by Deck Davis
He took out his sword and he spat on the blade and rubbed it, but he could only gain a dim reflection in the metal. Not enough to see his face fully, but enough that, despite the sun he’d lived under for weeks, his skin was now as pale as the moon.
He’d heard about necromancers who had earned the Corrupt Soul trait before. He could picture the way they looked now, the way they had been drawn in the necromancy texts; skin like curdled milk, eyes glowing like coals after water has splashed them but before their heat has fully gone.
He was marked, and the more he used his reanimation powers the more marked he’d be. It used to be that if he shed his black coat he could pass as any normal person. Now, eyes would stare as he crossed through a village. People would know what he was, they’d know that he dabbled with the blacker side of death.
But no more disease. Poison would affect him less. The undead would see him as an ally. That had to be worth something.
He didn’t want to dwell more on what it meant for corruption to show on his skin. It made him want to retch to think he’d look like those horrible necromancers in the academy books, but it wouldn’t do any good to think about it now, not while there was a chance he might not even make it out of Toil.
So he evaluated the rest of what he’d earned in his level up, and this was more pleasant; his Essence Grab would give him more essence than before, and using Reanimate would give his reanimated creatures more of their old skills and autonomy.
What about Spirit Transfer? That was a power he knew the academy looked on with disdain. It was a spell used by necromancers without a conscience, and its uses could swing the staunchest moral compass way, way south.
Using Spirit Transfer, a necromancer could take the spirit of a recently-deceased person and use his magic to put them into a new vessel. A new body. And that was where it became murky; no vessel was off-limits, and the spirit in question had no say in the matter.
He remembered reading about a man who’d spent his life abusing his wife, only to kill her accidentally when his sadism went too far. Not content with that, he paid an unscrupulous necromancer to Spirit Transfer her into the body of a mule, which he then kept chained in an outhouse on his estate. The poor woman suffered a second life’s worth of cruelty, only getting the respite of death years later. Luckily - if there was any sort of luck involved here - a spirit could only be transferred once.
Jakub felt sick now. Each necromancer earned powers based on how they had used the gift of necromancy, and his new powers were darker than oil.
Was this the person he was now? He didn’t feel like he’d used his spells badly, but there was no doubting how he had been rewarded. He felt dirty now, like his spirit needed a good, long scrubbing.
Forget it, he told himself. Focus on the now.
If he could just help Gunar and the others, maybe that would be the soul-cleansing that he desperately needed.
Then there was a power he’d heard only brief mentions of; Wilting Touch. It was hard to know how to feel about it.
On one side, Wilting Touch was a purely corrupted power, one rarely mentioned in any morally-good necromancy spellbook. A person could earn it only by choosing the Raiser shade, and then only by using darker spells for the majority of a level up. It wasn’t a spell to brag about in church.
Then again, not much of necromancy was.
Forgetting morals for the moment, Wilting Touch was a spell of tremendous strength. While much of necromancy was dealing with death after the fact, Wilting Touch connected a necromancer to death itself. It might not make them as one, but it introduced their souls to one another, it brought the enemy of death closer to its deliverer.
With a touch, he could drain the essence from something, leaving rot and corruption in its place. He didn’t have to drain from the dead now; his touch would drain essence from living things.
The problem there was that this went against every tenement of necromancy. A necromancer should never be able to take the essence from the living. Their art lay in manipulating death to give life, not in taking away life and using it to control death.
Wilting Touch was a corruption, and like most corruptions, it could not be controlled. Jakub wouldn’t have a choice in using his touch; as soon as he placed a finger on bare skin, he would corrupt what he touched.
Handshakes were going to be fun from now on.
Just like that, with a thought humorous only to himself and meant to make light of his new state of being, the consequences fell on him with the weight of iron girders.
He could no longer have physical contact with anything living, lest he steal their vitality and replace it with corruption.
Hugs were gone. Intimacy, a little as he’d had recently, was no longer an option. He’d have to wear gloves all the time, avoid even the slightest of touches. Passing coin to a merchant would be an ordeal because honest traders didn’t like receiving a dose of death along with payment.
Sure, touching someone for a second wouldn’t kill them. He’d read enough about Wilting Touch to know it took more than the briefest of touches for the spell to work.
But even if slight contact wouldn’t hurt them, the sense of corruption would register with its unfortunate recipient. They’d sense the death lingering around him, even if they hadn’t noted it in his pallor yet.
What was he? He could hardly be called human now. He was everything that his instructors like Kortho and Irvine had warned against. They would have been disappointed in him.
As these thoughts continued their assault, Jakub felt like he wanted to retch. He coughed so much it was like his body was trying to purge him of his own soul, but nothing came from his empty stomach.
But hey, at least he had an excuse not to hug distant relatives at family gatherings, now.
When his stomach recovered a little he summoned his level-up words back and he read them again, and he noticed something that sparked glimmers of relief in him.
Wilting Touch only worked when he had essence. Therefore, as long as he had no essence or wasn’t wearing his soul necklace, nobody would be corrupted by contact with him.
He was going to have to learn to hug, after all.
