Emeralds in the Bog

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. Fables told of a city-sized beast at the edge of the Earthly plane. His twin heads and tails whirled around each other like a fern’s spiral fronds. He was supposed to be the last. Frozen mid-flight in an immense glacier. Bubbles hung still and scales bleached coral white. His meteor eyes oscillated steadily as a pendulum, turning in concert with constellations on head. He wore the glacier like a crown, the world atop Atlas’ back.

A new dragon emerged on a muggy summer day over the Sakkhara Duchy. It was a day when clouds smeared the sky like curdled cheese and the air licked sweat soaked linen. She swirled over thick pinelands and sawgrass marshes and swamps dense with rot. Spiraled the sky like maple keys propelling to the ground. Buried herself deep in mud, disappearing like the children who sipped swamp water sweet as candied sugar.

Why did a dragon visit the land of lilies and bladderwort? They lived in the Ice Era when primordial humans meditated on barbaric thoughts. Sentenced fellow man to execution by glacier. The glacier melted long ago and carved out the valley. Instead of ice, the dragon found crushed skeletons and sugar scented mud. If dragons roused in summers past, why not the gods in winters to come?

To the lowly butcher or spice merchant, necromancy and necrophilia were one and the same. Like conjoined twins — both must stick along for the ride. Look how similar they were! The necromancer pulled crackling green ghosts from underworld sludge. The necrophiliac slid himself deep into cold corpses. What revolutionary imaginations regarding all words prefixed by necro! I loved it when they thought my career a fetish.

They placed bets on the day I’d be imprisoned alongside the cannibals and fairy traffickers and treasonous court ex-appointees. No matter what I did for that wretched city, I was always an other. My name was the cherry atop the proverbial iced cream. Emerald Emshri Emris. Black-footed children asked why a boy shared a name with a dull rock. The wizard who named me said it complimented my hair, red as an angry Mars. He was either joking or had a screw banging around his skull. I insisted people refer to me as Em. Anyone who used my full name was liable to get a one-way ticket to their afterlife of choice.

Craddock, the capital of the Sakkhara Duchy, was muck to be trudged through. Nosy neighbors snooped through parted curtains, stealing looks at the boy with skin as pale as the lard that floated the city river. Congealed pig blood ran the streets and stained my shell cordovan boots. Ignorant dolts without even a collar to cover their necks looked at me as a housewife looks at a rat in the pantry.

Fear infested hearts favored Craddock over the outlying scapes ripe with tales of ghost infested wetlands. The screech of the male cicada and the bellow of the alligator were the instruments in the swamp’s symphony. Such magic was nowhere to be found in the incessant chattering of homemakers stringing laundry between window sills. Home was where hogs scrounged water-logged soil and black bears coated their noses with red maple flower pollen. Home was snug against the Yaga Swamp, nestled among bald cypress trees whose trunks grasped the soil like human fingers.

I prepared to leave home for my meeting with the new Astral Vertex chief of eastern Craddock. I worked with Chief Illin for years until his sudden retirement. The wizard suggested his department work with a mage to investigate difficult murders. No one else was to know the details of my involvement with the law, not even the Duke himself. To the stiff-necks, I was a detective with a good hunch. In reality, I cleaned up the messes they couldn’t. Who else but me could interview the dead?

I worked with them for ten years, raising everything from zebra-centaurs to meth-elves back from the dead. Anytime they got stuck on an investigation, Illin appeared at my doorstep with the case details and a meeting time. How well would a man named Hug-something-or-other fair? Illin assured me he was trustworthy. He is a man of great posture. I was to meet this new chief near Yetonson Charnel before the witching hour that night. A few cups of wine would get me through it.

I slunk through the plum-colored entryway with a creak. The green-eyed tabby, my only friend to visit regularly, sat still as a painting with a salmon-egg sunset in the background. She was old enough to remember when I teethed, when I studied magic until the Sun rose, when the wizard still slept on the third floor. I was probably 25 years of age at the start of this story, but she never aged a day. A cursed haunt? Animal guide? A feline therianthrope? As a child, I entertained myself by inventing fables for the children who once played nearby. I still remember the words that angered the wizard into forbidding me from poetry.

The vengeful she-devil

eyes radiating neon green

prowled alleys as a tiny tabby

A green tinted moon

mourning a star-crossed tragedy

ebbed the waters of the mind

Suicides abound under the full moon

Forget the werewolf

fear the cat.

