Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  In the fourth night Simmu, more easily lost than Zhirem and more easily found, already two-thirds elemental and at home with strangeness, drew herself from his arms and went to the weird fire. She rocked herself above its cat’s-eye flames and she cast into it the Eshva gem. No item made in Underearth was destroyed overhead without some notice taken by the demons. Simmu grinned like the she-wolf as the green jewel turned black in the green fire.

  In the morning, however, the fire was black and the jewel was green again.

  Zhirem sat beside the lake. He watched its salty shining. He did not turn to Simmu. He tried to see fish at the lake’s bottom where none could be. He was empty, deadly amused by his dejection. Demons did not exist or did not have commerce with men. He had been thrown into a black pit which contained Nothing.

  The sun sank. A solitary bird soared over, jagged winged in the afterglow. The lake glazed and began to gleam like pink mirror.

  Simmu as she crouched by the fire, Zhirem seated by the lake, both heard a soft crunching of the charcoal sand. Both rose and faced about with the hair shifting on their necks. From the western gloaming a shape seemed to weave itself, but it was not any shape they watched for.

  A bent old man picked his slow way along the shore. His garments of formless black flapped about him, his hair hung down in iron ropes.

  He came to Zhirem first, this old one. He lifted up at Zhirem a face like a fire-scarred arid rock, and out of this devastated face two eyes burned with a light Zhirem took for senility and madness.

  “The black land crabs,” hissed the old man, in a voice which was oddly powerful and arresting. “I look for the black crabs which crawl upon the land to mate.”

  Zhirem, half stupefied with a terror and an anticipation which had borne no fruit, said nothing.

  The old man made an erratic gesture with his hand, graceful, uncanny. “How would you name me? Crazy, would it be?”

  Zhirem stared. He said:

  “Nothing lives in the salt lake.”

  “Crazy you would name me,” repeated the old man. His voice rose and fell like a dire and improbable music. “Not so crazy as those who come here meaning to call up the Master of Night.”

  Zhirem caught the old man by the shoulder. But when he touched, a lightning seemed to ignite under his hand.

  “You are a magician then,” Zhirem said.

  “Even a magician trembles at the name of Azhrarn.”

  Zhirem looked away. He looked into the air itself, searching. The old man turned from him, and made his arch-backed course along the sand to where the green fire burned, and where Simmu, clad now in her peasant rags, stood and gazed at him. As the old man got closer, Simmu raised her arms. It was as if she opened a gate to let him in.

  When he reached the fire, the old man spat suddenly into the flames. A blue tongue flashed where he had spat, and Simmu dropped to her knees, without understanding why she did so. Her eyes swam as she met the mad burning of the old man’s eyes. But, to her, the burning was not madness. It was a profundity of sight too awesome to withstand.

  “You danced naked,” said the magician. “I beheld your dance. I have noticed other things. To the north, a plump priest has expired. Beyash, fleeing a black talking bird, fell down a stairway to his death. Which does not gladden you, my little one, seeing you hate Death, and would not even give your enemies into his care.”

  Simmu shivered. She did not see the magician look over his shoulder, and how Zhirem also turned as if at a shout, and came back over the shore to the fire.

  “If you are a magician,” said Zhirem, “teach me how to summon the Prince of Demons.”

  “Summon?” asked the old man, and never did such a soft murmur carry so great a menace. “Him you do not summon. Neither call to him, if you are wise. And for what should you wish to risk yourself in his presence? Maybe someone has told you the tale that those who call him may ask of him a single boon. The tale is not necessarily accurate.”

  “I would serve him.”

  “Serve him? Has he need then, do you suppose, of human servants? Has he not his own people for that? Men have misled you, Zhirem. You were not meant for the dark.”

  Zhirem’s face grew like white steel.

  “Never say that now,” he said, “I have travelled too far.”

