The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

Evan drove the thrust at Shawn. The man's head was already swimming — the human body only carries so much blood, and Shawn's was leaving it faster than any training could compensate for, burning as it went in that peculiar pale-green flame. His attention slipped for one fraction of a second. In a fight between people of this caliber, that fraction was the entire margin. When he caught it, Evan had already pulled back, and Shawn's throat was open.

Shawn went down fighting against it. The bishop saw the blood spray even as the two figures crossed, understood what it meant, and began to cast. Too late — Evan was already moving backward and the column of holy light hit the space where he'd been standing.

"You dare kill servants of the Maker, heretic?" Bishop Gankhuf's voice had gone raw.

"I already killed them. As for servants of the Maker — you're parasites who use the Maker's name, nothing more. The peasants you tax have more genuine faith than you do." Evan kept his voice steady. He was saying more than he strictly needed to, but the New Church had been making the same arguments for a generation and the bishop had no good answer to them.

"You quote the new heresy at me?"

"I quote what's accurate. The Maker watches over us all, your lordship — even those you've decided he doesn't."

Gankhuf stopped arguing. He began to sing.

Sacred light came down from somewhere above the clouds, dense and directed, carrying a pressure that Evan felt before it arrived. He went forward instead of back — toward the bishop, not away from the incoming light. His attributes were wrong for absorbing this kind of hit. The only answer was to not be where it landed.

He moved fast enough. The light struck behind him and left a crater. He was already at Gankhuf's throat.

The bishop split.

Two identical figures, one to each side, appearing simultaneously from the same point. Evan's thrust went through air. Both figures smiled.

He felt it coming before he understood what it was and went backward hard. The two figures merged. Wings of light unfurled from Gankhuf's back — white feathers that looked real, not like illusions, and the holy light that rolled from them wasn't directional. It spread in every direction at once, a tide of it.

Evan retreated but the edge of it caught him.

The sensation was immediate and severe. Holy light and undead energy were not merely opposed elements — the Creationist Church had spent eighteen centuries specifically developing their sacred techniques against creatures of the dark. The burning started at the surface and went inward. Evan felt his body beginning to unmake itself, a creeping dissolution working inward from his skin.

Then the nameless technique surged.

He had felt it accelerate before, in moments of crisis, always beyond his deliberate control. Now it ran at a speed and intensity he hadn't known it possessed, a cold clarity moving through his organs that was nothing like the slow steady circulation he'd come to take for granted. The dissolution stopped. The tissue that had been going wrong reversed. The burning sensation ended and the black smoke that had been rising from him dissipated.

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Evan stepped clear as the holy light contracted back toward Gankhuf.

The bishop was hovering, wings fully extended, looking at Evan with open confusion. He had identified him as a lich — but liches were destroyed by holy light, and this one was standing unharmed. He began to recalculate what he was actually fighting.

Evan filed away the lesson: next time, full effort from the first moment. The only reason he was still present was a technique he didn't fully understand and couldn't control. That wasn't a reliable margin.

Black smoke coalesced in his hand and hardened into the shape of a spear — black-bright along its length, the head darker than the shaft, the weight and balance of something that meant business. Spear of Hadir. He threw it.

"The Spear of Hadir — you're a death magic Arcanist?" Gankhuf caught himself and redirected, holy light gathering into a focused beam to intercept. The beam and the spear met between them. The world went still for the span of a breath and then discharged. Everything in a wide radius scattered outward — dead leaves, loose soil, anything not rooted.

Gankhuf was blown back fifty cubits. He came down with his holy light re-establishing around him, blood at the corner of his mouth.

"Who are you really? Is this your actual power?"

Evan started to answer and caught a shape rising behind Gankhuf. Ferdinand. The Vampire Baron had appeared from somewhere and was moving with the silence of something nocturnal, his wings unfurled, his face showing what it actually was rather than its usual polished presentation.

Tina saw it and her expression gave it away — she had met Ferdinand as a well-dressed gentleman and the version now airborne above Gankhuf was considerably different.

The change in Tina's face alerted Gankhuf a half-second before Ferdinand arrived. He twisted. His holy light came up — but unprepared, unsteady, the timing all wrong. Ferdinand's claws came through it, the dark energy around them burning off the interference, reaching for the bishop's chest.

Gankhuf blinked out. Short-range teleportation, emergency use. Blood in the air where he'd been. Ferdinand had nearly taken the heart.

The teleportation brought him directly in front of Evan.

He hadn't had time to stabilize. Evan's blade was already moving — the bracers' array activated by intent, death magic channeled into the steel alongside the sword-aura, the light along the edge running black and white together. Gankhuf registered the blade entering his chest and felt the cold of it.

Death magic meeting holy magic inside a body produces a reaction.

Evan read the warning in time — barely. He ripped the blade free and threw himself backward. Gankhuf detonated.

The shockwave hit Evan as he was still moving away. His blade came up by instinct and a wall of steel motion appeared in front of him, the sword working too fast for deliberate thought, and pieces of what had been Bishop Gankhuf impacted against it. Evan came to a stop several yards from where he'd been, covered in things he was going to need to clean off, and took stock.

Gankhuf had been stronger than Ferdinand by a significant margin. But he had spent himself in the exchange with Evan, and Ferdinand's ambush had caught him mid-recovery, and his desperate teleportation had put him in the one location he should never have been. Skill and bad luck and good positioning had combined into an outcome.

Evan looked at Ferdinand, who had his wings folded again and his expression back in order, as though the previous thirty seconds had been a minor inconvenience.

"Thank you. What are you doing out here?"

"The governor moved. Every irregular organization in Kansas City is being swept — including our people." He raised his voice slightly. "Teresa. You can come out."

From behind a low rise, Teresa appeared. She smelled terrible and her clothes had things on them that Evan preferred not to identify.

"The sewers?" he said.

"The drainage channel." She said it with the tone of someone who had done worse and would do worse again if necessary. "Governor Thompson. I'll repay this. My people are dead."