Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  “I? Oh, my Lord, do I have the skill? But naturally I am willing. Brick by brick, if you will have it so.”

  Then he caught a glimpse of a pair of black eyes, friendly and terrifying, which seemed to be glancing right in at his soul and leaving some knowledge there. Yolsippa understood he would not have to build the city personally. Others would do that. Yolsippa understood he was to be an overseer (he, slit-purse, night-prowler, seller of ineffectual potions). And he was going to oversee the creation of one of the most remarkable and most strange citadels erected since time’s beginning. A city of gods on earth.

  Yolsippa was alarmed at his promotion; simultaneously he swelled with vainglory. And then a smoke billowed and in the smoke came a lightning bolt, and the plain was empty of Yolsippa and of the Prince of Demons, and the fire went out for a second time, in ashes.

  At sun-up, Kassafeh did not precisely search for Yolsippa, but momentarily, as she clawed out her hair, straightened her rags, she kept an eye for him to come blundering up, vociferous with advice and protest. Simmu did not appear to notice the man’s absence. Was he glad to be relieved of such a reminder of his heroic role?

  Later, when the two moved on, following the green of the plain into the east, Kassafeh began looking over her shoulder. Finally she spoke.

  “Can the fat man have left us? Or is he lost? Suppose a wild beast attacked him?”

  “He cannot perish any more than we can,” Simmu said tersely, reluctant, as ever, with his first words of the day.

  “But if a jackal tore him open—” exclaimed Kassafeh luridly.

  “I imagine he must heal. For he could not die.”

  “But,” said Kassafeh, “he was most concerned with your welfare. That men recognize your fabulous deed.”

  “Woman,” said Simmu very sharply, “he spoke of a city, and you listened. A city for you is a courtyard decked with roses and awash with scented baths. You say hero to me, and see me a king, and Simmu as king means Kassafeh as queen, with pearls in your hair and silk on your body. But I have seen a city with only dead in it. Cities are cages. Why do you wish me to rule in a cage?”

  “I wish nothing,” said Kassafeh haughtily. “You are the hero, not I. You said you would wed me, but I do not clamor to be wed. Did I not gladly fly just such a scented silliness as you describe? As soon as we reach a habitable area, I will leave you, and you may do as you please.”

  Thus they walked all day in silence. But at night he wooed her back to him under the moon. Much of the time they were at one. But not at every time.

  And still she looked over her shoulder. And now and then she pictured a city of gold where she ruled as a queen, not from power-lust or greed, but as a child plays in her mother’s garments. And besides, this man she honored she would wish others to honor. Armies bowing before him, women weeping with desire.

  They passed, in a few days more, through a couple of towns, poor enough places, but Kassafeh was conscious of her rags, for she had been the daughter of a rich merchant. In the garden she had been proud to be scruffy, it was her protest. But now she wanted golden armor for Simmu and silver satin for herself. On a white elephant decked with rubies they should travel, flowers strewn before them; trumpets blowing and incense going up in fogs. Instead, an urchin threw a pebble after them. It was not good enough.

  • • •

  It was said to have been this way. A man would seek his bed, would fall asleep, would experience a curious and exotic dream. Would wake, as he believed, next morning—to find his household in an uproar, screaming and wailing that he had been gone ten days or more. Some of these men were carpenters by trade, and some were masons, and one or two were architects who waited upon the whims of lords.

  Now there was one such of these, an architect and scholar of no mean reputation, and in high favor with the king of his land. One morning he regained his senses and called for his servants, but no one came near him. Then he left his bedchamber and walked out into his house, and found it full of the king’s soldiers, who, when they saw him, shouted in fear and amazement.

