He turned and sank into the depths. Dante yelled out and ran forward, casting his mind into the mud above and beneath the glowing spot of water, but the lich was ready for him, and grabbed hold of his command like a grown man pinning the wrist of a naughty child. Dante struggled against it with all his might, but the lich held firm.

  The glow curved around an island and was lost from sight.

  So ended the second of the last ten days they had left.

  25

  "No!" Dante screamed. "Get to the canoe! We have to run him down!"

  "He is gone," Gladdic said.

  "Then we'll figure something out! We can't just stand here like fools!"

  The Blighted withdrew from the island, calmly, almost meekly. They didn't so much as look back as they dipped into the waters and disappeared.

  "He will not slow down," Gladdic said. "We have no means of catching him again."

  "Were you even listening to what he just said, you idiot? He's not just searching for warm bodies anymore, he's going off to do something. Unless he can do that thing while swimming six feet deep in reeking water, he's going to stop eventually."

  "We should at least go talk to Sadan first," Blays said. The slimy little infant-like things were still falling along with the rain and he mustered himself to step on one before it could crawl up his leg. "Make sure they're all right. No need to get angry in the meantime."

  "No?" Dante waved his hands at the clouds as more pink lightning laced across their seams. "Because I just watched the only thing that can stop this horrific shit swim away like a glowing blue dolphin! We're all going to die now! And apparently we're not only going to die, but we're going to be tortured for hundreds of thousands of years first! "

  "It doesn't look great. All I know is that it's not over yet."

  "We can't kill Wessen without the lich, and we're never going to see the lich again. There's nothing left! We ruined everything!"

  Blays scratched the corner of his jaw. "And you think this is helping?"

  "There's nothing more to help. That's the entire point! We blew it! We've only got two options left now: go bring as many of our people to the Realm, to be Taim's slaves forever, or kill ourselves before the eons of torture kicks in."

  "Eons of torture?" Sadan said from behind them. Between the rain, the vile little beings whisking down through the trees, and the shouting, they hadn't heard her approach. "What in the freezing blue hell is going on here?"

  "The lich somehow knew we were waiting for him." Some of the anger deflated from Dante's throat and chest. "He got away. We don't have any way of catching up to him now."

  "These little freaks falling out of the sky, they're part of what you've been talking about?"

  "Yes. I wouldn't let them touch you."

  "But they look so friendly." She gazed at the shore. All of the Blighted had departed and aside from some muddy footprints there was nothing to suggest a hellacious battle had just been about to unfold. "What'll you do now?"

  "We don't know. Chasing after him feels pointless now."

  "I don't suppose you've got any hidden secrets of the swamp to reveal to us," Blays said.

  "'Fraid not."

  "We may not be able to chase him down," Gladdic said. "But we may not need to. Not if we know his ultimate destination."

  "You're talking about opening another portal," Dante said. "It could work. Except my scouts can only travel about thirty miles from me before the connection breaks. We'd have to follow him until he reaches his destination, then backtrack to the portal we've already got. Which would take more time than just continuing straight toward him."

  "But if we are able to run him down, kill him, and reclaim the stone, we will have to backtrack to that same portal anyway."

  "This is starting to make my head hurt."

  "What about the light?" Blays said. "It knows the lich best. He said he's got one last thing to do before the end. Any guesses what that might be?"

  The light of life was still in Dante's pocket—it was the safest place for the thing, though he felt a little awkward keeping a sentient being there, especially as now, when he'd forgotten about it—and he drew it forth.

  It floated above his palm. "Bade's greatest fear has always been of dying before he could make himself fully immortal. Since taking on the light, I'm sure he spent a great deal of time pursuing methods to protect himself from death, or to escape from it if a threat proved insurmountable. He'll be attempting one of those methods now."

  "Then let's just hope that method isn't a portal out of here," Blays said.

  The back of Dante's neck tingled. "He's had them before. At Bressel. He may well no longer have the power to make new ones—and from what we saw, he only made them within Rale, not out to other worlds—but he might know where an old one is."

  "Don't suppose you know of any portals in this area, light?"

  It pivoted from side to side. "I'm sorry."

  "If there is any chance he seeks a portal, then we have no choice but to pursue him, and now," Gladdic said. "For if he makes it there before we apprehend him, we will surely lose him for good."

  Throughout the discussion, the grotesque miniature human-things had continued to thud to the ground and crawl toward them, and Dante had been venting his wrath upon them. They must have had some touch of intelligence to them, because they were starting to crawl away in search of easier prey. Somehow this made him loathe them even more.

  "Then we'll head after him again, for whatever good it'll do," Dante said leadenly. He nodded to Sadan. "What will you and the Mara Taub do?"

  "You were telling the truth all the while, weren't you?" she said. "About this being the end of it."

  "You thought we were lying but still went along with our crazy plan? The one that could've meant the deaths of the last Tanarians?"

  "Wasn't sure. But I did believe you'd killed the lich. Figured we owed you for that much."

  "So what's the answer?"

