Necromancer Awakening

by Nat Russo

  At least he left the belt.

  He tied it around his waist, but couldn’t figure out where the wide portions should go. They seemed comfortable in the back, where they draped down below his waist. The old man hadn’t put any underwear in the wardrobe, so Nicolas didn’t wear any. He gave the belt one last tug and ran out of the room.

  A large doorway stood before him on the third level of the building. A mix of open and closed coffins lined the sides of the room beyond, and dusty cobwebs covered the entire place, as if its owners had abandoned it decades ago. The room smelled from centuries of burning candle residue, and wax hung like stalactites from the candelabra that stood between the coffins.

  A grating noise made him turn. Mujahid was sliding the cover off one of the coffins.

  “Real funny, Mujahid,” he said.

  Mujahid kept his eyes on the coffin. “Good. You’re an early riser. You did well last night, boy.”

  “You can wake someone up without smacking them.”

  Mujahid looked at Nicolas’s clothes for the first time and raised his eyebrow.

  “What in Arin’s name are you wearing?” Mujahid said. “Those aren’t the robes I gave you.”

  “And just try putting a boot up my ass and see what happens.”

  “I see,” Mujahid said. He closed his eyes and shook his head. An odd smile formed on his face.

  “So you do think this is funny?” Nicolas said.

  “Any time now, brother,” Mujahid said.

  The sound of rushing air filled the room, along with the cracking pops of tiny releases of static electricity. A foot stepped out from thin air between them, attached to a black-robed man that followed it. It was like watching someone step out from behind a mirror. The man was laughing and clapping his hands as he approached Mujahid with his back toward Nicolas.

  “Brother,” Mujahid said, shaking his head. “Torturing postulants again?”

  When Nuuan turned around, Nicolas had to question his own eyesight.

  Mujahid and Nuuan were identical twins.

  “Postulant Nicolas,” Mujahid said. “Meet my brother. Nuuan Lord Mukhtaar.”

  “He’s a little long in the tooth for a postulant,” Nuuan said. “Don’t you think?”

  “You didn’t have to dress him like a woman, brother.”

  “What? A woman?” Nicolas asked.

  “Look at him,” Nuuan said. “He doesn’t know teet from arse, and you think he’s the one?”

  “Excuse me…the one what?” Nicolas said.

  Mujahid gave him an anxious look of warning.

  “I think you’d do well to get your head out of all these books and your arse out of Paradise,” Nuuan said. “Now that I think on it, getting your head out of your arse wouldn’t hurt either.”

  “There’s too much to be done.”

  “Hey,” Nicolas said. “I’m standing right here, and I asked you a question.”

  Mujahid’s eyes grew wide, and he held up his hand.

  Nuuan’s expression changed from joy to a mixture of shock and rage.

  “On your knees, postulant!” Nuuan’s eyes flashed white and something forced Nicolas to the ground by the shoulders. “By the sweat on Arin’s festering—”

  “Brother,” Mujahid said, placing his hand on Nuuan’s shoulder. “Please.”

  Nuuan exhaled a long breath. “Control your postulant, or I will.”

  “He is unfamiliar with our customs. It was my fault, not his.”

  Nuuan’s face relaxed. “You’d wager the clan on him? After what we did to unify it?”

  “After what you did?”

  Nuuan scowled. “I may have been the blade, brother, but you were the hilt.”

  Mujahid looked down. “What’s done is done. I’ve studied that prophecy for more years than I care to admit.”

  “Kagan isn’t going to wait for him to be ready.”

  “Leave the worrying to me. It’s time to head south.”

  Nuuan raised an eyebrow. “Tildem?”

  Mujahid nodded.

  Nuuan whistled. “There’s no going back once I open my robe and flash the Pinnacle.”

  “I know.”

  “I hope you do, because when it starts, the two of us may be the only ones fighting. This boy-girl over here looks more apt to trip over the power than wield it.”

  Nicolas wanted to say something but thought better of it.

