Chapter 5: The Kill
Dyna's hand moved before his mind did. By the time he registered that it was only a suit of armor — a full set of plate, human in shape, standing guard beside the door — the dagger was already buried in its chest. The armor let out a low, dull clang. Not loud, but in the dead silence of the night it cut sharply enough to freeze him. He grabbed the armor before it could topple, his free hand braced against the breastplate, and held perfectly still. He didn't breathe. He listened. After a long moment, nothing came. He let the breath out slowly. His shirt was soaked through.
The tower opened into the castle's interior. Before him stretched a long, dim passage, stone-walled on both sides, and flanking the door stood two armored figures exactly like the one he'd nearly knocked over — sentinels, or the appearance of them.
Dyna kept his outline faint and moved forward along the passage.
The corridors inside were a maze. The castle was old, inherited by Nicholas Andrew from an earlier necromancer, and it was large — a square structure with towers at each corner, an open courtyard at the center, and stone buildings running around all four sides in one continuous mass. The passages within were deep and poorly lit. Even in daylight the place would have been gloomy. In the dark it was something else entirely.
He moved carefully through the corridors, threading past gargoyles and ghouls where they stood motionless in the shadows. As long as he didn't enter their radius, they showed no interest in him. At one turning he found two gargoyles guarding a door. According to what he'd been told, that was Nicholas Andrew's practice chamber, with the storeroom somewhere nearby. Dyna edged close without crossing into their zone and noticed a door to the side, unguarded. He thought about it. Taudet had mentioned an alchemy laboratory.
He was still considering it when movement came from the far door. No time to think — he slipped into the alchemy room, eased the door to behind him, and left just a sliver of a gap to see through.
The far door opened. Evan came out, his training session finished, no thought in his head of an intruder.
But stepping into the corridor, he felt something off. A sensation, faint and sourceless, like eyes on his back. He noticed it, found nothing when he looked, and didn't pursue it. He assumed it was the product of spending too many days alone with his thoughts. He tightened his grip on the sword-cane without meaning to, swept his gaze along the passage — nothing — and moved on. In the alchemy room, Dyna stopped breathing entirely, especially when Evan's glance passed across the very door he was standing behind.
Evan turned away. Dyna's relief lasted about half a second before a new thought surfaced, one he almost didn't believe he was having: What if he saw something and is pretending he didn't? What is he planning?
He eased the door shut. Darkness complete. He wanted to look around the room, his hand drifting toward the fire-starter tucked against his chest — then he let it fall. The room had a sharp, complicated smell: a mixture of chemical vapors and medicinal astringency. He left it alone.
The corridor outside had light, the kind that came from magic lamps enclosed in glass. Evan, lich or not, apparently preferred not to live in the dark.
Evan went to his bedroom and shut the door. He didn't need sleep, but he had kept the habit of lying down — a few hours on the bed each night, thinking through the day. He'd developed it in his previous life out of necessity, flat on a hospital mattress with nothing to do but let his mind run. Over time the idle wandering had settled into something more deliberate: reviewing each day's events in detail. He lay back now and began to do exactly that.
In the alchemy room, Dyna waited in the dark for over an hour. Nothing stirred. The smell had stopped bothering him some time ago. When the corridor outside remained silent, he cracked the door and slipped back out.
He spent the remaining hours of the night moving through the castle. Most of it he was able to cover; a few areas were closed to him by gargoyle and ghoul sentinels, but those he noted and avoided. By the time the sky began to lighten, he had a thorough picture of the layout. He made his way to the main gate — thick oak, reinforced, with a crossbar a foot square on the inside — and studied it. Even a battering ram would struggle with that door. He thought it over, then worked his dagger slowly around the crossbar's housing, cutting most of the way through and leaving only a thin skin of wood intact. When the time came, it would give way at a push.
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Still not satisfied, he found a lamp and settled near it with a charcoal pencil, drawing out the castle's interior from memory. He marked the locations of every guardian, every passage, every room he'd identified, and added written notes on what he'd observed.
