The Dying Earth

by Jack Vance

  Was this beautiful? T'sais pondered. Her warped brain saw bleakness in the line of the moor, cutting harshness in the crags, and in the forest—terror.

  Was this beauty? At a loss, she twisted her head, squinted. She heard footsteps, jerked about, wide-eyed, expecting anything. It was he of the black hood, and T'sais leaned back against the door-jamb.

  She watched him approach, tall and strong, slow of step. Why did he wear the hood? Was he ashamed of his face? She could understand something of this, for she herself found the human face repellent—an object of watery eye, wet unpleasant apertures, spongy outgrowths.

  He halted before her. "Are you hungry?"

  T'sais considered. "Yes."

  "Then we will eat."

  He entered the cottage, stirred up the fire, and spitted meat. T'sais stood uncertainly in the background. She had always served herself. She felt an uneasiness: cooperation was an idea she had not yet encountered.

  Presently the man arose, and they sat to eat at his table.

  "Tell me of yourself," he said after a few moments. So T'sais, who had never learned to be other than artless, told him her story, thus;

  "I am T'sais. I came to Earth from Embelyon, where the wizard Pandelume created me."

  "Embelyon? Where is Embelyon? And who is Pandelume?"

  "Where is Embelyon?" she repeated in puzzlement. "I don't know. It is in a place that is not Earth. It is not very large, and lights of many colors come from the sky. Pandelume lives in Embelyon. He is the greatest wizard alive—so he tells me."

  "Ah," the man said. "Perhaps I see ..."

  "Pandelume created me," continued T'sais, "but there was a flaw in the pattern." And T'sais stared into the fire. "I see the world as a dismal place of horror; all sounds to me are harsh, all living creatures vile, in varying degrees—things of sluggish movement and inward filth. During the first of my life I thought only to trample, crush, destroy. I knew nothing but hate. Then I met my sister T'sain, who is as I without the flaw. She told me of love and beauty and happiness—and I came to Earth seeking these."

  The grave blue eyes studied her.

  "Have you found them?"

  "So far," said T'sais in a faraway voice, "I have found only such evil as I never even encountered in my nightmares." Slowly she told him her adventures.

  "Poor creature," he said and fell to studying her once again.

  "I think I shall kill myself," said T'sais, in the same distant voice, "for what I want is infinitely lost." And the man, watching, saw how the red afternoon sun coppered her skin, noted the loose, black hair, the long thoughtful eyes. He shuddered at the thought of this creature being lost into the dust of Earth's forgotten trillions.

  "No!" he said sharply. T'sais stared at him in surprise. Surely one's life was one's own, to do with as one pleased.

  "Have you found nothing on Earth," he asked, "that you would regret leaving?"

  T'sais knit her brows. "I can think of nothing—unless it be the peace of this cottage."

  The man laughed. "Then this shall be your home, for as long as you wish, and I will try to show you that the world is sometimes good—though in truth—" his voice changed "—I have not found it so."

  "Tell me," said T'sais, "what is your name? Why do you wear the hood?"

  "My name? Etarr," he said in a voice subtly harsh. "Etarr is enough of it. I wear the mask because of the most wicked woman of Ascolais—Ascolais, Almery, Kauchique—the entire world. She made my face such that I cannot abide my own sight."

  He relaxed, and gave a weary laugh. "No need for anger any more."

  "Is she alive still?"

  "Yes, she lives, and no doubt still works evil on all she meets." He sat looking into the fire. "One time I knew nothing of this. She was young, beautiful, laden with a thousand fragrances and charming playfulnesses. I lived beside the ocean—in a white villa among poplar trees. Across Tenebrosa Bay the Cape of Sad Remembrance reached into the ocean, and when sunset made the sky red and the mountains black, the cape seemed to sleep on the water like one of the ancient earth-gods ... All my life I spent here, and was as content as one may be while dying Earth spins out its last few courses.

  "One morning I looked up from my star-charts and saw Javanne walking through the portal. She was as young and slender as yourself. Her hair was a wonderful red, and strands fell before her shoulders. She was very beautiful, and—in her white gown—pure and innocent.

