Caladin’s Climb—Part 27 (Patreon)

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          When Caladin saw Jenny, she was just sitting in the cage looking bored. Not the least bit upset. The only change was that her face lit up with excitement when she saw him. “Uncle Cally!” she called out. “Are you here to let me out?” Blood had dripped down from her mouth and covered the front of her dress. She smiled at Caladin as though nothing were wrong.

          “One minute, dear,” Caladin said to her. “I need to talk to the other adults.” Kelly seemed the most composed, so Caladin pulled her aside. “What happened?” he asked her. “Tell me everything.”

          “We don’t know,” Kelly said. “Janet was the only one who saw it happen. She just came running out, saying that lil’ Jenny was attacking her mom. She said she was bitin’ her throat. By the time we got to ‘em, her mom was already dead.”

          Caladin looked over at the cage where little Jenny was sitting. She didn’t have the disposition of someone that had just lost her mother, let alone someone that had killed her mother. She just sat there, picking at something in her lap.

          “What are you going to do?” Kelly asked. “I don’t think garlic is going to help with this one.”

          “Me neither,” Caladin agreed. He looked around at everyone that had gathered to watch the show. At least three dozen faces, all ones he recognized. There was a clear rift in the crowd that hadn’t been there the last time Caladin had visited. The living were in one group, while the undead Caladin had brought back to be with their family stood off to the side, alone. Caladin could see the tension between the two groups of family members in the way they traded glances, or avoided them. Jenny had caused a rift between the living and dead that Caladin wasn’t sure he could fix. Wasn’t sure he should fix it. Standing closest to Jenny’s cage was her undead father, Jared. Like his daughter, he didn’t look upset. He actually gave a little smile and wave to his daughter like he was trying to reassure her. “I… have to think about this,” Caladin said. Kelly was supposed to be in charge, but somehow everyone had decided to defer to Caladin. He was too young to be leading anyone!

          “Are you going to bring her back?” Kelly asked. “The mom, I mean. I think that’s what everyone’s expecting.”

          But would that actually solve the problem, Caladin wondered. “Where’s the body?”

          Kelly motioned with a nod of her head. There was a suspiciously shaped lump under a blanket sitting between the segregated crowd.

          “I don’t know,” Caladin said. “I don’t know if magic is the answer here. Jenny killed her own mother. We can’t have people killing each other like this. Maybe… maybe the undead living with the, uh, living isn’t a good idea.”

          “Then what?” Kelly asked. “Are you going to take them away? Just after you brought them all back?”

          Some words of Brorn’s echoed in Caladin’s mind. You restored the mind, but not the soul. He’d never stopped to wonder what a mind without its soul might be missing. Clearly, it was enough to act like the person it had once been, but was acting the same as being? “Let me just talk to Jenny,” Caladin told Kelly. He approached the wooden cage Jenny was locked in and motioned the others back before squatting down so he could talk at her level. “Jenny?” Caladin asked. “How are you feeling?”

          “I’m okay,” Jenny said. She was still picking at something in her hand. Caladin got a better look, seeing that what she’d been fiddling with for the last little while were the pieces of a dismembered butterfly. It looked like she was trying to put the pieces back together.

          “Do you want to tell me what happened?” Caladin asked.

          “Mommy was sad,” Jenny said. “But I’m never sad. Not anymore. So I thought if I made her like me, she wouldn’t have to be sad anymore. Daddy said it made everyone upset, so I should be a good girl and sit in this cage until you got home. Are you here to fix her now? Make her like me?”

          Like me. Caladin wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. He could do it. Obviously, he could. Nobody in town would bat an eye. They’d consider the whole thing resolved and go back to their lives. Maybe there would be some lost trust, but how long until the next murder? And the next? Brorn would tell him he could put the body back together, he could animate it, but it would never be the same as it was. Caladin had been so sure he knew better. A soul made of mosquitoes was not, it turned out, quite the same as the genuine human article. The only way he was going to be able to fix Jenny and the other undead—give them the conscience they clearly lacked—would be if he used the souls of living people that already had good moral principles.

