The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  Stone ground behind them. Dante whirled. Gladdic called up a second spot of ether just in time to catch the door slamming shut behind them.

  Blays swept back his hair. "Probably just the wind, right? A gust from the massive storm we've got going on down here?"

  Rather than waste time arguing whether they should go forward or back, Dante continued down the hall, tromping through the water toward the door Gladdic's light had shown at the far end. The water felt warmer on his sandaled feet. He stopped. A current ran over the top of his foot.

  "The water," he said. "It's getting deeper."

  He jogged forward, water spraying from his heels to splatter the tight walls. Dante came to the door at the end of the passage, grabbed its steel ring handle, and pulled. The door didn't budge in the slightest. He tugged again, getting nothing.

  Hot prickles ran up his back and arms. "It won't open!"

  "Have you tried not being an idiot?" Blays yelled. "Use the nether!"

  The water continued to flood in, now reaching their shins, foamy and lukewarm. Dante shaped the nether into a dense spike and rammed it into the middle of the door. Chips of grimstone flew everywhere, a large crack spreading from the impact. Dante hit it again, opening a hole to the other side.

  Warm swamp water jetted from the hole and sprayed him in the face.

  "It's a trick!" He backed away, nearly falling. "It's not a door, it's a wall!"

  As he stumbled back toward the other end of the hallway, Gladdic waded forward, his face hardened with resolve. He lifted his hand. Light speared from his palm to the hole in the wall.

  Dante's heart jumped. "What are you—?"

  The ether coalesced into the hole and settled into the cracks. It went solid white, then faded away, revealing a smooth and unmarred wall.

  Gladdic smiled in brief satisfaction. "Your nether is apt at destroying. It might even be used to create that which is new. But the highest virtue lies in preserving that which already exists."

  Dante rolled his eyes. "True virtue lies in finding where the gods damn water's coming in from before we drown."

  "Shit!" Blays yanked his right foot out of the water. A hand-sized silver fish dangled from the blade of his foot, blood dripping from its jaws. "Now that's just rude!"

  Dante felt as though he and the world had slipped out of joint from each other. He knew the feeling well: they had entered a situation where if you slowed down to think, you would get swept out to sea. The only thing left was to act and hope your instincts were well-honed.

  "Light!" He pointed at the water. "As much as you can!"

  Gladdic spread his fingers wide. Dots of light spread through the water, flashing from the scales of the wriggling ziki oko. Darkness darted from Dante's hands. A fish blew apart in a red and silver haze. He struck at a second and then a third, clouding the water with their blood and filmy guts.

  Blays grabbed Volo and hauled her from the water, boosting her up on his shoulder. He bugged his eyes at Dante. "Here's a suggestion: get us out of here!"

  Dante nodded, but had no intention of doing any such thing. He had the feeling, and it was a strong one, that if they abandoned the corridor to let it flood, the water would stick around for a good long while before it drained. Long enough for the White Lich to arrive. And if they lost the prime body now, he knew they'd never see it again.

  He exploded four more fish. Naran yelped and jerked up his left leg, taking aim at the ziki oko clinging to his ankle and skewering it with his Odo Sein blade, nearly severing his own foot in the process. Dante blasted two more as they streaked toward the commotion Naran had kicked up.

  The light was still spread across the water, shining crazily with the tossing of the surface. Another fish zipped toward Blays, apparently from nowhere. Dante reduced it to a cloud of silvery chunks and slogged toward it. Another fish raced in toward the expanding cloud. Dante dispatched it and followed its track back toward the wall.

  Gladdic grunted and stepped up beside him. Yet another fish swam in, seemingly straight from out of the rock. Dante blew it apart. Gladdic frowned and thrust forth his palm. A flurry of ether tumbled toward the base of the wall. The air crackled as the water there turned the milky white of quartz. Frost shot up the wall, glittering in the pure light of the ether. A wave of cold blew past Dante's face.

  No more fish came. The surface was still tossing and turning, but it already seemed calmer. Dante waded forward and nudged the ice with his foot. "How long is that going to hold?"

