“I can’t believe it. A zombie titan,” Katie breathed. The shadows around her stirred as she instinctively reached out with her magic. Small tendrils of darkness rustled along the titan’s form. “What are you using as the base for it?”
“That’s a good question.” Timmy stopped dancing and led her around the catwalk that ran along the edges of the room. “I’m using the corpse of a frost titan as the base. It takes forever to make a zombie titan, and I can’t afford to have it rot before I’m done. Even in death, a frost titan’s body radiates cold, so it doesn’t decay as quickly.” He gestured at the runes and seals that glowed on the walls and floor below them. “Those are the only reason it isn’t freezing in here.”
Katie nodded, rapt. “But where did you even get a frost titan corpse? I thought they were extinct in Everton, and they’re extremely rare in the few places they do exist.”
“You’re right. They are extinct in Everton. You’ve got to go much, much, much further north to find them.” Timmy smirked. “But I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows another guy, who knows a frost titan undertaker who wants some extra gold, so he can move south.”
“What? Master, you’re making that up.”
“It’s true. Not all frost titans like the cold. The one I’m talking about wanted to buy a property in the wilds north of Everton. I mean, technically, it’s still part of Everton, but the terrain is too rugged for normal people. So long as he pays his taxes, kills anyone who tries to invade, and generally does the right thing, he won’t have any problems with the Council.” Timmy turned his attention back to the zombie titan. “Anyway, this corpse is only a few months old, and I’ve been working on it down here in my spare time.”
“So this was the surprise you had.” Katie marched right up to him. Despite her small stature, most people would have moved back as spectral claws and jaws formed in the shadows behind her. Timmy was not most people. “You should have told me it was a zombie titan! I knew it would be something great, but this is way, way, way better than just great! I could have been working on this with you!”
He poked her in the forehead and chuckled at her outraged growl. “I wasn’t sure if you were ready to work on something like this yet. But with our mission coming up, I thought it’d be a good time to see if you could handle it since it needs to be finished soon. Reanimating one of these takes a lot of time and power, and that’s not even considering all the modifications we could make.”
“Modifications?” Katie looked like she was about to swoon. In truth, she almost had. The bigger and sturdier something was, the more they could modify it. She’d even read a book about making zombie titans. It was one of her favourites. There were entire chapters devoted to adding all kinds of things. “We could give it dragon wings or hydra heads. What about covering it with salamander flesh, so it’s immune to fire? I mean we could even give it extra arms or put siege weaponry on its shoulders and –” She stopped and blushed. She was babbling. “I mean… I’m sure we could work something out.” She looked back down at the zombie titan and squealed. “This is so cool.”
“So cool?” Timmy chuckled.
Katie took a deep breath and put on her calmest expression. “Yes, it’s quite fascinating on a purely intellectual level.” She tried to hold back her smile and failed. “Oh, come on. This is the first zombie titan I’ve ever had the chance to work on. I bet you were the same the first time your master let you work on one.”
“My situation was a bit different.” Timmy shuddered, something he often did whenever he thought about his master. “My master decided to give me two days to put together my first one before sending it off to fight an actual giant.” Time pressure had been one of his master’s favourite ways of testing him. “It went… less than perfectly.” He shook his head and handed Katie a sketch from one of the shelves that lined the edges of the room. “Here’s what I was planning. Have a look.”
Katie glanced at the sketch for a second and then glared. “Master, I can’t tell what this is. It looks like a stick figure. Your drawing is terrible.”
Timmy’s eye twitched. “Not everyone can draw as well as you. All that matters is that I can tell what it looks like.” He snatched the sketch back. One of these days, he was going to learn how to draw properly. Maybe after he’d gotten his pardon and retired to a nice cottage somewhere. “I was planning on modelling the zombie titan after one of the Unfathomable Ones to really inspire some terror in our enemies. That means attaching some kraken tentacles to its chest and back, adding some hydra heads here and there, maybe some chimera heads too, and a whole bunch of other stuff. You’ve read the old legends. You know what I mean.”
