Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Others in the Innerearth, who ventured from Uhlume’s granite palace to investigate the golden light of the new palace which now reared up, brilliantly real as were hallucinations in that country, were met at the door by phantom guards with swords. Next came a naked maiden, clothed in hair, who ordered them to prostrate themselves before her mistress. It was the old thing. What Lylas served must be greater than any. Maybe Lylas wondered if Death would get to hear of it, and what he would do. But the contempt and resentment which had struck her suddenly on her fall into this cellar, sustained her. Narasen did not fear Uhlume, never had, not in a perfect sense. And certainly, Death never came to chide them. As for Death’s subjects, fascinated by this new arrogance of the awful blue woman who so plainly despised them, they paid her homage and crept away. And later, it was not only Lylas who took up that name: Queen Death.

  Lylas crouched at the knees of Narasen and let her breasts bloom through her tresses till Narasen, unappeased long years, seized her delicious tormentor and made much, with hands and mouth, of what she found under the hair. Lylas proving agile, versatile and willing, they were soon most intensely knotted. Thereafter, stretched slackly in exhaustion, they were presently confidants and into knots of another kind.

  Narasen poured out, one drop at a time, her gall. Lylas learned how Narasen yearned for Simmu’s pain. Lylas clung to Narasen, whispering. She too confided, not entirely truthfully. She spoke of the awful secret which Uhlume had entrusted to her, the secret of the second well. (Narasen listened, as if bored.) Then Lylas spoke lyingly of a rumor she had heard. That Azhrarn favored Simmu and had sought knowledge of the second well, to give Simmu a hero-deed: the chance to wrest Immortality for mankind. “I am dead,” Lylas whispered. “I cannot prevent such an act. But Uhlume will blame me. Advise me, wise mistress, what I should do.”

  “You liar,” said Narasen, twisting the witch’s hair. “Your own snares caught you, some game you were at. You betrayed the secret while you lived, did you not? Making eyes also, no doubt, at the Black Cat of Underearth, Azhrarn. Yes, you would sell anything.”

  Then the witch felt it wise to break like a brittle reed. She wept on Narasen’s knee: “He came by night, Night’s Master. Who can resist him? I was in terror and he read my brain. You know his cruelty, great lady, who faced him as I dared not—” And she kissed the bone hand copiously.

  Narasen mused. At length: “And is Azhrarn, then, the lover of my son? Yes, I recall he loves him well. But Uhlume will not love Simmu, if Simmu has been clever. Has he?”

  Lylas clung to the knees. “I fear he has. It is all my fear.”

  “There is a glass in Death’s hovel, which shows the world. Let us see if you are right. If you are, we will then seek the black and white one himself. Can Uhlume, fear-maker, be afraid, I wonder?”

  Lylas stared at Narasen’s dark face (dark almost as Death’s own).

  “Death may turn his rage on me. I never meant betrayal—but will he reckon that? And if he spends his wrath on me, Simmu may escape him. And surely, my queen-king, you wish Simmu to suffer, not your handmaiden?”

  “It has all led to this then, has it?” inquired Narasen, smiling. “You have made yourself useful, you think, to me, in order to protect you from White Cloak’s wrath? But there is no wrath in Uhlume.”

  “I beg you—”

  “Beg me then.”

  Lylas slid down the length of Narasen and embraced her feet. Lylas knew she had gambled.

  Presently Narasen rose, and Lylas went after her.

  They moved from the lamplit night of the illusion to the never-dying gray un-light of Innerearth, and crossed the bleak landscape.

  Such tricks that realm perpetrated upon dreams of vengeance. Impulses were as abrupt and total as brooding was indefinite and long. Even the psychology of human things was out of joint and curious there. Passions unmatched, hopes ridiculous, cravings unreasonable. How, in such a place, could it be otherwise?

  • • •

  Uhlume came back, from some battlefield, some plague-ripped city, some solitary death-bed, and found Narasen in his apartments, among the dark shadows and the emptiness, as once before he had found her there. But the witch cowered behind her, the witch kneeled to Uhlume and hid her face. Did Uhlume notice how the witch kept hold of Narasen’s black dress, as if keeping hold of a talisman?

