The Book of Silence

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Garth remained skeptical. “It has been scarcely three years since the Thirteenth Age ended; that is hardly an age.”

  “No rule is known that limits the length of each god’s age, either maximum or minimum. Perhaps your refusal to accept your role, welcome though it is, has cut short the Age of Bheleu.”

  “Why are you so certain that I wish to take the book to the King in Yellow?”

  “I saw that old man who took the sword, Garth, and felt something of his power. Who else could it be?”

  Chalkara made a suggestion. “You do not trust us, Garth, but Silda, here, has heard of the King; let her describe him, and we will let you decide whether it is he you serve.”

  Garth was quite well aware that the Forgotten King was also known as the King in Yellow and that he was exactly what the wizards said he was, but the overman found himself wondering what the archivist knew. He would welcome any new information that might help in his dealings with the old man.

  “Speak, then, archivist,” he said.

  Silda looked at each of the three in turn, then said in a precise voice, “The King in Yellow is a legend in the most ancient histories of Ur-Dormulk. I know of no connection between him and any deity, nor of any connection with a book, or with overmen, or anything else you have spoken of, save only destruction and death. He once ruled an empire from this city, long ago, when it bore another name; one version called it Hastur, another Carcosa. His origins have never been explained; in the very earliest records and even earlier myths, his presence is accepted as an ongoing thing since time immemorial. The legends are all vague as to who or what he was—many seem to assume that any reader will already know—but it is clear that he could not die, and that he was an object of terror throughout the world as these historians knew it. His visage was said to hold death or madness for all who met his gaze.

  “Although he was once a king in fact, and a king whom emperors served, he gave up his throne to a successor who founded the ancient Imperial dynasty that the founders of the present Ur-Dormulk overthrew centuries later—yet it was said that in time the King would return and reclaim his rightful place, and when he did, the stars would fall and the earth shatter. He disdained all trappings of royalty and went about the world in scalloped tatters that were a strange shade of yellow—hence the name, the King in Yellow. His servants wore black. This is said to be why the lords of Ur-Dormulk wear black and the people of the city shun all shades of yellow.”

  Silda paused and shook her head. Chalkara glanced down at her yellow dress, and Garth was uncomfortably aware of his custom of wearing black armor.

  Silda continued. “Such a bare recounting of the facts known to me does not convey the essence of what I have read and heard concerning him. Throughout all the city’s recorded history, from times so ancient that we cannot interpret the dates and on until the chaos of the Twelfth Age, the shadow of the King hangs like smoke. In every account of tragedy he is mentioned, and in descriptions of more pleasant times there is always an air of foreboding associated with him. In the wars of the Age of Aghad the city was sufficiently disrupted so that the continuity was lost and the myths forgotten among the public. But there can be no doubt that, before that age, the tales of the King had persisted, at least among the learned, for more than ten thousand years. This, despite the fact that no historian or storyteller ever dared set down anything but veiled hints as to his true nature. I had thought that no one now alive had ever heard of him, save myself; that only in the ancient books and scrolls was he mentioned—books and scrolls that no one but me has read in three centuries or more. To hear you three speak of him as if he were alive today, as if you had seen him...”

  “I have seen him,” Shandiph said.

  “He has been lost for more than a thousand years!”

  “You said yourself that he could not die,” Chalkara pointed out.

  Garth said nothing. He was mulling over what he had heard.

  He had thought of the Forgotten King’s life span in terms of centuries, not millennia. He could not conceive of anything existing for eleven thousand years. He could not truly conceive of living even one thousand years. That would be seven times his own lifetime, roughly; eleven thousand years would be his years seventy-sevenfold. His species itself had not existed for much over a millennium.

  For the first time he honestly thought he understood why the King wanted to die. The weight of so many years was surely more than any mind could bear.

  He had known that the King had a sinister reputation among any who knew of him at all; Garth had attributed this to his position as the high priest of death, but here there seemed to be something more. Why were the city’s histories silent on the exact nature of the King’s menace? Why was it said that the heavens would fall if he returned?

  Would delivering the Book of Silence truly begin an Age of Death? If so, what would that mean?

  That, at least, was a question he might ask. “What would an Age of Death entail?” he inquired.

  “Widespread death, obviously,” Shandiph replied. “Just as the current age is one of war and chaos and destruction, and the last was a time of stagnation and decay.”

  “And after it, what?”

  Shandiph shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps nothing will survive the Age of Death, not even the earth or the gods themselves. Perhaps humanity will be destroyed but the rest of the world will go on, and your people will begin a new cycle of their own. Perhaps death will be limited, and many, even whole nations, will survive, and the lesser gods will have their turns as the rulers of the ages. I don’t know. I do know that an Age of Death is not something I want to see.”

  Garth considered these possibilities, particularly the first and most horrific.

  What if nothing were to survive the Age of Death? The world itself vanished, and the gods dead; would not even time itself cease to be? The end of time would be an actual fact, not just a poetical turn of phrase.

