Ersksts'thulan

I am old, oh my master. Older than perhaps even you would believe. Of the lost continent on which I was born, or of the life I lived there, I can remember nothing. But I can remember when I remembered, and I know I was a mighty necromancer in my day. For seventy-five thousand years I lay dormant in the buried ruins of Herud Hiti, master-less and motionless until you found me. But it was two hundred thousand years ago when I perished in some nameless land which time has obscured from all memory, even my own. I have passed through many masters throughout the ages. Some were greater and some were lesser, yet all were greater than you. I am astounded at how much knowledge is lost now. With my help you'll soon outstrip the pitiful sorcerers of this age and rule this strange new world, so odd to me by how utterly mundane it is, but there is much I must teach you before you'll match even the least of my ancient masters.

The greatest of my masters? My last, certainly. Mal Char'Nal, the master of Herud Hiti, was the greatest necromancer who ever lived. Despite the haze in my memory, I am sure none of the sorcerers I have forgotten could have matched his power. All knowledge was his. All spells and incantations, all concoctions and cantrips, all lore and all wisdom were his. Sigils from beyond the stars and inscriptions from pre-human peoples who could not have been remembered even in my life were his. From whence no one knew, he came to the ruby city of Herud Hiti and called forth his Obsidian Tower from the earth with a deep chant which sounded throughout the whole city for hours. The emperor's armies and court sorcerers rushed against him as his monotonous incantation shook the Earth beneath their feet, but all fell dead before a single spear or sent demon came within a mile of him. With the chant's last note, the emperor pitched forward, dead, and his sons fell victim to a shrieking, hopeless madness.

The city's surviving sorcerers came to the Obsidian Tower to do homage to their new master, and they presented me to Mal Char'Nal as a gift. I possessed much ancient lore, which the necromancers of Herud Hiti had used to make their city wax grand and mighty, but Mal Char'Nal soon found there was little I could teach him. The hazy fragments I yet retained of my life were of small use, for the magic of those days was rather primitive for Mal Char'Nal and the countless schools of sorcery at his command. The more advanced necromancy I had learned during my long eons of service after I was torn from death were well-known to him, having been pioneered by great sorcerers whose works he had studied extensively. Mal Char'Nal interrogated me for months, hoping to wring out some fragment of knowledge he did not already possess, and he seemed dejected when he finally accepted I had little to show him.

He is the one who gave me the name Ersksts'thulan. I don't remember why.

Though I had little to teach him, Mal Char'Nal found many uses for my power and knowledge. The people of Herud Hiti knew me best as the eye and ear of the great necromancer. Mal Char'Nal had bound to his service legions of undead foot-soldiers – empty husks too mindless to act without instruction – and unclean spirits of the air – beings whose minds were too inhuman to act without very precise instruction – to police the city. Mal Char'Nal was able to see through the eyes of his creatures and send them commands, but found constant surveillance to be too tiresome for a living being with needs and desires. The dead, however, can be quite patient, so Mal Char'Nal passed the spell to me. With a thought, I could flit from sentry to sentry and issue the necessary commands. With some light meditation, I could arrange for my left eye to be shown the sights of a different sentry every few seconds or so, and in this manner I was able to observe the whole city while carrying out my duties.

It came to pass one day that my services proved quite useful to my master. When, exactly... oh, it must have been rather near the end of his reign, for the boy Mordhos Orz was there. Yes, I remember the day the necromancer and his apprentice came to my study.

“Erskts'thulan,” said Mal Char'Nal, “The boy and I will be busy. It is imperative that you do not disturb us for the rest of the day. You'll want to stay away from the top floor of the tower as well.”

“As you command,” I replied, setting my pen into its inkpot, “But what's going on?”

“A being I've never seen before has arrived near the star Cassiopeia. I've spent all morning summoning spirits from other worlds to learn something about it, and the only one who knows anything at all could only tell me it's a being that’s said to eat death. I want to summon it here to see if it knows something I don't, but I suspect I'll have to sacrifice every undead servant in the top floor’s retinue. You understand why we can't have you up around when it gets here.”

