Chương 292: Meadwhite's Capture

I don't know what I was expecting. Black clouds raining hordes of zombie birds at us. A wave of invisible death magic that just slew everyone where they stood. A contingent of skeletal knights. Or just a massive wizard-borne airstrike of hellfire and tornadoes to scour this district of the city away. What I got instead was a single lich running like an Olympic sprinter down the street out of an extremely expensive car crash, screaming with every step, " Please make it stop!"

while every potential witness screamed and fled to get off the street. My passing instinct was to summon void and implode him, destroy this body. It's gotten to be a habit when I see Meadwhite, really. And even with a new body I've never seen, wearing new bones and a new haircut, I could tell that this was Meadwhite, the voice was still exactly the same. But, we did not build a giant lich-catching trap so that I could just pop him into nothingness again. We're not here to just kill him.

Today we intend to destroy him. So, blowing him up is off the table. And after my reflex to smash him just to save myself, comes the reflex to overthink. Something is wrong. This is unexpected. Some kind of trap. It's a trick. A distraction. A decoy. An ambush. Something. But... how? I did recover my wits, after a few seconds. I've never really completely overcome my freeze response when confronted by something startling and unexpected.

It's part of why I like to stay on an aggressive footing: if I'm taking action, all the situations I'm in are situations I create and control and I don't have that moment of hesitation. I plunge into a portal and appear inside the building.

"Incoming, front door, ten seconds," I told them, and then I ported back out. I could have given a more useful briefing. But after all, I wasn't even part of their plan. Any heads-up I give them is more than they planned for. Also, I feel really unwelcome here. Also, I want to wrap this fast and get back outside so I can get a decent vantage point. I don't want to take my eyes off of the situation.

I appeared myself high in the air over the intersection, where I had a decent view of the running bellowing undead monster that was all that was left of the last Duke Meadwhite, and all the civilians running for cover and leaping behind wagons and slamming window-shutters for safety. Meadwhite hit the door like he expected to go through it, slamming facefirst and rebounding. He lunged for it, scrabbled at the locked door, tried to force it, scratched at it with his bone-tipped fingers." Let me in!"

he screamed in the most desperate, piteous voice I've ever heard from a dead man." Please!" He was clearly hurting, badly. He pressed himself flat to the wood, splayed, T-posed, spread-eagled. He mashed his cheek and chest to the door and scratched at it like a cat stuck in the rain. If I had made a list of the fifty things I most expected from this lich encounter, I would never have gotten close. Not a single thing that has happened has been part of any of my guesses. Cautiously, I floated closer.

He was wearing a bathrobe, he was alone, and I could not pick up any inks or sigil-prints on him at all. No creature-pieces or wooden wands, nothing. None of his paraphernalia, none of a necromancer's tools. Like he had leaped up from wherever he had been and just sprinted straight at us at top speed, only slowing to get in the carriage.

That said, his scratching at the door stopped looking like desperate clawing to dig through the wood, and more like he was using his sharp-tipped phalanges to carve precise grooves into the wood. Some sigils don't need ink at all, only shapes. They tend not to be the most impressive ones, but odds are that Meadwhite knows a lot about scrivening that I don't. I shot a steel blade out and it cut off his hand at the wrist. He broke his neck turning to glare back at me.

He looked incredibly offended that that I disarmed him. But apparently he was not ambidextrous, his other hand just scratched inarticulately and without any magical symbolism. Or, he thought I'd cut that one off too. Also: it was creepy as fuck hearing his vertebrae snap and crunch just so he could shoot me a dirty look. This was a rather odd and precarious position: how do you ambush and capture someone who is trying to merge their body with the front door?

I used some giant steel staples to clamp the lich's legs and arms (one at the wrist, the other at the elbow) in place, and then I let the warriors inside know that we were coming in. I took the door off of its hinges, and floated it inside. With a gesture, some of the floorboards peeled up and blocked up the doorway, leaving us all alone inside this place. The Ebonder operatives advanced cautiously, keeping him observed.

"Let me, let me go, let me to her, let me go," Meadwhite was gasping as he struggled against the restraints. Not struggling to free himself just to get free, but struggling towards the single stone cell in the middle of the building. The stone bunker that Belisa was locked inside. He wriggled like he was going to try to swim at her, crawl to her, his urge to get there was so blind and helpless that he was almost not making coherent movements.

