The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  Dante flicked a beetle from his sheet. "Why would they do that?"

  "To prevent us from reaching the inconvenient conclusion that we can never learn their skill in time, and that the only way to confront our foe is to bend the Odo Sein to our will by force, and make them come with us after all."

  "I think you're mistaking this for the sort of thing that you would do."

  But now that Gladdic had planted the thought in him, Dante couldn't evict it from his mind. It was a long time after the candles were out before he fell asleep.

  Their fourth day at the Silent Spires opened to an unbroken sheet of wind-hustled clouds. It was drizzling and the grass was wet, but Ara took them out to the boundary anyway.

  "The forest is still out there," she declared. "Find it, and you'll be on your way."

  Dante sighed in a way that could have been mistaken for meditative breathing and closed his eyes. He smelled the rain on the leaves. Somehow it hadn't occurred to him before, but there were still some trees in the Hell-Painted Hills, weren't there? Right there in the Silent Spires. He opened his eyes and swiveled his head to gaze at them. Once he'd committed them to memory, he closed his eyes again and used them as his model for how he imagined the old forest must have looked.

  Whenever his attention wandered, he nudged it back to the exercise. Half an hour into it, as he was imagining himself walking through the barren hills with the woods sprouting up around him as he went, he opened his eyes. They didn't have to learn the Odo Sein themselves, did they? Not if they could find a way for the Voices to be able to leave the sanctuary of the Spires without dropping dead.

  Ara walked up behind him. "What is it? What do you see?"

  Dante snapped his eyes shut. "Tall trees. Like these ones here."

  "That's it?"

  "There are animals, too. Squirrels. Things of that nature."

  "Right," she said. "Keep looking."

  He did, but was beyond relieved when she finally called a halt to their activity, if you could call it that.

  Blays stood, walking in small circles. "I don't think I could spend more time thinking about forests if I was one."

  Gladdic stretched out his spindly legs, rubbing his right hip with his left hand. "Bel Ara, I can no longer hold my tongue. I see no sign that we're making progress toward our goal. Am I wrong?"

  "Probably not," she said.

  "Then why not offer us specific guidance? Why not teach us what we're looking for and how we might find it?"

  "Did you not listen the first time I told you? Is that why you're having such trouble with this? If we wanted to smother you, we'd use our hands, not our dogma. Find your own way or give up trying."

  Dante got to his feet. "It's hard to find your way when you don't even know what your destination is. At least give us some direction."

  Ara's face radiated scorn. "What do you think these exercises are? A joke? A merciful way to let you spend your last days dreaming about peaceful woods before the Eiden Rane comes to stomp the life from your body? I'm giving you what you need to learn. If you're not getting it, blame yourself."

  "Why let us wander in circles when you know a threat like that is on its way?"

  "You want me to act as an institution? To hand down my precious knowledge from on high? To hell with that. Institutions only stray further and further from the truth they once held, lost in the swamps of their own dogma, drawn astray by charlatans and profiteers. The only way to remain pure is to get every new student to reconfirm the truth for themselves."

  "That's not always true. I run one of the largest institutions in the north. It's been around for centuries, and we're still dedicated to the pursuit of what's true."

  "Are you, priest of the eleven-and-one gods?"

  Dante folded his arms. "Why do you keep calling me that?"

  "Because I think it's hilarious that you northerners need an entire army of gods just to explain to you that some things are right and others are wrong. Tell me, defender of dogma, have you never found anything in your endless scriptures that rang false? That didn't mesh with what your own eyes were showing you?"

  "Sometimes, yes. But—"

  "Shut your mouth. You know I'm right but will defend your institution to the death because that's what they do to you. They enslave you. Blind you. Twist you from supporting truth to supporting them. We make you find knowledge for yourself. Does that make it tougher for you? Too fucking bad. Because in doing so, you're constantly bringing us new wisdom, and exposing the falsehoods within our beliefs."