          But how was he to square that equation, Caladin wondered. Taking a life in self-defense was one thing, ripping someone’s soul out of their body to force it to pretend to be someone else was a different thing entirely. Would that even work? Would they not just slowly become the person whose soul he’d stolen for them? Caladin had never set out to play god; it had just sort of happened. And now… now he was regretting it. Brorn had tried to warn him, but he’d thought he knew better, thought he was smarter. Brorn had always been so quick to anger when he’d seen that Caladin had restored the minds of any undead. What had he said?

          “I suppose you will have to learn these lessons the hard way.”

          Yes. An ancient man, that Necro-King, and despite the trappings of luxury and narcissism he surrounded himself in, it seemed he hadn’t quite avoided the wisdom that came from all those years.

          Brorn’s “hard way” meant death. The death of innocent people. The death of Jenny’s mom. She’d been sad. Now she was dead. As hard as Caladin tried to look at the situation from Jenny’s perspective, he just couldn’t see that as an improvement. She didn’t understand how much maintenance it took for Caladin to keep all the undead functional. Or how he didn’t know how long their minds could be overwritten before memories would start to go. The rest of the undead family members watched Caladin intently. What he did next would have ramifications for all of them. Caladin could see where the paths laid out before him led. Down one path, he would raise Jenny’s mother. More would die. He would raise them too. It wouldn’t end until everyone was undead or he finally put a stop to it. Down the other path? A lot more pain now…

          Caladin let out a sigh. He knew what he had to do. He stood up. “Okay,” he announced. “I can’t express how sorry I am to everyone about this. It appears I have made a mistake.”

          “Are you going to raise my wife?” Jenny’s father, Jared, asked.

          Caladin shook his head. “No. That was the mistake. I should have let the dead rest. A brief visit to say goodbyes and get closure is one thing, but it is clear to me now that the dead do not come back as they were. What happened to our family was horrifying. For all of us. But this wasn’t the answer.”

          “Bullshit!” Jared shouted. “Bring her back! Right now.”

          “I’m sorry,” Caladin said. “But I’ve made up my mind.”

          “No!” Jared barked. “Bring her back! Or-or else!”

          “Or else what?” Caladin asked. “What power do you think you hold over me to make such demands? I’m the one who gave you life. I’m the one who—”

          Jared darted out across the gap between the two crowds and pounced on Thomas Kinsitter. He grabbed the boy by the neck and hoisted him off the ground. The boy flailed in his arm, but he had about as much hope of over-powering an enhanced zombie as he did of uprooting a tree. The surrounding crowd scattered. “Do it!” Jared ordered. “Bring her back or I’ll kill Tom.”

          “Yeah!” Jenny shouted from her cage. “Bring back my momma!”

          Little Tom just gurgled helplessly. His eyes darted across the crowd desperately, landing on Caladin. Though he couldn’t speak, or even make a sound, his cry for help was deafening.

          Caladin held his hands up in a calming gesture. He didn’t need any hand signs to use his magic, so it didn’t really matter what he did with them, but if it kept Jared calm, it was worth a try. “That’s not going to help anything, Jared,” Caladin said. “Tom didn’t do anything to you or your family.”

          “What does it matter?” Jared asked. “You can just bring him back anyway. Unless you don’t want to anymore? You just gonna let us all die now? Is that it? Is that how you treat your family?”

          Caladin spotted Kelly out of the corner of his eye. He nodded at her with his chin. “Get everyone else out of here,” he told her. “Then send for your brother.” Kelly’s brother, Lenny, was one of the few family members missing the drama at the moment. He was the undead Caladin trusted most. He was also the undead King Haedril had put in charge of his newest and strongest legion of soldiers. Whatever happened here, Caladin knew Lenny would have something to say about it. His wife had been brought back and was now among the undead members of the village. She was watching the events play out with the same cold, green eyes as the rest of them.

          “On it,” Kelly promised. “You heard him! Let’s go!” She clapped her hands. “To the castle, come on. All of you.” She sprinted up the hill, frightened family following after her. None of the undead followed the procession. They just continued to stare at Caladin, waiting to see what he had planned for them.

