The Necromancer King

What Lives Beneath The World

The entrance to the tunnel was not impressive.

A rusted iron door half buried in a hillside at the edge of the forest, so covered in dead vines and old dirt that a person could walk past it a hundred times and never know it was there.

Kane stood in front of it and pressed his palm flat against the metal and felt what was on the other side the way you feel heat from a fire through a wall.

Hundreds of thousands of them.

Sleeping in the dark. Packed into the earth like seeds waiting for rain.

"This is it," he said.

Seraphine stood beside him looking at the door with an expression that was working very hard to look calm. "It smells like three hundred years of death." She said looking irritated

"It is three hundred years of death," Kane said with a chuckle.

"Wonderful," she said. "Open it."

The door groaned when Kane pulled it. A sound like something that had not spoken in centuries deciding it still remembered how.

Cold air pushed out from the darkness beyond it, heavy and still and carrying the particular smell of deep earth and old stone.

Seraphine raised her torch and stepped inside.

Kane followed her in.

The moment he crossed the threshold the power in his blood woke up completely.

It was not like before.

This was something larger than numbers.

Something that filled the entire space around him and pressed gently against the walls of his awareness from every direction at once.

Kane stopped walking and stood very still with his eyes closed and just felt it.

Hundreds of thousands of souls lying quietly in the dark beneath his feet and inside the walls on either side and above his head in the ceiling and below the floor he was standing on, stacked and layered and going down deeper than he could reach.

All of them were aware that he was here.

All of them were waiting.

"Kane." Seraphine's voice was quiet. "What is happening to you?"

He opened his eyes. "I can feel all of them." he replied.

"How many?" she asked.

He reached outward with the power, pushing it out like hands spreading wide in a dark room, feeling the edges of what was there.

He could not find the edges.

"Hundreds of thousands," he said. "Maybe more."

Seraphine looked at the wall beside her. Just a stone wall with dark patches of old moisture and the occasional root pushing through the cracks.

She looked at it differently now. Like it had just told her something about itself that changed everything.

She turned back to Kane.

"And they all answer to you?" she said.

"Yes."

She nodded once. Then she turned and kept walking.

"Then we are not as exposed as I thought," she said. "Let us keep moving."

Kane raised his hand.

Fifty soldiers rose from the walls on either side of them without effort, their old grey bones sliding out of the stone like they had simply been leaning against it all this time waiting for someone to call.

They fell into formation around Kane and Seraphine automatically, twenty five on each side, moving in perfect silence.

Seraphine looked at them.

"That is either very reassuring or very unsettling," she said.

"I guess it's both," Kane said.

They walked on.

Seraphine's torch started dimming about twenty minutes in. She did not say anything, she just kept walking at the same pace, adjusting her eyes to the reduced light with the particular quiet stubbornness of someone who had been dealing with difficult situations alone for a very long time.

Kane moved one of his soldiers ahead of them where its purple eye fire threw enough light to see the path clearly.

Seraphine glanced at it. Then she adjusted her pace to match the soldier's without a word.

Neither of them mentioned it.

The tunnel narrowed about ten minutes later, the walls closing in until there was only enough room to walk a single file.

Seraphine went first, Kane followed close behind. In the narrow space his arm brushed against hers every few steps and neither of them moved away from it.

Malachar's voice came quiet from the back of his mind.

"You are not paying attention to your surroundings," he said.

"I am paying perfect attention," Kane said inside his own head.

"You are paying attention to something," Malachar said. "I am not certain it is the tunnel."

Kane did not answer that.

The tunnel widened again and they walked side by side.

The silence between them was different from the silence at the beginning, less like two strangers being careful around each other.

More like two people who had stopped needing to fill every quiet moment with words.

Seraphine tripped on an uneven stone.

Kane caught her arm before she went down.

She righted herself immediately and he let go immediately and they both kept walking like nothing had happened at all.

"Thank you," she said after a moment. Quietly. Like the words surprised her on their way out.

"You did not have to say that," he said.

"I know," she said. "I said it anyway."

He looked at her sideways in the purple torchlight. She was looking straight ahead with that straight jaw and that small old scar and those sharp black eyes that missed absolutely nothing.

Then Malachar spoke again. And this time his voice was different.

"There is something I need to tell you," he said. "About your father."

