Ashes And Grave

by Aiden Bates

  By the time the sun rose, and Mikhail finally stirred—reacting as if I had spoken to wake him up; maybe that was his ghost-friend—I was almost too emotionally exhausted to maintain a grudge. I didn’t like him, I was sure of that. He represented a foul kind of magic, one that was too dangerous to be in the world.

  I just had a hard time holding that against him personally.

  He sat up, bleary-eyed, and found me sitting on his couch in the dim morning light. “You really sat there all night,” he muttered. “You are very stubborn, you know that?”

  “Now you know,” I replied. “I trust you’re rested enough to get back to work?”

  “I will be,” he grunted as he pushed his blanket back. “Once I get some caffeine, and some food.”

  “There’s instant coffee in the cupboard,” I told him. “Should be some oatmeal and eggs and such as well.”

  “Instant coffee,” he said, as if the words tasted as bad as he imagined the coffee did. Which wasn’t necessarily wrong. I didn’t know where the coffee came from, but we hadn’t stocked anything premium. “How gracious.”

  He stood, and stretched his arms over his head before bending over to reach his toes. He wasn’t badly shaped for a human. I’d noticed the night before, but hadn’t lingered on it. Now that I was a bit more numb inside, I had a vague recollection that Tam had told me—for no reason at all that I could conceive of—that Mikhail was single.

  Now that I saw him like this, I did kind of wonder why. He was attractive, seemed intelligent. Maybe it was the necromancy—it would run plenty of people off. In fact, it was probable that he’d never really had much in the way of close friends or lovers. Death freaked people out. He was probably...

  I cleared my throat, freshly angry with myself for thinking it. What did it matter if he was lonely? If he even was. He clearly had some kind of obligated ghost-friend.

  Still, I spoke without really thinking about it. “There’s a cafe near the middle of the weyr. They’ve got real coffee, and will have fresh biscuits, gravy, that sort of thing.”

  He straightened, cracked his back, and eyed me with suspicion. “That is good to know, I suppose.”

  I frowned. “I’m saying there’s another option.”

  “And I am saying,” he said, reaching for his bag, “that I appreciate the information.”

  “I can take you,” I clarified. “To keep an eye on you.”

  Was that a ghost of a smile on his lips? Probably not. Probably he was remembering as he unzipped his bag that his ghost-friend had told him that I sniffed his boxers.

  Which was ridiculous. I had been looking for his phone, like I said. If I noticed a pair of boxers, and gave them a cursory sniff, it was because my sense of smell was sharp enough to detect everything from general emotional states—if they were intense enough—to blood and other such things which could have told me a lot about him and what he was really here for.

  I had a responsibility to my weyr to investigate.

  He pulled a shirt on, then bent again to collect those boxers and a pair of socks. I half expected him to drop his pants and change, but instead he went to the bathroom door.

  He paused, though, and turned to me, holding the boxers up. “You sniffed my underwear?”

  “I sniffed everything,” I said.

  Mikhail blinked, glanced to the side, and suppressed a smile as he closed the door.

  “They’ve been in contact with everything in the bag,” I called after him. “I wasn’t specifically sniffing—ugh.”

  There was no reason to be bothered by it. I didn’t have to explain myself to him. He emerged a moment later, his dark hair combed, his face washed, and fully clothed. He looked me over, his eyes lingering just a bit before he glued them to my face. “Are you planning to go like that?”

  I frowned, shifted a little on the couch, my arms folded. “Maybe.”

  He chuckled. “Dragons. You’re an odd lot. Whatever works for you, though.”

  He picked up his messenger bag and slung it over his shoulder. “So, are we going?”

  We stopped by my place first, so that I could put on clothes. I traveled in my half-form, which drew some attention. No one dared whisper about the pre tem leader of the weyr coming back from the mage’s quarters undressed and ready for a fight, at least. Not in my presence, anyway.

  I had time during that walk to reflect on my decisions. Pride often went before the fall, as someone once said. Maybe that person had once made decisions out of pride which had unforeseen consequences.

  Whatever the case, I ignored all interest, and quickly dressed once we reached my home.

  Mikhail seemed puzzled by the house, which was small—one bedroom, one bathroom, fairly spare but comfortable to me. “I know that the Emberin home is somewhere near the heart of the weyr,” he called as I changed in my room. Not because I cared if he saw me naked again; it’s just where I keep my clothes. “Why keep your own place?”

  I emerged from the bedroom dressed in a new set of track pants and a zippered sleeveless hoodie. “I like having my own space,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I suppose I understand that. But...”

  I sighed, slipping my bare feet into a pair of sneakers by the door. “But what?”

  “I know that Roland Emberin is officially leader of the weyr,” he said. “Your father. At least according to Tam Blackstone, who is practically my brother-in-law. He does not know that you are ‘leader pro tem’. I think that no one does, which makes me wonder if your father is... alive? Well?”

  “Maybe you should limit your wondering to things that concern you,” I offered as politely as I could. I even smiled as I opened the door. “You hungry or not?”

