Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Hhabaid went to this image, and setting her hands on its shoulders, raised herself to the height of its mouth, into which she blew.

  Instantly the image responded by drawing in a breath of its own, and bubbles rushed from its nostrils and ears. Its verdigris eyes swivelled to look this way and that, and then it spoke.

  “Behold me, I am your mentor,” the image said. “Who would learn of me, then enter me.”

  At which it split entirely in half, dividing exactly from the crown to the hem of its robe. Within, the case was yet the shape of a man, just roomy enough another man might enter and stand there.

  “Have no fear,” said Hhabaid. “Obey, and grow wise. Or, if you are a coward, we can return.”

  But Zhirem advanced to the image case and stepped into it, no doubt with misgiving, but not to be deterred. Then the image closed again, confining him in the dark in that small man-size piece of sea.

  • • •

  For a moment or two, inside the man of verdigris, Zhirem had pause to wonder and be troubled. Then his mind was swept from him. For in the brain box of the image had been stored the art and science of a thousand magicians, maybe more, the genius of Sabhel.

  A year became a second there. Yet, in some manner, still it was a year.

  It seemed he saw a younger world whose mountains touched the sky. It seemed he saw the flood cast everything down, wash away mountains and sky, and mankind with them. Then came the dream of magic, in which it appeared to him he moved and lived in the bodies of others, felt their pain and glory, and knew their heartache and ambition.

  Their cruelty and their pride etched deep channels into his own latent cruelty and his own dormant pride. His skull sang. He practiced thaumaturgy, necromancy, cast glamour, bane, fascination, uttered incantation, summoned elementals and sent them packing. His fingers cracked. He sewed upon parchments, in great books; chiselled in marble and in the sand itself runes of power and the mathematics of destiny. It came to him sure as a fire which melted and a mold which reformed, an alteration of his spirit and his heart, or perhaps only a finding. And what he found was his own wickedness, the dark of his soul, which all souls possess. And he clung to it, embraced it, like one upright pillar in a tumbled house, while the motives of the wicked who had preceded him filled him, and their skills. He was crammed with their knowledge, arcane and marvelous. The philters mixed under his own hands, the stones leapt before his own will. A thousand or more had been before him and now gave up to him all they had.

  The brain of some, in the chamber of the image, had burst; and they had come forth madmen, or slumped forth dead. But when the two halves of the verdigris cracked wide to let him go, Zhirem came forth a magician.

  • • •

  Hhabaid paled when she saw him, paler than she had been from watching in the cave. She had not expected the cabinet of the image to destroy Zhirem, but neither had she expected quite what she perceived in him now. Something behind his face, itself unseen, gave his expression new accents. She had hoped for his love. His appearance warned her from her hope, though she did not heed the warning.

  “How you are changed,” she said.

  “How I am changed. Your people are clever to withhold such learning.”

  “Many hours have passed,” said Hhabaid.

  “You have betrayed your city,” said Zhirem, “for I might take it now, if I wished.”

  “No,” she said, “for you are not the only magician in Sabhel.” But she turned and began to swim from the cave, and soon he followed her. He did not smile. His look was inward, brooding, cold, and vital.

  No illusory guardian stood up on this occasion, as they went from that place. The tall weeds shrank aside, the stone door gave smoothly. In the hall of dead kings, the corals sat impassive.

  “I might shatter them, these relics of Sabhel which have such worth.”

  Hhabaid said nothing, but she swam more quickly.

  They returned through the avenue of pillars to the gates of gold. There the serpent roped, this first and last sentry yet barring their exit.

  “You watched me, and may now do the same as I to hold him,” said Hhabaid.

  But Zhirem went to the gates and tore the serpent from them. At once the creature swelled and enlarged, rearing up in the murky water with its razor jaws clashing and its eyes on fire. But Zhirem spoke one word of Sabhel-the-Sorcerous which had to do with these circumstances, and the serpent broke into fragments like round black coins, that exploded in all directions into the gloom beyond the lamps. Only its eyes remained intact, but presently went out in death.

