It was a rare day when Benicio Cecchini was able to cut loose. Across his long and tumultuous life he had received many epiphanies, strengthened his body, ordered his soul, and developed his art to the point he could directly manipulate gold with his body’s internal energy.
Outside of the church or the aristocracy, he wagered there were fewer than a dozen people in the city more advanced in their cultivation.
One of those few was Formoso Atrani.
A great and renowned sculptor, painter, humanist, and polymath, Atrani had been a thorn in Benicio’s side for decades. Benicio had been exiled from his native Anthusa four times, and twice it was thanks to Atrani’s schemes, ruining his reputation and denying him the contracts he deserved.
Worse, Atrani was exactly the mediocrity the jeweler’s boy should never become: talented enough to be rich and famous, cowardly enough to spend his life making nothing more than pretty furnishings.
It was Atrani who beat him for the Gulphay contract, using his contacts among the aristocracy to disgrace the good name of Cecchini. With the backing of that great house, he was virtually untouchable, and Benicio was long denied his revenge.
But today, fortune favored a humble goldsmith.
Anthusa had long since allied itself with House Gulphay, preferring service to a great foreign power to takeover by any of its neighbors. But despite that strong Gulphay following in the city—or perhaps because of it—the local families fought neverending feuds into which their foreign masters were chary to involve themselves. Five hundred years earlier, the Vincosa and Lunolgi families started a fight over whether allegiance to House Gulphay should precede obedience of the Holy Son. The battles that followed split the city down the middle and piled bodies in the streets.
That feud only ended when, aided by a traitor in their ranks, the Lunolgi family snuck into the Vincosa fortress and slaughtered their hated allies in the night. Afterwards, that fortress became the Palace of Sighs, a headquarters for pro-Gulphay partisans and their greatest defense against civil unrest. With high and thick walls, vast networks of wards, and round-the-clock guard patrols, it was counted alongside the Tower of the Cathedral Severe as one of the most secure locations in the city.
On any other day, even Benicio Cecchini would have hesitated to break in. But today the city was in chaos. The common people were piling into the churches and the homes of their patrons for protection. They were afraid of the Abyssinians, sure, but they were more scared of each other. Nobody knew exactly who had died in the attack on the Holy City, but no small number of the city’s families and factions, which rested in the shadow of the great and powerful cardinals, couldn’t contact their most powerful patrons. It would take days to learn if they were hiding from the Abyssinians or dead. If you wanted to get away with tremendous and bloody violence, now was the time to go all in. People like Benicio understood that.
So did the guards of the Palace of Sighs, who abandoned their posts en masse, trusting in the Palace’s powerful wards to defend their charges in their absence.
Indeed, that would have been an excellent decision… but Benicio had performed repair work on the wards many years ago, before his second Atrani-linked exile and his professional relegation to the goldsmith’s trade.
Dodging the gazes of the few remaining guards, Benicio came to an unassuming brick on the outer wall of the castle. Finding four pits in the stone, spaced as wide as his fingers, he sent a pulse of energy through the wards there. The hole he left in their security network tore itself open, and Benicio wasted no time in smashing through the stone.
That left him at least a few minutes before anyone found his entrance, hopefully longer. He rushed silently through the tight stone corridors under the unwavering light of enchanted stones, making way to the palace’s center, where Atrani was most certainly staying.
The halls there were done all in majestic polished teak, with thick rugs displaying the history of House Gulphay and chandeliers of wondrous colored glass filling the rooms with spellbinding hues. Benicio took a moment to admire the craft of the old masters whose work covered the walls.
A projectile sped through the air toward Benicio’s head. He dodged with a swift and instinctive twitch and heard the projectile lodge itself in the wall behind him, but still felt a bloody streak open from the corner of his lip, scoring a line of hot pain across his face and slicing off the top of his ear.
Despite being caught off guard, he didn’t cry out or panic. He turned to the source of the attack: Formosa Atrani in the flesh, foppish hat and all, emerging from behind a doorway.
