* * * *
Unwilling to test the diagnosis, Vendriel stared at Vendreela, who stared back adoringly. He thought a thought and she made it flesh. He wept at her beauty and ardor. He whispered, “I love you,” and he knew the truth.
His first thought was to call for his apothecary to decant them both their deaths. As he was a Vendren, his second thought was to defy the gods and dupe his creature into the belief that she had a soul of her own.
“You have deluded yourself!” he cried; as did she.
The captain of Death’s Darlings who dared creep into the First Lord’s chamber on the following afternoon found his master dead, and in a state of decay more advanced than anyone would have thought natural. Beside the deliquescent corpse lay an indistinguishable welter of animal, mineral and vegetable matter.
A sometime poet, the captain swore that he also sensed a hint of our brief spring in the fetid air about him, but that it soon dissipated.
* * * *
As I have said, the story of Lady Ailissa, Vendriel’s first wife, had a curious sequel. The First Lord’s son and heir, Vendrard the Demented, believed that he was a date-palm. His father, oddly enough, had nothing to do with this: Vendrard had conceived his delusion and earned his epithet on his own. The Elders of the House, while regretting the loss of his unique talent for standing through the longest and dullest ceremonies with the most lordly grace, deemed him unfit to rule and sent him to Fandragord, unhappy home of his especially wicked branch of the family.
Frothard Vendren, of the Frothirot branch, was given the rings of the First Lord. Ten years into his reign his son Forfax, a devoted student of fungi, was investigating that region of the catacombs where Lady Ailissa had been released from her cage when he was seized by enormous rats of anomalous appearance and borne screaming into the deeper depths.
The unfortunate lad’s fellows on the field-trip described the beasts as relatively hairless; as somewhat ungainly in their four-footed gait, though very fast; and as having uncommonly dexterous forepaws. An exhaustive search resulted only in the mysterious loss of a dozen searchers. The fumigation of the pits with sulfur provoked nothing more than an irruption of perfectly ordinary rats into the New Palace. The older region of the underground was securely bricked off.
It was said that Lady Lereela, when she came to the capital from Fandragord some threescore years later, trafficked with these creatures of the abyss: who might have been her rather distant cousins.
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The Retrograde Necromancer
By the ninth year of his infamous reign, Vendriel the Good believed that he had heard everything.
When he disclosed his plan for chastising the wayward city of Lilaret, his generals said, “We cannot—”
“We have heard that before,” Lord Vendriel said and jumped aside, for his sword-bearer was very quick.
When the epic poet Phoqquidor had chanted only half the first line of his latest canto, Lord Vendriel said, “We have heard that before,” and Phoqquidor’s cheeks soon squeezed those of his peers on the iron spikes of Poets’ Row.
The First Lord’s sword-bearer was a bulgy-armed youth named Flindorn, who seemed to have neither time nor desire for anything but sharpening his manqueller and using it. He nevertheless found enough of both for a vigorous exchange of juices with Glittitia Fulnathooza, his master’s favorite. Barely had the transfer been made than the chill of the First Lord’s presence fell upon them with his shadow.
Although she had tried to deceive a necromancer fabled to disperse himself into the dust-motes eddying through the Vendren Palace, the better to spy on his court, Glittitia wasn’t stupid. But against the cold iron of his rage, her intellect froze like a raindrop, and she blurted: “He forced me!”
“We have heard that—”
Flindorn then astounded them both by leaping from the hammock and Glittitia’s embrace, snatching up his weapon, and beheading himself.
The moment that Lord Vendriel spent fingering his beard as he stared at the twitching body was time enough for the lady to recover her wits. She said, “I know something you’ve never heard.”
He thought he had seen everything, too, but Flindorn had proved him wrong. He said, “Speak, corpse.”
“No. Unless you promise to spare me, I’ll never say. The secret will rot with my head on Concubines’ Row.”
“We can make those heads speak, you know,” said the First Lord. Then he chucked her under the chin as he complained in a mode he thought playful, “I have to spare you, don’t I? Thanks to you, I’m without a headsman.”
