The Spear of Stars

by Edward W. Robertson

  He began to pace across the grass, gesturing sweepingly with his massive hand. "But do not despair. For I have come to cleanse them. Lay down your arms and do not interfere and I will remove those who have invaded you. I will return your city to you. I will scour the worshippers of death from your streets. Let my light fall upon you and cleanse you—and let my light fall upon them and destroy them. For one thousand years my lord has beseeched those who love the light to purge those who would defile it. You have been unable to complete this task on your own. That is why Taim has now sent me to make it so."

  Blays peered over the top of the palisade. "Hasn't he been locked inside an iron tomb for generations? And before that, wasn't he just faffing about in the swamp forever? How does he know all these things about us and Mallon?"

  "I don't know," Dante said. "But he's doing his best to use them to break us apart."

  "Well, we should probably just stand here and let him do that, then."

  Not entirely sure what he was doing, Dante pulled himself over the palisade and took three steps forward, raising his voice high. "Right, you're just a holy man sent to dispel the evil from the land. That's why you opened your war on us with the extremely holy sight of your army of the undead brutally cannibalizing living people."

  "You speak of the Blighted?" The lich chuckled. It was an unsettling sound. "Do you not see what the Blighted are? They are but people who have had all the light drained from their soul. They are what your path would lead us to. The shadow has grown too long. Taim has sent me to take up your power and bend it against you while exposing to the world the void that lives at the heart of what you do."

  Dante turned, muttering toward Blays. "This is nonsense. He's absolutely not some servant of Taim. When I was under his power, he never said a word about this."

  "You saw what you were allowed to see," the lich said, although there was no natural way for the lich to have heard him. "No less and no more." The lich turned back to the crowds of soldiers and priests, lifting his hand skyward. "Perhaps the sight of me is not proof enough for you to accept what I am. Then I will now show you something that very few people have seen and about which almost no one knows—for they do not want you to know. For it would expose them as frauds and liars who wish to keep you separate from the truth of the gods who love you. And so I ask you: what do they tell you about what lies beyond this life?"

  "Oh shit," Dante whispered.

  "It is said by your holiest priests that when you die, you pass through Taim's Gate. There, you are judged and sorted. Those who abided by his law are sent to the lord's garden, which is walled and protected against the darkness that is always seeking to wend its way inside the human soul. But those who disobey his law are cast into the forest of damnation. Within this forest they will find many trials and torments from which it is uncertain that they will ever escape.

  "Yet this is not the reality. It is but a story designed to enslave you to those who have turned away from the father of all things. Do you wish to see what Taim has created for you to ascend to? Then I will show you. And I will tell you the truth of it: that it is open not just to the most virtuous, but to everyone."

  He'd been holding his hand open above his head. Now he clenched it into a fist. Ether shot into the sky in a narrow beam. It pierced the patchy clouds, then began to unfurl, widening near the ground and the clouds to form two vast cones, the upper one tipped upside down so their tips were set against each other: an hourglass, hundreds and hundreds of feet in height. Once it had attained its full size and stopped expanding, it twisted in the middle until it had taken a quarter turn.

  "That's what I saw in the lich's mind," Dante murmured. "As above, so below."

  The top of the hourglass began to shine like moonlight. The air there seemed to thin, the clouds fading until they were hazy, translucent, then gone altogether. After a moment, fluffy white clouds popped into place within the wide circle—and they were interrupted by pockets of rocks, trees, and streams.

  "Is that the Mists?" Blays' voice was so flat it didn't sound like a question.

  "Or an illusion of them."

  The circle at the top of the hourglass held its position in the sky, but the image within it shifted to the left, as if it was a magnifying lens being drawn across a page. It skimmed across a jumble of tumbling fog punctured by the occasional stand of birches or pines. After a few moments, it came to a road and followed it to east. The spots of land thickened until there was more solid ground than mist. Farmhouses and cottages now dotted the clearings.

  Next came a sturdy stone wall: and beyond it the plazas and spires of a great city. One where each neighborhood different from the next so radically that they looked like they had each come from a different place—or a different time.

  "That is no illusion." Gladdic's voice caught in his throat. "That is the same city we visited."

  With his head tilted back so far, Dante felt as if he might fall over. "How can he be doing this? How does he even know about the Mists?"

  "My answers would only be guesses, and they are no better than your own."

  A man in a gray robe ran toward them along the palisade: it was Corson, his eyes wide and his face pale. "Ordon Gladdic! What is happening? Can this man be telling us the truth? Has he been sent here by Taim?"

  Gladdic shook his head tightly. "It cannot be so."

  "But what he's telling us—what he's showing us—it's true, isn't it? Isn't this the very place that you yourself traveled to in search of the Spear of Stars?"

  "And I am no avatar of the gods, am I? So how is this proof that he is?"

  "There's nothing about him that's earthly. His size, his color, his eyes! Everyone is questioning. They are on the brink of walking away!"

  "He's put us in a vise," Dante said. "We have to stop him. But if we attack him now, he'll tell the Mallish it's further proof we're trying to silence the truth."

  They all stared into the sky. The lens into the Mists was passing between the glorious cathedrals that reached from the city like upraised arms.

