Night's Sorceries

by Tanith Lee

The veiled woman hesitated. She appeared to decide her course. “Madam, it did not long survive. Which is as well for now you could not, as you are, save the child.”

  Shemsin wept. But through her tears, her mind wildly scurrying, she said, “Nevertheless, we are not to die through that, you and I. But for entering the forbidden room. For looking on the deceiver in his disgusting state.”

  The veiled woman started violently in turn.

  “Did you so?”

  Shemsin’s voice rose to a scream.

  “You know it well, since you were with me! Oh, how you beguiled me, killing my child in my body by the rigors of that way, delivering me to this fate. Yet,” her voice sank low, “mine was the greater evil, to love an abomination. The Goddesses know, most probably the child came out malformed from his sowing and is better dead. As am I.”

  In that chamber, the candle also was near death. Outside, all sounds of any sort had ended. Silence and the dark laid hands upon the room.

  “Shemsin,” said her veiled companion presently, “we are to finish soon, and thus you will believe I have no reason to invent. If you entered the tower of the magician, I was not with you. Though, if you had asked it of me, out of my regard for you, perhaps I should have ventured the exploit.”

  “Then I am mad,” said Shemsin dully. “For I remember how it was you persuaded me. And in that place you were my guide, opening its immovable doors, subduing by sorcery its fiends and supernatural guardians.”

  “Not I. How could I perform such miracles?”

  Shemsin, there in the dark, discerned as if by a lightning flash.

  “It is true. It cannot have been yourself who came to me that evening, for she had neither your walk nor your accustomed ways, and none of your kindness. She was proud, hard as a woman of iron.”

  “As I was going to you in the dusk,” said the other, “one met me on the stair beneath your court and turned me back. She, too, was veiled—Oh lady, this house is infected with abnormal things, with flits, haunts and, I have heard, by demons. Such will make purposeless mischief for the mere happiness of causing harm.”

  (In this, the young midwife was not quite correct. The Prince Hazrond, when he had adopted her guise to lure Shemsin into danger, had had a distinctive purpose, which, be sure, was now achieved—the physical demolition of the child. Old scores settled?)

  But Shemsin said, “Let us speak no more of these awful things. Soon it will be night, for us.” Then she added, “Yet, before the candle dies, let me see your face, for comfort’s sake. Or is it not permitted you?”

  “At any time.”

  And the midwife drew the veil up from her head and shoulders and let it fall on the floor. Revealed, she was a maiden of Shemsin’s age or a very little older, and darkly fair as the iris by the lily.

  “Shemsin,” she repeated, “we are soon to finish.”

  “So you have said, and so I understand.”

  “Then let me tell you why I never put aside my veil. It was out of fear because, from the moment that I saw you, I loved you.”

  Shemsin answered, “And so said Rathak at our couching.”

  “But he lied.”

  And at that instant, the candle’s flame went out.

  The women flung their arms about each other. In blackness, on the sea of death, they clung. Each thought in her heart: At least I am not alone.

  • • •

  He had learnt nothing.

  The soul had refused to render him another sentence. It had not cried aloud, as the child did. The air was choked by the stinking vapors and louring excrescences of Rathak’s minions. After some hours, he foresaw the infant must die of its treatment, despite the spells of retention he had cast to secure it. Its death was not his aim. Dead, the soul evaded him once more and might, besides, seek some vengeance on him. Such were the great mage’s notions of astral business: He saw all worlds by his own light.

  Thus, he left off his labors.

  The ventings of his frustration and anger were then accommodated in a number of ways.

  And thereafter, in the emptiness of that sorcery-scorched and psychically-abused tower-high moral basement, Rathak shed like a blistering curse a charm of healing on his daughter.

  But, despite his magecraft, not much healing was in Rathak. He had spent his days in nurturing poison. Though the formula thrust off death, it did little to encourage life.

  When he had seen to it, he called one up to him, from the vaults of the mansion.

