The whales were still in the process of heaving about. The Andrac swam through the water like something was propelling them. As they neared their targets, they launched themselves from the water, each one landing on the back of a whale.
The demons drew back their claws and gouged downward with all their strength, meaty hunks flying away from their frantic scrabbling. Their tactic soon became clear: to burrow straight through the creatures' sides. Dante had to remind himself that the whales were already dead.
"Take command," Dante told Nak. "I need to find Gladdic."
He jogged toward the conflagration, glancing between his footing and the river in case the White Lich hit at him again. Blays was still at the front of the fighting, retreating inch by inch as the Blighted claimed more of the shore. Dante found Gladdic kneeling in a patch of grass uphill from the shoreline.
"Are you hurt?" Dante said.
Gladdic shook his aged face. "Recovering."
"From the Andrac?" Dante motioned to the river. The whales had submerged, but dense trails of bubbles were streaming away toward the channel. "How are they faring?"
"Two of the leviathans have already been disabled. We shall see how much longer the Andrac have to complete their task."
Even as he said this, light flared beneath the surface at the channel entrance, briefly illuminating a massive figure. The ether branched three ways, each fork streaking toward one of the inbound whales. One was lagging behind the others, listing on its flank as scraps of itself fell away and trailed in its wake. Dante glimpsed a Star-Eater clinging to the back of one of the other two whales, clawing at it hard; another demon swam after the last of the beasts.
The one clinging to the whale's side ducked its head as one branch of the ether hit it in the shoulder, obliterating its whole arm. Yet it held fast, biting a hole in the whale's flank and wriggling inside. A second branch of ether hit the swimming Andrac somewhere in the back. It flailed in the water, leaking nether like blood from a cut artery. The final bolt of light pierced the badly wounded whale, but if it also hit the demon tearing it apart from the inside, there was no way to tell.
The worst-off whale's flukes stopped moving. Then so did the rest of it, leaving it adrift on the current. The lich flung another spear of ether at the whale with the demon in its belly. Judging by the spray of nether that flushed from the whale's wound, the spear found its mark. In the fading light, the lich raised his hand. The river went dark.
"He is draining the nether from them," Gladdic said. "It will only be another moment."
The priest lifted his hand, moving it in a straight line sideways through the air. Ether blossomed in the channel. The two surviving whales were currently swimming through it. But rather than descending to the bottom to scoop up more Blighted for delivery, they passed out the other end, vanishing into the gloom. The Blighted that were currently crawling into and up the disheveled channel stopped moving, gazing forward in expectation.
At the bank, dozens of the undead made a choking noise, as though they'd tried to swallow something too large for their throats. Still swiping at the air in front of them, they backed up into the water rank by rank, until they had yielded the entire shore. Sorcerers cast light into the water while soldiers hurried to create a formation at the water's edge to prepare for the next attack.
Dante hustled downhill, gathering nether in his hands. Once the Blighted were all below the surface, they turned and marched downstream. And once they reached the channel, the undead there turned about and joined them, heading back toward the sea.
Blays jogged up beside him. His face was sweating and bloody, but Dante didn't think the latter was his own.
"Am I mistaken," Blays said, "or did we just hold off the Eiden Rane?"
16
The soldiers began to cheer—at first with relief, and then with triumph.
Dante had the feeling the retreat was genuine, but given that it was the White Lich, and that one mistake could get them all disintegrated, he wasn't about to take any chances. He traipsed through the grass until he disturbed a fly, then slew it with a pinhead of nether and sent it high into the sky.
"To the wounded!" Nak waved his pudgy hands, beckoning the nethermancers up the bank to where the injured soldiers had been carried away from the fray. "They need your aid!"
Dante cursed and hurried toward him. He grabbed the shorter man by the upper arm, bending in and speaking in low tones. "Has it occurred to you this isn't the time for that?"
Nak stroked his somewhat shapeless chin. "I don't follow you. Should we wait to heal them until they're dead?"
