Night's Master (21 page)

So Qebba spoke a spell of opening, and the golden fruit broke in two
pieces, and from within them drifted a gauzy smoke.

Who would dare invite such a smoke? To some it might be healing, but to
others, bane. Breathed in at the nostrils, it seemed to fill the eyes and ears
and brain. To a man who knew many things, it would reveal many more, to a man
who knew little it would reveal too much. Its name was self-knowledge.

Qebba breathed in this potion and staggered up, dropping the two pieces
of the broken fruit, clutching at his skull. He had remembered everything—his
past, his name, his youth, his love, his loss, his direful sojourn in the hills
of rock—and he had reasoned that a hundred years were gone, that all he cared
for had passed from the earth. He was alone, and cheated. He had borne the
brunt of supernatural malice, without guilt. Men had mocked and reviled him,
beaten, burned and cursed him. And now, even here, one sought to make a dolt of
him. He had put aside Kaschak’s justice, mislayed how he had reverenced him and
felt calm in his presence as a frightened child found by its father. He thought
simply that he had been duped once more. He knew himself, and he was brimmed
with anger, hatred and a thirst to inflict hurt upon the world, as the world
and its denizens had hurt him, poor Qebba, who would not own his former name
even though he recalled it at last, poor Qebba weeping in the magician’s
garden.

The magician had come. His shadow fell slanting from the light of the
floating lamps across the back of Qebba—one more burden that he would not bear.

Qebba started up, throwing off the shadow.

“You sought to cheat me,” Qebba cried. “You have made me a worm, and
laughed at me behind your sleeve. Once too often you mocked my foolishness.
See, I have discovered it all. I am clever; you were careless to teach me so
well. I am a magician too.”

The magician Kaschak said a word that should have bound Qebba more
tightly than rope, but Qebba writhed and spoke another word, and the spell
slipped aside. Then Kaschak paled, and gnawed upon the large ruby in his ring.
For sure, Qebba had learned excellently. Kaschak saw, belatedly, that he had
been too certain the beast was tame.

“Come,” said Kaschak in an easy winning tone, “your prowess pleases me.
You were my servant, but shall be my brother. I saved you from a living death,
do not be rash. This may turn out for the best.”

But Qebba grimaced, showing his teeth. There was yet some wolf in him.

“One deceived me before. He came by night, as you do, but him I did not
see. I do not want the lying kindness and the gifts of men, nor of other than
men. I am armed now.” And he turned and strode away across the garden.

At that Kaschak was afraid, as he had not been afraid for a score of
years. And, summoning his power, Kaschak flung a thunderbolt after his rogue
apprentice, to slay him. But the smoke of self-knowledge had greatly heightened
Qebba’s abilities. He heard the thunderbolt and, spinning about, he flung one
of his own, so the two met in the air and exploded with a blue flash. Qebba
laughed. “Now I know you fear me,” said he, and he ran from the garden.

A single lion stood by the cliff gate, lashing with its tail and
snarling. Qebba struck the lion dead with a shining lance he fashioned of air,
and passed through the gate and on to the gravel beach. Despite his new-found
skill, he had no power over the ocean, for the seas were of another kingdom
than the earth, and had their own rulers and their own laws. But Qebba took
from his belt a shaving of wood he had picked up, and tore a scrap of cloth
from his sleeve, and said the applicable words, and threw them on the water. The
cloth and the wood became a little ship and Qebba stepped into it and sailed
away from the island.

And Kaschak watched him go in the magic window behind the lacquer doors,
and his heart was full of anger and unquiet.

Qebba sailed
seven days until he came on a rock in the sea, about the length of four men
lying head to heel, and about the breadth of three men in the same attitude.
Here, because beauty and comfort were forever soured for him, Qebba set up his
home, sheltered by the point of the rock and certain arrangements of stone and
cloth. For food he gnawed the sea wrack that grew there and fish that the tides
washed up. When he thirsted he made rain fall from the sky into his cupped
hands.

Then began a grim and deadly battle of two intent wills and two inventive
minds. The strength of Kaschak lay in his mage-craft, but Qebba’s ultimate
strength lay in his unremitting, senseless, steely hate. As a man struck by
misfortune will blindly turn and strike a chair or some other object to hand,
so Qebba, unable to strike back across the years at what had truly injured him,
now struck at his former master.

