Chapter Twelve

After a morning of brisk riding across the rather barren lands to the east of the Lava Fist sect’s headquarters, we eventually reached the ocean. The land dipped down, and though it was rough in places, the path had been trodden upon enough that there was something of a road leading all the way down to the beaches and to the edge of the waters.

“Interesting,” I said as I stepped out of our carriage and moved over to the very edge of the waters. The tide was lapping in and out, foamy water splashing just short of my feet before receding back. As far as I could see, there was nothing, but blue-green water.

Magical sight didn’t reveal much more. There were little traces of motion in the distant depths, no doubt some magical fish or ocean dwelling beasts.

There was more though, hints of necromantic magic, not over the water, but beneath it. I walked some ways down the beach, then knelt down over a stony outcropping and pressed my hand against the stone. It was faint, washed away by the shore and time, but something had passed here that was long dead.

“Did you find anything, Master?” the limpet asked.

I glanced over my shoulder and found the limpet following after me. She was barefoot, shoes poking out of her bookbag. “I think so,” I said as I gestured to the ocean. “Something undead came from there. Not over the waters though.”

“Not over the water?” she repeated as she glanced that way. “There’s an island way over there. It’s on all the maps. I think that’s where some of the undead are.”

“Is there a fortress, perhaps, or some sort of undead settlement?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I remember something about a lot of cultivators going to the island and searching for them, but not finding anything. Some of the boys at the Lava Fist sect mentioned it.”

I stood. “There might be a good explanation for that. The undead don’t need to breathe.”

“Huh?” she asked.

“Let’s return to the carriage, shall we?” I walked past her on my way back to the carriage. Rem was pacing around the side of the carriage. Occasionally she jumped up and down on the sand and kicked at it with her bare feet. Alex, meanwhile, was caring for the horses.

“Have you found them, Daddy?” the maid asked as I approached.

“I believe I have,” I said. I pressed a hand to the carriage and let loose a few basic enchantments. Hardening, mostly. The terrain we would be crossing would be difficult. “I’m afraid I will have to kill the horses.”

“Oh,” Alex said. “That’s alright. Do you want me to do it?”

“Certainly,” I said. “Limpet, Rem, could you come over here please? Oh, and bring the dog, I suppose.”

The mantis and the girl looked to each other, but they complied soon enough. The limpet winced when Alex stabbed a hand into the side of one of the horses and no doubt crushed its heart. “Ah, what’s going on?”

“The living can’t breathe underwater, so we’re killing the horses,” I explained.

“Um, are you going to kill me too, Master?” she asked.

“I certainly could, but the process of resurrecting you later would make you lose some of your progress.” I pat her on the head. “Don’t worry. I’ll merely give you three the ability to breathe underwater. It’s a simple spell. Third tier Transmutation.”

Rem hissed. “I hate being wet,” she said.

“How unfortunate. Please stand still.” I made an abbreviated somatic gesture in their general direction while the second horse neighed behind me.

“Water Breathing.”

Rem and the limpet blinked as the magic settled onto them. “I didn’t feel anything,” the limpet said.

“That’s because the spell was cast properly,” I said. “Poorly cast and you’d either be unable to breathe entirely, or you’d only be able to breathe underwater. Regardless, for the next day or so you should be unable to drown. I would advise emptying your lungs before the spell wears off though.”

“Uh, how do I do that?” the limpet asked.

“I don’t have lungs, ask someone else,” I said before I left to join Alex. Our carriage had four horses at the front, now they were four slumped over corpses that were slowly bleeding out onto the ground. “Ah, I see you’re done.”

“Yes,” Alex said. He was busy wiping his hands clean on a handkerchief. “Will you be turning them?”

“I will, yes,” I said. “Limpet, you might want to observe this. I don’t know what you might glean from it, but it could be valuable.”

“Oh! Can you wait just a moment, I want my notebook, and I need to cast Detect Magic on myself.”

I nodded and gave her the time she needed to prepare herself. It was slowing us down a little, but I figured it was for the sake of better understanding and learning things, which was always a fine excuse for a delay.

Once the limpet was ready, I cast Raise Undead upon the horses, one at a time, and by going through each step with no shortcuts. I skipped the incantation, seeing as how she wasn’t quite ready to try herself, but I did let her observe how the magic settled into the corpses.

Soon, the animals were standing once more, glassy-eyed and a little less lively (Oh hohoho!) but ready to pull us into the deep.

“Couldn’t you have just made them able to breathe water too?” the limpet asked.

“I could have, but while you can lead a horse to water, you can’t convince it to drown itself.”

The limpet blinked at that one. I jumped back into the carriage, quite proud of myself, then waited for the others ,save for Alex, to join me.

