardians."
"Guardians?" Still tilted on his chair, Blays wobbled, but caught himself. "Oh, is that what the snowmen were?"
"The…snowmen?"
"When we ran into Adaine, he had these soldiers who'd pop right out of the snow. They were like ice statues. If ice statues had swords for arms. And wanted to kill you. To get them to die, we had to cut them in half, then destroy some glowy thing inside their exposed guts. Now, I don't know how much killing you've ever done, but that's a lot more than it normally takes."
Elenna gazed at him a moment. "That is a bracing story, sir. If summoning them was not a skill of Adaine's, I suppose these ice-men must be the guardians. Time goes swiftly. The last I knew, the near western rift was guarded by the great bear."
"The great bear?" Dante sat up straighter. "Just how great are we talking?"
"Do you know of whales?"
"A bear as big as a whale?"
"No. A bear as big as two whales."
"I think I'd rather fight the snowmen," Blays said. "So what's guarding Talassa?"
Elenna considered the towering map. "I can't say."
"What, it's a secret? We're going to be finding out for ourselves in a couple days, aren't we?"
"It's not that I can't say because it's secret. It's that I can't say because I don't know. Over time, the guardians change."
"They ch
ange?" Dante said. "Who's replacing them?"
"Oh, there is no who, sir. The land here isn't like your own. It is alive, in a sense. That's the very reason it can be manipulated to change what lies below it. This means that things emerge from it of their own will." She laughed to herself. "I can already see the questions on your face. I can't answer them. We don't know how these beasts come to be, or why some of them seem bound to ward people away from the rifts. All we know is that they do."
"What were the last guardians at Talassa?"
"I don't know. All I can tell you is they will be there. You must watch yourself."
"Then consider us warned. What else can you tell us about the place?"
"I'm afraid that is it, lord. Anything more I do not know or cannot say without exposing myself further than I can allow."
Dante looked to the map for a time, but if it held more secrets, they kept to themselves. "Elenna, what is it that your order does? Why are you getting involved in this?"
"I cannot say."
"I expect if we asked around, we'd get some answers."
"And risk everything to get them." She looked down. "We are historians of a world that isn't our own. And we don't wish the Mists to fall."
Dante waited, knowing silence could often provoke more answers than direct questions, but she said no more.
He took a step from the wall. "I'd like to copy our route. Don't worry about it falling into the wrong hands and revealing your involvement. I'll make it look like a different map."
"In that case, such a thing might be allowed."
"I have a final question," Gladdic said. "The enemy we are about to face will have died in our land to pass into the Mists. Can he also die in this land?"
"Yes," Elenna said.
"What happens to him then?"
"He will pass into the last of everything to merge with every soul that has ever been."
"You speak of the Worldsea. And if we die instead—what is our fate?"
She turned on him, a great distance stealing over her eyes. "Then you would be lost beyond finding or return."
Dante copied the portion of map that included the town, the rift back to Barsil, and the one at Talassa. Elenna gave them a curt but polite goodbye and had a servant show them out the back door. They pretended to head straight for the gates, but with a treacherous path ahead of them, and what sounded like a massive cavern at the end of that path, they diverted to locate a shop that sold equipment for venturing up into the mountains. Lacking any local currency, Blays shadowalked inside and stole up the place, although Dante suspected he'd left some form of payment behind.
They set out on a journey that Dante hoped would take no more than a day and a half. The pace would require them to push themselves to their limits, and to employ no end of sorcery, but if Adaine had survived the encounter in the snows and headed straight to Talassa, Dante feared he'd beat them there no matter how fast they traveled.
The way ahead was filled with long ridges like the one the town had been set on, dipping steeply down into a valley as narrow as a knife wound before rising just as steeply on the other side. Rather than wasting time trying to scale these, they headed back up the mountain where its face was all but smooth of major obstacles. Just lots and lots of little ones.
As soon as they were underway, Dante looned Nak to exchange news, then to order him to send five sorcerers, including Somburr, down through the woods west of Bressel to find Winden and travel into the Mists. Once there, they would try to pass through the Split Crypt to guard the rift there—or, failing that, to stop anyone else from entering the crypt through the Mists.
"I think there's a story about Talassa in the Book of What Lies Beyond," Dante told the others once he'd concluded with Nak. "It isn't named as such, so I can't be sure, but the final trial Sabel had to complete to be rewarded with the Spear of Stars was to delve into the underdark and return with the three tails of the dragon that dwelled there. Sabel described the entrance as being in the same region we're headed toward."
"A dragon?" Blays said.
"I suppose that should have been my first hint the Realm of Nine Kings isn't in our world."
"Because we don't have dragons. But you think they do here."
"Elenna said creatures here arise from nothing, willing themselves into being. Why couldn't there be dragons?"
"Because I really don't want to fight one."
