Dirge for a Necromancer Read Free Page B

do! You need something to do, Raet. When you don’t have anything to do, all you do is sleep and drink and play chess, and you yell a lot. You’ve got a short temper when you’re bored, Raet.”
    “I’ve got a short temper all the time.”
    “Yeah, I guess,” the unicorn allowed. “But it’s even shorter when you’re bored. Besides, it’s only going to be a few years. Ten at most. Ten years isn’t anything, is it, Raet?”
    Raettonus sighed again. “No,” he admitted. “Ten years isn’t anything at all. I can put up with some centaur’s snot-nosed whelps for ten years. I’ve put up with you for several times as long, after all.”
    “That’s the spirit,” said Brecan cheerfully. Raettonus scowled, irritated that he hadn’t understood the dig.
    A gryphon cried somewhere in the distance, and Raettonus turned his face in that direction, toward the blood-colored burn that was the Koa Kurok desert. The beast’s sad call echoed over the empty landscape, and Raettonus found himself thinking of Slade’s coat of arms—a gryphon rampant over a field of red checkered with black. Close on the heels of that thought came the memory that had been with him as he had awoken. He needed only to close his eyes to see it all over again, and he did. Slade’s room, with the drapes blowing wildly, the rain coming down outside in hard sheets, the shutters clacking against stone, sounding like a heart beating out of control, the blood soaking into the sheets…
    When all was said and done, the blood had soaked all the way through and had begun to fall onto the stone beneath the bed in great, coalescing drops by the time he’d finally gone to clean it.
    “Please don’t hate me,” Slade had said to him, taking his hand. “Please don’t hate me for this.”
    Raettonus couldn’t hate him. Not him. No matter what.
    Slowly, he opened his eyes and wondered why it had to always be that memory. There were other things he might have thought about; there were better times with Slade. Slade had taught him how to ride, and how to hold a sword, and how to read. There had been good days, back then. Why did it always have to be that memory that was so ingrained in his mind that he only needed to close his eyes and he was there in that cold room, reeking of blood?
    All at once, he noticed that they were rather closer to the mountains. Brecan was singing a song about a maiden who had killed herself and her lover who, seeing this, had flung himself into the ocean. Raettonus pinched one of Brecan’s ears and the unicorn yelped. “Stop singing that,” he said, narrowing his eyes.
    “Ouch—sorry, Raet,” Brecan said quickly. “What song would you rather I sing?”
    “I’d rather you sing none at all.”
    They flew on in silence.
     
    * * *
     
    At night, the wolves came out and prowled the world. The Kingdom of Zylekkha had no shortage of wolves. They wandered the wastelands, scuffing the ice and the sand as they lurched over the rises and through the valleys. They roamed the forests and the cliffs and the plains land. Zylekkha was full of wolves, and the night belonged to them. The moon was full up by the time Brecan reached the mountains, and on his back Raettonus could hear the wolves howling.
    Even in daylight, the Dragon’s Teeth were a dreary, unwelcoming place full of sandy soil and sheer rock faces. The paths were uneven and narrow, and in places they crumbled away to nothing. The bridges, where they existed at all, were made of wood and rope; they were rotting, treacherous things that might break beneath one’s weight with little warning. The only trees that grew in the Dragon’s Teeth Mountains were thin, sparse things, and even those were not very common. There were a few nice places—scenic ponds and slow moving stretches of river that sat in some of the valleys where the grass grew green around them and some hardier trees managed to eke out a fair survival—but they were few and far between.
    That was in the