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

TO BECOME A SORCERER, by Darrell Schweitzer

Surely Surat-Kemad is the greatest of the gods, for he is lord of both the living and the dead. The Great River flows from his mouth; the River is the voice and word of Surat-Kemad, and all life arises from the River.

The dead return to Surat-Kemad, upon the waters or beneath them, borne by some secret current, back into the belly of the god.

We are reminded of Surat-Kemad daily, for he made the crocodile in his own image.

I, Sekenre, son of Vashtem the sorcerer, tell you this because it is true.

I

That my father was a magician I knew from earliest childhood. Did he not speak to the winds and the waters? I heard him do so many times, late at night. Could he not make fire leap out of his hands, merely by folding and unfolding them? Yes, and he never burned himself, for the fire was cold, like river water in the winter.

Once he opened his hands to reveal a brilliant, scarlet butterfly, made of paper and wire but alive. It flew around the house for a month. No one could catch it. I cried when it died and the light went out of its wings, leaving it no more than a trace of ash.

He made a different kind of magic with his stories. There was one in particular that went on and on, about a young heron who was cast out of his nest by the other birds because he had short legs, and no beak or feathers. He could pass for human, for all that he wasn’t. So he wandered in a lonely exile and had many adventures, in far lands, among the gods, among the ghosts in the land of the dead. Every evening for almost a year, Father whispered more of the story to me as if it were a special secret between the two of us. I never told it to anyone else.

Mother made things too, but not fire out of her hands, nor anything that truly lived. She built hevats, those assemblages of wood and wire and paper for which the City of the Reeds is famous, sometimes little figures that dangled from sticks and seemed to come alive when the wind struck them, sometimes great tangles of ships and cities and stars and mountains which hung from the ceiling and turned slowly in a vastly intricate, endless dance.

Then a fever came over her one summer and she spent weeks working on a single, articulated image. No one could stop her. Father would put her to bed but she would get up again in her sleep and work on the thing some more, until a vast snaky creature of painted wooden scales writhed throughout every room of the house, suspended on strings just below the ceiling. At last she put a face on it—half a man, half a crocodile—and even I, six years old at the time, knew it to be an image of Surat-Kemad, the God Who Devours.

When the wind blew, the image writhed and spoke. Mother screamed and fell to the floor. Later, the thing was merely gone. No one would tell me what had become of it. When Mother recovered she could not recall anything that had happened to her.

One evening by a late fire, she explained that it had been a kind of prophecy, and when the spirit has departed, the seer is no more than an empty glove cast aside by some god. She had no idea what it meant, merely that a god had spoken through her.

I think even Father was frightened when she said that.

He told me one more installment of the story of the heron boy the same night. Then the spirit of that, too, left him.

* * * *

Father must have been the greatest magician in all Reedland, for our house was never empty in the early days. People came from all over the city, and from the marshlands; some journeyed for days on the Great River to buy potions and philtres or have their fortunes told. Mother sometimes sold them hevats, sacred ones for devotions, or memorials for the dead, or just toys.

I didn’t think of myself as any different from other boys. One of my friends was the son of a fisherman, another of a paper-maker. I was the son of a magician, just another child.

But in the story, the bird-boy thought he was a heron—

As I grew older, Father became more secretive, and the customers came no further than the door. Bottles were passed out to them. Then they stopped coming.

Suddenly the house was empty. I heard strange noises in the night. In the earliest hours of the morning, Father began to receive certain visitors again. I think he summoned them against their will. They did not come to buy.

Then Mother, my sister Hamakina, and I were locked in the bedroom, forbidden to emerge.

Once I peeked out between two loose panels in the door and saw a bent, skeletal figure in the dim lamplight of the hallway outside, a visitor who stank like something long decayed and dripped with the water from the river below our house.

Suddenly the visitor glared directly at me as if he had known I was there all along, and I turned away with a stifled yelp. The memory of that horrible, sunken face stayed with me in my dreams for a long time.

I was ten. Hamakina was just three. Mother’s hair was starting to go gray. I think the darkness began that year. Slowly, inexorably, Father became, not a magician who worked wonders, but a sorcerer, to be feared.

* * * *

Our house stood at the very edge of the City of the Reeds, where the great marsh began. It was a vast place, which had belonged to a priest before Father bought it, a pile of wooden domes and sometimes tilted boxlike rooms and gaping windows fashioned to look like eyes. The house stood on log pilings at the end of a long wharf, otherwise not a part of the city at all. Walk along that wharf the other way and you came to street after street of old houses, some of them empty, then to the square of the fishmongers, then to the street of scribes and paper-makers, and finally to the great docks where the ships of the river rested at their moorings like dozing whales.

Beneath our house was a floating dock where I could sit and gaze underneath the city. The stilts and logs and pilings were like a forest stretched out before me, dark and endlessly mysterious.

Sometimes the other boys and I would paddle our shallow boats into that darkness, and on some forgotten dock or rubbish heap or sandbank we’d play our secret games; and then the others always wanted me to do magic.

If I could, I refused with great and mysterious dignity to divulge awesome mysteries I actually knew no more about than they. Sometimes I did a little trick of sleight-of-hand, but mostly I just disappointed them.

Still, they tolerated me, hoping I would reveal more, and also because they were afraid of Father. Later, when the darkness began, they feared him even more; and when I wandered in the gloom beneath the city, paddling among the endless wooden pillars in my little boat, I was alone.

I could not understand it then, but Father and Mother quarrelled more, until in the end, I think, she too was afraid of him. She made me swear once never to become like my father, “never, never do what he has done,” and I swore by the holy name of Surat-Kemad without really knowing what I was promising not to do.

Then one night when I was fourteen, I woke up suddenly and heard my mother screaming and my father’s angry shouts. His voice was shrill, distorted, barely human at times, and I thought he was cursing her in some language I did not know. Then came a crash, pottery and loose wood falling, and silence.

Hamakina sat up beside me in bed.

“Oh, Sekenre, what is it?”

“Quiet,” I said. “I don’t know.”

Then we heard heavy footsteps, and the bedroom door swung inward. Father stood in the doorway, his face pale, his eyes wide and strange, a lantern in his upraised hand. Hamakina turned to avoid his gaze.

He remained there for a minute as if he hadn’t seen us, and slowly the expression on his face softened. He seemed to be remembering something, as if he were waking up from a trance. Then he spoke, his voice faltering.

“Son, I’ve had a vision from the gods, but it is your vision, by which you will become a man and know what your life is to be.”

I was more bewildered than frightened. I got out of bed. The wooden floor was smooth and cold beneath my bare feet.

Father was forcing himself to be calm. He clung to the edge of the doorway and trembled. He was trying to say something more, but no words came, and his eyes were wide and wild again.

“Now?” I asked without realizing what I was saying.

Father strode forward. He seized me roughly by my robe. Hamakina whimpered, but he ignored her.

“The gods don’t send visions just when it’s convenient. Now. You must go into the marshes right now, and the vision will come to you. Remain there until dawn.”

He dragged me from the room. I glanced back once at my sister, but Father merely closed the door behind me and barred it from the outside, locking her in. He blew out his lantern.

The house was entirely dark and smelled of river mud and worse. There was a trace of something burning, and of corruption.

Father raised a trapdoor. Below floated the dock where all our boats were moored.

“Down you go. Now.”

I groped my way down, fearfully, shivering. It was early in the spring. The rains were nearly over, but not quite, and the air was cold and full of spray.

Father closed the trapdoor over my head.

I found my boat and got in, and sat there in the darkness cross-legged, my feet drawn up under my robe. Something splashed nearby once, twice. I sat very still, clutching my paddle firmly, ready to strike at I knew not what.

Slowly the darkness lessened. Out beyond the marshes, the moon peered through thinning clouds. The water gleamed silver and black, waves and shadow. And it was then that I made out what seemed to be hundreds of crocodiles drifting in the water around me, their snouts barely breaking the surface, their eyes sparkling in the dim moonlight.

It was all I could do not to scream, to keep silent. It was the beginning of my vision, I knew, for these beasts could easily have tipped over my boat and devoured me. In any case, there were too many of them for them to be natural creatures.

It was as I leaned over to slip off my mooring line that I saw, quite clearly, that they were not even crocodiles. Their bodies were human, their backs and buttocks as pale as the flesh of drowned men. These were the evatim, the messengers of the river god. No one ever saw them, I’d always been told, save when he is about to die, or else when the god wishes to speak.

So my father had been telling the truth. There was a vision. Or I was going to die, then and there.

I paddled a short distance off, very carefully. The evatim parted before me. The tip of my paddle never touched one.

Behind me, in the darkness, I heard someone coming down the ladder onto the dock. Then something heavy splashed in the water. The evatim hissed, all as one. It was like the rising of a great wind.

I paddled for what felt like hours among the posts and pillars and stilts, groping my way with my paddle sometimes, until at last I came to open, deep water. I let the current take me a short distance, and looked back at the City of the Reeds where it crouched amid the marsh like a huge, slumbering beast. Here and there watchlamps flickered, but the city was dark. No one goes outdoors in the city at night: because the mosquitoes swarm in clouds at sunset, thick as smoke; because the marsh is full of ghosts who rise up out of the black mud like mist; but mostly for fear of the evatim, the crocodile-headed servants of Surat-Kemad, who crawl out of the water in the darkness and walk like men through the empty streets, their heavy tails dragging.

Where the city reached into deep water, ships lay at anchor, bulging, ornately-painted vessels come upriver from the City of the Delta. Many were ablaze with lights, and from them sounded music and laughter. The foreign sailors do not know our ways or share our fears.

* * * *

In the City of the Reeds, all men who are not beggars wear trousers and leather shoes. Children wear loose robes and go barefoot. On the very few cold days they either wrap their feet in rags or stay indoors. When a boy becomes a man, his father gives him shoes. It is an ancient custom. No one knows the reason for it.

Father had hurried me out of the house without even a cloak. So I passed the night in quiet misery, my teeth chattering, my hands and feet numb, the cold air burning inside my chest.

As best I could, I steered for the shallows, in among the grasses and reeds, making my way from one patch of open water to the next, ducking low beneath vines, sometimes forcing my way through with my paddle.

A vision of sorts came to me, but all disjointed. I did not understand what the god was trying to say.

The moon seemed to set very suddenly. The river swallowed it, and for an instant moonlight writhed on the water like Mother’s thousand-jointed crocodile image somehow glowing with light.

I set my paddle down in the bottom of the boat and leaned over, trying to make out the thing’s face. But I only saw muddy water.

Around me, dead reeds towered like iron rods. I let the boat drift. I saw a crocodile once, huge and ancient and sluggish with the cold, drifting like a log. But it was merely a beast and not one of the evatim.

A bit later I sat in a stagnant pool surrounded by sleeping white ducks floating like puffs of cotton on the black water.

Night birds cried out, but I had no message from them.

I watched the stars, and by the turning of the heavens I knew it was no more than an hour before dawn. I despaired then and called out to Surat-Kemad to send me my vision. I did not doubt that it would come from him, not from some other god.

At the same time, I was afraid, for I had made no preparation, no sacrifice.

But Surat-Kemad, he of the monstrous jaws, was not angry, and the vision came.

The light rain had stopped, but the air was colder yet, and, trembling and damp, I huddled in the bottom of my boat, both hands against my chest, clutching my paddle. Perhaps I slept. But, very gingerly, someone touched me on the shoulder.

I sat up in alarm, but the stranger held up a finger, indicating that I should be silent. I could not see his face. He wore a silver mask of the Moon, mottled and rough, with rays around the edges. His white, ankle-length robe flapped gently in the frigid breeze.

He motioned me to follow, and I did, silently dipping my paddle into the water. The stranger walked barefoot on the surface, ripples spreading with every step.

We travelled for a long time through a maze of open pools and tufts of grass, among the dead reeds, until we came to a half-submerged ruin of a tower, no more than a black, empty shell covered with mud and vines.