Kane's pace slowed without meaning to.

"His name was Dorian Ashveil," Malachar said. "He was not a poor man who knew nothing. He was the last surviving carrier of the original necromancer bloodline before you.

He spent years moving through this city quietly collecting evidence, documents, testimonies, proof of everything the Shadow Council has done and hidden for a thousand years." A pause. "He was three days from making all of it public when he disappeared."

Kane stopped walking.

Seraphine stopped two steps ahead and turned to look at him. She saw his face and did not say anything. She just waited.

"Disappeared," Kane repeated.

"Taken," Malachar said. "There is a difference. A person who runs leaves traces of choosing to go. Dorian left no traces. He was simply there one day and gone the next. Everything he had gathered went with him."

"Is he alive?" Kane asked inquisitively

A silence that stretched long enough to answer the question before Malachar spoke.

"I do not know," Malachar said. "I exist inside you Kane. I cannot see the outside world. I cannot track the living.

The moment your father disappeared he disappeared from everything I can reach." Another pause. "I am sorry. I know that is not enough."

Kane stood in the middle of the tunnel surrounded by fifty skeletal soldiers and one girl who had stopped and was watching him with those quiet eyes and said nothing because she understood that this particular moment did not need words.

His father was not dead.

His father was missing.

Somewhere out there in the world was a man who carried the same blood Kane carried. Who had known the same truth Kane was only beginning to understand, who had tried to do something about it and been taken before he could.

Kane started walking again. Faster than before.

"Then we find the truth he was trying to make public," he said. "We finish what he started."

Malachar was quiet for a moment.

"That," he said, "is exactly what I was hoping you would say."

They were close to the eastern end of the tunnel when the soldiers stopped.

All fifty of them. At exactly the same moment. Kane had not told them to stop. They simply stopped, like a sound cutting off, and stood completely still facing the dark ahead.

The purple fire in their eye sockets was burning differently. Brighter. More focused.

Seraphine felt it too. Her shadows thickened around her automatically, spreading out from her hands and pooling along the floor like dark water.

"What is that," she said quietly.

Kane reached forward with the power. Searching the dark ahead carefully.

Something was there.

Not a soldier. Not a person. Not anything with a body. Something that existed in the space between the physical world and whatever lay beyond it.

The system activated urgently across Kane's vision.

UNKNOWN ENTITY DETECTED.

Classification: Ancient, Pre Church era.

Threat assessment: Cannot be calculated.

This entity does not respond to standard necromancer commands.

Warning: It has been aware of your presence since you entered the tunnel.

Kane stared at the message.

Then a voice came from the dark ahead of them.

It was not Malachar's voice, it was something completely different.

The sound of it filled the tunnel without echoing, which was wrong, which meant it was not entirely sound.

"The king's blood returns," it said. "We have waited a long time."

Seraphine moved to stand directly beside Kane. Not behind him. Beside him. Her shadows spread wide around both of them.

"What is that," she said under her breath.

Malachar had gone completely silent.

For the first time since Kane woke him in the forest Malachar had nothing to say.

That silence was the most frightening thing that had happened all night.

"Malachar," Kane said quietly inside his mind. "What is that?"

There was a long pause.

Then Malachar said one word in a voice that sounded like a man seeing something he believed was gone forever.

"Impossible," he whispered.

The dark ahead of them shifted.

And a figure emerged from it. Not walking. Simply becoming visible the way shadows become visible when light moves across them.

It had a shape that suggested a person but the edges of it moved like smoke and the place where its eyes should have been held were two points of deep cold blue fire that were nothing like the purple of Kane's soldiers.

Nothing like anything Kane had ever seen.

It stopped five meters ahead of them and looked at Kane with those cold blue points of light.

"The tomb has been awake for three days," it said. "Since the night your blood touched the bone. We felt it from down here." It paused. "The ones above felt it too. They sent their greatest soldier to stop you from reaching it." Those cold eyes did not move. "He is not at the checkpoint to catch you, young king. He is there to reach the tomb before you do."

Kane looked at Seraphine.

She looked at him.

In Valdris City, in a building made entirely of pale stone and silence, Aldric Voss walked down a corridor that nobody below the rank of Senior Inquisitor was permitted to enter.

