Night's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Five nights Drezaem woke and orgied, five days he slept like the dead.

  And on the fifth day Shezael climbed the pile of granite and found him.

  She was thin and pale. The journey had been weary, terrible. The empty plains were formidable beneath the unrelenting hot sky, and after sundown, the cold winds blew. Her clothes were in rags, her feet and her hands were bleeding, yet she had noticed none of it; her pain and exhaustion meant nothing to her. The goal was still before her. Her instinct led her without hesitation. The severed soul within her was like an unhealing wound.

  Seeing the granite stack in front of her, she had known how close she was. Her heart had seemed to burst. She ran to the rock and pulled herself among its steeples, and there she found him, the man who she had dreamed she was, the man whose flesh contained the other half of what was hers.

  And at once she was soothed, comforted. She had no rage or bitterness in her, and so her answer to the sight of him was not to harm or to snatch, but to love. She knelt beside Drezaem in love. She kissed him, his lips, his eyes, his hands. The portion of the soul within him sensed her, but, as the Prince of Demons had arranged things, so Drezaem slept too deep to wake.

  Throughout the day, Shezael sat beside Drezaem among the granite.

  The sun went down. In the dusk, a black wolf padded over the rock.

  He was not like the other wolves of the plains, which had not come near Shezael. The eyes of the wolf scorched into the brain of Shezael where few meanings had penetrated. The wolf was Azhrarn. His gaze hypnotized and overwhelmed. Shezael could not fight him, and did not try. He forced her from the side of Drezaem, from the granite place, though the portion of the soul in her was torn like a mortal hurt. Azhrarn drove her away into the empty night.

  Far from the spot, Shezael saw a radiance of lamps woven into the sky. Shezael stood alone and weeping on the plains. She thought: ‘My beloved is there. What am I to do?’

  She had begun to reason.

  Shezael returned, over the track her own bare bloody feet had made when the black wolf had compelled her thence. She came to a gate of brass with a variety of hideous heads piked above it. Beyond the gate lay a garden and a palace, and she knew Drezaem was there.

  Shezael set her hand on the gate, but at once a wall of blue fire burst up all around the garden, and from the fire sprang terrifying shapes that drove her off with whips.

  She lay down in a cave, immobile as a stone, though her blood and her tears mingled on the rocky floor.

  She did not go back till the sun had gone over the sky and almost down again. She kneeled beside Drezaem where he slept. She had a girdle about her narrow waist of twisted strands of colored silk. This girdle she now wound about the wrist of Drezaem.

  “I knew him from a single hair tangled in a harp string. When he wakes he will know me from this girdle I have worn so long. He will know me, and then we may not be parted.”

  And she kissed him and stole once more away.

  Night came, and demon-kind. Drezaem stirred upon a heap of satin, hyacinths for a pillow. And as he stirred, Jaseve stepped near, and she saw the ragged girdle wound about the wrist of Drezaem, and in a moment she had pulled it from him and thrown it in a brazier of green fire which consumed it.

  Night passed in riot. Dawn walked across the plain.

  Shezael wept.

  Then again, near sunset, she sought the place where Drezaem lay sleeping. She took a sharp stone and cut off a lock of her pale hair and hid it within his shirt.

  “He will surely know me from this lock of hair, and then we may not be parted.”

  But when the sun was gone, and Drezaem stirred upon a heap of velvet with asphodel for a pillow, Jaseve came and smiled, and searched his clothing till she found the piece of hair and, before he woke, the demon-woman had thrown it in the brazier.

  Another night, another dawn. Shezael in the afternoon, looking on the man who slept among the rocks.

  “Perhaps you will not know me then. Perhaps the half of the soul which is yours has grown silent. There is no other thing I can leave you. I will come no more.” Then she leaned and kissed him, his lips, his eyes, his hands, and she went away to the cave and lay down there, as once Bisuneh had lain down, expecting only to die.

  Night dawned black.

  Drezaem stirred upon a heap of furs with violets under his head. Jaseve stood over him, and searched diligently, and found no girdle, no lock of hair, nothing of Shezael’s.

