Creatures of Light and Darkness

WINNING THE WAND

On Marachek, in the Citadel, stand they all, there, as backward reel their minds.

“I’ve the shoes,” says Wakim. “You may have them for my name.”

“I’ve the glove,” says Madrak and turns away his face.

“… And I’ve the wand,” says Horus, and it falls from his hand.

“It did not pass through me,” says the Prince, “because it is not formed of matter, nor any other thing over which you may exercise control.” And the mind of the Prince is closed to the inner eye of Horus.

Horus steps forward, and his left leg is longer than his right leg, but he is perfectly balanced upon the now uneven floor; the window burns like a sun at the Prince’s back, and the Steel General is turned to gold and flowing; Vramin burns like a taper and Madrak becomes a fat doll bounding at the end of a rubber strand; the walls growl and pulse in and out with a regular rhythm keeping time with the music that comes from the shuffling bars of the spectrum upon the floor at the end of the tunnel that begins with the window and lies like burning honey and the tiger above the wand now grown monstrous and too fine to behold within the eternity of the tower room in the Citadel of Marachek at Midworlds’ Center where the Prince has raised his smile.

Horus advances another step, and his body is transparent to his sense, so that all things within him become immediately known and frightening.

“Oh the moon comes like a genie

from the Negro lamp of night,

and the tunnel of my seeing is her roadway.

She raises up the carpet of the days

I’ve walked upon,

and through caverns of the sky we make our

pathway,”

says a voice strangely like yet unlike Vramin’s.

And Horus raises his hand against the Prince.

But the Prince already holds his wrist in a grip that burns.

And Horus raises up his other hand against the Prince.

But the Prince already holds that wrist in a grip that freezes.

And he raises up his other hand and electrical shocks pass along it. And he raises up his other hand and it blackens and dies.

And he raises up a hundred hands more and they turn to snakes and fight among themselves and of course he whispers: “What has happened?”

“A world,” says the Prince, “to which I have transported us.”

“It is unfair to choose such a battleground,” says Horus, “a world too like the one I know-only a fraction away and so twisted,” and his words are all the colors of Blis and round and dripping.

“And it is indecent of you to want to kill me.”

“I have been charged with this thing, and it is my will also.”

“So you have failed,” says the Prince, forcing him to kneel upon the Milky Way, which becomes a transparent intestinal tract, racked by a rapid peristalsis.

The smell is overpowering.

“No!” whispers Horus.

“Yes, brother. You are defeated. You cannot destroy me. I have bested you. It is time to quit, to resign, to go home.”

“Not until I have accomplished my objective.” The stars, like ulcers, burn within his guts, and Horus pits the strength of his body against the kaleidoscope that is the Prince. The Prince drops to one knee, but with his genuflection there comes a hail of hosannas from the innumerable dog-faced flowers that bloom upon his brow like sweat and merge to a mask of glass which cracks and unleashes lightnings. Horus pushes his arms toward the nineteen moons which are being eaten by the serpents his fingers; and who calls out, oh God, but conscience his father, birdheaded on sky’s throne and weeping blood? Resign? Never! Go home? The red laughter comes as he strikes at the brother-faced thing below.

“Yield and die!”

Then cast…

… far forth

… where Time is dust

and days are lilies without number…

and the night is a purple cockatrice whose name is oblivion denied…

He becomes a topless tree chopped through and falling forever.

At the end of forever, he lies upon his back and stares up at the Prince Who is his Brother, standing at all heights with eyes that imprison him.

“I give you leave to depart now, brother, for I have beaten you fairly,” come the green words.

Then Horus bows his head and the world departs and the old world comes again.

“Brother, I wish you had slain me,” he says, and coughs behind his bruises.

“I cannot.”

“Do not send me back with this kind of defeat upon me.”

“What else am I to do?”

“Grant me some measure of mercy. I know not what.”

“Then hear me and go with honor. Know that I would slay your father, but that I will spare him for your sake if he will but aid me when the time arises.”

“What time?”

“That is for him to decide.”

“I do not understand.”

“Of course not. But bear him the message, anyway.”

“…”

“Agreed?”

“Agreed,” says Horus and begins to rise.

When he regains his feet, he realizes that he is standing in the Hall of the Hundred Tapestries, and alone. But in that last, agonizing instant, he learned a thing.

He hastens to write it down.