Necromancer's Curse Read online

  Through it all, the Necromancer laughed as if watching a jester’s performance. Behind them, Logan heard the golem change its demeanor. It had stopped its groaning and was now panting heavily. The Necromancer’s crimson eyes grew brighter as a cloud of shade moved like living mist out of the dying gnome’s body into the palm of his upraised hand.

  “Entwith, Valah, Yultodleh!” Isaac’s voice boomed from Logan’s side, filling the room with a commanding presence that drew all eyes to the mage. Isaac was still leaning weakly against Nero, but now he gripped his staff forcefully, aiming it directly at the Necromancer.

  For a moment the Necromancer looked mildly amused at the dark-skinned man.

  “Away with you, shadow puppet,” Isaac said with a steely resolve that made even Logan suddenly nervous.

  The Necromancer realized what power shared the room with him. He saw through the illusion of the wandering mage and recognized Isaac for what he really was. He made a mewling sound of flimsy defiance.

  But it was too late. The spell was already cast, and a great wind moved through the library. The air rippled like an ocean gale, spraying books off shelves and scattering debris in its boiling path. At its head, Logan could have sworn he saw the visage of a diving white eagle.

  The spell hit the Necromancer head on, forcing him out of the room as if he were no more substantial than a feather. As he was hurled beyond the massive hole the golem had created to get inside, the Necromancer let out a horrible shriek and unleashed a line of black energy from the Shadow Stone. In his wake, all manner of shelves, tables, books, bones, and scattered wood were piled over the hole by Isaac’s spell, sealing it tight under a mountain of debris and locking the Necromancer in the hallway beyond.

  Meanwhile, the line of black energy crackled across the dead gnome, sounding like lightning touching down. The warrior’s dead body was flung into Bipp and Thorgar. Logan and his brother let out a cry as they watched their dear friend knocked into the stained-glass window behind him. It shattered as Bipp, Thorgar, and Alma were forced out of the castle’s second story window.

  Logan howled and tried to run to his friend, but he was weak, and Corbin had to grapple him around the shoulder and neck to keep him from falling over.

  “Logan, stop,” Corbin yelled through his own anguish.

  “We have to go after him,” Logan denied, trying to fight against his brother’s hold.

  “There’s no chance,” Corbin said, though whether he meant for Bipp or for them to get to the window, Logan could not tell. “We have to go.”

  Isaac and Nero were already shuffling for the secret tunnel. If the mage had looked emaciated before, now he looked downright dead on his feet.

  The flesh golem had gathered itself again and was deeply disturbed to see its eternal master forced from the room. It had Corbin’s voulge in hand, which it had worked out of its spinal column, and bellowed.

  Logan stopped struggling and flicked his gaze to the enraged behemoth, which rose to its full height behind them. The flesh golem brought Corbin’s voulge, which was made of solid Falian steel, down hard over its knee, snapping it in half.

  This time when Corbin tried to drag his brother back into the secret tunnel, Logan did not put up a fight. They did not even stop to try to seal the tunnel door, focusing all their efforts on retreat. As Isaac and Nero slipped in behind them, the flesh golem battered the doorframe and howled into the tunnel.

  Beaten for now, the companions limped away into the darkness.

  Chapter 23

  Long ago, the walnut tree resting beneath the elaborately crafted window of Ul’kor’s Library was a spectacle to behold. Many a visitor to that fair city found themselves resting beneath its heavy boughs with a book in hand, lost in the peace and tranquility the courtyard was known for.

  That was before the curse fell over the land, seeping into the soil and poisoning the once magnificent tree’s roots. Now it stood like a petrified version of its former glory, its twisted, ashen branches looking as if they were reaching out for the castle to grab hold of it and shake away the disease and rot which had fouled the place.

  Bipp blinked slowly awake. He could hear the sound of clashing steel and battle cries coming from the castle gates, a good ways from the desolate courtyard.

  “You must wake at once,” Alma pleaded again, shaking his shoulders.

  Bipp moaned and moved to rise, but the priestess was quick to react, pinning him in place.

