Rise of the Necromancer

by Deck Davis

  They were the survivors of Gunar’s caravan.

  Jakub felt a rush of longing in him now. He’d spent maybe a month and a half with these people, yet seeing them now after everything had happened and the days he’d spent alone, they could have been his best friends in the world.

  It was hard to reconcile their dust-pale and beaten faces with the ones in his memory, because his memories of the camp were happy ones where Gunar would call an end to the day’s travel and lutes would be fetched, fires lit, meat placed on sizzling pans.

  He needed to see familiarity. See who had survived. He didn’t know all their names but he knew faces, and he felt like every pair of recognizable eyes would be like finding greenery in the desert.

  Damn it. He was too far away to really see them. It didn’t matter, though, because it didn’t change his resolve.

  Time to answer a question; how did one lonely necromancer free his friends from a guarded slaver camp?

  CHAPTER 28

  It took a full afternoon of thought back at the canvas-covered finger rocks, but he finally had a method and a means. Jakub lay under the canvas with his wagon in his peripheral vision and with Olin and Alban sharing the roofed space, and he went over everything in his head.

  First, he had to choose his time to attempt a mass rescue; in the daytime or the night. He was no scout, but he guessed darkness would give him better cover than the beaming sun. Good – that was settled.

  But the slavers had wagons parked on the edges of the camp, each with a man on watch. It made sense that at night they’d double their watch. To make sure he was edging on the side of caution, Jakub settled on the tripling their watch.

  That meant 18 men staring out into the deepest darkness. Or, 36 eyeballs that could potentially spot him sneaking into camp, and would certainly notice a bunch of slaves sneaking out. He was fairly certain of that, because the way he saw it, slavers were protective of their slaves. They wanted to make sure they didn’t escape since it would be more than a minor mishap to lose the produce they had journeyed into the desert for.

  So sneaking was out. There was just no way he could do this quietly. Like an actor changing garb to suit changing characters from one scene to the next, Jakub would have to look at this differently. The longer he did, the more certain he was that there was only one answer.

  Chaos. A man dealt enough bad poker hands by fate to lose his life and fortune would be well advised to throw his cards and flip the table, and escape his debts while fellow players recovered.

  Chaos could be a shield and a cloak, and Jakub saw it as his only way through the slaver’s watchers.

  At first, he looked at his wagon inventory and he checked his spell list and he wondered how he could use his resources to draw the slavers away from the slaves. When he realized he was only thinking of the here and now, of the immediately visible. He was lacking imagination.

  Instead, he imagined he had power without limits. If that were true, what would he do?

  Well, the last time he’d seen chaos rip a new arsehole in a camp, it had been when he and Gunar and the rest of the folks neared Equipoint rock.

  Yes, that was it. Complete and utter anarchy from the ground and sky. Only, Jakub couldn’t summon a dust storm nor could he wield dry lightning, so there was no way he could inflict that kind of destruction on the slavers.

  That left one more means; the toil-lusks that had corkscrewed out of the ground and emerged in a spray of dust and had swept through the weather-battered caravan.

  Jakub couldn’t control storms or lighting. But if he could find and kill a toil lusk, he sure as gods’ shit had the means the control one of those.

  CHAPTER 29

  If finding a toil-lusk was hard, then killing one was damn near impossible. Really, even trying it bordered on the kind of headsickness that usually saw men standing outside taverns at night, bollock-naked and shouting curses at the moon.

  Jakub had only done that once, the night before an ex-academy friend’s wedding. It seemed perfectly normal at the time.

  The more he thought about it the more he realized how utterly reckless it was to try this. Bards in taverns far, far away sung songs about mad kings and insane princes, and even those royal wife killers and child imprisoners weren’t headsick enough to do something like this.

  He was going to do it.

  And so he stood under a canvas strewn over three finger-shaped rocks, wondering how to coax out one of Toil’s meanest predators. The canvas-covering didn’t offer much room with him, Olin and Albin sharing its protection, and the sun was blazing so he wouldn’t take them outside.

  But he needed to think. In order to think, he needed to pace. There probably wasn’t any science behind walking around and getting ideas, but it sure helped. Maybe it was something about blood flow. Then again, it was said that an old necromancer named Curious Tom created the basis for the Health Harvest spell while on the toilet.

  Olin and Albin chewed on the oats in the half-filled burlap and they watched him walk to and fro with an empty, torn burlap over his head to protect him from the sun. He had a water jar in one hand and a handful of sunflower seeds from the slavers’ stash in the other, simultaneously sipping and chewing as he worked out how to get close to a lusk without dying.

  Even after spending a lot of time talking with Gunar and his desert-seasoned men about what to expect from Toil, he’d never bothered asking how a guy might find a giant lusk and try to kill it. He might as well have asked how to trap the sun.

  This left him wondering how to find them. He knew they’d attacked the caravan, but he hadn’t seen one since then. A few nights earlier he’d perhaps heard one, late at night when there was a drop in the wind and he heard a giant crash in the distance and wondered if it was a lusk breaching. But since then? Nothing.

  That was the first knot to untie; how to find a lusk.

