He resisted the obvious but profoundly embarrassing explanation, that he had ignored the elementary step of purging his workshop before practicing his art. In raising the recent dead, he might have evoked unwanted spirits from dust that had drifted here for centuries: even the dust, perhaps, of the legendary witch-queen Cunymphilia, said to have illuminated her revels with necromancers soaked in pitch.
At last he gave in to his fears and devoted a full night to leaping, stamping and shouting through the figures of the most potent exorcisms. A waning moon seemed to mock his powers, if not to oppose them, by squeezing fingers of shadow across the desert toward his tomb.
* * * *
“Sir, please! I’m grateful your servant rescued me, but he can let me go now. Please, tell him.”
“Gabble and foolery,” Mobrid grumbled, not lifting his eyes from the rent he was caulking in Aryana’s magnificent thigh. The dead could prattle interminably to no purpose; the pit-fighter, for instance, had been complaining that her sandals were strapped too tightly ever since he began surgery on her leg.
“Sir, if you please!”
An unfamiliar spark of animation and arrogance in that voice forced his eyes toward the door. A living woman struggled in the grip of a new servant called Squazzo, formerly a passionate amateur of archeology.
“It is she, I tell you!” Squazzo rasped. “This is the mummy of Queen Cunymphilia, found precisely where my calculations—”
“Let her go!” Mobrid commanded. When he was obeyed, the girl fell on her face.
He ran to her side and tore aside her rags, his breath catching at the beauty of the unlooked-for gift. Her emaciation and dehydration would pass in a few days, her burnt and lacerated skin would repair itself. Killed cleanly after she healed, she would need no patching at all to become the crown of his collection.
“What do you think you’re doing, you horrible old man? Stop that at once!” she croaked, batting his hands aside.
“Don’t worry, I’m a doctor.”
“A doctor should know that I need water far more than I need having my breasts squeezed, assuming the latter procedure is even necessary.”
“Aryana! Bring water.”
“My sandals are too tight.”
His visitor stared at the blond giantess for a moment before whispering, “She’s not wearing any.”
“Most of my patients—” Mobrid believed he had made his flock presentable by now, but he furtively scanned the room to make sure no especially horrific sights were displayed—“are sick in their souls.”
She sat up and tried to pull her tattered clothing together as she gave him and his protégés a closer scrutiny. “I can believe that,” she said. “But surely no one can cure lunatics!”
“I was driven from Fandragord for insisting that I can.” He composed his features in a look of martyrdom that he had perfected in his youth.
“It’s a shame you left before you saw my husband.” She snatched the cup from Aryana and drank greedily until Mobrid wrested it away. He shoved his minion aside before the girl could notice the maggots squirming in her fissured thigh.
“We don’t want you dying just yet,” he said with a twinkle as he dispensed the water a little at a time.
She slept, and she remained asleep for all that day and the following night while the necromancer tidied up his tomb. He finished his work on Aryana, who no longer complained of tight sandals when the maggots had been scraped out. The body of the Fomor he shrouded in a niche where one might expect to find a corpse.
With time on his hands, he made an exhaustive study of the treasure that had fallen into his lap, nor could he discover one detail to displease him. As she slept the sleep of youth and exhaustion, he denied himself only the most intrusive indecencies.
* * * *
“Did you know that this honey is fermenting?” Lady Paridolia asked. She sniffed at the bubbling crock before slathering some on a shingle of the unleavened bread baked by Mobrid’s servants. “That must be why it tastes so odd.”
“You began to tell me,” he said as he sidled in to cover the crock that held the severed head of Syssylys and ease her away from it, “why you came here.”
“That’s easy enough. My husband was a vile degenerate, if not actually mad.” She paused to survey the glassy-eyed servants. “Do you suppose, on top of being crazy, your patients could be drunk? From the honey?”
“What you observe are the effects of my therapeutic potions. Go on, please.”