  "Don't move too quickly now." Blays held out a warding hand to Dante. "I'm afraid she's just disemboweled you."

  Ara switched to the second exercise, flipping on and off the influence of the Odo Sein while the others watched. When she decided she'd punished them with this for long enough, she moved on to clamping down on their powers while they attempted to sneak, wriggle, or wrest themselves free.

  Volo swung her mat to face the fiery hills. Dante felt bad for her: she couldn't participate in anything involving sorcery, meaning she likely wasn't going to have much at all to do once they got into the swing of things. She couldn't make it back through the Hills without them, either. Even if she tried, she had nowhere to go; she'd broken away from the rebellion she'd been a part of, a move that must have cost her most of her friends. As far as he knew, she had no family—although he felt mildly guilty for not being sure.

  A pebble struck him in the face. He flinched, much too late. Ara bounced another pebble in her right hand. He gave a nod of apology. She told them to reach for their sorcery and he did so.

  A servant was making his way from the towers to bring them their midday meal. Before he got to them, Volo shot to her feet. She scrabbled away from the border so hard that she fell on her rear in the grass. Face contorted with panic, she continued to kick herself away from the Hills.

  Ara swept herself to her feet, seeming to close on the girl in a single stride. "What did you see?"

  Volo tipped her face toward Ara, staring up at her with spooked eyes. "It. I saw it."

  "Speak like we're not privy to every one of your thoughts."

  "The forest. The people. They were right there. They were there and it was like I wasn't me anymore and—"

  Ara slapped her across the face. "Do you think it's useful to babble like you've been kicked in the head? Slow down, and calm down, and think through what you just saw. Quickly now, before you lose it."

  Anger flashed across Volo's face, but it was gone as fast as it had appeared. Absently, she rubbed her cheek, gazing into the wasteland. "I was sitting here. And I was thinking about how it must have looked back then. And how it would look if it came back. And then it was like…"

  She rolled her hand through the air. "I saw these flashes out on the rocks. Bits of gold. And then everything lurched and I was still looking out at the hills except they were covered in trees. People were there, too, singing to each other as they took water from a stream. Only I didn't recognize any of the words. The people didn't look right, either. They looked hari."

  "What else did you imagine?"

  "That's just it, Bel Ara. I don't think I was imagining anything. It was like I was there!"

  "Then what?"

  "One of the men at the stream looked at me. He looked so surprised, I know that he could see me. That's when the vision popped. Just like a soap bubble. And I was sitting on my mat again. It was like falling asleep in one place and waking up in another. That's why I yelled out."

  "You sound sheepish. Don't be. It's always startling to be given a Glimpse."

  Dante rubbed the back of his neck. "A glimpse of what?"

  "That depends," Ara said. "In this case, I'd say it was the past."

  "The past? As in the actual past?"

  "Ask better questions or don't ask them at all."

  "How could she have seen the past? It's gone. It's past. That's what it does."

  Wind gusted from the hills. Ara stepped beneath the cover of a tree, casting
her face into shadow. "You're a warlock. By waving your hand, you kill people from across a field. With a nod of your head, you heal lethal wounds. You crossed the Hell-Painted Hills, which no one who wasn't Odo Sein has ever done, and even the Eiden Rane can't yet do. And you find this so unbelievable?"

  "Yes?"

  "Then you're welcome to keep going along as you have been. Or you could find out what the girl did that you couldn't."

  "Let us accept that this is real," Gladdic said. "What, then, is a Glimpse?"

  Ara smiled. "Why, it's a function of the Odo Sein, old man."

  "You say she saw into the past. How? Was she granted a vision? Does memory exist independent of the body, and she caught a passing scrap of it? And what does this have to do with the ability to neutralize sorcery?"

  "Good questions. Going forward, you'll want to try to answer them."

  Blays motioned to Volo. "This was the first time you've seen anything like this, right? You've been at this for days. Were you doing anything different this time?"

