by Alan Bayman
It was a shock, the warmth. Feeling something that real, that alive, was intensely pleasant. If I hadn’t had the memory of being warm before, I wouldn’t have been able to stop eating. Even so, it took an enormous amount of effort, and I was only successful after the itching sensation in my chest from the knife wound stopped suddenly. I jerked back up from my crouch and tried to get my bearings.
I looked at the wound through the hole in my tunic and found it to be completely healed. Beneath me was a gruesome sight. I had devoured the flesh on both the man’s arms and part of his face. A confusing mixture of emotions welled up from the embers within me as his grey eyes gazed into mine. It was too much. Not wanting to think about it I dragged his body over to the canal and pushed it in. “Let the fish have him, and be happy,” I thought to myself. I watched the water turn red around him as the fish began their little feasting dance by darting up against him, taking a nibble, and darting away. It was so familiar. It calmed me.
I watched for a while. I began to notice something else in the interplay between the body, the water, and the fish in their dancing feast. There was a shimmering sort of smoke above and around the body, slowly entwined with it. But it could not have been smoke, for it was in the water as well. As I focused on it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, drifting lazily in the air and water, but it was drawn to the body.
Miasma, a distant memory told me. But what was miasma? The memory for which the word came floated to the surface of my mind: copying some arcane text in a brightly lit room, my hand cramping from trying to get the illustrations exactly right, fearful of the wrath of my employer should I make a mistake.
The Necromantic currents, or Death Currents, most commonly known as Miasma, can be found in all forms of elemental patterns, but is easiest to perceive in the air and water elements. Laymen once believed it to be the wisps in the Veil between life and death. Nay, it is death itself. The very end cycle (and anathema) to the currents of Life, and the foundation to the Necromantic Arts.
Miasma will gather most where death avails itself; morgues, slaughter houses, and temples dedicated to the god Null. To use it, one must first perceive it, but beware, it is one of the deadliest of currents….
The book from my memory was titled, “The Seven Steps of the Magi, an Introductory Guide to Wizardry.” I vaguely remember the copying job was for the author of the book, a powerful man full of self-importance. Given the fear I felt in the memory, I wondered if he had murdered me over some typo.
I heard a noise behind me, turned, and saw a woman hurrying along the alleyway with a burlap sack full of clothing over her shoulder, head ducked down, trying not to be noticed. My hands and face (and surprisingly little else) were covered in blood. I did not think she would report me to the guardsmen, considering the sort of neighborhood this was, so I ignored her. I needed to get the blood off, but the canal was too deep for me to reach down and wash. I settled on wiping myself down with the inside corner of my cloak.
I began walking again, this time watching the wisps of Miasma that drifted around the city and trying to recall other buried memories related to it. More fragments came to me as I made new discoveries. Some memories came from The Seven Steps book, but most of them came from other books and scrolls, most of which were too hazy to get any further background.
I saw Miasma clinging to a man and intensify when he gave a wracking cough. By that I knew him to have a disease in his lungs, likely fatal. It was surprising how many people had diseases or infections quickening their life to an end.
A hairless man in chains with sunken cheeks and skin like parchment pulling a small cart in the direction of a merchant seemed to be almost completely of Miasma. I sensed it roiling beneath his skin like a storm trapped in a glass jar. Nothing alive could be like that. He must be a zombie.
Like me.
He did not acknowledge me in any way as we passed by one another, save his eyes. Watery grey and sunken, they locked on to me with such a fierce intensity that almost stopped me in the middle of the street. I could not tell what he was feeling, tense as he was. Anger? Despair? Hunger? I thought about the first man I met and concluded that this zombie must have been subjected to the same control that was tried on me, but with greater success. I wanted to free him but did not see how I could without making a scene. He passed by and disappeared toward some marketplace, the cart and merchant in tow.
A few streets later it occurred to me that if I recognized him as a zombie, then others could recognize me as a zombie just as easily, despite being well dressed and hooded. I had been lucky so far, but that couldn’t last. I needed somewhere I could hide, and though I didn’t like it, it had to be somewhere that had “food” nearby in case I got injured. I didn’t know if or for how long I could control myself if I got hungry.
I took to the alleyways near the docks again, this time searching for places where Miasma gathered. There were a few buildings where it gathered but something held me back. The Miasma didn’t drift there so much as was “pulled”. Something told me that whatever was in there, it would not be friendly.
One place I considered was made up of a small crowd of one room houses stacked on and around one another that had been turned into a brothel. From the ruins around it, at one time it may have been a tavern. All the ladies there where ill to some degree. It looked like a place I could hide in an emergency and the ambient Miasma would hide what I am. I would not, or couldn’t afford, to stay there a lengthy time unless I owned the place. But owning the place would force me into a situation I would not want; I would have to foster the suffering of the ladies who worked there in order to remain hidden. The embers within me did not agree to that at all. In fact, watching them suffer at a distance bothered me.
