Theoretical Necromancy: Theoretical Necromancy, #1

By Cay Reet

The first volume collects the following three misdeeds:

Stray

Gabrielle Munson takes a busman's holiday to Italy to 'liberate' a necromantic text from the library of a town. Unfortunately, while she's there to steal the book, other burglars kill a librarian. Now Gabrielle is in the hot seat, because she's the only one who has stolen something from the library and both the police and the inquisition are hot on her tail. Will she make it out of the town alive and with the book she risked so much for?

The Tower

Apparently, Gabrielle Munson is not the only family member in disgrace. Two of her cousin arrive in her home town of Marazion, Abigail in disgrace after a very unsuitable relationship was discovered and Jonah forced to go along to keep an eye on her. As Gabrielle introduces them to what passes for society, they follow an invitation which leads to murder, mayhem, and some use of necromantic powers.

The Death Mark

Everything has calmed down for Gabrielle Munson and her cousins in Marazion when a surprise visit of the siblings' father and older brother shakes things up. A curse has been put on the family and another necromancer is working hard on making it come true. Despite her usual principle of not tangling with others in her trade, if it can be avoided, Gabrielle has to go to war to protect those family members she likes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cay Reet
• Release date: Aug 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393670544

Book preview

Stray

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

The Tower

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

The Death Mark

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

More by the Same Author

Stray

featuring Gabrielle Munson

One

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The inhabitant of the guestroom was binding a mathematical - it was a good one, very neat, very precise and very, well, mathematical. Gabrielle then grabbed her frock coat and slipped into it. For the breakfast in the pension, she was not going to bother with a hat, of course, but she slipped her hands into the black kid gloves without which she didn’t walk around in public. With her short-cropped, brown hair and her lean, tall build, she could pass muster for a man without too many problems, but her hands were always on the edge of giving her away. Not that the social sin of wearing trousers as a woman worried her much - compared to the crimes against humanity, nature, and, if one was religiously inclined, God she had already committed, cross-dressing did hardly count. She left the small, but clean guestroom and walked down the stairs to the breakfast room on the ground floor. The air was already heating up - Italy in early summer was not the kind of place she would have chosen for a holiday. On the other hand, she was on a busman’s holiday, if that, so it was hardly her choice for a holiday at all. Finding a small table which was, so far, unoccupied, she slipped down in the seat facing the room and ordered a small breakfast of the continental variety - but then, she certainly was on the continent, so coffee and bread would certainly do.

A little later, after having eaten and brushed her teeth, she grabbed her wide-brimmed slouch hat and left the pension. In the warm climate, an additional coat was not necessary. Gabrielle wandered down the narrow, winding street leading from her pension to the centre of the town. She kept her steps measured and calm, aiming for the same destination as during the last few days - the local library. It was nothing to write home about, just a small, well-appointed building which hosted a large variety of books the locals might like to check out and read. The official collection, however, was not what Gabrielle was in town for - a book from the subterranean archive was.

Gabrielle entered the library, as she had done during the last few days, picked up a copy of a local paper from the stack and walked off towards the reading room which, by pure coincidence, was next to the locked and bolted door leading down into the basement. She picked a suitable table, settled down, and opened the newspaper in question. Her Italian was suitable for everyday life and certainly up to reading the articles, but she only glanced over the headlines while keeping an eye out for the door in question. It was rare that the librarians had to go down there during hours - the old books kept downstairs were in the catalogue, but it needed a written permission from the local magistrate to be allowed to view them, let alone check them out. Gabrielle had expected something like this, though, and was merely doing reconnaissance in the library. She knew she had no chance of getting the Principae Necromantica out of the library by any legal means. Books about necromancy were off-limits by the law and the only reason why the book hadn’t been destroyed so far was that the Vatican had no idea it was kept in the library - which served Gabrielle well, since the library was unlikely to make too much of a fuss about its disappearance, lest a few inquisitors might turn up and ask uncomfortable questions.

Pretending to be done with the paper, she folded it carefully, rose from her table, and carried it back to the stack, replacing it for the next person to read. She nodded to the librarian at the desk and left the library. Staying for too long could be suspicious, but a tourist perusing the local paper in the library instead of buying it was perfectly fine.

