Dirge for a Necromancer

by Ash Stinson

  Sullenly, the beheaded goblin followed Raettonus out of the room. The soldiers watched them with wide, fearful eyes as they passed, and Raettonus saw one fall to his equine knees and retch. The pair went downward to the seventh floor where Raettonus found a vacant kitchen with wide tables, sharp knives, and sinks with faucets that could be pumped for water. Raettonus set Deggho’s head down on a counter and helped his body up onto a table.

  “So, what was Hell like?” asked Raettonus as he undressed the body.

  “I don’t know,” said Deggho. “I…can’t remember. I’ve got a big, blank place in my memory between being beheaded and waking up out in the mountains with a bunch of soldiers. Oh, but there was sunlight! Out in the mountains, I mean, it was all sunny. I’d missed the sun. I’d missed it so much.”

  “Does this hurt?” Raettonus asked him, pushing the tip of a knife slowly into his stomach.

  “Hurt? No, not really,” said Deggho. “I…I feel the pressure, and I feel the cold of the steel, but…but there’s no pain.”

  “None at all?”

  “Not at all,” said Deggho. He frowned. “I’m…I’m really dead, aren’t I? It doesn’t feel like it but—but I am, aren’t I?”

  “Your disembodied head is sitting on a counter watching your body get cut open on a table three feet away,” Raettonus told him dryly. “Of course you’re really dead.”

  “I don’t want to be dead,” said the goblin quietly. Tears were beginning to well up in his eyes and slide down his sunken cheeks, onto the counter beneath him. “I never got to see my mother and father again. I never got to fall in love, or have kids, or…or a thousand things. I don’t want to be d-dead.”

  Raettonus ran his knife down Deggho’s chest and stomach, all the way to his navel. Malnutrition had made Deggho’s body brittle, and it was no hard task for Raettonus to cut his ribs along the sternum. The goblin winced at the cracking sounds as the knife slid through his chest. “Do I really have to be in here while you do this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Raettonus, pulling back Deggho’s ribs with more cracks and snaps. “Maybe if your head gets too far away from your body, you’ll stop possessing one of them.”

  “Possessing my own body and head?” said Deggho. “I’m not one of your necromancy projects. I’m not possessing my own body.”

  “Look, do you want to die again?” snapped Raettonus. “Shut up so I can work.”

  Deggho bit his lower lip. “A-all right,” he whimpered. “Could you at least turn me so I’m not facing this? It’s…it’s really weird and I’m feeling uncomfortable.”

  “No. Shut up.”

  The goblin whimpered again slightly, but made no further protest as Raettonus finished opening his body cavities and pinning back the flesh and muscle. Small amounts of visceral fat clung to the shrunken organs within. Nothing moved. The heart and lungs did not pulse rhythmically; the stomach and intestines were empty, collapsed into themselves. Raettonus ran one of his fingers along Deggho’s bowel, prompting the goblin to yelp. “Don’t do that!” said Deggho. “That feels so—augh! Please, never do that again.”

  Raettonus arched one eyebrow. When Deggho spoke, his organs continued to stay still. “Can you sigh for me?” asked Raettonus.

  “Only if you promise not to touch any more of my organs.”

  “I promise nothing. Sigh for me.”

  “All right,” said Deggho, lowering his ragged ears. He heaved a heavy sigh, and Raettonus could hear the breath moving through his body, but his lungs stayed still.

  “Interesting,” said Raettonus. He spread his hand above the body, trying to suss out where Deggho’s soul was connected to it, but he couldn’t feel anything. It was like trying to find the soul of a living body; it was so well integrated with the physical form that it might as well have not existed at all. He placed his hand over Deggho’s heart.

  “You’re not going to touch that, are you?” asked the goblin weakly. “I’d really rather you didn’t. Magician, can you hear me? Are you listening? I said I’d really rather you not touch my heart. Please, don’t touch that. I’m being quite serious.”

  Ignoring him, Raettonus placed his hand on the quiet heart and Deggho yelped. Though he wasn’t nearly as skilled at necromancy as his master had been, Raettonus was beyond good enough at it that he could reanimate bodies using his own energy, if only for a short time. He wasn’t sure what to expect on Deggho’s body, but he tried it anyway, letting his magical energy flow through his hand into the heart. Beat, he thought, and the heart obeyed.