CHAPTER 36
A band of slavers left less of a trace than he’d thought. It was astounding that they moved without leaving much of a trail.
The only thing that made sense was that the slavers cleaned up after themselves; that a couple of them hung back and wiped away horse hoof imprints and wagon trails from the sand.
Either way, it was like trying to follow an assassin’s fart.
Jakub had discovered this when he headed back to his canvas camp after killing the lusk and leveling up. He pushed all his doubts about corruption away and he channeled them into energy.
He stomped back to camp with his reanimated lusk padding alongside him. There, he drank half a skin of water, ate some fava beans while trying his hardest to pretend they were pieces of roasted pork, and he hitched a canvas bag full of things to Olin. His preference was to keep the brothers together but he needed to be as hidden as possible, given he was trailing a bunch of people who wouldn’t give him a warm welcome.
That meant he couldn’t take the wagon, nor could he take both horses, so he had to choose. Since Olin was the lighter colored of the two brothers and would blend into the sand better, he chose him.
He hitched Albin to the rock and made sure he was covered properly by the canvas spread overhead.
“I’m leaving you with grain and water,” he told him. “Your brother and I are taking a short trip, and I’ll be back for you. Okay?”
Albin gave him a sad look, and Jakub did his best to ignore the stabbing feeling it gave him as he climbed onto Olin, made another check of his gear, and then set off.
It took a day of riding to get back to his map marker where he’d first encountered the woman and the wagon. His lusk followed him from underground, invisible to the eye but appearing as a smudge of Jakub’s map, trailing him and Olin.
It was strangely comforting to know the giant insect was there, ready to breach the surface on Jakub’s command. Knowing that he was the master of such a gigantic creature was the only thing that let him ride willingly toward a band of slavers.
From there he made a detour back to the dunes where loyal Ben was waiting, along with the inventory Jakub had buried. He added this to the bag hitched to Olin, he spent a ridiculous minute explaining to Ben what had happened and where he was going, and then he set off, leaving Ben where he was. It was hard to abandon the bison there, but Ben didn’t give off much of a stealthy flavor. Besides, Ben had no feeling in his reanimated state. He couldn’t have cared less if Jakub disappeared for a hundred years.
From where he’d first taken the wagon, Jakub spent hours searching the surrounding sand and dry ground until finally, he found a faint mark, and then another, gradually becoming a trail. He followed this southwest until he hit what must have been a camp.
It was empty now, but the slavers had been here. Burst pigskins and blackened animal bones littered the ground, set in a circle around the charred remains of a fire.
A few hundred meters away were a series of holes in the ground that must have served as trenches for the slavers to shit. He dismounted Olin and he kneeled by the fire and touched the ash with his finger. Then he picked up a handful and felt the cold flakes crunch in his palm. Stone cold. They had camped here, but there were gone now.
By now the sun had risen to its zenith and he was out of alchemical paste. Riding hard and long with a shirt buttoned up and canvas bag tied around his head made him sweat like a fire mage’s imp, which meant more water breaks, or using the water stone to find the precious liquid. More lost time.
He took one of the littered pigskins and sliced it open a little more so it served as a bowl. He put two handfuls of dirt inside and sloshed a little water and made a paste from it, and he spread this charcoal mess over his hands, face, and neck. He was no alchemist, but hopefully it’d protect him from the sun a little.
As a final act of luxury, he drank some water and paste at the same time and rubbed his teeth with it and swished it around his mouth and then spat a spray of watery black onto the ground, and then he wrapped the pigskin tight and climbed back onto Olin.
“Trail’s this way,” he said to Olin. “Let’s hope it’s the trail they left by, and not the one they made when they came here.” Then he spoke to the ground where his Lusk waited, knowing that a mental command was enough but wanting to hear his voice just to reassure himself he still had one.
“Lenny, keep following. Don’t breach until I tell you.”
The trail was an untrustworthy guide, often lying to him, Olin, and Lenny as they followed it through Toil for days.
Sometimes wagon tracks ran true, and a few times he even saw clear hoof imprints dug into the dirt. Other times he’d follow what he thought was tracks, only to realize that hid eyes were deceiving him, and the wind had parted the sand in a way that made it look like lines left by wagons.
The Sun Toil wind really was a bastard.
After three days, twelve jarfuls of water, a dozen stops to use the water stone to find the stuff, and more grain and beans than he ever thought he’d have to eat in his life, Jakub saw the slavers.
They were in the distance, just dark shapes set against the horizon from so far away, but there was no doubting that they weren’t part of the landscape. Seeing them filled him with trepidation. He hadn’t had to think about this when he’d been following their tracks, but seeing the slaver caravan made it real.
He was going to have to actually do something. Killing and reanimating Lenny had been hard enough, and that was only the start.
Now he was going to have to save Gunar and the rest from their fate.
CHAPTER 37
York the hunter, Gunar Helketoil, Bear
York stumbled once and lurched forward, only finding his balance at the last second. Another step and he lost it again, this time falling to the ground. He put his hands out, the jolt firing pain through his old wrists.
