by Gene Wolfe
“It is death between us.”
“Yes, it is.”
And when the feast was done and the other guests departed, Vandibar Nasha bade Lord Radaces tarry, and led him into the house, into a large, empty room hung with tapestries to muffle any sound, and there he plunged a dagger into his enemy’s back. But Radaces wriggled off the blade like quicksilver and became a serpent, whipping his coils around Vandibar to crush him. Vandibar in turn became a shaft of molten iron, and the serpent fell away, its flesh steaming. It reared up, its hood spread to reveal the face of Radaces, contorted almost out of recognition by rage.
“I…shall never…forgive.”
“Nor I,” said Vandibar Nasha. The injury is too great.”
The serpent dissipated like smoke and was gone.
* * * *
Then Vandibar Nasha pored over certain arcane books, and sorcery grew within him like a cancer. Each night he slipped out of bed and went into his study, lit a lamp, and waited until Sekenre came to him, padding silently on the polished floor. Sometimes the boy brought him more books, massive codices with iron locks which could only be opened with a touch and a whispered word; sometimes scrolls which seemed to unroll out of the air into endless length, then roll up again into nothing, invisible. Or he would discourse in many voices, in a babble of tongues, all of which Vandibar came to understand.
Together they raised up spirits. Together they questioned the dead about the secrets of the living.
They prayed to the Shadow Titans, together, and then looked up into the sky and beheld them in their true aspects, not as reflections in the pool.
And once or twice, though Vandibar was sure Sekenre was testing him, the other seemed merely a skinny, scruffy boy with a bad foreign accent, who was alone and wanted company, and asked Vandibar to tell him some story of his own life, of how it was before he became a sorcerer that night in the garden.
Vandibar told such stories, though he did not know if he was giving the right answer, or what the test was.
Once Vandibar offered Sekenre a plate of particularly fine, sweet cakes. The boy sniffed them cautiously, almost as an animal would, then devoured them greedily, oblivious to all else, licking his fingers clean.
His dark eyes revealed nothing.
Many times Vandibar worked to build some apparatus, or peered into murky jars at flopping, wriggling captive things which screamed back at him in tiny, but distinctly human voices; or he merely read, and Sekenre sat across from him and waited.
Sekenre was one more riddle to figure out. The simple questions made Vandibar laugh. Why couldn’t a powerful sorcerer afford shoes? Was it an ascetic discipline, or a mere disguise, since a barefoot street child would be underestimated by his enemies?
The deeper mysteries intrigued him. Once the boy had let slip that he had once met a certain king of the Delta, and the name he gave was one Vandibar knew only from history. There was also the matter of the deep scars on the boy’s bare legs, which almost formed a kind of writing. And the palms of his hands were seared almost featureless, and part of one of his ears was missing, like that of an alley cat who has gotten into one too many fights.
His manner was often gentle. Certainly Vandibar never saw him angry, but at times it seemed that Sekenre, or some of the selves which he contained or could become, were dead to all feeling.
Often Vandibar looked up and realized it was almost dawn, and that the boy was gone.
And yet, too, as the sorcerer swims below the surface of time, and emerges into the duration of men’s lives only at points of his own choosing, after long nights of labor, Vandibar Nasha awoke in bed each morning beside his wife, fully rested. Each morning, sorcery seemed a fading dream. Each day his study was filled only with familiar books and carvings. His household servants came and went. He looked out a window. He saw his son Vashimur riding a horse around and around in the exercise yard. The youth was growing tall and strong, and Vandibar was proud of him.
It was as if he lived three lives simultaneously. Each night he studied or labored with Sekenre. Each night he slept beside his wife. And each night, too, he returned to the garden party at the Spring Festival, where he stood beneath the full moon and greeted his guests, and spied his enemy among them, and the ritual words were passed: “It is death between us.”