"The lich is just regrouping. He could be back in minutes. The night has only just begun. We'll see a lot more fighting before the morning."
"You're suggesting we need to conserve our energies."
"Heal the exceptional ones back to full strength. Don't do more than stabilize the others. Use your judgment, but remember: when the lich makes his next attack, a few dozen revived soldiers aren't going to save us. But a handful of sorcerers with nether still in hand just might."
Looking more reflective than normal, Nak nodded and bustled after the nethermancers, who were almost to the laid-out wounded. He caught up to the others and drew them aside.
Blays eyed a human body eddying lazily in the shallows. "What's the plan from here? Hang around with the corpses? Can't say they're the worst company I've ever kept, but I thought we'd be a little more involved with the front."
"First, we watch the White Lich for his next move," Dante said. "In the meantime, we should probably start gathering up the bodies of our dead."
"Don't tell me you're going to use them for zombies."
"I just wanted to get them out of here so the lich can't do that. But that is a very interesting backup plan."
"I really need to stop giving you ideas."
Dante assigned a crew of soldiers to fetch one of the boats docked upstream and start collecting the dead for transport and storage. As they set off, he silently reminded himself to see that, wherever they wound up stored, the facility could be set on fire at a moment's notice.
All in all, over three hundred soldiers lay dead, their corpses fallen between rocks and facedown in the water, the odor of blood and viscera a nauseating contrast to the mud and fresh water. Two monks and a priest had fallen, too. It was hard to tell, given that so many of them had been washed toward sea, but he thought they'd taken five hundred Blighted in return.
It felt like a lot, especially so soon into the siege. Yet it was only one percent of what the enemy had brought to bear. Meanwhile, they had suffered roughly equivalent losses—inasmuch as they had anything equivalent to zombie sharks and hollowed-out whale-wagons—and they'd been on defense within fortifications and superior ground. It was a victory, but it was a victory of the quality that you didn't want to have to win too often.
His fly couldn't see anything, since it was above water and the enemy was below it. Dante moved to the water's edge, cleared his mind, and called down enough ether to shed light into the shoreline. A few fish were drifting around, possibly to inspect all of the blood and meat that had just been dumped into their home. Dante slew six of them, reanimated them, and sent them speeding down the river.
The last Blighted were just now making their way out to sea and heading east. Fearing an attack along the shore despite the tactical disadvantages it would cause the lich, Dante rallied everyone who wasn't wounded or tending to them. The sorcerers took to their horses, riding at the head of a column of infantry. Scouts ran along the walls with torches in hand. Dante very much wanted to pin down the lich's exact location, but settled for trailing the rearmost Blighted with his fish while having runners with horns fanning out all the way to the eastern barricades.
Both groups headed steadily in that direction. Dante and his legion reached the city's eastern wall and continued down the road to the defenses. The fly, traveling high above, watched as a white figure emerged from the sea fronting the forest where most of his
army had gathered while he was circling in secret toward the river.
And which had apparently stayed put in the woods during all of the recent fighting. There were plenty of Blighted in the treeline, but the ground between them and the defenders was undisturbed.
"There hasn't been a battle here yet?" Dante said. "Why didn't they attack at the same time the lich did? Press us on both sides?"
Blays regarded the torches and lanterns lighting the ramparts where thousands of men carried arms and waited. "Maybe they didn't like their odds without the big guy."
"This is one of those things that I hope is correct but I'm almost certain isn't."
He trotted toward the rampart where Duke Pressings kept his command. Of course, if he would have provided the duke with a loon, he would already know everything that had gone on in their absence, while Pressings would know all about the outcome of the battle at the river. But it hadn't been a power Dante had wanted to share with the Mallish, who would almost certainly resume being his enemy if they made it through this. It did make him wonder, however, what secrets the Mallish might still be hiding from him.
