Chapter 5
A Lesson in Death
“—CK,” Mal said, as he landed on a hard wooden floor.
Whatever words he had tried to say during transit had been censored by the void.
Mal tried to rise to his feet and found that nothing he possessed functioned as it should.
His legs were jelly, his arms could not hold any weight, and his head could not determine which way was up.
After a few moments, Mal’s facilities began to return and he found Kosh standing over him.
“Sorry about that,” Kosh said, helping him up and back into an armchair. “We haven’t got you set up on the system yet; you would have lost that hand if I didn’t warp you here. Admin at this place moves at a troll’s pace. Apologies.”
Mal vaguely understood that what Kosh spoke were, indeed, words and nodded politely as if he understood. Of course he didn’t understand; he was still trying to figure out what was happening and where he was. It took a few full minutes before up was up, down was down, and Mal was Mal again.
“Was I hit by a truck?” Mal said, his mouth finally cooperating.
“Not so much,” Kosh said, chuckling to himself. “I assure you this is better than losing your digits.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Mal said, pulling himself up in his chair.
Having now had time to orient himself, Mal could see he was in a rather quaint little office.
Kosh sat behind a sturdy wooden desk; the walls were a yellowish stone, and around them in every corner, in every nook, and in multiple crannies lay a mess of papers and scrolls.
Stacked high, scattered, distributed, splayed, and sprawled.
It was as if a hurricane had passed through several ancient libraries, then suddenly stopped in this tiny room.
Between the various papers lay odd artifacts: a strange pink doohickey sat on the desk partly filled with sand, several wands lay scattered about, and Mal could have sworn he saw something moving at the back of the office among all that paper.
“Tea?” Kosh said, gesturing to an empty area on the table. (Empty in this sense meaning only three or four papers deep.)
“Yes, gods yes,” Mal found himself saying.
With a pop, a tea set appeared in the “empty” space Kosh had gestured to.
Mal noticed Kosh’s eyes change, just for an instant, in time with the pop; his pupils flattened into lines, then returned, like a camera flash.
Kosh poured them both some tea, at one point conjuring milk, Mal hoped from a nearby fridge, to complete their brews.
Mal sipped his tea and luxuriated in how combobulated he now felt.
“How did the interview go?” Kosh said, easing back into conversation.
“It went well I think. Not that I’d know either way.”
“You think he did it?” Kosh said with an inquisitive eye. Mal thought for a moment Kosh might be testing him, but couldn’t tell through his now-unmoving poker face.
“I don’t know. Probably not. He doesn’t seem the murdering type.” Mal thought back to the kindly seeming old man. He wondered what the “murdering type” would look like. He wasn’t sure he actually knew.
“You haven’t heard much about his youth then. I say youth—he was in his eighties. He had quite the body count. Many long-time villains retired specifically to avoid facing off with him.”
“Really?” Mal said, as if he’d suddenly become an inquisitive child.
“Those trophies on his wall, did you sense anything from them?” Kosh smiled, as if revealing his hand to be a royal flush.
“I did, actually … Wait, how did you know about that?” Mal, while not normally this dull, was slow to the take today.
“Ha, I’d already vetted Taran before Walters sent you and Des. I had a sniff about too. I didn’t find much of anything. Those trophies, though, they have some terrifying stories, I’m sure of it.”
“Did you find out he was sick? Des managed to get it out of Elaine as we were leaving.”
“No, they didn’t mention it,” Kosh said, nodding. “I’ll let Walters know about that one.”
Mal felt a certain satisfaction. Their little outing might actually have helped provide something useful.
He had to admit that he didn’t get the information himself, but he had at least been helpful adjacent.
That’s much better than disaster adjacent.
It certainly couldn’t hurt Mal’s position in the Order.
This false satisfaction vanished quickly with Kosh’s next words.
“Shall we crack on then?”
Ah, Mal thought. The real reason he was here. Mal nodded reluctantly and Kosh continued.
