"Rats?" Blays pointed his head at one of the rodents perched on a bleached log thirty feet away. The animal watched them with knowing black eyes.
Dante slapped the dust from his pants. "Or maybe they just sleep until prey wanders into them."
"You know what? I don't care how they do it. Right now, all I care about is getting out of here before…"
Dante had turned around to pick up the flask of water that had come untied from his shoulder when he'd fallen. Hearing Blays trail off, he whirled to face the hole.
Legs poured out from it, dragging grotesque round bodies behind them. The spiders emerged into the daylight, writhing hypnotically, stirring the specific revulsion that only a swarm of bugs can invoke. There were dozens of them—and they were heading straight toward the three men.
"Are we running?" Naran called.
"I am!" Blays took off like a loosed arrow, twigs flying up from his feet.
Dante fell in behind them. The spiders streamed across the flat, hard-packed ground, limbs clicking.
"They're catching up!" Dante said.
Blays glanced back, mouth half open. "You're the wizard! Do something about it!"
Dante drew his antler-handled knife and held it over his arm, waiting for his steps to smooth out enough to prevent him from mangling himself. Then, coming to terms with the idea that mangling himself was the whole point, he lowered the blade, gashing his arm. The nether leaped to the trickling blood.
Black lances slammed into the closest three spiders, splashing their blue interiors across the gray desert. Ten of their kin stopped to lap up the precious fluid. Dante's stomach flopped. As the next wave closed on his heels, he struck those down, too. More and more spiders peeled off to feast on the easy prey. Yet forty others continued after the humans.
Unhindered, Naran and Blays were outpacing Dante, veering away from a jumbled scree that had formed beneath a low butte. Dante headed straight for it. Rocks turned under his boots. Heading uphill, he felt woefully slow. The spiders rushed on, closing to thirty feet, then twenty.
Dante thrust his mind into the stone beneath the rubble, turning it to mud, then ripping it away. With a roar, the loosened rock tumbled toward the verminous swarm. The spiders disappeared beneath the avalanche.
Dante stumbled a few steps higher, then staggered to a stop, breathing hard. A pall of dust strung out on the breeze. Behind them, the spiders who'd turned aside continued to slurp up the dead.
"Well done," Blays called from his right. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to start running again."
* * *
They crossed the remainder of the Spiderfields as swiftly as their muscles allowed.
At last, the gray, matted plains gave way to familiar gray hills. By sundown, the bulge in Dante's forehead had intensified to the brink of discomfort. They kept watch that night, more leery of being ambushed by giant spiders than by Mallish forces.
Morning brought nothing unpleasant besides the heat, which Dante was growing used to. Or maybe it was growing less severe as the summer neared its close. In any event, the morning's trek felt easier. Within an hour, Dante crested a low ridge. The pressure in his head spiked. He came to a halt.
He pointed to a butte less than five miles away. "Whatever's left of the shaden we found on the farm, it's over there. Let's just hope the rest of the shells are with it."
They made their way below the ridge so their silhouettes wouldn't stand out, then hunkered down behind a redolent stand of sage. Minutes later, a column of dust approached the butte. Three men on horseback rode up the trail that had been scoured in its southwestern face.
"Mallish," Blays murmured. "Colleners typically think horses are too precious to be ridden. They only use them in fields."
Dante glanced his way. "You're turning into a regional expert."
"With all the time I've spent in Collen's taverns, I've been absorbing a lot more than beer."
"My element is the sea, not the desert," Naran said. "But even I can see that there isn't much cover between here and there. How do you propose we advance?"
Blays swept a bead of sweat from his nose. "We could alway wait until dark and I could get close enough to sneak in. Or Dante could find some unfortunate creature to kill and send in right now."
Dante tramped around the hillside until he spooked one of the rodents. He struck it down with a lash of nether, then reanimated it, ordering it across the plain. It ran tirelessly toward the butte. Once it was within a mile of its target, he sent it to the highest nearby hill to stand on its hind legs and take in the scene, where he could watch through its eyes.
