The Lost Tower

by Eric Martinez

  Even though the woods seemed to be conspiring against her, Sephi managed to close the gap between her and the goatman. She still hadn’t gotten a proper look at him, but she figured it was just a matter of time. Once she got close enough, she could cast a snare trap. The spell was outside of her specialty—illusions rarely affected the physical world—but expending the extra magic power to cast it would be worth it.

  The creature stopped suddenly about thirty yards ahead of her. Sephi froze midstep. The thing turned around in her direction, and she saw its face for the first time. He had the features of a man, but his eyes glowed golden and his pupils were black horizontal slits. Those slits turned to look right at her.

  Her spell was still active, but the man seemed to focus right on her. He blinked once and then darted away through the trees. Sephi cursed and gave chase, still invisible but not worrying about the noise of her pursuit.

  In less than a minute, she had lost sight of the creature. Soon after, she lost its trail altogether. She spent another hour looking for signs to follow, but the creature must have made it a point to cover its tracks because she couldn’t find a thing.

  Finally, she admitted defeat and hurried up the road to catch up with her friends.

  Magnus and Echo had already set up camp for the night by the time Sephi trudged into the circle of firelight.

  Echo looked relieved. “Any luck?”

  Sephi told them the few details she’d been able to glean from her unsuccessful chase. She finished by saying, “The fucker got away.”

  Magnus puffed out his chest, wearing a smug look on his face. “Perhaps you should have let me go after it.”

  “And perhaps you should keep your opinions to yourself,” Sephi said.

  Magnus chuckled like he had won the exchange, and then he returned his attention to feeding logs into the fire.

  “Do either of you know what that creature could have been?” Sephi asked.

  Echo chewed her lower lip in thought. “I can’t recall anything like it. Magnus, what about you? You’ve been around. Ever seen a goatman?”

  He stared into the fire and shook his head. “I have yet to encounter such a beast, but there is no doubt he is still out there, watching from afar. Plotting our deaths, most likely.”

  “Enough,” Sephi said. “After yesterday’s nightmares, I don’t even want to think about death right now.”

  As if it had been waiting for her words, the earth beneath her feet rumbled and the soil around them churned like boiling water.

  Then a horde of skeletons clawed their way out of the ground.

  Chapter 9

  On instinct, Sephi unsheathed her dagger, and Magnus was almost as quick, pulling his sword out in one smooth motion. Echo had a glowing vial in each hand, ready to throw. Princess strained at the rope binding her to a nearby tree. She licked and smacked her lizard lips eagerly, seeing a sea of bones for her to chew on.

  The skeletons surrounded the campsite in a loose circle, their numbers too high to count. Some of them looked human, but on some, Sephi noted the rotting horns thrusting out of their skulls and the black hooves at the ends of their legs.

  “It looks like that goatman sent us some friends,” Sephi said as calmly as she could.

  “I don’t know of any creatures that can raise the dead,” Echo said.

  Sephi shrugged. “And I never thought I’d ride a spectral horse who wanted to eat my dreams. Nothing really surprises me anymore.”

  “Maybe it’s a trap set by the Night Brother,” Echo said.

  Before they could discuss it any further, the skeletons charged all at once, threatening to crash over them in a wave of clattering bones.

  Sephi’s magic was somewhat drained from her day of tracking, but she didn’t need magic to fight. She slipped a throwing knife from her belt, preparing to trade one weapon for something with a bit more power. She flung the dagger in a spinning arc toward Princess. The knife severed the rope tying the lizard to the tree, and Princess romped into the swarming skeletons with what looked like a smile on her face.

  The buru swung her thick tail and turned a group of skeletons to bone dust. She trounced through them like they were made of paper, chomping them with her massive jaws and swiping at them with her sharp claws.

  Princess had one flank covered, but plenty of enemies remained for the mages.

  Echo threw a Black O’Lantern at the group nearest to her. The glass shattered, and a black cloud erupted in the air like an ink blot. The skeletons marched through the artificial darkness without slowing.

