[Beastborne: Tower of Blight] Chapter 48

Besal looked over the lich’s head at Ralst, trying to silently communicate with her by flashing his hands. Using expressions had gone very poorly.

Not only because Besal’s armored helmet turned his head into something like a burning matchstick, but because his normal facial expressions were almost impossible to map to a human. Or a drow, like the woman before him.

This is the person we risked our lives for? Besal signed frantically.

He has stopped crying at least! Ralst replied, dangling her finger in a hooking gesture to display her annoyance at having her orders questioned.

Besal figured she was upset because this was not the sort of man that seemed to have his house in order. He wailed and cried, then wailed some more.

After the first hour, Besal lost all sympathy for the lich. At least he hadn’t tried attacking them. He was far too distraught about his missing pieces to do much more than bemoan his lot in life.

“We need you to come with us,” Ralst told him for the thirtieth time. “The knowledge you have of the Balesians and of the Calamity is of the utmost importance Aldrich. If you want any chance of restoring your body, you’ll need to come with us.”

That finally got his attention. The lich looked up. “I can get my body back? I know of no such magicks that can do this. Eternal life is hard enough, eternal beauty and eternal life is all but impossible without rigorous upkeep and magical application! I should know, I wrote the book on it!”

Besal was glad he didn’t have to worry about such things. He preferred his immaterial body to that of mortal flesh and bone. Unlike this lich, he didn’t have to worry about missing pieces.

Ralst looked ready to snap. She was about to say something, then bit off the words before they had a chance to leap from her traitorous tongue.

“You did not have Founders back then,” she said with a sly smile. “We have them now. They are men and women who have been blessed by the Shard itself. If you were to help us save this star, you might get awarded a favor from them. With their… er, powers combined, you could become something more than just a mere lich.”

Aldrich stroked his chin with his bony fingers. It sounded like a squeaky wheel. “Remade, you say? New body… I could work with that.”

“Then you will lend us your aid?” Ralst asked suspiciously.

They had gotten close to the lich agreeing to help before. Then he remembered he was a talking skeleton and started to cry again.

This time seemed different.

The prospect of a new body, a real body, was more than the lich could handle. Besal noticed that nowhere in that exchange did the drow woman ever promise him a new body. Or say that it would happen. She only hinted at the possibility.

Sneaky.

Whatever her game was, it was clearly working. Aldrich Valerion got to his bony feet and announced he needed a change of clothes, then swept out of the room with his clothes breaking off in moldy fragments behind him.

Luda watched in silent horror.

Even if two of their number didn’t possess incredible tracking skills, the shreds of cloth left in the skeleton’s wake would have been hard to miss.

They found the lich humming to himself in another room off to the side that neither Besal nor Ralst had noticed before.

As the lich moved from room to room looking for his equipment, his clothes, and his staves in that order, Besal was impressed with how thorough the dead mage was.

Not only had he managed to tame a large section of the Fathomways, but he had built an underground Dungeon/mansion for his very own needs.

That’s not such a bad idea, Besal thought. Maybe I’ll get me a pad like this one day.

Unsurprisingly, most of the lich’s equipment was damaged or destroyed, but he managed to cobble together enough eclectic items to complete an ensemble.

All three of them stared at the lich as he showed off his new outfit. “What?” he asked. “It’s the hat, isn’t it? The hat doesn’t fit.”

“No, the hat doesn’t fit,” Ralst said, deadpan.

“Blast it!” Aldrich cursed, throwing the floppy hat down. “Nothing can hide the fact that I’m a skeleton! People will be terrified.”

Ralst shrugged. “Let them. Terror works in our favor. We’re not a bunch of heroes looking to save our world by only ‘good means’. We’re here to do whatever it takes.”

The lich’s skull grinned at them even more than it usually did. “Oh, my dear! You do not know what that means to me. I had feared… well, let me say if only I had some organs and skin–!”

“I don’t date mages,” Ralst said simply. “Never had. Never will.”

Aldrich looked crestfallen. As much as a skeleton could.

With a bony finger pointed at the large floppy cowboy hat, Aldrich summoned a tongue of flame to incinerate the offending headpiece. His naked skull gleamed in the ethereal light of the Fathomways.

“What about a hood?” Besal asked.

“Ah, very good choice!” Aldrich said, digging into a trunk at the other end of the room between two armor racks. He finally pulled out a cloak that had clearly once been very fine. Now it was gray and tattered with mythril-green stitching on the hem.

Aldrich flipped the hood up, the green necromantic fires in his eyes lighting up with joy. “Yes?”

“Very much so,” Besal said. “Now, at least you don’t look like a skeleton from a mile away. Once we’re close enough to do some damage, then let the mortals see you for what you really are. If they want to stop us, they’re welcome to.”

Aldrich looked among them, settling his fiery green gaze on Besal. “I suppose you would understand, looking as you do. What manner of beast or man are you?”

“Neither,” Besal admitted. “Something new.”

Aldrich rattled his finger bones as he drummed them against his ribcage absentmindedly. “Very interesting! I look forward to seeing what we are capable of with my guidance.”

“You are not leading this group,” Ralst told him. “I am. If you want to challenge that, then please get it over with so we can–”

The first necromantic bolt of fire burst where Ralst had been halfway through her bored speech.