Then hundreds of other robed, masked figures emerged from the marsh, not walking on the water as had my guide, but crawling, their movement a curious waddle, their bodies swaying from side to side as does that of a crocodile when it comes out on land. I watched in amazement as they gathered around us, bowing low at the upright man’s feet, as if in supplication.

He merely spread his hands and wept.

Then I recalled one of my father’s stories, about a proud king, whose palace was more resplendent than the sun, of whom the gods were jealous. One day a crocodile-headed messenger came into the glittering court and hissed, “My master summons you, O King, as he summons all.” But the king, in his pride, bade his guards beat the messenger and throw him into the river whence he came, for the king did not fear the gods.

And Surat-Kemad did not care to be feared, only obeyed, so the Great River flooded the land, swallowing the palace of the king.

“That’s not much of a story,” I’d complained to Father.

“It is merely true,” he said.

Now I looked on in awe, desperate to ask so many questions but afraid to speak. But the sky lightened, and the weeping of the standing man became merely the wind rattling in the reeds.

The sun rose, and the supplicants removed their masks and became merely crocodiles. Their robes were somehow gone in the shifting light. I watched their dark bodies sink into the murky water.

I looked to the standing man, but a long-legged bird remained where he had been. It let out a cry and took to the air, wings thundering.

* * * *

The warm sun revived me. I sat up, coughing, my nose running, and looked around. The sunken tower was still there, a heap of dead stone. But I was alone.

It was midday before I got back to the City of the Reeds.

The city is a different place in the daylight, bright banners waving from towers, houses likewise bright with hangings and with designs painted on walls and roofs. The ships of the river unload by day, and the streets are filled with the babble of tongues, while traders and officials and barbarians and city wives all haggle together.

It is a place of sharp fish smells and strange incense and leather and wet canvas and unwashed rivermen who bring outlandish beasts from the villages high in the mountains, near the birthplace of the river.

By day, too, there are a thousand gods, one for every stranger, for every tradesman, for everyone who has ever passed through or resided or merely dreamed of a new god during an afternoon nap. In the street of carvers one can buy idols of all these gods, or even have new images made if one happens to be divinely inspired at the time.

At night, of course, there is only Surat-Kemad, whose jaws rend the living and the dead, whose body is the black water, whose teeth are the stars.

But it was by day I returned, making my way through the tangle of ships and smaller boats, past the wharves and floating docks, then beneath the city until I came out the other side near my father’s house.

Hamakina ran to me when I emerged through the trapdoor, her face streaming with tears. She embraced me, sobbing.

“Oh Sekenre, I’m so afraid!”

“Where is Father?” I asked, but she only screamed and buried her face in my robe. Then I said, “Where is Mother?”

Hamakina looked up into my face and said very softly, “Gone.”

“Gone?”

“She has gone to the gods, my son.”

I looked up. Father had emerged from his workroom, his sorcerer’s robe wrapped loosely over soiled white trousers. He hobbled toward us, dragging himself as if he didn’t quite know how to walk. I thought there was something wrong with his legs.

Hamakina screamed and ran out onto the wharf. I heard the front door bang against the outside of the house.

I stood my ground.

“Father, where is Mother?”

“As I said…gone to the gods.”

“Will she be coming back?” I asked, hopeless as I did.

Father did not answer. He stood there for a moment, staring into space, as if he’d forgotten I was even there. Then he said suddenly, “What did you see, Sekenre?”

I told him.

He was silent again.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It didn’t mean anything. Did I do something wrong?”

For once he spoke to me tenderly, as he had in the old days when I was very small.

“No, faithful child, you did nothing wrong. Remember that the vision of your life goes on as long as your life does; and, like your life, it is a mystery, a maze, with many turnings, many things suddenly revealed, many things forever hidden. The longer you live, the more you will understand what you have seen this night. Each new piece of the vast puzzle changes the meaning of all that has gone before as you draw nearer and nearer the truth…but you never reach your destination, not entirely.”

The cold and the damp had given me a fever. I lay ill for a week, often delirious, sometimes dreaming that the masked figure in the vision stood at my bedside, barefoot on the surface of the black water while dead reeds rattled all around. Sometimes, as the sun rose, he took off his mask and a heron screamed at me, leaping into the air on thunderous wings. Sometimes it was my father beneath the mask. He came to me each dawn, put his hand on my forehead, recited words I couldn’t make out, and bade me drink a sweet-tasting syrup.

After the fever had gone, I saw him very little. He retreated to his workroom, noisily barring the door. Hamakina and I were left to care for ourselves. Sometimes it was hard just finding food. We tried to assemble the leftover pieces of Mother’s hevats but seldom got much for the results.

Meanwhile, lightning and thunder issued from the workroom. The whole house shook. Sometimes there were incredibly foul odors, and my sister and I would spend our nights outdoors, on rooftops among the beggars of the city, despite all the dangers. And once, as I crouched by the workroom door, terrified and holding back tears, Father spoke and I heard him answered by many voices, all of them faint and far away. One sounded like Mother. All were afraid, pleading, babbling, screaming.

At times I wondered where Mother had gone, and tried to comfort Hamakina.

But in my worst fears, I knew perfectly well what had happened to her. I could not tell Hamakina that.

There was no one I could turn to, for now Father was the most feared of all the city’s black sorcerers, and even the priests dared not anger him. Demons of the air and of the river regularly convened at our house. I heard them scratching, their wings and tails dragging, while my sister and I huddled in our room, or kept to the rooftops.

In the streets, people turned away when they saw us, made signs and spat.

Then one day Father came to me, moving slowly and painfully, as if he were very old. He sat me down at the kitchen table and stared into my eyes for a long time. I was afraid to turn from his gaze. He had been weeping.

“Sekenre,” he said, very gently, “do you love your father still?”

I could not answer.

“You must understand that I love you very much,” he said, “and I always will, no matter what happens. I want you to be happy. I want you to do well in your life. Marry a fine girl. I don’t want you to become what I have become. Be a friend to everybody. Have no enemies. Hate no one.”

“But…how?”

He took me by the hand, firmly. “Come. Now.”

I was terribly afraid, but I went.

There was near panic as he came into the city, yanking me along, walking in his strange way with his whole back writhing and rippling beneath his sorcerer’s robe like a serpent trying to stagger on heavy legs.

People shouted and ran as we passed. Women snatched up their children. A pair of priests crossed their staves to make a sign against us. But Father ignored them all.

We came to a street of fine houses. Astonished faces stared down at us from high windows. Then Father led me to the end of an alley, down a tunnel, and into a yard behind one of the mansions. He knocked at a door. An old man appeared, by his garb a scholar. He gasped and made a sign to ward off evil.

Father pushed me inside.

“Teach my son what you know,” he said to the old man. “I will pay well.”

That was how I became an apprentice to Velachronos the historian, scribe, and poet. I knew letters already, but he taught me to make fine ones full of swirls and beautiful colors. Then he taught me something of the history of our city, and of the river and the gods. I sat with him for long hours, helping to transcribe ancient books.

Clearly Father wanted me to become learned, so that I would dwell in honor among the people of the city, and know at least modest comfort, as Velachronos did. The old man remarked on this once, “You seldom see a rich scholar or a starving one.”

But my sister was ignored completely. Once, when I came home after lessons and found Father outside of his workroom, I said, “What about Hamakina?”

He shrugged. “Take her along. It hardly matters.”

So Velachronos had two apprentices. I think he accepted us out of fear at first. I tried to convince him we were not monsters. Gradually he acquiesced. Father paid him double. I labored over the books. Hamakina, too, learned to paint beautiful letters, and Velachronos taught her something of music, so she could sing the ancient ballads of the city. Her voice was very beautiful.

He was kind to us. I remember the time with him fondly. He was like a grandfather or a generous uncle. He took us to the children’s festival that spring, and rose from his seat to applaud when Hamakina won the prize in the contest of the masks and the sparrow-headed image of the god Haedos-Kemad leaned forward and showered her with candy.

I felt too old for that sort of thing, yet Father had never taken me to the priests to declare me a man. It is a simple rite unless parents want to make it elaborate. There is only a small fee. I had already had my vision from the gods. Yet Father did not take me and I remained a child, either because I was somehow unworthy, or he merely forgot.

Meanwhile his sorceries grew more extreme. At night the sky flickered from horizon to horizon, and sometimes he came out onto the wharf in front of our house to speak with the thunder. It answered back, calling out his name, and, on occasion, my name.

The stenches from the workroom worsened, and there were more voices, more terrifying visitors in the night. But, too, Father would sometimes stagger about the house, pulling at his beard, flailing his arms like a madman, like someone possessed by a frenzied spirit, and he would seize me and shake me so hard it hurt and plead with me, “Do you love me, son? Do you still love your father?”

I could never answer him. It drove me to tears many times. I locked myself in my room and he would stand outside the door, sobbing, whispering, “Do you love me? Do you?”

Then came an evening when I sat studying in my room—Hamakina was off somewhere—and a huge barbarian adventurer climbed in through the window, followed by a little rat-faced man from the City of the Delta.

The barbarian snatched the book from my hands and threw it into the river. He took me by the wrist and jerked. My forearm snapped. I let out a little yelp of pain and the rat-faced man held a long, thin knife like an enormous pin to my face, pressing gently on one cheek, then the other, just below my eyes.

He whispered, flashing filthy teeth. His breath stank.

“Where’s yer famous wizard da’ who’s got all the treasure? Tell us, brat, or I’ll make a blind girl out of ye and tie yer guts fer braids—”

The barbarian merely grabbed me by the front of my gown in one huge hand and slammed me against the wall so hard that blood poured out of my nose and mouth.

I could only nod to my left, toward Father’s workroom.

Later, when I returned to consciousness, I heard the two of them screaming. The screaming went on for days behind Father’s door, while I lay feverish and Hamakina wiped my forehead but could do nothing more. It was only when the screaming faded to distant murmurs, like the voices I’d heard that one time before, like the voice that might have been Mother’s, that Father came and healed me with his magic. His face was ashen. He looked very tired.

I slept and the barefoot man in the silver mask knelt on the surface of the water, sending ripples all around my bed. He whispered to me the story of the heron boy who stood among the flock in the dawn light and was left behind when the birds took flight, standing there, waving his graceless, featherless arms.

A few weeks later, Velachronos threw us out. I don’t know what happened with him at the end. Perhaps it was just a rumor, or a culmination of rumors, or he might even have heard the truth about something I did not know, but one day, when Hamakina and I came for our lessons, he stood in the doorway and all but shrieked, “Begone! Get out of my house, devil-spawn!”

He wouldn’t explain or say anything more. There was nothing to do but leave.

That night a vast storm came up from the mouth of the river, a black, swirling mass of clouds like a monster huge enough to smother the world, lumbering on a thousand flickering, fiery legs. The river, the very marshes, raged like the frenzied chaos-ocean that existed before the Earth was made, while the sky thundered light and dark; and for an instant you could see for miles across froth-capped waves and reeds lashing in the wind; then there was only utter blackness and stinging rain and the thunder once more, thunder calling out my father’s name again and again.

He answered it, from within his secret room, his voice as loud as the thunder, speaking a language that did not sound like human speech at all, but shrieks and grating cackles and whistles like the raging wind.

In the morning, all the ships were scattered and half the city was blasted away. The air was heavy with the cries of mourners. The river ran beneath our house muddy and furious where before it had been mere shallows.

Many people saw the crocodile-headed messengers of the Devouring God that day.

My sister and I sat in our room, almost afraid to speak even to each other. We could not go out.

From Father’s workroom there was only silence that went on for so long that, despite everything, I began to fear for him. I met Hamakina’s gaze, and she stared back, wide-eyed and dazed. Then she nodded.

I went to the workroom door and knocked.

“Father? Are you all right?”

To my surprise, he opened the door at once and came out. He steadied himself against the doorway with one hand and hung there, breathing heavily. His hands were gnarled, like claws. They looked like they had been burned.

His face was so pale, so wild, that part of me wasn’t even sure it was Father until he spoke.

“I am going to die,” he said. “It is time for me to go to the gods.”

And, again despite everything, I wept for him.

