The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  Gladdic allowed himself a smile. "Their path is revealed in ether."

  "Let me guess," Dante said. "Just as Taim told you it would be?"

  "Taim doesn't speak to me. Does Arawn speak to you?"

  "Only to tell Dante what a disappointment he is," Blays said. "How did you know it'd be here?"

  "I don't believe the Eiden Rane expected pursuit." Gladdic ducked under a branch. "After so long in the prison of the Riya Lase, his hunger for his old power will be immense. He will head straight to his feeding."

  Back on the hunt, Volo and Blays paddled with renewed purpose. When their arms wore out, they switched with Naran and Dante. They entered the ruins they'd passed through on the way to the Wound, crumbling walls and foundations lying among the rubble of themselves. Dante now understood why they'd been abandoned—if it was abandonment that had destroyed them, and not the wrath of the Eiden Rane.

  The trees changed too, slim orange things that braided together at the trunk like the ropes of warships, the leaves slender and black. Grotesque as they were, after the otherworldly and unstirring forests around the Wound, they were an oddly welcome sight.

  After the deadness of the Wound, every swoop of a dragonfly or ripple of a breaching fish made Dante jerk his head around to make sure they weren't about to be attacked. Mortals didn't have the focus to watch everything around them, did they? There was so much happening at any given time that you could only pay attention to a tiny sliver of it. Dante was abruptly discombobulated by the idea that this was true of all facets of life—that for all his wisdom, all his acuity, he was actually seeing no more than a single fly as it bumbled about, while being blind to the wondrous forest that the fly lived within.

  For miles, the brightness of the trail held steady. As the afternoon wore on, the partial sunlight seemed to diminish it. And when dusk neared, and the daylight waned, the trail was fainter than ever.

  Dante peered down at the ribbon of ether as it passed beneath their bow. "Is the path fading?"

  "They outpace us," Gladdic said.

  "They're traveling with a small army. They should be as slow as their fattest oarsman."

  "Their oarsmen are Blighted. While they aren't physically quick, they are tireless. If we wish to catch them, we must be the same."

  Blays swore. "Easy for you to say, One-Arm. You don't have to paddle."

  "We might not have the endurance of the half-undead," Dante said. "But we do have the cheating powers of humans. Paddle hard enough to wear yourself out within ten or fifteen minutes. Let me know when you're starting to flag."

  "The sign will be that I'm calling you a gods damn slavedriver."

  The bugs were starting to get to them, and before they carried on, Volo passed around the red paste the Tanarians used to ward off the worst of the bites. This done, Blays and Volo dug into the water, arms flexing as they pulled themselves forward. The canoe sliced along fast enough to ruffle Dante's hair. Blays and Volo were soon breathing hard, the collars and underarms of their jabats darkening with sweat.

  They continued on until they were red-faced, then Dante and Naran spelled them. The ribbon of ether seemed to steady out. They swapped rowing duties again, then a third time. Night fell, the air awash with the chirp of bugs and frogs. The trail shined like melted stars, lighting the underside of the forest canopy.

  Before Blays and Volo took their next shift, Dante sent the nether into their muscles, washing away most of their tiredness, and tended to the blisters forming on their hands. When it was their turn, he did the same for himself and Naran. They covered mile after mile, the trail getting a little stronger by the hour.

  When the nether grew less effective at taking away their exhaustion, they slowed at last, three of them snoring in the boat while one paddled onward at a slow but sustainable pace. Whenever Dante woke, Gladdic was seated in the same position in the stern, his eyes sunken pits within the crags of his face, which in the glow of the ether looked as white as something left in water for too long. He gazed into the ethereal pathway like it was a scroll unfurling before him. One filled with secrets that had been lost for ages.

  By morning, they were ready to restart their frantic pace. The landscape flew past them, easing from the warped orange trees surrounding the greater Wound of the World and back into the typical swamp of Tanar Atain. Which meant that it was also once more full of awful creatures, to say nothing of the schools of flesh-eating ziki oko swimming under the surface.