  Narasen shook off this hold. She smiled at Uhlume.

  “Welcome home, sir, to your luxurious abode. How is the world? Where have you been in it? Did you take joy in your visit?”

  Uhlume regarded her. The witch pressed her face to the floor. Narasen said:

  “One place you did not go to, I believe. Would you care to see, in your magical glass, where I have been looking?”

  Lord Death did not take the glass, but Narasen raised the glass so he could see in it. She raised it a good while, but her grip did not falter.

  From the beginning, it seems Death had known her as some special thing, an omen or an enemy. He gazed into the glass, as ever expressionless, and she gazed at him. Death gazed upon a dawn, a city in the dawn, on Simmurad. He recognized instantly—or appeared to—what Simmurad portended. Nothing in him changed, yet somehow he was altered. (Lylas reacted to this alteration. She threw himself full length under her hair.)

  Again, time had sneaked past in the Innerearth. The few days of Lylas’ waking from coma, Narasen’s seduction, their conspiracy; the few hours even of seeking the glass, showing the image in the glass to the Lord Uhlume—mortal years. Five years in Simmurad, they say.

  The Image:

  Rose marble, gilded towers, enamelled domes. Beneath, streets slimly peopled, and what moved there, the beautiful and the best. Lovely women, sorceresses, hair to their waists, jeweled eyes; men, handsome and strong, magicians, and wise.

  The whisper of the Immortal City had spread.

  Many set out upon a quest to seek it, died searching for life, slaughtered others on the way. Some found it (“Eastward, eastward it lies”). Many of these few were turned away. Yolsippa the rogue, the wretch who took the gift as a cheat and understood its worth the more, he it was who guarded the brazen gates of Simmurad. If and when a man came there, Yolsippa could cry the challenge from the high gate-tower.

  “Who are you, and what? State your business, and your name, your virtues and your learning, your powers. What can you offer in exchange for the most precious gift, for the gift all men covet? Tell me, bearing in mind that later you must prove all you say.”

  Some were angry, some afraid. Some lied, and perished, striving to prove what they could not. A minute quantity of men, a more minute quantity of women, were brave and well-tutored enough to breach rose-red Simmurad, to receive, in a thimble of black jade, one drop of muddy liquor, the Elixir of Eternal Life.

  This, Death saw. He saw a kind of glow from the people of Simmurad, inner fires, unquenchable. Did he see the pallor of their faces?

  He beheld Simmu. Simmu in a library of great shelves, each shelf massed with gemmed and ornamented books. Simmu read as if he hungered and must be filled. He was alone. He had locked the doors. He read as he had never read in the temple, in his youth. His eyes burned as he scanned the pages. He did not look quite as he had, the thinly muscular bronzed youth, the hero entering the city, innocent, still feral, not yet fettered. Now Simmu, young and handsome though he was and would always be to time’s cessation, now Simmu had a glaze of age, a hardening, a petrification.

  She had it too, the slender fair-haired girl, lingering outside the doors. Kassafeh, the wife of Simmu, wed to him five years before, in a vast strange night ceremony in the citadel of Simmurad. Kassafeh, her eyes leaden, her hand on the door, unspeaking, not attempting to knock. In youth years pass slowly. These five years of eternal youth had passed like centuries. Kassafeh, also, was coming to a hardening of her ageless flesh.

  Alabaster dolls, their clockwork stopped. Did
Death see that? No, he saw life which did not die.

  Narasen, who had seen before in the glass all she wished to observe at this moment of her son and his fortune, had not taken her eyes from Uhlume. How she watched. She made herself a student of his face, his stance, his gesture.

  “Can the Fear-Maker be afraid?” she had asked. She believed it.

  All men, no doubt, would believe Death must tremble at this threat. So, carried by their vote, he must.

