The Spear of Stars

by Edward W. Robertson

  Yet they reached the banks of the Chanset without being stabbed, bludgeoned, or ensorcelled. It was a clear day and the sun warmed the banks, lifting the smell of mud and clams and fresh water drying on mossy rocks. Dante crouched and reached down into the water. It was cold enough to only feel good on hot summer days.

  "According to Corson," Blays said, "the entire city's hanging by a thread, and the Golden Hammer is looking for any opportunity to snip it."

  Dante drew the nether from the unseen places beneath the rocks, blackening the water around his hand as if with ink. "So what?"

  "So if you go and dam up their river, thus flooding their city, or make their source of water disappear entirely, the locals might get the ridiculous idea that you're here to harm them."

  "I'm not going to shut it off right here and now. I'm just going to map it out to figure out what to do with it."

  "Ah." Blays picked up a round, flat stone and flipped it into the air. He caught it on the fly and sent it skipping across the current. "If you're not even doing anything, then what am I doing here?"

  "Watching my back. City dangling by a thread and all that."

  "You could have warned me the idea was that I'd sit around while you go for a splash. I would have packed rum."

  Dante sent the nether coursing out into the river, following the contours of its bed. Close to the shore, it was a jumble of boulders, patches of pebbles, and flats of loose, thick silt fostering thickets of slimy, undulating weeds. It remained relatively shallow at first, but once he got thirty feet from shore, the bottom fell away starkly, plunging to twenty feet deep, then forty.

  From there, the decline grew more gradual, yet it continued to fall. Dante remained quite safely on shore, yet the sensation of all that water passing above his consciousness sent a chill down his spine, and he had to fight the urge to turn and walk quickly away. There was rubble and litter down there, too, old barrels and twists of metal, the decaying remnants of small boats, while on the surface intact ships glided by in perfect ignorance, unaware of the things lost below in the mud and the dark.

  On an existential level, it was horrifying. On the level of his more immediate aims, however, it simply provoked a feeling of defeat. The river was nearly a mile wide and ran deeper than a hundred feet. There was no simple way to dam or redirect that much water without running the risk of flooding the city. Covering it over with rock wouldn't work, either; the Blighted could still march in through the opening to the sea. If they were accompanied by a single lesser lich, who would have no need of air either, he could lead them to whatever spot in the rock covering he liked, then blast a hole through it and let his horde overrun the city.

  A physical barrier was out, then. But that didn't mean they had to be taken by surprise. Dante brought his mind back toward shore, moving into the nether within the water and following it toward the nearest life. Locating a school of fish, he deftly slew three of them, reanimating them with strings of shadows. The others rushed away in ichthyotic panic.

  He instructed his three fish to swim downstream parallel to shore. They moved so cleanly it was almost as though the water was parting for them. Dante ordered them to swim as fast as they could. They shot downstream at the speed of a galloping horse.

  They couldn't keep such speeds up for long, but even their casual swimming pace was much, much faster than the Blighted could walk along the bottom. He could probably patrol the river from one side to the other with as few as twenty fish. That could be handled by a single sorcerer, and not even a very good one.

  Feeling better, Dante turned the fish about to swim upstream and test their speed against the current. This slowed them, obviously, particularly their "trotting" speed, but they swam past the rocks and weeds with the grace of birds in the air, or, well, fish in the water.

  Ahead, something white shifted in a copse of dark green weeds. Dante sent the closest fish in for a better look. A body rested in the waving fronds. Its wiry limbs were as pale as milk. Dante's experience with corpses was deep and varied enough to know the water had a way of bleaching them, but this one had none of the blotching or mottling that came along with that.

  He sent the fish in closer yet. The fish's dead brain noted that the body smell-tasted funny. More like bones than rot-flesh.

  Dante was standing in the shallows and his toes had gone half numb, but the chill had nothing to do with his shiver. "Step back from the water."

  Blays frowned. "Why? Is it about to get mysteriously warm?"

