by Deck Davis
1
“The gods will see everything you do,” Mitchell said, “and they’d see it if you freed me.”
“If the gods want to intervene, they’re more than welcome. Let’s give them a few seconds, shall we? Just to make sure that they don’t mind you being here. No…nothing. It appears they are looking elsewhere. I hear there’s a great play on at the auditorium down the road.”
“Do you want gold? I don’t have much, but I can get some. My brother, he owns…”
“No.”
The truth of it all hit Mitchell then. He saw their masks, white and ceramic. The tallest man’s mask was cracked on his left cheek and discolored around his eyes.
He smelled the leather bonds that strapped him to his chair, so tight around his wrists that his fingers were pale and had started to feel tingly as the blood struggled to flow.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Nothing that you can bargain with.”
“Bastards! Just tell me why...”
They wouldn’t answer his pleading after that. Not the first time, not the hundredth. Not when he begged, nor when he shouted. The idea that he thought he could bargain for his life seemed to annoy them, because each time he did, they tightened the straps around his wrists and ankles.
They never took his tongue, and he thought it was because they didn’t care what he said. They didn’t take his eyes, because they wanted him to see. When they started removing his fingers with bolt cutters, they wanted him to watch, they wanted to hear him scream.
He tried reasoning with them until his throat hurt, but he began to realize that was the scariest thing; they didn’t have a reason. When a person had no reason, they had nothing holding them back.
So much pain. It started with the cuts, hundreds of them over his body, each inflicted with a torturer’s precision and designed to tease out the maximum pain, to wrench agony from him like he’d never felt before.
Then the flaying; they’d started with his left hand, the hand he used for his work. They’d stripped the skin from him while he was awake, letting him scream and shout and writhe, but for all he tried, he couldn’t get free. They’d bound him too tightly, bound him by his own attempts to buy freedom.
“What did I do to you?” he shouted, but they didn’t answer.
This wasn’t right. He was just a leatherworker, damn it! He’d married Lorraine as soon as they had both come of age, and he’d never strayed from her. He’d never hurt anyone, never inflicted pain. The worst he could be accused of was cheating at a game of cards in the Slug and Apple inn, but the pot had been just two silver coins.
Surely that wasn’t the reason for this hell?
No, it wasn’t, he told himself. Because these people had no reason.
“Just talk, gods damn it. Please, one word, anything! Whatever you want to know, I’ll tell you. Whatever you need, you can have it!”
No answer.
“Is it making you hard? Is that what it is?”
When he realized that no pleading would save him from the agony, he tried to retreat into his mind. To think about Lorraine and the kids, about Tommy and how he would be waiting at home for him to get back. He was supposed to take him to the market and buy him what he’d need for his first day at the Queen’s academy.
He’d been scared of the day when the academy mages would come to collect his son, but Lorraine had felt it worse.
“Write to them. Cancel it, tell them we aren’t letting him enroll.”
“He’s going to have a better future than we could have given him,” Mitchell said.
Lorraine wouldn’t look at him.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ll see him when he comes home for holidays. It isn’t a prison.”
“It feels like I’m giving them a part of myself. He’s my boy.”
“I’ll miss him too, but him going to the academy, learning with them…it’s the best we could have hoped for,” said Mitchell.
But now Lorraine and Tommy and little Lijah seemed eons away in another life, and he was here, bound to this chair in this crypt of a room with the robed figures staying silent as they stripped his skin from him.
It was then that Mitchell faced a fact about himself; something he didn’t admit out loud to his captors, but he knew to be true.
That if the Gods offered him release there and then, he’d have traded Lorraine and Tommy and Lijah for it, just to get away from the pain.
What kind of a man was he?
Hours passed. Days. He screamed, vomited, cried, defected. The smell shamed him even with the pain, but his tormentors didn’t remark on it. They simply bathed him and dressed him in silence, and this was the only time they were gentle. After that, they unmanned him with every cut, broke him down piece by piece.
He shouted questions, begged them to tell him why. He cried for his family, he offered bribes, tried to put guilt on them.
They never answered.
And when they’d flayed his left arm, then his right, and then started on his chest, he begged for something else. The only thing that would end it.
They wouldn’t let his body give up; they forced potions into his mouth, set broken bones into place. Since they wouldn’t let his body surrender, then his mind had to instead.
“Kill me,” he said, spit and blood bubbling from his lips, his voice barely a whisper, the agony of hundreds of cuts and stripped skin burning in him.
He couldn’t look at his reddened flesh. The pain clouded his mind so that he could barely see Lorraine’s face now. More than a decade together, all hidden by a fog of pain. All he could hear were their dim voices in his mind. Was this all it took to make a man forget his family and pray for death?
“Where’s dad?” Tommy would say. “Why’s he so late?”
He couldn’t think of home anymore. He was so hurt, so full of agony, he just wanted to die. He begged them for its release, because even if he’d never see his family again, at least it would free him from his torture.
So, when a voice said to him, “It is time for you to die,” he broke down.
