Lich for Hire

A wedding was the last thing Ambrose had expected to see.

The image was frustratingly vague. He could make out a man and a woman in elaborate wedding attire, exchanging vows beneath the blessings of a gathered crowd. They appeared to be on the verge of a kiss, but their faces were entirely unreadable, blurred beyond any hope of identification.

The clothing offered little more. The bride's dress was long, rendered in smears of yellow and white that conveyed nothing about its style or origin. No matter how extensive Ambrose's knowledge, there was no making sense of color blotches this indistinct.

The guests were numerous, their clothing a riot of color in every shade imaginable, red through violet, black and white alike. A row of figures who appeared to be bridesmaids stood to one side. The groom's side had no counterpart.

From which lands did this tradition stem?

Ambrose ran through the weddings he had attended over the years. None of them had been quite like this.

The one thing he could say with certainty was that the ceremony was taking place on land.

He turned the image over in his mind. "Strange. I was divining for the shagin migration and got a wedding instead..."

Fate was difficult to reason about. That was the nature of divination: when a vision could be interpreted, you had to do so carefully; when it couldn't, you left it alone rather than forcing meaning onto it.

Last time, he had seen his own head separated from his body and assumed the worst, only to discover it was Black Rose who had removed it, not an enemy. Overreaction to prophecy had a way of steering the future toward exactly the disaster you were trying to avoid.

So Ambrose set it aside. He would look into it at some point and see whether any notable figures had recently announced engagements or planned marriages, but it wasn't worth dwelling on now.

After the unexpected appearance of the enormous shark, the ghost ship encountered nothing further to slow it down.

It carried them to a trench in the ocean, somewhat different from the one where they had met Aige before. This stretch of deep water was thick with bioluminescent fish, their light drifting up through the dark in shifting blues and greens.

Milena's eyes lit up like lanterns. She spent the entire descent pressed against whatever surface offered the best view, her golden gaze chasing schools of fish through the water. But when the ghost ship finally reached its destination, she collected herself and fell in behind Ambrose as he crossed onto a massive and ornate vessel, far grander than the ghost ship that had brought them there.

Even from a distance, Ambrose could feel the change in Aige.

She was stronger, considerably so. It was the kind of shift that announced itself without any effort on her part.

She met them on deck in the form of a sea sprite, as before.

"It's been a while, Captain," Ambrose said. "You've grown more powerful."

Aige nodded. "Thanks to you. You cleared up questions I had had for centuries and pointed me forward. My goal is to become a deity and petition Aion to restore my father's life. That isn't something achieved through the kind of aimless wandering I was doing before."

In the past, her search for a way to revive the old shipwright had mostly consisted of drifting and gathering rumors. It was Ambrose who had told her that only Aion could save her father. With a clear target, her plans had sharpened. When he had later mentioned wanting to help her ascend to godhood, she had invited him to come and discuss it without a moment's hesitation.

After their time together, everyone in the Elegiac Society had developed a thorough understanding of what Ambrose was capable of.

Whatever he committed to, he delivered, provided the price was right. Aige had spent the intervening time making sure she could pay his price.

"Becoming a deity isn't simple," Ambrose said, "and I can only offer guidance, not guarantees. That said, the original plan may need some adjustment. I've recently come into some knowledge about the divine that might help you get there faster, but first, I need to understand everything about where you currently stand."

The knowledge Leyla had shared defied ordinary description. She might have been a lesser deity by divine standards, but what she had access to was of a different order entirely from anything a mortal could perceive.

There were mortals who had killed gods, but killing something and understanding it were very different matters. And Ambrose couldn't pass the knowledge on directly. He could only use it as a lens to examine Aige's situation and see what it revealed.

Aige didn't answer immediately. Instead, she turned toward Milena. "You must be Milena. I'm sorry. I've been talking past you since you arrived. I am close friends with your mother. There's no need to be nervous, and no need to stare at me quite so intently."

Milena flushed slightly. "I'm sorry. It's just—you're so beautiful."

"Call me Aunt Aige," she said, smiling. "I'm nowhere near as beautiful as your mother. We've been friends for a long time, so there's no need to flatter me."

"I'm not flattering you," Milena said earnestly. "I mean it. You're more beautiful than my mother, in terms of the soul!"

Since stepping aboard, Milena had barely taken her eyes off Aige. It might have looked like the same helpless admiration she fell into whenever a striking woman appeared in her vicinity, but this was different.

Aige's face, by any conventional measure, couldn't compete with an elven queen or Black Rose. What Milena was seeing through her golden eyes was something else: the light that radiated from Aige's soul, a brilliance that approached the divine, luminous and genuine and unlike anything she had seen at such close range.

Aige felt the quality of that gaze, seemed to sense there was something unusual behind it, and looked at Milena with open surprise. "What a remarkable child. Your father weaves souls, and you see them as they truly are. You really are his daughter."

She turned back to Ambrose. "An undead having a child is something even Valarun, the god of liches, never managed. You've already surpassed what gods can do. Becoming one yourself is only a matter of time."

Ambrose accepted this pronouncement without false modesty. "That's kind of you to say, but let's return to the matter at hand. Captain, I'd like you to show me everything you're capable of. Hold nothing back."

Aige raised an eyebrow. "It's a good thing we're both undead, or that statement would sound quite misleading."

Ambrose opened his mouth to clarify that the idea of anything untoward was absurd, that they were hardly the likes of Gareth and Alabastra, making oddities of themselves in the middle of the Elegiac Society, but then the vision of the wedding surfaced briefly in his mind and he paused.

Was this, too, a hint from fate? That the couple about to be married shared no genuine feelings?

It had to be a political marriage, then. That narrowed the field down considerably.

He filed the thought away with quiet satisfaction. Milena, meanwhile, was burning the entire exchange into her memory with absolute precision.

Before they had left, her mother, Black Rose, had given her very specific instructions. Everything Ambrose said and did on this journey was to be observed and remembered without exception. Word for word, gesture for gesture, even things she didn't understand—especially things she didn't understand—were to be committed to memory first to be sorted out later. That was how one got smarter.

"I will remember every detail," Milena told herself, "and report it all to Mother when we return, so she can explain it to me and I can become cleverer."

She fixed her large golden eyes on the two of them and resolved not to blink unnecessarily.

Aige had no idea what either of them was thinking. She had made a small joke; in response Ambrose had gone quiet, and Milena had started staring at her with an intensity that could have cored through the hull.

She felt a ripple of awkwardness. Had she miscalculated? She had lived at the bottom of the ocean for a very long time. Perhaps her sense of what was appropriate in casual conversation had fallen behind the times.

"Ahem. What you want to see is my legendary boon, I assume. Let's find somewhere with more open space. I'll demonstrate it properly."

She changed the subject and began steering the great ghost ship.

Ambrose blinked. "Where are we going?"

"My legendary boon works best with actual opponents to use it against. You wanted to cause trouble for the githarks, didn't you? I'll take you to the Isle of Dragons. We can visit Gareth and Alabastra while we're at it."

And hopefully, she thought to herself, having two more members of the Elegiac Society around would dispel whatever strange atmosphere had just settled over the cabin.

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