So, at least now I know that liches don't have some kind of willpower superstrength to resist the urge of the soul-tether's pull. He was almost maddened by the effects of his magic on her shell. After spending so long thinking of him as being this hypercompetent, invincible foe, this was just too much. He has so many plans and contingencies and resources and powers that my framework has always been me struggling just to survive contact with him, or to delay and interfere with his latest gambit.

Now I've found his weakness, and the whole landscape has shifted underneath me. It's weird to see an invincible foe suddenly laid low. Is this what it's supposed to feel like when you hold the cross up against the vampire? We've spent considerable amounts of time and effort to find and exploit his weakness. But I didn't anticipate what it would look like to find it. I expected more "This is not the end! I cannot be defeated!" and less pathetic scrabbling.

And then a dark spot in the far corner, that had not been dark before, started to stretch towards us. This shadow did not care that the candles were on either side of it and that everything else was well lit. It just stretched until it broke like an elastic membrane, parting to let the Marquis Septimus Ebonder step through and into the warehouse.

"Damn," I said.

"I have spent all this time under the impression that I was the only one who can teleport. I have to reevaluate."

"Nah, it's not teleportation, but you could be forgiven for thinking so, it looks similar from the outside," he said, focusing on the scrabbling corpse-man.

"Now, who's ready for an interrogation?" The interrogation was actually weirdly anticlimactic. After all this time, after blowing up a city park, dismantling an entire street of traps, chasing him from town to town, overthrowing his whole clan, cutting off his network of contacts bit by bit... now that he was in our power he was just pitiable. He was shaking like an strung-out junkie two days late for the fix he needs. He would tell us anything just for a promise that he could get at Belisa. Just for a promise.

And he did not care that it was not really a credible promise, because the slight chance we would honor our promise was better than his odds of pulling free of those staples on his own.

"How did you manage to hold out for so long?" I asked to get us started.

"I can't imagine lasting a full week against that pull. How did you resist for so many days?"

"Resist?!" he sounded incredulous. His dead pores were trying to sweat.

"I was in Johnpur when suddenly the pressure got really intense. I didn't resist anything, I got here as fast as I could!" I could have facepalmed. I had assumed he was shrugging off our soul-summoning trick and was building up an army of necromantic powers in the city to attack us. He had been in a different city. A week away from here, but only if you've got a horseless carriage that you're willing to push to the breaking point. He's spent the last week getting here as fast as he could.

Amazing that his carriage lasted as long as it did, really. He was on the far end of the kingdom and late winter is not a good season for road conditions. He wasn't readying a sinister attack for the past several days. He just physically could not have gotten here any faster. Which I should have seen coming, because he never sets up a hideout in the same city twice. But if he's been all the way over there, then who's been collecting and working with Belisa here at home?

There's other people to deal with, other loose ends to clean up.

"You've got local contacts," I said.

"Someone was running things here. Tell me about them."

"No. Let me at the girl," he demanded.

"No." And like that we're at an impasse.

"Let me at the girl, or I tell the marquis what you really are," Meadwhite said, suddenly sly. And my heart maybe stopped just a little. Just like that, he's got control of the impasse. Septimus rolled his eyes and flicked his hand, and my soul came unpinned from my right arm from the shoulder down. I turned to stare at it, Meadwhite turned to stare at it, but the assembled guards and warriors did not seem to notice anything. I glanced at the necromancer, and he looked at me with something approaching amusement.

Right. The king of necromancers can probably tell an untethered essence when he sees it. I started reattaching the essence of my arm, weirdly self-conscious. It felt like I'd been caught half-undressed. Meadwhite just turned his fleshless face sullen, realizing that a crucial piece of leverage just dissipated. I on the other hand now have about a thousand new questions for Septimus. He, on the other hand, has just as many questions for the lich.

"How did you bespell the girl so that she cannot be found or followed?" Septimus asked. The corpse craned around to look at Ebonder. The broken vertebrae grated against each other, setting my teeth on edge.

"I used sigils, dumbass," Meadwhite said. I wouldn't have called him a dumbass, but Meadwhite does not have my reticle. He can't see the real danger that's there. I don't really know what was in his head. Maybe he's a lich speaking to a necromancer. Maybe as a deposed duke speaking to a mere marquis. Whatever it was, some part of how he viewed Septimus led him to use a shockingly condescending tone. I hope Ebonder doesn't decide to destroy him just out of pique.

I hope I don't have to play peacemaker between them just to get our interrogation finished.

"I checked for sigils," I said, and he turned back my way with a grinding sound of crepitus. I tried to ignore the sound and kept going.

