Chương 15: Dust to Dust

Hammers were wonderful tools. Ever since Grug picked up a rock to brain a rival back in the Stone Age, the simple beauty of blunt force trauma had been a staple part of humanity's arsenal. Handy for dealing with nails as well, but as the monster finished forming in front of me, thoughts of construction were pushed from my mind. Many, many ribs and spines had lined up to form a barrel-like torso that was almost five feet long.

Seven arms sprouted from the complex array of shoulders at the top, and five legs formed a circle around the base. The limbs were thick and strong, with multiple bones fused together to make each section. Rising up above the gaggle of arms, three spinal columns waved, each crowned with a skull whose eye sockets were filling with smoky black fire. The table bumped into my legs as I backed away, and I slipped sideways to put it between myself and the behemoth.

Ossified Custodian Level 17 STR 29 AGI 8 MAG 4 ARM 49 It reached for a mop with one hand and a broom with one of its many spares. Brandishing them like weapons, it advanced slowly towards me. Moving with more than the number of legs you're used to is always tricky.

"I haven't made a mess!" I offered, hands upraised and glancing around for possible weapons. Two of the three heads turned away and searched the room; the central one stayed focused on me. Ingredients? Whoever the necromancer was had a lot of stuff for strengthening the undead, but nothing that I could see could be used to weaken one. It emitted a rattling sound and shuffled closer. The mop swung back, dripping water over its shoulders that trickled into the gaps between the amalgam's various bones.

Sparks of magic linked them, but the water dripped through the grey strands. I sent out a trail of bone powder from my pouch; more and more of the stuff flowed into the air between us, then snaked out to settle into the joints in its arms. Elbows and shoulders flexed, and I forced more of the dust into the cracks to slow the thing down. All six shields lashed out, chipping away at it, but they were poor substitutes for an actual hammer. Hurdling the desk, I dodged in close.

Avoiding a clumsy swing of the broom, I slapped a hand against the thigh of one of its legs. The bone dissolved into dust, but it was thick. I pressed my hands in as I made a gouge into the construct's limb. An arm that ended in a dozen fingers that were twice as long as they ought to be tried to reach for my head. One of my shields caught me in the chest, shoving me backwards and out of range just as the weakened leg snapped under the weight of the thing.

"Shit. Four more legs to go, I guess." Losing one leg was less of an inconvenience than it should have been; the damn thing had spares. Switching the big shields to new targets, I started attacking the thin spinal sections that held the swaying heads up above the body. It didn't like that at all and began flailing its arms around to swat them away.

Taking the opportunity, I darted forward and wrapped both of my bony hands around a knee, dust exploding out and immediately circling through the air to clog the monster's joints. A fist slammed into my back, pushing me to my knees. My hands met the ground to catch me just as the knee snapped. Grabbing one of its severed legs in each hand, I jumped back and spun them in my wrists to gauge the weight. Then I went to work.

The custodian was slowed by the dust in its joints, clumsy with two missing legs, and distracted by the buzzing shields trying to decapitate it in triplicate. My improvised hammers were made of Ancient Bone, the best kind I'd be likely to find in the city, and now I had weapons that could do some serious damage. I fell into Vermicelli's Varangian, an elegant fighting style focused on dual-wielding.

It was graceful, spins blending into hammer blows that put my entire mass behind each hit, and I finally started to do some real damage to it. My primary targets were where thighs met hips. The need for movement left them lightly armoured, and the creature's towering height worked against it. Using Bone Throwing, one of my foot-bludgeons was sent crashing into a nearby ankle, so that I could latch on with my now free hand to the chipped and broken bones at the top of leg number three.

More dust circled around me as it gave way. I rolled away. With a thought, the foot I'd launched before flew through the air and bashed into one of the skulls. Then, foot number three slammed into the next one. Taking careful aim, Bone Throwing sent the one I still held into the central skull, and it exploded. I caught the shards with Bone Control and jammed them into the shoulder joints to lock the arms still at last. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Who the hell needs a cleaner like you?" I muttered as I began disassembling the body using Dust to Dust. It took a while; this thing must have had the bones of twelve or thirteen bodies, all merged into one.

"That doesn't explain why the rest of those alcoves were empty." What the hell had I stumbled into? You have killed a level 17 Ossified Custodian! Minor bonus XP granted for being a bit of a sneaky, mean-spirited bastard! XP gained: 167! You levelled up! You now have: 2 stat points to allocate! 1 skill point available! Local Class Bonecaster General Level 12 STR 17 AGI 12 MAG 26 ARM 24 XP 68/100 Bone Matter: 71/85 Skills: Dust To Dust, 3/10 Convert Bones into bone dust. You have become fertiliser, grower of crops!