  “Wha—” Bipp groaned.

  “Careful now, let me guide you,” Alma insisted, slowly helping him lift his head.

  He could swear he still heard the Necromancer’s cold laughter as he used the king’s man as a battering ram, knocking them through the stained-glass window.

  “Oh, Nelly,” Bipp yelped upon seeing they were perched high above the ground in the boughs of the walnut tree. He stiffened like a board and grabbed the thick branch beneath him, thankful for its support.

  “It’s okay,” Alma said. “The tree caught us.”

  “That’s not my usual luck.” Bipp rubbed the stiffness out of his neck.

  “There’s no time for jokes,” Alma said with a fervency Bipp had not noticed until now. “I fear we are in serious trouble, and we have to get the king back inside straight away.”

  “Inside?” Bipp said. He was not sure he understood what Alma meant. His thoughts seemed to be a jumble. And where was the king? “Thorgar!” he gasped, spotting the gnome lying face-down underneath them on the ground.

  “He must have been out of range of my spell of buoyancy,” Alma said, a trace of guilt lining her words.

  Bipp took her offered hand to help him rise. When he stood, he looked deep into Alma’s eyes, meaning to reassure her, but what he saw there startled him enough to jerk backward. His foot slipped out from under him, and Bipp lost his balance. He hit every branch on his way down until finally he landed hard on King Thorgar’s back and bounced off into the dry grass.

  The tree was circling above him in his daze, and through its boughs he saw Alma’s worried gaze. Thorgar groaned beside him. As relieved as Bipp was to hear the king stirring, he could not peel his eyes off of Alma, who had undergone a visible transformation. Her eyes had become a cloudy grey, her skin sunken and vastly wrinkled, and her hair was thinning.

  “Y-you’re growing old?” Bipp asked.

  Alma came down out of the tree as fast as a squirrel. Her hand was already glowing blue, and when she pressed it to Bipp’s cheek, radiating warmth succored his body. He at once felt rejuvenated and sprang to his feet with restored strength.

  “This is bad, we never expected….” Alma’s voice trailed off as she contemplated something Bipp could not understand. “King Thorgar needs to get inside.” She motioned for him to help as she bent and tried to lift Thorgar’s limp forearm over her neck. Bipp could see the fear reflected in her glassy eyes and he wasted no time, easily hoisting King Thorgar up, though the sight of the sickly king almost startled him half to death.

  Bipp took a steadying breath and began to move the king toward the castle. “What is going on with you two?”

  Thorgar coughed, sounding like his throat was filled with sawdust. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Oh, King Thorgar, it’s bad, really bad, like beyond what we thought could be bad,” Alma lamented.

  Bipp felt some of the king’s weight come off his shoulder as Thorgar came back to consciousness, pressing his own feet against the ground. “Stop beating around it then.”

  “We’re aging, Your Lordship,” Alma croaked.

  “Aye, tell me something I don’t know. Even my bones feel tired after so many decades guarding this tomb.”

  “Not like that,” Alma said. “Something must have gone wrong, an unforeseen side effect to the Hierophant’s spell. As soon as we left the castle grounds, our bodies began to age rapidly. If we don’t get back inside, we’ll be dust soon.”

  That did it. Bipp flexed his aching arms and hoisted Thorgar up even more, thro
wing himself into a near jog to get to the nearby doorway. He was going to be damned if he brought the mightiest king in gnome history back to life just to watch him wither away and die because he stepped outside.

  As the door loomed before them, Bipp reared back and gave it a mighty kick. The weathered portal gave way easily enough, and in seconds the three of them fell inside, panting in the dark, dusty hallway. It stank like old rags, and Bipp coughed as dust entered his lungs.

  When the cough cleared up, he gazed at Alma and the king. Before his eyes, their faces changed. For a brief moment they seemed to sink in and wrinkle, but then, in the blink of an eye, the process began to reverse. The network of lines around Alma’s eyes and mouth smoothed out, and her hair thickened back to lustrous health.

  “How?” Bipp gasped.

