The Necromancer

Chapter 3, Part 1

Skip bounded up a mossy log so tall that I couldn't even touch the top of it. From there, she scampered up a nearby tree trunk and balanced on a branch with her arms held straight out on either side. Even from down on the forest floor, I could see the grin on her face. It was like watching a fish get released back into water; it was obvious that Skip just felt at home in forest.

"You're in a good mood," I commented.

She dove from the branch in an impressive swan dive and landed in a crouch on the forest floor. She must be part cat. Then she sprang up and turned to me with a wide smile. "Why wouldn't I be?"  She practically danced up a nearby rock, full of energy. "This is the first lead we've had on Amcerlizar's location after nearly a year of searching! God, I should have asked you about this sooner so we wouldn't have wasted all that time heading in the wrong direction!"

"Yeah, why didn't you ask me sooner?" I really hadn't thought about it, but I'd been traveling with Mog and Skip for days before all of this came out. And they knew the whole time that I was a Necromancer. Surely they should have connected the dots.

"Well..." Even through the shadows of the forest, I could tell she was blushing a bit. "I just... when we met, you were not really..." I don't think I'd ever heard her stammer like this. "You weren't exactly presentable."

"SMELLY," Mog volunteered through the trees from behind me, causing me to jump. Despite his massive size, he was surprisingly good at blending in and sneaking up on me whenever he wanted. Having said his part, he went off crashing through the brush to go explore some more.

Skip giggled a bit. "That too. I just didn't know how small the Necromancer community was, and I didn't think that someone like Grand Master Amcerlizar would really know someone ..."

"Like me," I finished for her. She pursed her lips and nodded apologetically. I couldn't really blame her, though. I was being chased by Paladins like a rodent, and I was covered in feces from falling in that ditch. Wouldn't a friend of Amcerlizar's just flee back to the Blighted Lands and hide out there? At the very least, non-magic users would probably assume that any peer of Amcerlizar could snap his fingers and have an army of skeletons ready to defend against any Paladins.  Skip had seen a bedraggled bum without a single minion to his name and naturally assumed that I was the bottom of the barrel as far as Necromancers go. "That's ok," I told her. "I would have thought the same."

Mog picked the perfect time to rush up to us, holding a snake that was doing its best to twist out of from between the ogre's fingers. It had to be over six feet long but it seemed like a miniscule worm in his big hands. The snake was beautifully patterned with ribbons of purple, yellow, and orange: hardly good camouflage for the shadowy green forest. And that just meant that it was extremely poisonous. 

"LOOK," he told Skip, holding it right in her face. I could almost see it coiling up, getting ready to strike out at her. And right when it was about to lunge forward, Mog moved his hands again causing it to just lash out at the air. "PRETTY!" Mog said with almost chidlike wonder. He'd brought back a number of things to show to me and Skip over the past hour or so: a weird branch he found, a square shaped rock, an old cow skull...

"Yes, Mog. Really nice." Skip shot me a sidelong smirk. "Now put it back where you found it." He bolted off back into the forest and disappeared through the trees, still giggling about the snake. Skip and I just watched him go with the same bemused smile on each of our faces. 

"So!" she said as she swung energentically from a low-hanging branch like a monkey. "Tell me more about this other Necromancer that you're leading us to?" She soared forward and landed in a thicket of ferns with a laugh.

"Lamneras," I told her again. "A friend of mine from back at the Academy. We were both in the same class with Amcerlizar." We'd been headed toward Milotia so that she could turn me in, which I certainly hadn't forgotten. So I convinced her to go to Bermatora instead, where I'd at least have one friendly face to back me up in case she decided to sell me to the Paladins anyway. She seemed pretty trustworthy at the moment, but I'd seen how she'd convinced those Paladins back when we first met. There was no such thing as trust with a girl with her abilities.

"And he'll know Amcerlizar's incantation?" Maybe I hinted at that possibility when convincing her that we should go this way.

"I certainly hope so," I told her. Lamneras almost certainly wouldn't know it; he hated that jerk even more than I did after Amcerlizar completely humiliated him in a one of our lessons on destruction magic. Completely torched Lamneras's robes to a pile of black cinders, revealing his dirty underwear to the entire class. I'm pretty sure most of our classmates still referred to him as Flamin' Ass. But as long as Skip believed that I could lead her to Amcerlizar, she'd protect me instead of getting rid of me. 

"Gods, I'm so excited!" She said. "It's like the tips of my fingers are tingling!" Hopefully she didn't eat some of my mandrake root; I needed it. "What does your friend there do? Is he a big Necromancer warlord too with a whole mass of skeletons and all that?"

"Errr, not quite. he's... well, he's currently Lord Berman's Potions Master, actually." A position that no respectable Necromancer would ever want to be in. Potion brewers were pretty much the lowest rung of the sorcery totem pole. 

Skip didn't seem to know that though. She just smiled. "Oh, nice." 

 The one good thing about it would be that he'd have all the ingredients I could need to replenish all of my abilities. Get Lirk a new body, maybe hit the graveyard and find some new minions, power my destruction magic again... everything I needed to get right back into fighting shape. I may be too proud to ever be a Potions Master, but I certainly wasn't too proud to steal from a Lord's stockpiles of magical ingredients.

 Skip stopped suddenly and climbed up a gnarled oak to survey the forest. "How long has Mog been gone?"

I glanced around too, even though my eyesight was no match for Skip's, and I certainly wasn't willing to climb  tree to help look. So my searching didn't add very much. "Not since he brought back that snake."

"MOG!" She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted into the trees. 

The buzzing insects and chirping birds fell silent just long enough to hear the faint, distant reply: "STUCK!"

Skip rolled her eyes and jumped down from the tree. "I swear, if he sank into another bog, I'll kill him. It took a week for the algae to all wash off last time." She took off running through the forest in the direction his voice seemingly came from. I reluctantly did my best to follow her, doing about as well as I did the first day we'd met. Meaning that I stumbled over nearly every single branch, rock, and root in my path. Skip charged ahead and disappeared into the undergrowth, and I was only able to find her again when I heard her shout: "Oh, crap!" 

I fought my way through one last bramble bush and came up next to her, with Mog standing in a clearing just a few dozen feet away between two massive tree trunks. "What is it?" I asked. I couldn't really see the problem: the Ogre was just standing there squirming a bit. Then a beam of light managed to make its way through the canopy and fell across Mog's left shoulder, where I saw a hatched pattern of gossamer lines. 

"SPIDERS!" Mog called out, straining against the nearly-invisible web strung between the tree trunks.

I took a step back. "Ooooh no! No, no, no. I do not like spiders." A shiver ran down my spine just thinking about it. "All those little legs crawling around under my clothes!"

Skip gave up on trying to cut the webs; if Mog wasn't strong enough to pull himself free, a knife probably wouldn't make much difference. "Well, you won't have to worry about little legs, then." She nodded to the opposite end of the clearing, where a large black shape at least the size of a horse came gliding out of the forest on eight gigantic legs. 

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