“Now you must be a faithful son for the last time,” he said. “Gather reeds and bind them together into a funeral boat. When you are done, I shall be dead. Place me in it and set me adrift, so that I shall come, as all men do, to Surat-Kemad.”

“No, Father! It isn’t so!”

When I wept, I was remembering him as he had been in my early childhood, not as he had become.

He squeezed my shoulder hard and hissed angrily, “Quite inevitably, it is. Go!”

So Hamakina and I went together. Somehow our house had lost only a few shingles in the storm, and the dock below the trapdoor was still there. My boat was too, but sunken and dangling from its line. We struggled to pull it up, dumped it out, and set it afloat. Miraculously, not even the paddles had been lost.

We climbed in and paddled in silence for about an hour, far enough into the marshes that the waters were again shallow and still and reeds as thick as my arm swayed against the sky like trees. With a hatchet I’d brought along for the purpose, I cut down several, and Hamakina and I labored throughout the day to make a crude boat. In the evening, we towed it back to our house.

I ascended the ladder first, while she waited fearfully below.

For the first time I could remember, the door to Father’s workroom was left open. He lay inside, on a couch amid shelves of books and bottles, and at a glance I knew that he was dead.

There was little to do that night. Hamakina and I made a cold supper out of what we could find in the pantry. Then we barred the windows and doors, and pushed a heavy trunk over the trapdoor, lest the evatim crawl up and devour the corpse, as they sometimes do.

I explored the workroom only a little, going through Father’s books, opening trunks, peering into coffers. If he had any treasure, I didn’t find it. Then I picked up a murky bottle and something inside screamed at me with a tiny, faraway voice. I dropped the bottle in fright. It broke and the screaming thing scurried across the floorboards.

The house was full of voices and noises, creakings, whispers, and sighs. Once something heavy, like a huge bird perhaps, flapped and scraped against a shuttered window. My sister and I stayed up most of the night, lanterns in our hands, armed with clubs against whatever terrors the darkness might hold. I sat on the floor outside the workroom, leaning against the door. Hamakina lay with her face in my lap, sobbing softly.

Eventually I fell asleep, and Mother came to me in a dream, leaning over me, dripping water and river mud, shrieking and tearing her hair. I tried to tell her that all would be well, that I would take care of Hamakina, that I would grow up to be a scribe and write letters for people. I promised I wouldn’t be like Father.

But still she wept and paced back and forth all night. In the morning, the floor was wet and muddy.

Hamakina and I rose, washed, put on our best clothes, and went to the priests. On the way, some people turned their backs to us while others screamed curses and called us murderers. In the square before the temple, a mob approached with knives and clubs, and I waved my hands and made what I hoped looked like magical gestures until they turned and fled, shouting that I was just as bad as my Father. In that single instant, I almost wished I were.

A whole army of priests followed us back to the house, resplendent in their billowing gold-and-silver trousers, their blue jackets, and their tall, scale-covered hats. Many of them held aloft sacred ikons of Surat-Kemad, and of the other gods too: of Ragun-Kemad, the Lord of Eagles, and Bel-Kemad, god of spring, and of Meliventra, the Lady of the Lantern, who sends forgiveness and mercy. Acolytes chanted and swung smoking incense-pots on golden chains.

But they would not let us back into the house. Two temple matrons stood with us on the wharf, holding Hamakina and me by the hand. The neighbors watched from a distance, fearfully.

The priests emptied out Father’s workroom, breaking open the shutters, pouring bottle after bottle of powders and liquids into the river, dumping many of his books in after, then more bottles, then most of the jars, carvings, and strange specimens. Other books, they confiscated. Junior priests carried heaps of them back to the temple in baskets. Then it seemed the exorcisms went on for hours. They used so much incense that I thought the house was on fire.

In the end, the priests marched away as solemnly as they had come, and one of the matrons gave me a sword which had been my father’s, a fine weapon, its grip bound in copper wire, its blade inlaid with silver.

“You may need this,” was all she would say.

Fearfully, my sister and I ventured inside the house. The air was so thick with incense that we ran, choking, our eyes streaming, to open all the windows. Still, the burners hung everywhere and we dared not remove them.

Father lay on the couch in his workroom, bound in gauze. The priests had removed his eyes and placed amulets like huge coins in the empty sockets. I knew this was because they were afraid he would find his way back otherwise.

Hamakina and I had to get him down to the funeral boat. There was no one to help us. It was a terrible struggle. Hamakina was, after all, only eight, and I was fifteen. More than once I was afraid we would accidentally drop him.

One of the gold amulets fell out. The empty socket gaped like a dry, red wound. I was almost sick when I had to put the amulet back.

The funeral boat was hung with gauze and charms. Incense rose from a silver cup set in the prow. One of the priests had painted a symbol, a serpent swallowing its tail, only broken, on the stern.

In the twilight of evening, Hamakina and I towed the funeral boat out into the deep water beyond the city, among the crooked masts of the wrecked ships, and beyond.

The sky faded gently from red to black, streaked with the purple tatters of the last few storm clouds. An almost frigid wind blew out of the marshes. The stars gleamed, multiplied upon the rippling water.

I stood in my shallow boat and recited the service for the dead as best as I knew it, for my father whom I still loved and feared and did not understand. Then Hamakina let loose the line, and the funeral boat began to drift, first downstream toward the delta and the sea; but in the darkness, just before it disappeared, it was clearly going upstream. That was a good sign. It meant the boat had caught the black current, which carries the dead out of the world of the living, into the abode of the gods.

I thought, then, that I had time to mourn. When we got back, the house was merely empty. For the first time in many years, I was not afraid. It was almost bewildering.

I slept quietly that night. I did not dream. Hamakina, too, was quiet.

The next morning an old woman who lived in one of the first houses at the other end of the wharf knocked on our door and said, “Children? Are you well? Do you have enough to eat?”

She left a basket of food for us.

That, too, was a good sign. It meant that the neighbors would eventually forgive us. They didn’t really think I was as my father had been.

I took the basket inside slowly, weeping half for joy. Life would be better. I remembered my promise to my mother. I would be different. The next day, surely, or the day after, Velachronos would take us back and we could resume our lessons.

Only that night Father came to me in a dream, and he stood before my bed wrapped in gauze, his face terrible behind the golden disks. His voice was—I cannot truly describe it—oily, like something dripping, something thick and vile; and the mere fact that such a sound could form itself into words seemed the greatest obscenity of all.

“I have delved too far into the darkness, my son, and my ending can only come with the final mystery. I seek it. My studies are almost complete. It is the culmination of all my labors. But there is one thing I need, one thing I have come back for.”

And in my dream I asked him, “Father, what is it?”

“Your sister.”

Then I awoke to the sound of Hamakina screaming. She reached for my hand, missed, caught the edge of the bed, and fell with a thump, dragging the covers onto the floor.

I always kept a lit lantern on the stand by the bed. Now I opened the little metal door, flooding the room with light.

“Sekenre! Help me!”

I stared incredulously for just an instant as she hung suspended in the air, dangling, as if an invisible hand had seized her by the hair. Then she screamed once more and seemed to fly through the window. For a second she grabbed hold of the sill. She looked toward me. Our eyes met. But before I could do or say anything she was yanked loose and hauled through.

I ran to the window and leaned out.

There was no splash; the water below rippled gently. The night was still. Hamakina was simply gone.

II

In the morning, the third after Father’s death, I went to see the Sybil. There was nothing else to do. Everyone in the City of the Reeds knows that when the great crisis of your life comes, when there is truly no alternative but surrender and death and no risk is too great, then it is time to see the Sybil.

Fortunate is the man who has never called on her goes the old saying. But I was not fortunate.

She is called the Daughter of the River, and the Voice of Surat-Kemad, and the Mother of Death, and many other things. Who she is and what she is, no one has ever known; but she dwelt, fearsomely, the subject of countless terrifying stories, beneath the very heart of the city, among the pilings, where the log posts that hold up the great houses are thick as any forest. I had heard of the terrible price she was reputed to demand for her prophecies, and that those who visited her came away irreparably changed if they came away at all. Yet since time immemorial she had dwelt there, and for as long people went to listen to her words.

I went. For an offering, I had my father’s sword, the silver one the temple matron gave me.

It was in the earliest dawn twilight that I slipped once more through the trapdoor beneath our house. To the east, to my right, the sky was just beginning to brighten into gray, but before me, toward the heart of the city, night lingered.

I paddled amid the wreckage left by the recent storm: planks, bobbing barrels and trunks, and, once, a slowly rolling corpse the evatim had somehow overlooked. Further in, a huge house had fallen on its supports, now awash and broken, its windows gaping like black mouths. Later, when the gloom lessened a bit, I came upon a capsized ship jammed among the pillars like a vast, dead fish caught in reeds, its rigging trailing in the black water.

Just beyond it, the dark, irregular mass of the Sybil’s dwelling hung suspended, undamaged by the storm, of course.

There’s another story they tell about her: that the Sybil was never young, but was born an old hag in the blood of her mother’s death, and that she stood up in the pool of her mother’s blood, in the darkness at the world’s beginning; and she closed her hands together, then opened them, and columns of flame rose up from her palms.

My father used to do that trick, and once he grew terribly angry when I tried it, even though I’d just sat staring at my hands, opening and closing them without understanding or results. It was enough that I had made the attempt. He was perhaps even frightened at first, at the prospect that I might try again and eventually succeed. Then his face shifted from shock to cold fury. That was the only time in my life he ever beat me.

But when the Sybil made fire with her hands she rolled the flames into balls with her fingers. She breathed on one to make it dim, and released them both—the Sun and Moon. Then she drank long and deep of the Great River where her mother’s blood flowed into it, stood up by moonlight, and spat out the sparkling stars. And by starlight the multitude of gods awoke along the banks of the river and beheld the Earth for the first time.

As I gazed upon her house, I could almost believe the story. No, I did believe it.

The Sybil’s house was more of an immense cocoon, like a spider’s web filled to overflowing with debris and dead things, spun and accumulated since the beginning of time. It hung from the underside of the city itself, its outer strands a tangle of ropes and netting and vines and fibers stretching out into the darkness in every direction until I could not tell where the enormous nest began or ended.

But the core of it hung down almost to the water, like a monstrous belly. I reached up and tied my boat to it, slipped Father’s sword under my belt, bound my robe up to free my legs, and started to climb.

The ropes trembled, whispering like muted thunder. Mud and debris fell in my face, splashing all around me. I hung on desperately, then shook my head to clear my eyes, and continued climbing.

Higher up, in complete darkness, I squeezed along a tunnel of rotting wood, sometimes losing my grip and sliding backwards for a terrifying instant before I found another hold. The darkness was…heavy. I had the impression of an endless mass of debris in all directions, shifting, grinding as I wriggled through it. Sometimes there was an overwelming stench of decay.

I crawled over the upturned hull of a boat. It swayed gently beneath my weight. Something soft fell, then slithered against its side. All the while my hands and bare feet scraped desperately for purchase against the rotting wood.

Then came more rope, more netting, and in the dimmest twilight I was in a chamber where trunks, wicker baskets, and heavy clay jugs all heaved and crashed together as I crawled among them.

Serpents and fishes writhed beneath my touch amid reeking slime.

And yet again in utter darkness I made my way on hands and knees across a seemingly solid, wooden floor. Then the boards snapped beneath me and I tumbled screaming amid ropes and wood and what touch alone told me were hundreds of human bones. I came to rest on heaving netting with a skull in my lap and bones rattling down over my bare legs. I threw the skull away and tried to jump up, but my feet slid through the net and I felt only empty space below.

I dangled there, clinging desperately to the rope netting. It broke and I was left screaming once more, swinging in the darkness while an avalanche of bones splashed into the water far below.

One further story I’d heard came to me just then: that when someone drowns in the river, the evatim eat his flesh, but the bones go to the Sybil, who divines fortunes from them.

So it seemed.

At precisely this point she called out to me, and her voice was like an autumn wind rattling in dead reeds.

“Son of Vashtem.”

I clung tighter to the remnants of the net, gulped, and called up into the darkness.

