I thought he might be dead then, but Arshadin knew better. He leaned down over him and shouted at his closed eyes, “If you thought me your equal, why did you never trust me with those things I needed to know? Why were you so sure that I would use them for ill? I was young, and there were choices yet before me—there were other ways, other journeys, there were!” Once again, for an instant, I saw his thick, empty face turn almost incandescent with old pain, almost beautiful with bitterness. Then he caught himself and went on stiffly, “Much could have been different. We were not doomed to end here.”
My friend opened his eyes. When he spoke this time, his voice was different: weary beyond telling, but calm and clear and strangely young, as the nearness of death often makes voices sound. He said, “Oh, yes, yes, we were, Arshadin. There was never but the one road for you, being who you are. Being who I am, I loved you because of what you are. So we were doomed to this, you see, it did indeed have to happen so.” He reached up and took sudden frail hold of Arshadin’s right hand. He said, “And yet, knowing, I did love you.”
Arshadin snatched his hand away as if the old man’s touch had seared it through. “Who ever cared about that?” he demanded. “Your love was your own affair, but I had a right to your faith. Deny it and you’ll die lying.” He was screaming now, more human in his fury and pettishness than I could have imagined him. “By every filthy god and demon, I had a right to your faith!”
“Yes,” my friend answered him softly, “yes, you did. Yes. I am sorry.” I had never heard him say such a thing before. “But I must tell you even so, you were a fool to trade your heart’s blood for your heart’s desire. It is an old bargain, and a bad one. I expected you to make a better deal.”
Arshadin made no reply. My friend beckoned Soukyan and me closer, and we came, standing together across the bed from Arshadin. I could smell Soukyan’s hair and the unmistakable cold fragrance of my friend’s dying. Arshadin was sweating heavily, but there was no smell to it at all.
My friend looked toward the window and nodded, greeting the new moon. To Soukyan he said only, “Remember about the flowers,” and to me, more sharply, “Chamata, whatever you may be plotting, give it up right now.” Lukassa and Rosseth pushed in between us, clutching blindly for his hands. He used the last of his earthly strength to push them away, whispering, “No, no, no, don’t come near me, no.” We moved back from his bedside, even Arshadin, and he said a name I did not know, and died.
I recall certain things very clearly from that moment. I recall that the four of us immediately stared, not at his body, but at Arshadin, as though—logically enough—he were the one bound to change into a demon. He looked strangely startled and uncertain himself at first, but then he sketched a couple of hasty signs over the bed, and gabbled some words that made my skin prickle and my ears ache down inside, the way such things always seem to do. Rosseth put his hands to his own ears, poor child. I pushed him further behind me.
Over Arshadin’s shoulder, out of that pallid night, eyes began to glitter at the window: first two, then four, then many on many, like frost forming on the glass. Not one pair was like another, except in the shining malice of their gaze. Arshadin turned and spoke to them—to them, and to something else, something surging deep below and beyond them, the great wave that was dashing these wicked sparklings at the window. He cried out, “Behold, he is yours, he is in your power for all time! I have done as I pledged, and our covenant is ended. Give me back my blood, as you promised!” If there was an answer, I never heard it, because it was then that my friend, who was dead, stirred and muttered and slowly opened his eyes.
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.