The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 38
Blays shouted in frustration as the Eiden Rane dashed forward just before he could close with the spear. The lich tossed some ether behind him, but it popped and fizzled into a blinding cloud before the spear could draw it into its stone. Dante knew it was harmless, just meant to confuse and distract them, but he couldn't help holding his breath as he ran through the twinkling fog.
He emerged in time to watch the lich start up the staircase to the temple entry. Dante followed, but they were falling behind again. He felt ahead of the lich into the stone, meaning to pull it shut across the stairwell, but the lich felt what he was doing and blew it apart with a twitch of ether.
The echo of the lich's heavy footsteps ceased—he'd gotten outside. He had enough of a lead that Dante wasn't sure they'd ever seen him again, but when he and Blays scrambled out into the grim, damp vista atop the temple, the White Lich was standing at its edge, gazing out at the swamp.
He turned and fixed his shifting blue eyes on Dante. "You raised it from the waters?"
"It's no wonder no one ever found it," Dante said. "But we've gotten pretty good at unearthing old secrets."
"I suppose I should thank you for releasing me. But it was a strange experience, my time in the stone. I had a great deal of time to think. Such thoughts are different when you don't have a body. They become more transcendent. Less tied to the irrelevant details of the day and the place you happen to exist within. After a while I began to be able to see the future unfolding in my thoughts. Soon after that I learned not only how to see the future, but how to feel it. The texture and the taste of it.
"What I saw of that future was as bleak as grimstone. A world of death and decay and despair. I can feel it in the air right now. It will not be long before I am the only man that still walks this earth. I see this lasting for a very long time. Possibly for all eternity.
"Yet as I dwelled on this fate, another feeling came to me. The feeling that I could not stop what was coming but that I could find a way to rebuild from the desolation. The more I thought on this the more certain I became of it. The solution stood like a mountain before me but I ascended more of it with each day. It was not long before I looked up and saw the summit.
"That was just two days ago. Minutes ago, I was pulled from the stone—and its clarity was lost to me. As was the solution I had discovered. In your arrogance to claim my power for yourself you have robbed me of finding the way out from the doom that lies before us. You will soon die. You will die, and when you do, I want what I have just told you to be the last thought you have.
"Farewell. We will not meet again."
He turned and stepped off the edge of the temple.
Even with the knowledge that the lich was far beyond mortal, seeing him step into the void from such a great height made Dante yell out in surprise. He ran across the roof, stopping well short of the edge in case he slipped on the wet stone.
The swamp was astir with the falling rain, meaning there were no ripples to tell where the lich might have gone. Yet as murky as it was, Dante could still make out a faint blue-white glow swimming beneath the surface toward the cover of the trees beyond the clearing. He sent three of his undead flies to follow the lich, though Dante suspected the lich would detect and destroy them if they got close enough to see him beneath the trees.
Blays watched from beside him. "Did our last hope just throw itself off a sixty-foot temple?"
"We've done crazier things ourselves," Dante said.
"Well, I'm not about to try it myself. So stop staring and build us a staircase down from here."
"There's no point. Even if we could catch him, my power's almost exhausted and Gladdic might be dying."
"But we'll lose him!"
"No we won't. He just absorbed half the light of life. We'll use that to track him."
"Even if we know where he is, that won't help us if he keeps moving. We've only got so much time to run him down."
"Then we'll have to trust in the gods. But I don't think he'll keep running for long."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Because even after draining so much of the light of life, he was still beat to hell. Compared to how strong he used to be, I think he's feeling skittish. Maybe even outright scared. He'll want to undo his weakness as quickly as he can."
"By Blighting a bunch of people?"
"Yep."
"Then we'd better really hope that he didn't kill everyone here the first time. Otherwise he'll have to travel all the way to Alebolgia—and we'll run out of time."
After watching a few moments longer, they hurried back down through the temple to the bottom floor. Gladdic was awake but remained sitting on the shadowy grass, taking sips from his water skin. Dante explained what had just happened.
"Then what is to be done next?" Gladdic said.
"It seems plain to me. We run down the lich and we kill him. Then I'll try to take on his mantle instead."
"You will do what I could not."
"I'll try. But if I'm going to have any hope of doing so, I need to know what just happened."
"There is little to tell, in part because I do not know how it should have been done instead. I felt the light entering me. Its glory. Its might. It had the elegance of the ether yet the liveliness of the nether. I felt a sense of completion—I knew that it was done, and that I indeed wore the mantle." He blinked, gazing into the distance. "But then I felt his presence awakening in the stone and working to fight free of it. I tried to stop it, to push him back inside and seal him away once more, but he was too much to stand against. Even so—I might have stood a chance."
"But?"
"At the height of the struggle, he whispered to me a promise that if I were to let him free, he would still make me his equal. I did not give in to this, but I hesitated. The intoxication of such power is even greater than the dalax. It made me wish that his offer was true, even though I knew that even if he could offer me any such thing, he would only kill me instead. However, that moment of hesitation was enough for him to gather his will. That is when he pushed past me. As for how he reconstituted himself, I cannot say."
