Ashes And Grave

by Aiden Bates

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “This ‘Rav’... you saw him?”

  “Yeah,” Nix said. “If I could have mustered the fire, I would have done it myself.”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  He closed his eyes, and took a steadying breath. “Tall, maybe six feet. Blond hair, but eyes that were almost black. Pale. A scar from his cheek to his chin, that looked old, healed over. I only saw it because Pop made me get close to him, spit in his face.”

  Well. Shit. “He deserved it,” I said. “Believe me. He isn’t worth your pity or guilt.”

  And I should know.

  “Is it crazy that I sometimes dream about him?” Nix asked. “That I think of that moment, when I spit on him, when I was so full of hate... I dream of that and I dream that I burned with him. As if we were connected.”

  I shivered to think of that moment. “I don’t think it is strange,” I said quietly. “I think that anyone would. Anyone with a conscience, who believes in justice. Even when the person is evil beyond hope of redemption, none of us who are good, deep down, wish to take a life in cold blood.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s blood was cold that night,” he said. “But... I know what you mean.”

  I only then noticed that Gabby was watching me, concern on her face. Her hands were clasped before her, her lips thin and hard, her brow pinched tightly. She knew. Gabby knew everything about me there was to know. She was perhaps the only one that did. There were things I hadn’t even told Vance.

  “I didn’t mean to freak you out,” Nix said, drawing my attention away from Gabby’s worry. “We don’t particularly like mages here, and obviously we have some history with necromancers. But... we can tell when someone is trying to help. Even if it takes a little bit to catch on.”

  I forced a smile, and settled for something sympathetic and a little sad, which was the best I could muster. “I am not worried,” I said. “You care about your people. It’s an admirable trait. And you grieve an evil man. That takes a kind heart that most do not have. For what it’s worth, on behalf of my profession, I absolve you. He would not have fared better in the hands of the cabals. For some, there is only one way to deliver justice. You weren’t wrong before. All magic is dangerous in the wrong hands. It means that the consequences for misusing it must be that much more severe.”

  “I wish I could say that made me feel better,” he said and seemed to shake off his reaction to remembering it all. “Are you all done here? There’s another step, right?”

  “There is,” I said. “I need just a short time to prepare for it.”

  He gave a nod of agreement, and began walking back toward town. The final stage had to be completed at the center of the arrangement, which was very close to the Emberin house.

  We walked in silence, which I almost regretted. It gave me time to think, to worry, to begin assuming the worst, and to scare myself into thinking irrational things.

  I had seen him in the underworld. Laryn had taken me to him, to show me the consequences of walking down his path. There had been so little of him left. Not from the way he’d died, but from how he’d lived. From the atrocities he’d committed against his own soul in order to gain more power.

  When I was twelve, my brother and I had gotten into a fight. It was bad. All these years later, I don’t even remember why it started. We were both enrolled at Custodes Lunae by then, and Ivan had started the fight. We had tussled, fallen to the floor. He’d hit me, hard, enough that I was momentarily blinded by it. I flailed, closed my hand around a broken chair leg. I struck him with it, honestly afraid for my life. It had opened a gash on his face.

  From his cheek to his jaw.

  Some time later, he’d disappeared, never to be seen again. Not by us, anyway. He had taken with him a valuable and dangerous book on high necromantic arts. And he had used the knowledge inside to leave a trail of destruction behind him that the Custodes Lunae tried to follow for many years, until eventually the trail went cold.

  After that, Laryn had found him in the underworld, rotting where he belonged, in one of the nastier levels of Tartarus.

  I couldn’t tell Nix that it was my brother who had stolen his brother’s soul, whom the Emberwood dragons had hunted and executed. Who had forced his father to slay his own son. Because if I did, I had no doubt that whatever softness he might feel toward me in this moment would harden, and perhaps become something sharp, and murderous.

  But if it was Ivan at work here...

  It was very possible that I was in far, far over my head.

  9

  Nix

  I felt as tired as Mikhail looked by the time we got back to his little house. I could go a few days without sleep, but that limit was fast approaching. Mikhail dug through his other bag, collecting more bones, the odd ceramic tile, and other things I couldn’t begin to define. While he did, I sat on his couch, fighting to keep my eyes open.

  He stood from his rummaging, slipping the strap of his bag onto his shoulder as he did. “All set.”

  Somehow, I had thought it would take longer. Long enough for a nap, maybe. But I stood all the same, and pretended I wasn’t about to fall asleep on my feet. “Great,” I said. “I’ll show you the place.”

  As we fell into step down the street, he looked up at me with a critical eye. “How long since you slept?”

  “A while,” I said dismissively. “I’m fine.”

  He clucked his tongue. “It’s not my place,” he said, “but you know, if you don’t take care of yourself, you cannot be expected to take care of an entire community.”

  I started to agree that it wasn’t his place, but it felt rude. And for some reason, I didn’t want to be rude to him. Not needlessly. I shrugged instead. “Maybe after this is done, there will finally be time for it.”

  Hopefully, that was the case. We walked for a while to get to the Emberin house. The spot we needed, based on the map, was practically in the backyard. I looked up at the old house as we came close, at the window to my father’s room.

