The Necromancer Series Box Set

by Deck Davis

  The animals that lived in Toil would need water.

  That was the understanding that came to him then, hunched into a near fetal position under his dead bison. It seemed so obvious a thought that it was almost as nourishing to his body as having water itself.

  It was a long, long day after that. It seemed like the sun was burning its reserves longer and brighter than usual just out of spite, knowing that Jakub had to shelter from it under Ben and couldn’t go acting on his idea until the temperature began to dip.

  He slept in fits, snatching minutes at a time. These naps were always broken by one thing; dreams of water. Drinking it. Washing in an ice-cool cove. Swimming in it; finding a sea and floating out into nothingness.

  He always woke to a sea of a different kind. Hot and dry and yellow, sitting way above him in the sky and giving his skin a rash whenever it breathed its rays on him. His throat was like sand. His lips felt dry enough to fall off.

  When he was awake, he began to have strange thoughts. He heard his father’s voice calling to him, asking where he was. Jakub hadn’t heard that voice since he was a kid, but he recognized it. The weirdest thing was that the voice sounded older, as if his brain had aged it to make the hallucination more realistic.

  Later, as he dozed in and out of consciousness, he saw the academy right in front of him. Close enough that he could have hit it with a rock. A glimmering building of sky-touching turrets and an intricately carved façade. It was empty. Dark windows, untended grass around it, yellow and dead.

  Later, both his father and the academy were gone, and he was glad to be rid of one but found himself wishing for the other.

  Finally, the evening started to come, and Jakub felt a faint chill in the air. He climbed from under Ben, stretched his legs until he rid himself of an aching pain in his knees, and then he packed away his fur and slung his makeshift fur bag around Ben’s neck. He set off north-east first since he didn’t want to go back on himself, nor did he want to tackle the giant dune in the north yet. He didn’t have the energy to conquer that.

  Tonight wasn’t about travel. It was about finding water, and he would cut a circle in this area, he decided. He began his walking arc, heading northeast and scanning the ground and the horizon. Up and down he brought his gaze, usually landing on sand or sky, dirt or cloud. There wasn’t much else for a man’s eyes to see.

  His first few finds weren’t what he needed. The body of a black-tailed jackrabbit, preserved by its burial under a dune and unearthed now as the breeze labored to sweep the sand away. The skeleton of a rat or a squirrel, he didn’t know which, but it didn’t matter because bones wouldn’t find him water. Though, Jakub did pick at them and take a few of the sharper bones, decided you never knew when you needed a skewer.

  Item received: Rat bones

  He rested after four hours. It was getting too dark now, the black swarming in the sky like millions of flies, only with the swirl of the wind instead of a buzz. He’d made a mistake today. He should have forced himself to rise in the morning when it was cool, searched until midday, and then rested and searched again at night. If only the idea had come to him.

  He feared the chill of night as much as the heat of day, but he was becoming a little more practiced in finding places to sleep. After testing the wind with a wet finger, Jakub strayed to the base of a dune.

  He made Ben lie down and then he tucked himself close to his friend and he draped the fur, now ratty and marked with dust, over himself. The bison and the sand dune held the wind back from him, and he slept.

  The sun rose and set on his seventh and eighth days, giving Jakub nothing and taking everything he had. He searched as long as he could, gaining six hours on day seven, seven hours on day eight.

  He felt different when the morning sun of day nine met his eyes. He felt empty. Devoid of soul, nothing inside him to make him go. Thinking about getting up for another say of fruitless travel seemed impossible, and actually getting up even more so.

  He could smell death lurking, but he wasn’t ready to go with it yet. A necromancer was a great prize for Death, and that was why death never rushed things. He did it properly, waiting for his chance. You rarely heard of a necromancer dying near Dispolis, because Death knew that was close enough for his body to be taken to the academy, where a master necromancer might resurrect him.

  But out here, where the jackrabbits and kit foxes and the rats and the squirrels had no idea what an academy was, much less where it was?

