by Mike Ashley
“I think he did,” said Taine, staring at the Holy Grail resting on the desk top between them. “In that last instant, I believe he realized the trap into which he had fallen. But, by then, holding the Cup, there was nothing he could do. In a way, it was a grim sort of justice.”
Ashmedai shrugged and reached for the Cup. “The fools never understand that the Grail turns all that come in contact with it pure. Including those men foolish enough to hold it.”
Taine nodded, his gaze fixed on the Chalice. “The conflict in their souls destroyed them both. Repentance was not enough. Scaglia could no longer serve evil, so he tried to destroy it. And King Wedo, overwhelmed by his monstrous crimes, resorted to suicide.”
The detective paused. “Do you dare risk taking it? I carried it here in a box I discovered in King Wedo’s office. I never touched it myself.”
“The spell wears off quickly,” said Ashmedai confidently, lifting the Grail. “Joseph was no fool when he covered the Cup in silver. No ordinary mortal could touch the Chalice and live with himself afterwards. No man is that pure.”
The bearded man examined the Cup carefully, a wistful smile playing across his lips. “So many years – so many years.”
“Now that you have it . . .” began Taine.
“The Grail goes into my collection,” replied Ashmedai, his gaze still fixed on the Cup. “Where it will remain out of the sight of man until needed.”
“You called it the Cup of Treachery?” said Taine, puzzled. In all of his studies of the occult, he had never encountered the phrase before.
Ashmedai lowered the Chalice to the desk. Unseen eyes stared at Taine from behind dark lenses.
“The Chalice was a gift to Christ from one of his disciples,” said the bearded man. His voice sounded weary, terribly so. “One who doubted and thought to use the Grail as a final test. And thus began a tale of treachery – and eternal damnation.”
Ashmedai sighed. “Now do you understand?”
“Yes,” answered Taine, no longer curious to see the eyes behind those glasses.
Darrell Schweitzer
There is a small but very select group of fantasy writers whom I regard as the inheritors of one of the greatest of all fantasists, Lord Dunsany. Dunsany was supreme at creating believable magical worlds inhabited not necessarily by heroes, but by villains, minor gods and mischief-makers. What’s more he could invent names for these people that were so beautifully out of this world. Like the dragon Tharagavverug and the magician Allathurion in “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”. Many have tried to imitate Dunsany but few have succeeded. Amongst Dunsany’s inheritors have been Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith (whom we met earlier), Michael Shea and today’s supreme stylist, Darrell Schweitzer (b. 1952). Since 1991, Schweitzer has been producing an occasional series of stories about the sorcerer Sekenre. The following, which was the first, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and was reworked to form the start of the novel The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995).
Surely Surat-Kemad is the greatest of the gods, for he is lord of both the living and the dead. The Great River flows from his mouth; the River is the voice and word of Surat-Kemad, and all life arises from the River. The dead return to Surat-Kemad, upon the waters or beneath them, borne by some secret current, back into the belly of the god. We are reminded of Surat-Kemad daily, for he made the crocodile in his own image.
I, Sekenre, son of Vashtem the sorcerer, tell you this because it is true.
1
That my father was a magician I knew from earliest childhood. Did he not speak to the winds and the waters? I heard him do so many times, late at night. Could he not make fire leap out of his hands, merely by folding and unfolding them? Yes, and he never burned himself, for the fire was cold, like river water in the winter.
Once he opened his hands to reveal a brilliant, scarlet butterfly, made of paper and wire but alive. It flew around the house for a month. No one could catch it. I cried when it died and the light went out of its wings, leaving it no more than a trace of ash.
He made a different kind of magic with his stories. There was one in particular that went on and on, about a young heron who was cast out of his nest by the other birds because he had short legs, and no beak or feathers. He could pass for human, for all that he wasn’t. So he wandered in a lonely exile and had many adventures, in far lands, among the gods, among the ghosts in the land of the dead. Every evening for almost a year, Father whispered more of the story to me as if it were a special secret between the two of us. I never told it to anyone else.
Mother made things too, but not fire out of her hands, nor anything that truly lived. She built hevats, those assemblages of wood and wire and paper for which the City of the Reeds is famous, sometimes little figures that dangled from sticks and seemed to come alive when the wind struck them, sometimes great tangles of ships and cities and stars and mountains which hung from the ceiling and turned slowly in a vastly intricate, endless dance.
Then a fever came over her one summer and she spent weeks working on a single, articulated image. No one could stop her. Father would put her to bed but she would get up again in her sleep and work on the thing some more, until a vast snaky creature of painted wooden scales writhed throughout every room of the house, suspended on strings just below the ceiling. At last she put a face on it – half a man, half a crocodile – and even I, six years old at the time, knew it to be an image of Surat-Kemad, the God Who Devours.
When the wind blew, the image writhed and spoke. Mother screamed and fell to the floor. Later, the thing was merely gone. No one would tell me what had become of it. When Mother recovered she could not recall anything that had happened to her.
One evening by a late fire, she explained that it had been a kind of prophecy, and when the spirit has departed, the seer is no more than an empty glove cast aside by some god. She had no idea what it meant, merely that a god had spoken through her.
