Chương 113: Chapter 99 - Old Workings

++The things that a lich can do with sufficient time and resources make any act of raw power pale by comparison. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Sakhent was…hm.

"What name do you prefer?" I asked.

"Call me Sethira," Sethira replied.

"Including when we are alone?" I was a lich, and not prone to tripping up in my speech as humans were. She considered this, then shrugged before finally nodding.

"Yes. It is my new identity, and one never knows when others are listening in anyway." It was fair enough.

"Call me Isabel for the same reason," I replied. She nodded, and continued leading the way. She did it well, clearly familiar with these tunnels, while I was mainly preoccupied with studying them, and of course memorising their routes, as we went. They were old, that much was obvious, but remarkably well preserved. I sensed a flavour of subtle magic worked into the stone which went a long way to explaining that, though seeing it applied over a structure as vast as this one was, itself, quite striking.

A human Highmage might have managed such coverage with such power, if he was willing to die of old age shortly afterwards. And we were alone, for now. Sethira had ordered her men to retreat from us and take a different route, leaving me and her unwatched by others. She had said this was so that we could have a private, honest conversation. I believed her. But I also saw the test for what it was. She wanted to give me a chance to flee early and see whether I would take it.

And I would not, because I also believed that she wanted to take me as an ally rather than a prisoner. She had no other reason to have been so self-detrimentally nice to me in our previous clashes besides that.

"You are puppeting that body, correct?" I asked her.

"Occupying it as if it were your own corpse, still connected to your phylactery."

"Correct," Sethira told me.

"And that's how it works for you, too?"

"Correct," I confirmed. I saw no reason to hide this, we could both have safely guessed it about one another anyway.

"What I am curious about, though, is the ritual I saw you performing. You killed this body, did you not? Cut its throat. So why does it still live?" Sethira smiled.

"I needed to die, but I did not need to stay dead. Once my heart stopped beating, I was able to drag my spirit back into this body, having it healed by others to make it ready for me to occupy again."

"I was primarily asking about the power you showed after that ritual," I noted.

"The power that allowed you to fight a Demigod, if a weak one, and win. That power was not present during our bouts before."

"I've been hiding it," she replied.

"That sort of raw strength gets noticed easily, even from across a city." She was right, and it made sense, but she was also lying. I could see magicians whose power was restrained, and she was showing none of it. This also told me that she did not share my mana sight. If she did, she would have been more cautious about trying to deceive me in such a useless way.

"I aided your resurrection to share your knowledge, will you be sharing that?" I deliberately did not turn the question into a demand or challenge, trusting in her own knowledge of what was in her best interests to give me the answer I wanted.

"Yes," Sethira said after only a moment's hesitation.

"Though that begs the question…how powerful is your true power?" For a brief moment I considered actually telling the truth. That would have been stupid, however.

"Close to yours," I said instead. Had she just relaxed a shade? Probably, liches are solitary creatures by nature and do not tend to get along with other liches any more than we do anything else. One day, no matter our alliance here, Sethira and I would turn on each other. And I had just assured her of an advantage she would enjoy against that future problem.

"Who were you in your previous life?" She asked me.

"Sascithius." My apprentice would probably mind having his identity used. He would probably mind a lot, in fact he would probably spend no less than an hour screeching about it in outrage upon finding this out. It actually made me want to do it even harder.

"You are powerful, then," Sethira noted.

"There's a lot of stories about you." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. This was dangerous ground for me, as much of Sascithius' deeds had been done only after the Great Setback that sent me to the Depths. Much of what remained was censored by historians.

"I do not like to talk about my past existence."

"And yet, I would very much enjoy it if we did," Sethira added.

"You're one of the few liches in all of history older than I am. Some even call you an apprentice of Lord Dread." My interest was, as much as I hated to admit it, piqued.

"Lord Dread," I echoed.

"What do you know of him?" Sethira chuckled.

"I know that he's a myth. The Gods of Garamon hold that he was some alien thing from the Depths themselves, that slithered through into physical reality and corrupted the first necromancers. Other necromancers teach that he was simply the first, and greatest, of us. The inventor of our field. Both stories are a bit…dramatised, I think." As much as it stung my pride, I decided that this was for the best. The less information Sethira had about Lord Dread the better, and if she did not even believe he existed…

"Who could say?" I replied airily.

"People spread all sorts of tales about me and my past, some are true and others are not." Sascithius was an egotist of only middling genius who had always been desperate for more admiration than his talents could actually secure him. I liked to think I was managing to behave exactly as he would have regarding supposed rumours about being trained by the creator of necromancy himself.

