He resumed his pacing. On further consideration, romance seemed unlikely. She just did not have any opportunities. Oh, there had been some gossipy nonsense about a gamekeeper, but he didn’t employ a gamekeeper, nor did anyone hereabouts. In the end, he had to put the rumor down to the tendency of silly females to make things up when there was nothing to talk about.
Suddenly another thought occurred to him. Had she gotten some sort of fright?
His blood ran cold for a moment at the idea she might, against all odds and precautions, have found him out. That she might have learned what he planned for her.
What if she did? Where would she go? Would she know enough to find another Elemental mage and reveal his true nature? He paused again and reached blindly for the back of a chair to support himself. To be exposed . . . to be hunted by that wretched Alderscroft and his Lodge as he himself had hunted others . . .
They would show him no mercy.
But then, sound good sense took over. She couldn’t possibly have discovered what he planned. He’d never told anyone, not even the redcaps. The only way for her to have learned such a thing would be from some preternatural source, some occult source such as a vision or a dream, or—
—Or reading his books.
Again, he froze for a moment of absolute terror. Those books were explicit. There was no doubt what they were about. And Alderscroft would know exactly where he had gotten them.
No, that was impossible. Even if she had been able to read them, all his books were safely hidden away in the secret Work Room. No one in the house knew he had such a room, much less where it was, except for him and the creatures he bound to serve him.
And even if the human servants had known the room existed, no one else in the house knew how to get into it. He kept it locked at all times, except when he was in it.
The boggarts and redcaps wouldn’t have told her. And if she had seen the boggarts and redcaps, she wouldn’t have stopped to chat with them, foul little beasts that they were. She’d have run screaming at the sight of them. Any sane person would. And they did have the ability to make themselves visible to perfectly ordinary human beings without a touch of magic in them.
Could that have been it? Could she have gotten a glimpse of one of his bound servants and fled the place in horror?
No, that made no sense. A female, confronted with one of the little terrors, would turn to the nearest strong man for protection. She would have come running to him, not away from him!
As for occult means, such as visions and clairvoyance—that was just nonsense. Being able to do such things without a complicated and costly spell? Impossible. Besides, she’d shown no more occult powers than a paving stone.
He resumed his pacing. There had to be a reason. Nothing ever happened without a reason.
Perhaps she had gotten a fright, but it was not of the obvious sort. Perhaps it was merely that she was frightened of the education he “planned” for her. He had set her to a lot of difficult lessons, and with her mind dulled by years of servant work, they might have proven so hard that she was coming to hate the idea of more.
Women are intellectually lazy. They only exert their minds if they are forced to. Even Rebecca had shown that unfortunate trait, perfectly content to settle into a placid round of household tasks and feminine handiwork. If he hadn’t kept encouraging her to exert herself, she never would have taken herself out of the domestic round.
That seemed the likeliest of all; either because Susanne felt she was incapable or because she was lazy, further quickening and filling her mind could have seemed a nightmare to her. Simply put, she might have run off rather than be sent to university. Perhaps she feared the snubs of those with better educations. Perhaps she was certain she would fail. Perhaps she was simply afraid of so much work. Stupid chit! It was all the more vexing because, of course, he’d never intended to send her to university. And if she’d felt intimidated, all she had to do was express her concerns. He would have had another chance to appear to be the regretful father eager to make amends. Instead . . . she bolted. Like a little boy afraid of the tutor. And she was more than old enough to know better.
He paced angrily in his room. Neither boggarts, nor goblins, nor redcaps had found her, either, and he’d spread them all out to a day’s run in every direction. Using trolls was out of the question of course, and simply finding a misplaced girl was exactly the sort of thing that the smaller creatures were good at.
Except they had found nothing. She had vanished right out of their ken. And the other Earth Elementals would no longer obey him. He couldn’t even force them to; the moment he had spilled blood in Blood Magic, he had broken the Compact, and they were not obliged to answer him to be forced.
That left using a Hound, but she hadn’t left a thing behind he could use to trace her—not a hair, not a nail paring, not a stocking. A Hound needed the scent, for it worked by the Law of Contamination. The wretched housekeeper had confirmed that she had taken all her old things, and only her old things. “All them pretty dresses, she left, Master Richard,” the old hag had quavered. “Reckon she didn’t want t’ be beholden to you, sir.”
The notion that she didn’t want to be “beholden to him” would have been amusing had the situation not been so dire.
Not that necromantic magic was very effective for the tracing of people who didn’t want to be found. A Hound was a great deal like a real bloodhound, and it could easily lose the trail if enough other people crossed it. He was only this moment realizing how much he crippled himself by devoting himself to necromancy only, and alienating the other Elementals. Short of having something he knew was hers—hair, blood, skin, nails—he had no way to find her. The new clothing he had given to her was too new to have anything but the faintest association with her, easily muddled, and he couldn’t even use his blood tie with her as her father because he had effectively—and magically—renounced that very tie when she was born.
