Sykdom, galskap og død var de sorte engler som stod vakt ved min vugge og siden har fulgt meg gjennom livet.As they rode down the river, he was told off by his captain to investigate a small grove of yews visible to the west on a vague ripple of higher ground, and trotted there willingly enough, glad of the chance to escape his companions for a space. The ripple was higher than it seemed from distance and he had to pick his way up a steep, crumbling slope that seemed, despite the lushness of the river plain, to have received little rain in the past year. Stones rattled continually down the slope behind him in seeming protest of his invasion, the sound of the farther and older-disturbed muttering into silence beneath the brisk complaint of the nearer and younger, and dust rose wraith-like to accompany him upward, probing at his eyes, nostrils and mouth with dry, gritty fingers.Edvard Munch.
Then, with a lurch as though he crested a sea-wave in his long-dead father’s coracle, he was over the lip of the slope and riding forward across smooth dry turf to the grove. As the dust-wraith faded around him the silence of the yews deepened and he seemed to feel the weight of their eld on his shoulders, crushing him deeper into his saddle. His horse whinnied and stumbled, and for a moment he thought he had grown heavier, but it was merely a crumbling patch of earth beneath its forehoof, and he reached the grove safe enough. Here he dismounted, his sabatons sinking deep into the litter of needles, and drew his sword before walking forward among the trees. The gloom beneath the low-hanging boughs seemed to match the needle-litter beneath his feet, welcoming the eye but revealing nothing substantial, just vague shape of trunk and branch. But his eyes were adjusting and now he saw an upright of grey, unlichened stone, then a cross-bar and second upright.
It was a door or gate to a deeper gloom, and when he stood before it he could smell cold air underlain faintly with burnt wood and oil, as though someone with a torch had passed through an hour or two before. He saw now that a fresh torch waited in a bronze bracket by the gate, its head wound in oil-soaked cloth. He lifted it forth and grunted with surprise, almost letting it fall, for it had blazed to life in his hand, throwing back the darkness around and before him with eager fire-tongues that spoke a spell of light. He re-sheathed his sword and walked forward through the gate, having to stoop his head a little and kicking yew-needles ahead of him. They carpeted the floor for some paces, then thinned quickly and disappeared, so that his sabatons rang on the black stone of the floor. Echoes ran to search out the darkness beyond the light of his torch, returning to tell him how the corridor ended a half-stone’s throw ahead.
But as he advanced, he could read the echoes more clearly and was unsurprised to find a descending spiral stair surmounted by a inscription of tarnished silver. He lifted the torch to read:
Then he descended the stair, spiraling into the earth, feeling the air grow colder around him, watching his breath plume thicker, till he was glad of the flickering warmth of the torch on his face. When he reached the foot of the stair and the branching corridors that waited there, he lifted the torch again to read the inscriptions above each. One read IL, the other LA. He made his choice and walked forward, and the echoes returning through the corridor-spanning fog of his breath told that the corridor branched again ahead of him. When he reached the branch he lifted the torch again to read SERRAGLIO and PESCATORE. He chose again and walked forward.
,shcunue sih yb detrocse ,regnol on emac mōuzlanM-hpīšH ,eyA
dekan hcihw ni ,oilgares eht fo snoititepmoc eht egduj ot
thgil fo sniahc htiw skcab rieht dniheb dnuob sdnah ,slrig
dettonk pu ward ot tauqs dluow ,revlis elbignarferri tub
nwo rieht ot roloc ni dehctam klis fo sdroc dettonknu ro
;dettonk ro dettonknu meht egrogsid neht ,eceelf-rehten neklis
fo seigoloisyhp srevid eht ni regnol on dethgiled eh dna
,htnātmiY lanoirtnetpes fo slrig elap-wons eht :oilgares sih
gniliorb-tfahs a sselehtreven dewerb secifiro dna niks esohw
niks esohw ,ūkkaZ lairotauqe fo slrig cinaidisbo eht ;taeh
;htlooc gniyfed-emilc fo tsartnoc yb erew secifiro dna
evoba deliorb ohw ,vanesT naenarretidem fo slrig hsidaj eht
detsaerb yllacixodarap eht ;âsrev eciv ro ,woleb delooc dna
nomannic fo detnecs yllaretxed erew ohw ,ëymarM fo slrig
eht ;dran ro esnecniknarf fo yllartsinis dna yramesor ro
klim dedleiy ohw ,ruūtukN fo slrig gnitatcal yltnenamrep
.lla meht fo derit dah eh ,enif ni ;yenoh naht reteews
Deeming his soul-sickness permament, he had made no efforts to search out a cure, spending instead all hours of light and dark aloft in his highest tower, as though to spurn, so far as he might, the limitations of earth; but rumors of his malaise ran and ramified throughout his empire and one day his chief eunuch, the capon-plump Ngvimb-Hatārkă, climbed to him and reported, having recovered his breath, that a wizard of the Eastern Wastes had come in search of an audience, claiming to possess the key to his labyrinth of melancholy. Hšīph-Mnalzuōm turned bleak grey eyes on him from the empurpling line of the western horizon, where he had awaited the rising of the planet Mlaan, and opened his mouth to issue an order of dismissal for the wizard. But some impulse, arising he knew not whence, possessed his tongue and he heard himself ordering instead the preparation of the neglected throne-room, where he would receive the wizard in an hour.