  “They don’t have eyes,” Sephi called out.

  “Well, then how can they see us?” Echo asked.

  “Feel free to ask them later,” Sephi said. “Assuming we live that long.”

  Magnus charged into the oncoming horde with his sword at the ready. He unleashed an earth-shaking battle cry, and the runes on his sword lit up. He swung the massive blade, which looked light in his hands, and he mowed down a wave of horned enemies. Their bones shattered with the blow.

  Most of them ended up on the ground in pieces, but the scattered arms still moved. They clutched at Magnus’s legs with skeletal claws, making it hard for him to maneuver.

  Planted in place, a second wave of skeletons piled onto the battlemage, burying him in an avalanche of bones.

  Sephi started toward him, not sure how to dig him out but knowing that she had to try. Before she could reach him, a sphere of white light erupted from beneath the pile. The force of the spell turned the skeletons into a cloud of dust. Sephi hoped she wouldn’t breathe in too much of the vile cloud.

  Inhaling undead things couldn’t be good for her health.

  A quick image flashed through her head of the dust forming into a fist in her lung, reaching up to crush her windpipe and choke her from the inside. She shook the idea from her head. She had enough real monsters to fight without dreaming up new threats.

  The undead were upon her now. She ducked beneath swinging claws and sidestepped through the gaps between the shambling creatures. If she let them surround her, she would inevitably join them in the afterlife.

  It was a tough situation no matter how she worked through it. Even if her magic wasn’t low, she didn’t have destructive spells like Magnus did in her repertoire. Her magic fooled the senses, and these lifeless husks didn’t seem to have any senses to fool. She had to keep moving, but she managed to shatter a few skulls as she evaded their strikes.

  Sephi caught glimpses of Echo tearing through huge swaths of skeletons at once. With one hand, she lobbed bombs as fast as she could pull them from the satchel hanging at her side. Gouts of flame lit the darkness, taking down anything in each bomb’s radius.

  With her other hand, she wielded one of her wands. A bright pink beam of arcane power burst from its tip, cutting through bone like butter. Glittering sparkles trailed from the beam. The effect was purely aesthetic. Echo had explained once that her magic could be both deadly and cute.

  Sephi doubted the skeletons appreciated Echo’s flair for pretty things.

  Weariness seized Sephi’s limbs as the battle raged on. No matter how many skeletons they dropped, more came to replace them or they simply regathered their bones together to rejoin the fray. This had to be the site of some massive battle for there to be this many dead to reanimate. The human dead must have fought the goatman dead in some long-forgotten conflict, the tragedy of it lost to time.

  Whatever had happened here, the soldiers from both sides were now allies in death, and they still had plenty of fight left in them.

  As she weaved through enemies, Sephi tried to figure out how to end things once and for all. Fighting these skeletons head on wasn’t working. Their sheer numbers alone would overwhelm the mages eventually, and the fact that the undead didn’t seem to tire didn’t help the situation.

  The Night Brother had to be controlling them. Without eyes or ears or brains, the skeletons couldn’t act on their own. They were being manipulated like puppets. The
best way to stop them would be to find the puppeteer. He had to be nearby on the fringes of the fighting.

  Dipping into the dregs of her magic, Sephi conjured up an image of herself and went invisible. She slipped to the edge of the clearing and circled around it, straining her eyes to see any spectators.

  She saw a hooded figure standing in the shadow of a towering tree. The figure’s hands gestured in a steady rhythm, conducting the grisly symphony from the safety of cover. The figure was much too tall to be the goat-man from earlier, and his hands were human. But whatever was beneath that cloak was going to bleed all the same. Goat or man.

  Sephi flowed through the darkness, less than a shadow herself. She sidled up behind the figure, and much like she’d done to Magnus the day before, she pressed her dagger against the figure’s throat, only she wasn’t as gentle this time.

  “Put your hands down before I add another corpse to this forest.”