  Volo tucked her chin, thinking. "Before, I was just thinking about trees and things. As if I was sitting there watching the leaves blow in the wind. But this morning, I started thinking about how I've never been in a forest like this, have I? I'm a swamp rat. That's all I've seen. So first, I had to think about what it would look like for everything that dies to fall on the ground and just stay there and not get swept away like it does in the swamp. And that got me thinking, things can just run around on the forest floor, can't they? They aren't confined to some little island or routes through the tree branches.

  "Then I started to wonder what it must be like to not be a swamp rat, but to be a ground rat. So that's what I imagined myself as: just a little rat, running through the grass, trying to find seeds, hiding when I saw an owl or a taka ito. And how the ground must be dense with fallen leaves, and what that must smell like, and what lives in the leaves. And then I got sad, because it had all died when the lich came. All those trees. All those birds. Even the rats.

  "But I don't like being sad. So I started imagining something else: how some day, the poison will be gone from this place. The dirt will build up in the valleys. Seeds will blow in from the fringes and take root in the new soil. Flowers will grow and bees and flies will come to them, and then lizards will come to eat the bugs, and birds will come to eat the bugs and the lizards, and all of this stuff will be crapping and dying and making more dirt.

  "Until one day, there's enough dirt for a tree to grow. And become tall, and drop its seeds, and form a grove, who drop their seeds, and become a forest.

  "And then I, the little rat, come back to the woods that I thought were gone forever."

  Volo fell silent, blushing like she'd accidentally flipped the hem of her jabat over her head.

  "That's when this Glimpse came?" Blays gestured in a circle. "While you were out ratting it up?"

  "I felt weird a few times before that, but I didn't know what it was. It was like it wanted to show up but it wasn't quite ready yet."

  Dante raised an eyebrow at Ara. "She's taken a step forward, hasn't she? Maybe a big one. Yet why do I have the impression that you're not going to tell us anything about what this means?"

  Ara shrugged. "Because you're finally starting to learn."

  "All right, but what in the world does seeing a moment from the past have to do with locking the nether in place?"

  "Nothing. There's no direct connection. At least not one that we've ever thought of. I'll tell you that much to spare you from getting lost in an eel warren pursuing answers that aren't there. Now get back to work."

  She resumed holding the shadows down while the three of them attempted to break free, but Dante could barely focus. As impossible as it would have been for him to believe a few minutes earlier, he was ragingly impatient to kneel down on his mat and think very hard about old forests.

  For reasons that were probably sadistic, Ara kept them at their current practice for another half an hour before sending them back to their mats. At last, Dante closed his eyes. What had Volo been doing that he hadn't? Was it the specificity of her vision? That she'd placed herself as an active participant in the scene rather than a passive observer? Or was it the highly dynamic passing of time she'd employed?

  The simplest test would be to try to mimic exactly what she'd done and see if he got the same results. Dante pictured himself as a humble rat, not much different than the countless rodents he'd slain to use as scouts. He went about his ratly duties, foraging for fruits and seeds, hiding from things with bigger teeth and claws, building a cozy nest.

  Initially he got so lost in the vision that he forgot what he was doing it for. With this realization, he got excited—it seemed like the sort of thing that would trigger a revelation—but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He certainly hadn't been struck with a Glimpse.

  He moved on to visualizing the destruction of the forest, the current state of the Hills, and the gradual return of plants and life to the wasteland. Nothing came of his efforts except annoyance at Volo for being the first to achieve a breakthrough while the three trained nether-wielders were still sitting around like morons.

  They finished the day without any further excitement. At dinner, Dante drilled Volo over everything that had led up to her Glimpse, but her story was the same as before.

  He woke in the morning with the sense that he'd been dreaming. An idea shook loose from the tattered and fading hints of the dream: trying to duplicate Volo's work was foolish. Time and time again, Ara had stressed the vitalness of self-discovery. Blazing your own trail.

