Code of the Necromancer

by Deck Davis

  Months later, Ian came back from the academy at the Solstice holidays.

  “Master Kortho has advanced me again,” he told their parents, while Witas tried to stop his brother’s voice making him want to smash things. “I’ll be studying with people four years older than me. And he’s moving me onto necromancy.”

  “Bullshit,” said Witas.

  His father glared. “Watch your tongue, lad.”

  Not only was Ian the wonder boy, but they’d put him onto necromancy training, which had more prestige in those days.

  Part of him was happy for his brother, part of him wanted to smash every window of the academy. He was self-aware enough to know he was behaving like an arse, but he didn’t have the self-discipline to do anything about it back then.

  “If you’d just studied harder,” said his father, “Instead of screwing around…”

  That was it for Witas, he was done. He stayed in his apprenticeship until he became a novice alchemist, since he didn’t want to waste the work he’d already put into it, and then he left home and moved to Dispolis.

  It was in Dispolis that he discovered the grand library, and he started honing his magic craft again, though without direction.

  He was in the library reading a book about mana-gem creation one day, when a man wearing a cassock approached him.

  “You’re Witas Irvine, yes?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Priest Mossaraya of the Church of the Brightlight. We need a cleric healer, and I have heard about your talents. Are you ready to use them?”

  This started the best period of Witas’ life. He found employment using his magical skills. He became a cleric for the church, where his job was to heal the stream of sick people who the church invited into their doors.

  Lepers, the poxed, the crippled; Witas’ job was to call on the powers of the divine and use the powers they bestowed on him to heal the churchgoers. It was a job not just anyone could do; forget being religious, the divine usually only answered to those who were adept at using mana.

  Around the same time he became a cleric, he met a girl called Ria. She used to go into the church and sit on one of the pews. She was so beautiful that it took Witas two weeks to actually talk to her. It took him another week to ask her out.

  After that, they spent every minute they could together.

  When Witas decided to marry her, Priest Mossaraya smiled. “The church will give its blessing to your union,” he said.

  “I wasn’t aware I needed it.”

  “A cleric is nothing if he doesn’t have the ears of the divine, and how would you hear them if you were not part of our church? You need our blessing for everything.”

  Despite his struggle to adjust to church life, things couldn’t have been going better. He was using the gifts that had gotten him into the academy– though in a different way than he’d expected - he was growing stronger as a healing cleric, he was marrying Ria, and he never had to go home and see his parents and look at Ian’s smug face.

  It was at this time that he heard three words that changed his life.

  “Witty,” said Ria. “I’m pregnant.”

  Witas couldn’t have been happier. He had to stop himself day-dreaming about boys and girls names while he was in work. It took all his self-discipline not to rush out and buy all the things they’d need straight away.

  Four days later, Priest Mossaraya interrupted one of his healing sessions. Where Ria had changed his life with three words, Mossaraya changed it again with seven.

  “Witas, sit down please. Something has happened.”

  The next few minutes were a blur as Mossaraya explained everything. They were parts of his memory that his brain barely wanted to hold onto, and so had only remembered snatches of them.

  A couple of street urchins had found Ria in an alleyway, covered in blood. One of them had run to get the guardship, while the other had held her hand as she died.

  That evening, the guardship captain visited Witas.

  “I’ll be straight with you,” he said. “They left nothing behind to say who they were. Nobody saw a thing.”

  “Was she snatched from the street?” asked Witas.

  “Everything’s a mystery.”

  “What about that spell Ian always talks about. Last…last…”

  “Spell?”

  “You called in the necromancers, right?”

  The captain grimaced. “I don’t know about that necromancy shit.”

  “You haven’t even asked the academy to come here? Are you fucking stupid? Tell me that her body is on the way to the academy.”

  “Remember where you are and who you’re speaking to, cleric. I don’t see what a bunch of teachers can do.”

  “I don’t care what you think about magic, just tell me you already arranged for her body to go to the academy.”

  “Her body ain’t leaving this city until I’m satisfied that we’ve learned everything we can. She’s not the first to die. Not even the first this week.”

  Witas argued with the captain until he was ready to punch him, and it took all his self-restraint to walk out of the room without smashing his nose.

  They wouldn’t release Ria’s body to him given it was an ongoing investigation. That was the short of it, and no amount of talking would change their minds.

  So, he took it at the point of a knife, holding a blade to the coroner’s apprentice’s throat.

  Even as he left the morgue, Witas knew he wouldn’t get through Dispolis without every guard on duty hunting him.

  He looked at the coroner’s apprentice, who he had seen at the church from time to time. “Your mother has grey-pox, doesn’t she?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Bring her to the church tomorrow. I work as a cleric there; there will be no charge for healing her, other than making sure nobody hears about this.”

  He made a similar promise to a wagon driver who he knew. The man had a lame leg, but he refused to either join the Church of the Brightlight as a worshipper or donate coin in order to get healed.

  “Get me out of the city and don’t breathe a word to anyone,” said Witas, “and I’ll heal your leg.”

