by Deck Davis
“Is Kortho any better? Could you do anything about the thorn? If we can get him to a doctor, we can-”
The woman shook her head. “I am sorry. Your friend has died.”
CHAPTER 20 – Necromancer Renault
Ryden opened the portal to the Greylands in his own artificed tent so that none of the other inhabitants saw it. It wasn’t that they didn’t know he was a necromancer; why should he hide it? That was the whole reason they wanted him here in the first place.
No, it was because of the things a man might see in the Greylands. A person had to build up their tolerance to the Greylands before they could stare into it, and eventually that tolerance would grow into the ability to actually enter the land between life and death as a mortal.
For today, he needed to commune with one of his bound creatures. He had three, and he had recently earned the summon slot for a fourth.
A face appeared in the portal in the ground, a visage of cracked, red skin poking through the swirl of light.
This was Clarence, Ryden’s first bound creature, and the only one he considered to be a mistake.
Things had been great when Ryden had first been bound to him at the academy, but boy and demon soon learned that their personalities weren’t compatible.
It wasn’t because Clarence was a demon; demons in the Greylands weren’t always evil, or even bad.
It was more that Clarence used to bully Ryden when he was a child. Whenever Ryden summoned him for comfort, all he’d get were insults designed to bore into his psyche, and this carried on for years until Ryden got older enough that words didn’t hurt him anymore.
It was his experience with Clarence that made him decide to never bind to a demon again. His other bound would be something else, and he’d take their tongues. They couldn’t talk back to him if they couldn’t talk. He let them cast their thoughts out as words, but it was easy for him to block these.
Whenever he saw Clarence and his red skin, his stupid little goatee beard, and the gold-rimmed spectacles he wore even though his eyesight was fine, Ryden got a horrible tension in his shoulders.
Sure, the tension could actually have been a pain from an injury he’d gotten as a child, the injury that made him drop from assassin training, but he preferred to blame it on how much Clarence pissed him off.
“Hello, Andrew,” said Clarence, with a nod.
“It’s Ryden, as you know. You are my bound animal, and you will address me properly.”
“According to the rules of the Greylands,” said Clarence, “Properly means addressing one’s master by their given name. Which in your case, though you try to hide it, is Andrew.”
“You’ve been researching this, haven’t you?”
“You’re aren’t the only one who can read, Andrew.”
It was a battle they’d had dozens of times, and he didn’t have the energy to fight it again tonight. He wished it was possible to cut a binding.
“Fine. Call me whatever you want if it makes you feel better. I’ll suffer through it here on the surface. You know, where it’s not grey and dark and everything isn’t dead. In the meantime, I need you to find some information for me.”
“It would be an absolute pleasure to attend to your every whim. What do you need?”
“There’s another necromancer here. I saw his bound animal spying on the camp. It was a wolf, or maybe a large dog. Can you find it?”
Clarence sighed. “Do you know how enormous the Greylands are? Time folds on itself once, twice, eight times. A mile on the surface is eight down here. You expect me to search it all?”
“Go and get Kiefe,” said Ryden. “He can help you.”
“And Zack?”
“I have Zack doing something else.”
Clarence nodded. “We will search, but do not hold out hope.”
“Believe me, Clarence, I put little hope in you. You’re my back-up; I have other ways of finding him.”
“What do you want us to do when we find this bound creature?”
“Tell me you’ve found it, and I’ll take it from there. I need to find out more about our visitor so that he doesn’t mess everything up for us. The only reason another necromancer would be here is to recover Helmund’s body, though if they’re from the academy, I suspect they don’t know why it’s so valuable.”
“I suppose I should go and start my wild goose chase,” said Clarence.
“I suppose you should.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Oh. There was one other thing,” said Clarence.
“What is it, you miserable waste of essence?”
“The demons have been excited. Lots of rumors going around. Apparently, a necromancer has died in the Killeshi lands, and he is now somewhere in the Greylands.”
This got Ryden’s attention. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“It is a rumor.”
Yeah, and you like the idea of holding back information as long as possible. As a bound demon, Clarence couldn’t directly disobey Ryden, but he could be creative with the things he knew. Most times, Ryden had to ask the demon careful questions to make sure he got all the information he needed.
Clarence’s attitude usually annoyed him, but he didn’t care now. Not with this information. This could change everything.
“Do they know who the necromancer is?”
“Rumors say its Kortho Carlisle.”
He felt like an avalanche of snow had fallen on his shoulders, freezing him.
“No. They wouldn’t send him here.”
“That’s what they say; I’m only repeating their gossip. Could this bound wolf be Kortho’s creature?”
He shook his head. “Kortho has a demonic stag, and they hate each other. Me and you are best friends in comparison. The hound doesn’t belong to Kortho.”
“Then perhaps the rumors are wrong.”
“Maybe, but it’s worth pursuing. This is the best thing I’ve heard in weeks. If this is Kortho, and he’s really dead, and we can get to him…Clarence, you and Kiefe forget about the bound wolf. Keep your ears open and report if you find it, but I want you to concentrate on this rumor. If Kortho is in the Greylands, I want you to find him.”
