"Not much there to sacrifice," Blays muttered.
Dante shot him a pointed look. "The darkest solutions are often the fastest. The easiest. The surest. But sometimes, there are other methods. We have made a long and ridiculous career out of finding those alternatives. Let's try to do the same here. Agreed?"
"Agreed," Gladdic said.
Blays folded his arms. "We'll do more than try."
Dante sighed heavily. "Then it's settled. With such an enlightened agreement in place, I'm going to descend to the common room and acquire a bottle of local liquor. On second thought, I'll get two."
"No." Naran pushed off from the wall, wandering toward the middle of the room. "I can do this no longer."
"But I just told you we're done arguing. Don't tell me you're against drinking time."
"I mean that I can't participate in this alliance. Not with him."
"Ah." Dante hesitated, unsure how to approach the awkwardness of the situation, then remembered he didn't give a damn about Gladdic's feelings. "I'm not particularly thrilled about palling around with my worst living enemy, either. But the cause we're working toward is much greater than our differences. Right now, the five of us are the only thing standing between—"
Naran held up a hand for peace. "There's no need to argue. I am already convinced that what you are doing is right. But I cannot continue to fight alongside a man who would threaten a child. The same man who murdered my captain."
Everyone looked Gladdic's way, but the priest seemed perfectly uninterested in defending himself. Because he knew he was guilty? Or because he knew that they would never understand the reasons for his innocence?
"Naran," Blays said. "You can't just flounce off. Not after everything we've been through."
Naran smiled a little. "It has been an experience like none other. But it's also because of everything that we've been through that I must go."
"But we need your help here."
"Do you? Volo knows these waterways like I know the middle seas. As for the three of you, you can do things that would make most gods jealous. Myself, however? I am just a man with a sword. I can't stand against what you fight now. But I can be of more use elsewhere."
"What's the plan?" Dante said.
"I'm not yet sure. I may attempt to find the spice route for Lady Vita in order to win Alebolgian allies. They'll be closest to this menace if the White Lich breaks free of the swamps. I'm sure our war coffers wouldn't mind the assistance, either."
"I hope this will be over long before it comes to that. But if it does stretch out, we're going to need every ally we can get, and every person we've got working to the best of their talents. Are you sure this is what you want?"
"I have spent too long away from my ship." Pride warmed Naran's eyes. "It's time I served my crew again." He unbuckled the belt bearing his Odo Sein blade and held it out to Dante. "You may find someone who will put this to better use than I can."
"I can think of no better use for it than for you to use it defending yourself." Dante ran his hand over his mouth. "Which you might need to do sooner than you'd like. We can't send Volo to bring you to Aris Osis. We need her to help us find the Odo Sein."
"I understand. I know how to navigate the waters. I will find my own way."
Volo scoffed. "You buffoon. If you aren't eaten alive by a swamp dragon, the Monsoon patrols will lock you in a tower until you're as old and gray as he is." She jerked her chin at Gladdic, then smiled. "So it's a good thing for you that you know me. I got friends here. Others like me. One of them will take you to Aris Osis."
"You would do that for me?"
"You're the one rushing around the swamps to do battle with the craziest things I'll ever see in my life, all for the purpose of defending Tanar Atain, a place you've never even seen before. And you're asking me if I'll help you?"
Naran laughed. "Tanarian logic is a formidable enterprise. How long will it take you to make your arrangements?"
"Better make it tonight. I expect our friends here want to get moving at sunup."
He made for the door. "Then let's be on our way."
Blays reached for his arm. "Hang on, Captain. How about a drink before you run off on us?"
Naran clasped his forearm. "No, my friend. There is nothing for us to drink to. Not yet."
He released his grip, nodded to Dante, and stepped outside, Volo right behind him. The door closed. Sandaled footsteps rasped down the hallway.
"Well," Blays said. "I'd hate to waste a good pub just because one of us is too busy 'getting things done.' Shall we?"