  The magic glass, held in Narasen’s hand, suddenly shattered. It fell to pieces, and those pieces into pieces, till only fragments like sugar lay on the ground.

  “Are you angry, my Lord?” Narasen said. She stared as if she loved him. In a way she did; he gave her hate, her second food.

  Uhlume’s pale eyes were wide. They were dry and blindingly bright. Facially expressionless, it was his hands that spoke. From the tips of them, blood burst. The blood was oddly as red as the blood of a man. His brain—who could tell that? Perhaps he strove to make in himself this wild and static bleeding anger, because humanity expected it of him. Where the drops of blood fell, the ground cracked. The red speckled his white garments. His eyes were so wide now, his face was taking on an expression at last: madness.

  “Azhrarn gave the city to Simmu, Azhrarn is the lover of Simmu,” Narasen said. “But—the Black Cat is nothing to the White Dog. Find a way, Death, find a way to murder Immortals.”

  Death lifted his bloody hands and covered his eyes. His cloak and his hair blew back, twisted, flared—there was no wind to stir them thus. Death turned and strode from the granite palace. He strode across the country of the Innerearth, his hands before his face. The blood stained the gravels underfoot. The blood sprang up in red flowers with black hearts, black stems, poppies, the flowers of death. The blood of Death dappled those white still waters of Innerearth. The waters caught alight and burned, and black smoke made clouds in the featureless sky.

  In a cliff of iron was a backless chasm, and into it Death walked. The blood ran from the mouth of the chasm, ten rivulets. No sound, no movement came from the chasm. Only the blood came. Only the blood of Uhlume, Lord Death, one of the Lords of Darkness.

  7

  The witch lay an age, importunate, at the feet of Narasen. She was yet in alarm that Lord Death would return to punish her for letting slip the secret which had permitted Immortality to mankind. But Death seemed to have forgotten this secret and her part in it. Death seemed to have lost sight of all things. He had accused no one, had said no word. At last Lylas embraced the knees of Narasen in her former way, and praised her intelligence and her manipulation of Death’s mood. The fragmented sugar of the magic glass crunched under the women’s feet as they left the apartments of Lord Death.

  Outside, one of Uhlume’s thousand-year slaves, heeding Narasen and where she came from, bowed to the tindery ground, and Lylas smirked.

  • • •

  The Lord Uhlume sat upon the plateau of an eastern mountain.

  Far below, the horizon was burnished by a sea; nearer, a stair cut in the mountain led to the plateau from the shore. The plateau itself ended against the mountain’s final upthrust wall, and in this wall were set two gates of shining brass.

  The Lord Uhlume sat with his back to the gates.

  Death could go here and there through all the places of the earth, for on every inch of the earth something had died. Or very nearly. At the world’s edges the sea, the mountains endured, and were young in their millennia. And within Simmurad nothing had ever expired. Only this far, therefore, to the head of this stairway, could Death ascend, because only this far had death ever ascended—some fish floating belly uppermost in the primeval sea, some blade of grass withering upon the mountain flank, these had made his journey possible to the plateau. No farther.

  Somehow, a chair had molded itself from the pearly rock, offered itself, and Uhlume had seated himself in it. Somehow a black spreading shade tree had grown, or fantasized itself behind the chair, to dapple it in a parasol of shadow through the long, long dawns of Simmurad.

  Death sat in the shade.

  One hand rested beneath his chin, one on his knee, bloodless now. A white cowl covered his white hair, partly concealing that face like a carving of black polished wood. His black lids were lowered. The thick fringe of albino lashes lay upon his cheeks, but he did not sleep. Men in such a pose might look vulnerable. You could perceive how terrible he was thus for he did not look vulnerable, even with the lashes lowered on his cheek. Those shut lids are like the lids of boxes closed on a wisdom that pierces through lids.

  And then he raised his lashes, and his eyes were open.

  Four men rode up the stairway in the mountain and reined in their horses on the plateau about thirty feet from the shade tree, the chair and Death.

  They were travelworn and they had a wild stare.

