Lich for Hire

When Kalgore Kruman opened his eyes again, he was lying on a beach.

Above him was a sky full of stars.

"I'm alive?"

He sat up slowly and ran his hands over himself. His body was intact. His blood, somehow, had been restored: he was no longer a dried husk.

The last thing he remembered was the vampire's teeth at his neck. Why was he still here?

Was this the afterlife? It didn't feel like the afterlife. It felt like a beach.

He looked around carefully. The sand looked ordinary, but he had the persistent, unsettling sensation that the grains were watching him.

Any particular patch seemed just like sand, but the texture of the island felt wrong in a way he couldn't name. Even the stones seemed to have mouths, whispering words he couldn't hear.

"Grush above, is this some kind of divine punishment?!"

He invoked the name of the orc god. He wasn't particularly devout, but the situation seemed to call for some form of appeal to a higher power.

Heki Stone's voice floated down from nearby. "Stop calling on Grush. Your patron now is Cancheris, god of vampires. Get used to the name."

Kalgore jumped up in shock. He tried to dissolve into shadow, but his body didn't cooperate.

Heki Stone drifted lazily into his field of view. "Save your energy. My blood is running through you now. You're my blood thrall. Do you understand what that means?"

Kalgore behaved as though he hadn't heard. He kept struggling, his whole body straining, as he shouted, "I will never be anyone's slave again, never!"

The effort made his skin ripple with strange raised shapes. The blood inside him was delivering punishment for the resistance, enforcing the hierarchy Heki Stone had created.

Blood was the mechanism of vampiric transformation for a reason. The conversion required feeding a significant quantity of a higher vampire's blood to the subject, and that blood then became the means of total control.

A vampire of sufficient power could dictate not only the actions of their blood-kin but reach into their thoughts. Heki Stone had converted the orc because he had seen genuine capability and wanted a useful subordinate. The Elegiac Society was a competitive environment, and he was frankly the least combat-capable member of the group. Having a strong fighter at his disposal seemed prudent.

He had deliberately not involved Ambrose. If that lich found out, the orc's bones would somehow end up in an inventory somewhere.

Kalgore's resistance was expected and not particularly concerning. Every newly converted vampire went through this phase, convinced they could hold out indefinitely. And they could, up to a point. Unless this orc had an entire kingdom's military backing to bring to bear, the contract couldn't be dissolved by willpower.

So Heki Stone simply waited.

Kalgore lasted several minutes before the pain brought him down. This wasn't something he could endure through determination alone.

The blood sought out his marrow and worked its way into the deepest structures of the body, producing a sensation as if someone was directly engraving his soul. There was no point at which the body learned to tolerate it. The pain only got worse.

"Not bad—nearly ten minutes," Heki Stone said, once Kalgore was on the ground. "That's the longest I've seen. Now, are you ready to accept the situation?"

Kalgore lay flat on the sand. "I've lost," he said, lifelessly. "How long do I have to serve you before you let me go?"

Heki Stone chuckled. "Your eternal life belongs to me now."

"Then kill me," Kalgore said. "I won't be a slave."

"That's not your choice to make!" Heki Stone said, annoyed. "If you keep refusing, you'll only keep suffering."

He triggered the blood again. Kalgore curled up as if he were being crushed, his pain visible in every muscle.

But this time, Kalgore didn't struggle. He just endured.

When Heki Stone let him breathe, he said the same thing again. "Kill me. Or free me. Don't waste your time."

Heki Stone stared at him. He had shown no restraint in what he'd applied. Under normal circumstances, that level of sustained agony would break his mind long before it broke his will. How was this orc still capable of speech?

He applied the punishment again. Kalgore writhed across the sand. When it stopped, he said the same thing.

Heki Stone was genuinely at a loss.

If Kalgore simply decided to lie there and accept whatever happened without resisting, there was actually very little Heki Stone could do about it.

Compulsion and charm were options, technically, but that wasn't what he wanted. A puppet with no will of its own was useless. He had plenty of those already. The whole point of converting this orc was to get a subordinate who could think and act independently.

