The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

After lunch, the four of them set out with James, though not by carriage — the road to the gamekeeper's cabin was narrow and difficult, muddier still after yesterday's rain. Evan and the others had changed clothes for the occasion. Evan wore a double-breasted overcoat and a top hat, his signature sword-cane in hand. The two students wore suits, though without hats, while Jessica had put on a tailcoat with a black top hat of her own — an ensemble that suited her rather well.

James wore a suit with a black top hat as well, and the five of them set out on foot toward the west side of town. Their departure didn't go unnoticed; word spread through every faction in town almost at once. Evan and Jessica exchanged a glance loaded with unspoken meaning. The two students didn't catch it. James, for his part, looked perfectly calm, and Evan let his gaze drift over him, seemingly by accident.

"First day here, and it seems Hollingburton isn't exactly welcome," Evan said mildly, his eyes sliding briefly past James.

"This is a chaotic place. It's only natural, your first time here," James said with a smile.

Evan gave a noncommittal hum and let it drop. It was only then that Jaymes and Peter caught on that something was off, glancing back to discover they'd become the focus of a great many watchful eyes.

"What's going on?" Peter asked.

"Nothing much. The people in town probably don't feel at ease with us around," Evan said evenly. The two students, only half convinced, fell in behind him. The five of them walked on ahead while a small crowd trailed at a discreet distance. Evan had spent most of his time in this world on the run in one way or another, and he'd grown intimately familiar with being followed. Jessica, a senior mage of the mind school, might not have much sensitivity to elemental disturbances, but she was acutely tuned to the presence of other minds. The people tailing them were experienced hands at this sort of surveillance in the underworld, but there was no slipping past the two of them — the moment they'd stepped outside, both had sensed it.

Evan simply smiled. The five of them made their way into the woods on the west side of town, where the road turned out exactly as poor as promised — thick with mud. For Evan, though, it was as if his feet had a sense of their own; every step landed with perfect precision, light and unhurried, as though the muddy ground beneath him were nothing but a paved road. Odd as it seemed, though his feet clearly touched the mud with each step, they came away without a trace of it, unlike everyone else's.

Something clicked quietly into place in his mind. Cultivating magic wasn't only about meditation — anything at all could serve as training. In this world, few mages ever bothered to train their bodies alongside their minds, and yet physical conditioning had its own benefits, one that seemed to reinforce magical cultivation in turn. Without meaning to, the knight training he'd taken up on the side had been quietly strengthening his progress all along.

"Here we are. That's the gamekeeper's cabin," James said, pointing ahead to a small wooden building — three rooms, raised roughly a cubit above the ground on wooden supports. Evan counted at least a dozen thick posts holding the structure up.

James stepped up onto the wooden stairs, wiping the mud from his shoes before leading the others inside. Evan lingered a moment behind the rest. Once James had gone in, he glanced back and gave his hand the faintest twitch — a few thin wisps of black smoke slipped down into the ground and vanished.

Somewhere behind them, the various watchers following the group all shivered at once, though none of them noticed anything amiss; each simply assumed he'd caught a chill from the damp air, and thought nothing more of it.

Evan stepped inside. The table and chairs lay overturned and broken on the floor. In the middle of the room stood a wooden platform stained with old blood, ringed with various magical sigils. Evan drew a breath through his nose — the scent had faded almost to nothing, but a faint trace of blood still lingered, along with something cold and strange underneath it.

The vision struck him again — that same disorienting flash he'd experienced before. A man and a woman stared blankly ahead, their eyes wide and utterly devoid of light. Figures seemed to crowd around them, candles lit, voices raised in some frantic chant, bodies bowing again and again — though the whole scene was blurred and indistinct. Somewhere in it, someone with blood on their hands seemed to be altering the sigils along the edge of the platform. Evan shook his head, forcing the image out of his mind.

"What's wrong?" Jessica asked, concerned.

"Just a moment of discomfort. The scene here is a mess — there's something like resentment lingering in this place," Evan said. His gaze sharpened, fixing on the sigils. They had indeed been altered. He frowned. This wasn't devil worship — the alteration was too subtle for that, as if something had borrowed a different kind of power to construct an illusion. But what? His eyes flicked toward James.

"You're a necromancer. You say you feel resentment here — do you actually sense something?" Jessica asked, frowning slightly. She'd picked up on nothing herself, though given how many days had passed and how many people had already tramped through the scene, most of whatever traces had once lingered here were probably long gone.

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James's eyes flickered with a trace of unease at that — something Evan caught cleanly, though he gave no sign of it. "Most of it has dispersed by now," Evan said, "but these sigils here still hold some kind of memory. On the surface, they look like devil worship, but they've been deliberately altered — right here. Look familiar to you? Most people wouldn't recognize it, but you should. It's a mind-school sigil. A rare one."

