Authors: Tanith Lee
Night's Master (20 page)
The imbalance of each, counterweighted by the other, had become the most
exact of all balances. Negative aligned with positive, the divergent paths
coalesced. Iron was silk; silk was iron. What emerged was serenity, wisdom,
power, magic—the unique perfection.
Neither was afraid—how should they be? They watched Azhrarn with a
detached sweetness. They had the look of gods, or of God; the soul unseparated,
complete. They were two beings, yet they were one.
Azhrarn wrapped his cloak about him. He was much taken with this sight.
It pleased him, for an instant, more than wickedness.
“Too fine to sunder twice,” he said. “For what it is worth in the world,
go with my blessing.”
PART TWO
Between the
rocky hills, an old track led to the city and the sea, but it was rarely
traveled. For a hundred years or longer, men had avoided this road, since, even
at the brightest hour of day, they declared, you might hear a monster howling
there in the rock beneath your feet, and who knew but that sometime it might
not get out and eat you? The mighty magician, however, he of the black and
green silk coat and the ruby ring the size of a gazelle’s eye, he, over whose
head a menial held a fringed parasol as he rode in an open carriage drawn by
six black horses from whose bridles dripped pearls—he was not daunted in the
least by tales of howlings and eatings. Even the servants of the magician
laughed.
“This is the Great Kaschak,” they said. “Suppose there is some monster
concealed under the road. Suppose it emerges. Then you may suppose Kaschak will
eat
it!
”
So the magician set out. He had a mind to reach the city and its seaport
before sunset, and had chosen the track for its swiftness. He had come to this
land to work a healing miracle for a king’s eldest son, and now, this miracle
performed, he wished to take ship for his home.
The old track was dusty and here and there stones had fallen. The
magician cleared the stones away with a momentous word or two that dissolved
them in smoke. An hour after noon, the magician’s party came to a dry well.
“It is time the horses were watered,” said Kaschak. He struck the side of
the hill and a fountain burst from it and formed a poo1 for the horses to drink
at. Just then, from the mouth of the dry well, there rose a mournful ululation.
The servants of the magician showed no fear, for they trusted his powers.
Kaschak himself went to the well, and leaned there to listen. Soon enough the
fearsome noise came again.
“I believe I should like to see this creature,” said Kaschak. He called
for an unlit torch, and blew on it and it took fire. Then he lowered it some
way into the well and left it suspended in mid-air while he peered down through
a magic spyglass to see what was to be seen. “Ah,” said the magician presently,
“as I thought. A human translated by the fabulous method of a demon into a
curious shape.” (The glass revealed such information.)
Kaschak snapped his fingers and sparks flew from them. The sparks spun
about and formed a net which poured itself down the well.
A vile clamour was heard, a scraping of hoofs, a scrabbling of teeth, a
slithering smack, a slavering bark. Up from the head of the well drifted the
torch, and went out. Next came the sparky net with, rolled and tangled and
kicking and writhing inside it, an awful beast.
The front half of the beast was a boar, the back half a giant lizard’s
tail. Its head was a wolf’s.
It floundered and bellowed and howled, swiveling its eyes and gnashing
its lupine jaws. It had wandered for a century or a little longer through the
crevices and caves that undermined the hills. It could not die, sealed forever
within the scabbard of a demon’s whim. Blows had not slain it, nor the fall
into the gully; the burning straw had scorched and roused it, but not killed.
For sure, it had forgotten its beginning, that once it had been a man,
handsome, virile and young, who had lain down upon the body of his beloved
bride to slumber, and woken imprisoned in the hellish form the Drin had made at
Azhrarn’s direction. Bisuneh’s lover, still trapped in misery, while she had
been dust for eight decades or more.
Kaschak saw all this, or sufficient of it. He was not a man of pity, but
neither was he unjust. As the foul, stinking horror tumbled and groaned in the
sorcerous net, Kaschak sent his servants hither and thither, to fetch this
chalk and that powder, to take this amulet from the chest and lay that one
back. In the middle of the afternoon, Kaschak began his spell. It was not
concluded till the sun itself began to tire and sink down upon its distant bed
of blue hills. The thing in the net had undergone many transformations and had
lamented beneath them. Now, as the red light left the sky, a wrinkling movement
went over the back of the beast. As a serpent crawls from its expended skin, so
something now crawled from the wrinkled, three-fold hide.