  "Longer than it should," Gladdic said. "Yet likely not as long as we'd like."

  Blays swung Volo from his shoulders and placed her into the water. She tipped back her head at him. "You held me from the water. But what would you have done if the fish had come for you?"

  "Scream, I expect." Blays made a quick inspection of his legs. "If I didn't know better, I'd almost think someone doesn't want us to be here."

  "A common reaction to your presence." Dante waved his hand, sealing the small bites Blays and Naran had taken to their feet. "Does anyone see anything resembling a door?"

  They poked and peered at the walls. Other than the false door, there was no other sign of an exit from the corridor. Dante couldn't manipulate the grimstone itself, but he could follow its edges with his mind—something he should have done when the flooding began, but which he hadn't thought of in the heat of the moment. As it turned out, the chamber they were inside jutted out into open water, a dead end.

  But there was another level below them.

  A search of the floor turned up a trap door. Blays and Naran hauled it open, revealing a staircase. Though some of the water had drained from the false corridor, several inches remained, and it poured down the steps, leaving an unpleasant trail of scales and fish eyes.

  Dante took the lead to the landing below. Past a foyer, another pillared chamber yawned into darkness. He'd been tamping down the pressure in his head so he could pay better attention to his surroundings, but he allowed himself to feel its full strength. So close to the target, it was hard to be sure, but the feeling indicated the prime body was somewhere ahead of them yet, and possibly deeper still.

  He entered the chamber. Torchstones lit up from the walls to right and left, spilling over the faces of another score of Blighted. Seeing the living humans, they stampeded forward. Perhaps Dante was imagining it, but for once the frustration in their expressions looked more resigned than furious, as if they understood they had no chance but still couldn't stop their compulsion to attack any more than a rock, when dropped, could stop itself from falling.

  Dante and Gladdic cut them down before they had the chance to close on the others. Those that didn't die right away glared up at the darkened ceiling, curling and uncurling their fists.

  Along with the pillars, the chamber held a number of long, sturdy tables covered in grime and fine white mold. Slabs of solid grimstone served as benches for the tables. The latter bore books—some of them left open, the pages ruined by mold, which Dante found highly irritating—along with glass flasks, neat arrangements of bones, and copper cubes carved with symbols half-obliterated by a green patina.

  Dante motioned to Gladdic. "Does any of this have any significance to you?"

  The old man made a brief inspection of the table's contents, then pushed back. "Research. Perhaps alchemical, perhaps sorcerous. Sophisticated, if I had to guess. Quite possibly involving knowledge we no longer possess." His cheek twitched. He picked up one of the cubes, turning it in his hand. It was clear that its corners had once been sharp and crisp, and that the symbols etched into it had been precise and artistic, but everything had been blurred and disfigured.

  Gladdic dropped the cube on the table. "In Mallon, we are taught to praise Taim as the highest of the gods. As the one who brings order to our lives with the gift of time. But time is a curse, isn't it? It doesn't bring order. It brings chaos. Breakage and decay. To the bodies of ourselves and everyone who will ever be."

  "Odd," Blays said. "You look like a
n eighty-year-old man. Yet you sound like a fifteen-year-old boy whose girl just told you she can't see you anymore."

  Dante picked up one of the cubes. Its weight felt right. He bounced it in his palm, then tucked it into his pocket. He moved on past another set of tables, giving them a once-over for anything interesting, more torchlights winking on as he advanced deeper into the chamber. The rasp of his sandals echoed from the blank walls.

  Another set of torchstones came to life, casting their light on a great throne of grimstone and iron, which had rusted over the years, the ruddy fluid staining the chair's sides like old blood. Dante stopped short, breath catching in his throat. A man sat in the chair.

  He was motionless. Desiccated. Dante reached into the nether and felt that it was quiet.

  "He appears dead," Dante said. "Then again, so does everything the lich is involved with."

