Rise of the Necromancer

by Deck Davis

  Hips lost his balance and fell into the wagon, smashing his skull into the corner. He slumped onto his back and he died there, eyes open, blood gushing out of his throat and wetting the Toil ground just as Gunar’s blood had earlier.

  Helena grabbed the second dagger and put it on top of the pigskin crate and then she headed toward the wagon with it, taking only a few steps before Hips’ words really hit her.

  The lusk had tipped the wagon and destroyed the bars, and now it had stuck its head into the opening and was tearing its jaws at the trapped people inside.

  “Beate!” she screamed.

  Jakub drained soul essence from every corpse he passed, feeling a flicker of regret that by doing so, he was robbing them of their chance to go to an afterlife. Two things banished this; his academy-trained erosion of empathy, and the knowledge that these bastards were slavers.

  He reached the crater in the middle of camp where the lusks had emerged. Just ahead was the giant lusk, a leviathan of a creature that seemed to give off dread in waves, and Jakub felt like they were as real as the wagon smoke when he breathed it in.

  With most slavers dead, the lusk was the only thing between him and the caravaners, but what a thing it was.

  A full two-span bigger than Len, with teeth like bloodied diamonds and skin that would deflect the bolts from the most powerful crossbow. With every second it snapped another caravaner in its jaws, crunching through flesh and bone with ease.

  Jakub raised his hands. His shirt sleeves fell back to his biceps, revealing his glyphline tattoos on his forearm, etched in skin and lit by the dying wagon fires.

  He spoke the spellword of Reanimate. He said that word once, twice, then again and again, each utterance casting waves of blue light out from his soul necklace and dispersing it all through the camp until the light was flying out and exploding like fireworks.

  Bodies began to rise. Bodies covered in wounds and blood. Bodies with bones sticking from torn skin, faces mauled, and clothes singed and hanging in shreds. The dead slavers whose essence he hadn’t taken got to their feet, puppets dragged from death by his necromancy and ready to serve him, once enemies but now his only allies.

  He pointed at the lusk, and his dead army of a dozen slavers lumbered toward the beast. They had no fear now; death had robbed them of that, and Jakub was glad.

  “Weapons,” he told them, and they picked up whatever was nearby, some finding discarded swords, others grabbing only the blackened remains of charred wood.

  As they reached the lusk, Jakub looked around, finally spotting Len resting on his haunches, making a piecemeal of a headless body, with blood staining his mouth and teeth.

  The lusk, he commanded.

  In one leap, Len the lusk was upon his older, bigger brethren, biting and clawing at his thick hide. The undead slavers surrounded the lusk’s lower part and they hacked and lashed and clubbed, finally earning the monster’s attention so that it left the caravaners and faced its new enemies instead.

  This was a chance to escape. If he could shake the caravaners from their panic, they could tip the wagon back over, gather what horses were still hitched to the rocks, and try to flee over the desert.

  Even as he had the thought he knew it was wrong. Their escape would only be temporary because Len and the undead couldn’t kill the monster, and this creature was in a blood frenzy now.

  It would follow their wagon for miles over the sand, and the horses could not outrun it, and the sight of this giant would stir panic in them and they wouldn’t respond to any driver.

  No, he had to finish it.

  Knowing this to be true, Jakub gripped his sword in his hand and he swallowed back his fear. He ran at the lusk. When he reached it, he commanded one of his undead slavers.

  “Kneel.”

  The lusk lashed out with a giant limb, scattering five undead, decapitating one of them. The severed head rolled along the ground until it banged into another corpse.

  Jakub climbed on his kneeling slaver and used him as a step, and then he gripped the ridges between the lusk’s skin and climbed up it as though it were a rock.

  When he reached the top he raised his sword, tensed his muscles, and at that moment he felt all of his fear and panic leave him.

  He drove the sword down true, stabbing through the lusks head.

  The lusk leaped up, but it could only gain a few feet of air now, weakened by the cuts and stabs of the slavers, hurt by the giant wound in its skull.