  “Listen,” said the old man, and his voice sang and was a spell. “Listen,” he said, and the whole ear of night obeyed. The trees listened, and the earth, and the water of the lake, and Zhirem sank down by the fire and listened also. Then the old man told Zhirem the story of Zhirem’s own beginning. Everything was there, as if the old man had witnessed all of it, the muttering among the tents, the alarm of Zhirem’s mother, the slinking in of the witch-woman. The night he spoke of when the cloud bore the child and his mother to the garden of green sand. He spoke of the well of fire and Zhirem plunged into it. He spoke of the price of this unique and total armoring, which left no loophole for hurt. For in burning off mortal weakness, mortal luck and happiness were also burned. It was some antique law of the gods, older than time. Men could not have too much. Ecstasy and vulnerability belonged in the same dish. A fear the cup would be snatched away was what gave the wine its savor, and as Zhirem’s cup was sure, so was his joylessness. It was a price even demons, the magician said, would not pay to make safe a human they valued. It was the fire’s light had harmed Zhirem, not the darkness.

  Sweat ran on Zhirem’s face, his eyes blazed drily, and he said: “What then?”

  “What indeed,” said the magician.

  “I believe no word of yours,” said Zhirem.

  “Do you not? Go, and prove I am mistaken.”

  Zhirem met his glance with hatred and pleading. Then, like a dog which has been whipped from the hall, Zhirem got up and walked straight into the blackness of night, and the blackness parted to receive him and shut at his back.

  Simmu, about to spring up and go after, discovered the hand of the magician had alighted on her wrist. And the hand seemed to bind her with a chain that was unbreakable, yet she loved the chain.

  “For you, this,” said the magician. “Your mother was a queen who ruled in a distant land. The kingdom is called Merh, and now it is yours. Do you want it?”

  Simmu, enchanted by the touch of the magician, closed her eyes. Kingdoms meant nothing. She thought of Zhirem lost in the blackness and wished only to comfort him, but the chain bound her and she loved the chain. She laid her head against the old man’s shoulder, and she sighed.

  And presently she found it was the hard ground she lay on, and her hair was wound about her wrist, and the fire had died.

  • • •

  Zhirem entered a valley in the lawless lands, in the moonless abject hour before dawn.

  The valley was ugly, and it had a pitiless aroma. All about lay shards and flints like razors; the gaunt trees had clawed the wind till even the wind was afraid to stay there. It was a place to meet death in, and Zhirem recognized it.

  He picked up the razor shards as he walked, and let them go. He reached the valley’s center where a chasm had been wrenched out by some huge meteorite’s plummeting, a valley in the valley, and on its floor a black stream flowing with veins of red poison in it. A place of death for certain, and with many forms of death in it. It might have been put there as part of Zhirem’s fate.

  Zhirem halted on the chasm’s brink.

  He said, to the valley, and to the dregs of the night, and to any who might hear him: “All that is left of me is here. If any claim me, they must do it now.”

  The valley, where no wind blew, was silent. Yet in the silence was answer enough.

  Now Zhirem had been told he might not die. Events had told him, and also an old man by a lake. To die is a fear, but to live is a fear also. Zhirem stepped off from the edge into space, and what he truly wanted is not simple to divine, nor did he find it simple, whether an
end or the curse of not ending. If the rocks had speared through him with agony and death, maybe he would have cried out in remorse. But the rocks left him be, and how he fell was as if through gauze into velvet; not a scratch on him, not a bruise. And when he dragged himself to his feet and gazed up the wall of the chasm and saw the length of his fall and knew himself alive and unharmed, then his cry of remorse and anguish was at life, and he had no room left in him to understand it might have been different.

  Zhirem seized the flint daggers from the rocky floor. He drove them at his heart, his neck, the veins of his arms—and none pierced him. He sprawled beside the poison stream and lapped there. He lay with his face in water and his hair floating, and he felt the scald of the toxicant alter to blandness in his throat and belly; worse than bane, it did him good.

  He could not support the horror of uniqueness. He could not persist with loneliness and without a goal. He crawled upright once again and, untying the priest’s belt from his waist, he made a noose. He looped the bough of one of the fearsome trees and hanged himself from it. But as the cord tightened, he seemed to hear the tree whispering spitefully: “Zhirem is too beautiful to die,” and the bough snapped.

