Dread of Spirit: Rise of the Mage - Book One

by Jason Bilicic

  “Kelc. Kelc, wake up. You need to set everything up.”

  He opened his eyes and a bleary-eyed Shaia, holding a candle, smiled at him. She peeked behind her, seeing nothing but darkness through the doorway, and leaned down, giving her brother a gentle kiss.

  “Come on. The rending is just after dawn.” With that, she padded out of the room.

  Kelc sat up, smiling in the darkness despite how exhausted he felt.

  He pulled on his heavy socks and breeches and slipped a tunic on over his head. He then pulled his formal breeches on over his others, expecting it to be cold outside. He belted his blades and pulled on and tightly laced his boots. Finally he took out his funeral jacket, a highly decorated military style coat with long tails, again pale grey with dark grey cuffs and lapel, and buttoned it up.

  He tried to soften his steps as he moved through the house to the kitchen where he raised the wick in a lantern and struck it afire.

  With his lantern, he snuck out the front door.

  The sun still slept, as did Kreg and Varrl. They’d worked long into the night preparing Ilda’s body, Timmon’s mother. Varrl had told Kelc he’d need to get up well before the sun and take care of all the preparations since he and Kreg had to work through the night.

  Ilda was small, though. Kelc felt like he could have cleaned and prepared her in only a few glasses. Why they needed to work through the night… “Makes no sense.”

  Kelc dropped off the porch and moved around the house to the tool storage, the frosty grass crunching underfoot.

  The air felt freezing and yet to Kelc, it seemed fresh and clean as it burned in his nose and throat. He took a couple of deep breaths just to feel the torrent of freezing air drop through him, gusting it back out before him in visible clouds.

  At the tool storage, he drew a heavy iron key from the pocket of his jacket and unlocked the holding bar. He placed his lantern on the ground just outside of the shed and quietly, using both hands, lifted the heavy iron bar and slid it out of the way.

  The doors shifted a bit as they became free, alarming Kelc for a moment. “Hells,” he sighed, noting how quiet everything suddenly seemed.

  He pulled open the right door until it stood out of the way, allowing his lantern light inside, and began searching out what he needed.

  “Podium first,” he mumbled, pulling his father’s two-piece lectern from the shed and dropping it in the grass. “Piece of flaming skeesh, this thing. Anyone saw it…” When in use, a Symean funerary banner hid the rickety wooden stand, little more than two crates, the top one with an angled side for script storage. “And the rod.”

  Kelc had seldom touched the rending rod. Coppery in color, with another reddish metal that made it reflect scarlet in the sun, this rod that pulled the soul from a dead man and forced it to Reman.

  With such fear of witchcraft and magic, Symea long ago accepted the tradition of rending the spirit from the dead. No ghosts or demons could be allowed to walk the land. Everyone called it tradition, but so far as Kelc understood it, failing to rend a dead body would result in a sentence of death.

  Anytime Kelc asked how it worked, he was quieted, or given no answer. Kreggen once told him it had to do with the metals, the way that they were forged and which ones were used, but to Kelc it seemed like magic of one sort or another. He could never voice such a thought, not even to Kreg. Just saying the words would earn him a beating he’d never forget, maybe even get him disowned, which would leave him a legal member of the Symean Army, a reputedly difficult existence.

  He waved the rod about as if it were a sword, but it felt like nothing more than a freezing cold piece of metal. “Huh.” Again, he didn’t know what he expected, but the rod left him unimpressed.

  Kelc dug the tapestry from the shed, tucking it under his arm along with the rending rod. He picked up each of the two halves of the podium and carried them to the funeral lawn, the only area of the property where the grass was kept short.

  He set up the podium and draped the tapestry over it, laboring in the darkness to get the emblem on the front exactly as he knew his father would want it.

  “Hells,” he said, thinking about why in the world he thought he could get the drape right without a lantern.

  A dull thud off in front of him and to his right made him freeze where he stood. The cleanhouse. That was where it came from. He focused on the building, able to see nothing more than a vague grayish blob with what little light the stars offered.

