The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  As long as they were, a century and even a millennium were still relatable enough spans of time that people had words to express them. Yet there was no word for a length of ten thousand years. Ten thousand years ago was so distant that not a single name, word, or deed from that time was remembered today.

  And if, as Ara had implied, the time Shan had seen was closer to a hundred thousand years ago? Then time was a black pit, bottomless and without end. When your life came to a close, you were flung down that pit, and though your screams might echo to the surface for a while yet—until everyone who had known you died as well; and perhaps a few hundred years beyond that, if you were exceptionally famous—over a long enough period of time, you would be forgotten. Then you would be alone, damned to fall forever in darkness, punished eternally for having dared to exist for your flash-brief span of years.

  This was deeply unsettling, so Dante turned to the purpose of improving their immediate security, which was all he could hope to control. He killed a half dozen dragonflies, sending two ahead, one behind, and three others in the direction of the lich's armada.

  Their team passed the remainder of the day swapping between paddling and practicing with the stream. Dante checked in with Jona that night and was informed that the White Lich was now heading straight for Aris Osis. Even with all the speed of the Blighted, however, it would be two to three days until the enemy arrived at the city. It might even be long enough that Dante would be able to raise strategic ramparts with enough time to fully recover the nether before the battle.

  They made camp on an island. After the quiet of the Spires, the cacophony of birds and bugs was almost overwhelming. Summer was near and brought the dawn early. They sailed on. Dante spent time with the stream, but in the middle of a bout of Forest, he found himself thinking of Ara. He'd promised to return to the Spires, and he hoped he'd be able to keep his word. Otherwise, she was confined there, and he'd never see her again.

  They were still half a day out from Aris Osis when Dante's loon throbbed.

  "Lord Galand," Jona said. "I bring urgent news. News that won't make you look at me with any fondness."

  "The sooner you tell me it, the sooner I can figure out who actually deserves my anger."

  "It's Aris Osis, sir. The enemy is much closer than we knew. They'll be upon the city in a matter of hours."

  "That's not possible. Your scouts have been shadowing the lich this whole while. Even if he'd somehow slipped around you, he'd still be at least a day out from Aris Osis."

  "You're not wrong, lord. The problem is that the enemy who's closing on the city isn't the White Lich. It's the Righteous Monsoon."

  11

  "The Monsoon?" Dante began to get to his feet. The rocking of the canoe reminded him this was extremely bad form. "How many are there?"

  "Hard to be certain, sir," Jona said. "We've only had one scout come in yet, and she didn't stick around long enough to tally a good count. She claimed the enemy had no fewer than two thousand, but that it could easily be much more."

  "Two thousand wouldn't be nearly enough to take the city. Ten thousand might not do it."

  "Aye, Lord Galand. Captain Naran raised that same point, and suggested they will lie in wait to attack alongside the lich. But he also thought the Monsoon might strike first."

  "Locking Aris Osis' defenders in place. Allowing the lich to maneuver freely."

  "And perhaps to identify in advance where it's keeping its most vital defenders."

  "Such as any remaining Knights of Odo Sein."

  "That was the captain's thinking."

  Dante gritted his teeth. "How did the city's scouts miss the fact there was a second fleet on the way?"

  "The swamp is a dark place, lord. With so many of our eyes on the lich, we didn't spare enough to watch the rest of the wilds."

  "I'll have eyes of my own on the lich soon enough. I'd like for you and Naran to withdraw to the city."

  "Will you arrive before the Monsoon?"

  "I doubt it. That's why I need your eyes there. That way, you can tell me exactly where to land the hammer-blow to break the siege."

  Dante silenced the loon. The others had heard his side of the conversation and he needed no more than a few moments to deliver them the rest.

  "The Monsoon will attack first," Gladdic declared. "To the Eiden Rane, they are wholly expendable. Just as Naran suspected, the lich will deploy them to press for weaknesses and to identify any elements who could pose a threat to the lich himself."

