Tombs

by James Dorr

  I nodded. “But then … ?”

  “Such things pall in time, you know. Even the joy in acquiring more gold, though that, I must say, lasted me the longest. I have no heir—my women were bought ones and not worthy of me. And as for my many friends … ”

  “Yes,” I prompted.

  “As for my friends, they fell away from me. They perceived a gloominess falling upon me and feared they might catch it too—not even money could dissuade them then!—until, as the years passed, finally I was left only with these.”

  He gestured then toward the six who had accompanied him, ugly too in their ways, sitting motionless, as they had all this time, on the hard floor of my underground home, their backs to the river-wall. Remaining motionless even as he spoke.

  “Only these,” I said, “for all your gold coins. And yet I smell the stench of death about them.”

  Gombar only nodded.

  “You have been to Old City?” I asked.

  He nodded again. “It is not as you think. I do not traffic with ghouls, despoilers of the dead. Even one such as I has more respect. Rather I sought there a Necromancer.”

  “Some say it comes to the same thing,” I told him. “Ghouls. Necromancers. And some go to Old City to follow the unclean—to take up their customs. But if not that, why then?”

  Gombar gestured once again to the six that sat on my floor. “These,” he said, “were the last of my true friends. They were my bodyguards—as I have said, a man like me acquires enemies too, ones who would do him harm. These six gave their lives for me.”

  “And … ” I prompted.

  “And, just as some bring their dead here to the Tombs, so I took my dead to a Necromancer. To give them their lives back.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That explains part of the puzzle. That explains why, for instance, your ‘friends’ rarely move save that it be at your specific bidding. You see, the separation of life and death, that of the body and the spirit that gives it being, that wills its future, that makes it what it is, is at best unstable. It is a union of utmost delicacy, one out of the reach of necromancy that may, at most, only restore animation, as has been done here. That may, for a time, protect the flesh from deterioration—but cannot restore souls.”

  “But you can,” Gombar said. He did not ask it.

  “For these?” I said, nodding myself toward the six that sat there.

  He shook his head. “My friends’ needs are simple. And, in their way, I believe they are happy. I would not disturb that.”

  “The soul,” I said, “is complicated. As life itself is. It has components: That which holds the body together as well as that which animates it—these your Necromancers can deal with. But also that which gives it its will, that which gives it its distinctive psyche—its individuality, if you like—and that which defines its ultimate life-wish—z’étoile, its ‘star.’ These all are parts of it, and all must be in perfect balance lest the whole fly apart.”

  I paused then and looked at him, long and hard, judging the seriousness of his manner. “That is what death does,” I finally continued. “It sunders this balance, sometimes at the slightest of disturbances. And so, to restore it … ”

  Gombar nodded. “But you can restore it … ”

  I paused once more and gestured toward the wall behind us, lined with shelves on which were heaped scrolls upon scrolls upon more scrolls, some in cases, some loose and half-unwound. “The knowledge is there,” I said.

  “As is the money now to do it,” Gombar said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But for what reason? What really has brought you here? What do you, who with your wealth have had everything you might desire already, seek here in the Tombs?”

  “I seek love,” he answered.

  • • •

  We in the Tombs act as our own masters, doing one thing, then trying another, until we finally settle on that which we wish the most for our lives to be bound with. We help one another, of course, as needed—keeping the ghouls from breaching our city-walls when they attempt to steal from us new corpses, extending the walls themselves as those we guard increase, pitching in to help with the gravedigging when a more well-filled than usual corpse train crosses the causeway to us from New City—but mostly we end up pursuing our own projects.

  And so it was that Gombar’s quest became mine, selecting an individual corpse for its oneness of psyche, its z’étoile, its will, its animation, its wholeness of body to be rejoined to it. And so for Gombar to love. And so, as he hoped, for it to love him as well.

  But first: The choosing.

  I am, as I have said, a curator. A collector of the physical artifacts of the most ancient of those that sleep with us. And so it was that I had life-records, portraits, personal treasures—their jewelry, their clothing, their brushes and mirrors, sometimes their cosmetics, the things left behind them—sometimes even death-masks of those whose relations had had such things made to help in their remembrance. These things we pored through.

  We narrowed our search down. Gombar insisted we choose one who had been rich, so as to aid, when it came about, their mutuality of understanding. It also must be young, that is, to have been young when it met its life’s end, and also attractive. It must, in fact, be of surpassing beauty of face and body, even as Gombar’s own face was so hideous, though, as we searched on, it did take on a softening once again, however fleeting it might have seemed to be, much as it had that time before when he smiled.

  And also the corpse that we chose must be female—I questioned him closely on that at the start, knowing from what he had said of his life that, when he was young, he had tried not just women—but he was adamant, holding to this one above all the others of his criteria. Saving, perhaps, the first one about former wealth.

