But so was the Reborn Shrine.
Its west wing was utterly flattened. Its central dome had collapsed, taking its front wall with it. The back wall remained upright, but it was little more than a shell. Tapestries lay twisted and shredded. Pages spewed across the ruins. Glazed shards of pottery shined in the sunlight.
"The shrine," he said dully. "I'm so sorry."
The Keeper smiled. "The shrine has been rebuilt before. It will be again."
Dante's body ached and his clothes were sodden with blood, but his flesh was smooth and clean. The Keeper had mended him while he was unconscious. He got to his feet, troubled by the idea that there was something he needed to do. To retrieve. It felt fairly important, but the details eluded him. Something he needed to do before…
He spun in a circle, trying to locate the smooth spot of ground he'd buried Blays beneath. Everything was coated in gravel and stone dust. Near the edge of the shrine's footprint, soldiers dragged themselves out of the rubble, inspecting each other for injury and whacking grit from their trousers, but the Keeper was the only other person within a hundred feet of him.
"Blays," Dante said. "I sank him into the ground. Do you know where that was?"
The Keeper frowned. Before she could answer, Dante plunged his thoughts into the earth, questing about until he found a hollow space. He pulled back the rocky lid covering it. Blays lay at its bottom. His eyes were closed and his clothes were blood-soaked, but his chest rose and fell.
The Keeper shuffled beside him, ether shining in her hands. She sent it streaming down to Blays.
Blays inhaled suddenly, sitting upright. He gaped at the walls hanging above him. "What's this? A grave?"
"It was a way to keep you from needing one." Dante extended a hand. Blays picked up and sheathed his swords, grabbed Dante's hand, and swung himself over the lip of the hole.
He blinked at the blasted surroundings, turning in a circle. "Question. Where'd the shrine go?"
"We're standing on it," Dante said. "Parts of it, anyway. All that nether in the Andrac had to go somewhere."
"So you chose to slam it into Collen's holiest temple?"
"I chose to crash it into the Andrac. Which happened to be leaning on Collen's holiest temple." Gazing about the rubble, his pride dimmed—and was replaced by elation. "The demon's dead, Blays. Cord and her people are free to fight back!"
"Our soldiers have already gone to find her," the Keeper said. "They'll seize the road from below, then cleanse the city."
"Then we have to find Gladdic before he learns the tide's turned."
"He was seen coming here. When the Andrac died, he fled southwest."
Blays caught Dante's eye. "Toward the road. Sounds like we'd better hurry."
With the need for as much speed as they could muster, they left the Keeper behind. The city streets were clogged with debris and skirmishes, so they drifted south toward the open ground that ringed the butte, sprinting across the paving stones. Dante felt remarkably good. It wasn't just the triumph of having destroyed the Andrac. The Keeper was a skilled healer.
Shouts carried from the interior of the city. Before, they'd been scared. Now, they were defiant. As Dante ran, he caught glimpses of mixed groups of soldiers and citizens jogging down the street, weapons in hand.
"They're going to retake the city," Blays said. "When they do, suppose they're going to reprise the slaughter at the river?"
"If they've got a brain between them, they'll keep the prisoners as leverage. But it doesn't matter. As soon as we finish Gladdic, we're going to find Naran and put this place behind us for good."
Hearing the shouts of their fellow citizens, people had begun to open their shutters. As Dante and Blays ran on, Blays called questions to the residents, asking if they'd seen Gladdic pass. Three confirmed having seen a tall, cadaverous man in plain gray robes. As Dante and Blays neared the south side of the city, however, a woman in a window told them that rather than going to the road, Gladdic had continued past it to the west.
Blays glanced to all sides. "The road's the only way down from here. Why would he go back into the depths of the city?"
Dante shook his head. "Maybe some of his people were trapped by the Colleners. Or he's going back for a relic of some kind."
"Or maybe it's a trap."
They headed west. Within three blocks, heavy footfalls sounded ahead. Gladdic bobbed down the street at a fast walk. He glanced over his shoulder, double-taking as he spotted them, then broke into his best effort at a sprint.
Dante and Blays caught up easily, spreading apart as they neared. Blays held his swords in hand, Dante the nether. Breathing heavily, Gladdic turned. His face was sweaty, red, and contorted with fear.
"I know how this looks," the priest said. "But there's been a mistake."
Sick to his stomach, Dante laughed. "It was an accident that you tried to murder everyone in this city?"