“I do.” Katie cackled. “This is going to be so much fun.”
Timmy cackled. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
And so it wouldn’t feel left out, the rat on her shoulder started cackling too. Not far off, one of the little horrors drifted through the wall and gave a cackle of its own before disappearing.
“Can we start now?” Katie asked, once they’d gotten the requisite cackling out of the way. Her shadows quivered in anticipation.
Timmy nodded. It was so nice to have an apprentice who wasn’t squeamish. He’d been exchanging letters with one of his friends. The other necromancer had found a smart lad, hard-working too, but he wasn’t fond of the grittier aspects of necromancy. “Yes, we can.” He stroked his imaginary beard. Maybe he should grow one? It might make him look more menacing, but it would take time and effort to cultivate a suitably fiendish one. No, he was better off leaving things as they were.
“How do you even get something this big to work?” Katie asked. “The amount of magic needed to reanimate it would be huge and trying to control it would take a lot of power too.”
“Allow me to explain.” Timmy puffed his chest out. It wasn’t often that he got a chance to lecture his increasingly knowledgeable apprentice, so he was going to make sure he enjoyed this opportunity.
And enjoy it he did. Perhaps he should have been a teacher. Then again, his enthusiasm did have a lot to do with the subject matter. A three-hundred-feet-tall zombie titan was extremely interesting. It was also vital that Katie learn how to make one herself if she ever wanted to become a Grand Necromancer like him. Sure, there were other ways to gain the title, but building a zombie titan was one of the less troublesome ones. It was also far less likely to end in her arrest and execution than creating a highly contagious zombie plague.
After discussing how the zombie titan worked, they tossed around ideas for what else they could add to it. By the time they were done, the zombie titan would have parts from a frost titan, a dragon, some hydras, some chimeras, a kraken, and at least one sea serpent. They would have a towering monstrosity whose mere presence would cow their enemies into abject submission. It would, without a doubt, be the coolest thing they did all month, possibly all year.
And if the zombie titan made it through their mission in one piece, there was a necromancer in Avleria that Timmy had a bone to pick with. His rival had found an obnoxious apprentice of his own, and he knew Katie would be more than happy to unleash some doom and gloom upon them. When they’d last met, the other necromancer’s apprentice had insulted Katie’s rats, earning himself a punch in the face and a kick in the shin from the girl. Yes, Katie would most definitely not object to crushing their castle and looting their treasury. If they played their cards right, they might even be able to convince the Council to fund their attack as a mission since Everton and Avleria had never been on good terms.
* * *
Gerald had come to enjoy life in Timmy’s castle. Sure, it wasn’t what he’d grown accustomed to, and he’d almost had a heart attack or stroke several times, but it was nice enough, albeit in a weird sort of way.
Katie was good company and very well read. They could talk about books for hours, as long as he avoided mentioning any of the more questionable volumes she’d read. He did not need – or even want – to know about the fifty different ways zombies o
f different kinds could be spliced together, and he really, really didn’t want to know more about the things that lived under the castle. Timmy was also fine company when he wasn’t putting together some fresh new abomination that was going to give Gerald nightmares and inevitably require killing with a shovel when it turned against him. Even Avraniel wasn’t that bad when she wasn’t threatening to burn or eviscerate somebody. However, her habit of carrying her dragon egg around while whispering about all the havoc they would wreak was disturbing. It sent a chill down his spine to think about all the fiery death Avraniel could unleash if she had a dragon to command.
When Councillor Winters had arrived, Gerald hadn’t known what to think. Her predecessor’s views on necromancy had been very clear, so the thought of the councillor meeting Timmy had been terrifying. He’d seen what the councillor could do, and being stuck in the same room as her and a necromancer like Timmy had almost been enough to give him a heart attack. If the councillor started a fight, Timmy would be forced to fight properly and unleash his zombies and the nameless horrors that lived under the castle. Avraniel’s presence would not have helped at all. It would have ended in blood, tears, zombie guts, fire, and more paperwork than he could imagine – and that was assuming he survived.