  Then he saw a whitish figure for a moment, a woman, he thought, in a robe or a shift. He smiled. Shy. He picked the rending rod up, unwilling to leave it behind and headed for her.

  His knees battered taller grass as he stepped around the headstones, needing to pay attention in order not to trip over them since they were not set in straight rows. As he arrived at the cleanhouse, he saw no light at all, though the door, he found, was unlocked. That’s what the sound must have been, the locking bar falling against the door frame.

  He took the handle of the door in his grip, and stopped. Shy is out in this cold, in nothing but a shift, in the cleanhouse while a prepared body lay there? Kelc shook his head minimally acknowledging how unlikely that was.

  Spider flesh prickled from his toes to his scalp. Panic surged in him. There is no way Varrl left this door unlocked and open. Kelc had definitely heard a noise and saw a person. Now, he couldn’t move. He could hardly think.

  Witchcraft, he thought. A phantom. He raised the rending rod before him, holding it in his sword hand. With his left, he quietly eased his skiver out.

  Kelc realized how heavily he breathed and tried to slow it down. And it’s suddenly greeching freezing, he thought. Witchcraft.

  After a few silent moments, he jumped from the cleanhouse door and pulled it open. The heavy door swung open and clunked against the jamb noisily, hardly rebounding.

  Before Kelc there was…nothing. He eased into the cleanhouse, both the rod and the skiver at the ready. The inside of the cleanhouse lay obscured from his vision, even darker than outside. He cautiously waved his dagger and the rod out before him.

  Afraid he might accidentally stab Shy if she were there, he began whispering for her. “Shy. Shy, are you in here?” Nothing.

  With his next half step, the rending rod hit something, something soft. Kelc sucked in a breath and lurched backward, knowing what he’d done.

  In his left hand, his skiver felt warm in his hand. “Greech!” He put it away. “What happened?” he whispered.

  He’d struck Ilda with the rending rod. Though he couldn’t see her, he knew that she’d be on the angled body plank where Kreg and his father worked on her.

  “Kelc!” hissed Shaia, behind him, halfway between him and the house. He nearly leaped from his skin.

  “Hells,” he hissed back. “Hells.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What?” In the dark, he felt woozy. Worry and panic trampled logic, leaving him reeling. He had done something. “Nothing. I thought I heard someone…No, I did hear someone, and saw them over here. I thought it was you.”

  “You two,” Adda said as she came out the front door in a shift and a robe. “What is happening here?” She raised a lantern up over her head. “Get out from there right now, Kelc.”

  Kreg lazily stepped out behind his mother. “Everything alright?” He wore nothing but undershorts and his boots and he held a sword in his hand.

  “Yes,” Shaia and Adda snapped at him together.

  Varrl’s yelling started even before he got out of bed, curdling everyone’s expression. “What in all the greeching hells is going on around here at this hour? Some of us haven’t gotten any bleeding sleep!” He pushed through the door and stomped out onto the porch, wearing a robe and his boots. “Well!” he demanded.

  “I heard someone in here and then saw…” But it was what Varrl saw that required attention.

  “Kelc, damn it all, why are you walking around with the rod?” Varrl bounded down the stairs past Adda, thro
wing Shaia to the side hard enough that she fell to the ground with a cry. “You need only carry it from the storage to the lawn!” he roared, and the back of his hand caught his youngest son flatfooted, blasting him back. Kelc’s head knocked against the cleanhouse, where he dropped the rending rod.

  “Sir, I…”

  Varrl took his throat in both hands, squeezing it as he pushed him against the cold stone. “You make error after error! You’re soft and slow. It makes me wonder if you’re even my child! Your brother is hale and strong and on his way to honoring this house. Your sister is soon to father sons.” One hand fell from Kelc’s neck only to catch him across the face, scalding his cheek in the frozen air. “But what of you? What are you going to do? Well, Kelc? You’ve two years and you’re free to have industry. What are you going to do?”

