Book 4 Chapter 24: Apprenticeship
Book 4 Chapter 24: Apprenticeship
++The psychology of a lich is difficult to really define, largely because they are so fundamentally removed from any other creature psychologists have studied. How does one go about examining the mind when there is not even so much as a physical brain to house it?++
- From ‘The Dark Arts’, a scholarly work upon necromancers, the undead and other forms of black magic. Outlawed shortly after publication.
Dumping the corpses was, fortunately, a quick affair, and I was not forced to remain in Yir for much longer. Blakely and I took flight across the ocean again, this time without receiving any complaints from my bodyguard about the flying sled I was using. Apparently the thought of fleeing from the reach of Garamon’s wealthiest man was a strong enough motivator that Blakely found the prospect of a mere terminal velocity tumble to be far more relaxing by comparison.
Poloira was rearing up ahead of us soon, but I did not head for my refinery this time. No, I had a more particular destination in mind. I flew right past it and cut an arc over the landscape, heading for a nearby mountain.
“Where are you going?” Blakely asked me as I passed my refinery.
“There are certain secrets I have,” I told him, “that will get you killed if you are found to have known them. I can tell you, if you want. You have earned that much from me, and I am now certain you will not cut and run, if only because you are in too deep to have that option. But I will still leave it as your choice.”
My bodyguard took his time in making that choice, frowning in thought and shooting bitter glances my way. He seemed annoyed to have been roped into such subterfuge without prior warning.
Well, I did not much care about that. If he wanted to avoid being roped then he should have kept a better eye out for the rope.
“I’d rather not know,” Blakely said at last.
“Good. Then you can remain outside the cave mouth.”
“Cave mouth?” he was sounding less certain by the word.
“I need to meet an associate, simply wait for me out of sight and there will be no problem.”
The mountain was quite far from the refinery, in gross terms. Thirty miles or so. That was, however, less than two minutes’ flight for me at top speed, and then only because I wasted precious time decelerating to avoid hitting the mountain bullet-fast.
Blakely was shivering by the time we came down, his teeth practically chattering, and he seemed all too happy to remain outside as agreed. I, for one, was also happy. In his current state, I imagined bringing the man into a dark, enclosed and unknown environment on incomplete information would be rather akin to lighting the fuse on a keg of dynamite.
The mountain itself was large, and I knew the cave systems within it were deep and sprawling. I had already memorised their inner workings myself however, so navigating them was no real inconvenience. A few dozen twists later, and I was entering into the expansive chamber that I knew to be the lair of my associate.
It had changed quite a bit since I last set foot here, now furnished with all the equipment I had purchased for him as a gift, and also clearly expanded too. Magic had blasted away at stone as surely as dynamite, and if the expansions were limited, that was probably only to preserve the structural stability of the place.
Footsteps greeted my ears, and I turned to see my associate approaching.
He was tall. His skin was dark in the way only those native to the southern areas of Irucci were. His hair was brown and curly, though seemed to hang lifeless upon his scalp. His eyes were sharp and keen. His face was handsome, which struck me as odd more than anything else, because I was used to seeing it eaten by age.
Aadan Farah looked better now than he had at any other point I had ever seen him. This was not such a striking surprise of course, he had finally made his ascension from living to dead. Or rather, to undead.
The young lich stepped up to me with a grin that was just a little shy of the breadth a mortal man might have managed. “Dread,” he greeted me. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
His affection for me, it seemed, was as strong as ever. As strong as might be expected from a man who had escaped the grave thanks to the interference of a single person.
All around us his laboratory bubbled and hissed with the progress of a dozen experiments, rather reminding me of my own. This mountain was not terribly magical, but it had enough ambient mana left from leylines long-drained that Farah, young and nascent lich that he was, would be able to hide here for at least a generation or two.
“I need your help with something,” I told him. His face fell, not so long dead that the muscles did not still move instinctively alongside his emotions.
“Help?” he asked me. “That’ll be…difficult.”
“Your consultation,” I amended. “I do not intend to drag you out into the light, do not worry.”
Not yet at least.
“What is it then?” he asked. “Nothing magical I’d wager, I’ve just barely entered into lichdom and I already feel my horizons expanding. You’ve been existing with this level of enlightenment for, what, ten millennia? Twenty?”
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“I remember bronze being the neat new thing,” I shrugged. “By that time my original human ethnic group had already genetically drifted out of existence.”
He shivered. “Right. So you want something political in nature, connections or identification or what-not?”
The Grandmaster seemed more mentally together, to me. Thinking quicker, with no lapsing pauses in his speech. I knew that this was not a consequence of his lichdom—the mental effects would take many decades to even be noticeable. No, he was just no longer saddled with his decaying human brain. To him, it must have felt like his intelligence had become superhuman overnight.