  Stretched on the rock, Zhirem made no effort now to rise. A chill rain dashed itself into his open eyes, and mingled with rain, a shadow.

  Through his daze and through the water, Zhirem made out a man, tall against the paling raining sky. Black the man was, blacker than the night had been, and the rain did not moisten his white hair and his white garments, whiter than the day would be.

  “You cried for me,” said the man, who was no man, but Death. “You cried for me but I may not come to you. Not for long years and long centuries. Only this can I give you,” and he leaned down and laid his fingers on the brow of Zhirem so his senses and the whole world left him, and even dreams had no place in that dungeon of unconsciousness.

  After Death had gone, another came.

  Simmu leaned over the chasm’s brink and perceived Zhirem on the floor of it, stone still in the rain with the cord about his neck and the broken bough nearby. And Simmu knew that Death had been in the chasm as a leaf knows winter has brushed it.

  Neither had Simmu properly understood the magic story the magician had recounted. Maybe it had been meant only for Zhirem and no other. The well of fire remained a mystery to Simmu, and thus she saw Zhirem dead on the chasm’s floor. And she saw her life dead there with him.

  Her womanhood left her as she stared. Simmu became again a man, a youth, kneeling upon the brink, then jumping up and flying from the place, his old fear on him.

  And, as Simmu fled, he wept, but the whole sky was weeping for Zhirem.

  Part Four

  She Who Lingers

  1

  IN MERH, which meant nothing to Simmu, Jornadesh ruled.

  Jornadesh, the commander of the armies of Narasen, he who had had her slain with a blue drink, who had made himself a king and shut up the true king in his mother’s tomb, alive—all the sixteen years of Simmu’s life, Jornadesh had been lord of Merh. At the same moment Simmu wandered weeping through the lawless lands, Jornadesh lay on a cushion of silk in the palace of Merh, lording it.

  He had grown corpulent, had the handsome commander. The only exercise he took was at the table or in the bodies of his women. Luxury was everywhere; he battened on the land, but the land did well enough, in spite of him. It was rich and prosperous, Narasen had left it so. And for Narasen, what? Nothing. No rites, no honors at her mausoleum, no mark of mourning, however spurious, not a single spire of gold erected to her remembrance. Now this, for the dead, would be a small matter. Souls did not usually remain to spy or to brood. But for the soul trapped by Death’s bargain in the Innerearth, bound to its flesh another thousand years, for that soul, the acts of the world had interest.

  Jornadesh, leaving the cushions of silk for a bed of silver and the silken body of a girl, lapsed at length into sleep and had a dream, the substance of which was this: In the palm of Jornadesh lay a blue jewel, at which he peered greedily, admiring its luster. But even as he peered, the jewel began to change. It became a blue spider which crawled across his skin. And swift on this vision ran another: A blue flower bloomed in an urn, but when Jornadesh bent to sample its fragrance, the flower became a hand which gripped his throat. Last the sight of a blue hill, but the blue hill split and spewed out a vast legion of scorpions, termites, venomous snakes and beetles, and these things, all of them blue, swarmed over Jornadesh, devouring him as they progressed, so he woke yelling.

  Jornadesh did not like his equanimity disturbed. Even asleep, he wanted charm and peace about him. When he slumbered again and had the self-same dream again, he rushed heavily from his bed, calling for lights and for sorcerers.

  “Does someone work evil against me?” asked Jornadesh. “Reverse the influence upon him, and let him perish in his own snare.”

  But the sorcerers could find no evidence of an ill-sending.

  Jornadesh was not satisfied, though he retired to bed. Near dawn he had the dream a third time, and now, he roused the whole palace with his cries.

  The sorcerers were brought, and reminded of various instruments of torture secreted here and there in the byways of the royal establishment.

