Necromancy 101

  The short line of skeletons stood shakily, swaying back and forth. One was missing a femur that Marci must have lost somewhere; another two she'd gotten the leg bones mixed up and were both lopsided. Their glowing blue eyes were spooky, but otherwise they looked about as threatening as a toddler with a bad attitude.

  "This is never going to work!" said Marci, pinching her nose. "These are pathetic!"

  "Don't despair, m'dy," said Saoirse encouragingly. "This is an excellent first attempt! Mine weren't nearly as good as this for months when I started!"

  "I'm a qualified wizard, Saoirse," snapped Marci. "I basically finished a Mastery, of course I'm better than a novice!"

  The succubus' tail drooped, and she cringed back.

  "Sorry, sorry," said Marci, shaking her head. "It's not your fault. I'm just frustrated. I thought this… I thought this was going to work…"

  "I believe the pn is still sound, m'dy," said Saoirse. "With arms and armour, especially if you incorporate them during the raising process, these would still be formidable. Especially, if they were complimenting stronger, demonic forces."

  Marci muttered darkly. The point had been that she wouldn't have to rely on demonic forces. She could always have done that, she had enough coin to pay for a small army for a not insignificant amount of time.

  But even if she got much better at raising undead soldiers, it was unthinkable that she would be able to assault Saxmoor prison with these.

  "Dammit," she said, reaching out through the Dreadfort's Shard and touching the mind of Jonda, who seemed to have been doing some kind of sword drill in the throne room.

  "Yes, Dark Mistress?" she said, falling to one knee. "How might I serve you? A meal? Something to drink? A back rub-"

  "Firstly, you don't need to do that—and no, I don't need any of that," replied Marci. "And secondly… can you please take one of the demons and go to Pandemonium and start recruiting more demons? Please, please, go for ones who look professional and might actually follow orders to the letter."

  "Your will is my command, oh great and terrible Mistress!" said Jonda, her mind radiating pleasure at the thought of having received an important mission from Marci.

  "Alright," said Marci, shifting her attention back to her body and waving a hand, severing the intangible threads binding the undead to the Shard at the heart of the Dreadfort. The light in the undead's eyes died, and they cttered to the floor. "Let's try this again, shall we?"

  It was slow, slow going, despite the praise that Saoirse heaped upon her. It wasn't that the actual spellcraft needed for this type of necromancy was that hard, it was that there were many subtleties to it, and experience and skill were central to actually getting a decently powerful bone-puppet at the end of the spell.

  Saoirse's constructs were sleek, strong, and fast, and if Marci had been able to just get her to raise the undead army for her, she was sure that would have been fine. But it didn't work like that. Although she could pour more mana into Saoirse's body through her link to the Shard, the succubus wouldn't be able to handle the huge quantities of energy that sustaining even a hundred of the troops would require. She'd burn to a crisp from the arcane backwash. Necromancers, while powerful foes, could not, barring something like a Shard, raise and command legions of undead by themselves, not without a whole host of supporting magical infrastructure which was apparently a non-starter in the time they had.

  *** Marci cast her eye over the assembled demons, arrayed before her, trying to radiate imposing malevolence—something that was easier said than done, since she was shorter than all of them save a few imps. The long trailing robes that hung beneath her as she hovered in pce probably helped a little bit, as did the burning red eyes, but she felt ridiculous.

  Jonda and Rafferty, the Pit Fiend in charge of the demon group she'd recruited, had come back with two dozen demons. Well, Marci had possessed Jonda to do the actual interviews, something the elf was very weirdly more than OK with, and she'd rejected five times that. Word that there was 'another Shardkeeper' was apparently spreading through the Underworld like wildfire, and demons were eager to 'get in on the ground floor of her Dark operation' as many of them put it.

  She'd weeded out the real psychopaths, like the incubus who had waxed poetic about his love for murder, and the twin imps who were psionic, virtually monosylbic, had a resume that talked about 'breaking wills,' and gave even Jonda the heebie-jeebies, but that didn't mean that she was particurly pleased about her new recruits.

  "Let me make one thing clear," she said, speaking in infernal to the deadly silent group. "I will not tolerate… unnecessary excesses. I run a tight ship; when you are assigned a mission, you will carry it out to the letter, you will not indulge yourself in killing those outside the briefing. Am I clear?"

  That was the angle she'd decided on. Since the demons were bound to her Shard on certain conditions, which could be broken, although not trivially, and not in a way that directly let them attack her, she knew she needed to try and act something like what they expected an evil overlord would for as long as she needed them. 'Efficiency' as a way of getting them not to commit war crimes was the best she'd been able to come up with in the short amount of time she had, and she was leaning as far as she could into the authoritarian appearance as well to justify it.

  The demons, thankfully, seemed to take this in their stride. Shardkeepers were notoriously fickle, at least, according to Jonda, so being anal retentive about procedure hopefully wouldn't be beyond the scope of expected behaviour.

  Hopefully.

  A hand rose—a young looking, four-armed wrath-demon woman.

  "Um, your Dark Ladyship?" she said.

  "Yes?" said Marci.

  "What about maiming?" she asked. "Can we do that? So- so long as it doesn't interfere with the mission?"

  Marci gred at her, and made a mental note to put her on the defensive teams.

  "No!" said Marci. "No maiming!"

  "What about some… roughing up?" said a rge female pit fiend. "You know, knock a few teeth out, that kind of thing."

  Marci continued to gre, the pit fiend, who was five times her size, if not more, flinched back.

  "No!"

  "Even if it doesn't interfere-"

  "No!"

  "What about 'enhanced interrogation?'" asked a succubus.

  "Enhanced… what?" said Marci, turning to Saoirse, who was standing next to her, looking rather chuffed at having been introduced as 'Chief Necromancer.' As far as demons went, the succubus was surprisingly non-homicidal, and although Rafferty was a bit upset that one of his subordinates had seemingly been elevated above him, she had appeased him by making him 'head of her Infernal Guard.'

  "She means torture," whispered Saoirse.

  "No torture!" said Marci.

  There were some disappointed noises from the group.

  "Look, I've hired you to carry out my orders to the letter," said Marci. "It is likely you will have to fight, perhaps kill, but as I said, I like efficiency-"

  "But murder is efficient!" protested the succubus who'd wanted to torture people.

  "Yeah, stab 'em, problem solved," said the wrath demon. "Simple. Clean."

  "Efficient," rumbled the pit fiend. "That is what-"

  "This is not a democracy!" roared Marci, reinforcing her words by making them echo psychically in their heads. "You are dismissed!"

  The demons all immediately flinched and bowed, and then scurried off deeper into the fortress to find the quarters that Jonda, who was rapidly becoming indispensable for the sole reason that she wasn't nearly as much of a monster as most of the others—with the possible exception of Saoirse, who seemed remarkably well adjusted for a demon.

  Well, Saoirse was a necromancer, but the more Marci learnt about the discipline, the more she became convinced that beyond the kind of gross nature of it, it wasn't even a particurly unethical branch of magic. Sure, most people probably didn't like the idea of their loved ones remains being puppeted and animated by magic, and the Church really hated it for what she understood were theological reasons, but it didn't actually cause harm to any sentient creature.

  Honestly, it was frankly embarrassing that the University and wizards who considered themselves serious people went along with the prohibition. Perhaps that was why so many wizards ended up turning into warlocks…

  Marci groaned and covered her face. Godsdammit, now she was making excuses for warlocks. She needed to rescue her friends and then find a way to disentangle her soul from this horrible fortress, preferably before any more of her somewhat loose morals slipped even further.