"Sure," Blays said. "Either that or Taim struck the chisel one too many times when he was carving your brain."
Gladdic turned back to Corson. "Continue to keep us apprised. Every day matters now. The slightest disturbance from Adaine and the loyalists could rob us of what slim chance we have."
"I will do that." Corson stood to go, then arrested himself. "Ordon, I must know. Is what you told Adaine true? Have these…" He gestured searchingly. "…men from the north truly seen what lies beyond?"
"It is always possible that they are lying to me. But I will soon have the chance to see for myself. I do not expect to find that I have been deceived."
Corson nodded, face distant. He made his goodbyes and was escorted out by the Odo Sein to be smuggled out from the palace.
Morning arrived after another uneventful night. After checking in at the earthworks to make sure no angry masses were about to tear everything down, Dante rode off toward his field to grow the day's wheat.
Gladdic soon caught up to him. The old man gazed down the trail.
After several seconds of silence, Dante muttered something under his breath. "What an odd coincidence that you should have business out in the exact same part of the middle of nowhere that I do."
"Would you show me how to do this?"
"Ride the horse you're riding right next to me right now?"
"What you are on your way to do. The art of harvesting."
"You want to learn to harvest?" Dante's surprise shifted to something closer to suspicion. "I'm not sure that it's my place."
"For it was taught to you by the Kandeans. A people I once sought to enslave or destroy."
"You can see why they might not look kindly on teaching you their most sacred knowledge."
"I expect they would be outraged by it. Yet if not for my intervention at the Plagued Islands, your path and mine would never have tangled, and I would never have traveled to Tanar Atain. Thus the Eiden Rane would have taken the swamps in secret. He would be in the same position he is now—poised to assault Bressel, then sweep across the continent—only we would have no inkling of what was coming, and would be taken completely unawares.
"Yet I did meddle in the islands: and because of it our lives were brought together, first in bitter battle, but now with the chance to avert a second coming of the apocalypse that took the world long ago. So perhaps my campaign against the Kandeans was fated to happen. Perhaps it was even the will of the gods."
"Yeah, or maybe it was just you trying to conquer a group of innocent people in the Plagued Islands so you could use their resources to conquer another group of innocent people in the Collen Basin."
Gladdic smiled like a gray-muzzled wolf. "Maybe so. Yet I am here now, and the lich will soon be, too. So what harm can be wrought by teaching me how to grow food for those who might starve?"
Dante rode on a moment, hoping the motion of the horse would jostle loose some morally sound answer. "I'll teach you. But only because it's an emergency. You have to keep it secret, too. I don't want the Kandeans to ever know about this."
"Secrecy. The surest sign that we are doing wrong, despite all our attempts to rationalize that it is to the good. I will not tell a soul."
They rode to the field. It had started with a single patch of wheat, but under Dante's instruction, the Drakebane's laborers had sown multiple plots of it, the idea being that Dante could rotate his harvesting between them, allowing the other fields to grow naturally in the meantime and save Dante some small measure of nether that could be used on the earthworks instead.
Dante found a spot where a few green sprouts had just started to break from the black-brown earth. He brought forth the nether, and Gladdic observed.
To Dante's private satisfaction, Gladdic was less skilled with the nether than he'd been when he'd only been twenty years old. But the old priest was a quick learner, and something about harvesting seemed to be suited to him, just as all sorcerers found more felicity with some talents than others.
That very afternoon, Gladdic was able to coax the first sprouts from the soil. Dante left to raise more ramparts around the city. When the two of them returned to the harvesting grounds the following day, Dante found that Gladdic had learned to grow full stalks of wheat.
With the city no longer on the brink of open rebellion, rapid progress being made on its defenses, and Gladdic taking over the production of grain, Dante was at last free to head down to the river to try to figure out how it might be defended. It was called the Chanset, meaning "Gray Waters," but under the light of the summer sun, it was as sparkling blue as a sapphire.
Dante beckoned to the nether. The banks and bed of the river were awash with death and the shadows came happily. He sent them across the earth beneath the waters, mapping it. He was near the river's mouth and the bottom was shallow and silty, with multiple islands and sandbars, along with deeper channels dredged for shipping lanes. Stout stone walls flanked the exit to the sea.
He drew the river's contours on a broad piece of parchment, then sat in the shade, considering his map and the real thing it represented. How to close it out from the Blighted? The first problem was that it was really, really big. The second problem was that it would always be big; there was no shrinking the water itself. It had to go somewhere.
After a while, he noticed a group of fishermen watching him. Wary of being accused of sabotaging the city's waterway, Dante returned to the palace. At the stables, they had a screw pump used to bring water up from the underground spring, which Dante used to form a little reservoir in the dirt. Employing the nether, he extended a small channel from the reservoir, curving it into a circular course. This done, he experimented with damming it and otherwise manipulating the waters, meaning to use his observations as a miniature model of the Chanset.
"What are you up to now?" Blays had appeared behind him as silently as if he'd shadowalked. "Did working on real walls get too hard, so you thought you'd go build sand castles instead?"
