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.