Chương 90: Chapter 82 - The Lich’s Society Of Preservation

++Book burnings have always offended me on a primal level. The wanton destruction of knowledge, simply for the sake of destroying it. Because the very existence of certain facts or thoughts is offensive to the ones involved. It is the very distillation of idiocy. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. My quarters in Orapathaqi were actually surprisingly nice. Somewhere along the way I seemed to have internalized something of a Garamon attitude about the city.

Of course they were nice, there had been vast stretches of noble and priestly quarters available for me to be assigned, and Nu'chista had already made it clear that he was pleased by my performance and eager to reward it. It was not as if Garamon had invented luxury, indeed the way its nobility were kept fell rather short of the excess I had seen in the royalty of the ancient world. I would have to bring that back when I returned myself to power. As I had requested, there were several bedrooms. Three in all.

Each one was large and expansive enough, and I promptly claimed the biggest for myself. Centred near the middle of the city, my new quarters were far from where the fighting had been, which left me free from the effort of picking debris out of bedsheets, or repairing walls. Apparently, the noble who owned it had perished in the fighting.

That was another bonus, as I had not been looking forward to being pestered by some imbecile who did not understand how important a contribution my having easy workspaces would be to the human race. I certainly had that workstation now. Without much of a social group, I wasted no time in clearing out a living room and setting up the surfaces I would need to do my work.

It was nothing compared to the dungeon at Winzorth, unfortunately, mainly because I could not afford to leave evidence of my necromantic studies out. But I finally had room to continue my more immediate goal, starting with my little project. That, and the knowledge taken from Orapathaqi's priesthood. Progress was looking like it would start surging on soon. My first day actually settled into Orapathaqi was spent acquainting myself with the arcane lore I had acquired. To that end, my new servant proved invaluable.

It was annoying, at first, to get answers from her, because she had a tendency to stammer and trip over her own words when spoken to, but the more she grew used to me the more accustomed she got to that and the easier it became for me to actually learn what I needed. Currently, what I needed revolved around the ancient burial rites of Estalia as much as their necromantic magics. The two were impossible to separate, I thought. Burial had not been something I had thought about much in my first life.

To my thinking, it was a wholly superfluous affair. What did I care what condition a corpse was in, provided it remained intact and functional when reanimated? It was an attitude born from impatient practicality, and one that had, apparently, led me astray. Because while there were few physical methods of improving a corpse's quality once it had fully died, the mystical implications of how it was prepared could make all the difference in the world.

"What is this section of the ritual?" I asked my new…I suppose she could be called a teacher.

"The removal of the organs, I see no purpose for that. Or does it make the corpse lighter and faster?" She bristled, as she tended to when I suggested a purely mechanical explanation for what was clearly a magical science. Even I could struggle with acquiring a new idea when it was sufficiently opposed to my previous ones.

"It is nothing like that, the organs are removed during a proper preparation because they decay if left inside the body." I frowned at that and tried to wrap my head around it.

"Undead do not decay at all," I pointed out.

"Not if made properly." She was growing frustrated, which was as much her fault as mine for being unable to convey the fundamentals.

"Reanimation cannot happen immediately after death, if done properly it is a slow process that takes months, maybe years."

"Why?" I was getting frustrated now, which I think was entirely the fault of my involuntary teacher.

"Why not simply reanimate them on the spot?"

"Because the body needs time to prepare. Once the organs are removed, it is free from decay and can begin to soak up the necromantic energies gradually and properly. Rather than just becoming a vessel for them, it lets them seep down to the smallest level and, eventually, starts to create more of them itself." The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"All undead create energy themselves," I snapped.

"Or rather extract it from their seat of consciousness."

"No! Not like this, the sacred undead don't just fuel their resurrector's power, they bolster it with their very bodies." It was this that finally had it sink in for me, and I felt like I had just discovered fire.

"So…you are able to treat bodies in such a way as to have them not only receive magic, but produce it of its own volition…and you can do this posthumously?"

"Yes!" she seemed relieved to finally see me grasp the implications, but I was past caring about her thoughts now. I had far more important considerations. The idea of creating magic in a once-living body, let alone something that would be animated once more, had been an obsession of every necromancer of my lifetime. None had succeeded, not even me.

That this had been discovered after my Setback by a civilisation of people merely adapting burial rites into magic was painfully ironic, but that did not register now compared to the wonder of discovery. I continued reading. More now, obsessively rather than just eagerly. I was devouring a book every few minutes and kept up my pace for so long that I even forgot to eat or drink.

