by K Hanson
“Have fun doing your experiments without that,” I said to the Necromancer, with a smile through gritted teeth. My wounds had begun to heal, but they still hurt like a bitch.
He shoved Amari off him, stormed up to me, and grabbed me by the collar with his gauntlets. “Do you know how long it took me to find that crystal and this exact location where to use it? It will take months to recover, if I ever do.”
“Good,” I said, glaring at him. I grabbed his wrists and squeezed them until he winced and let go of me.
A faint boom sounded, and then a rumble shook through the tower.
“What’s that?” I asked.
The tower shook so violently that I lost my balance. We all tumbled to the floor. Cracks started to form in the structure of the tower. In a few places, purple light shone out of it. The tower was falling apart, and we were on top of it.
The floor gave way, and we all plummeted downward. A scream caught in my throat as I flailed, trying to find purchase.
A bright purple light flashed and left a searing, numb feeling all over my body, similar to what had happened when the Necromancer hit me with his gauntlets. Only this felt rawer and less constrained. As I fell, rocks and bits of the supporting metal struck me, bruising and cutting my skin. I could no longer see anything below, as I was surrounded by collapsing debris.
After a few seconds that seemed to stretch into minutes, I hit the ground with a sharp pain in my head. I struggled to sit up, but darkness engulfed my vision. I fell back against the ground, unconscious.
CHAPTER 28
Eventually, my mind stirred awake. I was covered in the debris from the collapsed tower. My body ached all over, and I had the worst headache I’d ever had. For a while, I just lay still, letting my body recover from the fall. For most people, it probably would have killed them.
I didn’t know how long I stayed buried in the rubble of the tower. Eventually, I opened my eyes. A heap of stone pressed on top of me, wrapping me in darkness. I rolled around as I figured out which way was up. It wouldn’t do to dig myself out in the wrong direction. Once I oriented myself, I shoved my way up and pushed the stones out of my way.
They were heavy and occasionally fell back into place as I disturbed the stony bits around me. As I continued to dig, a slice of sheet metal cut across my hand. I sucked in air between my teeth, shaking my hand, and then returned to work.
It seemed to take forever, and at times it felt like I was making no progress at all. The burden of the wasteland as it sapped my spirits didn’t help, either.
Eventually, I caught a sliver of the dark purple sky. I never imagined looking forward to seeing it, but I was happy that freedom from the pile was going to happen soon. After moving a few more chunks of stone, I clambered out from the rubble and dusted myself off.
I turned back to gaze at the pile that had been the tower. It sat in a great heap all around the top of the ridge. A few purple fires glowed near the center. Even from a good distance away, they gave off an electric kind of heat that mixed with the chill of the air around me to create quite a dissonance of sensations.
Another bit of rubble shifted, and a familiar hand reached out. I ran over and helped Amari unbury herself. She had a few scrapes and cuts that were healing, but no major injuries. We had both survived.
Movement on the other side of the fires caught my attention. The Necromancer and his companion had also managed to get themselves free from the rubble. They looked dusty but mostly uninjured, as well.
The Necromancer’s gauntlets still held that glow. I guess destroying the crystal didn’t shut those down too.
Stopping to rummage through a wooden cabinet that had broken in half in the fall, the Necromancer picked up what looked like a collar and fixed it to his belt.
What the hell is he planning to do with that?
Amari and I could run back to the portal if we wanted to, but that would leave them to rebuild and just resume what they were doing. We had to stop them from doing anything like this ever again.
The Necromancer spun around to face me. “You’ve ruined my life’s work. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to recover from this. As you know, Arkwright isn’t exactly forgiving of people that owe them debts, and now I’ll be unable to pay it back. You’ve made life hard for me, and I don’t appreciate that.”
Amari and I fanned out. We would each have to take on one of the opponents. With the way the gauntlets upgraded the Necromancer’s fighting skills, that meant he should be my target.
Without waiting for them to close in toward us, I strode toward them.
I pulled my pistol, took a stable stance, and planted a shot in his leg. He stumbled to the ground, and I shot him in the shoulder.
I knew it wouldn’t keep him down for long, but it gave me the time I needed to get close.
As I approached him, he hunched over, wheezing. His head snapped up as he glared at me.
I squeezed one hand onto the wound on his shoulder, digging my fingers into the bloody hole, and he winced. With my other hand, I reached for one gauntlet and tried to pry it off. The clasp on the back wouldn’t give. His wound was healing under my fingers. I had never touched one of Amari’s wounds as it healed, and it felt strange, almost like warm gelatin closing underneath my hand.
He grabbed my right hand with the other gauntleted hand, and it let out a burst of purple energy that traveled its way up my arm. It was stronger than what he had sent at me before.
I reeled back from him, tripping backward onto the dirt.
“I was able to recharge these in the fire,” he said. “The crystal was a tamed version of the energy, though it could be transmitted. This is raw power, more difficult to control, but much greater in amplitude.”
He raised a gauntlet, pointed it in my direction, and clenched his fist. A ray of energy shot into my torso, and I collapsed to the ground.