Words in the mouth of a magician have power. He knew that, and it wasn’t the first time he’d inadvertently created a spell with his words either. Here he was, ironically, the cause of his own undoing. But how could he have known, twenty-one years ago, that she would turn out to be exactly what he needed?
He more than half suspected that someone in the household had colluded with her on this escape, even though they all seemed as bewildered by it as he was. He didn’t know them well enough to be certain the surprise was genuine.
How else could she have slipped away in the dead of night so easily and completely?
Well, before too long, they were going to get what was coming to them. And finally he would have completely obedient servants.
But not yet. He was not ready to take that step just yet.
What else can I use to hunt for her? If not the Hound, what about something that can work by sight? Something patient and slow?
That was when it came to him, and he smiled a little.
One of the many, many advantages of having a property like Whitestone Hall was that the Hall had its very own cemetery. Many of the great houses and stately homes had one; it was much more convenient than going to all the trouble of a burial at the village church. Oh, none of the family were buried there, although in the truly great manors and palaces the opposite was almost always true. Such places had their own chapels, and the family were often buried in crypts beneath the chapel. Not so here; this had been a little plot for the servants, where they could tend to the graves of their own without the inconvenience of walking all the way out to the village and the church and back. It hadn’t been used since Rebecca had died, and most of the graves were of children or servants with no family. That was why he hadn’t had Rebecca buried there. For his purposes, this could not be better.
He waited until the house was quiet, and everyone was asleep. Then he slipped into his Work Room. He needed to call up one of his bound slaves. For this, although a redcap might seem the obvious choice, a boggart was actually better. He wanted something that woul
d try to be unobtrusive. Boggarts were small and weak, and except when they could swarm a victim or knew they were more powerful, they tried to keep hidden.
Once in his workroom, he got out his tools, made his preparations, and began the magic. He cast his controlling circles with great care. It would not do for the thing to get loose until he released it with his coercions upon it. The books all called for this to be done somewhere that had been polluted with dark and dire things—a battleground, a murder site, or some other cursed place. It was not practical for him to do this in the open, on appropriately tainted ground, so instead he had a broad, shallow box filled with earth mixed with blood that he used for such purposes. The physical components of his circles were hemp rope steeped in more blood and other noxious substances. The curious thing about Elementals was that although they conformed to some physical laws, they seemed completely immune to others. Boggarts, for instance, had real bodies; they were not spirits, and they could accomplish tasks like the one he was about to set this one, things that needed physical bodies that could act in the physical world. They could do things for him, you could touch them—and yet he could call one right up out of a box of dirt sitting on the floor of a room on the second story of his home. He didn’t know where the creature was going to come from, or how it would get to the box. When he dismissed it at last, it would vanish without a trace back into the earth. He supposed such things would drive a scientist mad.
He felt the dark power of the blood-soaked earth as he prepared his spells, potent and heady. It had a scent; part putrefaction of the sort that was sickly-sweet, and partly bitter, like poison. To his eyes, it had a color—that of dried blood overlaid with a sullen orange. And it left a faint residue on the skin, sticky rather than slimy. If the power of the Earth that he had mastered before was like wine, this was stronger stuff, raw whiskey, straight from the still. It took a man with a lot of willpower to handle it. It was like holding a tiger; you were safe as long as you didn’t let go, but if you did—
Well, it could use you. It could open you up to the very things you were trying to control, and you would be the one that became the slave. Dangerous. Intoxicating. Very personal in a way that Earth magic was not. He had created this power, with the deaths he had made with his own two hands. No one else could use it but him.
He forced it into the shape he wanted; the channel through which a boggart would manifest. As he imposed his will on the power, it shaped itself in the physical world in a way that ordinary eyes could see. Rusty-red tendrils oozed upward from the ropes around the box, weaving together until they formed a transparent, half-dome cage over it. Earth power glowed; this did not. This was more like smoke; it moved to currents he couldn’t quite sense, thickening and thinning. Another half-dome of the same power extended below the floor, not visible from here.
When you made such protections with Earth magic, you got the same dome, but that one would glow with a golden radiance like ripe grain in the sun. He’d once in his early days as a Master been curious enough to find out if the power passed through the floor and was visible in the ceiling of the room below a Work Room, and he had gone to look. It did; it was a bit uncanny to see the half-dome glowing away, exactly like some lighting apparatus from a Jules Verne tale of the future. He’d been very careful to set up his spell-casting area above a place where such a phenomenon was not likely to be seen—the linen closet. Unlikely that anyone would be rummaging for fresh sheets in the middle of the night, and even if they did, his dark power would not be visible in the shadows of the ceiling.
It was so much easier to use this type of power than the Earth magic he had been taught to wield. There was no coaxing, no cajoling, and no insidious leaching of his own strength. It was astonishing how much latent power there was in something as simple as a chicken—and, of course, the power available increased to an astonishing degree the more intelligent the sacrifice was.
