Mulgara Read online

  “As you wish to live,” I crawled on top of him, “cease your whimpering and answer me.” He nodded, emitting squeaks that sounded like a girl’s. “Where can I find magistrates in charge of probate? In charge of wills?”

  —

  Given the room’s vastness and the excrement indicating hidden routes from the sewers, they’d be gnawed bones by the time anyone found them. But my thoughts were elsewhere. The will reading was only a day old; I clutched the top half of a municipal parchment. The top was all I needed. The choices were an insult, almost arbitrary, as if the barrister had written the will the day of, just to see the crowd’s reaction.

  I found the barrister. In his bedchambers the lawman frantically swore that he’d merely read the will as it had been written, a conviction that remained unwavering up to the last dagger slash.

  —

  We Ordrids are all fond of the moon. I gazed upon it, the great beacon of my House. I thought I’d heard it call my name as I stumbled through all the graves. Blossoming on the vines that grew on elder headstones, Orphedilias opened to vector in its gentle light. Poets and ninnies like Belot would have stopped to ogle at their shape perhaps.

  I came to the graveyard’s center, the Maedraderium. I halted and stood before the new obelisk. Black and gold, jutting out of a cluster of pediment tombs, this robust monument to my great-uncle now towered. His Virulence had worked in startling mystery at times, not issuing an immediate and savage revenge on the House of Rogaire was chief among my confusions.

  But now this. Of all the places to be buried.

  The common man was at best a two-legged dog, and Maecidion had willed his obelisk in a graveyard hardly good enough for such a dog’s dead fleas. What unfathomable nonsense! He could have been exalted a mile high; future generations of Ordrids and wide-eyed gawkers would have been straining their necks. The prattling on about the Maedraderium being City Cemetery’s wealthy centerpiece meant little to me. Most still just called this island of stones, more a small city of venerated dead, “Laugher’s Lot.” If it had any meaning at all, I’d have to guess it derived from the morticians, mirthfully swelling the lot as their coffers filled.

  I held in my hand a bottle of that corn liquor, Spiritual Oppressor. I took another pull. “I am sorry, dearest Lord,” I said, “but I cannot see to it. See to it that I leave your wishes untouched.” And why shouldn’t I feel this way? The very man whose will I was rebelling against had once made such bold moves in his own time. Would he—could he—at least appreciate my ambitions, providing the impetus to be so bold? The reading now three days old, it troubled me no less.

  Swaying, emptied bottle in hand, I arched my back and stuck out my chest. Behind Maecidion’s obelisk, the moon, a vast orb hinting at tainted cheese, greeted me like a brother.

  I hadn’t come to talk to an obelisk; just a thoughtful gesture along the way. I tossed the Spiritual Oppressor and continued to a hamlet on the edge of the graves.

  —

  I crouched in the hedges like some sneak thief. But such humiliations were necessary. Toadly’s tower wasn’t so much a tower, more a farmer’s silo, complete with thatched rotting top, giving the whole thing the appearance of a giant’s refracting phallus that had caught Thina’s Poxy. It loomed so close to City Cemetery that I couldn’t tell if the neglected hedge, grown wild with weeds and brambers, belonged to Toadly or to Nilghorde.

  I’d sobered quick enough, perhaps expedited by having suffered bouts of rain.

  Shadows conjoined and shifted behind Toadly’s windows. With-in, long bouts of silence would rip open in an instant with bellows of ignoramus mirth. Of all the nights for such a home to play host to the living. But as I adjusted a troublesome root for the third time, Toadly’s door swung open and out poured the filth. Though the departing gaggle was of several classes, they struck me as acquainted scoundrels, tarrying under a lone lamplight before finally leaving.

  I froze. A pack of other men scrambled out from concealing hedges across from my own. The moment I began to rise I’d been put back down, reduced to peering out through leaves. The pack moved from one shadow to the next, then broke down Toadly’s door.

  Toadly had enemies like snakes have scales: I among them. It would have been amusing if a brood of brothers with their stone-cutting father at the helm had burst in to avenge the lamentable state of one of the many concubines that had made Toadly famous. But the pack’s look of intent villainy disallowed such fantasies. The thumps and sounds of breaking glass and feet pounding up and down stairwells were at the bidding of, I knew beyond a doubt, some other fiend who’d also attended the will reading.

