The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  They'd crossed most of the moat, but were still fifty feet from the earthworks. They'd be skeletons long before they made it.

  Then again, he didn't have to swim, did he? Not when he could slip into the safety of the shadows and run across the water. He still had the Aba Quen safe in his jabat. All it would take to get out of the moat was to leave Bek and Gladdic behind.

  He reached for the nether.

  Chips of gold spun around his head, distracting him for half an instant; they felt closer than ever before, as if he could reach out and hold them in his hand. Lights flashed below the surface of the moat. At first Blays thought these were the silvery ziki oko converging on their meaty targets, but the lights were too bright, and rather than zipping toward the humans, they were plowing into the hand-sized shapes that had been coming toward the three of them. The ziki oko were ripped into clouds of scales and blood.

  Gladdic couldn't possibly hit every single one of the fish, but the ones he missed were swerving course, chomping down on the gobs of raw flesh and sinking bone. The constant strobing of the ether seemed to confuse others, sending them wandering unsteadily away.

  Gladdic emerged with a gasp. "Swim, you idiots!"

  Blays kicked his feet, grabbing the paddle he'd dropped when the enemy sorcerer had destroyed their boat. Ether flew about on all sides like vengeful fairies that had decided to take to the water and make the fish pay for every bad thought they'd ever had. Swimming hard, Blays kept the nether in his hand the whole way, ready to roll into the shadows if the ziki oko broke through the melee of light, blood, and guts. It was all so distracting that he frowned in surprise when he reached out for another stroke and touched solid bricks.

  He scrambled up the wall so fast he couldn't remember having done it. Bek looked to be all right, but Gladdic was having trouble getting up the wall. Blays lowered the paddle. Gladdic grabbed it and Blays pulled him up.

  Back the way they'd come, pale hunks of fish bobbed so thickly on the water you could practically have walked across them. The moat began to boil as if the whole damn thing were suspended over a campfire, but that was just the ziki oko eating their own.

  Their canoe was right where they'd left it, tied to the metal pin in the wall. They dropped into it and headed directly away from the Bastion. Horns were already sounding behind them.

  "What is the matter with you?" Gladdic demanded. Blays half-turned, still paddling, but before he could defend himself, Gladdic gestured in Bek's face. "You were supposed to be neutralizing their sorcerers!"

  "I employed my ability as I have been trained," Bek said. "That's never happened before. I must have missed one of them."

  "Fine time for your first failure to occur right as we were sailing across a sea of monsters!"

  "Berate me all you want. I did my duty."

  Figuring that the gates would be aswarm with people disinclined to let them through, Blays cut south through the canals of the merchants and aristocrats, the steep-sided hills looming above them. Horns blatted from all about the city, summoning and directing patrols. Lanterns and candles flared to life across the islands. Blays paddled past the manors, water dripping from his hair and clothes after his dip in the moat, and entered a market district.

  As they sliced past a dock, a man raised a lantern high above his head. "There they are! I see the hari—"

  A black bolt whisked into the civilian's chest. He dropped on his rear, still holding up the lantern, face drooping like he'd just lost a bet.

  But his cry was taken up by others, who poured across the dock, pointing at the canoe and yelling for guards. A high-pitched horn squealed from nearby.

  "How curious," Gladdic said. "To them, their horn is a call to brave action. To us, it is a warning to flee for our miserable lives. Yet it is the same sound to us all."

  "You should really write that down," Blays said. "I'd hand you some parchment, but I appear to be occupied with saving our foolish hides."

  As they crossed an intersection of canals, a white war canoe rushed at them from their port side. Gladdic hulled it with a hammer of nether. Its crew yelled out in anger, paddling the wounded vessel over to the closest dock before it could sink.

  Another couple of minutes and they were hustling along through the slums of rafts. The people there watched them glumly, but did so in darkness, unwilling or unable to waste a candle. A few of them even looked hopeful. The rebels might have taken the city, but the city hadn't necessarily taken to the rebels.