Besal turned to see the lich up against the nearest wall, the furniture between his previous position and the wall in shambles. Ralst held her armored forearm against the lich’s spine beneath his chin.

“The first one is free,” Ralst told him. “You do it again, and I’ll make it hurt. Do we understand one another?”

Aldrich didn’t seem to feel much pain, something that Besal envied when he thought about how he had challenged Ralst some weeks prior.

Still, he put up his bony hands in surrender. “You did tell me to try. I would not be much of a lich if I did not test the limits of my boundaries, would I?”

Ralst grinned at him, though it was more like baring her teeth as she let him down until his feet touched the floor with a faint click-clack.

“Very well.” She straightened her dark leather armor. “With your aid, and the access to the Fathomways, we should be able to turn this into a two-pronged assault. Finding the repositories of the Balesians to learn how they created the Fathomways and anything we can discover from the Calamity that our lich friend doesn’t know. And a second approach that seeks to excise the tumorous growths of Outsiders that have taken root in our home.”

“Outsiders?” Aldrich said. “Oh dear, so soon?”

“What do you mean, ‘so soon’?”

“Merely that, when a Worldshard is dying as this one clearly is, the Outsiders usually have the good graces to wait, you know, outside. If they are already within the walls of the Shard, somebody either invited them here, or there is something much worse than a repeat of the Calamity.”

Ralst could take a few guesses at who–whether intentionally or not–had invited their many-angled friends.

Perhaps she would have to do something she always feared she would be forced to.

Ralst shivered despite the warmth. It had always been her gravest fear that she would have to execute all the Kinslayers. Killing them, and any who touched that tainted Class, Beastborne, might be the only way to limit the influence of the Outsiders.

Without any such abominations to call more in, they might have a chance to cleanse the Shard of their presence.

“But first, before we go anywhere, I need my assistant,” Aldrich said as they turned to leave. He glided forward as if his feet weren’t touching the ground. It was hard to tell with the ragged hem of his cloak trailing across the floor.

“Your… assistant?” Ralst asked. “Another lich?”

“Oh, heavens no! He would not stand being a lich. He’s a vampyr. A very good one too, quite smart for their kind. Has a strange fascination with cheese, though.”

Besal made a sign with his hands, Are you sure he isn’t insane?

All powerful mages are a little insane, Ralst signed back. That’s why I don’t date them.

“Have no fear,” Aldrich told them. “I left him in my mountain retreat. No doubt he is still wiling away his time there, sorting the library and adding new collections and works.”

“You do know we are deep in the Fathomways beneath the Shiverglades,” Ralst reminded him.

“Yes, yes, easily remedied. I have a teleporter pad connected to my library in the mountain. Can’t leave books in the Fathomways, not books of power. No, no, too much chance a Dungeon will spawn.”

“A Dungeon can spawn from a book?” Luda asked, fascinated.

“Oh yes, my dear, very easily if you give it a few centuries to get going. There is so much power in words that people do not comprehend. Stupid, simple-minded people.” He shook his head as if he knew he should be angry, but simply could not muster the energy. “Anyway, as I was saying, I have a spatial link between this place and my mountain retreat. Follow me, if you will be so kind!”

The lich led them through winding passage after winding passage. They passed rooms filled with old and dusty experiments. Glass tubes that had long since dried out. Whatever had been inside was no longer viable.

Besal recalled another place that looked like this. The strange underground area beneath Murkmire.

Those memories were dimmer than the others. He hadn’t been “Besal” then, just a mindless Khaeros. A beast that did not think.

And now look at me, Besal thought. I’m going on my own Quest. Doing my own thing without Hal, and without having to harm him or his friends.

Despite his newfound freedom, he wished he could see Hal once more.

The thought of leaving the Fathomways brought a spark of hope to the Khaeros. Maybe he would see Hal again, and sooner than he thought possible.

Eventually, they arrived at a heavily warded door. The magic fizzled and sparked when the lich tried to open the vault-like door, but it eventually opened to admit them into a wide room filled with black marble pedestals a foot or two off the ground with short steps leading to them.

There were signs in the same dark material with golden lettering, though it was no language that Besal knew. When he turned to Ralst, she shrugged as if she couldn’t read them either.

Only Luda was studying them with interest.

Several of the glowing circles on the wide pedestals were dim, but a few seemed active.

“Where do these others go?” Luda asked with great interest.

The lich looked at her, then at some of the glowing platforms. “Nowhere, my dear. To other parts of my domain.”

“Oh,” Luda said, smiling sweetly.

“Come now, onto this pedestal,” Aldrich told them. “It will take us to my mountain home, where we can gather my faithful servant.”

Luda was first on the step. She leaned over to examine the golden writing that had survived so many countless years. “It is very pretty writing. What does it say?”

Ralst and Besal exchanged curious glances.

Aldrich waved away her concern. “Very old dialect of the Balesians. Don’t worry if you can’t read it, most couldn’t even in my day. But if you must know, it says, ‘Mountain Home’.”

“Really?” Luda said, turning a wolfish grin on the lich. “Because I thought it said, ‘The Fungal Wastes’.”

Aldrich opened his mouth to dissemble, but Ralst was there in the blink of an eye. She leaned in close behind him in a chokehold and whispered, “I said the first one was free. Now I’m going to have to hurt you.”