Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  The neck convulsed. A scalding fluid splashed on Simmu’s chest. He thrust again, and then he could breathe and sight flickered back into his eyes. As he lay gasping, he partially saw the apparition, clutching at its wounds from which brackish ichor was spilling, begin to dissolve on the dark. And in a few instants nothing remained of it save a ring of pain about the throat of Simmu and his bruised windpipe inside it.

  When he was more sensible, he roused the fire. No human in the house had woken, nor the dog. It was as if the visitation, meant only for one man, could be experienced only by him. Simmu turned his knife before the fire—the blade was coated with a substance which dropped from it in flakes leaving the metal burnished clean.

  Simmu did not sleep again. He crouched by the hearth till sunrise. But no second thing came to hunt him.

  In the morning, the girl child said she had dreamed a red bull had got into the house and ran through the fire, and the women laughed at her, as they plaited her hair, one plait each.

  They did not try to stay Simmu when he left but they watched him go, and the girl child stepped solemnly after him a short distance up the street.

  That day Simmu traveled with unease on his left hand and feverish alertness on his right. Nothing came near, however, until noon was past. As before, he was on a lonely track, as before the world seemed to muffle its noises about him. He turned his head and perceived no one, yet guessed the presence at his back. He had known, without reason, that the force which had attacked him was not done with the battle. Simmu shuddered but he kept on. Reaching a village, he made a detour. This night he should meet his foe in the open, and awake.

  The sun sank. Simmu sat down on the crest of a sheer-sided hill, his spine against the rocky comb. He ate the meal of edible stems he had gathered as he walked, and laid his knife ready.

  The sky’s roof became indigo and the wind danced through the caves and gullies of the hills, but sometimes there would come a curious patch of ruddy darkness, between Simmu and the sky, the land, the after-image of a light where no light was.

  The night turned its starry wheel. Sleep the fisher crept to Simmu and kissed his eyelids, but he sent her away, though, being shameless, she returned later and tried to kiss him again.

  But then sleep fled, for that which Simmu had been awaiting began to happen.

  From an uncertain, half-seen thing, the ectoplasmic patch surged into mass and into shape, a ghost assuming flesh. Like a round of heavy dough with the leaven working violently in it, the entity heaved and toiled toward existence. Firstly the stars shone through it, then the stars were eclipsed and hidden by the solidifying bulk. A dough man rose from the mix, yeasty and foully red, and in the blank of face the two wet wounds of the eyes fixed on Simmu. Of the wounds in its throat there was no trace. It had been remade whole in whatever un-world it had returned to the previous night.

  It moved uphill to Simmu with a very fast deliberate bounding terrifying to behold. Its hands were already outstretched to grip the windpipe it had been cheated of. But Simmu had risen, and as suddenly he raced to meet it.

  The thing groped to seize him. As it did so, Simmu plunged his knife into the area of the heart—if heart it had, and, immediately extricating the blade, stabbed again into the awful neck. The thing made no sound, nor had it before. Additionally ominous, where the knife had struck on this occasion no ichor poured forth. And clutching Simmu, rather than its hurts, the entity hugged him and squeezed him, this time both about the throat and the ribs.

  Simmu’s eyes blackened. He could not breathe, his left arm was gripped, yet he strove to wield the knife with the other. The proximity of the creature was almost too horrible to bear—a slimy, wet-clay, swamp-like sticking of its body to his. He thrust the knife, as he thought, into its eye but again no hot life-fluid flowed down over him. Besides, the thing seemed stronger than it had been. It writhed at his attack, but its clutch did not weaken. Instead, lover-like, it pressed his head into its revolting unflesh as it choked him.

  Simmu cut it once more in the back, but it was a feeble cut. His strength was failing, if the creature’s was not. The world was rushing from Simmu and he thrashed limply in the helpless spasms of the asphyxiated.

  And then the creature stumbled on the uneven hill slope, its grip slackened and Simmu, in a convulsive kicking motion, launched himself aside, and no sooner aside than forward again at the lower limbs of his adversary. One last floundering blow he delivered to those limbs, a blow that sent the red shape rolling off from the steep hillside and into the air.