  Upon inquiring what the matter was, the architect was informed that he had returned from a feast at the palace of the king, and gone to bed with his young wife, and in the midst of the night, the young wife had been disturbed and woke to discover herself alone in bed and the casement windows open wide. She accordingly got up and searched for her husband and presently ordered up the servants to search also. But there was no trace of the architect beyond one of his soft house shoes lying in the upper branches of a magnolia tree beneath the window. Next the wife, in her dismay, sought audience with the king and he, supposing the architect to have been murdered, cast all the servants into prison, and the wife into another prison for good measure. Then the king, who had been very fond of the architect, put on deep mourning and fasted and cried and became a shadow of grief.

  “But how long have I been gone?” demanded the architect in horror, “surely but one night?”

  “Indeed not,” said the soldiers, “it is three months since you were seen in the kingdom.”

  The architect made haste to dress and hurry to the palace. Here the king fell on his neck with sobs of joy, and ordered the instant release of the innocent wife and servants.

  “And now tell me,” said the king, “why you deserted me just as you were about to design for me a summer pavilion? As you instructed, I had imported for the building a hundred slave gangs, their overseers and masters, besides quantities of food to victual them, not to mention bronze and silver and precious marble for the structure. . . . Where have you been, and doing what, that you abandoned the project in the middle of the night, leaving only a shoe behind you?”

  “Well, my king,” said the architect, “I will tell you everything and you must judge for yourself if it was a dream, as I reckoned it to be, or if I am mad, or if perhaps, such an adventure can happen to a man.”

  The architect had gone to bed, as was generally known, with his young wife. There they had sported till each was satisfied and thereafter slumbered.

  But in an hour or so, the architect was roused by a marvelous noise in his ear, somewhere between singing and speech. Opening his eyes, he confronted a handsome young man with coal black hair and lordly demeanor, who said: “If you would win lasting fame, gather up the instruments of your trade and follow me.”

  “Follow you where?” asked the architect.

  “You shall see.”

  “I shall not see if I do not follow. And who are you, bold sir?”

  “A subject of the Prince of Princes, and one of the Vazdru.”

  Hearing the name of the upper echelon of the demons—whose existence he did not credit—the architect concluded he was dreaming and determined to enjoy the dream.

  “I will follow,” he declared, and stepped from the bed.

  Gathering various items from the adjoining room, the architect was soon ready. He had not troubled to be quiet, since it was a dream, and certainly his wife did not stir. The Vazdru prince next conducted the architect to the window, which stood wide, and pointed to a bizarre carriage drawn by black dragons and balanced up in the air. Even more convinced by this that he was dreaming, the architect chuckled with approving pleasure and jumped into the carriage, which started with such a jolt that his left shoe fell off into the magnolia tree.

  The dragons raced away into the night. High in the air they bounded with clattering wings which struck green sparks off the clouds. Below poured cities and forests and the shining broken glass of oceans. The architect peered at it all, grinning and nodding, enthralled at the breadth of his imaginative powers, which powers he had not before guessed he had. Meanwhile the Vazdru prince guided the dragons with an elegant hand on which dark rings flashed, a smile of tolerant amusement on his face.

  After three or four hours of enormously swift flight; a gilded line appeared in the east.

  At once t
he Vazdru sent the dragons diving earthwards. They touched the ground on the broad shore which divided a range of lofty mountains from the waves of a glimmering sea.

  “The dawn is near,” said the Vazdru, “and I must leave you. But there a road is marked which climbs the mountain side. Go only a short way, and you shall see one who will guide you.”

  The architect nodded, and when the dragon chariot and the young man together disappeared, he was vastly tickled.

  “Now I am nothing if not a cunning dreamer,” the architect congratulated himself. “A wonder, for I never recall any dreams of note before this one. No doubt I have been saving myself.”

  The sun was just now starting to lift on the left hand of the mountains, turning their eastward faces to rose and milk. The shore, meanwhile, took on a smooth crystalline sheen, and the limitless foldings of the sea swam inland to catch pink fire on their silver backs.

