Rise of the Death Dealer (45 page)

THE FINGER

T
iyy lay facedown on her bed, kicking her feet with petulant frustration. One
arm covered her head, and the other was thrust forward with the hand resting on
a pillow. She was naked except for the silver chain mail girdle that spanned the
crest of her tight round buttocks, and her muscular curves were oiled. Bright
torchlight, reflected by bronze mirrors inlaid in the rock ceiling, played
across her glistening sheen, and the leopard-skin spread covering the bed. She
smelled of midnight orchids, young men and fear.

She was in her private chambers, a stone-walled room within the castle hung
and carpeted with animal hides. Balconies were built off it overlooking the
Inland Sea, and daylight and the songs of birds flowed through the open doors.
She had been here three days exploring the pleasures of her new body, but now it
was time to work.

Her extended hand rested palm-down on a square of white cloth spread over a
zebra-skin pillow. It shuddered like a condemned prisoner.

Her three elderly priests stood to the side of the room with their heads
together, whispering. Bald and bare-chested, they wore white cotton skirts held
in place with black ropes, and elbow-length gloves of a yellow-green fish
membrane. Beside them, bottles and vials and bright steel cutting instruments were arranged on ceremonial
platters set out on pedestals sculpted like erect male reproductive organs.

Schraak and Baskt, now in his almost human form, stood obediently beside the
bed. Their flesh had had three days to heal since being boiled. Schraak’s was
shriveled, dry and flaking, and he was smaller, a dwarf. The sharkman’s natural
armor had lost all its subtle hues of blue and violet-pink, and was dark and
crusted with thick gnarled scabs. His once huge dorsal fin was now a small hump,
like a hunchback’s, and his body was thicker, stronger, without grace. The bones
of his formerly handsome face were bulging and blunt, and his upper teeth
protruded, giving him an overbite that the dwarf could have stood under.

Their expressions said lucidly that each of them had not only had their
bodies altered by torture and magic, but their souls. Their pride and
intelligence were intact, but their wills had been removed, and their eyes were
cold with death and obedience.

A priest picked up a platter containing a row of bottles, and shuffled toward
Tiyy. She looked up sharply, glancing over her bare shoulder at the approaching
bottles,-and moaned like a girl being forced by her mother to wear a tunic that
was out of fashion. She again covered her head, and kicked and twisted
violently. When she lifted her head, her pyramid of spiked hair looked as if it
had been restyled by a pitchfork. She glared hard at Baskt and Schraak as her
voice lashed them.

“It’s all your fault! If you’d found her, none of this would be necessary.”

Schraak and Baskt bowed agreement.

She whimpered petulantly. “You’re useless.” She turned to the high priest as
he stopped in front of her holding out the platter of vessels. She groaned, and
shouted at the two boiled men, “You’re going to pay for this!”

The pair bowed again.

Fuming, Tiyy turned back to the platter of vessels. They were of translucent
green bottle glass and corked. Inside each of them, a little finger severed from
a human hand floated in thick liquid that churned of its own accord, as if
alive.

“You pick one,” Tiyy said testily. “They all look ugly to me.” The high
priest nodded, and her head snapped up. “But if I don’t like it, I’ll have you
gelded.”

The priest, swallowing his wrinkled lips as if to stop himself from replying
to her petty outburst, bowed obediently and rejoined the others.

Tiyy grumbled huffily after him, saying, “It better not hurt either.”

The high priest did not react. He and the others assembled bottles and
cutting tools on a platter, then all three returned to the bed. Two held the
platters while the high priest bowed, revealing the three red circles painted on
his bald head, then kneeled alongside the pillow supporting the young queen’s
hand. His assistants extended the platter to him, and he removed a thin steel
knife, set it beside the hand.

The priests began to pray, and Tiyy again covered her head with her free arm,
trying to block out the sounds. But she couldn’t, and looked up, shouting, “Stop
it! I’ve said all the prayers that need to be said. Just do it. Finish it!”

She hid her head again, and the priests dipped their heads, went to work,
moving quickly and in harmony.