  It also made for an abundance of insects. With the trail growing brighter, Dante slew a trio of dragonflies and reanimated them. He directed one a half mile ahead to make sure they weren't about to run into anything nasty, then sent the other two whirring high above the canopy, scouting for the enemy flotilla.

  "A disgusting process," Gladdic commented. "Taking life and subverting it into parody of itself."

  Dante pulled back from the insects' sight. "Do you give yourself fifty lashes in penance whenever you wear a buckskin? Or eat a rasher of bacon? The insects are just a tool. Nothing more."

  By early afternoon, the ethereal path was glowing so hard Blays muttered that you could cook by it. A group of animals screamed from the trees. Volo swore to herself and angled away from the yelping creatures. A few minutes later, she swung around a stand of mangroves growing in a semi-circle. Inside the circle, wooden cages hung from the branches, suspended a few feet over the slack water. They were painted red and filled with human bones. In any other realm it would have looked like a scene of gruesome torture, but in Tanar Atain, it was a cemetery.

  "I know this place," Volo said. "It's for the village of Raga Don. They breed combfish here. Rip out the ribs and give them a good boil, and you've got the best comb you'll ever find."

  Dante reached for the gunwale of the canoe. "Could this village be what the lich is coming for?"

  "Stands to reason," Blays said. "You don't get a mane of hair like his without a quality fish-comb."

  "Which way is it from here?"

  Volo did some thinking, then pointed several degrees to the right of the path the ether was currently displaying. "That way. Not far."

  Dante shifted his vision to his dragonflies, diverting two of them in the direction Volo had indicated, one soaring high and the second skimming beneath the canopy. The upper dragonfly veered toward a clearing. Like most Tanarian settlements, it was roughly circular, with a few outer islands raised for paddies and the thickly-growing stands of banana trees. In the center, a long pier supported dozens of rafts bearing small shacks. People tended to the fish pens and worked beneath tarps that kept off the worst of the sun.

  "Found the village," Dante said. "But I'm not seeing any rampaging hordes."

  Naran pressed his finger to his upper lip. "Is there any chance the lich is merely passing by?"

  "Even if he is, we have to warn them," Blays said. "Tell them to get somewhere safe."

  "Precisely where might be 'safe'?" Gladdic gestured to their surroundings. "All of this will soon be his. Death is the safest place they can be."

  "We should sweep in and kill them ourselves, then? Is that your solution to everything?"

  "We'll warn them first," Dante said. "Then finish tracking down the White Lich."

  They abandoned the trail and made way for Raga Don, paddling hard. Dante kept one dragonfly circling above the settlement while the other two searched in the direction the ethereal path had been taking. While their canoe was still a mile out, the circling dragonfly spotted movement within the trees beyond the broad round clearing that held the village.

  Dante sent the insect in for a closer look. Seated in the canoe, his eyes flew open. "The White Lich—he's right outside the town. And so is his army."

  He took the dragonfly lower. The lich's forces were spread across scores of canoes, most of them filled with half-naked Blighted who paddled forward with crude, heavy strokes. The canoes near the back of the armada were crewed with members of the Righteous Monsoon, who remained in possession of their humanity,
at least for the moment.

  The Eiden Rane sat on a white chair atop a platform mounted across two canoes. His long white halberd lay across his knees. Next to his immense bulk—ten feet tall, with the build of a blacksmith—the Blighted crew looked as scrawny as toddlers. His skin and clothes were the blue-white of mountain snow that had never melted. While his clothing looked solid enough, his skin was semi-translucent, and glowed from within like some variant of ether. His eyes cycled between every shade of blue. His face was beardless and looked to have been carved from ice. His features were foreign, the corners of his eyes and mouth stretching too far to the sides, his nose a thick wedge dividing his face.

  "We're too far away to warn them, aren't we?" Blays said. "Please tell me he's just there to challenge them to a friendly game of Run."

  The canoes were already spreading out to circle the village, sticking to the cover of the trees. Dante punched his thigh. "He's surrounding them. Total ambush. We have to move fast."

  Gladdic pressed his lips into a tight line. "You can't save them now."

