by Jonah Hewitt
They all walked about purposefully as if they had urgent business. Their mannerisms were those of bureaucrats and civic officials and had their appearance not been so frightening, they would have seemed completely normal, dull even. They never spoke, but often looked intently at each for moments at a time. Nephys suspected that they must have other ways of talking. If there was a Death Sight, why not a Death Speech?
Nephys noticed something else disturbingly peculiar about them all. They were all wounded in particularly gruesome and violent ways. Some had horrible gashes across their abdomens, spilling out their intestines. Others had large pieces missing from their skulls. What was strangest, none of them seemed the slightest bit perturbed by this. To the contrary, it looked like they celebrated the deformities. Their clothes were elaborately cut and styled to expose the wounds to view, even to flatter them, no matter how graphic. One had his bowels tied into intricate knots that hung around his middle like an apron, as if it were a common fashion statement. Another had his severed arm hanging from an ornate, silver chain around his neck as if it were a spectacular trophy. A tall thin one that brushed by Nephys had boils and sores all over his face, but he had polished and decorated them as if they were encrusted gemstones. One, with her skull bashed open, had a crest of feathers erupting out of it like a floral arrangement, as if her cranium were nothing more than just an exceptionally fancy, if extremely macabre, vase. In all cases, it was clear that they were vain and proud of their distinction.
Nephys reached his hand up to his throat. He had always hated the mark of his death that he had bourn for more than a millennium. It was nothing that he was proud of or wanted to flaunt. It was a constant reminder of how, at a young age, he had been separated from home and family who he could barely remember, not to mention sunshine and dates and honey cakes or boat-trips on the Nile. For the first time though, he felt lucky that his wound so small. Even now as he felt it, it seemed much smaller than he had remembered it being.
Looking at all these souls with their proudly displayed lacerations, disemboweled abdomens and severed limbs, Nephys wondered if a horrible, disfiguring wound was a requirement of the job. Nephys suddenly had a funny thought. It was Falco’s sincerest desire to be promoted to the Halls of Death, but he had died as an eight year old from the plague. He had no magnificent wound to show off. What on earth could he do? What fashion could he possibly adapt to show off and flaunt his slightly more purplish hue? A transparent toga perhaps? Nephys giggled slightly at the mental image. Instantaneously the Herald stopped. The entire assembly of mutilated souls ceased whatever they were doing and glared at him with sightless eyes. The Herald’s metal-shod feet scraped the floor as he turned slowly to regard Nephys with the empty part of his face.
Nephys cringed. After what seemed like an eternity, the Herald turned back around and the rest of the court returned to their duties. Apparently laughter was not the proper protocol in such places.
“Blessed Anubis!” thought Nephys, “Can’t I do anything right?” Then he thought some more. “This is all Maggie’s fault,” he said to himself bitterly. Nothing had been the same since she had come into his life. This laughter was a complete distraction. He was in enough trouble already for seeing the stone; he didn’t need to compound problems by giggling. He resolved to have a stern talk with Maggie and implore her to be more proper when he got back.
They walked on past countless columns. The temple seemed vast, even bigger than the Acropolis on top of it. Nephys wondered how anyone found his way since everything seemed to look exactly the same. Soon though, they came to an aisle that was taller and broader than the rest. The Herald made an abrupt turn left up this aisle and quickened his pace. Soon they came to another large rectangular door, much like the entrance only smaller. It was also completely undecorated except for the solitary triangle above the door. Once inside, Nephys found himself in a broad antechamber.
Nephys didn’t think it possible but the characters inside were even more frightening than the ones outside. These wore the same black and silver uniforms, except their wounds were more lavish and spectacular than the others. One had a pike through his chest on the other side of which was embedded his still-beating heart and another was so encrusted with arrows that he resembled a human hedgehog. Some carried their heads under their arms like packages and others carried their organs in silver jars. Others were flayed alive and had their skins draped over their shoulders like they were fashionable capes. One in black, fluted armor seemed normal enough until he turned around to see the two pass. His face had been completely removed to show the grinning skull underneath – the flayed flesh hung from his lower jaw like a gruesome beard. Nephys turned quickly to avoid looking at him, but no sooner had he turned away than his sight landed on something more horrifying: a woman with her breastbone removed to expose the glistening organs within. Her ribs were splayed back to make two wing-like protrusions from either side, a particularly gruesome fashion statement.