“He told me he could play the husband only if he first watched me embrace another man, a guest in our home. I reasoned, I pleaded, I threatened to return to my mother. This was an empty threat, unhappily, since he had bought me from an impoverished branch of our glorious Tribe.”
“How much ... that is, how much of this could a noblewoman of your spirit endure?”
“Not much, let me tell you, especially since the man he was forcing on me, in contrast to himself, was neither old nor fat nor a slobbering deviant. But I would never perform with him for the delectation of Lord Phormiphex. I went to the man’s room without telling my husband. But he understood me better than I did myself. He had known just how to thrust me into another’s arms, and he was waiting. When he made his presence known, panting like a dog in a queue, my lover strangled him and fled to these very hills, or so everyone believes.”
“Surely with your late husband’s wealth, you could have hired an army to find him.”
Paridolia’s wry smile tore at his heart by recalling a girl he had loved in the dim days when he had fancied himself lovable. He hoped fervently that he could train her corpse to smile like that.
“I never saw my husband’s wealth. I was arrested as the instigator of his murder. I am free only because Lord Fandastard the Shy thought it would set a bad precedent to allow a relative of his, however humble, to be burnt at the stake. He stormed the prison to free me, and he believes I’ve gone to Frothirot.”
* * * *
Days passed. Paridolia healed, then bloomed. Golden now, her skin flaunted the texture of the orchid, her hair the drifting grace of the willow, her eyes the color of the lilac. She was a garden in the desert, where Mobrid found tranquility. She was a live thing among the dead, with whom he found companionship.
The dead, too, were charmed. She had the patience to listen, as Mobrid never did, to Aryana’s recital of the horrors she had inflicted on her opponents. When the fighter described her own death, Paridolia humored her. Among the rubbish the necromancer had flung together in his cart for a hasty departure, she found a looking-glass for Syssylys, who had been repaired while she slept, and she tried to persuade him that boredom and life are incompatible.
“But I’m dead, my dear,” he droned. “Boringly defunct.”
“Nonsense! You just need fresh air. Go outside and pick some lovely flowers, and then tell me you’re bored.”
“O Queen, live forever: where is your treasure?”
“Squazzo, you have to look. Would it be any fun if I just told you?”
Mobrid found himself actually listening to such chatter and smiling fondly into the book he pretended to read. She stirred the itch that served him for lust, but he felt none of his usual glee at the thought of quenching it on her cold corpse. For once it was the flame that obsessed him, not the exquisite molding of the candle that bore it.
He oiled his locks, curled his beard, arrayed himself in his finest robe, whereon the most potent stars and planets and symbols of necromantic import were embroidered in silver and prinked out with opals and amethysts. He arrogated Syssylys’s looking-glass, the better to practice smiles he imagined to be seductive. But with the predictability of a corpse’s conversation, Paridolia’s talk turned to her lover.
“His smile, Mobrid! Can you imagine? He turned to smile at me as if death were no more than a new cloak he was being fitted for.”
He had long since identified her lover, whom she never tired of describing in repulsive detail. His presence on a nearby shelf
had become an embarrassment to the necromancer; but it was the sort of embarrassment he was used to.
“How foolish!” he said, and she let him take her hand and caress it as if his touch meant nothing. “He smiled, did he? It proved he was a fool. Would you have loved him even more if he had crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out?” He made a funny face, something he hadn’t done in decades. He was rewarded by a giggle that emboldened him to writhe closer. “If the idiot can grin at death, he can laugh at separation from a girl so lovely. He’s run home to live in a tree and breed apes.”
“He’s near, I know it. He’s here, Mobrid, in these cliffs, I can feel him as clearly as—as your hand, which I would adjure you to remove at once!”
“Lady, I cannot, your beauty has maddened me, I—”
A cold voice told him that he was a greater fool than the Fomor had ever been, to force kisses on her that she so obviously loathed, but that voice roused him to a fury of denial. He fought his own chilly cynicism as vigorously as he fought her teeth and knees and elbows, and she could fling no worse accusations than he flung against himself: “You disgusting old pervert! You foul, horrible, stinking charnel-house worm!”
