by Deck Davis
He eyed Kortho’s body, lying just behind Ryden.
“Forgive me for using you like this, Kortho.”
He uttered the spellword of Death Puppet. His consciousness was wrenched from Thorndyke’s body and flung forward, through the flames of the bonfire, and into Kortho.
He woke in an instant, and he opened his eyes to see he was staring up at the night sky, wearing a new body now.
He got up. The screams sounded all around him, filling him with horror. Blood sprayed from wounds, fleshed cooked, claws slashed deep into skin and then tore through bone, but he ignored it all.
He got up, seeing the world from Kortho’s smaller height. He took a step, then fell, unused to the new weight distribution.
It was like walking drunk, and he could only take another step before falling again.
He had to master this now. Get a hold of himself.
Ryden turned around.
Jakub rushed at him now, and he slashed at the necromancer’s neck, tearing through his skin with Kortho’s claws.
Blood spattered into his face. Ryden crashed down onto his back, and Jakub fell on top of him.
“Kortho,” said Ryden. “Stop.”
Jakub raised a claw and drove it deep into Ryden’s chest again and again, tearing his skin, crunching his ribcage.
69
With their master’s demise, Ryden’s creatures fell, sucked back into their tarry pits. The survivors of the Killeshi and the camp dwellers collected themselves, struck dumb with the horror around them, no longer thinking with their blades but instead trying to come to terms with the slaughter around them.
It was over. Ryden was dead, his creatures gone.
“Pathetic,” said a voice.
Yutulia was walking toward him now, walking in Morrigan’s skin.
No, not Morrigan’s skin, he reminded himself. Her own skin, that which Morrigan had taken from her.
He had seen what Yutulia could do, and he understood why Morrigan had taken control of her.
Yutulia’s eyes were only half red now, but even that amount of mana would be enough. He read the evil in her face, and he knew that Yutulia didn’t have a side in this; the camp dwellers, the Killeshi, she belonged to none of them.
She was something else, something of her own, and she wouldn’t leave any of them alive.
After all this, after finally killing Ryden, this would be the end.
Or, it would have been.
He got up from Ryden and ran across the bonfire and to Thorndyke’s body. He took the Blade of Purge Evil from his old death puppet.
As Yutulia approached a group of terrified camp dwellers, Jakub ran at her.
He plunged the sword into her back.
Yutulia screamed. When she opened her mouth, the trails of mist left her, streaming up to the sky in twisting plumes, before exploding in a firework of light.
And then Yutulia fell to the ground.
Jakub collapsed too. He hit the ground, his energy gone. His essence was fading, he sensed, and he knew what this meant; if it ran out while he was still in Kortho, then he’d die with him.
He touched the wound on Kortho’s chest where the wyrm thorn had ripped him apart.
“I’m sorry it came to this,” he said.
With that, he revoked his spellword and left Kortho.
70
He awoke in the fields outside the hamlet, where he’d left Rud. Rud was gone, of course; he was in the hamlet.
Was he alive?
Jakub could barely summon the brainpower to think. He’d let Rud take the bracelet of rest, and now his debt of sleep was catching up with him.
All he knew was that he had to get back to Kortho. The window of resurrection was open, but it was too late now. No carriage in the world would carry him back to the academy in time. He just wanted to be with him.
Summoning all his strength, he got up and walked toward the hamlet. As he neared it, he saw figures rush out of the gates and toward horses idling nearby, seemingly oblivious to the carnage that had taken place inside the hill.
Two of them were Killeshi who he’d never seen, but he recognized the other two people; Harry Helmund and Laura, his twin sister.
He watched them reach the horses. He watched them saddle up and then ride away. He watched the subject of his assignment speed into the distance, across the thornweeds fields.
There was no chance of him giving chase; even if they weren’t on horseback, his sleep debt was creeping up on him.
He had failed.
Somehow, he no longer cared.
When he went into the hamlet, nobody paid him any attention. The camp dwellers were too busy sorting their dead from their wounded, too busy trying to push back the horrors of what they’d seen so they could console each other and reassure their children.
He saw Morrigan on the ground, her body limp. He kneeled beside her and looked into her eyes. He face was no longer twisted, no longer filled with hate, and he knew that he was looking at Morrigan and not Yutulia now, his blade having driven the evil out of her.
Maybe in death, she’d found peace at last.