  The creature came with a slow shuffling of its limbs and hung its heavy skull so its thick tongue poured upon the flagstones. It was like nothing on earth—or like such a patchwork of earthly somethings—that to describe it would be needlessly pedantic, and perhaps impossible. However, there it was, and with two or three bulbous, gleamless eyes, it viewed the magician, its master.

  “Slave,” said he, “do you see the infant there?”

  By some means or other, the creature affirmed that it did.

  “I have a use for it, the child, which I cannot now effect. Maybe I never shall effect that use. But meanwhile, the brat must be my captive. And, most definitely, it must survive. Assure me of your grasp of these words.”

  By some means or other, the creature did assure him.

  “To your charge, slave, I give the wardership. Take the child below into your own place, and there feed it with the nutrients of your own trough. Guard it equally from misadventure, escape, and the release of death. It will with time grow larger, and may begin to make sounds. Only then should you alert me by uttering that whistling note I taught you. Otherwise, the task is solely yours.”

  The creature nodded or made some corresponding gesture of compliance.

  “In return for your vigilance and care, you shall receive from me payment, under the code of such sorcerous bargains. Your wage is this: For three minutes of every day, you will experience an untold bliss of all the senses, such as I can devise. To gain a repetitive ecstasy of comparable magnitude many humans would undertake far greater toil. Is the fee acceptable?”

  The creature drooled. It evinced agreement.

  Rathak snapped his fingers.

  The creature crawled to the unknit circle, and pulled out the baby. It carried her, by some unusual route, to itself quite mundane, down into the foundations of the magician’s house.

  • • •

  Sunset came to the mansion, and reflected on the brazen doors, so they shone red. After the sun had gone, came the melancholy dusk, and lingered awhile. Then night ascended the rock—but dusk was still standing there, in the portico. Dusk was a man in a purple mantle.

  Raising his gloved hand, he knocked upon the doors.

  High up, on the left side, the fossilized braincase of a dragon had been fixed. Now its jaws creaked wide. It spoke.

  “Who is there?”

  “Darkness,” was the answer, “one fifth part of it.”

  “Who is it that you seek?”

  “He that nailed you to your post.”

  “You may not enter,” said the dragon’s cranium.

  “I am, it seems to me, already within. Shall I take off my gloves?”

  The cranium hissed. The left-hand leaf of the door opened two or three inches.

  The man in purple had vanished from the portico. Inside the courtyard of black, blood and emerald he stood now, gazing about. Faint phosphorus from the swamp had gone in with him; it glittered sharp as glass. He seemed handsome, though he kept the left side of his face well hidden in his hood.

  “Rathak, Rathak, Rathak,” whispered he.

  The court took up the sound and bellowed it.

  Rathak appeared suddenly in a cloud of light. He gazed at the visitor, then evolved from the air a scarf of vapor. In this Rathak swathed his eyes. Then, he bowed very low.

  “You know me,” said the visitor. />
  “I believe I do, imperial lord.”

  “But not all my legends.”

  “If I have offended in some form your royal person, I will give due recompense.”

  “Name me,” said the one in purple.

  “Lord, excuse me from doing so.”

  “Name me.”

  “You are,” said Rathak, “a Lord of Darkness and a Prince.”

  “More.”

  “You are Chuz, Delusion’s Master.”

  “More.”

  “You are Madness.”

  Chuz smiled, with the handsome portion of his face that was visible, and shook a lock of blond hair from his long-lashed, downcast eye.

  “You have nothing to fear,” said Chuz, “your wickedness has so infested you, you are already a mindless madman, Rathak. And yet, one day you will look into your own mirror, and see me there. You will see what you are. And then. You will dance and sing the song.”

  Rathak mimed with his lips a word of averting.

  Chuz smiled again. “It is not to be avoided. I do not hunt you. You are out hunting yourself. You are hot on your own heels, Rathak Dark-Wits. Do you hear yourself baying?”

