The Necromancer Series Box Set

by Deck Davis

  Pup never came and the sun never stopped, and Bear didn’t feel time pass now because his mind was one long stream of pictures. Pictures in his head of the things he and Pup had done, the things they had seen. Pictures of nights curled up in caves, both comfortable and knowing they were safe with each other.

  He’d forgotten what it was like to be alone. Now he would have to know again.

  More hours passed, and by the time darkness wanted to show itself again, Bear’s throat cried for water, his belly cried for food.

  But his mind wanted something else. His mind had turned as dark as night. He thought not of pup anymore but the man. Pup had sought the man, and he had found him, and only a man could have done this.

  Now, Bear would find him.

  For as many suns and moons as his old body had left, he would look for this man. After that, he hoped he would join Cub and Pup. Until then, the desert was his only friend. He might be getting slower and weaker, but Bear knew the land better than any man.

  CHAPTER 19

  It was amazing the damage a poor sleeping position and a shelter fit for a mouse could do to your back. After failing to find a tavern full of whiskey, women, and duck-feather mattresses, Jakub had decided to spend the night in the shelter he had labeled on his map as Back-killer Cavern.

  As much as his shelter was poor, at least the surrounding area had something to offer. Jakub bled it dry. He harvested every cactus he could find, foraging for more flowers, leaves, and even a few more previous prickly pear fruits.

  Desert life was all about priorities. Ultimately, he needed to find a way to travel the hundreds of miles either direction so he could leave Toil. He could head west to go back toward Dispolis and the heart of the Queendom, or head east to reach New Sanzance, the settlement Gunar wanted to trade with. He knew they’d crossed the halfway mark back when he was still with the caravan, so it’d be a shorter journey to the settlement.

  Once he decided which way to go, he needed the means to do it. He hadn’t tested it yet, but he figured that he could walk between twenty and thirty miles per day. He had a long way to travel. He’d need food, but he reckoned he could harvest enough cactus and even hunt the occasional rabbit or fox for that.

  Next were the two biggest worries; water and shelter. He needed a plentiful water supply, and he needed a way to store the water. Next, he needed a portable shelter. If he was walking out of here, he’d have to do the bulk of his traveling in the early morning and evenings, keeping out of the sun when it was at its strongest.

  He could cut this travel down, of course. He might find one of Gunar’s wagons, which Ben could pull. It’d be slow, but it’d solve his shelter problem at the same time. Jakub didn’t work this into his calculation because he couldn’t bank on it. The dust storm had pulverized the caravan, and he didn’t think there was anything left at all.

  This brought him onto another problem; his skin was looking redder than a naughty child’s smacked bottom. He needed the salve or something else he could use. He was sure he could cover his arms and maybe fashion a wrap for his face and head, but it was too hot to travel like that. It’d do for now, but salve was essential.

  While scavenging the area in the coolest parts of the day and staying in his shelter when the sun was up, he’d had a lot of time to think. The biggest question he had was about the caravan; Gunar and a few of the other traders had told him how the dust storms started small and began picking up more and more specks of dust, traveling across the desert and growing bigger and stronger and faster until at their most powerful, the gravel and dust and stones were like little teeth that could shred through anything.

  He didn’t doubt Gunar was telling the truth. He was a skinflint, honestly, and the fact he paid for a storm oracle said a lot. Even so, Jakub couldn’t believe that there was no trace of the caravan.

  Nope, not possible. He’d just been looking in the wrong places.

  So, as the evening had approached on the second day in his new shelter, he’d tapped his glyphline tattoo to make his map appear, and he’d puzzled it out with Ben.

  “I was somewhere south in the explosive cart when the storms hit,” said Jakub, pretending Ben was listening. “I woke up here, and I didn’t see any sign of the caravan. We know that the storms hit primarily from the east, and the locust things seemed to come from the west. If anyone fled the caravan, they would have gone north. It would have been the only safe direction.”

