Dirge for a Necromancer (21 page)

Raettonus frowned at looked down at Diahsis, still nestled against his neck. “What were you expecting?” he asked. “An elf like you joining up with centaurs? You’re a blood traitor. No wonder no one wants to be your friend. The centaurs are always going to look down on you, you know, for being an elf. No matter how high you rise, they’re going to look down their noses at you. Any idiot could see that.”

With a wistful sigh, Diahsis raised his gaze to meet Raettonus’ eyes. “I know it seems very silly of me to even try to earn their respect,” he said. “Still, I can’t help but think… Well, at some point, they’re going to see how amazing I am. They’re going to have to. When this war is done, I fully expect King Saemohr to put me on the Zylekkhan throne, Magician. Unlike all the others, he understands that I am clever and strong and loyal. I am devoted to my king—utterly devoted—and he understands that. He’s going to put me on the throne here. He’s going to see how hard I’ve worked for him, and he’s going to reward me for it.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Raettonus, shaking his head. “God—you just lie to yourself until you believe it, don’t you?”

“I don’t lie to myself,” said Diahsis. “King Saemohr is going to reward me for all the sweat and blood I’ve given him. He will. I’m going to be king in Zylekkha and then…”

“And then what?” asked Raettonus. “What problems do you think it’ll solve, having a crown and a title? That’s all it will be, you know—just a title. So do you think being king is going to be any less lonely for you than being general?”

“I think—”

“It’s not going to be, and you’re a fool if you’re deluding yourself otherwise,” Raettonus said.

Diahsis closed his mouth and was silent for a long time. Finally, he said in a quiet voice that was more like the voice of a scared child than of a soldier, “I really have to try. I need to see. Maybe…maybe if I just get a little higher up, things are going to get better.”

He sighed and pulled himself away from Raettonus, leaning back and resting on his elbows instead. One of the paws of his wolfskin cloak slipped down off his shoulder, but he didn’t bother to pull it back into place. “What about you, Magician?” he asked after a bit. “You’re a powerful man. Are you lonely? It can’t just be me, can it?”

“Lonely,” sneered Raettonus. “Feeling lonely suggests you have a need to have other people around. I have no such need. No, I’m not lonely. I’ve never been lonely and could never be lonely.”

“Oh.” Diahsis sounded deflated.

“You were hoping to hear differently. Hoping I could sympathize with you and we could be buddies, right?” Raettonus said, looking at the general out of the corner of his eye. “Sorry to disappoint.”

Diahsis managed a weak smile. “Oh, it’s fine,” he said. “I just… I mean, I’m glad you’re not lonely. I am. It’s not a good feeling, so I’m glad you’re not lonely.”

With a groan and a roll of his eyes, Raettonus laid back on the table, arms folded behind his head. “Your optimistic spin on everything is downright grating, did you know that?” he said. “God, could you stop trying to be so damn cheery?”

“I’m sorry you don’t like it, Magician,” responded Diahsis. “But a bright disposition is really the key to success. I try to look at things positively. You really should try it, Magician.”

Raettonus rolled his eyes and made no answer. For a few minutes the pair of them sat in silence, the torches crackling softly in the quiet. Somewhere out in the hall, muffled by the stone, they could hear soldiers laughing together as they made their way to the roof or the barracks. Diahsis’ sharp ears bobbed slightly at the sound of the centaurs’ laughter, and he smiled faintly.

After what might have been five minutes or so, Diahsis broke the silence. “Magician,” he said, his voice soft and hesitant. “I’ve been wondering… Did it hurt when you lost your soul?”

“Hurt?” Raettonus raised one eyebrow. “No, it didn’t hurt.”

“How did you lose your soul, anyway?”

The magician let out a long, rattling sigh and scowled. “Everyone always asks me that,” he said. “I never get to have a conversation with anyone without them bringing up my soul. I don’t want to talk about it, all right? If I wanted to talk about it, I’d volunteer it. I don’t.”

Diahsis pursed his lips for a moment. “All right then,” he said quietly. “Sorry I asked, I guess.”

“Yes. Yes, you should be sorry,” said Raettonus. “God, what part of ‘lost my soul’ makes people think I’d want to tell that story? I mean, would you want to tell that story, if it were you?”

For a moment, Diahsis considered the question. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I suppose I would if it were an interesting story. Is it?”

