'Empire of the Necromancers' – Clark Ashton Smith

Trying to read anything this week has been like having teeth pulled, drawn out and really painful. There are reasons why but nothing worth bulking out a paragraph for ;o) It has just been one of those weeks where reading is a painful business, which is annoying at the best of times but even more annoying when I'd promised myself that I'd do more book posts... Yeah, that went well. But anyway...

It's times like this where I tend to end up reading more short stories, just to keep myself ticking over as it were. It has also been ages since I read any Clark Ashton Smith so off I went to my copy of 'The Emperor of Dreams' and picked out the story with the most eye-catching title, 'Empire of the Necromancers' it was then...

The legend of Mmatmuor and Sodosma shall arise only in the latter cycles of Earth, when the glad legends of the prime have been forgotten. Before the time of its telling, many epochs shall have passed away, and the seas shall have fallen in their beds, and new continents shall have come to birth. Perhaps, in that day, it will serve to beguile for a little the black weariness of a dying race, grown hopeless of all but oblivion. I tell the tale as men shall tell it in Zothique, the last continent, beneath a dim sun and sad heavens where the stars come out in terrible brightness before eventide.

Before we even get into the story itself, I love how Ashton Smith opens things here with his introduction to a legend that won't be a legend for presumably countless millennia, but he's telling the story like the legend it will be... Confused? I was a bit, to start off with, but then it struck me that Ashton Smith is making himself a part of the tale and adding to the mysticism of his work by being this storyteller who will tell you of legends that are yet to be born. And that is a pretty good way of ramping up the anticipation for what is to come next. And as luck would have it, what comes next is pretty special.

Imagine being a necromancer who just wants to raise a few bodies but has managed to pick an ultra religious country to do it in... That's where Mmatmuor and Sodosma find themselves, at the beginning of the tale, but as luck would have it, their flight takes them into Cincor, a country where plague has left the land empty of life but full of corpses (and that's not counting all the mausoleums etc) What a time to be a necromancer! :o) Setting up home in Cincor is almost too easy for the story to really find it's feet and get going but the sinister atmosphere over Cincor comes into it's own here and as a result, I got so deep into reading about this pale and silent land that I was halfway through the story before I knew where I was. Clark Ashton Smith's stories have a habit of doing that to me and 'Empire' was no different. Smith is also not averse to letting his readers know just how evil Mmatmuor and Sodosma are, not just because they're raising the dead but what they do to certain corpses afterwards. Little moments like these not only make you suddenly think 'eww, did that just did happen?' but also add a little fresh impetus to the tale when it needs it.

You couldn't have a whole story of this though, could you? While I think there is room for a tale of a well ordered empire rooted in necromancy, 'Empire of the Necromancers' isn't the place for it. No, having built up how evil Mmatmuor and Sodosma are, Ashton Smith needs to bring their empire crashing down. Zothique may not be the most wholesome of places but it's almost like Ashton Smith needs to show his readers that there is still a little hope to be found in the future. Either way, there's a lesson to be learned here as the 'Empire of Necromancers' falls due to the arrogance of its rulers. I mean, you can't blame them for assuming that the dead would just keep on working but you would have thought that they'd maybe keep an eye on the fresher corpses, just in case. 'The Empire of Necromancers' is a cautionary tale then but I'm stuck wondering whether it's a caution against evil practices or if it's just to keep your dead populace well subjugated ;o) Either way, the fate of the Necromancers is more than a little chilling (and very apt, given their profession) and in stark contrast to the fate of the dead who just want to die again and not be brought back. There's a real sad dignity to their fate that fits in very well with what I've seen of Zothique as a whole.

While I'm not sure that 'The Empire of Necromancers' is the story that will shift this latest reading slump, it still felt good to sit down and have Clark Ashton Smith tell me a story that will become legendary in the last days of Man. Cautionary words (richly told) that all necromancers would do well to heed.

You can read 'The Empire of Necromancers' over Here.