“O Queen, live forever!” Squazzo declaimed in hollow tones. “Behold your treasure!”
Paridolia screamed as the servant pulled the shrouded corpse from the niche and unrolled it on the floor, limbs flopping and head lolling. Preserved by necromantic arts, the large young man might have died yesterday.
Cursing and tearing at his newly curled beard, Mobrid let her evade his clutch to fall on the cadaver. At length he gathered his grand robe about him and stood looking down at the pair of them. It was odd, he thought, that the sight of her lavishing kisses on a corpse should so disgust him, when he himself had done that so often.
“One last look!” she cried. “One last kiss, one last touch, one last word—”
“And what would you give for them?”
“My life, you toad!” she choked through her sobs.
“Done.”
He slipped a lancet that had given him much good service from his sleeve and jammed it into the base of her skull. A few deft flicks of the wrist shredded her brain like a cabbage, but when the blade was withdrawn, only one pure drop of red glittered beneath her hair until he licked it away. Her ragged breathing and convulsive jerks lasted long enough to help him pretend he was raping the living woman.
Unaware that he had picked thorns and grasses and ill-smelling monk’s-rut, Syssylys returned from his mission and gazed at the three naked bodies on the floor. Only the least attractive one moved. The weeds trickled unnoticed from his fingers.
“Too boring,” he said.
* * * *
Now that his collection boasted a new pair of masterpieces, Mobrid regretted his exile. He acknowledged no peers whose opinion he valued, but even fawning idiots and censorious fools would have pleased him more than the vast silence of the desert and the indifference of the stars. Not as in Fandragord, where colorless pinpricks dotted the thief’s hood the city donned at night, stars in this clear air burned red and blue and green. They began just out of reach of his fingertips and ran beyond the writ of the gods. From one side to the other of that void, two wolves exchanged demoniac rants.
He turned from his disturbing door on the night and back to the orgy in the firelit tomb. Urging his creatures on, he switched one here and the other there, adding a fourth to this group and a fifth to that. He slapped chilly buttocks and squeezed breasts that felt like toadstools, where never a hint of sweat or other fluid greased the scraping and rustling of his orgiastic music.
He wallowed among them, probing and prodding, kissing and stroking, accepting the touch of whichever cold finger or dry tongue came close, but he was beyond true participation. The orgy had endured for two days and almost two nights now, and live flesh had its limits. Like the immortal Gallardiel, who defers the longed-for duet to the very end of his operas, he had contrived to keep Angobard and Paridolia apart. To his annoyance, they had exchanged looks, they had brushed fingers, but always he had paired them with others. They had always obeyed. Of course they had! How could they not?
He believed that the time had come, however, and the formation of this thought provoked a tingle he had thought impossible. He bent over her wriggling back and crooned in her ear, drawing the syllables out, “Par-i-do-li-aaah.”
“This filthy clavier needs tuning,” she muttered.
“It’s time,” he whispered, “for your tryst with Angobard.”
Obedience, respect, even concupiscence—his creatures always displayed these qualities, but alacrity? That was unheard of, and his surprise helped dump him on the floor when she sprang from her present involvement and flung herself on the Fomor.
Mobrid paid close attention to the prickle of the hairs on his neck. Perhaps having found each other, the two lost, mad wolves had ceased to howl. The dry wind whispered in the chinks of the walls, but it fell silent when he tuned his ears to it.
“Live forever, O Queen!” Squazzo groaned.
“Cut out your tongue!” Mobrid shrieked. “This is not her tomb, I did not accidentally raise her dust....”
The orgy had stopped. With the exception of Angobard and Paridolia, rocking in the most fervent copulation he had ever beheld in corpses, his flock stood about him in loose array.
“Are you planning treachery?”
“That would be too boring.”
“The poor fool thought she had me, once my ax slipped out of my bloody grasp, but when she strutted in for the final thrust, I killed her with one blow of my fist. It hammered her nose-bone into the middle of her brain; my knuckles were sore for a week.”
