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  terror. There was no bone-dust heap for me, no ignominious mound. There was eternity, and the world.

  They had piled a tomb on me. They might have piled on a hill, and over the hill, a mountain. It was all one, and mattered nothing.

  I used my Power to free myself. The restraints were done with. It never came so easily. A pillar of glowing energy that fired the case within as the passing sun had never fired it. The jewels shattered, the eyes of the peacock’s tail fell on my breast. Golden hinges melted and iron cracked. The lid of the sarcophagus rose up into sudden vast gulfs of space and crashed down beyond my range of vision.

  It was a fortune they had laid on my body, an armoring of bars and plates of enamelwork, onyx and bronze, a silver helm weighted with enormous palm-leaf rays of gold. No living man could have worn it and walked upright. On my skin, inches thick, was a gilt integument. I had been bandaged in metal, buried like a king. I could only give thanks to hasty or rascally workmen that they had not been completely zealous in the labor. Every oversight, every gap in the wrapping, had been a way for air to reach my flesh and my lungs. Without the air, I might have waited here, animate yet unaroused, till my plastering decayed. A hundred years, perhaps, or more.

  There was, too, the round opening in the lid of the cask. For Masrian custom dictated that even in death the corpse would wish to receive the beams of Masrimas’ sun.

  I split my fabulous armoring by Power. The gold anchors rang as they left me; the skin of gold flaked down in yellow shards.

  Stepping naked from my coffin on the floor, as though from some bed where I had slept late, I saw the massive lid on its side a small distance away.

  Besides its inner prettiness, it had some outer display about ten feet of gilding, gems and gold. That I had lifted by my will, a thing that would have taken perhaps twenty men to raise in their arms.

  This struck me as amusing. Next I looked about, and smiled some more.

  Masrian religious faith comprises an odd dichotomy. They tell you that after death the soul journeys to some unworld, ruled by their fire-god. However, since this soul may linger a while before departure, everything is set out in the tomb for its comfort. Whether any Masrian actually and wholeheartedly credits this I had no notion then, or now. Like Sorem,

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  maybe, the dark was all too easy to reach. Yet, for form’s sake, or as some spiritual bribe to their own uncertainty, they did these things.

  The chamber was not huge, despite my costly box, yet the floor was laid with painted tiles. A Masrian lamp of rosy glass hung from a silver chain, with flint and tinder set by. On little tables of burnished bone the implements of a thorough toilet were laid out, also a silver bath with accessory tall ewers, filled with water, and crystal vases of oils beside. A fresco on the wall showed gardens of flowering trees, where frolicked monkeys, cats, and birds. (So the ghost should not pine for the gardens of earth? I should have thought such imitation stuff would make it weep.) A couch with posts of gold and cushions of silk was fine enough on which to slumber. Nearby stood sealed flagons of wine, baskets of fruit and sweetmeats, and bread that had gone green. I was starved and ate it, nevertheless; it was vile but nourishing, and the wine helped wash down the taste.

  All this time, as I had plundered the food baskets, I had been noting the shape of the tomb. The walls were rounded, narrowing above into a chimneylike shape, where another hole made visible the sky. This hole corresponded mathematically to the position of the opening in the sarcophagus, allowing the sun to shine through one into the other as it crossed the zenith. The upper vent seemed wide to the hazy sky, but a fine grille must cover it or the birds would have been in. All this conformed with the structure of the funeral domes I had seen previously from outside, save at one point. Here the chamber was strangely abbreviated, and presently I grasped that another area had been made here, behind this, a chamber within a chamber. I went looking for the doorway and could not find it. So I axed a passage through with a bolt of energy, ham-fistedly malicious as any vandal. The piece of wall crumbled with a melting of rose trees, monkeys, and honey-yellow doves. Beyond, I saw a second sitting room of the dead.

  I had no premonition. Not until I glimpsed the mirror of silvered glass, the cosmetics in their vessels of amber, the slender, much-handled spears. Then I knew.

