by Mike Ashley
“You may need this,” was all she would say.
Fearfully, my sister and I ventured inside the house. The air was so thick with incense that we ran, choking, our eyes streaming, to open all the windows. Still, the burners hung everywhere and we dared not remove them.
Father lay on the couch in his workroom, bound in gauze. The priests had removed his eyes and placed amulets like huge coins in the empty sockets. I knew this was because they were afraid he would find his way back otherwise.
Hamakina and I had to get him down to the funeral boat. There was no one to help us. It was a terrible struggle. Hamakina was, after all, only eight, and I was fifteen. More than once I was afraid we would accidentally drop him. One of the gold amulets fell out. The empty socket gaped like a dry, red wound. I was almost sick when I had to put the amulet back.
The funeral boat was hung with gauze and charms. Incense rose from a silver cup set in the prow. One of the priests had painted a symbol, a serpent swallowing its tail, only broken, on the stern.
In the twilight of evening, Hamakina and I towed the funeral boat out into the deep water beyond the city, among the crooked masts of the wrecked ships, and beyond. The sky faded gently from red to black, streaked with the purple tatters of the last few storm clouds. An almost frigid wind blew out of the marshes. The stars gleamed, multiplied upon the rippling water.
I stood in my shallow boat and recited the service for the dead as best as I knew it, for my father whom I still loved and feared and did not understand. Then Hamakina let loose the line, and the funeral boat began to drift, first downstream toward the delta and the sea; but in the darkness, just before it disappeared, it was clearly going upstream. That was a good sign. It meant the boat had caught the black current, which carries the dead out of the world of the living, into the abode of the gods.
I thought, then, that I had time to mourn. When we got back, the house was merely empty. For the first time in many years, I was not afraid. It was almost bewildering. I slept quietly that night, I did not dream. Hamakina, too, was quiet.
The next morning an old woman who lived in one of the first houses at the other end of the wharf knocked on our door and said, “Children? Are you well? Do you have enough to eat?”
She left a basket of food for us.
That, too, was a good sign. It meant that the neighbors would eventually forgive us. They didn’t really think I was as my father had been.
I took the basket inside slowly, weeping half for joy. Life would be better. I remembered my promise to my mother. I would be different. The next day, surely, or the day after, Velachronos would take us back and we could resume our lessons.
Only that night Father came to me in a dream, and he stood before my bed wrapped in gauze, his face terrible behind the golden disks. His voice was – I cannot truly describe it – oily, like something dripping, something thick and vile; and the mere fact that such a sound could form itself into words seemed the greatest obscenity of all.
“I have delved too far into the darkness, my son, and my ending can only come with the final mystery. I seek it. My studies are almost complete. It is the culmination of all my labors. But there is one thing I need, one thing I have come back for.”
And in my dream I asked him, “Father, what is it?”
“Your sister.”
Then I awoke to the sound of Hamakina screaming. She reached for my hand, missed, caught the edge of the bed, and fell with a thump, dragging the covers onto the floor. I always kept a lit lantern on the stand by the bed. Now I opened the little metal door, flooding the room with light.
“Sekenre! Help me!”
I stared incredulously for just an instant as she hung suspended in the air, dangling, as if an invisible hand had seized her by the hair. Then she screamed once more and seemed to fly through the window. For a second she grabbed hold of the sill. She looked toward me. Our eyes met. But before I could do or say anything she was yanked loose and hauled through. I ran to the window and leaned out. There was no splash; the water below rippled gently. The night was still. Hamakina was simply gone.
II
In the morning, the third after Father’s death, I went to see the Sybil. There was nothing else to do. Everyone in the City of the Reeds knows that when the great crisis of your life comes, when there is truly no alternative but surrender and death and no risk is too great, then it is time to see the Sybil.
Fortunate is the man who has never called on her goes the old saying. But I was not fortunate.
She is called the Daughter of the River, and the Voice of Surat-Kemad, and the Mother of Death, and many other things. Who she is and what she is, no one has ever known; but she dwelt, fearsomely, the subject of countless terrifying stories, beneath the very heart of the city, among the pilings, where the log posts that hold up the great houses are thick as any forest. I had heard of the terrible price she was reputed to demand for her prophecies, and that those who visited her came away irreparably changed if they came away at all. Yet since time immemorial she had dwelt there, and for as long people went to listen to her words.
I went. For an offering, I had my father’s sword, the silver one the temple matron gave me.
It was in the earliest dawn twilight that I slipped once more through the trapdoor beneath our house. To the east, to my right, the sky was just beginning to brighten into gray, but before me, toward the heart of the city, night lingered.
I paddled amid the wreckage left by the recent storm: planks, bobbing barrels and trunks, and, once, a slowly rolling corpse the evatim had somehow overlooked. Further in, a huge house had fallen on its supports, now awash and broken, its windows gaping like black mouths. Later, when the gloom lessened a bit, I came upon a capsized ship jammed among the pillars like a vast, dead fish caught in reeds, its rigging trailing in the black water.
Just beyond it, the dark, irregular mass of the Sybil’s dwelling hung suspended, undamaged by the storm, of course.
