He broke through the dancers. “You there! Stop!”
But the boy was gone.
Then someone, whose touch was very cold and dry, whose grip was like a vise, took him by the hand and whirled him back into the dance.
He hissed, “Who dares?”
But the other merely bowed, with both arms spread wide, then straighted and stepped back, in a half-formed dance step. He discerned a slender lady in rotting funeral clothes, but that meant nothing on this night. Her mask was plain and featureless white, with mere round holes for eyes and mouth.
Now the rhythm of the dance changed. The music slowed and the circles broke apart. Dancers clung to one another, drifting off in pairs into doorways and alleys, beneath canopies, there to unmask.
The stranger led Kuthomes into the darkness beneath a broken bridge, far from the crowd, into silence. They stood on a ledge above the black water of a canal. The other lifted Kuthomes’ mask off and made to throw it away, but he snatched it back and held it tightly against his chest. She twirled her own white mask out over the water, where it splashed, then drifted like a sparkle of reflected moonlight.
“Do you not remember me?” she said, speaking not Deltan but that language universal among the dead, yet known only to sorcerers among the living and never uttered aloud. Kuthomes could make out enough: “…your promise…long ago. Our assignation. Complete what you began.”
He cried out. He couldn’t break free of her arms. Her breath was foul. Her filthy hand pressed over his mouth.
When she let go, he managed to gasp, “Name yourself…”
“Remember poor Kamachina…”
Then she was gone. He heard a splash. The black water rippled. He stepped out of the shadow of the bridge, into the moonlight and stood still, amazed and afraid.
The absurd thing was he didn’t know any Kamachina. It was a common female name in the Delta. There must have been hundreds of servants, daughters of minor nobility, whores, whoever. He searched his memory for a specific Kamachina. No, no one. He tried to laugh, to tell himself this was another, tastelessly misconceived joke, that even the dead could blunder.
But then he got the death-bell out of his pocket and held it on his palm. The bell still rang.
* * * *
On the third and final night of the Festival of the Dead, those who had received special signs assembled in silence on the steps of the black temple of Surat-Hemad, who created the crocodile in his own image.
The temple doors formed the Devouring God’s jaws. Bronze teeth gleamed by torchlight. Within the great hall, two red lanterns burning above the altar were the all-seeing eyes of Death. In the vaults beneath the altar, in the belly of Surat-Hemad, dead and living commingled freely, and the waters of dream, of Leshé, lapped against the shores of the living world those of the land of the dead. On this night, of all nights, the borders were freely crossed.
The doors swung wide. Twenty or so pilgrims entered.
Dark-clad, bearing the death-bell and his sword, but unmasked, Lord Kuthomes filed in with the others, circling thrice around the altar and the image of the squat-bellied, crocodile-headed Surat-Hemad, then descended into the deeper darkness of the vaults. He walked among stone sarcophagi containing the mummies of great or wicked men, who might return at any time they chose to inhabit such earthly forms.
He placed his hand on the carven effigy of some lord of centuries past. The mummy within stirred and scratched.
His mind was clear, though he had not rested after the second night. He had searched his books and gazed into his mirror for long hours, coming up with no revelation at all. He knew, then, that he could only confront the dead and allow them to speak. His fate, perhaps, was no longer in his own hands.
All things return to Surat-Hemad, so the prayer went.
Yes.
Still he could not remember a specific Kamachina. He didn’t know who the boy was either. The child’s significance, in particular, eluded him. He did not fit.
All things—
He had even consulted a true sorcerer, an ancient creature deformed and transformed by the magic within him, who walked in swaying jerks like a scarecrow come alive in the wind, whose head flicked constantly from side to side like a bird’s, whose noseless face was a mass of scars, whose metal eyes clicked, whose hands were living fire. The sorcerer laughed slyly in a multitude of voices, and turned away.
A priest of Bel-Hemad had merely shaken his head sadly and said, “By the end of the third night, you shall know who this lady is. I am certain of that.”
