Rise of the Necromancer Read online

  Another driver from four wagons along stood up. He was the oldest of them. His ancient eyes had seen more miles than every wheel of every cart in the convoy.

  “Everyone back behind your canvas. Stay away from anything metal and don’t open the water barrels. If you’re thirsty, tough titties.”

  Gunar was the next to speak, calling from his wagon. “Rodge?” he said to a young lad cowering near the blackened wagon. “You’re Henry’s apprentice, right? Get his body into the canvas and take the reins. He’s taught you enough to control the bison?”

  “Excuse me,” said a voice.

  This was a high voice. Laughable, even. And it was one that everyone ignored now, giving the owner the most peaceful punishment a trader caravan could; a shunning.

  “Yes, sir,” said Rodge, approaching his master’s scorched body and biting his lip to keep his fear inside.

  Gunar gave him a kind smile, despite everything. “You won’t be an apprentice by the end of this trip, boy.”

  “But…I thought I was doing a good job…”

  “I’m saying you’ll have passed your apprenticeship, you moon-struck oaf. I’m proud of you. Now get your master into the wagon. Carefully, now.”

  A spotter and a tall woman with bony hips rounded the side of poor Henry’s cart and approached. “The bolt hit him in the chest. His clothes are singed to hell, his skin’s like a beef patty left in a fire.”

  “Get someone in there with a poppy lotion to stop the pain,” said Gunar.

  “He needs a surgeon now. We can’t wait.”

  The sky bellowed then. It was an angry rumble, a threat aimed at the travelers who’d breached Sun Toil.

  But the sound didn’t come from clouds overhead. This came from north-west and east of them. Tandem warnings from the dust storms that could no longer be denied by even the most optimistic of travelers.

  “The storms are gaining ground,” said Gunar. “I’m sorry, but we can’t wait to patch Henry up.”

  “I’ll look at him while we’re moving,” said a voice.

  Gunar couldn’t believe what he’d heard. More accurately, who he’d heard it from.

  It was a young man. Early twenties. He had crow feather hair and a stubbly black beard that added a few years to his face.

  His eyes, though. His eyes added half a dozen more. He didn’t mean to have that effect; if anything, Gunar had found the young man to be pleasant and happy to pitch in even on work they hadn’t agreed to in his contract. No, it was glimmers he caught in the man’s stare, ones that happened without his control.

  His skin was tanned through travel. Peeling in places, like he wasn’t used to it. The first time Gunar had met him, the man’s wardrobe had consisted of a long, black coat with buckles and pockets everywhere. Ever since they entered Toil, he’d swapped to tight-fitted shirts with sleeves rolled up. They still had more pockets sewn into them than most shirts, but at least they didn’t cover his whole body.

  Gunar hadn’t expected him to know much about travel, the wilderness, or any of that, but he’d surprised him with his knowledge. It must have been something the academy taught.

  “Appreciate the offer,” said Gunar. “But he’s not dead yet.”

  The necromancer nodded solemnly. “If he was, I’d be no use to you. Told you that, Gunar; I’m not a master necromancer. Bison and horses, that’s my game. I’ll bring those back from the dead. Can’t do the same for a person.”

  “What can you do for Henry?”

  The necromancer got closer now. Close enough that the caravaners, those of them who weren’t applying alchemical ointment to canvas roofs or checking on their bison but instead were just watching, couldn’t hear.

  “Necromancy isn’t just about death,” he said. “We draw our essence from death, but the spells we use can bring life.”

  “Sounds like mystical bullshit. Thought you told me you hated that? I’ve already got one storm oracle who talks horse crap.”

  The necromancer laughed. He didn’t do it much, but when he did, it was a nice sound. The kind that put people at ease. Gunar thought he ought to do it more often, it might have made the magic-suspicious members of the caravan more likely to talk to him.

  “Fine,” said the necromancer. “What I said was true, but I said it like an arse. I have a healing spell.”

