I thanked another uncle, who dwelled in the most distant place imaginable, as I began to speak in Thari, a spell of my own.
A piercing cry, as of some swooping night bird, rent the air . . . The wizard was not distracted, nor my feet freed, but I was able to raise my arms before me. I kept them at the proper level, and when they reached the forward edge of the altar I cooperated with the summoning spell, increasing the force of each automatonlike step that I took. I let my elbows bend.
The wizard was already swinging the blade toward my fingers, but it didn’t matter. I put all of my weight behind it and heaved at the stone.
The altar toppled backward. The wizard scurried to avoid it, but it struck one—perhaps both—of his legs. Immediately, as he fell to the ground, I felt the spell depart from me. I could move properly again and my mind was clear.
He drew his knees up to his chest and began to roll even as I leaped over the wrecked altar and reached toward him. I moved to follow as he somersaults down a small slope and passed between two standing stones and into the darkened wood.
As soon as I reached the clearing’s edge I saw eyes, hundreds of feral eyes blazing from the darkness at many levels. The incanting grew louder, seemed nearer, seemed to be coming from behind me.
I turned quickly.
The altar was still in wreckage. Another cowled figure stood behind it, much larger than the first. This one was doing the chanting, in a familiar masculine voice. Frakir pulsed upon my wrist. I felt a spell building about me, but this time I was not unprepared. The opposite of my walk, a summons, brought an icy wind that swept the spell away like so much smoke. My garments were lashed about me, changing shape and color. Purple, gray . . . light the trousers and dark the cloak, the shirtfront. Black my boots and wide belt, my gauntlets tucked behind, my silver Frakir woven into a bracelet about my left wrist, visible now and shining. I raised my left hand and shielded my eyes with my right, as I summoned a flash of light.
“Be silent,” I said then. “You offend me.” The chanting ceased.
The cowl was blown back from his head and I regarded Melman’s frightened face.
“All right. You wanted me,” I stated, “and now you have me, heaven help you. You said that everything would become clear to me. It hasn’t. Make it clear.”
I took a step forward.
“Talk!” I said. “It can be easy or it can be hard. But you will talk. The choice is yours.”
He threw back his head and bellowed: “Master!”
“Summon your master then, by any means,” I said. “I will wait. For he, too, must answer.”
He called out again, but there was no answer. He bolted then, but I was ready for this with a major summoning. The woods decayed and fell before he could reach them, and then they moved were swept up in a mighty wind where there should be stillness. It circled the glade, gray and red, building an impenetrable wall to infinities above and below. We inhabited a circular island in the night, several hundred meters across, its edges slowly crumbling.
“He is not coming,” I said, “and you are not going. He cannot help you. No one will help you. This is a place of high magic and you profane it with your presence. Do you know what lies beyond the advancing winds? Chaos. I will give you to it now, unless you tell me about Julia and your master and why you dared to bring me here.”
He drew back from the Chaos and turned to face me. “Take me back to my apartment and I will tell you everything,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Kill me and you will never know.”
I shrugged.
“In that case, you will tell me in order to stop the pain. Then I will give you to the Chaos.”
I moved toward him.
“Wait!” He raised his hand. “Give me my life for what I am about to tell you.”
“No bargain. Talk.”
The winds swirled around us and our island shrank. Half heard, half intelligible voices babbled within the wind and fragments of forms swam there. Melman drew back from the crumbling edge of things.
“All right,” he said, speaking loudly. “Yes, Julia came to me, as I had been told she would, and I taught her some things—not the things I would have taught her even a year ago, but pieces of some new things I had only learned myself more recently. I had been told to teach her in this manner, also.”
“By whom? Name your master.” He grimaced.
“He was not so foolish as to give me his name,” he said, “that I might seek some control over him. Like yourself, he is not human, but a being from some other plane.”
“He gave you the painting of the Tree?” Melman nodded.
“Yes, and it actually transported me to each sephiroth. Magic worked in those places. I gained powers.”
“And the Trumps? He did those, too? He gave them to you to give to her?”
“I don’t know anything about any Trumps,” he answered.
“These!” I cried, drawing them from beneath my cloak, spreading them like a conjurer’s fan and advancing toward him. I thrust them at him and let him stare for a few moments, withdrawing them before he got the idea that they might represent a means of escape.
“I never saw them before,” he said.
The ground continued its steady erosion toward us. We withdrew to a point nearer the center.
“And you sent the creature that slew her?”
He shook his head vehemently.
“I did not. I knew that she was going to die, for he had told me that that was what would bring you to me. He told me, too, that it would be a beast from Netzach that would slay her—but I never saw it and I had no part in its summoning.”
“And why did he want you to meet me, to bring me here?”
He laughed wildly.
“Why?” he repeated. “To kill you, of course. He told me that if I could sacrifice you in this place I would gain your powers. He said that you are Merlin, son of Hell and Chaos, and that I would become the greatest mage of all could I slay you here.”
Our world was at best a hundred meters across now, and the rate of its shrinkage was accelerating.
“Was it true?” he asked. “Would I have gained had I succeeded?”