  Despite Kelc’s every effort, tears tumbled down his cheeks and he could taste the bitter iron of blood.

  “Father,” Kreggen called, still watching from the porch.

  “Silence, Kreg. Get dressed and finish setting up the funeral. Your brother can’t manage it.” Varrl leaned in until his breath washed over Kelc. “You disgust me, boy. I’d be a happier man if I had but one son.”

  A knee blasted into Kelc’s gut, awakening many faded hurts from the previous week’s sparring. He doubled over but was brought back upright by another knee, this one pounding into his neck and chest.

  “Never touch this rod again. It’s not for you. You aren’t worthy of it.” With that, Varrl picked the rod from the ground and whipped it through the air, smashing his son across the face with it.

  “Ehn!” Kelc grunted as he dropped to all fours, his left eye and cheek suddenly blazing from the blow. Varrl walked away from him, leaving him on the ground. “Shy,” he called, desperate for help.

  “You go near him, daughter, and I will beat you bloody,” Varrl growled. “Get in the house!”

  Shy offered only the sparsest resistance, a momentary frown, before turning and going back inside. Varrl spun back to Kelc.

  “I don’t know what’s going on with you two, but your sister won’t always be there to coddle your hurts, Kelc.” He took two breaths, sending plumes of mist out, frozen vapor illuminated by the lantern that Adda still held up high behind him, her face lost in shadow beneath it. “One day, you’re going to have to rely on no one but yourself. No one else. You. Alone.” He waggled the rendering rod before him. “There’s a terrifying notion.”

  His father turned away from him and ordered Adda back into the house. The lights all extinguished, Kelc lay on the grass, weeping, clutching at his face and chest. Terrified.

  Kelc stared out at the willow at the turn of the dirt road, his dark grey-green eyes locked on the swaying giant, unwilling to drop down to the ground before it. The tree’s long barren branches brushed the winter browned grass gracefully, each breeze bringing another loving caress while filling the air with the serene exhale of nature’s breath passing among the delicate limbs.

  Willing himself to a different existence, so certain that he needed this one no more, he stared at it hard and for so long that he felt as though he sunk beneath the tree’s rough skin and joined the swaying motion within, feeling every creaking fiber of wood as it groaned against the soft breeze. He concentrated with such intensity that he felt as if the world around him fell into darkness, as if he entered the tree itself, became part of it, leaving his misery behind.

  He closed his eyes and reveled in the deep roots that dug into the cool hard earth, ambitious and hungry, incessantly seeking water, the fine hair-like fibers reaching off of the smooth moist fingers as they sifted through the soil and slowly cracked solid rock, seeking another drink.

  The breeze gusted hard enough to lift Kelc’s bangs, swirling his auburn hair back for a moment before letting it drop back into place. His eyelids slid open and he let out a deep breath as he leaned hard into the headstone behind him, allowing the corner of the pinkish granite to dig into his back, pressing against a sore muscle.

  “Do you see him yet?” called out his mother. “Do you see the cart?”

  Kelc straightened up, sitting free of the headstone when he heard her voice, his ribs complaining. “No,” he called back into the house as he climbed to his feet, using the smooth grave marker to help. “Not yet,” he added.

  “Did you clean the pump and bores like your father asked you to?” Adda asked her son for the third time that afternoon, raising her voice to make sure she was heard. Asked me to? Kelc thought. Ordered me to, more like. Threatened.

  “Yes,” he answered, barking the word out again, irritated. “As if I don’t always.” The last words were low and only for him. He spun slowly where he stood, taking in his immediate surroundings, the grave he dug earlier and the orderly pile of dirt next to it, before he ambled in the direction of the cleanhouse.

  Varrl and Kreg drove off to get another body, this one a young girl who’d had some sort of accident. Kreg wasn’t going to come back tonight, but instead rode to get the body with father and then walk to Gold Arbor, a nearby village and look into purchasing a horse. So he can leave, Kelc thought.

