"Good thinking. No wonder you're the leader."
When she unpinned her vestments and dropped them to pool around her feet, he saw that her god had scarred portions of her body as well as her face, but those marks didn't repel him either. In fact, he kissed them with a special fervor.
Each gripping one of her arms, the two blood orcs marched Tammith toward the doorway, and she offered no resistance. Perhaps she'd used up her capacity for defiance seeking to protect Yuldra, or maybe it was simply that she realized the two gray-skinned warriors with their swinish tusks were on their guard. She had little hope of breaking away and wouldn't know which way to run if she did.
The spacious vault beyond the door proved to be a necromancer's conjuring chamber lit, like the rest of the catacombs, by everburning torches burning with cold greenish flame. Though Tammith had never seen such a place before, the complex designs chalked on the floor, the shelves of bottled liquids and jars of powders, the racks of staves and wands, and the scent of bitter incense overlying the stink of decay were familiar to her from stories.
Two Red Wizards currently occupied the room, along with half a dozen zombies. A couple of the latter shuffled forward and reached out to collect Tammith.
The gods had been cruel to make her believe that she might still have Bareris and freedom only to snatch them away. Her spirit had nearly shattered then, and she still didn't understand why it hadn't. Perhaps it was the knowledge that her love had escaped. He could still have a life even if she couldn't.
In any case, she hadn't yet succumbed to utter crippling terror and had vowed to meet her end, whatever it proved to be, with as much bravery as she could muster. Still, the prospect of the enduring the touch of the zombies' cold, slimy fingers, of inhaling the fetor of their rotten bodies close up, filled her with revulsion.
"Please!" she said. "You don't need those creatures to hold me. I know I can't get away."
The Red Wizards ignored her plea, and the zombies, with their slack mouths and empty eyes, trudged a step closer, but then a voice spoke from overhead.
"That sounds all right. Just position a couple of the zombies to block the exit, in case she's not as sensible as she seems."
Tammith looked up and observed the loft above the chamber for the first time. The giant zombie was there and its master, too. A number of round lenses attached to a branching metal framework hung before the fetus-thing like apples on a tree. From her vantage point, the effect was to break his body into distorted sections and make it even more hideous, if such a thing was possible.
Since the creature had decreed that she was to come to him, she'd expected to encounter him wherever she ended up. Still, the actual sight of him dried her mouth and made her shudder. How could anything so resemble a baby yet look so ghastly and radiate such a palpable feeling of malevolence? She struggled again to cling to what remained of her courage.
She didn't hear either of the Red Wizards give a verbal command or notice a hand signal either, but the zombies stopped advancing as the fetus-thing had indicated they should. The orcs looked to one of the necromancers, and he waved a hairless, tattooed hand in dismissal. The guards wasted no time departing, as if even they found the chamber a disturbing place.
Tammith forced herself to gaze up at the baby-thing without flinching. "Thank you for that anyway. I'm tired of being manhandled."
"And corpse-handled is even worse, I imagine." The creature smirked at its own feeble play on words. "Think nothing of it. This could be the beginning of a long and fruitful association, and we might as well start off in a friendly sort of way. My name is Xingax. What's yours?"
She told him. " 'A long and fruitful association?' Then… you don't mean to kill me?"
"Actually, I do, but death needn't be the end of an entity's existence. Lucky for me! Otherwise I wouldn't have fared very well after my mother's cuckold husband tore me from the womb."
"I… I won't be one of those." She gestured to indicate the zombies. "I'll make your servants tear me to pieces first."
Xingax chuckled. "Do you imagine I'd have no use for the fragments? If so, you're mistaken, but please, calm yourself. I don't intend to turn you into a zombie. You have a much more interesting opportunity in store.
"You've seen enough," continued the fetus-thing, "to discern what this place is: an undead manufactory. Given sufficient resources, we'd create only powerful, sentient specimens, since those are the most useful for our purposes. Alas, the reality is that it takes considerably more magic to evoke a ghost or something similar than it does to make a mindless automaton like my giant or my helpers' helpers.
"So we function as we best we can, given our limitations. Many of the slaves who come here end up as zombies or at best ghouls. Others go to feed newly created undead in need of such sustenance, and afterward we animate their skeletons. Only a relative few have the chance to attain a more advanced state of being."
Tammith shook her head. "I can tell you think that's a boon. Why would you offer it to me when I've raised my hand to your servants more than once?"
"For that very reason. You have a boldness we can put to good use. Assuming the transformation takes. That's the other thing I should explain. I recreate types of undead that became extinct long ago and breed others altogether new. It's a part of my mandate, and more than that, my passion. My art. The closest I'll ever come to fatherhood. The problem is that we have to refine the magic by trial and error, and well, obviously, it isn't right until it's right."
She imagined what might befall a captive when the magic was still wrong. She pictured herself shrieking in endless anguish, her body mangled like an apprentice potter's first botched attempt at shaping a vessel on the wheel. Hard on that image came the realization that she'd been a fool to cringe from the prospect of becoming a zombie. It was the best fate that could befall her. Her body would remain a thrall but her soul would fly free to await Bareris in the afterlife.
She lunged at the nearer of the Red Wizards. He had a dagger with a curved blade sheathed on his belt. She'd snatch it, slash the artery in the side of her neck, and all fear and misery would spurt away with her blood.
The necromancer had obviously been waiting for her to attempt some sort of violence. He barked a word she didn't understand, swept his left hand through a mystic figure, and black motes swirled around it to form a spiral.
The flecks of darkness didn't hurt her, but they fascinated her. She had no choice but to pause and stare at them, even though a part of her, now disconnected from her will, screamed that she mustn't.
The wizard stepped back and the zombies shambled forward, closing in on her. Their clammy hands grabbed her and held tight. The spiral faded, allowing her to struggle, but writhe as she might, she couldn't break free, and when she stamped on her captors' feet, snapped her head backward to bash a zombie's jaw, and even sank her teeth into spongy, putrid flesh, it didn't matter. Since the creatures didn't feel pain, the punishment couldn't make them fumble their grips.
"I rather expected that," said Xingax, "but it's still a shame. You were doing so well."
"Shall I subdue her?" asked the mage with the dagger.
"I suppose it would be best," Xingax replied.
The Red Wizard extracted a pewter vial from a hidden pocket in his robe, and holding it at arm's length, he uncorked it. He then moved to stick it under Tammith's nose. She strained to twist her face away, but with the zombies immobilizing her, it was futile.
The fumes had a nasty metallic tang she tasted as well as smelled. Her limbs went slack, and wouldn't so much as twitch no matter how she struggled. She might as well have been asleep.
"Put her in the pentacle," Xingax said.