Looking out from the top of the mound showed that the road we needed to follow wound between the other rock piles. It would have been a huge slog to have fought our way forward. The pile we were standing on showed at least a couple hundred undead. The others were similarly occupied.

I glanced over to Kasidy and said. “I’m sure there’s a good song about what happened here. I just don’t know if we will ever know how it happened.”

Kasidy nodded and then kicked a zombie hand that tried to grab her foot. “Yeah, whatever did this chose the most violent way. None of these look like they were sent to the next side.”

I nodded. “Yup, but we don’t have time to do it right now either. We may come back to clean up this mess once the lich is taken care of.”

Irwin snapped off a blast of fire into a headless skeleton, trying to walk towards us. “It would be good for travelers not to have to deal with all of this. If the castle is still in good repair, then that may be where people go to find you.”

I pointed to the wagon and horse. “Let’s get going. I don’t know what the lich is expecting right now, but I am sure he is on edge with all of this.”

We picked our way back down to our horses and then got going. As we headed out, I passed another two mana potions over to Renfry so that he could keep filling up his soul tank. I wasn’t sure how all that worked, but since he could disrupt the bonds that made the undead move. I wanted him as topped off as we could get him.

The piles weren’t the only defense that the lich had. As we moved between the rocks, we found that the road in some areas was made rough. Large stone had been left in the road between mounds. If we had tried to dash through the approach, we would have been stopped and surrounded.

As it was, we had to take the time to remove the stones as we moved forward because they were too large to go around with the wagon. That chore quickly fell to me as I pulled out my stone-to-earth wands. We needed to keep Irwin’s mana full so that he could heal us.

At our halfway point, the lich had made it even harder for us. The road vanished into a twenty-foot-deep hole. That alone took over an hour to fill so that we could get the wagon through. So while we moved much faster than we would have if we had to try to fight our way through, we still took several hours to move through the battlefield.

The whole time I was making the road passable, Renfry and Irwin were taking potshots at the random skeletons that had put themselves together or the zombie that still had some mobility.

When I was working on filling the hole in the road, they handled a prolonged tower defense style battle. The waves that came were slow and easy but never-ending. There was even a point where Kasidy had to turn around a mass of zombie parts until Renfry had the mana to deal with them.

When we crossed out of the mounds, the wagon triggered a trap. Not a physical trap but rather one that only a necromancer could put in. The side of the road was grass which should have been the first clue for us since the rest of the area was hard-packed dirt and rocks.

We were just rolling along when arms started to push up through the grass. I’m sure that the lich thought that it would work better than it did. However, trying to dig through the ground to attack us took too long to be much of a surprise.

As the first skeleton arm broke through the ground, Renfry shook his head. “My lord, there are a little more than twenty skeletons here. None feel to be high level. Do we want to finish them off or move on?”

I looked around, trying to figure out what the lich was thinking. “This seems like a poor trap unless it is only part of the trap. How long for you to finish them off?”

Renfry smiled. “With how full I am right now, just a moment. I can disrupt them, and then when they are weakened, pull their soul fragments.”

I nodded. “Do it. I don’t know how devious the lich is. But this just seems like a poor attempt to slow us down. So we don’t want to be here long.”

Irwin spoke up as we kept moving. “Necromancers tend to fight long battles. They win by wearing down their opponents. This whole approach seems to be that way. Nothing too powerful, but enough of it to make us fight the whole way.”

I scanned the road as we moved forward. “You’re right about that. If we were an army moving through here, then the narrow road and constant small attacks would mess with morale. It would also wear down the front. He might not be as dumb as he first appeared.”

Renfry rode up. “Eric was always a quick study. When I knew him, he was brash and wanted everything right away. But perhaps his time as a lich has changed that.”

Renfry sighed as he looked over his shoulder and then shook his head. “However, I think he might be just as brash now. None of the undead on this approach have been high-leveled. Sure, someone or something else took out most of them. But even so, nothing was above level 10. We know that he has some that are around level 20. Yet he didn’t have any here.”

Kasidy added. “Since he has been here for hundreds of years, it should have been easy enough to build a real fort down here.”

I shook my head. “Undead are hard to control. Much more than follow and attack, you have to tell them each step. While he might could have build a fort, I am betting that he either didn’t know how or lacked the control.”

Renfry laughed dryly. “Likely the patience to control them. The boy never did well on tasks that took time. I do miss him, though.”

We fell into silence after that for a while. I could tell that Renfry was down, even if he wasn’t saying it directly. He didn’t want us to have to kill the lich but knew that it wasn’t Eric anymore.

It was about an hour later when Castle Westiral came into view. It was still several miles away, placed high above us in the side of the mountain. The castle itself looked like half of it was carved out of the cliff face, and the other half was built from those very stones. The main complex of the castle was almost the size of Last Port. Then there was the ruin of a city all around it. Lastly, there were walls that stretched across the pass where it was anchored into the wall with a small fort.

The secondary fort appeared to be about twice the size of my tower before it became the Eternal Tower. The wall between the two fortifications was in poor repair. Whole sections looked like they had been torn down in battles long since fought.

Renfry pointed to the large castle. “Castle Westiral. When last I was here, the walls were painted white so that you could see them even further away than now. The walls between the castle and Fort Sebastian were twenty feet thick and sixty high. Over three thousand men guarded the walls of the pass. Around it was the great merchant city of Leb’on’e.”

As we were looking up at the once-grand castle, I asked. “Where did the kingdom lie that the Westiral was part of?”

“This side of the pass and on up and around. The plains that the Tower is in used to be farmland. This pass was one that we had to hold against not just our neighbor but against the orcs as well. At least in my time, there were dozens of tunnels through the mountains that they would use to attack us. We would find them and plug them, but they would just dig new ones.”

Renfry sighed as he looked up at the castle. “My family lived in the city around the castle. That’s where I would have gone to retire as well. Part of the reserves once I did my time with the lancers. I wonder what would have caused Eric to do this.”

I shrugged my shoulders and asked. “Renfry, in your day, did the other side of the pass have flying forts?”

He smiled and nodded. “That’s one of the main reasons for this pass. It’s the only one low enough that they could come through. But in the middle of the pass, we built a massive wall that ran from one side to the other. We managed to get one of the floating rocks and wedged it in high up in the pass. Then from that, the wall was built. It weighed it down and made a massive block that kept them from being able to float through. On the other side of the pass was another wall and two forts that the Crown kept.”

I reached out to Blink. I knew that she was near the castle, but I wasn’t sure if I could reach her. This was the furthest that I had tried.

I felt the bond connect as I asked. “Hey, sweetie, you okay?”

Blink hit me with a rush of emotions. Sadness and embarrassment were the biggest two, along with some anger and shame. “Daddy, the lich boy captured me. He has me in a cage. He tricked me when I went into the castle. He has been talking about what he will do with me once he has his title from you.”

* * *