The Necrosopher’s Apprentice

by Lilith Hope Milam

Facing the contraption, she disengaged the vacuum pump and waited for it to die down. Once it no longer wheezed and chugged, she was able to pull the catheters out of the elf's abdomen. Holding a jar underneath the tubes, she put everything to the side.

  Rolling the machine over towards the next dead elf, she then wound its clockwork pumps to begin another extraction.

  Gansel had been working for the Assembly now for almost a month. Her days had soon become standard. Sweeping the lab in the morning, then inspecting and preparing the equipment, and moving the extractor from one body to the next when it chimed its completion.

  There was a new set of corpses every day. She never saw whence they came from or to where the empty ones went. She was too terrified of Sharpe to inquire.

  She stooped to change out the jars in the machine. An almost opaque odor of cut grass poured out of the jars as she removed them. She wondered what people thought of the building when they passed it. How long had it been here? Why hadn’t anyone noticed or mentioned it in the city? True, the signs outside were a deterrent, but crossing the Assembly was likely an even greater reason to feign ignorance.

  When the corpses came in, they were always dry and bore the same holes in the stomach as the first dead elf she saw months ago in the alley. She realized that Sharpe hadn’t come by in response to strange reports that day. He had been searching for that elf.

  ‘That's when he saw what I could do’, she thought, cursing her luck that day. ‘Why did it have to be me that found that elf? It couldn’t have been some other idiot who would have at least passed out from the smell of elf blood?’

  She looked at the elf's naked form in front of her and slid the catheters into the gaping holes in its abdomen, stuffing some cotton around the tubes. Her job was to pump out what little blood remained in the corpses and prepare both the corpses and their blood to be transported somewhere else.

  She managed around thirty to forty jars a day, depending on the workload. She was thankful that all she had to do was exsanguinate the corpses. She dreaded to think about how they ended up this way, to begin with. Although, she wondered, was it really blood she was removing?

  It wasn’t blood like she’d ever seen before. This was thin, white, and sticky on her fingers, like sugared milk.

  ‘Just do the job so they make Mama get better,’ she reminded herself.

  She couldn't remember what she had imagined elves to look like when her mother told the tales of the elf wars fought in the last age, but she never expected something grass green and neuter smooth. No nipples, not even a navel!

  She had no problems working with dead things, but even now she twitched her shoulders and shivered, setting up her apparatus at the next table. She felt awkward and exposed all the time around Sharpe. He was always there, always a wrong move or a whisper away.

  Although he had broken her mother and intimidated her into working for him, she supposed she should consider herself lucky that he hadn’t insinuated something worse. She heard stories from Mama of worse things happening to Assembly wives and daughters.

  She knew he was dangerous and she didn’t want to find out how far he was willing to go to make sure she did what he wanted. She faced the fact that until she could figure a way out of this mess, she would have to do her best at whatever tasks Sharpe required.

  She only hoped that he was a man of his word. She had no way to know until it was over.

  She wiped the sweat off her brow and fanned herself, it was so hot in here! It would get hotter still though as the summer months drew out.

  What were elves? The Assembly called them inhuman, abominations. But they said that about anything that wasn’t ‘Of the Pure Human Spirit’ and it didn’t help anyone, much less herself, understand what they were.

  She looked at the elf’s green skin. There were no veins. The skin was slightly translucent, like the lobe of a succulent plant.

  “Are they actually plants?” she said with wonder, uncertain of herself. They couldn’t be!

  “Aye,” said the Primus over her shoulder, unimpressed. She gasped out loud, she hadn’t heard him creep up behind her!

  He continued, “Thousands of them live in the south, wretched things. Once you’re done draining this batch, we’ll be done with the day’s bleeding. It’s time for you to find out what makes them work.”

  “What do you mean? Work how?” She peered up at him as she was pressing into the elf’s skin.

  He smiled his creepy smile at her and reached over to stick his blade into the head. There was a minor resistance as the tip pierced a fibrous layer, “No brain.”

  Stretching down, he stuck it where a human’s lungs would be, in the side of its chest, “No heart.”

  He cleaned his blade off and stuck it back into his robes. “No blood like ours. Yet they think and move like us. Why? How?”

  But she wasn’t listening to him. He watched her poking around the elf’s chest. Running her fingers along what should be the sternum. “I thought I saw something when you stabbed it…”

  She pushed down on its smooth, featureless chest. A split opened down the center, like the white of a hard-boiled egg when pressed too hard. She didn’t think it was possible, but the odor of cut hay was even stronger now.

  She muttered to herself and pushed her fingers into the split. Something was in there! It was slick but had a rough, firm texture. She had to get her hand in deeper if she wanted to pull it out. She put her weight on her shoulder and held her elbow, trying to force her hand in further. She kept her fingers together and gave another push. It shifted! No. It shuddered.

  Sharpe watched from behind his mask, revolted. She was able to get her hand around most of whatever it was. Gripping it tightly, she pulled, hard. She could feel strands of wet fibers snap as she tugged on the solid, almost spherical thing. Finally, her hand came free!

