The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  She pivoted to the right, trying to extract herself from his lock, but he grabbed the collar of her robe with his right hand and her wrist with his left.

  "Let me go!" Ara tipped her head forward. As she swung it back at his face, meaning to bash out his teeth, Blays swept her foot from beneath her, holding tight to her robe as he guided her to the ground.

  But not too gently. He landed on her with just enough force to knock the wind from her, granting her half a minute of hitched breathing to think about the repercussions of her actions.

  "Bel Ara, you appear to be upset," he said. "If you'd like to explain why, I'd be happy to listen. But if you dislike my company that much, I'll be just as happy to toss you off the balcony so that you can make friends with the ground instead."

  "I'd let you. I'd be better off." Her voice was tight and scratchy from the struggle to regain her breath. "Except then I wouldn't be able to see your face when I tell you what an idiot you are."

  Slowly, he removed his weight from her, unfolding his arm from hers. He got to his feet, pushing the flower pot behind him where she couldn't get at it. Ara stood. Her hair and robes were disheveled, but her athlete's build and the smolder in her eyes provided her with a dignity that couldn't be taken from her if she were thrust into jester's clothes and shoved down a muddy hill.

  "You fools," she spat. "You should have stayed in Aris Osis!"

  "To get murdered by the White Lich and my best friend? I'm sorry, but in your country, is dying pointlessly considered a virtue?"

  "You still had a Knight of Odo Sein at your side! But you turned and ran like cowards. Are you that helpless without Dante?"

  "Cowards? Helpless? You're the ones whose fearless leader abandoned you to get ravaged by undead cannibals. We'll figure some other way to come at the lich."

  "No you won't. You should have fought for Aris Osis, and taken your shot at the Eiden Rane. You know I can't tell you a word about how to help your friend. You came here for nothing, and now everything is lost."

  Blays furrowed his brow. "Wait. Wait. Wait until I tell you that you can stop waiting. You're not pulling that 'figure it out for yourself' crap on us right now, are you?"

  "Maybe you don't understand, since your ears only have space for what you want to hear, but that's what my faith demands of me. I can't tell you how to un-Blight your friend. You do have to figure it out for yourself."

  "Do I, though? Because it would make so much more sense for you to simply tell me."

  "You ask me to break with my faith. To give up everything I believe in."

  "You're not giving it up. You're temporarily setting it aside. Or forgetting that it's there. Or overruling it for being so damn demanding. Faith is supposed to serve the people who hold it. Right now, yours is only hurting you."

  Ara flexed her jaw. "And if I strolled into your temple and demanded for you to forsake your gods for your own good, you'd hop right to it?"

  "Denying the gods is great! I do it every day!"

  "You only deny them on things that don't matter. But what about when they tell you not to murder the innocent? Or forsake your wife for other women? Is it still fun for you to defy them then?"

  "Do you know how often I have to betray what I believe in? How many times I've had to kill people who didn't deserve it? How often I've hurt people because not hurting them would be even worse?"

  The priestess looked him up and down. "If you betray your beliefs that freely, in what sense can you be said to hold them?"

  "It's what I have to do to save lives and stave off chaos, Ara. Even though I hate it. Even though it kills me. Just this once, be strong enough to throw aside your beliefs. Otherwise, we're all dead."

  "This is a very strange argument." Her voice was soft now, all her anger gone. "Our beliefs are the only thing that makes us good."

  Gladdic bowed his head. "Then don't simply hand us the answers on a gilded plate. Rather guide us to them, so that we might deduce them for ourselves."

  "That's cheating."

  "It is not as bad as it could be. To my understanding of your theology, it may even be possible to argue that it is acceptable practice, so long as you are careful in how you guide us."

  "A compromise that lets me flaunt the laws that give us strength while pretending to be a virtuous and humble servant. The two of you, I don't think, are the best of people."

  "Gladdic might be a sack of shit," Blays said, "but I am a respected and well-liked figure in all kinds of different lands."

