The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 46
He held his breath. But the bolt passed through the beam. And found its mark.
Gladdic glanced back at him, then away before Blays could catch it.
"She…she just fell," Dante said. "It disintegrated everything around her, so she was just on this little platform. Then it just tipped over."
"The light." Gladdic extended his index finger. "It withdraws."
Through the fly, Dante had already watched the ring stop expanding and fade away. The shaft of light remained where it was. As it continued to do nothing, he realized he hadn't checked on the mine in several minutes. The grounds outside it were empty. With a chill, he considered that the lich would have had enough time to exit the tunnel and cross the open ground into cover without him noticing. He decided the odds of that must be low, though. Whatever he'd taken to the mine so long ago must be very well-hidden.
The beam of the Eye's gaze began to move about, searching the cliffside for others. There was no urgency in its movements this time, though, and after another few minutes, it drifted away across the hills.
"So what happens if that thing spots somebody else?" Blays said, a question that had also been on Dante's mind. "We all just die, then?"
"That was what was seen in the vision," Gladdic said.
"Huh. Good thing it showed up out here in the middle of nowhere and not right over Setteven, then." Blays uttered a little gasp. "This is no joking matter. This land isn't nearly as deserted as we were told. And whoever they are, the people here aren't scholars of Thereter like you are. They're not going to know to hide from it."
"It is frightening to look upon, and that might be enough. But you are most likely right."
"Then we have to stop it. Or else the lich no longer matters, because sooner or later that thing's going to spot somebody and then it's all over."
"And how are we to stop it?"
"Well can't we just blind it?"
"What are you talking about?"
"It's an eye, right? So we must be able to poke it out."
"It is not an eye such as the ones I am using to gaze at you in disdain right now. Clearly you must be able to see that it is something much greater than that."
"Is it alive?"
"Unless it is pure sorcery."
"Well if it's alive, then it can be killed. That's what we always say, right?"
Gladdic stepped over a fallen tree whose trunk was being pulverized by ants the size of shiny black berries. "It is miles up in the sky. How do you propose to reach it?"
"Uh," Blays said. "Dante could lift a mountain up underneath it."
"Making something that big would take me weeks," Dante said.
"Then just raise up a thin little pillar."
"So it'll snap and kill us before we've gotten a tenth of the way to it."
"Then if we can't get up to it, we'll just have to lure it down to us. Somehow. Gladdic, what kind of stuff does the Eye like?"
Gladdic scowls. "You mean to lure it down with what, its favorite meal? A bewitching lady-Eye? There is nothing that it likes beyond bringing about the end!"
"That must be a pretty miserable existence for it then." Blays slapped the trunk of a tree as he passed by it. "Anyway, if it's such a big threat I don't understand why you don't want to do anything about it."
"The Eye of Rathar is a terrible threat, and everything we do now is likely in vain," Gladdic said. "But since it is completely beyond our reach, I can only focus on what remains within our ability to grasp."
"Right," Blays said slowly. "Right. Well if we see anyone else, we should at least warn them about it."
"That is reasonable enough."
The pink lightning returned to the clouds, but for the time being there was no rain, either in big sheets of the normal kind, or in grublings. The tingle of Dante's connection to the light was getting stronger. That all but guaranteed the lich was still down in the mine somewhere. And that meant that there almost certainly wasn't a portal in it. Good news. Probably. But also very confusing. Unless the lich believed that he might weather what was to come by hiding out in the deepest depths that the miners had accidentally opened up, where the demons had been trapped ever since the raising of the Woduns.
For the most part the terrain stayed forested enough for them to walk freely, and with the help of his scouts, Dante was able to avoid the occasional stretches of meadow. The overcast daylight dwindled. As they crossed a little brook running down the seam between two hills, Dante thought he glimpsed a pale face watching them from behind a tree. He called out and got no response. He sent a fly over to investigate, but it didn't see anything either. But why would the stranger try to hide from them? They meant no harm.
Night settled on the hills as slowly as a troubled man trying to fall asleep. Gladdic had said the Eye couldn't see them at night, but they still stuck to cover even when full dark was upon them. They took occasional rests but they had no intention of sleeping that night. Not when they would reach the mines before morning.
Dante tried to keep half an eye on his scout at the mine at all times. It was a little after midnight when he came to a halt. The tunnel entrance was glowing. As he watched, the White Lich stepped back out into the night.
"He just came out of the mine," Dante said. "And he's carrying something."
The lich trudged across the broken ground. He came to a patch where there was enough dirt for a few weeds and wildflowers to grow and set down the long sheet-wrapped bundle in his arms. He kneeled beside it and then gazed down on it for such a long time that Dante started walking forward again.
At last, the lich reached down and pulled the sheet from its contents. The fabric was so old that it tore apart.
"It's a corpse," Dante said. "A very mummified one."
"You are certain of this?" Gladdic sounded ready to gather up his robes and run away in the opposite direction.
"I've seen just enough dead bodies to know what one looks like."
"Then it is as we suspected: the Prime Body."
"What makes you so sure?"
