But instead of any vision of gods, the stars themselves rippled like lights reflected in wind-swept water, and a third of the entire sky was blotted out.
Suddenly, I was standing on the doorstep of an enormous wooden building, vaster than anything I’d ever imagined could be built. With a yell, I fell back, then scrambled to my feet and ran a distance off to hide in a clump of tall grass by a water channel. There I crouched, wide-eyed, watching, listening as the fantastic house began to shift and change, its timbers creaking, groaning, shuddering, as if a living monster, not a wooden structure at all, were stirring from sleep.
There, as had been foretold, undoubtedly and undeniably, was the dwelling of the sorcerer Evoragdou.
Towers rose like slowly stretching arms. The windows opened, like eyes, black and sightless. A corner swelled outward, becoming a turret with a gleaming, glass dome on top, sparkling in the starlight.
Truly this was as great a miracle as anyone could hope for, but I waited in greedy expectation for something more to happen.
Toward dawn, something did: A door opened onto a balcony far above, and a silver-bearded man in a flowing robe came out. What seemed to be a living flame flickered in the outstretched palm of his hand. It was enough to illuminate his face, but I couldn’t see the rest of him clearly. He might have worn a fine gown, or rags.
Slowly he turned, from side to side, holding up his light, as if searching for something.
I crouched very still.
Then he spoke just a few words, which made me very much afraid and sent me scurrying away through the mud on my belly in a ridiculous attempt to avoid being seen. I wanted to cry out, but I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood, and remained silent, as if somehow in silence I could still deny what I had heard.
At the edge of the village I got up and started running. I arrived home screaming like the mad boy who had come before.
* * * *
That morning, everyone went to see the sorcerer’s house, but stood a safe distance away. I returned, holding my father’s hand. By daylight it was even more fearsome, its details visible, no longer an ill-defined shadow but a living mountain of wood and brick and stone. Peaked roofs rippled like waves on a wind-swept lake to form the heads of fabulous birds or horses or dragons, which opened their eyes and mouths and wriggled their shrieking wooden tongues. More windows revealed themselves, some filled with light, some dark, appearing and vanishing like foam in a swift current. Great masses of wood turned before our eyes, revolving slowly like wheels within wheels, a pattern endlessly shifting. Sometimes the house would extend itself, walls and roofs forming a covered way, reaching out like a limb, snaking across the earth, shutters and doors clattering as if trying to speak. The people scattered to avoid it, and the extension would suddenly collapse, fusing back into the body of the house.
Everyone wanted to know what this meant. My father, my uncles, the head men of the village all conferred, speaking among themselves in hushed tones, as if they didn’t want to be overheard by whoever was inside. A runner was sent to Thadistaphon for the priests. But he wouldn’t be back before nightfall at least.
So we stood and waited. Throughout the day the house shifted restlessly in the hot sun, sometimes seeming to crumble into ruin, then rising up again, more magnificent and strange than before, its facade sculpted into the shapes of leaves and sunbursts and impossible beasts, sometimes into human faces which belched black smoke, then were consumed by flames before they renewed themselves.
Always the people asked the elders: Who had come to us? Why?
The elders only shook their heads and pretended not to know. But they knew. I was certain of that.
I made a serious mistake, perhaps because I wanted to be a hero, or just because I wanted to help. On an impulse, I tugged on my father’s hand and said, “Papa, it is Evoragdou. I know it is.”
“What?”
Hadn’t anyone listened to the mad boy, who had warned us of this thing? Didn’t they remember? Why were they deliberately denying the obvious?
“In the house. It is Evoragdou.”
“How do you know? No one else is so certain.”
I pulled away, and stood hugging my still-muddy sides, swishing one toe back and forth in the dirt. I couldn’t meet my father’s gaze.
“I just do.”
My father seemed both sorrowful and afraid.
* * * *
When the priests arrived that evening, I was the center of attention. They took me into a shed and locked the door, then grabbed me by the arms and yanked me around and around, from one angry face to another, demanding what I truly knew. Had I gone inside the house? Didn’t I know that to speak a sorcerer’s name is to summon him? Had he sent me? Was I his creature, a demon shaped like a boy? What did he want here? I screamed. I wept. I couldn’t answer. I tried not to tell them anything at all. More than anything else, I wished I’d been able to keep my secret to myself. They beat me with sticks. They said they would lock me in a dark hole beneath the temple in the city and I’d have to stay there forever while the sorcerer spoke out of my mouth, as inevitably he must.
I screamed some more and finally said, “I knew who he was because he said he remembered!”
The priests let go. I fell to the floor and lay still, sobbing, somehow very certain that I had ruined my entire life, that nothing would ever be right for me again.
The priests whispered among themselves, glancing down at me, then whispering some more.
Somehow they were satisfied. They didn’t carry me off to the city. Instead, they filed out and left me alone in the shed, with the door unlocked. Much later, when the door opened again and my father and mother stood there, I thought I had won. I hadn’t confessed everything. I hadn’t told the priests that the sorcerer had known my name, that, as he held his tiny flame aloft in his bare palm and peered into the darkness, he had called out, “Pankere, I know you are out there, for I am Evoragdou, and I remember.”
