Chapter 13: The Necromancer's Novice

Munne woke her late in the evening. Lilith cracked open her exhausted eyes, and sat bolt upright when she saw who it was. Lilith had been moved into one of the many empty monk cells in the Abbey a few days after her arrival, which was fortunate as at least now Paulus wouldn't be woken up with her. Lilith crossed her legs and asked “miss Munne, can I, uh, do something for you?”

Munne stood and looked down on her, which was hardly unusual considering how short Lilith was, though the three feet of height between the two meant that Munne absolutely towered above her. Lilith had never taken up sleeping on the bed even though she had one to herself; the barely-padded stone slabs the monks of this particular Abbey slept on as part of their asceticism were only moderately more comfortable than the floor, and something deep inside Lilith was scared of growing used to sleeping in a bed like a regular person only to have it taken away from her again. “Miss Munne?” Lilith asked. The Necromancer had still not responded.

“Fully awake?” she asked.

“Close to it,” Lilith said, “why are you here? Um, that is, if I may ask.”

“I'm here for you,” Munne said, “come.”

“Y-yes, Miss Munne,” Lilith said, getting to her feet.

“Gather up your belongings, you won't be back for some time,” Munne said.

Lilith swallowed. She knew it was strange for clergy to own slaves. Were they finally pawning her off to a noble, or just sacrificing her? No, they wouldn't tell her to gather her belongings if they were just going to kill her. In any case, she picked up her staff and the two spare changes of clothes kept in the chest at the foot of her unused bed and said “this is it, miss Munne, I'm...I'm ready to leave whenever.”

“Good, come,” Munne said.

Munne led Lilith towards the catacombs. “A grave watcher works mostly at night,” Munne explained, “the dead hate the sun. It blinds them. Burns some of them away entirely. It is necessary to be able to converse with the ghosts above the earth as well as below it when we need to. Get used to rising with the moon. So long as you're with me, you're on my schedule.”

Lilith had always preferred night to day. “Yes, miss Munne, but...Why am I with you again?” she asked.

“You wanted to help in the catacombs, and now you're getting your wish,” Munne said, “you wanted to learn witchcraft and you're getting that, too. Is there a third wish I should know about?”

“I...What?” Lilith asked.

“You're very lucky to have impressed me with your work at the fourth altar, girl, why don't just keep your mouth shut and see how long you can ride that impression?” Munne said. Lilith opened her mouth, nearly responded, but then her half-exhausted mind caught up with the rest of her and she closed her mouth again, settling for a nod. “Good. Mhenlo thinks you'll be more useful as a properly trained witch. I agree. He's agreed to lend you to me to see you trained. He's also agreed not to hold me responsible should I be displeased enough with your work as to feed you to the gargoyles. Oh, don't look like that, girl, keep up the work you've been doing and you'll be fine.” They were descending into the catacombs now, towards Munne's house in the ruined chapel. “These next few weeks, I shall teach you whatever basics your...Spotty training hasn't filled in for you already. Starting with, what have you learned already?”

Lilith wondered briefly if she should still be riding the good impression and keeping quiet, but failing to answer a direct question was probably a horrible idea. So, of course, she stumbled over her words and babbled incoherently for a few seconds. “It's a straightforward question,” Munne said, “just tell me how many holes I have to fill in, gods, it's not like I'm expecting much from a slave.”

“I-I was a noble,” Lilith said, “I went to Nolani Academy for a year. I know how to meditate, I can read some basic glyphs, plus I can read the standard alphabet, I know...Well, an awful lot of history and enunciation and other things that aren't terribly important to witchcraft. I can play the flute.”

“Glyphs and meditation,” Munne said, “is that all?”

“No, there's also the plague locusts, and I have the fangs, and...Well, I've mostly gotten the hang of sensing ghosts. I can hear them now, actually. They're far off,” Lilith said. They had reached the entrance to the chapel.

“It's always louder at night,” Munne said, “for those who can hear anyway. Can you spoil blood or channel it, place curses, raise the undead?”

“No,” Lilith said.

“Didn't think so,” Munne said, “you'll have to learn. These are basic concepts for practical witchcraft. That,” she pointed to the priest's chambers in the ruins of the chapel, “is my room. This is the kitchen, over there is the study. The rest of the building is unoccupied. Pick a room. I don't care which, so long as it's in the chapel.”

