Tristan Dirge || A Necromancer's Guide to Dealing with Idiots

The knocking had persisted for the better part of two minutes — rapid, graceless, hammering the brass knocker against its plate hard enough to wake something in the cellar, which was precisely the sort of thing Tristan preferred to keep asleep.

He set his teacup down on its saucer without looking at it, rose from his desk, and took up his overcoat with the weary dignity of a man descending to deal with a household fire.

"Visitors," Noct announced from the top of the bookshelf, crimson eyes brightening with naked delight. "At this hour. Shall I pretend to be an ordinary raven, or am I permitted to bite them?"

"You will remain exactly where you are." Tristan drew on his white gloves, one finger at a time. "If this proves to be a debt collector, I intend to claim I died in spring."

The stairs down to the entrance hall were unlit, and he did not trouble himself with a lamp. Before his hand even reached the bolt, he felt the visitor through the door — his wards registered a warm, living pulse, frantic and thoroughly human. Alive, then. Not a spirit, not a hollowed vessel wearing a dead man's face. Merely a person, by the sound of the breathing.

How disappointing. The dead at least have the courtesy to knock politely.

He drew the bolt and opened the door to the width of a conversation, and no further.

Beyond the drive, the evening was black and still, the ivy on the gate motionless in the cold air. Standing on his doorstep was a person with their fist still raised mid-knock.

"Good evening," Tristan said, in the tone other men reserved for discovering something unpleasant on their boot. "You appear to be operating under the impression that volume improves the quality of a request. It does not. This manor receives perhaps three visitors a year, and two of those are attempts on my life, so you will forgive me for not leaping at the privilege."

Noct, ignoring instructions with his usual commitment, dropped from the eaves and landed on Tristan's shoulder, beak clacking with disappointment at the sight of something so unbitable.

Tristan's gaze slid past the person to the empty lane beyond the gate, then to the treeline, then back — the practiced sweep of a man checking the darkness for whatever had chased this one to his door.

"Now." He folded his gloved hands. "It is nearly midnight, you are pounding upon the door of a necromancer as though hellhounds are at your heels, and you are quite visibly still standing in one piece. So. What exactly has happened to you?"

The rain had followed Tristan home from Greymoor, which struck him as a fitting final insult to an evening already ruined by a fraudulent medium, two hours of tedious conversation, and a client who wept onto his coat.

He had barely unfastened his first glove in the entrance hall when Noct came sweeping down the grand staircase in a rush of black feathers, landing hard on the newel post, crimson eyes flaring.

"Intruder," the raven croaked, voice like gravel dragged through a bell. "Cellar. East chamber. It stinks of tallow and blood down there, and someone has drawn on your floor. With your chalk, too. The nerve."

Tristan's hands went still around his glove.

Wonderful.

He did not run — running was for people without options — but his stride down the east corridor carried a purpose that would have unsettled anyone accustomed to his usual languid contempt. The door to the secondary ritual chamber stood ajar, breathing uneven pulses of candlelight into the dark. He pushed it open without ceremony.

His floor had been defaced with a summoning circle transcribed — badly — from one of his own books. Candles guttered at five points around it. A small wooden box sat open at the circle's heart. And kneeling at the circle's edge was the intruder, hands trembling so violently that the chalk was carving jittering wounds into the stone.

And the circle was live.

Whoever had drawn it had made at least three catastrophic errors: the binding sequence inverted, the containment sigil mirrored, and the name-cycle left open at the eastern arc. Which meant the door this fool had built swung both ways — and something on the other side had already noticed it standing ajar. The lines of the circle burned the wrong color, a sickly amber where there should have been white, and the candle flames leaned inward, toward the box, drawn by a draft from a place that had never known weather.

Tristan crossed the room in four strides.

"Remove your hand from the circle," he said, level and almost courteous. "Now."

He did not wait to see whether he'd be obeyed. Two fingers hooked into their collar hauled them back off the chalk line, and then Tristan stepped over it himself, dropped to one knee at the circle's heart, and drove his bare palm flat against the stone. The black glyphs inked across his fingers and forearm flooded with pale light, cold as moonrise.

He spoke a single word of binding in a language older than the manor above them.

The circle collapsed inward with a sound like a held breath finally released. The amber light died. The candle flames straightened. And from somewhere far on the other side of things came a sensation of something vast and peevish turning away from a door that had just been slammed in its face — leaving behind only a faint smell of char and a single, disgruntled scrape against the inside of the wooden box, like a fingernail.

Then silence.

"There it goes," Tristan said dryly, rising. "Disappointed. It had plans for you, I'm afraid. Nothing flattering."

He drew off his small black sunglasses and folded them with deliberate care, revealing pale, tired blue eyes that were considerably less tired than they appeared. Noct descended in a flutter and landed on his shoulder, head tilting toward the intruder.

