שממית בידים תתפש ותיא בהיכלי מלך משלי ל כח
Three-and-seventy years had the ascetic wizard Vmirr-Psumm dwelt alone in the desert of Yommtevac in a tent of sun-bleached camel-hide, nourishing himself on bitter drupes and exiguous dew and increasing ever in tenebrose wisdom and insight. Although he had cast off all desire for quotidian intercourse in his long-departed youth, it was his custom to maintain, by means of trained noctivolant birds and bats, a correspondence with others of his kind throughout the lands of men, and one evening, as he prepared the charts and instruments of a future-probing astrometry, there fluttered into his tent a bat bearing about its neck a phylactery jade-beaded with a rune of safe passage.
When he had captured and caged the bat, he opened the phylactery to discover a letter on fine-scraped vellum and a twist of thread-tied papyrus. The letter extended fraternal greetings to him from a wizardly correspondent of his in the far south, telling him that a long-sought sample of the jungle-herb mšulup was dispatched therewith, although the sender himself had been disappointed of any valuable results in his own experiments. The letter concluded with the runic initials of the dispatching wizard, succeeded by the initials of the two further wizards who had received the phylactery and passed it on its way, and Vmirr-Psumm nodded his silent thanks as he laid the letter aside and untied the twist of papyrus.
The richness and strangeness of the odor that rose from the opened twist might, to a less knowledgeable wizard, have been in disappointing contrast to the pinch of finely powdered herb found within it, but Vmirr-Psumm was well-acquainted with the rarity and value of the mšulup, and he knew that he had been vouchsafed a prince’s ransom by his austral brother. That he himself would be disappointed of results in his experiments with the herb he did not for a moment believe, for despite its rarity and the consequent infrequency with which it fell into the hands of wizards, one well-established property of the mšulup was that it yielded its fullest odor only to those whose psyches were truly attuned to the spirit of the generating herb. Accordingly, postponing his hard-planned astrometry without a second thought, he took up his wizard’s pipe of rune-incised ivory, plugged it with a quid of tobacco, and sprinkled thereon three grains of mšulup before lighting it and settling himself on his stool of meditation.
The first draught of smoke he drew into his lungs confirmed his hopes of success, for instantly the walls of his tent began to ripple and recede around him, and he heard a clangor as of brazen gates opening in the depths of the earth and the vaults of heaven. The mšulup grants, to those able to receive them, visions of ultimate reality, bestowing powers of universal clairvoyance and exalting its inhalers for a space to the heights of a god. All this Vmirr-Psumm had known beforetime, inspiring his oft-repeated requests to his correspondents in the south, where the herb grew in the jungles of Gnerrultan, and here at last was the proof. His tent and the desert of Yommtevac had vanished; the earth and her secrets lay transparent as quartz beneath him; and he comprehended the full sphere of reality at a glance, seeing the smallest and darkest comet-cinder in the furthest reach of the Universe as easily and closely as the largest and brightest star in his own celestial neighborhood. And gradually, as he gazed, thrilled with awe and wonder, he became aware of a reticulation of silver threads that filled reality from end to end, radiating out from a star in the constellation of Mirq-Tsemë, the Hippogriff, and ensnaring every atom of the Universe.
He fastened his attention on the origin of the threads and saw that they sprang from a planet orbiting the star in Mir-Tsemë, where, on a polyhedral throne of star-forged iron, the arachnomorph Goddess Nemilloth sat and span sempiternally, her eight limbs tugging and directing the course of all that was caught in the toils of her web. Then the vision was fading, the walls of his tent reforming around him, and the bright light of early afternoon slanting through the door-flap, though it seemed but moments before that he had taken up his pipe and drawn upon it. Now it was dead, and Vmirr-Psumm rose from his stool of meditation to leave his tent and shake out its ashes on the stony sand of Yommtevac, musing on what he had seen.