At first, Kaschak sought only to defend himself. The acts of Qebba were
childish yet unpleasant. It rained black frogs upon Kaschak’s garden, or red
mud; tornadoes smashed against the cliffs, the sky grew dark from swarms of
insects, flocks of ravenous predatory birds. But all these things Kaschak
turned aside and made harmless, and nothing he sent back against his tormentor.
Then there came a plague in the garden, an invisible worm that ate the pink
willow trees from within, blighted the exquisite roses, clotted the wine pools
with disgusting scum. Kaschak restored his garden and drove out the invisible
worm. He put seals and safeguards next over every inch of ground. Not a mote of
dust could enter now. Kaschak sat before the magic window in his workroom, and
he found in it the island where Qebba lay brooding. The face of Qebba had
become greenish with hate, and his eyes had sunk back in hollows like two malevolent
animals into their caves. His teeth were yellow and sharp from gnawing seaweed
and the bones of fish, yellow and sharp as when he had had the head of a wolf.
One of his legs too had become paralyzed, from lack of exercise on the narrow
isle and the dank weather. And he dragged the leg while he moved, as once he
had dragged the lizard’s tail. But his heart, like the heart of the boar, was
tough and lasting.

Kaschak tried many ways to be rid of his enemy, He sent storms to
overwhelm the rock, but Qebba thrust them back. Kaschak sent a phantom woman
who bared her loins and shook out her ruddy hair, but all lusts but one were
dead in Qebba; he flung stones till she vanished. Kaschak sent a levin-bolt of
enormous magnitude, which split the toy island in two. But Qebba reappeared on
the larger part of it, grinning.

The two magicians had reached an impasse. Kaschak spoke to Qebba through
the magic window: “Let us cease this wrangling. What do you want from me?”

“Your life,” said Qebba. His sunken eyes gleamed with his hate. “Your
life and the life of the world. My powers are expanding. I will see to it. None
shall be happy, for I was never happy. None shall live, for I never had a
chance at life. None shall love, save in the grave, for that is where my lover
couches.”

Then Kaschak saw it was no use. Kaschak was angry, but his anger was not
like the hating grinning anger of Qebba. Kaschak’s anger was leaden, and he was
also afraid.

Kaschak called four gales, and from the four hems of the four vast
garments of them, he made a supernatural net of interwoven boiling strands.
Next, Kaschak, by his arts, asked a parley with one of the lords of the sea.
How the lord came is not recorded, but perhaps he was blue-skinned and his hair
was a stream of salt water, and his company like him, and perhaps they rode
chariots of coral drawn by teams of the huge black and white sharks, the
killers of men. Maybe their eyes were circles of gold about a horizontal blue
pupil, as with certain creatures of the deep, and maybe they grew impatient,
finding the air of earth stifled them, and their slender scaled fingers, bright
with jewels spilled from drowned human ships, fidgeted with the chains of
little glass bowls in which gemmy fish, their pet canaries, flitted and sang in
voices only the sea-folk could hear.

At any rate, a bargain was struck. A ring of oceanic magic was made to
surround Qebba’s minuscule rock, and no escape or sending could get by it, as
it could not get by the net of gales aloft. And in return for this service,
Kaschak would throw a fine jewel into the sea each year, on a certain day. And
as long as Kaschak kept his part of the bargain, the sea lord would keep his.

Thus, for the second time in his wretched existence, Qebba was
imprisoned. His spells were impotent, his rage turned in upon itself.

To begin with, he ranted and screamed at the insubstantial yet impervious
walls of the trap, but the scream of the gales was louder. He also tried to
make a bargain with the ocean’s people, but in that he had no hope, having no resources,
nothing to offer, and the ocean stayed dumb. At last he was weary and lay down
on his face on the slimy rock among the sea wrack, and did not move again.

Only his brain worked. It gnawed inward, like a rat. His brain was all
hate. Hate devoured him. It reached his heart and soul. His hate had nowhere to
travel now, it could not escape. So, like any large force contained, it began
to ferment, to seethe.

Time passed. Kaschak lived to a prodigious age. He performed many
wonders, and was much esteemed. And every year, on a certain day, he would cast
a jewel into the sea. He never forgot. Then one night, in his twentieth decade,
Kaschak smiled, bored at length with living, and died. And that year no jewel
was sent to the sea lord, and the sea lord accepted the pact as finished, and
the magic fence about Qebba’s rock dispersed.

