There was a new pyre near the dock, just beyond the Fish Market. The storehouses had been leveled here on the night of the rising and had not been repaired: now human flesh fried and the blue smoke rose in the starless sky to guide me.

  The sick were yet piled about the gates of the temples. If there were less of them, as the physician said, I did not ascertain.

  But I had a rare wine in my blood. Expiation was over, guilt washed out, terror canceled.

  That wild ride, between darkness and red shadow, was indeed what the watchman had retreated from, the passing of Lord Death.

  4

  It was simple to appropriate a fishing boat, to row out on the black water under the formless sky. No lookout patrolled the quay. The spars of ships were a tangled water forest without birds. Somewhere, raucous music and tipsy voices slashed and mauled the silence, men praying to a flask of koois to save them.

  The Hyacinth Vineyard stood far out from the dock, where the Hesseks had pulled the vessel with their little craft, to keep him from the fire. My southern ship with its soft southern name and its southern male gender. I had foreseen it would lead me to my witch-mother, all those months and days ago on Peyuan’s island.

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  My strength had returned to me in double measure. The oars were light as reeds, and the somber shore, with its burning fire dots, retracted swiftly. I looked over my shoulder and saw the tall outline of the galley. There was a hard pallid light dancing on the upper deck, showing me three or four black figures, who regarded my coming, showing no alarm, unmoving. Even they had let down the ladder for me. They made no remonstration when I tied the boat alongside and began to climb aboard.

  It was not exactly like the dream. The masts had no sails, there was no splendor. The harsh uncovered flame tongues leaped and crackled, painting the deck in fitful bleachings. Six Hesseks about the rail, ten squatting aft, escapees of the jerds, for, as I remembered not all Bit-Hessians had been slain that night of the rising. Perhaps others prowled below. No danger to me, for I could kill them when I had to. The witch had failed with me. She dared not use my own Power against me anymore.

  I said to them, in their own tongue, “Where is she?”

  None of them answered me. It was another voice that called, “Here, oh beloved.”

  My hair rose. I spun around, and there she sat, on one of Charpon’s couches. She seemed to have arrived by magic; I had not seen her, though I had glanced that way before.

  Her whiteness was the whiteness of the torches congealed to flesh, so white it made me queasy to look at her, as if at something bloodless, unhuman; which, maybe, she was. She had masked her face, as ever, this time in a veil of yellow silk that hung from a diadem of silver in her white hair. Beneath the veiling, what? A cat’s head, or a spider’s? Behind her, almost as I had visualized it in the fever, a man’s body depended from among the shrouds, hanging by its feet, and torn by the gulls. The mutilated remnant of a face was Lyo’s, my messenger.

  “Behold your messiah,” the woman said to her Hesseks. “Behold the Shaythun-Kem. Y’ei S’ullo, y’ei S’ullo. GodMade-Visible has betrayed you. Shaythun sent the swarm of his vengeance, and BarIbithni the Beautiful bleeds on its deathbed. But this one thinks he has cheated Shaythun; this one thinks he will live.”

  Isep had got me a knife, along with the sentry’s clothes. I set my hand to it involuntarily.

  “See,” the woman said. “Barbarian still, calling himself the

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  sorcerer, yet preferring to use the metal blade of a Masrian cur.”

  The taunt was familiar. It checked me.

  “I am the sorcerer,” I said. “Then name yourself.”

  “You name me.”

  A wave of dizziness and heat went over me.

  “Uastis,” I said, “the bitch-goddess of Ezlann. My mother, but not for much longer.”

  She got to her feet, and with delicate mincing steps, she came along the deck to me. She was so little, small, and slender, and yet a force came with her like a huge dark shadow thrown upon the air.

  I could not seem to stand back from her or advance to meet her. She halted about three paces from me, and then I noticed how she held her head, somewhat aslant, as if she could see me only from the left side. And, as before, I reached out my hand and snatched off the veil.

  A woman’s face, not raddled now, but a girl’s. Beautiful as a statue, flawless, all but the right eye, which was gone, the scars hidden by a green jewel.

  It had taken me till that instant to realize. Whoever she was, she was not my mother, not Uastis Reincarnate, for Uastis had the blood of the Old Magician Race; she would have healed. Smoke went over my eyes, like a myriad insects running on a crystal pane. Then I saw differently.

  I had chased a phantom, fished for a reflection in a pool.

  No, not Uastis. The illusion slid from her as sand runs from an hourglass. The robes were dirty, torn, and of a grayish flax, and her hair was the dull black fleece of Hessek hair, and her one eye a black Hessek eye, the other bound in a rag, and her skin the sallow white of Hessek. But I had dug this pit that swallowed me down. I had been so intent upon the hunt that when a quarry offered itself I never mused it might be other than the one I sought.