  It stepped forward once, teetered for balance, and then crashed down.

  Jakub steadied himself and then approached it again as it thrashed on the floor, avoiding its desperate death strikes with its limbs.

  He raised his sword again and brought the tip down into its brain, stabbing it so deeply that he couldn’t wedged it free.

  The lusk went limp. Jakub stumbled back, his energy finally leaving him, and he couldn’t help but sit for a moment, covered in sweat and blood, smelling the stench of iron and piss and shit in the air, hearing the cries and low pleading of the caravaners who didn’t realize they were safe now.

  Then the lusk stirred, flicking its legs, trying to right itself, and Jakub didn’t have the energy to lift his sword again.

  Sever its head, he commanded.

  His army of undead took their swords and logs and they hacked at the creature until it could no longer move and it was as dead as the desert which it had called home for so long.

  CHAPTER 40

  Dawn broke over a desert drenched in blood. It dripped into the lusk cracks in the ground and went deep into their tunnels and warrens, where the smaller lusks, ones too tiny to breach, lapped at it and wondered when their matriarch would return.

  It seeped from the bodies of the fallen; the slavers, caravaners, and their poor horses. It covered the living so that some had no skin to be seen, only costumes of crimson that they were too shocked to wipe away as they staggered through camp in states of fugue, some tripping over the bodies of their comrades, others managing only a few steps before collapsing to their knees and retching.

  Seeing this, Jakub decided it wasn’t the best time for a bunch of undead slavers to be stumbling through the camp, so he commanded them to walk away for a hundred paces or so and wait for him.

  As his army shambled forth, Jakub felt tired, and he knew that if he gave in to it, there’d be no rousing him for a week. There was so much to do; so many people to help, supplies to find. He couldn’t rest yet.

  “Out, out,” cried a voice, and it was a voice Jakub recognized.

  He pushed himself to his feet and he wiped his hand on his shirt, leaving a trail of red down it. He spotted a pigskin nearby and he put it to his lips and drank until his stomach couldn’t take any more, finally feeling a chill of shock overtake him

  He sat on the ground for a moment, trembling, his stomach gurgling. He wet his hands and he wiped his face, and his palms were covered red. He swept his hair back, splashed more water on his face, and then he stood up.

  Helena was by the prisoner wagon. The side of her shirt was ruined by blood, and it was padded out with a rag dressing tied around her waist. She looked older this morning, as if a decade’s worth of suns and moons had passed in one night.

  The wagon was turned on its side, the wooden cage in ruins. She held out her hand and stayed steady as one by one the caravaners clambered out. Some stayed back, pressed as far away as they could, terrified to leave what once had been a prison but they now saw as their only sign of safety.

  Gunar’s wife held out her hands but those who remained, a young boy, old man, and a woman with two children clinging to her, wouldn’t come. Helena’s forehead was wet with sweat, and her hands too were stained with blood, the mess reaching up her wrists and to her forearms.

  Jakub staggered over, desperately needing rest but knowing it was a way away yet.

  “It’s safe,” he told them as he approached. “The slavers are dead. The lusk is dead.”

  The young boy shook his h
ead. “You don’t know!”

  Jakub sighed. He walked to the dead lusk and he grabbed it by the antennae and dragged its severed head across the ground until they could see it. He tried not to show how much it tired him but even its head felt as heavy as a boulder.

  The woman screamed, and her children clung to her harder.

  “Jakub!” said Helena. “Do you think that helps?”

  He let go of the severed head. “Sorry.”

  Something crashed into him, almost knocking him off his feet. His survival instincts, frayed beyond logic, fired.

  He almost reached for his dagger when he saw that it was Beate - Gunar and Helena’s daughter - whom Jakub had first met all those months ago and who he had always shared a cheerful word with in their early Sun Toil days. Old Shep was with her, wagging his tail furiously when he saw Jakub.

  His decision to help resurrect Shep had led him to this; to joining the caravan and his journey into what was surely an afterlife of hell on the mortal land.