In my right eye was a report I was writing on restocking some worn out undead servants. In my left eye was a cut-purse I was going to have arrested and hanged to help with that restocking. I'd need more than just him to replace the entire top floor's retinue. I might have sighed, but among the dead only the very new will sigh.

I didn't need to tell Mal Char'Nal I would obey. I simply began gathering up my papers.

“A summoning? Why, this is a first for young Master Mordhos, isn't it?”

The boy had a bright smile which grew brighter still when he was eager to learn.

“Yes, sir! Well, I've summoned ghosts before. Or, I've helped Master Char'Nal do it. I mean...”

The boy could babble when he was eager to learn too.

I stood up with my stack of reports and inclined my neck in a slight bow.

“I hope you find what you're looking for, Mal Char'Nal. In the meanwhile, I'll see that your empire runs smoothly.”

“You always do.”

I recited the short incantation to take myself to a lower floor - there were no stairs in the Obsidian Tower - and was soon settled in a spare office near the middle of the tower. Inside the room I found a maidservant - long dead, of course - and greeted her as I made my way to the desk of petrified wood. She made no response other than to slowly glance in my direction before shuffling out of the room to find work elsewhere.

With the spell that stole my slumber being strong enough to grant me my will and memory, I suppose I should not relate so much with the more mindless of the undead. But I do. Even to the motionless, buried corpses which have never been touched by magic, I feel a certain kinship. I feel a sense of being like them in a way I can never again be like the living.

I feel as though I view the world as only the dead could, and I mean this in both a figurative and a literal sense. For example, when I sat down at the desk, I looked at the wall. It was a sheer, smooth face of volcanic glass as blank as ink. Even in the darkness of the unlit office, I doubt if your eyes could see the sun through that glass as more than the merest hint of a gleam. As for me, ever since my eyes rotted away, I have found that they never fully adjusted to any light brighter than the grave. From that suggestion of a glint, I could tell it was about noon.

Far from the top floor of the tower, and thus far from the living who needed more light to see by, I did not bother to light a lamp or candle before setting about my work. In my right eye was a report on grain shipments from the farther reaches of the empire. In my left eye, a scrawny boy eyeing an apple cart, but scurrying away when he saw the undead sentry, almost seeming to look me in the eye. In my right eye, word from a war on the other side of the world. In my left eye, I was pushed out of the temple of the old god of light. I saw one of the sorcerer-priests cast a ward against unclean spirits before ducking inside. That was unwise of him; it only took a moment of my time to order a small army of the undead to storm the temple. In my right eye, a plan to restore some of the city's run down aqueducts. In my left eye, a noblewoman in her bath glancing around as though she felt watched. She must have been an insightful woman, for an unclean spirit hovered unseen just above her. I sent the spirit out of the lady's bath chamber before moving on to the next set of eyes.

My day went on like this until I began to feel something amiss in the city. Something in my left eye distracted me from my clerical work, but I could not tell what it was. Here, a group of boys carried a large rat toward their schoolhouse. There, a married merchant lay with his maidservant. And over there, a street demagogue preached that necromancy was a great abomination. How had I not noticed him before? I sent some of the undead to dispatch the man and drag his corpse here for reanimation. The rumblings coming from upstairs told me we would soon need every body we could get our hands on. Still, the mad preacher was not the source of my unease.

I flitted from eyes to eyes until at last, in the late afternoon, I saw something to give me pause. A woman stared directly into the eyes of one of the undead sentries. I realized then that I had seen her staring at several of the undead sentries that day, always wearing a small, secretive smile. Why had I taken special notice of her? In my mind, I named her the Golden Woman. Her skin was a shade of golden brown, her hair a golden blonde, and even her eyes had a shining, yellow hue to them. Her garment, too, was a rough-cut, shapeless tunic made from the golden pelt of an ancient breed of saber toothed cat which had been extinct for a hundred thousand years by then. I had little memory of the time when the golden breed still lived, but the sight of that pelt somehow stirred something deep in the back of my mind. The sight of the Golden Woman also revived some dormant memory from the thick fog of my past. When I saw her I knew, somehow, that I knew this woman.

