History prepares us for the death of fathers, but not the death of sons. The man kneeling before me now, whose blood trickles down to the deep furrows above his eyes, is a mystery to me.

“My son!” he chokes out. “My son!” He is ready to dash out his brains on the flagstones. My own son, sitting beside me, gives a two-fingered motion to the guards and they grab hold of the man’s shoulders to keep him from the task.

“Necropolis does not return the dead,” my son says. “We only employ them.”

“What does he look like, your son?” I ask. “How old?”

My boy turns and gives me a sharp look. His mouth and eyebrows are very thin, his zygomatic arch, very prominent. When he scowls like this, I know he is alive. It is an inheritance from his mother, these features, but this expression I cannot remember of her now, only the death mask, blank and cold as the ice in which I have entombed her.

I have conquered death. Having conquered death, I have conquered grief.

“Only twelve,” says the man.

“All dead are welcome in Necropolis,” my son says, “but none may leave. Your son is not your son.”

“I have seen him walking,” says the man, struggling against the guards, who from another two-fingered gesture, release him. “I have seen him run, his limbs, the way his fingers move, the patter of his footsteps, the way he runs—dear god, the way he runs!” He begins to weep again; his tears mix with blood.

“What you saw was a body, matter untethered from spirit,” my son says very quietly, very gently, very much with shame. “Whatever made him your son is gone. Whatever remains is in our keeping, for that you sold him to us long ago.”

“I didn’t know,” he says. “If I knew that this was… we needed the money for the grain, for the hard winter. But we have prospered now. I have money now, whatever you ask–” He fumbles in his blue girdle for a ring of sharp-cornered coins. Its weight and clatter is meaningless to me now, a sovereign king, but it summons in me a hunger I have not quite forgotten. I starved once in a foreign land.

“Impossible!” says my son. “An unwelcome precedent and an utterly meaningless gesture. The boy–the body–would cease to reanimate the moment it left Necropolis.”

“Then we will live here. Let us live here with him.” He turns to me. “Honored king, great king!” He rushes forward to grab my ankles. The guards, of perfect obedience, remain precisely where they are. My son, standing and furiously pointing at the man, spots my two fingers raised from the arm of the throne, and sits back down, and gives me the same sharp look again.

“Good father,” (I feel I must address him so), “I am the king of the city of the dead. The city of the dead. Not one of my ten thousand thralls draw the least sweat from their silent toils, nor do they feel pain, nor sleep, nor eat, nor do they speak. Feel their flesh.” One of the guards comes forward at my command and strips its sleeve. Pale and cold its skin, splotched with black rot like naked sycamores in winter. The man will not touch it. He clenches my ankles.

“Great king, honored king, lord of the dead.”

“Lord of the dead,” I say, “but not of Death. Your son I cannot return to you, good father, only that which you gave me: a body.” I can feel my son’s fierce gaze upon me for the lies I tell.

The man looks up. “Give that to me, then,” he says, softly.

“What will you do with it?”

“Give him to me.”

“What will you do with him except bury him?”

“Yes, I will bury him. I’ll bury him! Think of your father, lord of the dead—and yourself, a father too–think of this: all that I saw of him, which you call a body, was my boy.”

“A corpse,” mutters my son.

“So he was when I sold him!”

“What price will you give us?” asks my son.

“Name it.”

“All that you own,” I interject. “Every coin, every coffer, every part of land and cattle and chattel, and every seed and grain in your stores.”

“Father!”

But the man surprises us both with his terrible readiness. “It shall be done,” he says. My old bones tremble; I believe I am afraid.

“Enough!” says my boy, at last. “Go and take your son. We’ll take no price for him. Live here in Necropolis till you understand what folly you pursue.” The man takes a sharp breath, his legs buckle and he crawls on his hands and knees to kiss my son's feet. My son leaps up onto his throne. “Go!” he says. “Begone!”

When he leaves, my son sags slowly in his seat, like a winged seed into a deep well.

“I would not have taken his money,” I assure him.

“Not for that lie do I hate you,” he replies.

Then he rises again and commands the next supplicant to enter. More common fare: someone’s arisen dead rotted to the white core, the starch-white of bones showing between the eaten flesh, or one who does not obey anymore, or one that has been broken in pieces like a toy–and I, the toymaker. I, the mender. My thoughts are not with them, but on the will of that man and the memory of my wife entombed, whom I dare not resurrect, though I could steal her back from Death’s demesne, as I could have also that man’s son.

Not for that alone does my son despise me.


My empire is a city. My citizens number only a thousand and each is attended by a dozen dead. My citizens are artists and scholars, goldsmiths, poets, and architects. The science of resurrection is a spiritless one, as coldly uninspired as arithmetic, and yet my city is the center of culture in all the world. My city wants for nothing. My city is impregnable. My city is a dream fulfilled.

Most nights I lie awake. On the pillow next to mine, in which there is still the impress of my wife’s head, is a white conch shell with pink striations. If I put it to my ear, I can hear the ocean. I can hear the beach where my wife first found me, naked and destroyed. Necropolis is a hundred miles from the nearest sea, surrounded on all sides by desert frost. We cut our water out from the earth in cubic slabs. There is no sand here. Nothing grows here. No snow. It never rains. There is only blinding sunlight and dustless geometry. There was a time when necromancy demanded such isolation, when this was the only way to preserve the undead. But over the years my methods have evolved. My boy, who has spent his youth as an ambassador abroad, tells me the taboo has been lifted, that the same kings and magistrates who used to spit over their shoulders at the merest mention of my work, are now drooling over my success.

My son believes they should fear us instead. And it is true that I fear him. I think the limits of my city are enough, but my son would make the whole world this city. There have been secret talks of armies, of perfect soldiers, and a swift conclusion to all war. But for all I know of death, I know I cannot be its deliverer. This makes me a coward. This makes me a weakness to the city. And every day I am pressed more and more by my court, by my son, to divulge my science to him and his apprentices. And so I do. In order that I might continue to violate my own principles, and the most sacred law of Necropolis: that no dead be allowed within its walls, only the living and the undead. And between them, only memory.

“So, why,” asks my son, over dinner one night, “have you not raised her yet?”

“The customary mourning period–”

“Passed six months ago.”

I tease the uneaten meal on my plate. A senseless luxury, imported, at no small cost, a thousand miles to merely satisfy an ancient pattern. My son, born and raised in Necropolis, fed by the ambient energies that sustain the undead (a happy side-effect of the necromantic charm) has never had to eat a meal while within its walls, and has never starved outside of them. He swirls a goblet of eternally steaming, pitch-black wine, the only true necessity for life in this cold waste, an alchemy without which his blood would stick, his exposed hands and face rime and break, and his breath congeal to crystals in his lungs.

“Do you believe I loved her any less, father?”

“Why would you say that? How could you even think it?”

He shrugs. There is no food before him, only an empty plate and clean cutlery, as a gesture. He has not eaten since the third chair of this table was put away.

“You ask questions you already know the answer to.”

“I’m not the one asking the questions, father. It’s them.” He points to the city beyond the wall.