I found myself stopping at a little cottage set on one corner of the intersection between two canals. The other buildings crowded all around and sometimes on top of one another, but they all stopped a good 10 feet away from the cottage. Miasma hung over the old darken bricks like a fine sheet of mist. Hung over the front door of the cottage was a wooden carving of three circles entwined: the symbol of a healer.
Curious. Healing magic is supposed to repel Miasma. In fact, I had seen it earlier that day, when a priestess of Sol blessed a street urchin. Her hand, resting on his filthy head, caused a ripple in the air, and the Miasma settling about his flesh fled before her. Her merely walking down the street seemed to push it away from her.
I watched the cottage. A man with a broken arm staggered from the alleyways and through the front door. About an hour later he stepped out, grimacing, his arm tied and bound to a splint. Later, two men came dragging a third with a shattered leg and coughing up blood. The Miasma around the house intensified a little. Then the two men walked out muttering to one another. I caught, “stupid fool,” and “I warned him a thousand times, you can’t outrun a wine barrel,” as they passed. Then there was a loud splash from behind the cottage. I went over to see. The injured man, now dead, was floating, nude and face down, the fish beneath him beginning their dance. The water was clearer here than other places, and I could see the bones of many piled on the canal floor, picked clean by the fish.
This was a healer’s house, but a healer who lacked magic. Perhaps even an apothecary or herbalist with no knowledge of Alchemy. A perfect place to hide, if I played my cards right.
It was getting late. I opened the door and stepped inside.
2.
The room was large and sparsely furnished. A bloodstained table dominated the center of the room, with a smaller table next to it. The smaller table had some knives, sticks, bandages, some sewing needles, and a few rolls of thread. A few sturdy wooden chairs marked the perimeter of the room. There were two other doors, one directly across from the entrance, the other one to the right. The left wall had shuttered and boarded windows. A single lamp, brightly lit, hung from a hook in the center of the room.
Standing between the two tables was a tall middle-aged man in a bloodstained apothec
aries robe. He was thin, but with a large belly, and balding with scraggly tufts of hair just over his ears. At the moment he was drinking from a large jug marked as distilled spirits. When he saw me, he brought it down with a cough, splashing some of the clear liquid onto his robe. He scowled at me, the mole on his cheek turning almost downward.
“Let me guess,” his voice sounded too deep for his thin frame. “You’ve a boil somewhere delicate? Slumming with the whores and you caught something?”
I shook my head. I felt like I needed to say something, but the last time I tried to speak to someone, I vomited canal water all over the ground. I tried anyway.
I opened my mouth, then realized my lungs where empty. Filling them filled me the scents of the room; blood, alcohol, wood, stale sweat and vomit. I was so overwhelmed that I momentarily forgot to say anything.
The man’s scowl deepened, but before he could say anything I blurted out, “Apprentice.”
“You what,” He started. Then he gave out a cold bark of laughter. “You, what, an apprentice to me, a healer with no magic? You daft or a cripple?”
I shook my head.
“You on the run?”
I didn’t know how to answer him. I wasn’t on the run, but at the same time I could not be found out. Did that count as being on the run? Without me saying anything he started nodding, the scowl coming back.
“Yeah, a thief, eh? Stole some fancy clothes and now you’re a marked man?”
I shook my head. “It’s complicated.” My voice sounded like sanding paper but was getting better with use.
The man’s scowl turned to a grimace. He swayed slightly as he set the jug down on the smaller table with a clank.
“No, and no,” he said. “I don’t recognize you’re accent, and you could be a thief. I’ll not have you stealing my- “
“I’ll pay you,” I interrupted. Reaching into my belt I pulled out my coin purse. Cracking it open I thought to pull out a few silvers, but the thing was stuffed with gold! So instead, I pulled out a single coin and held it aloft.
The man’s eyes widened when he saw it, then narrowed as he looked back at me.
“Gold every two months,” I said. “Nothing more. I sleep here. You teach me. I will feed myself, and do whatever you say, as long as it has to so with learning the craft.”
The man’s eyes had strayed back to the coin. He licked his lips, then started to scowl again.
“You sleep on the floor, in here or in the storage room. Anything in there turns up missing you pay for it.”
I nodded.
“You do everything I say, without any whining. This is bloody work. If you don’t like it, go right ahead and leave, but I still get my gold.”
I nodded again offering out the gold.
“And you take the damn hood off. I make no agreement with a man I can’t look in the eye.”
I pulled the hood back. I was not sure what I looked like, but I hoped that he was drunk enough to be unable to tell that I was undead. He squinted at me, frowning.
“You ill, or something?”
Just then there was a loud bang as the door slammed open. Two men stumbled in, one man half dragging the other. They were dressed as dock workers; thick, heavy sandals, pants that ended above the knee, and ragged wool tunics. The man being dragged had a ragged gash that wound around one arm, and trailed up to his shoulder, through his tunic and across his chest.
“Put him on the table,” the apothecary barked, and then went to go help. After a moment, I followed, lifting the bottom half of the man easily onto the table. All three men looked at me in surprise, until the injured man gave a cough and groaned.
The apothecary turned away and started wadding up a small bundle of bandages, soaking them in distilled spirits. “What happened to him?”
