Unnatural Issue

by Mercedes Lackey

  So when he died, another delegation from the White Lodge would come, take the books away, and leave common things behind.

  They’d take the grammaries and the transcriptions. Maybe they would find something of use in them.

  None of these were the work of Elemental Masters, of course. The Masters had always had their own private printing presses from the time such things existed, and before that, they had had their own private scribes. The books for the training of new Elemental magicians and recording the results—and only the results —of experimentation on the part of a Master were grave and legible volumes intended to be passed down through generations. These grammaries were generally the work of one mage, who might not be altogether sane, and were never intended for any eyes but his or her own.

  Rebecca had never been interested in this, so transcribing the books called up no memories of her. He had spent years transcribing these books, delving deeper and deeper into the cobwebby recesses of the shelves. They were not organized in any particular fashion, not even by date. So it was not terribly surprising when, in the middle of a shelf piled high with the maunderings of half-literate “yarb-healers” and the scratchy notes of self-styled “alchymists” that must have been three hundred years old, he found a bundle of books of a much more recent date.

  Furthermore, although at first he had been certain they were just as worthless as the rest, the deeper he delved into them, the more he felt drawn, even compelled, to work with them—and the more certain he became that these books were not only of some worth, they were of incredible value.

  Especially to him.

  Because these were the private notes and detailed workings of a necromancer.

  Necromancy was related to Earth Mastery, although no Earth Master associated with the White Lodge would ever study such a thing even out of the purest of motives. He had known such books existed, though he suspected that if old Alderscroft had any reason to suspect the Whitestone library held such volumes, the entire Lodge would descend on Whitestone Manor and carry them away to be burned. Technically it was possible to be a necromancer and practice entirely benign magic. Technically the Spiritualist movement was nothing but necromancers—they spoke, or at least tried to speak, with the dead, after all.

  But real necromancers never stopped with merely entreating the dead to appear and listening to whatever they had to say. Real necromancers compelled the dead—both the spirits and the bodies too, if they were strong enough. And as such, in the eyes of most “right-minded” Elemental mages, they and their magic were absolute anathema.

  But then, those same “right-minded” Elemental mages had likely never lost someone so beloved that life was not worth living without her. And the moment that he recognized the books for what they were was the moment when a seed was planted in his heart that had grown to strange proportions indeed.

  These books may well have been the spoils of some former Master who had destroyed the necromancer himself and brought the books home as a kind of trophy. Although the White Lodge of London was very old indeed, not all Elemental Masters in England felt compelled to join it, and Richard was very well aware that not all the Whitestones of the Manor had been on cordial terms with the Huntmaster of the White Lodge of London. Someone who was not part of the Lodge could do whatever he wanted to with the trophies of his combat.

  It had not truly occurred to him at first that he could actually use these books. He had merely allowed himself to be lost in the fantasy of bringing her spirit to speak to him, so that he could beg her forgiveness for leaving her alone, for not being there in her dark hour of suffering and need.

  But then . . . then he began to think. Why shouldn’t he bring her back? Surely she longed for him as much as he longed for her. It was the cruel will of Heaven that kept her from him. Furthermore, it was Heaven that had allowed her to die, and not any lack of devotion to him. But enough power could break the gates of Heaven itself, at least for a single soul. So why shouldn’t he? Though it might be cold comfort to have only a faint ghost for company, it was better than no comfort at all.

  So, in the past six months, he had begun to try.

  His first effort at calling her back been a simple one and no more hazardous than anything some simple farmer’s wench would perform on All Hallows. Well . . . perhaps a bit more hazardous. A dairymaid would simply recite this “Spell to See the Beloved Dead” while staring into a mirror, and if it worked, she would see the person she longed to view looking over her shoulder.

  But the necromantic version enchanted the mirror first, so that not only would the spirit summoned be compelled to answer, but once present, it would be caught and held in the mirror itself. When you looked in the mirror, you would not see your own reflection. You would see the spirit caught in the mirror.

  He worked on that mirror for three days.

  To no avail.

  He performed the incantation perfectly. Everything was correct. He had not left out a single step.

  But nothing whatsoever happened. There was not even a shadow in the mirror, a suspicion of a figure.

  In a rage, he dashed the wretched thing to the floor and shattered it, grinding it to powder beneath his boot heels, then flung himself into his unmade bed for a torrent of furious weeping. He had been so sure, so sure it would work! He had put all the force of his formidable will behind it!

  And yet . . . nothing.

  His fury collapsed as his strength and energy ran out, and his choking sobs turned from angry to heartbroken.

  It must have been his own fault. He was not single-minded enough. He must have allowed his concentration to slip at a crucial moment. Perhaps one of the components had not been sufficiently pure.

  Then, from a state of heartbreak, he slipped, as always, into a state of despair. How could he ever have thought this would work? He should have known better. He didn’t deserve Rebecca in life, and why should that have changed?

