Nyateneri regarded him with a grave mock-frown. “That must indeed have been centuries ago. You insisted that I learn to make proper tea, just so, but you never would drink it. I nearly went mad trying to make tea that was at last fit for you.”
“By that time I had given up other things besides tea,” my friend replied very quietly. “By the time you came, I had long been occupied in making my lamisetha.” We gaped at him dumbly, and he smiled. “It is an old word, a wizards’ word. It means, more or less, ‘road of departure.’ If you are a wizard, nothing in your life is more important than how you die. Do you know why that is so? Nyateneri?” He might have been our teacher again, prodding and provoking us with riddles that seemed to have only one answer, and that one always wrong. “You used to be curious about that sort of thing, more than Lal ever was.” But Nyateneri shook his head silently.
My friend said, “A magician must die in peace. I am not talking about temporal peace with his neighbors or the local ruler, or of what most people call spiritual peace, meaning that he has performed all the proper observances of whatever gods he may have served. What I speak of is truly of the spirit—a drawing-in, a particular sitting still that requires great preparation and that a magician can only attain by means of a long, motionless journey. That is the lamisetha. As I said, it translates poorly.”
A knock sounded then, and I went to answer. I expected to see Karsh, but it was only Gatti Jinni, who had already begun backing away before I opened the door. He was notably afraid of both Lukassa and me, though he looked for excuses to attend loweringly on Nyateneri. He muttered, “Karsh. If the old man stays the night, more money.”
“He stays the night,” I said, “and longer, and in a better room than this. I will arrange it with Karsh. Meanwhile, send up bread and soup and wine for him, and not Dragon’s Daughter, either.” But Gatti Jinni had already scuttled off down the corridor. I turned back as Nyateneri was saying, “And yet you took me in. No holy calmness after that, certainly, but no question about it, not ever.”
My friend’s mouth twitched wryly. “Yes, well. It seems that I am easily distracted—you were hardly the first to beguile me from the arranging of my soul. But I determined at the time that you would definitely be the last; that this old lure, this old trap would have no further hold on me after you were gone on your way in the world. And it did not, and it does not now. I have kept my word to myself, as far as that goes.”
“Arshadin,” I said. The word seemed to squirm free of me, like a live thing.
“Arshadin.” When he spoke it, the name came out a sigh through cold, broken branches. “Arshadin became my son. Not of the body, but of the search, the voyage. Of the vanity, too, I am afraid. We do not fear death in the way that others do, we wizards, perhaps because we know transience rather better than most. And perhaps for that reason we hunger even more deeply to leave behind us some small suggestion of our passage. For some that may mean such achievements as appear to be commandings and shapings of the very earth itself, but for the rest of us it is nothing more than a handing on of knowledge to someone who at least understands how painfully it was come by and can be trusted not to let it slip away into darkness with us. But Arshadin. Arshadin.”
He stopped speaking and was silent for so long that, although his eyes were still open, I began to think that he had fallen asleep. He could do that when he chose, most often in the middle of conversations that were becoming more intense or revealing than he cared to deal with at the moment. Or it may have been pure devilment—I was never certain. And he was truly old at last now, terribly old, and terribly tired. Looking at him, just for that moment, I wished that I could sleep like that, sleep my way out of seeing him so. He promptly grinned at me, holding his ruined mouth up like a banner, or a flower, and went on as precisely as though he had never paused.
“I deserved Arshadin,” he said. “In every sense of the word. I was the greatest magician I ever knew—and mind you, I was prentice to Nikos and studied long with Am-Nemil, and later with Kirisinja herself. I asked less notice from the world than any of these, but I always knew that I deserved a true heir, that it was my right to be father to one wiser and mightier than I—one as different in kind from me as a bird is from the shards of its broken eggshell. And so I did, and so it came about, and I was given exactly what my pride and my foolishness deserved. I have no complaints.”
Nyateneri began, “I mean no disrespect—”
“Of course you do,” my friend said placidly. “You always did. Lal was a wild animal, but before that she had been raised to honor bards and poets and even the crankiest of old magicians. But you were always mannerly, even in complete despair, and yet there was never any decent respect in you. I attribute this to a lack of education and a youthful diet containing far too much tilgit.” But he took hold of Nyateneri’s left hand, where the bruise and the swelling hardly showed at all now, and held it briefly to his breast.
“Meaning no disrespect,” Nyateneri repeated, “all this praise of this Arshadin puzzles me somewhat. Neither Lal nor I have ever heard his name before now”—he glanced at me for confirmation and corrected himself—“rather, before Lukassa called it out of the air in that idiotic candyfloss tower of yours. And even there, he may have been the wizard who summoned—whatever he summoned— yet he was slain, and you survive. So how that makes Arshadin your master and the greatest of all magicians, neither of us can quite make out.”
