“This is the house of the lord Radaces,” said Sekenre, in an almost naive tone, Vandibar thought, in that barbarous up-country accent of his.
The monster seemed to understand him, and bowed with mock courtesy, continuing in the death-speech, “Then proceed, honored guests. The lord’s wife and children await thee within.”
“What about Radaces?” said Sekenre.
But the creature only bowed again and shuffled aside, its clawed feet scraping the tile floor, its long tail dragging.
Vandibar felt increasing helplessness as Sekenre led him deeper into the house, as if this were a terrible dream from which he wanted so desperately to awaken, and the voice of sorcery inside his heart told him, Never, never, shalt thou awaken from this dream, even beyond thine own death, until the ending of time and the deaths of the gods themselves, a thousand times never.
All of the lower rooms were empty, all the servants gone. They ascended a great marble stair, Sekenre silent, Vandibar cringing as his wet shoes made sucking sounds. Another of the evatim waited at the top, this one on all fours like a crocodile. Sekenre whispered something Vandibar could not hear.
The creature shuffled aside to let them pass.
Upstairs on the landing, they found the youngest daughter of Radaces, aged four or five, torn apart as if she had been savaged by dogs. The lord’s younger son hung by his ankles in the bedroom, gutted like a pig that has been slaughtered.
On the balcony overlooking the central garden, the wife of his enemy sat on a bench, hazing into nothingness, holding what must have been her youngest daughter Tatiane in her arms. It must have been that same slender girl of fifteen or sixteen, whom Vandibar’s son Vashimur secretly loved. But he couldn’t be sure. Her head was gone, and her blood had spread out at her mother’s feet like a sea of black oil.
Sekenre stepped back to avoid the blood. He held up his blue flame. Vandibar gasped, then turned and wept as he saw that the lady’s eyes had been gouged out. Her fingers were bloody. Perhaps she had done it to herself, to escape such sights. Her breath came in hoarse gasps, sobbing long since exhausted, and incredibly she began to sing almost inaudible, incoherent snatches of some lullaby as she rocked Tatiane back and forth. It was a small mercy that she was mad, but only a small one.
And Sekenre said, without irony, but in hard, unaccented Deltan, “Are these not the fruits of victory, for which the sorcerer Vandibar Nasha has so long striven?”
Furious, his voice breaking, Vandibar yanked the boy aside and would have hurled him into the garden below.
“No! No! It’s all wrong!”
“But it was all your doing.”
“Liar!”
“Look for yourself.”
Sekenre turned his head and Vandibar followed his gaze. Something stirred at the lady’s feet, swimming in blood like an enormous and ungainly spider. It was a severed human hand. The sign and name Vandibar had cut into it now glowed blue, the color of Sekenre’s flame.
Revolted, Vandibar let go of Sekenre and kicked the thing away. Then he caught the boy by the shoulder and shook him. “No. I didn’t mean it this way. Take me away quickly!”
II
All the while as they walked back through the deserted city, through the hot, steamy night, through the cool spring rain which sent the mud swirling around their ankles, in the chilly winter air, as the moon rose and set, crescent, gibbous, full, waning, Vandibar raved. He debated with himself. You did these things. No, you did not. They didn’t happen at all. They are a dream. You can undo them. You’re a sorcerer now, aren’t you? No, that is a dream too.
In the midst of all this Sekenre turned to him and said in his accented, little boy’s voice, “What kind of a monster is Vandibar Nasha?”
Weeping, the other replied, “A terrible monster indeed.”
They walked on some more, and Vandibar’s words poured out in a babbling torrent, and only after a long time did he realize that they had not seen the corpse of Radaces anywhere.
“I think he has escaped this particular holocaust,” said Sekenre as if he knew what Vandibar was thinking, his voice once more hard and his Deltan flawless. “Sorcerers can be elusive.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like trying to nail down quicksilver.”
“That’s not what I ask!”
“You and he are evenly matched.”
“Sekenre, help me!”
