Chapter 32: Undead Potters

The night was bitterly cold, and the village at the base of the mountain was completely silent.

Up in the castle, Jack sat in his high-backed wooden chair, wrapped in his heavy cloak. He had locked his door hours ago, ensuring no one would not walk in on him.

He closed his eyes and let his mind sink down into the crypts beneath the castle.

He bypassed the three armored mages—Bones, Rusty, and Dusty—and reached for the dormant threads of the fifteen skeletons that made up his Night Shift. The moment he connected the links, the familiar pressure settled over his brain like a thick woolen blanket.

“Awake,” Jack commanded mentally.

Down in the dark, the fifteen skeletons rose from the dusty floor near the breached stone wall of the old coal mine, exactly where he had left them after they dug the ventilation shaft.

Jack directed them to march back through the main crypts and out of the castle through the lower cellar chute. They emerged into the freezing, pitch-black night. The winter wind was howling, which was perfect. The noise of the storm would mask the clattering of their bare bones as they walked down the icy mountain path toward the village.

When the squad arrived at the center of the abandoned village street, Jack looked through their empty eye sockets at the massive pile of freezing, rock-hard river clay the humans had abandoned earlier that afternoon.

Beside the clay were dozens of small, rectangular wooden boxes that Giles had nailed together to serve as brick molds.

“Alright,” Jack projected his thoughts to the group. “We need thousands of bricks by morning. Plunge your hands into the clay. Knead it until it is soft. Push the air bubbles out.”

The skeletons did not hesitate. They moved forward and shoved their bony hands directly into the freezing mud.

To a living human, the freezing clay felt like reaching into a bucket of crushed ice. It caused immediate, agonizing numbness and threatened severe frostbite within minutes. But skeletons had no blood to freeze and no nerves to feel pain. They possessed unyielding mechanical endurance.

They grabbed large chunks of the stiff clay and began to knead it.

Squish. Slap. Squish.

Jack quickly realized he had to be incredibly specific with his instructions. Skeletons had no common sense, and they certainly did not know their own strength.

Through the mental link, Jack watched one of the skeletons grab a massive handful of clay, shove it into a wooden mold, and press down with all its might.

CRACK.

The wooden mold instantly splintered into pieces under the crushing force of the undead worker.

“Stop,” Jack sighed mentally, rubbing his temples in his bedroom. “Do not use your full strength. Press the clay firmly into the corners of the box. Once the box is full, stop pressing. Scrape the top flat, and turn the wet brick out onto the ground to dry.”

He guided them through the process step-by-step until they found a perfect rhythm.

The skeletons moved like a flawless, tireless assembly line. Five of them stood around the main pile, aggressively kneading the freezing mud until it was smooth and workable. They tossed lumps of the prepared clay to the next group, who packed the mud into the wooden molds, scraped the excess off the top, and flipped the perfect, rectangular wet bricks out onto the snowy ground in long, neat rows.

It was a logistical masterpiece. The pile of clay steadily shrank, and the rows of wet bricks grew longer and longer.

Jack sat in his chair, maintaining the connection for hours. It was a mental marathon. He didn’t have to direct every single movement anymore, but he had to keep the overall command active. He slipped into a sort of waking trance, listening to the wind outside his window while his mind hovered over the village street.

Eventually, the deep blackness of the night began to fade. The sky over the mountains was turning a faint, pale grey. Dawn was approaching.

“Halt,” Jack commanded.

The skeletons instantly stopped their work, freezing in place like statues.

Jack stretched his stiff legs in his bedroom. The job was done. The massive pile of clay had been entirely transformed into thousands of perfectly shaped wet bricks, ready to be loaded into the updraft kiln the moment the human workers arrived.

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“Before you return to the crypts, let me inspect the work,” Jack thought.

He selected one of the skeletons standing near the rows of bricks and took direct control of its vision. He made the skeleton lean down close to the ground to examine the top layer of the wet clay.

Jack looked through the empty eye sockets, expecting to see smooth, flat surfaces.

Instead, his heart completely stopped.

He felt a massive surge of panic flood his chest. His eyes snapped wide open in his bedroom, and he gripped the arms of his chair tightly.

“Oh no,” Jack whispered in pure horror.

Skeletons did not have human flesh. They did not have flat, smooth palms or soft fingertips.