I just mumbled the first words that came into my mind and tried to make them sound like instruction. When I had finished, the youth touched his forehead to the ground at my feet and remained crouched down like that as I walked away from him. Later, I learned that he had founded a sect of mendicant philosophers called The Wanderers, whose symbols are the shoe and the staff, and the empty bag which remains empty because they have not yet found wisdom. Each of them takes a vow never to sleep in the same place for two nights until that bag is filled.
I came to many places I had never even known existed, and after many years reached the City of the Delta, where the Great River empties into a sea like a blue-metal shield beneath the hot sun. My fame had preceded me. People gathered by the thousands on the beach before the white-walled city. I sang for them of sorrow and longing and of the mysteries of the Faceless King. Many fell to their knees as I approached and begged to become my disciples. But I told them that my mission, or curse, or whatever it was, was for me alone, and I would not wish it on anyone else. Still the great mob of them followed me shouting into the city.
The priests summoned me, and I sang for them in the temple, before the enormous image of the god of the city, Bel-Hemad. Afterwards the mob proclaimed that the image had shifted, grinding its stone guts like an earthquake, so that the god might lean down and hear me better. Up near the ceiling, amid the shadows and the pigeons, Bel-Hemad smiled his inscrutable smile and said nothing.
“This man is possessed of an evil spirit,” the chief priest said. “He drives the people to blasphemy!”
I was immediately arrested. Soldiers drove the mob from the temple, while the priests demanded of me the true meaning of my message.
I could only tell them that the Faceless King was an instrument of the secret god Verunnos-Kemad, and I in turn was an instrument of the King, even as my harp was my instrument. I knew that much. I no longer had any doubt.
But the priests were not satisfied. There was money in it, they said. Travelers would come from every land to heap gold on the altars to hear me sing.
“The Faceless King dwells amid the treasure-hoard of the Mother Dragon,” I said. “What need has he of your money? I am filled with his music. What need have I?”
The priests brought the King of the city to me, an old, feeble man they had to hold up by either arm. He commanded me to explain the magic of my song, and I told him the story of my life, but that was not enough.
The King stared at me intently. He pursed his lips as if about to spit. Just then he looked like an ancient mummy, not a living man.
“Each man hears something different in your song,” the King said at last, “and his soul is touched by it. Even I cannot touch a man’s soul. Your song is a greater treasure than all my riches. I would possess it.”
“Majesty,” I said with bowed head. “You are not worthy. Nor am I.”
Then the King gave me over to his torturers and they tortured me with great cunning, so that my pain would never end even after many years, but they did not let me die. And they would not take away my hands, lest I could no longer play the harp, nor my voice; nor did they dare steal the holy dagger I wore around my neck.
In the end, they put out my eyes with it.
There were many times when I fell into a delirium and dreamed that I was home, that I was still a boy in the walled town by the river, and none of this had ever happened.
Once I sat up suddenly in my bed at home, alarmed by some sudden noise in the night. My father stood there at the foot of my bed holding a lantern which was not a lantern at all, but the glowing mask of the Faceless King. He came forward to put the mask on me, but I struggled and cried out and woke with a start in utter darkness, rattling my chains.
Twenty years passed. My former life fell away like old leaves. I could no longer remember my wife’s name, nor summon her face into my memory. I still knew Voinos. He was but a minor agony among many.
I saw the Faceless King every night as I slept. He was always there, leaning forward, about to speak.
At last I screamed to him, whether waking or asleep I do not know, “Let it end! Let me come to you!”
And at last he did speak, saying, “Then come to me right now.”
That night ships arrived from across the sea to sack the City of the Delta. They must have taken the city by surprise. In the morning, I could hear the fighting below my window, and I could smell the smoke of burning houses. By evening there was only the smoke and an occasional cry. Then the lock on my door was being smashed, and a wild-voiced, strange-smelling barbarian burst into my cell, panting with exertion. But then I heard only shuffling. I groped about and found his shoulder level with my waist. He was kneeling before me. Gently, he pressed my harp into my hands.
My chains fell off of their own accord. The barbarian did not strike them.
“I must follow my own path,” I said aloud. I remembered my conversation with the young man on the road, so many years before. “I am like a man on a swaying rope bridge above a deadly gorge. I cannot remain there. I must go either forward or back, and after so much travelling, I do not wish to go back.”
The barbarian cried out something in his own language. I could only make out a few words. He was afraid. I am sure he thought me mad, and to barbarians, madness is a sure sign of the presence of the gods.
I hobbled through the city unopposed. Often someone would take me gently by the arm and guide me a little ways. Once I heard many women weeping. Often I heard a masonry crashing, as if the conquerors did not intend to leave any stone atop another.
Finally I was on the beach, the sea breeze blowing in my face, driving away the smoke of the dying city. The lukewarm surf broke around my ankles.
I began to play my father’s harp softly, and sing of my home for the first time in a long while. All the good memories came back. That was the greatest mystery of the Faceless King now, that I could remember a time when I had not known him, and had lived in a remote town and been happy.
