Chương 243: Chapter 264: Hints

I have, after all, missed a week of school. So now there's a whole grind of missed assignments, rescheduled tests, extensions for project deadlines. Fortunately there's not more trouble than that- normally when a situation like this develops the process of making up one week's worth of work winds up adding three times as much effort and annoyance. Petty power-plays, schedule conflicts, quibbles about prerequisites, whatever. Nothing could ever be simple.

Fortunately, the current minister of education owes me huge favors, the deans and provosts of the school are getting juggled without mercy, and the fastest way for a teacher or admin to lose their job at this Academy is to annoy me, by this time. Well, except for Dean Corder. He's being left right where he's at. He thinks this makes him lucky. A good patsy should think that.

So the whole issue really was as easy as stopping by on Oneday morning, picking up all the things I missed, blasting through all those during homeroom, and moving on with my day. I habitually work ahead of the lectures, fill out workbooks in advance, and we're only weeks into this school term. It is really damn easy for me to fill in the answers and be done with it.

And the tests I've missed are easily recovered, because I can take those in my class under supervision while also keeping up with the lecture of the current assignment. Not every element was as easily deferred. My plans to become Ryichsur's teaching assistant had been badly derailed, we were right at the point of negotiation when I had to take a week's leave because of a mandatory trial that escalated to matters of state and kingdom-wide politics. Sure I had a good excuse.

But our discussion at the time had literally been at the stage of "well, we'll give it a shot and see if you can do this reliably" and then I miss a whole week. Good excuse or no good excuse, that is going to make it really hard to progress. I'll get there, but not right away. This is an important stage in my plans to recruit dozens or hundreds of sharp-thinking would-be scientists who can do the carefully iterated trial-and-error work of practical invention. And of course, Belisa Roadaway.

For the past week, she's slumped to class and slumped back, with barely any stimulus. I have been using the lessons from Souls and Soullessness to work with her, but my return on Oneday was full of disappointments. After being separated for nine days, the shell of her mind and body were more ravenous for the contact of my soul, not less. The pull against my essence was not just needy or insistent, it was aggressive. This made it very clear: I had not been teaching her shell to grow a new soul for itself.

My efforts had not been seeding the terrain or shading her with nascent soul-materials, there wasn't any way that I would just urge her mind to find its own soul or something. This was not like that, this was not a sapling to carefully resprout from roots. No gardening analogies at all would work here, it's not like I could offer her a cutting to nourish into a real soul again.

A shredded soul is agony, and trying to restore her by offering her the scraps of my own shredded soul would leave her in a state of torture best described as "absolute". My efforts had served only to coax her shell into learning how to house the soul of another, by any means necessary. Despite all my hopes, I had been forming her into a living lich's vessel. The kind that absolutely is not supposed to exist and was completely unprecedented. Well, nearly unprecedented.

Just over sixteen years ago, the first living lich arrived in Hearstwhile, with a thriving growing corpus but an untethered essence, confusing and rousing the curiosity of any liches and necromancers that perceived it. I grit my teeth and reel out more of my soul's massless ethereal volume, streaming up her arm and lodging in her shoulder. More than I've ever done before, but I have to know. I have to learn more about this. There has to be a clue here somewhere.

The more of her body I inhabit, the more of her mind I draw as well. And Belisa has the clues that nobody else has. Her mind is intact, and with it her memories. She knows who did this to her and I need that. At the shoulder, the pressure drops significantly, the wider aperture here distributes the vacuum more evenly. Her wrist was a wind-tunnel, this is open and easier. Gods dammit, I know I'm acting like the wrong kind of necromancer. The kind I hate the most, the kind I hold in such contempt.

The ones that make the stupid mistakes and get in over their heads. I know this is exactly that kind of behavior, testing dangerous ground without having even a strong theoretical knowledge of what comes next. Maybe I'm not gluing corpses together with lightning rods or cramming fifty ghosts into a salt shaker, but I am performing tests on necromantic subjects with absolutely no precautions.

