A Necromancer Arises

Betn’ah paused irresolutely in the alleyway. She could sense that there were people ahead, and she worried they might be her tormentors.

In the breathless heat of the narrow gap between the two clay-built structures, she considered her options. Behind her was a path leading to the marketplace, where she had snatched the bread roll clutched tightly in her hands. She had taken this passage since it led to a small courtyard, which was usually deserted at this time of day. But through the mysterious sense that gave her an impression of where nearby living creatures could be found, she was sure that three people were lurking ahead of her.

She made her decision. Better to go on to the uncertain welcome of the strangers than back to the possibility that the baker or her assistants would recognise her. Before proceeding, she quickly wolfed down half the roll and stashed the rest under her sacking garments. The gnawing, ever-present pain of her hunger receded slightly.

At a run, she burst into the courtyard, already running for the exit, which led deeper into the warren of twisted passageways in which she made her home.

“Look, it’s the little freak.”

“Get her!”

The voices rang out as she crossed the open space. They were indeed some of the older children who hung around this part of the town. They must be twelve or thirteen, and she couldn’t be more than ten, and short for that. By the sound of it, one of them was Roy’act, a large boy with a scar over one eye who was vicious when he got hold of her. She pressed on into the maze of passages that she knew well. They were all taller and faster than her in a straight-line, but she had no intention of giving them that sort of advantage. Instead, she wove her way deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of blank walls and shuttered windows. Most of the other youths had actual homes to go back to, so were unlikely to follow her for long.

She knew they were still pursuing, both from their shouted cries to each other and the occasional revealed flashes of their locations behind her. They had already followed her for longer than she had expected, but she had another card to play. Rounding a corner, she dived for the ground and rolled under a protruding fragment of wall where a derelict building had once stood. Scrambling back to her feet, she then pitched headlong down a set of steps into an abandoned cellar and then pushed through a hole in the floor, letting herself down into a forgotten passage which led under the road.

She paused, holding her breath, listening for the pursuit. The life-glow of a couple of people could be sensed rounding the corner into the street above her. A few fragments of speech could be made out.

“…did she go?”

“…around here somewhere…”

It felt as if the two were milling around, moving this way and that. And then a third presence joined them. She cursed to herself. They were evidently in no hurry to abandon the chase. She had sheltered here before, but had no illusions about her ability to avoid detection if a prolonged search was made. Her only other choice was to follow the dark passageway onwards, which she’d been reluctant to do in the past. She had no means to make light, and all sorts of creatures might lurk in the nooks and crannies deep below the city.

She sensed one of her tormentors crawl into the building she’d entered through and heard him saying something to the others. She made up her mind and slipped noiselessly along the passageway, trailing her fingers on both walls to keep her bearings. Within a few minutes of walking, her sense of the pursuers faded away.

As she walked onward, the walls felt less like a man-made passage and more as if this was a natural cave, with smooth walls and vertical fissures replacing the brick patterns. The cave branched repeatedly, but she took the right-hand branch on each occasion, desperately hoping that she wouldn’t circle back on herself and become hopelessly lost. The level of the passageway had dropped too deep for her to sense life above the ground, which disoriented her more than the blackness pressing on her eyes. As long as she could remember, she’d had the ability to feel the location and something of the nature of other living creatures, and it was rare that she could sense nothing.

After a long walk, she discerned a faint glow ahead. In another few minutes, she was practically blinded by a beam of light slanting in through a crack in the ceiling way above her. A small pile of sand, no doubt from the desert which surrounded the city, had sifted down onto the floor and lay in a rough circle below the gap.

The cave led onwards, angling upwards again now, and Betn’ah followed. Then she paused. She could feel something nearby. Not a human, the spark of life was far too faint for that, but definitely alive. It appeared to be pressed back into a dark corner off to her left.

She approached slowly, hearing a scrabbling sound as the creature tried to retreat further into the rock-face.

“Hello, who are you?” she said in a voice cracked from disuse, and tried to push feelings of reassurance into the lifeform, whatever it was. She got on well with most animals, better than with her fellow humans at least, and had found that they could sometimes sense and respond to what she was feeling.

The scrabbling paused for a few seconds, and then there came a few tentative taps as something crept towards her. In the faint glow from the gap in the passage ceiling, she could barely make out a shape about the size of a cat, which looked vaguely furry.

