As one they extended their arms, trailing billowing sleeves, and pointed at my body. By this point it was being shoveled into a wheelbarrow by two whistling ghouls. I wondered what the angels were getting at until I felt myself being pulled towards it.
“Er, no, that’s OK,” I said, displaying my hands. “I’m done with it, you can have it if you want—” a sudden roar of astral wind drowned my voice, and the pull strengthened, yanking me off my feet. I scrabbled wildly for a handhold, but the astral realm proved as insubstantial as it looked. The angels watched without movement or pity as I was yanked back into the land of the living.
For a few panicky hours I was trapped without sensation in a yawning blackness, until my vision suddenly sparked back on as Meryl carefully re-inserted one of my eyeballs. I immediately put it to good use by taking in my surroundings. In any sane doom fortress the room I was in would have been called a “stable.” In this one it was apparently filling the role of infirmary. If it had ever housed horses they were now either stolen, escaped, or eaten.
I was lying—to use the word creatively—on a wooden workbench with a number of vicious-looking medical instruments. There certainly seemed to be substantially less of me than I remembered. And what did remain was twisted into some very unpleasing shapes. I should have been thankful that I no longer felt pain, but I was in no mood for gratitude.
“Well, that was a silly billy thing to do, wasn’t it?” said Meryl, screwing in my other eye.
“Eye aah aah eye,” I replied.
“Hang on.” She clicked my lower jaw back into place. “There you go.”
“Why can’t I die?”
Her permanent smile extended a little. “You’re already dead.”
“Dead, but not dead enough.”
She giggled. “That’s awesome. I’m going to embroider that. You should write it down. If you wrote a book it’d be a good tagline for the back cover.”
She picked up one of my legs and gave it a sharp twist until the bone reset with an eye-watering crack. “Ow,” I said.
“That hurt?”
“No, but it looked like it should have done.”
“Isn’t he marvelous? Dreadgrave, I mean. Not like those lazy necromancers who just make zombies that fall apart the moment you trip them up. When he raises the dead, they STAY raised.”
I was dubious. I still had very clear memories of those angel things and they didn’t seem like Dreadgrave’s work—they were certainly overdramatic and pretentious, but not in the same way. No, there was definitely something fishy going on. I wasn’t in the mood to try and deduce anything further, though, because I had a hefty backlog of despair to offload.
“When I died, it made me realize something,” I monologued, as Meryl continued putting me back together like a putrescent jigsaw. “I might have been surrounded by stupid people and arrogant people and fat people, and the natural world might have seemed to be be out to get me a few times, too, with rains and hurricanes and big steep hills that you have to walk all the way up on your way home from school. But you don’t need to put up with any of that crap forever. You just die, and it all just shrinks away into nothing, and you wonder why any of it ever mattered. You’re finally at peace. But now you’re telling me that that’s been taken away from me, for keeps. How am I supposed to feel about that?”
“Give it a rest,” said a voice from somewhere off to the side. I swiveled my eyes—one of the few body parts I could currently move—as far as they could go and saw another severely mangled minion piled up on the next bench, and another on the bench after that. “We’re all having to deal, sonny.”
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“Jumped off the tower, didn’t I? Like everyone else.”
I had always considered myself a unique, special sort of person who didn’t cave in to things like fashion trends, and this was a bit galling. “Do a lot of people do that?”
“All the time,” said Meryl cheerfully. “Some people really have trouble accepting that they can’t die.” I heard a loud SHLOCK sound from somewhere to my rear, and sensation spread through my body like a diamond rain. “Welp, that’s your spine back in. See if you can sit up and I’ll test your reflexes.”
“Hey, how much longer is this going to take?” said one of the piles. “I was here before that guy—”
“Shut up!” snapped Meryl, flashing a vicious scowl in his direction before turning back to me and softening. “You’re all getting done in order of importance.”
“I’m Dreadgrave’s new personal assistant!” he protested.
“I mean, severity of injury.”
“My thighs are in my lungs!”
