A Different Kind of Deadly (6 page)

Sure enough, the Ivory Arch was an
arch made of bones. Bones the size of mighty oaks, and bones the
size of nails. Skeletons of a number of races hung from the top of
the Arch, meticulously pieced together in chains, forming the most
outlandish beaded curtain I'd seen in my life.

"Diana... how dangerous is the
Moor?"

"Extremely."

That technically answered my
question, but not nearly as well as I would have liked. She set me
down on a bed of dirt that smelled heavily of rust.

"What's this?" Leo asked, pinching the
earth.

He rubbed his fingers and I
watched as granules fell like chalk powder.

"Marrow," Diana answered in her nonchalant
way.

It was almost comical how Leo's expression lit
up with wonder at this discovery, while I gripped my stomach in
disgust. More concerning was the fact that something could crush
these bones so finely that only powder remained.

Well, I suppose it could be useful.

"Leo," I said. "May I borrow a knife and some
water?"

"Sure thing." He set the objects in the palm
of my hand.

Leo stepped back, no doubt having
an inkling of what I was going to do.

I may have serious problems with the practical
aspects of necromancy, but I knew the ins and outs of how the magic
worked. Like any sort of spell-smithing, there are as many ways to
go about it as there are magicians. The only component required in
spells of life and death was a drop of the caster's blood. In
necromancy, this is called the Anchor. It binds the target to the
one performing the ritual.

And because bone powder was still technically
bone, I could customize the appearance on a miniscule
level.

I drew a glyph in the powdered
ground with the tip of my finger, poured drops of water at points
of intersection, and ran the edge of Leo's knife against the outer
side of my palm.

Blood trickled onto the powder, bringing out
the rusty hues of the marrow like a stroke of scarlet paint. Now
came the hard part: rune recital.

"
Reha em oyu'fo slehfeh nad taerh. Deln em royu h'getsernt;
royu r'wohpoe.
"

The center of my sigil began to shimmer
red.

Runes were dangerous when used
improperly. They are the universal language of magic, and in a way,
alive. The nature of runes, besides being words of power, was to
impede those who would use them. I felt them trying to twist my
tongue into a knot as I spoke them aloud, my voice becoming less
familiar by the second.

"
Tatse shti, ym'cesesne, nad hurthog'ti, ym'letomra
losu.
"

The diagram glistened like crushed rubies,
branching throughout like pulsing veins. I needed to go on as long
as I could; the longer the rune during the summoning process, the
more efficient the summon.

"
E'atk shti, het pehsae ni'ym'dim'n eey. E'atk royu clehpae
ta'ym'eisd!
"

That was all I could manage. I felt faint, and
dug the heel of my palm into the earth to prevent myself from
falling face first into the ground.

The water I'd poured on the circle of power
worked as an adhesive agent that bound the crushed bone powder
together. The golem that emerged from the marrow looked on its
hands, and quickly found an emerald chemical pool.

I didn't have a very specific notion of what I
wanted from this golem, but I did require that it be capable of
protecting me, and by extension, be an able fighter in the
Moor.

Leo, Diana, and I watched this humanoid figure
step into the corrosive liquid, and I was a bit appalled at first.
Did my spell backfire? Or was it that there was no way a pile of
marrow could be capable of fighting anything we might find in the
Moor?

We saw something emerge from the viridian vat
less than a minute later, hot steam rolling off its surface. My
golem was in the shape of a man, and my twin in height and frame.
Its skin was like a sheet of smoldering embers, but in the place of
flame there was the corrosive substance of the pool. The acid ate
away at my creation, only for patches to grow back just as fast.
This gave his body the appearance of a sea of tiny tectonic plates,
with the solid bits floating amidst veins of poison gas.

He moved until he was kneeling before me, a
hand over his fist in the strangest interpretation of a knight I'd
ever seen.

"
Massster.
" Its voice was like a
steam vent, hissing between the syllables. "
Hasss you naaame for me?
"

"Uhh..."

"
Uhh
," the golem repeated.
"
Uhh confirrrmed
."

"Wait! No, I didn't mean that your name was
Uhh."

My golem cocked his head, puzzled.

Diana laughed.

"I can't believe you can recite a rune that
complex, but don't even know that the first name you grant a golem
is permanent."

Leo cackled as well. "Don't take it too hard,
Marvin. Uncle Larry got into one of his rants while his golem was
still forming."

I shot him a withering look. "I doubt it's
worse than 'Uhh'"

"Well, considering his name is Bustingmyballs,
I'd say yeah, it kinda is worse than 'Uhh'."

"Yeees?" Uhh asked.

I slapped myself in the face. "I can't believe
this is happening."

"
Maaaster... ready yourrrself.
"

"Ready myself?" I looked at Uhh and wondered
if he was broken. "Ready myself for what?"

Diana whirled around.

"Combat."

10: Fleshy
Uglies

Please don't be
fleshy
, please don't be
fleshy.

Great GODS ABOVE, DON'T LET IT BE
FLESHY!

