Books & Bone

by Victoria Corva

  They should leave. This wasn’t skirting the edges of a fire; it was leaning forward and pressing her face into it. She glanced at Smythe. His skin was blanched and he clasped trembling hands in front of him. He looked barely a breath away from fleeing.

  He’d never talked about the curse or what it had felt like. But it had nearly killed him, and she doubted it had been pleasant.

  They needed to leave. Running into the Lich by accident was one thing; throwing themselves into his path was another. And Larry, who had been falling further and further behind the deeper into the Lich’s wing they travelled, was nowhere to be seen. No counting on another rescue from the immortal minion, then.

  But though a few quick steps would carry her out of danger, she found herself taking another step forward.

  ‘Uh — Ree?’

  The books she needed were here, she was certain of it. The Lich had been here for centuries longer than anyone could remember. He’d had his pick of the collected knowledge of several cultures and generations long past. Magic that had been forgotten. Magic like therianthropy.

  This could be her chance. Maybe her only one.

  ‘Stay here,’ she whispered to Smythe.

  ‘What? Why?’ His voice spiked in panic. She half-ducked, but the Lich didn’t look up from its tinkering at its desk.

  ‘Because you’re clumsy and I’m not. I’ll be right back. I’m going to scout the room out.’

  ‘Ree!’

  Ree ignored his protests and slipped into the room on soft-soled boots. She’d crept past sleeping kings and the corpses of necromancers long past. She could be quiet, when she needed to. She skirted the bookshelves at the other end of the room, scanning the books with intermittent glances at the Lich. If she could just discern its classification system, she might get an idea of where to start looking.

  As she edged further into the room, the Lich stiffened. The Lich doesn’t see, it doesn’t hear, Ree told herself, though her entire body clenched in terror. It follows a set path. If I don’t get in its way, then —

  Its robes swirled, tentacle-like, in the air as it began to turn.

  Every few years, some hot-headed practitioner believes they have the power necessary to take on the Lich, and further that that would somehow be a sensible idea. The town has never yet been able to recover the bodies.

  And yet none of this ever truly stirs it the way the council fears. It is known to kill adventurers, and any others that cross its path, but it doesn’t do anything with them. Perhaps it is just too old and too removed from its humanity to think of vengeance any more. Perhaps it is too powerful to bother seeking more power.

  But the council still fears it. Not because of its power, but because they do not know what it wants.

  If the Lich no longer desires power, then why does it still wander the crypt every day? What is it searching for?

  ~from A History of Tombtown by Emberlon the Disloyal

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WHAT NECROMANCERS FEAR

  Ree dived to one side and tucked herself behind a bookcase as the Lich turned. It fixed its gaze at the spot where she’d been, the ragged ends of its robes swirling in slow-motion as if underwater.

  Ree kept a hand over her mouth, fighting to keep her terrified breathing silent. She almost choked on the thick, humid feel of its power. The Lich was boney and withered, but its presence was enough to fill the library.

  Ree peeked out from behind the bookcase, only to jerk back as the Lich’s head snapped round. Her blood pounded in her ears as she pressed herself back against the wall. It must have seen her. Those white marble eyes …

  The Lich drifted past, gaze never flickering in her direction. Its shrivelled legs trailed bonelessly in the air behind it. For a moment, the pressure of its magic was so overpowering that Ree feared it would suffocate her, but then the pressure eased.

  Ree gasped and lurched forward, one hand pressed to her chest. She risked a glance at the Lich, but it was leaving the room through a door beneath the balcony, heavy tome still held loosely in its too-long fingers.

  Had it known she was there? It could have been a fluke, a coincidence. Must have been. The Lich wasn’t aware of the world anymore. It had stopped being sentient, in the traditional sense, a long time ago.

  She thought of the intensity of its gaze, the way its magic filled the room: cloying, suffocating.

  Muffled footsteps. Ree had barely leaned out from her alcove before Smythe barreled into her. ‘Ree!’

  ‘I’m fine, everything’s fine,’ she said, because Smythe’s eyes were wild behind his glasses.