  "I loved her, and she said she loved me. And she gave me a band of black metal to wear. In my blindness I clasped it to my wrist, never recognizing it for the evil rune it was. And weeks of great delight passed. But presently I found that Javanne was one of dark urges that the love of man could never quell. And one midnight I found her in the embrace of a black naked demon, and the sight twisted my mind.

  "I stood back aghast. I was not seen, and I went slowly away. In the morning she came running across the terrace, smiling and happy, like a child. 'Leave me,' I told her. 'You are vile beyond calculation.' She uttered a word and the rune on my arm enslaved me. My mind was my own, but my body was hers, forced to obey her words.

  "And she made me tell what I had seen, and she revelled and jeered. And she put me through foul degradations, and called up things from Kalu, from Fauvune, from Jeldred, to mock and defile my body. She made me witness her play with these things, and when I pointed out the creature that sickened me the most, by magic she gave me its face, the face I wear now."

  "Can such women exist?" marvelled T'sais.

  "Indeed." The grave blue eyes studied her attentively. "At last one night while the demons tumbled me across the crags behind the hills, a flint tore the rune from my aim. I was free; I chanted a spell which sent the shapes shrieking off through the sky, and returned to the villa. "And I met Javanne of the red hair in the great hall, and her eyes were cool and innocent. I drew my knife to stab her throat, but she said 'Hold! Kill me and you wear your demon-face forever, for only I know how to change it.' So she ran blithely away from the villa, and I, unable to bear the sight of the place, came to the moors. And always I seek her, to regain my face."

  "Where is she now?" asked T'sais, whose troubles seemed small compared to those of Etarr the Masked.

  "Tomorrow night, I know where to find her. It is the night of the Black Sabbath—the night dedicated to evil since the dawn of Earth."

  "And you will attend this festival?"

  "Not as a celebrant—though in truth," said Etarr ruefully, "without my hood I would be one of the things who are there, and would pass unnoticed."

  T'sais shuddered and pressed back against the wall. Etarr saw the gesture and sighed..

  Another idea occurred to her. "With all the evil you have suffered, do you still find beauty in the world?"

  "To be sure," said Etarr. "See how these moors stretch, sheer and clean, of marvellous subtle color. See how the crags rise in grandeur, like the spine of the world. And you," he gazed into her face, "you are of a beauty surpassing all."

  "Surpassing Javanne?" asked T'sais, and looked in puzzlement as Etarr laughed.

  "Indeed surpassing Javanne," he assured her.

  T'sais' brain went off at another angle.

  "And Javanne, do you wish to revenge yourself against her?"

  "No," answered Etarr, eyes far away across the moors. "What is revenge? I care nothing for it. Soon, when the sun goes out, men will stare into the eternal night, and all will die, and Earth will bear its history, its ruins, the mountains worn to knolls— all into infinite dark. Why revenge?"

  Presently they left the cottage and wandered across the moor, Etarr trying to show her beauty—the slow river Scaum flowing through green rushes, clouds basking in the wan sunlight over the crags, a bird wheeling on spread wings, the wide smoky sweep of Modavna Moor. And T'sais strove always to make her brain see this beauty, and always did she fail. But she had learned to check the wild anger that the sights of the world had once aroused. And her craving to kill diminished, and her face rela
xed from its tense set.

  So they wandered on, each to his own thoughts. And they watched the sad glory of the sunset, and they saw the slow white stars raise in the heavens.

  "Are not the stars beautiful?" whispered Etarr through his black hood. "They have names older than man."

  And T'sais, finding only mournfulness in the sunset, and thinking the stars but small sparks in meaningless patterns, could not answer.

  "Surely two more unfortunate people do not exist," she sighed.

  Etarr said nothing. They walked on in silence. Suddenly he grasped her arm and pulled her low in the furze. Three great shapes went flapping across the afterglow. "The pelgrane!"

  They flew close overhead—gargoyle creatures, with wings creaking like rusty hinges. T'sais caught a glimpse of hard leathern body, great hatchet beak, leering eyes in a wizened face. She shrank against Etarr. The pelgrane flapped across the forest.

  Etarr laughed harshly. "You shrink from the visage of the pelgrane. The countenance I wear would put the pelgrane themselves to flight."

  The next morning he took her into the woods, and she found the trees mindful of Embelyon. They returned to the cottage in the early afternoon, and Etarr retired to his books.

