Chapter Fifty Two

On the way back up the elevator, Lilia remained silent, but inside her was a maelstrom of shame and guilt at having failed Cinna. In her mind this had been her chance to prove herself and earn a place at Cinna’s side in the long term, and she’d botched it. Even if she still didn’t quite grasp why she wanted that in the first place, having never felt close to anyone before save her parents, her failure to achieve it left her despondent.

All she could do now was hope Cinna’s new plan would still involve her.

So mired in unfamiliar emotions was Lilia that she didn’t notice when the elevator reached the top and Cinna stepped off. She stood there for several seconds giving her mana to the contraption before Cinna’s voice broke her out of her trance.

“Uncle, I’m afraid I must report we failed to destroy the bridge. I have no excuse,” Cinna said from the next room. Hearing Cinna phrase it like that filled Lilia with a desire to jump to her friend’s defense.

“It’s my fault!” Lilia shouted, hurrying out of the elevator to find Tryggve standing in the room with all the farspeakers. “I should have worked faster, or done a better job at dealing with the corpses and handling the bridge at the same time, or—”

“No one’s blaming anyone, little lady,” Tryggve interrupted, raising a hand to forestall any further words from Lilia. “Cinna, what happened?”

“They were waiting for us behind the gate with two liches—a necromancer and an earth mage,” Cinna summed up in short.

“Damn it. I’d hoped they’d be too busy with our mages to spare any for you…” Tryggve cursed. “We should have taken the risk and sent you down there with at least one.”

“I didn’t ask for any because I knew they were all needed above. If the walls had fallen before we finished they would have had us surrounded. It would have changed little anyway. We might have had fewer casualties, but in the end it was those very losses that permitted us the progress we had. Without them there would have been nothing to occupy the necromancer,” Cinna explained.

“Oh…right. He caught me as soon as people stopped dying,” Lilia realized. She hadn’t been paying enough attention to the fighting to know any of the other details, but she’d recognized the moment there were no more lingering souls distracting her.

“Precisely. The issue is that we have no means to destroy a necromancer. Even if we captured one, Lilia would require many hours to execute them. We wouldn’t be able to deal with the bridge until she finished,” Cinna noted.

“Do you know if the damage you caused has been repaired yet?” Tryggve asked.

“I can check!” Lilia volunteered, glancing around with her soul sight to get her bearings. The undead bridge stood out like a beacon, so Lilia only needed to cast her eyes in the right direction to spot it. She hurried over to the nearest wall and focused hard. From so far away she couldn’t make out much detail, but… “It hasn’t. Strange.”

“Do you have any idea why that would be?”

“Not really…well, unless their soul sight is worse than mine…” Lilia guessed, but that couldn’t be it. Soul sight was the most basic skill a necromancer possessed. A mage could only be called a necromancer if they first acquired that ability. Moreover, the necromancer in question could do many things Lilia herself couldn’t.

“Why would that have anything to do with it? Remember, Lilia, that we cannot see the things you can,” Cinna reminded her gently, joining her near the wall. There were thin windows in the wall at regular intervals, but Lilia wasn’t standing at one, so Cinna only spared the wall a single glance before fixing her gaze on Lilia instead.

“The souls making up the bridge are really, um, bright. Way brighter than regular souls. I think it’s because they’re connected. Normally a lot of the mana coming through their mana conduits would just be lost, but it’s not going anywhere for some reason,” Lilia attempted to explain. She didn’t fully understand the concept herself, though, so she struggled to find the right words.

“I hope you understand what she’s saying,” Tryggve said to Cinna.

“Perhaps,” Cinna muttered, furrowing her brow. “Would it help if I likened it to looking at something with the sun in your eyes?”

“Yes! Exactly!” Lilia exclaimed, nodding rapidly. “I had to try really hard just to know what I was looking at. And the further away I get, the harder that is. But that other necromancer was closer, and knows how to cast spells and all sorts of things I don’t know how to do, so shouldn’t they be better at it than me?”

“That might be precisely why they’re worse,” Cinna said knowingly. “Once they acquired this soul sight you speak of, they may have moved onto studying other topics. By focusing more of your attention on a single subject, you may have reached heights other necromancers never realized existed.”

“So they can’t see through all those connected souls,” Lilia concluded. “And they can’t fix what I did if they can’t see it.”

“Which means we’ve gained valuable information,” Tryggve added. “While you were gone, I received reports from Merethe and Valto. The good news is that while liches have constructed several other large bridges over the fjord, only this one was built with necromancy. Leo destroyed one already and incapacitated the lich behind it, and is currently working with Valto to eliminate a second.”

“Do we know how many there are?” Cinna asked.

“At least three, including the one Leo destroyed. Valto happened to be in the vicinity of the second and is holding our side of it until Leo reaches it. Merethe put soldiers on every horse she could find and sent them ahead to delay the undead trying to cross the last one until she can arrive with her entire army,” Tryggve relayed before sighing. “But we can’t be certain that’s all of them. Our scouts may turn up more as time passes.”

