The Necrosopher’s Apprentice

by Lilith Hope Milam

  Tymuld’s rejoinder swelled behind her lips. She felt confined and stifled. Then all her frustration and anger dropped like a windless sail. All her excuses for hating Gansel at once seemed empty, she felt hollow. Gansel had been a friend.

  “It’s true,” Earlok granted her, “almost every human we’ve met has been needlessly cruel. But not every creature is borne from the same vein. Sometimes you find truesilver amongst the schist.”

  “But we can’t afford for the Assembly to come back around here,” she defended, “They hurt people! Are you listening Pa?”

  But it seemed that Earlok was ignoring her, lost in thought. He had gone behind the bar and pulled down his favorite stein from a peg on the wall. It was the last remaining piece from a set that he managed to salvage when Tymuld and he fled from Krichshear Halls those many years ago when she was still a baby.

  The handle and body were hewn from a giant piece of green obsidian with all the sharp edges flaked off the lip. She never liked handling the thing, it always felt like it was going to slice into her hands. But her father’s leathery skin had no difficulty in raising it to his lips.

  He poured himself a stout ale and drank in silence, turned inward and taciturn.

  She walked up to him from the other side of the bartop and looked him in the eye. He met her fiery gaze and she probed, “What are you thinking of doing Pa?”

  He drained his glass dry and slammed it on the counter. She could see sunlight melting through the dark green glass. “Ain’t nothing sitting right about any of this! First Buchak came with some sort of mysterious business and ain’t been seen since he went off. Then his nephew came searching for him and now he’s been taken as well!”

  “What are you gonna do? Break him out?” she scoffed at the idea.

  He shook his head. “Ain’t gonna happen. Pure suicide. No love, we’re gonna do what we should’ve done years ago.”

  “What do you mean Pa?” she asked, uncertain.

  “We’re leaving Myskatol,” he disclosed. “It’s too dangerous here for us to stay any longer. You, me, and the Bug, we’re taking the first boat out and making our way to Saagardell, then on to Opdonderje. Where we should have been years ago.”

  22

  We love to create beautiful things out of pain,” his captor said while he applied the tip of the hot poker over and over to his wrecked body, now scarred with blackened skin scribed in series of concentric rings. The smell of burnt fur and flesh clung to him, his nostrils, his mind, the Vicar had begun with his legs, pressing the glowing metal rod onto the tops of his feet and bringing a dotted line around his ankles.

  Every time a ring was completed, the Vicar would ask, “Please tell us, why are you here?”

  The first few times, Asman was able to resist saying anything, partly from being overwhelmed by the sheer pain. He blacked out when the rings were drawn around his knees.

  He woke up. The cell was still torch-lit. His feet throbbed with pain. He felt like a boar hung-out in the wind to age before butchering. A sharp acrid smell cut through the moldering stench of the room, the smell of his own charred flesh.

  Vicar Fingerhut entered the chamber, looking refreshed and happy. Asman noticed for the first time that the priest was different from when they met back in Kazan. The simple cut of the Assembly robes he wore disguised the fact that the young priest had lost weight. He seemed taller as well.

  Asman shifted his weight and his skin screamed and cracked. The tendons and muscles in his legs and feet felt strained and it hurt to stand on them.

  “You’re awake?” Fingerhut asked Asman with a wide smile. “Wonderful! Now we can continue listening to your story!”

  The jailer was fanning the coals in the brazier. They glowed a dark orange and the Vicar pulled the poker back out. He eyed the bandages on Asman’s feet.

  “We hope the experience isn’t too dreadful for your weak subhuman spirit,” he said with a petulant huff. “We do so want you to survive this process!”

  Asman looked at him in surprise. Wasn’t he to be killed? Would he be leaving? In what state? Fingerhut saw the look on his face.

  “Oh? You thought you’d never see your filthy home again?” The Vicar clucked and shook his head. “Then who would get to see our creation?”

