by Alan Bayman
I wasn’t sure if the Gargoyle would kill Alula or not, but I had read tales of these sad and twisted relationships. They never ended well for the lovers or those who knew them.
“How do you know,” he asked.
“You said your mother had a reputation for promiscuity.”
“For what?”
“She likes sleeping around.”
“Oh. Yes.” He looked awkward for a moment. Kind of amusing that he chose now to be after everything else he had said.
“She didn’t promise her loyalty before he demanded it, did she?”
“Well. No,” he replied.
“So, he knew she slept around. He slept with her knowing she sleeps around. Then he gets angry for her for doing something he already knew she did. He acted betrayed for a loyalty he knew she didn’t have. They have a name for people like that in the books I’ve read, and they’re called tyrants.”
We rowed for a while in silence. Shan-lo hummed quietly to herself, sipping on the last of the watered wine.
“So, what do we do?” Elgin looked at me. “I don’t want him to kill my mother.”
“We watch, and we wait. Rebelling against tyranny is tricky business.” I paused. “In the meantime, we train. We learn.”
Well figure out how to kill a Gargoyle. Just in case we need to topple this tyranny the traditional way.
Priorities. This must be done first. So, first Gargoyle, next Marcus, then zombies, and finally slaves.
I had a feeling the list was going to get a lot longer before it shortened.
16.
The canal entrances to the city are three times as wide as a regular canal. The city wall forms a bridge over it, with flanking towers on either side. Each one has a portcullis of oiled wood and iron that is lowered at night to prevent smugglers and creatures from the marsh sneaking in.
But the gates where often in disrepair and were left open so the fishermen could come and go. At any given night at least one of the gates was open.
We could tell the gate we entered through was one such a gate because small fishing boats were already returning with their haul. The guards on the shore eyed us suspiciously but did not try to waylay us. I knew then that if I was to start traveling this way in and out of the city often, I would have to bribe them or face constant searches.
The morning light sent rippling reflections on the nearby buildings and canal walls as we rowed in, discussing our next move.
Elgin was going to get supplies and return home. Right after the Midwinter festival he was going to come back and fetch me to go visit again. Elgin also gave me several books his mother had given him for me to read. One was on herbalism, two were on witchcraft, and one was on alchemy. Or rather, a witch’s version of alchemy, with simpler recipes that have a lot more side effects. I was to return them when I next visited.
Shan-lo would return to her tribe within the city and find me someone willing to train me to fight. I would go every other night and visit her at the inn by the slavers auction (the inn has no name, other than “Inn”). I gave her some money to support herself and hire someone to train me.
If she could not find someone right away, I was to come anyway for language lessons. She would teach me Orc, and I planned on showing her how to speak Modern Cyrian.
Adan greeted me with the usual “get the hell over here and help me,” the moment I walked in the door. It was good to be home. Patients were the usual crowd of dockworkers with various work injuries they could not afford a magical healer to fix, with a higher number of sick people since it was winter.
Over the next couple of nights, I read the books leant to me. Most of the herbs I recognized, and it was interesting to find were they came from. The books on witchcraft seemed to assume the reader was a woman; there was a lot of rituals that either worked in relation to one’s menstrual cycle or could only be done during various stages of pregnancy. There were however some spells that helped one sense other types of magical current. These later proved to be immensely helpful.
Applying my knowledge from the book on alchemy had to wait. I had other work to do.
I started going out again on walks through the poorest parts of the city in the cover of night. My enhanced sense of Miasma gave me a greater understanding of the goings on in the buildings I passed. I stopped in front of the brothel that I first considered hiding out in. It was still riddled with death.
It was a large building that had once been an inn, but now only offered temptations of the flesh. The part of the building that once served as a kitchen had been mostly destroyed by a fire. The rest of the building was sagging in disrepair. Several of the rooms had their doors broken open or were destroyed and the only thing separating them from the common room was a thin blanket, from which the sound of grunting and rutting came from within.
I watched from the ruins of the kitchen as the owner worked, with two thugs besides him, taking money from customers and directing them to rooms. Customers had between five and ten minutes, depending on the owner’s mood, before he’d direct one of the thugs to unhook a heavy cudgel from his belt and go into the room and demand more pay. Usually the customer was either dragged out or the thug came back and handed a few coins to the owner, who stuffed them in a heavy purse at his side.
Not once did a woman come out of the rooms, until the end of the night. Then they all filed out, bruised, tired, some of them limping. They all went to the back of the inn as one and used a bucket on a rope to rinse off with. The guards and owner watched them. The owner held a large jug of ale that he passed around to the women. The women were frostbitten and cold. Most of them were sick and shivering and the canal wasn’t helping. As the men herded them back into the inn, I heard them mutter to one another.
“We’re going to lose a few more soon,” one man said.
“We better get some more then,” replied the owner. “We need a surplus for the midwinter festivals.”
“He’s going to charge more,” the other man said.
“He always does this time of year,” the owner said. “But I’m not going to be short supplied this time. Ain’t worth it.”
