Dirge for a Necromancer (28 page)

“I was trying to cast a spell to stamp out a pestilence in my world,” Raettonus said sourly.

Kimohr Raulinn laughed softly. “And why would you bother to do that?” he asked.

“Because people were dying.”

A thin smile flitted across Kimohr Raulinn’s lips. “As if something so inconsequential ever mattered to you.” He smoothed the embroidered hem of his robe against his thigh. “So that is when you really caught my eye. The day you lost your soul. I kept a very close eye on you after that for as long as you were in Zylx. Sometimes you’d leave and I’d lose track of you. I couldn’t help but worry at first that you might not come back. Oh, but you always come back. Zylx is the closest thing you have to a real home now, isn’t it? You might stay awhile in other worlds, but you don’t belong there. Not like you belong here.”

Raettonus furrowed his brow and looked down into the courtyard. “I don’t belong anywhere,” he said bitterly.

“That’s true enough, I suppose,” said Kimohr Raulinn. “But this place suits you best, I think.”

“So, what—you’ve been watching me for all this time, then? For centuries and centuries?”

“That’s right,” affirmed Kimohr Raulinn with a slow nod.

“Why now?” asked Raettonus. “Why wait all that time and then just suddenly decide to do this?”

Kimohr Raulinn shrugged one slim shoulder. “I felt it was about time,” he said. “Honestly, I’ve been watching you dwell on Sir Slade’s death for all this time. I’ve been watching your wounds fester and turn necrotic. It reached a tipping point, I suppose you might say, where the benefits of putting you through this now were more irresistible than the promise of what might happen if I continued to bide my time.”

“Benefits?” Raettonus spat. “And what, praytell, are the benefits of dangling my master in front of me—the only person I’ve ever really loved, the person I’ve been fighting my whole miserable life to get back—knowing he would just be snatched away from me again? What the fuck kind of benefits are you talking about?”

“Benefits for me, of course, and not for you,” said Kimohr Raulinn. “The amount of chaos that’s been created here…it’s immeasurable. I didn’t do this out of malice toward you, you must know. Believe me, Raettonus, if I could have this chaos and you could have Sir Slade, I would certainly make it so. But that is, unfortunately, beyond my power. Sir Slade had to die a second death. There was never any question about that. He was never going to live more than a few weeks.”

“You could’ve told me that to begin with,” Raettonus said. “You could’ve warned me it was only temporary.”

“Raettonus—dear, sweet Raettonus,” cooed Kimohr Raulinn. “All things are only temporary.”

“You could have told me to begin with.”

“Would it have made a difference?” asked Kimohr Raulinn. “To you, I mean? To me it would have. Your pain was just so much more potent when you thought you’d have Slade for the rest of his life and had him taken from you again. That pain… I’m sorry, Raettonus, but pain like that just calls to me.” He smiled like a cat camped at a mouse hole. “No hard feelings, right?”

Raettonus ground his teeth hard together and narrowed his eyes at the god. Clenching his right hand into a fist and putting as much weight behind it as possible from his position, he threw a hard punch.

His knuckles connected with Kimohr Raulinn’s jaw with a loud, reverberating crack, breaking part of the mask and sending the god toppling sideways onto the ground. Raettonus shook out his hand. He’d cut the skin on his knuckles, and they looked like they’d be bruised for a week, but it was worth it. On the ground, Kimohr Raulinn sputtered and spat out some blood. He sat up shakily and gripped the bottom part of his mask, a chunk of which was missing. Blood dripped out of the uneven edges around the break. “You hit me,” Kimohr Raulinn said, scandalized. His pretty, pink lip was beginning to swell and turn red. “Are you insane? I am a god.”

“Get out of my sight,” said Raettonus. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Kimohr Raulinn scrambled to his feet, eyes flashing with rage. “You don’t have the right to speak to me this way.”

Raettonus stood and drew his rapier. “That a fact?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow.

Kimohr Raulinn looked from the blade to Raettonus’ face. Shoulders slumping slightly, he turned his gaze away from the magician. “We might have been friends,” he said sorely. “You would’ve done better to be my friend than to assume I’m your enemy. Fine, though. I’m going. Good night, Magician. Until we meet again, adieu.”

“We won’t be meeting again, you and I,” Raettonus told him coldly.