Accepting this as the best mercy she could get, Glittitia said, “You’ve never heard the voice of the Archimage.”
* * * *
Pondering this truth, Vendriel neglected to order her execution for nearly a week. By then he had a long list of heads that more urgently required separation from their bodies, and no one to see to them properly. He had used up so many sword-bearers that few candidates were left with the flair and energy he demanded, and those few had fled the city after Flindorn tendered his imaginative resignation.
Glittitia Fulnathooza had in fact told the First Lord nothing new. In his youth he had conceived a fascination with the mysterious recluse whom other wizards resemble only as whirligigs resemble a tornado. Even in the dizzyingly ancient scrolls that he had filched from the shunned ruins of Crotalorn as a boy, guarded allusion was made to an immortal Archimage.
None of the scrolls revealed by what name his hypothetical mother had called him. To know that would be to wield power over the immortal, and so Vendriel had raised old bones and even older dust to learn it. The word “Archimage” was repeated to him in ever more barbarous accents by the shades of his sea-raider ancestors, who had come from Morbia at the dawn of history. The aboriginal inhabitants of the island had a similar word in their apish gabble, but none of them knew a proper name.
His informants grew less substantial as he sifted more ancient dust. A shaman of the sea raiders, vexed at being woken after thousands of oblivious years, was able to blacken Vendriel’s eye with his thigh-bone rattle before being subdued, and even then he managed to cast an antique spell that afflicted the necromancer with the botch of Bebros. Earlier shades, however angry, could muster no such strength for their blows or their spells. The very oldest were little more than whiffs of fetid air that chattered and wavered for an eye-blink before subsiding forever.
From an urn found beneath the nethermost crypts of Fandragord, he at last evoked a shadow unlike any he had yet conjured, disturbingly unlike any sort of man or woman at all. In the problematical language of the Lomar Texts, it whispered words that would have set Vendriel’s hair on end if he hadn’t temporarily lost it to the botch. This dust was uniquely pleased to have been reconstituted and defied all attempts to lay it. Skipping from the restraints of Vendriel’s pentacle as if it were a child’s hopscotch diagram, it burst from the wizard’s tower and capered through the dark labyrinth of Frothirot’s Lower City for a week, leaving scores of victims in its wake whose weightless bodies would crackle and flake away like the husks of cicadas. It was last glimpsed flickering toward Fandragord, where all evil finds its home; but before departing it had disclosed a fragmentary name.
Afraid of nothing in those days, Vendriel used the fragment in an exploratory spell, a tentative extension of an insubstantial feeler toward his quarry. The most potent adepts would never have noticed the spell at all, or would have dismissed it as an irksome gnat. Not one of them could have traced it back through its deceptive route to the tower of the necromancer. But barely had Vendriel begun to hiss the snaky syllables than his robe burst into flames.
The stargazer Quisquillian Fesh was heaped with derision for describing the visitation that night of “a comet with a bald, pock-marked head that seemed nearly human,” after he witnessed part of the flaming necromancer’s arc from his high window into the crocodile-pond below. Although used to receiving screaming treats from that source,
the crocodiles were momentarily put off by the flames, giving Vendriel time to evade their jaws with a hastily gargled spell.
Shamed and scared, Vendriel resolved to tempt the Archimage no further; but his lesson wasn’t over. For the next three years, the future ruler of the Frothoin was plagued by an imp that would set fire when least expected to such unlikely inconveniences as his boots, his bathwater and his semen. The attendants charged with dressing, scrubbing and diverting him would run and hide when they were most wanted, and for years afterward he would scream if someone struck a light without warning in his presence.
When he at last devised a spell for liquefying human bones that his father, Vendriel the Kindly, was unable to counteract, Vendriel the Good acceded to the First Lord’s rings. He hoped that his boyhood impertinence was forgotten, and he decided to invite the Archimage to his investiture. No such mission had been undertaken in living memory, and the ceremony was delayed for a week while he tried to find members of his dread household regiment, Death’s Darlings, who would rather carry the message than drink poison.