  But there was one thing, something so small one woman never knew she had left it, while the other woman, even with demon cunning, never saw.

  A silver lash from the eyelid of Shezael had fallen among the lashes of Drezaem as she kissed him. And when he woke the lash fell in his eye.

  The lash did not discomfort him, but it did strange things to his sight. The miraculous palace trembled and grew shadowy, the delicious form of Jaseve took on a gleaming awful look, as if phosphorus were brewing in her bones. And suddenly a feeling of inconsolable loss rushed upon Drezaem, and he knew he had felt the despair of it before. He put his hand to his eye and rubbed it, and the silver lash slid on to his finger. As soon as he touched it, he knew what was amiss with him. His half-soul pounded on the gate of his heart and his flesh, and he cried aloud. “I must find her.”

  And then, too swift for all those snares of the dark to trap him, he ran into the plains, ran without understanding how he guessed the way, straight to the cave where Shezael was lying.

  Later, Azhrarn strode across the plains. He strode until he made out two figures seated on the rock beneath the open sky.

  Behind him, the sorcerous palace was gone, Jaseve poured like a rare wine back in the ewer. The peacocks spread their fans no more on the earth, and the clockwork nightingales lay unwound in the workshops of the Drin.

  Azhrarn called to the two on the rock:

  “Turn, Shezael. Turn, Drezaem. I am here.”

  And turn indeed they did, without hesitation. Azhrarn saw them in the clear radiance of the moon.

  They were beautiful as two things can only be beautiful which flawlessly make one whole thing. As their hands fitted together, so did every part of them seem fitted, the angle of each limb, the curve of her cheek, her breast, against the straight symmetry of his. Drezaem’s hair was silver, Shezael’s eyes were silver. Her hair was floating gold, his eyes were burning gold. What had been bestial in him had grown calm; who had been inert in her had grown vital. The expressions that passed across their faces were identical, and would always be.

  The imbalance of each, counterweighted by the other, had become the most exact of all balances. Negative aligned with positive, the divergent paths coalesced. Iron was silk; silk was iron. What emerged was serenity, wisdom, power, magic—the unique perfection.

  Neither was afraid—how should they be? They watched Azhrarn with a detached sweetness. They had the look of gods, or of God; the soul unseparated, complete. They were two beings, yet they were one.

  Azhrarn wrapped his cloak about him. He was much taken with this sight. It pleased him, for an instant, more than wickedness.

  “Too fine to sunder twice,” he said. “For what it is worth in the world, go with my blessing.”

  PART TWO

  4. The Anger of the Magicians

  Between the rocky hills, an old track led to the city and the sea, but it was rarely traveled. For a hundred years or longer, men had avoided this road, since, even at the brightest hour of day, they declared, you might hear a monster howling there in the rock beneath your feet, and who knew but that sometime it might not get out and eat you? The mighty magician, however, he of the black and green silk coat and the ruby ring the size of a gazelle’s eye, he, over whose head a menial held a fringed parasol as he rode in an open carriage drawn by six black horses from whose bridles dripped pearls—he was not daunted in the least by tales of howlings and eatings. Even the servants of the magician laughed.

  “This is the Great Kaschak,” they said. “Suppose the
re is some monster concealed under the road. Suppose it emerges. Then you may suppose Kaschak will eat it!”

  So the magician set out. He had a mind to reach the city and its seaport before sunset, and had chosen the track for its swiftness. He had come to this land to work a healing miracle for a king’s eldest son, and now, this miracle performed, he wished to take ship for his home.

  The old track was dusty and here and there stones had fallen. The magician cleared the stones away with a momentous word or two that dissolved them in smoke. An hour after noon, the magician’s party came to a dry well.

  “It is time the horses were watered,” said Kaschak. He struck the side of the hill and a fountain burst from it and formed a poo1 for the horses to drink at. Just then, from the mouth of the dry well, there rose a mournful ululation. The servants of the magician showed no fear, for they trusted his powers. Kaschak himself went to the well, and leaned there to listen. Soon enough the fearsome noise came again.

