by Deck Davis
Jakub felt tension coil inside him. He had an idea what this was.
Soon, the mud and rocks knitted together and took shape in six monstrous forms, humanoid in figure and gorilla-like in their bulk, except made from rock and dirt.
Each was shaped differently and was a product of the earth it had come from; one had a nest of weeds on its back, while another was slightly reddened, maybe from the clay deposits that groundsman Nipper said were all around here.
None of them looked friendly.
11
“Mud golems,” said Mason. “That means there’s a golemite summoner nearby. Bendie; summon your familiar. Until we find the bastard, we can kill the golems all we like but the summoner will just pull more out of his arse.”
It was a chance to prove himself. He wished he didn’t feel like he had to, but with Mason here, with Bendie watching, Jakub wanted to leave them with something to talk about, a lasting impression that wasn’t just ‘the guy who got expelled.’
Bendie rolled up his sleeves to show his warlock glyphline tattoos. Before he could say a spellword, his horse reared up and neighed in pain.
The novice warlock clung to the reins, but the horse drew its front legs up so high that he lost his grip and toppled off.
“Woah, woah,” shouted Norris, as his own horse stomped left and right, unsure whether to bolt or cower. While he looked around, gripping the reins of his animal, a bolt tore through his neck.
Bendie shouted. It wasn’t a word, just a noise; the sound of him losing his cool.
Mason leapt off his horse. “We have a sniper watching us too. Arses on the ground, lads.”
“We need cover,” said Jakub.
The ground shook as the golems advanced on them. Jakub heard a thwacking sound as a bolt smashed into the mud by his feet.
They were pinned down by the sniper, and they were outnumbered against the golems. Not only that, but Mason was right; golemite summoners could only conjure a certain number of creatures at once but when one died, they could summon another as long as they had enough mana and material.
It was six against three – eight if you counted the summoner and the sniper – and their enemy could re-generate their creatures at will.
Bendie tugged on Jakub’s sleeve.
“Bring Norris back. Bring him back, you piece of shit.”
Jakub ignored the insult; he knew Bendie wasn’t thinking logically.
“I’m a novice. I’m not strong enough to resurrect a person even if I had essence.”
Bendie pulled his sleeve harder. Jakub shoved him away but then Bendie was on him again. His eyes had a wildness in them, the sign of panic.
“Bring him back!” he said.
A person panicking in a fight was as dangerous as a man drowning in water. If their minds had snapped, they’d push you under the water to save themselves. Right now, Bendie was going to drag him into the flight path of a bolt.
“Novice Bendie, you need to calm yourself right fucking now,” said Mason.
“No! We’re going to die. We should run.”
Mason punched him in the face, and Bendie went limp and hit the ground.
Jakub crossed another item off his bucket list; see an instructor knock a novice out cold. Tick.
“He’s as much use to us like this as he was awake,” said Mason. “Drag him over to the horse. It’s dead already, so a few more bolts won’t hurt it. The shots are coming from the north, so lay him beside the horse and the bolts can’t reach him.”
Jakub was beginning to see why the other instructors resented Mason being employed even as a contractor; the man was wild.
Mason raised his arms in the air. The brooch on his cape glowed green, and Jakub guessed it was something similar to his own soul necklace.
Jade light spread from the brooch and to Mason’s fingers. The warlock cast the light out, then shouted a word Jakub had never heard before.
Spent mana cracked in the air, the sour smell pinching in his nostrils. The boom of the golems’ steps met with the swirling sound of the warlock’s light, and with a whoosh, the airborne haze took two solid forms.
The first form was a seven-foot-tall, pot-bellied demon with horns that flopped like a peacock’s feathers.
The second was a small, squat creature that was less a defined physical form and more like a splattering of flesh; it was misshaped, lob-sided, and had tentacles writhing from it like worms swimming in a puddle. Its lack of a face only added to its disgusting appearance and its three glowing red eyes blinked in odd intervals to complete the hideous picture.
