Lessons in Necromancy
Rise of a Necromancer, Part 3
by S.C Bryce

Dermanassian sat in the back of a hollowed out canoe, paddling down the slowly swirling Attaya River. In the four and a half months since he left Glorious Tehare, the desert elf was once again hungry, tired, and uncertain of his sanity.

He wondered whether he would ever find the Suti. Perhaps the ancient necromancers had been devoured by this abominable place. Perhaps they were not true people at all, but degenerates corrupted by their art. Perhaps he should return to the cool caverns of Glorious Tehare to consult with his foster brother. Together, they might find another way to get the knowledge he needed.

He dipped his oar again.

The dark water was thick with plants clinging to the oar and dragging at the canoe like desperate fingers. The stench of decay filled the wide river basin, where the water abruptly split into channels separated by tufted marsh before rejoining and splitting off anew. Along the river, trees vied to blot out the sun. Their branches stretched toward the sky or hovered over the banks so that their leaves dipped into the brown water. The occasional breeze sent murmurs through the greenery, but, like the bursts of rain, did little to alleviate the humidity.

Sweat dripped down his brow. Even in his desert homeland, he did not perspire so. He cursed the river, imagining it flowed with moisture stolen from unsuspecting travelers. He drank from a gourd to replenish his losses.

Dermanassian felt that he floated through a cave of shivering green, more oppressive than any made of stone. He might have better pretended that the jungle did not leave him ill at ease if it were not for the calls of unseen birds breaking the quiet and the hoots of monkeys from the shore. His sharp black eyes picked out flurries of color as creatures moved within the canopy. Worse were the clouds of insects drifting above the water, shifting and rolling like flocks of tiny birds. He learned immediately that the insects were blood-suckers, for paddling through the cloud, it instantly turned into a maelstrom of buzzing and biting. Cursing, he threw himself into the tepid water and pushed his canoe until he left the angry insects behind.

Aboard the canoe once more, Dermanassian's wet braid stuck to his skin. He scratched at the welts peppering his long-fingered hands, his neck, and his face. The stings resisted what healing arts he commanded; the burning lessened, but did not cease.

Yet another insect stabbed him, this time beneath his ear. When the itching grew worse, he reached back to scratch at it. Instead, he felt the thin shaft of a dart. Startled, he yanked it from his neck and squinted into the tree line, a trickle of blood dripping down his neck. He struggled to draw the blue lotus sword, but his hand fumbled uselessly and his vision darkened. He fell backward in his dugout.

The canoe continued down the verdant tunnel, with Dermanassian's black hair trailing in the hazy waters of the Attaya River.

He woke to drums and incense.

Streaks of light pierced the canopy. Wincing, Dermanassian blinked. The sun felt as if it had been forged into daggers to slice his muddled brain. He lay nearly naked in a hammock woven from strangling vines, his skin coated in sweat and viscous ointment smelling of wild mint.

Voices surrounded him. They were heavily accented, so that at first the desert elf thought their language incomprehensible.

He struggled to think, mind coming into focus with the drumbeats. He was among the Suti, he was certain, for they were the only people who dared populate this place. He was unarmed, but lack of weapons was not his greatest problem. He had little feeling in his body; he was paralyzed. Was he drugged? Poisoned?

The drums stopped, replaced by the shuffle of sandaled feet. A face appeared above his, haloed by the sun. It was completely covered in an animalistic mask of polished hardwood. Holes were drilled into it and from these brown eyes peered and a thin mouth frowned. At the edges of the startling mask was an artificial mane of dried fronds that rustled as the man moved. From what Dermanassian could see, the remainder of the stocky man was covered in a swath of cloth and a slather of crackling mud. He could see almost no bare skin, only a tiny patch where the mud flaked off: it was maggoty pale, as if never exposed to the sun. Neither cloth nor mud hid the pudgy stomach of middle age. He seemed an ordinary man, if extraordinarily dressed.

