The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  "All for a little statue of a lizard," Blays said. "You'd think they'd make a weapon like this more fearsome-looking. I'd have gone with a shark swinging a battle axe."

  He paddled along, splashing softly. Behind him, Dante shifted his weight. "Then what happened?"

  "We headed your way," Blays said. "Personally, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to finally be rid of you, but Gladdic thought it wouldn't be fair if we had to fight the White Lich and you didn't."

  He finished up the tale of the last few days of travel between Dara Bode and the fight at the base of the Hell-Painted Hills. It didn't take much longer. After that, they were both quiet.

  "I think we've gone far enough," Dante said once the afternoon had passed its peak heat. "The Blighted would take days to find us on their own."

  "If it means I can stop paddling, I'd agree with you if you told me the sky was orange polka dots."

  Blays brought them aground on the nearest island that looked large enough to offer concealment. They dragged the canoe toward the reeds. Blays picked up Gladdic while Dante grabbed their gear. The old man was still out cold, his skin mottled with the light pink patches where he'd been healed.

  Blays found a grassy spot near the center of the island. Dante flapped out a blanket and Blays set Gladdic down. Dante crouched next to the priest, a few shadows flickering around his hand.

  Blays moved a step closer. "He all right?"

  "He exhausted himself in the battle. He needs sleep, that's all." Dante didn't look up. "Do you still want him dead?"

  "Do I want him dead?"

  "You heard me."

  "Should I have transferred part of my brain to you as well? I'm the one who woke you up to stop him from bleeding out."

  "That's what's confusing me. Because when you threw him off the tower at Aris Osis, I assume it wasn't to give him a dose of fresh air."

  Heat prickled over Blays' skin. He'd almost convinced himself that night had been nothing more than a drunken dream. Even now, he wanted to deny it—but when you lied to yourself, you only made yourself weaker. When you came face to face with something about yourself that made you feel weak or scared, you stared it down. And you walked through it. And that was how you made sure you'd never have to face it again.

  "How did you know?"

  "You were out drinking at the docks," Dante said. "Naran was only a couple of islands away. Almost half a mile closer to the scene than you were. There was no way you could have heard about what happened before he did. Yet the two of you showed up together. Because you didn't need to be told."

  "Maybe I'd had enough to drink and was on my way back to bed. Then again, I bet you already know that I beat Naran to the tower, and waited for him to arrive before heading upstairs. I thought it'd look less suspicious if I didn't show up alone." Blays plucked a tall blade of grass, tearing it apart piece by piece. "He'd hurt so many people. He'd always gotten away with it. After he hurt Volo, something inside me snapped."

  "I know why you did it. I want to know if you still want to see justice done to him."

  "If I asked you to, you'd do it? Spike him right now?"

  "Yes."

  Blays got to his feet, turning his back to them. "Leave him be."

  "Why?"

  "Because without him, you wouldn't be here."

  "This has all been so strange," Dante said. "Typically, pressures like the ones we've been under breaks people. Warps them into awful shapes. But maybe it can squeeze you into something stronger."

  Blays shook his head, then laughed. "I'm too tired to guess. Not if I'm going to take first watch, anyway."

  Dante put up a brief fight about handling the watch himself, but Blays rejected each argument. Although there was still plenty of light, Dante fell asleep in less than a minute. Blays waited by the camp for a while longer, then began a small circuit of the island. His head throbbed flatly. It felt like his mind would snap if he tried to think, so he didn't.

  He and Dante traded watches every two to three hours. By the middle of the night, Blays was starting to feel normal again. The next time Dante shook him awake, Gladdic stirred, mumbled blearily, and opened his eyes.

  "Told you he'd live," Dante said.

  "There goes another ten chucks," Blays said. "I knew I should have smothered him in his sleep."

  Gladdic blinked owlishly, then chuckled in wonder. "I am intact?"

  "If your definition includes being so old that you season your rocks with dirt, then sure, you are perfectly intact."

  "And everyone else is as well?"

