The Red Sea (25 page)

"There won't be nearly enough ropes to cross," Winden said. "You mean to harvest across the gaps?"

"That's right." Dante moved to the cliff's edge. "It'll be hours faster than getting the ropes back up. Now let's find out how strong these vines are."

They tested several, hanging from them with all their weight. Some of the single vines snapped, dumping them to the ground, but two vines together was more than enough for one person, and three braided could hold both of them at once.

Dante kneeled by the cliff's edge and drew the nether to a length of vines. They extended, tumbling down like rivulets of water. They snaked across the tops of the brush, wriggled up the roots on the side of the next plateau, found hold in the nearest tree, and pulled taut.

By the time he had the first gap bridged, Blays had climbed back up with the first of the ropes, which they used to haul up the others. Methodically, they worked their way across the valley. Where the ropes were long enough to cross, Blays tied them to a tree, climbed down into the ravine below, and then climbed back up the neighboring plateau, securing the end of the line there.

Dante had been hoping to span the entire valley that same day, but Winden's hold on the nether flagged less than a quarter of the way across. He still wasn't all that skilled at harvesting, but he made it almost halfway before his own strength gave out. He tried feeding what little ether he could draw to the plants, but they didn't so much as budge.

Warriors started trickling in by mid-afternoon. They carried spears and knives, some metal and others bone. Their arrows were tipped with bone or obsidian. Unlike the armies in Mallon and Gask, there were as many women as men, their hair pulled back into braids. Some bore ropes and climbing gear they used to span several more gaps. As night neared, Niles arrived with a final band of four more soldiers, putting their numbers at 23.

"It was as many as I could muster," he said. "The people are scared to strike back. They know it will provoke a war."

Blays scratched his neck. "Then why did any of them agree to fight?"

"Because if we give up the Dreaming Peaks, then we've already lost."

They camped on the plateaus overnight. During all the thrashing about down in the ravines, Dante had stumbled on any number of dead animals. He raised a rabbit and something that resembled a ring-tailed squirrel to stand watch on the far side of the valley.

By morning, they'd seen no sign of Tauren scouts. With the help of Blays and several soldiers, Dante and Winden finished crossing to the other side.

It took a day and a half of travel to reach the fringe of the jungle. Beyond, the trees thinned, replaced by grass and rocks.

"Blays and I will scout ahead," Dante told Niles. "Be ready to march after sunset. We'll strike in the middle of the night."

He and Blays continued on, with the rabbit and the ringtail scouting ahead. As the undead vermin neared the colorful, bubbling pools, a man carrying a short bow and a thin sword made his way down the slopes. He wore iron bands around his joints and moved from rock to rock with the fluid lope of a lifelong scout. Dante grabbed Blays' sleeve and pulled him behind a shelf of basalt.

"Please tell me you're not about to try to kiss me," Blays said.

"Scout ahead," Dante said. "Quarter mile."

"Then let's leave him be."

"Don't tell me you think we're getting out of this without killing anyone."

"We shouldn't kill this one right now. Because if we do, we'll tip off the others before we're ready to strike."

"Oh. Right."

The scout jogged onward, pausing on outcrops to survey the long downward slope. Dante shadowed him with the rabbit. The man stopped well short of the jungle, turning back for the mountains. Dante and Blays continued upward toward the high single peak and the pass running beside it. The steam from the flatulent-smelling pools obscured them, providing decent cover.

They crossed a small ridge. In the dip below, flies buzzed as thickly as rain. No less than thirty of the golden-furred monkeys lay strewn across the rocks, hacked and bashed. Judging by the smell (bad, but not gut-turningly so) and the level of bloat (minimal), they'd been dead less than a day.

Blays kneeled beside the nearest. He reached out and touched the beast's golden fur. "Why would they do this?"

Dante pointed to the pieces of a broken shaden shell scattered around one of the bodies. "Looks like they were thieving."

"I'm going to pretend we were sent here to get their revenge."

"I think we're close enough. Let's hunker down and I'll send in the spies."

