I blinked speechlessly at him, recalling that he had neither embraced me nor so much as waited to watch me go, that day when I set out alone again into the world because he said it was time. I was still young, and he was all I had then, and I cried for him many a night, huddled in my blanket under dripping trees, no more than their branches between me and the wind. But it would never have occurred to me to wonder whether he felt at all lessened or lonely without me, and the idea seemed nearly as unnatural to me even now as it must have done to him. Nyateneri smiled slightly, without malice. It annoyed me anyway.
“Disconcerting,” my friend went on. “Either I am more sentimental than I knew, or else my vanity starves without someone to rescue and protect and teach. However that may be, Arshadin appeared at my door when I was, if you like, at a low ebb, a bit at loose ends. An ordinary-looking boy, without your fierce charm, Lal, without Nyateneri’s presence. Nor was he a fugitive of any sort, but a farmer’s second son, well-fed, moderately educated, and most calmly certain about what he meant to do with his life.” He paused, absently stroking Lukassa’s hair and looking with great deliberation from one to the other of us. I am the Inbarati of Khaidun, if I never see Khaidun again—and I never will—raised from infancy to tell tales, but I learned as much of the storyteller’s sly art from that man as I did from my mother and grandmother and all my aunts. I never told him that.
My friend said, “Arshadin’s simple, single ambition was to be the greatest magician who ever walked the earth. He achieved it.”
Rosseth’s donkey brayed again just at that moment, which set us all laughing too loudly. My friend fell silent again for a moment, and then resumed, speaking almost to himself. “You always wonder about it, you know, if you are one of those who cannot resist the enticement of teaching. What will happen when I meet someone with a greater gift than my own? It is easy enough to be kind and helpful to those who do not threaten me—but how will it be with one who is my master and does not yet realize it? How will I be in that day?”
Nyateneri and I began speaking at once, but he stilled me with a gesture that was no less commanding for being so frail and miniature. “If you don’t mind, we can leave out the part where you both assure me loudly that I could never have to face such a decision. We all meet our masters, all of us—why do you think we are in this world?— and I am telling you that I met mine one overcast afternoon when I went to the door with my mouth still full of tea-cake. I knew him on the instant—as you will know a greater swordsman one day, Lal, with the first salute of your blades. And I invited him in for tea.”
Nyateneri regarded him with a grave mock-frown. “That must indeed have been centuries ago. You insisted that I learn to make proper tea, just so, but you never would drink it. I nearly went mad trying to make tea that was at last fit for you.”
“By that time I had given up other things besides tea,” my friend replied very quietly. “By the time you came, I had long been occupied in making my lamisetha.” We gaped at him dumbly, and he smiled. “It is an old word, a wizards’ word. It means, more or less, ‘road of departure.’ If you are a wizard, nothing in your life is more important than how you die. Do you know why that is so? Nyateneri?” He might have been our teacher again, prodding and provoking us with riddles that seemed to have only one answer, and that one always wrong. “You used to be curious about that sort of thing, more than Lal ever was.” But Nyateneri shook his head silently.
My friend said, “A magician must die in peace. I am not talking about temporal peace with his neighbors or the local ruler, or of what most people call spiritual peace, meaning that he has performed all the proper observances of whatever gods he may have served. What I speak of is truly of the spirit—a drawing-in, a particular sitting still that requires great preparation and that a magician can only attain by means of a long, motionless journey. That is the lamisetha. As I said, it translates poorly.”
A knock sounded then, and I went to answer. I expected to see Karsh, but it was only Gatti Jinni, who had already begun backing away before I opened the door. He was notably afraid of both Lukassa and me, though he looked for excuses to attend loweringly on Nyateneri. He muttered, “Karsh. If the old man stays the night, more money.”
“He stays the night,” I said, “and longer, and in a better room than this. I will arrange it with Karsh. Meanwhile, send up bread and soup and wine for him, and not Dragon’s Daughter, either.” But Gatti Jinni had already scuttled off down the corridor. I turned back as Nyateneri was saying, “And yet you took me in. No holy calmness after that, certainly, but no question about it, not ever.”
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.