  "This is the land my lord has made that awaits you." Despite its metallic ring, the lich's voice was somehow soothing. "There are more secrets beyond these. I will share them with you—but you must depart this field so that I might cleanse it of those who seek to corrupt you beyond all redemption."

  "During the Dialogue of Death and Bread, Adaine suggested the lich was sent by Taim." Corson's voice was caught between wonder and dread. "Adaine has always been said to be able to speak with the gods. What if he heard this from Taim himself?"

  The Mallish were arranged on the right flank of the Narashtovik soldiers. Among the Mallish camp, their soldiers and priests were busily arguing with each other, glancing between the vision of the Mists, the White Lich, and the northerners holding the defenses beside them. Dante could feel the moment slipping away—they would fracture and then they would fail—but the lich had played them into a corner.

  Gladdic ran his hand down his face. Gathering himself, he strode along the rampart toward the lich. "You are not a messenger, but a murderer. The light that spills from your body is not meant to illuminate the world to us, but to hurt our eyes so that we must turn away from you, rendering us unable to spy the truth of it. For those who would deceive you come dressed in silver and gold, so that by the gleam of their splendor, you will not think to question them."

  "Yet also trust not those who would spin their words as if from gold," the lich answered without missing a beat. "The truth needs no fineries: it may come dressed in the plainest sackcloth, or even naked: for unlike man, when the truth goes naked it is not in shame, but in virtue."

  Gladdic blinked. Their words had the feel of a ritual of some kind, but although Dante had the sense he should know them, he couldn't place where he knew them from.

  The priest lowered his head a moment, then returned his eyes to the lich. "I walk in the darkest woods, where the foul trees curse me. I walk in the desert, where each grain of sand scorches my foo
t. I walk in the caves beneath the world, where horrors lurk and wait for me to stumble. At all times I am afraid: and yet I smile."

  "Whenever I rest, I ask the stars and their masters when my passage will end," the White Lich replied casually. "Yet all I hear back is laughter, for the stars alone know the whens of beginnings and ends. To you as you walk the path, the end is mystery, unknown until the moment it arrives."

  Gladdic's voice was strangled. "This is not possible."

  "Did you expect that I would not know the words my lord wrote for you? I know them all, Gladdic of Bressel. Bring me quill and ink and I will write each one of them from start to finish."

  Dante's scalp prickled. At once, he understood what was happening: Gladdic had started quoting the Ban Naden at the lich, assuming he wouldn't recognize it and would thus be outed as a fraud. Instead, the lich had quoted it back in kind—and was now offering to write it cover to cover from memory alone.

  "What if he is a god?" Dante said. "I don't mean Taim, or even his messenger. But a new god, or maybe a very old one we don't know about. How else could he know the entire Ban Naden when he's been in Tanar Atain this whole time?"

  Blays rattled his sword in its sheath. "Maybe he is a god. In that case, it's time for us to become god-killers."

  "You bluff," Gladdic called to the enemy. "You have used some trick to read my mind and rob the answers from me!"

  The lich chuckled, which was all the more disturbing for its complete lack of concern. "It was at this time that the tide returned, and came flooding across the salt flats, where many of both sides were drowned. As long as the rains endured, the city could not be sieged."

  He cocked his head, waiting.

  Gladdic scowled. "And so the rains went on, one day after another." He paused. "Until in the ninth week…" He trailed off. "A moment. It will come to me!"

  "Do you see?" The lich spread his arms wide to the Mallish. "I bear his light! I speak his words! I have been sent to free you from the darkness that surrounds you on all sides. Leave this field, and I will save you!"

  To their right, Adaine mounted a palisade. Ether flashed about his head. "People of the light! We've prayed for deliverance, and deliverance has come! If we will not heed the words of Taim himself, then we will be swept away with all of the others who deny him! Walk with me! Walk with me away from this field and into the light!"

  The Mallish soldiers rippled, looking to the priests. The priests looked to Adaine. Adaine hopped down from the palisade and began to walk west away from the defenses, chanting praise of Father Taim.

  "Now would be a good time to do something," Blays said.

  "Like charging at the lich and making him look right about everything and then getting vaporized by him for trying?" Dante's heart thudded dully. His scalp and armpits were sweaty. "Or should I try quoting scripture I don't know? How can we convince the Mallish the truth of things they haven't seen?"

  "By showing them." Sudden dots of stream coiled around Blays' head. "He wrongfooted us with the truth about the Mists. So wrongfoot him with the truth. Show the Mallish what he's really like."

  "By using the stream?"

  "By using fingerpaint if you have to! Just show them! Before there's no Mallish left to be shown!"

  "Right." Dante walked away from the protection of the defenses and toward the lich. "The White Lich is right." Dante lifted his right arm, pointing up to the lens that showed the city in the Mists. "That is the afterworld. I should know, because I've been there several times now. It's the exact same place we spoke of in the Dialogue of Death and Bread. The lich is right about something else, too: if you walk away, he'll kill the Tanarians, along with me and my people. But he's not telling you the whole truth: once he's done with us, he will come for you, too.

