Theoretical Necromancy Volume 2: Theoretical Necromancy, #2

By Cay Reet

The second volume collects the following three misadventures:

The Revenge of the Devil Monks

In Croatia, Gabrielle just wants to look for a book left behind by devil-worshipping monks. Little does she know that the innkeeper was right and the day on which she visits their castle is the one on which they will come back to take revenge on the living. Locked in a castle with a group of five-hundred-year-old monks, she and a gold-tier inquisitor she had bad memories of have to fight not just for their lives, but also for those of a group of innocent tourists.

The Cursed Paintings

Gabrielle is not a fan of the new man in town, Eliah Haggard, who shows an unwanted interest in Mr. Gabriel Munson. Yet, when her cousins wish to follow an invitation to the infamous Ludewig Mansion outside of town, she tags along and finds herself locked in a battle with the master of the house over the life and health of Jonah. Can Gabrielle overcome all problems and dish out punishment where it is needed?

The Suitor

Abigail Munson finds herself supposedly engaged without knowing how it happened. A persistent suitor is living on credit on the account of being her fiancé and cannot be dissuaded from it. Things take a turn for the worse when the man is found clearly stabbed and the inspector on the case homes in on Gabrielle as his main suspect. Can Gabrielle get her name cleared and the real culprit punished?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cay Reet
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201615543

Book preview

Revenge of the Devil Monks

One

Gabrielle Munson stood at the end of the queue climbing into the bus — a large group of tourists, most of them American, climbing in to drive off to visit the Matthiasburg, a local castle. In front of her, a family of four — the children already well into their teens — were talking about how they wanted to see the torture chamber and how they hoped there were some old bones lying around somewhere in the basement. Having researched the castle long before travelling to Croatia to visit it personally, Gabrielle was sure there were some old bones lying around in the basement, but somewhat doubted they would be on the tour.

Finally, the group in front of her climbed into the bus and Gabrielle followed them, taking the last free seat. The bus was humming with conversations — there were about twenty people in it and all of them were on a holiday, as was Gabrielle to a degree. She certainly did enjoy the landscape which was very much not like Britain, yet it was a busman’s holiday for her at best. As the bus took the long, winding road up to the castle overlooking the area, she reminded herself of what she had read about the place beforehand.

A long time ago, in the middle of the middle ages, the castle had been held not by a local lord, as was common, but by a group of warrior monks — an order not unlike the Templars or other groups of that time. Yet, they had done what the Templars had been persecuted and killed for: worshipped the devil and performed unholy rites in their fortress. Not that they’d gotten away unscathed, but it had taken its time — certainly too much time in the eyes of the local peasantry who’d suffered most under their rule.

Isn’t it exciting? the woman in the seat in front of Gabrielle said to her friend in the window seat. A real castle! And one with a dark story to boot!

The friend nodded. Yes … and it’s been five hundred years to the day, or so the landlord told me earlier when warning me off going there today!

Well, these people here are so simple in their believes … no real education, a man from across the aisle put in. Those men surely did evil things, but they were punished for it and there’s no reason to worry now.

Gabrielle kept silent and glanced out of the window, looking past a young girl sitting next to her and sheaving through a travel guide of the area. She didn’t watch the landscape, though, but thought about her reason for visiting the castle. If it were just an interest in castles, she could have stayed in Britain, even at home in Cornwall. She was after something which legend put in the castle they were approaching: an old book filled with unholy secrets by the very monks people were so excited about. It might just be a legend, of course, but before she had made sure of that, she wasn’t going to leave the castle again.

The bus had reached the winding, steep road leading up to the castle. It was intended to be like that, of course — a narrow, winding road with a good, steep incline meant there was no rushing towards the castle gates and the inhabitants of the castle were very likely to spot any attackers way before those reached the gates. This coupled with the steep sides of the hill it was on made the castle secure — something every fortress should be. In better times, it had been the last refuge for people from the area when big battles happened. In modern times, it was merely a tourist attraction, filling the coffers of all the innkeepers and many of the shopkeepers in the area with ample money from foreign tourists lured in with the lurid history of the place.

Finally, they passed through the gate and the bus stopped in the wide outer courtyard — the castle was ‘new’ enough to have an outer and an inner courtyard. The tourists filed out of the bus, Gabrielle this time staying somewhere in the middle. She was rather sure that what she was looking for wouldn’t be in some kind of showcase, but demand careful searching. Which, in turn, would then demand of her to stay in the castle overnight. She had been a little regretful over having to leave her Gladstone bag in her room at the hotel, but it would have been suspicious to bring it along. Like every necromancer, Gabrielle was very careful about not appearing suspicious — which in many cases was the first step towards the end result of swinging from the gallows.

