The Necromancer’s Light by Tavia Lark
❧
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shae
Over the next few days, Shae practices riding. Mostly at the walk, and a few tries at the jolting trot. Even half an hour a day leaves him impossibly sore, but he doesn’t mind. He almost regrets getting used to the way Duchess moves under him, and the way he has to move with her to stay on comfortably. The less he has to focus on the mechanics of riding, the more he’s able to ruminate on the true mystery plaguing him.
Why the fuck is he being so nice to me?
It has to be some sort of paladin thing. Maybe Arthur’s sworn to Vara to always be polite even to disgusting dark mages. Maybe the Radiant Order only accepts helpful human-shaped herding dogs. The man smiles at him. Which probably doesn’t mean anything. Arthur’s the sort of man who smiles at everyone.
Shae’s just not used to counting as everyone.
Riding at the walk is more effort than it looks, and a while into the day’s journey, Shae’s ready to return to his own two feet. As soothing as it is to move along with Duchess’s steady gait, he’s about to reluctantly ask to get down when a flash of ice burns his right hand. He flinches.
One of his rings, alerting him to danger.
“What is it?” Arthur asks, ever observant. He tugs Duchess to a halt.
Shae drops the reins to look at his hand, touching each ring to confirm—yes, the one on his middle finger. Ghosts, restless and hungry. He tries to remember the map in his head. He’s been so distracted by Arthur and learning to ride and the summer breeze in the trees and Arthur, but he thinks there should be a village up ahead. “How near are we to Hannick?”
“Another mile or so.”
That’s as far as his ring can sense. Shae twists his ring and takes stock of his strength. He feels good right now, his soul replenished by the paladin’s constant warmth. He can handle a few ghosts, if the villagers don’t get in his way.
“Then Hannick has a ghost problem,” he says. “Uh. Help me down?”
Arthur’s broad hands settle firmly around his waist, and Shae’s suddenly breathless. His blood pulses towards Arthur’s touch, his skin warming. He manages to swing his leg over awkwardly, then lets himself down. The ground is farther away than he remembered, and with wobbly legs, he falls back against Arthur’s chest.
He jerks out of Arthur’s grasp before he combusts on the spot.
Arthur slides Duchess’s reins back over her head, now that Shae isn’t pretending to use them. “Are ghost problems something you deal with?”
“If the locals pay me.” His lips twitch in an unhappy grin. “And they always pay me.” If they don’t, he threatens to raise the dead right back up again if they don’t. That generally works very well. Arthur would probably disapprove, because Arthur’s a nice person.
Shae can’t afford to be nice.
***
The ghost problem isn’t in Hannick, though. At least, not the inhabited part of it. The paladin’s aura drives off the worst of the cold, but Shae still feels the grief and frustration permeating the landscape, and it leads them out onto an overgrown dirt path. The only footprints Shae sees belong to animals.
Half a mile later, they find the burned-out church. Years of rain and wind have swept away the ash, but the remaining stone walls are still blackened and crumbled, the wooden roof and doors and window frames entirely missing. The building looks like a corpse itself, and Shae can’t help shuddering with the chill and stepping closer to Arthur.
Maybe too close. His arm brushes Arthur’s elbow, and Arthur naturally moves away.
“This looks like a Harvest Lord chapel,” Arthur says. “Hannick must have rebuilt it elsewhere after the fire.” There’s no question they would have rebuilt. The people of Charain are loyal to their gods. Shae doesn’t feel that sort of devotion to the divine, but he understands it.
He’s about to suggest they look around back for a graveyard when another alarm ring stings his right hand. His forefinger, this time, the plain silver band that alerts for—
“Demons,” Arthur says, hand on his sword hilt. “Not close, but we should be careful.”
Shae forgets sometimes that Arthur has magic too, that his brilliant aura is more than just the best source of life and warmth Shae has ever found. “Let’s find the graveyard quickly.”