She ignored him. My nerves were back to their usual, slightly numb selves. I sat with my legs dangling over the side as she prepared a small chisel, then stroked one of my knees like a small child petting a beloved family dog.
I took a good look at Meryl for the first time. As I had earlier noted, she was a couple of years younger than me, or at least had been at the point of death. Her hair was surprisingly full and red for a corpse and was arranged into two cheerful pigtails pointing diagonally upwards from her skull. She was wearing the kind of revealing leather singlet popular with female warriors who probably didn’t get enough attention at childhood, but she was also wearing a plain brown dress underneath, which struck me as missing the point somewhat. As I took her in, she dug the chisel as hard as she could into the space just below my left kneecap.
“Have you seen a priest anywhere around here?” I asked, while we waited. “Tall and old, with a face like he’s been sucking vinegar off a stinging nettle?”
“Well, you could be describing quite a few people I know, there,” she said, watching my knee intently. Suddenly, my right foot kicked forward. “Yep, seems normal.”
“This one keeps yelling about how we’re all servants of the devil and how righteous he is.”
“Funny how the whole resurrection thing has that effect on priests, isn’t it?”
“So have you seen him?”
She pointed to the bench to my left. “He’s over there.”
His knees were hooked over his shoulders and half his ribcage was sticking out his back, but the face was unmistakable, as was the way his eyes were rolled back into his head as he tried to speak in tongues.
“Hey,” I said, getting his attention by knuckling his forehead. His eyes swiveled toward me, and the hatred coming off them was almost physical. “I’m kind of considering options right now and I wanted to ask you something.”
“Ask your question, demon of ignorance,” he gurgled manfully, through his discomfort.
“Yeah. I was just wondering how long it takes to be saved with your religion. ‘Cos I tried dying and it wouldn’t take, and I’m wondering if it’s anything to do with me being a heathen.”
He seemed surprised for a moment, then took on the triumphant look of an evangelist with an in. “The road to becoming a Seventh Day Advent Hedge Devolutionist is a difficult but rewarding one,” he said, with the labored air of the pulpit. “After the baptism of halibut oil, you must recite from memory the eight hundred Great Teachings of the Most Holy Brother Randolph the Incomprehensible. Only then, and after you have run the Sacred Hundred Leagues with the Stone Tablets of Blessed Hernia strapped to your back—”
A thought occurred to me. “Did you jump off the tower?” I interrupted.
“Twice now have I been plucked before my time,” he said, his eyes glistening with rapture. “And twice now have I been returned by the LORD, to continue my great work. His angels came to me as my soul did move to depart, eight in number and without face, to usher me back to this world.”
“Sou-nds fam–il–i-ar,” interjected the corpse that Meryl was now attending to. She was beating him back into shape with a lot less of the tenderness she had shown me.
My mood shriveled even further. From what I could interpret, the priest had received the exact same treatment as I in the dead world. Seventh Day
Advent Hedge Devolutionists, at least, were probably barking up the wrong tree. Still, the theory of the scheme was sound, and called for experimentation. “Is there a library in this fortress where I can look up religions?”
“Look,” said Meryl kindly. “Why don’t you stop trying to find ways to die and start finding ways to live?”
The line sounded very well-rehearsed. She’d probably used it on several patients today. “Pardon?”
“People keep coming through here after jumping off the tower, and they’re all too busy moaning about not being dead enough to really step back and see what a wonderful thing has happened to them. There are people walking around here with their legs replaced with broomsticks and tea towels instead of faces, and most of them have much better attitudes than you. I didn’t think a Borrigardian would be like that.” She paused and looked at me in a way she probably thought was authoritative, before going back to massaging a disembodied brain with the air of a baker kneading dough. “You’ve been brought back to life. Back to life! You’re free to experience all the things you missed first time around.”
“I’m dead!” I said, arms akimbo. “I’m a zombie! I stink and half my body doesn’t work!”
