Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  The black mollusks came at his spell, and bore him upward between the rocky piers, through the rubber-fingered forests, by the drowned citadels of men which he mocked in his turn: You must endure, but I ascend. On a pillar of crumbling marble, he sorcerously burnt his name, to leave his brand there in the sea, the thing a boy would do, yet, when he did it, not quite that. And the letters of his name were altered; the last symbol become that which then the human magician took, so he was no longer Zhirem, but Zhirek.

  Higher, where the sea turned the shade of a green shadow, he called the sharks to him, and they carried him and his burdens up onto the world of the sea’s surface, and later, to the shores of the dry land.

  7

  He slept that night on the cold shore, but it was not cold to him. He could summon the earth’s fires, too, and brought one to light and warm him. A tent he made, out of night air it seemed, black velvet. Just within the door, Hhabhezur looked with his dead eyes, propped inside the brassy cage. Already, fish-king, he stank, or would have, if the arts of Zhirek the magician had not outlawed the stink with dark and fragrant gums burned in the fire. All these luxuries were to hand for a magician for, in those days, there was little the true magician could not compass.

  Zhirek gazed at Hhabhezur.

  “You have what I may not have,” said Zhirek, “death. But I do not want death now.”

  Yet the congealed eyes of Hhabhezur were unanswerable, and they seemed to say: This door you cannot breach, this luxury you cannot summon. Death does not obey Zhirek. However weary Zhirek shall become of the desert of life, this cool drink may not be his, for centuries, or more.

  “You are putrid, king,” Zhirek told the dead.

  The dead eyes glowed from the fire:

  Your gaze must fall down before mine.

  Zhirek stretched out to sleep on velvet. He would have disdained this couch in the days of his priesthood. He dreamed of women, all the forbidden women he had been denied and warned from enjoying. Golden and pale and cinnamon and amber. They lay with him, but at the summit of his ecstasy a whisper would say to him: Love is not enough. And when he turned restlessly, another whisper: Nor life. And, near dawn, the third: Neither sorcery. But, being now wise and educated, he forgot.

  When he woke, the sun was high. The flesh fell from the body of the corpse like azure leaves. Zhirek, with a dagger from Sabhel, smote loose the left great toe of the king, which was now a bone.

  Outside, the sea boiled on the beach, shot with translucent colors, stormy, though the sky was clear.

  Zhirek waded out a short distance. He tossed the bone to the sea.

  “I promised you his return,” he murmured. “I did not stipulate the fashion in which he should come.”

  • • •

  He walked some days, along the coast. This was not the land he had journeyed out from in the pirate’s ship; another country. He walked it barefoot. He had never worn shoes since he was a child. (Soon it would be thought his affectation; since Zhirek was so powerful, surely he need not lack for shoes.) No longer did he drag the cage of brass with the putrefying king in it. Zhirek had equipped the cage with legs. It, too, walked.

  Three times, on the fifth day, Zhirek passed small villages on the sea’s brink, where the narrow fishing boats were drawn up on the shore, for the sea was rough and uncertain, and the fish grown shy.

  At the first place, the men who sat on the pebble-scaled beach got up and ran headlong from the walking dark one with the brass cage of death walking behind him. At the second village, a man entreated him: “You are clearly a mage. Tell us how long this weather will keep us from the sea, for our women and our children starve—”

  “I will bring you fish,” said Zhirek. And he spoke to the sea and a wide comber rolled in on the beach and left there some twenty fish flopping and gasping. The fishermen were amazed, for no land magician they had ever heard of had power over the sea or its creatures. Yet Zhirek, who had learned so much of the sea lord’s magic, mocked the fishermen, for when they lay hands on this unexpected catch to take it up, a second comber smashed on the shore, soaking the men, their nets and their craft, and plucking from the shale and from their fingers every one of the fish. Zhirek stood and watched it with a baleful expressionlessness.

  The fishermen cursed him in fear and anger. A man, more angry than the rest, flung a stone, which of course shattered uselessly on the pebbles at Zhirek’s feet. But Zhirek said words to the seething ocean, and then to the man he said: “When next you venture onto the sea, your boat will go down and you with it.”