Gabrielle left the library again and rounded the building once. The old library wasn’t what she would call overly secure by any means, but then, it didn’t hold that much of value. Most of the books were common and relatively new, the contents of the archive were hardly known outside some very small and very easy to define circles. Yet, Gabrielle didn’t covet the book for the regular reason - enhancing her powers as a necromancer -, but for information on her own powers. Ever since she’d involuntarily raised a dead mouse at the age of seven, she’d been wondering about how she had gained powers others had to sell their soul for - literarily so.

Within viewing distance of the library’s back door was a small café where she could easily have spent most of the day. She didn’t do it, though, she merely went there after her trip to the library to drink a coffee and, apparently, enjoy the sun. Her always slightly tanned skin made it much easier to pretend she was used to the sun, despite the fact that it was a legacy from her grandmother, who had been Indian. She sat down at her usual table, where she was not quite looking at the back door, but could easily watch it, nevertheless.

The waiter arrived, asking what signor wanted to drink and she ordered her usual espresso from him. The coffee was good, which was one reason for her to choose the café - not the main reason, she would even have come in for horrible coffee to watch the door without making herself a suspect.

Today, a table a little further off was occupied by a group of five men, all sitting closely together and stopping their conversation whenever the waiter drifted closer and asked whether they wanted something else. Gabrielle leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, seemingly just enjoying the sun. In reality, she was listening very closely, making good use of her very acute and trained hearing. If one needed to open a few safes one didn’t have the combination to, one did well to sharpen one’s hearing in time.

Remember, one of the men said in Italian, tomorrow is Saturday and the place is closed on Sunday, as everything apart from the churches.

And the restaurants ... and the cafés ... and the pubs, another man added.

Be it as it may, number one took over again, his voice laced with annoyance, nobody is going to come there on Sunday, which means the break-in will not be noticed until Monday morning. That gives us a long time to look for what we’re paid to find.

So they were planning a burglary - which was very much what Gabrielle herself was doing as well. She stopped listening in, not caring much for what they might be after. On Saturday night, she was otherwise occupied. One or two days afterwards - as not to arouse suspicion -, she would be leaving, ending her short holiday and taking a train back north. Through Austria, Germany, and France, she would then make her way back to Marazion and to her cosy flat there. To her laboratory, too, of course, but that was not quite as cosy.

After enjoying her coffee, Gabrielle left the area of the library, going on a little shopping spree. She didn’t need that many tools for her plan - and she surely wasn’t going to buy a crowbar or a metal saw only two days before breaking into a building -, but she needed a few ingredients from the local apothecary. Buying necessities for the travelling gentleman at a drugstore next, she came back to the pension in order to unload, then she went out again, taking a bus to the coast for some sightseeing of ancient Roman ruins. Even though they weren’t what she’d come for, it filled her spare time and made her tourist identity a little more believable.

* * *

Early evening saw Gabrielle back in town, moving further from her pension and the library and into the newer quarters where a few nice restaurants drew guests. She found herself at a small one with more locals than tourists. In her experience, you couldn’t go wrong with choosing a place to eat or drink by how many locals frequented it - they had the time to figure out which place served the best food and drinks and would rather go somewhere they were sure to be satisfied than somewhere that looked flashy.

Again, she was proven right by a very agreeable Italian menu and a very good local wine which she ordered some additional glasses of. She returned to the pension late, but not too late, and went right up to her room, locking the door carefully. She wasn’t done for the day yet, there were still a few things to be taken care of.

Once she had pushed the chair from the small desk under the door handle, she opened the packages from the apothecary and the drugstore. Then she retrieved her Gladstone bag from the recesses of her suitcase - it was better not to carry it around openly. From within, she produced several small pieces of glassware and a Bunsen burner which came with a small flask of gas attached to it. Setting up her little laboratory on the desk, she swiftly measured several of the ingredients from the apothecary and a good amount of the aftershave she had bought at the drugstore. Adding a few shavings from the shaving soap she didn’t need on account of not growing a beard, she slowly stirred the concoction until the colour turned to a light green, then she turned the off burner and placed the glass bottle with the liquid on another space on the desk to let it cool off. She removed the remainders of her ingredients, stacking them in small tubes in an etui she also kept in the bag. Except for one small glass bottle with a good rubber stopper, all bottles were afterwards bundled into a piece of paper - she would remove it from her room the next day and discard it somewhere in a public trash can.

