Dirge for a Necromancer

by Ash Stinson

  “Yes, Master,” said Raettonus with a nod. He cupped his palms before himself and invited a tiny fire to fill them. By the fire’s light, Raettonus saw the horse’s foreleg was all twisted and bloody.

  “He must’ve stepped in a hole,” said Slade. “Poor creature. We should’ve ridden a little more carefully…”

  “You can set it though, can’t you?” asked Raettonus. “You can set the bones and they’ll mend? Like that time I broke my arm and you set it and it healed just right?”

  Slade shook his head. “I’m afraid not,” he said, standing. The horse was screeching and trying to get to its feet. The dark-haired man sighed and unsheathed his hunting knife. “Horses aren’t like people, Raettonus. There’s no way to get him off his leg for the time it’ll take to set, and if we could get him to stay off it he’d get sick.”

  Raettonus looked up at his master and bit his lip. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I’m going to put him out of his misery,” said Slade, kneeling beside the injured horse. He placed his hand on Silvershield’s neck and whispered softly into his ear that it was going to be okay.

  “Don’t kill him,” said Raettonus, putting his hand on Slade’s shoulder. “Please, Master…”

  With a tired smile, Slade looked up at his ward. “Everything dies, Raettonus,” he said. “You don’t need to be sad about it or afraid of it. Death follows life like rainbows follow rain. This is the kinder way. Silvershield won’t be in pain anymore. Instead of his life petering out painfully, he can go quickly, without more hurt. I know he’s a good horse, and you’ll miss him, but this is the best way.”

  Raettonus looked from Slade’s face to the blade of his knife and then to the horse. “Animals don’t go to heaven, do they?” he asked quietly. “You—you told me that, once, when I asked when I was little. You told me animals don’t have souls.”

  “That’s right,” said Slade, turning his face away.

  “So what happens to him when he dies? I’ll never see him again? Not even in heaven?”

  “You’ll still have your memories of him,” Slade said. “I know it doesn’t seem like much, but it really is. Look, why don’t you take Steorra back to the castle? You don’t need to be here for this. I—Ride carefully.”

  Raettonus nodded numbly and mounted his master’s horse. The destrier placidly obeyed as Raettonus steered him away, much less concerned by the other horse’s screams than Raettonus was.

  It was a few hours before Slade returned. He’d cleaned his knife off carefully, but had neglected to notice some of the blood he’d gotten on his tunic. The sight of it—the knowledge of where it’d come from—made Raettonus queasy, but he said nothing.

  It was around three years later that the plague hit Slade, and Raettonus found himself reliving that same conversation all over again.

  Slade’s health had deteriorated so rapidly, and Raettonus had no idea how to help him. Only a couple days after the first symptoms appeared—fever, dizziness—Slade was bedridden and covered with festering black abscesses on his thighs and under his arms. His room stank of corruption every time Raettonus brought him food or water, and there was always sweat on Slade’s brow and pain in his eyes.

  “Raettonus,” croaked Slade when he came to bring water. He grabbed Raettonus’ arm. “I need you to help me. I’m in so much pain.” The words were so hard for him to say, and they came out between labored breaths that rattled in his thinning chest like a dried bean in a tin.

  “What do you need, Master?” asked Raettonus. “I’ve got water. Do you want me to go fetch something to help you sleep?”

  Slade swallowed hard. “Please,” he said. “Kill me.”

  The pitcher tumbled out of Raettonus’ fingers and shattered on the floor. He didn’t bother to pick it up. “W-what?” said Raettonus, his words trembling as they came off his tongue. “I think I misheard you.”

  Slade’s blue eyes were foggy with pain as he gently pulled Raettonus close by the front of his tunic. “I want you to kill me,” he said, every word heavy with the effort of speaking. “This hurts—hurts so bad that I… I can’t make it, Raettonus. I can’t…”

  “It’s going to pass, Master,” said Raettonus. Blood rushed in his ears; it sounded like thunder imitating a heartbeat. He was in a nightmare, he thought to himself, and when he awoke the conversation would vanish into the fog, forgotten. “You’re getting much better. Here—let me go get you some more water.”