He folded the paper, produced a small bird from inside his coat — a blue-eyed sparrow, a first-tier magical beast — tied the paper to its leg, carried it up to the tower, and released it. The bird shot away like a bolt from a crossbow. One of the gargoyles opened its eyes, saw a bird, and closed them again.
Gargoyles, ghouls, skeletons — all of them were magical constructs with no real intelligence, only instinct. As long as nothing entered their designated range, they registered nothing.
Dyna allowed himself a small smile. The lich would never imagine that someone had spent the night inside his own castle. If things went according to plan, when the Fang Company attacked this afternoon he would emerge from behind at the right moment, and the outcome would be beyond question. He made his way down from the tower and headed for the servants' quarters — the obvious place to hide, the last place a lich would think to look.
The corridor turned ahead, the servants' rooms just around the bend.
Dyna stopped.
Someone was standing in the passage in front of him. Black robes, deep cowl, entirely wrapped in shadow. A sword-cane held loosely in one hand.
The cold sweat came instantly. Dyna's right hand found the dagger. "You're the lich Nicholas Andrew," he said, voice gone rough. "How did you find me?"
Evan didn't answer.
He had found Dyna the way he found most things now — through the habit of lying down each night and replaying the day. He had felt those eyes on him in the corridor, dismissed it, gone to bed, and then turned it over again in the quiet. A person? The doors and windows were intact. The castle walls were high and guarded. Logically, no one should have been able to get in.
But this wasn't Earth, and the moment he reminded himself of that, he felt a chill that had nothing to do with his body temperature. He reached for the gargoyles.
The constructs weren't his — they had been here long before him, built by whatever necromancer had owned the castle originally. Evan had simply reactivated them when he arrived, supplying a trickle of magical energy each day to keep them from going inert. They had limited memory, not much longer than a day or two for the lower-ranked ones, though the stronger constructs could retain impressions for up to ten days. Those impressions came to Evan as images when he chose to access them, the world seen through their eyes.
He went through the memories quickly. Mostly darkness, mostly nothing. Then the tower — a shadow, a flicker, a gargoyle rousing and circling and finding nothing. Whoever had come in was skilled enough to slip past a gargoyle's awareness, which wasn't designed to track something that careful. But Evan's review was more thorough than a gargoyle's instincts. He found the trace — the faintest impression of a shape against the stone — and that was enough.
Then he saw the blue-eyed sparrow fly from the tower.
The message was already gone. But the person who sent it was still inside.
He sat up. Dawn was coming. He murmured a quiet incantation, made the gesture, and a faint eye-shaped form appeared above his head and faded immediately into the air — Wraith Eye. He sent it drifting through every room in the castle.
The images came back one by one. The Wraith Eye carried the faint trace of undead energy — detectable, if you knew what to look for, but Dyna had no such knowledge. The thief was moving through the corridors without bothering to blur his outline, comfortable now, heading for the servants' quarters as though he'd done it a hundred times.
Evan put on his cowl — he kept it off when alone in the castle, put it on whenever he might be seen; he had no interest in showing anyone what a lich actually looked like underneath — and went to meet him.
He studied Dyna as the man stood there. Mid-twenties, dusty yellow hair, not particularly large, with quick and restless eyes. Evan cleared his throat softly and started to speak.
Dyna had been waiting for exactly this. The moment Evan made a sound, the thief's body dissolved into a smear of motion — dagger coming up in a clean arc straight for Evan's throat.
Evan's body moved on its own. Ten thousand repetitions had made the draw-and-thrust as automatic as breathing; his mind hadn't finished registering the attack before his hand had already answered it. The blade went out.
Dyna's movement stopped.
He looked at Evan with something past disbelief. The sword had gone through his throat. His dagger was still two feet from its target.
He folded to the ground. He had not expected this — to be killed by a lich with a rapier, rather than by any of the death magic a lich was supposed to use.
In the forest beyond the castle walls, a blue-eyed sparrow arrowed through the trees toward a distant camp.