There were many different kinds of courtiers here. There were Sumerian high priests and Chinese mandarins, Briton druids, Teutonic knights and African shamans. By their costumes and dress, most of them seemed to come from the earlier ages of man. There were few that wore the increasingly tighter and ridiculous clothes of the last few centuries. They all stared at him in what was either contempt or apathy – Nephys couldn’t decide which. It was just clear that none of them were happy to see him there.
All of the people gathered there were also profoundly blind and sightless but around each hung a pallid blue aura of light. Some auras poured over their occupants like flowing water, others licked at them like flames. There was dark and powerful magic clinging to each one. They were not busying themselves with errands or messages like the ones in the outer halls either. They were working their hands into dark figures, making spells or something, but Nephys didn’t know for what purpose. They were writing figures to each other with blue flames that hung briefly in the air before disappearing.
All of these people were marked with the same triangle badge he had seen above the doors and on the tabard of the Herald, but there was something else. Flanking the triangle were two outstretched, upright arms glowing with faint blue light. Nephys knew this symbol. It was the Ka sign. The Egyptian symbol for the soul or life essence found in the blood and bones of every human body.
Nephys recognized at once who these high-ranking courtiers were. These were no ordinary functionaries. These were the elite of the Courts of Death. These were the nameless ones. These were the champions of Death himself. These were the Necromancers. The servants of Death on the other side.
Death did not often tread openly on the world above. Just his presence in the underworld was enough to insure the continuation of the business of death as usual back on earth. When Death did emerge from his Temple to walk the land of the living in person it almost always portended horrible times. Famine, plague and war followed in the footsteps of the Great Master like eddies in the wake of a great ship. Where Death walked, disaster followed: The Fall of Atlantis, The Eruption of Versuvius, the Black Death. Nephys shuddered at the thought.
Thankfully, Death rarely did emerge. The last time was many decades ago. When he left the temple, it was like a horrible wind that fled out the gates of Erebus, and when he returned, a flood of harvested souls like a tidal wave followed after him. Nephys knew very little of the events of those times, but he had caught snippets of it from the stacks of poor, thin grey paper sheets with smudgy ink that had come down to the scriptorium in heaps. Usually, those things, newspapers they called them, were left to the print boy in the paper hat and apron to copy down, since they were closer to his time. When Nephys had on rare occasion happened to transcribe some of those strange texts, he had made certain to use the red ink for all the strange-sounding names: Buchen-Wald, Okinawa, Auschwitz and Nagasaki. It had seemed the reverent thing to do.
When Death did not see to matters personally, he needed agents and representatives on earth to ove
rsee the passage to the underworld. That was the role of necromancers. Nephys didn’t know how it began, but at some distant point, the Great Master had shared his power with a few select families. They in turn served him in life…and death. From the looks of their shattered bodies, the price was a high one. In the Halls of Death they served as his generals, soldiers, legates and viziers. Their very names were hidden behind ranks and titles, which is why the children of Limbo simply called them “The Nameless Ones,” known only to Death apparently. They were rarely seen outside the walls of the Temple, and none of the children of Limbo knew exactly what their functions were, but it was almost always a very bad omen to see any of them about. It was rumored that a few of them could even return to the land of the living, though Nephys wasn’t exactly certain how.
The soul was comprised of many parts: first was the Ka, which was the life essence of every living thing, but it was found only in the land of the living, for obvious reasons. The second was the Ba, which was the personality, and the third was the Akh, or as the Greeks called it, the Nous, which was the mind or sense of self. Added to these were the heart or Yib, and the shadow or Sheunt – light and dark, truth and illusion, the energy sources that powered the other parts of the soul.
