by Deck Davis
“You did, and I refused to give it.”
“Look, I was trying to be nice.”
“Nice words aren’t the way to my good side. I’m Morrigan.”
“After the constellation?”
“After the Killeshi deity. The constellation was named after that. Don’t tell me that you’re an astronomer as well as a necromancer.”
“They put me in a private dorm sometimes,” he said, neglecting to tell her it was usually in the days after his nightmare episodes. “It looked out onto two things; the pile of shit that the farm hands heaped from the academy horses, and the sky. I tried looking at the pile of crap at nights, but you can guess what I found more pleasant.”
“A romantic as well, eh? Can we pause this conversation while I vomit?”
Jakub tried to rise above her attitude. “It’s …maybe not good to meet you, Morrigan, but it’s fortunate. I’m Jakub.”
“I know; you and your mentor introduced yourselves after ruining my wyrm hunt. You need my help, Jakub, don’t you?”
“We can help each other. You said you needed me to use my essence for something?”
“That was my price for bringing your friend here and trying to help him. I did that – I tried. You can’t broker new lines of credit by offering to pay the old ones.”
“You don’t talk like I imagined a Killeshi would.”
“And you’re not like the necromancers they talk about in bard tales, are you? A Killeshi I might be, but a branding doesn’t count for much when you’re banished.”
“Banished?”
“Tell me what you need,” said Morrigan, ignoring his question. “We’ll see how it changes the price.”
“Do you have a paper and pencil?”
CHAPTER 22
He wrote the recipe for goodlight on the paper, breaking it into its component parts.
While he wrote, Morrigan looked after the boy with a care he hadn’t expected from her. There was only one bed in her hut, since she lived alone, and this was a single-sized bed set on four supports that looked ready to snap.
She drew back the covers. “Get in,” she told the boy. “You need some sleep, child. You look exhausted.”
The boy climbed in without speaking a word. She ruffled his hair. “Close your eyes. The monsters of the night come for tired boys.”
The boy’s eyes opened wide, and he looked to Jakub as if to say is she right?
“You’re scaring him,” said Jakub. “I don’t know where he’s come from, but he looks like he’s seen enough to scare him as it is.”
“I used to love it when my mother told me about the night monsters.”
“Not all children are like you.”
She shrugged. “How about I get my spider collection for you?” said Morrigan. “Some of them are as big as my hands,” she said, holding up her hand and wriggling her fingers.
The boy shrank back further.
“Don’t worry, they’re not alive…” said Morrigan.
“This whole idea of comforting someone is alien to you, isn’t it?”
She huffed. “Then what do I say to the boy?”
“If you have to say anything at all, then say something nice.”
“Would you….” She paused then, as if searching her brains for something nice to say. “Would you like something to eat?”
The boy shook his head.
“Anything to drink?”
Another shake.
“Then sleep well, and try to ignore us. We’ll be here while you sleep, okay?”
She went to move, when the boy grabbed her and pulled her close to him. He seemed to have grown comfortable with her in a way he hadn’t with Jakub. Given her talk of night monsters and spiders, Jakub couldn’t believe it.
“I rescued the kid from a basement, and you threaten him with nocturnal predators, and you’re the one he likes. Huh.”
“What’s wrong?” Morrigan said, focusing on the boy.
The boy clung to her arm.
“You need to sleep. Come on. We aren’t going anywhere.”
He shook his head wildly and tried to climb out of bed.
Jakub looked at the boy. He looked at his eyes, all dark and wide. He watched the way the boy glanced to the window, at the darkness outside, and then at the bed, and he noticed the dark rings under his eyes. He thought he understood.
“The boy has nightmares,” he said. “He doesn’t want to sleep, and he probably doesn’t need it either, being undead.”
“I thought you just met him? How would you know he has nightmares?”
“Trust me. He’s exhausted, but he doesn’t want to sleep, and the nightmares are why.”
“I’ve got something for that,” said Morrigan.
She fumbled in a wooden chest on the other side of the hut, before returning with an object that seemed a curious mix of sticks, wire, and different colored gemstones. It looked like something you’d find hidden on a shelf in a junk trader’s shop.
She removed a painting from the wall beside the bed - this a painting of a creature like the one she had tied up outside her hut - and hung the strange object on it.
“This drains the nightmares as soon as they enter your head, and it stores them there all night so you don’t have to watch them. I’ll toss them out in the morning, okay?”
The boy looked passed her and at Jakub, who shrugged. “Don’t ask me, kid. First time I’ve ever seen something like that.”
Morrigan glared at him, and then raised her eyebrows. “Now who isn’t being comforting?”
“I’m playing with you,” said Jakub. “It works like magic.”
The boy smiled for the first time since Jakub had met him, but the smile was clearly for Morrigan. The woman returned the smile, and Jakub was amazed to see how well she’d done in bonding with him, given how awful she’d been minutes earlier.
With the boy in bed, Jakub decided it was time to find out where he had come from.
He cast Last Rites on the boy, but no sooner had Jakub sent essence over to him, then it rebounded into his necklace. He tried again and got the same effect.