“Power is like money,” I said. “You can usually get it if you’re competent and it’s the only thing you want in life. Would you have gained by it, though? I don’t think so.”
“I’m talking about the meaning of life. You know that.”
I shook my head.
“Only a fool believes that life has but one meaning,” I said. “Enough of this! Describe your master.”
“I never saw him.”
“What?”
“I mean, I saw him but I don’t know what he looks like. He always wore a hood and a black trench coat. Gloves, too. I don’t even know his race.”
“How did you meet?”
“He appeared one day in my studio. I just turned around and he was standing there. He offered me power, said that he would teach me things in return for my service.”
“How did you know he could deliver?”
“He took me on a journey through places not of this world.”
“I see.”
Our island of existence was now about the size of a large living room. The voices of the wind were mocking, then compassionate, frightened, sad and angry, too. Our wraparound vision shifted constantly. The ground trembled without letup. The light was still baleful. A part of me wanted to kill Melman right then, but if he had not really been the one who had hurt Julia . . .
“Did your master tell you why he wanted me dead?” I asked him.
He licked his lips and glanced back at the advancing Chaos.
“He said that you were his enemy,” he explained, “but he never told me why. And he said that it was going to happen today, that he wanted it to happen today.”
“Why today?”
He smiled briefly.
“I suppose because it’s Walpurgisnacht,” he replied, “though he never actually said that.�
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“That’s all?” I said. “He never mentioned where he was from?”
“He once referred to something called the Keep of the Four Worlds as if it were important to him.”
“And you never felt that he was simply using you?”
He smiled.
“Of course he was using me,” he replied. “We all use somebody. That is the way of the world. But he paid for this use with knowledge and power. And I think his promise may yet be fulfilled.”
He seemed to be glancing at something behind me. It was the oldest trick in the world, but I turned. There was no one there. Immediately, I spun back to face him.
He held the black dagger. It must have been up his sleeve. He lunged at me, thrusting, mouthing fresh incantations.
I stepped back and swirled my cloak at him. He disengaged himself, sidestepping and slashing, turned and advanced again. This time he came in low, trying to circle me, his lips still moving. I kicked at the knife hand, but he snapped it back. I caught up the left edge of my cloak then, wrapped it about my arm. When he struck again, I blocked the thrust and seized his biceps. Dropping lower as I drew him forward, I caught hold of his left thigh with my right hand, then straightened, raising him high in the air, and threw him.
As I turned my body, completing the throw, I realized what I had done. Too late. With my attention focused on my adversary I had not kept track of the rapid, grinding advance of the destroying winds. The edge of Chaos was much nearer than I had thought, and Melman had time for only the most abbreviated of curses before death took him where he would incant no more.
I cursed, too, because I was certain there was still more information that I could have gotten from him; and I shook my head, there at the center of my diminishing world. The day was not yet over and it was already my most memorable Walpurgisnacht ever.
Chapter 4
It was a long walk back. I changed my clothes on the way. My exit from the labyrinth took the form of a narrow alleyway between a pair of dirty brick buildings. It was still raining and the day had made its way into evening. I saw my parked car across the street at the edge of a pool of light cast by one of the unbroken streetlamps. I thought wistfully for a moment of my dry garments in the trunk, then I headed back toward the Brutus Storage sign.
A small light burned within the first-floor office, spilling a little illumination into the otherwise dark entranceway. I trudged on up the stairs, terminally moist and reasonably alert. The apartment door opened when I turned the knob and pushed. I switched on the light and entered, bolting the door behind me.
A quick prowl showed me that the place was deserted, and I changed out of my wet shirt into one from Melman’s closet. His trousers were too big in the waist and a bit long for me, though. I transferred my Trumps to a breast pocket to keep them dry.
Step two. I began a systematic ransacking of the place.
After a few minutes, I came across his occult diary in a locked drawer in his bedside table. It was as messy as the rest of the place, with misspellings, crossed-out words, and a few beer and coffee stains. It seemed to contain a lot of derivative stuff mixed with the usual subjective business—dreams and meditations. I flipped farther along in it, looking for the place where he’d met his master. I came to it and skimmed along. It was lengthy; and seemed mostly comprised of enthusiastic ejaculations over the workings of the Tree he had been given. I decided to save it for later and was about to stow it when a final riffling of the pages brought a brief poem into view. Swinburnian, overly allusive and full of rapture, the lines that first caught my eye were “—the infinite shadows of Amber, touched with her treacherous taint.” Too much alliteration, but it was the thought that counted. It revived my earlier feeling of vulnerability and caused me to ransack faster. I suddenly wanted only to get out, get far away and think.
The room held no further surprises. I departed it, gathered an armload of strewn newspapers, carried them to the john, tossed them into the bathtub, and set fire to them, opening the window on the way out. I visited the sanctum then, fetched out the Tree of Life painting, brought it back and added it to the blaze. I switched off the bathroom light and closed the door as I left. I’m one hell of an art critic.
I headed for the stacks of miscellaneous papers on the bookshelves then and began a disappointing search among them. I was halfway through my second heap when the telephone rang.
