Lich for Hire

Heki Stone's shouting was unnecessary. The towering wave had already caught Ambrose's attention.

By the time Aiolos came surging toward the shore on his wall of water, Ambrose was already in the air.

A burst of magic from his fingertips sent a cascade of hailstones down. The wave froze solid mid-crash, the water locking into place with Aiolos suspended inside it.

Ambrose descended and looked at Heki Stone. "What is going on?"

Heki Stone glanced at his newly acquired subordinate, then back at Ambrose. "How should I know? I was standing here looking at stars, and this person came riding a wave at me. He's your enemy, presumably?"

Ambrose turned his attention to the orc standing nearby, baffled. "Who is this?"

Kalgore Kruman didn't know Ambrose, and was now technically employed. He looked toward his employer.

Heki Stone explained. "The orc I mentioned earlier. I took him on as a subordinate, and he's a vampire now."

Ambrose studied the orc with focused attention. Something seemed slightly off. There was something unusual about his proportions: his nose too broad, his facial structure oversized, his thighs far too thick even for orcs.

"What clan are you from? You look like you have ogre blood."

Kalgore Kruman's expression shifted. "How did you know that?"

"Was I right?" Ambrose said. "I met a mixed ogre-orc bloodline years ago, the Krumans, was it? They left a strong impression on me."

"The Krumans?" Kalgore's eyes narrowed. He was staring at the lich very carefully now.

Ambrose registered the killing intent and blinked. "You can't be serious. A descendant of the Krumans? You lot aren't extinct yet?"

Kalgore roared and threw himself at Ambrose, twin blades in hand.

He made it approximately one step before going completely rigid and falling over.

Heki Stone had seized control of the blood running through Kalgore's body.

"Idiot," he snapped at the orc. "Did I tell you to do anything?"

Then, with considerably more courtesy, he apologized to Ambrose. "A small misunderstanding. He apparently came here with a grudge against you. I'd just been told there was some kind of history."

Heki Stone was genuinely irritated with Ambrose, but there was a difference between setting up a situation to squeeze money out of someone and actually trying to kill them. Kalgore was his subordinate. Ambrose was a fellow member of the Elegiac Society. He knew which relationship mattered more. And practically speaking, he was almost certain he would lose the fight anyway.

Ambrose was unruffled. Rather, he was looking at Kalgore with astonishment. "Your family is still alive? I thought I'd been thorough. There wasn't a single adult left standing—only children too young to matter. Your bloodline survived all that? Your ogre heritage really does breed resilience."

Kalgore roared in outrage. "You sound proud of having massacred my family's ancestors!"

"Proud, yes," Ambrose said pleasantly. "I've done few genuinely good things in my life, but destroying the Krumans is absolutely one of them. Do you actually know what your family did?"

Kalgore went still.

He didn't. He had grown up a slave. Everything he knew about his family's former prominence had come from his father's spoken accounts, fragments passed down in the dark about how great the Krumans had been and how terrible their enemy was. He had barely known how to read, but he had memorized the hatred with more care than he'd given to anything else.

He had expected to need months to track down this enemy, not to trip over him on the first island he found.

Ambrose crouched down and took hold of Kalgore's jaw, tilting his face up, his own voice low. "Your family ran a slave operation. They specialized in capturing people, brutalizing them, and eating them. I watched the Krumans skin children alive and eat them raw. I was there." He let that sit. "You eat people too, don't you?"

That was the worst failure of Ambrose's entire adventuring career, and also the most memorable.

He had been an experienced mage by then, and part of a well-regarded adventuring company. The Kruman family had hired them under false pretenses. Ambrose had been away on business when the rest of the company accepted the terms; by the time he returned, the trap had already been sprung.

He had been out of practice with his divination at the time and was deliberately suppressing those abilities, so he'd had no warning.

The entire party had been captured, Ambrose included.

His arm was torn off and eaten in front of him. Several of his companions lost hands or feet. Everyone was subjected to whatever the Krumans felt like doing to them that day.

But Ambrose had been clever enough to invent fictitious buried treasure in a place he knew was occupied by undead, and talked the orcs guarding him into taking him there.

He killed them, returned to the Kruman family's slave compound, and freed everyone: his companions and every other prisoner besides.

But that hadn't been enough. Once his arm grew back, he changed his appearance, invented a new identity, and secured a position in the orc court as a minor cook.