Welcome to the Matthiasburg, the guide greeted them, his English slightly accented and his voice reflected by the castle walls. Its first iteration was finished in 1402, a time at which the Teutonic Order was no longer operating in Jerusalem, but had shifted its work to Eastern Europe. The Matthiasburg was lost to the Turks rather early on, due to being in the southern part of Eastern Europe, and later on became a regular stronghold for the local rulers. This is not what makes it a special place, though, since this is a fate it shares with many other strongholds built by the various orders of warrior monks who came out of the crusades and needed a new place to work. It is what happened here in the sixteenth century which makes it such a special place.

The man took a deep breath before getting down to the meat of the story, the part his audience was waiting for. At that time, a sub-division of the Teutonic Order had taken the castle back … although that wouldn’t last … and was holding it again. The men sent here, however, were no brave knights with a virtuous heart. They were murderers, sadists, and rapists. They terrorized the countryside, taking people right from the fields to still their unholy lusts. Yet, due to being knights and to being the masters of the area, they could go about it without any punishment for a long time … until the daughter of a local noble fell into their hands, was raped and killed in a horrible manner. She, unlike the many, many peasant girls, had a father with power. He wrote to the king, demanding retribution for the death of his child. In his letter, he detailed all the atrocious deeds of the men he had heard about or witnessed himself, writing out a long list of crimes. The king, uncertain of his power over an order of monks, conferred with the church and the local bishop, upon seeking advice from Rome, agreed with him that those were no longer holy men and that they needed to be punished for their deeds.

At this point, the man walked towards the entrance to the castle proper and the group fell into step, following him.

He continued the story as he walked on. The king sent troops to the area while Rome sent inquisitors of their own. Together, they fought for entrance into the castle, although the fight was a hard one, costing many lives on their side. Once inside, they found the castle in a horrible state. Many of the servants, upon seeing the attacking army, had either taken their own lives or been killed by their masters so they couldn’t betray them, their corpses strewn all over the floors of the rooms within. Among them also were the dead and mutilated bodies of the latest kidnapping victims from the area … young men and women who had gone through horrible tortures prior to their deaths. All of this the inquisitors and the soldiers took in and it only made them more set on finding the ones responsible and bringing them to justice. There were about twenty actual warrior monks in the castle and they couldn’t keep the attackers at bay for long. All of them were caught alive and all of them were bound in iron and dragged away to be properly judged. The king himself came to judge them and the bishop accompanied him.

In the hallways, the guide’s voice was amplified by being thrown back from the hard stone walls, making it even more intense than in the courtyard. What they saw and learned was enough to make them nauseous and to make it clear that those men could not be allowed to live. The leader of the monks, however, claimed that no human weapon could smite him and his men, not after they’d made a deal with Satan himself. Their lives were to be eternal and there was nothing a sword or a rope could do to end them. The king took him up on this and made an example out of him, having him beheaded. As the sword met with the neck, though, it ran through without slicing the head off. A rope to hang him proved just as useless, it couldn’t tighten on his throat or break his neck, but would drop him to the floor … alive, if a little bruised.

At this, Gabrielle’s ears perked up a little. This was why she had come to the castle. Those monks had gained powers similar to those of a necromancer, but, by all she’d read, only to use on themselves, not on any other body. Their book, which included all of the knowledge they’d gained from Hell, was what she was looking for.

The king, the bishop, and the head inquisitor conferred about this, of course. The men had to be put to death and there had to be a way to do it. After many days of making plans and seeing them fail, they came up with a solution which was a suitable punishment as well as a way to kill those men. They decided to blind the monks and wall them in alive. Down in the crypt, a new room was prepared, just large enough to hold twenty men chained along the opposite wall. Once it was ready, the men were led into the outer courtyard and each of them was blinded with a red-hot iron. Their screams rang out under the loud cheers of the local peasantry. As they were dragged back into the castle, though, their leader called out that even this would not kill them and that they would return in five centuries to take revenge upon the descendants of all those present. The soldiers didn’t listen, but dragged him and the others away, down into the crypt, into to new room there. Side by side, all twenty men were chained up there, then the entrance was walled shut, keeping them in the dark, unable to move, unable to ever get out.

When was that? a man in the group called out.

From the documents we have, the guide answered, it was five hundred years ago … on this very day.

Excited chatter came up as the tourists turned to each other to speak about the news. Gabrielle kept silent, though. She was reasonably sure that the day was still a few weeks off, but the guides would, of course, capitalize on it for the full year, since it made things even more interesting for the tourists. Gabrielle mustered her surroundings. They’d reached the living quarters already, which would be as good a chance as any to slip away.