  None answered, for they all believed him.

  The third village was more prosperous. Evening was settling like a broad-winged bird upon the water. A tavern with yellow lights, and loud song coming from its doors, stood on the cliff path that led from the shore. Zhirek entered the tavern, the cage keeping pace, and silence fell and even the lamps fluttered as if they were afraid.

  “Bring me wine and meat,” said Zhirek, and when it was brought, he ate and drank in that old listless way of his. The horrid cage lurked in the shadow, but the odor of its corruption—faint now, for little remained of Hhabhezur’s flesh—stole about the room and turned the revelers pale and sick.

  “Surely, it is an enemy who has wronged him, and he a mighty sorcerer,” they deduced, but they took their leave with some haste, and soon only Zhirek, the tavern owner and his family remained.

  In the dim flare of the fish-oil lamps, Zhirek sat, chin on hand. Near midnight, the storm swelled and the sea crashed on the shore. Zhirek took the knife from the roast and smote off the clean bone of Hhabhezur’s left forefinger, went outside, and flung the bone into the sea.

  The tavern owner, peering after, thought he discerned vague glimmering shapes far out on the crested waves of the ocean, men with flying hair and strange chariots and the phosphorescent gleam of sharks’ backs. There was a wailing in the wind like a woman’s voice.

  Zhirek returned to the tavern.

  “Give me your bed to sleep in,” he said to the tavern owner, “and the prettiest of your daughters to lie with me.”

  In terror, the man complied. The daughter, who went to Zhirek in loathing, presently began to moan with love, and in the morning, made bold by sentiment, would have detained him, to no avail. Then, stupidly convinced she could deal with him as a man since she had found him a man in bed, she shrilled and shouted after him till abruptly Zhirek spoke and her noise stopped. She remained dumb from that day onwards.

  • • •

  He came to a city by the sea. Its towers went up into the morning and its birds flew over the bleached-red disc of the sun. His weariness came to Zhirek, that weariness from which he could never properly be rested. He was even growing weary of spite and wickedness and injustice, even this quickly. But he did not acknowledge it. Meeting men on the high road that ran along the cliff beside the ocean, he had changed their faces to the color of olives—so they beheld each other and began screaming—a childish viciousness. And farther on, passing a well, he had turned the water in it to the appearance and smell and taste of blood, one of the oldest and vilest of mage-tricks. Then, reaching the walled city, its towers, the birds, the market place in the great square, the tiered citadel, it seemed to him, though he had in fact regarded few cities, that he had seen a thousand. And, in his weariness of spirit, at last the urge came to him to be only in one spot, unmoving. The motive impulse of his youth was done with him, for in his soul he was no longer young.

  He went by the city, however, searching its outskirts. Here and there he perpetrated some subtle unpleasantness—it acted as a fuel, to keep him going, otherwise, it occurred to him, he might simply stop in his tracks, turned to living stone.

  (He had been glad to leave Sabhel, even that land had wearied him. Magic and love had come too easily. It had all been too easy, either that, or unobtainable.)

  The cage walked after him. H
habhezur, minus toe and finger, was all bone now, rattling.

  A ruinous house loomed up in powdery greens and grays. Zhirek climbed the rotting stairway, through a decayed garden with the bare rock of the cliff showing through it. Doors creaked, teetering on their hinges. Inside, the mosaic floors had been picked clean by thieves. Through broken windows spray and raw weather blew, for again the storm, which had followed Zhirek up the coast, was gathering. Salt water flushed the cellars where part shattered jars now rooted seaweeds.

  The melancholy and the wreck of the house had caught Zhirek’s morbid fancy. Perhaps some phantom superimposed itself here of the ruined fortress in the desert, where the mad old priests had piously misused and foolishly caressed Zhirek when he was Zhirem and ten years old, extravagant in their attempts to ostracize his “devil.” “Build no palace in the world. . . .” What irony if, having succumbed to all the traps they had warned him of, that hankering for their poverty had persisted.