I think even Father was frightened when she said that.
He told me one more installment of the story of the heron boy the same night. Then the spirit of that, too, left him.
Father must have been the greatest magician in all Reedland, for our house was never empty in the early days. People came from all over the city, and from the marshlands; some journeyed for days on the Great River to buy potions and philtres or have their fortunes told. Mother sometimes sold them hevats, sacred ones for devotions, or memorials for the dead, or just toys.
I didn’t think of myself as any different from other boys. One of my friends was the son of a fisherman, another of a paper-maker. I was the son of a magician, just another child.
But in the story, the bird-boy thought he was a heron –
As I grew older, Father became more secretive, and the customers came no further than the door. Bottles were passed out to them. Then they stopped coming.
Suddenly the house was empty. I heard strange noises in the night. In the earliest hours of the morning, Father began to receive certain visitors again. I think he summoned them against their will. They did not come to buy. Then Mother, my sister Hamakina, and I were locked in the bedroom, forbidden to emerge.
Once I peeked out between two loose panels in the door and saw a bent, skeletal figure in the dim lamplight of the hallway outside, a visitor who stank like something long decayed and dripped with the water from the river below our house.
Suddenly the visitor glared directly at me as if he had known I was there all along, and I turned away with a stifled yelp. The memory of that horrible, sunken face stayed with me in my dreams for a long time.
I was ten. Hamakina was just three. Mother’s hair was starting to go gray. I think the darkness began that year. Slowly, inexorably, Father became, not a magician who worked wonders, but a sorcerer, to be feared.
Our house stood at the very edge of the City of the Reeds, where the great marsh began. It was a vast place, which had belonged to a priest before Father bought it, a pile of wooden domes and someti
mes tilted boxlike rooms and gaping windows fashioned to look like eyes. The house stood on log pilings at the end of a long wharf, otherwise not a part of the city at all. Walk along that wharf the other way and you came to street after street of old houses, some of them empty, then to the square of the fishmongers, then to the street of scribes and paper-makers, and finally to the great docks where the ships of the river rested at their moorings like dozing whales.
Beneath our house was a floating dock where I could sit and gaze underneath the city. The stilts and logs and pilings were like a forest stretched out before me, dark and endlessly mysterious.
Sometimes the other boys and I would paddle our shallow boats into that darkness, and on some forgotten dock or rubbish heap or sandbank we’d play our secret games; and then the others always wanted me to do magic.
If I could, I refused with great and mysterious dignity to divulge awesome mysteries I actually knew no more about than they. Sometimes I did a little trick of sleight-of-hand, but mostly I just disappointed them.
Still, they tolerated me, hoping I would reveal more, and also because they were afraid of Father. Later, when the darkness began, they feared him even more; and when I wandered in the gloom beneath the city, paddling among the endless wooden pillars in my little boat, I was alone.
I could not understand it then, but Father and Mother quarrelled more, until in the end, I think, she too was afraid of him. She made me swear once never to become like my father, “never, never do what he has done,” and I swore by the holy name of Surat-Kemad without really knowing what I was promising not to do.
Then one night when I was fourteen, I woke up suddenly and heard my mother screaming and my father’s angry shouts. His voice was shrill, distorted, barely human at times, and I thought he was cursing her in some language I did not know. Then came a crash, pottery and loose wood falling, and silence.
Hamakina sat up beside me in bed.
“Oh, Sekenre, what is it?”
“Quiet,” I said. “I don’t know.”
Then we heard heavy footsteps, and the bedroom door swung inward. Father stood in the doorway, his face pale, his eyes wide and strange, a lantern in his upraised hand. Hamakina turned to avoid his gaze.
He remained there for a minute as if he hadn’t seen us, and slowly the expression on his face softened. He seemed to be remembering something, as if he were waking up from a trance. Then he spoke, his voice faltering.
“Son, I’ve had a vision from the gods, but it is your vision, by which you will become a man and know what your life is to be.”
I was more bewildered than frightened. I got out of bed. The wooden floor was smooth and cold beneath my bare feet.
Father was forcing himself to be calm. He clung to the edge of the doorway and trembled. He was trying to say something more, but no words came, and his eyes were wide and wild again.
“Now?” I asked without realizing what I was saying.
Father strode forward. He seized me roughly by my robe. Hamakina whimpered, but he ignored her.
“The gods don’t send visions just when it’s convenient. Now. You must go into the marshes right now, and the vision will come to you. Remain there until dawn.”
He dragged me from the room. I glanced back once at my sister, but Father merely closed the door behind me and barred it from the outside, locking her in. He blew out his lantern.
The house was entirely dark and smelled of river mud and worse. There was a trace of something burning, and of corruption.
Father raised a trapdoor. Below floated the dock where all our boats were moored.
“Down you go. Now.”
I groped my way down, fearfully, shivering. It was early in the spring. The rains were nearly over, but not quite, and the air was cold and full of spray. Father closed the trapdoor over my head. I found my boat and got in, and sat there in the darkness cross-legged, my feet drawn up under my robe. Something splashed nearby once, twice. I sat very still, clutching my paddle firmly, ready to strike at I knew not what.