“Meet Krenick and Gary,” said Mason.
These were Mason’s demons. As a warlock, he had demons bound to him in a similar way Jakub did with Ludwig, with two exceptions; Mason’s bound demons were real once he summoned them, and they were from the Blacktyde, rather than the Greylands.
Mason spoke to the larger, chubby-bellied one. “Krenick, see the novice over there by the horse? Protect him. There’s a bastard shooting bolts, so make sure he doesn’t get hit. If he wakes up, you have permission to knock him out. The boy is a liability.”
“Yeeees master. Right away. I am but a slave.”
“Cut the sarcastic shit, I don’t have time for it,” said Mason. Then, he spoke to his weirder, tentacled splodge of flesh. “Gary, I need you to help with our golem friends here.”
Gary? That thing is called Gary? thought Jakub.
Gary blinked his top eye, then his middle, then his bottom, and he slithered toward the golems, who were just ten feet away now. He made a squelching sound as he moved.
Mason drew his sword in such a refined way that it made a satisfying metal shring sound as it left the sheath. He held it aloft, and mana light danced over the metal and made him look every inch the hero.
Jakub drew his weapon in a much-less an impressive way, getting it stuck on his hilt, wrenching it free, then almost dropping it. His blade was black, blunt, and best used for slicing fruit, but it’d have to do until he looted something better.
“Do they teach necromancers how to fight?” said Mason. “I could use help with the golems.”
“I’ll find the golemite summoner instead,” said Jakub. “No point us killing golems if they keep coming back.”
“Good thinking. Summoners are cowards, so he’ll be out of sight. Near enough to see us, far enough away that he doesn’t feel like pissing himself with fear when he sees a sword.”
Jakub thought about the obvious hypocrisy here; the fact that Mason himself had just summoned two demons, making him a summoner, too.
In the split second that he decided that voicing this thought would be ill-advised, something collided into Mason’s sword and made a ringing sound that buzzed in Jakub’s ears.
He saw a bolt by his feet. “I’ll kill that bastard sniper too,” he said.
Mason nodded. “Watch your arse. If I go back with two dead novices, it’ll come out of my pay.”
Mason roared a battle cry and then tore toward the golems, his hair flapping in the wind, his sword aloft. If Jakub hadn’t have just seen him raise two demons from the Blacktyde, he’d have sworn that the lunatic instructor was a barbarian, not a warlock.
When Mason reached the first golem, he swung his sword as though he was wielding a club; both hands on the hilt, depending on strength to cleave through the golem’s mud body in a spray of dirt. He definitely didn’t rely on finesse.
While Mason dealt with the golems and his demon stood watch over Bendie, Jakub started toward the hill north east of them. Shaped like an arm, it rose fifteen feet into the air, and there was a mound at the peak that offered cover. That must have been where the summoner and maybe even the sniper were hiding.
Jakub rushed to it. A bolt whizzed by his face, so close he couldn’t help but drop to the ground on instinct.
He’s reloading. Get up, he told himself.
He forced himself up and then ran. His calves ached as he sprinted up the hill but he reached the top of it, only to
find it empty.
And then a bolt ripped into his thigh.
Pain tore through his leg. He lost his balance and fell, rolling down the hill, banging his head on a rock at the bottom.
He coughed out a mouthful of dirt. “Shit,” he said, and the word sounded dull in his ears, as though he hadn’t really said it.
The sounds around him dimmed now. He heard a ringing in his ears, and cold seeped over him.
He clenched his fist and pushed himself up to his knees, then wiped mud from his lips.
The longer he stayed still, the more chance he’d get hit again. He needed to move, now. He needed to cut the sniper open before another bolt ripped through him.
Where else can he be hiding?
The bolt had hit his left leg when he’d reached the hill summit, so it must have come from the west.
He knew where the bastard was, but now came the hard part; he was injured and in the open, and he needed to move with a wounded leg.
