Chapter 022: The Ancient Castle
"After this job we're re-equipping and heading to the Borbert mountain country. Someone up there hired us to look into an old castle — nobody knows its history anymore. There's apparently been a vampire problem recently. We're going to investigate."
Evan knew the mountains. He hadn't heard about a vampire. They weren't common — some people classed them as a phantasmal species, others as a longevity species.
"Doesn't that frighten you?"
"What can you do. Frightened or not, you still have to eat. Every mercenary ties their head to their belt and goes out. Different for people like you, of course — you get to talk to the nobility." Arnold said it without resentment, more wistful than bitter.
Evan drained his cup, flagged the wine seller down, and put a gold coin on the table. "Another for me and keep filling my friend's cup. Keep the change." He said it easily. A cup of barley wine cost a few copper pieces.
Arnold drank with the enthusiasm of a man who has just had someone else's gold appear in front of him, and Evan drew him out about the Borbert mountains and the castle. He had heard something, back in the castle's wine-heated gossip, about philosopher's stones and old ruins, and he was curious whether there was anything real behind it. Arnold, with several cups in him now, poured out everything he knew and half of what he'd only heard from someone else's someone else.
By the end Arnold was beyond coherent conversation. Evan waved over a soldier, had the man helped back to his bedroll, and sat alone in the cooling air and thought.
The Borbert mountains lay to the west, but the castle Arnold had described was somewhat to the north of the direct route — a deviation of a hundred or two hundred li, not crippling. He knew the place, in the way he knew many things he hadn't personally experienced: Nicholas Andrew had gone there once, more than ten years ago. No vampires then. The castle had been decrepit and apparently empty.
Curiosity was one reason to go. The rumor of philosopher's stones was another. And for a vampire to be dangerous, it needed a living victim — a lich was something else entirely. The overlap between what vampires fed on and what a lich was made the encounter less threatening than it would be for a normal person.
He decided to go.
The next morning he said his farewells. Franklin hadn't expected him to leave so soon; Becky and Raymond made the arguments he thought would work. None of them did. Franklin accepted it, pressed the better part of his available coin — just over ten thousand gold pieces, with the ransoms still incoming — into Evan's hands without making a ceremony of it.
Evan took it without false modesty.
"After I'm gone, be careful," he said. "You have your title now. But the peace negotiations between Laine and Edward — the Grand Duke's mediators and the Church's envoys are already on the road, a few days out at most. Edward will push hard before they arrive. Don't try to distinguish yourself. Survive the next week without a disaster and you've done enough."
Franklin asked where he was going. Evan gave the answer about roads and books that committed him to nothing, and Franklin accepted it. Then Franklin paused: "If your road takes you through Waltersdorf, I have an elder there — Leonardo, he's Becky's teacher. A mage and an alchemist. You'd be welcome at his house. Let me write you a letter."
Evan accepted the letter and the sealed introduction, put it in his storage ring, and rode west toward the Borbert mountains.
He didn't notice, as he left the town's edge, that he passed Robin's people coming in the opposite direction. Cecilia said: "Robin, we should head back. We've been out for months. We delivered the mortar to Earl Edward. Why are we still involved in Liya's internal affairs?"
"We weren't involved. We sold a cannon to one of the parties. Whatever happened after that had nothing to do with us." Robin's tone suggested there was more he wasn't saying.
"What about my student?" Andrea said. "He helped that Franklin boy do something impressive, from what I heard."
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"Don't start," Cecilia said. "I told you not to come on this trip."
"He came to me, Robin. Tell her."
Robin laughed. "If I'd known he had that in him, I'd have recruited him instead of letting him walk away to help that boy. Wasted talent."
"Then let's go back and get him!" Andrea said.
"Leave it. We're done here. Laine and Edward have been enemies for years — Liya can only defend itself, it won't expand without cause. The Taemir eastern border is stable. The only loose ends are the Fang Company, which seems to have vanished into the forest, and Nicholas Andrew, who offended the Holy Eton Curia and also seems to have disappeared."
They didn't know Evan had already gone.
