Maybe he should make smaller creatures. Maybe he should make creatures that didn't eat, that didn't reproduce. Aside from those things, though, why live? What was the point of life except to eat and reproduce?
Ixidor stood, abstracted. There had to be more to life than that. If there wasn't, Ixidor would make more-he would create not just life but also meaning.
Before he could create either, though, he had to create room.
Ixidor slogged out of the stream and strode toward a desert agave. It was a light green plant with broad, sawtoothed leaves that jutted up all around it. Ixidor studied the configuration. He chose the widest frond at the base of the agave. Setting one foot beneath the foliage and the other on the flat of the blade, he bent it down and cracked it. He yanked back and forth until the fat leaf came off in his hand.
He was bleeding again. It was fine. He kept the blood off the leaf and walked along the bank. His feet knew the way. Ahead stood a burl of rocks, gushing water-the headwaters of the stream-and beyond those rocks, desert sand stretched like an empty canvas. Ixidor settle down on a shaded spot near the burbling spring. He laid the agave leaf beside him and stared out into the blinding desert.
Light flooded his eyes, blinding him. Overwhelming light and overwhelming darkness were the same-the unknown emptiness, begging to be made into something. In that blankness, figures moved. They were made of the same ethereal stuff that made up his spirit guide, his muse.
Ixidor reached for the agave leaf. In mud and blood, he drew a long, waving line up it. He widened the line and gave it depth, so it seemed to be a river with broad banks running through the trackless sand. He glanced up from the leaf to the desert and saw his vision imprinting on the world. At first, the curving line was only a retinal afterimage. He blinked, and it became real.
The stream reached its slender, intrepid way out across the desert. The rocky gnarl had become a bubbling prominence in the midst of rolling water. What had once been but a brief stretch of water had become a long stream.
"A river. I want a river."
His bloody finger widened the line, and a sudden roar told of the widened waterway. Without looking away from the agave, Ixidor created a distant lake-large and deep. Quick strokes raised a forest along the banks of the water.
At last, Ixidor looked up and saw the wide river, the thick stands of tree, and the deep and distant lake. He had created them out of his own mind, his own blood.
Ixidor trembled. This was new power, unbelievable power. Image magic could do more than raise mud pigeons to life. It could create whole landscapes.
He had created the oasis. The realization struck Ixidor with the pithy weight of fact. The oasis had come into being out of his own desperate desire for it to be. He had seen it in his mind and had made it.
A pit opened in the sand before Ixidor. A second and third formed in a curving line. They were deep pits, black, with no visible sides or bottom. Three more took shape. It was as if some great beast burrowed quickly below, causing cave-ins. Ixidor staggered back. He goggled at the agave leaf, only then seeing the blood spots that had dripped from his finger onto it. Those droplets had formed the pits.
Power indeed. His very blood could carve bottomless holes in the world.
With his uninjured hand, Ixidor wiped the spots away. Sands smoothed over the pits as if they had never been.
He had never created on such scale. He had to think of water flow, habitat, heat, and light. "The land needs shade."
Ixidor mixed mud and blood on his hand and sketched a tall mountain just beyond the lake. He made the peaks impossibly tall and curved so that they seemed like claws. One summit even reached up to pierce the sun. The jagged range of peaks cast deep shadows across the lake and much of the sandy desert.
It was time to transform that sand. Ixidor rubbed his hands together, forming a wet paste. Opening his palm, he smeared it across the agave frond, turning bright sand to brown topsoil. The light before Ixidor dimmed, and he looked up to behold his labors.
Where once the dunes had beamed, now rich, brown earth extended. Ixidor reached out beside him, plucking up fern fronds and grass. He scattered them across the paste. Jabbing and prodding, he righted each of the segments to make them seem trees in a forest. The effect was less than perfect. Ixidor focused his will upon them, imagining how he wanted them to look.
The trees came, not rumbling up from the earth or striding out across it but simply appearing where they would reside. Trees became glades, and glades became forests, and forests joined the already-verdant oasis. It was a rough-and-tumble wood, the best that could be expected from finger-painting in mud and blood on agave. He needed true brushes and paints and a real canvas if he were to make this place look the way he wished it to.