  Out here was the perfect place for a necromancer to die.

  If Jakub died out here, there wasn’t a moon’s chance that a master necromancer could make it here to claim his body and perform a resurrection. Right now, Jakub was a prize beyond reckoning for Death.

  He wouldn’t let him have it yet. Lacking the strength to get up, he hooked his arm around Ben’s neck.

  “Stand up,” he told him, keeping as strong a grip as he could. As Ben straightened so did Jakub, and he leaned on his friend and hoped standing would let his blood rush to his legs and let him stay up for a while.

  He looked around. His vision was foggy, as though the burning, wavy horizon was close for him to grab it. He blinked once, twice, and his vision rightened for a minute or two, but not longer. Just as his eyes were struggling so was his mind, and his thoughts were sluggish now.

  Hooking his arm around Ben he walked, human and bison matching steps, Ben going slowly enough that Jakub could let him bear his weight. Every walk in the desert seemed slow because everything looked the same but this walk seemed slower than the rest. Held back by his fatigue, Jakub took the steps of a life-weary old man, and each one felt like one more toward death.

  He passed rock piles that his mind tricked him into believing had been placed in certain shapes by human hands. He never saw the hands that placed them.

  Next, he saw cacti with their leaves plump and ridged. He cut one, tore it, and sucked at the insides but they weren’t as succulent on his tongue as he hoped.

  The sun watched him on his march of death. It was still early for it, it wasn’t ready to blast the desert with its true heat yet, and he felt it watch him walk, then stumble, then almost crawl his way through the desert.

  When thoughts of giving up were less a cloud in his head and more a storm that darkened everything else, Jakub spotted something. Something in the distance.

  It looked like a coil of leather, spotted black and thick like butcher’s sausage meat. It almost blended into the sand, given away only by a slightly darker hue. The longer Jakub watched, the surer he was that this was what he needed.

  He watched it curl in on itself into a tight ball, and then straighten out, straighten up, look around with its head barely larger than a stone, eyes like raisins, twisted tongue trembling.

  A snake.

  The last snake he’d caught was too engorged on meat to move, and it was easy for Ben to crush it. This one would be too quick, and crushing its brain was the opposite of what he needed this time. Crushing its head would make Jakub’s spells useless.

  Seeing the snake had already accomplished one thing in his mind; he felt renewed energy rush through him. Whether it was a phantom feeling made by a brain on the very of death he didn’t know, but he stood upright for what might be the last time, and he breathed through cracked lips, and he felt sunlight shine on skin dryer than the desert ground itself.

  “Stay here,” he told Ben, though his bison wasn’t likely to wander off.

  Jakub approached the snake with dagger and fur. Arcing right, he added more steps to his approaching and it put him behind the snake.

  Now he was careful. Every time it moved, he flinched.

  He stopped. He felt his pulse pound in his ears. Knowing this was his last chance made every coiling and uncoiling and every slither a potential sign of death.

  If the snake fled, he’d never catch it. If it rushed him, it would kill him.

  He gained ground. He reached it and threw his fur over it. Summoning his last bout of energ
y, he rushed the snake and grabbed it its body through the fur, holding it a few inches below the head and pinching it tight as it hissed and spat and tried to go for his face.

  He cut its neck with his dagger. Blood came out in a spurt. Thick, stinking, spitting all over his hands.

  The snake thrashed, nearly broke his grip, but he held on until it was too weak, and until his hands and sleeve made him look like he’d slaughtered a dozen men and the desert ground was wet for the first time in a long time with a red rainfall. It was so tempting to lift the snake to his mouth and slurp as the last drops of blood came out but he held back, unsure if its blood was poisonous.

  Knowing that a snake’s head was still dangerous even when it looked dead, Jakub flung the snake away from him and waited. Its eyes looked no different in death than they had in life. Squinting, smaller than bronze coins, blacker than tar.

