by Gene Wolfe
Flames began lapping up from the paving in a crescent that imprisoned d’Artois and Barrett in its semicircle. The fires slowly converged, inch by inch, hungry blue flame relentlessly advancing.
“Hold your breath and dive through!”
“No!” shouted d’Artois, seizing Barrett by the shoulder. “It’ll burn us to cinders. Elemental fires!”
Barrett did not understand; but he read the desperation in d’Artois’s eyes.
“Resist his will. Fight his thought! If you fear, you are lost!”
“What do you mean —”
“Do as I say or you’re lost—she’s lost!”
Barrett was dismayed by that uncanny, marching flame. Above his wavering crest burned the fixed, malignant eyes of Don José. The madness of that awful night had reached its climax when blue flames were exhaled by solid flagging. But when he saw that d’Artois’s gaze was fixed, and his features composed, he gained courage.
“I defy your will and your power with my will and my force!” he heard d’Artois tensely whispering. The low murmur became rhythmic as drumbeats, and inexorable as fate. And Barrett began to repeat d’Artois’s words, halfheartedly at first, then confidently.
“I defy your will with my will, your power with my power!” he repeated.
Suddenly he felt a strange thrill of triumph surge up from within him; and for an instant the psychic concussion of the liberated force, shook him, and his dry eyes blinded as he blinked, caught a sobbing breath, and repeated, “I defy you, my will against your will.…”
He saw that the flames no longer advanced. The intolerable heat scorched and singed, but no longer increased.
The flames retreated—only by the breadth of a finger—but they retreated, beaten back by will that fought will.
And then Barrett faltered, cracking under the terrific strain.
“Can’t make it…I’m done in!”
They heard a cry of triumph from beyond the wall of flame. Don José knew that his victims were helpless, and stood waiting for the fires to close in. D’Artois and Barrett exchanged despairing glances.
“Try it!” muttered Barrett. “It’ll roast us anyway —”
D’Artois nodded, and his fingers closed on the haft of his red knife, but his occult knowledge assured him that the blade would fuse from the terrific heat.
Don José’s exultation, however, was checked as a mighty voice thundered from the passageway, “my will against your will, and my power against your power!“
It was awful in its richness and volume. Sidi Abdurrahman was chanting as he advanced, solemn, prodigious-seeming as a descending doom—a colossus of power stalking across the Border.
“I have returned to accomplish where once I failed. You escaped me, ages ago, when the Dragons of Wisdom proclaimed the black night of doom for lost Atlantis. I failed, but in the many lives I have lived since then, I have gained power against your power, and will against your will!”
Don José made a gesture. Then he found his voice, and uttered a command. The flames wavered as he spoke, then surged high as his followers clustered about him. They resisted the Chêla’s awful will—but in vain. The tips of the crescent of fire drew from the wall. Don José had lost command of the weapon he had devised; it lived on by the force that the Chêla concentrated. Flight was futile; space is nonexistent in occult combat. And the beast-men and their chief made their last desperate resistance as the flaming crescent reversed its curvature, enfolding them in its terrific embrace.
There was no outcry—only a hissing and crackling that endured but an instant. Then came the dreadful stench of searing flesh as flame, hungrier than any earthly fire, lapped with deadly swiftness, roaring, as winds lashing monstrous cliffs. A column of awful radiance burned for a moment with adamantine brilliance.
When their dazzled eyes had become accustomed to the ensuing dimness, d’Artois and Barrett emerged from their niche and strode over the blistering tiles. They were careful not to look at the spot where the flames had centered.
Sidi Abdurrahman’s august features were still transfigured, but the power was leaving him. It was only with an effort that he kept his feet as, smiling wanly, he made a gesture of benediction.
“This is the end of an old feud that started many lives ago. I was not ready for this meeting—but to save her—and you—I spoke. The Occult Masters sought to help—did help —”
He gasped, caught his breath, and with difficulty resumed, “they warned me—I could not endure the test—since I could not—receive all the force they were sending. But I could not decline —”
D’Artois caught the Chêla as he collapsed. The silence for a moment was unbroken save for the bestial whimperings of the wounded who had dropped short of the vortex of flame.
