Necrobane by Daniel M. Ford

Author:Daniel M. Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

17

RETREAT

Aelis woke with a cry and a great deal of pain.

She didn’t dare open her eyes, but she could feel a hulking presence looming over her, smell the clean but powerful scent of smoke and wind and animal that lingered on him.

“Tun,” she croaked. “Please tell me I’m dead this time.”

“You’re dead this time,” he said, without a hint of laughter or jest in his voice.

“Oh good,” she rasped. “I’m afraid that being alive is going to be even more painful than this death.”

“Is this some kind of private joke for the two of you?” Maurenia’s voice, above and behind Tun’s.

“I’m touched by your concern, Maurenia,” Aelis murmured.

“I am concerned,” she protested, stung.

Aelis, eyes still closed, raised a hand, opening and closing her fingers. Maurenia took her meaning and clasped it with her own two hands, wrapping Aelis’s hand with relief.

“I know,” Aelis said. “You sounded angry, which you wouldn’t be if you weren’t interested in my survival. And no, it isn’t the first time I’ve woken up in heroic amounts of pain and asked Tun if I was dead.”

“Probably won’t be the last,” Tun said.

“Onoma’s Bleak Mercy, I hope it is,” Aelis said. She finally dragged her eyelids open—it felt like pulling a rasp over her eyes—then pulled herself into a sitting position using Maurenia’s arm.

They were inside their traveling shelter, with Aelis wrapped in what seemed like every scrap of hide and fur they had to spare. A fire burned in a pit dug out of the cold earth, the smoke escaping through an opening where sections of the shelter met.

“How did you lot handle the animations without me?”

“Got a lot easier once we remembered we had that alchemical whatnot,” Timmuk said.

“It’s a kind of soap, technically,” Aelis said, beginning to grow drowsy in the shelter’s warmth. “At least, it’s activated silver and…” She waved a hand vaguely in the air, “a few other things suspended in a soap.”

“Right. Well. Soap. Killed them proper.”

“My alchemy professors would be so proud,” Aelis said.

“At the risk of ruining the dramatic tension,” Maurenia said, “did you find what you went in there for?”

Aelis grunted and shrugged off the blankets they’d buried her in. Her eyes were adjusting to the semidarkness, and she saw her gear in a jumble nearby. She pawed at it frantically till she touched both the rough wood of the rod and the cold iron of the candlestick. “Yes,” she said, trying for more certainty than she felt. She lifted the length of wood, caught for a moment in the way the firelight reflected off the faintly rust-colored leaves from the far end. “This is Rhunival’s. I’m certain of it. And this,” she said, struggling a bit to lift it, “is the command totem for the animations.”

“It’s a candleholder,” Maurenia said. But then Aelis turned it so that the two upraised holders faced the half-elf, and Maurenia’s eyes widened in alarm.

“What…” Maurenia said. “What am I seeing?”

“You look at this from the right angle, and it’s the seal of the College of Necromancy,” Aelis said.

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