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  Edging forward, they came to the boundaries of the thornweeds and looked out onto a clearing. A hill of rotting dung occupied much of it. This was the wryms nest, and it was definitely the source of the rotten smell.

  Wryms slithered around it, writhing through the pile of shit, sliding over each other and making a series of hisses.

  Jakub felt a jolt of dread inside him now, but it wasn’t the presence of poisonous wryms.

  To the left of the nest, there was a woman.

  “Kortho,” he said, elbowing his mentor.

  “I’ve seen her.”

  She was six feet tall with a warrior’s muscles. Her black hair was braided, and each braid had miniature skulls woven into them that rattled together when she moved her head. It was like a windchime but for her hair.

  She wore a mishmash of armor that but not all of her skin was covered, and her sweat-marked muscles showed where her armor didn’t reach. Her eyes were the greenest Jakub had ever seen; an explosion of nature in her eyeballs. They were so green that the color could only have come from one source – a mana drenching.

  “She’s a Killeshi,” he said.

  The Killeshi woman was surrounded by five blightwood wryms, each of them long and thick and with bodies lined with poison-filled thorns. Underneath their thorns the wryms’ flesh bulged, which Jakub knew was because they were pumping venom into their thorns.

  One of them slithered forward and then pounced at the woman. She prodded at it with a spear that was as long as she was tall. Green light leaked from her eyes and fizzed along the spear, before a green flash left its pointed end.

  The flash zapped over the wrym. The creature recoiled, and a burning stench filled the air, growing stronger as the wrym flopped around on the floor, its skin burning. Each sizzle sent fresh waves of stench around them.

  The woman’s eyes had faded in color now; only slightly, but enough for Jakub to know his guess had been right.

  “She’s leaking mana from her eyes and using it on her spear,” he said. “She’s mana drenched.”

  “Mana can only help so much, and she’s out of it.”

  “We should help her,” he said.

  Kortho grabbed his arm and held it tight. Jakub felt his claws press against his overcoat. “The Killeshi don’t hunt alone. There could be others watching.”

  “She looks alone to me, and she’s in trouble.”

  “Think with your brain and not your cock, boy.”

  “Think with…what? You think I’m looking to date this woman, or something? Kortho, she’s alone. See? Nobody else around.”

  “She’s also Killeshi. They aren’t stupid, and they know their lands better than we could imagine. No number of classes in the academy could ever match up to the generational knowledge every Killeshi is born with.”

  Jakub knew what Kortho meant by this. When a Killeshi tribe member died, the Killeshis conducted a ritual that transplanted the life experiences and knowledge to the next Killeshi baby. Every Killeshi child, in a real sense, grew with the experience and memories of their ancestors inside them.

  As a necromancer it was a fascinating field of study given that it was, in a way, resurrection. That said, the Killeshis had never let a necromancer into their tribe to study the secrets of the ritual.

  All of this meant Kortho was right. The woman in front of them didn’t need their help. In fact, it was patronizing to assume that she would. Out here, she was more capable than a rookie necromancer and his reptilian mentor.

  As two wryms slithered behind her, the woman let mana drain from her eyes. It travelled along her spear, and then with one sweep of the weapon, she flashed her attackers with molten mana.

  The green energy scorched across their skin, leaving them writhing on the ground.

  The remaining two wryms took their chance now. One jolted forward quicker than a mana flash and bit her arm. Its partner followed, and within a second the woman sported identical wyrm bites on her flesh.

  “Okay, she needs us now.”

  Kortho shook his head.

  “Look at her arm! It’s already swelling. Hells, that’s disgusting.”

  The woman waited for the wyrms to attack her again. One leapt at her, but she caught it midflight and squeezed its body in half with her hand. Blood and flesh oozed over the metal like pulp from a rotten fruit.

  The other wyrm, having seen its brethren die, slithered back toward the nest.

  “Why didn’t they all attack her?” said Jakub. “There must be twenty of them at the nest.”

  “Not every wrym is a soldier. The ones at the nest are nurse wyrms, and they only gather food and tend their home. I expect that we will soon see why this woman choose to stay and fight a group of soldier wyrms, rather than leave for an easier hunt.”

