Ashes And Grave

by Aiden Bates

  I gritted my teeth, and tucked my hands into my jacket pockets. “Because Samar thinks his son should take over when you pass. He doesn’t like you any more than Areela does. So. I wouldn’t put much stock in his assessment. Also, the fucking poltergeist attacked in the middle of the session, so we didn’t exactly get to the end. I put my foot down, though, and I did not make excuses. I did everything you taught me. Maybe ask Vilar for his opinion instead.”

  Pop shook his head. “Vilar’s a follower by nature, not a leader. He’d just tell me what I want to hear.”

  “And what is that, exactly?” I asked.

  He narrowed his eyes. “That you’ve grown a pair of balls and gotten some steel in you. That you told them all to sit down and shut up and follow you, or else.”

  “I’m sure that was a lot easier when there wasn’t a council,” I said coolly. “But… I’ll take that into consideration for next time.”

  “If there is a next time,” he said. He twisted his head one way and the other. “I’m starting to feel a little better lately. Probably over the worst of it. I’ll start healing again soon, and I’ll take back over.”

  This wasn’t the first time he’d said that. We’d run every test we could. It wasn’t cancer, it wasn’t a virus, it wasn’t an infection. It wasn’t magic, as far as anyone could tell. He wasn’t cursed or under the influence of some corrupting attack.

  For whatever reason, his dragon seemed to have just… given up on him. It had started with a scratch that had lingered for days before healing. Then more gray in his hair. Then a bald spot. More and more, signs of age just started cropping up well before their time. Now, here he was. ‘Starting to feel better’.

  Pop wasn’t going to get better. I knew it. He knew it. Neither of us wanted to admit it.

  “You’re looking a little better,” I agreed, though nothing could be further from the truth. “Maybe if you’re feeling up to it later, we could go for a flight. Circle the weyr. Keep an eye on the necromancer.”

  He turned and spit, and didn’t respond.

  Which was a response.

  Rezzek came back with a mug. “Coffee, old man.”

  “Finally,” Pop said as he pushed himself up against the pillows to support himself as he accepted the warm mug. He inhaled like it was the best thing he’d ever smelled, and a lately rare smile spread over his lips, cracking them a bit. “Nobody tell Miral.”

  He sipped, and said nothing else, which in my experience was the equivalent of being dismissed. I watched him, just in case he had something else to say, and when that didn’t happen, I turned and left. Behind me Rezzek muttered a polite good-bye and a promise to come see him again, and Pop of course told him that he’d like that.

  I didn’t speak until we were outside the house again. “Is it bad that I feel like life will just get easier when he dies?”

  Rezzek winced, and put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t say stuff like that. You can feel it, I’m sure plenty of people do. But… you really can’t say it out loud.”

  He was right, of course, and I made a promise to myself that I never would again. I hadn’t before. Rezzek was safe to talk to, of course. He’d keep my confidence, always.

  I gave him a short nod. “I know. Thanks for coming. It does him good to see a friendly face. Fuck knows he doesn’t give a shit when I come around.”

  “Hey,” Rezzek said, “your Pop loves you. He’s just an asshole is all. Assholes have a hard time showing it.”

  It was his way of trying to soften the blow of it all, be kind, help me feel better. Like there was some heart of gold buried under all that shit, and my father was just bad at letting it shine through. Of course, he was also completely wrong. “Doesn’t seem to have a hard time showing you,” I pointed out.

  Another wince. He took his hand from my shoulder. “Yeah, well. He’s a politician. He’s good at pretending he likes people he doesn’t give a shit about.”

  He had a point there, too, maybe. But it didn’t make me feel any better. I followed him down the stairs and to the street, checking the time again. “Our resident zombie-fucker should be finishing interviews in about an hour,” I said. “I should see if he’s found anything. How long he’ll be here. Maybe follow up with the people he spoke with, see if they get a bad vibe from him.”

  “He helped as soon as he got here,” Rezzek pointed out. “That’s gotta count for something, Nix. Don’t run him off, we need this. People are fucking scared, even if they won’t admit it openly.”

  “I know,” I admitted. “But you know what else happened?”

  He shook his head, eyebrows pinched.

  I took a few steps backward down the sidewalk. “That poltergeist showed up right before he did.”

  4

  Mikhail

  “To my knowledge,” Gambin Forsyth said, in the languorous way he had been speaking for over an hour, “there has not been a great tragedy on this land that would engender the sort of violence which this spirit displays.”

  I made a note, though I left out the bit where he presumed to tell me how my world worked. “What about before the colonies?”

  He frowned. “What about that?”

  I tapped the pencil on my notebook. “The natives? Before the white man came here?”

  “Oh,” he said, flicking aged fingers as if it hardly rated mentioning. “There were, I believe, the Coosa people here, but we didn’t arrive until 1789, after the conclusion of the war was successfully obtained. They would have no quarrel with us.”

  I had explained already that one did not have to be personally, individually responsible for a tragedy in order to draw the attention of an angry spirit, but it seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. “All the same, what do you know about the history of those people? They would have been forcibly removed, yes?”