“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Right, right. My mistake,” said Diahsis. “I was just thinking lately about dying, and… Well, anyway. I’ve been thinking lately about dying. Magician? Supposing you could die, how would you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” mumbled Raettonus as he stared up at the dark ceiling. “All deaths are pretty uniformly awful. I suppose it’d be most fitting if I were to burn to death. Just walk into a fire and burn down to ashes.”

“Like a phoenix!” exclaimed Diahsis with a laugh.

“Christ, I’d hope not,” said Raettonus. “Phoenixes just come back to life. If I’m dying, I want to stay dead. Anyway, fire’d be the most fitting, but I’d hate to burn to death. I’ve seen people burn to death. I’ve seen lots of people burn to death, in fact. It’s not a pretty way to go. They scream and scream until their lungs are too seared for them to scream any more. And the way the fat burns off them first, and the whole thing smells like someone roasting venison on a campfire… Yeah, no thanks.”

“So how would you want to die, then?” asked Diahsis, turning to look down at Raettonus.

Raettonus shrugged and sat up. “I don’t know,” he said. “Like I said before, there’s really no good way to die.”

“I don’t know, I think there is,” Diahsis said.

“Oh, yeah?”

The general nodded. “Sure,” he said. “In battle. That’s a good way to die. That’s how I want to die.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised by that.”

Diahsis laughed and smiled that winning smile of his which sat so handsomely upon his face. He crossed one leg over the other at the knee and the hem of his chiton fell up his thigh a little. He said, “Well, if all deaths are going to be bad, why not die a glorious death? Honestly, I can’t think of any better way to end one’s life. So that’s how I intend to die, Magician—my sword in one hand, my dagger in the other, all dressed in bronze and silver with the lion of Tahlehsohr shining on my chest. It’ll be beautiful. Perfect.”

An amused smile cracked Raettonus’ thin lips as he regarded Diahsis. “Are you serious?”

“Deathly serious. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Raettonus shook his head. “You’re something else, you know that?” he said.

“I’ve been told that, yes,” said Diahsis, his smile only broadening. He shook his foot slowly back and forth, causing his chiton to slip further up his well-toned thigh. Slowly, his grin faded away and his light blue eyes took on a distant look. “My late lover, Rysah, was a scholar, did you know? He was. He was a scholar, and he spent all his time doing research on stars, and birds, and poisons. Do you know how he wanted to die? Poison. I know because he swallowed a cup of hemlock.”

“Sorry to hear that,” muttered Raettonus awkwardly.

“It’s fine,” said Diahsis, his gaze coming to rest again on the torches. His voice was low and tired. “He was dead before that, I think. On the inside, he was already dead. Have you ever been with someone like that, Magician? Someone who’s there physically, but they’re never really there? He doesn’t laugh when you do, or smile back when you smile at him, or do anything that suggests he even hears it when you talk to him. Gods, it’s a lonely state of affairs.”

He sighed and his sharp ears drew back. The distant look vanished from his eyes, and he turned his face again to Raettonus. “The moral of the story is don’t invest too much of yourself into a man who spends all his time working with poisons. Nothing good will come of it,” he said. “So, what about you? Have you ever had a lover die?”

“Insofar as I’ve had lovers, I guess so,” Raettonus responded with a shrug. “Certainly most everyone I’ve bedded, I’ve outlived. I can expect to outlive the ones that haven’t died yet. That whole ‘being immortal’ thing, you know.”

“Ah. Right,” said Diahsis. “Well, that must be sad for you.”

Raettonus shrugged his shoulder. “I don’t know. I get on fine,” he said.

“Oh.” Diahsis sat up and set his hands in his lap. “There was this time a few years back when Rysah kept all these songbirds. Hundreds of them. They were so loud I could hear them in all the hallways of my estate. Birds, just chirping and chirping in his study. So I told him to get rid of them, and he refused to because they were part of his studies. So I waited until he was asleep and I snuck down to his study and I snapped their little necks one by one and fed them all to my hunting hawks. The next morning he came into my room all in a huff and demanded to know what I’d done with them. Rysah never hit me before that or after that, but when I told him how I’d killed those songbirds of his, he punched me so hard it cracked one of my molars and left a big, fist-shaped bruise on my cheek for weeks after. Gods, Rysah was a big, muscular man, and that punch hurt like hell—but all I could do was laugh. I just laughed until he stormed back out.”

“Well. Sounds like living with you must have been a real treat,” Raettonus said. “God, were you surprised when the man killed himself? You shouldn’t have been, really.”

