The King is dead. He lies flat on a coarse stone slab in a shabby room in one of the great towers of the City of the Miserable.
His robes are muddy and torn, his skin is marred by leprosy, and his eyes are nothing more than pus-swollen black pools. His greenish skin is scratched and bruised by brambles and rocks, and there is great pain in his frozen expression. And yet for two reasons he still births great jealousy in all who see him: first of all, he is dead, and thus spared the Miseries of life. And second, he was once a King, and so lived a life without Misery, as all Kings surely do. He does not belong here, they whisper, one who has never known our burden, and never will.
What they do not know is that Misery was the name of his domain.
In a far-off city, which stood on the shores of a nameless lake, the King ruled from behind a Golden Mask. And the Priests and the Jesters and the Women of his court were masked as well; and behind their masks hypocrisy reigned. His pious Priests laughed mockingly, his mirthful Jesters were broken by sorrow, and his luscious Women were faithless and haggish. And he, who was pure in blood and rich in earthly wealth, was in fact a hideous leper, and a master of a dead kingdom. He learned the truth one horrible day, when he was inspired by idle fancy to glimpse his own face for the first time.
In the King’s dreams another King had come before him, wearing a mask of his own, of pallid white. This second King, whose robes and vestments shone gold, was the one who had whispered the suggestion that he should remove his shining mask, and look upon the visage beneath. It was this Hidden King who had brought him to shame and ruin…
When the leper King first took to wandering the wilds of his land, having chosen exile for himself, he wondered sometimes if the Hidden King had driven him off his throne to take it for himself. But that no longer concerned him. His grief and disillusionment were too great. So great were they that he had taken his very eyes from their sockets, and roamed bleeding and blinded in search of oblivion or fate.
Now he is dead, his final mask having fallen away. The illusion that is life has left him.
And yet—two others stand by his side. One is the leper-girl who found him, and brought him into the City of the Miserable; while the other is an Ethiopian, one of the legendary Embalmer Women of the desert who make art out of corpses.
“It does not bring me joy to sell the body of one I loved,” the leper-girl says, shuddering. “And yet, the miseries of the City of the Miserable have proven to be beyond my imagination. I must find some good in this man’s death.”
“He is a strange being. I sense a curious light in him,” the Embalmer Woman murmurs, from her toothless mouth. “I will give you thirty pieces of gold for him.”
“For thirty pieces of gold,” says the leper-girl, with more than a hint of shame, “I may well quit the Miserable City.”
The Embalmer smiles, exposing the pink nubs of her gums. She does not tell the young leper that the wounded King will bring her much more than she’s paying.
The girl likely knows, but she accepts the money anyway. The King’s spirit, lingering nearby, sees the perpetuation of the cycle that drove him from his throne. Love and promises are eroded by gold; no wonder his forefathers made their masks of it, when hiding from the world and its light.
But still he slumbers, only dimly aware of the sale of his remains. The embalming commences. The Woman removes his organs from his cavities with her long, curving fork, and fills his veins with her potions. She grooms his hair and scrubs his skin smooth, or smooth as a leper gets, with the hard edge of a clam-shell. She polishes him in the manner of her people, making even his eyeless face lovely. He feels no pain in this process.
He does feel the faint motion of the Embalmer Woman’s cart below him; but its significance eludes him. He is carried elsewhere, far, far away from the City of the Miserable, to a place called Arras. The Embalmer Woman knows the clientele of Europe, and the trio who await her here will make the best use of his body.
He only begins to dread when he hears their eerie laughter. It is that laughter that provides the first breath—for already they have begun pushing the spark of life back into his carcass. They will make a splendid poppet of him. Beyond their cackles comes the second breath, and all of a sudden feeling and caring are forced back inside him. A third breath comes, and then a fourth.
His mind, now a victim of their sorcery, perceives the whole of time and space. For theirs is a power banished from the primordial long ago—or at least, a fragment of such. Even dimmed, it is great enough to open infinity to his mind. He sees ages of ice, the creeping frozen death of mankind’s early days, through the eyes of a masked primitive called Odjigh. Just as swiftly he is thrust to the creeping frozen death that waits at civilization’s end, when the Terrestrial Fire will sweep down and make mockery of the Sun. Brackets around history: the Ice Age at one end, and the Night Land, Zothique, and the Junpi at the other. Eons of horror and famine under a crimson gaze—or an emerald one.
And in a great rush he sees everything in between…infinite purpose emerges, only to dissolve into meaninglessness, as he witnesses the fall of all ambition, all empires.
When the King in the Golden Mask awakens into life again, he does so babbling, with froth at his lips.
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