Lich for Hire

"Have you saved more lives than that lich?"

On its face, the question was absurd, and yet James Watson had no answer. He was getting old, he supposed. His thinking had grown sluggish. He had lost sight of the most fundamental thing.

While still High Inquisitor, Watson had issued Ambrose's pardon without hesitation. The reasoning had been simple: the lich had saved lives, and the rules said you pardoned someone who saved lives. That was all.

But since his resignation, as he watched Lyon slide further into corruption, he had set aside Lyon's law alongside everything else. Without the law to anchor him, the standard he had held himself to for a lifetime had dissolved, leaving him adrift.

His son Cade had just pointed out the obvious. Watson was only now seeing how badly he had lost his bearings.

Cade Watson looked at his father's aging face and, emboldened by the alcohol still in his system, pressed on. "Father, this is what happens to retired men. Every one of them goes through some version of this. You leave the environment you've spent your life in, and suddenly you don't know what to do with yourself, and everything seems darker than it is. My suggestion is to keep thinking of yourself as the High Inquisitor, just one who's on holiday."

Watson's expression turned indignant. "That's nonsense. A title is given to you by others. You don't get to assign it to yourself. You're telling me to lie to myself!"

Cade spread his hands in surrender. He had known from childhood that this kind of response was coming. He had never fit comfortably into a rigid framework, and his father had always found this the least appealing of his qualities.

"Fine, I'll concede the point. But I'll stand by one thing: however you look at this lich, he has saved the continent many times over. I wouldn't even be surprised if the Lord of Dawn gave him a blessing tomorrow. Don't let him fool you."

He disconnected before his father could respond.

Watson sat in his boat, staring at the now-silent mirror. Had he really been misreading this lich all along?

He sat with that question as the boat moved away from the island. Whatever the answer was, he was too uncertain about himself right now to be making judgments about anyone else.

All those who knew Ambrose knew only a facet of his soul.

To most people in Lyon, he was exactly what a lich was supposed to be: cruel, powerful, evil, the kind of threat that required Lyon's full response. The quintessential undead enemy.

To the goddesses he had maneuvered against, he was that which should not exist, a tongue that could have earned its own divinity on the power of the spoken word alone. Every sentence he spoke was a blade aimed at making the deities destroy themselves. Loss's and Shara's fates were proof enough.

To the undead, he was the sharpest strategist in a millennium, who had managed to subvert the High Inquisitor and walk off with the Holy King's heroic spirit. He was Lyon's natural counter, and the most accomplished undead of the age.

And to the clear-eyed, like Cade Watson, Ambrose was a lich who talked about cruelty and ruthlessness while spending his existence saving the world.

The wars he had prevented, the kingdom he had kept from damnation, the astral invasion he had dismantled—his deeds were quickly approaching those of the heroes of the Dragon Tyrant's era.

And yet all these perspectives were one-dimensional.

Ambrose had lived in this world for several centuries. He had met more people than he could count and witnessed more stories than he could catalog, and what he had arrived at, eventually, was this: intelligent species were all the same. There was no race composed entirely of beauty, or of greed, or of good faith.

Culture mattered, certainly, and stereotypes existed for a reason.

But even the dragons' particular flavor of unrepentant self-interest had plenty of human equivalents, and Lyon's extreme religion producing extremist behavior was a pattern that had appeared in different forms across every culture in recorded history.

The Unholy Kingdom, at its worst, had had the same system of mutual denunciation, the same atmosphere of fear and false accusation. Everyone thought they were different from everyone else, but they weren't.

Any crime that existed had appeared in every nation, because crime came from human weakness, and human weakness was not geographically distributed.

Ambrose had discarded racial allegiances very early in his existence. His gold had no faction. It did not distinguish the righteous from the wicked.

Lyon was coming to kill him, and his job was to figure out how to maximize what he gained from that, not to adjudicate whether they were right to try.

He did two more circuits of the island, directing the wraiths to feed the magical array and repair what had taken damage, then retreated to his personal space to prepare.

As Watson had correctly identified, the purpose of this whole exercise was deterrence. Lyon's attack was built into the plan. The requirement was not just to win, but to win in a way that was visible and legible to every observer—to make it clear that, if even Lyon could not reach him, those who intended to attack should think carefully about their odds relative to Lyon's.

