The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

Chapter 5: What the Plate Would Not Say

He did not remember coming down from the dais.

There was a gap, and then he was at the clerk's table with a disc of stamped tin in his fist, and the clerk was talking in the voice of a man who had said the same thing forty times that morning.

"...provisional charter's six bits at the desk, when you've got six bits. Unverified classes hold themselves ready for second assessment on summons. Don't lose the tag. Next."

The tag was the size of a crown piece and still warm from the die. He had worn one like it on a thong round his neck for fourteen years, until the letters wore smooth. That one had said BEARER. F.

This one said SUMMONER (UNV.) F.

It was a lie pressed into metal by a woman he had never spoken to, in front of three hundred people and two priests, and it was the only thing standing between him and a cell.

Walk, he told his legs. Not fast. Boys who run get looked at.

He walked. Down the long aisle, past the benches of the quality, where Castor Vey sat straight-backed among his kin and did not turn his head. Past the Lowlock corner, where somebody thumped his shoulder and somebody else said, "Summoner, Rav! What'll you call?" and he showed his teeth in what he hoped was a grin. The whole way he could feel a gaze between his shoulder blades, mild and patient as lamplight. He did not look back to see whose.

The door was held for him again.

"Summoner!" Emeric Lyle was beaming as if the tag were his own. "There, now. What did I say? A calling class, out of Lowlock! You'll have parties fighting over you before you're..."

Ravel went past him without a word, and down the nine steps, and did not stop.

Behind him the bright voice faltered. "...Well. Good luck to you, anyway."

It was kindly said, which made it harder to walk away from. In nine years he had never once heard Emeric Lyle say an unkind thing.

Chartery Row at mid-morning was a river of people, and the news had got down it ahead of him, the way news does in a city of canals. A tout by the rank board jerked his chin. "That's him. The Lowlock Summoner." A woman with a party's badge on her shoulder looked him up and down, found the (UNV.), and lost interest. "Come back when you know what you call, lad." An old porter leaning on his carry-frame, with a brass BEARER tag gone green at his throat, spat neatly into the gutter and grinned without malice.

"And here's me telling the lads we'd have you on the frames by summer."

"So did I," Ravel said, and meant it more than the man could know.

He got as far as the corner of Sluice Lane. Then his knees went, and he sat down on a mounting-block with his head between them and shook.

Anselm.

Twenty-six, a parish curate with ink on his cuff, fourteen years away from a vault and a voice saying I had so hoped it would not be you. Here. In Greywater. At his Reading. Had he been there the first time? He must have been. Standing behind a dozing old man at the edge of the lamplight, watching a slum boy be Read a Bearer with a fault on the fourth line, and thinking nothing of it at all.

Not this time. This time he had come forward to look.

Count, Ravel thought. It was what he did when the ground went. Count what you have.

One. The plate had not said Bearer. It had said a word that was not a class.

Two. The examiner had lied for him on the roll, in front of the Church. He did not know why. People did not do that for nothing, and Ilse Varga did not look like a woman who did anything for nothing.

Three. A priest had seen his face.

Four. His eyes had changed colour, and his mother had noticed before he had.

Five. Eleven people, and the sun already high.

Five. A man could carry five things. He got up.

There was one place in Greywater where he could be sure of being alone, and his feet took him there without being asked.

Under the lee of the Ninth Lock's great gate, a brick hut no bigger than a privy crouched half in the water. It was the old gauge-house, where the keeper had once read the levels. It had gone under in the flood of '09 with the keeper inside the lock, and the Lock Board had built a new one on higher ground sooner than pump out the old. Nobody came here. The children of Tanner's Row said it was haunted, and they said by whom.

The door had swollen in its frame. It took his shoulder and most of his breath.

Inside it was dim and green and smelled of river. Silt lay ankle-deep in the corners. On the back wall, under eight years of damp, the ghost of a chalked table still showed: nine columns and twelve rows of bells and levels and gates, in a square, patient hand. The lock schedule. When he was small he had thought it was a spell. Tam Ashlock had made his son say it by heart before he let him so much as touch a paddle, and Ravel found that he could say it still.

He sat down on the keeper's bench, put his back against his father's handwriting, and called the Writ.

It came.

That alone nearly undid him. For a boy Read that morning it would have been a marvel. For Ravel it was like feeling a severed hand grow back. A page of pale grey opened behind his eyes, ruled in thin silver, and black letters wrote themselves down it one line at a time.