  "We're not old. We are young, or close enough to it to continue to pretend, and one of us has a physique that makes statues gossip jealously to each other in the back garden."

  "I can see that you are unharmed, and have possibly located a long-lost supply of bottled spirits. Dante? Are you recovered?"

  "I've felt better," Dante said. "Including after I've been repeatedly stabbed. But I'm here again."

  Gladdic laughed and smacked his knee with his left hand. "Perhaps the gods do not hate us after all. Or perhaps they find the world a more interesting place to observe when you are free to sow chaos across it. Whatever their motives, this is a miracle."

  "Blays told me everything you guys had to go through. I suppose I should thank you."

  "One might consider our motives entirely selfish, as without your presence, we would be considerably more likely to die at the hands of the Eiden Rane." Gladdic sat up more fully, taking in the warm night and the stars peeping through the boughs. "Life is without any logic at all, is it? Six months ago, I would have given up my right arm voluntarily if it had allowed me the chance to spit on your corpse. And now? Now, I see you are alive, and I appear to be happy."

  Blays joined the others in laughing at that. It was still dark out, and would remain so for another two hours, but they'd been sleeping since late afternoon—longer, in Gladdic's case—and seemed awake enough. They ate some dried fish and bananas, which no longer seemed remotely exotic to Blays.

  "We don't have anything left, do we?" Dante flipped an empty peel into the brush. "The lich knows how to combat the Odo Sein now. That was the only way we had to get at the prime body without being annihilated."

  Blays motioned toward the bag where he'd stashed the statue. "What about the Aba Quen? Can we use that to de-lich him?"

  "I spoke with the lich after you ran away. He was utterly unconcerned about the Aba Quen's ability to harm him. He seemed to find the very idea funny."

  "So we've lost our only way to hit back at him and he's become stronger than ever. Well, that just means the songs they'll wind up singing about us will be even better."

  "Before any such songs can be composed," Gladdic said, "what is our next move?"

  Dante shrugged. "We go back to the Silent Spires."

  "To do what? Complete our education in the Odo Sein? You just said that it was now worthless."

  "Against the lich, it is. We're not going there to learn the Odo Sein. We're going there to warn them, and to get Naran and Volo, if she's well. And then we're going to leave Tanar Atain."

  Silence hung between them like a dark doorway.

  "Er," Blays said. "We are?"

  "The Drakebane was right to leave this place. We'll follow his lead."

  Gladdic pounded his leg with his fist. "The Drakebane was a coward and a deserter!"

  "But he knew this land was doomed. We found an avenue to victory he didn't know about, but we took our shot and we missed. Now, the White Lich has taken Aris Osis. That doubled his army. It likely doubled his personal power, too. It's time to pull out."

  "You have spoken with the Eiden Rane many times. You must understand that withdrawing from Tanar Atain does nothing to protect us. Once he consolidates his homeland, he will strike out for the next nation. Perhaps he will go to the south—but perhaps he will come for Alebolgia. And then Collen. Then Mallon. Then everything."

  "I know all of that and more. I spent two weeks taking his orders. Tha
t's why I'm going to murder him myself."

  Gladdic arched his left eyebrow. "Then you do have a plan to defeat him?"

  "I don't know have any gods damn idea how to do that. After serving under him, and listening to him talk, I'm not sure it can be done. But I know we can't fight him here any longer. Tanar Atain is too wild for us, but it's his home turf, and he's about to control every corner of it. It's time to fall back to somewhere that we can defend."

  "There is reason in this. Yet if we cede this land, does it mean we've achieved nothing here?"

  "We bought ourselves time. Nethermancers from Narashtovik are already crossing through Mallon. We can meet up with them there. And it isn't just us. We've given places like Mallon and Pocket Cove more time to prepare, too. Without us hampering the lich's every move, he would have swept through Tanar Atain weeks ago. And gone on to overrun Bressel."

  "We did more than that," Blays said. "We proved that we can stand against the White Lich and walk away with our lives. We'll do it again—and next time, we'll win."

