Katie’s jaw dropped, and she whirled around. “Are you a complete idiot? We’re trying to help you.”
The villager sneered. “We don’t need your help… tiny necromancer!”
Katie bristled. Tiny necromancer? Maybe they should let the ogres eat that villager. And she wasn’t tiny – she was young. There was a difference. Sure, she was a little bit short for her age, but she was still within the normal range. Plus, she had years of growing left. She might even end up taller than her master if everything worked out.
“I’d say that you do need our help, seeing as how you’re about five minutes from ending up as ogre food,” Timmy replied. Katie giggled. Her master had always had a talent for stating the obvious. He stepped aside and waved the villager forward. “Although if you want to handle this yourself, well, we’ll be on our way. We wouldn’t want to burden you with our necromancy.”
The villager opened and closed his mouth several times. He sagged. “Good point. I’m going to stop talking now… and I take back my comment about you and the demon world.”
“Thank you.” Timmy turned back to the ogres. “As part of my attempt to be less of a criminal, I’m going to be very generous and give you the chance to walk away. If you leave and never come back, then that’ll be the end of it. You’ll get to live. If you insist on trying to eat these fine people, I’m afraid that you’re not going to like what happens next, mainly because it’ll involve all of you ending up dead.”
“Why help them?” one of the ogres growled. He had three heads, which meant that he was one of the oldest and most intelligent ogres present.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. They’re not my villagers, but the principle is the same. I can’t stand by and watch people get eaten. I can’t. I’m also being rewarded quite handsomely for this.” Timmy shrugged and pointed his shovel back at the villagers. “Believe me, I know how annoying villagers can be with all their attempts to burn necromancers at the stake, wipe out zombies, and how they sometimes forget to pick up my mail, but I still can’t stand by while they get eaten and then murdered. Oops. That should be murdered and then eaten.”
And that was one of the reasons Katie liked her master, even if she’d never admit it. Oh, he was a great necromancer, but she doubted that she’d like him very much if he were like all the other Grand Necromancers. She wasn’t an idiot. He’d killed people before – quite a few of them to protect her in recent years – but it wasn’t like he went out of his way to do it, and he usually gave them a chance first. Most of them simply refused to take it. He’d also done his best to instil the same attitude in her. And given what she knew about her magic’s history – her shadow magic’s history – it was a good thing he had. From what little she’d been able to uncover, her ancestors had possessed the less than pleasant habit of murdering large numbers of mostly innocent people, not to mention their own families.
“So,” Timmy said as he leaned on his shovel. “What do you think? Are you going to walk away? I promise not to tell anyone, so you don’t have to worry about looking bad in front of all the other ogres. You can even say that there were, I don’t know, a thousand of us, so you decided to go for a tactical retreat.”
Katie tensed. She was quite certain that the ogres weren’t going to do the sensible thing – and she was right. One of the ogres raised a poorly made spear and hurled it at her master. He didn’t even blink. His magic surged through his shovel, and a pillar of rock jutted up to intercept the weapon. The spear was four yards long and thicker than Katie’s arm. It thudded into the pillar and quivered for a moment before the impromptu barrier crumbled away to let the spear clatter to the ground.
Her master scratched the back of his head. “Oh well. I gave you your chance.” He nodded at the others. “Go get them, guys. Oh, but try to leave them intact. Katie and I would like to use some of them as zombies.”
“Old Man,” Katie shouted as she glanced back to make sure that Gerald was still behind her. Sure enough, the bureaucrat was already safely out of harm’s way with the other villagers. The rats that had accompanied him had joined the zombies in forming a perimeter, and they had their weapons out, ready to intercept anything that got too close. “Can you make sure that none of the ogres reach the villagers? We’ll try to take out as many of them as we can.”
Old Man nodded and put his bonsai tree on the ground as he reached for the wooden sword he’d brought along. She would have been worried about him – it was a wooden sword – but she’d already seen what he could do. With his real sword – the one his bonsai tree transformed into – he could cut through a gigantic, otherworldly horror like it was made of paper. A wooden sword would be more than enough against an ogre.
