The Necromancer's Gambit: Mate

I run my hand down the Queen’s spine, trying to feel for an injury, just to be careful, then Harry helps me set him on the floor. I check his vitals: pulse is steady, breathing heavy, but otherwise healthy.

There’s a poison on the air, though I can’t quite name it, but just residue; Queen inhaled the rest. He starts to cough, and I help him onto his side in case he needs to vomit. Instead he spits up a rock of the poison on the carpet. “Mariri might be a life saver, but I wish it didn’t have to taste like a dead donkey’s cock.”

“Seeing as you nearly died, I won’t ask how you know,” Harry says.

“And that’s the poison,” Bishop says. “Unsurprisingly, poison tastes bad. The mariri itself tastes like charcoal- not pleasant, but not poisonous, either.” She’s looking over the necromancer, turning him over. There’s already a large pool of blood gathering beneath him.

“Can you save him?” I ask Bishop.

“Entry’s clean, just a tiny little hole where the bullet went in. The real bitch is the stomach wound, where the bullet and all the bits of bone and flesh blasted out of him like a really festering pimple.”

“I don’t need him to dance again. I just need him not to die in the next ten hours.”

That numbers give her pause, but she brushes it to the side. “I think I’ve got some blood in storage. Probably not his type, but”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Then I'll go get it. Put pressure, here,” she tells Harry, pushing his hands into the other necromancer’s stomach.

She leaves, and a second later there's a shadow in the doorway, and I assume Rook forgot something, or wants to ask a question I don't want to answer. It's the Arbiter. “I don't like being left behind,” he grouses.

But there's someone else behind him, and from the shape of the silhouette I know it's Pawn. He steps into the light. “You look a little pale,” I tell him.

“And you look a little stupid, ugly and shit-smelling.”

“Rough night, I take it? Where’s Rook?”

“Figured she’d be here. What? I’m suddenly her keeper.”

“That was the idea, yeah.” Then it hits me, all at once. “You split up.” I pull out my phone and dial Rook, it rings, but there’s no response.

“Was I supposed to take both the hunter and the vamp while babysitting your noobie?” I punch him in his fat face and he falls on the marble floor with a loud crack.

Then my phone rings. It's the VC. I need this like a hole in the head, but I answer, anyway, on the off chance it's good news- because really it seems I'm about due. “Hey boss,” Rook says, though I barely hear her. “The vamps got the hunter.”

“You left her to be murdered,” I tell Pawn. I shouldn’t kill him. But Christ do I want to.

But he can’t just take his licks and be thankful; no, he has to shoot back, “Well, seeing as she ain’t murdered, I feel I maybe made the right call.”

“Should I kick you while you’re on the ground?” He glares at me.

“Look,” Rook says, “I know the vamps are all buddy buddy with the guild and everything, but I can’t help but feel like the last roll at the Old Country Buffet, and the old folks look mighty hungry.”

“Pawn will pick you up.”

“Um, no offense, but could somebody else come get me, someone more, um, reliable.”

“He’ll be there in five minutes. Or I’ll flay him.”

“So that’s why you wanted that flaying spell,” Bishop says.

He doesn’t believe us, but it’s enough to make him move faster, anyway. “I’m going. Fuck. Apparently this is the thanks I get for helping to save the Gambit. Would you like a party, Pawn? Why, no thank you. How about a pat on the back and this mid-priced prostitute? No, I don’t do this job for that. A swift but deep kick in the child-berries? Now, there’s the benefits package I’ve come to expect…”

“His bitching really carries,” says Harry.

“It’s the hard surfaces,” I say, “and the high ceilings- and all that bass in his voice.” But out of the corner of my eye I get a glimpse of the King dead at his desk. “Bishop, can we talk a sec?”

Bishop's already got an IV in the necromancer's arm, and finishes injecting a sedative into the blood she's giving. “Yeah.” She comes over to me.

“I want your notes, on Castle, and Elise.”

“Notes?” She plays coy.

“I know you took them. Because prudence be damned, you can’t just let knowledge disappear. So you wrote it all up, even reverse-engineered the parts you couldn’t figure out at a glance- even if you’d never tell a soul where for fear they might use them.”

“You can’t.”

“I will.”

“No, I’m not sure you can. It’s complicated. Tricky. And there are some dangerous parts to the ritual. And I won’t help you.”

