Fantasy serial. Velma attends a necromancy lecture.
Velma Kuroda, a young specialist in magical and enchanted antiques, is taken under the wing of Hamish MacKinnon, a master enchanter and centuries-old immortal — a crotchety old man possessed by a horde of little demons.
Hamish had described Doctor Indistinguishable King as “rather sexy, in an untouchable sort of way”, which was confirmation, if confirmation was needed, that the old man was fucking insane.
He was laid up in bed at the house – he’d hurt his hip when he’d fainted yesterday, and while it wasn’t broken or sprained (this being his best guess, given that he’d not let the paramedics so much as touch him) – and had asked Velma to do a few errands for him, mostly things around the shop, bringing stuff up to him to work on.
He’d meant to hand today’s parcel off to his usual delivery girl yesterday too, but when she’d arrived in the early evening, he’d understandably been a bit behind schedule, messy with Kaito’s blood, waving the paramedics off, his back against the door to keep the alastora on the other side and stop them from getting into the shop. Velma had volunteered to do it, the drive up to Camelot. She’d been voice-transcribing essay notes the whole time, thinking out loud.
Doctor King was a white man in his early sixties, square-built and a little skinny, with silver hair only showing a few streaks of remaining black, and dark eyes, thin lips, gaunt cheeks. He had a high widow’s peak and his hair was thinning on top, and his beard and moustache looked as though they’d been trimmed with the help of a fucking stencil, the lines were so neat and angular.
“What,” he said quietly – he had a very low voice that seemed like it should have been quiet, but rang with an impossible resonance, filling the lecture hall without need for a microphone – “is a ghost?”
He stood up straight, his long-fingered hands together, palm-to-palm, fingertips-to-fingertips, his wrists rested against his belly. He wore black robes tailored tightly to his body, somewhere between old-fashioned and new, gold pauldrons resting on his square shoulders and gold ornamentation down his chest to his belt, as well, mirroring the rough shape of a sternum and the angle of collarbones. She wondered if it was just metal, or if the ornamentation stitched into the robe was just gold-plated bone.
Velma was sitting toward the back of the lecture hall, up near the projector booth, which had more than just a new projector in it – there were several kinds of film projectors lined up on shelves inside, dozens of different ones, and magical projectors made of different skulls and glass spheres and discs, too. A cool chill was emanating out behind from the glass.
She’d driven up to Camelot from Nottingham this afternoon, and no one had so much as looked at her as she’d moved through the corridors of the university toward the Necromancy department. It was a busy university, and she didn’t look different to any other student here.
“It’s a question,” he said when there was ringing silent in the lecture hall, no one daring even to breathe, to move. It was a big class, a very busy one, and most of these people weren’t actually studying necromancy or any other death magic. This was just a core introduction to some of the concepts. “You may answer. You there.”
A woman to the right of the hall, an older woman with greying blond hair, up against the wall with a notepad in front of her, said, “Something dead that seems to live.”
“Seems to live,” King repeated, smiling faintly, and he nodded his head. Behind him, a piece of chalk began to scrawl in Gothic capitals on the blackboard beside a little skull-shaped bullet point what the older woman had said. “I rather like that phrasing. Where comes the seeming, and makes that life untrue?”
“It isn’t alive any longer,” she said. “It’s a dead thing’s parody of life.”
“Parody of life,” he repeated, and this was scrawled in the next bullet point. “Would you call it that, a parody? Is a ghost a mockery of life, or of death?”
Velma looked around the room, taking in the faces of most of the students present. Magical universities often had classes that skewed older than mundie ones – there had been mature students in her classes when she was doing her Bachelor’s, and there were more in her Master’s seminars, but the majority of the other students were about her age.
In magical universities, the apparent ages were more varied: only about twenty percent of the people here, she’d estimate, were in their early twenties. Most were between thirty and fifty, and then another twenty percent were older than that, had white or grey hair and lined faces.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and she didn’t look at it – it was another picture of the cat, probably, or a meme, or something. Kaito had been texting her little things all day, wanting her to reply to his apology text, which she’d left on read. His skateboard was in the back of her car. She’d fixed it this morning, replaced the cracked rail on the one side and repainted the art, filling in a broken skull. Hamish had raised an eyebrow when he’d seen what she was doing before limping back up the stairs, but hadn’t said a word.
“Death is the great equalizer,” King said in his soft but powerful voice. “All people die – all humans, all fae, all demons, all beasts and animals, all creatures come to a death.”