  "I should know—because I was once his slave, and I saw everything."

  He had been gathering nether in one hand and ether in the other. Now, he unleashed them in the sky—not nearly as high as the lich's hourglass to the afterworld, but high enough for everyone in the fields to see. And he used them to illustrate a city of spires and islands separated by canals and connected by small bridges. He hadn't used this ability much in some time and the image was fuzzy at first, but grew sharper as he went along.

  "This is the city of Aris Osis," he said. "It was a port in Tanar Atain. And what he did there is the same thing he'll do here."

  On a dock in a canal, thousands of people lay piled up like a catch of fish. They were bound and wriggling, but there was no escape from the towering, ice-white figure that approached them. The lich lifted his hands, pulling half the soul from nine-tenths of them. Once they had been turned, the lich stepped back and nodded to the other Blighted, who had been waiting with the air of a dog told to stay. They fell upon the two thousand captives, devouring them alive—and still bound—until the docks were soaked in blood and nothing was left but tangles of scalps and well-gnawed bones.

  "But I haven't just seen what he's already done. I've also seen what he'll do in the future."

  Dante wiped the vision clean, summoning from his imagination a series of images: the Blighted coursing through the streets of Bressel, killing or capturing every man, person, and child they found. And then doing the same in Narashtovik. And Setteven. And then, when people learned to flee from the cities and take refuge in the wilds, the Blighted pursuing through the forests and over the mountains, as tireless as their hunger. Any sign of smoke or farming drew them. Until, in time, there were no people left at all: just the Blighted, milling across every empty land, still as ravenous as they had always been.

  "Perhaps you see this and you think one man isn't capable of exterminating every last soul from the world," Dante said. "You would be wrong. I've seen the deep history of the world. A history so ancient that no scrap of it remains today, in ruins or in memory—because nearly every last person alive then was slaughtered."

  This time, the image he painted across the sky was one the White Lich had shown him personally. A city grew from the land like no city seen since, its towers like blades of glass, its streets shining as if paved with gold. Yet into this city the rebels marched, a slave army, and they fought with the sorcerers who had built the city, burning them out of their towers.

  Yet just as the last of the sorcerers seemed set to fall, something poured from their spires. Demons with long claws and fangs bounded through the rubble, brutalizing the rebels; and for each person that fell to the demons, they returned as one. The plague of monsters took the city. Ate the very sorcerers who'd created them. Then spread from village to village, through town and city, just as the Blighted had done in the vision before, until only a handful of survivors huddled in the high mountains and deepest forests, and the world went silent and dark.

  Dante let the image linger, then swept it from the sky. "Stand aside, if the thing before you has convinced you he's been sent by Taim. But if you abandon us tonight, the scenes I've just shown you spell the fate that will come for you once he's done here."

  The defenders were now as quiet as the emptied-out past had been. Corson was the first to speak. "The last thing you showed us—you said this happened? When?"

  "No one knows for sure," Dante said. "At least twenty thousand years ago. And maybe as many as a hundred thousand. All trace of it was lost long, long ago."

  "Then how can you possibly know about it?"

  Dante glanced sidelong at the Drakebane among his troops. He was quite certain the Glimpses were supposed to be kept secret, but at that moment, none of them had the luxury of secrecy.

  "I've spent years of my life traveling to many strange places," Dante said. "And Tanar Atain is one of the strangest of them all. There, they have ways of seeing into the past. That's where we learned about what used to be."

  "I don't understand." Corson gestured to the Mists printed on the sky. "First the afterworld, now this deep history of yours—this could change our very understanding of our place in the world. Why wouldn't you tell the people about th
is? Why would you hide the truth?"

  "I was afraid it would cause chaos. I thought that things might fall apart, like they're so close to doing right now. But maybe it's time for the people to learn the truth. In that sense, maybe the lich was sent by Taim—not to destroy us, but to force this knowledge into the open and enlighten us."

  Corson stared at Dante, then turned to the Mallish, lifting his voice. "People of Mallon. Faithful of Taim. We're being lied to. If we swallow that poison, we will die. It's time to save our land. Time to save our souls. To war! To war, to war, to war!"

  He thrust his fists above his head, filling them with light. Then he turned and ran along the rampart toward the White Lich. His compatriots stared after him, agog, as if ready to leave the lunatic to his fate.

  An old man scrambled over the palisade behind Corson, gray robe snagging on the poles. He cursed the fabric, then turned his invective on the others. "Come on, you bastards! Or are you just going to let him lie about being sent by our Father?"

  He turned and ran after Corson, holding his robes high like a skirt. Like the breaking of a dam, the other priests followed, hastening to catch up as Corson entered the cropped grass beyond the fortifications.

  "Go!" Dante yelled, windmilling his arms. "To the aid of the Mallish!"

  The nethermancers poured through a gate in the palisade, nether streaming to them from all sides. Drakebane Yoto sallied forth in the company of his knights and sorcerers.

  "STOP!" The lich's voice roared like the breaking of a great bell. "You move against your own lord! You will break your path to the heavens!"

  He curled his upstretched hand into a fist. The massive hourglass of light twisted, the lens into the Mists blurring and shaking.