I thought he might be dead then, but Arshadin knew better. He leaned down over him and shouted at his closed eyes, “If you thought me your equal, why did you never trust me with those things I needed to know? Why were you so sure that I would use them for ill? I was young, and there were choices yet before me—there were other ways, other journeys, there were!” Once again, for an instant, I saw his thick, empty face turn almost incandescent with old pain, almost beautiful with bitterness. Then he caught himself and went on stiffly, “Much could have been different. We were not doomed to end here.”
My friend opened his eyes. When he spoke this time, his voice was different: weary beyond telling, but calm and clear and strangely young, as the nearness of death often makes voices sound. He said, “Oh, yes, yes, we were, Arshadin. There was never but the one road for you, being who you are. Being who I am, I loved you because of what you are. So we were doomed to this, you see, it did indeed have to happen so.” He reached up and took sudden frail hold of Arshadin’s right hand. He said, “And yet, knowing, I did love you.”
Arshadin snatched his hand away as if the old man’s touch had seared it through. “Who ever cared about that?” he demanded. “Your love was your own affair, but I had a right to your faith. Deny it and you’ll die lying.” He was screaming now, more human in his fury and pettishness than I could have imagined him. “By every filthy god and demon, I had a right to your faith!”
“Yes,” my friend answered him softly, “yes, you did. Yes. I am sorry.” I had never heard him say such a thing before. “But I must tell you even so, you were a fool to trade your heart’s blood for your heart’s desire. It is an old bargain, and a bad one. I expected you to make a better deal.”
Arshadin made no reply. My friend beckoned Soukyan and me closer, and we came, standing together across the bed from Arshadin. I could smell Soukyan’s hair and the unmistakable cold fragrance of my friend’s dying. Arshadin was sweating heavily, but there was no smell to it at all.
My friend looked toward the window and nodded, greeting the new moon. To Soukyan he said only, “Remember about the flowers,” and to me, more sharply, “Chamata, whatever you may be plotting, give it up right now.” Lukassa and Rosseth pushed in between us, clutching blindly for his hands. He used the last of his earthly strength to push them away, whispering, “No, no, no, don’t come near me, no.” We moved back from his bedside, even Arshadin, and he said a name I did not know, and died.
I recall certain things very clearly from that moment. I recall that the four of us immediately stared, not at his body, but at Arshadin, as though—logically enough—he were the one bound to change into a demon. He looked strangely startled and uncertain himself at first, but then he sketched a couple of hasty signs over the bed, and gabbled some words that made my skin prickle and my ears ache down inside, the way such things always seem to do. Rosseth put his hands to his own ears, poor child. I pushed him further behind me.
Over Arshadin’s shoulder, out of that pallid night, eyes began to glitter at the window: first two, then four, then many on many, like frost forming on the glass. Not one pair was like another, except in the shining malice of their gaze. Arshadin turned and spoke to them—to them, and to something else, something surging deep below and beyond them, the great wave that was dashing these wicked sparklings at the window. He cried out, “Behold, he is yours, he is in your power for all time! I have done as I pledged, and our covenant is ended. Give me back my blood, as you promised!” If there was an answer, I never heard it, because it was then that my friend, who was dead, stirred and muttered and slowly opened his eyes.
We looked away instantly, as we had been warned. I cannot speak for the others, but I looked back just as quickly, sideways, because I had to. He—no, it, I have trouble saying that even now—stood up on the bed and stretched itself, making a soft, thoughtful sound. It might have been a child in a nightgown waking to a new day.
Then it stepped to the floor and walked toward Arshadin. It was smiling just a little, just enough for me to see the fire behind its black teeth.
Arshadin looked a bit flustered, but not frightened—I will give him that, and admire him for it. If he had expected whatever moved beyond those eyes at the window to materialize, thank him graciously and relieve him of his fearful creation, he showed no sign of any alarm. He spoke haughtily to the griga’ath—this time in the language wizards speak together, which I can follow somewhat— bidding it to know him and do him honor. Even in such plain speech, his words shook the room, as though the walls themselves were trying to obey.
