The Mysteries Of The Faceless King
by Darrell Schweitzer

* * * *

He could never remove the mask, never return to what he’d been.

When I was eight, my father took me deep into the forest to see the altar of the Faceless King. Voinos, my elder brother, came too; mostly because, as I was smugly certain at the time, Father didn’t trust him out of his sight. Voinos was fourteen then; and he hated everyone: me, Father, Mother, the town elders, and even, I think, himself. That year, when he was fourteen, was the last time anyone was ever able to control him.

It was in the autumn, when the leaves had turned brilliant red and gold and yellow, on the morning of the Festival of the Masks, when children make masks out of those leaves and try and go into other people’s houses and impersonate other children, only to receive treats when they are discovered. But the Festival of Masks is for younger children, and that year my father decided that I was older. Only fathers can know when this happens, and when they do it is the time of going, when fathers and sons go off together, to some private place the gods reveal, to learn together such wisdom as the gods see fit to inspire. In this way, boys become men. So I came a man at the age of eight, and Voinos at fourteen because Father did not trust him.
Going. Old Decronos, the chief priest of our town, was there by the gate, seated at a table sipping broth. He barely looked up when the three of us knelt before him and Father said softly, “Going.”
The priest touched Voinos and me on the shoulder with his feather-tipped cane and waved us away. Then the guards opened the heavy log gates, and off we went.
The terraced fields above the Great River were places of mud and dead corn stalks. It was bad to be there at this time of year, I knew, because sometimes ancestors rise up out of the mud, begging to be remembered; and if you don’t remember them, it can bring a curse. I wanted to get away quickly, but we walked for most of the morning through the empty fields in silence, following the river. Once we came to a calfs skull and some beads stuck on a post. It was a charm, Father explained, to make the ancestors gather there and not bother anyone. We walked a wide half-circle around it.
Going. By noon we were far from any path, in the unbroken twilight beneath heavy pine branches. No birds sang. No animals ran before us. The forest stood silent and expectant all around, the bright leaves of autumn now a memory among the faded blue-greens and browns and the all-pervasive grey.
Voinos complained a lot. He would insist we stop to rest, then sit down; and Father would have to drag him up by the scruff of the neck. Then he’d try to run off, but Father was too quick and his long arms would always have him. Voinos made a fist once, but Father just swatted it aside. He could have hurt Voinos. He was a big, agile, powerful man. That alone my brother respected in him.
The shadows deepened, and it seemed night already. The soft needles muffled our footsteps. The horizontal rays of the setting sun flickered between the black trunks.
We paused then, built a fire and had our supper, then sat without a word while the flames burned low, Voinos glowering, I almost too excited to be still, a little scared, expecting wonders.
After the sun had been gone for perhaps an hour, the moon rose, gleaming among the branches, like a huge penny.
Father was a bard, one of the very best. He was often called to recite in the halls of the great lords. There, in the forest before his sons, he got out his harp and began to make a story — for a bard is a maker; he calls up his matter out of nothing, and when he has finished, it lives.
He sat for a moment with his eyes closed, gazing into himself, strumming softly on the harp; and when he began to speak, it was with all the intensity of a bardic tale, for all that his words were less formal.
“These things came to me in a dream,” he said, “and that was why I brought you here. The dream came from the gods.”
“Well, what did the gods say?” Voinos demanded.
I gasped and looked away, shocked at the interruption; but Father merely answered.
“I dreamed of Verunnos-Kemad, the most secretive of the gods. He is known by the wind in the night, by the pattern of the leaves as they fall, by the voice of the river and the running beasts, by the multitudes of birds. All these are signs of him. I dreamed that the holy one stood here, almost where we sit, in the darkness of a night a few scant centuries after the creation of the world. His whole body shone like the pale moonlight. There was a man here too, prostrate on the ground before him. The name of the man I do not know. Nor did I see his face. It does not matter. He was but one man of many.
“In this time, so long ago, there were dragons in the land, swarming thick as starlings.” Father turned to me suddenly, still strumming the harp. “Did you know about the dragons, Evad?”
“There’s bones,” I said, startled. “Bones in the cliff by the river road.”
“Yes, one of the last of the dragons died there, and his bones remain for all to see; but these were living dragons, great and terrible. They hovered in black flocks, their wings like thunder. Sometimes people make offerings to them, gold, animals, even their children; and the dragons would go away for a while. But sometimes they would just burn the towns with their breath and swoop down to devour the fleeing people.”
Voinos shifted about, rustling.