The delegation of heroes trooped back with a large orange cat. They said the wizard’s servants had assured them that this animal was none other than the Archimage, in the form it had pleased him to inhabit for the last several centuries, and that he was delighted to attend, as his hearty purring showed. Vendriel closely quizzed the cat, which yawned and licked its testicles. He was almost certain that it was a plain cat, meant as a slur on the heraldic tiger of the Vendrens, but he didn’t dare interrogate it through wizardry or show it the slightest disrespect.
Lounging in a conspicuous place of honor on a velvet cushion, the cat watched him assume his father’s robe and rings in the Temple of Polliel. Like several others it dozed off during his maiden speech as First Lord of the Frothoin, but it was the only one to do so with impunity.
The cat disappeared soon after, leaving Vendriel uncertain whether the Archimage had honored him above all previous rulers or made a complete fool of him. The people feared that he was even crazier than they had supposed, but he knew that such a fear was never a handicap to good government.
He had put the immortal out of his mind until Glittitia Fulnathooza rekindled his old temptation. He was no longer the overweening boy who had tried using the master’s own craft to spy on him. He was no longer the novice ruler who had pestered him with inept diplomats. He was old, wise and powerful. He had seen and heard everything.
Except the Archimage.
* * * *
The only persons known to visit the palace of the Archimage were the unspeakable childcatchers. One of these hairy brutes was seized at the First Lord’s command, roughly scoured and scented, clubbed to a semblance of civility and kicked into his audience chamber.
“I didn’t do it!” Zago the childcatcher screamed as he tumbled by accident into a properly prostrate mode.
“We’ve heard that—no!” Vendriel caught himself before Gnepox, latest aspirant to Flindorn’s place, could swing his manqueller; but that young man, gazing into the polished shield of a conveniently immobile guardsman while knotting various combinations of his muscles, had missed his cue. Although Flindorn had by now rotted so long in a common pit that not even the most skilled cosmeticians and perfumers could have made him presentable, Vendriel was of half a mind to reunite his head with his body and give him back his job.
He bade Zago rise. When apprehended he had worn only the codpiece affected by the second-lowest sort of wretch, which those charged with sanitizing him had immediately burned. Disinclined to waste clothes on a dead man, as any ordinary person who attracted the First Lord’s notice would likely soon become, they had thrust him naked into Vendriel’s presence. His shrinking stance couldn’t conceal a wolfish physique acquired from chasing urchins through the sewers and warrens of the Lower City, from battling rival childcatchers and the odd outraged parent. Vendriel wondered if he were skilled with a headsman’s sword, and Glittitia Fulnathooza was not the only courtling who marked an aspect of the nude ruffian that pleased her, or that might.
Vendriel the Good tried to put his subject at ease with one of his wan, terrifying smiles and said, “You have seen the Archimage, fellow?”
“No, Lord.”
“You have heard his voice?”
“No, Lord.”
“At his palace, have you seen—” Vendriel’s pale gaze whipped the court like sleet as he searched for anything like a smirk—“have you seen ... a cat? An orange cat?”
“Lord, I’ve never been inside his palace.”
“Then how do you transact your business with him?”
“I don’t, Lord. I scrape up unwanted spawn and shove them through the west gate of his garden. Those that survive come out the east gate as the sweetest-tempered things you’d ever want to see.”
“Our grasp of commerce is limited, but shouldn’t someone pay you to do this?”
“Yes, Lord, that’s the Lord Protector of Redundant Subjects, and if you want to interrogate a criminal, he’s the one you should go after, not—” The childcatcher correctly guessed why Vendriel’s lips became suddenly paler than his white skin and returned to the subject: “At the east gate I collect the ones with my brand and turn them over to the Lord Protector. He pays me, lord, if you want to call it that, though any fair man would call it sucking out my heart’s blood and spewing it in my face.”
“And what does he get out of it, the Archimage?”
“He eats their souls. Or so it’s said.”