  “I’m dying, Raettonus,” said Slade. His voice rasped, and he half-coughed as he spoke. His skin was waxy and his cheeks hollow. He looked like he had already died. “It’s not going to go away. This pain… Even with hell awaiting me for it, I would kill myself to end this pain.”

  “Master, you shouldn’t say things like that.”

  “I don’t have the strength to do it myself or else I would,” said Slade. “Please, Rae—if you love me, kill me.”

  Slade’s dagger was on the bedside table. Raettonus stared at it for a moment that stretched on and on. Its naked blade gleamed like quicksilver in the dim light. Outside the rain pounded, and a wind pressed gently against the shutters and batted back the thin drapes.

  “You’ll get better, Master,” Raettonus insisted weakly. “You…you’re doing so much better.”

  “Raettonus,” said Slade again. Raettonus winced to hear his name spoken in that cracking, pained voice. “I’m not getting better. I can feel death coming for me. It aches and it burns and—Mary, mother of God. Raettonus, I just want to die. Please—please.”

  He couldn’t look at Slade’s pale, fevered face. It was too much for him to try to meet the man’s gaze. Instead, he stared and stared at the dagger on the bedside table. The gleaming blade of it, so full of menace. The seashell-shaped crossguard. The hilt made of ebony banded with pewter. He could hear Slade’s sad, labored breathing as he looked at the weapon. He could smell Slade’s fetid wounds eating away at his healthy flesh. He could feel the heat of the sickness in the air around him. The dagger sat on the table, promising both relief and horror.

  “All right, Master,” said Raettonus quietly. He picked up the dagger gingerly, as if it were something delicate and temperamental.

  “Please don’t hate me,” Slade said, taking Raettonus’ free hand. The flesh of his palm was cold and wet with perspiration. “Please don’t hate me for this.”

  No matter how hard he tried afterward, Raettonus could never forget the way the dagger felt as he slid it between Slade’s ribs. He had killed many, many times after that, and it always brought back the memory unbidden—the resistance as the blade dug through the tissue, the smell of blood filling his nostrils, the look of pain on Slade’s face followed by tranquility.

  He need only close his eyes, and he was once again in that moment. He couldn’t escape from that moment. Far and fast as he might run, that moment was always right behind him. It was inside him, dwelling in every fiber of him. That moment had wrapped itself, serpent-like, around his brainstem, and it refused to let go.

  That hot, wet room that smelled of rot. That gleaming dagger pushed up to its ornate crossguard into Sir Slade’s ribcage. The hissing rattle that came up Slade’s throat as his lungs collapsed into themselves. The rain pouring down like little tiny hoofbeats against the castle’s stark stone walls.

  Covered in the blood of the person he loved the most, Raettonus collapsed beside Sir Slade on the bed and wept until his eyes ached and his throat was raw and red.

  Raettonus was snapped out of his memories suddenly as he became aware of someone standing near him.

  He jerked his head toward the figure and found it to be Kimohr Raulinn. Shadows pooled in the eyeholes of the chaos god’s mask, obscuring his eyes. Through the wide-open grin of his wooden mask, Raettonus could see his lips outlined in the firelight. He wasn’t smiling.

  “What do you want?” asked Raettonus, glaring at him.

  “Nothing at all,” Kimohr Raulinn responded easily. He took a step toward Raett
onus cautiously and looked out across the empty stone expanse around them, toward the faint, black outlines of the mountains. “I see Cykkus has fixed Hell’s gates. Pity.”

  “You knew he would.”

  Kimohr Raulinn shrugged slightly and leaned against one of the iron bars that caged the roof. “I had a feeling,” he said. “You’re only mortals, after all. Who could seriously expect you to best Death himself?”

  A wind kicked up and flapped Kimohr Raulinn’s lavish white robes. The beads around his neck clacked against each other softly as they were rustled. “Why would you do it if you expected Cykkus would just fix it anyway?” asked Raettonus as dying sparks from the pyre below floated by on the wind.

  The god chuckled softly. “It’s what I do,” he said. “All sources of chaos are only temporary. Entropy is the natural state of things, but if any one specific type of entropy were to become the rule—why, that’d just be a different sort of order, wouldn’t it? Everything I do is fleeting, my dear, sweet Raettonus. Nothing—nothing—in this world is permanent.”