  Ben was quiet, and although Jakub was as sure in his guess as he could be, he needed reassurance. “Ben, if I make a proclamation or ask a question, just make a grunt from now on.”

  The bison half-grunted and half-mooed, and Jakub felt strangely optimistic. He spent the rest of the night trying to sleep, and as soon as there was a slight hint that morning was breaking, he rose.

  He checked his provisions for the journey. He had five prickly pear fruits. That was his only source water, and they’d last him a day. He needed to find something else, the sooner the better. He’d dreamed of waterfalls last night, clear lakes for the two nights before it.

  Food-wise, he was doing better. He’d dried the snakeskin in the sun to preserve it, and he had enough cactus flowers and leaves to last him a few days.

  For soul essence, he had five bars in his necklace; enough for one or two spells, depending on what he used. He still wasn’t sure about that.

  Orientating himself using his map, then tapping the rocks that had been his shelter for the last two nights and thanking them, Jakub headed north.

  Anyone or anything watching then would have seen a necromancer striding in the early dawn with his shirt fastened and with coyote fur on his shoulders, ready to slip over his head when the sun peaked.

  They’d see his reanimating bison walking loyally alongside him with his inventory hanging over its body in a sling he’d fashioned from leftover fur, its skin caked in dust and showing signs of tearing from the harsh desert conditions.

  Above all, they’d see a man who wasn’t ready to die yet, trapped in a place where death came ready or not.

  CHAPTER 20

  He would have sold his soul for a half cup of water. He was sure some necromancer out there had figured out a way to do that, but he was still thinking rationally enough to know it wasn’t a fair trade. The water was worth way, way more.

  Thinking about souls had made him consider one solution; whenever he summoned Ludwig, a portal to the Greylands, the life between life and death, opened. Jakub could then jump into the portal and get into the Greylands. It’d be an escape from the desert, at least.

  There were two problems there.

  For one, the Greylands was full of creatures capable of stealing his thoughts, emotions, and memories with just a single look. That was how dangerous a place it was for him; just one wrong look into a demon’s eyes, and it would wrench information from his brain.

  It might take his ability to walk. It might steal his academy training. It might make him forget the one, glorious night he’d spent with a librarian redhead named Ami, just after he’d left Dispolis to go traveling.

  Secondly, he’d be swapping one hostile, barren, pit of hell for another. Greylands wasn’t a place for mortals. At least not physically; people went there when they died. It wasn’t somewhere with plentiful food and water.

  Of course, there was the chance that some of the caravaners would be there. The dead ones who hadn’t gone to their afterlife yet. Hmm, maybe that was something.

  See, every person who died went to one of the afterlives, barring any interference from those pesky necromancers, of course. But before they died they went into the Greylands, where they waited for their afterlife to be allocated to them. This was done by a complex weighing of the soul by things nobody had ever seen nor could understand, and it wasn’t important to get bogged down in thinking about that.

  Necromancers called this time in the Greylands a person’s Resurrection Window. During the time that they spent in the Greylands, they could be resurrected by
a mancer with appropriate skill levels. After they went to their allocated afterlife, it was too late. The window had shut.

  For a person, an average resurrection window was between three and five days, with five being a rarer case. He’d heard, though, of someone being brought back on their sixth day after death.

  This meant there was a chance - a chance barely bigger than an ant’s balls - that one of the caravaners would still be in the Greylands awaiting travel to their afterlife. If Jakub could go down there, he could ask them what happened to the rest of the caravan and if anyone had managed to break clear of the storm.

  Then again, summoning Ludwig so he could open the portal would waste essence, and it was incredibly unlikely a caravaner was still in the Greylands.

  Nope, it was too risky to waste essence like that. The Greylands was a non-solution. Another to cross off the list.

  Jakub focused on another cheery subject as he walked; his dwindling supplies.

