Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Exactly then, Kassafeh stepped into the room. Her eyes were the color of dusk, lover’s eyes, but her foot ground on a piece of the smashed vessel, and looking down at it, her eyes changed to a sizzling yellow. “What have you done?” she cried.

  “There will be no more Immortals,” Simmu said, “neither can you take a love-gift to Zhirek, save only Kassafeh.”

  Now the eyes of Kassafeh were the color of green iron. “I saw you asleep,” she said. “You were not yourself. It was a woman I discovered on your couch. You had better call your demon-people to rescue you.”

  “In any event,” said Simmu, “you should not expect gentleness from Zhirek, whatever you take or tell him. Neither is he the hero you wish to be associated with.”

  Kassafeh flung up her head.

  “Baaa!” she shouted at him. “You are a sheep like all the rest.”

  And she ran away with frightened fury in her breast.

  4

  The long dawn evaporated; day passed through Simmurad. Later, the sun set a brief powdering of red on the walls, swift as sunrise never was. Twilight filled the gardens and the colonnades like a blue snow, and the strange eastern stars shone down.

  The lamps were lit for the feast that was nightly held in Simmurad. Since Zhirek constantly appeared at these feasts, few citizens would stay away, drawn to curse his somberness and display bursts of wild merry-making before him. Only Yolsippa was consistently absent. Unliking of Zhirek in the extreme, he grew very attentive to his position as gate-keeper, and kept to the gate, solacing himself there with fatty foods, red wines and orgiastic dreams, procured from a witch in Simmurad, of cross-eyed persons of a lascivious disposition.

  In the bright hall of the feasting, fountains played and sorcerous clockwork birds trilled in silver cages. Zhirek came always behind the rest of the feasters, and when he entered, that shadow entered with him, to chill and stimulate the Immortals. Tonight, however, the shadow was deeper and more than usually chilling. Fate seemed to pad at the heels of Zhirek, robed in cold silence.

  Zhirek wore black and a golden collar he had taken from the lords of Hhabhezur’s court and over that, the scarab of ink-black gems which an emperor’s tomb had rendered him. In one hand he carried a shard of clay pottery, and he walked to Simmu’s silver chair, while Simmu sat motionless in it, watching him.

  “You have saved me some work,” Zhirek said, to Simmu, but all there heard him. “I had pondered how to be rid of the Drink of Life, but you have solved my problem, drinking it down yourself. The vessel is broken and dry.”

  There was an outcry in the hall. Some shouted that Zhirek had lied, and asked for Simmu to deny it. Others, forgetting too easily they had accepted Simmu as their king, insulted him. Demands were made as to the purpose of their great scheme to conquer the world, if men were not now to profit by it.

  Simmu rose. They fell quiet, anxious to hear his excuse or denial.

  “There will be no more Immortals,” he said, as he had said to Kassafeh. “We are the first, and last. It is true, the Elixir has been drunk to the ultimate drop.” This time, no noise. Positive realization had subdued them all. Simmu confessed bitterly: “It is this man, this Zhirek, who has put such doubt, such horror in my heart that I could not any longer blind myself. Our lives are worthless. We are like birds that cannot fly, like roads that lead nowhere, save into some desert.” None challenged him; he had clearly half reckoned that they would, maybe trusted that they would, that arguments could be advanced against his dismal declaration. Only the skilled surgeon was heard muttering that his life was far from worthless, that he had much study to perform that would benefit mankind. But his voice was scarcely audible and each sentence unfinished, as indeed, all his studies had been. “No,” Simmu said. “It is irrevocable, this state we have come to. I do not comprehend why it should be that safety of life should rob us of our best qualities. But so it is. Zhirek has torn open my vision. I do not know what path to choose. I am afraid, but even my fear is sedentary and uninspiring.”

  Then debate did break out, as before it had broken out against the awful statements Zhirek had made.

  “Who desires extinction?”

  “To live only for mild pleasure is better than to lose life.”