It was only thanks to all the reading Evan had done recently that he'd caught it at all — and even then, only after the vision had formed in his mind first, drawing his attention to the detail. He directed the comment to Jessica, knowing full well she was the resident expert in that school.

Even as Evan pointed it out, he noticed James flinch — just for an instant, gone almost before it registered, as though the reaction itself had been an illusion. James's expression gave nothing away.

Jessica's face turned serious at once, and she leaned in to study the sigil carefully. Blood had been used to alter it — subtle enough that anyone not paying close attention would simply assume the sigil had been stained by accident.

"This is a mind-school sigil. For it to appear here, it must draw on some devilish power — but that's strange. Even borrowing sacrificial power from a devil, this sigil has no combat function at all. It can only project illusions. What use would that serve? Would a devil really bother with a trick like this? Why not simply draw the proper sigils out in the open from the start?" Jessica puzzled over it, unable to make sense of it.

Evan shook his head. "I don't know. But it wouldn't be here without a reason."

They checked over the rest of the cabin and turned up nothing else useful. Just as they were about to leave, Evan's brow furrowed. "Watch out!"

The words were barely out of his mouth before he stepped forward, his sword-cane — the one he'd carried this entire time — thrusting out like a blade. A long dagger materialized in front of it with a sharp clang, catching the strike, and a figure flickered into view — masked, having crept into the shadows near the doorway. Had Evan not called it out, the blade would have gone straight for Jaymes. Jaymes flinched hard. A thief, was his first thought.

To mages, thieves were a particularly unwelcome breed. The profession had grown out of military scouts centuries ago, evolving over thousands of years into experts in stealth and assassination who rarely engaged anyone head-on. Mages, unlike knights, were poor at close combat — and unless a mage had reached the rank of Arcanist, having grasped elemental will, casting still required an incantation, which meant time. Let a thief get close enough, and a mage would often die before ever getting a spell off.

That wasn't to say mages were somehow inferior to thieves — the two simply fought in entirely different ways. Mages tended to clash openly, and to unleash their full power they generally needed knights or similar support alongside them. On a battlefield, a mage was often the deciding factor, which was why nobles prized having one in their service, while a thief could never command the same kind of standing. Of course, combat wasn't the only measure of a mage's worth — many were scholars whose knowledge mattered more to a region or a nation than any spell they could cast, which was part of why mages held such an elevated status in the first place.

Startled, Jaymes began chanting at once, throwing up a wind shield the instant the words left his mouth. The others flinched too — Peter cast a lesser version of Water Curtain, a faint blue-green light flaring up to shield himself, Jessica, and James all at once. Nearly everyone had a protective spell up within the same heartbeat.

Jessica alone didn't move. The mind school had no defensive spells to speak of, only ones that could draw an enemy into illusion — and she never got the chance to cast even that, because Evan had already closed the distance, his blade thrusting forward.

Steel met steel, and the figure vanished from sight in the same instant. Evan let out a cold snort, and with a ring of metal, the sword-cane's blade slid free of its housing — only then did the others realize the cane Evan had never once set down was in fact a magic sword. Blade-light flared, slicing through empty air.

They were all mages; seeing the blade's glow surge like that, none of them thought to call it a sword aura — they simply assumed it was some property of the magic sword itself. From the seemingly empty space ahead came a pained grunt, and the shadowy figure flickered into view again — only to split into two, each racing off in a different direction.

Evan took another step forward, his blade turning with his body, ignoring the second shape entirely. The blade-light surged again. There was a soft thud, and the figure ahead staggered — while the other shape vanished instantly.

He turned, his eyes full of genuine astonishment. "How did you know that one was an illusion?"

"I guessed," Evan said flatly. In truth, it hadn't been a guess at all. Though he hadn't fully grasped Sword Intent yet, he'd absorbed enough of it that the moment it surfaced, it locked onto his opponent directly. Judging by strength, this one barely qualified as a low-tier knight — not that Evan would ever meet a true knight head-on if he could help it, though given the right opening, he could kill even one. A Great Knight, though, was a different matter entirely — a Great Knight had already awakened a kind of instinctive awareness, so that even an enemy in stealth would still register on some level once close enough. A mage needed to reach Arcanist rank for anything comparable, unless the thief in question was skilled enough to slip past that instinctive sense altogether.

A flicker of self-mockery crossed the man's eyes before his body collapsed. Evan made no move to pull back the mask covering his face, only saying evenly to the space in front of him, "No more hiding. Come out."

The air rippled, and two more figures resolved into view — one standing in the shadow by the door, the other farther off, positioned at the base of the steps, his body blending naturally into the shadow of a tree.

"Didn't expect you to have swordplay in you as well. Why not use magic?" said the one in the shadow by the door.

"Swordplay and magic are the same thing, in a moment like this — just two ways to kill a man," Evan said, eyes fixed on the pair, a note of mockery running through his tone. "Neither of you carries the stench of the devil. So why come after us?"