  Jakub was about to ask why, when a sound made the question pointless. It was a cracking sound, like an egg shell smashing apart as the living thing inside it sought life.

  Only, instead of a bird poking its way out of an egg, this cracking sound was that of a mother blightwood wyrm emerging from the nest mound.

  The rotten pile of mud and flesh broke open, and the mother wrym slid out and then slapped out onto the ground until she was fully on the surface.

  All thirty feet of her.

  Jakub wanted Kortho to see him as someone who took everything as it came, so he fought with himself to keep his surprise inside him.

  Being long past trying to impress anybody, Kortho didn’t bother to hide his own amazement. “Holy hells, a mother wyrm breached and ready to fight. You don’t see that often.”

  The mother wyrm was so tall that as she stretched to full height, his neck clicked when he looked up at her. Her body was thick and sinewy, and lined not just with venom-filled thorns but with little bulbous sacks too. Inside these sacs were the forms of baby wyrms, writhing in their juices.

  When the mother wyrm opened her mouth, she bared rows of pointed teeth bigger than Jakub’s sword. He could only imagine the damage they could do if the mother wryms gnashed them around his body.

  The spectacle was made all the more fearsome by the fact that the mother wyrm didn’t have eyes; eyes would have given her a face and made her less terrifying, but instead she only had a mouth. A cavernous mouth with teeth.

  “Let’s get the essence from the dead ones and go back to the outpost,” said Kortho.

  “And leave her to face that thing?” said Jakub, staring at the Killeshi.

  “That’s what she came here to do. She wouldn’t thank us for intervening, nor does she need us to.”

  “But her eyes. The green’s gone; she’s out of mana.”

  “Only the strongest Killeshis undergo the mana drenching, and most of them do not need it anyhow. This is her land, so let’s not teach a cat how to hunt mice.”

  Leaving didn’t seem like such a bad idea, since Jakub didn’t relish the idea of facing the mother wyrm. He knew that they couldn’t though. It wasn’t just guilt about leaving the Killeshi woman on her own; like Kortho said, she could probably handle it.

  No, something else tugged at him. “Think of the soul essence we could get from that thing.”

  “There’s easier essence to be found in these lands.”

  “It’ll take us hours to find anywhere near the amount of essence we could get from her.”

  “You’re forgetting the presence of a Killeshi warrior, Jakub. A mana-drenched one at that.”

  “If she sees us help her with the mother wyrm, surely she won’t attack?”

  Kortho seemed to waiver on this. He scratched his chin.

  Jakub pounced on his mentor’s hesitation. “You said yourself that you don’t want to be out here when it gets dark. Let’s help her with the wyrm, take the essence, and go. With the essence I’ll get from her, we’ll have enough not just for Last Rites on the solider, but other things.”

  Kortho got to his feet, gripping his jagged sword. “Did you ever study mother wyrms in critters and creatures class?”

&nbs
p; Jakub briefly retreated into his mental palace, his fortress of memory where he tried to store everything his instructors ever taught him. It was a skill he’d developed to stay ahead of the rest of his class, one of many methods that he learned to keep away the thing he feared above all else – failure.

  Failure now, though, was represented by a gigantic wyrm with teeth that could shred him apart.

  Finding the information, he needed in his palace, he relayed it to Kortho. “Her skin is too tough to cut with a blade, but her underbelly is soft. That’s why she’ll keep it on the ground.”

  Kortho nodded. “Unless keeping her belly on the ground proves more dangerous. We have to make her believe that danger lies in the earth beneath her. Come on.”

  As they stood up and left their spot in the boundaries of the thornweeds, the Killeshi warrior and the mother wyrm faced off.

  The wrym acted on animal instinct; keeping her underbelly on the ground yet rearing as high as she could to intimidate her enemy.

  The Killeshi woman gave a display of her own. Holding her spear in her unhurt hand, she pounded it three times on the ground, and then kneeled on one knee. Whether it was a battle ritual of the Killeshi or something else Jakub didn’t know, but it was a strange sight either way.

