Lich for Hire

Chapter 374: The Holy King's Covenant

"Every kingdom on the continent has to forgive you? What kind of condition is that? Who would ever forgive the dragons?"

Ambrose suspected Sephris was merely telling him a convenient story. Driving the dragon clans into exile made sense. The surviving dragons had been too few and too wounded to finish off entirely, and pushing them to annihilation would have cost more than it was worth.

But leaving behind a clause for their potential return?

Arthur Lyon could simply have barred them from returning permanently. Why entertain the possibility of forgiving them at all?

Sephris exhaled. "You're right. No race would ever forgive the dragons. That's precisely why we've spent more than a thousand years on this ocean, not daring to return. Bone dragons are a different matter. We've crossed into undeath, which means we're no longer technically dragonkind, so the covenant's terms don't apply to us."

"So the Dragon Graveyard," Ambrose said, reading into what lay unspoken, "the entire apparatus you've built here was designed to convert dragons into bone dragons so they could return?"

"Impossible. If all the dragons die, there are no more dragons." Sephris's voice was flat. "If we all became undead, the dragon clans would have no future."

"That's a bit prejudiced," Ambrose said.

Everyone present was undead. None of them appeared to lack a future. Ambrose's own projected future involved becoming the wealthiest individual in the world, a future most living people would envy.

Sephris didn't pursue the point. "The terms of the covenant were straightforward. At the time it was signed, there were only three surviving adult dragons, myself included. All of us were severely wounded. The remainder were several hundred juveniles."

Gareth, who had been listening with great interest, couldn't stop himself from asking, "So why didn't Arthur Lyon just kill all of you?"

Sephris glared at him. Ambrose hurriedly cut in. "Is that how you ought to speak to your father-in-law? And if Arthur Lyon had finished the job, your wife probably wouldn't exist."

Sephris turned to Ambrose. The lich had been even more offensive than his foolish son-in-law! Small wonder they were friends.

Gareth apologized quickly. He had spoken without thinking.

Arthur Lyon had been his personal idol once. Gareth never thought he would one day cut through his idol's empire.

But Ambrose still didn't understand how the githarks played into this at all. "What exactly are the githarks planning to do to dissolve the covenant?"

Sephris shook his head. "They haven't told me everything. I no longer count as dragonkind, and they keep their own counsel. What I can confirm is that their plan will require several years to complete."

How would the githarks obtain the forgiveness of every kingdom on the continent? Stage an attack on all of them and have the dragons swoop in to play the savior?

That was too transparently theatrical. No one with any sense would believe it, and even if they did, forgiveness was a different matter from political convenience. Allowing dragons to return and compete for their living space was not something any kingdom would agree to out of gratitude.

None of the obvious angles made sense. Ambrose decided it was his time to shine.

"For something that happened over a thousand years ago," he said, "we might as well ask someone who was there. There may be details in this covenant that we don't know and that Sephris has simply forgotten."

Sephris frowned. "Who? Among the dragons, I'm the only one who remembers the covenant at all. The rest are all from younger generations. Most of them were barely old enough to remember anything from that time."

"I'm not talking about a dragon," Ambrose said. "I mean Arthur Lyon himself."

He extended a small containment barrier to repel the ambient dark energy, then reached into his personal space and produced the hourglass.

Everyone looked at it. Sephris gaped in genuine shock. "The Eternal Hourglass? How do you have that? That was Atros's treasure—Arthur Lyon stole it, and no one has known where it ended up since. If Atros had had it, he would never have lost to Arthur Lyon."

Just what was up with this lich? How could he suddenly produce a lost relic out of nowhere?

"Lord Sephris," Ambrose said calmly, "prepare yourself. What comes next is going to be more surprising."

Sephris steadied himself. "You can't possibly be about to tell me you've resurrected the Dragon Tyrant."

"Not quite. But I can bring the dragons' old enemy before you. Arthur, come out and meet your former acquaintances."

At Ambrose's call, the heroic spirit of Arthur Lyon materialized from the hourglass, taking gradual shape above it.

The moment Arthur Lyon's eyes found Sephris, he looked uncertain. "Forgive me, have we met?"

Sephris stared. He would have known that face anywhere. Those eyes. The weight of holy light that radiated from the spirit, even diminished as it was—Sephris had carried the memory of it for over a thousand years.

"Arthur Lyon!" Sephris roared. "It really is you. But how could you have ended up in such a state? Weren't you supposed to have entered the Lord of Dawn's divine realm? I will— I am going to kill you—"

"Wait, wait," said Arthur Lyon, with the expression of someone who had been accosted by a stranger. "I genuinely don't recognize you."

"You don't recognize me?!" Sephris' composure shattered. He reverted to his true form, an enormous iridescent bone dragon, one wing hanging loose at a broken angle, colors shifting across ancient bone.

"Look at my wing. Look at it. Do you remember now?"

