Peter entered the library study hall and strode through the mass of translating ghouls.
Instantly, the air shattered into streams of purple light, as his armband leeched twenty ghouls at once. When they clustered together so tightly, Peter found himself unable to avoid their small, tightly packed groups.
Those he passed flopped over, depleted of their time almost instantly. The rest scattered, clacking angrily as husky limbs scraped across the ground. The pygmy ghouls must have had smaller time reserves with how quickly they drained. They showed no intention of resisting. They weren’t fighters.
As ghouls dropped and new ones passed, fresh tendrils of purple wispy light snaked away from new prey, every time they got too close. Dozens of the hunched, short figures poured out of the former study hall and swarmed past human enforcers who ran to see the disturbance. Peter walked between long tables, leaving scores of translating ghouls drained and motionless on the ground.
The vibrant bird-headed elder lich clutched the book to his chest and cried out in panic with clicks and breathy gasps. Peter furrowed his brow in confusion; he didn’t understand the necrotic language.
Six sentinel ghouls poured out from behind the open platform office and ran in front of the elder lich, making a protective formation.
Peter clenched his teeth and ran at them, clutching his spear tight. The ground thumped underfoot. He knew what he had to do, and the sooner it was over, the better.
Peter almost got to the defensive line before he realized these ghouls looked different from ordinary sentinels. They had brass breastplates on their chests and wooden headdresses plastered to their heads. Moreover, they were all heavily armed — significantly more than the usual ghouls.
Conventional ghouls had been armed with a spear and a short sword. These sentries also leveled the traditional spear, but Peter also glimpsed those strange blades that he’d first seen lich General Montu carried an exotic hybrid of sword and axe, with half straight near the hilt and the second half sweeping outward. The sentries also had hand sickles, and axes secured to their belts.
Peter charged and thrust towards an armored chest with his spear. The ghoul knocked his spear off course, with a sharp clack of wood on wood, and sent him flying with a powerful, well-placed kick to the chest. Peter hit and slid down one of the long wooden tables, violently knocking against chairs, books, and ink until he slid to a stop.
Peter groaned as he looked at his opposition in surprise. Broken ribs mended, and he scrambled up to one knee.
The elder lich clicked twice from the back of his throat, and the ghouls broke formation, bounding after him. They snarled through barred, pointed, and serrated teeth. These six ghoulish guardians weren’t sentinels at all. A couple dropped on all fours and loped after him like apes.
Peter thought frantically about the classification system Norah had taught him. Bestial and inhumanly strong, they must be feral and enforced ghouls. Peter scrambled to his feet and snarled back at them as he charged them head-on. It didn’t matter if they could deliver a better beating or bite harder. A ghoul was a ghoul; he would drain them, then stab them in the heart.
They were fast. One parried Peter’s strike, spear-on-spear, and ran Peter through the chest.
Peter didn’t stop. He used his momentum to continue past the spearhead, allowing the shaft of the spear to slide through him. Peter pulled out a short sword and rammed the ghoul through the ghoul’s chest.
The ghoul didn’t drop. It did take a bite out of Peter’s neck.
Peter cried out as blood sprayed from some torn artery.
Of all the times Peter had died so far, this was probably the messiest and easily the most painful. The spear shaft burned and clattered, and Peter pulled out his second short sword. He stabbed the lead ghoul through the chest again. Maybe he missed the heart the first time.
The ghoul didn’t die. It grabbed him around the waist, hoisted him in the air, and slammed him down onto the table next to it.
Peter crashed down. The table broke with a splintering crack.
Peter didn’t have time to cry out; another ghoul was on him in an instant and pinned him on the ground with a spear.
Peter’s leech light stripped them of their time, but none had dropped yet. Peter choked, a sudden flare of panic burning in his chest as he considered his mistake.
The elder lich clicked and hissed at his guards, and they clicked in return, almost conversationally. So they could speak? The ghouls withdrew, leaving Peter pinned to the ground. Peter had to crane his neck to see the elder lich sending a wisp of purple limelight into the ghouls, refueling what Peter had stolen.
Peter’s memory flashed to him being pinned to the road on his first day on the road, and he realized he was very close to being captured.
“I won’t let you take me!” Peter screamed, blood-flecked saliva spraying from his lips. He grabbed the spear shaft and, hand-over-hand, started climbing, pulling himself through the pole. His wounds vanished, making the hole in his abdomen tight. Peter hissed with exertion as he threw his weight and jerked on the spear, opening the wound again.
The elder lich stumbled back.
Tears flowed down Peter’s face as he inched his way up the spear that pinned him to the ground. Then, being high enough, Peter jerked his weight and used his leverage to pull the blade of the spear from the ground.
