THE THIRD WAY

THE THRID WAY, by Darrell Schweitzer

 

So we rode, by magic, across the wide ocean as if over a dusty plain, into the burning lands, into the country of sunset near the world’s edge; we rode, the two of us, Mazantes, greatest of all heroes, and I, his follower, as close behind him as his horse’s tail.

And men cried out in wonderment and despair at the sight of our passage, saying, “Look! Look! Even great Mazantes is running away! The end has come!”

And the cities of Earth burned, and the men of Earth fell upon swords of the enemy, or, worse yet, on their own swords, in their wonderment and despair.

The air was thick with their ghosts, trailing after us. I heard them whistling in my ears, like a faint but angry wind.

That the hero’s faithful Grion, his cur, rode with him was not worth noting, being taken for granted, like a horse having a tail.

But I note it. I, Grion.

I bear even his guilt, for that is my task, to carry my master’s burdens even as I carry his luggage.

Behind us, the Enemy rejoiced, that one who is called Garadis, which means merely Shadow. He was perhaps once a man and had a human name, but long ago he left his name and his face and his human life behind to become merely the Foe, Devourer of Kingdoms, the Thief of Souls who commanded countless soulless men and lifeless corpses and many-shaped monsters to rise out of the earth and sea and place the mark of his hand on the whole of creation.

Even the gods turned their faces away from him, and the Heavens were silent.

And the Enemy laughed and grew stronger, seeing Mazantes running away.

I will bear the guilt for that too.

Therefore we rode, without any words, leaning into the wind, the plumes of our great-crested helmets streaming; and we rode without rest or pause. I think it was in a kind of delirium that we rode in red blood to the knee and I saw the faces of friends and companions and fellow warriors floating like lilies on a pond, rippling aside as we splashed among them, calling in failing voices for me to join them, to save them, or to avenge them. I felt their hands reach up to touch my knees. They were trying to pull me down.

But I leaned forward and caught hold of the tail of Mazantes’s horse, and held tight, all the while clinging to my own horse with my thighs.

And the dream passed, and we rode, the earth thundered, and the skies were filled with terrible signs.

It was only when we stopped, when we fell from our saddles and lay there gasping by the bank of a black and misty river, that Mazantes rolled over and half-jokingly said, “Still with me, my faithful boy?”

I was not a boy. I had a black beard. (His beard of course was silver-gray, and grown thick to hide ancient scars. It had been thus for as long as I had known him.)

But I did not correct him. I did not argue. I was exhausted beyond coherent thought. All I could say was, “I don’t think I can ride anymore.”

“Good,” he said, getting to his feet stiffly. “We will go the rest of the way by other means.”

I stood too, trembling. Once his strong hand caught me and steadied me.

We stood by the shore of that black river which engirdles the world, which may not be crossed by ship or by swimmer or by any beast or fish, for its waters burn like scalding oil. A scarlet mist hid the further shore from view.

Therefore, by careful and ancient rite, we slew our horses, cut out their hearts, and gave these up in sacrifice to a gaunt sorcerer who dwelt in a cave by the river’s edge. He, in turn by ancient rite, poured out some of the blood in a kind of libation, and the black river hissed and steamed.

Then the mist parted, and we could see the distant shore, which marks the boundary of the land of the dead.

Yet alive we would go into that place, to perform our special and very necessary task.

For Mazantes had not run away out of cowardice, but out of hope, and if Garadis thought he’d won, he would have to go on thinking that for a while longer.

“A stratagem is required,” Mazantes often said, “when the enemy cannot be beaten by main force.”

I would bear the guilt of it.

So the sorcerer conducted us into a boat made of bones — the charred bones of men who had tried to cross these black waters in ages past — and rowed us across. Again, as in my delirium, I saw the faces of friends and comrades and even of the enemy slain, floating in the water like lilies, and I heard them calling out to me on the angry wind.

If the tale is told properly, say that my master and I stood tall and proud in our gleaming armor and tall, crested helmets, that we gazed ahead intently into the country before us.

But the truth is that we both sat, gazing at our feet and leaning against the sides of the boat to hide our weariness, and our shields and armor were tarnished with the dust of the road and the accumulation of battle.

Neither of us said a word.

The boat bumped up against the further shore.

When we made to disembark, the sorcerer, who wore a hood, pushed back his hood to reveal a face like leather stretched over a naked skull, and he said to us slyly, “My Lords, what will you do now? Have you any further gift for the ruler of this place? I hear he’s quick to anger if guests come empty-handed.”