Dermanassian wanted to speak, but his swollen tongue would not follow his command and his throat was scratchy and weak. He could do nothing but cough spastically. The man put a thick, painted finger to his lips before walking away. Dermanassian fell unconscious as the drums reverberated in his bones once more.

When next he woke, the drums were silent and the haze of incense faded into the jungle. Realizing he could once again move, Dermanassian sat gingerly in the hammock. The mint ointment was gone, leaving a lingering stickiness. His head throbbed as if he had been clubbed. He instinctively searched for a knot on his skull, but found none. He stopped when he saw the man in the animal mask watching from a mossy log. A trio of small drums bound in a triangle by rope rested at the man's feet, along with Dermanassian's clothes, sword, and travel pack.

"Crocodile and Broken Bridge returned to Ta-Praht," the man said, as if his words held meaning for Dermanassian. His vowels were round and elongated, his masked face impassive. "You are an upstream creature, though not of a sort we have ever seen," he added.

Dermanassian nodded tentatively then grimaced. "Upstream, yes," he said. He had paddled and floated down the Attaya River for days.

"These are dangerous years to be wandering the borderlands of death. Why are you here?"

"My name is Dermanassian." He noted that the man's eyes momentarily hardened and wondered if it was possible that his reputation had traveled so far. "I have come to study with you."

"Study?"

"Necromancy."

The man scowled behind the wooden mask and spat onto the jungle floor. "Upstream man, what do you know of such things?"

"Little."

"It has been a long while since an upstreamer came to the Suti. Not in five lifetimes at least, and longer since one came to learn our arts."

"Will you teach me?" Dermanassian asked, although part of him remained unconvinced he wanted to learn this darkest of the arts.

The man stood, waving his hand to indicate that Dermanassian should follow. "We will see," he said, sounding doubtful. "Few enough upstreamers have been able to learn."

"Friend, what is your name?" Dermanassian asked, swinging his unshod feet from the hammock and testing his balance.

The man scowled. "We have been watching you for days, but our observations did not reveal how deeply you swim in the river of ignorance. Since you have come here to learn, you may as well start now. There are things you must know if you are to survive here. Or you will be dead and we will have yet another spirit prowling our jungle.” He shook his head as if talking to a child. “The Attaya River runs past our cities. Where it disappears into the mist, it goes through the canyon that separates this world from that of the dead."

"The Po Divide," Dermanassian murmured, remembering too well when he stood in its mists, at the edge of irrevocable death.

"Yes. And beyond that limbo. And beyond that the netherworld. You must understand that things can come from downstream. Outside, we are vulnerable to them. Inside our temples, we are less so. And so we of the Suti do not speak our true names or expose our true faces. We keep that each to ourselves, and I counsel you to do the same. For spirits are all around us, and some are resentful or jealous. Anonymity is the defense of the necromancer who does not wish downstream creatures to take their bitterness out on him." The necromancer paused. "Outside, you may call me Red Monkey. Do you have an outside name?"

Dermanassian frowned, sorting out the reasoning of the necromancer. "I have been called the Gray Mist."

"An ambitious name for a necromancer," Red Monkey nodded, rustling the fronds that rimmed his mask, "but Gray Mist it shall be."

He handed back to Dermanassian the blue lotus sword and his travel pack, and the desert elf saw that his belongings were in order. The ointment’s residue, he discovered, offered welcome protection against the many insects, and so he did not bother to dress in his sweaty clothes.

The pair walked nearly two miles to Ta-Praht, one of the temple complexes where the Suti lived. Despite the temple's almost incomprehensible size, the jungle was so dense that Dermanassian did not see the compound until they were nearly upon it. Vines attacked its pockmarked face blending the cut stones of the ziggurat into the crushing greenery.

Its massive doorway was shaped like the stylized head of a roaring cat with eyes of glittering stones and a mouth fanged and agape. The workmanship was astonishing, rivaling the desert elves’. The necromancer led Dermanassian onto the stone path running from the mouth like an outstretched tongue. Carved doors at the back of the giant's throat blocked their path. The threshold was outlined in a curious reddish rock that pulsed faintly.

Red Monkey placed his palms upon the doors and chanted.

