by Cory Herndon
Green glowposts, gnarled and twisted into shapes that mimicked familiar old Devkarin runes, pulsed with life—or, more accurately, unlife—and competed with her torch to light the path. When she cleared the end of the culvert and stepped into the thousand-year-old prison, a small forest of the luminescent plants lining the walls did the same.
The Matka Scrolls that held the accumulated generational wisdom of the Golgari priestly caste held many tales and legends of Svogthir, but Savra’s shadowy friend had filled in much that had been forgotten by the guild in the millennium since the old guildmaster’s “destruction.” Svogthir was a parun, an original signatory to the Guildpact. Svogthir had signed third, after Razia of the Boros Legion and Azor the Judge, giving his allies on the side of chaos an excuse to follow his lead. It wasn’t an exaggeration, the scrolls read, to say that if not for the Golgari and Svogthir’s simple act of wisdom, there would be no guilds today.
Before the Guildpact peace, Svogthir was the greatest necromancer of his time, and his time stretched on for millennia. Most reanimated dead were, at best, intelligent enough for simple labor, simple desires, and a brutal and brutally simple society. But Svogthir had massed armies of the dead gifted with canny intelligence that were more than equal to the living enemies of the age. He’d discovered the secret of keeping his own consciousness—his ghost—within his body at the time of his death, something even the Devkarin necromancers had never learned. The god-zombie granted himself necromantic immortality and near indestructibility.
Svogthir held power as Golgari guildmaster for nine millennia, and all that time he continued to improve upon his own body with a never-ending series of self-enhancements. At the time of his fall from power, the god-zombie was said to have the right arm of a giant gorilla, a species he had personally helped make extinct; the left claw of a massive scorpion; legs made of pythons woven with oak vines; and the torso of a giant cyclops. By the end, his head was the only original part left, and many past matka had opined through the scrolls that this was certainly a major factor in the degenerative madness that eventually allowed the gorgons to seize control.
By the late 8000s, Svogthir had become a virtual prisoner of his own power, growing more paranoid and reclusive with each passing year. At the dawn of the Guildpact’s nine thousandth year, his trusted lieutenants—the gorgon Sisters—turned on him. And according to every existing record, including the scrolls, the Sisters had destroyed him.
That, her beloved said, was the lie. The Sisters had not been able to completely destroy Svogthir. He was immune to their powers of petrifaction, even if he was mad. Unable to petrify the guildmaster, they’d shattered every bone in his body and left him deep beneath their lair. And there, her ally said, the god-zombie still sat atop a calcified throne. Dangerously mad, to be sure, but very useful to the right Devkarin priestess with the right guide.
Svogthir’s presence washed over her before she actually saw him. His broken form blended into the slimy walls of his prison, long since grown into a once-grand seat made of vine and bone. It was impossible to tell where the god-zombie ended and the grimy, calcified throne began.
“Well, well. Savra, isn’t it?” Svogthir said. His voice was an agonized rasp that wheezed through a torn, rotten neck, and despite his decomposing bulk the shattered god-zombie sounded for all the world like a withered, asthmatic old man. “Is my church in the paws of whelps?”
“Guildmaster,” Savra said and dropped to one knee, head bowed. “I—Your fate has been hidden from your … followers.”
“Please,” said the shriveled white head, the only part of Svogthir that seemed capable of any movement at all. It rolled to one side and flashed what she supposed passed for a smile. “Call me Svogthir. You have come to release me from this prison. This I know. Don’t deny it. I think you’ve earned the privilege of speaking my name, yes?”
Savra cleared her throat and lifted one foot to let a scuttling, crablike thing pass by on its way to join its brethren. A nest of the creatures had taken up residence in the god-zombie’s left knee. She wondered if the crab-things hunted the family of bats she saw suspended in the ancient necromancer’s chest cavity or vice versa.
Svogthir was a virtual impossibility. Nothing in this condition should have been able to think, let alone joke. Yet there he was, nesting vermin and all. The oldest conscious—if not technically living—thing on the plane.