Each night the two of them fought, devising and countering new strategies. Once he found the roof garden party populated only by corpses in feathered masks. They dropped their masks at a signal from Radaces. But Vandibar caused the sun to rise suddenly, and the corpses melted away like mist. Then the ordinary guests emerged from shadows and departed, a little startled that they had let the whole night past without realizing how late it was.
Once there was only ice, the house, garden, the guests, even the moon and stars made of shimmering, almost luminous ice, and the contest between Vandibar and Radaces was to find the single tiny flame hidden somewhere, which meant both life and destruction for the whole world.
Vandibar found it rising out of the palm of his own hand. But Radaces blew on it, and the fire leapt up to devour the entire city of Elandisphon. Vandibar’s mind was filled with the screams of the countless dying. He felt each of those deaths. He drowned in remorse and pain. And he rose up, transcending any feeling at all, beyond to conscience and compassion, and rearranged the white and black tiles of countless lives into such patterns as suited him.
In some other newly-cut channel of time, he and Sekenre both walked barefoot on the surface of the Great River, in the night’s darkness as the gray stars of the otherworld looked down, and they guided the souls of the slain into the land of the dead, one by one, speaking to each the words of passage.
He took aside the ghosts of his murdered servants, the one who had lost a hand, the boy who had not returned, and others. Of these, in a hushed, secret voice, he asked forgiveness.
So the people of the city both lived out their individual lives and died their individual deaths, and perished together in flames on a single night, while Vandibar Nasha held those flames back from his own house with upraised hands, pushing them back like an impossible tide.
All of these things were true at once. He understood that now.
He and Radaces directed armies against one another from atop mountains. Perched on the backs of enormous, black and silver birds, they fought above the clouds. Higher still, the gods and titans battled, like hugely-cast shadows of Vandibar Nasha and Lord Radaces. It was a combative dance between the two of them, whirling, whirling, striking out to kill or to parry, until the two became as one, and Vandibar Nasha peered deep into the mind and heart of Lord Radaces, and beheld only himself there, as if in a labyrinth of mirrors.
And, greeting one another among the guests on the rooftop, they passed between one another polite words, and treacherous gifts, and poisons.
Sorcery was a craving now, a lust Vandibar could not control. Only briefly, during half-dreamed mornings when he woke up beside Takida, could he remember that man who had once been. More briefly still, he wondered what had ever become of that fellow.
Yet when he awoke, that other Vandibar Nasha, who was an exemplary lord of Elandisphon, progressed through a separate life, troubled by terrible dreams of Vandibar the sorcerer.
His wife Takida grew lined in the face, gray-haired, then silver, then white. Vashimur grew to be a man and married Tatiane, daughter of Lord Radaces. The wedding feast was held at the house of Radaces, who greeted his guests in the frescoed atrium, as the benevolent gods gazed down from the rooftops of the temples nearby.
Among the gifts exchanged was a bronze coffer shaped like a human hand, which Lord Radaces presented to Vandibar Nasha.
Takida aged. Vashimur had three sons by Tatiane, all of whom were strong, wild boys who ran through the house making lots of noise. Soon the firstborn of them appeared to be about as old as Sekenre’s, or even older.
Vandibar remained as he was, as did Lord Radaces. There were gray streaks in both men’s beards, but no
t more than before. Neither lost the vigor of his stride. People remarked on this at first, then looked after them furtively and began to make signs after them as they had passed, to ward off evil. Fewer guests came to either house.
Vandibar held back the tide, but he couldn’t hold it forever. One night, after the garden party had ended, when the last of the guests had departed, he came upon his wife’s head impaled upon a stake, while around him the ruins of the house smoldered.
Takida opened her eyes, which burned with blue fire. This time she spoke in the language of the dead, which requires no breath to utter.
“Husband, what is this abomination that thou hast done?”
He could only reply, helplessly, in his own language, “I don’t know. Once I did. It was clear. But it isn’t anymore.”