What was the tabby doing blocking the door? She did not want food, for she never ate. Ting-a-ling. She shook her head like a dog after a bath, wearing a black collar with a bottle as its charm. Strange. I’d never seen her wear anything. Normally I wasn’t allowed to touch her, but she allowed me to untie the bottle. Length of my pinky finger. Crystal-cut. Transparent. Filled with a charcoal liquid. Wait, was it ink? My hands perspired inside black moleskin gloves.

In all my dealings with banned goods and the black market, I’d seen ink once. Watered down and barely legible on paper, but still sold for a 50-sack of Durrems. The new ink was blacker than a chimney in east-side Craddock. Runes thin as insect legs were etched up the bottle. I never failed to translate languages from south-eastern coastal duchies, but I didn’t recognize the runes. Either too old or too distant a language.

Before I could look twice at the tabby, she mewed and strolled into the marsh marigolds.

The scent of rotting pine needles mixed with sea-salt on the heavy air and ate at the lungs with retching humidity. Mud and hay and fish scales licked the back of the throat. People crouched in the streets, thrusting their fingers into mud to search for lost droplets of wine. Craddock’s welcoming party. Homes with roofs painted hemoglobin-red and sea slug-blue were packed tight as tinned sardines. Homeless lived in collapsed houses, eyes shining through gaps in the stone and straw and water-swollen wood.

Dockworkers wearing nothing but hemp chausses and straw hats meandered after work. Rolled tobacco hung from their lips. “Strange tides lately,” one muttered with a puff of smoke.

Streetwalkers sat atop barrels to entice men into private rooms at cheap inns. Their naked necks and collarbones were leathered and sun-spotted from working the streets day and night. The fairies and mermaids and other exotics were locked behind closed doors at specialized brothels. I never understood how men found themselves enticed by a woman with the body of a trout.

Undesirables avoided me like I had a bad case of the cat plague. Who would mess with someone dressed so blatantly as a mage? I slicked my hair back with honey wax. My black mulberry silk cloak reached my calves. Jade vines snaked up the back, embroidered in teal thread, pollinated by bats drinking their nectar. I pinned my collar in place with an emerald broach the size of a bumblebee.

My embarrassment about the name Emerald didn’t get in the way of me wearing extravagant jewels. Only royalty, pirates, and mages wore them. A single glance told anyone I was the latter. Catastrophe at its finest. People feared invoking the wrath of whatever god they thought I worshiped. It made it easy to lounge near the charnel where I was to meet the new chief. I loaded up an ebony wood pipe with cherry soaked tobacco. The Sun tucked under the horizon obscured by an ocean blanket.

When Hug arrived, he frowned at me. He was in the prime of his life with an impeccable bronze mustache and face that screamed upstanding citizen. Spine straighter than a flag pole. He looked like the hero of this story. I was a giraffe of a man with a lanky body draped in soft silk. I looked like the villain. He wore coarse brown fabric. No surprise he was out of uniform. Discreteness was key. Best not let anyone know an honorable law-man worked with a scoundrel like me.

“Mr. Emris, I presume? I was told to look for the man with hair as red as a desert poppy.”

“Please refer to me as Em. I don’t care for formalities.”

I did my best to hide my accent, but the wine didn’t help. The wizard always warned me not to play with children from swamp-villages, lest I acquired their yokel accents. I didn’t listen.

“My name is Maverick Huguenin.”

I peeled the gloves off my witch-like fingers and shook his hand. His skin burned hot like a fever . “Huguenin, was it? I’ll continue to call you Hug if you don’t mind. That’s quite the nickname.”

“Well, I-”

“Before he scurried off, Ilin told me you have a case for me.”

“The former chief told me to find you for help with problematic investigations. I think this one fits the description.”

“All he told me was that you had another fairy killing.”

“A river-skimmer found a naked body washed ashore near the Murdock bridge. We think she’s a fairy but can’t prove much else. Her face is too disfigured and her wings, if she had them, were cut off.”

“Asking for me was a good call. It’s nearly impossible to identify a faerie without a face or wings.”

“Off to the Yetonson Charnel now? That’s where the chief told me to send the body to. Not the nicest place. Wouldn’t you prefer a capital run charnel? They’re much cleaner and have more reputable staff.”

“A charnel that ignores us in exchange for a few pieces of silver is perfect. We don’t want anyone eavesdropping on us.”