Only a living human soul was complete. The Ka departed at death and remained only in the land of the living. The light and shadow could only be at peace inside the soul of a living human being. Once dead, the heart or light had to depart for the afterlife. Usually the Ba and Akh came with it, but that was not mandatory. The other pieces might end up anywhere in a variety of unpleasant combinations. A Ba without an Akh would become a mindless shade in the afterlife. A Ba without his Akh in the land of the living became a ghost or a specter.
The shadow was a powerful, ravenous force: amorphous, unpredictable and consuming. Imps were made of the disembodied shadows of souls that long ago consumed their other, better parts. The shadow could re-animate the once-living body, making it undead. Nephys assumed the souls of necromancers returned the same way – by pouring their shadows and Akhs into the re-animated body. There were dozens of types of undead: blood-drinkers and ka-stealers, revenants, mummies and skeletons. Nephys shuddered. Shades were scary enough. He hated to think of what it might be like to meet up with any of the others, but then he was already dead. What could they do to him?
The Herald led him across the antechamber to another identical door with the now-familiar triangle overhead. This one actually had a solid door of blackened bronze that opened unbidden when the Herald came near. Nephys followed and was pleased to see that this room was empty and mercifully free of morbid inhabitants. It was impossibly tall and even though the walls were lined with torches of blue flame, Nephys couldn’t make out the ceiling. On the opposite side was another door of identical bronze. Unlike the outside halls, which were transparent and crystalline, both the doors and the ceiling above were impenetrable to the Death Sight. Nephys realized he was standing and gaping at the architecture and not following so he rushed to catch up. The Herald walked to the center of the rectangular room and abruptly stopped. Nephys nearly ran into him. The Herald turned around and looked at him with the empty space above the stub of a nose he still had left. There on his chest was the usual triangle, but below it was the Ka sign with outstretched arms, burning with a faint blue outline. That was definitely not there before. Only now did Nephys realize that the Herald must be one of the nameless ones too.
Nephys swallowed hard.
“Wait here,” The Herald said once. This was the first time Nephys had heard the Herald speak and he sincerely hoped it would be the last. It was somehow quiet yet shook him like a thunderclap immediately overhead. He felt it more in his stomach than in his ears and it made his bones and teeth ache and his skin crawl. He couldn’t imagine that even the voice of Death himself could be more frightening. No wonder he was chosen to be Herald of Death. Who could ignore that?! When Nephys recovered from the unavoidable cowering the words had forced him to assume, the Herald grimaced at him, huffed and then brushed by him and walked towards the doors they had just entered. Nephys watched him go as they opened magically before him and closed silently behind him.
Nephys was alone. There was a dawning realization that he must be just one door away from the Great Master. He was numb from fear. He immediately scanned the room looking for an exit in the delusion that he could make a run for it. When it became obvious that that was madness he began second-guessing all the decisions he had made in the last two days: going out to rescue Maggie, cracking jokes at Falco, pretending not to see the stone. He ran them over in his mind wondering whether if he had just decided differently he wouldn’t be here now, but that was worthless too. He could no more change the past than he could escape this room. He turned to look back and forth at the door behind and the door ahead. As he felt the panic start to consume him he felt his throat, the gash seemed larger and more ragged than before. If the presence of a shade could burn a soul, how much more would the presence of Death consume him?
The colorless world of the Death Sight was overpowering him, and it wasn’t doing him much good in this room somehow immune to its effects. So he decided to open his natural eyes. He wanted to see with them one last time. Instantly he was plunged back into darkness. The torches only seemed to give light to those using the Death Sight. Why would they need to do anything else? But now as his inevitable doom descended on him he found some measure of calm and took comfort in the sense of disembodiment that existed in this place.
