The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

Shuang couldn't stop humming snatches of the songs from Eternal Tragedy for the next two days. When she had nothing else to occupy her, she'd drift into one of the melodies and shoot Evan a reproachful look, as though his failure to be moved constituted some personal failing. She kept the commentary between them — in front of others she never let slip what he was — but alone she was perfectly willing to tell him that liches clearly lacked the capacity for feeling.

Evan let it go.

On the morning of the third day, Newton came down to the harbor to see him off. They said their goodbyes at the gangplank — not quickly, Newton had the manner of someone who finds departures genuinely inconvenient — and then Evan boarded the double-masted passenger ship and watched the alchemist's figure shrink as the dock receded.

The ship was divided into four tiers of accommodation. The four first-class cabins had been reserved before tickets went on sale. Evan had second class, which meant a small private cabin. As he made his way forward past the first-class corridor, he felt it — a quality of light-element energy somewhere on the other side of the cabin wall. He kept walking. At the first-class entrance, two men stood quietly: guards, both at the Knight tier or close to it. Their bearing wasn't the hired-security posture of merchants' bodyguards but something with more cultivation behind it. Old money or actual nobility, by the look of the men protecting whoever was inside.

Shuang's voice threaded into his ear without reaching them: "The person in there has a strange signature. Strong on the surface, but underneath there's something hollow. Like a lantern with the wrong kind of fire in it."

The two guards glanced her way — not because they'd heard anything, but because a flower fairy traveling with someone warranted attention in its own right. Evan moved on without acknowledging them.

Inside his own cabin, door closed, Shuang circled the small space once and then came to rest on the edge of the porthole.

"This is the first time I've seen the sea," she said. "It's enormous. Is Nabos as big as all that water?"

"Nabos is an island, but a large one. If you walk to the center, you forget you're surrounded by water." He sat on the bunk. "What do you make of the passengers in first class?"

"The one who smells like a priest is high-ranking. The other one — the hollow one — I think he's a noble. High enough that the bodyguards have that kind of posture."

Evan filed this and set it aside. Whatever was happening in the first-class corridor was not his immediate concern. Provided nothing came for him in the next two days, Nabos would handle the rest.

The ship moved through the night. Most of the passengers slept. The signal lamp cast a small sphere of yellow light against the dark, and the sea barely moved, the wind just enough to keep the sails filled.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Shuang was asleep. Then — without the gradual transition of ordinary waking — she wasn't, and the version of her that came awake in the darkness had the flat, assessing quality that Evan had learned to recognize.

"That fool girl can't smell a thing. There's something wrong with this ship." Dark Shuang's voice was quiet and sharp.

"A mysterious noble and his priest," Evan said. "On a passenger vessel. What exactly is the threat you're sensing?"

She was about to answer when he raised a finger. Outside, something.

He poured water from the pitcher beside the bunk, held it suspended with a touch of intent, and shaped it into a flat mirror. This was Divination, technically requiring a crystal ball to achieve useful range, but Dark Shuang's presence gave him roughly ten percent additional output — exactly the margin he'd needed to make water work as a substitute. The range dropped sharply: a li with a proper crystal ball, fifty cubits with the Water Mirror. But it was enough.

A dark night owl appeared in the water's surface. It had come from the left, from somewhere over open ocean, moving fast, and landed on the ship's railing without disturbing anyone.

A dark night owl, over open ocean, at this hour. Evan turned the question over while he watched.

A flash of warm white light crossed the water mirror's image, and the owl came apart in a spray of feathers, the shriek carrying across the water before it faded. Someone on board had identified the owl as a threat before Evan had finished identifying it at all. He let the Water Mirror dissolve, water pattering on the floor.

That flash had carried a specific signature: Sandera Ray, divine-art light magic, originating from the first-class corridor. The priest. Which meant the priest had been alert before Evan thought to check outside.

Evan adjusted his own energy profile — not hiding it entirely, since Shuang's presence already marked him as someone out of the ordinary, but making the quality of his attention less readable. He was ready. He wanted whoever was out there to know that.

In the first-class cabin, the priest apparently understood the signal. A soft light passed outward through the hull and spread across the ship in a slow ring, fading as it went. True Sight — a divine technique capable of reading every living presence on the vessel within its range. It swept around the ship and then went still, becoming a passive awareness rather than an active scan. A persistent watch, using what Evan suspected was a crystal ball for focus. In his own perception, the technique registered as a bright sphere of light somewhere in the first-class corridor, vivid enough that he could track it without trying.

He did not cast anything in return. The common danger, whatever it was, made temporary alliance sensible regardless of who the passenger in first class turned out to be.

He switched to Fairy Sight instead — Shuang's elemental perception, which he could share through their contract. No magical signature, no wave of intent to detect. The people sleeping around him became faint points of light. Three or four burned brighter: professionals, Knight tier, all motionless in sleep.

One point was different.

It moved — not continuously, but in short bursts with long stillness between them, the pattern of someone being extremely careful about being observed. Its core was bright, noticeably brighter than the sleepers around it, but the exterior was shadowed somehow, muted, designed to read as ordinary in casual observation. Only because Evan was concentrating specifically on it did the incongruity stand out. And it was moving, with patience and in increments, in the direction of the first-class corridor.

He watched it for the rest of the night without moving, tracking each brief shift, each long pause.

Pale light began to appear at the edge of the sea. On the horizon, a ship took shape.