by Tanith Lee
“Give me now what you promised me,” rasped the Drin.
Rathak rose. “It is yours, and welcome.”
He gestured. A narrow door opened into the chamber. Through it came gliding a girl of the magician’s harem. She was young and fair, and quite ensorcelled. With glazed eyes she beheld the demon-dwarf, evidently saw some other, and beckoned to him ardently. Glad to oblige, the Drin bounded forward.
From his safe circle, Rathak watched their liaison, but they did not, with their unusual acrobatics, much claim his attention. For his was to be the rape of ultimate knowledge, of powers to rival the knack of the gods. The trapped butterfly was due to reveal to him all its former learning, and thereafter it would be his vessel and weapon, a beautiful girl under his supreme authority, a goddess reborn—as formerly, through a white-haired mother—into his grip. What might he not do with and through her? All Azhrarn had failed to do. Not to anger the gods, but to overthrow all the petty empires of men—that would be enough, for Rathak.
And such ideas moved his mind from the erotic and athletic enterprises the Drin (whose race had no female counterpart) tried with the slave-girl. Indeed Rathak was not sorry when, scenting the approach of sunrise, the demon wormed away through the floor again, leaving his leman lying, a discarded rag upon the carpets.
• • •
She dreamed of walking in a mist. She thought she had lost her way in the quag beneath the mansion, but this was not any such domain. It was a region Shemsin half remembered, though she could not guess from what era of her young life. Yet, it seemed only yesterday. . . . As she strayed there, searching, others rushed by her. And as those shadows passed, they cried to her in slender voices: “On, on—follow us on this great and terrible journey.” “Where are you going?” cried she. “To be born!” they cried in return. “To the tomb of flesh.” “I am already in that grave,” said Shemsin sadly, “and this is but my dream.”
Then she saw that she had about her waist a silken wire; the end of it was so long it trailed upon the ground and led away out of sight. Shemsin pursued the wire into the mist . . . and came at last upon a burning bush. Not that, in fact, the phenomenon was either bush or burning, yet in this manner it suggested itself to her. And what caused the burning of the bush was the element which lay tangled there. It had no true shape, or at any rate none mortal Shemsin recognized. However, it glimmered and made the non-bush seem to burn. The silken wire of Shemsin’s girdle ran in and out and all around, and had formed a cage.
“Why, you are a butterfly,” said Shemsin. “Poor thing, my girdle has caught your wings.”
And she leant forward to try to free the shining creature.
But as she stretched out her arms, she saw another, another flaming thing, black and blazing, guarding the bush. The image seemed to have snakes for hair, black snakes bound by restless silver, and in its uplifted hand, a sword.
Shemsin drew back. She put her fingers instead to the girdle at her waist, to break it. A fearful pain shot through her.
She opened her eyes to discover herself upon her bed in a private chamber of the magician’s house. The two chief midwives of Rathak’s harem bowed low to her.
“Lady, you are with child.”
“He will be gratified, lady. To get you planted at one couching.”
• • •
Shemsin waxed heavy, a flower burdened with a bud.
She lay wan beside a fountain, in an upper courtyard with a window-roof that was turquoise-green. She was kept from the other women of the house, though sometimes she saw them parading below her, on an enclosed avenue that was fenced with orange trees. Their fans winged to and fro, and she thought of butterflies. Occasionally, at night, her sleeplessness was disturbed by a rustling on the inner stair, the chink-chink of an anklet. One of Rathak’s wives had been summoned to his bedchamber. (In the dawn the same sound awaked Shemsin, returning.)
“He spoke to me of loving me. He valued me so much, he said. Yet never does he send for me.”
The darker midwife—both had come always veiled to her—answered this reverie. “There is an antique law. Once you are filled, you are holy. He may not touch you again.”