Recognizing Dante, Pressings' guards called out to let him and his entourage through. Dante rode up the fortification with Blays, Gladdic, Nak, and a small retinue of soldiers and servants. They were met by Pressings, who rode a black horse with a white band across its eyes like a highwayman's disguise.
The duke himself was only in his mid-thirties, but his hair was thoroughly and strikingly iron gray, lending even more authority to a man who anyone would recognize at a glance as an aristocrat both by training and by birth.
He wore a purple doublet with the crest of Wenford on its center, a swooping hawk with its tail feathers spread wide, one of them conspicuously missing. He had been involved in two different military campaigns, one in Collen and the other to pacify an unusual amount of banditry and unrest within and beyond the western border of Mallon. He had the reputation of being fair and honorable to those of his enemies who fought with any measure of decency and utterly merciless against those who didn't.
"Lord Galand." Pressing's blue eyes looked them up and down. "I'm quite jealous. You have seen battle."
"I'm surprised you didn't. Any thoughts why not? What have they been doing out there?"
"They shined more of their pretty lights about. I think they're meant to intimidate us, but I'm beginning to enjoy them. Twice their troops massed at the end of the clearing as if to make a sally, but soon returned to the cover of the trees. Either they're scared or they're scheming. You faced the lich?"
Dante gave a condensed description of the battle. "We did better than I feared we might. But it took a hell of a lot of our strength to hold him at bay."
The duke looked amused. "I was told this White Lich was little less than a god. If you survived his presence, how powerful can he really be?"
"I think he meant to test our strength and see if he could end the battle with the first thrust. But mostly, it was an exploratory jab. He's never led a siege on foreign lands before, let alone against so many sorcerers. I guarantee that if he'd broken through, he'd have attacked you on this front, too."
"Yet he hasn't dared attack here yet. You parried his first effort without suffering overmuch. What happens if he decides the city's too big of a bite to swallow?"
"Then we wait until we're sure he's gone and then get very, very drunk. But there will be at least one more attack. One that might not come in the form we're expecting. He's had centuries to plan his conquests. Be watchful."
Dante turned his horse around and returned to Narashtovik's portion of the fortifications. He had placed Somburr in charge during his absence. The spindly little man was currently standing behind a palisade and chewing his lip as he watched the enemy. The Councilman was dressed in plain black, with no markings of his station. It occurred to Dante that if need be, his spymaster could operate quite effectively in Bressel: between his brown skin and hard-to-place accent, no one who didn't already know about him would think to connect him to Narashtovik.
"So you fought him off." Somburr kept his eyes trained across the field. "Well done."
Dante lifted a brow. "Do I detect scorn?"
"Not toward you. Toward him. He's been toying with us on this end: the lights, their busy maneuvers that go nowhere. I hear that he fought you with practically all the beasts of the sea. Who's to say he wasn't toying with you, too?"
"Where are you going with this, Somburr?"
The smaller man lifted his right hand and shook it about. "When will the games get serious? And will we know it when we see it?"
Uncertain where to go with this, and starting to feel piqued that no one seemed all that impressed by his victory over the lich—which was probably the first one that anyone could claim since the enemy's return—Dante moved down the palisade, inspecting one of the small barrels of shaden they'd set up along the lines. It was a strange fate for a snail, being plucked from its home waters and carried across an ocean to serve part in a mad war, but he supposed that was what they got for being so useful.
There was a bit of movement in the trees, but nothing that presaged an attack. Dante's scouts kept their distance but were staying close enough to do their job and had seen no hint of foul play either in the water or the forest. It was a warm, pleasant night, the kind that would have seen young lovers strolling hand in hand through the streets—if those streets hadn't recently been conquered by one invading force, and were presently being besieged by a second.
Around eleven o'clock, a blue-white light emerged from the trees. Even across the field, Dante recognized it at once: the Eiden Rane.
