Читать книгу The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ® - Darrell Schweitzer - Страница 7

THE STORY OF A DADAR

It was in the time of the death of the Goddess that the thing happened, when the Earth rolled wildly in the dark spaces without any hand to guide it, or so the poets tell us, when Dark Powers and Bright drifted across the land, and all things were in disorder.

It was also in the open grasslands that it happened, beyond the end of the forests, where you can walk for three days due south and come to the frontier of Randelcainé. All was strange to me. I had never been there before, where not a tree was to be seen, anymore than I had been to a place where there are no stars. All that afternoon, my wife Tamda and I drove our wagon through the familiar woods. Slowly the trees began to seem farther apart, and there was more underbrush. I remember how the heat of the day faded quite quickly, and the long, red rays of the setting sun filtered between the trunks, almost parallel to the ground, giving the undersides of the leaves a final burst of color before twilight came on. The trees ahead of us stood in silhouette like black pillars, those behind us, in glory. Above, little birds and winged lizards fluttered in the branches. I reflected that these things had always been thus, even in the earliest times, when the great cities of the Earth’s mightier days stood new and shining, and other gods and goddesses, the predecessors of the one which had just died, ruled the sky. Those ancients could just as well have been seeing this sunset and this forest through my eyes.

Then a wagon wheel sank axle-deep in mud, and I didn’t have time to reflect on anything. The two of us struggled and gasped in pained breaths that we weren’t young anymore. If only our son were still with us.… But he had gone away to serve the Religion. What is religion when your wheel is stuck?

When at last the wagon rolled free, stars peered down between the branches. The night air seemed very cold. We sat still, panting, until Tamda had the good sense to get our cloaks, lest the chill get into us.

So it was that we emerged from the forest in darkness. At first I was hardly aware that there were no more trees. It seemed merely that there were more stars, but then the moon came up and revealed the vast dark carpet of the plain rising and falling before us. Imagine a fish, which had always inhabited the dark and narrow crags among the rocks at the bottom of the sea, suddenly rising up, into the open wonder of the sea itself. So it was. Overhead the Autumn Hunter was high in the sky. The Polar Dragon turned behind us, and the Harpist was rising. By these signs we knew our way. Neither of us wanted to stop for the night. I suppose plainsmen feel the same way, their first night in the forest. So we pushed on and shortly before dawn reached our destination.

The village glowed on the plain like a beast with a thousand eyes, reclining there, alive with torches. We would never have found it otherwise. The houses were all curving humps of sod, hollowed out and walled with logs. Had they not been lit, we would have passed them in the night, thinking them little hills.

We were expected. Everyone was awake and waiting. A man in a plumed helmet took our horse by the bridle and led us to a building larger than all the others.

“Are you Pandiphar Nen?” asked the chieftain who stood at the door.

“Yes. You sent for me,” I said. “You understand, then, that I do not heal broken bones, or cure any sickness which can be cured with a herb or a little spell?”

“Yes, I do, or I would not have sent for you.”

“The price is high.”

“Please, bargain later. It is my daughter, sore afflicted. She has…left us. Her mind is in darkness, far underground.”

Tamda and I climbed down from the wagon seat. I got my bag out of the back. We were shown inside. The house had but one room, and a fire burned in the middle floor. The smoke hole wasn’t large enough, and the air was thick. On a pile of hides to one side a maiden lay, her eyes open, but her gaze distracted. She did not seem aware of us. She rolled her head and muttered to herself. I listened for a moment, catching a few words, but most of it was strange to me.

“Put the fire—out,” I said to those who had come in with us.

“And leave us alone.” This was done. I waited for the smoke to clear.

Then I made a mixture of the ground root of the death tree, the water of life, common flour to hold it all together, plus other ingredients, including something called Agda’s Toe. Agda was my master, to whom I had been apprenticed when I was fifteen, some thirty years before. Then I had believed he had an infinite supply of toes, which could be regrown whenever he cut them off and sold them to pharmacies all over the world, but of late I had had my doubts. He never took off his shoes in public.

I ate a spoonful of the mixture and washed it down with wine. I sang the song of the false death, with Tamda at my side to make sure that I did not truly die. She would hold my wrist and take my pulse, counting one heartbeat a minute, and listen for a shallow breath about as often. If I got into trouble she would shout my name and call me back. She alone had this power.

I departed. At once my awareness was out of my body, sharing that of the girl. I saw through her eyes. Tamda and I stood absolutely still, distorted out of shape, like tall sculptures of glowing jade. The room was full of a white mist, and in it swam things like the luminous skeletons of fishes, and some, like impossible herons made of coral sticks, walked on a surface below the floor, wading in the earth. They sang to me, trying to lull me into sleep within a sleep, but I paid them no heed. They were common spirits of the air. I had seen them many times before.

I turned inward. Indeed, the girl’s soul was far beneath the earth. I had a sensation of sinking a long way in thick, muddy darkness before I had an impression of a hunched shape, like something carven out of rough, dirty stone, embedded in her.