If only he had a soul necklace, he could have used Health Harvest to heal himself. As it was, he had no essence to use in his spells, no potions to give him a quick fix.
Behind him, he heard Mason’s roars mix with thuds as he swung his sword into one golem after another.
“They’re getting back up!” he heard him shout. “The summoner, novice. Take him out!”
He had to be quick. He needed to fight through the pain.
He checked his leg; the bolt shaft had snapped in half on impact, so the head and a splinter of it was wedged in him.
No sense pulling it out now; it’d make him bleed more and if he lost enough blood, he’d faint.
Find the sniper, find the summoner. It was the only way to finish this.
With a struggle, he got to his feet. His thigh felt numb now, and he knew that was shock setting in; first step numbness, next up would be weakness, nausea, vomiting.
He had to get to them before that happened.
“Over by the bushes!” shouted Mason.
Jakub saw them now; the golemite summoner was a gwarflock; a goblin-like creature whose furry body was covered by a green robe. He wore a hood over his head, but his pointed ears stuck out. He carried a wooden staff in his hand, and the staff was no doubt serving as a focal point for him to channel his mana into.
The sniper, lying beside the summoner and squinting through his crossbow sights, was a man. He was rotund and dressed head to toe in battle leathers, and had a quiver of bolts beside him.
A gwarflock and a man. That was something he could deal with, if only he didn’t need to cross thirty feet of ground while avoiding the sniper’s bolts to get to them.
His thigh wound meant he’d be too slow to sprint, so the sniper would nail him as soon as he rushed toward them. Since they’d already seen him, sneaking up on them was out.
He needed something to give him cover, but what?
12
He couldn’t use necromancy, and he didn’t have a crossbow of his own. He had to either reach them before the sniper could fire a bolt, or kill them from afar.
Knowing what was in his inventory bag off by heart, he knew there was little he could use.
Well, he had to try something.
He took an iron sword from his bag. Lightweight, blunt, and cheap, it wouldn’t be much good in hand to hand combat, but that wasn’t what he had planned.
He held it by the hilt, kept the sniper in his vision, and then threw the sword.
It spun through the air, rotating again and again…before landing ten feet away from the sniper and the summoner.
Damn it.
Maybe Mason would have had enough strength to make that work, but not Jakub.
The sniper raised his crossbow an inch, ready to fire.
“Shit!”
Jakub dropped to the ground. It made him a harder target, but still a target.
And then one figure ran through the middle of the battleground, followed by as second giving chase.
“Get down, you fucking idiot,” shouted Mason.
The first figure was Bendie, awake and back on his feet and panicking in a way that was too shameful for a warlock, even a novice. He wasn’t looking where he was going, instead just sprinting in the first direction he’d seen, desperate to escape the battlefield.
“Come back, young novice!” shouted the portly demon as it chased him, its horns flopping as it ran.
The sniper let a bolt loose. It caught Bendie on his ankle, ripping through skin. The novice crashed and hit the ground, his nose crunching on contact with the soil.
Nearby, Mason pivoted his whole body, cleaving a mud golem in two, sending shards of dirt and rock flying around.
Jakub struggled to his feet. His pulse hammered as shock worked through him. Though his thigh was numb, the wound was triggering his body’s response, and he felt a dull sickness in his stomach.
Not long now before he’d be useless. A body’s response to a wound was shock; to make the wounded person useless. Some defence.
It was now or never.
With the sniper reloading and the summoner focused on raising one of his dead golems, Jakub ran toward them, holding the sickness back, willing the cold and the shock to leave him.
He covered the ground as the sniper clicked the bolt into place. The man looked up.
“Oh, shit,” he said, raising his hands.
Jakub swung his sword. The blade carved into his head, meeting resistance on his skull, chipping bone and making blood spurt.
He tried to wrench it free but it was stuck fast in the man’s head. It didn’t matter; the man was dead now, his eyes blank, his fingers losing their grip on his crossbow.