I'm in the back row of a classroom, for gods' sakes, swirling souls around like cake batter, testing the limits of what is and is not a lich. If I don't become just another cautionary tale of idiotic necromancy methods, it will be pure dumb luck. And just like every stupid fucking necromancer, I'm positive that what I'm doing is justified and necessary. I bet most of them at least thought they were smarter than the others and that the rules don't apply to them. I know, with open eyes, that this is bad news, but...

what else am I going to do? I can't do this in a safe environment. Someone here is keeping tabs on her. Her movements are controlled. And I can't even strongly consider following her back to her cell. That thought does not stick. So I can tell this issue runs very deep. Someone has created a vessel for a living lich, and left it where I can get at it. And it's almost certain that whoever did this, already knows about me. Someone who has connections to the Roadaway family.

Belisa was [Broken] right after I freed her family from Kudder's blackmailers. That's a connection to Kralcit. Kralcit is connected to Meadwhite. Meadwhite is the only lich who has seen me the real me and survived the experience. I'm ninety-percent sure that Duke Meadwhite the Last did this to her. Well, eighty percent- there's a lot of bad people in this world. And I'm sure that the reason she is sent to sit in class next to me is specifically to encourage me to experiment.

All of this is tangling together, but the bigger picture is emerging: I think that Belisa is one part of an experiment in creating a new kind of lich, without the usual liabilities. And I think that I'm the other part of that same experiment. I think that Meadwhite has dangled her in front of me to see what I'll do. And the dumbest thing I can do is play along and explore this subject, pull the threads to see what it all means. As I've mentioned: in theory I'm a genius. But this feels stupid.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. The math works. The thing I'm doing is ninety-nine percent safe, and has a chance of a very positive outcome. And not doing anything is one hundred percent safe but leaves me with no clues at all as to what a vengeful, interested lich is planning. That's how the necromancer's failure works, after all: each step is almost entirely safe. Eventually, that's not good enough. I can stop any time I want.

That's what they always say, right? My essence has a lot more volume than my body. At nights I flare out several feet across, and it takes some time and some care to spool back into just myself when it's time to wake up. I do not need to abandon my own body and mind just to give more of my volume to Belisa. I just never have, because it's a terrible idea and I have no idea what the risks are. I billow out my essence into her, filling out, instilling her heart and up into her head.

I reach more of her memories, and flinch. Her thoughts overlap with my own, it's unpleasant to feel two mentalities at the same time. I tune out most of them, and focus on the process- filling out as much of Belisa as I can and still be sure I'll return to my own self when I'm done. I don't think I can get trapped in her, but there's a wrong way to find out. The head, the brain, is where most of the mind is kept, but if I'm going to get any use of it I need to inhabit most of her.

The raw code of memory is filtered through senses and activity, I need to know her muscle memory and her sense of self before her memories will make any sense to me. I pick snippets at first: light and dark, loud and quiet, sense of time passing, the everlasting yawning aching need that permeates all things. As I occupy her bones and her nerves, lungs and tongue, I can start decoding the taped memories that live inside her brain.

I remain careful, never to become more of herself than myself, never to lose who I am or why. Her limbs are still the highest-pressure parts of her, as if the most actively-moving parts of her body are where the empty need runs the strongest. The joints were like whirlpools, but occupying her head, her arm, and most of her torso was enough for me to start patching her memories. I rather wish I had not, it was a foolish risk for no benefit, I learned nothing I did not expect.

"Sorry ladies, Larianne and I need to take our lunches to go," I said with a smile that I am not sure was not a crazed rictus grin. I gestured for Countess Ebonder to get out of her seat and follow me. Elica rolled her eyes dramatically.

"Oh swell. She's been a Crown Princess for seventy-two hours and it's gone to her head." And there I was starting to think I was a good influence on her. Vancy said something in my defense that was sweet but still strangely off-base while I grabbed up her roommate and all but dragged her from the main dining hall. Larianne kept her plate and dinner, jogging to keep her feet as I pulled her along by the wrist.

I brought us to one of the rarely-used conference rooms and slammed the doors, sealing them, and started binding the whole room with layers of vacuum and wind to lock out any eavesdroppers. Larianne set her plate of pasta on the table, poked it twice with a fork.

"Could use some warming up."

"Right right," I said, waving a hand and making it happen. Magic of convenience is not something to hoard.