I began to draw the spirit out. Literally, I drew it. By a trick known only to healers, I was both deep inside the girl’s soul and in my own body. I was aware as my hands took up drawing paper and charcoal and began to sketch the image of the spirit. When I was a child I had always had an urge to draw things in the dirt, on walls, hides, scraps of paper, any thing, and my father always boxed my ears and told me not to waste my time. But when I began to draw things he had seen in his dreams, and things others saw in theirs, he understood my talent. Everything after that, even my apprenticeship to Agda, was a refinement of technique and nothing more.

I knew what to do from much experience. As my hand moved over the paper, I wrestled with the thing inside the girl. Soon I saw it more clearly, a frog-like king clad in robes of living marble. He had long, webbed claws like a beast, but his face bespoke vast intelligence and age. I understood him to be a creature from some earlier age of the Earth, trying to return now that the Goddess was dead. His eyes seemed to speak to me, saying, “Why should I not have this girl, and walk beneath the sky again?”

“You shall not have her,” I said in the language of the dream, and as I spoke, my hand completed the drawing. Then my body got to its feet, stood over the girl, and with a pair of tongs reached into her mouth, pulling out first my spirit, then the other. It was like flying up out of a mountain through a little hole in the top, into my own hand.

“Pandiphar Nen,” said my wife, and with the sound I came into myself. I was whole and fully awake. The white mist and the things in it were gone. The task should have been over. The second spirit I’d extracted should have melted into the air now that I had captured its image.

But the stone king was standing before us. Tamda screamed. It turned to stare into my eyes, and its gaze caught me as surely as any prey is ever charmed by a snake. I was helpless.

“Dadar,” it said. “Know that I was placed here to bring this message to you from worlds beyond the world. I am sent by your creator. Know that you are a dadar, a wizard’s shadow and not a man, a hollow thing like a serpent’s skin filled with wind, pretending to be a serpent, deluding itself. The master shall make himself known shortly, and then you shall be sent on the task for which he made you, his dadar.”

Then, howling, the creature went through the closed door of the house like a battering ram, scattering wood and screaming at the villagers outside.

I was in a daze, only half aware of anything.

“Let us get away from here,” Tamda was saying. “They’ll think we’re witches. Hurry, before they regain their courage. Forget about the payment.”

“I don’t understand,” was all I could say. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”

She gathered our things and bundled me into the back of the wagon. No one interfered as she drove away from the village.

* * * *

The wagon rattled around me. Sunlight burned through the canvas cover. I lay in the stuffy heat, thinking.

The problem, and the reason I felt so much dread, was that I did understand what had happened. My spotty education was more than enough to include everything I needed to know. Some wizard had directed me, his dadar, into that village for his own ends. I knew full well what a dadar was. The world has never been thick with them, but they have been around since the very beginning. They are projections, like a shadow cast by a man standing before a campfire at night, but somehow the shadow is given flesh and breath and a semblance of consciousness. Hamdo, the First Man, made one. He had shaped with his hands the egg from which all mankind was to be born, but while he slept by the River of Life, a toad came along and swallowed it. Then a serpent swallowed the toad and a fox swallowed the serpent, and was in turn devoured by a lion, which fell prey to a bull, which was eaten by a dragon, which in turn was swallowed by an Earth Thing for which there is no name, which before long found itself residing in the belly of a Sky Thing which remained similarly nameless. Therefore Hamdo climbed the mountain on which the sky turns, charmed the Sky Thing to sleep with his singing—for he was the greatest of all singers—and then, on the mountaintop, he made a dadar of himself, and put a feather in one of its hands and a burning torch in the other. He sent it inside the Sky Thing to make it regurgitate the Earth Thing, the dragon, the bull, the lion, and so forth. From inside the toad it cut itself free, rescuing the egg. Things were different in those days, I suspect. Animals don’t eat like that now. But the dadar was still a dadar, a reflection in the mirror of Hamdo.

More recently, the philosopher Telechronos spent so much time brooding among the ruins of the Old Places that he nearly went mad. He made a dadar for company. It became his leading disciple.

And a king of the Heshites was found to be a dadar. The priests gathered to break the link between the dadar and its master, lest some unseen, malevolent wizard lead the country to doom. The link was broken and the king crumbled into dust. A dadar is an unstable, insubstantial thing, like a collection of dust motes blown into shape by the wind.

Thus I feared every sound, every movement, every change in the direction of the wind, lest these be enough to unmake me. All the confidence I had gained in the years of my life ran away like water. I was nothing. An illusion, even to myself. A speck of dust drifting between the years.

I wept like a child abandoned in the cold and the dark.

And I argued: Can an illusion weep? Can its tears make a blanket wet? But then, how could I, with the senses of a dadar, know the blanket to be real, or the wagon, or the tears?

I looked up front and saw only the horse nodding as it walked, and Tamda huddled at the reins. I did not speak to her, nor did she turn to speak to me. I think she was nearly as afraid as was I.