  His snake meat was gone. He’d already popped the last pear fruit and enjoyed the fleeting rush of moisture on his tongue. He’d rationed himself, but even so, he’d eaten half his leaf and flower supplies. The desert, the barren bitch that she was, had refused to offer anything else to him. He was beginning to realize that the cacti near his old shelter had been the exception, rather than the rule. The rule in Sun Toil was, no food and water for miles and miles, and that’s what you got for trying to cross it.

  Staying in his shelter hadn’t been an option because he’d bled the surrounding area dry. Lacking other options, Jakub had gone north.

  Ask anyone who has traveled through a desert and they’d agree on something; there was nothing to see. For Jakub, it meant that he walked for hours and hours across rocks and dirt and sand, and the landscape around change so little it wasn’t a stretch to think he’d just imagined walking. That he was still asleep in his shelter, dreaming of walking instead of actually doing it.

  His body wanted to help him. It wanted to make him feel sure he’d walked as much as he though. Aching legs. Heat trembling over his skin; not burning it because he was covered, but making him itch, breaking sweat from his puckered pores. His mouth sounded like an ancient door hinge turning when he opened his mouth wide, so great was his thirst.

  When the sun was more of a bleeding of orange light than a covering, when the sky darkened and brought its cold gusts, the ground began to change. Checking his map, Jakub was impressed.

  “We covered fifteen miles today,” he told Ben.

  His sense of achievement soured when he realized that represented more miles without finding water, food, or signs of the caravan. If his luck didn’t change soon he wouldn’t need luck anymore, because luck was something that mortal men hope for, and afterlives were luckless.

  His headache was back now. Something beat inside his skull like it was a man trapped in there, beating on cell walls and begging for water. Jakub knew that the pear fruits had done little but prolong his thirst. He was falling down the slope, and the steepest drop was sure to come. If he didn’t find a food water source tomorrow, he would be too weak. Then, there was nothing to do but let the desert claim him.

  Pushing on to find shelter for the night, Jakub crossed into a changing of the guard where the desert was concerned. The rocky plains of the south gave way to more sand. Way, way ahead of him it even rose into dunes, soft and curved like butter rising into waves as a knife cuts through it. He passed Equipoint Rock. It was way east of him but no less visible, standing like a sentinel so it could keep watch over the land around it.

  Jakub thought to head to it and climb the rock to get a view of the desert, but distances were webs of lies here. What looked a mile away could be ten, and Jakub was too tired, too thirsty, too hungry to be lied to. If every man was filled with life force, Jakub was empty. Wine drips at the bottom of a spent barrel.

  Every few steps he scanned the horizon. He prayed to see the glitter of fading sunlight on the surface of a water pool. Then, when the sun finally set, he prayed for the twinkle of starlight, again on the surface of a water pool.

  He didn’t find it.

  The sky was a canvas of pure black, with constellations of stars tucked tight together in sparkling packets. Jakub hadn’t found shelter. For hours, his sore knees and swollen feet cried for him to stop but he kept telling them just ten paces more. Let me just see the horizon. There might be shelter.

  He’d climbed on Ben’s back an hour earlier. The bison was built for pulling, not carrying, and their going was so slow that stars overtook them when they cut arcs through the tarry sky, and Jakub’s head bobbed up and down with the rhythm of Ben’s plodding feet.

  Ten paces more became twenty, forty, a hundred, and they carried on deep into the night and the wind became a chill became a gale became what felt like an ice storm. As much as it was easier to ride Ben, it would quadruple his traveling time. It was a luxury he’d have to give up.

  If tears had formed in Jakub’s eyes then, they would have crystallized in their dryness. But a man trained in death learned not to fear it. Even so, he saw it coming. He felt it with every dry gulp that brought pain in his throat. In every throb inside his skull.

  He wore the coyote fur around his shoulders to stop the wind snaking down his shirt collar. He tucked his shirt into his trousers and stuffed the front with bison hair. Even that wasn’t enough, because the wind attacked his legs, made them feel so heavy that if he fell off Ben, he doubted he would get back up.

