They call me Bast and I am a fat elf. There are few elves as fat as I anywhere, in the World or in the land of the Elves. I sit at a finely-worked desk of rosewood, imported from the World at great expense. It has a massiveness complimentary to my own ponderousness. No lesser desk would fit such a grand image as this grandiosely huge form.

I am drinking the finest of wines from a vessel, a trophy of sorts, made from the empty skull that once contained a human mind. It seems the bright young man murdered an elf ambassador. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well, Horatio.

It is my nature to be curious and contemplative, investigative and interested. This cat-killing inquisitiveness, however, should not suggest a rash nature.

Mine has been the responsibility for some deaths, both by my own hand and indirectly. Now, I sit with my journal, contemplating the acquisition of this artifact, this skull, turned to gold and reshaped by elf magic, encrusted with gems and inscribed by Riiallana, the famous old artist, commissioned surreptitiously, secretly.

A vile, chilly day initiated the series of events by which I acquired that head and scull. I shall write about that infamous occurrence.

The headsman's axe. Drale clearly hears the inevitable flex and rub of the arms as the dread headsman's blade rises, in an instant to be slammed down, through the skin, bone and spine of his own, innocent (of this crime) neck. Drale's terror nears the ultimate. A whistling swish. A silence. His bladder involuntarily releases and he begins to soil himself with the arrival of the lack of pain and spurting of blood.

Bloody hands, recently cut free of their fetters, reach into the headman's wicker basket for the head and become bloodier still.

The one and only allowed necromancy in these lands between the mundane World and the Elf Dominion is this: forcing a convicted, beheaded man to proceed by his own motivation but without any volition to his grave. This most horrifying spectacle, the condemned conscious of his fate to the point of being placed inside the box (the last time this sentence was necessary the executed man was made to put his remains into a canvas bag, tying the end off inside with a length of twine), serves well to deter more of the same kind of lawlessness. As the body proceeds, clearly the deceased face is contorted in a rictus of pain.

Drale's remains shamble through the cemetery gate. The body approaches its lavish headstone provided, the crowd knows, by the dead man's wealthy friends and past employers. The blood stained hands place the gore-trailing head on the expensive monument (hat rack : head stone, a sly, sick, private joke of the necromancer). Because of the man's good reputation, the muttering onlookers feel both pity and an unreasonable jealousy at that implied wealth. Drale might have laughed to know of this avarice toward the dead had another been in his place.

Drale's dead hands, free with wrists unbound, reach for the shovel. A degenerate youth dressed in the colors of a homosexual gang slouches against granite at the rear of the crowd and idly contemplates suicide as he watches, then takes a long red pull from a bottle that once contained imported beer. Members of several gangs, both human and elf, are present, most only feigning enjoyment of the spectacle.

There is no fighting at the funeral. There is music, though.

During a warmer time of year, the more ghastly and sick among the crowd might have planned an afternoon of picnicking, eating potato salad and hot dogs while watching the corpse digging its grave.

"Watch Monty," says one fellow, jabbing his mate in the ribs and pointing at the civil necromancer. "He'll be taking a leak in the middle 'o this diggin'. Before, he did it that time. To show off his control, y' know. He 'haint got the chance in twenty years."

As if to contradict the man's assertion, dead hands drop their shovel. Retrieving it from atop the headstone, the head is placed on the bloody stump of a neck by bloody fingers in an unheard-of display of self-determination by a corpse animated by a necromancer, a necromancer now reddening and backing away from the unnaturally natural looking man-figure. A short thin member of one gang hits the stop button on his boom box as the corpse started to stagger backwards.

If asked later, the crowd would be hard pressed to decide if the scene had been more bizarre before or after the music stopped.

A look other than abject pain finds Drale's dead face. The intellect of the dead man is at work, trying to overcome the pain evident earlier. As the crowd watches in horror, the hands leave the head that, instead of toppling to the turned turf unsupported, remains in place as the minutes-dead corpse turns, breaks into an awkward run, and flees through the bleating flock of horrified men and woman watchers.

Hurdling the low stone wall surrounding the graveyard, the corpse disappears down an alley and corner. The chill wind blows dead leaves across the tawny lawn. The old church bell clangs gently, amused spirits saluting the escape of one of their own, as the crowd shares a stunned shiver.

Drale is running. Fleeing the necromancers, the Guard, the dead man realizes some chance. He sees the street as he did in life, but more distantly and dimmer somehow. He wonders briefly at this razor-thin chance for vengeance. Drale's existence had been forfeit as the headsman's blade fell. That would be true except for some byproduct of his investigation of the magical arts, practiced about this border region.

