Page 26 of The Rut in the Road

It means,the ghost replied,that once body and soul split, they’re meant to stay split. You try to put me back in my corpse, it’s gonna make me all messed-up and not right.

I’m sorry, I told him.I still don’t understand.I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of trying to put a ghost back in their body, but Archie’s explanation wasn’t making sense.

The ghost sighed.You know how some people just ain’t right?he asked me.

I shook my head.

Some people, they do bad things because they like it. They want to hurt people. Want to make them suffer, that crap?

I did know that, so I nodded.

Well, what happens when you take a soul and put it back in the body, it somehow gets… messed up, he said, repeating what he’d said before. But he continued before I could point out that it still didn’t make sense.When you’re not supposed to be attached to your body still, being forced back in it takes away the good things—the things that make you care about people. So even people who were perfectly nice, if you raise them and put the soul back, end up twisted and messed up.

Why?I asked. I’d understood this time, but it still didn’t make sense why putting a spirit back into a body would have that kind of an effect.

Archie thought about this.Don’t rightly know, he admitted.Just the way it is. My grandpappy taught me that’s how it was, and I wasn’t gonna test it.His expression grew darker.I’ve seen it, though, he said.Not ever because of anything I did, but once you see that, it makes you wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into. Never asked why.He shrugged.Never much cared.

I thought about this for a moment, wondering whether or not Fiona would be able to help me find out. I liked understanding things. Understanding how magic was supposed to work helped me to think about how to use it or how to keep from using it. Understanding rules—whether about magic or physics or behavior—helped me to know what was going to happen and how I could do things differently in order to keep from hurting people or causing them to be upset.

If I understood why bringing a body and spirit back together caused some kind of magical corruption, I could avoid some other way that I might accidentally create that corruption or allow it to happen.

You don’t do it, though, Archie said firmly, interrupting my thoughts.Swear you won’t do it.I blinked, surprised at the intensity of his insistence.

I have no desire to mess anything up, I told him honestly.And I don’t think I’d want to put a spirit back into a body anyway.

He nodded once.You don’t, he said, and his tone was ominous. He studied me for a moment longer, then decided something, although I wasn’t sure what.Okay, then, sport, he said.We start with finding the dead.

Finding them?I asked.

This whole damn city was built on the dead,Archie said.Ask His Nibs if you don’t believe me. Slaves, Indians—sorry, Indie-whatsits—and colonists who didn’t know their arse from a teakettle.

I must have made some sort of confused expression, because Archie glanced at me and laughed.

The English who came here weren’t the brightest bulbs in the pack,he explained, and I was relieved that I at least understood that expression.Hell, some of them ate the other ones in Jamestown because they were too stupid to know to grow their own food.

I nodded. Mason had explained about what he’d called the Starving Time.

Well, between the natives and the slaves sold at auction and beaten or worked to death for whatever stupid reason their owners decided, this city is more bones than soil in some places,Archie continued.So some places it’s harder to not find the dead than to find them.

Ward had talked about this on occasion—he didn’t like trying to find spirits in some places when Dan Maza couldn’t give him a name to look for, because he might raise a lot of dead in the process, which was both tiring and counterproductive. It seemed the same thing would be true for necromancy.

The other thing to remember is that there’s more than dead people,Archie continued.’Specially if you’re looking just for bodies.

What do you mean?I asked, frowning.

If all you’re tryin’ to raise is a corpse,Archie replied.You can get corpses from all kinds of critters.

You’re saying a necromancer can raise animals?I asked.

The ghost nodded.Yup. Dogs, cats, spiders, mice, you name it.

Well, that was disconcerting.

In fact,Archie continued.That’s usually where we start. You raise a shambling human corpse, it’s gonna upset people. You raise a spider or a fly, nobody much cares or even notices.

I thought about this. It wasn’t unlike what I’d done on my own at Tranquil Brook—trying to control my death magic to see if I could focus it, both in terms of avoiding particular targets and in terms of reducing its strength. A lot of spiders and flies had died in the process.

I suppose if there was anything left of them, I could now raise their tiny bodies.