"Yes," Dante said. "Over the next few weeks, if not days, the last free Tanarians will be captured, conquered by the Righteous Monsoon or converted into Blighted by the Eiden Rane. At best, the lich will leave the Monsoon to rule themselves as they've been doing, stamping out your ways and replacing them with the unquestioning conformity of their belief. At worst, the lich will turn on them and bind them as his mindless and half-human soldiers. Either way, the Tanar Atain you know will perish."
"That's exactly what will happen." Her voice went husky. "Most of my people will be Blighted. They won't even be able to speak. Most of those who aren't Blighted will be Monsoon loyalists, who want to destroy everything we've stood for. Only a few of the few will remember the culture we once stood for. But anyone who speaks up about it will be put to death by the Monsoon. For those who remain silent, our ways will die with them.
"And that will be the end. Not even the outsiders will remember us, because we didn't let them know us. Even if there comes the day when you cut out the Eiden Rane's heart and burn it to ashes, that won't undo our fate. Tanar Atain is dead."
"You could be right. But you're forgetting something."
"What? That you will have known us, and can tell our story for us after we're gone? You don't know us at all, outsider. Even if you mean well, the story you tell of us will be no more than a shadow of what we were. Better to tell no story at all."
"I won't have to tell your story for you. Tanarians are still alive right now in Bressel. I will find the chink in the lich's armor and I'll drive a knife through it with my own hand. Then your people will return to your land. And they will rebuild it."
Her eyes shimmered. "I want that to be true more than anything. But the more we want something to be true, the more we'll lie to ourselves to get it."
Dante almost stopped himself. Instead, seized by impulses that felt like they were coming from outside himself, he took her in his arms and tipped back her head and he kissed her. Her eyes went wide and she pushed against him; but that was only the instinct of surprise. She froze, deciding, before wrapping her arms around him and pressing herself against him.
In time—he wasn't sure quite how long—she drew back.
She touched her mouth. "Why did you do that when you're right about to leave?"
"Because I'm right about to leave."
"You know that I can't leave here."
"While I have to. So there's no point, is there? But I'm not sorry."
"I didn't say that I was." Ara regarded him coolly. "What are you going to do now? Against the lich?"
"I imagine that I'll take his life."
"That's as specific as you can get?"
"I don't know how. It doesn't matter. I'm going to do it. And he should be afraid."
"There's something different about you. Something more urgent."
"Is that better? Or worse?"
"Better for leading us where we need to go," she decided. "But worse, I think, for your own peace of mind."
"That might be accurate."
"What was it like?"
He didn't pretend to not know what she was talking about. "I killed people. Lots of them. They hadn't done anything, other than not hand themselves over to the Monsoon or the lich, but that was crime enough for them to die. But most of them? I handed over to become Blighted. That's worse than death. They've lost half their soul and most of their mind, and all that's left is hunger and anger.
"I thought I was tilling the field for a new crop to grow. Fixing the mistakes the gods made when they first brought us to this world. You know what's worse than anything I did? That I enjoyed it."
"You literally weren't yourself. Only a fool would blame himself for that."
"I wasn't in a haze of some kind. I remember all of it, Ara. What I did and how good it felt to do it. It feels like it was me." He reached for a desk set against the wall, gripping it so hard he thought his hand might break. "That's why I know I'll find a way to end him. It's the only way to dim the screams in my head."
"But there's another way, isn't there? To die fighting him. And you know that." Ara parted her lips. "Come here."
He did so.
~
Sunlight cut through the open window, shining redly through his eyelids. He opened his eyes. She wasn't there.
Dante rolled from the low-slung bed, picked his wrinkled jabat from the ground, and dropped it over his shoulders. He went to the balcony. Ara wasn't there either, but down in the plaza, Blays and Naran were already loading provisions onto a team of lan haba.
Dante found his sandals and headed down to the plaza. The morning was warming quickly, with an unsteady breeze swirling about them as if it couldn't decide which way to go.
Naran grinned, dropped the pack, and walked over to embrace Dante. "You live! I knew that they would bring you back."
Dante smiled. "That's why you stayed behind, was it? Your raging confidence that I wouldn't kill everyone who opposed me?"
"I'm sorry I wasn't there. I should have been. I didn't believe that I would be of any use."
"You have nothing to apologize for. Anyway, we could sure use you now. Have you heard our next move?"
"Blays says you intend to leave Tanar Atain. Is that all?"
"Ah, so you do know the plan."
"Until I met the two of you, I didn't know that 'shameless retreat' qualified as a plan of battle."
"Bah," Blays said. "The only people who badmouth it are the ones who don't have the balls to do it themselves."
Dante motioned to the north. "We need to warn everyone halfway friendly about what's happening. Lady Vita in Alebolgia. Those bastards in the Collen Basin. And we might even convince the Drakebane to work with us, or at least not to stab us in the back. Point is it's a lot of travel that I'd really rather not do by foot."