Kimohr Raulinn let out a stiff chuckle, blood still welling up bright and red from the ruined edges of his mask. He turned away and was gone, just as if he’d never been there to begin with. Raettonus glared into the empty air for a long while before he lowered his sword. A stiff breeze blew at his back, carrying with it the dying sparks of the funeral pyre far below. The little red embers brushed the back of his neck, singeing the hair and skin there, but he could hardly feel them. Overhead the moon was like a grinning mouth, smiling at his failures.

Chapter Eighteen

Kaebha Citadel felt emptier and emptier with each passing day. Aside from the guards on Diahsis’ floor, Raettonus rarely found himself passing soldiers as he made his way through the fort. Most of the ones he did come across were Zylekkhan. Strange, he thought, since he didn’t remember there being nearly so many turncoats. He could hazard a good guess regarding that change in proportions, however.

Dohrleht no longer came to lessons. Raettonus hadn’t spoken to him since the attack on the citadel. Maeleht was severely weakened by his efforts caring for the injured, and so he didn’t come to lessons either. Raettonus passed his days alone, walking the halls, or else in his room asleep. Diahsis often invited him to come up to his room, but Raettonus rarely took him up on the offers, and on the rare occasions he did go he found himself regretting it. At the best, a trip to Diahsis’ quarters was spent listening to the general play his flute or coldly turning down his flirtations. At the worst, Raettonus had to put up with his blowhard tales and his stories about his dead lover.

The only place within the citadel that seemed in any way busy was the shrine. Day and night the fortress’ shrine was crowded with Zylekkhan and Tahlehson soldiers. They laid candles at the base of the statue of Cykkus and begged to be forgiven for their blasphemy in fighting against him. They hadn’t wanted to, they told the statue. They hadn’t known. No one had told them who they were fighting against. When Raettonus skulked the halls in the dead of night, he could see candlelight glaring out of the cracked door of the shrine. He didn’t go in to look, but he imagined it to be the light of thousands of candles burning all at one. Waste of energy, he thought bitterly. He’s not going to forgive you, and either way you’re just going to die.

A few uneventful weeks passed. As the fervor of war died away in the fort it became as though the fight against Cykkus and his abassy had never happened at all. Sometimes Raettonus couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t just dreamed the whole thing as he strolled emptily through the silent halls of the citadel.

“You want to go for a walk?” Brecan would come to his room to ask him now and again. Raettonus would always shake his head and roll over so his face was buried in his pillow. Brecan would always hesitate for a moment before quietly withdrawing. The same scene, every two or three days. Always just the same. Brecan would come and then go and leave Raettonus in desolate silence. As Raettonus pressed his face hard into his pillow, he couldn’t help but think that he used to be able to hear a clock from his room. At some point, he was sure, that clock had given up ticking. Now all he heard from his room was cold silence.

It must’ve been two months after the battle. Maeleht still couldn’t come to lessons, and Dohrleht still wouldn’t. Raettonus was lying in his bed letting a fire come to life in his palm and then smothering it in his fingers again and again. The door opened slowly at a timid push from the hall. Assuming it was Brecan or a messenger from Diahsis, he didn’t bother to look up. However, when the intruder spoke it was with Rhodes’ gravelly voice, words all slurred together.

“Mashter Raettonush,” he said. “May I come in?”

Raettonus closed his hand on the little fire, suffocating it. He looked up at Rhodes through the thin curls of smoke rising between his fingers. In the doorway, Rhodes stared back at him with one brown eye surrounded by rotting flesh and one filmy white eye in a skeletal socket, the thin, greasy strands of what remained of his hair falling across his face. He wasn’t able to make facial expressions but Raettonus could tell by his posture that he was nervous. “If you want,” Raettonus said, sitting up. He motioned vaguely toward the desk chair.

Rhodes bowed slightly and entered, leaving the door open. He went slowly to the chair, dragging his left leg uselessly behind him. The reanimation job Raettonus had done on him was a sloppy one, and it had been done before Raettonus knew good ways to preserve flesh, so much of Rhodes’ body had decayed while Raettonus figured it out. Raettonus watched him unblinkingly as he crossed the room and pulled out the chair. With difficulty, Rhodes sat down and laid his decayed hands on his knees.

“Mashter Rattonush, I know you’re upshet right now,” began the corpse after a silent minute. “But Shlade wouldn’t want you to mourn him like thish.”

“That a fact?” said Raettonus. “Seems to me that the man who pretended to be his friend and then tried to kill him shouldn’t be lecturing me about what Slade would want.”

