water-grass.
I drew myself back into the house, bewildered, but by now too numbed by wonder to be afraid. I made my way out of that first room, into a second, which I found utterly bare and brilliantly sunlit—only its windows revealed, instead of any forest or mountains, a placid ocean stretching to the horizon in every direction, its waves lapping less than an arm’s length below the windowsills. I reached down, touched, and then tasted the salt water.
So I returned to the first room, which now had no windows at all. The disembodied, burning hands drifted among the wooden beast-men.
“Evoragdou,” I called out. “Enough of this. Give me my son.”
He made no reply.
I couldn’t find the stairs down which I’d fallen, passing instead into a third room, where the floating hands did not follow. Here the air flickered with faint light, like a captive aurora. I stood in the doorway for a while as my eyes adjusted, then shuffled cautiously forward, probing the air in front of me with my sword, until I reached another window.
The latch came off in my hand. The shutter swung wide, this time presenting neither hills nor forests nor ocean, but infinitely receding stars. I clung to the window ledge for a long time, leaning out, somehow expecting, demanding that I see more. What? Some vast sky-serpent stirring in the depths? The very gods? Or perhaps the Shadow Titans, who dwell in darkness and whom the gods fear? Possibly a trained sorcerer could discern these things, but I saw only the unflickering stars.
And I shouted the name of Evoragdou once more and pleaded with him to explain himself, to end my torment, or at least let my son go, whatever he would do with me. But he did not speak, nor did he reveal himself in any way. His magical obligation, his geas, was embodied in this house, its mystery like a book I could not yet read, unopened on a table before me.
* * * *
The heroes in the stories complete their tasks quickly, invading the enemy’s domain, performing mighty labors, seizing rare prizes, then returning to the familiar world, or perhaps dying nobly in battle, there amid strangeness. Think of Canibatos when he rescued the sun and moon. Think of Arvadere and the Bird of Night, or of Sekenre, who descended into the land of the dead. Their stories come to definite conclusions.
It wasn’t like that for me. The mystery was like smoke, rising forever.
I spent what could have been days or even weeks exploring the house of the sorcerer, where no two rooms were ever alike, and no room the same after I left it; nor was there any limit to the number of them; an infinity of wood and brick and stone, 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