  Simmu had seated himself, and did not answer, nor Zhirek, who stood dark as the gathering night itself before Simmu’s chair. Kassafeh stared only at Zhirek, her eyes a curious complementary darkening purple. She had gilded her lids and put sapphires and flowers in her hair for Zhirek’s sake, but he did not appear to notice her. When she had warned him that Simmu had drunk the last draughts of the Elixir, Zhirek had merely nodded. Now a personal alarm beset Kassafeh. She sensed, as each in that place suddenly seemed to, annihilation breathing on her neck—negation, if not death. And with her stare she entreated Zhirek: Beloved, I will be your slave. Do not condemn me also.

  Then Zhirek spoke.

  “None of you have anything to tremble at,” he said, “for Death cannot enter Simmurad. Nothing has ever died here, nor can it die, all being immortal, even to the grass of your lawns and the lions in your hunting park. And Uhlume, Lord Death, can only walk where the condition of death has walked before him.”

  And he smiled about at them, and they shrank from him, even the magicians and the wise men shrank. Their faces took on the rictus which the faces of men had assumed in Zhirek’s house when poison was offered to them. Somehow, there was not one present who did not guess what Zhirek meant to do and was yet unable to prevent him. It was a symbolic thing, but utterly destructive, as such sympathetic magic must always be.

  He began.

  He lifted the scarab from his breast and set it on the floor. He murmured the spell softly; in that room of enchanters, no doubt a few were schooled in it themselves. The jewels quivered—Zhirek spat on them—their glinting facets turned to a dull obsidian sheen and, with a clicking sound, began to run about the floor. The scarab had become a living creature.

  “No,” Zhirek said, “Death cannot enter Simmurad till something has died here—an excellent motive, I hazard, why none of you has left these walls. Though you say you have no need to avoid Death, yet you avoid him.”

  Zhirek paced slowly after the scuttling beetle. He let it circle between the legs of the tables, under the silken caves of draperies, but always he pursued it. At the center of the hall, the beetle paused to investigate a red flower fallen from some woman’s fingers. As it did so, Zhirek brought down his bare hard foot on its back. So still the hall, the crack of the carapace was heard throughout. Zhirek removed his foot. They glimpsed, straining to see, the shattered beetle crushed on the petals of the flower, and a stifled moaning went up. The fact of death had breached Simmurad. Death himself might follow as he willed. A vast wind roared through the palace, unprecedented, seeming to announce him.

  Zhirek’s sorcery gripped all of them. At the second when panic strode among them bidding them fly, not one could shift himself. Even their eyes grew rigid, fixed on the miniature dead thing at the hall’s center. Only Zhirek raised his head, looking at Simmu, as immobile as the rest, but not as expressionless. Simmu who had faced Death, struck him, challenged him, Simmu grinned with a terror worse than any other’s. No delight in the battle now. Zhirek had stripped him naked and truth smote him like a sword.

  The wind smashed in the windows of the citadel. It was alive, this gale. It stalked across the floor, it swirled and settled and formed itself, and Uhlume, Lord Death, stood in the core of Simmurad, city of the Immortals.

  “Welcome, Lord of all Lords,” Zhirek greeted him. “These people cannot bow to you, for they are prevented from doing anything. I have worked the method of their own spiritual atrophy against them. They resembled wax, now they are mesmerized to stone, unable to run from you or show you courtesy. They feel nothing, but they see and they hear. Pronounce sentence, my lord.”

  In this hour of his triumph, Uhlume w
as impervious. But he looked about him, gazed long at everything. His blank white eyes gave away a sort of hunger, even greed, as they dwelt on the face of each who had defied him.

  After some minutes, Uhlume said: “Beasts are in the parks, but they may be spared. The debt is owed me by men, who made this war in full knowledge of what they did. However, in this hall, one is missing.”

  Zhirek glanced aside. Kassafeh had vanished.

  “She slipped the leash of my spell by some means unknown to me, but, even so, she will be trapped in Simmurad. For the beasts, I will send them out of the city, if you desire it.”

  “They shall live in the Innerearth,” said Uhlume, “there is a woman there who may value them, to hunt perhaps.”

  “One request then, my lord,” said Zhirek, “before I complete my service to you here.”