“Uh, that one looks-” Lilith began.

“I said I don't care,” Munne said, “for tonight you will go light the candles between here and the Temple of Thorn. The spirits there are a reliable core of devoted Thorn worshipers, my main source of support in the catacombs. Light the candles, let them know they're remembered for me, while I sort out the situation in the Sect War corridor. It should get your sleep schedule adjusted. Tomorrow night we can begin the real work.” Munne did not bother asking if Lilith had any questions before spinning on her heel and leaving the chapel, so it was a good thing she didn't.

Lilith gathered up the candles, lit one on the lantern in Munne's home, stuck the rest in a satchel, and headed out towards the Temple. The path was fortunately quite clearly marked, being one of the only places the living who were not grave watchers went to with any regularity. Or at least had in the old days. There were places to worship Thorn on the surface, of course, but Hallow's Eve was dedicated to the dead, and people had used to visit the catacombs regularly on that night, back when they were maintained. The signs pointing the way were from a century ago before that dark maelstrom had grown up in the heart of the catacomb. Once the Sect Wars had started decades and decades ago, the kingdom's population slowly stretched thin. Lacking grave watchers, the most ancient spirits in the heart of Ascalon's vast catacomb grew angry, violent, and bitter. Ultimately they had coalesced into this, a beacon of terror that sat and gnawed at the back of Lilith's mind every second of every day, a poltergeist that spanned three counties and which contained more spirits than the entire living population of the kingdom above it. The grave watchers had a new duty, now, not one of honoring the dead, but of containing them.

Lilith dug out the burned out stubs of the old candles at the first altar, replacing them with fresh ones and lighting them one by one. "I'm sorry I don't know your names," she said to the faint ghostly presence she could feel around it, "I didn't have time to learn today, but I'm sure it's the first thing Munne will teach me. I guess I'm her apprentice, now." She smiled, and then for a moment was terrified that this couldn't possibly real, that at any minute she would wake up and be back at the Roblis Estate, or that tomorrow Munne would change her mind and send her back to the Abbey, and they'd sell her off to some new noble family. Or maybe Munne would just sacrifice her to appease some angry spirits.

Her hands shook, and the flame on her candle sputtered and died. Lilith took a deep breath and lit her candle on one of the altar's. If she wanted to stay where she was, the obvious first step was to do a good job with the first task she'd been given, and she wouldn't do any better by worrying about what would happen if she failed. Or if Munne just didn't like her.

As it turned out, Munne did not reject her that day, nor the day after. She did not say much, only took Lilith with her to ask the spirits of the Temple Corridor if they had been properly honored. When they said they had, Munne gave Lilith a single nod of approval and led her back to the chapel. Lilith was exhausted by that time, having only slept three hours, and was more than grateful to return to sleep as the sun rose, finding a sturdy pew in the chapel and clearing away the dust and debris to make a bed. If there were rats down here, and Lilith imagined there were, she didn't want them nibbling on her while she slept.

The names of the dead were indeed the first thing Munne taught her. The names of those in the Temple Corridor, and of the friendly spirits in the Labyrinth, which was a hotly contested region between the spirits of the maelstrom and those still friendly to Ascalon. This was not an assignment Lilith was fond of, and involved a lot of terrified fleeing from the angry spirits when they trespassed into the friendly spirits' territory, to say nothing of the constant fear that she might take a wrong turn and run straight into the poltergeist. The Labyrinth led straight into the Pit, the heart of the great maelstrom. Just being so close to it quietly terrified her.

From Munne, she learned that Oberan the Reviled made his home there, communing with the spirits of the maelstrom, sustaining himself on their hatred and spite. The other grave watchers did not know how he had managed to become accepted by them, and he no longer considered himself a friend of Ascalon (though, fortunately, he did not consider himself their foe, either), and so did not tell. Recently, however, the maelstrom churned and turned upon itself, which Munne gathered from snippets of conversation with Oberan was due to him. The spirits were enraged by war, but they were enraged by everything, so the only real difference is that their rage was directed inward.

