We looked away instantly, as we had been warned. I cannot speak for the others, but I looked back just as quickly, sideways, because I had to. He—no, it, I have trouble saying that even now—stood up on the bed and stretched itself, making a soft, thoughtful sound. It might have been a child in a nightgown waking to a new day.
Then it stepped to the floor and walked toward Arshadin. It was smiling just a little, just enough for me to see the fire behind its black teeth.
Arshadin looked a bit flustered, but not frightened—I will give him that, and admire him for it. If he had expected whatever moved beyond those eyes at the window to materialize, thank him graciously and relieve him of his fearful creation, he showed no sign of any alarm. He spoke haughtily to the griga’ath—this time in the language wizards speak together, which I can follow somewhat— bidding it to know him and do him honor. Even in such plain speech, his words shook the room, as though the walls themselves were trying to obey.
Walls heed wizards. Griga’aths do not. It kept coming, shuffling on through one sky-splitting spell after another as the wizard backed and backed away. It still looked like the man we had known: it did not grow an inch taller or more massive, nor did it sprout rows of extra heads and arms, as demons are always drawn in my country. But it smiled flames, and burning, stinking yellow tears spilled out of its eyes, and it reached out both beckoning hands, and it walked silently toward Arshadin.
And even then he faced it, calling down power to make the poor old Gaff and Slasher rock to its wine cellars—we could hear beams cracking above us, windows exploding in other rooms, doors slamming and slamming themselves in pieces. Courage must have nothing to do with having blood, or a soul, because Arshadin was a terribly brave man. But he might have been ten times more brave and a hundred times the wizard he was, and it would have meant nothing to the thing that had been my friend. It kept walking toward him.
And we four? Soukyan never looked once at the vase of wildflowers, and I neither fled nor even thought to harry Rosseth and Lukassa into flight. A wizard had wasted his desperate dying counsel on us: we were separated from one another as though by miles and centuries, each alone forever in a lonely place with the griga’ath. For my part, there was no room anywhere in me for anything but the impossible truth of the being that stalked Arshadin, its faint smile flickering over the shuddering walls. So I know only that I gaped and gasped and stood petrified where I was; more than this I cannot tell you.
Arshadin was a proud man, as well as brave, for he did not call again for aid until the griga’ath had brought him to bay against the window. Then he wheeled, turning his back on it, on us, on everything but the night, and he shouted, still in the formal tongue of wizards, “Will you dare use me and abandon me so? Nay, but I’ve my own employment for such a creature. Give me back my blood, or I’ll find such occupation for him as may make you wish you had kept faith with me. And so be advised, my lords.”
Bravado? Perhaps. He would not turn from the window, even with the griga’ath’s hands almost on him. I think that it did touch him, but I will never know. The night stepped into the room, not only at the smashed window, but spilling through every crack, separation, and nail-hole in the walls, through the exhausted pores of the wood. As it must have done when Arshadin summoned it in the tower, it puddled together in a corner, slowly forming a shape that was round at the top and broken into jagged, twisted shadows below, the whole barely as high as Rosseth’s chin. As in the tower, it had become a passage to somewhere else, a dark archway that drew my vision in and would not let it go again. A wind began to stir under the arch: a wind from somewhere else, smelling of burning blood.
The darkness spoke to us. What it said—not in words, but singing in the roots of my hair, writing with broken glass on the underside of my skin—“Come to me. Be with me. Be me.” I obeyed immediately, without a moment’s hesitation, without any sense of having a choice, or wanting one. Soukyan was beside me on my left, and Rosseth took my right hand. Lukassa cried out, but the sound seemed to come from very far away. We were marching straight into that black court, and in that instant I saw, or felt, or knew what was on the other side. It is not what you think, that place.
But that is not to be talked about here, for the darkness did keep its word to Arshadin, after all. What the darkness had come for was not any of us but my friend, in this form that it could swing like a hammer against the foundations of the world. It lost interest in us and stopped calling. Do you know what that was like? It was like being rescued from drowning just as you have begun to feel so sleepily peaceful; it was like being snatched back from a high place just as the whisper has finally convinced you that it is bound to happen anyway, so you might as well let go now. One more moment and I, at least, would have been truly lost. I am grateful. I know I should be more grateful than I am.
The darkness was calling to the griga’ath now: “Be with me, be me, be me.” It turned swiftly from Arshadin, making a sound I could feel but not hear, like the deep whine of the air that comes before an earthquake. Soukyan and Lukassa and Rosseth averted their faces, but this time I did not. This had nothing to do with courage or defiance—I simply froze, too dazed and confused not to look into the eyes of the griga’ath.
They were not his eyes. They were green, yes, but it was the green of the deepest northern seas, the icy, oozy green of the weeds that come up with your anchor from those unhealed places that have never seen the sun since the world began. They were hunting the sun, those eyes, they meant to eat the sun; but infinitely more terrifying was the fact that nothing else of him had changed. “It will look like me,” he had warned us, and so it did—exactly like him, only more so, in the way that trusted faces so often become hugely, monstrously familiar when my dreams turn nightmare. Perhaps we are all, even wizards, no more than faded sketches of the good we contain, the evil we might have done: if that is so, what faced me now was the original of my friend, the sum of his nature. He was all himself, all his possible self, and he was nothing, nothing but destruction. No, I did not turn to stone seeing him, as people do in the old tales; but neither did I escape whole. And the rest is my business.
The griga’ath paid no attention to me. It moved past me, still wearing the face and form—and even the smell, like an old boat in the sun—of someone I loved. Fire was just beginning to leak through the body now, twinkling coyly between the ribs and under the arms. Griga’aths blaze without burning, eternally; in time they become exactly like stars cloaked in human skin, shattering and swallowing what they come near. It halted a step before the darkness, turning my friend’s body this way and that: strangely uncertain, even looking back once. I hid my face from it, like the others.
Someone was pounding furiously on the real door of the real room. As though the noise had suddenly tipped the balance, the griga’ath took a single stride forward and passed from this world. I could still see it for what seemed a very long time, glowing steadily brighter as it grew smaller, spinning slowly away down the black archway that runs between what we know and what we cannot bear to know. I think I cried after it; if I did, the sound was lost when the door gave way and Karsh lunged into the room. Tikat was just behind him.