He kneeled over the corpse again. This time, rather than feeding the blood to it—blood that looked different, paler, than before—he sank the knife into the heart of the corpse. He withdrew the knife and picked up the bowl, pouring its contents into the dry wound a few drops at a time.

  Once the bowl was empty at last, the lich, who had more than enough blood on his shirt to need to draw any, brought the nether to him. It was the first time Dante had seen him use it in the ritual and he watched with close interest, but for the moment the lich wasn't doing anything more than summoning great gobs of shadows, then dismissing nearly all of them while retaining just a few, as if sorting for only the finest of the nether.

  The three travelers crossed from the highlands and into the last of the hills. After a long time of sorting through the shadows, the lich finally seemed to find what he was looking for. He stood, throwing back his shoulders, and lifted his hands. The shadows bounced about in agitation. Just as it looked like they were ready to fly apart, they slammed together instead.

  A dark being unfurled before the lich. It was as tall as he was but more solid, more like he'd been before his death. Dante expected it to be an Andrac, but while it was as black as one, with claws to match, its head and face were much different, almost human, although the thing's features were far crueler than any man, sneering and vicious.

  Wordlessly, it threw itself at the White Lich.

  "Well this is a new one," Dante said. "The lich appears to have summoned a demon of some kind—don't ask me why, maybe to get it to destroy the Prime Body for him—but it turned on him instead. They're wrestling like a couple of bears."

  "Great news," Blays said. "Let's hope it does our job for us."

  That was an interesting thought. At the very least the thing would keep the lich occupied for the near future. The two figures strained against each other, arms locked together. The demon's claws dug into the lich's upper arm and blue-white blood pattered to the ground. The lich fell back two steps, then caught himself, but the demon had pushed him out onto the loose rock of the spoil, and this turned underfoot, betraying him.

  The lich fell like he'd been struck dead, crashing down on his side. The demon leaped upon him, jaws opening as wide as an animal's, but the lich caught it by its throat, holding it back. The thing grinned down at him with pointed teeth. Its eyes were black pits.

  It reached for the lich's own throat, squeezing it, more blood trickling from both sides. The lich struggled, trying to shake the demon off him, but it clung to him like it was a part of him. Something new flashed in the eyes of the White Lich: fear. Dante hadn't been at all sure that the demon could actually kill him, but he had no doubt of it now.

  The demon tightened its grasp. Its claws, inches long, buried themselves within the lich's neck, the cords of which stood out like iron rods. The demon tensed its arm and jerked it back.

  The lich had been waiting for this. He sprung forward, freeing himself from beneath the demon. With their momentum headed in the same direction, instead of ripping the lich's throat out, the demon came away with no more than a few scraps of flesh.

  All this had thrown it well off-balance. The lich did not waste the moment. He threw himself at the demon, flinging himself on top of it. He pressed his hand against its chest. His fingers glowed white and sank into its body.

  "My soul will not be yours," he said. "Not on this night."

  His hand plunged in past his wrist. The demon bucked but couldn't be free of him. The lich pulled forth his hand. In it he held a beating black heart.

  The demon collapsed into a heap of ash. The lich fell on his back and stayed there for a long moment before sitting up. He gazed at the pile of ashes, then lifted his eyes to the sky.

  Something was manifesting twenty feet above him. Something not unlike the Eye of Rathar. As it took shape, though, it became more like a hole in the sky, enclosed by a corona of shadows. Slowly, it began to spin, wheel-like. Nether sifted from the hole in its center. Starry silver twinkled within the shadows as they drifted downward and settled over the mummified corpse.

  The lich got to his feet but drew no closer. Dante glanced at the others but didn't say anything. No need to put their hopes to death until he was absolutely certain.

  The nether continued to flow until every inch of the body lay under a shroud of shadows. They twitched. Then again. The shroud swept upward, then dissolved into the corpse's skin.

  The corpse was now sitting up. And its—or rather, his—eyes were open, staring at the White Lich.

  "Welcome back," said the lich. "It's been a very long time, hasn't it?"

  The resurrected man tried to speak, but his throat was too dry and he coughed instead. He still looked half dead, but there was something familiar about his face.

  "Who are you?" he said.

  "I think you will remember soon enough. How do you feel?"

  "Alive," he said. "But—how?"

  "It was not easy," the lich said with good humor. "But I have been tested, and I was up to the task. Can you stand?"

  He reached out his hand. The no-longer-dead man glanced at it, then at the lich's face. His eyes flew wide with shock and fear. "Bade."

  Dante's mouth fell open.

  "It's not the Prime Body," he managed to get out. "It's his brother. The one he killed to become the White Lich. And he's just brought him back to life."

  28

  Wate tried to stand and run from the lich, but his legs gave out from under him. The lich swooped forward and caught him before he could hit the ground.

  "Don't be too quick to exert your limbs," said the lich. "It has been eight hundred years since you used them."

  "Get your hands off me!" Wate tried to thrash out of the lich's grasp, but even if he'd been at his full strength it would have been as futile as an overboard sailor trying to fight the winter sea. "Murderer! Of your own brother!"