“I can bring her back,” said a voice.
It was Ryden. Bleeding, broken, but still alive. “You know the Healing Harvest spell, yes?” he said.
“What are you saying?” asked Jakub.
“I’m too weak to heal myself. You saw to that. Use harvest on me, and agree to let me go, and in return, I will bring her back.”
Jakub looked around. There were enough corpses in the hamlet for Ryden to gather essence for the resurrection.
By all rights, he should take the necromancer back to the academy so he could answer for what he’d done. But if he did that…
Ryden shouldn’t have been in a position to offer a deal, but Jakub couldn’t turn away from the facts. He couldn’t force Ryden to perform a resurrection, after all; the necromancer had to speak the spell word voluntarily. Nor could he ignore what he was offering.
He knew what he had to do.
71
Hours later, Jakub finally broke clear of the Killeshi lands. The spot where the trader was to meet them was on his map, and he’d followed it through the harsh terrain.
“Wait up, lad,” said a voice.
Kortho hobbled behind him, and Jakub smiled. Every second with his master was precious now, and he felt a strange kind of gratitude toward Ryden. Gratitude and hate all mingled into one, so that he didn’t know how to think about it.
Even after everything he had done, he had still been the one to bring Kortho back.
Jakub was only sorry that when the necromancer made his offer to resurrect Morrigan, he’d refused it and told him to bring back Kortho instead. He felt bad for her, and he tried to console himself with the idea that her spirit would finally find peace, but a part of him knew that he was wrong; given the choice, Morrigan would have chosen to live.
If only there had been enough essence.
The trader was waiting with his wagon on the edge of the dirt path.
“You two look like hell,” he said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Get what you came here for?”
“Not in the slightest.”
Jakub helped Kortho onto the wagon and then settled down, sandwiched between a pile of furs and two wooden crates. The trader had certainly gotten what he came here for, anyway.
As the wagon started to roll away, Jakub shut his eyes, only to feel a claw on his shoulder.
“You need to tell me everything,” said Kortho.
“I need sleep.”
“Sleep can wait.”
“Yeah, but I think I’ve made it wait too long, Kortho.”
“Tell me everything, and then you can sleep all you like.”
Jakub told Kortho everything that had happened, from the mother wyrm’s thorn, to his travels with Morrigan, and then to the hamlet, and to Ryden.
“You shouldn’t have done that, you know,” said Kortho.
&nbs
p; “What?”
“Taken his deal.”
“You were dead, Kortho. What would you have done?”
“Duty above self, duty above love, duty above all. Isn’t that the mantra? You seemed to believe in it, lad.”
“I ask you again; what would you have done?”
Kortho smiled, and Jakub felt a great warmth burst him at the sight of it. It was a smile he’d never thought he’d see again after finding the inquisitor dead, after everything had seemed lost.
“What about the boy?” asked Kortho.
“Ryden’s binded? He’s in the Greylands.”
“No, the boy one who helped you.”
“Rud? He’s resting up. He and Hilda and the others are leaving the hamlet. I don’t know where they’re going, but they’re moving on.”
“Such a tragedy. That poor girl.”
Jakub thought about Florence. She was binded to Ryden now, trapped with him. He couldn’t imagine how Rud was coping with it.
Ryden should have answered for it, but Jakub had taken that away. He’d forgone everything – what was right, his duty – to bring Kortho back.
Duty above all was bullshit. He knew that now.
“What will we tell the academy?” he said. “We lost Harry Helmund.”
“We’ll tell them the truth,” said Kortho. “and then see what they want to do.”
“I failed.”
“No; you did what you could. Now it’s time for you to sleep.”
He couldn’t help it then. His feelings were busting inside him, fighting to get out.
Kortho held out his arm and Jakub fell into it just like he had all those years ago, when Kortho had first saved him.
He’d held it in for so long now, and he couldn’t do it anymore. He’d seen too much death, even for a necromancer. It wasn’t what a necromancer should do, but he sobbed, he sobbed all the horrors out of him until he couldn’t do it anymore.
And then he slept.
As the wagon drove them away from the Killeshi lands and back to the academy – back to civilization – Jakub fell into the arms of sleep. This time, he didn’t have any nightmares. His body was too weary for that; and instead, he slept properly for the first time in forever.
The end of book 1 – thank you for reading and I hope you stick around for book 2, which is coming soon.
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