The graveyard behind the church was once fenced in, but all that remains of the fence is the occasional splintered post. Stone blocks and statues as grave markers all line up in rows, surrounded by the encroaching forest. Not all the trees are intruders, though. Shae spots the fruit trees he recognizes from other graveyards dedicated to Maiza, the Harvest Lord. More fruit trees and more gravestones climb up the hillside and farther into the forest, spilling out from the original boundaries.
“The first spell I do is just to find the right body, before I call out the ghost,” Shae says. He’s had to practice necromancy in front of his hired guards a few times over the past year, and he learned the hard way that it goes better if he explains some of it first. “You don’t have to look at anything, especially when I’m done digging, just stay close.”
Arthur loops Duchess’s reins over her head and ties them up away from her feet instead of tethering her. “Is this dangerous?”
“Very.” Shae shrugs out of his coat and slings it over his shoulder, then starts rolling his left shirtsleeve up to his elbow. “Only if something goes wrong, but I expect something to go wrong. There shouldn’t be new ghosts in a graveyard this old.”
A ghost that lingers long enough turns into a fiend or curse or parasite. Something has shaken this spirit from its place of rest within the past ten years, and Shae has a nervous feeling it’s more recent than that. He glances around as he draws his knife from his belt.
“There shouldn’t be demons this far from Lyrisenia either,” Arthur says. “We should—what the fuck are you doing?”
Arthur seizes Shae’s right wrist, stopping the knife’s blade an inch away from his bare left forearm. Shae jolts, nearly dropping the blade. The paladin’s familiar warmth floods through him, overriding the pain of Arthur’s iron grip. His eyelids flutter, and he’s half a breath from moaning at the contact.
“What the fuck?” Arthur says again, and Shae slams back into his normal state of mind.
Which is currently extremely annoyed. He yanks his arm forcibly from Arthur’s grasp. “I’m practicing necromancy,” he snaps. “Because I’m a necromancer. Look away if you get squeamish.”
“I’m not squeamish,” Arthur snaps back. And Shae isn’t great at reading people, but he looks more angry than disgusted. “Excuse me for reacting the same way anyone would react to you taking a blade to yourself.”
That one sentence deflates all Shae’s annoyance, leaving only confusion and a weird twinge behind his ribs. He’s cut himself in front of plenty of people, clients and hired mercenaries, and they all looked away in disgust or stared in sick fascination. Not one of them ever tried to stop him.
“Sorry,” Shae says after a long moment. He’s not sure who’s more shocked by the apology, him or Arthur. “I should have explained. I need blood to find the disturbed body. It’s either that or dig up every grave on this hillside.”
Arthur doesn’t look happy, but he steps back to give Shae space. “Fine. Do your work.”
The wind rustles through the trees, and Duchess moves to another patch of grass. The sky is a perfect eggshell blue. Were it not for the graves and Shae’s sense of unease, the day would be idyllic.
Shae brings the blade to his arm again and slices, quick and shallow, a few inches from the elbow. A thin line of blood wells up immediately, bright against his fair skin. It’s hardly the first mark on his arm. Faint silver and pink lines pattern his skin, most of them deliberate. Nobody’s ever looked closely enough, nor cared about them, and Shae suddenly feels self-conscious with Arthur here.
But Arthur doesn’t say anything else.
Shae shifts his grip on the knife and murmurs a few words in Lyrisenian. Any language would work, so he uses the tongue he grew up with to say: “Let blood call to bone. Let bone call to blood.”
A tendril of cold snakes from his heart through his veins, spills out from the cut. The blood pools on the surface of his skin instead of falling, and after a moment a round drop of it the width of his thumbnail rises up into the air. It hangs still, trembling, then flies slowly forward.
Shae follows the drop of blood, careful to step around the graves in his way. He’d rather not disturb anyone unnecessarily. They’ve earned their rest. He hears Arthur following behind him, but all his attention is focused on the drop of blood leading him towards the back of the graveyard.