She pushed more thoughts of warmth and reassurance at the creature, and she felt its life-force seem to react and soften. It stretched out to her, as if tentatively reciprocating her feelings of friendship. The dark form stepped a few more steps forward and she could see it at last. It was a spider. Its body was nearly the size of a water bucket, and its legs were nearly as long again.

Not a spikkan, one of the vicious carnivorous cave spiders. Instead, this looked more like one of the jumping spiders from deeper into the desert. Except that this one was clearly injured, with one leg bent unnaturally.

Betn’ah had always loved insects and spiders. She put out one hand gently and offered it the back of her hand. It nuzzled against it briefly and then stroked her with a leg. All the while, she kept pressing her feelings of warmth at it and she felt it answering, the bond between them strengthening somehow.

“Aren’t you pretty?” she said.

She carefully withdrew her hand and extracted the remains of her roll from under her layers of clothing. She tore off a small piece and put it on the rock floor in front of the spider. The spider stroked it with its leg as if curious, but made no move to eat it. Betn’ah concentrated and felt a sense of thirst and hunger from the creature.

“Hmm, not bread then,” she said. “Assuming you’re like other spiders, probably insects or other small creatures.”

There was no reply.

“Stay here,” she said, and followed up by pushing that request at the beast. Something sunk into the spider’s life-force, and she could sense her instruction floating in the centre of its consciousness. She stood up carefully and backed away, and the spider stayed put. It clearly trusted her to know what was best.

She turned and strode along the passage more quickly than before. As she walked, she felt her connection to the spider stretch out and somehow become faint and unresponsive.

* * *

When Betn’ah reached the far end of the cave passage, she was surprised to find a small cave crowded with detritus. A doorway had been fixed across the entrance to the passage, and a brief investigation revealed that the cave mouth was tucked away in a tiny niche in a rock-face flanking what looked a natural rocky outcrop, entirely concealed from casual view.

Betn’ah had heard of smugglers, merchants that tried to avoid the city authorities who regulated the buying and selling of goods. Perhaps this cave had once offered a route to bypass the gates? Someone had clearly used this passage long before, but, given the layer of dust covering everything, it had been some time ago.

She shrugged; it was irrelevant to her. She climbed out onto the rocks which hid the cave opening and looked around, quickly identifying her location as just outside the part of the city with which she was familiar. Over there to the left, she should find water. In that direction, she could see the line of what she knew to be moulded clay troughs which carried the water supply to her quarter of the city.

She scrambled back to the cave and dug through the rubbish inside. She soon discovered an old, dry waterskin. It was perished but still looked to be serviceable. She also found a rotted bag, little more than a few folds of material, which she tucked inside her clothing.

A few minutes later, she was jogging down the dune that led towards the well. A regular clanking sound could be heard, and she smiled.

Rounding the corner of the hill, she saw a huge clay figure, roughly in the shape of a human but looming far larger, clumsily turning a handle connected to a wheel. As the wheel turned, a loop of rope was dragged up out of the well. Tied along the length of the rope were clay pots, which the mechanism dipped into the water in the well and then hoisted them up to tip out into the rough channel which led towards the city wall.

Betn’ah was familiar with the scene inside the city wall where the water channel led. There would be crowds of people, contesting with each other to fill their water buckets from the thin stream of water which emerged into the stone basin set at the end of the supply.

She vaguely remembered the day when the clay model had been finished. It had been about five years ago, before her parents had gone away, and the entire district had helped to build it, to dig the well and to construct the line of pipes leading to the city. When all was finished, there had been a day of celebration with food and music, and some mysterious figures in black had arrived to wave their hands over the clay giant, which had shuddered into life and begun to turn the handle. A ‘golem’ her parents had called it. As far as she knew, it had been out here ever since, toiling away.

Curious, she ran her senses over the golem. She could definitely sense its presence, but it didn’t feel the same as a human, or her spider, or any other living creature. It was as if it had a pool of life-force imposed on it.

She shrugged. Nothing to do with her, and she’d heard terrible tales of the ones in black. No-one dared cross them, and most would cross the street rather than get too close.

Betn’ah quickly filled her flask from the jugs as they poured out. She could also feel a host of other tiny living creatures in the desert landscape around her, drawn by the smell and sound of water. After some searching, she located a small furry creature a little bigger than a mouse. Using the same skill of pushing emotions towards it that had worked with the spider, she tempted it into the sack and captured it. She continued to force reassuring feelings and a command not to move at it until it stopped biting its way out.