  "Yet here you are. Breathing and speaking. Can a man be called a murderer if the man he killed walks freely?"

  "I can call you one. For you murdered me!"

  "I did. But it was always my intention to restore you once my work was finished."

  "What a great favor you've done me, to only kill me temporarily." Wate had been released by the lich as the conversation went on and he turned in a circle, taking in the mine and all of the crushed rock outside it, though it was so dark he couldn't have seen much else. "Has it really been eight hundred years?"

  "Did you not live them out for yourself in the lands beyond death?"

  "I knew at once what that place was for. It was meant to dull and pacify me, to sway me to let go of my anger and become at peace with what had been done to me. I wanted no part of that. I deserved my anger. So I passed into the final realm instead. Time is much different there."

  "I was not sure if souls who crossed to that place could return from it."

  "So you didn't even know if you could restore me."

  "The possibility of it failing in that way was only something I learned much later, when I learned more of the mysteries of the many layers of reality."

  "You are such a liar! You didn't know how to revive the dead!"

  The lich shrugged. "But I knew that with the new powers I was taking on, I would one day learn how."

  Wate glared at him. The glow of the lich's skin lit the man's face well enough but it was hard to read the specific expression on his face. Both because it was an obscure one, and because the man looked exactly like someone who'd been dead just a minute earlier. His eyes were sunken, his cheeks hollow, his lips pulled tight to his teeth. His black hair lay limp and thin on his head.

  "I am sure you unraveled the great mysteries, just like you always boasted you would," Wate said. "Me, I barely know any of it. As I said, I went into the final realm as soon as I got an inkling of what was happening to me. In that realm, you aren't…you. I barely have any memories of the place. I certainly have no sense of how long I was there. If you tell me it's been eight hundred years, I have no choice but to trust you."

  "I would not lie to you."

  "Bullshit. Maybe it's been so long that you've forgotten, but I know you better than you know yourself. You would say or do anything to advance your wants. You would probably kill our own mother if it gave you a single scrap more power." Wate looked up at the clouds. "But she must be gone for a long time now, isn't she?"

  "Yes."

  "How?"

  "In her sleep," said the lich. "After a long and happy life."

  "That is good, then."

  "And she never stopped missing you."

  Wate nodded, looking away again. After a few seconds, he gave a wry smile. "Any other news of note from the last eight hundred years?"

  "To tell you of all that has happened would take more time than we have at present. But if I can achieve my next goals, we will have all the time in the world." The lich shifted his feet and folded his arms. "But I suppose it will only take a few minutes to relay the most important events."

  He began to describe how he'd exterminated the demons from Tanar Atain. Throughout the brothers' conversation, Dante and the others had been hiking speedily uphill, with Dante doing his best to relay what was happening less than a mile ahead of them.

  "So it's definitely not the Prime Body?" Blays said. "It's his brother?"

  "Yes," Dante said.

  "Then the lich isn't in any danger of destroying himself and the lichstone."

  "He's got something else in mind. I don't have any idea what that is, but it doesn't matter if we get to him while they're still talking."

  "And what do we do about the brother?"

  "I'm not sure we'll have to do anything. It sounds like he'd be more than happy to see the lich dead."

  Dante switched his primary attention back to the White Lich.

  "And so I cleansed the land of the threat that would have surely brought our people to their end," he was saying. "A threat that would have quickly brought all peoples to their end. Yet for this service, I was not venerated. I was not beloved. I was not handed the crown that I had so rightly earned. Instead I was hated. It was then that I decided the rulers of Tanar Atain were not wise enough to be allowed to continue to hold their power."

  "And so you, in your great altruism, decided to relieve them of it, and take it for yourself."

  "It was my duty. Otherwise the people would have been led into ruin."

  "I get the distinct impression they were ruined anyway."

  "Only because of the very intransigence of those same rulers." The lich sounded irritated for the first time since resurrecting his brother. "If they had only admitted that only I had the strength and wisdom to shepherd the people of Tanar Atain, it never would have gone any further."

  "Yes, I'm sure that if only they'd crowned you king of that stinking swamp, that would have put all your ambitions to a peaceful end. For some reason I feel like you're not sharing the full truth of what happened."

  "The truth I share is much deeper than you allow yourself to understand. It was through this betrayal—the fear and conniving of their small minds—that I came to understand how deeply flawed and feeble humanity was. It had neither the ability nor the will to reshape itself into something more worthy. I, however, did."

  "These are the ravings of a madman." Wate grew angrier as he spoke. "You were half-insane back in my time, and now you've become cracked beyond all recognition."

  "I know it will be difficult for you to comprehend many of my thoughts. But you will come to do so in time."

  Wate laughed out loud. "If only you could hear yourself! I don't care about your gangrenous thoughts, Bade. I won't listen to them any longer. I'm leaving. Try to stop me, if you like. But you'll just have to kill me again."

