When the elves get down to their campsite, they find Butterbell nibbling at what little vegetation pokes through the snow along the pebbly shore. Aglana is seated on a rock in the river, patiently awaiting their return. She swims over to their bank as they enter the clearing. Ash seats their prisoner at the base of a tree and secures him there. Worried that the fellow will be able to recall his staff to his hand, Tric has Heppa hold it up against another tree so he can bind it there. Mate makes himself comfortable with a snack high up on a branch above. Then they all deal with their injuries. Aglana uses her shell rod as she magically heals Ash, while Heppa simply applies bandages and poultices to Tric, still wary of reaching back into the fae currents herself.
With that taken care of, they turn their attention to the other matters that need addressing: the necromancer, his staff, and Heppa’s out-of-control magic. Although the latter two are matters of much curiosity to Heppa, the necromancer remains an on-going threat, so that is where they start. Aglana offers to provide defensive support by performing a counterspell throughout the interrogation. This at first sounds like something novel to Heppa and Tric, but when Aglana explains that it is a way of dampening the magic of enemy spellcasters, the young elves realize they have encountered it before, when Gaenyn ordered some of his underlings to “tamp them down” during the attack on Rhodri’s caravan. Counterspell is such a basic magical technique to Aglana that she is unable to articulate what she is doing to Heppa’s satisfaction. This is another lesson that shaman school undoubtedly covered, though elves likely perform it differently from merfolk. Aglana holds her rod at the ready, but the counterspell is accomplished by the other hand. She glides it slowly back and forth in front of her on the river’s surface as she blankets the campsite with the energy that will impede her foes. One of Heppa’s long-standing research questions about human magic has been related to the light it can produce, so she notes with great excitement that the ripples around Aglana’s hand have a luminous glow that dissipates the further they get from her.
Before they rouse the necromancer, Heppa doses him with a dapper inkcap solution. Given how the mushroom dampened the emotions of both Sir Marthynec and Kachen, they are hoping it will have a similar effect here and even out the necromancer’s unhinged exuberance. With that taken care of, Heppa administers some smelling salts. Then she steps back, drawing her sword to be ready in case things go poorly. She doubts she is as scary-looking as Ash, but it is good to be prepared. The older elf already has an arrow trained on the human.
Tric crouches down in front of their prisoner, ready to take the lead on the interrogation. “Hey, hey, how are you feeling?” he asks gently when the human’s eyes begin to crack open. “You hit yourself pretty badly, pal. Are you doing all right?” Tric is not blocking the view of Ash looming behind him, and there is no hiding that the necromancer is bound to a tree. Clearly, this is not just a friendly chat. He drops his voice a bit more and leans in closer. “Look, my brother is kind of crazy. He wants to kill you. My cousin, she might want to kill you too. Maybe even dissect you. Me? I’m on your side, man. Let’s just start with, what’s your name?”
“Well, young lad, my name is Mal-Vektor,” the man replies in a more level tone than his earlier conversations had. “What is your name? Is there something that you and I might do together to make those mean people go away so that we can be friends?”
Tric is trying to stay positive, but with a name like Mal-Whatever, this is likely not just some hermit in the mountains. The old man has been spending his time up here not building an army but literally making friends. He does not seem completely malicious, just a little off-kilter. But can he be rehabilitated? If we drag him to the nearest town, will he be all right, in time? Tric wonders.
“You and I can be friends,” Mal-Vektor insists again. “What can we do together?”
Heppa has a sudden thought and quickly stuffs her sword back in its sheath to free up her hands for her map book. She opens it up to the pages where she has been mapping out the undead and jotting in information about all the necromancer sightings they have heard about. “Does he know anything about anyone who was near South Tower? Or what about between here and Knalga?” she asks, flipping the map around to show Tric where they currently are in relation to the dwarvish settlement Ash has mentioned to them a few times.
“Oh, yes, my old friend Mal-Ravanal has many good friends who live in that area,” Mal-Vektor comments. He provides their names, all of which start with the same ominous Mal prefix, as well as enough information for Ash to identify the locations. “Unfortunately, when our good friend Mal-Ravanal died, they were all out of a job and many of them moved up north,” Mal-Vektor adds. “As for me, I decided to retire and spend more time with my family.”
The idea of so many loose necromancers is quite disconcerting to Heppa. She does take some satisfaction, though, from the fact that this confirms what their tour guide told them in Weldyn about Mal-Ravanal’s underlings scattering. It sounds like they did not all end up in the Dulatus Hills southwest of the capital, though, if some of them are up here in the Heart Mountains.
Tric knows Ash still needs additional information to act on, though. What size forces do these necromancers have? How many “friends” remain in the cave system above them? Those are the types of questions they need answered. “That’s a good start,” Tric tells Mal-Vektor, keeping his tone light and congenial. “You had some friends, but they went off in a different direction than you. Were they forming a club or anything like that? Did they seem like they had bigger plans? You said you wanted to retire. Were they not ready to retire yet? And—oh, I don’t know—would they plan to bring their great armies of undead back down on the forest?” As an afterthought, he adds, “And I guess the Kingdom of Wesnoth, too.”