It had been a lark, really. While it is true that a human man, born outside, could hope to practice magic, it is well established that even a man born here can hope for no more than the most basic faculty. It is also a fact that money will buy magic. Drale's import-export business, he called it, provided ample money for this fascination.

Magic. It was how he had met Gilia.

With friends in all of the lowest places, the name of an elf wizard had answered his questing for such a one. After some little arranging she had entered the empty shop one afternoon as he was closing.

"Hello, human." The voice was honey and brandy.

Looking up, he felt his heartbeat quicken in panic and a longing that filled his entire soul. It had been a start.

Somehow he had gotten her to work for him. It still surprised him, though that had been the reason for her visit in the first place. Later, and much more gradually, she had fallen in love with him too.

Elves and humans don't make pretty kids: not mules, but not anything anyone seems to have much time for. Outcasts, unwanted by either parent race. Neither Drale nor Gilia wanted to risk getting offspring. It was the only flaw in their passion, decided over a year ago.

Now, because of Gilia he had this chance.

A microscopic chance, he recognized, crossing into a familiar blind alley. He would have to pay more attention to his surroundings, though his instincts had been true. Drale found the catch in the wall, opened a panel hidden so artfully that he wondered if some magic had been worked to accomplish the deception, and slipped inside.

The little shop from which he operated the legitimate side of his business had been built in the 1920's. The little room in back, about four feet by twelve feet, was cleverly hidden from the main shop. One external four-by-eight plywood sheet in the back wall was hinged at one edge and had catches on the other. It appeared from the inside as if it were nailed onto the framing studs like all of the other sheets. Prohibition had given way to its Repeal and the hidden room had fallen into disuse.

Drale would wait here for whatever came next. To think.

A fat elf sits drinking wine from a flagon shaped from the skull of a human. Bast's brows furrow as he mulls over the news, just delivered, about the human Drale, who should now be just finished digging his own grave, putting his head in his coffin, laying down to think about his zombie state, listening while others nail shut the lid and lower the box, hearing falling dirt and rocks hitting the lid. Then silence. Only when the grave is completely covered does the necromancer release the convicted soul to finally die completely.

But Drale is not in his grave, like a nice little corpse. Instead, the infuriating little human is at large.

Snarling, the fat elf flings his flagon across the room. The gold of the rim is bent and dark red wine whips away from the impact. Even his closest advisors would have been outraged to know that this private reserve wine was blended with human blood. The vintner had assured him that the wine would not go bad and Bast's gold smoothed any awkward details over. Of a sudden, the secret flavor has lost some of its appeal.

Calling his lieutenant, he instructs her to "Find the bastard" who had escaped justice, "and bring him." Fuming, Bast grates out, "Bring him to where I can, myself, finish the job. Now, get out, damn you, and BRING HIM!".

The woman retreats warily. Bast falls heavily as one will who is overburdened by weighty matters. The overstuffed chair is well built and does not even creak as his great mass settles itself. His mind seeths with the image of an aware consciousness captive within a rotting, yet sensitive, zombie corpse until not enough remains of the flesh to hold the corpse's soul, and the best way to ensure that the wait will be a long one.

Awareness comes to the pain and disfigurement. The area about Drale's secret portal has experienced a magical flux. The spell tying his soul to the dead body has lapsed and he has been truly dead.

"I'm surprised that I didn't wake up dead." Drale wanted to say it aloud but during the unaware state his body has mortified further. His larynx is not as plastic and will not respond to form his voice, only a harsh gush of air rushes out. Another thing that assails him is the fact of rigid limbs. To move now requires great effort, and his limbs refuse most of what he thinks to ask of them.

Rigor Mortis. Drale knows that he must wait until the other side of the rigor, the more putrid side, before going on. His hidden door had shut itself as he came inside. He must have fallen in with the passing flux. No recollection. Now he lies upon the dusty boards of the storeroom. How many hours and magic lapses will pass before the next stage of putrifaction? Drale does not know exactly. Some recollection from a biology course tickles his memory. What was it? Ah yes, after a day or two he would get back some flexibility. "But how much time has elapsed since, since . . . " his mind spasms, trying not to conceive and failing. "How long since I died?"

A second awakening, or an awareness of a change, sudden, bounded again by the small death. How does one describe the lapse during which one is dead, not asleep, not comatose, not just near death.

Drale finds his limbs again operative. He also smells something that a dog might like to roll around in before realizing the smell's source. "The ants crawl in," he recalls.

Darkness. No one has found him. If they had, they had not disturbed his body. He considers this, rising from the floor. No, no footprints or signs of any other presence. The floor is covered by a pristinely untouched layer of dust. No one has been on this floor recently but Drale.