“You’re changing the subject,” he said. “What do dragons have to do with Veruna — Vero — whatever his stupid name is?”
Again I was afraid of my father’s sudden anger, but as long as he was telling the story, his patience seemed limitless.
“I think the man’s children had been taken by the dragons, or perhaps they were about to be. I don’t know. But I saw, in my dream, the man lying there and the god bending down over him. The hand of Verunnos-Kemad glowed softly, like a paper lantern. He touched the man on the shoulder and raised him up, and placed on the man’s face a mask of brilliant silver, shaped like the full Moon, mottled, with thin rays. And he gave him a silver staff and a silver-bladed sword, and said to him in terrible, relentless whispers, You are the first. Let it begin.
“Then he was gone, and the man stood alone in the forest darkness, until the first light of dawn touched the mask and staff, and they shone more brilliantly than the sunrise. But in the full day they were merely silver, for their power and their glory were of the night.
“This man was the Faceless King. Whoever he had been previously had ceased to exist, for he could never remove the mask, never return to being just an ordinary man. He emerged from the forest in the evening with his sword drawn, and the bravest of heroes followed him, and together they slew all the dragons, including the one who died by the river. At last they slew even the mighty Mother of Dragons in her cavern at the center of the world. Then the Faceless King parted from the heroes. He sent with them his farewell to all he had ever known, and he remained in the cavern of the Mother Dragon, among the treasures and the pillars of stone the color of blood. He sits there still, watching over the world. The wisest and the bravest know his sendings, for he is their lord.”
“It’s just an old story,” Voinos said. “You’ve taken us all the way out here to tell us an old story. We could have stayed home. You could have told it any market day.”
Father stiffened. I could hear barely restrained rage in his voice.
“Some of it I could tell again, as a story, for it is good to have the truth in a story. But the dream itself is a secret thing, between me, your father, and Voinos and Evad, my sons. I do not know why the Secret God sent it to me. That is a mighty and even terrible mystery. But I am sure that your lives will be shaped by it. This is the night of going and now I have told you all that I have to tell you.”
“But — but, Father,” I asked softly, as respectfully as I could, “what does it mean?”
Father pointed to a rise of land, a tree-lined ridge I could barely make out in the darkness. It looked like the back of a huge, sleeping dragon to me.
“There. Just beyond is a little valley. The heroes built an altar there, in secret, for the Faceless King. Sometimes he would manifest himself there and even give them gifts, rare crowns and jewels from the Mother Dragon’s hoard, and he would speak to them in prophecies, for he shared the thoughts of Ve-runnos-Kemad, and at such times his voice was the voice of the god.”
Suddenly Voinos was up and running toward the ridge.
“Where are you —?” I managed to say.
Father cursed, grabbed his staff and a burning brand from the fire, and took after him. I followed.
But as we were running the shadows of the night began to move. I thought it was black smoke at first, rushing silently between the trees, but then I saw that it was an enormous flight of birds rising from the earth. Soon the whole forest shook with the whirring of their wings.
I knew this was a sign, a miracle, for there were millions of them. The very air shuddered with their passage, yet not a single bird cried out. Pine needles and twigs rained down on us. Above, the Moon vanished, like a shiny pebble beneath a dark tide.
“Father!” I shouted.
He dropped his staff and brand, then fell to his knees, covering his face. I think he was weeping. I groped toward him, bent against the mighty wind of countless wings, hundreds of birds colliding with me. I reached out. His hand found mine and I embraced him, and so we remained, he kneeling and I standing hunched against him for what seemed like hours, until at last the night was still. The Moon reappeared. There was no wind. Not a branch rustled. I could hear my father’s heart, and my own, racing.
“Father . . . ? Voinos, he —”
“Come!”
Still holding my hand, he leapt to his feet, snatched up his staff, and yanked me along as he ran. We topped the rise and looked down into a hollow, where Voinos stood in the moonlight before a roughly rectangular slab of white marble.
“What have you done?” Father shouted as we approached.
Voinos turned slowly. He spoke with open contempt.
“It’s just an old rock.”
He spat on the altar stone. I let out a sudden cry of “No!” and cringed at the desecration. It was then that my eyes met my brother’s, and I knew that the sign had not been for him. He had seen no flight of birds.
Father demanded again, “What did you do?”
“Nothing. I was looking for gold. I wanted to see if there was any treasure left.” Voinos acted as if it were a commonplace, completely ignoring Father’s mounting rage.
“You didn’t intend to share it.”
“What matter? There’s nothing to share. The Faceless King is dead, if there ever was any Faceless King. He’d have to be a god himself to live so long. It’s just a stupid old story.”