The enunch bowed and retreated, and to the accompaniment of his dwindling footsteps and wheezes Hšīph-Mnalzuōm rose and clad himself in a cloak of peacock feathers, breeks of fine-woven byssus, and sandals of sole-massaging pearlwork, for he dwelt with no servants of dressing or feeding in the tower, having found some slight alleviation of his malaise performing these tasks for himself, in despite of all precedent and custom. But he had not so far descended from imperial loftiness as to prepone an appointment with an eremitic wizard, and having dressed he lit his reading-lamps and leafed through his once-well-loved books of astrology and divination, stifling his increasing yawns with a slender hand whereon lay the ruby Issĭmnēlph, highest symbol of his imperial house. Latterly, as though in sympathy with its master’s moods, the fires of the gem had slumbered; but tonight he saw with vaguely stirring interest that they glowed with their draconic strength of old.
So it was that, the hour uncustomarily abscinded, he descended the ivory treads of his tower with more speed than had been his wont on his ever-rarer journeys below, wondering whether the wizard had indeed brought him surcease of his malaise; and his feet woke louder and more hurrying echoes down the corridor to his throne-room than they had for many months. The room had been swept and scented with scrupulous care under Ngvimb-Hatārkă’s bastinado-minating eye, and blazed with largest lamps of sharpest-burning oils upon the hastily donned finery of all his court. But the darkness of Hšīph-Mnalzuōm’s soul rose to greet the light and splendor of his throne-room, driving all hope of cure from his heart and brain; and he sighed as he planted his backside to the swan-downed cushions of his chryselephantine throne, barely able to find will to flick a finger in signal that the wizard should be brought to him.
Nor did the ridiculous aspect of the wizard’s entrance, as he advanced down the room dropping the smuts and ashes of his eastern dwelling from his tatterdemalion rags and medusine hair and beard, to the besom-whisking disconcertion of the eunuchs who crawled on hand and knee beside and after him, call forth more than a momentary smile on the face of the emperor. But when the wizard halted and bowed before him, brushing the richly mosaic’d floor with his beard and filling the air with a distinct odor of sulfur and soot, Hšīph-Mnalzuōm gazed upon him with unwonted attention, trying to discern what core of nigromantic wisdom, if any, lay beneath this unprepossessing rind. The wizard faced him unblinking, with redly glittering eyes that wandered perpetually and independently amid the ash-strewn strands of his hair and beard, like lamps borne at hazard through a benighted forest, and Hšīph-Mnalzuōm missed the singular sharpness and discernment of their scrutiny.
When he was satisfied that the wizard was no definite vagabond or mummer, he flicked finger again; and his eunuch-chamberlain demanded of the wizard his name, antecedents, and purpose in seeking an audience with the Most High and Puissant Emperor of All Lands and Isles Beneath the Sun. Hereupon the wizard bowed again, re-depositing the besom-swept floor with smuts by the brushing of his beard, and straightened to boom out his answers in a voice of eerie resonance and power.
“Know, O Emperor, that I am the wizard Gžō-Vmŏkk of the Eastern Wastes, three-hundred-and-forty-third son of a forty-ninth son of a seventh son, and that I have come to Thee possessing a cure for the sickness of soul that hath ailed Thee this year-and-a-half past.”
Hšīph-Mnalzuōm knew that the wizard’s claim of filial descent was formulaic at best, but was nevertheless impressed by the manner and conviction with which the wizard spoke, and flicked his finger more sharply for the chamberlain to proceed. On being questioned as to the nature of the alleged cure, Gžō-Vmŏkk bowed again and straightened to boom forth his answer.
“Hast Thou, O Emperor, a gaŏvūtr among the botanic splendors of Thy gardens? If so, then I beg that it be brought to me, that I might demonstrate the cure to Thee in its destruction.”