  The sorcerers conferred. One said:

  “Majesty, we are able to discover nothing. Indeed, who should wish you harm, seeing you are both just and virtuous. But if you are troubled, we have heard of a certain sage who lives on the plains beyond the city. He is said to have powers of divination. If you desire, we will summon him.”

  They hoped thereby to divert the wrath of Jornadesh upon this fellow, who was reputedly eccentric. Jornadesh, to their relief, agreed to consult the sage, and he was sent for.

  He was a wild man. He lived on fruits and raw meat and dressed in the skin of a leopard. His beard grew to his knees but his head was shaved. When they led him into the presence of the king, he seemed unimpressed, and when they informed him that Jornadesh wished him to divine a dream, he only asked what it was. When he had been told, he sprawled down full length on the mosaic floor. He breathed deeply and his eyes rolled up and presently he began to writhe and groan. And after he had writhed and groaned quite a while, he roared out in an awful tone:

  “Beware! Jornadesh and Merh, beware. She does not forget that you have not remembered. Beware of water, and beware of the unlocked gate, and beware the footstep in the street at night when no dog barks. Beware of she who lingers.”

  Then the sage was quiet, and he opened his eyes and arose serenely.

  “Now what does this mean?” ranted the king.

  “How should I know?” asked the sage scornfully. “I understand nothing of the power which possesses me. I only speak as I am given to speak.”

  “Take him and have him whipped!” shouted Jornadesh.

  “I have been whipped before,” said the sage.

  And when the soldiers tied him and beat him, the sage made no noise and appeared in fact not to notice, though blood ran down his back. And finally the two whipmen began to howl, for they declared that every time the lash struck the sage he clearly felt no pain, though he was wounded, and they—with no wound—felt every blow. So they left off beating him and untied him and cursed him from the yard, and crawled whimpering to their beds, while the sage strode, bloody yet blithe, from the city.

  Jornadesh meanwhile was in a frenzy.

  “Who is it that lingers—who can it be?”

  The sorcerers slunk to him.

  “Perhaps, merciful lord, it is an unquiet ghost. Perhaps, generous lord, it is the ghost of Narasen, after whose unquestionably natural and inevitable death you wisely saved Merh from anarchy, and ornamented the city with the jewel of your magnificent reign.”

  “Narasen,” whispered Jornadesh, and he went pale.

  Before the sun had accomplished the zenith, Jornadesh h
ad given Merh notice of a month of mourning for Narasen.

  “Who is Narasen?” asked the children, born after her demise.

  “Some dead bitch-lady,” mocked the older ones, who just recalled her.

  “A harlot,” said the old women.

  “A man-hater,” said the old men.

  Memory had not dealt kindly with Narasen. Her strengths and her acts of preservation had dissolved in an acid of fault-finding and malevolence. Besides, it had not necessarily been polite to speak well of her once Jornadesh ruled in her stead.

  Now, however, incense was burned to the gods on behalf of Narasen, till all the temples reeked of it. Hymns in praise of Narasen were sung, and processions went up and down the streets, sounding gongs and entreating the people to reverence her name.

  Jornadesh put on a coarse gray robe, and traveled northward along the river to Narasen’s tomb. Outside, on the marble platform, the rites for the dead were declaimed freshly at great length and with much show—as they had not been on the first occasion, sixteen years before. When that had been seen to, Jornadesh addressed the tomb itself, assuring Narasen that she should be honored henceforth. Then he ordered the tomb opened, for he had brought caskets of treasure to adorn the burial chamber and her remnants—or at least, with which others should adorn them. But when they came to the door, they found it already accessible, and venturing in, though many bones lolled about the place, the bier of Narasen was vacant. Not a scrap of cloth or a wisp of hair remained, and the dust rested thick and showed no mark either of flesh or skeleton.

  None who witnessed this thing experienced delight, but Jornadesh was overcome by misgiving. He fled back to Merh and shut himself in the palace. Here, guarded by his soldiers without, and by his strongest slaves within, he twisted in his bed, rattling with fright. Till, at last, he fell asleep and had the dream again.