  He lay in bed without changing his clothing or even getting up to eat for three days, alternating between despair and anger.

  Anger won.

  At the end of three days he rose, more than ever determined to restore Rebecca to his side.

  He tried incantation after incantation, spell after spell. All were utterly unsuccessful, and he was going nearly mad with frustration. He knew necromancy worked! He had fought necromancers before! So why did these spells keep failing? What was it that they did that he was not doing?

  And then, finally, he came across a passage that he must have skimmed over a hundred times—

  These are but Trifles, and apt to Fail, unless the Spirit is willing to Come, and the Veil between Life and Death is thin. The farther from the Time of its Death the Spirit is, the less it can feel the Compulsion of the Living Mage, and the harder it is to find its Way to the Living World. Only if the Mage is willing to Pay the Highest of Prices can the Veil be thinned enough by Magical means to allow the Reluctant Spirit, or that held Fast by the Other World, to be pulled Back.

  Now . . . now he began to understand just what that passage was (rather coyly) saying. “The Highest of Prices” could only mean Blood Magic.

  It had been nearly twenty years since Rebecca had been taken from him. That was a very long time indeed. Even spirits that wanted to remain faded over time, and for all of his trying he had not seen a single sign to tell him that Rebecca remained on this side of the Veil.

  Of course not. She had always been the most docile, sweet-natured, and biddable of women, which was something of a disadvantage when what he wanted was for her to rebel against those who would insist that she pass through the Great Door and into the Light. She had, in fact, probably done exactly that the moment that her body gave up the uneven struggle against blood loss and pain. She had been on the Other Side hours before he had arrived at her bedside. And while he had no doubt whatsoever that he could persuade her to remain if he forced her back, until he actually had her standing in some form before him, her current guardians would see to it tha
t no voice reached her ethereal ears but theirs.

  It was a moment of great epiphany for him—and while on the one hand it meant that in order to get her back he would have to engage in the very sort of magic he had always fought against, on the other, well . . . he knew that this would be easier than anything he had tried until now. Blood Magic always was. There would be no need to spend his own strength; the power of the magic came from the life force he would take. The younger the sacrifice, the greater the life force, as all the years the creature would have lived translated directly into greater power.

  This was why those who sought magic and had no power of their own went straight to Blood Magic. If you had the tools, the sacrifice, and the will, you didn’t need your own power.

  He did not for a moment hesitate when he realized what it was that he would have to do. He opened the third volume of the set, the one he had set aside when he realized it was a treatise on Blood Magic, and began to study it.

  The words fairly leaped off the page and into his mind, where they burned themselves into his brain. For months now, he had lived, breathed, eaten, and slept his studies. When the house was asleep, he would slip down into the yard and find some animal that no one would miss—kittens and puppies (that were going to be drowned anyway, no doubt), the odd hen or rabbit. These were his instruments of practice, learning how to shape the spells, how to eke the most power out of the sacrifice. It was easily done; the remains went into the privy-hole, the rest was trivial to clean up. The more he practiced, the more he began to realize that he actually was going to be able to do more, much more, than bring Rebecca’s spirit back. If he was bold enough. He was intelligent, he had a strong, trained will, and he had a considerable amount of personal power.

  One thing he would not do. He would not reanimate what was left of her beautiful body with the spirit he would capture. That might do for a necromantic servant, but not for his beloved. No, Rebecca’s spirit would have a new home. She would live again!

  He could do that. He would need to disinter her, of course, for he would need her bones. But on that framework, he could create a body for her. The spells were there. He could actually restore her body. Not reanimation but restoration, building her from power and blood, if he could just find the right sacrifice—or sacrifices. It might take more than one. They would have to be human, of course.

  And that led him to the first problem. Where would he find them? He couldn’t sacrifice his own servants; they would be missed. He himself might be isolated from the rest of the community, but the servants were very much part of it.

  Perhaps the common itinerant laborers that came at harvest time . . . or perhaps the Gypsies. If he took Gypsies, though, he would have to make sure he got the entire group. And he was just one man . . . no, that was out of the question. He could wait until harvest. The traveling laborers were often lone creatures, or at best traveled in pairs. He could dress like one, say he’d found work at Whitestone, lure his victim to one of the outbuildings no longer used, ply the sacrifice with liquor. It would be easy . . .

  But what if someone saw him? What if one of the servants grew suspicious? Worse still, what if he somehow picked someone who was expected, who was supposed to meet with a larger group?

  For the first time, he wished he lived near a city. The cities were full of people who would never be missed if they vanished. Could he go there? Could he make forays, like a big game hunter, into the city to stalk his prey?

  But how? Once, perhaps, but over and over again?

  How would he even get there? He didn’t have a motorcar, and he wouldn’t know how to drive one. If he took the pony and cart or the lone riding horse, it would be missed, and he’d probably be caught up as a thief.