  “And it’s powered by…”

  “By death. Yes. But death does not affect the healing, alright? I’m not going to turn Henry into an undead, he won’t be possessed by a demon, and he won’t wake in the night hungering for blood.”

  “Then by all means look,” said Gunar. “Thanks, Jakub.”

  Gunar watched the necromancer walk away and he felt grateful. It had been a risk bringing him. Though the man hadn’t asked for much pay, his presence had made others uneasy. But Gunar was sick of having to account in advance for losing bison. It looked like the risk had paid off, if he could fix Henry.

  A rumble in the horizon broke his gratitude, turning it bitter when he saw the twin storms.

  “They’re getting closer,” said Gunar. “Moving fast. Must be a current helping them along the way. Hitch up the weaker wagons. One of the food wagons has a wonky wheel, right? Hitch it to a stronger one and double up on beasts to pull them both. How are our bison? If some are tirin’, I want them paired with tougher ones. Hurry.”

  The storm oracle approached them.

  “We can’t stay for this, Mr. Helketoil,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “You think lightning’s going to hit us again? More chance of the queen asking for my hand in marriage.”

  “This isn’t a lightning storm,” said the oracle. “This is dry lightning. Do you see any rain clouds overhead? No.”

  “Funny that you’re suddenly attuned to the clouds again.”

  “Dry lightning doesn’t come from clouds. It forms around us like a static energy. It might look like it comes from above when it strikes, but that’s because when you see a flash in the sky, you’re used to looking up. Dry lighting forms from the center. It builds in energy, spreads out, and explodes.”

  “And where was this knowledge when I asked you to choose a storm-free path?”

  “Everyone is fallible,” answered the oracle, finally.

  The admission of his mistake didn’t make Gunar feel better. The oracle was such a stubborn man that his admission sounded like defeat, like giving up. Maybe the dry lightning was the last step, maybe it worried him so much that he didn’t care how he looked now.

  Gunar’s stomach knotted up, and he fought to keep his rising nerves from showing. His fear would spread through the fleet like a disease if he let it.

  “Is there anything we need to do?” he asked. “I know to stay away from trees, from metal…”

  The oracle shook his head. “You aren’t getting it. Though it looks similar, this is not the lightning you know. Forget the rules you were taught. Dry lightning has enough force and enough explosive energy that it could tear through steel.”

  “All the better we didn’t get caught in it.”

  “We’re already in it! A dry lightning storm doesn’t hover above. It doesn’t rumble to let you know it’s there. It just throws forks of explosive light. It draws its power from movement; every movement around a dry lightning storm creates a static energy. This energy hangs in the air, only moving when it spots pockets of energy created by movement. These pockets find each other and merge invisibly, growing larger and more unstable with each blend, until finally, they explode into dry lightning.”

  “The more we move, the worse the dry lightning gets.”

  “Correct.”

  Gunar looked around. He saw all his people. Over a hundred of them. Half as many bison. Inventory caravans, living quarter carts. So many people and things, so much movement.

  He wanted to yell out to everyone to stay still, but such an order would create fear. Besides, most people were glad of the extended break and were taking the opportunity to rest. Old Fogen Jones had
hitched a hammock from one cart to another, and he was dozing in it. The soles of two pairs of boots poked out of the end of one cart, with the owners laying on their backs, napping.

  He spoke quieter now. “Just how much movement is enough to force a strike?”

  “The last one, the one that hit the poor driver, was ten minutes ago. In that time the energy has been quietly gathering. It won’t be much, yet, but everything adds to it. See there? See Mrs. Elanor’s children playing tag? They’re adding energy to the storm. See the merchant swinging his hips? Adding to it.”

  “Why the hell did nobody ever tell me about this? I’ve been traveling Toil half my life.”

  “Because you’re more likely to see a magic pig dancing in the clouds than a dry lightning storm. So few people visit Toil, so little wildlife lives here, that when the storms begin, they usually starve, lacking energy gained from movement. Sun Toil is thousands of miles long and wide; you’d have to be unlucky to get caught in one, to be in that place at that time.”

