The Necromancer Series Box Set

by Deck Davis

  “Is she a…girlfriend?”

  “Hardly – she summoned a bunch of rats to kill me, and her friends don’t have the best intentions either. I need to find out why, and who the rest of them are.”

  Ludwig’s tail dropped. “You’re in danger?”

  “I don’t have time to explain it all now, Lud. I just need you to find this woman. She had dark brown hair, and like I said, she’s a necromancer too. She shouldn’t be hard for you to track.”

  “The Greylands is a big place.”

  He showed her the woman’s soul necklace. “Take a sniff of this. Is that enough?”

  Ludwig nodded. As he did, a different look spread on his face, as though a sour taste had flooded his tongue.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” said Ludwig. “I wasn’t supposed to say yet; I promised. But now that you’re down here…”

  This was weird – Ludwig had never kept a secret from him before. Ludwig was his bound animal and he only answered to Jakub, so who could have made him promise not to tell him something?

  “What is it?”

  “There’s someone down here. I wasn’t supposed to tell you because then you’d have come here, and it’s dangerous. I guess now you’re here, there’s no point hiding it.”

  “There’s someone down here?”

  Ludwig paced nervously. “Should I have said anything?”

  Jakub felt cold now. The only reason a person would come to Greylands is if they were a necromancer, or if they were dead.

  “Did someone die? Who, Lud?”

  “Cross the essence stream north. They’re not far away. I’ll leave you two alone and go and look for this woman.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Ludwig sniffed the air and the tore off eastward, leaving Jakub alone with his questions.

  Someone he knew was down here?

  Who was it? Who had died?

  He almost didn’t want to find out, as if staying here would mean he never knew, and therefore it never happened.

  Come on; you’re being stupid.

  He knew what Irvine, Kortho, Henwright, Lolo would all say; they’d repeat a quote for the Necromancia, one of the earliest texts on necromancy.

  ‘When a necromancer fears death for himself or his loved ones, he is a necromancer no more.’

  And so, Jakub followed Ludwig’s directions, walking north by an essence stream until it came time to cross it, and then he found the narrowest part and leapt over it, crossing from one fleshy landmass to another.

  Then, he saw him. A figure in the distance, sitting by a rock of bone.

  No.

  He stopped, rigid, unable to force himself to take another step.

  “Kortho?” he said.

  His mentor was sitting beside a bleached bone. It looked like a rock from far away, but a nobble at the top of its showed that it had once joined onto something, and had been part of a skeleton.

  Instead of his necromancy robe, Kortho was wearing pyjamas. They were made from cotton and had blue stripes. Jakub had never seen his mentor looking so casual, much less in pyjamas.

  Jakub ran over to him. “Kortho!”

  Kortho turned his way. “Ah, damn. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted the hound. You shouldn’t be down here, Jakub. I told Ludwig to keep it from you because I knew you’d come looking.”

  A flood of thoughts hit Jakub, so many that it was hard to grasp just one.

  “What…how? What happened?”

  “A heart attack,” said Kortho, pinching his pyjama top, “Hence the clothes. That’s what I think, anyway. I think I was next to Winifred, listening to her read to me. That was something we did – took it in turns to read to each other. While I was listening to her voice, my heart decided it had had enough.”

  “You’re dead?”

  “Well observed. I always said you’d make a fine necromancer.”

  “If I tell Irvine to send someone to collect your body from your house, we’ll have time to take your body to the resurrection chamber and he can-”

  Kortho gave him a tender smile. “You’re not thinking clearly. You’re letting death cloud your thoughts.”

  All these years, even when Jakub had gone through a phase of being a teenage arsehole, Kortho had always been patient with him, always willing to talk through his transgressions or errors.

  And he saw his mistake now.

  “You’ve already been resurrected once, so you can’t come back again.”

  “One of the Seven awaits me now, lad. I hope it’s the Upperlon; me and Winnie always said we’d try for that afterlife and meet each other there. Course, I know that you can’t choose.”