Radaces stood beside him. Their eyes met, but no words passed. Weeping, Vandibar covered his face with his muddy gown and rushed into the house, which was not burnt. He climbed into bed beside Takida, who stared up at the ceiling with blind eyes and muttered something in her sleep, as if she were shouting in a dream.
When he slept, he dreamt of a man—or perhaps several men—called Vandibar Nasha, but when he awoke in the morning he could not recall any of the details, distracted as he was by the discovery that Takida had died in the night and lay still, staring at the ceiling, with a tiny stream of blood staining her upper lip.
He slid his hand around her neck gently, to reassure himself that her head had not been cut off; but somewhere else, he was sure, it had, and he wept, knowing that.
Many years later, word came that Lord Vashimur, aged about seventy—that same one who was reputed to have a father younger than he, if one believed such stories—had been thrown from his horse and killed.
But Vandibar found young Vashimur amid the ruins of his house, naked and crucified, with the evatim at his feet.
In his final pain, the youth cried out in the corpse-speech, “Where is my father? Thou art not he, but some other, evil thing.”
Radaces was there. He and Vandibar merely gazed at one another, and after a while Vandibar said, “Come with me and let us make an end.”
IV
Together they descended into the lower garden, but the garden was dead, and the pool filled with dust. They followed that dust as the wind bore it, across an endless plain toward a bloody sun that lingered on the horizon before them but never set. Amid terrible storms they struggled, Radaces bracing Vandibar and Vandibar lifting up Radaces when he fell. It seemed, several times, that they came into various countries and settled there, living out whole lives as amicable neighbors before rising again to resume the endless quest. It seemed, too, that they were enemies and fought in the darkness, amid terrible transformations.
Yet neither could conquer the other, for all each sought out some fatal weakness in the mirrored depths of the other’s soul, during those quiet times when they lived side by side and interpreted one another’s dreams.
Together, they mourned murdered children and wives, and were comforted by the remembrance of the lives of those children and wives lived out to the full in some impossible interval before the counting of days came to the inevitable black tile.
“We are swimming just below the surface of time,” said Radaces, “and we carried them along in the ripple of our passage.”
“As long as we could,” said Vandibar.
The two of them wept together, and were transformed, and fought.
“I don’t know how to stop,” said Vandibar.
“Nor do I.”
Then Radaces told how Sekenre had come into his house each night, bringing books of magic, and Vandibar told the same. Neither raged that Sekenre was a traitor, false to both of them, for they had reached that point in sorcery which is beyond passion, which is only doing because there are things to be done.
When they found Sekenre at last, he was seated on a marble bench by the dry pool in a dead garden, scuffing one bare foot idly in the dust. The red sun shone dully, low in the west.
The boy sat with his other foot up on the bench. He held various pens and brushes between ink-stained toes. He was writing something in a book. When the two sorcerers approached, he held up the book to them, revealing a beautifully illuminated page of text, in swirling, delicate script.
“What kind of abomination is Sekenre?” demanded Lord Radaces.
“Indeed, that is what we must know,” said Vandibar Nasha.
Sekenre closed and covered the book carefully, placing a blotting cloth over the page he had been working on. He put pens, brushes, and ink bottles away in a leather bag. Then he stared at his own hands and said, in his own, heavily accented, adolescent’s voice, but in a distracted manner, “I don’t think Sekenre is an abomination at all. But he contains abominations, and they, in turn, have committed abominations. Sekenre is a boy who never got to grow up. Did you know that in Reedland, where Sekenre was born, the children go barefoot, while the young men who have passed through the rite of manhood wear shoes? The father must lead the son, unless the father is negligent, in which case the son remains forever a child. Sekenre’s father was worse than negligent, though he, or part of him anyway, loved his son deeply. Vashtem was a sorcerer of great wisdom and evil. He caused his son Sekenre to murder him. That was part of his plan. Therefore Vashtem the sorcerer awoke in the mind of Sekenre, for to slay a sorcerer is to become a sorcerer, and Vashtem became Sekenre and Sekenre became Vashtem, and he became many others, whom his father had slain before, whom he had occasion to slay afterward. They all mixed together, like paints in a pot. Sekenre learned, slowly and painfully, that in order to remain Sekenre he had to remain as he once was. Therefore Sekenre is forever a child of fifteen who wants to be good, and who wants to grow up. It’s not going to happen.”