He proved it several seconds later.
One of the ogres rushed forward with its club held high. Old Man vanished and then reappeared on the other side of the ogre as it exploded in a shower of gore, none of which landed on him. She’d have to ask him how he did that since she always seemed to get covered in gore and other gunk. Right now, however, she needed to focus on other things, like the three ogres headed her way. They looked less than happy about the fate their comrade had met.
Over the years, Katie had learned a lot about her magic. The greatest strength of her shadows was their versatility. At first, all she’d been able to make were rough shapes, but as she’d gotten older and her master had put her through increasingly difficult training exercises, her skills had improved dramatically. She could make brooms to sweep the floor and command them to do it while she did other things. She could pick a lock after transforming her shadows into a suitable key or lock pick. She could even make things like swords or scythes out of her shadows without breaking a sweat, and those weapons could shear through ordinary metal ones without difficulty.
But versatility was not without problems. She was a naturally thoughtful person, at least when her master wasn’t teasing her into losing her temper. It was why she was so good at the theoretical and experimental side of necromancy. She could memorise information easily – her memory was virtually perfect – and she could read with incredible speed. It didn’t hurt that she also enjoyed studying and learning about new things. She was naturally curious, and her master had generally encouraged and indulged her curiosity.
Where she sometimes faltered was in decision-making. There were times when she could be indecisive. However, being decisive was something her master excelled at. Oh, he might hem and haw, but that was all for show. She’d yet to see him actually hesitate in an important situation. It was something that he was trying to help her with, and her master, for all of his many faults, was a good teacher. He had a knack for sniffing out weaknesses and making sure that she got rid of them before someone else – someone who wouldn’t merely tease her, ruffle her hair, or lightly tap her on the shoulder with a shovel – turned those weaknesses against her.
So, as the ogres rumbled toward her, Katie’s mind came up with no less than fifteen different methods of dealing with them. She tossed ten of them aside in less than a heartbeat for being too impractical. The one she settled on, she chose because it was quick, simple, and unlikely to go horribly wrong. It was also perfect for preserving the ogres for use as zombies later. Now, all she had to do was execute it without doubt or hesitation.
The shadows at her feet spread outward and raced toward the ogres. As soon as the ogres stepped onto them, the shadows lanced upward. Katie fought back a shudder as the jagged shards of darkness pierced through the ogres and stabbed into their hearts and other vital organs. Impaling golems was one thing, but it felt different to stab something made out of living flesh. Ogres were a lot squishier, and there was a lot more blood involved. What made it a lot easier to accept was that these ogres would definitely have killed and eaten those villagers. They would have killed and eaten her too if they’d gotten the chance. But as tough as the ogres were, they were no match for her shadows.
Her lips firmed into a thin line as two of the ogres continued to twitch and fi
ght to break free. That was… weird. They weren’t dead yet, and she could have sworn she’d pierced both their hearts. Several more shadows went about their business before she let the ogres topple to the ground. They were large and bulky – perfect for turning into zombie ogres. She might even enhance them since she had a lot of spare parts to work with. Perhaps she’d combine them with salamanders. Burning zombies that could withstand fire were always useful to have around, or she could go a different route and add some venomous snakes to their backs or something. But she could think about it later. Right now, she had a fight to finish.
Nearby, Avraniel was enjoying herself immensely. She yelled at the top of her lungs as she hurled herself into the fray, wreathed in a mantle of flame. Katie wasn’t entirely confident in her ancient elf, but she was fairly certain that Avraniel was not saying anything polite. Apparently, the elf had taken Timmy’s mention of not needing all of the ogres intact to heart since she promptly set all of the ones closest to her on fire. Nor was she being particularly careful with her fire either. Katie cringed as her master surreptitiously used his magic to hurl some dirt onto the roof of a house that Avraniel had accidentally set alight with a blast of flame. To add to the sheer craziness of the scene, the elf was busy riding the shoulders of one of the ogres she’d set on fire as it flailed about in a pathetic attempt to put itself out. Katie shivered. They definitely needed to let Avraniel burn things more often because she clearly did not handle long periods of inactivity well.