The boy’s voice reverted to the softer tone and the accent that Vandibar had somehow come to trust. It was therefore some comfort when Sekenre said, “Yes, I’ll do whatever I can.”
But there was no comfort at all when the boy guided him up the last street, to the smoldering ruins of his own house, where the walls had been breached and broken, and the bodies of his servants lay beneath the fallen timbers. A part of the roof-garden remained, and there Vandibar found his son Vashimur crucified on two of those same timbers, naked and bloody and near to death, already whimpering deliriously in the language of the dead.
In that same tongue, Vandibar addressed him, gently. “It’s only a dream. Think that you’ll soon wake up and it’ll all be over.”
But the head of Takida, Vandibar’s wife, glared down at him from a stake. The eyes opened and burned with blue fire. The mouth tried to form words, but lacking breath, could not speak them, yet the meaning was clear enough, and they called Vandibar liar.
All around them, the evatim crawled on all fours like beasts, sometimes reaching up to snap at Vashimur’s nail-pierced feet.
And Vashimur spoke only one more word in reply, clearly pronouncing the name of Tatiane.
Then Vandibar covered his face with his ruined gown and allowed himself to be led into the lower garden, by the pool. Only there, out of sight of his wife and son, did he think it proper to grab Sekenre and try to break his neck. He, Vandibar, was a tall man, over fifty but still strong. Sekenre weighed nothing. He could snap him like a twig. He screamed in all hisb pent-up rage and tried to do exactly that, but Sekenre slipped from his grasp like quicksilver, and stood apart from him, gasping.
“Think, Vandibar Nasha. Think what it means to kill a sorcerer. His sorcery doesn’t die. It lives on inside you. You become what you have slain, devouring your foe, so that everything you loathe about him becomes part of you.”
“I loathe only myself.”
“And not Radaces?”
“Radaces also.”
Sekenre began to pace back and forth, hands clasped behind his back, his manner that of a much older man, and his voice changed yet again, to an accent and a tone Vandibar had never heard before.
“Ah, now we are getting somewhere. You still hate Radaces, even if you hate yourself. Yes. I cannot tell you how to undo what has been done, but perhaps it can be deflected, or, more precisely, delayed in its effects. Do not doubt that in the end you will burn for it in terrible fire, and for what Radaces has done.”
“And he too?”
“You are evenly matched.”
Wearily, Vandibar sat down on the marble bench beside the pool. “I see that I can’t go back, only forward. Very well. Tell me more.”
And the other within Sekenre discoursed, in a dry, stern voice, on the nature of sorcery and its relation to time, repeating much that had been said before, about swimming outside of the normal flow of events, or perhaps beneath it, only surfacing into the lives of ordinary men at chosen intervals. Vandibar understood very little, at least right away. But there was another image, which made more sense.
Sekenre worked a few tiles loose from the edge of the pool, and held them in his hand, arranged in a line, a single black tile second in the sequence among the white.
The black tile was the day of suffering, of the deaths of all Vandibar loved, and the white were the days of their lives, and his own.
Sekenre, or the person who wore Sekenre like a cloak, looked up at him and smiled, and the expression on his face was utterly inscrutable, perhaps cynical, perhaps genuinely offering hope, perhaps beyond an
ything he had words to describe.
The boy rearranged the tiles until the black one came last.
“You can’t get rid of it,” he said, “but you can place it differently.”
In that instant, Vandibar Nasha heard something incredible.
Music and laughter came from the roof-garden above him. He rose from the bench and hurried away from Sekenre, and ran up the stairway by the trellis. He didn’t care how he looked in his muddy gown, and when he reached the top, in full moonlight, on a warm spring night, he was as elegantly garbed as he had ever been.
He gazed in amazement at the swarming guests, at their gaudy robes and masks and feathers, and spied Vashimur and Tatiane furtively holding hands over by the punch bowl. He waded into the crowd, almost oblivious, making only perfunctory replies to any who spoke to him, and came upon Radaces seated on the bench in the shadows, against the far wall amid the vines.
He sat down beside him. For an instant, the two of them silently surveyed all before them.