“Little Benicio! I had a feeling you would be coming by.” He twirled his long mustache with a casual grin. “Did you miss me that badly?”
“What gave me away, you whelp?”
“Nothing. You did the same thing to Francesco della Fevre in Tirol.”
More specifically, he took advantage of a siege to catch that jackass poet without his bodyguards. Everyone knew it too, but he managed to avoid banishment then thanks to being halfway through a big contract for the Tor family. When did he get this predictable?
“So you’ve been living in fear of me ever since you won the contract? Or longer?”
“Not fear. Preparation.”
Both men drew their slender daggers and rushed at one another. Atrani kept swiping at Benicio’s injured right cheek, while the goldsmith had his eyes set on his enemy’s heart. He lunged, but held back as Atrani’s blade swung back and cut the air where his wrist would have been.
He looked off balance, but Benicio wasn’t fooled. The sculptor’s eyes flashed, and he dove back, hearing the same projectile whizz through the air and land back in Atrani’s palm.
A quill. Atrani had just tried to kill him with a quill, twice. The showoff.
“You can’t beat me in a straight fight, my friend.” Atrani put all the condescension he could behind those last words. “So just stay put here until the guards come around.”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Get fucked”
Benicio reached into one of the bags at his belt and threw a handful of powder at the sculptor. With a snap of his fingers he ignited it in flight, filling the hall with the terrible, flaming stench of asafoetida.
“My clothes!” Atrani coughed. “I’ll wash them out with your blood!”
He charged through the fetid cloud, but Benicio was already gone, running pell-mell down the corridor. He moved with great agility despite the bag on his back and sacks on his belt, but Atrani’s quill kept flying at him. That little artifact had already tasted his blood, and it was all Benicio could do to limit the damage.
He burst out into the central courtyard and made for the great oak tree at its center, dropping his bag by the roots.
“Do you think so little of my abilities, little Benicio?”
A lithe, low branch struck the goldsmith full in the face, and another wrapped around his waist while he was stunned. Lifted high into the air, the sacks fell from his belt and scattered their powdered contents, perfumes and fetid ingredients, all around.
Benicio took a deep breath and spat flames, setting the tree alight as well as much of the surrounding earth. His flames ate through its branches with a vicious hunger, and the tree dropped him directly into Atrani’s fist. Benicio spun across the ground and crashed against the courtyard wall, blood dripping from his mouth, head, and a dozen small wounds across his body.
“How gauche. I don’t suppose you can even afford to compensate my hosts for the damage you’ve caused.”
Benicio leaned back against the wall and spat blood onto the earth.
“What? Do you have nothing to say for yourself?”
A long and slender dagger appeared in Atrani’s hand as he stalked toward the goldsmith, pinching his nose at the stench of the burning powders.
Benicio mumbled something under his breath.
“Speak up, you worthless lout! I’ll have your last words before I cut your throat.”
The goldsmith smiled. “Look behind you.”
Atrani rolled his eyes. “Now that has to be the stupidest-”
Then a wave of spine-chilling nausea rolled through him. He turned. Benicio’s sack lay at the roots of the burning tree. Something was moving inside it. Growing. Rising. Tearing its way out.
A thing of blasphemous horror, stinking fat and rotting tendons on white bones, ripped open the sack and stood tall beneath the burning tree.
“Necromancy! Cecchini, have you gone completely insane?!”
The raising of the dead required five ingredients. First, the remains of, or at least some item very closely bound to, the dead. Second, powerful sensations to rouse the dead from their slumber. Any sense could work, but pungent smells worked fastest. Third, a fire. Fourth, the blood of the summoner. Fifth, words of welcome.
“Spare me. I don’t take criticism from small-minded mediocrities.”
Atrani responded with a hyena laugh. “Whatever. Look at yourself. You can barely stand. I’ll dispatch this monster of yours and have you flayed alive.”
