The ingredients necessary to return the dead to life were threefold: The particular, the universal, and the geophysical medium. The town of Khargrad functioned as this medium, for nowhere else in the world was the line between life and the hereafter thin enough to sustain prolonged contact. The ‘universal’ was likewise a reliable constant, being always an extraction of the departed flesh burned together with myrrh in a bowl formed of a yew burl. There was then only the matter of the particular.

  “Do you think his journal will suffice?” Ivan asked.

  “Perhaps if it contains a memorable entry,” Peter replied, rummaging through a desk.

  Scouring their father’s study in the dead of night, the two brothers resembled befuddled burglars, unsure of what they were taking. In every scribbled note and smoke-scented handkerchief lay the promise of an item dense enough with memory to entice their father’s spirit back to the world. A single tobacco pipe or worn slipper might suffice, but their necromantic training afforded them a special discrimination between when an item had the potential to entice the dead, and when it merely held sentimental value for the living.

  Ivan slapped the journal down on the desk. “Nothing in it. Business and social observations, that’s all.”

  Peter shut the drawer he was looking through and gingerly turned a brass key in the lock. Above them lay their mother’s room and she was sure to still be awake. They themselves had hardly slept since their father’s passing.

  “His reading chair. Check the folds,” Peter said, gesturing at the overstuffed chair with its garish geometric patterns favored by a culture several thousand miles from Khargrad. He could hear even now his father’s light-hearted argument with their mother who thought the chair garish and ugly:

  “It’s the essence of the thing, you see, not the outside. It’s ugly to be sure, but sit your rump on it. Sit! Sit! See now? With most chairs a man will ache after an hour or two. But my back and my behind feel right as rain even if I were to sit all day. A painting is measured by its prettiness, but a chair by how it serves the ass! The rest is unnecessary chaff."

  Though their mother continued to pout, their father’s belly-laugh drowned out any bad feelings lingering in the air and all seemed silly.

  “Ah! I might have found something!” Ivan said, as loud as he dared raise his whisper.

  The item was a piece of paper: Scribbled notes lost amongst the cushions. He uncrumpled it and found written shorthand references to one or another of their father’s training sessions with them. In the funny way only incidental things can be, Ivan felt a wave of tenderness attack his throat and chest and had to turn away from the scribblings to compose himself. His elder brother took the note from him.

  “We ought to subject it to a test,” Peter said. “Finding a good ritual component is harder when the person is close to you. We need to make sure our feelings are not getting in the way.”

  “Oh for the gods’ sakes, Peter, you can stop being a necromancer for a moment and be a man who’s lost his father!” Ivan said.

  Peter shushed him as his brother’s voice rose above a whisper and their house creaked with movement. The noise was as likely to be a rat in the walls as their mother getting out of bed, but it was no excuse for clumsiness. They listened for a minute, straining to hear the soft thumps of their mother’s feet down the upstairs hall. Even the wind outside hushed to hear if the brothers would be caught committing their family’s gravest sin. But there was nothing.

  When the danger passed, Peter looked at the note and found he knew precisely the training session it recalled. His father had been trying to impart on them the importance of mindset when chanting the incantation. He was been seated on a cushion at the head of the ritual chamber with Ivan and Peter kneeling in front of him, Peter around 12 at the time, Ivan, seven or eight. Their father’s seriousness had struck him then, his booming voice echoing out across the ritual chamber like a god to his faithful.

  “The smallest distraction will ruin the incantation the way spoiled meat ruins a stew,” Vladimir Smertsky said. “If you bring impurities with you, it will fail. There can be nothing else in your mind but the sacred words. No intentions but the calling of the dead.”

  This lecture had been directed at Peter, who had failed several times by then to call to the dead. His father had neither punished him nor chastised him, but it was clear in his tone and demeanor he wished for Peter to fix this mistake as soon as possible. At feasts, when Vladimir Smertsky was at his most gregarious, his eyes did not see and his ears did not hear his first born son. This treatment continued until Peter corrected the incantations.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  In the present, Ivan sighed. “If you must do the tests, do them, but I trust my instincts.”

