Still I searched for my son and called his name, and dreamed of him, then wept when I awoke and did not find him. In my dreams I could hear his voice and feel the touch of his hand, and the weight of him on my shoulders as I carried him when he was small was so real, so intense, that it was a special torment to discover my shoulders empty and myself alone.
Ricatepshe came to me in my dreams too, speaking of everyday things: crops and prices, what ships arrived on the river, children and washing, of quarrels with the neighbors and preparations for the spring fair. It was as if I still lived with her, in my own home, in my own country, and all that I experienced in the house, everything I saw through the countless windows, these, these were the phantasms, the insubstantial vapors of the mind.
Nefasir appeared, with her husband Takim, whom I had never seen in waking life. Later, they brought their sons, the oldest of which reminded me so painfully of Khamire, the child I had failed to rescue.
But in this place, what was an instant, a day, a year? Had it been any more than the count of ten since my boy had come into the sorcerer’s house? Had he even arrived yet?
I learned to think like that, in paradoxes, in puzzles which the farmer Pankere would have thought merely the ravings a sun-struck madman. In my mind, I felt the sorcerer Evoragdou’s approval. It is like a lock you’re trying to pick, he told me. Now the first tumblers were beginning to fall.
In a room of living automatons, of fantastic clockworks, I discovered a trapdoor beneath a carpet. I turned a key. A metal ape raised the trapdoor. I descended a ladder to the floor below. When I let go of the rung I was holding for just a second, I was unable to locate the ladder again.
My eyes adjusted. Once more the floating, burning hands gathered around me, their flickering light revealing cubby-holes filled with scrolls, extending higher than I could reach, further in every direction than I could walk.
I knew then, or at least dared to hope that I had found Evoragdou’s study and library, the core and source of his magic. Here, he wove his vast enchantments. Here, all locks were opened, all hidden things revealed.
Trembling with excitement, I sat down at Evoragdou’s desk. The hands gathered around me, providing enough light for me to see the pages of his books.
At first any reading was a struggle, for my learning had been only what letters the priests gave me. Black, skeletal hands fetched volume after volume. At last I found something I could understand. This led me to another, and another. Click, click, click. The tumblers fell into place.
I dwelt in that dark room for weeks or perhaps months, as the hands brought me food, fresh clothing, and more books. I found Evoragdou’s notes in a desk drawer and made annotations with his own brush, my handwriting at first crude and imperfectly formed, but gradually becoming so much like his own that I could not tell the two apart: the universal script of sorcery, an elegant labyrinth of swirls and dots and intricate angles.
I wore his flowing white robe now. I slept on the floor by his desk, still clutching my useless sword as I lay there, dreaming of home, of the life of the imaginary Pankere who dwelt in a village a day south of Thadistaphon. He was a grandfather now. His daughter’s children had almost grown up. His son, Khamire, was still missing, having ventured into the sorcerer’s house when he was small. Khamire’s father, Pankere, followed him and was lost; and life became a dream and dreaming a kind of life, each enveloping the other, like a serpent endlessly swallowing its own tail.
* * * *
Now I set forth from the house through its many doors, on more adventures than may be told, enacting the legends of Evoragdou, both the ancient ones and those we villagers made up to get money from foreigners.
But it was I who rode the winged sphinx through the stars, into the darkness, and confronted the masters of a world of living flame. It was I who caused the lands to tremble, who raised mountains and shaped them into hieroglyphs only the gods could read. I conversed with heads of black stone in a cavern at the Earth’s center. Beneath the hills of Bhakisiphidar, I slew the serpent that walked like a man.
At a crossroads, at midnight, I cut down a hanged corpse from a gibbet, speaking the Voorish names as I carved the symbol tchod upon its forehead. At once the corpse sprang to ferocious life and wrestled with me until dawn, when, at the sun’s first touch, the dead thing’s vigor departed. Just before the rotted limbs broke apart and the spirit fled, the thing whispered to me of the College of Shadows, where all sorcerers must eventually attend to gain true and complete mastery of their arts and of themselves.
