Tyron and company had indeed been allowed within the walls, and while Elsbeth and Munhilde hurried to meet with the other members of their faith, Rurin ushered him and the three students to a less salubrious part of town.
“There aren’t enough people to need these buildings, so this part of town hasn’t been repaired,” she told him cheerfully. “Since you seem so confident in your labourers, you can put them to work here. Probably do it at night, though. I doubt the locals would take too kindly to seeing zombies doing street work.”
The Necromancer raised his brows.
“I thought they might be pleased to see the work getting done at least, and I don’t keep zombies, skeletons only.”
“At least you won’t be found out by the smell. I’ll let a few of our people know you’re here and who you are, and send some runners out to the rifts so the people in the field know you’ll be out there. I doubt they’d be grateful to be surprised by undead in the field.”
“Unlikely,” he agreed.
Having said their piece, Rurin and Tim had waved their goodbyes and departed back to the keep, leaving Tyron and three nervous students alone in a dark, half-crumbled building, surrounded by more of the same.
“Be careful,” he warned them, “it’s possible there may be stray kin here, tucked away in the rubble.”
The three jumped closer together, eyeing the toppled walls and beams with naked suspicion, if not outright fear. Tyron could only roll his eyes before he stepped away from them and began to prepare a ritual space.
This far from the keep, tucked deep into the broken areas of town, he hoped nobody would notice the magick, but even if they did, he didn’t really have a choice but to do it. All of his minions were currently locked away within the Ossuary and he felt naked without them. Munhilde and Elsbeth had assured him it would be the best and safest way to approach the city, but he’d needed a fair bit of convincing before he’d finally agreed. Things had worked out, but he still hated feeling so vulnerable.
When the ritual was complete and the doorway into the Ossuary had manifested once more, he threw open the door with a smile on his face, pleased to see the rows of waiting undead within. With a brief mental command, he summoned the strongest of his minions to his side, along with a smaller contingent of regular skeletons. Forty should be enough to start with.
His three pupils watched him perform the magick from close by, but as usual, they seemed totally lost watching him. At their level, what he did must seem impossible, beyond human, and they’d probably be surprised to learn he knew the feeling well. His own mother had dazzled him with her mastery, sending spells flying around the house so quickly he could barely see her hands move, or understand the words coming out of her mouth.
For a Battlemage, fast casting was perhaps the most important skill to master, and Beory was well beyond a master. At his best, he could match only half her speed, even now. But he didn’t need speed, he needed precision, and efficiency. That was how he comforted himself, anyway.
“Don’t worry about it,” he comforted his students, even though they hadn’t asked, “it’s hard to learn anything when you watch somebody who’s far above your level. This ritual dabbles in areas of magick you haven’t touched, and perhaps never will.”
The three each digested his words in their own way. Georg accepted it most readily, while Richard was the slowest to let go of his frustration.
“What would you like us to do, Mr… uh… Tyron. Sir,” Briss stammered out, eyes locked on the skeletal arch that had materialised before her.
“We need a place to sleep. Let’s see if we can find something that looks like it won’t fall on our heads.”
It didn’t take that long to find one. It looked like an old clothing shop, built right up against the wall. With huge gaps in the walls further around on both sides, it appeared this particular dwelling, and those close by, had been spared the worst of the monsters’ rampage. With the aid of the undead, it didn’t take long to gather up the refuse and dump it in a neat pile nearby. Within a couple of hours, they’d managed to tie up a canvas and put up some tents. Most importantly, Tyron pulled his table out of the Ossuary before he dismissed the door once more, giving everyone a place for their notes as they returned to their studies.
Out of sight of the rest of the town, his skeletons continued to toil, moving rubble and broken beams, gradually bringing order back to this abandoned section of Woodsedge. When night fell, Munhilde and Elsbeth came looking for them, along with Rurin and Tim.
The two priestesses looked satisfied, if a bit weary, whereas Rurin looked completely exhausted.
“I hate paperwork!” she groaned, slumping to the ground as Tim stood behind her, radiating smug energy.
“Did you bring your ledgers for me to look at?” Tyron asked.
“And miss a chance to get them out of my hands? Not on your life.”
She had, in fact, brought a leather satchel, which she deftly removed from her neck and tossed at him as if it weighed nothing. It did not weigh nothing.
He caught it with a grunt, then pulled out the two thick, bound volumes within. With a sigh, he placed them on the table.
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“It’ll take a little while to hear back from the teams on the rift, but you should be safe to head out there tomorrow or the day after,” the gold slayer informed him.
“In the meantime, I get to go through your records.”
“Isn’t it a shame?” she grinned at him.
“You’re worse than my father was,” he told her.
She gasped and clutched a hand to her chest.
“How dare you?” she demanded. “I saw him file a report once. He nearly died!”
It sounded like an exaggeration, but it almost certainly wasn’t. Magnin had hated pen pushing with the intensity of a thousand suns. He would rather carve his details into a wall with his sword than fill in a form, and had, in fact, done so on more than one occasion.