An orc who had been broken into compliance was just a very inconvenient zombie.

He applied the punishment a third time, and a fourth. He kept going that way for over two hours.

Kalgore's answer never changed.

"That damned lich can charm an elven queen into warming his bed," Heki Stone muttered under his breath, "and I can't even manage one orc."

He almost went to get Ambrose and ask for advice. He stopped himself on the grounds that doing so would definitely result in the orc's bones being itemized and sold.

He tried a different approach instead. "What's so bad about being a vampire? Eternal life and considerable magic. The only real downside is sunlight. Isn't this better for you overall?"

Kalgore looked at him. "I'd rather die than be a slave."

Heki Stone was silent for a moment.

"Fine," he said. "I'll compromise. I'll give you some degree of freedom if you work for me and follow orders."

Kalgore raised his head. Something had changed in his expression. "I can be free? Sleep whenever I want? Eat meat whenever I want?"

Heki Stone blinked. "That's what you mean by freedom?"

"Yes!" Kalgore said, with more energy than he'd had since surfacing. "That's exactly what freedom is. Nobody docking my food, nobody dragging me out of bed before dawn to work. Sleeping when I'm tired, eating when I'm hungry. That's all there is to it."

Heki Stone looked at this young orc, the faint scar tissue still visible on his skin from a life that hadn't been gentle. The marks would fade over the next few years now that he'd been converted, but were still apparent at the moment.

A runaway slave. That explained his reaction to "freedom."

Easy enough: Heki Stone would just call him a subordinate, an associate, an employee, a hired hand—the label might be different, but the relationship was the same. If the orc couldn't see past the label, Heki would simply give him a different one.

Heki Stone smiled. "Agreed. Sleep whenever you want, eat whenever you want. In exchange, when you're rested and fed, you work."

Kalgore thought about this for a moment. "Swear on it. Swear on your god, on Kan-whatever-his-name—"

"Cancheris," Heki Stone said. "Remember it properly. If you mispronounce a deity's name in a formal oath and you're punished for it, that's not my problem. You'd spend eternity as someone else's slave."

Kalgore shut his mouth immediately.

"Good," Heki Stone said with satisfaction. "Now tell me your name and where you're from."

He needed the orc's background, and a proper assessment of what his abilities actually were.

Kalgore gave a brief account. There wasn't much to hide. A newly freed slave, he had tracked a grudge all the way to the open ocean. Bad luck had left him before a vampire.

"You're one of that lich's enemies?" Heki Stone said, surprised. What had Ambrose done that someone carrying a ten-generation vendetta was out here looking for him? The man genuinely wasn't afraid of anything.

Then a very satisfying idea occurred to him.

He moved next to Kalgore and clapped him on the leg. "Right. You're my sla—you're my subordinate now. Your grudge is my grudge. I'll help you get what you're owed."

Kalgore stared at him, genuinely taken aback. The vampire had been true to his word about freedom. Was he offering to help with the revenge too? He might actually be a decent fellow.

Heki was thinking to himself, "I'm going to squeeze several hundred thousand gold out of that lich, enough to make him visibly pained for days."

He was on the verge of standing up and going to find Ambrose when the ocean interrupted. A furious voice could be heard from afar. "Treacherous mortal! I've found you at last!"

Heki Stone turned. Walls of water, dozens of meters high, rolled toward them. At the crest of the largest wave was a very angry, completely naked, and extraordinarily ugly man, staring directly at the two of them.

Heki Stone stared. "Who is this?"

Kalgore stared alongside him. "I cut his head off. How is he still moving?"

Kalgore turned to Heki Stone. "Boss, you said my grudges were yours, right? So about this..."

Heki felt a dull ache in his chest. He seemed like he was about to cough up blood.

"Damn it all," he said. "I never catch a break!" He tipped his head back and bellowed at the top of his lungs, "MEGAMAN TIGA! WE HAVE A PROBLEM!"

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!