by Deck Davis
If he could just get them out of here.
“I need you onside,” he told Helena. “The others listen to you more than me. They respect me, but they love you. When folks are tired and hurting and scared, respect doesn’t mean much. I need you to explain what we’re going to do, and make sure they do it when the time comes.”
“And when’s the time going to come?”
“Tomorrow night, by my count. There will only be three of them on watch.”
CHAPTER 35
His chest looked like one of the academy cadavermen had cut it open. A slit from his neck to the bottom of his ribs, like the cuts they made when they were opening a body to try and see how a man died. Jakub had watched dozens of them over the years as part of the academy de-sensitization training.
He didn’t need a cadaverman to tell him what happened here, though. The dead lusk on the ground next to him, with its unusually muscled legs and its knife-sharp claws and teeth, was enough of a reminder.
As much as he wanted to get back to the horses and his shelter, he needed to fix his wound. The lusk’s claws had gouged deep, carving a canyon into his skin. When he pressed his palm against it blood welted over his fingers, and when he pressed down hard he felt like he was trying to close a leaky dam.
He took out his soul necklace and looked at how much blue light glowed inside it.
Essence Remaining: [IIIIIIIIIII ]
Good, he had enough to heal himself. He’d already judged how much he needed to perform his lusk necromancy, but he hadn’t expected it to cut him up like a Yule turkey.
Pressing his Soul Harvest glyphline tattoo, Jakub spoke the spellword of Health Harvest. As the light in his necklace dimmed a touch, he felt a soft wind blow against his wound, warm like honey in the sun and as gentle as a fairy’s touch.
It cleaned the river-shaped cut and it drew his skin tighter, stemming the blood. As the last breath of wind tickled over his now nearly-closed injury, he felt it numb his chest and carry away his pain.
Necromancy EXP Gained!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ]
Seeing his EXP was a surprise. He’d almost done it. After all the corpses he’d drained essence from here in the desert, all the beasts and creatures he’d reanimated out of necessity, he’d almost made the next level. This set his heart thumping, as it would any mage, artificer, archer, arcanist.
There was nothing, nothing, in the queendom that could rival the rush of feeling that came with leveling your powers. It was so exquisite a sensation that it was almost toxic because the rush of utter splendor was addictive and it could lead a mage to chase it into dangerous places.
He could hardly focus as he stood above the lusk now. Its eyes were glazed, its blood had seeped in a puddle around it. Death hadn’t been kind to its body, not in the way Jakub had killed it. At least its head was intact, and that was the most important thing.
Excitement rushed through him in pulses as Jakub concentrated on the creature and he cleared his throat and then, in as booming a voice as he could muster, he shouted the spellword of Reanimate.
Essence left his soul necklace in a blue cloud. It burst above the lusk before drifting down on it, the energy revitalizing dead limbs and breathing life into deceased flesh. A smell like spent mana hung in the air, and Jakub breathed it in and he felt a great rush of something inside him, a tide of anticipation and happiness.
And then two things happened at once.
The lusk stirred and it got to his feet, alive in the docile way only a reanimated creature could be.
At the same time, words knitted themselves into the air, large and bright like starlight.
*Necromancy EXP Gained!*
[IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII]
*Level Up!*
New Rank: Journeyman [2]
The excitement rose and exploded inside him in successive hits, each hot and cold at the same time as they burst and made him light-headed and flushed with blood. His nerves felt like they were dancing, swaying more each time the waves of joy flooded over them.
All he could do was sit there weak-legged and let it ride the same way he had every other time he’d leveled up in the past. It seemed like each level up was more intense than the last, but that made sense; every successive level up was harder to earn, and each brought stronger powers and more intense magic.
He could hardly comprehend what he’d had to do to earn this one. All the essence he’d drained from the dead. All the souls he’d raised, even if none had been human.
Now the feeling ebbed, but everything around him seemed amplified. The wind was fresher, the stars brighter so that they seemed to cause a glare in his vision. He lay down and let the world pass by, carried away on the euphoria.
It was daylight when he awoke. He felt empty but content, as if the level up had drained his spirit and body the same way a night of beer drinking would, except he awoke now to a feeling of completion rather than regret.
As he rubbed his eyes, words formed in the air in front of him, fizzing and shining like torches sent from the gods.
You have focused your efforts on harvesting from the dead and raising the creatures of the world to be dolls in your army.
Your deeds in earning this increase in rank have been considered in your reward, necromancer.
Skill Increased: Essence grab increased from [2] to [3] [Soul Harvest Glyphline]
Essence Grab now draws more essence from the dead than before.
Skill Increased: Reanimate increased from [1] to [2] [Raiser Glyphline]
Animals brought to life using Reanimate now possess a shred of their former intelligence and abilities.
[Passive] Skill Learned: Corrupted Soul [Raiser Glyphline]
Through multiple Reanimations, a corrupted form of resurrection, death has infected your soul. This leaves its mark on your body, and some of the living may fear you. Even so, time will touch your body slower than most. Poisons and diseases will find no home within you. Undead beings are drawn to you and will offer servitude and friendship.
