Thy Servant, Death
Scott J. Couturier
It was whispered by those of the court that the two had been down in the catacombs, offering joint sacrifice, but what occurred—how and why the prince was slain—went unknown beyond nebulous speculation. All particulars eluded common concurrence: there were many theories. The people of the well-to-do towns and the nomads of the plains and the folk of the bog villages all had their own versions of the telling, some fabulous and grotesque, some scandalous and shameful, some humorous, even bawdily comedic.
In certain regions it was averred the king had killed his sole heir for losing his best hound in a hunt, casting him to the bloodthirsty pack as penance. Others whispered there had been a foiled coup, the prince seeking to depose his aged father, who had already reigned for forty-three years. Others still said it had all been an accident, an arrow fired awry or wounded beast flushed too suddenly from the undergrowth. None, of course, knew the truth.
Only the king of Aoravia knew—and briefly his Queen, hastened to her deathbed in a month’s time by the knowledge.
He was old now indeed, the prince his solitary offspring, destined to occupy the porphyritic throne once his father joined the Revered Pantheon of Ancestors. But now there would be no inheritance, no gentle succession of the sapphire-gilt crown.
A sense of dark, ever-more-restless expectation brooded over the countryside as the king’s health grew yearly more dire. His subjects barricaded themselves indoors at night, lighting warding fires, as bands of ruffians marshaled in the hills, waiting to sweep down on Aoravia as soon as her sovereign breathed his last. It was many hundred years since that fair country was sacked, decades since her armies saw concerted military action beyond the banalities of pomp and parade. A swollen kingdom, ripe for the picking: all that remained was for her sovereign, heirless, to die.
The king knew all of this well. Fretful and cross in his dotage, frail in both body and spirit, twice daily he went tottering to the shrines of his ancestors, the great and terrible kings of his race, to offer up a sacrifice of fat and spices. His cracked voice would raise in orison: intoning prayers to each long-dead sire, he begged that Aoravia be spared at his death, also pleading for some diversion to distract him from the doom hovering ever-nearer over his lands, his subjects, his own soul.
Early in the year—yet winter—the necromancer came to court.
She wore black figure-mummifying robes, making it impossible to see her face or make out the slightest particulars of her physique; only her voice betrayed her sex. Emerging by night out of the Southern Wastelands, where no good thing grows, she presented herself before the king, bowing and introducing herself as Oola-Saggath of the Midnight Sisterhood.
“I come bearing a gift,” she said, in muffled portentous tones, “a boon to distract the king in his time of darkest, bleakest need. For the god which I serve has heard his prayer, and offers reprieve.”
Swaying on his throne, king frowned. Not long past he would have ordered a necromancer—or any practitioner of the magical arts—put to an instant, zealous death. However, after murdering his son by his own hand he’d sought out the services of every witch, sorcerer, hedge-wizard, diviner, shaman, soothsayer, necromancer, and seer within a thousand leagues, inviting them to come test their obscure rites on the prince’s corpse. His perverse summons evoked dismay in the people of Aoravia, taken as portent of the kingdom’s inevitable fall.
Still, many nursed hope that one charlatan or another would succeed in resurrecting the king’s self-slain bloodline—but, magic was weak in those days. Finally, one of the necromancers absconded with the prince’s spell-scarred remains, and the fiasco was stricken from the royal records. The king ordered a gaudy tomb sealed up in the catacombs, inscribed but empty.
Now, the king narrowed his rheumy eyes as he stared down at Oola-Saggath. He didn’t recognize the name, but this was unsurprising: many practitioners of the black arts worked pseudonymously. The court, breathless, stood in nervous anticipation of his decree.
Then, “Show me this reprieve,” he said, words emerging as a mumble between wine-stained lips. He made no inquiry as to which god the necromancer served.
The black mage smiled.
A snap of her fingers, and the throne room resounded with the sharp rattling of bone on bone. A skeleton—walking free and unaided, wholly devoid of flesh—entered the chamber, footfalls clacking loudly on the red-veined marble floor. Atop its skull sat a crooked, moth-eaten miter, denoting the priesthood of some archaic religious sect. Its death’s-head grin set the courtiers to gasping and muttering as it advanced to stand rigidly before the king.
It bowed, then executed a neat upwards-jump and heel-click, spun in a circle, and began feverishly to dance, bones jangling and gnashing at every appallingly graceful movement. A waltz. A crude, energetic peasant’s round. A quick spiral jig. The skeleton’s jaw flapped and clacked each time its unshod feet left the marble.
The king stared in awe at this outlandish gift. The necromancer grinned widely, her sharpened teeth glistening like a sickle in the darkness of her cowl, and said, “See? I bring Death itself to caper and jest for thee, o noble and long-suffering king!”
