After a moment of quiet anticipation, Tybalt drew out the first bone.

  He saw that it was gray, charred from the flames that had scorched the village.

  He held the thick, club-like object in his hand and examined it. An arm bone, he guessed. There were anatomical diagrams in Unholy Forces, which he might refer to later if this turned out to be harder than he thought. The material was lighter than he had expected, though it did not feel fragile. Unlike the rotting corpses he expected to be working with most of the time, it did not stink, either. There was a strangely pleasant aroma that reminded him of barbecue.

  The other bones were not all matching in color. There were some that were more or less unburnt, although not many. Those were an off-white like the skeletons Tybalt had seen in the Tower of Death. Others were charred in varying shades of gray, reddish-brown, black, yellow-white, yellowish-red, yellow-brown, blue-gray, and in a few cases, a purer shade of white than the bone naturally was.

  Tybalt paused and thought about the sheer variety of shades for a moment.

  I’m guessing this is something to do with how hot the fire burned? How close they were to the center of the Lieutenant’s flame? Or how long they burned?

  Tybalt had started and maintained enough fires to know how wood changed its color with more time in the fire.

  But he knew this was an idle thought for now. He could stop and try to understand what the Lieutenant’s abilities were when he was more fully rested—ideally when he had seen her apply them firsthand, rather than simply observing her at a distance.

  He quickly but carefully extracted the rest of the bones. He did not dump them on the ground. He was a little worried the flames might have made them more delicate than they seemed—or made some of them more delicate than they seemed, anyway, though he could not know which ones yet. Until they had his mana reinforcing them, it was possible he could break them irreparably into pieces too small to work with before he had crafted a single new undead.

  So he handled them delicately, like little treasures. He sorted them by color and placed them in little clusters in the sand. He assumed that bones that had been burned in close proximity to each other had been exposed to similar degrees of heat and were discolored in similar ways by the flames. Therefore, they were hopefully likely to belong to the same person. Though that was not necessary, he thought it might result in a more powerful skeleton.

  “Oh, master, there was something else I wanted to mention,” Baldwin said as Tybalt was pulling out the last of the pieces. The necromancer's hand shook as the revenant’s voice broke the silence, and he barely managed to avoid dropping the chunk of ankle.

  Tybalt’s gaze shot up, and the two men made brief eye contact, clearly slightly uncomfortably for Baldwin while Tybalt kept his gaze inscrutable.

  “Sorry,” Baldwin said quietly.

  “It’s fine. What else did you want to tell me?” Tybalt asked calmly.

  “The fire mage’s—Lieutenant Sperry’s—flames were still burning when I got there. Very slowly, very low heat by that point. Still…”

  Tybalt nodded. “Fire magic is the biggest threat to us. Thank you for noticing that. I hadn’t realized that the Lieutenant’s magic was… so advanced.”

  Tybalt recognized that he still didn’t have much of a clue at what level Sperry would have acquired a skill like that. It probably isn’t a first tier skill, though. Maybe she has more combat experience than I realized. Or she’s practiced a lot with her skills…

  “Do you know anything about fire magic?” he asked.

  The revenant shook his head mutely.

  “Darn,” Tybalt said. “Well, we’ll figure it out with time. And I have some ideas I’ve been working on for how to counter her if necessary. I’m going to get started with the bones now. I will want some quiet for this part, so I can do it quickly and efficiently. If you have something to share, please hold the thought unless it’s urgent.”

  Baldwin simply nodded.

  Tybalt continued organizing the bones on the ground, now not just by color but shaping one cluster of them into the form of a human body.

  “Oh, keep watch for me, would you?” Tybalt asked, almost as an afterthought. He assumed that Baldwin had been looking out for observers, since the existence of witnesses would be catastrophic for both of them. But assuming the revenant was loyally looking out for their shared interests could be hazardous, Tybalt had decided previously. And there was no harm in overtly telling Baldwin to do it.

  “Yes, master,” Baldwin replied quietly.

  Tybalt focused on the bones in front of him until he had what felt like the complete body of an ibex beastman fully assembled—horned skull down to human toe bones. It was remarkable how almost the entire skeleton was identical to one of those that Tybalt had encountered in the Tower. There was really very little that separated demihumans from humans.

  Brushing that thought aside, he concentrated all his attention on the remains before him. He thought about the way the man would have died and how that process had damaged his body; how this body would move in skeleton form, without ligaments—or with ligaments and muscles replaced by magical energy instead; how the bones were subtly different from human bones, slightly thicker and stronger. He visualized how the necromantic energy would flow through him. Tybalt recalled everything that his book had taught him about his most basic skill.

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  Precision was key in his mind.

  Necromancy did not necessarily require this level of careful focus, especially not for a simple skeleton undead. But Tybalt wanted this second revival to go absolutely perfectly. He could relax when he had dozens of minions, not just one.

