by Gene Wolfe
Some part of Vandibar’s mind felt sudden, irretrievable loss, as if he’d just dropped a particularly precious gem into the sea without realizing he’d done so until it was too late. He was a man who loved as well as hated. Was this boy saying he was now beyond all that?
He dismissed the thought. “You could be just a lunatic.”
The boy closed his hands, then opened them slowly. Blue flames danced on his palms without apparently burning him.
“I demand to know why thou hast come,” said Vandibar Nasha firmly, startled that he had used the corpse-language.
Sekenre’s voice shifted again. His accent was gone. Someone else seemed to speak through him. “Only to show you what you have already done, Oh dread sorcerer, Vandibar Nasha.”
“What have I done? I haven’t done anything.”
Sekenre in this new voice replied only, “Radaces,” and accented again, said, “Come with me.”
Vandibar rose and followed him. The boy walked noiselessly, lighting the way with blue fire in an outstretched hand. They came to the stone trellis and the stair. Vandibar hesitated. He wasn’t going to appear before his guests in such company.
But Sekenre continued, barefoot on stone, quiet as a ghost, and he could only follow.
He heard no voices, no music, no sound at all, and was astonished to find the roof-garden deserted, the canopies rolled up, the furniture cleared away. Dead leaves rustled across the pavement in a faint breeze. The moon, which had been full tonight, was now well past, and low in the east, though the hour must have been quite late.
His mind wasn’t working right. He couldn’t reason. He merely accepted. Such details were not clues, but portents, part of a vision.
His breath came in white puffs. The air was cold, as in winter.
Sekenre said nothing. In the moonlight, Vandibar Nasha saw that his initial estimation had been wrong. This wasn’t a beggar child: skinny, but not emaciated; his trousers roughly torn off just below the knees and his tunic several sizes too large, but not ragged; his face clean and his hair trimmed. An ordinary forum brat, then; but that was one more falsehood, another mask.
And the voice of sorcery within himself seemed to ask, What mask do you wear, Vandibar Nasha?
Sekenre shivered in the cold, the blue flame flickering as his hand trembled. When they descended the further stairway, which lead to a covered passage bypassing the house, there was ice on the steps.
Yet when they emerged into the street, the moon was gone, and warm rain poured over the pavement in muddy rivulets, swirling around the boy’s bare ankles. The fire in his hand did not go out. Vandibar followed him down steep, cobblestone streets, tier after tier, as the city extended down to the river like a carpet flung over a flight of stairs.
By the time they reached the forum, the rain had stopped. The air was hot and stifling. Mist rose from the pavement like smoke. The temples of the gods all around them silent and empty, the stone colossi on the rooftops gazing down blindly through the thick haze. For just an instant there was a hint of a crescent moon, but then it was gone.
So the two of them reached the house of Radaces in utter darkness, but for the almost lightless flames flickering through the fingers of Sekenre’s half-closed hand.
Here again, Vandibar hesitated, thinking of proprieties, imagining how ridiculous he must look in his sodden, ruined gown, with his fine shoes now muddy and squishing as he walked, his hair plastered to his face.
Sekenre, dripping beside him, sneezed loudly. “We must go in,” he said.
“Yes, we must.”
Sekenre touched the door with fire. The door swung silently inward. Vandibar followed, into the darkened house, through what he knew to be a gaily-frescoed atrium, where just a year earlier, it had been Radaces’s turn to greet guests at the Festival of the River’s Rising.
Now there was only gloom and the only sound was of his squishing shoes.
They came upon what seemed to be a naked, hugely muscled, pot-bellied man. He took it for a statue, but then the apparition lurched forward, drawn by Sekenre’s light, and he saw it more clearly: bloated, hideously pale like one long drowned, wearing some kind of animal mask.
The long jaws opened, and Vandibar knew it was no mask at all, but the true face of one of the evatim, the messengers of the death-god Surat-Hemad, which crawl up out of the river to devour corpses. No one ever sees them except when he is about to die, or when someone very close to him as died, or perhaps in the midst of deepest sorcery.
For the first time, Vandibar Nasha was truly afraid. He wished he could go back, that the vision would end, that none of this had ever happened. He was almost ready to apologize to Radaces.
But Sekenre pressed on. Vandibar reached out and took the boy’s free hand, for comfort, fully aware of the absurdity of the gesture. But Sekenre did not pull away.
“Why hast thou come?” said the monster in the death-speech. “This is my master’s house now.”
“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 t
he 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 his 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 anything 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.