“He is but a man,” Father said, intoning his words as if speaking a doom. “Some say that the mask extends his life, and he lives for many centuries, but in the end, he dies like any man. When he is dying, he summons his successor from out of the world, and someone else becomes the Faceless King. He dies in secret. No one, not his attendants, not his messengers, ever sees his face.”
Voinos laughed, shockingly. “Then how do they know it’s him?”
Even Father was stunned at that.
I merely said, “Huh?”
Voinos turned to me sharply. “Idiot, if they can’t see his face, it could be just anybody.” He leaned over and poked my chest viciously. “Even you.”
Father still held my hand. I felt him tremble.
“The one who wears the mask is the Faceless King. He hears every leaf that falls —”
Voinos mimicked him in sing-song mockery, “He hears every piece of dung plop in every privy in the whole wide world—”
Father let out a terrible cry, almost a scream, shoved me aside, and swung his staff, Voinos rolled out of his way and ran. The unexpended force of the stroke sent Father reeling. He slipped in mud and pine needles, and fell face down before the altar of the Faceless King.
Voinos laughed as he ran, then turned and shouted filthy names, ran again, and was gone.
Strangely, Father made no attempt to pursue him.
He sat up slowly. I crouched down by his side.
“Father . . . I . . . saw the Faceless King. So I know you’re telling the truth.”
He grabbed me with both hands and shook me so hard it frightened me.
“When?”
When the birds ... I saw the silver mask in the darkness, coming toward me. The eyes were open. The mouth was about to say something.”
Father began to weep. I stood there, bewildered. I did not even know if I was telling the truth. I wanted it to be true, but my mind was in such a muddle I couldn’t be sure.
But Father believed me.
‘No matter where you go or how you live, my son, this night will remain with you, and you will spend all your days uncovering its mysteries. That is the meaning of your going.”
“What about. . . Voinos?”
“It’s his night too. Already he is searching for the answers.”
Voinos kept on running. I did not see him again for many years, although sinister rumors soon reached us of how he had gathered a band of ruffians around himself and had begun to rob travellers. By the time I was fifteen, there were more than rumors, and Voinos was widely feared. The bodies of his victims were always found mutilated — no one knew why — their faces slashed beyond recognition, or even burned until no trace of the features remained.
Mother died that year, more of grief than anything else, and Father placed two wooden skulls above the doorway of our house. He told everyone he had only one son now, and the chief priest
the new one, Hamilcestos, for De-cronos had been murdered on a journey
came to exorcise the spirit and memory of Voinos.
But it did little good. The next day, as if to mock us, three faceless corpses were found seated in a neat row against the town’s stockade. Thereafter, whenever I walked anywhere, people would turn and stare, then glance away quickly if they thought I’d noticed them. Sometimes I even overheard a whisper. “There! That’s him! The brother of Voinos the madman.”
People even said that Voinos came to us at night by a secret tunnel, and that we lived better than we should off of our share of his loot.
I followed my father in his profession, and he and the other bards trained me in the ways of the art. I spent long days reciting to myself, chanting all the old stories of our people. And when it came time for me to recite in the marketplace, people listened, perhaps out of respect for the stories, not the teller. But I was never summoned to the halls of the lords, either because I lacked skill, or because I was the brother of of a murderer.
At seventeen, I managed to marry, a year and more later than most young men of the town. My wife was called in public merely Evad-ka, the woman of Evad, but I alone called her by the name I had given her, Rael-Hisna, the Flower of the River. She had come from the Great River, with traders on a barge from a strange place far upstream, where villages perch on cliffs above steep gorges, and the people do not worship the gentle gods of the fields and forest, but only the terrible Ragun-Temad, who commands eagles from mountaintops above the clouds.
I truly loved my Flower of the River. She was the one great joy in my life, which was otherwise often bitter. Father was growing old more rapidly than his years, weighed down by his sorrows. One winter, his voice left him, and he was reduced to playing the harp while I sang or recited, desperately trying to reconstruct the wonder of his half-remembered performances. He never saw the inside of a lord’s hall again.
Gossips said the gods had cursed him for having sired Voinos, to which he replied hoarsely that such a son was curse enough, and the gods didn’t have to do anything.
Then Rael-Hisna gave birth to a son, my son, and Father was glad again for the first time in a long while.
But that very day Voinos’s band, now hundreds strong, seized nine barges on the river. Faceless corpses floated by our town for a week.