"You don't understand. That wasn't me! I'm not—"
Dante clenched his teeth. "You put thousands of innocent citizens to their deaths. Now, you answer for that."
Nether slashed through the air in a black blizzard. Dante hurled it at Gladdic. The priest shrieked and flung his hands over his face. Droplets of ether shimmered in Gladdic's grasp, but they were torn aside by the storm of shadows.
Blood squirted into the priest's robes. With an airy gasp, he flopped to the dirt. Gladdic lifted his hands, a marble-sized ball of ether shining in each palm. Dante gathered more shadows. Hands shaking, Gladdic turned the ether on himself.
His body contracted, shortening and plumpening. His gaunt cheeks filled out. His gray hair darkened; his face went round, wrinkles smoothing under a boyish layer of fat. He was no longer a tall, ropy man in late middle age, but a short, rotund youth.
Bleeding into his robes, the young man gave them a tired, baleful look, like that of an old bloodhound. As if to say "I told you so." He collapsed on his back, hands plopping to the ground, eyes staring vacantly into the warm autumn day.
"A second ago, wasn't he all gangly?" Blays said. "What did you hit him with? A plate of bacon?"
"This was a decoy." Dante spat in the dirt. "An illusion. To cover his tracks while he escaped down the cliffs."
"If you're smart enough to have figured that out, then what are you doing standing around while Gladdic escapes?"
It felt like Dante had spent the entire day running. Even after the Keeper's ministrations, he barely had the strength to jog back to the road down from the butte. Collenese soldiers had taken the top of the road and were digging in, leery of a counterattack from the small Mallish army that remained on the plain. The Colleners reported that a plump young man in gray robes had been seen descending the switchbacks fifteen minutes ago, but peering down the road, Dante saw no sign of Gladdic there or in the fields below.
"He's been operating out of one of the caves, hasn't he?" Blays motioned downslope. "Think he might be hiding out there?"
"Why would he do that?"
"Because worms feel most at home in dank, dark places?"
With no other ideas, Dante headed downhill to the cavern where Gladdic had brought forth the gigantic Star-Eater. The doors remained open. Dante blew on his torchstone, lighting it. The cavern beyond was big enough to hold hundreds of people. Clean bones lined the walls. The smell of recent incense couldn't quite cover the lingering odor of blood.
"This was where he was killing them," Dante murmured. "Careful. Earlier, he had a second Andrac guarding the slopes. I haven't seen it since."
Other than the bones and a small platform near the back, the chamber was empty. A passage at the rear curved into a second room as large as the first.
Dante stopped in his tracks. Hundreds of bodies lay on the floor, packed shoulder to shoulder, three to five layers deep. Most showed blackened, withered wounds. The predominant smell was that of skin; beneath it were notes of urine and feces, but there was no rot whatsoever.
Thousands of them. Dante had seen more dead in o
ne place on the battlefields of Gask, but those men had died fighting. They'd been armed, uniformed, equipped. These people had been fed to a demon and then stripped to their smallclothes.
Blays nosed the air. "This wasn't all from today, was it? How can they be so well-preserved?"
"Ether. It's holding them in their ideal state. Unable to decay."
"Why would he preserve them? Part of another ritual?"
"I don't think he could dispose of them without tipping off the city as to what he was doing. He preserved them so they wouldn't smell. Once everyone was dead, I'm sure the bonfire would have been visible from Dog's Paw." Dante tried to make a quick count of the bodies. "How do you think the others will react to this?"
"By making the local vendors of torches and pitchforks very rich."
"And the hatred the Colleners hold for Mallon will only burn hotter. It's already beyond control. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to bury the dead before the survivors find them."
"They already know what Gladdic was doing." Blays sheathed his swords. "Anyway, I thought we were done meddling with this place."
They headed to the town below the butte, but it was completely vacant. If Gladdic had come through it, there were no witnesses. Even if there had been people there to see, most likely, Gladdic had left in disguise. They spotted a handful of people hastening west through the desert, but even if, by luck alone, they chose the one that was Gladdic, they wouldn't know it until and unless he revealed himself—which, if it happened, would most likely occur as he was attempting to slay them.
"He'll go back to Bressel," Dante said. "We'll find him there."
"That worked so well for us before."
"Things are different now. We've destroyed his source of shaden. Learned to defeat the Andrac. He doesn't have any more weapons left to use against us."
"But this time, he'll know we're coming."
