Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Cobb rode into the way station on a dying horse, and when it settled into the ramshackle barn there, he had a feeling that it would never move again under its own power.

The station was little more than a crossroads, a barn and a hitching post and a house where the road from Smokewood met the road to the Old Mission in the foothills of the wilds. A tattered sign offered stables for the night, a meal, and a roof over one’s head for the right price. Cobb, his eyes hard and the mess of brambly curls that served him as hair all tussled, was after something else entirely.

“I’m looking for an orc,” he said, sauntering into the main house. “Big guy. Tattoo of a royal flush on one arm, and green as a field in springtime.”

The proprietor, slouched in a hammock and limp against the late-season heat of the wilds, cocked his slouch cap up. “We don’t sell orcs here, tattoos or not,” he said. “We sell cold food, cold beds, and cold stables.”

Cobb reached into his haversack, an old ex-army rag, and produced a coin, which he slapped on the countertop in front of the man. “For all of the above,” he said. Removing another one–his last–he laid it alongside. “Just in case this helps spark some emerald-colored memories.”

This, at least, was a language that the way stationmaster spoke. He was on his feet alarmingly fast, pressing the coins between callouses and passing them up for a nibble in his few remaining blackened teeth. “Coin’s good,” he said. “You can stay the night, get whatever tuck you need from the pantry. As for your friend-”

“He ain’t my friend,” Cobb said sharply. “I mean to see him hanged by the neck until dead.”

“As for your enemy, ask the stablemucker. Everyone what comes through here looks the same to me.”

“Coin purses on legs?” Cobb said. “Sponges to squeeze?”

“Fools,” the man said flatly. “There’s nothing out there but starvation and edor-breedin’ elves and orcs that’d kill you as soon as look at you.”

“Thanks for the encouragement,” Cobb said. “I’ll take it under advisement, as I told your sherriff.”

The stationmaster grumbled and pulled down his cap. “When there’s buzzards picking at your bones and a wild miscegenated edor wearing your britches, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

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The next day, when Llewelyn stumbled his way up the back stairs and unlocked his room, he found an engraved invitation slipped under his door. “You are invited,” he read, “to the inaugural meeting of the Undead Society of Smokewood. All members must attend. Reception to follow.”

He balled up the invite and threw it away. “Oh please, you old stick-in-the-mud.”

Trotting down the stairs, with half a mind to steal another swig of the good stuff off of Elijah, Llewelyn was surprised to see that Silas had set out a feast. Candied spinal cord, chilled brains, and every last bottle of various bodily fluids that Silas had held in his private reserve hidden in the crypt. What’s more, Smathers the zombie was present, as was every other undead that Silas could rustle up: the ghoul sisters from Smokewood hills, the vampire rancher from the
Double O ranch, a feral zombie tied up with a rag in its mouth, and the stone-dead corpse of Zachariah’s granddad Eli, rented for the occasion for a fifty-cent discount on a Pining Away model casket.

“Please, join us, Llewelyn,” said Silas hoisting a goblet. “I’ve taken your advice and made the Undead Society far more egalitarian. All whose hearts no longer beat are now welcome, provided they are able to behave themselves.”

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Dinner was served promptly every other day in the kitchen, and consisted of delicately prepared castoffs from the funeral parlor’s customers, prepared in a deliciously noxious fashion by Silas himself. Llewelyn took to his plate of reeking brains with gusto, clawing into it with both hands while resting his elbows on the table as Silas looked on uncomfortably.

“So, Mr. Ebonwright…tell me of your business,” Silas said. “What do the Ebonwright owe their fortune to? Banking, as is the case with so many of your lithe-eared brethren?”

“Oh, we have…land,” Llewelyn said, brain matter dribbling down his chin. “Lots of it. Not sure where, really.”

“Why be bothered by such trivialities in one’s income?” Silas said. “We Moores have long been in the body-trade, even back east.”

“Even when that old zombie was still alive,” laughed Elijah.

“Eons ago by the look of it, then, even to my long-lived folks,” Llewellyn laughed.

Silas, stung, was silent for a moment before continuing. “We have long recognized that there will always be a need for people to attend the newly bred, the newly wed, and the newly dead. And as we haven’t the feminine proclivities to be midwives or the dextrous needles to sew wedding finery, we chose the latter.”

“I don’t know, Silas, I feel like you’d be a pretty good midwife,” said Llewellyn as he slurped noisily at a goblet full of lymph. “You’ve got the sissy aspect down, certainly.”

“Sissy?” Silas said. “I would call it more…refined. I am a gentleman about town, and the leading figure in our first Undead Society.”

“Is that where the lace on your sleeves comes from? Being a refined gentleman? Or is there a bylaw in the Undead Society that only the biggest fop may lead?” Llewelyn roared with laughter at this, spraying the party with fluids and chunks of cerebrum.

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“I also have important messages which have apparently been going unread,” said Dr. Robert B. Strasser, the Fancy Rat‘s sole passenger (and cargo handler third class for the duration of the voyage).

“Look, I’m sorry about that,” Jai said. “I promise, I’ve just been busy and under a lot of stress. I’ll get back to everyone in good time.”

“Be that as it may, the information is of crucial importance,” said Strasser. A computer scientist of some kind, he was nominally in charge of the data dump that the Fancy Rat was carrying–exobytes of network data to bring the Umbrielites up to speed on everything that had happened on the nets. It was faster and cheaper to load it into physical storage, since transmitting it to the Verge would have taken a century and exowatts of broadcasting power without a relay system. No one was likely to do that, and least of all for the Umbrielites.

“If it’s about Taos, don’t worry,” said Jai. “He’s working fine.” Rather than paying the going rate, Strasser had gotten himself a discount by installing the artificial intelligence. It was an excellent deal, as Taos was a top-of-the-line model capable of navigation and automation in addition to his sparkling personality. Most Diocletian-class cargo scouts shipped with a glorified autopilot.

“Yes, I sent you explicit instructions regarding Taos during the data transfer.” Strasser, an older man whose pale bald head often shone with perspiration, squinted at Jai through eyes both rheumy and Teutonic. “Please read them. It’s absolutely essential that you follow those protocols and not connect Taos to the Umbrielites’ primary network.”

“Fine, fine,” said Jai, waving his hands. “I get it. Understood.”

“And there’s the cargo manifests, too,” said Curnow. “We need those notarized and then we have to do a visual inspection to check for damage.”

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