“I think we have something,” said Mazantes, as he cut out the sorcerer’s heart. I held the fellow down as he did it. The sorcerer snapped furiously. He knocked my helmet off my head, then bit off most of my right ear, but I just elbowed his blood-splattered face aside and held him fast, while his body writhed like a snake made of living stone. And though Mazantes stole his heart, he did not die, even after Mazantes struck off his head. Instead he lay there in the dust, his body twitching, his head glaring at us, his eyes alive with fire, the expression on his face somewhere between a grimace and laughter. He was dead and alive and mad and utterly sane all at once, and he spoke prophecies of the world’s future and of the ending of our lives and the outcome of our mission, but it all came out as gibberish, like the angry wind in my wounded ear.

Therefore Mazantes held the sorcerer’s heart in his cupped hand, and he let a few drops of the blood fall on my lips, to renew my strength, and he took a few more himself; but only a few, for that Lord into whose country we had come was a jealous host by all report, who would know if his intended gift were much diminished or sampled prematurely.

Call that one the Gray Neighbor, the King of Silence, the Dreamer at the End of Dreams, or many other names which are not his name; for his true name may not be spoken, not by anyone living.

So we marched, Mazantes before me, holding the sorcerer’s heart wrapped in his cloak. We held our shields up against the dust that blew in our faces, and leaned our plume-crested helmets into the gathering gale.

This was a kind of battle in itself, pushing against that wind. One might compose a heroic verse or two, to celebrate the steadfast Mazantes; but I couldn’t, not then, because my throat was dry as parchment and I was gasping for breath amid a swirl of increasingly frigid dust.

And the wind spoke in many voices, crying out, “Look! Look! Mazantes has run away!” and swirling around us, thick as the dust, were the ghosts of warriors slain in our wake, after our passage from the battlefield, wailing with anger and despair. They named our names, calling to us.

I heard trumpets blast, far away, the horns of Garadis at the other end of the world, for though the side of my face was a bloody wound and most of my ear was gone, my hearing was somehow made more acute; and I heard the words of the wind; and somewhere, far ahead of us, the Lord of the country into which we had come responded in a low and steady voice — perhaps with laughter — like the slow and steady beating of a vast funeral drum.

It must have been my own blood which fell and nourished the barren soil, not drippings from what Mazantes carried wrapped in his cloak under his shield — I say this because I was the one who saw the forests of trees rising around us like smoke. I don’t think Mazantes noticed them. I saw the ghosts walking among trees that seemed to be made of beautifully shining, black glass, creaked in some unknowable wind, which was not the wind that blew from the road, but something more subtle, almost musical. I could hear that other wind in my wounded ear, almost like a song.

I think it was for me alone that a white-robed maiden opened her arms to embrace me, and spoke in a voice I knew. I knew her name, too, but I will not repeat it; she was one I had loved one summer in my youth, before I went away to join the Brotherhood of Swords and follow Mazantes.

Now she dwelt in a marble garden, where the trees and flowers and grass, likewise the benches and stairs, were of living, pale stone. A silver pool gleamed there, and she bade me sit by her and gaze into that pool and see our lives as they might have been if I had never gone away, if there had been no battle nor strife, no pain or parting or the loss of friends; and she said that the magic still existed whereby we could enter into that pool and live out those lives in a bubble of time, and all that had otherwise happened, all suffering and strife, would become a dream, to be forgotten when we awoke —

Mazantes saw and heard none of this, but he must have sensed it, for with his iron grip and his free hand (the other held his shield, and the sorcerer’s heart bundled in his cloak) he grabbed me by my collar and yanked me away.

The maiden cried out. For an instant her face was like a skull —

“The fortress of the enemy is before us!” whispered Mazantes, not into my wounded ear, but into my whole one. “Do not falter! Have courage!”

Perhaps my blood nourished the land. Perhaps it was drippings from the sorcerer’s heart. Perhaps our footsteps merely stirred the dust; for the dust rose up, forming a great castle, tier upon tier, battlement upon battlement, towers filled with flaming windows. They rose in uncanny silence, as if the whole castle were a thing of folded paper dropped into a still pool of water; and winged shapes streamed from the roofs and towers, filling the sky like spilled ink, until the darkness was even darker than before, beyond what the eye can perceive or the mind conceive. Blackness poured out and up and away into infinity, and the sky was the sky of the Deathlands, which no living eye may gaze into for long. The burning windows of the towers seemed to drift across the black sky and become those new and strange constellations which are not seen from Earth except in certain dangerous dreams. Much terrible lore may be learned from those dead stars, we are told, but the heedless gazer risks being sucked up into them like a dust mote into a whirlwind.

Again Mazantes grabbed me by the collar and yanked me away.

“Tarry not,”  was all he said.

We climbed the ten thousand black steps of the Castle of the Many-Named and Never-Named Lord — Master of the Lives After, Dreamer at the End of Dreams. Guards descended to oppose us, their helmets gleaming in starlight, their cloaks billowing in the wind like huge wings, their bodies skeletal, like rods of living iron.