It was a sign. I knew that I had to go into the forest as my father had, in secret, and pray before the altar of the Faceless King, that perhaps the King or even Verunnos-Kemad might look on me and restore some order to my life. I wanted things to be better for my son. When he was grown, I would take him to that altar as I had been taken, and things would work out better at his going. Mine had been such a disaster.
The path seemed longer this time. Perhaps I strayed from it. I walked all night through the forest. A fog had come in and the needles were wet, so I made no sound as I went. I listened always, but heard nothing, and still I was afraid. The whole countryside was infested with bandits, with wild beasts, or worse. Toward dawn I slept seated against a tree and dreamed that hundreds of armed men stood before me, all of them wearing the silver mask of the Faceless King, like a mirror image endlessly repeated. I cried out, in my dream, and was answered with familiar laughter. The masks came off. Each face was that of my brother. He made to speak, but the only sounds were the crackling of flames, and all those faces burned away like parchment. The rising sparks cried out fragments of words.
I fell forward, suddenly awake. I knew where I was. The familiar, dragon-backed ridge rose before me in the twilight. I ran, looking for some other sign, another flight of birds perhaps, but there was only the mist and the dank smell of the deep forest.
And there was Voinos, waiting for me. He had changed much since we had last been here together, and was now a black-bearded, barrel-chested giant nearly twice my size, who wore jewels in his hair and rings dangling from his ears, and a wildly colorful costume which seemed all bright sashes and pantaloons.
He stood leaning on a hammer, catching his breath. He had been working hard. He had broken the altar of the Faceless King to bits. Now he watched me coldly, as if I were mere prey.
“Are you . . . still looking for treasure?”
He made no reply.
I spread my hands apart from my body to show that I was not armed, all the while glancing furtively about, certain his men had arrows trained on me every step of the way.
Suddenly a morning bird began to chirp merrily, followed by a chorus of others, announcing the new day.
I stood there, facing my brother, while the sky lightened. A light spray of rain blew in my face.
At last I said, “You’ve changed a lot.”
And with terrifying suddenness he lunged forward and grabbed the front of my jacket with a meaty hand and yanked me off my feet as if I were a rag doll.
“Yes!” he said, holding me inches from his face. His breath stank. “I’ve changed. I’m no longer a child and you still are. You always will be a child, Evad.”
“Why —?”
“Why? I came here to put an end to an old story. How? No magic. I had the town watched. I know you, child-brother. I knew you’d come here eventually. When you set out, that was the signal.”
I barely managed to gasp, “The signal for . . . what?”
“For a little homecoming.” He shook me, again like a doll or a small child. “I haven’t been back to my town for such a long time. My men are there even now, delivering my regards. When they are done, I’ll go piss in the ashes.”
I struggled against him. He only laughed. It was then that I understood that there were no hidden archers in the bushes. Voinos had only contempt for me. He was certainly not afraid.
“You’re not going back, child-brother. I’ve spared you, just you, because you are my dear brother.”
Suddenly he was pressing the point of a knife under my chin. He pressed harder. I felt it slicing the skin and tried not to breathe. There was a warm trickle of blood.
Then he held the knife up where I could see it. The blade was silver, the handle gold inset with jewels. The sign on it, in relief on the blade, was of the lunar-mask, the emblem of the Faceless King.
“Pretty, isn’t it? In found it inside the altar. There was a secret compartment. Think of it was one last gift from the gods to our loving family. And because we love each other so much, child-brother, you are going to perform a task for me.”
I thought of our family now, Father and my wife and child probably butchered by Voinos’s men, and I said grimly, “Just kill me and get it over with. I’ll do nothing for you.”
Incredibly, he forced the knife into my hand and closed my fingers around the grip. Then he flung me to the ground, hard, and I lay stunned, while he stood astride me.
“Well? You might kill me with that.” He indicated the knife. “But you can’t, can you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can.”
He slammed his foot down on my chest.
“I don’t think so. I am not planning on it. Instead, you will help me carry out my beautiful scheme. Do you remember, dear child-brother, what we talked about when last we, ah, enjoyed each other’s company here?”
“I. . . remember.” I gasped for breath. His foot was crushing me.
“I reasoned then that if nobody has ever seen the face of the Faceless King, he could be, well, anybody. Remember?”
He leaned harder. There was a sharp pain as ribs cracked. I could only sob hoarsely.
“That is the point, child-brother. The knife is a token from the god. With it, you will journey very far. All men will make way for you. And, if such a person as the Faceless King really exists — you know, I have never made up my mind about that — you will return his token, preferably in the heart. If there is no such King, then you’ll wander forever, which I think will be very funny. But if there is, well, you will use this dagger. Then the face behind the mask will be yours. No one will ever now, will they? Just you and me. A secret between brothers.”
