The Necromancer Series Box Set

by Deck Davis

  After climbing down the rocks he ran at a half-crouch, keeping himself small. After closing a quarter of the distance, he stopped dead.

  He could see something now. As he’d suspected, the caravaners were in a guarded wagon. But in the center of the camp, near the bonfire, there was something Jakub could use; a body lying on the ground.

  Given the body wasn’t in a wagon, he assumed it was a slaver. Maybe one of the caravaners had managed to hide a weapon or something. Either way it was a body, hopefully dead, and it was Jakub’s ride into camp.

  Focusing on it, Jakub spoke the Death Puppet spellword. A feeling overtook him, a sudden lurch followed by a rush as if he had just been thrust off a tower.

  Though his vision went dark he felt his consciousness being thrust across the desert, before coming to an abrupt stop.

  Necromancy EXP gained

  EXP to next lvl: [III ]

  He felt different now. Heavier. Warmer. The feeling was like waking mid-dream, swimming to consciousness but not sure what was real and what was a figment of his wandering mind.

  His eyes were shut, and he knew that he’d used Death Puppet correctly and that it had transferred him from his own body into this one, a corpse lying next to the bonfire in the middle of the slaver camp.

  Now he needed to get a sense of who was nearby and what was going on. The longer he stayed in the body the more essence it’d use, and he didn’t have enough to waste playing dead.

  With the need to act came a slight problem; the people around him assumed he was dead. If he suddenly got to his feet, it’d probably cause a reaction. Most people, when encountering a corpse rising from the ground, tended to act a little unpredictably.

  He opened one eye slowly, bit by bit, until light leaked into his vision. He saw waves of red and orange flickering over wood, and knew he was facing the fire. It was as though letting the flames into his sight awakened all his senses, and he was bombarded with the smell of burning wood, with sweat and piss and shit, with the iron stench of spilled blood.

  Voices made a chorus around him, none of them singing from the same sheet. Twice he heard Gunar’s name mentioned, possibly by his wife. Each time she spoke a slaver would tell her to shut her mouth.

  From listening, he could tell most voices were coming from behind him, and there was a mix of slavers and caravaners concentrated in and around the wagon. This was more than a little annoying, since he needed to get to the wagon to get them free.

  With his essence draining, his own body currently defenseless and empty some ways across the desert, it was time to do something.

  He made a fist with his new hand and felt his knuckles crack. He shifted his left leg, and then the right, trying to quickly grow used to the weight distribution of a new body. This was the hardest thing about Death Puppet; stepping into a corpse wasn’t like trying on a new pair of trousers, it was like trying to ride an unfamiliar horse with your arms tied and eyes shut.

  When he finally pushed himself up to his feet and he stretched his arm out above his head and felt his limbs pop, he turned and took a look around.

  And then a silence fell over the camp.

  Every person stared at him. Thirty or so faces, some belonging to slavers, others to caravaners. Eyes widened, mouths opened in silent gasps of astonishment.

  Helena as the first to speak. “He’s alive!” she shouted. “Gunar’s alive!”

  Gunar?

  He was in Gunar’s body?

  A wave of guilt stabbed him now. Whatever had happened, Helena’s husband was dead, and he’d given her hope that it was not so.

  And to think he’d worried that his new Wilting Touch was a corruption of necromancy. It turned out that the corruption wasn’t in a man’s powers, but how he used them.

  At the very least, he wouldn’t use Gunar in vain. With essence bleeding out of him, Jakub reached into the fire and grabbed a burning log in each hand. His mind flinched at the flame and expected heat, but this wasn’t his body and those feelings of pain wouldn’t reach him.

  Setting sight on the slavers near the wagon, Jakub charged at them, reaching one in time to swing a flaming log at him, crunching his nose and setting his beard alight.

  An arm grabbed him but he swung with the other log now, hitting someone behind him. He didn’t stop to check who.