“Because of the spellwork? I’m not sure how comfortable I am with this, but I trust Illin’s judgment.”

“Let’s just get to work.”

The witching hour chimed and the sleeping ghosts stirred. The Moon’s light dribbled through velvet fog. Venus hung next to the waxing crescent thin as a fingernail clipping. Millennium-old bells rang from slanted spiral towers. Once. Twice. Thrice.

Simile leaned against the charnel’s doorway. He was a Diener — a corpse servant who dealt with bodies. His work attire consisted of clothes with decade old blood stains and a sweat soaked rag for a scarf. “Not followed, Em?”

“Only by my dear friend Hug.”

“Hurry on in. I don’t like staying out this late.”

I draped my cloak on a hook and strode past the entry room to the basement where bodies were stored to slow their decomposition. Under the cloak, I wore a coniferous green suit as black is inappropriate to wear during fairy revivals.

Simile ambled up the stairs to leave us to work. The girl was strung across a table and draped with an empty potato sack. I peeled it off and tossed it aside with a flourish. Hug averted his eyes, suddenly interested in the sticky cobble floor. She was so weak and malnourished she looked like a child. Normally, fairies have delicate features: pointed noses, monolid eyes, and rosebud lips. Hers were deformed, swollen to twice the normal size. The stringy brown hair might’ve fallen out with a light tug.

I pried apart her stony hands clamped shut from rigor mortis. A fingernail was torn off, leaving a tender blue button at the tip of her pinky. Spiderweb veins peeked through near translucent skin. I rolled her onto her stomach. Two gnarled wounds stuck out of her shoulder blades like knots on a tree trunk. “Look how deformed the scars are. This is the worst wing amputation I’ve seen.”

“Perhaps she wanted to escape her place of work,” Hug said.

Prostitution as a fairy was dangerous. Sometimes, the addicts murdered their drug. “She failed to escape, even without wings. What’s worse is that her soul didn’t make it to her afterlife.”

“Where’s her soul?”

“Floating in limbo. It’s what happens when one is unable to reach their afterlife.”

“It must have been devastating,” he said.

“Their wings are everything to them,” I rolled her onto her back. “Help me put her on the floor.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Hug, I have the utmost respect for you and your job. But this is my domain now. I must ask that you comply with my instructions. We have little time before the witching hour is over.”

A moment passed before he nodded. We hoisted the body to the floor.

To improve her scent, I rinsed her body with rosewater, rubbing it into both fresh wounds and old scars. With fairies, every detail mattered. Simile’s odor would have frightened her away, but Hug smelled like tanned leather and incense. I smelled of nighttime damp and electric air.

I removed a bottle of greasy pink paint made of several hundred crushed swallowtail butterfly wings. Faeries were too sensitive for cheap ritual paint; they needed a reassuring scent. I popped the cork with my thumb. Paint flecks sprayed onto my hand. It created a burning sensation when I dipped my finger in. The scent of fresh cut grass and bitters wafted from the bottle as I painted the floor around her body. I drew crude butterfly wings to imitate the ones she had in life. With the excess paint, I wrote the summoning runes onto her breasts, forehead, palms, and soles of the feet.

“What is that for?”

“Runes to imbue intentions in body parts. They’re necessary for certain revivals.”

“Revival? You don’t mean necromancy?”

“What did you think I was doing? Common folk magic?”

He grabbed my writing arm. “No. Not necromancy. It goes against everything I believe in.”

“What makes necromancy morally inferior to other forms of magic?”

“Do souls consent to being ripped from their gods and placed back in rotting bodies?”

“Many souls beg to return to reconcile unfinished business. Do you think I toy with them? My intention is to bring them and their living families peace.”

He let go of my arm. “Life and death are part of a natural cycle. In no way is it natural to bring things back from the dead.”

“Wouldn’t you agree magic abilities are gifts from the gods? The sculptors of nature? Who are you to say their magic is unnatural?”

“In many ways, the gods have flaws just like humans. Why else would they war with each other?”

“Any further down the rabbit hole and I won’t have time to solve your case. If you are truly interested in a philosophical debate on necromancy, I am happy to discuss another time.”

“So you want me to just stand here and watch?”

“Don’t forget to take notes. And lighten up a bit. You have no obligation to work with me after this.”

He pulled out a thick stack of yellowing paper and a stick of charcoal wrapped in cloth. “If it helps the girl.”

Her ghost would be guided back to with a white candle placed above the body’s head. Using flint and steel, I lit it with a single spark. She was ready for the incantation.

