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  But when the Sybil made fire with her hands she rolled the flames into balls with her fingers. She breathed on one to make it dim, and released them both—the Sun and Moon. Then she drank long and deep of the Great River where her mother’s blood flowed into it, stood up by moonlight, and spat out the sparkling stars. And by starlight the multitude of gods awoke along the banks of the river and beheld the Earth for the first time.

  As I gazed upon her house, I could almost believe the story. No, I did believe it.

  The Sybil’s house was more of an immense cocoon, like a spider’s web filled to overflowing with debris and dead things, spun and accumulated since the beginning of time. It hung from the underside of the city itself, its outer strands a tangle of ropes and netting and vines and fibers stretching out into the darkness in every direction until I could not tell where the enormous nest began or ended.

  But the core of it hung down almost to the water, like a monstrous belly. I reached up and tied my boat to it, slipped Father’s sword under my belt, bound my robe up to free my legs, and started to climb.

  The ropes trembled, whispering like muted thunder. Mud and debris fell in my face, splashing all around me. I hung on desperately, then shook my head to clear my eyes, and continued climbing.

  Higher up, in complete darkness, I squeezed along a tunnel of rotting wood, sometimes losing my grip and sliding backwards for a terrifying instant before I found another hold. The darkness was…heavy. I had the impression of an endless mass of debris in all directions, shifting, grinding as I wriggled through it. Sometimes there was an overwelming stench of decay.

  I crawled over the upturned hull of a boat. It swayed gently beneath my weight. Something soft fell, then slithered against its side. All the while my hands and bare feet scraped desperately for purchase against the rotting wood.

  Then came more rope, more netting, and in the dimmest twilight I was in a chamber where trunks, wicker baskets, and heavy clay jugs all heaved and crashed together as I crawled among them.

  Serpents and fishes writhed beneath my touch amid reeking slime.

  And yet again in utter darkness I made my way on hands and knees across a seemingly solid, wooden floor. Then the boards snapped beneath me and I tumbled screaming amid ropes and wood and what touch alone told me were hundreds of human bones. I came to rest on heaving netting with a skull in my lap and bones rattling down over my bare legs. I threw the skull away and tried to jump up, but my feet slid through the net and I felt only empty space below.

  I dangled there, clinging desperately to the rope netting. It broke and I was left screaming once more, swinging in the darkness while an avalanche of bones splashed into the water far below.

  One further story I’d heard came to me just then: that when someone drowns in the river, the evatim eat his flesh, but the bones go to the Sybil, who divines fortunes from them.

  So it seemed.

  At precisely this point she called out to me, and her voice was like an autumn wind rattling in dead reeds.

  “Son of Vashtem.”

  I clung tighter to the remnants of the net, gulped, and called up into the darkness.

  “I’m here.”

  “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, I await your coming.”

  I was so startled I nearly let go.

  “But I’m not a sorcerer!”

  “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer.”

  I started climbing once more, all the while telling her about myself in broken, panting speech. Still a few bones fell, suddenly out of the darkness, striking me on the head as if in sarcastic reply to what I gasped out. But still I told her how I had never done any magic myself, how I had promised my mother never to be like my father, how I was apprenticed to the learned Velachronos, how I was going to be a scribe first, then maybe write books of my own, if only Velachronos would take me back when this was all over.

  Then the Sybil’s face appeared to me suddenly in the darkness above, like a full moon from behind a cloud. Her face was pale and round, her eyes inexpressibly black, and I think her skin did glow faintly.

  And she said to me, laughing gently, “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you’re arguing with the dread Sybil. Now is that a brave thing to do, or just foolish?”

  I stopped, swinging gently from side to side on the ropes.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “What you mean is not necessarily what you do, Sekenre. Whether or not you’re sorry afterwards means nothing at all. There. I have spoken your name once. Sekenre. I have spoken it twice. Do you know what happens if I speak it three times?”

  I said meekly, “No, Great Sybil.”

  “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, come up and sit before me. Do not be afraid.”

  I climbed up to where she was. I could barely make out a wooden shelf or ledge, covered with bones and debris. I reached out gingerly with one foot and my toes found, surprisingly, solid, dry planking. I let go of the ropes and sat. The Sybil reached up and opened the door of a box-lantern, then of another, and another. I thought of lazy beasts winking themselves awake.

  Now light and shadow flickered in the tiny, low-ceilinged room. The Sybil sat cross-legged, a blanket with gleaming embroidery draped over her knees. A man-headed serpent with scales like silver coins lay curled in her lap. Once it hissed and she leaned low while it whispered in her ear.

  Silence followed. She gazed into my eyes for a long time.

  I held out my father’s sword.

  “Lady, this is all I have to offer—”

  She hissed, just like the serpent, and for an instant seemed startled, even afraid. She waved the sword away.

  “Sekenre, you are interrupting the Sybil. Now, again, is that brave or just foolishness?”

  There. She had spoken my name thrice. I felt an instant of sheer terror. But nothing happened.

  She laughed again, and her laugh was a human one, almost kindly.

  “A most inappropriate gift, sorcerer, son of sorcerer.”