He let up the pressure a little and I whispered, “Why . . . ?
He shrugged. “I want to pray to you, child-brother. It’s good to have family connections in high places.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“You will. What else can you do?”
With that, he took his foot away, hefted the hammer onto his shoulder, and vanished into the forest on long, relentless strides.
It rained all day. Late in the afternoon, I approached the town. The smell of burnt wood carries very far in the rain, so I knew that everything my brother said was true. I believed, too, that he had gone out of his way to piss in the ashes. That would have been just like him.
I was utterly alone, and moreover, incomplete. The pain had not settled yet. I was like a warrior in battle who has just received a terrible wound, but so far has only felt a light blow. He has a little momentum left.
I had a little momentum left as I turned, clutching the sacred dagger Voinos had given me, and walked away from the town and everything I had ever known in my life. I refused to see with my own eyes that my wife and child and everyone else in my world — except Voinos! — were dead. That way there would always be the nagging doubt that I had dreamt it, and eventually the nagging would drive me mad, and in madness there would be some relief.
But the smell of the wood followed after me, and in time I stopped and sat down on a stone and just waited there, shivering, until it was almost evening and the rain ceased. Then I entered the town and saw the blackened logs and the heaps of ashy mud. An occasional corpse lay half-buried. Shadows lengthened as night came on, and I could not tell who any of the dead people were.
The place was very quiet. Here and there smoke rose. Crows cawed in the distance. Above me, the first stars began to appear.
I think I went mad then, for a little while. I screamed and wept and did a strange dance, kicking the heaps of ash and splintered wood, cursing the gods and the Faceless King and even my Father who had, after all, sired Voinos to kill and me to suffer.
And I held up the sacred dagger to the night sky. It gleamed a brilliant silver, like a moonrise. Then I threw it from me, as hard as I could. But I ran after it, and found it glowing where it had fallen. I picked it up, and suddenly the ashes all around me heaved and burst, as if the earth were boiling, and once again there was a miraculous flight of thousands upon thousands of grey and black birds buffetting me, their wings like thunder, rising to fill the sky. I lay huddled there, clutching the knife, and when I closed my eyes I saw the Faceless King clearly this time, sitting on a silver throne in the darkness behind tapestried curtains woven silver on black. His mask seemed to float in the air like a pale moon. He leaned forward, his robes wrinkling, and I was certain he was about to speak, but then the birds were gone and the vision passed.
I hated him. I swore that if I ever did find him, I would kill him, not because Voinos wanted me to, but because I wanted to.
But then I walked a little ways in a direction I somehow knew and there on the ground was my father’s harp, coated with ash but whole. It seemed to me then the most precious object in the world. I sat down and placed it on my lap, weeping softly, and my rage passed as I spent hours carefully cleaning the harp and tuning its strings.
I wore the sacred dagger of the Faceless King around my neck on a cord, the blade exposed and dangling before me. Wherever I travelled, men recognized it and stood aside to let me pass. Even among the wildest mountain trails, in countryside filled with robbers, I was not molested.
I was summoned to the halls of the great lords as my father had been in the old days, but my song was not what the lords commanded. It was always the same, though the words changed like the passing waters of the Great River. There was anger in it and I sang of bloody vengeance; and then there was sorrow; and longing; and I sang of memories and my soul was purged. At the end I always sang of the Faceless King, whose ways are ever a mystery, who yet guides each one of us on the pathway of this life.
Men came to me from many lands asking to know the secrets of the Faceless King: when this or that lord would die, how a certain god must be placated, the answer to some ancient riddle. When I told them I did not know, they continued to follow me from place to place, saying, “He is testing us,” or, “We are not yet worthy to know his mind.” When I sang to them, they went away appeased, and yet I myself was not appeased for to me the mysteries remained mysteries, and I could find no reason for all the things that had happened.
I saw the Faceless King often in my dreams, always leaning forward in the darkness behind the curtains, about to speak but never speaking.
I thought this was because I was not worthy to know his mind.
When a youth came to me and said, “Make me your apprentice. Your singing is the most beautiful I have ever heard,” I replied sadly, “You are as I once was. Remain so.”
But he would not go away. He followed me for days. At last I turned to him and said, “You must chose to follow your own path, your own way, wherever it may lead you. I don’t know what you want or need or will ever find. It is a mystery to me.”
