Percy and Gaia followed me as I walked out of the ship, where we met up with Eurso and Cerberus. The enhanced raptor bounded up right to my side and stayed there. For being so aggressive and violent while being controlled by Fahsteth, he was pretty nervous now. It was probably a little funny, seeing this big armored raptor tucked in close to me like a toddler with his mother at the mall. He kept crouching down as though trying to stay half-hidden behind my much smaller form, looking around rapidly to watch for anyone waiting to jump out at us. I couldn’t help but put a hand on his side reassuringly, which seemed to help a bit.
We found ourselves back on that battlefield. Well, it was more of a massacre site, considering how thoroughly those three had completely wrecked the pirates here. It hadn’t helped that the guys were scattered and already on the ropes thanks to the ghost assault, of course. But even if they had been at full strength and ready to go, I really didn’t think they would’ve stood much of a chance against these three. Especially not Gaia when they were using so much technology. It really wasn’t fair at all.
That point was made even more apparent as I stood amongst all the bodies and felt the power of death overwhelming everything else. It was honestly kind of overwhelming and even frightening. I wasn’t sure exactly how I could sense what kind of death had happened here, but it had a sort of different… taste to it. That was a disgusting way to think about it, but I couldn’t describe it any other way. It was like a taste in the back of my mind rather than my tongue. It–yeah, it was weird. I could feel that the deaths here had been quick and overwhelming. It wasn’t a battle, it was a slaughter. None of these people had even stood a chance.
Which really made me wonder what Fahsteth had intended them to fight if they had to go up against someone who might be protecting Sonoma. Did he think they could beat Bastet if she was there? Or just slow her down? This was a few hundred years earlier than when I’d seen her, so maybe she was significantly weaker at this point. Or maybe this fight would’ve been somewhat different if Gaia didn’t specifically have her technology power and they hadn’t been taken so off-guard. But either way, I really didn’t think they could’ve done more than slow Bastet down. Maybe that would’ve been enough. After all, in the end, Fahsteth probably only cared about completing the mission and getting himself out of there safely while leaving all these guys behind as sacrifices to secure his escape.
Well, so much for that.
I could tell that Gaia and Percy both had a lot of questions about what I was doing. Hell, Cerberus probably did too. But they all simply watched while I stood in the middle of the slaughterfield. The only one who made any noise was Eurso, who gave a very soft chirp-like sound while tilting his head at me. It was a lot like a bird, actually. I gave his snout a reassuring pat, letting him know I wasn’t going anywhere. Then I turned away and focused on what I was doing.
My eyes were closed, arms spread to either side as I focused intently for several long minutes. All around me, I could feel the ghosts begin to gather. Not my ghosts, not the ones who had already signed up with me. These were the ghosts of the people who had been killed right here, the pirates themselves. There was resentment, anger, frustration, even fear. They were worried that death hadn’t been the end for them, that I was about to enact an even harsher punishment on them.
It was almost like Necromancers had a terrible reputation for some reason.
Once I felt like I’d managed to summon every ghost from that battle, I opened my eyes. Not every dead pirate had left behind a ghost, but enough had for my purposes. There were close to a hundred of them gathered around me. They were all staring, some angrily, some fearfully, others more curious than anything.
“Hey there,” I started, letting my gaze pass over the assembled ghosts. Percy, Cerberus, and Gaia were in the background, watching all of this go down. Eurso, right beside me, was staying completely silent. “First off, I’m sorry you guys had to die in that fight. It wasn’t personal or anything. Though really, you should’ve known better than to sign on with someone like Fahsteth. Especially when it involved time travel and just–bad. It was a bad idea. So I don’t feel that terrible. But still, like I said, it wasn’t personal. That said, I’d like to offer you all a deal.”
Obviously, my words sparked a bit of incredulity. A handful of the pirate ghosts snapped vicious retorts, a few were just sarcastic, and a couple others made it clear they thought this was still a trick of some sort. Through it all, I held up my hands until they stopped talking. In the end, I was pretty sure it was them realizing that I didn’t use my power to force them to be quiet that actually made them stop. Once I had their attention again, I continued. “Sorry to say it, but we can’t really trust you the same way I trust my other ghosts. I mean, my friends killed you, so… besides, that just sounds awkward and nasty. And I don’t want to force you all to follow orders or constantly keep my eyes on you the way certain other Necromancers would. So I won’t be recruiting you as ghosts. But, I think you guys all know that you can’t stay here. I don’t know how long it would take you to fade away, but on the off chance that anyone who can talk to ghosts shows up before all of you do, there’s too big of a chance that you could end up changing the future. I don’t know if you’d do it intentionally or not, but a Necromancer could force you to answer questions even if you didn’t want to.”
The ghosts all exchanged looks while murmuring to each other before one of them hesitantly demanded,”What, so you’re just going to banish us all into the void right now?” There was a mix of anger and fear in his voice, and I could sense that spreading through the group.
