The Necromancer Series Box Set

by Deck Davis

  “Who the hell is this?” said Mason.

  Jakub stared at them, and recognition hit him.

  There was a man leading them. He was old; so old that he looked like he might fall off his horse, yet it was strange. He gave off a sense of power and of strength inside him.

  He recognized his face. He’d never seen the man in person, but he’d seen a painting of him on a poster in an academy bedroom.

  “It’s mage Wyrecast,” he said.

  “Wyrecast? Hells, it is! What’s he doing here?” said Mason.

  “I asked a friend to send him a message about Trout.”

  Wyrecast led his men toward them, stopping a few feet away. He didn’t dismount.

  Jakub couldn’t help feeling awed; Wyrecast was the most famous mage in the queendom, and if even half the stories about him were true, then his spells were to be feared.

  “I’m looking for someone called Jakub,” said Wyrecast. The he eyed the destruction around him. “Will someone tell me what the hells happened here? Never mind – tell me later. Where is my grandson’s body?”

  Jakub approached. “I’m the one who sent you a message,” he said.

  “Where is Troutan?”

  “He’s in the academy, but-”

  “Then why are we flapping our gums here? Why haven’t you resurrected him yet?”

  Mason walked forward now. His steps were slow, and Jakub noticed that’d he’d taken a wound on his side. Even so, his eyes were burning with anger.

  “Listen, you old bastard, are you blind? Can’t you see all the fucking corpses around you? And you’re concerned about one?”

  The rumbling from the steel dome grew louder now.

  Jakub looked at Wyrecast and he wished the old mage had gotten here earlier. Minutes earlier, even. At least then there wouldn’t have been so many bodies.

  He couldn’t rewrite things; all he could do was focus on the now.

  “Mage Wyrecast,” he said. “The man who ordered your grandson’s death is in that dome. He attacked the academy, and now he’s trying to escape.”

  “It’s a spell, isn’t it? I can smell it.”

  “We can’t get through.”

  Wyrecast rolled up his sleeves, and Jakub saw his glyphlines; they were patterned, colorful, the most intricate glyphlines he’d ever seen, ones formed through great power and through decades of experience.

  The mage shouted a spellword, his voice booming.

  And that was what it took; with the spellword of the most famed mage in the land, the steel melted into droplets, spattering on the ground and revealing the men inside it who had almost dug their way into the tunnels.

  The men turned, caught in surprise.

  “Hem them in,” shouted Mason. “Not a single one escapes.”

  Bendeldrick was the first to react.

  Jakub saw him take a dagger from his sheath and grip it in his liguana claws and raise it to his own throat.

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “You’re not going to the Greylands yet.”

  He looked at the sky, where one of his reanimated falcons was swirling.

  Stop him.

  As Bendeldrick raised his dagger, the falcon swooped in, claws raised, and it tore into his face.

  Mason and the surviving students made a circle around the invaders, pointing their swords, shouting orders.

  Bendeldrick’s men dropped their weapons and fell to their knees, and with that, it was over.

  CHAPTER 104

  Four weeks later, Jakub was back in the necromancer’s wing of the academy. He was sitting on a chair in a room he knew all too well. In front of him was a table with a cloth bearing the academy emblem draped over it.

  Sitting around the table were Instructor Irvine, Madam Lolo, and Mason D’Angelt, the new full-time instructor of the academy’s warlocks.

  Jakub didn’t have notes in front of him this time. He had no rehearsed lines, no expectation of help from an old friend.

  Instead, he’d answered their questions truthfully, without trying to put a positive spin on anything.

  Now, he just had to wait to hear the outcome of his appeal.

  Instructor Irvine cleared his throat. “We have reviewed your conduct, Journeyman Russo,” he said. “While we cannot excuse your actions on your first assignment, we can understand your justification of it. Furthermore, we have considered your actions of late, your resourcefulness when you heard about danger to the academy, and the selflessness with which you came to its aid.”

  “You acted with honor,” said Lolo.