  Mikhail saw me looking. “This is your father’s house,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I muttered.

  He rubbed his jaw. “You know… if he is the one that killed Rav, it is very possible that—if he is sick—sealing off this place from the influence of the underworld will restore his strength.”

  “If he were sick,” I replied, “what makes you think it would help?”

  Mikhail sighed. “It is complicated to explain, but the short version is that a necromancer is capable of what we call a death curse. It’s like a backup plan. When you kill a person, there is a connection between you and them. For a necromancer, that connection is a kind of link that they can use. For example, to bring themselves back, or just to empower themselves in the underworld. It’s dangerous to kill a necromancer for this reason. If Rav is out there, somewhere, either returned or still in the underworld, he would be able to steal your father’s life force to sustain himself. If your father were sick, that is.”

  I frowned, guilty all over again for not having told him before and accepting his offer to help. It wasn’t that I wanted my father to die; nor that I wanted to be responsible for his death. But even before he had to kill Pendrig, he hadn’t been a good man. Not really. If not for my being born a shifter, I would have the scars to prove it. Still. Mikhail’s hypothetical did make some sense. “What would the symptoms be?”

  “In a human,” he said slowly, “they would be severe and short-lived. In a shifter? A slow wasting disease with no apparent cause. As if they were aging too quickly. Wounds would not heal—it is your connection to the primal life force that enables your rapid healing, you know.”

  I didn’t realize that was a thing mages knew about us. “So… if that were to happen, and that death curse could be broken—”

  “More like interrupted,” he said. “There are few ways to break a death curse. All of them require the soul of the necromancer that laid it.”

  “—if it could be interrupte
d, then,” I went on, “would the afflicted person recover? Could they survive?”

  He shrugged. “Probably. For a human, survival odds are very low. There just isn’t time. For a shifter, though, it likely is a better prognosis. I don’t know for certain, because I haven’t seen a case like that myself. Mages tend to deal with our own. When we have need to execute a necromancer, there is a lot of follow-up required. It happened recently, in fact. Blackstone was attacked by a man named Henry DuPont. It was Tam Blackstone that killed him. When DuPont’s remains were disposed of, we had to ensure that DuPont wouldn’t be able to use his death curse.”

  So, if we’d had any kind of relationship with the cabals when my father executed Rav, we might not be this situation. Any of it. I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Mikhail seemed like a decent person, like someone I could even… appreciate, if I got to know him, maybe. But Pop had told me since I was able to understand words that mages were the enemy, that the cabals would wipe us out if given the slightest chance.

  He didn’t even know Mikhail was here. It had been agreed that no one would tell him, so that he didn’t prevent us from seeking the aid we needed. He thought we were dealing with a sickness, something supernatural but not magical.

  If Mikhail was right, and activating these protections freed him of whatever siphoning thing was happening, and he recovered to retake his position, he’d be furious to know that we’d gone to a mage for help. And that he’d benefited from it.

  Now probably wasn’t the time to say all that. I pointed to the back of the house. “The spot you want is back there. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Mikhail glanced up at the window I’d been looking at again, but dropped the subject for now and followed me to the spot. We’d been as exact as we could in determining where it was. The more precise the pattern, Mikhail had said, the more powerful the protection would be. He walked slow circles around the place we’d located, his hands outstretched while he muttered to Gabriella, I assumed, and together they ultimately picked a patch of ground the size of a fist.

  Over the next half hour, he dug a foot-deep hole as he had in the other places, and then began murmuring over bones and tiles and oddly shaped stones. One by one he placed them, and then produced a knife from his messenger bag. It was small, the handle bone-white—and, probably, made from actual bone; he seemed to use a lot of bones in his magic—and a blade about three inches long, narrow and triangular. He used it to draw a thin, shallow cut across his palm.

  Then he closed his eyes, and dripped blood into the hole as well, before covering it all back up.

  This time, there was no meditation. Instead he stood over the spot with his hands outstretched, eyes closed, his head tilted back. I thought perhaps he would say something else in the Latin that he seemed to use for his spells, but instead he began to croon a dulcet, wordless melody.

  It was haunting, something in a minor key, that seemed to have no real beginning or end. If it weren’t for the repeated parts of the tune, I would have assumed he was making it up as he went along. The air grew chilly as he sang, and frost began to form over the small mound of dirt. A day ago, I would have asked him to stop. Now, I was only nervous at the changes, and watchful, but did my best to trust that he knew what he was doing.

  Whispers began to come from all around me, as if there were people watching, hidden just out of sight behind the corner of the house, or the trees that lined the backyard, or crouched behind bushes. I balled my hands into fists and looked around for the source of them, half expecting to see a cadre of ghosts drifting all around us.

  It was so distracting, that when Mikhail suddenly clapped his hands, and the sound was far too loud for his delicate hands to have made on their own—like short-lived thunder that didn’t echo far enough—I nearly jumped free of my skin.

  My heart raced as I watched him lower his hands and take a deep breath. “It’s good,” he said, nodding his head. “I think it will hold.”

  “What,” I asked quietly, “the fuck was all that?”