  Rathak shook, but such was his control that it was not to be seen. Even Chuz, Prince Madness, did not see. Only Rathak himself knew that he had shaken. And for an instant he heard a distant baying in his ears, as of hounds upon a scent.

  When he thrust off the notion, Chuz was no longer before him.

  So then Rathak ascended again into his sorcerous tower of brass, and there he ringed himself with such bastions of power, the air of those chambers turned as sluggish as treacle, while in the sky above the tower no stars or moon were visible, and when the sun should rise again, it would look shrunken from that spot, like an aborted pomegranate.

  But even inside his overloaded honeycomb of protection, Rathak stayed aware of Chuz, who seemed creeping all over the walls and roofs, all up the pillars and over the ceilings, like a purple insect.

  “He is scratching on a windowpane,” said Rathak. “He is tapping on the stones.” Rathak struck sparks of music from the atmosphere. Through the music, he thought he heard Chuz, still on his insectile progress. “Who else is scratching on the stones? Who is tapping on the windows?”

  “Who?” breathed the pale girl to the dark girl, “who is that, tapping and scratching on the stones?”

  “Hush, my dearest. It is only our fancy. It is a dream of hunger and despair. Or perhaps it is gentle Lord Death, who has come quickly to free us from prison.”

  Just then, the slabs of the walling-up dissolved.

  Chuz, in his mantle, half hidden and half beautiful, smiled graciously with gloved hands and lowered eyes.

  “Pretty ladies, leave this dismal cell.”

  Bemused, they got to their feet and felt themselves wafted to the vanished barrier. Outside, the evening, very silent and occluded. Some length below, the domes of the mansion, and here a huge carpet woven of velvet, midnight black and midnight blue, magenta, violet and gold.

  And handsome, hidden Chuz, beckoning and cajoling. So the next thing they knew they had stepped upon the wondrous carpet, and all three were sailing away across the star-embroidered night.

  “Here is wine and here is milk,” said courteous Chuz. “There are meats and fruits and cakes. Here are transparent lilies for you, and dusky irises for you.”

  He beamed on them and told them stories. He hymned their loveliness in a voice they would never forget or remember.

  “It is a hallucination of death,” the maidens said to one another. But weakness deserted them, health seized them. They laughed and ate and drank, and even jested with Prince Madness.

  “You are dear to me,” said Chuz. “Once, I was another, who loved another, who is now another, but this latter other you have both recently known.”

  Then, with half the moon-crescent of his smiling mouth, he kissed them asleep.

  The carpet had passed above an ocean like a storm of silk, and over a diadem of mountains, and now, in a land of rivers and green corn, he brought it down and left them. Left them sleeping, with the velvet vehicle for their coverlet and the flowers and the feast at their side.

  But on the bed of a stream, in letters of gold (where at sunrise, astonished and rejoicing, they found it), he wrote:

  AZHRIAZ

  “But who is Azhriaz?” said Shemsin softly.

  “I do not know.”

  They turned to each other, among the sea-green corn.

  The writing soon faded in sunlight.

  3. An Ill-Earned Fee

  Deep in the cellarage of the house, the creature of the magician performed its duties. Twice a day, it dragged the small scarred bundle of the infant to an obsidian trough which, sorcerously at those times filled with pap, tasteless and somewhat disgusting, though nutritious. And thereafter to the waterspout the creature went, its charge in tow. The baby, at the onset no more than a month in age, should normally have perished long since, let alone been able to digest the viands of an unhuman brute. But the spells of Rathak, while doing the child no good, had staved off all current ability to die or to sicken. Nourished she was, at the trough and the spout. And sleeping day and night otherwise, among the filthy straw of weeds, things which rooted there in the dark and which the creature-slave hacked for a couch, lightly she existed and imperceptibly took the upward path to life and growth.