A bitter yet sickening happiness flooded him. He cried tears of the sourest joy. An end to it, finally. Time to die. Time for the agony to finish. Even if they wouldn’t tell him why, at least they’d give him death.
They couldn’t hurt him anymore in death.
“He’s about to croak,” said a voice. “His pulse is slower than a legless cat crawling through mud.”
“Then send him on his way. I have an appointment with the barber at twelve, and I missed the last one. I hate it when my hair grows over my ears.”
A robed man held a dagger to his throat and cut him, each inch of the arc spreading pain through his flesh, and his life webbed away, and finally, finally, he was free from their torment.
He drifted into the sleep of death, where pain couldn’t touch him anymore.
And then he woke up.
They were standing in front of him in their robes. It was nighttime now, his fifth in that crypt by his count, but it was impossible to say how accurate that was.
“You…you promised. You said you’d kill me.”
“And I always keep a promise.”
“But why am I…”
“You might have straw for brains, but surely you have heard of necromancy?” said the voice.
He had, and it sent a chill through him so violently that he wanted to be sick.
“If only death were the escape that you’d hoped,” said the robed person. “But alas; sometimes, it is a new beginning.” Then he turned to the others. “Start on his legs next, but keep his skin intact. Don’t tear the tattoos.”
He knew what they’d done, now. They’d given him the death he had begged them for, only
to bring him back with their arts.
They’d brought him back so they could begin his torture afresh.
It didn’t begin straight away, though. They tended him as well as they could; set bones, cleaned wounds and let them heal, applied a salve to his raw flesh where they had stripped away his skin. One of them must have been a healing mage, because there was no alchemy in the land that should have been able to keep him alive and free from infection.
One of them, a woman who never took the hood down from her head, even spoke to him in tender whispers as she cleaned him.
She squeezed his shoulder when he sobbed, and she read a story to him; The Shadow of the Endless Night. It was a story he knew well, because it was from a collection called The Scarlett Tales, and his mother used to read it to him.
They didn’t just repair his body; they repaired his mind, too. The others talked with him then, and they were kind. Their conversations were all fluff; they told him nothing of himself, nor did they ask about his life.
They gave him hope, though. They dangled the possibility of escape; that maybe if he paid them, if he agreed to tell nobody about this, he could go.
“If we let you run back to your family, can we trust you to keep your word?” said one.
“I promise!”
“I believe you.”
Relief flooded through him, reaching the sliver of his mind untouched by pain.
Maybe now that they’d tortured him, killed him, and brought him back, they were done.
Then, just as he began to believe he might see Lorraine and Tommy again, they took out their knives and their whips and their hooks and they set upon him again.
2
It was sign that a problem was bad when Jakub would rather face a clan of swampgators than face the issue itself.
Then again, the swampgators might have been all hide and bone and teeth, but luckily the academy swampgators were tame. Having lived in the academy grounds for centuries now, each successive generation became less hostile than the next.
Groundsman Nipper came out to feed them every two days, and he was so comfortable around them that it wasn’t unusual to see him get on the ground and wrestle with them.
Today, though, the swampgators were making a hell of a noise. It sounded like wind wheezing out of a torn bagpipe.
“Something’s got them agitated,” said Ludwig, Jakub’s demonic hound.
“Don’t pay them any attention. Nipper says they’ve lived around the academy so long they don’t even notice we’re here.”
“No, they’re crowding around something. What is it…no! Jakub, it’s one of their young. It’s dead.”
The gators were in a circle. Eight of them, the older ones with worn scales and pale eyes, the younger ones leaner and swishing their tails. In the center there was a little gator the size of Jakub’s palm. If it had been alive, it would have been cute.
“Poor thing,” he said.
“Lucky we have a necromancer here.”
“No, Lud. Irvine will shit a pile of rocks. I have to get permission to resurrect anything on academy grounds. If I wanted to bring back a fly I’d have to finish enough paperwork to wipe out a forest.”
“Have a heart,” said Ludwig.
“The day of my inquiry isn’t the day to start breaking rules.”
“Look at them. They’re grieving for it…”
“Damn it,” said Jakub. “You’ve got that annoying ability to pull on my heart strings, you know that? You’re like an emotional puppet master. Keep your floppy ears open and tell me if you sense anyone coming.”
He took his soul necklace from underneath his shirt. Good – it was three-quarters blue, which meant he had enough soul essence. He’d taken the essence from a dead deer that groundsman Nipper had found in the woods. It had succumbed to blight rot so there was no question of bringing it back, but at least in death its essence would help the baby swampgator.
He pressed his thumb tattoo and let his spell list appear in front of him.
Jakub Russo
Necromancer
Rank: Novice Lvl 3
[IIIII ]
Glyphline 1: Soul Harvest
Essence Grab [2]
Draw soul essence from the dead for use in necromancy.
Health Harvest [2]
Convert soul essence into a healing wind.
