by Deck Davis
“Laura!” shouted Harry.
Then, Morrigan lashed out with her arms, snapping the ropes on her hands and letting the pieces fall to the ground. She took the gag out from her mouth.
“You are in trouble now,” she said. “All of you.”
The voice wasn’t hers; it was deeper, rotten to the core and flowing with hate. It was Yutulia; the real owner of her body, the girl that Morrigan had told Jakub was so dangerous.
Where her eyes had once glowed green with the drenching of mana, they were now red. She raised her hands, and red spikes of light took form on her palms.
She pushed her arms out, and the spikes shot through the air.
She didn’t discern with her aim; the spikes of mana lashed into men, women, and children. Into the camp dwellers, into the newly-arrived Killeshi. They burned through arms, singed into flesh.
Blood spurted. Screams sounded, a chorus of them filled with pain and horror. The smell of the bonfire met with the aroma of scorched flesh, and people fell left, right, everywhere.
The camp dwellers lost their minds; the armed men and women didn’t know who was their enemy and who wasn’t.
Laura urged her Killeshis forward, and the campers, those not killed by Yutulia’s spikes, met them. Swords met swords, steel sang against steel.
Ryden cast a spell of his own now; he spoke spellwords that Jakub couldn’t hear over the din of steel and pain and death.
Swirling portals of black opened on the ground, and creatures climbed out from the depths, creatures like the ones Jakub had fought in the basement but bigger, with claws larger than a man’s head.
In the chaos, amidst the slaughter and the magic and the growls of unworldly creatures, Jakub saw his chance.
He eyed Kortho’s body, lying just behind Ryden.
“Forgive me for using you like this, Kortho.”
He uttered the spellword of Death Puppet. His consciousness was wrenched from Thorndyke’s body and flung forward, through the flames of the bonfire, and into Kortho.
He woke in an instant, and he opened his eyes to see he was staring up at the night sky, wearing a new body now.
He got up. The screams sounded all around him, filling him with horror. Blood sprayed from wounds, fleshed cooked, claws slashed deep into skin and then tore through bone, but he ignored it all.
He got up, seeing the world from Kortho’s smaller height. He took a step, then fell, unused to the new weight distribution.
It was like walking drunk, and he could only take another step before falling again.
He had to master this now. Get a hold of himself.
Ryden turned around.
Jakub rushed at him now, and he slashed at the necromancer’s neck, tearing through his skin with Kortho’s claws.
Blood spattered into his face. Ryden crashed down onto his back, and Jakub fell on top of him.
“Kortho,” said Ryden. “Stop.”
Jakub raised a claw and drove it deep into Ryden’s chest again and again, tearing his skin, crunching his ribcage.
CHAPTER 69
With their master’s demise, Ryden’s creatures fell, sucked back into their tarry pits. The survivors of the Killeshi and the camp dwellers collected themselves, struck dumb with the horror around them, no longer thinking with their blades but instead trying to come to terms with the slaughter around them.
It was over. Ryden was dead, his creatures gone.
“Pathetic,” said a voice.
Yutulia was walking toward him now, walking in Morrigan’s skin.
No, not Morrigan’s skin, he reminded himself. Her own skin, that which Morrigan had taken from her.
He had seen what Yutulia could do, and he understood why Morrigan had taken control of her.
Yutulia’s eyes were only half red now, but even that amount of mana would be enough. He read the evil in her face, and he knew that Yutulia didn’t have a side in this; the camp dwellers, the Killeshi, she belonged to none of them.
She was something else, something of her own, and she wouldn’t leave any of them alive.
After all this, after finally killing Ryden, this would be the end.
Or, it would have been.
He got up from Ryden and ran across the bonfire and to Thorndyke’s body. He took the Blade of Purge Evil from his old death puppet.
As Yutulia approached a group of terrified camp dwellers, Jakub ran at her.
He plunged the sword into her back.
Yutulia screamed. When she opened her mouth, the trails of mist left her, streaming up to the sky in twisting plumes, before exploding in a firework of light.
And then Yutulia fell to the ground.
Jakub collapsed too. He hit the ground, his energy gone. His essence was fading, he sensed, and he knew what this meant; if it ran out while he was still in Kortho, then he’d die with him.
He touched the wound on Kortho’s chest where the wyrm thorn had ripped him apart.
“I’m sorry it came to this,” he said.
With that, he revoked his spellword and left Kortho.
CHAPTER 70
He awoke in the fields outside the hamlet, where he’d left Rud. Rud was gone, of course; he was in the hamlet.
Was he alive?
Jakub could barely summon the brainpower to think. He’d let Rud take the bracelet of rest, and now his debt of sleep was catching up with him.
All he knew was that he had to get back to Kortho. The window of resurrection was open, but it was too late now. No carriage in the world would carry him back to the academy in time. He just wanted to be with him.
Summoning all his strength, he got up and walked toward the hamlet. As he neared it, he saw figures rush out of the gates and toward horses idling nearby, seemingly oblivious to the carnage that had taken place inside the hill.
