by Deck Davis
The woman screamed, and her children clung to her harder.
“Jakub!” said Helena. “Do you think that helps?”
He let go of the severed head. “Sorry.”
Something crashed into him, almost knocking him off his feet. His survival instincts, frayed beyond logic, fired.
He almost reached for his dagger when he saw that it was Beate - Gunar and Helena’s daughter - whom Jakub had first met all those months ago and who he had always shared a cheerful word with in their early Sun Toil days. Old Shep was with her, wagging his tail furiously when he saw Jakub.
His decision to help resurrect Shep had led him to this; to joining the caravan and his journey into what was surely an afterlife of hell on the mortal land.
And for all that, he was glad to see her, and as she hugged him, only reaching to his waist, he felt a flicker of a smile on his face. He made sure not to hug her back so that his Wilting Touch power didn’t rear its rotten head.
“I’m so glad you’re safe,” he told her.
Helena leaned on the wagon. “You have to get out,” she said, frustration in her voice. “We can’t stay here, and this is the only wagon. Unless you want to walk out of Toil, we need to get it right and back on its wheels.”
A man approached now. Tall, reedy, but with a leathery face and scars that suggested experience but not wisdom. Jakub recognized him as one of the mercenaries who always had a knack of winning his caravan gambling games.
“No point righting it,” he said. “Nothing to pull it with. The horses have fucked off.”
Looking around, Jakub saw that he was right. The realization was a knife in his gut. After all this, after fighting free of slavers, after killing the biggest lusk he’d ever seen, they were still stuck in this hell.
“We’ll worry about pulling it once we set it straight,” said Helena.
“Let ‘em stay in there, if that’s what they want to do. Me and a few of the others are walking while it’s cool. Some of the stuff in those bastards’ wagons might have been spared the flames. If we’re lucky, it’ll be enough to get us halfway out of the desert.”
“How many of us made it?” asked Jakub.
“Oh, the corpse botherer speaks,” said the mercenary.
Jakub bristled at the slur. As a necromancer, he was used to hearing all kinds of names, usually given by people who didn’t understand his magic and so feared it. Normally it wouldn’t have mattered to him at all, but right now, after everything…
Before he could say a word, the mercenary smiled wide, and he marched over to Jakub and put his arm around him. “I’m only joking, lad,” he said. “Without you, we’d all be in that big fucking lusk’s belly.”
“Thanks.”
The merc jostled him with his elbow. “No, thank you. I don’t deserve a flea’s piss of gratitude here, but you… Never mind. You don’t remember my name, do you?”
Jakub was never the kind of guy to lie out of politeness. He found that white lies usually caused more trouble than they spared. “Sorry. I wasn’t at my best when we set out.”
“No bother. I’m Matthias, among various names both earned and otherwise.”
Helena gave Jakub a look then, but it wasn’t a friendly one. There was something behind it, but he didn’t have the energy to figure out what.
“I’ll take a look around,” he said. “See what supplies we have.”
As he started to walk away, he heard a scream. One of the caravaners, a woman with golden curls, big, blue eyes, and blood crusted around her face, pointed at a lusk. It was hopping through camp, not paying attention to any of the humans around it, instead just mindlessly moving as if working on some residual instinct.
“Don’t worry, he’s one of mine,” said Jakub.
“The lusk?”
“You can call him Len.”
“Oh no,” said Helena, with her hands on her hips. “Not a feckin’ chance. You think folks can pull themselves together with that thing inches by? Kill it.”
“It’s already dead, and killing it again would be a waste, trust me. We’ve got a hell of a lot of ground to cover in Toil, and we’ll need Len to get us through it.”
Now two more mercs joined Matthias. “Cut its bug-eyed head off and shit down its neck. Strip its skin and dry it out. Turn it into a book cover. Seen ‘em being sold in Dispolis.”
“Touch the lusk and they’ll be binding your skin to the latest Tale of the Wandering Bard,” said Jakub.
While the survivors huddled together and cleaned and dressed wounds as best they could, Jakub walked around the camp. He kept his map open as he did, marking anything useful on it for collection later. He didn’t have the energy to pile everything up yet.
It was when he reached the eastern side of camp that he saw a huge mound of fur laying on the ground. He got closer and saw that it was the bear, and York was underneath it.
The bear and hunter had died together, but seeing the old man raised so many questions. What in all hells was he doing out here? Was he part of the slavers? Well, he’d never get an answer now.
As he looked at them, something occurred to him.
He was only a journeyman necromancer, so he wasn’t strong enough to resurrect a person. But his Major Beast Resurrection spell would let him raise the bear from the dead.
He could use his new Spirit Transfer power to send York’s spirit into the bear, thus bringing him back to life. A new, strange life, sure, but it was still life.
Would York want that? To be dragged from death and put inside the body of the bear that had killed him?
Jakub understood now why Spirit Transfer was considered so corrupt a power. In fact, the idea of performing such a transfer without consent made him feel dirty. And yet, he was considering it.
Then, he heard a gasp of breath.
“York?” he said. He stood and grabbed a teenager who was walking past with three crates of beans. “Give me a hand with this.”