“No. It is only he is tired of me,” said the girl. “While I, seeing him, became his forever.” She had no one else to confide in. Harmonious sights were always about her. Food fit for a queen was served to her by unseen servants. She entered the chamber to find the meal laid out but no one there, and half supposed it was done by magic. If she wished for music, too, musicians played for her, or others read to her, or acted scenes to amuse her behind a high thin wall of porphyry.
In this way, the young girl grew to think more and more of the darker midwife, who in any event now tended her alone. It was this woman, of course, who tutored and steadied her in the maze of pregnancy, ministering to her alarms and the upsets and small ills that lent themselves to the condition. The woman’s voice was also dark, and pleasing, and her narrow hands never rough. Shemsin began to request the woman’s company, not only by day, but in the hours of night.
One evening, “You come always veiled before me,” said Shemsin. “I would dearly like to see the face of my friend.”
“It is the Lord Rathak’s decree which keeps me veiled.” Then she added, in a whisper, “Better you had seen through the veil of the magician.”
Shemsin was surprised.
“But I have looked upon his face. I have seen his handsomeness. It is that very sight which now breaks my heart at his neglect.”
“My innocent,” said the woman. “Know that once I was of a rank which equaled your own. I also was wife to him you speak of, Rathak Black-Brain. I learnt many of his secrets in this way. Then, when he wearied of me, he enslaved me by his spells, and for my knowledge, which was considerable, put me to this task. I can never leave his service, nor betray what I know. I must tend the bitches of his kennel.”
“Alas,” said Shemsin, “you are after all my foe.”
“Strangely, not,” replied the woman. “For you are only a child, not having any viciousness in you either. I bear you no malice. It is him I hate.”
“If you are enslaved as you say, how do you dare to speak of it?”
“I may not leave him, I cannot give his foulness over to justice. But liberty elsewhere he allows. It diverts him, my hate. Therefore seldom do I indulge in the treat. I utter now only in order to advise you.”
“But of what?”
Then the dark woman sat gazing some while upon her charge, so that even through the heavy veiling, Shemsin could detect the glowing ferocity of her eyes. Eventually she spoke again.
“You are enamored, he has seen to that. Let it be. Think of the child within you. In another month you must hold it in your arms.”
But Shemsin said, “If I stand upon the brink of a precipice, better I should see the drop beneath my feet.”
The midwife nodded. She rose.
“Three hours after midnight, expect me again. I know the hidden way into the tower of brass. If you have the strength of mind and body, I will show you your beloved husband in his sleep, drunk with wine and wickedness. Tonight is a time of the calendar he lies alone after his spell-making.”
Shemsin shuddered.
“So be it.”
For already her heart, which somehow always kept its doubts, had gone over to the midwife.
Midnight then came and went and the first hour dragged behind it, but the second hour hastened and the third arrived on running feet. A tap upon the door. Shemsin, laden with her unborn baby, moved out into the walk beyond. There stood the dark one, muffled faceless, not even a lamp in her hand. “Follow. Say no word, ask no question, make no slightest sound, whatever you may hear or see. Or both of us will die.”
They progressed along this corridor, and others, and ascended and descended in the mansion’s gloom, lit only here and there by the influx
of the stars. Shemsin trod with difficulty and dread. Eventually they reached a door no wider than a boy’s shoulders. The dark woman waited a moment, her hand lifted in admonition. Then, partly raising her veil, she breathed upon the door. It opened.
Within lay not a stairway but a stony ramp. It was visible by the rays of phosphors, each burning in a lamp that was a human skull of abnormal proportions, either gigantic or curiously tiny.
The woman went floating up the ramp in the skull-light as if she moved on wheels. Shemsin labored after.
No sooner had they got a quarter of the way up the incline than a weird noise began to toll and buzz from every area of the enclosure. Shemsin was in fear lest it alert the magician, but since she had agreed to total and unquestioning silence, and since her friend yet climbed ahead of her, she did not hang back or cry aloud. Presently the atmosphere became full not only of the buzzing and ringing, but of peculiar gleaming flakes and motes that flitted against her and sometimes briefly stuck on her clothing or skin, so she was in a torment of fright. But still she stayed speechless, and went on.
