Caladin’s Climb—Part 13

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          Caladin surveyed their work from afar. The building was really coming along. There were already walls and a roof. He walked back inside the empty frame to talk to the carpenter. The dimensions of the interior were bordering on ridiculous. The carpenter had insisted on support beams every twenty-five span and there were a lot of support beams. “How’s it coming along?” Caladin asked the carpenter as he supervised a six-zombie team mindlessly hammering in nails. “You have enough boards to finish the roof, or should I make more?” Caladin had been saving time by using his magic to mill the logs into manageable boards. He was starting to run uncomfortably low on mana and still needed to reserve enough for his first activation of the Teleportation Circle once he got it up and running. He could resupply his mana at Brorn’s manor, he just… had to figure out to get a stable circle working across that many leagues.

          “We’re good on lumber for now,” the carpenter said. “But I don’t like this building. There’s no solid foundation.” He was a human artisan who claimed he’d spent most of his life making furniture for his eldrin master by hand. He was used to taking orders and didn’t balk at the ones Caladin gave him. The only slight issue was that this was the carpenter’s first attempt at building an entire house. And it was being built over a river.

          “Don’t fret! The foundation is solid enough,” Caladin said, clapping the man on the back. It was the sort of thing he imagined construction workers did to each other. “It doesn’t need to be strong. It just needs to float.”

          “You sure?” the carpenter asked. “Won’t the whole building sink if we put too much weight on it?”

          “Just let me worry about that part,” Caladin told the man. “I can fix any problems like that with magic.” He tried to sound more confident than he was. He didn’t have a clue what he would do if his new store started to sink. Ice magic maybe? The whole thing was just a fancy raft anchored to the shore on either side of the river. Now that the frame was done, it was time to start filling in the interior and coming up with some products to sell. The whole point of a store was to sell products, after all.

          Caladin went back outside and inspected the shore of the river again. Just as he remembered, it was rich with clay. If they built a kiln, they could make any manner of clay products and there was plenty of wood in the surrounding forest. Pottery was something most people would use if they could get it cheaply enough. It was only a shame they didn’t have easy access to a mana well. Once the teleportation circle was up, that wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem though.

          Lenny walked out of the woods. He had a bundle of sticks on his back and dropped them next to a pile of similar sticks by the shore. It was rather remarkable how much work all Caladin’s zombies got done when they never had to sleep or rest. “What did you learn?” Caladin asked him.

          “There’s a bunch of deer trails,” Lenny said. “Hard to say if any of them were the one we used when we lived out this way.”

          “You’ll just have to check them all,” Caladin said. “Systematically. I’ll get you a map to keep track of the ones you’ve checked. We’ll find it eventually.” That was the real job Lenny had been given: tracking down the location of the old camp they used to live at. Whatever was left of it was somewhere in the surrounding leagues of untamed forests. Lenny was the only one he trusted to hunt for it without running off.

          Caladin had burned through the majority of his mana reserves milling lumber and repairing injuries to his brainless undead minions. They were starting to smell, which meant they’d need to be properly repaired soon, something he didn’t have the extra mana for. It limited how far they could range if their bodies fell apart out in the field. Even for Lenny. Rot was, however, an unavoidable fact of unlife. That rebel soldier, Jaeryl, was the only one Caladin was worried about. He wanted to die, so he’d be sure to jump at the chance to collapse somewhere unseen in the woods to get picked apart by vultures. He’d been assigned to help with the construction for smaller tasks that required thinking, and he was doing it. Reluctantly.

          “What’re ya goin’ to do once you find it?” Lenny asked.

          “Magic,” Caladin replied. There was no point in being more specific than that. “Just focus on finding it and let me worry what happens once it’s found. I’ve wasted as much mana as I care to trying to scry the place. It’s harder than you’d think to find a camp like that in the middle of the woods. I’m counting on you, Lenny.”

          He nodded. “I get close to any’a my old huntin’ grounds, I’ll recognize where I am,” Lenny promised. He gave an upward nod of his chin and pointed over Caladin’s shoulder. “Looks like we got company,” he said.

