A screeching sound like a cat being given a bath in dog drool pierced the chamber, and a demon creature jumped out of the darkness onto Zeke’s back. The thing looked like a naked Crypt Keeper whose head had been sliced off from the nose up.
Zeke grabbed at the creature, but it scrambled around on his back, swiping at his hand and clawing at his cheeks and neck.
An alien, the shiny black creepy-as-crap alien from the movie Alien, charged out of the darkness, hissing through its protruding silver teeth.
“Go!” Zeke shouted. His face flushed red, and veins stood out in his neck and forehead. He found the demon creature’s bisected head by feel, dug his fingers into the creature’s exposed rubber brains, and yanked the thing from his back. With a wild man’s scream he swung it like a floppy club at the alien’s head.
A clank sounded to our left as a cylon robot rounded the corner and raised a blaster rifle.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing Mort and shoving him toward the door as Zeke’s berzerker shout rang off the walls. “Go!”
Once we were on the other side of the door, I glanced back. Three wardens were closing in on Zeke, each holding glowing batons.
Zeke flung the torn-off head of the cylon at the nearest warden. His gaze shot in my direction, but his eyes were wide, wild, and without recognition.
Mort grabbed my arm. “He said to close the door!”
“I know,” I said. But that didn’t make me feel any better as I pressed the warden’s ring to the square silver plate beside the doorway, and the metal slab of the door slid closed between us and Zeke.
25
Two Tribes
I turned from the door and the muffled sounds of fighting in the science fiction museum, and led Mort down what felt like several floors of stairs to the Inner Sanctum.
The Inner Sanctum below the EMP looked like a Catholic cathedral turned into an attraction at Disneyland. Pillars and arches, frescoes and candelabra gave it a sense of ornate class and great age, though I suspected they were no more than fifty years old at most.
Between these touches of fanciness stood displays of the dead. Not simple sepulchral niches, but the kind of elaborate altar displays one might expect a rabid stalker to create in their basement out of loving devotion, worship, and the hope to one day bear the child (or possibly skin suit) of their object of obsession.
“Come on, we need to find Verona,” I said.
We found Katherine Verona in between Ana Mendieta and Scatman Crothers and other arcana who had died in the eighties, wearing a wizard magus’s formal red robes, her silver hair held up in a bun by two crossed wands. There were no war-related artifacts as I’d expected—no medals, war-era wands, silver-coated swords and bayonets, mana ration cards, or other items typically found surrounding a war hero. Instead, she sat in a comfortable and worn-looking armchair, surrounded by stacks of books on philosophy, ethics, history, and politics, as well as a collection of colorful knitted hats, slippers, gloves, and wine cozies in the shapes of Fey and feyblood creatures, including a Cthulhu-looking creature I suspected was a toilet roll cover.
I climbed the stairs onto the small stage to join her and pulled a crystal ball from my satchel, a grapefruit-size sphere that weighed twice what it should. I moved a stack of books, lay down at Verona’s feet, and placed the crystal ball onto my stomach with my hands folded over it. The weight of the ball might help to anchor me to this world. And it would serve one other purpose.
I looked at Mort. “Remember. As soon as I stop breathing, you need to feed my body life energy, keep my brain from dying. And if you see any flickering in the crystal, you need to jolt me with as much life energy as you can. I’m, like, literally trusting you with my life here, brother.”
This was the part of our plan that had me most worried. All Mort had to do was nothing, and I’d die. And Mort had always been really good at doing nothing.
“Hey, don’t worry, man,” Mort said. “I got your back.”
I tried to read any deception in his tone or manner, but couldn’t. And I didn’t have much choice now, except to move forward or abandon the whole plan. I lay my head back and closed my eyes. After a brief meditation, I summoned myself.
Now, there is a very good reason young necromancers are told to never try to summon themselves, and it has nothing to do with growing hair on their palms. Rather, it pretty well rips your spirit from your body. It is a bit like running over your own head with a lawnmower: extremely difficult and rather unpleasant.
Everything went white, and I felt my spirit dissipating, my energy bleeding off.