She had also learned how to spoil an enemy's blood, making it run foul and slowly poisoning them from within, and, at last, the hallmark of the witch, the reason for which they were called necromancers: the summoning of bone horrors to serve her. The spirits of the dead, Lilith learned, were sacrosanct and to be honored. They were powerful and everyone joined them in time. But their remains were just flesh and bone like any other, and twisting them into servants and war machines was not just allowed, it was encouraged.

“A weak necromancer, or a stupid one, might simply animate a corpse and be done with it,” Munne said, raising up a shambling minion with a gesture. It staggered up to its feet and clutched a sword with numb hands. “This is foolish. Even an untrained opponent has serious advantage over a minion that tries to fight like a man.” The zombie lurched towards Lilith and pulled back to swing its sword to her, and Lilith's eyes widened in surprise while she ducked under it. “Further, the rotting process makes them weak, and the lack of elan vital makes them clumsy in ways we do not yet fully understand,” Munne said, while her minions continued its clumsy attack on Lilith, who backed away from each blow and finally struck its kneecap the bottom of her stuff. It collapsed, and then began crawling toward her, feebly trying to swing its sword at her from the ground until Munne called it off and waited for it to expire.

“Certain rituals can animate vast armies, and there is simply no time to custom-build a thousand corpses to be proper killing machines,” Munne continued, “these rituals are costly, but at times, effective, and terrifyingly so. It is from here that the popular image of the necromancer in command of a vast army of recognizably human corpses comes. However in the vast majority of cases, you will be better off with a small amount of personalized minions.”

She opened up another cabinet in the catacomb and slid out another corpse, fresh from the north just a few days ago. “I'll do this slow so you can observe, but I'll only do it once, so pay attention.” Munne pulled a ritual knife from her belt and began slicing off pieces of the corpse, carved various glyphs into its skin, sewed other bits and pieces on. She hacked off the left hand, used a glyph to extend the radius and ulna of the forearm, fused them together, then used the knife to whittle and sharpen the hunk of bone into a massive blade. “The human body can do a million things and all of them well, but without the animating spirit a body is clumsy. An undead minion should focus its efforts on doing one thing as best as it can, for even when so specialized it will hardly be adequate.”

The head she cut off, and turned the ribcage into a massive set of vicious jaws that emerged from the stump of the neck, facing forward and hunching the whole thing over slightly. “Posture doesn't matter to the dead, nor does a creature with no spirit to see or hear have any need for eyes and ears. Remember, the undead are not like the swarms that live within us. They are not living creatures and have no volition of their own, not even an animal intelligence. They are extensions of your will, appendages. They are not attached to you and mercifully we cannot feel when they are hacked to pieces, but nevertheless your minions are best thought of as a body part. Understand that anything I say to the contrary is metaphor.”

The legs she reinforced with tendons taken from the upper neck and hands. “Mobility is important. The dead are slow, powerful legs make them faster.” Its off-hand had been withered away, its flesh stripped off, internal organs ripped out. “If you don't need a part, get rid of it,” Munne said, “every ounce makes a minion that much harder to sustain. An invisible umbilical cord ties you to each of your dead children. Don't make them any more hungry than they absolutely have to be, and never raise more than you can feed.” Munne stopped and thought a moment. “Which is good advice in general, really. Remind me to teach you how to atrophy unwanted fetuses sometime.”

It took her nearly an hour to finish sculpting the creature. “This is a standard war horror,” Munne said when she had finished,"some make the mistake of crafting an entire horde out of nothing but these. Certainly there are advantages to mass production. The more you craft a single breed of minion, the faster you will be able to create them. Experienced necromancers can craft a familiar minion in twelve minutes, fast enough to assemble a respectable pack in an hour. But such a general use tool is rarely useful outside of actual war zones."  Munne turned to look directly at Lilith. "Tell me, how might you make a more useful minion than this one?"

"On my first try?" Lilith asked.

"Stick to theory for now," Munne responded.

"Well..." she thought. The shape was still basically humanoid, but was that really optimal? Humans were creatures of plains and woods. What did creatures of caverns look like? Bats. Insects. Spiders. They could all get up and down very easily, but why? Trees were easily climbed and almost always had branches within the six foot reach of a human being, open plains meant that anything that couldn't fly could only move in two dimensions, but caves were covered in walls, in passages dug by time in random positions. "Some way of getting to hard to reach areas," Lilith said, "up and down vertical shafts, to openings that are far above the ground."

