The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

Johann stamped his foot and the ground rippled outward in a wave. Every skeletal hand shattered simultaneously. The black fog dispersed.

He looked up with the expression of someone who has just demonstrated something conclusive, and found the Spear of Hadir already in the air.

The detonation left a crater six feet across and two feet deep where he had been standing. When the sound finished rolling over the field, Johann was at the crater's edge, clothes in ruins, blood at the corner of his mouth, the sword in his hand damaged and dim. He had not fallen.

In the distance, Andrea turned her horse back toward the explosion. Alfred stopped her.

"You can't help. You'd only give him an opening." Alfred looked once toward the fight, saw Evan standing with the sword extended and light moving along the blade, and brought Andrea's reins around. "The meeting point. Come."

Johann climbed out of the crater with visible effort. For a Great Knight, it should have been trivial. It wasn't.

The calculus of the fight had changed for him. He had broken through to Great Knight rank at exactly the wrong moment — too new to control what he'd gained, too soon to use it properly. He had believed, for a few seconds after the breakthrough, that he could reverse the entire night alone. He understood now that he couldn't.

He raised his sword anyway.

Evan looked at him for a moment. He lifted his own blade in acknowledgment — a formal gesture — and spoke without mockery: "You're extraordinary. I would rather not have you as an enemy. Let me see you off properly."

Johann's breathing was audible. He raised his sword one last time, and the aura along it was the aura of someone who has decided this is the final stroke and has nothing left to save — not the efficient economy of a fighter conserving energy, but everything burning as bright as it could burn because there was no reason left to hold back.

Evan moved.

The rapier became a line of light. Johann's final stroke came to meet it, the blades crossing, and then the light went out of Johann's sword, and he was still standing, and Evan stepped back and drew the blade clear.

Johann didn't fall. He simply stopped. The life went out of him where he stood.

Evan sheathed the sword and bowed once to the body. Then he turned to survey the field.

The camp had ceased to exist as a fighting unit. Soldiers were running in every direction, calling for people who weren't answering. His two hundred moved through the chaos with the purposeful economy of people who had been told what to do and were doing it. The dead on the ground were almost entirely Normandy's men.

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He walked away from the crater. The direction he chose was not the meeting point.

……

The riders assembled in the dark east of the ruined camp. Twenty-eight dead, fifteen wounded, against fifteen hundred. The survivors were still working out what had happened, the way people do when things go much better than they had any right to expect.

A courier brought Andrea a letter.

She read it by torchlight and went pale.

"He's gone. He just left. How can he just —"

Robin arrived with the main force a few minutes later, having revealed himself once the explosions announced that Evan's part was finished. He had kept Bonarpan occupied with lights and movement all night, making rescue impossible, and Bonarpan had been too professional to take the bait — he had organized a clean withdrawal, abandoned his cannon, and arrived at Normandy's destroyed camp to find it silent.

One figure was standing among the dead.

A knight rode forward to investigate. "Johann," he reported. "Killed in action."

Bonarpan dismounted, removed his helmet, and bowed. The knights behind him did the same.

"Bring him," he said, and led his army away.

Cecilia arrived and looked around the assembly. "Where is Evan Wang?"

"He snuck off," Andrea said, her voice doing something it didn't usually do. "He's a terrible person and when I see him again —"

"You won't catch him," Robin said. He had read the letter by then. He folded it and held it. "He has somewhere to be. We couldn't have held him." He called the withdrawal. "Move out."

……

Evan walked west.

He had known about Andrea since the night around the fire — he wasn't unobservant — and had thought about it, and arrived at the same conclusion each time. He was a lich without a soul vessel. The body had been changing in ways he couldn't fully explain, but what he was hadn't changed. The things that came naturally to living people didn't work the same way for him, and pretending otherwise helped no one.

Time and distance would do what they usually did.

What occupied him instead, over the following days, was Johann.

Not Raphael — Raphael had been overwhelming from the start, the experience reduced to terror and endurance and luck. Johann had been something he could actually learn from. A newly-broken Great Knight, one level above him, fighting without decades of accumulated mastery behind the breakthrough, in conditions that let Evan observe what was happening in something approaching real time. For the first time he could see the structure of sword-intent from inside rather than simply experiencing it as pressure from without.

It was spiritual force made specific. Shaped by the person who produced it — their convictions, their quality of attention, the particular way they understood what a sword was for. Johann's had been weight and finality. Raphael's remained something Evan still didn't have the vocabulary for.

He turned this over as he walked. The wall he had identified in his own sword-work coming out of the forest — he could see now what was on the other side of it. Not bigger movements, or faster ones, or more force. Something that started behind the sword.

He crossed two ridges into heavy pine country without paying proper attention to his surroundings, which he would not normally have allowed. When he finally looked up and registered where he was, he understood that he had walked into the Black Forest — seven hundred li of mountain terrain so dense that most travelers spent four or five months going around it, because those who entered rarely found their way out.

He had walked into it because he had seen a unicorn.

He had meant to avoid the animal. They were natural counters to what he was, in the way certain things simply cancel each other — the legends were consistent, and his existence as a lich made him precisely the kind of thing they rejected. He had started to step aside.

The unicorn had already seen him.

The horn lit with crackling white-gold light.