He would make one final thing out of his own blood. Lifting a sanguine fingertip, he sketched a small, leaning rectangle. Its two sides extended down into a pair of legs that rested in the grassy ground. Ixidor drew two more legs behind the first, reaching from the top of the rectangle. A slender dribble of blood formed a chain that would keep the front and back legs in a peaked frame.
Beneath the rectangle, Ixidor formed a small shelf. He set upon it round jars with wide mouths and lids. In a cylindrical tube at one end of the shelf, Ixidor created narrow stalks, tipped in horsehair. A shapeless board hung there too, with a hole just the right size for a thumb.
Ixidor stared at his painting one moment longer, closed his eyes, and said, "Pow!"
Opening his eyes, Ixidor looked out at his proudest creation-an easel with paints and brushes, water and oils, and the almighty palette. Tenderly, he set down the agave leaf, for fear its destruction would mean the dissolution of the land he had made. Ixidor smiled. That easel would give him astonishing new power. He took a step toward it.
A clod of mud fell from his forehead to smack upon the ground. No, he was not yet worthy.
Ixidor turned and descended into the fast-running river. It carried perhaps ten times the water that it had before. The currents dragged at the filth that covered him. Dirt turned to mud and washed away, the red stains across his flesh lifted, salt dissolved, and sand sloughed. Ixidor dipped his head beneath the water and let it cleanse every pore. He stripped off the rag that did so little to protect him and was created new in cleanliness.
Ixidor emerged, dripping, from the river he had created. It would be called the Purity River, and the palm forest would be Greenglades, and the claw-topped mountain would be Shadow Mountain.
The arid air gulped water off his flesh. He was dry even as he stepped up to the easel. Naked and clean, the creator stood before a blank canvas. Below it, the pigments gleamed in their jars-ochre, saffron, woad, kobold, beet, reseda, calcimine, koal-absolute potentiality. With these pigments, these brushes, and this canvas, he could make anything.
Already he had filled this comer of the compass. A new canvas needed a new desert. He hoisted the easel, and naked and unashamed, strode through Greenglades. In furtive groups, rabbits followed him out into the new forest. The bugs in their ubiquity went too, and the birds after the bugs. All seemed to sigh, glad for the new lands.
Greenglades was a jungle of giants. Trees as wide around as villages rose to unthinkable heights. Vines draped from them crosswise, forming a network of elevated highways. It was a hot place, hot and wet, and brought sweat out across its creator's skin as he struggled through it.
He was glad to have so savage a place. He would have to make jaguars and anacondas, once he had the chance, but he needn't live in its monstrous heat, among its primeval foliage. He needed a cooler place, a place of sky and water, fluidity and potentiality. Already his palace formed in his mind, and he smiled. In a castle like that, with infinite rooms and recursive stairs, he could hide forever from his grief.
Ixidor reached the edge of his creation. The forest ended abruptly, its flora seeming almost crimped off by the edge of a frame. This had been the limit of his vision. In a rumpled line, the jungle gave way to wide-open
desert.
Ixidor planted his easel in the sand and stared out across the blinding emptiness. While his eyes drank in that desolation, his hands worked. He opened the woad, mixed oil with it, and deposited some of the deep blue pigment on his palette. Opening the calcimine, he dipped in his fattest brush and mixed the white with the blue. When he had acquired the right color, he painted with broad strokes from the top of the canvas to the bottom. The horizon line, near the top of the canvas was the lightest blue, with the color deepening above and below it. White formed high clouds in the firmament. Thicker pigments in mottled tint and shade formed waves on the waters beneath the firmament. With a different brush and tones of light ochre, he created the dry ground, sands descending in the foreground to the beautiful waters.
Pausing and stepping back, Ixidor sighed. He had brought it into being. Before him to the blue horizon lay a scintillating freshwater lake. It seemed like a vast slice of sky laid down within the dunes. Ixidor felt as though he stood at the edge of the world and stared off into infinite possibility. He closed his eyes, letting his spirit roam over the face of the deep.