  Simmu lay on the ground and watched it fall, soundless, on to the neck of the hill below. At the impact the being seemed to shatter, burst apart, though quite noiselessly. And then, as before, it melted into the dark, leaving no atom of itself behind.

  Simmu lay a long while face down on the slope.

  His own physical frame was wrung and battered. Probably he could not survive many more such supernatural duels.

  For he knew there would be others, though almost certainly no others tonight. Tonight the visitation would be mended in whatever region sheltered it. But tomorrow it would be galvanized once more to pursue Simmu and to fight with him. And tomorrow it would be stronger still. And the next night supposing Simmu could withstand till the next, it would be stronger again. For clearly the thing was sorcerous and sorcerously sent, and he had no chance against it. Destroy it as often as he liked, it would come back to him the following night, always it would come back, till Simmu was slain.

  4

  Who had sent the red pursuer? Who but the one who had beaten on a red drum after she betrayed her darkest secret to Azhrarn and to Simmu.

  In panic had Lylas turned to that drum with its unidentified red drum skin, for not carelessly was such an item turned to. And then the handmaiden of Uhlume, Lord Death, had tapped and coaxed and conjured, and what she had conjured she had set to track Simmu and to kill him. A long while it had taken, for Simmu’s inherited Eshva quality had clouded the trail, his spoor was not quite human. But eventually the repellent conjuring had found him out and, obeying the witch’s geas, had begun its murderer-task.

  Now this being, this conjuration, was evolved from a place neither on the earth nor in the nether regions of the earth, and yet accessible, a kind of black magician’s psychic cupboard full of afreets. To open the cupboard required particular procedures, most of all a particular sort of intellect and intention. No one stumbled accidentally on such a sphere.

  From the depth the fiend arose, and into the depth the fiend would remove itself when its errand was run. Here too it was drawn after its battles with Simmu, that its injuries might be knit together by the unthinking but huge power of the psychic cupboard. It could never be completely overcome, as Simmu had divined, merely warded off for a space. It had, too, this quality, that each time it was defeated and so renewed, its endurance doubled. It had another quality, in some ways more dreadful. It could not be demolished more than once with any single weapon. Thus, the knife which had despatched it on the first night was useless on the second. (There was a direful tale concerning a king who had had one of these things activated against him, and maybe Simmu had even heard the tale and remembered it. On the first night, the king slew the sending with a sword, on the second with an axe, on the third night by strangulation with a cord. Being invisible and impalpable to all but the intended victim, the monster was impervious to the blows of any other, and so the king must sleep by day and rise to fight at sunset when the apparition manifested. On the fourth night a spear was used, on the fifth a bow, on the sixth a bowl of acid, on the seventh a mallet of stone. There followed seventy further grisly nights, for each of which the king devised a fresh weapon and used it. Meantime the kingdom fell into ruin, invaders massed on the borders and the monarch’s courtiers abandoned him. Finally, on the seventy-eighth night, exhausted by his hopeless and never-ending ordeal, the king drank poison. And reputedly the horror
, when it returned that sunset, found only the king’s ghost, bitterly chuckling on the threshold, which declared: “You are too late.” But he was mistaken, for the sending, unable to find a body to mutilate, and being itself unearthly, ripped instead at the spirit of the king, so only a portion of his soul escaped the world entire.)

  Simmu had no wish to strive inadequately seventy-seven nights, even could he sustain his life that length under the onslaught. To be sure, his mind had already gone to Azhrarn’s parting words: “Burn this green jewel at your throat once more in fire, I will answer.”

  Simmu guessed none but the Demonfolk could help him—if they would. But he had not wanted to call to Azhrarn. As a child desires to prove itself unaided in the world, so Simmu did. And he feared to lose the little of Azhrarn’s love he might have earned, by imploring him too soon or too often.