  It was too dark now. Shelter could be waiting twenty meters away and he’d go right past it. Time to stop.

  “Woah, Ben,” he said.

  His friend halted. Jakub tried to climb off him with grace, but grace depended on muscle control which depended on energy, and Jakub fell off the bison and hit the ground, smashing his face into the sand. Small mercies, at least. The dunes were softer than rock.

  “Lie down,” he told Ben.

  The bison settled onto the sand. Jakub squeezed up beside him. Ben’s flesh was cold now. Not rotting; at least reanimation slowed that process. But he was cold. And as freezing as he was, Jakub lay right beside him as close as he could get and he was thankful for Ben blocking the wind and he felt a tenderness toward him now, knowing that the animal had saved his life just as Jakub had robbed him of his afterlife.

  He spread the fur over his legs as best he could manage and he tried to adjust it to cover him whole, but it was too short. Either his legs or his head would feel the cold tonight. Knowing how much he’d need his legs, he let them have the fur.

  Awaking from a nightmare, Jakub sat up and shouted through cracked lips, but the sound came out as a moan that even a mouse would struggle to hear. The sun was on him now, cascading down the dunes around him. Ben, dutiful, loyal Ben, was laying down, his weight firmly pressed into the sand and making its mark.

  Jakub wished the morning had brought him renewed energy, but no. Perhaps if man could draw nourishment from the sun like a leaf would, then he would have loved the golden rays of daytime.

  Instead, though it was still early and the sun hadn’t worked itself up to full powers yet, its presence was a reminder that he was completely, irrecoverably, absolutely fucked.

  Water. That was the key. He felt if he could find nourishment for his barren insides, then he could carry on and take care of his other needs.

  But he couldn’t just keep walking. That wouldn’t get him far at all. He needed a direction to head in, not a blind path. Where would he find water in the desert?

  With so little moisture left in his body, he decided to stay out of the sun and think about his problem. Lacking cover, he had Ben stand up, and he crawled underneath him so that the bison’s belly protected him from the sun. Despite knowing the sun would damage Ben’s skin, it wouldn’t hurt him, and it was the best he could do.

  Next, he tried to remember everything he’d learned in the academy and from Gunar. The academy’s survival training for its field mages was basic; since a necromancer could conce
ivably travel anywhere in the queendom, their survival guides focused on this, with lessons such as: rule one: find water, food, shelter.

  Gunar, the sand-seasoned trader, had spared him much worthier words. Jakub raked his mind now and tried to collect them. What had Gunar said about water?

  “Water’s as rare as a whore in a monastery. Canyons and valleys are your best bet. They’re cooler, and they have little potholes and ridges where water collects and the sun might not get its greedy golden teeth on it.”

  There was nary a canyon as far as Jakub could look, just dune after dune, with the sandy hills rising high further north, taller than the tallest tree and making his calves hurt just to think about scaling them.

  He was thinking about this wrong. So had Gunar. Gunar had talked about canyons and water ridges and the importance of getting to them before the sun did, because Gunar believed that Toil was a place of death. The trader traveled back and forth out of it year on year and he saw it as nothing but an obstacle to be conquered.

  That was an easy attitude to fall into when you traveled with wagons of food and water, when you removed the risks of Toil one by one so that you never really heard its pulse, never felt the life force that throbbed in the air, that drifted along the dunes and made sand softly trickle.

  Jakub was beginning to understand. Toil was a system like any other. It had life and death, the tools that a necromancer used to cast his rod. Things survived in Toil; things rarely seen by the eyes of men. Foxes that skittered and scampered and lived years and eons from the glow of civilized lamplight. Bears, coyotes, hares that lived beyond the reach of man’s world.

  Once he got over the fact that it was an inhospitable place to man, that a person wasn’t meant to find joy here, he began to see that Sun Toil swarmed with life. And life was life was life, no matter where or when it existed, and life needed the same things no matter which creature lived it.