  A silver crown rested on the man's head, blackened with age. His robes looked like they'd once been exceedingly fine. Tarnished silver bracelets and rings adorned his hands, but atop his shriveled skin, they resembled a wealthy child dressed up in his parents' jewelry.

  Naran appeared to be about to take a step forward, then thought better of it. "Do you see his jaw? The planes of his cheeks?"

  "Looks an awful lot like the Eiden Rane, doesn't it?"

  "Is this it? The prime body?"

  "No." Dante moved closer, keeping the nether locked in his left hand. "The blood's telling me the real one's lower down. But I'm sure the White Lich wants anyone who finds this to believe it's the prime body."

  Blays drew his sword. "Step aside."

  "I just told you this isn't it."

  "And I am replying to say there's no reason to take that chance." He twirled his sword. "Besides, chopping things is fun."

  Dante glanced reflexively at Gladdic for guidance, then frowned and stepped aside. "Chop away."

  Blays flicked his wrist, sending his nether-coated blade through the body's brittle neck. The head took a moment to topple over, as if it had to wake up first. It hit the floor with a dull clonk. The dead man stirred. Blays grunted and lifted his weapon, but the body was just leaning to the right after having been relieved of the weight of its head.

  Dante tapped his temple. "Pressure's still there. Congratulations, you have successfully defiled a corpse."

  "Well if he's down here, he probably did something bad."

  "We'll tell everyone he drew his sword on you first. Come on, help me find the next door."

  He walked behind the throne. There, a mural lay across the floor. Beneath the grime, the tiles illustrated a scene of a great battle, legions of men in lacquer armor arrayed against an icy white titan while the world around them burned.

  The walls were all blank stone. Dante closed his eyes and felt down into the nether. As he'd thought, it seemed as though there was another level below them. Unable to feel anything about the grimstone other than that it was there, he instructed the others to spread out to search the floor manually for another trapdoor. But where the corridor had been tight, limiting the grounds of their search, this room was a massive open space. Searching all of it carefully enough to reveal a concealed door could be the work of hours.

  Yet as with any overwhelming task, the only solution was to ignore the intimidating scale of it and start chipping away at what was in front of you. Dante made his way across the floor, bent like an old water-carrier, poking at cracks in the floor with his knife.

  "Galand." Gladdic's voice echoed across the room. Standing beneath one of the wall-mounted torchstones, he beckoned with a bony finger. "Join me."

  Doing nothing to disguise his irritation, Dante crossed the room to join the priest.

  Gladdic gestured upwards. "Do you see this torchstone?"

  "You mean the source of light making it possible to see anything at all?"

  "Indulge the possibility I am not a complete fool, and imagine that I am asking you to examine it."

  Dante sent his mind into the torchstone. Though they were notoriously difficult to craft—in fact, as far as he knew, the ability had been lost altogether, although possibly it was merely that everyone had run out of the proper resources—the design itself was quite simple. The ether in the gems was converted to light, which was in turn enhanced in brightness by the nature of the stone itself, allowing for a small portion of ether to illuminate a space for a disproportionately long time. Dante was no expert in the stones, nor the ether, but everything in the item appeared perfectly standard.

  "I'm looking," Dante said. "It looks like a torchstone."

  "It does. Now indulge me a second time, and examine this stone." Gladdic walked away from the corner toward the center of the long wall. He stopped beneath the next torchstone.

  Dante moved into the ether—at least, as best as he could—then gave a shake of his head. "I don't see anything strange."

  "Then you are poorly trained. Look again. Knowing that the device is attempting to deceive you."

  "How can you be so old and still be so bad at making your point?"

  Dante sent his focus back into the glowing stone. On the surface, everything appeared the same as the last torchstone. Pointedly aware that he was missing something that was apparently obvious, he pressed closer yet. On instinct, he sent a wisp of nether into the stone. The light flickered—and so did the wall.

  Dante clapped his hands. "It's not just lighting the room. It's casting something onto the wall."

  "Shall we find out what?" Gladdic squared himself to the wall and lifted his hand. Ether winked between his fingers and the torchstone. The light wavered, then flashed and went out.