  He knew when he was ready.

  Generate Undead!

  Tybalt felt the power surge up within him, flow from his core out through his arms, and move into those off-white bones—the least burned set of bones being the one he had chosen to use for his first experiment of the night.

  It wasn’t a massive amount of mana—in fact, it was small even by the standard of Tybalt’s recently reduced pool of mana—but he felt the impact that it made all the same.

  The bones beneath Tybalt’s hands began to shake as his power flowed through them. A deep green glow visibly bound and connected the bones together, as subtle ligament-like structures built themselves out of pure mystic energy.

  A green glow kindled in the endless blackness of the skull’s eyes.

  As the skeleton’s finger bones twitched for the first time, Tybalt received two alerts.

  A surge of energy swept through him.

  That’s right, creating Baldwin left me pretty close to another level up. Will I get a level every time I create a new kind of undead?

  That would be pretty great. Tybalt already planned to include a diverse array of monstrosities as he slowly built up an army. And he needed every level.

  A new divine message caught his attention.

  “Sure, I’m naming it ‘1,’” Tybalt replied immediately, out loud. The latest notification vanished.

  He looked down at the skeleton, which was clutching and releasing the sand with its fingers, looking from side to side with its glowing green eye sockets—not nearly as eager to move as his last undead had been.

  Speaking of whom, Baldwin looked appalled.

  “Really, master? You just named your very first skeleton, your second ever undead, the first one you ever got to name… and you decided to call it ‘1’?”

  “I’m going to have about a million of these things if I ever achieve real success as a necromancer,” Tybalt said. “Odds are this one won’t last a week anyway. I would be wasting mental energy if I tried to come up with a better name. If I make a ghoul or something, I’ll be sure to give it more thought. A skeleton is not a revenant. It doesn’t need a real name.”

  He consciously avoided pointing out the fact that this skeleton was a hodgepodge of different bones from different individuals. If it had been mostly the bones of one person, then it would have already had a real name. That would feel like criticism to Baldwin, and Tybalt was genuinely pleased with this result.

  “Fine,” Baldwin said after a moment. “I’m going to call him ‘Prime.’ It basically means number one, but without your pessimism about his survival. Is that all right with you, master?”

  Tybalt nodded. “Call it whatever you like, Baldwin.”

  It’s basically going to be your pet, he thought.

  He turned and started arranging the next cluster of bones—a set of reddish-brown burned ones—into a coherent shape.

  As Tybalt worked, Baldwin spoke to the skeleton lying in the sand.

  “This is your master,” Baldwin said, pointing at Tybalt. “Rise up and bow to him.”

  The skeleton tilted its head from side to side for a few seconds until Tybalt sent it a mental command to obey Baldwin.

  Then it pushed itself to a sitting position and shifted to a kneel.

  “I don't think this one will be much of a talker,” Baldwin observed.

  “No vocal cords,” Tybalt replied without looking up from his work. “But if he somehow lives long enough to evolve, our 1 might eventually gain the power of speech.”

  “I’m glad I’m not a skeleton,” Baldwin muttered.

  Tybalt snorted but said nothing. He was in the zone again.

  The knee bone connected to the thigh bone…

  Ten minutes passed in silence, during which Baldwin played with the skeleton. The revenant had a pair of socks that he had tied together and crumpled into a ball, which he used for a game of catch. The skeleton caught on to how to play, following instructions and demonstrations from Baldwin—learning slowly at first, then very quickly.

  Tybalt was weirdly reminded that Baldwin had a child out there in the world somewhere, and there was a playful side to him.

  Meanwhile, the necromancer got the skeleton more or less organized, drew his dagger from his waist, and began to carve an ancient rune into the side of the skull, in the hollow of the temple. The symbol was a sealing rune he had taken from Unholy Forces, the main product of his brief study session earlier.

  There should still be some trace amounts of fire magic clinging to these bones, Tybalt thought. Sealing the essence of fire in will hopefully give the skeleton a boost to its fire resistance. Skeletons were already harder to kill with fire than other undead. With luck, this would make the resulting monster almost impossible for Lieutenant Sperry specifically to destroy with her fire magic. Unfortunately, skeletons were also the weakest form of undead, so Tybalt didn’t want to bet his life on the efficacy of these creatures. It’s not much of a countermeasure, but it’s the best I can do right now with the materials I have to work with.

  Tybalt finished carving the symbol, focused his mind on the anatomy and functioning of the skeleton again, and poured in mana until the eyes glowed green and the horned head twitched from side to side, a freakish semblance of life restored to it.

  It looked at Tybalt with something that felt like awareness, but he knew that it wasn’t quite that. Newborn skeleton undead were virtually never sapient as far as Unholy Forces recorded. Even special variants.