by Janet Morris
"Such as?" Niko asked him brazenly.
Randal would have touched his partner, hushed him, but the dream lord raised an eyebrow, chuckled like spring's first breeze, and nodded. "Fair enough. I'll answer all your questions later. But as yet you don't know what to ask me, Nikodemos. I wish with all my heart you did." Aškelon raised a hand and the obsidian talisman known as the Heart of Aškelon glowed dark red with reflected firelight—or the blood of its wearer, if legend was truth and the dream lord's heart was really in this amulet upon his wrist.
"Randal, you must help your partner. More than stealth, more than strength, is needed." As Aškelon spoke, he picked up a short sword, not a forearm's length, whose blade wriggled like a snake frozen in mid-slither. "This kris, magician, is for you. You have pacted with a dead man to avenge his murder; a dreaming soul you call 'Belize' has taken you at your word."
"I—" Randal began to demur, to object, to explain.
"What?" Niko demanded, staring at Randal with a mixture of respect and confusion.
"This blade," Aškelon continued, as if neither had spoken, "has certain powers, as all your panoply, Nikodemos, has charms and strength you know not of. Listen closely, Randal, for only once will I—"
"I don't want any magical weapons; neither does my partner. I tried to give these back before. Now I'll leave them here with you—" Niko, as he spoke in anger, began to strip the cuirass from his shoulders.
Aškelon stopped him with an imperative glance and a pointing finger. "Listen. Learn. Profit. Or not even I can save you from the witches and the murderers intent on that boyish soul of yours. Any other would have let his weapons speak to him, so that I'd not have to bring you here in person."
The shadow lord turned to Randal, the kris held out. "Take it. Hold it with the hilt toward you. Place your right thumb across the flat of the blade where it meets the hilt, your left next to it, so that it just touches the right. Walk down the blade, thumb over thumb, until the tip is reached."
Randal did so, working his way over the nine undulations until his thumb, at last, met the tip of the blade exactly.
"It fits him perfectly," Niko whispered.
"I made it for him with these hands." Aškelon held them up. "Among mortal smiths, the thumb test proves a kris lucky, proper for an owner. Among those of us who can do more than men, its power is assured. Listen closely, Randal: by its power you may dispatch a man merely by stabbing his shadow or his footprints. Hold its point near fire and move the blade, and the flames will follow the point. From its tip, should you wish it, hornets will issue. You may draw water from it by squeezing the blade and making this sign." Aškelon's fingers flickered.
Randal, accustomed to this sort of instruction, let his own fingers follow suit. He nodded.
"If you are righteous," Aškelon continued, "merely pointing its tip at an enemy will end his days. If you are loving, it may on occasion jump from its sheath to fight your battles. If you are careless and thus endangered, it will rattle in its sheath to wake or warn you."
Randal stroked the recurved blade. "Thank you," he whispered, frightened and yet proud.
"I warn you: never use these powers unnecessarily, never for display. And do not trust your kris to ferret out an enemy or to know good from evil. It knows no more than you, is neither benign nor malicious. It is your character and your nature which animate it, nothing more."
Feeling fragile and yet lightheaded with joy, Randal noticed Niko staring at him. Catching his eye,
Niko shook his head.
"And now," Aškelon said softly, "I must show Nikodemos the stables, where the sire of his horse holds court—and another place which, I wager, will be familiar. Niko, if you will… Perhaps you'll learn something about your own weaponry on the way."
Niko didn't move.
"Go on, idiot," Randal whispered, giving Niko a shove. "We can't offend him."
"Cime will see to your wants, Randal, and to your friend's, while we are gone," the dream lord decreed, coming so close that Randal could see opalescent whirlpools in those deep-set eyes.
Then all things became confused. Cime was beside him, saying that so fine a kris had not been given a mage in all the time she'd lived, and Sturm was there too, congratulating him with downcast, covetous eyes and unmistakable envy in his voice. When he looked up from the blade whose nine undulations were so fascinating and so perfect, Nikodemos and the dream lord were nowhere to be found and Cime was offering to show them such wonders of Meridian as few mortals had ever seen.
