"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.
The zombies laid her on her back, spread her arms wide, and crossed her legs at the ankle. Then, for a considerable time, the Red Wizards chanted rhymes in an unknown tongue while brandishing smoking censers; slender, gleaming swords; and a black chalice carved from a single piece of jet.
At first it was sinister but ultimately incomprehensible. Eventually, however, the necromancer with the dagger-she had the impression he was the senior of the pair-crouched down beside her and dipped his forefinger in the black cup. It came out red. He rubbed her lips with it, then her gums, then worked it past her teeth to dab at her tongue. She tasted the salty, coppery tang of blood.
After that, she could somehow perceive the power gathering in the air and conceived the crazy, terrifying notion that the chanted incantations were a thing unto themselves, a living malignancy that was simply employing the mages to further the purposes implicit in the tercets and quatrains. She still couldn't comprehend them, but she felt the meaning was on the very brink of revealing itself to her and that when it did, she wouldn't be able to bear it.
A mass of shadow seethed into existence above her, thickening until she could barely see the ceiling or Xingax peering avidly down at her through a pair of lenses positioned one before the other. The clot of darkness took on a suggestion of texture, of bulges, hollows, and edges, as if it had become a solid object. Then it shattered.
Into an explosion of enormous bats. The rustling of their countless wings echoing from the stone walls, they flew in all directions. Xingax cried out in excitement. The Red Wizards, for all that they'd conjured the flock and were presumably in control of it, retreated to stand with their backs against a wall.
A bat lit on a zombie's shoulder and plunged its fangs into its throat. The animated corpse showed no reaction to the bite, but despite its passivity, the bat fluttered its wings and took flight again only a heartbeat later.
Three bats settled on a second zombie, bit it, and abandoned it immediately thereafter. Because they crave the blood of a living person, Tammith thought, her heart hammering. Because they want me.
She made a supreme effort to roll over onto her belly. If she could only move a little, she could crawl away from the middle of the floor, then… why, then nothing, she supposed. The part of her that was still rational realized it wasn't likely to matter, but she needed to try. It was better than simply accepting her fate, no matter how inescapable it was.
Her limbs trembled. The effect of the vapor was wearing off. She felt a thrill of excitement, of lunatic hope, and then the first bat found her. Cold as the zombies' fingers, its claws dug into her chest for purchase as its fangs sought her throat.
As it sucked the wounds it had inflicted, the rest of the flock descended on her, covering her like a shifting, frigid blanket, the bats that couldn't reach her shoving at the ones who had like piglets jostling for their mother's teats. Scores of icy needles pierced her flesh.
Had she ever imagined such a fate, she might have assumed that so much cold would numb her. Somehow, it didn't. The assault was agony.
The bats tore at her lips, nose, cheeks, and forehead. Not my eyes, she silently begged, not my eyes, but they ripped those too, and then she finally passed out.
Tammith woke to pain, weakness, searing thirst, and utter darkness. At first she couldn't remember what had happened to her, but then the memory leaped at her like a cat pouncing on a mouse.
When it did, she decided Xingax couldn't possibly have intended to create the crippled, sightless creature she'd become. The experiment had failed as he'd warned it might.
"So kill me!" she croaked. "I'm no use to you!"
No one answered. She wondered if she actually was alone or if Xingax and the Red Wizards were still present, silently studying her, preparing to put her out of her misery, or-gods forbid!-readying a new torment.
Suddenly she was frantic to know, which made her blindness intolerable. She felt a flowing, a budding, in the raw orbits of her skull, and then smears of light and shadow wavered into existence before her. Over the course of several moments, the world sharpened into focus. She realized she'd healed her ruined eyes, or if the bats had destroyed them entirely, grown new ones.
It suggested that Xingax's experiment hadn't been a complete failure after all, but she appeared to be alone nonetheless. Her captors had deposited her in a different chamber, a bare little room with a matchboarded door. Up near the ceiling, someone had cut a hole, probably connecting to the ubiquitous system of catwalks, but if the aborted monstrosity was up there peeping at her, she couldn't see it.