The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  He shook his head and looked up from the water. Nether lay everywhere in great heaps. He had the sudden conviction that if the swamp were to dry up, it would reveal a bed of solid bones. He called the shadows to him, wrapping his arms in darkness. He drew them wide and laid them over the canoe, blacking out their sight. As he stretched the nether further, shaping it into the appearance of a toppled white tree trunk, it thinned out, giving them a shaded but clear view of their surroundings. They could see out, but the Blighted wouldn't be able to see in.

  "We are now officially a tree," Dante declared. "Let's hope the Blighted don't have the brains to wonder why a tree is cruising about like a hungry fish."

  They struck away from the island, continuing toward the Wound. Dante could feel the condensed nether of the Andrac shadowing them from below. More than once, he imagined the demon launching itself from the depths and grabbing hold of their canoe, crushing it to splinters and drowning them in the waters.

  "We will conceal ourselves a short way from the Wound," Gladdic said. "The Andrac will go forth and make its strike. Should it survive the encounter, I believe it will be able to retreat swiftly enough to escape. With this vessel, we will be able to outpace any but the White Lich himself, and as he is still building his strength, I doubt he would pursue us alone."

  "Let's hope so," Blays said. "Either way, I'll be paddling away like I've stolen something. That'll be a hard one for me to imagine, but I'm willing to make the effort."

  Two white faces appeared ahead. The Blighted stared at the passing "log" with mild annoyance, which seemed to be the least hostile expression they could muster, then swam onward, keeping no more than their eyes above the surface.

  Volo headed down what turned out to be a sort of box canyon of rock and scattered bones. As she backed up, Dante kept both eyes open for a trap. They were soon speeding along again. A white hill appeared above the ghostly trees, looming like the lost shell of an enormous sea creature. The first time they'd come to it, Dante hadn't had any idea what was lurking inside it. Seeing it now, he felt a cold sweat rise from his skin.

  A quarter mile from the rise of the Wound, Gladdic motioned them into the lee of an island. The Andrac surfaced beside them, head lifted in an arrogant tilt. Gladdic leaned over the side of the canoe and whispered instructions. The demon bowed its head, turned away, and swam toward the high white hill, leaving barely a ripple behind it.

  Dante nicked the back of his arm, keeping the nether at hand. Blays loosened his swords in their sheaths. Gladdic had gone perfectly still, preparing himself to receive the ether.

  They waited in silence for twenty minutes. Without apparent provocation, the priest frowned, the creases around his eyes and mouth deepening by the minute.

  "What's wrong?" Dante craned his neck toward the Wound. "Can you see through its eyes?"

  Gladdic held up a hand for silence. He moved his mouth as if speaking, then swayed back, wincing. "The Wound is empty. The White Lich has gone."

  3

  "He's gone?" Blays said. "Like gone-gone?"

  The priest nodded. "The Andrac and I share a bond. The connection is dim, but the message is clear. The lich is no longer present in this place."

  "Typical. He heard we were coming and dashed off like a coward."

  Dante tugged the end of his nose. "The demon hasn't been gone more than half an hour. That wouldn't be nearly long enough to search the whole place."

  "Our bond is not subtle enough for the Andrac to explain," Gladdic said. "But I assure you, its confidence is complete."

  "Either that or it's been bewitched by the Eiden Rane and is luring us into a trap."

  Dante hadn't meant this as more than grumbling, but to his consternation, Gladdic gave the idea serious thought. "If such a thing had happened, I believe I would have felt a change in our connection."

  "Well, tell the Andrac to keep looking."

  The priest nodded. They didn't talk much over the next fifteen minutes. Then Gladdic raised a salt-and-pepper eyebrow at Dante. "The Andrac is insistent that our quarry is gone. You may hang back here if you wish, but I am going in to investigate for myself."

  Anger flared in Dante's chest. "Is that your attempt to manipulate me?"

  "Are you so ruled by your ego that you think this is about you? Young girl, I require passage to the Wound, if you please."