          Caladin turned around and spotted a small contingent of eldrin walking towards the construction site along the shore of the river. They were coming from the direction of the nearest Eldesian town: Jakarta. The one leading the group Caladin recognized as the homely undead woman he’d sent into town that morning. She was a bit squat, with short brown hair, but her bright green eyes were the feature that stood out the most, they were hard to miss and had the unmistakable, sickly glow of necromantic magic in them. “That would be Maggie,” Caladin said. “I sent her to town to get supplies for the teleportation circle. Looks like she made some new friends.”

          It was pretty obvious from the demeanor of the men that they weren’t friends. Caladin was just trying to put a positive spin on it. Maggie was shackled at the wrists and being forced to lead the others by the point of a spear. Half a dozen or so of the men at the front of the procession wore armor, while some non-military types followed behind. This had been an outcome Caladin had anticipated when he sent her into town. He put on his most confident smile and walked forward to meet the group, giving them a friendly wave as he got close. As he walked, he triggered one of the illusion scrolls that would disguise him as an eldrin. “Can I help you, good sirs?” Caladin asked the men.

          “Is this creature yours?” a slightly portly eldrin with a square purple hat asked from safely behind the soldiers. He sneered as he said the words. He looked like some kind of bureaucrat and seemed to be the one in charge based on the way the others let him speak for them.

          “Maggie, yes,” Caladin replied. He didn’t let a crack show in his smile as he nodded. “Did she cause some kind of trouble in town?”

          “She’s undead,” the man said. “Zombies are barred from public spaces. I would have been in my rights to destroy her. Do you have a permit for your undead servants?”

          Caladin laughed. “Permit? No. I don’t need one.”

          “Then by public ordinance 177-B, I have to issue you a fine.” He pointed behind Caladin at the raft-house-store-thing where the sound of hammering emanated at regular intervals. “Now tell me about this construction project. I assume you didn’t get a permit for that either? Your servant told us about the store you were building.” He frowned. “I assumed she was exaggerating about the size… Do you have any idea how many laws you are breaking by building a store without consulting the planning department first? And it even spans the entire river! How will the next grain barge get past you!” The eldrin bureaucrat’s pudgy face grew brighter and more animated the longer he talked.

          Caladin already knew about the grain barge, and had plans to forcibly purchase their entire stock at a steep discount, then send them back up the river to get more… but now wasn’t the time for that particular conversation. He cleared his throat and casually reached inside his jacket, pulling out his copy of the Setsyan treaty he’d acquired a few days prior. He held it out for the other man to take. “This should address your concerns,” he said.

          “What is this?” the man asked. He walked forward and took the scroll, eyes scanning the page immediately.

          “A treaty,” Caladin said. “Between the nation of Eldesia and the Setsyan Empire.”

          The portly bureaucrat shook his head and tried to hand the scroll back. “Why are you showing me this? This isn’t a permit!”

          “Because,” Caladin said, pushing the treaty back into his hands. “You need to know your rules don’t apply to me.” The eldrin’s brows drew together. “I’m not in Eldesia,” Caladin continued. “Your border ends at the shores of this river. You’ll notice the anchor points for my houseboat are in the riverbed, not the shore. I am also not an Eldesian citizen, so you have no authority over me. Now, if you would please return my property to me, you can be on your way.”

          “Excuse me?” the eldrin bureaucrat fumed. “What did you just say to me?” It seemed like this guy wasn’t used to people disobeying him. He was going to have to come to terms with the idea.

          Caladin leaned forward, sounding out his words slowly. “I said. Give me back. My property. Then you may leave.”

          “I may leave?” The man repeated indignantly. “No! You are under arrest. I do not care about your stupid treaty! Guards, seize this man!”

          Caladin smiled. This time it was genuine. He knew he’d have to put the locals in their place before they’d leave him alone and he was going to enjoy doing it. The moment the man called for Caladin’s arrest, Caladin pointed to one of the closest soldiers and triggered one of his prepared scrolls. The targeted soldier was hit with a gravimancy spell called Alter Fall, which caused him to start falling up instead of down. The spell didn’t have much mana, but it didn’t need to. Even if it only lasted ten seconds, the fall back down would be fatal. Before the others had even realized why their friend had started screaming and flying into the sky Caladin pointed to the next guard—the pointing was merely for dramatic effect—and triggered another scroll. This time his target sank to his neck in the thick clay of the river’s shore from a lutumancy spell called Quick Sand. The guard sputtered and squawked in surprise. The paltry mana from the scroll quickly ran out, leaving him trapped and helpless in clay.