Then I began to see stars in the dark sky. I thought for a moment that they were an illusion of my brain, like an itch in an amputated limb, but I went on singing, and I called on the Faceless King.
A silver glow spread across the sea and sky and huge mask of the Faceless King rose above the midnight waters; and thousands of black ships bobbed on the waves, their masts hung with lanterns, and these lanterns were the stars. Millions upon millions of birds soared up from between the ships, their wings like murmuring thunder, the stars flickering at their passage. Then I walked upon the water amid huge trees of utterly black stone, while the ships with their lanterns drifted among the trunks, and the birds flew in an endless, swirling mass before the Faceless King. I walked until I came to a dark place in the heart of the black stone forest, where silver-masked priests came out of a temple and challenged me. But I showed them the dagger I still wore around my neck, and they let me pass up the high, black steps of the temple, past endless rows of pillars, until, almost imperceptibly at first, the smooth floor gave way to tumbled stone and the pillars were rough fangs dripping from the ceiling and uncountable treasures lay about in heaps, glowing like coals in the darkness.
I knew where I was then, that my quest had come to an end, that I had arrived by strange and devious ways at the Earth’s heart, in the lair of the Mother Dragon.
I stood at the lip of an alcove, before black curtains embroidered with silver thread.
I began to sing once more, the song of the secret god, and for the only time in my life my song was completely pure, devoid of any longing or hatred or wish, as eternal as the wheel of the sky.
But the Faceless King spoke harshly from behind the curtain.
“Well, what have you come for?”
Astonished beyond all reason, I dropped the harp. It struck the ground with a resonant clang. It was as if I had been dropped suddenly from a great height.
“Evad,” the King said. “You know for what purpose you have come here.”
I c
ould not bring myself to reply, so stricken was I with a terror that goes beyond any mere dread of danger.
“Come to me,” the King said, his voice grating.
I opened the curtains. The masked King leaned forward on his throne, regarding me.
“You know the reason,” he said.
I lifted the cord from around my neck and held the sacred dagger in my hand. I thought back, then, over many terrors and many years. No, I told myself. It is all too insane. I will not.
But the Faceless King spoke with my brother’s voice, saying, “You will always be a child, Evad.” And he began to laugh, and it was my brother’s laugh.
It all came back to me, my fear, my hatred of Voinos, the deaths of everyone I had ever known, the laughter of Voinos in the forest where he’d smashed the altar.
And the King said in my brother’s voice, “It’s good to have family connections in high places.”
Screaming, I lunged forward and grabbed the Faceless King by the front of his robe, yanking him off his throne and onto the blade of my knife. I held him in a terrible embrace while I stabbed him again and again and again.
When he was still and limp, and I felt his hot blood on my hands, I stood there trembling, not so much out of fear, but out of an appreciation of the sheer absurdity of my position. I let the knife and the body of the King drop to the cavern floor.
But the King was not quite dead. He whispered in the voice of my father. “It is finished.”
I began to sob with crazy remorse. I fell to my knees beside him. I cradled his head in my hands. “Why?”
“Why?” he said. “Because I am weary. Because I wanted to die. When you have heard every leaf fall and known the flight of every sparrow, when the thoughts of all men living and the cries of their ghosts have merged into an endless babble for so long, one can only yearn for an ending. Therefore I caused you to be born, Evad. I made you as you are and Voinos as he had to be, shaping your lives, directing every step of your wanderings, all as part of my plan to bring you here. It was a long labor, but now it is done. Have I not concluded it well?”
“No,” I said, feeling rising anger within myself, all the while shocked into terror at the mere fact that I could be angry at such a time in such a place. “You have not. What about me? I am merely left here.”
“Oh yes, you,” he said. His voice was now that of a stranger, very old, very tired. “I had nearly forgotten.” He laughed softly, sadly. “It must have been the confusion of the moment. Forgive me.”
He was silent for a moment, and I shook him in my terror. “Tell me.”
“You may turn from your path even now. You may go back to the village by the river and live as you always did. That much I can promise you. I will restore you to your former state.”
I shook my head sadly. “It cannot be so. I would remember all these things, if only in dreams, and the memories have changed me. I am no longer that Evad who dwelt by the river. I have travelled too far and too long, and learned too much—and not enough.”
And, one last time, he had my father’s voice.
“It is finished,” he said.
“No,” I whispered into his ear. “You have not finished it well, or badly. You have not finished it at all.”
Then I let his head drop to the floor. He was dead.
* * * *
Indeed, it was not finished. Many things happened very quickly. I have never been able to fully account for all of them, even after many centuries of meditation.
I was blind again. I heard the priests come running, shouting in alarm. I was afraid, ridiculously, that my assassination would be discovered and I would be punished.
Quickly I groped around for the mask, found it, and put it on. Then I could see through eyes of silver.
The face of the dead man was first my father’s, then my brother’s, then face after face of countless strangers, the features running together, blurring, melting like wax. I stripped off the King’s robes and put them on myself, then sat on the throne.