The corners of Naran's mouth twitched. "How can a man employ so many words and still not have enough of them to ask if I can get us on the Sword of the South?"
"Can you?"
"When she chose to be, Captain Twill was a smuggler. There were many times when it was feasible that the ship might have to leave port with such haste that some of us would be left behind. She quickly developed a method to unite her ship with her estranged crew."
"Where do we need to go to meet it?"
"Either end of the Hills will work. A few days ago when I spoke with Ara about the matter, she suggested I travel northwest, into Alebolgia. It's no further than the swamps from here, and will be much safer."
"Then that's our plan." Dante clapped Naran on the shoulder, gazing up at the seven quiet towers. "Where's Volo? I should see her before we go."
Naran led him up to the second floor of Ara's tower, showed him to her room, then returned to the plaza. She lay on a thin mattress on the floor. Her eyes were open, but they didn't so much as twitch toward Dante.
"Volo?" He moved beside the mattress. "They say you can't hear us. Is that true?"
She didn't stir. He sent the nether to her, but it showed nothing out of sorts.
"But I don't know that you can't hear us," Dante continued. "All we know for sure is that you can't show that you can. If you are hearing this, I want to thank you for all your help. Without it, we'd have died or been driven out a long time ago. So I'm sorry that it came to this. Wherever you are, don't give up. And I want you to know that when this is over, I'll come back and I will fix this."
Part of him really thought his words would provoke a response from her—a smile, a flutter of an eyelid—but no part of her moved except for her chest as it rose and fell. Dante gave her a moment, then left the room.
Ara stood in the hall. He moved toward her, but she held up her hand. "No need for that. Just tell me if you'll come back."
"If I live, I will."
She smiled. "Then try to live, will you? Even when we had new knights to train, it was pretty boring around here."
"I'm jealous. At this point, I'd love to be bored."
"Funny, because what I'd love mo
st is to be able to get out into the thick of things and do my best to serve the lich a bowl of his own intestines." She looked him up and down. "But I suppose I'll have to settle for you. Go on and end this, will you? We've lived in his shadow for centuries. We won't last much longer."
Dante nodded. He could have said more, but he didn't and neither did she. She walked downstairs and he followed. Gladdic had arrived in the plaza during Dante's absence, and though Dante's stomach was rumbling, everyone else looked ready to go. He supposed he could eat in the saddle. He swung up onto the back of one of the beasts.
Blays jumped up on his mount and saluted. "Sorry for the abbreviated stay, but we have heroism to do. I know it might look like running away, but that's exactly what we want the lich to think."
Ara held up her hand. Dante waved back. They moved into the trees. Once they emerged from the woods and climbed the ridge beyond, Dante glanced back toward the plaza, but he was much too far away to tell if she was still there.
~
Mounted on the lan haba, they struck out from the Spires, heading northwest. It was dreadfully hot, obliging Dante and Gladdic to shade them with nether from sunup to sundown. Dante spent most of the day of travel going over everything he and the Eiden Rane had spoken about, sifting through the words and plans for anything that might reveal a weakness in the lich. Yet nothing stuck out.
After a full day of travel, with the very first hints of Blight starting to creep in, they mounted a hill and stopped. Ahead, the fire-streaked black of the Hell-Painted Hills met a brown plain dusted with green shrubs and weeds.
Blays shielded his eyes from the sun. "What are we looking at here? Some kind of dry land? Where's all the muck? The fetid pools?"
"Doubtless the work of a foul sorcerer," Gladdic said. "We should proceed with much caution."
Dante smiled, then curled his fingers into the shaggy fur on the goat's neck. "We've actually done it, haven't we? We've abandoned the swamps to him. The lucky ones will die. And the rest will serve."
"Do you wish to go back?"
"What would that accomplish?"
"Nothing. In other words, the exact same amount that it accomplishes to sit here and complain about a decision we have already come to terms with."
Dante shook his head, digging for more, but nothing came. "Excuse me for being concerned that we've doomed an entire country."
"The lich doomed it, not us." Gladdic took up his reins. "Now if you have finished displaying your pious compassion for those poor people, shall we proceed?"
Dante dug his heels into his lan haba's flanks. The animals started down the final slope. Frustration swirled in Dante's mind. He had already accepted that Tanar Atain would fall. For that matter, most of it was already gone to the lich. Then what was it that bothered him?
The lan haba stepped out of the streaked black rock and onto the dusty reaches of Alebolgia. The four foreigners dismounted, took down their packs and weapons, and thanked the guides, who nodded and rode off to find a safe place to spend the next day recovering before the journey home.
Blays led the way, skirting the Hills as they moved southwest toward the coast. After the closeness of the forests and waterways of Tanar Atain, the openness of the land and the width of the sky was unnerving. The only cover came from low, threadbare grass and the occasional tuft of sagebrush. It had been just as open in the Hills, of course, but that had been different, dead lands where no enemy dared to travel. Now, they were vulnerable again. If something came for them, they'd have nowhere to hide.
