Limbo's Child (35 page)

The Herald didn’t hesitate but walked across the small drifts of sand and directly into the door. He disappeared like a stone falling into an inky pond, except there wasn’t even so much as a ripple. Nephys only then realized his feet were rooted firmly on the black sand. He suddenly rushed forward to follow, afraid of what might happen if he didn’t, but he couldn’t help but pause in fright at the threshold. It was like standing a half-inch from living blackness. He willed himself forward a half dozen times but couldn’t budge. After what seemed like an eternity, he finally worked up the nerve to step forward. However, no sooner had he barely begun to shift his weight off one foot to move it forward when the large arm of the Herald reached back through the darkness and pulled him in.

The passage inside was impossible to explain. There was no feeling of transition or movement like walking through fire or plunging into cold water. If you took all those feelings and imagined the exact opposite of them, that’s more what it felt like. It was more like he had entered a place with no movement at all. It was utter blackness. He couldn’t see anything – not even his own body – he couldn’t even
feel
his own body anymore. Not the weight of his feet in his sandals, not the clothes on his skin, not even the still and languid movement of Limbo’s normally stagnant air on his face. Nothing! It was like he didn’t exist except as a thought. Nephys realized that he had entered an entirely new place like a separate universe. It felt as far away from Limbo as Limbo felt from earth. He never imagined he could miss the torpid and dull realm of Limbo so much. Whatever its faults, it was better than this.

Nephys began to panic. He couldn’t feel or see anything! How was he supposed to manage at all?! Was he going to be like this for all eternity – a disembodied thought struggling for existence? How could the heralds and servants of Death manage stumbling around in the darkness like this without even so much as the pain of a stubbed toe to let them know where they were?! How could they see and function in this place at all?! Then he remembered that the Herald didn’t even have the top of his head, let alone eyes, to see with. Of course!! He calmed himself and looked inward. The Death Sight came to him, and the blackness slowly melted away and was replaced by the crystalline world of the Death Sight. A hypostyle hall like a forest of massive, crystalline columns came into view and then a ceiling and a floor. As the darkness continued to fade away, Nephys realized he was surrounded by people –
lots
of people, a huge crowd of courtiers, clerks and messengers – and they were all staring down at him with dead, sightless eyes like he was a lunatic.

Nephys looked around with his Death Sight. He was lying on the floor, desperately grasping on to it like someone clinging to a cliff-face for life. He stood up. The Herald was there bending over him ominously and Nephys was certain that if he had eyes, he would be rolling them right now. The brief distraction over, the crowd started to disperse. The Herald turned to go. Nephys thought he heard the Herald huff in frustration as Nephys’ sandals slapped against the hard stone floor catching up to him.

He felt horribly foolish and silly. Of course you had to use the Death Sight in the Halls of Death! It was obvious now that he thought of it. No one there had any use for eyes anymore. Had Falco, that little tyrant and suck-up, entered the hall with his dead, white, pupil-less, fish eyes he wouldn’t have even noticed the change from outside. Falco always lived in that crystalline world now. He would have walked in like he belonged there and no one would have noticed him. Only a clueless idiot like Nephys who was still sentimental about his eyes would make a stupid mistake like that.

The Herald and Nephys walked on past featureless, columned halls, each indistinguishable from the next. Along the way, Nephys examined the residents. There were more than he ever could have imagined. They were terrifying. All wore the black and silver robes that marked service in the company of Death, but the fashions of those uniforms were from many different lands and many different ages. All were profoundly blind however. Some had pallid, white orbs like Falco’s, others had removed their eyes altogether and replaced the eyes with bizarre jewelry that looked like elaborate daggers and spear-points embedded into the empty sockets. It was ornamentation designed to draw attention to their lack of sight, as if they were vain about it.

They all walked about purposefully as if they had urgent business. Their mannerisms were those of bureaucrats and civic officials and had their appearance not been so frightening, they would have seemed completely normal, dull even. They never spoke, but often looked intently at each for moments at a time. Nephys suspected that they must have other ways of talking. If there was a Death Sight, why not a Death Speech?