Dermanassian spun as the exit thundered close behind them, trapping them inside the cavernous mouth. The Suti was undisturbed. Instead, he continued chanting, even as a gust of hot wind blew over them, lifting the bits of dirt and plant matter that littered the stone floor into a spinning whirlwind. As Dermanassian threw his arms across his eyes, the unnatural wind retreated, disappearing into nothingness.

The doors at the back of the cat's throat opened.

Dermanassian’s arms dropped to his sides. He could not have imagined the inside of Ta-Praht from its exterior. The base of the ziggurat contained an entire town and its space soared upward, culminating in a square of sky where the capstone would be. The opening was outlined with the same reddish stone that surrounded the entrance. Sunlight and fresh air struggled downward, caressing the town with diffused light, mixing with the scents of roasting fruits and meat. Arched tunnels in the sides of the ziggurat revealed that other such pyramids were attached, forming a massive complex that, like Glorious Tehare at its peak, housed innumerable market stalls, offices, apartments, and public spaces.

The people crowding Ta-Praht wore sleeveless tunics of an unfamiliar plant fiber, dyed in fantastic hues and patterns and hanging to their bare knees. Stones and feathers decorated their straight, glossy hair. Long strands beaded with carved nutshells hung from their necks. Like Red Monkey, they were quite short compared to Dermanassian. The tallest among them did not reach his shoulder. Each wore a thin, brightly painted mask of abstract design. They turned and stared at Dermanassian's nakedness, and he knew they stared more at his garishly uncovered face than his body.

"Here, you may call me by my inside name: Gana," Red Monkey told Dermanassian as he removed his mask and headdress. Beneath was a lighter mask like those of the other Suti. His round face poked around the mask's carved edges as the necromancer regarded the angular features of the desert elf. "And I will call you by yours."

Dermanassian frowned, remembering Red Monkey's disapproval of using his given name. "I have no inside name."

"Then if you have no objection I will call you Yentu, which in our almost forgotten tongue has the same meaning as 'upstream man.'"

He led Dermanassian to a public bath, a pool of clear water whose glazed tile bottom gave the appearance of untold depths. The water, Gana explained as they rinsed grime from their skins, was channeled from the warm Attaya River. It was filtered through layers of gravel and then through the same reddish rock that marked every entrance into Ta-Praht. The stone was important part of Suti architecture, for it ensured uninvited downstream creatures could not breach the sanctuary.

When Gana washed his face, he ducked under the water and turned to the wall. His lacquered mask was replaced as he broke the surface. "I shall have to get you an inside face, Yentu," he said, frowning behind the dripping mask as he watched the Suti whisper and point at the unmasked stranger beside him. "For it will not do to have too many know your true one."

Dermanassian's lessons began in a secluded room beneath the main temple of Ta-Praht with a small group of apprentice necromancers.

He sat among the Suti in a circle upon the stone floor, his legs crossed. Like the others, he wore a light tunic of woven fiber that rustled unfamiliarly against his skin. Its color, a brilliant blue, was not one that he would have chosen, nor did its trim of grass-green appeal to him. The "inside face" he wore was carved from half an orange gourd, rubbed to a high sheen. It was generic and expressionless, a proto-face that might evolve into almost any creature. His long black hair was brushed straight in the manner of his hosts and bound by borrowed clasps. Altogether, he supposed the effect was the desired one as he understood Suti philosophy, for certainly it would maintain his anonymity: this "Yentu" could never be mistaken for Dermanassian or even recognized as a desert elf. Only his build betrayed him as different from the others in his circle; even seated, his head towered over theirs and his legs did not fold as neatly, leaving his rough knees poking out from beneath his short robe.

In the center of the Suti circle, a tiny monkey covered in shaggy, golden hair lay dead on an altar surrounded by a ring of lush white flowers and fat beeswax candles. Its pink face was flaccid. Gana stood beside it.