  Hands on hips, she looked about herself, sighing slowly at the pink lightning and its monstrous children. "If this is the end, there's no point running to the mines this time, is there? If the Mara Taub are going to die at last, we'll damn well die on our home land."

  "I don't think he'll be back. But I wouldn't stay here. Might even want to switch to the village of that other clan you mentioned."

  "I was thinking we'd go on and take the Drakebane's palace," she said. "Let Tanar Atain have one last queen."

  "Is that where I should send my sorcerers and craftsmen? Assuming we aren't all consigned to a living hell a few days from now?"

  "You don't owe us a thing. Our plan didn't even work, did it?"

  "I made a promise. I don't think I want to tempt the fates by kicking off our new era of peace and rebuilding by breaking my word."

  "All right, then." She sounded skeptical but amused. "I'll see you in your new era."

  Dante's appetite for getting in the canoe and doing more paddling was about as big as it was for eating one of the wriggling miniature human-grubs live. Yet pursuing the lich was their duty, and so they did it, shoving off and heading dead north. It was still raining and the clouds were still flashing and the grub-things were plopping in the water and drowning there.

  "You know," Blays said as they detoured around a large island, "it would save us a lot of time and trouble if you just cut channels through these things."

  "That's…true," Dante said. He reached out and carved a passage just wide enough for the canoe to pass through. The smell of damp earth enveloped them as they paddled along the newly-shaped banks.

  Encouraged, he brought a couple of flies in to scout the immediate way forward and identify any more spots where it would be advantageous to tunnel out a shortcut, trimming their route to something significantly more efficient. It still wasn't enough to keep up with the lich, let alone gain ground on him. But they weren't losing much ground on him anymore either.

  After a couple of hours, he caught some sleep. He woke to a sense of dread but nothing new was amiss. He spelled Blays, who fell asleep almost at once despite the canoe being very unlike a nice bed. Gladdic was asleep, too, murmuring to himself, though Dante could only occasionally make out any of the words.

  The hideous grublings had stopped falling from the sky some time ago but it wouldn't quit raining and the drops whispered on the water. Lightning flashed between the clouds, thunderless. Sometimes the bolts chained together in strange symbols but Dante didn't recognize a single one of them.

  Though neither the weather nor the surroundings were at all similar, the isolation of the moment made him recall with total clarity the night he'd gone to the churchyard outside Bressel when he'd been just a boy. The place where he'd found The Cycle of Arawn—and not just a copy, but the copy, the original. Finding it had saved his life, he was sure of it. If he hadn't, it would only have been a matter of time until one of the other street criminals would have stabbed him and left him for dead. Either that or the city watch would have arrested and hanged him, whether for numerous crimes, or because he would have been too eager and stupid in his hunt for a copy of the book, and been taken in for heresy.

  And all of that—both his life itself, and the sorcerer he'd since become—it had all been due to luck. Just as he'd despaired that the ruined chapel was empty, he stumbled over the entry to the hidden cellar. Where he'd found the object of his search. More than half his lifetime later, the events of that night had led him to this one. Strange to think that so much depended on a single moment that never should have happened.

  More lightning snapped across the sky. It forked out on all sides, forming a star that hung in the heavens. As it faded, a new thought formed in his mind. One he had no proof of, yet one he would bet his life on.

  Finding the entrance to the cellar hadn't been an accident.

  He should have walked right past it without ever being the wiser. Yet some force, so sublime that he would never have noticed it even if he'd been wary of it, had directed him to find it. Arawn? Carvahal? It could have been either. Even Urt, for that matter. He had no way to know, really.

  All he knew was that one of the gods had wanted him to find the true Cycle. They had wanted him to wind up with the chance to prevent the destruction of Rale. Now, it was possible they'd already squandered that chance, that everything they did from this point out was pointless futility. But the chance had existed. And there was still the chance that it did.

  Rain tapped against the hood of his cloak. Gladdic muttered something in his sleep. He paddled on.

  ~

  The pulse of the loon pulled him from sleep. It was morning, gray and damp.

  "Yes?"

  "Ah, there you are," Nak said in his ear. "I was beginning to fear something had…happened."

  "A lot of them have," Dante said. "How are you weathering things? Are our subjects all right?"

  "There have been some attacks. Along with a new form of sickness. But we are enduring. And you?"

  Dante shook his head, unsure where to even start. Then it came to him, as fully-formed as his epiphany the night before. "Nak, I'm going to ask something of you that you shouldn't have to do. I should be the one to do it. But I can't. The burden must fall to you."

  "This sounds, er, ominous."

  "It is the worst thing I will ever have to ask of anyone. So I will just say it. Another week from now, if we haven't forced the entity from Rale, I need you to put all of our people to death."

  "I…what?!"

  "You didn't mishear me."

  "But…" Nak's voice sounded tight. "Sir, are you sure that you haven't gone mad? Has one of Nolost's plagues corrupted your mind?"

  "I wish that was true. But my mind is clear."

  "Then…why? Why would you possibly want to do that?"

  "Because that's when the world is going to end."

  "You know it to the day? How?"

  "Carvahal told me."

  "Oh." Nak sounded smaller. "But if everyone's going to die then anyway, isn't your request a little, well, redundant?"