Rhodes sighed raggedly. “Are you going to hold that againsht me forever?” he asked tiredly.

“Yes, I think so. After all, you tried to kill him.”

The rotted tissue on the half of Rhodes’ face that still had any muscle at all twitched, as if he were trying very hard to make some sort of expression. “There were…circumshtancesh,” said Rhodes. “I never wanted to kill him, but…”

“But you were still willing to,” Raettonus said.

Rhodes sighed again. The sound hissed and came out through his ribs and through a hole in his throat, causing the shreds of damaged flesh there to flap weakly. “Yesh, I wash willing to,” he said. “I wash…in a bad way. There were debtsh I needed to pay, and a man approached me with an offer of quite a lot to kill Shlade.” He rubbed at the back of his neck with one bony hand and turned his eyes to the floor. In a small voice, he said, “For what it’sh worth, I refushed at firsht. I threw him out, told him never to come to me again. But…thosh debtsh jusht kept piling up, and… And I’m a weak, weak man, Raettonush.” He lowered his hand from his neck to pick at a loose thread on the hem of his tunic that Raettonus couldn’t see. “I didn’t desherve to shurvive that fight that day in the orchard. I’m a worm. Lower than a worm, even.”

“Yes, you are,” said Raettonus. The gaze he regarded Rhodes with was icy cold.

“Even sho,” continued Rhodes, looking up. “I knew Shlade for many, many yearsh. We grew up together. He wouldn’t want you to do thish to yourshelf. He’d want you to be happy.”

Raettonus looked away. “I’m tired of this place,” he said after a moment. “Pack up Slade’s stuff and take it north. We’re leaving soon.”

Rhodes hesitated slightly before he said, “Ash you wish.” Slowly he stood and left the room, closing the door gently behind himself.

For a while, Raettonus stared silently at the door before standing with a sigh. Sliding his rapier into his belt, he ventured out into the hall to skulk aimlessly about the citadel.

* * *

The corridors were mostly empty, with only a few centaurs loitering about between shifts on the roof and repairing the damage to the outer walls. The main exception to this was the shrine, which was less crowded than it had been but still markedly busy as Raettonus passed it by.

When Raettonus made his way through the courtyard, he found a few soldiers drilling and jousting, but not as many as he had expected. With a slight sense of disappointment, he noted Brecan was not with them. A shadow fell across the yard, and Raettonus looked upward to see a hippogryph circling the steel cage above the citadel. One of the patrolling guards on the roof waved to it, and it glided over to him and landed on the metal bars. He took a rolled up paper out of its beak and gave it something from a pouch at his hip, and the hippogryph took off again into the sky. Raettonus watched it disappear beyond the walls and continued across the yard.

His mind wandered as he meandered along the stark, stone halls of the citadel, lonely footfalls echoing behind him. He didn’t even notice he was in one of the subterranean levels until it became dark enough he needed to light a fire to see by. He continued meanderingly onward along a cobweb-filled passage with a high ceiling. As he made his way down a broad staircase the scent of putrefaction caught in his nose. He stepped off the last stair and coughed slightly as the odor stung his lungs. It was drifting in, he noted, from a side path. Curiously, he turned and followed the smell to its source and shortly found himself entering the citadel’s dungeon level through a little-used stairway entrance covered in dirt and grime.

There were no guards posted on the cell, Raettonus observed as he entered. Beyond the bars, Raettonus saw centaurs lying all across each other, entirely still. He edged closer, letting the firelight illuminate their forms. As he expected, their throats had been cut. Dried blood stained their cloth uniforms or the bare chainmail they were wearing. Flies buzzed about the cell in great black swarms, and Raettonus could see maggots wriggling up out of the decaying bodies near the bottom of the stack. The maggots struck too many chords, which brought to his mind the fight against Cykkus, so he turned his face away from them.

It was difficult to say how long the oldest bodies had been there. The weight of the corpses piled atop them had crushed them down into what was mostly pulp and rot. Raettonus’ best guess came from the smell of all of it. He would’ve ventured that the executions had started just on the heels of the attack by Cykkus’ army.

Across the room, up the well-kept staircase usually used to approach the cells, he heard a couple centaurs coming down. Extinguishing his fire, Raettonus withdrew to the access he had entered by. As he ascended the stairs, he heard the centaurs speaking in Kaerikyna as they unlocked the cell and tossed something heavy in. Quietly, Raettonus left them to their dubious activities.

