He left the next morning.
Felix tried to keep him longer. Bess and Rein both made their cases. He took the gold Felix had put together, said his farewells to each of them in turn, and rode west.
Reuben's group passed him going the other way — he didn't see them, but he caught Cynthia's scent as they moved through the same stretch of road and understood what it meant. They were heading back. He didn't stop.
As for Reuben: he had sold a mortar to Earl Eward's side, which had then ended up in Count Rein's hands through the series of events that included Evan's involvement. The Taimir duchy's eastern border situation was stable, and the Lia Fellwood remained impassable for any large organized force, which was what mattered. Reuben had gotten what he came for.
"My student," Angie was apparently saying, somewhere behind him. "How did he do?"
He rode west for three days and then turned north into the Bolo Hills.
The hills ran north to south, tilting slightly southeast, and they marked the end of the Lia Fellwood's outermost reaches. This had been contested territory once, in the wars that Charlemagne and Emperor Kaelon had fought against the peoples they called savage — a thousand five hundred years ago, long enough that the descendants of those peoples were now fully assimilated, their existence reduced to footnotes. The castle in the hills had no historical record that anyone could find. It predated the records. Some said it was from the savage era. The ancient battlefield below it — where Kaelon had invited the local chieftains to celebrate a peace treaty and then killed them during the feast — had left its mark on the land, or so the local accounts maintained. Strange things had been reported there for fifteen centuries.
Evan arrived at dusk.
He stood on a facing ridge and looked across at the castle as the last light died. The walls were old in the way very few things were old — not ruined, not decayed, but settled, as if the stone had given up on falling and decided to simply remain. Climbing plants covered patches of the surface, sparse and deliberate-looking. The castle sat on bare rock, which probably explained its survival.
He opened his thermal perception and looked at the approach. The plants between here and there were not normal plants. Normal plants didn't grow in patterns that suggested awareness.
As the light failed entirely and the crescent moon came up, the plants began to flower.
Fire-red blossoms, appearing one after another in the pale lunar light, as if the dark had been holding them in waiting. Then the castle released its bats — not ordinary bats, but hell-bats, their eye sockets glowing faint green, that eerie light less about vision than about disorientation, their actual navigation handled by echolocation the same as any natural bat.
The bats descended on the flowers. Most settled and drank. Others discovered too late that the flower had a different idea: the petals closed, the grip tightened, something that was less mouth than trap contracted, and the bat was gone. The sound — if Evan had still had functioning body hair, it would have risen.
The surviving bats lifted off eventually, drunk or stupefied, and drifted. Evan began to pick his way down the slope toward the castle.
The green-lit eyes of the hell-bats swept across the path. Evan walked through the beams without concern — disorientation attacks that worked through optic nerve interference had no purchase on a Lich's perceptual system. He was not technically seeing with human eyes.
The cloud crossed the moon and the hillside went dark, the castle above becoming a mass of shadow against the sky. Every plant on the slope came alive at once.
Evan's bone-staff appeared in his hand — he'd kept it concealed until now, not wanting to show what he was — and he murmured the incantation for Terror Aura. No visible result, no barrier, no light. But within a radius of several feet, anything with a living nervous system would feel, from somewhere below rational thought, that it was going to die.
The hell-bats flew into the radius and scattered. The flowering plants on the slope — the ones he'd watched swallow bats whole — extended toward him, tendrils reaching, and then recoiled as if burned. A tree to his left pulled its roots from the stone and moved away. A flower uprooted itself and fled.
Evan watched this and felt something that was almost amusement.
He kept moving. The castle gate was ahead. Then, from above — a dark shape diving.
He saw it a half-second before it reached him and cast: "Kavah broshya — Soul-Drain Spell!"
The black light struck the diving shape and it convulsed, screaming, and fragmented into a mass of bats that scattered in every direction. Evan watched them wheel and reconverge, the black smoke condensing back into a figure: young-seeming, gold-haired, the bat-wings folded against his back, their surface marked with blood-red runic lines. A vampire — the wings marked him as Baron rank, which in vampire hierarchy was the first true rank, the threshold of what they called their own.
He was injured. Where he landed, the flowering plants opened toward him immediately — he absorbed something from them, the tendrils embracing him and then falling away desiccated, and his breathing steadied.
"You're a necromancer," he said. His eyes glowed in the dark. "What do you want at Bolo Castle?"
"I heard vampires had appeared here. I wanted to see for myself."
The vampire — he gave his name as Robert — didn't move, but the red glow in his eyes shifted. He was weighing something. Then: "If you don't want to die, leave. That's all I'll say." He spread his wings and was gone through the castle gate.
Evan watched him go. Then he followed.