Death's Master Page 18

  “May I,” entreated Lylas, “summon anything for my Lord? A chair of silver hung with rare velvet for him to be seated in? A wine of smoke made from the breath of a summer lotus? Shall music be played? Shall incense be burned? I ask no more than to serve you.”

  “Rest assured you shall,” said Azhrarn, and Lylas shivered. Then he laid his hand lightly on the shoulder of the young man beside him. The young man’s extraordinary eyes flickered—Azhrarn had communicated some cue or information to him. And now the young man spoke in a quiet but clear hard voice that sounded as if it seldom liked to be used.

  “My mother was Narasen, the queen of Merh. Do you recollect her?”

  “I?” said Lylas smoothly. “Many enter my house.”

  The young man tensed. The witch, not even looking at him, started at a sudden danger in his person apart from the borrowed danger of Azhrarn.

  “You wore my mother’s finger bone at your waist,” the young man said. “She made a pact with the personage you reverence, whose agent you are. When she was dead, you ground up the bone, as is your custom, and drank it in wine and thus renewed your youth, as constantly you do.”

  “Well,” said Lylas, “it is true. I do recall the lady. But I am under the protection of my master, and I have done nothing that was not agreed on.”

  “Yes you have. One thing.”

  “What thing?” demanded Lylas, raising her head to gaze at the youth, and she did not care now for his lynx’s eyes or the way he stared back at her with them.

  “The poison from which Narasen died—you made it to that purpose.”

  “I?” said Lylas again, but she took a step away from him.

  It was a fact. Lylas had not taken to Narasen, disliking Narasen’s hauteur with Lord Death—the worse that he had not checked it. Lylas had grown envious, for she was jealous by nature. She had plucked a red pomegranate and dug out its curiously blue toxic seeds, and from this she had made a lethal liquor and had stored it in a little phial. And day by day, and night by night, she had smilingly played with this phial, thinking what might be done with it. At length she sent a spy to Merh—she had governance over certain of the lower orders, various worms and lizards. Her emissary took many months to reach the city and get back again, but it brought her news, and finally the witch put on a disguise (she had several) and she went herself. Here she sought the house of a likely physician, a man who was corrupt and avaricious and served greedy Jornadesh into the bargain. And, entering the house in an abnormal fashion and arriving unexpectedly in the physician’s laboratory, she offered to sell him the phial.

  “Now why should I have an interest in such muck?” demanded the physician, trying to conceal his alarm at her supernatural entry.

  “Is there not someone in this city who is ambitious, someone who dreams of the throne of Merh?”

  The physician coughed. “Merh has already a queen.”

  “Yes, and she will soon be in her bed in travail with a child. And when the child is born and she is weak from her labor, she may call for drink.”

  The physician said: “Your chat is treason.”

  But after further discussion he said: “Why should this potion be superior to any I could mix myself?”

  “Because,” said Lylas, “it is possible to adapt the dose in order that death occur at the most convenient moment. More, the draught is painless, yet renders the victim both powerless to resist or to cry for help. And it will show no trace until some hours after the corpse is cold.”

  “I have only your word for that.”

  “You have my leave to experiment.”

  So a poor urchin was bundled into the house, forced to sample the brew, and presently expired at the predicted instant, painlessly, silently, and in despair, and without turning immediately blue.

  In exchange for the phial, Lylas received three pieces of gold. These she did not spend, having small need of coin, but kept them in a jar in her house. And sometimes, during the sixteen years since Narasen’s demise, Lylas would take out these three gold pieces and play with them, smiling.

  Now, however, she did not smile.

  “It is a lie,” she said. “Who told you such a falsehood?”

  “It is no lie,” said Simmu. “Be thankful vengeful Narasen did not hear it. Just now she came up from the Innerearth and slew all Merh in pique.”