  The two brothers shut the door to their father’s study with the tenderness of a mother escaping a slumbering newborn and crept out the hall, into the main hallway, the foyer, the porch, and from there to the garden shed where they had stockpiled the ritual supplies which might give their transgression away. From beneath a pile of half-rotted rope Peter produced a brass bowl to test the suitability of their calling material. He laid the scrap of paper in the basin along with a sprinkle of their father’s ashes and prepared to chant the incantation. Ivan took up position across from his brother and clasped the other side of the bowl. The two locked eyes with one another and opened their mouths and throats as slowly as their jittering nerves permitted in order to synchronize the incantation.

  “Our vessel is empty. It is without original nature. That which we abide in is temporary. When its constituents have run their course, they take on a new form. Equally empty. So it is with all things great and small. Nothing is born, nothing is dead. Nothing is gained and nothing is lost. Nothing is and nothing is not. Those who know this can see the threads along which lives run like beads and thus may they turn them in their hands,” they chanted.

  For the full ritual there were another five stanzas, but for a test of the ritual material this was enough. After a moment of pregnant silence, the dusty air of the garden shed filled with a low, brassy ring as though a ghostly hand were tracing a fingernail along the rim of the bowl. Peter took the bowl and set it down on a workbench and it ceased ringing.

  “I told you! I could feel it,” Ivan said, eyes fixed on the scrap of paper in the bowl.

  Suddenly, as the prospect of the full ritual drew closer, Peter felt nauseous. There was something dark and sinister about the business all of a sudden.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t do this after all,” he said.

  Ivan stabbed a finger at him. “I came back with you. That was our deal. You cannot back out now.”

  Peter swallowed. “I know what I said, but just as you trusted your gut about that scrap of paper, now I am trusting mine. Why do you think our ancestors banned performing our rituals on family members? Surely they must have had a good reason.”

  “Who knows why we have any of these rules!? If it were so dangerous, wouldn’t we have been told why?” Ivan said, looming over his elder brother. “I know not to run in front of a horse to avoid being trampled and I know not to put out an oil fire with water because it will spread. I know these things because people have told me why they are dangerous. But if our ancestors banned something, they should have told us why. Unless it isn’t so dangerous after all.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Peter said.

  “I am not being ridiculous!”

  “Suppose we were to ask one of the family patriarchs why?”

  “And hint to them what we’re up to? Don’t be daft! You know as well as I, our rules exist to mystify patrons, to sell them the story that our clan is the only one who ought to be trusted with necromancy. Or, to keep power in the hands of patriarchs so no one questions why they get all our earnings and we get a measly allowance!”

  “Patriarchs like our father?” Peter asked.

  His younger brother blushed. “I didn’t mean… You know what I meant! I’ve heard you say as much before.”

  “I know, but…” his mind was changing, was what Peter wanted to say. He was beginning to feel the wisdom of the prohibition, though he could not articulate it, and being unable, had no argument for his brother. “Is there nothing else I can offer you?”

  “No,” Ivan said.

  “And what if when we… when we speak with father… what if he says things we wished we hadn’t heard? Secrets better left forgotten?”

  “I am no coward. I am not afraid of what our father might have done. Suppose he had a mistress, why should I care? Whatever disappointment I might feel will be made up tenfold by speaking with him once again.”

  Peter could not help but think his brother resembled their patrons when warned of the dangers of speaking with the dead. Peter had been present at numerous rituals and was all too aware of the horrors which might come from a ghost’s candid mouth. Most patrons came to the Smertsky clan knowing the dangers, yet they forged ahead with an obsessive fervor, seeking a closure they were unlikely to receive. All too often the pain they sought to fix by speaking with the dead resided with the living, and most often within themselves. His brother ought to have known this, but to live that aching need was to have it seize your reasoning. Peter could feel its clutches upon himself even now.

  “I will do it,” Peter said, “but you must promise me one thing.”

  “Another promise?”

  “Yes, another. We should speak to father only about what we already know. Memories, stories, and tales. Promise me that we will not pry into anything we do not already know the answer for and I will utter not a word more in protest.”

  “I hadn’t wished for anything but! All I want is to hear the tales of old again. I want to hear him one last time tell us of how he met our mother and of the silly Dwarven ruins and all those old stories. That is all I want,” Ivan said.

  Seeing in his younger brother’s eyes that he was sincere, Peter scooped up the scrap of paper from the bowl, placed the ritual supplies back under the pile of rotten rope, and turned to the door. “We’ll begin at dusk tomorrow.”