  He recalled, with a growing apprehension, that when he had bargained with the King for eternal fame, the King had sworn that Garth’s name would be known “as long as there is life upon this earth.” When the King had offered him immortality—or so he had understood the offer—the old man had said that Garth might live until “the end of time” if he aided the King’s magic. The King had said that his magic would cause many deaths, including those of the entire cult of Aghad. And perhaps most important of all, the priest of The God Whose Name Is Not Spoken in Dûsarra had told Garth that the Forgotten King was bound to live until the end of time. The King sought to perform a feat that would allow him to die.

  It appeared very much as if the Forgotten King meant to bring about the end of time and the death of everything. He had meant to assure that Garth might live and be known until the end of time, not by extending the overman’s life, but by destroying the world and time itself.

  Chapter Ten

  After a moment of silence in which Garth absorbed the basic concept that he might be aiding in the utter destruction of the world, he began to consider the possible ramifications and permutations of his situation.

  One question came to mind immediately. It seemed reasonable to assume that the world could not end, and the King could not die, until the end of the Age of Death. Yet the old man had implied that his death would be immediately achieved by his conjuring. When Garth had believed that the method involved summoning The God Whose Name Is Not Spoken and renouncing his bargain, he had seen no contradiction there. He had thought that the King’s offer of eternal life was based on substituting Garth for himself in the Death-God’s power, but that no longer seemed reasonable. The offer had not been of eternal life at all.

  “How long,” he asked, “would the Age of Death last?”

  Shandiph shrugged. “I told you,” he said, “I am no theurgist, nor am I an astrologer or a seer. I don’t know. I have heard philosophers say that the length of an age is subjectiv
e and cannot always be predicted or measured. Perhaps it will last a million years, until the sun grows cold and the seas run dry, or perhaps it will be over in an instant, and the world will vanish in a puff of smoke.”

  That was a very unsatisfactory answer, in Garth’s opinion. “Wizard,” he said, “I was told by Bheleu, in a vision he sent while I held the sword and he sought to dominate me, that his reign would last thirty years. Now you speak as if it might be over in just three. How can that be? Could the god have been wrong? That was not part of my understanding of the nature of a god. Might my refusal to serve him have altered that, when the god himself had once said it? I had thought that the ages were fixed in the stars, and that only failures of interpretation caused the uncertainty and disagreement among astrologers.”

  “I don’t know,” Shandiph admitted. “Perhaps the stars offer a choice; perhaps the god lied. My friend Miloshir told me that Bheleu’s reign would last for either three years or thirty, but could not say which; it may be that his knowledge was lacking, or it may be that it had not yet been determined. Your refusal might in truth have been the crucial event; perhaps you ameliorated the Age of Destruction only to hasten the Age of Death.”

  Garth remembered the smoking battlefields and charred wastelands he had seen in his journey south through Eramma. If these were the scenes of a mild Age of Destruction, what would it have been had he not refused his role? That was a depressing line of thought.

  The possibility that by limiting the destruction he had brought the end of the world half a generation earlier—or a full generation for humans—was even more disheartening. It appeared that he had faced a situation in which he would cause disaster, whatever course he might choose.

  “You say that my actions might bring the Age of Death; how could that be prevented, if that is to be the next age? Must there be an Age of Death? Need it be the Fifteenth Age, and not the Hundredth?”

  “Again, Garth, I cannot say with any certainty. Miloshir spoke as if there were to be fifteen ages to complete the current cycle, the first seven dedicated to the Lords of Eir and the last to the Lords of Dûs, while the Eighth Age was an era when light and darkness were in balance. Whether this scheme of being is truly fixed and immutable I do not know. If it is unalterable, then there will be a Fifteenth Age, a final age, an Age of Death, and it will occur immediately after our current Age of Destruction.”

  “It seems little to choose, between destruction and death.”

  Shandiph shrugged. Chalkara, who had been following the conversation closely, said, “I would prefer to live, however terrible the times in which I live, than to perish.”

  “Do you think that by stopping me from performing my errand you might avert this Fifteenth Age?”

  “We feel we must try. It may be that it can be delayed for another twenty-seven years, or perhaps it can be weakened, as Bheleu’s reign was, so that some might survive where they otherwise would not.”

  Garth sat back and thought for a moment. He was not happy about this new information. The possibility that the wizards were making it all up for reasons of their own did not escape him, but that seemed unlikely; it all fitted far too well with what he knew. The blue-clad man had suggested the end of the world as just one of several possibilities, which did not jibe with a lying attempt to frighten anyone; it was Garth’s own knowledge of the Forgotten King that convinced him that that was exactly what was fated to occur.

  The Fourteenth Age had lasted almost three years thus far; before it, the Age of P’hul had been three centuries, and the Twelfth Age was old when the first overmen were created a millennium ago, as he understood it, so it had lasted at least seven hundred years. The ages appeared to be getting shorter. The Fifteenth might be three days, or three hours. The end of the world, and his own death, might be only a few days in the future.