  I stepped around the wall and met head on the coldness of mortality.

  The cask was bronze, ungilded and without ornament. Over it was draped the Empress tapestry of lilies.

  I stopped where I stood, and leaned on the jagged brick. I

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  recalled her face floating above me in the fever mist, how she had asked me what rites should be performed for me. She had survived the plague, or it had seemed she had. Yet here she lay.

  This was the measure of her regard for me. Fearing I went cheated, my proper rites unsaid, she had given me instead the best of Masrian ritual, the greater chamber, the accouterments of a prince or king, and that tomb of jewels, and all this, in spite of herself. It had been her bed in which I reclined. I had loved her supple unrepentant tallness, her eyes nearly level with my own-yes, her couch would just have fitted me. As for the metallic fortune in which they had cased me, what funds and what cunning had she employed to get it unlawfully for me, who was not even a noble of the city? This done, she took the slave’s place, the outer room; dying, she was unaware of the havoc circumstance would play with her gift. Indeed, how could she know I would return from my silence, wake and cry out, stifling in these tokens of her love, her generosity, her pride that denied me nothing of hers, even in oblivion? How could she know, who had expected to become, and had become, only dust?

  There was no light in this secondary tomb, save what came in now through the broken wall, and no aperture in the bronze box. What she had done tore inside me like a lion’s claws. I turned away from the cask, and walked about the small area, picking up her things and setting them back. Her combs lay on their tray, the kohl she had painted about her eyes. A necklace of jets glittered as I had seen them glitter around her throat. Among her scents I found the vial I knew most readily, and took it up to breathe her in with it-to lessen or increase my wretchedness. But it had no smell of her, merely of incense held in crystal.

  Abruptly I moved around, and went to the bronze sarcophagus. There was in me a grim spirit of exorcism, and also that murky human part of me which drew me to stare. The unalterable claim of death. I was free of this end, but I alone. Forever now, and for how long I did not know, I must watch a procession go by me to the grave, and I remain beside the road, impervious, and with no companion.

  I wrenched off the top of the cask with my bare hands. The Power filled my arms with a strength I barely felt; it was simply rage. The lid flew away and clattered down, and a musty perfume of balm rose up.

  I had anticipated everything, corruption, bones, the stench

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  of rottenness. I had no means of judging how many days had passed, or months. Yet it had not been long, for her at least, and the sealing of the bronze, which denied her Masrian rites, had preserved her for me to look on.

  She was dressed in red finery, but they had not painted her body; so I saw her flesh, which appeared as I remembered it. Thus I learned she had not died of Yellow Mantle, for the unmistakable, awful color of the plague was absent. What then, in the name of her god, had brought her here? I gazed some minutes before I discovered the silver flower over her breast. I had thought it an ornament at first, but it was the hilt of a little knife-sharp, but not of any great length-of the sort that Masrian ladies use to trim their hair before the tongs. To make it do its work, one would have to understand exactly how to strike to come at the heart, and drive it home without flinching.

  I imagined then that she had killed herself because of me, such was my vanity and my anguish. I bent nearer and drew a piece of her black hair between my fingers; it was glossy, as if fresh from Nasmet’s care. Truly, Malmiranet had no look of death. But my hand brushed her forehead and left a mark there like a bruise, and the black curl came away in my grasp.

  It was the broken brick against my spine that halted me, halting also the primitive horror that had overcome me, reminding me of myself.

  No longer a man, no longer merely a sorcerer. No longer confined by the natural laws of the world. Now and again the whisper had come, and I had put it aside in fear. But I was beyond fear at last, and beyond half-doubt. Vazkor had mastered death.

  I had done everything else, why not this?

  No need to stand alone beside the road. The multitudes would pass, but those I selected from among them, these I should keep by me.