Walls heed wizards. Griga’aths do not. It kept coming, shuffling on through one sky-splitting spell after another as the wizard backed and backed away. It still looked like the man we had known: it did not grow an inch taller or more massive, nor did it sprout rows of extra heads and arms, as demons are always drawn in my country. But it smiled flames, and burning, stinking yellow tears spilled out of its eyes, and it reached out both beckoning hands, and it walked silently toward Arshadin.
And even then he faced it, calling down power to make the poor old Gaff and Slasher rock to its wine cellars—we could hear beams cracking above us, windows exploding in other rooms, doors slamming and slamming themselves in pieces. Courage must have nothing to do with having blood, or a soul, because Arshadin was a terribly brave man. But he might have been ten times more brave and a hundred times the wizard he was, and it would have meant nothing to the thing that had been my friend. It kept walking toward him.
And we four? Soukyan never looked once at the vase of wildflowers, and I neither fled nor even thought to harry Rosseth and Lukassa into flight. A wizard had wasted his desperate dying counsel on us: we were separated from one another as though by miles and centuries, each alone forever in a lonely place with the griga’ath. For my part, there was no room anywhere in me for anything but the impossible truth of the being that stalked Arshadin, its faint smile flickering over the shuddering walls. So I know only that I gaped and gasped and stood petrified where I was; more than this I cannot tell you.
Arshadin was a proud man, as well as brave, for he did not call again for aid until the griga’ath had brought him to bay against the window. Then he wheeled, turning his back on it, on us, on everything but the night, and he shouted, still in the formal tongue of wizards, “Will you dare use me and abandon me so? Nay, but I’ve my own employment for such a creature. Give me back my blood, or I’ll find such occupation for him as may make you wish you had kept faith with me. And so be advised, my lords.”
Bravado? Perhaps. He would not turn from the window, even with the griga’ath’s hands almost on him. I think that it did touch him, but I will never know. The night stepped into the room, not only at the smashed window, but spilling through every crack, separation, and nail-hole in the walls, through the exhausted pores of the wood. As it must have done when Arshadin summoned it in the tower, it puddled together in a corner, slowly forming a shape that was round at the top and broken into jagged, twisted shadows below, the whole barely as high as Rosseth’s chin. As in the tower, it had become a passage to somewhere else, a dark archway that drew my vision in and would not let it go again. A wind began to stir under the arch: a wind from somewhere else, smelling of burning blood.
The darkness spoke to us. What it said—not in words, but singing in the roots of my hair, writing with broken glass on the underside of my skin—“Come to me. Be with me. Be me.” I obeyed immediately, without a moment’s hesitation, without any sense of having a choice, or wanting one. Soukyan was beside me on my left, and Rosseth took my right hand. Lukassa cried out, but the sound seemed to come from very far away. We were marching straight into that black court, and in that instant I saw, or felt, or knew what was on the other side. It is not what you think, that place.
But that is not to be talked about here, for the darkness did keep its word to Arshadin, after all. What the darkness had come for was not any of us but my friend, in this form that it could swing like
a hammer against the foundations of the world. It lost interest in us and stopped calling. Do you know what that was like? It was like being rescued from drowning just as you have begun to feel so sleepily peaceful; it was like being snatched back from a high place just as the whisper has finally convinced you that it is bound to happen anyway, so you might as well let go now. One more moment and I, at least, would have been truly lost. I am grateful. I know I should be more grateful than I am.
The darkness was calling to the griga’ath now: “Be with me, be me, be me.” It turned swiftly from Arshadin, making a sound I could feel but not hear, like the deep whine of the air that comes before an earthquake. Soukyan and Lukassa and Rosseth averted their faces, but this time I did not. This had nothing to do with courage or defiance—I simply froze, too dazed and confused not to look into the eyes of the griga’ath.