“Take this, you people-eating, time-wasting, mentally-damaged, ogre sons of bitches!” Avraniel bellowed before she unleashed a much harsher wave of profanity that Katie couldn’t help but wince at. How could anyone yell so much while they were fighting? Wasn’t it hard to breathe, and wasn’t Avraniel the least bit embarrassed about saying things like that about the anatomy of her opponents? And Katie was absolutely sure that what Avraniel had just suggested the ogre do with its club was anatomically impossible. Her eyes widened, and her jaw dropped. Apparently, it wasn’t anatomically impossible. It was just extremely fatal.
Antics aside, it wasn’t like Avraniel was in any trouble. The one time an ogre tried to sneak up on her, she simply turned and put an arrow into its eye – an arrow that promptly exploded and blew the ogre into a billion pieces. Katie hastily threw up a barrier with her shadows to protect herself from the gore. What was with that? If she’d been even half a second slower, most of the gore would have ended up in her hair.
Her master was doing his bit, of course, as he carefully downed ogres with his shovel and his magic. Like Katie, he wanted to turn them into zombies, so he couldn’t simply attack them with his full power although a forest of hardened earth spikes would have settled things in a jiffy. He was also working to keep the collateral damage to a minimum since the cost of repairs would be coming out of their reward money.
And then there was Spot.
The ogres hadn’t bothered to approach the dragon at first. He wasn’t big enough for them to consider him a threat, and with all the people around, he didn’t qualify as food either. He was too scaly for their tastes, and not nearly plump enough. Eventually, however, one of the ogres ambled toward Spot with his club raised. He most likely thought that Spot was an overgrown lizard. Ogres, after all, were the very opposite of smart. And even if lizards weren’t as tasty as people to ogres, the ogre could always enjoy Spot as a side dish. Spot disabused him of that notion using the tried and true method that dragons across the world had favoured for millennia – by spewing fire and putting those teeth and claws of his to work.
Needless to say, after watching Spot flambé one of them and then devour him in about ten seconds, the other ogres were much more reluctant to approach the dragon. Spot might have been a hatchling – he wasn’t even a month old – but a newly hatched dragon was still incredibly dangerous to anything that didn’t have powerful ranged weaponry or the ability to severely injure it before getting mangled. These ogres couldn’t get close to Spot without getting ripped to shreds, and the only ranged weapons they had were makeshift spears and the occasional rock.
In other words, Spot no longer had to worry about today’s dinner or any of tomorrow’s meals. He had a veritable buffet in front of him, and although ogres weren’t as tasty as cows – if the expression on the dragon’s face was anything to go by – the sheer quantity of food in front of him was tempting. It was a shame they didn’t have more metal on them, which meant he’d have to satisfy himself with some of the ore that Gerald had brought along.
Katie could only hope that it wasn’t her turn to clean Spot’s teeth. Avraniel had found out that tooth decay was a common issue in dragons although they did regrow any teeth that fell out. It might also have explained why dragons were so ill tempered. Katie had once had a cavity before her adult teeth had begun to come in, and the ache had made her extraordinarily snippy. Thankfully, her master had organised a trip in disguise to a suitably skilled dentist. Since then, however, Katie had made extra sure to take good care of her teeth. One cavity was more than enough for her to learn her lesson. In any case, Avraniel had vowed that her dragon would not have to worry about his dental health. Spot would have his teeth brushed on a regular basis, even if she had to threaten everyone else into helping.