“What about gods?” asked a man with a stave resting on the desk beside him, and King smiled.
“Gods, yes, of course,” he said. “Ymir is dead. Kronos is dead. God is dead, if you listen to the philosophers.”
“Angels don’t die,” said the man beside Velma, a young man with braids in his hair.
“They do, in fact,” King said immediately. “Some angels die as soon as they Fall to earth – others die on the death of a loved one, after certain battles, certain events. Of the few hundred angels to die that I know of the twenty-something thousand to have Fallen to earth, I know of seven who died in the Nazi death camps; I know of many other angels who have died in pogroms of one sort or another. I don’t mean Jews only, of course. Koreans. Natives. Angels that have undergone extreme suffering alongside their peoples, their loved ones, their friends, adoptive families, who have undergone torture and atrocity. Angels do die.
“There’s a reason they attempted to execute Jean-Pierre Delacroix twice over after his assassination of Rupert Blondeau: they hoped that the second firing squad would kill him.
“Angels do not die of illness or injury or old age, as other beings do. It has been said that angels die of two things only: pain, or peace. Asbat Nur-Badr.” Velma frowned, thinking of the records lined up on Hamish’s shelves. King said the name like Nur-Badr was some sort of philosopher instead of a musician. “Suns die: planetary systems, galaxies, universes die. The angels who do not die on this earth with us will die when the sun goes out.”
The silence rang in the room like a held note, heavy and painfully resonant, and her stomach churned at the painful emotion of it.
“To return to the matter at hand,” King said, moving across the room with the skirts of his robe shifting slightly about his knees – he wore dark leggings underneath, tucked into tight, black boots – “I ask you again – what is a ghost? Shout out, now.”
“An echo.”
“A manifestation.”
“A spectre.”
“A wraith.”
“An imprint.”
“Imprint!” King repeated, more loudly, more animated, sweeping around to look back at them again even as the other words were scrawled on the board by multiple pieces of chalk at once. “Who said that?”
Velma raised her hand.
“Go on,” King said, staring up at her with his cold, blue eyes, uncomfortably vivid in their colour even from the other side of the lecture hall. “An imprint, what do you mean by that?”
“Most hauntings,” Velma said, “are imprints of either specific events or specific personalities. They’re normally charged with emotion or some other sort of intensity. Either a person whose schedule was so rigid that it becomes imprinted on the spirits around them, kind of like how stairs can be worn down by regular footsteps over time, or a specific moment or event that’s so traumatic or painful – or very rarely, so joyful – that it ends up echoing afterwards. It’s why a lot of famous hauntings are murders or the last walk of a bride or an executioner’s victim, or replay certain aspects of life. It’s the events that individually are so emotional, or a routine so all-encompassing as to have a lot of emotion associated with it over time, that they leave a mark.
“As the person or people die, and they think of their most important moments, the combination of intense emotion and magical flow, the spirits around them copy it. Play it out again and again. It’s not conscious or anything. It’s the same as how they follow ley-lines or other channels of magical flow.”
King’s smile was all white teeth. It was a little scary, his face. Skull-like. The fuck was sexy about him to Hamish?
“Most of your compatriots here,” he said quietly, gesturing around, “seem a little baffled by what you mean precisely. You say “spirit” as though they are distinct from ghosts, as though they’re something of their own.”
“In terms of magical taxonomy, there are spirits that are conscious beings, although they’re a different category from animals. A spirit isn’t technically a living thing, in that it’s a manifestation of magic. It can’t die, because it’s formed of magic: it can take specific shapes, and it can then alter its shape or have its shape altered, but it can’t be killed. They can seem like living things, they can hunger, have needs, even seem like people, but they aren’t actually animals or demons. They don’t die, they don’t reproduce.
“They’re more like, um… Pure magic. They’re things through which magic channels and shines through. Like how light can shine through glass, but closer to life. They were explained to me as like molecules of water. You can’t really see them as individual things, only as a flow. When a specific spirit is formed – a species of house spirit, for example, or when spirits form together and repeat events or personalities in the form of a haunting, it’s like you’ve poured the water into a vessel or channelled it through a pipe. The spirits can take shapes, either temporarily or in a way that’s harder to change, but they’re still what they are.”
“Whose explanation was this?”
“Hamish MacKinnon’s.”
“Ah,” King said, and made a note on a piece of paper. “You can let Mr MacKinnon know I’ll be borrowing his phrasing in future, I like that molecular explanation. I’m sure he’ll complain.”