"Don't insult my intelligence," Sethira sighed. She did not push the topic further, which was just fine by me.

"What about you?" I asked.

"Sakhent the Immortal is a name I have heard, obviously, though I never made much study of you." In actuality, I had obsessively studied him since arriving in Orapathaqi, and had almost never heard of him in passing before. Hopefully my knowledge distribution did not give this fact away to her.

"All of this around you," Sethira replied.

"I built it." A living person with an organic mind would have looked at our surroundings once again, reflexively reminding themselves what they looked like. I just remembered it all with photographic precision, then nodded in appreciation.

"It is…impressive." Sethira nodded.

"It is. I started the work in my early existence, when I still lived. At the time it was nothing, a single layer of chambers and corridors under the city. When I ascended to undeath, I continued it. Do you know how big it is?" I spent a moment calculating, then gave up. There were too many variables regarding how much time Sethira had dedicated to this, when she had started, how much her power had grown in the early days. I did not have the data to know.

"I do not," I finally admitted.

"Neither do I," she told me.

"My memory failed before I could commit every last inch of it. And it grows by itself now." It is such a delightful novelty to be genuinely surprised by magic. I could not help but giggle, a most girlish sound. And one that Sethira echoed herself.

"We sound ridiculous," she grinned after a moment.

"Like little girls."

"We are little girls," I shrugged.

"On the outside, at least. And the outside is where our giggles are, so I do not see anything incongruous with it." We walked farther as I felt more questions bubble up.

"Your necromancy is different from the kinds I have encountered before. Where does it originate, with you?"

"No. I was a revolutionary and systematised much of the modern Estalian teachings, but I did not invent them. I was only the greatest and most significant in a long line of scholars who contributed to the art you have seen so far." I supposed it would be too much to hope for, meeting a kindred spirit whose history with magic was the equal of my own.

"And you can teach me this?" I pressed.

"I have agreed already, yes. You will learn. Provided you supply your own knowledge to improving this system, too. As I said, it is a rare treat to meet a lich older than myself. And things have been forgotten." She did not, I decided, know the half of it. The real Sascithius could probably have made this agreement and left Estalian necromancy well benefitted by the end of it. Lord Dread himself? I would have to be careful not to feed her too much knowledge too fast…

My thoughts were interrupted as we came to a new chamber, one that bloomed outwards from us like an expanding flower. The walls and ceiling were so impossibly high as to leave me genuinely disoriented for a moment, this structure must have been poking out from the ground above… unless?

"We have been descending," I realised, staring accusatorily at Sethira.

"Extremely briefly, but it must have been going on for miles." She smiled again.

"Most people are more disoriented than that."

"You have never taken a lich here, I assume." She grunted, like she was acknowledging the point scored.

"I designed the labyrinth to be as confusing as possible, just in case people like those Garamon monkeys found their way in and started doing monkey things. It has several actual functions, but one of them is essentially just as a storehouse for my possessions. I don't like it when idiots break my things." I could agree with that sentiment, but before I could respond to it I detected presences closing from around us. The chamber was huge, but dark.

I could barely make out the looming walls and ceiling, and any finer details were entirely lost on me. But I heard the scraping of clawed feet on floors and the sound of mass moving. Moving towards me. My magic answered the urgency without the slightest delay, pushing out to my fingertips and flooding the air around us with glaring light. It might have damaged the eyes of human assailants, but all it did now was expose the things sharing this chamber with me. Quadrupeds. Big. Lithe.

Like cats, like snakes, like falcons. Like all those things at once. Like monuments to predation and strength. Their skin was spotless obsidian, eyes bright gold orbs. They had mouths, but no air came from them. Their teeth glowed. Fire burned somewhere deep in their bellies. Blades hovered around them, like they danced on invisible strings. Five, no, six. They closed around us as one and approached fast.

Each one was two or three times the size of a tiger, all solid stone, but I did not hear a single sound as they approached. The magical light seemed to die as it touched their skin, eaten by the black crystal. I readied a spell to fight back, and felt, somehow, doubtful that it would work. Then the creatures all stopped and bowed. Bowed to Sethira.

"My guardians," she smiled.

"I was not surprised to learn they still exist, nor that they seem to have multiplied in number. There are advantages to a multi-millennium absence." I did not need her to tell me that, I was looking at those advantages myself right now. Could a Demigod overcome these creatures? Yes, definitely. But I could not imagine they would enjoy the act of doing so. My respect for Sethira grew.