Vandibar found it rising out of the palm of his own hand. But Radaces blew on it, and the fire leapt up to devour the entire city of Elandisphon. Vandibar’s mind was filled with the screams of the countless dying. He felt each of those deaths. He drowned in remorse and pain. And he rose up, transcending any feeling at all, beyond to conscience and compassion, and rearranged the white and black tiles of countless lives into such patterns as suited him.
In some other newly-cut channel of time, he and Sekenre both walked barefoot on the surface of the Great River, in the night’s darkness as the gray stars of the otherworld looked down, and they guided the souls of the slain into the land of the dead, one by one, speaking to each the words of passage.
He took aside the ghosts of his murdered servants, the one who had lost a hand, the boy who had not returned, and others. Of these, in a hushed, secret voice, he asked forgiveness.
So the people of the city both lived out their individual lives and died their individual deaths, and perished together in flames on a single night, while Vandibar Nasha held those flames back from his own house with upraised hands, pushing them back like an impossible tide.
All of these things were true at once. He understood that now.
He and Radaces directed armies against one another from atop mountains. Perched on the backs of enormous, black and silver birds, they fought above the clouds. Higher still, the gods and titans battled, like hugely-cast shadows of Vandibar Nasha and Lord Radaces. It was a combative dance between the two of them, whirling, whirling, striking out to kill or to parry, until the two became as one, and Vandibar Nasha peered deep into the mind and heart of Lord Radaces, and beheld only himself there, as if in a labyrinth of mirrors.
And, greeting one another among the guests on the rooftop, they passed between one another polite words, and treacherous gifts, and poisons.
Sorcery was a craving now, a lust Vandibar could not control. Only briefly, during half-dreamed mornings when he woke up beside Takida, could he remember that man who had once been. More briefly still, he wondered what had ever become of that fellow.
Yet when he awoke, that other Vandibar Nasha, who was an exemplary lord of Elandisphon, progressed through a separate life, troubled by terrible dreams of Vandibar the sorcerer.
His wife Takida grew lined in the face, gray-haired, then silver, then white. Vashimur grew to be a man and married Tatiane, daughter of Lord Radaces. The wedding feast was held at the house of Radaces, who greeted his guests in the frescoed atrium, as the benevolent gods gazed down from the rooftops of the temples nearby.
Among the gifts exchanged was a bronze coffer shaped like a human hand, which Lord Radaces presented to Vandibar Nasha.
Takida aged. Vashimur had three sons by Tatiane, all of whom were strong, wild boys who ran through the house making lots of noise. Soon the firstborn of them appeared to be about as old as Sekenre’s, or even older.
Vandibar remained as he was, as did Lord Radaces. There were gray streaks in both men’s beards, but not more than before. Neither lost the vigor of his stride. People remarked on this at first, then looked after them furtively and began to make signs after them as they had passed, to ward off evil. Fewer guests came to either house.
Vandibar held back the tide, but he couldn’t hold it forever. One night, after the garden party had ended, when the last of the guests had departed, he came upon his wife’s head impaled upon a stake, while around him the ruins of the house smoldered.
Takida opened her eyes, which burned with blue fire. This time she spoke in the language of the dead, which requires no breath to utter.
“Husband, what is this abomination that thou hast done?”
He could only reply, helplessly, in his own language, “I don’t know. Once I did. It was clear. But it isn’t anymore.”
Radaces stood beside him. Their eyes met, but no words passed. Weeping, Vandibar covered his face with his muddy gown and rushed into the house, which was not burnt. He climbed into bed beside Takida, who stared up at the ceiling with blind eyes and muttered something in her sleep, as if she were shouting in a dream.
When he slept, he dreamt of a man—or perhaps several men—called Vandibar Nasha, but when he awoke in the morning he could not recall any of the details, distracted as he was by the discovery that Takida had died in the night and lay still, staring at the ceiling, with a tiny stream of blood staining her upper lip.
He slid his hand around her neck gently, to reassure himself that her head had not been cut off; but somewhere else, he was sure, it had, and he wept, knowing that.
