Dead Reign

Chapter One


Marla Mason sat in the branches of an ancient oak on a ridge, spying on the moonlit cemetery below. A tall elderly man with a walking stick stood near a freshly disturbed grave, supervising a pair of homeless ordinaries armed with shovels. A black goat chewed peacefully on the grass near the grave, tethered by a length of twine to the stone cross of a neighboring headstone.

"I can't believe we're sitting in a tree," Rondeau said, shifting on the branch next to her, but remembering to whisper, at least. "I'm ruining my pants."

"At least it's summer. Be glad we're not sitting in an ice-covered tree in winter. I told you we were doing a stakeout tonight. It's not my fault you decided to wear a leisure suit." She glanced at her morose colleague. "That shade of green doesn't even blend in with the foliage. I'm not sure that shade of green even exists in nature." She looked back down on the scene below. The tall man paced around the gradually emptying grave like an expectant 1950s father in a waiting room.

"Why do I have to be here again?" Rondeau said.

"Stakeouts are boring. You make them slightly less boring, what with your amusing complaints and comical discomfort."

"Wonderful. Remind me to cultivate greater dullness. I don't see why we need to spy on Ayres. We're in the business of hassling crazy people now?"

"We're not hassling Ayres. He doesn't even know we're here. We're just going to enforce the terms of his parole. Unless you want hordes of zombies running around all over town?"

"Fast zombies or slow zombies?"

Marla scowled at him, but he didn't take much notice. "What?"

"Well, the classic George Romero Night of the Living Dead zombies, shambling around slowly, there could be a certain pleasure in dealing with that, you know? Taking them out using shotguns and baseball bats, whack whack whack. Killing zombies is like killing Nazis. You don't even have to feel bad about it. It's like shooting rats at the dump. Very cathartic."

"You're a sick bastard, Rondeau."

He shrugged. "Fast zombies, though, like you see in movies nowadays, those are scary."

"Ayres makes real zombies." She considered. "Well, not actually like Haitian Vodoun zombies, either, I guess. He animates corpses to do his bidding. Not like movie zombies anyway."

"Oh, so the zombies aren't even contagious? I mean, if they bite you, you don't rise from the dead with a craving for brains? Hell. Those would be easy."

"Under the terms of his release, Ayres isn't supposed to practice necromancy. I insisted on that. And unless he's gotten into garden-variety grave-robbing, he's about to break his agreement."

"Why the restrictions, though? Dr. Husch said Ayres is cured. He's trying to become a contributing member of our little underground society again. I think you just have an irrational hatred for necromancers, ever since that guy Upchurch raised Somerset from the dead and you got your ass kicked."

Marla punched Rondeau in the arm, making him grab wildly for a branch to keep from tumbling out of the tree. "My ass was only kicked provisionally. I beat Somerset in the end. No, I've got personal reasons to want Ayres out of the picture."

"Why don't you ever tell me anything?"

"Sorcerers have secrets like surgeons have scalpels, Rondeau. Tools of the trade."

Marla didn't look at him, but she could sense Rondeau rolling his eyes. "Okay, whatever. So what's the goat for?"

"Sacrifice. Necromancy runs on blood. To make the dead speak, a few drops of the sorcerer's own blood will suffice. To raise a fresh human corpse, you don't need much blood--just a rat or a pigeon. To raise older corpses or get a skeleton walking around, you need more blood, bigger sacrifices."

"That looks like a fresh grave they're digging up, so why's he going to kill that cute goat instead of a rat?"

Marla shrugged. "He's an old man, and it's easier to buy a goat than catch a rat? Or maybe it's because he's been out of practice for fifteen years? I don't know. I'm not a necromancer. Smelly, ugly business."

The men at the pit hauled the casket up out of the hole with ropes. Ayres paid them, and they left, brushing grave-dirt off their already filthy clothes. The necromancer watched them depart, then opened a satchel and drew out various jars and candles. The goat watched him with interest. Marla let him pour out a few lines of sand and powder on the grass, getting well into his ritual, before saying, "Okay, let's go break up this shindig."

She dropped out of the tree, her black cloak flapping behind her. She'd permanently retired her signature magical purple-and-white cloak--she preferred using magic that didn't actually drive her insane, and this new cloak was purely decorative. It had silver trim and everything. Still, style counted for something, and at this point most of the denizens of Felport's magical underworld had a visceral reaction to the sight of Marla Mason wearing a cloak--pretty much the way a field mouse reacts to the shadow of a hawk on the ground.