  Gladdic lowered his head. "Then we will return to the Silent Spires. And pray that the gods will forgive us what we do next."

  ~

  The three of them returned to the spot where they'd arranged to meet the Odo Sein on their return. Dante was scouting the way ahead with his dragonflies, and hence knew before they arrived at the rendezvous that no one from the Spires was waiting for them.

  But his scouts had also seen that the Blighted had apparently spotted their boat and were also converging on the rendezvous. Low on options, they ditched their canoe and hiked once again into the Hell-Painted Hills.

  Blays spent most of the day's trek bitching about the heat and spitting out ideas about how to harry, slow, wound, hamper, push back, and otherwise resist the White Lich and his forces. He knew that most of his ideas weren't very good, but he lobbed them out there with the express purpose of seeing if anyone else could pick them up and do better, and was disappointed when Dante barely responded to them at all, and in fact seemed irritated that Blays was even trying.

  Gladdic picked up and kicked around a few of his suggestions, but Blays quit by afternoon, marching over the uneven ground and wishing for the Spires to appear even though he knew they were more than a day away. Had they accomplished anything in Tanar Atain? At best, they'd learned a little about the lich, but they hadn't actually hurt him, had they? Had it been worth it to slow down his progress in exchange for all the lives lost along the way?

  Around one that afternoon, a team of lan haba emerged from the hill ahead. In the heat of summer, the oversized goats stank fiercely, but Blays' spirits lifted the instant he took the saddle.

  They rode hard, climbing from rock to rock, pushing past sunset, after which Gladdic lit the way with floating globes of ether. Around the same time Blays' stomach was starting to do some serious complaining, they navigated the final ridge and looked down on the green valley of the Silent Spires.

  Servants met them at the border between the dead rock and the living grass. The staff barely exchanged four words with the lan haba-mounted guides before turning around and running back to the towers. Blays and the others came to the plaza and dismounted.

  Footsteps dashed across the half-lit square. Ara ran forward, her robe pulling back from one of her legs.

  "You're alive!" She rushed forward, embracing Dante. She detached herself and hugged Blays and Gladdic in turn. "Don't look at me like that. When the two of you left, I thought I'd never catch sight of your hides again. Unless the lich used them to skin the hulls of his new kayaks."

  "We've avoided such a fate for now," Blays said. "The even better news is we've successfully reduced his army by one."

  Ara walked a half-circle around Dante, looking him up and down. "You look fine. A little gross, like you've been sick, but fine. I can see with my own eyes that it worked, so I'll skip right to the meaningful questions: how did it work? Did you have to do anything different because he was a lich?"

  Blays nodded. "I had to not screw everything up, which was a challenging change of pace. Otherwise, it was the exact same de-Blighting process Bek said it would be."

  Her look of curiosity shifted to an unwanted awareness. "Where is Bek? Something's happened to him, hasn't it?"

  "The White Lich and I worked out a way to break past the Odo Sein," Dante said. "When the three of them came to free me, Bek locked me away from the nether, but only for a moment. I let them get comfortable and believe I was no harm. And then I struck him."

  "And you killed him."

  "I'm sorry, Bel Ara. I was under the lich's power."

  "You don't say? Idiot that I am, I'd completely forgotten that when you were a lich, you weren't yourself. I can still rage at the one controlling you!"

  "I know exactly how you feel." Dante curled his hand into a fist, face twisting with an anger Blays had rarely seen on him. "I will kill him for what he's done, Ara. I swear it on my life."

  She moved a step closer, examining his face. "I think, at last, you might."

  "Where is Naran?" Blays said. "And how is Volo?"

  "Naran's asleep. He's an early riser, that one. Likes to beat the sun to rise and help us in the gardens. As for the girl, she's seen no change in her condition. I'm starting to doubt she ever will. During the fighting in Aris Osis, she saw into the depths of the abyss. And it destroyed her. There's something missing inside her now. A spark, a light. I don't think it can be brought back."

