The Lich: Or, the Confessions of a Witch-King Read online

  The lich

  Or, the Confessions of a Witch-King

  A Novella

  By

  Adam Vine

  They called me the Coffin King.

  I was the hero who slew the Lich and returned the Crown of Whispers to the Empire. The man of the people who rose to become emperor, only to fall again to a conspirator’s blade. The cursed one. The creature of darkness, doomed to wander these shadowed halls for years uncounted. I have feasted on the bones of warriors who came by the thousands to win glory to their names through my destruction, brave warriors - the bravest of the brave - much like yourself. The mere mention of my name sends children to bed at a reasonable hour and keeps them from playing outside after dark.

  I am the monster the stories warned you about. I am the Lich.

  But you already knew all this, didn’t you? If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have ventured miles beneath the earth to my Castle-Under-The-Mountain to the foot of my Throne of Skulls with your silver sword in hand, ready to plunge it through my cold, un-beating heart. You wouldn’t have slaughtered my wights and left their dust piles littering my halls. You wouldn’t have waltzed past those treasure chests I left brimming for you in plain sight with booby traps a child could disarm, a last generous offer for you to turn back. You wouldn’t be wearing that same fragile smirk I’ve seen so many times before, which you assure yourself is an adequate mask for your fear.

  You wouldn’t have come to slay the Lich if you didn’t know what I am. But there are some minor discrepancies in the version of my story you’ve heard. Inaccuracies. Falsehoods. Naked slander.

  Yes, it’s true, that mountainous pile of silver swords, spears, axes, and glaives belonged to your fellow monster hunters.

  And yes, I have been sitting here sharpening these long, black fingernails on the skulls of my throne for a very long time.

  Yes, the Crown of Whispers, which you have come here to reclaim, does adorn my lolling head.

  But any man who is willing to become an executioner should first be a good listener, should he not? To be a confidant for the last words of the one he has condemned?

  Be honest with yourself. You didn’t just come to kill the Lich. You came for a confession; to hear it all, the trail of my crimes that led me here, straight from the corpse’s mouth. So a confession you shall have.

  Now please, come a little closer. I don’t trust you, either, but we can’t get started with you standing all the way over there, can we? No. This old, dead voice is far too meek, and I must save at least some of my strength. It is a long and harrowing tale.

  ***

  I began my life as a coffin maker's son. I was never schooled, except in the art of felling cloud pines and fashioning them into six-foot-long boxes for the dead.

  I spent my boyhood exploring the cloud forest where we cut our trees, pretending I was all manners of warrior or royal assassin, even going so far as to spy on the local lord, whose name is now lost to me, and his retainers when they went hawking in my woods. I quickly learned two ways of speaking, one for the people in our village, and one for myself when I was alone and pretending to be a nobleman.

  My father had served as an archer in the king’s army before turning to the trade of making coffins. I practiced with his longbow as soon as I was old enough to draw it. I learned the differences between hunting for food and hunting in war, how to hold my arrows in my bow hand so I could quick-draw them without reaching for my quiver, how to shape my own bow from wood. He taught me which plants and roots could be eaten and which would kill, how to follow without being seen, how to kill with a single arrow.

  But my father was a drunk and flew into an easy rage any time I made a mistake. If I misplaced a nail or dented the wood with my hammer, he would box my face and sides until he felt something break. If I overshot my target and lost my arrows in the woods, he would not let me eat or sleep under his roof until I found them.

  Eventually, I left home, preferring to spend my nights sleeping on a bed of pine boughs in a cave high in the cloud forest overlooking our valley, next to the place where the river fell over jagged bluestone cliffs into a deep, crystalline pool.

  It was there I met Justina, my first love.

  I can still envision her, like a sliver of a dream. She had hair the color of volcanic glass, eyes that held the light like jade mirrors. Her face was a pale, heart-shaped jewel, her skin the blue-gold color of fresh milk. When she smiled, it filled my heart with the indescribable mixture of joy and sadness that only comes when we love someone more than we love ourselves.

