But the first burst of ether was already streaking from Corson's hand.
As if this was the signal fire of a lit arrow, the legions of Mallon let loose with all they had. Dozens of lights shrieked through the night. The lich crossed his heavy arms in front of his chest. Lines of ether surrounded him, then bent into a sphere. The first bolts struck it with a glow of burning metal.
Dante released a charge of nether, followed at once by a second. To his right and left, his priests launched a volley of shadows. Each one rammed into the lich's sphere and disintegrated like ashes in the wind. But the sphere's surface dimpled and rippled with a rainbow shimmer. Dante summoned and hurled another ball of nether.
Blays ran beside him, easily keeping pace, right hand on the hilt of his sword. "I've never heard so much yammering before a war before. I was about ready to ask the lich to Blight me and get it over with."
"All that talk was a good thing." Dante watched his latest assault dash against the sphere. "It's a sign he's not sure he can win."
"Pretty sound tactic to try to crack us apart, given that the Great Mallish Alliance is about as fragile as an eggshell made of testicles."
The White Lich pulled more ether from the sky, gathering it like a spider spinning her silk, and reinforced the front of the wall he'd wrapped around himself. He reaped another handful and launched one of his arcing, multi-point strikes at the Mallish. They slowed their assault on him, firing at the counterattacks instead.
Golden threads winked from the Odo Sein. The spherical shield flickered. The lich seemed to be wholly ready for this, drawing on the power of his remnant to restore his connection to the ether and stabilize his sphere.
Yet a bolt of nether—it was impossible to say whose—zipped past the shield in the precise moment of its flicker. Distracted by his effort to undo the work of the Odo Sein, the Eiden Rane could do nothing to stop the bolt from plowing into his chest.
The lich grunted. Silvery white blood sprayed from the wound. He blinked his shifting blue eyes in pain.
No sooner had the wound been opened than it sealed itself shut—but the very sight of it, the understanding that the lich could be hurt and thus killed, drove the city's defenders into a frenzy. Ether and nether seemed to blot out the space between them and the lich. His shield strobed with all colors. The lich took a step backward, then another, falling back toward the trees that now seemed a very long way behind him.
"Everything you have!" the Drakebane yelled. "Before his armies can aid him!"
Dante's command was starting to quiver, but he grabbed at more shadows, barely pausing to shape them before firing them at the Eiden Rane. A salvo of ether wrought cracks across his shield. He turned and ran, his strides as long as the bounds of a deer, but the shadows were far faster. They pummeled into the iridescent sphere and shattered it.
The lich reached behind himself, shooting a river of light at the countless attacks of his pursuers. He sent so much ether behind him that his figure was all but lost in the black and white flashes of deflected strikes. A nethereal dart jabbed into his back, followed by a second. Ether gouged into his broad shoulders. One wound after another opened in his back, faster than they could heal themselves.
He roared in pain, running on. But the very next volley sent him toppling into the tall grass.
The defenders yelled out, ready for blood. The lich's aura was still glowing from down in the grass and they didn't let up, hammering the area with light and with dark. Dante's heart boomed in his ears.
Nether flew up from the grass. Not where the Eiden Rane had fallen, but from a dozen or more different points across the field. A small host of lesser liches stood from the tall blades, some sending their sorcery to defend their master, others hitting back at the priests. With a snarl of joyous rage, hundreds of Blighted jumped to their feet as well, stomachs grimy from crawling through the dirt.
"Ignore them!" Dante yelled. "This could be our only chance at the lich!"
He brought a lance of nether to hand and hurled it at the place where the lich had fallen. He thought the man's glow was starting to fade—but it must have been his hopes getting the better of him, because the White Lich stood from the grass, thick blood trickling from a score of wounds, the ether glinting from within both his hands.
17
The Blighted sprinted through the grass, teeth bared. The lesser liches closed like a net on the Eiden Rane. One of them reached out with his ether, restoring the lich wound by wound.
