by M. R. Forbes
“Not helping,” I said.
I coughed again, still feeling like an idiot. I knew better than to fuck with magic I didn’t understand. But the mask had given me access to the other magical fields for a time when I used one of the captured souls from the dice. I had always been able to control that magic. I had always had an innate understanding of it through the soul involved. This wasn’t the same thing. This was direct, immediate access. It was like a tempting whisper.
Hear me. Use me. Become immortal. Become like him, or better yet, become him.
I knew who the him was in that song. I was scared of death, but I was more scared of Samedi. I was done with dark magic.
Permanently.
“Amos killed it,” Dannie said. “No harm done.”
From her lips to something’s ears. No sooner had the words left her mouth than the ground began to shake.
6
Them Bones.
“Seriously?” Amos said, his head swiveling back and forth. “Did that cliche bullshit really just happen?”
Frank was scanning the area, too, his augmented eyeball probably a bit more useful than Amos’ beady ones. The ground was still vibrating, and a rumble was rising from further ahead. If I were a cowboy, I might have shouted "stampede." As it was, I closed ranks with the others, forming a tight wedge as we waited for the threat to materialize.
The brush ahead of us started shaking, thrashing around as it was pushed aside or stomped over. Amos raised his shotgun. Frank crouched with his hands out like a linebacker. Dannie pulled a knife. From where? Her jeans were doing a great job outlining her ass. They shouldn’t have been able to conceal a weapon.
I was unarmed and one-handed.
I was also the only user in the group.
I could hear the dark fields. I could feel them, too. But I could also hear the chaotic symphony of the Death magic, reaching out to me from below the earth. I pulled it in, collecting it, taking note of the change in my storage capacity with my diminishing health. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I considered taking out the spell book and leafing through it for a solution.
There was no time.
The vegetation parted in front of us.
The things that were coming weren’t of this world. Or at least, they hadn’t been part of this world for a while. There were hundreds of them, each unique, each individual. They were composed of bones, thousands and thousands of bones that had been pulled from the ground and stitched together by Samedi’s dark magic. Some were rotten and falling apart. Some were fresh and almost clean. Some had moss on them. Some had flesh on them. Some were small, and some were big.
Somehow, they all had teeth.
“I don’t know whether or not to laugh,” Amos said.
They charged toward us, their forms clattering but otherwise silent in their rush. Amos pulled the trigger, sending a round of shot into the front line. One of the creatures lost cohesion, exploding in a mess of marrow. A few others lost a finger or a foot, tripping slightly but still coming.
He fired again with similar results before opening the barrel and inserting two more rounds.
“Wish I had some grenades,” he said, snapping the shotgun closed and pumping the action.
Frank roared, charging toward the line. He grabbed a pair of them in his hands as they smacked into him, squeezing and shattering them apart, throwing them aside and picking up two more. A number of them circled him, biting at his arms and legs. Their teeth sank into his flesh, but he grabbed them and threw them aside, the pustules on his trogre skin opening and healing the wounds.
I positioned myself in front of Dannie, my good hand ready to do some magic.
“I don’t need you to protect me, Conor,” she said.
“You have a knife. That’s not exactly an efficient weapon for fighting skeletons.”
“I think you’ve forgotten something.”
I turned my head back to look at her. “What?”
She danced around me, finding one of the incoming creatures and kicking it hard in the side of the head, knocking it away.
“I have my legs back,” she said.
I watched her join Frank on the front lines, using the knife as a stick to spear the bone monsters and toss them away. I flinched whenever it looked like one was getting too close to her, only to feel the high of relief when she deftly avoided it and beat its head in with a tight kick. She had been pretty badass even after she wound up in the wheelchair. Now that she was whole again? I tried to figure out what I had been worried about.
“You gonna do something useful?” Amos said, looking back at me as he used one of his meaty hands to knock a creature aside. “Or just keep playing with yourself?”
“What do you want me to do?” I replied. “I don’t have a gun, and I’m not a trogre or a fucking ninja.”
“And you’re supposed to save the world?” He huffed, using the butt of the shotgun as a golf club and slamming it into one of the things.
The three of them were doing an incredible job of breaking the bone creatures down almost as quickly as they could arrive. I was jealous of their ability to take care of business without relying on magic to do it. Dannie had taught me how to fight, so I wasn’t completely useless in that arena, but my missing appendage was making me feel as though I was. I knew it was more selfish bullshit to be feeling sorry for myself at the moment, but that’s where I was. I could hate myself a little more for it later. Besides, they had the fight under control.
Bones littered the ground around us as they finished off the creatures, with Frank doing to honors of destroying the last one by stomping it into the ground. Once it was in pieces, he turned back and looked at me, a big grin on his face.
“That was fun,” he said. “Too bad there’s none left.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Dannie said. “We haven’t reached the volcano yet.”
“Damn it,” Amos said.
“What is it?” I asked.
He held up his arm. His overcoat had a hole in it. “This is my favorite coat. You owe me a new one, Baldie.”