His mind traced out lines there-vast drums delving down through the flood to sit upon the foundations of the world. Above the drums and just above the water, he imagined a single massive slab of stone, two fathoms thick and a mile square. He cut out its center so that every chamber of his palace would hover above deep waters. On this slab, a rock below the sky and above the sea, he would form his world.
Ixidor opened his eyes. Already he was mixing the stony pigments. Gray slate and white granite, marble in red and black, tan limestone and jewels throughout the spectrum. He mixed and dabbed. Brush strokes scrambled over the canvas, coalescing into a glorious palace.
At its center rose a huge onion dome covered in gleaming mosaic. Its peak poked holes in the ragged clouds. At nine points around the dome's perimeter, ornate fountains clung and shot water up the tiled roof. The liquid gleamed as it ran back down, sluiced into channels, and poured from nine waterfalls into floating pools below. The streams descended nine flying buttresses to nine twisting minarets. From there, the waters followed the spiral grooves down to join the lake.
Just as water draped the palace in finery from top to bottom, so did foliage. Hanging gardens filled the castle, brimming with fruit and verdant with life. Enormous balconies held whole glades, palms flourishing amid fields of orchid. Vines trailed down to dip their tips in the flood. Everywhere, curtains of moss veiled the lower reaches.
Ixidor stepped back from the canvas and stared beyond it. He smiled, seeing his palace stand there, glorious amid the waters. The high lancets, the golden pilasters, the magnificent courses: It was a place of impossible beauty.
Ixidor's eye caught on one detail, and he frowned. He had miscalculated one of his vanishing lines, so that the palace's easternmost wall became a floor halfway down its length. In disgust, Ixidor stared at the offending lines. His brush angrily mixed the paint that would eliminate the error. He lifted the brush, filled with the colors of stone.
His hand paused above the canvas. His fingers trembled. The color was wrong-the gray of rotting flesh, the last color of Nivea before she was gone. Ixidor withdrew his hand. He would not eradicate this error, any error. They would help him hide. His palace would be perfect in its imperfection.
With a steady hand, Ixidor reached in with his stony pigments and modified another wall so that it too would flip to floor somewhere along its length. He repainted the flying buttresses so that they tangled with each other, the farthest arches overlapping the nearest. As each new line took form on the canvas, the reality beyond conformed. If it was possible in art, it was possible in truth.
Ixidor jabbed new colors on the brush and modified the front archway. The passageway became a solid slab and the stone arch above it dissolved into a space. Figure-ground relationships. He reworked stairways so that they never rose but only ran in recursive circles or ascended to the foundations or descended to the heavens. Every optical illusion that he knew, and some he discovered along the way, he incorporated. Solids turned liquid, and liquid turned to air, and air turned to solid. It was a building in the literal sense of the gerund, for it was always building itself out of impossibility.
Ixidor breathed. He could lose himself in this creation. It was exactly what he wished to do. Glorious, absurdly huge, gleaming and perfect, diverting, infinitely diverting, but he needed more than a shell. He clutched the edges of the painting, bent his head toward the canvas, and imagined each room. He hung drapes from the windows and paper from the walls. He furnished each chamber, put clothes in the wardrobes and food in the pantries. Bed linens, table linens, place settings and flower settings, supplies for art and supplies for life-everything he could imagine needing. He would live here the rest of his life. It was his undreamed land.
Those had been her words. Words held such peril. Even in this place of utter impossibility, Nivea intruded. He could not bear the pain of having her ghost instead of her.
Most men lived out their days surrounded by their memories. Ixidor would live out his hiding from them.
He touched his brush to the kohl and added a small detail to the shore. A boat, a barge, really-wide and flat, with low walls and a single long pole to drive it across the waters. It would take him to his home. He would not propel himself across, no. He needed a barge man.
Here was the great conundrum: He had not yet needed to make another thinking thing and didn't wish to do so now. Perhaps a huge ape could send him along, but what would be more dangerous than a gigantipithicus crouched upon his landing? He didn't want a creature with free will, with thoughts, hopes, and aspirations. He wanted a husk of a man, an unman.