“Guildmaster Svogthir,” Savra said as respectfully as she could manage, “I bid you greeting. You must—”
“Oh, I must nothing except sit here. I don’t suppose the Sisters are dead yet?”
“No, not yet,” Savra said. “Help me, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Yes, I’m sure you will, my lovely,” Svogthir wheezed. “Forgive me, it’s been so long since someone got this far. Not used to talking so much. Should have known the best candidate would show up at the thousand-year mark. There’s a cycle to these things.”
“As you say,” Savra said.
“So I imagine you didn’t get here without help. Mind if I take a look?”
“What?” Savra said, but before she could raise an objection she felt an oily presence slither unbidden into her mind. Svogthir oozed painfully through her thoughts, pouring around or boring through the obstacles she threw up against the intrusion. A few seconds later, the presence was gone, and she clutched both hands to her temples. Her knees buckled, but she managed to remain standing until the throbbing pain receded.
“Yes, that hurt, didn’t it?” Svogthir said. “I really enjoyed that, I don’t mind telling you. You’re a complex elf, considering you’ve only seen a couple of centuries. Easy on the compound eyes, too, I might add. I’d thank you, but I don’t think you’re looking for gratitude.”
“No,” Savra said, teeth clenched. “So did you find what you were looking for?”
“Oh, yes, yes indeed,” the god-zombie cackled. “I suspected as much. Yes, this is most interesting. All right. I’ll help you.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Oh, you shouldn’t, not entirely,” the god-zombie replied. “That would be a silly mistake, my girl. Svogthir is not to be trusted in most things. But you can trust that I do not seek to control this guild any longer. Nine millennia above and one more in this dull solitude have made me really sick of this place. If you want it, you can have it. I merely want my revenge.”
“Is that so?” Savra said.
“You know this is true, or … your ‘ally’ would not have sent you to me.”
“You know about—?”
“I wasn’t looking for recipes, priestess,” Svogthir said. “I will help you on two conditions.”
“And what are those?”
“First, you simply must do something about this pile of wreckage they made of my poor body. I certainly can’t kill the Sisters for you in this condition, can I?”
“All right,” Savra said. “And the second?”
“When the Sisters are defeated, destroy me. You have this power, Matka, by right of your title and the strength of your necromancy. I only ask that you use it on me when the Sisters are defeated.”
“That’s insane,” Savra said. “Why should I believe you won’t turn on me?”
“Would you rather sit in a cell for a thousand years of boredom or spend one hour tearing your most hated enemy to pieces with your bare hands?” the god-zombie rumbled. “They’ve forgotten me up there. Let them remember me one more time.”
“You’re remembered,” Savra said. “You’re a god to our people.”
“Exactly. A god. Not something real. I seek to become your most holy relic. Your staff,” he explained. “When I am gone, you will add my head or whatever remains of it to the totems you carry. This you must swear to do right now or no deal.”
“You know, Guildmaster,” Savra said, “I think those legends I heard about you being completely insane may have been a little off the mark.”
“No, I’m quite insane,” Svogthir replied.
“Trust me, no one thinks through his plans as thoroughly as a crazy wizard, especially one who is so completely, utterly bored. Do we have a deal, Matka Savra?”
“Deal,” Savra said.
* * * * *
Less than an hour later, Savra had assembled what she needed to rebuild the god-zombie.
“May I ask you a question?” Savra said as she carefully measured a gram of green powder and sprinkled it over the arcane sigils she’d traced on the stone with equal care in charcoal.
“Of course,” Svogthir wheezed.