  Instead, he pushed himself away, got to the edge of the wagon and looked through the bars at the terrified prisoners.

  “Whatever happens, don’t leave the wagon until it’s over,” he said. “I’ll open the door, but don’t leave yet.”

  A hand grabbed his shoulders. He shrugged it off. Helena reached for his empty hand, but he slipped her grasp. Raising the fiery log, he smashed it against the padlock on the cage door again and again until it shattered.

  With that, his essence left him, and his mind was catapulted all the way back across the desert.

  There, he awoke in his own body. It hadn’t been a smooth journey, and he felt like his mind was a ball bearing rolling side to side in his skull, and the feeling made his stomach protest. He retched once, then breathed and held it in.

  He got to his feet. The camp was in chaos now, one man running around the bonfire with his head aflame while the others tried to waft it out with blankets. The wagon door was open and a figure stood halfway out of it. Slavers were torn between guarding the prisoners, extinguishing the burning man, and inspecting the corpse that had just risen, attacked them, and died again.

  There had never been a more opportune time for a lusk to breach.

  Len, Jakub commanded, with a thought. Rise from your sandy grave.

  CHAPTER 39

  York, Bear, Jakub, Helena

  A boom roared out from the camp due east, causing the horse to whinny and raise its legs. York held the reins with one hand and stroked its mane with the other.

  “Hush, fella. It’s okay,” he said, but his dry throat didn’t lend much of a soothing tone to his words.

  Maybe it was because he didn’t believe them. The boom worried him, and in his heart, he knew this could never be okay. The camp had caused him enough worry; the cloth and compass had pointed this direction until York saw flames, and it was only when he got closer that he realized this was a camp of twenty-something people with wagons and horses.

  So many people out here meant only a couple of things, neither of them good.

  The explosion was altogether worse because not many things in Toil could cause such a riot. Either the idiots at the camp had just thrown a barrel of gunpowder on the fire, or…

  A second boom shattered the peace, this louder than the first. His horse reared so high that York tumbled off and smashed onto the ground, knocking the wind out of him.

  He got to his knees and sucked in half a breath at first and then more as his lungs would allow it, while clenching his fists through the pain. At the same time, he watched the camp in amazement.

  Something rose up from the ground from directly under the fire. It was a monstrous shape, twenty feet tall but too dark to make out against the pitch black of night.

  As it breached the ground it sent fire logs flying in every direction, some smashing into the sides of wagons, the flames leaping onto the canvas sides and setting them alight. As flames tore through the tarpaulin the added light illuminated the whole camp, and York saw everything.

  A bunch of folks running this way and that, some collecting weapons, others trying to douse flames.

  A wagon full of people, some of them climbing out, others hunching back into the corner, petrified.

  Two monstrous gods-damned lusks rampaging through the camp, one taller than a bell tower and making the ground shake with every jump, the other nimbler, leaping across camp and tearing into any poor bastard who got too close.

  York had a mind to help them, and he also had a mind to stay the hell away. It was hard to know which mind to listen to. In the split second he’d had to assess the situation, he felt he had a pretty good idea what was going on. That was part
of a hunter’s play deck; there weren’t many situations where you had the luxury of time to make a decision.

  Way he saw it, the folks in the wagon were prisoners. Otherwise, what were they doing in something that looked like a damn cage?

  That’d make the bastards running around camp their captors. Slavers, mostly likely. They could have been queen’s men taking bounties someplace, but that didn’t seem probable as there was no way they’d cut through Sun Toil.

  You only went through Toil to avoid being seen. And you only avoided being seen if there was something you didn’t want others to find.

  The creatures leaping to and fro through camp and tearing limbs from sockets and heads from necks were lusks. Big bastard lusks on a gorging frenzy, too dumb to know when they were full and it was time to stop eating. They’d tear through every person in camp, drinking blood and eating flesh until their stomachs were ready to burst. Whichever god mixed a pea brain with a predator’s body was cruel, cruel son of a bitch.