  Simmu’s reluctance and the sluggishness of his beaten body delayed him. The night washed away and the sun came up, and no demon would answer by daylight.

  Accordingly, Simmu sat on the hillside, partly angry and partly despairing, and filled by a sick yearning for Azhrarn who would—or would he?—reply to the token.

  Not long after the sun had passed through the zenith there began again that eerie evil promise of impending arrival, that shadow patch on the air.

  Simmu glared at it, trembling with fury and fear. Then he got up and gathered dry roots and branches from a downhill thicket, and laid a fire ready.

  As soon as the western sun started its decline, Simmu lit the fire, and as one red light sank, the smaller flared up and he dropped into it the Eshva jewel from his neck. And then be bowed his head and prayed, as he had never prayed in earnest to the gods, to Azhrarn the Prince of Demons.

  The night settled on the landscape. The red fire spat and danced, all else was blackness, and on the blackness, the patch.

  Simmu waited. He waited for the advent of love or death.

  Love appeared.

  There on the hillside suddenly, a dark dove, which changed into an Eshva man, not to be mistaken, but not Azhrarn.

  The eyes of the Eshva coolly levelled on Simmu. The eyes said: Do not ask where he is, for he has sent me to you.

  Simmu began aloud, “I am haunted—” but the Eshva man silenced Simmu with an upheld hand, and gazing about, the Eshva conveyed this: I know you are haunted now, and by what. Be patient. And then the Eshva was gone as abruptly as he had come.

  Startled, Simmu could only continue his vigil, his existence in the balance.

  Presently the fire went out and Simmu took from it the burned jewel—which tomorrow would be restored to its greenness. He wondered if he would live to see it. An hour was sliced from the night, and another.

  All at once, the simmer on the air began to come to the boil.

  He, who had styled himself Death’s Enemy, was about to die.

  And then the most astonishing thing, more astonishing than death, happened to Simmu. With awful agony he felt himself convulsed, squashed, compressed. He would have cried out, but could not speak, could barely see. Or at least he saw, but from a different vantage. Everything had swelled five or six times its normal size, everything was of an unreal pallor—whitish hills against a whitish sky with black stars . . . or no, a greenish sky and stars like—black sapphires—or. . . . Simmu moved. All of him moved. He was roped, limblessly, in a night forest of ferns, gazing two ways at once from the sides of his head. A gentle hand took hold of him and he wound himself in a number of loops about the wrist of the hand.

  Simmu had been transformed into a serpent, one of the silver serpents that adorned the hair of the Eshva. As he was realizing this, he made out with his weird Underearth-snake’s eyes, a muddy clay-man on the hillside. But the clay-man conjuring had halted where it stood. Its outstretched arms grappled at nothing.

  And Simmu was conscious that flowing from the Eshva—there were three Eshva, all told, on the hill—was a charismatic aura that hid his own presence as securely as his form was hidden, bewildering and stultifying the fiend.

  The Eshva laughed with their eyes. They laughed at the fiend, able to perceive it but inviolate to and disdainful of it. And the fiend prowled round them, powerless to approach or to damage; powerless to find Simmu.

  Now it was a fact that a conjuring of this type, once called, must find its prey on each successive night. And the conjuring could not, though it perfectly recognized that Simmu should be there, must be there, for he was nowhere else in the world, above or below it. And the conjured fiend began to seethe like a yeasty drink, and with no warning it foamed into fragments, and the night seemed to suck it down and curl it away into nowhere.

  But there was in actuality somewhere that the conjuring went to.

  The Eshva strolled on over the hills some way. They kept Simmu a snake apparently out of affectionate vague maleficence. His mind, crushed into the brain-box of the metallic serpent, was in a silly chaotic state; he scarcely grasped any more where he was or how he came to be there or why. He partly forgot his own identity, though some worry nagged at him, and even that he did not recall. Yet it was beautiful to be among the Eshva, the dream-burned ones, the wandering children of shade.

  When he came to himself it was with another blast of pain, and some hours after. He was a young man again, the world was its proper size and color. The Eshva were leaving him.