“I’m here.”

“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, I await your coming.”

I was so startled I nearly let go.

“But I’m not a sorcerer!”

“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer.”

I started climbing once more, all the while telling her about myself in broken, panting speech. Still a few bones fell, suddenly out of the darkness, striking me on the head as if in sarcastic reply to what I gasped out. But still I told her how I had never done any magic myself, how I had promised my mother never to be like my father, how I was apprenticed to the learned Velachronos, how I was going to be a scribe first, then maybe write books of my own, if only Velachronos would take me back when this was all over.

Then the Sybil’s face appeared to me suddenly in the darkness above, like a full moon from behind a cloud. Her face was pale and round, her eyes inexpressibly black, and I think her skin did glow faintly.

And she said to me, laughing gently, “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you’re arguing with the dread Sybil. Now is that a brave thing to do, or just foolish?”

I stopped, swinging gently from side to side on the ropes.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“What you mean is not necessarily what you do, Sekenre. Whether or not you’re sorry afterwards means nothing at all. There. I have spoken your name once. Sekenre. I have spoken it twice. Do you know what happens if I speak it three times?”

I said meekly, “No, Great Sybil.”

“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, come up and sit before me. Do not be afraid.”

I climbed up to where she was. I could barely make out a wooden shelf or ledge, covered with bones and debris. I reached out gingerly with one foot and my toes found, surprisingly, solid, dry planking. I let go of the ropes and sat. The Sybil reached up and opened the door of a box-lantern, then of another, and another. I thought of lazy beasts winking themselves awake.

Now light and shadow flickered in the tiny, low-ceilinged room. The Sybil sat cross-legged, a blanket with gleaming embroidery draped over her knees. A man-headed serpent with scales like silver coins lay curled in her lap. Once it hissed and she leaned low while it whispered in her ear.

Silence followed. She gazed into my eyes for a long time.

I held out my father’s sword.

“Lady, this is all I have to offer—”

She hissed, just like the serpent, and for an instant seemed startled, even afraid. She waved the sword away.

“Sekenre, you are interrupting the Sybil. Now, again, is that brave or just foolishness?”

There. She had spoken my name thrice. I felt an instant of sheer terror. But nothing happened.

She laughed again, and her laugh was a human one, almost kindly.

“A most inappropriate gift, sorcerer, son of sorcerer.”

“I don’t understand…I’m sorry, Lady.”

“Sekenre, do you know what that sword is?”

“It was my father’s.”

“It is the sword of a Knight Inquisitor. Your father tried to deny what he was, even to himself. So he joined a holy order, an order of strictest discipline, devoted to the destruction of all things of darkness, all the wild things, witches, sorcerers, even the wild gods. He was like you, boy, at your age. He wanted so much to do the right thing. For all the good it did him. In the end, he only had the sword.”

“Lady, I have nothing else—”

“Sekenre—there, I said it again. You are very special. The path before you is very special. Your future is not a matter of how many times I speak your name. Keep the sword. You shall need it. I require no payment from you, not yet anyway.”

“Will you require it later, Great Sybil?”

She leaned forward, and I saw that her teeth were sharp and pointed. Her breath smelled of river mud.

“Your entire life shall be payment enough. All things come to me in proper time, even as you, I think, come to me now, when your need is greatest.”

Then I began to tell her why I had come, about Father, and what had happened to Hamakina.

“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you are lecturing the Sybil. Brave or foolish?”

I wept. “Please, Great Lady…I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I want to do the right thing. Please don’t be angry. Tell me what to do.”

“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, everything you do is the correct thing, part of the great pattern which I observe, which I weave, which I prophesy. At each new turning of your life the pattern is made anew. All the meanings are changed. Your father understood that, when he came back from beyond the sea, no longer a Knight Inquisitor because he knew too much of sorcery. He had become a sorcerer by fighting sorcery. He was like a doctor who contracts the patient’s disease. His knowledge was like a door that has been opened and can never be closed again. A door. In his mind.”

“No,” I said softly. “I will not be like him.”

“Hear then the prophecy of the Sybil, sorcerer, son of sorcerer. You shall journey into the very belly of the beast, into the mouth of the God Who Devours.”

“Lady, we are all on a journey in this life, and when we die—”

“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, do you accept the words of the Sybil of your own will, as a gift given?”

I was afraid to ask her what would happen if I refused. It wasn’t much of a choice.

“Lady, I accept.”

“It is of your will then. If you stray from your path, if you step aside, that, too, changes the weaving of all lives.”

“Lady, I only want to get my sister back and—”

“Then accept these too.”

She pressed something into my hand. Her touch was cold and hard, like living iron. The serpent thing in her lap hissed, almost forming words.

I held my open hand up to one of the lanterns and saw two grave coins on my palm.

“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, on this day you are a man. Your father did not raise you to manhood before he left you. Therefore I must perform the rite.”

The serpent thing vanished into her clothing. She rose, her movement fluid as smoke. I could only see her face and hands, like lanterns themselves floating in the half-light. She took a silver band and bound my hair as the men of the city bind it. She gave me a pair of baggy trousers such as the men of the city wear. I put them on. They were much too long. I rolled them up to my knees.

“They used to belong to a pirate,” she said. “He won’t be needing them now.”

She rummaged around among the debris and produced a single boot. I tried to put it on. It was nearly twice the size of my foot.

She sighed. “Always the pattern changes. I’m sure it’s portentous. Never mind.”

She took the boot from me and threw it aside.

Then she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. The touch of her lips was so cold it burned.

“Now you are marked by the Sybil, sorcerer, son of sorcerer, and by that mark men will know you. Because you are marked, you may call on me three times, and I shall hear you and reply. But beware. If you ask my favor more than that, I shall own you, like all the things in my house. That is the price I ask of you.”

She gave me a water bottle and a leather bag with food in it—cheese, bread, and dried fish—and told me to put the grave coins in the bag too so I wouldn’t lose them.

The bag had a long cord. I slipped it over my neck. I hung the bottle from the loose belt I wore outside my robe.

My forehead was numb where she had kissed me. I reached up and felt the spot. It was cold as ice.

“Now go, sorcerer, son of sorcerer, into the very jaws of the Devourer, of your own will. Go, as the Sybil has prophesied, right now—”

She stamped her foot once. I screamed as the floor swung away beneath me like a trapdoor and I was falling endlessly down amid glowing white bones and debris and the Sybil’s tumbling lamps. I saw her face once, far above, streaking away in the darkness like a shooting star.

I hit the water hard and sank deep, but somehow reached the surface again, lungs bursting. I started to swim. The sword cut my legs. The bag choked me. I almost threw them both away, but did not, and slowly, clumsily made my back to where I thought my boat waited. I looked around fearfully for the evatim, which surely haunted this place.

Above, the house of the Sybil was silent and dark.

At last my feet touched soft mud and I stood up in the gloom. Faint light filtered among the ten thousand wooden legs of the city.

I waded through thick mud, then into open water and fell in over my head and swam a short distance, struggling toward the light. Then my feet found a sand bank, and I climbed out of the water and rested.

A whole night must have passed then, for I slept through terrible dreams of my father in his sorcerer’s robe, stalking back and forth at the water’s edge, his face so twisted with rage that he hardly seemed to be my father at all. He would lean over, raise his hand to strike, then pause, startled, even afraid, as if he had seen something in my face he had never seen there before.

I tried to call out to him.

Suddenly I was awake, in total darkness. A footstep splashed nearby. Far away, the birds of the marshes sang to announce the dawn.

And my father’s voice spoke.

“Sekenre…do you still love me?”

I could not answer. I only sat terribly still, shivering in the cold air, my knees drawn up to my chest, hands clasped tight to my wrists.

Daylight came as a gray blur. I saw a boat nearby, beached on the same sandbank. It was not my own, but a funeral boat, made of bound reeds.

For an instant I thought I understood fully what the Sybil had prophesied and I froze in terror, but I had known so much of terror in my life already that I had grown indifferent to it. I couldn’t bring myself to care. I couldn’t think coherently.

Like one bewitched, when the body acts of its own accord without the will of the mind, I pushed the boat out into open water, then climbed in and lay still among the scented corpse-wrappings.

I felt only resignation now. So it had been prophesied.

Almost on a whim, I reached into the leather bag and took out the two grave coins. I placed them over my eyes.

III

For a long time I lay still and listened to the water lapping against the side of the boat. Then even that sound faded, and I felt, very distinctly, the boat reverse direction, and I knew I was drifting with the black current now, out of the world of the living, into the land of the dead. The water was silent, as if the boat were gliding along a river of oil. I could hear the pounding of my own heart.

I lay awake and tried to make sense out of my adventure with the Sybil, reviewing every detail in search of some central thread by which all the parts would be connected, like beads on a necklace, assuming form and meaning. But there was nothing. I had expected as much. It is the way of prophecies: you don’t understand them until they’re about to come true, and then, suddenly, the whole pattern is revealed.

Even the silence of the river and the thunder of my heart were part of the pattern.

Even my sister’s voice.

I thought it was just a ringing in my ears at first, but it formed words, very weak, very far away, at the very threshold of hearing.

“Sekenre,” she said. “Help me. I’m lost.”

I called back to her, either with my voice or my mind.

“I am coming, little one. Wait for me.”

She sobbed hoarsely, sucking in breath as if she had been crying for a long time.

“It’s dark here.”

“It’s dark here, too,” I said gently.

She was too brave to say she was afraid.

“Hamakina—is Father with you?”

Something splashed in the water right next to the boat, and my father’s voice whispered, inches from my ear.

“Sekenre, if you love me, go back. I command you to go back! Do not come here!”

I let out a yell and sat up. The grave coins fell into my lap. I twisted about, looking all around.

The boat slid past huge, black reeds. In the silent darkness, white herons stood in rows along the river’s edge, faintly glowing as the Sybil’s face had glowed. And in the water, the evatim watched me, rank upon rank of them like dead-white, naked men with crocodile heads, lying motionless in the shallows. But there was no sign of Father.

Above me, the sky was dark and clear, and the stars were not the stars of Earth, but fewer, paler, almost gray, arranged in the constellations of the dead, which are described in the Books of the Dead: the Hand, the Harp, the Jar of Forgetting, the Eye of Surat-Kemad.

Very carefully, I picked up the grave coins and put them back in my bag. I was thirsty and drank a sip from the water bottle. I could not drink river water here, for only the dead may drink of the water of the dead, and only the dead may eat the fruits of the land of the dead. That too is written in the Books of the Dead.

And so I gazed with mortal, uncovered eyes into the darkness that never ends. Far behind me, along the way I had come, there was a faint suggestion of light, a mere paling of the sky, as if way back there was an opening through which I had already passed. The living world drew farther and farther away with each passing instant.

The white herons rose as one and for a moment the air was filled with the utterly silent passage of their wings. Then they were gone. They too, like the evatim, were messengers of the God of the Dark River.

But for me there was no message.

I began to see ghosts among the reeds, sitting up in the mud as I passed, beseeching me to take them aboard my funeral boat so they might go properly into the final land. They were no more than wisps of smoke, suggestions of shapes glimpsed from the corner of the eye. When I looked directly at any one of them, I could not see it.

Some called out in languages I had never heard before. Only a few spoke of places and people I had known. I was afraid of these few. I did not want them to recognize me. I lay back down in the bottom of my boat and put the coins back over my eyes. I slept fitfully after a while and dreamed of my father. He paced back and forth on the surface of the black water, his trailing robe sending ripples as he walked, his face contorted with rage. Once he stopped and seemed to shake me furiously, saying, “No, my son, no. This is not what I wanted for you. I command you. I forbid you.…because I love you still. Go back to Reedland. Go!”

But, in my dream, I only answered, “Father, I will go if you let me take Hamakina back with me.”

He made no answer but continued to rage and pace, too furious even to ask if I loved him.

I awoke from my dream to the faint sound of singing like many voices carried on the wind from far away. I sat up once more, put the coins in my bag, and saw a vast trireme bearing down on me, its sail bellied full, its oars thrashing the water into foam.