When she returned to the cave, the spider was still there, patiently awaiting her. First, she poured out a little water into a crevice in the rock floor. Initially, the spider didn’t react at all, continuing to follow her request for it to stay still. She eventually discovered how to release it from that instruction, and it then darted to the water and sucked it up greedily.

Next, she extracted the furry creature that she’d caught and pacified. She placed it next to the water. The spider moved quickly, plunging its fangs into the hapless mammal, which shuddered and then soon stopped moving. Her own hunger forgotten, Betn’ah watched for the next few hours, fascinated, as most of the flesh of the rodent gradually liquefied in the spider’s venom and was sucked up into its mouth.

Over the next few weeks, Betn’ah spent much of her time in the cave, nursing the spider back to health. Aside from the damaged leg, she discovered it had various bruises to its sides that had probably been caused by an attack of some kind. As she watched, fascinated, it repeatedly shed its outer layers, revealing fresh, new growth underneath.

To keep them both fed, she made repeated visits to the city, to the water golem and to the surrounding desert.

When visiting the city, she avoided using the tunnel. After a few near misses, she decided that the bullies who had chased her before must have taken to hanging around the emergence point, possibly in search of her supposed lair. Instead, she entered via the nearby gate, which was usually busy enough that no-one paid attention to one more feral child running in or out.

* * *

The weeks in the cave felt like a break and a new beginning to Betn’ah. She found that her bond with the spider broadened, and occasionally she got a glimpse of what it was seeing and feeling, which she always found deeply disorienting, given their very different senses. She learned that her talent could discern more than simply the location of other lifeforms, but also something about their nature and intentions.

One day, her period of retreat came to an abrupt end. She had ventured out from the cave door and was climbing the outcrop, intending to make her way to refill her waterskin. Lulled into a sense of security in her new refuge, she didn’t bother either to look around her or scan the surroundings with her life-sense. Suddenly she found herself grabbed from behind, with an arm locked around her neck.

“Got you, you freak,” came a rough, breaking voice, which sounded like Roy’act. “She’s over here! Come help me!”

With a sense of despair, she figured that he or one of his cronies must have seen her making her way to this area over the desert sands. With hindsight, there was little cover to shield her approximate destination if someone was actually watching for her.

She acted immediately before the other children could clamber up the slope towards them. She bit down hard into the bully’s arm and felt blood trickling out of her mouth as he gasped and flung her from him onto the rocky ground. Without waiting to see more of his reaction, she rolled back to her feet and ran over the top of the ridge and down the side of the dune, sliding more than running.

She could hear sounds of pursuit at her heels, and could sense three or four followers only a handful of yards behind. Reaching the firmer ground at the bottom of the dune face, she desperately fought to keep her balance and ran towards the well site, hoping that she could find some sort of cover to escape their search.

Behind her, she could feel them fanning out to block her escape routes, and glancing over her shoulder she could see that some of the pursuers were armed with sticks. They paused to allow Roy’act and a couple of others to catch up, which allowed her to lengthen her lead, but in despair she realised that out here on the open wasteland there was little scenery that would shield her, and no hiding places they wouldn’t see her enter.

She dodged behind the toiling golem to give her a few moments to think, but no inspiration came to her.

“You can’t hide there, you weirdo,” said one of the others. “There’s no escape, and no-one’s going to help you this time.”

‘No-one to help you’, she thought. Or was there?

As they closed in, she pushed her thoughts as strongly as she could into the ball of life-force in the golem.

<‘Stop the boys’>

She sent the mental command to the clay giant repeatedly with all the focus that she could manage, accompanied by images of striking the bullies in the same way she’d learnt to guide her spider. Initially, the golem put up some resistance against her instructions, but she battered her way through it with her reiterated cries for help.

And the golem paused, and then straightened, taking his rough clay hands from the wheel.

Her attackers registered the motion too late. It swung its arms forcefully, and three of them were down in a fraction of a second as they tried to circle the figure. The golem then staggered on towards the others, waving its arms clumsily.

Betn’ah didn’t wait to see more. As fast as she could, she ran around them and back up the hill towards her refuge. Slamming and securing the door behind her, she made her way along the darkened passage to her spider.