  “Be thankful too,” said Azhrarn, “if your master does not hear. Uhlume loves to make bargains with mankind, and who will bargain with him any more if they learn he is not to be trusted, that no sooner is a soul promised him than he permits his agents to slay the flesh and send the soul below before its time?”

  Then Lylas went paler than ever. She had been very stupid, in the way only someone purely clever and sly could be stupid, and now she perceived her stupidity. She fell on her face again and seized the feet of Simmu.

  “Beautiful youth, I will do penance, I will do whatever you wish. Set me a task—I will perform it. Chastise me, I will suffer it. But pray do not betray my foolishness to the Lord of Darkness, Uhlume.”

  Simmu glanced at Azhrarn for guidance, and into the brain of Simmu there flashed a last bit of knowledge casually tossed to him by the Prince of Demons. And Simmu said to the witch: “I will inform Uhlume of nothing, providing you will answer me a question.”

  “Anything,” said the witch. Her second stupidity.

  “Tell me what it was that you told Death, that he first agreed to make a bargain with you.”

  Simmu uttered this without thinking, at Azhrarn’s unspoken direction. But no sooner had the words left his mouth than his eyes widened, for he sensed their impact. The eyes of the witch also grew wide.

  “Ask me another thing,” said she, “for that may not be told.”

  “No other thing. I will have this.”

  “Lord of Lords—” began Lylas, turning to Azhrarn.

  But Azhrarn merely regarded her, and by his beneficent expression he somehow reminded her of the proximity of Uhlume’s kingdom to his own, and of how simple a matter it would be for one Lord of Darkness to communicate tidings to another.

  Lylas cursed aloud then. She cursed the pomegranate trees in the wild orchard for tempting her with their poison screaming to be utilized. She cursed the little phial, she cursed the physician and she cursed Jornadesh. She did not curse her own error, nor Simmu, seeing he had such a mighty guardian with him.

  It had taken the devious intellect of Azhrarn to guess that, despite her current role of Death’s servant, in the beginning, without some bargaining strength, she would not have approached the Lord Uhlume, nor would Uhlume have listened. It was plain, this witch had once discovered a weak point in the unbreakable armor of Lord Death. Weak enough that she had profited by it to become Death’s handmaiden, two hundred years old, and older, yet gifted by him with a method forever to extend her youth.

  Simmu, now fully aware of this, caught the witch about her elderly, fifteen-year-old throat.

  “Since you love Death so well, I will send you to him.”

  “No,” squealed Lylas, “I am not ready for that. I will answer.” But, as Simmu let her go, a canny glint went through her eyes; she meant to lie.

  However, Azhrarn said, “She has no need to answer. I have seen it.” For he had read the picture as easily in her mind when she thought of it, as if he had glanced into an open book.

  It has been mentioned before that at fourteen years of age Lylas, returning over the hills in the hour before dawn, had met Death beneath a gallows where three men dangled. It has also been mentioned that she and he talked there some while, but not the substance of their conversation. Here then, as follows.

  “Master,” said Lylas, “I kneel before you, for who does not understand you are greater than any king of the earth, greater even than the gods, and my heart quakes with dread.”

  Uhlume said, “Do you seek me?”
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  “No,” said Lylas, “for I am young and vital. Yet I will adore you for your beauty and your awesome majesty, and I will tremble since, standing before you, my life hangs by a thread.”

  “All lives hang so,” said Uhlume, Lord of Death.

  “Today they do,” said Lylas, “but one day, maybe, there will be found an antidote to dying. Alas then, incredible Lord, for your stern law is necessary and good. If mankind could live forever, and laugh—you will pardon me, it is not my hope—laugh at death—ah then, what a monster should humanity become. And you, King of Kings, what would become of you?”