"Damn, damn. HELL. F**K. DAMNITALLTOHELL!" In a rising crescendo, Bast wails and screams, wrenching his bulk into a sitting position, searching the marble-topped bedstead for some message delineating the fact of the fled convict's recovery and present whereabouts. Nothing. The night bodyguard, looking not even a little groggy, enters through the bedroom door to check on the elf he thinks of as the "Fat one."

"Where the HELL is my convict?"

Bast had dreamt of consuming mortal terror caused by the entrapment within a rotting corpse buried beneath six feet of unpacked earth, surrounded by a cheap, rough, wooden casket; no threat of asphyxiation, no need for sleep, nothing to see, read, or otherwise be aware of except the moldering circumstances and, eventually, the arrival of the parasites and worms. Paralysis. For one dizzying delicious instant, Bast had imagined himself to be the hapless, helpless victim, but, being a person much more capable of inflicting misery than accepting it, his sleeping mind quite simply could not maintain the concept for more than a moment before his unconscious fancy had taken him to a new dream of theft and extortion. The morning's waking reality made him furious.

"Get me dressed. NOW!" the fat elf roars.

Rising, the elf casts his eye about the room. While he had gotten the best guards that money could buy, he feels certain of safety only after his own inspection.

The bodyguard disregards his boss's behavior. One midnight an assassin had entered Bast's bedroom. The intruder had died, not noiselessly. His employer had snored on. The bodyguard had toyed with the prospect of passing a knife across the fat throat to collect a bounty that had been repeatedly, though surreptitiously, offered. On a perverse impulse, the bodyguard had removed that corpse and mentioned nothing. Bast had been disturbed the morning of the following day by his subordinate's infuriatingly enigmatic smile.

The bodyguard complies with the shouted orders, emotionally unreacting as usual. With Bast dressed and business begun the bodyguard leaves for home in the Soho district, muttering halfway down the block "Fat fool elf," without even being conscious of it.

Morning had dawned long after Drale's return to awareness. Time had passed enough to reconstruct, mentally, just why the Hell he was still aware.

"The scientific method comes to the rescue." Drale had decided some time during the silent good night.

He had been the "Grad Without a Thesis." Physics had palled in three postgraduate years attending M.I.T. It was inevitable that one day some bright, imaginative young scholar, or fool, would research the characteristics of the band of land bordering the Elf region. Drale, Edward Eustice Barnes in the World, had answered that intellectual (laugh) call to arms.

Magic this side of the blockade runs kind of contrary. Perhaps that is the nature of magic. One moment a spell will work perfectly, the next it might not work at all. Similarly, technology. It seems that the phenomena are not all-or-nothing but possess shadings. The first order of business upon Drale's arrival became the mapping of magic and technology.

Using a dual apparatus consisting of a strip chart run mechanically by a gear mechanism driven by a bicycle chain with two pen tips, one held to left by a magnet, the other by magic, both pulled right by springs, the man had charted the presence of both maximum and minimum areas of technological and magical influence, trying to find any correlations. A grid of vertical and horizontal map data points had been plotted in a single day by a boy souped up on pharmaceutical and magical speed. A correlation appeared.

Sine squared. Great. Just verify the findings the following day and, Presto!, a Nobel prize.

The next day, a different correlation appeared. And so on, the next. The second hand on a clock, corkscrew and street names. The lyrics to a brand new song, popular now but never performed until after its characteristic day, finally reconciled. Thirty patterns in as many days, all probably definable but without any detectable "metapattern." No way to anticipate what the next would be. Shit.

And it had caught him twice with no more than what should have been a handful of heartbeats between. Then there had been no relapse between. His research assured him, without reassuring him. The spell tying his soul to his body was unbelievably persistent. Anything less would have dissipated in the doldrum state, leaving him permanently dead. Or, at least unable to self revive, subject to a necromancer's influence.

Subject change. What to do? Who had gotten Drale into these straights? The potential suspects included all of Elfdom and at least a fourth of the rest of the town's population. While he had made a point of TRYING not to piss anybody off, Drale's competence, confidence, and razor sharp mind had left several competitors without any market for their wares.

His marketing history had begun at M.I.T. Noone could better arrange a frat' party, complete with the requisite booze, band, women and drugs. Finding a demand, Drale had satisfied it. There were still people at the college who were told of the service he had once provided. This natural industriousness had paid for his education and a comfortable existence, nothing more. Upon graduation he had abandoned the entire enterprise, ladies' phone numbers, shady seven-11 clerks, and common dope dealers alike, and never thought again about them. His little black book sat somewhere in the same unopened box with his textbooks.