  "Because for all my skill, I still don't have the ability to regrow lost feet."

  Blays grunted and backed up through the clattering pebbles until he stood in two inches of water. Dante forged a spike of nether, dipped it under the surface, and jammed it into the corpse's forehead.

  The man's eyes flew open. They were almost as red as the blood that sprayed from his wound. He thrashed spasmodically, reaching for the surface, and died.

  The body had jerked its way loose of the weeds and was now floating downstream a short way below the surface. Dante extended a limb of rock from an underwater boulder, grabbed the body by its ankle, and towed it in to shore.

  "Son of a bitch," Blays said. "That's a Blighted." He swiveled his head, taking in the river. "Are we about to be invaded?"

  "We'll know in a second."

  Dante sent his three fish downstream at full swim, then reached out into the water, slaying a small school of them and dispatching them in all directions. The sun twinkled on the calm surface of the river, but Dante's heart roared like a waterfall.

  Several minutes passed. At last, he took a deep breath. "I only see a handful of them in the river. There's no sign of an army marching through the sea, either. I don't think an invasion's here yet. I think the lich is just using them to spy on us."

  "Implying that he's about to invade us. So why do you sound so happy?"

  "Because he just handed us the means to spy on him. The first thing I need to do is purge the river. Then you and I are headed back to Tanar Atain."

  8

  There was no light beyond what was begrudgingly shed by the stars, and the horizon was as black as the waters beneath them. But after four days at sea, Dante could sense they had come back to the swamp by the smell alone.

  Blays wrinkled his nose, catching the same wind. "Why did we ever think it was a good idea to step foot in a place that smells like they wear fish for shoes?"

  "I recall getting used to it. Eventually."

  "I'm starting to suspect the White Lich was just a massive conspiracy cooked up by Drakebane Yoto to give him a reasonable excuse to relocate to somebody else's country instead."

  With the swamps at hand, Dante went to confer with the captain. The ship, a small but swift Tanarian sloop loaned to them by the Drakebane, heaved about, angling toward shore.

  It had been five days since they'd found the Blighted hiding in the waters of the Chanset. They'd left Gladdic in Bressel to handle any developments with the Golden Hammer. Corson had been working on the sly to identify a bloc of priests who would form a unified front with the Tanarians on two conditions: first, that the threat of the lich was real; and second, upon any victory against the lich, the Drakebane would remove all his people from Bressel, never to return.

  So far Corson had gotten less than a quarter of the clergy to come around to this position, but it was still progress of a sort. And at least things hadn't gotten obviously worse. Nak, meanwhile, had been scouting locations for the force from Narashtovik to make camp in, and was less than two days out from doing so.

  All in all, it was a period of quiet, which had allowed Dante to spend most of the voyage studying the Book of What Lies Beyond the Land of Cal Avin. His latest read-through invoked no earth-shattering revelations, but he did manage to make some new notes on the Spear of Stars, along with all the references he could scrape together as to where the Realm of Nine Kings lay in relation to Cal Avin. It was Dante's hope that, if they were later able to travel into the Mists and speak
to Yoto's deceased sorcerer, even if the man didn't know how to forge a new spear, Dante would be able to combine the man's knowledge of Cal Avin with the geography in the book, allowing them to find their way to the Realm and win the weapon as Sabel had.

  The sloop edged nearer to the coast. In time, Dante could make out the ragged canopy of the forest that grew from nearly every square inch of swamp. He had several fish scouts swimming through the water near the ship and he sent four in toward the brackish beaches. They didn't see any Blighted hiding in the waters, but then again, it was so dark the White Lich could be throwing an underwater Falmac's Day parade and Dante never would have noticed.

  It was nearly three in the morning when a sailor rousted Dante from his hammock belowdecks. The ship had anchored in a small cove a few miles north of the city of Aris Osis. Dante explored the vicinity with some fish and bugs to ensure they were alone, then moved to the large chest at the stern.