“As the witching hour rings, I call you: child of the winged nebula. I rip you from your prison limbo. By my will, child of an unknown name, return to the world of the living. Let my light guide you home.” The words made my lips sting with ice.

She shook like an epileptic, seizing until her eyes shot open. As she lifted herself, translucent wings outlined in paint peeled off the floor. Her opalescent eyes shimmered blue and pink. Veins pulsed, attempting to pump the coagulated blood under paper-thin skin. Her heartbreak was a crystal grown overnight in a child’s experiment, ready to crumble with the press of a finger.

She sobbed when I touched her arm. Her voice gurgled and jellied blood leaked from her mouth. “Don’t hurt me Abel. Please.” Her breath stank of bone dust and river water.

“I’m not Abel. My name is Em. You’re safe with me.” I spoke in a low voice to calm her.

Her hands fumbled about until they reached my face. “What happened? I can’t see. Did they take my eyes?”

“Don’t worry. It’s temporary. What’s your name?”

“Amora.” Her zombie lungs gasped for air.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“Humans. I curse the men that walk the Earth.”

“Be fearless Amora.”

She moaned and tore out strands of hair. “I must be strong. Fairy hearts are immortal. Do not stoop.”

“Who did this to you?”

“Abel Lakelock. He always babbled about his name. Said he came from royalty. But I never heard of a royal family by that name.”

“How did you know him?” My surroundings started to lose their color, fading into grayscale.

“He was my regular at a Zoo. I escaped from there and got my wings cut so I could hide. Flitched like a halibut. Somehow he found me.”

“Where is this Zoo?”

“It’s the house painted red with the false ivy over the windows. On the east bank of the river by the Murdock Bridge.”

“I’ve passed it a hundred times. Should have known it had exotics.”

“I used to watch the sunrise from a second story window. But they boarded it up and hid it behind ivy. Didn’t want us to jump out.”

“What did Abel do to you?”

“I don’t know how he found me. His greasy hair and vulture’s nose mocked me. He was mad that I ran away. That I cut off my wings. He violated me. Must have blinded me too. I don’t remember much.” She stroked her eyes with a touch as soft as a mouse. “It’s a miracle I made it out alive. Papilius protected me. He cared for me even without my wings.”

“I’m sorry miss, but you didn’t make it out alive,” Hug said.

“Allow me to do the talking,” I said.

“How can I be dead? I’m talking to you, aren’t I?” Her opal eyes welled with tears.

“You don’t remember dying because you never went to the Circle of Lacuna. I brought you back temporarily with a spell.”

“Why can’t you bring me back for good?”

“I apologize. There’s nothing more I can do for you.”

“What kind of person does such a cruel thing? Why didn’t you leave me dead?” Her arms flailed and beat against my chest.

“Abel will be arrested. He will pay for his crimes. I had to bring you back. I gifted you temporary wings to fly to Papilius after passing.”

She probed her back until she found the hair-thin wings which glowed in the dim room. Tears rolled off her cheeks and splashed my clothes.

“I thought I’d never see them again.” She laughed.

“Do you have anything else to say before you go?”

“You gave me wings. I can be with my family again. Thank you.” Her body shook, attempting to expel the ghost.

There was no more color in my vision. “It’s time.”

“Will you hold me?” Her wings fluttered.

I wrapped my arms around her, already giving up on my clothes. They were covered with blood and skull fragments and fairy tears.

“I name your god, the butterfly nebula, king of fairies from the lost kingdom Papilius. I license you, Amora, to depart unto the Circle of Lacuna on borrowed wings. Farewell.”

Eyes dulled and she went limp.

“She’s gone now?” Hug slammed his paper onto the table. The charcoal stick shattered. “How do you sleep soundly at night after everything you’ve seen? Everything you’ve done? For the sake of all that is holy, I just witnessed you talking to a dead girl.”

“Now you know who the killer is. Satisfied?”

“I’ll thank you for that, but I cannot do this again. The smell. The rasping breaths. And my god, the eyes. No good man would choose to do this for a living.”

“It will please you to know that I did not choose this life.”

“I’m sorry you have to live like this. Here you are Mr. Emris.” He placed a pouch on the table.

I painted on a smile and with all the enthusiasm of a necromancer in the prime of his life, told him I preferred the name Em.

“I’ll pray for you.”

“I’ll toast to that. You know where to find me.”