  Mason leaned his cheek on his palm, bored. “Get on with it, Ian.”

  Irvine nodded. “Taking all of this into account, the board find justification in reinstating you to the academy. You will not resume active duty at first; for a probationary period of two months, you will assist Lolo in the teaching of early necromancy classes. Providing you conduct yourself well in this period, you will be reinstated as a field agent of the academy.”

  Lolo smiled. “You earned this, Jakub.”

  “You did good, kid,” said Mason.

  “What do you say?” said Irvine.

  Jakub only had to think about it for a second. Witas was the one who’d urged him to lodge an appeal. He didn’t think he’d have a chance of success, but all the same, he’d already considered every possibility.

  “I respectfully refuse your offer,” he said.

  Irvine leaned forward. Mason, suddenly interested, sat up straight.

  “Excuse me?” said Lolo.

  Jakub tried to keep his voice calm and respectful. After all, they might have screwed him over in his first inquiry, but they were good people who had the academy’s interests at heart. Compared to Henwright, they were deities.

  “I never wanted to come back,” he said. “I just wanted to hear you say that I could. The academy helped me when I needed it. They gave me training, and even when you kicked me out, I got over how pissed I was and came to understand why. But I’ve met people recently who made me think that actually, there are paths that a necromancer can take that don’t involve the academy.”

  “Why do I sense my brother’s influence?” said Irvine.

  “Not just him,” said Jakub, glancing at Mason.

  “You are sure about this decision?”

  Jakub nodded. “I need to see the world a little. Learn more about necromancy on my own. Who knows, maybe I’ll come back and work for you one day. On a contractor’s rates, of course.”

  “You are making a mistake,” said Irvine.

  “At least it’s mine to make. There’s more to the world than the academy and Dispolis.”

  “The academy offers its agents paid leave. You don’t need to refuse our offer to get travel time.”

  “And I don’t want the academy to say when I can and can’t travel, and I don’t want them to decide where I should go.”

  “Let’s be honest,” said Irvine. “Where are you going to go?”

  Jakub shrugged. “The Racken Hills first. I need to go and see someone and deliver a message.”

  “Racken hills? Kortho’s house, you mean?”

  “For a start.”

  Irvine said nothing for a few seconds, but finally, he nodded. “Then we wish you the best, journeyman.”

  Jakub left the necromancy wing and headed down the stairs and outside of the academy. The grounds were quieter than they ever had been; with students dead, hurt, and others whose parents had withdrawn them, its numbers had never been so low.

  Outside, he found Groundsman Nipper and quartermaster Tomkins kneeling beside a statue, hammering bolts into the stone to secure it.

  When Jakub stared at the statue, he felt his heart swell. It was Kortho cast in bronze. They’d made him look a little taller than he actual was, but they’d captured his facial expressions perfectly; authority and kindness, with a dose of humor.

  “How did it go?” said Tomkins.

  Jakub told the quartermaster what Irvine had offered, and what his answe
r had been.

  Tomkins smiled. “If you ask me, you made the right call.”

  “At least someone thinks so.”

  “Well, as it happens, I’m leaving too. Gonna travel some, see a bit of the world.”

  “Maybe we’ll catch up along the way.”

  “Take care of yourself, Jakub,” said Tomkins.

  After yet another hug – Jakub had been hugged more times in the last month than he had his entire life – Jakub left the academy and headed down the Path of Returning, to where the carriages waited.

  Two students got out of one and headed by him, and Jakub hurried to catch the driver before he left.

  He guessed he’d go to Dispolis first and pay one last visit to Witas. The cleric had been reinstated back at the church of the Brightlight. Although he and Ian Irvine hadn’t quite made up, at least the brothers had talked a little.

  Old grudges took a while to clean out, and Jakub guessed it’d be a while before they healed their sibling wounds.

  It wasn’t just the brothers that had to heal, though. It seemed that everyone did; Dispolis was recovering from the blast on the Royal Mile, and the academy was healing from the battle. They resurrected as many students as they could gather the essence for, with Trout Wyrecast being the first.