Two of them were Killeshi who he’d never seen, but he recognized the other two people; Harry Helmund and Laura, his twin sister.
He watched them reach the horses. He watched them saddle up and then ride away. He watched the subject of his assignment speed into the distance, across the thornweeds fields.
There was no chance of him giving chase; even if they weren’t on horseback, his sleep debt was creeping up on him.
He had failed.
Somehow, he no longer cared.
When he went into the hamlet, nobody paid him any attention. The camp dwellers were too busy sorting their dead from their wounded, too busy trying to push back the horrors of what they’d seen so they could console each other and reassure their children.
He saw Morrigan on the ground, her body limp. He kneeled beside her and looked into her eyes. He face was no longer twisted, no longer filled with hate, and he knew that he was looking at Morrigan and not Yutulia now, his blade having driven the evil out of her.
Maybe in death, she’d found peace at last.
“I can bring her back,” said a voice.
It was Ryden. Bleeding, broken, but still alive. “You know the Healing Harvest spell, yes?” he said.
“What are you saying?” asked Jakub.
“I’m too weak to heal myself. You saw to that. Use harvest on me, and agree to let me go, and in return, I will bring her back.”
Jakub looked around. There were enough corpses in the hamlet for Ryden to gather essence for the resurrection.
By all rights, he should take the necromancer back to the academy so he could answer for what he’d done. But if he did that…
Ryden shouldn’t have been in a position to offer a deal, but Jakub couldn’t turn away from the facts. He couldn’t force Ryden to perform a resurrection, after all; the necromancer had to speak the spell word voluntarily. Nor could he ignore what he was offering.
He knew what he had to do.
CHAPTER 71
Hours later, Jakub finally broke clear of the Killeshi lands. The spot where the trader was to meet them was on his map, and he’d followed it through the harsh terrain.
“Wait up, lad,” said a voi
ce.
Kortho hobbled behind him, and Jakub smiled. Every second with his master was precious now, and he felt a strange kind of gratitude toward Ryden. Gratitude and hate all mingled into one, so that he didn’t know how to think about it.
Even after everything he had done, he had still been the one to bring Kortho back.
Jakub was only sorry that when the necromancer made his offer to resurrect Morrigan, he’d refused it and told him to bring back Kortho instead. He felt bad for her, and he tried to console himself with the idea that her spirit would finally find peace, but a part of him knew that he was wrong; given the choice, Morrigan would have chosen to live.
If only there had been enough essence.
The trader was waiting with his wagon on the edge of the dirt path.
“You two look like hell,” he said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Get what you came here for?”
“Not in the slightest.”
Jakub helped Kortho onto the wagon and then settled down, sandwiched between a pile of furs and two wooden crates. The trader had certainly gotten what he came here for, anyway.
As the wagon started to roll away, Jakub shut his eyes, only to feel a claw on his shoulder.
“You need to tell me everything,” said Kortho.
“I need sleep.”
“Sleep can wait.”
“Yeah, but I think I’ve made it wait too long, Kortho.”
“Tell me everything, and then you can sleep all you like.”
Jakub told Kortho everything that had happened, from the mother wyrm’s thorn, to his travels with Morrigan, and then to the hamlet, and to Ryden.
“You shouldn’t have done that, you know,” said Kortho.
“What?”
“Taken his deal.”
“You were dead, Kortho. What would you have done?”
“Duty above self, duty above love, duty above all. Isn’t that the mantra? You seemed to believe in it, lad.”
“I ask you again; what would you have done?”
Kortho smiled, and Jakub felt a great warmth burst him at the sight of it. It was a smile he’d never thought he’d see again after finding the inquisitor dead, after everything had seemed lost.
“What about the boy?” asked Kortho.
“Ryden’s bound spirit? He’s in the Greylands.”
“No, the boy one who helped you.”
“Rud? He’s resting up. He and Hilda and the others are leaving the hamlet. I don’t know where they’re going, but they’re moving on.”
“Such a tragedy. That poor girl.”
Jakub thought about Florence. She was bound to Ryden now, trapped with him. He couldn’t imagine how Rud was coping with it.
Ryden should have answered for it, but Jakub had taken that away. He’d forgone everything – what was right, his duty – to bring Kortho back.
Duty above all was bullshit. He knew that now.
“What will we tell the academy?” he said. “We lost Harry Helmund.”
“We’ll tell them the truth,” said Kortho. “and then see what they want to do.”
“I failed.”
“No; you did what you could. Now it’s time for you to sleep.”
He couldn’t help it then. His feelings were busting inside him, fighting to get out.
Kortho held out his arm and Jakub fell into it just like he had all those years ago, when Kortho had first saved him.
He’d held it in for so long now, and he couldn’t do it anymore. He’d seen too much death, even for a necromancer. It wasn’t what a necromancer should do, but he sobbed, he sobbed all the horrors out of him until he couldn’t do it anymore.
And then he slept.
As the wagon drove them away from the Killeshi lands and back to the academy – back to civilization – Jakub fell into the arms of sleep. This time, he didn’t have any nightmares. His body was too weary for that; and instead, he slept properly for the first time in forever.