Dante nodded, stood there a moment, then walked out with Blays. They headed downstairs. The common room wasn't overly crowded, the local liquor was of decent quality (if inexplicably fishy tasting), but they didn't seem to have much to talk about, and they were drawing stares from the Tanarians. After a single if strong drink, they returned to their room. With nothing else to do, they went to sleep.
~
Volo had been out for half the night, but as the sun broke through the eastern haze, she rolled from her cot with an eagerness that made Dante acutely jealous that he was no longer young. After a quick meal downstairs, they headed for the "stables," retrieved Volo's canoe, and departed the capital.
According to Fade Alu, the Silent Spires of the Odo Sein were located roughly eighty miles from the coast in the middle of the Hell-Painted Hills, which separated the southeast border of Alebolgia from the northwest of Tanar Atain. According to Volo, everyone said the Hills were still as hostile to life as when the Yosein had first poisoned them against the White Lich.
"I once knew a boy named Goss who said he'd spent a day in them," she said. "But he used to bite off his own toenails. And tell us that if you went deep enough into the Go Kaza, the fish had wings and flew through the sky while the birds had fins and swam in the water."
Dante shifted on his seat. "Do you know of anyone who's stepped foot in them? You don't drop dead the instant you touch them, do you?"
"I didn't. Not when me and some other Maggots decided we had to explore them. But we were only in the Hills for a few minutes before we all started to feel like it was a really bad idea."
"Because you were scared? Or because the land was imposing that feeling on you?"
"I think that it was a lot of both."
"What exactly did it feel like? Did you get an impression of what would have happened to you if you'd stayed?"
Volo screwed up her mouth, eyeing the patchy clouds beyond the canopy. "It felt like I was becoming someone else. And that if we'd stuck around much longer, whatever I am would have been lost."
"Well," Dante said. "I hope very much that you're wrong."
Gladdic smoothed the front of his jabat. "What if it is only possible to travel into the Hills while in the presence of a Knight's sorcery-deadening field?"
"Then we're completely screwed, aren't we? What kind of question is that?"
"The kind we must never be afraid to ask ourselves if we are to succeed."
Volo estimated the journey to the Hills would take four days. Within the first hour of leaving Dara Bode, they were stopped twice by Monsoon patrols, but apparently Volo's status as a corpse-carrier was still valued under the new leadership, as they were let on their way without issue. After the second stop, she took more obscure passages wherever she could.
She'd assured Dante that she'd left Naran in good hands, but he feared what would happen if Naran's escort were stopped by the Monsoon. Given local hostility to foreigners, Dante wondered if it had been a mistake to let Naran go. Or if they should have accompanied him to the port of Aris Osis themselves.
A nice thought. But it would have cost them a week or more of travel. Gladdic was, to a certain extent, correct. They were a long way beyond niceness. Dante thought it could be a long time before they had that luxury again.
Late in the day, they passed by the town of Yeli Pade, which was nowhere near the size of the two cities they'd been to, but a dozen times larger than t
he outer villages. It had fallen to—or pledged allegiance to—the Monsoon. The white banner flew from its small stone fort. On it, the two blue orbs, which Dante suspected were to represent the eyes of the lich, watched over the town.
After they made camp, he spent an hour working on the blood-flicking, but nothing he tried provided any results whatsoever. He was starting to think it never would: things were always passing from the world, devoured by the blind jaws of time. When they were gone, there was no getting them back.
That night he dreamed of sailing out to sea and coming to an immense edge that stretched from one horizon to the other, the ocean spilling over it in a colossal waterfall to nothing, dragging all the water and all the land behind it into the abyss.
The next noon, as they approached the town of Uru Hine, the clamor of battle swelled in the distance. They diverted, approaching stealthily, and watched as the Righteous Monsoon overwhelmed the town, which had apparently remained loyal to the Drakebane. The rebel soldiers seemed to be taking special care to take as many of the residents alive as possible. Not out of respect for their countrymen. It was to provide the White Lich with as many bodies as possible.
