Red Magic - Jean Rabe [59]
Tiring of the display, the lich ran his hand over the crystal, and the colors reappeared, obscuring the scene. The glow from the ball faded, and Szass Tam pushed himself away from his desk, taking up the scarlet robe he had laid across the back of his chair and putting it on over his simple, long linen tunic. The robe hung loosely on the lich's cadaverous form. The folds draped to the floor and made the costly garment appear several sizes too large.
Szass Tam did nothing to mask his appearance when he was alone or with his undead minions. Only in public did he put on a truly human face-one of a tall, scholarly man with jet-black eyes and fleshy cheeks. To walk around looking like an undead creature would unnerve too many important Thayvians. He also knew that appearances were frequently deceiving in his country and that other zulkirs and their underlings also masked their true likenesses.
His frail-looking arms were nearly lost in the sleeves of the silken robe. The edges of the garment and the trim around the hood were embroidered with gold thread seeded with garnets. The lich enjoyed the fineries of human manufacture, like his expensive clothes and jewels. Others of his foul kind preferred to remain in the clothes they died in, looking like ill-preserved mummies and smelling like the grave. Szass Tam believed clothes presented an image, and thus he always decorated himself in the latest and most costly fashions.
He glided to the bookcase nearest the door and made a slight gesture with his left hand. Immediately he seemed to grow taller. The folds of the robe, which lay about his feet like a pool of blood, vanished, and in an instant, the hem barely touched the floor. The lich was floating, his slippered, skeletal feet dangling in the air. Pointing a bony finger toward the ceiling, he rose higher, ascending slowly, like a marionette pulled by invisible strings. He levitated up several feet, moving as a ghost, until his eyes were level with the topmost shelf. For several moments, he hovered in the air, studying the bindings of the books, which were worn and unreadable because of the passage of time. He grasped a thick red book from the center of the shelf and opened it to the first page to make sure it was the work he sought. Satisfied, he descended like a feather to the floor and padded from the room, reading the book as he went.
The volume was one of military strategies, a subject that the lich usually only had a passing interest in. He was curious about it now primarily because of Maligor's gnoll forces. Szass Tam glided through the halls of his fortified keep, passing skeletons, wights, mummies, and other creatures. He had four keeps in Thay; this was the largest, situated between Amruthar and Eltabar. It was ringed with graveyards, where more of his minions slept, waiting to be called to his defense if need be. The lands around this and his other keeps were patrolled by undead-in the evening with all manner of creatures, including several vampires and ghosts under his control, in the day by living men and by skeletons and zombies cloaked in heavy robes to help hide their appearance.
Szass Tam was more of a force to be feared after dark because his most powerful undead could only walk under the cover of darkness. Still, he knew the other zulkirs considered him too powerful a force to threaten even in bright daylight.
The lich continued to pace in his keep, lost in the writings of some long-dead general. It amused him that humans sought to gain land, influence, wealth, and glory through wars, only to lose all those things because of their mortality. He knew that Maligor had lived beyond a normal human lifespan. Most of the other zulkirs had also prolonged their lives by magical means. But Maligor was the oldest on the council other than Szass Tam, and the lich knew that the Zulkir of