Peter led the spear back out of him, wrenching the spear to open the hole when his wound sealed the hole. It was slick with his blood.
“Hey!” he barked, turning to the ghouls and raising the bloodied spear. “I’m not done.”
The lich clicked instructions, and the ghouls turned on him again.
Peter cried as he charged. Two ghouls launched spears at him, and he stopped to swat one out of the air, but the other one slit his arm as it trailed past.
Three ghouls now had swords, and three still had spears. His armband clicked in the strange language and that frustrated him.
“Maybe a little help I could understand?”
The thick book in the bird-lich's hands also began clicking, in that same strange rhythm, and the lich hissed at it reprovingly, a little panic in his tone. A talking bracelet, a talking book? He had just shown up for information, but maybe this was bigger. He seriously doubted that the ever-so-militant-minded Nine Fingers had ever tried anything like this.
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The ghouls surged forward in their second charge, snapping and screeching with animalistic fury as they came. Two dropped their weapons altogether and launched themselves at Peter. One went high; the other low. They reached for him with their terrible fingers.
Peter dropped and slammed his spear shaft through the neck of the ghoul at his knees, pinning it to the ground. The ghoul that lunged for his chest sailed overhead, missing its target.
Peter bent over the ghoul at his feet. He grasped the two short swords protruding from its chest and ripped the blades out, then jerked suddenly as he took two sword wounds to the back. He straightened, spun, and struck another in the heart. He was sure he hit it — until it tried to bite his hand. Peter had used his hands to hold off ghouls who had tried to bite him in times past, but they hadn’t been able to unhinge their jaws, like this. The ghoul’s mouth widened in a grin, exposing jagged fangs, which bordered on tusks. Peter stabbed it through the open mouth instead, trying to give himself a handle to push it back.
A ghoul grabbed him from behind in a bear hug and bit his shoulder, while another drew two knives and stabbed him in a rapid-flowing movement while he was restrained.
They’ll drain! They’ll drain! He screamed to himself, shaking in dread despite their seemingly endless supply of time.
Peter screamed, and the one who held him dropped, finally depleted. It had gotten too close for too long.
The others scrambled back to their leader for a refill, and Peter grabbed a spear and stabbed the one on the ground in the chest repeatedly until he was sure he couldn’t have possibly missed its heart.
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The chattery whisperings of the book and band grew louder and angrier.
The lich sent the ghouls out for another round, and Peter took a strange sword from the dead one and advanced, swinging it widely. The elder lich fidgeted in troubled frustration, and even his strange bird face wore the expression somehow.
Peter was gaining on him, one agonizing step at a time. The fight was surely costly on his ghoul fuel reserves.
The lich held out a hand, and released another purple whiff of light back into the dead ghoul on the ground.
Peter watched, panic-stricken, as the ghoul began to rise again.
Peter cursed Doctor Aarts and Norah for telling him all he had to do was destroy the heart. There was no way that ghoul still had a functioning heart.
Imagine now that each of Court Rahashel’s ghouls had a heart in random, unpredictable locations. Peter recalled Doctor Aarts’ words. These ghouls weren’t run-of-the-mill sentinels. They were an advanced guard. It would make sense to give them an altered anatomy.
Peter attacked and was easily deflected as a ghoul ripped into him with a pair of hand sickles, which tore horribly rather than slashing.
Peter managed to sever one at the forearm, but he was killed shortly after. He was unsure which ghoul killed him as attacks came from all sides. As always, in death, his fatigue washed away, and he pushed one back, claiming a step towards the elder lich, who clutched the book.
Three of the ghouls dropped as they pressed him, giving him the room to swing his sword in hopes of doing any damage. Peter held his ground, and the remaining three rushed back for a refill. Once full, they turned and waited for Peter to advance.
Peter panted, having burned through any reset from his last rest in a matter of seconds. The elder lich stood but didn’t order his ghouls on again.
“Surrender, Court Child!” the lich hissed, but Peter could see the desperation in his eyes.
“Why don’t you join the party?” Peter half laughed-half growled as the last of his wounds vanished. “Is it maybe that you’re not a fighter?” he asked.
The lich betrayed the truth as he fidgeted.
“I met some of your friends at the time vault earlier,” Peter said. “The ram face Khnum didn’t fight either, which makes me think you’re not all combatants. Which is why you hide behind those dolls, isn’t it?”
“Thieving crop!” the lich hissed through his thin beak. “I could destroy you here and now if I wanted to.”
“Then why offer the chance of surrender?” Peter asked. “You’re almost out of power, aren’t you? You can run out, right? And that’s why you’re worried.”
