It wasn’t a disease in the full sense of the word. Instead, it was half sickness, half curse that had haunted the world for several centuries. Its origins were tragic. When a sorceress who commands the magic of life falls in love with a necromancer, people will never leave them alone. The castle where the happy couple lived and experimented was attacked by zealots of the Bright Saint. It is still unclear what exactly transpired there, but both mages were killed, and the castle burned down. All witnesses died shortly afterward, and no killers managed to survive for more than five years after the murder. Even their friends and family wound up dead.
And then, several reckless souls decided to dig inside the castle ruins, hoping to find something valuable. They got sick on the second day after coming back. The entire village died out then, and several more. Three towns later, the epidemic was stopped. Life mages were powerless. They said it was common chickenpox, just augmented—corrupted and amplified. Outraged, they cursed the experimenters and attempted to find a cure. They tried everything, from plants to magic, but to no avail. Treating the chickenpox required a skilled necromancer. The disease was two lovers’ dying curse. The sickness researched by that sorceress in order to find a cure became her necromancer lover’s last hex—and as all hexes, it could only be undone by another necromancer. Afterward, the remaining symptoms could be easily cured by any life mage.
Rene was more than skilled, which is why he never got infected. A necromancer unable to protect himself from a curse? Ha! But he was unable to save Cassandra. His dear wife, who knew very well about her husband’s occupation—and never objected—had tried to keep in touch with her uncle. There was a reason. Hermann Likeworth was famed for his piety. Would he be friendly with a necromancer’s wife? He couldn’t; not even with a woman whose husband was simply suspected of anything shady. That was useful. So, Cassandra routinely paid visits to her uncle, listened to his preaching, accompanied him to church, brought him freshly baked stuffed buns on holidays—in one word, cozied up to him as much as she could. She had never harbored a grudge against Hermann. She knew that he wished her well—it’s just that his understanding of that was too different. Oh well. Maybe he was a fool—but not a villain.
Still, Cassandra was perfectly aware that if her uncle ever learned about her husband being a necromancer, he’d rat him out in an instant. For her, that just meant that he shouldn’t find out about that, and nothing more.
Her uncle was one of the first to fall ill, and so was Cassandra, who was visiting him that day. That was the danger of the lilac chickenpox—it never showed itself on the first day. Nobody knew who could infect them. The only visible symptom was the color of a sick person’s veins, which turned lilac instead of blue. As soon as his wife stepped inside the house, Rene realized she was sick. Noticing a hex in her aura was simple for a necromancer. He set out to find a cure. Removing the curse took two hours; giving his dear wife an elixir for treating common chickenpox and making sure no trace of sickness was left in her aura was even simpler. The hardest thing was gathering her belongings and convincing her to get away in a hastily hired carriage.
Cassandra was dead set against leaving. She has no reason to—the illness poses no danger anymore. Nobody ever gets infected with lilac chickenpox twice. She will remain with her husband. Actually, she’s expecting!
Rene, who already knew about her pregnancy—he was a necromancer, after all, and any experienced necromancer could easily detect the number of souls next to him—realized that logic was powerless against Cassie, and started to comfort her. It took him two hours—and very pleasurable ones. Yet Cassandra didn’t want to go even after that. She was convinced only by her husband’s promise to come to her after the epidemic was over.
Rene wasn’t fooling himself. He knew he would last a moon, while the epidemic was in its height and the others still needed him. Then his fate would be sealed. They would try to kill him. As long as you had a necromancer, finding a stake to burn him on was simple enough. So after fending off the disease, he would need to leave. But first, he needed to sell all of his things to get established in his new home, and his dearly beloved Cassie would have to be sent away from the city with all the money he could gather.
So Rene set out to find a family who would want to escape the city as well—at least for a time. He didn’t have to search long. A mail coach driver lived two houses away from him. After hearing the necromancer’s tale about lilac chickenpox and seeing the proof—one of his children’s veins changing color from blue to lilac—Ruben Shikhley was ready to kiss the necromancer’s hands and feet, for warning him and saving his boy.
They left the same day in Ruben’s carriage. He had promised to get Cassie to Limdor, a small town on the Riolon border, and look after her until the necromancer—or a man with the necromancer’s letter and his ring—arrived. He was paid with his family’s sterling health, as he drove away with not just Cassandra, alive and well, but with his mother, wife, and two children—before anybody knew anything, before panic swept the streets, before the epidemic broke out in full, and the roads got blocked. They were going to wait out the epidemic in Limdor. Just in case, the necromancer gave his wife a few well-crafted protective amulets designed to reflect unvoiced ill will. Translated into common language, it meant that if the owner of such an amulet got a death hex sent their way, it would be reflected on the originator of the curse. Wishing a broken leg would cripple you, to burn—well, you’d be lucky to stay alive after the fire. Such amulets never worked for long, but Rene hoped to find his wife before they ran out of power.
Cassandra was crying and swore to wait for him. Rene escorted the carriage to the gate and went to visit a life mage. Was it foolish? Yes. Incredibly dangerous? Absolutely. Yet he couldn’t do anything else. He just couldn’t.