They stopped in a hollow. Dante sent the ringtail and the bunny the rest of the way up the slopes. The Tauren had been busy since claiming the Dreaming Peaks. Rocks had been dislodged from the heights, clogging the entry from the north. A wooden hutch had been built on both sides of the rise overlooking the rubble. Both structures contained a sentry. As the ringtail advanced past them, Dante made sure to make it stop to poke around the pebbles, flick its tail, and otherwise not look like it was a puppeted zombie.

Beyond the wall, the fields of flowers were empty of workers. A single warrior walked down the path to the great hall where the Dreamers had slept. The ringtail followed the man inside. There, a dozen soldiers snored in the beds or kneeled around low tables playing dice games that looked like woten, but involved the exchange of iron coins rather than truths.

"Counting at least fifteen soldiers so far," Dante murmured. "No sign of sorcerers."

Outside, the rabbit hopped languidly through the grass. It came to a trail at the base of the cliffs. Dante directed it up a switchback too narrow for two people to pass each other. Very easy to defend. Dante wasn't that surprised when the rabbit emerged on a shelf of rock where two soldiers sat before a round wooden structure. Small branches stuck from the building's sides, sprouting leaves. It was new—probably to keep out the monkeys—and had been harvested here. A door stood in its face, but the rabbit found nothing to crawl through. The windows were placed too high for monkeys to get to, let alone a bunny. A stem-like chimney jutted from the middle of the roof.

Dante still hadn't seen any of the Dreamers or their monk wardens. He sent the rabbit back down the slopes and the ringtail up the rocks behind the harvested structure, meaning to search for a way in.

While the ringtail was still working its way up the crags, the rabbit entered a grassy field. There, people in plain clothes dug listlessly at sprouts and weeds, their bodies rickety from disuse. They appeared to be preparing fields to grow crops for the occupiers. When Dante had last seen the place, there had been roughly forty Dreamers. Now, there were only a dozen, with no sign of the monks. The laborers were overseen by three armed soldiers seated in the shade, along with one of Vordon's nethermancers, a hefty man who wore short pants and no shirt.

While the ringtail searched fruitlessly for a way inside the round structure, one of the two guards rose and opened the door. The creature scampered in beside him. Seamless wooden bins were grown to line the sides of the walls. They were covered tightly with nets. The soldier grabbed a sack from a shelf, tossing shelled nuts into his mouth.

After he walked out, the ringtail hopped on up one of the bins. A foot of water filled its bottom. Shaden oozed across a layer of sand and rocks.

Dante withdrew from the eyes of his scouts and leaned back against a rock. "They've got roughly twenty soldiers and, as far as I can tell, a single nethermancer. On numbers alone, we could take them."

"Then what's the wrinkle?" Blays said.

"Shaden. They have a storehouse full of them. We can't go against that. With that many shells for them to draw on, our people could be torn apart."

"So kill the nethermancer first."

"That might work," Dante said. "But if they've got another one I don't know about, we'll be walking into a deathtrap. And you know how I feel about deathtraps."

"Then the solution suggests itself. We steal the shaden."

"Can you shadowalk in?"

"Depends. What are they housed in?"

"A house."

Blays rolled his eyes. "And what is this house made out of?"

"Harvested wood. Basically seamless."

"No good, then. I can only walk through stone."

"How is it you can move through rock—proverbial for its hardness—but a few boards will stop you in your tracks?"

"Don't ask me. You're the expert in mystical doings, Sir High Priest of Arawn. And if the People of the Pocket haven't figured this out in the last thousand years, I doubt whether we'd be able to do so in the next few hours."

"So we sneak in together," Dante said. "I'll heat the lock. Break it off. And you shadowalk through the door."

Blays squinted at him. "Why do I need to be invisible to walk through an open door?"

"For one thing, it will be a lot harder to see you."

"But not you. Is there any other way inside?"

"It's got a few windows," Dante said. "But they're barely a hand's span wide. Way too narrow to squeeze through."

"For a person, maybe." Blays grinned. "It's time for the revenge of the monkeys."