  Volo glanced between them. "Well? In or out?"

  Dante clenched his teeth. "Take us to the Wound."

  Volo and Blays paddled them onward. Though it was beginning to sap his strength, Dante maintained the illusion of the log around them. The white shell of the Wound climbed higher and higher. Near its base, bodies floated lazily in the red water, but rather than being Blighted, they were Tanarians in their tunic-like jabats. Some were dressed in the colors of the Monsoon, but others wore the green and white of the Drakebane's men.

  Volo scowled at the ones that bobbed too close to the canoe, shoving them away with her paddle. She guided them to a low shelf of white stone and dropped the twine-wrapped rock that served as the vessel's anchor. Dante dispelled the illusion of the log. With the haze of nether stripped away, the overcast light felt incredibly bright.

  Blays peered into a rocky canyon. "Unless any of you has a thing for being murdered alone, I suggest we go in together."

  Gladdic stepped onto the white stone with a look of visceral disgust. "This place is unholy. A mockery of life."

  "Welcome home!"

  The priest snorted. Dante climbed out of the canoe, reaching into the nether. It waited thickly, but didn't feel particularly disturbed. Gladdic strode forward, his dirty robes flowing about him. Naran glanced back at the canoe as if in longing.

  They entered the canyon. A naked Blighted lay on the ground, his bare back gashed open. Blays gave him a preemptory stab in the back of the neck. The body didn't so much as twitch. Their group continued to the end of the little canyon, which opened into a stretch of the reddish pools and shrub-like mineral projections that made up most of the heart of the Wound.

  A towering dark shape flowed out in front of them. Dante startled and grabbed for the nether, but it was only the Star-Eater, baring its teeth at Gladdic in frustration. The demon gestured with the fluidity of the shadows of clouds, then turned and loped onward. Gladdic followed it at a jog that seemed too sprightly for his advanced years. Then again, a deep connection to the nether or ether seemed to stretch out a person's life. Cally had made it well beyond a hundred years and might well have lived for decades more. The Keeper had known Cally in their youth, and she was still going strong. Dante might be able to expect another century of life for himself.

  Assuming he wasn't devoured by an evil Tanarian demigod first.

  The landscape was speckled with a few bodies of both Blighted and humans, but without any living people in it, it looked almost unbearably stark—even more so, in its way, than the upper heights of the Woduns, which at least looked like it belonged to the world around it.

  The five of them came to a ridge overlooking the bowl-shaped valley where they'd fought the White Lich. They hunkered behind cover, surveying the slopes and the central mound that held the wreckage of the iron prison of the Riya Lase. The bodies were more plentiful than ever, but not a one of them stirred.

  Volo swept back her dark hair, retying it behind her head. "If he's not here, then where'd he go?"

  Gladdic's eyes were hooded. "It is difficult to say."

  "You're some kind of monster-person, aren't you? If you don't even know how to get to the Eiden Rane, why should we keep you around?"

  The old priest glanced at her sharply, lips pressed into a thin line. He laughed once through his nose. "Tanarian bluntness is as bracing as the strike of a cane. Under less trying circumstances, I might have come to like it." He considered the valley. A low wind picked up, hissing monotonously through the coral-like structures jutting from the ground. "With any luck, the lich has taken the Monsoon to crush the nearest settlement of Drakebane loyalists."r />
  "That's your hope?" Blays said. "That he's off slaughtering civilians? Are you even trying to not be hated?"

  "The alternative is that he endeavors to release one of his lieutenants."

  "Er, he has lieutenants now?"

  "Over the centuries, numerous sorcerers have been sent to destroy the Eiden Rane. All who fought him were thought to be slain. But the Drakebane believes that not all of them are dead—rather, that the lich bound some of them to him as his servants."

  "We're fighting an entire order of liches now? Quick question, will anyone fault me if I decide it's surrendering time?"

  "If the Drakebane's theory is true, however, I don't think the lich will seek to free his underlings just yet. He will wait until he has strengthened himself, and his servant-sorcerers will have no chance of overthrowing him."