“So life’s become a challenge. Makes things more interesting.” She looked at me pityingly. “Look. Give it a chance, all right? Working for Dreadgrave is a cushy gig. Give it a few weeks, and I’m sure you’ll soon be getting up with a bright shining face every morning to meet the new day.”
Not for the first time, and definitely not for the last, I sincerely missed the ability to throw up. “Fine.”
“You’ll do that for me?”
“Sure, whatever.”
“Off you go, then. I’ll let you know if your nose turns up.”
FOUR
So, I became an undead minion in the fortress of Necromancer Lord Dreadgrave. And after three months of trying, I was no closer to a dignified death.
Religion certainly didn’t help. By the end of the second week, I was spending every lunch break converting myself to a new religion and every evening being scraped off the quad under the main tower. I became a practicing New Reformist, Lesser Somnambulist, Greater Pedant, Follower of Astromelon, Follower of Mongbotty, Follower of The Smaller Of Two Acorns, Soggoth, Bimbelle, Choppler, and Git. And I would have been a Seventh Day Advent Hedge Devolutionist if my bulk order of halibut oil had ever come in.
But no matter what freakish chants or arcane dance moves I displayed after death, none of it seemed to impress the angels—or whatever they were—who made no reaction besides batting me back into the living world like a cosmic ping-pong ball. After two weeks I’d grown disillusioned with the scheme. It didn’t seem like any Gods worth their salt would be fooled by such lightning-quick conversions, and I was sick of Meryl’s daily reminders to keep a sunny disposition and not stink out my dormitory with incense and rotting animal sacrifices.
I still didn’t quite get Meryl. She spent almost all her time vying for my attention. At first I’d been entertaining the possibility that she had a crush on me—as had several of our mutual acquaintances, to their considerable amusement—but when she wasn’t stitching me back together, all she ever wanted to do was talk about Borrigarde and how much I could remember about my family history. After being trapped in conversation for an hour trying to remember the names of all my family pigs, I took to avoiding her whenever we weren’t sharing what was laughably termed “guard duty.”
I had to admit, though, she had been right about one thing: working for Dreadgrave was a pretty cushy gig. “Guard duty” usually involved sitting around in a room or hallway chatting and playing board games with the other minions in the detail. There was no need to work out official patrols. There were so many undead scattered throughout the fortress that intruders tripped over several the moment they arrived—literally, if they arrived via the quad beneath the main tower.
Intruders, there were plenty of. I soon understood why Dreadgrave needed so many of us. It seemed like everyone in the adventuring industry was drawn to the fortress like moths to a flame, and with roughly the same results. Swordsmen, archers, mages, rogues—we found all sorts skulking around trying not to be seen, and none of them were a match for our numbers, especially since we couldn’t stay down. I also found that being a magic-infused undead creature gave my spells a boost, and my firebolts could now actually singe an enemy, rather than just give them a touch of sunburn.
But I did wonder at the sheer number of adventurers trying to raid the fortress. More traveling mercenaries and bounty hunters passed through our dungeons every week than I had ever seen in my entire pre-undead life. We must have put the equivalent of three medium-sized villages through the rotating knives, and there never seemed to be any less of them around.
“There are a lot of people out there who seek to know my secrets,” Dreadgrave had said, when I raised the issue one morning as he made his daily rounds. “Apparently they feel that sending these poor fools to their deaths would be much less trouble than, say, paying me lots of money.”
Dreadgrave had turned out to be an amazingly good employer. He had learned from the examples of too many necromancers and dark lords who had ruled their minions with whips and iron fists and who had ended up friendless and dismembered the moment the chips went down. He followed through on his promises. The light musical theatre events took place regularly as scheduled and were pretty enjoyable, even if the traveling theatre groups that were brought in tended to perform with a certain wild-eyed terror. And we were allowed to keep whatever we looted from invaded villages. This rarely amounted to more than a few armfuls of potatoes and the occasional sheep, but we didn’t hold it against him because he was just so considerate. One time I made an off-hand comment about how hard it was to hurl prisoners into the rat pit without getting nibbled, and the very next day there were nibble-proof overalls waiting in the rat pit antechamber. For three months, I had nothing to complain about, besides the fact that I existed at all.