  “Sounds like the kind of luck a man with two dust storms closing in east and west has. A man who needs to go south a little but can’t, because if he moves, he might blow his people straight to one of the hells.”

  “There’s something else,” said the oracle.

  Gunar’s stomach lurched now, the knot getting so tight he was in pain. “The sky’s going to start raining fire on us? The gods are going to spray molten shit over our heads?”

  “One of your traders has a wagon filled with isopropoil, yes?”

  Gunar nodded. “The Sanzancers buy it to blast their quarries.”

  “The only thing more likely to explode when dry lightning hits would be a cart filled with dynamite. We were lucky with the last strike, but the next could blow us all to a thousand pieces.”

  Gunar faced his people. Failure throbbed inside him. Part of him knew that two dust storms coming from different directions was such an anomaly that only the subtleties of nature could be blamed. The oracle had told him that to get caught in dry lightning was exceptionally rare. Could Gunar be blamed for that?

  Every person here, save the children whose parents had brought them, had taken a role in this convoy of their own free will, because they wanted to earn gold.

  Even so, he could hardly look at them all now. He’d failed them, hadn’t he?

  No.

  He’d faced things like this before. Not these exact things, but he and danger were old friends. Now, he’d do whatever it took to get free of Toil’s three-pronged attack.

  “Nobody move,” he yelled, feeling their collective attention snap on him. The time for shielding them from panic was over. “Don’t take a step, don’t move your arms, and don’t do anything.”

  As they watched in nervous silence, he explained that every movement of theirs would charge the static in the air and that this would result in an explosion of dry lightning that would almost certainly cause the isopropoil cart to explode, killing most of them on the spot.

  “I won’t lie to you,” he told them all. “This is going to get worse. But that’s why I brought a necromancer with us. Any man who dies tonight will get his life back.”

  This seemed to smooth over some of their frayed nerves, and everyone seemed a little calmer. Everyone except Helena, who marched over to him.

  She was smiling, but a husband knows when his wife’s smiles are genuine, and he knows which smiles are painted on and really mean I’m mad as hell. He couldn’t blame her.

  “I didn’t marry a liar, so why am I looking at one now?” she whispered. Even in her anger, they were a team, and she wouldn’t question his leadership in front of everyone. “The necromancer isn’t a master. He’s here to revive the beasts, not people.”

  “Men make better decisions when they’re not terrified,” said Gunar.

  She seemed to understand his reasoning now even if she wasn’t happy, and she put his arm around him while he addressed the caravaners.

  He spoke confidently, He warned them against their instinct to run, explaining that running would make their collective death more likely, not less. Given the fact that movement could doom them every man, woman, and child, Gunar would personally kill anyone who ran.

  Did he mean it? Perhaps. He’d once had to wield Toil justice and tie a noose around a man who had lost his mind and decapitated two bison and would have done worse, had Gunar not ended his suffering.

  With nobody moving, a silence settled over the camp so eerie that Gunar wished he could command the bards to start singing. The silence gave the sound of the dust storms free reign to tease their way into the caravaners’ ears. It made them seem like they were moving closer.

  There was no denying that they were turning southeast and south-west now, and that the caravan would be caught in them. That was as deadly as the lightning; in a dust storm, the sand grains would spin so fast that they were like tiny razors in the air, and they would shred absolutely everything.

  Yet if they tried to change course, they’d provoke a dry lightning strike that could hit the wrong wagon and blow them all to the stars.

  How had it come to this? Gunar had taken so many precautions that he cut his profit margin by paying for a necromancer and a storm oracle. How had he led his people into death’s snapping jaws?

  Forget self-pity. Pity never pulled a man up from the ground.

  Gunar began to work a plan in his head. Firstly, they would have to risk movement. No way around that. But if he could offer extra gold for anyone willing to drive the explosive cart away from camp, then that would remove one threat.