But nothing of the sort had happened. Apparently, Timmy and the councillor were friends. Imagine that. And now that Timmy had the Council’s approval, he was free to take his horde of zombies and smite what would most likely be an army of golems. But first they needed to have all the proper permits ready if they wanted to move around without declaring a state of war or emergency. There were also laws about the transportation of corpses that Gerald needed to review. Did a zombie army on the march count as transportation of corpses? And if it did, did necromancy count as preservation magic? Transporting corpses over long distances without preservation magic was definitely illegal unless the final destination was a graveyard or a funeral.
On his way back to his part of the castle, he found himself lingering. Avraniel lived in a section of the castle that was close to his and far from Katie’s. Although he wasn’t normally one to question the elf’s decisions – he enjoyed living too much – he had noticed all of the fertiliser and gardening equipment she’d been ordering in. It wasn’t that he minded. Timmy had generously given the elf free reign to order in whatever she wanted, provided she could convince a merchant to deliver it, because having a bored Avraniel could not possibly end well for them or the castle. To Gerald’s surprise, the elf had paid for everything with her own money.
A surreptitious look at her mail, which had been redirected to the castle, revealed that the elf had a surprisingly diverse array of investments. She was, amongst other things, a majority shareholder in a company that peddled insurance although now that he thought about it, it did make a lot of sense. She was essentially a walking natural disaster, and he had always wondered why the company in question had a disclaimer about not covering acts of divine vengeance or pyromaniac elves. Now, he knew. Still, the fact that she’d managed to invest in a large, reputable company – as well as dozens of others – while evading the law amazed him. She’d even managed to secure a controlling interest in a company that offered security along some of Everton’s major trading routes.
In keeping with his duties as an inspector, Gerald had made some discrete inquiries about Avraniel’s investments. Everything checked out. As far as he could tell, everything was completely legal and above board. However, he still couldn’t understand why she’d started ordering in gardening supplies. He was under the impression that plants hated her, and she’d said as much on many occasions. Perhaps she’d turned over a new metaphorical leaf. She was an elf, and the gardens of the elves were legendary for their beauty. Maybe all she’d needed was a fresh start with stable living conditions and a place to call her own. Yes, it might be a good idea to have a look before going back to his paperwork. He could put his mind at ease and congratulate Avraniel on her garden before returning to work.
Oh, what a naïve fool he was.
As he wandered through Avraniel’s section of the castle, he wondered why she hadn’t made any attempt to close it off to outsiders. Then he remembered whom he was thinking about. If someone stole something from her, they were dead. It was that simple. Absently, he noted that she preferred shades of orange, yellow, and red for decoration instead of the usual greens, blues, and greys that her tree-loving kin favoured. There were pointy bits of metal hanging from the walls too, along with numerous torches, all of them blazing merrily. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought a dwarf lived here, not an elf.
He followed a winding corridor to where he thought one of the courtyards was. If she were going to start a garden, a courtyard would be the best place. A few moments later, he opened a door and stepped into a large courtyard brimming with plants. But these weren’t the lush bushes, flowers, and trees that most elves cultivated. This was no garden of carefully balanced colours and textures, no oasis of harmony and symbiosis where each plant worked with the others to create a picture of unity and beauty that appealed to each of the senses.
This garden was Avraniel’s in every single way, which meant that it was full of plants that Gerald had only ever read about and had gone out of his way to avoid: carnivorous and poisonous plants of varying sizes and deadliness. It was, in short, something ripped right out of his nightmares, a place where even the slightest misstep could end in death. All that was missing was a giant monster of some kind, and there were plenty of places for one to hide around here.