  I caught her bathing in my Crystal Pool one morning, and her mother caught me watching her. Her mother vengefully promised to turn me over to my father, but I begged and pled not to make me go back, the tears carving their own waterfalls from the encrusted dirt and grime of my cheeks. I must have looked an overwhelmingly pitiful creature, because the old bag relented and started crying, too, avowing to take me in.

  I slept in the attic of the inn owned by Justina’s family. In exchange, I washed the guests’ dishes. When Justina’s mother would go to bed, I would steal a bottle of wine from the cellar and Justina would sneak out her window to meet me at the edge of town. Navigating by candlelight, we would sneak up the mountain path to the cloud forest, where we’d get drunk and swim in the Crystal Pool, then fondle each other until we both fell asleep. As long as we both awoke and were back before dawn, her mother was never the wiser.

  Justina was the first girl I ever loved. But our happiness, like most, was not made to last.

  I caught her screwing the nobleman’s son. I found him taking her from behind against a tree, not far from our Crystal Pool, where she’d promised she was mine, forever.

  On my last night in the village, I recall imagining I was standing over her bed while she slept, dagger in hand. But in the end, I simply packed what few belongings I had in a potato sack, slung it over my shoulder and stole away upon a moonlit road, promising myself between peaks and troughs of rage and heartbreak that I would use my pain as fuel to see the world and make myself a better man.

  Whatever you may think of me now, dear warrior, there was a time when I was good. Now please, come a little closer. I’m finding it hard to continue at this volume.

  ***

  I arrived in the capital a month later, as lean and filthy as the road could make me. It was mid-summer, and the sun was ungodly hot, made worse by the fact there was no water to be found. The capital was experiencing the worst drought in recorded history. The wells and streambeds were dry. Bathing was an unspeakable luxury, and drinking water had to be purchased from merchants who charged prices so astronomical I wondered how the city’s poor were able to survive.

  It was there I learned the truth of the stories I’d been hearing since I was a boy: that our once-great Empire of the Sun and Moon was dying.

  The fields were barren and the trees black and brittle. The ancient palaces and grand promenades were filthy and overrun with beggars. Giant columns of unwashed, unpainted stone stained black with smoke towered over swarms of mucky children lying bored and starving in the shade.

  “You’re from the provinces. They think you’re rich,” an impossibly tall, thin merchant said to me with a laugh as I passed his stall. He was selling locusts, the one food item the capital seemed to have in abundance. He wore a savagely curled black mustache that covered half his face, mirroring the shape of the dagger that hung from his belt.

  “Why?” I said.

  The merchant responded, “Because life is still good there. The fruits still ripen on the vine. The water is still clear enough to drink. People are healthy, and their bellies full. But it won�
��t be so for much longer. Soon the corruption destroying this place will spread to the provinces, too. He means it to spread across the world entire.”

  Scratching my beard, I said, “Who?”

  The merchant picked up one of his own locusts and let it hover by his mouth, not noticing the minute tremble of its legs. “The Lich.”

  A confounded look must have seized my face, for he raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Have you not heard of him?”

  “No. Who, or what, is a Lich?”

  With a heaving sigh that trembled the locust’s tiny feelers, the merchant began. “He was High Wizard, the Emperor’s most valued advisor. He murdered the Emperor and stole the Crown of Whispers, which the Gods of Sun and Moon gave to this land in the Age before Time. Rumor has it he used black magic to seduce the Princess. Many believed the High Wizard meant to use her to usurp the throne.”

  “So, what stopped him?” I said.

  The merchant scraped one greasy, shining corner of his mustache with the locust’s tail and said, “His plot was discovered, and the Emperor arrested him. But on the morning of his execution, instead of going to his death with honor, the High Wizard murdered the Emperor, stole the Crown, and fled to the Castle-Under-The-Mountain.”