Of course, you would have to repeat that ritual individually for every shade you wanted to raise. Terrifying though they might be, they were rarely a threat to powerful cultivators without large numbers.
There was an exception, however. It was the reason that necromancers sought out graveyards and ancient battlefields, rather than just taking the remains of the dead and raising them at home. Once one specter stepped through the veil between life and death, it became easier for more to do the same. And if the first being was closely connected to others that died in the same place, they would come rushing.
It was in this very courtyard that the Lunolgi family gathered the Vincosa, from the elders to the infants, the men and the women, highborn and low, and put them to the sword as they looked upon the body of their patriarch, Sergio Vincosa, hanging from that very tree.
The reconstituted skeleton of Sergio Vincosa screamed. The air darkened. The flames surrounding it cooled to embers, and dark shapes appeared in the courtyard. First one or two, then dozens, hundreds, filling the yard like a black mist.
Atrani gibbered madly.
“You’re insane. Insane!”
“So I am. Good luck, Atrani. I’m counting on you.”
“What! Do you mean-”
“That’s right. I can put down what I call up, but I only called up that one,” his limp arm pointed at the skeleton. “I got nothing for the others.”
The dark shapes multiplied, solidified, their agonized faces manifesting.
“They’ll eat us all!”
“No, they’ll eat you all. I’m safe.”
“The city-”
“There’s just a few hundred shades, and they’re all old and weak. They’ll gorge themselves on you and whatever guards are left in here. That’ll get them good and lethargic, the church won’t have any problem exorcizing them after that.”
Atrani stood shocked at the unbelievable callousness in the goldsmith’s voice. He realized entirely too late that the shades were already on top of him.
Hands as cold as the grave dug into him, drawing out the warmth from his guts. He fled, but just ran into more shades, as thick around him as the castle walls.
“Mercy Cecchini, mercy!”
“Mercy, is it?” He got on his feet unsteadily and staggered over to his rival. “I only have one kind, I’m afraid.”
Atrani knelt on the ground, growing paler by the second. Meek as a lamb, he stood still as the goldsmith wrapped a hand around his neck and wrenched. Formoso Atrani’s well-coiffed head flew through the air and landed in the blazing pyre at the center of the courtyard. His body followed soon after.
The shades searched around dumbly for more warmth, and the skeleton of Sergio Vincosa stepped toward its summoner.
Benicio spat another handful of blood.
“What are you looking at me for, you stupid bastard? You’re already dead.”
With a wave of his hand and words of dismissal, Sergio Vincosa returned to the earth. Many of the shades went with him, though a handful lingered.
Benicio stumbled toward the burning body, and pulled out an amulet from under his tunic, a sparkling green opal on an iron chain. Chervin would have doubtless scoffed at the workmanship, but with tools like these Benicio cared a great deal more about functionality than looks.
“Formoso Atrani, I call you!”
A ripple in the spirit world. Reluctance. Hate.
“Formoso Atrani, I call you!”
Refusal. Curses. A challenge.
If he had to take the bastard’s soul by force, he would do so gladly. Benicio daubed the amulet in blood and intoned a horrible incantation.
Then he stopped, releasing his energy. He could hear yells outside the fortress. The crowd had found his entrance. They would be inside in a matter of minutes.
This was no time for a lengthy and difficult binding.
A laugh emitted from the spirit world. Delight.
“I’m not through with you, Atrani. I’ll see you in Hell yet.”
The spirit world was ominously silent.
Benicio hopped the high walls and stepped back onto Anthusa’s crowded streets, wards be damned. That hadn’t gone nearly as smoothly as he planned, and in his current state he had little chance of returning to his home without suspicion. He needed to get out of the city, and fast. It was fortunate he had long since prepared for his fifth bout of exile, and knew just the place to lay low and lick his wounds.
It would be a productive exile. As the body of Formosa Atrani burned behind him, Benicio Cecchini finally had inspiration for his masterpiece.