Blays whipped out his swords and put himself a step ahead of Dante. "Are we standing and fighting?"
"Don't know." Dante fired a bolt of nether toward the White Lich, arcing it with the intention of slamming it down on his head. One of the lesser liches batted it down as soon as it began to descend.
"Well, we don't seem to be running. And they are, towards us. So I'd say we're standing and fighting."
The Knights of Odo Sein drew their swords, purple and black light flashing in the darkness, and moved to the vanguard of the Tanarians. Both the Mallish and Narashtovik contingents had brought a number of men-at-arms along with their priests. They'd been hanging back, helpless against the lich's sorcery, but they now moved to stand with the priests. To Dante's right, three of the lesser liches switched from defending the Eiden Rane to targeting a single Mallish priest. The man scrambled back in surprise, yelling out as he was beaten to the ground by the flocking shadows.
Dante held his focus on the lich. When he'd been running away, the lich had looked troubled if not exactly scared, but he now looked grimly resolved. Although he was still being attacked by dozens of defenders, none of their efforts were able to sneak through.
With the sorcerers deadlocked with the liches, the Blighted charged forth nearly unscathed. Blays held the center of Narashtovik's men-at-arms, weaving between the undead like a well-practiced dance, albeit one that left a trail of severed arms and heads in its wake.
"More Blighted are flanking through the trees." Somburr seemed to appear from nowhere, startling Dante enough to send his latest strike of nether veering wildly away from the lich. Under normal circumstances, Somburr was twitchy, as if beset by a constant state of nerves, but he was now as alert and focused as a ferret on the hunt. "Do we call for the cavalry?"
Dante clenched his teeth. "They're trying to draw us into a battle outside our defenses. Bringing out more men is the last thing we want to do."
"Then you'd best make your orders before we have no choice."
"Fall back!" Dante commanded. "To the walls! Hold to your discipline!"
They'd practiced plenty of retreats from one fortified position to another, but rather fewer over open ground. Yet despite this and the constant press of the Blighted, who seemed almost physically incapable of disengaging, they fell back in orderly fashion. A messenger on horseback galloped back to the defenses to prepare the soldiers there to aid them once they neared.
Sorcery flew more thickly than Dante had ever seen, but for all its thunder, there was very little blood: it seemed as though the air was so choked with it that nothing could squeeze through to cause any harm.
As they neared bow range of the ramparts, the White Lich made a hard push, slowing the retreat to a crawl. But Dante saw it for exactly what it was: an attempt to delay them long enough for the flanking Blighted to catch them in the open field. Taking a calculated risk—if they got bogged down, it could lead to total disaster—Dante called for a surge of reinforcements to meet them in the open. With the help of the new troops, they made it back to the safety of the palisades while the second set of Blighted were still running at them from the trees to the northeast.
The archers loosed two volleys at the undead, slaying many. The lich withdrew to regroup after the chase. Scores of dead humans and Blighted alike strewed the turf, but considering the ferocity of the sorcery, there had been very few losses.
Dante called for his horse. Blays put away his swords and stared out into the darkness. The Blighted didn't seem to need an
y lanterns to fight by and the only light past the fortifications was the glow cast by the liches.
"Was it my imagination," Blays said, "or was there a moment there when we were about to win?"
Their mounts arrived; Dante heaved himself into the saddle. "Assuming the whole thing wasn't a trap to lure us out and butcher us in the open."
"I do not believe it was intended to be a trap." After two false starts and waving off the grooms, Gladdic wrangled himself onto his horse. "Even if it was, it has only worked against the lich. We wounded him, and whatever can be wounded can be killed. For all the power he has accumulated, he remains mortal."
"Well, that's good news." Blays adjusted his scabbard on his hip. "Except for the part where it means we had the chance to kill him and then completely failed to do that."