They were not his eyes. They were green, yes, but it was the green of the deepest northern seas, the icy, oozy green of the weeds that come up with your anchor from those unhealed places that have never seen the sun since the world began. They were hunting the sun, those eyes, they meant to eat the sun; but infinitely more terrifying was the fact that nothing else of him had changed. “It will look like me,” he had warned us, and so it did—exactly like him, only more so, in the way that trusted faces so often become hugely, monstrously familiar when my dreams turn nightmare. Perhaps we are all, even wizards, no more than faded sketches of the good we contain, the evil we might have done: if that is so, what faced me now was the original of my friend, the sum of his nature. He was all himself, all his possible self, and he was nothing, nothing but destruction. No, I did not turn to stone seeing him, as people do in the old tales; but neither did I escape whole. And the rest is my business.
The griga’ath paid no attention to me. It moved past me, still wearing the face and form—and even the smell, like an old boat in the sun—of someone I loved. Fire was just beginning to leak through the body now, twinkling coyly between the ribs and under the arms. Griga’aths blaze without burning, eternally; in time they become exactly like stars cloaked in human skin, shattering and swallowing what they come near. It halted a step before the darkness, turning my friend’s body this way and that: strangely uncertain, even looking back once. I hid my face from it, like the others.
Someone was pounding furiously on the real door of the real room. As though the noise had suddenly tipped the balance, the griga’ath took a single stride forward and passed from this world. I could still see it for what seemed a very long time, glowing steadily brighter as it grew smaller, spinning slowly away down the black archway that runs between what we know and what we cannot bear to know. I think I cried after it; if I did, the sound was lost when the door gave way and Karsh lunged into the room. Tikat was just behind him.
THE INNKEEPER
I suppose I should give thanks that the bottles hit the Kinariki wagoner and not me when they toppled from the taproom shelves. The Kinariki was paying his score at the time: his hand pulled across mine— courteously leaving his change behind—as he widened his eyes and sank to the floor without a sound. Do the gods expect my gratitude for that? Very well. I give thanks.
And that is all the gods get from me for the rest of my life, and you may tell them so if you’re much in the habit of chatting them up. Between one minute and the next, The Gaff and Slasher, my home for thirty years, came crashing to ruination around me, as I knew would happen the day I let those three women cross my threshold. The bottles were followed by every mug and wine glass I owned, and then by the hanging lamps. I thought javak at first, though we haven’t had one of those corkscrew storms since Rosseth was small. But when the two windows blew out—not in, out—as though they’d never been there, and the shelves behind the bar started pulling loose with a long squeal of old nails in old planks, I knew that this was no javak. The beer pumps were groaning and bucking under my hand, trying to plunge free of their sockets; the few rusty tag-ends of armor I had anchored to the walls to keep people from stealing them shot across the room like crossbow bolts. A hide-factor from Devarati got hit that time, but I think he recovered.
Earthquake? Earthquake? There wasn’t so much as a twitch out of that floor—my customers, the conscious ones, were down flat, clinging to it with their fingernails, like lizards to a wall, while benches and broken glass and overturned tables hurtled past them. Within thirty seconds, I was the one object still standing in the taproom, supported by nothing but outrage. For I never doubted the source of this catastrophe for one instant. Storms and volcanoes and family spats of the gods be damned—the cause, the bloody cause, was only a few bloody inches above my head, and I was already on my way up there even though I may not have seemed to be moving at all. I was just waiting for my feet to catch up with my fury.
Tikat staggered through the outside door just then, crouching low to stay on his own feet. When I came out from behind the bar to meet him, I felt like a very small boat pushing off from shore into a howling rapids. Tikat was yapping something at me and pointing upwards. I couldn’t hear him in the confusion, but I knew he must be asking about his mad white Lukassa. I shook my head and shouted back, “Where’s the boy? Have you seen the damned boy?”
