Dirge for a Necromancer (19 page)

Raettonus spun and slammed the door as he exited. Furiously, he kicked open the door to his own cell and closed it hard enough to splinter it around the lock. Rage boiling inside him, Raettonus kicked over his brazier and tore the half-burned tapestry on his wall to the ground. Fire danced across his shoulders onto his hands as he felt all his bitterness churn in his stomach. His magical fatigue was suddenly gone, replaced with a powerful, hateful rage.

With a scream, he grabbed hold of the remaining tapestry and burned it to cinders, and when it was nothing but ash he found himself wishing only that ashes could be burned. He grabbed the unicorn figure from his desk and hurled it at the wall, shattering it. The little white pieces of it were like a shower of sparks as they fell onto the coals of the overturned brazier, catching the light and glinting. The gryphon and the phoenix followed close behind their fallen comrade, exploding into a glittering swirl of splinters as they struck the wall.

Teeth clenched, face contorted with rage, he kicked a pile of coals spilt from the brazier, sending them hurtling across the room so they fell like orange hail on the books and clothes and papers on the floor and burned holes in them. He punched at the wall with all his strength, tearing the skin on his knuckles and leaving them bloody. Without really knowing why he was doing it, he knocked all the stacks of books and the little bottles of ink and herbs from his desk. The vials clattered on the stone floor and shattered, and black ink spread out around the glass like blood.

It was only when his rage began to subside that he realized he was crying. He slid down a wall into a crouching position and buried his face in his hands. He was still hot with fury, and his tears were turning to steam in his eyes. He looked around his room, all a mess, and saw his dagger lying beneath his desk, beside the wall, where it must have fallen.

Bitterly, he laughed.

Chapter Thirteen

Diahsis’ feast was the height of revelry, full of bawdy singing and roughhousing and loud conversations all throughout the hall, which had been cleaned and decorated in yellow, blue, and green for the occasion. The general sat at the head of the longest table with Deggho at his right and gave Raettonus a seat at his left. Daeblau stood near them with Dohrleht, but Maeleht wasn’t there—he had become especially faint, his brother said, and Ebha didn’t think it would be a good idea for him to tax himself too much. Brecan joined them just as Raettonus thought he would and took his place right beside the magician.

“Oh, hey, Raet!” exclaimed Brecan as he drew close. “You cut your hair! You haven’t cut your hair in ages.”

Raettonus shrugged. “I like it better short,” he mumbled into his goblet of wine.

“Then why do you keep it long?” asked the unicorn, cocking his head to the side.

“Stop asking questions and let me drink in peace,” said Raettonus, punching Brecan in the nose.

The unicorn winced. “Oh, okay, Raet,” he said, turning to his other side to talk to a cheery, boisterous centaur with a thick, Tahlehson accent. Raettonus turned his attention to Diahsis, who was drinking merrily and laughing with Deggho about something one of them had said.

“I think I’ll make a suit of armor out of its bones,” Diahsis said, holding his goblet to his lips and then pulling it away without taking a sip. “Dragon-bone armor, banded with gold and encrusted with sapphires. From then on, they’ll call me Diahsis Dragon-bone, and armies will flee before me, and opposing soldiers won’t even dare to whisper my name!” He laughed and took a drink.

“It’s too bad you didn’t kill the dragon,” Deggho said. He sat in a high-backed chair with his head carefully balanced on his shoulders. “Then they’d call you Diahsis Dragon Slayer.”

“That’d be something,” said Diahsis, setting down his wine and wiping the corners of his mouth on a napkin. He leaned forward and turned to Daeblau. “I must say, Daeby, you were magnificent when you took the dragon out.”

“Thank you, General,” said Daeblau with a nod.

“Have you fought dragons before?” asked Diahsis, reaching for a basket of rolls set on the table, but falling a little short. He frowned and tried a little harder, stretching across the table, but ended up knocking the basket over.

“A few times,” Daeblau said.

“It’s so dangerous,” said Dohrleht, taking Daeblau’s hand in his own. “I wish you wouldn’t put yourself in harm’s way like that.”

