Taking her to a place designated for the nameless and faceless forgotten made me ill to the core. Hooded, in midday, I took the laden mule down Red Wolf, over the little white bridges that ran through Nilghorde Commerce, past the Tower of the Waning Moon, and finally through winding roads that made the strange district called the The Dead Kettle.
Arriving at the front offices of the morgue, I tethered the mule and stared up at the fat man’s nearby tower we’d once raided. Since then it had withered terribly, as if the ultimate perversions once contained within had howled free, leaving the rook beaten by decay beyond the normal brutality of the sun and rain.
I carried Somyellia through the doors of the Pauper Morgue. The transaction was as brief as one would expect. Then a pair of pale bald men took her.
Looking at these two, if you saw them you would find them disgusting and queer, and not be ashamed of it. Stubby legs supported flab up to the neck, and pouty bottom lips held spittle ready to drip. It was too easy to see the types of men that had paid Somyellia over the years. Just as easily, to see them mongering over her body the moment my back was turned. Eventually letting go of my knife’s handle, I helped them unwrap her from the sheet.
“What do you want on the tombstone?” the shorter one asked.
Throughout the years, I have read dozens of excerpts in poems and books, the ones loaded with saccharine romancing, and I wished I’d used a number of them. Particularly striking was a line out of Songs in Regal Twilight, authored by Vandahl five hundred years before I was born. At the time, though, all I could do was fight back a surge of tears and scribble out what was clawing:
SOMYELLIA ORDRID
CAPTOR OF MANY HEARTS, RULER OF ONE
A Black Lamb In Your Arms Do I Hope To Find You
“Good sir,” the taller one said, sounding a degree more elegant than his counterpart and pulling me back to the world. “We are looking to replace an employee…very soon. The position requires the ability to read and write.”
“Skills elusive to many willin’ to work here,” the short one said.
“We don’t mean to ask you this without regard to the tragedies that befell you,” the tall one said, brushing a hand over Somyellia, “but we need a strong back most urgently.”
I don’t know if I had death written on my face. Maybe these little trolls, so close to it on a daily basis, were able to see things others couldn’t. This opportunity seemed to fall out of the sky and onto the lap of a man well-adjusted to life’s apathy. This was so harmoniously ideal that my shift to excitement with the smell of Somyellia still on my skin pelted me with guilt.