Right next to him was a plant legendary for producing flowers that could act as explosives – and right next to it was a flower famous for producing extremely powerful acid. Oh, and what was that over there? It was a pot-shaped plant the size of a large bear that happened to be filled with jagged teeth. And over in the corner, tucked away in its own spot, was a plant that shot harpoon-like spines at passing wildlife before reeling them in. Even the grass here was dangerous. It exuded a sedative that could lull animals to sleep – whereupon the grass ate them. Where had Avraniel gotten all of these plants from, and how had she managed to put a garden like this together so quickly? Could it be that she’d been trying to grow the wrong plants all these years by focusing on normal plants instead of plants that killed people?
Gerald gulped. He needed to leave right now. Only someone like Avraniel could stay in a place like this and not end up dead. He turned. He’d read his fair share of horror stories, and they always – always – ended with the bureaucrat getting eaten. At least he’d found out what all the gardening supplies were for.
Something tapped him on the shoulder.
He froze and reached up. It didn’t feel like a hand. He swallowed thickly and then turned to look behind him – and then really, really wished he hadn’t.
The Everton giant man-eating rose was one of the most elusive plants in the world. Gerald had never seen one before, and to the best of his knowledge, no one except the elves had either, except for in books. But the specimen in front of him was most assuredly not from a book, and it was infinitely more terrifying up close than in the badly drawn pictures he’d seen while skimming through a book about rare plants.
The rose was a good twenty feet tall. As he gaped in stark, mind-numbing terror, the massive rosebud that served as a head of sorts unfurled to reveal a great many teeth, all of which were about the length of a butter knife but far, far sharper. Thorny vines lashed the air, and the rose crept forward, moving almost silently across the ground, its vast bulk supported by several leg-like roots. Dimly, he remembered the passage about how the rose caught its prey. It would move quietly through the foliage before latching onto its prey with its poisonous thorns. When its prey was completely immobilised, it would devour them through its rosebud. The process was supposed to be exceedingly hideous, with the teeth acting like the blades of some enormous, rotating saw. Anything too big to fit into the rosebud was ripped into smaller pieces by its vines.
&nbs
p; Gerald was about to become yet another carnivorous plant statistic and the first bureaucrat in three years to get eaten by a carnivorous plant, the last one being a bureaucrat who’d been assigned to a particularly inhospitable mountainous area.
The plant leaned forward, and Gerald – already imagining the headlines his death would make in the next issue of the World Bureaucrat Monthly – did the only thing he could think of. He summoned a frying pan with his magic and whacked the rose over the head with it. It didn’t matter that there were still scrambled eggs on the frying pan. All that mattered was that it was a big, heavy piece of metal. Then he turned and ran, screaming at the top of his lungs because, at this point, subtlety was not going to help. The rose rumbled after him, somehow managing to fit its bulk through the door and into the corridor behind him.
“Help!” Gerald wailed, waving his arms above his head as his voice took on a new and impressively high pitch. “Someone, help!”
He sprinted down the corridor, summoning a variety of objects and hurling them at the plant behind him as his mind continued to rattle off a series of completely useless, but horribly relevant, statistics regarding the number of bureaucrats eaten by carnivorous plants before the Council banned their presence on official Council property and launched a campaign to thin their numbers. Halfway down the corridor – and after throwing a pogo stick at the plant that had merely bounced off and almost gotten him in the eye – he was absolutely certain that he was going to die. Suddenly, the air above him rippled, and several tiny figures appeared and darted past him.
Metal wire filled the corridor and stopped the plant in its tracks. The crackle of electricity filled the air, and the rose gave a shrill cry as the faint scent of ozone drifted through the corridor. Gerald tripped and scrambled back to his feet, turning to get a better look at what had happened. A dozen ninja rats had arrived. Thank the gods! One of them was even brandishing a pair of hedge shears that were bigger than it was while another two sported secateurs. Another rat appeared on Gerald’s shoulder and gave a few reassuring squeaks. What was more reassuring than the squeaks was the axe the rat held.
Unconventional Heroes 2 - Two Necromancers, an Army of Golems, and a Demon Lord Page 5