by Deck Davis
No sound could be heard. There was little trace of the hundreds-strong convoy that only this morning had breakfasted under a clear Toil sun. No mercenaries arguing about cards, no children playing.
Death had blown its foul breath over Gunar’s company. Men, women, and animals. Work hands, mercenaries, wives, children. They all suffered its taint.
The song of death was sung softly into their ears, the notes changing for every person, the words belonging to only them as they died. With each death, the storm abated, the lightning crashed softer, the lusks fled with full bellies.
Then there was only silence. Like a planet with no atmosphere, with no touch of a man. Just a peaceful, calm, suffocating vacuum of sound.
Dozens of them died that day. A spread of families with dreams and purpose, dead.
But one man had ridden from the storm.
A young man from Queen Patience’s Magic Academy. A survivor who had been seized by the hand of fortune and dragged through three disasters to achieve the unlikeliest of escapes.
A journeyman necromancer separated from the academy he once called home and working for Gunar as a mercenary. He had been tasked with resurrecting any livestock who perished on the slog through Sun Toil. No chance of that now.
There was only one sound now; an explosion in the distance as the necromancer, who had never driven a cart before, hit a rock.
The jolt made the precarious cargo in his cart ignite.
An unusually tuned ear would have heard a thud just before the explosion; the thud of the necromancer diving off the wagon and hitting the ground.
A boom sounded out, the noise traveling far over the desert to the distant canyons and rocky hills and caves. Debris rained from the sky and thudded onto the ground.
When the explosion was over, the necromancer stirred.
He blinked.
He opened his eyes.
Pain throbbed through him, and he retched until his eyes watered.
CHAPTER 4
Jakub Russo
It was disconcerting to be in agony in one part of his body and completely numb in another. After Jakub had finished vomiting and blinked the water from his eyes, he saw why this was the case.
A wooden rod from a wheel spoke was sticking out of his waist, just to the left of his stomach. That accounted for the pain.
The numbness came from his legs, where he had the slight misfortune of having a full bison carcass lying across his thighs, pinning him down.
His first thought was, which god did I piss off today?
His second was, how the heck did this happen?
He knew this trip had been dangerous. A journey through Sun Toil, how could it not be? But since everything that had happened in Dispolis, with the flesh-stripping murderers kidnapping academy students and torturing the magic from their skin, Jakub had wanted to do nothing but travel. He needed gold for that.
The merchant Gunar Helketoil was renowned for making the Sun Toil trip once per year and paying wages that’d keep a man flush for six months. He had to; otherwise, nobody would make a trip like this.
Besides, the danger became merely a threat if you planned enough, and experience chiseled that threat to just a warning. Gunar was a seasoned Toiler, and what’s more, he traveled with his family. That had been enough to convince Jakub that Gunar knew what he was doing and that the wages were worth it.
His reason was that a trader wouldn’t take his family on a dangerous journey. He was revising that opinion now, and his current thinking was that Gunar Helketoil was a crazy bastard and that Jakub was even crazier for not seeing it.
He’d agreed to travel with them as the caravan necromancer, bringing the bison and pack animals back from the dead should they succumb somewhere along the journey through Sun Toil.
It was going to take more than just journeyman necromancer to bring them back now. Jakub couldn’t remember much of what led to him being trapped under a dead animal, but he saw flashes of memory in his mind.
Dust storms taller than a giant. Leviathan toil-lusks rising through cracks in the ground and feeding themselves into a frenzy on the panicked caravaners. Lighting crashing down, exploding into the ground.
He heard snippets of sound; women screaming, Gunar bellowing. The feeling of chaos that was as real as the static in the air.
Looking around, he couldn’t see any sight of the others. No people. No dead animals apart from the bison currently using his legs as a mattress.
“Hello?” he tried to shout, but his voice came out throaty, like a man on his death bed calling for the nurse. “Hello?”
It was useless. The others were dead, and anyone who had survived was gone. That left him alone here, trapped, thirsty, and in pain.
But wait. Was he ever alone? Had he ever really been alone since he had earned the journeyman necromancer rank?
Back then, after leveling to journeyman [1], he’d visited Necormancia Hall for the first time, and he’d met the original creators of his art. Their names were Nelania, Crotalus, and Mancerno, and each existed in a gaseous form, fed by the necromancers who cast spells in their name.
The three had bargained with Jakub, tried to get him to choose their own shade. A shade was a path of necromancy that would influence which spells a mancer learned, and out of necessity, Jakub had made a choice he sometimes regretted.
He’d chosen Mancerno’s shade, the dark path of the Raiser.
Since then, he’d been able to talk to the ancient spirit using his mind, though Mancerno’s intrusions were mostly uninvited. Now, though, choosing the Raiser shade could turn out to be a masterstroke.
“Mancerno,” he thought. “Are you there?”
No answer.
“Mancerno?”
The silence worried him. Mancerno had never wasted a chance to invade his mind, so where was he?
Then the realization hit. He hadn’t spoken with Mancerno for weeks now, and the lack of intrusion on his thoughts was something that had passed unnoticed because that was the way things should be. Like a noise sounding outside your window for hours, it could stop and you wouldn’t notice it had ceased.
