Chapter 465: The Necromancer (Castle Bonus 5/5)

Ruggah was sitting at the corner table with his back to the wall, and Coin stood by the door with her hood still up. There was a subtle tension in the air that I could feel.

“We leave today,” Ruggah said. “This morning, if we can get the beasts fed.”

I arched one of my brows. “I take it the maps were expensive.”

“The maps were cheap.” He pushed a rolled bundle across the table with two fingers. “It is the… other news that cost.”

I sat down, unrolled the bundle and looked at the top sheet. It was three hides joined together, inked in a careful hand, showing this corner of the continent, with a legend in the corner listing the years each section had been surveyed. The newest section was forty years old. Most of it was older.

With this map, I was able to put names to places from the vast overall maps of Terra that I had seen in the stone tablets in Dorrik’s hall. A god does not bother with the names of countries and cities, and I had only seen the overall shape of the world. With this map, I was able to update a small part of the map in my head.

“That is the last good map anyone made of the north,” Ruggah said. “Since then the borders have moved eleven times, and nobody who could draw has been willing to travel.”

“It’s more than we had.”

“Yes. If we wanted a better map, we would need to go to a major temple of a god. That would not be a good idea. Better we collect maps piecemeal as we travel.” He tapped the table. “Now look at the other thing.”

∞

Beneath the maps was a square of board about the size of a dinner plate, wrapped in oilcloth. I blinked. It was a painting. Cheap work, I could tell at a glance, as if it had been hurriedly copied from a better one.

It showed a valley of red glass. The bones of a serpent lay across it in a long white curve with the skull at one end, and the sky above was torn open in a jagged hole with the light of a pillar going up through it. And before the bones stood nine figures.

Ruggah, well, I knew it was Ruggah, because the Beastkin had a lion’s head with one eye and was holding a glaive high with both hands on the haft. Ogg was painted beside him with his arm out and green light coming off it. Thurrim was at the front with his beard braided and his hammer down and his mouth open in what the painter had decided was a war cry. The three Shades in a row, rendered as three identical dark shapes with white eyes, which was not inaccurate. Coin. Ines, with a bow drawn and the arrow burning. Tam beside her with a sword.

I was a bit surprised at how the painter had been able to put so much detail into it with minimal effort, but what drew my eyes were the weapons of the warband, all drawn in the same stylized shape, with little rays coming off the edges the way a child draws the sun.

These were obviously the god weapons made for them by Dorrik.

Hmm, I could not see myself in this painting. Then I looked towards the edge of it, as if drawn as an afterthought, and saw a bolt of lightning. I looked at it for a long time.

“Well,” I said. “They got Thurrim’s beard right.”

Ruggah looked at me and sighed. “That is what you have to say.”

I shrugged. “It was a good painting. How did you get this?”

Ruggah rubbed the bridge of his nose. “This was the information that cost money. According to my contact, the party that made this painting is a… Necromancer.”

The bit of amusement in my eyes vanished. I had never heard the term before, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way. It was almost like a word I should hear in the future, in the midst of mages and magic, not in the era of the gods.

Ruggah saw my frown. “Do you know what a Necromancer is?”

I shook my head. “How did this Necromancer paint these?”

Ruggah looked around, then drew closer and whispered, “They said he made the bones of the god speak.”

I looked at the painting. “Then the god must be a bad messenger. This painting, if I am not wrong, may be suggesting that the warband is responsible for slaying the serpent.”

Ruggah nodded. “I can see that, but it may be a diversion, something to obscure the true knowledge they have of us. These paintings are spreading across the towns, and it would not be long before they spread all over the continent.”

“How long?” I said.

“Before someone puts names to the faces?” Ruggah shrugged one shoulder. “Hard to say. If we were scattered, it would be almost impossible to locate us, but with the warband together, the risk of discovery is high. Also, I am a Nemean with one eye and a glaive, and I commanded at Serrath for eleven years, and there are men in this town who served under me.” He tapped the board. “It will not take long.”

“And when they have the names?”

“Then every faction on this continent will want us. Not to kill us, but to own us. If they believe the free gods can now give weapons to mortals that can slay gods, they will be looking for that god.”

I rubbed my chin in thought, and Thurrim came down the stairs at that exact moment, saw the painting in my hand, and laughed until he had to hold the doorframe. Then he leaned in and looked at it properly, and the laughter went out of him slowly, the way it does when a man works out what he is holding.

“At least they got my beard right,” he said at last, quieter. “Lot of folks do not know how important a beard is to a dwarf.”

I glanced at Ruggah, and he sighed. “Well.” He rolled the oilcloth back over it with surprising care. “It is a poor likeness. You are much shorter.”

The Beastkin focused on me. “Elric, with this painting, would it not be a good thing if the warband separated from you and drew attention away?”

I frowned and shook my head. “No, I still need you all. Besides, like you said, this could be a diversion. We all know that I was the one who killed the god, and they may want me to go out alone into the world… a world that I do not fully know.”

∞

We were on the road before the sun was properly up, but we did not use any of the gates. Ruggah took us out through a postern on the east side that he had used thirty years ago and was apparently still unguarded, and we went out past the burying ground and joined the north road four miles above the town.

If we kept going north and kept away from all major cities and encampments, we would reach the edge of the map in a month. Without following the roads, though, we would be passing through wild places that were ancient and dangerous.

Terra was a unique world that was constantly expanding, and where it expanded, cities and roads were built to keep well clear, since those places were extremely dangerous. This painting had ensured that the warband would have to cross them if we wanted to move through the world unhindered.