  The golden gates swung idly. Hhabaid said:

  “By such a deed you have earned the hate of Sabhel. Why did you do it, when to pass without violence was so easy?”

  “To know myself,” Zhirem said, “as now I am.”

  “Sorcery is a strong wine, and you are drunk on it.”

  “Do not anticipate I shall sober.”

  Once through the dismal water, they re-entered Hhabaid’s apartment via the hidden way.

  Hhabaid left his side immediately, and he made no move to prevent her. Instead he sought the familiar annex of the courtyard, and lay down there as if to sleep, but sleep he did not. The effect of his tutoring still splashed and glittered, dazzled and stormed through his thoughts.

  The city darkened to sun-dim, the sun faded to a moon. Zhirem rose and drank the fish-colored wine of Sabhel. He went next to the princess’s library and there took down various books and scanned their pages, discovering he could read more languages than formerly, not merely that of Sabhel. Some pages, even, he retained a dim memory of dictating himself—or rather of former magicians dictating them, whose recollections he had pilfered in the image-case. But such intimate associations were leaving him. Only their personal arrogance, the inspiration of his, remained, the cruel callousness of the sea people.

  He knew Hhabaid awaited him, and that this time few locks could stay him. Indeed, when he tried her doors, she had not locked them against him, even those of the bedchamber, partly from love, partly from pride, knowing he could break in on her.

  But she stared at him, and twisted nervously between her fingers a long veil of golden stuff.

  As he came nearer, she said: ‘I loved you from the moment I set eyes on you. But I would not lie with you. You have the ability to get free of the city now. I advise you, Zhirem, to be gone.”

  “Another veil?” he asked her, plucking the golden gauze from her hands. “I knew you in the black one well enough. Your veiled words are as plain. Do you fear me?”

  “You are like my father now,” she said, “like all the lords who step out magicians, from the image case. I did not think this change would be so in you, but in you it is yet stronger and more terrible. Yes, I fear you, but it is my love bids you fly Sabhel.”

  “Let your love bid me to other things,” he said. And he drew her against him, and wrapped the veil about her waist and his two or three times, and tied the gauze and so bound them together, that even the tides of the water should not separate them. Then with one arm and hand he bound her further, and with the other peeled from her breasts the gemmed bodice, and the cobwebbed silk that clouded her thighs he tore loose in handfuls.

  She shut her eyes, but soon a wild passion overcame her, and fiercer even than he, she clawed the garments from his shoulders and clung to him and softly cried her love to him and sank her teeth in him at length, savage as if she would devour him, forgetting her fear and all things save his flesh.

  So they turned, ceaselessly winding about each other, in the green ocean-air of the room, in slow whirling motions appearing almost aimless, till she seized with her hands the jewelled bed post above and roping Zhirem instead with her lower limbs, slid her narrow feet down the length of his back. He thrust home through the ring into the depths of her, and the light became a redness and the silence a sound. To lau
gh under the sea brought pain and a bursting in the lungs, to love under the sea, worse than all laughter, brought a noose which tightened at the throat of each, yet seemed, in some anomalous way, to increase pleasure.

  The hearts of both thundered, galloped, their eyes blackened and silver stars cascaded through their vision as if galaxies were born of the action of their loins, which in curious sort so resembled the action of the pestle within the bowl, which can create fire. And as they mounted, through waves of heat and sensation, into an even more stifled blindness, an even more brilliant fire, death seemed to brush them, then to clutch them, grinding them out upon each other. The fire was struck suddenly. The woman flared up, her body became a whirlpool, her hands gouged the fragile minerals in the post. Zhirem shook from his eyes sufficient of the blood-darkness to glimpse her face, almost as beautiful, demented and terrible as a spell, as a wickedness, but not quite, before the blaze leapt from the tinder of her body into his. The ceiling seemed to crash upon them. Their fires were extinguished in a blackness resembling a faint. In the black, if he had needed to, he could recall another time when he had known that love was not enough, as now he knew it.

