Volume 1, Chapter 45: A Bone to Pick (Patreon)

Hurrin reached for the sword tucked into the sheath behind his belt, then grabbed his spear and shield and jumped down from his mount, calmly patting it along the back.

I simply climbed down from mine and copied his reassuring movements. I left the staff with Bri sealed inside it, wedged into the place meant for a spear.

Peter, whom I had lost sight of because his mount was now behind mine, must have dismounted too, because I heard a third pair of feet hit the ground.

Ahead of us, the strange thickets of mycelium were being torn apart like a stretched membrane by the bony hands of corpses forcing their way through from between the trees.

Three skeletons emerged, stripped of every other organ except for loose skin hanging from their bones—human skin, by my reckoning—stretched across their shoulders and chests.

Their skulls turned toward us with empty eye sockets and jerky, unnatural movements, teeth clattering as their heads tilted sideways once they somehow sensed us with senses they obviously no longer possessed. It looked as though they remembered where eyes, mouths, noses, and ears were supposed to be, and moved according to how a human body ought to behave rather than how it actually did.

Somehow, whenever I narrowed my eyes and almost closed them, I could smell decay—but also something fresh, like a meadow full of flowers waking to life in the morning. Black and white colors mixed together like yin and yang. I heard the sound of wind chimes and felt a strange loss of balance.

But whenever I focused fully and opened my eyes wider, all of those sensory impressions faded away.

Then my nose caught only the damp, ever-present smell of mushrooms and wet stone, mold and sweat, while the only things I could hear were the steps of those bony feet striking the rocks, the soft scraping of the boots worn by the three of us, and the crackling of the fire produced by Bri.

“Necromantic spawn,” Hurrin whispered. “Cut along the base of the spine. Try to separate the bones. If you get the chance, tear the skin off them—that’s where the magic keeping them alive is stored. As long as it’s touching even a single bone, the whole skeleton will keep moving, no matter how badly you dismember it.”

“Yo, can they turn us into whatever the fuck they are? Like vampires or zombies or some shit? They bite us, we turn too?” Peter asked, emerging on Hurrin’s left and boldly stepping forward. He took off his sunglasses and slipped them into his pocket, then planted his hands on his hips and watched the approaching skeletons.

Something else was coming through the hole they had torn in the mycelium behind them—something shaped like an oversized frog, judging by its skeleton, except this one too was covered in human skin, stretched just behind the neck and hanging down over its back and chest like some grotesque cross between a mane and a cloak.

“Nasty as fuck.” Peter muttered.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that happening to anyone. Their cursed creator must be somewhere nearby. We need to watch out for him too,” Hurrin replied, leveling his spear beneath his arm and drawing his shield closer to his chest.

“Chill, y’all. Now that I know how to drop these motherfuckers, I got this shit handled.” Peter said, and simply charged straight at the enemies.

He took off running on his skinny legs and, just before reaching them, lunged forward and made a short jump, landing right beside the first skeleton. The jump looked almost comical after such a long, noisy run-up, especially with him screaming at the top of his lungs the entire way.

The situation itself wasn’t funny. Startled by the attack, the skeleton swung at him and struck him in the side, knocking him off balance and sending him to the ground. On the way down, though, Peter managed to grab one of the creatures and drag it with him. He quickly crawled onto the skeleton’s stomach, crushing its pelvic bones and ribs beneath his weight, then started hammering its skull with his fists. The damn thing refused to crack easily.

Hurrin reacted to our companion’s antics and ran forward, carefully placing every step on the uneven terrain. Keeping his spear ahead of him, he drove it through the chest of another skeleton, then braced himself backward, planted the butt of the spear into the ground, and used it like a lever to lift the creature.

The skeleton slid down the shaft onto his shield. With a quick motion of his arm, Hurrin threw it off onto the nearby rocks, where it landed amid the clatter of bones.

Knowing the knife wouldn’t be much use in this fight, I looked around and spotted several loose stones. I grabbed the first one and threw it at the third skeleton, which had started moving toward Peter from behind, craning its spine forward as it tried to sink its teeth into the man’s neck.

My first projectile missed the monster by barely an inch. The second one didn’t. It struck the skeleton hard enough to knock the bony thing away after it had already bitten into Peter’s shoulder.