He decided to return to his room and had almost reached his floor when a soldier in Tahlehson armor came around a corner. “Ah, Magician!” called the soldier in a thick accent. He spoke common Zylekkhan haltingly, as if unsure how to put the words together into a thought. “I am sent by General Diahsis to find you. He is requesting of your company in his chambers. He says that I should to tell you he’ll be, ah, very disappointed if you are to not show up.”

Raettonus gave the soldier a tired look and suppressed a small sigh. “Yes, all right,” he said at last. “You don’t need to show me the way. I know it myself.”

The Tahlehson bowed his head slightly and, passing Raettonus, continued down the hall. Raettonus bit back another sigh and made his way up to Diahsis’ floor.

There was only one guard posted on the staircase when Raettonus reached the level, and he seemed to have been drinking. He moved aside to let Raettonus in, swaying slightly as he did.

Somewhere beyond the halls and empty passages, someone was playing a sorrowful song on a flute. He followed the sound to Diahsis’ airy study, where the general was seated beside Deggho dek’Kariss on a couch, playing a gleaming white flute. Lorum and another centaur were standing behind the couch, listening to the general play while Daeblau stood off beside a window overlooking the courtyard, staring down into the yard. As Raettonus stood in the doorway Deggho waved him in, but the others didn’t seem to notice him at all. Diahsis was playing with his eyes closed, a look of concentration on his face.

At some point after the battle someone had sewn Deggho’s head back onto his shoulders. The stitch work was neat and tidy, so Raettonus guessed it must have been Ebha or maybe Maeleht. Anger boiled up in Raettonus’ belly as he looked at the goblin. Deggho was just as unnatural as Slade, but yet here he still was. No one came to drag him back to Hell. All the other corpses that might have risen when Hell’s wall was breached—were they simply inconsequential? Was it only Slade’s life which had to be ended again? Was it only the life of the one man Raettonus cared about which needed to be taken away?

Apparently so.

Smothering the anger as best he could, Raettonus took a seat in a cushy armchair, throwing up his legs over one of the arms. Diahsis half opened his eyes as he was playing and stopped abruptly. “Magician!” he exclaimed. “You decided to come see us! I’m glad.”

“Well, I was already out and about,” said Raettonus.

Diahsis smiled. “Deggho painted a picture of me,” he said, pointing with his flute toward where the canvas leaned against a wall drying. In the painting, Diahsis stood proudly adorned in his shining dress armor, all bronze and silver and wrapped with yellow and blue silk. “It’s good, isn’t it? It looks just like me!” Diahsis wrapped one arm around Deggho’s shoulders. “You’re amazing, Deggy, you really are.”

“You’re too kind, General,” said Deggho. The goblin might’ve blushed a little if he still had blood circulating in his body to blush with.

Raettonus arched one eyebrow. “You’ve been drinking today, haven’t you?” he asked Diahsis.

Diahsis nodded, still smiling. “Just a little,” he said. “And it was only wine. Ah—would you like some? Vyrah, where did you put that bottle? You had it last, I think.”

The centaur standing beside Lorum—a young man with long, black hair and a scar that ran from his lower lip all the way to his navel—shrugged and said in a voice without an accent, “I think you emptied that one, actually.”

“Did I?” asked Diahsis, looking slightly distressed. He looked back toward Raettonus. “Gods, I’m sorry. I guess I drank that bottle. We could get a fresh one, though, if you want.”

“I’m fine,” Raettonus said. “I’m not in a mood to drink anyway.”

“Are you sure?” said Diahsis. “It’s very good wine. I think we have some brandy too. And—oh, we definitely had some rum.”

“I’m fine, really.”

Diahsis’ smile faltered a little. “Oh, all right,” he said. “Hey, Daeby, come over here and join us. Why don’t you tell us that story you told this morning? Raettonus and Vyrah weren’t here to hear it.”

“Hm?” Daeblau glanced at him quickly before returning his gaze to the yard. “Ah, forgive me, General, I don’t seem to recall what story that was.”

“Oh, you know—the one about that slave fighting ring in Ti Tunfa,” said Diahsis. “You tell it so well. Come over here and join us. What’s so interesting down there anyway?”

For a moment, Daeblau was tense. Suddenly, however, his shoulders relaxed and he turned away from the window. “Nothing,” he said. “Just watching the men at their drills. That’s all.”

“Oh, is that all?” said Diahsis, chuckling slightly. “See anything you like down there, Dae?”