He snorted.
"It is all a matter of what is really important to you," he said then.
"Exactly." He kicked a cushion into the middle of the floor. "Have a seat," he said.
"I'll stand." He shrugged.
"Okay," he said, and he began muttering softly.
I waited. After a time, still speaking quietly, he moved to the black curtain. He opened it with a single quick movement and I stared.
A painting of the cabalistic Tree of Life was revealed, showing the ten sephira in some of their qlipphotic aspects. It was beautifully executed, and the sense of recognition that struck me as I regarded it was unsettling. It was no standard item from some head shop, but rather an original painting. It was not, however, in the style of any of the works hanging in the other room. Still, it was familiar to me.
As I studied it I had no doubt whatsoever that it had been painted by the same person who had done the Trumps I had found in Julia's apartment.
Melman continued his incantation as I regarded the painting.
"Is this your work?" I asked him.
He did not answer me. Instead, he advanced and pointed, indicating the third sephiroth, the one called Binah. I studied it. It seemed to represent a wizard before a dark altar, and
No! I couldn't believe it. It shouldn't...
I felt a contact with that figure. It was not just symbolic. He was real, and he was summoning me. He loomed larger, grew three-dimensional. The room began to fade about me. I was almost...
There. It was a place of twilight, a small glade in a twisted wood. An almost bloody light illuminated the slab before me. The wizard, his face hidden by cowl and shadov, manipulated objects upon the stone, his hands moving too rapidly for me to follow. From somewhere, I still seems to hear the chanting, faintly.
Finally, he raised a single object in his right hand and held it steady. It was a black, obsidian dagger. He laid his left arm upon the altar and brushed it across the surface, sweeping everything else to the ground.
He looked at me for the first time. "Come here," he said then.
I began to smile at the stupid simplicity of the request.
But then I felt my feet move without my willing them to do so, and I knew that a spell lay upon me in this dark shadow.
I thanked another uncle, who dwelled in the most distant place imaginable, as I began to speak in Thari, a spell of my own.
A piercing cry, as of some swooping night bird, rent the air. . The wizard was not distracted, nor my feet freed, but I was able to raise my arms before me. I kept them at the proper level, and when they reached the forward edge of the altar I cooperated with the summoning spell, increasing the force of each automatonlike step that I took. I let my elbows bend.
The wizard was already swinging the blade toward my fingers, but it didn't matter. I put all of my weight behind it and heaved at the stone.
The altar toppled backward. The wizard scurried to avoid it, but it struck one-perhaps both-of his legs. Immediately, as he fell to the ground, I felt the spell depart from me. I could move properly again and my mind was clear.
He drew his knees up to his chest and began to roll even as I leaped over the wrecked altar and reached toward him. I moved to follow as he somersaults down a small slope and passed between two standing stones and into the darkened wood.
As soon as I reached the clearing's edge I saw eyes, hundreds of feral eyes blazing from the darkness at many levels. The incanting grew louder, seemed nearer, seemed to be coming from behind me.
I turned quickly.
The altar was still in wreckage. Another cowled figure stood behind it, much larger than the first. This one was doing the chanting, in a familiar masculine voice. Frakir pulsed upon my wrist. I felt a spell building about me, but this time I was not unprepared. The opposite of my walk, a summons, brought an icy wind that swept the spell away like so much smoke. My garments were lashed about me, changing shape and color. Purple, gray . . . light the trousers and dark the cloak, the shirtfront. Black my boots and wide belt, my gauntlets tucked behind, my silver Frakir woven into a bracelet about my left wrist, visible now and shining. I raised my left hand and shielded my eyes with my right, as I summoned a flash of light.
"Be silent," I said then. "You offend me." The chanting ceased.
The cowl was blown back from his head and I regarded Melman's frightened face.
"All right. You wanted me," I stated, "and now you have me, heaven help you. You said that everything would become clear to me. It hasn't. Make it clear."
I took a step forward.
"Talk!" I said. "It can be easy or it can be hard. But you will talk. The choice is yours."
He threw back his head and bellowed: "Master!"
"Summon your master then, by any means," I said. "I will wait. For he, too, must answer."
He called out again, but there was no answer. He bolted then, but I was ready for this with a major summoning. The woods decayed and fell before he could reach them, and then they moved, were swept up in a mighty wind where there should be stillness. It circled the glade, gray and red, building an impenetrable wall to infinites above and below. We inhabited a circular island in the night, several hundred meters across, its edges slowly crumbling.
"He is not coming," I said, "and you are not going. He cannot help you. No one will help you. This is a place of high magic and you profane it with your presence. Do you know what lies beyond the advancing winds? Chaos. I will give you to it now, unless you tell me about Julia and your master and why you dared to bring me here."
He drew back from the Chaos and turned to face me. "Take me back to my apartment and I will tell you everything," he said.
I shook my head.
"Kill me and you will never know."
I shrugged.
"In that case, you will tell me in order to stop the pain. Then I will give you to the Chaos."
I moved toward him.
"Wait!" He raised his hand. "Give me my life for what I am about to tell you."
"No bargain. Talk."
The winds swirled around us and our island shrank. Half heard, half intelligible voices babbled within the wind and fragments of forms swam there. Melman drew back from the crumbling edge of things.
"All right," he said, speaking loudly. "Yes, Julia came to me, as I had been told she would, and I taught her some things-not the things I would have taught her even a year ago, but pieces of some new things I had only learned myself more recently. I had been told to teach her in this manner, also."
"By whom? Name your master." He grimaced.
"He was not so foolish as to give me his name," he said, "that I might seek some control over him. Like yourself, he is not human, but a being from some other plane."
"He gave you the painting of the Tree?" Melman nodded.
"Yes, and it actually transported me to each sephiroth. Magic worked in those places. I gained powers."
"And the Trumps? He did those, too? He gave them to you to give to her?"
"I don't know anything about any Trumps," he answered.
"These!" I cried, drawing them from beneath my cloak, spreading them like a conjurer's fan and advancing toward him. I thrust them at him and let him stare for a few moments, withdrawing them before he got the idea that they might represent a means of escape.
"I never saw them before," he said.
The ground continued its steady erosion toward us. We withdrew to a point nearer the center.
"And you sent the creature that slew her?"
He shook his head vehemently.
"I did not. I knew that she was going to die, for he had told me that that was what would bring you to me. He told me, too, that it would be a beast from Netzach that would slay her-but I never saw it and I had no part in its summoning."
"And why did he want you to meet me, to bring me here?"
He laughed wildly.