  “Forgive me, but what is the Castle-Under-The-Mountain? I’m from the provinces and don’t know much about politics,” I said.

  “It is an ancient, hidden fortress, a secret redoubt built to hide the royal family in times of crisis,” the Merchant said. “No one knows its exact location, though many now seek to find it. For the Lich remains there still, using the Crown of Whispers to blight this land with famine and plague. Did you do any research into our fine city before coming here?”

  “News takes long to travel to the provinces,” I said.

  The merchant shrugged and, at last, popped the unfortunate locust into his mouth.

  To avoid an uncomfortable silence with my new friend, I pushed the subject. “So why do you call him a, what was it you said? A… lich? What makes him different than any other run-of-the-mill scoundrel, or brigand?”

  The merchant said through a mouthful of insect parts, “The gods punished the High Wizard for his betrayal. They cursed him, sapping the life from his body, turned him into a living corpse, who must drain the souls of the living to survive.”

  “But if that’s true, shouldn’t he already be vanquished?” I wondered aloud. “He secluded himself in a place that sounds very hard to get to, yet he can only survive by preying on others. Sounds to me like the problem should have solved itself.”

  “Clever man.” The merchant grinned. He offered me a locust. I took it and chewed. “And if no one ever sought him out, you would be correct - the problem would easily sort itself out. Unfortunately, there seems to be no shortage of brave idiots with silver swords and maidens’ promises in hand eager to march off on a fool’s quest to slay the Lich and save the Empire. There is a widespread belief that whoever kills the Lich and takes the Crown from his head will become the new emperor. If you ask me, people simply can’t resist the temptation to pay mind to those who they despise, even when not doing so would cause their opponents to wither in obscurity.”

  “So you’re saying the Lich has an infinite supply of food,” I said, swallowing.

  The merchant offered me another locust. “I can see you’re thinking of going after him. I’ve tried to convince you otherwise, like all the others. Oh, well. Your life is yours to lose, my friend. I can’t help you win this moronic quest, but I can tell you where to start. The map showing the location of the Castle-Under-The-Mountain is hidden in the Great Library. And, who knows? Maybe the next time we meet, I’ll be calling you emperor.”

  ***

  It wasn’t hard to figure out where the map was hidden. I suspected it would be built into some part of the library’s architecture, most certainly the floor, so I climbed the stacks until I reached the highest indoor vantage point the library offered, a hanging scaffold where an absent artist had been repairing one of the spires in the giant mosaic of the Crown of Whispers that adorned the inside of the dome.

  No, the hard part was seeing through all the bodies. Sleeping, standing, leaning, begging, the library floor was teeming with refugees, orphans, and the homeless. The Great Library was the largest building in the capital, even larger than the royal palace, and it was open to the public. I had to wait until five minutes before closing, when the last tawny fingers of dusk were seeping through the highest skylight, before I could make out the image on the floor.

  The map was hidden in the design of the floor tiles, as I’d expected. I instantly recognized the landmarks, as they weren’t far from the valley where I’d grown up. The river that gave life to my village was a tributary of the great river Ist, which flowed south from the Iga Mountains, the map’s starting point. I would have to cross them at the Izo Pass, the sacred high road where the Sisterhood of the Moon Singers lived in their ancient monasteries cut straight from the faces of the rock. Then, I would have to ascend the heights until I found the mountaintop crater holding the sacred lake known as the Eye of the Sea, where the entrance to the Castle-Under-The-Mountain was hidden.

  I spent many more days in that library, learning everything I could about liches and how to defeat them. Since I could not read the books myself, I employed a young girl named Pia to read them to me. Pia had bright, translucent hair the color of whiskey, and barely looked old enough to be in school, yet was already studying alchemy at the university level. I paid her in locusts borrowed on good faith from my friend, the merchant San, who always gave them to me with a silver-capped smile and a wink.