There’s another story they tell about her: that the Sybil was never young, but was born an old hag in the blood of her mother’s death, and that she stood up in the pool of her mother’s blood, in the darkness at the world’s beginning; and she closed her hands together, then opened them, and columns of flame rose up from her palms.
My father used to do that trick, and once he grew terribly angry when I tried it, even though I’d just sat staring at my hands, opening and closing them without understanding or results. It was enough that I had made the attempt. He was perhaps even frightened at first, at the prospect that I might try again and eventually succeed. Then his face shifted from shock to cold fury. That was the only time in my life he ever beat me.
But when the Sybil made fire with her hands she rolled the flames into balls with her fingers. She breathed on one to make it dim, and released them both – the Sun and Moon. Then she drank long and deep of the Great River where her mother’s blood flowed into it, stood up by moonlight, and spat out the sparkling stars. And by starlight the multitude of gods awoke along the banks of the river and beheld the Earth for the first time.
As I gazed upon her house, I could almost believe the story. No, I did believe it. The Sybil’s house was more of an immense cocoon, like a spider’s web filled to overflowing with debris and dead things, spun and accumulated since the beginning of time. It hung from the underside of the city itself, its outer strands a tangle of ropes and netting and vines and fibers stretching out into the darkness in every direction until I could not tell where the enormous nest began or ended.
But the core of it hung down almost to the water, like a monstrous belly. I reached up and tied my boat to it, slipped Father’s sword under my belt, bound my robe up to free my legs, and started to climb.
The ropes trembled, whispering like muted thunder. Mud and debris fell in my face, splashing all around me. I hung on desperately, then shook my head to clear my eyes, and continued climbing.
Higher up, in complete darkness, I squeezed along a tunnel of r
otting wood, sometimes losing my grip and sliding backwards for a terrifying instant before I found another hold. The darkness was . . . heavy. I had the impression of an endless mass of debris in all directions, shifting, grinding as I wriggled through it. Sometimes there was an overwhelming stench of decay.
I crawled over the upturned hull of a boat. It swayed gently beneath my weight. Something soft fell, then slithered against its side. All the while my hands and bare feet scraped desperately for purchase against the rotting wood.
Then came more rope, more netting, and in the dimmest twilight I was in a chamber where trunks, wicker baskets, and heavy clay jugs all heaved and crashed together as I crawled among them.
Serpents and fishes writhed beneath my touch amid reeking slime.
And yet again in utter darkness I made my way on hands and knees across a seemingly solid, wooden floor. Then the boards snapped beneath me and I tumbled screaming amid ropes and wood and what touch alone told me were hundreds of human bones. I came to rest on heaving netting with a skull in my lap and bones rattling down over my bare legs. I threw the skull away and tried to jump up, but my feet slid through the net and I felt only empty space below.
I dangled there, clinging desperately to the rope netting. It broke and I was left screaming once more, swinging in the darkness while an avalanche of bones splashed into the water far below.
One further story I’d heard came to me just then: that when someone drowns in the river, the evatim eat his flesh, but the bones go to the Sybil, who divines fortunes from them.
So it seemed.
At precisely this point she called out to me, and her voice was like an autumn wind rattling in dead reeds.
“Son of Vashtem.”
I clung tighter to the remnants of the net, gulped, and called up into the darkness.
“I’m here.”
“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, I await your coming.”
I was so startled I nearly let go.
“But I’m not a sorcerer!”
“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer.”
I started climbing once more, all the while telling her about myself in broken, panting speech. Still a few bones fell, suddenly out of the darkness, striking me on the head as if in sarcastic reply to what I gasped out. But still I told her how I had never done any magic myself, how I had promised my mother never to be like my father, how I was apprenticed to the learned Velachronos, how I was going to be a scribe first, then maybe write books of my own, if only Velachronos would take me back when this was all over.
Then the Sybil’s face appeared to me suddenly in the darkness above, like a full moon from behind a cloud. Her face was pale and round, her eyes inexpressibly black, and I think her skin did glow faintly.
And she said to me, laughing gently, “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you’re arguing with the dread Sybil. Now is that a brave thing to do, or just foolish?”
I stopped, swinging gently from side to side on the ropes.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“What you mean is not necessarily what you do, Sekenre. Whether or not you’re sorry afterwards means nothing at all. There. I have spoken your name once. Sekenre. I have spoken it twice. Do you know what happens if I speak it three times?”
I said meekly, “No, Great Sybil.”
“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, come up and sit before me. Do not be afraid.”
I climbed up to where she was. I could barely make out a wooden shelf or ledge, covered with bones and debris. I reached out gingerly with one foot and my toes found, surprisingly, solid, dry planking. I let go of the ropes and sat. The Sybil reached up and opened the door of a box-lantern, then of another, and another. I thought of lazy beasts winking themselves awake.
Now light and shadow flickered in the tiny, low-ceilinged room. The Sybil sat cross-legged, a blanket with gleaming embroidery draped over her knees. A man-headed serpent with scales like silver coins lay curled in her lap. Once it hissed and she leaned low while it whispered in her ear. Silence followed. She gazed into my eyes for a long time.