The king of Aoravia leaned back on his throne and barked out a dry laugh. A grating sound, attenuated, almost unnatural: his gaiety was unused to use. Turning to his steward, he commanded Oola-Saggath be laden down with all manner of priceless gifts from the palace vault. “For,” he said, eyes sweeping over his astonished subjects, “Death has long been my enemy. Creeping ever-closer, hiding in shadows, whispering threats on the North Wind. Far better, I say, to have Death jeté here for the amusement of all—indeed, Death shall become my cup-bearer, that it may never again leave my sight!”
So it was done. The grinning, obsequious necromancer was laden down with treasures and returned the next night to her nameless abode in the Wastes. The skeleton—tireless, in the way of dead things—was given the king’s goblet to bear, and stood always at his right hand, eyeless sockets peering sardonically at all who came to issue grievance or beg for favor. In the shadow of that mirthful effigy of Death, the king regained some of his hale goodwill, though he became ever-crueler towards criminals, the castle’s chopping block dyed black by ample use.
With the return of the king’s levity, his health improved. The skeleton became the highlight of court—he would have it arrayed in all manner of finery, or in a peasant’s dingy dung-stained burlap, and command it to dance for hours on end while the court looked on in commingled fascination and dismay. The only commonality of its costume was the miter it wore on arrival, for this proved impossible to remove. Foreign dignitaries were treated to performances, and told that the king held Death on a leash. Eventually, this rumor reached the mustering brigands in the hills, and they slumped away with many a mumble and dark grimace, intent on finding weaker kingdoms to raven.
That spring and summer the king seldom thought of his son. After the mysterious slaying he’d subsequently brooded, dimming the lambency of the sapphire-gilt crown: he poisoned the land and its people with the guilt of his atrocious deed. But now, as the skeleton tirelessly pranced for his amusement, death’s-head grinning, a lightness stole over the kingdom, an almost-nonsensical surety of disaster averted.
That spring, trees and fields blossomed with vigor, the rivers flush with sharp, clear, cold water. There were many births among the cattle—for two weeks every hen laid at least one double-yolk a day. Word reached court that the bandits had fled their haunts in the hills, making travel safe again. That summer, bazaars came to Aoravia, brightly colored caravans trundling into the king’s city bearing goods and ideas from far-off lands, exotic isles. Much talk centered on the venerable monarch, who many (since he had mastered Death itself) assumed to be immortal. They gossiped that he would reign forever.
The summer passed in a haze of alternating heat-stupor and frenzy. As a northerly realm, Aoravia’s few months of marrow-stirring warmth were to be treasured. For his part, the king never believed mortality was his to command. The mitered skeleton was obviously the remains of a revered cleric, animated by the necromancer in a fit of blasphemous inspiration. Still, the symbol of the thing swayed him to feeling again the master of himself, the master of his fate and lands. He even began to wonder if he was still capable of siring a child, and set his steward to bring him girls from the country to test his age-diminished lust.
Throughout that glorious, honey-jeweled summer the skeleton danced with an inexhaustible grace, grin unwavering. The king and his courtiers devised all manner of parlor games to play with the thing—releasing dogs from the kennel to chase it comically around the courtyard, or tossing it from the lookout’s tower to smash dramatically apart on the rocks, only to reassemble with a quick, jaunty hop. At other times, a more solemn attitude was affected, the skeleton dressed in flowing funereal robes and trundled before the court in a black carriage draped with red-and-purple samite, the king throwing withered flowers to the effigy as it passed.
Some, at the king’s discretion, took to prising off the thing’s finger bones and swallowing them. The bones wriggled inside their stomach and bowels, offering a unique sensation until they were excreted and reattached. Privately, this technique even helped the king overcome his persistent constipation.
Finally, in late autumn, approached the next anniversary of the prince’s murder. Desiccate brown-gold leaves still clung to the oak trees, rattling with a persistence matched by the skeleton’s mad pirouettes. Hallowe’en night brought dark thoughts to the king’s mind; for the first time he banished the dancing undead from his court, retaining a living cup bearer. All that November his teeth chattered as his spirits blackened—the upcoming anniversary spread like a bloodstain in his mind, plaguing both dreams and waking memory. At last he resolved to pay tribute to his slain child by laying a wreath of remembrance before his empty tomb.
The night of the anniversary, he made secret preparations. The wreath he wove himself, adorning it with asters, phlox, and wilted roses from the royal conservatory. Sans servant or guard, adviser or cleric, he slipped from his royal cells by a secret way, descending the narrow corkscrew passage which led by uneven degrees to the catacombs. He carried a torch to light his path, the rags soaked with priceless funereal resins; their miasma clouded the passage, set the king to sneezing.
