by Alan Bayman
A few hours later, we were walking through the poorest sections of the Orc inhabited part of the city. I had thought the poor human areas were bad, but I had no idea the Orcs had to live so wretchedly. No sanitation. Mud filled huts and exposed sleeping quarters. Filth filled canals. Ambient Miasma everywhere.
With the nearby waters so wretched I was wondering if I would be able to tell when the water turned “black”. It looked dark enough to me. But then we rounded a muddy street corner and the water in the canal off to our left looked as black as night. I could sense Miasma writhing around underneath the waves. The water wasn’t pure liquid Miasma, but it was close.
Shan-lo froze as soon as she saw the waters color, and I bid her to wait around the corner. There had been few signs of life before we arrived here, but in this area there was none. Old, crumbled buildings and empty shanties surrounded me. It was eerily quiet for a place so deep in the city. No sound, even from the near still waters of the canal. No insects.
All the Miasma in the area seemed to flow in and out of a single building that had been built over an intersection of the canal. It had collapsed and was sunk almost up to its roof in the intersection. Once ornate stone shutters, now cracked and crumbled, adorned a single window, exposing the blackened depths of the house’s innards.
My memory of what followed grows hazy, which is in itself telling, for most of the time since my awakening my memory is near flawless. I remember climbing into the window. I remember the black water rising to touch me, and willing it to move aside.
I remember the water flowing up and around the walls and ceiling forming a tunnel. The water was so thick with Miasma, I must have been able to manipulate it, but I don’t remember how. Stepping down into the curiously dry floor within the house. Grey stone cracked with black water writhing within. I have no recollection of breathing, yet for some reason I recall the smell of cinnamon, or something like it. It was utterly silent, save for the faint sound of rippling water. The tunnel followed me as I moved, clearing a path before me and then collapsing behind.
I remember descending and old stairwell made of rusted iron. It creaked and groaned when I set foot upon it. As the black water receded before me, it revealed cracked old stone tiled floors and a myriad of bones. I was reminded of the part of the canal behind our cottage where I used to dump bodies. But here there were no fish to strip the bones bare. At least, none that I could see.
As I stepped among the bone littered tiles in my little moving tunnel of water, I discovered a body with flesh clinging to it, but as I moved to examine it further my memory grew hazy again.
I remember the raging fire within me grow cold and dim, almost back to the embers they once were. I remember my thoughts weakening, and a numbness, almost like falling asleep, overtaking me. I watched as Miasma within my body started to leak out, and I stood there too tired and uncaring to do anything about it. The walls of my tunnel began to close in. Before me, out of the water, stepped the translucent form of an Orc. He was grossly emaciated, his body looking little more than flesh stretched over bones. His eyes glowed with a green light that reminded me of distilled Miasma, and he wore tattered robes and held a black staff so infused it seemed to radiate darkness.
He uttered something in Orc. I did know or care what he said. He pointed the staff at me, so that it’s tip touched my forehead, and from it my mind began to leak out like the Miasma was from my body, only instead of just “out”, it was going into the staff.
This, I think, was his only mistake, and lucky for me. The staff touching my head reminded me of The Stick.
The embers within me flared and I almost instinctively grabbed the staff. That disrupted whatever he was doing to me, and the inferno in my mind came roaring back, and Miasma stopped leaking from me.
The Orc shade gave a wailing shriek and tried to yank the staff from my grasp, but I was much stronger than it. With a single pull I yanked it from the creature’s hands. It started at me with a look of surprise mingled with fear. And then it gave another wail and vanished.
I looked around for the Orc, but all I could find were more bones and the fleshy body I had seen earlier. It was a human in tattered clothing. It was undead, but it had so little Miasma within it at was barely existing. I could also sense it somehow had some sort of connection to the staff. The staff itself was writhing with Miasma moved in concert with the blackened water. I could sense something in it touching my mind, like the Traveler’s Bag does, but this was darker, a whisper appealing to my hunger. The staff wanted to feed me and feed itself in doing so.
I broke it over my knee.
There was a great rush as the Miasma within it was released, and my memory returned to its usual clarity. There was a ripple in the water that coincided with the staff breaking, and the Miasma began to bleed away from the water. Soon the water would hold no Miasma and I would have no way to keep from getting wet. I wasn’t sure what submerging my Travelers Bag would do to it, so I picked up the undead gentleman, slung him over my shoulder, and hurried up the stairs and out the window.
12
“Who are you?”
The dead man’s voice sounded surprisingly young, considering his body’s condition. He looked parched and withered, like a corpse left out in the desert sun. This was surprising, considering that I had found him underwater.
I reached into my bag and after some shuffling handed him a vial of liquid Miasma.
“Drink this. It should restore you.”
His motor skills were barely functional, so I had to help him drink. As soon as he did, his skin began to pulse and writhe, until he looked almost alive again.
He looked young. He must have still been a boy when he died.
When we came back, I purchased a room at the tavern over by the slave house. He lay on the dingy room’s one bed, his skin now a light grey, but he looked otherwise like a street urchin in tattered rags. His hair was a dark brown and his eyes a deep blue, like an infant.