"What else could it be? This is why it was never found. He did just as the Mara Taub did, hiding it in the one place that everyone feared to go."
"It's definitely old enough," Dante said. "And shriveled enough. But what would he want with the Prime Body?"
Gladdic stared at him. "Do you not see?"
"Why would he care about protecting it when no one had ever found it and everyone's about to be killed anyway?"
"Because everyone is not about to be killed. Before that happens, they will be tortured for tens of thousands of years of our time. The lich will not be excluded from this hell."
"I think you're right. But I'm still not following."
"He has not come here to protect the Prime Body. He has come here to destroy it. He wishes to kill himself and escape this world before he can be tormented alongside the rest of us."
Dante's skin tingled. "When we killed him, he wasn't truly dead. That's why the lichstone manifested, containing what was left of him. But if he destroys the Prime Body, he'll be fully destroyed, right? There won't be anything left to become the stone."
"This is sounding bad," Blays said.
"We're still miles away. We can't possibly get there in time to stop him."
"Then we must run," Gladdic said. "And we must not stop running until it is over."
They leaned forward, picking up speed. It felt as though they'd fallen through a doorway and now the night would never end and the stars would go out one by one, and when the last one winked off, all that would be left was pain.
His heart leaped as the lich stirred. The lich brought ether to one hand and nether to the other. Dante wanted to close his eyes and scream. The lich shaped the two powers and sent them to the mummified body. Dante waited for it to disintegrate and for the lich himself to blow away in a cloud of ash, his light lost forever.
But the two powers didn't rip into the corpse. Instead, they sank into it. White light rippled down from its head, followed by a band of black light. The lich drew an icy dagger and cut across his left palm. He tightened his hand into a fist and squeezed drops of blue-white blood onto the mummy.
"He's doing something to the Prime Body," Dante said.
"Like, ah, not destroying it?" Blays said.
"I don't know yet. Purifying it, maybe. Or undoing wards he put around it."
Even if the lich had to undertake some rituals first, it seemed impossible that they would reach him before he brought an end to himself, but Dante couldn't stop watching. The lich stood and gathered more ether and wove it into a complex and ever-shifting pattern. As he expanded it, he shifted the previous portion up and to his right, forming part of a curve. As he moved onto the next section, he looked intent on creating a complete ring of it. And, given the ring's projected size…
"I still have no idea what he's doing," Dante said. "But whatever it is, it's going to take a while. Maybe even long enough to get to him before he finishes."
"Why not just blow up its head and be done with it?" Blays said. "Did dying do something to the lich's brain?"
Yet Dante didn't think that was it. The lich hadn't seemed any less sane to him than before they'd killed him. If anything, he seemed more cogent, less swayed by his grandiose visions. Dante wouldn't go so far as to say the man had been humbled—such a thing wasn't possible—but he'd at least been shaken, kicked out of the dream he'd let himself get lost in.
"We're going to run into a meadow in another few minutes," Dante said. "Gladdic, is it safe to cross it now?"
"It should be so," Gladdic said. "The Eye was not supposed to be able to hunt in the dark."
"Good. Detouring around it would add more than a mile to our journey."
The lich continued to work on his ethereal pattern. By the time they came to the meadow, he'd completed about an eighth of a full circle. Dante had to admit his skill with the ether was magisterial, and as the lich stood alone in the short, patchy grass, weaving strings of light into something Dante could barely comprehend, the sight of it was even beautiful.
Dante stopped at the treeline and gazed across the meadow. The grass was only knee-high. Not enough to provide cover unless they intended to belly-crawl across all five hundred feet of it. Gladdic nodded to him. Dante walked out into the open field.
It was too dark to make out the details of the Eye, and it was no more than a slightly different shade of black than the clouds behind it. Dante didn't want to take his eyes off it, but he didn't think it was a very good idea to look directly at it.
The meadow seemed to stretch forever. They'd only been dealing with the Eye for a few hours, but after treating open sky above his head like a death sentence, he suddenly understood how mice must feel. The others followed behind him in total silence.
He jerked back in surprise as a face loomed to his right. The figure vanished before Dante could get a good look at him—he'd thrown himself into the grass or something—but something, impossibly, made him think it was Cally. Yet Dante didn't dare call out to him.
He cleared his mind and reached for the ether.
Even as he did this, he knew it was a grotesque mistake. Yet he felt compelled to do it, powerless to stop himself as he shaped the light and shined it in the grass to expose the man trying to hide from them.
Gladdic made a choking sound. "What are you doing? Snuff out the light!"
Like the breaking of a spell, Dante dismissed the ether. His hands were shaking. He shot a glance at the smudge of the Eye. "I saw someone. I thought it was—"
"I do not care if it was Arawn himself! The Eye cannot see us in the dark. But that becomes irrelevant when you remove the dark!"
"I'm sure you're quite right," Blays said, gazing up at the clouds. "But maybe you should berate him for his unbelievable stupidity as we run for the trees?"
