The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  He opened the pouch. Having only one hand, he was obliged to pour the coins into Blays' palm.

  Blays inspected them, then dropped them back into the bag. "Well, I know whose corpse I'm looting first."

  As the two dragonflies zipped their way deeper into the phantasmagoric hills, Gladdic hunted through the grass until he found a shield-shaped green beetle. He placed it inside an empty, narrow-mouthed ink bottle, then walked to the knife-sharp edge separating the live land from the dead stone. He set the bottle on a naked black rock and stepped back.

  Mile after mile of black slag-land passed beneath the dragonflies. The trail of gold blots carried onward, spaced irregularly, sometimes as much as an eighth of a mile apart from each other. Sometimes, however, two to five of the marks were clustered within a few feet of each other.

  Just as Dante was starting to worry about how much further his scouts could fly before the connection dropped, a spot of green drew his eye. Unlike the sharp, jagged angles of the hills, this was fuzzy.

  He took the dragonfly higher. The greenery poured down the side of a slope and into a valley, forming a circle of trees and grass hundreds of yards across. Within it, a ring of towers jutted from the hillsides like the spokes of a cage with its roof torn off.

  "Bad news, Blays," Dante said. "You owe Gladdic ten silver."

  "I don't see how that's bad news for me," Blays said. "Go on and pay the man. And if you have any decency, wash the coins first."

  "The other bad news is the Spires are at least twenty miles in. Maybe thirty. Even if we—" The dragonfly's sight blacked out. Dante felt for his connection, but it had been snipped like a loose thread as it had been right about to pass over the edge of the trees. "Lost my scout. Probably closer to thirty miles, then."

  "Of some of the worst terrain I've ever seen. We'll be lucky to make it in two days."

  "Two days in a land that supposedly kills everyone who hangs around in it for more than a few minutes. Volo, how long were you and your friends in the Hills before you turned back?"

  She scrunched her mouth to the side. "More than an hour, less than two."

  "Excellent," Blays said. "Then all we have to do is cross thirty miles of horrific terrain in under two hours to get to the Spires, which may or may not be just as toxic themselves."

  "I think it's okay," Dante said. "They have plants there. Trees. Whatever's keeping life out of this place doesn't impact the Spires."

  "Mind set at ease, then. Race you there!"

  "Maybe it's just superstition that's keeping people out. That and rough terrain."

  "People explore everything. They'll travel for hundreds of miles across the ocean, which is essentially a bottomless pit of salty poison. If the Hills were safe to travel through, someone would have found out by now."

  Gladdic moved to the boundary, crouched, and picked up the ink bottle. He returned and held it before them.

  "Behold." The green beetle strolled around the bottom of the bottle, antennae twitching. "It lives."

  Blays placed his hands on his thighs and bent in for a closer look. "So you're saying all we have to do to survive the Hills is turn ourselves into beetles?"

  "Young Volo has already ventured into the wastelands for a modest period of time without suffering harm. If we begin to feel ill, we will do as her friends did, and turn back."

  "Is this the brightest way to go about this? What if we sail to Bressel, kidnap one of the Drakebane's pet Odo Sein, then bring him back here? You guys can tie him to a pole and wave him at the lich while I move in for the stabbing."

  Gladdic tucked down the corners of his mouth. He turned his back to them and waded through the grass toward the boundary. As he neared the line of blasted rock, he wavered, then set his shoulders and stepped across.

  He tilted back his head and breathed through his nostrils. "Wait here, then. I will return with an acolyte of the Odo Sein, or not at all."

  He walked onward into the fiery kaleidoscope of stone. The wind ruffled his hair. He didn't look back.

  "Gods damn it," Blays said. "Are we about to let a crazy old man shame us into committing suicide?"

  Dante shrugged. "Look at the bright side. If we drop dead, you can spend the next nine hundred years in the Mists calling him a moron."

  He braced himself and stepped onto the black pan of rock. There was no thunderclap from above, no wilting in his chest. Blays did some swearing and joined him. Yet as they made to follow after Gladdic, Volo remained standing in the grass, her eyes wide as she stared down at the lifeless ground before her.