  He drove the tip of the poker into Asman’s calf. The fur burned away first, disappearing in a puff of smoke and adding to the room’s foul odors. In an instant, the metal settled into Asman’s flesh, pain shot through him like lightning. His breath seized in his chest as Fingerhut held the poker to his calf. “One, two, three, four, five, six…”

  He drew ten circles on the left calf and then repeated another ten on the right. The poker pulled away and stars swam across Asman’s vision as he gasped for air. His head thudded against the column as he lost consciousness.

  The Vicar sighed, bored. He motioned to the jailer who walked up to the bugbear and struck him across the chest with a long cane. Asman’s head jerked up and he inhaled a sharp breath as his eye popped back open. “You’ve got remember to breathe or you're going to pass out again!”

  Panting, Asman looked at his torturer, “Wh-wh-what’s wrong with that?” he asked in a slurred voice. He was so exhausted.

  Fear and anger had surged through his body so many times that he no longer had the strength to remain awake, let alone feel anything beyond his livid nerves. Only pain, shifting, coursing, striking, registered in his mind.

  “Oh, the problem with you passing out,” said Fingerhut, “is that this is a cooperative process! We’re working together to make something special here!”

  Asman looked at him, a surfeited expression hung on his face. What was it with humans? Why were they so eager to fill their lives with meaningless shit, so eager to find satisfaction in the suffering of others?

  “You see,” explained the Vicar, “this is as much a journey for you as a creative expression for us!”

  He sunk the poker deep into the coals once more and fanned them until they glowed.

  “Every time you fail to remain conscious and blackout, we have to start over to bring you back to nearing the glorious crescendo you could finally experience!”

  He slid out the poker and held it trembling over Asman’s thigh “But it’s alright, the jailer and the healer are on hand to keep you conscious and functional enough so that you will be able to return to your foul swamps.” He paused and thought for a second. “Well, someday.”

  “But, until then, I want to share something I learned from a wise, old being recently. Something valuable you should learn.”

  Asman gazed at the Vicar with a bleary eye. “What. What could you possibly teach me that’s of any worth?”

  Fingerhut sunk the glowing poker into Asman’s flesh. The acrid smell of burning hair and tissue underscored his words. “There is no greater experience of the divine than a confrontation with the inevitable.”

  Asman gritted his teeth, holding back the screams.

  The human slid the red hot point of agony across Asman’s inner thigh. “All religious expression is an attempt to deny the inevitable.”

  Asman let out a long scream. His lungs emptied and the poker was pulled away.

  Crying and gasping, he asked between breaths, “The inevitable?”

  Fingerhut nodded. “Indeed! Birth and love, loss and pain, aging and death.”

  He stuck the poker back into the fire and turned it in circles as it reheated. “When confronted with these unavoidable commonalities, experience is brought to its rawest state.”

  He pulled the poker back out and returned to Asman. “The state in which your individual personality is but a puff of smoke.”

  He stuck the fresh, glowing tip into the bugbear’s armpit and listened to his prisoner scream another cleansing scream. “Swayed by the wind and then dissipated by the chaos.”

  As the hours dragged on, the cell grew hot from the coals and the exertion. Sweat poured down Asman’s body, salty and stinging as it mixed with the fluids oozi
ng from his welted skin. Every so often, the Vicar would stop to allow either the healer to tend to the burns or the jailer to cane his flesh to keep him conscious.

  For what seemed days, he was branded, then whipped on the unburnt skin, then branded, and finally tended to by the human girl.

  When Fingerhut was finally satiated, he placed the poker back on the coals and mopped his brow, announcing that they’d take a break for the night.

  The jailer corrected the Vicar and told him that it was early in the morning, causing Fingerhut to break out in unhinged laughter. “It is amazing how one loses track of time when creating something!”

  He looked Asman over once more and nodded. “This is turning out wonderfully!” He turned to the healer and the jailer and said, “Now out with you both! We need to let our guest rest before we finish this afternoon!” and he strode to the door. At the last moment, he paused and turned to regard Asman. “Oh yes! One last thing!” He pointed at Asman’s chains. “Take him down and let him rest on the floor for the day.”