“I will tell Kiefe the good news.”
“I’ll look for Kortho up top. If he died around here, then his body will be here somewhere. I’m going to search this area – all the hundreds of miles of it - until I find it. Make sure that neither Kortho, this other necromancer, or his bound are safe in the Greylands. The minute one of them is found, attack, subdue, and then find me.”
CHAPTER 21
Some words have the power of bursting through the logical part of a person’s mind and pulverizing otherwise stable synapses and brain paths.
For Jakub, the words ‘I am sorry. Your friend has died’ ripped his mind apart.
There was no pretense of a lake of calm, no rationality to be found, he was gone, lost to his primal instincts.
These instincts pushed him past the woman and carried him into her hut, where he found Kortho laid out on a table in the center of the only room.
“No. This can’t be right.”
His mentor’s skin was blackened from the venom inside him, a sight only beaten in horror by the thorn protruding from him, covered in yellow liguana blood. His slit eyes were open a centimeter, and his tongue hung from his mouth, stuck fast against his skin.
Smells hit Jacob; poison, blood, defecation. Death was never pretty no matter how peaceful or how violent its form, and studying corpses in the academy was different to seeing his mentor like this. The aromas made want to vomit.
He lost feeling in his legs, and he fell to his left. As he crashed toward a wooden counter piled high with pans and pots, arms caught him and steadied him, and then gently pushed him to the floor.
He sat with his back against the counter. The woman was kneeling beside him but his eyes were out of focus, and she was hazy. His thoughts rushed at him, and they seeped from his brain until th
ey welled deep in his chest.
“Breathe,” said the woman in a tender voice.
She touched his shoulder but he only knew that because he saw it; he was too numb to feel anything.
“Your skin is cold,” she said. “That’s a bad omen.”
Jakub couldn’t find the words to respond, but he knew staying in this state wouldn’t help.
Instructor Irvine and his mental lessons spoke in Jacob’s head but they were echoes at first. As he forced himself to listen he remembered the words and the techniques they imparted on him, and with every ounce of will he made his thoughts slow enough to say two words.
“What happened?”
She moved away from him and approached the table and stood over Kortho’s body. She picked up two glass bottles full of a black, syrupy substance.
“I drained as much of the poison as I could. A warrior or barbarian could have fought the poison for longer, but someone his size…”
Jakub forced himself to stand. He noticed the boy now, who was standing as far away from Kortho as possible with his back pressed hard against the hut door as though he wanted to somehow pass through it and into the night.
“I thought you’d slowed the venom?” said Jakub.
“I’m no doctor. Even with a mother wyrm, a person can usually last days. He must have had an allergy to it, some condition that sped up the venom.”
He forced himself to approach his mentor’s body. He felt sick. Not just nauseous, but a gut-wrenching sickness. If it hadn’t been hours since he’d last ate, he would have coughed his stomach onto the hut floor.
His instinct was to put a finger to Kortho’s throat and hope to feel the rhythm of his heart, but he’d been around enough cadavers to know what death looked like. It was too early for rot to set in yet, but the specter of death was heavy in the room regardless. His attuning to the essence made him feel that.
With that thought came another, one that had been drilled into him again and again in the academy. He pictured instructor Irvine saying it to him.
“In the field, when you come across fresh death, always drain the essence from it. Never miss a chance for essence. Don’t think of it as leeching from the dead; think of it as letting the dead give service to the living, even when they have passed.”
The idea wrenched his gut, that he’d draw from Kortho as if he were a mother wyrm or a creature from a gloomy outpost basement.
“Necromancy is supposed to have its perks, isn’t it?” said the woman.
“I’m levels away from that kind of resurrection spell. I couldn’t even perform a temporary resurrection on him.”
“Alafar unto e’ niyten,” she said.
“What?”
“Let his soul carry him to endless sleep.”
It must have been a Killeshi phrase, and it sounded all too final. Jakub wasn’t ready to admit Kortho was gone.
He paced away from his body, running his hands through his hair. “I need to think.”
The boy moved away from the doorway now, and he walked past Jakub and stood beside Kortho’s body. He was so small his head only peaked over the table.
“Who’s the boy?” said the woman.
“I don’t know yet. I just met him.”
“Won’t his parents be looking for him?”
“Hells, I didn’t kidnap him. He was alone.”
He couldn’t think about the boy now. All he could focus on was Kortho.
Jakub fought the urge to summon Ludwig. He needed a friend with him now, but he couldn’t spare the essence.
Not only that, but he couldn’t break the news like this. Ludwig’s bond with Kortho was as deep as the one he shared with Jakub, and this would leave him distraught.
There was the chance that the two would meet in the Greylands, of course. When a person died, they passed into the land of in-between while their resurrection window was open. But the Greylands were vast, and the spirits down there passed like specters, barely regarding each other most of the time. It would be a disaster for Ludwig to find out that way, but it was such a remote chance that it wasn’t worth thinking about.