  He looked over at me, all innocence. “Oh, yes. Well… for a few minutes, it’s necessary to open the underworld just a little bit, to make the right kind of barrier. I would have warned you, but there was a chance you would have told me you’d rather me not do it.”

  Mikhail wasn’t wrong. I probably would have. The world had returned to normal. But I had been right here, watching him work. I knew that he had caused it. “Did that only happen here?”

  “Ah…” he gave me a sheepish sort of grimace, and spread his hands. “Probably there was a little bit everywhere inside the circle.”

  Which meant that basically everyone in the weyr had just had a likely alarming encounter with the underworld. “Mikhail,” I growled. “Damn it.”

  “On the bright side,” he said cheerfully, “we’ll be pretty safe for about a week. And we can take a nap.”

  He did have me there, though I suspected that I would have to put sleep off just a bit longer. At least I’d lost my phone in the woods when we were attacked. It was probably blowing up with council members leaving nasty voicemails.

  “This should be fun,” I murmured, and waved at the ground. “So it’s done, then?”

  “As done as it can be for now,” he said. He stifled a yawn. “So, if you don’t mind—I didn’t get much sleep, and I am not a dragon. Also, the bed you so kindly equipped me with… is just comfortable enough.”

  I knew that wasn’t true. It was old, had very little padding, and was barely a step above rusty springs with cloth thrown over them. “I’ll see if I can get you something nicer,” I said.

  He blinked, surprised at that. “That would be appreciated.”

  My next instinct was alarming. I started to speak, but cut my words off. Instead, what came out was a kind of garbled cough.

  Mikhail frowned, coming close. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.”

  He cocked his head curiously to one side. “You seemed like you were going to say something.”

  “No,” I said, waving a hand. “I wasn’t.”

  “Huh,” he grunted, and watched me suspiciously for a moment before he shrugged and went to collect his messenger bag.

  This was just stupid. It wasn’t like I was propositioning him or anything. “If you wanted to sleep at my place,” I said, “you may as well. Just to get better rested, while I look for a better mattress for you. Won’t take long, and I won’t even use it, I’m pretty sure I have to deal with the council for the next few hours. And then there’s other stuff to do, I should check on my father, and maybe get Basri’s files on the attacks so you can look them over—I mean, I’m not saying you can stay there, obviously.”

  His eyes widened slightly as I rambled. When I finally managed to stop talking, he cleared his throat and glanced to one side, then went a little pink around the cheeks. “That’s a very generous offer,” he said. “But I—”

  He lurched forward, very much as if someone had pushed him. I moved to catch him, and he shot a hand out to catch my arm as I intercepted him before he lost his balance entirely. His hand lingered for just a second before he took it away like my skin had burned him. When he spoke again, it was through gritted teeth. “But I will need to collect my bag from my current lodging before we go,” he said, and straightened his jacket and bag as if they needed it. “If that’s all right.”

  Had Gabriella just pushed him? I looked around the empty air, mystified and a little confused, and wondering why she might have a stake in where her master—or friend, or whatever he was to her—slept.

  Either way, the offer was made and accepted now. “Sure,” I said. “We’ll swing by on the way.”

  “Great,” he muttered, and stalked off toward the front of the house without waiting for me.

  Before I followed, I looked around again. “Gabriella?”

  There was no response. I didn’t really expect one. And I tried not to smile like I wanted to, because I worried that she might
see it and report back.

  Because I thought that someone was trying to hook me and the necromancer up.

  And I wasn’t really sure that my feelings on that were entirely black-and-white.

  10

  Mikhail

  “He’s into you,” Gabby whispered, as if there were any reason not to speak up.

  I had been ignoring her for the last twenty minutes while I collected my things from the shack and followed Nix back to his house. I didn’t actually need my bag, not merely to sleep at his place, but between his offer and Gabby’s asshole move giving me a shove—something she had to expend a lot of energy to accomplish—I panicked.

  “Seriously,” she insisted. “I saw the way he smiled at you when you weren’t looking. He seems nice! At least be open to the idea.”

  She knew that our ‘conversation’ would be one-sided as long as Nix was in earshot—which was a considerable distance—and was taking full advantage of it. Thankfully, we reached Nix’s place and he opened the door to lead me inside. He had business to deal with, and I could have a proper dressing-down session with my supposed ‘ally’.

  “Thank you for this,” I muttered as I put my bags down inside the door. “I won’t need more than a few hours to rest, and then we can focus on who is responsible.”

  “Sure,” Nix said as he closed the door halfway, thought better of it and pulled it back open, chuckling. “Right. I’ve got—obviously, I’m not staying. Um, help yourself to whatever.”

  “If you insist.” I bit the inside of my cheek at that. Stupid thing to say. “I appreciate the hospitality.”

  He nodded, turned to the door, paused again. “Uh, let me just show you around.”

  “Wouldn’t want to get lost,” Gabby muttered by my ear, smug.

  I swiped at her when Nix was no longer looking at me, and let him lead me to the bedroom. He opened the door and waved a hand inside. “Bedroom. There are extra blankets in the closet if you need one. Not that you would, this time of year, I guess, in the afternoon. But just so you know.”