Using wooden tweezers, the high priest removed a bright yellow Panka
tarantula from a bottle and placed it on the vein in the crook of the elbow of Tiyy’s extended arm. He poked at it until it bit her, and she screamed
sharply. But she held still. The high priest put the spider back in its bottle,
then sat back on his heels watching the arm.

It swelled slightly around the bite, and a yellow-grey jaundiced rash
quickly spread out from the bite, reaching for her wrist, then her fingertips.

When Tiyy looked up, her stomach convulsed at the ugly blight on her flesh,
and her head teetered sickly. When the nausea passed, Tiyy tried to move her
fingers, three times. She could not. “It’s ready. I can’t feel anything.”

The high priest bowed in acknowledgment. Then, in a high-pitched falsetto
required of him when speaking to the high priestess, said, “Forgive me, Oh
beloved breaker of hearts, for putting my worthless knife into your sacred
flesh.”

“Aaughh!” she snarled. “Stop that intolerable squealing and talk like a man.
There’s going to be no more of that nonsense around here. Now cut it! Just cut
it, and get it over with.”

Instinctively he bowed again, picking up the knife, and one of the assisting
priests slid a square of hard black-enameled wood under the white cloth. Holding
her hand down with his free hand, the high priest, with a deft cut, made an
incision above the knuckle connecting the finger to the hand. A thin red line
showed where the cut had been made, and Tiyy’s lower lip thrust forward, her
eyes filled with tears. She turned and glared at Schraak and Baskt.

“You see what you’ve done? I’ll never be the same again. Never!”

Coolly and swiftly, and using practiced cuts, the high priest removed her
little finger and set it on the white cloth, while holding the bloody stump high
in the air. An assistant opened a bottle containing a floating finger and
removed it. The liquid from the bottle was heavy and glutinous, and clung to the
digit, which wiggled and squirmed with life. Using napkin after napkin, an
assistant removed the sticky substance and then ran the finger between his own,
wringing the fluid out of it. The third time he did this, the finger stopped
wiggling. He then held the new finger in place against the stump. The high
priest felt about the joints of hand and finger, fitting them as he did, then
took a long vampire worm from the other assistant. It was no thicker than silk
string. He threaded a needle with it and thrust the needle through the Nymph
Queen’s smooth brown flesh, joining the knuckles of hand and finger with the
living thread. The vampire worm promptly began to attach its body to the living
bone and flesh around it. The high priest then sewed the flesh together with
thin strands of monkey gut which had been treated with Tiyy’s own magic, so that
it would eventually merge with her flesh.

Tiyy, who had watched the entire operation, was sweating profusely when it
was over and shaking from forehead to toes. When she looked up, the high priest,
who had gotten off of the bed, handed her a small vial of black wine which she
had previously prepared for herself. She took it in her good left hand and
downed it hurriedly, the black light glowing on her pouting face.

Immediately her normal healthy color began to return to her arm, and then
spread into her hand. Before it reached her fingertips, the ugly stitching
around her knuckle was already beginning to disappear.

She held her finger up, watched the last stitch fade away and laughed with
giddy relief. She abruptly sat up on her knees, holding her hand to her face,
and wiggled her finger, studying it with rapt attention.

Suddenly she frowned savagely, thrust her hand at the priests and shouted,
“It’s ugly! It’s the worst choice you could have made. Look at it! Look what
you’ve done to me. Just look!”

The priests looked.

“I hate it,” she screamed. “It’s fat and wrinkled! And the nail is square and
thick. Arrrgghhh!” She sank back on her heels. “You’ve destroyed me.”

She looked at her finger one more time, then let herself fall on her back,
and spread out on the leopard-skin holding her hand as far away from her as
possible. Her quarrelsome breasts heaved angrily, and their nipples grew hard
and red. Her face was turning the same color, and her eyes were thin and dark.
Suddenly she sat up angrily and demanded, “Give it to me.”

The priests looked at her, not understanding.

“My finger,” she screamed.

The high priest moved toward the now bloody white cloth, and she shouted,
“Never mind.” She scrambled to the cloth and snapped up her severed finger. She
held it against her heaving breasts possessively for a moment, suddenly afraid.
Then she raised it alongside the new one and groaned fractiously.

