The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror

by Darrell Schweitzer

  “Do you say that the Emperor comes here? That if I wait I might meet him here?”

  The eunuch squawked, then wriggled free of the messenger’s grasp, and stood apart, straightening out every crease and fold in his robe, as if his dignity had been affronted, and said, “The Emperor has not taken His pleasure here in all the time I have served Him, but He could, and for this reason all must be perpetually in readiness.”

  Then the messenger grabbed the eunuch again, by both shoulders, whirled him around and shoved him in the direction of a parapet. All the others shrieked and cried in a weird chorus of something other than words, but they did not stop him.

  The two of them stood by a railing, gazing out over the Holy Empire from an astonishing height, but the messenger had no concern for the magnificence of the view, though he could see half the Earth from where he stood. He pointed to the columns of smoke from the burning cities on the horizon, which seemed more numerous now, and closer.

  “That,” he said, “is improper and that is most irregular, and the Emperor must see and know of it.”

  But the eunuch could not seem to grasp such a concept in his mind, and could only say, “The Emperor’s majesty admits nothing which is unpleasant.”

  The messenger could have hurled him over the parapet in exasperation, but he saw it was useless.

  He let go. The chief eunuch clapped his hands and shrilled commands, and before long the others had fetched beautifully embroidered silk tapestries stretched between tall poles, and placed them along the parapet and around the edges of the garden to block the view.

  Later, having left the eunuchs, the messenger came to a vast library of many levels, filling many galleries and vaulted rooms, and he walked for hours in twilight amid row after row of dust-covered volumes, until at last, far ahead he saw a flickering light.

  He ran toward it, kicking up dust. Then he shouted to a hunched figure in a dark robe that he saw seated at a lectern poring through a huge volume.

  As he drew closer, the man in the dark robe—it was an ancient man, with a furrowed face, and long, white beard and hair—held up a finger to his lips in an angry gesture to be silent.

  The messenger looked around. He didn’t see anyone else who could be disturbed. Besides, he didn’t care who he disturbed at this point. He hurriedly explained. He got out the very letter and showed it to the old man, pointing to the raised golden lettering and the raised seal which identified as a message from the Captain of the Farthest Frontier to the Holy Lord Emperor himself.

  The old man did not look up from his reading. Straining his eyes, leaning closer, he ran a withered finger down a column of text. “I am of the opinion,” he said, “that there isn’t even a palace, much less any world beyond it; that the universe consists of nothing but this library, which is infinite—”

  The messenger drew his sword again. He could have lopped the man’s head off in sheer fury, as easily as he might have cut through a dry stick, but instead he merely touched the man under the chin with the tip of the blade and raised him up from his reading.

  “If that is so, then were did I come from?”

  “That is a proposition like ‘what is the sum of infinity plus one?’ On one level it’s nonsense, but I am sure that I can find a reference for it somewhere—”

  * * * *

  Great and wise are the holy emperors, infinite their power and their justice, for they are served by all that are worthy and they reward all who are true and brave and loyal in their duties—

  So the messenger recited (from some book or other) as he climbed a cobwebbed staircase littered with bones, threw open a pair of black doors and plunged ahead into darkness, where huge and impossibly loud bells rang overhead somewhere far above, proclaiming the glory of the Emperor. The sound struck him like a physical thing; it deafened him until he could only feel it as pain, and yet he made his way onward, until he came into light again and his ears were bleeding.

  Yet the emperors command and are served not because they lack any thing possible to desire, but because by such service are the souls of men forged and made right—

  He faced a dragon in a long corridor, and suffered wounds and burns, but slew it.

  He crossed a gallery filled with statues that ground to life, turning after him, but he held up the message and proclaimed the name of the Holy Emperor, and they paused, and let him pass.

  Once something like an enormous worm, but with a pasty, soft human face disturbingly like that of the chief eunuch blocked his way as he tried to ascend a stair through a passage, and the only thing he could do was split the creature’s face in half with his sword, then cut his way all the way through the thick, foul-smelling body which blocked the passageway, until he had emerged at the upper end, covered with steaming gore.

