A blow struck Tybalt in the center of his back, and he spasmed for a few seconds, his body moving uncontrollably.

  Perhaps they had struck his spine in some particularly damaging way. When he stopped moving, he realized everything had come to a sudden stop. Tybalt heard the soldiers shuffling through the sand. There was whispering that fell just outside the range of his perception.

  Someone bent down beside him, loosened the sack from around his neck, and then pulled it free from his head. A steady hand was placed on the top of Tybalt’s back.

  “It’s over,” said the Sergeant, not unkindly. “Don’t try to move too quickly. You probably have some broken bones. We’re going to give you half a health elixir. I wouldn’t bother getting more from somewhere else. That’s wasteful… and if we see you looking too spry, we might have the impression you didn’t get the lesson tonight properly.” He lowered his voice. “You took it like a man, though. Like a soldier. Well done.”

  He rose, and another figure immediately took his place.

  “Talk out of turn again, we’ll do more than just hurt you next time.” It was Indus’s voice. As he spoke, he placed a hand on the back of Tybalt’s neck, his tone threatening and—something more, something that was hard to place but that put the hairs all over Tybalt’s battered body on edge.

  “Fuck you,” Tybalt said, practically spitting the words through a mouth half full of blood.

  “I admire those balls, bastard,” Indus said. “Maybe I’ll keep them after we geld you.”

  The words landed more threateningly with Tybalt feeling weak and broken. A part of him thought for a moment that they might turn him over, rip off his pants right there, and take a burning hot knife to his privates. He would fight that, but there wouldn’t be much he could do about it just then. He definitely had a few broken bones, and his hands were two bundles of smashed sausages. He probably couldn’t even properly hold a knife, let alone throw an impactful punch.

  I do have the bone knife still, in my pocket. They wouldn’t be expecting that.

  But the thought didn’t come with much hope.

  Involuntarily, Tybalt pictured them holding him down and… permanently disabling him with a red hot blade. His fingers clenched involuntarily on the sand, pushing the grains further into the exposed, bloodied skin of his hands.

  Of course, it was just a paranoid moment that made Tybalt imagine that the worst might happen. He had already been beaten badly. Helplessness makes any disaster seem more conceivable.

  A few seconds passed, and then Indus rose, removing his hand from the back of Tybalt’s neck. Despite having already been badly beaten, the necromancer had to resist the urge to try to get up and fight. Had to remind himself that the Sergeant had said it was done. Over.

  As if to provide the punctuation mark, ending the incident, a glass bottle dropped onto the sand in front of Tybalt’s head. He heard it strike the sand, rather than seeing it, because he was still face down, and he didn’t seem to have the energy to get up.

  Tybalt forced himself to focus. He felt very tired, but he needed to rise. Needed to get that half a health elixir into him. He pressed his hands against the ground, palms down, pushup position.

  He started to lift himself up.

  A shadow fell over his face, and then a boot slammed into the side of his head.

  “Damn it, Graven—”

  The rest of what the Sergeant said was spoken outside Tybalt’s awareness.

  The world faded to black.

  —

  Baldwin drew his blade out of the stump neck of the man he had just killed.

  Just your bad luck, buddy, he thought. The miner had caught the revenant in the middle of dragging bodies out of the foreman’s cabin. Half-drowsy and stunned by the sheer surprise of what he saw, the human had made for an easy target. Baldwin hadn’t even meant to decapitate him, just to hack through his neck with enough force to guarantee the kill. Apparently I don’t know my own strength.

  Before Baldwin could even smile at this achievement, an alarm passed through his head. Then it repeated. The sensation was like having a loud warning gong being chimed over and over again, inside of his skull.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  He didn’t know how, exactly, but he instinctively understood what that meant.

  Something happened to Tybalt.

  Baldwin tugged telepathically and felt the connection to the necromancer as strongly as ever, so he knew Tybalt wasn’t dead. But there was also a powerful instinctive urge to go and help him. The revenant recognized this wasn’t a natural instinct. It was part of the nature of the mystical bond between undead and creator.

  This seemed to him to confirm what Tybalt had told him—that the necromancer’s creatures would not outlive their master.