  That morning, as they kneeled on their mats to face the emptiness of the Hell-Painted Hills, Dante let his mind rest empty. Once he felt ready, he called up the same basic forest he'd been imagining for the last several days, a blend of the growth you could see down in the swamps mixed in with the more temperate forests of Mallon.

  Previously, he'd drifted through these woods like a speck of matter, with no defined features of his own; he hadn't understood that, as Volo had done, it was fine to take a more active role in the forest. This time, he imagined himself there. He found a game trail and followed it to a shallow stream with a pebbly bottom. He was poking around the banks for fish and aquatic insects when he heard a woman scream.

  He blinked, receding from the vision. No one else had noticed, meaning the scream had to have been in his imagination, there in the lost forest. He'd never thought about people being there before, but of course they'd existed, the Yosein and whatever other groups whose names had been lost to time. Before he could start thinking too hard, he imagined himself racing toward the scream. Fighting past branches and thorns, he reached for the nether.

  He scrambled up a short incline. Ahead, men with spears and axes held a ragged line against a rush of grub-white attackers. The Blighted outnumbered the humans five times over. Behind the line of spearmen, women and children huddled together, the women bearing sticks or bone knives.

  The Blighted crashed into the line of humans, impaling themselves on the bronze spears. Despite their wounds, the undead continued to push onwards, raking at the men and bowing the middle of the line to the point of collapse.

  Dante spread his hands wide, sending a storm of nether over the heads of the humans and crashing into the Blighted. They fell with looks of angry betrayal. The survivors charged into the gap opened by the deaths, only to be hammered down by a second wave of shadows.

  The humans now stood alone. Several stared at Dante in shock. A beam of sunlight broke through the branches, golden and dazzling, half blinding him. The people fell to their knees in worship.

  He felt as though he was tipping forward. Into something unknown and not entirely safe. He pulled back, yanked out of the vision, which had felt half dreamlike, unfolding on its own, and half artificial, a story he'd been telling himself. He felt as though he'd been very close to something—maybe not a Glimpse, but something—but as much as he tried to slip back into that liminal space, he
could no more do that than he could wake from a dream, get up for a glass of water, then lie back down and resume the dream where he'd left off.

  He closed his eyes and started a new vision. The forest was there, and so was he, and—

  "That's more than enough." Ara slapped her hand against her thigh. "It's a good thing you can't see how stupid you look while you're dreaming away, or else I'd have to take away your swords to stop you from blinding yourselves."

  Blays got to his feet, bending down to stretch his hamstrings. "If I carved on myself every time I was made to look foolish, you'd currently be talking to a three-foot stack of roast beef."

  "Do you people really eat those things?"

  "What? Stacks?"

  "Cows. Lumbering piles of festering meat."

  "You think eating cows is gross? Then I won't even tell you about pigs."

  Ara switched them over to the practice Dante had come to think of as the Freeze. Before, he hadn't been certain whether imagining the forest (a process he'd mentally labeled, with great creativity, as "Forest") was no more than a mind preparation technique.

  Yet after Volo's Glimpse, he was now certain that it was actually a skill-honing exercise. Further yet, that it was clearly related, if indirectly, to what Ara was trying to teach them with the other techniques. What, then, were the central lessons of Forest? To be detailed and reasoned? And to pair this with the perhaps contradictory ability to be unbound, to let your thoughts run free and take you where they may?

  This seemed to have almost no relevance to Freeze, which involved watching passively as Ara took the nether and the ether and locked it in place. Either it was a comically poor exercise, or he was a comically poor student, because he still couldn't see how Ara was stopping the magics, only that she was.

  So far, he'd worked out what he thought were three reasonably good theories about the underlying premise. The most obvious was that Ara was freezing the light and shadows in place such that they couldn't be moved no matter how hard you tried. Alternately, that she was somehow tricking the two powers into thinking they weren't being summoned at all, deafening them to the sorcerers' calls. And lastly, that the Odo Sein had discovered a way to satisfy the nether and ether such that they didn't need to answer the call.