The hilt was sticking out from beneath the pillow. Delicately, I took hold of it and inched it away. The task was easier than I had expected. The thing slid out of a scabbard, which remained beneath the pillow. Once I froze in abject terror as my victim’s eyelids fluttered, but he did not wake.
“Do what you must!”
I felt as if I were about to slay myself, as if the first prick of the blade would burst me like a bubble. But then I told myself, well, I had been created for this. What years I had lived, I had lived. What man can avoid his appointed doom? My life is done, I thought. There are more painful ways to die than merely winking out of existence.
I took the sleeping man firmly by the hair, and quickly, savagely, before he could react, I slashed his throat so deeply that I felt the blade touch his neck bone.
I winced, and braced myself for oblivion, but nothing happened.
Nothing.
There was no blood from the open throat. Only a little dust dribbled from the wound, and the body deflated, like a punctured waterbag, until it was no more than a crumpled mass.
The one who had brought me here ascended the dais again.
“What does this mean?” I asked. “Why doesn’t he die like a man?”
“I can explain. Give me the knife.” Without thinking, I gave it to him.
He slammed it hilt-deep into my heart. There was—
—I—
—the beginning of pain; a scream, my knees like running sand—
—stood still. He held me up, impaled on the blade, frozen forever in an impossible dance of death.
“Dadar,” he said. “I can explain. He does not die like a man because he is not a man. He is a thing like a dadar, like you. A reflection of a reflection. You have killed one of your own number. Dadar, it should be all clear to you when you understand that I am Emdo Wesa, the one my brother sent you to murder.”
* * * *
Hearing came first. Footsteps. The sound of a small metal instrument being dropped into a glass jar. Breathing. Slowly, images coalesced out of the air. Bright areas became torches set in a wall. A drifting smear became a more unified shape, and wore the face of Emdo Wesa, whom I had known as Kabor Asha the Zaborman.
Was he with me, even beyond death?
I shook my head to clear it, and was aware of my body. I was bound spread-eagled to a table, and was stripped to the waist. Emdo Wesa, holding a sharp knife, bent over me. Impossibly, because I felt no pain, there was an immense gaping hole in my chest. I felt sure he could have ducked his head into it. And yet, I was numb, and blood did not spurt out. I watched almost with disinterest, as if all were part of a remote pageant performed by spirits in some other plane of existence. In the shadows.
“You know,” laughed the wizard, seeing that I was awake, “you could say it was obvious from the beginning that my brother had a hand in this.”
He put down the knife and reached into the cavity. His gloves were off and I could see that he indeed lacked three fingers. In their place light flickered.
He drew out a severed hand, totally covered with blood. From out of my chest. He took a ring off one of the fingers, then threw the hand away like so much garbage.
“Yes,” he said, examining the ring. “It is my brother’s hand. His last one. He used the other to make another dadar. How long ago was that? I don’t remember. Oh, I should tell you something. To make a dadar, the wizard must cut off a piece of his living flesh. You have to amputate something. Dadars are not made frivolously. So far I have had but three enemies I could not otherwise deal with, and each cost me a finger to make a dadar. But my brother, I believe, is more quarrelsome. He has lots of enemies. He has changed himself hideously. I won’t tell you the cause of our feud, because it would go on an on, and I don’t care to spend that much time doing so, but I will say this. The world, all the worlds, would be better off without him. He is a monster.”
“M—monster …”
Emdo Wesa smiled and said softly. “Don’t strain yourself, my friend. Don’t try to speak.”
“Who…? Friend…?”
“Now you have a good mind, for a dadar. I must compliment my brother on his workmanship. Or you shall, when you see him. You are so full of questions. Let me set your mind at rest and answer a few. First, know that sorcery changes the sorcerer. Every act makes him a little less a part of the human world. It has to be done with moderation. Otherwise, like my brother, one will drift like an anchorless ship, far, far into strangeness. He has. I don’t think his mind works at all like a human one anymore. But he is still clever. Why did he create you, and let you live unsuspecting for forty-five years before using you? It is because I have long journeyed outside of time, and forty-five years in this world has no duration outside. When I looked back into time, to see how things were going, at a point years ahead of where I departed, I saw you killing me in my sleep. It was no illusion, but a true thing. So I had to arrange for another to die in my place. That was what I had seen. Then I was able to come back some days before the event, encounter you, and make sure things occurred as planned. Thus my brother was thwarted.”
