Pomp does not like jars
and bottles. Never did. Especially not from the inside, which was the
side she had seen most often. There was usually some sort of sorcerer
involved, and this time was no exception. She had been in that
hookah, how long now? To her it didn't seem like too much time,
merely an annoyance, really. But Pomp, being eternal, but having
discovered that she is not entirely immortal, had a rather unique
concept of time. To humans, it had been almost 150 years, a century
and a half bottled up. Still, it was a bother and Pomp wishes, or
wished (how long until tense came naturally to her? Not yet!) she
could get out. Granted, now that she was out of the magic circle that
the sorcerer had put her in, she could
get out of this reeking tobacco boiler. But not without help. Not
without . . .
“Heraclix!” she
yelled at the top of her lungs. “Hey! Get up and get Pomp out of
here! Heraclix!”
“Heraclix!” His name
returned to him from some faint source beyond his dreams and
memories. Something here, now, something outside of his head,
assuring him that he was, is, himself.
“Heraclix!”
The voice was not of the
man he had seen as he emerged from the ethereal torpor that had held
him for so long. Nor was it the voice of the man who had trapped him
here in the first place. It was the voice of a very tiny woman, far
away, a familiar voice from somewhere before his dreams.
“Heraclix! Get Pomp
out!”
“Pomp!” The dreams
faded and memory pumped back into his skull as he sat up. He looked
around the dark, dusty room, but all was vagaries. A single oil lamp
burned nearby.
His last memories, before
the long stretch of dreaming, were that of a single candle flame and,
holding on to the sconce, the man who landed him in this position:
Gerhart Storm, necromancer. After the demise of Mattathias Mowler
(not to mention Heraclix's own demise, or the demise of the part of
him known as Okto Heilliger, before his death, but that is another
story), Heraclix had got on quite well with necromancers in general
(and, in fact, was one, when he was Okto Heilliger, before his birth
into undeath, also a part of another story). He had established ties
with the mystical Shadow Divan and, through those ties, been
instrumental in saving the Holy Roman Empire and possibly the entire
world from destruction at the hands of Mowler's earthly and abyssal
minions.
But the Shadow Divan had
little interest in the politics of men. They sought to unlock the
secrets of eternal life, to open the door to immortality through
magical means. Heraclix, being one of them, yet no longer one of
them, and, having been forced back from death and hell by Mowler, was
of great interest to the necromancers. They studied him and he
willingly gave himself to be studied. Still, they were unable to
repeat Mowler's success. Each perished, in his or her turn, and each
was replaced by a new disciple of death and life magic.
One of these, Gerhard
Storm, a gifted savant in the necromantic arts, had succumbed to the
allure of power and allowed corruption to enter in to what the Shadow
Divan had worked so carefully to protect: the laws of the sanctity of
life bounded by the grand brotherhood of man, for which they
silently, secretly, humbly labored. Through a series of subterfuges,
Storm tricked Heraclix and his companion, the pixie Pomp, and
captured them, incapacitating them and storing them in the attic of
Josefov's renowned synagogue with the aid of a young, naïve, and
unsuspecting rabbinical student, who had been bewitched into thinking
that the immense body was a clay statue that would come to life under
one's control when the correct kaballistic formulas could be applied.
He was also convinced that the hookah contained a demon bound by one
of the Seals of Solomon that could be similarly controlled, if one
could only learn the mechanism by which such control could be
exercised.
Pomp watched from her
glass prison as the young man grew old, poring over texts and
scrolls, studying number patterns in games of chance, and even
succeeding in conjuring up a very minor devil that pretended to be
far more knowledgeable than it really was, for all devils, Pomp knew,
were liars. The dedication with which the man pursued his desires
eventually drove the old man insane. Pomp last remembered a pair of
rabbinical assistants carrying the old Rabbi's body out of the attic
after he had fallen to the floor in a paroxysm during a particularly
strenuous ritual of some sort.
She had not seen Gerhard
Storm since the day he brought her and Heraclix to this forlorn
attic.
But Heraclix could not
have known any of this.
“Pomp!” He looked
around him, then picked up the lamp to angle the lighting to where he
could see more clearly around the darkened room. “Where are you?”
“Pomp is here!” She
banged on her prison walls.
He could hear the
frustration in her voice, over there, near that glass hookah. No,
inside the hookah. “What kind of sick . . .?” Heraclix
sighed, knowing the unspoken answer to his unfinished question.
“Lie low,” he warned
before breaking the neck of the hookah off with his hands. Pomp flew
up out of the jagged opening, dusting tiny shards of glass from off
her clothes. She removed the arrows from her quiver, then dumped a
crystalline shower out into the bottle beneath her.
“You still have those?”
Heraclix asked.
“And this!” She
proudly held up a tiny bow, sized just right for the needle-like
arrows.
“Why don't they ever
take those away from you?” He asked.
“Bad men are proud.
Pride is dumb. They don't think I can hurt them with these,” she
gave a mischievous smile.
Heraclix returned the
smile. “If they only knew . . .”
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