  She did this for only a second, before standing up and then charging at the wrym.

  As the mother wrym swooped forward with her gigantic mouth and teeth, the Killeshi stepped out of harm’s way, and stuck out with her spear. The tip smashed into a row of teeth, shattering one, cracking another, and dislodging a third from the wyrm’s mouth.

  The cracking of teeth sent a shudder through Jakub. It wasn’t sympathy pain but there was an empathy there, born from what the academy instructors had told him not to dwell on.

  ‘Write your nightmares down,’ instructor Irvine had told him. ‘Record them in this book. It’s enchanted, and the mere act of writing in it will free you from their burden.’

  Jakub hadn’t trusted Irvine nor his intentions with the nightmare book. Every child had nightmares, and those studying necromancer were bound to have lots of them until they grew de-sensitized.

  But the instructors had always seemed especially interested in Jakub’s, even if they never acknowledge that to him.

  As such, he’d made up false nightmares, less horrific ones, and he wrote those instead. He never mentioned nightmares, like the one where he was watching yellow teeth chew on human flesh.

  That was why the shattering of the mother wyrm’s teeth sent such a violent shudder through him.

  You’re in one of the three places you shouldn’t be, he told himself, hearing the words as a mixture of his own and Kortho’s voices. He wasn’t in the past nor the future but his nightmares, and he needed to get back to the present.

  He followed Kortho, who had moved ahead of him. He and Kortho approached the wyrm on her left side.

  The thorns on that side of her body shook, and Kortho pushed Jakub to the ground just as a volley of thorns flew out of the wyrm’s side.

  Four sailed a foot over their heads, while another was so close that it touched his hair.

  A jolt of adrenaline hit him, but that was all it was – a jolt. Then it was over. He knew he should have been more scared, fuller of adrenaline, and perhaps before today he would have been. Was he braver? Had he suddenly developed that most treasured of necromancer mental skills – a completely fearlessness of death?

  No. It was the boots of focus he’d taken from the soldier in the outpost. They were strong enough to take the edge off his fear.

  “We’re safe on this side,” he said, eyeing the empty thorn sacks on the wyrms body.

  “No,” said Kortho.

  Fresh thorns pushed their way through the wyrm’s skin and appeared where the others had been fired. The wyrm groaned as they pushed through, as if the process pained her.

  While growing new thorns on her side, the wyrm snapped her teeth at the Killeshi woman. The warrior was too agile for her, too practiced in her avoidance, and the wyrm’s teeth bit at the air.

  Their battle played out the same way time and time again – a gnash of teeth from the wyrm, a side step and counter spear strike from the Killeshi.

  Shards of teeth rained onto the ground, and globs of spit flew from the wyrm’s open jaws. A splatter of it hit the Killeshi in the face.

  She screamed, and Jakub looked on in horror as her skin began to burn.

  In her agony, the Killeshi dropped her spear and put her hand to her face, as if that would stop the burning. When the wyrm spit touched the Killeshi’s fingers, it sizzled over it. In pain and with her spear on the ground, the woman was in trouble.

  Jakub got to his feet and ran diagonally, out of reach of a fresh volley of thorns.

  “Jakub!” shouted Kortho.

  He ignored him and reached the Killeshi woman. As the wrym lurched forward, jaws outstretched and sure to hit the wounded warrior, Jackob smashed into the Killeshi’s chest, shoving her out of reach.

  The Killeshi landed on her back. She was up before Jakub, and she punched him in the face with her normal hand.

  Pain sang in his nose, and spots of light blinkered his vision. Then, behind those spots was the Killeshi, on her feet again and torn between Jakub and the wyrm.

  “Wait,” he said.

  He quickly reached into his inventory bag and took out one of the salves of agony he’d looted from the outpost. He tossed it to the Killeshi, who caught the glass vial.

  Jakub pointed to his face. “Face. Put it on. Stop pain.”

  “I can speak your language, idiot,” said the Killeshi, “but thank you.”

  As the Killeshi moved out of reach of the wyrm’s jaws, Jakub left her and rejoined Kortho.