Now that he had dared to think of using human beings as his sacrifices, the potential power made his mouth water.
The amount of power a sacrifice yielded also depended on its age. The younger, the more potent. All those years yet to be lived lay coiled inside under tension, like a spring.
He wrenched his concentration back to the conjuration; at this stage he could not afford a lapse. He bent all of his will on the box of earth. He needed a boggart. He would have a boggart!
With his mind alone, he traced the sigils of conjuration on the earth in that box rather than cross the barrier. The earth glowed dully where his thoughts branded the signs in place. Eight sigils, placed at equal distances around a circle, and then the final, most important one of all, right in the center.
And with a faint groan, the earth split, and the boggart crawled out of it.
The earth closed back again, snapping shut like an ill-tempered mouth.
The boggart glared at him across the barriers that kept them apart. It was a hideous thing, about the size of a child just beginning to toddle, but with a wizened body that looked made of knotted roots. Sometimes Richard wondered if the artist Arthur Rackham had actually seen Elementals, Earth Elementals in particular, since the withered, wrinkled, long-nosed face certainly had its counterpart in the fairy-tale drawings that fellow had done. But with one difference. Had Rackham ever portrayed the hate and anger visible on this creature’s face, children would have run screaming at the sight of his drawings, not been charmed by them. The skin was a putty gray, the hair looked like dead grass, the ragged clothing had no color at all.
It did not speak. It did not have to, because it was here to obey him, not have a conversation with him. And it knew this. This was part of the reason for the anger. It simply looked at him, full of impotent rage, and waited for instructions.
“Go to the graveyard to the east of this house,” he told it. “The one that I have marked with my sign. Find any revenants and discover their graves. Then bring me a fingerbone from each grave that hosts a revenant. Bring them here. Then I will release you.”
All such graveyards were haunted, to a greater or lesser degree. He was grateful that, years ago, he had not gone to the considerable trouble of sending those revenants to their respective “rewards.” At the time he had just had too much to do; the revenants were not harming anything and were so unobtrusive that the worst anyone had ever reported from the cemetery was a vague feeling of unease and sadness. Not surprising; no one buried in that earth had suffered a violent death, none had any great passions at all, really. They were just too bewildered, too apprehensive, or too ignorant to move on. Such spirits often needed help if they lingered past the moment of their deaths. The Door only stood open for so long, and once it closed, the spirit had to find its own way across by desiring a new Door to open. Most of the time, eventually, the spirits got so tired of living a shadow life that they reached for the Door in desperation.
It was an ironic thing that many were so convinced that their tiny little sins were so enormous they would be going straight to Hell that this fear alone stranded them on the metaphorical shore. That was the fault of the chapel preachers, of course, with their fire and brimstone threats and their utter condemnation of anything but the straightest and narrowest way. The child-ghosts, if they had been dragged regularly to chapel by a parent, were the most likely to suffer from this delusion. Of course, to a child, everything seemed enormous, from sin to blessing. And from time to time, in the past, that had bothered him a little. Eventually he had assumed that either he would help this sort of revenant, which was what the little cemetery abounded in, or they would learn to see and not fear the Door themselves—but he never had gotten around to it, and it took some creatures a very long time to realize that lingering in a gray half-life was a kind of Hell in itself.
But now, of course, since they were still there, he could use them.
This was one of the first pieces of business that a necromancer learned: how to find and bind revenants to do his will. There were more of them about than most people had any noti
on. Aside from those who lingered out of irrational fear, there were others who refused to cross. Some simply were not aware they were dead, though these were in the minority. Some were bound by emotion or tragedy to the place they had died or were buried. Some desperately wanted to live again. Some remained because of other bonds, of debt, or hate—and some because they actually were destined for an unpleasant afterlife and were in no hurry to speed to it.
The one thing they all had in common was that it was possible for the necromancer to use them, willing or unwilling. All he needed was something that had been intimately theirs. Once bound, they made the perfect spies. They could go anywhere; you closed your door in vain against them unless you were a mage yourself.
The problem with using revenants was a matter of energy. Since they were no longer living, they no longer produced any of their own. That was why ghosts faded over time; the very act of manifesting consumed some of their substance, and very few ever learned how to feed on other things to replace that substance. That was why a ghost seldom went far from the place (or object) it was tethered to—moving away took energy, and that was something a ghost could not spare.
Once a necromancer found a revenant that was particularly useful, it was generally possible to go beyond coercion into—well, something like indentured servitude. The next stage of the necromancer’s acquisition of power was to learn ways in which to feed revenants and strengthen them without making them too strong to control. Revenants being fed were not in a hurry to lose that source. Revenants being fed enough could act in the physical world to a limited extent. This made them ever so much more useful as servants.
But still not as useful as cooperative Elementals....
Curse it, he was half-crippled by the fact that his Elementals would no longer respond to him.
Bosh. There are better things. I just need to find them.
Unnatural Issue Page 21