by John Bierce
He looked like a distant relative of Sabae’s, Hugh thought.
Then one of the faces moved, the great wooden eyes turning to fix on the Rising Cormorant, and Hugh froze.
Several more faces shifted to look at the Cormorant with looks of idle interest. Most turned their eyes away soon enough, though a couple stayed focused on them.
As the Cormorant sailed between the first trees of the city, Hugh realized they were even taller than he thought, and that the lowest level of the city was well over fifty feet above them, and they were at high tide now.
He was about to ask Alustin how they’d get up there when one of the great mangrove branches began to move.
The branch was immense, far larger by itself than any tree Hugh had ever seen. At its end was a cluster of branches that looked almost like fingers, and as it drew closer, Hugh realized that the branches did, in fact, form a skeletal-looking hand, only with far more fingers than any human hand.
He couldn’t help but step back nervously as the branch approached, but no-one on the ship seemed panicked. The Radhan were bustling about and reefing the ship’s sails, while the captain was paying the channel guide.
His fellow students, at least, looked a little apprehensive.
As the great branch-hand slipped underneath the ship, Alustin spoke.
“Welcome to Zophor, demesne of the lich Zophor, home to a third of a million people, and one of the greatest tree-cities ever grown. Do try and behave.”
The ship shuddered gently as it was lifted up into the air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lich-City
“How are they powering these enchantments?” Hugh asked, as the branch slowly lifted the Cormorant higher into the air. “The aether here is about on par with Theras Tel, but this absolutely dwarfs their lifts.”
He stumbled a little as the deck shifted, and Godrick steadied him.
“They’re not enchantments, exactly,” Alustin said. “Or, they are enchantments, in a sense, but it’s mostly just Zophor’s control over his demesne.”
“What?” Hugh asked.
The deck shifted again, and Talia stumbled into Hugh. Judging by the smirk she gave him, Hugh somewhat doubted it had been an accident.
“Haven’t I explained liches to you yet?” Alustin asked.
“They’re undead skeleton mages?” Hugh asked.
Alustin took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Clearly not,” he muttered. “Do the rest of you at least know what a lich actually is?”
Sabae nodded and Godrick shrugged, but Talia shook her head.
“Alright,” Alustin said, putting his glasses back on. “A lich is, simply speaking, a mage who has imbued their entire consciousness into a location. Or, more precisely, a massive enchanted construct known as a demesne. And by massive, I do mean massive— a fortress is about the smallest sized demesne that can successfully contain the consciousness of a sapient being. Brains are far, far more complex than any structures we can build, so liches have to build to huge scales to contain a mind. Even a fortress-size demesne is a bit on the small side, and liches inhabiting them are more limited mentally and magically than in larger demesnes. Most liches who can achieve it prefer to build on the scale of a city or a mountain.”
“Ah’ve seen what happens when a mage tries ta’ inhabit a demesne too small fer it,” Artur said. “It’s not pretty.”
Hugh started a bit— he hadn’t realized Artur had joined them. Of course, he’d been more than a little distracted by the giant tree-city.
“So why would anyone build a small demesne?” Talia asked.
Alustin shrugged. “Most mages who attempt the transition to lichdom do so in old age, out of fear of death. Even if they have the capability to fill an entire mountain with enchantments, they seldom have time to do so. Likewise constructing a whole city. And the number of mages capable of actually doing either is incredibly rare.”
The ship shuddered again as it reached the height of the lowest roads. Hugh could see people in a market haggling over fish, and most of them only casually glanced at the ship as it was slowly carried into the air. People could get used to any sight, no matter how astonishing, Hugh supposed.
“Some liches also like ta’ try fer mobility,” Artur muttered.
“That’s a persistent dream of liches,” Alustin agreed. “A lich cannot leave its demesne, because, for all intents and purposes, it is its demesne. Most of them have avatars, but they’re little more than animated puppets. Keayda has a stone naga statue he puppets, Zophor has his faces and his own wooden statues, but their avatars cannot leave their demesnes. Lichdom is a path to incredible lifespans and incredible power, but it also effectively imprisons the mage for eternity. You can’t blame a mage for wanting to avoid that fate.”
“Ah sure can,” Artur said.
“Long lifespans, not immortality?” Hugh asked.
“Even the best made demesne fails eventually. Nothing is eternal,” Alustin said. “There are a few other limitations on liches as well. Their demesne needs to correspond to their affinity, first off, and not all affinities work. It has to be an affinity that can be made into a long-term structure. A fire mage couldn’t become a lich, both because it has no solid structure and because there is no way to keep a large enough fire in fuel for long enough. A stone or ice mage could become a lich, however. In fact, stone liches, like Keayda, are probably the single most common type of lich. As an interesting side note, Keayda is so old that no one but him knows whether he was actually a naga in life. The avatars of liches don’t have to have any sort of resemblance to them in life.”
The branch finally stopped ascending around seventy-five feet above the water. It held still for a moment, then started shifting to the side. Quite a few people on deck, including Hugh, stumbled. He frowned and assembled a modified levitation spellform in his mind’s eye to counteract the shifts, and applied it to the group.