  “I believe I should like to see this creature,” said Kaschak. He called for an unlit torch, and blew on it and it took fire. Then he lowered it some way into the well and left it suspended in mid-air while he peered down through a magic spyglass to see what was to be seen. “Ah,” said the magician presently, “as I thought. A human translated by the fabulous method of a demon into a curious shape.” (The glass revealed such information.)

  Kaschak snapped his fingers and sparks flew from them. The sparks spun about and formed a net which poured itself down the well.

  A vile clamour was heard, a scraping of hoofs, a scrabbling of teeth, a slithering smack, a slavering bark. Up from the head of the well drifted the torch, and went out. Next came the sparky net with, rolled and tangled and kicking and writhing inside it, an awful beast.

  The front half of the beast was a boar, the back half a giant lizard’s tail. Its head was a wolf’s.

  It floundered and bellowed and howled, swiveling its eyes and gnashing its lupine jaws. It had wandered for a century or a little longer through the crevices and caves that undermined the hills. It could not die, sealed forever within the scabbard of a demon’s whim. Blows had not slain it, nor the fall into the gully; the burning straw had scorched and roused it, but not killed. For sure, it had forgotten its beginning, that once it had been a man, handsome, virile and young, who had lain down upon the body of his beloved bride to slumber, and woken imprisoned in the hellish form the Drin had made at Azhrarn’s direction. Bisuneh’s lover, still trapped in misery, while she had been dust for eight decades or more.

  Kaschak saw all this, or sufficient of it. He was not a man of pity, but neither was he unjust. As the foul, stinking horror tumbled and groaned in the sorcerous net, Kaschak sent his servants hither and thither, to fetch this chalk and that powder, to take this amulet from the chest and lay that one back. In the middle of the afternoon, Kaschak began his spell. It was not concluded till the sun itself began to tire and sink down upon its distant bed of blue hills. The thing in the net had undergone many transformations and had lamented beneath them. Now, as the red light left the sky, a wrinkling movement went over the back of the beast. As a serpent crawls from its expended skin, so something now crawled from the wrinkled, three-fold hide.

  It was a man who fell exhausted at Kaschak’s feet. A man no longer with any appearance of youth, without a vestige of good looks or vitality in him. But still, a man.

  He could not remember his name, had forgotten it as he had forgotten his earlier life. He had a vague memory of being cheated, cruelly deprived of joy without even an omen to prepare him. His recollections were merely of dark dripping underpasses, echoing caverns bursting with his sub-human cries, filthy holes where he had hidden from meaningless terrors. Kaschak gave him food, wine in a vessel of yellow jade.

  “You shall serve me two years to repay my trouble. I will call you Qebba—the much-spoken-of—for so you have been in these parts.”

  “Qebba” did not argue, with the employment, with the name. His face was the grey bony face of a man dying of hunger who can never be filled. He regained human speech only slowly. He consented to ride on the footboard of Kaschak’s carriage. Sometimes, forgetting, his tongue would loll and his eyes roll frightfully. Those who glimpsed him when the carriage passed through the city thought him a lunatic, and marveled as to why he should accompany the Great Kaschak.

  It was late, but the ship had stayed for the magician, seeing he was who he was. On the quay, Kaschak made an obscure gesturing. The fine carriage became the size of a walnut; he put it in his pocket. The six black horses, a-drip with pearls, became six pretty, white-spotted black beetles. He put them in a comfortable box and, flanked by his servants, cheered by the astonished and captivated crowd, he went aboard, and Qebba with him.

  The seas were calm, with a following wind. Two days from shore they came to an island, a forbidding place of black obsidian cliffs that stretched, seemingly without relief or break, into the sky. Here the ship’s boat nosed on to a gravel beach, and the magician and his servants were put ashore. This gaunt outpost was no less than Kaschak’s home.

  The ship sailed on like a scarlet gull. Kaschak struck the impervious obsidian wall of the cliff, and a huge doorway, invisible before, folded open to let them through, grinding shut behind them. Beyond the cliff wall, the island was not as it had appeared—barren and bleak—but one glamorous garden of curious sort.

