The Drakebane stood on the third ring of ramparts, one back from the front. Next to him were his Knights of Odo Sein, clad in the insect-like armor of swamp dragon scales. His few sorcerers were with him, too, their hair woven with Tanarian glass charms of all colors that were embedded with small bones and bugs and ancient things.
The priests of Bressel left the city gates and made for Duke Pressings. Half were on horseback and each man's gray robe was trimmed with the color of his station: orange, dark blue, turquoise, or plain pure white for the rank-and-file monks. They gave no mind to the Tanarians, looking straight ahead to the glimpses of Blighted slipping among the trees half a mile distant. Each one of them wore the Hammer of Taim on a golden chain around their neck and the Ban Naden on a cord looped about their waists. They were severe and somber men, and though Dante had always considered them his enemy, there was no mistaking their quality.
It was only a minute later that Nak led the Arawnites of Narashtovik along the road to the barricades. Like the Mallish, at least half of those who could wield the nether were on horseback. They were draped in the silver-trimmed black of their city, with some bearing the White Tree of Barden on their chests or backs. Since they were marching to war, each one had a black ribbon tucked into their waistband, embroidered in silver with both Duset, the two parallel squiggled lines of Arawn, and also the sigil of their personal secondary lord, be it Carvahal or Lia or Mennok or any of the others.
Nak brought them to stand before Dante. "Sir. Your warriors stand ready."
"Well done. They look ready. Now spread them out along the spokes of the rampart."
"Disperse them? But they should be here to protect you in case the lich decides to target you."
"It's better that they're not all in the same place."
"But why?"
"So that if the lich does come for me, the rest of you will still have a chance to survive."
Nak gave him a long and searching frown, then turned to the priests and monks to relay Dante's orders.
Once they were on their way, Nak returned to Dante's side. "How much longer do you suppose we have?"
"He'll be here and assembled by nightfall. After that, I don't see any reason for him to wait."
"Well." Nak tucked his thumbs into his belt and rocked forward at the waist. "If it's not too much to ask of the gods, I'd very much like to see one more sunrise."
"If we do, I'd say our odds will look a lot better than they feel right now. My main fear is the lich will overwhelm us within the first few minutes of the contest. If we're able to hold out till dawn, we might have what it takes to make it all the way."
The main body of the enemy entered a dense forest some eight miles to the east. The trees were too thick to make out the road, but the Blighted were even thicker than the leaves, and Dante had no trouble tracking them from on high. The sun began its long slide to the west.
They had cut the eight miles to four by the time Blays finally strolled up to the earthworks. He had an Odo Sein blade at each hip, bracers on his wrists and steel on his shins, with light chain over his shirt.
"There you are," Dante said. "Forget the world-devouring wizard was on his way, did you?"
Blays rolled his head to stretch his neck. "I have no idea why you're all so hasty. He won't even be here for another hour. Meanwhile I'm refreshed and ready to spend the next sixteen hours chopping anything that gets close enough to be chopped."
Blays was wrong about one thing: the closer they got, the more the Blighted slowed down. It took until nearly six o'clock before flocks of crows, starlings, and magpies erupted from the forest across the clearing.
The army of the lich had come to Bressel.
15
The treeline filled with ghastly pale bodies. They stood motionless for a long time. Once the sun wasn't far from the western hills, pillars of light shot up from the trees. The soldiers on the palisades gasped and moaned.
But no storm of ether arced toward the defenders. Instead, the lights seemed to be of the same variety as the night before, blue and white and green and purple, lancing up into the sky with no clear purpose.
"They'll open with an all-out blast of sorcery," Dante said to the nethermancers who'd stayed near him. "Both to test us, and to provide cover for the Blighted on their way to our walls. Fight defensively, but if you see the opening to take down one of the lesser liches—or the Eiden Rane himself—hit back hard."
Across the field, which they'd stripped of everything capable of sheltering the enemy during their advance, hundreds of Blighted emerged from the trees. There was something strange about the way they were moving, hunched and waddled. They were carrying long, heavy bundles wrapped in cloth.
Dante squinted for a better look. The Blighted set the bundles down on one end, then ripped the cloth from them. Even at that distance, and even before they began to scream, it was clear what the Blighted had been carrying: living people. They had been stripped nude except for their hobbles. They now tried to flee, hopping awkwardly, but the Blighted pounced upon them, biting and clawing, blood gushing down the captives' skin.
The screams pitched up. Many of the soldiers were gaping. Some were hunched over, shoulders hitching, possibly gagging.
Dante realized he had forgotten to deliver a speech of any kind. Little time now. He cleared his throat and turned to his people, using a dab of nether to help project his voice.
"What they are doing is meant to disturb you," he said. "And it should. Because this is what they would do not just to your family, and not just to your city, but to the entire world. So let what they're showing you disturb you—but do not let it unman you. Let it strengthen you. Let it hammer-forge your resolve to fight, and not stop fighting, until every one of them is dead."
This drew a few cheers and whoops, but no sustained, frenzied war-lust. That was fine: most of them didn't understand what they were fighting yet, and thus wouldn't be able to muster that core rage to destroy it utterly. What he was hoping to do instead was to allow them to begin to understand what was in front of them so that, in time, that rage would emerge.
