The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer
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shifting, appearing, vanishing again.
Through the countless windows, I observed plains, deserts, mountains, rain-filled and impenetrable forests, and also the bottom of the sea where fish-headed men warred among the ruins of green-stone cities. I think I even glimpsed that empty expanse of white sand which was the entire world on the first day of creation, before ever the gods walked there and sowed living things.
This was the first part of my understanding, of the unraveling of the geas: that Evoragdou’s house drifted through time as well as space. In sorcery, time is but an illusion or a convenience, depending on how you use it. All times are one. A million years are as an instant, an instant as a million years.
Still I searched for my son and called his name, and dreamed of him, then wept when I awoke and did not find him. In my dreams I could hear his voice and feel the touch of his hand, and the weight of him on my shoulders as I carried him when he was small was so real, so intense, that it was a special torment to discover my shoulders empty and myself alone.
Ricatepshe came to me in my dreams too, speaking of everyday things: crops and prices, what ships arrived on the river, children and washing, of quarrels with the neighbors and preparations for the spring fair. It was as if I still lived with her, in my own home, in my own country, and all that I experienced in the house, everything I saw through the countless windows, these, these were the phantasms, the insubstantial vapors of the mind.
Nefasir appeared, with her husband Takim, whom I had never seen in waking life. Later, they brought their sons, the oldest of which reminded me so painfully of Khamire, the child I had failed to rescue.
But in this place, what was an instant, a day, a year? Had it been any more than the count of ten since my boy had come into the sorcerer’s house? Had he even arrived yet?
I learned to think like that, in paradoxes, in puzzles which the farmer Pankere would have thought merely the ravings a sun-struck madman. In my mind, I felt the sorcerer Evoragdou’s approval. It is like a lock you’re trying to pick, he told me. Now the first tumblers were beginning to fall.
In a room of living automatons, of fantastic clockworks, I discovered a trapdoor beneath a carpet. I turned a key. A metal ape raised the trapdoor. I descended a ladder to the floor below. When I let go of the rung I was holding for just a second, I was unable to locate the ladder again.
My eyes adjusted. Once more the floating, burning hands gathered around me, their flickering light revealing cubby-holes filled with scrolls, extending higher than I could reach, further in every direction than I could walk.
I knew then, or at least dared to hope that I had found Evoragdou’s study and library, the core and source of his magic. Here, he wove his vast enchantments. Here, all locks were opened, all hidden things revealed.
Trembling with excitement, I sat down at Evoragdou’s desk. The hands gathered around me, providing enough light for me to see the pages of his books.
At first any reading was a struggle, for my learning had been only what letters the priests gave me. Black, skeletal hands fetched volume after volume. At last I found something I could understand. This led me to another, and another. Click, click, click. The tumblers fell into place.
I dwelt in that dark room for weeks or perhaps months, as the hands brought me food, fresh clothing, and more books. I found Evoragdou’s notes in a desk drawer and made annotations with his own brush, my handwriting at first crude and imperfectly formed, but gradually becoming so much like his own that I could not tell the two apart: the universal script of sorcery, an elegant labyrinth of swirls and dots and intricate angles.
I wore his flowing white robe now. I slept on the floor by his desk, still clutching my useless sword as I lay there, dreaming of home, of the life of the imaginary Pankere who dwelt in a village a day south of Thadistaphon. He was a grandfather now. His daughter’s children had almost grown up. His son, Khamire, was still missing, having ventured into the sorcerer’s house when he was small. Khamire’s father, Pankere, followed him and was lost; and life became a dream and dreaming a kind of life, each enveloping the other, like a serpent endlessly swallowing its own tail.
* * * *
Now I set forth from the house through its many doors, on more adventures than may be told, enacting the legends of Evoragdou, both the ancient ones and those we villagers made up to get money from foreigners.
But it was I who rode the winged sphinx through the stars, into the darkness, and confronted the masters of a world of living flame. It was I who caused the lands to tremble, who raised mountains and shaped them into hieroglyphs only the gods could read. I conversed with heads of black stone in a cavern at the Earth’s center. Beneath the hills of Bhakisiphidar, I slew the serpent that walked like a man.
At a crossroads, at midnight, I cut down a hanged corpse from a gibbet, speaking the Voorish names as I carved the symbol tchod upon its forehead. At once the corpse sprang to ferocious life and wrestled with me until dawn, when, at the sun’s first touch, the dead thing’s vigor departed. Just before the rotted limbs broke apart and the spirit fled, the thing whispered to me of the College of Shadows, where all sorcerers must eventually attend to gain true and complete mastery of their arts and of themselves.
In that college, you take a master, learning everything he has to teach and more, for the student must kill his master in order to graduate.
These things I did, over months or years or perhaps in the blinking of an eye. When I closed my master in a room filled with fire and mirrors, and leaned expectantly against the door, my hands and cheek burning from the heat, he spoke to me in my own voice and said, “Do you understand? Do you remember?”
When he was dead, I opened the door and waded ankle-deep in his ashes. A thousand like myself walked within the flawless mirrors.
“Yes, I remember and I understand,” I said to them, and they to me.
Did I? I was seduced and consumed by what I had seen, what I had learned, an ever more willing captive of what I had become. The sorcerer’s lust, Evoragdou had called it once, that madness which engorges the mind, which changes and erases everything the sorcerer might have once been.
So, lustful, swollen with magic, I filed my former self away, like a book in a cubbyhole, in one of the uncountable rooms of my house.
For my house is my memory, ever growing, ever changing, each object, each window, each key in a lock, turning, each sound of groaning wood, each mote of dust another mark or swirl or curve in that delicate yet indelible script which is sorcery, which is the sorcerer’s mind.
Once, a peasant broke in, shouting for vengeance, waving a useless sword. My repartee with him was witty, then sad. He demanded that I reveal my secret to him, so he might slay me. Ah, if only it were that simple.
I left him stumbling about in the dark on a mission of eventual self-discovery.
I knew perfectly well who he was. It remained only for him to find out.
This incident too aroused a mote, a speck of memory. My mind stirred. I sat up suddenly on a pallet of straw in a room filled with carven, marble trees. I felt the sudden and subtle pang of an old sorrow.
“Khamire, my son,” I said aloud. “Come to me now.”
Bare feet shuffled on the marble floor. I reached out, caught hold of a thin arm and drew the boy to me, weeping, embracing him.
He struggled at first, but I spoke his name again and calmed him. Then we went out onto a porch, and looked out over the muddy flood-plain of the still receding Great River. The full moon shone overhead, and the spring stars.
I dropped to my knees before the boy, holding his frail wrists in my hands. He was so gaunt, so dirty, his clothing no more than a few ragged scraps. I think he had already been on his journey a long time.
“Why did you go into the sorcerer’s house?” I asked him. “Why did you begin all this?”
“I came because you called me, Father,” he said. “I didn’t begin anything.”
“No,”