“You can collect on it in the afterlife,” I said. “Let’s keep moving.”
I let Frank take the lead, while I pulled the spell book out and started flipping through the pages. I found an incantation inside that gave me pause.
“Frank, hold up,” I said.
He stopped and turned back toward me. “What’s up, boss?”
“Give me a minute.”
I went back to the aftermath of the attack, to the piles of bones that were now resting on the surface instead of below it. I took the magic energy I had collected and whispered, dispersing it along the field, casting a soft black shadow on the ground.
“I hate necros,” Amos said, watching me.
“At least he’s not reanimating kids,” Frank said.
I ignored them both. I could feel thousands of tendrils reaching out along the magic, touching the bones. I could sense the souls of each as I did. Most of the bones belonged to sheep, unsurprising given our location, and at first, I thought maybe I wasn’t going to find what I was hoping to find.
And then I did.
Bones that belonged to a human. The same human. I reached out to them, feeling the individual tendrils begin to shift, pulling the pieces together. There was nearly an entire skeleton in the field, and while it had been piecemealed together onto a dozen of the bone creatures before, it assembled itself into one structure now.
I walked over to it, putting my hand on it. I typically used the subject’s name to call them back to this world. It gave me more control. I didn’t know the poor dead guy’s name, but the increase in power my health status had granted me was enough to ease him in.
The head turned to look at me. “He aha i roto i te ingoa o nga atua,” it said. “E e koe. Te wahi e ahau i.”
“Nice job, Baldie,” Amos said. “I think you found a native.”
I held the skeleton with my magic, using it to calm him down.
<
br /> “I don’t need to have a conversation with him,” I said.
“Then what do you need him for?” Frank asked.
“We’re headed toward an immortal dragon’s lair that’s filthy with dark magic. What do you think we need him for?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s going to use him as a scout,” Dannie said. “Conor can see through the eyes of the dead he has under his control.”
“He doesn’t have any eyes.”
I closed mine, reaching out with the magic and transferring myself to the Māori skeleton. Frank was right, the less solid parts of the body had been eaten away at least a hundred years earlier. That was the thing about the spell I’d found. It described how to use the magical energy to see with, casting it forward and catching the reverberation like a supernatural version of LiDAR.
“I need someone to carry me,” I said. I couldn’t see through my eyes and through the skeleton at the same time.
“Don’t look at me,” Amos said. “I’m carrying enough weight already.”
“Whose fault is that?” Dannie asked.
“What? I like to eat.”
“And sleep. And f-”
“We don’t need to go there,” I said.
“I was going to say fart,” Dannie replied.
“You were not.”
“What happens in Vegas, Skeletor,” Amos said, laughing.
“Let’s keep it all there.”
“I’ve got you,” Frank said.
I could see him pick my body up through the sense of the skeleton, holding it in a fireman’s carry. I looked miniscule across his shoulders.
“All right, Skeletor,” Amos said. “Lead the way.”
7
Elevator Music.
I didn’t have any trouble keeping the skeleton moving, not with the strength of the magical fields around me and its proximity to my corporeal self. We trudged along fairly happily, keeping relatively quiet so as not to send another round of bone creatures coming our way. The path of the first wave was easy to trace back to the source, which we soon discovered was a magical trap of sorts, meant to unleash the hounds as they were in response to a loud noise like a gunshot. It was easy to picture having alternately stumbled into the small area where they had been gathered, and my earlier stupidity was forgotten behind the belief that they had been easier to handle coming at us in a line instead of walking right into the middle of the pack.
I started sending my alternate forward when we reached the kilometer-marker to the volcano, coming across the slightly worn and barely visible road I had traveled along with Tarakona’s second, Peter, not long enough ago. I knew the road would lead to a secret cave entrance into the mountain, which would lead to an elevator, which would lead underground to Tarakona’s lair proper.
I was nervous about what we would find there. If dark magic was enveloping the volcano strongly enough that Death couldn’t get us in, did that conversely mean that Tarakona couldn’t get out? Either that or the dragon was responsible for the veil. Otherwise, I would have expected him to be swooping around the site like it was Erebor.
Could the dark magic be Tarakona’s doing? I couldn’t put it past him, though it didn’t seem to fit his style. That is unless his goal was to keep Death out of his house, and by extension keep me out of his house. The bone creatures seemed like more of a Samedi thing, but at the same time maybe he was pissed at me for not letting him have Kirin? There was no way to rule out the possibility.
If the choice of enemy was either a lich or a dragon, both choices sucked.
My body stayed back with the others while the skeleton continued ahead. I could feel my thread to it expanding as it got further away, and I impressed myself with my ability to stay connected over a longer distance. That didn’t mean I could reach out to infinity, but I figured I should at least be able to get Maury to the bottom of the cave while we were still at the top.
“That’s a stupid name,” Amos had said when I returned to my self to update them on the skeleton’s status.
