Defiant Necromancer (Book 2 stubbed)

Five hundred beastfolk witnessed Tybalt accept a crown.

No one heard the command he issued as the mummy proclaimed him the new Beastking. No one except a few distant undead creatures, back in the beastfolk’s mountains.

Everyone saw him smile and give thanks. Everyone heard him give the go-ahead to celebrate.

The beastfolk rushed into the town, their energy much more positive than it had been fifteen minutes prior. The defenders on the wall still shook at the sight of this wave of invaders, but the watchmen didn’t try to close the gates on the beastfolk, and none of the beastfolk tried to harm the men on the wall.

As the Army occupied and began to make the town their own, the people of Vors slowly realized that the savages they had expected were not, in fact, there to kill them, sack their town, and eat their children.

All Tybalt’s forces did was establish control over the town and relieve the local pubs of much of their stock of drink.

The necromancer himself took part in the celebrations, sitting at a high table that his admirers had set up and accepting toasts to his good fortune and future success. His fiancees sat and drank with him - Dero had teleported all of the others there - and for once, Tybalt even let himself get more intoxicated than he was accustomed to.

“It’s good to be alive,” he said, to himself as much as to the women around him, after the fourth or fifth toast in his honor.

“I can think of worse lives,” Vidalia replied with a little wink.

“Now that you’ll be a king and a husband, you ought to choose a last name for our family,” said Mariella.

“Something to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies,” Victoria agreed, grinning.

“I would say we should all just use my last name, but Tybalt Autumn sounds like shit,” Dero muttered into her drink.

“What about Tybalt Twinleaf?” said Vidalia mischievously. “It’s been a tradition in our tribe for a while that anyone in the Twinleaf family gets and keeps the Twinleaf surname, including children of female Twinleaf family members. The powers that constitute our family’s special gift only run in the female line anyway.”

Mariella and Dero exchanged a look.

“I don’t think so, Vidalia,” the fire mage said slowly.

“Yeah, we’re not doing that,” Dero said.

“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” Vidalia said, laughing to herself.

“Pick a flower name, maybe,” Kistana suggested.

Like Hyacinth? Tybalt thought, smiling to himself.

“It has to be something absolute, to give an adequate impression of your power,” Victoria said.

“Something simple,” Dero said. “True elegance is always simple and timeless. And power feels more legitimate when it comes dressed in elegant trappings. A color, a season, a weather pattern. Something like ‘Storm’ would work.”

‘I am the Storm’ would take on a whole different meaning if that was my name.

“How about ‘Black?’” Mariella asked. “There are plenty of flowers with the color black in the name. It’s a color, but not really. It’s absolute, since it’s the only color that represents a total absence of real colors.”

“Vidalia Black sounds… sensual,” Vidalia said. “I like it.”

Victoria nodded, smiling.

“Black goes with everything,” Dero said in a tone of approval. “Not a bad name to be known by for a century or so.”

“I don’t mind it either,” said Kistana. Tybalt could tell she didn’t think it was really a flower name like she’d been hoping, but she wasn’t too insistent. The catgirl was just happy to be part of the family.

It was a good compromise choice.

“Tybalt Black,” Tybalt said slowly.

I guess it works. And it represents my powers well. The opposite of Greentear. Instead of making the land bloom, I manipulate death and disease to my purposes. A black power.

“Tybalt Black, the Terror of the Salt Waste,” said Dero with relish. “Lean into the darkness.” She let out a little evil chuckle.

“A black name for a black reputation,” Mariella said with an ambiguous smile.

“A good name to be inherited by any child who happens to inherit your classes,” Vidalia said. Her thinking, as was often the case, was the closest to Tybalt’s own.

“I accept the suggestion,” Tybalt said in a formal tone.

He rose from his seat and cleared his throat.

“From this day forth, our family name is Black!” he yelled out loudly.

The beastfolk were well and truly drunk as a body by that point, but they cheered that as they had the toasts Tybalt had made to them, to the undead, and to their other, absent, War Chief.

Then the necromancer moved down his table, kissing each of his brides in turn. It was a little like an advance on the wedding feast, except that the Twinleaf twins’ family and friends weren’t present, and the guests were far too well armed.

All the witnesses who were sober enough to notice the small gesture of affection smiled and murmured about what a happy family the new Beastking seemed to have.

Those who might have questioned Tybalt’s claim to the crown had been silenced, either by death’s embrace or by the sheer spectacle of his achievements over the last month.

Distantly, though, there were still those who would not easily accept his authority.

***

Hundreds of miles away, in response to a command from their master, undead creatures moved.

