They hadn't even had the chance to shape it before a ball of nether plowed into the wall, blowing a twenty-foot stretch inward across the bank. Dante flinched in the saddle.
Blays didn't twitch. "This is very bad, isn't it?"
"It hasn't even started to get bad. The lich is piling the Blighted into the water. They'll march straight here."
Streamers of dust blew away from the hole in the wall. One of the priests had been caught under a rock and some of the soldiers were digging him loose while the other priest held the man's shoulder and gazed out into the murky waters where the river met the sea.
Dante drew on the reins. His horse skidded to a stop on the hard earth. He dropped to the ground, drew his knife, and nicked his arm. As soon as he saw the first drop of ruby blood, he called to the nether.
The soldiers had cleared some of the rubble from the trapped priest, but a large stone was pinning him down. Blood dribbled from his mouth. Dante waved his hand, reaching into the block and dissolving it like sand in water. As he pulled it away, the priest gasped, then began to scream.
The unhurt man laid his hands on the downed priest. Ether twinkled forth into the man's body. He writhed, hacking up more blood.
"Get him out of the way!" Dante windmilled his arm, beckoning them out from the jumbled stones.
The unhurt priest looked up sharply. "He is injured. I can't move him until—"
"I said move!"
The priest stared at him, slack-jawed. Then two of the soldiers, used to following orders from anyone who ran up to them and yelled loudly enough, bent to pick the wounded man up by his ankles and armpits. The other priest put his hands under the man's back and helped bear him away.
Dante had hardly touched the nether all day and as he reached out for more it practically jumped into his hands. He gathered the shadows, walking out on top of the shattered stones, and sank the nether into the boulders and shards beneath his feet.
If he'd been better with the ether—perhaps much, much better—he might have been able to restore the stonework to its precise original shape. As it was, he had to settle for liquefying the rock and raising it up into a blunt and unornamented slab. As it climbed, it lifted him with it, until it matched the height of the undamaged walls around it.
"You could have told me you were about to do that," Blays said, skipping up the steps. "Would have saved me a flight of stairs."
Dante's eyes skimmed the surface of the brown waters where fresh water met salt. Before he could reply, a cone of ether leaped from the waters and sped toward the wall. Dante bashed it into the ground and took a step closer to the edge. Hoofbeats pounded the banks upstream, coming on fast.
The lesser lich lurking in the sea hit at the wall a third time. Dante parried it as easily as the last attempt. Nak and five other priests ran up the steps, with further reinforcements strung out behind them.
Nak bit his lip, examining the waters, then gave the wall an experimental stamp. "You patched that up in quite a hurry, didn't you?"
"The lich can't move a proper invasion force without us noticing," Dante said. "Worse yet for him, we can relocate our troops faster than the Blighted can move through the water. So he thought to send one of his lieutenants to breach the wall, and then bring up his army to storm through it."
"Rather dastardly of him. What happens now?"
"We're about to find out."
Dante ordered his people to string out along the wall, including on the opposite bank. A pair of monks ran to the river's edge to find fish to send out into the bay. The two Mallish ethermancers climbed the steps; the man who'd been in the process of getting crushed to death looked pale but healthy. He gave Dante a shaky nod. Then he and his peer sent the ether into the water, lighting it through the murk.
"They've failed," Dante said after another minute, watching through the eyes of a dragonfly on the eastern front. "The Blighted are withdrawing from the ocean and returning to the woods."
This made him wary that the whole thing had been a ruse, and that the White Lich would fall on the eastern defenses now that he'd successfully pulled so many defenders from it, but once he had returned his armies to the forest, they seemed inclined to stay there. After confirming to the best of his abilities that the lesser lich had withdrawn as well, Dante ordered a tripling of the sorcerers on the entrance to the river with as many scouts as they could keep in the water, then mounted up and returned to the eastern earthworks.
Early that afternoon, the lich made a push straight at them, leading with himself and his underlings, teeming masses of Blighted gathered behind him. It seemed as though their intention was to knock a hole through the third ring, after which they would force the defenders back and then demolish the seized fortifications beyond repair just as they'd done on the fourth ring.
But Drakebane Yoto had been coordinating with Nak. As soon as the fight began in earnest, the Odo Sein homed in on a single lesser lich, cutting him off from both nether and ether. At the same time, the priests of Narashtovik bombarded him with everything they had.
The White Lich shifted his energies to his lieutenant's protection, but not in time to prevent the lesser lich from being knocked to the ground. The Eiden Rane yelled out then, his voice ringing like an immense kettle. He collected his wounded sorcerer and fell back through the remnants of the fourth ring, then into the forest, ether blurring his hands as he tended to his wounded.
"Well that was fast," Dante said.
"Happens to the best of us sometimes," Blays said.
"He thinks the balance of sorcery doesn't favor him. He's leery of letting it skew any further to our side."
"Then it sounds like that's exactly what we should make happen."
Once it was clear the lich didn't mean to mount another assault any time soon, Dante met with Yoto, Pressings, and their generals and sorcerers to advocate for a strategy of isolating and eliminating the more vulnerable lesser liches. They spent the rest of the afternoon drinking tea and discussing ways to get this done, keeping one eye on the eastern woods at all times.