Gladdic moved beside him, face creased. "When was the last time you saw the Eiden Rane?"
"I don't know. A bit ago." Dante cocked his head. "Come to think of it, it's been a while. He's probably keeping back in the trees."
"Perhaps. Yet look at what is before you, and consider what its true purpose might be."
The eerie blue and green lights were still flashing from the trees. The Blighted continued to claw and scramble among the increasingly entropic remains of the captives they'd just killed. It was all quite transfixing.
And maybe that was the whole point.
Dante switched his attention to the fish he had milling around the mouth of the river. He left two cruising back and forth while directing the others out into the ocean at full speed. Once they got a few hundred feet from shore, the water at the depths was almost pitch black, but fish had a strange suite of senses, including the ability to detect motion and disturbances around them. Following the ocean floor, they soon swam into a wide field of irregular vortices.
A presence lashed out from the deep, grabbing hold of the fish with the strength of a grown man clamping down on the wrist of a child. Yet Dante had been waiting for this. The instant he felt the lich whipping up from the darkness, he severed the cords tying him to his scouts.
His skin prickled. "There's a second force. It's heading for the river. And the lich is with them. We have to stop them."
Blays rested his hand on the hilt of his sword. "Most of the army's right across from us. What if the march through the water is a ruse to pull us away from the front lines while the army makes its charge?"
"Then they win, because we can't risk them coming in through the river. We have to ride now!"
He dispatched runners to Drakebane Yoto and Duke Pressings, then turned his horse and galloped along the rampart toward the city, joined by Gladdic, Blays, and half of the troops and nethermancers
from Narashtovik. The Tanarians and Mallish watched in confused dismay until Yoto and Pressings rang out their orders, peeling off additional soldiers and priests to follow. There were already many hundreds of soldiers and a few sorcerers manning the walls at the mouth of the river, but it wouldn't be anywhere near enough to match what Dante had felt walking through the depths. Not if he and the others failed to arrive in time.
He crossed through the city walls and dashed through the twisting streets toward the Chanset. He and the other riders were ranging far ahead of the foot troops, but there was nothing to be done about that. He reached Marine Street and followed it straight toward the docks. Sunset was nearing and the wind was blowing in from the sea, mixing the smell of salt into that of the wharves and sun-warmed mud.
Dante came to the hard earth he'd piled along the river banks to dike it against the swelling of the waters he'd caused by narrowing the channel. He vaulted from his horse, landing in a crouch.
Blays hopped down lightly beside him. "Look at that, you didn't break any legs. Have you been practicing that?"
"I had the feeling the near future might hold a lot of panicked riding."
Dante drew his antler-handle knife and scratched his arm. Nether flocked to him like it was frightened—or ready to be put to use. He jogged down the bank, casting his mind wide for any sensation of ether. Sorcerers from Mallon and Narashtovik arrived behind him, following him toward the walls flanking either side of the river's mouth.
The ground between the exterior of the walls and the shoreline was a field of broken rock, elevated from the ocean by ten to twenty feet. It had always been a possibility that the lich would look to attack these walls—there were certainly less of them than the elaborate earthworks, ditches, and so forth around the rest of the city—but Dante had considered it a remote possibility. A successful assault would involve getting the Blighted to scale the short cliffs and then cross jumbled, rugged terrain, which would only get harder and harder to traverse as more of them were killed by the defenders. Slowed at every step, they would be grossly vulnerable to both archery and sorcery. The ground would be both a chokepoint and a killing field.
Rather than dealing with such adverse conditions, Dante had thought it much more likely the lich would strike across open ground, where his full army could be brought to bear at once, or up the river, where they could move under cover of the water and wade ashore without facing any defenses whatsoever.
Well, they were about to find out.
He ran up the stone steps to the wall three at a time. Blays and Gladdic were right behind him. Any other man of Gladdic's age would have been unable to keep up, but the ether had kept him spry despite his years. Priests in both black and gray hustled after them. The men who'd left the outer defenses on foot hadn't yet begun to reach the river, but there were plenty of other soldiers along the walls already. Dante sent one of them running upstream to order half the reinforcements to cross the bridge to the other side.
"Look!"
A monk pointed out to sea. A hundred yards away, the water began to glow with light as pure as the ether of the Mists. Within moments, it was far brighter than the light of the sun that was now setting to the west, obliging the defenders to avert their eyes.
"Prepare yourselves, if you can," Gladdic said. "For what comes next will be like nothing that you have ever seen."
The light grew brighter yet. Along the wall, ether and nether emerged from every speck of dirt and wisp of air, the nether flowing in like swift and choppy streams, the ether arriving in straight lines and pillars. Dante's head grew light: he had never felt so much power gathered in one place, causing him to feel both drunk yet more clear-headed than at any moment of his life. Golden motes danced around the stony faces of the two Knights of Odo Sein. Dante felt as though if he were to walk off the edge of the wall, he wouldn't fall.
One of the Mallish priests began to sing. The others joined him. Within the first few words, Dante recognized the song: "And Those Who Walk in Light," an old Mallish hymn of steadfastness in times of strife. Beside him, Blays began to sing, then Gladdic. Dante joined them.