  The figure grunted in surprise. She could tell from the low pitch of the sound that this was a man. His hands froze in the air. Sephi looked over his shoulder to see the skeletons had frozen in place as well, standing motionless like they awaited their next command.

  “Are you here to kill me?” the man asked.

  “I’m definitely considering it now,” she said.

  “But that’s not why you came here?”

  “No, you fuckwit,” she said, too exhausted and pissed to be polite. “Why did you attack us?”

  “When a group of Citadel mages shows up at my doorstep, I thought it prudent to defend myself.”

  “Some defense,” Sephi said. “You tried to murder us.”

  “I apologize for the less than hospitable welcome, but I don’t get many visitors out here. I thought the day had come when the Council decided to erase my inconvenient knowledge from the history books.”

  “Son of a bitch! So, you are the Night Brother?”

  “I hate that name,” he said. “But the fact that you know it means you are from the Citadel.”

  Sephi sighed. “Yeah, I mean, technically. But we’re not here to kill you. We’re just here to talk.”

  He snorted a laugh. “And why would I trust anyone working for the Council?”

  “Because if I wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  He started to nod, but she pressed the blade more firmly against his neck, causing him to stop. “Are you really just here to talk?”

  “If you tell your minions to stand down, then yes,” she said.

  “Minions makes it sounds so ugly,” he said. “I like to think of them as guards.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you call them as long as you call them off.”

  The Night Brother closed his hands into fists, and the skeletal horde clattered to the ground all at once. “How’s that?”

  Sephi released him from her grip. “It’s a start. Now get moving.”

  She gave him a rough shove into the clearing where Magnus and Echo were gazing around the boneyard with tired looks of surprise.

  “Look who I found,” Sephi said. “The Night Brother.”

  “I really hate that name,” he said.

  “What is it with you and names?” Sephi asked. “Whatever. What would you prefer I call you, your fucking majesty?”

  “My name is Brother Francisco,” he said. “The Council may have exiled me, but I refused to let them cast me out of the brotherhood.”

  In the firelight of the clearing, Francisco’s features were no longer wreathed in darkness. A long, graying beard cascaded down his chin, and he looked at Sephi and her friends through thick-framed spectacles. His robes were the color of ash, like his white robes had been irrevocably stained.

  Magnus took a menacing step toward Francisco. “Why did you attack us?”

  Sephi rolled her eyes. “I’ve been over this. He thought we were here to kill him.”

  Magnus frowned. “We’re just here to talk.”

  “He knows,” Sephi said. “Just shut up and let me handle this.”

  Magnus narrowed his eyes at her, but he closed his mouth.

  “Handle what exactly?” Francisco asked.

  “I need your help,” Sephi said, not sure how to get into the whole subject of the Council’s mandate.

  “Do we have to talk here?” he asked.

  Sephi shrugged. “Not especially. Why?”

  “Because worse things than me prowl the forest at night,” he said.

  “Yeah, we know,” Sephi said.

  Francisco shook his head. “I mean, the night mares alone—”

  “We know,” Sephi interrupted.

  He glanced at her, his eyes twinkling behind the curved lenses. “Well then, perhaps I could invite you to my home. It’s just over the next rise.”

  Sephi and her friends gathered up their gear and packed it in the cart. While they did, Francisco directed the skeletons to rebury themselves in the earth.

  “It’s the proper thing to do,” Francisco explained.

  Princess chewed happily on a femur, and any skeleton that tried to retrieve it got pulverized. Eventually, Sephi had to wrestle the bone from the buru’s mouth. “Sorry, sweetie. I’ll find you something way less gross soon.”

  Sephi handed the bone to a waiting skeleton who snatched it from her hand. She couldn’t discern any kind of emotion on the expressionless skull, but the monster definitely seemed bitchy.