* * *
Sturm had gotten lucky; right-living was its own reward. He'd escaped Bandara with its uncountable rules and antiquated dicta. He was free at last of Levitas's handwringing and out in the world with a fine ship and having adventures, straightaway, the sort all young heroes dream of.
This Meridian, he thought, was not a dream realm; his Bandaran perceptions knew it to be real. His youthful impatience and boundless hubris deduced that Nikodemos was a burned-out coward and Randal, the junior Hazard, the true source of Nikodemos's overblown reputation. Just the fact that Niko had found need to take a partner proved this, as far as Sturm was concerned. Sturm needed no man's help.
Women, however, were another matter. Let Niko and Randal fondle and "support" one another, each womanish soul finding its mate timorously close at hand.
This Cime was most beautiful. If the truth be known, she was the first woman Sturm had craved to have. He wasn't worried about her rejecting him: he had a plan.
There were two things he wanted from Meridian: one was the magic dirk Aškelon had given Randal—a little magic never hurt anybody; the purists of the school did magic all the time, simply called it by another name and thus created exclusivity where nothing special existed—and the second was to give up his virginity in some silken bed with this obviously experienced, indescribably enticing creature, Cime, sweating under him the while.
He had a ship, he had his mental skills, and he had a good idea that she'd welcome his proposal, if he could just get her alone long enough to make it: he'd take her with him, rescue her from Meridian—it was this she'd said she wanted.
The rest would be between them, alone on the rolling sea in the fine little ship Randal and fate had so thoughtfully provided.
Walking through a high-hedged maze gardened with statuary and tinkling pools, he finally had a chance to whisper in her ear. The perfume of her skin was heady.
She looked up at him coquettishly, appraisingly, then tapped her lips with her fingers. "Leave? Together? We two? What a twist of fate!" Her fingers moved from her lips to his, traced them, trailed down his neck. Everywhere she touched him his flesh seemed to flame. "Perhaps we will, my dear… Sturm, isn't it?… a bit later on. You must be sure you can do it; make a good plan." Having whispered this conspiratorially, she added, "As for the kris, all I can do is… distract… Randal. You must secure it on your own." Then she turned on her heel, flouncing off to join the mageling where he sat on a stone bench before a reflecting pool, and began to do such things as nuzzle the junior wizard's big ears so that they flared bright red.
Soon after, with Sturm scuttling along behind them, Cime guided the entranced young sorcerer toward a likely bower.
* * *
On the pretext of showing Niko Meridian's stables, Aškelon was attempting to explain his great plan, his hope of restoring to men control of their dreams.
But Nikodemos, accompanying him down the aisle between box stalls from which horses of unparalleled quality whickered greetings, was far from receptive. "So you approve of this magewar in which so many have died? Or are you part of it?" The fighter who was known as Stealth walked at arm's length, regarding the archmage warily.
"I want," Aškelon rejoined, "my name to be known and invoked among men—it is this I ask of you."
"Why?" Niko stopped, crossing his arms and leaning back against a stall whose occupant poked out a blazed, wedge-shaped head to nuzzle him.
"To secure the stability of the seven
th sphere through its human connection; to prevent the possibility of someone like Cime again threatening the right of man to salving dreams. You, Niko, will be my avatar, my chosen instrument, and Randal also, whom I have plucked from among warlocks."
"The way Tempus serves as the war god's avatar? No thank you. I've got to make you understand… I don't want this. I have my maat; it entitles me to fight for my freedom—spiritually as well as physically. I want no master, in any realm." The youth's expressionless eyes met the dream lord's and held them. "Between a balanced soul and its destiny, no power has a mandate to interpose itself. Not you, father of magic, not an angry god or facile demon. No bribe will lure me from my center: I belong to no one but myself—especially to no magician, of any sphere."
"I'm sorry you feel that way. Let me try to explain."
"There's nothing to explain."
"You fear what you do not understand. Magic is not an end but a tool; its use assures your partner Randal an opportunity to attain true power. You two are wedded. Will you deny him your love and respect—worse, deny him his heritage—because of the ignorance of your prejudice?"