  “When the Hierophant came up with the idea to throw up the barrier, it was risky, at best,” Alma said. “No spell of its kind had ever even been attempted in all of gnome history, and for all we knew, it would not even work. I can only guess that this is some unintended side effect.”

  “‘Course it is,” King Thorgar grumbled. “What we did, it wasn’t natural. But what else was there for us to do but seal away that dark-hearted bastard and watch over him, stuck in time for eternity?”

  “This Hierophant, how did he make the barrier?” Bipp asked.

  “It wasn’t just His Holiness. All the leaders of the Cleric’s Guild joined in…all that were left, that is. His idea was to block the Necromancer off from the flows of time, and they sacrificed themselves to do just that.”

  “So you became frozen in time,” Bipp said thoughtfully, “like the Acadians.”

  “Don’t know about the surface dwellers,” Thorgar grumbled, “but it wasn’t exactly like that for us. Once the barrier went up, we could still move, but it was in fractions of fractions. Right down to our molecules, everything slowed down.”

  “Wait…you were still awake all that time?” Bipp said.

  “It’s hard to tell sleep from wakefulness in that state,” Alma said.

  “No, it’s not,” Thorgar rumbled. “I remember every stinking second of it. Centuries of watching those filthy mutts scraping against my doors, aeons of time lost listening to that Necromancer wail in his tomb. It was enough to drive us mad. Then the lot of you came barging in, and that was even worse.”

  “You saw us come in and take down the barrier?”

  “Saw you the time before that, when you brought that thing in here with you. As dark as the Necromancer, that one. Worse, even. Then after it murdered that Corbin fellow, the whole cobold army came down on my beautiful hall. Oh, how I wanted to tear those beasts apart, watching them tramp around the place like they owned it. But though the mind rages, the body remains unmoving in the Heirophant’s stasis, and entire weeks pass in the time it takes to blink your eye. And then you fools came back.”

  Bipp blanched and looked at the floor. “I’m so sorry. I wish we’d known.”

  “Ach, don’t you go doing that. No sense in us dwelling over what we can’t change.”

  “Still, if we knew, we could’ve—”

  Thorgar snarled and punched the stone wall. “I said don’t.” The king already looked normal again and healthy as an ox. He rose from the floor, using the wall to steady himself. “If you got some shame in you for what you lads done, save it. Turn that guilt into anger, fuel for the fight ahead.”

  Bipp gathered himself and nodded resolutely.

  “Good. Now pick yourself up off the floor. We got a Necromancer to go put out of his misery, and I think I know just where he slunk off to.”

  “Stop!” Logan shouted, skidding to a halt and peering anxiously back the way they had come.

  The hallway was dark and silent. No hint of pursuers came from either direction. They had been moving away from the library for some time to put distance between themselves and the flesh golem. But with each step they took, Logan knew they were also getting farther and farther away from Bipp.

  “We have to go back. We have to find him!”

  Nero let a weary Isaac slump to the floor. “Logan, we do not even know if—”

  “He’s still alive!” Logan snapped. “And don’t you dare say otherwise. And we left him…abandoned our friend!”

  Corbin was disturbed by his brother’s anguish. Not too long ago he had found himself behaving similarly, and it had taken Stur’s wise words to shake him out of his torment. There had to be something he could do to ease his brother’s suffering.

  Logan looked back and forth between the floor and the way they had come. Clearly he wanted to rush back to the library and see if Bipp was somehow safe after his disastrous fall through the stained-glass window. But then the thought of running into the flesh golem would loom in his mind, a dark reminder of the folly of pursuit.

  “I’ll search for him,” Corbin said, drawing Logan out of his mire.

  Isaac weakly lifted his head. “You must not.”

  Corbin stared back into his brother’s pleading eyes. “I must.”

  “It is too dangerous,” Isaac said, trying to give strength to his frail voice. “The stakes are too high.”

  Corbin ignored the mage and closed his eyes tight. He unraveled the psionic shield from his being and shot out like a dart of light, searching the lonely halls of the castle with his mind. That piece of himself sped past blots of shadow, swirling around the screaming minds of the undead.