"Good. Continue," Munne said.

"Um..." What did the grave watchers actually do down here? "Well, something that could light candles and say prayers, except..."

"Except what?" Munne said.

Except that if minions could do that, Munne wouldn't be doing it herself between apprentices. Lilith knew that making a new minion couldn't possibly take more than a few hours no matter how complex, and Munne would sink much more time than that into lighting the candles. But why? "Except the dead would probably be angered by having their rites performed by an unthinking minion."

"What makes you think that?" Munne asked.

"Because..." Lilith thought for a moment. Why would the dead care? Why did they care in the first place?

Her thoughts were interrupted by a leather strap striking her shoulder and leaving another welt. Munne had made fairly liberal use of that. Lilith wasn't sure if it was because she was a slave or if she did it to all her apprentices. "If you can't immediately tell me how you came to a conclusion you've already reached, that means it was either a guess or you know your reasoning is shaky. Which is it?"

"Well...There has to be some reason you didn't just use a minion to honor the altars between apprentices," Lilith said.

"Indeed. As it happens the point of the ritual is to show the dead they are remembered, and corpses do not remember anything," Munne said, "on top of which they can't move with enough precision to reliably light candles, nor would their prayers be heard as anything more than a barely-coherent groan." Munne twirled the leather strap in her hands idly. Lilith braced herself for another blow. "If you don't know, say as much," Munne said, "I ask you questions to make you think, girl, not to have an excuse to smack you. If I just wanted to hurt you I could do that whenever I want, for any reason or none at all. Even ignoring your legal status, there's no witnesses to anything down here but me and the dead things only I can talk to."

"Y-yes, Miss Munne, but..." Lilith's courage only lasted for the first word of her objection.

"But what?" Munne asked, and Lilith knew she couldn't drop it now.

"But you have hit me for not knowing things before," Lilith said.

"I chastise you for wasting my time so that you'll learn not to do so in the future," Munne said, "when you make me repeat back something I have already taught you, you waste my time. When you give me wild guesses when the truth is that you don't know and can't figure it out, you waste my time. And even if you have forgotten something I taught you, you'll waste less of my time and be chastised less if you're up front about it. Understand?"

"Yes, Miss Munne," Lilith said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry, do better," Munne said, "so, vertical mobility, altar work is out, what else?"

Lilith closed her eyes and concentrated again. The welt forming on her shoulder was not much more of a distraction than the usual irritating pain in her chest. What, besides honoring the dead, did the grave watchers do down here? They fought the dead when they grew restless. "Well, weapons," Lilith said, "of the same sort the standard horrors have."

"Not of the same sort," Munne said, "a catacomb minion will want a different sort. Why?"

Lilith thought for a moment. How did cave creatures fight? Bats swooped down on prey if they were carnivorous, but most of them were herbivores who ran and hid anyway. Spiders typically relied on venom or muscle power minions just wouldn't have. Insects like her plague locusts would rip things apart with their jaws..."If you reinforced the jaw to crunch the bones in half and then tear, you could probably get even a corpse to rip a living limb off, but...The war horror does that already, so, I don't know, miss."

"Gravity," Munne said, "a minion adapted for underground combat is going to get more force from falling on something than from hacking at it. A catacomb minion should have multiple legs with a powerful grip to enable it to climb around the place, the grip should be capable of holding things so it can be used as messenger, and it should be able to lose as many legs as possible without being immobilized or significantly slowed. It should be bidirectional, with no distinct top or bottom, and its weapons should point up and down so that it can fall onto a target and be able to get themselves out of the way when it needs to squeeze through a narrow space. This way you get a minion that can be used to transport and retrieve small objects as well as serve as a moderately competent combatant. All-told, far more versatile than a corpse usually manages.”