The Golden Woman grasped the undead sentry by the face and her grin grew deeper. The sentry should have defended himself, but instead he stood there and allowed the Golden Woman to stare me in the eye. I commanded the sentry to back away and move on. He obeyed, but the Golden Woman only broke out into a broad, toothy smile.

“It's true what they say then,” she said, “You really are watching.”

I flitted to a new pair of eyes and tried to resume my work. But it wasn't long before I saw the Golden Woman again.

She lay sprawled upon an ivory couch, smiling up at an unclean spirit. No, not merely smiling; she had trapped the spirit in place above her through sorcerous means. I should have been surprised, but I was not, and not only because the dead do not feel surprise.

“Could it really be you?” she asked, “The bond we share is so much stronger than death, so much stronger than time, that I had no trouble following it here. But are you really the watcher? The one they call Ersksts'thulan?”

Had any spell or enchantment of hers reached me through the link with the spirit, I would have known and defended myself. No such spell came, but I sat helpless before her. I could not move. I could not even think.

“I am Nye-Lis Saraa. Do you remember that name?”

I did. I did not remember ever hearing the name, but I knew it.

“How about this name?”

With a smile, she spoke a word. Before she spoke it, I had not known it. After she spoke it, it spilled out of my mind like so much water in cupped hands. But in the moment she spent saying that word, I knew she spoke my own name, the name I'd worn when I wore life. Seconds passed in silence. Her smile grew deeper.

“It must be you. I've seen how fast your creatures come for troublemakers. Only you would let me get away with this.”

Her smile became a laugh. Her laugh became a frown. Her frown turned pleading, then back into a smile.

“I've been gone for so long, I didn't think anyone I knew would still be alive. Well, I guess you're not alive, but you're better off than I hoped. I've seen so many things, learned so much, but I didn't realize so much time would pass here. I have so much I want to tell you.”

“He's busy right now, isn't he? This Mal Char'Nal?”

Her smile grew fiercer. She took on the look of something primordial, like an early human from the dawn of the stone age.

“I can sense it. Some powerful ritual is going on in that black tower. The sorcerers of this age are strong, but we hunted the shamans of the serpent-men in those forests so long ago. We know of more subtle tricks to conquer the strong, don't we? I can kill him. I can kill him and let his foolish empire crumble and have you all to myself. All you have to do is let me do it.”

My skin had long since turned to something like tough, shiny leather, inflated like a great air bladder around my yellowed bones. My skin could not grow warm, yet I felt hot. I had no sweat glands, and when I wiped my hand across my forehead it came away dry, yet I seemed to feel beads of perspiration rolling down my face.

“Make an example of her!” I said to the empty office, “Let none stand against my master!” I wanted to shriek the words, but my voice only sounded like crumbling stone.

I commanded a hundred unclean spirits - too many for any lone sorcerer to fend off at once - to kill Nye-Lis Saraa. Had I really known her? Or had she only enchanted my mind with some spell too subtle for me to notice? Had she been my colleague? My mistress? My apprentice? My sister? My mother? My enemy? My lover? What did she know about me? I had so many questions about this Nye-Lis Saraa. I didn't want to know the answer to a single one of them. I never did know the answer to a single one of them. The next time I saw her, she was a servant on the top floor of the Obsidian Tower.

Hours passed. The sun set. The moon became visible to me as a faint, silvery sparkle through the walls. When Mal Char'Nal was done with the summoning, he put Mordhos Orz to bed and came to speak to me.

“Anything happen while I was busy, Erskts'thulan?”

“No fewer than three separate attempts at rebellion. Everyone involved is dead now.”

“Good. We'll be needing them on the top floor.”

“The summoning didn't go so well?”

“Egh. Fool creature ate the whole top floor retinue and then couldn't teach me a single thing I didn't already know. Good experience for the boy, I suppose, but we sent the thing back to where it came from as soon as we could. Sometimes I think I know too much for my own good, Erskts'thulan.”

“Knowing too much can have its own dangers, oh my master.”

“True. Better than not knowing enough, though.”

“Is it?”

“I think so.