“Got caught in the ropes,” said the uninjured man. “Rigging went tight when it should have been unhooked.”
The apothecary shook his head. “Somebody got lazy.” The uninjured man nodded, anger on his plain face.
The apothecary then looked down at the man on the table. “Listen carefully, lad. I can tell by the way your breathing that your ribs are cracked. They could be broken. I’ve got to clean the wounds, and I don’t have anything for the pain that you can afford. It’s going to hurt like a father’s thrashing, but if you scream, or even take a tighten up too much, you’ll probably die. If I don’t clean it, rot will set in and you’ll probably die anyway. So, what’s it going to be? No, don’t speak, just knock once on the table for treatment, twice for no. But before you do, know that treating you is going to cost you half a silver. Three coppers for supplies and two for service.”
The man hesitated for a moment, then knocked once on the table with his good hand.
The apothecary nodded, and then with me holding the injured man down, began to dab the spirits-soaked bandages on his wounds. The man groaned and shuddered but tried to remain still. The Miasma hovering around his wounds shied away from the soaked bandage, and while it didn’t stay completely away, it was severely reduced.
After his wounds where cleaned, the apothecary picked up the needle and thread, and carefully sewed the deeper gashes shut. The injured man was given some of the spirits to drink and a rag to bite down on for the pain, along with repeated warnings that he must keep his breathing relaxed.
When the sewing was done, and bandages where wrapped around the wounds, the man’s friend and I carefully helped him to his feet.
“No work for a week, light work only for the next month or so, or he dies,” said the apothecary.
“But he as to work-,” his friend began, but the apothecary cut him off.
“Not my problem. Now pay me.”
Between the two men they managed to scrounge together 5 copper pieces. They left slowly, one man supporting the other, the door briefly illuminating the room with the evening sun. Then the apothecary turned to me.
“My name is Adan. And I’ll take that gold now.”
He took my coin, added it to the others, and hurried through the door to my left. From where I was standing the room looked like his bedroom recklessly collided with an alchemy lab. Vials, beakers, and jars of odd colored liquids lay scattered on some crowded shelves and even part of an unkept bed.
A moment later he returned, shutting and locking the door behind him and turned to me with a half-smile, half grimace.
“Now, let’s put you to work. Where to begin?”
3.
Time passed, though it was much more intense than when I was in the canal. I spent a lot of time cleaning things for Adan. Starting with the main room and all his instruments, then working back to the storage room, which held bandages, moldy grains, and a small distillery that he used to brew the alcohol for cleaning the instruments and drinking himself to a stupor.
He was initially suspicious of me. But I continued to be both reliable and competent, something he said he wasn’t used to in apprentices. I also sensed a lazy sort of apathy kept him from inquiring further.
When he wasn’t too drunk (and sometimes when he was) he would take in patients. At first, all I did was help them onto the table and hold them down if they were thrashing. But I watched everything he did, and when he realized my hands where sure and steady, he began to show me how to sew flesh together, tie tourniquets, bandage wounds, and set bones.
I took particular pride in my stitching. I recalled doing or copying illustrations as a scrivener and paid as close attention to all the little details with a needle as I would with a quill. I fancied my stitches much like my illustrations, the story they highlighted as that of one triumph over injury.
Well, sometimes. Other times (more often, in those days) our patients died at the table. If the patient was alone or no one was willing to pay for funeral arrangements, it was then my job to drag the body out through the storage room and out the back door, throwing it into the canal.
It was these times that I experimented with eating. I was uncomfortable at first. I worried tha
t my hunger was like an addiction that grew with each bite and would become uncontrollable. Also, I am eating people. I was a person, once, though I didn’t think I was now. I am remembering more and more what I was like. The living me would be appalled at what I had become.
But strangely, whenever I thought about it, my mind would drift to the fish in their feeding dance. I became peaceful. I felt myself in a sort of dance, like the fish. Very odd, perhaps not quite sane, but it made the situation acceptable.
I discovered that if I overate I would look more alive, at least physically. My skin took on a pallor that was almost normal, and my hair and nails grew a little. I think my hair and nails would continue to grow, like a regular corpse, but I think eating sped it up.
I tried letting the flesh I was eating turn to liquid and then spit it out before swallowing. This was very hard to do, as I had to fight my instinctive hunger even if I wasn’t hungry. What came out was a black ichor roiling with Miasma. It practically was Miasma, in liquid form. I touched it with my finger and it immediately seeped into my flesh. It was a pleasant sensation, like eating.
When I found several sets of alchemy vials at a nearby pawnbroker (more on that later), I tried, and successfully filled several vials with black ichor. In liquid form, it seemed that the Miasma would not pass through the glass. I decided that I would regularly keep a few to experiment with but would always keep half a dozen of them hidden away in case I was injured.
I began trying to manipulate Miasma as well, trying to recall what I remembered from the books I had copied and drawing from the notes of the man who had tried to enslave me. It turned out that his scrawling notes in Late Cyrian where instructions on Necromancy. They were barely legible, and not very clear, but made for a strong base to work from.