Spells of Undeath

by Stefon Mears

  Cavan was the first to cross the dividing line. And he was the first to breath in the stench of dying air.

  “Stale,” Amra said. “Like that tomb. Remember? In Traklis?”

  As though Cavan could ever forget. The tomb of Rikakan III, a long-dead sorcerer king of Voraas, the kingdom that fell before Traklis rose. Rikakan had laid a curse on the land that held off three centuries before striking. A curse that began to twist and corrupt the children of the kingdom.

  Cavan, Ehren and Amra had faced many traps and challenges stalking down into that tomb as they sought a way to undo that curse.

  “Not quite the same,” Cavan said. “That air was made stale by time and dust. This air, it’s as though it’s being throttled of its own life.”

  Cavan called the halt. Led everyone back up to the top of the hill, then down it again onto the healthy side.

  “We can’t just ride in there like this.” He shook his head. “If we spend more than a day breathing air like that, we may not survive it. And the horses definitely wouldn’t.”

  “How can the necromancer survive it?” Reesa asked.

  “I don’t know if ‘survive’ is the word I’d choose,” Cavan said with a grimace. “Necromancers … exist in a blend of death and life together.”

  “But what can we do about the air?” Ehren asked. “Zatafa’s glory may smite the undead, but this … this is outside of Zatafa’s purview. And there couldn’t be a priest of the Green Lord anywhere near this place. They’d never stand for what’s happening to the land.”

  “Obviously he has an idea,” Amra said, arching an eyebrow at Cavan. “Otherwise he wouldn’t make it sound hopeless.”

  “He does do that, doesn’t he?” Qalas said, frowning in realization.

  “Well, when your skills are limited—” Amra began, but stopped when Cavan cleared his throat.

  Amra fluttered her eyelashes with a smile that would have been sweet on anyone else. On Amra, it was pure menace. Playful menace in this case, but still.

  Though perhaps Reesa did not yet understand Amra’s expressions, because she frowned at the sight. As though she thought Amra might be flirting.

  “I do have an idea,” Cavan said. “Won’t help with everything, but it should at least keep us breathing healthy air.”

  “Are you up to it?” Ehren asked, in tones of pure practicality.

  “Should be. No sign of the spell fire so far. And before you ask, this shouldn’t trigger any more of it. It’s just that elementals can be a bit … capricious.”

  “He’s hemming and hawing,” Qalas said.

  Amra sighed. “It means he needs us to behave while he does this, and he’s not sure we will.”

  “There is precedent,” Cavan said.

  “In that instance we were not following the edict of a god,” Ehren said, giving Amra a look only he could give: hard eyes, but a small smile. A warning, without pressure.

  “Good,” Cavan said. “Now this is what I need you to do.”

  Making arrangements did not take long. Partially because Cavan’s friends really were cooperating without complaints or questions — which he could not always count on when it came to his spells — and partially because four of the five horses were well trained enough that persuading the courser to play along was not difficult.

  On that front, it helped that Reesa and Horizon had a strong bond.

  Soon enough, though, Cavan had everyone arranged the way he wanted them.

  The five horses all lay in the gold-and-green wild grass, at the bottom of the hill. Their legs folded underneath them. Their flanks facing inward, and their heads pointing outward, with Dzint facing to the north, then Highsun, Horizon, Caramel, and Ondiq.

  Together, the horses’ heads formed the points of a star.

  Each rider stood by the head of his or her horse, reins in one hand, and a hawk feather in the other.

  The tracking torch, Cavan set outside the area he’d paced off. It was unlikely that the simple magics of the tracking torch would affect this casting, but Cavan believed in removing potential variables. So he had planted it in the earth, its violet flame pointing against the oncoming wind.

  The wind came from the north, which was good, for that was the direction they had to go. It was also bad, though, because the stench of that wind was foul. That might influence any sylphs that Cavan managed to call in this place.

  He could only hope that he could control the spell well enough to call sylphs untainted by the necromancer’s magic. Alas, though, the only way to be sure of that would be to ride at least another day’s journey south from where they were.

  None of them were willing to backtrack that way. Especially not since the necromancer had already moved against them once.

  And so, Cavan would have to risk that his control would be sufficient, with a more powerful version of a spell he had cast only a handful of times before.

  Not that he would admit any of that aloud.

  Facing the north, Cavan held his hawk feather high, and signaled for the others to do the same.

  And then, Cavan began the first of the spells he needed to cast. This first prepared the way for what would follow. He chanted words that raised not only the power within himself, but reached out into his surroundings and drew in more power. Power he filtered, taking within the light, nebulous energies of the air, and holding them within himself. Allowing that power to build, build, build.

  Once he felt it reaching a peak, he said, “Now.”

  Cavan reached to the right with his hawk feather, while Ehren reached left. Cavan touched his feather to Ehren’s. Ehren then reached right, touching his feather to Reesa’s. Reesa repeated the movement to connect her feather with Amra’s, and Amra did the same to bridge the connection to Qalas’ feather.

  Qalas completed the chain by reaching to his right to touch feathers with Cavan.

