ashes, make him an undead like poor Janni, who was somewhere in the cone of the
fire-Crit couldn’t imagine how or why, but he could see, if he squinted, the
dead Stepson, fully formed and unconsumed, doing something that looked like
bathing under a waterfall, but doing it in a heat that would melt bone in
seconds.
Crit had learned, fighting magic and sometimes fighting it with magic, not to
ask questions if he didn’t want to hear the answers. So he left the matter of
Janni to those who ought to tend it: to Ischade, who’d raised his shade after a
proper Sacred Band funeral; to Abarsis, who’d come down from heaven and escorted
Janni’s spirit on high, and done it where the whole Band could see it. If there
was an argument about propriety here, it was between the necromant and the ghost
of the Slaughter Priest: it wasn’t a matter for a decidedly unmagical fighter
like himself. If Janni hadn’t once been Niko’s partner and a Sacred Bander, it
wouldn’t have been the business of any Stepson what Ischade had done. As things
stood, all you could do, if you were so inclined, was pray for Janni’s soul.
But “it bothered Crit intensely because the same thing could happen to Strat
Ischade could make it happen.
He wondered idly, trailing the ghost-horse on its rounds about the Peres estate,
how you went about killing a necromant. If Strat didn’t come through this
intact, he was going to find out. Maybe Randal would know-if Randal ever again
was capable of doing more than swallowing when you put a spoon of gruel in his