Unnatural Issue (29 page)

Not that necromantic magic was very effective for the tracing of people who didn’t want to be found. A Hound was a great deal like a real bloodhound, and it could easily lose the trail if enough other people crossed it. He was only this moment realizing how much he crippled himself by devoting himself to necromancy only, and alienating the other Elementals. Short of having something he knew was hers—hair, blood, skin, nails—he had no way to find her. The new clothing he had given to her was too new to have anything but the faintest association with her, easily muddled, and he couldn’t even use his blood tie with her as her father because he had effectively—and magically—renounced that very tie when she was born.

Words in the mouth of a magician have power.
He knew that, and it wasn’t the first time he’d inadvertently created a spell with his words either. Here he was, ironically, the cause of his own undoing. But how could he have known, twenty-one years ago, that she would turn out to be exactly what he needed?

He more than half suspected that someone in the household had colluded with her on this escape, even though they all seemed as bewildered by it as he was. He didn’t know them well enough to be certain the surprise was genuine.

How else could she have slipped away in the dead of night so easily and completely?

Well, before too long, they were going to get what was coming to them. And finally he would have completely obedient servants.

But not yet. He was not ready to take that step just yet.

That was when it came to him, and he smiled a little.

One of the many, many advantages of having a property like Whitestone Hall was that the Hall had its very own cemetery. Many of the great houses and stately homes had one; it was much more convenient than going to all the trouble of a burial at the village church. Oh, none of the family were buried there, although in the truly great manors and palaces the opposite was almost always true. Such places had their own chapels, and the family were often buried in crypts beneath the chapel. Not so here; this had been a little plot for the servants, where they could tend to the graves of their own without the inconvenience of walking all the way out to the village and the church and back. It hadn’t been used since Rebecca had died, and most of the graves were of children or servants with no family. That was why he hadn’t had Rebecca buried there. For his purposes, this could not be better.

He waited until the house was quiet, and everyone was asleep. Then he slipped into his Work Room. He needed to call up one of his bound slaves. For this, although a redcap might seem the obvious choice, a boggart was actually better. He wanted something that would try to be unobtrusive. Boggarts were small and weak, and except when they could swarm a victim or knew they were more powerful, they tried to keep hidden.

Once in his workroom, he got out his tools, made his preparations, and began the magic. He cast his controlling circles with great care. It would not do for the thing to get loose until he released it with his coercions upon it. The books all called for this to be done somewhere that had been polluted with dark and dire things—a battleground, a murder site, or some other cursed place. It was not practical for him to do this in the open, on appropriately tainted ground, so instead he had a broad, shallow box filled with earth mixed with blood that he used for such purposes. The physical components of his circles were hemp rope steeped in more blood and other noxious substances. The curious thing about Elementals was that although they conformed to some physical laws, they seemed completely immune to others. Boggarts, for instance, had real bodies; they were not spirits, and they could accomplish tasks like the one he was about to set this one, things that needed physical bodies that could act in the physical world. They could do things for him, you could touch them—and yet he could call one right up out of a box of dirt sitting on the floor of a room on the second story of his home. He didn’t know where the creature was going to come from, or how it would get to the box. When he dismissed it at last, it would vanish without a trace back into the earth. He supposed such things would drive a scientist mad.

He felt the dark power of the blood-soaked earth as he prepared his spells, potent and heady. It had a scent; part putrefaction of the sort that was sickly-sweet, and partly bitter, like poison. To his eyes, it had a color—that of dried blood overlaid with a sullen orange. And it left a faint residue on the skin, sticky rather than slimy. If the power of the Earth that he had mastered before was like wine,
this
was stronger stuff, raw whiskey, straight from the still. It took a man with a lot of willpower to handle it. It was like holding a tiger; you were safe as long as you didn’t let go, but if you did—

Well, it could use you. It could open you up to the very things you were trying to control, and you would be the one that became the slave. Dangerous. Intoxicating. Very personal in a way that Earth magic was not.
He
had created this power, with the deaths he had made with his own two hands. No one else could use it but him.

He forced it into the shape he wanted; the channel through which a boggart would manifest. As he imposed his will on the power, it shaped itself in the physical world in a way that ordinary eyes could see. Rusty-red tendrils oozed upward from the ropes around the box, weaving together until they formed a transparent, half-dome cage over it. Earth power glowed; this did not. This was more like smoke; it moved to currents he couldn’t quite sense, thickening and thinning. Another half-dome of the same power extended below the floor, not visible from here.

When you made such protections with Earth magic, you got the same dome, but that one would glow with a golden radiance like ripe grain in the sun. He’d once in his early days as a Master been curious enough to find out if the power passed through the floor and was visible in the ceiling of the room below a Work Room, and he had gone to look. It did; it was a bit uncanny to see the half-dome glowing away, exactly like some lighting apparatus from a Jules Verne tale of the future. He’d been very careful to set up his spell-casting area above a place where such a phenomenon was not likely to be seen—the linen closet. Unlikely that anyone would be rummaging for fresh sheets in the middle of the night, and even if they did, his dark power would not be visible in the shadows of the ceiling.

It was so much easier to use this type of power than the Earth magic he had been taught to wield. There was no coaxing, no cajoling, and no insidious leaching of his own strength. It was astonishing how much latent power there was in something as simple as a chicken—and, of course, the power available increased to an astonishing degree the more intelligent the sacrifice was.

Now that he had dared to think of using human beings as his sacrifices, the potential power made his mouth water.

The amount of power a sacrifice yielded also depended on its age. The younger, the more potent. All those years yet to be lived lay coiled inside under tension, like a spring.