Ixidor mixed kohl and calcimine. They formed a silvery hue, like mercury, shot through with light and shadow. He dabbed it onto the ferry, a simple glob in the relative shape of a man. He gave him arms and legs, hands and feet-but no mouth, no eyes, voice, or will. The man was simply an outline, a hole in reality. This was the sort of man Ixidor was prepared to live with.
Looking away from the canvas, he stared down the long beach. The barge waited below, its mercurial attendant leaning on the long pole.
Ixidor stowed the brushes and capped the paint pots, ready to descend to his creation. He lifted the easel and strode down the sandy slope. Only sweat and paint garbed him. It didn't matter. In skin, he was more fully garbed than the unman who waited below. The sands burned Ixidor's feet, a good sensation-purifying and purgative. He strode down to the barge and set up his easel on its floor. Then, before alighting himself, he immersed himself in the cool waters. They washed away sweat and paint.
Wet and naked, he stepped into the barge and stood beside his finished canvas. Only then did he look to that amorphous shadow, the unman who waited.
"Care much for art?" Ixidor asked, indicating the painting.
The unman did not move and made no reply.
Ixidor nodded. 'Take me to my palace."
The barge man set his pole and pushed away from shore. The boat glided out on the glimmering flood. With each thrust of the pole, they moved nearer to the glorious palace. Its true proportions resolved themselves, with walkways large enough for elephants and halls huge enough for dragons. It was a maze in three dimensions-or more, for all its warping of height, width, and depth-a labyrinth of mind.
The unman poled for two miles across the waters to a stone landing. Ixidor would have to walk two more miles of curved stairways and deceptive corridors to a room where he might sleep. He enlisted the unman to carry his easel, though he was unnerved by the thing's inscrutable silence.
They climbed. Thrice they arrived back at the same landing. Only when Ixidor gave in and slumped against a wall did he find himself suddenly outside this grand private chambers.
Tall double doors gilt in gold swung inward to a high hall. Red velvet and ornate tapestries adorned the walls, and thick rugs covered floors of white marble. An enormous canopy bed stood to one side, a
nd to the other stood a wardrobe that was infinitely deep and brimming with clothes all his size. Another cabinet held all his art supplies. From it, he drew new brushes, a new palette, and a new canvas. The best feature of the room, though, was the broad bank of windows that opened onto a huge balcony.
Ixidor walked out onto it. The stony space hung between sky and water as if it floated. Views through two hundred seventy degrees of arc showed only endless sky and endless water. There Ixidor set up his easel.
"You may go," he said over his shoulder to the unman.
The creature retreated among the shadows.
Ixidor opened the kobold blue and the calcimine and mixed up a whole new palette. Soon there would be fresh-water dolphins and manatees swimming below, with lake bass to feed them. The sky was his palette, too, and he would fill it with aerial jellyfish and coiling sea monsters, flying mantas and schools of cerulean cetaceans. His world would teem with things, all of them under his control.
No longer need he limit his mind to possibilities. No longer need he lurk among memories he could not change, for before him lay futures he could change forever.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE MAGNIFICENT ADDICTION
Staff in hand and hale at last, Kamahl ascended the Gorgon Mount. No beasts confronted him this day. They had seen him kill. the mantis druid a month ago. The monsters cringed away, as well they should, for Kamahl would have slain any of them. He planned to destroy even the source of their power, the thing that had made them: the Mirari sword. The beasts knew it.
So did the forest. It had no intention of allowing him to succeed.
From the top of the green canopy, a great bough crashed down toward him. Kamahl couldn't leap aside in time, but he planted his century stalk. It was like a lightning rod, channeling the power of the forest against the forest. The bough struck the staff and split. Massive halves fell to either side of Kamahl.
He stared down at the cross-section. The heartwood of the bough was slender and rotten, but the quick was a single thick ring-all that growth in one year. The Mirari had perverted the singular power of the forest, turning growth to cancer. It had seduced an entire land.
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