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“Pilgrims are the only ones who take this road. I think it makes them feel as though they are struggling in the face of adversity, as the soul struggles against the body, or some such patter.”
“Are you a pilgrim, then?”
“Of a kind.”
“Well, I didn’t know there was another road,” I sulked.
“Many and varied, many and varied. And perhaps one day there will be no road in the world which does not lead to our harbors and towers and chapels. One may hope. But if you are not a pilgrim, why do you aim your feet for Varaahasind, the City of Boars, where Indrajit sits on his throne?”
I sighed, and launched into the litany that by then was as familiar as my own tongue in my mouth. “I seek Death. I was at his door, he was at my window, he stood at my shoulder, but I could not see him. He has been the goal of my heart for years and I have walked half the earth in search of him—and do not tell me to wait until he finds me, or that a nice bo
y like myself should run off and play. I’ve heard it, and plenty worse.”
The man seemed to consider, and his collar glinted in the sun, reflecting the wet green road.
“No, I wouldn’t tell you that, not that.”
We walked for a while in the muck, until the first blanched-brick spires of the city showed through the thick trees.
At length, he said: “What if I told you, instead, that I knew where Death lay, and would take you there gladly?”
I swallowed hard. “I would ask what you would have in return for such service.”
“Only that when you have finished listening to all that Death has to say, you listen to me for a while, and see which of us is the wiser.”
Others had claimed to know, of course, and then led me to dark alleys dank with shadows, where I was subsequently robbed or beaten and left face down in innumerable puddles. But I could not afford, on so strange a task as mine, to refuse anyone. I shrugged and followed him into the city, where pigskin canopies shaded thin and winding streets, and the wind smelled of brewing barley. I followed him up through endless red-brick terraces and shining rice-fields stacked one atop the other all the way up thick green hills, rice-fields couched between towers, between barracks, anywhere a pool of water might stand.
Near the top of the hill was a house like an anthill, just beyond the enormous wall that shielded a bulbous and darkly glinting palace from the plain rice-plantings and dusty terraces. The house was large and might have been handsome if it did not so much resemble a man’s head half-buried in the earth. The thatch of the roof drifted down like hair, and the windows seemed to watch us, shutters like lids opening and closing fitfully in the hot afternoon.
“This is the House of Death,” my companion said, as casually as if he were announcing the house of a baker or a midwife.
We entered a large room not unlike a kitchen, with all manner of things boiling and drying and blanching and bubbling. The short man seemed to forget I was there, monitoring everything that sent steam and scent into the air. I finally cleared my throat and he looked up, startled as a sparrow.
“Oh. Death, wasn’t it? Yes, here.” And he rummaged behind a large cabinet for a moment before producing a dusty object with a stage magician’s flourish.
It was a large glass jar, filled to the brim with dirt.
“You have wasted my time, old man,” I sighed.
“Not at all, boy. You wanted Death? This is it. Dirt and decay, nothing more. Death translates us all into earth.” He frowned at me, his cheeks puffing slightly. “Are you disappointed? Did you want a man in black robes? I’m sure I have a set somewhere. A dour, thin face with bony hands? I’ve more bones in this house than you could ever count. You’ve been moping over half the world looking for Death as though that word meant anything but cold bodies and mushrooms growing out of young girls’ eye-sockets. What an exceptionally stupid child!” Suddenly he moved very fast, like a turtle after a spider—such unexpected movement from a thing so languid and round. He clapped my throat in his hand, squeezing until I could not breathe, just like those awful days when I hung on the wall and gasped for air. I whistled and wheezed, beating at his chest, and my vision blurred, thick as blood. “You want Death?” he hissed. “I am Death. I will break your neck and cover you with my jar of dirt. When you kill, you become Death, and so Death wears a thousand faces, a thousand robes, a thousand gazes.” He loosened his grip. “But you can be Death, too. You can wear that face and that gaze. Would you like to be Death? Would you like to live in his house and learn his trade?”
I rubbed at my throat, panting. “You’re just like the others,” I rasped. “You lure me to your house with the promise of wisdom and give me nothing but your fist.”
“Oh no, I am nothing like the others. I am a Wizard, Indrajit’s man, and I am as true a Death as you will find. Keep wandering after your phantoms if you like—eventually someone will strangle you for a scrap of food and then my lessons on the nature of mortality will be, let us say, unnecessary. Or stay with me and learn, stay with me and one day you will stand over a man as I have stood over you and he will know you to be Death, black of eye and sleeve. You may be stupid, but it is not every child who burns so to become Death’s prodigy. I am offering what you want, if you are wise enough to take it.”
I stared hard at the floor. “Would I have to wear a collar like yours?” I mumbled finally.
“It is always a choice,” he said softly, “and I chose it. Magic is a many-sided glass—”
“My mother says magic comes from the Stars, and I have about as much light in me as our cow.”
“Some believe that. Some of us, who find magic in things, in stones and words, in grass and leaves, long ago realized that it is unimportant where the leaves got their power, only that they have it. And of those, some folk, men and women and monsters, decided in days long past to trade their freedom for power. They took a collar, yoked themselves to a ruler. If you want power, you will do the same.”
“Magic is power,” I protested.
“Magic is magic. If you want to boil up cough medicine for local brats and keep your hair from turning gray, you’re more than welcome to it, and need nothing but an iron pot. But power, power to control one’s fate and the fates of others, real power, and certainly the power to become Death, to be Death writ large in the eyes of the lost—well, a monarch’s protection is useful, and their resources go far beyond grass and leaves.”
I glanced at the jar of earth and licked my lips. After all this time, Death was at my window again, and at my shoulder, and I stood at his door, and this time I could see, I could see everything he offered.