  Rose trees grew in the magician’s garden, tall as tall pines. Their blooms were of the palest green and the most transparent purple. Pink willow trees leaned beside the rosy pools that tasted of wine. On the blue lawns lions gambolled—they were the color of fresh cream with hyacinth manes—they ran to the magician and playfully licked his hands like dogs. Owls with round emerald eyes sang melodiously as young girls.

  The magician’s house was of green porcelain, with a roof of varicolored glass to let in the light. An avenue of black trees with fruit of pure gold led to the doorway.

  Qebba stared about him, bemused by the garden as by all that had happened to him.

  “A word of warning,” said Kaschak. “In my service you will necessarily learn some magic. Do not seek to learn too much or use carelessly what you come to know. Above all, never pluck the golden fruit of these trees.”

  The magician’s house was no less a wonder than the garden. Diverse beams of color from the glass roof above dyed the rooms, shining on many items of precious metal. A huge water-clock of brass and silver, and in the shape of a galleon, told the hours. At dusk the lamps mysteriously lit themselves.

  In a hidden chamber, behind two great doors of black lacquer, the magician practiced his arts. The handles of the doors were in the form of two hands of white jade; to open the doors one must needs clasp these hands in one’s own, and twist them. This Qebba noticed the most trusted of Kaschak’s servants do on particular occasions, when they were summoned to aid in some experiment. But Qebba himself was not admitted. He did not think to enter the room unasked, but it was reputed to be an awesome place.

  Qebba’s tasks were strange. Watch for a large bird in the noon sky. Count how many times it circled the magician’s house before flying away and write the number on parchment. Go to the twelfth pool, pluck a reed, crush it in a mortar, spread the paste of it on the doorposts of the house. Every ten days, Qebba was told to climb up on the roof and polish the glass there—it must be very thick for it did not crack beneath his feet. Or he would drive the lions, which fed on grass and wild yellow grapes, to another part of the garden.

  Two months passed. Qebba was neither happy nor unhappy. He fulfilled his duties, ate his meat and bread and slept in his allotted place. Occasionally he glanced at the doors of black lacquer with the white hands in them, but did not think to enter, did not really think of anything at all. Even now he would forget sometimes, loll his tongue, try to drag his hind limbs, as he had been forced to do when the tail of the lizard was fixed behind him.

  One morning Kaschak summoned him and said:


  “Go to the black trees in the avenue, Qebba, and pluck a golden fruit.”

  Qebba turned to obey, then hesitated and said:

  “But master, you told me I was not to.”

  Then Kaschak laughed and went away. He had been trying Qebba, to see if he could trust him still. That afternoon he called Qebba again and said: “Here is a golden sieve. Go to the second pool and fetch me wine-water in it.”

  Qebba did not argue this time. Though it was a sieve, if the magician demanded it to be filled, then filled it would be. And sure enough when Qebba dipped it in the second pool, none of the water ran out of the holes. He carried the sieve to Kaschak, and Kaschak smiled and said: “As I thought, your years as an enchanted beast in the thraldom of demon-kind have installed in you some aptitude for thaumaturgy. Come now, you shall enter my workroom.” It was a fact that Qebba had acquired unrealized powers, as the magician had suspected from the first. All his tasks had been a test. The circling bird was invisible to an ordinary human eye, the magic reed would not have ground to paste for any man. Under the feet of another, the glass roof would have smashed at the initial step, and few could shepherd the blue and white lions. As for the last test, who but one gifted with sorcery could hold fluid in a sieve?

  So Qebba entered the chamber behind the doors of black lacquer.

  A window was there that showed, not the garden beyond, but a hundred different places about the world, whichever the magician conjured to appear. The room was dark, yet everything in it might be seen. On a stand of brass stood the bleached skull of an ancient Magus, which could be made to talk when Kaschak required it. In a crystal jar with a stopper of agate was a tiny woman the size of a man’s middle finger, and though she was tiny she was very fair and her hair was like a russet leaf folded about her. When Kaschak tapped the crystal she would dance lasciviously.