Life, it seemed, was but a puppetry, for all was overseen and directed by Nemilloth from her throne of star-forged iron; and it mattered not whether Nemilloth were a literal deity or a personification of existential necessity, for the herb mšulup speaks sooth whether by true visions or by allegory. Even his own rebellion at the thought of his captivity, Vmirr-Psumm realized, was known and directed by Nemilloth, as was his realization that his rebellion was known and directed, and so ad infinitum. Having knocked out his pipe, he returned to his tent and searched for a scroll whose umbral periods had long fascinated and puzzled him, and into which the vision granted him by the mšulup had cast certain shafts of light. The scroll had been composed under the influence of a visionary herb closely allied to the mšulup, and told of a wizard, Tšenn-Gilë, of the long-vanished planet of Pmimmb, who had rebelled against the tyranny of the fisher-goddess Ndamburuhh and sought to cast off the net in which she bound his planet. He had succeeded, discovering and casting a spell that tore the substance of Pmimmb from her grasp, but the planet was shattered by an error in the working and Tšenn-Gilë’s secret had died with him.
When he had found and re-read the scroll with close attention, Vmirr-Psumm pondered its significance. The fisher-goddess Ndamburuhh was plainly a variant or ancestress of the spider-goddess Nemilloth, and Tšenn-Gilë’s rebellion against her was not allegory or metaphor, as he had previously believed, but true history. A previous wizard had seen the web of Nemilloth as he had, and had found some way to escape it. What wizard had found, wizard might find again, Vmirr-Psumm mused… unless some ingredient of the spell had, like Tšenn-Gilë himself, vanished with the planet Pmimmb. But had Pmimmb truly vanished? The scroll spoke of its shattering, not its dissolution, and fragments were perhaps broadcast throughout the Universe, to fall on planets far from the former orbit of Pmimmb, and perhaps on that whereon Vmirr-Psumm himself dwelt. If he could find such a fragment and the virtue of the planet-wide spell lingered yet therein, he might find a directer route to freedom than the long and wearisome search for a perhaps irretrievable and certainly hazardous spell.
Musing thus, Vmirr-Psumm prepared his evening meal of drupes and dew. When he had eaten and drunk, he refilled his pipe with tobacco, sprinkled three grains of mšulup atop it as before, lit it, and settled himself anew on his stool of meditation. As the vision began he fixed his attention this time not on the constellation of Mirq-Tsemë and the throne of Nemilloth but closer at hand, scanning the earth and her depths for some substance through which the silver threads of Nemilloth were not cast. He succeeded more quickly than he had dared hope, for the substance he sought was apparent almost at once a few strides beyond the flap of his own tent in a buried shard of the black mineral sorraim, long dismissed in wizardly lore as rare but worthless. When, as before, the vision faded after a seeming few moments that were in fact hours, he rose from his stool and stepped outside the tent to knock out his pipe and retrieve the shard.
When he had dug it free and carried it back into his tent, he smiled to think of its value. Here was an authentic fragment of a vanished planet, fallen to earth countless millennia ago but disregarded by all till he, Vmirr-Psumm, found the key to its significance. Indeed, perhaps it was the mystagogic influence of the shard, trickling into his thoughts over the decades, that had brought about his rebellion. He set to work with athame and cantrip fashioning a dodecahedral die from the shard, for he had reasoned that such a die, rolling outside the web of Nemilloth, would allow him to introduce true chance into the world. Merely by reading the varying faces of the die as it rolled he would introduce data into his brain that were unguided by Nemilloth, and perhaps thereby loosen the strands of the web in which his brain was caught.
When the die was complete he tested its symmetry with his instruments of sacred geometry, carved a little more from three of the faces, and was ready to begin his experiment by the light of captive desert glow-worms. Outside the sun was setting and eight or nine leagues to the east a caravan of desert nomads was passing en route to a shrine of the scorpion-god Ngšelgor, a close cousin of Nemilloth in some early theogonies. The nomads were witness to the final act in the story of Vmirr-Psumm, though neither then nor later did they know it. On a sudden they saw a mountain-high fountain of flame rearing skyward against the crimson skeins of sunset, and its shape was still seared against their vision when the desert rocked beneath the feet of their camels. A little later still, their excited conversations were drowned in thunder rumbling for long moments out of the west and sounding like the sardonic chuckles of a giant demon.
The nomads were still riding in panic eastward when the desert began to rattle around them and camels bucked and grunted to the sting of stony fragments falling from the heavens. Behind them the sunset was more glorious still with the dust of the cataclysm wherein Vmirr-Psumm had perished like Tšenn-Gilë before him, for he who loosens the web of Nemilloth in rebellion grants matter itself leave to rebel. A shard of mineral might remain outside the web and survive, but the die-inspired brain of Vmirr-Psumm was too large and had succumbed, on its vastly smaller scale, to the same forces that had torn apart the planet of Pmimmb.