Xachariah - Handout 35

We walked through the embalming rooms, the only sound aside from the occasional groan from a zombie was that of our footsteps. It was a cold, hard sound... hauntingly rhythmic in what would otherwise be silence.
Only occasionally would I see the gray swish of a Dustman robe, gliding past archways and behind columns like the trails of a ghost.
“Hey!”
I spun around quickly, whipping out my dagger. Annah and Dak’kon followed suit. Nothing but zombie workers. The whole chat with Dhall had left me unsettled if I was this jittery. Morte had been the one to speak up, and he had just floated over to one of the zombies,
“Chief, check out this one.”
“Not this again.”
“Naw, chief. Look. I think we know this guy.”
I leaned in. His features had withered, with flesh pickled and gray-blue with preservatives. Yet there was something about the arch of that chin, the remaining tufts of those brows that did seem familiar.
The number “331”had been chiseled into his skull and his eyes and lips were stitched closed. A gaping hole had been torn in his throat, and he smelled foul.
My eyebrows furrowed in curiosity. I leaned in, whispering in the soft murmurs of the dead. The words were dry and creaked with age, but the zombie’s head creaked up in recognition. Those who weren’t practiced in the Stories-Bones-Tell would never be able to recognize that sliver of consciousness that remained.
“Wh-wh...” The zombie was awkwardly getting his voice back, and he sounded alarmed. “Who’s there?! Answer me!”
“Can you not see me?”
“Blind I am, in death as I was in life... now answer me. Who are you?”
He calmed down a bit on hearing me, and the voice was familiar.
“Who areyou?”
“I...” The zombie became silent. “...my name... has fled me. I... can no longer remember who I am.”
I cradle her body, pressing my hand to her side to keep the girl from bleeding out. A dark red stain pools beneath her, staining the sky-blue dress. I click my tongue... what an annoyance she is. Cost a small fortune to get something so nicely embroidered yet cut for travel, and she had ruined it with her own clumsiness. Damn girl’s useless in battle. This would never be worth it if she dies before I need her to.
“The last of them are dead,” our companion reports, that hood obscuring his face. Damn fine thing that he’s blind as a bat. I’d learned to school my features to look as calm as possible, but with him that control slips frequently and I find myself grimacing. I can never fully trust someone I can’t look in the eye.
“My love...” she murmurs in my arms.
“Shh, it’s all right,” I wave at the man standing over us until I realize he can’t see my gesture. Tch. Another one of those slip-ups.
“We’ll need some blood charms to heal her up. Good work with the guards there...”
“...Xachariah?” I murmured.
“Wha... you!” The zombie seemed shocked, but gladdened. “By the Lady’s Gaze...” His tone took on a sense of wonder. “Aren’t youdead,cutter?” “What are you doing here?” “I am a stable hand in the most lifeless place of all. Be it that I could pass beyond the Eternal Boundary and have a Plane to call my home, but much of my soul was squandered, and now I am here.” “What can you tell me about our travels?”
He cocked his head, “Why? Have you forgotten yourself?”
“In a manner of speaking... yes, but I know that we were companions once.”
“A motley crew we were... a half-dead man who couldn’t get himself penned in the dead-book if he tried --so ugly all the Powers of death wouldn’t take ‘em --a wailing advocate’s daughter, a gith exile, a bobbing jackal-tongued skull, and a half-sodden blind archer like myself.”
“My love...” “Wailing advocate’s daughter?”
“That feisty chit-who-would-be-a-soldier swore she’d follow you to Baator and back, and by the Powers, she was so addled by the thought of you without her she did just that. Cared little for me or the gith, and a bare little it was. She was wild with heart poison for you, she was, proof she was barmy. I don’t understand what the womenfolk saw in yer scarred mug, but it set their blood a-boil,”
Xachariah chuckled, “She was some rich scut from the Clerk’s Ward, and you needed something from her, and the only price was that she came with you.”
I winced. Deionarra’s fate had eaten at me for so long. The things I’d seen, the snatches of memory I’d experienced, that terrible encounter with her Sensory Stone that left me crumpled on the ground and weeping in Grace’s arms... what did my past incarnation plan for the poor girl? “What did I want from her?”
“One of the darks I never did bring to light, cutter. Perhaps you tell me?”
“Sorry, Xachariah,”I sighed, “You said you were a blind archer?”
“That I was. You truly have forgotten, haven’t you? All men see with more than their eyes, cutter... some of them better than others. I sensed the hearts of my foes - yourfoes -and my arrows always struck true. Ah, those were some times...”
“And what about Morte and Dak’kon?”
“Wait, what? That pickled meatsack better not be talking crap about me, chief.”
“That filthy-talking skull was hankering for a bruising, so it was!” Xachariah hissed, “Always smarting off, it was, and making fun of my condition!”
“Uh, he says he misses you, Morte.” I was prettysure that sounded convincing.
“Hmm. Guess we got the wrong deader after all.”
“And the grim-lookin’ gith...” Xachariah continued, “unfriendly and silent, like all their kind. Didn’t trust that gith a lick, I didn’t. See, cutter, them spindly giths care only about two things: keeping out of slavery and killing them squid-headed illithids. Everything else is just lower down the slope, and he didn’t give a damn about any of us other than you. Always on guard, even when you wanted to be alone to scribble in that damn journal...”