The Borbert mountains ran roughly north to south with a slight eastern lean, and the final reaches of the Liya Demon Forest faded against their foothills. In the time of Emperor Kehwa the region had been home to the peoples he called barbarians; fifteen hundred years had passed since his campaign of treachery and victory, and their descendants had mostly been absorbed into the civilization that followed. The castle at the mountain's heart had no entry in any history Evan had found in Nicholas Andrew's memory — it was simply there, standing on a shelf of rock, its age unknown. Tradition held it was from the barbarian period, but tradition also held that it had never been built by anyone in particular, which was not very useful.
Below the castle was the site of the old battle. This was where Kehwa had invited the barbarian leaders to celebrate a treaty, and on the third day had killed them all. Their shaman's dying curse — directed at Kehwa personally, and somewhat validated by Kehwa's later assassination in Holy Eton at the height of his power — had reputedly left the ground wrong in ways that persisted. Alternatively, the magical battle between Kehwa's mages and the barbarian spirit-callers had destabilized local space in ways that still hadn't settled. Either way, various practitioners had investigated over the years and none had reached a definitive conclusion.
Evan arrived at dusk. He stood on a ridge and watched the sky go orange and then dark behind the western peaks, with the thin crescent of a waning moon already up, pale and unhelpful. Across a gap between peaks stood the castle. Centuries of weathering had done their work on the stone, but it had not fallen. Climbing vines traced lines up portions of the wall. The whole structure sat on bare rock, which probably explained its survival — rock doesn't shift the way soil does.
The gap between his ridge and the castle looked close and was not. And the vegetation on the slopes was wrong. Normal plants don't grow in rock faces.
The darkness settled. In the thin moonlight, Evan activated his infrared sight — and saw the mountainside bloom. Flowers had appeared, fire-red in the thermal spectrum, emerging as though the darkness had produced them. Then the castle exhaled: a mass of Hell's bats poured from the upper windows, hundreds of them, each pair of eyes carrying a faint green light. Not genuine vision — the light was a disorienting pulse, a mental effect, not illumination. The bats navigated by echo as normal bats did.
They spread across the mountainside and descended toward the flowers. Evan watched. Some of the bats settled to feed at the blooms, working with obvious pleasure. Others encountered flowers that had been patient, and those flowers unfolded differently — snapping shut around the bats with a sound he could hear from across the gap, a wet and rhythmic chewing that made his skin attempt to crawl.
The feeding bats seemed entirely unaware of their companions' fate. The ones that had drunk their fill drifted upward again, languid and disoriented, clearly affected by whatever they'd consumed.
Evan came down off his ridge and started up the other slope.
Green flashes moved through the dark as the bats continued their circuit overhead. At this level of mental interference, the effect was negligible — he was a lich, and the architecture of his mind didn't respond to the same pressures that made the light dangerous to the living. For anyone else, the ascent would have been considerably more unpleasant.
The vegetation activated as he approached, tendrils and branches moving with the directed intention of things that ate. He let them come close. Then he produced the bone staff from his coat — the white staff he had kept hidden since leaving the castle, the one that would mark him immediately as what he was — and murmured a short incantation.
Terror Aura expanded around him.
The name overstated what it was. There was no visible barrier. But anything living that entered the space within a few cubits of him would find the deepest part of its instincts producing a terror without origin or object, a conviction that it was in the presence of something it could not survive. Plants, as it turned out, were not exempt. A vine reaching for his ankle reversed direction so suddenly it nearly uprooted itself. A flower at the path's edge did uproot itself and moved away from him at a pace that flowers should not be able to manage.
Evan watched a flower flee and had the peculiar sense that the vegetation on this mountain was not quite what it appeared to be. The Terror Aura would last long enough for his purposes.
He climbed, staff in hand, toward the dark mass of the castle on its shelf of rock. A shadow dropped from the air above him — large, fast, coming in from above. The moment it entered the Terror Aura's range it slowed, and a deep purple radiance burst from it as its own defensive properties activated.
Evan looked up. His staff came level.
"Kavah broshya — Soul Drain!"