  Perhaps the gods had made Death. Perhaps men had made him, the shadow of their terror thrown on a wall, a name that had taken on a shape. How long had he existed? Long enough to come, in however strange and opaque a manner, to an awareness of himself. Or to an awareness of what himself must be. And, as he was capable of dispassionate tears, as he was capable of emotionless grief, now he unfeelingly felt the pangs of a hollow disquiet. Not at the notion of life, for life was susceptible to him . . . but at the notion of a life which was no longer susceptible, life which could negate death. For even Death did not wish to die.

  This, or enough of this, Lylas understood.

  She went on in a low and husky voice, full of her fear, her admiration and her cunning.

  “The wise and the wicked have tutored me, and I have heard tell of many things. Perhaps I have been misled and you will correct me. They say that in the land of the gods, in Upperearth, there is a well in which is stored the water of Immortality. No mortal can reach the spot, and if he should, this well is moreover excellently guarded. However, or so my tutors told me (and possibly they were wrong), there is a legend of another well, a well which lies somewhere on the earth itself. And the position of this second well corresponds exactly to the position of the Well of Immortality in the country of the gods, one being situated directly beneath the other. Now, my Lord, no human knows the location of either well, neither the well of Upperearth nor its sister on the earth. Indeed, this earth well holds only water. Yet my tutors said this: The one well lying below the other is no accident. That maybe it is a game of the gods, that someday the shaft of the Well of Immortality will crack—for it is reputedly constructed of glass—and then a few drops of the elixir of Everlasting Life will fall from Upperearth to earth and straight into this lower well, which has been placed so precisely to receive them. What a calamity, my Lord, if at that hour some human stumbled on the earth well, and learned its secret. For this one has no guardian. Or so they say.”

  Death gave no outward sign he was affected. But he said:

  “And why do you impart this story to me?”

  “Because, my master, being a Lord of Darkness, you will know the site of the well of Upperearth—and thus can discover the site of the second well below it in the earth. And this being as it is, you should post your own guardians at the second well, against the day when the drops of Immortality may fall. Or, if that is irksome, make me your laborer, and I will see to it. Though I am small and young, yet I am intelligent. All my art shall be at your disposal.”

  “And you,” said Uhlume, “being entrusted with this secret, will you not use it in the service of men?”

  The witch, for all her sharpness and her rough life, was yet fourteen. Men had used her, and she them. But here was one who was more than man, more beautiful and more awful than any man could ever be. She had a need for an ideal, and this dark and terrifying ideal appealed to her youth and her unnaturalness. So she lay down on the path before Death and told him she would serve him without question and in despite of mankind, and the honesty of her murky passion shone from her brain and her heart and Death saw it and was sure of her. (Though he made her his hireling in other things besides, thus binding her, and gave her her own form of everlasting life that came from drinking ground bones in her wine—that she should not have a use for a draught of Immortality herself, if ever it did descend.) Maybe he was not that sure.

  As for the mysterious lower well, Death found the place, as he could find all places. Though he had never entered Upperearth, for in those days the gods did not die, yet he knew the area of the sacred well. Accordingly, the situation of the mortal one was not taxing to discover. Lylas he took there, furled in the white leaf of his cloak. She did not see the way, but the destination she beheld in detail, for he set her down there to do her work, and left her to do it. His person was too abstract and too alarming to go randomly among men and give them covenants; he needed an intermediary. Besides, such trade would not have been to his liking. Instead, he loaned his agent extra powers and permitted her familiarity with his name. Most of her subsequent reputation was begun in that land, so that after, wherever she chanced to dwell, word would get about—it is she who has converse with Death.

  She put on airs, the witch, but she arranged things. By spells and various conjurings, she subdued the people of the region, who were ignorant at the time and primitive. She left an order and a myth behind her, and she left the guardians she had suggested. It was a great palaver over a tiny slimy mossy hole in the ground, which was all the second well had turned out to be.

  Now, however, cowering with fright before Azhrarn in the House of the Blue Dog, conscious that the Demon had scooped the whole tale from her mind (none could ever have got it from her mouth), Lylas commenced wishing she had not hired herself to Lord Death beneath the gallows that far-off morning two hundred and eighteen years before.