  Pinching it between thumb and forefinger, she held the object up towards the overhead oil lamp. It was brown and glistening. Its surface was wrinkled with whorls like a thumbprint and hundreds of tiny fibers clung to it. It reminded her of a giant peach pit, but with green veins.

  And for just a moment, it throbbed in her grip like a living heart.

  Her own heart skipped a beat. Was it alive?

  Sharpe held out a white enameled tray and she quickly dropped it in, revulsion making the skin on the back of her neck prickle with fear.

  “What in darkness is that thing?” she asked.

  He stared in wonder at her prize. “A seed?”

  She poked at in the lamplight. It shuddered once more and went still. How could it still be alive? Or was this a response like when you cut a chicken’s head off? Disgusted, but curious, she wiped her hands on her apron. What had she done?

  “How long has this elf been dead?”

  Sharpe stood and picked up the seed in his gloved hands. He examined it closely in the light. “A week. Maybe two. You concerned about it? Might as well be concerned for your favorite houseplant.”

  He looked at her coldly, calculations whirring behind his dark eyes “A new task for you, love.” Holding up the seed to her he said, “We need to know if there are more of these in the rest of them.”

  He placed the seed into a specimen jar, took a long saw off the wall over the workbench, tossing it on top of the now gaping corpse. “Get to work! Search the rest of them. Every single inch of them. Who knows what we’ll find.”

  She reached out for the saw, her hand hesitated. Searching that chest cavity had been almost automatic, she had only put her hand inside an existing orifice. Now she was to cut them up?

  She looked up at Sharpe, ready to argue. He was staring down at her, malice etched into his face. “Get to work girl. Earn your keep or our houseplant here won’t be the only one on the block tonight.”

  She swallowed and picked up the saw. Her heart raced as she put the toothed edge on its wrist. Sharpe chuckled. “No girl,” he corrected, “up here!”

  He grasped her hand and guided the saw to the cen
ter of the elf’s face. She looked at where the saw now lay and on either side murky, black eyes stared vacantly back at her.

  “Right there.” Sharpe laughed aloud as a tear escaped Gansel's eye, mocking her emotion.

  “Get cutting! When you're done with this one, you’ve still got the other twenty-nine to finish before you’re off duty.”

  Hours later, exhausted, she stumbled out of the warehouse towards her new lodgings. The cobblestones were slick with dew and the sun peeked over the eastern wall of the city. She squinted, pulling her hood over her head. Trembling with self-loathing, she wanted to hide from the rest of the world. Even though she had scrubbed her hands with soap and sand, her fingers still felt sticky from hours of picking through the white elf blood.

  The feeling reminded her of bringing in seasoned pine logs for the fire at home, her hands tacky from the sap that seeped along the edges of the old wood.

  That made a kind of sense, she thought desperately if they were plants, then that wasn’t actually blood. It couldn’t really be blood. Because blood was for sentient beings. It was for humans. Right? These weren’t humans. They couldn’t be alive as her. She clutched at her heart pounding denial in her chest.

  "Don’t lie to yourself, Ganny. You start picking and choosing who's alive and who’s not, you’ll wind up no better than the Assembly."

  She felt vile. She shuddered and closed her eyes to steady herself, but when she did, images of the dead elves filled her mind. It didn’t matter it if they were plants or not, they had been people, no matter what the Assembly and Sharpe thought.

  She stared at her hands as she walked over the bridge to the apartment the Assembly had set aside for her. Her fingers were tingling in the warmth of the sunlight. Wait. Not only her fingers, but her lips felt odd too. Like they were numb, thick and drooping on her face. This wasn’t good. A memory from sometime in the long, miserable night blinked to the front of her mind. Something she had done recently and forgotten for some reason.

  She placed her hand against the outside of her apron and could feel something large and round in the pocket.

  Nervous, she ran the rest of the way home, slammed and locked the door behind her. Her heart was racing and the flat she had been staying in for the past month felt unwelcoming, foreign. She leaned against the door and tried to catch her breath, but her heart refused to slow.

  She put her hand inside the apron pocket and closed her fingers around a seed she had extracted from one of the last elves she necropsied. It was still slick and had thin hair like roots sticking out all over.

  She had a hard time remembering the exact moment that she took the seed.

  Why had she taken it?.

  She remembered having her hand deep inside the dead elf’s chest, sliding around where a human’s heart would be. Her fingers tingled as she grasped the seed and tore it out.

  But, before she dropped this seed into the sample tray, Sharpe had excused himself for the day and told her to store the samples for processing. But as she stood there, holding the seed in her bare hands, she felt strange. Her mind drifted and she could hear herself distantly acknowledge the Primus’ instructions and the door closing behind him.

  As if in a daze, she put the seed into her pocket and just like a dream that you forget as soon as you wake up, the memory disappeared. Only to pop into her head as she walked home.

  Her head felt strange. Full and buzzing. A numbness that she felt on her lips and spreading into her skull.

  She sat and put her head down on the table. It didn’t help her feel better. Everything she touched felt too soft, giving beneath her weight like a poached egg.

  Resting the side of her head on the buoyant tabletop, she watched as the wood paneling on the walls of the house distended and melted to the floor.