Weird; he knew from his studies that the spell worked on the undead as well as the newly-dead. This just got stranger and stranger.
Putting that to one side, Jakub finished his list. He was no herbiologist, but necromancer students needed to know some alchemy. Not much, but enough to be able to find the things they needed for certain potions, and then how to mix them together.
The problem was, although he could waltz through his mind palace and find the recipe he needed, that didn’t mean he knew where the ingredients grew around here.
He handed the list to Morrigan. She chewed her lip as she scanned each item. Her eyes, now fully green as her mana had regenerated, cast a glow back on the paper.
The one thing Jakub hadn’t expected while watching Morrigan was that he’d find her beautiful. Maybe not in the same way he’d thought about Abbie Marth, but in a more primal way.
Morrigan had a way about her that was magnetic, so much so that all she had to do was read a list while chewing her plump lips, and he couldn’t stop looking.
“Your handwriting is awful. Read it out to me.”
He took the list back off her. He’d written the list in the style taught by the academy – clear, block letters. There were no slanty flourishes, no places were letters intermingled.
He suspected that she couldn’t read, but he didn’t want to point that out.
“My handwriting can be hard to read,” he said. “The instructors always told me that.” He glanced at her now to see her reaction. If she appreciated him playing along, she didn’t show it.
“Yeah, you really should sort that out. Tell me what we need again?”
“This is so I can make something called goodlight. Have you heard of it?”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“We use it to keep the soul essence in bodies for longer so that the resurrection window stays open. We usually get three or
four days more time, but it depends on the quality of the ingredients, and the skill of the person making the potion. It’s easy to make once you get the ingredients, but the tricky part is finding them. All I need is for you to mark where they grow on my map.”
“Tell me what you need, and we’ll talk price.”
“I need some blue basil…”
“Yep.”
“Autumn bark…”
“Got you.”
“Peace dill seed…”
“Easy.”
“And some orragrass.”
“Oh.”
Jakub looked up at her, staring into her eyes first. The green glinted back at him like torchlight. “Oh? Does that mean you can’t get it?”
“There’s nothing in this land or the next I can’t get. It’s what I’m willing to get, and the risk it means to me. The more risk for me, the more I need from you.”
“How much is this going to cost me?”
“Quite a lot, necromancer.”
CHAPTER 23
With the boy taking Morrigan’s bed she slept outside, curled up on a bale of hay with Beet, her full-winged groff, next to her. She’d told Jakub that when the weather was warm and dry enough she preferred that to a bed anyway.
“I like it out here when it’s warm and dry enough,” she’d said. “Better looking up at the sky than a bunch of cobwebs on my roof. You can take the floor, if you like.”
Jakub didn’t like the idea of staring up at the roof of Morrigan’s hut all night either, but he didn’t have to.
While Morrigan set up her blanket and pillow by the east wall of her hut, Jakub went to the west. He took a small piece of cloth from his inventory bag. It was folded up like a handkerchief and was the size of his palm at first, but when he threw it on the ground and spoke its word of unlock, it grew.
The folds unwound and the cloth spread out high and wide until they reached the size of a 4-man tent. Jakub smiled as he watched the artificery in action, and it half-made him want to become an artificer himself. There was something special about the skill of weaving magic into everyday things.
There was little in his tent except a sleeping bag and a couple of books he’d stored in there, but it beat Morrigan’s floor. He couldn’t wait to advance further up the academy ladder. Some of the grandmasters were given artificed pieces of wood that spread out into full-sized homes.
“That’s the dream,” he said to himself, and then lay on his sleeping bag and listened to the nocturnal sounds of the Killeshi forest until he fell asleep.
He awoke during the night to the sound of something ripping. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes, tossed back his sleeping bag and reached for his blade, gripping it in time to see the zipper of his tent door open all the way.
Rain splattered in and danced on the canvas flooring, and a shadowy figure filled the tent doorway.
He got to his feet. He was half-naked but ready for whoever it was.
Until a voice spoke.
“Good. I was hoping the academy training would mean you’d be well-conditioned. Your body looks delicious.”
It was Morrigan, her black braids soaked through, rain drops trickling down her face and her neck and then wetting the slip of a shirt she was wearing.
Only small underwear kept her modest, and the rain ran down her long, smooth legs.
“Morrigan?”
“I hope I didn’t wake you?”
Suspecting a trick, Jakub stayed where he was.
“Something wrong?”
“It’s raining. I didn’t want to be outside, and I didn’t want to go into the hut and wake the boy. I hoped I could stay with you, necromancer.”
“It’s pretty cramped. Only one sleeping bag.”
She ran her hand over her leg. “That’s fine. We can share.”
CHAPTER 24
Daylight teased on the side of his tent, sending a glare of light inside it and tugging him from sleep.
It took him a few seconds to remember what had happened the night before, and to wonder if it actually did happen, since he had woken up alone with only a lingering smell of sweat in the tent to remind him of what they’d done. Morrigan was gone now, but he could still smell her on his pillow.