Kuthomes had offered a fantastic sum of money, enough to startle even the priest.
“What is this for?”
“Help me escape. There must be a way.”
The priest had merely shrugged, and Kuthomes stalked away from the priest’s house, muttering to himself, striking people and objects in blind rage, pacing back and forth to fill the hours until the sun set and the third night of the Festival of the Dead began. The waiting was the worst part.
Dread Surat-Hemad, may all things be completed and finished and laid to rest, the prayers went.
Lord Kuthomes did not often pray.
Now he walked among the tombs of the ancient, sorcerous dead, the carven, laughing corpse-face in his hand, the tiny bell in its throat tinkling. Like all the others, he followed the sputtering tapers held aloft by the masked priests of Death, until all had gathered in an open space before a vast doorway.
A priest touched a lever. Counterweights shifted somewhere. Stone ground against stone, and the doors slid aside. Cold, damp air blew into the musty crypt, smelling of river mud and corruption.
Here was the actual threshold of the world of the dead. Beyond this door, he knew, down a little slope, black water lapped silently. Funeral barges waited to carry the dead—and the living—into Leshé, where madmen, visionaries, and sorcerers might glimpse Lord Kuthomes passing through their dreams.
Kuthomes hoped they would know and remember whom they had seen.
At the threshold, the tiny death-bell stopped ringing. Kuthomes threw it away, certain it was of no further use.
He reached under his robe and drew out the silver sword.
“You won’t need that.” A warm, living hand caught his wrist. The voice was soft, but not feminine, speaking Deltan, accented very slightly. The boy.
Kuthomes slid the sword back into the scabbard. “Who are you?”
“One who will guide you to your trysting place. Lord Kuthomes, the Lady Kamachina awaits.”
“Explain yourself, or die.”
“If you kill me, you will never know the answer, will you?”
“There are slow methods, which inspire eloquence…”
“But hardly worth the exertion, Lord. Come with me, and all will be made clear.”
Kuthomes hesitated. Slowly, the other pilgrims crossed the threshold. What could he do but follow? The boy was waiting.
Hand-in-hand, the two of them passed through the door and into absolute darkness, where not even the priests with their tapers dared accompany them. The only sound was the sucking of boots in the mud. The boy seemed to know where he was going. Kuthomes allowed himself to be led. They groped their way into a barge and sat still, among many other wordless pilgrims.
Then they were adrift, and gradually stars appeared overhead, not those seen over the Delta on any summer night, but the stars of Deathlands, of Tashé.
He discerned crocodile-headed things in the river, thousands, floating along like a great mass of weed; but their bodies were pale and human, like naked, drowned men. These were the true messengers of Death, the evatim.
Someone in the company shrieked, stood up, and did a frantic, whirling dance, hands waving and slapping as if in an attempt to fend off invisible hornets. He fell into the river with a splash. The evatim hissed all as one, the sound like a rising wind.
Someone else began strumming a harp. A song arose from many voices, a gentle, desolate lyric in the language of the dead. From ou
t of the air, from far beyond the barge, more voices joined in.
Many wept. Kuthomes was unmoved, impatient, tensely alert.
The boy took his hand again, as if seeking or offering comfort. He couldn’t tell which.
They were deep into Dream now, and the visions began. Some of the others cried out from sudden things Kuthomes could not see; but he was able to behold vast shapes in the sky, half human, half-beast, like clouds moving behind the stars, pausing in some incomprehensible journey to glance down at those in the barge below. These might have been the gods, or the
Shadow Titans, from whom all sorcery flowed. Kuthomes had no idea. He did not choose to ask the masked boy beside him, who, he was certain, did know.
From Leshé, Dream, as they passed over into the realm of Death, the rest of the adventure was like a dream, inexplicable, without continuity.