Fear, nausea, and delirium washed over me. I felt like I would vomit out my insides, but nothing came. I screamed my wife’s name.
“Tamda is not with you anymore,” said Emdo Wesa. “It is useless to call her.”
He reached somewhere beyond the range of vision and came back with a still beating heart in his hands.
“No…Tamda! You—monster!”
“Calm yourself. Calm yourself. I didn’t say where I got this. It is for you, that you might live.” He placed it in my chest. “You don’t think I…no, how could you? I am not some inhuman fiend like my brother. I am a man, like anyone else. I am human. I have feelings. I can perceive beauty, know sorrow and joy. I haven’t lost that. I am moved by compassion. I know what love is, even the love of a dadar.”
His breath came out like smoke. By the light of the torches I could see that what I had taken to be tight-fitting scale armor was really his flesh. His three ghostly fingers flickered as he sewed up the wound.
I screamed again.
He walked along the table, toward my face, the knife in hand once more.
* * * *
I thought that my being on the hill outside the shadow city, with Emdo Wesa beside me, was all a dream, something conjured by my desperate mind in my last moments of life. But the scene had duration, and I felt hard ground beneath me, and I touched my body and found that it was real. I groped under my shirt and encountered a tender spot, where the wound had been closed and still had a thread holding it. Much to my surprise I also encountered the dagger my wife had given me. Obviously my new master had nothing to fear from ordinary blades.
One side of my face tingled. There was something subtly wrong with my vision, as if one eye perceived things more intensely than did the other.
I looked at Emdo Wesa. He had a bandage over one side of his face, covering an eye.
Again I was a dadar.
“I am returning you to my brother,” he said. “I shall see everything you see and do. When the time comes, I shall direct you. When your task is completed, I promise you, I shall release you.”
“How can I ever believe that?”
“Why, you have my word, as a human being.”
* * * *
There is another gap in my memory here. I made to answer, when I looked up I saw a clear, blue sky. Surf crashed nearby, the air was filled with spray. I was no longer in the shadow, but on a beach somewhere in the real world, on a bright, day, and the wizard was no longer with me.
I had come to the ocean. I had looked upon lakes before, and but never the ocean. I had only heard of it, from those who had travelled far. Water stretched to the horizon, a vast array of whitecapped waves marching toward me like the ranks of endless army, only to break into foam at my feet. The wonder of it almost overcame the terror of what had gone before. For this, it was almost worth what I had endured. Perhaps, I thought, I had go
ne mad, and had imagined all that had gone before in my madness, and in my distracted state wandered over the world until at last I came to the shore of the sea. That was how I had come here.
But then I saw that there were no footsteps in the sand. I walked forward a step, and then there was a single set. I was not wet, so I had not come out of the waves, to have my tracks washed away behind me. No, I had been deposited here, out of the air.
When I pulled up my shirt, I saw the closed wound on my chest, red and swollen, the end of the black thread sticking out of it. It hurt when I breathed deeply.
Everything was true. I could not weep. All the salt water in creation was before me, so what would my tears amount to? Besides, I had expended them all before.
Anyway, a dadar is not a man, and his tears are all illusions.
I prayed to the bones of the Goddess, wherever they might be, and I called on the Bright Powers, repeating the names of them that I knew. But what are the prayers of a dadar?
Then I knelt down and began to draw in the wet sand. My hand moved by itself. Only when I realized what I was doing did I take out my dagger and use it as a stylus.