  He made his way through long galleries and along hallways, where servitors stood in endless lines to present the Emperor with rich gifts, or banquets on golden plates; yet all were made of stone, and the plates held only dust.

  He faced many more dangers. One he ran along a beach where the very stars in the heavens splashed as foam around his ankles while he battled sea-monsters; but at the very last, exhausted, more than a little bit mad, he reached the very pinnacle of the palace (which, he understood, is also the axis on which the Earth turns) and he stood outside a door of black ivory, which he knew, because there could be no other possibility, open into the throne room of the Holy Emperor himself in all his incomprehensible glory; and if the door was locked and no servitors or guards stood outside, that made no sense, but it was just more of the eternal mystery which reflected the Emperor’s eternal majesty even more clearly—so clearly that his mind was overwhelmed until, indeed, nothing made sense anymore and all those inspirational passages he had memorized from books were the murmurings of pigeons.

  He pounded his fist against the door, and fell down, weeping and at the end of his endurance. His mind was not right. He knew that. What if he…what if he…? Just went away and assumed the Emperor wasn’t interested in messages? What if he just slipped the message under the door? What if he lay down and died there and waited for it to be discovered?

  But no, he had been trained as a hero, to do brave deeds, to serve and never to desert his duty even as the Holy Emperor in his benevolence had forged his soul and the souls of all men by such ordeals.

  For the Emperor is the hope of mankind, he recited. This is our faith.

  And it came to him that the only recourse now was to run his sword through his own heart, so that his ghost, which could not rest with such a mission left unaccomplished, would eventually find a way to deliver the message.

  This made as much sense as anything. Finding a little more strength somehow, he tossed away his steel cap and pulled off his mail shirt, and made to stab himself; but his hand was as unsteady as his mind was dazed, and he missed, and gave himself no more than a bloody but superficial cut across the breast, and he fell down in despair against the door, sobbing, staining the message with his own blood.

  Then, to his amazement, as he rolled against the door, touching it with his head, the door swung open as easily as silken curtains might part.

  He crawled on hands and knees before the Holy Emperor, the Lord of All the World.

  The room was dark. Starlight shone through distant windows, but still he recognized the crown of the one seated upon the throne at the far end of the room—a gleaming disk set upon it like the rising sun shrouded in thick clouds, but burning through nonetheless. He knew the majesty of the figure seated there.

  He actually staggered to his feet, and spoke, explaining his mission, explaining the peril, shocked and amazed that he was doing this, doubtless violating protocol; ashamed and afraid and not ashamed at the same time. Boldly then, at the very last, he did his duty, and when the Emperor made no response he thrust the message into the Emperor’s right hand, which remained motionless on an armrest at the side of the throne.

  And as the messenger watched, the Emperor’s crown
fell down into a rising cloud of dust, and a stream of bones and dust and scraps of rotten cloth poured down out of the throne to settle around his feet.

  There was nothing more he could do. He had left his sword on the floor by the door. He couldn’t even fall and die in the honorable fashion.

  There was nothing. Nothing.

  He picked up the message and, though that part of his mind which was still sane reeled at the blasphemy, he broke the seal.

  Then someone took the message gently out of his hands.

  He turned and beheld one like a skeleton shrouded in black, holding an hourglass. This one read the message with hungry, empty eyes, turning its head slowly from side to side.

  Then this one looked up at the messenger, and were it possible for such a being to express pity—it was not—this one might have.

  “Don’t you know who actually rules the world?”

  But at this point the messenger was entirely mad. Whether he actually heard that voice, as the bells ringing in his ears receded a little bit, he knew not. He cared not. He leapt. He twirled about. He sang. He snatched the hourglass out of the apparition’s grasp and flipped it over. He ran up to the throne and sat on it, brushing away bones and dust. He placed the gleaming crown on his own head. He reached up and took down the Sword of Empire from off the wall, and held it aloft in his right hand, even as it crumbled into rusty flakes in his hand and the blade broke off and fell to the floor.

