The carriage rattled along the cobbled avenue towards the House of the Long Dead, which stood on the outskirts of the Upper City, next door to the vast Necropolis. Jyx stared out of the window as several miles of graveyard slipped past. He tried to pick out details but one broken headstone looked much like another.
“The only thing older than the Necropolis is the Palace,” Eufame said. She sat beside him, but Jyx couldn’t see her face in the depths of her hood.
“I’ve never seen it before.”
“Dean Whittaker leads me to believe your family resides in the Underground City?”
“That’s right. My mother and my brothers and sisters live on Benefactor’s Close. I wasn’t allowed to tell my mother the good news.”
Jyx scowled. Dean Whittaker’s insistence that he leave the Academy immediately rather soured his excitement at being chosen as Eufame’s new apprentice.
“Dean Whittaker has about as much emotion as my left boot, which is ironic since I know he says the same about me. No matter. I will have a note sent to your family to explain your new position, as I imagine your mother may worry when you do not return home this evening. If you pass your probationary period, then you can invite them to stay in one of our residences.”
“One of…”
“Of course, Jyx. We have several residences. You yourself will stay with me, but I have properties all over the city. I am sure your siblings would love the open spaces out at Marsh House.”
“You’d really let all of them live there?”
“Indeed. The apprentice of the necromancer general holds a higher station than an Academy student, and it really wouldn’t do for his family to be holed up in a dingy tenement in the Underground City.”
Jyx thought he heard laughter at the edges of Eufame’s tone, but said nothing in reply. He didn’t want to risk her withdrawing her offer. He hoped she would let him write the note to his family himself. His mother would have to fetch one of the judges to read it, but she’d recognise his handwriting all the same.
A large building shimmered into view through the afternoon heat haze. It crouched beside the Necropolis like a panther waiting to pounce, all black marble and Gothic arches. Stained glass windows studded its sleek exterior, and gargoyles topped the towers that punctured the clear blue sky. Its shining wall reflected an image of the Necropolis, sending the image of the cemetery into infinity.
The carriage bounced along the cobbles alongside the behemoth of a building and turned left onto a paved road. They passed under an arch between two massive statues of jackal-headed men, and pulled into a circular courtyard. A fountain took centre stage in the yard, cast in black wrought iron and surrounded by black marble. Dark red liquid played where Jyx expected to see water.
“That isn’t blood. It’s just coloured to look like it,” Eufame said, noticing Jyx’s pained expression as she turned to look at him.
“Why?”
“People expect a certain visual aesthetic to the House of the Long Dead. We like to give them what they want. Besides, we find it amusing. And, by ‘we’, I mean that I find it amusing.”
Jyx looked away, unable to decide which was the more frightening—the blood-red fountain, or Eufame’s attempt at a smile.
The carriage door opened, and a white-skinned Wolfkin clad in the black robes of the House appeared. It held open the door as Eufame stepped down into the courtyard. Jyx tried to emulate her smooth grace, but his foot caught the hem of his robe and he tumbled down the steps on his bottom. Eufame didn’t notice, and strode away across the yard. The Wolfkin seized Jyx’s collar and yanked him upright, gesturing for him to follow.
Jyx trotted after Eufame, conscious of the sheer scale of the house. The building rose for several storeys above him, each stained glass window separated by more statues. He recognised some of the ancient deities from his clandestine readings, but some of the figures both confused and repulsed him. He knew the house practiced arcane magick and dealt with beings far older than those the Academy would recognise, but Jyx gulped. For the first time since the age of six, the age he first discovered he could command the cold ashes in the fireplace, he felt out of his depth.
A gathering of men clustered near the doorway. One of them held the reins of an imposing horse, its bronze coat dull in the shadow cast by the building, while another held a vast bouquet of glass flowers. Hope and expectation lit up their faces when they saw Eufame. A short man with the shaved head of a cleric stepped forward, his robes of state flapping around his ankles.