Daeblau smiled gently at his young companion. “You shouldn’t worry,” he said. “Dragon hunts really aren’t that dangerous.”

“I beg to differ,” said Deggho. “I had a friend die on a dragon hunt. I miss him. He used to tell the best riddles.”

“Oh, riddles!” said Diahsis, delighted, as he managed to snag a roll that had fallen from the knocked-over basket onto the table. “I adore riddles! Oh, and I’ve got one. Here it goes: What’s green and long and flies through the air?”

“A green, long, flying thing!” exclaimed Brecan.

“Good guess, but no,” said Diahsis.

Brecan flattened his ears. “But you just said…”

The general laughed and threw his arms out wide. “A sea serpent being carried away by seagulls!” he told them happily. He bit into his roll and tore it in half, still chuckling to himself.

“That riddle didn’t even make sense,” said Raettonus, frowning.

“It sort of did,” said Deggho uncertainly. “Sea serpents are green and long.”

“Exactly!” said Diahsis. He swallowed the rest of his wine and called for more, and a young centaur refilled his goblet. “This is a good time. Oh! Too bad we don’t have any instruments—we could use some music. Do any of you play?”

“I used to be able to play the bek’kur. It’s a type of flute,” said Deggho. “But I don’t think I could anymore.” He motioned with one hand to his severed neck. “Seems like all my air comes out of my, um, neck hole, I guess you’d call it. Anyway, I don’t think I could play a flute that way anymore.”

“The bek’kur, huh?” said Diahsis. “I, too, play a type of flute. A Tahlehson bone flute, to be specific.” His eyes widened and a broad grin took his face. “Well, there’s something! I could make a dragon-bone flute! Then I could play it for you. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“That would be,” said Deggho, nodding slightly and causing his head to topple onto the table with a sharp yelp. Diahsis laughed and picked up his head.

“You know what, Deggho? I barely know you, but you are a lot of fun,” he said, bringing Deggho’s face close to his own. “You are my best friend at this table.” He grinned and brought Deggho’s nose and forehead to his own. “Also, from this close, it looks like you have one eye. That’s fun.”

“Your pinky finger is poking the inside of my throat,” said Deggho with a frown.

“Oh, sorry,” said Diahsis, handing the goblin’s head back to his body. “Let’s tell more riddles! What’s…hm. Okay, I’ve got it this time. What’s gray and spends all its time on the ocean?”

“Oooh, a rain cloud!” said Brecan. Raettonus flicked him hard on the nose. “Ow, why did you—oh, never mind, a rain cloud spends its time in the sky.”

Diahsis began to giggle in a very undistinguished manner. “It’s a wolf on a raft!” he said.

“Your riddles make no sense. I’m beginning to wonder if you actually understand what a riddle is,” Raettonus said. “How much wine have you had?”

Diahsis’ smile dropped away, and he looked at Raettonus very seriously. “Not nearly enough,” he answered somberly and called for his goblet to be filled again. He drank three more cups and told five more nonsensical riddles before the first course arrived.

“Oooh, gryphon,” said Brecan as it was set before him.

Raettonus poked at his meat with his knife. “Didn’t know you caught any gryphons,” he said.

“Well, I only caught one,” said Diahsis. “Deggho helped me catch it.”

“Vuriin,” said Raettonus.

“Yeah, that was his name,” said Diahsis, with a nod. He put a hunk of meat in his mouth. “Oooh, he’s delicious.”

Dohrleht frowned at his plate. “I don’t know how I feel about eating something that has a name,” he said.

“Everything has a name,” said Brecan. “My name’s Brecan. Some people say it Brekkan, but that’s wrong.”

The young centaur screwed up his face. “Then I guess I don’t know how to feel about eating something whose name I know.”

“We’re going to catch more gryphons tomorrow,” said Diahsis. His handsome face was flushed from the wine. He grinned and leaned his elbows on the table. “Lots of gryphons—whole armies of them! Right, Deggho?”

