The Necromancer Series Box Set

by Deck Davis

  Keeping to the shadows, keeping low, she made her way around camp. Halfway there a growl – no, a roar – rose into the air, the fury in it enough to chill her blood.

  Lusks didn’t roar. What in all the Toil gods’ names had been sent to hurt them now?

  It didn’t matter, there was no time. She carried on until she reached the wagon.

  With the rest of them ablaze the light here was blinding, the heat searing, and Helena could barely stand it. She felt like it would melt her clothes to her body. She managed just a few seconds there before she had to retreat to where the breeze was cold enough.

  Damn it all to the afterlives. She couldn’t leave without supplies, because she’d be leading her people to a death ride. But the longer they stayed, the more chance the lusks worked their way through the slavers and then focused on the easier prey in the prisoner wagon.

  So she ran to the wagon, opened the tarpaulin, and she found a crate of water pigskins, all full. The heat from the other wagons blasted her now, so hot that it made her eyeballs hurt. She opened one pigskin and emptied it over her head, dousing herself.

  That done, she lifted the crate of skins and set it on the ground, and she hefted a box of grains, seed, and bean sacks down too. They were too heavy to carry together, but after two trips they would be ready. She would take four of the horses tied to the rocks near camp, and then hitch them to the wagon.

  This could work. Horses, water, food. Escape might be possible. And then, miles away in the light of day she could explain to Beate that Gunar wasn’t coming back. That…

  “Going somewhere?” said a voice. “It’s rude to leave without saying goodbye to your host.”

  Helena had no time to answer before she felt something cold and sharp stab into her.

  Jakub found safety in the shadows and he tried to get the balance of things before deciding who to help, who to kill, and who it was too late to do either to.

  The longer he watched the more the horror turned from a creeping feeling to an intoxicating one, like burning oil poured into his soul and left to cool so it clogged him up. He watched men flailing on the ground, some pressing wounds on their stomachs to stop their insides plopping onto the ground. Slavers standing back to back, faces set in terror, slashing their swords at anything that moved their away.

  Some slavers had fled now, heading away from camp in all directions. The fiery wagons on the outer reaches of camp lit their escape, and Jakub saw the fleeing folks fall one by one as lusk-shaped shadows crashed into them.

  But it was through watching this that Jakub began to feel worry stir in him. Worry turned to fear, and it almost turned to panic before he got hold of it.

  His lusk wasn’t the only one terrorizing camp. There was another, larger one, one that Jakub couldn’t control. Had Len tunneled into it net and woken it? Had Jakub allowed this greater lusk to breach?

  It meant that he had to help the caravaners escape right now. Most of the wagons were already destroyed by flames, but the one holding the caravaners was far enough away to escape the fire. Now he just needed to find horses to hitch to it.

  As he swept his gaze around camp, he thought he saw horses hitched to rocks in the north, some ways away. But then something else drew his attention.

  A mass of fur not far to his left. It was a bear, the one he’d seen charge into the oil-whip woman in what seemed like weeks ago.

  The bear was on the ground, pinning a man underneath it and snapping with its jaws and slashing with its paws in a frenzy of violence. Jakub knew the poor bastard was beyond saving.

  Then something happened.

  The man raised his right arm. He held something in his hand, though Jakub couldn’t see what at first. Light gathered around whatever it was, and by the time it built to a sphere and then exploded, Jakub understood.

  The crack of the bolt wand met with the stench of burning mana. An explosion rocked the bear back, sending him flying feet away and then crashing to the ground. Jakub stared in astonishment as the man slowly got to his feet and then turned his head so that the flame caught his face.

  Jakub couldn’t believe it. It was York, the hunter he’d met all those years ago.

  Seeing a familiar face, even one from distant memories, broke something in him. He felt tears press against his eyelids, trying to come out. He held them back and he started toward York.

  A shape crashed into the hunter. A growling lump of fur, claws, and teeth, attacking the man with a fury Jakub had never seen before. It raised its claws again and again, tearing into his flesh as though it were digging a hole in the ground.