  “Quite charming,” said the architect. At the same moment he was struck by a particular and not quite explicable oddness in the landscape. It was a sort of innocence coupled to a sort of menace, a sense of a primitive and unspoilt geography, where humanity had not yet encroached in sufficient numbers to leave its seal. Another thing, as the sun’s face came above the mountains, it seemed both larger and more clear than usual. The architect was further entertained by this notion. That the earth, being flat and having four corners, must, near its edges, give way to remote, unsullied and infrequently visited domains, and here, perhaps, was one such domain, close to an eastern perimeter, and far from the interior realms of man. “Not only is the dream imaginative,” said the architect, “but also logical. Always supposing that the earth is flat,” he added. For he had sometimes thought it might be round, which in those days was a grave error.

  Shortly, he advanced up the shore and perceived a flight of steep steps carved in the side of the mountain. Obedient to the Vazdru’s suggestion, he began to climb them, but before very long he found a black donkey tethered to a post, and on the saddlecloth of the donkey were embroidered the words: “I will guide you.” Nothing loath, since it was a dream, the architect loosed the donkey and got on its back, whereupon the donkey began to carry him briskly up the mountain.

  The air grew thin, but it was wonderfully sweet and exhilarating nevertheless. At length the stairway ceased upon a plateau.

  Before, the peak of the mountain towered upward, but in the heart of it was riven a tall wide gateway. The donkey trotted straight in this gateway, and on the other side the bemused architect saw a sight.

  The inside flank of the mountain fell, and rose, and fell, and on all sides the flanks of other mountains did likewise. Some started up as if they meant to pierce the sky with their eager phalluses, others sank in natural terraces as if they would plumb the cellars of earth. And from these slants and staircases and thrusts and descents of stone, a most ethereal and beautiful jigsaw of half-formed buildings was arising. Here a portico, there three towers, a piece of delicately ascending wall, a balustrade, a bridge. The effect was of a cameo, for the mountains were of a gorgeous material, snow white to a certain depth, pink beneath that, strengthening into veins of rich red at the core, and the portions of buildings had been fashioned and coaxed from the actual stuff of the mountains.

  “Why, now I have it,” exclaimed the architect to the donkey. “This must be my dream. To construct a city from the living rock, from the lovely bones of the earth itself.”

  As the donkey bore the architect downward and along and upward over the slopes of this emerging metropolis, he caught glimpses of the augmentation of silver and jade and burnished bronze and yellow brass, of porcelain cupolas and tiles of onyx. In parts the city was fully formed, a colonnade all finished and singular to behold, a paved street, a plantation of trees which made the atmosphere more refreshing, above, fantastic casements of leaded glass. . . . And now, too, the architect perceived men at work among the treasures—masons, carpenters, joiners, bricklayers, and gangs of slaves striving with a will not generally found among slaves unless the whip plied their backs, which now it did not. Indeed, the air rang with the work-a-day noise of pick and anvil, haulage and pulley, shouted order and clatter of cart.

  At a certain spot, the donkey halted.

  Down a walkway lined with lemon trees, came a gross man clad in a gaudy patchwork. One walked behind to keep a parasol in position over the man’s head, another ran before and bowed to the architect.

  “Welcome, Lord Architect,” said this man. “Here is the Lord Overseer.”

  “What a dream this is!” cried the architect, enormously amused.

  “So it is,” agreed the bowing man. “I am a slave in a silver mine, but now that I sleep, I have only to serve this fat man, who treats me well enough, and every night I feast till I am round in the stomach. And then a girl comes to my couch and we play games together of a select nature. And she tells me, too, it is a fine dream.”

  “But the dream is mine, my good fellow,” said the architect, something peeved, “not yours or your doxy’s.”

  The fat man approached.

  “You must know,” said he, “we are engaged in building here a city to house a hero. You, as an architect, shall design the citadel and the palace of this city. Your name is well known, and we expect much of you, the Prince of Demons and I.”

  “Indeed,” said the architect “and, no doubt as it is a dream, I shall not be paid.”

  “Fame shall be your reward,” said the fat man.

  The architect laughed heartily.