  Jakub ran his hand through his hair. He was sweating but cold at the same time. His throat was dry enough that even breathing normally was difficult.

  It had all come down to this. Everything he’d been through to save Kortho, and death had played a joke.

  Back in his first assignment, Jakub had a banished necromancer at his mercy. This was a man named Ryden Renault; dangerous, deadly, and a real bastard.

  He should have taken Ryden to the academy to face up to what he’d done. The problem was, Kortho had been killed by a mother blight wyrm.

  Jakub had broken academy code and let Ryden go in exchange for Kortho’s resurrection.

  Jakub had ended his assignment tired, injured, and weighed down by the knowledge of his failure, but that had been okay because he knew Kortho was alive.

  All of that…for him to die of a heart attack?

  It was a truth about death they should have taught in the academy, but Jakub suspected everyone but the necromancers themselves understood it. For all their study of it, they neglected one thing; death didn’t give a shit.

  Go through hell to bring your mentor back to life?

  Death didn’t care.

  A healer spends hours and pours out all the mana in their body to save a life?

  Death looked on that with a sneer.

  Whatever you’d been through, whatever your plans, it meant nothing to the spectre that waited at the end.

  Tears welled in his eyes. “This is it, isn’t it? There’s no resurrection window for you, so you’ll go to your afterlife soon.”

  “I can feel it already, Jakub. I feel lighter than I ever have.”

  “What about Winifred?”

  “Will you visit her for me?” said Kortho.

  Gods, the tears were burning now. He fought to keep them back but it was impossible. “Of course I will. All the time. Only, there’s a problem.”

  “I know that the academy expelled you,” said Kortho. “Ludwig told me.”

  “It’s not that; shit has been piling on me lately.”

  “Be blunt, lad.”

  “Someone is trying to kill me, and Henwright set me up.”

  Kortho stood up now. As he did, Jakub noticed that his feet and ankles were hazy in the same way that Ludwig’s form was up on the surface, before Jakub had levelled his Summon Bound spell.

  It was starting already; Kortho’s essence was fading into the afterlife.

  “I don’t have long,” said Kortho. “Tell me everything.”

  Just then, footsteps pounded behind him. Jakub almost turned around to look, but he stopped himself at the last second. Who knew what was behind him, just waiting for him to carelessly turn around so they could steal his thoughts?

  “Jakub,” said Ludwig.

  Phew, it’s just Lud.

  The hound joined them, and he laid by Kortho’s feet and was soon enjoying a head scratch. “No sign of the woman,” he said. “She came to the Greylands like you said, but she started moving straight away. A demon told me she went north, and imp said she went south.”

  “Damn it. Time moves eight times faster down here, and she’s probably been here before. She must have guessed that I’d come here after her to question her.”

  “Her?” said Kortho.

  Jakub noticed with a chill that the haze had reached Kortho’s shins now.


  Minutes, that was all he had. Minutes and then he’d never see his mentor again.

  There wasn’t even a guarantee Jakub would see him again when he himself died – who knew what he’d do in his life? Who knew which afterlife his actions would take him to?

  Images flashed through his mind.

  Kortho taking his hand, dragging him away from his cannibal family.

  Kortho arguing with the other instructors to let them give Jakub a place in the academy instead of sending him to a workshop.

  Kortho inviting Jakub to stay with him and his wife in the holidays, instead of sleeping at the empty academy.

  “Kortho,” he said. He knew his voice was wavering, and he knew it was shameful for a necromancer, but he couldn’t help it. “Kortho, I-”

  Kortho put his claws on Jakub’s shoulder and stared at him with his slit eyes.

  “Jakub, lad, you can either say goodbye, or you can tell me who this woman is, and what’s happening to you. We can either be sentimental, or you can get my help one last time. It’s up to you.”

  So, Jakub told him everything.

  CHAPTER 37

  “So, they tried to take Abbie, and then they came for you,” said Kortho. “And you’re sure about this letter?”