The blood stops at a grave right on the edge of the old fenceline. An overgrown heap of earth guarded by a shoulder-height statue. The statue’s arms cross over its chest, and its face looks up to the sky, but its features have long been worn away by time. Man or woman, young or old, it’s impossible to say. The drop of blood falls, splashing into the crumbling soil and sinking in.
Shae waits to see if the ghost will appear, disturbed by the nearby necromancy. But the graveyard remains quiet and peaceful.
“I’m going to use a spell to dig up the grave,” he says. He thinks he can spare the energy, with Arthur’s aura pulsing around him, and they don’t have a shovel.
“Do you need help with anything?” Arthur still looks tense, and Shae can’t tell whether that’s disgust at disturbing a grave or lingering anger from Shae cutting his arm. But when Shae shakes his head, Arthur just takes a step back and looks out into the surrounding forest. “I’ll keep watch, then.”
Shae stops himself from grabbing Arthur’s arm and dragging him closer. Two paces away is close enough, he shouldn’t be greedy. Instead, he kneels at the foot of the grave and whispers in Lyrisenian, “Please excuse me.”
Not a spell, just an apology, before he places his palms on the ground. His bare fingers dig into the cold soil, and he opens himself up to the energy remnants of the corpse below. He weaves the energy into the dirt, a foot below the surface, and lifts. The surface rises up, grass roots tearing from their moorings. He tilts the whole thing, and the earth slides to the side, piling away from Shae and Arthur.
The ghost should have appeared by now, but it hasn’t.
He repeats the process layer by layer. He’s maybe a foot from the coffin lid when a low growl sounds throughout the graveyard. Arthur swears, and steel sings as he unsheathes his sword. His aura pulses, blinding bright. Shae flinches, blinking rapidly, and when his vision clears, he sees Arthur lunging for the old fenceline.
Facing him is a six-eyed, six-legged vaidkos.
The creature is huge, as tall at the shoulders as Arthur. A twisted cross between wolf and snake, a patchwork of ragged fur and crusted scales. Its jaws hang open, fangs gleaming, and all six of its red-and-shadow eyes fix on Shae.
Memory shudders through him. Burning eyes. A shadow caress. Cold claws in his hands, blood trickling down his wrists, a promise of power. A price he didn’t understand.
Arthur’s voice breaks him out of the reverie. “Do what you need to do,” he says grimly, without glancing back at him. “I’ll take care of this fellow.” He sounds tense but not panicked.
Shae really wants to trust him.
He bites his lip, sinking his hands in the grave dirt again, and finishes uncovering the coffin. There’s a crash, and he can’t help glancing up to see the beast pouncing forward, then lunging back as Arthur meets it with his sword. The paladin moves faster than Shae would have expected for a man that large, fast enough that the vaidkos can’t take him by surprise.
In the open grave, the worn wooden coffin is now uncovered. Where is the ghost? Shae can call it back into the body even if he hasn’t seen it, but that doesn’t change the fact that he should have seen it. He’s disturbing its body. The ghost should have tried to stop him.
A snarl reverberates through the graveyard, and Arthur yells as he drives the beast back again.
Holding his coat, Shae swings his legs around and lowers himself into the grave, still careful despite the chaos surrounding him. It’s a four-foot drop from surface to coffin, and even with his careful landing, the wood creaks and splinters under his feet, barely holding his weight. He can’t see the fight above anymore, but he can hear it.
“You all right down there?” Arthur calls to him. He barely sounds out of breath.
“Worry about your own skin,” Shae calls back, kneeling gingerly on the coffin lid, trying to distribute his weight evenly. He wraps his coat around his right hand, mutters another apology in Lyrisenian, and punches the wood, aiming high and to the side. Wincing as the impact shocks through his arm, he has to punch down three more times before a hole breaks in the lid. He yanks the plank up and back, until he has an open window above the skeletal face.