Paying for his postgraduate education had proven more difficult than earning a profit along this border but had shared one aspect Drale now considered. Illegality. Drale had stepped on someone's toes, someone who would work this kind of revenge.

Why had he stayed after his scientific defeat? Elves talked about it in riddles and rhymes and while more comprehensible halfies tried hard to relate the concepts they still couldn't translate them. Magic. Unexplainable, undeniable, and yet unprecedented in the World. There exist few humans able to work magic, even near to the blocade. Drale had continued trying to learn magic, but from a more theoretical standpoint, being unable to conceive even the most rudimentary sensitivity to it.

Now, smelling the stink of his own rotting flesh, he turns away from pondering. Walking out of the storage area, unused and almost completely abandoned since the shop's takeover, Drale waits behind the counter for the first arrival of the day. He notices Gilia's stuff. Gone.

Her bag. Drale had bought it as a one-month anniversary present, brown sheepskin imported from Australia in the World, it should sit behind the counter where she can grab and go if she needs something from Traders' Heaven, or to carry something, better kept unseen, to a customer. The giant pocket watch windup wall clock, the tiny Elfland painting that a customer had once offered half his small arsenal for in trade, and her spare cloak. Other odds and ends that should be there, gone. She has left with no plans to come back.

Pain.

Jack, then. His absence is not obvious. He will come in and open up. In vivid testament to Drale's pondering, now he does.

Drale sees that Jack has not noticed the unbreathing apparition behind the counter. The living human man releases the security spell, opens the front door and walks in. The smell makes him look up and into the eyes of the monstrous man before him.

Drale had chosen this man partly for his solemn, inscrutable, unreacting face. Every day may as well be the day Jack's wife and child died. Only he had never married, and as far as anyone knew, had no offspring.

Jack's nose wrinkles. "You stink." Turning around, Jack closes the door, locking it. He doesn't turn the Closed sign to its Open side. He pulls the shade. "What next, boss?"

Drale's own smell must be overpowering this man. Drale had washed the filth off of his body as best he could but he could barely stand being trapped inside himself. Although his gag reflex has died with his body, so has his mind's innate ability to become inured to the smell. The living, breathing man must be fighting a heroic battle against the rising of his gorge. His face shows none of this.

"Where have you been for the last four days?" Jack begins.

Drale absorbs the information. Four days.

"I'll help," Jack continues, "I mean, what can I do?"

"Thanks. First," The voice sounds like the violation of nature that it is. A painful expression tries to pass across the tautened face, "where's Gilia?"

"Drale, man. She left. She loved you more than anything in either world but she had to leave. You were dead." Turning his head to the side, "You are dead, man." Looking down, Jack pauses then says, "She won't come back for a dead man, not even you."

Drale's reply reflects his anger. "I KNOW I'm dead. At least I know that this BODY is dead."

"So what can I do?" Jack repeats.

Drale has passed beyond the phase when his dead and dying nerves caused him holy Hell with their itching. Nonetheless, he scratches at his scalp as he had done in life to concentrate. Jack is accustomed to waiting for Drale to think before answering but Drale had thought for hours about the answer to that question. But now he has to concentrate to suppress thoughts of lost Gilia.

"What's the word? Who's responsible? Why was this done to me?" Looking into Jack's eyes, the dead baby blue ones Drale turns on him elicit no more response than a small twitchy outturning of the man's palms.

Drale continues, "Gilia's gone. We haven't time to go searching. You have to be my eyes and ears again. Like before." Before Gilia. "You were the best before her. We both know that how good she was was partly her connection with elves. You are the only one left I can trust."

This was true. As Jack stands thinking, Drale remembers a time when Jack was there as one of Drale's men turned and tried to slash. Tried to kill. Drale had escaped unscathed. Jack had taken a minor cut as he disemboweled the man with a long blade that must, even now, rest within the puffy sleeve, his white shirt billowy as Jack preferred.

That dead man hadn't risen. Drale had only watched, amazed at what that trusted man had tried. Jack had arranged for the body to find its way, unobserved, to the bloody river. What no one but the two knew was that even saving Drale's life two more times, Jack would still be indebted. Much had passes between these two.

"Okay, man. It's that elf, Bast. I figured that you'd come to me eventually so I found out. You remember. `Fat Bast Turd,' they call him. That brown elf guy asked us to steal a goblet from him, then turned up dead?"