  “Let’s break it down, Olin,” he said, noticing he was the only one paying attention since Albin was sleeping with his long snout rested against his brother.

  “If I get real, real simple about this, then I know that lusks live underground, and they only breach for food. I’m assuming they must have burrows or something. A network of tunnels, most probably, and they’ll have sources of water underground.”

  Bored with the topic, Olin huffed and lowered his head to the ground, and the brothers slept side by side. Jakub pulled up his map, studying the transparent network of terrain as he paced.

  The thing was, lusks seemed like a mystery on first thought. Ten, sometimes twenty feet tall. They were insects, yet they were carnivores and actively hunted for meat. They could appear from nowhere, as the caravan had found when they breached without warning and rampaged through camp.

  As strange as they seemed, there would be structure to their behavior. Everything had a pattern to it, which Jakub had learned many years ago when he had been in a tavern near the academy.

  The barkeep there knew that most students who went in were below drinking age, but he didn’t care. If they had coin, he served them. One sweet summer, when the smell of the annual pepper crop hung in the air, Jakub had gone to the tavern to watch a bard perform. Twinkle Hands, they called him, and he was supposed to have played at the queen’s banquets a couple of times. Then again, it was rare to find a bard who wouldn’t claim that.

  Twinkle Hands played a lengthy set, finishing with a song that seemed to run for an hour. The words that Hands sang, hummed, and let roll from his tongue spanned eons and empires. As beautiful as it was, Jakub found it jarring. It was custom for a bard to rhyme his songs, but this one didn’t have a single rhyme in it, and the effect was like an ice bucket over his head. He couldn’t say why; it just stuck out. Maybe it was because Jakub needed order. He needed the expected.

  So he asked Hands why his epic song didn’t rhyme, and the bard said, “If there isn’t a rhyme there’s a reason, and sometimes the reason can be a rhyme by itself when you understand how it sounds.”

  That was
just vague enough to sound mysterious and meaningless at the same time, and Jakub left the tavern drunk and uninformed, with the lute tune from the ballad playing in his mind, but the lyrics not sticking because rhyme was the glue of song.

  Then, years later, he had been in Dispolis buying an academic text on burial shrouds and their supposed effect on resurrection, when he noticed a book. The Collected Lyrics of Twinkle Hands the Great (Who Played at the queen’s banquet twice).

  Jakub flipped to the end and there he found the Song of Age and Empires, and again he saw that there was no rhyme to it. Remembering what Hands told him, he wondered if there was no rhyme, where was the reason?

  And then he saw the genius. A song so long the lyrics spanned fifty pages, yet if he took the first letter of each line, they spelled out something of their own. A message. The last letter of each line did likewise, again with a message. That was when Jakub understood that even if you couldn’t see it, there could still be a structure to something.

  Why did this come back to him now, as he paced the desert while two stolen horses peacefully slept nearby? Memories got stronger out here. Like his brain needed something to cling to. A little like his glyphline tattoos which were focal points for spells, memories were focal points for survival.

  That, and the fact that he really, really needed a beer. He would spend fifty years resurrecting a barkeep’s chickens if he could just find a tavern, rent a room, draw a bath, and order beer after beer. Then he’d get in the bed and pull the duck-feather quilt over his toes and tuck it under his feet. Whenever he was in a bed, Jakub liked to tuck his feet.

  He shook the thought away, and he looked from his map to the terrain around him with fresh eyes.

  A reason for everything, even if you can’t see the rhyme. There was a structure to how the lusks behaved. So, what did he know about them? What had he seen?

  One, they had breached from where there were already cracks in the ground. The terrain near Equipoint Rock was full of them.

  Two, they didn’t show until things had already gone to all the hells. Until people had died, until their blood had been…

  The hand of inspiration gripped him by the balls.

  “Olin, fetch my blade,” he said. When the horse didn’t move, he trundled over to the canvas to get the weapon himself. “I was hoping that would work.”

  An hour later, Jakub was riding Olin, after leaving Albin under canvas back at the rocks. Lacking a saddle, he’d improvised by using the dead slaver’s jacket, shirt, and trousers, strapping these around Olin’s body using thin strips of canvas he’d cut from the roof he’d draped over the rocks. There was nothing to hold onto save Olin’s neck, but the horse was used to a saddle and seemed to enjoy Jakub’s company, and the going was slow in any case.

  They headed northeast, then north, then further northeast. Jakub stared at the ground so much he had a glare in his eyes when he blinked, like the sunlight had leaked into his skull. It paid off late in the afternoon when he spotted a lightning-shaped crack running all the way across the ground.

  “This way,” said Jakub, gently tugging Olin’s reins and leading him toward it.

  The trot of Olin’s hooves was the only noise as they worked their way over the dusty plains, following the crack which, after a few miles of thinning then widening then threatening to thin to a complete stop, opened ten inches wide so that it looked like a mouth set into the dirt.

  Jakub hopped off Olin and stroked his mane, and he hefted up the improvised saddle that had started to slide. Walking a few steps, he tried to stretch out his aching arse, his knotted thigh muscles, and his hurting shins. That done, feeling a little more limber, he kneeled beside the crack in the ground.