“As you might expect, I don’t have much in the way of a curriculum, so I wanted to use today to figure out where you’re at. We can kind of fudge it from there. Sound good?”
Mal let out an internal sigh of relief. There wouldn’t be any practical component to today’s lesson, and as such, very little likelihood of him having a panic attack.
“Yeah, that sounds good to me.”
“Excellent. So what have you been able to do thus far?”
Mal thought for a moment and wondered just how honest he should be. He’d never tried to explain this to anyone before; it felt a bit like having to describe something sensitive to a doctor. But like a doctor, Kosh had probably seen it all. If anyone was going to understand, it would be Kosh.
“So the obvious one,” Mal began, “my parents. I have vague flashbacks, but I’m not entirely sure what I did. Whatever it was, it scared them both senseless.”
“And you brought them both back?”
“Yeah, right after they … y’know.”
Kosh nodded and gave Mal a knowing, consoling smile.
“Since then I keep them topped up once a week. I don’t really know how that works or why the magic stops each week.
Other than that, I haven’t done much. A few accidental zombies here and there; I revived my great aunt once because Mum wanted to know about some family recipe.
And, y’know, I helped Walters with Murray. ”
“Yes, of course. Thank you for that, I wasn’t feeling up to it that day. Nice to finally have someone who can cover my shift, as it were.”
“So, is that helpful?” Mal said, waiting for the doctor to give his verdict.
“Very helpful,” Kosh said. “I’m sure we can muddle along nicely from here. I’m by no means a master, but I know enough to fill in most of the gaps—or would you prefer to jump right into some practical exercises?”
Mal’s nervous fidgeting at the mention of “practical exercises” was obvious even to him.
“Some explanations then?” Kosh said, with a smile.
Mal nodded.
“So conventional wisdom splits death in two. There’s the act itself, the death of the body, and there’s the journey of the soul thereafter.
But in the middle, for a split second, there’s a junction.
A crossroads between life and death. Here is the focus of our magic: the soul and the body, and how they combine. ”
Mal nodded listeningly.
“With Murray, you essentially brought the soul back to that juncture, and then rebooted the body so the soul could retake possession. That takes a lot of energy, hard to hold for long. What’s happening with your parents seems different.
Whatever you did upon their—” Kosh waved his hand as if to skip over the word death.
Mal nodded appreciatively.
“—seems to have bound their souls here. Probably to an object of some kind. So what you describe as ‘topping them up’ is probably just your basic corpsal reanimation. Their souls do the rest for you. The fact it lasts a week without you being in their direct vicinity is quite an achievement. You should be proud.”
Kosh seemed very sincere with this last comment, and for the life of him Mal could not figure out why.
It certainly didn’t feel like some great achievement.
Mal couldn’t tell if being good at something terrible made him feel better or worse.
What’s next, giving medals to people who are particularly good at murdering?
Who would possibly think that is a good idea?
“I see you still have mixed feelings about your powers …” Kosh said, as if reading Mal’s mind.
“Is it that obvious?” Mal said, trying to flatten his demeanor.
“Yes, very much so.” Kosh’s bluntness forced Mal to let out a little chuckle. “What is it about your powers that bothers you so much?”
“I guess I don’t see how I can use them and not be evil? Does that make sense?”
“I’m not sure exactly what you mean.”
“Like, the power is evil, so surely that would make me evil by using it? Right?”
“While I disagree,” Kosh said, “let’s try something. What do you call someone who goes around stabbing people all day?”
“A serial killer?” Mal said, confused.
“A surgeon,” Kosh said. “You walked right into that one.”
“Ah, yeah, kind of.”
“If you describe the day-to-day of what surgeons do as ‘cutting flesh’ you’d be technically correct, but you make them sound like monsters. But that’s not reality, is it? The reality is they save lives.”
“Yeah, but after a while don’t surgeons start to see people differently? Think of them as something other than people?”