It was a man who fell exhausted at Kaschak’s feet. A man no longer with
any appearance of youth, without a vestige of good looks or vitality in him.
But still, a man.
He could not remember his name, had forgotten it as he had forgotten his
earlier life. He had a vague memory of being cheated, cruelly deprived of joy
without even an omen to prepare him. His recollections were merely of dark
dripping underpasses, echoing caverns bursting with his sub-human cries, filthy
holes where he had hidden from meaningless terrors. Kaschak gave him food, wine
in a vessel of yellow jade.
“You shall serve me two years to repay my trouble. I will call you
Qebba—the much-spoken-of—for so you have been in these parts.”
“Qebba” did not argue, with the employment, with the name. His face was
the grey bony face of a man dying of hunger who can never be filled. He
regained human speech only slowly. He consented to ride on the footboard of
Kaschak’s carriage. Sometimes, forgetting, his tongue would loll and his eyes
roll frightfully. Those who glimpsed him when the carriage passed through the
city thought him a lunatic, and marveled as to why he should accompany the
Great Kaschak.
It was late, but the ship had stayed for the magician, seeing he was who
he was. On the quay, Kaschak made an obscure gesturing. The fine carriage
became the size of a walnut; he put it in his pocket. The six black horses,
a-drip with pearls, became six pretty, white-spotted black beetles. He put them
in a comfortable box and, flanked by his servants, cheered by the astonished
and captivated crowd, he went aboard, and Qebba with him.
The seas were calm, with a following wind. Two days from shore they came
to an island, a forbidding place of black obsidian cliffs that stretched,
seemingly without relief or break, into the sky. Here the ship’s boat nosed on
to a gravel beach, and the magician and his servants were put ashore. This
gaunt outpost was no less than Kaschak’s home.
The ship sailed on like a scarlet gull. Kaschak struck the impervious
obsidian wall of the cliff, and a huge doorway, invisible before, folded open
to let them through, grinding shut behind them. Beyond the cliff wall, the
island was not as it had appeared—barren and bleak—but one glamorous garden of
curious sort.
Rose trees grew in the magician’s garden, tall as tall pines. Their
blooms were of the palest green and the most transparent purple. Pink willow
trees leaned beside the rosy pools that tasted of wine. On the blue lawns lions
gambolled—they were the color of fresh cream with hyacinth manes—they ran to
the magician and playfully licked his hands like dogs. Owls with round emerald
eyes sang melodiously as young girls.
The magician’s house was of green porcelain, with a roof of varicolored
glass to let in the light. An avenue of black trees with fruit of pure gold led
to the doorway.
Qebba stared about him, bemused by the garden as by all that had happened
to him.
“A word of warning,” said Kaschak. “In my service you will necessarily
learn some magic. Do not seek to learn too much or use carelessly what you come
to know. Above all, never pluck the golden fruit of these trees.”
The magician’s house was no less a wonder than the garden. Diverse beams
of color from the glass roof above dyed the rooms, shining on many items of
precious metal. A huge water-clock of brass and silver, and in the shape of a
galleon, told the hours. At dusk the lamps mysteriously lit themselves.
In a hidden chamber, behind two great doors of black lacquer, the
magician practiced his arts. The handles of the doors were in the form of two
hands of white jade; to open the doors one must needs clasp these hands in
one’s own, and twist them. This Qebba noticed the most trusted of Kaschak’s
servants do on particular occasions, when they were summoned to aid in some experiment.
But Qebba himself was not admitted. He did not think to enter the room unasked,
but it was reputed to be an awesome place.
Qebba’s tasks were strange. Watch for a large bird in the noon sky. Count
how many times it circled the magician’s house before flying away and write the
number on parchment. Go to the twelfth pool, pluck a reed, crush it in a
mortar, spread the paste of it on the doorposts of the house. Every ten days,
Qebba was told to climb up on the roof and polish the glass there—it must be
very thick for it did not crack beneath his feet. Or he would drive the lions,
which fed on grass and wild yellow grapes, to another part of the garden.
Two months passed. Qebba was neither happy nor unhappy. He fulfilled his
duties, ate his meat and bread and slept in his allotted place. Occasionally he
glanced at the doors of black lacquer with the white hands in them, but did not
think to enter, did not really think of anything at all. Even now he would
forget sometimes, loll his tongue, try to drag his hind limbs, as he had been
forced to do when the tail of the lizard was fixed behind him.