“Come with me,” she said, reinforcing the words with a command for it to follow. Together they sped down the passage into the city.

At the other end of the passage, the two of them came into the cellar of the ruined house and, without breaking her pace, she led the way through the maze of buildings to another refuge. A cellar a long way from the other where in times past she had gathered together her own nest of bedding and treasures.

She ran on foot along the twisty, narrow alleys between the houses. The spider kept pace, leaping over the roofs with a sharp clattering, tapping noise as its feet rattled over the tiles, easily vaulting between buildings.

* * *

Betn’ah lay trembling with fear and shock for most of the rest of the day. The violation of the space she’d considered safe, and the violence that she’d triggered from the golem, was too much for her to process. At the same time, her mind felt raw and aching, from the force she’d used to impose her will on the clay figure’s mind.

When darkness came, she slipped into sleep, cuddled up against the furry form of the spider.

In the morning, she ventured out to search for news. It wasn’t difficult to find. No-one cared about yet another guttersnipe, curled up listening to a conversation, and the gossip was too hot to conceal.

She heard that the water golem had gone mad and deserted its post, attacking some local youths before freezing into immobility when they’d all been beaten to the ground. There was no lasting damage reported to the boys, but no-one seemed to care much either way. The big news was that the golem was completely stalled, and water had stopped flowing to this city district.

Many of the people she eavesdropped upon were bewailing the additional time and work they were going to have to waste, either visiting another quarter of the city or the well itself to fill their buckets. One well-dressed man spoke about a petition he’d made to the Council, whoever that was, to send someone to reanimate the golem.

There was no news of a girl being involved, which Betn’ah guessed was good and bad. Good, that no-one else was now looking for her, but bad, in that Roy’act and his friends clearly felt they could take their vengeance themselves.

Betn’ah crept back to her nest, where her spider awaited her. As dusk fell, she and the spider made their way stealthily to a market in an unfamiliar area of the city to find food.

After some experimentation, Betn’ah discovered she could instruct the spider to sneak up to a stall and seize a single piece of food and retrieve it for her. Its movements were quick enough that, combined with the shadows of dusk, no-one noticed as it retrieved first a loaf of bread from a baker’s stall, and then one by one some pieces of fruit and vegetables.

Her needs settled, she next needed to find something to feed her partner. Since the spider ate only meat, they sidled up to an impromptu butcher’s. It had been set up next to one of the more astonishing wagons she had ever seen. Given the dust and sand that coated the tarpaulins, they had clearly travelled a long way to arrive and were doing a brisk trade, mainly in bulk sales to a series of rich-looking merchants.

What was unusual, though, were the staff who were associated with the wagon. Not only were they showing signs of recent sunburn and wind damage, but they were dressed outlandishly, eschewing the usual layers of cloth which covered as much skin as possible, but instead decked out in some sort of more tailored and shaped garments. And the colours… They weren’t the usual outdoor clothing colours such as white, or gray, or yellow, nor were they the red and gold of the soldiers. Instead, they were what Betn’ah had always considered inside colours. Lustrous blues and greens.

Her parents had had a small tapestry of that exact green that they had always kept safely inside away from the sun. Until they had gone away.

Betn’ah focused again, concentrating on her instructions to the spider. In a few minutes, they added a piece of red meat on a bone to their sack, along with an unidentified bird-wing cured with smoke. Retreating to her lair, they were both able to eat well, in her case better than she could remember for a very considerable time.

* * *

A few days later, Betn’ah had ventured out by herself to fetch water from a nearby district and was walking along a busy street on her way back to the location of her refuge before she saw the figures dressed in black. She froze and then pushed herself into a corner between two buildings, slumping to the ground and pulling her scarves more firmly around her head.

Peeking out between the folds of her clothes, she saw that not only were they wearing black cloaks, but they each had a piece of thin material draped across their eyes, one coloured gray and one red. The cloth looked thin enough to peer through, but this was unusual. For most people in the desert, the only part of their faces usually visible was their eyes. She noted the gap that the other pedestrians were leaving around the pair and the muttered comments from onlookers that they ignored.

As they passed, she strained to listen to what they were saying. The man with the gray strip across his eyes was upset about something and was complaining to the other, a woman. They paused close to Betn’ah and continued their conversation.