“Maybe, but not necessarily. I think that’s down to the individual.”
“That’s fine for surgeons,” Mal said, “but what’s the reality when the day-to-day of what you’re doing is defiling corpses?”
“I’d say disturbing corpses; you’re not really touching them,” Kosh said.
“But I get your point. Well, I guess then it’s in how you use it.
I’d agree with you if you were just messing around in a graveyard willy-nilly.
But you’re not. Necromancy has many uses that could benefit society: helping solve crimes for one, historical research for two.
Helping ghosts move on is a common one. Medical research.
I bet many doctors wish they knew what patients felt in their last few hours or days so as to better understand what they died of.
I mean, mediums pretend to do what we do and they bring peace to countless loved ones.
If you opened up the same service, at least you wouldn’t be scamming people. ”
“You could solve inheritance disputes,” Mal said, surprising himself.
“Exactly,” Kosh said. “I’m not saying it’s very savory, or that if you do it enough you won’t become jaded.
But it has its uses.” Mal actually found himself agreeing with Kosh.
He still felt the same hatred for his powers, but he couldn’t argue with his logic.
Maybe Mal could find a way to use them for good, like Kosh did.
An ethical necromancer; Mal liked the sound of that.
“Also, not to gross you out,” Kosh added, “but what do you think surgeons and doctors practice on first?”
“Oh god,” Mal said, as the realization sunk in.
“That’s much closer to defiling than what we do. Just something to think about.”
“I’d rather not, to be honest.”
“Yeah, I don’t blame you on that one,” Kosh said, smiling at what they clearly both thought felt like some kind of breakthrough. “Well then, this feels like a good point to stop for today. I’ll go away and start drawing up some actual lesson plans, and you’d better get ready for your assignment.”
“Oh crap,” Mal said, realizing the time.
“Exactly,” Kosh said. “I can warp you back upstairs if you’d like?”
“I think I’ll use my legs,” Mal said, as the pair shared a chuckle.
Mal thanked Kosh for the lesson and the tea, and made an escape from the Order’s headquarters.
It took Mal five minutes to navigate the strange corridors and passageways that ran through the headquarters before he finally found the grand foyer he’d been greeted in a few days ago.
He waved and nodded to people as he passed; all seemed to remember him, while he had little to no recollection of them whatsoever.
He hadn’t found the time to go back over the footage of his induction.
When he’d made his way out and found himself in a portal station queue, he began to peruse the files he’d been given for his assignment. He’d saved the information to his hard drive and burned the real thing, safe in the knowledge that no snooping detectives would find it.
There was very little information on the nest, just a location, a time his “shift” started, and a few photos of people Mal assumed were vampires, as they’d been labeled vampires in the file.
They looked normal enough. They were photographed out in the sun, which perplexed Mal.
He didn’t know all that much about vampires if he was honest. There was plenty of non-magical folklore about them, and even more non-magical fiction, all completely useless as far as he could tell.
It seemed to Mal that vampirism was just like any other transformation, something a great soul demanded for you to use their magic.
Except this one was permanent and illegal.
Why the government had made this one illegal he couldn’t say.
There were plenty of dangerous transformations.
Werewolves, for example—they were legal and they lost control of themselves once a month.
The government seemed perfectly fine with issuing them a license and ensuring they had a “safe room” for a few nights a month; all you needed was a note from your GP.
Maybe the blood drinking? Maybe the eternal life?
He knew that was what the Order had against them.
Maybe the Order had some sway over the government all those years back when the law was passed.
Mal didn’t like the thought of that, though he wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
Maybe he needed to do some digging into the history of the Order and figure out what he’d gotten himself into.
Maybe he should have done some goddamn research into vampires before he set off to go stalk them.
These were all nice thoughts but, as of now, he had no time.
He made for the location in the file and hoped that his assignment would go as smoothly as the interview had. If only life was so kind, ey?