By the time I had finished the rest of the tomes, and safely stored their contents in my memory, my vision had started to blur from the effects of bodily exhaustion. Ordinarily I would have drunk, eaten and slept to keep my new physical form from degrading, but this was a special occasion and I could not afford to waste the hours.

Instead I indulged in one of the new stimulants of the modern age, a rather invigorating white powder administered through the nostril which wasted no time in combatting my fatigue and leaving me alert enough to continue doing what needed doing. There were so many plates for me to keep spinning that even I was starting to feel tired, but that did not mean I would stop working at it.

Having already seen the precious wisdom of Orapathaqi, I was more eager than ever to keep the rest of it from being lost and departed quickly to do so. My first stops were the city's libraries and temples, and I was utterly unsurprised to find Godtouched already within them and looking through the tomes. Godtouched. I loathe them more than perhaps any other creatures in the world, not for being its greatest problems but for being its most pathetic ones.

At least the Demigods gain more power through their servitude than virtually any magician can match, but the majority of Godtouched have little more than superficial advantages over common humanity and would prove just as strong if they took the path of magic, or even of a warrior. The ones greeting me at the first of the libraries, despite this pitiable weakness, were as arrogant as all things attached to the Gods inevitably became.

I was not permitted entry, rather forced to stand outside and explain myself to the lowliest of them, a simple doorman with a mere whisper of divine magic in him. He was smiling, more sneering, as he spoke to tell me the place was under the jurisdiction of Garamon's priesthood. This did not put me in a good mood, and so what followed were rather… hostile negotiations.

"I'm terribly sorry, my lady," the Godtouched barked.

"But we cannot permit you entry until this heathenous place has been properly examined, scrutinised and cleansed. You would balk at the offenses to nature and divinity we have already found within, I assure you." I took a moment to look around and feel out for magic, or see the smoke of flames. There were none. So if book burnings were already underway, and I had no doubt these grunting apemen would be eager to see that they were, none of it was occurring just yet, at least.

"Nonetheless, you do not speak for the magicians of this army, and we will be taking a look ourselves," I told him. It was actually pure bluff, I rather doubted the battlemages of Garamon had anything like the academic leaning their scholarly equivalents back home did. But I also knew that the lesser Godtouched tried not to butt heads with the larger institute of Garamon's magicians. When possible, at least. This man did not back down as I would have expected, his gaze growing harder.

"The magicians have no jurisdiction here, this is the army of great Nu'chista and all within it answer wholly to him." It was refreshing, at least, that he did not even try to pretend he would have had authority over me under more normal circumstances. The power of the magicians in Garamon society had waxed even in the few years since I had joined their ranks.

"Do you want me to come back with my superiors, and find out where our jurisdiction really ends?" I asked him. It was a risky gamble, he could easily have replied in the positive and caused me a whole new tangle of trouble. But he did not. Important people were not selected to go through a city's library just finding things to burn, and this man's lack of import made him easily bullied. His gaze dropped and I gained entrance into the library.

From there, I took no more than an hour to bully my way into custody of the books and leave with them. Nesariyah was awaiting me outside the building with an aether sled of her own devising; her spellwork was actually almost as impressive as Agrian's in certain areas and this was one of them. I deposited the treasures with her and headed off to another library to repeat the process. All of it kept me busy for quite some time.

There were many libraries in Orapathaqi, and if I had already emptied out the most important one for the most important books on the night of the siege, that did not make me any less desperate to save all the knowledge I could. Every word lost was another hole left in history. And another grudge I would nurse against the Gods commanding it. Then again, they were rather distant from this affair. If I had to choose someone to blame, I would be more accurate in aiming my hatred at the men responsible.

They were, I thought, the same breed of superstitious imbecile who had once tried to kill me in my childhood. It took the better part of a week for me to finish my work, saving what I could and redistributing the knowledge back to my own quarters. By the end my decision to insist upon such a large set of rooms was vindicated. I simply could not have fit the books in anything smaller. And I intended to wring all the knowledge I could out of each one of them. Them, and Orapathaqi as a whole.

Because Nesariyah's revelation had brought me another step closer to cracking the mystery of warriors, Godtouched and Demigods. When that finally happened, there would be no more challenges for Lord Dread.