Next, Gabrielle moved on to the window of her room. She’d chosen the very room for a reason - a very stable construction underneath which was meant to help the climbing ivy climb even better. The ivy had almost completely covered it, but the rather new wood underneath was still visible. To someone of moderate fitness, such as Gabrielle, it provided a ladder for coming and leaving unnoticed. Since she certainly wasn’t going to walk out of the building late at night and come back in the very early morning for all to see, such an additional way was necessary. Since the view from the room’s window wasn’t as nice as that of most other guest rooms - which looked out over a very beautifully kept municipal park -, it hadn’t been too hard to get the room. She’d simply claimed she was going to be out and about a lot and didn’t mind the view, but she liked being at the beginning of the corridor, close to the staircase. She was out and about a lot, so that had not been a lie.

With everything for the day done, Gabrielle undressed and pulled a simple nightshirt over her head. Then she settled in bed and closed her eyes, going over everything she had found out so far to put herself to sleep.

The library was open Monday to Saturday, but, like all of the businesses minus restaurants, cafés, and pubs, closed on Sunday. There were several librarians working in it; Gabrielle had counted three, but it was entirely possible that one was on holiday - it was early summer and thus people tended to travel. The library took up both storeys of the building, but part of the first floor was dedicated to offices and suchlike - separated from the open parts by a door marked as ‘private.’ Gabrielle wasn’t going to spend any time upstairs, she was going down into the basement as soon as possible - which was as soon as she had cracked the two locks on the door leading there. The lock of the door itself was relatively new, which was good - old locks were often harder to crack, because parts inside might be exhausted or rusty and wouldn’t react to the picks as they should. The lock on the bar which went across the door was older, of the padlock variety, and might give her troubles - which was what the acid she had just brewed was for. If the lock proved to be unreasonable, it would be destroyed instead of being cracked.

She had had a little glance at the blueprints during a visit to the archives of the local town hall - distracting the archivist with a question about the blueprint of an old villa which was a tourist location had provided her with the necessary time to check the basement layout. There were three rooms in the basement and the book had to be inside the one furthest from the stairs - because that room was marked as a secured area. She wasn’t happy with the amount of preparation which had been possible, but she simply couldn’t stay in the town for a month or more, because that would make her quite suspicious after the disappearance of the book. A tourist staying in the small town for about a week, seeing sights, enjoying the near seaside, that was plausible. A tourist coming to a place well outside of Venice, which might engage interest for longer, for a month was definitely not plausible. It was the end of the week and Gabrielle had not only seen sights and enjoyed the seaside, but also gathered information, yet she was running out of things to do after the information gathering was done.

The book should better be worth what she was going through for it - helping her to explain what had happened to her at the age of three when her twin sister Angelica had died and she had, too, only to wake up again ten minutes after drowning. That alone had been considered a miracle and wouldn’t have been bad for her future life at all. Blessed by God, Pater Jerome had said, clearly meant for great things. Four years later, she had touched a dead mouse in the basement while her father was checking the new wine which had been delivered. It had come back to life for a few minutes - which was more than a seven-year-old should have accomplished. It was well known that people needed connections to Hell - or at least other deities than the Christian one - to gain the power to raise the dead. Yet, here Gabrielle was, perfectly capable of mastering most necromantic rituals without ever having made a deal with a demon. Perfectly capable of walking across sacred ground, unlike most necromancers who were without a soul and thus weak when it came to the blessings of Mother Church.

Two

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Gabrielle spent the Saturday morning at the local market and the evening at a local theatre which performed in an old Roman stadium outside the town. Both were perfectly fine ways of spending a day as a tourist, of course, and allowed for her to give the right impression to everyone else. After a dinner out in town, she returned to the pension and went to bed early - only to prepare in her room for the time when she would have to leave for the library.