  Power shivered out of Cavan and through the connection into the feathers, which jerked and trembled as though they wished to leap up and fly even without the hawks they’d been attached to.

  Cavan and the others all raised their feathers in a single movement.

  The way had been prepared. Now came the tricky part.

  The chant Cavan began then was not in a language he spoke. Not even with the incomplete command he possessed of the language most of his spells required.

  No, this chant was much older. It was said to be old, when even Rentiss was young. That it harkened back to the days when humans first took a stand and demanded space from the elder races, such as the elves, the dwarves and the Dunaians. It was said that the first human wizards of that age forged pacts with the elemental kings, such that any human wizard who called on those pacts could command elemental servants for a time.

  Cavan had not cast this spell since it had been proven to him that he carried Dunaian blood. That he was not wholly human. He could not help but wonder if that were the reason these spells had not always worked perfectly for him.

  In the moment, though, Cavan had no space for such concerns. He focused on the syllables he had memorized. The rhythms of the chant. And the intentions he held. Even the reasons he needed elemental aid in this instance.

  The chant itself took time. It was long, and had to be issued in a single breath, for such were the requirements of the King of Air. And it had to be repeated three hundred seventy-five times, in order to call five elementals with the single spell.

  Cavan could only hold up his feather and give himself to his chant. Trust in the skills he had gained, the trials he’d survived since the last time he had called for elementals.

  After one hundred repetitions, the wind shifted. Came from the south instead of the north. Cavan could not risk the attention to speculate on what that might mean, or how it might affect his spell.

  After the second hundred repetitions, the wind began to swirl about them. Building slowly in strength. This, at least, was expected. Cavan tightened his grip on his feather, and hoped that his friends remembered that th
is would happen.

  Cavan’s jaw and tongue were beginning to get sore from giving voice to these awkward syllables, but he kept his focus on his goal and soldiered on.

  By the three hundredth repetition, the winds swirled and howled such that Cavan and his friends stood within the eye of a small tornado.

  The horses complained, but soothed. Even Cavan’s, which meant it was likely Ehren’s prayers, not mere horsemanship on the part of Cavan’s friends.

  At the three hundred and seventy-fifth repetition of that interminable chant, the tornado stopped.

  Five sylphs swirled in the air about them. Like tiny, beautiful men and women, with golden yellow skin and long, flowing hair.

  “Now!” Cavan cried out, and thrust his feather forward as though stabbing it into an enemy. He cried out the final words of the spell then. The connection between the feathers, the power, the elemental king of air, and that king’s five servants.

  One of the sylphs, a female, blew Cavan a kiss and slipped inside the feather which had been prepared for her.

  Silence followed. Even the wind stilled.

  Cavan swallowed. He was drenched in sweat. When had that happened? And how did his throat get so sore?

  Oh. Right. That chant.

  “Did it work?” Amra asked.

  Cavan looked about himself. Where there had been five sylphs flying about, there were none. With his wizard sight he looked at the feathers.

  He gave a sigh of relief. Nodded his head.

  Ehren thrust a waterskin into Cavan’s hand. He drank gratefully. Cool spring water. It tasted like the wonder of the afterlife.

  “How will this work?” Qalas asked.

  “The feather,” Cavan said. “It must stay touching your skin. Tuck it behind your ear if you like, but it would be better tucked close to your heart.”

  Cavan demonstrated, and the others followed suit.

  A breeze trickled down from the north, and Cavan smiled at the immediate difference.

  “I’m not…” Amra started, then stopped herself and gave Cavan a grin. “The stench is gone.”

  “The stench is still there,” Ehren corrected her, “even if Cavan’s magic has no ensured that it won’t trouble us.”

  “What about the horses?” Amra said. “They don’t have feathers.”

  “While we ride them,” Cavan said, “they’ll benefit. If we separate, we leave the feathers with the horses.”

  “Couldn’t we have used ten feathers?” Reesa asked.

  “Well,” Cavan said, trying to hold onto his patience, “I only have eight hawk feathers, so two horses would be short anyway. And it doesn’t matter. Horses don’t have the … capabilities required to participate in the ritual.”

  “Can we get moving then?” Qalas asked. “I’d rather get there before midnight. Who knows what that hour does for a necromancer’s powers?”

  Even with sylphs purifying the air about Cavan and his friends, the ride across that twisted, accursed landscape was not pleasant.

  Oh, the air was good now. Smelled fresh and clean as it did beside the waterfalls of Holst. But everything else was still … off.

  The ground sounded wrong under the hooves of their horses. It did not squish the way Cavan had dreaded, but their hoofbeats made only a dull sound as they rode.

  The suffering of the twisted, yellow-brown grasses and peeling, leafless, yellowed bone trees seemed to cry out to Cavan for aid. For justice. For a priest of the Green Lord to come and cleanse them. To purge them of their struggle and restore to them the breath of life.

  Worse, now and again Cavan could see creatures, moving about among the grasses. Things that might have been mice and voles once. But now their eyes glittered red, and their skins hung where they weren’t missing. As though they’d been dead for weeks, and refused to simply lie down.