  Gladdic grunted. "Only because you happened to be on the side of victory. Had you lost in the Plagued Islands, for instance, you would be seen as meddlesome warmongers whose unwanted interference caused thousands of unnecessary deaths."

  "To apply some Odo Sein logic here, maybe I keep winning because I'm so damn right all the time. In any event, we'll work with you on this however it needs to be done, Ara. What do you say?"

  She moved to the balcony, resting her palms on the rain-slick railing. The bleakness of the Hills rolled away before her. "I say that it isn't much of a compromise. I can deny it to the others, but I'll still know I betrayed our order."

  "But if you don't—"

  "Shut up. If I have to hear you say 'But we'll all die if you don't' one more time, I'll throw myself off this balcony. Yes, I'll help you. And I'll learn what it feels like to hate myself."

  Blays thought that was rather heavy on the guilt, but then again, it wasn't every day that he converted someone into a heretic. He would have liked to start right away, but his body reminded him that after the sickness of the Hills, not to mention the almost total lack of sleep they'd gotten while crossing them, starting right away would ensure that he'd never be able to finish, as he would shortly drop dead.

  Instead, they ate, then were ushered to the same room they'd occupied before. Blays swung his bed down from the wall, punched the mattress around, then climbed onto it.

  "Funny," he said. "We were barely gone for a week. It even smells the same. But it feels so different."

  Gladdic shuffled to the candle made of plant wax and blew it out. "That is because it is not the place itself that makes it feel as it does, but rather the people who are there with you in it. And many of our people are now gone."

  "Doesn't it ever get tiring?"

  "What is that?"

  "Looking at everything through shit-colored lenses."

  Gladdic didn't answer right away. "Sometimes, it is exhausting. But at least, and for the first time in my life, I think I might be seeing the truth."

  Blays rolled over and slept. He dreamed of a figure in a black cloak breaking through the Hell-Painted Hills, a storm of darkness in each hand and a smile on his face. The figure was just as he'd always been, except the face was wrong: so pale, and more gaunt even than Gladdic, without the slightest trace of mercy.

  Blays tried to draw his swords, but they felt glued into their sheaths. Clouds of shadows blocked out the sun, streaming across the sky as if they were erasing it. He might have tried to run, but he knew there was no point.

  After all of the tedious morning wake-up business—the Tanarians, being savages, declined to serve any kind of liquor with breakfast—Ara brought Blays and Gladdic to the edge of the field downwind from the seven Spires. She was alone and looked like she hadn't slept more than half the night.

  "What are you staring at?" she said croakily. "Let's get on with this before I change my mind."

  "Right," Blays said. "I guess we should start with the biggie. Is there a way to undo getting turned into a lich?"

  "How would I know?"

  "You said you knew how to cure being Blighted!"

  "Spinning gods. Do you even listen to yourself? Or do you just let the words fall from you, like animals fertilizing the fields with their own waste?"

  "Let me guess. The Blighted, by virtue of being Blighted, are not the same thing as being a lich?"

  "Very good. If you've got that down, maybe you're ready to explain to me why a rake isn't the s
ame thing as a swamp dragon."

  "But liches and Blighted aren't that different. From what I've seen, they're actually pretty similar. Maybe reversing the two conditions is like being a physician, where if you can cure the red fever, then you can cure green fever as well."

  "I don't know about your disgusting northern poxes. But I get the point. You're probably correct. The way you remove the lichness from somebody is probably similar to or the same as the way you remove the Blight."

  Blays clapped once. "Progress! So how do you remove the Blight?"

  Ara glanced away, sighing through her teeth. "You're going to have to do so much better than that. What you should be asking yourself is what it means to be Blighted."

  "To be an unpleasantly angry eater of people?"

  "You can take my heresy more seriously, or you can watch your friend serve your worst enemy as everyone around you dies."

  Gladdic leaned forward. "To be Blighted is to be converted into something not fully human."

  "Wrong," Ara said. "You've confronted the lich before. Have you seen him make any Blighted?"

  "Yes."

  "What did you see?"