  “If it is gone—” the rest I hissed into my hand. A sudden headache needled my skull: Someone had beat me to it. I’d sat around, pitying myself with a liquor bottle, and it may have just cost me everything. I felt a shame that my conscious would not fully allow. An image of brewing tricks and potions on the lowest branch in all Necrodom faded, and the part of my mind where words were found refit itself. The puma who slept through the deer migrating while dreaming of idle sheep. I gripped my dagger’s handle. Rain pooled on leaves and ran down my neck.

  After some while, the thugs reentered the street, and with their reappearance the vice-clamp around my head loosened its grip. On the ground, behind one of the larger men, was a mammoth bag, sowed tight and soaked with blood. I’d never quite experienced disappointment and elation at once, until just then.

  One of the oldest Ordrids ever to be penned to a scroll, Prince Basofial had enjoyed a parade of carnage, yet was denied the blood dipping of his own morning star. Seeing Toadly dead and stuffed into a sack, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is how the long-dead prince had felt when the droves of poor had killed the aristocracy over in Quinnari?

  I was again frozen. The grunting shadows were dragging Toadly right toward me.

  Grunts became words. Soon, shadows became scowls and leather gloves. Leading them, an over-muscled lug stowed a petite arm that had been severed at the elbow into his belt. All it would take is one alley-grade wizard among them to route me out, one of the lugs then pulling me up by my neck like a chicken. My crouching intensified to a curl, my dagger blade tight against my palm. If I were one of the Ordrids who prayed, I would have done so as legs burst open the hedge.

  The trail of boot prints and a sweep like a crocodile’s slide met the grass of City Cemetery. “Even split” and “not this rutterkin, ya pansy nob” became grunts once more, and soon, save for pats of rain, there was silence.

  “It’s been invaded by a pack of gorillas,” I spit, having entered Toadly’s trash heap. Knowing him, this parlor had always probably been a clogged artery of trinkets and spoiled meat. But whatever stage of slow explosion it had once been, it had burst like a zit. All was everywhere. Everything but the army of candles; hung about on sconces, stuck into cracks, and resting on frames of draperies that had somehow been spared.

  The last I had seen of the invaders, they were making their way toward the other side of the cemetery. In front of me now were the remnants of their night’s work: furniture upended, books torn to pieces, rather insignificant parts of the home mangled beyond repair. I would never be sure what a fire prodder, broken in three, could have ever hoped to contain.

  Still, this mangling may have only meant that they never found what they were looking for.

  I rushed up the first stairway. Near the top it was the swaying legs that I saw first, and behind them a large and well-lit room.

  Without the command of their master, the female slaves exhibited all the fuller their state of unlife. Dull, lidless eyes, nestled in sallow faces, alive but not alive, dead but not dead, stared at me as I summited the stairs.

  Passing between them was like walking through a forest where all the seeds had been planted in exact, nauseating little rows. Behind the last row of slaves was a giant bed. It was covered in blood; reflecting the halo of
candles that hung above. That he’d been killed right before one of his wretched orgies delighted me. From a new angle, I now saw that concubines closer to the bed had been sprayed by his blood. Their resemblance to a military formation suggested this was their position of maintenance when not bringing up a pot of cooked sea slugs or performing their sexual duties. Toadly’s reputation for incessantly leering at the female backside was all the more confirmed, as the swaying columns faced away from where he’d slept and self-fondled.

  Not a cauldron was left unturned. I shimmied up chimney shafts, settling for stretching a crawling arm up the ones that I couldn’t inspect further. I ended up mimicking the prior stampede up and down the stairs in a fever. I turned the place end over end—thrice over what the goons had done—but Maecidion’s lapis lazuli hand was gone.

  After I’d found a surviving vase to shatter to dust, my fury cooled. I gave the undead slut who’d had most her arm hacked off a prompt smack on her ass. The leathery cheek gave in all the way to the bone. I was soon staring up at the candles. Their shafts were hardly shorter than when I’d entered the tower. It hadn’t been long.