When the priests arrived, their masks glowing like little moons in the darkness, there was a King seated before them, and a corpse on the ground which had no face at all, merely a blank oval of flesh.
As Voinos had once remarked, How do they know it’s him?
I leaned forward, indicating the corpse and the bloody dagger.
“Take that away,” I said. “It has served its purpose.”
They took the corpse but left the dagger, and it lies there still among the pebbles at my feet. I have regarded it often.
* * * *
Even then I had not come to the end of my wanderings. I thought I had, but I was mistaken.
Through the mask, many things were revealed to me. I looked out into the world and I knew the flight of birds and the ambitions of kings and the words of lovers. I beheld armies in the night and grain ripening slowly in the summer sun, and I heard the songs of the leviathans in the depths of the midnight seas.
I sought my brother Voinos, and found him standing in a dank cell, his wrists chained to the wall. I manifested myself to him, and the cell was alight with the glory of the silver mask.
He started when he saw me, rattling his chains.
“So you do exist,” he said. “I was never sure of that.”
“Voinos—”
He let out a shriek of hysterical laughter, and dropped down limp in his chains. “That’s very funny,” he said. “You have the voice of a child I knew once. I’d always intended to throttle him, but I never got around to it. I don’t know why.” He banged his head against the wall, first gently, then harder, and laughed some more. There was only pain in his laughter.
“Voinos, it is I, Evad, your brother,” I said, and I told him some of the things that had happened to me.
“That’s the funny part,” he said, sobbing gently now. “The Faceless King shaped us like a pair of clay pots. For all the good it did him. Or us. Now, as you will be glad to hear, my celebrated crimes have caught up with me. I shall die tomorrow. What a pleasure to spend the last night of my life with you, dearest brother. But then, what choice did I ever have?”
“I think you could have set your foot in another direction. You could have turned aside.”
He screamed again and leapt up, straining at his chains. “You say I can turn aside. Well let me do it, now. Work a miracle for me and I’ll be as wretchedly virtuous as you, sniveling brother—”
I saw then that even I could not bring him peace, not yet, while he still raged at the terrors within his own heart, and I left him.
I found him again later, hanging from a gibbet, black birds pecking out his eyes, and a third time in the grey dawn mists, wandering aimlessly among the trees near the ruined altar of the Faceless King. That third time I bore his poor ghost in my arms and placed him at the feet of the gods, not to be judged, but to be unmade.
* * * *
All these things are as one to me, for I know the secrets of the dark forest, and of dreams, and of the grave.
For I am the Faceless King, the Blessed of Verunnos-Kemad, and I am also the hero of old, the slayer of dragons, and I am a man called Genimer who dwelt in a land far to the south and once designed a clock to measure eternity (but it did not work, for he has outlived it), and I am, further, En-Riose, the foolish one who longed for and actually believed he could achieve death by the shaping of the life of that Evad who dwelt by the river.
I contain multitudes. En-Riose should have known that no one who has been the Faceless King ever dies, though their bodies might perish. All of them join together in the next, each newcomer changing the rest, like a new color stirred into a mixture of paints.
I am still Evad, who did not want to turn back, lest all his sufferings be for naught. So we go on—I go on—until we find the final mystery, and our empty bag is filled and we might rest.
I am Evad, who caused the eyes of En-Riose to be opened, so that he too might understand.
I am Evad, who granted to Voinos the only
release he could ever have. Somehow, I was worthy.
For the mind of Verunnos-Kemad is my mind and the splendors of the worlds are before me—as new gods awaken by the hundreds and make themselves known, and the Earth is filled up with magic, and the holy powers thunder in the night like great storms. I sit on the throne in the dark temple, yet I am everywhere, year into year, even as the signs in the heavens are slowly rewritten.
This is my path. I will not turn from it.
KING YVORIAN’S WAGER
On the morning of his father’s funeral and his own accession, King Yvorian had a vision. It came to him as he rode in solemn state on the golden throne of the Eagle Kings, borne aloft at the head of a procession of priests and courtiers by the former king’s most trusted bearers. He sat stiffly in his metal-feathered robes, in his helmet that gleamed golden and silver like a second sunrise.
All around him the heralds chanted the dirge of the dead monarch, and soldiers marched grimly, clad in black armor, with black banners draped from their spears. The common folk leaned out of windows and gathered on rooftops and walls, waving palm fronds and making their own lamentations. Each strove to outdo his neighbor, to tear his hair more painfully, to shred his garments more wretchedly, to show his face more streaked with tears, for the old king had been a tyrant, and they feared him even when he was dead.
Then, suddenly, the young King Yvorian stood up. His bearers struggled desperately to keep the throne level as the weight shifted, and the people gasped, and the chanters ceased their chanting.
The king spread his arms, and for an instant his robes were like burning wings in the bright morning light.
Someone shouted, “The King is going to fly!” and the whole multitude dropped to its knees, for they knew that the first king of the Eagle Dynasty had flown long ago, soaring into the sun to return with a fiery crown on his head, bestowed by the gods. Surely, if Yvorian too were about the fly, it was, at the very least, a miracle.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror Page 12