“It’s humiliating, Charl’ah, that’s what it is. I didn’t expect to be doing straightforward peasant reanimation jobs after I graduated, nor wandering around the city streets looking for common hoodlums. I was hoping for danger and glory.”

“Got'act, will you slow down and think for once?” retorted his companion. “You inspected it as carefully as I did. It wasn’t a simple degradation, nor a logic breakdown, was it?”

“No, I guess not. It felt as if someone had wiped out the previously programmed commands and overwritten them with some sort of clumsy temporary patch.”

“Exactly. Clumsy, but with a great deal of potential power given the safeguards that had been brushed away. As you know, any Thaumaturgic Corps member would have embedded significant resistance to causing harm or damage. Just as you did with the rewrite.”

“So what does that imply?”

“Perhaps that we have an untrained person with the talent running around here? Or some foreign mage with some basic training? That would be even worse.”

“Oh. You really think… ?”

“I don’t see why a foreign mage would break their cover to beat up a few local youths, no. But our information sources have reported some local rumours about the merchant in that house over there. Perhaps you would like to make the approach while I protect you? I believe you mentioned your desire to encounter ‘danger and glory’?”

Still talking, the two stepped out of the range of hearing, as Betn’ah continued to watch carefully. The woman retreated down the street a few steps, standing out of sight of the doorway, while the man approached the opening and thumped loudly on the door frame.

After a few seconds of waiting, the curtain was pulled aside by a man completely swaddled in desert clothing with only his eyes showing. Betn’ah thought this was unusual, given that they were in the heart of the city. He said something to Got'act, but she couldn’t make out his voice.

Got'act replied loudly in a pompous tone. “Uncover your face, man, so I can see who I’m talking to. Don’t you know who I am?”

Another quiet reply from the merchant, who made no attempt to remove his scarves.

Got'act was clearly upset by what was said to him, and he spoke again in the same preemptory way.

“No. You will come with me at once.”

Then, several things happened in quick succession.

As the man turned his head as if to consult someone in the house, Got'act stepped forward and seized the man’s headscarf and pulled, retreating a little as he did so.

The man’s eyes locked on Got'act again and his hand came up in a strange gesture.

Betn’ah could now see the merchant’s uncovered forehead and noted some sort of tattoo mark in the centre. Got'act clearly saw it too, and his mouth opened in a gasp as he stepped back further.

The black robe that Got'act was wearing suddenly burst into flame, and he fell backwards to the ground, desperately beating at it to extinguish the blaze.

Out of the corner of her eye, Betn’ah saw the woman move as the merchant swung back to reenter his house. Before he could do so, black smoke poured out of the ground to cover the doorway, and the man bounced off it as if the mist had some sort of substance. The unveiled merchant wheeled around to see the woman for the first time, and his eyes narrowed. Both his hands came up, and Betn’ah could see the air by the black-clad woman shimmer as if it was in a furnace. The woman’s only response was to shrug contemptuously as more black smoke billowed out of her robes, somehow shielding her from the heat.

The merchant swallowed, and the shimmering in the air ceased. He lifted a hand and Betn’ah saw with terror that it contained a ball of lightning, which he threw at the woman. It hit the veiling smoke and dissipated.

She shrugged again, this time regretfully, and cupped one hand towards the merchant. Suddenly Betn’ah could sense what was happening. She felt the life-force of the man flicker and then stream out of his being into the lady. In less than a minute, the job was done and his body slumped to the ground, no longer registering to her as a presence.

Silence remained for a few more seconds, and then screams broke out from all directions. Passersby streamed away in terror, and Betn’ah scrambled to her feet and allowed herself to be dragged away by the flow of panicked people. The last thing she saw was the lady helping Got'act to his feet, one eyebrow raised ironically above her eye-covering.

* * *

Safely back in her nest, Betn’ah thought about what she’d seen. She was fairly sure that the black-clad people served the local authorities but were separate from the city guards, which the common people looked down on with contempt. She’d occasionally heard people referring to the ‘black ones’ or ‘black necromancers’ in tones of awe, respect and fear.

And the merchant, who she assumed must have been the foreign mage they had been talking about, had tried to attack them with no real provocation. Fortunately, the black ones had been ready for his tricks.

In any case, she and her spider companion were safer staying well away from that sort of encounter. They spent the next couple of days huddled away in the abandoned cellar, nibbling on the remains of their supplies, before hunger drove them out in search of food.

