Dread of Spirit: Rise of the Mage - Book One

by Jason Bilicic

  Once he finished that job, he turned in a circle, looking the place over again, pausing on the cap and suture table, noting that it, too, appeared very well organized. Even his father would be pleased. “Maybe.”

  “Kelc,” called his sister, interrupting the young man’s thoughts. “I think I see dust up on the road beyond the willow. That’s got to be father with the cart. Come on in and eat something. Goodness knows, you’ll have no chance once he’s here.” She hadn’t left the porch.

  “Coming,” he called out, draping the rag he used over one of the hooks on the wall, careful to make sure even that looked orderly. He stepped from the cleanhouse and made his way through the countless gravestones to the porch, where his mother left a bowl of stew, a loaf of warm bread and a glass of warm water.

  As was customary, the crusty bread served as the utensil. He dipped it at first, absorbing much of the spicy broth from the stew, biting each bit of the stained loaf off until only carrots and cubed goat remained. He then pinned the more substantial parts of the stew against the side of the bowl, mindlessly pressing it into the bread and lifting it to his mouth, his attention on the growing dust cloud out on the road.

  He nearly finished his supper before he could make out the cart, his father perched atop it, alone on the driver’s bench, snapping the reins in a practiced rhythm while urging the horses forward, driving the team at the fastest speed he dared.

  The quicker a corpse reached the body plank after death, the less rigor it held and the easier it was to work and drain. Thus, unbeknownst to most, a good embalmer was usually a very good teamster. And Kelc’s father was. He knew his team well, knew exactly how fast he could drive them without overdoing it or hobbling them.

  “Kelc!” his father shouted over the clamor of the wagon as he neared the house. “Let’s go!” The wheels bounced noisily on the packed dirt road and the struts creaked as the wagon began to slow.

  The horses were blowing, their coats matted with sweat. Macy and Freska, the two lead horses, even foamed a bit. Father had driven them hard.

  Kelc carefully dropped from the porch, jogging to the cleanhouse, meeting his father just as he pulled the team to a stop. Adda followed closely with Shaia. They would have to rub down the horses.

  “Whoa! Whoa now! Kelc, everything is prepared?” asked the man, his grey eyes severe beneath the black brows, expressing doubt that his son could have done all that he asked. “You did what I asked?” he snapped before allowing his son to answer.

  “Yes, sir.” Kelc circled the wagon and dropped the gate, looking at the carrier crate, a square coffin-like box. “Are you ready?” he asked, taking hold of the wide handle on his end.

  His father took his handle and gave a curt nod. “Go.” They lifted the crate and took four steps, as they had done dozens of times before. Then Kelc’s father set his end down and dropped off of the back of the wagon before again taking it in hand. They then carried the crate to the opening of the cleanhouse.

  His father threw open the crate, lifting the hinged lid without preamble, displaying the corpse.

  “Hells,” Kelc breathed. “What happened?”

  “She fell off a horse,” said his father dispassionately. “Broke her neck.” He shook his head once.

  It was obvious. The girl looked perhaps ten or eleven years of age, her ear resting flat against her relaxed left shoulder, her neck clearly disjointed. Her cheek muscles were flexed and her jaw set, neither very common for an accident victim, and she wore only her small clothes, a sleep shirt and shorts. Fell off a horse? Kelc had his doubts, but voicing them would only earn him a lecture or a beating.

  “Let’s get her up on the plank and get to work,” his father said. “Take her feet.”

  Kelc quickly grasped her ankles. She weighed almost nothing and as they laid her on the plank her shirt slid up, showing bruised ribs that jutted from her too lean body. As Kelc noted it, he didn’t even make a facial expression. Girls and women in Symea were considered little better than livestock to many. Expressing the disgust he felt at seeing the malnourished and broken little girl would only result in pain.

  Kelc had always felt that the dead needed care. He didn’t know why exactly, but logic told him that it was a tumultuous time for the spirit and soothing the recently deceased must make it easier for them. As often as he could, he volunteered to work the arms and legs, pushing and pulling on them to increase circulation, helping the ludpump, content to assist the passing of the corpses by lending a delicate hand. And saving them from the coarse handling of his father.