  With the undead laid to rest, the group followed Francisco up the road before cutting through a copse of trees that obscured the necromancer’s home. He lived in a ramshackle house, lit only by moonlight. The roof sloped drunkenly to one side like it was ready to give up, and the dark windows stared out of the walls like the eyeless sockets of the skeletons they had just fought.

  “Well, this isn’t creepy at all,” Sephi muttered.

  “We’ll be safe here,” Francisco said, opening his front door. “Please, come in. Excuse the darkness. I extinguished all the lights when you showed up.”

  He set about lighting candles, adding a warm orange glow to the normal-looking living room. Sephi sank into the cushions of an overstuffed couch, and its softness enveloped her like a cloud. Echo took a seat beside her, but Magnus stood rigid by the door, as if he expected another attack at any moment.

  At least one of us is staying alert, she thought. She was running on fumes, and it was a wonder she managed to stay awake at all.

  “Can I offer anyone some tea?” Francisco asked.

  Magnus shook his head. “This isn’t a social visit.”

  “So, no tea?” Francisco wrung his hands near his waist. “It’s just that I rarely ever have guests. And by rarely, I mean never. So I’m just trying to be a good host.”

  “You could start by not trying to murder your guests with a skeletal army,” Sephi said.

  He sighed. “You’re just going to keep bringing that up, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, you prick,” she said. “I haven’t quite moved past the near-death experience.”

  “Some chamomile tea might help,” he said, a smile twitching up the corners of his lips. “I’m just saying.”

  Sephi groaned. “Fine. Make me some fucking tea.” She paused. “Wait. You’re not going to poison me or something, are you?”

  Francisco looked shocked at the notion. “Of course not. What kind of man do you think I am?”

  “You’re definitely not what I expected,” she said.

  Dishes clattered in the kitchen as Francisco fetched the kettle. “And what did you expect? A blood mage living in a castle made of skulls?”

  “Would it be rude if I said yes?” she asked.

  “A little bit.” He snapped his fingers, and a fire blazed to life in the stone hearth in the kitchen area. He hung the kettle over the fire to bring it to a boil. “Though I suppose it’s to be expected with a name like the Night Brother.”

  “I mean, you did reanimate like a thousand corpses just now,” Sephi said.

  “It wasn’t a thousand,” he
said stiffly.

  “And where the hell did all those skeletons come from anyway?” she asked.

  He sat across from her, and the wooden chair squeaked in protest. “It’s the reason I settled here. I mean, aside from being off the beaten path. I read something about a great battle fought here long ago. It was just a footnote in a dusty tome, but when I came here to find it, the story turned out to be true. I needed access to the dead so I could continue my studies.”

  “Wait,” Sephi said. “Do you know who fought in that battle? Because some of those skeletons weren’t human.”

  He shook his head. “The book didn’t say. But you’re talking about the horned skeletons.”

  “Yeah, with the hooves,” she said. “Like some kind of goatman.”

  He spread his hands apologetically. “I don’t know what they used to be, unfortunately. Some long-dead species I suppose.”

  “What if they aren’t long-dead?” she asked.

  Francisco sat forward in his seat. “Have you seen one alive?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Interesting,” he said, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “I should very much like to study one alive.”

  The howl of the kettle interrupted their conversation. Francisco bustled around his kitchen, gathering an eclectic selection of crude ceramic cups. He brought them to his living room table, along with some cured meat and cheese.

  “Where do you get cheese out here?” Echo asked.

  He shrugged. “I have some cows in the back. It’s nothing fancy, but what I have is yours.”

  Echo nibbled on a sliver of cheese. “It’s pretty good.”

  “Thank you,” Francisco said. “But I’m sure you didn’t come here to ask about my aged cheddar. You said you needed my help?”

  Sephi launched into a quick explanation of what they needed from him. She told him about needing him to speak to a dead man to gather information, but she left out the part about the Zekarian Whispers. The favor she asked for was daunting enough without adding the First Mage’s spellbook in the mix.

  Francisco listened attentively while he sipped his tea. When she was done speaking, he set his cup down.