  “King Donal is our best choice,” Mujahid said.

  “The Union—”

  “Can’t be trusted. And you underestimate Nicolas’s abilities, by the way.”

  Nicolas wasn’t expecting Mujahid to come to his defense.

  “Malvol’s festering cock, brother,” Nuuan said. “My arse has welts from that flea-bitten adda they gave me in Agera, and now it’s off to Tildem?”

  “Blasphemy, brother.”

  Nuuan waved his hand. “The gods can—”

  “Would you rather train him and I go to Tildem?”

  “One day,” Nuuan said. “Just one day.”

  Mujahid smirked.

  “You’re denying the fair women of Paradise their greatest treasure,” Nuuan said. He frowned at Mujahid. “How uncharitable of you, priest.”

  Mujahid smiled. “The brothel has had enough of your treasure this year.”

  Nicolas adjusted his belt.

  “That isn’t a cincture, you little girl,” Nuuan said. “It’s a supporter.”

  Nicolas looked down at the belt and comprehension dawned on him. Nuuan had given him a bra, and…judging by the looks of it…a training bra.

  “The room over there, boy,” Mujahid said, nodding to his left. “You’ll find some robes and sandals. Take anything that fits.”

  “And remember this, Postulant,” Nuuan said “There are necromancers who would sever their own cocks to learn the arts from one of us.”

  “Nuuan,” Mujahid said.

  “You are a postulant of Clan Mukhtaar now,” Nuuan said. “Learn what you can, and learn it well, boy. The path you’re on—”

  “Enough, brother,” Mujahid said. He shook his head. “Too much too soon. Not good.”

  Nuuan chuckled. “You sound like old fish breath.”

  The two men embraced

  “Be careful this time,” Mujahid said. “This is different.”

  Nuuan nodded and walked away.

  Mujahid looked at Nicolas. “Unless you’re getting in touch with your feminine side, I suggest you change your clothes.”

  “Oh I’ll change,” Nicolas said. “But I’m keepin’ my boots.”

  Nicolas emerged wearing a long brown robe and his brown boots.

  Mujahid had removed the covers from the remaining coffins and was holding what looked like a polished femur.

  “Before I teach you to summon, tell me what you think necromancy is,” Mujahid said as he sat on the floor.

  The bone was unnerving, disgusting, but Nicolas joined Mujahid on the floor anyway.

  “It’s got something to do with raising the dead.”

  “True. What else?”

  “Slapping people with magic and dressing them up like girls?”

  Mujahid’s expression grew serious.

  “Being from another world is both good and bad. It’s good because you come here free of preconceived notions about this world. Therefore, you’re in the unique position of being objective. But you lack the most basic understanding of how this world functions. The world you’re from understands the concept of sacred, yes?”

  “We have religion.”

  “Excellent. How do you practice this religion?”

  “It’s not like there’s just one.”

  Mujahid raised an eyebrow.

  “There are billions of people on my world, and they all believe different things.”

  “Billions of religions?” Mujahid dismissed the comment with a wave.

  “There’s a handful of big ones. And they’re broken into smaller ones.”

  “But they all remain the same
at their core, no?”

  Nicolas chuckled. “Not even close. Some worship a single god, and others believe there are many. Hell, if you landed on Earth and flashed those eyes of yours, somebody would worship your sorry old ass too.”

  “A world that believes in more than one truth.” Mujahid shook his head. “Are contradictions a normal part of life there?”

  Nicolas thought back to the nuns who raised him. They wouldn’t be happy with the way he was answering these questions.

  “I don’t know,” Nicolas said. “It’s kind of complicated. Religion was never one of my strengths.”

  “Men often complicate the truth to further their own goals.”

  “I can buy that.”

  “So let me begin by telling you a simple truth,” Mujahid said. “Necromancy is the most sacred gift bestowed by the gods. Through necromancy the spirit is made pure, and the dead are made worthy of their final reward.”

  One of the nuns would have smacked Mujahid with a catechism by now.