  The bodies were dead, the tissue already rotting. Kelc knew that, but inside, he knew, something remained. Something powerful. And it didn’t leave until it was forced to leave. Until it was forced out by father, when he performed the rending.

  “Quit dawdling, damn it!” his father growled, taking the bores in hand, thrusting the right carotid to his son, surprising him. With one hand, Varrl took hold of the girl’s hair and jerked her head straight up. Kelc looked away as he winced, angry and ashamed to see his father handle the young girl so roughly. His father then looked at him pointedly, then the girl’s neck.

  A little shocked that he was allowed to help with something important, Kelc tentatively pressed his fingers into the girl’s neck, her flesh already spongy and soft, and found her carotid, swollen with immobile blood. He isolated the large artery between two fingers and with one proficient thrust, pierced it with the bore as he’d been shown, forcing it along the blood vessel until most of it rested deep in her neck.

  His father only nodded at the satisfactory job and then flicked his eyes to the ludpump before inserting his own larger bore on the other side of her neck, his hollowed with a larger flute to accept congealing blood. “I can work her arms and legs, father,” Kelc stated, eager to keep in contact with the corpse.

  “Do what in the Hells I tell you to do, boy!” his father almost yelled. “Nothing more! I’d think you would have learned that of late.” The man’s hand raised instinctively, prepared to enforce his will with a quick swat if needed, but Kelc fell away, taking the ludpump lever in both hands, slowly raising it.

  “Varrl,” Adda said from the door, Shaia just behind her, “did you…”

  “Woman,” interrupted her husband. “We’ve got plenty to do, what with this girl’s neck mangled and her family coming just after dawn for the funeral tomorrow.”

  “That’s all I needed to know,” she answered quietly, moving away from the door.

  Varrl ignored her and focused on the small legs he held, one in each hand, as he lifted them and forced them to bend at the knees, mashing her knees into her gut, breaking up the semi-congealed blood inside, fighting rigor that stiffened her joints.

  “Pump harder, boy.” Kelc increased his pace and almost instantly, the sound of fluid falling into the drainage tank filled the room, quickly followed by the acrid reek of blood. “A little faster while I work her arms and massage her stomach.”

  Kelc sped his pace more as his father worked, his touch on the dead girl unfeeling and rough, following the path of her major blood vessels, assisting them. Varrl stepped away from the little girl for a moment, leaning over the drainage tank to observe the fluid, seemingly immune to the horrid odor.

  “Slow it down now,” he said. “We got a little silvering coming through already and we don’t want to waste it. Costs coins. Let it eat at her blood some.” He peered into the tank for a few moments more. “Won’t be long. She’s pretty small.” He raised a hand to signal Kelc to slow even more and finally made a fist, indicating that the pump needed to stop.

  “Get the eye caps on her and start a suture.” Kelc nodded at his father, again shocked by the request, as he quickly selected a fine needle and thread before starting work on the girl’s eyes. “I need to go prepare a coffin. Don’t make a mess of this. You do and you’ll hear of it. Then you’ll feel it, boy.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kelc responded, his voice flat.

  His father’s hand c
aught him hard on the right cheek, the slap more alarming than it was painful. “Watch your tone, boy, or I’ll walk you out into the yard and beat you ‘til you beg for mercy, or until you can’t.” The man’s eyes were instantly full of fury.

  “Yes, sir,” Kelc said again, this time with a military crispness.

  “Better,” Varrl growled as he left his son with the body.

  Preparing a body for a funerary showing took a wide array of skills. From the alchemical understanding of the human body and need for surgical precision when dealing with the stiffened flesh and lax muscles to the artistic understanding that allowed a coroner to color the face and manipulate the corpse into an expression of peaceful understanding rather than the painful grimace most dead bodies wore upon dying, it took time to learn… and practice.