I held out my father’s sword.
“Lady, this is all I have to offer—”
She hissed, just like the serpent, and for an instant seemed startled, even afraid. She waved the sword away.
“Sekenre, you are interrupting the Sybil. Now, again, is that brave or just foolishness?”
There. She had spoken my name thrice. I felt an instant of sheer terror. But nothing happened. She laughed again, and her laugh was a human one, almost kindly.
“A most inappropriate gift, sorcerer, son of sorcerer.”
“I don’t understand . . . I’m sorry, Lady.”
“Sekenre, do you know what that sword is?”
“It was my father’s.”
“It is the sword of a Knight Inquisitor. Your father tried to deny what he was, even to himself. So he joined a holy order, an order of strictest discipline, devoted to the destruction of all things of darkness, all the wild things, witches, sorcerers, even the wild gods. He was like you, boy, at your age. He wanted so much to do the right thing. For all the good it did him. In the end, he only had the sword.”
“Lady, I have nothing else—”
“Sekenre – there, I said it again. You are very special. The path before you is very special. Your future is not a matter of how many times I speak your name. Keep the sword. You shall need it. I require no payment from you, not yet anyway.”
“Will you require it later, Great Sybil?”
She leaned forward, and I saw that her teeth were sharp and pointed. Her breath smelled of river mud.
“Your entire life shall be payment enough. All things come to me in proper time, even as you, I think, come to me now, when your need is greatest.”
Then I began to tell her why I had come, about Father, and what had happened to Hamakina.
“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you are lecturing the Sybil. Brave or foolish?”
I wept. “Please, Great Lady . . . I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I want to do the right thing. Please don’t be angry. Tell me what to do.”
“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, everything you do is the correct thing, part of the great pattern which I observe, which I weave, which I prophesy. At each new turning of your life the pattern is made anew. All the meanings are changed. Your father understood that, when he came back from beyond the sea, no longer a Knight Inquisitor because he knew too much of sorcery. He had become a sorcerer by fighting sorcery. He was like a doctor who contracts the patient’s disease. His knowledge was like a door that has been opened and can never be closed again. A door. In his mind.”
“No,” I said softly. “I will not be like him.”
“Hear then the prophecy of the Sybil, sorcerer, son of sorcerer. You shall journey into the very belly of the beast, into the mouth of the God Who Devours.”
“Lady, we are all on a journey in this life, and when we die—”
“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, do you accept the words of the Sybil of your own will, as a gift given?”
I was afraid to ask her what would happen if I refused. It wasn’t much of a choice.
“Lady, I accept.”
“It is of your will then. If you stray from your path, if you step aside, that, too, changes the weaving of all lives.”
“Lady, I only want to get my sister back and—”
“Then accept these too.”
She pressed something into my hand. Her touch was cold and hard, like living iron. The serpent thing in her lap hissed, almost forming words. I held my open hand up to one of the lanterns and saw two grave coins on my palm.
“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, on this day you are a man. Your father did not raise you to manhood before he left you. Therefore I must perform the rite.”
The serpent thing vanished into her clothing. She rose, her movement fluid as smoke. I could only see her face and hands, like lanterns themselves floating in the half-light. She took a silver band and bound my hair as th
e men of the city bind it. She gave me a pair of baggy trousers such as the men of the city wear. I put them on. They were much too long. I rolled them up to my knees.
“They used to belong to a pirate,” she said. “He won’t be needing them now.”
She rummaged around among the debris and produced a single boot. I tried to put it on. It was nearly twice the size of my foot.
She sighed. “Always the pattern changes. I’m sure it’s portentous. Never mind.”
She took the boot from me and threw it aside.
Then she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. The touch of her lips was so cold it burned.
“Now you are marked by the Sybil, sorcerer, son of sorcerer, and by that mark men will know you. Because you are marked, you may call on me three times, and I shall hear you and reply. But beware. If you ask my favor more than that, I shall own you, like all the things in my house. That is the price I ask of you.”
She gave me a water bottle and a leather bag with food in it – cheese, bread, and dried fish – and told me to put the grave coins in the bag too so I wouldn’t lose them. The bag had a long cord. I slipped it over my neck. I hung the bottle from the loose belt I wore outside my robe.
My forehead was numb where she had kissed me. I reached up and felt the spot. It was cold as ice.
“Now go, sorcerer, son of sorcerer, into the very jaws of the Devourer, of your own will. Go, as the Sybil has prophesied, right now—”
She stamped her foot once. I screamed as the floor swung away beneath me like a trapdoor and I was falling endlessly down amid glowing white bones and debris and the Sybil’s tumbling lamps. I saw her face once, far above, streaking away in the darkness like a shooting star.
I hit the water hard and sank deep, but somehow reached the surface again, lungs bursting. I started to swim. The sword cut my legs. The bag choked me. I almost threw them both away, but did not, and slowly, clumsily made my back to where I thought my boat waited. I looked around fearfully for the evatim, which surely haunted this place. Above, the house of the Sybil was silent and dark.