  And for all that, he was glad to see her, and as she hugged him, only reaching to his waist, he felt a flicker of a smile on his face. He made sure not to hug her back so that his Wilting Touch power didn’t rear its rotten head.

  “I’m so glad you’re safe,” he told her.

  Helena leaned on the wagon. “You have to get out,” she said, frustration in her voice. “We can’t stay here, and this is the only wagon. Unless you want to walk out of Toil, we need to get it right and back on its wheels.”

  A man approached now. Tall, reedy, but with a leathery face and scars that suggested experience but not wisdom. Jakub recognized him as one of the mercenaries who always had a knack of winning his caravan gambling games.

  “No point righting it,” he said. “Nothing to pull it with. The horses have fucked off.”

  Looking around, Jakub saw that he was right. The realization was a knife in his gut. After all this, after fighting free of slavers, after killing the biggest lusk he’d ever seen, they were still stuck in this hell.

  “We’ll worry about pulling it once we set it straight,” said Helena.

  “Let ‘em stay in there, if that’s what they want to do. Me and a few of the others are walking while it’s cool. Some of the stuff in those bastards’ wagons might have been spared the flames. If we’re lucky, it’ll be enough to get us halfway out of the desert.”

  “How many of us made it?” asked Jakub.

  “Oh, the corpse botherer speaks,” said the mercenary.

  Jakub bristled at the slur. As a necromancer, he was used to hearing all kinds of names, usually given by people who didn’t understand his magic and so feared it. Normally it wouldn’t have mattered to him at all, but right now, after everything…

  Before he could say a word, the mercenary smiled wide, and he marched over to Jakub and put his arm around him. “I’m only joking, lad,” he said. “Without you, we’d all be in that big fucking lusk’s belly.”

  “Thanks.”

  The merc jostled him with his elbow. “No, thank you. I don’t deserve a flea’s piss of gratitude here, but you… Never mind. You don’t remember my name, do you?”

  Jakub was never the kind of guy to lie out of politeness. He found that white lies usually caused more trouble than they spared. “Sorry. I wasn’t at my best when we set out.”

  “No bother. I’m Matthias, among various names both earned and otherwise.”

  Helena gave Jakub a look then, but it wasn’t a friendly one. There was something behind it, but he didn’t have the energy to figure out what.

  “I’ll take a look around,” he said. “See what supplies we have.”

  As he started to walk away, he heard a scream. One of the caravaners, a woman with golden curls, big, blue eyes, and blood crusted around her face, pointed at a lusk. It was hopping through camp, not paying attention to any of the humans around it, instead just mindlessly moving as if working on some residual instinct.

  “Don’t worry, he’s one of mine,” said Jakub.

  “The lusk?”

  “You can call him Len.”

  “Oh no,” said Helena, with her hands on her hips. “Not a feckin’ chance. You think folks can pull themselves together with that thing inches by? Kill it.”

  “It’s already dead, and killing it again would be a waste, trust me. We’ve got a hell of a lot of ground to cover in Toil, and we’ll need Len to get us through it.”

  Now two more mercs joined Matthias. “Cut its bug-eyed head off and shit down its neck. Strip its skin and dry it out. Turn it into a book cover. Seen ‘em being sold in Dispolis.”

  “Touch the lusk and they’ll be binding your skin to the latest Tale of the Wandering Bard,” said Jakub.

  While the survivors huddled together and cleaned and dressed wounds as best they could, Jakub walked around the camp. He kept his map open as he did, marking anything useful on it for collection later. He didn’t have the energy to pile everything up yet.

  It was when he reached the eastern side of camp that he saw a huge mound of fur laying on the ground. He got closer and saw that it was the bear, and York was underneath it.

  The bear and hunter had died together, but seeing the old man raised so many questions. What in all hells was he doing out here? Was he part of the slavers? Well, he’d never get an answer now.

  As he looked at them, something occurred to him.

  He was only a journeyman necromancer, so he wasn’t strong enough to resurrect a person. But his Major Beast Resurrection spell would let him raise the bear from the dead.

