I raised the skeletons from the dead soldiers; that was easy enough. As for the horses, though, that was kinda tricky. Of course, I knew how to resurrect beasts, since I’d done it with Fang, but was that what I wanted to do with the horses? I figured a skeleton ensemble would look better than a mismatch of zombie mounts with skeletal riders. After all, if I was going to have an army, I wanted them to look good.
I stared at a dead horse and thought of the same process I used to raise skeletons from dead people, trying to focus on the horse instead.
Nothing happened.
Grave Oath buzzed in its sheath, as if the weapon was trying to tell me something. I drew the dagger, and then it hit me: this was how I upgraded my powers. Grave Oath was the means by which I extracted souls—the items that gave me powers and increased the strength of my magic—and therefore, it stood to reason that it would be the conduit for increasing my powers and gaining new abilities.
I pulled out the dagger and gripped it with both hands, then closed my eyes and focused on my abilities—all of them. A jolt tore through my body, and it felt almost as if my soul was being sucked out of it.
I found myself in the middle of a vast, dark expanse. There was nothing around me for miles and miles but blackness, and it was the same both above and below. I was standing on ground that was solid, shiny, and black—like the blade of my kusarigama—and perfectly flat, like volcanic glass, for miles and miles.
Standing in the center of this strange black world was an enormous gray tree. The lower boughs were visible, but the middle and higher ones were shrouded in dark gray fog. I walked over to the tree and noticed that hanging from each bare, gnarled branch was an item. As I approached, three of the items began to glow with a strange, unearthly light.
On the lowest branch was a skeleton, and on the one above it, a skeleton holding a sword. On the third branch up was a zombie lizard that looked a lot like Fang.
Well, this was easy enough to figure out. What I was looking at had to be the abilities I’d learned so far. The powers that I didn’t yet have access to were, frustratingly, obscured by fog.
Grave Oath buzzed in my hands, its vibrating growing more urgent as I walked nearer to the tree. When I was a few yards away, I spotted countless stab marks in the trunk.
A smile touched my lips as I realized what I needed to do.
Focusing on my desired ability to raise skeletal beasts, I stepped up to the tree and stabbed Grave Oath into the trunk. The dagger shuddered and pulsed, and I felt as if the souls currently trapped in it were being injected into the tree. The dagger continued to vibrate for a few moments before it became still again. I looked up and saw some of the fog clearing.
A new branch had been revealed. On it hung a glowing skeleton of a horse.
I climbed up the tree and found that if I stretched up far enough, I could almost touch the skeletal horse’s hoof. With one final stretch, I managed to brush my fingertips across the item. Another jolt ripped through me, and the sensation of being yanked back into my body catapulted me out of the strange, dark place and back into reality.
“Are you okay, Vance?” Elyse asked. “You were just standing completely still and staring blankly into space for a few minutes, as if you were paralyzed. I was starting to worry.”
“I went on a little adventure,” I said with a smile.
“Adventure?” she asked, clearly confused.
“Watch.”
I looked at the dead horse and thought about raising its skeleton to serve me, as I had done many times before with dead humans. This time, however, the horse’s corpse exploded in a grisly shower of viscera, blood, and shredded hide. The beast’s skeleton stood up, as ready for a rider as any living horse.
“Ugh, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing that,” Elyse murmured, her pretty face crumpling into an expression of distaste. “But that is rather impressive.”
“I’m not done yet.” I commanded an undead cavalryman to pick up a spear and mount the horse. He did so, and a surge of triumph raced through me. “Now, I can add a cavalry division to my growing army.”
“You are learning quickly, Vance,” Isu said with more than a touch of jealousy. “But don’t let your early successes go to your head. Pride has been the downfall of many powerful men… and many gods.” She wore a cold smile as she stalked off and disappeared into the back of the wagon.
“Be careful around her,” Elyse said softly. “I still don’t trust her, and I think she’s plotting something. She’s not the sort who’ll just let you get away with stealing her divinity and reducing her to the rank of a mere necromancer. Did you hear what she said when she was consecrating the shrine? She said something about the reign of the current God of Death, with an emphasis on ‘current.’ Personally, I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll keep my eye on her, at least until she proves her true loyalty to me.”
I proceeded to raise the remaining dead horses and soldiers as skeletons. Once they were all up and ready, I ordered everyone else back into the wagon. We continued along the road, with my zombie Crusaders marching in front of the oxen and my army of skeletons trailing behind them. I remained at the front, mounted on Fang. This was for two reasons. First, there were simply too many skeletons to hide in
