The New Necromancer

The small light on the control panel suddenly turned green, and the ex-corpse on the table sat bolt upright, sucking in a ragged breath.

“Too much you idiot!” shouted Alto, lunging for an arm. “Move necromancer,” she screamed, locking both hands onto the nearest wrist.

Isi flung himself back against the cold stone wall. Another three assistants rushed in from every side, lunging for a flailing limb, each trying desperately to lock a hand around an ankle or wrist. For a split second, all three of them had a grip, the thrashing body almost controlled. Then, a leg ripped free and scissored back into the jaw of the assistant restraining the other leg, felling her with a sickening, bone-breaking crunch. Both legs free, the body convulsed along the spine, dislocating both its shoulders.

“Hold!” bellowed a new voice as one of the dislocated arms wrenched free.

Alto had the only remaining limb and held on for dear life as the other arm pummelled her. For an instant, it looked like she, too, would lose her grip.

Two massive, armoured figures flew in from nowhere. Pinning the body beneath their bulk. Sounds of more feet running in, shouting, groaning, and someone spitting a mouthful of blood onto the flagstones. Isi threw up.

“Alright, Isi?” shouted one of the giants pinning the still-thrashing body down. The gaps in her manic grin outnumbering her teeth. The pinned body tried fruitlessly to bite into her armour. She ignored it. “Rough first day!” she said with a theatrical wink.

Isi looked like he might throw up again. The big guard, what was her name? Cheri? Seemed to be enjoying herself far too much. She was almost laughing.

A stained red robe swept between them, and Isi’s chest was suddenly being crushed. Flung almost to the ceiling, his legs kicked uselessly at the thin air beneath him as the breath was crushed from his lungs. Alto, a vision of fury, stood below him, the tendons cording in her neck as she chanted. Two of Isi’s ribs broke.

“Enough!”

Isi slapped onto the floor like a wet fish.

“Healer,” commanded the newcomer, “drain the prisoner back down to harmless, heal the necromancer, and report to my office.”

“Yes, Jailer,” replied Alto flatly.

***

Isi stood outside the Jailers office. It was cold. In the three months, he’d been here, it had always been cold in this tower. Today was no different; he could feel the stones trying to suck the warmth out of his spine. Huddling further down into his cloak, he tried to ignore the shouting coming from the next office. It was miserable, like waiting outside the principal’s office, something Isi had been ordered to do far too many times during his school life.

A tentative silence seemed to have settled over the office behind him. He was straining so hard to hear what was going on that the sudden opening of the door made him jump.

“You’ve got a millennium with him, Healer. You WILL find a way to make it work.” The emphasis on the instruction hung pointedly in the air as Alto exited the office.

“Necromancer, come,” ordered the Jailer.

Isi found himself slinking into the office, head down, shoulders slumped, staring resolutely at the floor.

“By the gods, man, stand up straight,” the Jailer’s voice was tinged with frustration. “At least look like what you are.”

Isi forced himself to uncurl, pushing his reluctant shoulders back, drawing himself up to his painfully unimposing, just short of average height, and met the Jailer’s gaze. Even leaning casually on the edge of her desk, she was looking down at him.

The Jailer sighed, shaking her head. “You need to work on that, or Alto and her healers are going to walk all over you. How long were you first Necromancer in the hospital?”

“Nine months,” said Isi hesitantly. Surely, she had checked his references before accepting his application?

“And what, exactly, did you do for most of that time?”

“Err… I brought back almost twenty mothers and three children,” replied Isi.

The Jailer shook her head.

“Bit of a difference between bringing back new mothers who want to return and bringing back hardened criminals who don’t eh?”

“Um… yes,” conceded Isi glumly.

“What happened in there? You dragged him kicking and screaming out of death, and he wasn’t happy about it?”

“Yes,” said Isi.

He cursed himself for the response, he was falling into the monosyllabic type of responses that had characterised his school office visits. The Jailer wasn’t looking for schoolboy responses. Grabbing hold of his courage, he forced some more details out.

“He came at me just before we crossed over.”

“Mmm,” nodded the Jailer, picking an orange from her desk and beginning to peel it. “And you lost control of him.”

“Yes,” confirmed Isi dejectedly, slumping again.

“Look, Isi,” she said, “you’re new. I understand that, but you have to be careful. There aren’t many of you necromancers left. You’re the only thing that can bring these prisoners back to serve out their sentences. They all want you dead,” she paused to pop an orange segment into her mouth, “and they will do anything they can to kill you. Do you get it?”

Isi nodded.

“And you’ve managed to get on the wrong side of the healers too. They’ll heal you if I order them, but it won’t be painless. At least it won’t if Alto has anything to do with it, and she’s not just a healer, she’s a damn good interrogator too.”

“Oh great,” said Isi before he thought to check himself.

The Jailer let out a small laugh. “I don’t go to Alto when I need anything healed. I’d suggest that you might not want to either if you see what I mean.”

Isi nodded vigorously; he saw exactly what the Jailer meant.

“Look, you've got a thousand years of service, you have to make it work. Now, get out and be more careful next time,” said the Jailer, dismissing Isi with the wave of an orange segment.

“What did he do?” asked Isi.

“What did who do?” the Jailer replied, puzzled.

“The body I brought back, what did he do?”

“Oh, him.” The Jailer smiled without the slightest hint of humour. “He’s a special case that one. Killed eighteen people, sentenced to three thousand years.”

“What?” blurted Isi without thinking, “why so long?” Isi hadn’t been in the criminal justice system long. Still, he knew that crime would usually only attract six to seven hundred years at the maximum.

“Punishment,” shrugged the Jailer “judge wanted to make sure he got locked up for longer than the remainder of the contract he was trying to get out of.”

“What was his contract?” asked Isi.

“He was our last Necromancer.”