The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

The button depressed with a clean mechanical click, and the panel opened like a flower — four metal leaves folding back to reveal what was inside.

A magical array. The first one Evan had seen anywhere in the goblin fortress, inscribed in the interior of the chest panel. At its center, a quantity of black powder.

He studied the array. The core structure was a standard energy-extraction circuit, a conversion array of a type he recognized from human magical practice — but the outer control layer was different. The lines there were mithril wire finer than he had ever seen used in constructed arrays, interwoven with refined gold wire, and at several points around the perimeter, small magic-sensing crystals had been set into the structure.

He understood what this meant. The sensing crystals amplified spiritual force, reducing the threshold needed to activate the array to something that a person of average intelligence with slightly stronger than average concentration could manage. No formal magical training. No elemental affinity. Perhaps twenty or thirty percent of any ordinary human population.

The goblin civilization had developed magical arrays. The texts that claimed goblins had no magical aptitude had apparently not considered that aptitude for magic and aptitude for magical engineering might be different things. And the history books that discussed goblins at all had discussed only their steam technology, as though nothing else had existed.

Evan directed a small amount of spiritual force into the array. The lines lit in sequence. The black powder flared with dark light, the conversion circuit processed it, and two trails of fire extended down the mechanical warrior's arms, forming blades of flame at the ends. He withdrew his spiritual force. The flames died. The powder showed almost no reduction.

He looked at the powder for a while. It had the same character as a magic core but it wasn't a magic core — the consistency was wrong, the response was different, and magic cores formed in the moment of a magical beast's death, not as a natural deposit. This was something else. He had a hypothesis about what it might be but no way to test it here.

He took a small sample. The three elders watched him do it with the expression of people who very much wanted to object and had decided not to.

……

Evening came. Evan was given a room on a lower level.

Two young female goblins arrived to attend him. He considered their presence briefly, felt nothing that could reasonably be called interest, and sent them away. They had barely left when Nobi appeared, noticed the departing females, directed an expression at them that Evan didn't want to examine closely, and turned to face him.

Evan had been watching. He waited until Nobi had come inside and the door was closed, then snapped his fingers. A ring of dark light enclosed the two of them — sound suppression, image suppression, a basic privacy ward. At Arcanist rank it would stop anything short of Legend-tier from perceiving the conversation from outside. No goblin in the fortress was a Legend.

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"Go ahead," Evan said.

Nobi swallowed. "Master. Did you see the king? When you passed through the third level?"

"I saw several female goblins. Not the king himself."

Something moved through Nobi's face in rapid sequence — desire, calculation, hatred, ambition. Evan watched all of it with mild interest. Then a thought arrived fully formed: He's going to stage a coup.

"The king came to power through violence too," Nobi said, when Evan put the question to him directly. His voice had gone strange. "Why can he and not me? He's old. He keeps all the females for himself while we go out and risk our lives hunting. I almost died today. He arranged it. He suspects me. I can't wait."

"Disgusting goblins," Shuang said from Evan's hair, with considerable satisfaction. "Fighting each other. Excellent. Keep going. Die out completely."

Evan gave her a moment, then said: "This is your internal business. I don't involve myself. As long as I'm not harmed, you can handle it however you like."

Nobi grabbed his leg.

Evan detached him. "You've already been acting in my name to build your position here, haven't you. That's the real reason you brought me. Now you want me to either help you or at least not hold you accountable afterward." He looked at the goblin steadily. "So. What are you offering in exchange for my looking the other way?"

Nobi considered. "I'll build a statue of you. I'll make you the tribe's patron. The goblins will worship you. And if you ever need anything from Nobi, Nobi will provide it."

Evan started to refuse, and then paused.

This world had gods, and the gods drew on faith. The theological texts were careful about this — the Creationist Church's power was explicitly connected to the size and sincerity of its following. But the pathways for spreading a competing faith in the old territories were effectively closed: the Creationist Church held Tarenxi, the Ika Faith held the desert nations, Houtu had the East, and the new continents were contested enough that any new religious presence would attract immediate violent attention.

Several thousand goblins in the middle of the Black Forest, however, were not within anyone's active jurisdiction.

He didn't know if the theory about faith was correct. He had no way of knowing. But the cost of testing it was essentially zero, and a lich without a soul vessel had reason to explore every possible avenue toward longevity.

"Fine," he said. "Since apparently I'm a generous person. Go."

Nobi's relief was visible and immediate. Then, before leaving, he reached into his clothing and produced a sword. To Evan it was approximately dagger-sized, but the craftsmanship was recognizable even before he looked closely.

"A divine sword," Nobi said. "It used to emit holy light sometimes, depending on luck. Not anymore. I'm giving it to the master."

Evan examined it. The hilt held seven tiny gemstones arranged in a seven-star pattern, surrounded by an array of considerable complexity. The mithril wire in the array had broken in multiple places — years of disuse and probably rough handling.

The array structure was the same one he'd seen in the mechanical warrior's chest.

He retrieved mithril from his storage ring and melted it with a small fire, guiding the liquid metal into the broken lines with his spiritual sense, rebuilding the array until the circuit was complete. When he picked up the sword and directed the minimum necessary spiritual force into it, the hilt lit.

The gemstones were intact. Behind the surface, he found not a magic core but a dense crystal — mineral, not organic, holding energy that had nothing to do with a magical beast's death. The same type as the black powder in the mechanical warrior.

The sword blazed yellow-red.