“You won’t be so smug when Anubis gets here!” the bird-man said, attempting authority, but the fear betrayed his voice.
“So you’re stalling?” Peter said. “Then why don’t we make this quick? Hand over the book, or I’ll take it from your dead fingers.”
The three ghouls in front growled as they leveled weapons, daring Peter to try.
“Why don’t you refill these guys here?” Peter asked, nudging one of the three at his feet.
The elder lich glared at him in a stony rage.
“I have a theory. If you were to try to fuel them with me so close, I would leech your refill like a magnet to metal sand. So, you wait for me to advance, and refill them once I’m safely away?”
The lich didn’t answer, which was in and of itself an answer.
“You won’t mind if I do this, will you?” Peter reared back his half-straight half half-curved blade and started to sever limbs one at a time. Heads, arms, and legs. They might have hidden hearts, but Peter wasn’t taking any chances.
The lich looked around in desperate search of rescue. He didn’t risk sending his remaining ghouls into Peter’s leech radius.
“Wow, you are what passes for an elder lich?” Peter said mockingly, trying to goad the lich into sending the remaining ghouls away from their fuel source.
The lich stepped backward, up towards the head office. “The tables will turn!” He glanced around. “Soon, you’ll scream!”
Peter frowned. The lich wasn’t as narcissistic as he hoped. Time for a new approach. “How did you get on that fool Rahashel’s staff? Rahashel must be some kind of a two-bit retchgasket, if you’re one of his retainers.”
The scarlet ibis-face squealed in fury. Peter’s hunch was correct: when facing a zealot, insult their god.
“You miserable little insect! How dare you blaspheme the name of the great God, all controlling! Kill him!”
The ghouls charged, and Peter grinned. The fight was his, painful as it would be; this lich had exposed his last line of defense.
Peter managed to cut a head off in a single stroke, leaving one of the ghouls to thrash around blindly.
One grabbed him and slammed him on the ground, then pounced on him to rip him to pieces with his teeth, but Peter couldn’t stop himself from laughing hysterically through the pain. His head twitched twice.
“Is that all you got? Rahashel won’t last the turn of the year if this is all his followers can muster!”
The lich screamed and sent a light siphon into two of his three ghouls as they mauled Peter. He continually poured time back into the ghouls in a hopeless effort to keep them from draining.
One drained, and the other two relentlessly continued tearing and digging into Peter.
Light poured into Peter quicker than it went onto the ghouls, and after a few agonizing moments, they fell silent.
Peter groaned loudly but then laughed as he pulled himself to his feet, pushing the slumped ghouls aside. “That’s more like it!” he grinned victoriously.
The whole front of his shirt had been ripped off, leaving the front of his torso exposed and bloody from wounds past.
“You’re in trouble,” Peter sneered.
“What are you?” The lich clutched the book to his chest. “You’re not powerful enough to be a court, but you wear the band.”
“What am I?“ Peter asked as he picked up a spear. “I’m the one who’s still laughing.”
“You’re mad!”
“Mad?” Peter pondered as he fingered the sharpened point of the spear. “Funny, that word has two meanings, and the longer I’m here, the more they both seem to apply.”
The lich screamed as he tried to run past Peter, clutching the book to his chest.
With a well-placed throw, Peter hurled the spear through his ankle.
The lich shrieked like a bird as he went down, and Peter picked up a sword.
“No!” the lich cried. “Get away from me, you monster!”
“If pain and immortality were the equation for monstrosity, then you would be right.” Peter hefted the strange blade, testing its weight. It was a sword, but it also felt like an ax. “But they’re not. Cruelty, lust, and apathy make monsters. I’m not like you. I don’t laugh as I leech mothers in front of their children. I didn’t travel the stars to your world to steal your land, and your years.”
Peter reared back with the sword.
“This is our world.”
Peter exited the library with a short sword on his hip, a book in a pack on his back, and a spear in his hand. The human enforcers who watched him backed away, shrinking like snow before the sun.
“I’m Van Seur,” Peter told them. “Your race doesn't matter. If you side with them, then we’ll count you as one of them. We will kill you if they don’t get to you first. They are not your ally. Come back to us, and we will end Rahashel together.”
Peter pulled a flag out of a pole anchor and dropped it with a clatter to the ground. The flag depicted an obelisk topped by a sun — Court Rahashel’s banner. Peter stuck his spear into the cast in its place.
He walked away unmolested by the overseers, leaving the abnormally large bird head mounted on the spear behind him.
Time to get out.
He hesitated. He was Van Seur, but he was also Peter. Iris would be leeched to death any day now. If he did nothing, she would die.
He turned.
Time to get Iris.