Chapter Forty Nine

Lilia couldn’t have imagined herself in the center of a formation of knights a year ago, and quite frankly she still struggled to understand how she’d gotten herself there. But she had Cinna next to her, covering her with a big shield, so she felt as safe as she would have with her friends nearby. Even with arrows and the fragments of shattered magical projectiles raining down, Lilia didn’t feel scared.

The knights moved at a slow but steady pace, ensuring Lilia wouldn’t fall out of formation. She kept one hand on Cinna’s belt and focused on her soul sense as she walked. The closer they got to the gate, the more overwhelmed she grew. Dozens of mages were gathered along at the walls and around the skeletal bridge. Their souls were blindingly bright; mana seemed to radiate off of them. It felt like staring into not one but many suns.

That wasn’t even accounting for the bridge itself. Describing its components as many souls stitched together did it little justice. Such a description more befit a quilt than the horrific, fascinating construct the undead necromancers had assembled. Every soul added to the network seemed to make it glow more brightly than their total number alone could explain.

Although the bridge already spanned the entire fjord, it now appeared to be growing upwards. The larger it grew, the harder it became for Lilia to make out its individual components. Worse, the components Cinna’s uncle had pointed her at were on the other side of the fjord. There were too many bones holding the structure up from the near side, where they were spread out across the remains of the bridge. She’d never be able to sever enough souls to make it collapse from that end before someone could intervene to repair the damage she caused.

She needed to target the supports on the far side, which were braced against the side of the fjord. But with so many additional souls added to the bridge in the time it had taken her to reach the bottom of the tower and cross the courtyard, she could barely identify the souls connected to the bones in question. It felt like staring into a fog as it formed over a meadow. Towards the beginning one could see clear across to the trees on the other side, but sooner or later it would become so thick as to obscure the trees entirely.

If the bridge were going to continue expanding forever, that would imply an additional time limit. The liches adding onto it presumably had a goal, though, even if Lilia didn’t know enough about war to grasp what it might be. As things were, she would still have trouble weaving through the myriad souls in her way in order to cut away the ones she’d been told to target. Fortunately, the souls in question were getting clearer the closer she got. Not enough to entirely counteract the effect of having so many stitched souls blocking her vision, sadly, but every little bit helped.

Suddenly, at least from Lilia’s perspective, Cinna stopped. Lilia halted beside the princess and looked up, realizing they’d nearly reached the gate overlooking the bridge. At some point along the way the mass of soldiers surrounding them had grown tenfold or more, so although they’d stopped moving, there still remained a buffer between them and the gate.

“Open the gates!” Cinna called up to the gatehouse above. For a few seconds no one answered, and the voice that eventually did sounded shocked.

“Come again!?” someone shouted back. Lilia couldn’t see them from where she stood. The gate sat within a gatehouse that extended many meters in either direction, with a number of holes in the ceiling overlooking the tunnel leading through it. Cinna and Lilia were at the very edge of that tunnel. Even looking straight up, she couldn’t actually see into the gatehouse windows.

“By the authority of the crown princess, and with the full support of the high general, I command you to open the gates! Confirm with him, but do it quickly!” Cinna said impatiently.

“Apologies, Your Highness! The order just came in from the high general. Opening the gates!”

With far less sound than Lilia expected, the solid metal door ahead lifted up. That might have been due to the sounds of battle echoing off the walls of the fortress, though. Shouts of surprise shortly followed by battle cries rang out from further down the tunnel. Even Lilia hadn’t realized it until then, but draugr had already crossed the bridge and were quick to react to the opening of the gates. Now that she could see the draugrs’ souls in motion Lilia realized they were separate from the ones making up the bridge, but up until then they’d been hard to differentiate.

“Focus on your task. I won’t let them approach you,” Cinna assured Lilia.

“I wasn’t really worried,” Lilia replied honestly.

“Step up, my mark! One, two, step!” someone shouted from further ahead. One row at a time, the knights and soldiers escorting Cinna and Lilia took a step forward. Without her soul sense Lilia might have been confused, but she saw the draugr pushed back a moment before the knights stepped up to claim the ground they’d stood on. Matching Cinna, Lilia took a step as well when her time came.