  The way things had been going, Blays expected to reach the city's nets and come face to face with a full-fledged armada, but as they exited the clusters of banana trees, they looked out on open water. Gladdic sliced through the fish nets with a blade of nether. As Blays paddled them past, ether glimmered on the water, knitting the slashed nets back together.

  He lifted an eyebrow at Gladdic. "How considerate of you."

  "By mending the net, it will be more difficult for them to determine which way we went."

  "And for a second there I thought you might want to save the city's poor from being gobbled by ziki oko."

  Blays steered the canoe back into the wilds of the swamps. The city was lost to the trees behind them. They didn't see any sign of pursuit, but wary of enemy nethermancers tracking them down, they didn't pull ashore on a random island until well after midnight.

  Blays shook out his arms, then handed Bek the carving of the gecko with its tail wrapped around the two bones. "Well? Does everything seem to be in order?"

  The knight turned the figure over in his hands. Dots of stream materialized around him, disappearing as he put them to use. "It's the Aba Quen. And it's functional."

  "And that's all you need? You can free Dante with this?"

  Bek cupped the statue in his hands. "I can do as I've been trained. I can't promise it will work."

  "Is the process of be-liching someone that much different than Blighting them?"

  "If this was known, don't you think Bel Ara would have been the one to tell you?"

  "Or not tell me while lording her knowledge over me." Blays knew Bek was right—in fact, he'd known the answer to the question before he'd even said it out loud—yet he'd felt compelled to ask anyway. Now that they had the Aba Quen in hand, nothing stood between them and Dante. Ostensibly speaking, this was a very good thing—but it also meant there was nothing left between them and potential failure. "Plan, then? Where's Dante?"

  Gladdic closed his eyes and touched his brow. "He is presently some distance to the east. I would estimate fifty miles, and perhaps more. He has been traveling that way for two days now."

  Blays tilted back his head, envisioning the lay of the land. "Not a whole lot over that way, is there? Other than the odd village?"

  "Perhaps the Eiden Rane is using Dante to collect more souls from the hinterlands while the lich sees to the larger populations." Gladdic lowered himself to his bedroll. "We will begin our pursuit in the morning. We may talk as we travel."

  Reasonable an idea as this was, Blays couldn't get to sleep for a long time. Even then, he couldn't tell if he was awake or dreaming of being awake. He got up at first light feeling impossibly groggy, but he knew getting the paddle going would get his blood moving as well.

  Besides, now wasn't the time to be weak.

  "He continues to travel east," Gladdic said as they gathered up their gear. "Somewhat to the south as well."

  "If he keeps at it much longer, he's going to bump right into the Hell-Painted Hills." Blays' head was so muddled he could feel his heartbeat in his ears, yet the thought that came to him was as crisp and shiny as cut steel. "What if that is where he's headed?"

  "For what end? To assault it? The Odo Sein could destroy him without suffering a single loss."

  "I don't know. But it feels wrong. The White Lich wouldn't send him to the Spires to die. If that's his destination, then they have a plan to undermine it—or to destroy it."

  "A plausible suggestion. The Spires represent one of the last threats to th
e lich's power over Tanar Atain. He may not wish to expand his conquest to other lands until he's secured every corner of his own."

  A pit was opening in Blays' stomach. He decided to fill it with hard work. He loaded up the canoe and took up the paddle. It was another warm morning and he soon discovered the mosquitos had been at his legs overnight.

  "Sir Bek," Gladdic said once they'd gotten their start-of-the-journey silence out of the way. "Dante Galand is extremely dangerous. Although it would please me if you do not repeat this to him, I believe he may be the most potent nethermancer on the continent. How can we help you to confront him?"

  Bek rested his hand on the gunwale. "None of his warlock tricks will make any difference once he's been bound by the Odo Sein. I can do that at some distance, but I'll need to be closer to restore his soul. You can help me in several ways: by making sure he doesn't run, by stopping anyone else from attacking me as I close on him, and by making sure that there aren't any surprises."