Munne clapped her hands together and said “now, enough with theory, let's try it in practice. Come with me.” Munne led Lilith away from the large crypt where they had been practicing, which had been selected for its abundance of fresh corpses. Winding towards the Temple Corridor, past the ruined temple itself, and on into territory that was firmly controlled by the maelstrom. “I have discovered my wayward former apprentice has been doing ritual work near here, and has apprenticed himself to Oberan. Oberan is not our enemy, or at least not yet, but nevertheless this sort of betrayal cannot be permitted. Fortunately, it tends to clean itself up, since Oberan inevitably sacrifices them as part of some dark ritual, or maybe just to appease some of the spirits he walks with.”

The corridors here were a solid fifteen feet across, not nearly so grand as the Sect War or Temple Corridors, but wider by far than the twisting passages of the Labyrinth. As in almost all the catacombs, there were alcoves every few feet full of decaying bodies. “In any case, this latest apprentice left a mess. He bound a number of spirits into a creature of malice made into reality. It hates everything living and wants us all to die, and is entirely mindless and unable to be negotiated with, so there's really nothing else to do but kill it. And kill it you shall, with a minion army.” This place was quiet. The dead did not seem to linger here. The altars were deserted. “Fortunately he seems to have used up all the local ghosts to make the beast, which means you will not have to worry about anything but the monster itself. Sink or swim, my apprentice.”

Munne stopped, Lilith stopped with her. There was something softly burning up ahead, providing a brighter light than the green glow of Munne and Lilith's staves, which otherwise was their only light in the darkness. “What's that?” she asked.

Munne shrugged. “I haven't been here in years. It wasn't there when I was here last. This is your test. I'm just here to see if you can pass it.”

Lilith scrutinized the thing. It was like a lantern, constantly producing flame, but curiously the flame was smokeless. It must be sorcerous, and was probably either some kind of residue or maybe some kind of trap. Lilith didn't know much of practical sorcery, as the teaching of that was entirely reserved for the more advanced years at the Academy. Her old friends would probably be learning some of the first of it now, actually. It was autumn, and they'd be starting their third year.

What they knew on the other side of the kingdom wouldn't help her now, though. She knelt down besides a corpse and pulled out the tiny, razor-sharp knife Munne had given her for glyphwork. She cut the glyph of reanimation into the corpse's forehead, and then a corresponding glyph of control into her own arm, and focused her energies. “Come on, come on,” she whispered to herself. It seemed unfair that her first reanimation be part of a test, but then when had anything in her life been fair?

The corpse twitched, stirred, and finally staggered to its feet, and Lilith breathed a sigh of relief. She could feel it taxing her, though, draining her energies. And yet, through the same connection, she could feel it waiting for command. She willed it towards the fire, pointing to reinforce her direction; she knew its dead eyes were blind, but she knew also that this sort of reinforcement made the resolve stronger in her own mind, and thus sent the command more clearly to the minion.

The zombie lurched towards the fire, Lilith stood back, and then there was a spectacular bang and a wave of heat and blast that sent Lilith a step backwards, the fire pluming outwards to consume what pieces of the corpse hadn't been sent flying."Well," Lilith said to herself, "now we know what that does."

She had no idea how to make the many-limbed crawling thing that Munne had told her about in practice, and she did not trust herself to create one from scratch in theory. In any case, while it lost a lot of weight off its center, it made up for that in its many limbs, which would require Lilith to hack apart multiple corpses and stitch them together to get that many limbs, and surely that would take time which Lilith didn't have. These parts of the catacombs were dangerous for the living.

Lilith was reshaping the corpse into a proper war horror, hacking away the unnecessary limbs (she did not know the glyphs to wither them, but with some effort her knife could cut through the joints entirely), peeling off flesh here and stitching it back on there, and carving in what glyphs she knew to meld its bone into the blade, to turn its ribs into a maw that replaced its missing head, and finally to bind it to her will.

The legs were shaky. The radius and ulna were fused at the end, but separate where they connected at the elbow, a dangerous weakspot that would allow a clever enemy to cripple her minion's primary weapon with ease. But it lurched about steady enough not to fall over, and a few experimental swings at the wall showed it could at least hit a target without ripping its blade off, and hit it hard enough to cut something. It would do.

Lilith had created her third minion and been at it for close to two hours before she felt herself being stretched thin. The minions sapped her energy, anymore and she might grow weary simply maintaining them all. She knew from her studies at Nolani Academy that necromancers could trivially sustain a half-dozen minions. Had she really reached her limit so quickly? Hopefully there was some trick she was missing, or it would get easier with practice. She was young, she should have energy to spare.