* * * *
I made a crude outline. It was only a suggestion of a shape, and there were no colors to it, of course, but somehow this act set my senses spreading like smoke over the land and sea. I felt every wave in its rising, every grain of sand pressing against the rest, here concealing a shell, there a stone. I felt the chill of the great depths and the crushing currents beyond the reach of the sun. I heard the long and ancient song of the whales, a fragment of that single, endless poem which the leviathans have called out to one another since the beginning of the world. I seemed to pass out of my body for a while. There was no sensation. Then came a vague sense of direction, as if I were being led by invisible hands to the edge of an abyss.
I became aware of the drawing again. It had grown far more elaborate. My gaze drifted from it to the sky, and I saw that the sky was no longer blue, but a vivid, burning red, and I looked out over the ocean, which was now an ocean of blood, new and thick and spurting from some torn artery as huge as creation.
An object broke the surface near the horizon. It was little more than a speck, but it grew larger as it neared me, moving like a ship even though it had no sail or oarsmen to propel it. It was a rectangular box, rising and falling in the waves of blood, drawing ever nearer the shore, until I could discern quite clearly that it was a coffin of intricate and antique workmanship, embossed in gold and covered with strange hieroglyphs.
My will was not my own. Of its own volition my body rose and waded into the sea, till blood rose above my waist. My mind wanted to flee, but remained there, helpless, until the coffin was within arm’s reach. Then it ceased to rise and fall; but remained perfectly still, oblivious to the movement of the waves around it.
I watched with the terror of inevitability, like some prey cornered by the hunter when there is no further place to run, as the lid silently rose. Within was darkness, not merely an absence of light, but a living, substantial thing.
And slowly this darkness faded, and my new eye penetrated it. I saw Etash Wesa, the enemy against whom I had been sent, the one who had remained on earth for so long, never venturing out of time, the one who had fought so many feuds with so many enemies.
Indeed, by the look of him, Etash Wesa had made many, many dadars. His almost shapeless pink bulk floated inside the coffin, awash in blood, slowly turning over. In the gouged-out bulk which had been a head, there was an opening—I couldn’t call it a mouth—which mewed and babbled and spat blood when it rose above the surface. One stubby remnant of an arm twitched like a useless flipper. And yet, this was no helpless thing. Somehow I knew it was almost infinitely aware and powerful, and that it had grown far, far away from the humanity that spawned it, until it no longer saw or felt as men did. I think it touched my mind and its presence was an intense, exquisite torture beyond the ability of words to describe or the mind to conceive. No one thought can encompass the mind of Etash Wesa.
In its twisted way, with something other than a voice, it seemed to be saying, “My dadar? Where is my dadar? I have been separated from it, and yet I shall find it.”
The greatest terror of all those I had known was that Etash Wesa would indeed find me. I could look on him no more. Somehow I could move again. Screaming, I stumbled onto the beach. I obliterated the drawing. I covered my eyes with my hands. I pounded my head to drive out the memory of what I had seen, but still the red sky looked down on me, the sea of blood washed at my feet, and the thing in the coffin murmured.
I picked up my knife out of the sand. If I lived not another instant it would be preferable to living in the sight of Etash Wesa. What did I care of my promised freedom? What did I care of strange wars between wizards? What did I care, even if the world would be better off rid of Etash Wesa?
I did what I had to. I gouged out the eye Emdo had given me. Had I burst like a bubble then, it would have been a blessed escape.
I heard Emdo’s voice for an instant: “No! Stop!” Then he was gone. The pain was real. The blood ran down my face. I gasped, fell onto the sand, and lay there, panting, bleeding, waiting for the end to come.
I waited for a long time. The sun set and the stars came out. The salt tide went out and came back in again, nudging seaweed against my feet.
The rest is a muddle, a fever dream within a dream within a dream. I think someone found me. I remember walking along a road for a time. There was a bandage over my empty socket. There were a few words, a song, a carriage wheel creaking and rustling through dry leaves. I think I lay for a day beneath the hot sun in the middle of a harvested field. A boy and several dogs came upon me, then ran away in fright when I sat up.