          “So what’s it going to be?” Jared asked. “Bring my wife back or let another person die? Or—Hey. Don’t look so scared, Tom. It’s not that bad. You won’t even remember dying.”

          “Jared,” Caladin said flatly. “What do you think is going to happen here?”

          “You’re going to raise Jolene,” Jared said. “Then we can be a family again. And she’ll never leave us.”

          “And she won’t be sad anymore!” Jenny added from her cage.

          “Jared,” Caladin said. He took a breath. “Did you tell Jenny to kill her mother?” A few hours ago, the idea would have been absurd, but now Caladin wasn’t so sure. He blamed himself for not noticing sooner that things were off in the village. Maybe he would have, if he’d spent more time at home and less time fighting battles for King Philipus.

          “We’ll be the same,” Jared said. “When you bring her back.” It wasn’t an answer, but then again, it sort of was.

          “Jared, do you realize that murder is wrong?” Caladin asked.

          “Why?” Jared asked. “Death is a temporary state. Why does it matter if we live or die? Especially if living makes us sad.”

          Caladin shook his head. “She wasn’t sad because she was alive,” he said. “She was sad because you weren’t. Jared. If you don’t put Tom down immediately, you will force my hand. And I promise you won’t like what I do with it.” He looked around at the undead he’d raised. Jenny in her cage. Jared, holding Tom hostage—Tom’s only crime being easy to grab and close at hand. Lenny’s wife, Allison, the camp cook back when she still ate food. Little James, the other undead child, barely older than Jenny. Old Man Shivers, who hadn’t so much as twitched since being raised from the dead. The Landor twins, who didn’t stand as close to each other as they had when they were alive. He looked at all of them, and they looked back with those cold, glowing green eyes.

          These zombies Caladin had resurrected had every appearance of being the family members he’d lost. But they weren’t. They moved like them, talked like them, but they weren’t them. Maybe it was something wrong with Caladin’s process. Lenny was the only one that had been resurrected with whatever medium Brorn used as a replacement for souls and he’d never given off the apathetic energy he was sensing from the rest of the zombie’s he’d brought to unlife. He hadn’t taken the time to make sure they really were the same as they’d been before he set his creations loose to play at family. Jolene’s death was on his hands. Caladin looked at each of them and inscribed a spell on a scroll in his pocket. “Tom,” Caladin said. The boy’s eyes were wide with fear, but his throat wasn’t being squeezed hard enough to entirely keep him from breathing. “Close your eyes.”

          As soon as Tom’s eyes closed, Caladin released his spell. There was a wet sound, then all the undead collapsed at the same time. Caladin walked past the collapsed corpses to help Tom get back on his feet. His throat was red, and Caladin could tell he would have bruises later, so he cast a healing spell without a word.

          Tom coughed in surprise as the magic worked on him. “What happened?” he asked.

          “Nothing,” Caladin told him. “You’re fine. Run up to the castle to find your parents. Tell them I’m taking care of everything.”

          A squad of soldiers marched into the village square in a hurry. Caladin spotted the red mess of Kelly’s hair from a distance. She was leading the way. The soldiers all had green eyes. Lenny led them.

          “What happened here?” Lenny demanded. He looked around at the collapsed bodies. “Did you have to knock them out?”

          “No,” Caladin said honestly. “I destroyed their brains with visceramancy.”

          “What? Why?” Lenny demanded.

          “Because,” Caladin said. “This experiment is over. Jolene was killed. I think she was planning to leave her husband and daughter. They found out and killed her first. Jared asked his daughter to do it because he thought she would be more sympathetic.” He shrugged. “At least, that’s what I think happened. I could bring them back again and question them properly, but I don’t want to. And I don’t care. It’s irrelevant.”

          “Irrelevant? What are you talking about? You can’t just kill people without proof!”

          “Proof?” Caladin repeated indignantly. “Jolene is dead. We know who did it. The why hardly matters! What matters is that they did it. Don’t you understand? In what world would Jenny kill her own mother? That creature was not Jenny. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t the same person who died. None of them are. They’re missing something important; that deep down thing that tells them right from wrong.”

