The Red Sea (8 page)

"What are they doing?" Blays whispered.

"The song of going," Winden said. "It is always played before a journey. So if you die, the gods will know you were loved."

"Well that's nice."

"It's tonen. Another lie."

She didn't slow down until they'd hiked out of town. The canopy enfolded the path, dousing them in welcomed shade. After a few hundred yards, she took a fork in the trail, heading west of the slopes where Dante's father lay in the temple.

He found he felt very little for the man. It had simply been too long. Dante had assumed he'd died long ago. Perhaps that had been tonen—a sweet lie, better to believe than the unknown truth—but it meant Dante had also made his peace long ago. And while he believed Larsin had wanted in part to see Dante one last time before dying, Dante thought his father had primarily summoned him to the island because he believed Dante was the only one capable of curing him of his sickness.

Even so, Dante was happy enough to try to find the plant that might help him. Not for Larsin's sake. But for that of the people in Kandak. They deserved the chance to live free of the Tauren raiders. Since learning to use the nether, Dante had hurt countless people with it. But he'd also used it to free far, far more of them. If he could mend whatever was wrong with Larsin, and allow him to help his adoptive people to fight back, then Dante would leave the island with no regrets.

They spoke little. The trail degraded quickly, with some portions so washed-out and steep they had to detour through the shrubs. It was so warm that Dante had been toying with the idea of cutting his trousers off at the knee, but after struggling through a patch of oozing orange thorns, he was glad he'd left his clothes intact.

After one such detour, they stopped on the path to drink and catch their breath. Dante got a rag from his pack and wiped off the worst of his sweat. "How far is the march to the Dreamers?"

"Three days," Winden said. "If we can keep up this pace."

"And from there?"

"Two days more. Don't worry. We'll be back before your boat."

"You said the trip's dangerous," Blays said. "Anything we should watch out for?"

She tucked her hair behind her ear. "Snakes. Spiders. Floods. Quicksand. Cotters. The Tauren. Poisonous thorns—"

"I thought you were supposed to lie to me in situations like this. Maybe it would be faster to list the things that
won't
try to kill us."

Winden considered this. "Me."

She moved on. Within minutes, the ground leveled out. Worn black stones jutted from the ground. Most were all but hidden in ivy, moss, and brambles, but the visible portions were straight, squared off. The walls of buildings. The path led through the middle of the ruins, but Winden diverted around them into the jungle.

"What was this place?" Dante said.

"Destroyed by the Mallish during the old wars." Winden made a sweeping gesture above her brow. "It should be left in peace."

Even the birds seemed to agree, going quiet as the three of them skirted around what remained of the city. It took ten minutes to bypass it. A minute after they'd gone by the last building, the ruins faded behind them, lost to the jungle.

"These plants of yours," Blays said. "What do they look like?"

Winden paused to pluck burrs from the straps of her sandals. "We won't see them here."

"Yes, and if you won't tell me what to look for,
I
won't notice them even if they start growing out of my nose."

"Molbry. A red flower. Small, with two petals like the ears of a rabbit. Grows in the shade of the waterfalls on the southeast side of the island."

"Wonderful." Blays stooped low, examining the foliage alongside the crooked trail through the clay. "So all we need to do is find a flower shaped like a foxhound. Then it can do the hunting for us."

Late that afternoon, rain pattered the leaves of the canopy. Within a minute, the sprinkle transformed into a deluge. Dante strung a tarp between the branches and crouched beneath it. The storm blew itself out within twenty minutes, but it left the ground sticky and sodden. Dante's boots soaked through. He doubted they'd make three more miles before the overcast skies darkened toward night.

At day's end, they made camp beneath a tree that was twice as wide as it was tall. Its leaves grew in such greedy profusion that the ground around its trunk was almost dry. They ate another meal of root paste. With the hour no later than seven o'clock, Winden dug into her bag, removing several finger-shaped bulbs covered in rough skin. With a series of quick flicks, she peeled the skin away, then used her flint to light two bulbs. They burned with a soft, steady light and the smell of camphor. With the candlefruit providing light, they spent two hours gathering and preparing san root, then slept.