He knew why, too. After choosing the Raiser shade and earning its powers, Jakub was supposed to use the spells. Each spell fed Mancerno, allowed the ancient spirit to exist. Jakub had barely used any of his talents in the last months.
Now Mancerno had abandoned him the only time he might ever need him.
With no help coming from ancient spirits, he needed to focus. The only sign the caravan had even been here was a lonely wheel wedged into the dirt a couple of feet away from him, missing a rod. A hand-sized part of said rod was safe though; it was safely wedged inside Jakub’s waist.
Where the hell was everyone?
The longer he thought, the more doors opened in his mind.
Memories of the dust storm hitting with such speed and force that the grains began eviscerating tent canvas and shredding flesh from people’s bodies.
Memories of the giant insects spearing mercenaries who didn’t know whether to defend themselves from the storm or the creatures.
Memories of Gunar screaming orders here and there, and then bellowing his last before dry lighting shot from the sky and electrified the ground around him.
That had happened. It was no nightmare, no figment of his mind. Yet there was no sign of it now. So where had they all gone?
The lusks could have eaten the people and the animals. That was why they had attacked the caravan, after all. But if that was the case, where was everything else? Where was the wreckage from the tents, the wagons, and all the inventory they were taking across Sun Toil?
Besides, it didn’t make sense for the lusks to destroy all evidence of the caravan. Jakub had a three-week gap between taking the Toil job and setting out, and he’d used it to prepare. He read everything he could about Sun Toil itself, about wilderness survival, about the flora and fauna and creatures and critters he might expect to find in a hole like this.
Growing up
in the Queen’s academy, he had long-since been taught the best ways to retain information quickly and in great volume. Memory palaces, mindscapes he could wander through freely, accessing facts as he needed them.
And he had read about the toil-lusks. Omnivores who ate cacti and cholla plants most of the time. The spikes of a cactus presented just a few seconds of a problem for them since the lusks could cover the plants in their acidic spit and then flick the spikes off.
Only when they spotted easy prey would they try for meat. They could live without much protein, but would never pass up a chance for it. Above all, they were creatures of the moment. They ate until they were full, and then they left. Even their acid spit couldn’t break down teeth and bone.
The conclusion Jakub drew from this was that the lusks couldn’t have removed every trace of the hundred or so men, women, and children of the caravan.
The secondary conclusion he drew was that he needed to get the hell off the ground before the lusks found space in their bellies and once again breached the cracked ground, where they would find him as rather easy prey, given that he had a dead bison crushing his legs.
Sometimes it was hard to prioritize what to do. Other times it was easy.
Jakub pressed the glyphline tattoo on his wrist. “Priority one,” he said, and words began to form in the air as he spoke them.
Priority #1; get the dead, heavy-as-hell animal off me.
CHAPTER 5
A cold feeling settled over him, each shiver sent tremors of pain through his body. It was shock setting in. It had to be.
He buttoned the parts of his shirt that he could move without disturbing the rod sticking out of his waist. He rolled his sleeves down to his wrists. It was about as effective a shield against the chill as wearing a paper hat in a hurricane.
Time was tumbling away from him now. He’d seen what shock could do to a person, and he was worried. Though it was meant as a defense mechanism, it often hindered more than it helped, and if left to spread it could render a person in a trance-like state, shivering, not able to move. Out here, that’d be as effective a death sentence as putting a crossbow to his head and firing.
Time to see what he could do to get out of this.
Moving his legs didn’t work. Either the bison had been on them so long it had cut off blood flow and made him lose all sensation, or it had landed on him with such force that it had crushed his bones and paralyzed him, and right now his body was feeding him lovely spoonful’s of shock response to spare him from the pain.
If both legs were broken, he was fucked. Although through his necromancy he could cast a healing spell, his magic was fueled by soul essence, and he was limited to how much essence he could hold at one time.
As a level 1 journeyman, he couldn’t hold anywhere near the essence a master could. That was why Jakub took jobs reviving animals, and not people. He was far, far away from being able to resurrect a person.
Even so, his Health Harvest healing spell was the only thing stopping him from panicking. He had the wooden rod-end sticking out of his belly, and indeterminate damage to his legs. He might be able to heal all of it or none of it. But there was a chance.
Other spells that might get him out of this. His Major Beast Resurrection, which used to be Minor Beast Resurrection but had leveled up when he became a journeyman, would let him bring the bison back to life. If he did that, it would surely get up from his legs.
Two problems there.
One, resurrection was like waking someone up by dumping ice water over their heads, but magnified to an unthinkable degree. Anyone or anything brought back from the dead suffered a period of confusion at first. It made them dangerous, unpredictable.
The last thing he needed was to bring this thing back, find that he still couldn’t move, then lay helpless as it went mad and trampled his skull into a much flatter shape than was advisable.
Secondly, Major Beast resurrection was a major essence drain, and essence was precious. If he used it, he might not have enough essence to use for other spells.