The distant look had come back into Diahsis’ eyes, and he was rubbing gently at his cheek as if he could still feel the bruise there. “No,” he said slowly. “I guess I shouldn’t have been.” Another smile slowly crept onto the general’s lips. “Really, the joke was on me. He’d been testing slow-acting poisons on some of those birds, and I ended up losing a lot of my hawks. I stopped laughing after that. Gods, I was so angry…”

He sighed and rolled his neck. “Ah, but never mind all that,” he said. “It’s such a dreary subject…”

“The time you killed all your dead lover’s birds out of spite is a dreary subject? Who would’ve guessed?” Raettonus rolled his eyes. “If you don’t want to talk about dreary subjects, maybe you shouldn’t bring them up in the first place, huh?”

“Well, I didn’t mean to,” said Diahsis. “I was just thinking out loud, really. Ah, but let’s talk about something more pleasant. Hm… Ah, how are your lessons with the late general’s sons going? Well?”

“Well enough, I guess.”

“You’re teaching them magic.”

“Yes, I am.”

Diahsis leaned in close—so close Raettonus could smell the wine still on his breath and the scent of some sort of perfuming oil on his skin. “So, tell me, Magician,” he asked, light blue eyes focused intently on Raettonus’ dying-ember gaze. “Can you teach anyone magic?”

Raettonus raised one eyebrow and answered coolly, “That depends on the student, not on me.”

“Do you think you could teach me to do magic?” asked Diahsis. “Like how you lit the torches in here just by touching them? I’d like to be able to do that.”

The magician curled his lip and shook his head. “Honestly, you and magic,” he said. “You have a problem, General. You are obsessed.”

“I just like magic, that’s all,” Diahsis responded. He smiled. “I used to be magical, did you know? I could turn into a wolf.”

“So I gathered, you being half werewolf and all.”

“Mm. Yes, I suppose that does make it obvious, doesn’t it?” said Diahsis with a laugh. “Ah, but I can’t turn into a wolf anymore.”

“How’s that?”

Diahsis pursed his lips briefly and shrugged. “I had to give up a piece of my pelt after the Wolf-blood Wars to keep my position,” he said. “As a show of loyalty to King Saemohr, he asked me to give up part of my pelt, and so of course I did. It’s not that much to ask, I suppose. He’d already made me swear an oath to have no children years before that, and certainly asking a man not to find a wife and have children is a much larger request than asking him for a piece of wolfskin.”

“Funny,” said Raettonus. “Most every werewolf I ever met would rather die than give up his skin. To all of them it’d be like losing an eye or a hand.”

Diahsis smiled sadly. With his handsome face and his light blue eyes, the expression made him look somewhat like Sir Slade. “I’m not really a werewolf,” he said. “I’m just an elf who a werewolf happened to give birth to, Magician. That’s the way it’s always seemed to me, anyway. All the real werewolves—yes, they are quite attached to their pelts. Rysah was. Rysah didn’t want to give his up when the king asked him for it. He did give it up though. He had to. He was never right after that though. But for me? Well, it was little more than a fur tunic to me, really. I’m no real werewolf, Magician. I’m just a lowly elf.”

“But you miss turning into a wolf or else you wouldn’t have brought it up.”

“No, not really,” said Diahsis. “I didn’t do it much, anyway. What should I miss about it? Being a wolf is much the same as being a man, except you can’t hold a sword or open doors. Ah, but to be able to do real magic, the way you do it—I would kill gods for that.”

“There is nothing I could show you to do that wouldn’t take a lot of time for you to learn—supposing you could learn,” Raettonus said. “You’re a busy man, running this citadel and all. I doubt you’d have the time for such lessons, really.”

The wolf-blood general’s sharp ears drooped slightly. “Oh,” he said. “That’s a pity. Ah—but what about just a very small trick? It wouldn’t have to be anything impressive…”

“Even a small trick would take months of intense study,” Raettonus answered. “It’s not like picking up knitting, General. You can’t become a mage over the course of an afternoon.”

“Ah, of course not,” said Diahsis sadly. “I was just hoping… Ah, but nevermind. No, it was a silly thing to ask. I knew the answer before I even asked it.” He smiled again. “So, Magician, are you sure you wouldn’t like to come hunt faeries with Deggho and I?”

“I’m really not interested, no,” Raettonus answered. “I don’t like to hunt. It’s so much traveling and all for next to nothing, really. It’s boring. As a necessity I understand it—but when it’s merely for fun, then what’s the point?”