"It looked to me like he just rebuilt himself with the ether," Dante said. "Or maybe he used the light of life that was inside the stone. But unless we can do the same to turn ourselves into a lich, I don't think that part matters."
"Hold on," Blays said. "Can we do that?"
"Ah. That would make things a lot easier for us, wouldn't it? Light of life—" He stopped mid-sentence. "Gladdic, you haven't seen the light anywhere, have you?"
Gladdic did some more blinking. "Did the lich destroy it?"
"It was still here when we left."
Dante didn't voice the possibility that it could have died, if that's what balls of light did, in their absence. Within the minute, though, he'd noticed that the closer of the two streams was flowing in the wrong way again. When he reversed its course, the ball of light recohered. It was shivering, though, and it descended slowly until it rested on the tips of the grass.
Dante kneeled across from it. "Are you all right?"
"Please, don't hurt me." The light's voice, which had once sounded like it was made of multiple tones, had condensed to just one.
"I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to help you, if I can."
"Who are you?"
Dante grimaced. "My name is Dante. You told us your story, and of Bade. Don't you remember?"
"I…" The light rose a few inches. "I told you that?"
"And I'm grateful you did. It made a lot of things make a lot more sense."
"If I told you that, then we must be friends."
"We only met today. But we're going to need your help."
"What do you need of me?"
"We just revived the White Lich. We—"
"You brought him back? Why would you do such a thing?!"
"It was an accident," Dante said hastily. "Light, you've been damaged. I need to know if I can restore you somehow."
"He stole much of my light from me, didn't he? I'm starting to remember." The light swiveled slowly from side to side. "I don't think anything can be done for me. Only Arawn can restore the light of life. But I will do my best to do what you need of me."
"We need to find the lich and kill him. Then I need to try to take on his power. I'll need you for both of that."
"I'm going to leave the temple?" The light sounded both hopeful and frightened. "I haven't seen the sunlight in so long."
"Maybe it will do you some good. Gladdic, can you walk?"
The old man gathered himself and, with effort, got to his feet. But he was only upright for a moment before he sank back to one knee. "I will need another minute."
Dante nodded. A thought had been tickling at his mind, ready to be born. Finally, it came to him. "Then I'll be right back."
He jogged upstairs to what the light had called the Hall of Emptiness. After a quick glance between the many little altars and the objects lying upon them, he picked up the bracelet of swamp-snail shells and tucked it into his pocket. When he got back downstairs, Gladdic was back on his feet.
Rather than traipsing everyone to the top of the temple and then building a staircase back down from it, Dante merely walked to the wall and swept it open.
It still hadn't stopped raining, though it was more lackadaisical than the downpour earlier. The air smelled cleaner.
"It's so bright," the light said.
"Just wait until the sun comes out," Blays said. "You'll be in talking-light heaven."
With a sigh, Dante realized the canoe was still on the top of the temple.
Retrieving it required both him and Blays to do a lot of lugging and swearing, as well as expanding the stairwells in multiple places. At last, they waddled it outside. Gladdic had fallen asleep on the ground. Dante let him sleep while he used the light to open a connection to the lich. As it opened, he drew back, bracing himself, but the sensation wasn't strong enough to be uncomfortable. Good news for him. Bad news for the rest of them, including everyone on Rale, because it meant the lich had already gained meaningful distance from them.
They launched the boat and struck out to the southwest. The lich had indeed killed Dante's flying scouts when they drew close enough to see him and so Dante raised a few more, sending them high up to scout the quickest paths and make sure nothing awful was lying in wait for them. The clearing and its temple vanished behind them, swallowed up by the trees.
"So we've got what, four days at the most to catch up to him?" Blays said. "Any more than that, and we won't have time to get back to Pholos."
"In that event, all it means is we give up on destroying Olastar and pray Kelen comes through for us instead," Dante said. "So even if we won't have time to return, we should still hunt down and kill the lich just in case Kelen does succeed. The last thing we need is to be dealing with the White Lich and all of Nolost's armies at the same time."
"If time's running out, I say we let the lich go while we take one last try on Wessen. I don't think Kelen has a chance in hell of convincing a god to do something she obviously doesn't want to."
"Do you think we have any better chance of killing Wessen without the power of the lich?"
"Not really. But if it's all going to end, I want to die doing something that could have stopped it."
Dante drew his paddle through the water. Rain hissed on the trees and fell in fat drops from the leaves. "You're right. I don't think we can kill Wessen by ourselves. But if we somehow find a way, the first thing we'll do is come back here and destroy the White Lich for good."
Even as he said this, though, he realized it would be impossible. They could kill the lich, and reduce him once more to the stone, but destroying the stone itself was something Carvahal had offered to do for them. As soon as they collapsed Olastar, they would never see Carvahal again.