"They weren't there." The lich chuckled, teeth clacking. He was laying on a tabletop, still bound to the front door that I had brought in, hardly a dignified position.

"Tattoos, little usurper princess. They're under her skin. Were you too prissy to take her chemise off this whole time? They're not hard to see, under her clothes." Septimus, and his operatives, and I, all looked back and forth at each other. A bit of an embarrassed silence. We had a prisoner and we never checked her for tattooed sigils. I can excuse my making that mistake, I'm sixteen and I've never kept anyone captive after kidnapping them.

Every time I abduct someone I just dump them somewhere else and wash my hands of it. Septimus is a marquis and probably too busy to handle his own abductions. And the mana warriors... well, none of them look like they're used to leaving survivors. Also it probably never occurred to any of us because famously, that's not possible. But when the enemy does something impossible, don't stand around marveling at it, it gives them more control of the situation.

Gotta keep the conversation moving, we'll circle back around later to the fact that magic tattoos are impossible.

"What spells did you put on her?" I asked. Because also, I was getting mad now; this bastard had just scribbled spells into her flesh to keep us from finding her. That is incredibly demeaning and disrespectful, and intrusive in a stomach-turning way.

"Ah, well, all kinds," he said, sighing wistfully, looking at the stone cell like a long-lost lover.

"Distraction and diffusion, obfuscation and confusion. And then also more to keep her in perfect health for her entire life, sharper senses, needs less sleep... I really did outdo myself. And all thanks to you! I had never known that a living body could hold an untethered soul, but I saw your smoke, and started the most fascinating line of inquiry... I had to take additional readings, so many course corrections, but in the end... well, the information we got from you certainly saved dozens of hundreds of subjects."

"Happy I could be of help," I grumbled. Shit. Apparently my interaction with Belisa was a critically necessary part of the process for binding her as a living lich. That does not look good for me. I can see the marquis's glare from my peripheral vision. But I tried not to get distracted.

"Health? Sharper senses?" I said, baffled.

"Why did you bother, why would she need those?"

"They're not for her, they're for me," Meadwhite pointed out. He didn't call me a dumbass with his words, but he did say it in his voice.

"For me to enjoy and utilize for years and years! Living flesh can take and keep tattoos! Sigil work that never fades! How I've longed to just walk about in public unseen, untraceable! Even the best sigilwork to affect perception is imperfect, I can't go out like this, but an ordinary-looking girl? It won't matter if my protections fail for a minute, she would be ignored even before the spells took effect again. I could go wherever I please! Nobody would stop me!"

"So, you tattooed her with spells for you?" I asked, and I could feel parts clicking into place. The paranoid lich built countermeasures into the body he wanted to possess. All my trouble finding her, tracing her, was just a side effect of the spells he had built for his own use. She wasn't wearing spells targeted to keep me from finding her. She was embedded with spells that he had designed to protect himself. I am starting to realize how many assumptions I've been making here. Bad information, bad guesses.

We had not known his methods, his purpose, or even his location. We had not thought through his motivations well enough, and ignored that he never takes up shelter in the same city twice. And yet our plan worked. That's the part that is ringing in my ears like a bell. If you're strong enough, have enough allies, and build a solid enough plan, you don't need everything to go perfect for it to still work. This was a fundamental shift for me. I've gotten a lot better over the last year.

All those challenges and learning experiences, they're adding up. Also, I'm actually hearing actual bells. I glanced up in the direction of the sounds that tolled the hour.

"Well, I guess I'm going to be missing my invention class, because there's no way I'm walking out of this." Septimus paused, shifted his jaw thoughtfully.

"You could go if you wanted," he suggested. He was clearly trying to get rid of me, politely. I was pretty sure he has already considered, and rejected, the idea of threatening me directly to get me out of this place. If I may flatter myself, it may be because I am in line for control of a Central House, and in just a few years I may well be as personally dangerous as he is. Or he's more polite than I give him credit for, but I don't think so. Not after spending that whole day at the diner together.

Clearly he would like to have me gone, because he is a man who is protecting a lot of secrets. And I would like him to be gone, because I am also protecting a lot of secrets. He girded himself, and turned back to face the lich.

"Fine. Next question, lich. Where is the stolen portion of the dragonhide? You did not bring it with you."

"Left behind in a hidden vault," Meadwhite said through gritted teeth, his lips pulled back in a desiccated sneer.

"I knew my best leverage would be my portion of the dragon." This, for example, is one of the Ebonder house's most important secrets.