  Even the Queen was feeling the hurt of it all. After discovering that her uncle had helped Bendeldrick, the queen had promoted Lloyd Blackrum, taking him from the guardship and instilling him in her own court, with the order to clear the rot from the place.

  Jakub didn’t care about any of that now. He wanted the academy to recover, he wanted Witas and Irvine to get over their grudges, but most of all, he needed to heal himself.

  All he wanted was to go to the Racken Hills and sit on the veranda with Winifred and talk about old times, about Kortho, about life, and just to forget about necromancy for a while.

  THE END OF BOOK 2

  BOOK 3: Rise of the Necromancer

  CHAPTER 1

  The Caravan

  The sun was glorious on the day that 103 men, women, and children vanished. It wasn’t just a sunny day, but a cheery one. Ridiculously cheery. The kind of cheery that you wouldn’t expect from folk who were arse-deep in the most hostile place in the queendom but then, they had no forewarning of what was to come.

  Even if they had, would they have listened? These folks had learned to ignore the danger they were in. Like a lion tamer who has gone decades without being eaten, every journey into these harsh lands made them less respectful of its dangers.

  That’s not to say they were slackers. Far from it; they worked hard, and that meant when they got a break, they’d earned it. Whenever the caravan stopped for a while, guitars and lutes were brought out.

  Wagon drivers sat on upturned buckets and they oiled the wheels of their carts and drank water from pigskins. Musicians tuned their instruments until the twangs started to sound more pleasing and chords thrummed out the way they should. Kids roamed the surrounding barrens and collected cactus leaves, fruit, and flowers while staying alert for darkened patches of sand that spoke of water.

  It was the prospect of music that most were excited about, and the musicians didn’t have egos about their tunes. Come one come all was their attitude; if you want to join the song, then do it.

  With one arm around her baby, a mother listened to the opening lyrics of a song and tried to find her place in it, adding her voice when the bard reached the chorus. Sitting on a half-barrel, a mercenary ran a whetstone along his blade, and he recognized a lyric and sang in a soft, self-conscious voice.

  Banned from usual childish games due to potential for water loss through sweating, four boys and a girl crowded around the lute player and made up their own words, which the bard tried his hardest not to grin at them.

  While the others sang, four hired warriors were gathered around an empty weapons box-turned-makeshift-table, playing a game of caravan craps.

  They’d started with four equal piles of coins, but one pile grew taller than the others so that soon it resembled a tower ready to topple under its weight. After one unfortunate tumble of dice, a pony-tailed mercenary banged the table.

  “Keep cheatin’, Alec. Keep doing it and see what happens. You’re dicing with death.”

  His fellow players laughed, and Alec was the loudest. He brayed so long he lost his breath, and when he recovered it he was red-faced.

  “Did your ma never sit you down and explain you got the brains of a cow and a face like its arse? Dicing with death? I’m dicin’ with…well…dice. If you keep letting bison shit plop outta that mouth I’m gonna dice you up. I’ll feed you to the bison and wait at their rear ends with a bucket and say hello to you when you come out. Then we’ll see who’s good at craps.”

  Before long both the guitar and the lute on the opposite sides of camp played in harmony. Boots stomped out a rhythm to match them, sending a vibration through the caravan that worried one bison and made it back away a step. The bison tied to it didn’t move, because this was an old animal well used to the strange dances of its masters.

  Like bees swarming around their honeycomb nest, more and more folks latched onto the song and sang the lyrics. Out of rhythm at first, but slowly moving into one until a unified ditty played out over Sun Toil, the music soothing the desolate cracks of desert that rarely heard sound.

  They sang of pastures green and skies grey, because blue skies were plentiful out here and a person traveling Toil dreamed of clouds. They sang of days before the kingdom became a queendom and they sang about the days after. They sang words rarely heard out there in the bleak endlessness of Sun Toil.