  He recollected everything in a frantic rush. He tried to question the Eshva. The Eshva intimated to Simmu that he was safe from the peril which had stalked him. But how could this be, seeing the peril must have its prey? Prey the peril had had.

  Simmu watched them. Their eyes were soft with their dreams, innocently and dreamily wicked, telling no more.

  But it was true, he was safe, his very blood and heart and hair could feel safety. Azhrarn had swept death aside. Once more Simmu’s quest of the garden was freely before him.

  Though he wished, with the leisure now to regret, that Azhrarn had come to him in person.

  5

  Near two hundred and thirty-three years old Lylas was and she looked fifteen, and she sat in the chamber where the blue lamps burned pink fire in the House of the Blue Dog.

  She was playing a bone game, was the pomegranate witch. Not with the clean white finger bones from about her waist, but with chips and shards of stained and yellowish bone filched from upturned graves. She was Death’s Handmaiden and liked his emblems round her. Tonight she was proud and spiteful, thinking she had made Uhlume’s secret secure again, thinking of her youth and the endless years before her. But the bones she threw down, which were intended to form patterns that should show luck and prosperity ahead, showed only confused things, a future not as she had anticipated.

  “Stupid bones,” said the witch, “I will grind you under my heel for you are liars.”

  And she pictured the handsome youth with the cat’s gaze, baulked of the garden and the well, and dying somewhere in a red swirling, and she giggled. Till the red swirling came up in the midst of the rugs.

  Lylas stared.

  “Out!” she cried, “out, you fool! Did I call you to be idle? Go finish your business.”

  But the conjuring did not go, it solidified and its bloody eyes expanded on her with an incredible message in them.

  “He cannot have cheated you—return and search again!”

  But the conjuring could never return. Generally it did not need to. Illogical yet activated, all it wanted now was prey. If not the prey it had been instructed to take, then the prey which had instructed it. And so much Lylas beheld, and slowly she rose and retreated before it.

  Many and several were the powders and the dusts, the symbols and the tricks which she cast in its path to stay it. Many and several were the chants and incantations she uttered to facilitate its exit from the world. But such a creation, once unleashed, was uncheckable, the double-bladed sword.

  At las
t the wall was at her back and she could go no farther. She screamed a spell to transport herself, and transported she was, but the thing came after. Again and yet again she flung herself from one plot of the earth’s ground to another. Finally, in a forest somewhere, empty of anything save the trees themselves, the apparition, weary of the chase, seized Lylas by her hair, and with two tremendous grinding snaps, he broke her in half like a doll.

  All the bones of her girdle were scattered, as the other bones had scattered so inauspiciously when she played with them. Appeased, the conjuring dissolved into the night leaving her quite dead under the trees. Lylas could have been eternal, but she had never been invulnerable.

  Later, one blacker than the forest would come for her, for she too had made the thousand year bargain with Uhlume, not thinking to keep it for millennia.

  In the blue mansion, the blue enamel dog was already rifling her chests.

  6

  Simmu came to Veshum. He was seventeen and of rare appearance. His looks made both men and women turn to gape in the streets, not mere beauty but that shine of light inside, the flaring torch of purpose and defiance. Seeing himself so conspicuous gave him pause. But then he thought: They will all know at the last why I have come. He realized heroes must have witnesses. Besides, nobody ever questioned Simmu as to why he had journeyed here. They assumed that he, as with all the others, had come to marvel at their god.

  Inside the Garden of the Golden Daughters, the nine virgins were each sixteen, having served three years there. This, the people of Veshum told Simmu without being asked. They were altogether flamboyant with their sanctity. The god by now had a golden garland on his coal-black head, golden anklets and a robe of scarlet velvet. Every ninth sunfall a black cow was sacrificed to him. Simmu saw the rite and did not care for it. And among the shops of Veshum, among the vendors of fine silk and exquisite jewelry, of gorgeous sweetmeats and erotic incenses, one could buy small statuettes of the god which mimicked the larger one—they were considered lucky.