And I argued: But I have sired two sons. Two? One died when the cold of winter settled into him and spring did not drive it forth, but even in death he was real. He did not vanish like a burst bubble. And the other—he lives yet. Just this year he was called by a voice within him to journey south to the holy city of Ai Hanlo. I walked with him a long way, then wept when he passed from sight around a bend in the forest path. Does this not make me a man?

I was back to weeping. All roads of thought seemed to lead there.

I looked up again and saw that the sky was beginning to darken.

“Stop,” I said to Tamda, and she reined the horse. She was trembling as we made camp. We went through the motions of settling down to supper, but suddenly she was in my arms and sobbing.

“Please…don’t go away. Don’t leave me. I’m too old to learn to be without you.”

I was sobbing too. “I love you. Does that not make me a man? How can I prove it? Can a shadow feel such a thing?”

“I don’t know. What is going on? Are we both mad?”

“No, it isn’t that. I’m sure.”

“I wish it were. To be mad is to be filled with passion, and at least that’s real.”

Although both of us were tired and hungry, we made love there on the ground as the stars came out. But even as I did I was haunted by the thought that a shadow may make a shadow’s love and know nothing better.

Later, it was Tamda who put into words what I was groping for. She gave me a plan for action.

“You must find this wizard whose dadar you are,” she said, “and kill him. Then you’ll be free. You won’t fade away. I’m sure of it. We must go to him when he summons you.” She took a sheathed knife and put it inside my shirt. “When the time comes, surprise him.”

Then I got up and fetched my folio of drawing paper. I sat down beside her and paged through the book. I stopped to stare at the image of the frog king. I couldn’t help but admire the artistry. It was good work. When I wasn’t practicing my more esoteric skill, I simply drew. Sometimes I sold the pictures in towns we passed through. Sometimes I even sold the ones I’d made while healing, after the spirits were dispersed and we didn’t need them anymore.

I began to draw. I closed my eyes and let my hand drift. It didn’t seem to want to make any marks. I felt my hand slide along the page, the charcoal only touching paper seven—eight?—nine times?

Then I opened my eyes and saw that I’d made a fair outline of the Autumn Hunter, which vanishes from the southern sky as the year ends.

“We travel south,” I said.

* * * *

When first I looked over the plain by day, I thought of the fish from the deep ocean crags—now bursting out of the water altogether, into the air. As far as I could see, green and brown grasses rippled beneath the sun. Here and there stood a scrubby tree. A herd of antelopes grazed far away. Once we passed quite near to a green-scaled thing walking upright on thin legs, fluttering useless wings in annoyance at our presence. It stood twice as tall as a man, but looked harmless, even comical. I had heard of such creatures, half-shaped, still forming. They are said to emerge whenever one age ends and another begins. I had heard they were commoner in the south, as if the strangeness radiated from the holy city of Ai Hanlo, where the actual bones of the Goddess lay.

The journey was comforting. I relished every new experience more than I had any since I was a boy. But then the melancholy thought arose that it was only because I was about to lose these things, all sensations, all perception, even my very self, that they seemed more rare and exquisite.

Tamda slept in the back of the wagon while I drove. Horses are supposed to be able to detect supernatural creatures pretending to be men, but ours behaved normally for me.

The plain was divided by a winding silver line, which I knew to be the Endless River. It was said to engirdle the world. My son said he would follow it on the way to the holy city. I stopped by the bank to water the horse and to bathe. Tamda awoke and prepared a soup with river water. Later, I took up pen and paper and began to draw.

She watched me intently.

“Is it a message from our enemy?”

It wasn’t. A bird bobbing on a reed had caught my fancy, and I made a picture of it. It was a charming little sketch, the sort some rich lady would pay well for.

Later, in a town called Toradesh, by a bend in the river, a man came to us, begging that we rid his father of the spirit which possessed him. There were many people around, and I could not refuse. Tamda and I were shown into a basement room, where an old man was kept tied to a bed. His eyes were wide with his madness. He did not blink. There was foam at the corners of his mouth. He stank of filth.

The picture I drew was of a long flight of stairs, winding down into the darkness. Once I had departed from my body, I was on those sodden, wooden stairs, descending into a region of dampness and decay. At the bottom I waded knee-deep in mud until I came to a slime-covered door. I pulled on an iron ring to open it, but the wood was so soft that the metal came away in my hand. I kicked the hole thus begun until it was big enough for me to wriggle through.

On the other side something massive and hunched over, dark with glowing eyes, sat nearly buried in the muck.

“Begone!” I said. “I command you, leave this place. Be vomited up and leave this man.”

The thing turned to me and laughed. Its voice was that of a child, but hideous, as if the child had never grown up, but lost all innocence and wallowed in cruelty for a thousand years.

“Gladly would I leave, dadar, for the soul of this man is rotten and there is not much left of it. But you have no soul, so where would I go?”

“If I have no soul, what is this standing before you?”

“It is the dadar of a dadar, the image of an image, the rippling of water made by another wave. Dadar, Etash Wesa made you, and sends you as a present to his brother, Emdo Wesa. There is enmity between them, which you shall consummate. More than that you need not know. Your actions are his, your thoughts his. From now on, he shall guide you.”