That one step wasn’t enough to make much of a difference towards the difficulty of her task. But the maneuver repeated itself every few seconds. Each time the knights leading the formation forced their foes back they rushed to fill the space they’d emptied, with their comrades behind them then stepping in to push against their backs. This way they prevented the less organized draugr from pushing back.

While this happened, Lilia tried to figure out how to accomplish her side of the plan. She couldn’t determine which skeletons were the most important for holding up the bridge, so she would have to just cut out the ones in the area Cinna’s uncle indicated either by severing their souls or erasing the spells holding them together. The former would be harder to reverse but much easier to notice, while the opposite would be true for the latter method.

It all depended on how much attention the enemy necromancers were paying. That they were still adding onto the bridge didn’t give Lilia anything to go on. They might be distracted by the work, and conversely, they might be aware enough to notice any tampering specifically because they were actively working on it. She decided to start by going for the spells for the time being and switch to the other method later if needed.

Lilia began by reaching out with as little of her mana as possible, sliding it along the edges of the bridge in the hopes that the amalgam of souls would mask her actions. As she did so, she felt the souls making up the bridge jostling against her mana and each other in a way she’d never encountered before.

Normally souls, being incorporeal, didn’t interact with one another. They could occupy the same space without touching. Really, even saying they occupied space at all would be inaccurate, but Lilia didn’t have a better way of defining the things she saw with her soul sense. Something about the incomprehensible spells the hostile necromancers utilized had made these souls act as one being on a large scale, but on the small scale things didn’t seem to be quite as harmonious. They shook and rippled, moving without moving, trying to escape the fate that had been forced upon them.

For the first time, Lilia felt a chill go down her spine. This might have been the only thing that had ever truly horrified her. The way these necromancers, these liches, had perverted the souls of the dead to their own means made her realize that they’d truly ceased being human. At one point Lilia had wished to learn more about the spells necromancers used to control their thralls; now, she wondered if that hadn’t been a step too far to begin with.

Doing her best to ignore the obvious discomfort of the beings, both human and animal, that made up the bridge, Lilia worked her way to the other side. Only the smallest part of her mind remained aware of her own body stepping forward in synch with Cinna every few moments. Soon she had a tendril of her mana stretched all the way across the fjord, but that wasn’t enough. At the very edge of her reach her options were limited. All she could do for now was wait while gathering more mana. The closer she got, the more she could transfer to the far end.

Finally, when Lilia had enough mana available, she set to work. The complex spells used to hold the bridge together were easy to erase but many in number. Worse, though, she quickly realized the liches that designed them had included self-repairing spells in the mix. Punching a hole in the surface layer of spells, Lilia scoured the depths of the first soul she’d chosen to free for the familiar spell she’d trained to destroy using her master’s thralls.

Operating on this scale, the enemy liches hadn’t been able to utilize a multilayered approach like Master had. It took Lilia only a few moments to find the spell in question and erase it, then do the same for the soul-stitching spells on the surface.

“Uh-oh,” Lilia muttered when nothing happened.

“What is it?” Cinna asked.

“Separating the souls isn’t enough. They can’t reform their bodies on their own,” Lilia explained.

Lilia didn’t understand the physics behind how bridges worked, so she couldn’t hope to figure this out on her own. But the reality was that the weight of the bridge as a whole had already pinned the skeleton she’d cut from the larger mass in place. What she’d done had been little more than removing the mortar holding some bricks together when the bricks above them were already stacked high enough to do so themselves. It would take an additional force to knock them loose.

“Keep going. It’s too early to say for certain what the effects will be,” Cinna advised. Deciding the princess might know something she didn’t, Lilia chose to trust her.

Moving onto the next soul in the structure, Lilia repeated the process. She eliminated the repair spell first, then excised the soul from the bridge. Phrasing it that way made it sound like the work of moments, but it took far longer than that. While Lilia might have been able to make quicker work of the task at close range, it still would have taken a couple of minutes minimum. Instead she was forced to perform the same task at a distance, like operating a scalpel with her arms fully outstretched and her eyes squinted.

And all around her, the battle raged on.