What he hadn't expected was seven legendaries and an artifact, backed by a full elite legion. That would have been enough to take on the Unholy Kingdom by itself.

He needed to adjust his plans to ensure that his intended outcome would be a certainty.

While Ambrose prepared in his extradimensional space, Lyon's forces were boarding ships.

After the Unholy Kingdom's disappearance, Lyon's territory extended almost to the coast. No port infrastructure was necessary: they simply constructed a teleportation array, transferred the warships through, and launched. Lyon had the resources to make that entirely unremarkable.

The empire's economic foundation was deep. Its military victories had won it half the desert, and there was much gold underground.

Their single battlefield defeat had cost them their morale, not their capabilities.

The elite thousand-soldier force assembled: mages, rangers, and a full complement of priests capable of combined spellcasting.

There were no supply staff. None were necessary. The corps was sustained by dimensional pouches and teleportation networks.

The seven legends that commanded the elite corps were surely sufficient to destroy a single lich. By ordinary logic, Ambrose only had two choices left: to run, or to lose.

The commander of the expedition, Cyril Roland, was accordingly confident.

Cyril Roland had just turned fifty-five that year. He had reached the legendary rank at forty-two—exceptional even by the standards of the Knights Penitent, whom he led. His unit had put down uncountably many undead and monsters, many at his hand.

And his hand now held the Blood of Dawn, once the blade of Arthur Lyon himself.

The story was that, after the Holy King slew the Dragon Tyrant, the Lord of Dawn had granted him a blessing: a single drop of divine blood, fused into the steel of his sword. The Blood of Dawn had been the result.

The Draconic Armaments had more renown, but they were bound to royal blood, and only those of Arthur Lyon's lineage could wield them. The Blood of Dawn was something every paladin could aspire to, the highest honor the order knew.

Only the Silvermoon Knight had been granted that privilege for most of its history, and every deployment required a lengthy, solemn ceremony just to bring it out of its chapel.

Centuries of faith had only deepened its power. The moment Cyril's hand closed around the hilt, he felt the holy light within him respond to something larger than itself. He had never felt this strong.

That feeling of unprecedented strength was precisely what was making him nervous. He was carrying the Lord of Dawn's sacred blade into battle. If he were to fail, the weight of that failure would be beyond reckoning.

"Let me make sure all equipment is in order, all supplies are accounted for, that no one's going to experience difficulties with the sea crossing..."

He had walked the ship from end to end three times, checking everything twice over, the habit of someone who couldn't quiet his thoughts.

His second-in-command finally said, gently, "Cyril, rest. We're using magic to accelerate toward our destination. We'll get there in three days. At this rate, you won't have the energy to draw the sword when you actually need it."

Cyril exhaled. "I know, but I can't stop. My hand keeps going back to the hilt." He looked out at the water. "We cannot lose."

"We won't. No undead has ever withstood the Blood of Dawn. Trust in the Lord of Dawn. He will support us."

Cyril drew several deep breaths and nodded. "You're right. I'll go get some air."

He left the close heat of the cabin and moved to the prow.

The ship, built to carry a thousand, barely registered the waves. The fresh air helped. His thoughts began to settle. He had let himself get overwound—understandable, for a battle this significant, but unbecoming in a veteran who had seen far harsher situations than this.

Just as Ambrose had predicted, the artifact was so important as to rattle even the legends in charge.

Cyril Roland was just taking in a bout of fresh air when he narrowed his eyes. There was an unnatural emanation from the depths of the ocean.

The next instant, dozens of enormous tentacles drove up through the waves and reached for the ship's hull.

"Sea creature!" the lookout shouted from the tower, belatedly, as the horns sounded.

The ship had been making excellent time on magical propulsion and was well clear of the coast. The open ocean was full of things that lived in the dark, but no one had approached one to appear so quickly.

Cyril looked at the tentacles, which were thicker than ordinary pillars, and drew a single deep breath. He raised his right hand.

"In the name of the Holy Light, annihilate what evil stands before us!"

Power erupted from him without restraint, manifesting as a falling rain of white-gold blades of light. Every tentacle was severed in moments.

The creature below screamed. Then, as the blades found it in the dark, it came apart.

Fragments of the deep-sea creature rose slowly to the surface as Cyril's right hand returned to the sword hilt.

This time, they would surely win. That lich would end like that creature had, consumed by holy light until nothing remained.

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