Many years later, word came that Lord Vashimur, aged about seventy—that same one who was reputed to have a father younger than he, if one believed such stories—had been thrown from his horse and killed.
But Vandibar found young Vashimur amid the ruins of his house, naked and crucified, with the evatim at his feet.
In his final pain, the youth cried out in the corpse-speech, “Where is my father? Thou art not he, but some other, evil thing.”
Radaces was there. He and Vandibar merely gazed at one another, and after a while Vandibar said, “Come with me and let us make an end.”
IV
Together they descended into the lower garden, but the garden was dead, and the pool filled with dust. They followed that dust as the wind bore it, across an endless plain toward a bloody sun that lingered on the horizon before them but never set. Amid terrible storms they struggled, Radaces bracing Vandibar and Vandibar lifting up Radaces when he fell. It seemed, several times, that they came into various countries and settled there, living out whole lives as amicable neighbors before rising again to resume the endless quest. It seemed, too, that they were enemies and fought in the darkness, amid terrible transformations.
Yet neither could conquer the other, for all each sought out some fatal weakness in the mirrored depths of the other’s soul, during those quiet times when they lived side by side and interpreted one another’s dreams.
Together, they mourned murdered children and wives, and were comforted by the remembrance of the lives of those children and wives lived out to the full in some impossible interval before the counting of days came to the inevitable black tile.
“We are swimming just below the surface of time,” said Radaces, “and we carried them along in the ripple of our passage.”
“As long as we could,” said Vandibar.
The two of them wept together, and were transformed, and fought.
“I don’t know how to stop,” said Vandibar.
“Nor do I.”
Then Radaces told how Sekenre had come into his house each night, bringing books of magic, and Vandibar told the same. Neither raged that Sekenre was a traitor, false to both of them, for they had reached that point in sorcery which is beyond passion, which is only doing because there are things to be done.
When they found Sekenre at last, he was seated on a marble bench by the dry pool in a dead garden, scuffing one bare foot idly in the dust. The red sun shone dully, low in the west.
The boy sat with his other foot up on the bench. He held various pens and brushes between ink-stained toes. He was writing something in a book. When the two sorcerers approached, he held up the book to them, revealing a beautifully illuminated page of text, in swirling, delicate script.
“What kind of abomination is Sekenre?” demanded Lord Radaces.
“Indeed, that is what we must know,” said Vandibar Nasha.
Sekenre closed and covered the book carefully, placing a blotting cloth over the page he had been working on. He put pens, brushes, and ink bottles away in a leather bag. Then he stared at his own hands and said, in his own, heavily accented, adolescent’s voice, but in a distracted manner, “I don’t think Sekenre is an abomination at all. But he contains abominations, and they, in turn, have committed abominations. Sekenre is a boy who never got to grow up. Did you know that in Reedland, where Sekenre was born, the children go barefoot, while the young men who have passed throug
h the rite of manhood wear shoes? The father must lead the son, unless the father is negligent, in which case the son remains forever a child. Sekenre’s father was worse than negligent, though he, or part of him anyway, loved his son deeply. Vashtem was a sorcerer of great wisdom and evil. He caused his son Sekenre to murder him. That was part of his plan. Therefore Vashtem the sorcerer awoke in the mind of Sekenre, for to slay a sorcerer is to become a sorcerer, and Vashtem became Sekenre and Sekenre became Vashtem, and he became many others, whom his father had slain before, whom he had occasion to slay afterward. They all mixed together, like paints in a pot. Sekenre learned, slowly and painfully, that in order to remain Sekenre he had to remain as he once was. Therefore Sekenre is forever a child of fifteen who wants to be good, and who wants to grow up. It’s not going to happen.”
Vandibar Nasha and Lord Radaces both drew daggers, but no ordinary weapons. These were forged of that metal which only dragons may fetch from the cores of suns.
“Release us,” said Radaces. “Let us be what we once were.”