  "What's the matter?" Blays called. "So what if this place was hostile enough to drive out the White Lich? It's probably safe for squishy little humans."

  Volo didn't look up. "When I joined the Maggots, we were told we had free current to go anywhere in Tanar Atain except two places: the Go Kaza, and right here."

  "You can stay on that side, if you like," Dante said. "You've taken us far enough."

  She stamped from one foot to the other, then slapped herself in the face. "I can't walk away. If the Monsoon hadn't gotten me to trick you into helping them, then maybe none of this would have happened."

  Baring her teeth, she stepped over the line separating life from nothing. She froze for a moment, as if coming face to face with a bear, then hurried after them. "Come on. If we move fast enough, maybe I'll forget this place wants us dead."

  Gladdic hadn't slowed down for them, but despite his spryness, the others caught up with little effort, making good time over the gently sloping land as they moved from the first gold marking to the second. A quarter of a mile in, the ground shot upward in a series of blade-like ridges and deep valleys.

  Blays came to a halt. "Anywhere else, and I'd say we should take the ridges. Valleys would be choked with more shrubbery than a brothel's merkin locker. But somehow, I don't think undergrowth will be a problem here."

  "There's not even any rubble in them," Dante said. "It's just solid rock. Like it was draped on top of whatever was here before."

  "Or the surface was melted. Like a good cheese."

  "Cheese?" Volo said.

  Blays gaped in horror. "You don't know what cheese is? That's the real reason the Drakebane seized Bressel, isn't it? Not to escape the White Lich. But to get his hands on Bressel's famous Temple Yellow."

  Dante scowled. "Will you stop making me think about cheese?"

  The valleys would be protected from the wind, but their rear walls looked too steep to climb. They hiked up a ridge instead. The sunlight was only mildly warm on its own, but the black rock baked like a fire was crackling beneath it; completely exposed, with their limbs bare, the four of them were soon sweating like a stone brought up from the springhouse.

  "I don't know what's worse," Blays said. "The sun, or the footing. It's a damn good thing we have these rugged sandals to protect our feet from the jagged, jagged rocks."

  Dante already had an oozing scrape on one of his toes. "Let me know if you hurt yourself badly enough to need the nether. The code word will be 'Oh hell, I just sheared off three of my toes.'"

  With the worsening ground, they had to place each step carefully, cutting their pace by a third. As Dante's jabat dampened with sweat, he summoned a shadowsphere above their heads, flattening it and stretching it out until it was the consistency of a thick mist. With the sun blocked, the wind dried their sweat, suddenly cold.

  The slope leveled out. They stopped for a look around. Behind them, the swamp was a mat of treetops, water sparkling from beneath the growth. Ahead, the land rolled on and on, each hill a little higher than the one before it.

  Volo buckled her knees, reaching for the ground with one hand, as if she might collapse. "What's wrong with this place? Why is the ground all bendy? Is that from the magic?"

  "Disturbing news," Blays said. "Everywhere is like this. It's your swamp that's the weird place."

  "How can that be? If it's all a bunch of bare rocks, how can your boats get anywhere?"

  "Becaus
e we put wheels on them. And build little streams for them. Except instead of water, we use bare dirt, or paving stones. We call it 'roads.'"

  Volo regarded him suspiciously, then bit her lip. "If the rest of the world is made of land, and hills, why is ours so different?"

  "You should be happy about that," Dante said. "Coming from a unique place has made your people unique, too."

  He didn't tell her that it might not always have been that way: that the lifting of the Woduns, and the great changes that had seemed to have flooded across the land in the years before and after the last coming of Cellen, might have forged Tanar Atain from something mundane into its current shape. So that if not for his forebears, the land might never have been locked away from the rest of the world, to become the breeding ground for the White Lich.

  They moved down the ridge and ascended the next. After so long in and around the water, Dante found himself with an odd case of sea legs. On the positive side, though the rills in the ground were as sharp as knives, there was no dirt or grit to slip on.