THE END OF BOOK 1
BOOK 2: Code of the Necromancer
CHAPTER 1
“The gods will see everything you do,” Mitchell said, “and they’d see it if you freed me.”
“If the gods want to intervene, they’re more than welcome. Let’s give them a few seconds, shall we? Just to make sure that they don’t mind you being here. No…nothing. It appears they are looking elsewhere. I hear there’s a great play on at the auditorium down the road.”
“Do you want gold? I don’t have much, but I can get some. My brother, he owns…”
“No.”
The truth of it all hit Mitchell then. He saw their masks, white and ceramic. The tallest man’s mask was cracked on his left cheek and discolored around his eyes.
He smelled the leather bonds that strapped him to his chair, so tight around his wrists that his fingers were pale and had started to feel tingly as the blood struggled to flow.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Nothing that you can bargain with.”
“Bastards! Just tell me why...”
They wouldn’t answer his pleading after that. Not the first time, not the hundredth. Not when he begged, nor when he shouted. The idea that he thought he could bargain for his life seemed to annoy them, because each time he did, they tightened the straps around his wrists and ankles.
They never took his tongue, and he thought it was because they didn’t care what he said. They didn’t take his eyes, because they wanted him to see. When they started removing his fingers with bolt cutters, they wanted him to watch, they wanted to hear him scream.
He tried reasoning with them until his throat hurt, but he began to realize that was the scariest thing; they didn’t have a reason. When a person had no reason, they had nothing holding them back.
So much pain. It started with the cuts, hundreds of them over his body, each inflicted with a torturer’s precision and designed to tease out the maximum pain, to wrench agony from him like he’d never felt before.
Then the flaying; they’d started with his left hand, the hand he used for his work. They’d stripped the skin from him while he was awake, letting him scream and shout and writhe, but for all he tried, he couldn’t get free. They’d bound him too tightly, bound him by his own attempts to buy freedom.
“What did I do to you?” he shouted, but they didn’t answer.
This wasn’t right. He was just a leatherworker, damn it! He’d married Lorraine as soon as they had both come of age, and he’d never strayed from her. He’d never hurt anyone, never inflicted pain. The worst he could be accused of was cheating at a game of cards in the Slug and Apple inn, but the pot had been just two silver coins.
Surely that wasn’t the reason for this hell?
No, it wasn’t, he told himself. Because these people had no reason.
“Just talk, gods damn it. Please, one word, anything! Whatever you want to know, I’ll tell you. Whatever you need, you can have it!”
No answer.
“Is it making you hard? Is that what it is?”
When he realized that no pleading would save him from the agony, he tried to retreat into his mind. To think about Lorraine and the kids, about Tommy and how he would be waiting at home for him to get back. He was supposed to take him to the market and buy him what he’d need for his first day at the Queen’s academy.
He’d been scared of the day when the academy mages would come to collect his son, but Lorraine had felt it worse.
“Write to them. Cancel it, tell them we aren’t letting him enroll.”
“He’s going to have a better future than we could have given him,” Mitchell said.
Lorraine wouldn’t look at him.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ll see him when he comes home for holidays. It isn’t a prison.”
“It feels like I’m giving them a part of myself. He’s my boy.”
“I’ll miss him too, but him going to the academy, learning with them…it’s the best we could have ho
ped for,” said Mitchell.
But now Lorraine and Tommy and little Lijah seemed eons away in another life, and he was here, bound to this chair in this crypt of a room with the robed figures staying silent as they stripped his skin from him.
It was then that Mitchell faced a fact about himself; something he didn’t admit out loud to his captors, but he knew to be true.
That if the Gods offered him release there and then, he’d have traded Lorraine and Tommy and Lijah for it, just to get away from the pain.
What kind of a man was he?
Hours passed. Days. He screamed, vomited, cried, defected. The smell shamed him even with the pain, but his tormentors didn’t remark on it. They simply bathed him and dressed him in silence, and this was the only time they were gentle. After that, they unmanned him with every cut, broke him down piece by piece.
He shouted questions, begged them to tell him why. He cried for his family, he offered bribes, tried to put guilt on them.
They never answered.
And when they’d flayed his left arm, then his right, and then started on his chest, he begged for something else. The only thing that would end it.
They wouldn’t let his body give up; they forced potions into his mouth, set broken bones into place. Since they wouldn’t let his body surrender, then his mind had to instead.
“Kill me,” he said, spit and blood bubbling from his lips, his voice barely a whisper, the agony of hundreds of cuts and stripped skin burning in him.
He couldn’t look at his reddened flesh. The pain clouded his mind so that he could barely see Lorraine’s face now. More than a decade together, all hidden by a fog of pain. All he could hear were their dim voices in his mind. Was this all it took to make a man forget his family and pray for death?
“Where’s dad?” Tommy would say. “Why’s he so late?”
He couldn’t think of home anymore. He was so hurt, so full of agony, he just wanted to die. He begged them for its release, because even if he’d never see his family again, at least it would free him from his torture.