  He frowned. “I… suppose they must have been. Or perhaps they went west to avoid the spread of the new Americans, or the settlers before them. I wasn’t there. I’m sure the history is written in books somewhere.”

  Like the others before him, Gambin wasn’t especially helpful. He was reticent, only answering the questions that I asked and only so long as I asked them, as if I were only asking out of curiosity and not in order to understand what was happening here. Part of that was probably just ignorance—no one really understood what necromancers actually did. But some part of it felt a great deal like hostility, as well.

  It had been a long day. As promised, members of the community had begun to show up at about noon, and had trickled in for hours. Now, it was nearing seven, and as far as I knew, Gambin was my last. He was the weyr’s historian, though his particular interests seemed narrowed only to the history of his people; with little interest given to the history of the place, of the land on which his people stood.

  If they’d disturbed a sacred landmark, or breached an ancient mystical prison, or otherwise stirred something up since they moved to this region of South Carolina, he didn’t seem to know. “I am not,” he clarified for me, “an archaeologist. I am a historian.”

  “Well,” I said, closing my notebook, “all of that is very helpful, Mr. Forsyth. I appreciate the time you’ve given to me. Understanding the history of a place is critical to what I do. This will certainly help.”

  Lies, mostly, but the kind that at least gave him a small glint of pride that he would hopefully carry away from my lodgings to admire somewhere else. He stood from the table as if he intended to do the very thing. “If you have any other questions,” he said, “you may forward them to my assistant, Niva. She’s got a very keen mind for the subject. And… for that matter, I might arrange a meeting. She’ll know more about the history of the land itself, and the Coosa people. She’s part native, you see.”

  I suspected that being descended from a tribe did not inherently instill some knowledge of their history. I knew—finding native histories in the US and anywhere else that had been thoroughly colonized was difficult at best, impossible at worst. Still, he was being diplomatic,
at least. “I’d like that, thank you.”

  He gave a nod, pushed the chair he’d been sitting in under the table, as if he couldn’t see that this was not a house that required that sort of etiquette, and then left me. I waited for the next person to come in, and gave a small sigh of relief when no one followed.

  I sat back on the couch and reopened my notebook to the first page to review.

  The spirit was undoubtedly a poltergeist. Level three, at least, able to manifest itself spectrally. Several people reported having seen its shape, though it was never described as ‘human’, which meant that it was likely a long time dead. The only spirits that kept their mortal forms for any length of time were those that were attached to a family, or who served as familiar spirits. Even those gradually lost some of their definition.

  The rest tended to become twisted by whatever the prevailing emotion was when they died. Things like love, and laughter, and joy rarely were it. The nature of a haunting was generally an untimely demise, and it was hard to square that with dying at peace.

  The spirit could move things telekinetically, as it had been seen manifesting itself in one place while moving things in another place, at a distance. That was important. Spirits with that kind of power often hurled things, but it wasn’t beyond their ability to reach into a person’s chest and squeeze their heart at a distance either. Which was exactly how the first victim had died.

  There were three of them. The first was Yaren Forsyth, a great nephew of Gambin’s. Twenty-seven years old, he’d been found in the woods on the east side of the weyr, dead. They’d had to autopsy him to find black streaks across his heart, which had been badly damaged.

  The second victim was Mellora Casey. She’d been possessed, like the one after her. She had burned her house down, and shot herself. That event told me at least one important fact. The spirit wasn’t necessarily conscious of the people it was attacking and what they were. Dragons were fireproof, even the children. Burning down the house was pointless, other than the personal damage and inconvenience of it.

  I frowned, and noted that down on the inside cover along with a few other pointed details I intended to explore. Possibly personal?

  After Mellora’s death, things had been quiet for almost a week. Then, one of the security staff, Nissef Elarin, had gone into a rage, shifted and rampaged and eventually had to be brought down. Immediately after, the spirit had manifested and trashed a street.

  If there was a clear link between Yaren, Mellora, and Nissef, it wasn’t obvious from what people had told me. Everyone in the weyr knew everyone else, there was nothing unusual about all of them knowing one another or having mutual acquaintances. For that matter, they were all related, if you went back up their family trees, either through blood or a mating bond, which was the closest thing dragons had to ‘marriage’.

  Unfortunately, that made the scope of investigation very wide. Either they were being targeted specifically, and the key to understanding where the spirit was rooted was in exploring the connections they all shared, or the attacks were random and the spirit was an environmental factor. Of course, there was a third option—an intentional attack—but there were many far more effective and subtle ways to attack a community with necromantic magic. Still, I hadn’t ruled it out. But it did take me back more or less to the first situation. Attacks weren’t random. They were personal, directed, intentional.

  “Got a visitor,” Gabby said, drifting through the front door. “It’s the hot one.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Fuck. Of course it is. Probably wants to know that I’ve cracked the case in a single day. Does he look angry?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But he always looks angry. Bet a hate fuck would really—”

  “Gabby,” I growled. “Just… recheck the local ether? This thing could come back to take a piece of us any time.”