  "We just learned that, from the perspectives of the other worlds, Rale's final collapse is only going to take a few minutes. But for us, it's going to go on for hundreds of thousands of years—and we're going to be horrifically tortured for every single minute of it."

  "Arawn's stars. You're serious? Carvahal told you this, too?"

  "No, this came from the entities. It was something they told the White Lich."

  "The White—but isn't he quite dead?!"

  "It turns out we kind of brought him back to life. It wasn't on purpose."

  Nak started to speak, then huffed into the loon. "I must admit I'm a little lost here."

  "We couldn't kill the Chained God. We weren't strong enough. So Gladdic tried to use the lichstone to take on the lich's power for himself. But something went wrong, and the lich wound up escaping. We're hunting him down right now so I can try to take his power instead."

  "Do you think it's going to work this time?"

  "I really don't know anymore." Dante gazed up at the storm-tossed sky. "You know what, there's no more time for any dishonesty. I don't think we'll ever see him again, Nak. Even if by some miracle we do catch up to him, I'm not sure why I'd have any better luck than Gladdic did."

  A long silence took place. "Well, you have to, lord. Because if you can't, I'm not sure I can do what you've asked me to do."

  "I know," Dante said. "I'm not sure how I'd bring myself to do it, either. But you'll have to. If it comes to that point, it's the only way to save them."

  It was true, he thought. Yet it would mean that he'd been wrong all along. He never should have tried to save all Rale to begin with. Just his own people, even if it would have damned them to eternal slavery in the Realm. But in trying to grab everything, it had all slipped away from his grasp.

  The day was a quiet one. They slowly but steadily lost ground on the lich, to the point where Dante thought he'd lose his connection to his flying scouts, but the lich made a diversion of some kind in the middle of the afternoon, allowing them to trim down the distance between them. Just as an ember of hope began to flicker in Dante's heart, though, the enemy got back on his way, leaving them behind once more.

  Late in the afternoon, they came to an honest-to-goodness hill. It was one of the very few formations of land in Tanar Atain that stood taller than the trees around it, and though there was, strictly speaking, no real need to do so, given that Dante's reanimated flies could already see far ahead of them, they felt compelled to climb up it and see what they could see.

  "This must be the same hill Sadan was talking about," Blays said. "The place the Mara Taub had to flee from when the Blighted attacked them."

  "I wonder if her husband made it back here, or was slain elsewhere," Dante said. "If he made it here, I could probably find his remains for her."

  "You know that we have no time for such things," Gladdic said. "Unless, that is, we have decided our task truly is hopeless, and it is a better use of our last days to perform what acts of kindness as we can."

  He wasn't wrong, but that didn't make Dante any less annoyed to hear it. They hiked up through a curious forest of thick-trunked trees with peeling, papery bark that revealed pink and purple layers beneath. It felt good to stretch their legs, and after a brisk ascent, they came to the summit and found a lump of flat rock that offered a view of the way forward.

  Though Dante had already seen it through his scouts, it was still a shock to look out and see, not ten miles ahead, the swamps come to an end, with the land ramping up into a long sweep of green hills, with snowcapped mountains behind them.

  "He's still heading dead north," Dante said. "I think he's leaving the swamps altogether. What's going on here?"

  Blays shrugged. "Searching for new souls to Blight?"

  "But the only thing north of here is the old mines. Sadan said they're deserted. The hills, too."

  "Then it must be to take care of that last act he was talking about, right? Light, do you know anything about what he might be up to in the mines?"

  This drew a muffled response. Embarrassed, Dante got out the light of life from his pocket. It floated toward the ground before catching itself.

  "I was trapped away for almost all of the time that Bade has been the lich, and know little of what happened in that time, except what was whispered to me across the void by Arawn's servants," it said. "But I have always had a connection to Bade, through the light that he took from me. Sometimes it granted me visions not unlike your dreams. When they came, it was always when he was experiencing his most heightened emotions. This means they're rare, because he is terribly cold since becoming the lich, and almost never finds himself overcome by any emotion besides the will to seize power, if that can be said to be an emotion.

  "But I once got a vision—long ago, not long after he had scoured the demons from the swamps—of him striding through unfamiliar hills. It was a different season—yes, autumn, I can still remember the leaves lit up like fire, spinning down from the branches. I know little of the place we now look at, but it must be the same as I saw in the vision. For Bade was traveling to a vast tunnel into the hills. I took it to be a cavern, but it must have been a mine.

  "He was carrying something to the entrance. Something very precious to him—but something that he was deathly afraid of as well. It was these emotions, swirling within him, that brought my eyes to his, and let me watch as he carried his treasure into the darkness and depths, where he sealed it away."

  "Did you get a look at what he was carrying?" Dante said.

  "Not a glimpse."

  "Sounds like it could just have been the Prime Body, and he was hiding it where no one could find it and kill it—killing him along with it."

  "I don't think so," the light said thoughtfully. "He may have feared for someone finding the Prime Body, and destroying them both. But whatever he was carrying, he believed that it would one day save him."

 

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