NOVEL WEB Chapter 17: The Dark Path
Chief Warrant Officer Ceallach froze, her eyes bulging as she surveyed the burning meadow. The rebels had slunk across the lake to lick their wounds in a cave. All of her Leashes and most of her warriors lay dead. A chill ran through her core. Impossible. I had them outnumbered with trained tactical teams. They failed to kill the witch and paid with their lives. Her nostrils flared, drawing in the sweet scent of burned flesh. Her eyes landed on the gaping hole in the center of Specialist Trope. She collapsed to her knees beside her little sister and brushed the hair from her face.
“That slave will pay,” she hissed as tears misted her eyes. “She will live in terror for a thousand years. I’ll harvest the storm mage's Azure, toss her in the male pens, and leave her until she’s forgotten her name.” It wouldn't be allowed, but the fantasy cooled her rage.
She leaned against the obsidian spire to steady herself. The obelisk pulsed under her hand. A sharp crack and stabbing pain lanced through the back of her skull. "Oh, Gods!" Her sight blurred; dark currents of light pulsed in her left eye. Agony hammered the vision centers of her brain. Her world became torture.
Time stretched.
An eternity later, five minutes or days had passed, and CWO Ceallach had no way of knowing; her eyes opened. The right side of her world was, for lack of a better word, right. The left seemed okay until a familiar face walked by. “Serena? Specialist Trope?” She gaped. Her dead sister stopped and faced her, naked, tattoo and scar-free, pale as a freshly laundered sheet, and distraught.
“Amanda,” whispered Serena. She blushed as her hands moved to shield her breasts and feminine glory. “Why can’t I enter the temple? I must touch the nearest altar to move on, but I can’t pass the threshold. Please, help me…” Her hand sizzled against an unseen wall as she stretched a hand toward the marble altar.
CWO Amanda Ceallach touched her left ear. All sound, sight, and her sister's decrepit smell only came from the left. She scanned the smoldering battlefield. Dozens of specters wandered to her left but vanished as they passed to her right. Her mind reeled. Oh, my gods. These are the spirits of my team. They haven’t passed over.
“Serena!”
“Yes, Mam?”
“Stay. Help me capture the Stoneshaper.”
“I can’t. Remember the priest's words? Without a body, I am compelled to move on, to return to God for judgment. I must touch the altar.”
“Your body is right here!”
“It’s dead.”
“It won’t be if you get back inside where you belong.”
“Amanda, there’s a fist-sized hole in my body’s chest.”
“We’ll have a healer fix it…”
“No. It can’t support life; I’ll die again as soon as I connect.”
“I will help you live. I will force your body to endure.”
The ghost stiffened and shivered. “Necromancy? That… that’s legendary magic. It’s forbidden… Nobody’s done it for eons.”
“It’s only proscribed if done to an unwilling person. You want to live, right?”
“With a huge hole in my chest?”
“The Stoneshaper’s survived two massive chest wounds. If I can keep you alive long enough to capture the man, we can force him to share his secret and fix you.”
“Just you and me? You want to take on a team that can do this?”
“That was a fluke, the first use of power by a storm mage. She won’t be able to do that again for months, maybe years, if ever.”
“What about the rest of our team?”
“If they want to join us—”
“Amanda, almost thirty souls are waiting to cross over. Do you have the control or energy to perform the magic?”
“This will be my first use of necromantic power. We're on sanctified ground. That girl, the weather mage, she tapped the power of this place to kill you; I will tap it to give you life, to bring everyone back."
"Life? You're talking about undeath magic."
"I'm going to join your spirit with your body to form a soul; that's your life. Who cares how it happens? You can't be reborn, but I can do something close."
“But my body is dead.”
“Only because you’re not in it.”
“I’m not in it because I got blasted out! There’s a brattiraptor-sized hole in my chest.”
“I can work around that.”
“How?”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes, but—”
“That chain lightning strike did something to my Azure gems and opened several new paths through my glands. Everything on my right side is normal, but the left… it’s weird… I think the shock rewrote my entire left side. I can see and hear you when you’re on my left, and… this will sound insane, but I think my left-handed Leash skill has advanced and mutated. Now I can bind a spirit to their body and maybe unbind too… I won’t be sure until I try.”
“What about everyone else?”
“Get them over here. If I can help you, I should be able to help them.”
I'm not experimenting on Serena. She pointed at a male spirit, saying, "Corporal, go sit in your body!"
"Yes, Chief," said a pale ghost.