Dante still had a moth high in the sky, and through it, he watched as the lich summoned his full army from the forest. It was not a comforting sight. Once the Blighted were all free of the trees, they took to the march.
"They're not coming for us here," Dante said. "They're circling to the northeast."
Blays scoffed. "What does he think he's doing? Not attacking our most fortified position like a total cheater?"
Dante sent runners to the Drakebane and Lord Pressings. There was no time to wait for a response, so he yelled his orders to the soldiers and nethermancers of Narashtovik, who picked up from their positions and streamed north past the Tanarians, who had been on their left flank. The Mallish, who had been to their right, holding the ground between them and the sea, began to move as well, marching up the dirt path behind the outermost rampart.
Once they cleared the Tanarians, Narashtovik's troops hustled to their new positions along the palisades. They would still be in the center; the Mallish would leapfrog them, taking the northernmost spot and beginning to curve to the west.
Dante ordered one of the monks to pass out shaden to the nethermancers who'd fought at both the river and the field, many of whom were about to exhaust their strength and some of whom already had. It pained him to spend his resources so soon—he liked to treat such things as last resorts—but there came a point where being scrupulous and committing suicide became indistinguishable.
He feared the Eiden Rane might try to run them about for hours, taking advantage of the fact the Blighted needed much less rest. But either that hadn't occurred to him or he was confident he didn't need any such tricks, because the Mallish weren't fully in place yet when the lich pivoted his army about to face the defenders.
The lich made no battle speech—at least not any that Dante could hear, although it was always possible he was speaking it directly to the minds of the Blighted. If so, it was a short one, for the moment his legions were arrayed to his liking, they charged toward the city.
Rather than the bloody wordless battle-cries of men, the Blighted advanced with little sound except the slap of their bare feet and the hisses of their hatred. There was something unnerving about the quiet and Dante could sense the unease in the men and women around him.
"Archers!" He raised his hand above his head, then dropped it. "Loose at will!"
With a hissing of their own, the archers let fly. Their arrows were immediately lost in the darkness, obliging them to wait to see if their range had been true, but as soon as the first Blighted staggered, they launched their second volley.
So did the archers among the Mallish and the Tanarians. Dozens of Blighted fell on their faces, but most of them got up and kept running—or, if they'd been struck in the leg, limped and hopped onward. Only those who took an arrow to the head or the heart stayed where they fell.
"That's going to be a disadvantage," Dante muttered.
"For them," Blays said. "If you've never tried it, it turns out it's a lot harder to fight when you've got a three-foot handle sticking out of you."
The archers were now firing as they pleased. Ether played within the ranks of the Blighted: lesser liches readying themselves. Dante brought the nether to him. It wouldn't be long before he'd begin to need to supplement it with the shadows within the shaden.
The Blighted ran pell-mell, closing to within a hundred feet, then fifty. Seeing them coming by the thousands, it was almost impossible not to start blasting them with everything he had. But that was what the soldiers were for. They all had their role now. Breaking from it would only see them all killed.
The Blighted entered the rim of light spread by the defenders' lanterns. Spearmen braced their weapons. Archers fired relentlessly, hardly needing to take aim. And then the first of the Blighted were upon them, flinging themselves against the palisades and pulling themselves upward.
Men stabbed down with spears and swords. Some of the impaled undead grabbed hold of the hafts of spears and even the blades themselves, unbalancing the soldiers over the wooden posts, where other Blighted grabbed their arms and pulled them down to be ripped to pieces. Screams ran up and down the lines.
"Hold this ring as long as you can," Dante called to his people. "Make them pay for every inch of it!"
Blays stood on the earth piled on their side of the palisade, laying about with his Odo Sein swords, pieces of his enemies thumping to the ground in a steady patter. In a surge of spirit, Dante drew his sword with a snap of nether and jumped up beside him, hacking down at the Blighted piling themselves against the wooden wall.
