The Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer
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