Niko pushed away from the mare nuzzling him. "Are you threatening me? With Randal? If his soul's at risk, it got that way long before we met. Taking him as a partner wasn't my idea; we paired in spite of, not because of his wizardly bent."
"Again, your prejudice blinds you." Aškelon sighed. "Nothing is sadder than willful ignorance. I had thought you more open-minded; it is unlikely that in such a matter I was wrong. Your spirit is braver than your waking mind, Nikodemos, and less troubled by the baggage of experience. But I will try one more avenue via which to convince you…" The dream lord waved his hand so that a blinding light came to be among the stalls full of fragrant straw and sleepy horses.
When it was gone, Niko and the entelechy stood in another place, a broad meadow of waving grass, ringed by distant mountains, where a sighing wind played gently with Aškelon's silver-starred hair.
Niko's reserve and determination fell away with the revelation that he stood, corporeal and awake, in his treasured rest-place—not a mental refuge, now, but a physical location exact in every detail, the reality for which his soul had searched so long and which he had never described to anyone. His eyes, so noncommittal previously, filled with tears. He sank down upon the grass and let his hands rove in it, seeking by touch alone to determine how real was this overwhelming revelation. Niko (as all who studied the mystery known as maat hoped, but never expected to do) had found his rest-place in the phenomenal world.
"Still, do you fear me? Doubt me? Reject me?" Aškelon asked quietly, taking to the grass beside the dumbstruck fighter, who only shook his head. Aškelon smiled upon his "avatar" and spoke at length, gently, reminding Niko that Randal had received his kris at Aškelon's behest and that similarly would he, Niko, attain his fondest dreams— even come back here, eventually, to end his days where his spirit longed to be. "No gravel pond or guarded island can ever offer you more than a facsimile of this; you have lost nothing, losing Bandara, only shed a too-small skin. This is your place that your mind has claimed, and your body will return here, to our common ground, when your tasks are done. Right now, you know that what I say is true. Remember it. Your destiny lies with Randal's; together you will hasten one another's spiritual ascent and free your people from the misuse of magic and the fear which creates evil. Evil comes only from the minds of men. It has no objective reality, no power beyond what unscrupulous mages and immoral priests and ignorant fools have given it. As father of magic, lord of all creatures of nightmare as well as dream, I say to you that only men can put to rights what men have perverted. Thus I cannot act directly upon this travesty men have made. But you, my avatar, can and will act boldly. Drive a stake through superstition's heart, young fighter, and she will shrivel. Decapitate ignorance and demons will fade away. Vanquish the evil of men's creation and no greater principle of evil will survive it. You need not even believe in me, but only in yourself." Aškelon, having finished the generation of a hero, lay back upon the grass.
Pristine clouds wafted across a sapphire sky and under them a man swiped away tears a youth had shed. Niko, overcome in this moment by the truth of these words spoken in his rest-place, could not argue further. He sat where all initiates dreamed to sit: in his private place of power. As much as he hesitated to believe that he could do, or should do, all that Aškelon had decreed, he was determined to win his way back here, his right to be here, to live out his aged days here—to win, in his own terms, all a soul could claim.
So he said, sighing shakily and lying back in unconscious imitation of the dream lord, "All right. Teach me about the panoply. Teach me what you will."
Just before Aškelon began, Niko had time to wonder if it had been this way for Tempus, once long ago, and then gone bad. Had Tempus, a youthful pawn of fate and ferocious forces, given up, given in, willingly signed his soul away to labor in a "higher" cause? He didn't know; he couldn't say. The last thing Niko ever wanted was to be any power's avatar, let alone the willing servant of the entelechy of dreams.
He hoped the dream lord wasn't going to plague him, appear to him, dog him like a shadow as the Rankan Storm God breathed down the Riddler's neck. But then, no true parallel could be drawn: Tempus was immortal, undying, and resoundingly accursed.
Then came a torrent of instructions, some in words he heard and some in words which issued forth in red and flaming characters from Aškelon's mouth to burn among the clouds of Niko's private place forever, so that even though his conscious mind might not remember all that was said and done here, his spirit-self could never forget.