At last, after much scrabbling and labored breath, he reached his son’s white-marble tomb. It gleamed in the torchlight, blazoned with heraldry of the royal Aoravian line, inscribed with murals depicting events in the prince’s life—save no death-frieze, as was elsewise customary. The king sighed and bowed his head, grief adding to the debility wrought by unaccustomed exertion. Frozen breath lingered about his face in a wraith-like cloud as tears trickled down channels of sorrow and bitterness graven on his cheeks, catching in his beard’s silver tangle. In those fleshly lines his son’s death was memorialized, if not on the stone of his tomb. In his mind’s eye the king replayed anew the horrors of that unspeakable night, the wreath trembling in his frail hands, twined grapevines crackling.
Something stirred in the near-darkness, neither rat nor ghost.
The king rose in startled fear, turned and held his resinous torch aloft. He beheld the skeleton, the necromancer’s gift, firelight playing over the barrel of its ribcage and flickering in the depthless hollows of its sockets. The thing ambulated towards him, teeth clacking and chattering violently, long fleshless fingers outstretched. The king gasped and fell back before this apparition, though he did not flee, still thinking himself its master.
The skeleton drew nearer, an inner phosphorescence now lighting its sockets. Ivory arms rose to its skull and, for the first time, it removed and tossed aside its accustomed miter. Without the headdress’s gross exaggeration, the skeleton looked to be no taller than an average man—no taller, indeed, than the king’s own son had been.
The skull turned, death’s-head grin fixed, and the king for the first time cried out in fear, collapsing amid a strew of loose bones.
He could see the cracked skull, see the ceremonial dagger lodged deep in the brainpan. He knew the glint of that blood-hungry ruby—knew the noisome feel of that black leather grip. But, how could it be possible? He had flung the accursed thing out to sea!
The skeleton clattered as it came to stand over the quivering, weeping king. “It is I,” came a hollow voice, deep and dry as a desert sepulcher. “My king, my father, it is I.”
The king wept inconsolably, not even flinching as the skeleton reached down to grasp him by his wrists, exerting a cold and merciless pressure. Drawing the knife from its own skull, it began to flense the flesh and viscera from the royal person, discarding the stripped bones in a heap.
Now at last the king tried to scream, but the thing tore his shrunken lungs asunder, and soon enough he knew no more.
The sapphire-gilt crown, which often teetered embarrassingly on the king’s splotchy pate, now sat cockeyed on a too-bulbous brow. That his face possessed a notably different shape, that he walked with a new (yet strangely familiar) stride, none could deny: some noted a small black-handled knife sheathed at his waist, fret with a glinting ruby. Yet, his voice was his own, his words were his own. Even when he laughed uproariously upon seating himself on the porphyritic throne, no suspicion was roused—for, as has been observed, magic was weak in that time.
The king composed himself before opening the morning’s proceedings with a few ceremonial words. This token of familiarity put the court at ease, and before long the king of Aoravia was meting out sentences, hearing grievances, and granting royal favors as of old. Still, all noted something alien about his composure and character—that shimmer in his eyes, those eerily familiar-but-foreign motions! Even the long snowy flow of his beard seemed touched with an auburn tint.
As the sun climbed towards midday and the court prepared to adjourn for refreshments, the king suddenly clapped his mottled, too-long-fingered hands together. “But wait! It has been over a month since my loyal cup-bearer deigned to entertain us. I confess, I tired of the skeleton’s antics for a while… my mind has been unsettled, spirit fraught with unrest. But last night I made amends with the prince, my most grievously murdered son. And so, I would have a dance before we feast!”
Again he clapped his hands, and a desultory clattering emerged from the shadows behind his throne. Something humped and brittle shuffled into the commingled sun-and-brazier-light, the tines of its rib cage crusted with bony tumors, limbs pitted by age. It crept forward at a mendicant’s pace, legs shuddering violently, until the king clapped his hands a third irritable time.
At this commanding sound the skeleton tried to take a short leap, preparatory to a single simple dance step, and crumbled in pieces to the marble.
The poor parts wriggled and twitched futilely, trying to recohere, until a violent wind blasted through the court from all southerly facing windows. The wind tore at the shards, tumbling them about, reducing them to plumes of foul-smelling dust that rose and whipped spectrally about the throne room as the smiling monarch looked on.
At last the powder blew away, vanishing with the phantom winds back into the south.
A confounding silence followed, broken at last by the king’s laughter. “Would you look at that!” he roared, slapping a discolored hand on his thigh with all the vigor of youth. “It seems Death itself has grown old, perishing in my stead.”
He motioned for his cup, draining its contents in three quick gulps. The king then rose and decreed, “For her peerless gift, Oola-Saggath shall be recalled to serve Aoravia as my most trusted vizier and adviser. Now—and for all ages.”
Ripples of his decree spread throughout the countryside. That nightfall Oola-Saggath (who indeed went by many names) returned to court, descending on a thunderous pitch-black pall that would not abate for seven generations.
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