* * *

A few minutes later, as the group turned towards the basement with its exciting cell tract and torture chamber, Gabrielle stepped into a guard room by the stairs leading down and slipped behind the old wooden door there. With a group of twenty tourists, it was unlikely the guide would soon realize one of them was missing. She’d made sure to keep silent the whole time, so his attention would be on other members of the group, not on her.

Once the sounds of the steps down the stairs had died down, Gabrielle left the guard room again and went back through the living quarters. The book she was after wouldn’t be there — the rooms had been used by many inhabitants during the centuries and would have been renovated and refurnished several times. Something hidden there at the beginning of the sixteenth century would never have stayed hidden until today. No, there were other, more likely places.

She reached the entrance into the castle through which she’d come in earlier and looked down the two other hallways branching off from it. One led towards the inner courtyard where the stables would be. The other led towards the front of the castle, possibly to the area above the gate where an outlook would have been positioned at all times while the castle was still in use. The road coming up was the only viable way to reach the castle, after all. Where to go first?

She would never be able to cover the whole of the castle in the time the tourists were staying on their visit, so she needed to find a place to hide until they were well away and night had fallen. She patted her jacket pocket where a small light was stowed away. Searching the castle at night wasn’t something she was worried about — the castle was not inhabited and she wasn’t afraid of the dark.

For the time being, she was going to check the areas where the group had already been or wouldn’t get to for a long time yet. She walked off in the direction of the front gate, since the group had gone in the opposite direction and would surely linger in the basement with its macabre yet exciting rooms for quite a while. The way to the front gate was boring in comparison, but held several smaller corridors breaching out. Most simply led to different rooms — old barracks and rooms for the servants to sleep in, a few rooms which had probably seen use as workrooms while the castle had still been in use. One still sported an old furnace and had direct access to the outer courtyard — a smithy, perhaps?

There was a tower at the corner to the front of the castle. Gabrielle climbed it and soon realized it was not on the regular tour — everything was dusty and dirty and the rubbish stored there was very much stacked like one would stack old rubbish one was not going to throw away in an attic. Clearly, even castles were in need of an attic of sorts and this seemed to be this castle’s. If she remembered it right, the tower she was in was the only one — the castle didn’t have a traditional keep, yet it probably didn’t need one, taking up all available space on the top of the steep hill all by itself and thus being hard to bring down in a traditional siege with siege engines.

Level for level, she checked the tower carefully. By its build, she could tell it was part of the original design and would already have been there when those men had been walled in alive after they’d proven impossible to execute in a normal way. It would have been a place for them to hide the book and it didn’t look as if it had seen much use during the centuries since.

Yet, in the end she came up empty-handed. While all four levels of the tower were filled with rubbish, there was no place in it where the monks could have left their book. Books at that time would have been quite big, after all, and not that easy to hide. With a sigh, she went down again, determined to seek out the stables next — they, too might have provided a place to leave the book which wasn’t searched too thoroughly by the Inquisition. Gabrielle was, unfortunately, very familiar with the tenacity of the average inquisitor and knew any more or less regular hiding place would have been found by those fanatics.

Two

After having searched the area around the gatehouse, Gabrielle moved deeper into the castle again, going for the stables next, since those, too, might provide some hiding place for the book in question. Who, after all, would look for a book in the stables? Nobody, not even the Inquisition. She walked down the hallway leading in the opposite direction from the one she’d been down before and turned a corner without expecting anything — only to almost walk into a man she’d last seen in a northern Italian town, hunting for her and missing her by less than she had been comfortable with! They both stopped in their tracks and stared at each other.

My, my, my, he said bemusedly, "if this isn’t Signor Munson. Or am I wrong and it is Signor Russo who is far from his home town?"

Part of Gabrielle wanted to point out that, in fact, it wasn’t that far from the north of Italy to Croatia and she’d travelled a good deal further, coming down from Britain, but bit the comment back. I am Mr. Munson, yet you should be aware by now that I had nothing to do with the murders and the thefts. That, of course, was only partially correct — she’d not murdered anyone, but walked away with both stolen books in her bag, although she’d only stolen one from its previous owner, a public library.

Perhaps not, he admitted sourly. Yet, it is a strange coincidence, finding you here … is it not?

Gabrielle shrugged. I’m a man of means and I do like to travel.

You do, it seems. What brings you to this place? While he asked her that, the inquisitor pulled something out of his jacket.

Just seeing the— Gabrielle stopped speaking as he flung the content of a bottle into her face. Water dripped from her dark hair down into her eyes and she sighed, lifting one gloved hand to her head and brushing the locks back. What was that for?

He frowned. This is not what I expected to happen. Well… He flung the content of a second bottle at her.

Gabrielle looked down her front. This time he’d not only drenched her hair and face, but also parts of her white shirt and her black waistcoat. I am certainly wet now, she said then, lifting one eyebrow, but I fail to see what it is you are trying to accomplish this way.