I just mumbled the first words that came into my mind and tried to make them sound like instruction. When I had finished, the youth touched his forehead to the ground at my feet and remained crouched down like that as I walked away from him. Later, I learned that he had founded a sect of mendicant philosophers called The Wanderers, whose symbols are the shoe and the staff, and the empty bag which remains empty because they have not yet found wisdom. Each of them takes a vow never to sleep in the same place for two nights until that bag is filled.
I came to many places I had never even known existed; and after many years reached the City of the Delta, where the Great River empties into a sea like a blue-metal shield beneath the hot sun. My fame had preceded me. People gathered by the thousands on the beach before the white-walled city. I sang for them of sorrow and longing and of the mysteries of the Faceless King. Many fell to their knees as I approached and begged to become my disciples. But I told them that my mission, or curse, or whatever it was, was for me alone; and I would not wish it on anyone else. Still the great mob of them followed me shouting into the city.
The priests summoned me; and I sang for them in the temple, before the enormous image of the god of the city, Bel-Hemad. Afterwards the mob proclaimed that the image had shifted, grinding its stone guts like an earthquake, so that the god might lean down and hear me better. Up near the ceiling, amid the shadows and the pigeons, Bel-Hemad smiled his inscrutable smile and said nothing.
“This man is possessed of an evil spirit,” the chief priest said. “He drives the people to blasphemy!”
I was immediately arrested. Soldiers drove the mob from the temple, while the priests demanded of me the true meaning of my message.
I could only tell them that the Faceless King was an instrument of the secret god Verunnos-Kemad, and I in turn was an instrument of the King, even as my harp was my instrument. I knew that much. I no longer had any doubt.
But the priests were not satisfied. There was money in it, they said. Travellers would come from every land to heap gold on the altars to hear me sing.
“The Faceless King dwells amid the treasure-hoard of the Mother Dragon,” I said. “What need has he of your money? I am filled with his music. What need have I?”
The priests brought the King of the city to me, an old, feeble man they had to hold up by either arm. He commanded me to explain the magic of my song, and I told him the story of my life, but that was not enough.
The King stared at me intently. He pursed his lips as if about to spit. Just then he looked like an ancient mummy, not a living man.
“Each man hears something different in your song,” the King said at last, “and his soul is touched by it. Even I cannot touch a man’s soul. Your song is a greater treasure than all my riches. I would possess it.”
“Majesty,” I said with bowed head. “You are not worthy. Nor am I.”
Then the King gave me over to his torturers and they tortured me with great cunning, so that my pain would never end even after many years, but they did not let me die. And they would not take away my hands, lest I could no longer play the harp, nor my voice; nor did they dare steal the holy dagger I wore around my neck.
In the end, they put out my eyes with it.
There were many times when I fell into a delerium and dreamed that I was home, that I was still a boy in the walled town by the river, and none of this had ever happened.
Once I sat up suddenly in my bed at home, alarmed by some sudden noise in the night. My father stood there at the foot of my bed holding a lantern which was not a lantern at all, but the glowing mask of the Faceless King. He came forward to put the mask on me, but I struggled and cried out and woke with a start in utter darkness, rattling my chains.
Twenty years passed. My former life fell away like old leaves. I could no longer remember my wife’s name, nor summon her face into my memory. I still knew Voinos. He was but a minor agony among many.
I saw the Faceless King every night as I slept. He was always there, leaning forward, about to speak.
At last I screamed to him, whether waking or asleep I do not know, “Let it end! Let me come to you!”
And at last he did speak, saying, “Then come to me right now.”
That night ships arrived from across the sea to sack the City of the Delta. They must have taken the city by surprise. In the morning, I could hear the fighting below my window, and I could smell the smoke of burning houses. By evening there was only the smoke and an occasional cry. Then the lock on my door was being smashed, and a wild-voiced, strange-smelling barbarian burst into my cell, panting with exertion. But then I heard only shuffling. I groped about and found his shoulder level with my waist. He was kneeling before me. Gently, he pressed my harp into my hands.
My chains fell off of their own accord. The barbarian did not strike them.
“I must follow my own path,” I said aloud. I remembered my conversation with the young man on the road, so many years before. “I am like a man on a swaying rope bridge above a deadly gorge. I cannot remain there. I must go either forward or back, and after so much travelling, I do not wish to go back.”
The barbarian cried out something in his own language. I could only make out a few words. He was afraid. I am sure he thought me mad, and to barbarians, madness is a sure sign of the presence of the gods.
I hobbled through the city unopposed. Often someone would take me gently by the arm and guide me a little ways. Once I heard many women weeping. Often I heard masonry crashing, as if the conquerers did not intend to leave any stone atop another.