He got dressed, left it, and then commanded it to fold to handkerchief size. He put the tent back in his bag.
He found Morrigan outside, sitting beside her hawk cages. She had a glass vial in her hand. She took a drink from it and then grimaced, retched, and held in a deep breath. Then, she took another sip.
It was a potion. She obviously hated it, yet she was struggling to drink it anyway, so it must have been something she needed, rather than what she wanted.
“Morning,” he said.
“I left the boy in bed,” she said, setting the vial on the ground away from her. “Looks like he hasn’t slept in a week.”
“What’s in the vial?”
“None of your business, necromancer.”
Jakub was confused by her manner at first. She didn’t seem embarrassed, nor did she seem to want to talk about her nocturnal visit to his tent. That was good with him – he had things to do. The night before had been a good stress reliever and it had helped him forget Abbie Marth for a while, but he didn’t want attachments.
The fact was, sex was a biological function, and it could serve a biological purpose. That wasn’t the kind of thought that would get a lady hot, but it was true. Screwing Morrigan had relieved some of his stress, and it must have done something for her, too.
So, if she didn’t want to talk about it, he was more than happy.
“The sun is out but the sky is grey,” said Morrigan. “That’s a bad omen.”
“That’s the third bad omen you’ve seen since I met you.”
“One of those turned out to be true, did it not?” she said.
Jakub thought about the first time she’d said it; it was when they thought they’d killed the mother wyrm, but the birds still hadn’t gone back to their nests in the trees nearby and Morrigan had seen that as an omen.
It wasn’t an omen; it was predictable animal behavior that Jakub should have noticed. The birds had known that the mother wasn’t dead yet and that the fight wasn’t over, and he should have seen it.
“Want breakfast?” said Morrigan.
“I’d prefer to talk about the goodlight. I don’t have much time.”
“Breakfast is free…as is what we did last night,” she said. “The things you need for your potion? Not so much. I hope you’re ready for this.”
“What’s so hard about it? Where is it?”
“Let’s talk price first.”
Jakub had been thinking about this while he tried to get to sleep. The price had to be something to do with his powers but as a novice, his necromancy was weak. The whole point of his first assignment had been to assist Kortho, really. He’d been thrown deep into waters too heavy for him to swim through.
He needed back-up. He needed to find the inquisitor and then get Kortho back to the academy. Maybe they could even contact the academy if they passed a town with mana messaging equipment, and then academy necromancers could meet them on the road and resurrect Kortho.
First, he needed the goodlight. Kortho wouldn’t stay in the Greylands for long, and Jakub would do anything to bring his mentor back.
“Whatever the price is, you can have it. As long as it’s something I can do.”
“Don’t worry,” said Morrigan. Her eyes were especially green that morning. “I know you’re greener than a goblin’s arse, but this is something you can do.”
“What is it?”
“I need you to revive my pet.”
“Show me.”
Her pet was a hawk that she kept in a cage on the north wall of her hut. In fact, she kept three cages, and two were empty and had the doors open.
“I give them leave to come and go as they like,” she said. “More often than not they’re away for days, and then they’ll come back here and rest.”
&nbs
p; The third cage was the only one with the door closed, and the dead hawk was inside it. It’s clawed legs were limp, its feathers without luster.
“What happened to it?”
“Attacked by jack-crows,” said Morrigan. “This one is Reggie. The three are siblings, and he’s the youngest. Always trying to prove himself to his older brother and sister, and he got into trouble.”
“Where are the others now?”
“They haven’t come back since he died. I think they blame me for it.”
“What do you use them for? I mean, why keep the cages?”
“I grow carrots, onions, and potatoes in a field over yonder, and the hawks keep pests away. They’re handy to have in a fight, too.” She took a conch from her pocket. “They swoop in when I blow this. Or they used to, anyway.”
“Okay, I’ll do it,” said Jakub. “I’ll bring Reggie back for you.”
“You’re sure you can?” said Morrigan, looking worried for the first time since he’d met her. “It won’t hurt him? It can’t go wrong?”
“It’s resurrection of a minor beast. It’s a basic novice spell.”
“Reggie isn’t a minor beast.”
“It’s just the name of the spell, Morrigan. Stand back.”
Jakub rolled up the left sleeve of his overcoat so that his three glyphline tattoos showed. He touched his Resurrection glyphline.
“He was shot in the wing,” said Morrigan. “On the underside. Do you need me to move him so you can see it?”
Jakub tried to give her a reassuring smile. If he was a novice as a necromancer, he was even worse with his emotions, evidence by having only a few friends in the academy. It was hard to judge how he came across to people.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told her. “Resurrection doesn’t work like that.”
She played with her braids, making the skulls woven in then clatter together. He couldn’t believe how nervous she was; he’d seen her prepared to take on a nest of wyrms alone, but the fate of her hawk had shaken her.
“I know it doesn’t matter,” she said, regaining the steel in her Killeshi accent. “I’m nervous. Reggie was the first friend I made in my banishment. I was lonely, and I think he sensed it; he used to bring me the carcasses of mice. He must have thought I would like them as much as him.”
