Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Bone-white pillars of stone stood up at intervals, and in some were holes. Zhirek climbed the stone, selecting one of these fractures to dwell in. He sat down on the hot bare bone-floor and he bowed his head, and so he stayed for many years.

  By day the sun beat in at him, by night the blue winds. He ate only what came to him, which was the air, he drank the dew, the infrequent rain. He lived because deprivation could not kill him, any more than a spear or a sea or a flame. But he became a blackened wire and his beauty left him.

  Sometimes birds of prey would visit him. They approached because they believed him a corpse, a dinner laid out for them. He did not move or beat them off, and they rammed their beaks against the wall of his invulnerability and flapped away cawing.

  He slept often, that fearsome sleep Death had granted him. And portion by portion, this sleep began to wipe his brain clean of everything. The intellect of Zhirek, which had caused him such distress, put constantly into this blinkered box, gradually dislocated itself from reason and so from its very self. Though, now and then, swimming in a pool of semi-conscious dark, Zhirek would fling himself against the memory of Simmu burned forever in the well of fire. The monstrous pain of this was sweet and dear to him; he did not over-use it, squeezing out its juices drop by drop. It was all he had, or all he had kept for himself. But at length even this taste was numbed.

  Now, in the beginning, men had seldom come to that place, but decades went by, and men were venturesome. There was a year when caravans began to come and go across the bone-yard desert, and though their road was a distance from the stone pillar, at length some noticed that a thing sat in the hole there.

  In the town beyond the desert, they expounded variously:

  “It is a weird beast.”

  “It is a madman.”

  “No, it is a hermit, a holy man. We have seen the vultures fly to his cave and feed him at the direction of the gods.”

  From that observation it was a small step to suppose him gifted with powers. Inevitably, in bands of five or ten or more, they began to drift toward him across the stone land, clambering the pillar, peering in, bright-eyed, at the opening.

  Zhirek, or what remained of him, looked at them with a dreadful uninterest they interpreted as blindness or inner vision. He returned no syllable to their entreaties and their veneration, which they interpreted as a self-imposed vow of silence. They brought him honey-cakes, wines, raisins, and cold meats. The food, untouched, rotted on the ledge before him till others cleared it away.

  Some months having elapsed, fruitlessly, the people ceased coming, but they spread his fame, his curiosity and holiness and wild appearance; and they invented for him miracles he had not performed, in order to make their tales more entertaining. One day a prince arrived from a far land, having heard the story of the hermit.

  He travelled in a gilded chariot, this prince, under a canopy of scarlet. Thirty slaves loped either side of it, and young girls threw silks before him across the desert and all the way up the stone pillar—on which a track had long since been worn—so the slippered feet of the prince should not rest on common ground.

  The prince nodded to Zhirek.

  “I have had a dream,” said the prince, “which concerns the ending of the world. The sun blackens and a new sun rises; the mountains melt and the seas are poured away. What does it mean?”

  But Zhirek did not answer this prince of men, and Zhirek’s filmy eyes, which once had been the color of green water reflecting a blue sky, closed themselves like gates against him.

  So the prince went back unanswered over the stones.

  But fame is fame. After a hundred years, the demons themselves got word of the holy ascetic in the desert, who would neither talk, nor move, nor eat, nor love.

  When the moon rose, three of the Eshva stole to the pillar, and they began to dance under it. Neither did they say anything, having no need. Each rippling step spoke for them. And their dance led them up the pillar track to the very mouth of the cave where Zhirek sat bowed in his death-sleep.

  No mortal could undo that sleep, but the Eshva breathed their perfumed breath on the eyelids of Zhirek and their long black hair brushed over his body, and presently he woke. Then they laughed at him with their eyes, and traced him over with lascivious fingers smooth as the paws of black cats. Two females they were, and one male, and beautiful as all the demons, but Zhirek paid them no special heed, for at that season his brain and senses were worn nearly featureless.