  Kortho took two vials of his own from his inventory bag and passed one to Jakub.

  “Do you think the academy spent a fortune on your training so you can die helping the Killeshi?” said Kortho.

  “It was a tactical decision. If she dies, the wyrm will focus on us.”

  Kortho gave Jakub a look that translated as ‘bullshit’, but he stopped short of saying it.

  “We need her to show her underbelly,” he said. “Spread this on her right flank, over the ground. I’ll take this side. Watch out for her thorns; they’ll shake when she is going to release them.”

  “What is it?” said Jakub, shaking the glass vial. A gloopy orange liquid was inside it.

  “Wetfire,” said Kortho.

  That was all Jakub needed to hear to understand both what the plan was, and how incredibly dangerous it would be if he wasn’t calm. Careless mistakes, shaking hands, poor concentration - wetfire would punish all of them. It was lucky he had his boots of focus to take the edge off.

  He ran by Kortho and then, jumping over the wyrm’s thrashing tail, reached her right side. He carefully uncorked the wetfire vial and sprinkled it on the ground around her. When the vial was empty he rejoined Kortho, who had done the same on the left.

  “Now we need her to move over the wetfire. The minute it touches her, she will…”

  Jakub nodded. “I know what it’ll do. Got it.”

  Then, he looked to the Killeshi woman. She was still out of reach of the wyrm’s jaws, but the mother wyrm was snaking over to her, readying for another strike.

  That would take her away from the wetfire, not through it.

  “We need you to come over here,” he said to the woman.

  She rubbed her face. The burning looked to have stopped, but her skin was a nasty shade of red. She seemed warier of the wyrm than before, and she winced each time a glob of spit left the wyrm’s mouth.

  “Come on,” said Jakub. “This isn’t the time to be mistrustful. Over here. Now.”

  He put as much authority into his tone as he could, but as a novice necromancer used to taking instruction rather than giving it, he feared he lacked a sufficient amount.

  So, when the Killeshi grabbed her spear and her leather bag and joined him and Kortho on
the wyrm’s left side, he was happy and thought he must be more authoritative than he realized.

  With the three of them on her left side, the wyrm had to thrash around to face them.

  “Move back,” said Kortho.

  They did, and when the wyrm repositioned her body, she suddenly reared up, screaming a sound that was part-animalistic, part-insect, and completely drenched in agony.

  “She’s rolled in the wetfire,” said Jakub.

  Kortho nodded. “Move back further.”

  The wyrm reared up. With each agony-filled cry more burning spit rained from her mouth. The parts of her body where she had rolled in the wetfire smoldered now, and her skin melted into gloop.

  She rolled along the ground as if to try and extinguish the burn, but wetfire didn’t work like that; it was more like acid. Once it was on you, there was no snuffing it out.

  “Get ready…” said Kortho. He held his blade in his right hand, and he put his weight on his back foot, ready to run. Jakub did the same. “She’ll show it any minute now. As soon as you see her underbelly, get ready to…”

  The wyrm reared up to full height now. More of her skin burned, and glops of it fell to the ground like wax dripping from a candle. The stench was sickening; burning flesh and wetfire mixed into a pungent toxin.

  She reared up to full height, exposing an oval of skin as thin as tissue paper.

  “She’s showing her belly!”

  He gripped his blade and got ready to run at her, wondering how he could strike her without taking a face full of burning wyrm spit or gloopy, smoldering skin.

  The Killeshi put her weight on her back foot as well, but she didn’t run. Instead, she held her spear in her right, unburned hand, and she grunted and then launched it at the wyrm.

  The spear sailed through the air, striking the center of the wyrm’s underbelly. Its underskin broke apart, and a bundle of bowels and guts tumbled out and splattered onto the ground.

  With her skin burning and her insides leaking out, the wrym cried out and then crashed toward the ground like a felled tree.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was only then that Jakub’s focus left him. With the danger gone the effect of his boots wore off, and his heart beat faster, and fresh pain sprang in his face from where the Killeshi had punched him. His nose hurt to touch.