We fought them, and swords clanged on metal, but then passed through, meeting no more resistance than if we had battled swirling dust in a whirlwind.

Now there marched beside us and behind us, a great army, a vast tide of all men slain in the wars, their numbers increasing even as we went (for on Earth, the dread Garadis still ravened and triumphed). But the dead men were silent now, expectant, as if perhaps even they had some faith in Mazantes’s purported stratagem, whatever it was.

Even I did not know what it was.

My purpose was to follow him, nothing more. The stratagem was his alone.

So I followed. Blood dripped down the side of my face, marking the steps one by one.

In a tide of silence then, we entered into a great hall, where black flames burned from torches in the walls and somehow gave light, where a great fireplace blazed with black, gleaming fire, and the gleaming-crowned King Whose Name I May Not Speak sat before a table, on which white-bone gaming pieces had been set out.

“Ah,” said our host.

That voice was like the single beat of a drum.

Mazantes bowed low, then took the sorcerer’s heart from out of his cloak and offered it up. He placed it in a stone bowl upon the table.

“Ah.”

Another drumbeat. I saw that the King’s face was like a skull with leathery skin stretched tightly over it. His expression was somewhere between a grimace and laughter, and his eyes were alive with fire. I gazed into his face, as I had gazed into the black forest, the silver pool, and the forbidden stars, and again I could not turn aside, and for once Mazantes did not yank me away.

Now the million expectant ghosts gathered around us, silent and still, thickening the air.

“Great Lord,” said Mazantes carefully — I observed how he did not say “My Lord,” which would have bound him as a subject to the one he addressed — “in exchange for my offering, I request a boon. It is not for myself. I seek nothing for myself, but for all mankind.” (Thus Mazantes repeated the ancient formula, for the hero seeks nothing for himself, ever.) “What I want, then, is to end the suffering of the world, the strife –”

The other laughed, like muted thunder. He spread his dark-gloved hands and shrugged his high, narrow shoulders.

“Then let all mankind come to me, and there shall be an end of all suffering, all strife.”

Still I stared into that terrible face and fiery eyes. I could not turn away.

But Mazantes, the hero, kept his wits about him.

“What I want,” he continued, “is the seed of the death of Garadis. I want to hold it in my hand, that I might determine the ending of his days. I know, Great Lord, that you grow the deaths of all men like plants in a tray, nurturing each until it begins to mature. Then you take the seed of each man’s death and blow it onto the wind with your breath, so it drifts over the world in the days of his life, until he inhales it, and it begins to blossom inside him, and his life wastes away as his death grows the greater. Lord, I know this –”

“I know it too,” said the other, laughing slyly. He produced that very tray and laid it on the table top, There were hundreds of black seeds arrayed within it, neatly in rows. Out of each grew a little black hair, which was the death of a man, or a child, or even an infant not yet born. One of them; I could not tell which; must have been Garadis’s seed, which, although he bestrode the world like a terrible colossus and ground whole nations beneath his feet — and had done so for years — did not seem to have ripened very much.

“That one seed is all I ask,” said Mazantes.

“All you ask? All? Mazantes, you are a fool. You might as well ask a farmer for his seed corn, or a miser for the source of his gold. All? Mazantes, you should know that I love my dear Garadis, who acts as my deputy upon the Earth,  my tax-collector, my reaper, filling my kingdom and my coffer and my larder with tens of thousands of slain souls every hour. He made a pact with me long ago. We have, you might say, a convenient arrangement. So why should I ever give him up? Have you thought of that, Oh brave and noble Mazantes? Have you thought this through at all? Or isn’t thinking part of the hero’s code?”

Again the laughter was like a slow and steady drumbeat, far away and terrible, like thunder at the heart of the world.

“Thinking is part of the hero’s code,” said Mazantes calmly. “In fact stratagems and tricks are an important part of it.”

“Indeed?”

Mazantes paused for a time, as if carefully considering what to say or do next, but this was part of his stratagem, I knew.

He looked upon the table, at the carven figures placed there, which were set amid grooved lines, as on a game board.

“Great Lord,” he said, “you are my generous host and I an honored guest in your country and your hall. Courtesy requires that I must give you some satisfaction. Let us not bargain like tradesmen, but like gentlemen, host and guest, find some diversion, some amusement. . . .” Again he eyed the carven pieces, and the tray of seeds. “I have heard that you are fond of games.”

“As told in song and story, no doubt,” said the other.

“Exactly.”

“I am fond of them.”

The other indicated that Mazantes should sit, and the hero sat on the bench opposite. A further gesture indicated that I too should sit. There was room on the bench beside Mazantes.

They began to play.