Shan-lo said something in Orc, and he replied in the same language. Then he thanked me for rescuing him. He explained that he had gotten lost in the Orc slums and was lured in to the dark waters.
He told me his name was Elgin. I told him he could repay me by introducing me to the Shaman he was related to. He said he would ask his ancestor. He said he needed to go to them, but he would be back in ten to twenty days to take me to them.
I was a little weary of trusting him to uphold his end of the bargain, but I had little to lose, and he seemed to have strong ties to the Orcs who make a very big deal out of keeping your word.
I then turned to Shan-lo with some parchment and chalk to communicate with and offered to officially free her. To my surprise she refused. Instead, she offered to go with the dead man to his Shaman, and then return with him to me. After of which she would return to her tribe, and act as and envoy between them and me, occasionally visiting to teach me about her tribe and how to speak the language.
I got the feeling she would be getting a lot more out of this arrangement than I would, that this job I would be giving her would bolster her status in her tribe in some way. Still, I could see no down side from my perspective. I agreed.
It was near sunset as I started walking home, and I had many things to ponder. I had seen the enchantments in the slave auction house. That meant I could see magical currents other than Miasma. According to what little I have read, that meant I could possibly perform other types of magic as well.
But that brought up more questions. From what I knew of the undead, there were only two types that could perform magic other than necromancy, and that was vampires and litches. From my walking about during the day and obvious lack of blood cravings I was certain I was not a vampire. A litch was a necromancer who gained immortality through becoming an undead whilst retaining most of their power. I had heard that to become a litch the necromancer had to take their own heart out and put it into some sort of box or something. I was sure my heart was still in my chest: I remembered it beati
ng when I injected the distilled Miasma.
So, what the hell was I?
Adan greeted my return with a bellow of, “get your ass over here and help me suture this leg before I have to cut it off!” About an hour and one mangled-but-patched-up leg later we closed for the evening. Adan did not ask me what I did while out but told me to give him at least a day’s notice when I was planning on going out for an entire day.
Day flowed into night as I spent it pondering the further uses of distilled Miasma. Injecting it further seemed to have no effect other than healing my wounds at an astounding rate. Unlike liquid and ambient Miasma, it was extremely difficult to manipulate. My thoughts could wrap around and push or pull at it like the others, but it seemed heavier.
Perhaps physical weight equated with manipulative potential? But if that was true, then vaporous ambient Miasma should be the easiest to manipulate. Yet, I found the easiest to move was the black inky liquid Miasma.
A few weeks passed, and my studies had come to a standstill. My basic manipulation of all forms of Miasma had greatly improved, but there were no new discoveries. I had long since memorized the book Adan lent me, and its applications to medicine was fascinating, but I wanted to use magic to enhance the healing process. The problem was all my skill in magic revolved around killing things. I used it to destroy diseases and stave off infections and to perform sutures that caused the least amount of damage to my patient. But that seemed to be the limit of what I could do.
But I refused to be dissuaded. My living memory, fragmented as it was, recalled tales of great necromancers performing resurrections. If a master necromancer could revive the dead, why couldn’t a competent necromancer heal the living?
There was also the possibility that I could use other types of magic. But it was obvious that the manipulations of Miasma were where I excelled, and I wanted to use my talents to maximum effect.
With that in mind I debated if I wanted to be a healer at all. Why study life, if your talents resided in death? Why heal, when harming is so much easier? I had all sorts of philosophical and complicated answers, but the truth was simply because I wanted to. Studying and healing these bodies reminded me of what it was like to be a living, breathing thing. I could feel the fire within me missing it, yearning for it.
Sometimes when I focused on that yearning, and let it consume me, my heart would start beating again, and I would drown in sensations of exquisite pain and loss. To some that may sound masochistic, perhaps it is. But I had been severed from all feeling for so long, there were times I welcomed any emotion.
On the eighteenth day after I had met Shan-lo and Elgin they returned, sending a page to let me know they were waiting at the tavern by the slave house. It was early in the morning, so I left a note telling Adan I would be gone for a while and hurried over.
Elgin looked much better, dressed in cotton tradesman garb, although by his apparent age and stature he looked more like an apprentice. Shan-lo wore hunting leathers more befitting of her tribe, though she still wore my slave collar.
“I thank you again for saving me,” Elgin said. We talked for a while, me telling him about what I did in the city, and him telling me more about himself.
He told me about how he became trapped by the dead Shaman. He was fleeing from a group of Orc thugs and got lost. After some wandering he thought he heard them coming and dove into the canal, without realizing the water had turned black. The next thing he knew, I was setting him free.
He also told me a little about his origins. His mother is called a Shaman by the Orcs, but she is actually a witch living in the marshlands East of the city. She would often send him into the city for supplies she could not get through trading with the Orcs.
“You have to be careful trading with Orc tribes though,” he said. “Some of them believe that the dead aren’t supposed to be walking around. If their Shaman knows a bit of necromancy or talks a lot to his ancestor spirits, then they are easy going. But a lot of them are convinced they need to “return you to your restful slumber,” which usually means cutting off your head and setting you on fire.”
