Chapter 26. Old Friends

  “One hour? I haven't earned so much as half a silver in weeks!” Jeremiah kicked the closed door of the Stonefists headquarters in frustration.

  Pete brushed himself off. “Quite the pickle, that.”

  “Pete! Pete, can you spare me a gold?”

  “Hah!” Pete barked a laugh, but a strange one, in a voice Jeremiah hadn't heard before. The voice was gone as quick as it came. “I wish you luck, Jay, I truly do.”

  Jeremiah calmed himself, “This is no problem, he thought, I can run home and get…”

  Run home.

  Run home and ask to be saved.

  Run home and prove I am worthless.

  “Pete, maybe you can help me.” Jeremiah chased Pete up the stairs. “I just need a target, someplace nearby.”

  “I believe my help is thoroughly exhausted. Now, I have some business to attend to, if you’ll excuse me.” He turned to leave.

  “Wait!” Jeremiah caught Pete’s wrist. We’ll split the take, how about that?”

  “A most generous offer, Jay, my lad, but I do think you are wasting precious time—”

  “And I’ll owe you a favor!” said Jeremiah

  Pete was already smiling wolfishly. “Is that so?”

  ?

  Jeremiah threw a sack over the low wall and followed it to huddle behind a manicured bush. His target was two houses away, but every home in the neighborhood enjoyed a tiny walled yard, intact windows, and a reasonable number of inhabitants. Even the street was quiet, with just a handful of people out and about. The absence of furious throngs made Jeremiah feel like he’d somehow left the city.

  His target belonged to an elven woman named Lady Shasee, who enjoyed splurging on flashy jewelry, or so Pete had said. Like most elven fortunes, hers had come from a long family line, now maintained through various ancient investments.

  Jeremiah felt a twinge of malice. He had spent days begging fruitlessly for single coppers just to eat—the wealth and comfort on display here were like a slap in the face.

  When he opened the sack, though, he couldn’t help but smile. “Hello, old friends.”

  The sack was filled with dead rats. Rats had not been proven hard to find in the Pit. On the contrary, it was hard not to find rats. Accumulating a pile of dead ones had been a simple matter of bending down and picking them up, no killing needed.

  He had an hour to earn a gold. Well, more like forty minutes now. It was his first robbery and he hadn’t even been granted the time to properly case the building or make a plan. Therefore, he told himself, it was only reasonable to fall back on old habits. Just this once.

  Jeremiah hesitated. His reasons for swearing off necromancy flashed through his mind—the soldiers who’d been torn apart by his zombies, the man in the closet. The countless people who had seen his power as a tool to be twisted to their own purposes. And now he was preparing to go back on his word, not for some lofty life-saving reason, but to do a bad thing.

  “But is this really a bad thing?” Jeremiah thought. He was stealing from a woman who had plenty, in order to get closer to uncovering a depraved murder cult—surely that balanced out to good.

  The clock was ticking.

  “Power justifies its own use,” Flusoh said. “Come on home.”

  Rise.

  Jeremiah hadn’t anticipated how good it would feel. Back in the dungeon he had been too terrified to notice, but casting the spell now felt like stretching a sore muscle. The space in his mind was vast, and the rat bubbles were so small. He reflexively stacked them together, and the tiny amount of space they took up in his head painted a terrifying picture of how many he might be able to command at a time.

  He tipped the bag, spilling the rats onto the ground. They waited, primed to move at his command. “I really hope that Shasee lady isn’t around, or this is going to be one hell of a nightmare,” Jeremiah muttered to Gus.

  Climb .

  The zombified rats sprang to life and moved together like a roiling flea infested rug. They flowed over the garden walls and scuttled up the side of the elven woman’s house. Lanterns flickered downstairs, so he sent them up towards a second story window.

  Jeremiah closed his eyes and focused on the sensations. It felt amazing. Just being in this state again, sorting the bits of information and exerting his will, gave him a peace of mind he didn’t realize he was missing. Why did he give this up again?

  The upstairs window was closed, but not locked.

  Squeeze.

  When alive, rats were able to squish themselves nearly flat to slip through cracks in ways that’d defy imagining. As undead, when pain and organ compression no longer mattered, they were functionally liquid. The first rats crushed their own guts out while squeezing into the seams of the window, gradually forcing it open enough that the rest of the rats could pour inside.