On the morning of the day when things took an achingly severe turn for the worse, Meryl and I were on guard duty in Dreadgrave’s office. He was sitting behind his enormous desk (carved with the prerequisite grotesque skulls and demonic faces), working on the accounts for the last village raid. Meryl was at the door and I was at the window, leaning on a pikestaff.
“Riders approaching,” I said, watching clouds of dust rise from the horizon.
Dreadgrave glanced up. “Wearing?”
“Leather underpants, bandoliers—definitely adventurers,” I reported. As a general rule of thumb, the likelihood of someone being an adventurer was directly proportional to the amount of exposed flesh on their person. (This was with the exception of magic-users, in which case it was directly proportional to the width of their sleeves.)
Dreadgrave came over for a look. “Huh. Bigger group than normal.” He gave a little laugh—not his elaborate screaming cackle, but his understated evil schemey snicker for less formal occasions. “The fools will soon learn that no-one trifles with Lord Dreadgrave.” He banged the speaking tube that led up through the ceiling. “Archers fire at will.”
“Righty-ho,” came the tinny response.
We watched the first volley of flaming arrows rain down. One of the horses started having second thoughts about its commitment to the galloping project. “So anyway,” said Dreadgrave, “How’re things going, Jim? Any more problems with nibbling?”
Dreadgrave had the gift of the good manager in that he always remembered your name, no matter how generically horrific your appearance. “Oh yeah, that’s fine now. We’re still having a little trouble with the bodies, though.”
“Send in ground infantry,” he said into another tube, before turning to me again. “Oh?”
A mob of axe-wielding undead guards rushed out the front portcullis to meet the remaining unpunctured heroes. “The rats don’t seem to be nibbling the victims down fast enough,” I said. “They usually stop after a while, and then you’re stuck
with dirty skeletons cluttering up the bottom of the pit.”
“Mmm. Good for the intimidatory factor, though.” A severed hand flew up and bounced off the window pane with a wet splat.
“Maybe, but it’s getting pretty ridiculous. There’ll be more skeleton than rat soon.”
“Hm. Maybe we should cut down on the rat pit for a while.” There was only one adventurer still on his feet, and he was running around trying to fend off minions with one hand and pat out his burning beard with the other.
“I don’t think you need to do that—I mean, it’s a really effective torture-slash-execution device. I just thought, maybe we could order a couple of boat hooks and drag some of the bodies out, maybe stick them on spikes in the front garden for the crows to have a go at.”
He patted me on the shoulder. “Now that’s good thinking, Jim. The gardeners have some of those . . . oh, what do you call them? Curvy blade things on the end of poles for trimming leaves on trees? You could probably use those.”
By now, the last warrior was out of sight, and judging by the way the axes were falling and the wet sticky things were rising, it was probably safe to call the victory decisive. Dreadgrave rubbed his hands, and turned from the window. “Well, that was fun. Back to work.”
“Lord Dreadgrave!” came a yell from a speaking tube labelled “Tower Quad.”
“Yes, Frank?”
“There’s another of ’em, lord. Rogue. Snuck in while we were distracted, got into t’ quad. ’Sokay, though, Edward was jumping off tower and landed on ’im.”
“Is he alive?”
“’Course not.”
“I mean the rogue.”
“Oh. Yeah. Bit conked out. Shall we throw ’im int’ rat pit?”
Dreadgrave glanced at me. I shook my head.
“No . . . bring him up here. I haven’t had a good villain gloat in a while.”
We moved the desk out of the way so that Dreadgrave’s throne stood alone in the middle of the room, then unfurled a narrow blood red carpet leading from the door to his feet. Dreadgrave put on the carved skull helm he only wore for visitors, while Meryl and I donned faceless minion helmets and stood either side of him, pikestaffs in hand.
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