  “All necromancers are part of a sacred priesthood. We are priests of Zubuxo, the God of Death.”

  “The death statue outside is Zubuxo, isn’t it? I was right. This place is a religious site.”

  “Far more than you realize. Our charge is to assist Zubuxo in his eternal task of sorting the good from the evil. He takes the good and sees them on to their final reward.”

  “Leaving you with the evil?”

  “Us, Nicolas…and precisely. Never forget, even for a moment, the creature you summon is evil. When it awakens to this world, it will have one wish and one wish only…to kill.”

  Nicolas wasn’t sure he could do this. But if learning how to bring some psycho dead guy back to life would take him home to Kaitlyn and Toby, then so be it.

  “There are varying degrees of evil, to be certain,” Mujahid said. “Some spirits are so vile they can only be purified in one of the six Hells. You will not be able to summon those. But the initial instinct of the spirits you do summon is always the same, because it’s a survival instinct. They will kill anything within reach. You must gain control over your penitent as soon as you summon it.”

  “I was taught there’s only one Hell, and it’s eternal.”

  “There is another…no. Too much, too soon.”

  “But there’s a bunch of different ways to be bad, right? Not everyone’s a killer, so why do they want to kill?”

  “The person you summon may have been dead for centuries. They are shadows of their former selves, left only with the rotting evil the God of Death saw growing inside them. Many embrace their evil, becoming more and more sadistic over time.”

  “So, it’s our job to get them to see that they’re bad?”

  “A bad person doesn’t look at their reflection and see a bad person staring back. Nor do most people commit evil with the desire to cause evil. We have to help them see the consequences of their actions.”

  “But if they can’t remember anything, then how do we get them to see consequences?”

  Mujahid nodded and placed the bone between them.

  “Outside of the crypt, where we first met, you summoned the warrior without knowing what you had done.”

  Nicolas shook his head. A spider the size of a car attacked him, true. But he had nothing to do with summoning that homicidal skeletal dude who clawed his way out of the ground.

  “Let’s get this straight, now,” Nicolas said. “All I did was get attacked. And why did it have a sword?”

  “You raised a warrior from his own grave, boy. If you summoned a dead baker from under his kitchen, I’d expect him to be wielding a rolling pin.”

  “Still,” Nicolas said. “Who are you to judge anyone?” The nuns told him people didn’t have a right to judge others.

  “You only saw a glimpse of that warrior’s life. When you have control, and you summon with purpose, you will witness every evil act that person has ever committed. But that’s often not the worst of it.”

  “What could possibly be worse?”

  “Witnessing the consequences.”

  “Person does something bad, something bad happens in return. Not exactly a mystery.”

  Mujahid’s eyes took on a faraway look, as if he were staring through Nicolas.

  “You will see futures that are no longer possible. You will come to know and love children that will never be born. You will hear songs that will never be written and see great acts of wonder that will never be possible. You will see entire civilizations that will never exist, and in your heart you will know the sentence that must be served by your penitent, for in that instant you will know the blackness of their heart better than you know your own.”

  Nicolas looked down. “That’s…horrible.”

  “Yes. And I despise every moment of it. But that is our sacred duty.”

  Nicolas started seeing the bone in a different light. He hadn’t thought about those skeletons outside as people before, with past lives of their own.

  “Do you understand what I mean by sacred now?” Mujahid said.

  “I’m just wondering what happens when people die where I’m from?”

  “Necromancy will help you understand a great many things.”

  Nicolas looked up.

  “For a start you’ll come to understand that there is too much to understand.” Mujahid smiled at Nicolas. “And that, my young postulant, is the beginning of wisdom. Spend a few moments clearing your mind. There is more I must prepare.”

  Mujahid stood and walked to one of the coffins.

  Energy flowed all around Nicolas. At first it rushed in, threatening to force him backwards. But after a few moments he managed to control the flow so that it was a slower, steady stream.

  He opened his eyes and saw Mujahid staring back. “Oh, sorry.” He shut his eyes again.