NAME Ravel Ashlock

SPECIES Human

LEVEL 1

CLASS Necromancer [UNREGISTERED]

CLASS RANK I / none / ERROR

COMBAT RANK F

HEALTH 60/60 MANA 40/40 STAMINA 56/56

SOUL ENERGY 12/12

ATTRIBUTES STR 6 AGI 7 VIT 6 END 7 INT 9

WIS 11 PER 10 WIL 14 LCK 5

Mana Capacity 8 Mana Control 9

Soul Capacity 3 Soul Authority 2

SKILLS [Raise Husk I] [■■■■■■■]

TITLES none

EQUIPMENT none

RESISTANCES none

CONDITIONS Underfed

ACHIEVEMENTS none

He read it the way he had once read casualty lists: all the way down, and then again, slower.

Level one. That, at least, he had known.

Health, sixty. A Locklurker's bite took fifteen from an unarmoured man. He could be bitten four times.

Strength, six. At thirty-one it had been sixty-one, and he had still been the weakest fighter in the Fourth Lantern.

Mana, forty. He had never had the knack of it, and now he had less.

He looked for [Steady]. He knew it was gone. He looked all the same, the way a tongue goes looking for a pulled tooth. [Burden], gone. [Find the Fallen], gone. Fourteen years of a porter's small, unglamorous, hard-won competence, wiped off the slate as if a clerk had passed a wet rag across it.

But not everything.

Wisdom, eleven. Perception, ten. Willpower, fourteen. He frowned at those. A boy Read that morning scored five or six in each, seven if the gods were kind. The Writ had taken back every point it had ever lent him. These three, it seemed, it had never lent. They were his. They were whatever was left of a man when you subtracted the muscle and the skills and the tin tag: what he had seen, and what he had learned to notice, and fourteen years of getting up again.

It was not much to bring back from the dead. He found he was absurdly glad of it.

Then the line he had been stepping around.

Soul Energy. Soul Capacity. Soul Authority.

He had carried home the papers of two hundred dead delvers, tags and charters and assessors' reports, warriors and mages and one terrified Rank A elementalist. Not one sheet among them had ever held the word soul.

He pressed his attention on the class, as a man presses a bruise.

CLASS Necromancer

GRADE [UNREGISTERED]

ENTRY struck / not found / predates index

DESCRIPTION This class does not exist.

This class has always existed.

■■■■■ the dead ■■■■■ home.

The Writ did not contradict itself. That was the first thing anyone learned about it. It did not joke or explain or change its mind. It was a clerk, not a poet. And here it was arguing with itself in front of him, like a ledger with two different hands in it.

The dead. Home.

He read that line many times.

Because you bring them home, a young knight had said once, picking a Bearer off a list.

He tried the skill. It gave him seven words.

[Raise Husk I. Touch what has died. It will stand.]

No cost. No range. No warning. It read like something written by someone who did not care to say more.

The law had more to say. In Brannoch a man who raised the human dead was guilty of desecration, and got ten years on the dredging gangs for it. In the Canonry they did not trouble with years.

He looked down at his left hand, the one that would have to do the touching, and went very still.

There was a mark at the base of the thumb. One short stroke, purple-black, as fine as a pen-line. He rubbed it. It did not smear. It was under the skin.

He knew that mark. He had made it ten thousand times, in chalk, on the slates they hung at dungeon mouths: one stroke for every body brought out. A tally.

A tally of one. He did not know whose.

Two hundred and eleven, he thought. He had washed them, and straightened their legs, and folded their hands. In all those years he had never once wanted one of them to stand up.

But there were eleven people on Tanner's Row. And a porter does not get to choose his load.

That left the bars.

He had not looked straight at them in fourteen years. He looked now.

Seven black bars, in the place where a skill's name belonged. No tier. No description. They were exactly as they had been when a bored examiner called them a fault, and on every day after. He pushed at them and felt nothing push back.

He almost looked away.

In the margin beside the bars, outside the silver rule, where the Writ never wrote, there were letters. They were not black, and they were not in the Writ's square clerk's serif. They slanted, small and quick and violet, like a note pencilled into a ledger by somebody who was not supposed to have the book.

discharges remaining: 0

The gauge-house was very quiet. Water lapped at the brick.

He had seen that word before. At dusk, on a hill, with his own thread going up into a ruled white sky. Discharged.

So it had held one. Whatever lived behind those bars, whatever had reached into the Writ's own ledger and struck out a death, it had been able to do it exactly once. It had spent that on a Bearer bleeding out against a pillar.

There would be no third morning.

If the drain took him tonight, he would stay taken. So would they. All eleven, and his mother's cough, and Pim's grey sleeve, and a sky that opened like a book.

Far up the canal, the noon bell began to ring.

Ravel Ashlock closed the page, wiped his palms on his good trousers, and stood. He had perhaps ten hours, a skill of seven words, and one life.

He needed something dead.