There was no blood from the open throat. Only a little dust dribbled from the wound, and the body deflated, like a punctured waterbag, until it was no more than a crumpled mass.
The one who had brought me here ascended the dais again.
“What does this mean?” I asked. “Why doesn’t he die like a man?”
“I can explain. Give me the knife.” Without thinking, I gave it to him.
He slammed it hilt-deep into my heart. There was—
—I—
—the beginning of pain; a scream, my knees like running sand—
—stood still. He held me up, impaled on the blade, frozen forever in an impossible dance of death.
“Dadar,” he said. “I can explain. He does not die like a man because he is not a man. He is a thing like a dadar, like you. A reflection of a reflection. You have killed one of your own number. Dadar, it should be all clear to you when you understand that I am Emdo Wesa, the one my brother sent you to murder.”
* * * *
Hearing came first. Footsteps. The sound of a small metal instrument being dropped into a glass jar. Breathing. Slowly, images coalesced out of the air. Bright areas became torches set in a wall. A drifting smear became a more unified shape, and wore the face of Emdo Wesa, whom I had known as Kabor Asha the Zaborman.
Was he with me, even beyond death?
I shook my head to clear it, and was aware of my body. I was bound spread-eagled to a table, and was stripped to the waist. Emdo Wesa, holding a sharp knife, bent over me. Impossibly, because I felt no pain, there was an immense gaping hole in my chest. I felt sure he could have ducked his head into it. And yet, I was numb, and blood did not spurt out. I watched almost with disinterest, as if all were part of a remote pageant performed by spirits in some other plane of existence. In the shadows.
“You know,” laughed the wizard, seeing that I was awake, “you could say it was obvious from the beginning that my brother had a hand in this.”
He put down the knife and reached into the cavity. His gloves were off and I could see that he indeed lacked three fingers. In their place light flickered.
He drew out a severed hand, totally covered with blood. From out of my chest. He took a ring off one of the fingers, then threw the hand away like so much garbage.
“Yes,” he said, examining the ring. “It is my brother’s hand. His last one. He used the other to make another dadar. How long ago was that? I don’t remember. Oh, I should tell you something. To make a dadar, the wizard must cut off a piece of his living flesh. You have to amputate something. Dadars are not made frivolously. So far I have had but three enemies I could not otherwise deal with, and each cost me a finger to make a dadar. But my brother, I believe, is more quarrelsome. He has lots of enemies. He has changed himself hideously. I won’t tell you the cause of our feud, because it would go on an on, and I don’t care to spend that much time doing so, but I will say this. The world, all the worlds, would be better off without him. He is a monster.”
“M—monster …”
Emdo Wesa smiled and said softly. “Don’t strain yourself, my friend. Don’t try to speak.”
“Who…? Friend…?”
“Now you have a good mind, for a dadar. I must compliment my brother on his workmanship. Or you shall, when you see him. You are so full of questions. Let me set your mind at rest and answer a few. First, know that sorcery changes the sorcerer. Every act makes him a little less a part of the human world. It has to be done with moderation. Otherwise, like my brother, one will drift like an anchorless ship, far, far into strangeness. He has. I don’t think his mind works at all like a human one anymore. But he is still clever. Why did he create you, and let you live unsuspecting for forty-five years before using you? It is because I have long journeyed outside of time, and forty-five years in this world has no duration outside. When I looked back into time, to see how things were going, at a point years ahead of where I departed, I saw you killing me in my sleep. It was no illusion, but a true thing. So I had to arrange for another to die in my place. That was what I had seen. Then I was able to come back some days before the event, encounter you, and make sure things occurred as planned. Thus my brother was thwarted.”
Fear, nausea, and delirium washed over me. I felt like I would vomit out my insides, but nothing came. I screamed my wife’s name.
“Tamda is not with you anymore,” said Emdo Wesa. “It is useless to call her.”
He reached somewhere beyond the range of vision and came back with a still beating heart in his hands.
“No…Tamda! You—monster!”
“Calm yourself. Calm yourself. I didn’t say where I got this. It is for you, that you might live.” He placed it in my chest. “You don’t think I…no, how could you? I am not some inhuman fiend like my brother. I am a man, like anyone else. I am human. I have feelings. I can perceive beauty, know sorrow and joy. I haven’t lost that. I am moved by compassion. I know what love is, even the love of a dadar.”
His breath came out like smoke. By the light of the torches I could see that what I had taken to be tight-fitting scale armor was really his flesh. His three ghostly fingers flickered as he sewed up the wound.
I screamed again.
He walked along the table, toward my face, the knife in hand once more.
* * * *
I thought that my being on the hill outside the shadow city, with Emdo Wesa beside me, was all a dream, something conjured by my desperate mind in my last moments of life. But the scene had duration, and I felt hard ground beneath me, and I touched my body and found that it was real. I groped under my shirt and encountered a tender spot, where the wound had been closed and still had a thread holding it. Much to my surprise I also encountered the dagger my wife had given me. Obviously my new master had nothing to fear from ordinary blades.
One side of my face tingled. There was something subtly wrong with my vision, as if one eye perceived things more intensely than did the other.
I looked at Emdo Wesa. He had a bandage over one side of his face, covering an eye.
Again I was a dadar.
“I am returning you to my brother,” he said. “I shall see everything you see and do. When the time comes, I shall direct you. When your task is completed, I promise you, I shall release you.”
“How can I ever believe that?”
“Why, you have my word, as a human being.”
* * * *
There is another gap in my memory here. I made to answer, when I looked up I saw a clear, blue sky. Surf crashed nearby, the air was filled with spray. I was no longer in the shadow, but on a beach somewhere in the real world, on a bright, day, and the wizard was no longer with me.
I had come to the ocean. I had looked upon lakes before, and but never the ocean. I had only heard of it, from those who had travelled far. Water stretched to the horizon, a vast array of whitecapped waves marching toward me like the ranks of endless army, only to break into foam at my feet. The wonder of it almost overcame the terror of what had gone before. For this, it was almost worth what I had endured. Perhaps, I thought, I had gone mad, and had imagined all that had gone before in my madness, and in my distracted state wandered over the world until at last I came to the shore of the sea. That was how I had come here.
But then I saw that there were no footsteps in the sand. I walked forward a step, and then there was a single set. I was not wet, so I had not come out of the waves, to have my tracks washed away behind me. No, I had been deposited here, out of the air.
When I pulled up my shirt, I saw the closed wound on my chest, red and swollen, the end of the black thread sticking out of it. It hurt when I breathed deeply.
Everything