  “Five minutes,” bellowed a voice so loud that it snatched the music out of the air.

  Wheel oilers spun their spokes and listened for good health. The mother sent her children back to the kids’ wagon. The mercenary ran his finger over his sword as if it were the naked spine of a lover lit under the moonlight.

  A figure strode through the center of the camp, snapping an order here, casting a perfectionist gaze there.

  “Don’t groan at me you lousy set of bastards,” said Gunar with a smile on his face, as the caravaners packed up their instruments. “I never promised you days by the beach. We’ll have a longer break when we make Equipoint Rock. You can celebrate like it’s your birthday when I see old Equi sticking out of the ground.”

  Not many people traveled the desert, but those who did always looked out for the rock formation they called Equipoint, given that it usually signaled the halfway mark of Sun Toil, depending on your route.

  The closer it had gotten, the more camp spirits had risen. Everyone knew that Gunar, as rigorous as his preparations had been, was superstitious about the rock and would always stay the night underneath it and make everyone in his company drink a toast or several to good fortune.

  Toasts meant rest. They meant increased water and food rations for one night. Even wine and ale!

  This was a special bonus since Gunar banned beer and wine because of their dehydrating effects…not that it stopped anyone. If you watched the Toil travelers, they would all seem to have strange, bottle-shaped right forearms. You might think that they had hidden something in their sleeve so their leader didn’t see. How about that, huh? But Gunar wouldn’t stop them partaking when they reached the big, beautiful rock. Everyone looked forward to the first sighting of old Equi.

  The caravan spotters, who rode on the roofs of the foremost wagons and scanned the horizon for water, food, and danger, spent the whole day before reaching Equi with their hands against their forehead to block the sun. These were usually teenagers; boys and girls apprenticed to the caravan master.

  “First to spot Equipoint gets five gold,” shouted one spotter.

  “Make it ten and a night with your sister,” said another.

  “Make it a broken nose and eating soup for the rest of your life,” replied the first.

  Every so often a mercenary would slap his horse’s arse and ride level with the
frontline wagons. They’d always look up at the spotters. “Boy,” the mercenaries would say. It was always boy, lad, or more patronizing names when they spoke to the spotters, even the girls. “Any sign of Equi?”

  “None.”

  “You tell me first, you hear? There’s a bronze in it for you.”

  “Got it.”

  And then the mercenary would retreat to his assigned position in the company, careful not to draw the gaze and rebuke of the caravan master.

  Shortly after, only minutes, a different mercenary would ride to the spotters. Another deal would be made, even more bronze would be promised. Then yet another mercenary would approach them. The spotters would make these trades for the whole day until they were promised a gold coin.

  “Idiots,” said one spotter, after a mercenary had left them. “Why do they all need to know first?”

  “The captain has first-come-first-serve on watch duty times,” answered the other. “Nobody wants to be on watch when we’re celebrating, but they can’t call their time until we see Equi. First to notice it will get to make sure he doesn’t pull duty during the sing-song later.”

  “You know, almost every merc’s been up to us. Except for him. The weird one.”

  The boy jerked his thumb to the far-right of the wagon fleet. Right and behind them some, to where a driver sitting at the front of a cart raised his reigns and then lashed them down. The four horses in front of him picked up their pace.

  Next to the driver was a man. He wasn’t an apprentice to the driver, and he wasn’t a trader. He was a mercenary in the respect that he was being paid for his services on this journey rather than being part of the caravan permanently, but he wasn’t like the other mercs.

  The first few days in Sun Toil, the stranger had stubbornly worn his black coat. When the heat finally overcame him, he shed it and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing arms that although weren’t big, bore the toned look that suggested some fighting training. He said little to the rest of the caravaners. He was pleasant enough if you engaged him, but he never offered his own a branch of conversation. Whenever they stopped for a water break, he looked out on the rest of the camp with deep, sad eyes, ones that looked like they’d seen a lot of darkness and soaked it in, and sometimes it looked like it was going to spill out.