There was no talk of intervening.
Beyond Uru Hine, a swath of settlements had been gutted. There were no obvious signs of violence, and as far as Dante knew, the lich remained in the deep swamps of the north, laying the foundations of his power. It was possible the Drakebane had evacuated the people to be transported to Bressel.
Yet for some reason Dante suspected the Monsoon had gotten there first, and that there was, at that very moment, a flotilla of prisoners on its way to the Eiden Rane's hands.
He heard from Nak while they were two days out from the Hell-Painted Hills. The conversation didn't take long. The monks had scoured the archives. And the boat had returned from the holy men of Houkkalli Island.
Both of them had reported the same thing: they knew nothing of the White Lich, nor anything that resembled him.
"Great," Dante said once Nak was through. "Well, I suppose it's a good thing we kept Gladdic around."
The old man turned around in the canoe and lifted an eyebrow.
"I'll continue the search," Nak said. "Who knows what might turn up? And I assure you that I have nothing better to do."
Dante thanked him and shut down the connection. Later that same day, his loon twinged again. He answered hopeful that Nak had turned up an overlooked tome, but was greeted by Sorrowen's hesitant voice.
"There's been a lot of fighting," the boy said. "Like, a lot of it. For a while, nobody was sure which way it was going to go. Today, though, the rebels turned the tide. They drove the king's loyalists right out of the capital."
"Couldn't happen to nicer people," Dante said. "But we might need to get them back in power if that's what it takes to ally with them against the lich. The Bresselian resistance movement has likely already started. I need you and Raxa to join it and work your way toward the top. Show them the powers you can wield for them, if that's what it takes."
"Um," Sorrowen said. "That sounds dangerous. For us."
"Trust me, I'd be ecstatic to switch places with you. Work slow and steady to gain their trust, Sorrowen. When they see what you can do for them, they'll be clamoring to bring you into the fold."
After a bit more talk, Dante concluded the conversation. He spent the rest of the day thinking through the shape of an alliance between Narashtovik and Mallon. Cally would be turning in his grave at the mere notion of such an outrage, but things had changed for the stranger. Dante believed the old systems were about to be ripped out by the roots.
As they neared the Hell-Painted Hills, the air cooled by several degrees. Frequent winds shivered the branches of the trees, which stood taller and taller, vines dangling from their boughs like colonies of sick snakes. The pockets of land grew few and far between, but blades of rock lurked just below the surface, obliging Volo to slow down and feel the way forward with a pole.
There were no more villages, no more wandering fishermen, no more signs of human life at all. Enclosed beneath the lumbering trees, the swamp grew darker. The canopy shook with the wind, but below it, the air lay still.
After some miles, the way ahead brightened as swiftly as if the sun were passing from behind a cloud. The colors of flame and soot appeared behind the trees. And then the trees were gone, and the sky opened above them, and the swamp came, at last, to an end.
Blays rested his paddle on the gunwale. "We're supposed to walk into that? Are you sure there isn't a safer route? Like off the edge of a cliff?"
The landscape was a slope of rock as jagged as the just-cooled stone on the north coasts of the main Plagued Island. Most of the rock was shiny black, but it was streaked with the colors of flame, the more distant of which seemed to dance in the sunlight. After weeks in the flatness of the swamps, the heights seemed monstrous, like a vast black wave about to pound down on the shore. Not a single tree, shrub, or blade of grass grew from the land.
Except on the very border. There, the division between the Hills and the not-Hills was as stark as if it had been cut by a knife. Everything to the northwest was barren, but on the few blobs of earth that extended from the southeast of the line, yellow spring flowers bobbed their heads in the wind.
"We're here," Volo said, then blushed. "In case you hadn't noticed."
Blays reached his paddle across the border, nose tilted back like he was expecting the instrument to burst into flames. "Is it remotely safe to go in here? This place looks like an army of demons has spent the last thousand years barfing in it."
