“…so, since I didn’t know what any of it did, I just started scrubbing the spells off with my mana. But they came right back! Apparently Master put some kind of spell in that repaired the other ones if they were damaged, and he put it on the next layer down, so I had to keep scrubbing off the top layer while I got rid of it. And then when I did that, it turned out he put, like, three more in on the lower layers!” Lilia complained.
“Souls have…layers?” Cinna asked.
“Not really. They’re more like big balls of…fog? Because they’re not really…real. You can’t touch them, right? But they’re still there, and you can kind of put stuff inside them. I don’t really get it myself since Master never taught me how,” Lilia tried to explain. She had trouble putting any of the concepts about souls in words since she’d mostly pieced it all together through experience.
“I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand. How did you even know you could erase the spells?”
“How…did I know?” Lilia asked herself. She didn’t quite remember how she’d figured that out. “I probably just tried it to see if it would work. And then it did, so I kept doing it. Once I got really good at it I just erased the spells that were in the way and got rid of the rest afterwards.”
“If I understand correctly, you mean to say you can strip undead of their bindings?”
“Kind of. It’s harder with not-dead. They resist more somehow. I think it’s because their souls aren’t as loosely connected,” Lilia clarified. “I’ve been too worried about being noticed to try it, but it was harder to detach the souls of the not-dead in that knight guy’s village than it is with normal undead, so it’s probably harder to get rid of spells on them too…”
“It worries me that it’s possible to place spells on them at all,” Cinna admitted. Lilia tilted her head in curiosity. “You say they’re not quite dead, yes? Does that not mean it would be possible to do the same to a living person?”
“But that would be wrong,” Lilia pointed out. “My parents said the gods don’t like it when people do that.”
“Gods which are now absent. It doesn’t matter what they think now. If I’m correct…a lich capable of necromancy will now be able to treat a living person as if they are undead for the purposes of spellcasting. We’ll have to find some form of countermeasure when we reach safety.”
“Hm,” Lilia hummed in agreement. She didn’t entirely understand, but that was okay. Cinna said a lot of things she didn’t understand. Lilia just felt happy to have someone to talk to about necromancy. If she’d known Cinna would be so curious about it maybe she would have tried talking about it sooner.
At least, Lilia liked to think so. In reality she still didn’t feel entirely comfortable defying Master’s instructions. But like Cinna had pointed out, Master hadn’t told her what to do if someone else figured out that she happened to be a necromancer on their own. She’d also been correct in pointing out that, technically, Lilia wasn’t just a girl anymore. She could choose for herself what she wanted to do.
That fact had put all sorts of troubling ideas into Lilia’s head, though. All her life she’d made her decisions based on what her parents told her she could or couldn’t do. Usually based on whether it was something a good girl should do. However, if she wasn’t a girl anymore but a woman, did that mean none of it applied now?
Did that make stealing okay? What about resurrecting the dead? Could she eavesdrop? For that matter, if the gods were gone, did it still matter what they thought? If liches could alter the souls of living people, what stopped Lilia from doing the same?
So many questions and no one to ask. After all, if she got the answers from someone else then she wouldn’t be making the decision for herself.
“Look. There’s Storrhamarr,” Cinna announced, pointing to the horizon. From where the two women currently stood the city was only visible as a jagged shape in the distance so Lilia would just have to take her word for it.
“That’s where we’ll find a map?”
“Hopefully. Could you have your familiar scout ahead and check for undead?”
“Sure. Directions, do you mind?”
Directions chirped sharply and hopped off of Lilia’s shoulder, spreading his wings and taking flight. While they waited for him to get closer to the city Lilia and Cinna continued walking in that direction themselves. They likely wouldn’t actually reach it until tomorrow at their current pace, though; they only had an hour or two left before sunset.
Eventually Directions got close enough for Lilia to make out details so she began relaying what she could see to Cinna.
“Umm…I see a lot of undead walking around. Maybe not-dead. I can’t tell from here,” Lilia began.
“We can just call them both undead for brevity’s sake. The difference isn’t important for most of our purposes,” Cinna replied.
“Alright. So, there’s a lot of undead. They’re not moving around much though. Most of them are just standing there all around the walls. One of the gates looks broken, but they’re not all going in,” Lilia continued.