At least Katie had her shadows to make brushing Spot’s teeth easier. Her master had to stick his hand into Spot’s mouth, and although Spot had warmed up to them and they were definitely on the list of things that he no longer considered food, it was still a nerve-wracking experience. Spot had very big and very pointy teeth for something that wasn’t even three feet long, and they’d seen what those teeth could do. A shark would have been envious of Spot.
“Katie,” her master said in a singsong voice. “Eyes front.”
Katie’s attention immediately snapped back to what was in front of her. He only said that if there was something important – and possibly dangerous – happening. Her magical senses bristled as another ogre lumbered toward her. Unlike the others, this one had five heads, so it was at least a century old. No one was entirely sure how long ogres could live because they had a tendency to die in combat, but they had been known to live even longer than humans. The ogre carried a staff with magical symbols carved into it.
No wonder her magical senses had reacted. This one must be an ogre mage. She had heard of such ogres before, but she hadn’t expected to encounter one. They were very, very rare, but this would explain why there were so many ogres working together. It would have taken a particularly large and vicious ogre or an ogre mage of considerable power to keep a group this large together, which was why ogres often served well as mercenaries – the brutal hierarchy common to most mercenary groups actually suited them rather well. Periodic surges in ogre activity almost always coincided with the rise of an unusually strong and powerful ogre or mercenary leader.
“Try not to break him,” her master said with a cheerful smile as he dodged the club of one ogre and leapt up to bash it over the head with his shovel. The ogre toppled onto its back, and twin spikes of earth shot up to ensure that it stayed dead until her master saw fit to reanimate it. “We could use a zombie ogre mage. In fact, we’ve only got three of those in the castle, so a fourth would definitely be nice. I’ll even let you have him.”
Katie fought the urge to grumble. Trust her master to leave the hard work to her. Then again, he did have a point. With the proper preparations – preparations that she was still learning – it was possible to preserve most of the magical power of a dead mage after turning them into a zombie. It was one of the reasons that giving a necromancer time to prepare for a fight was a horrible, horrible idea. A good necromancer wouldn’t have only their magical power to rely on. They’d have the magical power of zombie mages at their disposal too.
There were limits. The more powerful a mage was, the more difficult it was to preserve their power and maintain control over them. Her master had often joked that if he ever got the chance to turn James into a zombie, he woul
dn’t bother since he’d be stuck with a powerful zombie jerk who would never, ever obey his commands. However, this ogre mage was a different story. Turning him into a loyal zombie mage should be well within her master’s power, and she should be able to manage it too if she had the proper guidance. And she’d make sure he gave her the proper guidance.
“Fine, master.” Katie huffed. “I’ll handle it. But remember, you said that I could have this one. No complaining and trying to steal him afterward.” Her master chuckled and gave her a look of mock innocence before he turned to launch a pebble at the chest of another ogre. Thanks to his magic the pebble was all but impossible to see, far outstripping the speed he could have achieved by simply throwing it. Katie scowled. He was definitely going to try to steal her zombie ogre mage later.
The first step in any magical battle between two mages of skill was to conceal one’s own magic for as long as possible while forcing the opponent to reveal theirs. Katie had seen her master win many battles by fooling his opponents into thinking that he relied solely upon his necromancy, only to swing the battle in his favour with his earth magic. This ogre mage might not have seen her magic yet, and Katie wanted to keep it that way until she could land a decisive blow. She had to swallow a giggle as she remembered the last time her master had concealed his magic from an opponent. It had been an overly zealous paladin who had gleefully obliterated her master’s zombies, all the while taunting him about the futility of facing a paladin with nothing more than necromancy. He’d stopped laughing after the ground under his feet had turned into mud. He’d slipped and knocked himself unconscious on a nearby rock. It had been so embarrassing for the paladin that shortly after her master had sent him back to his order with his tail very much between his legs, a story had emerged, doubtless from the paladin, about her master’s unbelievable prowess in battle.
Two Necromancers, a Dragon, and a Vampire (The Unconventional Heroes Series Book 3) Page 10