The world seemed to freeze as my thoughts sprinted. Of course. Today was the day when I was supposed to find my way here and be killed. Chances seemed decent that if it were going to happen it would have happened by now. So this could well be S, calling to learn whether my obituary had been posted. I turned and located the phone, back on the shadowy wall near the bedroom. I had known immediately that I was going to answer it. Moving toward it, I was allowing two to three rings—twelve to eighteen seconds—in which to decide whether my response was to consist of a wisecrack, an insult and a threat, or whether I was going to try to fake it and see what I might learn. As satisfying as the former could be, spoilsport prudence dictated the latter course and also suggested I confine myself to low monosyllables and pretend to be injured and out of breath. I raised the receiver, ready to hear S’s voice at last and find out whether I knew him.
“Yes?” I said.
“Well? Is it done?” came the response.
Damn pronoun. It was a woman. Wrong gender but a right sounding question. One out of two isn’t bad, though. I exhaled heavily, then: “Yeah.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m hurt,” I croaked.
“Is it serious?”
“Think so. Got something—here—though. Better come—see.”
“What is it? Something of his?”
“Yeah. Can’t talk. Getting dizzy. Come.”
I cradled the phone and smiled. I thought it very well played. I’d a feeling I’d taken her in completely.
I crossed the living room to the same chair I had occupied earlier, drew up one of the small tables bearing a large ashtray, seated myself, and reached for my pipe: Time to rest, cultivate patience, think a bit.
Moments later I felt a familiar, almost electrical tingling. I was on my feet in an instant, snatching up the ashtray, butts flying like bullets about me, cursing my stupidity yet again as I looked frantically about the room.
There! Before the red drapes, beside the piano. Taking form . . .
I waited for the full outline, then hurled the ashtray as hard as I could.
An instant later she was there—tall, russet-haired, darkeyed, holding what looked like a .38 automatic.
The ashtray hit her in the stomach and she doubled forward with a gasp.
I was there before she could straighten.
I jerked the gun out of her hand and threw it across the room. Then I seized both her wrists, spun her around and seated her hard in the nearest chair. In her left hand she still held a Trump. I snatched it away. It was a representation of this apartment, and it was done in the same style as the Tree and the cards in my pocket.
“Who are you?” I snarled.
“Jasra,” she spat back, “dead man!”
She opened her mouth wide and her head fell forward. I felt the moist touch of her lips upon the back of my left forearm, which still held her own right wrist against the chair’s arm. Seconds later I felt an excruciating pain there. It was not a bite, but rather felt as if a fiery nail had been driven into my flesh.
I let go her wrist and jerked my arm away. The movement was strangely slow, weakened. A cold, tingling sensation moved down into the hand and up along the arm. My hand dropped to my side and seemed to go away. She extricated herself easily from my grip, smiled, placed her fingertips lightly upon my chest and pushed.
I fell backward. I was ridiculously weak and I couldn’t control my movements. I felt no pain when I struck the floor, and it was a real effort to turn my head to regard her as she rose to her feet.
“Enjoy it,” she stated. “After you awaken, th
e remainder of your brief existence will be painful.”
She passed out of my line of sight, and moments later I heard her raise the telephone receiver. I was certain she was phoning S, and I believed what she had just said.
At least, I would get to meet the mysterious artist . . .
Artist! I twitched the fingers of my right hand. They still functioned, albeit slowly. Straining every bit of will and anatomy that remained under my control, I tried then to raise the hand to my chest. The movement that followed was a jerky, slow-motion thing. At least I had fallen upon my left side, and my back masked this feeble activity from the woman who had done me in.
My hand was trembling and seemed to be slowing even more when it came to the breast pocket. For ages after, I seemed to pick at the edges of pieces of pasteboard. Finally, one came free and I was able to twitch it high enough to view it. By then I was very dizzy and my vision was beginning to blur. I wasn’t certain I could manage the transfer. From across a vast distance I could hear Jasra’s voice as she conversed with someone, but I was unable to distinguish the words.
I focused what remained of my attention upon the card. It was a sphinx, crouched upon a blue, rocky ledge. I reached for it. Nothing. My mind felt as if it were embedded in cotton. I possessed barely enough consciousness for one more attempt.
I felt a certain coldness and seemed to see the sphinx move slightly upon its stony shelf. I felt as if I were falling forward into a black wave that was rushing upward.
And that was all.
I was a long time coming around. My consciousness dribbled back, but my limbs were still leaden and my vision clouded. The lady’s sting seemed to have delivered a neurotropic toxin. I tried flexing my fingers arid toes and could not be certain whether I’d succeeded. I tried to speed up and deepen my breathing. That worked, anyway.
After a time, I heard what seemed a roaring sound. It stepped itself down a little later, and I realized it was my own rushing blood in my ears. A while after that I felt my heartbeat and my vision began to clear. Light and dark and shapelessness resolved into sand and rocks. I felt little areas of chill, all over. Then I began to shiver, and this passed and I realized that I could move. But I felt very weak, so I didn’t. Not for a while.
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