“Miss Delsenza! We have awaited your arrival—”
“Save your breath, Dumier. I am uninterested and unmoved by your offers. You may tell Berelsine the same thing so that he may cease sending you cretins to harass me.” Eufame twisted her lips into a snarl, echoed in the low growl of the Wolfkin at her side.
“But Miss Delsenza!”
Eufame turned on her heel and strode up the wide staircase towards a tall set of doors. Scarlet flames blazed in braziers either side of the doors, yet Jyx felt no warmth as he passed. He shuddered as he crossed the threshold, aware that a pair of Wolfkin guarded the doorway on the inside.
“Who were they?” Jyx looked back towards the door. The cluster of men jostled for position, peering through the gap between the doors as they swung shut.
“Suitors, Jyx.”
“Marriage suitors?” Jyx looked at Eufame, trying to envision a man who would want to marry such a forbidding woman. She was so different from his warm, round mother. Jyx couldn’t imagine Eufame bending over a cauldron of nourishing broth, or cradling a sleeping child with one arm while bouncing a toddler on her knee.
“What else? However, city law prevents a married woman from holding any form of high office.” Eufame peeled her long gloves from her hands and dropped them into a waiting bowl held by a grovelling servant. The little man scurried away towards a small doorway.
“So you’d have to give up your job?”
“Being necromancer general is not simply a job, Jyx. It’s a vocation, and one at which I happen to be very good. No, none of those men out there actually wish to marry me. That silly old fool over at the Hall of Records wants my position and keeps paying suitors to try to entice me. Although I rather suspect the idea was not his own. There are others who would see me out of office.” Eufame glared at the doors as if her very stare could penetrate the thick wood. Jyx wouldn’t be entirely surprised if it did.
He stood away from the door, one foot in the pool of light thrown onto the floor by the brazier. Jyx looked around the atrium, aware that none of his fellow Academy students even knew what the house looked like. Some of them even disbelieved its very existence. Several storeys above them, light passed through the stained panes of a glass dome, throwing flashes of colour across the marble floor. Paintings of jackal-headed men covered the walls, and a band of glyphs ran around the room at head height. Jyx couldn’t read the language.
“Anyway, Jyx, enough of such unpleasantries. Welcome to the House of the Long Dead! This is our entrance hall, but I expect you figured that part out for yourself.” Eufame gestured to the square, lofty room.
“Whereabouts do you work, Miss Delsenza?”
“Downstairs. That’s where the magick happens. The upper chambers are mostly residential, administrative, or for entertaining.”
“Entertaining?”
“Yes. Strange as it may seem, we host the occasional formal gathering here, as well as a few informal get-togethers. We hold a lot of cultural cache with the government, and we have a lot of visiting scholars. Once you’ve been here a while and you’re used to my way of working, I’ll take you to the archives.”
“Visiting scholars?”
“Yes. We hold an awful lot of knowledge within our walls. But it’ll be a while before you’ll get to see them. Or the archives. There will be no midnight excursions to peruse our books. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Jyx nodded, more interested in the strange wall paintings.
“I mean it, Master Faire. At the Academy, the worst punishment you could face would be expulsion. Well, you’re not at the Academy anymore.”
Jyx followed Eufame’s gaze across the entrance hall. Streaks of white disrupted the smooth black marble of the floor at the bottom of the grand staircase. Eufame made a dismissive gesture with her bony fingers. Jyx crossed the hall, an inexplicable ball of dread growing in his stomach. He reached the white streaks and gasped. A skeleton was embedded in the floor. He looked back at Eufame, searching her face for answers. A smirk hovered around her mouth.
“Meet the last apprentice who disobeyed orders.”
Jyx stared at Eufame. The necromancer general looked at the skeleton and back at Jyx. Her pointed eyebrow mirrored the arched window behind her.
A paw planted firmly in between Jyx’s shoulders. The Wolfkin shoved him across the hall. Eufame turned and headed for a wide doorway set into the wall. A jackal head sculpture protruded from the door arch, its mouth open in a roar. Or a scream—Jyx couldn’t tell which.