  "But we can set the Andrac on him before the fighting's over."

  The priest smiled grimly. "You have no mind for sentimentality, do you? No wonder you make for a challenging foe."

  Uncertain if that was something to be proud of, Dante motioned them onward. The Star-Eater slid through the water beneath them, a disturbance of nether that felt wrong to be a part of. As the Eiden Rane's forces circled Raga Don, Dante racked his mind for a way to warn the villagers, but they were too far away for him to do something like write a message in the sky. Anyway, thanks to the policies of their former emperor, the Tanarians were completely illiterate.

  Through the dragonfly's limited hearing, he heard a man cry out from the trees ringing the settlement. A figure appeared in a simple canoe, paddling hard toward the low-lying gate set into the underwater nets that surrounded the village in order to keep out the flesh-eating ziki oko. A pair of workers glanced at him from the outer paddies. As he continued to shout, two canoes of Monsoon soldiers emerged from the trees and swung about. Archers stood and loosed arrows. These slashed down around the lone boatman, sending up gouts of water. The second volley struck him down, slumping him over his gunwale. His canoe drifted to a stop.

  The two paddy farmers jumped in their canoe and paddled like mad toward the town dock, hollering as they went. People spilled from their house-rafts, staring at the incoming boat, then ducked back inside their homes. Some emerged with short bone-tipped spears or compact bows, the arrowheads hewn from high-quality Tanarian glass. Others carried small children, running to the northern edge of the docks.

  There, as in most Tanarian settlements, Raga Don had a single tower for defense. Built from mud bricks, it was thirty feet tall, bearing many narrow windows and a single door of reinforced wood. As citizens piled into it, archers pulled canoes from the water and flipped them over on the docks around the tower, taking cover behind the hulls.

  Canoes full of Blighted emerged from all sides of the forest. Seeing the pale, manic faces, some of the villagers wailed. The archers on the dock let fly with a few exploratory arrows, but the Blighted didn't change course. They reached the outer nets and hacked through them.

  Arrows flew thickly. The Blighted swung about and converged on the far end of the dock, leaping out without concern for their boats. Carrying spears, hatchets, and clubs, they raced from raft to raft, dragging dozens of people out from hiding. Clubs rose and fell, stilling the captives' kicking legs. The Blighted bound them and tossed them in a heap on the dock.

  A contingent of Blighted pulled away from the captives and ran pell-mell toward the tower, forcing the archers who'd been harassing them to lock themselves inside the fort. The Blighted reached the door and pounded on it with hatchets, clubs, and bare fists, screaming thinly, their faces warped with hate and frustration, looking mad enough to chew their way through the door.

  Archers leaned from the upper windows and took what shots they could. The Blighted fell one after another, hardly scratching the banded door. Heartened, the defenders yelled battle cries and redoubled their fire.

  The Eiden Rane's boat approached the end of the dock. He stepped forth, glaive held in his left hand, the tails of his white cape flapping behind him. Both ether and nether churned around his right hand, the shadows flowing like turbid water, the ether like light split by a prism. An arrow arced toward him. It struck his chest and broke in three pieces.

  Those that followed fell away just as harmlessly. The lich stopped twenty feet from the tower and raised his right hand. Without so much as a twitch in his expression, he sent nether streaming toward the door. The door jerked, then ripped itself apart, vomiting shattered boards and twisted iron across the dock.

  The Blighted bared their teeth and charged inside.

  The fighting was over within three minutes. The Blighted marched the surviving defenders outside, packing them into a tight mass. Many of the villagers were bloody and in pain, but few appeared to have serious wounds.

  "I don't understand," Dante said. "They're not killing the villagers."

  Gladdic nodded. "He would not waste good lives."

  Through the dragonfly's eyes, Dante watched as the Eiden Rane gazed impassively at the prisoners.

  "You did not understand what you fought, or you would not have resisted." The lich's voice had a metallic ring, as though he were speaking through a giant stovepipe. "Worry not. Now, I bestow you with understanding." He swiveled his craggy head to the Blighted. "You may take your tenth."

