Chapter 9 #2
Otto shudders. He can’t help it. The thought of inhabiting another body is grotesque, but even worse is that in this way, he can live on indefinitely.
Suffering is infinitely more bearable when you know that it’ll end.
“I’m attached to this one, thank you very much,” he says with a lightness he doesn’t feel.
The necromancer stops walking and tilts his head back, his nostrils flaring and his mouth half-open as he drinks in the air in greedy gulps. “Say, do you smell smoke and meat cooking?”
Otto does. Despite being dead and thus requiring no food, the scent makes him salivate.
It doesn’t take long for them to reach the root of that smell.
In a clearing, two dirty men are crouched around a fire.
They are skinny and filthy, their eyes large and wild.
Otto has seen that look before in men whose minds have never left behind the battlefield.
These men certainly look like soldiers to Otto.
Instinctively, he places his hands on the pommel of his sword, ready to pull it out.
Then, his eyes fall on what the men have been cooking, and his stomach twists, and the bit of dandelion he ate tries to climb its way up his throat.
He gags, spits it out. It hasn’t been digested at all.
Knowing that people who are starving sometimes turn to eating the dead is one thing; to see it, actually see it, the cut-up body and the yellow bone and the meat marbled with fat on which flies crawl, well, that’s something else entirely.
Next to him, the necromancer begins to laugh. Soon, he’s shaking with it. In his black clothes, he looks like a twitching beetle. “Pretty perverse, this,” he says when he finally has breath to speak with.
One of the men lowers his eyes, ashamed. The other picks up a rusty knife, the whites of his eyes showing like a shying animal. “What do you want?” he asks.
“Otto, would you kindly dispose of these men?” the necromancer commands, because for all that it is wrapped up to look like a question, it is an order that Otto can’t refuse.
Despair and hatred surge inside of him. It would be easier to bear this servitude if only the necromancer wouldn’t act as if it is voluntary.
The sooner they find this skull, and he can wish for his life and freedom back, the better.
Don’t think, he tells himself as he wields his sword, cutting neatly through skin and fat and arteries, for just as he knows how to keep a man alive for days as he tortures every drop of information out of him, so does he know how to kill quickly.
Don’t think don’t think don’t think whatever you do don’t think…
Thinking only gets you killed.
Though he’s dead already, so what does it matter?
When it is done, and Otto has wiped his sword and hands clean on clumps of grass, he finds that the necromancer has gathered some body parts of the unfortunate wretch whom the two men were cooking and is arranging them on the ground.
Together, they fail to make a whole body, and the necromancer clicks his tongue in annoyance.
“What are you doing?” Otto asks, his nose and mouth pressed to the inside of his arm.
The body parts are ripe with rot. The two men he just killed must have been absolutely desperate to even consider eating it, let alone going so far as to actually cook it.
Perhaps it was a mercy that the necromancer ordered them killed.
Their death by the sword was quick and thus much kinder than the slow violence of food poisoning.
“I think this may be the peasant who won my skull from your dear friend Gottfried,” the necromancer says.
“That begs the question: Who has my skull now? I’d like to know who we are pursuing and must ultimately face if we are to get it back, though how am I to do that if I have a corpse that lacks the parts it needs to talk? ”
For a moment, Otto fears that he must fish bones out of the boiling pot, or worse, cut open the men he has just killed and root around their guts for whatever bits of flesh, bone, and gristle they haven’t digested yet.
The necromancer glances at him from the corner of his eye and chuckles. “No need, dear Otto. Go find the peasant’s head for me, please. The bones tell me it has rolled that way.”
As Otto goes to look for the head, he tries to extinguish his thoughts the way he would a candle, completely and all at once. But trying not to think is only possible if he focuses on his senses instead, and that’s hardly preferable.
You do not see, he thinks as he bends over the head, which is lying between some weeds at the edge of the clearing. It is dented with rot, the skin a greenish gray. The eyes are gone, as is part of the tongue. Eaten, most likely, but by man or beast?
You do not feel how slimy it is, Otto thinks as he picks it up, careful to hold it far from his clothes. Some black fluid dribbles out of its mouth.
You do not smell the stink of that fluid, so strong you can taste it, which you do not. You do not hear the way it crunches and squelches as you carry it.
But he does.
Of course he does.
He places it at the necromancer’s feet, then plucks some grass. There’s a way to whistle with a blade of grass; Frieda knows the trick of it. He sets to braiding it instead, anything to distract himself.
The necromancer frowns as he scrapes a bit of mold off the head’s temple with his dagger. “Oh, but I do hate it when they’re all cut up and decayed like this. What spirit wants to be called back to a body as rotted as that?”
It’s not as if the farmhand had any trouble with that, Otto thinks and shivers.
The necromancer looks at him with an expression halfway between offense and hurt. “There’s a big difference between simply puppeteering a corpse and calling back its soul.”
Can he see into my mind? Otto wonders. He must, surely, or else how could he know Otto’s full name? And why not? Why shouldn’t a witch who can puppeteer corpses and soldiers around also be able to see into the hearts and heads of people he has enslaved?
“This dead peasant might not be of any use to you if he was already dead when the skull was taken,” Otto says. His hands are trembling, and he keeps dropping the pieces of grass he has gathered. He balls his hands into fists, crushing the grass, releasing its good clean scent.
“You’re wrong there. Once the dead have been called back to this mortal plain, they have certain powers.”
“What sort of powers?”
“Knowledge, the power to spin illusions, manipulation of the will through dreams. You might try your hand at those yourself one of these days, Otto. The longer you are undead, the more powerful you grow. It’ll be something to look forward to, I’m sure.”
Otto can’t feel queasy anymore, not exactly, not without a working stomach, but he feels something close to it. Maybe the necromancer is right. Maybe this is Hell.
Meanwhile, the necromancer is still talking.
“This peasant might know where the skull is, though I don’t see how he can tell us anything without a tongue and lungs.
” The necromancer prods the dead man’s throat, and it takes all of Otto’s willpower to focus on the grass bleeding sap into his palm rather than on the squelching.
“The larynx has been crushed. What a pity,” the necromancer sighs. He saunters over to one of the men Otto has killed, crouches next to him, peers into his mouth. “This one still has a functional larynx. Are you any good with a needle and thread, Otto?”
He is, though soon, he really wishes he wasn’t.