At the top of the ramp, again the midwife paused. The lights whirled all about her, but she gave them not a glance. She beckoned to Shemsin and when the girl was close, leaned nearer.
“We are now within the tower of brass. Here is the hardest part. Whatever occurs, do not shrink, do not murmur, or both are lost.”
Then she glided on and Shemsin toiled to follow.
They seemed to go over a floor of black glass into which the light motes fell and expired, hissing. Then a profound new blackness drenched Shemsin’s vision. She stumbled and found that now the air itself, or some covering of the floor, bore her upward. Such was her terror that her leaden body felt weightless.
As she traveled, beings evolved above, beside, below her, and whimpered in her ears, and sometimes struck at or caressed her. Once or twice a nightmare face swelled from the black like sudden luminous smoke. Shemsin bit her tongue not to scream. She did not dare to hide her eyes for fear she be separated from her guide who—even then—was faintly perceptible to her, skimming upward as did she.
The surge ended at a platform that seemed to rest in space. Another door was visible at the platform’s center. It glowed with a hot and deadly glare. Across the threshold lay a beast of restless coils, with soulless eyes that glared as the door did. And seeing them with these eyes, this thing roused itself.
Shemsin was by now oblivious to whether she dreamed or woke, lived or had died. When her companion continued to advance, Shemsin followed still, stupefied.
The guardian of the door writhed up its great neck into a fountain from which several other heads started to unfold and pour over. The eyes of each slowly opened, every pair a twinship of malevolence. The many jaws separated and gaped, and again half-lifting her veil, the midwife spat straight into each of them—spah! spah! spah! There were lightnings. The guardian became a mosaic of fires, sparks, embers, which shattered apart like a breaking plate and went out entirely—but all this without a sound.
The woman caught the fainting girl and shook her. “Not yet. Now you must claim your reward.”
The door melted away and Shemsin beheld, as if it swam in water, the seven-sided chamber where she had lain that first night with her lord.
The bed of rubies and poppies was no more. This bed was of brass and sable, with curtains deep drawn, though torches blared at the room’s every seventh point.
“Come,” said the midwife loudly, “We have defeated his safeguards. He will not wake.”
And seizing a torch, she pulled Shemsin to the bed. The woman thrust the curtain aside, and held high her light.
“Gaze now on him you adore, and that you have suffered so much to see.”
And Shemsin saw Rathak lying there, her husband and her love.
He was, to look on, as obscenely grotesque as some ninety years of wrong-doing could make him, for this was the length of his existence, bolstered by his arts. No blood-red hair of silk had he, but withered rusty grass. His eyes, wide even as he sightlessly slept, were colorless and tarnished membranes. A bag of bones, with the belly of a full-fed dragon, he spilled upon his sheets. He smiled as he slept, too, with rotted teeth that sorcery kept drugged and sharp. He smiled, he slumbered, perhaps he even gladly dreamed, not knowing any in the world could breach his lair and see him so. For he had his little vanities, Rathak.
Shemsin shrieked, as she had not at the horrors of the journey. But just then Agony the empress came up behind her, threw her skinny arms about Shemsin’s heart and womb, and shut her mouth.
• • •
The baby, a female, was born after a long and tremendous labor. It was deformed. Yet it lived.
And since without a soul mortal life could not have been admissible to it, undeniably the trap had been sprung. The butterfly was caught.
2. Prisoners
Rathak raged. His scheme was amiss. The child, a vessel of the soul of the sorceress-goddess Azhriaz, was crippled and repulsive. Somehow the mother had connived a way into his sanctum. She had seen him, as he was, and the sight had so dismayed her in her idiocy that she had wrecked his careful creation. He had found the girl lying alone at the foot of a stairway in the tower of brass. Here she must have fled and fallen after her shrieks cracked the sphere of his sleep. How she had overcome the safeguards of his stronghold he could not fathom, nor did she seem to remember anything of it, delirious with pain and panic as she was then.