“We can do nothing for Sidi Abdurrahman,” said d’Artois. “Get Yvonne—quick! Before we all go mad!”
* * * *
AS THE SUN rose, Yvonne, revived from the drugs of the satanic ritual and quite unharmed, heard d’Artois’s narrative. Barrett, bandaged and smarting from his wounds, answered her weary smile, then turned to his friend:
“Pierre, I’m still stumped by a few things.”
“Only a few?” countered the old man with a flash of good-humored irony that for a moment struggled through the somber memory of death’s double thrust at a lovely girl and a great-hearted occultist.
“Where did he get that awful body for the elemental spirit?”
“The crypts beneath the city,” said d’Artois, “have spawned strange broods. Monstrous hybrids, perhaps archaic survivals of lost Shâlmali, revived from suspended animation by Don José. But that is an occult rather than a scientific problem.”
“After all,” said Barrett, “the final riddle is, why did anyone with Don José’s talents dabble in such ghastly studies? What motive —”
“He was following the tradition of the Black Brotherhood,” replied d’Artois. “He was moved by the lust for power given by the services of elementals. He needed familiar spirits to help him further his pursuit of dark arts. Blood alone would bind them to his will; and you know to what lengths he went.”
Yvonne shuddered at the evening’s memories, then interposed, “But why did your friend’s heroism end fatally?”
“At the best, I can only guess,” admitted d’Artois. “Despite his great learning, he was only a Chêla, not a full initiate. Thus he could not endure the forces which he called forth, and he knew that he could not. Yet he accepted the challenge.
“He created a psychic explosion whose repercussion literally blasted him to pieces. Not his physical body, but his vital forces, which were unable to withstand the strain of mastering that elemental fire.”
D’Artois paused. The silence was acute; and for a moment it seemed that they felt the presence of Sidi Abdurrahman. Finally Barrett spoke.
“He mentioned other lives —”
“According to the traditions of his order,” resumed d’Artois, “he believes in reincarnation. And it seems that in some former existence he failed in his duty, so that in the lives that followed, he sought to redeem himself.
“He stood there in the vault, holding the captured elemental a prisoner. He was oblivious to his surroundings; but when Don José called the fires down on us, the psychic impact aroused Sidi Abdurrahman and brought to his consciousness the presence of an age-old enemy of all mankind.
“But whatever the reason and however science may try to explain it, we owe our survival to Sidi Abdurrahman.”
D’Artois cleared his throat, rose, stepped to the door.
“I am an old man,” he said, “and vengeance leaves me weary. Let me therefore leave you in good hands while I rout out Monsieur le Préfet. I will have him dynamite the entrance of that accursed vault, so that no matter how ominous the stars may be, there will be no more archaic survivals coming forth in search of victims.”
And Barrett, regarding Yvonne Marigny, knew that when grief had received its due, untroubled moo
nlight on the Lachepaillet Wall would make the Gray Sphinx of the Pyrenees more alluring than before.
VANDIBAR NASHA IN THE COLLEGE OF SHADOWS, by Darrell Schwetizer
I
When his enemy’s servant gave him the bronze coffer shaped like a human hand, Vandibar Nasha accepted the gift politely. He did not have to open it to know that it contained the severed hand of one of his own servants, who had died hideously in a cellar beneath the enemy’s house.
The other had taken Vandibar’s piece, but the game would continue. That a little blood seeped through the hinge and stained his sleeve was the only cause for true offense. It was inelegant and unworthy, and Vandibar was, if nothing else, a fastidious man, who maintained about his person and his house a sense of unadorned, even austere, but undeniable elegance.
He gazed across the glittering sea of his guests, as they surged over the roof-garden in the twilight, beneath swaying paper lanterns. He spied his enemy, Radaces, by the punchbowl, dressed like a peacock in heat, a jumble of jewelry and multi-colored silks and, indeed, billowing feathers, his face painted and slightly streaked with intricate black and silver spirals. Radaces leaned away from the crowd, conversing with a man in a tarnished sun-mask.