Months of patient information-gathering followed. He identified leverage and constructed a situation that led the Kruman count directly into the orc king's harem.

The entire adult Kruman lineage was hanged. Children shorter than a cart wheel were spared, but enslaved.

He had assumed the bloodline was gone by now. At minimum, he expected it to be absorbed into the slave population.

He had not anticipated Kalgore to survive and seek him out.

Ogre heritage was certainly something, he had to admit. Whatever had been done to this family across ten generations, the bloodline had held firm.

Kalgore gaped. His family was in the slave business? That meant that many people, people like himself, had been taken and brutalized by his own ancestors.

His mind went blank. The certainty of his family's nobility and his enemy's wickedness had just been inverted.

Heki Stone looked pained. "Don't break him. He's still useful to me."

Ambrose dropped Kalgore on the sand with mild contempt. Heki Stone was his colleague in the Elegiac Society. That, at least, was worth some basic consideration.

He turned back. "Out of respect for you, I'll stop there. I'll take the position of second author as repayment for this."

"What?! Now hold on—"

Heki Stone stood there baffled. He had arranged this entire situation specifically to extract money from the lich using the orc's family grievance as leverage. Somehow, he had ended up owing Ambrose a favor. He genuinely could not identify where things had gone wrong. How did this lich always have the moral high ground? He was a lich, not a paladin!

Ambrose added reasonably, "Not worth it? Fine. I'll just convert him into a zombie. An ogre-orc hybrid is an interesting specimen."

"You—fine! I'll make you second author!"

He had just been bled dry again. If he said no, the lich would actually make good on his threat, and Heki Stone would have wasted extremely valuable vampire blood for nothing.

Heki Stone vented his feelings by kicking Kalgore hard enough to produce a satisfying crunch of cartilage. Kalgore's nose started bleeding freely. But the orc appeared to be so deeply traumatized by his ruined worldview that he didn't react to the pain at all.

Having acquired what he came for, Ambrose offered a conciliatory word. "Don't take it out on him. I had a grudge against him, and I'm not even holding him accountable. You're supposed to be his employer. By the way, who was that surfer supposed to be?"

He pointed at the ugly man who had been frozen in a block of ice, only to discover, to his surprise, that he was gone.

A Frost Ray shot toward Ambrose from the water, and he threw himself sideways. The beam hit the sand where he had been and left a spreading fan of white frost. That was more power than a Frost Ray was supposed to produce.

He turned. The ugly, naked man was standing on the ocean surface, both hands crackling with ice.

"You aren't dead?"

Direct exposure to a Hailstorm at that intensity should have produced a frozen corpse at minimum. But the man was standing there in perfect health, naked, and merely looking annoyed.

Aiolos wasn't interested in explaining himself to someone who had attacked him. He pointed at the motionless Kalgore. "What is your relationship with that treacherous creature?"

He had been chasing Kalgore through open ocean for some time. The orc's shadow-travel made him extremely difficult to track.

After failing to locate him in the water, Aiolos had tried the nearest island. When he arrived and saw Heki Stone in apparent conversation with Kalgore, he had assumed they were allies and launched the wave accordingly.

After being frozen, he had watched the following sequence of events take place: the lich berated the orc, and the vampire kicked him in the face until he bled.

He was young, barely hours old, but he understood the concept of the enemy of his enemy being his friend. Before making any further moves, he wanted to establish who was on whose side. He was here to find Ariel and propose marriage. If any of these people had a connection to her, attacking them carelessly would be counterproductive.

He didn't know what Ariel looked like yet, but considering that his father Thanos had personally directed him to marry her, she must be someone of extraordinary beauty or significance in this part of the world.

Marriage came first; everything else was secondary.

"You have a problem with this orc?" Ambrose asked.

Aiolos was furious. "I asked him for directions, and he cut off my head!"

Ambrose absorbed this. He looked at Aiolos, then considered the situation more generally. The web of relationships here was more tangled than in a historical drama.

"How are you still alive after being beheaded?" Ambrose finally asked.

The naked man had survived a hailstorm without visible damage. He had survived decapitation. Something was very wrong with him.

Aiolos drew himself up with visible pride. "That is beyond what mortals like you can comprehend. As long as the waves of this ocean yet move, I cannot die."

Ambrose: "..."

Had this ugly man just revealed a very significant secret?

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