  The first cadaver Kelc had ever worked on was a seventy-two year old man, Kindlen the butcher from Deeverton. The man had dropped dead of old age and been carted in by his family. Kelc’s father received him and since Kreggen, who normally worked on the bodies with his father, was off with his mother buying barrels or some such, Kelc was set to work.

  He helped with the ludpump and the blood furnace and even massaged the dead man’s arms to break up the rigor that had begun to settle into his blood vessels. The work didn’t bother him. In some ways, it excited him. It fit him. He was eleven at the time.

  Four years later, Kelc had worked on several bodies, a few completely by himself, all of those more recent, as Kreggen’s time became dominated by preparations for the warden’s service. Now, Kelc had this young girl, Henna Lanch, that needed to be prepared tonight and it looked like he would be left to tend to her.

  He checked her neck first. It was straightened but not sitting quite right. He pulled a broad belt across her chest and fastened it, using the winching locks to tighten it to her so that he could apply enough force to try and reset her neck. Once she was secure on the board, he wrapped his right arm under her head, setting her chin in the crook of his elbow. He pulled straight up on her head and felt the bones of her neck scraping each other. All at once, there was no resistance and he moved the head a half knuckle toward the center and slowly let it drop back down.

  He then looked at her from the front and saw that she looked much better, though intense bruising blackened her neck. “Later,” he muttered, his distaste for her condition tightening his stomach.

  Kelc turned his attention to her eyes. With death came a very noticeable sagging around the eyes. Using his thumbs, he firmly pressed on the delicate puffy flesh surrounding Henna’s eyes and adjusted it as if it were clay. The brows both needed lifting and the corners of the eyelids needed to be tucked back before the bottom definition of the eye could be rebuilt. Though the flesh to the sides and above the closed eyes was milk white, deep purple crescents underscored them, a common occurrence on corpses that met a violent end, but pigments would take care of that.

  Once he liked the way her eyes looked, Kelc used caps, small wooden saucers, to keep the muscles in place until rigor made the adjustments permanent. He carefully pushed the oblong spacers into her eyes, making sure to apply only enough pressure to keep them there without affecting the work he’d just done.

  Next came the mouth. Like nearly everybody Kelc had ever seen, Henna’s jaw has slackened and her mouth hung open. Once in a long while, a corpse would come in with its jaw clamped shut, something that indicated a brain injury or a quick death in battle, according to Varrl. But the girl’s was slack, hanging open and a little to the left side.

  Kelc pressed firmly on her jaw, forcing it to close, but like so many, the lips were so slack that the bottom one still drooped down. Snatching up a curved needle and thread, Kelc splayed the pale purple lips out as gently as he could and began to sew. The sutures needed to be just behind the area of the lips that would be seen, but deep enough in the tissue that when he pulled on the suture at the end it would not tear free.

  He carefully threaded the curved needle through the heavy flesh of her bottom lip and then pulled it until the triple knot caught. He then repeated the procedure in her top lip almost directly above the first suture before pulling the sinewy line until the lips closed together. He didn’t pull too hard as the mouth would then look unnatural and might even rip the suture from her swelling tissues. Some give was required to tie off the mouth suture as well. He continued across her lips, tugging each time to make sure her lips met, adjusting the tension of his work as he did it. At the end, in the very corner of her mouth, he pushed her lips apart and passed the needle behind his last stitch, creating a knot. As he tugged it tight, he used small shears to cut the thread. A little work with his thumbs to sharpen up the lips and the mouth was done.

  “Good,” he breathed, scrutinizing his work, unable to see any sutures in her mouth, though the back of her jaw still seemed to sag. “Tie that off.”

  He wrapped a belt around her head and under her chin before tightening it enough to draw her jaw up, fastening it against the top of her skull. Rigor would hold it there after only a glass or two. He buckled it and again surveys his work. “You were a pretty little girl, Henna.” Kelc sighed as he considered the broken body before him.

  He plucked a hair brush from a nearby cubby and fixed her hair, following the part that already existed, simply correcting tufts that formed during her death and transport to the cleanhouse. Once he completed that, he took a pair of cloth shears and began removing her clothes.

