Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Narasen had remained in Merh for a longer time than she had bought from Lord Death. She had brooded there in the daylight, going up and down the streets to gloat on what she had accomplished. Revenge had neither soothed nor distressed her, it was like a sort of makeshift meal when she was starved—something to staunch her hunger, but not enough. Now she took this route, searching for the corpse of Jornadesh. And, because she had done too much lingering and the protection of Innerearth was wearing thin, decay had begun to approach her body. She was more gaunt, bruised looking, altogether more dreadful, and her hair was like a wind clotted with rags.

  Simmu froze at the sight of her. The last occasion he had seen this lady she had been dead in her tomb, and sliding into the earth with Death himself. Simmu remembered, and a ghastly fascination, like that of the rabbit before the snake, struck him down. Thus he waited in sick dazedness for Narasen to reach him.

  She noted Jornadesh firstly, that colorful blot between the stalks of young (now poisoned) grain. Having noted him, she raised her frightful eyes and noted Simmu.

  She had given the idea of Simmu a deal of thought. Though he had altered even more than she since last they met, she knew him.

  Neither spoke, neither had need of words. Yet each was, in his own way, articulate. Then, cat-like, Simmu began to shrink, inch by inch, backward and away from her. And she, cat-like, inch by inch, crept forward pursuing him, while, as a background to this, the light thickened, the garish mulberry sun lowering on the edge of the land, and six or seven more birds fell from the air among the blasted grain.

  At the perimeter of the field was a narrow track. One less sure-footed than Simmu would have stumbled here, but he half twisted to stare at the track, and tensed himself as if after all to sprint away.

  Then she did speak, in that un-voice of hers.

  “Beloved. Stay, beloved. It is only Narasen, Narasen who bore you. I would only embrace you, my darling. Only that.”

  The voice, and the calculating false words it used, brought Simmu to a final extreme of fear, and he in turn screamed out. He screamed for Zhirem, without recollecting who Zhirem had been. And Narasen sprang forward, the leopardess yet, with all her claws in readiness.

  But the sun had fallen, and the rending death-laden hands of the blue woman met—not the flesh of Simmu—but a dark lightning bolt which suddenly shot upward in her path.

  “No, madam,” said Azhrarn, soft as could be, “you do not harm what is mine.”

  Narasen let down her claws. She became as expressionless as Death himself, and she took in Azhrarn coolly. She assumed the Prince of Demons could not hurt her as she was now, though she could not get by him.

  “Oh lover of the earth,” said she, “can it be that you, Lord of all wickedness, are protecting the innocent from the evil I would offer him?”

  “Return to the country of your kind,” said Azhrarn. “You have overstayed your welcome in the world.”

  “Give me what belongs to me.”

  “There is nothing here of yours.”

  “Black cat,” said Narasen, “go back and prowl in your crockery city, black cat. You and your cousin Uhlume, you two Lords of Darkness, I spit on both of you.” And then, in her fury, Narasen smote Azhrarn across the mouth.

  “Daughter,” said Azhrarn, in the kindest of tones, “you have not been wise.”

  And indeed, she had not been. For from her right hand with which she had smitten him, the flesh scattered like blue petals, leaving only the bare skeleton behind.

  “Take that with you to Innerearth,” said Azhrarn. “Tell the one you call my cousin, who is no kin to me, that he should keep his people in at night. Now go, daughter of bitches, go and play knucklebones.”

  And Azhrarn gestured at the ground, which parted and dragged Narasen snarling into itself.

  Presently Azhrarn looked about at Simmu.

  “And who is this Zhirem you call out to?” inquired Azhrarn. “I thought you were to think only of me.”

  “Only of you,” said Simmu, and sank down at Azhrarn’s feet. “But I am no longer as I was. I have seen death too often and too near.”

  “Demons do not meditate on death,” said Azhrarn. “Remember the Eshva women and what they taught you.”

  “Death has taught me I am mortal.”

  And in fact, it seemed that Simmu was not quite as he had been. Some glittering garment had sloughed from him, some new grayer garment had been put on.