Glyphline 2: Resurrection
Minor Creature Resurrection [1]
Resurrect small animals
Last Rites [2]
View the last few minutes of a corpse’s life
Death Puppet [1]
Temporarily re-animate a corpse and step into it
Glyphline 3: Death Bind
Summon Bound [2]
Summon your bound animal from the Greylands
He spoke the spellword of Minor Creature Resurrection and let soul essence drift from his necklace and over to the gator. The other beasts shuffled back when they saw the mist, and the younger ones snapped at it while the older gators just watched, blinking their slit eyes.
*Necromancy EXP Gained!*
[IIIIIIII ]
The baby gator stirred. It flicked out one leg, then another, and then it stood and looked at its family.
The gators greeted it with their own sounds, happy ones this time, and Jakub couldn’t help smiling as he saw the joy spread from gator to gator.
“Doesn’t it feel good to do something nice?” said Ludwig.
Jakub wasn’t sure that it did. He knew right from wrong, and he always hoped that in the times he needed to listen to his heart, it’d tell him to do the right things.
But when he actually did something good, he didn’t feel a glow. Now, using his necromancy to bring the gator back, he hadn’t taken anything from it himself.
Did that make him cold, or just practical?
“Kortho says having a big heart gets you into trouble if you listen to it too much. Maybe he’s got a point,” he said.
“Better than not having one. Should we head back to the academy?”
“It’s not time yet,” said Jakub.
The academy building was way behind them, and Jakub was keeping it that way for now. Thickets of shrubs and trees covered their left, blocking the mana and sword training fields from view. To their right was the Path of the Returning, which was the road that graduates took when returning from field assignments completed in the name of the academy and the queen.
They didn’t always return alive, either.
“Let’s run through it again. Be harsher this time,” said Jakub. “Irvine is going to grill me like I’m a fat rump steak.”
Ludwig prowled in front of him with his tail swishing, just happy to be on the surface instead of in the Greylands, the world between life and death. On his last assignment, Jakub had levelled his Summon Bound spell from [1] to [2], and with this, Ludwig’s form had changed. It was still spectral in its blue haze, but the ghostliness was dulled a little, and parts of him looked real.
Another level or two and who knew, maybe he’d be indistinguishable from a real dog.
“I’m being as harsh as I can. It doesn’t come easily to me,” said Ludwig.
“This isn’t tea time with besties, Lud. They’re going to tear me apart in there. They’ll try to put all the blame for failing on me.”
“They’re academy instructors. They aren’t out to get you.”
“When you graduate by the skin of your teeth, it’s wise not to completely mess up your first assignment. They’re going to put the heat on me like a hog over a fire, and it’ll be instructor Irvine turning the spit. Come on; pretend you’re him.”
“So, Novice Russo,” said Ludwig. “Are you so incompetent, so moron-brained, that you can’t finish a simple task?”
“Woah, Lud. Are you being Irvine there, or yourself?”
“Too harsh?”
“Tone it down a little.”
Ludwig cleared his throat. “Can you tell me why you didn’t recover the body of the traitor? Furthermore, p
lease explain how a master necromancer received a fatal wound while in your presence?”
Good questions, and ones he was sure to get asked by the panel of instructors. So, what was he going to say? He either stuck with the truth, or gave a version of it. The truth with a perfumed twist.
The trouble was, he wasn’t much of a liar.
Jakub tried for an answer, but he struggled to order it into a coherent narrative.
“Saying it in my head is one thing,” he said, “but why do words always get jumbled up when you speak them out loud?”
“It’s only me here. If you can’t say it to me…”
“They say your conscience acts out when you’re going against it, don’t they? Maybe the version I’m giving is too much of an excuse. Maybe my conscience wants me to take more of the blame.”
“Keep calm, and tell the truth.”
“Let’s run through it again.”
“Maybe we should leave it, Jakub. A person can sound like they’re lying when their story is too rehearsed. People telling the truth don’t need to memorize what happened.”
“Some instructors have a way of making the truth sound false, even in your own head. Especially one who has hated my guts since I got here. Irvine has been looking for an excuse, and unless I can tell things the right way today, he’s gonna get it.”
“The academy is too poor to keep you away from field work for long. It must cost a fortune to train up a necromancer until he’s ready for assignments,” said Ludwig.
“It costs even more to tolerate failure. I wouldn’t put it past them to take a hit so they can prove a point to the other graduates. Well, if I’m gonna be sweeping academy floors this time next year, at least I’ll make ‘em the cleanest they’ve ever been.”
“Keep calm, tell the truth, and you’ll get your next field assignment before you know it. I hope it’s somewhere nicer next time.”
Hopefully Ludwig was right, but his hound didn’t just wear rose-tinted glasses; his eyeballs were drenched in the pink hue. To him, the world was a place of wonder, where bad things rarely happened.
Jakub knew the realities of the academy. He’d graduated as a necromancer by the narrowest of margins, and even then only after Master Kortho had spoken up for him. Failing his first field mission gave the instructors who wanted him out enough reason to cast doubt.