“No,” I insisted, shaking my head. “That’s not what this is about. If I was just going to banish you, I wouldn’t have to talk to you guys first. And I wouldn’t have brought up the idea of making a deal. But I want you to know that I’m going to be pulling you guys in and holding you until I can get back into the future and let you go. I won’t force you to work for me or do anything you don’t want to do. I won’t enslave you. But I can’t just leave you here either. Whatever else happens, I’m going to keep you with me until we get to the present day again so I can release you where you won’t be able to change anything. After that, you can do what you want.”
Once I was sure they were all paying attention after that, I pushed on. “That part is non-negotiable. You’re staying with me until we get to the present again. But you don’t have to fight for me, you don’t have to work for me, you don’t have to do anything but wait for that. I will leave you alone. And once we get to the future,I can take any of you wherever you’d like to go on this planet and leave you there so you can haunt or move on however you’d like. You can say goodbye to anyone you left behind. I mean, assuming it’s not impossible to get into or anything like that. Any accessible place we know the location of, with people I can actually talk to.”
“You can do that?” one of the pirate ghosts snapped, a bit disbelievingly.
“Hey, why should we listen to anything he says?” That was another ghost. “Last I checked, he’s the biggest reason we’re dead in the first place! If it wasn’t for Mr. Necromancer there pulling his Haunted Ghost Story business, we could’ve been ready for those three over there and taken ‘em!”
“If it makes you feel any better, you really couldn’t!” Percy helpfully called out. She had taken out a small bag of cookies from somewhere and she and Gaia were each munching on one.
Ignoring that, the ghost who had first demanded to know if I could do what I claimed spoke up again. “You can actually take us anywhere we wanna go?” He sounded cautiously intrigued by the possibility.
“Anywhere on this planet, as long as I can get into it,” I confirmed. “I can teleport anywhere on the globe as long as it’s not magically blocked off or anything. As soon as we get back to the present, I’ll take you there. Oh, and for the record, that goes for anyone who just wants to move on before we go back into the future too. I’ll take you wherever you want to go. That one I can do any time you want. But just so you all know, I can tell when a ghost fades away, so don’t think you can trick me and then go off to pull timeline shenanigans. If you’re ready to disappear ahead of time, I’ll take you wherever you want to go to do that.”
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“And what exactly do we have to do in exchange?” another ghost demanded. That prompted a ripple of agreement through the ninety or so others that were all around me. They were clearly apprehensive about what I could possibly want in return for something like that. Which was almost silly, since it wasn’t as though holding onto them and transporting them somewhere else was hard or anything. But then again, they had been working for Fahsteth, so maybe they were just accustomed to being around people who couldn’t be trusted and would absolutely gouge them for every little thing no matter how simple.
“That’s not part of the deal, I’ll take you wherever you’d like to go regardless,” I replied. “It’d feel pretty shitty of me to call you up and then threaten to leave you stranded here if you don’t do what I want. So, no matter what happens, once we catch up to the present, I’ll drop off your spirits wherever you want as long as it’s here on the planet and accessible. But I’d also like to ask your permission to use uh, what you left behind when you died.”
Silence followed that for a moment, stretching out awkwardly while I tried to think of the best way to clarify. Then one of the ghosts blurted, “You mean our bodies?! That’s it, isn’t it? You want permission to use our bodies for your Necromancer shit, and in exchange you’ll take us to a happy place?”
“Like I said, as soon as we get back to our present, I’ll take you wherever you want to go to haunt or disappear,” I reminded them. “That’s what I’ll do just because it feels like the right thing after… all that. But if you guys agree to let me use your bodies, I’ll throw in a little extra. We use magic as currency, right? Because it takes effort and energy or whatever. Well, in exchange for using your bodies, I’ll pay you with my own energy. You want to be able to touch things and interact with them? I’ll give you energy so you can do that. Energy so you can pick things up, interact with stuff. I’ll even leave you on your old ship so you can watch videos or play games and stuff. And I’ll take you on field trips to other places whenever I get a chance. Right now, you’ll be stuck sitting around waiting to get to the present. That’s the basic level of what’s gonna happen before we get to any deal. All of you are going to be waiting around to either fade away, or get to the present. Once we get there, or, uhh, then, I’ll take you wherever you want to go. But if you accept the deal, you get special privileges. You get energy, you get to go on field trips, and you get to stay on your old ship where you can watch old–or really, really new movies. You get to be entertained while you’re waiting. In exchange, I get to use your bodies for my work. Sorry if that seems unfair, but, I mean, you were working for Fahsteth, so to be honest, I’ll get over my guilt. That’s the deal I’m offering. Any questions?”
