“Give it to me!”
Imid looked across at the Stentorian Nun. Their public debate had collapsed into a ruin of vicious insults which, while entertaining to the crowd, were otherwise worthless. One rather strange consequence of the exchange was that the nun’s clothing had become disheveled. Even her veil had begun to sag at one corner, revealing half of the hate-twisted mouth.
In which Imid now saw pointy teeth. He stabbed out an accusatory finger. “She’s got filed teeth! She wants my baby! She’s a cannibal!”
Mobs were unpredictable beasts, particularly after a night of unspeakable trauma. Among this one could be found mothers who had lost their young ones to the Temple, to nuns just like this one. With her hungry snarl and shark-like teeth. The shouted proclamation from Imid Factallo required a moment of stunned silence in which to do its work, time sufficient for various terrible details to fall in line.
Then-screams, a surge of vengeful humanity, grasping hands, ugly animal sounds.
The nun bleated and made to flee.
She did not get far.
A horrifying scene ensued, Imid Factallo’s witnessing thereof cut short when Elas Sil used both hands to pull him away, round to the other side of the altar, then stumbling onward towards the temple doors. Seeing their destination, Imid pulled back. “No! Not in there!”
“You idiot!” Elas Sil hissed. “Those teeth weren’t filed! They were rotten! Just stumps! That woman slurps her meals, Imid! Understand me?”
He looked back, and saw very little left of the Stentorian Nun. “I could have sworn they were pointed-”
“They weren’t!”
“Then… baby soup!”
“Oh now, really!” They approached the doors, and Elas Sil added, “Mind you, what a great way to close a debate. I’ll have to remember that one.”
“They looked pretty pointy to me,” Imid persisted in a grumble.
Elas Sil grasped the iron ring and tugged.
To their surprise the door swung open. They peered into the gloom. An empty chamber, longer than it was wide, the ceiling arched and sheathed in gold leaf, and no one about.
“Where is everyone?” Imid wondered in a whisper.
“Let’s find out,” Elas Sil said.
They crept into the Grand Temple.
King Necrotus The Nihile was feeling decidedly unwell. For one, his left arm had fallen off. And he’d found bats nesting in his crotch. They’d fled, thankfully, some time during his frenetic dancing on the wall. Even so, the little claws from which they had hung were sharp, and now that brittle sensation raced through his withered flesh, sensation so painfully reawakened, he found certain parts aching abominably.
Stumbling over his own arm was an unexpected development. One moment swinging amiably at his side, the next fouling his feet, resulting in a face-flat fall that broke something in his jaw, where things now rattled loose whenever he turned his head. All of this in consequence to his panicked flight from that mob, a mob that had been perniciously hunting down the dead and tearing them apart. Base prejudices hid beneath even the most placid of surfaces, which came as little surprise to the king known as the Nihile, but had proved inconvenient nonetheless.
And now he was lost. In his own city. Hopelessly lost.
There were no burning buildings nearby, and so he stumbled along in darkness, left arm tucked under his right (the Royal Seamstress could do wonders, assuming she still lived), in search of a familiar landmark.
Unexpected, therefore, the strange transformation of the street he walked down, the sudden swirling of mists, the leaden smear of sky, and the massive arched gate appearing at the far end, a gate composed entirely of bones, from which a hunched, scrawny figure hobbled into view.
Necrotus halted twenty paces from the figure, who also stopped, leaning heavily on a gnarled cane. The figure then lifted a skeletal hand, and beckoned.
Overwhelming compulsion tugged at Necrotus and he found himself slowly drawn forward. “Who are you?” he hissed.
Hooded head cocked to one side. “The Lord of Death? Harvester of Souls? The Bony Fisherman who casts his all-encompassing net?” A sigh. “No, just one of his minions. Have I not great potential? I keep saying so, but does he ever listen? No, never. I keep the path swept clean, don’t I? Polish the skulls of the Gate, yes? Look at them-blinding, even the teeth are entirely devoid of tartar! I am no slouch, no sir, not in the least!”
Necrotus struggled to escape, yet watched, in horror, as his feet were dragged forward, one then the other, again and again, closer to that dread gate. “No! I’ve been raised! You can’t have me!”
The minion grunted. “Korbal Broach. One abominable act after another, oh we despise him, yes we do. Despise and more, for I am tasked to pursue him. To capture him. That must mean something! Great potential, and so I must prove my worth. I have gathered a legion-all of Korbal Broach’s victims-and we will find him, oh yes, find him!”
“Go away!” Necrotus cried.
The minion started. “What?”
“Go away! I hate you! I’m not going through that infernal gate!”
In a small voice, “You… hate me?”
“Yes!”
“But what have I ever done to you?”
“You’re compelling me to walk through that gate!”
“Don’t blame me about that! I am only doing my job. It’s nothing personal-”
“Of course it’s personal, you scrawny idiot!”
“Oh, you’re all the same! I drag you out of your miserable existence, and are you ever grateful? No, not once! You and your precious beliefs, your host of conceits and pointless faiths! Your elaborate self-delusions seeking to cheat the inevitable. And you hate me? No, I hate you! All of you!” With that the minion spun round and hobbled stiffly back through the gate.
There was a loud slam and the scene in front of Necrotus dissolved, revealing the slightly more familiar street of Quaint he had been stumbling down earlier. He stared about, bewildered. “He… he didn’t want me!” Well, that was good, wasn’t it? Then why did he feel so… offended?
King Necrotus the Nihile resumed walking. He still needed to find out precisely where he was.
A double thump at his feet. He halted and stared down. Two arms were lying on the cobbles. “Shit.”
Then his head rolled off, left temple crunching hard on the stones, his vision tumbling wildly.
Oh, this was not going well at all.
Bauchelain had climbed into the apparatus, deftly ducking rocking levers and edging round ratcheting gears until he was next to King Macrotus.
Standing near the spilled supper left on the floor by the servant, Emancipor Reese watched with reluctant admiration. The necromancer was not one for exercise, yet remained lean and lithe, ever in fighting form on those rare occasions when sorcery, guile, deceit and back-stabbing failed. Physically, he looked to be about sixty, albeit a fit sixty, yet he moved with a dancer’s grace. The result of good living? Possibly. More likely alchemy.
“Well, Master?” the manservant called. “How many days, do you think?”
Bauchelain leaned forward for a closer examination. “At least two weeks,” he said. “I believe his heart burst. Sudden and indeed catastrophic.” The necromancer glanced back. “How did you know?”
Emancipor shrugged. “He wasn’t eating.”
Bauchelain made his way back. “Proponents of vigorous exercise are mostly unaware,” the sorceror said, “that exercise as a notion, discrete from labour, is a gift of civilisation, derived from tiered social status and the leisure time thus afforded. True laborers care nothing for exercise, naturally.” He stepped cleared of the clanking, wheezing apparatus, paused to brush dust from his cloak. “Accordingly, one salient fact that laborers well know, but appears to be lost on those who fanatically exercise, is that the body, its organs, its muscles and its bones, will inevitably wear out. I believe, Mister Reese, that, for example, there are a set number of beats of which a heart is capable. In similar manner all muscles and bones and other organs are allotted a specific limit to their functioning.” He gestured grandly back at the laboring corpse of King Macrotus the Overwhelmingly Considerate. “To hasten one’s own body to those limits is, to my mind, the highest folly.”