Book 7: Chapter 8 - The March of the Dead (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 8 - The March of the Dead

Necromancy is the imperfect art of binding the souls of the dead to an object, or of gifting unlife to a corpse. It is taboo and forbidden because it trespasses upon the realm of the gods. It is said that souls so bound are denied the afterlife, stained not only by their own sins, but by the sins of the caster who dragged them from their appointed rest.

The old texts speak of the fruit of the Necromantic Path, saying that its roots lie deep in Dragon lore. From that forbidden tradition came such things as Vessel Weapons, artifacts capable of holding a soul and growing in power through purpose, memory, and bloodshed.

It is rumored that the Crown of Aranthia is one such artifact, granting wisdom and madness in equal measure, for within it dwell the collective souls of those who have worn it.

- Master Betrand of the University of Quas.

My mount was already chewing on a corpse’s arm. For a moment, I simply watched Theodore worry at the limb with an almost bovine patience, blood wetting the blunt edges of his beak. I had forgotten that he was omnivorous, of all things. A small oversight. This world had taught me that the small ones were often the most grotesque.

Fortune smiled, or perhaps frowned, upon one of the men. There was a survivor.

His legs had been broken beneath Theodore’s enthusiasm, crushed somewhere between bone and mud, but his lungs remained hale enough. He was screaming for his mother at the top of his voice, a shrill, ragged sound that cut through the forest.

I hopped down from Theodore, my armored boots making deep impressions in the soft forest floor. As I approached, the man’s screams diminished into whimpers. That was the way of such things. Men shouted defiance at death when it was still somewhere over the horizon. Once it stood over them, wearing black-gold plate, most remembered they were made of meat.

I gestured for Theodore to come closer, then withdrew a healing potion from my saddlebag. When I pulled the stopper free, a sweet scent drifted into the air, almost obscene amid the stink of blood, loam, and opened bowels. I forced the bottle between the man’s complaining lips and made him drink.

“Waste, if you ask me,” Larynda commented from atop her floating mount, Bubbles.

“The half-blood speaks the truth of it,” Marimae said, her elvish features an almost perfect mirror of her sister’s.

“Got to find out where they came from, Gil,” Elwin suggested from my right, his voice unusually hollow. “Bandits like these have to have a base. Maybe more of them there, planning to prey on travelers. Would be a good deed if you stopped them.”

“That is the plan,” I said.

“What plan, Gilgamesh?” asked Saranea, running a hand through her white-silver hair with vague annoyance.

“To find out where these rogues came from,” I replied, “and then perform a little rough justice.”

“Rougher than this?” her sister asked with a raised eyebrow.

I shrugged one armored shoulder. “First, we find out whether they have a base and where it is. Strip the dead of whatever valuables or coin they carry. We may need it for the road. Leave them their weapons and what armor they have.”

“But…” one of the sisters began.

“But nothing,” Larynda said sharply, shooting the elves a look that dared them to challenge me. “We’ll do it.”

“While you attend to that,” I said, looking down at the broken bandit, “I will have a few words with this man.”

I knelt beside him, my armored knee disturbing the leaves and damp soil of the forest floor.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Gerald,” he whimpered.

“Now, Gerald, this is the part where you die. I will give you a choice some men never receive. You can die hard, or you can die easy.” I smiled down at him, cool and light, almost playful. “I have brought with me a plentiful supply of healing potions. I will also have you know, however, that I take no pleasure in this.”

***

Gerald broke almost immediately.

There was no dignity in it. No grim endurance. No hardened criminal resolve. The man simply came apart beneath the certainty of what would happen if he did not speak. His words tumbled from him in a desperate flood, wet with spit, tears, and the bubbling sounds of a throat trying not to choke on terror. A camp, he said. Hidden near a ravine a few miles away. More of them there. Supplies. Families. The remnants of whatever miserable little community had decided that survival was worth staining the road with the blood of the innocent.

True to my word, I snapped his neck once I had the information I needed. A few experiene points, nothing much, but it was better than nothing. It was a clean death and more than he had any right to expect.

As for the girls, they had managed to loot a number of trinkets, a few bits of jewelry, and enough coin to amount to several gold. Some change for the road. Now it was time now to bring justice to whatever remained of the bandits.

Gerald had said something about farmers driven from their land. Families in the camp. Women and children. Hungry mouths and desperate choices. The usual litany. Everyone, it seemed, had a sob story. Everyone was innocent. Everyone had been forced by circumstance, by lords, by taxes, by bad harvests, by cruel winters, by the hard hand of fate pressing them down on them. And everyone, I was determined, would be held accountable for their decisions.

I had absolutely no intention of going on another detour, so I called upon my magic and Whispers of the Grave answered as I strengthened it with Overboost.

Even through the silence of my hands as they formed its spell construct, it did not come like clean, not like a neat arrangement of Mana like the other spellsl. Empowered now, it came as a chill beneath the skin, as the taste of old copper on the tongue, as the sudden certainty that the ground underfoot was not earth at all but the thin lid of a vast and crowded tomb. The forest seemed to lean closer. The small animals, and even the insects fell silent, as if some ancient predator had opened one eye in the deep places beneath the world.