Vandibar pressed gently toward them, pausing to greet guests, to laugh at their witticisms, to sample delicacies, even once stooping as a child prattled something in his ear. But still he made his way, and by the time he reached Radaces, the man in the tarnished mask was gone, something Vandibar noted with concern. He knew, though he was not supposed to, who that person was: a prince up from the Delta on an intrigue.
He confronted Radaces, still holding the hand-shaped coffer. Their eyes met. Radaces leaned forward, that none might overhear, and said, “It is death between us now.”
“I know that. I’ve found you out.”
Radaces laughed softly, and waved his hand to indicate the crowd in attendance, “But we must maintain appearances.”
“Yes, of course.”
So they stood together, host and illustrious guest, smiling at the assembled nobility of Elandisphon, the City of the River’s Bend. Above, a brilliant moon shone. It was a Goddess Moon, Shedelvendra’s Lantern, marking the springtime and the river’s rising. Therefore tonight was a time of celebration, of renewals and new unions, and, especially, of maintaining appearances.
Both he and Radaces pretended not to notice a certain young couple seated among the tumbling vines against the far wall. Vashimur, who was Vandibar’s son, furtively held the hand of Tatiane, daughter of Radaces.
Suddenly there came a commotion from the great stair that led up from the inner court of Vandibar’s house. Everyone whirled about, including Radaces.
Then Vandibar touched his enemy on the shoulder with the brazen hand. Radaces turned, startled, and Vandibar whispered, “I think it is death coming.”
Radaces’s face went pale for just an instant. But everyone was laughing as eight slaves, hugely-muscled, sweat-drenched (but perfumed), bore a palanquin up among the guests, set it down, and pulled back the canopy to reveal a cooked and stuffed crocodile bedecked with pearls, crowned with a silver wreath, its claws sheathed in gold. Vandibar’s crier announced the advent of Surat-Hemad, Lord of Death, the Devouring God, whose mouth is the night sky, whose teeth are the stars.
A murmur of amazement rippled through the crowd.
On this night, however, the crier continued, the Devourer was to be himself devoured, for the springtime is a celebration of new life.
Flower-masked page-boys ran through the crowd, handing out forks. One of the slaves produced an enormous knife and began carving.
At the first touch of the blade, flames exploded from the crocodile’s mouth. There were astonished shouts and a couple of screams. But the slave blew the flames out in a single breath, and everyone applauded, if nervously, and began devouring the Devourer.
Radaces smiled weakly. “A brilliant jest.”
“Yes. Isn’t it? But more your style than mine. I designed it with you in mind.”
“That doesn’t change anything.”
“Nothing ever does.”
Much later the dance began, and a priest and priestess whirled in the circle which had been cleared for them, their respective green and yellow streams trailing fantastically as the two of them embraced in imitation of the sacred coupling of Bel-Hemad, who brings the rain, and Shedelvendra his consort; only then could Vandibar Nasha slip away down a marble, spiralling staircase, past a stone trellis covered with night-blooming, almost luminescent flowers, into the empty lower garden.
Only then could sorcery come to him, almost as a distraction.
Even here, in the quiet, familiar place to which he had retreated, as he sat on a marble bench by the edge of a stone pool; even here, alone in the dark, as the sounds of dinner-party faded into a murmur only occasionally punctuated by a voice or a note of music louder than the rest—a squeal of laughter or a cymbal clashing—even here, Vandibar Nasha maintained perfect decorum.
He sat quietly in the perpetual twilight of the garden, among the night-blooming flowers, by the edge of the pool, where the water like polished ebony perfectly mirrored the sky. He did not yield to rage, or to fear, or to laughter. He sat with the bronze hand in his lap, and it seemed that, ever so subtly, something opened within his mind, like a shutter left slightly ajar; and a single dark moth fluttered in out of the night.
There. Like that.
He looked up with a start, as if he’d been pricked. But he was alone. The distant music and voices whispered like a tide. Tree branches creaked gently in the night breeze.