Once it seemed that he and the boy sat alone on the barge. The boy closed and opened his hands, and blue flames rose from his scarred palms. Kuthomes removed the boy’s shabby mask, tossing it out among the evatim. By the blue light, he could see a very ordinary face, soft, beardless, with large, dark eyes; a man-child somewhere in the middle teens, with tangled, dark hair. Part of one of the boy’s ears was missing. That struck Kuthomes as merely odd.
“Who are you?” he whispered in the language of the dead.
In that same tongue the boy replied, “A messenger.”
“One of the evatim then?”
“What do you think?”
“You seem alive.”
“Death, also, is a kind of life.”
In another part of the dream they walked on water, barefoot because the river would not hold up Kuthomes as long as he wore boots. Ripples spread on the frigid surface. They walked through a dead marsh in wintertime. Among the reeds, skeletal, translucent birds waded on impossibly delicate legs.
Later still, the sky brightened into a dull, metallic gray, without a sunrise, but with enough suffused light that Kuthomes could see clearly. He and the boy walked for hours through sumptuous dust, until they both were covered with it. A wind rose. Swirling dust filled the air. By tricks of half-light and shadow, in the shifting dust, he seemed to make out buried rooftops, part of a city wall, a tower. But all these crumbled away when he touched them, then reformed again somewhere nearby.
Sometimes he saw faces on the ground before him, or in walls or doorways. He made his way through the narrow streets of a city of dust. The boy led him by the hand.
Here was the silently screaming dust-face of Lord Vormisehket, stung by a thousand scorpions; and here Adriuten Shomash with his throat still cut, sand pouring out of the nether mouth beneath his chin. Lady Nefirame and her three children confronted him. She had hurled herself into a well with the children in her arms. So many more, faces and bodies sculpted out of transitory dust, forming and reforming as Kuthomes passed, dust-arms and hands reaching out for him, crumbling, reaching again.
He saw many who had been useful to him for a time, then inconvenient: Akhada the witch; Dakhumet the poisoner, who hurled tiny, darts fashioned like birds; even the former king himself, Baalshekthose, first and only ruler of that name, whose sudden ascent and descent both Kuthomes had brought about.
The boy dragged him on, pulling at his arm, completely plastered with the gray dust so that only his eyes seemed alive.
Kuthomes felt indignant anger more than anything else. Why should these phantoms accuse him? Such deeds were the stuff of politics. Those who wielded power must be, by the nature of that power, above the common morality.
It was only when they came to a halt by a broken bridge over a dust-choked canal that Kuthomes recognized where he was. Here, in dreams and dust and ash, was a replica, shifting and inexact but a replica nevertheless, of the City of the Delta, of a disreputable district where, many years before, he had promised to meet someone by that bridge.
In this place of dreams and death, amid the dust, the memory came back to him, clearly, like a book opening, its pages turning.
She was waiting for him, tall and slender in her dusty shroud. He knew her even before she spoke, before the caked dirt on her face cracked and fell away like a poorly-wrought mask to reveal empty eyesockets and bare bones.
Her voice was gentle and sad and exactly as he remembered it. She spoke in the language of the dead.
“Kuthomes, my only love, I am your beloved, Kamachina, whom you once promised to marry and make great.”
He could not resist her embrace, or her kiss, though both revolted him.
“I never knew what happened to you,” he managed to say at last.
He had been seventeen, an upstart from outside the city, youngest of many sons, driven out of his village with few prospects, ridiculed by the great ones of the Delta, desperate for recognition, for a position of any sort. He had dallied with a girl, the daughter of a minor official. Already he was precocious in the ways of the court, though he had yet to set foot inside a palace. His lies had the desired effect, with hints of plots and of suppressed factions soon to rise again; with the implication that Kuthomes was not who he seemed at all, but perhaps a prince in disguise, whose true name would make the mighty tremble. With this and more he secured introductions, a position. In exchange for the favor of the girl Kamachina, he promised to make her family great.