  The Blighted arched their backs in pleasure, eyes overflowing with hurt and gratitude. They swarmed forward, grabbing one out of every ten villagers and dragging them screaming from the pile of bound people. The Blighted ripped and clawed at their prey, digging their bare fingers into bellies, gnashing at necks and hands. The victims erupted with screams, their pain turning their voices inhuman.

  Blood spattered across the dock. Bits of flesh rolled and bounced. The Blighted didn't even seem to be eating: just rending and chewing, shredding and destroying, strips of skin dribbling from their mouths and falling down their chests.

  "What's happening out there?" Blays said. "You look like you're watching hell."

  "I might be." Shakily, Dante turned to Gladdic. "Send the Andrac to the edge of the forest."

  The old priest lowered his gaze to the water. Dante could feel the density of the demon's nether slipping forward, lost in the murk. It soon passed from range of his senses. In the village, the dock was slick with blood and scattered with chunks, but Dante made himself keep watching. Anything he could learn from the savagery could be vital.

  The Blighted slowed, calming from their mad and frenzied scrabbling. The wrath and pain on their faces seemed momentarily eased. The White Lich gestured to them to move back. They wandered away with the sluggishness of those who had feasted too much the night before. Some of them dragged severed arms or disembodied rib cages behind them.

  The White Lich approached the remaining villagers. Some bucked and wriggled at their bonds, trying to roll away, even if it meant falling into the swamp and drowning. The lich made a flicking gesture. Nethereal bonds locked them all in place.

  "Right now, you fear." He leaned closer. "You should relish it. In another minute, you won't be able to experience that feeling ever again."

  He lifted his finger, a dot of purest ether circling its tip, then seemed to think better, taking a heavy step forward. "Do you understand the cruelty of the state the gods have condemned you to? In crafting you, they have made you more than the animals, but so much less than the divine; in result, you lack both the conviction of the beasts and the invulnerability of the immortals. Your existence is one of fear and frailty, with just enough of the divine spark to understand that you have been cheated, but lacking both the wisdom and the courage to know what to do about it.

  "You would have gone to your graves in ignorance—only to serve your creators again in their heavens and hells, nev
er to understand why you owe them for the misery they have filled you with like water in a glass, nor how to escape it."

  The lich parted his lips in a snarl, his teeth glinting. "But I have seen the shape of their plans. I have mapped a chart of its evil—and the path to tear it all down. Fear me, if you think fear will help you. But I am your salvation. And together, we will destroy those who have cheated you."

  He lifted the index finger of his right hand, the other fingers curled. Ether gleamed on his fingertip, as bright as a candle. Then a bonfire. Then the sun. Dante tried to shield his eyes with his hand, but the sight was inside his mind. He made himself watch, eyes streaming from the glare. A strange, tendriled fog formed around the piles of frightened people. It lifted and snaked toward the lich.

  The people gasped, arching themselves like strung bows. As they sputtered, more fog spilled from their mouths, cohering into tight lines and probing toward the lich, who thrust back his shoulders. The tendrils flashed with pinpricks of light, intensifying like the rising of a white sun. The people began to scream.

  They bucked and thrashed. Their skin grayed, marbling with red lines. The tendrils unspooled faster and faster, rushing at the lich and meeting his skin with erratic pulses of light. He closed his eyes, shuddering as the power entered his body.

  Dante swallowed. "Send in the Andrac."

  "You are certain?" Gladdic said. "We have but one—"

  "He's turning them. He thinks he's safe."

  Gladdic turned away, a vague scowl overtaking his face as he bent to directing the Andrac. "It will be done."

  "What do you mean, he's 'turning them'?" Volo said.

  Dante swore under his breath. "Into something else. Something that isn't alive."

  "Where you're from, you say 'turning' instead of 'killing'? So you would say 'Please turn that snake for me before it bites me'?"

  "Some people might say that."

  "Like who?" Blays said. "You, when you're lying to a young woman about what's happening, presumably because it's so gruesome that we're about to find out if an Andrac can soil itself?"