Yet it was an insubstantial thing like the ghosts in the reeds, a shape of smoke. The voices of the oarsmen were muted, the throbbing of the pace-setter’s drum like the failing thunder of a distant, dying storm. The stars shone through the hull and sail, and the foam of the oars was a phantom thing, the water around me still black and smooth and silent.

This was a wonder, but no mystery, for the Great River co-exists with the River of the Dead, for all that they flow in different directions. Sometimes the rivermen fleetingly glimpse the traffic of the dark current, faint shapes in the night. When they do, they reckon it a bad omen and make sacrifices to soothe the anger of whatever god might have been offended.

Now I, on the River of the Dead, saw the living as phantoms. The trireme loomed up, and then my boat passed through it. For a moment I was among the oarsmen and I could smell the reek of their laborings. Then a richly-furnished cabin swam around me. A great lord feasted, surrounded by his followers. I think it was the Satrap of Reedland himself. One lady of his company paused, cup in hand. Our eyes met. She looked more startled than afraid. She poured out a little of her wine, as if to make a libation to me.

Then the trireme was gone, and I lay back again, the coins on my eyes, my father’s sword clutched against my chest.

I slept once more and dreamt once more, but my dream was only a confusion, shapes in the darkness, and sounds I could not make out. I awoke parched and famished, and took another sip from my water bottle, and ate a little of the food in the leather bag.

It was as I ate that I realized that the river was no longer flowing. The boat lay absolutely motionless in the middle of a black, endless, dead marsh beneath the grey stars. Even the evatim and the ghosts were gone.

I was truly afraid. I thought I would be left there forever. No, somehow I was certain of it. Somehow the Devouring God had tricked me, and the Land of the Dead would not accept me while I yet lived.

I forced down one last bite of bread, then closed the bag and called out, half sobbing: “Sybil! Help me! I’ve lost my way!”

And the sky began to lighten. I saw not merely reeds, but huge trees rising out of the marsh, stark and barren like ruined stone pillars.

Some of the stars began to fade. I thought the Moon was rising—how strange that I should be able to see the Moon here!—but instead the face of the Sybil drifted into the sky, pale and round and huge as the full Moon. She gazed down on me for a time in silence and I was afraid to speak to her. Then her face rippled, as a reflection does when a pebble is dropped into a still pool, and she was gone, but her voice came rattling through the reeds.

“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you have called on me foolishly and have wasted one summoning. You are near to your goal and could have found your own way. Nevertheless, if you think you need a guide, reach down into the water and draw one up.”

“Into the water?” I said. For an instant I was terrified that I had wasted a second summoning with that question. But the Sybil did not reply.

I reached down into the frigid water, wary of lurking evatim. I groped around, swinging my arm from side to side, my fingers outstretched. For an instant I lay there, half out of the boat, wondering if this were another of the Sybil’s riddles. Then the water suddenly stirred, as if something were rising, and my fingers closed on something stringy and slippery like an underwater weed, and I pulled.

A hand broke the surface, then another. I let go of what I had been holding and scrambled back. The hands caught hold of the side of the boat and the boat rocked beneath the weight of that which climbed aboard. There was a sudden, overwelming stench of decay, or rotted flesh. Long, muddy hair fell across a face that was more bone than anything else.

I screamed then, and kept on screaming when the thing opened its eyes and began to speak and I knew that it was my mother.

“Sekenre—”

I covered my face with my hands and merely sobbed, trying to remember her as she had been once, so very long ago.

“Sekenre—” She took hold of my wrists and gently drew my hands away from my face. Her touch was as cold as the Sybil’s kiss.

I turned from her.

“Mother, I did not expect—” I could not say more, and broke into tears again.

“Son, I did not expect to see you in this place either. Truly, it is a terrible thing.”

She pulled me forward and I did not resist, until I lay with my face in her lap, my cheek against her wet, muddy gown, while she gently stroked my forehead with a bony finger. I told her all that had happened then, of Father’s own death, and his return for Hamakina.

“I am your father’s sin, returning to him at last,” she said.

“Did he—?”

“Murder me? Yes, he did. But that is the least part of his offense. He has sinned more against you, Sekenre, and also against the gods.”

“I don’t think he meant to do wrong,” I said. “He says he loves me still.”

“He probably does. Nevertheless, he has done great wrong.”

“Mother, what shall I do?”

Her cold, sharp finger drew a circle around the mark on my forehead.

“It is time for us to resume our journey. The boat has served its purpose now. You must leave it.”

I looked at the black water with ever-increasing dread.

“I don’t understand. Are we to…swim?”

“No, beloved son. We are to walk. Get out of the boat now, and walk.”

I slipped one leg over the side, one foot in the frigid water. I looked back at her uncertainly.

“Go on. Do you doubt this one small miracle, after all you have seen?”

“Mother, I—”

“Go on.”

I obeyed her and stood upon the water. It felt like cold glass beneath my feet. Then she stood next to me, and the boat drifted slowly away. I turned to watch it go, but she took me by the hand and led me in a different direction.

Her touch was like the Sybil’s, a touch of living, frigid iron.

The channel widened, and the evatim were waiting for us. Here the water flowed almost swiftly, making silent waves and eddies and whirlpools behind the dead trees. Many ghosts waded in the shallows, but they did not call out to us. They merely stood there, turning as we passed. One of them was a man in full, gleaming armor, holding his severed head in his hands.

Then there were other boats around us, black and solid and silent, not phantoms of the living, but other funeral boats. We came alongside a long, sleek barge, its pointed ends rising high above the water, a lantern flickering inside its square cabin. The evatim crawled into this cabin and the barge rocked. I could hear them thrashing in there.

At last something huge and dark loomed before us, like a mountain, blotting out the stars. On every side I saw drifting funeral boats following our course, some of them twisting and turning among reeds. One caught on something, or else the evatim tipped it over. A mummy slipped into the water and drifted by, bandages trailing, so close I could have reached out and touched it.

The darkness closed around us very suddenly, shutting out the stars. I heard water rushing, and boats creaking and banging against one another.

“Mother!” I whispered. I reached forward and tugged at her gown. A piece of it came away in my hand. “Is this it? Is this the mouth of Surat-Kemad?”

“No, child,” she said softly. “We have been in the belly of the beast for some time now.”

And that, somehow, was even more terrifying.

IV

Nothing was clear any more, the whole adventure no more than an endless continuity of dream and waking, stark images and featureless mist, pain and terror and dull discomfort.

I had been on the river I knew not how long—hours, days, weeks—and at times it seemed I was inexpressibly weary, and at others that I was back home in my bed, asleep, that all of this was some crazed nightmare. But then I reached out, turning and stretching as one does when awakening—and I touched my mother’s cold, wet, ruined body.

And the stench of decay was gone from her, and she smelled only of the river mud, like some long-sunken bundle of sticks and rags.

Sometimes there were herons all around us, glowing dimly in the utter darkness like smoldering embers, their faces the faces of men and women, all of them whispering to us, imploring, speaking names—and their voices blended together like a gentle, indistinguishable rustle of wind.

Mostly, we just walked in the darkness, alone. I felt the cold surface of the river beneath my feet, but there was no sense of motion, for all my legs moved endlessly.

Mother spoke. Her voice was soft, coming from the darkness like something remembered in a dream.

I don’t think she was even addressing me. She was merely talking, her memories, her whole life rising into words like sluggish bubbles: scraps of unfinished conversations from her childhood, and, too, much about my father, and me, and Hamakina. For what might have been a very long time or only a few minutes, she sang a lullaby, as if rocking me—or perhaps Hamakina—to sleep.

Then she was silent. I reached out to assure myself that she was still there, and her bony hand found mine and squeezed gently. I asked her what she had learned about the Land of the Dead since she had come here, and she replied softly, “I have learned that I am forever an exile, without a place prepared for me, since I have come unprepared and unannounced into Surat-Kemad’s domain. My place of exile is the river, along which I must wander until the gods die and the worlds are unmade.”

I wept for her then, and asked if this was Father’s doing, and she said that it was.

Then she asked me suddenly, “Sekenre, do you hate him?”

I had been so confident just then that I did, but I could not find an answer.

“I don’t think he meant to do any harm—”

“My son, you must sort out your feelings toward him. That is where you have lost your way, not on the river.”

Again we walked for a long time, still in utter darkness, and all the while I thought of my father and remembered my mother as she had once been. What I wanted, more than anything else, was merely for everything to be restored—Father, Mother, Hamakina, and myself, in our house by the edge of the City of Reeds, as all had been when I was small. Yet, if I had learned any lesson in life thus far, it was that you can’t go back, that our days flow on as relentlessly as the Great River, and what is lost is never restored. I was not wise. I understood very little. But I knew that much.

The father I longed for was merely gone. Perhaps he, too, longed to be restored. I wondered if he knew it was impossible.

I tried to hate him.

The darkness and the silence of the river gave a sense of being in a tunnel, far underground, but were we not more than underground, deep in the belly of Surat-Kemad? We passed from darkness into darkness, always beginning, as if through countless anterooms without ever finding the main hall.

So with our days. So with our strivings, I thought. Whatever we seek to understand yields only a glimmer, and a vast mystery.

So with my father—

Very suddenly, Mother took both my hands in hers and said, “I may only guide you a little way, my son, and we have come that little way. I cannot go where an exile is not welcome, where there is no place prepared—”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“I am not permitted into the god’s house. I must leave you at the doorstep.”

“But you said—”

“That we have been deep within his belly for some time. Yet we are at the doorstep of his house—”

She let go of me. I groped frantically for her, then found her again.

“Mother!”

She kissed both my hands very gently, and her lips, like the Sybil’s, were so cold they burned.

“But you are a hero, my son, and you may take the next step, and the next. That is what it is to be brave, you know, merely to take the next step. I have always known that you were brave.”

“Mother, I—”

Then she sank down into the water. I clung to her. I tried to hold her up, but she sank like a thing of stone, and I lost my grip. At the very last I found myself crawling absurdly about on the cold surface of the river, sliding my hands from side to side like a blind child who has lost marbles on a smooth floor.

I stood up, suddenly shivering, rubbing my arms with my hands.

She was wrong, I told myself. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t brave. I merely had no choice. The Sybil had seen that much.

Yet I never once thought of turning back. The road behind me was impassable, in more ways than one.

I wanted to call on the Sybil again, to tell her I had once more lost my way. In the darkness, without any point of reference except the sensation in my feet to tell me which way was down, I couldn’t even tell if I was facing the way I was supposed to be going, or the way I had come.

In the end, it did not matter. I don’t think direction is a physical thing in the belly of a god. Instead, it is a matter of degree.

Things began to happen swiftly once more. Lights rose around me, like lanterns drifting up from the surface of the water, then above me like stars. The water itself rippled, frigid, oily waves washing over my feet.

I started to run, afraid that whatever magic had held me up was leaving me, now that Mother had. Nothing, it seemed, could be more horrible than to be immersed in that river, there, in the belly of Surat-Kemad.

I ran, and the points of light moved with me, turning as I turned, swirling about me like burning motes on the wind. There was a sound. I thought it was indeed the wind, but then I realized that it was breathing, spittle hissing through teeth, and the lights were eyes, not reflecting light as a dog’s will by a campfire, but actually glowing, like living coals.

The darkness lessened and I saw that I had indeed emerged from a tunnel. Jagged, fissured cliffs loomed on either side of the river, towering to unknowable heights. Far above, the grey stars of the deadlands shone once more.

And the evatim stood around me by the thousands, on the river, scrambling up the cliffs, some of them just standing at the water’s edge, staring. By the light of their eyes and by the pale stars, I could see that I had come at last to the place where the Great River ended and truly began, a vast lake where the white-bodied, crocodile-headed ones paced back and forth, ankle-deep in thick grey mist, their long jaws bobbing up and down.

The evatim bore long hooks on poles, like boathooks, and as I watched one of them would occasionally pause, then reach down with his hook and draw up a human corpse, heave it onto his shoulder and depart, or just stand there, holding the dead in a lover’s embrace.

