Cathexis: Necromancer's Dagger (67 page)

“You get all the gold in this room, but I
doubt you can spend it,” she said, standing and gesturing with her
hand.

The door and windows all slammed shut again,
and the purple sheets of energy covered the exit holes.

“What is this?” the leader exclaimed, “We
did as you requested.”

“Yes you did, but I’ve had to use too much
of my power waiting for you, it must be replaced,” she explained.
As she spoke she walked toward the leader of the urchins.

The boy started to back
away
but froze when the necromancer's gaze
locked on his eyes.

With a smile on her beautiful
face,
she walked up and reached forward until
her insubstantial hand entered his head. His body shook for a
moment as she absorbed his dying spirit and then he collapsed to
the wood floor, dead at her feet.

A few minutes later RIveK walked out of the
building with her power recharged; in her
wake,
she left a room littered with tiny dead bodies.

A short time after the
sated
necromancer departed, the one small
frightened little girl, that RIveK had let go, went back into the
urchin’s building. A moment later she stumbled out the door and
fell to her hands and knees in the slimy alley. The shock might
have been too much for an adult to recover from quickly, but the
young street urchin got back to her feet. She wiped the slime on
her hands down the side of her worn dress as she tried to wipe the
image of her dead friends from her mind.

She did not know what she was going to do in
the future, nor did she even think about her plans. Right now she
had one thought in her mind; the Woman who had done this was pure
evil. Up to now this young child's world had not included true
evil. There were faceless enemies, like the hunger that often
clawed at her stomach, or the cold that bit at exposed skin in
winter, but these were not things of evil. Here, in this one
moment, evil had come to her in the form of false beauty, but it
was in truth the horror that comes from the elder darkness.
In contrast,
all other things the
little girl had witnessed, this was true darkness incarnate.

With that
thought,
the little girl knew that she had to warn the
two people that ‘The Woman’ had sent her friends to find. She had
to find them and warn them of the darkness that stalked them. She
would tell them that The Woman was coming, that evil thing that
knew their names, but where were they?

Shaking with the thought of what she had to
do, the little girl ran down the alley searching for the cloaked
form of the evil woman
on
the
streets ahead. If she was going to thwart the darkness the little
girl would have to follow The Woman and see where she was
going.

RIveK walked her projected body toward the
better part of town and eventually stopped a man on the street and
asked the way to the Rose and Thorn.

After receiving her instructions she
continued. The little urchin ran up to the man RIveK had spoken
with and found out where she was headed. Then she dashed off to try
and beat the necromancer to her destination.
Unfortunately,
she did not realize how fast
RIveK could travel in her spirit form once she knew where she was
headed, so RIveK arrived at the restaurant before the young
girl.

The necromancer went into the waiting room
and looked in through the thick curtain to the dining area.
Scanning the room quickly, she located the man and woman who fit
the description of Elizabeth and her Knight Protector, but she had
to be sure. Leaving the restaurant she nearly ran into the little
girl emerging from the alley, but the urchin saw her and jumped
back into hiding. RIveK took no notice of such a small thing as a
street urchin.

The necromancer went to the side of the
building and leaned her ghostly shape in through the wall so that
she could listen to her suspected knight and lady.

They were discussing the quality of the
food, a totally uninteresting conversation to RIveK, with one
exception. Both spoke in Lindankar accents of the highborn. That
alone nearly confirmed their identities, but RIveK had to be sure
that this was Elizabeth and Hetark, so she continued to listen.

Then the woman
clinched
it in her next statement. “You’re having a hard
time calling me Marinda, aren’t you, Hetark?”

RIveK moved away, afraid that the Kirnath
sorceress would sense her if she stayed too long.

She went back into the hotel lobby and wrote
a message and had it sent to the restaurant to be delivered to
‘Marinda’.

Once RIveK left the building and was out of
sight she stepped into a
rift
she
opened between the worlds.

A moment later she stepped out into the
prearranged spot to meet SCorcH. He sat on a crate a few feet away,
waiting.

“Is the Ardellen woman here?” he asked
immediately.

“Yes, and you can find her at the restaurant
called the Rose and Thorn, it’s on Gibbel street. A Lindankar
knight accompanies her at the restaurant,” she explained, then
described what Poison was wearing.

“The knight is inconsequential, but if he
interferes in the destruction of the Kirnath
witch
I will kill the idiot. Is her child with
her as well?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t located the heir yet. They
were at breakfast when I found her, so perhaps she left the infant
in their hotel room. I’ll try and locate him next, but he is
nothing compared to her, a powerless child, a mere detail,” she
finished, writing off the importance of her small error in not
knowing Michael's location.

“A very important detail, find him,” SCorcH
commanded.

“Don’t take that tone with me or I may
forget the council’s law and release you from your pitiful
existence,” she threatened.

“Try it, I welcome you,” he replied through
his exposed blackened teeth.

“Kill her,
iffff
you can,” she replied, mocking his speech
impairment as she disappeared back into the Dark Plane.

But RIveK didn’t go to find the Lindankar
heir,
instead,
her spirit returned
to her body only a few miles away.

G’Taklar fell through the suddenly exposed
hole and dropped twenty feet before landing hard amidst the rubble
of the broken ceiling.
Fortunately,
he landed on a pile of what felt like dry
sticks. They cushioned his fall somewhat, snapping and breaking as
he landed hard on his back.

Jatar spoke up immediately within his mind,
“’Tak, quickly, you must tell Rachael to stay back or she might
fall... ”

But Rachael spoke first, “G’Taklar! Are you
all... ” a high pitched scream followed the start of her question
and more rubble came raining down followed by the screaming body of
Rachael. She landed almost entirely on G’Taklar. His body
inadvertently cushioned her fall, but the impact did nothing for
G’Taklar’s health.

