The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

The avalanche caught Raphael while he was still inside the black smoke. He'd felt the ground change before he understood why — a vibration through the soles of his feet, the particular wrongness of a mountain deciding to move — and he threw himself forward through the dispersing fog as the mass of snow came over the ridge above.

He was a Great Knight. His sword-aura came up as a reflex and held. He hit the leading edge of the avalanche moving fast and the snow took him anyway, burying him in the kind of cold weight that didn't care what he was.

Evan didn't watch any of this. He was already on his horse and moving.

He understood his own arithmetic clearly: he could not beat Raphael. He had held him, which was something, and he had hurt him slightly less than Raphael had hurt him, which was something else. But the gap between them in pure sword-skill was not going to close in the time available, and a lich without a soul vessel who lost the wrong fight was simply gone. The avalanche had been in the terrain all along, waiting. He had used it. This was not dishonor; it was sense.

The horse found the road and kept moving west.

About the time it takes to eat a meal, the mountain finished its business. Then the snow heaved and Raphael broke through from beneath, his expression the expression of a man who has just been defeated by geography and knows it. He scanned the white expanse for any sign that Evan was still buried somewhere beneath it. He found a single line of horse tracks leading west, already going cold in the wind, disappearing where the treeline swallowed them.

He looked at the tracks for a while.

Three people arrived from the direction of the city. He recognized one of them — Spindou of the Holy Knights Order, called the Whip of God, who carried a golden-and-silver braided whip made, it was said, from dragon sinew and refined mithril, a weapon that could extend to a hundred cubits and had effects against magical defenses that pure steel didn't. The man was at or near Epic Knight rank. The other two were a Great Knight and a senior Knight. All three of them were New Church.

The whip reached Raphael before the man did. It didn't strike him — it simply occupied the space around him, forty or fifty cubits in every direction suddenly full of potential, the air between them made conditional.

"The Blade of Gabriel," Spindou said. "This isn't Holy Eton. What are you doing here?"

"Pursuing a lich. Nicholas the necromancer."

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"A lich. In New Church territory." Spindou's tone expressed mild surprise so perfectly calibrated it was clearly not genuine. "Well. Surely the Maker's light doesn't reach everywhere equally." He paused. "And the avalanche?"

"We were fighting when it started. He triggered it deliberately, I think."

Spindou looked at him without visible expression for a moment, then sent the whip sweeping in a single motion — a demonstration, and also a search, the hundreds of braided lines striking through the snow in every direction from where they stood, the disturbed powder resettling empty. No one hidden below.

"He's gone," Spindou said.

Raphael followed the line of horse tracks west until they were gone. He felt something he didn't entirely want to name. The lich had known from the beginning that he couldn't win and had fought anyway, and had taken what the terrain offered at exactly the right moment, and had gotten away. The planning required for that was uncomfortable to think about.

"Leave," Spindou said. "You aren't welcome here."

He turned and walked back toward Waltersdorf. The other two went with him.

One of them asked, after some distance, why they hadn't simply arrested Raphael.

"Three on one, and he doesn't have his dragon. It would cost us blood. And then what does Holy Eton do?" Spindou shook his head. "Leave it."

Later, someone else asked about the lich. Whether Nicholas had actually been in New Church territory.

"He was here," Spindou said. "But did he touch any of our churches? Did he harm any of our people? Did he declare himself?" He kept walking. "He has enemies with the old Church. We don't. I don't see why we should solve old Church problems for them. A lich who passes through our territory without incident didn't pass through our territory at all."

The logic was understood. No one pushed further.

Evan was several li into the forest before he slowed the horse. The trees were dense enough that no one who wasn't a lich would have chosen to ride through them, which made it safe to think.

He replayed the fight against Raphael as clearly as he could. In pure sword technique, there was no contest — Raphael had decades of serious training and the cultivation of a Great Knight, while Evan had months of self-instruction and the foundation methods from The Knight's Light. The gap was real and large. But Evan had entered the Arcanist rank, and had the physical changes that the nameless technique kept making, and had survived an encounter with a Great Knight by using terrain rather than force.

He thought about the path he was on. Standard wisdom in this world held that mages maintained range and knights closed it, and that trying to combine both disciplines diluted both. He had come to the combination by necessity — no soul vessel meant he couldn't afford to lose the body, which meant keeping the body capable. And the body had been responding in ways that no standard lich cultivation would predict.

The unnamed technique. It had been running since the first night, beyond his control, doing what it wanted. He had stopped trying to understand it and started letting it show him what it was for.

The horse was drifting, following the path of least resistance through the snow-covered undergrowth. Evan's attention had gone inward.

Then every hair on his body stood up at once.

The signal traveled upward from the base of his spine to the back of his skull before his conscious mind had any idea what was happening. His body understood first. He was off the horse before he'd decided to move.