          Someone from the back shouted the obvious. “He’s using magic!” There were four guards left—the nearest of them fumbled at his waist for a sword. Caladin pointed at him and triggered a ferromancy spell called Shape Metal that he’d designed to turn the metal he targeted into liquid. The meager mana invested in the scroll ran out in an instant, causing the soldier’s plate mail armor to solidify into a slightly new shape with all the joints fused together. He fell forward on his face, trapped inside his own armor.

          One of the guards appeared to know a little magic of his own. Rather than reach for a blade, he started moving through a series of hand signs. Caladin pointed at him and broke both his arms with a kinomancy Telekinesis spell that twisted his elbows in the wrong direction. He dropped to his knees and started screaming. By this point, Caladin’s limited attention had allowed the soldier that had been poking Maggie in the back with his spear to attempt to stab him. The soldier lunged forward and Caladin was forced to lean back, then he flicked his wrist and triggered a sonamancy spell called Sonic Boom to both knock aside the spear as well as the soldier wielding it. That left two soldiers. They both had their swords out but didn’t look the least bit interested in using them.

          “How about you two?” Caladin asked them. “Do either of you feel like dying today?”

          One soldier shook his head. The other pretended to sheath his sword, then tried to lunge forward. It probably would have worked if the cynic in Caladin hadn’t counted on something like that happening. He flicked a single finger at the attacker and triggered a visceramancy spell Brorn had given him called Rend Flesh. There weren’t even screams. The soldier’s body just fell into bloody pieces. His empty armor collapsed and fell apart into a wet puddle of blood and gore.

          The last soldier used that distraction to throw out a Fireball: a very simple pyromancy spell, but one which would have killed quite easily from such a close range. Caladin pointed to the Fireball and extinguished it with a pyromancy spell of his own: Snuff Flame.

          “That was stupid,” Caladin said to the last guard. “Are you going to keep being stupid? Or maybe you’re ready to start being smart.” He pointed a finger at the soldier; normally an innocent gesture, but not when done by an archmage.

          The soldier visibly flinched, dropping his sword. “N-no!” he said. “I mean yes!”

          Caladin skewered the bureaucrat with his best glare. The man looked like he was about ready to piss himself, as were the last handful of hangers-on he’d brought with him. “I told you that you had no legal right to detain me,” Caladin said. “And you attack me? If you want to live, you will kneel! All of you!” Caladin imbued the word “kneel” with a lithomancy compulsion. The remainder of the procession dropped to their knees. Several of them started crying, the bureaucrat that had been bossing Caladin around was among them.

          A screaming man fell from the sky and smacked into the ground nearby. Everyone was frozen in silence.

          Slowly, calmly, Caladin walked over to Maggie. He waved his hand at the shackles around her wrists and inscribed a custom ferromancy spell on a piece of paper in his pocket at the same time that would undo the lock on them. The shackles fell from her wrist. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

          “Yes, master,” she said, ducking her head respectfully. Caladin hadn’t told any of them to start calling him that but Maggie refused to stop using the honorific.

          “Sorry you had to see that,” he told her. “Go ahead inside.” She ducked her head again and hurried off. Caladin liked Maggie. She didn’t have it in her to disobey—no compulsion necessary.

          Caladin turned back to the last five members of the procession that were kneeling in the wet clay of the riverbank. “Now, did someone say I was using magic?” Caladin asked.

          “Yes?” the pudgy bureaucrat said, his tone indicating he wasn’t sure if that was the right answer or not.

          “Correct!” Caladin replied, his smile returning. He started ticking off fingers. “Let’s see… gravimancy, lutumancy, ferromancy, kinomancy, sonamancy, visceramancy, pyromancy, then some lithomancy right at the end there. Is that enough of a demonstration for you?”

          “Yes!” the soldier trapped up to his neck in clay said.

          Caladin held up a hand to stop more responses. “That was a rhetorical question.” He spread his arms wide at the chaos he’d sewn. “I would like you all to remember what you saw here today,” he told his captive audience. “Tell your people I am willing to follow your laws but I am willing and—more than able—to defend myself if the need arises.”