  They spread out and pooled, then began to reshape themselves into roots that dug deep into the soil all around her. They spread wide and far, covering everything. What remained of the walls stretched up and extended their branches into the deep blue of a night sky.

  A thick forest stood all around her and glowing nebulae filled the sky.

  Its light shone down and wove around the branches.

  Leaves sprouted.

  Flowers budded.

  Blossomed.

  She could feel every tree around her.

  They were alive inside her heart, her mind.

  A massive oak turned its attention on her.

  It was as big as the Assembly temple.

  Its shadow covered everything around her and it knew her.

  It saw her.

  She could feel it looking at everything she had done today.

  Yesterday.

  Everything.

  “No! Don’t look at me!” she whimpered aloud to herself.

  She wanted to hide and cover her shame.

  “Don’t look there!”

  She felt naked and afraid.

  The tree saw deep into her.

  She felt every one of her fears brought to light.

  Every guilty and irrational thought exposed and observed.

  “I hurt Momma. I hurt everyone at school! I’m responsible! If it hadn’t been for me, they’d be fine!”

  But, every time her guilt rose, the tree would only observe it.

  She felt it acknowledge the shame’s existence, without judgment.

  Then let it go.

  Nothing more.

  She could feel it shift its awareness within her as if to say, “This happened and nothing more.”

  Tears streamed down her face.

  She was known by the tree.

  The sun sped over the forest as she sat on the soft mossy ground.

  Day bled into night into day.

  But, the sun.

  Was it going backward?

  Lytule and Grutule, the red moon and planet that filled the night sky, streaked through the stars with the sun in pursuit until only a blurred band of red and white crossed above her.

  The glowing sky dimmed and she stared into the darkness.

  ‘Watch.’ said the tree, ‘You need to see.’

  She had heard that voice before.

  The sky was blacker than the longest Winterdark.

  The forest was swallowed up in gloom.

  She was wrong.

  The forest had disappeared!

  She could only sense the tree in her mind and a vast empty plain all around.

  The world was void of everything but the dark, the tree, and her.

  Standing there. Waiting with no moons or sun above her, nothing.

  There! Eight pinpoints of light winked into existence.

  They hung in the darkness, the corners of an octagon.

  They grew.

  Colors began to flow out from around each light, glowing and mixing as they spread across the sky.

  They settled as the lights hung over the horizon.

  The nebulae had returned and she could see the outline of mountains off in the distance to the north.

  One of the lights fell towards the mountains, a halo of rainbow-colored light domed up from where it disappeared behind the peaks.

  A flash of light burst from where it struck and she felt the earth shudder.

  As though rock had struck the surface of a pond, red magma spouted into the sky.

  Another light fell to the east, she saw it descend over a large lake.

  When it plunged into the surface, a plume of water and steam shot up like a mushroom.

  The wind swept across the land and the shock wave obscured the air as it blew dirt and grit in her face.

  Once the wind and dust settled, she heard the tree once more, ‘Look up.’

  She lifted her eyes up to the heavens and saw another star, this one hung above where she sat.

  Growing larger and brighter.

  The star expanded.

  But the light had gone, the brightness replaced.

  Instead, it was a mass of glowing, writhing, reflecting tentacles.

&nb
sp; She thought for a moment that it looked like an enormous flower.

  ‘Here we come,’ she heard in her mind.

  The air grew heavy as the weight and force of whatever was coming drew closer.

  Her vision filled with its luminosity.

  The air was too thick to breathe and she clutched her throat, her eyelids squinting shut against the glare.

  She was blind and everything vibrated with the light’s presence.

  She felt pressed down to the ground.

  Suddenly everything flew up and away.

  Or had she fallen?

  She hadn’t seen where it had disappeared to but was thankful it was gone.

  Her eyes adjusted to the shuttered morning glow. She was back in her house! Her head felt strange like she had been wearing a sack and someone had yanked it off. She could breathe freely again, deeply, and everything looked different, brighter, sharper. As if her eyes had been filthy and wiped clean like an old window.

  What had happened? Where had all of that come from? She felt a tingle run up her neck and the tree spoke inside her with the voice of a young girl.

  ‘Keep listening, Branch. You need to find and save the Root. Together, you will seek out and restore the Crown.’

  Gansel stood up and spun around, this wasn’t some dream, “Who are you?”

  ‘I am Fulang. Find the Root, find Us.’

  Darkness welled up all around her.

  Swallowing up everything she saw.

  No, not up.

  She was falling again.

  Down into the dark of the world.

  Her shoulder took the brunt of her fall and she opened her eyes, looking up to see the chair she had been sitting on. She lay still, rested her head on the floor as her mind reoriented itself, and saw the large elf seed laying on the boards in front of her.

  Reaching out with shaking fingers, she touched the seed. Warmth stilled her shivering. It felt… happy.

  20

  A hollow gong reverberated in his head as his face hit the floor. He was instantly awake but stunned and struggled to breathe through the pain. He could feel the sackcloth hood scratching against his batlike nose but could see nothing out of his good eye. He grunted and struggled enough for his captors to put a boot on the back of his neck. A sword point was at his throat.