“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.
My friend touched his arm and thanked him, waiting until he had stumbled from the room before he spoke again. “What Arshadin wanted to learn did not come cheaply or simply. There were powers to be supplicated, principalities to be appeased, there were certain unpleasant advance payments to be endured. But he felt that it was all well worth the price, and who am I, even now, to deny that? I have paid my own fees in my time, negotiated across fire with faces I would rather not have seen, voices that I still hear. Magic has no color, only uses.”
How often had I heard him say that, whenever I or another of his ragbag of student-children voiced a question about the inherent nature of wizardry? Some of us, I know, left him convinced that he had no sense of morality whatever, and perhaps they were right. He said, “But then again, I have never before been a payment myself. It makes a difference.”
He ignored the meal, but gestured for me to pour him a little wine, which I did according to the old ritual he taught us, in which the student sips from the cup before the master. The wine was better than Dragon’s Daughter, but not much better. He took the cup from me and passed it on to Lukassa, smiling at me as he did so. He was accepting her as a student before she ever asked to be received, as he had done with me. I smiled back, trembling with remembrance.
“The true price of Arshadin’s education is my lamisetha,” he said. There was no expression at all in his voice. “Arshadin is to make certain that I die, when I die, such a troubled, peaceless death that I become a griga’ath. What is that, Nyateneri—a griga’ath?”
The shock of the question—no, of that word—actually made Nyateneri grunt softly and take a step backward. He answered after a time, his voice gone as pallid as his face. “A wandering spirit of malice and wickedness, without a home, without a body, without rest or ending.” I had never seen him look as he looked then, and I never did again, except once. He said, a bit more boldly, “But there is a charm against the griga’ath. You taught it to me.”