  Dimly, through their separating emptied state, there came to them the vibration of doors thrown back, and the upheaval and rocking of the water which this caused.

  King Hhabhezur’s jest had been that his daughter should use Zhirem in her bed, and that he should be made to “toil earnestly.” But in his perverse reason, either Hhabhezur had not reckoned she would—or else he had built upon the belief she might, for now he entered in wrath, making their coupling his excuse.

  “That a king’s daughter should play thus with vile flotsam not of our people, sub-stock of some damned and nameless race—”

  Hhabaid, releasing Zhirem and released, drew round herself the gold veil which had bound them, hiding herself with anger and shame from the stare of the king, of his escort of shark-tailed soldiers and that of two or three courtiers poised in the rear.

  “I did no more than I was told.”

  “Far in excess, rash minx. For this man—”

  “For this man,” said she, “beware. Not only is he invulnerable. He has arts to match your own.”

  The king’s face became terrible, his evil nature rising to the surface of his skin like the blood.

  “What have you done, sluttish daughter?”

  “She took me visiting the man of verdigris,” said Zhirem. “He has lessoned me.”

  At once the king raised his hand, and from it shot a spinning flax that braided itself about Zhirem, far enough from his body that his invulnerability did not interfere with it, near enough to secure him—but only for an instant. Zhirem, too, had raised his hand. The flax unraveled, melted, and out of it flew a bolt of steely radiance. The king shouted. A shield of brass appeared before him, deflecting the bolt, but on every side the shark-men sizzled, writhed in grotesque contortions, floated calmly—lifeless. (Beyond them, unharmed but appalled, the courtiers fled.)

  And now the brass shield shivered, and was a brassy urn, tall as the figure of Hhabhezur the king, which abruptly it contained.

  “You would have slain me if you could,” said Zhirem. “Now your daughter shall rule in Sabhel.” He spoke three words.

  In the brass urn, Hhabhezur screamed. Bubbles gushed from the mouth of the urn, then a crimson fluid. Last, a spear rose up from the mouth of the urn, crimson all its length, but it vanished swiftly.

  “You will not weep, Hhabaid,” said Zhirem. “You owed him duty but no love.”

  “I will not weep,” said she in a very little voice, her face turned from him, “because the sea people, whose eyes are ever full of the salt sea, have no tears of their own to shed. But kill you did not have to. Do you mean to be the king of Sabhel?”

  “Your coral city is nothing to me,” Zhirem said.

  “And I am nothing to you, that you will leave me here.”

  “Our commerce is done,” said Zhirem, “as much as either expected of it.”

  “Your commerce, perhaps, not mine.”

  They regarded each other unlikingly. She had stayed his appetite, hers had been increased. Maybe the souring of romance would not have come this swiftly to them, if violence and shock had not forced the pace. Left to itself, love might have lingered a few hours more.

  “I want no woman with me,” Zhirem said, “but I thank you for investing me with a magician’s powers, which I shall use in the world above.”

  “Expect no joy there. I curse you. And all Sabhel will lay its curse on you, for the murder of my father, the king.”

  “Oh, worse merely than murder,” he said.

  “What will you do?”

  “He is my safe conduct through your city of traps. You advised me excellently, Hhabaid.”

  The brass urn had become instead a cage. Zhirem moved about it. He sealed it with magic. He ensured that none save he could take Hhabhezur from it. Zhirem pulled the ends of the king’s hair through the mesh of the cage, and knotted them in his fist.

  “This is his state. So I will carry him.”

  “We are not a tender people,” she said, “but you make soft babies of us.”

  “I surprise myself,” he said. “But I was promised to wickedness long ago. The dogs have caught me up at last, the hounds of the demons.”