  He sat there on the throne and said softly, “Yes, of course I understand who rules the world. I do, for I am the Emperor of Hosts, the Lord of the Ancient Word which was given by the gods to the first of my line and whispered from father to son a thousand thousand thousand times. I believe you have a message for me.”

  The shrouded one handed him the message.

  It was blank. Perhaps the hungry eyes of the other had devoured the words right off the paper. Perhaps there never were any words in the first place. It is, in the end, a mystery.

  * * * *

  The palace dissolved, like a dissipating mist. The messenger awoke in the bright morning on a hillside. He had lost his steel cap and his weapons and his shirt of mail. He was bleeding from a wound across his breast. His right hand was stained red with rust.

  He sat poring over a blank sheet of paper, turning it over and over, struggling to discover its meaning.

  So the barbarians found him. At first, when he did not resist, they surrounded him, mocked him, and abused him, but when he held up the message so the Captain of the Farthest Frontier might read it—for the Captain’s head was there, stuck on a spear—they saw that the messenger was mad and honored him; for among the barbarians it is held that madmen are touched by the gods and sacred. Indeed, he became a prophet among them. He took their chieftains to hilltops at dawn and bade them behold, there within the sunrise, the infinitely glorious palace of the Emperor of All the Earth, who commands the Ancient Word. At first none of them could see, but after a time a few could, then many, until he had converted the entire nation, and it was they who bore him up in a litter (for he was very old by then) and insisted that he lead them on to the palace of the Emperor so that the message might be delivered and his duty fulfilled.

  THE LAST HERETIC

  …and I believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ, made, not begotten, different in being from the Father, the first and holiest of all created creatures…”

  —The Creed of St. Arius

  I

  Old Gaius Anicius Probus had chosen the instrument of his own destruction carefully.

  He heard hobnailed footsteps on the stairway outside his door, and he knew exactly what was about to happen. He arranged the books and manuscripts on his desk neatly, then sat back, holding a partially unrolled scroll as if casually reading, and waited, every detail of stagecraft exactly so, as it had to be.

  I cannot tell you exactly how this story came to me, but these events took place in a tower tucked away in the Tuscan Hills, where Anicius Probus had long sought shelter from the pressures and poisons of the world, in the Year of the Created Savior 622, when Alaricus VI was newly made Roman emperor in the West, Heraclius was Roman emperor of the East, and Gundobad was pope.

  The footsteps paused. There was silence.

  Outside, below the window, the soldiers who had surrounded the tower conversed in Gotho-Latin.

  But the door did not open. Probus realized that sometimes even the most perfect set-pieces of destiny need a little prodding.

  He put down his scroll and said loudly, “Come in, come in.”

  The door opened.

  The moon-faced, soft-looking young man who stood there, for all he wore the uniform of a centurion of the papal guards, had the manner of a naughty child caught playing dress-up and could only let his jaw flap a bit and the sound that came out was something like, “Um, Sir, well, I…um, um…”

  Sighing, Anicius Probus delivered his carefully rehearsed opening line.

  “So you have come to murder a kinsman, then?”

  The centurion actually entered the room at this point, but only managed to say, “Huh?”

  “We are related. Didn’t you know that? You are of the Anicii, however remotely, are you not?”

  Now the other seemed to come to himself and said more firmly, “My name is Servius Paulus Suplicianus Aurelius Anicius Pulcher, but I don’t use most of it.”

  “Well if I had a piled-up chariot-wreck of a name like that, I wouldn’t use most of it either, my dear—what do they actually call you?”

  “Servio.”

  “Servio, then. Alas for the decadent times in which we live. No one knows how to form a Roman name anymore. No one speaks the speech of Cicero—”

  The boy gave him a blank look.