Night came and passed. Just before dawn, the sheet of clouds hanging over the city opened up, dropping a torrent onto the city. Dante had lived long enough in Narashtovik to recognize the various forms of coastal rain. Most common were the squalls, which came in on low, swift clouds, the wind blowing the rain in at a hard slant. These rains rarely lasted any more than an hour, and were often over within minutes, if not seconds, as the clouds hurried inland past the city.
By contrast, these clouds were much higher, implying they would take longer to depart. Rain spilled from the sky in sheets as straight as a woman's combed tresses spilled down her back. It was the kind of rain that was likely to last for hours, and which might start and stop for days.
By mid-morning, water gathered in puddles in the footprints stomped in the field. By afternoon, the sorcerous craters were threatening to turn into little ponds. The rain eased up as evening neared, first to a drizzle and then to nothing at all, only to return at midnight as fast as a clap, startling Dante from his sleep.
It made for a somewhat unpleasant experience, out in the field as they were, but at least it wasn't cold. And it was possible the rain was the reason the lich didn't choose to attack that day, or the next, when the storm slowed but persisted enough to keep the grass sodden, the earth muddy, and the river moving fast.
On the third day, however, where the clouds remained but had no more rain to give, and the lich remained encamped in the forest, Dante found Blays and Gladdic.
"He hasn't made a move in days," Dante said. "Is he trying to siege us out?"
Blays chewed a stalk of grass. "It's not the stupidest idea I've ever heard. He and the Blighted don't really need to eat while we've stubbornly hung onto our stomachs like backwards barbarians."
"Which means he doesn't have any supply lines for us to disrupt, either."
"We have shown no willingness to emerge from our walls to attack him," Gladdic said. "If need be, he could w
ait us out for generations, until all who oppose him now have died of old age, and all those born since his arrival will have lived imprisoned in despair."
Blays smiled. "You get so poetic when you talk about suffering, misery, and death."
Dante looked up at the sky, but there was no telling what the clouds held next. "If this is shaping up to be a siege, the sooner we start treating it like one, the better off we'll be. We should speak to the Mallish about what supplies they think their citizens will need. In the meantime, I'm going to tend to our stomach problem."
He padded around the camp until he found Winden, who had stayed on the front even though Dante and Blays were the only people she knew there. Her foreign appearance had drawn some interest from some of the soldiers and a few of the monks, though, and she'd been kept busy swapping stories with them, answering questions about her homeland as she asked the Narashtovikers to recite their songs and poems to her.
Dante approached, waving off two soldiers and a priest who'd been speaking with her. "You might have guessed from the lack of fighting for our lives that the White Lich hasn't been attacking us lately. We're starting to think he means to besiege us."
Winden tilted her head. "Besiege?"
"It's like when you go to war with someone. And then do what he's doing right now."
"What are they doing now?"
"Now that they've surrounded us, they're not going to let anything in or out. They'll try to starve us."
Winden snorted. "It is honorable to starve you? Not to conquer you in battle? Barbaric. You land-dwellers, you should be ashamed."
"We have discovered that feelings of shame tend to evaporate quickly when your enemy's dead and you're still standing. If we are being sieged, we're going to need food. Much more than we can grow for ourselves. I'd like you to harvest it—and to teach some of my people to do the same."
"I prefer to be here. To fight."
"Yes, and I prefer to be sitting on the beach outside Kandak, with a mug of good whiskey in one hand and a mug of better whiskey in my other hand. But if I were to run off and do that, a hell of a lot of people would die, and there'd be no one left to sell me more whiskey. This is the talent you've brought to us. I think the gods meant for it to help save us."
She scowled, gesturing broadly. "Your words, they say that I have too much skill to fight. That is not so!"
"If you've never seen a proper siege before, then you don't understand what's coming. It's not the soldiers who will die. We need them to keep up their strength. No, the first to die will be the elderly. Then the children. Then the women and the men. Somewhere in there, we might surrender. But until then, you'll get to see thousands of people dwindle away to nothing."
Winden exhaled through her nose. "The ones I teach. If I teach them well, and they are then able to do all that is needed, then can I come back here?"
"Of course. When the lich moves again, we're going to need everyone we can get on the lines."
She nodded once, sealing the agreement in the fashion of the islanders. Dante consulted with Nak about which of their people could be spared from the front and were adept at picking up new skills. He selected six in total, figuring they wouldn't all be able to learn the foreign trick. And if they were, well, then he supposed they would feast.
He put Winden in charge of their training, but when he had no immediate duties, he would wander over to observe how things were going and to put in the occasional word of advice. Incredibly, by the end of the very first day, a woman named Vanna was already conjuring the sprouts of potatoes up from the ground.
The clouds broke overnight, revealing stars strung across the pool of the black sky. Morning came, hot and still. The lich stayed put in the woods.
Either Dante had chosen her students wisely or Winden was an excellent teacher, because two more of his nethermancers were harvesting their first sprigs of wheat. Dante was watching their progress with satisfaction when Corson strolled up to him, hands tucked behind his back.