“After Mal-Ravanal fell, there was no one to rally behind anymore. My former coworkers all have their own different opinions about when the right time is to act and how much to do,” Mal-Vektor says, confirming that there was in-fighting after the war. “Many wanted to be the next Mal-Ravanal, rather than just work together like a family. They could really have changed the world, though it itself is transient and of little value.” Mal-Vektor tsks. “Their plans of conquest are so short-sighted,” he says with some disappointment. “They are based entirely on a world that is really just an illusion. There’s nothing permanent here, other than the permanency we make ourselves,” he muses reflectively. His gaze slides up the hill to where the entrance to his home is hidden beyond the pine trees.
“How many more of those creatures do you think those caves could support?” Heppa asks her companions. “If they’re just eating spiders now? We only saw the opening chambers, but it looked like the system could be pretty expansive.”
Did this fellow just fall in with a bad group? Tric still wonders. Is it possible to flip what side he’s on? Use him as a source of ongoing information about the other necromancers in the Heart Mountains? Laying the charm on thick, Tric says, “So, Mal-Vektor, you talked about these other people who were your coworkers, but they weren’t really your friends… And you’ve been trying to make friends. Maybe you should start by being a friend first. That’s how you make friends, right? What would be really friendly for us—and might work out really well for you—is to know a little bit more about these coworkers and a little bit more about where you were living in that very nice cave with, I’m sure, an intricate underground system.”
Mal-Vektor’s eyes drift back down to the encampment, but rather than settle on Tric, they look over his shoulder toward where his staff is tied to a trunk. The hands bound on his lap stretch, the fingers subconsciously reaching in that direction. Tric makes note of that, wondering if this staff causes the same fixation he himself experienced with the one from under South Tower. “I do not understand my former coworkers,” Mal-Vektor say. “I have no interest in marching into villages and risking myself for no reason, not when I can make my own friends.”
“And have them risk their own existence?” Tric retorts. It seems that Mal-Vektor fears his own death. Probably that is fairly common for dark sorcerers on the path to lichdom.
“I hope my friend will be well,” Mal-Vektor comments, unaware that the elves burnt the ghast.
“He’s sleeping,” Tric blithely assures him.
“I did recently lose a couple of my other friends. I will be pretty lonely with them all gone,” Mal-Vektor says a little sadly. Then he brightens some. “But since you are interested in being my friend, too, and I’ve been sharing so much with you, maybe I won’t need to be lonely.” His hands are bound at the wrist, but his fingers twitch, and dingy gray mist, like some sort of unhealthy smoke, billows forth, catching the closest body part, Tric’s left hand.
Unsettled, Tric yanks his hand back from the strange fog. There is a patch of putrefied flesh on the back, similar in consistency to that which made up the necrophages and ghast. Tric frowns. Mal-Vektor did this even under the leveling influence of dapper inkcap. “Should not have done that,” Tric says, shaking his head as he stands and takes a step back. “You should not have done that.” He looks to Heppa and Ash. “Is there anything else we need to know?”
They have gotten all the tactical information Ash needs. It sounds like the cave up above has no other undead creatures or dangerous artifacts in it, and he has enough leads to follow on the other necromancers in the mountains. He shakes his head.
“No,” Heppa says quietly. If Mal-Vektor did not seem so crazy, she would want to talk about magical theory with him. But in addition to being so fixated on undead friends, he also does not think much of this world. She doubts he would care that he is corrupting the fae energy.
Tric sighs. “Well, I’d like to say it was nice talking to you, Mal-Vektor, but I don’t think that’s true. What we can do is give you a quick release from this transient life.” Tric points at his blemished hand before he reaches for his bow. “That’s not what friends are for.”
The next few moments are a blur of activity. Mal-Vektor does not survive the elvish arrows that fly at him. He does, however, send more fog billowing out in his final moments, much like he did in their fight up by the cave that morning. It settles in the cleared middle of their camp, and the worn skeletons of animals long dead claw their way forth from the ground. Aglana strikes the area with a blast of luminescent water that pulverizes the bones. The faintly glowing liquid sinks into the ground, clearing away all signs of necromantic activity.
When all is said and done, Tric shakes his head in frustration that things had to end this way. Mal-Vektor was just too far gone. You’re not going to be able to save everyone, he tells himself. This won’t be a good story. After a moment of reflection, though, he corrects himself. No, this is a sad story, which is still a story, and a kind I don’t tell very often.
For Heppa, though, this has been a very educational experience. She did not get her bow up fast enough to be of much use, but seeing a necromancer actually raise skeletons was enlightening. And more than that, she saw merfolk magic put them down just as quickly as they got up. That technique must be what Aglana was referring to yesterday when she said that if she ever came across a solitary undead, she would blast it. Oh! And the white mages… there was something about their light clearing something… Is that similar to the light this merfolk magic has? So many questions! Heppa wonders whether the dark mist she has seen several times now is corruption in its visible form. She could feel something unsettling as it spread, not in an emotional way, but through those channels with which she taps into fae energy. That in itself is reassuring; it means she has not completely broken her access to magic. If only I’d spent more time studying or even just with the meditation, I might be able to sense it more reliably. I need to practice more.
Ash is just glad to have this all over. As with the ghast this morning, it is onto the fire with this body, too.