“The process of becoming a lich is a gradual one that can take years,” Alustin said. “Bits of the mage’s consciousness are slowly transferred over to their demesne as they construct it, and it’s a process with an extremely high failure rate. The farther along the process goes, the closer you need to stay to your demesne, and near the end of the process you can no longer leave your demesne for any appreciable amount of time. One of the most common failure states of transition to lichdom is running out of your affinity’s material you need for the construction partway through the process, whether due to miscalculation or outside interference. Running out of the alchemical compounds necessary for enchantments is also common, as are failures in the enchantments themselves. There are few more complex enchantments out there, if any.”
A mangrove leaf bigger than Hugh fluttered down past the ship, and Hugh realized that the size of the leaves must be proportional to the size of the tree.
“Can there be multi-affinity liches?” Hugh asked. “Like, a stone and steel one?”
“Yeh tryin’ ta’ turn me inta’ an undead monster already?” Godrick asked with a smirk.
Hugh rolled his eyes. “They were just the first affinities to come to mind,” he said.
“You can, in fact, have multi-affinity liches,” Alustin said. “They’re rare, though, because the difficulty of constructing a demesne grows more challenging with each material used. But if you don’t use one of your affinities in the construction of your demesne, you lose it for good.”
Hugh’s eyes widened as he saw another great hand-like branch coming for them.
“Can you keep enlarging a demesne after it’s built?” Talia asked.
“Absolutely, though it’s far more difficult than building it larger in the first place,” Alustin said. “In fact, Zophor is a great example of that. His story is fascinating in general, really. He was actually born in Ras Andis, Sabae, I don’t know if you knew that.”
Sabae shook her head. “I didn’t, actually. I knew he’s something of an ally of my family, but I didn�
��t know why.”
“He’s said to have something of a soft spot for Ras Andis still,” Alustin said.
The first branch passed the Cormorant gently over to the second, but gently for something this large still shook the ship alarmingly. Hugh’s spell, however, kept them all steady. Several of the others shot him curious looks, and he nodded.
Hugh kind of enjoyed having the job of keeping people from falling down. If he was being honest, it helped keep the part of his mind that told him he was useless quiet.
“Zophor was born over a century ago into a body he despised,” Alustin said. “He was a particularly powerful and precocious mage with a mangrove affinity. Given that more specific affinities are more powerful than more general ones, mages with affinities for specific species of plants are powerful indeed when surrounded by their plant. Zophor was absolutely brilliant, and began the process of growing his demesne here in the Ylosa delta, the largest mangrove forest on all of Anastis, right on top of a small submerged labyrinth. He wasn’t much older than you all when he reached archmage status and began constructing his demesne— just over twenty, in fact. Since he started early for the purposes of gaining a new body, rather than trying to escape death later in life, he had far longer to construct his demesne than other liches. He chose the challenging path of growing a living demesne out of the mangroves, which has the advantage of being able to repair and extend itself over time more easily. He has even greater control over his demesne than the average lich, and it would be absolutely foolish for anyone to attack him head-on without assembling multiple great powers at the very least.”
The second branch carried them around the curve of a trunk, and Hugh spotted the docks ahead of them.
It was a series of massive, water-filled wooden bowls, suspended in a spiderweb of branches connecting multiple giant mangrove trunks, fifty feet above the water. The bowls ranged in size from ones just large enough to contain little fishing schooners to ones large enough to contain ships half again the size of the Cormorant. Around two-thirds of them were occupied at the moment. There were also a number of dry storage areas for smaller ships, including canoes and dinghies. Hugh could spot at least seven of the great branches moving ships around the docks, as well as innumerable smaller branches moving cargo and smaller ships around.
“It should also be noted,” Alustin said, “that Zophor constructed his demesne entirely without a patron. Most liches have the backing of a great power, a city-state, or a nation, and nine out of ten still fail. Kanderon is, in fact, the leading patron of liches across much of the continent, and even with her assistance, the number of mages that fail is still around seven in ten. Zophor, however, figured out the process entirely on his own, and achieved the task single-handedly. People started moving into his demesne before he even finished, and it’s said that when his transition into lichdom was complete, he tossed his old body in the river like it was trash. Under no circumstances should you underestimate or disrespect Zophor— he’s a living city of unbelievable power, and he’s hardly humble or understanding.”
As the branch-hand lowered the Cormorant into one of the great water-filled bowls of the docks, Hugh looked up at the great wooden faces of Zophor looking down at them, then shuddered.
The docks were apparently so crowded due to the storms. Half the ships that were there were taking shelter from them and waiting for them to subside. The storms had started within a couple days of Midsummer, and hadn’t abated since.
Hugh saw goods of an astonishing variety being loaded onto ships around him. Planks and logs of rare jungle hardwoods from upstream were loaded alongside exotic animal pelts. Rare herbs for alchemy went onboard the ships side by side with tropical fruits, all to be stored behind preservation wards. Heavily warded lead casks of alchemical mixtures were loaded alongside beautifully carved furnishings.
Most of all, though, Hugh saw salt. Huge crates and barrels filled with salt littered the docks. Everywhere he looked, he could see little piles of fine salt that had been spilled on the docks.