  “Do not disappoint me,” said Azhrarn. “There are ways to circumvent even death.”

  “Teach me them,” Simmu cried.

  “Perhaps,” said Azhrarn. “For one, I will tell you this. To touch any part of this place is fatal, the woman has so polluted it with her venom. But that round your neck, that given jewel of Underearth, has protected you.”

  “You mentioned my father to me once,” said Simmu slowly, “but I do not recall what you said, save that it had to do also with death.”

  Then Azhrarn beheld for sure that a form of humanness had got hold of Simmu. Men, not demonkind, mused on their fathers. And yet, within Azhrarn, a flickering of malicious light came and went. It appeared to him that Simmu had abruptly arrived upon the threshold of his fate, and that his fate held all the seeds of upheaval and wildness that a demon could yearn after. And so Azhrarn, who had informed himself of all of it, lessoned Simmu in his surprising beginning. He made a story of the beautiful man-queen and of the curse of Issak. He told of her visit to the witch in the House of the Blue Dog, and the bargain struck with Uhlume, Lord Death. He made a dream of her liaison with the blond fair youth who walked from his tomb to meet her, whiter than marble and twice as cold. Simmu sat at Azhrarn’s feet in the poisoned land of Merh and listened. And the grayness gathered about his eyes, and his mouth became the mouth of a bitter anguished man.

  Later, still scenting destiny and mischief, alert for it. Azhrarn conducted Simmu through the very streets of the murdered city. Azhrarn’s companionship was itself a talisman against Simmu’s terror, and familiarity worked its own dreary healing.

  The dead were all about. They lay in heaps. Birds and beasts, men and women and their children. The flowers had died, the trees; the wells were inky. The houses and the very stones of the roadways had a look of death. Everything she had laid her hands on, everything her foot or her hair or her robe had brushed had perished.

  And those who had afterward touched these things, or other men she had previously touched, had been contaminated; a swift and thorough plague. The city was dyed with it. Merh was a tomb, and the whole land of Merh, infected to its borders, and none spared—or almost none.

  Simmu could not see all this and retain an actual shock at death. No, his emotion was transferred. It became a violent hatred.

  Somewhere in the deep of the night, walking with Azhrarn over the slopes where the birds had rained from the sky, Simmu said aloud:

  “You have cured me, my Lord, of my cowardice.” He cried it as a mortal man, no longer in the unhuman fashion of before. “Now I will not hide or retreat. I will be the enemy of Death. I will seek his destruction. And I believe in my soul, O Lord of Lords, that you will help me.”

  “Simmu,” murmured Azhrarn, “only men remember they have souls.”

  Part Five

  Pomegranate

  1

  SIMMU WOKE THIS TIME, not recollecting when he had slept or when Azhrarn had left him. The sun was glaring down on the corpse of Merh. Simmu had within himself a similar raw glaring which he could not evade. He had learned a great amount in the darkness. He had learned he was mortal. He seemed to himself very changed, almost unbearably so. The innocent elemental qualities which had enabled him to work Eshva magic, the pure ruthlessness and singleness of purpose and oblique sweetness that had made him unhuman before, all these seemed gone. Even physically, he experienced his clay. He felt heavy and leaden. He
saw himself in retrospect as he had been—saw himself with amazed and uneasy wonder, as others had seen him. But he was not, in reality, so very altered. The metamorphosis was in his spirit, and his flesh did not positively reflect it. To another, still, he had that glaze of the marvellous and the strange. But to himself, he was less.

  Presently he got to his feet, and with head hanging, trudged about the plain, purposeless as only a human thing can think itself to be.

  Suddenly, out of the soundless, lifeless expanse, a voice called. Simmu spun to face it—only he or a lynx could have moved so limber and so swift, but he did not credit himself. And there, on the left hand, some thirty feet away, stood a weird figure, a shaven-headed bearded man clothed in a leopard’s skin. Over his shoulders were the healing marks of whip stripes, and his skin was blue. Simmu looked at the skin and Narasen leapt to his mind’s eye.