  There wasn’t much to see, just darkness. It was about what he expected; this wasn’t a lusk-breach, since a giant insect bursting from the ground would make a bigger mess. Maybe it was a sign of a lusk tunnel network under his feet. It made sense that if a lusk was burrowing a dozen or so feet under the ground, then the commotion might make a crack form on the surface.

  The crack became slimmer again a few hundred paces away and from there it seemed to run on endlessly. The only thing in the distance was a clump of hills made from the orange rocks that were so plentiful in this part of Toil.

  He wiped the sweat off his face and adjusted the piece of canvas around his head so it covered him better. He stared into the crack and tried to derive meaning from it.

  This had to be a sign of toil-lusks. A crack by itself meant nothing because the desert was full of them wherever the sand gave way to flat plains. But this one was wider and had to mean activity underground. Maybe not lusks, but it was a starting point. Jakub brought up his map and made his mark.

  Map marker added: Toil-Lusk tunnel network [Site of my impending maniacal plan and possible self-destruction.]

  Daylight was dulling and the breeze was whispering in his ear, so he climbed on Olin and headed back to his new home, this time thinking not about where to find lusks but how to kill one.

  CHAPTER 30

  Sleep called to him all night but Jakub’s thoughts were fixed on ten-feet-tall insects that lived under Toil’s dirt. Ones who could rip a man in two, ones known for taking men, women, and children screaming underground, to their hives deep under the surface where they’d harvest them for eating.

  What horrors happened in those pits of hell nobody knew, because nobody had been to one and lived.

  Jakub was considering it.

  Or he had been until he realized that was desperation making him chase after the phantom of a plan. As soon as he took his first, stupid step underground he was a dead man, and a dead necromancer wasn’t an effective one.

  The only way was to draw a lusk out onto the surface and then kill it. He thought he had an idea of how to draw it, but the method made his stomach churn. There was no choice.

  So, if he knew how to coax a lusk onto the surface, how did he kill it? They were an annoying combination of difficult to hit and strong enough to tear a man in half. They could leap over a person’s head easier than Jakub could take a step. How was he supposed to deal with that?

  His first thought was tied into his plan to draw them out. Lusks only breached the surface for food. That was why they’d attacked the caravan; somehow, they sensed meat ready for collecting.

  To draw one out now, Jakub would have to use Olin or Albin as bait, and the thought of one of the poor horses, the ones who’d come to trust him, standing beside a crack in the ground, completely unaware that they were being used to draw out a carnivorous insect…it made him tear up. His emotions were running strong, lately.

  Also, Ludwig would be pissed with him. He’d tell Jakub that his life wasn’t worth more than Olin or Albin’s just because he was human. But his academy instructors would tell him the opposite; a necromancer’s work was more important than a horse’s, and thus his life was worth more. Pity Jakub had worked so hard on developing his empathy lately.

  Supposing that he went ahead with his plan, then Olin or Albin could work as both bait and trap. He’d have to kill them, find a few snakes, and fill their bellies with venom. Then he placed them near one of the lusk cracks and waited. A few chomps of dead horses, and he’d have an equally dead lusk. All that without any danger to himself.

  Sitting under his canopy and watching Olin and Albin lying right up beside one another, Olin’s nostrils flaring as he snored, Albin chewing on grain, he felt dirty. His thoughts felt like thick tar running through his brain.

  So he thought some more.

  The only way of drawing out the lusks that didn’t involve Albin or Olin meant taking a risk to himself. He could loiter beside an entry point and drip blood into the cracks to draw the lusks out.

  When a giant man-eater emerged, he’d have to fight it himself, which he imagined was going to be more than a little difficult and carried an unfortunate consequence of possible death. And he’d worked really, really hard to avoid dying, so it seemed a shame to waste that j
ust to trap an overgrown bug.

  Either kill a horse he’d grown fond of or risk killing himself, who he was also a little fond of.

  In a last effort to figure something out, Jakub went through the inventory he’d found in the wagon, checking through the kidney beans, water stone, grain, and little knick-knacks that belonged to the dead slavers. It was when he idly popped a dried kidney bean into his mouth that a third option snuck upon him.

  It took a lot of work. He avoided as much of the sun’s peak shining hours but even so, he had to work when it was too damn uncomfortable, and he felt like he had no sweat left to release from his pores and that most his body was made of dried ash that’d disperse if someone sneezed on him.

  By the time the stars were winking at him he’d finished preparations of his third plan, which though would take work and might be a bust, would mean neither he nor his new horse friends would have to risk themselves.

  He retreated under his canopy and he cuddled up to Olin and Albin and he shared their body heat, and he felt so exhausted that he might be able to sleep through the night.

  Before closing his eyes he looked at the desert beyond, and he imagined his days’ labor out there, and he wondered if the things he’d made would work.

  Earlier, when he had chewed on a kidney bean, he had suddenly thought of all the other desert critters. The ones who survived in Toil by eating plants, cacti, weeds. And though their diets were meat-free, their bodies certainly weren’t. If Jakub could kill a bunch of them, catch a few snakes, and then do so butchering and venom milking, then his first plan could work without Olin or Albin having to die.