There were other ways to dive to the bottom of an ocean with a carriage. I could have split the ocean up in half, but that would lead to the wheels getting stuck in the mud in the middle, and it was always rather poor form to destroy environments like that. It was fine to do it once to see what would happen, but it was a scientist’s duty to keep the area where they experiment more or less stable. Large scale ecological disasters tended to go counter to that.

I could have turned the carriage into some sort of contraption to move through the water, or merely teleported us all down, but those methods either took too much time or lacked appropriate flair.

After all, there was a proper way to go meet some undead in their own home, and just teleporting right in was not it.

The carriage rattled forwards, the wheels soon splashing through the water before they were entirely enveloped. I tucked my book into my pocket to keep it dry and saw the limpet hurry up to do the same a moment later.

Water started to pour in from the corners, because of course the carriage wasn’t air-tight, and I idly noticed my pants starting to stick to my bony legs.

“Are you sure that water breathing spell works?” the limpet asked. She was hugging her gown and staring at the rising water. If she was trying to hide her concern, she wasn’t doing a good job of it.

“Stupid,” the mantis said. She stabbed the water. It didn’t have any noticeable effect.

“I suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” I said as the water reached my waist, then just continued to rise. I shook my head a little as the water rose above me. Having a pocket of air stuck in one’s skull was a singularly unpleasant experience.

The limpet took a deep breath and held it as water rushed over her face. The mantis, far less reasonably, climbed to the top corner of the carriage and tried to hide in the last remaining pocket of air while wasting her breath with an entire panoply of swears. They lacked some creativity, and mostly amounted to testaments about my own stupidity, the stupidity of everyone around her, and most confusing of all, the stupidity of oxygen.

Everything settled in some time later when the mantis ran out of air in her corner and nearly fainted.

Water breathing did not mean one was able to breathe in carbon monoxide.

When Rem snapped out of her dazed state underwater and was still able to live, she found that she could still complain, this time about how the water made moving difficult.

I leaned back and enjoyed the view out of the carriage windows. The ocean floor was always such an alien place. The first half kilonecrometer or so was all sandy ground with the occasional rocky outcropping, but that soon gave way to a colourful coral-filled landscape where darting fish swam from cover to cover, and where great billowing clouds of smaller fish moving in coordinated masses.

I noticed some interesting critters on the ground, scuttling about and some larger fish that seemed more predatory moving with the slow, sure gait of something on the top end of the food chain.

There was more life per square necrometer here than on the surface. More chaos too.

“Whoa,” the limpet said. It came out rather distorted, on account of the water in her lungs, but I found her understandable anyway.

Her wide-eyed fascination was nothing compared to the mantis’ the bug-like creature kept twitching as she saw more and more edible things moving about.

The path down was made somewhat easier to follow when Alex found a sort of road cut into the landscape. Creatures, many hundreds of them if I had to guess, had moved across the same part of the landscape, turning the ocean floor into a road more than wide enough for the carriage to bump though.

The rise was somewhat smooth, possibly owing to our change in buoyancy. I would have to investigate lightening enchantments and their applications on making a carriage ride more comfortable in the future.

We soon caught sight of our destination.

The undead of this region had, at a guess, been here for some time. Their settlement, or perhaps fortress, was testament to such.

Huge pillars of bone, made from the ribs of many hundreds of large creatures, formed a circular wall, with stacked stones cemented together at their base holding it all in place. Towers rose up at intervals, with the partial skeletons of man and beast fused to them. A technique I had used myself to create stationary guards.

Within the compound were a few buildings. Stone worked together to create small castles with roofs like jagged teeth where coral and seaweed grew. I supposed that from above, the entire compound would actually be somewhat difficult to make out, especially in the darker depths of the ocean where the bright light of day turned into a deep blue shadow.

One building, in the centre, stood out from the others. It was the corpse of a giant turtle, easily as big as some of the buildings around it. Stonework around it held it up, and windows and doors had been placed over its many entrances.

There were a few gates around the compound, and Alex aimed for the nearest of those.

I had no doubt that whomever had built this place was a necromancer of some sort. Therefore, it was only natural that I prepare myself accordingly.

“Limpet, hold onto this please,” I said as I found a mirror in my pockets and gave it to her.

She did as I asked, keeping it even as I replaced my brown bowtie with one that had a little skull pattern on it. Part of the official necromancer uniform, of course. I was quite happy that the union had eventually modernized away from those drafty black robes, but that was way back in my youth. I hoped that I was still at least somewhat fashionable.

I patted it into place once it was properly tied. There was no longer any doubt that I too was a necromancer.

“Well then. Shall we go visit some of these old bones? I have a feeling that it will be quite educational.”

***