Nephys noticed something else disturbingly peculiar about them all. They were all wounded in particularly gruesome and violent ways. Some had horrible gashes across their abdomens, spilling out their intestines. Others had large pieces missing from their skulls. What was strangest, none of them seemed the slightest bit perturbed by this. To the contrary, it looked like they celebrated the deformities. Their clothes were elaborately cut and styled to expose the wounds to view, even to flatter them, no matter how graphic. One had his bowels tied into intricate knots that hung around his middle like an apron, as if it were a common fashion statement. Another had his severed arm hanging from an ornate, silver chain around his neck as if it were a spectacular trophy. A tall thin one that brushed by Nephys had boils and sores all over his face, but he had polished and decorated them as if they were encrusted gemstones. One, with her skull bashed open, had a crest of feathers erupting out of it like a floral arrangement, as if her cranium were nothing more than just an exceptionally fancy, if extremely macabre, vase. In all cases, it was clear that they were vain and proud of their distinction.

Nephys reached his hand up to his throat. He had always hated the mark of his death that he had bourn for more than a millennium. It was nothing that he was proud of or wanted to flaunt. It was a constant reminder of how, at a young age, he had been separated from home and family who he could barely remember, not to mention sunshine and dates and honey cakes or boat-trips on the Nile. For the first time though, he felt lucky that his wound so small. Even now as he felt it, it seemed much smaller than he had remembered it being.

Looking at all these souls with their proudly displayed lacerations, disemboweled abdomens and severed limbs, Nephys wondered if a horrible, disfiguring wound was a requirement of the job. Nephys suddenly had a funny thought. It was Falco’s sincerest desire to be promoted to the Halls of Death, but he had died as an eight year old from the plague. He had no magnificent wound to show off. What on earth could he do? What fashion could he possibly adapt to show off and flaunt his slightly more purplish hue? A transparent toga perhaps? Nephys giggled slightly at the mental image. Instantaneously the Herald stopped. The
entire
assembly of mutilated souls ceased whatever they were doing and glared at him with sightless eyes. The Herald’s metal-shod feet scraped the floor as he turned slowly to regard Nephys with the empty part of his face.

Nephys cringed. After what seemed like an eternity, the Herald turned back around and the rest of the court returned to their duties. Apparently laughter was not the proper protocol in such places.

“Blessed Anubis!” thought Nephys, “Can’t I do anything right?” Then he thought some more. “This is all Maggie’s fault,” he said to himself bitterly. Nothing had been the same since she had come into his life. This laughter was a complete distraction. He was in enough trouble already for seeing the stone; he didn’t need to compound problems by giggling. He resolved to have a stern talk with Maggie and implore her to be more proper when he got back.

They walked on past countless columns. The temple seemed vast, even bigger than the Acropolis on top of it. Nephys wondered how anyone found his way since everything seemed to look exactly the same. Soon though, they came to an aisle that was taller and broader than the rest. The Herald made an abrupt turn left up this aisle and quickened his pace. Soon they came to another large rectangular door, much like the entrance only smaller. It was also completely undecorated except for the solitary triangle above the door. Once inside, Nephys found himself in a broad antechamber.

Nephys didn’t think it possible but the characters inside were even more frightening than the ones outside. These wore the same black and silver uniforms, except their wounds were more lavish and spectacular than the others. One had a pike through his chest on the other side of which was embedded his still-beating heart and another was so encrusted with arrows that he resembled a human hedgehog. Some carried their heads under their arms like packages and others carried their organs in silver jars. Others were flayed alive and had their skins draped over their shoulders like they were fashionable capes. One in black, fluted armor seemed normal enough until he turned around to see the two pass. His face had been completely removed to show the grinning skull underneath – the flayed flesh hung from his lower jaw like a gruesome beard. Nephys turned quickly to avoid looking at him, but no sooner had he turned away than his sight landed on something more horrifying: a woman with her breastbone removed to expose the glistening organs within. Her ribs were splayed back to make two wing-like protrusions from either side, a particularly gruesome fashion statement.