  “Your eyes don’t matter. You may need to summon in the middle of battle, and battle isn’t the place to close one’s eyes, boy.”

  Nicolas opened his eyes again.

  “First, a word about the energy you’ve been feeling,” Mujahid said. “You must be close to a source of death in order to use it. Necropotency surrounds us in this estate, but beyond these walls that is not the case.”

  Mujahid took a step back.

  “Look at the bone on the ground before you,” Mujahid said. “I’m going to show you the first way of summoning the dead.”

  “There’s more than one?”

  “The first way uses a corpse. The second does not. Always use the first when possible.”

  “Why?”

  “Summoning without a corpse takes its toll on you. It’s called a pure summoning, and it uses more energy, because you’re pulling someone from the Plane of Death and incarnating them here. They come back as skeletons of whatever race they were when they died. And they have neither armor nor weapons. Just rage and brute force.”

  Mujahid looked down at the bone. “This belonged to a man I knew personally.”

  “Was he a good man?” Nicolas hoped so. The thought of seeing all that evil stuff disturbed him.

  Mujahid shrugged. “I’ve never known a good man who had no evil in him. And I’ve never known an evil man who had no good. Is your mind prepared?”

  “I think so.”

  “That is something you need to know, boy, not suppose.”

  Nicolas sighed and cleared his mind as best as he knew how. “Ok, it’s clear…I think.”

  Mujahid frowned. “Do you sense the symbol of power in your mind?”

  “It’s always there now, like a tiny point of energy. It’s like I could point to it if I wanted to. Except I can’t and…I couldn’t. Am I making any sense?”

  “Search for a place in your mind where the energy is accumulating. It’s a like a pool of necropotency. It should exist close to the symbol of power.”

  “Yeah, I can feel it.”

  “Right now there’s only one symbol of power in your mind. As you acquire more, they will aggregate around that pool of power.”
<
br />   “How many symbols of power do you have, Mujahid?”

  Mujahid’s eyes grew dark.

  “Don’t ever ask that question of a priest. Ever.” Mujahid looked away for a moment. “It is rare for a Mukhtaar Lord to take on a postulant.”

  “Why—”

  “Too much too soon.”

  “Yeah, not good. I heard.”

  “Imagine a pathway between the pool of energy and the symbol of power. Allow the energy to embrace the symbol.”

  Nicolas tried to force the power to touch the symbol floating in his mind. The power rushed out of him, but it had no other effect.

  Mujahid shook his head. “Ordering something to do what it already wishes to do is pointless. The power wishes to assist you by its nature. It wants to embrace a symbol of power. But you must show it how.”

  Nicolas allowed the necropotency to enter him in a slow trickle. He imagined a small river of energy flowing down a pathway, at the end of which it struck the symbol and wrapped around it.

  Energy burst from his well in a torrent and imbued the skull symbol with power. The necropotency pulsed in his head like a throbbing headache, as if it begged him to release it.

  “I think I did it.”

  “Good. The connection will maintain itself until you cast the power or you are cut off from its source. Now, cast the symbol into the bone on the floor.”

  “How?”

  “We should be past that point by now, boy. Show it how.”

  Nicolas imagined the necropotency reaching out like a cloud and touching the bone on the floor. Nothing happened, so he imagined the symbol of power flying forward and entering the bone.

  His vision went black, and he started groping around like a blind man.

  “All is as it should be, Nicolas. As you grow in power the blinding effect will lessen. Now, watch for the stream.”

  Images poured into Nicolas’s mind. But they were flying past like debris in a tornado. He could hear bones clacking together, so he concentrated on the sound.

  “You’re hanging on to the present, boy. Embrace the time stream. Merge your thoughts into it.”

  A sense of goodness filled Nicolas, like the feeling he’d get after meeting a really nice person. When his vision returned, he saw a skeleton standing in front of him.

  Nicolas wanted to run. He pushed himself backwards, trying to get away from it.