  The creature-slave however received, once in every diurnal unit, its three-minute wage. During those three minutes it lay oblivious of all else. The phase would also come on it at different hours, without warning, and once even it had fallen in the trough, so extraordinary was its bliss, only emerging at pleasure’s termination in a cloak of pap on which it subsequently dined. (On that occasion the feeding of the child was neglected, but by then she had learned sufficiently to stumble at last to the trough and feed herself.)

  In the subterranean gloom of the cellar, not much was visible, but the least brilliant of glows emanated from the bedding plants, while erratic breaths of the quag issued in between the stones, and then phosphorus limned every surface, including the misshapes of the slave and the child.

  She was a poor little thing, all humped and buckled, with a head poked forward like that of a tortoise. Her stick-like legs were of unequal length, her skinny arms hung askew. The scars had sewn together in strange ribs and laminations, so her flesh resembled some shell or slate marked for years by the sea.

  Though her soul, or some element of it, had spoken at Rathak’s interrogation, now that soul was folded up at her core, and she had no more memory of it than she had of the events of yesterday, in that dayless, nightless hole. If one had come to her and said Azhriaz, like her mother she, too, would have stared.

  Life and the world were the dark underground, the fungoid straw. Eventfulness was the trough, the spout, the occasions of phosphorus, or the movements of her fellow inmate, the creature. (She did not know fear or liking for the brute, for it had given her cause for neither.) Asleep—and sleeping was her only recreation—abstract dreamings might have lessoned her in other forms and conditions. But having no reference for them, not even any language, her starved, unbudded brain forgot them instantly.

  In this fashion then, the child spent her early months, her initial garnering of years. And although she grew and sometimes even thoughtlessly exercised herself by crawling and stretching, scrabbling at the weeds, swinging from the waterspout, she perceived no urgency for speech, for sounds of any complexity, and made none.

  The creature, in fact, came to be able to ignore its charge, to concentrate only upon its own needs, and to await hungrily the trio of ecstatic minutes, to enjoy them, and then once more to anticipate their return.

  What actual amount of time proceeded is unsure. It may have been as much as five years.

  Unknown to all the underdwelle
rs of those cavernous vaults, their master the magician had turned somewhat dubious and fraught. The isolate nature of his home had become more than ever that of a hermitage. A forest of thorns now guarded the rock, so the road disappeared, and only the topmost domes of the house pierced through. Their bricks and stones had been reinforced by the densest magics. None of the windows or doors would give save at the recitation of a particular vernacular rhomb. For the mortal accessories of the mansion, the slavegirls and servants, and the harem of wives, they had been dismissed—or slaughtered, it was said. He dwelled alone now, Rathak, the rumor went, with just his zoo of phantoms, flits and fiends for company.

  Perhaps he had mislaid the idea of the child. The plan had gone so wrong, it was doubtless better put down to experience.

  Yet the warder-creature’s fee, the three delicious minutes, that continued. Once active, only Rathak’s wish could halt the blessing.

  One morning, at dawn, the merest of earth tremors slipped under the rock. It disturbed not much. In the manse a pane or two of stained glass was cracked, and being ensorcelled immediately de-cracked itself. A tile fell from a ceiling. An amulet in the tower of brass turned upside down.

  In the vaults below, the foundations shifted, and settled. In one area, where the stone abutted on a cave-like tunnel under the swamp, a piece of the wall parted. It was an aperture no bigger than the girth of an undergrown child five years of age.

  Perhaps it was the smell of the cave which drew her, for the bedding weeds flourished out there and her couch was due for renewal. Or maybe some intimation of openness hung beyond the stink of the cellar and within the stench of the swamp.

  And it happened that, in the moment of the wall’s parting, the child’s approach, random investigation and half-involuntary exit, its three minutes of ecstasy claimed the creature who was to have been her jailor.

  When it regained awareness, the break in the foundation was already sorcerously sealing. For some further minutes, the slave, languid in after-bliss, did not notice it. Much later it did so, and then it sought the child. The lair afforded few enough opportunities for concealment, but these the creature ransacked over and over. The cloven wall had meanwhile entirely closed.