          “So you’re just going to leave them like that then?” Lenny demanded. He pointed to one of the corpses. “My wife is right there. Are you saying she’s not herself? What about me?”

          “You’re… different, Lenny. Brorn made you, not me, and he’s ten times the necromancer I’ll ever be. But even with his work, you’re not the same person you were before you died. Don’t try to deny it.” Caladin rubbed his forehead. He hoped he was getting through to Lenny, but he was prepared to act if he wasn’t. “That’s why I’m putting an end to this. The experiment is over. I might have been a little slow, but I finally learned the lesson Brorn tried to teach me all those months ago.”

          “What lesson?” Lenny asked.

          “To let the dead lie,” Caladin said. He completed a rather complex spell and released it. Lenny and the rest of his undead collapsed.

          “Lenny?” Kelly called out. “What did you do, Cally?”

          “I ended it,” Caladin said.

          “But Lenny didn’t do anything wrong!” Kelly shouted. “He wasn’t like the others. You said so yourself!”

          “I did,” Caladin agreed. “But I can’t take that chance. If Jenny can kill her mother, then Lenny can kill you. I’m not going to wait until it’s too late.”

          Kelly turned towards Caladin with tears in her eyes. “You didn’t even… let me say goodbye.” She wiped her sleeve over her face. “He was different,” she said. “He wasn’t cold like the others. He was still the Lenny I remembered.”

          Caladin thought about that seriously. It was possible Kelly was right. If there was one undead he could risk keeping around, it was Lenny. “This isn’t forever,” Caladin promised her. “Just for now. I’m not giving up. If there is a way to bring them back like they were, I’m going to find it.”

          “You promise?” Kelly asked.

          “I promise to try,” Caladin amended. It was a subtle distinction, but an important one.

          One of Philipus’ officers and a small contingent of guards marched down the hill. Caladin raised a hand to call them over. “I know what this looks like,” he said when they approached.

          “It looks like you just destroyed over a hundred of King Haedril’s elite undead infantry!” the officer shouted. “What is the meaning of this insubordination? Did the king order this?”

          “Relax,” Caladin said. “They’re undead. I didn’t destroy anything. I just made them safer. They will still function perfectly fine.” He cleared his throat, then shouted out the command, “Stand up!” The undead rose to their feet. They fixed Caladin with empty eyes. Eyes that were as devoid of intelligence as they were malicious intent. He decided he liked them much more that way. “See?” Caladin said. “They still work. But now there’s no chance they’ll disobey. It’s an improvement.”

          The eldrin officer harrumphed. “We will see what King Haedril thinks of this,” he said. “Men? Follow me.” He turned and marched back towards the fortress.

          “I need some space,” Caladin told Kelly. “You can decide what you want to do with the bodies.” He didn’t give Kelly a chance to object. He triggered a teleportation scroll in his pocket and disappeared.

          Caladin reappeared in an isolated location with a public Anchor he’d read about. It was meant as a lesson; a place for eldrin to come and reflect on the mistakes of their past. What mattered to Caladin was that it was far from civilization with nobody and nothing to hurt. It was the heart of a section of wasteland in Eastern Eldesia that had died off after excessive mana well siphoning. Caladin had read about the territory a while ago in a history book. Supposedly, the Eldesians had learned from the ecological disaster and adopted more sustainable mana extraction methods. Caladin wasn’t convinced, but that didn’t matter to him. He didn’t care about the cause so much as the result. What mattered to him was that the land was completely dead. Nothing lived here. Which meant that nobody could disturb him. It was just sand, sand, and more sand in every direction he cared to look. Caladin needed to blow off some steam after what he’d just been forced to do. Nothing helped him quite so much as working on a complex puzzle, and the puzzle he was most interested in solving at the moment required the utmost privacy.