  A few grueling hours and miles onward, no one had reported feeling any signs of illness. Was it superstition that kept everyone out of the Hills? Maybe there had been an enchantment protecting the land, but it had faded away long ago, while the memory of it lived on. Whatever the case, other than a general sense of exposure, and the low-grade anxiety of being in a place that would offer a person no hope of survival if they were to get lost in it, everything seemed normal enough. Gladdic had brought the beetle in the ink pot along with him, and it showed no signs of trouble.

  Sunset poured across the land, the oranges and reds matching the smears of color on the rock. None of them had seen an uninterrupted sunset since the last time they'd been in Aris Osis, and they watched it until it was almost all the way down before descending into a valley where they'd be out of the wind.

  "We're somewhere over a third of the way there," Dante declared once they got a tarp up and had progressed to arranging their blankets in a futile attempt to spare them from the hardness of the ground. "We'll want to be out before dawn if we want to avoid spending a second night here."

  "Because of the invisible wolves?" Blays said.

  "You've not seen them, too?"

  "Stalking after us, unseen. Howling to each other, unheard. When they bite us, it might not look like they're doing any harm, but that's only because you can't see the blood."

  Dante wrapped his blanket over his shoulders. The wind had driven the humidity down and the late spring evening was much colder than in the swamps. "It's about more than the Hills themselves. We're going through our water faster than I thought we would. We'll have to ration it until we get to the Spires."

  Volo got a funny look on her face. "Ration water? You guys make it sound like you've had to do this before."

  "Nobody tell her about deserts until the morning," Blays said. "Not unless you want to carry a wet blanket the rest of the way to the Spires."

  They arranged a watch schedule—more than watching for intruders or animals, it was to observe each other for signs of illness—and did their best to sleep on the mercilessly uncomfortable ground. Dante got up for good a few minutes before first light. His thighs and feet were achingly sore.

  He was usually the first to get up, but Blays was already sitting up and blinking his eyes, and Gladdic had had last watch. He sat at the edge of the tarp, illuminated by the tiniest trace of ether.

  Dante shuffled over to him. "How's the beetle?"

  Gladdic lifted the ink bottle to the light. The green beetle twitched an antenna but was otherwise still. "Sluggish."

  "From the aura of the Hills?"

  "Perhaps. But I pray that if I were confined to a bottle without sustenance for a day that I would be doing half as well."

  "How are your legs? Strong enough to travel?"

  Gladdic smiled thinly. "I have eased my soreness enough to continue. But your concern is appreciated."

  Dante rousted Volo. They ate and packed up. Gladdic lit the way onward with the ether until the sun broke clear of the eastern ridges. The Hills were as rugged as ever, yet they made steady progress. Dante kept the fog of nether over their heads to protect them from the sun, but the day warmed quickly, and sweat trickled down his sides. Limiting himself to scant sips of water, he found his hands were shaking.

  Late that morning, they stopped in the shade of a cliff to rest. Dante had been keeping his remaining dragonfly relatively close to ensure that they weren't wandering off course nor that there were any unexpected threats lurking ahead of them. Meaning to see how far they had to go, he sent it whirring along until it spotted the pocket of greenery that made up the Silent Spires.

  To the best of his judgment, they were ten to twelve miles out. Doable by nightfall, if they pressed hard. He sent the dragonfly closer, searching for the best approach by foot, as well as any defenses they might have. As soon as it flew above the outermost trees, it blacked out.

  Dante swore. "Just lost my other scout."

  "To what?" Blays said. "The invisible air-wolves?"

  "It wasn't far enough away for the link to degrade. It dropped dead at the same spot as the first one. Something stopped it."

  "And this upsets you? Sounds to me like it's proof they've got active Odo Sein there."

  A half mile later, as they trudged up an incline as steep as a set of stairs, Volo's right sandal snapped, spilling her to the ground. As Dante swept away her cuts with the nether, Gladdic waved his hand, restoring the sandal with a glare of ether. Yet the strap wasn't pristine, merely reverted to a state of being heavily worn but not quite broken. It looked as if it would give out after another couple of miles. Even if Gladdic used the ether to fix it again, the state it was returned to would be more worn than it was now, meaning it would break again even sooner, with the cycle repeating until the ether could do nothing at all.