  Dante got up from behind cover and walked slowly downhill. "Can you track his footprints with the ether?"

  Gladdic rubbed his jaw, which had started to sprout white stubble. "Let us find out."

  They headed toward the central mound, wary for ambushes even though the Star-Eater had already checked the area. As they neared the heart of the Wound, Gladdic slowed, bending closer to the ground. They climbed the slope, passing the corpses of several mangled Odo Sein. Dead for not quite a day, most were stiff, limbs twisted tight as they bucked against their death, but a few had already begun to relax into the final surrender to their fate.

  At the top, the ruins of the giant iron hexagon that had enclosed the lich lay in rusting silence.

  Gladdic circled the grounds, then stopped and rested his left hand across his navel. "I see nothing. The traces of passage only last so long."

  Dante blinked against a gust of wind. "Maybe they regrouped elsewhere in the Wound before striking out. The tracks would be fresher there."

  "Perhaps. But the longer we spend searching, the more any tracks will fade."

  Lacking any better ideas, they advanced toward the southern reaches of the Wound where the Monsoon had made their landing. By the time they got to the low-lying shore, Gladdic still hadn't found a single ethereal track.

  Gladdic screwed up his face and spat on the gritty white rock. "Damn this grimstone. It is too solid for feet to leave their marks upon. Even bare dirt would have betrayed their passage."

  "That's what this stuff is?" Dante ran his hand over the ground, which felt like something between sandstone and bone. "Grimstone?"

  "As I told you. Where nether concentrates beyond what is natural, the earth grows as if it were a living thing."

  "Could this have been the first source of life?"

  "I suppose so. As long as you are willing to denounce every story told in your precious Cycle."

  "Not necessarily. The gods could have employed this process to create us."

  "Yet all mention of it was dropped from the tale of creation? Your beliefs ride you like a knight rides his horse, spurring you on to gather the justifications they eat as fodder!"

  Naran stared out at the wind-rippled swamp. "People might not leave tracks on bare rock. But they can leave them on water. When The Sword of the South has been on the hunt for other vessels, we found some of them by the refuse they dumped in the water—and the birds and fish that came to eat it."

  "There aren't exactly many animals around here to be drawn to their spoor," Dante said. "Then again, there isn't much in the way of currents, either. You suppose they were stupid enough to cast their trash behind them as they went?"

  "If they are sailing out to fight, the members of the Monsoon might have dumped unnecessary weight. Besides, for the humans among them, everyone eats."

  "And shits," Blays said. "Don't forget shits."

  Gladdic sent the Andrac off into the nearby waters. Volo fidgeted, glanced at the others, then ran west along the thin shelf of rock protruding from the base of the Wound.

  "Hey!" Dante yelled. "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

  She stopped and turned, fists balled at her sides. "This is right near where we left my canoe."

  "So what? We've got a perfectly good one right here."

  "But it's my way-boat. I'm supposed to go with it until one of us dies!"

  The look on her face was so anguished that Dante was almost ready to let her go look for it. Instead, he shook his head. "It's too dangerous. The lich is gone, but we don't know he took all of the Blighted with him."

  Blays rattled his sheathed swords. "I'll go with her. Won't be long. I know how impatient you get."

  He jogged after her, brooking no argument. Volo beamed at him. The two of them disappeared around a bend to the north. Dante cursed under his breath. The Andrac was back in minutes, silently insistent it had found something. Dante gritted his teeth and gazed west. Just as he was about ready to go after the others, a canoe swept around the bend of grimstone. Volo sat in the front, grinning like the sun, eyes wet with tears.

  She pulled up beside them. "Thank you for waiting. If I'd lost it for good, I don't know what I'd have done with myself."

  Dante didn't suggest that she might have simply christened the newer vessel as her replacement way-boat. They transferred their things to her canoe, then paddled around the southern face of the mounded white hills. The demon showed them to a large portion of yellow rinds bobbing against the side of a rock.