“I cannot forgive,” said Radaces at last.
“Not can I.”
“Then we are agreed.”
“It is death between us.”
At that moment, the revellers broke out in riotous laughter and applause as muscular slaves delivered a stuffed crocodile, and everyone devoured the Devourer with silver forks.
Later Vandibar rose and joined with all the others, even with Radaces, in the great dance which concluded the evening, to celebrate the holy union of Bel-Hemad, god of the springtime, and Shedelvendra, the Lady of the Lantern.
The fat poet Agetirae was too drunk for all that whirling and circling. He had to be led away discreetly. Everyone else departed more graciously, presenting the host with a final gift.
Radaces gave Vandibar a coffer shaped like a human hand, which Vandibar accepted graciously.
Later still, after everyone had gone to bed, he awoke in his own bed, trembling. Takida, his wife, stirred beside him.
“What is it?” she said.
“I dreamed…terrible things.”
“Go back to sleep. It’s just vapors.”
“It’s probably something like that,” he muttered, but he instead got up, wrapping himself in the same elegant gown he had worn to greet his guests.
He walked out onto the roof garden in his bare feet. It was nearly dawn. The moon hung low in the west, almost touching the desert beyond the river. The city lay dark and silent.
A few of his servants were still sweeping up, carrying away benches, and taking down the now extinguished lanterns.
He called a boy over to him and told him to run down into the city, to the house of Lord Radaces.
“Now, Master?”
“Yes, now. I want you to tell me if his house is still there and if all is well.”
The young servant looked at him strangely. “They’ll all be in bed.”
Vandibar fished a silver coin out of his pocket, and held it up. The servant’s eyes widened.
“This will be for you if you do exactly what I tell you.” He picked up a slate one of the waiters had used, rubbed it clean with his sleeve, and made a sign with chalk. In some other time, in the midst of his terrible dream, he had carved that sign with a pin into the dead flesh of a severed hand. “Make this sign on Lord Radaces’s door. It’s a joke between us. He’ll understand. Now go.”
The servant took the chalk and went.
Vandibar returned to bed, then arose at the usual hour and breakfasted. But the servant did not return. In the middle of the morning, a parcel arrived, wrapped in silk, sealed with the emblem of Lord Radaces.
Vandibar took it alone into his study. There he broke the seal and pulled away the wrapping. Inside was a beautifully lacquered box. The sign inlaid on it in mother-of-pearl was that same one he had intended to be written on his enemy’s door.
Inside the box was a bloody nail.
III
“So Radaces has countered you,” said Sekenre, by the pool, regarding the nail. The water rippled in the darkness, and the Shadow Titans appeared.
“You said that I would burn in a terrible fire.”
“Every act of sorcery has a price, and that price is usually pain, but that pain, the consequences of your actions, can often be put off, even as tiles may be rearranged. Your son will one day die in great agony, as you saw him do, and he will die a young man, but this does not mean that he can’t first grow to be an old one, happy and prosperous, surrounded by wealth and friends, by his sons and grandsons. It doesn’t mean he can’t live happily to be a hundred, only that one day, when his death is upon him, he may find himself snatched from his deathbed, made young again, and nailed to a cross. That much cannot be prevented. The rest can perhaps be contrived.”
“And the children of Radaces?”
“The same for them. And for his wife. And yours. It is admittedly only a partial solution.”
“But how?”
“You must counter Radaces every time.”
Therefore Vandibar Nasha rose and returned to his garden party, on that spring night beneath the full moon. There he greeted his guests, saw Vashimur and Tatiane slip away as if no one had noticed them, and leaned beside Radaces against a railing, looking out over the city.
“It is death between us.”
“Yes, it is.”
And when the feast was done and the other guests departed, Vandibar Nasha bade Lord Radaces tarry, and led him into the house, into a large, empty room hung with tapestries to muffle any sound, and there he plunged a dagger into his enemy’s back. But Radaces wriggled off the blade like quicksilver and became a serpent, whipping his coils around Vandibar to crush him. Vandibar in turn became a shaft of molten iron, and the serpent fell away, its flesh steaming. It reared up, its hood spread to reveal the face of Radaces, contorted almost out of recognition by rage.
