With my first story selection, we move away from Averoigne and land in Zothique, the last continent of a dying Earth basking under the red sun and waiting for an imminent end. What science there was in the past has been forgotten, and magic is back, courtesy of the Theosophical readings of Clark Ashton Smith, and his long standing passion for the Arabian Nights and (I think) William Beckford’s Vathek.

I love the Zothique stories, that were my first introduction to CAS’ work in the old – and today rather precious – Italian edition of the collection originally edited by Lin Carter. For my money, the Zothique tales represent the best in Smith’s production. And I really connected with the setting and the writer when I read The Empire of the Necromancers, originally published in Weird Tales in September 1932.

The story is short and sweet (OK, maybe sweet is not the right word), and tells us of Mmatmuor and Sodosma, two necromancers exiled from their own country, who create an empire for themselves by chancing upon a dead city in the desert, and bringing back the dead inhabitants to be their subjects and their slaves. But a handful of reanimated members of the royal family progressively gain a sort of awareness, and decide to free and avenge themselves.

The story is rich of color and vivid imagery, and is told in the tones of legend and ancient history.
But what’s truly memorable is the strong element of macabre humor that runs through the tale.
Mmatmuor and Sodosma are a couple of losers, that soon succumb to hedonistic and necrophiliac pleasures – they are evil and twisted, but also pathetic and useless for all of their power. Theirs is no great darkness – they are just freeloaders that happen to have a great (if limited) power.
One can almost hear the evil chuckling of the narrator as the necromancers’ debauchery is presented to us in all its ridiculous futility.

Thus did the outcast necromancers find for themselves an empire and a subject people in the desolate, barren land where the men of Tinarath had driven them forth to perish. Reignhg supreme over all the dead of Cincor, by virtue of their malign magic, they exercised a baleful despotism. Tribute was borne to them by fleshless porters from outlying realms; and plague-eaten corpses, and tall mummies scented with mortuary balsams, went to and fro upon their errands in Yethlyreom, or heaped before their greedy eyes, from inexhaustible vaults, the cobweb-blackened gold and dusty gems of antique time.
Dead laborers made their palace-gardens to bloom with long-perished flowers; liches and skeletons toiled for them in the mines, or reared superb, fantastic towers to the dying sun. Chamberlains and princes of old time were their cupbearers, and stringed instruments were plucked for their delight by the slim hands of empresses with golden hair that had come forth untarnished from the night of the tomb. Those that were fairest, whom the plague and the worm had not ravaged overmuch, they took for their lemans and made to serve their necrophilic lust.

C.A. Smith, The Empire of the Necromancers

The story is short and as sharp as a knife – it can be read in a single sitting, and with its gruesome vistas of dead cities and rich courts in which the dead carouse, it will stay long with the reader. This is a perfect introduction both to the world of Zothique and to CAS’ dark humor and style.

And for those that do not want to read it (the links above lead to the full text and to a digital copy of the September ’32 issue of Weird Tales) here is an audiobook version…