“Come along, Jyx. You knew life here would be different. Do as I say, learn well and work hard, and you’ll be fine. You’ve shown a lot of promise so far.”
Eufame snapped her fingers and the door swung inwards. Jyx watched her disappear into the gloom beyond and gulped. He glanced back at the main entrance, guarded by the twin Wolfkin. Another shove in his back sent him stumbling towards the door.
A stone spiral staircase led into suffocating gloom. Jyx clung to the handrail on the way down, conscious of the Wolfkin behind him, and the skeleton set into marble upstairs.
“Come along, Jyx. Don’t dawdle on your first day.” Eufame’s voice echoed up the stairwell, hollow reverberations against cold stone. Jyx couldn’t decide if the harsh edge to her tone was admonishment or amusement.
Jyx stumbled as he reached the bottom of the staircase. Purple flames burned in braziers on each wall in the tiny anteroom. Figures, painted flat in profile, cavorted in narrow bands across the walls. A pair of giant Wolfkin portraits adorned the wall either side of the archway opposite the staircase. Jyx assumed they were Wolfkin—they had the same canine heads and muscular human bodies. Yet unlike the Wolfkin behind him, the figures wore elaborate headdresses and simple loincloths instead of the armour favoured by Eufame’s guards.
The Wolfkin behind him shoved him towards the arch. A blast of cold air hit Jyx in the face when he stepped through into the vaulted room beyond. The room stretched far away into the gloom, and more braziers flickered from the columns holding the vaulted ribs aloft. A gallery ran around the Vault near the ceiling, granting access to the glass cabinets of potions and salves that lined the walls. Doorways were hewn into the stone walls, the rooms beyond cold and dark. Jyx stared into the empty portal to his right, and imagined what could lurk in the depths of its shadows.
“Welcome to the Vault.”
Eufame stood before him, and gestured to the cavernous room. More painted figures adorned the walls below the gallery, interspersed with the same strange glyphs Jyx had seen upstairs. A narrow table stretched along one wall, groaning beneath the weight of glass vials and tubes. Braziers burned beneath some of the flasks, giving off coloured smoke and intoxicating fumes.
“Is this where you work?” Jyx stared at the apparatus. The only time he’d seen a set-up like that was an engraving in a dusty book about alchemy.
“It is, yes. The House of the Long Dead occupies far more space than the building above you. Admin and entertaining happens upstairs, but we do all of the actual work down here in the Vault for containment purposes. As you can tell, it’s a lot colder down here, but it makes it easier to work our magick on the bodies. That, and it stops them decaying before we can finish our work,” Eufame replied.
She strode away from Jyx. Bandaged bodies lay on marble slabs on either side of the room’s central aisle. Jyx shuddered, unable to remember the last time he’d been close to a dead body. Living in the Underground City, he’d encountered many suspicious piles at the bottom of the many closes, and seen the apprentice undertakers with their dead-carts, heading for the graveyards, but these were real corpses, and royal ones, at that.
“You’ll soon grow accustomed to this,” Eufame said.
Jyx scowled in her direction. He hated how easily she seemed to read his thoughts. Perhaps he’d find a text in the archives that might teach him to guard his mind. Eufame’s step faltered and Jyx thought of his mother, scrubbing the kitchen floor with black soap. He wouldn’t even be able to consider pursuing knowledge unless Eufame felt he needed to learn it.
A tabby cat poked its head around the side of the tomb nearest to Jyx. It peered up at him with huge golden eyes, its whiskers quivering in the cold air. The Wolfkin behind Jyx uttered a low growl, but the cat ignored it. Jyx thought of the rat catchers in the Underground City, huge fierce bags of fur with claws like knives and tempers to match. The little tabby barely seemed related to them.
“You have a cat?”
“I do. Meet Bastet. She keeps down the rodents in here. She’s quite friendly, I assure you. Nothing like the beasts you’ll be used to. Now come along, Jyx. I must show you your quarters before I can set you any tasks. It’s vital that you consider this place to be your home.”