  “Truly I will curse you, if you do this.”

  “Curse me then. I will, for my part, remember only your sweetness and your gifts.”

  He left her, dragging Hhabhezur in the cage of brass.

  Hhabaid tore in pieces the veil, she who could not weep, next tore her hair, as if to complement her heart, which was torn already.

  6

  An ominous quiet lay over the city as Zhirem, hauling the cage by the king’s hair, emerged between the upper towers of the palace into the rich canary-yellow water of late sun-bright. A burnished red panoply, the roofs and domes and minarets, set amid their seaweed gardens, sank below. Neither citizen nor slave threaded between the fantastic arches, no carriages dashed along the thoroughfares. The stillness was that of a cat about to spring—Sabhel had been quickly alerted, as Zhirem had guessed it must be. Hhabaid’s doing or that of the fleeing lords of Hhabhezur’s court.

  When he had risen higher yet, higher even than the high cupola where hung the disdainful prayer-bell of the city, a gushing up behind him, like a black smoke, caught his eye. It was some hundred of the shark-men soldiers, bringing nets to cast about him and spears tipped with the white stings of submarine creatures to aim uselessly at him: After these, the blue-haired lords were riding in gold contraptions strapped on the paved backs of bleak-eyed giant turtles.

  Shouts and challenges blurred through the hearing-pearls inside the ears of Zhirem. The tailed slaves drew closer, flung their nets, jabbed with their spears—the spears shattered and the nets dissolved.

  Zhirem paused. He showed the lords the trophy in the brass cage.

  “Have you not yet learned I am invulnerable? And now I have your magic, what use are any of your tricks?”

  The lords frowned. The turtles grinned on their golden bits, with no amusement.

  “Then give us our king, whom you have slain.”

  “No. He is my final safeguard.”

  “We must have his body—he must sit in the stone hall, where the sea remakes men as coral. It is our only religion, our covenant with eternity.”

  And one, less arrogant than the rest, said quietly:

  “You do not need Hhabhezur’s flesh. We will give you safe conduct if we must. Besides, what have you to fear from us, self-protected as you are? I beg you, let go the cage.”

  But Zhirem, trusting them little, but mostly out of perverse humor in seeing their despair, paid no heed.

  A great distance they pursued him, however. Beyond the city and among the groves of snakelike palms where the orchid
s bled upon the sands and sucked in the fishes alighting on their petals. But though the lords pursued, they were powerless, and they knew it.

  They reached the huge shell gate that led from Sabhel.

  Here, once more, Zhirem halted briefly. He joked with the lords of Sabhel, telling them the water beyond the gate was too cheerless to please them and that they should follow no more.

  “I will make this pact with you,” said Zhirem, “that when I am secure on dry land, I will send the body of Hhabhezur back to you. But if you trouble me further, I will destroy it. To cement the bargain, I will accept Hhabhezur’s ransom in advance.”

  Then he smiled at their grimness, and he asked them for their rings of gold, their jeweled collars, their armlets of orichalc and their electrum daggers set with emeralds in sheaths of indigo sharkskin. These items he slung in his cloak, and as he did, his memory stirred like the water, bringing old stale visions which suddenly pleased him with their irony—a young priest in a yellow garment, who healed the sick and refused their coins, who put the silver torque his temple gave him in the hands of a crippled farmer. A youth presently falsely accused of the theft of a silver cup to pay a harlot. . . .

  Zhirem struck the shell, and uttered magic to it.

  The shell folded back along its ribs. The icy darkness of ocean appeared, out of the range and glow of the glass sun.

  Zhirem passed through with his heavy cloak and the heavy cage, and shut the shell gate behind him, and bound it with a seal of closure that it might take the lords of Sabhel some days to unravel.

  In the pitch black then, three or four miles from the gate, Zhirem evolved a light, the witch-fire he had learned how to summon. And by its glare, he summoned other things.