  “Gods!” exclaimed Deggho as Raettonus pulled his hand away from the now beating heart. “St-stop it! That’s too weird. I don’t like it! Stop!”

  Blood began to ooze from all the body’s broken blood vessels, black and thick. Raettonus watched the blood puddle around the goblin’s neck for a while before withdrawing his energy from the heart. “How are you alive?” he wondered quietly. “This doesn’t make sense. Clearly you’re dead. I can’t necromance the living, after all. Nothing in your body’s alive, individually, but for some reason… Not to mention your head not being attached to your body. I have a servant who is a walking corpse with his soul reattached, but this isn’t the same thing. I can’t find your soul.”

  “I don’t have a soul?” asked Deggho, furrowing his brow. “Is that why I came back to life? Because I don’t have a soul? Am I like you?”

  Raettonus glared at him. “Not what I meant,” he said. “I mean to say, your soul’s still part of your body, as though you hadn’t died to begin with.”

  “Does that make me immortal?”

  “It makes you more interesting,” said Raettonus. He put some of his magic into Deggho’s arm and lifted it.

  “Stop that!” protested the goblin. He grabbed the possessed arm with his free one. “What’re you doing? This is—it’s creepy! Stop!”

  “Fine.” Raettonus withdrew his energy and started away.

  “Hey, wait!” said Deggho, hopping off the table and grabbing his head. He rushed after Raettonus. “You haven’t closed me up! My organs are cold and all exposed!”

  “Close it up yourself,” Raettonus said.

  “Wait! You cut me open,” said Deggho, following after him.

  “So?”

  “So, maybe you should close me up. I—I wouldn’t know how, anyway,” Deggho said. “I mean, you let me get killed, so the least you can do is sew me closed after you’ve opened me all up like this.”

  Raettonus turned to look at him. “I didn’t let you get killed,” he said. “It just happened. But fine. I’ll close you up. Hop on the table. But you’re going to have to clean all your blood off it.”

  “That was your fault,” said Deggho with a sigh.

  “Yeah, well it was your blood,” Raettonus responded, taking the goblin’s head and setting it in a sink before helping his body get up on the table. He sewed him up, neat and tidy, then left him to clean up the mess.

  Raettonus’ thoughts were racing as he made his way back to his room. He closed and barred his door and went to his bookshelf, gathering every book he had about necromancy, death, and healing. Laying them in a heap on his desk beside the three stone heraldry animals, he set about reading them, looking for anything that would shed some light on what had happened to Deggho dek’Kariss. He searched the texts until it was dark and he had to light his brazier to keep reading, checking them from cover to cover—annotations, footnotes, indexes. He found stories of powerful necromancers turning themselves into liches, but Deggho was not a powerful necromancer. He found stories of gods granting immortality to heroes, but Deggho was not a hero. Nowhere did he find any tales of ordinary men being killed by grievous bodily injuries, only to wake up after a day or so and continue to live while being dead. It was baffling to Raettonus to say the least; to say the most, it was frightening.

  He pushed his chair violently away from the desk and hurled the book he had been reading into the wall. It hit the stone with a thud and fell into the b
razier. For a while, he watched the fire lick at the leather of its cover, curling and charring it. The book had turned full into ash and embers before Raettonus turned his gaze away. With a sigh, Raettonus walked to his bed and threw himself facedown upon it. “I hate necromancy,” he muttered into his pillow.

  Suddenly he felt a weight on his back. Flipping himself over, he found Kimohr Raulinn sitting on top of him, wearing a beautiful robe of crimson silk with billowing sleeves that covered his hands and an unusually high neckline. He looked paler than usual, and the smile on his lips was a tired one. “Did you know—I was dead once,” Kimohr Raulinn said, his voice a purr as he sat on Raettonus’ legs.

  “You don’t say. Get off me,” Raettonus told him.

  The god ignored him. “It was a long, long time ago,” he said, leaning forward so his chin rested on Raettonus’ chest. He winced slightly when he moved, but did his best to cover the pained expression. The magician sighed and let him lay there. “It was so long ago, in fact, that you’d think I’d forget it ever happened. Thousands of years ago, in fact. That’s a long time even to you, isn’t it? I was little more than a child back then, and it had been discovered that my godly domain would be chaos. I was shunned by the other gods. Even my own mother did not want me. You know what that feels like, don’t you? To have a parent cast you out into the pouring rain?”