* * *
When Randal came running, disheveled and short of breath, into the stables shouting Niko's name, it seemed to him that the dream lord and his leftside leader appeared from nowhere.
"Niko! Thank the… ah—achool" Horses! Horses' hair stopped up his nose and made his eyes water and his throat close up, despite the fact that now was no time for it. Miserable, enraged at himself, Randal skidded to a stop before them. Then, with an effort of will greater than any he'd ever mounted against this internal problem with which he'd lived so long, he blurted out what had happened while tugging on Niko's arm in an attempt to drag his partner bodily from the stables.
Niko's eyes were red and he seemed disoriented. If Randal hadn't been so full of remorse and horror at what had just occurred, he would have marked it.
But he did not. He only tugged and gasped out, "The kris! It did it. It did it. I didn't. By all the—"
Coming out the stable door, Niko shook off the mage's grip and demanded, "What? What did the kris do?"
Aškelon, his hollow cheeks deep with shadow and his mouth downdrawn and sad, handed Randal an embroidered handkerchief. Somehow, from the long-suffering look on the entelechy's face, Randal knew that this news, no matter how terrible, was not going to be entirely unexpected.
He blew his nose, a furious honk. He breathed deeply. He said, "The kris rattled in its scabbard, just as you warned." He faced the lord of dream and shadow wondering if, after all, what had happened was somehow his own fault. "I— I wasn't wearing it. You see, the free agent… she took a coin she thought was Niko's, but it was mine. So she was bound to… to—" He couldn't bear to tell the entelechy that his consort had seduced a lowly Tysian Hazard. It was going to sound bad. Yet, what had happened after that should not have occurred here, not in the land of dreams. On his way here, Randal had passed weeping, white-faced residents who knew, somehow, the travesty in which he'd had a part.
"Spit it out, man. Get hold of yourself. What happened?" Niko demanded, suddenly coming close and taking hold of his partner's shoulders. "Are you all right?"
Randal took a deep, shuddering breath, closed his eyes, and told all. "Cime, she tried to make love to me, to discharge a coin's worth of debt. I took off the kris; it was lying on the grass in its scabbard. It rattled. I didn't pay attention. She's dangerous, might have killed me afterwa
rds—still might—and I knew it but I couldn't fend her off. She was… doing things to me… when the kris—it flew out of its scabbard and through the air right at this bush… I thought it was a bush. It was, I mean, but Sturm was behind it. Then he screamed and fell out, with the kris sticking out of him… And she laughed. She laughedl" He'd vomited, right then, and fled. He didn't tell them that. "She's after me, maybe."
"Sturm!" Niko snapped. "Is he dead?"
"Oh, yes. Dead."
"And your kris, Randal?" Aškelon said evenly, as if he weren't surprised, as if Randal were a very junior prestidigitator who'd made a rabbit disappear and couldn't bring it back again, "Did you leave it there?"
"I— She— Yes, yes." His anger flared. "I don't know if I want it. Look what it did! It killed someone! I mean— Do you think I did? Am I to blame? You said, my lord, that it was a mirror of my—"
Aškelon snapped his fingers, and in his hand the bloody kris appeared, gore smeared on its scabbard. "You had an enemy who wished your death. You knew it; he knew it; the kris knew it. Were she not so powerful, Cime herself would have been skewered. It is said of the kris that one's enemy's body is its only rightful sheath. And you, Randal, who use meekness as a shield and pretend to weakness, must come to terms with what else lies within yourself. It is unfortunate that Cime has brought violent death to Meridian, but she is its manifestation." Holding out the kris, the dream lord, seeming all of a sudden much taller and much harsher in his wine-dark robes, took a step toward Randal, then another. "Take it. It is yours. What it does, you rightly feel, is your responsibility. Succumbing to temptresses of Cime's sort never leads to a good result. Take it."
Randal's hand, of its own accord, followed the dream lord's order. The kris's sheath and grip were sticky and cold in his palm. With Niko watching, his imperturbable mask again in place, Randal knew he could not refuse the lord of shadow's gift.