  Toadly’s killers had been thorough in their search but careless in their escape. I followed their boot prints and spilled keepsakes all the way through the heart of City Cemetery. I was led right between Maecidion’s obelisk and the bottle I’d tossed. Picking up the trinkets and smearing the mud and blood of heavy boot prints would keep the Ward out of this—in the rare chance an investigation into someone like Toadly’s disappearance caught the fancy of an aspiring shift-lead. That concern, however weak or strong, evaporated when I saw where the boot tracks had ended.

  —

  “Theee reeevenge I shall enact upon you,” Toadly moaned inside Belot’s parlor. His curses didn’t come so much from his mouth, but gurgled from the slash that ran across his throat. Blood and lung-froth spilled over and ran down to the table he was bound to.

  I stood outside Belot’s window, moon and graves to my back. It was a matter of convenience that Gormorster Toadly and Denoreyph Belot chose to live on opposing sides of City Cemetery. For those of us privy to such skirmishes, it created a sort of chess board between the two, rumored to have been encouraged by a committee of Scepters to maintain low property value in the surrounding areas. The demands of the dead had leveled entire city blocks to make way for new rows of headstones and cheap tombs. Yet these domiciles of the two corpse-diddlers remained: paragons of tradition.

  I scanned the room. A place for poor work, surely; Belot stood at the foot of the table. Behind Belot, tall as a man, were shelves heavied by standard potions and jars. On the other side of this table, Belot faced the material he used when playing necromancer. The stack of corpses appeared untampered, having died at ages from elder to infant, and now lay like firewood in different stages of decomposition. And above everything, attached to a ceiling hook, watching from an iron birdcage, sat my imp. Seemingly content to forever study the shelves; feet, arms, and nose poking out from the caging, the imp, I rejoiced, must have refused to imprint with Belot. Imprisoned until it assimilated to its new master, the little fiend was reduced to sit and watch.

  Strapped down at his wrists and his ankles, purple with fresh death, Toadly could only squirm and weep. “Youuuu,” slid off Toadly’s swollen tongue as his eyes rolled upward against his will.

  “Oh, silence now,” Belot said, hands on his hips. “If you absolutely refuse to tell me where it is, I can’t let you rest. You’re doing this to yourself, you know.”

  Delight and intrigue fought for a superior position within me. It was a delight to witness Toadly be tortured, and even more a delight to savor these moments right before Belot’s big surprise. I knew what he was up to, for Belot, if anything, was consistent. Though Toadly’s flesh was now dead, his mind again lived, one Belot had brought back, and now began to dominate.

  Where it is? It struck me like a lightning bolt. Abducting Toadly and executing this reanimation had to be for a good reason. It—Belot could only be referring to the hand statue! If Belot didn’t already have it, then where did Toadly have it hidden? I glared through the window as I redeveloped my plan. I could usurp minds too.

  Belot’s arms began to rise and Toadly howled in accordance. My luck had turned, for I couldn’t have asked for more perfect timing.

  Baying in protest, Toadly was feeling every thought he’d ever held suck toward his captor like warmed honey dripping from a wooden spoon. Belot, fueled by the frantic kicks and pleas for mercy through a slit throat, inched closer to putting Toadly in the state all necromancers feared most. For while what body one could occupy could change form, and the very boundaries of life and death could be hopped over like a naughty child hopping over a line deemed off-limits, the mind itself was the sole source of a being, to be preserved and unmolested at all cost. Belot’s arms raised, he held the separate powders for this spell in each hand. Upon their union, Toadly would divulge all, and go forever to his grave defiled.

  If I hadn’t switched out the powders the day of the reading.

  When Belot’s hands met, he lit up as if made of lamp oil. A detonation erupted. Belot became ghastly whistles in a burgeoning gown of flames. Toadly, eyes wide and elated, showed even the undead savored comeuppance.

  I kicked open the door. Toadly flopped his head toward the noise of my boot, just as soon recognizing me and returning to his panic. “That blue hand,” I said, looming over the gluttonous wretch, “is in as many paintings in my home as pulseless whores are in yours. And you thought you’d have it?!” The pleasure of knowing I’d suck up every drop of Toadly’s miserable mind was second only to the joy of hearing Belot’s screams.