“G’Taklar, are you all right?” she asked as
she rolled off of his body.

“... ” He replied because the wind
was knocked
out of his lungs.

“I’ve killed him, G’lan help me!” she
wailed, clawing over the stick like objects to his body. Her elbow
landed back in his stomach area as she tried to see his face
through the dust caused by their fall.

“Ow!” he exclaimed.

“You’re alive!”

“No thanks to you. Why didn’t you stay away
from that hole? You could’ve thrown down a rope,” he
complained.

“I was worried about your health!
Obviously,
you’d have been happier
if I just left you down here for dead!”

“At least we both wouldn’t be trapped in a
tomb of souldead, or worse,” he snapped back without thinking,
Jatar had warned him about scaring the girl.

“Souldead!" She exclaimed. Then she clawed
her way onto his lap for protection and locked her arms around his
torso as she gazed fearfully around the room. When she got a clear
look she let loose with another high-pitched scream, deafening
G’Taklar’s right ear.

“Ow!” he said again.

Now that the dust was settling they could
just make out the walls of the chamber from the dim illumination
shining down through the hole in the ceiling high above. They had
landed in a room filled with bones from wall to wall, about
four-foot deep.

Rachael kept screaming and scrambling,
trying to get completely off the bones and onto G’Taklar.

“Stop panicking!” he finally yelled, though
he was close to panicking. He slapped her across the cheek
lightly.

She stopped struggling immediately and spoke
in a hurt voice, “You hit me.”

“Yes I did, I had to get your attention
since you were in a full panic,” he explained.

“You didn’t have to hit me, I thought you
were different from those soldiers,” she pouted.

“I had to because I’ll need your help if
we’re going to get out of here.
Believe
me, I understand how you feel. It wasn’t very
long ago that I was the panicking person and someone had to get my
attention, the hard way,” he explained, thinking about his travels
in the caverns a few days ago and Jatar’s calming measures.

“You need my help?” she asked.

“Definitely, we need to work together on
this,” he reassured her.

“All right, I’m sorry I panicked, I’ll try
to do better,” she promised, still holding on to him tightly.

“Let’s see if we can get to that opening
over there,” he said, disengaging her clutching hand from his
arm.

They clawed and scrambled over the dry and
dusty white and brown bones. As he moved G’Taklar looked at the
bones, at first he thought them to be human, but
eventually,
he decided that many of them were
too large.

“
They must be a mixture of human bones
and some other type of creature,”
Jatar thought to
G’Taklar.

“Can we pile up the bones high enough to
climb to the ceiling hole?” Rachael asked.

Looking around the room in the dim light
G’Taklar estimated how high they could pile the bones, but it
looked to him like it would not come close.

“
What do you think, Jatar?”
he
thought to his cousin.

“
I seriously doubt it, there just aren’t
enough bones to make a pile that will get you the twenty feet to
the ceiling,”
he replied
, “You may have to try it anyway,
but first look around and see if you have any other
options.”

“
We’ll need light,”
G’Taklar replied,
“I have the tinder box in my pocket, but I don’t see any
wood”

“
Make a torch from your shirt and one of
the bones. Unfortunately, it won’t last long, unless you can find
some type of oil,”
was Jatar’s answering thought.

G’Taklar began pulling off his shirt.

“What are you doing?” Rachael inquired.

“Making a torch, do you have any oil with
you?” he asked in return.

“No, I only have a comb and my perfume.”

“Great, we can look and smell good when we
starve down here,” G’Taklar replied sarcastically.

“Don’t ask if you’re going to complain about
my answers.”

“
Wait, that perfume could be more useful
than you think, see if it has an oil base, many of them do,”
Jatar submitted.

“Let me see your perfume,” G’Taklar
requested.

“Why?”

“We could use
it
if it’s flammable,” he replied.

“You’re going to waste my perfume?” she
asked.

“I’ll buy you some more if we survive.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” she said, getting
the bottle out of her waist purse.

It was surprisingly large, for a perfume
bottle.

“This must be the expensive stuff,” G’Taklar
said, facetiously.

“It belonged to my mother, you seem happy I
have it,” she replied.

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” G’Taklar
apologized. He opened the container and put a drop on his
forefinger, then rubbed it between the finger and thumb.

“
It feels oily, doesn’t it?”
Jatar
asked.

“
Yes, I think you’re right,”
G’Taklar
replied.

Following Jatar's
instructions,
he wrapped his shirt tightly around the end
of a long bone and then carefully poured the perfume over the
material. He applied it slowly to let it soak into the cloth so
that he didn’t lose a drop.
Eventually,
he lit the makeshift torch and they were
ready to proceed.

G’Taklar used the light of the torch to
study the room; the corridor seemed to be the only exit, so he led
the frightened girl in that direction.

She followed close behind him and they
entered the corridor. It was eight feet wide and turned out to be
only fifteen feet long. It emptied into another chamber the same
size as the one they had just left. This one was full of bones as
well.

On the far side of this
room,
there was the beginning of another
corridor. They climbed over the bones and continued.

They found themselves in a third room and
like the first and second, it was filled with bones.

“Is there no end to these bones? I never
want to touch another bone in my whole lifetime,” Rachael
complained, trying to wipe the bone dust off her hands by rubbing
them on her dress. She wasn’t getting anywhere because the dress
was covered as well.

G’Taklar didn’t think it wise to point that
out.

“Look!” he exclaimed pointing across the
room and holding up the torch.

On the other side of the room they could see
a large stone door, but when they climbed over the bones to the
other side of the room, they found the door locked shut. G’Taklar
tried pounding on it, but it didn’t budge. It felt solid enough to
withstand an army.