  And, at last, we found one: A corpse that was worthy, or so Gombar said to me. This was a Princess, as legend had it, a daughter of the Emperor of the hill, carefully mummified when she had died scarcely into her late-teens, and placed beneath an obelisk within her father’s tomb’s shadow. She had not been married, or so we found out when we searched her life’s record. She had been beautiful, graceful, perfect—even voluptuous—her portrait told us, with long, raven hair, with skin white as swans’ feathers, with tapered fingers and delicate toes and long, sinuous legs and arms, strong thighs and buttocks. With breasts soft as cushions and—this from her death mask—with eyes deep as fire pits and finely arched cheekbones. Everything he was not, except, of course, for wealth.

  These things we saw from her mummy also when we disinterred it. In short, she was perfect. I came in time to call her, myself, the Beautiful Corpse—and also, in time, to think of her almost as if she were my daughter. And as for Gombar, she was everything he wished. Except, of course, for the one thing that he and I would not be able to know until later: That is, if, again alive, she would love him as well.

  For make no mistake, Gombar already loved her.

  • • •

  Then came the construction of apparatus: The preparation. The reading of scrolls, long into the days when nights were finished. The digging of new chambers off my own wall-tomb, to house both the things we built—tables and water tanks, soon to be filled with that drawn from the river, purifiers and filtering mazes for what we would add to it, great-beaked retorts for the distilling of oils and unguents for restoring flesh to youth-like suppleness—as well as larger rooms meant to be his and the Beautiful Corpse’s new bridal dwelling, should all be successful.

  For I had warned him then, as I would also many times after, that life and death and the boundary between them were, in the most fortunate of circumstances, still at most uncertain. Even for us, the already living. And that it would take time.

  Time and money.

  “Time I have,” he said. It had been in the earliest of spring that he had first come to the Tombs, and already—even with the help of his six servants, as well as others who were friends of my own—the heat of the outside had risen to summer. Even by now it was nearin
g early fall.

  “And, as for money … ”

  And money he had too, the six baskets of it, four of which by that time still remained to us, though they, too, were dwindling. While other contraptions we bought in the New City and had floated to us on huge, open barges across the river, these to be built outside. Towers and sheet-like tents—rain collectors—and twisted iron poles to capture the lightning. Funnels to take the wind such as wraiths sometimes will ride on their wanderings, drawing it to us. Piping it downward. Vast, web-like tapestries, limned by the finest artists to be found both in the New City and in the Tombs as well, to show the soul we sought once more its body, to entice it nearer.

  To show it its pleasures: In life past, as well, if it willed, in that which could come. Life—and love, also.

  And bottles to hold it in, to keep the soul in all its components, if it should will so, awaiting its new vessel. That which it had once had. That which it once enjoyed. That which it might again.

  And two more baskets were nearly depleted when the ghouls first came.

  • • •

  It had been a day of gathering clouds, so those who had watched from their shelters told us. A day of first autumn, presaging night storms with burning rain. With winds that could whip like steel. A night that even ghouls, or so we had thought at first, even with skins as hard as horn that protected them somewhat from such kinds of weather would still not prefer to venture out into.

  As for us, word travels in the Tombs quickly. Many knew of what we were attempting—and that fact, perhaps, was the chief one that saved us. But outside the Tombs’ walls our secrets do not pass, unless, of course, they include apparatus that rises above those walls. Pinnacled lightning rods. Guy-wired web-funnels extending, by now, even to the Bridge Gate’s towers. Things that ghouls might see.

  And things the Necromancers among the ghouls might interpret.

  But this was a night when ghouls should not be out, nor would we have normally had watchers posted between the guard lookouts, save that my neighbors—and, now, Gombar’s also—knew the delicacy of what we were doing. And so there were a few who, when they had time, had offered to help keep an eye on our constructs, especially on nights like this when we could not afford to have them blown down.

  But ghouls are weather-wise too, more than we sometimes. And, as they must have guessed, the storm we feared did not come until morning.

  While, meanwhile, they—a small party of ghouls, but armed with baskets and nets for corpse-snatching—skulked over the wall between the Bridge and the River Gates where my quarters lay, and, had it not been for a single shout, from a friend above who had spotted the shadow of one of the last of them almost too late, they would have been on us completely unheralded.

  Gombar and I were in the Corpse’s crypt, that which Gombar’s bearers had carved from the stone beside mine so the river’s nearness would keep it cool too even during the only now just-passed summer, when we heard the shout.

  “Ghouls!”

  I echoed it then—“Ghouls!” Not knowing yet where they were, nor that it was we, or rather the one we kept, that they intended to be their target. Hearing, dimly, the cry echoed outside as more took up warning.

  But then they were on us. I scarcely had time to snatch up a ratpick—a long, iron-tined implement, heavy and sharp-edged, used to rake vermin off the freshly-dead—to push them away with. To slash and hack at them while, through weight of numbers, they, in their turn, tried to force us aside. To enter the room where the Beautiful Corpse lay.

  “No!” I shouted, while Gombar fought too, more silently, by my side. “This one is not yours. Look if you can—her corpse is too old for you!”

  “Liar!” they shouted back. “Vampire!” they shouted. “Those who have watched tell us you seek to renew her.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. I slashed again, taking one’s legs from under it, while Gombar, with a pole, skewered another. “But even if this is so, we do it not for you. She will be of the Tombs—not the Old City!”