But I had not won. It was Evoragdou who was victorious.
* * * *
Nothing further happened for a long time. The priests built a fence around the sorcerer’s house, painted all over with signs and sigils and strange writing. Not even they had ever dared to go inside.
Soon multitudes flocked to see this wonder, first more priests, then the rich and high-born from Thadistaphon and passengers off boats that passed along the river, even a few nobles from the City of the Delta. Our village prospered as the people sold bread, palm wine, embroidered cloth, and painted images to the travellers. No two images were ever the same, for the house of Evor~agdou was never the same for two consecutive hours, let alone between one day and the next.
But in time, the flow of travellers diminished. The house merely remained as it was, forever assuming meaningless shapes, offering nothing, threatening no one. The sorcerer never emerged, nor did he speak again, through me or anyone else.
We all recited the legends of Evoragdou, some of them genuinely ancient, a lot more newly invented to amaze the foreigners and earn a coin: of his battles with monsters, his voyages to other worlds, and, most especially, how he ventured into time until his past and future were as confused as images in a house full of mirrors. He was the greatest of all sorcerers, we said, virtually a god. But secretly tellers and listeners and priests alike began to suspect that only the house remained, mindless, like a water wheel left turning when the miller has gone away, and that the sorcerer Evoragdou was dead.
The priests may have let me go, but certainly I was marked, singled out. Neighbors turned their faces from me. They made signs against me, to ward off bad luck. The other boys threw stones if I tried to come near. The girls ran away.
I think they all may even have been jealous, because I had actually seen what they and the travellers who had come so far longed to see. Certainly I felt so. I hated
them for it.
But, when no miracles or demons manifested themselves around me, I was allowed to grow up. Two priests returned to our village to live. They took me aside, taught me letters, and probed, very delicately, for news of the sorcerer Evoragdou. Many times I disappointed them, but they never beat me, and I even came to take comfort in their company.
They wanted me to go away with them, to become a priest too, but I would not. Unfulfilled as I was, I heard no god calling me. In the end, the priests arranged a marriage for me with a girl from another town. My parents had died by then. My wife Ricatepshe and I dwelt in the same house I had always known. I worked the same fields. Heaven sent us three sons, but a plague took two of them back again.
By the time I was forty, my beard was gray, Ricatepshe’s hair was almost white, and we had two children left, Nefasir, almost a grown woman, and the boy Khamire, who was twelve. We neither starved nor particularly prospered.
* * * *
When I was forty, the thing happened for which I had been waiting all my life. I recognized it at once.
Nefasir woke me in the night and led me outside. She was trembling. She took my hand in hers, then pointed across the fields in an all-too familiar direction.
“I couldn’t stop him,” she said, breaking into sobs.
“Stop who?”
“Khamire. He has gone into the sorcerer’s house.”
* * * *
I spoke with Ricatepshe, trying to deny the obvious, the inevitable, for I was very much afraid.
“We must ask the priests for help,” I said.
“We have no money. If the sorcerer destroys one child for whatever purpose, the priests will not risk opposing him unless they are very well paid. You know that.”
“We’ll go to the Satrap.”
“You’d never get inside the palace. The guards would likewise demand money.”
“Then I will stand in the marketplace and proclaim our plight to all who will hear, until I find a hero who is seeking fame, like Canibatos in the stories.”
“Such heroes only exist in stories. Besides, what will Evoragdou have done to our son while you are waiting? Have you thought of that?”
“Then I must go myself. I am the hero. Let the story be mine.”
“Yes,” she said softly.
So we prayed together for an hour to all the gods whose names we knew, and I purified myself, then put on shoes and a woolen robe as if for a journey, and got out from its special chest my grandfather’s sword, which he had bequeathed to my father as his first-born, and my father to me as his, in case a hero’s courage would ever be needed.
Grandfather had been a kind of hero, a soldier in King Wenamon’s army during the Zargati wars. I prayed to his spirit too.
Just before dawn I set out, across the fields. Ricatepshe walked with me for a while, clinging to my arm, but let go as the sorcerer’s house loomed over us like a black mountain, motionless for once, as if waiting for me. I barely noticed that my wife was gone. I lived only in that instant, concentrating on what I had to do, as I broke through the fence and entered the domain of Evoragdou.
* * * *
The transition was more subtle than senses could follow. The house itself reached out and embraced me, though I did not actually see it move. Shadows shifted, and without any sense of opening a door or climbing in through a window, I was suddenly inside, surrounded by the domain of Evoragdou.
I groped in utter darkness. The sky overhead was shut out. My hand found a wall. I followed along it to another wall, this one cold to the touch, and alive, wriggling like a tapestry of serpents. I let go in fright and disgust and staggered back, tripping over something, crashing into pots and jars.
I sat up on a creaking wooden floor, amid clay shards, trying not to think about what might have been in the jars. Something scuttled across my hand. I let out a yell.
“Do you desire a light, my brave one?” came a voice out of the air, from no particular direction.
I stood up and drew Grandfather’s sword.