“I am looking for a magical artifact in Asyran,” I told him. “I need a guide to take me through the region.”
Asyran was to the far east of Garamon. I had explored it less than any other region of the world as Lord Dread, predominately because the place had boasted its own Gods long before even Garamon did. Not as widespread or mighty, but still strong enough that Lord Dread had been forced to deal with them cautiously.
Fortunately, the Gods of Garamon had been far less cautious in dealing with them during my absence in the Depths.
I did not know if the Asyran pantheon had been totally eradicated or simply driven into hiding, but I did know that they were not my problem. If idiots like Earl Elqarth could loot the continent then its deities were essentially a non-factor.
“Asyran, Asyran…” Farah considered that, a smile growing on his lips. “You know, I’d have had to take a long time to search through physical records of names to answer this a while ago.”
“Yes,” I sighed. “You have been freed from the mind-killing ravages of time and feel your intellect restored to its former glory, we have all been there, shut up and help me.”
He scowled. “Fine. You’ll want Professor Idjatanya Johns, he’s the best in the business as far as I can tell.”
“Is he a frothing, lunatic misogynist who is unable to comprehend the very idea that a woman might have goals beyond sleeping with him?” I asked.
Farah shrugged. “Probably not. I don’t know. Truth be told I’m not a woman and I’ve never given enough of a shit about them to bother finding that out in my past dealings with him.”
“Then why did you recommend him to me?”
“He’s the best in the field. I reckoned you’d care more about that than whether or not he’s mean to you.”
He had, in fact, reckoned right, at least when it came to someone who would be under my employ, and therefore forced to be on his best behaviour. It was the frothing, lunatic misogynists with the power to treat me as they pleased who were impossible to work with.
“Very well then,” I sighed, turning and making my way for the door. Farah stopped me with a question.
“Wait,” he asked. “I…haven’t seen you in months. Not since I was still human. I have questions.”
I rolled my eyes. I had worked out the intricacies of lichdom on my own, and yet this snivelling brat felt entitled to skip that part of his learning process? Sometimes the youth of our kind left me speechless.
“What is it?” I demanded. “Make it quick.”
Farah’s eyes seemed to harden a shade, though the expression was muted.
“Am I going to rot?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I told him. His face remained unresponsive, probably as much due to the new nature of his being than any deliberate effort to control it.
“When?” he asked.
“Not soon, not by the way you would measure time. It varies somewhat but I have found that liches tend to decompose at roughly one hundredth the rate of an ordinary corpse. A mere few months old, you are still well preserved, if seizing up with rigor mortis. You have the most disgusting period of your existence to look forward to, and it will last many decades.”
I wished his face was not already losing its ability to express emotion, the tiny hints of horror were utterly delectable.
“When will I be a skeleton?” he asked. “Totally skeletonised I mean. Or does that not happen?”
“That generally takes a full millennium. The decomposition begins to slow once most of the flesh is gone, and what bone remains increases in density over time. You will find little height loss, despite the absence of flesh or connective tissue. Eventually you will start to gain height.”
Eventually, if he lived long enough, his body would swell to be fully fifteen feet tall like Lord Dread’s.
More likely, he would die before his first millennium had expired. Most liches did. It was not attaining immortality that was difficult, though this minor hurdle did cause many semi-remarkable geniuses to trip and fall, but managing to cling onto it once gained.
The whole world was hostile to a lich, after all. Everything in creation was our enemy.
I paused. Then I considered that with new eyes. The eyes of Isabel Vornholt, acquired by painful but significant experience in this new life.
Liches had historically been hostile even to other liches, and to some extent this was encouraged by our very nature. Only the most egomaniacal and deranged magicians tended to have the strength of will required to become one. I had to admit, my own ascension to lichdom was largely fuelled by a long and sustained rage-induced mania.
My influence in forming the culture that later became commonplace among liches was not universal, and there were certainly other factors involved, but I had to take responsibility for my role in it.
And given how disastrously my own efforts to stand alone against the Gods had been, and how much success I had enjoyed in these brief twenty years spent cooperating more extensively, perhaps a change to that culture was required.
“...The road ahead of you is hard,” I told Farah at last. “But if you stay your course and walk it, you will live forever. You will continue to learn and grow forever. That is what I have given you. Not instantaneous power, not an immediate return, but the chance to become better than you ever could before. You have continued practicing magic?”
“...I have,” he told me evenly.
“Never stop,” I advised him. “Never miss a day. Your Vessel will continue to strengthen as you push it. In a few millennia, with your talent, you may rival a Demigod.”
And if he was the first of many liches…Well, I had been getting used to dealing with egomaniacal magicians and nobles. Why not start, very carefully of course, sharing the teachings that would see me leading an army of liches instead of an army of mortals.
It was, after all, what the Gods had always feared.