The dead hand that had done that deed now weighed down Mobrid’s shoulder.
Shivering, he shrugged it off and went to the side of the mutually absorbed couple. Tears—impossible!—streaked their sunken cheeks.
“Stop it,” he shouted. “Stop it!”
Unthinkably, he was ignored. He leaped over the lovers like a hurdler and sprinted beyond the royal sarcophagus to the rear of the tomb, where his books crammed shelves stained by melted knights and dissolved ladies. His books held all the answers, they had always held all the answers, but none of the volumes he wrenched down and tumbled aside, none of pages he ripped in his babbling haste, held an answer to the many-footed question that shuffled after him and blocked all exit.
“Oh, oh, oh,” the dead deceitful lovers sighed over his ransacking researches, and, “Ah, ah, ah.”
“ ... and then there was the time a pallid, puling, puking pretense of a man tried to force his way with me,” he heard Aryana say as her long monologue came again within earshot and she gripped his biceps as a millstone grips grain. “I took a handful between his legs—no, I’m a liar, it was no handful at all—and twisted it off the way a girl might twist a rosebud off a bush.”
“No!” Mobrid screamed, crouching to shield his crotch, but the warrior merely maintained her grip on his arm and propelled him toward his plasma.
“O Queen, live forever!” said Squazzo. “Your bath is drawn.”
“I commanded you to cut out your—”
Gripping Mobrid by the ankles, Squazzo upended him into the seething slime. He held his wildly kicking shanks aloft to keep him from raising his torso.
“There’s a bug in my soup,” Aryana said, ignoring the necromancer’s bone-deep bites to hold his head beneath the muck.
“Boring ... boring ... boring,” said Syssylys with each thrust of Mobrid’s own sword into his convulsing body.
* * * *
Denied the guidance of their mentor, the dead strayed into the wilds on dreamlike promptings from their former lives. Denizens of the Cephalune Hills were no longer set upon by corpses, but they continued to shun the tomb that Mobrid Sleith had usurped. Those who dared creep close enough descried a curiously domestic scene on its portico: a young man and woman who sat very still as they observed, day after day, the interpla
y of light and shadow across the desert.
It was generally believed that they were dead, although they persistently refused to decay. After several months, it was remarked that the man’s right hand had moved. Formerly holding the woman’s hand, it now rested on her belly; which, some insisted, was swelling.
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The Art of Tiphytsorn Glocque
It’s not easy to cause a stir in Sythiphore, where people go naked in the streets and make love in plain view, likely as not with close relatives, but Tiphytsorn Glocque did.
Gossip had flurried when his parents died horribly after gorging themselves on a dish sauced with the poisonous ovaries of blowfish. His father was a wealthy fish-merchant who had started in life with his own net, who knew more about fish than the squid he resembled in his inky secretiveness and grasping nature, if not in his personal odor, and for such an expert this was surely an unlikely end.
“Glocque! Glocque!” the empurpling merchant gurgled, clutching his throat with one hand and flapping the other as urgently as the fin of a speared shark, according to the most oft-repeated and scurrilous version. “Glocque!”
“Yes, yes, I’ll drink to that!” Tiphytsorn is purported to have cried with a maniacal laugh. “To our glorious family, you silly old pervert! Glocque, indeed, Glocque forever! Tiphytsorn Glocque!”
“And Phitithia,” his sister supposedly murmured as she scraped the sauce from her portion and dug in.
However virulent, the gossip then was brief. The real stir came later, when the young heir began to disport himself in public as an eccentric hobbyist—or, as he would have it, an artist.
Disdaining clothing, fashionable Sythiphorans satisfy their urge to make a splash, and even their convoluted notion of decency, with body-painting. They have themselves decorated by cosmeticians who vie savagely with one another to ride the crest of the latest fad. Grandiloquence comes easily to these rump-daubers, but Tiphytsorn outstripped their wildest flights when he took up their craft and called it Art.
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