I realized to my horror that I was standing on a vast sea of corpses. I looked down and I could make them out dimly beneath the water’s surface, inches below my feet: faces, arms, bobbing chests and backs and buttocks jostling slowly in the black water like numberless fish in a net. I jumped back in revulsion, but there was nowhere to jump to.

I started to run again. Somehow, miraculously, the evatim seemed too busy with their tasks to notice me.

For the first time my footfalls made a sound, a heavy splashing and sucking, as if I were running through mud.

Truly this was the place I had read of in the Books of the Dead that Velachronos and I had copied, where the bodies and souls of the dead and the unborn are sorted out by the evatim, who are the thoughts and servants of the terrible god, and each person is judged, and carried to his rightful place, or cast out, or devoured.

I despaired then, for I knew that if Hamakina were here, I would surely never find her.

Yet I took the next step, and the next, and the next, slowing to a fast walk. If that is what it is to be brave, then I was. I continued. The mist swirled around my shins.

I seemed to be nearing the shallows. Reeds rose around me like bare iron rods. I passed one sunken funeral boat, then another, then a long stretch of boards and debris but no corpses or evatim.

A beach spread before me like a pale band on the horizon, like a white sunrise. The evatim struggled across it in an endless procession, dragging their burdens from the water.

I stood among the reeds and watched them for a time. Then I took a step forward, and cold water splashed around my knees. I gasped involuntarily at the sudden shock of no longer walking on the water, but in it. There was mud and sand beneath my feet.

I neared the beach, crouched down, trying to conceal myself among the last of the reeds. Gradually I could make out three huge doorways in the cliff-face beyond the end of the white sand. The crocodile-headed ones labored toward them, bearing their burdens through the doorways.

I didn’t doubt that each doorway led to a different place, and that here the final judgement of the god was made. Yes, I was on Surat-Kemad’s doorstep, in the anteroom of his great hall, forever beginning my quest.

But I didn’t know which of the three doors to go through. Surely my Father waited beyond…one of them.

I took the next step, and the next, freely mingling with the evatim, who took no notice of me. We crowded toward one of the doors. I was hemmed in by cold, hard bodies. I let the movement of the great mass of them determine my direction.

The empty face of an old woman bobbed in front of my face, her corpse slung over the shoulder of her bearer, her open mouth black, frozen as if perpetually about to shout or kiss or devour.

Once more the cliffs rose around me. Once more some of the evatim scrambled up the jagged stones, their glowing eyes seeming to rise into the sky like stars. Those who had climbed, I saw, set their burdens down on ledges and began to feast.

I turned away quickly and stared at the ground, and at the almost luminously pale feet and legs of the evatim.

The sides of the great doorway were carven smooth, its iron gates flung wide. The gates resembled, more than anything else, enormous, gaping jaws.

I tried to peer ahead again, but I could not see over the mass of the evatim. I jumped up. I turned and looked back, but only masses of crocodile-faces stared back at me, like a swirling shifting cloud filled with burning eyes.

“Stop! You are not of the brotherhood of the evatim!”

I whirled around again. A pallid, black-bearded face hovered before me, its red eyes unblinking. It rose on the body of a snake, only stiff as a tree trunk and covered with glistening silver scales the size of my outstretched hand. As I watched, another face rose from the ground on such a glittering stalk, and another, bursting out of the sand, out of the stone of the cliff face until a forest of them blocked my way. The evatim drew aside.

“You may not pass!” one of them said.

“Blasphemer, you may not enter our master’s domain.”

I got out my leather bag and struggled desperately with the drawstring, then poured the two grave coins into my hand.

“Wait,” I said. “Here. These are for you.”

The foremost of the man-headed serpent-things leaned forward and took the coins into its mouth. Its lips, like the Sybil’s, like my mother’s, were searingly cold.

But the coins burst into flame in the creature’s mouth and it spat them out at my feet.

“You are still alive!”

Then all of them shouted in unison, “This one is still alive!”

And the evatim came writhingthrough the scaled, shrieking forest, free of their burdens, on all fours now, their great jaws gaping. I drew my father’s sword and struck one of them, and another, and another, but one caught me on the right leg and yanked me to my knees. I slashed at the thing again and again. One of the glowing eyes burst, hissed, and went out.

Another reared up, closed its jaws on my back and chest, and pulled me over backwards. That was the end of the struggle. The great mass of them swarmed over me, while still the serpent-things shouted and screamed and babbled, and their voices were like thunder.

Teeth like knives raked me all over, tearing, and I still held the sword, but it seemed very far away and I couldn’t move it—

A crocodilian mouth closed over my head, over my shoulders and I called out, my voice muffled, shouting down the very throat of the monster, “Sybil! Come to me again—!”

I cannot say what actually happened after that. I saw her face again, glowing like a distant lantern in the darkness below me, but rising, racing upward, while the evatim tore at me and crushed me slowly in their jaws.

Then I distinctly felt myself splash into water, and the viscous blackness closed around me and the evatim were gone. I sank slowly in the cold and the dark, while the Sybil’s face floated before me and grew brighter until the darkness was dispelled and my eyes were dazzled.

“This time, you did well to call on me,” she said.

* * * *

I awoke on a bed. As soon as I realized that it was a bed, I lay still with my eyes closed, deliberately dismissing from my mind any thought that this was my familiar bed back home, that my adventures had been no more than a prolonged, horrible dream.

I knew it was not so, and my body knew it, from the many wounds where the evatim had held me. And I was nearly naked, my clothing in tatters.

But I still held my father’s sword. I moved my right arm stiffly, and scraped the blade along hard wood.

This bed was not my bed. It was made of rough boards and covered not with sheets but with sand.

I started to sit up, eyes still closed, and gentle hands took my by the bare shoulders. The hands were soft and warm.

I was dizzy then. The sword slipped from my grasp. I opened my eyes, but couldn’t focus. There was only a blur.

Warm water was being poured over my back. My wounds stung. I let out a cry and fell forward and found myself awkwardly embracing some unknown person, my chin on his shoulder.

I could see, then, that I was in a room stranger than any I had ever imagined, a place once richly furnished but now a wreck, turned on its side like a huge box rolled over, its contents spilled everywhere. Stained glass windows hung open above me, dangling, ornately worked with designs of glowing fishes. Books and bottles lay in heaps amid fallen beams, plaster, and bricks. There was a splintered staircase that coiled out and ended in midair. An image of Surat-Kemad had been fixed to the floor and remained fixed, but now it stuck out horizontally into space. A lantern dangled sideways from the grey-green snout.

My host pushed me gently back onto the bed and I was staring into the face of a grey-bearded man. He squinted in the half-light, his face wrinkling. For a moment the look on his face was one of ineffable joy, but it faded into doubt, then bitter disappointment.

“No,” he said. “It is not so. Not yet…”

I reached up to touch him, to be sure he was real and alive, but he took my hand in his and pressed it down on my chest. Then he gave me my father’s sword, closing my fingers around the grip, and I lay there, the cold blade against my bare skin.

Then he said something completely astonishing.

“I thought you were my son.”

I sat up and this time sat steadily. I saw that I was indeed almost naked, my clothing completely shredded, and I was smeared with blood. Suddenly I felt weak again, but I caught hold of a bedpost with my free hand and remained upright.

I blurted, “But you are not my father—”

“Then we are agreed,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

Wind roared outside. The room swayed and creaked, the walls visibly shifting. More plaster, wood, and a sudden avalanche of human bones clattered around us, filling the air with dust. Tiles rained over my shoulders and back. The window overhead clacked back and forth.

I thought of the Sybil’s house. I looked to my companion with growing dread, but he merely shrugged.

“It’ll pass. Don’t worry.”

When all was once again still, I said, “I am Sekenre, son of Vashtem the sorcerer.”

He hissed and drew back.

“Then I fear you!”

“No,” I said. “I’m not a sorcerer myself.” I started to explain, but he waved his hand, bidding me to cease.

“You are a powerful sorcerer indeed. I can tell! I can tell!”

I concluded that the man was mad. What could be more natural, after all I had been through, than to meet someone who was mad? If he thought I was a sorcerer, there was no sense dissuading him.

I placed my father’s sword across my legs, then folded my arms across my chest, and directed toward him what I hoped was a stern gaze.

“Very well. I, a sorcerer, command you to explain yourself.”

He spread his hands and looked helpless. “Sorcerer, I don’t know where to begin—”

“Why did you think I was your son?”

He moved over to the broken statue of a bird and sat on the flat space where the head had once been. He did not answer my question, but sat still for several minutes. I thought he had forgotten me and had fallen into some sort of reverie. I stared up at the dangling window, then toyed with the sword in my lap.

At last he sighed and said, “What do you know of where you are, sorcerer and son of sorcerer?”

I told him something of my history, and he only sighed again and said that I was a mighty sorcerer for all I was yet an ignorant one.

“Then teach me,” I said.

“When your mother left you,” he said, “that was because she could not pass beyond Leshé, the realm of dreams. Because she had never been prepared for burial, she could not truly enter the land of the dead. There are four realms; you must understand this. Earth is the realm of Eshé, the world of living men. But our dreams arise from the mists of the river, from Leshé, where the country of sleep borders the country of death. We see unquiet ghosts in our dreams because they linger in Leshé, as your mother does. Beyond is Tashé, the true domain of the dead, where all dwell in the places the god has appointed for them.”

“And the fourth realm?”

“That is Akimshé—holiness. At the heart of the god, in the mind of the god, among the fiery fountains where even gods and worlds and the stars are born—that is Akimshé, holiness, which may not be described. Not even the greatest of the prophets, not even the sorcerers, not even the very gods may look on the final mystery of Akimshé.”

“But it’s still inside Surat-Kemad,” I said. “I don’t see how—”

“It is well that you do not understand. Not even Surat-Kemad understands. Not even he may look on it.”

I said very quickly, “I have to continue on my way. I have to find my father.”

And my companion said one more surprising thing.

“Yes, of course. I know him. He is a mighty lord here.”

“You—you—know him—?” I couldn’t say anything more. My thoughts were all a jumble.

“He dwells here in peculiar honor because he is a sorcerer,” the old man said, “but he must remain here, unique among the servants of Surat-Kemad, but a servant nonetheless.”

I got to my feet unsteadily. The remains of my trousers dangled. I wrapped them around my belt, trying to make myself at least decent, but there wasn’t much to work with. I slid the sword under the belt.

I stood there, breathing hard from the exertion, wincing as the effort stretched my lacerated sides.

“You must take me to my father,” I said.

“I can only show you the way.” He shook his head sadly.

“Where?”

He pointed up, to the open window.

“There?”

“Yes,” he said. “That way.”

“But—” I walked across the room to a door now sideways in the wall, and opened it, lowering the door against the wall. I stared through at a dense sideways forest, the forest floor rising vertically to one side, the trees horizontal. There was a glowing mist among the trees, like fog at sunrise before it melts away. Brilliantly-plumed birds cawed and fluttered in the branches. Warm, damp air blew against my face and chest.

The gray-bearded man put his hand on my shoulder and led me away.

“No,” he said. “You will never find your father through that door.” He pointed to the ceiling again. “That way.”

I started to climb, clumsly, my muscles aching. My right palm was numb where the guardian-serpent’s lips had touched me.

I caught hold of the image of the god, hooking an arm over it. Then pulled myself up and sat there astride Surat-Kemad, my feet dangling.

“You never answered my question. Why did you think I was your son?”

“It is a very old sorrow.”