For a moment, my heart stung and felt like it stopped beating.
I was on my knees, with one arm propping me up and the other hand over my chest.
“Looks like I have just enough charge,” he muttered to himself.
He strode over to me, took the collar from his belt, and clasped it around my neck. He pressed something that let out a soft beep, and my body went numb. I could still see out of my eyes, and my consciousness was my own, but I was no longer deciding what my body did.
Through a tingling fog, I felt a bit of what my body felt: the recovering ache of my heart and the grit of the ground beneath me. But it felt distant, almost like that feeling of waking up after anesthesia.
Like a soft echo, I heard the Necromancer speak above me. “Stand.”
Automatically, my body obeyed him.
“Good. Now, look at me.”
My head turned toward him. I tried to force myself to look away, but I couldn’t.
“Raise your right arm above your head,” he said.
My arm obeyed, extending above me.
I tried again to lower it, but I couldn’t do it.
The Necromancer gave me a devious, victorious grin. “Ah, well, it did work after all. I can only control one creature from the gauntlets, but if I had to pick one, you’d definitely be my choice.”
He paced around me, looking me up and down. “You may be wondering how I did this. Well, you have night stalker blood in you, after all, and that makes you sensitive to the energy of this place. I can use that just like I did with the night stalkers, stingers, and other creatures. You’re now mine to command. I offered you the chance to do so willingly. You and your friend could have been treated well. Now, though, you’ll simply have to do as my pet. And this,” he said as he tapped the collar, “is your leash.”
Sorry, I don’t like to be chained up outside the bedroom. The retort didn’t reach my lips. I couldn’t even speak. My body had become a cage for my mind, and I could only watch as the Necromancer gave his commands. I needed to fight back, find a way to get free.
Amari’s eyes darted between the Necromancer
and me. I wished I could speak to let her know I was trying to escape the collar’s influence.
The Necromancer shrugged. “Oh well, this way I know you won’t show any hesitation when it comes time to give you an order.”
My consciousness fought back against the cloud that was filling my mind. The world around me was almost dreamlike.
“Follow me,” he said as he started walking toward Amari.
My body all but drifted through the chill air as I trailed after him.
Amari stared at me with wide eyes, panic in her face. She was now all alone, and I was a prisoner in my own body. I would only be able to act in following the orders of the Necromancer.
I had to find a way out of this. Maybe I could think my way past it. He had only ever tested this on creatures of this realm. From what I could tell, I was an experiment in itself. That meant that it was possible there were holes in what he had developed.
“Pick her up,” the Necromancer said, pointing toward Amari.
I stepped up to her and wrapped my hands around her waist. As I started to lift, the Necromancer interrupted me.
“No,” he said, “by her neck.”
I tried to resist, but my body obeyed on its own. My hands let go of her waist, and then I gripped her throat with my right hand, hauling her up and off the ground.
As she choked, Amari’s fingers pulled at mine, unable to loosen my grip. Her feet kicked at me as she tried to wriggle free.
“Good,” he said. “Now, hold her over the edge of the cliff.”
No, no, no. I could see where this was going. I wouldn’t do it. I focused as hard as I could on staying still.
Yet, robotically, I turned and carried Amari over the lip of the ravine. Far below, pairs of glowing eyes shifted in the shadows, along with a faint silhouette of one of the giant crabs.
“Let her go,” the Necromancer commanded.
With all of my willpower, I fought the instruction.
I knew Amari would recover from the fall, but what would the crabs do to her? Would they eat her? I didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.
The Necromancer was testing me and showing how much power he had over me. My fingers started to loosen. Any moment, I would watch her hurtle down into the dark abyss below.
A tear slid down my face as I imagined hurting my friend, as I thought of my failure to fight back.
Except, I realized that he hadn’t told me where, exactly, I needed to let her go.
I pivoted and tossed Amari back onto the ground.
I heard a soft spark from the collar. So, it wasn’t built to handle loopholes.
“What the blazes are you doing?” He stomped up to me and put his face right in front of mine. “How are you doing that? Throw Amari over the edge.”
The edge of what? He didn’t say.
I picked Amari up, and fear flared in her eyes. I managed a wink, which surprised me, and then glanced at the scarred man. His clothes had edges.
I chucked my friend straight toward the man, and each of them seemed equally surprised.
Sorry, Amari.
The collar sputtered some more, losing its hold on me. While it struggled to recover, I grabbed it with both hands and tore it from my neck.
I glared at the Necromancer and lunged into him. Before he could react, I sent a jab to his torso, snapping one of his ribs. I forced him back with a flurry of attacks.
His gauntlets let out a dazing blast of light. I staggered backward, shielding my eyes.
As long as he had those gauntlets, we would have a stalemate.
A few feet away, Amari and the scarred man engaged in a brutal fight. They would each kill the other, and then they would resurrect, over and over again. If it wasn’t so vicious, it would actually be comical. But continuing to watch one’s friend get disemboweled, dismembered, and stabbed through the chest was never easy to get used to. Amari did just as much damage to the scarred man. It was an unending duel.
We could end up doing this forever, but we had to finish it somehow.