  “The pickpocket stole it from me, and then he wound up cut in half. It has to be a set-up; I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “No? Well the universe has a funny way of throwing them at us. I have a hard time believing that Henwright would do this.”

  “That’s exactly why I haven’t gone to the academy. Nobody would believe me.”

  “I’d believe it,” said Ludwig. “In your inquiry, what you told me…they didn’t give you a chance.”

  “Sometimes, Lud my friend,” said Kortho, “The academy must act to protect itself, rather than one student. That was why they threw up such opposition when I wanted Jakub to join, and I went against every credo of the academy to get him permitted. Irvine, though, has no such sentimentality, but nor would he move against students for his own gain.”

  “And Henwright? Why did he give me the letter, if not to set me up?” said Jakub.

  “Whoever these people are, you’re following a trail of fire, and its likely to burn you when you get close. You should go, Jakub. Leave Dispolis and travel far away. I hear the far western isles are nice.”

  “If we’re right that they’re targeting students, then I won’t be the last.”

  “I should have known you wouldn’t think of yourself. If you had done that in the Killeshi lands, you wouldn’t have failed your assignment.”

  “And you’d have died.”

  “Well it seems when the afterlives want you, they will take you anyway,” said Kortho.

  Jakub heard something strange in Kortho’s voice, and he thought it might be regret.

  He hadn’t expected that; Kortho was a master necromancer, and he knew death intimately. He couldn’t believe that when it came to it, Kortho was like everyone else – scared of going, scared of all the things he’d leave undone.

  Or was Jakub just projecting?

  Maybe for Kortho it wasn’t fear for himself, but for Jakub and for Winifred.

  Perhaps all the de-sensitization training in the world couldn’t rid a person of that most primal instinct when it came to death.

  “You need Irvine and Lolo’s help on this, Jakub. The academy has to know,” said Kortho.

  “They won’t believe me.”

  “Then you’ll take them something they can’t deny. You say this woman killed herself, rather than talk to you?”

  “She didn’t even flinch.”

  “A person only does that when they value the thing they are protecting more than their own life. She is a necromancer, and she will know about the resurrection window, and about Last Rites. I’d imagine that now, wherever she is, she is making sure her window closes earlier than it should, so that you can’t take her corpse to the academy in time.”

  “Do you know who she could be? She must have been a student, right?”

  “I’ve taught many students over the years, Jakub. Our academy isn’t the only one to teach necromancy, either. But you said there were others?”

  “When I cast Last Rites on the pickpocket,” said Jakub, “We saw a man. He knew I was going to use it, and he left a message. He sat there in front of the boy, and spoke to him, but he knew he was speaking to me, really. He expected me to watch the Last Rites.”

  “And you said he was showing off his coins?”

  “He was playing with us. Using up the time of the Last Rites so we wouldn’t learn anything.”

  Kortho smiled. “Then he isn’t as clever as he thinks he is. I might know this man.”

  “What?”

  “Coin collectors are a funny breed. There aren’t many of them, and they are obsessive in their hobby. I was once assigned to resurrect an old warlock in the Gaspen Isles. Everything went as it should, and I travelled back to the academy with the loot I had found on my mission. Among that loot was a coin shaped like a lion’s head.”

  Jakub’s heart raced. “He showed us that coin!”

  “Yes, and I’m the one who sold it to him. When I looted it, I knew I’d found something valuable. I went to a coin collector’s exhibition, and they were like hyenas fighting over a carcass when they saw my coin. They almost came to blows trying to outbid each other. Eventually I sold it for 700 gold. That’s right- 700. You can pick your jaw up off the floor.”

  “You sold it to him?”

  Kortho nodded. “I’ll always remember him. After all, the man was seven feet tall. Not someone you would forget. But his name…what was his name?”

  Remember, willed Jakub. I need it.

  Kortho shook his head. “Damn it. All the times I used to joke about your mind palace and how obsessively you followed Irvine’s instructions on it…I wish I had one of my own, now.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I’m sorry, Jakub.”