Slowly the darkness lessened. Out beyond the marshes, the moon peered through thinning clouds. The water gleamed silver and black, waves and shadow. And it was then that I made out what seemed to be hundreds of crocodiles drifting in the water around me, their snouts barely breaking the surface, their eyes sparkling in the dim moonlight.
It was all I could do not to scream, to keep silent. It was the beginning of my vision, I knew, for these beasts could easily have tipped over my boat and devoured me. In any case, there were too many of them for them to be natural creatures.
It was as I leaned over to slip off my mooring line that I saw, quite clearly, that they were not even crocodiles. Their bodies were human, their backs and buttocks as pale as the flesh of drowned men. These were the evatim, the messengers of the river god. No one ever saw them, I’d always been told, save when they are about to die, or else when the god wishes to speak.
So my father had been telling the truth. There was a vision. Or I was going to die, then and there.
I paddled a short distance off, very carefully. The evatim parted before me. The tip of my paddle never touched one. Behind me, in the darkness, I heard someone coming down the ladder onto the dock. Then something heavy splashed in the water. The evatim hissed, all as one. It was like the rising of a great wind.
I paddled for what felt like hours among the posts and pillars and stilts, groping my way with my paddle sometimes, until at last I came to open, deep water. I let the current take me a short distance, and looked back at the City of the Reeds where it crouched amid the marsh like a huge, slumbering beast. Here and there watchlamps flickered, but the city was dark. No one goes outdoors in the city at night: because the mosquitoes swarm in clouds at sunset, thick as smoke; because the marsh is full of ghosts who rise up out of the black mud like mist; but mostly for fear of the evatim, the crocodile-headed servants of Surat-Kemad, who crawl out of the water in the darkness and walk like men through the empty streets, their heavy tails dragging.
Where the city reached into deep water, ships lay at anchor, bulging, ornately-painted vessels come upriver from the City of the Delta. Many were ablaze with lights, and from them sounded music and laughter. The foreign sailors do not know our ways or share our fears.
In the City of the Reeds, all men who are not beggars wear trousers and leather shoes. Children wear loose robes and go barefoot. On the very few cold days they either wrap their feet in rags or stay indoors. When a boy becomes a man, his father gives him shoes. It is an ancient custom. No one knows the reason for it.
Father had hurried me out of the house without even a cloak. So I passed the night in quiet misery, my teeth chattering, my hands and feet numb, the cold air burning inside my chest.
As best I could, I steered for the shallows, in among the grasses and reeds, making my way from one patch of open water to the next, ducking low beneath vines, sometimes forcing my way through with my paddle.
A vision of sorts came to me, but all disjointed. I did not understand what the god was trying to say.
The moon seemed to set very suddenly. The river swallowed it, and for an instant moonlight writhed on the water like Mother’s thousand-jointed crocodile image somehow glowing with light.
I set my paddle down in the bottom of the boat and leaned over, trying to make out the thing’s face. But I only saw muddy water. Around me, dead reeds towered like iron rods. I let the boat drift. I saw a crocodile once, huge and ancient and sluggish with the cold, drifting like a log. But it was merely a beast and not one of the evatim.
A bit later I sat in a stagnant pool surrounded by sleeping white ducks floating like puffs of cotton on the black water. Night birds cried out, but I had no message from them.
I watched the stars, and by the turning of the heavens I knew it was no more than an hour before dawn. I despaired then and called out to Surat-Kemad to send me my vision. I did not doubt that it would come from him, not from some other god.
At
the same time, I was afraid, for I had made no preparation, no sacrifice.
But Surat-Kemad, he of the monstrous jaws, was not angry, and the vision came.
The light rain had stopped, but the air was colder yet, and, trembling and damp, I huddled in the bottom of my boat, both hands against my chest, clutching my paddle. Perhaps I slept. But, very gingerly, someone touched me on the shoulder.
I sat up in alarm, but the stranger held up a finger, indicating that I should be silent. I could not see his face. He wore a silver mask of the Moon, mottled and rough, with rays around the edges. His white, ankle-length robe flapped gently in the frigid breeze.
He motioned me to follow, and I did, silently dipping my paddle into the water. The stranger walked barefoot on the surface, ripples spreading with every step.
We travelled for a long time through a maze of open pools and tufts of grass, among the dead reeds, until we came to a half-submerged ruin of a tower, no more than a black, empty shell covered with mud and vines.
Then hundreds of other robed, masked figures emerged from the marsh, not walking on the water as had my guide, but crawling, their movement a curious waddle, their bodies swaying from side to side as does that of a crocodile when it comes out on land. I watched in amazement as they gathered around us, bowing low at the upright man’s feet, as if in supplication.
He merely spread his hands and wept.
Then I recalled one of my father’s stories, about a proud king, whose palace was more resplendent than the sun, of whom the gods were jealous. One day a crocodile-headed messenger came into the glittering court and hissed, “My master summons you, O King, as he summons all.” But the king, in his pride, bade his guards beat the messenger and throw him into the river whence he came, for the king did not fear the gods.