  Yet, by his craft and by use of men, taken mesmerized from the city or dragged thence by those already under Zhirek’s spells, the house was somewhat put to rights. Thick rugs lay on the floor, merchandise stolen or procured by even more sinister means, draperies blew before the windows. Sometimes women came, wandering like sleepwalkers, along the shore road, up the stair where the stone beasts leered, across the noxious garden, through the house to the canopied black bed of Zhirek. That bed, which, with its posts and carvings and dark, resembled by unconscious accident or gloomy design, nothing so much as a tomb. At other hours, men died to amuse the magician—though he derived small amusement from their pleas, their pangs, their death. He was jealous of their death, or else he strove to drive himself to feeling anything—jealousy, pain, rage, for all emotion was smoldering out in him. Even cruelty became a habit.

  Once the king’s tax collectors ventured there, though the house was rife with sorcery. Zhirek dealt with these visitors, and then himself visited the king. That was the day when the king reckoned he was a dog, mounted a bitch, ate bones.

  With his own store of bones Zhirek was miserly. He portioned Hhabhezur, waiting for the storm to rant over the ocean before he slung the morsel to them. And the storm came less often as the months went by and next, the years. As if the sea people of Sabhel had also grown tired of passion and dispute.

  How prolonged the time, endless. Time without meaning, that which the mother of Zhirek had been warned of, when insistent, she had demanded for him the terrible fire of Invulnerability. “There is no benefit which has not a sister in misfortune.” He pondered it himself, in the long quiet evenings when, the whole of the land and sky seeming colored by the glaze of the sea, that silver quiet entered even into Zhirek, briefly. How must it be that he, given so much, could only misuse and suffer from it? When, vulnerable and ignorant, he might have gleaned happiness and comfort from his life, both for himself and others. He had been thrust toward evil, but evil had rejected him; Azhrarn, by proxy or in disguise, had rejected him. Why then had Zhirek not returned to his spoiled innocence, tried to mend the torn garment? Because he had never done good save through a fear of doing evil. Evil no longer a threat, paradoxically, evil was all he could set himself to practice.

  One day Zhirek attempted an experiment. Going through the city, the doors as ever slamming, the crowds left on the street as ever bowing down and turning sallow, he came on an infant boy-child playing, overlooked, in a gutter. Something in the child almost touched Zhirek, the red-yellow shade of its hair, maybe, though its eyes were not green. Zhirek fashioned from nothing the semblance of a harmless sweetmeat, and offered it to the child, who took the gift unquestioning. Just then the mother came running. She grasped the child and lifted it and stared at Zhirek in shrinking fright. Zhirek said, with a desultory, still experimental gentleness: “Ask me for something.”

  “Then save my child, which you have poisoned,” the woman shrieked at once.

  “No, but I have not,” Zhirek stated, and stretched out his hand.

  At that the woman jerked back, and turning her foot against a stone, stumbled and lost her grip on the child, who fell. Its skull was smashed instantly on the rim of the gutter.

  Though he knew the event sprang from what he had made of himself in the city, yet Zhirek accepted it as his portent that evil must continue to attend on him, as the crow circles the gibbet.

  But some farther years later, standing before an actual gibbet with the murderer dancing on it, one spoke behind Zhirek saying his name, not exactly as it was.

  One spoke, and a soft though bitter cold spread over Zhirek. He realized that, for a moment, Lord Death had stood at his shoulder.

  8

  The sun set and night arose from the sea. By the light of an alabaster lamp, stolen from a kingly mausoleum by men in the magician’s thrall, Zhirek sat reading from a black and silver parchment, stolen in like manner from the same location. The book contained certain lore and instruction regarding the most dangerous of magics, raising the dead and similar stratagems. Zhirek perused it idly, but a sound in the house caused him to put the parchment aside.

  None entered now the dwelling of Zhirek, unless they were called by spells. It was well known that fearsome things guarded the place. Yet again, an odd sound, like metal striking on the echoing stone floor below—someone had come there, someone immune to Zhirek’s safeguards, and apparently to fear itself.

  Zhirek lit the way with weird glowing witch-fires, as he descended into the hall of the stone floor, and glanced about.