As it gazed at the scattered buildings atop the butte, it was hoisted suddenly from the earth. Wings beat against it.
"Damn it," Dante muttered. "A hawk just grabbed my spy."
Blays chuckled. "Maybe the Mallish have finally learned how to fight back."
Dante scared up another rodent. He'd have had no problem slaying a city rat, but for some reason, killing one in the wild sent a small pang through his conscience. Perhaps it was the desert. In the woods, life was everywhere. Here, it had to fight for every day. Snuffing it so coldly felt disrespectful. He consoled himself with the idea that, if he took away the shaden from the Mallish, it might save hundreds of Colleners.
The vermin zoomed across the plain. This time, he sent it straight to the switchbacking trail up the butte. The path was lousy with the prints of boots and hooves. Horse droppings scattered the dirt. At the top, a wooden palisade had been erected between the ruins of a stone wall. The rodent scooted under the gate.
Crumbling brick buildings baked in the sunlight. Soldiers in blue uniforms moved between the most intact structures. An ox-drawn cart rumbled down what had once been a road. Dante sent the rodent for a closer look. The cart came to a stop near the edge of the butte. There, a team of incredibly filthy men clambered into the cart's rear, took up shovels, and began flinging dirt and loose rocks off the side of the plateau.
"The Mallish are here in force," Dante said. "And they appear to be digging for something."
Blays shifted behind the sagebrush. "Like what? A well? Buried treasure?"
"I'm going to find the shaden, then figure that out."
Separated from the butte by several miles, the pressure in his head was too indistinct to use it to guide him to the shells. His only way to find them was to send his rodent scout through the crumbling city. The wattle and daub houses sported countless holes in their walls, making for easy entry. Most of the brick and stone structures had held up better, but their doors had been hide or wood, and had fallen off long ago. The rat went from structure to structure, sticking its snout through the entry long enough to confirm that it was a barrack or storage before moving to the next.
As it made its rounds, it passed by the dig. Twenty men stripped to the waist jabbed shovels into the dry earth. They'd already excavated a section of ground twenty feet to a side and three feet deep. Dante hid the rat behind a water barrel. A soldier hopped down into the dig, going from man to man. Each man handed over rusting blades, small leather sacks, tarnished silver necklaces, and other trinkets too time-worn to identify.
"I see," Dante muttered. "They're graverobbing."
He described the scene. Naran snorted. "They came all this way to steal from those their ancestors killed decades ago? No wonder the Colleners hate them."
"It gets worse. They're pulling out the bones, too. Gods know why."
He moved the rat along. It soon came to a tall round building whose mortared stone walls were weathered but intact. A closed wooden door revealed that it contained something leadership didn't want the rank and file to have access to.
Dante sent the rodent around the structure's circumference, searching for cracks or a drain. He found no entry. The building bore narrow windows, but these started six feet up the sides and the wall, though eroded, was too slick for the rodent to climb, especially now that it had been rendered clumsier by its recent death.
While Dante was still sear
ching for a way in, a man in a gray robe swayed up to the door, looking sweaty and miserable in his heavy church garb. The priest got a key from his pocket and opened the door. The rodent scooted in behind him.
The door creaked closed. Yellow sunlight illuminated a broad, circular room. At one end, a chalk circle had been drawn on the stone floor. A gray tapestry hung from the wall, sewn with the blue hourglass of Taim. Of far greater interest to Dante were the barrels lined along the wall—and the sharp, brackish odor the rodent scented on the air.
The priest fetched an iron rod from the wall. One end of the rod curved, splitting into three prongs, like a bent fork. The priest went to one of the barrels, removed its lid, and lowered the instrument inside. After a bit of splashing and thumping, he removed a shaden. He turned it side to side, eyeing it, then replaced the instrument on the wall and exited the building.
"Found them," Dante said.
Blays clapped his hands. "About damn time. How many?"