The summoner pointed his staff at Jakub.
Jakub left his sword stuck in the sniper’s head and instead grabbed the man’s crossbow, levelled it at the summoner, and pulled the trigger.
It was a poor shot.
He’d aimed for the summoner’s neck, but he was unpracticed with the weapon, and even at close range he missed his target by two feet.
But while he’d missed the summoner’s neck, the bolt had found home in his gut.
The gwarflock fell onto his back, groaning.
Jakub stumbled over to him, and then crashed down onto the gwarflock chest knee-first, making the gwarflock wheeze out all his breath.
With no weapon to draw, Jakub put his hands around the gwarflock’s neck and squeezed, tensing his muscles to fight through the summoner’s struggles, putting all his energy into closing his windpipe, suffering desperate scratches and punches until the gwarflock was limp.
13
The clearing was quiet now, with only Bendie’s groans breaking the silence. Despite the numbness in his thigh disappearing and the pain throttling back, Jakub was determined not to join Bendie in his screaming.
On top of that, his hands felt strange now, as if he could still feel the gwarflock’s flesh in his grip. He could still hear its desperate chokes in his mind, only they sounded more pathetic now.
Mason wouldn’t have felt bad about it. Or, he wouldn’t have admitted to it, anyway, but Jakub wasn’t worried about confessing the truth in his own mind – killing felt wrong. No matter what it was, the human soul was designed to feel heavy when you took a life.
Right now, there were other things to worry about.
The splintered bolt was stuck in his thigh just above his knee. There was blood smeared around it, and dribbles of it had stained his trousers. He needed to pull it out, but he needed something to stop the blood when he did.
Mason passed him a vial. “Try and save some of it,” he said. “The academy is stingy with its potions. The alchemists act like its gold dust.”
Jakub popped the cork, smelling the fruity pinch of restoration potion. He gripped the bolt near the shaft, but the smallest movement sent tremors of agony through him.
Knowing Mason was watching him, knowing that if he could just hold in the pain then he would look tougher than Bendie, Jakub breathed deeply.
&
nbsp; “Here, let me,” said Mason.
“I’ve got it.”
Jakub knew the basic of field dressing and how to deal with combat wounds; it was a class that everyone in the academy had to take. He’d even put it into practice in his first assignment, when a creature with giant claws had sliced his right thigh, leaving him with a scar.
He gripped his sword and bit the hilt, and then wrenched the bolt free. Pain exploded in him, coursing from his thigh and buzzing in his skull. It was a wave of it at first, but the wave subsided with each throb until it reached its plateau.
He dabbed restoration potion on the wound, then watched it close until it was half the size.
Knowing the limits of restoration potion, he corked the vial and passed it back to Mason. He’d have to let the rest of the wound heal naturally, but at least the bleeding had stopped.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Can you walk? Need me to take you back to the academy?”
“Yeah, they’d love that wouldn’t they? I’m good, thanks.”
He got to his feet, limped a few steps, and then the pain lessened as the restoration potion numbed his skin.
“I’m a man of my word,” said Mason. “Whatever loot you find, it’s yours. I’ll check on my little warlock friends here.”
“You don’t seem too upset that one of them died.”
“The beauty of working for an academy with a necromancy department is that death is rarely the end.”
“They might have used up all the academy’s soul essence supplies bringing Abbie back.”
“I didn’t think of that. Irvine’s gonna take that out of my pay.”
“You really don’t give a shit, do you?”
“A man’s got to look out for himself. This is a job, nothing more. You’ll have to learn that yourself, now you’re out of the academy.”
“What about Abbie? What happened to her, Mason? Nobody will tell me anything.”
“How about you tell me why you’re so interested. I’m older than you, and I’ve seen a lot of the world. I know what concern for just a friend looks like, and this isn’t it.”
“We used to go out,” said Jakub.