  “Vazkor is yet Vazkor,” she whispered. “He has learned his mistake at last. Not the old witch, but the young. For you made me young, my master and my lord, my stallion, my beloved, and I shall be your death.” Lellih smiled at me and slid her arms about me and pressed her body to mine. I felt all its youngness through the fabric of her clothes and mine, all the youth with which I had reenameled it. “In life you turned from me, but in death you will obey me. In your burial place I will work my magic, and lie in your dead arms. Oh, I can’t heal my flesh, it’s true, but there are more won-

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  drous things. It is you who taught me, my sorcerer. Listen how I talk. Do I sound like an old hag of a sweet-seller, my dove? No. The Power you poured into my brain to recreate my girlhood created me also your equal. A sorceress. A goddess.”

  A fire came and went across my eyes, obscuring the deck, the shadowy motionless figures of the Hesseks, the pendant corpse. Lellih wound me about like a snake and her mouth on my skin was like the fall of burning rain.

  I remembered the Hall of Physicians, her tiny bird skull between my hands, the surge of Power that passed from me to her, illuminating her mind like the sun. I remembered my pride.

  Small miracle she had been able to tap my Power ever after, to turn on me those abilities I had inadvertently installed in her. I had been her powerhouse from the first.

  “Yes,” she murmured, reading my thoughts, as previously she had read my whole brain, my history, my vow, my compulsion. “Yes, you have become my joke, beloved, with your quest for Uastis, who was really Lellih. I took her form to mislead you. You took my poor eye, my lovely eye, in exchange for that jest, beloved. Even that I should have forgiven you, if you had valued me. Then BitHessee might have sunk in the mud for all I cared, and Shaythun, Shepherd of Swarms, sunk with it. There is no Uastis here, and no devilgod either, Vazkor. Only a wellspring of belief I used as my instrument. It is I who sent the plague. It is my betrayal I punish you for, not the betrayal of my people-Lellih’s anger, not the anger of a god. Know this, Vazkor… . What?” she asked me then, for I had tried to speak to her. I mumbled something through my frozen lips. She said to me, gently, “No, you’ll die, Vazkor, I promise you. Do you suppose of all the numbers who have perished that you alone, who I have cursed twice for every curse I laid on BarIbithni, that you alone, my darling boy, will escape? Believe in the vitality of your own magic which you gave me. You are dying in my arms this very minute.”

  I knew it to be as she said. She had reseated the plague on me. My viscera scalded, but my flesh was like a layer of wool. I could barely see or hear, only the lower mast between my shoulders kept me on my feet, that and her twining. She had crawled up me to my mouth, and fastened there as if she herself would drain me of my life.

  Somehow then, I felt the knife. My hand had not strayed

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  from it. My muscles were lead and my lingers water, yet this hand and this arm I could move, if I willed it. It seemed to take me hours. She was too busy with her grave-cold kissing to heed my hand and the knife. Not till the blade went through her back into her heart did she heed it.

  I had never killed a woman before, not meaning to, but with her it was more like crushing a viper beneath a stone. It Was a clean blow, despite everything, though she was not inclined to go, and fought an instant, and her one eye stayed wide when she fell upon the deck. She had uttered no final ill wish, having emptied the vat of her perverse hate on me, and to the dregs indeed.

  She refuted Shaythun, and maybe she was wise, but something led her to her death, as I to mine.

  I stepped over her, and began to stagger toward the rail, but suddenly my eyes cleared, and my brain. I thought, It shall end here, after all, for me and for the rats who killed me. The Power came with no effort. I saw the rays leave me, hitting the leaping forms of men, the body of Lellih, and the hanging corpse, the masts, the shrouds, the wall of the night itself.

  A torch fell. It caught the edge of Lellih’s gray-white garment. It was right this should dissolve in fire, as everything was dissolved in it, BitHessee, the plague-dead, the glory of BarIbithni.

  Masrimas’ light.

  A burst of white flame lighted my way as I crawled down the ladder and fell into the boat. The rope came free, and the small craft, swinging in against the ship’s side, swung off again from the impetus, catching the current, drifting out into the fire-flecked sea.

  Thus I, too, drifted, into a raging hell of agony, and the world came and went around me, and came and went.

  Voices shouted.

  A mile off, a burning ship mirrored its tumult in black water.

  The face of a man was nearer.

  “Vazkor, do you know me? No, Bailgar, I don’t think he can speak. It’s up with him for sure. So much for physician’s prophecies, so much for sorcery. By God, look at the blood he’s lost.”

  Someone else said, “Have a care lifting him. That moron

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  girl of the Empress, to let him go. Sheer luck I recalled the Vineyard.”

  They were lifting me. I tensed for the pain but it did not come. Someone’s rolled cloak was under my head, and through the murk of the sky I thought there was one star stabbed through like a silver pin.

  I could recognize Bailgar’s voice now, but not who he was. He bent over me, and said, “Try to last, Vazkor. She’ll want to see you.”

  Unaware of who he meant, I shut my eyes.

  “It’s odd,” the first man said, “he doesn’t stink, like the Others with this filthy thing-maybe it’s a good sign.”