Eventually, she backed the scarred man up against the purple flame near the center of the rubble. They each balanced precariously among the chunks of stone and gnarled heaps of metal.
The man lunged toward her with his knife, and Amari caught the blade in between her hands. It sliced through her palms, but she held it and slammed her head forward into the man’s nose. Even from across the pile, I could hear the crunch.
He staggered back, and Amari yanked the sword from his grasp. She flipped it around and thrust it straight through his chest. As he slumped down to his knees, she kicked his shoulder, pushing him off the blade.
His body fell into the purple flame, and he let out a scream unlike anything I had heard before. A sound of immense and deep pain. His skin dissolved off him in a trail of smoke that drifted upward, and then his body crumbled to ash.
He did not resurrect from that.
So, we could kill them.
I kept up the pressure against the Necromancer, enduring the stinging, numbing hits from his glowing gauntlets.
He lunged forward and grabbed me by the shoulders.
I pressed against the searing sensation as he pushed against me. The gauntlets gave him some extra strength, but I still had more. My flesh started to crackle, but I gained ground.
Finally, I wrapped my hands around his head and twisted. With a snap, his neck broke, and he fell to the ground.
“Amari, the sword,” I said between pants.
She tossed it toward me, and I caught the handle.
Before the Necromancer could heal, I raised the blade and swiped it down as hard as I could. In a single blow, I cleaved his head from his shoulders.
I jabbed the blade into the soil, the blood dripping down the length of the steel, and then grabbed his head in one hand and dragged his body with the other.
Without a word, I strode over the rubble toward the nearest flame. When I reached it, I tossed the head and body into the flames and watched as they crackled and disappeared into ash.
The Necromancer was dead, and his experiments were gone with him. The only remnant of what he had done was now living with Amari. I didn’t know how it would affect her in the long run. Would she age? Was there another way for her to die? Or would she continue to survive as long as she didn’t come into contact with something like the fire that had finally destroyed the Necromancer and his servant?
We might never know. But those were questions for another day.
Now, we stood over the ruins of the Necromancer’s work, the ashes of his corpse, and the bodies of several dead stingers and night stalkers. After a few minutes, the flames died down, and I retrieved the gauntlet from the Necromancer’s ashes, in case we could learn something from it.
Then, it was time to go home
I was exhausted. Even with my superhuman endurance, so much fighting in one day could take it out of me both physically and mentally.
“Come on, Amari, let’s get out of here. Drinks on me when we get back,” I said.
“I won’t say no.”
As we turned back to head toward the path that led to the portal, I caught a faint sound in the distance.
I held my hand up and stopped.
“What is it?” Amari whispered.
“Shh, do you hear that?”
We stood in silence for a moment.
“I don’t hear anything,” Amari said.
I didn’t say anything further, and Amari waited next to me. As the sound clarified, I recognized it and frowned. It was a regular beating rhythm. It wasn’t random.
No, it was the sound of something, or someone, beating a large, deep bass drum.
CHAPTER 29
The drums sounded at a marching pace. It took me another moment to place where it was coming from. The ravine.
I tugged Amari’s arm, and we crouched our way over to the edge of the ridge. A long way off, in the opposite direction of the portal, faint lights moved. They were only a few points at first, b
ut more and more emerged from the darkness. I couldn’t see where they were coming from at that distance, but the lights moved in formation, and they were getting closer.
It seemed that the explosion at the tower had awakened something, and it was on its way to see what was going on.
We had to get moving.
“Oh shit,” Amari said. “I hear it now.”
“Yeah, let’s not wait to see what it is.”
We dashed along the ridge and down toward the portal. We couldn’t afford to be careful. We would just have to take our chances with the worm scorpions and anything else that might await us. I wouldn’t have us stick around and wait for an army of the residents of this place to show up.
The landscape of the wasteland flew past us as we darted across the ground. A couple of times, we skated a little too close to one of the predator trees and had to dodge a swiping branch as it tried to grab us.
Perhaps we were being a bit reckless as we made our way toward the portal, but there was no time for caution.
The portal came into view.
Nearby, a shape moved under the ground, as dirt shifted around it. One of those scorpion things was coming for us, straight from our right side.
We darted to our left, but we weren’t quite fast enough.
It had almost reached Amari when I shoved her out of the way. The creature burst from the ground, and its pincers trapped my ankle between them with a sharp sting. It yanked me down with it into the ground.
Dirt poured down around me as I struggled to escape.
The sharp points of its stingers embedded in the flesh of my lower leg. I was surprised I hadn’t gotten torn free from the pincers, but it somehow held on as dirt and rocks scraped past me.
I rotated just enough that I could kick at it with my left foot. With the toe of my boot, I caught one of its large buggy eyes.
The pincers let go, and I burst upward to the surface, wriggling my waist free of the last bits of dirt and rock. I was lucky that the creature hadn’t pulled me deeper into the ground.
The creature scuttled toward me with its unsettling clicking sounds. Its stinger swung toward me and swept across my legs. As I fell onto my back, the creature raised its stinger again and plunged the point toward me.