  “I don’t understand…I’m sorry, Lady.”

  “Sekenre, do you know what that sword is?”

  “It was my father’s.”

  “It is the sword of a Knight Inquisitor. Your father tried to deny what he was, even to himself. So he joined a holy order, an order of strictest discipline, devoted to the destruction of all things of darkness, all the wild things, witches, sorcerers, even the wild gods. He was like you, boy, at your age. He wanted so much to do the right thing. For all the good it did him. In the end, he only had the sword.”

  “Lady, I have nothing else—”

  “Sekenre—there, I said it again. You are very special. The path before you is very special. Your future is not a matter of how many times I speak your name. Keep the sword. You shall need it. I require no payment from you, not yet anyway.”

  “Will you require it later, Great Sybil?”

  She leaned forward, and I saw that her teeth were sharp and pointed. Her breath smelled of river mud.

  “Your entire life shall be payment enough. All things come to me in proper time, even as you, I think, come to me now, when your need is greatest.”

  Then I began to tell her why I had come, about Father, and what had happened to Hamakina.

  “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you are lecturing the Sybil. Brave or foolish?”

  I wept. “Please, Great Lady…I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I want to do the right thing. Please don’t be angry. Tell me what to do.”

  “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, everything you do is the correct thing, part of the great pattern which I observe, which I weave, which I prophesy. At each new turning of your life the pattern is made anew. All the meanings are changed. Your father understood that, when he came back from beyond the sea, no longer a Knight Inquisitor because he knew too much of sorcery. He had become a sorcerer by fighting sorcery. He was like a doctor who contracts the patient’s disease. His knowledge was like a door that has been opened and can never be closed again. A door. In his mind.”
/>   “No,” I said softly. “I will not be like him.”

  “Hear then the prophecy of the Sybil, sorcerer, son of sorcerer. You shall journey into the very belly of the beast, into the mouth of the God Who Devours.”

  “Lady, we are all on a journey in this life, and when we die—”

  “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, do you accept the words of the Sybil of your own will, as a gift given?”

  I was afraid to ask her what would happen if I refused. It wasn’t much of a choice.

  “Lady, I accept.”

  “It is of your will then. If you stray from your path, if you step aside, that, too, changes the weaving of all lives.”

  “Lady, I only want to get my sister back and—”

  “Then accept these too.”

  She pressed something into my hand. Her touch was cold and hard, like living iron. The serpent thing in her lap hissed, almost forming words.

  I held my open hand up to one of the lanterns and saw two grave coins on my palm.

  “Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, on this day you are a man. Your father did not raise you to manhood before he left you. Therefore I must perform the rite.”

  The serpent thing vanished into her clothing. She rose, her movement fluid as smoke. I could only see her face and hands, like lanterns themselves floating in the half-light. She took a silver band and bound my hair as the men of the city bind it. She gave me a pair of baggy trousers such as the men of the city wear. I put them on. They were much too long. I rolled them up to my knees.

  “They used to belong to a pirate,” she said. “He won’t be needing them now.”

  She rummaged around among the debris and produced a single boot. I tried to put it on. It was nearly twice the size of my foot.

  She sighed. “Always the pattern changes. I’m sure it’s portentous. Never mind.”

  She took the boot from me and threw it aside.

  Then she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. The touch of her lips was so cold it burned.

  “Now you are marked by the Sybil, sorcerer, son of sorcerer, and by that mark men will know you. Because you are marked, you may call on me three times, and I shall hear you and reply. But beware. If you ask my favor more than that, I shall own you, like all the things in my house. That is the price I ask of you.”

  She gave me a water bottle and a leather bag with food in it—cheese, bread, and dried fish—and told me to put the grave coins in the bag too so I wouldn’t lose them.

  The bag had a long cord. I slipped it over my neck. I hung the bottle from the loose belt I wore outside my robe.

  My forehead was numb where she had kissed me. I reached up and felt the spot. It was cold as ice.

  “Now go, sorcerer, son of sorcerer, into the very jaws of the Devourer, of your own will. Go, as the Sybil has prophesied, right now—”

  She stamped her foot once. I screamed as the floor swung away beneath me like a trapdoor and I was falling endlessly down amid glowing white bones and debris and the Sybil’s tumbling lamps. I saw her face once, far above, streaking away in the darkness like a shooting star.

  I hit the water hard and sank deep, but somehow reached the surface again, lungs bursting. I started to swim. The sword cut my legs. The bag choked me. I almost threw them both away, but did not, and slowly, clumsily made my back to where I thought my boat waited. I looked around fearfully for the evatim, which surely haunted this place.

  Above, the house of the Sybil was silent and dark.

  At last my feet touched soft mud and I stood up in the gloom. Faint light filtered among the ten thousand wooden legs of the city.

  I waded through thick mud, then into open water and fell in over my head and swam a short distance, struggling toward the light. Then my feet found a sand bank, and I climbed out of the water and rested.

  A whole night must have passed then, for I slept through terrible dreams of my father in his sorcerer’s robe, stalking back and forth at the water’s edge, his face so twisted with rage that he hardly seemed to be my father at all. He would lean over, raise his hand to strike, then pause, startled, even afraid, as if he had seen something in my face he had never seen there before.