Dante still wasn't thinking clearly, and likely would have kept standing there in befuddlement if not for Blays' suggestion. Hearing it swept some of the cobwebs from his mind, though, and he rocked back on his heels and ran toward the treeline.
A hazy green beam speared through the sky. It shot across the land toward them like an arrow loosed by a god.
27
He ran. He ran as hard as he could. The cover of the trees was less than a hundred yards away. But the Eye's gaze had to cross many miles.
It wasn't until they were within fifty feet of the trees that he knew that they wouldn't make it. Pulse pounding, he grabbed at the nether and stretched a flattish shadowsphere over their heads. That meant he could no longer see the shaft of vague greenish light sweeping across the wilderness—until it pierced through the shadowsphere like it wasn't even there.
His stomach flopped. "It's got us!"
"Keep running!" Blays yelled.
The circle of light sharpened, painfully bright. It snapped wider, its outer ring getting even brighter while the rest of it dimmed away. Wherever the sharp green ring touched, the land disintegrated into empty blackness beneath it. Dante tried to pull the earth across the gap the ring had just made ahead of them but the dirt refused to budge. He skidded to a stop in front of a void that was already too wide to jump and getting wider with each moment as the ring continued to expand.
"What are you waiting for?" Blays said. "Build us a bridge!"
"The earth won't move," Dante said. "And if we try to run through that light, it'll disintegrate us just like the ground."
"Then what do we do?"
"I don't know."
"Gladdic, did that insane scholar of yours have anything to say about a situation like this?"
"Yes," Gladdic said. "But you will not wish to hear it. We cannot cross through the light. And even if we could, it would do us no good. The light will keep spreading outward until it has consumed everything."
They found themselves stranded on a pillar of bottomless height. Dante wanted to walk to its edge, but his feet felt rooted in place. "Is this a good thing?"
"Did the light vaporize the contents of your skull?" Blays said. "What part of this is good?"
"If everything is doomed to grim and unending torture in the end, maybe it's better to let it be peacefully erased instead."
"But we still had a chance!"
"Until right now, when we don't. That's the moment when it became good."
"Yes. Right. It was bad until it was good, but now it's good."
"The void opens before us," Gladdic said. "We must have the strength to gaze into it."
"In another few minutes from now, there won't be anything else to look at."
"I speak of the meaning of this void. Dante reasons as though we are the only people now fighting against the entity. But there may be others, with schemes of their own that we can only guess at."
"That means," Blays said, thinking out loud, "that it's not good anymore, it's bad."
"But we don't know that there's anybody else who can actually stop Nolost," Dante said. "Given what we've seen in our travels, I strongly doubt there is."
Gladdic stared into the darkness. "Even if Kelen is the only other hope besides us, he may yet convince the gods to intercede—especially if they are now watching us, and see us die. At that point, what other choice do they have but to act?"
"Our deaths force their hands," Blays said, half-awed. He slammed his fist into his palm. "We should have thought of this a long time ago!"
"So it is a good after all," Gladdic said. "The greatest good we could possibly secure. For our chances of catching the lich and using his powers to kill Wessen were but a sliver, and now the survival of Rale is guaranteed. There is just one last thing we must do."
"Oh? What's that?"
"Step over the ledge."
"And die, you mean. To stop the Eye from erasing Rale before Carvahal and Maralda can save it."
Gladdic nodded.
Blays' eyes dimmed. "I've always thought of offing yourself as a pretty boring way to go out. I always figured that if my life ever got that bad, I'd just run off and start a life of piracy or something."
"But we're not killing ourselves," Dante said, finally understanding. "We're sacrificing ourselves."
"Yes, I suppose that's a little different."
"No one will ever know what we did. That they all lived because we died. But it won't matter, because it will be the greatest deed in the history of Rale."
While they'd been talking, the ring of void encircling them had been growing larger and larger. They were now surrounded on all sides by hundreds of feet of nothing, held aloft on a tiny island of grass.
"There's no sense drawing this out," Dante said. "This is what we were always meant to do. It's been our destiny since the day we were born."
"I see that now," Blays said. "It's been an honor."
"To think that I am as old as the trees," Gladdic said, joining them on the northern edge of the platform. "Yet my life did not truly begin until I traveled in the company of two infidels."
Dante nodded. Then smiled. For there was nothing left to say.
He stepped toward the ledge. Before and below him was nothing but a yawning darkness. He knew that within it would be the best sleep of his life. He stepped over.
Blays grabbed him roughly by the arm, pulling him back onto the platform. "Stop this," Blays said. "Something's wrong."
Dante shook his head. "We just went through this. This is a good thing. The greatest thing."
"Then why doesn't it feel that way?"
"It does to me. You're just scared."
"I don't think it does feel that way to you," Blays said. "At least, it didn't until you talked yourself into it."
"Let go of me. I don't know what you're talking about."
Blays dropped his arm. "What about you, Gladdic?"
"I am unsure of your meaning as well," Gladdic said.
"None of this feels strange to you?"
"Every part of it does, and has since the moment we crossed into the Realm of Nine Kings."
"Yeah, all right, that's true, but this feels different-strange."