In that college, you take a master, learning everything he has to teach and more, for the student must kill his master in order to graduate.
These things I did, over months or years or perhaps in the blinking of an eye. When I closed my master in a room filled with fire and mirrors, and leaned expectantly against the door, my hands and cheek burning from the heat, he spoke to me in my own voice and said, “Do you understand? Do you remember?”
When he was dead, I opened the door and waded ankle-deep in his ashes. A thousand like myself walked within the flawless mirrors.
“Yes, I remember and I understand,” I said to them, and they to me.
Did I? I was seduced and consumed by what I had seen, what I had learned, an ever more willing captive of what I had become. The sorcerer’s lust, Evoragdou had called it once, that madness which engorges the mind, which changes and erases everything the sorcerer might have once been.
So, lustful, swollen with magic, I filed my former self away, like a book in a cubbyhole, in one of the uncountable rooms of my house.
For my house is my memory, ever growing, ever changing, each object, each window, each key in a lock, turning, each sound of groaning wood, each mote of dust another mark or swirl or curve in that delicate yet indelible script which is sorcery, which is the sorcerer’s mind.
Once, a peasant broke in, shouting for vengeance, waving a useless sword. My repartee with him was witty, then sad. He demanded that I reveal my secret to him, so he might slay me. Ah, if only it were that simple.
I left him stumbling about in the dark on a mission of eventual self-discovery.
I knew perfectly well who he was. It remained only for him to find out.
This incident too aroused a mote, a speck of memory. My mind stirred. I sat up suddenly on a pallet of straw in a room filled with carven, marble trees. I felt the sudden and subtle pang of an old sorrow.
“Khamire, my son,” I said aloud. “Come to me now.”
Bare feet shuffled on the marble floor. I reached out, caught hold of a thin arm and drew the boy to me, weeping, embracing him.
He struggled at first, but I spoke his name again and calmed him. Then we went out onto a porch, and looked out over the muddy flood-plain of the still receding Great River. The full moon shone overhead, and the spring stars.
I dropped to my knees before the boy, holding his frail wrists in my hands. He was so gaunt, so dirty, his clothing no more than a few ragged scraps. I think he had already been on his journey a long time.
“Why did you go into the sorcerer’s house?” I asked him. “Why did you begin all this?”
“I came because you called me, Father,” he said. “I didn’t begin anything.”
“No,” I said slowly. “I do not think there even is a beginning. That is the greatest mystery of all, lives reflected again and again like something seen in a thousand mirrors, but without any initial cause, any solid thing to cast the first reflection.”
“I don’t understand, Father.”
I stood up. I ran my fingers slowly through his hair.
“Nor do I.”
We stood in silence for a time, looking out over the fertile earth. “I am not your father anymore,” I said after a while. “Pankere is one of many names meaning ‘tiller-of-the-field.’ How very appropriate for such a man as your father. But my name means ‘clutter’ or ‘forgetting’ or ‘accumulation’ or perhaps ‘many dreams.’ All these, too, fit. My name
has many meanings, like hidden rooms. It changes like foaming water, utterly different and yet the same from one instant to the next. It contains everything and nothing. It is not so simple as ‘Pankere’.”
He shook his head. His wide eyes gleamed in the moonlight. Tears streaked his muddy cheeks. “What shall I do…Father?”
I lifted him up. He didn’t resist. I marveled at how light he was, like a bundle of sticks. Gently, I lowered him down over the porch railing, until his toes touched the newly deposited mud. He sank almost to his knees, clinging to the railing, gazing up at me.
“I want you to go back home,” I said, “and tell everyone what you have seen.”
“Yes, Father. I will.”
“Khamire, do you know who I really am?”