Dante smiled thinly. "Do you think that will matter?"
"No," Blays said. "I don't."
They trudged back up the road. At the top, four hundred Colleners had gathered to defend the chokepoint into the city. Many had blood on their weapons and clothes.
Cord jogged from their ranks. "Ah, there you are. We've retaken the city!"
"That was fast," Blays said. "Though I suppose everything goes a little faster when you don't have monsters trying to bite you in half."
Dante motioned downhill. "We think Gladdic's fled the city. Have any of your people seen him?"
She queried her defenders. A couple of them confirmed having seen Gladdic heading west past the road, but that meant they were referring to the dead young man who'd been disguised as the older priest. They were still interviewing the soldiers when a runner approached Cord, sweating heavily.
She spoke to him briefly, then made her way to Dante. "The Keeper's at the Reborn Shrine. She insists we join her."
"Insists?" Dante looked to the east, but after the devastation of the shrine, no part of it rose above the rest of the city. "What's this about?"
"She said nothing more. But she's the Keeper. Her request is enough."
Cord let her lieutenants know she was stepping out, then walked to the east at a good clip. Dante and Blays fell in beside her. People were singing in the streets. Others had started cook fires, aided and surrounded by men and women who'd gone gaunt during the occupation. Seeing their celebrations and relief, Dante's heart soared with pride.
The shrine lay in its own ruins. Hundreds of people had been drawn to the spectacle of its shattered walls and tumbled dome. They stood in silent disbelief, glancing from the wreckage to the new arrivals.
The Keeper stood in front of the bronze front doors, which had fallen, dented and half-buried. Before her, she had assembled a gut-high cairn, each of its rocks seemingly made of a different type of stone. The woman's pale blue eyes flitted to Dante, then drifted over the heads of the crowd.
"Time after time," she said, voice booming like the northern surf, "the Mallish have torn this shrine to the ground. No matter how many times they've forced us to rebuild it, we have never despaired. For the prophecy has always told us that, after the twelfth time the Mallish razed the shrine, we would rebuild it yet again. And on that day, Arawn himself would appear to lead us to lasting victory."
She gazed up at the ragged back wall of the Reborn Shrine. "History tells us that, before today, the shrine had been razed and rebuilt ten times. That was a lie. One meant to lull the Mallish into complacency. In truth, they have destroyed it eleven times. And eleven times it's been reborn."
Placing one hand on her back for support, she stooped and picked up a jagged slab of basalt. Arms quaking, she stood. "Today, our foes tore down our shrine for the twelfth time. Now let it be reborn."
She placed the stone atop the cairn. As soon as it was in place, a squiggly line of light sprung from either side of it, converging in front of the monument. Dante recognized it at once. Duset. The two rivers.
Symbol of Arawn.
The crowd thrust up their fists and cheered as if the god himself had arisen behind the Keeper. In disbelief, Dante wandered closer. The Mallish hadn't blown up the temple. During his research into the Andrac, hadn't he read an account from her archives confirming the shrine had been destroyed and rebuilt ten times?
He drew within twenty feet of her and stopped. Around him, the audience quieted, watching.
"I don't understand, Keeper," he said. "Your prophecy said the Mallish had to destroy the shrine." He gestured to the broken stone. "They didn't do this. I did."
The Keeper laughed wisely. "But you are Mallish." She uplifted her hands to the sky. "Behold! The man who freed his people from the empire of Gask. The man who exposed Mallon's lies about our past and brought us the truth: that the ruining of our land wasn't our fault. Behold the man who slew the demons that threatened to kill every last one of us. The man who commands the nether as the gods themselves."
The Keeper lowered her arm and pointed at Dante. "My people! The avatar of Arawn appears among us—and he will lead us to victory in Mallon."
Every eye in the square locked on him. Before, the crowd's shouts had been furious. Now, they were frenzied. The manic, euphoric cries of losing your mind to a belief far grander than yourself.
The Keeper kneeled to him, bowing her head. Hundreds of Colleners did the same. Dante stood alone, like an idol before the masses. Ones convinced that he'd been sent by the gods to put an end to a war that had burned for nine hundred years.
Once, many years ago, an old man had used him as an unwitting weapon against a mighty kingdom. As the people began to chant his name, and the old woman grinned at the ground, he understood.
The cycle had repeated.
FROM THE AUTHOR
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If you'd like to read the earlier books in this world, the previous trilogy is called The Cycle of Arawn.
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