“That sounds as if they’re laying siege,” Cinna noted thoughtfully, stroking her chin. “From what you’ve said undead outside of anyone’s control lack direction, so something must have positioned them there. The only alternative is that a large number of people died spread around the walls and revived on the spot, which wouldn’t make any sense.”
“What if they got locked out?” Lilia looked at Cinna. It might have been disorienting if she hadn’t gotten so used to using her own eyes while sharing senses with her friends.
“I’ll answer that question with another. Are they concentrated around the gates or spread evenly around the perimeter?” Cinna asked.
“They’re all over,” Lilia answered, still not quite getting where Cinna was going.
“If they were locked out prior to dying then they would have died against the gates, not around the walls. Even if someone had opened the doors to let them in at the last minute it would do those people no good were they nowhere close to said doors,” Cinna explained. “Which suggests to me that, unlike the previous towns we’ve encountered, Storrhamarr did not fall to a surprise attack. Tell me: how do things look within the city?”
“I can’t tell yet, but Directions will be flying over it in a couple more minutes,” Lilia reported. “It’s weird, though. I don’t see anything on the walls. ”
“…what stands out to you about that?” Cinna inquired.
“Well, undead don’t usually get back up all at the same time on their own. There’s differences from person to person,” Lilia explained, thinking back to what she’d seen in that first town before encountering the lich. “So shouldn’t there be some that haven’t gotten back up yet or that are still remembering how to walk?”
“Not the conclusion I drew, but an interesting perspective nonetheless. If a battle occurred on the walls there should be dismembered bodies left behind. The defenders wouldn’t have been able to keep the walls clear after being overwhelmed and even if a necromancer raised the corpses they would have no use for severed parts,” Cinna replied.
“So there…wasn’t a battle?” Lilia guessed. Cinna nodded.
“Exactly. The gates were sealed but the walls weren’t defended. I suspect that once your friend gets close enough you’ll discover the inner keep still holding out…” Cinna paused, her tone growing harsh. “…because Count Keller withdrew the entirety of his forces to there, sacrificing the rest of the city to buy himself time.”
“…you’re right!” Lilia confirmed a few moments later. “I see people fighting!”
“Why?” Cinna asked. Lilia didn’t know how she could possibly know, though. “Why do any of this? Was it a lapse in communication? Did the undead cut off his retreat before he could evacuate? It makes no sense. All of this could have been avoided if he’d simply evacuated as ordered!”
“Let’s ask him,” Lilia proposed. If the soldiers in Storrhamarr were still alive then surely there leader would be as well. But even if he wasn’t…what was stopping Lilia from patching up his soul conduit and asking him a few questions?
Nothing, apparently.
Cinna stared for a few seconds before laughing. “Ha! You’re right. You’re absolutely right. We should ask him. But we’ll need to get to him first. Can you get us past the undead?”
“I just have to tell them not to notice us, so probably. But if there’s any liches they’ll just ignore me like last time,” Lilia answered nervously.
“How did you defeat the last one you encountered?”
“Cyclops tore its throat out and Mr. Bearbones held it down while I cut its soul loose. It was really hard. It felt like threading a needle through a tornado!” Hearing his name, Mr. Bearbones came up behind Lilia and pushes his skull against her hand from below. She patted the top of his head idly as she continued. “Hey, since Vindar is gone, does that mean we won’t have tornadoes anymore?”
“If anything I have reason to believe it means they will be more deadly than before,” Cinna answered with a sigh. “More importantly, I’ll attempt to eliminate any liches we encounter, but it’s comforting to have a backup. As with living mages liches require time to cast—time I may use to close in and destroy the soul crystals you told me about. But I suppose I don’t need to tell you that being as you knew to target the throat.”
“Actually, I just guessed…” Lilia laughed awkwardly. Sure, it had seemed likely at the time, but she’d had no reason to think mages couldn’t cast silently. It wasn’t as if Lilia herself needed words to control her mana. For all she’d known there actually could have been a way to perform more complex magic without speaking.
“Ah. You did say your master taught you very little, didn’t you? Well, yes. No mage can cast spells without the ability to speak. Magic requires very precise pronunciation and intonation. Silence the caster and you render them impotent. Keep that in mind if we happen to encounter any liches,” Cinna advised.
“Right! Um, Cyclops, remember that.” Lilia did not have claws and doubted if Mr. Bearbones would remember. She had much more faith in Cyclops and his love of hunting things that moved.
“Now…all we need is a way into the inner keep.”
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