  “What now?” one asked who carried a bow upon his back.

  “There is the gate,” said another.

  “Even at this moment,” said the third, “I do not properly believe what is told of this city, though we have sought five years to discover it.”

  The fourth rider turned his head.

  “Who sits there, beneath the tree?” he asked.

  “Which tree? I see none,” said the third rider.

  “I see the shadow of a rock,” said the first.

  “It is a man in a white robe and cowled in white,” said the fourth rider.

  The second rider cuffed him.

  “He is trying to distract our purpose by mentioning phantoms. It has occurred to me,” he went on, his wild face become wilder, “that only one of us will be chosen. Do they not say that in this city men must undergo ordeals of strength and sorcery before they are permitted the Drink of Life? Well, we are equals in all things, my brothers. And I doubt they will take all four.” Then he drew his sword, and he sheared off the head of the fourth rider, who all this while had gazed at Death beneath his tree. Having done that, the second rider slashed his horse with his whip so it bolted, weary though it was, toward the brass gates.

  The first rider instantly unslung his bow, set a shaft to it and loosed the string. The shaft took the second man between the shoulder blades. With one loud cry, he whirled from the horse and fell dead, just before the gateway. Suddenly then, the first dropped on his saddle—the third man had stabbed him. Now only the third man remained alive.

  He dismounted slowly and walked across the plateau toward the gate, but his head hung. Near the gate, he turned and looked over his shoulder, but no one followed. He rapped on the gate.

  Within and above, a voice called:

  “State your business and name.”

  The third rider stood away from the gate. He began to weep. In the midst of weeping, he laughed, and roared: “Is that the fat thief they say is porter at the doorway of the Immortal City?”

  Within and above, no one answered.

  Then the third rider became aware of a figure on his left hand, just before the gate, and he stared, for the figure sat where the second rider had fallen to the arrow. But it was not he. It was one robed and cowled in white who sat in a chair of rock under a spreading tree, and his face was hidden in shadow—the dead man sprawled at his feet.

  Uhlume was now able to approach the gate, as far as death had approached.

  The third rider wiped his eyes.

  “If I believed all the tales, I would believe ill of you,” said he trembling. He ran at the gate and rapped a second time. “Let me come in,” he pleaded, “for my death is out here.”

  No answer. The fat thief, apparently, had taken exception to insult.

  The third rider looked at the Lord Uhlume. The third rider sank on his knees.

  “You have turned cutthroat now, my lord, have you? You rob the flesh before the allotted span is done? I heard another story. King Death is wed. He wed a woman whose
skin is blue, whose hair is a storm cloud. She nags him so he is glad to get from home. They say she nags him, his wife, Queen Death, till he will give her anything. They say she asks for obscene presents. One night she went to a land and poisoned it; all she breathed on or touched she slew, and she came back to her husband and recounted her deeds to him, and numbered those she had slain, and King Death exulted.” Then the third rider crawled to the gate once more and knocked, but his knock was feeble.

  “The fat thief is at breakfast,” came the cry from within.

  The third rider crawled from the gate, the other way. He glanced up into the cowled countenance of the Lord Uhlume. Then the third rider stabbed himself and died at Death’s feet, on the body of his comrade.

  Above and within, Yolsippa belched, his breakfast concluded. He did not always attend the gates of Simmurad, but when he did, he reclined upon a couch, cushions under his head, and he ate and drank for diversion, for, being immortal, he had no need of food or drink to keep his health. The food itself was exotic and curious, summoned by sorcery, perhaps partly constructed of sorcery, but Yolsippa’s rich robes were greasy with it. Now, having wiped fresh grease on these robes from his fingers, he opened a trick portal high in the wall of the mountain, and peered out.

  The four horses had run from the plateau, down the stairway; they were gone. The dead men remained. Yolsippa clicked his tongue. Then he noticed the cowled figure seated by the gate, visible only through the branches of the shade tree.

  “Pray enlighten me,” cried Yolsippa, “if you are he who knocked at this gate of the Immortals?”