Chapter 28 : The Book of the Undead
The spirit sea opened and Evan came back to himself inside it.
The space his awareness now occupied was vast and dark, elemental energy moving through it like ink dispersing in still water. Within the first moments, the disturbance radiated outward and briefly disturbed the elemental balance within half a cubit of his body before settling. He hadn't done anything to cause this. It had simply happened.
Nicholas Andrew's memory was clear on one point: after comprehending elemental will, a mage might spend a long time before the spirit sea opened — the two events were distinct, separated by months or years of consolidation. Evan's had opened in the same moment. He turned this over briefly, found no answer, and set it aside. He was an Arcanist now. Whatever the mechanism, that much was clear. He was satisfied.
He noticed something else in the aftermath: the circulation in his organs, which had been running its quiet unchanging course since the first night, had shifted. Each cycle now left a trace — too small to describe as an amount, really more like the idea of a trace — that seemed to be absorbed into his bones. With the spirit sea open and his internal awareness newly sharpened, he could follow this process for the first time. He filed the observation away.
He looked back at the Book of the Undead. It had unfolded fully — not a bound codex but an accordion-fold manuscript, spread open in the air before him, revealing every page at once. There were no spells inside. What was there was a sustained examination of the relationship between death and life as reciprocal processes: each requiring the other to be intelligible, neither final.
The philosophy differed from what he'd experienced in his vision, which made sense once he thought about it. The book had been a catalyst. What he'd seen had been his own mind — two worlds of knowledge running together, the physics he'd absorbed through a school education filtered through the conceptual vocabulary of this world's magic, the result belonging to neither tradition entirely. The book had opened a door. What he'd found on the other side was his own.
On a different level of the tower, Raphael had seen the same frontispiece and reached his conclusion before he'd finished reading it. He didn't recognize the Gonishu script, but the meaning came anyway — the book had been written with a Tongues enchantment embedded in its making, which brought words directly into understanding rather than through the eye. He didn't stop to reflect on this. He had his lance raised before the recognition finished forming.
The book didn't break. The strike passed through it as though through a reflection, and then the space around him filled with faces — everyone he had ever killed, pressing toward him with the silent insistence of the dead.
He looked at them without flinching. He had never been afraid of the dead. Alive they hadn't frightened him; he was certainly not going to let them disturb him after the fact. He held the center of his conviction, and the faces didn't cross the distance.
He looked back at the book. It had opened completely. The text was in him already — not read so much as absorbed, the words placed directly into some layer deeper than memory. He read them again anyway:
Death is the destination of all things and the origin of all things. From the silence of death our world was born. In the end our world will return to eternal death...
The lance came up again. Holy light blazed from him with an urgency that was, for the first time in Raphael's memory, something close to panic. The light pressed against the words and couldn't move them. The book dissolved on its own — vanished, as though it had completed whatever it came to do.
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Raphael dismounted and knelt. His hands formed the gesture of prayer, fingers laced together, and he spoke into the silence of the tower room, seeking absolution in the only way he knew how, the holy light rising from him again, quieter this time, self-directed.
Shur did not pray. Shur was thinking. Something in the dragon's eyes had shifted. The deep red that normally characterized its presence had dimmed slightly.
Sophia's hands were trembling when she reached for the book. It opened for her, and she read the frontispiece, and something in her face went through bewilderment and out the other side into something she didn't have a name for.
Her hand passed through the book. It was there and it was not there.
The book spread open before her eyes. She wasn't reading it — or rather, she was, but not through the motion of reading, the words entering her through some other channel while her eyes remained unfocused. Around her, a mist of blood rose slowly and began to darken. Her skin aged — visibly, rapidly, wrinkles forming across her face and hands as decades compressed into moments. The blood mist grew denser and turned black-red. She was entirely enclosed in it.
Then the flow reversed.
The mist poured back into her body all at once, and she grew younger as it entered — past her original age, past what she had been, arriving somewhere two years younger than she started. Her skin settled with a quality she'd never seen in herself before: translucent in a particular way, like amber held up to light.
She came back. She had been somewhere — she felt the shape of an experience she could no longer access in memory, something to do with a long passage through alternating states. In her chest, where no elemental core had been before, she found one: dark red in color, formed in the heart rather than any of the conventional locations. The Blood Clan's relationship to elemental energy was embodied differently from a mage's, bound into the flesh rather than abstracted. This was neither. She didn't understand it, and attributed it to the book.
She reached for the book again. Her hand passed through it again. It faded and was gone.
She looked up. A staircase had appeared from nowhere, ascending into the upper air as though the ceiling hadn't been there a moment ago. She climbed it, and the steps vanished behind her as she went.
The same staircase appeared for Evan. And for Raphael.
Sophia arrived at the top first. The floor of the tower's highest level was deep blue — lapis lazuli, it looked like — and large, roughly half a li across. On the southeast and southwest sides of the room, two other stairways opened at floor level. She looked outward through walls that were opaque from outside but transparent from within, and could see the landscape of the demi-plane and, below, her father and the rest of the Windsor clan at a distance from the still-flowing lava. They couldn't see her.
She moved toward the outer surface and stopped. Some kind of barrier held her in. She settled to wait.
She knew who was coming. Evan, who had opened the demi-plane and then vanished from her awareness inside the tower. And the other one — she did not want to think about the other one. Raphael, who had fought her father to mutual ruin. If it was him, trapped here with her in this room with whatever gains she'd made from the book, she had no confidence in the outcome.
Movement from the stairways. Almost simultaneously, two figures emerged — Evan from the southwest, Raphael from the southeast, on the back of Shur.
Both of them looked at the room, saw each other, and the killing intent surfaced in both of them at once, visible and undisguised.
Evan's calculation was immediate: Raphael was injured, his power still reduced from the fight with Windsor. If he left this place without resolving the situation, the Church's most dangerous operative now knew his approximate nature and location. He had just opened his spirit sea. This was the best possible moment, and he was not going to waste it.
Raphael's was just as direct: a lich was an abomination. He didn't need any further justification.
Raphael glanced sideways and saw Sophia. He made a quick assessment: female vampire, unknown strength, probably weaker than the lich. He could take the easier target first.
He reached for Shur and mounted. The dragon raised its head and roared.
Evan saw Sophia at the same moment and felt a small, genuine relief. He turned to her and made a slight bow.
"Sophia. Shall we deal with this Church gentleman together?"