“Three more, but none are made of bones?” Cinna questioned, though Lilia suspected this was one of those “rhetorical questions” Cinna had told her about. “Then our objective has changed. The bridge itself isn’t the priority; it’s the necromancer that made it.”

“Correct. That bridge went up in moments, and in a fraction of the time an earth or water mage would have needed to build one of the same width. Destroying the bridge isn’t enough; they can just build another. We need to remove its architect,” Tryggve confirmed.

“Shouldn’t we have just grabbed the necromancer on the bridge, then?” Lilia wondered. After all, she could have halted the draugr defending that necromancer for as long as she wanted. They’d had nothing protecting them.

“No, that’s the last place we want to fight them,” Cinna refuted, shaking her head. “My gut is telling me that it would be a mistake to think of it as a simple bridge. It’s an undead creature in its own right. For one thing, the necromancer would be just fine if the bridge collapsed under it, but we wouldn’t. You might not be able to stop it from disassembling itself in time. Besides, we don’t know which necromancer constructed it.”

“It was that one. Definitely,” Lilia asserted, eyes falling as she remembered the horror she’d felt just from coming into contact with the necromancer’s mana.

“How are you so sure?” At Cinna’s question, Lilia looked up to find both uncle and niece watching her intently.

“Uh…well, I felt their mana when they caught me. They used it to grab onto mine. It felt wrong. I remember thinking…oh, this is what the mana of someone that could come up with something so horrible would feel like,” Lilia explained, shivering a bit at the memory. “And mana is the stuff of souls. I think, maybe, peoples’ mana might be a reflection of their soul.”

“It’s not a lot to go on. What do you think?” Cinna asked, directing the question towards her uncle.

“Makes sense that the builder would need to stay close by, if nothing else. But if we can’t find them on the bridge, we’re going to need to draw the necromancer into the fortress,” Tryggve determined. “It’s going to have to be convincing, too. We can’t just pull our forces away from the walls or open the gates.”

“Even a fool would see the trap therein, yes,” Cinna agreed. “These necromancers are novices at strategy, but they’re no idiots.”

“…I have a plan, but it’s risky. Not something I can decide on without consulting your father first, and absolutely not something I could implement with him on the walls. I’ll call him up here to discuss it,” Tryggve said after thinking things over for a few moments.

“You could have done that any time you wanted?” Cinna asked skeptically.

“I may have to…fudge the truth a bit to coax him from the walls. Wait here,” Tryggve replied, walking off to speak to one of the farspeakers while shaking his head.

“Now that he’s gone, are you alright?” Cinna asked. Lilia looked at her, confused. “Don’t act so surprised. You’ve been brooding over something since the retreat.”

“It’s nothing,” Lilia denied.

“Is this about that reward you requested?” Cinna persisted, leaning in closer. “Lilia, so long as we both survive this, you’re free to ask whatever you wish of me. The failure of our initial plan has no bearing on that. It wasn’t your fault to begin with.”

“But if I’d just been a little faster…”

“Then the bridge would have collapsed with the necromancer on it, dumping them into the Stryk River. They would have found their way out and built another one soon enough,” Cinna pointed out.

“So you’re not disappointed in me?” Lilia asked weakly, afraid to hear the answer.

“Of course not,” Cinna replied quickly, much to Lilia’s relief. “I’ve been with you every step of the way since you rescued me on the road to Saltvatrmarr. I knew as soon as I realized an enemy necromancer was present you would be hard-pressed just to keep them in check. That’s no fault of your own; mages of the same type typically cancel each other out barring a vast gap in skill.”

“If that’s true…how am I supposed to save the country when I’m just one necromancer, and the rest are all helping the undead?” Lilia asked, suddenly feeling more out of her depth than she ever had before. Cinna had mentioned multiple times how important she thought Lilia’s abilities were, but until now Lilia hadn’t really known anything about how mages fought each other. It almost sounded to her like she would need to be more skilled than every other necromancer combined to make a difference.

“Oh, Lilia,” Cinna said, wearing an awkward smile. “It’s not your ability to conquer opposing necromancers that is important. It’s your knowledge of the most basic skills of necromancy which baffled even an experienced necromancer like Javert, and your intuitive understanding of souls that—”

“Tryggve, you son of a Skyfolk, how dare you tell me my daughter is injured and then refuse to tell me where she is unless I come to you!?” roared a voice unfamiliar to Lilia, cutting off Cinna in the middle of saying words Lilia very much wanted to hear. Leaning around the princess, Lilia saw a man in a full suit of ornamented plate mail already in the process of lifting Cinna’s uncle clean off the ground by his collar.

Cinna sighed.

“Father, please put him down. I’m right here.” Under her breath, audible only to Lilia, Cinna continued. “This is not how I imagined this reunion to go.”