Finally I was on the beach, the sea breeze blowing in my face, driving away the smoke of the dying city. The lukewarm surf broke around my ankles.
I began to play my father’s harp softly, and sing of my home for the first time in a long while. All the good memories came back. That was the greatest mystery of the Faceless King now, that I could remember a time when I had not known him, and had lived in a remote town and been happy.
Then I began to see stars in the dark sky. I thought for a moment that they were an illusion of my brain, like an itch in an amputated limb, but I went on singing, and I called on the Faceless King.
A silver glow spread across the sea and sky; and the huge mask of the Faceless King rose above the midnight waters; and thousands of black ships bobbed on the waves, their masts hung with lanterns; and these lanterns were the stars. Millions upon millions of birds soared up from between the ships, their wings like murmuring thunder, the stars flickering at their passage. Then I walked upon the water amid huge trees of utterly black stone, while the ships with their lanterns drifted among the trunks, and the birds flew in an endless, swirling mass before the Faceless King. I walked until I came to a dark place in the heart of the black stone forest, where silver-masked priests came out of a temple and challenged me. But I showed them the dagger I still wore around my neck; and they let me pass up the high, black steps of the temple, past endless rows of pillars, until, almost imperceptibly at first, the smooth floor gave way to tumbled stone and the pillars were rough fangs dripping from the ceiling and uncountable treasures lay about in heaps, glowing like coals in the darkness. I knew where I was then, that my quest had come to an end, that I had arrived by strange and devious ways at the Earth’s heart, in the lair of the Mother Dragon.
I stood at the lip of an alcove, before black curtains embroidered with silver thread.
I began to sing once more, the song of the secret god; and for the only time in my life my song was completely pure, devoid of any longing or hatred or wish, as eternal as the wheel of the sky.
But the Faceless King spoke harshly from behind the curtain.
“Well, what have you come for?”
Astonished beyond all reason, I dropped the harp. It struck the ground with a resonant clang. It was as if 7 had been dropped suddenly from a great height.
“Evad,” the King said. “You know for what purpose you have come here.”
I could not bring myself to reply, so stricken was I with a terror that goes beyond any mere dread of danger.
“Come to me,” the King said, his voice grating.
I opened the curtains. The masked King leaned forward on his throne, regarding me.
“You know the reason,” he said.
I lifted the cord from around my neck and held the sacred dagger in my hand. I thought back, then, over many terrors and many years. No, I told myself. It is all too insane. I will not.
But the Faceless King spoke with my brother’s voice, saying, “you will always be a child, Evad.” And he began to laugh, and it was my brother’s laugh.
It all came back to me, my fear, my hatred of Voinos, the deaths of everyone I had ever known, the laughter of Voinos in the forest where he’d smashed the altar.
And the King said in my brother’s voice, “It’s good to have family connections in high places.”
Screaming, I lunged forward and grabbed the Faceless King by the front of his robe, yanking him off his throne and onto the blade of my knife. I held him in a terrible embrace while I stabbed him again and again and again.
When he was still and limp, and I felt his hot blood on my hands, I stood there trembling, not so much out of fear, but out of an appreciation of the sheer absurdity of my position. I let the knife and the body of the King drop to the cavern floor.
But the King was not quite dead. He whispered in the voice of my father.
“It is finished.”
I began to sob with crazy remorse. I fell to my knees beside him. I cradled his head in my hands.
“Why?”
“Why?” he said. “Because I am weary. Because I wanted to die. When you have heard every leaf fall and known the flight of every sparrow, when the thoughts of all men living and the cries of their ghosts have merged into an endless babble for so long, one can only yearn for an ending. Therefore I caused you to be born, Evad. I made you as you are and Voinos as he had to be, shaping your lives, directing every step of your wanderings, all as part of my plan to bring you here. It was a long labor, but now it is done. Have I not concluded it well?”
“No,” I said, feeling rising anger within myself, all the while shocked into terror at the mere fact that I could be angry at such a time in such a place. “You have not. What about me? I am merely left here.”
“Oh yes, you,” he said. His voice was now that of a stranger, very old, very tired. “I had nearly forgotten.” He laughed softly, sadly. “It must have been the confusion of the moment. Forgive me.”
He was silent for a moment, and I shook him in my terror. “Tell me.”
“You may turn from your path even now. You may go back to the village by the river and live as you always did. That much I can promise you. I will restore you to your former state.”
I shook my head sadly. “It cannot be so. I would remember all these things, if only in dreams; and the memories have changed me. I am no longer that Evad who dwelt by the river. I have travelled too far and too long, and learned too much — and not enough.”