Later, when she pressed her claim and became inconvenient, he put her off, all the while whispering that she and her father were both mad, obsessed with absurd plots. At the very end, there had been the assignation at the bridge. The two of them would exchange marriage vows but keep them secret until the time was right for the revelation.
“But you never came,” she said. On that final, sacred night of the Festival of the Dead, when uttered vows are binding forever, he had betrayed her, and, in her grief, she had flung herself into the canal and drowned.
“I truly loved you,” she said. “You were my every, my only hope.”
“I…did not know.”
“I was great with your child. Did you know that?”
“I…had not seen you in several months.”
“I could hardly confess such a thing in a letter.”
“Someone might have intercepted it,” he said.
She dragged him to his knees, then lay by his side in the cold dust.
At last he broke free, stood up, and brushed himself off.
“But all this was almost forty years ago. How can it matter now?”
She reached up and took him by the hand. “Among the dead, time moves much more slowly.”
He looked around for the boy and saw him crouching nearby in the dust, hands folded over his knees, watching dispassionately.
“Is that your son?”
“I have no son,” said Kamachina, reaching up for Kuthomes. “My child is still within me, waiting to be born.” Once more she dragged him down into her irresistible embrace, pressing her corpse-mouth against his.
Kuthomes screamed. He fought her, drawing his silver sword, striking her again and again, slashing her head off, hacking her body to pieces.
But it was no use. She merely reconstituted herself, a thing of dust and dead bones, sculpted by some magical wind.
She caught his wrist in her crushing grip and made him throw the sword away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I did what I had to do. I didn’t know
…If I could help you, I would, but it’s too late…”
“What is begun on the last night of the Festival of the Dead,” she said, embracing him once more, “is sacred, inviolate, and must always be consummated.”
* * * *
So it was that Lord Kuthomes came to dwell in the country of the dead with his Lady Kamachina. He was mad with the terror of it all for a long time. It seemed that he sat on a throne, and ruled as emperor among the corpses, but slowly, subtly, they turned from him, perverting his every command, until at last he was cast down, reviled, trampled into filth. He shouted that he was a great lord, that he was alive and th
ey mere corpses, but they only laughed at him.
Dead hands tore his entrails out of his body, lifted his bleeding heart up before his face; dead lips drank his blood and devoured him. So it seemed, in his madness, though each time he awoke, he found himself whole.
He tried to bear all this in the manner of a great lord, silently plotting his revenge, but that was absurd, and before long he too was shrieking aloud at the hilarity of the idea.
“How shall I be revenged against myself?” he asked the ghosts. “How?”
They could not answer him.
All the while Kamachina was with him, touching him gently, whispering of her love. She alone did not mock him, nor injure him in any way, but her love was the worst torment of all.
In his madness his mind opened up. The speech of gods and of the Titans poured into him. There were many revelations, passed through Kuthomes into the dreams of men who awoke in the living world.
Gradually his pain and his madness lessened, and it seemed he had merely backtracked along a path he had once taken, then set out on another. His old life became the dream, the fading memory. Now he came to see himself dwelling, not in dust, but in an austere palace of massive pillars and black stone, there waited upon by ghosts, while his wife’s belly swelled with his child.
“Is it not the duty of a lord,” she said, “to provide for the comfort of those beneath him?”
He supposed it was. He didn’t know anymore.
He sat with her in her garden of leafless trees and brittle stalks, listening as she spoke or sang softly in the language of the dead. He learned to play a strange harp made of bones as delicate as strands of silk. He came to behold the growing life in that dead garden, the nearly invisible leaves and blossoms like sculpted smoke, and he ate of the fruits of the trees, which tasted like empty air, and was sustained by them. After a while, he could recall no other taste.
She was delivered there, in the garden. The mysterious boy appeared once more, to assist the birthing.
“Who are you?” Kuthomes asked. “Can you not tell me at last?”
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror Page 20