  Then when he got there—how would he ever find his way about?

  The problems seemed insurmountable, but he kept studying, kept trying to find a way around the problem. Surely he was not the only necromancer to confront such difficulties!

  Then, as he delved deeper still, he realized that he did not need to find several sacrifices, he only needed to find one, a single perfect one.

  Because he did not need to create a new shell. That was doing things the hard way. There was a much, much easier way.

  If he dared—and if he could find everything he needed, which included an even more exactingly perfect victim than simple sacrifice—he could oust one soul from the vessel he needed and give the shell to his Rebecca.

  It would shock her, of course. At first, it might well appall her. She had been taught the same things he had, after all. She had been raised to believe that necromancy was utter anathema. But he could persuade her . . . he had always been able to persuade her.

  She would live again, and not within a fragile creation that had been restored by magic—a shell that could just as easily be sundered by magic. No, she would live as a soul, in a perfectly ordinary body, as firmly bound to it as if she had been born into it.

  There was the matter of finding the correct vessel, however. It would have to be someone who would not be missed. It would have to be someone either fourteen or twenty-one—multiples of the powerful number seven. Twenty-eight would be too old, because most women who would not be missed were dead before then—or if not dead, were certainly disease-ridden and gin-raddled, if not worse. Perhaps he could find a suitable widow or spinster, but not without more searching than he was prepared to undertake. And seven was much too young; he wouldn’t have the patience to wait for a child to grow up.

  It would have to be someone who looked as much like Rebecca had as possible, to lessen the shock of the spirit being bound into a new body. The closer the vessel looked to her original form, the more likely she was to settle into it quickly and with few objections.

  Another reason why using a child as a vessel would be inadvisable. Even a fourteen-year-old would be risky. Ideally—twenty-one.

  He brooded over this for many days, trying to formulate a good plan. The largest numbers of young women who would not be missed were among the poor of the cities, and cities . . .

  His initial thoughts on gathering victims had born some fruit.

  Well, cities were not as much anathema to him as they had been. His forays into Blood Magic had skewed his powers rather drastically. No longer were the fauns and Brownies in the least attracted to him, but he could summon kobolds and redcaps, goblins and other unsavory Earth creatures. They thrived on the filth and decay of cities. He had realized that he did not need to hunt, physically, himself. They could search for him, although they were of limited intelligence. Still, even creatures of limited intelligence could recognize a picture.

  Once they had found a suitable vessel, he could . . .

  And that was where he found himself stuck on the same rock again. He had not left the house in so long that he was not sure where to start. It wasn’t as if he could simply help himself to a horse and cart and drive off to the city, then return with a bag full of girl. People would notice. And there was a very good chance he would be caught by the law. He certainly couldn’t entrust such a task to a troll or a kobold, they weren’t bright enough.

  What to do?

  He paced the floor for days, alternating his pacing with fevered forays into the books. Slowly, painfully, he developed a plan. Night and day passed, and he did not pay a great deal of attention, except that at night he had to light candles to read, and by day that irritating old housekeeper kept bringing up food she insisted he eat.

  He came to realize that he was going to have to control some very dangerous creatures if he was going to succeed at this. The redcaps.

  If he could control them, if he could command them not to slaughter his prize, they were capable of abducting someone for him. Unlike trolls and kobolds, abducting victims even from the heart of a city was something they did all the time. Strong, wicked and intelligent, powerful out of all proportion to their small size, and vicious, they got their name from the caps they wore that they kept red with the blood of their vic
tims. Murder was literally meat and drink to them.

  And although scrying did not come easily for an Earth Master, he could do so if he bent all of his will to the task.

  So, if he could get control of some redcaps, he could send out the kobolds and goblins to hunt for him, and when they found someone, he could scry to see how suitable she was. Once he found the right vessel, he could send the redcaps to take her.

  Once they brought her here, he would have to keep her bound in magical sleep in one of the unused rooms on this floor until he was ready. And that opened up another series of problems: There was a time limit to how long he could do that before his victim died of dehydration or became too weak to withstand the shock of being un-souled. So he would have to have everything prepared the moment she entered the house. He would get only one chance once he finally summoned Rebecca.

  He groaned with sudden realization; that opened up yet another series of problems. Once Rebecca was bound into the vessel, how would he explain the presence of a strange woman here, one that just appeared in the upstairs rooms?

  Problems piled on problems . . .

  I shall not give in to such petty obstacles! he swore to himself. I will find a way! I—

  The crowing of a rooster interrupted his thoughts, and he swung his head angrily in the direction of the sound. The window was open. The housekeeper must have done it, under some vague notion of “healthy fresh air.” Through it came not only the “fresh air” but also the infernal clamoring of roosters and birds. Furious at the interruption, he shuffled to the window and made to close it, when movement at the edge of the forest that bordered the dead lawns caught his attention.