  The way its body blended near-perfectly against the desert was a reminder that it belonged here and Jakub didn’t, yet the snake was the first of the two of them to die. How fair was that? That its evolution, that the honing of its body and insides over thousands of years were attuned to Toil, but Jakub was the one to live.

  As he watched, a buzzard swooped overhead. Jakub walked closer to his snake to protect it in case the buzzard wanted easy meat. Way behind, Ben lay on the ground, staring. He blinked. As a reanimated creature, he wouldn’t feel the need to do that. It was just an echo of his former instincts.

  Finally, Jakub judged it was safe, though he still hung back; he’d heard of snakes biting even in death. Some kind of motor reaction. He took out his sword and prodded its head, he put the blade in its mouth and heard the metal tink against its fangs. Nothing.

  Good. As a necromancer, he was confident in pronouncing it dead.

  Next, he spoke the spellword of Reanimate, letting his breath fall on the snake and the essence from his necklace bind with them and give them whatever the magic was that let them whisper life into the dead.

  Its tail was the first part of it to move. Sam, because that was the name he’d decided to give the reanimated snake, unfurled his tail and straightened out. His beady eyes looked just as dead as before, but his tongue tremored and made a gentle whir-whir sound.

  Necromancy EXP gained!

  EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ]

  Essence Remaining: [III ]

  Sam was a beautiful creature, really, now that Jakub wasn’t worried about getting bitten. As long as the span of both his arms when he stretched out, with skin that could blend into the desert ground perfectly if it weren’t for a slightly darker color. Brown and green spots freckled his body, while his underbelly was a strip of soft, pale skin.

  He wondered if Sam still had his venom inside him. He guessed he had; he just wouldn’t produce more, given his new state of death. Still, it was something to think about. If he came across antelope or anything likely to feed him for a while, he could send Sam after it.

  For now, he had more important ideas.

  “Sam,” he said, his tongue thick in his mouth. His gums and his lips and his inner cheeks were so dry that they rubbed together, and each word hurt. “I need you to show me where you last drank water.”

  He followed Sam over desert and dune, beside rock formations shaped like fists bared at the gods, around cracks in the ground that a careless necromancer could easily slip down, though they only went ten or so feet deep. The snake could sliver faster than his step even if Jakub was at his best, so he had to tell Sam, “Slow down. Let me catch up.”

  It was all he could do to lean into Ben and let the bison bear most of his weight. He had been avoiding riding him as much as he could; in Ben’s state, his muscles would weaken and tear at some point, and he’d have to abandon him after that. He wanted to keep him around as long as he could.

  When he’d walked so long that the sun was burning at its fullest, he stopped.

  “Sam, come back a second.”

  He faced a leviathan of a sand dune, one that swept up like a tsunami wave ready to crash on a dock on then tear over land and rip apart a village, only the dune didn’t move save for the odds grains of sand displaced by the breeze. The breeze, by the way, that seemed like it took a rest during the day, when he really needed it to cool him.

  Jakub didn’t think he could scale the dune, but that was where Sam was headed. He couldn’t go around it, either; this beast of a dune covered the horizon.

  He had a choice to make now. He hadn’t seen anything that would serve as a shelter, but he needed to get out of the heat and rest.

  At the same time, he was on the brink now. He would have drunk his tears if he could make himself cry. He hadn’t needed to empty his bladder since yesterday afternoon, and even then, it had barely been enough to wet the sand. Resting up now would kill him.

  So, he had to go on. Following Sam to the snake’s water source was his only option, and that meant conquering the great dune waiting not far ahead. It meant doing it now, under the full glare of the yellow demon in the sky.

  To get ready for it, Jakub used the last of the heat-leave-me-salve that he’d been saving. He spread it over his face, neck, arms, and even rubbed it into his scalp, making his hair a greasy mop. It pained him to see the mental tin empty, but there was no point saving the salve just so someone could find it on his corpse.

  Next, he cut the left sleeve off his shirt and he tied it around his head, covering it from the sun. He thought about eating some of the cactus leaves for energy, but eating made dehydration worse.