Despite being the skeleton of an amphibian, the approaching monstrosity moved with the same slow, unnatural lack of sudden motion as the others, only on four long limbs.

Hurrin approached it after tearing the skin free from the skeleton he faced and, thrusting repeatedly with his spear, tried to stop the massive thing’s slow advance toward us.

The creature raised one enormous forelimb and began swinging it toward the soldier.

That was when a bloodied Peter got back to his feet, screaming at the top of his lungs as he grabbed the skull of the skeleton that had tried to bite through him.

He threw it over his shoulder onto the one he had already nearly crushed. Once it was on the ground, he tore the skin from its bones, instantly stripping it of whatever life remained. The blood running down Peter’s arm began flowing under the direction of his magic toward the blood already gathered around his fists, where it hardened into something resembling red, gelatinous gloves.

As he ran toward the larger opponent, the wounds along his neck seemed to be closing.

I narrowed my eyes in disbelief. Again, something strange washed over my senses. This time it was the smell of rain and air above the ocean, a salty taste in my mouth, and the sound of dripping blood. When I looked back at the battlefield, all of those sensations disappeared.

I continued throwing stones at the largest of the creatures.

“Stop!” The shout suddenly rang out just as Peter drove his fist into the frog’s side, knocking it over with a crash against the rocks. “Why are you attacking my servants!?” shouted a hunched figure wrapped in rags as it stepped through the opening the skeletons had made earlier. “My poor undead!” She shouted again, and despite the raspy voice, I was fairly sure it was a woman. She supported nearly all her weight on a wooden, gnarled staff.

Peter ignored her pleas and kept pounding on the amphibian skeleton, which began cracking beneath his blood-reinforced fists.

Our guide, meanwhile, drew his sword and started toward the hunched figure.

Only then did I realize she wasn’t actually dressed in rags. What I had taken for torn fabric was some kind of cloak made from layer upon layer of overlapping strips of stretched, dried human skin, dyed black and white. I only made the connection due to blemishes, birthmarks and scars clearly visible beneath the dyes. Along with that realization, the contents of my stomach tried to come up, but I forced them back down with a swallow.

“Why are you doing this!? We haven’t done anything to you!” the figure shouted, gripping her staff with both hands as she slowly moved toward the skeleton being destroyed. She planted the butt of her walking stick and placed all of her weight on it with each step.

“Silence, necromancer. You tried to ambush us, and when that failed, you turned to your foul tongue. Today, you will join your own.”

The man raised his shield tightly in front of himself and, step by step, closed the distance between himself and the dark sorceress.

“Listen,” I said. “I think the carousel should yes fight.” My disgusting affliction made communication difficult, but at least the sheer absurdity of what I had said forced the others to look at me.

Even Peter stopped fighting and jumped down from the last skeleton, now shattered and broken beneath him.

“I wanted to sing that it is not advisable for us to undertake a skirmish,” I tried again, saying essentially the same thing in different words.

This time, it finally came out almost the way I intended.

“What do you mean? She’s a necromancer! The filth of this air.”

“Is there some law”—I took a deep breath because I knew the next word was going to come out wrong, so I approached it from another direction—“requiring the extermination… of necromancers… whenever one is… encountered?”

“No, but they kill people so they can strip off their skin and pull out their bones. They’re monsters… wearing human skin.”

“That isn’t true,” the necromancer replied. “We recover bodies thrown into the river after their souls have been taken, and we make use of what you discard. I have never killed anyone.”

“Your servant attacked Mr. Peter. It tried to bite through his neck.”

“They were only defending themselves! You attacked them! I’m only here gathering herbs and mushrooms we need for our brews. My lovely minions were here to protect me. Now I’m completely on my own…”

“Lies. Lies,” the soldier replied, spitting on the ground. “You’re as rotten in spirit as you are as a person.” He rammed his sword into its sheath, snatched up his spear, and charged the woman.

She tried to limp away, tried to turn. At the last second, she even threw away her staff, flinging out both arms to keep her balance, but it was already too late.

Hurrin drove the spear through her side. He ripped it free with one sharp pull, and when she collapsed forward onto her hands and knees, he struck again, driving the weapon through her head. He had aimed for her temple, but at the last moment the woman turned toward him. The spear went through her eye instead.