It was still early morning and Dante didn't call their first rest until noon. He refreshed them with nether as they ate small wild apples plucked from a tree. They had some food in their packs they'd carried from their own land, but Dante picked more apples before getting on their way.
Blays began to talk incessantly of game and meat. Deer and elk roamed the highlands, and there were squirrels and mice on the forest floor, but some of the animals there were completely unfamiliar: big-eared cats sitting in the boughs, tails twice as long as their bodies dangling beneath them; and wrinkly-nosed little things scampering around the undergrowth like wingless bats.
At least there was no more sign of gigantic bears. They took another rest and carried on. Far downslope to their right, Dante spotted a star-shaped lake that was one of the markers of their path. It had been about ten miles north of the town. It was good progress, but they needed to make much more.
Once night drew near, Dante angled downhill to gain a bit of temperature. They pressed on through twilight, lighting the way with Dante's torchstone until it gave out an hour later. After that, Gladdic lit the forest for them. Dante healed the blisters forming on his toes. Around eleven o'clock, he finally called it quits for the day. He located a sturdy-looking ash and harvested a sleeping platform from its upper branches.
"What's that about?" Blays pointed up into the leaves. "Afraid of a few bears?"
"No. I'm afraid of one giant bear."
They climbed up and laid out their blankets. Dante gazed back the way they'd come. "I really, really hope we're making the right decision. If the lich uses a different rift than Talassa or the one near the Split Crypt, there won't be a thing we can do to stop him."
"Indeed," Gladdic said. "Which means that you should also be praying that we can trust Elenna."
The fact this hadn't occurred to him before made Dante's skin crawl. It was the kind of thing that would have kept him up if he wasn't so tired from hiking. They held watch, switching every two hours, but there was no trouble that night. Nor, as far as Dante heard, any respiration from bears so enormous their breath sounded like the wind.
They got back on their way before dawn. The mountains swung westward while they continued north, leading them to descend hundreds of feet in the span of an hour. Crevices and fissures riddled the land ahead; the sky was just starting to go gray and they were obliged to brighten the ether to ensure they weren't about to tumble down any pits. A trail snaked between the numerous dangers, but in places the fissures ran for miles in both directions, leading whoever lived in this place to span them with rope bridges. Their progress slowed. The break of dawn made it little better. Dante began to despair of reaching Talassa that same day.
To find the best path forward, and hunt for anyone else heading toward the same destination, Dante killed a few damselflies and sent them north and northwest. Yet some seemed to die within minutes while others wandered off to do as they please, as if they weren't even dead, or as if something in the air was making them wild and free. It was even worse than the problems he'd had with his mouse scouts outside the first rift. He soon discovered that the only way to get the damselflies to do as he wished was to explicitly guide them—something he couldn't do while on the march.
His loon pulsed mid-morning. Nak's voice, usually an even keel, was strained. "Dante. The White Lich is moving from the city."
"He's moving? What about his army?"
"It's on the march too. Nearly all of it. And they're heading north."
"Toward you?"
"It would seem so."
Dante barked his shin on a
rock, wincing. "We're still a day out from our destination. Muster your people and head north as fast as you can. I need you to buy us more time."
"It seems to me that if he doesn't know quite where to find us yet, moving en masse is a sure way to show him right where we are."
"That's a risk we have to take."
"Are you quite certain he'll use the portals again? What if he simply overwhelms us?"
"He'll open another. I'd bet my life on it. Not only will it let him defeat you with much fewer losses, but it'll destroy the Mists, too—and stop anyone from finding the Spear of Stars."
"A neat little strategy," Nak said glumly. "I'll take our forces north. But please hurry, Dante. Something tells me the sand in our hourglass is about to run dry."
Dante didn't bother to tell him that they had been hurrying, but he picked up their pace nonetheless, jogging wherever the uneven ground allowed it. Twice, he extended stone bridges across ravines rather than taking a longer route to a rope bridge. They had dropped out of the heights and the day grew hazy and warm.
He wanted to press forward without rest, but pausing to map the way ahead for the best path through it might save them precious hours. He called for a stop beneath a stand of trees whose crowns were bent like the heads of penitent monks, their long, whip-like branches dangling toward the ground, shuffling in the light wind.
There was plenty of water down in the crevices and gaps, which meant plenty of damselflies to be put to use. Dante slew six of them and sent them on diverging northward courses. Even with his full attention devoted to the task, one dropped away, then two more. After that the remaining three stayed with him, flying swiftly over the jumbled terrain.
They crossed a few more miles of the cracked and open ground, then a forest stole forth from below. Yet the cracks in the earth were still there to clog the way. Without the scouts, and with the trees hampering their sight, they might easily have wandered onto a bad trail or a dead end. Instead, Dante charted a clear course through the natural maze, marking it on a sheet of parchment.
The damselflies flew onward. It seemed as if the fissures would go on forever. Yet Elenna had told them that the only known entrance to the cavern would be found within a lake. At last, sunlight glittered on open water.
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