With an arrogant smile, Dravuliel began to sink through the deck, just as he had walked through the walls of Fort Zombie. He was using magic to escape for a third time, and Mordan’s heart plummeted at the thought. He lashed out with his rapier, and was surprised to see it draw a bloody line across the necromancer’s spectral forehead. Dravuliel looked equally surprised—his eyes widened and his mouth dropped open, and he began to sink faster.
Only his torso and head remained above the deck when Mordan struck again—a savage, twisting thrust downward through the pit of the throat. He felt the blade glance off the elf’s collar-bone and penetrate lungs and organs before it was stopped by the solid timbers of the deck. The necromancer stopped sinking through the deck; his ethereal body hung on the enchanted blade that transfixed it, as helpless as though he had been solid. Dravuliel’s mouth worked noiselessly, blood trickling from the corners—and then his eyes rolled back in their sockets and his head slumped.
Mordan stood over the spectral figure, his hand still on the rapier-hilt, hardly able to believe that the necromancer was dead. For several heartbeats, he watched and waited for any sign of a new trick, a new evasion, but the elf remained unmoving. Then, little by little, Dravuliel began to solidify again. His spell had ended with his death, and now his corpse was returning to a solid, material state. Timbers creaked and bones cracked as the necromancer’s body tried to occupy the same space as the deck planking; blood pooled around the corpse, but it remained caught as Mordan withdrew his blade.
Tarrel limped over and looked down at the dead elf; Mordan answered his questioning glance with a curt nod. The Brelander relaxed a little, closing his eyes for a moment.
It was only then that Mordan noticed that the airship was flying above the forest now, beside and a little behind the Ministry craft. Haldin stood at the helm. He was steering with one hand while the other held his sapphire dragon over the wheel, and he seemed to be talking continuously. It seemed that he had come to some arrangement with the undead elemental that powered the craft. Meanwhile, Adalrik crouched beside the control column, inspecting the workings of the mechanism with great interest. Bodies littered the main deck, but to Mordan’s relief most of them seemed to be long dead; casualties among the boarders seemed to be few and light.
A sudden ray of light made Mordan look around; behind them, the sun was rising. With one last look at Dravuliel’s corpse, he sheathed his rapier and leaned on the rail, watching the color slowly return to the world as the darkvision spell wore off.
“So have you decided what you’re going to tell your folks?” Tarrel joined him at the rail, taking a long pull from a flask of a healing potion. He offered it to Mordan, who drank gratefully.
“Not yet,” he said. “It’s going to be a little while before I’m sure what happened myself.”
He paused and looked at the Brelander.
“What about you?” he asked. He didn’t envy Tarrel the task of reporting back to Brey’s father.
“I don’t know,” he said, scratching his head. “I might just leave out the unpleasant details and tell him she died fighting evil, like a good paladin. That is, if your government ever lets me go. I have a feeling they’re not going to want word of this to get out.”
“It is going to be a little complicated, I must admit,” said a wheezing voice from beside them. They glanced down at Haldin, and then at the helm; a half-elf crewman was manning the wheel.
“Don’t worry,” said the gnome, “he’s a good helmsman. And the necromental keeping us aloft is surprisingly reasonable for an undead creature. We should arrive in Korth in a matter of hours.”
Mordan sat in his room, staring idly out of the window at the rooftops of Korth. It was comfortable enough, but that didn’t make it any less of a prison.
In the days since the party had returned from the Nightwood, he had been kept strictly separated, and submitted to polite but determined questioning by various Ministry officials. He guessed that the others were going through the same process. Still, he thought to himself, free room and board. It wasn’t as though he had any pressing business anywhere. For the first time since he returned from the Talenta Plains, he wondered what to do next.
He also thought about what—if anything—he would tell the family. The official report of Gali’s death on the Day of Mourning had taken a terrible toll on both his parents, and telling them the truth could only make things worse. The news that their beloved elder son had been corrupted by an evil necromancer and turned into a murderous wight would be bad enough, without adding the fact that the disgraced Kasmir had added fratricide to the list of his crimes. He decided to wait until he knew what the official report of the whole affair would say, and decide then.