  Bailgar grunted softly, and told him to look at my ship, which was going down.

  Her face was a golden mask and her hands were also gold.

  “I had them speak our rites for you,” she said “I didn’t know which were your own and you could not tell me. Can you rest with that? I’ll do whatever you ask.”

  I could not speak-besides, could dredge up no words. I did not know her or where I was. I did not even know it when I died.

  5

  There was a light.

  I had been half aware of it some while-not what it was, its meaning, simply that it was present. In color it was gold, this light, a rich red gold, and here and there flowers bloomed in its path, white and rose and blue.

  The light, and the flowers that grew in it, fascinated me.

  I had no other sense, only the organs of sight that showed me this.

  Gradually the gold broadened, dimming slightly at its perimeters.

  It was a roof of flowers, a sky of flowers, and I lay under it.

  In a sort of dream that asked no questions, demanded no explanation, my eyes moved over knots of blue corundum, rose crystal, pearls. Flowers made from jewels, and there a

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  carved peacock forever spreading its turquoise fan as the light discovered it, a horse of white enamel with its feet lost in the dark.

  I could see it now, where the light came from, an aperture a little way down the flowery roof, about a foot above me and level with my breastbone. Instinctively then, still without reasoning or true motive, I set myself to rise and investigate this source of illumination, and found I could not move.

  At first you do not believe such a thing. Movement is your right. You attempt it several times, each time thinking, Now. But at last you come to believe it, that there is a heaviness on all your limbs, your torso, your skull, fetters that have soldered you to the earth.

  I was more bewildered than afraid. Writhing there, I seemed able to twist a limited distance inside a kind of case, and at each stultified spasm my own flesh seemed to crumble and flake painlessly away. Meanwhile, the glorious light began to fade and as it faded, by contrast, I vaguely ascertained a heap of dull gold beneath, and how the sides of the flowery roof sloped down to it, and they were narrow sides, very narrow. Each of these things was teaching me. I lay quiet, recollecting everything by swift degrees. I recollected who I was and what had happened to me. I put on my manhood and my life with all their obligations of sensation and horror. I was Vazkor, the sorcerer. I had nearly died of the plague, but somehow my healing body was recovered. I lived, I breathed, I was whole. And I was in no sickroom I had ever imagined.

  Slowly now, in the last of the light, my eyes returned over the jeweled ceiling above me, the ceiling so low and close to me that its every detail was apparent. My childlike wonderment altered to a measureless fear.

  I had dwelt among Masrians long enough to glean something of their customs. I had seen the Royal Necropolis on its southeastern hill, the sugar domes, the gilded stucco.

  Yes, Vazkor had survived the plague, but had not given evidence of his survival quickly enough. Now I had the lesson pat.

  They had thought me dead. They had buried me alive.

  Then my stillness left me.

  In a maddened blind terror, I began to call and cry out, my wordless roaring filling the great hollow cask so it rang like a bell, and I tried to haul up my arms, to smash my fists upon the beautiful roof of my prison. All the while I screamed within myself to those gods I never admitted I

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  owned, as the gold light vanished on the pitiless staring of the flowers, the peacock, and the white horse.

  There was not a vast amount of air in the sarcophagus, only what came in with the sun at that hole in the lid, and thence through the open nostrils and other small vents of what they had bound me in. Shortly, I started to choke and faint and fell back in a muddy swimming of the senses. When the swimming stopped, I was in darkness.

  If you seek revenge on your worst enemy, if he has done things for which you believe no punishment sufficient, incarcerate him in a golden tomb, alive.

  I do not know how long I lay there, except that I remember the light came and went across the gems twice or maybe thrice. There was no time for me within that box of death. I became a slobbering witless beast, that now and again started into human awareness, to roll and cry and whimper. My seasons were partitioned out in clamor and unconsciousness and the mindless waking stupor that intervened between them.

  How I kept my reason is beyond me. If I kept it. For I think the return of intelligence did not actually prove I had not grown insane. Not till some time after did rationality reclaim my mind, and by then I was far from that place and all my deeds in it.

  However, my brain did eventually revive, and logic came. It came in the form of a single realization. Something like a madness in itself.

  I had not been buried alive, I had been buried dead. Stone dead. Corpse-cold without heartbeat, unbreathing, sustenance for the worms. Yet no worm had fed on me. I was entire, even within this tomb.

  It was the final gate, the absolute ordeal, the last magical capacity. What I had part suspected myself of possessing, but never dared to test. Having once decided, the facts showed me it was no more than plain truth. For this was undeniable; if I had lain sick enough to seem dead, waking from that sickness as I did in panic and shadow, starved of food and drink, weighted down and shuttered up with barely the air to keep my senses, surely I must have died then if not before. Yet I lived. I lived.

  My thoughts had cleared like water. I was calm and fear fled me. If I could die and return to life, I could do anything. I had no need to be afraid, I had surmounted the ultimate