All three of the men were sick as well, although the owner was the healthiest. A simple pattern of Miasma drifted through his body, centered around his groin. I suspected that he had been spending some of his gains on cures.
I spent a week watching him. He paid off local criminals from bothering him but wasn’t part of any organization. He said he owned the inn, mostly because no one else wanted it; it was in too poor of a district and too costly to repair.
He got his women from a man who bought daughters from poor families willing to sell off one of their children so that the rest of them could eat for the winter. It wasn’t considered slavery because slaves where often better trained and therefore of higher value. As I watched them in their misery, thoughts of my wife when I first met her would come unbidden to my mind. I would imagine her among them, sharing in their misery, and the fire within me would flare in cold fury.
My original plan was simply to buy or subvert and take over the brothel and run it as it was. I could not do this. Not with her memory haunting me. I would have to change it, but that would create its own problems. The prevalent death in the brothel could hide me from necromancers, without it I could be discovered. Also, if the place did not make money, I would need to find a way to sustain it.
I could repair the building and make it into a regular inn, but it would cost a great deal to invest, and with so little return, being in one of the poorest places in the city, it just wasn’t worth it.
I decided to table the idea for a time and work on other things while I mulled it over.
I spent time contemplating my recovered memories of tomes I read while working as a scrivener and began applying that information to my studies. I learned to shape dead and decaying flesh. I could have made a zombie, but I had little interest in reanimation, apart from discovering more about myself.
I found that over time th
e arm that I had torn off to replace my own had slowly molded itself to become indistinguishable from my original arm. Likewise, if I took a piece of foreign tissue and applied it to a corpse I could shape it to restore any missing pieces the body had. In this way I could restore a corpse to a pristine condition. I recalled reading that it was the first step to greater reanimations and ultimately to resurrection.
To this I asked myself if I could take a piece of dead tissue to replace undead tissue, why couldn’t I take a piece of dead tissue to replace living tissue? The answer was that I could, but it would be tricky. Too much dead tissue used to restore the living and the living would succumb to the overwhelming proximity to concentrated Miasma and simply die. Sometimes it would even reanimate on its own. But with a small amount of reanimated tissue, roughly no greater than 25% replacement, and the creature would not only survive, but be strengthened from its original state.
I learned all this from experimenting on rats. I had taken to breeding them to use their intestines for suturing. I was quite successful in that regard, and we had cut the cost of buying sutures considerably, as long as Adan remembered to feed them when I was away.
As planned, I was seeing Shan-lo to learn their language. She had found someone to train me to fight, but they were “out hunting” and would not be back for a couple of weeks. From what she wrote to me he was worth the wait.
I learned to my surprise that there is more than one Orc language, both written and spoken. It made sense, with Orcs in each different region changing their culture and their language along with it.
But Orc culture was something I had never thought about and was from my readings was encouraged not to. Many human scholars referring to them as simple savages little better than animals on two legs.
The Orc language I was learning was Tomo, or “trade-tongue” in Orc. It was the simplest Orc language, and most Orcs knew it. The language of Oobos, as humans knew it, was Tomo with bits of other Orc dialects thrown in.
Tomo’s writing system was little more than math, and part of the written Orc I already knew as well. The written Orc I knew was Zhu-mo, or “war-tongue”, and was the written tongue for most of the tribes in Ubenfold.
As our communication improved I told her about my experimentations with attaching dead (or rather reanimated) tissue to living beings. She grew excited and told me she wanted me to meet someone. I agreed, and a few nights later when I walked into the inn there was another Orc woman with her. She was only slightly taller than Shan-lo, far older and portly, but the family resemblance was unmistakable.
“Jorm, this is Dhan-lo, me mother,” Shan-lo spoke slowly in Orc, so that I could mostly understand her. I stood stiffly and gave a slight bow with a nod, as Shan-lo had taught me how to greet an elder.
Dhan-lo smiled and said something rapidly in Orc. It sounded complimentary, but I wasn’t sure as Shan-lo’s response sounded curt. I walked over to the table, pulling out parchment and charcoal.
“Master,” Shan-lo wrote, “will you mend my mother’s foot?”
I looked over at her mother. Shan-lo said something to her, and she nodded slowly, moving her left leg out from under the table and lifting the grey dress she was wearing slightly.
Her foot was gone up to her shin. In its place was a wooden block carefully carved to resemble a sandaled foot with soft leather straps binding it to her leg.
I stooped over slightly and examined it. Her leg had healed long ago, though walking on this contraption had weakened her knee and the rest of her body.
“Tell me why your Shaman has not healed her,” I wrote.
“He cannot,” she wrote in reply.
“I have never done this before on man or Orc,” I wrote. “Only rats.”
“Please try, Master,” she wrote. “I think you can. Her life will be better, and you will win great respect from my clan.”
“Then I will try,” I spoke in Orc, and they both gave the same beautiful smile, a mirror image contrasted with age.