  She wore only a light shift and underpants. Kelc first removed the shift and pulled it from beneath her back before carefully cutting through the underpants. “Ah, Hells!” he breathed as he pulled the cloth from her. Her inner thighs were coated with dried black blood, though no hair grew on her pelvis. “Damn it.” With a quick proficient movement, Kelc covered the little girl’s naked form with a blanket and turned from her. “Hells.”

  He stepped to the cleanhouse door and looked out across the graveyard, feeling no solace in the rank upon rank of headstones and markers. His left hand rose to his face where he pressed a fist under his nose and took slow measured breaths.

  “Kelc?” Shaia said coming around the corner, her tone changing instantly upon seeing him. “Kelc, are you alright?” Her eyes darted from him to the house, obviously concerned with being seen with him.

  He looked at his sister for a long moment before he lowered his hand and shook his head. “No,” he whispered before clearing his throat. “No.” He gave a sideways glance to Henna, where she lay beneath the blanket.

  Shaia didn’t move a knuckle. “Was she beaten?” Kelc’s nod was minimal, but enough. “Raped?” his sister asked, a tear already forming in her left eye. Kelc looked at her and she knew. Tears dropped down her face while they stared at each other. “She’s just a little girl.”

  “Yeah.” He let his eyes wander to the horizon, above and beyond all of the graves, far from his home.

  “That’s…” A sob burst from Shaia. “Can you feel…” She pressed her arms to her face, stifling the sound and mopping the wetness from her cheeks. She knew it wouldn’t do to have father come and check on the situation, any more than it would to delay in getting him what he needed. Even still, she took a few deep breaths before speaking. “Father said that there’s some sort of straight knife in here.” Her voice was fragile as she began to recompose herself, though her eyes were wide as she looked toward Henna. “He needs it to tap the liner into the coffin.”

  Kelc turned clumsily and gestured to the rack of blades. “There,” he mumbled, “top left.”

  “Kelc, please just finish in here. I’ll bring a white woolen back and we can get her wrapped and comfortable, and just put it behind us. Father won’t care, and if he thinks we’ve dallied then he’ll…” She took the knife from the peg it hung on and gave her younger brother a quick hug and kiss. “Please.” He looked at her and nodded once. “Good. Let me get the robe before father comes.”

  Kelc turned back to Henna, staring at the little girl, thinking.
What in the world could she have done to deserve such an end? What does any child do in Symea to deserve what they get? The sons are beaten and the daughters are…nothing. He rolled his head around on his neck, stretching.

  “Greeching Hells.” He couldn’t change anything right then, could he? He leaned over the drainage tank, letting a different kind of horror knock the previous one from his mind. The drainage was almost all silvering now.

  When using the ludpump, thick bright red blood was forced from the body, replacing it with silvering that threaded through the arteries and veins. Over time, the silvering actually began to break the clotted blood down, liquefying it further so that it, too, could drain. The two combined to create a sort of deep scarlet sludge that oozed from the drainage line until it turned to pure silver.

  “Fine,” Kelc announced to no one. He moved back to Henna and rolled the blanket down, exposing her head and neck. He slid each of the bores from her neck, dropping the blood line into a pitcher of alcohol. He reached past it to the silvering bung and closed the valve before he raised the ludpump and gave it two quick cranks. He could hear the much thinner alcohol splashing into the drainage as it cleaned out the bore and the tube.

  Kelc treated the puncture holes with white gum, causing them to immediately vanish. He held the filler in the hole with his fingers until it hardened and then wheeled the small color table over next to the little girl.

  He opened a lightly tinted flesh tone and used the broadest brush, working on her neck first, each stroke of the fine bristles painting over black and purple bruising. He then dusted her face with it, taking extra time on the crescents of darkness beneath her eyes, making sure that they would not be visible.

  He plucked the eye caps up and looked at her overall expression. She looked so much better than she did when she arrived, what with the injury not visible and the bruising now covered, but she didn’t look peaceful. “No wonder about that,” he breathed, his words allowing a surge of emotion into him. “No,” he barked, cutting off the tightness in his chest. “Just…finish.”