I didn’t command him. “Can you…tell me?”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and gazed up at me. “I was called Aukin, son of Nevat. I dwelt far beyond any land you ever knew, beyond the mouth of the Great River and across the sea among the people you would call barbarians. I had a wife. I loved her very much. Is that a surprising thing, even for a barbarian? No, it is not. When she died bearing my first son, and my son too was dead in her womb, my grief was without bounds. The gods of my homeland could not comfort me, for they are harsh spirits of the forest and of the hills, and they do not deal in comfort. Therefore I came into your country, first to the City of the Delta, where I prayed long before the image of Bel-Hemad and gave the priests much gold. But he did not answer me, and when I ran out of money, the priests sent me away. So I wandered all along the Great River, in the forests, on the plains, among the marshes. I tarried with holy men in the high mountains. From them I learned to dream. They thought they were teaching me contentment, but no, I clung to my bold scheme. It was this: I would be the mightiest dreamer of all and travel beyond Leshé to the lake of Tashé and farther, and I would find my son who had tried but failed to enter the world, and I would bring him back with me. The dead have been truly reclaimed by the Devouring God, so there is no hope for my wife, but the unborn, I thought—I still think—perhaps will not be missed. So far I have succeeded only with the first part of my plan. I am here. But I have not found my son. When I saw you, alive, here, I had hope again, just briefly.”

“This is the Sybil’s doing,” I said.

“Yes, I can tell that it is, by the mark on you.”

“The mark on me?”

He got up, rummaged among the debris, and handed me a broken piece of mirrored glass.

“Didn’t you know?” he said softly.

I looked at my reflection. The spot on my forehead where the Sybil had kissed me was glowing as brightly as had the eyes of the evatim.

I handed the glass back to him, and it was then that I noticed that my hands, too, gave off a faint light where my mother had touched them at the very end. Where the guardian-serpent’s lips had touched me when it took the coins, the skin was seared and healed into a smooth white scar.

I sat still, staring at my hands.

“If I really am a sorcerer,” I said, “I’ll try to help you. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

He offered me a cup. “Here, drink this.”

“But I can’t. If I drink anything here, I’ll—”

The old man sighed. “You are still an ignorant sorcerer. This water is from Leshé, from the river where it is filled with dreams. It will give you many visions. It will truly open your eyes, but it will not bind you to the dead. The waters of Tashé will do that, but not those of Leshé.”

“Do I need to see visions?”

“I think you do, to get where you’re going.”

“This is the Sybil’s doing again,” I said.

“Yes, it is. Drink.”

I drank. The water was very cold and, surprisingly, sweet. My whole body trembled with it. Only in the aftertaste was it bitter.

“Now go,” said Aukin, son of Nevat, who had lost his own son.

I stood up, balancing myself precariously on the image of the god, and caught hold of the window-ledge, then heaved myself up. For a moment I dangled there, looking down at the old man. He waved me on. I heaved again and felt a blast of hot wind against my face and chest, and sand stung me, as if I had crawled out into a sandstorm.

Then I was falling, not back into the room, but down, away from the window as directions somehow reversed. The window receded above me and was gone as I tumbled head over heels through hot, blinding, blowing sand.

Visions came to me:

As I fell, I saw the whole of Tashé spread out before me. I saw that each dead person there dwelt in a little space formed out of some memory from life, either a pleasant one, or, if some guilty memory tormented him, an endless terror. So the domain of Tashé was an incongruous tangle, a jumbled mass like the inside of the Sybil’s house.

And as I fell, I was in many places at once. I walked on soft moss to the edge of a pool, deep in a forest suffused with golden light. Three young girls sat by the pool, washing their hair. A young man, scarcely older than myself, sat by them, strumming on a lyre. All around them, the forest seemed to go on forever. Pale white fishes drifted through the air among the trees.

Then I took one step back from the pool, and the forest was gone.

I ran beneath the pale stars over an endless expanse of bricks so hot that they burned my feet. Bricks stretched glowing to the black horizon. I wept with the pain and began to stagger. It was all I could do not to sit down. Smoke and flame hissed out of fissures. Still I ran on, gasping for breath, streaked with soot and sweat, until I came to a window set horizontally in the ground, in the bricks as if in a wall. The window was open. A curtain blew straight up at me on a searing gust. Still, somehow, I had to look.

I swayed dangerously, then dropped to my hands and knees, screaming aloud at the new pain. I crept to the edge, peered in, and beheld a king and his courtiers below me, all sitting solemnly at a banquet table. Yet there was no feast before them, and each face was contorted in unimaginable agony. Their bodies and clothing were transparent, and I could see that the hearts of these men and women were white hot, like iron in a forge.

And again, I saw a girl in a pleasantly lit room, singing and spinning forever. A man sat at her feet, carving a piece of ivory into a form that was somehow infinitely ornate and beautiful but never complete.

And I lay, naked as I was, in a frigid stream amid snowbanks. A blizzard made the sky featureless white.

And crowds babbled in a marketplace; and I was alone in endless, silent halls thick with dust; and I walked on water to a ruined tower where men in white robes and silver masks awaited my coming; and a resplendent pirate paced back and forth endlessly on a single deck suspended in the middle of the air. He looked up, startled, as I plummeted by.

And I saw into memories, into the lives of all who dwelt in that land of Tashé, and I knew what it meant to be a king, and a slave, and in love, and a murderer, and I knew what it was to be old and remember all these things vaguely, as in a fading dream.

And I found my sister, Hamakina.

I fell amid swirling, stinging sand, and suddenly the sand became millions of birds, flapping their soft wings against me to hold me up. All these birds had my sister’s face, and they spoke with my sister’s voice.

“Sekenre, I am here.”

“Where?”

“Brother, you have come for me.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Brother, it is too late.”

I wasn’t falling anymore, but lay choking in a heap of cold, soft ashes. I sat up, spitting out ash, trying to wipe ash from my eyes.

In time, tears and spittle gave me enough moisture to clean my face, and I could see. I was in a garden of ash. Fading into the distance in all directions, white, bare trees stood in neat rows, leafless, yet heavy with round, white fruit. Ash rained from the sky, the ash, the sky, and the earth all featureless gray, until I could not tell where earth and sky met.

I stood up amid dead flowers with stalks like winter reeds—huge, yet delicately preserved in every colorless detail.

The ash fell heavily enough that I could feel it striking my shoulders in clumps. I was coated with it, until I too seemed a part of this place. I held my hands over my face, struggling to breathe and to see, while making my way along a path amid sticks that might have been the remains of hedges, the ash cool and soft and knee-deep.

The overwelming smell in the air, the odor of the ash, was intensely sweet, unpleasantly so, strong enough that I felt faint. But I knew I could not stop here, could not rest, and I took one step, and the next, and the next…

In an open place, which might have been the center of the garden, a wooden shelter stood half-buried amid drifts, a domed roof atop squat pillars. The roof was shaped into a wide-mouthed, staring face, the mouth already clogged as if the thing were vomiting gray powder.

Hamakina sat waiting for me there, on a bench beneath that strange roof. She too was barefoot and in rags, plastered with ash. But her cheeks were newly streaked with tears.

“Sekenre…”

“I’ve come to take you back,” I said gently.

“I can’t go. Father…tricked me. He told me to eat the fruit, and I—”

I waved a hand toward one of the white trees.

“This?”

“It didn’t look like this then. The trees were green. The fruit was wonderful. It smelled wonderful. The colors were…shining, changing all the time, like oil on water when the sun touches it. Father told me to, and he was angry, and I was afraid, so I ate…and it tasted dead, and then suddenly everything was like you see it now.”

“Father did this?”

“He said it was part of his plan all along. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said.”

“Where is he?”

I drew my sword, clutching it tightly, furious and at the same time aware of how ridiculous and helpless I must have seemed. But it was my sword now, no longer my father’s, given to me by the Sybil for a specific purpose—

“Sekenre, what will you do?”

“Something. Whatever I have to.”

She took me by the hand. Her touch was cold. “Come on.”

I don’t know how long we walked through the ash garden. There was no way to measure time or distance or direction. But Hamakina seemed to know for certain where we were going.

Then the garden was gone and it seemed I was back in the cramped, swaying darkness of the Sybil’s house again. I looked around for her luminous face, expectant, but my sister led me without any hesitation across a rope bridge above an abyss, while vast leviathans with idiot, human faces swam up out of a sea of guttering stars, splashing pale foam, each creature opening its mouth to display rotting teeth and a mirrored ball held between them. I gazed down through the swinging, twisting ropes and saw myself reflected there on the curving glass.

Somehow Hamakina was no longer with me, but far away, down below, inside each mirrored sphere, and I saw her running ahead of me across featureless sand beneath a sand-colored sky. Then each monster sank down in turn and she vanished, and another rose, its jaws agape, and I saw her again.

There were black stars in the sky above Hamakina now, and she ran across the sand beneath them, a gray speck against the dead sky, receding into the black points which were the stars.

And each leviathan sank down and another rose to give me a glimpse of her, and from out of the abyss I caught snatches of a song she sang as she ran. Her voice was still her own, but older, filled with pain, and a little mad.

“When I am in the darkness gone,

and you’re still in the light,

come lie each day upon my grave;

I’ll lie with you each night.

Come bring me gifts of fruit and wine.

Bring them from the meadow.

I’ll bring dust and ash and clay;

I’ll bring gifts of shadow.”

Without any transition I could sense, I was suddenly on that endless expanse of sand beneath the black stars, and I followed her voice over the low dunes toward the horizon and a black shape that huddled there.

At first I thought it was one of the stars fallen from the sky, but as we neared it the thing resolved itself, and I slowed to a terrified walk when I saw the pointed roofs and the windows like eyes and the familiar dock beneath the house, now resting on the sand.

My father’s house—no, my house—stood on its stilts like a huge, frozen spider. There was no river, no Reedland at all, as if the whole world had been wiped clean but for this one jumble of ancient wood.

When I reached the dock, Hamakina was waiting for me at the base of the ladder.

She turned her head upward.

“He is there.”

“Why did he do all this to you and to Mother?” I said. I held onto the sword and onto the ladder, gripping hard, trembling more with sorrow than with fear or even anger.

Her reply startled me far more than anything the dreamer Aukin had said. Once more her voice was older, almost harsh.

“Why did he do all this to you, Sekenre?”

I shook my head and started climbing. As I did the ladder shivered, as if it were alive and felt my touch.

And my father’s voice called out from the house, thundering:

“Sekenre, I ask you again. Do you still love me?”

I said nothing and kept on climbing. The trapdoor at the top was barred from the inside.

“I want you to love me still,” he said. “I only wanted what was best for you. Now I want you to go back. After all you have done against my wishes, it is still possible. Go back. Remember me as I was. Live your life. That is all.”

I pounded on the trapdoor with the pommel of my sword. Now the whole house shivered and suddenly burst into white, colorless flame, washing over me, blinding me, roaring in my ears.

I let out a yell and jumped, barely clearing the dock below, landing face-down in the sand.

I sat up, sputtering, still clutching the sword. The house was not harmed by the fire, but the ladder smoldered and fell as I watched.

I slid the sword under my belt again and started climbing one of the wooden stilts. Once more the white flames washed over me, but they gave no heat, and I ignored them.

“Father,” I said. “I am coming. Let me in.”

I reached the porch outside my own room. I was standing in front of the very window through which Hamakina had been carried away.

All the windows and doors were barred against me, and flickering with white flames.

I thought of calling on the Sybil. It would be my third and last opportunity. Then, if I ever did so again—what? Somehow she would claim me.

No, it was not time for that.

“Father,” I said, “if you love me as much as you say, open up.”

“You are a disobedient son.”

“I shall have to disobey you further.”

And once more I began to weep as I stood there, as I closed my hands together and opened them again. Father had beaten me once for attempting this act. Then I had gotten no results. Now I did, and it was as easy as breathing.

Cold blue flames danced on my outstretched palms. I reached up with my burning hands and parted the white fire like a curtain. It flickered and went out. I pressed my palms against the shuttered window. Blue flames streamed from between my fingers. The wood smoked, blackened, and fell inward, giving way so suddenly that I stumbled forward, almost falling into the room.

I climbed over the windowsill and stood there, amazed. The most fantastic thing of all was that I was truly in the house where I had grown up, in the room Mother, Hamakina, and I had shared, and in which I had remained alone for half a night at the very end waiting desperately for the dawn. I saw where I had once carved my initials into the back of a chair. My clothes lay heaped over the edge of an open trunk. My books were on a shelf in the far corner, and a page of papyrus, one of my own illumination projects, was still in place on the desk, with pens and brushes and bottles of ink and paint all where I had left them. Hamakina’s doll lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. One of Mother’s hevats, a golden bird, hung from the ceiling, silent and motionless.