Drale remembers. That was one house on Dragon Hill that no one would f**k with. At least, no one not desperate enough to risk death. The big, two-story house was shielded by at least four distinct security spells, had automatic laser turrets, and underground detectors. This was one dicey elf. To an elf the house read like a sign, "Touch this house and you will die." Milliel, the brown elf who had died while trespassing, hadn't been discovered until the next day. He had been high on elf drugs when the lasers had sliced him into two large pieces and several small ones.

"Yeah, I remember."

"We've been cutting in on his business with the ladies. With the dust. I think he even resents our pharmaceuticals business. You sent the pill woman to the World with money to restock her supplies and get supply stuff. I told you, elves don't like uppity humans with delusions of free enterprise."

"Can you be sure?" Drale asks. Of course Jack is sure, but Drale needs to know more. "Couldn't it have been one of the gangs?"

"Come on, man. The gangs? Without a girlfriend to aim their best brain couldn't p**s straight and hum a tune."

Drale can't even name a popular song and now he will never get over his ignorance of music.

Again looking off to one side, Jack continues, "Bast has a supply of dragons scale."

This shocks Drale. He and Jack and about two other humans alive (alive) know about dragon scale, soul thief scale. Burn it and inhale the fumes. Be someone else. The effects, while temporary, were rumored to have caused embarrassment in the Elven Court.

"And that's how I came to kill an ambassador." He can no more remember the incident than his own birth, though he had been there both times.

Another day has sped past and Bast is furious. But if that had ever hindered the operation of his "enterprises" before the cause would have been eliminated. Drale had been eliminated but had not been gotten rid of. Disturbing. D**n.

So much so that by the end of the day Bast is drunk. He has drunk too much wine, but more important, has indulged in too much mood altering elf dust for his own good. Too much for his employees' good, had they the guts to admit it.

He calls for his lieutenant again. She enters and Bast has her delineate the plan for finding Drale.

"We had agents check out the shop but Jack the Nose was the only one around. Whimpy checked out the back but didn't find anything. I had to spell Jack to keep him from interrupting the search."

"What about other friends?" Bast grumps then lets the elf woman continue.

"He had an elf girlfriend. You've met her. Gilia is her name. Born here. Never been to the Elf side. She worked for Drale before he died. Now she's living with friends on the 'Tooth. Supposed to be hiding but we found where she's staying. She was also one of Drale's snoops.

"Also, we checked where Drale and Gilia used to live. Empty. She took both their stuff and just left. We burned it down. Whimpy sent a group of our wizards to Jack's house, but they couldn't break in. Last night one of our girls hit on him but he wasn't interested. Not in the boy, either. We were able to check the place out later through the windows and had someone listening. Drale couldn't be there.

"Drale just didn't have any other close ties."

"What about INCEDENTAL ties? Do I have to do ALL of the thinking here?" Bast by now is fuming, bloodshot eyes narrowed.

"We reviewed Drale's history. He is very intelligent. A college masters graduate student doing an unapproved doctoral thesis on the nature of magic."

Bast guffaws, "Stupid human."

The woman continues as if Bast had not interrupted. It is the way to survive around Bast. "For a time he rented space in the museum building. Doing some computer analysis. If he went there, his soul has fled and he is no worry. Besides, Drale hasn't used the museum for the past year.

"He sent the pill peddler to the World to buy drugs. Pharmaceuticals, not the other kind. We checked her and the museum's owner out. No good. Drale seems to have disappeared. The 'suits haven't found his body either. After four days I think we can assume that he is dead."

Bast takes a little while to realize that the woman's monologue has run its course. Thinking mightily, Bast concludes the audience with, "Dead isn't good enough! Place a double watch on each of these people and if anything develops, inform me."

Gulping from his flagon, Bast does not notice as the woman leaves to carry out his orders. Her dismissal has ended any necessity of further consideration. He drinks from the flagon, opens his dust box and begins to snore at his desk. He has not been sleeping well lately.

Jack knows Bast's bodyguard, his cooking staff, his business staff. All are ostensibly loyal, either directly to Bast or to oaths taken as part of their occupation. None of them would touch him, though some had proven bribable for information. Jack also knew all of Bast's other henchmen.

Around midday Whimpy, the six-foot-three, two hundred four pound, ex-linebacker, ex-drummer appeared standing behind a burned- out four-wheel-drive rust heap at the end of the alley opposite the shop. The derelict vehicle's presence, with the whitewashed wall behind, had partially decided where Drale had set up shop. It is exactly the kind of place an observer would stand to spy on this shop. Because of this, Jack made a point of looking it over regularly.

Whimpy. Supposedly responsible for several "accidents" that had left their victims floating face-down or -up in the sluggish red of the river. Drale must be told. Jack must wait until closing time.