  The rats explored the room, gradually filling in Jeremiah’s sense of the place until he could be confident it was a bedroom. Since he hadn’t heard any screams of horror, he assumed the room was empty.

  “Uhh…” This part was tricky.

  Take?

  The trickle of information from the horde became a chaotic torrent as the rats began pilfering random objects. Jeremiah struggled to make sense of what was happening. Several rats started trying to drag something heavy towards the window, and Jeremiah had to separate their bubbles from the stack to stop them. When each seemed to have something in tow, he recalled them.

  Rats started streaming out of the window, back towards Jeremiah. He hoped it was dark enough, and any passersby uninterested enough, that they would go unnoticed.

  Jeremiah opened the sack expectantly as the first rats returned. They scurried inside so he could evaluate the take.

  In retrospect, Jeremiah should have predicted that the objects rats would choose, even zombie rats infused with his will, would be different from what he would have chosen. The sack was filled with crumbs of food, dead bugs, fluff, bones from a mouse, and torn pieces of fabric. A couple coppers made it in, but no where near enough to equate a gold. Clearly the rats had seized upon whatever was nearby, likely on the floor and under furniture, when he had given the command.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Jeremiah swore. He estimated about half of his time had now gone, and he still had nothing to show for it. “Okay, new plan.”

  This time he selected a group of bubbles to form a task force of sorts, just three rats to limit the onslaught of sensory information and allow Jeremiah to direct them more specifically. He hoped, anyway. He had never attempted anything like this.

  The task force rats made their way back over the wall and into the bedroom. Jeremiah tried to figure out how to command them to do what he wanted.

  Climb. Search.

  The rats climbed the furniture and scanned around on top while Jeremiah struggled to make sense of what they were seeing. Large, flat soft—that had to be a bed, thankfully unoccupied. Smooth, flat, good for biting—a wooden surface of some kind. Soft, up, movement—some kind of hanging textile—maybe curtains?

  Jeremiah took a breath. He had never even considered this type of necromancy, but there was no reason he couldn’t figure it out. Instead of spreading his focus wide, like he was used to when performing necromancy, he had to bring it in closer. Sharper. Like with enchanting.

  The information from the rats became more concrete. Dull shapes came into focus, he felt textures under his fingertips. There was a dim light from somewhere in the room, but the rats didn’t register it as a dangerous light that meant people. Jeremiah sent them to investigate. It was a large vertical surface, flat and too slippery to climb. It was emitting a soft light….a mirror!

  Jeremiah had to stop himself from shouting with triumph. The mirror was reflecting the moon from it’s position above a vanity table. If this was where Lady Shasee sat every morning to get ready for the day, her jewelry collection had to be close to hand.

  Sure enough, the rats soon found a large box resting on top of the vanity. Opening it was surprisingly easy—it seemed the muscle memory rats retained from pilfering human stores in life applied here. The box was filled with small non-food objects that the rats found horridly boring.

  The rats swiveled as one towards a sound from downstairs. A person was moving about, which every rat knows means danger.

  “ Now or never! ” thought Jeremiah. The rest of the horde streamed back out of the sack, over the garden wall, and up to the window. The footsteps were definitely making their way up the stairs. as the rats squeezed their way through the window.

  Take, return.

  He held the position of the box firmly in his mind as the rats swarmed over the box. “Come on, come on!” he quietly urged them. They began scurrying back towards the window with their prizes, some of them struggling to fit larger objects through the narrow opening.

  The footsteps were coming down the hall now, nearly at the bedroom. Jeremiah tried not to think about what would happen if Lady Shasee discovered a robbery in progress by a horde of rats. He tried especially hard not to imagine what would happen if it were discovered that the rats were undead.

  He ordered them all back, whether or not they had an object. Surely whatever they had grabbed already would be worth at least a gold, including the split he’d promised Pete. The rats fled, then Jeremiah remembered to send one back to close the box. It scampered across the vanity and jumped on the lid of the box just as the doorknob to the bedroom turned. Jeremiah ordered it to hide, and then severed the connection.

  The rest of the rats swarmed into Jeremiah’s sack with their treasures. Or at least, so he hoped—before he could check, he needed to get some distance from the scene in case Lady Shasee was about to discover she’d been robbed. He lifted the sack over her shoulder and casually exited the bush, heading back towards the Pit as though he hadn’t a care in the world. As soon as he turned the corner, he broke into a sprint.