From behind his mask he said, "When this monkey swung in the jungle branches, there was a force within it called life. Now it lies before us, a vessel empty of life, but not empty. Death fills it, for death is not simply the absence of life; it is a force independent, fierce, inexorable. You instinctively know this to be true. Now let your mind know it as well as your heart. Feel death."

He pulled thin sticks of incense from a leather sack and, after lighting them with a mottled candle, set them upright within holes in the altar. Smoke curled above them and its musky fragrance filled the small room. Gana nodded his masked head with a peculiar rhythm. He sang, his voice high and nasal, the words almost visibly coiling into the smoke.

Dermanassian's nose wrinkled as he took in the sharp scent. The room's temperature suddenly dropped. It was a creeping, sinister chill that emanated from the limp monkey and crawled against his skin like an exploring troop of ants. His gut twisted and his thoughts babbled from fear. This ritual ran against his nature. He was not Suti; he had no business with an ancient people that dwelt here in the borderlands of death; his foster brother was mistaken to advise him to learn necromancy; Dermanassian was a fool for accepting the flawed recommendation.

"You feel now the death that fills this monkey," Gana continued. "And it will reign over this monkey's corpse until the earth and its creatures claim it."

The Suti seemed undisturbed by the cold so that, himself on the verge of panic, Dermanassian wondered if indeed they felt it. Perhaps the touch of death was ordinary and trite to them, however horrific it might be for him. He shivered, wanting nothing more than to retrieve his dugout and take his chances with the biting flies of the Attaya River as he paddled upstream with all the speed he could muster. It was no wonder that some of their most experienced practitioners were rumored to be insane. Like the tiny Mousehawk, he thought, surprised to notice the master necromancer crouching in the shadows. He was certain she had not been there at the start of the session. Her lacquered mask bore strong resemblance to the raptor from which she took her outside name. She was a hunter, trained to protect the Suti ziggurats from roving spirits. He risked a glance at her. She stared back at him, her eyes unblinking. He battled to remain still.

"We cannot control that which eventually conquers all – death,” Gana continued. “But we can, in small amounts and for short periods of time, control those subject to death's sovereignty. I speak not just of vessels filled with death, but also the spirits – whether they have gone to dwell in the mists, in limbo, in the netherworld, or whether they yet roam our own. Those spirits are tied to their mortal remains, so long as those remains exist."

With a gesture and a murmur from Gana, the golden monkey twitched. It jerked to stand awkwardly upon its delicate feet. Its black eyes opened blankly as it faced the masked necromancer.

"See that, as we can control the monkey's body, so we can recall and control the monkey's spirit."

Gana pulled a vial of yellow liquid and a slim, obsidian dagger from his sack. Chanting anew, he pricked the end of a finger with the honed blade so that his red blood dripped. Pausing in his chant only long enough to unstop the vial with his teeth, he leaned over the twitching corpse and poured the fluid atop his finger. It mixed with his blood so that the yellow swirled with red as it fell upon the tiny monkey. Gana stepped back.

The monkey's eyes flashed with something resembling life as its spirit was brought back into its corpse. Its face contorted with fright. It raised itself on trembling hindquarters and barked a warning, long tail rigid as it prepared to spring.

Gana continued his chant, his voice both lulling and commanding, and the monkey relaxed. It blinked as if waiting for instruction. Gana beckoned and the golden monkey, wet with the mixture of fluid and blood, lurched to the Suti's feet. It sat and looked up at him like a tiny dog.

Dermanassian nearly bolted.

Dermanassian crouched in the brush that lined the path. His skin was entirely covered in chalky mud. The feathers of his over-sized outside mask bobbed in the breeze and the blue lotus sword dangled from his back.

Beside him kneeled Mousehawk. Like Dermanassian, her only concessions to modesty were scraps of cloth and the veneer of drying mud. She was tense, yet still.

They hunted a downstreamer that had killed a pair of children collecting fruit. Mousehawk did not know whether the downstreamer had escaped from beyond the mists of the Po Divide or had been released by some unknown necromancer in some unknown country. Nor did she care. She had a vague description of the spirit from another child who had escaped into one of Ta -Praht's sister cities and she had examined the depleted bodies, drained of all their fluids as if by a monstrous spider. That was enough.