The rain returned in the night. In the morning, the air was damp and cool, warming within minutes from the rising sun. As Dante walked downhill from camp, a small golden-furred creature flung itself through the branches. Its limbs were long and loopy and its eyes bulged like melons. Rather than paws, it had hands—on its back legs as well as its front. As it dangled from a branch by its tail, shelling a nut with its front teeth, Dante finally understood how far away he was from everything he knew.

Throughout the morning, the terrain continued to rise, until streams of mist rolled through the trees, condensing and falling like fat, inconstant raindrops. Late that morning, they ascended from the mist and found themselves at the edge of a cliff overlooking a shallow, tree-choked valley miles and miles long. Scores of rocky plateaus jutted up from the sea of vegetation.

Winden moved to a squat tree. Two ropes, one fat and one thin, stretched from the cliffs to the branches of a tree a hundred yards away. Winden pulled in the lighter rope hand over hand. A length of wood emerged from the branches of the lower tree, straps dangling from its underside. Beyond the connecting tree, another length of rope carried on for hundreds of feet, forming the second link in a chain that appeared to span the entire valley.

"Oh no," Blays said. "This is going to be even worse than the bridge, isn't it?"

"The Broken Valley," Winden said. "Full of cliffs. Falls. Ravines. You can spend days hacking your way across its floor. Or you can spend an hour soaring over its roof."

"Is there an option to nap in its bed?"

"Sure. When you land after the rope breaks."

She reeled in the length of wood, which looked distressingly like handlebars, and tied a sturdy strap around her left elbow and wrist. Gripping the handles in each hand, she moved to the edge of the cliff and stepped off.

She whisked along the rope, hair streaming behind her. Dante laughed out loud. Blays looked pale. After her swift initial descent, the rope line leveled out and she slowed, coasting. She made landfall on a wooden platform, brushed herself off, then hauled on the rope, returning the handlebar to the upper cliff.

From the trees at the edge of the drop, a family of the small golden creatures emerged, oversized eyes blinking, dangling from the branches by their tails and hands.

"Great," Blays muttered. "And now we have an audience."

"What's the big deal?" Dante said. "Normally, you collect death-defying experiences like a child collects bugs."

"Then heights are the equivalent of those bugs who eat shit." The handlebars arrived, rocking side to side. Blays grabbed for them and tied the strap around his left arm using the most secure knot they'd ever learned at sea. He shuffled up to the cliff's edge, scowling so hard it looked like his face might break free of its moorings with a rubbery clap. "If I die, I want you to bag up whatever's left of me and bring it to Minn. I know she hasn't had enough of me yet."

"Would you like me to reanimate you, too?"

Blays closed his eyes and hopped into the void. The rope tensed under his weight. He swooshed along it, slowing as it grew horizontal. At the platform, Winden steadied his landing. He unstrapped and heaved on the rope, returning the handlebars to Dante. Dante tied the strap around his arm, took a deep breath, and let himself fall from the cliff.

His stomach surged into his throat. His eyes watered; the wind rushed past him so fast he couldn't breathe. But it streaked through his hair, too, and his heart beat like the hooves of a galloping deer. Too soon, he found his feet skidding across the platform.

Fortunately for his inner thrill-seeker, this was only one leg in a trip of dozens. It wasn't until his fourth ride that he found the poise to take proper stock of his surroundings. The trees supporting the ropes grew from high islands of rock separated from each other by channels of empty space. These channels ran at least fifty feet deep. Within their heavy shade, Dante glimpsed green vines, trickling streams, and jagged rocks. The trees bearing the ropes added another twenty to fifty feet of distance to the bottom.

They advanced platform by platform. Between having to make three individual crossings per plateau, including the time spent returning the handlebars and strapping in, their overall progress was somewhere around walking speed. Even so, this was infinitely faster than trying to navigate the channels.

Winden crossed to the next platform. Blays followed, then hauled on the rope, returning the handlebars to Dante. Dante tied himself to them and swung off the little island of rock.