  “I am a-fire to commence. Lead me to the site and thence to a chamber where I may work. We must be swift. I do not wish to wake before I am done.”

  “No fear of that,” said the fat man.

  Everything was arranged in accordance with the architect’s specifications. He lacked for nothing. If he required an instrument he had forgotten to bring with him, from somewhere the proper article was achieved and brought to him. Slaves of a most unusually eager and friendly disposition ran at his beck and call. All concurred with him that the dream was an enjoyable one, and appended that freedom awaited them in it when their dream tasks were completed, and they prayed fervently not to rouse before this sublime event. When night fell, a feast occurred in a marble palace already standing. Intoxicating wines and succulent meats were set ready on the table, and luscious black-haired maidens danced with silver serpents, and though they would not lie with the men, there were women in plenty, many of great beauty and breeding. One, a princess with emeralds at her throat, toyed with the slaves and announced with pleasure that she had never before had such an opportunity to slake a passion she had for the lower strata of society. While a comely peasant added she would certainly never have dared such sexual extravagance had she been awake.

  The architect went celibate to bed, however, and for many hours lay awake, afraid that if he slipped into slumber in the dream he would stir alert in real life. Through lying awake, he came eventually to hear fresh activity about the city site. Going to the window of his chamber, he saw new work gangs had replaced those that operated during the day. These labored by lamplight and by the light of small forges where they hammered mightily. All were of similar and remarkable appearance, a squadron of repulsively ugly dwarfs with jeweled loin-guards and luxuriant sable hair. “Ah, the demon Drin,” said the architect smugly, recollecting the excellent metal work upon the buildings. Returning to his couch, he fell asleep despite himself. He woke with surprised delight still in the dream, and persevered with his creation of the citadel in elevated spirits.

  A long while the architect continued his creation, all the time assured he was but passing a single night in his bed. Once he was interrupted by the fat overseer, who approached him and inquired concerning the state of the architect’s own country, his king, the king’s wealth, and the number of slaves kept to assist in the erection of buildings. The architect gave this interruption small thought.<
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  One dusk the plans were completed. No sooner had the architect laid aside his scrolls and ink than a shadow fell across the table.

  “I will come to supper presently,” said the architect.

  “Alas, you will not,” said a voice, and turning, the architect found his original guide, the Prince of the Vazdru, at his shoulder.

  “Ah, but you will not force me to leave before I see my plan in progress?” cried the architect.

  “Three months have elapsed,” said the Vazdru with a scornful look, “which to a mortal is a lengthy while. Besides, your king mourns, your wife and your household are in prison. You had best return.”

  “What nonsense,” muttered the architect, “it is only a dream.”

  But the Vazdru was not easy to argue with, and the architect did not attempt further resistance.

  Outside, the weird dragon chariot lurked against the deepening sky. The architect mounted it and was whirled up among the stars. Arriving, after a long journey through clouds and miles above the lands of earth, the architect was deposited in his bed, where, it is true, he did not notice his wife sleeping as when he left her, and dropped into profound unconsciousness.

  “And when I came to myself,” said the architect to the king, “all was as I had been warned.”

  Despite the sorcerous quality of the tale, the king was impressed, and heaped wealth on the architect, so glad was he to have him back. The architect, however, remained somewhat uneasy. Now, for sure, he knew there were such beings as demons making mischief in the world, and he had not forgotten (though he omitted to tell the king) of how he had been questioned about the king’s slave gangs.

  Sure enough, two or three nights later, the hundred gangs of slaves were somehow snatched from their pens, and along with them the food for their victualling, not to mention quantities of marble and precious metal the king had stored for his pavilion.

  4

  Something had guided Simmu and Kassafeh eastward from the beginning. In the desert, a stubborn facing out of the sun, followed by an equally stubborn turning of the back to it, had kept them in this direction. Later, much later, after their days or months in that arid zone, the pursuit of greenness had led them on into the east. East, the gate of sunrise, the phoenix corner of the world.