The creatures' method of descending the short stairways in the corridor was to fall down them, and then get back up, but they seemed no worse for the wear. Two more of the fire traps Lilith encountered on her way in, and in each case she animated a whole corpse nearby, taxing herself for only a minute while it lurched into the trap, set it off, and was blown away. Better not to sacrifice minions which took her a half-hour at best to construct.

A final flight of stairs branched off from the main corridor, leading down into the ritual room. Previously a chapel dedicated to the veterans of the ancient war with Istan, at least 500 years old and in a state of advanced decay, it was covered now with candles placed with ritual precision, which still burned bright. Standing in the center of the room was a massive, bestial creature. It looked a bit like a primate might, but hunched over so far that it still crawled about on all fours, and thick-set, like someone had crossed an ape with a bull. It had no fur or flesh, however, and instead seemed to be comprised of pure shadow.

Its ethereal head turned towards Lilith, and it climbed towards her, its body passing straight through the candles without disturbing them. Lilith's minions marched ahead of her, tumbled down the stairs, and then righted themselves, baring three sets of rib-fangs as the beast advanced. A minion stepped forward and gave an experimental swing, and the nightmare flinched backwards, but too late to avoid a minor nick on its shoulder. Shadow escaped from the wound like steam from boiling water, but the creature was deathly silent.

It reached out with a shadowy hand and grabbed a minion, dragging it towards itself and ripping through its boney structure with its spare hand, the lower ribs used to support the upper half collapsing under the powerful blow. The other two minions rushed forward to hack away at it, and Lilith opened her mouth, the plague locusts emerging from all orifices and flying towards the nightmare. If it can be cut, it can be devoured.

The bugs bit into the shadowy beast as it finished ripping the first minion apart, casually tossing it aside and yanking the arm off another before the swarm took hold, and the nightmare began to stagger about, its claws scraping the locusts off of it while the remaining two minions hacked or bit into it, depending on what body parts they had left. The nightmare had no mouth, made no noise, and yet somehow Lilith could tell it was howling with fury as it put its fist through the jaws of one of the minions. It went flying backwards, but having lost its head once already, it wasn't terribly fazed to have lost the replacement. Jaws shattered, it rose to its feet and charged the nightmare, which was busy dismembering the other minion.

The nightmare bled shadow from multiple wounds now, including hundreds of tiny bites from Lilith's swarm, but the plague locusts were beginning to drop dead, incredibly short-lived outside of Lilith's system, and the last remaining minion was quickly ripped in half. The nightmare advanced up the stairs towards Lilith, who raised her staff and thrust it straight into a large wound on the creature's neck, then twisted the staff sideways, hoping to hit something vital. The creature reared backwards in pain, tearing the staff out of Lilith's hands, and then grabbed her around the throat, its other hand coming to rest on her head. She could see its tenebrous muscles tensing in preparation to twist her head off and closed her eyes, and then the creature shuddered and went limp.

Munne's own staff glowed with green light, having cast some curse on the creature to finish it. Lilith backed away, coughing and sucking in deep breaths of air as the nightmare dissolved back into its component spirits. “Go, now,” Munne said, “return to your altars. Be free once more, and remember who it was that bound you, and who it was that set you free.” She knelt down, grabbed Lilith, and yanked her to her feet. “Come on, not all of the dead will be grateful for what we have done for them. We don't want to be here when they recover their senses.”

Lilith followed behind Munne as she strode away from the scene. Apparently the danger wasn't urgent enough to warrant an all-out sprint. “W-why?” Lilith asked, “why save me? I thought-”

“That you had failed the test?” Munne said, “it's a nightmare, girl, a novice doesn't fight nightmares and win even with the advantage of surprise. You used what you had with an...Acceptable level of proficiency. I've taught smarter than you. I've taught stupider, too. You'll do.” Lilith smiled, an expression which vanished when she heard the furious wailing of the ghosts behind her, and instead she put her energy into moving faster. “You'll need some decent armor before we go any further,” Munne said, “from here on in the kid gloves are off. You'll be doing dangerous work.”