  Then again, maybe there were different gods up there. There were different afterlives, so why not different gods? Maybe one of them had arranged things just so York would be right here, right now.

  Maybe he wasn’t here to kill an old bear after all. He was here so that on one horrible night, when a bunch of slavers stopped for night camp and lusks decided it was time to feed, York would be there to help a bunch of innocent souls get free.

  Feeling renewed, he got to his feet. He approached the horse and stroked it and whispered soothing gibbering sounds to it, and when it looked calm enough he took his things.

  First his crossbow, which he slung around his shoulder. Then his machete, which he tucked into his belt. Finally, he made sure his bolt wand was tucked into his belt, and then he set off toward camp.

  Bear reached the camp of men just as the old ones broke from the ground. He stayed there on all fours, barely in reach of the spots of hot light that were eating the men’s things, their skin orange and red and yellow and crackling like the clouds before lightning.

  Whether it was hot light or some kind of animal the men could usually control it and use it to cook flesh, but today the hot light was wild, spreading itself across the camp, sometimes jumping onto men who got too close, and the air filled with the smell of hair burning in the sun, and the deep stench of blood.

  If Bear wasn’t still full of lizard blood this would have sent him into a frenzy.

  The frenzy of this evening belonged only to the old ones. The ones that had lived under this land long before Bear, and who left their marks by parting the very ground itself, and who he had learned to be careful of.

  Thinking of this made his side hurt, as though a long-healed scar was opened afresh, and he remembered the time that an ancient one had broken from the ground near a watering hole and tried to take him deep under the soil.

  So he knew enough to realize that he could sit and wait and let the old ones leap back and forth, tearing the men apart. As he did, he watched men sink to their knees and try to hold their bellies in place with their hands even as blood seeped out.

  He heard screams that sounded like pups screeching for their mothers, but these came from the throats of men. He heard rushes of wind as the old ones darted across camp like shadows.

  Were any of these men the ones who had hurt Pup? Or were they all the ones? If one man had done it, and the rest belonged to his pack, should he punish them all?

  He felt that if he watched and waited, the old ones would leave nothing for him. He almost made his mind to charge, when he stopped.

  Sniffing the air, he couldn’t believe it.

  One smell drifted free of the stench of hot light and delicious stink of blood. It was the smell of a man, but one he recognized, one that stirred in his gut and made his paw throb where he’d lost a claw.

  Sure enough, a man walked around the edges of the camp. Tall, big like Bear, but also old like him. Whiskers turning the color of the clouds, skin sagging and marked by many suns.

  Bear felt anger brew hot in his belly, as if someone had put the lizard blood in his gut under hot light and then let it slosh around. At the same time, he felt something else, a sharp feeling. Pictures came to his mind, ones of the last time Bear had seen this man.

  Cub had been alive then. The first cub, the cub of his flesh.

  Bear’s mind was burning with hot light then, and it spread so fast that he couldn’t control it anymore and pictures of cub mixed with the sight of this man now, old as he was, walking around the camp with a weapon in front of him that bear recognized, not scared by the lusks or the screaming.

  He let out a deep, low growl that shook through his skin and fur, and then he charged, feeling like a young, strong bear again, feeling the dirt break under the crash of his feet, his gaze set on the man and his old skin and knowing how easily it would tear.

  The man turned just as he reached him, and he leveled the weapon that had once hurt him so deeply, but he was too late. Bear was on him already.

  Gunar had lived through his throat being cut and through losing pints of blood. Helena had seen it herself, she’d watched him stand and break the wagon lock.

  And then he’d fallen again, just like that, as if some mystical energy had given him one last chance to save them, and then abandoned him. Grief was pressing at her not just in her head but all through her body, as though every nerve ending in every limb shook with the loss. The very last thing to do now was to surrender to it. Not now, not with Beate and everyone else in anger.