Now a dozen or more hands floated in the darkness, tiny blue flames dancing from upturned, bare palms.
“How very foolish,” said the sorcerer, “to show your enemy what weapons you have. You lose all possibility of surprise.”
I turned, slashing at the drifting hands. They scattered like moths.
“No matter. I knew you bore a sword. I remembered it clearly.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Is this some trick of yours?”
Evoragdou sighed. The tone of his voice changed distinctly. He wasn’t mocking me any more. He seemed, instead, regretful, melancholy. “It is certainly a trick,” he said, “but one I have spent many years trying to puzzle out.”
“What is the matter?” Now I mocked him, bitterly. “Can’t you remember?” Even as I spoke, I was amazed at what I said. I tried to convince myself that I was as brave as Canibatos in the stories, daring to ridicule a sorcerer. But I didn’t believe it.
“At least you are clever,” said Evoragdou after a long pause. “That must count for something.”
“Monster! I have come for my son. Give him to me or I shall find a way to kill you. I swear by all the gods—”
“That is odd. I don’t remember you killing me.”
“Show yourself, Evoragdou. Come to me now.
“Here I am.” His voice came from a distinct direction. I rushed toward him. The lighted hands swirled around me. I tumbled headlong down a flight of stairs, banging knees and elbows, desperately trying to catch hold of something without losing my sword.
When I came to rest at last, I shouted into the darkness. I screamed. I cursed myself and Evoragdou. I pleaded with him to let me son go free. I offered myself in the boy’s place.
“Ah, Pankere, son of Zorad, father of Khamire, if only it were that simple. But no, you must first come to understand the entire mystery of this place, and of myself. First that. I lay this geas upon you.”
* * * *
It might have been that same morning, or some other, when pale light finally seeped in through slatted windows. I lay where I had fallen, in a dusty, debris-strewn room filled with boxes, jars, bundles of cloth and, more disturbingly, with man-sized, wooden images of beast-headed demi-gods or demons, creatures so cunningly carved and painted that they seemed to shift slightly as the light and shadow played over them. I waited to see if they would come to life. But finally I prodded one with my sword, then ran my hand over the gilded snout of another. Only wood.
I got up and went over to one of the windows. Fumbling, I discovered a little lever which opened the window slats, and looked out.
Already I was disoriented. I had come in at ground level, then fallen down a long flight of stairs. I should have been in a cellar. But when I looked out the window I saw that I was high up, and, more amazingly, I beheld a landscape like none I had ever seen. Forested hills rolled green to the horizon, where blue mountains rose like stationary clouds. A river forked among those hills and vanished among the trees as the Great River, I was certain, never did.
The wind blowing in through that window was bitterly cold, yet dry, unlike a rainy winter wind.
Risking all, I raised the latch and opened the window, leaning out into the freezing air. I couldn’t see the ground below. The house seemed to float in an endless forest like a boat among water-grass.
I drew myself back into the house, bewildered, but by now too numbed by wonder to be afraid. I made my way out of that first room, into a second, which I found utterly bare and brilliantly sunlit…only its windows revealed, instead of any forest or mountains, a placid ocean stretching to the horizon in every direction, its waves lapping less than an arm’s length below the windowsills. I reached down, touched, and then tasted the salt water.
So I returned
to the first room, which now had no windows at all. The disembodied, burning hands drifted among the wooden beast-men.
“Evoragdou,” I called out. “Enough of this. Give me my son.”
He made no reply.
I couldn’t find the stairs down which I’d fallen, passing instead into a third room, where the floating hands did not follow. Here the air flickered with faint light, like a captive aurora. I stood in the doorway for a while as my eyes adjusted, then shuffled cautiously forward, probing the air in front of me with my sword, until I reached another window.
The latch came off in my hand. The shutter swung wide, this time presenting neither hills nor forests nor ocean, but infinitely receding stars. I clung to the window ledge for a long time, leaning out, somehow expecting, demanding that I see more. What? Some vast sky-serpent stirring in the depths? The very gods? Or perhaps the Shadow Titans, who dwell in darkness and whom the gods fear? Possibly a trained sorcerer could discern these things, but I saw only the unflickering stars.
And I shouted the name of Evoragdou once more and pleaded with him to explain himself, to end my torment, or at least let my son go, whatever he would do with me. But he did not speak, nor did he reveal himself in any way. His magical obligation, his geas, was embodied in this house, its mystery like a book I could not yet read, unopened on a table before me.
* * * *
The heroes in the stories complete their tasks quickly, invading the enemy’s domain, performing mighty labors, seizing rare prizes, then returning to the familiar world, or perhaps dying nobly in battle, there amid strangeness. Think of Canibatos when he rescued the sun and moon. Think of Arvadere and the Bird of Night, or of Sekenre, who descended into the land of the dead. Their stories come to definite conclusions.
It wasn’t like that for me. The mystery was like smoke, rising forever.
I spent what could have been days or even weeks exploring the house of the sorcerer, where no two rooms were ever alike, and no room the same after I left it; nor was there any limit to the number of them; an infinity of wood and brick and stone, shifting, appearing, vanishing again.
The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Page 66