  ‘Ree, it saw you. It saw you — I’m certain of it! We must get out of here.’

  Ree shook her head. Her heart-rate was slowing to a more manageable pace now, and she refused to leave empty-handed. ‘There has to be something here, Smythe.’

  Smythe’s gaze wavered on her face, then he set his jaw and nodded curtly. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’d best get started before that fellow returns and makes minions of us.’ Larry lumbered down the stairs after them and Smythe gave him a mock-bow that didn’t quite hide his nerves. ‘No offense, old chap!’

  Ree knew she was asking a lot of Smythe. For once, he knew the danger they faced far better than she. But right now, they had access to texts no-one else in Tombtown had ever handled — or even knew existed. She and Smythe split up, Larry attaching himself to Smythe, to better cover the shelves.

  Ree rushed along the bookcases, pulling off any likely books and thumbing frantically through the pages. She found books on strange rituals and ancient traditions, books on creatures long thought legendary, and books in languages so old that even she couldn’t read them. She could hear Smythe muttering as he read and thought aloud, hear Larry’s unusually quiet, high-pitched grunting. No matter how desperately she read or how absorbed she became in her task, her eyes always returned to the doorway the Lich had exited through. If he appeared there … well. They needed to be ready.

  To her relief, there were a few contenders. She shoved Wynas Serasaphi and A Study of the Old Ways into her pack with such roughness that it made her cringe, but she was in no position to waste time with careful treatment. Smythe, too, had added a few tomes to his pack, though whether they were on therianthropy or were just particularly interesting to him, she didn’t know.

  She pulled one more book — one with peeling leather and no title, but with various animals embossed on the spine — and looked to Smythe. Her stomach knotted as she saw him peering through the doorway, Larry drooling at his shoulder.

  ‘Smythe!’ She hurried and took him by the wrist. ‘I’ve got the books, we need to go before —’

  But Smythe resisted, his eyes on the other room. ‘What was it you said the Lich does all day?’ His voice sounded faint.

  Ree’s breath went short at the paleness in his cheeks. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘He wanders, he reads. Nothing, if you don’t get in his way.’ Her nose wrinkled; there was a horrible, metallic smell growing on her.

  ‘And — sorry but — how fresh would you say that is?’ He nodded at something in the room.

  Ree followed his gaze, hairs rising on the back of her neck. The other room was a further library, but the stone floor was a mess of blood and chunks of flesh and entrails, leading a gory path to the next door.

  Ree’s mouth went dry.

  ‘I’m assuming — from your expression — that this isn’t “nothing”.’ Smythe nodded to himself. ‘All right, well, this has been a jolly adventure, but I think now we should —’

  ‘There were no corpses.’ Ree said the words quietly.

  ‘Uh — pardon?’

  Ree stared at the bloody smear. ‘There were no corpses, no bodies, nothing. Empty tombs and empty rooms. What do you think he could do with that many bodies?’

  ‘Uh?’

  Ree looked at him. ‘We can’t leave. Not without knowing.’

  Smythe ran a hand through his hair. ‘You — but — you see, I’d really rather not.�
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  Ree breathed out through her nose, staring at him for a long moment, before following the trail. She didn’t want to go either, but if the Lich was behaving strangely, that could be a danger to the town. After a moment, she heard Smythe follow. ‘Keep an eye on Larry,’ she whispered.

  ‘Of course, I — uh, where is he exactly?’

  Ree spun. The doorway was empty and Smythe was scratching his head. There was no sign of Larry.

  Perhaps he had a self-preservation instinct afterall. It didn’t comfort her.

  She came to the wooden door, so thickly smeared with gore that the handle dripped. She pulled her sleeve over her hand and carefully lifted the latch. The door creaked open, just a crack. The stench that rolled into her sent her reeling back, gagging. Smythe, behind her turned and wretched.

  She pressed her arm to her nose and went to the door again. Bodies, ripped and dismembered, were mounded in front of her. She couldn’t see the Lich, but she could hear its scratchy death echo as it chanted, could hear the meaty tear of flesh. It must be somewhere behind all that … whatever it was he was building.