  Raettonus frowned. “How much do you know about me?” he wondered in a quiet voice.

  “Only what you tell me,” Kimohr Raulinn replied, a smile in his yellow eyes. He kissed the tip of Raettonus’ nose. “I had a lover who I cared very much for, but when my domain was revealed, he turned his back on me. From that moment onward, I was to be evil. That is how they wanted me to be. That is what a chaos god meant to them—someone to hate. Evil. As if that word even means anything. I ran away from the Gods’ Spring, where they live. I ran away, through the forests, and over the plains and through the mountains. I kept right on running until I ran right off a cliff. It was raining and there was a storm and I drowned. The water came in my nose and my mouth and down my throat and into my lungs. And I drowned. You’ve seen drowned men, haven’t you?”

  “Many times,” Raettonus said. There was a river which had run beside Sir Slade’s home, and drowned yeomen would wash up there sometimes. He had helped Slade bury them and had examined their bloated bellies and discolored flesh with horrified fascination. Sometimes when Sir Slade would take them in his arms to place them in the grave they would begin to twitch as if they were alive, and Raettonus would be startled, but Slade would take a deep breath and close his eyes and they’d stop twitching.

  Of all the ways to die, Raettonus had always thought drowning was the worst.

  “But drowning, dear Raettonus, cannot kill a god,” Kimohr Raulinn said. “Not for long. Enchanted weapons—only enchanted weapons can send us to Hell for good. Only the Fates could say how long I spent underwater, all filled up with brine, my eyes rolled back inside my head. When you die, you don’t dream; I found that out. The ocean carried me far away to Kyshem’mur, where I washed up on the beach. A young woman found me there and pressed the water out of my lungs. I still remember her face—soft, round cheeks with brown eyes and a mole right on the tip of her nose. She took me into her house, and she gave me new clothes and washed the salt from my hair. She fell in love with me, and I used her to forget about other gods for a while. We made love and I grew stronger—but barely. It then occurred to me that she was not hurt enough on the inside to give me proper strength. So I made her hurt. I did all that was in my power to cut her soul to pieces and then sew it up, just to dash it again. Oh, yes—I tore her apart from the inside out, and it gave me more than enough power. Even though I was now strong, I kept right on abusing her until she killed herself. I enjoyed having her wrapped around my finger. I used to be ashamed of that, but that was thousands of years ago. Shame dies.”

  “What do you want from me this time?” asked Raettonus, glaring at him. “You here to try to trick me into bed with you again? Or did you just come to charm me with stories about how much of a monster you are?”

  “Oh, Raettonus,” said Kimohr Raulinn lovingly. “I hope you never lose that fire of yours in your soul…or your absence of a soul, as it were. Ah, but the answer to your question is neither. Charming you with stories about how much of a monster I am is just an added bonus. It was a good story, wasn’t it? It really happened, you know. Gods don’t lie.”

  “Like I’d believe that.”

  “Okay, they do,” admitted Kimohr Raulinn. “But this god doesn’t.”

  “Are you going to get off me any time soon?” Raettonus asked, scowling.

  “I wasn’t planning on it, no,” said Kimohr Raulinn.

  “You have five seconds to get off me before I burn you.”

  “All right, all right,” said Kimohr Raulinn, rolling off Raettonus and sitting up. “That’s really no way to treat a god.” He sat cross-legged on the bed as Raettonus slid himself up against the headboard into a sitting position. Kimohr Raulinn’s robe had pulled up slightly, and Raettonus could see a bandage on his ankle, soaked through with blood.

  “What happened there?” asked Raettonus, nodding toward Kimohr Raulinn’s bandaged ankle.

  Kimohr Raulinn pulled the hem of his robe down over the wound. “Oh, nothing to be concerned about,” he said. “An accident, only.” Raettonus frowned at him. “Has anyone ever told you just how silly you look when you pout?”

  “I wasn’t pouting,” Raettonus said. “What do you want?”