  They were silent. It felt to Raettonus as if Kimohr Raulinn was waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t really feel like talking. He stared down at his boots and picked at a tear in his hose. He had changed from those stained, white clothes into a clean, dark red tunic with Sir Slade’s gryphon embroidered over the heart in black thread. If the sight of that proud, rearing beast had made him sad before, now it crushed his heart in his chest and made his throat swell up.

  Raettonus smoothed at the hem of his tunic and picked at a loose thread. All the while, he could feel Kimohr Raulinn’s gaze on the back of his neck, making the hairs there stand on end. “So,” Raettonus said, finally giving in. “Did you choose to put me through all this at random? Did I just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  Kimohr Raulinn straightened and walked toward him. He knelt beside Raettonus so that they were at eye-level. “No, it wasn’t random,” he said as Raettonus lifted his eyes. “It had to be you. You’ve lived such a long, bitter life that you had enough emotional turmoil to let me break Hell apart; that’s why it had to be you. Also, I don’t know of anyone else who could convince an entire army to fight a suicide battle on his behalf.” He smiled.

  “I see,” said Raettonus. His voice was tight.

  “You are something amazing, Raettonus,” purred Kimohr Raulinn. “I’ve watched you for such a long time, you know. When you first stepped foot in this dimension, I noticed you. You had so much…hm, let’s call it ‘promise.’ You were promising.”

  “Promise,” repeated Raettonus, narrowing his eyes.

  “Yes, promise,” cooed Kimohr Raulinn. “I could feel it inside you—all that chaos bottled up, just waiting to come out of you. Ah, but there are lots of people like that. People who hate the world and want to tear it apart. You only really caught my attention after that silly business in the Center of Souls. You lost your soul there, didn’t you? What was it for? I never could find out…”

  “I was trying to cast a spell to stamp out a pestilence in my world,” Raettonus said sourly.

  Kimohr Raulinn laughed softly. “And why would you bother to do that?” he asked.

  “Because people were dying.”

  A thin smile flitted across Kimohr Raulinn’s lips. “As if something so inconsequential ever mattered to you.” He smoothed the embroidered hem of his robe against his thigh. “So that is when you really caught my eye. The day you lost your soul. I kept a very close eye on you after that for as long as you were in Zylx. Sometimes you’d leave and I’d lose track of you. I couldn’t help but worry at first that you might not come back. Oh, but you always come back. Zylx is the closest thing you have to a real home now, isn’t it? You might stay awhile in other worlds, but you don’t belong there. Not like you belong here.”

  Raettonus furrowed his brow and looked down into the courtyard. “I don’t belong anywhere,” he said bitterly.

  “That’s true enough, I suppose,” said Kimohr Raulinn. “But this place suits you best, I think.”

  “So, what—you’ve been watching me for all this time, then? For centuries and centuries?”

  “That’s right,” affirmed Kimohr Raulinn with a slow nod.

  “Why now?” asked Raettonus. “Why wait all that time and then just suddenly decide to do this?”

  Kimohr Raulinn shrugged one slim shoulder. “I felt it was about time,” he said. “Honestly, I’ve been watching you dwell on Sir Slade’s death for all this time. I’ve been watching your wounds fester and turn necrotic. It reached a tipping point, I suppose you might say, where the benefits of putting you through this now were more irresistible than the promise of what might happen if I continued to bide my time.”

  “Benefits?” Raettonus spat. “And what, praytell, are the benefits of dangling my master in front of me—the only person I’ve ever really loved, the person I’ve been fighting my whole miserable life to get back—knowing he would just be snatched away from me again? What the fuck kind of benefits are you talking about?”

  “Benefits for me, of course, and not for you,” said Kimohr Raulinn. “The amount of chaos that’s been created here…it’s immeasurable. I didn’t do this out of malice toward you, you must know. Believe me, Raettonus, if I could have this chaos and you could have Sir Slade, I would certainly make it so. But that is, unfortunately, beyond my power. Sir Slade had to die a second death. There was never any question about that. He was never going to live more than a few weeks.”