  The drapes blew before the windows, and uncanny shades dipped and flitted. A huge candelabra blazed with a dull light amid a lace of yellow wax. A rat, which had been feeding on the wax, darted across the paving. On a stand of gold rested the last of Hhabhezur—only his skull, which Zhirek, in a final dreary malice, had retained. Just beyond the light, a tall chair of carved ebony had assumed a curious sheen. Zhirek approached and found a robed figure seated there, its head covered with a pallid cowl. In its white-gloved right hand it held a staff of iron ringed with gold, which it had used to strike upon the stone floor to attract attention.

  There washed over Zhirek the kind of frightened exhilaration that a boy or a woman might feel, meeting unexpectedly a near-stranger with whom they had fallen in love. Zhirek trembled, and the tremor amazed him.

  Very slowly, the cowled head was raised. Within the white frame of the cowl was only black, and two colorless burnings—eyes.

  “Do not ask me who I am,” said the figure to Zhirek. “You know me. We have met.”

  Zhirek remembered—like a dream remembered—a shadow which long ago had touched his brow, and delivered him, for a small space, from despair and frustration, by the gift of senselessness. Now the recollection turned him faint.

  “You are Death,” he said. “Am I to go with you?”

  “No,” said Death. “The fire put you beyond me, for centuries at least.”

  “But you are here,” Zhirek said.

  The left hand of Death rested on the arm of the ebony chair, itself as black, being ungloved. Zhirek half fell forward suddenly, and grasped this hand, the bare skin of Death.

  To touch Death was literally that—to feel the touch of death. A release to some, a dread to most. But to Zhirek, who could not die till his enduring flesh had worn itself out, that touch was bliss and comfort. Like a drug, it overcame him, almost stunned him—Death’s only possible gift, the half-death of unconsciousness, the promise of an ultimate rest from self-doubt and the pointless, roiling wickedness of man’s existence. But the black hand was withdrawn, and semi-aware, Zhirek sank against the white-robed knees of Death. In a way, Zhirek really was in love with this stranger.

  “Do not—” Zhirek faltered, “do not leave me. Let me serve you.”

  “Another you would have served,” Death said.

  “Others planned that service for me, but a demon refused it.”

  “I know
it all,” said Death. He did. He had studied the matter, Zhirek’s life and the paths he had trodden.

  “You,” said Zhirek, “you I would serve.”

  “To the detriment of others, will you serve me?”

  Zhirek smiled, his eyes fast shut, like a child nearly asleep.

  “You have seen my love for others, Lord Death.”

  “One might stay you.”

  “None, but you.”

  “Simmu,” said Death, “called in your childhood, Shell. Simmu a youth, or a maiden. Will you serve me in despite of Simmu?”

  Behind the lids of Zhirek, the slightest movement. “The demons reared Simmu, who presently betrayed and abandoned me. Simmu was the stair by which I made my way into hell. Simmu was the snake beneath the stone. But for Simmu, I might have lived well on the earth, a healer, a man without appetites, or else blind to them. And at the last, when nothing was left to me save Simmu, was Simmu to be found? See, I am alone, Lord of Lords.”

  “In this one thing, you are bitter.”

  “Oh, I am bitter in much. I curse the mother who set this fate on me. I curse Simmu who seduced me that I might see the worms crawling in my own soul. I curse Azhrarn, I being the only mortal, perhaps, who may do such with impunity. I curse the woman in the sea, Hhabaid, who led me to this meaningless power of sorcery that I can only misuse. I curse the whole world which fears me and yields to me, and will not fight me, and cannot destroy me as I should be destroyed, who am a cancer in it. Only you, Lord of Lords, bring the balm I require. Death is all I ask, and all I may not have.”

  “To die is not as you believe,” Death said. But no more he said of that, for it did not suit his purpose. Instead, Uhlume, Lord Death, gave particular information and bizarre pledges to the man who rested against him, as if from pitiless labor. The bargain was not of the former sort, involving bones . . . but then, Uhlume was not as he had been, since Simmurad, a sore on his heel, had chafed him at every step.