Light speared from the sea in a column as wide as a road and screamed toward the wall. The soldiers threw themselves flat. The sorcerers stood their ground, gesturing madly, some of them chanting, hurling forward forty different streams of ether and nether until Dante could hardly tell which was his.
These streams burned toward the blow of the lich. The first struck it head-on, chipping away a long spine of ether. A dozen more followed it in, each one showering the air with white sparks, but the column carried forward without slowing.
Ten more bolts hit it, then twenty. At last it broke apart, much of it sizzling away while seven discrete pieces flew onward toward the wall. The trailing edge of the defenders' counters blasted these to small chunks. Even then, the fragments of ether—none of them larger than a coin—tumbled onward. Dante slung a second round of shadows at them, then ducked behind a merlon. The broken bits of light struck the wall with a soft hiss.
Blays peeked up his head. "Did we just survive a direct attack from the lich?"
"One," Dante said. "And all it took was half an army."
New light gleamed beneath the sea. With a chant of the rarely-heard Tanarian language, the two Odo Sein sent string-thin spirals of the Golden Stream toward the mounting ether. The light blinked twice, then vanished. After a moment of pregnant silence, a cheer swept across the wall—but it was silenced abruptly when the ether glowed anew.
A second column erupted from the water. The defenders met it with another barrage of mingled powers. As before, the column chipped apart, then splintered, tiny fragments smacking into the wall but barely scratching it.
The last sparks were still fading when the lich launched his third column. Those on the wall reacted instinctively, pelting it with black and white bolts until it broke apart.
The waters now lay dark and silent. The last of the sun dipped behind the hills. Dante turned his head to speak to Gladdic, but Gladdic was already splaying his left hand toward the river.
Light bloomed through the water. The channel ran deep and the water was silty, yet they could still make out the legions of lean and pale people marching upstream.
One of the Mallish priests cried out in anger. He raised his hands, throwing two bright darts into the water. They staggered one of the Blighted and dashed the brains out of the second, a pall of organic matter spreading away from the slowly spinning body.
Bolts of light and shadow rained down from the wall, streaking through the river like notions of fish. Everything was flashing, the reflection of ether distorted by the tossing water and spraying erratically in all directions. The bolts plowed into the Blighted, clouding the river with blood and flesh. Within seconds they'd killed dozens, but others marched on by the hundreds, leaning into the current, unconcerned by the carnage around them.
More lights began to streak up the river: the lich moving to protect his army. His ether swooped through the water like birds in flight, ramming into any flicker of light or shadow cast down by the defenders. Barely any of their attacks now made it through to knock down the Blighted, who were currently marching along the walls that lined the entrance to the river. In another minute or two, they'd make it to the channel Dante had narrowed to increase the current through it—and if they made it through that, they could climb right out on the banks and maraud through the city.
"The dead Blighted!" Dante yelled. "Reanimate them and turn them against the others!"
He reached down into ten of the drifting bodies, infusing them with nether and tying them to him. Theoretically, this left him open to the White Lich grabbing that connection and following it to him, but Dante didn't see what the point would be—and suspected the lich was currently a lot too distracted to do so even if there was something to be gained by it.
The ten dead Blighted shuddered, then stretched their limbs, finding their footing once more. Dante ordered them to engage at will
. They flung themselves at their former comrades, biting and gouging.
The other nethermancers followed his lead. A picket line of zombies arose, snarling the Blighted. The Mallish ethermancers who'd come with them watched in obvious shock, but didn't say a word, continuing to blast at the lich-controlled forces. Every time they took one of the Blighted down, a nethermancer was waiting to reanimate it and turn it against the others.
The advance slowed to a crawl. The lich diverted some of his ether to striking the reanimated Blighted down, but that only opened the sorcerers on the wall to pound away at the lich's soldiers and turn them into zombies to replace the ones the Eiden Rane had just removed. To distract them—or perhaps out of frustration—the lich launched another pillar of light at the walls, obliging them to use their full attention to counter it.
Despite the current and the zombies arrayed against them, the Blighted were still making progress, slogging past the part of the walls where the defenders had first arrayed themselves. Dante called for most of the sorcerers to fall back with him to stay even with the lich's army. They jogged down the stairs to the lower set of walls that abutted the riverbank there. Not far ahead was the swift-currented channel; beyond that was disaster.
White light flashed from the eastern fringe of the city, stark against the darkening sky. Pieces of bodies bobbed in the current. A grisly charnel smell arose from the river as zombies and Blighted ripped at each other. The soldiers they'd brought with them from the eastern ramparts lined the walls and the shores past the channel, waiting.
Ether was still flying everywhere, strobing through the river as it sought Blighted to kill—or, if it came from the lich, seeking attacks to negate. The defenders had slain at least two hundred Blighted already, but there were thousands more in the water, a column that stretched back to the darkness of the sea.
The army came to the southern edge of the channel, leaning into the swifter waters. The river was much deeper here and even with the ether providing light it became harder to make out the details down at the bottom. The sorcerers were fighting half blind now, easing the pressure on the Blighted.
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