“Indeed,” Isu said, still smiling strangely.
“What do you know about all of this?” I demanded.
“Ah, well, I would have known every little detail.” She batted her eyelashes at me in a half-flirtatious, half-mocking manner. “But that was when I was a goddess. When you took that from me, you also took many of the memories of my time as goddess. Now, as a simple necromancer, those memories of mine have simply faded into oblivion. How inconvenient for you, Vance.”
I didn’t know if she was lying about this whole loss-of-memories thing or if she genuinely had lost them when I’d stolen her divinity from her, but either way, it was clear that she wasn’t going to tell me anything. I’d have to find all this stuff out on my own. Perhaps this Wise Woman in the Wastes could somehow give me answers to these questions… and to questions that I hadn’t even begun to properly formulate yet.
“Well, uh, thank you for showing me that,” I said grudgingly to Isu. “Now please put my ancestor’s coffin cover back and get your shit ready to leave in the morning. I’ll talk to you later; I still have a lot to organize before I go.”
I turned and left the crypt without waiting for a response from Isu. She had given me some very valuable information, but she’d also pissed me off. She had a talent for doing both of those things at once.
Chapter Five
I headed over to my personal armory to check on my weapons. Grave Oath, of course, stayed on hip at all times, but I also had my other items that I didn’t need to carry with me permanently. Gleaming menacingly on its mount on the wall was my kusarigama. It was imbued with Death magic, enabling me to draw from and channel the strength of my undead warriors through the chain section. Now that I’d resurrected Xayon, it had also had its Wind powers restored. This allowed me to shoot small tornadoes from the weapon and aim them with deadly precision.
Then there was the little wrist crossbow imbued with the Tree God’s magic. It was a small weapon that packed a big punch; with this little crossbow, I could turn dead materials into wood, and living opponents into trees.
I took the weapons out of the armory and headed over to the dungeons of the castle, which was where my undead troops were stationed. When I kicked my uncle’s ass and took back my rightful spot as ruler of Brakith, the dungeons were practically overflowing with prisoners.
Most of them, however, hadn’t been actual criminals—just people who had been loyal to me and hadn’t believed my uncle’s lies, or people who had made disparaging remarks about my uncle in public (or who had said such things in private but had been reported by spiteful neighbors or my uncle’s lackeys). So, of course, I’d set all these people free immediately, which had cleared a lot of room in the dungeons. Many townsfolk were, understandably, a little unsettled by the presence of my skeletons and zombies. I’d thought it would be wisest and most diplomatic to keep my undead in a place where the public wouldn’t have to constantly see (or smell) them.
The dungeons were a perfect “barracks” for my skeletons, zombies, and skeletal horses. They didn’t need food, water, or fresh air, so that worked out.
Sarge, the first skeleton I’d ever raised, still wielded the golden greatsword of the pompous paladin I’d killed. He kept it with him as he stood guard at the entrance to the dungeons, along with Captain Jandor, leader of my contingent of zombie Resplendent Crusaders. Not that they needed to stand guard, really, but both of them, I think, had a need to do something rather than mope around all day… as much as zombies or skeletons could really “need” or “want” anything.
Sarge was looking good, but Jandor and his crusaders… well, they were, uh, not looking so great, and they were smelling even less so. My skeletons’ bones would become brittler and weaker with the passing of time, I had learned; my Death magic was enough to keep them “alive,” if you wanted to call it that, but it wasn’t strong enough, at least not yet, to stop them from decaying. So, with the skeletons, this simply presented itself as weakening bones, but in the case of the zombies, it was full-on decay. Their flesh was slipping off their bones and dripping in globs of putrid black goo. The stench was absolutely unreal, and a wall of it hit me when I stepped into the dungeons. I was used to the stink of death now, but this was strong enough to make even me want to vomit.
I knew that I just needed to advance my magic levels to slow down and perhaps even permanently halt this decay; it wasn’t evident in my lesser creatures, Talon and Fang, who were not rotting at all. I figured that keeping human corpses reanimated in a stable state took a higher level of magic than I currently possessed. All the more reason to take more souls.
Speaking of taking souls, I’d noticed that for the last couple of weeks, Grave Oath had been buzzing a lot. Someone had been taking souls on my behalf. I’d figured it had been Rami-Xayon, in some way, but considering the number of souls that appeared to have been taken, she would have had to have gone on some sort of serious rampage to have accomplished it on her own.
Now that Cranton and Grast were coming here with an army in tow, I was pretty sure I knew where all of these souls were coming from. It had all happened at just the right time too; I needed a little boost in my powers before setting off on a new quest into perilous territory.
With my weapons fitted snugly into my