  “Never be alarmed,” said the sage, whom Jornadesh had had ineffectually whipped. “The poison is already fading from my system and has done me no harm. Besides, I see you also know a trick or two and have survived here. But everything else has died.”

  “Part of me has died,” said Simmu.

  “Then yield it to death.”

  “No, I grudge him the least portion,” said Simmu, dismally recalling his pledge of the previous night, and how it appeared Azhrarn had grown bored with him and left him quickly after it, with no promise of return.

  “To speak of death as if he were a man is to create a man to be death,” said the sage. “Wickedness has also assumed a shape, and you travel by night in company I should not like to share.”

  Simmu saw a dead serpent before him in the dead grass. He kneeled and lifted the serpent and stared at it.

  Proclaimed the sage: “I must warn you, the power which uses me—or I it, I have never been sure—is about to possess me.”

  “Is such a thing agreeable to you?” asked Simmu dully.

  “I do not believe it is,” said the sage, “but since I noticed you, I have been aware of a gathering in me, and that I shall be made to gibber out some nonsense or other. Which you will then be obliged to interpret for yourself.”

  Simmu trembled, not knowing why. The sage abruptly crashed headlong, flinging himself about and grunting as if in a fit. Then, from his frenzy, he called sternly and distinctly:

  “Consider the blueness of Merh’s poison and the blue face of the dead. Find the pomegranate drinker of bones. Shout of poison among the poison trees.”

  This delivered, the sage rolled over and arose with great dignity and calm.

  “I do not understand—” faltered Simmu.

  “I told you would not,” replied the sage.

  “A drinker of bones—blueness—poison among poison trees—”

  “Now do you think, pretty youth, I am going to interpret my own riddles to you? I will say only this. If you are seeking a particular thing and can put together the words I have uttered and use them, then the thing is as good as found.”

  “What do I seek?” Simmu shut his eyes. He let the dead snake fall. “I am Death’s Enemy,” he whispered, “so I am seeking the destruction of Death.” Then he opened his eyes, and beheld the wild man some paces away. “Wait!” cried Simmu.

  “No,” said the sage. “You are too fair, and I am sworn to celibacy, and I do not mean to grow a third leg I may not journey on.”

  And he would say no more, nor glance behind him, and soon he was gone from view.

  • • •

  Simmu’s hopeless goalless walking took him in a circular mode about the spot where he had woken. He did not mean to stray too far, and when the sun westered, a frantic eagerness welled in him that with the coming of night, another also would come.

  The sun at length went down.

  The silence, which was absolute, seemed to become impossibly more silent. Even the wind held its breath.

  Huge and mercilessly cold were the stars above dead Merh. Next a moon ascended, a sickle blade cleaving the shadows.

  Simmu could not fail to see, with all this glow, no one had come to join him on the plain.

  And it occurred to Simmu, oddly, that he had known a desertion and a cooling of love before. And then, as he lay on the untender ground with the stars driving their spines into his eyes, a vague dream washed over him like a wave on a beach. Unicorns were dancing on a charcoal shore and he dancing with them.

  And still half in the dream, Simmu rose and threw the peasant’s robe from him. The moon burned him with her white fires and some of the new enamel of mortality un-hardened from his soul. He thought of Azhrarn, and the body of Simmu shivered and rippled to the deepest cores of itself, and with satisfying lithe twists and tremors of delicious pain, it rearranged itself. And Simmu the maiden lifted her arms against the narrow moon and began to dance.

  And as she danced, still her brain was more human than before, and with a woman’s small deceitfulness she thought: I am beautiful now, and he will return and I will pretend I have forgotten him, even he, the Lord of all Lords.

  But when he did come, (perhaps he had been delayed by another sport, perhaps he had been only awaiting just such a proof that the demon element in Simmu persisted) there was no pretense. Dancing, a black smoke enveloped her, an incense smoke that drugged her and sent her reeling, not downward, but up into air. And looking through this smoke with unfocused eyes, she saw swimming there the moon and the stars, but more beautiful than stars, the two eyes of Azhrarn.