  We need to go back, Baldwin thought with a touch of anxiety. Tybalt had warned him about what was likely happening, or Baldwin would be in full panic. Even with the foreknowledge his master had provided, Baldwin still wanted to return to Tybalt’s side as soon as possible.

  He needs me, Baldwin caught himself thinking. He shook his head. No, no, I need him to stay alive, so that I stay alive.

  He had to remember what the actual conditions were. Must not let himself be subsumed into Tybalt’s slowly growing faceless horde, even though he did feel a strange sense of identification with the necromancer and his fate now—and it clearly wasn’t all a result of the idea that Baldwin would die whenever Tybalt did.

  Was it Tybalt’s powers? Or a genuine, burgeoning sense of loyalty?

  Tybalt, are you all right? Baldwin sent.

  A few seconds passed.

  Fucking answer, master! Baldwin shouted telepathically.

  The silence stretched on until it became ominous.

  Fuck…

  Baldwin turned and quick-stepped over to one of the latrines, where he heard the sounds of a man gasping out his last breaths. The skeletons had done well with the element of surprise thus far. At least, neither of the kills the two groups of skeletons had managed had raised an alarm.

  Two kills for the skeletons would have to be enough for this trial run.

  They had six bodies now, assuming that Baldwin counted the headless corpse he had just made. That would be plenty for the nine of them to carry together.

  Baldwin knocked softly on the door of the latrine. The dying man inside made a plaintive squeal, begging for help. The revenant ignored it.

  “After the man dies, bring his body outside,” Baldwin said. “We are returning to the master.”

  He turned, walked over to the other latrine, and conveyed the same message.

  “Come outside. The master needs us. Bring the body of the man you killed.”

  Silently, the skeletons emerged from the two outhouses. They looked even more menacing than usual—with their monstrous horns, their bones covered in blood, and dragging two dead bodies—but Baldwin could only think about whether it was worthwhile it to bark at them to hurry up. He decided against it. They had little mental capacity to start with. Every instruction he gave them would add processing time to their efforts.

  Wait, one of them is fucked up.

  Coming out of the left latrine, one of the skeletons—with a grayish cast to its bones—was missing an arm. It looked to have snapped off at the shoulder.

  “How did—” Baldwin stopped himself from talking to the mute creature and simply stepped past it, through the open door of the outhouse.

  He looked around for a minute inside the cramped space of the latrine and finally saw that the detached bones had wound up in the pit where the crap fell. It was floating in a deep standing body of mixed solid and liquid waste.

  The guy they killed put up some resistance, huh? Well, I’m not going down there.

  Baldwin thought about ordering the skeleton down into the hole to retrieve its lost limb, then shook his head.

  I don’t even know how to reattach it. That would be one more thing to carry. And we need to get back to the mast—to Tybalt, right away.

  He stepped back out and raised his voice slightly to give the whole body of skeletons an order at once. Hopefully this wouldn’t wake up any of the miners.

  “Meet me over there with the bodies of those you killed.” He pointed at the foreman’s cabin. Then Baldwin rushed toward the building.

  This whole situation is fucked…

  It was impossible to tell if he was panicking for entirely justifiable reasons or if the necromancer being in trouble was simply something that his creations were bound to overreact to. Either way, the feeling accompanying the situation was the same.

  Baldwin entered the cabin through the wide open front door, found the fire still going in the fireplace, took a hunk of firewood, and ignited it.

  Then he walked around the inside of the cabin and set each room ablaze. He might not have fire magic, but there was more than one way to skin a cat—or burn a house down.

  When he returned to the outside, the horned skeletons were there waiting for him.

  Baldwin felt a ridiculous pressure from their steady, patient glowing green gazes.

  I’m working as fast as I can, he thought.

  “Help me take these cadavers, and follow me,” Baldwin said after a moment, gesturing at the corpses he had removed. His voice was sharper than he intended it to be, but the skeletons gave no indication of caring. Because of course they didn’t. They were skeletons.

  The silent squad took the bodies in their arms, and as Baldwin led the way, they began the march back across the miles of desert that separated them from the necromancer, dragging the freshly dead beside them.

  I hope we’re not too late.

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