Jack continues about his business day, arranging this, procuring that, and generally keeping the front operation going while the Boss stays hid out in the hidey-hole out back.

Cellophane. The boss had wrapped himself in it, all but his head, then Jack had opened the store. Jack had swept up and dusted while the boss worked on his wrapping. He had also damp-wiped the counter and rearranged the whetstone display. An excuse for late opening.

Drale had heard the sounds and known Jack's reasoning. While ignorant of the technical and scientific aspects of things, Jack is an excruciatingly practical thinker. Ask him how to react to a situation, not how to build something.

Gilia. Drale crinkles cellophane and has to unwrap it. Tears don't fill his eyes. Sobs fail to rack his frame. A moan does escape barely, unheard by anyone outside this small space. A corpse this long dead holds no tears. She had visited his cell. She had not believed that Drale couldn't remember the incident but she could not think of a good reason why Drale would do what he had done or why he should lie about it. A day later, Drale had been executed.

This Bast must die. Drale has decided. Bast would die, surely as Drale feels the pain of loss even with his loss of pain. No swollen-shut throat accompanies the pain, no tightening of the belly, it will never be that kind of pain again. There is, however, a change. Suddenly, Drale can scent her. She has been present in this room at some time and Drale recognizes the fact. How can this be? Can he be imagining?

No. Jack's presence is here. More recently. Things have a glow to them. A spellcell stored in a corner shines a different color/texture/blend. Magic. Elusive in life, suddenly accessible in death. Drale's soul has fled his body and returned. Perhaps the human part has been blown away, burned off. Perhaps what is left is elven. The corpse wants to laugh or cry but cannot cause his own diaphragm to work either of these ways. The crying will have to come from someone else.

Jack will find out what is necessary. Drale would see to it.

Whimpy reported the late opening to his boss and she reports it to Bast. It is a change and will be investigated. Bast orders his minions to enter the shop again and search.

Whimpy notices dust tracked toward a blank wall and investigates. They find Drale's immobile corpse in the back room, unseeing eyes pointed at the ceiling rafters. One of the guards tries to close the eye lids but after the first lid tears free, gives up in disgust.

Jack notices that the stench back here is horrid. What could you expect from a four-day old corpse left unembalmed at room temperature? He claims that he hadn't known that the corpse was there, that he seldom went to the back room, that the smell had not penetrated. Whimpy breaks his arm and then the fingers of that hand. Jack does not scream. Even if he had wanted to, the gag in his mouth would have stopped it. They leave Jack where he falls and two of Whimpy's elves carry Drale's corpse out.

Whimpy has the corpse dumped in an alley behind a northside cop station and leaves. With shift change in a half-hour the body would be found, if the smell didn't alert any men or elves sooner. It happens that Drale is spotted rising and running away. An elf cop chases yelling, "Hey, stop! Stop!"

Breathing is no problem. Dead lungs need no oxygen. But the shambling pace at which he runs would have gotten Drale caught if the elf had been any nearer when he began his chase or in better shape.

Drale runs on even after the cop stops chasing, not panting, not getting cramps, just running. Soon, Drale finds himself in an alley near Farris's Night Spot. Its music shines through the doors of the place, now coiling, now jaggy. He has never seen music before. He stops running but doesn't recognize the band from the sound. He never listened to music much.

Now, he spends some time inspecting himself. Larger. Putrifaction swells his limbs, his stomach, his head. Dead brain cells have given up their memories. His spirit alone retains all that he knows. Flesh has worked its way through the wrap in a few places but the pants, shirt, and shoes hide all of this well enough. His face isn't hidden but night has fallen while he ran. He is short an eyelid, but it doesn't hurt. Nothing does anymore.

Drale's head superficially reattached itself as he ran from his grave. Gilia. She had cast first-aid spells on Drale. Binding spells. One of them must have remained intact but latent when his body had died. She had cast a number of spells on him, one of them demonstrating that a spirit could not, by spell, be cast out of a body. The draw was just too strong. When he had died the draw had evaporated. His soul had fled. In her whimsy, on that long ago day, she had cast his spirit at the Sun.

Gilia. Gilia had told him of her life growing up with the beauty of magic and the wonders of technology. She it had been who told Drale about dragon scale. Now, she was lost to him.

Could her spell have remained in place, only to come into influence now? When he had been reanimated, perhaps the draw had returned his soul. He remembered instinctively returning his head to his neck, running, seeing poorly and attributing it to being dead, though the understanding had been purely intellectual. Had he, even that soon, been seeing the auras that shone from everything?

