Boniface had no confidence in his chances. He had just completed the transformation and needed time to stabilize, and beyond that, Nicholas Andrew was fighting on home ground inside a Hell's Projection he had built himself. Walking back into that as a newly made lich would be asking to lose. He decided to wait.
No one else knew what he had become. But as a lich he was now a declared heretic, an enemy of the Creationist Church by definition. Better to lie low and let events develop. The Holy Inquisition would almost certainly come for Nicholas Andrew regardless — and if he survived that, Boniface could deal with him afterward. The revenge itself posed its own complications. A lich's soul vessel was notoriously difficult to locate, which made a lich effectively impossible to kill permanently. Then again, he reflected, that cut both ways.
Boniface made no move against Evan. Evan knew nothing of him. Boniface assumed he was dealing with a lich much like himself, not knowing that Evan had no soul vessel at all.
With Hell's Projection covering the ground for a li around the castle, Evan would be warned the instant anyone entered the perimeter — the skeleton sentinels would alert him immediately. Inside the castle he continued his training without pause. He was still a lich, and a lich's path to the next level lay in comprehending elemental will, specifically dark elemental will, the only element available to him. In this one respect he was behind Boniface, who had grasped the rudiments of dark elemental will before his transformation — a thin understanding, but a qualitative difference. It was why Boniface's transformation had gone cleanly while Nicholas Andrew's had killed him.
For Evan, the elements remained deeply foreign. He had Nicholas Andrew's memories, but his instincts were those of someone raised on science, and science created a subtle resistance — an inability to simply accept what he couldn't reason through. He didn't understand why he couldn't make progress on elemental will. He only knew that he couldn't, and it was beginning to bother him.
It forced him to think about what elements actually were. Light, white. Wind, green. Fire, red. Water, blue. Earth, yellow. Lightning, pale blue. Dark, black. And the enigmatic elements of space and time. The classification reminded him of the five phases from ancient Chinese thought — metal, wood, water, fire, earth — a system that modern science had long since shown to be intuitive rather than literal, a practical framework rather than a description of underlying reality. Was this world the same? Or were the elements here something genuinely fundamental, not merely a label the people of this world had given to forces they half-understood?
He was still turning this question over when, a month ahead of his estimate, the Holy Inquisition arrived.
Allen had moved faster than Evan anticipated. The moment he reached the nearest town he had gone to the Creationist Church and given them everything — confirmation that Nicholas Andrew had completed the transformation, the castle's location, what he knew of its defenses. The Inquisition had mobilized at once. Evan had assumed he had two months, perhaps three. In fact it took one.
In that month he had settled thoroughly into his magic. He couldn't break through to elemental will yet, but his spells were fast and precise, and his swordsmanship had reached a kind of equilibrium — one technique, one thrust, practiced until there was nothing left to find wrong with it. The gaps were getting harder to see.
He was in the middle of a practice session when something made him pause. The sword had already completed its arc before he consciously registered the distraction — so fast now that the motion was invisible, draw and strike and withdraw in one continuous thing. He closed his eyes and listened to what his sentinels were sending him. A bat, one of the Hell's Projection's denizens with poor eyesight but acute hearing, relayed the information: seven people approaching. One of them felt familiar, though the bat's impressions weren't precise enough to be certain.
Inquisitor-General Yalta came with six others, Allen among them. Allen had not wanted to come. His defection had secured him a degree of Church protection, but his abilities were modest — barely past the threshold into the Mage stage — and he had no desire to face his former master. He carried guilt about it, and he was aware that it showed. Yalta's expression gave nothing away, but Allen could feel the contempt behind it. The other Inquisitors didn't bother to conceal theirs. Allen swallowed his anger and kept his face carefully arranged. He understood that traitors were not admired even by those who used them. He smiled where smiling was called for and said nothing else.
"Hold." Yalta raised a hand. Before them the landscape had gone grey and indistinct. The castle was visible through the haze, but only barely.
"Hell's Projection," said Kencheli, the oldest among them, studying the murk. "This will take some doing."
"We underestimated him," Yalta said flatly. "A Hell's Projection of this scale. The area will carry corrupted influence for decades. Prepare your weapons. If I'd known, I would have requisitioned a dragon knight." Dragon knights were among the highest combat power on the continent — rider and dragon fused into a single fighting unit, devastating from the air.
