The Warden, page 36
She almost wished she hadn’t.
Before her was a vast stone door without visible hinges, no lock, no handles, no place to wedge a pry bar or chisel, even if she had one.
The door greeted her with a grinning skull, the match of the seal on the letter that had brought her here. The match, she knew, of the ring that only one Magister of the College of Necromancy still wore, the match to the seal he carried ostentatiously on a thick chain around his neck and likely enough the pattern embroidered on his bedrobe.
Before it, on a slim pedestal, sat a simple stone bowl.
Aelis dimmed her lamp and unclipped it from her belt, lifting it up as she approached the pedestal. As she looked over it, it was clear that the bowl and the slim length of stone it sat on were of a piece; a tiny hole in the bottom of the bowl led down into the pedestal, but she hadn’t the light to see any inner workings.
A few possibilities suggested themselves. She dismissed the first out of hand.
“Not even the most desperate would design a barrier that required actual human sacrifice to open,” she muttered, though she didn’t feel much better.
It was possible that it required only a drop of blood, and that she could provide.
“But,” she brought herself up short with a whisper, “it’s possible that it has a Blood Catalogue of every specific person empowered to open it linked to the mechanism, and I’m not going to be on that list.”
She began ticking off the things that it could do if someone not in such a Catalogue attempted to open it. Most likely, nothing. Second, set off an alarm. Third, some kind of mechanical trap, but linking magic to gears is rarely predictable or worth the effort and time will have taken its toll. Fourth, respond with some magical mayhem.
There could be passwords, but those would be closely held or routinely changed or both.
“If I can’t get in, doesn’t that mean that anything dangerous couldn’t get out?” She considered this possibility a moment, imagined running straight back to Lone Pine, convincing Maurenia to stay the winter, hopping into bed and not getting out until spring.
This vision was abruptly interrupted with one of undead soldiers clawing and digging their way out of a none-too-secure barracks-crypt and descending on Lone Pine and other settlements, mindlessly seeking battle without any directing intelligence to control them.
Given the way the fortress was collapsing, Aelis couldn’t be sure that whatever was behind the death’s-head door was still there, much less sealed in. And she had a duty to know for certain. It was even possible that enough degradation of the fortress could trigger orders that had been laid on any of the undead within, and that they were attempting to burrow their way out even now.
Aelis considered other ways to open the door. Gathering her will, she walked to within arm’s reach, called a simple First Order Necromantic Pulse into her hand, reached out, and laid her power against the stone.
The right eye of the skull blazed with a brief blue light, and words sounded in Aelis’s mind.
Prove your mastery of the First Art to open me, the long-dormant spell told her, and her heart sank. She caught herself readying a fist to smash uselessly against the stone skull. It mocked her with its grin, promising malevolence and danger, and she wanted to have Tun by her side, if only to see whether it could stand up to his strength.
But in the end, she turned and walked back to the entrance to the tunnel.
It took a strong ward to give her some lift and a moment of struggling, but she pulled herself back up onto the floor above with a strength born of anger, and felt shame at what she knew she was about to do.
* * *
Until the gray squirrel, fat and fluffy for the winter, climbed into her lap, Aelis wasn’t entirely sure she could use Enchantment to lure an animal that close to her. She had used a powerful Enchantment on a bear, but of course that bear had proven to be Tun, and she hadn’t spent much time puzzling out which part of him she’d enchanted.
But with a simple Beckoning, a gray squirrel had hopped right out of the nearest tree and onto her shoulder, then into her outstretched hand as she sat down, cross-legged, and contemplated it.
With her power laid over its small and unfocused mind, the squirrel lacked all fear. It sat in her palm, twitching occasionally, its puffed tail flicking here and there, changing position, blinking up at her.
She readied herself, with an anatomist’s certainty, to snap its neck in order to use it to open the crypt.
Then she imagined Tun standing over her, watching what she was doing, and she let her tiny thread of Enchantment slip. The animal darted away. Aelis stood up, swatted snow off the back of her coat, and stomped back into the fortress, seething at herself.
She swung her alchemical lamp back and forth as she went, looking for what she needed.
“I don’t have to animate a corpse,” she muttered. “I just have to make the spell on the door understand that I can.”
Strictly speaking, she wasn’t supposed to attempt to bend spells the way she was going to. And even were she sitting in a laboratory or writing a theoretical paper, she couldn’t be sure it would work.
But out here, in the wilderness, with the cold searing her lungs with every breath and her legs throbbing and feet hurting and stomach wondering when she was going to eat something other than bread and dried fruit mixed with fat, she had no doubts at all. It would work. What was magic, after all, if not bending the rules of the world? And if the rules of magic couldn’t be bent, what could?
Aelis had only cast the spell she was about to attempt once before, under tightly controlled, closely observed laboratory conditions. She hadn’t had to do anything else that day, just cast that one spell and then put down the resulting animated corpse however she chose.
She had been certain from the moment she entered the laboratory that she would not forget the events.