Think later. One last job to do. Drale had lain as one dead while Bast's man, Whimpy, had broken Jack's arm, his hand. Jack, too, would be avenged.

He hadn't been thinking like a corpse (a CORPSE!). There must be an advantage (an advantage!)

Drale wishes that there were something to laugh about. He misses laughing.

Still thinking, avoiding everyone, he begins to make his way under cover of darkness to his enemy's house.

Bast kills Whimpy. He asks him up to his room and has him pour two glasses of wine. It tastes odd to Whimpy who spits it back into the glass. Too late. It was too late as it touched his lips.

Bast orders his night bodyguard to dispose of the body. Bast himself is retiring.

The bodyguard obeys thinking, "Fat Fool Elf." Lifting the body easily he calls for the woman. While waiting for the woman he thinks, "He kills his people. The man was only doing what seemed best. Taking initiative. When will it be my turn?"

The bodyguard instructs the woman to load a wicker box with rocks and the body, wrap it with hemp rope, and dump it into the river. Bottom-feeding fish, fish he had never and would never eat, will pick the bones clean as the evidence rots away.

The woman has long understood the danger presented by this gruff-voiced, understated man and immediately complies.

The bodyguard returns to his boss. His contract obligates him for one year. An elven contract. Should he fail in any way to protect the body of his employer, he will be cursed. Only three months remain on his contract, then he intends to leave.

Drale stands in front of the house. He had found out from Jack where the dragon scale was stashed. Not an easy procedure, getting this kind of information. Drale's business had made lots of money since setting up operations but the outlay had still stung. A housekeeper had given the goods and was now long since back home in a small southern city somewhere in the World. Perhaps she was right now safe at home with the family she had missed so.

Drale had broken open an emergency cache containing a gun and cash. There had been food but his appetite was as dead as his reflexes. The gun he could use. He stands, a specter haunting Bast's house front.

Approaching, finally, along the walk, Drale moves to the front door. He reaches out. Too fast. His hand is rebuffed. Slower. Unthreateningly. Very slowly, smoothly and deliberately, with a steadiness impossible for the nervous actions of the living, Drale tries again. This time, a tingling feeling passes through the dead nerves, flesh and bones of his hand, but the hand penetrates. Ah, it is as he suspected.

The latch clicks. As he crosses the threshold a bug, a spider, falls from his dry brown hair. Drale hadn't known the thing was there. It must have climbed in when he fell on the floor the last time, just before Bast's goons arrived. Dead. The door pushed inward. Drale followed smoothly. The spell had killed and would have been fatal also to a live Drale.

Stepping up, smoothly, deliberately, Drale's shoe catches under the lip of a carpet. Jerk. Laser flash. A sizzle on his left arm and side and fluid gushes to the floor as Drale falls into the room.

Upstairs, a noise, not a very loud one, alerts the bodyguard. Probably just the house creaking but you can never be too sure. He doesn't rise from the high-backed padded chair to investigate, preferring silent inaction, listening. Not yet. He takes from his pocket a spell cell in the shape of a rod. A magic wand if you will. It is charged to stop the heart of any beast, man, or elf at whom it discharges. Expensive, but then, his services are not cheap.

A noise on the stair. Subtle. He wouldn't have heard it moving around. Possibly the house contracting with the cooling night. "Best to look," he thinks.

Past the top of the stairs, silent and absolutely still, facing the door through which the bodyguard has stepped, stands the dead man, Drale. His gun stares the bodyguard straight in the face. The terrible realization comes that this man's heart has stopped over half a week ago.

The dead man carries a sawed-off shotgun, short barrel. Not certain death, but sure enough. The bodyguard shuts the door as the stench slaps him. He wants to puke but manages to restrain his reaction.

"You can't." The bodyguard's voice is hoarse but quiet.

Drale pauses. Listen and learn, his professors had taught an impetuous boy who kept getting ahead of himself. Read and retain. Learn and later put your lessons into practice. Drale can afford time to listen. No one is going anywhere.

"Why not?" Drale asks.

"A spell. Bast isn't stupid. Well, he is but he knows how to protect himself." The bodyguard speaks quietly.

A terrible thought occurs to Drale, "Gilia," he guesses. The living man would have found a lump in his throat, would have stood paralyzed with the revelation. Drale merely looks on coldly.

Rotting flesh smell, compounded by the dead man's externally cold attitude is making the bodyguard increasingly unnerved.

"Yeah. You hurt Bast and the girl dies. I was there last night when Bast bought the curse, the spell. I don't think I need to describe it to you."

"How do I know you're telling the truth?" Drale is fishing, hoping for some break.