He walked alone, his long glaive in his left hand, his white cape trailing behind him. Everyone went silent, as if the lich had ensorcelled them, freezing them in place. The stillness lasted for three seconds, then five: then it broke like a pane of ice struck by a hammer, with thousands of people whispering intently to each other at once, as if all the grass in a lonely, wind-swept field had just been granted a soul and was asking itself why.
The lich crossed a third of the meadow and came to a stop. A cold wind seemed to emanate from him, ruffling his cape. His entire body glowed softly, like moonlight or starlight, the ever-shifting blue of his eyes shining sharply.
"People of Mallon." His voice carried easily across the distance, grave and forceful, but not so loud as to be oppressive. "Have those who spur you against me told you what I am? Let me see if I can guess. I expect that they told you I am an ancient and evil sorcerer driven by conquest and blood-thirst. That my purpose in coming here is to consume or enslave you. Think for one moment about the people who have told you all of this. Now think about where they have come from and what else they believe."
The lich paused, the butt of his glaive planted beside him. "Had it occurred to you to question the claims these outlanders brought you? Has some doubt already stirred in your mind? Then you will be less surprised by what I now tell you. I am no vampire, no lord of evil. It is in fact the opposite: for I am the messenger of Taim. I have come to deliver you his word."
He pulsed with the crystalline light of pure ether. A spire of it seemed to reach all the way to the clouds, but it was gone as swiftly as it could be seen.
Shouts rang out across the lines; those of the Tanarians held a different timber than those of the Narashtovikers, which in turn differed from the Mallish.
"Blasphemy!" This came from Corson, who stood among his peers in their gray robes. "You're a deceiver! A butcher! You're not worthy to speak Taim's name!"
The lich swiveled his head to Corson, but did nothing to interrupt him, speaking only once the priest was finished. "It is you who have been deceived by foreigners who care nothing for your beliefs and would be happy to see them smashed. Look upon me, and look upon the light."
"I have spent my life in veneration of Taim, the father of light. You are not him!"
"LOOK UPON ME!"
The lich's voice rang so loudly that those w
ho were standing fell to their knees. Alone in the field, he spread his arms wide, lifting his weapon from the ground. Ether coalesced around him, taking on patterns that were both strange yet somehow familiar, a shifting cage that seemed also, in ways that were wholly mysterious, a projection of his inner soul, as if he'd grasped the remnant within himself and brought it forth for all the world to see.
And it was beautiful.
The light shimmered and seared, as if it was cutting a portal through the dismal world and into a brighter and better plane of being. Sometimes it almost seemed to take the form of words, or faces or creatures, bringing forth, perhaps, the ideals the gods had once used to make all of the things that now existed on the earth. The ether was both the starkest white of virgin snows but also contained every color that could be painted or seen.
Images now flickered within the light. Some seemed to be of the past while others seemed to be from the future. Both showed eras of glory: one that was now long lost, and one that was yet to come under the rule of the lich.
Gladdic laughed, harsh and crow-like. More adroitly than his age would seem to allow, he swung himself over the palisade and dropped to the other side, strolling across the rampart toward the distant lich.
"Tricks of the light prove nothing to no one. I am far closer to the truth of Taim than you are, and I am a wretched heretic who may find, when I die, that I am damned."
It was the lich's turn to laugh, the sound like a sheet of copper being shaken about. "You are a deceiver, Gladdic of Bressel. Nothing more than an agent of the Drakebane." He turned back to the Mallish. "The same Drakebane who would steal your land and your home and then use you as mere fodder against me."
Gladdic began to say more, but the lich continued on, drowning him out. "Look at all the ways in which the Drakebane corrupts you. You are men of the light, yet you are now ruled by those who deny the words and law of my master, the lord of the divine realm, Taim, father of gods and of you. At the same time, this foreign lord tricks you into inviting the men of shadow into your home. That which you were meant to destroy is now what you fight alongside as false brothers and allies! What sickness has befallen you?"
The Spear of Stars Page 26