  “Glamorous and magical Lord,” she wailed, “do not use this knowledge. I would have fared better if I had confessed my other fault to my master—how I helped poison Narasen. If he learned that, he would punish me. But to learn I have betrayed the definite existence of the second well—Oh, pity me!”

  But Azhrarn had somehow gone away between one of her panting breaths and another, and he had taken the youth with him.

  Lylas screamed, and beat her fists on the floor.

  Then at length she left off, got up and went to a table and opened an ebony box which stood there. Inside the box was a miniscule drum but not the drum of bone with which she called to Uhlume. This drum was of old red wood and the drum skin was the stretched hide of some red unidentified creature.

  The witch seated herself and, biting her lip in her terror, she began to beat and tap on this drum with her seven-fingered hands.

  • • •

  Azhrarn could locate the secret second well quite without trouble, for he too comprehended the position of the first. But he did not take Simmu any farther than a hilltop, and here, under the white rain of the stars, Azhrarn told him what was necessary, and then bade the youth farewell.

  Simmu smiled, a human smile with no pleasure in it.

  “Now I am absolutely a mortal, you will leave me. But what am I to be to myself if I am nothing in your sight?”

  “A hero,” said Azhrarn, “the creator of confusion and upheaval.”

  “Yes,” said Simmu. For an instant his green eyes glittered and the Eshva gleam of black mischief was in them. “And Death’s death I will bring to him. Even though, my Lord, I do not see the way, unless the cistern of Upperearth should crack, and how is that to be?”

  With scornful affection, Azhrarn said:

  “Mortals possess destinies. You will find a way, for it is your destiny to do so.”

  Simmu gazed at him. His eyes once more were bleak.

  “You have the look of another,” said Azhrarn.

  “Who?”

  “One named Zhirem.”

  “Who is that?”

  Azhrarn drew through his fingers the long hair of Simmu, and he said, “You called to him when you were afraid.”

  “No,” said Simmu, “or if I did, I do not remember it, or him.”

  “Like demonkind, you forget,” said Azhrarn.

  “And I shall be forgotten,” said Simmu in the plaintive voice of a wo
man, for under the caressive touch of Azhrarn, she had changed herself. “One day I shall call your name, O Lord of my life, and you will never hear me, or care to.”

  “I will hear,” said Azhrarn, “and if you burn this green jewel at your throat once more in a fire, I will answer. Let that be a token between us.”

  Then Azhrarn kissed her on the mouth, and from that kiss everything that was Simmu, soul or flesh, seemed to catch alight. But in that same moment of ecstatic fire, the Demon vanished.

  Simmu—maiden, Eshva, anguished human man—was alone with his comfortless heroic task, on that starlit hillside of the world.

  Book Two

  Part One

  The Garden of the Golden Daughters

  1

  It is not recounted, the exact situation of that second well. But doubtless it lay somewhere toward the earth’s center, though far from the black and fiery volcanoes of that innermost region. The land of the well was neither fair nor prosperous, it was a desert through which one river took its way to a distant sea. And the life of the people of the land took place only along the two banks of this river. Here they farmed and fished and hunted the creatures of the river swamps. Out in the desert itself they did not often go, for they feared it, and wisely. There was no water to be had beyond the river, not for a thousand miles, or so they believed. No water, save in one spot. A day’s journey from the river a solitary group of mountains rose from the dunes. They were nine in number, and they formed a rough circle, inside which was a valley, as barren and dusty as the rest of the desert except at its middle. Here a sort of mossy pit opened, small mouthed but deep, and far down in it, barely visible, lurked a muddy glaucous water. This was the secret second well.

  Two hundred and eighteen years before Simmu’s arrival at the House of the Blue Dog, Uhlume had deposited his self-elected handmaiden in the land of the well. She was fourteen; she was intoxicated with her own wit and her success. She was accordingly extravagant.