Vandibar Nasha and Lord Radaces both drew daggers, but no ordinary weapons. These were forged of that metal which only dragons may fetch from the cores of suns.
“Release us,” said Radaces. “Let us be what we once were.”
“Or else die,” said Vandibar Nasha.
Sekenre rippled like quicksilver and stood behind them. Both of them turned. He shook his head sadly. For just an instant, his expression was that of a little boy who has made a mess and is terribly sorry, but can’t do anything about it. Then his manner changed, and he seemed older, and he spoke without an accent.
“Once that single instant has passed in which you open yourself to sorcery, there is no going back. You cannot say that when this is all over you will resume your former life, because it will never be over.”
Vandibar, fingering his dagger, said, “But we are still apprentices. I’ve read that to truly become a sorcerer, you have to attend the College of Shadows, and there take a master, learn everything you can, and in the end, as a graduation exercise, you have to overcome and kill the master, thus becoming the other sorcerer.”
“Or else the master kills the student, and the result is much the same,” said Radaces.
“There is one difference,” said Sekenre. “The winner is the jar, containing the loser.”
“I understand further,” said Vandibar, “that I have been attending this college for a long time, that it is all around me, and has been ever since that first night in the garden. It is different for each individual sorcerer.”
“But we have not yet graduated,” said Radaces, holding his dagger in a firm, clenched fist. “I think it’s time we do.”
Sekenre merely shrugged and sat down on the bench again. He got out his book and pretended to ignore them.
Vandibar and Radaces both stepped forward.
“Then you must discover who your master is,” Sekenre said, not looking up as the two of them paused and glanced at one another uncertainly. “Each student may encounter any number of teachers, but he has only one master, whose heart and mind he comes to know as intimately as his own, with whom he shares the great majority of exercises, sparring, countering one another as both grow in sorcery. Don’t mistake the
master for the attendant, who merely brings what is wanted and leads you to the places of learning.”
Then, heedless of them, Sekenre got out his pens and brushes and began writing on opposite pages the tales of Vandibar Nasha and of Lord Radaces, both sorcerers of great renown. But when he reached a certain point, he stopped, because he didn’t know how either story was to end.
Vandibar and Radaces stood by the edge of the empty pool. They wept, naming their wives and children long gone. They comforted each other as best they could, and then they looked into one another’s eyes, and each clenched his dagger firmly.
“It is death between us, old friend,” said Vandibar Nasha.
THE POWER OF PRAYER, by Brian Stableford
When the great plague arrived in the lush farmlands and market towns of Central Aquitania, forty years before its conquest by Charles the Great, panic swept downstream through the valley of the Dordogne even more rapidly than the disease itself.
Aquitania had then been a Catholic country for more than two centuries, although the descendants of Clovis were well enough aware of the fact that their ancestor’s conversion of his kingdom had been made for political reasons, in imitation of a stratagem once successfully employed by the Roman emperor Constantine. There were some among the Aquitanians, even at eight generations removed, who thought it unbecoming of conquerors to be so slavish in their imitation of the manners and pretensions of those they had conquered, and were therefore careful to maintain older beliefs and rituals alongside those of the Roman church.
“It was, after all, the Goths who triumphed over Constantine’s descendants,” the secret heretics argued. “Should the descendants of Clovis not be proud of their Gothic heritage?”
These proud men understood well enough that history was securely in the custody of the churchmen, but they were also prepared to be proud of their refusal to learn to write. For this reason, no matter what the churchmen recorded for the benefit of posterity, the great upsurge of religious sentiment and devotion provoked by the panic that came rushing down the Dordogne was by no means confined to the established churches.