          “Wh-who are you?” the bureaucrat asked.

          Caladin threw up an arm in a dramatic flourish, triggering a sensomancy scroll in his pocket to make himself appear to grow twice as tall, voice expanding to match. “You may call me Archmage Caladin,” he answered. “Master of magic. Apprentice to the great Necro-King Brorn. And future manager of your local Brorn-Mart!”

          “Brorn… what?” the soldier stuck in the ground asked. He seemed to be the most willing to speak up.

          Caladin dismissed his illusion and stuck a hand on his hip, doing his best to non-verbally communicate his annoyance. “Well perhaps if you people had actually tried talking to me you would know that.” He gestured to the floating building behind him. Even with all the chaos outside, his zombie workers hadn’t stopped hammering away inside. “I am here to open a store, not fight. That I had established it outside Eldesian jurisdiction and had the paperwork to back that up was your hint to let me go about my work. If you come back out here again it better be because you want to take advantage of the best deals—and lowest prices!—on all your favorite products. That means no more talk of fines, permits, or arrests! This river is outside your jurisdiction and it’s going to stay that way. If your new queen wants to push Eldesia’s territory beyond the border currently outlined in your treaty I will be informing the dryads. Do you want to start a war? Because that’s how you start a war. I wouldn’t think a simple bargain market would be worth that much hassle, do you?”

          “N-no?” the bureaucrat said, making it a question.

          “No!” Caladin agreed in a much cheerier voice. “I’m glad we got that all sorted out.” He walked forward and dismissed the lithomancy compulsion that was forcing the remaining members of the procession to kneel, offering a hand to the bureaucrat. “The rest of the party is free to go now,” Caladin said. He offered a smile. “Come back next week and see what we have in stock! You wouldn’t mind if I sent Maggie back to town to announce the grand opening, would you?”

          The pudgy man ducked his head. “Yes, of course. We, uh… don’t mind at all.” He hurried away, gathering his remaining allies around him. Only one of the soldiers walked away uninjured. Of the other two that even walked away at all one whimpered pathetically about his broken arms and the other stumbled around stupidly, blood leaking from his ears from the sonic attack he’d taken.

          “Wait! Don’t leave me!” the soldier trapped in clay pleaded.

          “I-I still can’t move!” the muffled voice of the one trapped in his armor yelled. “Is someone going to get me out of here?”

          Caladin sighed. He’d assumed his visitors would take care of their own people, but apparently not. They scurried off as fast as their dignity allowed; which was impressively fast. Caladin had no love lost for eldrin that contributed to the very system that had hunted his family since he was a child, but he’d wanted to spread word of both his new store and his reputation. He was forced to waste more mana freeing the last two soldiers from their traps. They barely stuck around to thank him for it.

          “That was… quite the display,” Lenny said. He came out of the store to watch the last two soldiers chase off after the companions that had left them behind to die.

          “Yeah, well, I didn’t have much mana to spend so I had to use my prepared scrolls,” Caladin replied. “Probably would have been easier if I could have just picked one spell that worked well. Doesn’t matter. They saw me cast half a dozen combat spells in quick succession. All from different harmonics. If that doesn’t get the people talking, nothing will.”

          “You sure you want that kind of attention?” Lenny asked.

          Caladin nodded. “Quite sure. Don’t worry about my reasons; just know that attention like that will only be good for business. We do need to make money you know, or else Brorn will get suspicious. Now help me with these bodies.”

          Lenny pointed at the empty suit of armor filled with glowing eldrin guts. “What do you expect me to do with that?” he asked. “It’s nothing but pulp.”

          “It’s so much more than pulp!” Caladin insisted. “Eldrin blood is full of mana, and my stores are getting low. Now, where did Maggie go?”

          “H-here, master,” Maggie said from the doorway of the store.

          Caladin beckoned her over and gave her a pat on the shoulder. “Very good work today,” he congratulated her. “That went better than I thought it would.”

          “It… did?” she asked, sounding confused. “But I didn’t get any of the supplies on your list! The guards arrested me as soon as I got to town.”