“Or else die,” said Vandibar Nasha.
Sekenre rippled like quicksilver and stood behind them. Both of them turned. He shook his head sadly. For just an instant, his expression was that of a little boy who has made a mess and is terribly sorry, but can’t do anything about it. Then his manner changed, and he seemed older, and he spoke without an accent.
“Once that single instant has passed in which you open yourself to sorcery, there is no going back. You cannot say that when this is all over you will resume your former life, because it will never be over.”
Vandibar, fingering his dagger, said, “But we are still apprentices. I’ve read that to truly become a sorcerer, you have to attend the College of Shadows, and there take a master, learn everything you can, and in the end, as a graduation exercise, you have to overcome and kill the master, thus becoming the other sorcerer.”
“Or else the master kills the student, and the result is much the same,” said Radaces.
“There is one difference,” said Sekenre. “The winner is the jar, containing the loser.”
“I understand further,” said Vandibar, “that I have been attending this college for a long time, that it is all around me, and has been ever since that first night in the garden. It is different for each individual sorcerer.”
“But we have not yet graduated,” said Radaces, holding his dagger in a firm, clenched fist. “I think it’s time we do.”
Sekenre merely shrugged and sat down on the bench again. He got out his book and pretended to ignore them.
Vandibar and Radaces both stepped forward.
“Then you must discover who your master is,” Sekenre said, not looking up as the two of them paused and glanced at one another uncertainly. “Each student may encounter any number of teachers, but he has only one master, whose heart and mind he comes to know as intimately as his own, with whom he shares the great majority of exercises, sparring, countering one another as both grow in sorcery. Don’t mistake the master for the attendant, who merely brings what is wanted and leads you to the places of learning.”
Then, heedless of them, Sekenre got out his pens and brushes and began writing on opposite pages the tales of Vandibar Nasha and of Lord Radaces, both sorcerers of great renown. But when he reached a certain point, he stopped, because he didn’t know how either story was to end.
Vandibar and Radaces stood by the edge of the empty pool. They wept, naming their wives and children long gone. They comforted each other as best they could, and then they looked into one another’s eyes, and each clenched his dagger firmly.
“It is death between us, old friend,” said Vandibar Nasha.
ONE OF THE SECRET MASTERS
When we were both freshmen in high school, Frank Bellini had all the answers, and I believed everything he said. Einstein was wrong, and you really could go faster than light. Frank said so. Time machines were possible too. “Because time is relative!” he shouted again and again in the long and roundabout schoolyard argument we had over that one, the both of us equally passionate and equally ignorant of what such terms actually meant. But he won that one too, because he was Frank.
Later, when he was old enough to drive, it was the magic carburetor treatment which could give you two hundred miles to the gallon, and, of course, the gas pill, both of which had been suppressed (and here the dark theme entered our discourse) by the oil companies and the government. Frank was on to the extracurricular activities of the CIA. Once I asked him why they didn’t silence him, if he knew so much, but he just hit me and wouldn’t talk to me for a week.
He commanded authority. At fourteen he was already over six feet tall, all arms and legs but somehow massive, with a dark face like the business end of a hatchet and bushy eyebrows over dark, penetrating eyes.
But it was more than sheer I-can-beat-you-up size. He was smart, articulate, forceful, imposing.
By the time we got to college, the relative sizes had evened out a little bit, I had acquired what I thought was an intellectual swagger of my own, and doubt began to creep in. My friends and I baited him, demanding news of the Conspiracy of the Week.
“It’s the right-wing Texas oil billionaires,” he’d explain. “We’re in Vietnam because they own Lyndon Johnson.”
“And the Trilateral Commission?”
“Them too.”
“Kennedys and Rockefellers?”
“They decide who gets to be a Kennedy or Rockefeller. It’s all genetic engineering.”
“They?”
Nonplussed, he produced his secret identity card, showing him to be a high-ranking operative of the Technological Hierarchy to Enslave Mankind, otherwise known as T.H.E.M. “Whenever you hear that ‘They’ are behind something, that’s because they are.” And he smiled slyly, hinting at unfathomable depths of conspiracies within conspiracies, and no one could answer him back.
