“I’ll be right out,” Tybalt sent. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  Vidalia made a little noise of protest in her sleep and grabbed hold of his pants by the waist as Tybalt slid her body off of his.

  He struggled not to laugh at that strange reflex as he pulled her away. It was odd but endearing.

  “Not going anywhere,” she muttered. But she was very clearly still asleep. Her eyes were closed, and she didn’t stir in any other way.

  I’m a little surprised it didn’t wake her up, honestly. I could have done that a little more smoothly.

  The foxgirl seemed to adjust to his absence quickly. Her expression shifted to a small frown. Then she pulled the sheets he had been wrapped in up to her face and nuzzled against them, apparently placated. She continued sleeping as if she was cuddling those sheets.

  Wait, is she smelling the sheets? Do I really smell that good to her?

  Mariella had said something similar to that once, about liking the way he smelled.

  Tybalt lifted his arm experimentally and sniffed the armpit.

  It smelled fine to him. Normal, not as if he’d been exercising, but not perfumed with cologne either.

  He shrugged.

  Women. It’s not my role to understand them. Only to enjoy them.

  He looked around until he found his gambeson. Someone had lovingly sewed up the holes from where he had been stabbed and taken an arrow to the chest. The person responsible had even tried heroically to wash out the bloodstains, though with only mixed success.

  I guess I have to thank Vidalia.

  She seemed the most likely culprit.

  Tybalt walked outside, and he was immediately confronted with the spectacle of Baldwin. Hieron was standing there beside the revenant, too, but Baldwin dominated the necromancer’s attention for the first ten seconds. He looked like a child’s doll that had been tossed to an angry cat to play with.

  There were rips and tears all over him, from the gash in his neck—a wound that grinned at Tybalt and would certainly have been fatal to a living human—to more superficial injuries, cuts to arms and legs. He also had what Tybalt guessed was a small gore wound in his abdomen.

  Though there was no smell of rot anywhere, flies buzzed around the neck and abdominal wounds, taking great interest in the revenant’s exposed, bloody flesh. Baldwin didn’t bother swatting the bugs away, apparently oblivious or indifferent to their presence.

  He hunted very clumsily, the necromancer thought. Or with no regard for his own safety.

  Tybalt could see all of these wounds and the attention the flies paid to specific ones, because Baldwin was shirtless, his gambeson folded in half and slung over one shoulder atop a dead body. The revenant had carried that full-grown adult soldier on his back and dragged a wild boar with him, too.

  Hieron’s haul was less impressive but still meaningful considering his size. He had two macaques by the paws. The dirt matting their fur made it obvious the fext had been dragging them along the ground rather than carrying them.

  The pair had clearly taken seriously Tybalt’s request to bring him as many dead as they could, and he didn’t doubt this trip would be the first of many.

  “Good to see you both,” the necromancer said.

  They bowed in unison.

  “Master, we’re at your service,” said Baldwin.

  “We’ve been working hard, master,” Hieron said, smiling with a hint of mischief in his eyes. “You wouldn’t believe the progress I’ve made.”

  Did the kid get bigger? I know a fext can age and develop like a real, living human up until a certain point, but… this seems fast. How strong have they gotten?

  The necromancer pulled up Baldwin’s status first and read it from the bottom up.

  Right, that’s the skill he told me he got before… He did grow a bit, and—wait, what the fuck?

  “Baldwin, you’re half-dead!” Tybalt said, a little annoyed. “How did you let your health get to this point?”

  “Oh, no, master, you’re right,” Baldwin said sarcastically. “I should have used one of these health elixirs that are made for a human digestive system.” He drew one from a pocket of his pants.

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  I mean, maybe if you were desperate, the necromancer thought. Did you ever actually try one? They had never conducted any experiments to see if health elixirs worked on the undead.

  “No, moron, I told you before that undead can restore health by eating the flesh of the living,” Tybalt said.

  “Like a human being?” Hieron asked, eyes widening.

  “Or any living thing that wants to stay alive,” Tybalt said, quietly groaning. “Not vegetables. Animals. Or humans. Whatever. Flesh of something that is or was recently alive. That’s the only requirement as far as I know.”

  “Oh, um, yeah, I remembered that,” Baldwin said. “I just wasn’t hurting badly, so… Um, do you mind if I eat some of this guy?” He pointed at the dead boar by his side. “I had brought him for you, but…”

  “Give me a minute, Baldwin,” Tybalt said. “I’ll look at Hieron’s status, too, and then I’ll think about what to do.”

  In the back of his mind, Tybalt was wondering if this might not be an opportunity to try and cultivate the Undead Repair skill. He could use Fleshcraft to attempt to fix Baldwin, and try to apply his mana as a binding agent in repairing any injuries that Fleshcraft alone would not suffice for. If he failed, it wasn’t as if he could really make Baldwin worse.

  “Hieron’s catching up to you, Baldwin,” Tybalt observed aloud.

  “Damn right!” the boy exclaimed. “Take that, old man!”