Then I heard them, the recent dead. Their souls sang as they flit about through the air. It was a chorus of confusion and denial, a thin, high keening at the edge of hearing. Some called for mothers. Some called for their gods. Some called for wives whose names they had no right to utter after the things they had done. Others did not yet understand they were dead, and so they floated in maddeniny circles.

The poor fools were trying to find the gates of paradise, but I had denied them. Around me were the unworthy, souls made heavy by sin, fear, and the choices that had brought them beneath my lance. They would not find the certainty of hell, heaven, or purgatory yet. Not until I was done with them.

The empowered spell tightened its grip.

Before, the shades could but harass my enemies, clawing at the mind, chilling the blood. Now the spell had deepened into something uglier and far more useful. It no longer merely called the dead. It gave them shelter.

The air thickened around the corpses. Shadows gathered where there should have been none, pooling beneath broken ribs and split mail, crawling into open mouths, empty eye sockets, and gaping wounds. Corrupted Mana moved through the dead like black thread through a rotten tapestry, stitching soul to meat, command to corpse, purpose to what should have been still.

The first body twitched. Then another. Then all around us, the freshly slain began to rise as my spell brought them back for one last macabre dance. And they did not rise cleanly. There was no grace to it at all. 

A dead man with his spine crushed bent backward before lurching upright, his head hanging at an angle that would have made life impossible. Another dragged himself to his feet with one arm, the other dangling by strips of flesh and leather. A third tried to breathe through a throat that had been opened from ear to ear, producing only a wet, bubbling rasp. Fingers flexed and grasped around their weapons with both reluctance and hunger. 

Their movements were wrong in two different ways at once. Fast and erratic one moment, sluggish and dragging the next. Like marionettes pulled by two masters who hated each other. But inexorably, the corpses shambled, jerked, and steadied into something that approximated human movement.

The smell changed too. Death had already been present, of course, a smell that I had unfortunately too much experience with. Blood, ruptured bowels, wet leather, opened stomachs. But this was something colder. Not quite the sweet sourness of corpses when rot claimed them too quickly. Not quite the scent of a grave exhaling too early. It was almost pure in a way.

The sisters swore under their breath and made signs to whatever elven gods they still believed might be listening. Marimae’s face had gone very still. Saranea’s mouth tightened, her eyes following each corpse as it found its feet. Yet there was steel in them too. Horror had touched them, but it had not mastered them. They had resigned themselves to learning the nature of the sword at my side, and whatever dark road that might lead them down.

Not that I was walking a dark road. If a quest for survival and immortality against those who called themselves gods was evil, then there was no justice in the world.

The more reluctant shades gathered around me before they fully settled into flesh, hollow half-images of how they remembered their earthly forms. Some still looked like men. Others were already becoming less distinct, their faces smearing at the edges, their bodies thinning into smoke and memory. A few tried to flee into the trees, drawn toward whatever judgment they imagined waited beyond the veil.

My magic did not permit it. I did not permit it.

There was a gravity to Whispers of the Grave, a pull that seized them by whatever passed for the spine of the soul and dragged them back. They struggled. They clawed at the air. They pleaded without mouths. But the only shelter I allowed them was their own freshly made corpse.

Gerald was among them. His soul was a pale, panicked thing, still wearing the expression he had died with. He stared at me, then at his broken body, then at me again, as if some appeal might yet be made. There was none. The spell claimed him, and pushing him down into the meat he had so recently vacated.

His corpse convulsed. The snapped neck cracked back into a rough alignment, not healed, merely arranged well enough to obey. His eyes opened, filmed and empty. His mouth moved around words that could no longer form.

The rest took longer, but in the end they found their bodies.

Soon the dead stood in a loose ring around us, armed with the same weapons they had used in life, stripped of valuables but not of purpose. They were not soldiers. They were not a proper army. They were a collection of ruined men held together by my will.

I pointed them toward their comrades’ encampment, with Gerald leading the way. They turned as one, slowly at first, then with growing certainty. Weapons dragged through leaves and mud. Broken boots scraped over roots. Dead throats clicked and rasped. They moved into the trees and I my eyes followed them until the trees and the underbrush swalloed them up, zombies one and all upon a mission of justice.

“Well,” Larynda said, her voice cutting neatly through the silence, “you do not see that every day. I saw Vincenzio animate a few corpses once, but never this many. You seem to have a talent for it.”

She watched the last of the dead disappear between the trees, their dragging steps fading into the dusk.

“Setting corpses to make more corpses,” she added. “Efficient.”

“He was a good man in an impossible position,” I uttered quietly. “His Path lives on in me, after a fashion.”

One of the elves looked toward me, her expression caught somewhere between curiosity and distaste. “Who was this Vincenzio?”

I glanced between the pair of them.

“A Magister of the so-called dark arts,” I answered. “A man of no small power, and rather more conscience than most who would have condemned him. He taught Larynda and I. He taught me, you could say, the importance of life and death. The weight of both.”

I looked back toward the trees where the dead had gone. “He was a good man.”

Larynda nodded once, solemnly. For all her cutting remarks, she knew when something was not to be mocked.

“Now then,” I said, turning away from the slaughtered road. “Let us be away from this place. I command the dead, but I have no great love for their company.”

It seemed that I had branched out a little bit into a minion build. Now, all that remained was to see how long my temporary summons would last for.