In the blinking of an eye I was back in the basement room, and the old man was mad as ever. Tamda let out a startled cry. She had not called me. The townspeople scowled and muttered something about “theatrical fake.” Tamda tried to calm them. We had failed, she told them, and thus would demand no payment. We left the town at once. It may have only been the subtle and remote workings of Etash Wesa, directing my fate, which prevented us from being smeared with dung and driven out with rods. Someone mentioned that as the traditional punishment for frauds.

* * * *

I was drifting. Sometimes in a dream I would see a hill or a bend in the road or men poling a raft along the river. Sometimes I would draw pictures of these things or awaken to find that I had drawn them. Especially in these cases, when the image was firmly in my mind, I could be sure that sooner or later I would behold those things while waking. I drove the wagon when I could, letting instinct which I knew to be the instructions of my maker be my guide.

I didn’t have any doubt now that I truly was a dadar, a thing like dust carried in the wind. I was going to confront Emdo Wesa. Then what? Would some other secret of my nature be revealed?

Once I fancied that in the presence of Emdo Wesa I would explode into flame, consuming both of us. For this purpose alone I had been created. The rest was random happenstance.

Tamda said little as the miles went by. She knew she was losing me. Sometimes when she did speak she mentioned things I could not recall at all, as if I were slipping away from myself, becoming two, real and unreal, a reflection again reflected.

* * * *

I awoke in the middle of the day, the reins at my feet. The horse had wandered to the side of the road to graze, pulling the wagon askew. How had I gotten there? I didn’t remember any morning. Last I remembered, we were travelling nearly into the sunset. Tamda was asleep in the back.

I had a vision of a man in an iridescent robe, bent over a steaming pot. I could not see his face. His back was toward me. He was missing the last three fingers of his right hand. With thumb and forefinger only he reached into the pot, immersing his arm all the way to the shoulder—and yet the pot wasn’t a third that deep—and as he did there was a scratching inside my chest, as if a huge spider within me began to stir. I gagged. It was coming up my throat, into my mouth.

Then it retreated back inside me and there was a sudden, intense pain. It had wrapped its legs around my heart, and was squeezing, until blood rushed to my temples and my head and chest were about to—

* * * *

I awoke with a scream. A flock of startled birds rose all around me, wheeling in the twilight of early dawn.

I was sitting by a campfire in the middle of the grassland. There was no sign of Tamda or the wagon.

Flames crackled. There was no other sound except that of the birds. I let out a grunt of surprise.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you know where you are?”

I looked up, regarding the speaker, saying nothing. He stood opposite me, a spear with a rabbit impaled on it in his gloved hands. He had a long beard, brown hair streaked with grey, and he wore a long robe alternately striped blue and red. For an instant I feared he was the man from my vision, but by the way his hands worked, spitting the rabbit over the fire, I was sure he had all his fingers. I guessed him to be slightly younger than myself, and by his speech, a foreigner. He seemed to take my presence for granted, as if we had met before this instant. Carefully, trying not to reveal the gaps in my memory, I got him to tell me what I wanted to know.

“You may have heard of my country,” he said. “Here in the north the people say the air is so thick in Zabortash that men carry it around in buckets, into which they dunk their heads when they want to breathe. They blame our foul dispositions on this. But these things are slanderous lies. Am I not a man, like any other?” He smiled when he spoke, and I felt sure he was deliberately mocking me. This was a new terror, but I forced myself to remain calm. I allowed that he seemed a man, like any other.

“Now you, on the other hand,” he went on, “seem strange. Last night when you came upon my humble camp, you were like one walking in his sleep. ‘Who are you?’ you asked, and I said ‘I am Kabor Asha,’ but a few minutes later you asked again, and again I answered, and it seemed that your mind wandered even farther than your body did. Most strange.”

He offered me some of the rabbit. When we were done eating, he noticed that I was watching him as he wiped his gloves clean, without removing them.

“You are wondering why I don’t take them off and wash them, of course. I can’t, you see, because I am not alone. In my country no magician bares his hands in public. It’s obscene.”

“You are…a magician?”

“That’s another rumor they have here in the north, that everyone in Zabortash is a magician. It’s not true, but they are so numerous that there is no work for many. That is why I wander, you see, to practice my art.”

And again I wondered if he were mocking me, but I made no sign. An idea came to me. Another magician could help me against my enemy. At the very least, it would complicate Etash Wesa’s plans. So words poured out of me in a torrent. I was well into my story before I realized what I was doing. Then there was nothing to do but finish. I told him all.

“I know of Emdo Wesa,” he said when I had finished. “I can take you to him. Then the whole unpleasant business will be over and you’ll be free.”

“Wait! What business? What am I supposed to do? Who are you? How do you know—?”

Before I could do anything he stood over me. He had opened his robe. Beneath he wore some sort of armor. The scales glittered blue and black, close against his skin. I had a sudden fear that it wasn’t armor at all, that he was some kind of reptile—

The cloak closed over me, covering my head as he knelt to embrace me, hugging me to his chest.