“It’s horrible!” She bent her new finger and straightened it several times.
“And stiff! Heavy! And too small! It doesn’t match the others. Everybody’s going
to notice! They’ll know it’s not mine as soon as I enter the throne room.” She
glared at the priests. “It makes my flesh crawl. It’s… it’s like a stranger
has invaded my body. Who did it belong to anyway?”

The high priest started to reply, but hesitated, his face turning pale.

“Tell me!” she demanded. “Was it some filthy savage? Is that what you’ve done to me?”

“No, no, my queen,” the high priest said quickly. “It… it was a… a
slave girl.”

“I know that,” she snarled. “What was she before that?”

“A… a…” The priest drew himself up, gathering control. “She had no
tribe. She… she was a mix of many tribes.”

“Aarrghh! A mongrel.”

“But she was young, your holiness. Only thirteen. That is why it is so small.
But this was intentional, so that it can grow according to the dictates of your
own body. By tomorrow, or the day after, it will be almost perfect.”

Tiyy frowned and sank back, looking from her original finger to the
replacement. “Thirteen,” she mumbled. “Well, all right. I’ll wait, but if it
doesn’t look any better by tomorrow, I’ll geld all three of you. Now get out!”

The priests bowed, backed up the nine steps required by ritual, then departed
swiftly.

Tiyy drew her legs up under her, and sat looking at her new finger from all
sides. After some of this, she looked up at Schraak and Baskt, and said, “You’ve
put me to a lot of bother, do you know that? And pain!” She held up her new
finger. “Not to mention this… this piece of filth! And at a time like this!
When I am looking better than I have in over a hundred years, maybe even my
best!”

They bowed agreement, and she said peevishly, “Oh, stop that! You haven’t the
slightest idea of what I’m talking about. You don’t know how I feel. You
couldn’t. You’re not capable of it.”

They bowed again, but she ignored them, and looked at her former finger for a
moment, calming herself. Then she decided she didn’t want to be calm, and with
scalding eyes and a churlish tone, spoke to the two brutes.

“You’ve tried to ruin everything, and almost have, but that is all over now!
Now that I can show myself to my people again, I’m taking charge.”

Baskt started to protest, but she cut him off. “Don’t interrupt me, Lord
Baskt! You’re the one who should have taken charge of the army when I grew weak,
and strengthened it, rebuilt the castle fortifications, filled our coffers with
silver and gold.”

“We have gold,” Baskt said.

“I know that,” she snapped, “but we won’t for long! You two are going to
spend it. All of it, if that is what it takes.” She lay over on a hip and smiled
at them with malicious amusement. “I’m sending both of you into the desert, to
En Sakalda. The hottest and most miserable spot in the desert, even for lizards,
I’m told. The flies and sand and heat there can turn a man into nothing but an
itching, pus-filled lump of rash within weeks… to say nothing of what they
can do to a shark and worm.”

Their eyes thinned with terror.

She smiled cruelly and continued, “I need an agent in En Sakalda. An agent of
prestige and importance who is well known, like yourself, Lord Baskt. Because
soon now, En Sakalda’s slave pens will again be teeming with life.” Her tone had
begun to ring with an authority that was twenty times the age of her flesh. “I
have sent out my slavemasters to buy young girls of high spirit and great
beauty, as many as they can. With them, and the new formulas I have concocted, I
can sustain myself for years just as you see me now… and have strength left
over to manufacture all the black wine I will need to put my kingdom back in
order.”

Their eyes doubted her, and she snapped, “Don’t argue with me. I am telling
you a simple fact. As I told you, my powers are not completely or permanently
restored, but there is now enough magic in my smallest finger,” she held up the
severed finger, “for both of you to see the invisible aura of virtue that
surrounds this girl called Robin Lakehair. Do you understand?”

They did not.

“Dolts,” she said irritably. “All you will have to do is eat it. Then, when
you look upon her naked body, you will have the power to see her aura
yourselves.” Baskt and Schraak stirred unnaturally, beginning to understand, and
their grey cheeks grew hot.

She laughed and waggled the finger at them. “That’s right! You would like to
chew on me, wouldn’t you?”

They did not reply, but their cold empty eyes said yes.