My friend sighed. Nyateneri and I looked across him again, and this time neither of us was able to keep from smiling. We knew that particular rasping, hopeless sigh as we knew the reproachful murmur of our own blood in our eardrums: another thoughtless minute gone, another tick like the tock before—how many, how many, how many of those do you suppose you have? He always sighed like that to inform his students that their answers to his last question had shortened his life by a measurable degree and filled his few remaining days with quiet despair. It always worked on me, even after I knew better.
“Lukassa,” he said to her, “what happened to you when you died?” She looked back at him without fear, but with the sort of adoring transparent puzzlement that would have gotten our ears boxed even then, weak as he was. But now, he only petted her and asked, even more gently, “What happened to you, to Lukassa inside? Did you sleep? Did you sleep, as people say we do?”
He was nodding even before she shook her head. “Of course not. Wide awake and screaming, you were, just not breathing. Well, imagine—and I say this to you because you at least do not think you know everything about magic, unlike some—imagine what becomes of a magician in death. Most people are wide awake only now and then—on special occasions, as you might say. But a magician is wide awake all the time, on call for everything, which is why most people call him a magician. And he is never more so than at the moment of his own death.” He deigned to look around at Nyateneri and me now, that theatrical old fiend. “If his dying is unquiet, if he has not been allowed to make his lamisetha, oh, then his wide-awakeness may become something truly dreadful. There is a word for it, and words to command it.”
I cannot say that the room became as dramatically still as he would have preferred. A couple of carters were shouting at each other down in the courtyard; dogs were barking, chickens carrying on, and I could hear that particular sheknath-in-heat bellow that Karsh uses to restore order. But between the four of us, a separate quietness sifted down coldly. My friend said, “There were words that I did not want Arshadin to learn. He learned them anyway. There were things that I would not teach him. Others would. He went to those others. No hard feelings—never, never any quarrels or hard feelings with Arshadin. He even offered to shake hands when he left me.”
Quite suddenly, and without a sound, he began to cry. I am not going to tell you about that.
When Nyateneri and I could look at him again— Lukassa never looked away, but stroked his face and dried his eyes as we would never have dared—he said, “I loved him as myself. That was the mistake. There was no Arshadin to love. There is no Arshadin, only a wondrous gift and a glorious desire. I thought that I could make a real Arshadin grow around those things. That was the vanity—the stupid, awful vanity. Thank you, dear, that will do.” Lukassa was trying to help him blow his nose.
Nyateneri spoke gruffly, which startled me, I remember. It was the first time I had really heard his voice as a man’s voice. “So. He went off to those who would teach him what you would not, and you went back to organizing a proper wizard’s funeral. And in time I came along to distract you again, and what with one thing and another, you forgot all about Arshadin. Except now and then.”
“Except now and then,” my friend agreed softly. “Until the sendings began. They were not so bad, those very first ones—a few nightmares, a bad memory or two made visible, a few rather tremulous midnight scratchings at the door. Nothing you might not take as ordinary, nothing you might recognize as a sending. But I did, and I summoned Arshadin to me. I could do that then.” He sighed, deliberately comical, even rolling his tired eyes. “And he came, and he sat in my house, just as he did at teatime that first day, looking no different, and he told me how truly unhappy he was that it was going to be necessary to destroy me. If there were any other way, but there wasn’t, nothing personal, honestly. And the worst of it was that I believed him.”
The food and wine I had sent for arrived then, brought, not by Marinesha, as I had expected, but by Rosseth. Karsh must have ordered him to do it. He was horrendously ill at ease, stepping around us all with his eyes lowered, once bumping into Nyateneri, once almost tripping over the mattress as he set the trencher down. I felt sorry for him, and irritable as well. I wanted him gone, this clumsy servant, this kind boy who had kissed me and found out my heart, Rosseth. Telling it now, so long after, I still want to ask him to forgive me.
My friend touched his arm and thanked him, waiting until he had stumbled from the room before he spoke again. “What Arshadin wanted to learn did not come cheaply or simply. There were powers to be supplicated, principalities to be appeased, there were certain unpleasant advance payments to be endured. But he felt that it was all well worth the price, and who am I, even now, to deny that? I have paid my own fees in my time, negotiated across fire with faces I would rather not have seen, voices that I still hear. Magic has no color, only uses.”
How often had I heard him say that, whenever I or another of his ragbag of student-children voiced a question about the inherent nature of wizardry? Some of us, I know, left him convinced that he had no sense of morality whatever, and perhaps they were right. He said, “But then again, I have never before been a payment myself. It makes a difference.”
He ignored the meal, but gestured for me to pour him a little wine, which I did according to the old ritual he taught us, in which the student sips from the cup before the master. The wine was better than Dragon’s Daughter, but not much better. He took the cup from me and passed it on to Lukassa, smiling at me as he did so. He was accepting her as a student before she ever asked to be received, as he had done with me. I smiled back, trembling with remembrance.
“The true price of Arshadin’s education is my lamisetha,” he said. There was no expression at all in his voice. “Arshadin is to make certain that I die, when I die, such a troubled, peaceless death that I become a griga’ath. What is that, Nyateneri—a griga’ath?”