Just then a narrow sliver of light appeared in front of him. It was bright and odd. It wasn’t blue or grey like everywhere else in Limbo. Instead it glowed amber and gold and the stream of light was full of dust. He had to shield his eyes from it at first, but as they grew accustomed to it, he saw the narrow sliver turn into a tall, narrow rectangle that progressively got wider. A golden pathway of light flooded over him. A dry breeze rolled forward, acrid and tainted with the smell of dust and rot. It was heavy and sickly sweet, like the myrrh, beeswax and spices used to embalm the mummies in his own land. It suddenly dawned on him what he was seeing. It was the other door! It was opening!! He instantly threw himself on his knees, dropping his reed pen case clattering to the floor. He bent his forehead to the ground placing both palms on the smooth floor and attempted to adopt the most reverential posture he could. He then tensed his body, like a person tightening against a blow. Nephys was certain he was destined for destruction, but the blow never came. Slowly as time passed, he lifted his head a little and risked a peek.
The wide door had opened to reveal a room full of lights. Thousands of candles, lamps and lanterns lined the walls, in endless profusion and variety, flooding the innermost chamber with a warm amber glow. He certainly had not expected that. In the center of the room were two figures illuminated by the radiant flickering amber light: one, was a figure of a man, sitting cross-legged on the floor in a posture of relative calm like a student before the other figure, a vast, gigantic beast of unfathomable size and shape. Nephys’ eyes shot back to the floor in terror. It was Death.
The living imagined Death in many forms. Some imagined him as a skeleton with a scythe and an hourglass, others as a corpse, and still others as a woman with long hair, but they were all wrong. None imagined him as he really was. Death was a monster, a great, terrible amalgamation of hideous forms and mismatched parts, gigantic and terrible. Nephys had heard stories of course, but there was an enormous difference between hearing rumors and seeing it firsthand. He trembled on the floor, too terrified to look again. He knew it was impossible, but it felt as if beads of cold sweat were rolling down his face and neck. He felt paralyzed, but inexorably, as seconds ticked by, he couldn’t control the urge to look once more. He looked up from his crouching position.
It was a terrifying sight. It was a gargantuan beast, bigger than the stone heads or the door to the Temple itself. Nephys wondered how it could even leave the room it seemed to fill. It was covered by broad drapes and r
agged shrouds that hung nearly to the floor. These concealed its form, but not its sheer mass. Despite these coverings Nephys could tell that it was misshapen and oddly formed. Many limbs and appendages moved about under the drapery creating the impression of several great beasts writhing over each other under the coverings. Beneath the trailing edges of the shroud one could see the many clawed and monstrous feet of the monster. Here was an iron cloven foot like an ox’s hoof. There was a gray, giant paw like a lion, only many times larger. A vulture’s taloned toes scratched at the pavement. The edge of an enormous, black wing grazed the ground nearby. There were more than a dozen feet in all. Underneath the shroud the feet were constantly moving, making it nearly impossible to get a sense of the monster’s true form. All of this was so incongruous it was nearly impossible to imagine how these parts connected together to form a single creature.
There was an arching bulge in the draperies on the side closest to the sitting man that must have covered the creature’s head and neck. From where he was watching, Nephys could see the light from the candles shining through the linens covering its head. The backlit silhouette revealed an equally monstrous head of diverse shape. It was horned like an ox and maned like a lion, with a ruff like a griffin vulture. This strange profile at times looked like a vulture’s rapacious beak, and at others times like a man’s face.
But even as he watched the Great Master, transfixed, Nephys noticed something even stranger about the great beast than its shape or form. The wing was haggard and limp, the feathers gray and dull and several battered and threadbare giant feathers littered the floor beneath it. The lion’s paw was ashen and weathered as if from great age, its claws dull or in some cases, snapped off. The iron hooves were cracked and broken in several places, like a neglected and ancient plow ox, and the aged vulture’s foot scraped desperately on the floor, scrambling to gain a stable foothold like a sickened animal. It drew in great, rasping breaths with difficulty only to cough them back out. The closer he looked, the more improbable it seemed, but the creature stumbled and staggered, and shuddered like a frail and sick man, uncertain of its step or balance. Despite its size and many limbs, it seemed brittle, fragile, tired and impossibly old. This of all the characteristics of the Great Master was the most terrifying and puzzling.