His flesh was cold and hard as iron. I couldn’t feel any heart beating.

“Help! Wait! Where is my wife? What have you done—?”

“You didn’t tell me you had a wife,” he said as he pushed me over backwards and tumbled onto me.

The ground did not catch us. We were falling off a precipice, tumbling over and over in the air, the wind roaring by us, for a long time. I screamed and struggled, and then all the strength went out of me and I hung limp. He straightened out from our hunched position and stopped somersaulting. I could see nothing but darkness beneath his cloak, but somehow I had the impression that he bore me in his arms like a bird of prey carrying off a fish.

The fish, from out of the crag, wandering into the wide ocean, bursting into the air, snatched away by a sea hawk—

—falling among faint lights, false images behind my eyelids, but then stars, as pure and clear as any seen by night over the open plain, as if Kabor Asha had all the universe inside him.

We stopped falling without any impact or even a cessation of motion. My vertigo simply faded slowly away, and after a time I felt solid ground beneath my feet.

He took his robe off me, and I saw that we stood on a little hill before a vast city which rose up tier upon tier, like something carven out of a mountain. Every stone, every wall, every rooftop of it was of dull black stone, and it stood silent and empty against a steel grey sky. As far as I could see the ground was bare and dusty grey. Every color, every trace of life seemed drained out of this place.

“Behold the holy city of Ai Hanlo,” said my guide and captor, “where lie the bones of the Goddess. But this is not the Ai Hanlo to which pilgrims flock, where the Guardian rules over half a million citizens. No, this is one of the shadows of the city, in a world of shadows. Where the bones of the Goddess lie all magic intersects, all powers are centered. All shadows come together here, branching out into separate worlds. Thus, in a sense, all practitioners of deepest magic, not that petty and shallow stuff you yourself use, the sort you can see on any street corner in Zabortash, but the deepest, most secret magic, which partakes of the inner nature of things; all who know this and immerse themselves into it—all these dwell in Ai Hanlo, alone, in some shadow or other, where ordinary men cannot follow. In this particular shadow Emdo Wesa dwells. You must go to him.”

I looked up at the city in dread. It was no city, but some monster, waiting to devour me in the labyrinths of its mouth, to dissolve me utterly.

Dadar though I was, if I had any will, I would resist.

I ran down the hill, away from the city, away from the one who called himself Kabor Asha.

“Stop! Fool!”

The spider in my chest scurried to my heart and squeezed and sank its fangs deep. I screamed once, but the sound broke into gurgling, and the pain filled me.

The next thing I knew the Zaborman was helping me to my feet. I was numb and weak. I could not fight him.

“Don’t try to run away,” he said. “Listen to me. I can still help you. I can be your friend.”

“Who are you really? You didn’t find me just by chance.”

“No, I did not. Let me merely say that I am one who wants to see you complete your mission and go free. I want to help you do what Etash Wesa has sent you to do, and get it over with.”

“You seem to know what I must do.”

“Yes, I do. It is quite simple. You will find Emdo sleeping. Reach beneath his pillow and take out the jeweled dagger you find there. With it, cut his throat from ear to ear.”

“Why should I murder a man I do not know, with whom I have no quarrel?”

“Because you were created for that very reason. Be comforted. You have no more guilt in this than does the dagger.”

“That’s very comforting,” I said bitterly. “What happens to me afterwards?”

“In all honesty, I do not know. You could go on for a while, the way ripples do in a pool, even after the stone that made them comes to rest on the bottom. If so, take that as reward for services rendered.”

So, filled with helpless dread, like a victim led to slaughter, even though I was supposed to do the slaughtering, I let him guide me through the dark gate of this shadow Ai Hanlo, through the wide squares, up streets so steep that steps were cut in them, below gaping empty windows, to that gate beyond which, in the real city, no common man was allowed to go. But no guards stopped us, and we entered the inner city, the vast complex containing the palace of the Guardian and—in all the shadows too?—the bones of the Goddess resting in holy splendor. All the while the air was still and dry, not warm, not cold, giving no sensation at all. There was an overwhelming odor of must, like that of a tomb which had not been opened for a dozen centuries. We came to the topmost part of the palace, the very summit of the mountain, to a great chamber beneath a black dome. In the true city the dome was golden, and was said to glow with the sunset hours after the rest of the world was dark.

In that vast, empty room, by the faint light of the grey sky coming in through a skylight, I could make out two mosaics on the floor, one of a lady dressed in black, with stars in her hair, and another, of the lady’s twin, in flowing white, with a tree in one hand and the blazing sun in the other. The Goddess, in her bright and dark aspects, as she was before she fell from the heavens and shattered into a million pieces, which we know as the Powers.

Where the feet of the two images came together, there was a dais, and on it a throne. A man sat there asleep, his head on an armrest. I had expected him in a bed, the pillow beneath his head. But, no, he was sitting on it.

