Lich for Hire

For most deities, faith was the most precious commodity in existence. No god willingly traded it away. The only way to acquire more was to take it.

Sylvanas had been willing to accept Leyla as a subordinate deity, only to hand her a hundred druids and tell her to figure out the rest on her own. That, more than anything, illustrated how precious each follower truly was.

There were only two ways to grow a following: convert those who believed in nothing, or poach the faithful from another god. Either approach struck directly at a deity's most vital interest. The resulting conflicts tended to be vicious.

Ambrose genuinely had no desire to make enemies of any deity, not even the weakest ones.

But sometimes there was no avoiding it. If Levitra hadn't acquainted herself with him by trying to scam him, he might have reached an agreement with her from the start, avoiding the entire cascade of evil-aligned goddesses that followed.

This time, he told himself, would be different. He had no intention to make more divine enemies.

He intended to help Aige ascend to godhood in order to secure a strong backer, but if he had to offend an established deity in the process, what benefit would he even get out of that arrangement?

That was why he wasn't going to antagonize any deity over this.

In fact, he wasn't going to antagonize any deity at all. There were many deities of the sea, after all.

The oceanic pantheon alone ran to fifteen or twenty gods: Pesena, deity of the triton seafolk; Sekkora, deity of the shagin; gods of sea monsters, of dolphins, and stranger things besides. Even the demon prince Demogorgon held his domain here as the deity of the ixiray, a deep-sea creature that apparently merited its own divine patron.

There were plenty of beings out there that no god had bothered to claim. He would work with those.

"I'm here for business, not trouble," Ambrose murmured to himself. "No offending anyone, absolutely not gods. Peace brings prosperity. Peace brings prosperity..."

Then, Ambrose felt the ghost ship slow.

Ambrose was about to ask what was happening when Milena appeared at his side with a shout and a gasp. "Father, look at how big that shark is!"

Her voice was projected via spiritual resonance, bypassing the ordinary mechanics of sound. Ambrose extended his perception outward.

The deep water below revealed itself to his senses: reef, coral, darting fish, drifting sediment, the slow drift of things living and dead.

Everything within range registered in his awareness and translated itself into a precise, exhaustive catalogue of information. He had learned, over time, to filter out the noise and find what mattered.

Then he felt a vast shadow moving through the dark.

As Milena had described, this was a shark, but one that dwarfed the ghost ship entirely. Close to fifty meters from snout to tail, it moved through the water with the unhurried authority of something that had never needed to fear anything. Its head alone was wider than the ship's prow. Each tooth in its two rows thereof was larger than a shield.

The creature slid past them, its white underbelly passing like a moving wall. The water it displaced rocked the ghost ship from side to side.

Ambrose felt a jolt of genuine alarm. Something that size could dismantle the ghost ship without much effort if it wanted to. Whether it ate the undead was an open question. Some things consumed anything, regardless of freshness.

The crew of the ghost ship, by contrast, looked delighted. Every one of them was watching the shark with the expression of someone who had just spotted a prize they very much intended to claim.

Ambrose frowned. He would rather arrive at their destination without incident.

Fortunately, Phil stood at the prow with his harpoon in hand and didn't throw it. The enormous shark moved on. The ghost ship resumed course.

Phil came back looking deeply regretful. "What a waste. That's one of the shagin's tamed sharks. If it was a wild one, we'd be feasting tonight."

The undead didn't need to eat to sustain themselves, but most zombies had an appetite for fresh flesh regardless. Consuming blood and flesh was satisfying in a way that nothing else quite replicated.

"Tamed by the shagin?" Ambrose said. "How can you tell?"

"The tail. Shagin always cut a distinctive notch into the tails of their tamed sharks." Phil would know. He had been a shagin in life, and was well acquainted with his own kind's habits.

"We have a tight schedule today. Otherwise, I might have gone for it regardless. Taking down a shark that size wouldn't be the hard part. The problem is the blood in the water that follows. That would bring the shagin after us, and then we'd miss our meeting with the commander."

Phil feared nothing in the ocean. Of every creature in these waters, only Aige commanded his respect. He would have taken a swing at that shark even if it were Sekkora in physical form.

"What do the shagin use a shark that size for?" Ambrose asked. "Do they eat them?"

"No, just like humans don't generally eat primates. The shagin look too much like sharks. They don't eat their own. A beast like that is a communal project, raised by an entire tribe working together over many years. They use them to fight against deep-sea monsters. Some of the deep-water octopuses are bigger than that shark, and the shagin themselves are only about my size. Against something truly enormous, they need the help."

He paused to consider the situation. "That shark was out hunting, which means there's a shagin settlement somewhere nearby. Within two hundred nautical miles, I'd say." A significant range, but then a shark that size needed an enormous feeding ground. The ocean provided, one way or another.

"That's not the part I find interesting," Ambrose said. "Did the shagin settle here recently? Or is this a route you're not very familiar with?"

Phil scratched his head. "Now that you mention it, there shouldn't be shagin here at all. When did they move in? Don't they know this is the territory of the Silent Sea Pirates?"

"My guess would be the githarks," Ambrose said. "A hundred thousand githarks and several dozen dragons need to eat. If they've claimed the territory these shagin were in, the shagin would have had no choice but to relocate."

Phil shook his head slowly. "Something's wrong. The ocean has never had a shortage of food, and the githarks I've seen aren't swimmers. Most of them can barely manage it, let alone fight underwater. Red dragons can't go too deep either. They'd stay around the islands, maybe fish the shallows. There's no way they'd be threatening shagin in deep water."

"Not even a hundred thousand githarks?"

"Honored guest, you don't have a feel yet for how large the ocean actually is. If you picked up the entire continent and dropped it into the sea, the sea level wouldn't even rise very much. The tallest mountains on land reach a few thousand meters. The ocean has trenches that go down ten thousand. Adding a hundred thousand githarks to that doesn't change anything. It certainly doesn't starve out a shagin tribe."

"Interesting," Ambrose said, mulling things over. Then what had caused the migration?

A feeling settled over him, quiet and distinct, the kind that didn't come from logical reasoning. This wasn't coincidence. Fate was signaling him.

He reached for his dice of fate.

As a diviner, he had to treat the dice with care. The goddess of fate was not always in a generous mood, and casting the dice carelessly was a good way to glimpse something you'd rather not have seen—your own death, for instance, rendered in unambiguous detail.

Ambrose only used the dice when the feeling was strong enough that ignoring things seemed more dangerous than knowing. Strong intuition, he'd learned, was often the goddess nudging him toward something. Ignoring her nudge had its own consequences.

He didn't need much. A thread to pull on was enough.

The dice left his hand and tumbled through the water—or rather, through a layer of reality that the water couldn't quite reach. Their ghostly forms stirred no current, displaced nothing, and existed in a register that only those attuned to fate's power could perceive.

As they came to rest, a blurred image assembled itself before him.

Ambrose studied it carefully, then frowned. "This is... a wedding. But whose?"

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