The Chief knelt beside the young man. "Lay down inside your body."
"Yes, mam."
The Chief ran her left hand over the young man's body. She pushed Elystria into his flesh, sacrificing a day of her own life to tack his spirit to each of the twenty droui glands with threads of power. She finished the last stitch, his body twitched, and dead eyes opened.
He screamed, howling in agony. His back arched, and every limb shook. "Let me out! No! Oh, Gods! It hurts! Let me die!"
“Stay still! I'm not done yet.” Amanda battled tremors as her left hand searched the man’s body, double-checking each connection. What did I do wrong?
The man fought his spasms and ground his teeth to hold back screams. “Gods, save me!” Spirit eyes bugged out from behind dead irises, reaching for her, pleading for release.
She saw her mistake. It was evident in retrospect. “Shite, I have to start over.” She snipped the threads of energy binding the spirit to his dead body.
The man’s ghost lept and sprinted headlong into the field of power guarding the temple. “Please! Stoneshaper, let me in! Oh, God! Let me come home…” Energy crackled and popped as the spirit pushed into the barrier.
CWO Amanda Ceallach stood and began to chase the man’s spirit. “Stop! Come back,”
He shoved through with a metallic bang, stumble-ran into the altar, and vanished in a column of blinding light. The scent and sounds of burning energy filled the air as all but one of the specters rushed the barriers, crying out for the Stoneshaper’s forgiveness and his blessing to enter. Within moments, all but one of the ghosts were gone.
“Cowards.” CWO Ceallach spat and kicked the man’s body. “I took a shortcut, and it didn't work.” Worse, she thought, the twenty days of my life I sacrificed are gone.
“Amanda,” asked Selena, “what did you do wrong?”
“I’m in a hurry. We need to catch the Professor, so I took a shortcut.”
The sisters shared a glance full of memories.
“I only stitched the twenty major glands,” said Amanda. She scrubbed her scalp, pulled at her hair, and released a rage-filled barbaric yawp. “I should have stitched all two-hundred and sixteen droui glands.”
“That’s all? Why did you torture Jude by picking out what you’d already done?”
“The order matters. The connection between the subsidiary and primary droui glands is broken when you die. The secondary glands become unbalanced without the link, which induces pain.”
“I trust you, Amanda. I’ll let you try with me, but I don’t want to live with the pain you inflicted on Jude. Promise you’ll kill me again before I have to suffer like him.”
“I won’t have to; I know what to do—”
“Just swear—”
“Okay! I promise you won’t suffer like Jude. Can I begin?”
The ghost of Selena bit her lip, took several unnecessary deep breaths, and nodded. A hint of a smile twitched her lips. “If you screw this up, I will haunt you. I will scare off anyone who might sleep with you. You won’t even get a charity lay in the Amekia temple.”
“Love you too, sister. Now, climb back into your body and hold still while I stitch you back together.”
An hour and a half later, Amanda tied off the two hundred and sixteenth thread of Elystria. She shrieked as months of life energy flowed from her body into her sister. She collapsed, yawning, exhausted in mind and body, against one of the temple pillars. Gasps, sweat, and tears escaped her as the bone-deep aches and pains rocked her body. The cracks and snaps echoing through her skeleton were the expected, if unwelcome, part of magical skill growth.
There was a man in Clover who could rate and grade the growth, quantifying it into tiers, levels, and nonsense, as if becoming better at a task was part of some children's game. What would he name her new gift?
She’d raised the dead. By law… she shook her head. This was a forbidden gift. Raising the willing dead was akin to healing, but she was not a healer. She was a grey mage. Her curse was legal because her Leash skill was helpful to the government. What she'd just done crossed the line into black magic, the first step to necromancy. She could be forgiven for helping her sister. Still, the next step, animating a corpse, would cost her freedom, living the rest of her life as an animal, being harvested by her colleagues. The ultimate sin, forcing an unwilling soul into a dead body or another person’s body, was preferable; it carried the death penalty.
Still, she thought Selena and I would never capture the Stoneshaper alone. The trail will go cold if I take a week to get more soldiers. There are thirty abandoned corpses around the temple. If I animate them, leash them to my will, I will have the forces to capture the renegades. Heim will forgive my crimes when I hand over the Stoneshaper.
Amanda stumbled to Jude’s abandoned body.
“What are you…,” began Selena. “Don’t do it, sis…”
CWO Ceallach ran her left hand over the male corpse. Now, how does this work?