Inside the castle, the stone gargoyles stood dormant in every corridor, and Sophina moved past them without triggering any of them. Evan followed her track exactly and they left him alone. He mapped the interior as he walked — every turn, every distance, every junction — and found that the map built itself in his mind without effort, a spatial awareness he hadn't known he had until this moment.
The wall Sophina walked through wasn't a hidden door. She simply passed through it, and Evan followed, and there was no resistance.
The room beyond it was a great hall lit by magical gems mounted in the walls and ceiling — not candles, not oil, not electricity, but jewels carved with magical arrays that absorbed ambient energy during daylight and released it as light, steady and soft. Evan looked at them and thought briefly about the economics: a product that never wore out couldn't sustain a production industry, which was probably why this level of technology hadn't spread. He filed the thought and looked at the room's occupants.
Fifteen vampires.
When Sophina brought him in, most of them looked up. Several frowned. None of them spoke.
"Father," Sophina said. "This is Evan. He's a Lich."
The frown on most faces relaxed. A Lich was, by the Prime Church's standards, the same category of heretic as a vampire — which meant the same category of potential ally.
Duke Winser was tall, silver-haired, and wore a warmth in his expression that Evan recognized immediately as the surface behavior of something very old and very careful. He extended a welcome, explained that his people had been here for some days and his daughter for two years before that, and said that the castle's secret remained unresolved. They hadn't been able to open the passage to the half-plane.
On the wall behind him, carved in Gonishu script, was a line of text. Ashton's memory had covered Gonishu script with some thoroughness; the man had been fascinated by the civilization.
*Death is both the ending of life and its beginning. Only the force of life carried within death can reach the far shore.*
Evan read it twice and stayed quiet.
Outside the castle, where no one inside could see it, a red dragon was circling on the thermals above the volcano.