          Caladin pulled some scrolls from his pocket and inscribed his new Pyroclastic Destruction spell on them. “I feel like blowing something up,” he said out loud. “Let’s see what you can do.” To start, Caladin erected a ward to protect himself, then cast a flying spell. From higher up, he had a good view of the only landmark in sight: an outcropping of jagged stones that rose from the sand to form a small mountain. He flew a little closer to it. When he thought he was roughly at the spell’s maximum range, he cast a single instance of Pyroclastic Destruction. It detonated powerfully enough that Caladin was forced to turn his head away, despite the wards protecting him. Caladin was still blasted backwards through the sky. He let himself be thrown around and just enjoyed the thrill of it, whooping in delight as he was launched up and fell back down from the force of the blast. When the dust cleared, there was a crater in the side of the mountain. The analytical part of his mind tried to tell him that if he was truly going to be methodical in his analysis, he would fly down there to measure the diameter of the crater. He didn’t bother. It was too much fun blowing stuff up. He could just count how many blasts it would take to annihilate the entire mountain, then do an estimate later. He cast the spell again. And again. And again.

          About an hour later, Caladin was floating over a sea of lava and glass. The mountain was gone, and despite not really focusing on doing a technical analysis of the spell, he’d still learned a lot. For one thing, he could say with confidence that he’d spent more mana maintaining his Flight spell than he had leveling an entire mountain. After the first several explosions, he’d also tried modifications to try directing the blast. He wouldn’t be able to use it safely at close range until he could minimize the damage in at least one direction. The spell was supposed to be a modified Flame Lance, so he’d assumed directing it would be easier. It hadn’t been, but after a bit of trial and error, he’d found a way to force the blast to explode in only one direction, even if he could do little about the resulting shock wave. As it was, he managed to reduce the shock waves that spat out the back side to a manageable enough level that they would probably be survivable if he was ever forced to use the spell at close range without wards.

          As for where the energy came from for the spell’s power? Caladin was still completely clueless about that part. All he could say for certain was that the size of the explosion was wildly disproportionate to the mana put into the spell. More mana did create larger explosions, but he quickly learned that was an incredibly dangerous thing to test after a modest increase in mana output resulted in an explosion that propelled him into the upper atmosphere. Sometimes bigger wasn’t always better. The only other spell Caladin was aware of that could add more output to the damage it caused than the mana input was the fulgramancy spell, Levin Bolt. But that spell worked by siphoning lightning out of the atmosphere. Successive uses in a short period quickly exhausted that enhancement effect and got progressively weaker. Pyroclastic Destruction had no such weakness that Caladin could find. The size of the explosions it created was always precisely proportional to the mana input. All the studying he’d conducted had helped him reach a singular conclusion: somehow, compressing air and heating it up at the same time to sufficiently high levels just… made it explode. And the explosions were utterly and spectacularly powerful.

          Caladin had been concerned about what he would do if another cohort of soldiers attacked him without Brorn to save him, or without a mana well to feed on. Now he had no concern at all. He didn’t even need Belorian’s Crown, and all the risks using it entailed. He could do it all on his own. A wave of his hand could destroy armies. The hard part would be making sure nobody else got their hands on the spell. The repercussions of common wizards casting such a powerful spell in the middle of a war would probably leave the planet uninhabitable. Caladin couldn’t let that happen. He gave the problem some thought. There were no hand-signs anyone could learn by watching him, so really, the only thing he needed to protect was his mind.

          That meant cerebromancy. Caladin figured he would need to defend his mind against even the most powerful intrusions by cerebromancy if he wanted to keep his spell safe. That was hardly his only secret worth keeping, so it was as good a time as any to think about protecting himself from that particular kind of magic. It wasn’t something he was overly familiar with and required extensive training to master. That was part of why talented cerebromancers were so rare. But rare wasn’t non-existent, and he couldn’t keep depending on luck to keep him safe from them. Instead, he went with his specialty: lithomancy. Rather than slap together a mediocre cerebromancy ward, Caladin imbued his mind with as powerful a lithomancy compulsion as he could manage. It was very simple. A Stop compulsion, that would trigger when someone entered his mind. Anyone that probed his mind would trigger it and immediately stop everything they were doing. With any luck, that would give him the time to find them and make sure there wouldn’t be any follow-up spells. He rather liked his solution to the “mind mage” problem. Rather than fight them with their own specialty, he would do the mental equivalent of deflecting their blow against his—

          Pop.