One morning Kaschak summoned him and said:
“Go to the black trees in the avenue, Qebba, and pluck a golden fruit.”
Qebba turned to obey, then hesitated and said:
“But master, you told me I was not to.”
Then Kaschak laughed and went away. He had been trying Qebba, to see if
he could trust him still. That afternoon he called Qebba again and said: “Here
is a golden sieve. Go to the second pool and fetch me wine-water in it.”
Qebba did not argue this time. Though it was a sieve, if the magician
demanded it to be filled, then filled it would be. And sure enough when Qebba
dipped it in the second pool, none of the water ran out of the holes. He
carried the sieve to Kaschak, and Kaschak smiled and said: “As I thought, your
years as an enchanted beast in the thraldom of demon-kind have installed in you
some aptitude for thaumaturgy. Come now, you shall enter my workroom.” It was a
fact that Qebba had acquired unrealized powers, as the magician had suspected
from the first. All his tasks had been a test. The circling bird was invisible
to an ordinary human eye, the magic reed would not have ground to paste for any
man. Under the feet of another, the glass roof would have smashed at the
initial step, and few could shepherd the blue and white lions. As for the last
test, who but one gifted with sorcery could hold fluid in a sieve?
So Qebba entered the chamber behind the doors of black lacquer.
A window was there that showed, not the garden beyond, but a hundred
different places about the world, whichever the magician conjured to appear.
The room was dark, yet everything in it might be seen. On a stand of brass
stood the bleached skull of an ancient Magus, which could be made to talk when
Kaschak required it. In a crystal jar with a stopper of agate was a tiny woman
the size of a man’s middle finger, and though she was tiny she was very fair
and her hair was like a russet leaf folded about her. When Kaschak tapped the
crystal she would dance lasciviously.
Amid these curiosities, Qebba began to learn strange arts, and Great
Kaschak was his tutor. The manner of the teaching was bizarre, involving fast,
fire, solitude and blood. Qebba’s brain, slow in all else, moved swiftly at
these lessons. And at his growing powers, a thrill ran through him. Yet always
he looked to the magician for guidance, called him “master,” kissed his ruby
ring and was grateful. He was the child, Kaschak the father. This pleased
Kaschak. He foresaw innumerable possibilities in this apt pupil, without danger
to himself. The gifts of Qebba, coupled with his ingenuous dullness and
malleability, made him the most perfect and most useful aid and servant. He did
whatever Kaschak asked, all but one thing.
“Go, pluck a golden fruit in the avenue,” said Kaschak.
Qebba answered: “You told me I must not.”
And Kaschak laughed.
But even the wise are foolish.
It was the third time Qebba had heard mention of the golden fruits. Once
he had been young and happy and quick of mind. Now some buried thought stirred
in him. That night he dreamed he plucked golden fruit galore, and it rained
down upon him, and, as each fruit touched him, it felt like the warm kisses of
a lovely girl, and the glow of gold was like the glow of her hair in lamplight.
Qebba woke with a cry, and, barely knowing what he did, he ran into the
night-time garden, into the avenue of black trees, and reached up one hand and
grasped what grew there glittering.
At once a snake appeared, wound in the branches, a spotted snake of
crimson and green, which seized Qebba’s hand in its jaws. But Qebba knew by now
a spell to defeat beasts and flying things and reptiles, and this he spoke, and
the snake withered and shrank into a twisted cord of green and red silk, and
slid into the bushes.
Then Qebba grasped the fruit again, but this time it became as hot as
fire and scorched him and he could not keep hold of it. But Qebba had learned a
spell of cooling, and this he spoke and the fruit was cold once more.
Then Qebba took it in both hands, and tugged it, but the fruit would not
come away from the tree. So Qebba spoke a spell of loosening, and the fruit
fell.
Qebba examined the fruit as it lay on the blue grass of the lawn. He did
not know what to do with it now it was picked. But after a moment he heard a
rustle inside the fruit as if something moved there, and presently a sort of
scratching as if something would come out.
Qebba became alarmed, but stronger than alarm now was a sense of urgency.
Lamps were floating from the magician’s house, floating in the air with no man
to hold them up, and close behind, Kaschak would be walking, come to see what
went on at midnight in his garden.