He had to check. His essence was stored in his soul necklace, and just a glance would tell him how much essence he had. But what if it was hardly any? What if he had barely enough for a single spell?
He almost didn’t want to look.
That was a logic fallacy, though. Not looking at his soul necklace didn’t mean he was spared the danger. If his essence was low, then it was low whether he looked at it or not. So better to look and to know, then to live in ignorance with a dead bison straddling his thighs and part of a cart sticking out from his gut.
Jakub carefully unbuttoned his shirt, flinching at the tremors of pain that sprang from his stomach every time he moved too much. They hit him in waves, one after another, each as fresh as the last. It reminded him of when he’d gotten his glyphline tattoos on his wrist; pain that never seemed to end, yet was strangely bearable if you just stopped being such a coward about it.
Wanting to save face despite being alone, Jakub pushed his pain back. He bore it like a necromancer should.
Yeah. That ought to impress all the people around here in the remotest part of the queendom.
Finally, feeling inside his shirt, he touched metal. Bringing his soul necklace out, he looked at it. A flinch of fear crossed his chest like the touch of a ghost. Which, for a necromancer, was a likely possibility most of the time.
This particular flinch was from the pathetic amount of essence trapped in his soul necklace.
Soul Necklace
Essence: [IIIII ]
It was a fifth of the way full. For necromancers, as in life, everything was relative. If a master necromancer had a fifth of his necklace full, it would be plenty. Enough to resurrect a dozen bison, to seal the wounds of fifty cuts.
For a journeyman, it was enough to make Jakub feel sick again. If it weren’t for his empty stomach and the vice grip he kept on his mind, using his academy training to stop seeds of panic blooming, he would have.
That was one advantage a necromancer had over other mage disciplines. Given that by definition, a necromancer would spend a lot of time with corpses, it was likely he or she would see things that would send a normal person’s mind into panic. That wasn’t advisable for a guy whose occupation centered around death.
Imagine a necromancer who panicked when he saw a corpse. Imagine how impractical that would be, for him to get shaky or scared while mourners looked on, desperate for him to bring back their loved one. Imagine a necromancer huddled in a corner while angry relatives waited for their loved ones to be resurrected. Not a great look for a mancer.
Jakub remembered his training and he forced calmness on himself, stopped panic turning into tidal waves and changed them into little tremors gently lapping onto the shores on his mind, washing little litters of logic upon the beach.
Come on, logic, he willed. Give me a reason-based hug.
He had some essence. Not a lot, but some. If he used it right, cast the right spell, he could at least get onto his feet.
So, the most immediate problems; the bison on his legs, the wooden rod in his side.
His brain honed on the rod. It was wedged deep into his flesh, and he wanted to get it out, but that was an instinctual response, and one he needed to tell to get the hell out of there.
His Health Harvest spell could heal the wound in his side. He had enough essence to power that spell, but there was no point yet. If he cast it on himself now, the spell would heal his wound while the wood was stuck inside him, and then he’d never get it out. He didn’t want to live his life with a foot-long piece of wood sticking out of his belly.
At the same time, he couldn’t take it out yet. For one, though he was no surgeon, he guessed it would hurt quite a lot. As famished and dehydrated as he was, the pain might be too much, and his body might pass out in shock. He couldn’t afford to lose more time to unconsciousness.
Secondly, the rod might have hit an artery. Its presence in his flesh might be the very thing keeping him alive
, and pulling it out could let his blood gush over him. That would be bad. He had to leave it in until he had something to stop blood loss.
That left the bison as the priority. It was pinning him in place, and of all the places in the queendom that it was dangerous to get stuck under a bison in, Sun Toil was the worst.
It was evening now. Soon, night would descend upon Sun Toil, and it would bring a devastating cold with it. Even if Jakub survived the freezing night while trapped under the bison, he would be greeted by the morning sun, which would get hotter and hotter, cooking him and the bison alike. Dehydrating him, shriveling his skin.
He needed to get the damn thing off him.
He couldn’t move his legs to shift it, and though his body was toned through the academy weapons training students of all disciplines had to practice, he wasn’t strong enough to shove the animal off him.
If physical force weren’t enough, then magical force might be. He could cast Major Beast Resurrection. The bison would rise from the dead, resurrected and wholly alive again. Assuming it didn’t crush him, he’d be free.
But casting that would sap all his essence, and he’d have none left for Health Harvest, which meant that although he wouldn’t be trapped, he’d have no essence left to heal his wounds.
Damn it. His head began to pound with the pressure of deciding. Then, as his skull throbbed, he felt something flutter across his forehead. He watched as a butterfly looped in front of him. A deep, brilliant blue with jagged yellow bolts on its wings.
“Sammus,” he said, and he wondered what had become of the boy who had named him, and a great pity stirred inside him.
But maybe Sammus was a sign. He knew another spell, of course. When he had risen to the journeyman rank, Jakub had learned the Reanimate spell.
Where Major Beast Resurrection restored an animal from the dead and made it just as alive as it had been before, Reanimate was different. It gave it life, of a sort, but not in a conscious way; the animal would become a meat puppet with no mind of its own, only able to do whatever Jakub commanded.