Ludwig would have to wait. If he could think this through, maybe there was a way to fix it. There had to be.
“I can pull the thorn out now,” said the woman. “If you want to take his body back to your lands.”
“My head is throbbing. I don’t want to think about the specifics.”
“If we wait too long the venom will bind the thorn to him and close his skin around it. I am sure his family will not want to see him like this.”
“I can’t think about pulling that thing from his body.”
“These are things you will have to think about,” she said.
“Well, not yet.”
“He was special to you, this liguana?”
He felt too hot now. “I need air.”
“I have something better,” she said.
For the next few seconds she opened jars, moved pans, opened boxes. The kitchen filled with the scent of herbs, but even if Jakub had any herbology skills, he’d have been too dazed to pick out what the smells were. When she finished, she handed him a cup filled with a brown drink.
“Here. For the throbbing in your head.”
“Thanks, but it’s not that sort of thing. It’s not a headache…”
“I know. I understand what it is. This will help.”
Jakub eyed the mixture warily. The academy prepared its students well for field work, and poisonology was an aspect of that. It usually applied to rogues and assassins who played the game of spies, but there was no telling when someone might try to kill a member of the academy.
“I’m okay,” he said, “but thank you.”
She sipped from the cup, swallowed, then handed it back to him. “Don’t be so distrustful. This will take the edge off your thoughts. Because you need to think now, don’t you, necromancer?”
He thought about taking it from her. It would be good to calm his mind. In the end, his distrust won out. “Really, thank you, but I’m okay.”
She shrugged and then drank the rest of the glass. “Suit yourself.”
The fact was, he didn’t want to use herbs to remove the feelings from his mind. He needed to remember these emotions and use them as fire. Until the resurrection window closed, Kortho wasn’t dead.
His pulse had stopped, his brain had ceased functioning, but to a necromancer, a man wasn’t dead until you put him in the ground.
So how could he bring Kortho back?
First, there was no chance he could perform the resurrection himself. A novice could bring back small creatures from the dead, but resurrecting a complex being like Kortho was beyond him. It was the spell of mastery, and Jakub was so many ranks away from achieving it that it was completely beyond reach.
He needed a necromancy master, and the only others he knew were back in the academy.
“What’s the resurrection window for a person?” he said, pacing as he turned the question over. “Two days for a man, a week more if you douse him in goodlight. What about a liguana? Come on….I know this…”
If this were a written exam like the ones he’d done to graduate in the academy, he’d have guessed thirty hours. Not quite the same bracket of opportunity as for a man, but more than a smaller creature.
This wasn’t a test, and there was no room for guessing. This was his instructor, and not just that, his friend. He wanted the next time he went to Kortho’s house in Racken Hills to be for Summer Solstice and to see his wife Wersini under happier circumstances, not to deliver the worst news possible.
“Can’t you summon your academy friends out here? I’m sure the Queen will pay for the finest mana-powered carriages. No expense spared for the academy, right? But not a second of thought for areas like this. You leave the Killeshi here to rot,” said the woman.
“We travelled here on a trader’s cart. We spent eight hours nestled between crates of cabbages and turnips, and we camped outside at night when he stopped. Y
ou’re crazy if you think our pockets are full of gold.”
“Hit a nerve, have I?”
“If you’ve got a problem with the wheel, don’t blame its cogs,” said Jakub.
“I’m sure a click of your fingers will see a dozen necromancers here with their big black coats flapping and their balls weighing heavy in their trousers.”
“Balls weighing heavy?” said Jakub, then shook his head. “What? Whatever. It’s not an option. It’d take a couple of days to get a message back to the academy, and then five and a half days for someone to get here even if they left right away.”
“Unless you took your friend to the academy yourself.”
“The trader is picking us up on the return journey of his route in a few days’ time. Even then, add on 5 days for the journey. It’ll be too late.”
“Hire another wagon,” said the woman. “Lingmell town is twenty miles south. It’s not affiliated to the queendom, but it’s not a Killeshi town either.”
Jakub perked up at hearing this. He knew a place called Pendle was forty-odd miles south, but didn’t know there was a town closer than that. “They have any necromancers in Lingmell town?”
She shook her head.
“Damn it. All of this for a traitor’s corpse.”
Then it hit him. The inquisitor. Kortho had told him that the Queen’s inquisitors were sending an agent to meet them here, even though Kortho hadn’t intended to resurrect the traitor until they got back to the academy.
The inquisitor would have a wagon of his own, or at least the funds to hire one that could leave straight away. That might give them enough time if they found one that was quick enough – they said that mana-fueled carriages could cover two hundred miles a day, didn’t they? It was a matter of waiting it out until the inquisitor arrived, and then meeting him at the outpost.
The problem there was the window of resurrection. Without him doing something, it would close before the inquisitor got here. For that, he was going to need the woman’s help, because he didn’t know the area.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t ask your name.”