  Probus waved his hand to dismiss the point. He had indeed chosen well. This Servio was the remote youngest son of a youngest son of a distant cousin twice removed, and very likely the single most obscure and ostensibly harmless surviving member of the family of the Anicii, a name of greatness, which dated all the way back to the beginning of the Republic and very likely to the old pagan gods—if you couldn’t find at least an illegitimate offspring of Jupiter in the family tree somewhere it would be disappointing—including among its numbers innumerable senators, consuls, philosophers, advisors and even in-laws to emperors, and had now descended all the way down to this certain Servio, who was, what? Nineteen or so? Not so much an imbecile as an unawakened person, who had spent the whole of his allegedly “adult” life thus far wearing that uniform, ceremoniously guarding one of the pope’s outer doorways, saluting a lot, and otherwise spending his time in gambling, at the races, in brothels, and, oh, by the way, attending church on Sundays and sometimes paying attention to his seventeen-year-old wife by whom he had an infant daughter, which at least showed an ability to keep the bloodline going, one could hope.

  Probus had good spies and some influence, even now, in his old age, as he was approaching seventy, after he had ostensibly retired from politics, but nevertheless he was certain to feel the axe now that there had been a massive shift in political fortunes. The new emperor, crowned not in Rome or even Ravenna, but in Aachen, was not only out of reach but entirely under control of that old serpent Count Udo, and the entire clan of the Anicii was proscribed, to be exterminated all the way down to that same, very obscure and harmless Servio, unless he just happened to be manipulated into proving his loyalty to church and state in the fashion he was about to do, which brought one, appreciating the exquisite irony, back around by circuitous routes to the subject of kinsmen murdering kinsmen.

  Servio, of course, didn’t get it.

  “I’m just supposed to escort you back to Rome, Sir,” he protested. “Nobody said anything about anybody killing anybody. You’re not even under arrest.”

  Probus sighed, and nodded toward the window.

  “And those men out there are just an escort to protect me from bandits on the road, I suppose.”

  “Sir?”

  “Further
more, their captain, a certain…Bauto, I believe…is assigned the task of making sure that the bandits don’t lead you astray either.”

  “There aren’t any bandits on the road. We didn’t see any as we came here.”

  Anicius Probus got up, a little stiffly because of his age, though he had been a physically powerful man when he was younger. He put his arm around Servio. He still had a powerful grip, enough to direct Servio as if he were a rag doll to sit down on a nearby couch, and a commanding enough voice and presence that when Captain Bauto came up the stairs, he, Probus, was the one who said, “Everything is all right, Captain. No one is going anywhere until dawn anyway. Tell the men to make camp and break out their supper,” and the captain did so.

  Then he tried to explain the basic outline of the situation to Servio, who, very much as Probus had suspected, had never had a serious thought in his life and couldn’t follow very much of this. Nevertheless, he, Probus, was still the spellbinding speaker he had been in his prime, and held the young man transfixed even as a snake holds the mouse it is about to devour transfixed by its hypnotic gaze. He explained, “Yes, I am a heretic, a follower of the infamous heresiarch Athanasius,” a name completely unfamiliar to young Servio, which figured. An abstruse and rather lengthy theological discussion followed, which might have been retitled An Introduction to Basic Christology for Idiots. Servio could make no sense out of that whatsoever, any more than he could grasp why it mattered politically and militarily, not to mention historically, what God was made of and whether or not His Son was made or begotten, co-existent for all time, or only brought into being at the instant the Virgin Mary, rather like Leda with her Swan, got divinely knocked-up.

  Probus used phrases like that for shock effect, but it usually didn’t work. It was like explaining things to an extremely docile ape, but still, patiently, manfully, he continued in the finest Roman tradition of heroic striving toward a greater future goal, having concluded after careful consideration that what he needed for his purpose was a blank slate, and in the person of Servio Et Cetera Et Cetera, he certainly had one.