  "I am no sorcerer," he told her regretfully. "I am acquainted with but a few simple spells. Yet I make occasional use of magic, which may ward me from danger tonight."

  "Tonight?" T'sais inquired vaguely, for she had forgotten.

  "Tonight is the Black Sabbath, and I must go to find Javanne."

  "I would go with you," said T'sais. "I would see the Black Sabbath, and Javanne also."

  Etarr assured her that the sights and sounds would horrify her and torment her brain. T'sais persisted, and Etarr finally allowed her to follow him, when two hours after sunset he set off in the direction of the crags.

  Over the heath, up scaly outcroppings, Etarr picked a way through the dark, with T'sais a slender shadow behind. A great scarp lay across their path. Into a black fissure, up a flight of stone steps, cut in the immemorial past, and out on top of the cliff, with Modavna Moor a black sea below.

  Now Etarr gestured T'sais to great caution. They stole through a gap between two towering rocks; concealed in the shadow, they surveyed the congress below.

  They were overlooking an amphitheater lit by two blazing fires. In the center rose a dais of stone, as high as a man. About the fire, about the dais, two-score figures, robed in gray monks-cloth, reeled sweatingly, their faces unseen.

  T'sais felt a premonitory chill. She looked at Etarr doubtfully.

  "Even here is beauty," he whispered. "Weird and grotesque, but a sight to enchant the mind." T'sais looked again in dim comprehension.

  More of the robed and cowled figures now were weaving before the fires; whence they came T'sais had not observed. It was evident that the festival had just begun, that the celebrants were only marshalling their passions. They pranced, shuffled, wove in and out, and presently began a muffled chant.

  The weaving and gesticulation became feverish, and the caped figures crowded more closely around the dais. And now one leapt up on the dais and doffed her robe —a middleaged witch of squat naked body with a great broad face. She had ecstatic glittering eyes, large features pumping in ceaseless idiotic motion. Mouth open, tongue protruding, stiff black hair like a furze bush, falling from side to side over her face as she shook her head, she danced a libidinous sidelong dance in the light of the fires, looking slyly over the gathering. The chant of the cavorting figures below swelled to a vile chorous, and overhead dark shapes appeared, settling with an evil sureness.

  The crowd began to slip from their robes, to reveal all manner of men and women, old and young—orange-haired witches of the Cobalt Mountain; forest sorcerers of Ascolais; white-bearded wizards of the Forlorn Land, with babbling small succubi. And one clad in splendid silk was the Prince Datul Omaet of Cansapara, the city of fallen pylons across the Melantine Gulf. And another creature of scales and staring eyes came of the lizardmen in the barren hills of South Almery. And these two girls, never apart, were Saponids, the near-extinct race from the northern tundras. The slender dark-eyed ones were necrophages from the Land of the Falling Wall. And the dreamy-eyed witch of the blue hair—she dwelt on the Cape of Sad Remembrance and waited at night on the beach for that which came in from the sea.

  And as the squat witch with the black ruff and swinging breasts danced, the communicants became exalted, raised their arms, contorted their bodies, pantomimed all the evil and perversion they could set mind to.

  Except one—a quiet figure still wrapped in her robe, moving slowly through the saturnalia with a wonderful grace. She stepped up on the dais now, let the robe slip from her body, and Javanne stood revealed in a clinging white gown of mist-stuff, gathered at the waist, fresh and chaste as salt spray. Shining red hair fell over her shoulders like a stream, and curling strands hung over her breasts. Her great gray eyes demure, strawberry mouth a little parted, she gazed back and forth across the crowd. They called and crowed, and Javanne, with tantalizing deliberation, moved her body.

  Javanne danced. She raised her arms, wove them down, twisting her body on slender white legs ... Javanne danced, her face shining with the most reckless passions. A dim shape dropped from above, a beautiful half-creature, and he joined his body to Javanne's in a fantastic embrace. And the crowd below cried, leapt, rolled, tossed, joined together in a swift culmination of their previous antics.