He wrenched his concentration back to the conjuration; at this stage he could not afford a lapse. He bent all of his will on the box of earth. He needed a boggart. He
would
have a boggart!

With his mind alone, he traced the sigils of conjuration on the earth in that box rather than cross the barrier. The earth glowed dully where his thoughts branded the signs in place. Eight sigils, placed at equal distances around a circle, and then the final, most important one of all, right in the center.

And with a faint groan, the earth split, and the boggart crawled out of it.

The earth closed back again, snapping shut like an ill-tempered mouth.

The boggart glared at him across the barriers that kept them apart. It was a hideous thing, about the size of a child just beginning to toddle, but with a wizened body that looked made of knotted roots. Sometimes Richard wondered if the artist Arthur Rackham had actually
seen
Elementals, Earth Elementals in particular, since the withered, wrinkled, long-nosed face certainly had its counterpart in the fairy-tale drawings that fellow had done. But with one difference. Had Rackham ever portrayed the hate and anger visible on this creature’s face, children would have run screaming at the sight of his drawings, not been charmed by them. The skin was a putty gray, the hair looked like dead grass, the ragged clothing had no color at all.

It did not speak. It did not have to, because it was here to obey him, not have a conversation with him. And it knew this. This was part of the reason for the anger. It simply looked at him, full of impotent rage, and waited for instructions.

“Go to the graveyard to the east of this house,” he told it. “The one that I have marked with my sign. Find any revenants and discover their graves. Then bring me a fingerbone from each grave that hosts a revenant. Bring them here. Then I will release you.”

All such graveyards were haunted, to a greater or lesser degree. He was grateful that, years ago, he had not gone to the considerable trouble of sending those revenants to their respective “rewards.” At the time he had just had too much to do; the revenants were not harming anything and were so unobtrusive that the worst anyone had ever reported from the cemetery was a vague feeling of unease and sadness. Not surprising; no one buried in that earth had suffered a violent death, none had any great passions at all, really. They were just too bewildered, too apprehensive, or too ignorant to move on. Such spirits often needed help if they lingered past the moment of their deaths. The Door only stood open for so long, and once it closed, the spirit had to find its own way across by desiring a new Door to open. Most of the time, eventually, the spirits got so tired of living a shadow life that they reached for the Door in desperation.

It was an ironic thing that many were so convinced that their tiny little sins were so enormous they would be going straight to Hell that this fear alone stranded them on the metaphorical shore. That was the fault of the chapel preachers, of course, with their fire and brimstone threats and their utter condemnation of anything but the straightest and narrowest way. The child-ghosts, if they had been dragged regularly to chapel by a parent, were the most likely to suffer from this delusion. Of course, to a child, everything seemed enormous, from sin to blessing. And from time to time, in the past, that had bothered him a little. Eventually he had assumed that either he would help this sort of revenant, which was what the little cemetery abounded in, or they would learn to see and not fear the Door themselves—but he never had gotten around to it, and it took some creatures a very long time to realize that lingering in a gray half-life was a kind of Hell in itself.

But now, of course, since they were still there, he could use them.

This was one of the first pieces of business that a necromancer learned: how to find and bind revenants to do his will. There were more of them about than most people had any notion. Aside from those who lingered out of irrational fear, there were others who refused to cross. Some simply were not aware they were dead, though these were in the minority. Some were bound by emotion or tragedy to the place they had died or were buried. Some desperately wanted to live again. Some remained because of other bonds, of debt, or hate—and some because they actually
were
destined for an unpleasant afterlife and were in no hurry to speed to it.

The one thing they all had in common was that it was possible for the necromancer to use them, willing or unwilling. All he needed was something that had been intimately theirs. Once bound, they made the perfect spies. They could go anywhere; you closed your door in vain against them unless you were a mage yourself.

The problem with using revenants was a matter of energy. Since they were no longer living, they no longer produced any of their own. That was why ghosts faded over time; the very act of manifesting consumed some of their substance, and very few ever learned how to feed on other things to replace that substance. That was why a ghost seldom went far from the place (or object) it was tethered to—moving away took energy, and that was something a ghost could not spare.

Once a necromancer found a revenant that was particularly useful, it was generally possible to go beyond coercion into—well, something like indentured servitude. The next stage of the necromancer’s acquisition of power was to learn ways in which to feed revenants and strengthen them without making them too strong to control. Revenants being fed were not in a hurry to lose that source. Revenants being fed
enough
could act in the physical world to a limited extent. This made them ever so much more useful as servants.

Curse it, he was half-crippled by the fact that his Elementals would no longer respond to him.

A movement in the earth of the box alerted him to the fact that the boggart was back. It crawled its way out of the dirt, brushed off its leather garments, and dropped a dirty bag at its feet. “Got bones,” the boggart said, in a strange voice that sounded like an unoiled hinge.

He merely nodded. It wasn’t an outstanding performance, so did not warrant a great reward. He flung it a bit of power; it sucked the stuff down greedily and eyed him for more. When more wasn’t forthcoming, it looked disgruntled for a moment, then its face assumed its habitual sneer.

Richard restrained an impulse to punish the wretched thing. That would be counterproductive. Instead, he merely collapsed the magic about the boggart, forcing it back to where it had come from, rather than dismissing it. It was a peculiar effect; the sphere of sullen, ruddy smoke shrank, like a child’s balloon deflating, growing more opaque as it shrank, until there was nothing but a pea-sized sphere of darkness lying atop the earth. Then that, too, vanished.