But surely Qebba had not lived so long, devoid of nourishment, of space,
of activity. The pseudo immortality, the life the monster’s skin had lent him,
had been amputated with the skin itself. No, Qebba could not live still, and
did not. Indeed, his very flesh had vanished from the rock, his bones had even
blended with it, were no more.

Yet something remained, something which would not die. The thing which
had seethed, bubbled and intensified here in its prison: Qebba’s unmitigated,
deathless, starving hate.

Which could now get free.

5. A Ship
with Wings

Flat or
round, there has always been hate in the world.

The hate of Qebba drifted from the rock and across the sea in the early
darkness of night. It had as yet no form, but it had a faint smell, as of metal
corroding in acid. It needed food, this entity, till now it had fed upon
itself. But the earth was a granary, well stocked, the doors open.

Rough weather began. A hurricane rent the sky and spooned up the ocean.
Qebba’s Hate came by a foundered vessel. Her sails were torn like the sky, and
her lower deck awash. In her belly her rowers shrieked and cursed in their
shackles, above, a little boat was being lowered, and men were fighting for a
place in it, and as soon as one had slain another, a third man came and slew
him. At this spot, the Hate of Qebba supped and dined, and a new strength
flooded into it.

Later, Hate drifted to shore. In a wood of pines, five robbers had caught
and were knifing a traveler. Presently they cheated each other of their shares
of the robbery, and fell to blows. Hate fed. In a town of many lamps, a husband
mounted his wife and took his rights of her; how she loathed him and wished him
in his tomb. In a yard, a woman whipped her child-slave; the slave lay huddled
on the cold stone and dreamed of gouging out her eyes as the whip sliced his
back with the vehemence of the woman’s fury. In a cheerful tavern, two poor men
plotted to murder a rich man, for they were envious of his wealth. In a tower,
a girl on a velvet bed stuck pins into the heart of a wax image of her lover
who had deserted her. Under a bridge, two youths fought for the favor of a
third, who laughed at and despised them. On the highway, a leper was beaten to
death.

Hate, fed, Hate feasted. Hate moved swiftly onward, and feasted again.

The world was wide, a great banquet-table. The dishes were various: hate
which slew, hot as fire, hate which whispered and spoke lies, cold as ice, hate
which merely hated, the strongest hate of all, the hate which, turned in upon
itself, gained power and resonance, hate as black as a pit. All these
delicacies the Hate of Qebba gorged upon. It grew vigorous, vital. It swelled
and burgeoned.

Soon it could itself, by a projection of its aura, inspire hatred on the
earth. Where it passed, adrift like a cloud, dislike altered to a wild gnashing
thing. The girl who had tired of her sister’s chat, seized a dagger and plunged
it in her breast, the servant who coveted his master’s goods bought poison. All
caught the sickness. Presently, the prince, enraged by petty grievances, made
war upon his brother’s land.

Then came a new era over the earth, the time of Hatred.

City marched against city, kingdom rose in arms against kingdom. The
little individual murders by man of man were followed swiftly by greater
murders, as nation tore out the throat of nation. Everywhere was blood and fire
and the clashing of steel. Everywhere the air was loud with lament and
maledictions.

The seed is very small; it will become a tree when nourished by good
soil. Qebba’s Hate had been also very small, but it had moved, a catalyst, in
the soil of mankind, absorbing, growing. Now the tree covered the world with
its shadow. It had taken many years, but years are of no consequence to such an
entity. While it could feed, it could not die, and there were rations in
plenty. Time was on its side.

And the works of Hate were not done. The earth itself, bearing these
struggles on her back, began to writhe and groan with malice. Her beautiful
places became battlefields, crows flapped on the corpse of her land among her
burned woods and among the ruins of each vast metropolis that had been her
jewel. Now the ground split with earthquake, mountains spewed up fire and the
seas boiled over like cauldrons.

By day the face of the sun was livid, and by night the moon was red.
Plague rose from the swamps in her robes of yellow and black, Famine walked
both behind and before, gnawing her own knuckles for hunger. Death was everywhere,
but maybe even he, who was another of those Lords of Darkness, even Death,
maybe, beheld this harvest with unease, his baskets being overloaded.

