The Gem Lords

The Realms - Part 6

     If they'd still been ordinary, living people, Alustra would have offered them refreshments first, and they would have spent the rest of the day unpacking and settling in, only getting down to business the next day, refreshed by a good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast, but they were beyond that now. As undead creatures, they no longer needed to sleep and they were unable to eat, their digestive systems having long since become reduced to a tangle of dead, leathery cords somewhere under the cavernous overhang of their rib cages.

     It had been well over a century since any of them had known the taste of a well cooked meal or the flavour of a fine wine, and their envy of the common, living masses who could do what they, with all their power, could not, occasionally grew so great that it verged on hatred. The very subject of food was avoided by the raks, therefore, as were all the other pleasures of the living body that the majority of the human race took for granted. They headed straight to the laboratory, theredore, determined to forget their miseries in their work.

     Seeing Sheena Kun brought it all back to Tak, however, and if he'd still been capable of shedding tears he would have wept at the gaunt, haggard monster the beautiful black girl had become. All of a sudden he remembered the touch of her fingers, the warm, soft feel of her body against his, and the pain of it was almost more than he could bear.

     What did we do to deserve this? he cried in the privacy of his own mind. What terrible crime did we commit that we should be so harshly punished? Didn't we try to be just and virtuous? Didn't we save a city from the tyranny of Khalkedon and rule justly and fairly in his place? Maybe Jack Nowl was right all along. Maybe all wizards are damned from the start, no matter what they do. No matter how they live their lives. He remembered how Jack Nowl had nearly killed him once, how he'd threatened to throw him off a mountain if his kidnapped daughter wasn't returned to him, and now Tak cursed the long dead man for not doing so. Why hadn't he killed him when he'd had the chance? Was it possible he'd somehow known what the future had in store for him and had left him alive to suffer?

     None of this showed on his shrunken, skull-like face, however, and none of the others showed any sign of whatever tumultuous emotions they were suffering. Instead, they simply greeted each other, Lord Sapphire and Lady Jet merely inclining their heads to acknowledge their familiarity with each other. Sheena was no longer Tak's black beauty, and Tak was no longer Sheena's little white man. They were now just two undead creatures, united by their shared suffering, working together in search of an escape. Either a return to life or, if that proved not to be possible, death, and as the long years passed without any glimmer of hope, death was looking increasingly attractive.

     The equipment arranged on the laboratory benches was distressingly similar to the contents of Tak's own workrooms, suggesting that Lady Diamond wasn't pursuing any radical new lines of research. He listened patiently as she outlined her most recent experiments, though, and pored over the notebooks she passed across to him. The excitement he'd felt at her supposed breakthrough collapsed with a heavy thud. There was nothing new here. It was an avenue of research Tak himself had followed some thirty years before and which he'd shared with the others, but which Alustra had evidently forgotten, or which she'd thought had possibilities Tak had overlooked. Those possibilities now turned out to be empty dreams, and as the facts sank in their hostess apologised with a flat, soulless voice for having wasted their time.

     Coal placed a shrunken, clawlike hand on her shoulder. "We must not despair," he said. "It doesn't matter if we cover the same ground a thousand times. If it takes an eternity to find the answer, well, we have an eternity. We will continue to search, and eventually one of us will succeed. Come, let the rest of us now take turns to tell the others what avenues of research we've been following. Maybe one of us will think of something everyone else has overlooked."