  The god grinned broadly through the fanged mouth of his mask. “Oh, I don’t want anything,” he said. “I’m not here for myself. I’m here for you, really. For what you want.”

  “Can’t you ever speak plainly?” complained Raettonus.

  “That’d take all the fun out of speaking,” said Kimohr Raulinn. “I might as well go the full way and start dressing plainly and eating plainly and acting plainly. Then I could be just as boring as everyone else, hm?”

  Raettonus sighed and rubbed at his eyes with the palms of his hands. “What on Earth did I do so wrongly to be cursed with having to talk to you?”

  “I think we both know the answer to that, Magician Raettonus,” Kimohr Raulinn said with a chuckle. Raettonus scowled and turned away. “Well, if it’s any consolation, you’ve done horrible things but I still like you.”

  “It isn’t,” said Raettonus. “Not at all.”

  “I’ve been speaking to Sir Slade,” Kimohr Raulinn said. “We’ve become fast friends, he and I.”

  Raettonus turned back toward him. “Master Slade?” he asked. “This is a lie, isn’t it? You’re just trying to get a rise out of me.”

  “Not at all,” Kimohr Raulinn said. “I revived him, just as I said I would. Why, he’s just the same as if he’d never died at all. He’s not like one of your walking corpses, you know—nor like Deggho dek’Kariss. Oh, yes, I know about Deggho…ah, but Sir Slade the Gryphon is alive again—truly alive. I came to bring him to you, in fact.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “He’s still in my temple in Kyshem’mur,” Kimohr Raulinn said. “I left him there while I went to check if you were in a mood to see him.”

  “Of course I’m in a mood to see him!” exclaimed Raettonus. He scowled. “That is, if you have him at all. I have my doubts.”

  “Oh, Magician—you really should learn to trust a little more,” Kimohr Raulinn said, pinching the blond man’s cheek. “Trust others. Trust yourself. I could feel you watching me in your dreams. What would make you think those experiences were merely fantasy when you already knew your dreams can transcend that?” He sighed and disappeared, fading away in the span of a few seconds.

  “Hey, wait!” called Raettonus. “Get back here—where’s Master Slade?”

  The room was quiet, save for the fire crackling in the brazier. Frustrated, Raettonus spun and kicked the bronze brazier, sending it rolling across the floor, spilling out embers and hot coals. Th
ey sizzled on the grimy stone, and one or two landed on discarded sheets of paper and began small fires. With a defeated sigh, Raettonus righted the brazier and got down on his knees to collect the still-burning coals. He picked up a couple of red-hot embers that had rolled under the bed, grumbling to himself, and tossed them into the brazier. He turned and saw a fire had started on one of the tapestries hanging on the wall. “Christ!” he shouted. “That—I’m going to get blamed for that.”

  He closed his eyes and reached out his hand, concentrating on that place between places. He fumbled his fingers across a book and a necklace before he found the pitcher and withdrew it quickly, the contents sloshing over the brim. It splashed down his tunic, leaving little behind to throw at the fire, and when he did fling the water, he mostly missed. The fire hissed slightly, but continued to burn. Raettonus cradled the empty pitcher on his lap and sighed.

  Suddenly, a thin stream of water arched over Raettonus’ head onto the fire, extinguishing it.

  Raettonus turned quickly, and in the dimness of his chamber he saw a tall, broad-shouldered figure standing, watching him with glowing blue eyes. Raettonus lifted one hand toward the brazier and bid the fire grow. His heart was in his throat as light filled the room; he was afraid he would not see what he hoped so violently for. But when he could see clearly, it was Sir Slade that he saw, watching him with a smile on his face. There were tears on his cheeks.

  Raettonus couldn’t remember getting up, but the next moment found him hugging Slade tightly, burying his face in Slade’s chest, and crying like a little child. Slade didn’t say a word; he just held him gently and let him cry. Raettonus clung to him firmly, shaking with sobs, as Sir Slade rubbed his back soothingly. The blood rushed out of his knuckles, leaving them blanched, as he grabbed hard to Slade’s tunic as though he were afraid that his master would disappear forever if he should let go or ease his grip even a little.

  “It’s all right, Raettonus,” said Sir Slade softly after several minutes had passed. “It’s all all right. Here, sit down.”