  He'd assured the sailors it was perfectly harmless, but they'd made him chain it shut anyway. He removed the absurdly large padlocks and opened the lid. Inside, six reanimated Blighted lay still, eyes open, awaiting his command.

  Dante ordered three of them to climb out onto the deck. The sailors stepped back, uttering oaths and words of protection. Dante gave the three Blighted a silent order to walk off the side of the boat. They stared at him a moment, their red eyes almost black in the darkness, then dropped over the railing, landing with a limp splash.

  He directed two onto land and the other one to ten-foot-deep waters, where it turned to walk parallel to shore, sticking beneath the surface, lightly buffeted by currents and waves. The three undead obeyed his commands, but there was something off about them. As if a part of their Blightedness remained conscious. As they made their way toward Aris Osis, he kept a close watch on his bonds to them.

  The two traveling overland made good time, scrambling across the small islands that made up the territory of Tanar Atain and swimming through the copious lanes of water separating them. The one slogging through the sea was significantly slower, but part of the purpose of sending it that way was to learn how fast they could march underwater—and to patrol for any legions of lich-controlled Blighted that might be doing so at that very moment.

  Before, it had been common to see canoes and boats plying the waterways even at night, especially close to major settlements like Aris Osis. But over the course of their journey, the two landward Blighted didn't see a single crewed ship of any kind. The boats they did see had been abandoned on the shores of the islands, or were half sunk and jutting from the surface, slowly succumbing to the water's rot.

  There were no camp or cook fires. Nor lights of any kind. The few huts the Blighted saw looked abandoned, and the only people they saw along the way were dead, little but picked-clean bones and hairy scalps wrapped in the sodden remains of their jabats. The insects and rodents stirred by the Blighteds' passage hurried away as quick as they could.

  The forest gave way, opening to a vast clearing. Across a stretch of shallow water, countless towers rose from behind a city wall.

  "They've reached Aris Osis," Dante murmured.

  The sky grayed with the approach of dawn. The two Blighted crossed through the waters. If there were any ziki oko present, they had no interest in the undead. Like the swamps, the city was free of smoke and the only sounds were the birds, crickets, and frogs. The Blighted came to the city wall, moving along it until they came to a gate, which hung wide open.

  Once, Aris Osis had been the only port into Tanar Atain, and its canals had thronged with commerce. People had strolled back and forth over its many bridges and lunched on the terraces of its towers.

  The canals and bridges were now empty. The docks were desolate. There weren't even any boats moored at them; they'd all been used to evacuate the citizens during the battle. The towers and bridges that had been knocked down in the fighting remained where they'd fallen. The lich's only interest in the city had been to convert its people into Blighted. Once he'd gotten that, he'd left it behind like the rind of a scooped-out fruit.

  As the third undead continued to tromp across the ocean bed, Dante ordered the two Blighted in the city to search for any sign of the lich. The morning brightened. The sun broke free of the treetops, making the canals glimmer pink and orange.

  Crossing a bridge, both Blighted stopped and lifted their noses. They changed course, loping toward a squat tower of plain gray stone. This, along with the wide bridge leading to the island, suggested it had once served as a warehouse. Normally, Dante's reanimated subjects expressed little to no desires at all, likely on account of the fact they were dead, but the tingle he felt through his bond to the Blighted felt distinctly like the anticipation that something paining them was about to be brought to an end.

  Hoping they were about to be reunited with their kin, Dante allowed them to run toward the tower. They beat and pried at the doors until they flew open. The only thing that could have rushed in faster than the Blighted was the sunlight.

  It illuminated a sprawl of bones higher than a man. The two Blighted dashed toward them, skidding over the remains, dropping to their knees to chew on fleshless ribs and tarsals.

  Dante swore, retreating from their vision to rub his eyes. "We might be screwed."

  "What's the matter?" Blays said. "Did we get our countries we'd recently spurred a war in mixed up?"

