The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

"Name?" the fat man asked.

"Does it need to be given?"

"It doesn't have to be. But without a name, full payment is required upfront rather than a deposit, and you won't receive confirmation when the contract is fulfilled. If those terms work for you, we can proceed that way."

"They work for me." Evan described Baron Iden — location, rank, current circumstances. The fat man nodded pleasantly and named a price fifty percent above the standard rate for anonymous registration. Evan agreed without negotiating. The man behind the counter made a reasonable assumption about why someone would want anonymity when commissioning the death of a noble, and kept it to himself.

"Five thousand gold, then." Evan produced it from his storage ring. The fat man registered the transaction and explained how confirmation would be posted on the public notice board outside the office — a shipping notice, in code, phrased as cargo either delivered safely or lost to bandits on the road.

Evan thanked him and left.

On the wall beside the office door, a column of notices. Various shipments, various fates. He read a few and walked back out of the alley with the blood thrall, back toward the street.

At the alley's mouth he stopped.

A man had just come out of the church. The word that came to Evan's mind was blazing — the man's presence was so consolidated, so fully expressed, that even to Evan's perception it was like looking at a torch in a dark room. Church. One of their serious practitioners.

Evan drew his presence down to almost nothing and moved with the blood thrall on the far side of the street. The man from the church noticed the blood thrall without appearing to try. He said something quiet that Evan was just close enough to catch — someone who has sold their soul to the devil — and then turned his attention away. He had somewhere to be.

The blood thrall exhaled with the care of someone who had just narrowly avoided a situation.

Evan filed it — a Church practitioner in Kansas City, deliberately engaged with something, powerful enough that he could identify a blood thrall at a glance and choose not to act on it because it would have been a distraction. He mentioned it to Ferdinand when they returned, gave what description he could, and left Ferdinand with his concern.

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Outside, Evan and Tina took their horses and walked.

Tina went still beside him before he registered the new attention himself. "Someone's watching us," she said, not quite certain.

Evan wasn't surprised she'd felt it. He had already begun to revise his assessment of her. "Don't turn around. There's a glass door ahead — look at the reflection."

She looked. "The one leaning against the wall."

"That's him. Silver Hand, almost certainly. They're down one — they have two more attempts. He won't move yet. Too many people, too much light."

"Are you sure?"

"Professional killers don't work in daylight on busy streets. He'll wait for the right conditions." He kept walking. "Don't act differently."

They found an inn in the commercial district and took rooms. The man following them disappeared from view once they went inside, which Evan expected — he knew where they were staying now, and would come when the time suited him.

Tina drilled her sword forms that evening in the small space of her room, and Evan watched. Her progress was genuinely startling. The movements were clean, the weight transfer was already becoming natural. He set a simple alarm around her door and window before returning to his own room.

Nothing happened that night. Evan sat through the dark hours and waited for someone who didn't come.

The next morning he checked the notice board. No new postings. He and Tina spent the morning walking the city, which he did partly for the information and partly to see if the Silver Hand's man would show himself. He didn't, which was mildly interesting.

When they returned to the inn, something had happened while they were out.

Soldiers in the courtyard. A stable hand was dead — found in the stall, apparently without a mark on him. No sign of violence, no disturbance, nothing taken. The constable had brought several men and asked a few questions and found nothing to act on.

The constable was clearly ready to call it a natural death and move on. In this world, Evan knew, the forensic machinery that existed was ecclesiastical rather than civic — a mage's death or a noble's death merited a priest and a memory-retrieval spell; a servant's death in a stable merited whatever the constable felt like writing down. The man had been a commoner. The case would close itself.

Evan looked at the body before they covered it. The face was bluish-grey. No damage to the clothing. The man hadn't been in any evident distress when he died — no struggle, no attempt to call for help.

He looked more carefully. The right hand. The middle finger. A mark almost invisible against the discoloration that had spread through the entire hand — a point of entry, very small, from something thin.

He thought about it.

The stable hand had no particular enemies. Nothing had been taken. There was no obvious motive for targeting this specific person.

"He was poisoned," Evan said quietly.

Tina looked up. "How? Without anyone seeing?"

"Not ingested. His fingertip was pricked. Something he touched." He was looking at the saddles hanging neatly on their racks across the stable. "Not him, specifically. He was incidental."

His eyes stayed on the saddles.

"The Silver Hand's man," he said. "I understand."