He never bothered to answer, but only reeled on by me, treading on customers and armor bits alike, slipping in the puddles of mingled ale and wine, heading for the stair. I scrambled after him, pushing him out of the way well before we reached the landing. No one was going to break down that door but me.
TIKAT
Down in the taproom it was bad enough. Even with the windows gone, the pressure around me was so great that it was like being under water when I dived and dived for Lukassa. I found myself holding my breath for fear of drowning, and pushing the air away with my spread arms as I struggled forward. But on the stair there was a hot, stinking wind blowing straight down, battering Karsh and me from wall to railing while the steps themselves flew apart under our feet. We seemed to be making no headway at all: now we were birds beating against a storm, flying slowly backward, counting it progress to lose only a little ground. How long this went on, I cannot tell you.
I think today—I say I think—that I might well have given up then, but for Karsh. Not that he spared me even a glance after he thrust me aside, let alone any encouragement; indeed, he missed his footing once and lurched full into me, and would have had the two of us bouncing all the way down those splintering steps if I had not been able to catch hold of him and brace myself in time. But he never lost heart or looked back, that fat, roaring man. He bent his fleshy neck and bowed his shoulders, and lumbered ahead, heaving and cursing, hacking out a way through the wind. I followed, gratefully riding his wake, unable to imagine what could be driving him on so savagely. Because it was Karsh, you see. If it had been anyone else, surely I would have understood, but it was Karsh.
On the landing he paused for a moment, shaking himself heavily, and I saw his face, huge with that pale rage that takes him over when nothing is going as he would have it. The blue eyes were darkening as I watched, turning almost lavender; his teeth were set savagely in his lower lip, which was bleeding. Then he was off again, charging along a corridor choked with falling plaster and roiling dust and shrieking half-clad guests trampling each other to reach the stairs. I was knocked down myself, almost immediately, but managed to roll aside and get to my feet by climbing up and over someone in a purple night-robe. The hallway was booming and rippling, like the metal sheets those actors used to use for thunder. I stumbled along, arms across my face, toward the tafiya’s room.
Karsh was already there, hammering on the door, rattling the knob, pounding again, then beginning to heave his whole body against it: one slow, muffled thump after another. For once there was no breath in him for bellowing—I could hear it wheeze out each time he smashed himself into the thick old wood. I was not quite up with him when the door finally burst open and we fell through.
At the far end of the room there was nothing. Ther
e was an emptiness. No, listen, don’t interrupt, listen to me. The emptiness was a mouth: you could see its edges writhing and folding like lips, beginning to close, and the foul wind seethed between them. Far away, or far in, or far down, a bright, bright spark tumbling forever, blazing bravely in the void. I knew what it was.
Lukassa was standing with her back to me, near the empty bed. There were others in the room, but I only saw her. She did not turn at the noise when Karsh and I broke in, but began to walk toward that black mouth that was closing more quickly now. Her steps were as light as they had always been when she came to meet me, never quite running, but running in her heart and her eyes. She was gone into the emptiness before I could call; and before I could reach it myself, it had snapped shut and vanished, leaving nothing behind but a sagging, crumbling wall in a little wrecked room full of the sound of her name.
LUKASSA
I am not Lukassa. I am no one. No one can pass the gates of death twice. I am no one. I walked through, and they waited for me. They do not want to wait, but I will make them.
Cold, cold, cold, like the river. Someone was calling, is calling me, far behind on the edge of Lukassa. But I was not Lukassa then. I am a drawing that has been scratched out, scrawled over, erased again. Far ahead, a star, singing, promising to tell me my name if I can catch it in time. Is that why I am here, was here? I should hurry. Did I hurry?
Death is a nowhere lined with lightning. I remember. There is cold nowhere under my feet, but I walked swiftly, because I remember the way. There are faces now, there were faces before, flowing by in the dark, between me and the star. When I die the first time, I will see those same faces.
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