  "In that case, I may construct an Andrac or two in order to provide us with more flexibility. When you deploy the Aba Quen, and transfer the part of your remnant to him, how long does the process take? And what does it entail?"

  "The process should only take a few seconds. I'll use the Odo Sein to locate Dante's connections to the ether, but rather than using my power to shut down his access, I'll use it to create a link to my own light. Normally, his remnant would be closed to me, sealed away by the strength of the owner's will, but the Aba Quen works as a key to a lock—or a knife to an oyster shell. All I have to do is touch it with the stream to bring it to bear. It will cut through his resistance on its own. This done, I will connect my remnant to his and permit mine to flow forth. At last, I'll stop the flow before too much has left me and I accidentally Blight myself."

  "But you've never done this before, have you?" Blays said. "What makes you so sure that you can?"

  Bek gazed back at him. "You're worried for your friend. You should be. But don't be afraid of my inexperience. Nearly everyone else who's ever done this was doing it for the first time, too."

  "Shouldn't you at least practice? We might only have the one shot at this."

  The knight grimaced as if dealing with some visceral pain he knew he could never get rid of. He removed the Aba Quen from his jabat and lowered his head. Within moments, golden splinters swam before his face. He sent them spinning toward Blays. They hit him with the clapping sensation of the Odo Sein, but rather than being cut loose from the nether, his awareness of the shadows expanded as if he'd emerged from a forested hillside onto a clear ridge.

  Bek detached a hair-fine thread of stream from what he had remaining and sent it to the Aba Quen. It disappeared into the yellowed ivory of the gecko. A dream-like knife struck the center of Blays' guts, but there was no pain, only the initial shock that precedes it.

  "Right now, either of us could open our remnant to the other," Bek said. "All that's needed is to open the barrier. It will feel like a lid or a plug. Can you feel it?"

  Blays reached inside himself. He was expecting to grope about blindly and eventually give up, probably while swearing, yet he was drawn toward the ether within himself the same way he was drawn back to earth after jumping in the air. His mind brushed against a tap. He focused on it. His faint touch was enough to begin to pull it loose.

  The connection dissipated like a drop of blood in turbid waters. Bek exhaled sharply. "The hard part isn't the ritual. It's finding someone who can do it."

  Blays touched his torso in the soft spot just below the breastbone. Cold sweat had sprung up across his body. "Appreciate the demonstration."

  Gladdic stirred in the aft of the canoe. "This raises a final point. We have discussed how we will attempt to enact the ritual. But we have not discussed what we'll do if we fail."

  Blays shoved the paddle into the water. "Bek just told you that we won't."

  "He told us that any failure would not be due to inexperience. But there is the matter of Dante himself. He will fight against us. And he has shown a marked capacity to win."

  "If he gets away, then we'll come after him again."

  "We remain uncertain that the ritual can even be performed on a lich. If Bek makes his attempt and learns that it cannot be done, what then?"

  "Same as always. We regroup and come up with another plan."

  "Such as what?"

  "You see, Gladdic, I don't know yet. If I did know the solution, I'd skip the whole part where we fail and go right to the success."

  "We must allow ourselves to carefully think this through," the old man said. "We learned of this solution through the Odo Sein, an institution which has resisted the Eiden Rane for hundreds of years, and knows his ways better than anyone else in the world. If they don't know how to lift the Blight from a lich, who might we seek to learn from instead?"

  "Is the White Lich the only lich who's ever liched? Surely someone, somewhere in the world, can teach us."

  "And if we spend months chasing down this ghost, the lich will have time to swallow Mallon, Gask, Narashtovik, and all of the lesser kingdoms. Our new knowledge will be wasted, for by then, our foe will wield the power of a god."

  "Then we won't go anywhere! We'll hunt down the other liches, and experiment on them until we work it out!"

  "With whose remnant? If Bek expends his experimenting on another lich, who will be left to—"

  Blays stopped paddling, twisting about to get a good look at the old man. "What are you trying to convince me of, Gladdic? That sometimes things don't work out the way you planned? Because I feel like that might be the very definition of 'being alive.'"