"Didn't think that was a thing you could teach to others." He chuckled. "Don't know why I thought that. Everyone has to learn their tricks from somebody else, don't they?"
"That tends to be more efficient than trying to blunder it out for yourself."
Corson tapped his chin. "That the kind of thing she could teach to us?"
"It uses the nether."
"I know. But I was thinking if she showed us how it was done, maybe we could come up with a way to get the ether to do it, too."
"It's Winden's skill to teach, not mine," Dante said. "But I can't see why she wouldn't show you."
Corson watched Winden's pupils furrow their brows as they drew sprouts up from the dark brown earth, then chuckled again. "That's the damnedest thing. Never thought I'd see the day when the shadows were creating life instead of taking it. Surely the apocalypse must be upon us!"
Winden agreed to take on more students, though she looked annoyed to do so, likely suspecting it would lengthen the amount of time she had to spend in training. But the priests Corson sent were eager and studious, and by nightfall, Winden looked to be taking pride in her new authority.
Over the next two days the Eiden Rane sent a pair of lesser liches to the north and west along the outermost ring, probing to see if they could employ a fast strike to breach multiple layers of defenses at once. But the mounted sorcerers shadowed their every move, keeping them at bay with little exchange of magics.
"I don't like this," Blays said once the liches had returned to the forest. Night had fallen, the moon shining above and the crickets singing around them. "We're just…sitting around."
"I thought that was your favorite conscious and non-intoxicated activity."
"That's true, but when someone in my line of sight is scheming to kill me, I prefer to do something about it."
"We've held out so far. This is the safe bet."
"The safe bet to give him all the time he needs to come up with something bad enough to break through."
"What should we be doing? Insulting his lich-mother until he snaps and throws his army at us again?"
Blays shrugged. "For one thing, we could try to find the prime body."
"My scouts haven't seen a single sign of it. For all we know, he left it in Tanar Atain."
"Then let's ride out and attack him."
"We barely held them off from a fortified position. If we attack them in the open field, it'll be raining bits of us for days."
"Okay, so that isn't the best idea. But it's an idea. I think we should have more of them. We're being complacent. Just…waiting."
"That's why it's called a 'siege' and not a 'run at each other as fast as you can and keep hitting each other until somebody's all dead.' We just have to hold out. And be patient. If we can do that, we can win."
"Maybe." Blays picked up a small rock, flicked it into the air, and caught it despite the darkness. "But all the other times we've won, it wasn't by sitting around. It was by destroying our enemies with plans so cunning our foes are probably still thinking about them up in the Mists."
Another pair of days crossed without serious action from the lich. The air grew hot and thick, sunny the first day and then cloudy the second, although in a way that felt different from the rains earlier on. Dante spent some time thinking and talking about ways to go after the Eiden Rane, but every possibility seemed doomed for the same reason that they were currently cooped up in the city.
That afternoon, with the air smelling of ozone and threatening thunder, Corson ran up to him and told him that they'd found Adaine.
"He's dead," Corson said. "Murdered. Savage affair."
Dante blinked. "Murdered? Do you have any idea who did it?"
"None of my people claim to have anything to do with it. Could yours?"
"If one of my men had killed Adaine, they'd be telling me about it and receiving their prize for valor. Take me to the body."
They mounted up and rode through the streets to Bressel's western quarter. The district was
old and quiet, the buildings made of pale stone stained with a thin layer of green mold. Dante wasn't sure that he'd ever been to the neighborhood before and it felt so charming and antiquated that it almost seemed like it had been transported directly from the city in the Mists.
Corson led him to a temple of weathered black stone sheathed in mold, moss, and ivy. It looked centuries old and abandoned for most of that time, like something you would stumble on out in the middle of a forgotten forest, yet the doorway and windows had been kept clear of foliage, suggesting use. Above its door, a large cicada was carved in relief.
Dante rolled his lip between his teeth. "What was he doing in a temple of Urt?"
"Couldn't tell you. But Adaine was well-versed on all the gods. Thought they wouldn't exist alongside Taim unless there was something critical about them. So it was best for him to understand them, too."
Corson opened the door. Before Dante stepped inside, thunder banged overhead, but he hadn't seen any flash of lightning precede it.
Two gray-clad priests guarded the entry from the inside. They eyed Dante for a moment, but if they thought anything was untoward about the High Priest of Narashtovik coming to examine the dead body of an ordon of Bressel, their faces didn't show it.
Corson led Dante through an antechamber and into a round room. High, narrow windows shed light from above, but the stained glass that had once filled them had been shattered across the floor. A round platform stood a foot high in the middle of the room. Adaine lay upon it in a pool of congealed blood, resting on his left side.
Dante rocked to a stop. "Has anyone touched anything?"
"We made sure he was as dead as he looks," Corson said. "Then I gave him his rites. Other than that, it's as we found it."
Dante crossed to the body. The front of Adaine's robe was caked with blood; he'd suffered a wound to the chest. Dante reached for his wrist, which was the same temperature as the air, and lifted it easily.
"The blood's not fresh and the stiffness is gone from his limbs," Dante said. "He's been dead for at least half a day."
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