  Then, fired by the moonlight, there shone a green ray from the throat of the masculine Eshva. Some remaining awareness roused in Zhirek, and the dilapidated and ancient stick that was Zhirek’s remnant reached out one hand to pluck at the gem hung from the Eshva’s neck. But all three Eshva shrank pliantly from him, and watched with a childlike innocent malice as he began to cry.

  And he too, like a child, rocked himself, knuckling his eyes, and thus he wept and the rusty noises of grief rasped in his chest till the Eshva lost their pleasure in the spectacle and smoked away. And long after that, yet he cried and rocked himself, till the moon set and the stars faded and a red rose bloomed in the east.

  When the morning was full, riders went by that way toward the town.

  “What is that lament?” they questioned each other.

  “It is the holy man in the cave,” said one who knew the story. “Generally he is impervious.”

  Now a priest rode with them, and pompously he declared: “No doubt the hermit is weeping for the sins of the world.”

  But Zhirek was weeping, whether in rage or gladness he did not know, because he had been supremely cheated.

  2

  The fire.

  Simmu, thrust into it, had been a second suspended, then plunged beyond all things.

  The torment was immeasurable, the suffering so elaborate that in a fraction of time it had surpassed all limits of pain, ceased to be pain, become another state no less appalling, yet inexpressible and undefined.

  Following his flesh, his thoughts were next to burn away. The immortal core persisted, that link which trapped the soul in the structure of a man, just enough of the body to hold him in the fire intact though almost obliterated.

  But one other thing was burning along with hair and skin and bone and brain. The green Eshva jewel about his throat.

  How long did the fire chew on him? It was said to be nine years. And then, with no sight or hearing left him, something suggested itself before the sockets of his eyes, and cadences rang in the cavities of his ears, a conversation like music, and quantities of miles below him.

  “See, there the jewel is, burning, as I told you.”

  “It is the third burning. Each time the heat strikes it, it gives off a green hard note. But our prince will not honor his vow to the mortal?”

  “Yes, but he will honor it.”

  These were the Vazdru, talking so melodiously below. And somewhere a dwarfish Drin tore his sable locks and groaned as his precious artifact, the faceted gem, spattered in the flames. It was the Eshva, the demon messengers, who flew up suddenly like black doves into the well of fire. Their water-cool hands grasped Simmu, all that there was of him, their hair fanned him. They bore him downward.

  He did not know where he was going. Shapes flashed through his sightlessness. The whispers of their silver minds were in his ears that had no hearing. His agony was horrible. He had forgotten the demons, although they were a comfort. He went through three gates, and never saw them, into a shining umber city beneath the earth.

  How he was, his blackened husk, goes unrecounted. It is possible to visualize it, unwise to set it down. His hurt shall be described no further.

  Then, he felt—positively felt, though no feeling but the hurt had been left him—the imprint of a hand upon his breast. Like frost-blighted leaves he crumbled, but never knew it, for the hand brought him balm and oblivion.

 
Azhrarn looked at what lay on the floor of his hall, under the windows of wine-red corundum. The jewel which had become his pledge, he had plucked off. It was like a dead coal. Even Drin-crafted handiwork could not endure that conflagration in the well.

  The motives of the demons were both complex and simple. What intrigued them, they permitted liberties and rapture. What was fruitless or insolent or unwary, they eradicated. What bored them, they overlooked. Despite such factors, they were mobile, their choice not always steadfast.

  Simmu had failed Azhrarn. Given Immorality and Simmurad to boot, Simmu’s ingenuousness had proved a fatal flaw. Yet, when Azhrarn met Death on the river bank that night, and put in his way the one weapon whereby Death might breach the city: Zhirek, it is not inconceivable that Azhrarn had flung more dice than merely Uhlume’s. Zhirek was Death’s pawn, but had also been a spoon to stir the pot of Simmurad.