Beory had handled most of the filing work in their household.
“I confess, I didn’t know the Steelarms that well,” Timothy mused, “but I find it hard to believe the Century Slayer had an even greater aversion to lodging paperwork than this sorry excuse for a rebellion leader.”
“In that case, you’re right,” Tyron told him.
“In what respect?”
“You didn’t know them well.”
The man pondered that for a moment before he shrugged.
“You two look like you had a mixed reception,” the Necromancer said to the two priestesses.
Elsbeth pulled a face.
“It was fine, really,” she sighed.
“Our fellow clergy members just aren’t used to operating so openly,” Munhilde chuckled. “We’ve tended to the flock in secret for thousands of years, and been actively hunted all that time. Now they want us to help lead a rebellion against the empire? My fellow ordained may have been hoping for it to happen most of their lives, but they now find themselves more exposed than they are comfortable with.”
“Are they going to be alright?” he asked with one raised brow.
If the clergy didn’t stand up and lead, then the rebellion would falter in its early stages, whereas they needed it to grow as quickly and smoothly as possible.
He needed it to grow. It was an instrument of his vengeance, one tool with which he would pry open the empire and scoop out the guilty.
Munhilde snorted at his question.
“Of course they will. Think about the gods we worship and serve. Do you really think the people chosen to serve them are soft?”
If they were anything like the Venerable, then they were the toughest and most ornery bastards to ever walk the realm.
“I suppose not,” he said, nodding. He turned back to the volumes on the table. “Well, let’s get started. I want to finish this as soon as possible.”
“What… now?” Rurin gaped.
“Yes, now.”
Tim smiled like a cat.
“It’s like my birthday,” he murmured.
~~~
He remained within the walls for two days, working without rest on ledgers and forms under the resentful gaze of Rurin, until she managed to convince Tim to sit in for her. It wasn’t a challenging task, merely tedious, with the most important documents being the ones required to send to the Red Tower. The magisters loved their records, and the more innocent the paperwork flowing from Woodsedge was, the longer it would take them to investigate the place. It was a paperthin ruse, given that they would eventually know the magisters here were dead, but any time they could buy would be valuable.
The rest of it was simple recordkeeping and administration for the town itself. He was hardly an expert in such matters, but he flew through the pages with such cold efficiency he left the two gold ranked slayers wide-eyed with shock.
“Are you sure you weren’t a clerk in a previous life?” Tim had asked him at one point.
Once he figured out what needed doing and how to do it, it was simple enough to turn those tasks over to Elsbeth and Munhilde, who could then pass them on to the local clergy. On the third day, Tyron rose and stretched, finally freed from the table. After checking on the students and giving them some feedback on their studies, he once again summoned the Ossuary and brought out everything that had remained inside, including the ‘study materials’.
Before they had left Cragwhistle, he had received the first offerings from the newly Awakened who now specialised in the preparation of corpses. Those bodies had been fermenting within the Ossuary for some time and needed the condensed death energy within them to be purged, lest they rise on their own, but once that was done, he had dozens of bodies for his students to practise on while he was away.
After some final instruction, it was time for him to depart. It had been stifling, sitting at the table while the rift was so close. The kin emerging at Cragwhistle hadn’t been strong enough to truly test him anymore; his skeletal horde had grown beyond it. Now he finally had the chance to take on a greater challenge.
Nagrythyn, the realm beyond the Woodsedge rift, was far more dense in magick that the world of ice which had so recently connected to the western province. More dense magick meant more potent kin, and more of them. With the full might of his undead army, Tyron intended to push harder to gain the levels he desperately needed to realise his plans.
Stepping out through the hole in the wall, he smiled to himself, thinking just how difficult it had been for him to leave the town the first time he’d tried. After lining the street hoping for a slayer team to notice him for days on end, he’d finally gotten a chance when Monica Briar, a mage on Dove’s slayer team, had picked him out from the crowd.
Now, all he had to do was literally walk out through an unrepaired hole in the wall.
Just like that, he was on his way. With over two hundred skeletons in formation around him, he pressed forwards, into the woods. Despite the teams in the field being told of his presence, he avoided the main path, preferring to go cross country. Not that his path was too rough, given he had dozens of shield-bearing skeletons to clear the way for him.
He didn’t see too many kin at first, which made sense. After a break, the buildup of monsters on the other side of the rift was depleted. Well, not depleted, they just came into this realm and murdered everything they could find until they themselves were killed, but it still equated to less kin. It would take time for their numbers to build again, and once they did, they would press against the rifts once more, with more slipping through than before.
After almost an hour of careful trudging, he ran into his first kin. The little ankle-biting swarms had been difficult for him to hunt when he had only a few poor-quality minions, but now they were destroyed before he was really cognizant they were there. The skeletons at the front of his formation skewered them the moment they appeared, launching themselves out of the brush.
For a moment, he considered collecting their cores, but decided against it. The more he pressed forward, the more frequent the monster attacks became. Eventually he would close in on the rift itself, and then he could finally put his new abilities to the test.