With a bow-like twang, the rope snapped. Dante's guts lurched as he plunged downward. Beneath him, branches rose to meet him like a field of spears.

He sliced downward through the warm air. Years ago, chasing arcane secrets around the tree-city of Corl, he'd fallen from a much higher elevation than this. He'd saved himself by softening the earth and plunging into it like water. Here, though, he plummeted toward dozens of branches. He was about to be gored and thrashed. His only hope rested in staying lucid enough during the aftermath to heal himself before he bled to death.

Something hissed through the air. A vine appeared from nowhere, stringing across his upper chest. He jolted, slowing. The vine snapped and he resumed his fall. He hadn't traveled five more feet before he was arrested again, this time by three vines which tangled around his shoulders and waist. Dante dangled there a moment, reassuring himself this wasn't some perverse trick, then grabbed hold of the vines, tied one around the rope he'd used to replace his stolen belt, and climbed up the others to the thick branch they were hanging from.

Over on the platform, Blays gaped. Winden leaned against the trunk of the tree, bracing herself as if overcome by Dante's near death. Dante scooted along the branch toward the trunk, then climbed down to the ground.

Blays rushed over to him, grabbing his shoulders. "Those vines came for you like you owed them money! How did you do that?"

"I didn't do anything." Dante nodded at Winden. "She did."

Blays cocked his head. "Winden. And I thought you were only here for your sunny disposition."

She moved toward the edge of the rock and stared at the next platform two hundred feet away. "The rope. It's broken. We have to figure out how to cross."

"That won't be a problem," Dante said. "You know what is, though? You being able to do something I've never even heard of before, then trying to act like nothing happened."

"I'm not responsible for your ignorance. How do we get down?"

"My plan was to use my awe-inspiring powers. But that would be pretty dumb of me if you're capable of growing a vine between this tree and the next one."

She thrust her jaw forward. "Everything that you can do, have you told me of it? High Priest Galand?"

"I'm starting to think I should. We're out here in the wild. Our survival might depend on knowing what we're all capable of doing. So I'll start. I'm a skilled nethermancer. I can harm and heal. Create light and darkness. I can reshape dirt and rock. I can see through the eyes of the dead. And if we ever find ourselves really, really bored, I can make a troupe of dead rats stand up and dance."

Blays lifted his hand. "I can disappear. Walk through stone walls, too. Impressive, I know, but I must warn you: I'm already married."

"I am a Harvester," Winden said. "And you have just seen what I can do."

"Grow things? Then why not start with that molbry flower we're after?"

"I can only grow what is already there." She gestured toward the next island. "I can't simply string a vine between here and there. I wouldn't trust it to hold us. But we can use one to climb down, and another to come up."

She tipped back her head. A few feet above their heads, a vine detached from the high branches, nosing forward like a snake. It lowered itself to the ground and slithered over the side of the cliff.

Dante kneeled on the rocky edge and watched the vine disappear into the shrubs clinging to the almost vertical slopes. "Are there many of you?"

"Very few. So my people will appreciate it if you would not get me killed."

Blays nodded, got a look on his face, and burst into laughter. "Hang on a second. I think she just said something funny."

Once she'd extended the vine to the bottom of the defile, Winden led the way down. The face of the rock wasn't completely vertical, and though it would have been highly dangerous to descend without their makeshift rope, there were enough holds for her to pick her way down.

"Have you ever heard of anything like that?" Blays said. "These Harvesters?"

Dante shook his head. "Never. But it makes a certain amount of sense. The nether resides in all living things. What she's doing isn't so different from when I make a body regrow from its wounds."

"Oh boy. You're going to spend the rest of the trip trying to figure this out, aren't you?"

"The thought had crossed my mind."

Winden called from below. Dante made his way down. The bottom of the ravine was so densely filled with shrubs, thorns, and dead branches that he gave up any thoughts of trying to cross the entire valley from below. At the next island, Winden crawled another vine up to its top. They ascended to its surface, spent a very long time inspecting the rope there, and continued on their way.