  The demon presence which Simmu had often yearned for in his citadel and which had never greeted him there—maybe it had been nearer in the conclusive days of the city than any guessed. Had Azhrarn been watching from the shade of a moonless night, or in some magic glass of Underearth, or through the eyes of a panther on the lawn? If so, what had Azhrarn beheld? Perhaps the Demon had meant to deliver punishment on what had failed and disillusioned and wearied him. But the punishment was delivered by another. And the punishment was complete. The fire was more terrible than any scheme Azhrarn the pitiless could just then concoct. To harm Simmu, had he wished to, Azhrarn could have done no more than this the fire had done. It had come to the point where the only avenue Azhrarn could take to display his omnipotence, and appease his vanity, was that of redemption. Besides, the demons were fascinated by justice, by what was apposite, however heinous or unlikely it might be.

  Azhrarn called the Drin and told them what he wanted. They skipped with ravishment at his attention, and cringed in case they should get it wrong. Then they carried the leaves of Simmu away with them, those blighted leaves from which there feebly came the sound of a man’s breathing, or a small twitching as of a man in slumber.

  By a lake like black syrup, the smoulders of Drin forges throbbed on the starry air of Underearth. The stunted folk of Druhim Vanashta were renowned for their obnoxious whims and for their genius with metal, minerals and all items mechanical.

  They labored to construct a complicated image. It was of a man’s height and a man’s form. It was made in this way. To commence, a framework of bones was carved from the finest whitest ivory, and from the frame not a rib was missed, not the joint of a finger. The skull was burnished and enhanced with gorgeous teeth sculpted from the whitest of the white ivory. Then, about this skeleton was woven an anatomy of silk and silver wires astonishing to witness, and amid the curiosity of it were placed fabulous organs of bronze and fiber that a novel clockwork presently set in rhythm—permitting the heart to beat, the lungs to inhale. Next, over the carven bones and silken flesh was fitted a single skin, close as a glove, of the palest and most matchless vellum, and into the enamel veins beneath were poured faint fragrant juices to color from within. The image was unmistakably of demon kind. Its hair was black, but the black growing ferns of Underearth supplied it, and the black lashes of the eyes were ebony grasses from the lawns of Druhim Vanashta. For the eyes themselves, they were polished black agates, and the nails of the hands and feet were polished nacre.

  It was marvellous this object, when it was finished. It looked alive, yet too perfect to be living, even to be a living demon perhaps. . . . The Drin wondered at their own cleverness. They stroked the image and mooned over it with admiration and amorousness. But they had no claim, either to what it was or to what it should be. In the end, they opened a box in which had been strewn a pile of tindery leaves, and they intruded this matter into the image by a vent they had left in the skull for the purpose, then sealed the vent and shook the image brutally and crudely, as if indeed to settle sugar in a canister, rather than a man’s undying fragments in their case. This macabre ritual completed, the Drin hopped aside, as if their creation abruptly unnerved them.

  Nothing happened for a moment. At that, the Drin began to upbraid each other horribly, each swearing another had omitted some vital part or magic from the work. They had fallen to purple-faced cuffing, kicking and biting, when the image, lying flat on the couch where they had laid it, sighed, and turned its head in sleep from their noise.

  Azhrarn entered the workshop, and the Drin scrambled to prostrate themselves, squeaking. Azhrarn approached the couch. He studied the image which now contained the last mortal surviving part of Simmu that was neither soul nor spirit but leaves of burned flesh.

  “Little cunning ones,” Azhrarn said softly, “you have done well.”

  The Drin slobbered and kissed the edges of Azhrarn’s cloak.

  Azhrarn put his hand lightly upon Simmu’s shoulder—the Eshva image which housed Simmu’s life was entitled to his name—and Simmu’s eyelids lifted. He blinked with the lashes of black grass, and with his radiant eyes of agate he focused on the Prince of Demons.

  His agony had been subtracted from Simmu, and everything else returned to him—nearly everything. His senses and the sensual properties of taste and smell and touch and hearing and sight, all were there; but he was dumb, for the Eshva could not, or would not, speak. One other thing was also banished—memory. Amnesiac, he came alert at the infinitesimal pressure of Azhrarn’s fingers, and in that instant, Simmu was born.

  He was pristine. No vestige clung to him of the past, no sweetness and no pain. This was the initial awakening, the initial impression. And Azhrarn the Beautiful was the first thing be saw in his new, never-before-experienced world.

