J’aime le jade,
Couleur des yeux d’Hérodiade,
Et l’améthyste,
Couleur du sang de Jean-Baptiste.Comte Robert de Montesquiou (1855-1921).
When the throne of Tsmommb fell vacant at last and the millennial dynasty of the Kšar was ended, word came east by fleet-winged apodes to the wizard Ven-Zwuluur; and in the morning he was gone from his tower of elemental-builded jade and porphyry in the city of Hsun-Duw. Sixty-seven years before he had applied for the post of court astrologer in Tsmommb, and been rejected with contumely and opprobrium for his lowly birth and paucity of sponsors. He had brooded long on revenge, after the manner of wizards, and when he came into the fullness of his power he cast many spells beneath late-rising stars, slowly nudging the orrery of fate to his will. Now his schemes had borne fruit, and he rode west to pluck and savor them.
The mummified Emperors of Tsmommb were carried into the rubiginous desert of Qvirr to be laid in a necropole whose location eighty generations of thieves had never learned; but among his soul-bartered store of wisdom Ven-Zwuluur knew the languages of the jackal, vulture, and kite, and when he came to Qvirr his questions did not go unanswered. The necropole was delved in cliffs of rose-colored sandstone in the desert’s deep south-west, and thither Ven-Zwuluur went solus on a yearling black camel whose blood smoked in the light of that night’s moon, summoning the elementals who had reared his tower in the east. Again they reared a tower for the wizard, thrice as tall as before and facing the giant necropolitan gates, stocked it with the impedimenta of his sorcery, and set atop it a mighty organ, fit for the tallest and widest of temples. In the morning, carrying a kitchen-knife of rusted iron and a wide garden-basket of fraying flax, Ven-Zwuluur broke the seals on the gates of the necropole and passed within, to emerge with the basket heavy with gold-crowned heads.
These he set atop the pipes of his organ, melding them to the instrument with curious art, so that when he sat to play the imperial anthems of Tsmommb the dead mouths opened and released the notes as though in song. And it pleased him to set the fair heads of the Empresses of Tsmommb atop the bass pipes of the organ, and the stern heads of the Emperors atop the treble, so that the gut-shuddering tones of leviathan and behemoth emerged between petaloid female lips, and the orthian tones of lamiæ and sirens between bewhiskered male. So he sat with the half-emptied basket at his feet and played to the cliffs and necropole, filling the desert behind him for leagues with the echo of his music; and when, ever and anon, the slender head of an Empress or broad-browed head of an Emperor was burst into dust by its inapposite usage, to fall with gem-studded crown to the base of his tower, he delved in the basket anew and refitted the organ for play. Week on week he played, back through the centuries of Tsmommb’s greatness, and slowly the south-western base of his tower was heaped with gems, gold, and imperial dust.
Then, one day, he returned from the necropole and climbed the spiral stair of his tower with the head of the Emperor Msarr-Dzulm riding atop the pile in his basket. Msarr-Dzulm it was who had composed the oldest and greatest of the anthems he had profaned, and the Emperor’s mummy-case had contained a wax-sealed scroll, evidently, from the characters incused in the seal, a never-performed requiem for his young-dying Empress, Yioth-Lmirr, whose bare head Ven-Zwuluur also carried in his basket. The wizard set the head of the Empress, uncrowned in tribute to the rarer gold of her hair, atop the largest of his bass-pipes, where it was certain to burst within the half-hour, then set the head of Msarr-Dzulm himself beside the mammoth-ivory keys of his organ, to watch as he thundered out the requiem for his Empress.
He broke the seal on the scroll, unrolled it with caution, lest it crack or crumble with extreme age, and pinned it to his reading-stand of polished bronze. The musical notation employed therein, though long passed into desuetude, was familiar enough to him, and by a pleasing coincidence, though in defiance of Tsmommbean custom, the requiem was written for the hydraulikon, a water-powered sister to his own wind-powered instrument. He read the scroll through twice, flexed his fingers as his withered but untiring shanks began to pump on the treadles, and then, with a nod to the Emperor whose sightless eyes gazed upon him, he began to play. Three heads burst and were replaced as he played, hurling the ear-tormenting discords of the requiem into the necropolitan gates that gaped before him; and when he finished with a flourish of bass arpeggios, that of Yioth-Lmirr burst too, and her golden hair sprang into the air like a spurt of flame and fell from sight, to land far below in the dust-heap.
With a chuckle of satisfaction Ven-Zwuluur lifted the head of the Empress Vwilh-Tsonnh from his basket and walked to the organ to set it in place of Yioth-Lmirr’s; and as he did so he glanced over the parapet of his tower, to see the hair of Yioth-Lmirr lying where it had fallen. There it was, brighter than the gems and gold atop which it lay; but that was not all he saw, for through the gates of the necropole, sometimes stumbling and falling, to be trodden flat by those who followed, but always regaining their feet, the headless mummies of the Emperors and Empresses of Tsmommb were emerging with implacable purpose. Ven-Zwuluur flung down the spell that swung the lower iron door of his tower shut with a crash as of thunder, then ran for his most puissant wand to strike the mummies one by one out of their unnatural reanimation.
But the magic that had awoken them was stronger than his own, and now a few of the mummies, casting out across the desert, had discovered the base of his tower, and were beginning to beat on the iron door with natron-hardened fists. The crash of the assault seemed to re-direct those stumbling astray over the red sands of Qvirr, and to summon those newly emerged from the necropole, so that scores of mummies were soon crowded at the base of his tower, their close-wound bodies muffling the repeated fist-crash of those nearest the door. By now Ven-Zwuluur had had resort to natural weapons, setting aflame lumps of amber and candles of human fat and casting them down on the besiegers, whose age-brittle wrappings burnt readily and fiercely, hazing his tower with a throat-catching smoke; but the mummies themselves were nowise discomfited by the bombardment.
Having exhausted his lumps of amber and hair-wicked candles, Ven-Zwuluur began to set aflame and cast down his codices of sorcerous art, hoping to heap a pyre for his enemies; but the codices were too few and the mummies too many, and the fists continued to beat on the door. In a last extremity, the wizard snatched up the requiem scroll from his organ, meaning to cast that down with his codices, but his eyes caught fresh ink on the thing, and bulged as he read the name now standing in the title in place of Yioth-Lmirr’s and saw that the struck-out lines of the requiem had been replaced with a single note flanked with the symbol for repetitio ad libitum. Below him he heard his iron door cave in, and then his tower began to shake with the tread of ascending feet. Now he cast the scroll aside and slammed the iron door to the roof, then rushed to the parapet to see how his tower was ringed with headless sentinels, lest he seek to escape by somehow descending the outer wall.
Now the fists began to crash on the second iron door he had closed, thundering at him with ineluctable menace as eye-stinging smoke leaked around the jamb, and he watched the iron surface of the door buckle toward him. Soon that door too burst open, and the headless avengers, some burnt to skeletal nigritude, poured through. The disanimating spells he gabbled ended in a death-screech, when his head was plucked off and set atop the slenderest treble pipe of his organ; and by now the mummy of Msarr-Dzulm had retrieved and restored its stolen head, and was ready to sit at the organ and play the singularly monotonous requiem for Ven-Zwuluur.