  He entered the library. The flesh golem was gone, off to find them, no doubt. Out through the window the dart moved, hovering on its precipice as his mind scanned the area.

  “He’s there!” Corbin said with elation, his eyes still pinched shut.

  “Where is he? Is he alive?” Logan demanded.

  “He’s back inside the castle…so are the king and Alma!” Corbin opened his eyes.

  A heavy weight was lifted off Logan, and he looked fit to take on the world, though only in spirit, for he still hobbled as he tried to walk. “Then we must find him at once!”

  Corbin grabbed his brother’s arm to stop him. “Slow down. We’re in no shape to go to him.” He nodded toward Isaac, who leaned with sleepy eyes against the wall.

  Logan took in the mage. He looked absolutely wretched, and come to think of it, so did his younger brother. “What happened to the two of you in there?”

  Corbin shivered and curled back his lips, but it was Isaac who spoke.

  “Some things are not meant to be discussed until daylight has burned away the shadows.”

  “It was awful,” Corbin said in a hoarse whisper. He firmed his shoulders and turned away from Logan. “Don’t ever ask me about it again. I don’t ever want to remember.”

  Logan wasn’t sure what to say. He looked to Nero for some guidance, but the mage was staring listlessly at the ceiling.

  “Did you manage to retrieve the Agimat?” Nero asked.

  Isaac lifted the sleeve of his robe, revealing a gleaming golden bracer around his right wrist.

  “Wow,” Logan said. “Is that it? I thought it was set?”

  “Alma has the other,” Corbin said as Isaac searched his pockets for something. “We decided it would be better odds for both of them to have one.”

  “Foresight and all that rubbish,” Isaac mumbled, producing a thick brown root from a pouch and eying it as if he were inspecting a diamond’s clarity. He sniffed it and wrinkled his nose. Logan could smell it from there, like wet feet. He screwed up his face when Isaac suddenly plopped the root into his mouth and chewed it.

  “Yuck,” Logan said. “What was that?”

  Isaac swallowed with a thick gulp and produced another one, offering it to Logan. “Brandy root. It’s good for aches and pains. Got ‘em from the Nibru Valley in Alfenheim.”

  “Uh, no thanks,” Logan said.

  “Take it,” Isaac insisted. “We need to heal, and it’s the only thing I’ve got on me.”

  Logan took the root in his palm and tentatively fingered the smelly little th
ing.

  Nero snapped his head down the dark corridor. “Something comes. We need to keep moving.”

  Pile upon pile of cobold bodies littered the castle hall to the point that Broxlin and his men could not even see the floor any longer. For a while the gnomes piled the dead up high, creating macabre defensive bunkers to fight behind, but now even that was proving difficult. The laws of mathematics were not on their side. There were simply too many of the dead and not enough square footage in the hall.

  “We’ll have to face the next wave outside,” Fodlor said.

  “I don’t like it,” Broxlin grumbled. “We’ll be too exposed, and we’ve no way of knowing how many more wait for us out there.” Was this their plan all along, to lure the gnomes out into the open by flooding the halls with dead cobolds?

  “What choice do we have?” Gabbrix said. “You’ve seen how the little critters move, scurrying across walls like there’s no such thing as gravity; sliding across their own dead kin like they weren’t much more than dirt.”

  “Ay,” Fodlor said, “Gabbrix’s right. We can’t hold this hall much longer before we drown in their dead.”

  “And what if the Necromancer comes this way?” Gabbrix said. “It’ll be a slaughter of gnomes should he raise these cretins and turn them on us.”

  That mental image sent a peel of shivers and trembling through the stoic gnome warriors. Sounds of padded feet and growling came toward them from outside the hanging castle gates.

  “Another battalion approaches, Broxlin,” one of the forward warriors exclaimed.

  Broxlin took another flickering look over the piles of dead and the shadows that draped around them. “Fine, we get out of this hall and face the cretins on our own terms!”

  The warriors clapped their weapons against shield or armor and marched to meet their mortal enemies.

  Chapter 24