  With Pia’s aid, I learned that silver is toxic to the undead, but that they also hoard it. I didn’t understand this paradox until my young assistant found in an old black tome that the undead are drawn to silver by instinct, just as we are to food or drink. It cannot harm them unless it penetrates the heart or brain. Liches, though physically frail, were notoriously brutal sorcerers by their nature, so I decided the best way to kill this Lich would be with a silver arrow.

  I made the perfect plan. I would sneak into the Castle-Under-The-Mountain and shoot the Lich through his cold, wicked heart, then take the Crown of Whispers and be back in the capital before the seasons changed.

  I convinced Pia’s father, a metalworker named Gahri, to forge me twenty silver arrowheads. He was as strong and skilled with an axe, so I promised he would be my Royal Master-At-Arms when I came into power. I do not believe he would have given me a nickel if it wasn’t for Pia.

  The next morning I set out to slay the Lich beneath a purpling sun.

  ***

  As soon as I entered the Lich’s lair, it became grossly apparent how little I knew about magic. The old corpse had seen me coming before I had dipped my toes into the Eye of the Sea, even before I had left the lowlands for the grueling, week-long climb up the Izo Pass.

  Fireballs shot at me from invisible ziggurats secreted in the walls from my first step into that old, dusty tomb. They singed the hair off my arms and neck as I flailed to escape their deadly communion. I sprinted and slid down serpentine halls of slick, time-smoothed stone, my elk-skin boots barely making a sound as I leapt nimbly over spike pits and impaling objects flung from murder holes in the ceiling and walls.

  Yet despite my quickness, the Lich’s wights found me as if I wore a beacon. They’d been waiting for me, I knew as soon as I heard their eager howls echoing from the depths.

  You of all people, brave warrior, should know how terrifying it is to be charged by a wight. I can see the sweat still creeping down your brow, the tremble still lingering in your fingertips.

  I felt it too, then. My blood flowed like fire, and time, like sugared sludge. Their dead, contorted lips screeched octaves I didn’t know existed. I quick-drew my bow on every pale face, every set of flinty, unseeing eyes, and unleashing missile after missile into the disintegrating slag of their faces. I recovered as many spent arrows as I could, but by the t
ime I reached his Throne of Skulls, I had only two arrows left.

  I crept slowly into the hall, bearing down on every moving shadow and glimmering mote of dust, but the Lich wasn’t there. I stood where you now stand and with great confusion, lowered my bow.

  Then I heard the scraping of rough cloth on smooth stone, shamble, scratch, shamble, scratch, scratch. He entered walking on the ceiling, cupping something in the pallid bowl of his hands.

  The Lich uttered a word and I froze. He drifted down as paper falls through air, silently landing on his throne, and scattered the dust pile at my feet. When he spoke, his voice sounded ancient and exhausted.

  “The gods did not make me a Lich,” the Lich said.

  I tried to speak and found I could not.

  I’m sure you’ll agree, brave warrior that it’s hard to describe the look a dead face makes when it emotes. I can only describe it as sadly unsurprised. The Lich descended his throne and took my face in his hands. His touch stung like ice, but was dry as ash. I tried to fight, but I couldn’t move.

  I thought he would kill me then. Instead, he only sighed. “My heart stopped beating because it grew cold. Not the other way around. I pushed everyone who ever loved me away, for power, country, glamor, fame. When I realized how truly alone I was, I sought the purest love I could, that of a beautiful young girl with innocence in her eyes. Or did you think I stole the Princess, like everyone else? You may speak.”

  “Traitor,” I spat. “Murderer. Demon.”

  The Lich returned to his throne, where he tapped a long black fingernail on the bones of the armrest. He was toying with me, I realized, trying to squeeze every last bit of information he could about the outside world before he slew me.

  But I had no trump card up my sleeve to play against his magic. I couldn’t move anything but my lips. My only chance to survive was to make him angry enough to stumble and release his grasp. “What would she tell me of your innocence, I wonder? What would the princess say?”