  “Name it.”

  “Simmu, who calls himself your enemy, owes me also a debt. I plan a separate destiny for him from these others. A worse destiny.”

  “Cruelty,” said Death implacably, “is your food, not mine. Even now, not mine.”

  “Then you will grant it to me? Yes, my lord, I mean to commit an act of such savagery that it will rip and gnaw on me, soul and brain, for all the wretched centuries I must endure. It is the only thing which will keep me from madness—to rage, to suffer and to regret. While my heart beats, it must bleed, or I cannot bear what must be borne, that numbness in me that only pain can alleviate. Give me Simmu, my lord, with your other gifts.”

  “Take him,” said Death. “And then, give me Simmurad completely.”

  • • •

  Kassafeh ran through the night avenues and gardens of Simmurad. The shadows were generous to her, wrapping her close, hiding her from any supernatural and far-sighted eye. But the stars were merciless on the marble streets, and when the moon rose like an apple of green jasper, she approached despair. Then, for none apprehended her, her preservation seemed miraculous. She was not aware she was in a trap, that, run where she would, she could not get free of it.

  She had abandoned the hall the instant the windows shattered. She had not planned what she did. Her rapid departure was instinctive. That she could break out of the cage of the mesmeric spell was another matter. Wise men and magicians alike, they had stood rooted and entranced. She, though she felt the weight of the spell, was able to elude it, given an impetus of insane fear. Of course, she was not only a merchant’s daughter. Zhirek’s sorcery had missed her for the same reason that the illusions of the Garden of the Second Well had not ensnared her, nor the Eshva glamour Simmu had used there. The blood of her second father had immunized Kassafeh to earth-magic—the bluish ichor of the sky elemental that was mixed in her blood.

  For Uhlume, she had not seen him. But it was enough to sense his advent. Like all Simmurad that night, though immortal, she cringed at Death.

  It was the gates she made for, both to rush through them and to enlist the aid of Yolsippa, he being the only free man in the city, through his absence from the feast. Actually, it was his companionship she needed more than his dubious wits. She, too, had been betrayed. She had not yet had the leisure to grieve.

  Near the gates, racing on her bangled feet, three leopards dashed past her, going another way. The gold rings of their eyes unnerved her in an abstract fashion. She guessed they had found—or been granted—an exit she had not.

  Then the road swept upward to the carven mountain where the brass gates reared, closed and gleaming in the moonlight.

  She climbed swiftly up the stair that ascended the mountain wall, and went through the small doorway of the gate-house.

  “Yolsippa,” she cried, “Simmurad is lost!”

  But Yolsippa lay, burping and snoring intermittently, upon his couch.

  Kassafeh seized the wine jug and up-ended it over Yolsippa’s head—to no avail, for he had already drunk the jug empty. So she struck him repeatedly, and as she did this, she heard a far-off but ominous thunder, and the stone beneath her feet and above her head seemed somewhat to vibrate.

  “Yolsippa, wake and be accursed! Simmurad is lost—come, open the gate for we must be gone.”

  Yolsippa woke, and prudently he asked her:

  “Who has taken the city?”

  “Death has taken it, with Zhirek’s collusion. Some doom hangs over us—I have no notion of it, but I am afraid.”

  Yolsippa sweated and staggered to the levers which would activate the gates.

  “And for Simmu, what? Does he not heroically battle Death?”

  Kassafeh let out a scream that might have believed itself a laugh. She shed sudden tears, for whom she was uncertain, but she shrieked at Yolsippa to hasten.

  Yolsippa, though, directed a suspicious look about him.

  “The gods, who abhor me, have resumed their vigilance. The gates do not respond to the mechanism.”

  “Oh, this is more of Zhirek’s doing,” Kassafeh lamented.

  Yolsippa toiled and Kassafeh added her strength. Her tears, his sweat dropped on the levers, but the gates refused to part.

  “Shall we climb from the portal?” Kassafeh demanded.

  “Too vast a distance and too sheer a wall, damned be the idiot who designed it.”