The Gladstone bag had a belt added to it, which would allow for her to wear it on her body, leaving both hands free. She bottled the acid in the small glass bottle she’d retained from yesterday’s brewing. Generally speaking, she made sure to have everything she might need, from the lock-picks to a small gun for absolute emergencies, then she settled for the wait. The window looked out over the pension’s small backyard, where nobody went much after the kitchen was closed for the night, but it paid to be careful. The sun went down slowly and already quite late - it was, after all, early summer in the Mediterranean. The sky changed its colour from bright blue over shades of orange, pink, and purple to the nightly black peppered with stars. The sounds of the city became more muted, the pension wasn’t quite in the centre of town and not in the newer quarters where most of the taverns and restaurants were to be found. Few businesses in the area were open into the night and the tourists out for entertainment were unlikely to choose the streets around the pension, either. It was one reason why Gabrielle had chosen this place for her stay.

Finally, it was dark and the streets and the backyard had grown silent. Gabrielle slung the belt of her Gladstone bag over her shoulder and across her chest, then she made sure the bag was sitting well on her lower back. She slid out of the window, her feet finding easy purchase on the rungs meant for the ivy. The ivy, luckily, wasn’t very dense yet, so she could climb down without too much trouble. Only about a minute later, she strode out of the backyard onto a small alleyway which was used for deliveries. She picked her way to the library carefully, avoiding the streets she knew to be crowded at night.

The library’s back door was not in an area where a lot of people milled about at night - the café opposite closed around sundown, because most people were looking for different drinks after that. For Gabrielle, who was quite experienced with cracking locks, the door didn’t present much of a problem. The lock there had been replaced recently, so the parts were still in working order and well-lubricated and it yielded to her picks in short time. Slipping through the door, she pulled it closed behind her and turned the Gladstone bag towards her front to rummage around in it for a moment. She came up with a slender light and turned it on. A narrow corridor led to the reading room, so she was already close to the door in question.

The lock built into the door wasn’t much of a challenge, either. Like the one in the back door, it was relatively new, as she’d know already, and yielded quickly to her skills. The padlock keeping the bar across the door, however, was a different matter. It was old, slightly rusty, and didn’t react well to the picks shoved into its opening. After several minutes of silent cursing and hard work, Gabrielle gave up on cracking it. She would have preferred that, because it would have left the librarians in the dark about the burglary, but if she needed to use other means, she was prepared for that, too. A few drops of the acid she’d brewed the day before took care of the lock. She placed the remains on a nearby shelf and pushed the bar back, unlocking the door completely.

The staircase down was narrow and steep, in addition, even Gabrielle, who wasn’t overly tall, had to duck her head slightly. Whoever had designed the basement had not considered it a necessity to make it easily reachable. At the foot of the staircase, she let her light travel, looking for the right door. It, too, had a combination of a regular lock and bars, but this one had three bars drawn across it, each with a heavy padlock to keep it in position. After already having disposed of one padlock with brute force, she decided to go for the quicker solution, even if one or two of the padlocks might have responded well to her lock-picks. A few more drops of her acid per lock made quick work out of them and she pushed the bars back, then she cracked the lock in the door the regular way, since doing that with an acid was much more difficult than just using the picks. The door yielded quickly and she pushed it open. Behind it were rows upon rows of free-standing shelves, all filled top to bottom. Naturally, the library catalogue didn’t specify where on those shelves the book she was looking for should be. Still, the really restricted books should be on the same shelf, most likely at the back of the room. Gabrielle set out on her search.

Almost an hour later, she came upon the right shelf and managed to locate the Principae Necromantica between two others which were of less interest to her. Considering taking them as well, she decided against it in the end - there was no reason to take them as they weren’t what she was looking for. She pushed the book she’d come for into her bag and returned to the door. There was no reason to lock it again, what with the padlocks having been destroyed. On the whole, it was pretty obvious that someone had been in the archive and it wouldn’t take the librarians too long to find out what had been taken. That, however, wasn’t Gabrielle’s problem. By the time they found out about it, she should be on the train heading north already, what with the library being closed on Sundays and the archive full of books.

On top of the stairs, just as she placed her hand on the door handle, she stopped dead. There were voices outside. Soft voices, admittedly, but still voices. Could a librarian be working late and had they, in this case, seen the broken padlock and called the police? No, the