The body belonged to a woman, judging by the long-braided hair and the jeweled necklace slipping between her sunken ribs. What’s left of her skin clings dry to her bones.
“Hello,” Shae says faintly. His stomach churns. He’s never going to be used to this. “Sorry to bother you, I just need to get you back to… you.” He bites his lip, yanks off his left glove, and presses his palm to the dead woman’s forehead. He calls on his necromancy and whispers in his birth tongue, “Come home, friend. It’s time to rest.”
It’s as much a plea as a spell. The shadow-magic in him arcs out, sinking into the body, then bursts forth again, sweeping from the grave, seeking, seeking. Not the bright white paladin sunlight—the spirit shouldn’t be far—
Shae gasps, eyes wide and unseeing, as his power slams against a blood-red torch of magic. The vaidkos. He tries to yank away, skirt around, but the spell-plea-longing dives right back. He feels it then. An ice-cold heart beating weakly in the belly of the beast.
He yanks back his hand, breaking the spell, gasping for breath. The vaidkos has eaten the woman’s spirit, and it will take all the power Shae can spare to drag her back out. But if the vaidkos dies too soon, he won’t be able to save the ghost.
Shae gathers enough breath to yell out, “Don’t kill it yet!”
There’s another crash above, splintering wood, the thunder of hooves. Something sliding through dirt, and Arthur grunts before shouting back, “Are you fucking crazy?”
“Just hold it off,” Shae yells. “I’ll tell you when you can kill it!” It’s a lot to ask. Maybe too much. It would be easier, safer, to let this soul go. But he can’t give up, not yet.
Arthur’s sword swings through the air. There’s a thud. But he shouts back, “Fine, but hurry it up!”
All Shae can do is trust that Arthur will do his part. He unsheathes his knife again and digs the cut in his arm a little deeper, spilling more blood down his arm. He barely feels the pain. He needs the extra power. The blood feels hot trickling down his arm as he lays his hand on the skull again, until he breathes, “Come home,” and reaches out.
His blood evaporates into shadow. His eyes are open, but he can’t see anything except the flow of energy surrounding him. His own darkness, Arthur’s sunlight, the vaidkos’s blood-red fire. The faintest hint of silver. Shae reaches for it, pouring his own life force into the magic. More and more, until all that’s left is the last core of his soul, the part he’s sealed safe away from the necromancy, and the gold and shadow wall he’s woven around it. Everything else, he turns into a shadow blade to pierce the vaidkos’s soul.
There’s a collision of gold and blood flames. The vaidkos has to defend itself against Vara’s Radiance. Shae’s power darts forward, and he seizes the remnants of the spirit. He drags it screaming from the beast’s jaws.
“Now!” Shae yells. His voice sounds thin and distant, but it tears through his throat.
He doesn’t know what Arthur does. All his attention is on the remnant flying towards him, guided by his power and his blood. The spirit sinks down and through him, shivering down his veins. Shae’s vision crystallizes to see his hand glow bright silver before the ghost sinks back into her body, again at rest.
Leaving Shae caught in the veil between life and death.
He can’t feel the cold anymore. He can’t feel Arthur’s aura. He only feels the buzz of power beneath his skin, the exhilaration of piercing the veil. He could be a god, like this, feeding off the spirits of the dead, just like the vaidkos. Greater than the vaidkos. If he just dropped the last protective wall surrounding his soul. If he turned himself fully over to Izen’s gift, he wouldn’t feel cold anymore.
“No,” he whispers to himself. Grabs his arm and claws at the wound, heedless of the dirt under his nails. He needs the pain to keep himself human. “No.”
He drags himself from the veil, and releases the power.
The vaidkos. Arthur. Everything’s quiet above, and Shae can’t tell who’s alive or dead. He’s so cold. He scrambles to his feet, but the movement is too much. Dizziness swims through him. He falls against the dirt wall of the grave, then slides back to his knees. Collapses completely in an ice-cold faint.