The Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer
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