Dante jerked up his head. It wasn't the abandoning of the swamp itself that gnawed at his stomach. It was the fact they had to abandon the swamp. They'd never been beaten before, had they? Oh, they'd lost scores of battles, but never the war. And perhaps they would still win the greater war against the Eiden Rane.
But they'd certainly lost the war for Tanar Atain. At that very moment, the Blighted were hunting their way across the swamps. Binding people in ropes and carrying them back to the lich to be converted into monsters. And eating one-tenth of their catch alive. For all of their effort, they couldn't stop the cataclysm from swallowing the swamps whole.
As much as Dante hated the lich, and wanted him to die—needed him to die—now that they'd lost once, he was no longer so certain that they wouldn't lose again.
The morning wore on. The land ahead shifted from scrubland to low dunes of black sand shot through with grains of red, yellow, and orange. Confused winds poured from the Hills in eddies and dust devils, obliging them to wrap cloths around their noses and mouths. It was a slog and a half, and Dante was more than glad when the sands petered out that afternoon, replaced by gray dirt stubbled with sage and the thorny green spheres of the tumbleweeds that would bounce across the fields in the months of late autumn.
With night coming on, they found a shallow ravine and made camp. Blays poked at the dirt with a stick. "We should light a fire."
"We've spent all day attempting to convert our asses into sweat," Dante said. "And you want to light a fire?"
"The sparking of fire is not only about banishing the cold." Gladdic paced side to side, gesturing like an orator. "It is about establishing a center from which civilization may take its stand against the chaos."
"Precisely," Blays said. "That, and turning dead animals into tasty meat."
"We don't have any meat," Dante said.
"Maybe if we light a fire, some of it will show up in tribute. Gladdic, go get the kindling, would go?"
Gladdic winced and pressed his palm to his back. "I am but an old man, infirmed by frailty. You should honor your elders by gathering the wood for yourself."
"But I already did the hard part and came up with the idea. You can't expect me to do everything."
"The labor will only build your strength, allowing you to be a more able warrior, which will be of the better for everyone."
"Counterpoint: I don't want to."
Naran glanced at Dante and raised a skeptical eyebrow. Dante shrugged.
As the others argued on and on, Dante rolled his eyes and got to his feet. "Stop already. I'd rather do it myself than listen to you two squabble all night."
He headed down the ravine, getting out his torchstone and blowing on it to illuminate the twilit desert. There were virtually no trees and he wasn't likely to find any fallen branches or the like, but he thought it was possible he'd find an old snag that had succumbed to the heat.
After a few minutes, he was starting to think about uprooting some sagebrush instead. Turning toward a reasonably sized clump of it, his light snagged on a coalstick, a short and squat plant found in more arid regions that burned so steadily Dante half suspected they'd been created by some long-dead desert nethermancer. The stalk was no bigger than his forearm. Wouldn't make for much of a cooking fire by itself. Seeing no others around, he cut it near the base with a blade of nether, then sent the shadows back into it, harvesting the stump back to full size.
He repeated this four times in all, then brought his armload back to the camp. "While you fools were arguing, look what I found."
Blays elbowed Gladdic in the ribs. "See? I told you it would work."
Dante's jaw dropped. "You did all that arguing to exasperate me into doing the job for you? Do you have any idea how pathetic that is?"
"Oh, quit complaining. Unless you don't want any of our rabbit." Blays produced two dead rabbits. Judging by the small, precise holes in their foreheads, they'd been brought down by nether.
Gladdic arranged the coalsticks and lit them with a whoomp of shadows. Naran watched as Dante and Blays gutted and cleaned the rabbits.
"The labor involved in this is proof the gods intended us to eat fish," the captain declared. "One cut of the knife and a scoop of the fingers, and they're ready to roast."
He wandered off to trim some sticks to skewer the meat on. By the time Naran got back, the meat was trimmed and seasoned with traveling salt. They arranged it above the fire and seated themselves around it. The sme
lls of the cooking rabbit and the smoke of the coalsticks was hypnotic, lulling the four of them into silence as they watched the fire speak the flickering language that only it understood.
The last few weeks had been ones of setbacks and hardships. Their enemy was stronger than ever, and the only part of the future that was certain was that it would be bleak. Since being freed, a boulder of dread had bent Dante's back.
Yet all it took to shed the weight was to light a fire against the darkness with the help of those you trust.
FROM THE AUTHOR
Good news: The Cycle of Galand still has a couple more books to go. If you'd like to make sure you hear when the next one's out, please sign up for my mailing list.
For more regular updates, or if you'd like to just hang around, check out my website at edwardwrobertson.com or my Facebook at facebook.com/edwardwrobertson
Thanks to Andrew Mackay for the extra help in post-production—and thanks to all of you for reading. I'll get the next one done for you all as soon as I can.
- Ed
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