By early afternoon, they stood on the far side of the valley, having suffered no further mishaps. More heights rose ahead. That meant climbing, but after his experience with the rope, Dante was happy with any method of travel that kept his feet in contact with the ground.

"What if you had died in the fall?" Winden said as they hiked up what appeared to be a game trail. "What would have happened to you?"

"I imagine," Dante said, "I would have gotten very bloated. And very discolored. And then been devoured by insects until I was nothing but bones and hair."

"Not your body. Your spirit. Your god, Arawn—he is a god of death. He must be hungry for your soul."

He shook his head vehemently. "That's nothing but Mallish propaganda. An attempt to discredit him. We all die in time. Why would Arawn be in some special hurry?"

"Do not get him started on this," Blays said. "Not unless you want a nine-hour sermon on all the ways Mallon has distorted the holy message of the guy who gave us pestilence, famine, and beheadings."

"I don't give sermons. And it's not about clearing Arawn's reputation. It's about letting people worship as they please without fear of getting strung up for it."

"This hike," Winden said. "It's long. And it's boring. So I don't care if it takes nine hours to explain. I want to know where Arawn sends you when you die."

Dante glanced up at the sky. It was hard to see through the leaves, but it was dimming as gray clouds mounted against the peaks ahead.

"A hill under the stars," he said. "Where you join him in the hereafter."

"This is a reward? What about those who did wrong? Bad people?"

"They go there, too."

"That can't be. This must be a trick. A lie."

Dante ran his forearm across his brow, which had grown grimy during the tree crossings. "To accomplish what?"

"To deal justice to those who deserve it."

"Not having visited the place, I couldn't say. But if he's looking to trick us, you'd think he could come up with something more enticing than a hill beneath the stars."

"I died once," Blays said. "It was nice. Scenic. No fancy hills or stars, though."

Dante swatted at a fly. "Is that what happens when you die, Winden? You're brought forth to be judged?"

She nodded, glancing down as a small pink lizard scampered off a rock and into the brush. "Brought to Kaval to tell the story of your life. But there is a problem. Living can only be done by hurting others. So all are guilty."

Blays made a face. "Some kind of universal exemption seems in order, then."

"There is a loophole. Kaval lives in his world, not ours. How is he to know what's true about our lives and what isn't? When you face him, you tell him tonen, the Sweet Lie. That you were not so bad. That you deserve mercy. If the lie is convincing enough, he will spare you. Send you to sail through the Worldsea."

"And what happens if you're judged to be a jerk?"

"Then you are chained to the Rock. Where your ancestors are gathered to watch your shame as you are torn apart by the birds and the crabs for 180 years. Then you are made whole again, to witness the tearing apart of your descendants."

"That sounds…extreme."

"This is why we practice tonen all our lives."

To match the mood in the air, rain began to sprinkle the canopy. Dante lowered his head and tried to ignore the percussive droplets on his crown. "Your language. Will you teach it to me?"

"Why?" Winden said. "You leave here in twelve days."

"Which means that for the next twelve days, you're our only way to communicate. With people who appear to be professional liars. If we're separated, or you get hurt, we could find ourselves in deep trouble."

"Our language is for ourselves. Outsiders have no claim to it." She was quiet for a moment. "Why are you here?"

"You know that. To save my father."

"You barely saw him. You ask no questions about him. It's obvious you care nothing for him."

"You're right. I came here because I would have regretted it if I didn't. If he had been all I'd found here, I doubt if I'd be hunting flowers with you now."

"What else did you find?"

"People who, despite their fondness for scamming strangers, seem peaceful. Who deserve to live free of the threat of constant violence. If I can help give that to them, then I'll leave here happy I came."

She pressed her lips together. "I'll teach you. But if someone asks, it wasn't me. You will lie."

She started at once. The language was called Taurish, named for the raiders, who were said to be the island's first inhabitants. Over the years, Dante had tackled several foreign languages, but soon found Taurish to be the easiest he'd encountered. Structurally, its only major difference from Mallish was that it tended to place the subject of the sentence at the very beginning, or even to isolate that subject as a chopped-up sentence of it own, which explained Winden's occasionally curious Mallish grammar.