“Well, I don’t know about armies,” muttered the goblin, picking up his head and carefully placing it back on his shoulders, only for it to roll off into his lap. Diahsis laughed heartily and picked up his head by the hair. “Certainly we’ll find a gryphon or two.”

“Wonderful!” said Diahsis, holding Deggho’s head against his chest with one hand and picking up his goblet with the other. “And then we’ll hunt faeries! Oh, Raettonus, will you be joining us?”

“Nope,” said Raettonus, chewing his gryphon meat slowly.

“Suit yourself,” said Diahsis. “It’ll be fun though. You’re missing out. How about you, Daeblau?”

Dohrleht squeezed Daeblau’s hand and looked at him pleadingly. “No,” said Daeblau after a short hesitation. “I think I’ll sit this hunt out.”

“Well, fine,” said Diahsis, his pointed ears lowering. “I guess that Deggho and I will go by ourselves then, spoil-sports.”

“What about the soldiers?” asked Deggho, his voice somewhat muffled by Diahsis’ forearm.

“Them too,” said Diahsis. He set Deggho’s head down on the table and patted it fondly. “But when we bring back delicious faerie meat, you don’t get any, Daeblau, because you wouldn’t come with us.”

Daeblau smiled slightly. “I think I can go on without it, General.”

Diahsis frowned and took a long drink from his goblet. When he set it down again, he said, “How about more riddles?”

“Oh, dear God, no,” said Raettonus, resting his head in his hands. “Those aren’t riddles you’re telling, anyway. No more.”

“All right,” said Diahsis, somewhat deflated. He swirled his goblet around in his hand. “We could tell stories instead.”

“I love stories!” said Brecan.

“So do I!” said Diahsis. “Do you have any?”

The unicorn flattened his ears and cocked his head to the side. “Well, no, I guess I don’t, really,” he said. “One time I fought a chimera. That’s a story.”

“Go on, then,” said Diahsis, waving one hand lethargically toward the unicorn. “Tell it.”

“Okay,” said Brecan. “Well, this one time I was in the forest, and I came across a chimera, and then I fought it. The end!”

“Who won?”

“Huh?”

“You or the chimera?”

Brecan’s ears perked forward. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I guess…we drew. I mean, he went his way, I went mine.”

“It didn’t try to kill you?” asked Diahsis.

“No, we just argued a bit about who had the right to keep walking down a narrow path,” said Brecan. “Then I remembered that I could fly, so I flew. The end!”

Diahsis frowned. “Oh, I see. Very… Erm. Well, I guess, technically, it was a story.” He thought for a moment and said, “I’ll tell a story now, then. I’ll tell a story about how I became a general!”

Beside Brecan, the Tahlehson centaur sighed and edged away to listen to the conversation on the other side of him. Apparently, this was a story he’d heard before.

“I am well known throughout Tahlehsohr for my deeds in the Wolf-Blood Wars, you must know,” Diahsis began, leaning back in his chair and puffing out his chest proudly. “I did many marvelous, brave, and frankly amazing things. It’s really quite surprising it never reached you. I’m a folk hero.”

A couple of the nearest Tahlehsons chuckled to themselves quietly, but Diahsis didn’t seem to notice. “What were the Wolf-Blood Wars?” asked Dohrleht, leaning forward.

“Wars against wolf-bloods,” answered Diahsis, raising his goblet to drink. He found it empty and called for more. Once a young soldier rushed to him to refill it, he continued his story. “I was serving with a battalion of five hundred men, lead by one General Gaema. I was just beneath him, actually. I hated being just beneath him, really; he made me attend him everywhere he went, as though I were some kind of servant. In his day though, Gaema was a great general and a perfect soldier. But his day was long, long past by the time I joined his battalion. By the time I came, only the dregs of the army served beneath him—the worst soldiers or those the higher-ups simply didn’t like. They put me there because of my elven blood, so even though I was the hardest working soldier in all of Tahlehsohr I was serving with green boys, men with a rebellious streak, and cowards. Worst of all was Gaema’s leadership. He’d lost a lot of men at a battle twenty years before, and it never left him. By the time I came to serve beneath him, he was a hopeless, sad, alcoholic mess. They would have discharged him, I’m sure, but his brother was King Saemohr’s trusted Councilor of Wind.”