  “You could’ve told me that to begin with,” Raettonus said. “You could’ve warned me it was only temporary.”

  “Raettonus—dear, sweet Raettonus,” cooed Kimohr Raulinn. “All things are only temporary.”

  “You could have told me to begin with.”

  “Would it have made a difference?” asked Kimohr Raulinn. “To you, I mean? To me it would have. Your pain was just so much more potent when you thought you’d have Slade for the rest of his life and had him taken from you again. That pain… I’m sorry, Raettonus, but pain like that just calls to me.” He smiled like a cat camped at a mouse hole. “No hard feelings, right?”

  Raettonus ground his teeth hard together and narrowed his eyes at the god. Clenching his right hand into a fist and putting as much weight behind it as possible from his position, he threw a hard punch.

  His knuckles connected with Kimohr Raulinn’s jaw with a loud, reverberating crack, breaking part of the mask and sending the god toppling sideways onto the ground. Raettonus shook out his hand. He’d cut the skin on his knuckles, and they looked like they’d be bruised for a week, but it was worth it. On the ground, Kimohr Raulinn sputtered and spat out some blood. He sat up shakily and gripped the bottom part of his mask, a chunk of which was missing. Blood dripped out of the uneven edges around the break. “You hit me,” Kimohr Raulinn said, scandalized. His pretty, pink lip was beginning to swell and turn red. “Are you insane? I am a god.”

  “Get out of my sight,” said Raettonus. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  Kimohr Raulinn scrambled to his feet, eyes flashing with rage. “You don’t have the right to speak to me this way.”

  Raettonus stood and drew his rapier. “That a fact?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow.

  Kimohr Raulinn looked from the blade to Raettonus’ face. Shoulders slumping slightly, he turned his gaze away from the magician. “We might have been friends,” he said sorely. “You would’ve done better to be my friend than to assume I’m your enemy. Fine, though. I’m going. Good night, Magician. Until we meet again, adieu.”

  “We won’t be meeting again, you and I,” Raettonus told him coldly.

  Kimohr Raulinn let out a stiff chuckle, blood still welling up bright and red from the ruined edges of his mask. He turned away and was gone, just as if he’d never been there to begin with. Raettonus glared into the empty air for a long while before he lowered his sword. A stiff breeze blew at his back, carrying with it the dying sparks of the fu
neral pyre far below. The little red embers brushed the back of his neck, singeing the hair and skin there, but he could hardly feel them. Overhead the moon was like a grinning mouth, smiling at his failures.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kaebha Citadel felt emptier and emptier with each passing day. Aside from the guards on Diahsis’ floor, Raettonus rarely found himself passing soldiers as he made his way through the fort. Most of the ones he did come across were Zylekkhan. Strange, he thought, since he didn’t remember there being nearly so many turncoats. He could hazard a good guess regarding that change in proportions, however.

  Dohrleht no longer came to lessons. Raettonus hadn’t spoken to him since the attack on the citadel. Maeleht was severely weakened by his efforts caring for the injured, and so he didn’t come to lessons either. Raettonus passed his days alone, walking the halls, or else in his room asleep. Diahsis often invited him to come up to his room, but Raettonus rarely took him up on the offers, and on the rare occasions he did go he found himself regretting it. At the best, a trip to Diahsis’ quarters was spent listening to the general play his flute or coldly turning down his flirtations. At the worst, Raettonus had to put up with his blowhard tales and his stories about his dead lover.

  The only place within the citadel that seemed in any way busy was the shrine. Day and night the fortress’ shrine was crowded with Zylekkhan and Tahlehson soldiers. They laid candles at the base of the statue of Cykkus and begged to be forgiven for their blasphemy in fighting against him. They hadn’t wanted to, they told the statue. They hadn’t known. No one had told them who they were fighting against. When Raettonus skulked the halls in the dead of night, he could see candlelight glaring out of the cracked door of the shrine. He didn’t go in to look, but he imagined it to be the light of thousands of candles burning all at one. Waste of energy, he thought bitterly. He’s not going to forgive you, and either way you’re just going to die.