He did not punish her at once. He required the child. But she had spoiled the child—ah! How she had spoiled it. The premature eviction into the world might have resulted in still-birth had not the soul been sorcerously linked to the flesh (and by a better steel than even Rathak could manufacture). And so the spiritual essence was hauled in with the body by the relentless hand of life. The dualism lay before him now within the circle of powers and powders, humped, askew, and mewling. In the crushed blob of its face, the sickly eyes slid senselessly after flutters of the light.
“Yes, little horror, I can do nothing with you. Even my arts could not undo such mess; they are geared to make and not to mend. For a mask of beauty . . . I need that fount for another, myself. It transpires therefore I may not use you as I had dearly hoped. Nevertheless, you will give me all you can.”
Then Rathak spoke terrifying words, made gestures of force, so the chamber reverberated as if at unheard thunder.
The lamps failed down to an overcast, the air went icy cold.
“I command you, spirit,” said Rathak, “spirit fresh from Nothingness. The memories of your former life are with you yet, though you may draw no help from them. The mutilated fleshly case of a baby holds you, yet you are, at the core, still Azhriaz. I command you, Azhriaz, by the sign of this, and this. You must answer.”
Then the formless mouth of the child parted. Out came a voice nearly human, but of no gender, very beautiful, and, too, disembodied; also metallic, fluid, ethereal, while even as it filled the room, eons off.
Yes, I answer, magician. But I am not she you name. I am only I.
“Do not play at theosophy with me. She you were you dwelled with.”
A thousand mortal years ago, or an afternoon, I did.
“And I have bound you. Do you know yourself bound?”
I know myself bound.
“And that I am your master.”
Of the flesh which contains me master you may be. But of this I am, which now speaks to you, master you are not.
“Yet you must obey me.”
You are in error.
Rathak said, “I will have from you all the knowledge of which you were possessed, which you will remember, and though some particles are gone from you in translation, it shall amount to a tolerable volume. Either obey in that, or I will torture at leisure, and with intent precision, the cage of skin and bone and blood that, until death, you may not now
escape. Shall it gladden you?”
It will injure me, both body and spirit. I, too, shall suffer, as you know. But know, too, that Azhriaz, when she I was, incurred some debts. I will submit to the suffering, and offer it to my inner self as payment for past wrongs of hers. In that manner, each cruelty of yours will ultimately assist me. Shall that gladden you?
“Soul,” said Rathak, “I do not bother myself with your ambitions. I have those serve me that will get much joy from your anguish. I will call them now. Let us gladden them.”
• • •
Because she heard her child shrilly crying, Shemsin came to herself and said, searching about her in confusion, “Where is my daughter?”
But the crying had faded away and instead she heard a stranger sound, which she did not know at all.
So then she murmured, “What noise is that?”
“Madam,” said one at her side, “if it might be kept from you, willingly I would do it. But seeing you must learn at last, I will tell you at once. It is the noise of Black-Brain’s masons, who even now wall us up alive within this room.”
Shemsin started from her pillows. Immediately she heard the sounds for what they were, the setting in of giant slabs to mortar.
And she saw the daylight had already shrunk from the chamber to a miniscule dot which now, as soon as she had looked at it, went out.
Peculiarly then, details of her surrounding came to her, such as they were. For the room was bare, save for a guttering candle, and the divan on which she had been lying, while upon the floor rested a jar of water and a loaf of bread.
“Provisions have been left to prolong rather than to alleviate our suffering,” said the voice quietly.
Shemsin turned to find, seated beside her, her companion the midwife, still in her veil, and seeming calm as a stone.
“You—why are you here?”
“I am to be chastised, too. We allowed the offspring of Lord Rathak to emerge weakly and deformed.”
“My baby,” said Shemsin.