  I went back to her across the small inner chamber of the tomb. The light was deepening, the open chimney vent dyed a violet rose into the tiles beyond the wall. Dusk and shadow everywhere, save within me, where the shadows were burning.

  .

  It was not even hard for me to do. If there were gods, and they were just, there would have been some warning then. Yet maybe there was a warning, some sign I did not note.

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  It was like a thousand healings I had performed, nothing out of the way in it. With Hwenit, my black witch, I had had some trouble; she had been nearly dead, her pulse faint as the flicker of an insect’s wing. But with Hwenit I had not known myself as I should become. With Hwenit I had reckoned myself fallible, human.

  Malmiranet returned as the sea returns to the shore. I chose the word “returned” with a little thought, for it seemed she did come back from some dark forest in which she had been wandering. Her skin grew firm and flawless, and the marks of the bruising of decay left her, like the shades of those black death-trees under which she had been walking. Her eyes opened suddenly and looked straight at me. I had somehow not expected that look, so immediately direct, so clear. She raised her hand and put it to her breast where I had drawn out the little dagger, and not finding its blade, the last hurt she had known, she sighed.

  She lay yet within the bronze box, which I did not like to see. (Even at such a moment, this obsolete superstition unnerved me.) I took the hand she had let fall, and spoke her name. I helped her to sit up, then lifted her from the cask. She stood before me, as she had stood countless times before me, and her eyes were bright as swords, though she did not speak to me or make any movement of her own.

  I led her through into the other chamber, to the silken bed, and poured her wine. At first she would not drink, till I set the cup to her lips. To see the soft ripple of her throat as she swallowed brought home the wonder to me afresh. The responses of sex live close by death—it has always been so, nature striving to replenish the store-and rape has followed the battlefield time out of mind. For all the prelude, I was hot to lie on her now, among the shiny silk. Only her wide eyes kept me from it.

  “Malmiranet,” I said. “What is it? You’re safe and I am with you.”

  As if at a signal, she placed her hand again over her breast. There was no longer any mark of the knife on her, as I could well see when I leaned and rested my mouth there.

  It had not been her practice to be so wooden. At length I told myself I asked too much, and, holding her by me, tried to explain to her the things she must already be aware of, but perhaps could not comprehend. Fool that I was, I even required her to inform me why she had slain herself. I had

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  some notion to shock her from her reticence if I could not bring her to me more gently.

  I heard my own voice go on and on, as if I lessoned a child. And she in my arms, like a wide-eyed child, unspeaking.

  I was weary, and fell asleep somewhere in my monologue, and woke in the near black tomb to find her there beside me yet. A star stood over the vent in the dome and showed me her eyes, still fixed as gems.

  I rose and lighted the lamp that had been provided for my ghostly comfort. In an ivory chest close by, a pile of clothes were lying-my own gear from the Palace; even the jeweled collars in a tray, and the boots below.

  I glanced about at her, and she watched me silently.

  “I will dress myself as befits a civilized man,” I said to her, “since you’ll have nothing to do with me. Then we leave this place.”

  I had no plan; all ways were open but inchoate. My world was centered here, despite my words. I had found I could not quite think what I should do with myself and her. Smash down the wall, that was easy, erupt out into the amazement of the city-or, if I pleased, levitate myself and her to the opening above, destroy the grille and, as once before, travel over a starry nighttime sky. But to what?

  There had been a star when I was dying in Bailgar’s boat, I remembered it now, one star visible through the murk, like the star in the vent of the tomb. A distant breath of unease passed over me, for even inside safe walls, one may hear the wolves howling.

  “Who rules BarIbithni?” I said to her. “The council, or has the old man got back in the chair?” This illusion to Hragon-Dat brought me to Sorem. I had forgotten him, an indication of my true state if I judged myself. Sorem, too, was dead, locked in some gold case. I could raise him, if I felt it proper to my scheme of things. Would he then look at me as she did, and with such bright, unblinking eyes?

