Greywalker - Kat Richardson [97]
I sighed. “And my client wants it. He claims it’s a family heirloom, but having seen it—and him—I’m starting to wonder.”
“He must be a rather unusual person.”
“I don’t know if he’s a human being. He’s . . . Grey, but I don’t know what. Not a vampire, though.”
“That would explain why signs point to you. I don’t like the idea of a thing like that on the loose with someone Grey. Why does he want it? I mean really?”
“It’s certainly no sentimental heirloom. I have a bad feeling there’s a purpose for that thing.”
Mara thought a moment. “We’ll have to do something about it, if for no other reason than that it’s blocking magic that could be useful other places.” She wrinkled her brow and toyed with the steering wheel. “If we could discover why it’s a dark artifact, we might be able to figure out what to do about it. I don’t usually care for them, but a necromancer would be useful here.”
“What? Why?”
“A necromancer manipulates magic through the auspices of death.”
“Hang on. They kill things?”
“Not necessarily, though a large number of their rituals can only be effective in the presence of death, and the easiest way to get that is to kill some sacrificial animal. When I say death, I mean not just dead bodies or something of that ilk, but the change in the power state that happens when someone or something dies. Y’see, the force, or energy, of a living thing becomes free at the moment of death—it’s one of the things which causes ghosts, too. The right kind of magical attractor in the immediate area can capture the energy, and a great deal of energy and information are available for a little while to anyone who can manipulate that attractor. It’s terribly dangerous stuff, though, to those who can touch it at all. Many of us feel it, but necromancers are among the few who can use it. The necromancer exchanges some of his own life-force energy for control of the new energy source, so long as it lasts—giving up life for the knowledge and power of death, for a time.”
“Ugh,” I said with a shudder. “What good would that do us?”
“A necromancer can create dark artifacts or examine their history. Necromantic artifacts are always grim and lowering like that organ because of the thread of death tied up in their creation.”
“Are they worse than any other kind?”
“Can be. The power of most dark artifacts comes from a sort of accreting process, where layers of use, power, and purpose adhere to the object and become bound up in it. Many necromantic dark artifacts are relatively harmless. Since they are created for specific purposes and only used once or twice, they don’t build up that sort of power. But that one . . .” She shuddered.
“All right,” I said. “So why would we want a necromancer here?”
“A necromancer can look back to a dark artifact’s moment of creation and see what caused it. Don’t know how they do it—it’s bloody spooky. If we knew what the artifact’s purpose and process of creation was, we would know how to neutralize or destroy it. This is not going to be easy. If we go about it wrong, we run the risk of increasing its power by having our own sucked into the artifact.”
“I’d rather not see that thing get any stronger,” I said. “You don’t know any necromancers then?”
“No. I find their practices a bit disgusting, and they’re a dying breed. Necromancers aren’t just created out of practice and determination. They’re born with the potential talent and develop it as they age. It’s not a very politically correct profession, you can imagine. Boys and girls who kill their pets so they can ‘touch the power’ usually end up in mental institutions. The right type of conditioning and therapy breaks the potential and steers them into more normal courses.”
“So psychos who torture animals are potential necromancers?”
“Oh, no. One in a million children is a potential necromancer, and he—or very rarely, she—may never tap the power, never