He dwelled on this as they navigated through the waterways. He supposed that if it came down to it, they could always sail back to the Plagued Islands and throw the lichstone in a volcano.
His arms were tired after the first couple of miles. It was still the middle of the day, and they were falling behind even with two of them paddling, but the raising of the temple and the subsequent battle had wrung him all but dry of nether, exhausting his mind. Realizing that he was going to be worthless even if they somehow caught up to the lich, he drew in his paddle and tried to find a comfortable position to slump down in.
He woke some time later to two different sensations: first, a severe crick in his neck. And second, a sudden increase in the tingling of his connection to the lich. He sat up in the canoe, excited, until the tingling decreased just as quickly.
It was darker than before he'd gone to sleep, though he didn't think it was quite sunset. Gladdic was still out cold. The light of life rested in the hull in front of Dante. It was quite dim—not because it was damaged, but to draw less attention from anything that might be out in the swamps—though it hadn't said anything since they'd shoved off, either.
"Oh, finally ready to take your turn?" Blays said.
"I'm afraid you can't stop paddling yet. I think the lich is doing something. I need to figure out what."
Blays muttered something unkind. Just a few minutes later, though, the tingling waxed and waned again. Once it steadied out, Dante slowly turned his head from left to right until the sensation picked up a little.
"I think the lich is moving," he said.
"As opposed to the thing he's been doing ever since he jumped off the temple?"
"I mean he's no longer moving in a straight line. He's breaking in different directions."
"Why would he be doing that?"
"I don't know. Maybe he got lost."
"In the swamp that he's lived in for eight hundred years?"
"He spent most of that trapped in the Riya Lase."
"He's not lost," Blays said. "I think he's searching for something."
Dante picked up his paddle and pitched in. The tingling gained and lost intensity several times over the next hour. This made it hard for Dante to be sure about something else he thought he was feeling: that the overall level of it was slowly increasing.
"We're gaining on him," he said once he was certain. "Still a ways out. But we're finally catching up."
He paddled harder. He drew on the nether to test it and found it responsive: he'd recovered a good deal of his strength. The canopy and the clouds made it seem later in the day than it truly was and the light held as the tingling mounted. As the afternoon lengthened, the sensation suddenly began to increase much faster.
"I think he's stopped," Dante said. "Unless he's weakened enough to need to rest, he might have just found whatever he's been looking for."
His arms were getting tired again and he used the nether to refresh them. They hit a dead end of trees across their path and had to backtrack, but even with that setback, he could tell they were still gaining ground. Until roughly an hour later, when the prickles in his mind steadied out again, and then retracted just enough for him to notice. Glumly, he announced the lich was on the move again.
Roughly two miles after that, Blays quit paddling and pointed to a lump ahead of them. "What's that?"
Dante already knew what it was, though. A body. Floating face-down. It was twitching now and then, but not because it was still alive: something was nibbling on it from under the water. As they drew closer, he saw that it was missing great pieces of flesh from its arms and neck.
"Those bite marks," Dante said to Blays. "What do they look like to you?"
"Disgusting?"
"They're too big to be ziki oko. To me, they look human."
"I am appalled that I somehow have the experience to say I agree with you."
"Though I doubt the things that made them could still be considered human."
Blays stared at him a moment, then jerked up his chin. "Blighted."
"It makes perfect sense. The lich returns to life. But he's a shadow of his prior self. He's wounded, depleted. Despite devouring part of the light of life, he's still not even back where he was when he first broke free of the Riya Lase. So the first thing he does is find some people to Blight—and begin to restore himself."
"Then some Tanarians yet live," Gladdic said. His voice was thick from sleep.
"We'll take a quick look around," Dante said. "But I doubt there's much else to see here."
They resumed paddling. Aside from the canal-filled cities, the more remote villages of the swamp had tended to be man-made clearings with fish pens and aquatic agriculture surrounding a large central island or cluster of them. What they found now was something far more primitive.
Some of the islands had ropes strung between them, tied from one tree branch to another, and these, though well-hidden, were what led them to discover a settlement they might otherwise have missed. The landscape had hardly been touched, with simple structures, some of them little more than lean-tos, scattered across a host of natural islands. The shelters were tucked back between screens of trees and shrubs, as were their canoes. Some fish nets were strung out in the water, but they likely would have missed them if they weren't on the lookout for such things.
The body wasn't alone. They found several more in similar condition. But not nearly enough to populate the whole village. Just enough to satisfy the raging hunger of the newly-created Blighted.
As they neared the end of the village, and found what was little more than a bloody skeleton poking from the shallows of an island, Blays stopped paddling.
"This is the best plan we've got?" he said. "Just keep on chasing the White Lich, wherever he goes?"
"Maybe he'll do us the kindness of settling in for a good long nap soon," Dante said.
"If we're counting on the lich to slow down, or stop moving altogether, I don't think we're ever going to see him again. But maybe we can get him to come to us."
"How do we get him to do that? By offering him a tasty new village to devour?"