  He started off, a little wobbly, and headed south toward the swamps.

  The lich watched him. "Are you angry with me for having killed you? Or for what the act of killing took from you?"

  Wate stopped and turned his head. "You mean my life? You murderous, soulless husk of a—"

  "But it was much more than your life. You were on the cusp of attaining greatness. Something far beyond your mortal limits. You were meant to become a figure of unthinkable power and glory. It is that that I stole from you."

  "Do you imagine that's profound in some way? It is both, you abomination!"

  "I have just returned your life to you," said the lich. "I believe that I can also return the power that I stole from you—and much more."

  Wate laughed out loud. "Is that so? You're just going to conjure up the sorcery of the gods, are you?" He made a theatrical spinning gesture with his hand. "And bestow it on me?"

  The lich considered him for a time. "You cannot think it is coincidence that you're here now."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Returning you to life required that your physical body remain intact. How do you think that it stayed intact and undecayed? That no harm ever came to it throughout these long centuries?"

  "I don't know. Presumably you tainted it with your sorcery."

  "It was through my sorcery, yes. But I would not call it a taint."

  "Wonderful. You're a saint, not letting the worms get to the body of the brother you murdered. What are you getting at?"

  "I have been preparing this for a very long time," the lich said. "But there is a complication. Surely you have felt it in the air all around us. A great menace."

  "I have," Wate said measuredly. "But I've been dead for most of a thousand years. I assumed that's just how things are now."

  "In a quirk of humor, if a dark one, it turns out that the gods agreed with me that the mortals of this world are impure. Even more so than they intended to create them as. I don't know how long they've felt this way or why they let it continue for so long. I suspect that even the gods can fall prey to denying the truth because to admit it would be too painful, or to letting the regret of their mistakes paralyze them into taking no action to correct them.

  "What matters is they finally chose to correct that mistake," he continued. "But they chose to go much further than removing humanity from this world and replacing it with something higher. Instead their plan is to eliminate this world from the fabric of being altogether."

  Wate's brow was heavily furrowed. "Are you speaking in metaphor?"

  "I mean my words exactly as they sound."

  "Then you're lying to me."

  "I didn't want to believe it myself. I was supposed to take this world and reshape it into something greater. The gods may even have preferred my plan to their own: if a former mortal arose to correct the flaw, then the correction was built into their creation all along, and so their creation was not flawed. It would also have spared them the moral weight of having to take action into their own hands."

  "But whatever this grand scheme of yours was, it failed."

  "It was subverted," the lich said, fighting to control his anger. "One or some of the gods worked in secret and through mortal proxies to serve their own ends. Cowards who refused to move in the open. But that no longer matters. What matters is the plan put into action to replace mine. The wholesale annihilation of the earth. In typical divine fashion, they will not step forth and destroy it themselves. Instead they have sent an entity."

  "Forgive me, brother," Wate said, openly irritated, "but I never had the chance to be initiated into the deep mysteries. I wouldn't know what an entity is if it was eating me alive."

  "The entities are deep and primordial beings. Even I do not know much about them. Where they came from or what they want of creation. What is important to us is that they have the power of gods. Perhaps in some ways more. Yet their minds are alien. They are closer to embodied wills than intelligent consciouses. A storm cannot be argued or bargained with and they are just as beyond reason. That is what has been sent to destroy us."

  "What I have felt in the air and in the nether does feel like something I've never seen before." Wate's voice was guarded. "Then again, for all your talk of death and destruction, it looks quite peaceful."

  "That is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is due to the emptiness of these lands. These hills were never resettled even after I cleansed our country of the demons. The land was said to be cursed. Along with the much more material fact that all who knew how to work the tunnels had been slain and so the mine was of no more use. Nonetheless. I know that the end is upon us. Not in a matter of years or months. But in a matter of days."

  "How terrible. Let me guess. You brought me back because you need my help fighting this entity."

  The White Lich laughed. "There is no fighting it. To try to fight it would only end in death. Even for me. But that does not mean that you and I must die. Recently I have discovered a doorway to the realm of the gods. That is enough to ensure that we will not die alongside this world—but it is not in itself the most important implication of the doorway."

  The lich clasped his hands together and lifted his head. "I didn't have time to explore their realm as much as I would have liked. But what time I spent there turned up something of great interest to me. Just as the nether is ground by Arawn's Mill—the same Mill I used to help revive you—there is also a site that produces the light of life. There was not enough of the light remaining here to transform you into the being that I have become. But there is more than enough of it in the gods' realm.

  "Attaining it will be no simple thing. But I believe it will be within our power. Especially so when the gods will be so distracted with their assault on this world and the creation of what they will build to replace it. Once we have attained the light and learned how to wield it, we will use it to elevate you. Not simply into what you would have been, but into something much more than that. I believe that if we work together to study its properties, we will be able to employ it to elevate ourselves into something even higher yet. Perhaps even to full godhood."

  Wade had listened to this with his arms crossed. "This is what you're offering me. To, I suppose, in your mind, set things right."

 

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