* * *

Under cover of darkness, twenty golden-furred monkeys climbed through the heights to the right of the sentries, picked their way across holds far too small for human hands, and came to the bluff above the Harvested building.

Below, a single sentry watched the switchback trail. The monkeys were reanimated corpses, prone to clumsiness, but they retained some of their long-limbed grace in death. They formed a chain down to ground level, descending in silence. The windows were too high for them to jump to, but at the back of the building, they assembled a simian pyramid. Once this was several monkeys high and in reach of the window, the other monkeys climbed up their peers and squeezed through. Inside, they plucked the snails from their bins and used the shelves to climb back up to the window. Any rustling they made was covered by the steady winds.

They reformed their chain up the cliffs. At the bottom, one monkey dispensed the shells, which were passed on from monkey to monkey to the top of the bluff. Finished, they assembled at the top and withdrew, each animal clutching several shells to its furry chest.

Once they were out of the Tauren-occupied land, and heading back down to Dante, he withdrew from their vision.

"Got the shells," he said. "And still not a peep out of the Tauren. Know what? I think we can do this by ourselves."

"Oh sure. We've got two dozen troops, but why not take on all the risk personally?"

"I think there's less risk of waking the enemy if it's just the two of us rather than twenty-plus people trying not to step on any twigs."

Blays chuckled without much humor. "What's the plan? Take out the guards, and knife the others in their sleep?"

"They'll never surrender to the two of us."

"Probably not. Still feels a bit unsavory."

Dante tucked his hair behind his ear. "If we do it this way, there's less chance they'll be able to hurt the Dreamers they've captured."

Blays shifted his sword belts. "That's reason enough. Let's do this."

Dante went to Niles to tell him the plan. "Blays and I should be able to handle this on our own. After I take out their guards and clear the path in, bring your people over the rubble, but keep them back."

Niles stuck out his lower lip. "You're sure you don't need help?"

"It'll be so easy I might even feel bad about it."

He and Blays headed uphill, moving from rock to rock. It was a clear night and the stars shined like raw ether. A half moon provided a little more light than Dante would have preferred. He pulled the nether around Blays and himself, darkening the air around them. His monkeys ran up to him. He took two shells from them and sent the others downhill to Niles.

Dante's ringtail was perched on the cliffs to the right of the blockade of rubble. As he neared, he used the animal to watch the sentries for any sign they'd spotted him. He closed within five hundred feet, then three hundred. He stopped behind a boulder.

Two lances of shadows streaked toward the guards. Both men fell, voiceless, slumping back against their hutches.

The rubble was now unguarded. Dante picked his way across the rocky scree. Once he and Blays were on the other side, he sent the rabbit bounding back toward Niles.

Before heading to the great hall, Dante detoured to the harvested shaden vault, dispatching the single sentry there with another bolt of nether. He and Blays crept back down the switchback. At the hall, the skin that had once been used to cover the entrance had been replaced with a wooden door. Dante didn't have eyes inside the building, but from the outside, it was silent, at peace.

Blays drew his swords and walked toward the stone wall. Shadows shimmered around him. He moved into them, disappearing. Five seconds later, the bolt scraped from the other side of the door, which swung open with a creak.

Dante moved inside, stopping beside the doorway to watch for movement and let his eyes adjust. The vast space was darker than it had been outside; on the far left and right walls, a single lantern hung from a hook. The space was broken up by pillars and drapes, but Dante didn't see anyone up and about.

"Person to person," he whispered. "If they mount a resistance, get out and wait for our people to back us up."

Blays moved forward. His posture wasn't proud, but it bore the sturdiness of someone who knows what he has to do. A worm of shame turned in Dante's gut, but as he neared the pallets of the sleeping soldiers, his nerves went calm. These beds had once held the Dreamers. Who gave up their lives to seek the forgiveness of those their people had once wronged. And most of whom had almost certainly been put to death by the Tauren.

He moved from bed to bed, spiking each soldier's brain with nether. Blays worked across the other side of the hall, muffling mouths and slicing his blade across their throats. After tending to four of the occupied pallets, Dante still hadn't seen the portly nethermancer among them.