Dozens of tiny pairs of wings and scores of claws acted in concert. These creatures had been observing the beastfolk conspiracy for over a month now, carefully absorbing the signs and signals used by those in the inner circle.

They had sifted what they observed and passed it on to the necromancer, who had made his determinations.

The birds, the bugs, and the rodents that spied for Tybalt had also retained some simple scraps of information in their own simple brains.

Repeated movements, made regularly. Key locations.

There was a certain tree that received periodic traffic.

A desert sparrow fluttered over to it. The bird lifted a piece of red chalk from its hiding place in a hollow near the bottom of the tree. Then it stared at the trunk through cold, dead eyes as it used its claw to scribble a single red marking. A perfectly copied symbol from the old beastfolk script, used almost exclusively by the elder generation of beastfolk.

The sparrow finished, checked its work for precision, and then darted back into the hollow to replace the chalk. Then it flew off into a bush.

The tree was in a moderately well trafficked area on a central mountain. Over the next twelve hours, eight people passed by it. Six of them took no notice of the marking. Two saw what it signified and passed the word to the other interested parties. No one coordinated sufficiently to ask who had made the mark. Each group assumed it was someone from the other.

A hundred eyes and ears witnessed and carried events to their master, from the tree down all the mountain pathways, into the private residences of those who thought themselves consequential.

Nothing escaped the ever-present eyes.

***

Andric, Tatiana, and Sabine stood in their long cowled robes at the prow of the ship.

Tybalt had placed Whadesgart’s swiftest vessel at their disposal. A pair of undead stood quietly behind them, a wight knight and a nachzehrer, for their security.

“I think I can see Eshangart,” Andric muttered. In the distance, a spit of land was beginning to come into view.

“How will we know it?” asked Sabine quietly.

Tatiana smiled, pleased to see her sister speaking up in Andric’s presence at all. Sabine was the relatively timid one of the two sisters.

“We won’t, but maybe the big silent ones will tell us, huh?” Tatiana said.

Engaging with her companions helped her forget that the elements of the situation were a little frightening for her.

When Andric had explained it, the assignment - go and treat with a tribe of half-civilized ogres - had sounded almost like Lord Necromancer had tired of his rival and decided to dispose of the foxman and his fiancees.

Yet Andric himself had sounded completely confident that he understood Tybalt’s motivations.

“He has begun to trust me,” the foxman insisted. “He would not waste us on a fool’s errand.”

You don’t think he just wants complete control of this army you’ve helped him to assemble? Tatiana had wanted to ask. Now that the beastfolk trust him, he removes the only other authority.

To her, it seemed like a logical guess.

But she also trusted her future husband’s judgment, especially of other people’s character. Tatiana was, if anything, congenitally cynical about others’ motives. So she went along.

The truth was that if the necromancer was sidelining them, he was doing it in the gentlest and most diplomatic possible way. It would be easy enough for him to have the three quietly killed, their bodies destroyed or turned into undead that their friends and family would take as their unaltered selves. That was the terror of his power: how absolute it was, even as it continued to grow.

If you weren’t an ancient dragon, all that power left was the choice between submission and destruction.

The hours passed, and the land that they had spied became clear and then easy to make out. What appeared to be a fairly large, uninhabited island, and opposite that, a peninsula. The city on the peninsula looked extremely well developed.

“We’ve reached Eshangart!” called the ship’s captain from nearby. He gave his most important guests a meaningful look and lowered his voice. “With your excellencies’ indulgence, we will use this opportunity to take on some additional supplies and do a bit of trading?”

“We still have further south to go to accomplish our mission,” Andric muttered. “I suppose if it is very quick- ”

But Tatiana squeezed his arm and gave him a surprisingly pleading look.

“I want to see the city,” she said in a soft voice. “We’ve never left that stupid desert.”

“Tati, we’ll have to wear our cloaks the whole time,” Andric said quietly. “You won’t be able to fly. I won’t be able to lower my hood. The Kingdom doesn’t tolerate our kind well.”

“In ports,” said the captain in a confidential tone, “we often get many different kinds. No one says anything about it. Just so long as you don’t ask about buying land, and no one thinks you’re settling here. The government has a human exclusive policy, but it doesn’t keep us from being friendly to visitors.”

The harpy and the foxman exchanged a quick look. They both knew that the Kingdom was far from friendly to their race. The extermination policy had been in effect for centuries… but apparently it was focused in the desert where they actually lived.

If the captain was correct in describing the common attitude outside of the Salt Waste, then this could be an invaluable opportunity.

“It could be a good chance to gather some intelligence,” Andric said in a grudging tone.

Tatiana squeezed his arm again. “It’s a date.” She turned to her sister. “Come on, Sabine, let’s get dressed!”