She bit her lip impatiently, watching the trap set in the path.

Dermanassian wondered if his mentor had been prudent in entrusting him to the tiny hunter's care. But Gana had waved away Dermanassian's concerns about rumors regarding Mousehawk's sanity, saying that such rumors had circulated for a long time. Dermanassian was grateful that he had brought along the blue lotus sword, even though Mousehawk had assured him that the blade was unnecessary. Mousehawk herself had taken only a cloth bag stretched full with contents she refused to describe. When he had asked about it, she said only that it contained her "tools," and gripped the bag as if she feared he would tear it from her. She had refused even to tell him what to expect, saying that he was just to do what he was told if he "knew what was good" for him.

There was a murmur through the jungle's canopy and the temperature dropped, nearly imperceptibly. They exchanged glances.

Behind her mask, Mousehawk's teeth flashed a grin. "Groaner," she mouthed silently.

All too familiar with madness, Dermanassian now saw it flashing in her eyes. The rumors about Mousehawk were correct: she might be a superb hunter, but she was also completely insane. He wished again that he was hunting animal spirits with Frog. He had been warned about groaners. Generations ago, they were rare. Then something changed and groaners became increasingly common.

Dermanassian and Mousehawk turned back to watch the trap. It was a little thing; a child made of straw and mud stuffed into Suti garb. It sat in the middle of the narrow path as if, exhausted from long walk, it decided to take a short rest.

To Dermanassian, it was hideous. He recoiled from a sodden ball that Mousehawk had shoved inside and was, even now, seeping through the straw to leave a dark stain on the doll's clothes. "Birthing blood," the hunter had explained tersely and Dermanassian had not asked her how she obtained it. It was the bait that would attract the errant spirit.

As they watched, wisps like thin smoke curled around the bend of the path and drifted toward the straw child. The hairs on Dermanassian's arms rose. His hand wrapped around the waxy talisman that hung around his neck, which the necromancer had told him would disguise the scent of their living spirits. Now-familiar revulsion welled up in his stomach. He forced it down.

The wisps spiraled downward, encircling the straw child in a web of smoke. They convulsed against the slumped doll. Its straw head bobbed grotesquely.

Mousehawk silently pulled a blow gun from her bag and stuffed the end with a wad of orange herbs. She leaned forward into the brush, leveling the reed tube at the path beneath the doll. With a powerful puff, she shot the herbs into the soft ground.

Instantly, a net of light erupted from the dirt, exploding upward to capture the straw child and the groaner in a bright sphere.

The wisps of smoke twisted as if in pain. The groaner screamed, its other-worldly voice screeching into the night. Dermanassian resisted the urge to cover his ears. "Go," Mousehawk whispered, pressing a dagger into Dermanassian's palm. The knife's blade was sculpted from the same red rock that protected the Suti strongholds from intrusion by downstreamers, and engraved with angular symbols. Its hilt was wrapped in snakeskin. "Destroy it."

Dermanassian frowned. He did not know what a groaner was, much less how to fight or destroy it. Once, he might have grabbed the knife and engaged the groaner without hesitation, trusting to his skill, luck, and wits. Yet his betrayal by the god Asbeth had taught him to question blind obedience and his time with the Suti had taught him caution when dealing with downstreamers.

Mousehawk would have none of his faltering. Grinning wildly, she shoved him through the brush, springing after.

Dermanassian stumbled into the path, the stone dagger almost slipping from his grasp. He got to his feet as Mousehawk prepared to open the trap and loose the groaner. The curling mist twisted in tight kinks within the net of light. It screamed and yowled, its disembodied voice as piercing as the cold that radiated from it. Then Mousehawk threw a handful of herbs onto the net and instantly the trap disappeared.

The path fell again into the dull darkness of the starlight. The groaner was free.

Dermanassian readied his stone blade and again dropped into a crouch.