  Dante bent his mind to the problem, yet it vexed him more with each minute that passed. Broken things could be fixed by hand, but only if you had the materials to replace or reinforce what had worn down. There were no plants here to work with; should they shred one of their blankets to wrap around her foot? Carrying her was out of the question. It would make whoever was carrying her ten times more likely to unbalance and fall off the ridge, and anyway, even Blays wouldn't be able to bear her on his back for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

  An hour later, Volo's sandal snapped again, sending her reeling to the edge of the ridge. Blays caught her, falling down in the effort. She landed on top of him.

  Gladdic peered at the broken strap in angry confusion. "Why would it do that? Doesn't it know that we need it to function properly?"

  He snapped his hand back and forth as if he were dueling with a miniature sword. The ether glared at a skewed angle, knitting the strap back together. Gladdic spat on it and walked onward, wobbling a little.

  Volo roughly wound the straps around her feet and calf. "This sandal is stupid. Feet are stupid. They should be hard enough that you don't even need shoes."

  She ran after Gladdic at a speed that seemed much too fast. Dante walked after them, frowning deeply. Could he make her feet harder? Grow a lot of skin on the bottom or something? But he couldn't do that, could he? Unless…what if he drew the rock up around her foot, encasing it in a thin stone booty? He could remove it once they reached the Spires! It would—

  Stars flashed over his vision. He crumpled to the ground; he'd kicked a clump of rock. His toes were mashed and bloody and one of the nails was split. It should have turned his stomach, but he wanted to laugh. He muttered to himself. The nether came slowly, as if confused, then settled onto his wounds, erasing them.

  Blays snorted at him. "Forget that rocks are stronger than feet, idiot?"

  Dante got to his feet. "Let's find out if your face is harder than my fists."

  "I could fight using only my face and you'd still lose."

  Dante stomped to within two feet of Blays. "Then let's find out! You want t
he first swing?"

  Blays drew back his fist, mouth twisted into a leer. As his elbow reached its apex, he paused, eyes darting to Volo and Gladdic, who watched eagerly.

  "Dante," Blays said. "There's something wrong."

  "That you're not bleeding from both nostrils? I'm about to correct that."

  "Dante! Look at us!"

  Dante's nails were digging into his palms so tightly he'd drawn crescents of blood. With difficulty, he relaxed and took a long breath. Across from him, Blays was wild-eyed, and despite the healthy tan they bore from months on months of travel, he was as pale as a Tanarian.

  Gladdic was, too. Volo's face was as white as plaster, while her eyes were webbed with red cracks.

  Dante could barely get the words out. "We look like Blighted."

  The anger receded from Gladdic's eyes like a spell. He fumbled for his pocket, extracting the ink bottle. At its bottom, the green beetle lay on its back, legs folded over its thorax.

  "The Hills," Gladdic said. "They have come for us at last."

  Blays groped his own face, as if afraid it was in the act of changing form. "We have to go back!"

  Dante wagged his head, dizzying himself. "Can't do that. We have to get to the Spires."

  "I won't become one of them!"

  "It's nearly twenty miles back to the swamp. We'll never make it there in time. The Spires are much closer—and there are people living there. It must be safe."

  "For the Odo Sein, maybe. What if it isn't any safer for us?"

  "Then we die! Or we join the lich's service like the other Blighted! Do you want to stand here arguing about it? Or do you want to run for your gods damned life?"

  Blays snarled, then fought down his anger like he was swallowing his own vomit. He wiped his forearm across his brow and laughed. "We run, then. And hope the Odo Sein have a beer waiting for us on the other side."

  Dante moved to the front of the column and broke into a jog. He drew a knife and cut his arm. Wherever the ridge was too spiky with rocks to run over it, he reached into the stone and smoothed it before them. Behind him, he felt Gladdic drawing on the ether. Light glowed on Dante's skin.