  Jakub felt his instincts fire. He focused on camp now, on the corpses strewn all over it, and he drained the essence from them one after another until his soul necklace filled.

  Then he sprinted to the bear. Up close the beast seemed bigger than was possible, and the utter fury with which it carved York open scared Jakub deep, deep to the core of his being, stirring a primal fear that made his brain work differently, sending thoughts of just fleeing and leaving everyone behind. To save himself, not York, not the caravaners.

  Jakub remembered his academy training. He dredged those lessons up, heaving them from the waters of his mind like a sailor lifting an anchor, and he brought those lessons up to deck and remembered the words of his mentors like Kortho and Irvine, and how a necromancer could use death, could respect it, but must never fear it.

  Emboldened, Jakub reached out and placed two hands on the bear’s shoulder, and he felt his corruption leak out from his as Wilting Touch spread from palms to fur.

  The bear’s fur turned grey and brittle and it began to fall out in clumps, until Jakub was gripping bare skin. The skin reddened and tuned a nasty shade of green, forming welts and letting off a stench of rot and pus and blood.

  The bear struck out with its right paw, hitting Jakub in the face and jolting his brain loose.

  He staggered in a daze then, with the echo of what sounded like bells sounding again and again in his skull. Blood leaked from his nose, and his vision dimmed so much that he could only barely make out the bear rearing up high in front of him.

  He drew his sword again, but he could barely grip it and it fell to the ground. So he pulled his dagger from his sheath, and again the bear’s strike had been so powerful that Jakub could barely control himself, and he dropped the dagger.

  Finally, his legs gave way and he fell to his knees.

  The bear took two great strides to stand in front of him, and Jakub, for the first time, saw death not as a necromancer, safe and removed in the audience, but as a player in its theatre.

  His vision cleared enough for him to look the beast in the eyes and meet death without shying away.

  A bolt speared through the bear’s throat. Blood burst out and covered Jakub’s face and went in his mouth so he could taste it on his tongue.

  Behind it, a few feet away, stood York. Holding a crossbow in his hands, but drenched in blood and staggering and gasping, ready to drop.

  The bear spun around, choking, and it crashed toward the hunter holding the crossbow. When it was on him it tore at him with its paws one last time, and both fell to the ground together and then were still.

  He wiped the blood from his eyes. He picked up his sword and crossed to the hunter and bear. Neither of them was moving now, and the way they died made it look like they were embracing, and Jakub felt sorry for them both.

  Now he faced the camp and the wagon, and his heart almost burst when he saw the biggest lusk charge straight into the cage and tip it onto its side, making the caravaners inside tumble onto their backs. The lusk bit at the bars, ripping them apart like matchsticks so it could get to the people inside.

  Helena fell back against the wagon. The pain was sharp and shallow, the knife only cutting an inch before she escaped it. She could feel her blood wet against her shirt, but for now, she worried not about the wound or even the knife, but the man holding it.

  She stared at her husband’s killer, at his
face that was brutish and feminine at the same time, at the slaver mark etched deep into his right forearm, at the daggers he held in each hand that caught the glint of the flames and seemed to sparkle.

  Would he kill her there and then, rather than let her go? With most of his men dead, was thoughts of her value on his mind anymore?

  “Grab the water and grain,” he told her. “We’ll take the cage wagon. Bastard lusk has tipped it, but we can get it right. I’ll draw the thing away but I need you to get everything ready.”

  Words hid from her for a second.

  Not much earlier, this man had cut her husband’s throat and was going to sell Helena and her daughter into slavery. Now he was helping her escape?

  She understood him then. He was a practical man above all else. Gunar had led them into Toil year after year, even knowing the risks, doing it because it was the only way he saw to support them as he wanted. Hips Maguire was taking risks of his own, doing things he knew were wrong because it was the only way he could see. This, helping her escape, was pure practicality.