He lay there for a full two minutes, cheek against the ground, tasting the dust on his lips and feeling it fill the fault lines in his dehydrated skin. The pain was just an echo, because he’d long-since lost the ability to feel it properly.
Since he’d lost Kolja he’d waked for days, compass out and needle pointing to the bear and the person, and at first he wondered which he’d meet first, and soon he stopped wondering that and instead his mind fixated on water, vegetation, any sign of something that would sustain him.
It was no good. The sun never tired. Sure, it rested in the evenings but it always came back stronger than before, and the pitch black of night brought little relief because the winds were bitter and spiteful, and York had only his clothes and a blanket to shield himself from them.
He was wise enough to the fact he was dying. A man couldn’t see six decades and then drag his tired body to the harshest place in the queendom, and then let it dry in the sun without sustaining it.
A young man might survive a few days more, but York was almost gone. The carrion eaters would find him in death and they’d strip the flesh from his bones, and if anyone came across the skeleton that he left behind they’d have no idea who it belonged to. His grandchildren would never know what became of their grandpa, if they cared. The hunters’ guild would mourn him and have a service, after a time, but only if York’s old pals were of sound mind enough to realize he’d not been heard from in years. Suddenly, York wished with all his heart that he hadn’t shut himself away since his retirement. That he’d stayed near the guild and that he’d spent his days in the guildhall with a mug of warm ale and basking in the chatter from the stubble-faced apprentices and the growing journeymen and the weary but good-natured masters.
It was this thought that sparked enough energy in him to get up. He put one hand out. Then the other. He leaned into them, he pushed himself to his feet. Then he walked.
And walked.
And walked.
The sun was fading by the time York finally saw something in the distance. Three jagged rocks sticking up from the ground, like fingers of dirt giving the sky his favorite three-finger curse. But there was something else, too. Something that York couldn’t believe he was seeing. Didn’t want to let himself believe, in fact. It could be a hallucination, and breaking it would see his hope go completely.
The closer he got, the more real it became until finally York reached the rocks and he saw what was there.
He wept. Hardly any water was left in his body to supply the tears, and just two drops ran down his face. York caught them with his finger and he licked them and he wept some more, sinking to his knees and shouting thanks to all manner of gods, none of which he believed in.
It was when he’d wept so much his stomach had cramped that he finally took stock of what he’d found. There was a piece of canvas draped over the rocks. Under it, shielded from the harsh sky, was a horse.
Dark brown with splotches of black like an overcooked sausage, with a wide mouth full of crooked but endearing teeth. It was the most beautiful animal that York had ever seen, and he couldn’t stop himself from hugging it tightly as though it was a long-lost child. The horse, its body warm and soft, bore his hugs without much trouble.
By its head was an opened sack of grain a quarter full, and two pigskins of water, both half-full.
“I hope you don’t mind an old man sharing with you,” said York, and he bent by a pigskin and he lapped at the water.
He went carefully, knowing what excessive water could do to a dehydrated stomach. It took willpower he’d thought he’d abandoned many miles ago but he just drank a little and then waited an hour, and then he drank more and waited, and finally, he drank until his stomach was full.
After that he ate some of the grain, crunching it in his mouth and then loosening it with a swig of water so he could swallow it easier.
Then he slept. It was dark by now, and he knew there was an owner o
f these things who might return, but York was beyond caring. He curled up next to the horse and felt its warmth radiate on him, and he slept like a child in a warm room in wintertime.
He woke up fed and hydrated, and this brought his senses back to him. His inner caution made him draw his crossbow, and he loaded a bolt and placed it on the ground so he could pick it up if needed.
“Where’s your owner?” he asked the horse.
No answer came, so York searched through the things under the canvas but only found a few smaller sacks of beans and another pigskin of water. Then he did a tour of the surrounding desert, finally finding horse tracks leading away from the area, rather than to it.
York took the piece of black cloth from his pocket and held it against the compass. The needle swung left, right, then landed in the direction of the trail. Then he tapped his bear claw against it, and the direction was almost the same, save a few degrees of difference.
Wandering back to the horse, he felt sad. “They left you here, didn’t they?” he said to the horse. “I lost my friend some ways back. Fancy traveling together?”
He took the curling of the horse’s lips as a yes, even though it was trying to purge a rogue seed from between its teeth.
York spent the hottest part of the day drinking more water and eating grain and beans and sleeping some, and by the time the winds came back he welcomed them.
He tied what was left of the water pigskins and grain bags to the horse’s saddle and he slung his crossbow around his shoulder and made sure the remaining bolt wand was in the loop on his belt.
Then he set off, following the way of the compass and feeling deep in his bones that not many miles were left to him.
“I don’t like this,” said Gunar.
Helena looked up at the sky. “Not long now, love.”
She held his index and middle finger with her hand, and she rubbed the nub where he’d lost most of his ring finger years ago. Ever since Gunar had told her his plan, she’d started to look him in the eye again. Call him love and Guny, a name that he used to get irritated when she said in public, but now sounded like the sweetest sound that lips could ever make.