  He cocked his head to one side a bit. “I am not idly curious,” he said, unperturbed with my attitude this early. “A lot of shifter communities and cabals along the coast are having... issues... with leadership. From people who have died, to successions which are contested, to votes which threaten to split organizations. There are apparently treaties and trade agreements at risk in all of that. It’s a great deal of chaos where there has been order for some time now.”

  “Well, we don’t have any treaties,” I said, “and no trade agreements. Your people saw to that. So, that’s all got zero to do with us.”

  He put a hand up as I gestured again at the door. “If your father has passed, and it is being kept secret, then I will keep that secret. But if he died under strange circumstances, or if he is very ill with something mysterious, then it could well be that—”

  “My father is fine,” I snapped. “He’s just old and tired and I’m taking some stuff off his plate.”

  I don’t know why I lied, why I shut him down so harshly. Maybe because he’d come so close to pinpointing exactly what the situation was here, and I didn’t like the idea of him going back out of the weyr after this was done and spreading our business around. No one had a right to it, and we didn’t need any opportunists jumping at the chance to take advantage of a momentary weakness.

  Maybe just because I didn’t want to talk about it and deal with the inevitable sympathy.

  Either way, he got the message, and dipped his head in acknowledgment before he walked out of my place without another word on the matter.

  That tension, though, stuck with us to the diner, where we collected coffee and breakfast and ate in relative silence until he’d gotten some caffeine in him.

  “So,” he said finally, seemingly refreshed, “we will complete the work that I started last night. I may take time for the—”

  I cleared my throat, glanced at Jani behind the counter. She was a gossip; if she overheard we had a necromancer problem, she’d spread it around and we’d have a panic spreading. “The poltergeist?”

  Mikhail frowned, unhappy with the idea of keeping it quiet, perhaps, but played along. “It may take time for the poltergeist to recover,” he said pointedly. “Or, it may come back very quickly, and with a vengeance. Once the protections are established,
I will be able to dedicate more attention to finding where it originated from. What it’s bound to here, why it’s doing what it is doing now and not some other time. That will all help me to locate... the spirit, and deal with it in a more final manner. But, it is important that I am not interrupted. Whoever you assign to follow me around, they need to understand the delicate nature of this work.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, waving a piece of bacon before I ate it. “I’ll be on it.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You did not sleep last night.”

  “I might have,” he said.

  “I have it on good authority that you did not,” he said meaningfully.

  So, I hadn’t been paranoid. She was watching me. “Your friend,” I said, “is she... What exactly can she do?”

  He leaned back, arms folded as he took on a self-satisfied look. “Maybe you should restrict your wondering to things which concern you.”

  “Fine,” I breathed. “I don’t need to know anyway. You done?”

  He snorted, and went back to eating. When we finished, he looked around our little downtown square. “This is a nice place,” he remarked, looking up at the clear sky. “Better, when it is in the light.”

  “We do what we can with what we’ve got.” I pointed to one corner. “The place we left last night is that way.”

  He glanced up at me, and started walking. I fell into step beside him, and found myself wondering where his ghost-friend was. Would I know if I walked through her, or something?

  “You know,” he said as we left the square and started toward the field that bordered the woods where we’d been attacked, “if your father is sick... there could be a reason why. And it could be a reason that I could help with. You don’t have to tell me anything. Just... think about it, is all.”

  I didn’t respond to that. It was none of his business.

  And, worse... on some level I was almost as worried that he might actually be able to help than I was of him knowing anything privileged about the weyr.

  I hated that. And I kind of hated him a little for reminding me of it.

  Worst of all, I almost hated him for offering, as if he actually gave a shit.

  Because if he did give a shit... what did that say about me?

  8

  Mikhail

  My rest was not deep, but it was enough to get me through the day. I envied mages like Vance, who had an abundance of magic to draw from all around them. The world of the living was saturated with psychic energy. The energy which connected life and death? Not so much.

  That energy was buried deep down beneath the skin of the living world. It took effort to reach for it. In part, that was one of Gabby’s functions. To be a conduit for it, allowing me to reach through her connection to more easily access the underworld and the magic there that had, for whatever reason, touched me perhaps before I was born and invested itself in my very essence.

  “You don’t look great,” Gabby told me, once I finished the last point on the octagram. She knelt before me as I opened my eyes from the process of awakening the magic in the bones and icons that pinned the formation down, and connecting them to their respective realms in the underworld. “And I don’t feel great. We should rest before you finish this.”

  “I will be fine,” I assured her. “And so will you. I’ll see to it.”

  From a few yards away, Nix turned to me, confused until he recalled why it was that I spoke to no one sometimes. “Your friend worried about you?”

  “He’s growing on you,” Gabby said. “I can see it. You don’t get that same nasty look on your face when you see him or he speaks, or you remember that he exists, or—”

  “Yes,” I said, standing. “It is a strain on both of us to do this much magic without rest. But the task is almost done, and then we will have some degree of protection in our corner. I can recover my strength after, while I complete the more academic side of my investigation.”

  “Determining who the necromancer is?” he asked.

  I gathered my things into my bag. “Yes. It is like any other investigation. Means, motive, and opportunity. We have means, clearly. Opportunity will tell us why now, specifically. Motive is what will ideally reveal an identity we can act on. I don’t suppose your weyr has pissed off a necromancer that you can name, in particular?”