He did not answer me, but turned away and waded through the mud, his feet making sucking sounds as he struggled toward higher ground. I shouted my true name after him. I told him who I was, once, twice, three times, as loud as I could. The third time only, he looked back at me and screamed like a lunatic, then hurried on with renewed desperation. At last, I saw him in the distance, running in the moonlight, wheeling his arms.
When he was gone, I went back into my house, climbed a spiral staircase I had never seen before, of beaten silver, then emerged onto an unfamiliar balcony, and surveyed what might have been almost the same landscape, but now a ploughed and planted field. Brilliant stars gleamed in a moonless night sky.
Near at hand, a few reeds clustered along an irrigation channel. Someone was hiding there.
“Pankere, I know you are out there,” I said, “for I am Evoragdou, and I remember.”
THE MYSTERIES OF THE FACELESS KING
When I was eight, my father took me deep into the forest to see the altar of the Faceless King. Voinos, my elder brother, came too, mostly because, as I was smugly certain at the time, Father didn’t trust him out of his sight. Voinos was fourteen then, and he hated everyone: me, Father, Mother, the town elders, and even, I think, himself. That year, when he was fourteen, was the last time anyone was ever able to control him.
It was in the autumn, when the leaves had turned brilliant red and gold and yellow, on the morning of the Festival of the Masks, when children make masks out of those leaves and try and go into other people’s houses and impersonate other children, only to receive treats when they are discovered. But the Festival of Masks is for younger children, and that year my father decided that I was older. Only fathers can know when this happens, and when they do it is the time of going, when fathers and sons go off together, to some private place the gods reveal, to learn together such wisdom as the gods see fit to inspire. In this way, boys become men. So I came a man at the age of eight, and Voinos at fourteen because Father did not trust him.
Going. Old Decronos, the chief priest of our town, was there by the gate, seated at a table sipping broth. He barely looked up when the three of us knelt before him and Father said softly, “Going.”
The priest touched Voinos and me on the shoulder with his feather-tipped cane and waved us away. Then the guards opened the heavy log gates, and off we went.
The terraced fields above the Great River were places of mud and dead corn stalks. It was bad to be there at this time of year, I knew, because sometimes ancestors rise up out of the mud, begging to be remembered, and if you don’t remember them, it can bring a curse. I wanted to get away quickly, but we walked for most of the morning through the empty fields in silence, following the river. Once we came to a calf’s skull and some beads stuck on a post. It was a charm, Father explained, to make the ancestors gather there and not bother anyone. We walked a wide half-circle around it.
Going. By noon we were far from any path, in the unbroken twilight beneath heavy pine branches. No birds sang. No animals ran before us. The forest stood silent and expectant all around, the bright leaves of autumn now a memory among the faded blue-greens and browns and the all-pervasive grey.
Voinos complained a lot. He would insist we stop to rest, then sit down, and Father would have to drag him up by the scruff of the neck. Then he’d try to run off, but Father was too quick and his long arms would always have him. Voinos made a fist once, but Father just swatted it aside. He could have hurt Voinos. He was a big, agile, powerful man. That alone my brother respected in him.
The shadows deepened, and it seemed night already. The soft needles muffled our footsteps. The horizontal rays of the setting sun flickered between the black trunks.
We paused then, built a fire and had our supper, then sat without a word while the flames burned low, Voinos glowering, I almost too excited to be still, a little scared, expecting wonders.
After the sun had been gone for perhaps an hour, the moon rose, gleaming among the branches, like a huge penny.
Father was a bard, one of the very best. He was often called to recite in the halls of the great lords. There, in the forest before his sons, he got out his harp and began to make a story—for a bard is a maker; he calls up his matter out of nothing, and when he has finished, it lives.
He sat for a moment with his eyes closed, gazing into himself, strumming softly on the harp, and when he began to speak, it was with all the intensity of a bardic tale, for all his words were less formal. “These things came to me in a dream,” he said, “and that was why I brought you here. The dream came from the gods.”
“Well, what did the gods say?” Voinos demanded.
I gasped and looked away, shocked at the interruption, but Father merely answered.