More than anything else I wanted to just lie down in that bed, then rise in the morning, get dressed, and resume work at my desk, as if nothing had ever happened.

I think that was my father’s last offer to me. He was shaping my thoughts.

I walked out of the room, the floorboards creaking. I knocked on his workroom door. It, too, was locked.

Father spoke from within. He sounded weary.

“Sekenre, what do you want?”

It was a completely astonishing question. All I could say was, “I want in.”

“No,” he said after a long pause. “What do you truly want, as my son, for yourself?”

“I don’t know anymore.” I drew my sword once more, and pounded on the door with the pommel.

“I think you do. You want to grow to be an ordinary man, to live in the city, to have a wife and family, to be free of ghosts and shadows and sorcery—on this we are agreed. I want that for you too. It is very important.”

“Father, I am not sure of anything. I don’t know how I feel.”

I kept on pounding.

“Then why are you still here?” he said.

“Because I have to be.”

“To become a sorcerer is a terrible thing,” he said. “It is worse than a disease, worse than any terror, like opening a door into nightmare that can never be closed again. You seek to know. You peer into darkness. There is a certain allure, what seems like unlimited power at first, then glory, then, if you truly delude yourself, vast wisdom. To become a sorcerer is to learn the secrets of all the worlds and of the gods. But sorcery burns you. It disfigures, changes, and the man who becomes a sorcerer is no longer the man he was before he became a sorcerer. He is hated and feared by all. He has countless enemies.”

“And you, Father? Do you have countless enemies?”

“My son, I have killed many people in my time, thousands—”

That, once more, astonished me into helplessness. I could only say, “But why?”

“A sorcerer must have knowledge, not merely to ward off his enemies, but to live. He hungers for more dark spells, more powers. You can only get so much from books. You need more. To truly become a sorcerer, one must kill another sorcerer, and another, and another, each time stealing what that other sorcerer possesses, which he, in turn, has stolen by murder. There would be few sorcerers left were it not for the temptations, which recruit new ones. Sorcery goes on and on, devouring.”

“Surely some magic can be used for good, Father.”

I stopped pounding. I looked down at my hands, where they had been marked, where the flames had arisen so effortlessly.

“Sorcery is not magic. Do not confuse the two. Magic comes from the gods. The magician is merely the instrument. Magic passes through him like breath through a reed pipe. Magic can heal. It can satisfy. It is like a candle in the darkness. Sorcery, however, resides in the sorcerer. It is like a blazing sun.”

“I don’t want to be a sorcerer, Father. Truly. I have…other plans.”

Now, I think, there was genuine sadness in his voice.

“Beloved Sekenre, my only son, you have looked upon the evatim and been marked by them. Throughout your life you will be scarred from their touch. You have conversed with the Sybil and you bear her mark also. You have journeyed among the ghosts, in the company of a corpse, through the realm of Leshé, the place of dreams. You have drunk of the waters of vision and have seen all that is in Tashé, the land of death. And, at the last, you burned your way into this house with flames summoned from your hands. Now I ask you…are these the deeds of a calligrapher?”

“No,” I said weakly, sobbing. All my resolve drained away. I let the sword drop to the floor and I slid down, my back to the door, and sat there. “No,” I whispered. “I just wanted to get Hamakina back.”

“Then you are a disappointment to me, son. You are a fool,” he said with sudden sharpness. “She does not matter.”

“But she is your child too. Didn’t you love her also? No, you never did. Why? You owe me that much, Father. You have to tell me why…about a lot of things.”

He stirred within the room. Metal clinked. But he did not come to the door or touch the bolt. There was a long silence. I could see my mother’s hevat, the golden bird, through the open doorway of my own room, and I stared at it with a kind of distracted intensity, as if I could discern all the answers to all my questions in the intricacies of its design.

I felt cold. I clutched my shoulders hard, shivering. The slashes the evatim had made in my sides and back pained me again.

After a while, Father resumed speaking.

“Sekenre, how old do you think I was when I married your mother?”

“I—I—”

“I was three hundred and forty-nine years old, my son. I had been a sorcerer for a long time by then. I had wandered through many lands, fleeing death, consumed by the contagion of sorcery, slaughtering my enemies, raging in my madness against the gods, whom I considered to be at best my equals. But I had a lucid interval. I remembered what I had been, long before. I had been…a man. So I pretended I was one again. I married your mother. I saw in you…all my hopes for what I had once been. In you, that ordinary man lived again. If I could cling to that hope, I too, in a small way, would remain human. So you were special. I loved you.”

“But Hamakina—”

“—is mere baggage, a receptacle and nothing more. When I felt the weight of my death on me at last, when I could no longer hold off my enemies, I planted the seed of Hamakina in her mother’s womb, and I raised her as a prize specimen, for a specific purpose. I brought her here to contain my death. The seed of her was something wrought in my laboratory. I placed her inside her mother with a metal tube, while her mother lay in a drugged sleep. So, you see, her life did not come from the River, from the dreams of Surat-Kemad, but from me. I offered this new life to the Devouring God in exchange for my own. It is a bottle, filled with my own death. So I am still a sorcerer, and a great lord in the land of the dead, because I am neither truly living nor truly dead. I am not the slave of Surat-Kemad, but his ally. And so, my son, your father has outwitted all his enemies, evaded all dangers. He alone is not wholly consumed by sorcery. He continues. There is a certain beauty to the scheme, you must admit—”

I rose to my feet, numb beyond all sorrow now. I picked up the sword.

“Sekenre,” Father said, “now that I have explained everything—you were right; I did owe you an explanation—you must go away. Save yourself. Be what I wanted to be. You are a good boy. When I was your age, I too was good. I only wanted to do what was right. But I changed. If you go now, you can remain as you are—”

“No, Father. I, too, have changed.”

He screamed then, not out of fear, but despair. I stood before the door, sword under one arm while I folded my hands together, then opened them.

Once more, it was as easy as breathing.

The flames leapt from my hands, red and orange this time. They touched the door, spreading over it. I heard the metal bolt on the inside fall to the floor. The door swung open.

At first my eyes could not focus. There was only darkness. Then faint stars appeared, then an endless black plain of swirling sand. I saw hundreds of naked men and women dangling from the sky on metal chains, turning slowly in the wind, mutilated, their faces contorted with the idiocy of hate.

The darkness faded. The stars were gone. Father’s room was as it had been before the priests had cleaned it out. All the books were there, the bottles, the shelves of jars, the charts, the strange shapes muttering in jars.

He lay on his couch dressed in his sorcerer’s robe, as I had last seen him, his eyes gouged out, sockets covered with golden coins.

He sat up. The coins fell into his lap. Fire burned within his eye-sockets, white-hot, like molten iron.

And he said to me, “This is your last warning, Sekenre. Your very last.”

“If you are so powerful, Father, where is your power now? You have not resisted me, not really. You only give me…warnings.”

“What would I have to do then, my son?” he said.

“You would have to kill me. It is too late for anything else.”

His voice began to fade, to become garbled, to disintegrate into a series of hisses and grunts. I could barely make out his words.

“Now all my preparations are undone. You disobeyed me to the last. You did not heed my many warnings, sorcerer, son of sorcerer—”

He slid off the couch onto the floor, wriggling toward me on all fours, his whole body swaying from side to side, his terrible eyes blazing.

I almost called on the Sybil then. I wanted to ask simply, What do I do now? What now?

But I didn’t. In the end, I alone had to decide what was right, the correct action. Anything I did would please the Sybil. She would weave it into the pattern. Surat-Kemad did not care—

“My son…” The words seemed to come from deep within him, like a wind from out of a tunnel. “To the very end I have loved you, and it has not been enough.”

He opened his huge, hideously elongated mouth. His teeth were like little knives.

At that final moment, I did not fear him, nor hate him, nor did I sorrow. I felt only a hollow, grinding sense of duty.

“No, it was not enough, Father.”

I struck him with the sword. His head came off with a single blow. My arm completed the motion almost before I was aware of it.

It was as easy as breathing.

Blood like molten iron spread at my feet. I stepped back. The floorboards burned.

“You are not my father.” I said softly. “You cannot have been my father.”

But I knew that he had been, all the way to the end.

I knelt beside him, then put my arms around his shoulders and lay with my head on his rough, malformed back. I wept long and hard and bitterly.

And as I did, dreams came to me, thoughts, visions, flashes of memories which were not my own, and terrible understanding, the culmination of long study and of longer experience. My mind filled. I knew a thousand deaths and how they had been inflicted, how a single gem of knowledge or power was wrested from each. I knew what every instrument in this room was for, the contents of all the books and charts, and what was in each of those jars and how it could be compelled to speak.

For I had killed a sorcerer, and if you kill a sorcerer you become all that he was.

This was my inheritance from my father.

* * * *

In the dawn, Hamakina and I buried our father in the sand beneath the house. The black stars were gone. The sky was dark, but it was the familiar sky of Eshé, the Earth of the living. Yet the world was still empty, and we dug in the sand with our hands. When we had made a shallow grave, we rolled him into it, placing his head between his feet in the way a sorcerer must be buried. For a time, Mother was with us. She crawled into the grave with him and we covered them both up.

The sky lightened into purple, then azure. Then water flowed beneath the dock and I watched the first birds rise from among the reeds. Hamakina stood among the reeds for a little while, gazing back at me. Then she was gone.

Suddenly I began to shake almost uncontrollably, but merely from cold this time. Though it was early summer, the night’s chill lingered, and I was almost naked. I climbed up into the house by means of a rope ladder I’d dropped through the trapdoor and put on trousers, a heavy shirt, and a cloak.

Later, when I came down again with a jug to get water for washing, I saw a man in a white robe and a silver mask walking toward me across the water. I stood up and waited. He stopped a distance off, but I could hear what he said clearly enough.

At first he spoke with my father’s voice.

“I wanted to tell you the rest of the story of the Heron Boy. There is no ending to it, I fear. It just…continues. He was not a heron and he was not a boy either, but he looked like a boy. So he dwelt among men pretending to be one of them, yet confiding his secret to those who loved him. Still, he did not belong. He never could. He lived out his days as an impostor. But he had help, because those he confided in did love him. Let me confide in you, then. Sekenre, when a boy becomes a man his father gives him a new name which is known only between the two of them, until the son gives it to his own son in turn. Therefore take the name your father had, which is Heron.”

And he spoke with the voice of the Sybil.

“Sekenre, you are marked with my mark because you are my instrument. All men know that out of the tangle of the world I divine the secrets of their lives. But do they also know that out of the tangle of their lives I divine the secrets of the world? That I cast them about like bones, like marbles, and read the patterns as they fall? I think not.”

And, finally, he spoke with the voice of Surat-Kemad, god of death and of the river, and the thunder was his voice; and he took off the mask and revealed his terrible face, and his jaws gaped wide; and the numberless, fading stars were his teeth; and the sky and the Earth were his mouth; and the river disgorged itself from his belly; and his great ribs were the pillars of the world.

He spoke to me in the language of the gods, of Akimshé, the burning holiness at the heart of the universe, and he named the gods yet unborn, and he spoke of kings and of nations and of worlds, of things past and things which are to come.

Then he was gone. The city spread before me now. I saw the foreign ships at anchor in the river, and the bright banners waving in the morning breeze.

I took off the robe and sat on the dock, washing. A boatman drifted by and waved, but then he realized who I was, made a sign against evil, and paddled away frantically.

His fear was so trivial it was somehow incredibly funny.

I fell back on the deck, hysterical with laughter, then lay there. Sunlight slanted under the house. The air was warm and felt good.

And I heard my father whisper from his grave, gently, “My son, if you can become more than a sorcerer, I will not fear for you.”

“Yes, Father. I shall.”

Then I folded my hands, and slowly opened them, and the fire that I held cupped there was perfect and pale and still, like a candle’s flame on a breezeless summer night.