They did have a few, about logistics, what exactly I was offering, and how far I could take them when I was time to drop them off. In the end, about fifteen of them told me they didn’t want anything to do with it and to leave them alone. I agreed to not talk to them again until it was time to let them go, then pulled their ghosts back to me and sort of put them away for the time being. It was sort of like putting something in my pocket, but on a metaphysical level. Or like setting aside a thought, putting it mostly out of my head unless I chose to think about it again. It was some combination of those two things. Hard to explain, really. But the point was, when they didn’t want to have anything to do with me, I acquiesced and simply put their ghosts aside where they would be safe and unable to alter the timeline.
The rest of them, about seventy-five in total, agreed to the deal. Well, first they asked what I was going to do with the bodies of those I couldn’t find ghosts of. I told them I didn’t feel right about using a body like that without permission, not for the long-term sort of stuff I needed to do. But I could use at least some of them to power my Revenant-gained corpse charging power. They were already dead, and I didn’t feel all that bad about turning the body to dust in order to use the power they left behind.
Was that a weird and arbitrary distinction, to be okay with destroying the dead body in order to fuel my Revenant boost, but not okay with animating the same body without their permission? Maybe, but it was my weird and arbitrary distinction and I was sticking to it.
Anyway, I could stack ten charges for that, and the rest I would simply disintegrate. I had to do that much, to make sure they didn’t leave anything behind that might cause a problem.
With the help of these ghosts who had agreed, I walked through the battlefield and found each of their corpses. It took a while to find all of them, because they didn’t always know the precise spot where they had died. It was more than a little chaotic at the time, and they were a bit traumatized by the experience. I wasn’t sure if Percy and Gaia offering what they remembered of the whole thing helped or hurt more.
Either way, I eventually found all the bodies. Each one was mixed in with others, but we pulled them out carefully. Once the body in question was free, I focused on it and animated the body to follow me. That was a bit weirder than using ghosts, but I wasn’t actually making a full zombie. Not yet, anyway. These wouldn’t be any good in a fight or anything. They simply followed incredibly basic physical instructions. Mostly I was just putting a little energy into the corpses with a command to follow me from a certain distance. A distance which I extended a bit more pretty soon, since being followed around by shambling, power-puppeted corpses was creepy and weird enough already without them being right behind me.
Finally, I had all seventy-five corpses trailing behind me, like some sort of incredibly morbid conga line. Especially when you added in Eurso the raptor trailing along right at my side, constantly looking over his shoulder to stare worriedly at the dead-yet-animated bodies. I walked with them away from the battlefield and had each body gather around me in a circle. While the ghosts watched intently to see what I was doing, I stepped in front of each corpse and touched their forehead, then their throat (or at least as close to the forehead and throat as I could find in some cases of particularly alien biology) and used my instant-inscription power to leave magical runes on them. I also left some marked coins in front of each body.
I had done this before while doing my training during this little trip to the past, though only with animals, and not this many. But the principle was the same. This was just going to take more time and work. I very carefully made certain I was arranging each part of the spell correctly, allowing myself a few extra minutes just to go over everything one last time. Finally, after almost an hour of preparation, I stood in the middle of the circle of bodies I had made and began to feed energy through the coins and into the spell.
The whole time, the ghosts watched. Not just the ones I was using for this, but the rest as well. Jason, Kaleigh, Emily, and Chas’s ghosts were there too, all of them watching curiously. They had seen me do this with deer or other animals. Hell, they’d seen me animate dead animals just to attack the pirates while we were doing that whole ‘scare the crap out of them so they take down the shield’ plan. But this sort of animation was different. Like the ‘follow me around’ instruction, that had been little more than very simple puppeting. In this case, I was investing enough power into the dead bodies for them to become actual zombies. Zombies that could follow my instructions, as long as they weren’t too complicated, without constant supervision. They had no intelligence and couldn’t actually converse or anything, of course. But… well, a good way of putting it was that I could give them a task and they would continue attempting to do that task either as long as they could, or until my designated ‘end state’ was achieved. In the case of a battle, they could follow an order to ‘attack these specific people’ for as long as they were physically able to do so. Even if that meant crawling after them to bite their knees off.
Eventually, I had fed all the energy needed into the coins. The air itself was vibrating with power as I waited another moment and took a deep breath before triggering the spell. There was a loud clap like thunder that echoed for several miles, followed almost immediately by echoes of the magic itself. The bodies jerked one way, then the other all at once. Then they turned and looked at me, clearly waiting for instructions. It worked. I had an army of zombies. Well, if seventy-five counted as an army.
The ghost of each newly-animated body flew closer to stare at what had happened to their corpse, while Percy gave a delighted squeal and ran up to hug me. “You did it! But, Jacob, why did you even want to animate this many bodies? Do you really think impressing Laein is the best way to get information out of her?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied, tilting my head before watching as the zombies all did the exact same thing.
“But it is a good way to convince her to join the secret Necromancy school I’m going to set up.”