But, as usual, the Gods have shitty reception
this far beneath the surface. I stared straight at a pair of
hulking... brutes? Monsters? I didn't know what the hell they were
besides ugly.

Two, giant, fleshy sacks of ugly.

The Uglies in question looked like
the failed, rotten leftovers from House Soma, with bulging muscles
and flailing limbs sewn together by the most questionable kind of
tailor. There was no head on the damn thing, and my cowardice was
tempered by my confusion as I looked at it, a mass of arms and legs
in a roughly spherical shape, hobbling towards us from behind a
pile of bones.

"Uhh, is there any chance those things don't
want to kill us?" I asked.

"
None.
" My golem tilted his head.
"
Sshall I errradicatte
them?
"

"That would be nice," I squeaked.

Uhh charged into action, followed by Tully,
who had hopped off Leo's shoulder and started plodding off to face
these giants.

Diana was calm, something that went deeper
than her porcelain facade. I knew it from looking at her impassive
expression, borderline boredom from what I could tell.

Tully nabbed one Ugly by a swollen ring
finger. The monster did its utmost to shake the bird off, but its
flesh must've been in worse shape than I thought, since Tully
succeeded in tearing off the digit.

Uhh, meanwhile, ran up a heap of bones and
jumped directly onto the second Ugly.

I'm going to take a brief mental breather to
state that the name "Ugly" is going to stick, provided I didn't
discover an actual term for these things.

The Ugly that Uhh had landed on began to run
backwards, probably hoping to squash its attacker by crushing him
into one of the many stalagmites. The fact that these things had
any sort of intelligence was both fascinating and worrisome, as I
watched the Ugly destroy the rock behind it with laughable
ease.

Uhh clung to its surface valiantly, melting
off the Ugly's skin by grace of his corrosive nature. The air
reeked of acid and necrotic flesh, and my golem tore his arm
through to the core of his foe.

I heard a disturbing, gelatinous
sound, almost like an exaggerated pulse.

Self preservation led me take a
step behind Leo's massive frame.

Now that Uhh had destroyed the Ugly's heart,
the entire monster exploded, instantly turned into a mass of
stinking, scorching, puss.

The bulk of it splattered across Leo, who was
now pumping his fists excitedly.

"Did you see that, Marvin? That was
incredible!"

I threw up.

Uhh made short work of the second Ugly, and it
burst apart in an identical fashion. I pulled the collar of my
shirt over my nose, but the stench assaulting my olfactory senses
didn't acknowledge that flimsy filter.

Diana picked me up for the third time that
day, and I felt her shaking, a sensation I recognized as her way of
laughing.

"I seriously fail to see what's so
funny, Diana." I was hot, humid, terrified, and altogether in a
very foul mood. Even if she was Inval's disciple, and a killing
machine, I wasn't in the mood to take any more crap from Diana
today.

"You took out those monsters all by yourself,
Marvin."

I blinked.

"Diana... Uhh took them out."

"And Tully!" Leo shouted, running after
us.

"And Tully," I amended, trying to ignore the
taste of vomit in the back of my mouth.

"Marvin, Uhh is your golem," Diana pointed out
as we passed beneath the curtain of bones. "A modest success is
reading off individual runes; respectable necromancers can string a
sentence together. It's been very long time since I've seen anyone
recite three at once."

Uhh had no trouble keeping up with Diana. I
felt his eyes scanning the caverns ahead, and realized that, like
always, Diana was right. He was an incredibly advanced golem. Most
golems in Nethermount could only follow basic commands, and their
movements were choppy throughout. Uhh reacted in a human manner
from speech to execution. The scientist in me wanted to discover
the extent of Uhh's sentience.

"Diana, where are you leading us?" I
wondered.

"Krisenburg."

"Krisenburg?"

"It's a town."

Leo bull-rushed his way next to us. "Town?
There're towns down here?"

"Just the one," said Diana. "And a
few homesteads

scattered here and there."

"Uhh," I began, out of sheer curiosity. "Do
you know anything about Krisenburg?"

"Marvin," said Leo, "he's just made of bones,
you can't expect him to know anything."

"Bones that were found here, Leo," I reminded
him. "We already know that if we resurrect a normal person, they'll
retain the memories they had while they were alive."

The phenomena I was describing was called
Afterlife Embossing. The theory behind it is rather
simple.

Let's say that there's a body of a desert
nomad. He died of old age, and the only wound he had on him was a
scar he received while he was a young boy.

If a necromancer decided to resurrect him,
then this old man would sit up, now undead, and still remember how
that scar came to be.

In the simplest sense, Afterlife Embossing was
based on the theory of muscle memory; that our bodies are like
scrapbooks an undead can look to in order to remember the events of
their life. I was curious whether Uhh had any such memories, since
he was cobbled from organic matter, but I guess Leo was
right.

"
Krrrissenburrg.
" Uhh stared into
space. "
Fooounded... centurrries ago. Town
forrr failurrres; rottinnng scrapss of
Netherrrmountain.
"