"Hold on." He sent the rodent up the side of one of the barrels. It fell three times before making it to the top. "They have about twenty barrels. It's too dark to see inside, but there have to be hundreds of shaden here."
"What's the situation around them?"
"They're in a secured building. Stone walls. Plenty of soldiers around, but they're mostly occupied by the dig. There's a trail up to the top of the butte. Gated. And guarded. There's at least one priest in the vicinity, probably more. Since he took one of the shaden with him, I'm guessing he knows how to use the nether."
"The nether?" Naran said. "But that's a crime punishable by death."
"Don't ask me. Maybe they make allowances for themselves when they're out of Mallon."
"Don't be naive," Blays said. "The powers that be exist to set strict rules for the commoners. They have no intention of following the rules themselves. That's why they seek power. And it goes all the way to the top. Taim couldn't even follow his own rules about infidelity. Most of his compatriots are no better. The holy books paint the gods as such drunken, petty sluts it's a wonder they haven't brought humanity to trial for libel."
Dante regarded him with amusement. Blays rarely expressed much interest in theology, probably because the slant of his opinions would get him hanged in most places where he wasn't best friends with the high priest.
Naran set his chin in his hand. "I suppose it doesn't matter what the laws are. What matters is that a powerful force is standing between us and the shells."
Blays glanced toward the distant butte. "Oh, that's nothing. The building's stone. I'll shadowalk right in."
"Is that so?" Dante said. "Do you intend to shadowalk out with twenty barrels slung over your shoulder?"
"I intend to stuff the shaden in a sack of some kind."
"And you'll have enough nether to shadowalk up the trail, over the gates, inside the building, and then repeat on the way out? What if you get delayed at some point? Or one of these shameless priests notices you blundering around in the nether?"
Blays waved in dismissal. "It's not blundering. I'm not running around the shadows drunk. Except when I am."
"Even if you're perfectly stealthy, you won't have enough nether to get in and out."
"Do you have a better idea? Maybe you'd like to fight our way through them?"
"Nope. I'm going to tunnel through the butte—and then straight up into the building."
"That's actually pretty great. But what happens if someone stumbles into us? After you've cut through all that rock, are you going to have any woo-woo left to kill them with?"
"Not much," Dante admitted. "But I'll have the shaden to draw on, won't I?"
"Now that's handy. What do you say, Naran? Want to head in with us? Or would you rather stay out here?"
"If it comes to a fight, I can't offer more than a sword," Naran said. "But if I can speed up our gathering of the shells, we'll be less likely to get in a fight in the first place."
The rodent scout was still perched on the edge of a barrel. Dante ordered it to jump into the water, find one of the shaden, and remove a small piece of its meat. This accomplished, its next task was to climb back out of the barrel.
While Dante waited for the creature to pull that off, he provided the others with a detailed description of what he'd seen so far, especially the building the Mallish were using to house the shaden.
"There's something funny about this," Blays said. "This is an awfully long way to travel to dig up some rusty old chain mail."
Naran brushed a large red ant from his boot. "It's not politically sound, either. Relations with Collen are strained at the best of times. Why worsen matters by digging up Collenese graves?"
"Two possible answers," Dante said. "Either they don't care what the Colleners think. Or whatever they're after is worth so much that it doesn't matter how much outrage they cause."
Once the rodent had escaped the barrel, he sent it scampering up a set of shelves and out one of the windows. It landed in the pillowy dust. Without haste, it made its way beneath the gates, down the switchbacks, and across the miles of open field, stopping often to watch for hawks.
After more than an hour, it reached Dante. He held out his hand. It spat the bit of shaden meat into his palm. He dropped his connection to the shell they'd found at Mrs. Fielder's farm, swaying back at the welcome release of the pressure. He gave himself a minute, then delved into the shadows within the flesh the rodent had brought him. A new bulge sprung in his mind. One that would lead him straight to the storage room.