The stars rippled. He gazed, not at the sky, but into the pool, as if that dark thing already lodged inside him gave him this instruction, and reassured him that one day, but not yet, he would be ready to look up and behold this miracle directly.
For now it was as if the earth were no more than the floor of a great hall, and he had opened a portal, and now gazed into the infinity below.
The stars in the pool shone more brilliantly than he had ever seen them before. They drifted back and forth, like gems set in a dark velvet hanging which billows with a sudden breeze.
Faces appeared behind the stars, huge and fierce, wild in their aspect, with terrible eyes. He knew that these were not the gods, but the Shadow Titans, shadows cast by the gods on the first evening of creation, which rose and came to life, which even the gods feared, but which sorcerers adored, for sorcerers are abominations which serve the abominable.
He knew that if he were to turn his head and look up at them directly, he would die.
But he was already a sorcerer. That was enough.
In that instant of realization, he was exultant. He would swiftly take care of Radaces. No sorcerer would ever have to suffer such a fool.
Besides, with Radaces out of the way, Vashimur could marry Tatiane, and all the wealth of the house of Radaces would be joined to that of the house of Nasha.
Therefore Vandibar became a sorcerer, by unknown means, toward an unknowable end, and he knelt by the pool and prayed to the reflected Titans, and offered to them thanksgiving. He was not afraid.
He heard the Titans whispering. They told him what to do. He opened the bronze coffer eagerly, fumbling with the latch, heedless of any possible venomed edges or similar childish devices. He washed the severed hand of his murdered servant in the starry water. Blood swirled over the faces of the Titans, obscuring them briefly.
With an ornamental pin from his collar, he carved a certain sign and the name of RADACES on the back of the hand.
He placed the thing on the surface of the water. It stood up on pale fingers and scurried like a water-striding insect across the pool and into the garden on the other side. He heard it rustling among the leaves for a few seconds and then it was gone.
Once more he gazed into the reflected stars, and a voice within him spoke through his lips. The Titans replied in the language of corpses, that universal speech of the afterworld in which sorc
erers, alone among living men, are conversant. For the moment, Vandibar understood little. He was like a small child eavesdropping on adults. Yet the understanding came, a remembrance, not of a dream, but of an earlier life before the dream which had been his life up to this point, from which he had now suddenly awakened.
Then the water splashed and the Titans disappeared. Someone addressed him in a soft voice, in a stiffly formal manner mimicking the corpse-language, but in Deltan with a bad provincial accent.
“Art thou, then, Vandibar Nasha, who holds the doom of Radaces in his hand?” Here what might have been an impudent snicker, and the tone and accent changed. “If you will pardon the expression.”
Vandibar looked up, furious, then incredulous to see what seemed to be a child seated on the opposite side of the pool, splashing his bare feet in the water; a ragged boy of early teens, with a round face and large, dark eyes.
It wasn’t one of his servants, whom he would have had beaten within an inch of his life for such an outrage. It had to be some starveling beggar, whom he could have killed.
But he realized that he hadn’t heard anyone approach, and now the boy spoke in the true death-speech.
“Thou art indeed that Vandibar Nasha, whose name is known in the land of ghosts, whose deeds are told by the dead around their cold fires.”
Sometimes, Vandibar knew, when the game takes an incomprehensible turn, one must keep on playing, no matter what, merely to survive, and hope for advantage to appear later. Therefore he answered, “I am.”
The boy reverted to Deltan, his accent far worse, his manner casual. “Oh, I thought so.”
“But I don’t understand. What deeds? What stories?”
“All that are and shall be, for among the dead there is no time, as it is for the sorcerer, who swims in eternity like a fish in the sea, rising to the surface only when he chooses.”
A moment of silence followed. Vandibar closed the empty hand-coffer and floated it in the pool, rippling the surface gently.
“I am Sekenre,” said the boy, “not of this place, but of Reedland, also a sorcerer and therefore an abomination as you are; perhaps your ally, perhaps your foe, but unlikely to be your friend, for it is a fantastically rare thing for a sorcerer to have a friend.”