* * *
The corpse had been a man, and he had been dead for some time. A week at least, perhaps longer. Necromancy labs had enchantments laid into their foundation stones, their doorjambs, their tables, their instruments, that would preserve a corpse a dazzlingly long time. The lengthy incisions in the man’s torso indicated that his chest had been opened and most of the major organs had been removed. The eyes and mouth had been carefully sewn shut, and his genitals had been removed and the skin sutured over. Likely enough this same corpse had provided surgical and anatomical practice to a younger set of students.
All instruments and furniture other than the surgical table on which the corpse lay had been removed. The door was locked behind Aelis when she entered. She was allowed to carry only the implements of her Colleges. For most, that had meant only the Anatomist’s Dagger, perhaps a Seer’s Diadem or a Conjurer’s Mirror.
For Aelis it had meant her dagger, her sword, and her wand. Though she knew full well the latter would be useless, she liked the feel of it in her sleeve. And though the sword was not the custom willow-leaf blade that would be made to her hand after she passed her Abjurer’s test, the weight on her hip felt right.
A disguised, disembodied voice filled the laboratory, but she felt the slithering tones of Archmagister Duvhalin behind it.
“Animate the corpse. Give it three orders. Untether it. Then dismiss it in whatever manner you see fit.”
Aelis drew her dagger, and was already gathering her will through the hilt. In the stark light of the alchemy lamps overhead, the blade glittered darkly in her fist.
Animating the corpse was laughably, seductively easy. The power gathered in her like ice on a pane of glass. It chilled her, but something in it was beautiful; there was something there to stare at and marvel over.
Was this what was forbidden to her? To her College? This simple power, the First Art, as the original Magisters of Necromancy had called it, that weighed in her hand like a dark and glittering gem? What small minds would sever her from this beauty?
Then she crushed the “gem” in her fist and sprinkled it over the body. A black-purple glow rose out of the chalk-white skin of the corpse, and it sat up.
Aelis knew that, with its lungs removed, the corpse made no actual noise. But her mind told her there was a wheeze, a moan, all the same. She knew, in the sensible, studious part of her mind, that what she heard was simply a pocket of air being forced through the tiny stitches in its mouth by the unnatural motion.
Aelis gathered more power into her hand, shaped it into commands.
Stand.
Walk a circuit of the room.
Lie down upon the table.
The corpse stood. It looked at her, if a thing without eyes or functional sense organs could be said to look. It walked around the room, in slow, halting steps. Amplified by the silence and emptiness of the room, its footfalls were soft, wet-sounding things that threatened Aelis with gooseflesh. She was not shy around corpses, not unused to the sights of the body, and still there was something undeniably wrong about what she was doing now that her mind was not filled with, and deceived by, its own power.
The corpse returned to the table, lifted itself up with strength, if not grace, and lay down.
Aelis severed her will from it, and took a moment to breathe.
Something, something she could not name and did not want to know, was suddenly in the room with her. Something cold and hard and unspeakably malevolent. It ignored her.
The corpse sat up.
Instinct took over. She shifted her dagger to her left hand, drew her sword with her right, summoned a ward. The corpse lunged for her. Her sword took it in the chest, just off the centerline where the heart would be, tearing its skin like paper, splintering its already once-broken breastbone and ribs.
On it came. The broken bones and torn flesh that would be the undoing of a living attacker were no deterrent to the already dead.
Her dagger lashed out, quick, vicious slashes. It wasn’t until the third one that she recalled that it wasn’t a true Anatomist’s blade, had not been consecrated and enchanted to her yet, and that it required her own wit and will to work any magic.
She slashed low with her sword, felt the blade crunching through the corpse’s knee and sending it toppling to the floor. She lashed out with a boot, the force of her kick sending it skidding, buying her time to take a couple of quick steps backward and gather herself.
Aelis formulated the words of a Dismissal, a Second Order work of Necromancy. She stepped forward, planted her boot hard into the corpse’s chest, breaking more of its ribs, its spine, and plunged her dagger down into its skull.
Harsh, irregular syllables tore themselves from her throat. An absence of light outlined her hand in darkness. The thing beneath her foot thrashed once more as the black force around her hand sank into it.
The air went cold. Breath stung in Aelis’s throat. The animated corpse ceased all its twitching and she almost felt as if fingers of ice twined themselves around her neck for a moment, and then were gone.
“What the FUCK was that?” she shouted as the door that had been locked behind her opened and three black-robed, hooded Necromancers filed in.
“That,” Archmagister Duvhalin solemnly intoned as he removed the mask that concealed his condescending smile, “was very nearly your final failure in the College of Necromancy, Miss de Lenti.”
Aelis swallowed her immediate impulse, which was to correct him to Lady de Lenti, knowing he’d just somehow humiliate her further over it.
“However,” the Archmagister went on, his smile still aimed at her like a weapon, “you also have now seen the reason we no longer allow ourselves to animate the dead.”
* * *
Aelis grasped the hilt of her dagger. It wasn’t necessary to draw it out, only to attune her senses through it and send them casting out in the world around her. Through the hilt she felt a faint pulse; the material she was looking for was nearby. She took a step forward, carefully monitoring the strength of the pulse in the dagger. It seemed to weaken, so she stepped back to where she’d been standing. Then she took another, to her left. The signal strengthened.
