Chapter 7: Another Lich
"Get down!" Shazzo's voice cracked. He had seen artillery before — not in the clash between Earl Edward and Count Laine, but in the war between Norma and the Kingdom of Oboli — and he knew what it could do. At this range, in this corridor, his stomach dropped.
The cannon fired.
Shot spread across the confined space like a sudden rainstorm, covering every inch of the passage. None of them had time to react. Colin and Dyna took the full force of it. Dyna was already a walking corpse and was simply destroyed, blown apart beyond recognition. Colin's body was riddled through, his head reduced to ruin, blood and matter thrown across the walls. He was dead before he could fall.
One shot. Three dead — Colin, Devon, and Joanna. Joanna had been between Shazzo and the blast; her body had shielded him from the worst of it, but he went down with serious wounds, his life hanging by a thread. Boniface had heard Shazzo's warning and instinctively begun to cast, but the earthen wall he raised came up a heartbeat too late. The shot was already on him before the wall had any height. He'd had no chance to cover the others, and several pellets had found him as well. The cannon hadn't been loaded with a single iron ball — Evan had packed it with as much shot as it would hold — and Boniface felt his life draining out through the wounds.
His fury was cold and complete. A lich, using a cannon. Too cowardly to meet them on even terms, setting a trap like this to take them all at once.
He crouched, hauled Shazzo across his back, and turned to run. He had barely straightened before a voice came from somewhere in the dark, low and unhurried:
"Do you think you can run?"
The corridor went dark. Something like night fell over the space — a night that moved and swarmed, countless bat-like shapes pouring out of it from all directions. Hell's Projection.
"Go!" Shazzo summoned the last of his strength, wrenched himself free from Boniface's grip, and shoved him backward. His greatsword blazed and he threw himself at the mass of shapes descending on them. "Get out — avenge us!"
The creatures closed over him. In a moment he was gone.
Boniface shouted once, then understood: if he died here too, all of it meant nothing. He tore a magical scroll from inside his coat and ripped it open, drove his fingers into one of his wounds to keep the pain sharp and his mind clear, and as the scroll's light burst outward he felt speed flood through him. He ran. The corridor, the gate, the open ground beyond — he was through before the Hell's Projection could spread to catch him, and he didn't stop.
Behind him the scroll's magic discharged across the ground, ice spreading in sheets and building into a wall. But the wall barely formed before something pushed against it from the other side — the Hell's Projection expanding outward, the ice dissolving under its pressure, bats spilling through the gaps along with shapes of white bone, skeletal animals among them, the darkness rolling out across the ground until it covered everything within a li of the castle and stopped, skeletons moving at its edges in slow patrol.
Evan had not given a moment's thought to this world's customs of honorable combat. He had no interest in knight-spirit or fair play. What he cared about was surviving. He could acknowledge that Shazzo's people had been capable — in other circumstances they might have been formidable — but he had held the advantage from the first moment and used it cleanly. The Lich's Howl to open, amplified by the enclosed passage. Dyna's reanimated corpse to break their formation and create one instant of hesitation. The cannon for the instant that followed. Hell's Projection to finish the job and secure the castle's surroundings for the months ahead — the projection would hold for two to three months, and within it a lich moved freely, even gained a measure of additional strength. He had prepared it for the Holy Inquisition. It would serve that purpose when the time came.
He looked at the corridor. The walls were pocked and gouged from the shot. The bodies on the ground were barely recognizable. Joanna's eyes were open, her expression fixed in the last thing she'd seen. The others were in no better state. Shazzo was bones. From their equipment, they had been a mercenary company.
Boniface had gotten out. Fast — fast enough that the Hell's Projection hadn't caught him, and by the time Evan thought to pursue he was already out of sight. Evan considered it for a moment, then went after him anyway.
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It was his first time outside the castle since arriving in this world. Within the Hell's Projection his power ran a little hotter, a little stronger. Beyond its edge the open air felt different — quieter, less charged. He cast around and realized he could smell the man. Not in a vague sense. He had a clear scent trail, sharp enough to form something like an image in his mind: Boniface, moving fast, stumbling, fleeing into the trees. Evan didn't know whether this was a lich's ability or something else. His memory of Nicholas Andrew's knowledge contained nothing about it. He followed regardless, like a hound on a line.