“The notes will be enough. And if I get in over my head, I’ll just end it, shoot him in the temple and be done with it. This prick isn’t claiming any more bodies.”

She has the notebook with her, in a small bag. I assume she's been working on it in her off moments. “I noticed some… inefficiencies in his spellcraft. Things that limited longevity. They were probably errors, but maybe they were mercy.”

“If you’re arguing for some of our own, that ship sailed a couple bodies ago.”

“Then at least, don’t use my suggestions,” she doesn't want to call them improvements, though we both know that's what they are. “They were, I only meant them theoretically. It was academic, thought exercises.”

“I won’t,” I tell her. I don’t think the lie fools either of us, or makes us feel any better about it.

“I think we have everything we'll need here, um, except”

“If it's necromantic supplies you need, I've got a guy,” Harry says.

“Okay. You two get those, I'll stay with our patient.”

“I've got a bandage for the gunshot wound- technically two of them, if you want to apply them,” Bishop says. “And I figured we'd shove it full of gauze, too. It'll get infected, but if we're not worried about the long term”

“We're not,” I tell her.

And then I'm alone with the necromancer. He's out, looking vulnerable. I could kill him with my hands, now. And maybe I should. Maybe that would be the decent thing. But I'm past decency. Only killing him now wouldn't be enough, not for everything he's done.

So I wait for the supplies. Harry's contact comes in a hurry, so he gets back first. “How much am I going to owe this guy?”

“It's gratis. I think he hopes that if the Gambit starts using some of his more exotic supplies, maybe the prohibitions on them will go away.”

“Maybe I'll just have him invoice me later,” I say. Because, hypocritical as it might sound, not everyone should be able to do what I'm about to. I'm not even sure I should.  

Bishop gets back a few seconds later, looking sad. “You haven't doctored any of this, have you?” I ask her. And that only makes her sadder- probably because she didn't think to do it when she could have. She shakes her head, no.

“Good. Then you should go.” She wants to stay, to try to make me keep my word about not using her enhanced version of the spell… but I think she knows she’d fail, and then feel a party to what I’m about to do next. And guilt isn’t supposed to be a part of her job description. She leaves the room, but stops in the doorway, to look back at me. And I feel worse about lying to her- though still not bad enough to reverse course.

“You can go, too, Harry.”

“You’re kidding me, right? This is necromancy, not a mix for your Easy Bake Oven. You’re as likely to turn yourself into an undead cantaloupe as pull off this spell,” he pauses, “without me.”

“It’s not something you need to be a part of.”

“Maybe. But it’s something you’re going to do. And if you think it’s the right thing to do, then I’m right here with you.”

“Arbiter?”

“In for a penny. Besides, it’s been ages since I attended a good vivisection.”  

“Tell me honestly, are you Death?” I ask.

“Oh God,” the Arbiter says, “is he behind me?” He whirls around with surprising agility. “Don’t scare an old man like that.”

Bishop’s notes are thorough, like they usually are. Creating a Dahlia is a complicated process. The most important element of the spell is the bind, creating a connection between all of the constituent elements of the body, and strengthening the connections that do exist. When it's alive, the human body is designed to be interconnected; it helps the process along.

The first element involves a red silk rope, knotted seven times around the throat. There’s an incantation that goes along with each knot, and ties the individual to the Seven African Powers by way of the Catholic Saint Anthony; magic makes for strange bedfellows.  

Then there’s a spell from Hungary with some Romany elements in it that uses mirrors; the more typical version uses it as a love spell, keeping people together and faithful, that kind of thing. I hold up a mirror the size of a sheet of paper to the necromancer’s face, and Harry pries open his eyes; it doesn’t matter that he’s unconscious. Then I smash it against his skull. I take the two largest pieces, and push them into his eye sockets- not through the balls, but over them, pressing them deeper into the socket wall. I set aside five more shards, for later.

Finally, there's a spell out of the French Antilles, involving nine acacia branch wands. The wands are inserted under the fingernails, one for every finger and the right thumb. The left thumb gets a silver of serpentine; unlike the acacia it can't be forced in without a hammer; there’s nothing that prepares you for the noise that makes. But that takes care of binding the body together.