My years being disembodied in the Other Realm proved extremely helpful now. It felt natural to control my spirit by will alone, to coalesce it into human shape and regain a sense of the world around me.
I floated above my own body. Mort leaned over me, one hand on my forehead, the other on my stomach just below the crystal ball. The ball rose and fell gently as my body continued to breathe.
Well, it looked like I wouldn’t have to haunt Mort for the rest of his life, at least.
I willed myself over to Verona’s body, and placed my hand inside her chest over her heart. Or at least I tried. I met resistance, like trying to push two powerful opposing magnets together. “Come out come out, wherever you are,” I called. I spoke without a real mouth or lungs, so my voice was the vibration of the spirit energies in the room, my breath made of my will. Mort couldn’t hear me. But I knew someone, or rather something, could. “I feel your presence, Anubis. By the bond of Gramaraye blood that bound you to this body, I call you forth. Reveal yourself.”
The air by Verona’s right side wavered, the shadows coalesced like black smoke hardening into Jell-O, until a semitransparent ebon figure stood beside Verona. It had the body of a male wrestler and the head of a dog with sharp ears. Its hand gripped my spiritual wrist firmly, preventing me from reaching into Verona’s chest.
“You summon me, necromancer?”
“I wish your help to travel over and speak to this one whom you protect,” I said with as much confidence and formality as I could.
Anubis looked down at my body. “Have that other necromancer allow you to die, and you may pass beyond the veil and speak to whomever you wish, without my aid.”
“I wish you to guide me to this woman’s spirit beyond, and then to return to my body and the world of the living,” I clarified.
“Ah. That is another matter altogether, isn’t it?” Anubis grinned a jackal’s grin. “What you ask requires a bargain, a balancing. To bring back knowledge from the beyond to your world, you must give up something.”
“I am prepared to offer you fifty Toths of magic,” I said. “I have it there, in my satchel.”
“Fah. I receive such nourishment with every binding. But few seek to travel beyond the veil with my aid. This is a rare opportunity for me to ask something greater than mana.”
Why did that not fill me with awesome feelings?
“What’s your price, then?”
“That gift which is most powerful in you, that has shaped who you are. Will you give this up to earn the answers you seek?”
My Talking gift. This creature wished to strip me of my ability. And I could understand why. The Anubis had been at the beck and call of necromancers its entire life, and here was a chance to strip one of his most valued power.
“Do you swear that I shall be unharmed and unchanged in any other way?”
“What is harm?” said Anubis. “Is loss not harm of a kind? But I promise I shall take nothing from you except what is agreed, not life nor health nor any other part of you.”
I knew the correct answer then, but I found myself pulled back and forth.
Being a Talker had only brought me the unwanted work of my grandfather’s tutoring, the envy of Mort, the expectations of the family business, the promised future of trading my life to Talk to the dead. Talking had killed my mother, and as I’d learned these past days it was the reason that I’d been framed and exiled.
I should be happy to give it up.
But it had also shaped me, defined my life as Anubis said. The world wasn’t as I’d left it. I no longer knew my place in it. I doubted that I could make games as I’d dreamed, Father had been driven mad and Mort barely kept the family business from going under. Without a Talker in the family, how long before the family home was taken over by more powerful necromancers, my family scattered to the winds?
My Talker gift might be the one thing to save my future, and the future of my family.
Yet, what future did I have unless I figured out the Legion’s plans for me, and stopped them? And to do that, I needed to Talk to Verona.
“Wait, if I give you my Talking skill, how will I be able to Talk to Verona?”
Anubis laughed, a mirthless barking sound. “That is not a concern. And I shall not take my price until you have brought back answers from the spirit you seek. Agreed?”
I hesitated, then said, “Agreed.”
“Then let us travel, necromancer.”
Anubis held out his hand, and I took it. The Inner Sanctum blurred and disappeared.