Your soul will corrupt the more you use Reanimation, amplifying the effects, both good and bad.
Skill Learned: Wilting Touch [Soul Harvest glyphline]
The necromancer can draw essence from living things with a touch, leaving death in its place. The longer a necromancer touches the living the more essence he steals, and the more death he spreads in return. Wilting Touch requires essence to use, though more essence is gained than lost.
The use of Wilting Touch will taint a necromancer’s being, and its consequences are enhanced when the necromancer already has a corrupted soul.
Skill Learned: Spirit Transfer [Resurrection Glyphline]
The necromancer can transfer the spirit of the recently-deceased into a vessel.
Jakub read the words again and again until he finally let them disappear. In the academy, he’d always been taught that when you leveled up, it was best to meditate for half a day, letting your mind soak the new knowledge and abilities given to it so that when you needed them, it would be mere instinct to use them.
He didn’t have the luxury of half a day now, but he let the words drift in his mind, and he tried to organize and asses them and see where the level up had taken him.
The first thing that struck him was worry. Back in Dispolis when he’d leveled up to journeyman rank, he’d chosen the Raiser specialty of necromancy. This had set him at odds with the academy, who considered Raiser to be a corrupt shade.
Jakub had no choice back then. He either chose the Raiser shade and used its power, or he let a bunch of murderous torturers flay the magic from his skin. The threat of madmen stripping your flesh from your bones tended to skew your moral compass. At the time, it wasn’t a tough decision to make.
It seemed that using Reanimate so much in Toil had weighed heavily on his level up, and he had overused it so much that it had corrupted him.
Corrupted him.
It was only thinking the words again that gave them
meaning, and now he felt a flicker of fear.
He took out his sword and he spat on the blade and rubbed it, but he could only gain a dim reflection in the metal. Not enough to see his face fully, but enough that, despite the sun he’d lived under for weeks, his skin was now as pale as the moon.
He’d heard about necromancers who had earned the Corrupt Soul trait before. He could picture the way they looked now, the way they had been drawn in the necromancy texts; skin like curdled milk, eyes glowing like coals after water has splashed them but before their heat has fully gone.
He was marked, and the more he used his reanimation powers the more marked he’d be. It used to be that if he shed his black coat he could pass as any normal person. Now, eyes would stare as he crossed through a village. People would know what he was, they’d know that he dabbled with the blacker side of death.
But no more disease. Poison would affect him less. The undead would see him as an ally. That had to be worth something.
He didn’t want to dwell more on what it meant for corruption to show on his skin. It made him want to retch to think he’d look like those horrible necromancers in the academy books, but it wouldn’t do any good to think about it now, not while there was a chance he might not even make it out of Toil.
So he evaluated the rest of what he’d earned in his level up, and this was more pleasant; his Essence Grab would give him more essence than before, and using Reanimate would give his reanimated creatures more of their old skills and autonomy.
What about Spirit Transfer? That was a power he knew the academy looked on with disdain. It was a spell used by necromancers without a conscience, and its uses could swing the staunchest moral compass way, way south.
Using Spirit Transfer, a necromancer could take the spirit of a recently-deceased person and use his magic to put them into a new vessel. A new body. And that was where it became murky; no vessel was off-limits, and the spirit in question had no say in the matter.
He remembered reading about a man who’d spent his life abusing his wife, only to kill her accidentally when his sadism went too far. Not content with that, he paid an unscrupulous necromancer to Spirit Transfer her into the body of a mule, which he then kept chained in an outhouse on his estate. The poor woman suffered a second life’s worth of cruelty, only getting the respite of death years later. Luckily - if there was any sort of luck involved here - a spirit could only be transferred once.
Jakub felt sick now. Each necromancer earned powers based on how they had used the gift of necromancy, and his new powers were darker than oil.
Was this the person he was now? He didn’t feel like he’d used his spells badly, but there was no doubting how he had been rewarded. He felt dirty now, like his spirit needed a good, long scrubbing.
Forget it, he told himself. Focus on the now.
If he could just help Gunar and the others, maybe that would be the soul-cleansing that he desperately needed.
Then there was a power he’d heard only brief mentions of; Wilting Touch. It was hard to know how to feel about it.
On one side, Wilting Touch was a purely corrupted power, one rarely mentioned in any morally-good necromancy spellbook. A person could earn it only by choosing the Raiser shade, and then only by using darker spells for the majority of a level up. It wasn’t a spell to brag about in church.
Then again, not much of necromancy was.
Forgetting morals for the moment, Wilting Touch was a spell of tremendous strength. While much of necromancy was dealing with death after the fact, Wilting Touch connected a necromancer to death itself. It might not make them as one, but it introduced their souls to one another, it brought the enemy of death closer to its deliverer.
With a touch, he could drain the essence from something, leaving rot and corruption in its place. He didn’t have to drain from the dead now; his touch would drain essence from living things.