  I had been examining the chest rather than continuing to gaze at her. Her stare had begun to strike chill on me. The rustle of her skirt made me turn about.

  A curious phenomenon. I could survive death, yet my instincts to avoid a mortal blow were as insistent as ever.

  She had stolen out as quiet as air and up to me almost as quietly. Her face had not altered, nor her look, but she had

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  brought me another gift. One of those slender hunting spears, which she had raised to plunge between my shoulders.

  I jumped aside. The spear flashed down and bit upon the wall and the head broke from the haft. I recalled how she had told me once she had not gone hunting in a long while. The wood had softened, still it was the force of her striking that snapped the shaft. She had meant a second death for me, and to spare.

  I caught her by the arms, but she made no other move at me. She was expressionless and she did not struggle. I wondered how I had slept by her and come to whole. Was it some madness of grief or terror on her that drove her to this?

  “Malmiranet,” I said, “in what way have I done you wrong? Tell me. I will set it right.”

  I had grown to a knowledge of her face, of her body and its gestures; I could have picked her out if she had been masked and draped among forty women. Now, her body familiar, its contours positive through the silk, and the chiseling of that face of hers unlike any other’s, and those narrow hands, one wrist with its wound serpent of gold that I had seen her wear when all the rest of her apparel was gone now, when she was identifiably one woman only, yet she was not that woman. This was some doll, fashioned in the absolute likeness of Malmiranet, but Malmiranet it was not.

  I had let her go, and I had walked away from her, keeping my eyes on her, nevertheless. I took garments from the chest and began to clothe myself. It seemed always so with me, that after the greatest and most miraculous feats of my life, I must be made to feel, by emotion or .by circumstance, a whipped brat among Ettook’s tents. I could not bear the searing blankness of her stare on my nakedness, like the leveling of a blade. We had been skin on skin too often; it was hard to find winter risen from that fire.

  What I had put on I scarcely noticed, some workaday suit of the Crimson Palace, too fine for anything but lounging in. With the jeweled accouterments there was a belt of rare white snakeskin, chased with gold and with a buckle of lapis lazuli-something she had given me. I showed it to her, remembering how she had buckled it on me, and what followed.

  She took half a step toward me, her hand outstretched and my heart leaped in my throat, wondering what would come this time.

  What came was this: all passivity left her, she flung back her head, her mouth opened wide, and she screamed. Not a

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  woman’s screaming but the ululation of an animal, piercing, feral, almost continuous.

  I ran to her and pulled her to me. I tried to stop her cries, tried to rock her, console her. The terrible wailing went on and on. When I drew her head against me, she sank her teeth in my shoulder till they met, and still she cried in her throat like a beast, even as she gnawed my flesh.

  My blood had grown cold, and I shook as if my death had returned for me. I have no recollection of what I said nor of what I did, until my desperation drove me to that thing I hated and abhored, to seek the reason in her mind.

  The mysteries of existence and of surcease remain with me, with me more than with most for, in setting me apart from them, my heritage has denied me, for a while at least, the answer all other men learn too swiftly. The grape of truth is often bitter, but not to taste it in its season would be to waste the vine. One answer I had, there in that tomb with its painted flowers, its clothes chests and its gold. Not mine, but all other human flesh decays, and at its death, what lives within it goes elsewhere. Maybe to some other place, some fiery world such as the Masrians talk of, or to the black pit of the tribes, or to something too wonderful to conceive of, or maybe to nothing, to smoke, to air, to silence. Whatever else, no magician, however masterful, can bring that substance, that element-spirit or soul-back into the vase which held it. Or no, I will amend that I will say only that Vazkor could not, after Malmiranet’s death and the failing of her flesh, recall her. Everything of her I had healed. She was whole, her organs sound, she breathed and her heart beat. But she, she was in another country. The creature lived and moved and made its noise, but it was empty as the sarcophagus from which I had lifted it.