  "Great," Blays said. "As long as they're intent on feasting their way across the entire swamp, we'll be on them in no time."

  Without explaining what he was doing in case he was wrong, Dante scooped up some of the rinds, squeezing out what little liquid was to be had from one of them. He plunged into the nether in the pulp, holding it in his mind. The resulting signal was slow to come; when at last it did arrive in his head, the pressure it created was so slight that it sometimes disappeared altogether.

  He pointed to the south. "I think they went that way."

  Blays cocked his head. "The fruit told you that, did it?"

  "I'm tracing the nether in this part of it to the nether in the rest of it. Now let's get a move on before the rest of it ceases to be fruit and enacts its new life as sewage."

  Gladdic made a noise of dissent. "How will we avoid being spotted by the Blighted? Will you disguise us as a log all the while we pursue the Eiden Rane?"

  "Do you have a better idea?"

  "Do you think one cannot object to a fault unless one also has a solution?"

  "Lyle's balls, you idiots." Blays paddled them about, heading back toward land. "This place is loaded with dead people. And what are dead people?"

  "An often-overlooked source of meat?" Dante said.

  "Close! Dead people are humanity's fruit. Once they drop to the ground, you can take whatever you like from them. The Monsoon are the lich's buddies, right? Pop us into their uniforms, and the Blighted will just think we're allies trying to catch up with the others."

  They scrambled ashore and made their way to the closest battlefield, where there were more than enough dead Monsoon for their purposes. They shucked off their nondescript jabats and replaced them with the colors of the rebellion.

  Gladdic's legs extended from the base of the tunic like white staves of gnarled wood. He held his heavy gray priest's robe out before him. "When I donned my robes, I always thought I would die in them." He cast the garment to the ground. "Perhaps I did."

  They returned to shore and clambered into the canoe. Volo and Blays paddled hard to the south. A few minutes later, Naran pointed out a scrap of white fabric idling on the surface. It had the look of a bandage. Not long after that, they found another one. A little beyond that, and they nearly plowed into a bandaged corpse floating facedown in the water.

  The link to the fruit rind dimmed, fluttering like a tatter-winged butterfly. Within a few hours of travel, it died altogether. By that point, however, they had the enemy's general course—assuming the Eiden Rane was traveling with them, which Dante wasn't sure of but Gladdic insisted was almost certainly the case—and had passed by several other bits of
debris cast aside by the living humans traveling with the army. All they had to do was catch up before the enemy changed course.

  Yet as soon as the fruit rind's connection gave out, so did the trail of garbage. As time wore on, Dante scanned the waters to all sides, sourness growing in his stomach.

  "We've lost the trail," he said. "They must have changed direction. We should backtrack to the last refuse we saw. We can paddle in concentric circles until we locate another sign."

  Blays furrowed his brow. "You think the best way to catch up to our foes is to sail around in circles?"

  "We'll lose some ground at first, but we don't have a choice. It's better than losing them altogether."

  Gladdic was as still as a stump. "We will keep going forward."

  "We've made a mistake. Typically, you don't solve a mistake by continuing to make it twice as hard."

  "Although that would explain a lot about him," Blays said.

  "I have become an expert in losing faith." Gladdic gestured to the south. "And I tell you that now is not the time to give up."

  Spite gathered in the back of Dante's skull. "I'd have thought that a complete lack of evidence is a great reason to lose faith, but your complete lack of evidence has convinced me otherwise. On we go."

  Volo shrugged and paddled onward. Around them, the growth stopped being rocks that looked like trees and started being actual trees again, albeit ghostly white ones. The water remained empty of any spoor. Gladdic sat with his eyes forward and glazed, looking like a boy who'd been dragged to the temple sermon when the year's first good snow was busy falling outside.

  "You see that?" Volo pointed ahead. "Because if you don't, you're all even older than you look."

  A hundred feet ahead, light shimmered on the water. At first Dante thought it was a patch of oil, or an illusion, but it only strengthened, defining itself into a ribbon that weaved through the many small islands that humped from the water like the bleached shells of turtles.