Chapter 6: The Attack
Shazzo and the others waited with growing impatience. They trusted Dyna — he was an exceptional thief, and he had come back from worse assignments than this without a scratch. As the hours stretched on, a blue-eyed sparrow shot into the camp and landed on Joanna's arm. She took the folded paper from its leg, read it carefully, and passed it to Shazzo.
"Dyna's fine. He's hiding inside the castle. This map shows the guard positions — gargoyles and ghouls at all the key points, as you'd expect from a lich. He's asking us to attack from the front while he comes up from behind."
"Dyna's done well." Shazzo handed the paper to Devon Gale. "Devon — how do you see the approach?"
Devon hadn't finished reading before Colin cut in. "What's there to think about? We go straight at him. We've been sitting here long enough. He's one lich, we're six people, Boniface outranks him — let's just roll over him."
"Colin." Shazzo's tone sharpened.
"I'm just saying what's true," Colin muttered.
Joanna gave him a flat look. "No one will think you're dead if you stay quiet. We listen to the captain."
"Actually, Colin isn't wrong," Devon said, showing his teeth in a brief smile. "We have six people, and our strength exceeds the lich's. Dyna is already inside. Sometimes the straightforward approach is the right one — when you hold the advantage, meet the enemy head-on. Save the schemes for when the odds are against you."
Shazzo nodded. "Agreed."
"That said, we should pick our timing. Midday — when the sun is at its peak. It won't harm a lich directly, but it does limit them."
Colin frowned. "Won't it limit Boniface just as much?"
"Not particularly," Boniface said. "My primary work is necromancy, but I have solid grounding in water and earth as well. It won't be a problem."
"Then it's settled," Shazzo said. "We move to the castle gate before noon and launch the moment the sun hits its height. Dyna's already dealt with the door." The others allowed themselves small smiles. Taudet, whose leg had mostly healed, smiled with them.
Evan killed Dyna with a single thrust, which was not what he had intended. He hadn't decided to kill him — his hand had simply acted, the motion so deeply ingrained by days of repetition that it had moved without thought, and when his mind caught up the blade was already in the man's throat. He stood there watching Dyna's eyes go wide with disbelief, listening to the wet sound from his throat, and watched him fall.
For a moment Evan was as stunned as the man he'd killed. He felt something almost like nausea. Earth's laws were still somewhere in his subconscious, and his mind produced the absurd thought: I just killed someone. That's a capital offense.
The thought cleared quickly. This wasn't Earth, and there was no one here to hold him to account. The nausea was psychological — a lich's body had nothing to vomit up even if it wanted to. He let out a slow breath and found a steadiness behind it. He had crossed a line. He wasn't entirely sure what he felt about that, but the guilt was less than he might have expected. There was some regret. Not much more than that.
He looked at the body for a moment, then turned his attention to the practical question: who had sent this man, and were there others? The Holy Inquisition seemed too fast. He studied the body — the dark fitted clothing, the thief's tools, the dagger — and shook his head. Not an Inquisitor. The Holy Inquisition didn't send scouts in alone. This was a thief, which meant someone else entirely.
He found little on the body beyond the dagger. Nothing that identified the man. Evan was about seventy percent certain he wasn't dealing with the Holy Inquisition.
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He looked at the corpse and had a thought. He made a gesture, murmured the words, and the body stood up, opened the door to the servants' quarters, and walked inside.
Evan didn't follow. He was thinking about what had just happened — the thrust, the instinctive response that had saved him. The training was working, and something about killing the man had clarified things in his mind, though he couldn't have articulated exactly what. He didn't know it, but he had stumbled into something — what some would call single-minded focus, the state where repetition stops being mechanical and the body begins to learn. It was still early. But it had begun.
He put the thought aside and considered the more immediate problem. The thief had been inside the castle for most of the night. Evan only knew about him because of the habit of reviewing his day; without that, the man would have moved freely until he chose to act. Whatever he'd been doing in those hours, he hadn't done nothing. The blue-eyed sparrow was already gone, which meant information had been sent.
Evan went up to the tower and checked for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing obvious. He moved through the castle methodically, working out in his mind where an enemy would enter if they were coming from outside. The walls were high, the roof guarded — what the thief had managed required significant skill and wouldn't be easy to repeat. The main gate was the obvious route. Had the thief prepared something there?
He went to the gate. It was still closed. He pressed against it, testing — and heard a faint crack of stressed wood. He stopped. He had put real force behind it, and the gate was thick, the crossbar heavy. A cracking sound from one test push was wrong.
He looked more carefully and drew a sharp breath. The bar had been nearly cut through, leaving only a thin skin of wood. The gate could be forced with a single hard shove.
He reached for the bar — and stopped himself.
Better to let them in than keep them out.
A cold smile crossed his face.
Shazzo brought four people to the castle gate just before noon, leaving Taudet at camp. They used the trees for cover, moving carefully through the sparse growth until they were close, keeping low and quiet.
As the sun climbed toward midday they broke from cover and crossed the remaining ground to the gate. Joanna drew her bow, an armor-piercing arrow already glowing white along its shaft — and at that moment the gargoyles on the roofline stirred. Stone shapes spread membranous wings and dropped.
The bowstring sang. The arrow punched through the first gargoyle in a flash of white light; black smoke poured from the impact and the thing shattered into gravel. Boniface's staff flared blue, and a volley of Ice Lances struck the second gargoyle mid-dive, encasing it in spreading frost that cracked under its own weight and brought the construct down in pieces. A third bowshot from Joanna took a third gargoyle out of the air.
"Don't mind the rest of them — Colin, the door!" Shazzo brought his greatsword up in a rising arc and swept it in a wide horizontal stroke overhead, beating back two gargoyles that were coming down on the group and buying space around the gate.
Colin raised a short axe, bellowed, and drove his shoulder into the wood. The gate blew open. The crossbar snapped in two.
"In — now!"
Boniface swept his staff through a quick incantation. A blue water-curtain rose behind them. A gargoyle plunged into it, the surface buckled inward, and the construct was flung back into the air. Under that cover the five of them poured through the gate, heaved it shut behind them, and stood in the corridor beyond.
"Stay tight," Shazzo said, his voice level. They formed a circle without being told — Colin and Devon back to back, Shazzo and Joanna the same, Boniface alone at the center but already gathering energy at his staff's tip.
Then a sound came from somewhere ahead. Low, not loud — but the air in the corridor rippled visibly, distortion spreading outward in waves.
"Lich's Howl!" Boniface shouted. His staff blazed blue and he threw up a water-curtain between them and the sound. The curtain shook violently. In the enclosed passage the sound waves reflected off the walls and built on themselves, and under the compounded pressure the curtain buckled and burst.
The water had absorbed most of the energy. The five of them went pale, one or two grunted, Devon tasted blood at the corner of his mouth. They were shaken but standing.
They still hadn't laid eyes on the lich. He'd opened with a Lich's Howl ambush, and it had almost worked. Several of them exchanged looks — this lich was more cunning than expected. But they weren't rattled. An ambush was just an ambush.
A figure came through a door behind them. Colin's axe was already moving — then it stopped.
"Dyna? I thought you were going for the lich."
Dyna didn't answer. The dagger in his hand came straight for Colin's throat.
"He's under the lich's magic!" Boniface shouted.
Before he'd finished the words, another door swung open. Behind it waited a bronze cannon, its dark barrel pointed down the corridor. A skeletal hand gripped a lit torch, already moving toward the fuse.