Dante shielded his eyes against the sun. "Does anyone see any golden streaks? Volo, is this Frog's Reach?"
"Sure is," she said. "And so are the twenty miles to either side of us. The frogs like it here because the fish don't."
"Frog's Reach is that big?"
"I don't think people are that concerned about giving a name to every little piece of the land they never go into."
"It would have been nice if Fade had mentioned that. Then again, I suppose he was a little preoccupied with stopping his granddaughter from getting slaughtered like a pig." Dante squeezed his temples with one hand. "We've got two jobs here. First, we find the trail. And second, we figure out if it's safe to follow it."
"The answer to the second question may be before us." Gladdic extended his knob-knuckled finger. "Consider the insects."
Dante peered into the sunlight, uncertain what he was looking for. Gnats and flies weaved through the air on their drunken little missions. "What am I looking at? A bunch of pests?"
"A bunch of pests who cross the boundary without falling on their backs and crossing their legs above their bellies."
"So it isn't so treacherous after all!" Blays said. "It must be sheer coincidence that the Hills don't have a single bird, mouse, tree, or blade of grass on them."
"If it's that poisonous, you might finally be able to get the mold out of your smallclothes." Dante called to the nether. "I'll see if I can find us the path. Then we can argue about who has to go first."
He knocked down two dragonflies from the countless number of them that were cruising around, then reanimated them, sending one along the border to the southwest and one to the northeast. Unsure how bright or conspicuous the gold markings might be, he leveled the insects out at just sixty feet up, moderating their speed.
Ether and nether stirred behind him. After a moment of panic, he realized Gladdic was poking at the boundary of the Hell-Painted Hills, seeking answers.
Within ten minutes, gold glinted in the vision of the northbound dragonfly. Dante descended, confirming that the color was a part of the rocks rather than a lost piece of royal jewelry, then swung the insect about to fly directly away from the boundary and into the wasteland, gaining altitude as it went. Two hundred feet further into the Hills, a second blotch of gold shined from below.
"Got the trail," Dante said. "It's only a few miles north."
As they paddled to
ward it, he recalled the second dragonfly, sending the one that had found the gold marking inland as fast as it could. By the time they'd gotten the canoe up to the first marking, the inland-bound scout had crossed a good ten miles of the Hell-Painted Hills. In all that time, it hadn't seen a single sign of life. Not even bones.
A lobe of grassy land extended from the barren border. They brought the canoe up to it and climbed out.
"I'm still on the trail." Dante motioned into the hills. "But I have no idea how long it'll be before I find the Spires."
"Assuming Fade was telling the truth about them being here," Blays said.
"He was," Gladdic said. "I have no doubts."
"Why would you? After all, why would a man lie to save his family?"
"Would you like to make a wager on the matter?"
Blays grinned. "Since when were Bressel's high priests allowed to gamble?"
"Bressel is no longer Mallish, is it? Nor part of the Mallish faith. Hence I have no church left to answer to."
"If it's good enough for you, who am I to argue? The only problem is I've spent all my money in this damn place." Blays rubbed his chin, then brightened. "Aha! Penny-pinching Dante over there always has extras hidden away. Probably tucked behind his balls. I'll bet you ten of his silver that the Spires aren't here."
"You won't," Dante said.
"As an agent of the Citadel, I haven't been paid in months. Fork it over and I won't charge you interest on what I'm already owed."
Dante was too distracted by his dragonflies to do more than don an unpleasant look.
"Very well." Gladdic produced a pouch from beneath his jabat and gave it a jangle. "Ten silver. If Fade Alu was lying, it is yours. But if the Spires are there, then yours is mine."
Blays stretched. "I assume you won't be insulted when I ask to see the color of your money first?"
"According to you, 'cheater' would be the least of my crimes." Gladdic made a thoughtful noise. "Which would, in fairness, only make your suspicion all the more reasonable."
The Light of Life Page 17