A gasp of incredulity and anticipation succeeded this request, for the gaŏvūtr was the rarest and most beautiful of the Emperor’s blooms, purchased at treasury-draining expense seventeen years before from the king of Tsenav, and the slightest whisper of its destruction from a prince ou princesse du sang, let alone from one so lowly and dubious as the wizard, would once have had Hšīph-Mnalzuōm bawling for his headsman. But now he merely shrugged and nodded to his chamberlain, who signaled for the plant to be fetched in its pot of myth-chased gold. When eight brawny guardsmen, panting with their exertions, had deposited the gaŏvūtr before the throne, the wizard requested permission to proceed with a barely detectable quirk of his more-than-hircine eyebrows; and having received it in a vague imperial nod, searched among the shred and tatters of his chest a hair-thin chain of lamp-catching silver, wherefrom hung a minutest box of sparking gold.
A further gasp of incredulity now went up as the wizard, in defiance of strictest regulation and closest-conducted previous search, produced a forbidden dagger or athame and with its tip levered open the box. Therefrom he shook onto a leaf of the gaŏvūtr a pearl no larger than a sand-grain, then stood back and made certain passes of his heat-and-mortification-shriveled hands, accompanied with a gutturally muttered cantrip in an unknown tongue. Hereat the air about the gaŏvūtr commenced to flicker with alternate shade and light, as though with the breath-paced passing of night and day, and the pearl proved no pearl but the egg of some hirsute grub, which hatched and waxed from fingernail’s-length to finger’s-length to hand’s-length in scarce more than the time it takes to write it, consuming the glossy leaves and honey-scented blooms of the gaŏvūtr in a whirl of chomping jaws. Hšīph-Mnalzuōm, confirmed in his reading of the wizard’s skill, watched these prodigies with an interest he had not felt since the onset of his melancholy. The grub, sated at last, now suspended itself from a stripped branch of the gaŏvūtr and split to reveal a gold-flecked chrysalis of caerulean blue, more splendid than any jewel the Emperor had ever possessed or seen. Hšīph-Mnalzuōm grunted with anticipation, for what vast-vanned butterfly of unprecedented colors and beauty would hatch from a chrysalis so large and spendid?
But now the wizard stepped forward again to halt his tachychronic spell, leaving the chrysalis hanging and developing in natural time as he turned to the Emperor and boomed out an allegory after the following wise:
“Dost Thou find the tikăndu of my grub most dazzling and splendid, my Emperor? Aye, ’tis plain that it is so. So suppose, my Emperor, that Thou hadst not the foreknowledge that the thing would split to release somewhat more splendid yet. In Thine ignorance, wouldst Thou not be satisfied to possess the thing as now it hangs, that Thou mightest delight Thine eyes thereon till Thy death? Aye, I see again that ’tis so, therefore I say to Thee that, after another wise, Thou art lacking in this foreknowledge and that Thou dost satisfy Thyself with the chrysalis, careless of the greater-by-far durlāth that could spring therefrom. The girls of Thy seraglio, my Emperor, they are Thy chrysalids, for their present beauty is but the flicker of a dying night-light to the glory of the risen sun against what Thou couldst make of it, with my aid. Watch, my Emperor.”
And again the wizard made his passes and muttered his spell, and the flicker of light-and-shade resumed about the gaŏvūtr, so that very shortly the chrysalis blurred on its stalk and split to reveal the butterfly Hšīph-Mnalzuōm had anticipated. In three heart-beats the wings of the thing were dry and it had sprung aloft on wings of sky-flecked gold, released from whirl-time by another gesture of the wizard to spiral the throne-room with graceful flaps and stately glides, releasing a rich and chest-swelling spice that quite drove out knowledge and memory of the wizard’s sulfur-and-soot. Then the thing alighted on the stripped gaŏvūtr, to lay a single pearly egg that the wizard took up on the tip of his athame and stowed away in his minute gold box, before returning that to the shelter of his rags and bowing for a third time before the Emperor with beard-brushing and ash-deposit.
“My hermaphroditic vžarzi has mated itself and restored my egg, O Hšīph-Mnalzuōm, and now I offer Thee the secret of waking the inner kuvžarăză of Thy girls from their present chrysalids, whereof Thou might lose Thy ennui for ever.”
Here he was interrupted by a sigh from the assembled court of Hšīph-Mnalzuōm, for the great butterfly had relaxed its grip on the gaŏvūtr, and fluttered to the floor in death, greying and crumbling even as it fell.