“You’re the greatest necromancer this plane has ever seen,” she said. “Why have you let yourself degenerate like this? Why do you need me to revive you? I always heard that this …” She waved a hand at his ruined, chimera body. It had been engulfed in a tight wrap of snake-vines she’d summoned from ancient seed casings embedded in the god-zombie’s flesh. The vines would keep him together while his necrotic tissue grew back, preventing him from moving and interrupting any important part of the process. When she was finished attaching Svogthir’s four new limbs, the vines would fill with blood and necrosap, sink into his new body, and form a secondary musculature. For a time, the god-zombie’s strength would be greater even than it had been at his peak, in the old days.
For a time. Despite his noble, cynical words, only a fool trusted the god-zombie. To the Golgari, the mythical thing Svogthir had become was both devil and savior and his name was invoked as both a curse and a blessing.
“You don’t understand,” Svogthir replied, “and I am not surprised. It is my fault, really. I have spent so many long hours working through the scenarios that might see me free of this dull place that I sometimes forget what I have and have not told you.”
“The crabs ate part of your brain. That couldn’t have helped.”
“I don’t begrudge my only true companions these last thousand years a snack now and then,” Svogthir said. “Yet that is irrelevant. Any power I had to reclaim the dead—even myself—is long gone.”
“How is that possible?” Savra asked and raised a hand before Svogthir could answer. She whispered a soft, steady chant for exactly forty-four seconds, then dropped her hand when the sigils, one by one, started to glow. There was one for each new leg and arm and a large one in the center for Svogthir himself. “Go ahead.”
“The Sisters don’t use power the way you or I do,” Svogthir continued. “They don’t understand the arcane mechanics or even really grasp the basic tenets of necromancy. But they feed, Devkarin, on more than flesh. They consume raw power, be it magical, supernatural, or physical. They are like the moon oaks that drain the sinkholes, and they reach down to me with tentacles of pure will. They sapped me long ago and in the process burned away my abilities. Even now, after you’ve broken the seal of my prison, I can’t feel it. I can sense you, sense the putrid tang of life everywhere, but the dead aren’t speaking to me.”
“Give me a minute. You might be surprised,” Savra said. “You’re going to be as good as new when I’m finished with you.” For a time, she added silently.
“Devkarin, I’m of little use to anyone but as a battering ram,” the god-zombie wheezed. “I like it. If old Cisarzim could see this … This is his torso, did you know that?”
“No,” Savra said absently, but she wasn’t really listening. All her focus was on timing her next enchantment. She reached into another of the myriad pouches tied to her robe and untied its leather straps. The matka pulled out a single dry, silvery-green leaf, crumbled it in her palm, and folded her fingers over the fragments as she approached Svogthir. “The new limbs are in place. All that remains is to fill in everything else between you and them. Try not to scream. There’s quite an echo in here.” She extended her hand, palm closed. “This is going to hurt.”
“I can only hope,” Svogthir said.
Savra opened her palm and blew a puff of air into it. The silvery bits scattered in the torchlight and fluttered down upon the god-zombie like tiny, burning snowflakes. She turned, strode to the exact center of the sigils, and knelt, her head bowed and her arms spread wide.
Savra started her incantation. Despite her request, Svogthir screamed.
His torso grew back first. The jagged, snapped ribs that framed the cavern of his empty chest closed in on themselves while fresh, blackish-green moss knit the new seam together. Ropy muscles burst and popped into being, forcing fresh, gray bark-skin through the cracked, dead hide. Tiny wooden spikes pierced Svogthir’s new skin and formed anchor points for the web of vines and tendrils crisscrossing the god-zombie. The tendrils stretched and grew into his new limbs. No longer would Svogthir use borrowed arms and legs. Savra was providing him with his own limbs grown from scratch and far stronger than anything that could be appropriated from donor creature.
Louder and louder Svogthir screamed in exquisite agony and forced Savra to raise her own voice to hear herself chant. The incantation was a long one and had to be repeated thrice, without a single error, or all would be wasted. Savra’s concentration did not shake easily. As the incantation and Svogthir’s scream reached a deafening pitch that leveled off into a single, oily note, Savra rose to her feet, arms still flung wide, and threw her head back. She let the last syllable of the chant turn into a cry that matched the god-zombie’s in intensity, if not in raw agony.