There were many different kinds of courtiers here. There were Sumerian high priests and Chinese mandarins, Briton druids, Teutonic knights and African shamans. By their costumes and dress, most of them seemed to come from the earlier ages of man. There were few that wore the increasingly tighter and ridiculous clothes of the last few centuries. They all stared at him in what was either contempt or apathy – Nephys couldn’t decide which. It was just clear that none of them were happy to see him there.

All of the people gathered there were also profoundly blind and sightless but around each hung a pallid blue aura of light. Some auras poured over their occupants like flowing water, others licked at them like flames. There was dark and powerful magic clinging to each one. They were not busying themselves with errands or messages like the ones in the outer halls either. They were working their hands into dark figures, making spells or something, but Nephys didn’t know for what purpose. They were writing figures to each other with blue flames that hung briefly in the air before disappearing.

All of these people were marked with the same triangle badge he had seen above the doors and on the tabard of the Herald, but there was something else. Flanking the triangle were two outstretched, upright arms glowing with faint blue light. Nephys knew this symbol. It was the
Ka
sign. The Egyptian symbol for the soul or life essence found in the blood and bones of every human body.

Nephys recognized at once who these high-ranking courtiers were. These were no ordinary functionaries. These were the elite of the Courts of Death. These were the nameless ones. These were the champions of Death himself. These were the Necromancers. The servants of Death on the other side.

Death did not often tread openly on the world above. Just his presence in the underworld was enough to insure the continuation of the business of death as usual back on earth. When Death did emerge from his Temple to walk the land of the living in person it almost always portended horrible times. Famine, plague and war followed in the footsteps of the Great Master like eddies in the wake of a great ship. Where Death walked, disaster followed: The Fall of Atlantis, The Eruption of Versuvius, the Black Death. Nephys shuddered at the thought.

Thankfully, Death rarely did emerge. The last time was many decades ago. When he left the temple, it was like a horrible wind that fled out the gates of Erebus, and when he returned, a flood of harvested souls like a tidal wave followed after him. Nephys knew very little of the events of those times, but he had caught snippets of it from the stacks of poor, thin grey paper sheets with smudgy ink that had come down to the scriptorium in heaps. Usually, those things,
newspapers
they called them, were left to the print boy in the paper hat and apron to copy down, since they were closer to his time. When Nephys had on rare occasion happened to transcribe some of those strange texts, he had made certain to use the red ink for all the strange-sounding names: Buchen-Wald, Okinawa, Auschwitz and Nagasaki. It had seemed the reverent thing to do.

When Death did not see to matters personally, he needed agents and representatives on earth to oversee the passage to the underworld. That was the role of necromancers. Nephys didn’t know how it began, but at some distant point, the Great Master had shared his power with a few select families. They in turn served him in life…
and
death. From the looks of their shattered bodies, the price was a high one. In the Halls of Death they served as his generals, soldiers, legates and viziers. Their very names were hidden behind ranks and titles, which is why the children of Limbo simply called them “The Nameless Ones,” known only to Death apparently. They were rarely seen outside the walls of the Temple, and none of the children of Limbo knew exactly what their functions were, but it was almost always a very bad omen to see any of them about. It was rumored that a few of them could even return to the land of the living, though Nephys wasn’t exactly certain how.

The soul was comprised of many parts: first was the
Ka
, which was the life essence of every living thing, but it was found only in the land of the living, for obvious reasons. The second was the
Ba
, which was the personality, and the third was the
Akh,
or as the Greeks called it, the
Nous,
which was the mind or sense of self. Added to these were the heart or
Yib
, and the shadow or
Sheunt
– light and dark, truth and illusion, the energy sources that powered the other parts of the soul.