  She nodded at him. “The grain crate is stuck. Hand me something to cut it free.”

  Hips passed her the dagger from his right hand, and Helena took it and reached over to the grain sacks.

  “Which way will we go?” she said.

  “East. There’s a gully three hundred miles that leads out of Toil and onto the border of the Killeshi lands. I’d avoid it normally, but we’re beyond that.”

  “Three hundred miles east. Got it,” she said.

  And then she turned in an arc, catching Hips with the dagger and shoving it into his throat, cutting through skin and tendon and forcing herself not to falter when she could feel the resistance from the gristle in his neck.

  Hips lost his balance and fell into the wagon, smashing his skull into the corner. He slumped onto his back and he died there, eyes open, blood gushing out of his throat and wetting the Toil ground just as Gunar’s blood had earlier.

  Helena grabbed the second dagger and put it on top of the pigskin crate and then she headed toward the wagon with it, taking only a few steps before Hips’ words really hit her.

  The lusk had tipped the wagon and destroyed the bars, and now it had stuck its head into the opening and was tearing its jaws at the trapped people inside.

  “Beate!” she screamed.

  Jakub drained soul essence from every corpse he passed, feeling a flicker of regret that by doing so, he was robbing them of their chance to go to an afterlife. Two things banished this; his academy-trained erosion of empathy, and the knowledge that these bastards were slavers.

  He reached the crater in the middle of camp where the lusks had emerged. Just ahead was the giant lusk, a leviathan of a creature that seemed to give off dread in waves, and Jakub felt like they were as real as the wagon smoke when he breathed it in.

  With most slavers dead, the lusk was the only thing between him and the caravaners, but what a thing it was.

  A full two-span bigger than Len, with teeth like bloodied diamonds and skin that would deflect the bolts from the most powerful crossbow. With every second it snapped another caravaner in its jaws, crunching through flesh and bone with ease.

  Jakub raised his hands. His shirt sleeves fell back to his biceps, revealing his glyphline tattoos on his forearm, etched in skin and lit by the dying wagon fires.

  He spoke the spellword of Reanimate. He said that word once, twice, then again and again, each utterance casting waves of blue light out from his soul necklace and dispersing it all through the camp until the light was flying out and exploding like fireworks.

  Bodies began to rise. Bodies covered in wounds and blood. Bodies with bones sticking from torn skin, faces mauled, and clothes singed and hanging in shreds. The dead slavers whose essence he hadn’t taken got to their feet, puppets dragged from death by his necromancy and ready to serve him, once enemies but now his only allies.

  He pointed at the lusk, and his dead army of a dozen slavers lumbered toward the beast. They had no fear now; death had robbed them of that, and Jakub was glad.

  “Weapons,” he told them, and they picked up whatever was nearby, some finding discarded swords, others grabbing only the blackened remains of charred wood.

  As they reached the lusk, Jakub looked around, finally spotting Len resting on his haunches, making a piecemeal of a headless body, with blood staining his mouth and teeth.

  The lusk, he commanded.

  In one leap, Len the lusk was upon his older, bigger brethren, biting and clawing at his thick hide. The undead slavers surrounded the lusk’s lower part and they hacked and lashed and clubbed, finally earning the monster’s attention so that it left the caravaners and faced its new enemies instead.

  This was a chance to escape. If he could shake the caravaners from their panic, they could tip the wagon back over, gather what horses were still hitched to the rocks, and try to flee over the desert.

  Even as he had the thought he knew it was wrong. Their escape would only be temporary because Len and the undead couldn’t kill the monster, and this creature was in a blood frenzy now.

  It would follow their wagon for miles over the sand, and the horses could not outrun it, and the sight of this giant would stir panic in them and they wouldn’t respond to any driver.

  No, he had to finish it.

  Knowing this to be true, Jakub gripped his sword in his hand and he swallowed back his fear. He ran at the lusk. When he reached it, he commanded one of his undead slavers.