Men cried to their gods. In the morning they would slay each other; by
night, fresh from the battlefield, they raved before unreplying altars. So they
came to hate even the gods, and smashed their images and defiled their
sanctums. “There
are
no gods!” they cried. “Then who has done this thing
to us?” In the light of the riven mountains, on the shores of the wailing
oceans, they did not see the shadow cast on them, the shade of the tree of Hate
they had fed. “It is the worker of all evil,” a woman cried in one land, a man
in another, “the Master of Night, Bringer of Anguish, the Eagle-Winged, the
Unspeakable.
He
has done this.”

So, as towers fell, they would scream it; when the earth opened and
swallowed them down, they would choke out his name. They no longer feared him.
They had other things to fear.

“Azhrarn has done this to us. The Prince of Demons means to destroy the
world.”

He was
innocent. An irony that he, creator of black deeds, had had no hand in this,
save at its remotest beginning, unknowing.

He had been at some sport or game of the Underearth, had Azhrarn,
something that had kept him from the world a year or two, four hundred mortal
years or more. It was some beautiful boy, some fabulous woman, another Sivesh,
another Zorayas, or someone he had created for himself; like Ferazhin, or one
who had consented, unlike Bisuneh, and he, in his turn, had not tired of them,
down below ground in the wondrous city of Druhim Vanashta, where he must have
taken them. While he had lain with cool flesh, or walked beneath the black
trees of his garden, or dreamed some dream exclusive to a demon’s brain, a dream
too strange and of too great magnitude that it be guessed at—while he had done
that, Hate had chewed at the world, and the world begun to shrivel and to die.

The Demon Prince had caused illimitable pain and loss there, war and
sorrow, rage and death. The Vazdru, hearing the cry of humanity ring in the
bell-like psychic cavity of their inner ears—Azhrarn destroys us!—looked to see
their prince smiling. But Azhrarn never smiled. He strode between the jade
palaces and the iron; he mounted a horse of black oil and blue steam; he rode
through the three gates. And riding away from the earth’s center and its
volcanoes, he saw new volcanoes exploding their fire across the length and
breadth of earth, and where they did not burn, the cities were burning in their
stead. And he saw Plague go by, and Famine, and Death walking on the horizon.
The seas he saw too, in different places, drowning the land, and the broken
towers poking up, and the bloated corpses floating, and where the new land had
pushed from the waters he saw armies struggle ashore and begin again to fight
among the sea pools and the sea wrack. And above, the bloody moon gave
relentless light that he might see it all and miss nothing.

Azhrarn reined in the demon horse upon a jagged cliff top. He gazed to
east and west, to north and south, and the face of Azhrarn, it is truly said,
had become white. Long he looked, and long his pallor increased. A mortal man
could not grow so pale and live.

A memory had found Azhrarn, of the warning of Kazir, the blind poet. How,
when the Demon Lord had told him all he possessed and asked him if there were
anything he yet needed that he could not do without, the poet had quietly
answered him: “Mankind.”

And the cold song of Kazir had come back to him, which related how all
men had perished and the world was empty, and the sun rose and set on
emptiness. But then Azhrarn flew in the form of an eagle over the noiseless
cities, the sailless oceans, searching for men. But not one was left to fill
the days of the Demon with joy and wickedness, not one was left to whisper the
name of Azhrarn.

Cold fear had fallen then upon the heart of Azhrarn like winter snow.
Cold fear came now. Even the dark star cannot live without the sky to hold him;
there is no foothold in the bottomless abyss.

Yes, Azhrarn, Lord of Fear, was afraid. He foretold the death of
humanity, he observed Hate like a black moon rising in the sky, and read human
destruction in it. With such eyes as his, he could see the very shape of Hate,
which had no shape, and he smelled the smell of it, of acid eating at metal,
eating at the life of the world. And Azhrarn fled the earth, fled into his city
underground, into a deep room of his palace, and there he shuddered, locked in
and alone that none should witness his terror. Yes, terror; Azhrarn, Lord of
Terrors, terrified.

Terrified.

A silent
horror cloaked the demon city of Druhim Vanashta. No Vazdru mocked or sang,
there came no chord of harp nor ring of dice nor baying of hounds. The Eshva
wept, and did not know why they wept. By the black lake, the hammers of the
Drin were still, and the red forges sank to ashes.

