"Down!"
Charles's voice broke on the word. He'd seen artillery before — not in Earl Eward's wars, but in the fighting between the Noma Empire and the Kingdom of Opoli, cannon fire at range that had been enough to stop his heart. At three feet, in a stone corridor, there was nowhere for the word down to lead, but he said it anyway.
The cannon fired.
In the length of the corridor, the grapeshot spread like a horizontal rainstorm. Darren and Colin took the full weight of it. Darren was already dead and came apart entirely. Colin's body was still upright when the shot passed through him. He was not alive when it finished. Devin and Jocelyn were in the spread's outer edge — neither of them intact, neither of them standing afterward. Charles had Jocelyn between himself and the cannon; he survived because she didn't.
Five people had entered the castle. Three of them died in the first second. Charles was dying on the floor. Boniface had managed to start a stone wall — too late to matter for the others, but enough to absorb a portion of the edge of the blast himself. He was still upright, shot through in several places, his life leaving him faster than he could process.
He thought: *that cowardly, skulking Lich, not a single honest engagement, just traps and—*
"Going somewhere?"
The corridor went dark. The darkness moved. Out of it came a sound like wings — the beating of uncountable wings — and then the shapes, the swarm of hell-bats that lived inside the Hell's Projection spell, and the darkness that was the projection itself, bleeding through from whatever it was anchored to, flooding the stone corridor with something that felt like death rather than simply looked like it.
Hell's Projection. A spell that sustained itself for two to three months, leaving its area saturated with undead energy.
Charles had enough left in him to grab Boniface's arm and shove him toward the door. "Go. Come back and avenge us." Then he turned into the swarm with his sword and gave Boniface the two seconds he needed.
Boniface did not waste them. He tore a magical scroll from his coat, ripped it open — the cold pain of the tear kept him conscious — activated the speed-enhancement it contained, and ran. The spell's effect poured into his legs. He was out the main gate, across the blighted ground, into the tree line, and gone before the Hell's Projection had finished settling into the space he'd been standing in.
Behind him the darkness expanded: outward from the castle's walls, through the gate, covering a circle that extended more than a third of a mile in every direction before it stopped. In its wake, skeletons rose and began their slow circuits of the perimeter.
In the corridor, Evan stood alone in the wreckage and thought about the problem of survivors.
He hadn't planned to feel anything about this. These people had come to kill him for money. They hadn't succeeded. That was the complete summary, as far as the practical dimension was concerned. He looked at what was left of them — Jocelyn's eyes still open, the pattern of the shot across three bodies that were no longer human-shaped — and found that what he felt was something quieter and less comfortable than satisfaction, but also smaller than guilt. This world was not Earth. The law he'd grown up under didn't apply here. He had defended himself, and he had survived.
He went through their belongings methodically. Mercenaries, by their gear and what he could reconstruct of their approach. Not the Inquisition — the Inquisition would have come through the front.
One of the bodies had been his own work with the Wraith Eye spell — an animated corpse, used and discarded. He'd had to think quickly when he realized what Darren had done to the gate bar, and the animation had given him the distraction he needed for the cannon placement.
He was still turning these pieces over when he remembered the survivor and went after him.
It was his first time outside the castle since he'd arrived in this world. The Hell's Projection extended past the walls; within its boundary he moved more freely, his undead nature absorbing the ambient energy rather than resisting it. Outside the projection's edge, he caught the scent.
He hadn't known until this moment that he could smell things. He'd been vaguely aware of food's appeal, the kitchen's smells reaching him in ways that shouldn't have been possible for a Lich — but this was different, a detailed impression that resolved in his mind into an almost visual image: one living person, injured, moving fast and getting faster. Definitely not a Lich ability. Something his particular version of this body could do that he didn't have an explanation for.
He followed the trail to a camp. In the camp was a single body, small and desiccated — drained of vitality. He looked at the face.
Todd.
He recognized him despite the state of the body. He stood there for a while. Then he buried what remained, returned to the trail, and followed it to a river. At the river, the rain had reached it first. The scent was gone. The ground on the other side held nothing.
He turned back.
Boniface, meanwhile, had run until his legs stopped working and started dragging himself instead. He reached the hills as the rain came down and found a cave mouth half-covered by hanging vines. He pulled himself through. Inside was dark. He collapsed against the cave wall and let himself breathe.
He was a dead man. He knew it. The shot had hit him in multiple places, he'd used everything he had to run, and the vitality he'd pulled from Todd on the way out was already gone — drained out through the holes in him faster than he could hold it. He had enough hatred left to keep his eyes open, and not much else.
His eyes adjusted. There was something at the back of the cave.
An altar. A statue of the Death God Hedi. And a Soul Vessel, intact, sitting in its place on the altar's surface. In front of it, a skeleton — someone who had come here to do what he was about to do, and hadn't survived the attempt.
Boniface crawled to the altar. He was shaking badly enough that checking the arrays took longer than it should have. He went through his storage ring for offerings. The arrays were complete. He had everything he needed except, possibly, the time to finish.
He arranged himself in front of the altar and started to chant.
The black fog rose around him. In the cave entrance, the rain hammered down.
The chanting accelerated. The black fog formed a figure. Inside the fog, a face appeared — agonized, twisting — as everything poured out of Boniface and into the shape above him. His wounds were pulling closed as he shrank into himself, the stolen vitality from Todd burning through in the effort of the transformation.
He screamed. The Soul Vessel blazed with black light. The sounds around him went silent. Outside, thunder rolled. The black energy collapsed inward all at once, flowing into the vessel like water finding a drain.
The transformation was complete.
The rain outside was fading. The light had gone to dusk. Boniface moved his fingers, then his arms, and stood. He felt nothing in the body — not pain, not warmth, not his own weight. Like wearing a garment. Cold in every direction.
He put the Soul Vessel away and stood in the cave thinking about what he now was.
He understood the gap between a Lich and a death mage for the first time from the inside. The dark element ran through him in a way it never had before — purer, denser, without the ceiling he'd always felt as a mage. Every other element was gone, closed off completely. He'd always thought Liches were overrated. He had been wrong.
He thought about the Fangs Mercenary Company going after one, and almost laughed.
He was a Lich now himself — a very new, very low-ranked one. He didn't know what level Nicolai Ashton stood at. Probably not far above him. Was revenge the next step?