Renegade Wizards by Lucien Soulban Page B

craft. Magic was a dance for her, sometimes the dance of a seductress and sometimes the dance of a tribal warrior. Silently, Ladonna knelt in the muddy soil and removed her gloves. With practiced hands, she clasped the sides of the dead man’s face and opened his opaque eyes with her thumbs.
    Ladonna leaned in close, as though to kiss the corpse. She began whispering to it, her breath congealing as cold vapor. A trickle of mist seeped from the corpse’s lips.
    The Black Robes and their skills in necromancy were renowned among wizards, and frankly, the skills of healing and resurrection powers once attributed to holy women and men were skills of the distant past, things of legends. No, she was not healing him or bringing him back to life. She was stroking the tattered veils that bordered the lands of death. She was coaxing a little of what was left back intoits vessel. The corpse was no more living than an echo of the original voice.
    Par-Salian blanched and looked away; necromancy was a controversial art, surrounded by its most vocal Black Robe supporters and White Robe detractors. The Red Robes remained neutral, as always, judging the situation and not the practice. Tythonnia continued watching out of curiosity because she’d never seen anyone use the magic of the dead before. It distracted her from her nagging thoughts, that there was something she should have noticed. But the whispers of the dead swelled the air, their ghostly strokes falling between the patter of droplets and finding all the negative spaces to fill. Tythonnia couldn’t understand their words, but the dead were speaking and Ladonna was listening.
    Even when the corpse tilted its head up to within an inch of Ladonna’s ear, even when it reached up to stroke her face and stopped just shy of Ladonna’s cheek, Ladonna never flinched or appeared distressed. Tythonnia marveled at her bravery and had to wave a startled Par-Salian back from saving Ladonna.
    Whatever Tythonnia was overlooking, however, continued to nag at her. It would not remain silent, even with all her attentions focused on Ladonna. She shook her head the same way she might shoo a fly bothering her and looked around. What was she missing? What was so important that—
    Tythonnia’s eyes flew to the rag doll that Ladonna had kicked away from the corpse. It was still resting where it lay. She looked to find the other doll near the burned child, but it was no longer inches from her fingers. It was several feet away, closer to Tythonnia and Par-Salian.
    The blood froze in Tythonnia’s veins, exposing her stomach and chest to an ice-water chill. She looked around and saw another rag doll and another. All lay in the mud, all near bodies or in the ruins of buildings, yet somehow untouched.
    Tythonnia stared from doll to doll and from shadow to shadow, and while she saw none of them move, each seemed somehow closer than the last time, their limbs in different positions.
    “Par-Salian,” Tythonnia said, trying to keep track of the rag dolls. She counted six … then seven. “The dolls!”
    “What?”
    Ten dolls rested in places Tythonnia knew there hadn’t been any dolls before. And they were edging closer.
    “The dolls!” Ladonna shouted as she rose from the mud. Her fingers were scrambling for her reagents pouch. “The dolls murdered everyone! They’re alive!”
    No longer bound by pretense, the heads of the dolls snapped upward in unison. There was a greenish glow to their wood-button eyes, and their stitched mouths strained open, tearing the burlap fabric. There was malice in their expressions and rage for anything living.
    The dolls scrambled forward in the mud like a pack of dogs. There were more than a dozen, and they moved with frightening speed. They emerged from the burned buildings and crawled out from puddles, from beneath the mud and under the bodies.
    Tythonnia had never seen such terrifying venom in their expressions. Par-Salian tried to cast a spell, but the creatures