“Mhm, um…” Bri’s muttering blended into the crackling of her flames, though by now my ears had no trouble telling the two apart.

I felt just as disappointed by how things had turned out. Whether the necromancer had been hostile toward the world or not, she could have been a source of priceless knowledge. Now, at best, I could check what she had been carrying.

Hurrin looked down at her for a moment as he pulled the spear from her body and let the blood drip onto the rocks.

“Master Arthur, may I make use of your fire?” he asked, turning toward me.

“For… what purpose?” I replied, choosing my words more carefully now.

“What do you mean? To burn her. So that her soul can never return to the river of death.”

“In that case… you will not have… my permission.”

“Why?” he asked, spreading his arms.

I ignored him and walked over to the woman who, as it turned out, was somehow still alive. Her one remaining eye was still following my movements.

“First, I don’t agree… with your judgment of her… character,” I said, reaching for the knife. “Maybe she really was a star…” I sighed when I realized my speech had gotten ahead of me again. “A woman with a wicked heart,” I corrected myself. “But maybe she wasn’t.” I thought about myself—a thief, a con man, and a killer. I felt a certain sympathy for people who ignored the laws of the majority and followed their own moral code instead. “Second, she may have something useful on her.”

I drew my arm back slightly and, with a few quick movements, drove the knife through her face—through the other living eye, through the nose, then up through the roof of her mouth as her old, wrinkled jaw fell open.

I felt no reach from the knife into my mind, no offer to accelerate my senses. That was enough to tell me she was dead. I started stripping the woman of her skin cloak.

“What are you doing!? That’s human skin… surely you’re not planning to wear it.”

“No,” I lied. I was indeed considering wearing it if doing so might let me infiltrate some secret society and learn the secrets of necromancy. Even if I never got the opportunity, leaving something like this behind would still be a waste.

As I pulled it off, I searched the long pockets and found a knife she had probably used for cutting herbs, several short lengths of string, and small bundles of plants and fungal growths she had already collected.

One pocket also contained three dried human fingers. Finding nothing else, I put everything back where I had found it. Under the cloak, the woman wore only a simple linen tunic, shorts, and beneath those—as I discovered after pulling them aside slightly—a pair of thick, oversized granny panties.

Around her neck hung a necklace made from what looked like human tendons. At its lowest point were several dried, miniature hands bound together in such a way that their fingers gently held three human eyes between them, with the optic nerves threaded around the fingers.

I untied it from her neck and took that too, placing it on top of the bundle I had made from her cloak. Then I carried everything over and stuffed it into the bag I had received from Plasario’s quartermaster.

“I’m… we can go,” I said.

“Man, you sick as hell.” Peter said as he climbed onto his lizard.

Hurrin, who still hadn’t taken his eyes off me, slowly mounted his own reptodon as well. With a movement of the reins, he signaled that we should move. I, meanwhile, focused on what I felt whenever I touched the cloak, fingers and necklace.

It was the same sensation that had accompanied the appearance of the skeletons—that feeling of imbalance, the stench of rot and flowers, black and white, and little bells. I could feel all of it somewhere inside myself whenever those objects were in my hands. I knew instinctively, then, that they were saturated with magic.

The Daimon confirmed it as well, feeding me an understanding—through concepts rather than words—of what those objects actually were.

[Inspired items found:]

[Mummified Finger of a Drowned Man Pulled from the Mud, Classification: Work. Known properties: A single-use item created by a necromancer, allowing the user to reach into the memories of a person they touch and take one of those memories into their own mind. The most recent memories are the easiest to retrieve. Particularly useful on the dead, whose entire lives passed before their eyes at the moment of death. Known risks: An inexperienced user may become lost inside another person’s mind.]

[Upriver Skin Cloak, Classification: Work. Known properties: Made from fragments of skin taken from exactly one hundred people, this cloak symbolizes membership among the necromancers of Salirion. It grants the wearer immunity to the greed of water and allows them to heal themselves at the expense of the health of those within the wearer’s Aura.]

[Cradled Eyes of the Husks, Classification: Work. Known properties: Upon contact with the wearer’s skin, the nerves of the Husks’ eyes connect to the wearer’s body, creating temporary eyes on a hand of their choosing.]