  “Kneel.”

  The lusk lashed out with a giant limb, scattering five undead, decapitating one of them. The severed head rolled along the ground until it banged into another corpse.

  Jakub climbed on his kneeling slaver and used him as a step, and then he gripped the ridges between the lusk’s skin and climbed up it as though it were a rock.

  When he reached the top he raised his sword, tensed his muscles, and at that moment he felt all of his fear and panic leave him.

  He drove the sword down true, stabbing through the lusks head.

  The lusk leaped up, but it could only gain a few feet of air now, weakened by the cuts and stabs of the slavers, hurt by the giant wound in its skull.

  It stepped forward once, teetered for balance, and then crashed down.

  Jakub steadied himself and then approached it again as it thrashed on the floor, avoiding its desperate death strikes with its limbs.

  He raised his sword again and brought the tip down into its brain, stabbing it so deeply that he couldn’t wedged it free.

  The lusk went limp. Jakub stumbled back, his energy finally leaving him, and he couldn’t help but sit for a moment, covered in sweat and blood, smelling the stench of iron and piss and shit in the air, hearing the cries and low pleading of the caravaners who didn’t realize they were safe now.

  Then the lusk stirred, flicking its legs, trying to right itself, and Jakub didn’t have the energy to lift his sword again.

  Sever its head, he commanded.

  His army of undead took their swords and logs and they hacked at the creature until it could no longer move and it was as dead as the desert which it had called home for so long.

  CHAPTER 40

  Dawn broke over a desert drenched in blood. It dripped into the lusk cracks in the ground and went deep into their tunnels and warrens, where the smaller lusks, ones too tiny to breach, lapped at it and wondered when their matriarch would return.

  It seeped from the bodies of the fallen; the slavers, caravaners, and their poor horses. It covered the living so that some had no skin to be seen, only costumes of crimson that they were too shocked to wipe away as they staggered through camp in states of fugue, some tripping over the bodies of their comrades, others managing only a few steps before collapsing to their knees and retching.

  Seeing this, Jakub decided it wasn’t the best time for a bunch of undead slavers to be stumbling through the camp, so he commanded them to walk away for a hundred paces or so and wait for
him.

  As his army shambled forth, Jakub felt tired, and he knew that if he gave in to it, there’d be no rousing him for a week. There was so much to do; so many people to help, supplies to find. He couldn’t rest yet.

  “Out, out,” cried a voice, and it was a voice Jakub recognized.

  He pushed himself to his feet and he wiped his hand on his shirt, leaving a trail of red down it. He spotted a pigskin nearby and he put it to his lips and drank until his stomach couldn’t take any more, finally feeling a chill of shock overtake him

  He sat on the ground for a moment, trembling, his stomach gurgling. He wet his hands and he wiped his face, and his palms were covered red. He swept his hair back, splashed more water on his face, and then he stood up.

  Helena was by the prisoner wagon. The side of her shirt was ruined by blood, and it was padded out with a rag dressing tied around her waist. She looked older this morning, as if a decade’s worth of suns and moons had passed in one night.

  The wagon was turned on its side, the wooden cage in ruins. She held out her hand and stayed steady as one by one the caravaners clambered out. Some stayed back, pressed as far away as they could, terrified to leave what once had been a prison but they now saw as their only sign of safety.

  Gunar’s wife held out her hands but those who remained, a young boy, old man, and a woman with two children clinging to her, wouldn’t come. Helena’s forehead was wet with sweat, and her hands too were stained with blood, the mess reaching up her wrists and to her forearms.

  Jakub staggered over, desperately needing rest but knowing it was a way away yet.

  “It’s safe,” he told them as he approached. “The slavers are dead. The lusk is dead.”

  The young boy shook his head. “You don’t know!”

  Jakub sighed. He walked to the dead lusk and he grabbed it by the antennae and dragged its severed head across the ground until they could see it. He tried not to show how much it tired him but even its head felt as heavy as a boulder.