  This assumed, however, that the Fifteenth Age would really begin when the Forgotten King received the Book of Silence. Garth knew of a serious flaw in that theory.

  “Would it lessen your concern,” he asked, “if I told you that the Book of Silence is not the device of The God Whose Name Is Not Spoken?”

  Shandiph considered for a moment, and then said, “Not really. If it is not, then what is? And you, Bheleu’s chosen, will still be doing the King in Yellow a service if you bring him the book, even should it be the totem of another god. Miloshir told me that it might be the device of Dagha himself, god of time, the father of all the higher gods. But in that case, what is the totem of Death? He thought it might be the basilisk that dwelt beneath Mormoreth, but that seems unlikely; the creature died, did it not? And bringing the King in Yellow Dagha’s totem might easily be as devastating as bringing him his own, whatever it might be.”

  Garth had to admit the logic in this speech; after all, he had taken the Sword of Bheleu from Bheleu’s altar, and not from the followers of P’hul.

  “Still,” he said, “the Age of Death, as I understand it, cannot begin until two conditions are met; I must do the King a service, yes, but more importantly, he must acquire the totem of his god. Is that not correct?”

  Shandiph nodded. “I would ask, though, how you know that the Book of Silence is not that totem, when you profess to know nothing about it.”

  “The King told me,” the overman replied; almost immediately, he realized how feeble that sounded. Still, he believed the old man. He knew that the King was a schemer, adept at speaking half-truths and implying falsehoods without actually stating them, yet he had never heard him tell a direct and definite lie. The old man had said, in effect, that the Book of Silence was the totem of Dagha, not of Death. At the time, it had seemed odd that he had wasted so many words, rather than letting Garth believe what he chose, but now it appeared the King had foreseen a moment such as this, when Garth might be reluctant to fetch the book if he believed it to be the device of the Final God.

  The Final God—that name suddenly seemed more appropriate, if his age was to end the world.

  “You may have reason to accept his word,” Shandiph said, “but we do not. Furthermore, how do you know that he does not already possess the symbol of the Unnamed God, whatsoever it may be?”

  “He did possess it once, but left it here, in this city, with the Book of Silence.”

  “He told you this?”

  “Yes.” Garth remembered that the old man had said also that he was not wholly free of the Pallid Mask even when apart from it, but Garth suppressed the thought. He wanted to bring the Book of Silence to the King so that he might trade it for the Sword of Bheleu and kill Aghadites with the sword.

  The thought of killing Aghadites, of watching them bleed and die, was so appealing that he let himself linger over it for a moment, and Chalkara’s next question did not register at first.

  “I said, what is the totem of Death?” she repeated.

  Garth recalled himself and shrugged. “He called it the Pallid Mask.”

  The two wizards glanced at each other, then at the archivist.

  “I never heard of it,” Chalkara said.

  “Nor I,” Shandiph declared.

  “I am not sure,” Silda said. “It might have been mentioned in the tales of the fallen moons.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Garth said. “I have no intention of bringing anything to the King but the Book of Silence. You have my word.”

  “I would rather have your word that you would give up this quest entirely,” Shandiph said.

  “I cannot do that. I need magic for my revenge, a magic that the cult of Aghad cannot counter.”

  There was a moment of silence. It was Chalkara who said at last, “You want the Book of Silence for that?”

  “No,” Garth replied. “I want the King’s aid, which he has promised in exchange for the book.” It seemed impolitic to mention that he meant to take up the Sword of Bheleu again; the wizards would surely oppose that as strongly as they oppose
d the Age of Death. The Fifteenth Age was a theory, but they had seen the sword’s power and suffered under it.

  “You would risk the lives of every man, woman, and child, every overman and overwoman, every bird and beast in the world, to avenge your wife’s murder?” Shandiph asked.

  Garth answered simply, “Yes.” He did not think it worth pointing out that the cult of Aghad was a menace to all and had threatened further deaths, or that destroying it would be both an act of vengeance and one of prevention. Kyrith’s death was reason enough.

  Chalkara glanced at each of the others in turn, then whispered to Shandiph, “He’s mad!”

  She had not allowed for the keen ears of overmen; Garth heard what she said, but ignored it.

  “Garth,” Shandiph said, “please reconsider. We will aid your vengeance in every way we can, if you will not bring the King either the book or this mask, or serve him in any manner.”

  That was a tempting offer, but Garth reluctantly knew he had to refuse it. These wizards had little real power; much of what they had turned against him before, they had lost, either destroyed by the Sword of Bheleu or sealed away by the Forgotten King. They might be a match for an Aghadite magician in a fair contest, one against one, but the cult was clearly widespread and did not trouble itself with fairness; rather, it made a point of being unfair, treacherous, and hateful, in keeping with the nature of its deity. Furthermore, the full party of wizards that had fought him—and surely they had summoned their greatest strength for that combat—could not have exceeded two dozen, and at least one in four had died, perhaps half or more. That meant that far less than a score could have survived, while the cult might well number in the hundreds or even the thousands.