  "Such as us," Dante said. "Which raises the question of whether we should intervene against the Monsoon at all."

  Blays cracked his knuckles. "So your daring proposal is to race into Aris Osis as fast as we can, then boldly sit on our thumbs while its citizens are slaughtered?"

  "The White Lich wants us to show our hand. If we hang back, we retain the element of surprise."

  "But we can absolutely demolish the Monsoon. We'll shred these guys so bad there won't be enough of them left to wipe our asses with. Which I would recommend against, as it might turn out you're using a piece of their ass."

  "The priority must remain upon the lich," Gladdic said. "If leaving the defenders of Aris Osis to fend for themselves enables us to bring the Eiden Rane down, then that's what we must do."

  "When you break the point of the spear, you blunt the weapon. By crushing the Monsoon, we can smash the lich's campaign while saving thousands of lives."

  "Those lives are inconsequential beyond their use against our foe. We have been forced beyond the bounds of conventional morality. Anything and everything may be sacrificed to the cause."

  "I'd say that's been your motto all along. Aris Osis is your chance to get a little less in the red on the life-ledger."

  Dante silently commanded one of his forward dragonflies to beeline toward Aris Osis and determine how far they had left to travel. "I think we have to play this one by ear. If the defenders are holding their own, there's no need to intervene. It would only reveal us. But if Aris Osis is in danger of falling to the Monsoon before the lich even gets there, we have to get involved. Otherwise he'll have the city without exposing himself to us. And that's the end of that."

  Everyone except Gladdic took up the canoe's three paddles, driving themselves forward as fast as they could. When they wore down, Gladdic used the nether to remove the weakness from their muscles. Their pace was strong, but the path through the waterway was crooked and winding, fouled with brambles and dead trees. Dante's dragonfly spotted the towers of Aris Osis after an hour of flight, implying it was as little as thirty miles away, but he expected it would be six hours until their arrival.

  The city still bore evidence of the attack led by the lesser lich the week previously. The outlying crops had been torn down and burned, and some of the house-raft neighborhoods had been scattered. Like a furrow left by a great plow, a trail of ash and devastation marked the pathway the lesser lich and his army of Blighted had carved across the islands on their way to the city's core. There, the towers of two islands had been knocked into rubble, broken stone jutting from the canals. Several other towers bore damage heavy enough to render them unstable. Repair efforts had been made at their bases, but these had clearly been suspended in the face of the second attack.

  Their efforts were now being spent to buttress the defenses. Aris Osis featured a unique challenge in that regard: each island was separated from its neighbors by a wide canal, and sported two to five towers, rendering them difficult to take through conventional means. However, this same separation meant that if the neighboring islands could be taken, the defenders would be completely cut off, without any means to retreat.

  Furthermore, that lack of mobility meant that if the enemy could break a hole in the defenses, they could penetrate straight through to the citizen population. Not good news when the lich could convert every captured citizen into a new member of his own army.

  To work with all these considerations, the people of Aris Osis were stacking their defenses o
n a peninsula of islands that extended into the protected bay of the port. To fend against the Blighted, who could bypass the chokepoint by walking straight through the water, the defenders had piled up dirt and rubble into ramparts on the shores of the island. Wooden stakes thrust outward from the shorelines and the tops of the ramparts. Soldiers drilled in war canoes, maneuvering between the canals and the bay. Laborers extended the hasty earthworks.

  On the side of the peninsula facing away from the city and out to the ocean, a huge cluster of rafts and canoes bobbed in the gentle currents of the bay. If the defenses were overwhelmed, the people could hypothetically strike out to sea. But this struck Dante as a very desperate last resort. Few of the vessels were seaworthy, and he doubted there were enough to carry the thousands of people packed into the towers.

  Still, it looked like more than enough to deal with the Monsoon. Dante ordered the dragonfly to gain elevation and head east-northeast in the direction of the incoming rebels. In less than half an hour of flight—a dozen miles, perhaps—his scout spotted the canoes slicing through the swamps. He lowered it through the canopy to skim over the length of the convoy.