With Elgin translating, Shan-lo told me she was hungry. I wondered briefly how long it had been since she had eaten, for it looked as though she had lost some weight. I ordered the same thing we had before for her, then handed 6 silver coins, telling her that I wanted her to be a healthy weight by the end of the month. At that she blushed a little but smiled a great deal.
Elgin said, “We should head to my mother’s house soon, while the way is still open.”
“Will it take long?”
“Not while the way is open. When it is, it only takes half a day. Otherwise If can take a month or longer.”
“What about getting back? I don’t want to be trapped there.”
“Don’t worry,” he grinned. “Leaving my mother’s house is always easier than finding it.”
13.
It took the rest of the day to find his mother’s cottage. During that time, we spoke at length over a variety of things. He told me of some of the rarer herbs we passed by (some of which I stopped to pick), and I told him some of their uses in alchemy. He told me a little about the Orc tribes that his mother dealt with, though he only knew a little about them; his mother often kept him hidden in fear they would try and destroy them.
The only tribe he knew much about was the Dem-huk tribe, which was the one Shan-lo belonged to. Their Shaman and chief communed a lot with the dead, so his mother allowed Elgin to trade with them.
“A third of their tribe are zombies,” he said, “and when they hunt they dress like corpses.”
“Why?”
“To scare their enemies,” he grinned. “They also take both their dead and the bodies of their rival tribe after a fight. Makes them look un-killable.”
We had taken a small boat. Elgin and I rowed, but it was hardly necessary. The current took us straight to a little cottage surrounded by trees. Most of the land in the marshlands was comprised of floating pieces of vegetation, and the land the cottage rested upon was no exception, though it was larger than most pieces.
I could sense enchantments all over the house and property, and even something in the surrounding area. I had no idea what they did, though I assumed many of them had to do with safety and protection.
Most of the cottage looked like it was made from interwoven sticks and brambles that the island itself was made from. They were so thick and well woven that they looked like a solid wall at a distance. The single window frame and chimney were made of clay. The small window held no glass, and the shutters were open, and I could faintly hear singing from within.
Shan-lo stayed in the boat with a bag full of dried meats and travel rations and a small jug of watered wine. Elgin led me inside to a surprisingly spacious room. In one corner was a small bed covered in thick sheepskin furs. Shelves were built into the walls around it, littered with various books, scrolls, and nick knacks. A wooden table with a stone top dominated the center of the room. On it was the half-butchered carcass of some enormous eel. A knife stuck out of its head, and one of its eyes was missing. The opposite corner to the bed was a fireplace, where a small fire burned cheerily beneath a grey cauldron. Liquid churned and bubbled within, though it was nowhere near overflowing. The walls were covered with crammed shelves or hooks where items hung. Bags, jars of herbs, herbs hanging to dry, incense, knives, a bow and quiver, the list goes on. The floor was soft and covered in animal skin.
Amidst all this was Elgin’s mother. She looked surprisingly young, barely a girl come of age. She had a light pale skin, with thick dark wavy hair tied tightly behind her head. She was short, her fame finding a happy union between petite and voluptuous. She had a longish nose, but it was proportionately well framed on her delicate face, with deep red lips and cheeks flushed from attending the fire. She moved back and forth between the fireplace and the table like a dancer in a cream-colored blouse and a dark skirt, her feet barefoot as she twirled, cutting short strips off the
eel here and there and then placing them daintily in the cauldron.
She hummed loudly to herself as she did so, her voice low for a women’s, yet rich and sultry.
She suddenly stopped mid twirl and faced us.
“You’re back!” She cried, skipping around the table and throwing her arms around Elgin.
“Hi mom,” he smiled, returning her embrace. He then gestured toward me. “This is Jorm. The zombie I told you about.”
“Hello,” she said, giving a bright, genuine smile. She had dark eyes that seemed to smolder. “Thank you for saving my boy. I owe you a debt, and I intend to repay it.”
I gave a polite bow as one would give a lady, and her smile widened.
“I have questions about my past,” I said. “Can you help me answer them?”
“I can try,’ she said. “But it is almost dinner time. You will have to wait until after.”
She then returned to preparing the cauldron, quickly cutting off more pieces of the eel and throwing them in. Sometimes she would add some herbs from a nearby shelf. Sometimes she would utter something in a language I didn’t understand, that sounded like it could be Old Uben, and a bit of enchantment would briefly flare in the pot.
Finally, she grabbed two pieces of leather and used them to pick up the cauldron. As she did so she said, “Elgin dear, hold the door open. You and Jorm wait inside. Jorm, for your safety please don’t come outside.”
She hurried out the door, which Elgin closed behind her.
“What’s going on,” I asked, and Elgin brought a finger to his lips to shush me.
He slowly walked over to me and whispered, “Mother is going to feed the guardian of her house.” I heard a thump outside. “He is jealous and possessive of her.” Zombies don’t seem to have much in the way of facial expressions, but I could see anger in Elgin’s eyes, and his fists were clenched till his knuckles went white.