The problem there was that this went against every tenement of necromancy. A necromancer should never be able to take the essence from the living. Their art lay in manipulating death to give life, not in taking away life and using it to control death.
Wilting Touch was a corruption, and like most corruptions, it could not be controlled. Jakub wouldn’t have a choice in using his touch; as soon as he placed a finger on bare skin, he would corrupt what he touched.
Handshakes were going to be fun from now on.
Just like that, with a thought humorous only to himself and meant to make light of his new state of being, the consequences fell on him with the weight of iron girders.
He could no longer have physical contact with anything living, lest he steal their vitality and replace it with corruption.
Hugs were gone. Intimacy, a little as he’d had recently, was no longer an option. He’d have to wear gloves all the time, avoid even the slightest of touches. Passing coin to a merchant would be an ordeal because honest traders didn’t like receiving a dose of death along with payment.
Sure, touching someone for a second wouldn’t kill them. He’d read enough about Wilting Touch to know it took more than the briefest of touches for the spell to work.
But even if slight contact wouldn’t hurt them, the sense of corruption would register with its unfortunate recipient. They’d sense the death lingering around him, even if they hadn’t noted it in his pallor yet.
What was he? He could hardly be called human now. He was everything that his instructors like Kortho and Irvine had warned against. They would have been disappointed in him.
As these thoughts continued their assault, Jakub felt like he wanted to retch. He coughed so much it was like his body was trying to purge him of his own soul, but nothing came from his empty stomach.
But hey, at least he had an excuse not to hug distant relatives at family gatherings, now.
When his stomach recovered a little he summoned his level-up words back and he read them again, and he noticed something that sparked glimmers of relief in him.
Wilting Touch only worked when he had essence. Therefore, as long as he had no essence or wasn’t wearing his soul necklace, nobody would be corrupted by contact with him.
He was going to have to learn to hug, after all.
CHAPTER 36
A band of slavers left less of a trace than he’d thought. It was astounding that they moved without leaving much of a trail.
The only thing that made sense was that the slavers cleaned up after themselves; that a couple of them hung back and wiped away horse hoof imprints and wagon trails from the sand.
Either way, it was like trying to follow an assassin’s fart.
Jakub had discovered this when he headed back to his canvas camp after killing the lusk and leveling up. He pushed all his doubts about corruption away and he channeled them into energy.
He stomped back to camp with his reanimated lusk padding alongside him. There, he drank half a skin of water, ate some fava beans while trying his hardest to pretend they were pieces of roasted pork, and he hitched a canvas bag full of things to Olin. His preference was to keep the brothers together but he needed to be as hidden as possible, given he was trailing a bunch of people who wouldn’t give him a warm welcome.
That meant he couldn’t take the wagon, nor could he take both horses, so he had to choose. Since Olin was the lighter colored of the two brothers and would blend into the sand better, he chose him.
He hitched Albin to the rock and made sure he was covered properly by the canvas spread overhead.
“I’m leaving you with grain and water,” he told him. “Your brother and I are taking a short trip, and I’ll be back for you. Okay?”
Albin gave him a sad look, and Jakub did his best to ignore the stabbing feeling it gave him as he climbed onto Olin, made another check of his gear, and then set off.
It took a day of riding to get back to his map marker where he’d first encountered the woman and the wagon. His lusk followed him from underground, invisible to the eye but appearing as a smudge of Jakub’s map
, trailing him and Olin.
It was strangely comforting to know the giant insect was there, ready to breach the surface on Jakub’s command. Knowing that he was the master of such a gigantic creature was the only thing that let him ride willingly toward a band of slavers.
From there he made a detour back to the dunes where loyal Ben was waiting, along with the inventory Jakub had buried. He added this to the bag hitched to Olin, he spent a ridiculous minute explaining to Ben what had happened and where he was going, and then he set off, leaving Ben where he was. It was hard to abandon the bison there, but Ben didn’t give off much of a stealthy flavor. Besides, Ben had no feeling in his reanimated state. He couldn’t have cared less if Jakub disappeared for a hundred years.
From where he’d first taken the wagon, Jakub spent hours searching the surrounding sand and dry ground until finally, he found a faint mark, and then another, gradually becoming a trail. He followed this southwest until he hit what must have been a camp.
It was empty now, but the slavers had been here. Burst pigskins and blackened animal bones littered the ground, set in a circle around the charred remains of a fire.
A few hundred meters away were a series of holes in the ground that must have served as trenches for the slavers to shit. He dismounted Olin and he kneeled by the fire and touched the ash with his finger. Then he picked up a handful and felt the cold flakes crunch in his palm. Stone cold. They had camped here, but there were gone now.
By now the sun had risen to its zenith and he was out of alchemical paste. Riding hard and long with a shirt buttoned up and canvas bag tied around his head made him sweat like a fire mage’s imp, which meant more water breaks, or using the water stone to find the precious liquid. More lost time.