Then Azhrarn appeared, his face like a handsome effigy cut from stone,
his eyes blazing. He summoned the Drin. He gave them a task. They were to build
for him a ship with wings, a flying ship, powerful enough to pierce the highest
sky and penetrate where neither mortals nor birds could go, the rare country of
the Upperearth, the domain of the gods themselves.

The Drin labored with fright in their murky little hearts. They took much
silver and white metal and a small portion of gold, the unloved stuff of
demons, and blue steel and red bronze. And as the Drin worked, the Vazdru
glided in and out of Azhrarn’s palace, and there they took his hands or fell on
their knees before him and urged him not to leave them. But Azhrarn put them
aside, and sat in stony speechlessness, tapping his ringed fingers upon an
ivory book, from impatience.

Presently, the ship was ready. The sides of it glinted and gleamed from
the many bands of metal there, blue and grey and yellow and red. It had a
canopy of smoke, and a silver sail woven of winds, and the tiller was the thigh
bone of a dragon. The wings of the ship were like the strong white wings of
swans, but the plumage of them was made from the demon flax that grew on the
margins of Sleep River, and steeped in the dreams of men.

Azhrarn came to the ship, and praised it, and the ugly Drin blushed and
simpered foolishly. Azhrarn entered the ship, and spoke to it and took the
tiller, and the ship rose through the three gates, through the vent of the one
quiet volcano left in the world, and the Vazdru shivered.

Up through the black and vulpine air of earth the ship thrust its way,
upward, till the land lay far below like seething pitch picked out by burning
lights of fire and wreck. The wind sail blew and turned. The ship passed the
congested moon that glared huge and awful in the dark. Through the roots of the
starry gardens the ship passed, through the world’s roof. Its wings made great
semi-circular beats. It flew where no ship of man had ever sailed or wayward
bird had ever flown, in at the wide, invisible, half-nonexistent gate of
Upperearth.

There was always light in Upperearth, undying light of enormous clarity,
like and unlike the constant illumination of the demon place. For the light of
Upperearth resembled that of a clear and icy winter dawn, though no sun shone,
and sky and land were all one.

A cold blue country was Upperearth, a cold blue which symbolized the
passionless celestial things that dwelt there.

There was no geography as such, simply this razor-edged blueness
everywhere, and in the far distance, a dim suggestion of knife-edged blue
mountains, capped with adamantine snow, though these mountains seemed to have
no bases, and indeed remained eternally distant and unreachable: even should
you walk towards them for seven years. Occasionally there might come in view
the isolated mansions of the gods themselves, each far removed from each. Such
structures bore no relation to the buildings of earth or to the palaces of
Druhim Vanashta. Rather they were like immense harps, or the strings of harps,
slender shafts of pure gold radiance that vibrated slightly in a soundless
music.

Near the invisible, half-nonexistent gateway, where the ship had come to
rest, stood the Sacred Well, from which might be drawn up draughts of
Immortality. But the Well was a paradox, no doubt pleasing to the gods, for
they themselves did not need to drink these waters, being already immortal,
while men, who craved such a drink, could never hope to reach the spot. (Once,
possibly, there had formed a tiny crack in this Well—which was made of
glass—through which a drop or two of the precious elixir might have spilled.
Or, time being as it was in Upperearth, possibly the tiny crack had yet to come
about.) Since the Well was made of glass, the water of Immortality was freely
to be seen in it. It was of a leaden grey, this water, perhaps a warning. Close
by, on a bench of thinnest platinum, sat two bowed grey-cloaked figures, the
Well’s Guardians.

Azhrarn stepped from the winged ship, and the Guardians raised their
heads at once. Neither had a face, only one huge swivelling and ever-attentive
eye, and they spoke from an unlikely area in their breasts.

“You may not drink,” said the first Guardian to Azhrarn, regarding him
with this pitiless fearsome eye.

“Indeed you may not,” said the other, regarding him also.

“I am not here to drink,” said Azhrarn. “Do you not know me?”

“It is futile to know anything,” said the first Guardian, “since all
things below pass, alter, decline and perish, and all things here above are
unchanging.”

“Humankind know me,” said Azhrarn.

“Humankind,” said the second Guardian. “What are they that we should be
interested in their knowledge?”

Azhrarn folded his cloak about him, and went by them. They, seeing he did
not mean to attempt drinking, bowed their heads again and appeared to sleep
beside the leaden water of Eternal Life.