          “Nonsense,” Caladin said. “You led them straight here, just like I told you to do if you were arrested. Word of what happened here will spread for leagues! Who’s going to threaten to rob a Brorn-Mart now?” Maggie looked confused. “Nobody! That’s who,” Caladin answered his own question. “Besides,” Caladin told her, “you did bring me the supplies I asked for.”

          “I did? But you wanted three silver ingots, you were very—”

          Caladin waved a hand in front of her face, cutting her off. “Look there, what do you see?” he asked her, pointing to the shackles that had been around her wrists until a moment ago.

          “Shackles?” she said without any confidence.

          “No. Silver!” Caladin said. “And enough to finish that circle if I had to guess. Silver is the best material for enchantments and I knew they would use their fanciest shackles on you.” He tapped the side of her temple with a gentle finger. “Your eyes had them afraid you were some kind of lich. Alright, you can go help with the construction now.”

          “What do you want me to do with these bodies exactly?” Lenny asked.

          “Just remove the armor for now,” Caladin said. “Then gather up any discarded weapons you can find. We can sell them later.” Caladin squatted down over the eviscerated body, trying to think how he would repair it to minimal functionality for the least amount of mana possible. He decided using small bursts of visceramancy while holding the different chunks together would probably work. With any luck, he could get it done for less mana than was in the blood of the corpse. It’s not like it really mattered if he had to deal with a particularly hideous zombie for a while. “We’re going to use these new bodies to cut your search time in half,” Caladin told Lenny.

          “You’re not going to resurrect them, are you?” Lenny asked.

          “Why? Is there something wrong with that?”

          “I thought Brorn warned you against raising any of your own undead while you were away.”

          “No,” Caladin clarified. “He said if he caught me with more than ten undead servants I would be in trouble. Brorn can’t tell one zombie from the next. I’ll have these two new ones sub in for you at the store. That way you can even get a partner to take tracking with you and Brorn will never be the wiser. If he comes to check on things he’ll find exactly ten zombies, just like he expects. I was already wondering how I was going to explain your absence if he asked about it, but this way I don’t even have to worry about it.”

          “Fine,” Lenny relented. “But you better know what you’re doing. I’m not excited about crossing Brorn.”

          “Let me worry about Brorn.”

          Caladin bottled up the eldrin blood from both corpses with the Condense Water spell while Lenny stripped the armor. He had the armor cleaned and set aside. They also gathered up four swords and two spears that had been discarded or left behind by the soldiers. Caladin saved one of each to use as a template for his zombies to make more and put the rest into new display cases his carpenter had put together. That guy was far more comfortable making anything furniture-related than he was supervising a large construction project.

          “Seems a bit wrong,” Lenny said once they had their first product displays up and Caladin was standing back to admire them.

          “They’re all perfectly functional,” Caladin said. “Why? You don’t agree? There are probably more valuable things I could make the steel into, but those would cost time and effort. The whole point is to keep costs down. Better to just sell them as is.”

          “Not that,” Lenny clarified. “I meant the part about profiting off dead men.”

          “If you’re really so offended, we can ask the dead men for permission,” Caladin offered.

          “And if they say no?”

          Caladin shrugged. “I’ll persuade them. It’s not like they can go back to their old lives now that they’re dead. It’s either work for me or oblivion.”

          “Didn’t Jaeryl choose oblivion?” Lenny asked.

          “Yeah, well, he’s a murderer. He doesn’t get a say.”

          On closer inspection, Caladin found the weapons and armor were of finer quality than he’d originally assumed. They had some basic enchantments to prevent rust, enhance durability, and resist lightning. Caladin made a note to avoid using any fulgramancy against eldrin in the future.

          The majority of his undead servants were the mindless variety, just repaired enough so that they wouldn’t stink. Only Lenny, Jaeryl, Maggie and the carpenter had enough of their mind to still think for themselves. Caladin left them in charge for a while so he could work on repairing the destroyed body. He wanted that done before he set up his Teleportation Circle. It took him most of the rest of the afternoon to piece the body together… it came out very much looking like it had been pieced together.

          When evening came, Caladin went outside and used the eldrin blood he’d harvested from the two dead bodies to power an aeromancy spell that created a low-grade tornado. Just enough wind speed to gather up a bunch of gnats and mosquitoes that had started to gather over the flat water of the river. The funnel of wind pulled bugs in, but wouldn’t let them out. He swept it up and down the river, collecting more bugs as he went.