They planned to make entry after nightfall. With nothing else to do, Dante sent his scout loping back across the fields and up into the butte. He positioned it near the excavation, hoping for a better look at what the Mallish were after. Dirt-smudged soldiers hauled up armor, weapons, packs, and bones, sorting them into piles.
After a few minutes, a gray-robed priest—a different man than the one Dante had seen take the shaden—looked up sharply. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he wandered toward the rodent. Dante retreated the creature into a ruined house. Once the priest returned to the dig, Dante sent the rodent to the shaden storage, where it waited outside until one of the priests entered the building late that afternoon. Dante tucked the scout behind a crate, intending to leave it there so they'd know it was safe to infiltrate.
As the sun advanced across the sky, the three of them shifted around the sagebrush, seeking shade. Only after darkness took the plain did they descend the hill and cross toward the plateau. Smoke rose from the soldiers' camp, lighter gray against the black sky. Dante stopped a half mile from the butte, the rodent perched in the storage room window, watching the grounds. The soldiers had already washed up and eaten. Soon, the men retired to their barracks.
"All quiet," Dante said. "Let's get thieving."
He led the way to the butte, coming at it from the west side, out of sight of the gates. The ground there was littered with loose stones and piles of dirt dumped from above. Tattered clothes and rusty blades scattered the upturned earth. Dante moved to the sheer rock wall, drew his knife, and cut his much-abused left arm. Nether shot up from all sides, unusually dense.
He placed his hand against the rock. It had been hours since sunset, yet the basalt was still blood warm. Stone flowed away like water down a drain, forming a narrow tunnel just large enough for a man to fit through.
Dante climbed inside, sloping the passage upward as he expanded it forward. Fifteen feet in, with the moonlight fading behind him, he got out his torchstone, blowing on the small white marble until pale light flooded the tunnel. Onward and upward, he advanced into the heart of the butte. The pressure in his head intensified with each step, slowly sliding from the center of his brow toward the top of his head. Once it reached the dead center of the top of his skull, he sent the tunnel spiraling upwards.
Minutes later, a pale light shined in the eyes of the rodent. Dante blew out his torchstone and climbed out onto the floor of the shaden vault.
9
Blays a
nd Naran entered behind him, taking in the lay of the room. Dante instructed the rodent to leap out of the window and take up position across from the door. Outside, the plateau was silent except for the song of crickets and the hollow hooting of owls.
Blays grabbed the claw-tipped rod from the wall, moved to the closest barrel, and winced. "Do you really think they'll survive? Buried in the desert for a week?"
"I don't know," Dante said. "But they've lasted this long. There's no other way to do this. We'll come back for them as fast as we can."
Not looking particularly mollified, Blays went to work scooping up shaden and relocating them to a single barrel closest to them. Naran rolled up his sleeves and grabbed other snails with his bare hands. The barrels contained hundreds of them. Highly unlikely to be Mallon's entire stock of shaden, but it might well be everything they'd recently imported from the Plagued Islands. And with the Tauren defeated, the Mallish no longer had a supply to draw on.
Dante pried the lid from a barrel and reached into the dark water. His hand brushed a shell. With some gentle prying, he worked it loose. As he lifted the brackish-smelling creature from the water, silver threads glimmered around its shell before fading.
He frowned, doing his best to follow the silvery tracework. "There's ether in these."
Blays didn't look up from his hook-work. "I thought there was ether in everything."
"This has been shaped by someone. I wonder if this is how they've kept them alive this long."
"It's not connected to anything, is it? Like an alarm?"
Dante blinked and did his best to follow the course of the ether. For him, even that simple task was a challenge, yet he couldn't have done it at all before visiting the islands. He didn't see any tendrils leading away from the shaden. Whatever the ether's purpose, it was self-contained.
He returned to the snails, fishing about in the water and relocating them to Blays' main barrel. Some of the shaden were far more stubborn than others. With Dante's frustration mounting, he stepped back, drying his hands on his pants, and wandered around the room, looking for another one of the hooked rods that seemed so effective at detaching the snails.
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