"You can't, man. You can't see magic like I can. You couldn't see it on an elf, anyway. Elves shine magic."

Drale knew it, though this man did not need to know that. He had seen elves since his death. What surprises Drale is that here is a human man who can see magic.

"So, what are my options? I could kill you. I might yet."

"No, don't. I'm just his bodyguard. I don't deserve to be killed like this. I only kill when I have to protect a client. Bast is my client but he can't order me to assassinate anyone. I wouldn't do it."

Drale doesn't like this. He has come to kill a killer and finds that he can't. Gilia is imperiled. Emotions result in nothing as he grieves for his life, passed.

There is still the matter of the dragon scale. The Elvish governor of the town is the only other person Drale knows of who possesses any of it. Bast's supply must be destroyed so that no one else will be framed up like Drale. At least for a while.

The bedroom. That is where Bast keeps it. Drale motions and he and the bodyguard enter through the bodyguard's antichamber. The fat elf sleeps on. The nauseating odor only makes him wrinkle his nose and smile faintly in his sleep. His dream this night has been of torturing some poor street urchin seen during the day, but alters to a dream where Bast watches the immolation by fire of Drale's aware corpse.

In the room, shotgun pointed at the bodyguard, Drale pulls from the wall a painting showing a fiery wall topped by a plant flowering bright purple, a painting of undeniable beauty and alienness. In back, wedged between frame and canvas, two iridescent scales peek out. Thicker than snake or even fish scales, they shine in the dim light from the lamp.

The air in the room thickens with the smell of putrifaction. The bodyguard is now wholly out of his element. He has killed men, yes, but none of them had moved by themselves from where they fell.

There is no threat to the fat elf he despises.

Drale draws out the scales and walks to the oil lamp by the bed. The scales sputter into flame as Drale holds them over the lamp chimney and they fume and smoke. The smoke rises questioningly, first straight up, then outward. Searching. One plume approaches Bast. The other comes straight for Drale, more like a probing worm than a striking snake. Drale watches as Bast breathes the vapor and comes suddenly full awake.

"Who the Hell is burning my . . . " Bast's shout breaks off when he sees and smells Drale, standing beside his bed.

Bast gasps sharply like a frightened movie queen in an old B flick. Involuntarily, he is caught by the fumes. Drale smells the smell and finds his lungs expanding of their own accord. He hears and feels fluids gurgling stickily and falls heavily onto the huge bed. Stinking, sick, slick slime trails from where the body strikes the bedclothes to where the body has fallen on the floor. Skin has split along with cheap food wrap. A messy pungent corpse litters the floor.

Bast lies on the bed, horrified by the intense smell and by the sight of the settling corpse. He looks at the aura surrounding the soul within and ties it off from the outside. The corpse will never revive again.

Bast rises, puts on his robe and tells the bodyguard, "Get rid of that filth."

The bodyguard had watched corpse and shotgun tumble to the floor. At least that danger had departed. But while the corpse fell a dual surge and flow had taken place. Magic Sight showed Bast's black spirit leaving his body and, simultaneously, Drale's brighter soul fleeing his. Bast's spirit, displaced from his body, had entered Drale's ensorceled shell. Drale had entered Bast's fat form and immediately used the magic resident there to tie Bast to the dead flesh. The bodyguard knows that he is in the employ of a new master.

"My name is Grim. I'm your bodyguard." Grim extends his hand without his normal confidence. Bast takes it. Drale is dead, sure. Also certain is that his soul lives. Bast's memories of the brain, of the Elflands, Drale's memories of the soul and the World live in one mind.

"I think it might be time to renegotiate your contract, Grim," the new Bast announces. "And I'm happy to be able to meet you."

Bast, he had to start calling himself Bast. The memories are there. So are the memories of another life. A life filled with Gilia.

"You can see magic. Can you conjur?" Bast/Drale asks. At Grim's nod Bast continues, "In these lands a man needs more than just his body guarded." And out of an unfamiliar habit, "Have the skull cleaned and sent to Riiallana."

Grim grins anxiously. This human interloper knows about Bast's morbid predilection and chooses to copy it. Grim must respect this new elf who stands straighter, looks more directly, and shakes hands with a grip of assurance, not of dominance. Perhaps he will come to like Bast after all.

"Remove this body and send someone to Drale's Grail. They will find my man, Jack, who needs healing. Get Jack fixed. He must keep that enterprise running."

Walking out of the room to rediscover his old house and escape the smell, Bast finishes more gently, "Tell him that when he is well, I want him to find someone for me."

Updated January 24, 1998, 10:52pm. shawn_h@sprynet.com