They headed off towards the large market that they’d visited a few times before. The spider scampered off ahead across the roof-tops, as Betn’ah navigated the crowded streets of her home district, slipping between the jostling crowd folk.

She didn’t notice the figures keeping pace behind her.

Eventually, she slipped down a deserted alleyway, which offered a shortcut. As she entered the dark space, she finally sensed some people turning in after her and she started to swing around, only to fall winded in pain as a stick impacted her ribs heavily.

There was a moment of pain and disorientation which then redoubled as another blow caught her knee. Through a mist of agony, she felt the bones crunch and, as she tried to roll to her feet, it felt like a white star had exploded inside her head and her leg immediately gave way dumping her the alley floor.

“Grab her. Drag her into the yard ahead.” It was the voice of Roy’act.

Rough hands clutched at her robes, and she felt herself being lugged along the alleyway. It would be so easy to give in to the pain from the repeated jolts to her leg and pass out, but she knew she was in serious danger. No sounds of alarm could be heard from the main street as the noise of the bustle faded. Perhaps no-one had seen the assault. Or no-one cared.

She was dumped onto the floor again as the hands let go. She could sense four of them surrounding her.

“Wake her up.”

A blow to her stomach, but not enough to drive the breath out of her again. She opened her eyes and tried to focus.

The face of Roy'act swam into her vision, covered with vivid purple bruising. He was pointing at it.

“You see this, you freak? That’s your fault, and now you get to pay for it!”

<HELP!>

She screamed mentally as hard as she could, but the spider had run on ahead of her, and what other help could there be?

“I don’t know what you did before, but there’s no help for you now.”

<HELP!>

She bellowed again, scooting herself backwards as Roy'act raised his other hand, which wielded a rough club.

And then, miraculously, she sensed the presence of the spider leaping down from the roofs above, and she sent an instruction filled with hate. It twisted in midair and landed on the bully’s forearm. As he fell backwards, shocked, she felt, rather than saw, the spider’s fangs sink into his hand.

Despite the pain in her shattered knee, she scooted herself backwards against the wall. She was in a small courtyard at the rear of some buildings, littered with discarded scraps of fruit rind.

“Get the creature off me!” Roy'act was still talking, although the club that he’d once clutched in his injured hand had fallen to the floor. But his friends were unhurt, and their sticks rose and fell in unison. She could feel the spider desperately clinging on, and then she suddenly felt its presence puff away. Her mind resounded with the violence of the snapping of the bond she’d established, and this time she did pass out.

Only for a few minutes though. She was brought around again by a slap to the face, which rattled her head against the wall against which it was resting. Opening her eyes, she saw Roy'act once more, clumsily lifting his club in his off-hand. The arm the spider had bitten was hanging limp, with blood dripping from a ragged wound that looked black in the shadows of the courtyard.

“Hold her,” he stammered out from between teeth clenched in pain. She felt hands on either side grab her arms, but her eyes had fallen to the bloody mess of the spider lying on the ground a few feet from her, battered repeatedly into an unrecognisable pulp. She’d disliked the boys before, feared them even, but now she hated them. The feeling filled her head with a fiery heat, overwhelming any remaining thoughts of self-control, and it felt like she could feel each pulse of her heart resounding through her.

As her tormentor stepped towards her, she simply cupped her hand in the way she’d seen the women do and with her mind she tore desperately at her sense of Roy'act’s living force. For a moment, nothing happened, and then the invisible boundary around his presence bulged and ruptured, and the dark, roiling essence rushed out of him in a sudden stream. Not knowing what else to do, Betn’ah absorbed the power, and she felt herself swell in a way she couldn’t describe. Her vision blurred again momentarily and then snapped back, the surrounding colours somehow more vivid, the scene more focused.

Roy’act fell lifeless to the ground. She could no longer feel his presence.

Her arms were released suddenly. She saw the others stare at each other in obvious horror and then they broke for the safety of the alley and the crowd on the main street. She could hear cries of “Murder” and “Monster” as they roughly forced their way out.

Betn’ah just lay there, the pain in her ruined knee redoubled by her suddenly keener senses.

It was only a few minutes before a detachment of the city guard showed up. Three soldiers, armed with pikes, in the brash red and gold decorated armour of the military and of the authorities.