  Another dead end. Jakub felt empty now. He could sense more of the arachnids in the distance, he could see their forms in his peripheral vision and he knew they were waiting for him to glance at them so they could take his thoughts. He couldn’t stay here much longer.

  Not only that, but the haze had reached Kortho’s waist now.

  How long did Kortho have in Greyland before he passed on? Minutes?

  “Kortho, we don’t have time. Forget everything; I need to say something to you.”

  “Wait,” said Kortho. He held a clawed hand in the air. “The receipt. The man made me sign the coin to him in a deed, and I kept a receipt of the sale. His name will be on it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “At my house, of course. Winifred will know where it is. Tell her to look in my study, in my desk.”

  “I’ll go to her.”

  “Tell her something for me,” said Kortho. “I know this might be awkward; but tell her…tell her that she was everything.”

  The words were a punch to the gut. A shower of ice spread through Jakub now, and the message finally reached him, firing in his mind, the knowledge that this was the end.

  The last time he’d ever see Kortho, the liguana who had saved him from his family, who’d given him a life.

  And for the third time ever in his life, Jakub felt his tears overwhelm him.

  Kortho grabbed him and pulled him close, and Jakub didn’t resist.

  This wasn’t what a necromancer should do, he knew that. But he was human, too.

  They hugged for a minute, and finally Kortho pushed him away. The haze had reached his chest now.

  “Go,” said Kortho. “I don’t want you to watch me fade. Go to Winifred, she’ll be happy to see you. We have no sons or daughters to call in on her, no grandchildren. Regrets, Jakub. As much as our kind deal in death we don’t experience it until our time is up. If you ever wonder what death feels like, it’s this – regret.”

  Jakub felt Ludwig nuzzle against his leg, and he sensed
the arachnids gathering in the distance, and he could see the haze spreading further up Kortho’s body.

  With that, Jakub touched Ludwig’s head.

  “Take me back,” he said.

  CHAPTER 38

  He found himself back in the chamber in the Rats’ Palace, soaking wet and with a horrible taste in his mouth.

  Witas was kneeling beside the dead necromancer and rifling through her pockets. When he saw Jakub appear next to him, he jumped.

  “Woah. A little warning,” he said, and then he looked at Jakub’s face. “Are you…okay?”

  Jakub didn’t want to tell him about the Greylands and Kortho. He’d never been the kind of guy to go spilling his emotions to anyone. Besides, Kortho wouldn’t have wanted that.

  ‘We can either be sentimental, or you can get my help one last time.’ That was what he’d said.

  Jakub knew that Kortho wasn’t just talking through decades of de-sensitization; he was a practical man. He always said, ‘my feelings belong at home with Winifred. Outside of that, feelings don’t help.’

  Jakub could either waste his time feeling guilt and anger, or he could remember his mental training with Irvine and he could push all that back, shove it into the part of his mind where he kept all the other stuff that he didn’t have the energy for.

  “I saw a friend in the Greylands,” he told Witas. “It’s a long story, but I can get us the name of Mr. Coin.”

  “Mr. Coin?”

  “He needs a nickname until we know his real one.”

  “He sounds more like a…Baron Moneyfingers? Barons are usually real bastards. Forget it - we’ll work on it,” said Witas. “What’s it like down there?”

  “The Greylands?”

  “It’s the ultimate question, ain’t it - what’s it like when you die? Sure, we all know there’s a stop gap, and then we move onto one of the Seven, but none of us have lived and breathed it. It must be pretty special to do that.”

  “I never thought of it like that. Necromancy always been a job, one I study and practice for.”

  “Just a job. And they say romance and poetry are dying. Jakub, you’ve got thousands of poems written by guys who’ve never set foot in the Greylands. They wrote pages and pages describing how they imagined it would feel, what they’d have lost, what they’d see, and they used their empathy to put that in words. You, on the other hand, have been to the land beyond more than once, yet you might as well have gone to the bakery for a pie.”