We crept closer, climbing the few steps until we stood by the throne. We stood over the sleeping man. He was very thin. I could not make out his features.

“Take the dagger, and do what you must,” said Kabor Asha, and as he spoke he stepped down from the dais. “Do it!” he whispered to me. “Hurry! Fear not; it is a magic weapon, the only one which can pierce him. Now carefully draw it out.”

The hilt was sticking out from beneath the pillow. Delicately, I took hold of it and inched it away. The task was easier than I had expected. The thing slid out of a scabbard, which remained beneath the pillow. Once I froze in abject terror as my victim’s eyelids fluttered, but he did not wake.

“Do what you must!”

I felt as if I were about to slay myself, as if the first prick of the blade would burst me like a bubble. But then I told myself, well, I had been created for this. What years I had lived, I had lived. What man can avoid his appointed doom? My life is done, I thought. There are more painful ways to die than merely winking out of existence.

I took the sleeping man firmly by the hair, and quickly, savagely, before he could react, I slashed his throat so deeply that I felt the blade touch his neck bone.

I winced, and braced myself for oblivion, but nothing happened.

Nothing.

There was no blood from the open throat. Only a little dust dribbled from the wound, and the body deflated, like a punctured waterbag, until it was no more than a crumpled mass.

The one who had brought me here ascended the dais again.

“What does this mean?” I asked. “Why doesn’t he die like a man?”

“I can explain. Give me the knife.” Without thinking, I gave it to him.

He slammed it hilt-deep into my heart. There was—

—I—

—the beginning of pain; a scream, my knees like running sand—

—stood still. He held me up, impaled on the blade, frozen forever in an impossible dance of death.

“Dadar,” he said. “I can explain. He does not die like a man because he is not a man. He is a thing like a dadar, like you. A reflection of a reflection. You have killed one of your own number. Dadar, it should be all clear to you when you understand that I am Emdo Wesa, the one my brother sent you to murder.”

* * * *

Hearing came first. Footsteps. The sound of a small metal instrument being dropped into a glass jar. Breathing. Slowly, images coalesced out of the air. Bright areas became torches set in a wall. A drifting smear became a more unified shape, and wore the face of Emdo Wesa, whom I had known as Kabor Asha the Zaborman.

Was he with me, even beyond death?

I shook my head to clear it, and was aware of my body. I was bound spread-eagled to a table, and was stripped to the waist. Emdo Wesa, holding a sharp knife, bent over me. Impossibly, because I felt no pain, there was an immense gaping hole in my chest. I felt sure he could have ducked his head into it. And yet, I was numb, and blood did not spurt out. I watched almost with disinterest, as if all were part of a remote pageant performed by spirits in some other plane of existence. In the shadows.

“You know,” laughed the wizard, seeing that I was awake, “you could say it was obvious from the beginning that my brother had a hand in this.”

He put down the knife and reached into the cavity. His gloves were off and I could see that he indeed lacked three fingers. In their place light flickered.

He drew out a severed hand, totally covered with blood. From out of my chest. He took a ring off one of the fingers, then threw the hand away like so much garbage.

“Yes,” he said, examining the ring. “It is my brother’s hand. His last one. He used the other to make another dadar. How long ago was that? I don’t remember. Oh, I should tell you something. To make a dadar, the wizard must cut off a piece of his living flesh. You have to amputate something. Dadars are not made frivolously. So far I have had but three enemies I could not otherwise deal with, and each cost me a finger to make a dadar. But my brother, I believe, is more quarrelsome. He has lots of enemies. He has changed himself hideously. I won’t tell you the cause of our feud, because it would go on an on, and I don’t care to spend that much time doing so, but I will say this. The world, all the worlds, would be better off without him. He is a monster.”

“M—monster …”

Emdo Wesa smiled and said softly. “Don’t strain yourself, my friend. Don’t try to speak.”

“Who…? Friend…?”

“Now you have a good mind, for a dadar. I must compliment my brother on his workmanship. Or you shall, when you see him. You are so full of questions. Let me set your mind at rest and answer a few. First, know that sorcery changes the sorcerer. Every act makes him a little less a part of the human world. It has to be done with moderation. Otherwise, like my brother, one will drift like an anchorless ship, far, far into strangeness. He has. I don’t think his mind works at all like a human one anymore. But he is still clever. Why did he create you, and let you live unsuspecting for forty-five years before using you? It is because I have long journeyed outside of time, and forty-five years in this world has no duration outside. When I looked back into time, to see how things were going, at a point years ahead of where I departed, I saw you killing me in my sleep. It was no illusion, but a true thing. So I had to arrange for another to die in my place. That was what I had seen. Then I was able to come back some days before the event, encounter you, and make sure things occurred as planned. Thus my brother was thwarted.”

Fear, nausea, and delirium washed over me. I felt like I would vomit out my insides, but nothing came. I screamed my wife’s name.

“Tamda is not with you anymore,” said Emdo Wesa. “It is useless to call her.”

He reached somewhere beyond the range of vision and came back with a still beating heart in his hands.

“No…Tamda! You—monster!”