  "I was really, really hoping to find the lich here. Or at least some evidence to point us in his direction. But I'm not seeing anything. After this, we can try Dara Bode, but there's no guarantee he'll be there either."

  "Which means searching the whole swamp."

  "Right."

  "The swamp full of fish, dragons, and dead people that want to eat us."

  "Also right."

  "Well, I'd like to express a profound no to that. There's nothing at all in the city?"

  "There's not even any Blighted. It looks like the place hasn't been touched since the battle. My Blighted got so bored they're currently gnawing on a bunch of old bones."

  Blays tapped the rail, then looked up. "Human bones?"

  "Yes. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume they're the ones left over from that time the lich killed everyone here."

  "So they were once attached to the flesh of the people who used to have these bones inside them?"

  "That's the general nature of skeletons."

  "So if that flesh had been eaten by something—like, oh, say, a slavering pack of Blighted—you might be able to track the bones to the meat."

  "Extremely unlikely," Dante said. "It would have been digested, absorbed, and incorporated into the body of the eater, destroying their previous connection." He shifted his sight to the two Blighted, who were still gnawing with muted anger on the bones. "Except the Blighted aren't really alive, are they? They might not even be able to digest things. This is worth a shot. Sounds like you and I are headed to Aris Osis."

  "I immediately regret this suggestion."

  The Tanarians lowered a canoe into the water. The men selected as paddlers didn't look happy to be going with them. They paddled from the cove into the swamps and made way for Aris Osis. Dante scouted ahead with his insects and fish, but by the time they arrived in the watery clearing surrounding the city, he hadn't seen anything unusual—discounting, of course, the freakish species of fish and crustaceans that were found everywhere in Tanar Atain.

  They paddled through the gate in the wall. Dante directed them toward the island hosting the squat tower. Passing through the depeopled city, the Tanarians kept a stoic demeanor, but their eyes never stopped roving. They put in on the grassy banks of the island.

  Blays climbed out and turned in a circle, taking in the empty surroundings. "What if they've already left to go slaughter some other country?"

  "I almost hope they have." Dante stepped out beside him. "That would give us time to search for the Spear of Stars. If the gods were to stop hating us for a second, we might even be able to resolve the
situation in Bressel."

  He'd directed his two Blighted to exit the tower and keep watch. As he and Blays passed them and headed for the tower doors, the two undead watched them with what seemed to be jealousy.

  Blays stopped inside the entrance and whistled. "Now that's a lot of bones."

  "Picture a hundred of these piles all stacked next to each other and you'll have the measure of what's been done here."

  "I can't imagine it's pleasant to have your mind."

  Dante kneeled and picked up a femur, figuring it would have the most marrow and hence the strongest connection to what else, if anything, was left of the body. He quieted his mind and reached into the shadows inside the bone. There weren't many there, at least not of the lively variety he was looking for, but the body had only been dead for a few weeks and several signals sprung up.

  Most of them thudded in his mind like they were right next to him. Which they were; the bone was linked to all the others in the room that it had once shared a body with. Dante walked outside to the north end of the island, putting the tower to his south.

  Of all the signals competing for his attention, only one now pointed in a different direction. It was quite faint, but it pointed northeast. Inland.

  "I've got something," he said.

  "I never thought we'd be looking for a map to the rancid gut of a Blighted."

  "It's possible someone carried off a piece of this skeleton for some reason. Let's try it a few more times first."

  He returned inside and took three skulls, ensuring they'd all be from different bodies. He touched the nether within the bones and walked back to the point of the island.

  "They're pointing in the same direction as the first one. I'm betting they'll lead us right to the lich's army of Blighted."

  Blays rested his hand on his stomach. "Either that or the world's most gluttonous swamp dragon. We're really going to do this?"

  "Spy on the enemy we spent days traveling here to spy on? It had crossed my mind."

  "Travel out into the swamps, by ourselves, and try to sneak around a guy so powerful he knows whenever an ant stubs its toe."