“Helena told me to find water. She’ll kill me if I don’t.”
“I’m a necromancer, I’ll bring you back.”
“Everyone knows you’re not a master. You can’t resurrect a person.”
“Just help me move the damn bear.”
Together they tried to move the bear, but the beast must have weighed more than a ton.
“Len!” shouted Jakub.
The lusk reached them in four hops, and the kid shuddered and fell onto his arse when he saw him.
“Len’s friendly,” said Jakub. “Or more accurately, his reanimation removed his predatory instincts and rendered him a pliable puppet. But I prefer to think of him as friendly.”
With Len’s help, they moved the bear off York, laying the beast on its back with its arms splayed out. Even in death it looked monstrous, and looking at it, every necromancial instinct in Jakub’s body begged, absolutely begged, him to reanimate it.
York gasped once more, and now bear-less, his ravaged body was visible to all. The bear had almost turned him inside out, with a large open wound across his chest, and hundreds of scratches of various shapes and sizes, all ugly as heck and marked with blood. Rivulets of blood formed a crisscross on his face so that it was hard to see anything except his eyes. When he took a ragged breath, a bubble of spit and blood inflamed and then popped.
The kid had turned pale and he was taking short, sharp breaths. Jakub put his hand on his back. “You’ll be okay.”
“He’s gonna die.”
“Can you get some water? Fetch a pigskin and a rag or blanket.”
Now alone, Jakub kneeled beside York. “It’s you, isn’t it?” he said. “All the way out here, all these years, and it’s you.”
York gasped and shut his eyes in pain.
“Wait a second,” said Jakub.
He checked his soul necklace but it was empty after having raised an army of slavers back from the dead. Damn it.
There wasn’t much else to drain from, since he’d already taken essence from dozens of corpses when h
e first came into camp. The giant lusk would have been a plentiful source, if they hadn’t hacked its head off.
Without Health Harvest, York was gone. Water and rags wouldn’t do a damn thing, he just needed to get the kid away before he passed out. Normal means wouldn’t help the hunter now; his wounds were too numerous, too deep, and he was too old to take them.
And then Jakub’s gaze settled on the bear.
“There goes adding an undead bear to my army.”
He focused on the beast and cast Essence Grab, and to his shock, the bear’s essence filled a full three-quarters of his necklace.
He held the trinket in his hand, staring at it as if it would change, as if the essence it held was a mistake. But no, the blue swirls stayed in the necklace, and Jakub was left wondering how one bear could gather him more essence than a dozen men.
He looked at the beast with a new respect now, and he felt a pang in his gut at seeing it splayed out like that, like it was on the rug of a nobleman’s manor. It’d get a burial, he decided. He might have robbed the poor thing of its afterlife by draining its essence, but he would give it a respectful send-off.
Now he kneeled by York and he stared at the old hunter and spoke the Health Harvest spellword. The bar’s essence left his necklace and it drifted out toward the hunter, gathering in the air around him and hanging there like some spectral wind, rippling with a beautiful energy that Jakub wanted to just breathe in.
He held himself back and he let the essence fall softly onto the hunter, where it gathered over his wounds and cuts. The essence of the bear knitted together the wounds the bear itself had caused. It cauterized veins, it repaired as much broken flesh and skin as it could.
By the end, the hunter was still covered in blood, his clothes were still torn, but at least he could breathe.
It was now that York looked at Jakub and there seemed to be recognition in his stare. Jakub wondered if the hunter remembered their brief chats all those years ago, and whether they’d made as much of an impression on him as they had on Jakub.
Sometimes it happened like that, didn’t it? Bonds could spark in a second, friendships could come and go in a week but have an impact for a lifetime.
“Jack?” said York. “That you?”
Jakub put his soul necklace back inside his shirt and fastened a button. “Close. Jakub.”
“I know your face.”
“We met once, a while ago,” said Jakub. “Turns out I’ve got a lot to thank you for.”
York sat up. He patted his chest, poking and prodding his skin as if it wasn’t his but belonged to someone else. Confusion sat heavy on his expression.
“Necromancy,” said Jakub. “I have a spell that can heal.”
“You’re the lad from the academy!”
“The very same.”
“What in all the hells are you doing out here, lad? School trip?”
Jakub grinned. “I left the academy years ago. This was a…uh…I’m not sure what you’d call it.”
“A fool’s errand into the most inhospitable arsehole in the queendom,” said York. “And I should know all about that. That’s how you wind up half-dead with a bear on top of you.”
“I understand the feeling. Only, mine was a bison, not a bear. Can you walk?”
York glanced at his foe now. He stared at the bear for a good ten seconds, and by the end his eyes were watery. “I remember a little of necromancy,” he said. “As I recall, I trapped a rabbit, and you spoke your little words and sapped the soul out of it. Is that what you did to my friend here?”
“I used the bear’s essence to heal you.”
“Huh. What a thing that is.”
Jakub held his hand out and York clasped it stronger than he expected, and rather than Jakub helping the hunter to his feet, the hunter almost dragged him down. Jakub dug in and tensed his calves and finally, the hunter was up and standing.
“Oh hells,” he said, looking at the carnage around him.
