The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

The knight who investigated the scene was named Adolf, and he was thorough. He studied each body in turn, paying particular attention to the wounds, and reconstructed the event in his mind.

Five people, five single wounds, all in the throat. He was a seventh-tier knight — a genuine knight, not a squire or attendant, meaning he had developed a sword-aura, that external energy that could be channeled through a blade or released independently, placing him in a different category from the lower ranks below him. His perception had sharpened accordingly. He looked at the wounds closely: narrow, deep, made by a thrusting weapon. The angles varied significantly from wound to wound, though the target was always the same. A skilled practitioner of the thrust.

He built the sequence in his mind. A single figure, one strike per person, the blade moving like something with its own intention. The final man had clearly been in motion — turned to flee, or just completing a turn — and the body's orientation and the expression still readable on the swollen face told the same story: he hadn't understood what had happened to him.

Adolf sent men out to sweep the area. Half a day's searching recovered three horses. The other two were gone. He stood in thought for a while, then went to make his report.

Iden sat up straighter when Adolf came in. "What did you find?"

"A rapier," Adolf said, with the confidence of someone who had looked at enough wounds to be certain. "Five clean kills, one thrust each, all to the throat. No magical residue. On the weapon type alone, you'd call this a thief or a wandering adventurer, perhaps an assassin. But the precision and the consistency suggest a knight's level of training."

Iden was on his feet. "I don't care what level he has. I want his head. And that girl's."

He was breathing hard, his face dark. Adolf waited for him to finish.

"My lord — they have been gone for over two days and they had horses. We don't know their direction."

"That's what I pay you for. Find them. He can't have vanished. The girl will slow him down — there'll be traces."

"My lord," Adolf said, in the same flat tone, "they are already outside your lands."

That stopped him. A noble couldn't take armed men beyond his own territory without a formal summons — it was one of the rules that held the entire feudal system together. Unilateral military action in another lord's territory was a much more serious matter than a dead son and a missing girl.

He sat. Then stood again. "Get me the Silver Hand. Whatever it costs. And report this to the Count — I want pursuit from both directions."

The Silver Hand was a professional organization. Their clients didn't explain themselves and they didn't ask for explanations.

Tina's grief had begun to recede over the days of travel, replaced gradually by the simple insistent interest of a young person seeing the world for the first time. She had never left her village before. She would probably never have left it at all if not for what had happened. Everything she encountered was new: the roads, the towns, the way people lived in places with more than a dozen households. She had gone from sitting silent and large-eyed to exclaiming at things, which was an improvement in Evan's estimation.

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The riding surprised him most. Within the first day she had stopped fighting the horse's movement and started moving with it, and within the second something had happened that he hadn't seen coming — a kind of natural integration, her body following the horse's rhythm the way water follows a slope. It wasn't that she was good for a beginner. She was good, full stop. Her muscles understood the horse in a way that most riders spent years learning to approximate. If she had been a boy, Evan thought, she would have been the kind of raw material that serious knights' schools fought over.

He was not a knight, but he had learned enough to recognize the quality.

Tina had accepted her position in their small group with clarity and without complaint. She deferred to him as a servant would, which he didn't try to correct — the world was what it was, and she understood her position in it better than any reassurance from him would change. She was also, as a personal attendant, somewhat less competent than she was as a rider, but she was thirteen and learning.

She called out with delight when a larger town appeared ahead of them. Evan reined up. "We'll eat here and rest. Then we continue."

They rode in at a walk, handed the horses to the stable-boy at the inn's door, and went inside. Tina went ahead to the counter and placed their order with complete composure, then turned to him: "My lord — does that suit you?"

"It's fine."

The room had gone a little quieter when Evan entered. He kept his cowl up inside the way he kept it up everywhere — the body underneath was not something he could explain to strangers, and the practice had become automatic. The quiet lasted only a moment before the noise resumed. Their food arrived quickly, and the serving girl departed just as quickly, though she couldn't have said why she felt the need to move away.

Tina had grown accustomed to the ambient unease that followed him. She came from a life already weighted with difficulty, and the particular character of Evan's presence was simply another thing she had learned to move around.

He ate mechanically — bread, barley wine, the motions of a living person. He didn't need it. He did it anyway.

A pair of eyes had found him from across the room. He registered the attention as hostility before he understood the source, and traced it to a man who looked ordinary enough at a glance — young, clean-featured, watching with a look that moved away when Evan noticed it. But Evan had seen enough by then. The hands: large, calloused across the palm and the base of the fingers, but with long, controlled fingers, and a stillness that hands maintain when their owner is accustomed to having a weapon in them. A fighter of some kind, and one with genuine training behind them.

He wasn't Church. Evan was certain of that much. Which made the hostility interesting. He didn't know the man and had no obvious reason to have offended him.

"Tina."

"My lord." She had gone still herself, just slightly.

"Something's bothering you."

"It feels like something bad is about to happen," she said.

He looked at her more carefully. He had checked her for magical aptitude and found nothing — no detectable affinity with any element. But she had sensed the hostility before he'd identified its source, and she'd sensed it without having the framework to name what she was feeling.

"Would you like to learn to fight?"

The words came out before she processed them, and then she was embarrassed by her own speed: "Yes. Can I? Can you teach me?"

"I can give you the basics. Eventually you'd need a proper teacher." He paused. "Though you don't need to worry about that yet."

Tina had her own interpretation of what he meant — she was going to become a burden to him, and this was his way of thinking about the future. She didn't say this. She said: "Anywhere you teach me is fine."

Evan hadn't considered that she might be drawing conclusions like this. He was thinking about swords.

"After we eat, we'll find a blacksmith. You're lean and your arms aren't strong yet — a rapier is too limited and a greatsword is wrong for your build. A saber would suit you better. It thrusts and cuts both, which fits where you are."

Tina nodded, not certain what distinguished one from another, but willing to find out.

They finished and left.