"You caught me. But once I'm done playing, I'm going to go build a second model identical to this one to figure out what the hell to do about the river."
"Oh, figuring that out should be a snap."
"Really? So what's the answer?"
"Just think about how you'd stop a school of invading fish."
"Pressgang the weavers' guild to craft me a river-sized net?" Dante motioned to his model. "I already thought about growing a stone grate across it to let the water flow while keeping the Blighted out, but the lich will knock that down as soon as he realizes it's there. We've already ruled out damming it up or rerouting it. So far, the best I've come up with is to raise the bed of the river's mouth while widening the whole thing until the water's too shallow for them to hide in. But that would destroy the walls currently protecting the mouth. And it would take so much work I'd barely have time to add anything more to the fortifications outside the city."
"Meaning they could just charge in through the non-existent walls instead."
"Right."
"This is a tough one. Who put that river there, anyway? He should be sacked."
"The best solution would be one that takes our foreknowledge of their plans—that they're going to invade through the river—and uses it against them. To boobytrap it so that when the Blighted are on the march, I suddenly crush them under a landslide or something."
Blays nudged the bank of the little canal, caving it in on one side. "You can't even think of a good way to stop them from using the river, and now you want to turn it into a secret weapon against them, too? You're trying to be too clever."
"Well, what should I do?"
Blays eyed the half-collapsed section of the model. Some water was still flowing into the system from the little reservoir, and it was starting to back up behind the partial blockage.
"Have you ever considered using the water to stop them?"
"Of course! I'll simply use my vast might to freeze the entire river. Turning it into a solid road into the city will surely stop
the Blighted from using it as a road into the city. Oh hell, turns out I can't freeze things like that. But maybe I can just diminish the sun's light instead, freezing the entire world."
"Yeah, you could try that. Or you could realize that the Blighted are going to be walking up the river. The current will be fighting against them."
"Which means I can stop them by making the current run faster than they can walk against it. So how do I do that when I can't raise the land to increase the current's speed?" He motioned to the cave-in Blays had caused on the model. Where the water was forced to shoot through the gap, it rippled with quickness. "I can squeeze it. When the same volume of water has to pass through a tighter space, it's forced to flow faster. It will still back up on the other side, though. There'll be flooding."
"Better a little flooding than a whole lot of getting eaten."
This was undeniably true. Dante passed the daylight hours fiddling about with his model, scaling it up to get a better idea of the impact of various changes on the water. Once night arrived, he headed down to a dock on the eastern shore where a Tanarian flat-bottomed boat was berthed.
While they prepped the ship, Dante dropped down to the river bank, broke off three sticks from a tree there, and stuck them in the water, embedding them in the mud so their tips were just level with the surface.
They made their way out toward the middle of the river. Dante directed the boat to one of the small islands of accreted sediment. He placed a dab of glowing ether on the end of a reed, handed it to one of the Tanarians, and hopped down onto the squishy island. The boat then traveled a short way upstream to the southern end of another island directly across from Dante.
The sailor dropped the reed into the water. The ether gleamed brightly from it. Dante counted from when it hit the water till when it came to the northern end of his island: 33 seconds.
He made a note of this, then went to work on the landscape, lifting the earth on the eastern shore until it broke the water, then angling it downstream and toward the middle of the river, as if to form one side of a funnel. Yet he didn't extend it too far—just a hundred feet or so.
He repeated the process on the western bank, building a second arm. Once these were in place, he extended them south toward the ocean. This done, they headed back to the dock. Dante climbed out and watched the water for several minutes. Only once he'd assured himself that no cataclysmic floods were about to take place did he head back to the palace.
He hopped out of bed at first light and was on horseback to the dock by the time the sun cleared the eastern buildings. The first thing he did was take a long look at the river for signs of disaster, of which there were none. The second thing he did was check the bank for the sticks. This took a while, as they were now submerged under several inches of water.
A new crew guided the boat out to the northern island Dante had used for his test the night before. He repeated the experiment. This time, the reed took just 31 seconds to travel downstream to the other island.
So the concept worked. The next question was how much faster he could make the river without flooding the city—and whether that maximum speed, whatever it turned out to be, would be enough to stymie the Blighted. To get a better handle on the latter, he drove a stake into the southern island, tied a string around it, then boated to the northern island, unreeling the string as they went. Once there, he marked how much of the string had played out, then went back to the southern island to collect it.
Measuring the string, he now knew how much distance lay between the two islands. Comparing that to how long it had taken the reed to travel between them, it was a matter of simple math to work out exactly how fast the current was traveling—and how much he'd increased it since his first test of the reed.
It turned out the current was…sluggish. Barely two miles per hour. He thought he might need to double that to significantly hamper the Blighted, and triple it to stop them from using the water altogether. He wasn't sure if the former was physically possible, let alone the latter, but somehow, it had to be done. He'd just have to experiment with it until he got it right.
As it turned out, he didn't have time. He was woken up the very next morning by a loon from his scouts at the swamps. Blighted had begun to pour out of the forest and gather in the shallows of the sea.