Was it honor? Stupidity? Naiveté? The feelings that drove him were hard to describe. He knew necromancy was outlawed, that people he helped to save would all run toward a thrall of the Bright Saint to confess and repent all to avoid “becoming corrupted with the Tempter’s taint,” that an enraged crowd could easily tear him to pieces.
He knew all of that, and yet, it was his home, his city, his people. He talked to them on the streets and drank with them in the taverns, prayed with them, and broke the law with them, laughed and danced during festivals. Two houses down the street from his house lived Fanchetta Merlo, a once pretty girl who he had been secretly in love with in his youth. Since then, she had turned into a happy chubby mother of six. Every time she saw Rene, she smiled, and her husband, a renowned cobbler, often invited him for a visit. Their children snuggled up to Rene and asked him to tell them stories about knights.
If he left the city, they would all be dead. They didn’t even have money for treatment, and necromancers generally weren’t known for philanthropy and helping the law. As for Rene, he had never been ostracized, and after meeting Cassie, he became a rare thing—a happy necromancer. And he started to think about people like Uncle Jenn, the innkeeper, and his three pretty daughters, who delivered heavy food trays, their cute cheeks reddening after hearing a coarse word. Even noblemen visited Uncle Jenn’s tavern because nobody could even raise their voice inside, not to mention swearing or yelling at another. Then there was Shadow Richelle, the Night King, who was Rene’s constant employer for almost twenty years, back when Shadow was just a lucky pickpocket, and Rene was only starting to practice his magic. And there was his son, too—the child of a runaway nun who had died in childbirth, his father’s pride and joy. And there were hundreds of other people, whom Rene barely knew, but couldn’t abandon to their fate.
The life mage welcomed Rene as a colleague, and the necromancer didn’t want to waste time. He unmasked his aura, quickly explained the situation, and asked the mage to accompany him to Hermann Likeworth’s house. They managed to cure Hermann before ulcers could appear. He wasn’t exactly thrilled to accept help from a necromancer’s hands, but Rene snapped at him. If his wife’s uncle wanted to die that much, he coul
d go kill himself! Cassie would never forgive me for the death of her closest relative. And really, if the dearest relative desires to perish, maybe he could postpone that until after the epidemic was over? Right now, every healthy person counts!
They went to the mayor together. He ordered the gates to be closed and black banners to be hung with red circles on them—epidemic. Two days later, royal guards blocked the roads. His Royal Majesty Rudolph didn’t send any mages or healers, he simply declared that everybody who tried leaving the city would be shot, from a distance, with a crossbow. At night, a ring of bonfires surrounded the city.
In the meantime, Rene worked. People were coming to him by the dozens. The healthy ones brought their sick. Guards patrolled the streets, and looters were shot on sight. Ten thousand people came, maybe even more. Was it a lot or not? The city wasn’t that big, but when you had to cure almost a hundred per day... Life mages could slow down the sickness for a bit or even cure it, but only after a necromancer removed the hex. Before that, the disease resisted any of their efforts.
How many hexes a day could a necromancer remove? Rene figured out his limit very soon. Like the disease, the curse spread every day. He could remove the hexes on days one to three pretty easily, but starting with day five, it became significantly harder, and on day seven, he could still cure them, but no more than one or two patients a day.
The necromancer could save no more than thirty people whose curse was light, or ten whose curse was severe, per day. That was just with his natural power; amulets allowed him to help all who came in, but the amulets weren’t a renewable commodity. Rene was so tired, he was literally falling off his feet. The healers fed him fortifying tinctures and a variety of herbal remedies. All of that caused him to lose weight and grow thin. The potions worked, but not as well as for ordinary people—life and death magic weren’t a good match. And if you had to drink that stuff in cups instead of spoons, side effects were bound to set in.
Yet he still couldn’t handle everything. He slept three hours, tops, just to replenish a bit of his strength, coughed blood, and on the third day of the epidemic, the whites of his eyes became red, like the eyes of a vampire. Everybody, including Rene, knew he would not last a moon—he had stretched himself too thin.
And then the mayor made a decision. Desperate times called for desperate measures. The prisons were...well, not exactly stuffed, but contained lots of robbers and murderers who could repay their debt to society in another way.
Would sacrificing a villain produce power?
It would.
Go on, then, necromancer! In the mayor’s basement... Oh, you’d prefer your own house? You have a pentagram and equipment there? Fine, whatever you want. How many criminals a day do you need? Two? Three? Ten?
Rene asked for three. Two was enough, but it was better to have a backup. The sacrifices helped. True, it was dirty work—to get the necessary power out of a person, the necromancer had to torture them for a while, two hours at least. Rene couldn’t torture all of them at once, which is why he enlisted the help of the local executioner, who had fallen ill, together with his entire family—a wife and two sons—on the first day of the epidemic. Rene managed to cure them before the main flow of patients came in, earning the executioner’s undying gratitude. Something as insignificant as faith in the Bright Saint and screams about evil and cruel necromancers couldn’t stop him. For the executioner, everything was simple: Rene saved his family—quickly and completely free. He could have left as soon as he learned about the epidemic, but he didn’t. He shared his secrets with everyone and started helping people. Was he a bad guy simply because he was a necromancer? Then a smith who forges a sword would be evil as well—his weapons kill. And the executioner as well—simply because he was an executioner.