“Calm yourself. Calm yourself. I didn’t say where I got this. It is for you, that you might live.” He placed it in my chest. “You don’t think I…no, how could you? I am not some inhuman fiend like my brother. I am a man, like anyone else. I am human. I have feelings. I can perceive beauty, know sorrow and joy. I haven’t lost that. I am moved by compassion. I know what love is, even the love of a dadar.”

His breath came out like smoke. By the light of the torches I could see that what I had taken to be tight-fitting scale armor was really his flesh. His three ghostly fingers flickered as he sewed up the wound.

I screamed again.

He walked along the table, toward my face, the knife in hand once more.

* * * *

I thought that my being on the hill outside the shadow city, with Emdo Wesa beside me, was all a dream, something conjured by my desperate mind in my last moments of life. But the scene had duration, and I felt hard ground beneath me, and I touched my body and found that it was real. I groped under my shirt and encountered a tender spot, where the wound had been closed and still had a thread holding it. Much to my surprise I also encountered the dagger my wife had given me. Obviously my new master had nothing to fear from ordinary blades.

One side of my face tingled. There was something subtly wrong with my vision, as if one eye perceived things more intensely than did the other.

I looked at Emdo Wesa. He had a bandage over one side of his face, covering an eye.

Again I was a dadar.

“I am returning you to my brother,” he said. “I shall see everything you see and do. When the time comes, I shall direct you. When your task is completed, I promise you, I shall release you.”

“How can I ever believe that?”

“Why, you have my word, as a human being.”

* * * *

There is another gap in my memory here. I made to answer, when I looked up I saw a clear, blue sky. Surf crashed nearby, the air was filled with spray. I was no longer in the shadow, but on a beach somewhere in the real world, on a bright, day, and the wizard was no longer with me.

I had come to the ocean. I had looked upon lakes before, and but never the ocean. I had only heard of it, from those who had travelled far. Water stretched to the horizon, a vast array of whitecapped waves marching toward me like the ranks of endless army, only to break into foam at my feet. The wonder of it almost overcame the terror of what had gone before. For this, it was almost worth what I had endured. Perhaps, I thought, I had gone mad, and had imagined all that had gone before in my madness, and in my distracted state wandered over the world until at last I came to the shore of the sea. That was how I had come here.

But then I saw that there were no footsteps in the sand. I walked forward a step, and then there was a single set. I was not wet, so I had not come out of the waves, to have my tracks washed away behind me. No, I had been deposited here, out of the air.

When I pulled up my shirt, I saw the closed wound on my chest, red and swollen, the end of the black thread sticking out of it. It hurt when I breathed deeply.

Everything was true. I could not weep. All the salt water in creation was before me, so what would my tears amount to? Besides, I had expended them all before.

Anyway, a dadar is not a man, and his tears are all illusions.

I prayed to the bones of the Goddess, wherever they might be, and I called on the Bright Powers, repeating the names of them that I knew. But what are the prayers of a dadar?

Then I knelt down and began to draw in the wet sand. My hand moved by itself. Only when I realized what I was doing did I take out my dagger and use it as a stylus.

* * * *

I made a crude outline. It was only a suggestion of a shape, and there were no colors to it, of course, but somehow this act set my senses spreading like smoke over the land and sea. I felt every wave in its rising, every grain of sand pressing against the rest, here concealing a shell, there a stone. I felt the chill of the great depths and the crushing currents beyond the reach of the sun. I heard the long and ancient song of the whales, a fragment of that single, endless poem which the leviathans have called out to one another since the beginning of the world. I seemed to pass out of my body for a while. There was no sensation. Then came a vague sense of direction, as if I were being led by invisible hands to the edge of an abyss.

I became aware of the drawing again. It had grown far more elaborate. My gaze drifted from it to the sky, and I saw that the sky was no longer blue, but a vivid, burning red, and I looked out over the ocean, which was now an ocean of blood, new and thick and spurting from some torn artery as huge as creation.

An object broke the surface near the horizon. It was little more than a speck, but it grew larger as it neared me, moving like a ship even though it had no sail or oarsmen to propel it. It was a rectangular box, rising and falling in the waves of blood, drawing ever nearer the shore, until I could discern quite clearly that it was a coffin of intricate and antique workmanship, embossed in gold and covered with strange hieroglyphs.

My will was not my own. Of its own volition my body rose and waded into the sea, till blood rose above my waist. My mind wanted to flee, but remained there, helpless, until the coffin was within arm’s reach. Then it ceased to rise and fall; but remained perfectly still, oblivious to the movement of the waves around it.

I watched with the terror of inevitability, like some prey cornered by the hunter when there is no further place to run, as the lid silently rose. Within was darkness, not merely an absence of light, but a living, substantial thing.

And slowly this darkness faded, and my new eye penetrated it. I saw Etash Wesa, the enemy against whom I had been sent, the one who had remained on earth for so long, never venturing out of time, the one who had fought so many feuds with so many enemies.