Jyx trotted down the central aisle that ran the length of the room. Eufame paused, and Jyx saw that another aisle crossed his path, cutting through the slabs across the width of the Vault. From this vantage point, the far end of the room’s dim lines was faintly discernible in the gloom. More bubbling apparatus occupied a far wall, though the smells from those flasks were less pleasing to his nose. Tall archways cut the walls at either end of the shorter aisle, and Wolfkin paintings guarded the doors. The more he stared at the paintings, the more Jyx became convinced that they were not Wolfkin. Perhaps they’re Wolfkin ancestors.
“Jyx, you’re staring a lot. It is most unbecoming,” Eufame said.
“It’s all just so new to me,” Jyx replied.
“I understand that, but before we go much further, I feel I must point out to you that the world is a lot older than you realise. The magick you learned in the Academy is useful, yes, but there are far more ancient, far more powerful forms of magick. If you learn well, then I will be able to teach you these. But you must understand that the ways of this house are not the ways of your previous life.”
“I know things will be different. I don’t have to put up with that idiot Markus Prady, for one thing,” Jyx said.
“That is true, but things will be different in other ways too. You already know that I am older than most. I was five hundred and seventy-three on my last birthday. My age alone grants me access to magick beyond that which the Academy will even officially recognise. You have become part of a very ancient tradition, Jyx.”
Jyx stared at Eufame. He wanted to see lines on her face, or streaks of white in her mane of black hair. He knew she was old, but hearing her say it unsettled him. He wanted to run away, leaving nothing behind but his screams, but a voice whispered in the back of his mind. It was the same voice that persuaded him to seek out forbidden texts in the library, and told him to accept Eufame’s offer. The same voice that sought knowledge—at any price.
“Few can accept my age, not least the fools that run this city. Did you know that I originally embalmed most of these royal buffoons that the prince hopes to present as part of his coronation pageant?”
“Really?” Jyx fought to banish the gawp from his face. He didn’t want Eufame to think he was surprised by everything.
“Yes, Jyx, I embalmed them. You see, the necromancer general does not merely raise the dead. It is part of our job to prepare and protect them. That was part of the role of the Wolfkin for centuries, before the Academy started using them as guard dogs, and this house was established.”
The Wolfkin behind Jyx growled. Jyx turned and looked up into its canine face. Sleek grey fur gave way to smooth grey skin that rippled across huge muscles. Its lips vibrated with the snarl, displaying glimpses of white fang. Jyx knew he should be afraid, but he saw pride and disgust in the Wolfkin’s icy blue eyes. The growl was not intended for him.
“But the Wolfkin—”
“You will learn of their ancestry when they deem it to be necessary. It is not my story to tell, but theirs. Anyway, enough of that lesson.” Eufame clapped her hands and wiggled her fingers, as if trying to dispel negative vibes.
“So the rooms…”
“Yes. The Vault’s layout is rather simple. The doorway in the western wall leads to my chambers. Do you know why the west is significant?” Eufame pointed to the doorway at the far end of the short aisle.
“I’ve never come across anything about directions in my reading,” Jyx said.
His ears burned and he stared at the floor, cursing himself for disregarding all of the work on folklore. I just wanted to learn the magick.
“A common mistake, Jyx. People dismiss folklore or myth as trivial or silly. They forget it contains nuggets of truth. In this case, the west is important as the direction in which the sun sets. The Lands of the Dead lie to the west. It seems fitting that my chambers would lie to the west, doesn’t it?”
Jyx nodded.
“On no account are you to venture beyond that arch. If you require me and I am not in the Vault, one of the Wolfkin will fetch me. You may also ask Bastet to find me. You, however, may not.”
“Yes, Miss Delsenza.”
“Your chambers are this way.”
Eufame ducked beneath the archway in the eastern wall. Jyx gulped to see the darkness swallow her up. He forced himself to ignore the rising sense of dread, and plunged headfirst into the black shadows beyond the archway.