74. Beneath the Earth (Patreon)

“Yeah. What is that?” Oz murmured, half to himself.

Loup wiped her face, inadvertently smudging mud from her dirty hands across her face. Her nose twisted, and she shook her head. “Bad.”

A simple earthen jar sat in the ground. Its lid pointed up out of the earth, still half-stuck in the mud. Oz knelt, reaching out, then paused. He retreated to the rocky jut’s edge and grabbed a long rock, then returned and used that long rock to nudge the lid open.

It didn’t want to lift. The mud clung to it, sinking into the cracks in the rough pottery and gluing it together. Something on the inside stuck, too, the whole thing refusing to give. Oz wrinkled his nose and wedged the rock in the crack between the lid and the jar, then pushed down, using it as a lever.

The lid popped off. From within, a fetid stench emerged, all rot and filth. Oz backed away, lifting his sleeve to cover his nose instinctively. “A burial pot?”

“It’s not large enough to hold a whole body,” Aisling murmured.

Peering in, Loup pointed to her head. “Only this. The rest is missing.” She nodded toward the rest of the field. “There’s more. Lots more, but only heads. Always heads.”

Oz swallowed. Heads? Is whoever’s behind this trying to make an army of dullahan? Properly, dullahan should be fey whose heads were removed, but… maybe with dark magic, it’s possible to craft humans into dullahan.

Flipping through the sea of knowledge in his head, Oz paused. Here’s a book that hints at dark magic that creates undead, but, well… it’s a mythology compilation, from the perspective of the righteous sect.

Illustrations lit up in his mind, the images from the book laying forth the sect’s members as brilliant, beautiful warriors in gleaming white, while the hideous monsters in black were led by a yet more monstrous dark mage who glowered from the rear of his army in red and sable. Oz shook his head, disappointed. It’s meant to serve as religious doctrine for the sect members, not provide historical or practical instruction. It glosses over the hows and what-fors.

And most of the others… yes. There’s quite a bit of talk about evil necromancers and how evil those dark mages are, but the practical bits are non-present. Come on, guys! I get that this is your backstory as to how your sect is the coolest and all the dark mage sects suck, but can’t you at least include a ‘practical guide to identifying dark magic?’ Or is that only available at the next level, huh? Or who knows. Maybe it’s half a dozen levels up before the precious sect members are allowed to know what dark magic looks like!

He grimaced. I really need to go research those dark magic books. As little as I want to risk corruption, I can’t afford to have such a critical gap in my knowledge!

I can at least guess at what’s important to know, from what I know about fey and demonic magic. “How are the heads laid out?” Oz asked.

Loup gave him an exasperated look. “You want me to dig them all up? Five chickens!”

Aisling nodded and reached for her storage ring.

Oz raised his hand. “Whoa, whoa. Hold up.” He looked at Loup. “How many chickens if you just mark where each head is? I just want to know the layout of where they’re put. I don’t need them all dug out.” If this functions anything like fey magic, disrupting the spell by digging them all up could either inform the caster, or backlash wildly onto us. I don’t want either of those results, so let’s just mark the heads.

Understanding, Loup nodded. “One… twochickens.”

Oz clicked his tongue. That little extortionist. Fine, fine. He nodded at Aisling.

Aisling ran her hand over her bracelet. Two whole raw chickens appeared in her hands.

Loup snatched them away and ran off, vanishing over the rocky ridge. She reappeared a few moments later and dropped back down to the field. Loup got to work, scratching a few claws into the ground here, then running to the next spot and scratching again, then again, then again. Thirty minutes passed. Forty. Loup darted back and forth across the field, scratching mark after mark into the dirt with her bare hands.

I’m starting to feel like this might be worth three chickens, Oz thought, standing back and crossing his arms.

At last, Loup stood. Dusting off her hands, she nodded at Oz and Aisling. “There!”

Oz nodded. “Aisling, give her another chicken.”

Aisling nodded. Another chicken exchanged hands, and Loup darted off yet again.

Looking at the symbol scratched in the ground, Oz twisted his lips. It looks like a Celtic knot. All the heads are set in arcs that wind around one another, feeding the energy from one head to the next, spilling it around in a tight knot where it can’t escape. He focused on the mark that Loup had scratched in the earth, drawing energy into his eyes.

Black light appeared before him, twisting along the shape of the knot. Misty hands and faces flickered in the dark, faces screaming, the hands clawing for escape. Around and around, forever stuck in the knot, unable to find their way free to pass on.

It’s some kind of spell formation. A spell formation, powered by ghosts. “A ghost formation,” Oz murmured aloud.

Aisling startled. She looked at him. “Are you sure?”

“Huh? Yeah? I mean, I don’t know what a formal ghost formation looks like, if this is it, but it looks like a bunch of ghosts caught in a formation. A knot-shaped formation.” Oz looked at the formation again and pursed his lips. A bunch of ghosts, all tied together, unable to escape. But merely the heads. Is this some kind of… binding technique? At a guess, cut off the heads and bind them in a formation. Then you have unintelligent, undead bodies that you can command as you please, that are bound to this earthly plane until they find their heads…which they can’t, because the heads are hidden, and nothing escapes the knot for the bodies to ever be able to sense their heads.

Well, I could be incredibly wrong, but if I had to take a wild guess as to what this ghost formation does, that would be the direction I took, just based on how fey magic works.

“A ghost knot,” Aisling said, startled. She backed away.

“Is it bad?”

“Bad? It’s…” Aisling bit her lip. She shook her head. “Do you know what a necromancer is?”

Oz nodded. “Yep.” Who doesn’t? I don’t even need to consult the books for that one. Buuuut doing a quick consult of the books anyways, yeah, necromancers are pretty much what you’d expect from the name. Dark magic that binds the undead to this world. And as you’d expect, they’re bad news.

Hard to not be bad news, when you win the battle of attrition by adding your enemy to your own forces.

“Ghost knots are one of the calling cards of a necromancer. If we have a necromancer on our hands, we need to inform the sects, immediately,” Aisling said firmly.

“No,” Oz disagreed.

“No? You don’t understand, Oz. A necromancer—”

“I understand. But Aisling, listen. If we turn back now, we still don’t know who’s doing this. We know there’s a necromancer, but we don’t know who is the necromancer. Sure, we put a temporary pause to this, but whoever is the mastermind gets off free. They can scurry off and restart this in another region. If we want to actually stop the necromancer, we need to discover who it is, not just what they’re doing.”

Aisling pressed her lips together. She opened her mouth.

“What do we have here?”

Oz and Aisling both whirled. Even Loup spun, startled, instantly raising her hackles and baring her teeth. A man’s silhouette stood atop the stony ridge, backlit by the sun.

The necromancer? Oz backed away, holding his breath.