  Blays had suspected this for some time, but hearing the words from someone else shot a pang of sorrow down his spine. "What do we do, then? Leave her here?"

  "We can't travel with her," Dante said. "We need all the speed we can get. If anything, she'll be in more danger with us."

  Ara nodded to the wasteland surrounding them. "If she stays here much longer, she'll be afflicted with the same thing the rest of us are. She'll never be able to leave."

  Blays crossed his arms. "But traveling is her life. It's all she's ever done."

  "If she gets stuck here, and comes back to her senses later, we'll do everything we can to free her," Dante said. "But it might be for the best. If the White Lich defeats us, this is one of the last places he'll come to."

  "Impressive rationalization," Ara said. "How are you going to come at the lich next, anyway? If he's discovered a way around the Odo Sein, how will you get near him without getting slaughtered?"

  "I'm not sure yet. With any luck, we'll figure that out along the way."

  "You're going to head for the Eiden Rane without any idea how you're going to attack him? Remind me why I ever agreed to train you?"

  "We aren't going after the lich," Dante said slowly. "We're leaving Tanar Atain."

  She blinked, knocked off-kilter for the first time in the conversation. "What are you talking about?"

  "The lich and the Monsoon are on the verge of sewing up the entire country. Another few days, and it'll all be theirs. We can't operate a resistance under those conditions. Our only choice is to withdraw, regroup, and put together a force capable of meeting him in the field."

  "And leave my country to be devoured? To be murdered and converted into his servants? How can you condemn us to this fate when you just suffered it yourself?"

  "Because it's the only way to win."

  "No." She advanced on him, eyes locked on his. "You will not leave. I forbid it."

  "How are you going to stop us, Ara? By using the Odo Sein to hold me down until I agree to do your bidding?"

  "If that's what it takes!"

  "Then you'll fail. Because I know how to break the Odo Sein, too."

  She flashed her teeth in rage, cheeks mottled red. "Then I renounce my protection of you—and I renounce you. Begone and be damned!"

  She turned on her heel and strode back to her tower.

  ~

  Dante watched her stride away, robes streaming behind her. He was tempted to find Naran, remount the lan haba, and put the entire stupid place behind him, but the anger that
had been simmering within him since being released from the White Lich's thrall boiled over. Before he knew what he was doing, he was running across the plaza.

  Ara entered her tower, slamming the door behind her. Dante was prepared to knock the door from its hinges, but it was unlocked. He crossed to the stairwell. Her sandals smacked the treads. He ascended after her, his steps as noisy as hers, but she paid them no mind.

  He exited the stairwell into the hallway where she kept her quarters just as she was clapping her door shut behind her. He flung it open. She whirled about. The room was so dark her face was little more than shadows, but her eyes burned like forges.

  "How dare you?" Dante crossed to her, jabbing his finger at her face. "We've done nothing but struggle for this land!"

  "And you're an utter failure, aren't you? So get out before you mess something else up! I order you!"

  "And I defy you. What are you going to do about it?"

  Face pinched with rage, she lowered her chin. Chains of golden flecks coalesced in a halo above her head. She lashed him with them, ripping the nether away from him. He smiled and envisioned the forest that had once grown across the Hell-Painted Hills. The vision was fleeting, and only produced a few flecks of stream.

  But that was all he needed. He picked them up, seeking their connections to all of the other shadows. Her bonds shattered.

  "Do you see what I can do?" He gestured east, toward the swamps. "He can do exactly the same. That's why we have to fall back."

  "I've already heard you dribble out your stupidities, so you must be here to convince yourself of them, not me. Because I know that you promised to preserve my country, and instead, you're forsaking it."

  "I've done everything I can! I've bled for it! Lost friends for it! I almost lost my soul for it, Ara. We can't fight him here anymore."

  "Have you thought through what this means? Without flinching? Without grabbing at every hope you wish to be true while blinding yourself to every flaw that would hurt you?"