Chapter 23, Part 1

Thanks for reading! The usual warning applies. Adult language and situations.





Stirling pushed through the outer doors of Strangefellows and out into the rain. There were still a few people clustered around the entrance with worried expressions on their faces. When they saw the charcoal bag on his head their expressions became even more deeply concerned. He nodded at them as he passed.

“Merry Christmas to all and to all a good fucking night.”

He rubbed his hands together, shoved them in his armpits and staggered into the rain. He’d gotten a bit too carried away with the mojo and he needed to find somewhere warm and dry before the possibility of hypothermia became a hard reality. Normally, he’d have a ceramic heater, a hot shower, and as much coffee as he could drink to warm him up. What he had now was a damp rain jacket, a dangerously low core body temperature, and a wet December night. Not good.

As he left the pool of yellow light at the entrance to the club, he pulled off the paper charcoal bag and tossed it away with a trembling hand. Cold rain pattered against his newly bald scalp. He did the best he could to wash away the charcoal dust from the inside of the bag before pulling on his hood.
He glanced at his phone. There were still four hours of night left and he was positive each one would only suck more than the one before.

Wet gravel and cracked pavement crunched under the soles of his boots as he loped around the blocky garage and back onto the street. A pool of orange sodium light marked an intersection a few hundred feet ahead and he pointed himself in that direction. A flicker of shadow caught his eye between himself and the streetlight. He could just make out the silhouette of Magnon perched on a darkened stop sign as it settled his feathers.

“Great job at keeping a low profile. Would you like me to let you know how spectacularly fucked you are, or would you like to start?”

“It’s not that bad. I was in disguise.”

“You cunning fiend! Nobody will connect the stranger who suddenly appeared at the doors of Strangefellows with the stranger who left wearing the same clothes and a charcoal bag on his head. Bravo.”

“You know, you’re kind of an asshole. Most of the people who saw me come in were gone by the time I left. Besides, that mess was my mess to clean up. Those things were animated with my magic.”

The crow let out a defeated sounding mental sigh. “No, not just your magic. Couldn’t you smell it? The whole place stank of alchemy. That was a Necroalchemical binding.”

“Whose the what now?”

“Necroalchemical. A fusion of alchemy and necromancy. Illegal, unethical, and really damn effective. Didn’t you see the souls?”

“Well, Duh. There were ghosts all over the place in there.”

“I said souls, not ghosts,” said Magnon slowly, as though explaining to a young child.

Stirling gritted his teeth. He wasn’t sure if it was from the cold or from the irritation. “I’m a little foggy on the whole ghost, soul thing. Want to give me the Cole’s Notes version?”

“Ghosts are like the spiritual shrapnel that get left behind when a soul goes to the other side. As I’m sure you’ve already noticed, they’re about as smart as a sack of rocks. A soul, on the other hand, is the whole nonphysical identity of a person. They’re the intellect and personality of the person that continues on after they die.”

A horrible thought occurred to Stirling. “So, when I was using my whips back there, I was killing souls? Why didn’t you stop me!”

“In your dreams. You have to be a powerful necromancer to even scratch a soul. It’s a good thing too, I’d rather be standing at ground zero at a nuclear test site than be in the same place as a sundering soul. No, all you were doing was sending them on to the other side. Trust me, you were doing them a favour.”

“They didn’t seem to think so.”

Stirling staggered level with the crow’s stop sign. He hadn’t warmed noticeably.

“Well, then that just goes to show that death doesn’t stop you from being a dumbass. Didn’t you see their wounds? That was what the binding did to them. The spell created spiritual parasites to bite off little pieces of the soul’s energy. The parasite infests the physical body and uses the energy to control and animate them. It’s a really efficient little set-up.”

“What would happen if the parasite used up all of the soul?”

“What’s one minus one?”

“Oh.”

Stirling chafed his forearms to bring some circulation back as he mulled it over in his mind. Magnon beat his wet wings to land on the slick power lines overhead.

“Who made the parasites? Do you think it was that Knox guy?”

“It’s a good question. A better question though, is who is controlling them? Since it wasn’t you, it had to be an alchemist. Knox of the White would be a good guess.”

“Since it wasn’t me!? What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“I did say necroalchemical, right? If you break the word apart, it has two different words hidden inside. Those undead back in Strangefellows were created by alchemical, and necromantic magic. You can come at the problem from either side of the fence with nearly identical results. Don’t think for a second that the alchemist who created them didn’t know that, either.”

“Of course an alchemist couldn’t do it by themselves,” Magnon went on. “They’d need someone dumb enough to leave necromantic magic lying around where anyone could find and use it,” the crow continued. “An enchanted wooden duck, for example.”

“I’m beginning to think I might have fucked up.”

“Very introspective of you.”

“This is really interesting, and I’ll be happy to admit that I screwed the pooch as much as you want later on, but right now I need to get somewhere warm,” Stirling said through chattering teeth. “I can’t feel my fingers or toes.”

Magnon cocked his head down at Stirling. “You do look cold. There’s a gas station in a couple blocks. You can get a coffee or something. I forget how inefficient new necromancers can be with their spells.”

“I’m not n-new, I’ve been d-doing this for years,” Stirling got out between shivers as he staggered forward.

“It was either call you new, or call you shitty,” replied Magnon. “Which would you prefer?”

“I had t-to teach m-myself,” Stirling protested. A thought struck him and Stirling glanced up at the crow. “How does a c-creature who sees r-roadkill as a n-nummy snack, know so much about n-necromancy?”

“Crows are psychopomps.”

“Psychopomp?” Stirling was suddenly treated to the mental impression of dark funnel clouds writhing against a wind-torn landscape beamed directly into his brain. Each of the twisters was made from tens of thousands of wheeling crows. He couldn’t see details, only the black shadows of crows as they flew, silhouetted on a backdrop of a glowing green sky. Stirling knew that each of the crows contained a soul of the newly dead, and through the eyes of memory, watched as they swooped in and released their charges into the heart of the vortex. As they were released, the souls made their spiralling way down the sides of the funnels until they reached the base and moved on from this reality into the next.

“Th-that’s your j-job?”

“It’s the job of every crow. Death feeds us at her table, and we repay our debt by being couriers of souls.”

Stirling thought about it. “That’s a nice p-piece of s-symmetry, there.”

“Deep Magics are usually like that.”

The glowing sign of a Husky gas station slowly came into view, and Stirling staggered through the door with Magnon perched on his shoulder. He stumbled to the coffee bar and chose their largest cup. He did his best to pour with cold-numbed hands and managed to get a little over half of it in his cup on the first try.

The attendant behind the counter looked hard between him, the crow on his shoulder, and the mess he’d made of the coffee bar. Stirling dug into his pocket and pulled out a ten.

“K-keep t-the ch-change, just let me w-warm up inside f-for a few m-minutes.”

“Fine, just clean up after yourself, alright, buddy?”

Stirling nodded his agreement and the attendant went back to reading a novel he had stashed behind the counter. Stirling wrapped his hands around the cup and sipped hot coffee. It burned deliciously as it filled his mouth and trickled down his throat.

By the time he poured his second cup, the shivering was slowly subsiding and is hands and feet were beginning to tingle uncomfortably with returning blood.