  "He drew something from them." Gladdic jerked back his head. "To be Blighted is not to be converted into something inhuman. Rather, it is to have something human taken away from you."

  "What might that be?"

  "It resembled ether. More than that—it was ether. I am sure of it."

  "And when it left them," Blays said, "they weren't really alive anymore. They weren't afraid of anything. Didn't even have to breathe. I might be talking crazy here, but what if it's the ethereal version of a trace?"

  Gladdic lifted an eyebrow. "What if indeed, Ara?"

  She lifted a dismissive hand. "What if you'd quit your foreign babble and speak real words?"

  "Though we all have nether flowing in and out of us, each of us also possesses a portion of nether that is fully unique to every individual. It is called a trace, and it might be thought of as a nethereal embodiment, or perhaps expression, of the soul. Since learning of it, I have suspected—or if I am to be honest, I wanted to believe—that there was an analogous form of ether. Only I could never find it. But the Eiden Rane has done so, hasn't he?"

  "You've seen the Blighted. You've seen the White Lich. You've seen the White Lich create the Blighted. Does your theory fit with everything you've seen?"

  They'd been seated, but Gladdic was so excited he couldn't help himself from pushing himself to his feet and pacing about the grass. "The White Lich steals the ethereal traces from the people. This, in turn, converts them into the Blighted. While at the same time, he absorbs this substance—this light of life—into himself, enhancing his own strength. Am I correct?"

  "That all sounds very seamless."

  "Indeed. It fits together like the joinery of a master carpenter. Yet I still do not know!"

  Ara looked down at the grass. "What do you know of me? Am I the type to listen to stupidity without calling it such? Without laughing at you? Without mocking you for having brains no better than the contents of a gecko's stomach?"

  Gladdic chuckled lowly. "Surely you are not of that type, Bel Ara."

  "Am I laughing and mocking you right now?"

  "No, Bel Ara. You are not."

  "Well that's cleverly done," Blays said. "How do you remove the Blight, then? By giving the poor fellow's ether-trace back to him?"

  Ara eyed him levelly. "How would you do that when it's become a part of the Eiden Rane?"

  "By carving it out of him? Could you even do something like that?"

  "It does not seem likely," Gladdic said. "When traces are mingled together to form an Andrac, they cannot be unmixed afterward. I would assume the same would be true when the White Lich mixes the ethereal traces within himself."

  Ara plucked up a sprig of grass, letting the wind scatter it across the boundary into the wasteland. She pointed to the golden sparks circulating near Gladdic's left shoulder. "If those are any indication, what you're saying makes a lot of sense."

  Gladdic paced some more. "To be able to think clearly about this phenomenon, we must first give it a name. 'Ether-trace' is too clumsy, and renders it secondary to the nether, an incorrect stance to suppose. Might we simply call it the light of life? Perhaps, but the phrase hits my ear as too grandiose."

  Blays rolled his eyes. "You'd be the expert on excess grandiosity."

  "As a source of our inner light, we might call it the spark, or perhaps the ember. But I believe these words are also too noble, for each one only serves the span of a single life, spending the rest of eternity as no more than a marker of the human it once imbued. In that case, much as we call the trace a trace, I propose we name this substance a 'remnant.'"

  "For all I care, you can call it a gibbery woo-light. Can we get on with it already?"

  "Very well. So if the original remnant cannot be returned to the victim, that leaves two possibilities. First, that a new remnant can be created for them from scratch. Or second, that a part of an existing remnant might be transferred to them." He made a fist of his hand and brought it close to his mouth. "I can think of no way to deduce which possibility must be false and which must be true."

  Blays scratched his head. "Any idea which one would be true if you were talking about traces?"

  "I do not. But I see a path toward discovering the answer. I could attempt to remove someone's trace, then attempt to restore it through both methods, and see which succeeded."

  "You want to take out someone's trace? The way the lich is taking out people's remnants? Wouldn't doing that risk turning the victim into some weird ether-Blighted?"