  From the rocks T'sais watched, mind under an intensity no normal brain could understand. But—in strange paradox—the sight and sound fascinated her, reached below the warp, touched the dark chords latent to humanity. Etarr looked down at her, eyes glowing blue fire, and she stared back in a tumult of contradictory emotions. He winced and turned away; at last she looked back to the orgy below—a drug-dream, a heaving of wild flesh in the darting firelight. A palpable aura was cast up, a weft in space meshed of varying depravities. And the demons swooped like birds alighting and joined the delirium. Foul face after face T'sais saw, and each burnt her brain until she thought she must scream and die—visages of leering eye, bulbed cheek, lunatic body, black faces of spiked nose, expressions outraging thought, writhing, hopping, crawling, the spew of the demon-lands. And one had a nose like a three-fold white worm, a mouth that was a putrefying blotch, a mottled jowl and black malformed forehead; the whole a thing of retch and horror. To this Etarr directed T'sais' gaze. She saw and her muscles knotted. "There," said Etarr in a muffled voice, "there is a face twin to the one below this hood." And T'sais, staring at Etarr's black concealment, shrank back.

  He chuckled weakly, bitterly ... After a moment T'sais reached out and touched his arm. "Etarr."

  He turned back to her. "Yes?"

  "My brain is flawed. I hate all I see. I cannot control my fears. Nevertheless that which underlies my brain— my blood, my body, my spirit—that which is me loves you, the you underneath the mask."

  Etarr studied the white face with a fierce intentness. "How can you love when you hate?"

  "I hate you with the hate that I give to all the world; I love you with a feeling nothing else arouses."

  Etarr turned away. "We make a strange pair . . ."

  The turmoil, the whimpering joinings of flesh and half-flesh, quieted. A tall man in a conical black hat appeared on the dais. He flung back his head, shouted spells to the sky, wove runes in the air with his arms. And as he chanted, high above a gigantic wavering figure began to form, tall, taller than the highest trees, taller than the sky. It shaped slowly, green mists folding and unfolding, and presently the outline was clear—the wavering shape of a woman, beautiful, grave, stately. The figure slowly became steady, glowing with an unearthly green light. She seemed to have golden hair, coiffed in the manner of a dim past, and her clothes were those of the ancients.

  The magician who had called her forth screamed, exulted, shouted vast windy taunts that rang past the crags.

  "She lives!" murmured T'sais aghas
t. "She moves! Who is she?"

  "It is Ethodea, goddess of mercy, from a time while the sun was still yellow," said Etarr.

  The magician flung out his arm and a great bolt of purple fire soared up through the sky and spattered against the dim green form. The calm face twisted in anguish, and the watching demons, witches and necrophages called out in glee. The magician on the dais flung out his arm again, and bolt after bolt of purple fire darted up to smite the captive goddess. The whoops and cries of those by the fire were terrible to hear.

  Then there came, the clear thin call of a bugle, cutting brilliantly through the exaultation. The revel jerked breathlessly alert.

  The bugle, musical and bright, rang again, louder, a sound alien to the place. And now, breasting over the crags like spume, charged a company of green-clad men, moving with fanatic resolve.

  "Valdaran!" cried the magician on the dais, and the green figure of Ethodea wavered and disappeared.

  Panic spread through the amphitheater. There were hoarse cries, a milling of lethargic bodies, a cloud of rising shapes as the demons sought flight. A few of the sorcerers stood boldly forth to chant spells of fire, dissolution, and paralysis against the assault, but there was strong counter-magic, and the invaders leapt unscathed into the amphitheater, vaulting the dais. Their swords rose and fell, hacking, slashing, stabbing without mercy or restraint.

  "The Green Legion of Valdaran the Just," whispered Etarr. "See, there he stands!" He pointed to a brooding black-clad figure on the crest of the ridge, watching all with a savage satisfaction.

  Nor did the demons escape. As they flapped through the night, great birds bestrode by men in green swooped down from the darkness. And these bore tubes which sprayed fans of galling light, and the demons who came within range gave terrible screams and toppled to earth, where they exploded in black dust.

  A few sorcerers had escaped to the crags, to dodge and hide among the shadows. T'sais and Etarr heard a scrabbling and panting below. Frantically clambering up the rocks was she whom Etarr had come seeking— Javanne, her red hair streaming back from her clear young face. Etarr made a leap, caught her, clamped her with strong arms.