The shock of the question—no, of that word—actually made Nyateneri grunt softly and take a step backward. He answered after a time, his voice gone as pallid as his face. “A wandering spirit of malice and wickedness, without a home, without a body, without rest or ending.” I had never seen him look as he looked then, and I never did again, except once. He said, a bit more boldly, “But there is a charm against the griga’ath. You taught it to me.”
“So I did,” my friend said, suddenly cheerful, “but it doesn’t work. I only made it up for you because you were always so frightened of those bloody creatures. Not that you had ever seen one, nor could I imagine that you ever would.” He paused, and then added in a very different voice, “But I have, and you yet may.”
Nyateneri could not speak. I knelt down by the mattress. I said, “It will not happen. We will not let it happen.”
He touched me then, drew his finger lightly down my forehead and across my cheek, for the first time since he bade me farewell and closed the door, all that world ago. “There’s my Lal,” he said again. “My chamata, who trusts only her will, whose true sword is her stubbornness. What is a griga’ath, after all, but one more enemy captain, one more desert in which to survive, one more nightmare to fight off until morning? Only a little extra determination, another snarl of refusal—Lal will not allow this! Lal exists, and Lal will not have it so! What’s a griga’ath to that?”
The words were mocking, but the light, dry touch on my cheek was love. I answered him, saying, “I have seen one of them, a long time past. It was very terrible, but here I am.” I was lying, and he knew it, but Nyateneri did not, and it seemed to help. My friend said, “A rogue griga’ath is one thing; that fate sometimes befalls a poor soul who has died with no one to think kindly of him in this world or to call to him from another. But far worse than that is a griga’ath under the control of a powerful wizard—I saw that tried once.” He fell silent, staring away past us, seeing it again in a dusty corner of the room. Or was that storytelling, too? I think not, but I do not know.
“And the most dreadful of all would be a griga’ath that had been a magician itself during its life. There would be nothing, nothing that such a spirit could not do, and no defense against it, whether it came to the call of an Arshadin or those whom Arshadin imagines he is using.” He gave an odd, papery giggle, a sound he never used to make before. “My poor Arshadin, he has absolutely no sense of irony. It is his only weakness, poor Arshadin.”
Something at the door. Not a footstep, not a scratch, not the least rustle of breath or murmur of clothing—just something crouching at the door. Nyateneri looked at me. I stood up very slowly, turning the handle of my sword-cane until I felt the lock slip open. It is a well-made cane. The lock made no more sound than whoever was out there in the corridor.
TIKAT
I do not know why she did not see me. Perhaps it was simply that she knew the doorways on this floor are all too shallow even to conceal a child. Anyone but a desperate weaver caught completely by surprise would certainly have gone to earth in the alcove under the stairway. She looked only briefly to either side, then advanced very slowly toward the stair, her swordcane no more than a glint out of its case. I will never like her, and I still despise her condescending kindness to me in front of Lukassa; but I never felt more the bumpkin I am than when I watched her moving across the corridor. I had no business in the same world with people who moved like that, nor did my love. I pressed myself back against someone’s door, held my breath, and tried not to think of anything at all. Thoughts cast shadows and make noises, in that world.
Having assured herself that no one was hiding in the alcove or the stairwell, she backed away into her own doorway, one silent, careful step at a time. The sword was out now, needle-thin, the least bit curved toward the tip, in the same way that her neck and shoulders were bending very slightly forward. One last long stare—not to her left, where I huddled only a few feet away, but to the right and the stair again, plainly expecting to see someone approaching, not escaping. Whoever she was waiting for, it was not me, not dungbooted riverbank Tikat. The needle-sword flicked this way, that way, like a snake’s tongue, and there was honest fear in the wide golden eyes. Then the door closed.
I stayed where I was a little longer; then crept from my doorway to listen again, as I had been when my breathing or my heartbeat alerted them inside. The old man was saying, “He knew me so well—he took advantage of my arrogance as no one ever has. I warded off his absurd little sendings as I cooked my dinner, his annoying night visitations without bothering to awaken. To my own old sense of loss there was added a great sadness for him—for my true son—never to know the true depths of his gift before he betrayed it so foolishly. There was nothing I could do for him now, but I did try not to humiliate him any further.”
He laughed then, and for a moment I heard nothing else, because it sounded so like the laughter of my little brother, who died in the plague-wind. When I could listen to words again, they were in the brusque voice of Nyateneri, the tall one. “But they got worse, the sendings, a little at a time?”
“A little at a time,” the old man whispered. “He was so patient, so patient. Not for years—not until the night when I found myself at last at bay in evil dreams and unable to awaken, did I understand how he had used me to ensnare myself. He knew me, he knew what my body and mind love most and what my spirit fears in its deepest places. Neither of you, nor anyone else, ever came near that knowledge. Only Arshadin.”
“And bloody good use he made of it, too.” Nyateneri again, a snort like an angry horse. “What happened then? He came to you again?”