  Their section of the room dimmed considerably. But the remaining stones provided enough light to show the door set in the wall.

  "A sophisticated act of trickery," Gladdic said. "The illusion is only deployed when someone enters the room, triggering the torchstones to activate. Additionally, this facility has employed the torchstones since we first entered it, and never as anything but a source of light. Only now, when we have long since grown used to their presence, and would not suspect them of any oddness, are they used to hide the truth from us."

  Dante motioned the others over to him. "Yeah, well if I'd been around for a thousand years, I bet I'd be able to come up with a pretty clever lair, too."

  Once the other three were assembled at the door, Dante pulled it open. Gladdic's ether lit up a cramped descending staircase. The smell that wafted from the depths was of something very old. Something that never saw the sunlight.

  Dante headed down, stepping softly. Someone—Volo, he thought—was walking down the steps with their sandals slapping. Just as he grew annoyed enough to curse the offender out, he reached the bottom of the staircase. Holding the nether at the ready, he entered an expansive room. Torchstones sprung to life along the walls, raining light through a chamber that at first glance seemed identical to the one above it.

  Dante touched his forehead, which felt ready to give birth. "It's just ahead."

  Beside him, he felt Gladdic reach for the nether. Blays, too. Volo drew a pair of throwing knives with leaf-shaped blades. As before, a line of pillars ran parallel to the two longer walls. Dante moved to the left side of the room and advanced along the columns, knowing the cover they provided was more psychological than real.

  By the fourth pillar they passed, he noticed one difference in this room: rather than the columns being etched with Yosein script, they were carved with images of demons boiling up from the ground and ripping people apart with long claws. The next pillar showed a field of bodies on bare, ravaged ground. At the edge of the carving, nothing but demons remained alive.

  Near the far end of the room squatted an iron and grimstone throne identical to the one they'd seen in the previous chamber. As before, a gnarled and shrunken body sat upon the throne, hands resting on the seat's broad arms. The corpse was bearded, swaddled in a moldering robe.

  Dante came to a stop. The pressure in his head had grown so painf
ul he had no choice but to clamp a mental lid on it. "That has to be it. The prime body."

  Blays moved beside him. "More like the prime mummified corpse. So what's our approach? Shred it into person-jerky?"

  "This and everything hence is beyond any man's knowledge," Gladdic said. "It may be as simple as destroying the body. But it might require destroying the body's trace as well."

  "Sounds like it's time to start experimenting." Blays drew one of his swords with a crackle of nether. "Tell me when to stop hacking."

  He took a step forward. On the throne, the corpse lifted its head and opened its eyes.

  Dante choked. Blays spat out a word that sounded like multiple curses ground up into a sausage-like slurry of nonsense.

  The dead man's eyes were a washed-out blue. He regarded each of them slowly, his expression foggy, as if he was examining a scroll written in a language he didn't understand.

  Blays lifted his empty hand. "Er, hello?"

  "You are the first ones to ever find me." The decrepit man spoke passable Mallish, accented the same as the Eiden Rane, with his S-sounds honed toward the sharper edges of a Z. His first words were halting, but grew more fluid as he went along. "How have you done this?"

  "It wasn't easy," Dante said. "We—"

  "Tell him nothing!" Gladdic pointed his finger at Dante's head. "You know nothing of what sits before you. His master is more treasonous than a winter storm on the high sea. And he will serve that master without any hint of human compassion."

  "I thought everything that came hence was beyond all knowledge."

  "Think, fool. Should we tell him, and we somehow fail, his master will ensure that the same trick may never again be used against him."

  The prime body braced his arms on the throne, as if trying to lift himself, then groaned in pain and slumped back, head resting against the chair. "Finding this place was no accident. No commoners could have reached this chamber. You are sorcerers."

  "That is too obvious for comment." Holding the nether and ether together in his hand, Gladdic paced sidelong in front of the prime body, keeping his distance. "Do you understand what you are?"