An hour of tracking brought him to a camp. He smelled death before he saw the body. He approached and stopped.
The corpse had been drained — life force drawn out of it, the face sunken and locked in terror. It had shrunk in on itself, but Evan recognized him. Taudet.
He stood there for a moment. Taudet had left with Allen. How had he ended up here, with a mercenary company? Whether he'd come to them willingly or been found by them, Evan couldn't say. He was dead now either way. Evan looked at him for another moment, then murmured an incantation. The ground opened, black smoke rising from the crack, and the earth took the body down.
He looked up. The sun had gone behind heavy cloud. The air had weight to it.
He followed the trail to a river. At the bank, the scent dissolved — Boniface had crossed — and as Evan considered going after him, rain began to fall. Light at first, then hard. The trail was gone. He turned back. The man had been gravely wounded; he wouldn't last long.
Boniface moved through the rain with nothing left but hatred. He didn't stop to examine the logic of it — he and the lich had had no quarrel before today, and the Fang Company had gone looking for trouble and found it. But the others were dead and he alone had survived, and his body was telling him clearly that he wouldn't survive much longer. He had drained Taudet to buy himself time, and the sight of the man's terror at the end had produced in him something ugly and satisfying that he didn't examine too closely. He kept moving.
He was a necromancer. In this world, necromancers were looked down on but not hunted — most mages nominally acknowledged the Creationist Church these days, and the Church had found ways to accommodate them, classifying magic itself as a gift from the Maker, and mages who came to the faith as straying lambs returning to the fold. The ancient nature-gods of the old religions had been absorbed and reinterpreted, elevated from primitive worship into something approaching philosophy — the Maker as the single ultimate principle, the source and terminus of all things, higher than any other deity, which became merely an angel in the new ordering. A necromancer could live with that, more or less.
But a lich was different. A lich could not negotiate with the Church.
He found the reasoning he needed without much effort. He couldn't die — not before he'd had his revenge. The path was the same one Nicholas Andrew had taken. He would transform. He had the knowledge; he was a necromancer, and the process was familiar to him in theory. What he didn't have was a soul vessel, and he had no time to prepare one. He was going to die.
He entered the mountain. The rain was easing slightly. He found the mouth of a cave almost hidden by vines and pushed through them into the dark.
Inside, his eyes adjusted — and stopped.
An altar. A statue of Death God Hadir. A soul vessel on the altar's surface, and before it the white bones of whoever had used this place last.
The Maker provides. Boniface nearly laughed. He crossed to the altar with shaking hands, checked everything carefully, drew items from his storage ring and arranged them as offerings, examined the magical array from every angle. It was intact. All of it was intact.
He knelt on the array before the altar and began to chant, his voice rising and falling in the ritual cadence. Black fog rose around him. The sound changed — something in it that wasn't quite human, a resonance like mourning. The fog thickened, shaped itself, became a figure whose face was contorted with pain, and the dark energy flowing from Boniface's body poured steadily into that shape. His wounds were already contracting as the vital energy left him. He grew thin. Thinner.
Then he cried out once — and the soul vessel blazed black, and everything went still. Only thunder from outside, rolling in the distance. The dark energy collapsed inward all at once and poured into the soul vessel.
The transformation was complete.
The rain slowed. Evening had come. He moved his new body experimentally. He felt almost nothing — flesh that didn't quite feel like his own, a cold that surrounded him on all sides. He put the soul vessel away.
Now he understood. A lich and a necromancer were separated by more than degree. A lich was entirely of the undead — the other elements were gone, inaccessible, and in their place death magic ran at a purity and volume no living necromancer could approach. He had underestimated liches his entire life, he realized. He would not make that mistake again.
He sat with the thought for a moment. The Fang Company had gone after a lich. He saw now exactly how wrong that had been. He was a lich himself now, and a newly made one at that — low-ranked, unsteady. He didn't know what rank Nicholas Andrew had reached, but probably not much higher than his own. He considered the question that had been forming since the transformation finished.
Did he still want revenge?