  Then again, could it really get worse?

  He was gambling on whatever lay over the dune. He had to. The only other choice was to lay down and die. So, he munched on some of the leaves he’d provisioned, and the momentarily thanks his stomach gave him felt nice.

  “Sam, take me to water.”

  His snake slivered and his bison trundled, and Jakub followed, and the three of them scaled the dune. It took everything he had to reach the top, and it was there he saw what waited below.

  CHAPTER 21

  York, the Hunter

  “Go wait by the horses,” Patton told the kids. The boy and girl fled outside, slamming the door behind them.

  York felt strange being alone with his son. The last time he’d seen Patton he was scrawny. A man, sure, because when you reached sixteen you were a man, but a rakish one. Thin of face and with a stare that would crack a nut. Few skills to boast about, even less gold, but he’d stood in the doorway and told York his news that day.

  “I’m leaving to join the Queen’s men. Met a recruiter in town, and they’re taking me on.” For the first time, York had really seen his son as a man.

  His ma was the one to ask Patton why he’d made a decision like that. York didn’t ask; York was a different person then. Stubborn as hell and all the worse for it. So mulish he wouldn’t ask his only son why he was leaving home.

  He might not have asked, but he got the answer. Patton’s tale of woe; that his hunter father was always away across the queendom. That Patton used to write letters to his father but York never answered them.

  “Never got ‘em,” York answered, but that was a lie. He just didn’t even spare his son the effort it’d take to put quill to paper. For that, he’d be sorry until the end of days, even if they were starting to mend their relationship now.

  “That doesn’t mean you have to run out on your ma,” York told him. Patton looked at his mother lovingly. “I’m not runnin’ out on anything.” Then he gave York his nutcracker stare. “I’m seeing your sorry arse for the last time. But I’ll be back to see ma. I need to make my own way.”

  Patton’s way took him through military training and a year into the Queen’s Eastern Firefields campaign, learning how to be a soldier until he’d finished learning and he was ready to rise in the ranks. He’d never be a general, but the higher-ups reckoned Patton could get a badge or two pinned to his breast.

  Then a gods-damned idiot apprentice alchemist had given Patton a powdere
d kettle drum so they could blow their way through some rubble on a mountain pass. He’d gotten the powder mix wrong, cut the fuse too short, and Patton got his arse blown twenty feet over the mountainside.

  He survived with a broken leg and fractured pelvis. Since he hadn’t quite earned officer rank yet they didn’t waste their healer’s mana on him, and they left his breaks to heal the natural way.

  Which, of course, meant they healed like hell, and now his leg sang in agony whenever it got too cold.

  Patton had left the queen’s service after a year, and he didn’t come home because he didn’t want York to see him crawling back. Instead, he got a job with a tanner. Sweeping his floor, carrying stock to market. That turned into an apprenticeship, and the apprenticeship turned into becoming a full-time tanner, and all the time he spent around the tanner and his family led to Patton marrying the man’s wife.

  She was gone now, though. Disease ate away at her at much too young an age. The healers couldn’t say what disease it was, and they were as powerless to heal it as they were to name it.

  That left York and Patton with something in common, to York’s mind, and both would have given the last drop of their blood that it wouldn’t be so. York felt like a bastard for even thinking it, but he’d have gone back to the days of being alienated from his son, if it meant that his love could come back. She was everything in his life.

  But time only moved one way, and York tried to count his gratitudes. That Patton had come to reconcile. That he had two beautiful, lively grandchildren. That maybe his days wouldn’t be as lonely as he’d thought.

  York faced his son now. He saw lots of his mother’s features in him. He never used to have them; he’d grown into them and taken on her strong look.

  “Have you had thoughts on a house?” he asked. “Gostin village doesn’t have a tanner. And I heard that Bertin the smithy is moving west. You might be able to get his house and studio for a good price, turn it into a tannery.”