His jaws opened. He came very close to simply swallowing Arthur Lyon whole.

Ambrose saw the situation deteriorating rapidly. "Gareth, stop your father-in-law. If they start fighting in here, the entire Graveyard will explode."

He wasn't exaggerating. Ambrose had been feeding Arthur Lyon soul fragments for a long time, and the spirit had recovered the bulk of his power. When Arthur and Aige had clashed, the collision had shaken the surrounding area for considerable distance. If that happened inside the Dragon Graveyard, the island would be devastated.

Gareth moved to place himself between Sephris and the spirit. "This isn't the Arthur Lyon you remember. The Arthur Lyon you see is a heroic spirit, which has inherited part of his memories. Calm down, Father! And even if he were the real Arthur Lyon, you can't do this here."

Perhaps Gareth's voice had an effect. Sephris began to calm down, then reformed into an old man in white.

Arthur Lyon, in the meantime, had been trying to work out where he had seen the old man before. It came to him. "I remember now. The wound on your wing—I caused it!"

Sephris nearly lost his composure again. The memory of that particular blow... He wanted to devour Arthur Lyon right then and there.

It took Ambrose considerable time to pacify the old man and explain the nature of the heroic spirit: what it was, how it had come to exist, and why it was not quite the same as the man who had won the war.

Once Sephris had calmed down, Ambrose finally asked Arthur Lyon about the dragons' covenant.

He had half-expected the spirit not to possess memories of the relevant period. Instead, Arthur Lyon said without hesitation, "The covenant? I know of it. I'd been thinking about what to do with the surviving dragons long before the war was won. What you've described matches what I remember."

"Why leave a way for them to return at all?" Ambrose asked. "For all the kingdoms to forgive the dragons is an impossible standard by any practical measure. It doesn't make sense."

Arthur Lyon looked faintly puzzled at the question. "Why doesn't it make sense? If you've done wrong, and you've atoned for it sincerely, others ought to forgive you. Isn't that simply how it should work?"

Ambrose wasn't sure what to say. Was this man genuinely this naïve?

"These are dragons," he said. "The dragons, who left a trail of blood too vast and too long to measure."

Arthur Lyon shook his head. "Dragons are an intelligent race. They are living beings of this world. We overthrew their rule because they were destroying other races and making it impossible for anyone else to live.

"I suspect most of the worst of them must have died in the fighting, which means the ones who were driven out were largely the young. Children deserve a chance at forgiveness. And if this generation can't achieve it, the next one can try, or the one after. Hatred can't be allowed to persist forever.

"Would you rather that a thousand years from now, someone starts another war because of grievances from ancient history? Can you imagine two people drawing swords because their ancestors were enemies centuries ago? If that's where we end up, then all the blood spilled in this war meant nothing.

"It won't be easy to genuinely forgive the dragons, human nature being what it is. But if it can be achieved, it will mean the dragons have made a sacrifice significant enough to earn it. I think that's a perfectly reasonable covenant."

He said the last part with a certain quiet satisfaction, as if the elegance of the arrangement were still evident to him.

No one spoke for a moment. Even Sephris had released the fist he had been holding clenched at his side. Whatever else Arthur Lyon had been, he had treated all intelligent races as equals. He had fought to survive, not to exterminate. Even in victory, he had left a thread of possibility open for the defeated.

Very much in keeping with the teachings of the Lord of Dawn, who held that hope was never fully extinguished.

His way of thinking was entirely different from most people's, and yet Ambrose couldn't find fault with it.

The covenant was beautiful in its way, its idealism, and it assumed far more goodwill from all parties than the world had generally been willing to provide.

Still, the more Ambrose considered it, the more his respect for Arthur Lyon deepened. The humans of that era had been fortunate to have someone like this leading them.

Then he caught himself. That wasn't the point right now.

"Arthur, think carefully," he began. "Is there any other way the covenant could be dissolved, any alternative you built in?"

He needed to understand the githarks' plan. Everything so far had been background information.

Arthur Lyon considered, then shook his head. "I'm not someone who hides things in layers. I don't enjoy word games. As best I can recall, there was nothing else—at least, nothing I intended at the time. Whether circumstances later created other possibilities, I genuinely wouldn't know."

Ambrose tucked the hourglass away and let the spirit return to his personal space, then settled into thought.

He was going to have to get answers from the githarks directly. Extracting a few souls and examining them ought to provide something useful.

He turned back to Sephris. "One last question, Lord Sephris, and I ask this as one lich to another. Why steal from the domain of death? What is the Dragon Graveyard actually trying to accomplish, and how exactly is it drawing on that power?"

Sephris grimaced. "You may find this difficult to accept. We draw on death's power for one reason only: to improve the success rate of the bone dragon transformation. As for the method, that belongs to the Elegiac Society, not to us. Your president sent us a ring. Through that artifact, we were given access to the power of death."

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