The spirit hissed and moaned. As Mousehawk silently faded into the brush, the groaner focused on Dermanassian, its mists coiling as if it were a serpent preparing to strike. Suddenly, the icy mist transformed. With a screech, it changed – elongating, growing, solidifying until it formed a gigantic, gaping mouth. A massive tongue rolled in the air, glistening in the starlight.

Dermanassian tightened his long fingers around the knife hilt until his knuckles whitened. He leapt forward to slash at the spirit. The stone blade moved through the air as if it connected with nothing, yet as he turned he saw that a neat slit had opened in the disembodied mouth. The groaner squealed, its tongue lashing madly.

Dermanassian gasped as the ghost tongue passed through his body. The groaner was so cold; Dermanassian felt that he had been stabbed through the chest with a blade of ice. He clutched at his heart, its beat abruptly arrhythmic. The tongue reached for him again, and he dropped to the ground, jabbing the stone dagger upward as he rolled behind the hovering mouth. Then he was behind it, ramming the knife into the groaner from behind.

Turning, the groaner shuddered and it changed again. This time, it took the tall, lanky form of a man. More specifically, a desert elf.

Dermanassian stared in shock.

His hair braided in the style of Grand Amarna, his embroidered robes marked him as a respected artisan, his skin bore the first wrinkles of old age. His face revealed no intelligence, only vacant desire. His – no, Dermanassian's mind frantically corrected, its – jaw unhinged and dropped low, opening a toothy maw of hideous proportions.

The groaner leaned toward Dermanassian as if struggling to tell him something. "It whispers, it whispers," the spirit finally moaned, its slurred speech barely intelligible. "Feed us, brother." The groaner reached with long, bony hands and snapped the waxy talisman from the desert elf's neck. "Feed us."

Dermanassian was suddenly limp, as if he fainted while still standing. His vision blurred, his black eyes rolled up. He lost his grip on his red stone dagger, and it fell with a soft thud onto the path. His sharp ears no longer heard the spirit's cries; sound muffled, then was gone. He felt nothing but frigid cold and doom.

Somehow, he jerked and fell backward into the turf. He gasped for air and his lungs seared as if starved. He blinked; his leg throbbed. The flat of his sword dug through its sheath and into his spine. Mousehawk was above him, her eyes blazing anger. It was she who had felled him, he realized. Viciously, she had kicked his legs out from under him.

The Suti hunter wasted no more time on Dermanassian. Yelling the same words of power etched into the dagger, Mousehawk jumped to face the groaner. It raised its stretched hands toward her neck, but the necromancer ducked and jammed the small stone blade upward into the spirit's body. In a fury, Mousehawk spun around the groaner, stabbing it over and over again. Its giant mouth gaped as if it would try to swallow her whole. Screaming in outrage, the groaner turned, trying to catch the necromancer. Yet with every attack, the groaner dissolved a bit where her knife-blade sank into its form. At her final thrust, the groaner collapsed into itself.

The horror was gone as if it had never been there at all. The straw doll lay on its side, its severed head rolled into the bushes. Dermanassian shook his head to clear his mind and propped himself upon his elbows.

Mousehawk sprang onto his chest, locking her knees on either side of his head.

"The groaners," he coughed, trying to force aside her crushing knees. "They are what remains of the victims of Risaa-"

"The groaners are downstreamers. That is all that matters," Mousehawk hissed, pressing the point of the stone dagger downward against his throat. "Put away your hesitations. The mind of a necromancer must withstand any assault. Do not ever forget: for a necromancer, failure is worse than death."

Dermanassian's mind reeled. His people, his parents – now frightful groaners. He had believed the spirits of his race had traveled beyond the mists of the Po Divide, as was the natural course of things. Now he knew it was not true, and never could be. For the stone blades and sorcerous spells that the Suti used against the groaners did not simply dispatch the suffering spirits from this world to the next, releasing them from the purgatory to which Risaa condemned them. The spirits were destroyed altogether. Thus Dermanassian could yet aid his dead race, but only by killing them again.

His foster brother might have better prepared him

THE END - PART 3
Look for Part 4 in issue #9 of Flashing Swords