“I dreamed of Verunnos-Kemad, the most secretive of the gods. He is known by the wind in the night, by the pattern of the leaves as they fall, by the voice of the river and the running beasts, by the multitudes of birds. All these are signs of him. I dreamed that the holy one stood here, almost where we sit, in the darkness of a night a few scant centuries after the creation of the world. His whole body shone like the pale moonlight. There was a man here too, prostrate on the ground before him. The name of the man I do not know. Nor did I see his face. It does not matter. He was but one man of many.
“In this time, so long ago, there were dragons in the land, swarming thick as starlings.” Father turned to me suddenly, still strumming the harp. “Did you know about the dragons, Evad?”
“There’s bones,” I said, startled. “Bones in the cliff by the river road.”
“Yes, one of the last of the dragons died there, and his bones remain for all to see; but these were living dragons, great and terrible. They hovered in black flocks, their wings like thunder. Sometimes people made offerings to them, gold, animals, even their children, and the dragons would go away for a while. But sometimes they would just burn the towns with their breath and swoop down to devour the fleeing people.”
Voinos shifted about, rustling.
“You’re changing the subject,” he said. “What do dragons have to do with Veruna—Vero—whatever his stupid name is?”
Again I was afraid of my father’s sudden anger, but as long as he was telling the story, his patience seemed limitless.
“I think the man’s children had been taken by the dragons, or perhaps they were about to be. I don’t know. But I saw, in my dream, the man lying there and the god bending down over him. The hand of Verunnos-Kemad glowed softly, like a paper lantern. He touched the man on the shoulder and raised him up, and placed on the man’s face a mask of brilliant silver, shaped like the full Moon, mottled, with thin rays. And he gave him a silver staff and a silver-bladed sword, and said to him in terrible, relentless whispers, You are the first. Let it begin.
“Then he was gone, and the man stood alone in the forest darkness, until the first light of dawn touched the mask and staff, and they glowed more brilliantly than the sunrise. But in the full day they were merely silver, for their power and their glory were of the night.
“This man was the Faceless King. Whoever he had been previously had ceased to exist, for he could never remove the mask, never return to being just an ordinary man. He emerg
ed from the forest in the evening with his sword drawn, and the bravest of heroes followed him, and together they slew all the dragons, including the one who died by the river. At last they slew even the mighty Mother of Dragons in her cavern at the center of the world. Then the Faceless King parted from the heroes. He sent with them his farewell to all he had ever known, and he remained in the cavern of the Mother Dragon, among the treasures and the pillars of stone the color of blood. He sits there still, watching over the world. The wisest and the bravest know his sendings, for he is their lord.”
“It’s just an old story,” Voinos said. “You’ve taken us all the way out here to tell us an old story. We could have stayed home. You could have told it any market day.”
Father stiffened. I could hear barely restrained rage in his voice.
“Some of it I could tell again, as a story, for it is good to have the truth in a story. But the dream itself is a secret thing, between me, your father, and Voinos and Evad, my sons. I do not know why the Secret God sent it to me. That is a mighty and even terrible mystery. But I am sure that your lives will be shaped by it. This is the night of going and now I have told you all that I have to tell you.”
“But—but, Father,” I asked softly, as respectfully as I could, “what does it mean?”
Father pointed to a rise of land, a tree-lined ridge I could barely make out in the darkness. It looked like the back of a huge, sleeping dragon to me.
“There. Just beyond is a little valley. The heroes built an altar there, in secret, for the Faceless King. Sometimes he would manifest himself there and even give them gifts, rare crowns and jewels from the Mother Dragon’s hoard, and he would speak to them in prophecies, for he shared the thoughts of Verunnos-Kemad, and at such times his voice was the voice of the god.”
Suddenly Voinos was up and running toward the ridge.
“Where are you—?” I managed to say.
Father cursed, grabbed his staff and a burning brand from the fire, and took after him. I followed.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack Page 10