The enemy was coming.
11
"There can be no mistaking it. The White Lich is mustering his army."
Dante's voice carried across the hall of war. Drakebane Yoto and his advisors watched from one side of the long table. On the other side sat a mixture of Bresselian officials and generals who had agreed to coordinate with them on the condition that the Tanarians leave the city shortly after it was secured and then pay ongoing tribute for the damage they'd inflicted. Blays and Gladdic were there, too, along with three priests representing the large faction that had broken away from the Golden Hammer in the wake of the Dialogue of Death and Bread.
It should have inspired hope to see them all together. But Dante couldn't find much hope left to be had.
"Thousands of Blighted have already gathered in the ocean," he continued. "It will take them time before they're ready to march, but no more than a day or two."
Yoto rubbed his hand over his mouth. "How long before they're here? Do you have any estimate?"
"Fortunately, it's not hard to guess their route." Dante stood, spreading his hands over the table. Employing a simple illusion of nether, a large square of wood turned white. Using the shadows, he quickly drew in a basic map, starting with Bressel on the southern coast of Mallon, and following the coast as it ran east past Collen, curved southeast along the Strip of Alebolgia, traversed the empty Hell-Painted Hills, and arrived at last at Tanar Atain.
"Now, they could come for us in a straight line." Dante used the ether to draw a sparkling line between Tanar Atain and Bressel. "But I extremely much doubt they'll brave the full depths of the ocean. It's infinitely safer to follow the shallows. That means they'll move along the coastline." Using the ether, he started at Tanar Atain and traced a path toward Bressel. "I can't see this taking more than ten days. It wouldn't surprise me if they can cut it down to eight."
"They can advance that quickly?" This came from Fidditch, the most senior of the three priests.
"The Blighted don't need much rest. They can walk twenty hours a day."
"And you are certain that they will come for us?"
"That's what they've been practicing for. They had spies in the Chanset, too. Their target is Bressel. And they'll be here in as little as nine days."
This led to a rapid exchange of glances. Yoto stared down at the map. "That isn't enough time."
"No, it isn't. As it stands, we might not even have the chance to attain the Spear of Stars before they're overrunning the defenses."
"Don't tell me that's still part of your plans. Even if you manage to speak to my sorcerer, it would take you a year or more to travel to Cal Avin, find the spear, and return with it."
"I wasn't hoping to dash off on some wild quest. I'm hoping to learn enough from the sorcerer to make one for myself."
The Drakebane raised an eyebrow. "That's an incredibly long shot."
"But if we take that shot and hit the mark, we won't have to worry about the lich's army. We can simply kill the lich." Dante unrolled his map of Bressel on the table. Using the nether, he filled in the ramparts and palisades they'd added to the city since he'd first made his drawing. "If the Spear of Stars is a long shot, our walls are our safe bet. I was hoping to have four or five layers before the lich came. As it stands, we'll only have two. We simply need more time."
"How do you intend to buy it? There can be no facing them in the open field. That's the very reason we're girding ourselves with earthworks."
Gladdic shook his head. "There is no call for open battle when distraction and sabotage might suffice. We know they will proceed across the coast of Alebolgia, most of which is high cliffs. If we were to locate one that was weakened, an
d crack it loose, it could smash a portion of their army, while the chaos the landslide inflicts upon the currents might scatter the others."
"That's a thought," Dante said. "But I doubt it'd delay them more than a day. We can't commit enough sorcerers to mount an effective harassment action, either. Not without running the risk of losing them all and leaving the city too weak to resist."
He threw the floor open to other possibilities. The priests, generals, and Tanarians offered one suggestion after another, but nothing mustered much excitement. The enemy had no supply lines to disrupt, and you couldn't stall them by taking out bridges or fortifying key roads. They were just…inexorable.
At last, Blays uttered a drawn-out sigh, resting his elbows on the table. "I've been waiting ten minutes for one of you to come up with this idea instead, but you're going to make me say it, aren't you?"
"What's that?" Dante said. "That a round of strong beer might feed our inspiration?"
"Now that you mention it, that was exactly what I was going to suggest. And once my cup's empty, I'll pretend the beer generated my actual idea: We dump a cliff on the Blighted, like Gladdic said. But we make it look like it was the Alebolgians."
Gladdic chuckled. "Just as Adaine dropped the tower on his own people, and placed the blame on us to spark war against us. For the longest time, I thought the most wretched deeds to come from Narashtovik were the brainchildren of Dante. But just as many came from you, didn't they?"
"Jealous you didn't come up with it yourself? You know, if my plan's too soft for you, you can always feed the Alebolgians directly to the Andrac instead."
Gladdic smirked.
Dante leaned back from the table, as if something unspeakable had just smacked down on it. "The idea is to get the White Lich to go after the Alebolgians?"
"We can't stop him," Blays said. "We can't directly slow him down much, either. The only way to buy ourselves time is to get him to take a detour."
The Spear of Stars Page 17