He was a thin man. Older than he looked from a distance, with sharp careful features and grey eyes that moved across everything they touched with the same flat professional attention. .

He wore plain dark clothing with a single silver cross at his collar. No decoration and no display. Aldric Voss had not needed to display anything in twenty years.

His reputation did that for him.

He stopped outside a heavy wooden door at the end of the corridor. The guard beside it straightened immediately. Voss did not look at him. He just opened the door and went inside.

The room was small and cold with a single table and two chairs and a torch on the wall that threw more shadow than light. A man sat in the chair on the far side of the table. He is middle aged, soft around the edges.

The kind of face that belonged to a man who had spent his life doing small work in a small world and had never expected anything larger to reach him.

The Church deacon from Valdris City Cemetery.

The man who had paid Kane three copper coins for a full night's work, and told him to be grateful.

He looked up when Voss entered. His eyes were red and his hands on the table were shaking and he had the particular look of a man who had been sitting in a cold room for a long time understanding gradually that nobody was coming to tell him this was a mistake.

Voss sat down across from him. Folded his hands on the table. Looked at the deacon with those flat grey eyes.

"Tell me about the boy," he said. His voice was perfectly pleasant. Conversational. The voice of a man asking about the weather.

"I already told the other one everything," the deacon said. "I barely knew him. He was just a grave digger. Nobody. He dug holes and I paid him and that was all."

"I know," Voss said.

The deacon blinked. "Then why am I still here?"

Voss looked at him for a moment.

"When did you first employ him?" he asked.

"Three years ago. Maybe four. He just showed up one morning asking for work. There is always work at a cemetery." The deacon shifted in his chair. "I paid him fair wages."

"Three copper coins for a full night's work," Voss said. "Is that a fair wage?"

The deacon's mouth opened. Closed.

"Times are difficult," he said weakly.

"Yes," Voss agreed. "They are."

He unfolded his hands. Reached into the pocket of his jacket. Set something small on the table between them. Three copper coins. He set them down one at a time, slowly, with the particular deliberateness of a man making a point he intends to be remembered.

The deacon stared at them.

"I am not an important man," the deacon said. His voice had gone very small. "I do not know anything about dark magic or necromancers or any of this. I am just a church deacon who runs a cemetery. You have to let me go. I have done nothing."

"No," Voss agreed. "You have done nothing." He looked at the deacon with those grey eyes that held no cruelty and no pleasure and no feeling of any kind. Just an assessment. "That is precisely the problem."

He stood up.

"The boy dug graves in your cemetery for three years," Voss said, straightening his jacket. "You paid him wages designed to keep him too hungry to think clearly. You called him names. You made sure he stayed small and cold and invisible."

He picked up the three copper coins from the table and held them for a moment. "You had three years to notice what he was. Three years to report it. Three years to do your duty to the Church you claim to serve."

He set the coins back down.

One at a time.

Slowly.

"You did nothing," Voss said. "And now because of your nothing a necromancer is loose in my city with a system I have been trying to prevent for nineteen years." He looked at the deacon for the last time with those flat careful eyes. "The Church does not only punish the wicked. It removes uncertainty. You are uncertain."

He walked to the door.

"Wait." The deacon's voice cracked. He was on his feet now, hands pressed flat against the table. "Please. I have a family. I have children. I am nobody. I know nothing. Please."

Voss stopped with his hand on the door.

He did not turn around.

"The boy you called grave rat for three years," he said quietly, "had no family. No children. He knew nothing. He had nobody to say please to."

He opened the door.

He stepped through it.

He nodded once to the guard standing outside to finish him off and closed the door.

Aldric Voss walked back toward his office at the same pace he did everything.

He passed two junior Inquisitors in the corridor who pressed themselves against the wall to let him through. He did not notice them. He was already thinking about something else entirely.

In his office he sat down at his desk. Pulled the Ashveil file toward him. Opened it to the page with Dorian Ashveil's name at the top.

He read for a moment. Then he picked up his pen and wrote below everything else on the page.

The son has entered the underground passage. He will reach the tomb within the hour. Move Seraph Cross now. The tomb must not open!!

He set the pen down.

Aldric Voss sat at his desk in the candlelight and looked at nothing in particular and felt nothing in particular and that was the most terrible thing about him.

Not the cruelty.

The quietness in him.