  No longer shackled to the stone column, Asman learned that this was no mercy given to him by the Vicar. It was yet another layer of torment he had to endure. The weight of his body pressed his burnt and screaming flesh into the filthy, rough stones of the chamber’s floor, creating new layers of misery. He got up as soon as he was alone. For hours, he switched positions. First kneeling, then standing on quivering legs, then doubled over, supporting his weight on both hands and feet, then falling back to his knees. He had to lay down, all his willpower had faded. There was nothing left in him to keep him upright.

  He lowered himself to his side. Fire traveled up and down his skin. Tears formed and he could feel their hot stinging pool in his empty eye socket then run down his face. His head felt as swollen like a tick, the fluids coursing through his body welled up under the flesh of his face and neck.

  He wanted to die, but he didn’t have the strength to get up and hang himself by the neck with the chains on the ceiling. He was completely trapped, with no way to escape and nowhere to go to even if he did. His heart began pounding harder and harder. He ached to be unconscious, but the fire in his skin prevented even that. He began to hyperventilate and his mind raced in circles.

  “I want to die!” he screamed.

  He turned his head towards the door. “Do you hear me?! I WANT TO DIE!”

  He panted hard, trying to catch his breath.

  “Kill me!”

  He breathed in deep.

  “Kill me!”

  Again.

  “Please! Kill me!”

  He pleaded over and over until his voice broke. Even then his screams rasped through his shattered throat.

  At last, he had spent every last ounce of his power and passed out from the exertion.

  The door opened moments or hours later. The jailer entered, followed by the young guard. Reaching up, he drew down a hook from the ceiling and latched the end to the manacles on Asman’s wrists. Walking over to the crank on the wall, he began to raise the insensible bugbear off the floor until he was high enough Asman could stand once he regained consciousness.

  The jailer was furious that his prisoner hadn’t stopped screaming until well after lunch. He couldn’t stand their squealing while he ate.

  A man’s gotta stay healthy, this is vigorous work it is, he thought.

  He walked over to Asman and lifted his head by the forelocks. “But fuckers like you are always ruining my lunch.” He lifted his cane and swiped it a few times across Asman’s face to see if he’d respond.

  Asman obliged and his left eye cracked open.

  “You in there you monster?”

  SLASH!

  He thrashed the cane one last time across Asman’s chest, “Time to wakey-wakey!”

  Asman’s eye opened wide and he surged towards the jailer. Even the fitful rest from passing out on the floor had afforded him the chance to recover more strength than the spitting little human could ever possess. Hauling himself up on the chain, he took the jailer’s neck between his large legs and began to squeeze. The guard at the door yelled something and ran behind Asman. He began clubbing the bugbear in the back of the head until his grip weakened and the jailer was able to wrest himself free. He skittered away from the bugbear, clutching his throat and gasping.

  Asman hung dazed from the chains again as the Vicar came back in. “Excellent! I’m so glad you are ready for our next session! But you need to be a little more alert than this.”

  The guard ran out of the room and returned with a length of rope. After he bound Asman’s feet together, the Vicar nodded, picked up the jailer’s cane, and swung it hard into the back of his captive’s thighs. Once, twice, thrice. He smiled as he saw the blacked skin break open and weep.

  Asman gave a stifled yell. Awake again, he looked around at his tormentors.

  Fingerhut threw the cane at the jailer’s feet and, smiling, said, “Now we’re all here and we can finish this.”

  Walking around Asman, he regarded his work. “We’ve been thinking about how to finish this off in the most genuine way possible.” He returned to face Asman.

  “You may not know this, being a savage, but there’s nothing worse than art that is hastily finished with no consideration for the final strokes.” He raised a finger as if instructing a student. “Hasty work looks terrible and fails to communicate the message to the intended audience!”

  Asman, still a little groggy from the blows to his head grunted, “You keep talking like you’re going to let me leave this place.”