  "I would think so. That is why I will perform this experiment on an unskilled servant, or perhaps someone who is too old to be of use, and no longer has purpose. Ara, who here might I use in this way?"

  She blinked at him. "Are you serious?"

  Gladdic gazed back. "If that is what it takes, yes. I have reached the edge of where pure reason can bring me. I stand on a ravine; the only way across is to build a bridge of experimentation, and see what lies on the other side."

  Ara rose to her feet, running her hands over the sides of her head, which were clipped short in Tanarian style. "Sometimes I'd swear I can see the future. And it's a curse."

  "My lady?"

  "You want me to hand you the answers. Otherwise, you'll be forced to do something awful in order to get them. Which, as intended, tempts me to bend even more than I already have. To the point of breaking my vows altogether. This is exactly what I was afraid would happen. You compromise yourself once, telling yourself it's for a good cause. But if it turns out that isn't enough, what then? If it made sense to betray your beliefs the first time, and you do so but the problem's still there, it only makes sense to compromise yourself again, doesn't it? It would be illogical to do otherwise. Because if it was right once, it must be right again; either that, or it was never right."

  She had been lecturing in the direction of the Hell-Painted Hills. She turned now to Blays, and though it seemed impossible, one of her eyes burned with wrath while the other brimmed with sorrow.

  "If it made sense to betray yourself the first time, and the second, why not the third time? The tenth? Every time? Where does it stop? How many steps can you take away from your center before you become lost for good?"

  In any other place, the question would have been rhetorical. In the maddening land of Tanar Atain, however, they expected answers to their impossible questions. And if you couldn't provide those answers—which they couldn't either, otherwise they wouldn't have had to ask you in the first place—then you were the idiot.

  "Someone like Gladdic would tell you that there is no end," Blays said, making it up as he went along, because that's what everyone else seemed to be doing all the time. "He'd say that if the outcome leads to more good than the bad it takes to get it done, then the evil man is he who lacks the moral courage to do what needs doing."

  Ara smirked. "Is that
true, Gladdic?"

  The old man shrugged. "It is close enough that I feel no need to argue."

  "By contrast," Blays went on, "someone like Dante would go on about how everybody thinks they've got one set of morals, but they've actually got two. One is what you'd call conventional morality. I don't think he's ever stuck a label on the second kind, but I'd call it emergency morality. Now, your conventional morality is for conventional times. When things are normal, you don't just go about stealing things and killing people. Why, that would just be wrong.

  "But when an emergency strikes, things change. If you're starving, there's nothing wrong with stealing bread. If you're in the middle of a national uprising, there's nothing wrong with executing the rebels—or, if you're a rebel, the loyalists. But even then, you've still got standards of right and wrong. If you're starving, stealing bread is one thing, but it's quite another to steal an honest man's purse because you want to buy some pretty clothes. In a rebellion, you wouldn't murder a rebel's children, or slaughter his whole town. You still have values, but they're more flexible. More suited to the circumstance.

  "Now, most people don't know their emergency values too well, because they don't spend much time in emergencies. Lucky for them. But those values are still there inside you. And as long as you don't violate your conventional values when you're in conventional times, or your emergency values when you're in emergency times, there's really no violation at all."

  "An interesting perspective. If awfully wordy." Ara watched him closely. "And you, yellow-hair? What do you say?"

  "I say you don't have to ask when you've gone too far. Your heart will let you know."

  She tucked down the corners of her mouth. "There's no reason in an argument like that."

  Blays burst into laughter. "If you think we're beings of pure reason, you need to get out of the Spires and go watch a married couple discuss money. We have brains, but we've got souls, too. It's harder for us to hear them, but they'll speak to you, if you know how to listen."

  Ara lifted her eyes to the sky and shook her head. "You can't remove the Blight by getting a person's inner light—their remnant, as you want to name it—back from the Eiden Rane. You can't build a new one for them from nothing, either. Not so much as I know, at least, for I'm glad to say I'm not a devil-siring warlock. But what you can do is give a Blighted person a piece of your own remnant."