Somehow I came to Ai Hanlo, the real city, where the Guardian rules, where the bones of the Goddess lie in holy splendor at the core of Ai Hanlo Mountain. I remembered slowly—my mind was clouded, my thoughts like pale blossoms drifting to the surface—that my son was here, that he had come to serve the Religion. I went to the square of the mendicants, beneath the wall where the Guardian comes all draped in gold and silver to bless the crowds. I slept with the sick and the lame. Somebody stole my boots. So, barefoot, tattered, stinking, my face a running sore, I went to the gate of the inner city and demanded to see my son. But the soldiers laughed and sent me away. I begged, but they would not call for him.
But what is the begging of a dadar?
I prayed to whatever Forces or Powers there might be, to the remaining wisps of holiness that might linger over the bones of the Goddess, but what good are the prayers of a dadar?
What good? At the very end, when I sat in a doorway, very near to death, a gate opened and a procession of priests came out, and I saw a face I knew, and I pushed through the crowd with the last of my strength. I called my son’s name and he stopped, and recognized me, and wept at my wretchedness. He took me to his rooms and comforted me, and later I told him that above all else I wanted to rejoin Tamda, his mother, my beloved, if she would have me, knowing me to be a dadar, without a soul, an uncertain thing.
“But Father,” my son said, “consider what uncertain things all men are. What is a man, but a bubble in the foam, a speck of dust on the wind? Can any man know that his next breath will not be his last? Can he know how fortune will treat him, even tomorrow? What of the calamities that carry him off, or the diseases, or even that one, faint breath of damp midnight air which touches his old bones and makes an end to him? Then what? Do we walk a long road till at last we come to the paradise at the top of the world, there to hear forever the blessed music of the Singer? Or do we merely lie in the ground? You think these are strange words, coming from me? But the Goddess is dead, and the last remnants of her holiness quickly drain away. All things are uncertain. The world is uncertain. Will the sun rise tomorrow? Father, you are weeping. How can a mere projection, an empty thing like a skin filled with wind—how can such a thing weep? It may deceive itself, but no
t others. I see your tears. I know that you are more than a sudden, random, fleeting shape, as much as any man is. Yes, a man. If you were not always a man, I think you have become one over the years through your living and your love.”
Which brings me back to weeping.
When at last I was able to travel from Ai Hanlo, my son went with me. We followed the way Tamda’s wagon was said to have gone, asking after her in every town. She made a few coins singing, people said, or selling sketches or doing sleight of hand. She looked thin and worn, they said.
At last we found her at a crossroads. It had to be more than just chance. She leapt down from the wagon and ran to me. Again we all three wept.
Later she said to me, “We are always uncertain. If you fade away, so shall I, when we are old. It may be very sudden. How are you unlike any man in this? Stay with me. Let the days pass one at a time, and live them one at a time. You can love. How are you unlike any man in this?”
Which brings me back to weeping.
REFUGEES FROM AN IMAGINARY COUNTRY
I first met Stephen Taylor in college, shortly after his first comic strip nearly got the entire staff of the campus newspaper fired, if not expelled. I found it leaning against the door of The Villanovan office one morning, in a large, flat envelope he must have placed there the previous night. As I sat at my desk, examining panel after panel in slack-jawed amazement, realized I had something very special here. There were ten panels in all, each on a separate piece of stiff poster board, way oversized, filled with hundreds of figures, fantastic detail, images spreading along the edges like the marginal doodles in Mad magazine.
Fellow staffers gathered around. Joe Meese, the editor, mumbled something to the effect that the intricate line-work might not reproduce. (“We’ll do it real big,” I said. “A two-page spread.”) Fran Hamilton’s comment best summed up what we all were feeling.
“Holy shit…”
The strip was called Stephanus. It wasn’t signed, but the artist had executed a what I guessed was intended to be a self-portrait in the first panel, depicting himself dangling naked in a dungeon, nailed to an overhead beam by a single spike through both wrists. The face was round, soft, and boyish, with dark, tangled hair and huge dark eyes; the expression one of absolute, wrenching despair and bewilderment. He looked a little like Dondi, the war-orphan from that sappy newspaper strip, only older—Dondi grows up and goes to Hell, I thought.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack Page 6