But it isn’t entirely that simple; the universe has an immune system, of sorts- and the second step involves tricking it. Every culture and religious tradition has its own psychopomps, who herald the dead from this life. So the second step in creating a Dahlia is protecting the body from them.

I initiate the rights of Anubis with spells from the Book of the Dead, marking the body as property of that god. But I don’t finish the ritual, which should leave him in a purgatory. As insurance, I’ll weight down the heart by injecting it with coagulants later, making it solidify full of blood instead of draining, just in case Anubis gets grabby and tries to measure his heart against Ma’at anyway; it’s a cheap trick, but it should work.

And since it’s a putatively Christian nation, I cover my bases. That spell involves changing the dying person’s name, so the angel of death can’t find him. Classically people use Raphael, meaning “the Creator heals;” the irony isn’t lost on me as I gouge that new name into the necromancer's chest with a knife.

While I’m at work on the first two segments, Harry prepares the third. It involves putting symbols on various implants, painting runes on metal, carving sigils in wood, and dying magic words and symbols on cloth and leather. It takes time, and patience, and he finishes just in time for me to start inserting them under the necromancer’s skin.

That last step is another bind, making sure that the noncorporeal parts of him, call it a soul, call it consciousness or the id, are connected to the physical. This step is last, because it’s the one most likely to kill him- but so long as everything else is working like it should, it also won’t matter.  

I start with the razor blades, and force them into the bend of his arm, behind each knee, and under his arm pits. The rest go everywhere, but unlike the razors each one requires its own incision, and since we’re doing it right, we sew each up after the implant is in place. There’s seventy, in total, and by the end of it he’s got a foreign object in his skin every few inches.

Then I make an incision into his pelvis, and pull out several feet of his intestines. I knot them, nine times, to make a witch's ladder, embellishing each rung with a black hen feather. For good measure, while I have an opening to his guts, I sew a tseuheur to his ribcage; it has the remaining pieces of the mirror, seven pebbles, seven seed pods, antimony powder, and clotted menstrual blood and pubic hairs from a corpse. He’s cursed about as thoroughly as any man has even been.

It takes nine hours before the spells are all done. It's shoddy work, rushed as it is, and since it's the first time we've ever put together a spell like it. But just as we finish, the necromancer wakes up. “You don’t need to do this.” I jam a syringe full of coagulant into his chest. “You don’t have to kill me,” he pleads.  

“I killed you ten hours ago, when I didn’t have a choice. The rest was just the after-party. And the only part of it I regret is that you got to sleep through it.”  

I push down the plunger, and he dies with sadness on his face, but not for the people he murdered, or any of his other sins, but because he’s got a hell of a lot more pain coming, and he knows it. Everything that happens to his body as it decomposes, he’s going to feel. Everything that happens to his cells as they’re broken down, is going to torture him. It’s even possible, though nobody knows, that even when he’s nothing but atoms, that he’s still going to feel like he’s being thrown around, smashed together, having electrons torn off him; I smile at that thought.  

“He’s going to come back a poltergeist.” Harry says; I think he still wants me to reverse course.

But I can’t. “Good,” I say. “I’d love to have another chance to kill him.”

“Bloody,” the Arbiter says. “Violent. But they loosed the dogs of war on a sanctioned Gambit. I can hardly see condemning you for putting the mutts down. I don't suppose you'll put his head on a pike. Makes for an excellent deterrent. But kids these days, too 'civilized' to put a head on a stick to impress the neighbors. In my day, we'd have decorated this place with his entrails and had a party with his guts hanging from the rafters like streamers. And we all would have gotten laid for it, too. All of us.” He seems almost bitter about that last part.

But I do like King asked, and I ignore the old coot. I take out my phone and  text Vergara to come to the Centre. It takes some explaining, to even get her to understand the basics of what happened. “But how does a man having a cardiac arrest try to stab someone?”

“Not being a forensic pathologist, I'd guess that the attack came after and likely on account of the stress of having stabbed someone.”

“And why do I get the feeling you're lying? Almost completely. About everything.”

“That’s one of those questions you shouldn’t ask.”

“Why? It’s not like you’re going to answer it.”

“But eventually, you ask enough questions I can’t answer and they outline a response- and then we have a problem.”

“Then maybe one of these days we’re just going to have a problem.”

“Let’s hope not.”