“I suppose you don’t know what’s happened here. I better explain,” said Jakub.
“Explain when we’re on our way out of here, lad. I take it we have transport?”
Ah. Transport. The missing horses. The problem resurfaced in his mind, only he had a solution now.
“Follow me,” he said.
CHAPTER 41
“You reckon that’s about big enough for a bear?” asked York, wiping sweat from his forehead “By all the gods’ hairy arses, I haven’t worked so hard in a long time.”
He held a shovel in his left hand, though despite his sweat, he’d barely used it. Jakub didn’t blame him. If he was that age and had only survived a bear attack after being doused in necromancial magic, he wouldn’t be digging graves, either. He wasn’t going to mention the fact that York hadn’t helped much.
Jakub had the other shovel, and this one was encrusted with dirt. The tools had once been used to dig holes for the slavers to piss and shit in, but now they were set to a more dignified purpose; making a grave for a great beast.
“Think I could have a moment alone?” said York.
Jakub eyed the dead bear and the grave and he thought he understood. “Sure.”
He walked a few paces away, and he saw the old hunter sitting next to the old bear with his hand on its furry chest. His lips moved but Jakub couldn’t hear the words, and he felt like he shouldn’t try.
Alone, he finally checked his necromancy levels. During the battle, he’d drained and used more essence than ever before, and the effort had exhausted him beyond a physical level and deep down into his being, and it’d be a few moons before he recovered from that.
Even so, raising an undead slaver army was very rewarding according to his experience bar. He could hardly believe the jump.
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIII ]
It wasn’t long since he reached the second level of journeyman, and he was already almost halfway to level three! Where Toil hadn’t been kind to his body, it had definitely helped refine his necromancy, even if he was painting his spellbook in a darker shade than he’d have liked.
He wasn’t too far from the journeyman level 3 rank now. And just one level up after that…
Wow. He was almost an expert-ranked necromancer. He could barely comprehend it, and he couldn’t believe how much it excited him.
That was the most thrilling part. When he’d joined Gunar’s caravan, he wanted to get away from the academy. To use his necromancy as little as possible. Sure, he’d resurrect a bison here and there, but he’d banked on miles and miles of doing anything other than necromancy.
So, to feel like he did now…was this what it felt like when old passions returned?
He looked right and saw that York was still sitting next to the dead bear, and his thoughts turned to Ben. It was stupid to even think it, but he missed him.
It almost made him laugh. A dead bison brought back to a semi-life by necromancy. A sack of flesh and muscle with no soul, and yet Jakub felt a panging in his stomach when he thought of him. He imagined Ben sitting by the dunes, waiting for him.
He gave a mental command, severing his reanimation link to the bison. His soul would never go to the afterlife, Jakub had robbed him of that, but at least his body could rest.
Later that evening, after packing everything that could be used or consumed into crates and loading them onto on side of the now-righted wagon, the survivors of the Toil Lusk Massacre climbed aboard and sat back as the wheels turned and carried them away from camp and northeast, toward an old province called New Sanzance. Riches didn’t await them there, but none of them cared about that now.
They traveled this way for many moons, gathering food and water whenever the opportunity arose. The going was slower than with most wagons, but then, this wagon wasn’t being pulled by horses.
Jakub and York always sat at the front in the driver’s compartment, and they watched as thirteen undead slavers pulled Helena and her people across the desert.
“They say fortune is a wheel,” said
York, “and once it turns it doesn’t stop until it has gone full circle.”
Jakub was about to answer when he sensed somehow peering over the driver’s compartment. Helena was there, scowling. “Nothing fortunate about this,” she said.
He was going to query her but she disappeared, and he didn’t have the energy to go ask what was wrong.
The slavers, attached to each other and the wagon by ropes, pulled the caravaners for miles and miles across the desert. Being undead, they did not need rest, water, food, or shade. Even as they watched their former captors drag them to safety the caravaners didn’t feel any joy in the change of situation. They were empathetic people, and even if they weren’t, the residual shock of the night before stopped them smiling.
Only the mercenaries seemed like their former selves. Matthias and the few other men who made it through the evening of blood spoke in hushed tones about where they would go next, about which lords were said to be offering gold for their services.
“I’m finding a nice quiet town,” said Matthias. “Gonna get a smithy to melt my sword and armor down. Find a girl who loves a flickering fire and cozying up. Needs to be somewhere quiet.”
“Somewhere cold,” said another.
“Somewhere it rains all the feckin’ time. I want so much rain I grow gills.”
Helena spent her time with Beate curled up next to her and with blank parchment binding on her lap. Lacking ink, she wrote using bits of charcoal she’d taken from around the camp, and she wrote down the names of every person who’d set out with them to Toil, living or dead.
“We’ve nothing to sell in Sanzance,” she told her people. “But I’ll square things with you eventually. All of you. You’ll get what you’re owed.”
Some muttered that she need not do it, that she’d already lost enough with Gunar gone. Others stayed silent. Others still thought they were owed more than promised, but they had the sense not to say it yet.
“Hang on a second,” said Helena, looking at the people in the wagon. “Twenty of us are here, but I only have seventeen names.”