  Something about the scene felt eerily familiar, but she found she couldn’t place it.

  ‘Ree?’ Smythe wiped spittle from his mouth with a shaking hand. He was looking to her for direction, no — permission.

  They could go now. The Lich was clearly practicing again, something she had been assured he did not do but had been raised to fear above all else. She could go back and tell the council, warn the town — but tell them what? That there were bodies and blood? Would they even take her seriously — she, being a non-practitioner, and Smythe only an acolyte. And it would take them another couple of days, even travelling fast, to make it back to the central mausoleum.

  ‘We need to know what he’s doing.’ Ree tried to keep her voice even, tried to project a confidence that couldn’t be further from what she felt.

  Smythe blanched. ‘I’d rather not,’ he said. His voice was a little too high-pitched. ‘You know, because he’s — because before — what if he curses us?’

  ‘Wait here.’ She started through the door, but Smythe caught her wrist.

  ‘No.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m — I won’t let you go alone.’ His entire body was trembling.

  Ree pressed a finger to her lips, fixing her eyes with his, then squeezed through the cracked door and crept behind the mound of body parts.

  Inside, the pressure of the Lich’s magic had risen again. But now, instead of a suffocating blanket, it was bright and painful with ennervation, a magic that made her heart beat too fast and her muscles sting. Slowly, she peered around the mounded bodies.

  The Lich had his back to the door. He faced an enormous pile of stitchwork flesh, with long tentacles curling out and a huge, fleshy head that blinked with too many eyes. As she watched, it twitched and jumped in response to to the Lich’s chanting, its many eyes rolling among the folds of flesh. Several books were laid in a spell diagram behind the Lich and annotated in bold letters inked with gore.

  ‘Festering rats,’ Smythe whispered. He swayed beside her; Ree gripped his shoulder and dug in hard with her fingers, praying he wouldn’t faint. ‘What — what do you think that is? That’s not anything that Usther — I never realised that one could —’

  Ree backed behind the mound and locked eyes with Smythe. ‘Look at me,’ she said, her voice urgent and low. Smythe’s entire body was rigid. His eyes darted back and forth, as if seeking escape.

  ‘It’s very big, isn’t it? I read about elephants in the northern lands, once — they were used as war animals in the third era, did you know? Very large and they always — and krakens, have you heard of them? Mythical creatures, not real, of course, but the tentacles —’

  ‘Smythe.’ Ree tried to force steadiness into her voice. She took Smythe’s chin in her hands, forcing him to look at her.

  ‘We shouldn’t have come,’ he said in a small voice. ‘We should never —’

  ‘Maybe not.’ Ree kept her breathing slow and even. Gradually, Smythe’s breath fell into sync with her own. ‘But we can’t leave now. Not when the Lich is doing this. Not when we don’t know what he intends to use it for.’

  There was a clarity in Smythe’s eyes now, something that went beyond terror. ‘It’s because of us, isn’t it?’

  She didn’t want to think about that. ‘We need to stop this ritual,’ Ree said. She released Smythe, now that the babbling had stopped. ‘We can’t let him use this on the town.’

  What was she saying? She couldn’t stop the Lich! She wasn’t a necromancer or a mage of any kind — that was why she had come here in the first place. She was a coward, a creeper, a cartographer —

  She was more than that. Whatever they thought of her, she was still more than that.

  But she wasn’t powerful enough to face the Lich.

  She closed her eyes, thinking furiously. Maybe she didn’t have to stop the Lich. She risked another peek at the ritual. The muscles all stitched together, the blood on the books …

  ‘Ghosts and gargoyles,’ she whispered. She quickly withdrew. Veritas, in his isolated madness, had been right. Usther would be horrified.

  Smythe watched her with an expression somewhere between wariness and hope.

  ‘I know how to disrupt the ritual,’ she said.