“It was the first thing that came to mind,” I replied. “What does it matter?”
“There have to be at least ten thousand names you could have picked that aren’t stupid. But you didn’t. I probably should have expected that.”
“I’ll name the next one Amos, to keep the trend going.”
That one got a laugh from Frank at least.
I returned to Maury. It was still a little strange to be able to sense things through him even though he had no eyes, and the entrance to Tarakona’s tunnels were stranger than that. It was so large that the energy couldn’t reach the sides, leaving me trying to navigate through the space without any sense of where the confines were, struggling to direct Maury in the proper direction. I moved him the wrong way a couple of times, burning valuable minutes while I stumbled too to locate a wall and guide him to the elevator.
I was unpleasantly unsurprised that there was nothing on the surface level. Specifically, no sign of Tarakona’s guards or servants, dead or alive. Either he had pulled them back to let any incoming idiots like myself think they had clear access, or they had been called deeper into the lair to defend their master. Both choices were shitty for obvious reasons, and I didn’t know which one I preferred.
Not that it mattered.
We had no choice but to go down there. We were fortunate we had a decoy to send in first.
We regrouped inside the cave, ahead of the elevators. The dark magic was thick and getting thicker, the noise of it almost enough to make my head throb. It was having a secondary effect of drowning out my ability to hear the Death magic fields, which in turn was reducing the strength of my connection to Maury.
I moved him into the elevator and sent him on his way down, but I wasn’t sure if I would still have control over him when he reached the bottom.
“So,” Dannelle said, making conversation even though I couldn't answer back. “Whatever happened to you and Miss Red, anyway?”
I almost lost control over Maury at the question. Was she really asking me about that now?
“That's right,” Amos said, covering for me. This wasn't going to be good. “You didn't hear about it because Conor got you dead. Miss Red expired during childbirth.”
“What? I wasn't dead that long, and we both know you can't-”
“Not a human ankle biter. A dragon. Tarakona’s kid. Hey, Conor, the kid should be down here too, huh?”
I cringed at the statement. I hadn’t been thinking about Ashiira. If Tarakona were in trouble, his son was in even more trouble.
They say that when somebody is talking about you, your ears will burn. I was thinking about Ashiira, and at that same moment, the dragon print on my shoulder began to burn.
“Fuck,” I said, reaching back to it. I put my hand on it and then pulled it quickly away. It was scalding.
“What’s wrong?” Dannie asked.
“Ashiira’s in trouble,” I said.
Of course, the distraction snapped me back into my self, and my hold over Maury fell apart. I cursed again as the thread broke, the rubber band of magic slapping me hard in the gut.
“Conor?” Frank said, somewhat concerned.
“We need to get down there,” I said.
“We don’t even know what we’re walking into,” Amos said.
“Something shitty,” I replied. “You’re immune to magic. You go first.”
“I ain’t immune, Skellington. I’m resistant. There’s a pretty big fucking difference.”
“That’s a hell of a lot more immune than any of us.”
Amos grunted. “Fine, pile in behind me. Jeez.”
We went to the second elevator, climbing in and letting Amos cover the doors. He held the shotgun in one hand while he pulled a pistol with the other.
“You can use that thing one-handed?” Frank asked.
“You ever see that movie where the guy pumps the action and reloads one-handed?” Amos asked.
“No.”
> “I did. Then I got obsessed with being able to do it. The hard part is grabbing more shells.” He turned the shotgun on its side, revealing a magnetic attachment holding a half a dozen rounds. “Not so hard with this.”
“Awesome,” Frank said.
Yeah, it was all fucking great. I quickly flipped through the spellbook. I could reanimate Maury once we got to the bottom, but I didn’t know if I wanted to. Getting further down would increase my magic even more, leaving me open to doing the kinds of spells I’d never been able to do before. Even at a time like this, when Ashiira was calling out to me for help, I was being selfish.
Would I be able to stop being an asshole long enough to get this job done?
The elevator cab shook as the mountain shook, rocking us slightly and causing it to dip a few feet as though it were about to come off its cable. Frank grabbed the sides tightly, his green face turning a lighter shade of green. Amos laughed. Dannie just stood there, always the professional.
I reached down to the fresh tendrils of magical energy that were snaking up from below, drawing in a massive breathe. Yeah, it was Death magic, but it still made me feel more alive.
Or something.
“Get ready to rumble,” Amos said, brushing his afro with the pistol hand like he was about to pick up a date.
I could sense how close Maury’s remains were to us. We were almost at the bottom. I held my hands up, staring for a moment at the dark swirl of energy that surrounded them.
“Most of what you do creeps the hell out of me,” Frank said. “But that is pretty cool.”
I had to admit.
It was.
8
Ashes, Ashes.
I didn’t know what to expect when the elevator doors opened.
I knew what had been there before. The smoothly hewn corridors of stone, the different rooms for Tarakona’s many followers. That one special room with the thick glass that allowed for direct interaction with the dragon.