  Smuggled under the canopy on his wagon, Witas took Ria to the academy, where his old classmates, now graduated novices, flocked around his wagon as it pulled into the grounds.

  “Get my brother,” he told them.

  Just an hour later, he, Ian, and Master Kortho were in a room on the necromancy wing, near the resurrection chambers.

  “I’m sorry, lad,” said Kortho. “You know the rules.”

  “Fuck the rules. Bring her back.”

  “She isn’t family,” said Ian. “Soul essence is so expensive, they’ll only let me bring family back.”

  “She isn’t family? She was going to be your sister-in-law in less in less than a month, you moron. Or don’t you remember the wedding invite you never replied to?”

  Kortho leaned forward. “Witas, do you know how much essence it takes to do this? To resurrect one person, we need the equivalent of a dozen lives’ worth of soul essence. That isn’t given lightly, with kingdom funds being as they are. It is a perk of necromancers that they are allowed-”

  “A perk? Saving her life is a perk?”

  “This isn’t saving her life; it is granting her a new one. She has had her time.”

  “Twenty-four years old, murdered in an alleyway. She had her time?”

  “None of us can measure death and calculate when he’ll come. Death is beyond reasoning. I’m sorry, Witas.”

  Witas looked at his brother. “Ian? Tell them you want to use your perk.”

  Ian said nothing for a few seconds.

  Witas knew then he’d never forgive his brother for that pause; it lasted only a moment, but there should have been no doubt. Witas wouldn’t have hesitated even a millisecond if everything was reversed.

  “Kortho, I’d like to use my resurrection,” said Ian.

  Kortho shook his head. “It isn’t your
s to dish out like sweet treats, novice. The academy decides when your resurrection will be used, and guidelines are clear; only a necromancer or their immediate blood family can use it.”

  So that was the end. Witas pleaded, he grew angry, but nothing would change Kortho’s mind. Ria’s resurrection window closed, and Witas knew that she’d gone to the afterlife.

  And that was when he decided to join her.

  A rope, a rafter, a deep breath, and then a kick of a chair.

  With that, Witas was in the Greylands.

  He just had to wait out his time there and then pray that he went to the same of the Seven that Ria had gone to.

  When that happened, he’d see her again. Not just for a moment, but for immortality.

  He just had to wait.

  And then he woke up in the resurrection chambers of the academy.

  41

  Witas paused for a second, pale-faced and tense. Water dripped from the sewer ceiling and snaked down his face, his jaw and onto his neck where the rope had scarred him, but he didn’t move.

  Jakub knew about the perk. He knew about essence and how precious it was, he knew academy rules around resurrection.

  But it was one thing knowing it as an objective truth, and another hearing his mentor put it into practice. Had Kortho really just let Ria die?

  Don’t be so damned stupid, he told himself.

  He’d made a mental error so jarring for a necromancer that he almost felt like he should be stripped of the title altogether.

  Kortho didn’t let her die; she was already dead. He just did his duty as the academy decreed it.

  He shared none of this with Witas. “Instructor Irvine arranged for you to be resurrected,” he said.

  Witas nodded. “He used his perk. That’s brotherly love for you.”

  “He could have saved that resurrection for himself. He must care about you.”

  “Look, I know most guys would thank the guy who saved their life. Without Ria, I didn’t have much to come back to. When I went to the church, Priest Mossaraya came to see me. He told me that coming back from death was unnatural and went against the teachings of Brightlight. They couldn’t keep me as a cleric anymore.”

  “One thing I don’t understand,” said Jakub. “Why’d you fall out with Ian? He came through for you. Sure, it took a while, but he made the right choice.”

  “And when people start acting with logic instead of emotion, the world will be a better place. I blamed him for bringing me back, because that meant I couldn’t join Ria.”

  “What did you do when the church told you to leave?”

  “You know much about clerics, Jakub?”

  “Only that most of them are healers.”

  “Clerics have always had a religious association. Look in books, and you’ll see drawings of them dressed in white looking holier than the divines themselves. But clericism isn’t about that; clericism at its base means calling power from things beyond our physical world. Whether that’s from the gods, or from something else. When the church gave me the shove and blocked my access to the entities they called their ‘deities’, I found other things to draw on.”

  “Demons from the Blacktyde.”

  Witas nodded. “Problem is, you can’t expect to draw healing energy from those bastards. It changed my spells completely.”

  “I can’t imagine there’s much call for a black cleric.”

  “I wasn’t interested in earning money that way,” said Witas. “I wanted to find the bastard who killed Ria. Captain Blackrum said if I used my gifts to help him on other stuff, he’d keep the investigation into Ria’s murder open, and give it resources. That was the deal – I helped him solve his cases and look good so he could get promoted, and he’d make sure Ria didn’t get forgotten.”

  “And you think the guys coming after me…did they kill Ria?”