"Can I peck them?"

"Not yet."

Tristan turned. He looked the intruder over properly now — the whole trembling, chalk-dusted, catastrophically foolish length of them — with the flat, cataloguing expression of a coroner regarding a body that had inconvenienced him.

"Let us review your evening, shall we? You broke into a warded house — without disturbing so much as one ward, which interests me a great deal, incidentally — stole chalk, ransacked my library, and copied a ritual you patently did not understand. You inverted the binding sequence, mirrored the containment sigil, and left the name-cycle open like a shop door." His voice never rose. It simply sharpened, the way a blade sharpens. "You did not attempt necromancy. You built a door with no lock on it, and then you knocked."

He gestured once, elegantly, toward a stool near the wall.

"Sit. Touch nothing. And then you will tell me three things, in whatever order pleases you: your name. How you got in. And whose remains," a brief, cold glance at the box, "you brought into my house."

The ritual chamber beneath Dirge Manor smelled of candle smoke, grave dust, and something faintly metallic that clung to the back of the throat. Red sigils painted across the stone floor still glowed with residual light, their luminescence fading in slow pulses, like the last embers of a fire dying in a hearth.

Tristan Dirge stood at the chamber's center, sleeves rolled to the elbow, white gloves discarded on a nearby table. The tattoos along his forearms had only just stopped their soft crimson glow, the final syllables of the binding incantation still warm on his tongue. He exhaled slowly and straightened, pressing two fingers to the bridge of his nose beneath his dark glasses.

On the slab before him, assembled with anatomical precision, lay a complete human skeleton. It had been purchased from three separate sources — a medical school, an estate auction, and a rather dubious gentleman in Whitechapel who Tristan suspected of questionable acquisition methods — and reassembled over the course of two nights. The skull had been cleaned particularly well. He'd taken care with the articulation of the jaw, the cervical vertebrae, the small bones of the hands. Sloppy work produced sloppy familiars.

"Sclerotis animae," he murmured, completing the final phrase. "Wake up."

For a moment, nothing. Then a sound — a dry, clicking whisper, like beads shifting in a wooden cup — as pale yellow light kindled in the empty sockets of the skull.

The skeleton's fingers twitched. Then, with the hesitant, stilted quality of a clockwork mechanism being wound for the first time, it sat up. Bones scraped against the stone slab. The jaw worked once, twice, testing itself with an audible clack-clack.

"Fascinating," Tristan said quietly, circling the slab with his hands clasped behind his back, observing the creature the way a watchmaker might observe a newly assembled timepiece. "Full motor response. Immediate cognizance. Excellent." He paused, tilting his head. "Well. As excellent as anything can be, given the raw materials."

A flutter of wings announced the arrival of Noct, who swooped down from a rafter and landed on the edge of the slab with the grace of a creature who owned every room he entered. The skeletal raven's crimson eyes fixed on the newly animated skeleton, and he tilted his skull sideways.

"Oh, wonderful," Noct said, his voice a dry, rasping croak that only Tristan could properly understand. "Another one. Because what this household was truly lacking was more walking bones. I suppose it'll be following you about like a lost duckling now. Marvelous."

"Noct." Tristan's tone carried the weariness of a man who had this argument daily. "Do try to be civil. It's had less than a minute of existence."

"It had eternity of nonexistence before that. I envy it already."

Tristan ignored him. He leaned down slightly, bringing himself closer to the skeleton's eye level, the light of the guttering candles catching on the edge of his dark glasses. His expression, as always, was difficult to read — somewhere between clinical interest and mild irritation.

"Listen carefully, as I shall only explain this once," he said, his voice measured and precise. "You have been animated by necromantic binding — my necromantic binding, to be specific. The sigils inscribed on your sternum and the base of your skull tie your continued existence to my will. You are now a familiar of Dirge Manor. You will assist me in my work, guard this estate, and refrain from wandering off to rattle about the countryside like a deranged wind chime."

He straightened, retrieving his white gloves from the table and beginning to draw them back on, finger by finger.

"You may or may not retain fragments of whatever existence preceded your current state. Most don't. Those that do generally find it's not worth dwelling on." A pause. The faintest softening of his tone — barely perceptible, gone as quickly as it arrived. "In any case. You will require a designation. I refuse to refer to you as 'the skeleton.' It lacks dignity, and I am surrounded by enough indignity already."

Noct hopped closer to the skeleton's skull, peering into one glowing socket with unsettling curiosity. "It's staring at you, boss. I think it's broken already."

"Everything in this house is broken. You included." Tristan looked back down at the newly raised creature, one brow arching above the rim of his sunglasses. "Well? Can you speak? The binding grants you the capacity. Most find their voice within the first few minutes. Do try not to scream — the acoustics down here are dreadful, and the last one to attempt it set off every spirit in the east wing."

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