“What sayest Thou, O Hšīph-Mnalzuōm?” insisted the wizard, ignoring the prodigy; and Hšīph-Mnalzuōm did not hesitate, but nodded to his chamberlain, that he might ask the price demanded by the wizard for his secret. The wizard nodded most vigorously at this, shaking free further of the inexhaustible ashes deposited in his hair and beard, and boomed out his price.
“I ask, O Hšīph-Mnalzuōm, the ruby Issĭmnēlph of Thy forefinger, which, I assure Thee, Thou shalt find most light of parting and soonest fading in memory.”
And Hšīph-Mnalzuōm, to the surprise and horror of his court, drew thereat the great ruby-ring of his ancestors from his forefinger and tossed it to the wizard, who snatched it up and threw in disrespectful return a phial of some fluid most similar in shade and lambency to the ruby the Emperor had unqualmishly relinquished.
“One drop in their wine, O Hšīph-Mnalzuōm, and Thou shalt see the puissance of my magick and know an end to Thy ennui,” Gžō-Vmŏkk boomed, then, setting a sun-cured heel to the mosaic whereon he stood, began to spin like a teetotum, showering the throne-room with the igneous detritus of his hair and rags so suddenly and thickly that it was some minutes before the Emperor and his court ceased to pick ashes and cinders from their eyes, whereupon they discovered that the wizard had departed none knew how or whither, for the doors of the throne-room had been closed and bolted against profane intrusion. Dismissing the mystery from his mind, Hšīph-Mnalzuōm hastened with Ngvimb-Hatārkă and the phial to his seraglio, where he had the two-hundred-and-twenty-three girls of the current year’s service assembled before him for dosing with the wizard’s philter.
Ah, he felt his ardor returning as of old as he surveyed the two-hundred-and-twenty-three in their filmy, gem-tinkled silks and filigreed breast-plates of gold, silver, or trikanāmph, and was hard put to restrain himself from ordering a venerean joust prepared there and then with one or another of his neglected favorites. But he remembered the wizard’s allegory of the chrysalis-and-butterfly, and merely ordered that each be provided wine wherein Ngvimb-Hatārkă might place a drop of the phiter. A creak of unused cupboards and rattle of long-parched crystal succeeded as the girls were equipped to receive the philter; then came a simultaneous gurgle of emptying wine-skins as under-eunuchs trotted hither and thither among the scented and giggling ranks of the girls, filling cups of emerald, sapphire, and mŭamŭatr; and last, wheezing anew from the urgency with which Hšīph-Mnalzuōm signaled him on, Ngvimb-Hatārkă wobbled in his underlings’ tracks to place a drop of the philter in each cup.
The girls were instructed to swirl the wine three breaths, ensuring that the philter was thoroughly mingled therein, then to drain it to the lees at a nod from their imperial master. When Hšīph-Mnalzuōm was certain that all eyes were fixed on him, he nodded; and the two-hundred-and-twenty-three girls obediently raised alternately delicate or Junoesque chins, lengthening alternately slender or muscular throats, and quaffed the wine in mostly three, occasionally four, more rarely two, throat-rippling gulps that echoed between the seraglio walls like the march of a faery-horde across some marsh of nectar. Thereupon succeeded the direst and most unexpected confusion, for scarcely had the wine settled in the girls’ bellies than they commenced to shriek as though they had swallowed waters of the Phlegethon itself; and Hšīph-Mnalzuōm’s eunuchs fled in wobbling terror, palms clamped to their tinnitating ears. Thus it was that Hšīph-Mnalzuōm alone, ears more effectively plugged with his forefingertips and contentedly driven for the nonce, at least, from his ennui, was witness of the final transformation.
The velvety skins of the two-hundred-and-twenty-three corrugated and creased appallingly before his widening eyes, swelling to enclose a sudden waxing of height and size and uncanny alteration of their morphology, then spangling and sparkling with scales of all species of gem he recognized and more he did not. Talons of diamond sprouted from once-slender hands and feet, gouging slivers from the marble floor as they were worked experimentally, and from once-shapely backs broad vans in a thousand shades of sunset or dawn unfolded, flapping the air to a sudden gale of nose-searing spices and eye-melting musks. Through his tears Hšīph-Mnalzuōm saw the smooth and beautiful faces of his girls, last of all externalities to transform, seethe and bubble like varicolored cheese on a chef’s griddle, then sprout into wide-nostriled snouts set with glittering diamond teeth and lapping golden tongues. He stooped, groping on the floor for the phial Ngvimb-Hatārkă had let fall in his flight; screamed to feel diamond talons shave his calf away from behind; then brushed and snatched up the thing, throwing his head back with a grunt of triumph to tip on his tongue the philter-drop therein.