She knew, of course, why he’d doused her in holy water twice — every regular necromancer would be screaming in agony as the water ate away at their skin like acid. Not too long ago, she’d had the dubitable pleasure of witnessing it first-hand, too. Since Gabrielle’s powers had not been given by Hell — at least not through a contract which had cost her soul —, she was in no danger from any kind of holy object or sacred ground.

This can’t be. You are a necromancer, Mr. Munson, you should be in agony after having been touched by holy water. These bottles have come from a charge blessed by his Holiness himself!

As far as Gabrielle knew, that didn’t play a role when it came to holy water. Whether blessed by the Pope himself or by a recently-ordained priest, holy water was always highly dangerous to a regular necromancer. I am not a necromancer … perish the thought! I am merely a man of means, a gentleman of leisure, who enjoys to travel and see the world. Which, of course, was a lie in more than one way, since Gabrielle was no gentleman, despite dressing like one, in addition to being a necromancer.

Instead of answering, he pulled another bottle out of his jacket and doused her in the content. Just how many of these bottles did he carry around all the time and what for?

Gabrielle glared at him. There’s a word for people who repeat the same action, but expect different results, you know. It’s not one to utter in polite society, either … madman!

I am not a madman! I know what I’m doing!

You’re ruining my clothes, is what you’re doing! I hope for your sake that this truly is holy water and not something which will stain my shirt, because it’s new and I wear it for the first time! She brushed her hair out of her eyes again, the water making the dark locks even more unmanageable than they were on a normal day.

He shook his head in shock. No, this is not possible at all. I am sure you are in league with the forces of darkness. Very well, you will accompany me back to Rome as soon as we have finished our mission here. Until then, I will have you locked away.

I protest! Gabrielle took a step back. First, you douse me in water simply because of your unfounded theories, now you even wish to lock me away! I am a British citizen and I insist on being left alone, unless you have proof of my deeds! Which, of course, he couldn’t have, as she didn’t do the things regular necromancers did. She was a theoretical necromancer, not a practical one, merely trying to find out how she had received her powers in the first place as a little child. I’m not even a Roman-Catholic! I’m a member of the Church of England! Not that they didn’t have their own inquisition, but it was independent from that of Rome.

Oh, I will have all the proof I need, once we have had a good conversation at the Vatican.

I will not accompany you. Gabrielle took another step back. You have no right to any of this.

She might have to break off the mission here, return to the group she’d come with, and leave with them. If the inquisitor was on a mission inside the castle, it would be unwise to look for the book on this very day. But then, she had time — the book had been hidden there for five centuries, it could wait for a few more weeks. She could pretend to leave the area, wait for the inquisitors to pack up, and join a tour again afterwards to continue the search.

I make my own laws.

Yes, I bet you do. She sneered at him. Not this time, though. I have merely been separated from my tourist group and I will now return to them.

No, you will not!

I definitely will!

He grabbed her wrist. You will come with me!

Unhand me immediately, sir, or I will not be responsible for what happens next! She had not survived for this long without learning a few things along the way. Freeing herself from his grip and giving him something to remember her by was quite within the range of her possibilities.

You are a necromancer and I shall bring you to justice!

I am not a necromancer! Your own test to prove it failed! Not because he’d been wrong, but still, it had failed and he couldn’t know the true reason.

I have no idea how you could protect yourself from the holy water, but it will not last forever. Sooner or later, the protection will end and you will show your true colours, the soulless creature your are!

As a matter of fact, he could pour holy water over her for eternity without getting a different result. I have done nothing to protect myself from holy water! What reason would I have, sir? I have attended many a mass in my life, and crossed myself with holy water as is the custom! I touch it quite often and it has never done anything to me!

Attended mass! He snorted. An unholy creature like you cannot enter a church without burning up much less bear to hear the holy words!

An unholy creature could not even enter a churchyard, in fact, nor could a regular necromancer. Gabrielle, however, could very well enter a church and attend mass whenever she wished to — she avoided churches because she didn’t believe in God’s mercy, not because she risked her health and her life going inside.

Very well, she said, glaring at him. If you think I cannot enter a church, why don’t you take me to the chapel here … it is still sacred ground, is it not? I shall go in there with you and cross myself with holy water right in the middle of it before reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Will you also touch the cross there?

If it serves to prove to you that I am not a necromancer, I certainly shall. Everything to make it clear that I am innocent of these horrid crimes you suspect me of.

I agree. He grabbed her arm instead of her wrist. Let’s go there.

Gabrielle sighed and allowed herself to be dragged along. If this helped with getting the inquisitor off her back, she was prepared to dig out her childhood education in Christian rituals.