The soldiers who'd been getting pulled over the defenses soon learned to drop their weight if their weapon was grabbed, or simply to let go of it. The Blighted were dying in droves, but that just meant the ones that came after them had more to stand on. Some were already able to jump from the heaped-up bodies and vault over the palisade, where they grabbed soldiers and threw them down to their pale kin on the other side, or ripped at everyone around them in a bloodthirsty frenzy.
Ether flashed from within the lich's formations, inasmuch as they could be called formations. Cries went up from among the priests, who pointed toward the gathering power. Shadows swept along the rampart. Ether streaked toward them like lightning bolts made of ninety-degree angles. Dante backed away from the palisade, clasping the nether in his hand, then releasing it toward an incoming bolt.
The bolt broke apart in a white flash, forcing both Blighted and soldiers to avert their eyes. Others burst up and down the lines. They hadn't knocked down the last one before the enemies launched another barrage. The priests and monks remained disciplined, employing just enough nether to neutralize the light. There were now enough dead Blighted lumped on the other side for the others to handily leap the barrier, but the jump left them exposed to attack, and they were losing multiple troops for every one they claimed from the defenders. Dante wasn't sure how much longer the lich could afford to press the attack.
A third wave of the strangely-angled lightning soared toward them. Dante drew nether from the shaden and released it at his target. Light flashed over the field, low in the sky. Dante averted his gaze.
To his right, another light seared to brief life. But it wasn't forty feet up like the others. It was at the ground. At the wall. With a rolling boom, the palisade and the earth around it was flung into the air.
Bodies were blasted skyward with it, flopping head over heels. People were screaming, scrambling back from the attack on hands and knees. The Blighted that had been fighting there had been pulped into chunks, but that did nothing to discourage those behind them from trampling over what was left of their bodies as they raced through the gap in the defenses to attack the soldiers on either side.
Blays didn't look away from his butchery of the Blighted atop the wall. "How screwed are we?"
"Not completely." Inside, Dante was screaming, but his mind had already conjured a plan and moved on to telling the panicked parts of him to shut up. "I'll just raise a rock wall there, sealing the gap and—"
Sixty feet further south from where the first attack had gone off, ether blazed from the foot of the palisade. Earth and flesh were hurled high into the air, smoking posts spinning crazil
y in all directions. Another mass of Blighted sprinted into the opening while the debris was still raining down on their heads.
"Gods damn it!" Dante said. "I don't see a lich anywhere near the strikes!"
"That's because it doesn't look like a lich." Blays cleaved through the snarling head of an undead, then used his fouled blade to point south. "It looks like a Blighted."
Dante gazed dumbly, mouth half open. Through the swirling dust and crush of bodies, he made out the faintest flicker of light from the hands of one of the Blighted—or at least something made to look like one of them.
"Come on! Before it loses itself in the crowd!"
He abandoned the palisade and ran for his horse. He vaulted into the saddle and spurred his mount toward the site of the second explosion, cutting down a Blighted as it prepared to leap at him while doing his best to keep his eyes trained on the disguised lich. Hoofbeats stomped behind him. They'd hardly gotten underway before the defenders at the palisade they'd just left called for a retreat. Dante didn't look back.
He galloped into the chaos where the first attack had taken place. His soldiers had all but abandoned the site and Blighted were hurtling through the broken defenses with such reckless speed that more than a few of them were tripping in the churned earth.
Some swerved toward Dante and his escort, which turned out to be both Blays and Gladdic. Dante and Blays laid about with their swords while Gladdic slew his targets with pinpoint strikes of ether. Surrounded on all sides as they were by inhuman monsters, most horses would have been pissing into their horse pants, but they were riding destriers so muscular and battle-bred that they seemed half monster themselves. They rode down any Blighted stupid enough to run at them head on.
They broke through the horde and into the relatively empty ground behind an abandoned palisade. Ahead, the disguised lich moved further south along the defenses. It mixed with a crowd of Blighted pressing against the palisade. For a moment, Dante lost it.
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