For a moment he thought he was too late: his once-girls were tearing the marble of the seraglio floor like tissue as they pawed thereon, testing new muscles and sinews for flight, and if he fell beneath their talons untransformed he would be slashed to bloody collops; but then his belly too blazed agonizingly with the wizard’s magick and he felt his skin commence its corrugation and gemmification. In the next instant the air above him was torrefied by the first fire-blasts of proceeding transformation, but the heat felt to him beneficent, soothing and easing his transformation to patriarch of his former harem. A year later Hšīph-Mnalzuōm’s once-proud capital was crumbling and his folk devoured or fled far beyond the wide farmlands whose rich loam was reverting to forest and marsh; but Hšīph-Mnalzuōm, his brain-harp re-strung to fiercer and more vibrant melodies, only roared great laughter-gouts of sun-bright flame to see the ruin of all his former pride, ere he winged forth on star-brushing quests of transcendent glory.
At the end of the corridor surmounted GLORY he found another descending spiral stair surmounted with
But the silver of the inscription was even more tarnished and the treads descending beneath his torch were cracked. When he put a foot to one, a flake of stone crumbled from it and went rolling down the stair, its echoes trickling back up to him more and more minutely and never seeming to die. He turned and with walked back, following branch after branch till he reached the branch at which he had followed the word CORRUGATED rather than GREW. Here he chose the opposite branch.
The light was so intense now that he seemed to feel it streaming through his own body, exciting the nerves thereof so that his flesh tingled, ears hummed, nose seethed, tongue stewed with sensations like none he had ever known before. His body was a many-stringed harp plucked by luminal fingers, but his eyes, racked beyond capacity, reported only darkness as he stooped, groping on the floor for the phial Ngvimb-Hatārkă had let fall in his flight. He brushed and snatched up the thing, throwing his head back with a grunt of triumph to tip on his tongue the philter-drop therein. But he was too late: with a throb as of a wakening heart, the floor of his palace shook beneath him and the furnace-gate of their final transformation swung open on him, granting him, as the wizard had promised, surcease of his ineradicable ennui.
And at the end of the corridor surmounted ENNUI he found again a crumbling stair beneath a tarnished silver
He turned back, seeking to trace his way to the grove-gate wherefrom he might return to his horse and ride after his half-forgotten captain, but somehow he missed his way and found himself tracking another story to another crumbling stair and tarnished inscription.
But Szib-Knimm, feeling that he had many years yet in him and much wisdom yet to garner before he trod the chilly meads of the underworld, rebelled against his fate and determined to escape it. Accordingly, he brewed a philtre from certain rare and letiferous herbs, and for three nights focussed thereon, through a lens of roughly fashioned quartz, the sanguineous light of a certain circumpolar star. Then, climbing at midnight to the summit of the ruined central pyramid of Jmorsuu, he had drained the philtre and cast his soul forth to cross the abyss that separated Earth from the planet that encircled the aforesaid star.
Arrived thereat, he re-clothed himself in flesh with a simple cantrip and set about building himself a dwelling. He had chosen the planet with care, for it boasted no fauna above the level of flittermice, insects, and arachnida, or at least the analogues thereof in an alien œconomy. Its flora, however, was of a dazzling richness and complexity, leaving not a thumb’s-breadth of naked ground unexposed, for the planet’s periods of orbit and spin had come to coincide in the course of unguessable ages, and it now turned one face always to the mellow and beneficent light of its parent star, whereby plants were enabled to grow without a moment’s interruption throughout the year.
Szib-Knimm’s senses were delighted with a thousand wafted bouquets as he plaited twigs and wove huge leaves for his shelter; and when he was finished he had to walk but a few paces to pluck an armful of delicious fruits and berries. So he lived some days, beating papyrus from the reeds of a nearby lake and setting down his tale of escape, but soon he began to weary of his frugivory and turned his gaze to the plump flittermice that criss-crossed the air unceasingly around him.
Taking his cue from the spiders that competed with the flittermice for insect prey, he fashioned a large net of plant-fibers and strung it between two trees. When the flittermice swerved aside from the thing, he fashioned another, this time of thinner fibers, and was soon rewarded. Thereafter he ate flittermice daily, coming to distinguish a dozen species amongst them and learning how best to gut and cook each. Then, one day, he rose from his artificial period of sleep and found a new capture in his net: the flight-pod of an unknown plant, carried through the air on gas-filled bladders as some