“My journal? What about it? What happened to it?”
“That scrapbook that you’d stitched together outta yer own flesh and had more pages than I had years in my life! Good fortune indeed if you’ve lost that ghoulish book! Always scribbling in it, you were, and it smelled a fright. It was like you were afraid that at any moment someone would take it away... you wrote in it ‘til skin tore from your fingers and I wondered if you were trying to spill out your brain box through your pen. Sometimes we would hold up for days while you wrote. I hated that infernal book. It seemed to hold you by the heart, and not in a kind way. The last I heard of it, cutter, it was in your possession. If you don’t carry it, I don’t know where on the Planes it could be.”
Damn.
“What led you to this state, anyway?”
His voice dropped, as if ashamed. “It’s a hard path following in your footsteps, cutter, and many terrible things did I see. I took to drink, and became half-sodden with the stuff. Once, when I was sodding drunk, I signed my body off to the Dusties. Fate decided ta kick me when I was down, and I died shortly afterward.”
“What can you tell me about my previous life?”
“Well... you were a strange one, always suspicious and watching for something... reckon somebody like you had got enough enemies in yer lifetimes. And there was no denying that anybody who messed with you ended up in the black chapters of the dead book.”
I nodded, “Anything else? Any specifics...”
“You could be damnably ruthless, too... like when you made me sign that contract, or abandoned that one mewling chit on Avernus. We had a Balor of a time, as well,” he laughed... a creaking, dry sound, “None of us ever even entertained the notion to jump ship on your watch, son.”
“I... see. What else? Anything you could tell me would help.”
“At your core, you looked at what happened to you like taking territory in a war; everything was like a battle to you, and you were the most ruthless bastard I ever near met. Naught else mattered except for solving that goal. Poor Deionarra with her sobbing and pleading with you didn’t sway you none, the gith warning you about your strategies, and poor Xachariah just trying to hold on when we hit the Planes. You were tough like you couldn’t die, but we were only human. Now I guess we’re all in the dead book... or in and out of it, so to speak. You left something when you left us, cutter... you left Dak’kon without a master, and the skull without a friend. Me? You stabbed something so deep inside me, it never came out when I was alive. Caused my blood to run cold, it did, that thing sitting like a lump of lead in my chest.”
“What is it?”
“I... I don’t know. But it changed me, somehow. Changed my insides. I was already dying when you put it in me, so I wasn’t too concerned about it at the time.”
“Can I have it back?”
Xachariah shrugged, “It’s buried pretty deep, but I have an idea of where it is. Without a scalpel and some directions from me, you won’t be able to get it out. You got a scalpel?”
I unsheathed my dagger, “I’ve got this.”“Then open me up half a hand’s width below the sternum, and feel around for it.” I slit the stitches of his body cavity and reached in. His torso was surprisingly wet and cold.
“A little more to the left... a littlemore...” My hand closed on an object, and I pulled out a zombie liver.

“By the Lady’s gaze! Apologies, cutter... I thought them Dustmen took all those organs outta us before pulling us out of the Dead Book. Give it another go. Maybe it’s to the right.”
I winced and stuck my hand in again. Morte made a retching sound and Annah’s face twisted in disgust. “Don’t suppose you want to experience this, Grace?” I grunted. She laughed. It was a musical sound.
“There ya go... now go a little to the right and back...a little more...” there was something hard and cold inside, slightly larger than I expected. “I think that’s it. Pull it out.”
I twisted my hand and tugged it free of his body. His gauze-wrapped fingers curled around it, feeling its hard contours. “That’s it all right. Huh. Bigger than I thought it’d be. Is that... what is that? Feels like... a heart.”
Yech. I pulled a rag from my pack and wiped my hands clean. Always good to pack a load of rags for just this purpose with the places I go and the things I end up doing.
“What’s it like being a zombie, anyway?”
“It’s honest work...” The stitching came undone from Xachariah’s mouth and the flesh around his lips peeled back in a smile. “...I care little for it.”
We chatted for a little while longer on smaller things, telling him of my own recent travels. He seemed to find comfort in meeting someone familiar once again, but eventually the day had been stretched to its limit,
“I have to go. Farewell, Xachariah.”
“Before you go: I need you to do me a slight favor, cutter.”
“What is it?”
His voice dropped, as if ashamed. “I made some mistakes, some damned bad ones to be sure, and one of my biggest was signing that Dustman contract. If I hadn’t been so sodden with bub, I never woulda done it. I regret it, and I was hoping you could set it aright.”
“How?”
“Way I reckon, this body’s gonna last a long time... and every day’s too long to me. Couldja maybe gut me again, cutter... for old time’s sake? The thought of spending another batch of years here in the Mortuary with these whitefaces is a mighty cold one. Can you see fit to put me back in the Dead Book where I belong?”
“If that is your wish...”
I look around, and certain that no one was watching I gutted him. Xachariah fell to the floor with a heavy thud. There was a faint hiss from the body, and the chest heaved once. Then, with a faint rattle, the corpse fell silent. I spun a web of fire over the body, cremating it on the spot.
“Rest in peace, Xachariah.”