They readied themselves. Yalta drew two short lances, their shafts wound with dense runic patterns that shimmered faintly — enchanted weapons. Kencheli assembled a long spear, Holy Light wrapping its length. The others were more modestly equipped: Aubrey with a greatsword of fine steel carrying a light Holy Light blessing, not truly magical but serviceable; Bitcher with a shield in one hand and a short sword in the other, similarly blessed; Bogge with a chain-flail; Bob with a long knife. Allen carried only his staff.
They entered in single file. The moment they crossed the projection's boundary, the death energy pressed against them — a constant erosive pressure. They activated the blessings woven into their outer garments, and beneath those outer garments each wore a layer of light chainmail, the standard equipment of Inquisitors who needed to move quickly and quietly. The blessings kindled a faint shell of Holy Light around each of them, pushing the black energy back. Allen alone needed nothing — death energy was his native element.
Bats hung from the trees around them, eyes half-closed and glinting with malice, but held back from attacking. The group moved toward the castle in tight formation.
A sound like cracking bone. A column of skeletons emerged from the murk, green soul-fire burning in their eye sockets, bone-knives raised, closing from multiple directions. The group formed up without being told. Yalta began to chant, and a ring of Holy Light burst outward from him in a sweeping wave. Several skeletons froze in place; the soul-fire in a few of them went out immediately and the bones collapsed. The rest slowed, the fire in their eyes dimming, their movements going sluggish. Kencheli and the others pressed the opening — blades came out, skeletons were cut apart before they could respond, soul-fire extinguished, and the constructs came apart in heaps.
Allen stared. He had expected a prolonged exchange. He hadn't expected them to clear a wave of skeletons in seconds. Something shifted in his assessment of these people.
Before he could dwell on it, a roar shook the air and the black fog thickened sharply. Out of it came skeletal mammoths, curved ivory tusks like blades, enormous even in death, charging with terrifying momentum. The bats in the trees above responded to the surge of dark energy as though to a signal, shrieking and swarming together, a solid black mass that swept downward toward the group.
"Damn it all," Yalta said under his breath. He was already chanting, fast and precise, and a column of Holy Light rose from him and expanded outward — much stronger than the first pulse.
This time the effect was reduced. The bats filled the air and disrupted the light's spread, a few that flew directly into the column burning to ash but the rest swirling around it, and by the time the Holy Light reached the skeletal mammoths it had already been weakened. Black smoke rose where it touched the bone but the mammoths did not fall — they came on harder, the dark energy around them flaring.
Yalta ran straight at them, a lance in each hand, the light blazing from both. He moved like someone who had done this before, driving a lance directly at the soul-fire in a mammoth's eye socket. The mammoth swung its head, the great curved tusks cracking against the lance's shaft and deflecting the strike. The blow landed on the ribcage instead. Bone cracked, but black energy surged through the fracture and it closed. Yalta was pushed back two steps. So was the mammoth — several steps back, for all its mass. The exchange established that Yalta was not someone to underestimate.
Kencheli went up in a single leap, his long spear driving downward with Holy Light coiled along its length. The mammoth turned its head and the strike still connected, punching deep into the skull's frontal bone. His wrist turned on contact, and the bone structure exploded apart from within. He drove more Holy Light through the shaft, and the soul-fire was overwhelmed and extinguished. The mammoth crashed to the ground in a scatter of fragments.
The bats dove on him the moment he left the ground. Those that entered the column of Holy Light turned to ash, the column weakening with each one, and a handful got through, reaching him before he landed. His Holy Light flared and most of them burned on contact, but his face took scratches from claws. The wounds closed almost immediately under the light's effect, a faint black smoke rising from them as the damage was reversed, though the blessing in his clothing had noticeably dimmed.
Bitcher brought his shield up and worked at close range, a mammoth's curved tusk hammering the shield and driving him back several steps before Aubrey's greatsword came in from the side with the last of its Holy Light and extinguished the soul-fire. The massive skeleton scattered across the ground. What remained of the blessing in Aubrey's blade was barely a sliver.
Bogge and Bob went at a third mammoth together, their timing natural — Bogge's chain-flail caving in the skull, Bob's long knife going straight through the eye socket into the soul-fire the moment the bone gave way.
The ground shook. More mammoths were coming.