Ascended

I hadn’t become a Bokor.

I was Touched.

It made sense that I could feel the zombies. As a Touched, I was connected to them. I also realized that it wasn’t me that the zombies were afraid of. There was only one Bokor in the pen, Val.

“Did it work?” Val sat up and rolled her sleeves up. Purple swirls danced up her arms. It was the first time that I’d seen marks like that. Every Master from the island had marks that were in straight lines. If I wasn’t so worried about my condition, then I would have been stunned by the elegance of her marks.

“Yeah, you’re good,” I shrugged off my leather shirt. There were no marks on my arms. No marks anywhere on my body. I was cursed.

“How does it work?” Val asked.

“What?” I snapped.

“The magic.” Val was too amazed to notice my tone, “How do I use magic?”

“I – ” My voice trailed off, “I don’t know.”

I had been around Masters for most of my life. I had watched them use magic, but never asked them how they did it. They just pointed and stuff happened. The thing that we needed most was the one thing that I didn’t know how to use.

“You don’t know?” Val exclaimed, “How do you not know?”

“I was taught how to fight zombies.” I fired back, “Magic doesn’t come until after you get the marks!”

“Sorry,” Val looked at me. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong?” I repeated, “What’s wrong is that I didn’t make the transition.”

Val took a step back, putting her hands against the wall, “You’re going to become a zombie?”

“No,” I groaned, “I didn’t get the marks, but it didn’t kill me either.” My shoulders sagged, “I’m Touched.”

“Touched?” Val’s eyes widened as she realized what I was, “You mean one of those things that make zombies?”

I didn’t know how to answer her question. It was true that most Touched made zombies, but not all of them did. There was at least one on the island that lived in solitude in the caves under the fort.

“I’m not going to make any zombies.” I looked at the walls of the pen. As much as I was disappointed about being Touched, I couldn’t dwell on it. If the guards realized that we weren’t dead, then I had no doubt that they’d put an arrow in us.

The walls of the pen were only ten feet high. It was too high to scale without help. I looked over at Val. It wouldn’t be very hard for the two of us to get over the wall if we worked together.

I walked over to the wall. It was course, but smooth enough that I couldn’t get a handhold.

“What are you doing?” Val asked from behind me.

I turned around, “We can climb over the wall here.”

There was a look of horror on her face. I started to assure her that I wasn’t going to be a danger to anyone once we got out.

She exclaimed, “We’re leaving?” She looked to her right, “What about the people.” There was worry in her voice, “We can’t let them start the sacrifices again.”

I started to tell her that we couldn’t help them. We didn’t have any weapons, not that they helped us much before. We could go to the island and tell the council what had happened, but I’d be imprisoned at best and Val would probably be executed. I looked at her swirling marks and had an idea. The people inside didn’t know that we couldn’t use magic. All we had to do was use a little flair.

I looked at the wall of the city. It would be just as easy to climb the city wall from the pen wall as it was to climb the pen wall. I scanned the pen. The decapitated zombies had stopped leaking blood into the dirt, but the pools hadn’t soaked in all the way. I slid next to the closest one and began tearing strips of its clothes off. I ignored the blood that I was splashing in. Now that we had transitioned, the zombie blood couldn’t infect us.

“What are you doing?” Val asked.

I didn’t have time to explain. If we were going to succeed, then we needed as much darkness as we could get.

“Tie these in knots,” I threw her a handful of scraps.

She caught them and started tying knots. “What are we making?”

I dropped one of the knots in the corpse.

“Fireballs.”