  “Vampires,” one said again, taking the cry up. “All of you, vampires. Thieves and blasphemers!” But this one, too, was cut down, and this time from behind. Gombar’s bodyguards, his servants, his bearers—his friends—having heard the shouting, had come to our rescue. With bare hands they snatched and grasped, taking the ghouls in twos and threes before they could even turn back to protect themselves, thrusting them upward, back out to the surface where others had gathered. Where others, including the newly-roused Gate guards, took over the slaughter.

  Thus, almost as soon as it started, the ghouls’ attack had ended. Gombar and I looked first to his bodyguards’ wounds, the few bites and scratches that some had suffered, then turned again to the Beautiful Corpse we had been attending. Already its skin had become somewhat moistened from our long ministrations to it thus far, firm and yet yielding, no longer dry and baked hard as it had been through the passing centuries. Already its limbs had become lithe and supple, not yet as they had in life, but at least no longer completely corpse-like. Its hair had again begun to retake a sheen, gleaming in lamplight as we inspected it. Its other parts as well, as we inspected them: Its breasts and shoulders. The curve of its gentle jaw. Its hips and inner thighs, already lush in their burgeoning softness. The mound between them ….

  “It is almost ready,” I said in a whisper. “And with a storm approaching, a storm with winds of the sort young souls delight in—the souls of those that died young—we must take it quickly!”

  Gombar nodded to two of his servants who lifted it carefully, carrying it to the larger chamber we had prepared for it. Carefully, gently, they lowered it into a trough of liquid, while I gestured to a bench that was set at the trough’s side.

  “Now,” I said, gesturing, after the servants left. “Now you must lie there. You must lie still, no matter what happens”—I brought out a basin, and then a sharp knife—“while I take blood from you.”

  Gombar turned white. “Wait,” he said. “What do you mean, blood? What did the ghouls say—that you are a vampire? That all in the Tombs are?”

  I shook my head. “There are some in your New City that may have named us that, because we take their corpses to us—and yet we receive them already drained of their blood. But as for your question, no, we are no vampires, though in the Old City there are those also with their superstitions, who feared us for that once, until, through their own doing, they became creatures worse themselves. But as for blood, yes, I must take some from you”—I gestured to the glass-sided trough where the Beautiful Corpse lay—“to add to the fluid there. It will not be much, five or six drops only, but it is needed to remind the soul we seek of what it once possessed. A sort of binding … ”

  My voice was drowned out by a great crash of thunder, booming down from outside!

  Gombar whispered: “The storm is upon us!”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is why we must hurry!” I took up my knife—already, above, we could hear the wind whistling, the apparatus above us shaking.

  “Wait,” he said again. “As you have told me, you are not vampires. I will believe you, despite what the ghouls say. That there are no vampires, that these are just concepts of Necromancers, of superstition, as you have said also. But what then of her?” He gestured to the tank, its liquid surface already frothing as if there were currents swirling within it—currents not just from the rain and wind outside. “If it is with my blood, what will she be then?”

  I shrugged. “I do not know. Perhaps nothing. Everything. All that you hope for or, perhaps, a monster. It is something we must learn together, Gombar. By doing and watching.”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice still frightened. “By doing and watching.”

  He thrust his arm toward me and, pricking his skin, I drew six drops of blood from it. Carefully, I added these to the liquid.

  And then all was quiet until, again, there were crashes of thunder, multiple crashes, all around us, as if they were within the chamber with us. The jars
by the trough’s side—the glass collecting jars—glowed pink and amber, the colors together swirling, becoming green, then back to yellow. The colors flowed and ebbed, while outside the wind screamed, keened as if with a voice that was all but human. Sobbed and shrieked. While inside now the trough glowed too.

  “Perhaps a monster,” Gombar whispered.

  “Or all that you wish,” I said, while, outside, the storm suddenly slackened. The wind and the thunder, as quickly as they had come, now had left us, echoing only, faintly if we could hear it at all, somewhere in the direction of the New City.

  And, inside, the glow ceased.

  Taking a lantern, I carried it to the trough, peering through the murky liquid down to the Beautiful Corpse’s nostrils. And there, with Gombar peering beside me, we could discern, ever so feebly, a stream of bubbles.

  • • •

  That was the first sign: The coming of will again to the flesh to be, once again, living. The first animation. The coming of psyche, although that took longer. The coming back of z’étoile.

  And what came back with it was no monster.

  But, as I say, that took yet more months. All was not over. As soon as we saw the Beautiful Corpse attempting to breathe underneath the water, we lifted her from her tank. Just the two of us, Gombar and I, not even trusting Gombar’s servants.

  We carried her to the bridal chamber, the suite of rock-lined rooms we had prepared for her. The chambers that would become hers and Gombar’s together if all the rest were as successful.

  For now, though, we laid her there on what would be her bed, as if she were a woman who had over-partied at some New City fest or banquet, for, like such a woman, she needed to sleep long. To gain back the strength she had when she was living, as well as—and most important of all—to let the parts of the soul now within her knit themselves together.