Velma laughed, and she was aware of a lot of the actual students in the class looking back at her, looking between her and Doctor King like they were interested in who she was.
“This young lady is quite correct, particularly given that she’s speaking from a professional opinion – Ms Kuroda is a specialist consultant in magical antiques, as well as hauntings and infestations,” Velma looked down at the desk in front of her, not meeting any of the glances the actual students in this class tossed up in her direction, “a haunting is just as she says: an echo. As the echo of your voice in a cave or cavern, it generally lacks a soul or awareness of its own. Motes of spirit, pure life, echo patterns that are impressed upon them. A haunting might comprise of a ghost – a ghostly figure, a personality.
“I’d wager that if I reanimated a corpse in front of you today, made a skeleton walk, you would not call it a ghost. If I gave him his voice, maybe. A ghost is the personality of the dead figure, yes? And not just their personality, but their memories, their ideas. Raise your hand if you have personal experience with necromancy in this room – if you’ve summoned a dead spirit, engaged in corpse reanimation, used a spirit mirror or otherwise communicated with the dead.”
Velma’s hand shakily raised – she was in the minority. This lecture hall had maybe a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy five, people in it, and she didn’t see fifteen hands go up.
King’s smile was softer this time than it had been before, close-lipped, subtle.
“How many of you believe necromancy should be illegal?”
Velma’s hand hesitated, hovering in the air, before she let it fall.
A lot more hands went up.
“Mm,” said King, and laughed. “Yes, I see many stony expressions – to many of you, a person like me represents a botherer of the dead, a man who stirs the sleeping who would be resting, disturbs the peace that the dead have earned. What is a ghost mocking, life or death? What does it matter, when a necromancer makes mockery of both?
“The majority of you, living as you do in these islands, are of course influenced by Abrahamic notions of life and death – the idea of life followed by an afterlife, a Heaven, a paradise of one sort or another, or a Hell. In an ideal world, the dead are sleeping, or otherwise at peace, until such a time as Judgement Day or what-have-you. In other worlds, they are eating and drinking, frolicking, hunting, in Annwn, Tech Duinn, Valhalla or Hel, wherever you like. Some of you may believe in reincarnation or some other transformation of the soul following death.
“In any case, necromancy goes against any and all of these natural orders, does it not? You draw back the dead from their rightful reward, or punishment. You haul them back from their next life, or new state of being.
“Not so.”
Flipping the board over, King began to draw a complex diagram with a great many labels in neat Greek print – Velma vaguely recognised it from a book she’d scanned after dealing with the infant doll, although she hadn’t had the heart to actually read it in detail.
“… the departing soul, whilst passing through this veil or film or border into whatever comes next, this separation between life and death, leaves an imprint, a footprint, a shadow, whatever you like. It is this,” King circled the part of the diagram showing the loose flame that represented the soul passing through a straight line, “that we summon when we speak with the dead. Necromancy when we actually look at such forms of magic as reanimation, zombies, puppeteering, these are quite straight-forward – it can be something of a misnomer when it comes to speaking with the dead.
“Why, after all, when we use some technique to speak with the dead, can they not give us concrete answers as to what comes next? Because the speaker has no experience of it.”
Velma leaned forward, feeling her brow furrow, and she was aware of many other desks around the room creaking as most of the room did the same thing, as people showed a distinct interest.
King was smiling as he folded his hands across his belly once again, standing up straight and walking away from the neat diagram scrawled out behind him.
“A misnomer,” King repeated again mildly. “What we call speaking with the dead, it is the same as a ghost. We are finding the remainder of the dead’s personality, what echo or imprint was left as they passed through this veil, their ghost, if you will. But that ghost is disconnected from whatever essence of that person goes on to a further plane – as best as we know, in any case. We know that the spirits of the dead with whom we speak lack knowledge of any further plane or afterlife; we know that the dead summoned through necromantic magics do not share post-mortem knowledge with, for example, the dead in the realms of Hel or Valhalla.
“Speak with a dead man through a spirit board or with his animated skull, and then speak to the same dead man in Odin’s drinking hall. The latter will have no knowledge of your conversation with the former, or vice versa; the former will be able to answer no question as to the precise nature of this drinking hall.
“Questions? Yes, Mr Fei?”
“The soul passes on, then, and leaves this imprint behind?”