They brought the next course—a thick, brown stew filled with barley and carrots—and Diahsis paused to thank the young soldier who served them. As he started into his stew, Diahsis said, “Where was I? Did I reach the—oh, no. Never mind. Okay, so, here I was, stationed beneath Gaema, who never stopped drinking and had the smallest battalion in the kingdom. We were in Durahm Lyrii, near the heart of the insurrection—a city in heavily forested mountains that’s not easy to reach for larger armies. It had three enormous walls surrounding it and had been considered unconquerable. The city was originally an outpost to defend Tahlehsohr’s eastern coast, you see. Anyway, Durahm had a very large werewolf population, and they had already killed all the centaurs in the city and taken control of it. All the other groups, led by men who weren’t constantly in the bottle, were trapped miles away, so it was only us—Gaema’s five hundred soldiers, sent to waste the enemy’s arrows on bodies of no value to King Saemohr’s council. We were called the Lion’s Tail Battalion at the time, because like the poof of hair on the end of a lion’s tail, we were a slight disgrace on an otherwise fearsome creature.

“By the time we reached Durahm Lyrii, the werewolves had already found out we were coming, and they were prepared,” Diahsis went on. He spared a disdainful look at the paws of his wolf pelt, draped across his shoulders, as though their presence there were a disgusting surprise to him in that moment. “Because of Gaema’s incompetence, we lost half the battalion that day. The men wanted to retreat; they said we couldn’t possibly win with only two and a half hundred men. Gaema wanted to continue the fight. It was the only thing he was right in during the battle of Durahm Lyrii. The next day we tried again to take the city and lost fifty more men. Gaema was one of them.”

He smiled and set his goblet down before picking up Deggho’s head and cradling it to his chest. “An arrow got Gaema through the eye slit of his helm,” he said, and mimed with his hand an arrow in flight arching toward Deggho’s eyes. The goblin winced and shut them tight, but Diahsis stopped short of him. “He died a warrior’s death, and I got control of the remaining two hundred of the Lion’s Tail. Two hundred men, give or take a few, versus three thousand werewolf soldiers with better position and better discipline—and better weapons, since none of the Lion’s Tail were archers and most of them had broken their spears, lances, and other pole arms in the days before. We had swords and only swords.” He shifted in his seat and pulled at one of Deggho’s ears, ignoring the goblin’s faint protests. “The soldiers wanted to retreat, but I didn’t. One tried to desert and I cut off his legs. The rest were completely compliant after that.”

Dohrleht went pale, and Daeblau squeezed his hand reassuringly—though, if truth be told, he didn’t look all that well himself.

Raettonus raised one eyebrow. “You cut off one of your own soldier’s legs?” he asked.

“So judgmental,” said Diahsis, lifting his stew bowl and drinking some broth out of it. Setting it back down, he wiped his mouth with his napkin, but didn’t quite get all of it off his lips. “He disobeyed orders and tried to desert. He was lucky I didn’t hang him. Anyway, under my leadership, we were able to breach Durahm Lyrii’s walls the same way we breached the walls of this citadel. Simple enough, for the first wall, but the other two were a lot harder since the werewolves knew what we were up to by then. We had to build a structure to cover us. Of course, all of that was the easy part. The real fight began after that when we fought a sea of wolves for control of the city. I remember little of the battle itself except that the blood was thick on the streets—so much blood that everything but the rooftops was red when all was said and done. I was caked in so much blood that the cloth on my uniform broke apart, leaving only the bare mail beneath. I saw friends die around me. I led my men on. That day, we weren’t the tail of the lion—we were its claws, sharp and deadly. When all was said and done, I had lost fifty men. We had killed more than two thousand werewolf insurgents. The rest surrendered. By the time reinforcements arrived, Durahm Lyrii was flying the yellow and blue of King Saemohr once again, taken by the regiment sent on a suicide mission—all under my expert leadership. I was made a general for my brave and crafty efforts.”