I paid for a room for the two of them, along with their evening meal. Dhan-lo smiled gratefully and said a few things to her daughter while touching her hair affectionately. Shan-lo snapped back her replies, I heard the Orc words for “no” and “wrong” a lot, and she blushed a lot. I think her mother was trying to play matchmaker with me, and in the tradition of all mothers, embarrassing the hell out of her daughter.
I bid them farewell and went home, spending the rest of the night on other projects.
The next evening after sunset I grabbed some spare body parts and drugs, put them in my Traveler’s Bag, and headed over to the Inn. They were waiting at the bar, and I took them to their room.
I had Dhan-lo lay down on the bed and remove the prosthetic. I then examined her other foot so that I would have something to compare. It wasn’t necessary though it made it easier.
I pulled from my bag a human foot and leg that was roughly her size. She grew alarmed and through some translating asked if that was going to be her new leg. I told her no, that it was only the raw materials.
I then let her know that I had to cut the end of her leg to seal the new one on. She asked if her daughter could do it, and I didn’t see why not, so I agreed.
At my direction, Shan-lo skinned away the bottom of her mother’s stump until flesh and bone lay bare. They did not ask for drink or any pain killer, and her mother grimaced and grit her teeth, but did not cry out. I was impressed, I had witnessed grown men be reduced to hysterics for less.
I quickly placed the human foot over the bloody mass and began to mold it into her missing foot. It was a lot harder to do than with the rats. I had to break out two vials of liquid Miasma to finish the job. The black liquid seeped into the foot and helped me mold it without killing her.
It took about four hours. When I was done, she was pale and covered in sweat, but otherwise healthy. Her new foot looked normal, though it was a pale grey.
She flexed her new foot, and her eyes widened. She sat up quickly and ran her hands over the grey skin. She said something, and her daughter translated.
“I can feel it. Earth and fire, I can feel it.”
I beckoned her to stand. She did so slowly, carefully placing her weight down on her new foot. Then with a sudden cry of delight she leaped in the air and ran around the room. As she spoke rapidly to her daughter, her voice full of joy, I thought to myself, this is what necromancy can do, it is more than death. She ran at me full speed almost knocking me down as she threw her arms around me.
“Thank you, Shaman Jorm,” she said in thickly accented Cyrian. A pain shot through my chest as my heart beat suddenly, sending a warmth through me. My body tingled as she let go, smiling and talking again to her daughter. My heart stopped beating just as quickly, but the warmth lingered. I resisted the urge to grab her, to try and recreate the warmth as it dissipated.
17.
Over the next week I replaced two eyes, another leg, an arm, and attached several floating ribs for Shan-lo’s tribe. Their Shaman sent a message practically begging me to meet him, and everyone in her tribe wanted to train me to fight. This meant that I had the pick of whoever I wanted to train me, and by Shan-lo’s recommendation I picked Haas, the tribes retired Leader of The Hunt, who now held the title Second Eldest. I asked her what the title he now held meant, and she explained that the Elders acted as teachers for the children. First Eldest taught the Ways of Earth and Stone and taught the history of the tribe. Second Eldest taught the Ways of Fire and Night and how to fight and hunt.
I asked if he had time for me if he was training all the children. She told me that the tribe had few children these days. They had lost a great deal and most of their best warriors had been crippled or killed. That was changing, though, now that I restored four of their best warriors and her mother.
The first thing that Haas said to me was, “stupid.”
He was tall, rail thin with chipped tusks, pale green sagging skin and stark white hair. But he moved like a great cat stalking his pr
ey as he looked me over, shaking his head.
He walked around me, muttering stupid in Cyrian over and over. We had met in the stables behind the slavers inn, and his feet didn’t even make a rustling sound as he stepped on the hay littered floor.
“Excuse me, but what here is stupid,” I asked.
He stopped abruptly and reached out, poking my shoulder with a single finger. Unbalanced, I staggered.
“Stupid,” he snapped. He reached out again, pushing my arm. I almost fell again.
“Stupid,” he said even louder. As I righted myself he pushed a single finger into the side of my head. I fell over.
“Stupid!” He chuckled.
Annoyed, I stood back up.
“I’m not-,” I began.
“You stand like old cripple,” he cut in. “No, that insult cripples. You stand like old human woman who never learned to hunt. Head out and low. No balance. Orc baby with stick beat you up.”
Shan-lo looked away, trying not to giggle.
He did have a point though. Most of my mortal life had been spent at a writing table. My posture was atrocious.
I shrugged. “Can you help me?”
The old Orc grinned. “You unda?” he gestured at me. “Body stupid. But head smart. I am Haas. I can make your body smart. Body smart, then you learn to fight. Hunt,” his grin widened, “live,” and he threw back and laughed.
First, he showed me to stand on the balls of my feet with my knees slightly bent and my stomach tucked in. He would have me stand that way for about 5 minutes then he would have me walk across the room and get in the position again. If I was out of position he would correct me with a tap of his finger. If my posture was too bad he would poke me with said finger and I would usually fall over.
After a few hours of this he had me doing the same posture while carrying a cup full of water. Sometimes I would carry it, but usually I had to balance it on my head without it spilling.