  Back to the Pit. Jeremiah ducked into the corner of an abandoned hovel and knelt, not waiting to catch his breath before he opened the sack.

  Out.

  The rats dropped whatever they held and swarmed out of the bag, leaving only their earnings behind.

  Scatter .

  The rats scurried off in every direction. Jeremiah gave them a few seconds before severing the connection. Dozens of tiny bubbles burst, and he was sad to see them go. It had been like regaining his vision after being blind for over a year, but only for a moment.

  “It was an emergency,” he reminded himself.

  “There will always be emergencies,” said Allison.

  He peeked into the bag, and to his relief, discovered a respectable pile of jewelry, gemstones of various colors glittering together along with silver and pearls. This was easily worth several gold.

  Gripping the sack closed, he ran straight for the Stonefists’ headquarters, not daring to stop moving lest an opportunistic citizen of the Pit decide to take whatever he owned for themselves. He wasn't sure exactly how much time remained of his hour, but he knew it couldn’t be much.

  Pete was waiting for him in front of the entrance. “Good evening Jay, how are you finding things?” said Pete.

  “Great. Move, Pete,” said Jeremiah.

  But Pete merely smiled congenially. “I believe we had a bargain, did we not? I’ll be taking my share before you turn it all over, thank you.” There was a slight edge to his voice, the sliver of a threat.

  “Argh! Okay, fine. Just take whatever,” Jeremiah held the bag out to him as they descended the stairs, out of sight of anyone that might be spying.

  Pete took his time. Piece by piece, he sorted the jewels into two piles while Jeremiah paced impatiently. He was surprised to see Pete eschewing the more elaborate items in favor of loose stones and simple designs.

  “Thank you, Jay, it has been a pleasure doing business with you,” said Pete, collecting and pocketing his earnings. “Now, scurry along, Monty is surely waiting.”

  Jeremiah just about flew to Monty’s office, remembering only at the last moment to kick his shoes off at the door. The dwarf sat in the light of his single candle, as if he had frozen in place when Jeremiah had looked away.

  About eight minutes of sand remained in the glass as Jeremiah triumphantly emptied the contents of the sack onto Monty’s desk.

  Monty didn’t even glance at it. “What is this?”

  “You asked for a gold, I brought you several times that,” said Jeremiah. He tried to sound brash, but a sense of dread was tickling the back of his neck.

  “You brought me work.” said Monty. “You brought me a fence’s fee. You brought me personalized pieces I can’t sell. You brought me gems and metals of unknown quality, that I’ll need to pay to have appraised.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Jeremiah. “There’s plenty here to be worth more than a gold, even with all that stuff.”

  Monty gestured to the jewels with a cold smile. “Have a look.”

  Jeremiah swallowed and took a closer look at the treasures.

  Monogrammed. Every piece of significance was monogrammed or stamped with a crest. All of it was custom. The gemstones, few that there were, were small and cloudy.

  “And all of this…isn’t worth a gold?” Try as he might, he couldn’t keep the pleading out of his voice or his eyes.

  Monty kept smiling. “Could be. But it’s a lot of work on my part just to check, which I certainly don’t owe you. So, ‘best second story man in Shabad’, by my count you have four minutes and forty three seconds to produce my gold. After that, and not one second later, I offer the fine men and women upstairs—who have earned my trust the old fashioned way—the chance to collect your head for the same price.”

  “I-I can’t! That’s not enough time!” said Jeremiah, backing toward the door.

  Monty wiped his desk clean with a massive hand. The treasure clattered as it hit the floor. “Tragic.”

  Jeremiah ran up the stairs, his mind racing even faster. As he reached the main room, every eye in the room turned towards him.

  “Oh, this’ll be easy. I’ve got this one in the bag!”

  “The hell you do, I’ll have him inside an hour.”

  “Hey Ren, want to team up on this one? Fifty-fifty?”

  “Nah, let’s make this one a good ol’ fashioned race!”

  They laughed as Jeremiah shoved his way past. He had to do something, but what? Run up the Pit and rob the nearest person, hoping for a coin? He’d never make it back in time, even if he miraculously picked a gold from the first pocket he saw.

  He threw open the door and sprinted up the stairs. Maybe the head start over the Stonefists would be enough to make some distance. A shadow loomed over him at the top of the stairs, backed by the glow of a lantern flame.

  “Need a favor, lad?” asked Pete. He was holding a gold coin in his outstretched hand.