          An eldrin wizard appeared in the air next to Caladin, then immediately started falling. Caladin was still floating in the air with magic and there was nothing but fields of lava beneath him. The eldrin wizard who had appeared screamed the whole way down to the ground, then disappeared again at the last second.

          “That was… strange,” Caladin said to himself.

          Pop.

          The eldrin wizard appeared above Caladin’s head this time. Caladin heard him shout something about, “…wants to see you…” as the man fell past. Then he disappeared a second time. Caladin couldn’t be sure, since the man had appeared so suddenly and fallen the entire time, but he thought he recognized him. He tried to put a name to the face but came up blank. Either way, he was pretty sure the man was an eldrin. If Caladin recognized him at all, he was probably from Haedril’s court. Caladin sighed. Philip probably wanted to speak to him. He inscribed a teleportation spell and returned to Fort Sumnter.

          Caladin appeared in the fortress’s courtyard, on the teleportation circle. It hadn’t been exactly where he was aiming, but circles tended to do that. The falling man from before was lying on the ground next to him, panting. His hair was blown back and his robes were a mess.

          “Ah, there he is,” King Philipus said, favoring Caladin with a smile. “Good job, Galeonis. I knew you could find him.”

          “What. Were you doing. Floating. Over a lake. Of lava?” the eldrin vocomancer panted to Caladin.

          “Last I checked, I didn’t need anyone’s permission to run magical experiments,” Caladin said. “If you didn’t want to fall into a lake of lava, you shouldn’t have teleported to my location without making sure it was safe.”

          The man scowled at Caladin, then got up and stomped away. “He’s fine,” Philip said. “He’ll complain about it for a few hours, but by tomorrow he’ll find a way to make it sound like he saved you from a… did he say lava?” The king furrowed his brow. “Where were you, Caladin?”

          “Just blowing off some steam,” Caladin said.

          “I didn’t realize archmages did that so… literally.” Philip said. “I am not aware of any lakes of lava. My tutor taught me lava only came from volcanoes. Was he wrong?”

          Caladin rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. I made the lava. Just practicing with a new spell. What did you need? Is this about the undead infantry?”

          “That? No, no. You are the expert on matters of necromancy. I defer to you on all things magic, just as I expect you to defer to me on all things political. If you say they will be more loyal without their minds, then we shall deal with mindless undead.” King Philipus was smiling warmly. Caladin didn’t get the sense he’d heard about the death in the village. He decided not to be the one to tell him about it.

          “So, if it wasn’t that, what did you need me for?” Caladin asked.

          The king nodded smoothly. “As I said, the political is my domain. A matter has arisen that needs addressing. An urgent matter. You remember our talk about the various nations we would need to win over to our cause?”

          “The dwarf and dragon-kin nations,” Caladin supplied.

          “Yes. Precisely,” Philipus said. “Well, my message to Emperor Kalokai has received a response. He says he will support my bid to join Fayse’s council. However, he would only do so if I pledged to give him control of our vote.”

          “That doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me,” Caladin said. “If you don’t get a vote, what would be the point of joining the council?”

          Philipus frowned slightly. “Well, there are certain rules protecting council nations from each other’s wishes. We would gain that protection, but not much else. It is not an offer to be dismissed out-of-hand, though I agree it would hardly be an ideal outcome. That is where you come in. I managed to convince the emperor to agree to another contest of champions. Like Queen Rusalia, he has a champion he believes is unbeatable in single combat. The terms of the contest will be simple: a fight either to the death or willful surrender within the bounds of an arena. I will attend with you. If we are victorious, Kreet will support our vote to join the council without condition. If they win, we will vote as the emperor and his descendants direct for a period of 111 years.”

          “111?” Caladin asked. “That seems oddly specific.”

          “I am told it is a lucky number in Kreetish culture,” Philipus said with a smile. “Now. Any objections this time? I promise, there are no secret assurances made beyond those exact terms.”

          “It sounds fine to me,” Caladin agreed. “I have a new spell I want to try, anyway. I think I finally worked out all the kinks. Their champion doesn’t stand a chance.”

          Philip clapped Caladin on the back. “Just what I wanted to hear!” he said. “When can you leave? I wish us to depart immediately!”

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