In a nutshell, when the mayor asked the executioner to put his skills to use, just not in public, but in the necromancer’s basement, so he could charge the amulet and continue healing people, the executioner didn’t think twice. He was glad to be of assistance.
He took a big part of the burden from Rene’s shoulders. Now the necromancer had three or four hours more to devote to helping people. The dispelling process took ten to thirty minutes, the latter for the most hopeless cases, and those three or four hours meant life for several more patients.
After twenty-five days, the epidemic finally started to decline. Some died, some lived, but no people got sick. Rene didn’t count how many he had saved. He worked for five more days after the end of the epidemic. With no more newly infected, the city breathed a sigh of relief, and the necromancer started to get ready for a journey.
Well, he had been getting ready for a while already—he sold his house to the mayor for a hefty price and got a sizeable reward from the city treasury on top of that. He hid his most valuable artifacts and gave the remaining ones to his friends from the Thieves Guild, asking them to deliver the items to Limdor.
Bags of luggage were lying near the necromancer’s headboard, and he planned on finding a horse outside the city wall. Maybe it wouldn’t be the best, but any would do. He was a good rider and could handle even an unsaddled mount. If your life might one day depend on a skill, you were bound to become an expert.
On the night of the fifth day, Rene was rudely awakened by somebody shaking his shoulder. The sleepy necromancer’s first thought was I’ll kill you, then raise your corpse, then kill you again. And I’ll make it painful.
The second: I was too late. I didn’t escape them.
The third: What the hell?
At his bedside, Rene saw the honorable Hermann Likeworth, holding a warm heavy clock in his hands. Seeing that the necromancer had opened his eyes, Hermann shook him again, even stronger.
“Wake up. We don’t have much time.”
“What happened?” Rene asked, getting out of bed. “Is someone sick—”
“No,” Hermann grumbled. “Everyone’s safe. They will come for you in two hours.”
Rene hastily dressed.
“Who will?”
“The Bright servants. The Avenging Hounds.”
“How nice of them,” hissed Rene, fastening his pants. “An entire squad for a single tired necromancer? Why so few?”
Hermann didn’t catch the irony. He handed Rene the clock.
“Take it; it will come in handy. That’s all we have for now. A servant of the Bright Saint, my confessor, told me their plans today. He knows the epidemic is over. No more newly infected, the old are all cured. In a few hours, the army will march into town.”
“The gates are shut and blocked from inside.”
“There is a secret passage in the church,” the mayor came inside the room. “And I know two more that are missing from every map. I can’t give you a horse, it wouldn’t be able to go through, but I will spend a while combing the city in search of you and delay the pursuit as much as I’m able to.”
Rene nodded silently and took his bags. Then he hesitated. “Why are you helping me? I’m a necromancer.”
He promptly got a slap on the wrist from the mayor. “Don’t you have other things to think about? You’re an idiot, not a necromancer. And I’m an idiot as well; I should have sent you off a day before.”
“They’d have found him,” Hermann sighed. “They have five hounds. Right now, they’ll enter the city, which is why you’ll be able to leave—and even escape. And really...you’re not evil. Half of the city owes their lives to you.”
“I doubt it. I saved less...” Rene tried to joke, but nobody got him. Oh well. The devout Hermann Likeworth didn’t even understand the concept of a sense of humor.
“You’re a necromancer. But even you have a chance to save your soul.”
“That’s Cassie’s job,” Rene sighed. “I wouldn’t stay here if not for her.”
“Send my niece my regards. And...could you please write me sometime?”
“I promise.”
While talking, the three left the house that didn’t belong to the necromancer anymore and h
eaded down the street. The mayor gave Rene his last instructions.
“The passage is at least five hundred years old. It leads under the hill and exits two miles from here. That’s still inside the ring, but you’ll have to manage yourself. All servants and hounds will be inside the city, but you’ll have to pass through the guards. Will you able to do that, necromancer?
“Nightfall is our time,” said Rene, shrugging.
“Splendid. The money is held at the Astinor and Sons trade company. They won’t give it to anyone but you, and only after you show them this ring. Here.”
The mayor handed Rene a warm, heavy ring, which was too big even for Rene’s thumb—he had to cover it with another ring.
“Thank you.”
They went the rest of the way in silence. The mayor approached a pillar that supported the bridge across the river, moved something, pulled out a few stones, pressed...
Rene gave a strong handshake to those who saw him off and climbed down an old spiral staircase. Sheets of cobwebs covering the passage from floor to ceiling and mountains of dust easily convinced him that its secret had been kept well. It was most likely that nobody had passed that way for a hundred years, maybe more. Still, the passage remained. Rene gave a silent thanks to its unknown builders—and another one later, when the locking device of the second door worked, and he found himself in a village church not far from the city. Rene didn’t even think about brushing off the dust or trying to look more presentable—dirt would hide his face better than any mask.
Half-Demon's Revenge Page 7