Green flame erupted from the sigils on the floor and poured into Savra’s body through the conduit her bones formed, and out into Svogthir. His tiny thorns became protective, poisonous spikes jutting from his shoulders, back legs, and arms. Under Savra’s guidance the hardwood grew into place with agonized creaks and pops. They would keep teratogen attackers off him and provide makeshift weapons as needed.
The entire process took the better part of another ten hours, but when Savra finally let her chant fade into the smoky air, the god-zombie was whole again. Svogthir reborn was no longer a necromancer or a guildmaster. She didn’t need another necromancer. He was her avatar, a warrior, a giant of raw muscle and wooden bone.
She needed a weapon, and he was most certainly that. A weapon with a brain. Savra could have created something like this monster on her own, but it would have been a mindless thing, easy prey for the teratogen horde. Svogthir would burn bright and fierce, as long as he served her purposes.
Savra was confident, but she was completely aware that she was embarking on something very dangerous, with an even more dangerous champion.
Tiny eyes flashed within his withered skull, the only part of the god-zombie that remained unchanged, immune even to Savra’s magic. He stretched a pair of swollen gray arms, and the wooden spikes lining his arms, legs, and back clacked together. He tore himself free of the bone chair that had been his funeral slab for a millennium, stretched his legs, and took a couple of heavy, experimental steps on his new feet. The thick, leathery trunks were wrapped in pulsing green vines that made them look like a pair of twisted swamp trees. The god-zombie drew himself up to his full, enormous height, and a smile cracked his undersized face.
“That,” he rumbled in a voice that boomed and reverberated off the cell walls, “felt really good.” He balled one hand into a boulder-sized fist and raised it over Savra’s head. “I can’t believe you fell for that. My power may be sapped, but it will be mine again and so will my guild. But first I fear I must deal with you, priestess.”
* * * * *
Fonn heard the sound of a crackling fire and opened her eyes. She lay on her back on a bed of soggy straw in a moldering room that smelled of dead rodents, raw earth, and sulfur. She traced the dead-rat odor to a fur blanket that covered her from the waist down, its sour sweaty odor mingling with the pungent smoke of burning wood. She rolled her head to the right and saw she was next to a small fire, the source of the light flickering about the enclosed space. From her vantage point on the floor she saw spiders and insects climbing to and fro over the overgrown walls and the top half of a heavy, wooden door that was closed tight. A missing section of ceiling somewhere in the shadows abo
ve let the smoke rise from the room, but other than that slim passage and the closed door, there seemed to be no other way in or out.
Except for the bugs on the walls, she was completely alone. That made the voice all the more surprising.
You are safe, it said. It might have been in her head, it might have echoed inside the small room. She was still too dazed to tell. Wait. Everything depends on you.
It sounded, felt, familiar.
The voice didn’t say another word, and after a few seconds she figured she must have imagined it. The last fleeting words of someone in a dream, nothing more.
She sat up with a start. No, there was no one there. The voice was an illusion. The Living Saint Bayul was nowhere to be found in the small, dank room, nor was there any sign of Biracazir. And wherever this room was, she doubted it was the Tin Street Market.
Something, or more likely someone, had saved her from the blast. That meant that person knew the explosion was on the way. The shadowy form must have been wearing a chameleon hex, hiding in plain sight beside their table the entire time. Given that, Fonn reckoned this might not be the kind of savior she needed.
Despite what she’d always considered to be an unshakable faith, she found herself wondering if Bayul had known the figure was there, if her kidnapper was the one they’d been sent to meet. Then she felt a deep wave of shame at questioning the old elephant’s motives and capacity for deception.
Fonn stood and took a couple of unsteady steps toward the closed door but froze when she heard a sound of light footsteps beyond it, closing in fast. Ordinary human ears probably wouldn’t have picked up on it. Someone was walking toward the door with the grace of a cat.