Besides that, though, Taurish was very intuitive. Learning a conversational vocabulary was going to take far more time than he had, but by the time they made camp that night, he was already able to form simple sentences.

In the morning, they resumed the march. A single mountain loomed ahead, abutted by a lower shoulder that Winden confirmed was the Dreaming Peaks. Within an hour, the jungle thinned to a tree-studded veldt. A few hundred yards to their east, the land fell away in a series of sheer cliffs. A mile below, the sea shimmered and tossed. When the wind was right, Dante could hear the surf booming.

Streams trickled through the grass. Soon, there were no trees at all. Small pools of water blistered the rocks, steaming and churning, the vapors smelling of bad eggs. The banks of the pools were encrusted with blue, red, and yellow crystals.

Ahead, the eastern edge of the land bulged up into spires of naked rock. A trail was worn through the grass, leading straight to the pass between the spires and the mountain to their right. Cresting it, they looked down on the ruins of a city.

"Can't imagine why they abandoned
this
place," Blays said. "The location is so convenient."

"It's not abandoned." Winden withdrew a small bone flute from her pouch. She blew three quick notes. They seemed to linger on the air longer than they should.

After a minute, a man appeared at the fringe of the ruins. He carried a tall staff and wore a purple robe the exact shade as the ever-present clay; it must have been dyed with it. He stopped ten feet from them and spoke a few words that Dante couldn't catch.

Winden replied. After a brief conversation, she took off her pack, kneeled, and withdrew a shiny black box. The man lifted the lid and withdrew a shaden, water dripping from its black shell. He put it back in the box and tucked the box under his arm, then gestured down the path.

"We proceed," Winden said. "Don't speak to anyone. No matter what they say or do."

The man in the purple robe led the way. Winden continued to speak to him. Dante hardly understood any of it, but heard one word repeated: Tauren.

Crumbled walls rose to the sides of the street. Five minutes later, Dante hadn't seen a single soul. He didn't smell wood smoke or any of the general miasma associated with permanent human habitation. A white crow perched on a crumbling wall, raucously criticizing them as they passed. To the right, a solitary woman tended rows of orange flowers.

From their left, the spires of rock veered closer, channeling the ruins into a narrow canyon. The way ahead was blocked by a high wall in better repair than anything they'd seen so far. The path led straight to an entry in its side. There, the man in purple swept aside a shaggy-haired pelt hanging over the doorway, leading them into a cavernous chamber with twenty-foot ceilings.

Bodies stretched from wall to wall.

They lay on thin pallets, eyes closed. The nearest of them, a middle-aged woman, was breathing evenly, yet even with the rise and fall of her chest, she looked more like she was dead than asleep. There were perhaps forty of the sleeping people in all, dressed as simply as the fishermen in Kandak. Candlefruit glowed on black stone pedestals. Despite the height of the ceiling, the room felt close, smelling faintly of sweat and something floral, along with the pungent odor of the burning fruit. Down the way, another man in a purple robe trimmed a sleeping man's unruly beard with a pair of silver scissors.

Something jabbed Dante in the side. He whirled on Blays, then grabbed his rope belt to restrain his fist from flying into Blays' face. Winden walked down the middle of the room and Dante hurried after. The man in purple carried the box of live shaden off to a side room. Winden continued forward. Ahead, daylight peeped around a hide draped over the exit.

As Dante neared it, a woman sat bolt upright on her pallet. Her eyes blazed from the pallid sheen of her face, locking on his.

"De tregen!" she yelled. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She lunged at Dante, hands outstretched like claws, but her legs gave out and she spilled to the floor, jaw hitting with a crack.

Dante moved to help her. Winden grabbed his upper arm. Across the room, the man with the scissors stood, gathered the folds of his robe, and swished toward them. He took the woman by the shoulder and poured a viscous fluid down her throat. Winden hauled Dante outside.

"What are the monks doing in there?" he said.

She walked down the grass-dotted clay. "What they have to."