Level 3: Pile of Dust, You are become dust in truth. A point into strength and agility, and finally, that third point in Dust to Dust. Now we were cooking with mana. I'd had to dissolve the entire body to get the kill. Whatever ritual the necromancer had used to make that thing had been incredibly advanced. I now had over a hundred kilos of Ancient Bone Dust in the pouch, and my mind was spinning with the possibilities.

Refraining from glancing around nervously, if the homeowner walked in right now, I would be dead, so I didn't see the point in worrying. I quickly catalogued what was valuable and what wasn't worth stealing. There was no need to linger any longer than I had to. Any good thief knows as well as any good backpacker that the order of the shit you throw in your bag matters. Heavy stuff first.

The journal led the way, but it was joined by The Red Book of Borowyn, The Grey Book of Lyriel and finally the Black Book of Mogdibnaz at the bottom of my bag. They were about as illegal as it was possible to be, and they weren't the worst of the tomes this guy had collected. No way was I going to expose Bork to Calliope's Kalligraphy, so I left it on the shelf. The kid did not need to learn how to fuse demons and undead. Next, it was the alchemy ingredients and the summoning reagents.

I carefully laid the alchemy set on top, using some of the softer ingredients to pack around it and protect the glass from breaking. I held the sack in one hand and dropped in a bunch of enchanted robes, wands, and hats from the wardrobe next to the cubby hole the necromancer used for a bedroom. In a bedside drawer, I found several pouches that clinked heavily when I moved them. Into the bag they went.

Looking around at my handiwork, I concluded whoever owned this place was going to be pissed when they got back, and I'd best not be anywhere near here when they did. I briefly contemplated taking one of the red-stained sacks the owner had left in the corner and filling it up as well, but they glistened wetly, and the rest of the goods here weren't worth the effort for now. Not bothering to pull my hood up, I took the sack in one hand and my backpack in the other, holding the Torch of Everflame in my teeth.

I hopped over the trigger to the trap on the off chance it had rearmed, and quenched the torch, tucking it into a strap on the rucksack as I scuttled outside and locked the door behind me.

"Oi! What are you doing?" I didn't bother to answer, just bolted for the shadows with my hands full.

"We've got a grave robber! Move west, Hornik; you go east and circle around. You can't escape us, mate. Why not hand yourself in and make this painless? If we have to fight, old Varn won't be gentle," he called. Mercy was historically in short supply for those accused of grave robbing and corpse bothering, so I put no stock in his words. I jinxed through the monuments to the properly dead to try and gain enough lead to let me escape.

"He's over there!" A burst of speed sent me clear of the vaults and out into the less-visited sections of the graveyard. There'd be more wandering undead here. Spotting a zombie, I charged past it and heard a moan as it turned to follow me. Zigzagging from one wild undead to the next, I built up another mob trailing behind me.

"Fuck!" My closest pursuer had found my slowest meat shield and caught its attention. I stopped and threw my cloak on the ground, then tossed my rucksack and the Pouch of the Powders on top, tying the corners into a hurried knot. I looked up and found a skellie coming to a stop a couple of metres away from me. It raised a club above its head. The mouldy-looking wooden shaft descended perfectly in line with my skull. Blunt damage, my worst foe, but not today, I'm afraid.

My body, sword and shields all dissolved into dust that swirled unnaturally around my loot. The Pile of Dust ability I'd just unlocked came into its own, and my own body fell apart into motes that came under my mental control. It was disorienting; my perception fractured, and I seemed to be many tiny parts that struggled to work together. Learning to walk with an extra leg or two was a cinch compared to this.

I condensed the dust around my stolen goods, pushing all my many selves underneath it, resolving to level up Bone Control next to make this process easier, and lifted my goods into the air. I strained, using all the focus and willpower that I had built up over millennia, and the loot drifted up into the darkness, enshrouded in a black cloak against the dark sky.

"Fucking zombies!" The man's voice sounded broken and disjointed, but I knew it was my perception that was at fault. My mind tried to interpret the vibrations as they shook the dust that I was now made from; no ears were involved, and it was a jarring experience.

"Hang on." A flash of light below sent me drifting higher, but the obsession terrestrial creatures have for not looking up saved my bony bacon. The zombies began to shuffle away, and a squad of four humans moved across the ground, kicking at the bushes and poking swords into the shadows cast by the gravestones. The strain of holding up fifty kilos of loot was starting to tell on me when someone called out in the distance, and the four of them looked up, then hurried off.

I drifted a little lower and decided to push myself. The Shroud glowed with sparks of ancient magic in the distance, as visible to me as streetlights would be to a human. I got halfway there before I needed to land and rest. Stopping in an empty area, clear of roaming undead, I reformed my body with a thought and sat down on my loot for a non-breather, keeping an earhole cocked for anything approaching.