  All magic is physical — by which I mean, of course, that it is tied to bodies. Healers repair and enhance living bodies. Necromancers animate and control dead bodies. Even magicks of fairytale and legend, such as shapeshifting or mind-reading, rely on bodies.

  What is interesting is the way in which magic also affects the soul. None can deny the link between soul and body — it has been seen and confirmed by necromancers and even healers time and again throughout history.

  But the soul and body are also discreet, separate objects — or so necromancers claim. If the soul can be accessed due to its link to the body, what else, one wonders, could magic do if sufficient links were found?

  ~from Envisioning the Future of Magic by Elden Mannelyn

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A GOOD DENIZEN

  They were hiding behind a mound of gore in a room drenched in blood. The Lich’s magic rolled over them in sickening waves. The tentacled flesh monster the Lich had constructed twitched and writhed with the sound of meat slapping against meat.

  Standing in that room, choking on the stench while fear seized her lungs, Ree wondered why she thought she had any hope of stopping this.

  At her side, Smythe looked at her with worry pulling at his eyes. ‘Are you … well, quite certain this is a good idea?’

  Ree grimaced. ‘Not at all. But we can’t do nothing.’

  Because the Lich was powerful enough to wake up the entire crypt and bring it down around the town. Because the Lich was only doing anything at all because she had foolishly leapt into its path and then, twice as foolish, she had stolen Smythe away from it when it had marked him for death.

  This ritual, the stitchwork monster — it was all because of Ree and Smythe. And with the Lich so close to completing it, there was no time to find someone else to stop it.

  The Lich took one of the monster’s flesh tentacles in its withered hand and held it aloft, still chanting. It looked too frail to hold even so much as a book, but it hefted the meaty appendage as if it were weightless.

  Ree nudged Smythe. They split up, Ree coming up behind the Lich, Smythe skirting the walls to sneak behind the monster.

  Ree’s heart thumped against her ribs. She could feel her blood pulsing, could hear it in her ears. How good was the Lich’s hearing, now that it was awakened? Could it hear her muffled footsteps as she tread carefully toward the defaced books? Could it hear her frantic heartbeat?

  She saw a flash of dark curls as Smythe ducked behind the tentacle beast, but the Lich did not let up in its chanting. Ree prayed to her mother’s goddess that Smythe had taken as readily to shielding his mind as he had to summoning.

  Ree looked
at the books spread across the floor, a spell diagram webbed around them, blood smeared across the open pages. It was the central book, the heart of the ritual, that mattered most. She remembered Veritas’s outrage when she had reclaimed Astaravinarad.

  She didn’t like to think what the Lich’s fury would be like. She steeled herself and ripped the central book from the ritual; it tore away with the feeling of thread snapping.

  In front of her, the Lich stiffened. His chanting died. Ree dived for the mound of gore, only to freeze in her steps as the Lich spun and pointed at her.

  The force of its regard drove the air from her lungs. Ree stood, transfixed, as it glared at her with white-marble eyes. She pulled her mental guards snugly around her, felt her father’s magic flare in the amulet at her chest, but couldn’t break free of its centuries-old gaze.

  ‘Akho rizha kun,’ the Lich intoned, its voice entirely consumed in the death echo of the Craft. Behind it, the flesh monster began to stir. Tentacles crawled across the floor toward Ree, trailing blood.

  Now! Her thoughts were frantic. It has to be now!

  Just as Smythe and then Larry had distracted the Lich before, so Smythe needed to distract the Lich now. He was better prepared, he would surely be able to —

  Magic. The hairs on the back of Ree’s neck rose as though in a chill wind. The Lich seemed to hesitate at this intrusion. Slowly, it turned to face the beast.

  Ree went cold. Featureless figures, vaguely human in shape, oozed from every stitched piece of the tentacle beast, crying and howling in choked voices. Souls, somehow summoned from the assembled parts. Ree only had a glimpse of this horror before she rushed out of the room, gore-stained book clutched to her chest.

  She heard the Lich chanting as she skidded through the blood trail and out into the library. She was almost through the next doorway when a clash of thunder shook the ground, knocking her from her feet.