Vendriel knew more about these matters than Zago ever could; he had less interest in the answers than in the manner of the man who gave them. He could use a terrorized dupe who dealt with the wizard in a scheme involving his own unique talent for disincorporating himself. It was a dangerous skill that he used sparingly, for he would misplace some of his substance each time he did it, but it might let him hear and see the only one of his subjects who could still rouse in him the dimmest glimmer of curiosity.
Forgetting that he continued to stare as he shaped his plan, he failed to observe that he was melting the childcatcher to a sniveling accumulation of tics. Zago believed that the necromancer was trying to see if he, too, could eat a soul, and that he was succeeding brilliantly.
Noticing the long silence at last, Vendriel said, “Do you believe that he eats their souls?”
“I—” Zago could no longer speak. He saw many slaves at the periphery of the court, gray among the noble peacocks. Dully awaiting orders, they looked as spiritless as the ones he collected from the Archimage. He meant to point them out, to suggest that the First Lord see for himself, but he could only jerk and flail like an idiot.
Vendriel grasped his meaning. “No, we wouldn’t keep his products about us. These are the honest dead.”
As if the court were one gorgeous jellyfish, it shrank in all its parts from contact with the slaves. The courtlings knew what the slaves were, but they hated being reminded. Those who served Vendriel the Good too well, whom he couldn’t bear to lose, could anticipate a dim sequel to their butterfly lives; those who served him poorly might earn the same reward sooner. Trying to strike the fine balance, as they told anyone who would listen, made their lives hell.
Vendriel raised his voice to address the court at large: “It was once the custom to send not only redundant children but also lazy servants and other criminals to be stultified. This custom fell into disuse under the Empire, when it was thought too lenient, and when the Archimage began to cloak himself more darkly in his private concerns. But that personage came forth in humble form to bask in the radiance of our coronation, suggesting a desire to take his place at our feet; and in the absence of any lenient punishments, justice lacks its most effective tool, the power to shock. We have therefore determined to renew the custom.”
Zago had experimented with breathing again during what seemed a typically boring speech, but its meaning at last trickled to his heart and stopped it. “No, Lord, please! What have I done? Maybe I deserve d
eath, but—”
“Not you, fool. You will have the honor of escorting the malefactor we select to the west gate of the Archimage’s garden—”
“Thank you, Lord!”
“—and through that gate. We wish you to deliver the offender personally with our message, and to observe closely what happens to him. Or her.”
Although Zago had bullied a wailing herd through that gate every week or so for a decade, each visit scared him more. To pass through the gate himself was a horror he faced only in nightmares, but this time he would not be able to scream himself awake.
Those urchins whose nightmares he himself haunted might have been gratified to see Zago faint.
* * * *
The childcatcher was not alone in his terror that morning, for the least of the First Lord’s skills was seeming to speak pointedly to each member of a crowd. Even some of the dead slaves had to be revived after he swirled his cloak about his lank frame and stalked from the hall. Every man knew he was the malefactor whose soul would be eaten; every woman deemed herself damned by his ictic addendum.
None believed this more strongly than Glittitia. Her lord’s normal coolness had grown glacial. He had called for her only three times in the weeks since her lapse with Flindorn, and then only to assist a new favorite in the most demeaning ways. Worse, whenever his new sword-bearer bungled an execution in more than usually ludicrous style, Vendriel would slide exasperated glances her way while ranting at Gnepox, as if impatient to reach her name on his long list.
But she was delighted with the sentence that had appalled everyone else, for it held the first hope she had dared entertain. She was a native of Sythiphore, with the ivory skin, almond eyes, black hair and general cast of features that led the Frothoin to boast they couldn’t tell one Sythiphoran from another. She was also an avid reader of Mopsard’s tales, and particularly loved the one about the princess who persuades her executioner to substitute the heart of a swineherd’s daughter for her own and bring it to her wicked stepmother. She chose not to dwell on the fate of the princess when she later meets the Three Vengeful Pigs of the tale’s title.
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