It took nearly a quarter of an hour, but following the pulsing of her dagger, she found what she’d been looking for in a corner, buried beneath pine needles and dirt: a knot of bone. She pulled it free and quickly dusted some of the dirt on it away with one hand. It looked like a piece of the hip joint of an immature deer. There was no telling how long it had lain there, but Aelis was sure it would suffice. Along with it, she scraped up just a handful of dirt.
“There’s no reason this shouldn’t work,” she muttered.
Carefully she set the bone down in the center of the offering bowl, then strung out dirt to either side in thin lines.
Not every animated dead needed to be a skeleton or a walking skin. For a powerful enough Necromancer, a pile of bone could be raised into any shape the animating intelligence could control.
Ideally, of course, she’d have special training for this, and a certain amount of Conjuring was necessary, at least in theory.
“Fuck theory,” Aelis muttered as she took off one of her gloves and drew the tip of her dagger across the palm of her hand. She squeezed two droplets of blood along each line of dirt. Then she took a deep breath and searched her memory for the words she’d need.
The page of Aldayim’s Advanced Necromancy swung up before her eyes.
Necromantic Constructs made of more than one being, often called Chimeras, are dangerous and often uncontrollable …
Aelis found the words and spoke them despite the warning. She watched the bone rise out of the bowl atop the pillar and the little lines of dirt coalesce around her blood into limbs. They reached out like tendrils and sank into the inner curves of the little hip bone, lifting it further.
There was a sound as of a bell ringing. The hip bone and its two limbs of bloody mud stood up, wavering, on the bowl. Then there was a lance of purple-black light, and it vanished.
The skull craned forward, the jaws parted, and steps began to unfold from behind the teeth.
The doors open, Necromancer. The Barracks-Crypts of Mahlgren are at your disposal.
Aelis drew her sword and dagger and hoped she wouldn’t have to use them.
33
THE SKELETONS
When Aelis stepped through the door, she was already dividing her will into two components: the wards she was gathering through her sword, and the banishments and severings she was preparing to call into her dagger.
Before any of that could matter, though, there was threat assessment. The barracks she entered was blessedly small. Barracks-crypt was a misleading name, of course, as most storage places for undead soldiers were neither. Initially, either such space might have been used to store them simply because there was room there. Later, warehouses or even tents had been used. Later still, of course, hidden chambers such as this had been built.
The commitment to style had ended with the switch and the door, Aelis thought. A plain iron chandelier hung in the center of the ceiling, held in place with chains, the candles on it long since burned or crumbled away. The room was a simple circle of damp, mossy stone.
The damp, Aelis quickly realized, was going to be her ally, because it had caused the weapons clutched by bare-boned hands to rust and rot away.
Eight skeletons stood against the wall. Eight pairs of cold dark eyes sparked to life in their skulls, which turned to her with one uniform movement.
Somewhere there lay a control rod that would allow her to expand her will to cover all of them and control them directly. With it to hand, she could order them to combat one another until they were reduced to a harmless rubble to be thoroughly dismissed at her leisure.
Without a control rod, she could dismiss the animation of two of them at any one time, perhaps, if she had no distractions and no other demands on her power. But she’d already taken on several tasks with her magic that day.
So she re-settled her hands on her weapons and went to work. The skeletons stood up. The rattling they made was unnerving, like putting a bundle of thin sticks in a leather case and shaking it lightly.
The skeletons did not seem to see her as a threat until she gave them a reason to. She went immediately to her left. With three quick slashes of her Anatomist’s Dagger, one of the animated dead lost its skull and then its arms. The spine and legs stood for a moment or two before collapsing, as she had hoped; these had been designed with care and built to release when damaged beyond usefulness.
A counter in her head clicked from eight to seven. And she knew it was about to get more dangerous.
She whirled to face the room, putting the inactive undead behind her. The remaining seven pushed off the wall. Rust showered to the floor as they lifted their arms and the weapons they held crumbled. Whole pieces of their crude short swords fell to the floor; the rotted wooden hilt of one gave way when the skeleton’s hand tightened around it, and the pitted blade slipped from its fingers.
Two of the skeletons were worse enough for wear that they simply fell apart as they tried to move. The joints had been wired together with strips of cured hide and tendon, and in some cases had given way.
Five.
Aelis tried hard not to think too much about exactly who or what had provided those strips. Sometimes a Necromancer worked with what they had to hand.
Even so, this construction was better for her than copper wires or hempen rope, because these were technically dead flesh.
And her knife would cut through them as if they were seafoam.
She didn’t wait for them to come on. She called a ward, a simple First Order, often called the Buckler, centered around her right hand. It was an awkward stance for her, preferring as she did to wield only the one blade at a time, but she’d had rudimentary training in it.
She led with the ward as though it were a shield and knocked aside the skeleton’s ruined sword. Once again, three sweeps with her dagger and an undead soldier fell apart before her.
Four.
