Behind the brocaded hangings of the guarded portal lay a suite whose walls were hung with mystic purple. Here a bizarre tableau unfolded.
In a translucent sarcophagus of alabaster, the long lay as if in deepest slumber. His gross body was unclothed. Even in the slackness of repose, his form testified to a life besmirched with vicious self-indulgence. His skin was blotched; his moist lips sagged; and his eyes were deeply pouched. Above the edge of the coffin bulged bis bloated paunch, obscene and toadlike.
Suspended by her ankles, a naked twelve-year-old girl hung head down above the open casket. Her tender flesh bore the marks of instruments of torture. These instruments now lay among the glowing embers in a copper brazier that stood before a thronelike chair of sable iron, inlaid with cryptic sigils wrought in softly glowing silver.
The girl’s throat had been neatly cut, and now bright blood ran down her inverted face and be-drabbed her ash-blond hair. The casket beneath the corpse was awash with steaming blood, and in this scarlet bath the coipulent body of King Numedides lay partially immersed.
Set in a precise ellipse around the sarcophagus, to illuminate its contents, stood nineteen massive candles, each as tall as a half-grown boy. These candles had been fashioned, so rumor ran among the palace servants, of tallow stripped from human cadavers. But none knew whence they came.
Upon the black iron throne brooded Thulandra Thuu, a slender man of ascetic build and, seemingly, of middle years. His hair, bound by a fillet of ruddy gold, wrought in the likeness of a wreath of intertwining serpents, was silver gray; and serpentine were his cold, thick-lidded eyes. His mein declared him a philosopher, but his unwinking stare bespoke the zealot
The bones of his narrow face seemed molded by a sculptor. His skin was dark as teakwood; and from time to time he moistened his thin lips with a darting, pointed tongue. His spare torso was confined by an ample length of mulberry brocade, wrapped round and round and draped across one shoulder, leaving the other bare and exposing to view both of his scrawny arms.
At intervals he raised his eyes from the ancient, python-bound tome that lay upon his lap to stare thoughtfully into the alabaster casket, wherein the bloated body of King Numedides rested in its bath of virgin’s blood. Then, frowning, he would again return to the pages of his book. The parchment of this monstrous volume was inscribed in a spidery hand in a language unknown to scholars of the West. Row upon row of hooked and cursive characters marched down the page in columns. And many of the glyphs were writ in inks of emerald, amethyst, and vermillion, unfaded by the passage of the years.
A water clock of gold and crystal, set on a nearby taboret, chimed with a silvery tinkle. Thulandra Thuu once more looked deep into the casket. The tight-lipped expression on his dark visage bore wordless testimony to the failure of his undertaking. The rich red bath of blood was darkening; the surface became dull with scum as vitality faded from the cooling fluid.
Abruptly the sorcerer rose and, with an angry gesture of frustration, hurled the book aside. It struck the hangings on the wall and fell open, face down upon the marble floor. Had anyone been present to study the inscription on the spine and understand its cryptic signary, he would have discovered that this arcane volume was entitled: The Secrets of Immortality, According to Guchupta of Shambalkih.
Awakened from his hypnotic trance. King Numedides clambered out of the sarcophagus and stepped into a tub of flower-scented water. He wiped his coarse features with a thirsty towel while Thulandra Thuu sponged the blood from his heavy body. The sorcerer would allow no one, not even the king’s tiring men, into his oratory during his magical operations; therefore he must himself attend to the cleansing and tiring of the monarch. The king stared into the brooding, hooded eyes of the magician.
‘Well?” demanded Numedides hoarsely. ‘What were the results? Did the signum vitalis enter my body when drained from that little brat?”
“Some, great king,” replied Thulandra Thuu in a toneless, staccato voice. “Some—but not enough.”
Numedides grunted, scratching a hairy paunch with an unpared fingernail. The thick, curly hair of his belly, like that of his short beard, was rusty red, fading into gray. “Well, shall we continue, then? Aquilonia has many girls whose men would never dare report their loss, and my agents are adept.”
“Allow me to consider, O King. I must consult the scroll of Amendarath to make certain that my partial failure lies not in an adverse conjunction or opposition of the planets. And I fain would cast your horoscope again. The stars foretoken ominous times.”
The king, who had struggled into a scarlet robe, picked up a beaker of empurpled wine, upon which floated the crimson buds of poppies, and downed the exotic drink.
“I know, I know,” he growled. “Troubles flaring at the border, plots afoot in half the noble houses… . But fear not, my trepidations thaumaturge! This royal house has lasted long and will survive long after you are dust.”
The king’s eyes glazed and a small smile played at the comers of his mouth as he muttered: “Dust—dust —all is dust. All save Numedides.” Then seeming to recover himself, he demanded irritably: “Can you not give answer to my question? Would you have another girl-child for your experiments?”
“Aye, O King,” replied Thulandra Thuu after a moment of reflection. “I have bethought me of a refinement in the procedure that, I am convinced, will bring us to our goal.”
The king grinned broadly and thumped a hairy hand against the sorcerer’s lean back. The unexpected blow staggered the slender mage. A flicker of anger danced across the alchemist’s dark features and was instantly extinguished, as by an unseen hand.
"Good, sir magician!” roared Numedides. “Make me immortal to rule forever this fair land, and I will give you a treasury of gold. Already I feel the stirrings of divinity—albeit I will not yet proclaim my the-ophany to my steadfast and devoted subjects."
'‘But Majesty!” said the startled sorcerer, recovering his composure. “The country’s plight is of more moment than you appear to know. The people grow restless. There are signs of insurrection from the south and from the sea. I understand not— '’
The king waved him aside. “I’ve put down treasonous rascals oft ere this, and I shall counter them again."
What the king dismissed as trifling inconveniences were, in truth, matters worthy of a monarch’s grave concern. More than one revolt simmered along the western borders of Aquilonia, where the land was rent asunder by wars and rivalries among the petty barons. The populace groaned beneath their ruler’s obduracy and cried out for relief from oppressive taxation and monstrous maltreatment by agents of the king. But the worries of the common folk concerned their monarch little; he turned a deaf ear to their cries.
Yet Numedides was not so wedded to his peculiar pleasures that he failed to mark the findings of his spies, collected for him by his able minister, Vibius Latro. The chancellor reported rumors of no less a leader of the commons than the rich and powerful Count Trocero of Poitain. Trocero was no man idly to be dismissed—not with his peerless force of armored cavalry and a warlike, fiercely loyal people ready to rise at his beckoning.
“Trocero,” moused the king, “must be destroyed, it’s true; but he’s too strong for open confrontation. We must needs seek out a skillful poisoner… . Meanwhile, my faithful, hard-fisted Amulius Procas is stationed in the southern border region. He has crushed more than one arrogant landowner who dared turn revolutionary.”
Inscrutable were the cold black eyes of Thulandra Thuu. “Omens of danger overwhelming to your general I read upon the face of heaven. We must concern ourselves—”
Numedides ceased to listen. His trancelike slumber, together with the stimulus of the poppied wine, had flogged his sensual appetite. His harem newly housed a delectable, full-breasted Kushite girl, and a torture—yet unnamed—was forming in his twisted brain.