Alan slept a few hours toward dawn, then woke in a cold sweat and dressed quickly. The servants were already gathered at the dining table when he came down.
Evan looked at him once and said: "Eat first. I need to speak with you after."
Alan sat with dark circles under his eyes and managed a response, then kept his head down over the meal. The servants had prepared porridge and eggs. Evan sat in his cloak and long black robes, concealing himself in the shadow he always kept around him; Alan knew he was looking at a Lich and told himself the transformation must have succeeded.
The cloak wasn't unusual. A Lich was little more than skin over bone. Of course he didn't want to be looked at.
Evan, for his part, had not read Alan's intentions. He was too young for that, and whatever experience Ashton's memories carried wasn't the same as having lived it himself. The servants stood behind him with expressions that showed nothing, though what moved behind those expressions was something they were careful not to let reach their faces.
He noticed, vaguely, that something about eating felt odd. A Lich wasn't supposed to need food. Yet there was something that felt like appetite, and when he ate, he felt his stomach moving, felt something like satisfaction. His body was strange — incomplete, perhaps, but strange in a way that didn't feel entirely bad. He had no way of knowing that as the food went down, the cool current running through him quietly accelerated its cycles, breaking down what he'd taken in and redistributing it through the body with an efficiency that had nothing to do with Lich physiology.
When the meal was done, he sent the head servant Todd to wait below, then turned to Alan.
"How many years have you been with me?"
"Five, Master."
"Five years. A long time." He turned the sword-cane in his hands, unhurried. "I've brought some trouble on myself lately. There may be a serious reckoning coming. I want you to leave for a while, stay out of sight."
Alan's heart leaped. He had spent all night constructing reasons to leave — or even to go straight to the Prime Church. He hadn't expected to simply be told to go. For one brief moment he felt something. But Nicolai Ashton had made himself an enemy of the Church, and whatever he felt lasted exactly that moment and then was gone.
He put on a stubborn expression. "Master, I won't leave. I'll face this with you."
Evan, who had no idea what was actually behind the words, felt a small warmth at it. He didn't want to put anyone in danger on his account. He was going to make one stand here, and then head west. His soul was from a world that had different ideas about people who had nothing to do with your problems.
"Your loyalty means something to me," he said. "But I know what I'm doing. The Inquisition won't finish me. We'll see each other again when this is settled."
He made Alan take some materials and gold before he left, still not knowing he was equipping someone who had already decided to betray him. Then he called in the other servants one by one, pressed gold coins into their hands, and sent them off as well — partly because he didn't want them caught in what was coming, and partly because he needed room to work.
He let them go three or four together, thinking the forest's edge was manageable with Alan along. He didn't know what happened less than ten miles out: Alan raised his wand, sent a Nether Spirit Arrow into Tarn without a word, and the man was dead before he understood what was happening. Todd and the third servant split and ran into the forest.
Alan caught the third one. Then he turned back after Todd.
Todd ran until his legs gave out and pressed himself into a thicket, listening to the footsteps slow and circle. Alan had seen exactly where he was. He walked closer with a performer's patience, letting the tip of his wand drift from side to side — past the thicket, back across it, the fear doing its work.
The wand snapped to center. Alan's voice was cold and even: "Kavah broshya — Soul Drain!"
A green light flew from the tip, trailing the grey-white shape of a skull with its jaws wide open, rushing forward.
Todd's eyes rolled back. He went limp.
The skull was still closing the distance when a slab of earth-yellow light materialized from the undergrowth and struck it apart. A sound came from the trees — a low warning. Three forest dire wolves stepped out, their eyes picking up what little light remained in the canopy.
Alan looked at the wolves and made his calculation. One, he could handle. Three was a different question. He began backing away slowly, eyes moving between them, his wand still raised. They watched him go without following — something about him told them it wasn't worth it.
He retreated until the trees closed between them, then turned and walked quickly away. Behind him, at a distance, he heard one sharp cry and then silence, and then howling. He didn't slow down.
He counted his coins once he was well clear. One hundred and forty gold pieces from the Holy Capital Yidu, forty of them from the two servants. He had no intention of spending the rest of his life as a fugitive from the Astral Curia. He would go directly to the nearest town and deliver everything he knew.
Back in the castle, Evan was already moving the cannon into position.
He set it in a small room just off the main entrance corridor, angled toward the gate. Anyone who forced entry would walk directly into its field of fire. At this range, no amount of magical protection would matter — nothing short of Legend rank could absorb a direct cannonball at ten feet. He spent the rest of the day setting traps and trip mechanisms through the castle's main corridors, moving everything valuable into his storage ring, and converting the building into something that would not be pleasant to enter uninvited.
Then he practiced.
He had the rapier, and no formal training with it. From Ashton's memory he had no sword forms, no tradition to draw on. So he chose one motion and repeated it: a thrust, from every angle and stance, over and over, at every speed. The concept came from a story he'd read once, about a swordsman who had mastered a single stroke and become unreachable with it. He had no ambition of that scale. He simply wanted the motion to become reflex.
By the end of the first day he had thrown the thrust tens of thousands of times. A Lich's body didn't tire the way a living one did. Every fly in the castle ceased to exist by nightfall.
He also drilled the bracer spells — fireball, wind blade, ice lance, the handful of common attack and utility spells the arrays could produce. Speed and accuracy over raw power. He had enough sense to know that a fifth-level equivalent fireball wasn't going to win a serious fight, but a fast, precisely aimed one at exactly the right moment might.
He didn't know, doing this, that he was beginning to build something that didn't have a name yet in this world's magical tradition. He only knew that he wasn't leaving without making someone pay attention.
The first visitors were not the Inquisition.
The first visitors were the Fangs Mercenary Company.