And, one last time, he had my father’s voice.
“It is finished,” he said.
“No,” I whispered into his ear. “You have not finished it well, or badly. You have not finished it at all.”
Then I let his head drop to the floor. He was dead.
Indeed, it was not finished. Many things happened very quickly. I have never been able to fully account for all of them, even after many centuries of meditation.
I was blind again. I heard the priests come running, shouting in alarm. I was afraid, ridiculously, that my assassination would be discovered and I would be punished.
Quickly I groped around for the mask, found it, and put it on. Then I could see through eyes of silver.
The face of the dead man was first my father’s, then my brother’s, then face after face of countless strangers, the features running together, blurring, melting like wax. I stripped off the King’s robes and put them on, then sat on the throne.
When the priests arrived, their masks glowing like little moons in the darkness, there was a King seated before them, and a corpse on the ground which had no face at all, merely a blank oval of flesh.
As Voinos had once remarked, How do they know it’s him?
I leaned forward, indicating the corpse and the bloody dagger.
“Take that away,” I said. “It has served its purpose.”
They took the corpse but left the dagger, and it lies there still among the pebbles at my feet. I have regarded it often.
Even then I had not come to the end of my wanderings. I thought I had, but I was mistaken.
Through the mask, many things were revealed to me. I looked out into the world and I knew the flight of birds and the ambitions of kings and the words of lovers. I beheld armies in the night and grain ripening slowly in the summer sun, and I heard the songs of the leviathans in the depths of the midnight seas.
I sought my brother Voinos, and found him standing in a dank cell, his wrists chained to the wall. I manifested myself to him, and the cell was alight with the glory of the silver mask.
He started when he saw me, rattling his chains.
“So you do exist,” he said. “I was never sure of that.”
“Voinos —”
He let out a shriek of hysterical laughter, and dropped down limp in his chains. “That’s very funny,” he said. “You have the voice of a child I knew once. I’d always intended to throttle him, but I never got around to it. I don’t know why.” He banged his head against the wall, first gently, then harder, and laughed some more. There was only pain in his laughter.
“Voinos, it is I, Evad, your brother,” I said, and I told him some of the things that had happened to me.
“That’s the funny part,” he said, sobbing gently now. “The Faceless King shaped us like a pair of clay pots. For all the good it did him. Or us. Now, as you will be glad to hear, my celebrated crimes have caught up with me. I shall die tomorrow. What a pleasure to spend the last night of my life with you, dearest brother. But then, what choice did I ever have?”
“I think you could have have set your foot in another direction. You could have turned aside.”
He screamed again and leapt up, straining at his chains. “You say I can turn aside. Well let me do it, now. Work a miracle for me and I’ll be as wretchedly virtuous as you, snivelling brother —”
I saw then that even I could not bring him peace, not yet, while he still raged at the terrors within his own heart, and I left him.
I found him again later, hanging from a gibbet, black birds pecking out his eyes, and a third time in the grey dawn mists, wandering aimlessly among the trees near the ruined altar of the Faceless King. That third time I bore his poor ghost in my arms and placed him at the feet of the gods, not to be judged, but to be unmade.
All these things are as one to me, for I know the secrets of the dark forest, and of dreams, and of the grave.
For I am the Faceless King, the Blessed of Verunnos-Kemad; and I am also the hero of old, the slayer of dragons; and I am a man called Genimer who dwelt in a land far to the south and once designed a clock to measure eternity (but it did not work, for he has outlived it); and I am, further, En-Riose, the foolish one who longed for and actually believed he could achieve death by the shaping of the life of that Evad who dwelt down by the river.
I contain multitudes. En-Riose should have known that no one who has been the Faceless King ever dies, though their bodies might perish. All of them join together in the next, each newcomer changing the rest, like a new color stirred into a mixture of paints.
I am still Evad, who did not want to turn back, lest all his sufferings be for naught. So we go on — I go on — until we find the final mystery, and our empty bag is filled and we might rest.
I am Evad, who caused the eyes of En-Riose to be opened, so that he too might understand.
I am Evad, who granted to Voinos the only release he could ever have. Somehow, I was worthy.
For the mind of Verunnos-Kemad is my mind and the splendors of the worlds are before me — as new gods awaken by the hundreds and make themselves known, and the Earth is filled up with magic, and the holy powers thunder in the night like great storms. I sit on the throne in the dark temple, yet I am everywhere, year into year, even as the signs in the heavens are slowly rewritten.
This is my path. I will not turn from it.	■