  Perhaps I owed my late great-uncle an immediate and roaring “thank you”. When Belot was bequeathed what he had been, it was the final spur in my side to do the world a favor and rid it of him. That I would now own the imp, Toadly’s mind for an hour, and, with the latter executed correctly, the family heirloom too: I breathed in the smoke as fires died on the charred meat at my boot toe.

  How the zest for a meal is conquered by the desire to couple with a woman for the first time, and how retreating from a crumbling building would triumph over said coupling, my attention had been torn from Toadly to the burning of Belot. Now lamentably over, I was able to refocus.

  Toadly lay motionless.

  I shook his corpse as if trying to rouse a lazy wife from her bed. A sudden nervousness grew inside me, for this wasn’t supposed to happen. The preparatory segment of the incantation had been broken, yes, but experience and experimentation suggested that reanimation waned at a much slower rate. Toadly was now fully dead, the normal dead, and secondary and tertiary reanimations were exponentially more difficult.

  A sudden adjustment from the imp caused me to glance in the direction of not only its cage, but the bodies below it. Had that window above the corpse-stack always been ajar?

  How much time had actually elapsed since Belot had been a crawling bonfire? But this wasn’t the only pressing question. Toadly, though a low carcass in comparison to other practitioners that speckled our forbidden world, was not without his craft. There were tricks, hexes, and bedevilments accredited to his name. I was reduced to scratching my head and staring back at my imp.

  —

  After kicking Toadly one last time, I sat down and gave it all a laugh. It was all I could do. “Irion Ordrid the Poor Planner” may one day be chiseled into my own obelisk, but I would at least enjoy this next improvisation. Belot would live again.

  A few powders from his cabinet later, I’d poured the appropriate line between me and him. The invocations started, Belot’s smoldering heap began to twitch.

  The waiting was gruesome—not the visuals, but the agony of waiting for reanimation to fulfill. All people, bodies, and species were different, and in time-sensitive moments such as this, all I could do was pace about and kick random corpses. It was w
hen I looked up at my new imp once more that from Belot there burst the grimmest consecution of cries. No less the sounds of the shores of Hell, in this discord was concentrated a hatred in life ripened one thousand fold through death, and by treacherous events of the trip to and back from those shores.

  “What causes thee wakening of the Great Denoreyph Belot?” the grizzly skeleton wailed, rising to meatless feet.

  “You were always so lousy with components,” I said. Belot’s skull cocked back in a sign of recognition. “Laying them about the room, labeling them in that thick gaudy ink, like a man going blind.”

  “For thissss, you summon me? To reminisce about dead lyceum days, and the women who juiced my bed next to your celibate cot?”

  The skeleton, draped only in charred flesh, stepped closer, ribs stuck out and balled, bony fists cast back. In Belot’s eyeless sockets, I saw the immaterial glimmer.

  “Where is the blue hand?”

  “That’s no concern to me now,” Belot hissed. “Let us ask our dear friend—Oh, Gormorster. Oh, look—he’s dead, deader than I.”

  “If he still has it, I’ll get it from him. We both know it,” I said. “Professor Fryte did it with that stitched-up fuck she had locked up in her closet. We both were there. You remember. You may be,” my smirk broadened, “excuse me, used to be an overrate, labeling your childish jars and cheating on tests, but you know how usurpation works.”

  Belot blew out a laugh that paralleled his recent cry back to life in both its volume and hysteria. “That may be. But I always remembered to close my windows.” Everything in the parlor that could move stared at a lone open window. “My old freights looking a wee light there, Irion.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Belot erupted in cackles. “Toadly is goooone, Irion.” No, Toadly was laying on the table. Yet as I listened to Belot hiss, practices that I’d heard of but had never seen myself began to encroach my mind. Casting one’s essence into another form was a feat Toadly had been persecuted over and heralded for. It would have taken time to weave, but in my savoring of the fire, I had given him such a vital commodity. I looked once more at the stack of corpses below the open window. “Ah, yes, yesss. Good, Irion. Toadly is now,” I heard Belot saying. There had been a body there, one that was there no longer. It had been—Belot’s words then seeped into my ear, finishing my dreadful thought: “a babe.”