  If the isopropoil cart couldn’t blow up near them, he’d feel a little safer. Then they could travel south again. Their movement would generate dry lightning, but it was a risk they’d have to take, and it was manageable if the explosives weren’t with them. It was the only thing they could do, because staying and getting sucked into the dust storm’s wake was a death sentence for every man, woman, and child.

  Now, who was likely to volunteer to take the explosive wagon away, and who among the convoy could Gunar ill-afford to lose?

  It was when Gunar was thinking this, when he was descending into a guilty self-pity, that he heard the first cracking sound.

  But none of us have moved!

  He braced himself for the flash of burning, pure white and then the rumble of an explosion.

  And there was an explosion, but not of lighting.

  A woman screamed. Her husband pushed into front of her, shielding her. When he saw what she had seen, he screamed too.

  More explosions. More screaming, yelling.

  Gunar’s command to stay still was abandoned as some of the campers ran to their carts for their weapons, as some of them hopped up onto their carts and then disappeared behind the canvas to cower, as mothers and fathers instructed children to climb under the caravans and hide until it was safe.

  When Gunar saw what had caused his words to go unheeded, he understood.

  He even ignored his own command.

  All around their camp, forming a circle and closing them in, mounds of earth had exploded to reveal the opening of tunnels.

  From these tunnels emerged Toil-lusks. Gunar had seen a lot in his years, but nothing compared to the first time he’d ever seen a lusk. Taller than a man by a good few feet and with cracked, dirt-colored skin and wings that made a thut-thut-thut sound. Everything about them was repulsive unless you happened to be an entomologist. Even the biggest insect lover would take a step away when a toil-lusk fluttered his way and then landed nearby, antennae swirling, pincers clacking together.

  There was an old saying. Disaster always travels with his brothers. It had never seemed truer. Storms, lightning, and lusks? How in all hells had they hit them at once? Even the more experienced travelers were panicking now. They could have coped with one disaster, but three?

  Gunar eyed the explosives wagon. He’d have to drive it away by himself. Get it as far away from camp as he could. There was no time to waiver,
no time to even explain it. He saw Helena now; she was across camp, helping young little Boysie find his mother and father.

  Gunar didn’t have time to tell Helena what he must do.

  He sucked it all in, tried to turn his emotions to stone, and he turned to face the explosives wagon. That was when he saw the necromancer already sitting on the driver’s platform, urging the bison to move.

  The necromancer had read the danger, and he’d put the camp above himself. Gunar felt a welling of gratitude building inside him.

  There was an explosion behind him. He turned around to see two women and a child laying on the floor, bodies charred black. Dry lightning. It had added three more to its victim list, and it was charging again now as the campers packed and tried to flee. It was the strangest sight Gunar had seen; everyone’s hair was standing completely on end.

  Lusks wove in and out of camp, pincers stabbing, jaws snapping, hunting for soft flesh and having an easy time of it because nobody had been ready for the fight.

  Lighting charged and then struck, exploding into the ground, burning skin, sending the stench of singed hair into the air around them.

  And then, after the pincers and lightning had claimed all too many lives, as the surviving campers managed to get to carts and command their bison to move, that was when they realized that the dust storms had found them.

  Swirling sand grains, millions, billions, trillions of them, whizzed around in circles, traveling so fast that the eviscerated everything they touched. They sheared through canvas, through wood, through metal, through skin. The sound was deafening, a screech of whirring death.

  Even the lusks knew to leave then, burrowing back underground into their network of tunnels under the Toil soil.

  The storms from east and west converged, becoming one giant cloud of doom, their sand shredding anything it touched until soon no sounds could be heard. The noise of wagon wheels turning ceased, and not because their drivers had been careful in oiling them; it was because the storm had lashed through the drivers, shredding them into nothing. It was because it had done the same to the cart themselves.

  Hours later, the storms moved on. The dry lighting disappeared. There were no lusks here anymore.