  I tried to call out to him.

  Suddenly I was awake, in total darkness. A footstep splashed nearby. Far away, the birds of the marshes sang to announce the dawn.

  And my father’s voice spoke.

  “Sekenre…do you still love me?”

  I could not answer. I only sat terribly still, shivering in the cold air, my knees drawn up to my chest, hands clasped tight to my wrists.

  Daylight came as a gray blur. I saw a boat nearby, beached on the same sandbank. It was not my own, but a funeral boat, made of bound reeds.

  For an instant I thought I understood fully what the Sybil had prophesied and I froze in terror, but I had known so much of terror in my life already that I had grown indifferent to it. I couldn’t bring myself to care. I couldn’t think coherently.

  Like one bewitched, when the body acts of its own accord without the will of the mind, I pushed the boat out into open water, then climbed in and lay still among the scented corpse-wrappings.

  I felt only resignation now. So it had been prophesied.

  Almost on a whim, I reached into the leather bag and took out the two grave coins. I placed them over my eyes.

  III

  For a long time I lay still and listened to the water lapping against the side of the boat. Then even that sound faded, and I felt, very distinctly, the boat reverse direction, and I knew I was drifting with the black current now, out of the world of the living, into the land of the dead. The water was silent, as if the boat were gliding along a river of oil. I could hear the pounding of my own heart.

  I lay awake and tried to make sense out of my adventure with the Sybil, reviewing every detail in search of some central thread by which all the parts would be connected, like beads on a necklace, assuming form and meaning. But there was nothing. I had expected as much. It is the way of prophecies: you don’t understand them until they’re about to come true, and then, suddenly, the whole pattern is revealed.

  Even the silence of the river and the thunder of my heart were part of the pattern.

  Even my sister’s voice.

  I thought it was just a ringing in my ears at first, but it formed words, very weak, very far away, at the very threshold of hearing.

  “Sekenre,” she said. “Help me. I’m lost.”

  I called back to her, either with my voice or my mind.

  “I am coming, little one. Wait for me.”

  She sobbed hoarsely, sucking in breath as if she had been crying for a long time.

  “It’s dark here.”

  “It’s dark here, too,” I said gently.

  She was too brave to say she was afraid.

  “Hamakina—is Father with you?”

  Something splashed in the water right next to the boat, and my father’s voice whispered, inches from my ear.

  “Sekenre, if you love me, go back. I command you to go back! Do not come here!”

  I let out a yell and sat up. The grave coins fell into my lap. I twisted about, looking all around.

  The boat slid past huge, black reeds. In the silent darkness, white herons stood in rows along the river’s edge, faintly glowing as the Sybil’s face had glowed. And in the water, the evatim watched me, rank upon rank of them like dead-white, naked men with crocodile heads, lying motionless in the shallows. But there was no sign of Father.

  Above me, the sky was dark and clear, and the stars were not the stars of Earth, but fewer, paler, almost gray, arranged in the constellations of the dead, which are described in the Books of the Dead: the Hand, the Harp, the Jar of Forgetting, the Eye of Surat-Kemad.

  Very carefully, I picked up the grave coins and put them back in my bag. I was thirsty and drank a sip from the water bottle. I could not drink river water here, for only the dead may drink of the water of the dead, and only the dead may eat the fruits of th
e land of the dead. That too is written in the Books of the Dead.

  And so I gazed with mortal, uncovered eyes into the darkness that never ends. Far behind me, along the way I had come, there was a faint suggestion of light, a mere paling of the sky, as if way back there was an opening through which I had already passed. The living world drew farther and farther away with each passing instant.

  The white herons rose as one and for a moment the air was filled with the utterly silent passage of their wings. Then they were gone. They too, like the evatim, were messengers of the God of the Dark River.

  But for me there was no message.

  I began to see ghosts among the reeds, sitting up in the mud as I passed, beseeching me to take them aboard my funeral boat so they might go properly into the final land. They were no more than wisps of smoke, suggestions of shapes glimpsed from the corner of the eye. When I looked directly at any one of them, I could not see it.

  Some called out in languages I had never heard before. Only a few spoke of places and people I had known. I was afraid of these few. I did not want them to recognize me. I lay back down in the bottom of my boat and put the coins back over my eyes. I slept fitfully after a while and dreamed of my father. He paced back and forth on the surface of the black water, his trailing robe sending ripples as he walked, his face contorted with rage. Once he stopped and seemed to shake me furiously, saying, “No, my son, no. This is not what I wanted for you. I command you. I forbid you.…because I love you still. Go back to Reedland. Go!”

  But, in my dream, I only answered, “Father, I will go if you let me take Hamakina back with me.”

  He made no answer but continued to rage and pace, too furious even to ask if I loved him.

  I awoke from my dream to the faint sound of singing like many voices carried on the wind from far away. I sat up once more, put the coins in my bag, and saw a vast trireme bearing down on me, its sail bellied full, its oars thrashing the water into foam.