They stared at the scene in the courtyard in obvious confusion, one poking Roy’act as if checking for signs of life, although his eyes were open and glassy. Another squatted to inspect the remains of the battered spider. Another was looking at Betn’ah.

“It’s an orphan who lurks around the district, Sergeant. None of the other children will mix with her; they say she’s wrong somehow. And that’s the eldest son of a local fruit merchant. Good man, his father.”

“Right, you,” snarled the guard, who had been addressed as Sergeant. He leant his pike against a wall and drew a short sword as he stepped towards Betn’ah.

“Now, why don’t you tell me what happened here then,” he said menacing as he approached. “None of your tricks.”

Betn’ah tried desperately to shuffle herself further into the corner of the courtyard, pressing herself away from the approaching guard. Her anger was gone now, replaced by fear and desperation.

And at that moment, a fresh voice could be heard. A commanding-sounding female voice.

“And I tell you that the psychic shout must have come from this direction.”

Striding into the alleyway came a black-clad figure that Betn’ah thought must be the woman she’d seen defeat the foreign mage.

The newcomer scanned the scene and then locked eyes with Betn’ah. Somehow she felt that the woman’s gaze was sinking deep into her head.

“Hold in the name of the Thaumaturgic Corps of Kahlia,” she ordered. “I am placing this… girl… under my protection and custody, according to the privileges of the Corps.”

“Bloody necromancers,” muttered one guard, but the Sergeant looked curiously relieved.

“Right you are, Sir,” he snapped, saluting. “Can I request a confirmation to the district headquarters in the morning?”

“You’ll have your confirmation,” spat the woman. “Now clear out and give us some air. Hold back the crowds.”

Betn’ah saw the man who had accompanied the woman before step forward as the guards cleared out of the courtyard. Gently, the woman squatted to her knees and held out her hand.

“Hello, little one,” she whispered. “Let’s get you out of here. Can you stand? Got'act, get ready to block her pain.”

* * *

Betn’ah got to her feet carefully. She favoured one leg a little, but was more concerned about not disturbing something on her arm, under the folds of her black robes that she now wore. Across her eyes was stretched a strip of thin white material.

It was a few months after her showdown with Roy’act and the other bullies, and she had been sitting in a manicured garden in the grounds of the Kahlian Thaumaturgical Corps headquarters.

“And Mistress Charl’ah says that if I work hard, then one day she’ll teach me to produce the spooky-black smoke. A shield, she called it, which is a silly name because it looks nothing like the shields that the soldiers carry.”

She walked along the pathway towards the accommodation block. It was unclear who she was talking to, but she held one arm unnaturally still. On either side of the door, an armed skeleton stood at attention. As she got close, they pivoted around in unison to face away from the door and allow her passage. She ignored them and brushed past the curtain covering the door.

“The mage I saw her fight was a bad man. Mistress Charl’ah said he was from ‘Zaronia’.” She pronounced the unfamiliar word carefully.

“He was here to hurt the people of the city and steal from them. I’ll need to learn to fight like that to stop bad people from hurting the city.

“And it was very sad about Spidey, but because I trained him so well, Mistress Charl’ah let me be friends with you, Mr Prickles. They’ve been giving me treatments with an ‘antidote’ to protect me if you have an accident. I don’t like that because it makes my skin feel all cold and numb, but it’s worth it so that we can play together. They say you’ll be ever so big and pretty when you’re fully grown.”

Betn’ah had raised the hand on her other arm to the one she was holding out and carefully stroked the creature that stepped out from under her robe. It was a baby scorpion, a Torpula, still yellow and only a few inches long.

“You’ll be my friend, won’t you?” she chatted away gaily in a manner that would be unfamiliar to her teachers, who had rapidly got used to the silent, serious child. “We’ll be best friends forever and ever.”

* * *

This story is set in the capital of Kahlia about twenty years before the beginning of Starting Sphere.

I will leave it to the reader to decide if Betn’ah is one of the necromancers that Scordo encounters. I was inspired to write it by a review for Projecting Pyramid, which said “that some things are not wholly good or wholly evil.” Following that, I immediately wondered if I’d done enough to share the background of the Kahlian necromancers.

Whether this will remain a one-off short story, or form the kernel for a longer tale, I couldn’t say. I’d be interested in any opinions either way!