          “What are you doing?” Lenny asked.

          “Collecting bugs,” Caladin said. “Didn’t I tell you to keep an eye on Jaeryl?”

          “He’s fine,” Lenny said. “Maggie is watching him. If you really don’t trust him that much, why don’t you just turn him into one of those shambling idiots?”

          “Because,” Caladin said, “we still need him to lead us to that fortress his rebel king is holding.” The swarm of wind-trapped insects reached a point of density that Caladin couldn’t see through. That seemed like enough. He switched to the soul-extracting spell Brorn had taught him. Against mere insects, there was no chance of it failing. Living people were another matter. The swarm of insects collapsed all at once, instantly dead. They were mostly mosquitoes, so Caladin didn’t feel bad for them. He guided the captured insect souls into the most intact dead body; the one that had fallen out of the sky. The body started to shake. “Hold him down for me,” Caladin told Lenny. “Since you’re here and all.”

          Lenny sat on top of the shaking dead body. “What are you doing exactly?” he asked.

          “Raising the dead,” Caladin explained. “Brorn refused to teach me his trick for making synthetic souls, so I’m combining a bunch of little souls into one big one.”

          “Insects? Is that really going to work?”

          “What? Would you rather I use people? Because that’s what most necromancers do.”

          “No, no. Insects are fine,” Lenny said.

          Caladin continued, guiding the remainder of the insect souls he’d collected into the patchwork body he’d haphazardly glued back together with visceramancy. That body began to shake as well. Brorn had insisted his method of binding souls was also something Caladin wasn’t ready to learn yet, so he had only taught him a beginner’s version of Bind Spirit that required him to burn runes all over the skin of the dead body. He easily accomplished this with lithomancy. The new undead sort of looked like they had some kind of weird, full-body tattoo. He could cover that. Once the spell was complete, the random spasms stopped.

          “There,” Caladin said. “All done. As long as their skin doesn’t get too damaged and I keep the enchantments charged up, I think that should hold. You can get off him now, Lenny.”

          Lenny got up. Caladin commanded his new undead to rise. They opened their glowing green eyes and stood up. “They got marks on their skin,” Lenny commented. “Is that normal?”

          “It is now,” Caladin replied. “This the easiest way to raise undead. I’m just not very good at it yet.”

          “Are those marks going to be a problem?” Lenny asked. “I mean, won’t Brorn be able to tell you made these ‘uns yourself?”

          Caladin frowned. “Probably,” he admitted. “That might be a problem… and if I use that Repair spell… No. Damn! That would remove the runes. Now I really want to know how Brorn does that! You think he inscribes runes right onto their souls? Is that even possible?”

          “What makes you think I know?” Lenny asked. He shrugged. “They got marks on their skin. They look a little different. That’s all I can say. I just think Brorn might notice, is all.”

          “He might, but I can just tell him I attempted to repair two of the zombies he lent me on my own,” Caladin said. “In the meantime, I can keep practicing and I might just figure out the method he uses.” Caladin shook his head. “I used the mana from the blood I collected from them to raise them, but I’m still getting low. I don’t have any extra mana to spare if I want to have enough to activate the Teleportation Circle. That needs to be the next priority. I’ll need to melt down the—”

          Someone cleared their throat in an obvious way. Caladin looked up to see Maggie standing in the doorway of the houseboat. “You need something?” Caladin asked her.

          “Umm, master Caladin?” she said without any confidence. She was looking down at her shoes. “Jaeryl ran off. I couldn’t stop him.”

          “Shoot,” Lenny said. “He’s going to try to contact his people!”

          “Uh-oh,” Caladin said. He could feel his carefully laid plans coming unraveled. Jaeryl knew too much. He could warn King Haedril and put his Brorn-Mart in jeopardy. If Philipus Haedril suspected what he was after he could have the captives from Caladin’s family executed before he had a chance to mount a rescue. Or hold them hostage to prevent him from acting. It was a nightmare. Caladin had two replacement undead. “Go!” he told Lenny. “Go after him. I’ll figure something out. With these two the count’s still good at ten. Let me worry about Brorn.”

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