  He could use his new Spirit Transfer power to send York’s spirit into the bear, thus bringing him back to life. A new, strange life, sure, but it was still life.

  Would York want that? To be dragged from death and put inside the body of the bear that had killed him?

  Jakub understood now why Spirit Transfer was considered so corrupt a power. In fact, the idea of performing such a transfer without consent made him feel dirty. And yet, he was considering it.

  Then, he heard a gasp of breath.

  “York?” he said. He stood and grabbed a teenager who was walking past with three crates of beans. “Give me a hand with this.”

  “Helena told me to find water. She’ll kill me if I don’t.”

  “I’m a necromancer, I’ll bring you back.”

  “Everyone knows you’re not a master. You can’t resurrect a person.”

  “Just help me move the damn bear.”

  Together they tried to move the bear, but the beast must have weighed more than a ton.

  “Len!” shouted Jakub.

  The lusk reached them in four hops, and the kid shuddered and fell onto his arse when he saw him.

  “Len’s friendly,” said Jakub. “Or more accurately, his reanimation removed his predatory instincts and rendered him a pliable puppet. But I prefer to think of him as friendly.”

  With Len’s help, they moved the bear off York, laying the beast on its back with its arms splayed out. Even in death it looked monstrous, and looking at it, every necromancial instinct in Jakub’s body begged, absolutely begged, him to reanimate it.

  York gasped once more, and now bear-less, his ravaged body was visible to all. The bear had almost turned him inside out, with a large open wound across his chest, and hundreds of scratches of various shapes and sizes, all ugly as heck and marked with blood. Rivulets of blood formed a crisscross on his face so that it was hard to see anything except his eyes. When he took a ragged breath, a bubble of spit and blood inflamed and then popped.

  The kid had turned pale and he was taking short, sharp breaths. Jakub put his hand on his back. “You’ll be okay.”

  “He’s gonna die.”

  “Can you get some water? Fetch a pigskin and a rag or blanket.”

  Now alone, Jakub kneeled beside York. “It’s you, isn’t it?” he said. “All the way out here, all these years, and it’s you.”

  York gasped and shut his eyes in pain.

  “Wai
t a second,” said Jakub.

  He checked his soul necklace but it was empty after having raised an army of slavers back from the dead. Damn it.

  There wasn’t much else to drain from, since he’d already taken essence from dozens of corpses when he first came into camp. The giant lusk would have been a plentiful source, if they hadn’t hacked its head off.

  Without Health Harvest, York was gone. Water and rags wouldn’t do a damn thing, he just needed to get the kid away before he passed out. Normal means wouldn’t help the hunter now; his wounds were too numerous, too deep, and he was too old to take them.

  And then Jakub’s gaze settled on the bear.

  “There goes adding an undead bear to my army.”

  He focused on the beast and cast Essence Grab, and to his shock, the bear’s essence filled a full three-quarters of his necklace.

  He held the trinket in his hand, staring at it as if it would change, as if the essence it held was a mistake. But no, the blue swirls stayed in the necklace, and Jakub was left wondering how one bear could gather him more essence than a dozen men.

  He looked at the beast with a new respect now, and he felt a pang in his gut at seeing it splayed out like that, like it was on the rug of a nobleman’s manor. It’d get a burial, he decided. He might have robbed the poor thing of its afterlife by draining its essence, but he would give it a respectful send-off.

  Now he kneeled by York and he stared at the old hunter and spoke the Health Harvest spellword. The bar’s essence left his necklace and it drifted out toward the hunter, gathering in the air around him and hanging there like some spectral wind, rippling with a beautiful energy that Jakub wanted to just breathe in.

  He held himself back and he let the essence fall softly onto the hunter, where it gathered over his wounds and cuts. The essence of the bear knitted together the wounds the bear itself had caused. It cauterized veins, it repaired as much broken flesh and skin as it could.

  By the end, the hunter was still covered in blood, his clothes were still torn, but at least he could breathe.