  Her shoulder sagged, and she gave a long, weary sigh. “There’s nothing, boss, it’s too far down to get back here today. I wanna stay in case he needs to use the bathroom.”

  “You’re filthy,” I pointed out, “and ridiculous if you think he’d spend a second longer here than he has to. Go.”

  She threw her hands up, and faded out of sight but not out of my awareness. Though she did linger a moment longer, she eventually receded, ranging out into the deeper ethers to do her job, which was to make sure an angry poltergeist didn’t catch me by surprise. Just a heartbeat after she left, there was a police-like knock on the door.

  I smoothed my hair for no reason other than that I had sweated my ass off all day in this AC-free shack with zero insulation, and answered it to see Nix on the other side.

  He peered into the house. “I thought you had someone here,” he said. “Who were you talking to?”

  “I told you,” I muttered, “I have a condition. If you’re here for an answer, I don’t have one yet. Mr. Forsyth just left, I haven’t had a chance to dig through all my notes.”

  He frowned. Well, frowned more deeply, anyway. “How close are you, then?”

  I resisted the urge to tell him to fuck himself. “Well, like I said, I haven’t had a chance to dig through the notes. So I don’t know.”

  Nix’s jaw worked, grinding his teeth. “Then,” he said, “what do you propose in the meantime? How long will whatever you did back there last?”

  “The banishing?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. Depends on how strong it is, why it’s here, what it’s attached to—”

  “Fine,” he said. “What can you do to keep it from coming back? Can you keep it tamped down until you can deal with it? I don’t want to wake up to a call tomorrow that someone else is dead.”

  Working with people who had no idea what the work required, or what was even possible, but had very strong opinions on how it should work and what they wished was possible was… let's go with frustrating. To be diplomatic. “I would have to account for dozens of possible conditions,” I said. “It’s not feasible to do that and also do this work. If it shows up, run, someone call me, and I’ll deal with it.”

  “We don’t like be reliant on someone to have to rush in and rescue us every time,” he said, his eyes hard. “If you can give us some protection from it, I don’t see why you wouldn’t. Not if you’re here to stop this thing and keep us from losing more people.”

  Now it was time for me to grind my teeth. “I see. The implication in that being that I am here for some other nefarious purpose. The evil necromancer, here to spend a few days in squalor and pretend to help because… why exactly? I could just leave. This would be as effective a means of sabotaging your weyr as my being here. I could let you deal with this problem yourselves. Job done.” I dusted my hands as if I’d washed my hands of it. Which, given his attitude, I just about had.

  “The implication being,” he growled, “this thing showed up three weeks ago, and attacked right before you arrived to conveniently wave your hands and mutter some gibberish and make it go away, proving that we need you to stop it.”

  “You called for help,” I bleated, waving a hand in his face. “And I came, although I was told it was a waste of resources and time, and that you would treat my presence precisely how you have. Everyone knows how Emberwood feels about mages, and you may not know this but we are not especially fond of you, either. What do you want from me if not to help you?”

  “To tell us why you’re really here,” he barked. His eyes flashed a mix of gold and red, his dragon rousing with his anger.

  I hadn’t realized just how angry he really was until I saw it. Sensing my nervousness, Gabby emerged beside me. “What’s going on?”

  I didn’t answer her directly. “If you intend to harm me,” I said, “you should know that killing me is a very bad idea. Maybe this poltergeist has a reason to target your people, maybe it is random. But I will have a very good reason, and no other mage will come within a hundred miles of this place to help you.”

  “Is that a threat?” Nix asked. His chest swelled. He seemed to stand a bit taller, trying to l
oom over me.

  I looked up at him with no expression, forcing myself to be neutral. “A mage does not need to make threats. Especially a mage like myself.”

  He remained where he was, trying to intimidate me a moment longer, before he relaxed marginally and took a step back. “You said you’d have to account for dozens of conditions,” he said. “Right? To offer some protection?”

  I sighed. “Yes. It is a time-consuming process not guaranteed to be of benefit when I do not have the full story.”

  “We have plenty of time right now,” he said, a cruel smile coming to his face. “You can just cover us for everything.”

  He had no clue what he was asking of me. Asshole. Ignorant asshole.

  “We are paying you,” he pointed out.

  I grunted, and went to retrieve my messenger bag. There was no point in arguing with someone incapable of even processing the requisite logic. “Fine,” I said as I left the house and closed the door behind me to stand on the rickety porch with him. “But so you know—I just became a lot more expensive.”

  5

  Nix

  When the necromancer explained what he would have to do, it didn’t sound that complicated. “I will need to identify cardinal and sub-cardinal points around the land,” he’d said, “and establish a boundary that will suffice to make it at least very difficult for the poltergeist to manifest itself.”

  Maybe he hadn’t gone into detail because he didn’t think I would understand. I never would have admitted it out loud to him but… he wouldn’t have been wrong.

  After consulting a map of the weyr and the surrounding land, he marked out eight points to make a circle, then connected them to draw an eight-pointed star, marking each point with a number. I had expected, once I saw where he marked, that we would be walking a long circle around the area. Instead, we were criss-crossing while he set up this ‘barrier’ at each point.