Yet another rail station, yet more hassle. I have a trio of constructs following my with my luggage - giant spiders reshaped into travel-chests. Saves a lot of grief lugging things about, but the Thaos city constabulary is being awkward, trying to hit me with unlicensed necromancy. Just because I am a necromancer, they assume I’m some sort of power-crazed fool like those Ju-arg clowns - floating about in a desert ambushing caravans with their fabled touch that withers. Theres a victory of unreason over fact - if a Ju-args touch withers, how does he eat? More to the point, how does he take a piss? I came through the same academies as every other mage, I just saw a niche market.

The constable on the platform has halted my luggage, who are just sitting there now while he insists on seeing papers. He’s twice my age, if that, fat from the easy life in Thaos and probably as corrupt as he is stupid. Only someone truly cretinous would think that someone else would try something as stupid as march through a public terminal with illegal creatures. Even my ragged little familiar, my first real success at invigoration, is legal, albeit two half-cats stitched together - a ginger one and a black one - to make a whole one. Nothing in the city ordinances about having posession of dead creatures who are not a threat to public health, and apart from a rather strong odour of embalming fluid, the only threatening thing about Leo is the fact that he’s ever so slightly lop-sided, so it is possible that if he was somewhere high, he might slip and he is a rather large cat. Was a rather large cat. Two rather large cats. Needless to say it could hurt if he fell on you.
The contents of the chests on the other hand are in fact questionable - but they are under diplomatic protection, as am I, with the relevant seals and permits. I pull these out of my belt to hand to the constable. He flinches. How endearing - he thought I was going to strike him down with my awesome mastery of death.

Idiot.

He takes my passport, beaten steel covers etched with the seal of the Thaosian Consul General. He should have stopped there, he should have known that meant the Princes court had reviewed and accepted my papers. But no. He opened it, letting the document unfold to display my credentials, letters of authority and authorisation as a diplomatic envoy of the Inheritors. I pluck my papers from his fingers as his hand goes limp and he pales.

“Go..” his voice is a hoarse whisper and he struggles to control his gag reflex.

“Certainly.”

I fold up my papers without looking at them. Even just touching the horrid living script that old Suquol wrote conjures mental echoes of depth and darkness and the disturbing feeling that everything around me is a poorly painted stage set hiding crouched and ravenous horrors. Its a hint of how the Inheritors perceive reality - their world inhabits the same location as ours but has more dimensions. What I perceived as crouched horrors, they would recognise as their fellows. I am not a dimensionalist but from what I have gathered through my time among them an Inheritor ‘inhabits’ far more space than its physical form that we perceive and this space is not necessarily contiguous to our sense of things.

This comes across in their writing which is why I never, ever read what they write in their own tongue. Leading my luggage onwards I hear the constable retch behind me. At least he will be reasonably functional for his undemanding duty in a short time; the shock and skewing effect it has on me is usually sufficient to rob me of my talents for hours, if not days.

I guide my luggage onboard and chivvy them into one of the luggage racks at one end of the carriage. They clamber over one another to stack, then brace their legs to lock into place. I take a seat further down in the open carriage with a view of the racks. Most of my classmates would not deign to travel in such low class surrounds, but I find that details such as my skull-topped staff and my ragged familar tend to keep irritating people away. Those who do approach are usually worth talking to.

I fold my cloak and put it on the overhead rack before sitting down and pulling out out my slide-rule and the most precious sorcerous resource I posess. Not, as many would have, an elixir of eternal youth or pact with the hells or some staff of devastation. No, my most precious possession is my mimic-book, a small, light brass-trimmed quarto with about five dozen pages each of which holds the imprint of what ever was pressed against it - and right now I get to do what I have been putting off for my entire trip. If I have to invigorate some two dozen cadavers, whats the minimum energised ichor I will need? If monkshood is roughly two-and-a-half times a potent as hellebore, but I want to use hellebore because its far easier to aquire, what secondary impacts will that have?

The logistics of the undead. I bet they’re glad they have no brains and don’t have to bother with all this.

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