“That’s the subject of fierce and, to my mind, rather dull debate. What is the soul, where is it stored? In the personality, the voice, the face, the memory? Some other energy or spirit? I’m a necromancer: such questions are beyond my domain. Ask one of the philosophers about it.” The old man shrugged his shoulders. “The voice of the dead we summon through communicative necromancy is merely a tool for channelling knowledge and magic – rather like a stave or a wand or a line of runes.”
“Can you speak with dead angels?”
“I can’t,” King said. “Whether it’s possible, I’m really not certain – typically, one requires some intimate connection with or some physical object connected with the dead in order to summon a semblance of their personality. Even were someone to have these things to hand, one must always remember that unlike humans and other magical species, which are native to this planet and this realm, or demon and fae, which are native to the dimensions parallel, angels come from a place wholly apart from ours.
“Mythologically, people make reference to angels coming from Heaven, but it’s properly referred to as the Host, and it’s wholly discrete from any notion we have of an afterlife. I’ve even less idea as to what happens to angels on their deaths as I might anybody else.”
“Can summoned dead feel pain?” Velma asked.
King looked up at her seriously. “In a body, yes,” he said. “Pain is a physiological response – innervated flesh hosting a summoned spirit will allow for pain. It varies by tradition, but most necromancers in the British Isles and this side of Europe speak with corpses already stripped of flesh. This has been attributed in some places and stories to a need to allow the dead to rest for a period of time and to ensure the soul or spirit have had time to fully move on from the body and re-incorporate as a spirit elsewhere. But the primary benefit, of course, is the lack of capacity for pain when a reanimus is formed only of bones.”
“And other pain?” Velma pressed. “People who want to torture dead people, can they actually do that?”
“Yes, and no,” King said. “A ghost typically remembers pain, and has an idea of what pain might feel like. You’re familiar with those experiments, I’m sure, where you look at a mirror of your hand in a mannequin form and it’s cut or injured, you experience a phantom pain. Most ghosts will experience the same, although a certain level of magical power, mental fortitude, or even just a period of existing as a ghost, all of these things can attribute to an ability for them to ignore such threats.”
“And—”
“Am I correct in thinking you’re asking about spirit dolls, Ms Kuroda?”
Velma pressed her lips together, and then nodded her head.
“Some mourning mothers from magical families in Britain have traditionally been given spirit dolls,” King said. “It was most common through the 18th and 19th centuries, and was particularly common in parallel with the culture around grief and death through the Victorian era. A widow whose only child died, particularly when the child died during or soon after birth, was given a doll imbued with the spirit of that child. It would assist her with the grieving process – or, such was the idea – and give her a focus until such a time as she was ready to remarry.”
That made the room go very, very quiet. Velma could feel other people holding their breath.
“As I have known the enchantment laid,” King said, “it traditionally includes runes to soothe the child’s anxieties and hungers, make them sleepier, easier to soothe. I have read some argue that it might provide a solace to the child’s ghost as well as to the grieving mother.”
Exhaling, King leaned back against his desk. He wore rings that went between each of his finger joints and webbed over the backs of his hand, to the wrist. They shone gold, same as the joints over his breast and shoulders.
“I would encourage you all to sit with the discomfort you might feel about necromancy. Muse on it. Consider each and every time you do a man like me – a dusty old bastard drinking wine and making polite conversation with a library of skulls, feasting on their lost knowledge between my perusals of ancient tomes and crumbling scrolls.” There were a few quiet, scattered laughs in the room, but not that many. Velma didn’t laugh. “I am an academic – I’ve no business bothering the dead. I am easy to condemn and look down on, and rightly so.
“I am not a grieving mother in the dead of a December night, widowed by a cruel and senseless world. Naked beneath her bedclothes, smeared still with blood and sweat and uncaring as to the fact, dead-eyed and unmoving, near to catatonia. Mouth open. Eyes unseeing, so broken by my grief I would not breathe myself, were it not that my lungs and heart were working against me.
“What would you do, in those times before such things as therapy, psychology, mood stabilisers? You cannot force this woman to speak. You might force her to eat and drink – for how many days will you do so? For how many weeks? Are you to let her die? Inter her to a madhouse, so that a professional might force-feed her, even whilst you see that she lives no life at all?
“Or will you give her back her child, even for a short while? See the light come into her eyes as the doll in your eyes bawls out the first cry her new babe was never able to? Give her a babe to hold in her arms, speak softly to, feed, clothe, sleep with – something to live for, until the immensity of her feeling has dimmed enough that she might live for herself again?”
Velma wiped her eye with the cuff of her sleeve.
“Any more questions?” King asked, and nodded as the next hand went up.
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