  “You can’t tie a neat little bow around life, Jakub. The guy who murdered Ria could be dead, could be in jail for something else, could be living five hundred miles away. Or…the bastard could still be in Dispolis. I’ll find him one day, even if I have to die and then crawl through the Seven afterlives before I can rip his heart out.”

  42

  Jakub could see why Witas had been annoyed with Instructor Irvine. Resurrection was one thing, but forced resurrection?

  That kind of thing was why ‘do not resurrect’ notes were signed, and it was one of the only situations where you could be mad at the person who saved you and not sound like an ass.

  If only Witas knew what a privilege it was, though. It used to be, you had to earn master status before you earned ‘the perk’, before you were granted the resurrection of a family member on their passing.

  They’d relaxed that to include anyone over the journeyman rank, but everyone knew it was still bullshit; academy finances hadn’t improved at all, yet the number of people training for necromancy was dropping, since they were more lucrative magical disciplines that didn’t involve seeing corpses all the time.

  The academy had promised the perk on reaching journeyman status, but when it came to it, they were like weapon insurers; they’d do anything to avoid paying out.

  ‘Are you sure he’s your father? He doesn’t look related to you.’

  ‘Sorry, we found a ‘Do Not Resurrect’ note on his body. What? Your father was paralysed and couldn’t write? Well, we found the note, so…’

  As a necromancer, he should have been angry at someone who willingly gave away their life, but he couldn’t bring himself to be. Who was he to judge?

  The only person who could judge Witas was himself.

  “You haven’t said much,” said Witas. “You’re gonna give me the same lecture Ian did, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a novice necromancy banished from the academy, and I’m at least thirty years younger than you. I’m hardly in a position to climb on a pulpit.”

  “When he brought me back, Ian gave me an hour long talk about the miracle of life, the sanctity of it. Sanctity? Ha. The only thing sanctimonious was him. Lecturing me, thinking he knew me.”

  “Witas, life and death are issues with so complex that it’d be ridiculous for me to lecture you,” said Jakub. “Kinda like me trying to lecture you on the nature of the cosmos. Everyone makes their own path and pay for their own choices.”

  “Pretty level-headed. When I was your age, I was drunk half the time, whoring around the other.”

  “I didn’t make it up. Kortho taught me that saying. I think he did, anyway.”

  “I never told anyone that, you know,” said Witas. “I didn’t even give Ian the full story. After he resurrected me, he wouldn’t forgive me for ending it, and I wouldn’t forgive him for bringing me back. I’m surprised he sent you to me.”

  “He must have had his reasons.”

  “Maybe. If he has, he keeps them in his head. Thanks for listening, anyway,” said Witas. “We better get out of here. The smell is starting to turn my stomach.”

  “One last thing before we do.”

  It was something he’d been waiting for. A tremor of excitement had been building in him since he’d realised how close he was to levelling up, but there had been so much to do.

  He wouldn’t go any further without finishing it, though. It was too good an opportunity.

  He stood by the pool of water again. He shivered when he looked at it, and felt like he could taste it again.

  “It’s not the time for another swim. We still don’t know what damage the last one did to you,” said Witas.

  Jakub spoke the spellword of Resurrect Minor Creature and kept his focus on the waters.

  Essence left his soul necklace and cast wide over the surface, before sinking deeper.

  “Let’s hope there’s one more. I just need one…”

  The water churned from motion underneath.

  “Is that you?” said Witas.

  Jakub nodded, and he held his breath, waiting to see what would swim up from the waters.

  Before he saw i
t, text cast into being just inches away, floating level with his eyeline.

  *Necromancy EXP Gained!*

  [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII]

  *Level Up!*

  New Rank: Journeyman [1]

  He wasn’t a novice anymore. After years of studying, after using his necromancy in the field, he wasn’t the lowest rung on the ladder anymore.

  His heart beat so fast he felt light headed.

  Me? A journeyman?

  It was inevitable that he’d get there if he used his skills, but at the same time it’d seemed unobtainable.

  I wonder what spells come with it.

  Before he could cast away the text and see what being a journeyman meant, before he could see what he’d resurrected from the pool of water, the room warped around him.

  The walls shrunk and then new ones grew in their place, the ceiling stretched out and cracked, and the sewer smells disappeared.

  Jakub found himself somewhere else; a place he’d heard of before.

  43

  He was in a large hall with a vaulted ceiling so high up that he could barely see it. Similarly, the room was long enough that the windows at the end of it were just specks, and travelling across it looked like a full day’s journey.

  The room was bright, with rays of white light casting through the glass ceiling and through the windows on either side of him. There was nothing beyond the windows, though; no scenery, no landscapes, just pure, white light.

  It was Necromancia Hall; said to be the place where necromancy was born, and a place now gone from the physical world, having been damaged beyond repair in a war.

  Was he really here? Kortho and Irvine had both taught the students about this place, but advancing beyond journeyman had just seemed so far away.

  Now that he was here, he couldn’t wait to see what it meant to him. To his powers.

  He heard movement behind him, and the smell of mana exploded into the room.

  He spun around to see the Three hovering there. They greeted him in turn.