  Those were just the prey animals of the area. Cavan worried what the predators would be like…

  Amra rode in the lead, holding the tracking torch. Cavan rode just behind her, then Reesa, Ehren, with Qalas watching their rear. Reesa and Qalas rode with their bows in hand. Arrows not nocked, but in ready quivers.

  Cavan kept his focus on his wizard sight. Watching mainly for areas of dead but moving grasses, and calling warnings ahead to Amra, so she could steer around them.

  Cavan wasn’t certain that such low and sickly grasses could offer any threat at all to a cantering horse, even if they were animated by some evil force. But he didn’t see the point in risking it.

  The terrain here was flat. As though even any hills had died and left behind only the flattened spaces where they’d been.

  Cavan and his friends kept to their course now. None of them willing to stop before they had to, even if that meant slowing the horses to a walk, and feeding them during such walks, instead of giving them their proper rest.

  So long as they did not push for speed, but settled for a slower devouring of the distance between themselves and their target, the horses were better off this way.

  Nothing Cavan nor Ehren could do would make this land a healthy place for the horses to take a proper rest. If worse came to worst, there was a blessing Ehren had used before that would aid the horses stamina. But Cavan was never certain when his friend would deem that blessing appropriate, and when not.

  The hours drained past as they rode, and Cavan marked the distance three ways.

  First, the progress of the sun through the sky. By now the necromancer would know that a priest of Zatafa rode with them. Sending undead against Ehren while the sun was in the sky, that would only have wasted the necromancer’s resources without achieving any useful, tactical goal.

  And no necromancer survived to gather this much power — enough to twist the land the way Cavan saw — unless he also had brains.

  Second, of course, the tracking torch. Its violet flame flickered taller now than the length of Cavan’s hand. And it grew slowly taller yet as they rode.

  Finally, and this bit of information Cavan kept to himself for the time being, as the afternoon wore on, he could begin to tell how close they were to the necromancer by wizard sight alone.

  Riding with his eyes attuned to the magical side of things, the way he was, Cavan had grown used to the traces of death magic he was seeing, infesting the world about him. He’d begun to … taste its flavor, which was as close as he could come to explaining it, even to himself.

  Irritating, really, that he thought of it as tasting flavor, since most of what he picked up magically came through his vision.

  Just another place Cavan’s incomplete education failed him, in terms of defining exactly what it was he was doing. How his magical senses really worked.

  But the precise descriptors of the process were not necessary to understanding what he observed. And Cavan, he was beginning to develop a stronger and stronger sense of the key identifiers that lay behind the magic of this necromancer.

  It was not that Cavan understood that wizard’s magical signature, per se. He would have needed to witness more of the necromancer’s actual spellwork for that. This was more a deep familiarity that would allow quick recognition in the future.

  Cavan could not help comparing it to something he’d learned in warrior training. Ways to recognize people from the way they moved, rather than the features of their faces.

  On a battlefield, faces could hide behind helmets. Faces could be hidden by other combatants, or smoke, or any of a hundred other things. But the way someone moved, that was a far easier thing to count on spotting.

  Recognizing a magical signature was closer to identifying someone’s face. What Cavan was doing as he rode was more like developing a familiarity with the way the necromancer moved, magically speaking.

  And that familiarity made it easy for Cavan to realize something. As they rode through the afternoon sunlight, Cavan could begin to see what he thought of as the core of the deathly magical rot he saw in the land all about him.

  A core that became more and more obvious as the afte
rnoon wore on. It even felt at times as though they were racing the setting sun, on their way toward that core.

  At first, that core was a mere dot on the horizon. So far away, it barely seemed to get closer. Perhaps akin to a distant torch seen across a lonely moor, by night.

  But as time passed, eventually, it grew. More like seeing the fire of a distant camp.

  Then a closer camp. Cavan found himself glancing at the tracking torch more and more often then. Hoping they were getting close — that the power of this necromancer could only produce a core the size of perhaps a festival bonfire. Though he knew in his gut that they still had some distance to travel.

  And the core did not stop at the size of a bonfire.

  Past mid-afternoon, the comparison in Cavan’s head was akin to a castle whose lights could be seen for some distance.

  Then it was as though the castle were lit up for a feast, a blaze that would be seen from towns away.

  Then it was as though the castle were lit up for war. Blazing pitch, archers with arrows afire. By then, the sun was setting over the Dwarfmarches, a sight that looked redder and more threating here among this gnarled, abused landscape.

  Finally, Cavan could only whistle the halt.

  They were here.

  8

  The ground all around Cavan’s horse was dead. Flat. Pale. Jagged, with dusty cracks through that claylike smoothness.

  No grass here. Not sickened grasses, fighting for life, but at least not the undead grasses either.

  Just dry dirt.

  The sky above, a spreading purple from the east to the reds and oranges of the setting sun to the west. But here, within the realm of the necromancer, even those normal colors seemed bent. Wrong.

  The purples to the east, like bruises. The reds to the west, like those damnable glowing eyes Cavan had been spotting all day on the undead vermin that stalked this land.

  The worst of those had been that pack of wolves. Their fur was matted with dried blood, and they each were missing chunks of flesh. And yet they’d still tried to fight with the pack tactics of their living brethren.