  “Fuck you, brat,” Baldwin spat, though Tybalt noticed there wasn’t any real venom in it.

  The undead are so odd, the necromancer thought. They’ve lost all sense of propriety from when they were humans. Hieron would never have gloated as a normal child, and Baldwin probably wouldn’t have sworn at a twelve-year-old. Yet there are still those human-like qualities, like Hieron wanting to protect the bodies of his zombified parents or Baldwin playing catch with the skeletons. Is the odd stuff because they’re undead, or because they’ve just spent these last six days together? I wonder what the relationship is between these two now…

  “All right, I’ve decided I’m going to try my hand at fixing you, Baldwin,” Tybalt said, cutting off any further argument. “Unless either of you have new information for me, I’ll ask you to kindly pause your bickering while I work.”

  “Yes, master,” the two said in unison.

  The necromancer strode over. As he moved, he noticed for the first time how much stronger he felt in physical terms. It wasn’t just that he no longer felt weak from being stabbed. Every muscle in his body seemed to be crackling with energy.

  This is what levels will do for you, he thought. Need more.

  Unbidden, his mind went to Mariella. He wanted to know that he was finally stronger than her. More than that, he wanted to show her that he was. He still remembered the way her voice had changed when she described his potential as a fighter. An edge of excitement and something more had surfaced.

  “Kneel,” Tybalt commanded, looking the revenant in the eye.

  Baldwin lowered himself as ordered, dropping silently to his knees in front of the necromancer.

  Fleshcraft.

  His fingers touched the edges of Baldwin’s throat wound, then paused and immediately deactivated Fleshcraft.

  Tybalt’s sensitivity to his own mana had developed more quickly through his experiments with Private Graven, when he had forcefully invaded the other man’s body with his energies.

  Now he recognized that he could sense the damage incurred, not just to flesh and bone, but to the energy the necromancer had supplied Baldwin weeks ago, the power that bound the revenant together.

  Maybe that explains how his health ended up so low…

  “Baldwin, that was a mana-enhanced spear that chopped through your neck, wasn’t it…?” Tybalt muttered, more to himself than to the revenant.

  “Probably, master,” Baldwin replied a little nervously. “It has not caused me any significant problems. If you have to leave it as is—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Tybalt said, raising a palm to signal a resumption of the previous silence. “I have this under control.”

  If it’s a mana-infused weapon, I think it does more damage, not just to the physical body but to the binding that holds the undead together.

  He reached out and tried to sense all of his mana that flowed through the revenant.

  The necromancer was surprised to find that the mana he felt was a substantial amount. Significantly more than he’d possessed when he created revenant Baldwin. The other surprise was that he could visualize the shape of the mana.

  It was like a thread that ran through the whole body, damaged in multiple places, but still holding the shape of the corpse that had been Baldwin together.

  He sensed how the energy that composed the thread ran through the body, and bound all together. The mystical elements worked in a coherent way along with the undead physiology that Tybalt found he could intuitively understand. Immediately, the fact struck him that he could kill Baldwin in an instant if he chose to do so.

  The power inside him isn’t just mine, the necromancer observed. His own slowly growing mana reinforces it and joins with it. That’s why it seems like so much. His cells that used to produce neutral mana are now producing a mana that’s more like mine, which reinforces his undead status. Just like the mana living cells produce. This undeath mana strengthens the initial mana I gave him that holds his body together. But I could still pluck that thread. I could pull on it so hard that I took back all of the energy I gave him—and maybe all of his mana too?—and if I did that, he would permanently die. Unravel.

  The necromancer pictured it in his mind’s eye, Baldwin disintegrating.

  He opened his eyes and looked over at Hieron, who was staring in fascination at Baldwin and Tybalt.

  The fext looked a little intimidated at being observed, but Tybalt smiled at him cheerily, and after a moment, Hieron returned the expression, a false smile that just reminded the necromancer that the fext was another dead thing.

  I used to find him a little off-putting. But now I know. I’ll never have to worry about his betrayal. Not really. If he was so foolish… I can feel this thread now. I can feel it in Hieron too, now that I know what I’m looking for. I could reach through our bond and kill any of my undead with a sharp enough pull. I feel that. I’m almost certain that I’m right about this.

  The only way to be completely sure, of course, would be to try it. Tybalt wasn’t about to do that. Not on either of these two, certainly.

  He closed his eyes again.

  All right. That’s the stuff I needed to understand. Now, let’s try to fix all the damage as best we can. The flesh, the bone, the energies that bind, all should be fixed simultaneously, if possible, for the most effective repair.

  He activated all three of the skills he felt appropriate at once—Fleshcraft, Scrimshaw, and Generate Undead—and felt an instant, significant increase in mana drain.

  Tybalt reached out with one hand and with his intangible power, and he touched the edges of the wound. He felt everything about the wound, from the surface to the flesh and bone beneath, to the mystical structure that held the body together. All of it was at his fingertips.

  Then the necromancer began to weave together the wounded body once again.