Dirge for a Necromancer - By Ash Stinson Page 0,30

learn it. You may never learn it, even if I teach you.”

“Where did you learn it?” asked Dohrleht.

“I learned it from my master when I was a boy,” Raettonus said. “It took me many years to be able to do it even passing well.”

From her seat on the other side of the room, Ebha asked, “You can make the dead live again?”

Raettonus was surprised to hear her speak; it was the first time she had said anything at all in his presence. “No,” he told her plainly. “If I could make the dead live again, do you think I’d be here tutoring two cripples?”

“I’m not a cripple,” Maeleht objected.

“No, I’d be the God King of this whole realm, and probably every other realm I wanted to barge into,” Raettonus said. He turned back to the centaurs. “There are two sorts of necromancy. There are the quicker animations, which involve putting your own energy into a corpse to move it; and then there are the slower resurrections, where you attach a ghost to a corpse, allowing the ghost to inhabit the body. The former is easier, but more tiring, while the latter is difficult, but doesn’t wear you down after the fact.”

“But you said you can’t make the dead live again,” said Dohrleht. “That sounds kind of like living.”

“Hardly,” responded Raettonus. “Their bodies continue to decay, unless a myriad of spells are applied to preserve them, and those sometimes don’t work. Unless you’re a very skilled necromancer, they won’t be able to speak, either, and their movements will be awkward and clumsy. Most importantly, only ghosts can be tied to bodies, which means that the person in question must be tortured enough to hang around after death, or else you have to grab hold of them immediately after they’ve died.”

“Grab hold?” asked Maeleht. “Grab hold of their ghost?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Raettonus said. “You reach out with your energy and grab hold of their ghost before it departs. It’s difficult then, because they fight. Souls don’t want to stay on this plane of existence. They’ll fight you until they’re bound to the body. Sometimes even then. Inexperienced necromancers get killed by ghosts and corpses all the time. It’s a dangerous art.”

“Have you ever been attacked by ghosts and corpses?” Maeleht asked him.

Raettonus nodded slowly. “When I was young and just learning, yes.”

“What was it like?” Dohrleht asked. “Is it hard to fight a corpse?”

“A corpse? No, not really. It’s easier than fighting a man, in fact,” Raettonus said. “It’s far more dangerous to fight ghosts. For the time that you’re holding them with your energy, you’re connected to them. For a moment, all their memories and their experiences become an extension of your own. You can feel the death they experienced if they want you to—and I’ve yet to meet one that didn’t want you to. All the while, they’re gnawing on your life force, wearing you down. Killing you. They don’t want to go to hell alone, and they don’t want to stay here.”

“How do you keep them from killing you?”

Raettonus shrugged and yawned again. “You just do what you’re doing quickly,” he said. “Or else you let go of them and hope they’ll let go of you, as well.”

“Raettonus?” asked Maeleht after a lengthy silence had passed over them. “When are you going to teach us to do magic? I’m tired of hearing about it. I want to do it.”

Raising an eyebrow, Raettonus crossed his hands over his lap. “You’re quite eager. You might not be able to do any magic, you realize,” he said.

“But I won’t know if you don’t ever teach me to try.”

For a moment, Raettonus gave him an appraising stare. Finally, he relented. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll teach you a little bit of pyromancy. Both of you—come over here, get in close. All right. Hold out your hands. No, just one hand, each of you.”

He began to instruct him, as his own master had instructed him so long ago. Of course, when Sir Slade had begun to teach him magic he had tried to teach him hydromancy, not pyromancy. Raettonus hadn’t been able to do it, but he had enjoyed the lesson immensely. He and Slade had sat in the grass on a hill beside a river at the edge of Slade’s land, on an overcast yet rainless morning.

“Look here,” Slade had said, pulling him close and opening one large, empty hand. “Watch this.”

And just like that, the air above Slade’s hand began to swirl gently,