“I…shall never…forgive.”
“Nor I,” said Vandibar Nasha. The injury is too great.”
The serpent dissipated like smoke and was gone.
* * * *
Then Vandibar Nasha pored over certain arcane books, and sorcery grew within him like a cancer. Each night he slipped out of bed and went into his study, lit a lamp, and waited until Sekenre came to him, padding silently on the polished floor. Sometimes the boy brought him more books, massive codices with iron locks which could only be opened with a touch and a whispered word; sometimes scrolls which seemed to unroll out of the air into endless length, then roll up again into nothing, invisible. Or he would discourse in many voices, in a babble of tongues, all of which Vandibar came to understand.
Together they raised up spirits. Together they questioned the dead about the secrets of the living.
They prayed to the Shadow Titans, together, and then looked up into the sky and beheld them in their true aspects, not as reflections in the pool.
And once or twice, though Vandibar was sure Sekenre was testing him, the other seemed merely a skinny, scruffy boy with a bad foreign accent, who was alone and wanted company, and asked Vandibar to tell him some story of his own life, of how it was before he became a sorcerer that night in the garden.
Vandibar told such stories, though he did not know if he was giving the right answer, or what the test was.
Once Vandibar offered Sekenre a plate of particularly fine, sweet cakes. The boy sniffed them cautiously, almost as an animal would, then devoured them greedily, oblivious to all else, licking his fingers clean.
His dark eyes revealed nothing.
Many times Vandibar worked to build some apparatus, or peered into murky jars at flopping, wriggling captive things which screamed back at him in tiny, but distinctly human voices; or he merely read, and Sekenre sat across from him and waited.
Sekenre was one more riddle to figure out. The simple questions made Vandibar laugh. Why couldn’t a powerful sorcerer afford shoes? Was it an ascetic discipline, or a mere disguise, since a barefoot street child would be underestimated by his enemies?
The
deeper mysteries intrigued him. Once the boy had let slip that he had once met a certain king of the Delta, and the name he gave was one Vandibar knew only from history. There was also the matter of the deep scars on the boy’s bare legs, which almost formed a kind of writing. And the palms of his hands were seared almost featureless, and part of one of his ears was missing, like that of an alley cat who has gotten into one too many fights.
His manner was often gentle. Certainly Vandibar never saw him angry, but at times it seemed that Sekenre, or some of the selves which he contained or could become, were dead to all feeling.
Often Vandibar looked up and realized it was almost dawn, and that the boy was gone.
And yet, too, as the sorcerer swims below the surface of time, and emerges into the duration of men’s lives only at points of his own choosing, after long nights of labor, Vandibar Nasha awoke in bed each morning beside his wife, fully rested. Each morning, sorcery seemed a fading dream. Each day his study was filled only with familiar books and carvings. His household servants came and went. He looked out a window. He saw his son Vashimur riding a horse around and around in the exercise yard. The youth was growing tall and strong, and Vandibar was proud of him.
It was as if he lived three lives simultaneously. Each night he studied or labored with Sekenre. Each night he slept beside his wife. And each night, too, he returned to the garden party at the Spring Festival, where he stood beneath the full moon and greeted his guests, and spied his enemy among them, and the ritual words were passed: “It is death between us.”
Each night the two of them fought, devising and countering new strategies. Once he found the roof garden party populated only by corpses in feathered masks. They dropped their masks at a signal from Radaces. But Vandibar caused the sun to rise suddenly, and the corpses melted away like mist. Then the ordinary guests emerged from shadows and departed, a little startled that they had let the whole night past without realizing how late it was.
Once there was only ice, the house, garden, the guests, even the moon and stars made of shimmering, almost luminous ice, and the contest between Vandibar and Radaces was to find the single tiny flame hidden somewhere, which meant both life and destruction for the whole world.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror Page 22