"Sorry, I'm not sure where to start," I chuckled nervously, pacing the other side of the room. My hair and skirt swished around me. Larianne took a bite and chewed while she watched me try to turn my confusion into motion in hopes that I could pace my way to clarity. She cleared her throat.

"So, your soulless girlfriend?"

"Right yes, thank you," I said, and paused.

"Not my girlfriend though."

"You've literally been sharing your soul with her," Larianne pointed out.

"I don't think anything else could qualify as hard." I felt a tug of annoyance, and I let it show on my face.

"Fine. Not the time for that fight. Anyway, yes, about Belisa. After a week apart, her mind and body were even more hungry for the contact of a soul. She was pulling at me extra hard. And that's bad, really bad. Her default level of pressure was fixed: a vacuum. Someone had removed her soul and left her body and mind intact. Zero soul should exert a specific and immutable amount of pull, determined by the pressure of the ambient area. Like air pressure.

There's a physical limit to how much material can be drawn by a vacuum without needing to increase the external pressure. Pulling has different restrictions than pushing. And her limits should have been fixed and immutable from the moment I saw her. Which means, if there's more pull now, but not a raised external pressure, that changes the model. She's not tugging at me with a vacuum, this is a grip. An active force.

So now the issue is not just that Belisa has a missing soul and somehow is still motile and aware, it's that there is something about her that is reaching and seeking souls as an active force." Larianne nodded, as if this was entirely unsurprising. As it should be for someone raised in necromancy like it was her ABC's, I suppose.

"So, you either triggered something left behind, or her condition has a development period, or you accidentally left something inside her that is interacting with the existing necromantic effects." I paused, and swore with deep passion." Fuck. I didn't even really get that far. I wasn't even considering causes yet, I was still working on effects. For example, that if her corpus is currently grabbing at souls to drag in, eventually it's going to find one.

She had been a potential lich, or at least the body of a potential lich. Raw materials, prepared. But now she's basically a lich-in-waiting, she is trying to make that transformation. And I don't know where to start with the problems from that.

If she just encounters a stray ghost or spirit and gets her self possessed? Bad news. If she starts trying to pull the souls out of living people who make contact? Really bad news. If this is somehow acting as a beacon for some other lich that is supposed to come claim her now? Terrible news."

"Some other lich?" Larianne said, raising an eyebrow at me.

"Shut up, you know what I mean," I snapped.

"Look, this is time for Uncle Septimus to take her into safekeeping. I want this handled by the smart people with the proven qualifications. I am terrified by how far out of my depth I am here." Larianne nodded.

"Well, in that case I've got great news."

"Yes?" I seized on that, hope fluttering in my stomach.

"Yes. Uncle Septimus has great confidence in you, and he believes this is the best place for Miss Roadaway, and that you should continue you work. Everything is already as good as it could be."

"No!" I protested.

"This is not! I need the experts, I need the professionals! I need the generational wisdom that your family has available. I'm working in the dark and there's a lot of danger here that I can't quantify!" Larianne set down her fork with a clink. She looked at me with sympathy.

"Natalie?" she said.

"Do you understand that a tradition of learning like that in my family can only exist if we learn to never experiment with unforeseen events? We do not take on potentially dangerous projects. We perform proven routines, we execute routine projects. Since there is no precedent for this mess, then the Ebonder family is not going to take it off your hands. We can offer advice and resources, when doing so does not bring attention or danger to us.

But Septy is not going to move Miss Roadaway into our care until she has become something that we know how to deal with."

"Fuck."

"Sorry." I dragged a hand down my face.

"Don't be sorry."

"Very well," Larianne said, and went to finish her pasta. She could have been more sorry than that. I sighed, crossing my arms and leaning back against a wall.

"Anyway, that brings me to my next issue. I know who did it and I know how he did it, and I know how to track him."

"Oh?" Larianne said, looking at me through her inky bangs with her face half-lowered to her fork. Master of efficient communication. Economy of words.

"The lich, Meadwhite," I said.

"I know how to find him now. How to track him." She smiled.

"Well, that is fabulous news," she said, and took her bite.

"The bad news," I said, hugging myself closer, "is that now I know why your family has been building the same wall for over a dozen centuries and still hasn't finished it."