  Nix pursed his lips. “Well... other than every cabal in the region... just one. But he’s not a problem anymore.”

  I cocked my head to one side, peering at him curiously. “You’ve dealt with a necromancer in the past.”

  He seemed to ponder whether or not to say anything. “Once,” he said, with a great deal of regret that would have been plain to anyone. “Yeah.”

  “You killed him,” I said. I didn’t have to guess.

  Nix sighed. “Yes. Does that rule him out?”

  “Not necessarily,” I muttered. “What happened? Why did you kill him? What did he do? How did he die?”

  His mouth opened, but no words came out for a long moment. Gradually, his posture slumped. He hung his head, shaking it as if chiding himself for even thinking to tell me, and then straightened, combing fingers through his hair. “I don’t know what his name was,” he said. “He called himself Rav, but we’re pretty sure that was a fake. My brother got involved with him, after our mother passed. He wanted… to contact her.”

  “Did he?” I asked. I didn’t know the name, but that wasn’t saying much. I only personally knew six necromancers, and one of them was dead. The kind of dead that stuck.

  Well, seven total and two extra-dead, if you counted Henry DuPont. But I’d never actually met him, thankfully.

  “We’ve never been able to find out,” he said. “I mean, Rav told him that he had. But the things she said, the things she wanted from him... it couldn’t have been her. But Pendrig—my brother? He thought it was. He believed every word.”

  I winced. So many people could be fooled into believing what a necromancer told them. Never mind that if someone wanted to contact the dead—a common request—it could be done so that there was no question who they were speaking with. The unscrupulous, however, knew that our art was mysterious, and that people would believe if you could give them enough of a reason.

  “He turned his back on the weyr,” Nix went on. “Stole from us—mother’s heirlooms. Nothing terribly valuable, they weren’t jewels or gold or anything like that. Just artifacts passed down through our family for centuries. Important to us, of course, but not that rare these days.”

  I was curious about what kind of artifacts they were. Dragons supposedly hoarded all manner of ancient magical relics. But it didn’t seem like the time to ask.

  Nix cleared his throat. “Uh... I confronted him about it. Talked him around. He was going to come back. But he wanted to deal with Rav first, and insisted on doing it alone. This was a long time ago, ten years.”

  My stomach quivered at that. Ten years. Coincidence, probably. But I had a sinking feeling.

  “I was younger,” he said, “a teenager. Didn’t even have reliable control over my fire yet. So he left to handle it himself. I took what he still had back home, and waited. And waited. And he didn’t return.”

  I put a few pieces together, and went cold at the look on his face. “This Rav person took his soul,” I said quietly, sick just to say it out loud. Of course, we’d all heard about times it happened, and we all knew it was possible. It was often lesson number one—never ever do it, under any circumstances, ‘or else.’ I knew one necromancer, though, who had done it repeatedly.

  “He was hollow,” Nix breathed, his eyes distant and haunted as he remembered. “Empty. I saw something on his face, at the end, when we hunted him and Rav both down. We had to. We learned that Pendrig had torched a place—a trailer park in North Carolina.”

  “He was the dragon from the Clementine attack?” I wondered.

  It wasn’t a secret. And it was well known that a small flight of dragons had responded immediately, sending a clear message that the of
fending dragon was not one of them, that there would be terminal justice for the lives lost. But I never knew the dragon’s name, or where he’d come from. Those details had never surfaced.

  “Yes,” Nix said. He wrung his hands, the first real sign of genuine anxiety I had seen in him. “I was there. My father insisted. I didn’t fight, or anything, but I tried to talk him around again, to convince him to come back to us, to turn himself in. But he was a puppet at that point. Still. At the very end, when my father... uh, when he put Pendrig down... I thought I saw relief in his eyes. He looked at me when he died. It looked like peace.”

  “And Rav?” I asked. “You saw him die?”

  Nix nodded. “He wasn’t far away. And Pendrig stank of him. Of... well. Rav used him for more than destruction. So we followed it, found him. Burned him to ash. I watched the ashes blow away on the wind. I don’t know how it works, but if you were going to come back from the dead, you’d have to have something to come back to, right?”

  A lot of people thought that. It made sense, it was logical.

  Magic wasn’t always logical, though. Nothing was ever really gone—necromancers knew that perhaps better than any other mage. The difference between a pile of ashes and a body was a bit of matter and the will to hold it all together.

  “No,” I said. “I wish I could tell you that incinerating a body is enough. But it isn’t. There are ways. Terrible ways, and they come at a steep price, but... it is not as impossible as you imagine.”

  “You think he could have come back?” he asked.

  I spread my hands. “Honestly? I don’t know. He could have had an acolyte, now seeking revenge. He could be striking from the underworld, clinging to some place of power he knew about before he died, or discovered afterward. If that is the case, then all this that I’ve set up will protect us completely. There will be no intrusions originating in the world of the dead, at least.”

  “So that could help us narrow it down then,” he said. “If he, or whoever, can still get to us, then they’ll have to be alive, in this world.”