  However, impelled to look about for what threatened them, they opened the trick window and glared forth.

  The green moon gave all its glow unstintingly.

  At first, the night seemed innocent, sky above and mountain tops about them, and before and below the sheen of that huge horizon of the sea. But soon the thunder sounded once again, and the moon’s light on that watery horizon crinkled and fragmented like a splintered mirror.

  “The sea,” Kassafeh groaned.

  “Surely, it is unsettled,” admitted Yolsippa.

  “And much closer,” Kassafeh reported, “than before.”

  Yolsippa craned and squinted, but did not wish his sight confirmed. For the ocean, gray and cold as if it had spilled up from some inner deep where colors were unknown and warmth unheard-of, gathered, seething and rocking, at the very foot of the mountains. And now and then an enormous wave would comb it up against the flanks of the rock, and all the while, it seemed to rise a little to fill the hollow basin of the night.

  • • •

  Zhirek, who had learnt inside a man-shaped case of verdigris the lore and mage-craft of the sea folk, now summoned the waters of an icy, primeval ocean and all that they contained.

  Where they began, the breakers turned from their usual courses. Their tides expanded, evaded the calling moon, which, even in the days of the earth’s flatness, had her say in the movement of salt waters, both green and red. From some submarine womb, a giant surge beat up. A valve slid open, or was shattered. From depths, from abysses, waves erupted, exploded. The sea drove inland, rising, drinking the eastern shore, its beaches and its marmoreal escarpments, but thirsty most of all for Simmurad.

  Zhirek waited on a high, high roof, his prize—Simmu—stretched like a frozen thing at his feet. Zhirek coaxed the sea in the words of an ancient and untranslatable oceanic witchery. He felt nothing, or not much, only his unhuman power, a drunkenness already soured in his throat. Death was gone, his impulse for vengeance satisfied, if it had ever truly existed save by proxy, or if vengeance had ever truly been his aim. But the sea answered Zhirek.

  It filled the lower valleys of Simmurad in a joyous gushing, tumbling over the high ramparts and pouring downward, so the noise of waterfalls and rain storms ornamented the thunder of tall combers drumming on the mountains.

  Gradually, the gardens and the walks, the beautiful colonnades and courts and underpasses of the city succumbed. Up steps the sea glided, over the heads of trees.

  The water slipped almost self-effacingly into the feast hall of the citadel. It had already half-quenched the green obelisk before the doors; it had reached the words I AM, and it mouthed
them lovingly.

  When the sea carpeted the floor of the hall, lapping the slender ankles of the immortal women and the erudite ugly feet of the sages and the boots of the warriors, they did not stir. When the sea became bold, mounted their limbs, stroked and grew intimate with them, not even then. Held in the trap, hypnotized, they did not feel it, though they understood it all. And when the water brimmed up their chins, their mouths and over into their nostrils, throats and lungs, they did not choke or struggle, and their eyes were pebbles. Vulnerable, they drowned; immortal, they lived as they drowned, but living was no use to them.

  Even in those seconds, infinitesimal creatures clustered on them, the architects of the ocean. The coral of this sea was white. Its palisades would be years in their building. But at Zhirek’s bidding the coral-makers had come and would congregate, till every immortal of the city had been sealed in his own individual prison of spiny white carbonate.

  What Zhirek had seen in the Simmurians, their petrification, he had brought to pass on them. They had been wax dolls. Now they were pillars of limestone. They would not die. But Death had triumphed.

  Presently, the sea washed the roof of the hall, and the primitive fish that swam in it swished in and out of the wind-broken windows.

  But the sea had still some way to travel, till it had swamped the tallest towers of the city, and now its tumult had grown gentle and seductive. It kissed before it devoured.

  That much Kassafeh heeded, for as the water crept stealthily up the stair toward her, it would hush and croon, trying to soothe her into submission.

  “We are lost,” she dolefully decided.

  “A riddle I cannot answer,” Yolsippa heavily agreed, “for we cannot drown, yet we must. And though this city life is sometimes irksome, yet I do not wish to relinquish my senses. However, pray do not increase the level of the water with your tears.”