  It had been three days since the last rending, and the most recent beating, and Kelc had been largely ignored by everyone. Varrl had ordered everyone to leave him be, to let him grow up. Even Shy had avoided him, though she cast frequent worried glances his direction.

  That morning, before Varrl left, was the first time he’d even spoken to Kelc again, and only to order him to prepare the cleanhouse.

  “Hells,” muttered the young man through gritted teeth.

  The heavy wooden cleanhouse door stood open, allowing the air inside, but the smell of the silvering hit him like it always did, the harsh stink forcing him to wince before his senses remembered that they knew the smell, allowing him to bear it.

  Kelc stepped inside, looking over the embalming equipment, unconsciously plucking a rag from a side table to dust off the bores. The body plank, an angled table for the dead, with ankle straps and a chest belt hanging loosely from the sides, dominated the room. Made of a heavily cured red wood, it shined from constant polishing, as it needed to be absolutely scrubbed after every use to avoid horrid odors and disease.

  Next to it, hooked over a service stand, hung the bores and tubes, each of them fastened to the ludpump, a siphon that pulled the fluids from the body while it injected the silvering into the arteries. A large cylindrical barrel of silvering sat just behind the pump, a hose running into the airtight bunghole in its side.

  Kelc moved to the bores and casually picked one up, lifting the flexible tube with it, rubbing the needle with the cloth. It looked like a bright steel fang, stretching three knuckles in length with the slightest curve and hollow through the center to allow the ludpump to suck the thickening blood of the dead. He inspected the bore for even the slightest smudge before moving to the other, this one on the silvering line. It, too, was perfect.

  He then moved to the pump itself, inspecting its sides for any holes, not that he expected any, but the day one formed the mess would be beyond imagining, and he needed that to not be today. The ludpump looked like a blacksmith’s bellows, but rather than pushing air, the force it generated while being pumped pulled the heavy fluid from the veins of the dead while pushing the thinner caustic silvering in to break it down and replace it. From the pump, he moved to the drainage tank, his least favorite thing.

  The drainage tank, which received all of the fluids from the corpses, stood almost chest high. Its surface offered a distorted brassy reflection of Kelc when he squatted next to it to wipe it down with the rag, narrowing his already thin face by half, pressing his dark eyes and angular nose almost together. He breathed in through his nose, slowly, the smell of silvering and the feint odor of bitter iron strongest there.

  When the tank was full, which it nearly was any time they drained an adult body, it was just part of the job. It needed to be capped, the lid locked down tight as possible by the four pressure clamps
, and hauled out to the blood furnace, where it was pumped out and into the fire, disposing of the fluids.

  When it was empty, it almost made Kelc vomit, turning his stomach. As he stared at it, into it, to the clean bottom, it seemed massive. With time to think about how much fluid it took to fill the tank, to think about the ghoulish job that his father had done all of his life, inheriting the position from his father, the job Kelc would refuse if offered, made him ill.

  How had he done it? How could a person live out here, away from everyone else, with the dead, their mouths sutured shut, their bodies being eaten by worms and bugs? There was nothing, he thought. No reason to be there.

  Kelc knew the answer. His father prided himself on caring for the dead of the nearby towns. It was honor. How else would the spirits pass on to Reman if it weren’t for his work? How else would families have their last farewell, seeing their kin for that one final time before the spirit released its mortal vessel? It was honorable, a service that a man could proudly take to his grave.

  “No,” Kelc muttered to himself. He would never be like his father. “Never.” And yet, there was a part of the job, while caring for the dead, that Kelc truly enjoyed. And maybe, if it was done right… He shook his head slowly, driving such thoughts from his mind.

  He moved to the pigment jars, placing each one just so, making sure that their lids sat right, allowing no air in and none of the dry powder out. The jars were clear so that the color of each pigment was evident at a glance, ranging from light beige to ruddier pinks. Along with the fine brushes resting in the grooved table just beneath them, they allowed Kelc’s father, Kreg, or occasionally Kelc, to color the faces of the bodies, making them look less pale, more alive.