  But it was Azhrarn who asked of him: “Say who you are.”

  The question taught. It was a lesson. It filled the silver brain within the ivory skull. The agate eyes revealed their voiceless reply: A demon, and your subject. I am nothing more, but who would desire more? And Simmu sank down before Azhrarn, his body so excellently made it was precisely as graceful as the bodies of those creatures that were its model.

  Azhrarn mused. The completion of the spell lay with him and only with him. He lifted Simmu to his feet, and took Simmu away with him.

  Once, Azhrarn had said to Simmu: “The time is mine to choose, and is not now.” And now, unlooked for, the time had come. That it was a ritual and a magic thing made no odds. Some circle was joined, some lesion mended. For such as demons could not promise a thing and leave the promise unfulfilled; even their whisperings turned the sails of the earth, and their blackness, like a shadow behind glass, seemed to offer men a mirror by which to see.

  When Azhrarn caressed the fern hair of Simmu, it became actually hair, and the lashes of grass brushing the cheek of Azhrarn, their blades also became hair. And the eyes filled with tears and though they were beautiful, they were eyes, not agates. And when Azhrarn kissed the mouth of Simmu, it was flesh, and the body of Simmu was flesh and blood, that refined and wonderful flesh and blood of demon-kind—unhuman, better. And when Azhrarn possessed Simmu, and yet once more destroyed and yet once more reincarnated him through the death-like throes of ecstasy, then Simmu became, in every vessel and nerve and artery and muscle, in each inner mote and outer circumstance, animate, carnal, and real. This final sorcery Azhrarn worked upon him, for even among mortals, then and now, love is a catalyst, and how much more could the Prince of Demons do with love, who perhaps had invented it. But Azhrarn was lord and king, not lover, to Simmu, for with very few was Azhrarn ever lover alone, and they were mortals.

  But Simmu dwelt thereafter with the demons and roamed with them. Eshva, he inhabited the dusks of Underearth and the moon-milk nights of earth itself. What in the beginning Simmu had almost been, now he was. And on the dancing-floors of midnight woods he strolled, calling the beasts wordlessly to follow him, hunting the foolishness of mankind, meddling, at ease in the burning Eshva dream of those who, at the commence
ment of his life, had adopted and nurtured him. And maybe even with those two, the Eshva women who had first cradled him with their glamour, maybe even with those he occasionally wandered here and there, probably all three unaware that once before they had similarly wandered.

  Simmu, no longer apricot-haired, green-eyed, but demon-dark. No longer thrust now one way now another between the physique of male and female, for though male in his Eshva form, the demons, and particularly the Eshva, were pendulums, all love admissible to them, and their natures fluid, unhampered.

  Yet about his neck he wore a green jewel, facsimile of the other, Azhrarn’s gift, as often enough he gifted his people when they pleased him. Coveted by his brothers and the treasure of Simmu himself, this jewel winked and flamed through many many shadows. Generation after generation, murderers striding through forests, girls making charms and garlands, mages at complicated magics, glanced up at that sizzle of green, caught in the act by demon-kind in the person of Simmu.

  For naturally, down endless millennia Simmu took his way, though immortality had ceased to confound him, for he was Eshva now. The truly immortal had never feared their state, neither demons nor gods nor any others of that plethora of enduring ones; it was merely a secondary aspect of their mystical condition.

  One night, could it be, Azhrarn sent Simmu, Eshva messenger, to visit the mad hermit on his column of stone? Possibly the Prince intended some absolute joke, which only he might laugh at. Or possibly it was another of the Eshva who dipped and danced before the cave-hole, another gem about his neck, other mischief on his mind. That Zhirek was tutored by the happening, might have been due only to his wit, what there was remaining of it. For sure, he wept. And for sure, Simmu did not weep, save sometimes for entertainment, in the luxurious meaningless Eshva manner. Generally, Simmu burned instead, in the burning Eshva dream, all other fires forgotten. Thus it was in the Underearth, which was home to him at last—as it must always have been fated to be.