  So she appeared to herself to be lying in nothing in the sky’s vault with the arms of the Demon about her, but he gently said to her:

  “You have been talking with a bald bearded leopard, and what did he say to you?”

  “That I endangered his celibacy,” said Simmu the maiden, and she wound her arms about the neck of Azhrarn. And as she touched him the exquisite sensation she derived merely from this contact caused her softly to cry out. But, as gently as he had questioned her, Azhrarn disengaged himself from her, and he said: “The time is mine to choose, and is not now.”

  Then Simmu turned her face from him and discovered it was not the sky she lay in but a black forest of feathers, an eagle’s breast blacker and broader than a midnight. Or so it seemed. The eagle flew eastward, and the beat of its wings was thunder.

  The thunder told her this: “In your brain I have seen the image of a sage who mentioned bones and blueness and poison. I know the riddle, and will take you to the House of the Blue Dog, where it shall be answered.”

  A feather on the breast of an eagle, Simmu’s transitory girlhood left him, and the world fled by beneath.

  2

  She was sleeping on a couch, the witch in the House of the Blue Dog, Lylas. She was dreaming of the Lord Uhlume. He strode over the world and she trod demurely at his heels and she knew herself valued, and she heard mankind exclaim: “It is Death’s chosen sister.”

  She slept naked, did Lylas, but for her girdle of finger bones and her fabulous malt-brown hair that made a silken cover in which she moaned and softly writhed, dreaming of Uhlume’s footsteps passing before her and the edge of his cloak which occasionally billowed over her skin.

  Outside the mansion, the wild pomegranate trees whispered to each other nastily, and dropped their malignant fruit on the ground for their witch mistress to tread on in the morning. If the trees remembered Narasen, they did not say. But they discussed the moon and wished they could drag it down in their branches, for, being slaves trapped in soil, they resented the freedom of others.

  Uhlume, in the dream, was striding beneath a gallows and as she followed, the rope rasped over the witch’s breast. She opened her eyes and found the enormous dog of blue enamel licking her lasciviously. But seeing her awake, it barked:

  “Something is coming.”

 
; “What, dolt?”

  “There was a rushing of wings,” said the dog. “Part of the sky dropped in the meadow and I hurried away. Then I glanced back and a man came who was not a man and with him a youth who was not a youth.”

  “Will you play word games with me?” hissed the witch.

  “Delectable mistress, never,” fawned the dog. “But as I am your servant, this is what I saw.”

  That moment, the brazen door of the witch’s mansion was struck one ringing blow. Lylas frowned, for those who sought her aid did not normally make so vehement a signal. But she lashed the dog with her hair.

  “Hasten. See who is knocking.”

  “I am afraid,” grovelled the dog, but it bounded off just the same.

  And when the brazen door gaped wide, there it stood, seven hands high and barking at the callers:

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Azhrarn, the Prince of Demons,” said the tall dark man on the threshold, “and this youth you will conclude to be my son. Now, go tell your lady of the pomegranates.”

  The dog rushed to obey, with a loud clanking of its ceramic teeth, and its pottery tail between its legs and grinding horribly on the floor.

  The visitors advanced more leisurely. They climbed the stairway the dog had galloped up and entered a room of many blue lamps with pink fires in them. Then a piece of drapery blew aside and the witch ran in. Her face was white and she cast herself down at the feet of Azhrarn so the rugs were awash with her hair.

  “Lord of Lords,” cried the witch, “be more welcome than my own person in my house, and have mercy on your handmaiden.”

  “Suppose me merciful,” said Azhrarn, “and get up.”

  The witch arose. She put back some of her hair so a flower-bud breast appeared through its veiling, but she kept her bone girdle hidden. Her eyes darted, making sure of her guests in a single swift glare, before she lowered her lids modestly. One guest was as naked—more naked—than she, and so was dismissed as only an uncommonly beautiful young man. But she had seen sufficient, being learned, to know the other was no other than he said.