  "You are looking at this from your heart." For once, Gladdic's voice didn't carry any judgment or scorn. "The heart is a brave leader. It inspires us to blaze trails the mind would be too fearful to start down on its own. But if the heart is brave, it is also blind. If we are to avoid the end of all we hold dear, we must turn over command to our minds. Only they have the cold clarity to see a way out from the chasm that opens before us."

  They stared at each other. Flies buzzed among the trees. Frogs croaked from the reeds. Some things lived while other things died.

  "If the ritual fails, we'll kill him," Blays said. "We'll kill him, and then we'll make our run at the White Lich, and be damned. Is that what you want to hear?"

  "It is not a matter of it being what I wish to hear. It is only a matter of what must be said."

  Blays' heart wanted to argue, but his mind had already seen what they were facing. He could blind himself to it readily enough. People did that all the time, telling themselves what they wanted to hear, what was easy or flattering or comfortable. That was why kings told themselves their blood made them divine and hence the serfs their slaves; why fathers filled themselves with rum until they found room in their stomach to swallow the idea that it was better to walk away; why children and dogs were beaten for their own good; why so little ever got done and so much was let to fall apart.

  He could convince himself it was bound to work out. That even if it didn't work out, they'd find another way. Yes, he could lie to himself easily enough. He, like everyone, had been doing it his whole life.

  But he knew that if he did so now, when they met again in the Mists, Dante would curse him for it.

  Blays picked up his paddle and carried on.

  ~

  The next two days were of the worst kind: work and worry in equal measure, with no good cheer or comforts to salve the day's many stings, and the only relief to be had in unrestful sleep. It was enough to make Blays wish that nethermancers had a way to let you excise the memories you didn't want, or to allow you to exist and function for a given period without retaining any memory of that time.

  But no, they were too busy playing with their damn rats.

  Meanwhile, Gladdic claimed that Dante hadn't moved position. Meaning that he had now spent three full days parked on or near the border of the Hell-Painted Hills. If the White Lich had sent him to destroy the Spi
res, why would he dawdle there? Awaiting reinforcements? Or had he entered the Hills only to be struck down by their corrosion, and was now lying in a state somewhere between death and undeath, beyond all aid?

  For as much paddling as he did that day, Blays found himself almost unable to eat. Even the ripe bananas they'd taken from passing trees felt too dry to be swallowed. He ate anyway, forcing the mush down with the glum drudgery of climbing a mountain—or, for that matter, of paddling for days across an endless swamp.

  With the sun ripening to a bloated red, they put in at one of the islands. Gladdic estimated they were still ten to twenty miles away, but there was no talk of lighting a fire that night.

  Gladdic seated himself in their bare-bones camp. "He may not be alone. In the morning, I will create an Andrac to see what lies before us. If he is in the company of many Blighted, or the Eiden Rane himself, we will bide our time until an opportunity presents itself."

  "Or for us to create one." Blays poked at the ground with a stick. "This still feels strange. Like it might be a trap."

  "It might well be. Would that make any difference?"

  "To my determination? No. But it probably makes a big difference in our chances of being fed to the fish and subsequently crapped out across several acres of swamp."

  "It might well be a ruse. However, the Eiden Rane is typically more sophisticated than that. His every action contains many layers, with contingencies for every reaction that he can foresee. I suspect he has sent Dante to pursue a legitimate goal of some kind, while designing the venture in such a way that it can become a trap if we attempt to interfere."

  They talked a while longer, weighing different approaches. Once it became clear they were just rehashing the same tactics over and over, Blays and Gladdic fell into silence, revealing that Bek was snoring and probably had been doing so for some time. The two of them stared into the blank center of camp where a fire ought to have been.

  "I have been thinking," Gladdic said. "Is the quantity of ether and nether within the world fixed and finite? Or is more created over time as the mill of the heavens grinds on?"