  The Vicar laughed. “Perhaps we’ve been a little too rough on you! Of course, you get to leave! You’re going to be a walking testament! We’ll allow you to leave you in a perfected state so that our enemies and subordinates know our might and power. But first, let’s get you into a more secure position, wouldn’t want you blurring our art now.”

  After a few minutes of maneuvering, Asman was again fixed to the stone column. But this time he was on his knees, his arms open and wrapped around the cylinder. A chain was doubled around his waist and latched by both ends to the floor. He couldn’t stand.

  Fingerhut clapped his hands together. “Alright! Enough! To work!”

  The jailer got to his feet and coughed. He and the guard ran out of the room. The guard brought the brazier and poker back in, but the jailer was carrying a large wrought iron cage that was open on the bottom.

  “There it is!” Fingerhut exclaimed. “Oh! It’s even better than we imagined!” He took the cage from the guard, but he wasn’t expecting its weight. Almost dropping it, he hefted it up and turned it around awkwardly.

  Lifting it up to Asman, he presented it as if an offering. “We’ve been puzzling as to how to finish you when we left this morning, then we remembered that our Primus had some special tools that would be perfect for the occasion!”

  He pointed to the interior of the cage “The clamps here are used to slowly crush the heads of humans, but not to worry! Your skull is obviously far too thick for that to be your end!”

  He handed it back to the guard and with the help of the jailer, the lowered it over Asman’s head. He struggled as they pushed it down to rest on his shoulders and ran leather straps under his arms and back up to buckles on the cage. Asman thrashed back and forth as much as his chains allowed, but the cage remained in place.

  “The amazing thing about this device is that no matter how much you struggle, you only succeed in further immobilizing your head!” said the Vicar.

  The jailer, satisfied with the cage’s placement, began to tighten the screws. First a little on one side and then on the other; all the while Asman struggled against the device. The jailer laughed the entire time, enjoying himself with every adjustment. In the end, Asman’s head was secured awkwardly looking all the way to his right.

  No longer able to turn his head, panic began to set in Asman’s mind as his questions returned. What now? What is he going to do to ‘finish’ this? What does he mean I’m gonna leave as a ‘
perfect testament?’

  His eye darted back and forth within the cage. He couldn’t see the Vicar. He heard the jailer stoking the coals back up.

  ‘He isn’t,’ thought Asman.

  He heard the Vicar stir the poker in the coals and the acrid smell of the charcoal fire filled his nose.

  ‘No, he wouldn’t, why would he, it makes no sense,’ he denied to himself.

  He heard the Vicar’s boots shuffle under the Assembly robes as he approached from behind.

  “You can’t!” yelled Asman.

  The Vicar came into view looking as happy as a child, “This will be so beautiful!”

  “No!” bellowed Asman.

  Fingerhut steadied the cage in one hand and lined up the poker with one of the holes that provided access to Asman’s face.

  Asman saw the glowing red tip of the poker enter the cage and poise itself in front of his eye.

  “No! No! No! Nooo-”

  The Vicar plunged the brand into Asman’s eye.

  Asman screamed as the inside of his head exploded with pain. The smell of his eye bubbling away on the glowing metal made him vomit onto the bars of the cage and down onto his shoulder, Fingerhut clucked his tongue, stepping back from the spew.

  “Let’s make this clean…” said the Vicar to himself and he rotated the tip of the poker in a slow orbit, burning away the remnants of Asman’s eye.

  Asman kept screaming and screaming. The stars continued to explode in his head.

  When? When? When? When? Stop! his mind rattled in a litany of despair.

  The Vicar pulled the poker from the cage and Asman was surprised that the stars in his head stopped firing off. The pain was there, but distant and his screaming faded with it. But as the rod left his socket, he could still see something.

  A vague shadow of the room around him swirled with purple mists outlining the walls, the jailer, but not the Vicar. No, the Vicar’s form stood clear and stark in front of him. But instead of his human body holding the poker, a mass of pulsating violet and magenta worms twisted and squirmed in front of him under the black robes of the Assembly.