  Someone grabbed Helena’s wrist and squeezed so hard that it hurt. It was Beate, the scared little girl who’d just seen slaver cut her father’s throat open, who had seen lusks breach the soil once and now again.

  Could a young mind recover from two horrors like that? She had to hope that a child’s mind was like a child’s body, and that it would heal better than an older person’s.

  That wouldn’t matter if they died tonight. The slavers hadn’t harmed them until this evening – don’t think about Gunar, she told herself – but the lusks wouldn’t be so cautious. The lusks didn’t care if damaging them brought their value down.

  So Helena remembered something her father told her. He was a lieutenant in the king’s army, returned by the time it became the queen’s.

  The cautious man thinks before he acts and he sees his prize slip from his grasp. The prudent man acts and opens his fist when it is full.

  Her father might not have spoken to her ever since she married Gunar, but his words would help her now.

  She squeezed Beat’s hand. “Give me a minute.”

  “Will we be okay?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  An older woman crawled from the back of the wagon. It was Bina, ‘Fat’ Rhett’s wife. Fat Rhett had been torn in two by a lusk, rendering his nickname not only cruel but inaccurate, and Bina had barely spoken a word since then.

  Now, unlike the others who huddled together and sat with their knees draw against their chests and mumbled to themselves, she looked fearless. Was that the way it worked? When the worst happened, nothing else could touch you? Helena didn’t feel like that yet. She could feel her emotions throbbing, held back only by her need to keep Beate safe.

  “Here, girl,” said Bina, and drew Beate close and stroked her hair. She glanced at Helena and arched her right eyebrow, and Helena understood.

  So now Helena took in the mayhem of the camp. The lusks moved like shadows, if you took your gaze off them they were gone and would only signal their appearance when selecting their next target and then chomping their great jaws around them and tearing arms from shoulders, heads from necks, sending out a spray of blood that looked oil black in the night-time.

  The bonfire had died on the ground but the flaming logs scattered by the lusks had lit the slavers’ wagons, and canvas burned in the night like the wicker men that people who lived in the lower-south mountains set aflame outside their houses to ward away demons.

  As the fire ate through
canvas and tarpaulin it sent thick plumes of smoke up, which the wind then took hold of and spread through camp, and the men and women not looking for weapons or somewhere to hide would stagger, high on the fumes, and then sink to their knees and cough their guts out.

  One man retched, vomited, and then cleared tears from his eye, only to see that he’d vomited on the lusk-ruined corpse of his comrade. He fell forward them, falling onto his dead friend, and he cried.

  Another slaver strode through the camp butt-naked, his skin oiled and rippling with muscle. He held his hands in the air, spreading his arms wide.

  “Salvatore, sie alormo!” he bellowed, and energy seemed to tremble around him then. It pulsated, as though it was a force ready to be unleashed.

  “Eyan!” cried a voice. “Watch out!”

  But the warning came too late, and before the naked man got a chance to use his energy, a lusk leaped on him and bit his head clean off.

  Helena did her best to ignore everything she saw, heard, and smelled, and she looked for escape. The fire had ruined the slavers’ wagons, but the caged wagon she was in was undamaged. She just needed horses to pull it, and then they could leave here.

  Wait. They’d need supplies, too. Food and water at the least, or they’d just be fleeing one death only to ride into another, slower one.

  She gave one last look to Beate and Bina. “Stay here. I won’t be long.”

  Without waiting for an answer she hopped off the wagon. At first, her legs hurt and felt weak, and after days of only getting to stand up so slavers could escort her to urinate, it was hard to get her muscles to answer.

  She only took a step when a column of fire rushed at her. She ducked and fell onto her arse, only to see a slaver, madness written on his face, with a flaming piece of wood, swinging it at everything that moved near him in case it was a lusk.

  Helena backed away and then got up and made an arc around him. She fixed her sight on the slaver wagons, especially on the outermost one that was barely aflame now, and might have salvageable supplies inside.