According to Alustin, Zophor was one of the chief producers of salt on the continent. The great mangroves of the city excreted the salt on their leaves just like any other mangrove, and the city’s salt mages regularly harvested it before the rain washed it away, especially during the dry season. Zophor was Lothal’s main competitor for salt exports in the south, but the market was still far from glutted— civilization’s demand for salt was just about endless.
Hugh thought of Avah while Alustin was explaining the Zophoran salt industry— she would have been absolutely fascinated by it. Unless she’d already visited Zophor? She was far better traveled than he was.
Then Hugh glanced at Talia, by his side, and felt an abrupt pang of guilt. He didn’t think she would be upset with him for thinking about Avah— if nothing else, she was too busy being upset about the heat and the humidity— but he still felt a little uncomfortable about it.
“Hey Talia?” he said.
She looked over at him and smiled.
“Is it weird that the docks are reminding me of Avah? Should I be trying not to think of her, or… It’s probably weird that I’m asking you, isn’t it? I don’t think I’m very good at this boyfriend thing yet.” Hugh asked. He realized he was about to start rambling, then rubbed the back of his head awkwardly.
Talia’s smile faded into a thoughtful look, then to his surprise, she smiled at him. “It’s fine, Hugh. It’s not healthy to demand that someone you’re dating pretend like you’re the entirety of their dating history. Besides, I don’t have a problem with Avah. After all, I won in the end, right?”
Hugh smiled back at her, relieved.
“Did you get that from one of your novels?” Sabae asked. “Also, Hugh’s not a prize to be won, he’s a person.”
Talia stuck out her tongue at the taller girl.
Hugh glanced over at Sabae. She traveled lighter than any of them, only carrying her enchanted shield and the warded travel pack Hugh had given her— it could clean clothes going into it. He couldn’t help but notice that she had her shield stuck to her arm in battle-ready position— she seemed determined not to get caught unawares and unprepared like they had been in Lothal.
Hugh saw fewer weapons on the docks of Zophor than he had on docks in other cities— the lich-city was apparently one of the safest places to live or visit. There were still a few to be seen, though, so Sabae wasn’t getting any odd looks.
They had a long walk to their inn— it was a solid hundred and fifty feet higher than the docks, and two trees over. It would have been miserable to carry their luggage without levitation cantrips, but Hugh’s feet and legs were still aching before they were halfway there.
The crowds on Zophor’s streets were the most diverse he’d ever seen. Naga slithered along the roadways in great numbers. Gorgons, their distant cousins, strode about the streets as well. The shortest of them was as tall as Godrick and Artur, and several they saw were pushing ten feet in height. They were entirely scaled, but the scales were so fine as to look like brightly-colored skin from a distance. Hugh was surprised to see that they really did have snakes for hair, but of wildly varying types. He saw one with a matched head of dozens of small black snakes, another with at least a half-dozen different species of snakes, and a third especially tall gorgon with a single massive python coming from his or her scalp— it was difficult to tell— which wrapped multiple times around the gorgon’s torso, and watched the group as they passed, though the gorgon’s actual face didn’t look their way.
“They’re not born with the snakes,” Alustin said when Hugh asked. “It’s a sort of symbiotic absorption process. Their choice of what snakes to bond with is a hugely important one, and determines a lot about how they’ll fit into gorgon society. The sheer weirdness of it is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of the old legend that dragons originally created the gorgons and naga from humans to act as servitors.”
Hugh also couldn’t help but notice that a fe
w of the gorgons seemed to recognize Alustin.
Gorgons and naga were only the tip of the iceberg, however. Hugh spotted at least three dragons resting on roosts or platforms clearly built for draconic visitors, with merchants coming to the dragons to hawk their wares. An octopus of Ampioc’s species, though only a third of the size, had clambered partway up the trunk, and was bargaining with at least four different merchants over what appeared to be a sunken ship the creature had salvaged. Bids and counteroffers raced across the octopus’s skin in brilliant colors.
There were endless humans as well, of every color and appearance Hugh had ever seen or heard of, and then some. The majority, though, were the coppery-red so common among the inhabitants of southeastern Ithos— Phusan likely would have blended right in, as immigrants from Sica were one of the most common groups in Zophor, according to Alustin.
Sica was also a tree city as well, apparently, though not a lich-city. It was comparably impressive to Zophor, but wildly different, being grown out of baobabs by generations of tree mages, rather than mangroves like Zophor.
Hugh’s spellbook, meanwhile, was having a grand time flapping around over the crowds’ heads, drawing far more attention than the Skyhold group did. Several people Hugh could see were eying his spellbook acquisitively, but he wasn’t particularly worried. Hugh’s spellbook was absurdly strong for its size— it could more than lift the weight of a person into the air, at least for a short time.
Looming over everything were the immense faces of Zophor himself. Most of the time they stayed still, but it was rare not to see several in any direction monitoring the city.
When they finally reached their inn, Hugh’s feet wanted nothing so much as to lay down for an hour or three, but…
“We should do something to celebrate Talia’s birthday tonight, since we didn’t get to at sea,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” Talia said.
“No, we don’t have to,” Sabae said. “We want to, though, so we will.”