That was what made him so fascinating. He was always in control, either toying with you (“The Bavarian Illuminati killed JFK, you know…”) or just peeling you off from reality like a stamp from an envelope.
Once he led me into the cavernous cellars below Mendel Hall, the main science building on the Villanova campus. Where he went, I followed, even as we passed old radiation-warning signs (“There used to be an atomic pile down here, during the Fifties…”) and went through several doors marked RESTRICTED AREA and DO NOT ENTER. Somehow, Frank’s presence overruled all restrictions.
We hid behind a pile of boxes as a security guard went by, then descended a long, spiral staircase. A trapdoor led to a metal ladder. Down we climbed in almost total darkness, and groped our way along a dusty tunnel amid what felt like old electrical equipment until we emerged onto a metal catwalk overlooking a vast, underground chamber the likes of which you only see in movies about mad scientists. Television monitor screens flickered. Banks of lights blinked off and on in some arcane sequence, while computer-tape reels turned slowly, something bubbled and smoked in a vat, and electricity arced up a Jacob’s Ladder for no discernible purpose.
“This is one of their installations,” he whispered.
“Whose?”
He gagged me with his hand. “Quiet! You want to get us killed? Theirs. The Owners. The Secret Masters. They control everything from places like this.”
I wriggled free, then watched in silence for several minutes. No one was there. Once or twice I thought I saw something move, but it was a trick of the light. The machinery ran itself. Things flicked on and off. A TV screen showed sweeping views of the campus overhead.
“So where are they?” I said as faintly as I could.
He pointed. “Invisible. The men in black you hear about covering up UFO evidence. The same ones. But invisible.”
At that very moment, he had me so convinced that it didn’t occur to me to ask how he could know they wore black if they were invisible. Instead, I meekly followed him back up to the “real” world, where the ROTC squad drilled on the lawn in front of M
endel Hall and other students sunbathed on the slopes around the edge of the field. I wasn’t sure what I had seen, if anything. I wondered if Frank had slipped LSD into my lunch. No, more likely he was experimenting with mind-control.
“You seem like someone I can trust, Tom,” he said at last. “So I’m going to confide something very important to you, something I’ve learned, that They don’t want anyone to know. The more people who know it, the safer we are. It’s the password.”
“Huh?”
“Not ‘huh’, but leotfatu. It’s Old English for ‘light-bearer.’ Remember that. It may save your life someday.”
“What?”
He merely walked away, leaving me scratching my head and blinking in the bright sunlight.
* * * *
Twenty years later, all this stopped being a joke. I had a writing teacher once who said that a story really begins when the protagonist gets hit in the head with a brick. The rest is prologue.
So, end of prologue. Enter the sudden brick.
I was sitting at home, watching, of all things, The Simpsons, when the phone rang.
“You’d better get that,” my wife Marjorie called from the sewing room. “It’s undoubtedly for you.”
I hit the ‘mute’ button on the TV’s remote and picked up the phone.
“Leotfatu,” said the voice on the other end.
“Excuse me?”
The voice cleared its throat and spoke again, very precisely. “Leotfatu, the bearer of light.”
I almost, repeat almost, hung up right there. It was a true turning point in my life, when what I did would determine all that followed after, although of course I couldn’t know that at the time.
“Who is this?” I said.
“Tom? Tom Satterfield? It has to be the same one. I looked you up in the phone book. It’s your old pal, Frank Bellini. I’ve got to talk with you. In private. There are some things you can’t say over the phone, if you get my meaning.”
I felt a certain irritation. Who the hell was he to barge into my hitherto placid life like this on a moment’s notice, spinning webs of God only knew what sort of weirdness? I had hardly seen him since college. I remembered him as an amusing character and had told perhaps a few too many hilarious stories about him at parties, but he was no more my ‘old pal’ than I was the gullible disciple I had once been.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror Page 23