  Once he was done reviewing their troops, which took longer than he was happy about, he pinged Jona's loon. "I just got a look at the Monsoon's ranks. Your scouts must have been observing with one eye closed, because I see closer to four thousand."

  "You'll have to pardon the men," Jona said as mildly as ever. "They weren't expecting to see any armies at all, let alone one of them."

  "The Monsoon's traveling with some weird boats, too. Bigger than you typically see in the swamps. It could be logistical, but I have a bad feeling it's siege equipment."

  "We're right about to enter the city, my lord. I'll pass your findings along. But I have a question, my lord."

  "Yes?"

  "If you can spy on them better than our own scouts, why weren't you doing so from the start?"

  "My gods, you're right, Jona. Why didn't I think of that until right now?"

  "This falls under the category of things I don't understand, doesn't it?"

  "Even the nether has limits. Expect us in four hours. Until then, I'll be watching over you."

  He sent another pair of dragonflies toward the city, leaving the first behind to follow the Monsoon. Two boring yet strenuous hours later, the Monsoon still hadn't deviated course or broken pace. Dante looned Jona to expect an attack in as little as twenty minutes.

  Unlike most Tanarian cities, which were ringed by nothing more substantial than two sets of nets, Aris Osis was enclosed by a stone wall—the same one Volo had smuggled Dante and Blays through when they'd first come to Tanar Atain in search of Naran. Though the defenders were concentrating the bulk of their forces on the peninsula, they'd decided to make an initial stand at the wall, deploying four hundred soldiers along it, archers mixed with a few spearmen. In the event they were overrun, a long road consisting of both docks and small islands ran directly into the heart of the city, providing a fast means of withdrawal.

  Other than the soldiers along the wall, the swampward reaches of the city had been emptied out except for a handful of runners. The waters of their canals were so still that Dante could see the ripples of the fish breaching. As the first of the Monsoon's canoes broke from the treeline and into the clear outer ring of water on the north end of the city, one of the runners lit an arrow, tilted back his bow, and fired it into the air, leaving a thick band of reddish smoke in its wake.

  The man hopped into a canoe and paddled like mad toward the interior. The Monsoon crossed the waters without resistance, a chevron of over six hundred boats. Most were simple canoes, but one in eight were larger double-hulled war canoes with a simple bridge, and one in twenty were wide, covered barges that resembled lumbering turtles. Rather than being oar-driven, they were propelled by a pair of objects that resembled mill wheels, one wheel affixed to either side of the hull. The exteriors had been painted black with red lines sectioning the design into plates, furthering the resemblance to a turtle, and seemed unusually shiny, as if they'd been lacquered.

  The armada came to a stop just outside of effective bow range. A lone war canoe detached from the mass. It bore the white flag with the two blue circles of the Monsoon.

  Its captain climbed onto the top of the war canoe's bridge and made the typical demands for the city's defenders to lay down their arms and surrender. The defenders, aware that "surrender," in this case, was shorthand for "wait for the lich to turn you all into raving Blighted," responded with voluminous obscenities.

  The war canoe returned to its ranks. There was a short pause as orders were relayed via shouting and semaphore. Ten of the turtle-boats detached from the armada, wheels churning as they advanced ploddingly on the wall in a loose line. A score of canoes followed tightly in their wake. The defenders loosed arrows that struck the sloped hulls of the turtle-boats without dealing any damage at all.

  Flames lit up along the wall. A hail of burning arrows arced through the air, half landing on the boats while half sizzled into the water. Yet rather than flaring up and spreading to the hull, the oiled rags flickered dimly; the shiny surface of the boats had been applied to stymie this exact tactic.

  A Monsoon officer bawled an order. Slots opened in the front and sides of the turtle-boats. Arrows whisked forth, sending men toppling from the walls. The armored boats advanced inexorably, suffering not a single casualty as they inflicted a dozen on the four hundred soldiers holding the walls.