A wooded coastline appeared far beneath my feet, the nighttime landscape lit by a full moon and the occasional flash of lightning or fire on the ground. The scene rushed up at me as though I were skydiving without a parachute. I could make out buildings now, houses and concrete bunkers squatting in the terracelike fields cut into the forested hillside, and more lining the coastline. Fort Worden, I realized, though not quite as I knew it. The Marine Science Center did not jut out into the water, the state park campgrounds and parking lots were absent. The concrete bunkers still held their car-size cannons.
And there floated a giant, rippling line of violet light just above the tide line—a breach between our world and the Other Realm invisible to mundane sight but blinding and hypnotically beautiful to the magically gifted. This must be the last Fey-Arcana War, the final battle when the Fey broke through here and along several other coastlines around the world—the last, desperate fight to keep them from turning us all into feybloods or changelings.
I landed in a stone circle high up on the hillside, the clearing around it enclosed by the forest on three sides, and a steep drop off on the fourth looking down the wooded slope to the beach far below. The stone circle was three times the size of the one where Mort had traded with the gnomes, and hummed now with power as a dozen thaumaturges and wizards worked together to charge the runes that covered every inch of blue stone.
Bright light flashed along the tree line, and a mixed group of arcana and allied feybloods fell back into the clearing as enemy feyblood advanced, bolstered in strength and ability by possessing Fey. The allied feyblood—dryads, satyrs, sasquatches, gryphons, leprechauns, and others who had long established a working relationship with humanity and connection with our world—fought against waer creatures, ghouls, trolls, lindworms, wendigos, unicorns, and other dark feyblood eager for the power and freedoms the Fey promised them.
Wizards wielded wands and rings, or fought with tattoos and swords. Alchemists lobbed gas grenades, or splashed healing potions on the wounded. Sorcerers cast illusions to frighten and confuse, or controlled the minds of the less intelligent enemy feyblood and turned them against their own. Thaumaturges crushed and broke the enemy lines with prepared boulders or tree trunks by moving a resonant pebble or branch across their palm. And necromancers darted forth to rip the spirit from enemy creatures, or snag the magic from both ally and enemy fallen in order to fuel the arcanas’ spells and weapons.
The chill evening air reeked like spoiled steaks being burned over a dung fire as bodies were shredded, chopped, burned, boiled, petrified, and disintegrated. The only sounds louder than the explosions were the screams.
A call like Godzilla roaring into a jet engine rolled across the sky, and an emerald dragon the size of a big rig truck burst up over the tree line and swooped down to land in the clearing. A woman rode near its head, her wavy black hair dancing wildly around her face.
The dragon’s claws dug furrows into the earth as it skidded to a stop a dozen feet away. I could feel the heat of the creature’s internal fire as it hissed out a long breath that smelled of burnt cinnamon and, oddly enough, tacos.
The woman leaped off the beast’s head. It was a jump that should have broken her legs and probably killed her, but the woman landed as though merely jumping off a chair, and crossed the distance to the stone circle where the Anubis and I waited. She wore what looked like gray coveralls with flared legs that ended at her shins, and she had the red sash of an Archwizard tied around her waist, flapping now in the sharp wind blowing up from the inlet.
She looked younger than when I knew her, her face lacking the lines of sorrow and pain I remembered, but still I recognized her. Katherine Verona.
“Interesting,” she said, looking from me to the battle raging beyond the dragon. “Is this setting your doing or mine?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I summoned you here—or rather, I sought you out—but I’ve never done this before. So, I guess it wasn’t like this before I arrived?”
Verona raised her eyebrows. “You know what? I don’t remember, actually.”
I looked at Anubis.
“It is not part of our bargain that I explain the mysteries beyond the veil,” he said.
I sighed and turned back to Verona. “I need to ask you some questions. My life and the lives of my family are in danger, and I need to understand why.”
Verona’s eyes narrowed. “You’re Gavriel’s grandson, the Talker.”
“Yes.”
“Then there is likely more at stake than your life, young man. Tell me, what has happened?”
I gave Verona my story, of Felicity’s attack, my exile, and the attacks since I’d returned.
“Interesting,” Verona said. “I always feared he would take it too far.”