Indeed, by the look of him, Etash Wesa had made many, many dadars. His almost shapeless pink bulk floated inside the coffin, awash in blood, slowly turning over. In the gouged-out bulk which had been a head, there was an opening—I couldn’t call it a mouth—which mewed and babbled and spat blood when it rose above the surface. One stubby remnant of an arm twitched like a useless flipper. And yet, this was no helpless thing. Somehow I knew it was almost infinitely aware and powerful, and that it had grown far, far away from the humanity that spawned it, until it no longer saw or felt as men did. I think it touched my mind and its presence was an intense, exquisite torture beyond the ability of words to describe or the mind to conceive. No one thought can encompass the mind of Etash Wesa.

In its twisted way, with something other than a voice, it seemed to be saying, “My dadar? Where is my dadar? I have been separated from it, and yet I shall find it.”

The greatest terror of all those I had known was that Etash Wesa would indeed find me. I could look on him no more. Somehow I could move again. Screaming, I stumbled onto the beach. I obliterated the drawing. I covered my eyes with my hands. I pounded my head to drive out the memory of what I had seen, but still the red sky looked down on me, the sea of blood washed at my feet, and the thing in the coffin murmured.

I picked up my knife out of the sand. If I lived not another instant it would be preferable to living in the sight of Etash Wesa. What did I care of my promised freedom? What did I care of strange wars between wizards? What did I care, even if the world would be better off rid of Etash Wesa?

I did what I had to. I gouged out the eye Emdo had given me. Had I burst like a bubble then, it would have been a blessed escape.

I heard Emdo’s voice for an instant: “No! Stop!” Then he was gone. The pain was real. The blood ran down my face. I gasped, fell onto the sand, and lay there, panting, bleeding, waiting for the end to come.

I waited for a long time. The sun set and the stars came out. The salt tide went out and came back in again, nudging seaweed against my feet.

The rest is a muddle, a fever dream within a dream within a dream. I think someone found me. I remember walking along a road for a time. There was a bandage over my empty socket. There were a few words, a song, a carriage wheel creaking and rustling through dry leaves. I think I lay for a day beneath the hot sun in the middle of a harvested field. A boy and several dogs came upon me, then ran away in fright when I sat up.

Somehow I came to Ai Hanlo, the real city, where the Guardian rules, where the bones of the Goddess lie in holy splendor at the core of Ai Hanlo Mountain. I remembered slowly—my mind was clouded, my thoughts like pale blossoms drifting to the surface—that my son was here, that he had come to serve the Religion. I went to the square of the mendicants, beneath the wall where the Guardian comes all draped in gold and silver to bless the crowds. I slept with the sick and the lame. Somebody stole my boots. So, barefoot, tattered, stinking, my face a running sore, I went to the gate of the inner city and demanded to see my son. But the soldiers laughed and sent me away. I begged, but they would not call for him.

But what is the begging of a dadar?

I prayed to whatever Forces or Powers there might be, to the remaining wisps of holiness that might linger over the bones of the Goddess, but what good are the prayers of a dadar?

What good? At the very end, when I sat in a doorway, very near to death, a gate opened and a procession of priests came out, and I saw a face I knew, and I pushed through the crowd with the last of my strength. I called my son’s name and he stopped, and recognized me, and wept at my wretchedness. He took me to his rooms and comforted me, and later I told him that above all else I wanted to rejoin Tamda, his mother, my beloved, if she would have me, knowing me to be a dadar, without a soul, an uncertain thing.

“But Father,” my son said, “consider what uncertain things all men are. What is a man, but a bubble in the foam, a speck of dust on the wind? Can any man know that his next breath will not be his last? Can he know how fortune will treat him, even tomorrow? What of the calamities that carry him off, or the diseases, or even that one, faint breath of damp midnight air which touches his old bones and makes an end to him? Then what? Do we walk a long road till at last we come to the paradise at the top of the world, there to hear forever the blessed music of the Singer? Or do we merely lie in the ground? You think these are strange words, coming from me? But the Goddess is dead, and the last remnants of her holiness quickly drain away. All things are uncertain. The world is uncertain. Will the sun rise tomorrow? Father, you are weeping. How can a mere projection, an empty thing like a skin filled with wind—how can such a thing weep? It may deceive itself, but not others. I see your tears. I know that you are more than a sudden, random, fleeting shape, as much as any man is. Yes, a man. If you were not always a man, I think you have become one over the years through your living and your love.”

Which brings me back to weeping.

When at last I was able to travel from Ai Hanlo, my son went with me. We followed the way Tamda’s wagon was said to have gone, asking after her in every town. She made a few coins singing, people said, or selling sketches or doing sleight of hand. She looked thin and worn, they said.

At last we found her at a crossroads. It had to be more than just chance. She leapt down from the wagon and ran to me. Again we all three wept.

Later she said to me, “We are always uncertain. If you fade away, so shall I, when we are old. It may be very sudden. How are you unlike any man in this? Stay with me. Let the days pass one at a time, and live them one at a time. You can love. How are you unlike any man in this?”

Which brings me back to weeping.