  A runner sprinted along the wall, handed a bundle of arrows to an archer, then ran on to deliver a second batch. The first archer nocked one of the new arrows, the tip of which bulged like a sack. As Dante realized it was a sack, and that he'd seen the Monsoon deploy ones just like them before, the man loosed his missile.

  It had counterweights at the back to steady its heavy tip, and to compensate, the archer launched it in a steeper arc than the conventional arrows, lofting it into the air before it peaked and swooped down on the closest turtle-boat. It struck the ship on the port side. Light flashed; flame and smoke erupted from the boat, accompanied by a rolling boom. The ship stopped in its tracks. The wheel on its port side had been smashed to pieces and thrown across the water, the hull cracked and smoking.

  A second arrow flew wide of its mark, but a third landed square, blowing open the nose of a second boat. It foundered, water pouring inside.

  The surviving ships pressed hard forward, canoes darting from behind them to harry the defenders with arrows. A second contingent of turtle-boats detached from the fleet to trundle after the first wave, but there was no need; lacking more than a few of the explosive arrows, the defenders were only able to stop three of the first ten vessels from reaching the walls.

  Arrows flew back and forth like hornets, but the defenders soon fell back. Hatches opened atop the turtle-boats. As the first attackers raced up ladders to claim their portion of wall, fellow soldiers scrambled from the canoes to follow them up top. A second wave of canoes was already on its way to reinforce them.

  Now that the Monsoon had emerged from their shelters, they began to lose people as well, but they advanced steadily, pushing the Arisians back under a withering storm of arrows. Within a span of fifteen minutes from when the Monsoon had launched their attack, they'd driven the defenders to the center of the wall. The Arisians dashed down the steps to the long roadway leading back into the city.

  Dante moved the closest of his dragonflies in for a better angle. As he did so, his connection to it snapped like a dry twig.

  His heart froze. He sent his second dragonfly on the scene soaring higher and pulsed Jona's loon.

  Jona answered with the crisp readiness he displayed while at sea. "Yes, lord?"

  "Before you withdrew to the city, were you certain the White Lich was still with his army of Blighted?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "How certain?"

  "Unless he's got friends who are also ten feet tall, with skin as white as snow, and eyes of every shade
of blue, I am extremely certain he was still there, lord."

  "You have to get the defenders off the bridge," Dante said. "The Monsoon has brought—"

  Darkness flashed from atop the wall, streaking over the heads of the Arisians and smashing into a section of dock ahead of them. The wooden planks exploded into splinters, cutting off the defenders' retreat. The Monsoon charged forward, archers pelting the Arisians from atop the seized wall. The two sides clashed, corpses tumbling into the waters to both sides of the dock. After a minute of ferocious fighting, the beleaguered Arisians tried to drop back, but constrained by the tightness of the road, their retreat degraded into a chaotic mass. The scrum pushed dozens into the water. As those at the front were gashed down by Monsoon spears, other defenders leaped into the water, attempting to swim away.

  Canoes swooped in to scoop them from the water. The Monsoon soldiers beat the prisoners into submission and carried them back to the fleet's reserves. Fresh recruits for the Blighted. Before the slaughter of the Arisian's front line of defense could be completed, the last hundred men surrendered.

  "You just lost a tenth of your people," Dante said through the still-open loon. "And they've brought nethermancers."

  The Monsoon had already cranked open the gates. Scores of canoes patrolled into the city, followed by the wallowing turtle-boats.

  "Do you have orders?" Jona prompted.

  "We're nearly there, but you have to delay them as much as possible. If they bring their nethermancers to bear on the towers, they can topple your entire defense within minutes."

  "We'll do as we can, sir."

  The Monsoon took several minutes to regroup, ferrying more captives to the back while the turtle-ships moved to the front. As soon as they renewed their advance, small teams of defenders popped up on both sides of the canal and fired a volley of arrows from their compact Tanarian bows. As soon as the arrows were in flight, they turned and ran, scampering across the narrow stone bridges leading to the next islands. The enemy's return fire landed on empty ground.