“What do you mean? Who took what too far?”
“Your grandfather, and the Arcanites who supported him. He was obsessed with finding a way to ensure a swift and total victory over the Fey, the feybloods, even the mundies in the next war, a way where we could dominate them all.”
“Grandfather? But he died before any of this started.” And he certainly wouldn’t do anything to harm me, not knowingly.
Verona looked at the stone circle, then beyond, to the breach between worlds far below. “Our children pay the price of our sins and our follies,” she said barely above a whisper. Then she shuddered, and seemed to realize anew where she was. She waved at the battle behind her. “Another war is inevitable, and the plots that men like your grandfather set in motion will continue to affect the course of history for generations to come.”
“Everyone keeps talking about a war like it’s inevitable. These Arcanites you mentioned, are they going to start the war?”
Verona shook her head. “That’s the problem with youth today; you don’t study our history enough. The Pax Arcana has brought peace, and given us rules for trade and more. But it did not change hearts, didn’t eliminate all fear or greed, or any of the other things that lead to war. And most especially, it didn’t eliminate the need or desire for the precious resource of magic.”
“So … are these arcana groups preparing to fight the Fey to gain more magical energy? Or because the Fey are plotting to attack us?”
“Both, and neither. There are those on both sides who continue to desire peace. And there are those on both sides, individuals and groups, who believe that their own side could and should dominate the other. And there are many factions and plans and plots meant to achieve these goals, each believing their way is the one true path. Your grandfather was part of such a group who believed they had the best plan for victory. And you, I’m afraid, have become a victim of their plan.”
“All right. So this group, these Arcanites, they had me exiled for fear that Grandfather told me something, or that I might know or learn something about their plan and expose them. I already guessed somet
hing like that. What I need to know is, who else is in this group; who’s still determined to exile me? And what is it they’re so afraid I might learn from you, that I might reveal?”
“All I can tell you with certainty is that your grandfather came to me seeking my support. He said he was close to perfecting some new power that would shift the balance of the entire war to come. And he said young men like you and James Grayson were the key to it all.”
“Me? What new power?”
“I don’t know. I chose not to join his little faction or share my knowledge, and he chose not to trust me with any details.”
“But if you wanted to stop the war, maybe you should have joined him, at least long enough to discover his plans,” I said.
Verona shook her head. “War is inevitable, but I don’t feel I have the right to say whether it is good or bad, or to shape its outcome in any way.”
“I don’t mean any disrespect, Magus, but are you kidding? Look at this? How could this be good?”
I pointed at the battle still raging along the tree line, and Verona followed my gaze. A goblin leaped upon a necromancer who’d knelt to drain the magic from a gutted corpse. The glowing, ghostly form of a Fey spirit detached from the goblin and poured into the necromancer, who convulsed for a second, then rose haltingly to his feet, and turned to attack a woman next to him. She fell back, startled—and decapitated him with a silver sword. As his body and head fell to the ground bleeding out the dying Fey spirit, the woman stared at the place where he’d stood, a horrified look on her face. I wondered if he had been her brother, or husband, or just a friend.
“I know it’s hard for you to understand,” Verona said, watching the carnage. “Of course it seems like preventing war is the right thing. But when does the cost of stopping the Fey make us unworthy to survive the Fey?”
“What? You’re right,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
Verona sighed. “You know I helped build the foundations of the modern ARC system, yes? Well, it was supposed to represent law and order, and promote the good for all magicals. But they became like any government, where ritual replaces reason, where complacency and arrogance abound. The different factions have become so trapped in the goal of holding onto power that they’ve forgotten what that power was meant to be used for. They’ve become a kind of aristocracy serving their own interests. You see, good intentions often have unexpected and even terrible consequences, my boy, and I for one do not wish to see any more harm done from my choices. I was granted a strong wizardry gift, but that did not make me all knowing. It didn’t give me the right to end thousands of lives, or the surety that the sacrifice was worth—” Her words choked to a halt, and a tear ran down her cheek as she turned away from me.
Finn Fancy Necromancy Page 29