I cannot report all that happened between them, I fear, for whatever little strength I had gained from those few drops of the sorcerer’s blood was now failing me, and I was weary from my journey and from my own wound as my own blood dripped onto the tabletop and seemed to flow in tiny rivulets among the game pieces. I can remember that there was a kind of challenge, or wager, Mazantes playing for the seed of Garadis’s death, which, if he gained, he would take out into the sunlight, where it would ripen at once and he could set it on the wind over a battlefield, and that would be the Enemy’s undoing.

But the Enemy, of course was the special servant, or fond pet, or tax-gatherer of our Host, who would not readily give him up.

Both of the players swore oaths of honor to abide by the ending of the game.

“There is only one way this can end,” said our Host, the Gray King, the Gamester of Shadows, Lord of the Silent Grave.

“No, there are two,” said Mazantes. “Either you win — or I do. Two ways.”

It wasn’t quite clear to me what our Host would claim if he won.

For the first time in all our adventure, just then, I was truly, utterly afraid, for in the tone of his voice Mazantes sounded, just a bit . . . cocky . . . over-proud, blind to possibilities. It is a common failing of heroes, often expressed toward the end of sagas.

I gazed with enthralled fascination into the face of the skull-faced one, into the burning eyes, only peripherally watching the game.

Mazantes took a piece, which was carven in the shape of a runner, and the man ran on a hot day down a dusty lane, to bring the news to a city; whether good news or bad, I do not know, for the Opponent moved the same piece, and the runner caught a javelin through the breast.

Then Mazantes took a ship, and steered a crew of heroes through many adventures, overcoming many perils, but in the end the Other caught that ship in a whirlpool and all were drowned.

And the drowned sailors, still dripping from the sea, stood around the table, gathering amid the other ghosts, bewailing their fates in low voices like an angry wind.

Mazantes played next a piece shaped like a tower, which was the watchtower on the eastern shore, when the fleets and armies of Garadis first appeared on the Day of Doom, and the tower was overthrown and burned, and all the watchers impaled on stakes.

Then armies gathered, and came forth out of the western lands to face the enemy, and fought hard, and held firm for a time, but in the end the western host was scattered. Cities burned. Rivers ran with blood and choked with corpses.

“You know, I am winning this game,” said our Host.

No longer silent, the ghosts around us muttered with unease.

Still they played, and our Host was indeed winning. The fire in his eyes burned brighter and brighter. I could see that Mazantes was afraid, as even a hero is afraid, for a hero is just a man in the end, despite everything. Sweat streamed down his face (as blood streamed down mine) and he trembled, but, hero that he was, he did not desist. He played on by every wile and stratagem he knew until he ran out of pieces.

“I think I have won this game,” said the other.

Then Mazantes pushed back the bench, and rose, taking up his shield and drawing his sword.

“What?” said the other, amazed. “A bad loser? Have you no honor?”

Mazantes struck the flat of his sword against his shield for silence, and for an instant the muttering ghosts were silent and even the Gray Neighbor said nothing, while Mazantes exclaimed, “No! Take me! You have won me only and nothing more. Let me suffer all the torments of the many thousands who have died. I will bear them all. Spare the boy. Let him go. Give him the seed. Take me as your prize. if you can!”

I could have worshipped him then. He was never more the true hero than at that moment.

But I didn’t have time. It was all over so quickly. The Other flowed over the tabletop like smoke, his horrible face, his fire-filled eyes floating in darkness like a paper mask upon a swift-moving, dark river.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “There were only two possible ways this could end. You win. I win. It seems that I have won. Therefore I get to decide what constitutes my winnings, which begin with you but do not end with you, Mazantes, who, in the end, have not thought this through very carefully at all. Two ways. One way. My way –”

His darkness, his face flowed over us like a wave in a tempest. My blood upon the tabletop steamed. But it was then that the answer came to me. Perhaps the ghost of she whom I had once loved before ever I went to follow Mazantes into battle whispered it into my bloody ear. Perhaps it just came to me, out of the drifting bits of my delirium. Perhaps the story was all wrong from the start and I was supposed to be the hero, the one who came up with the clever stratagem.

Perhaps out of mere blind reflex I reached up and said, “No, my lords both, there is a third way –”

 

     #    #    #

 

My great and terrible, yet gracious King Garadis, you have feasted me well and treated me well this night, and perhaps I have eased the burden of your cares — for I know that ruling over the whole world is a great care indeed, however much the ranks of your slaves increase and the gold fills your coffers like the in-rushing tide of the sea. I know too how all the beautiful women in the world, after a time, fail to please, and it isn’t even amusing anymore to have their heads chopped off one by one at the end of your nights of pleasure — for thus you have done to rectify mankind, and demonstrate the fickle wickedness of women —

What? You want the rest of the story? The lamps burn low. Your courtiers drift away like ghosts and shadows. Yes, we are alone.

Whatever happened to, what’s his name, the hero?

Mazantes. I know that he did not die. His black seed was in that tray on the tabletop, but it did not grow. I have heard that he wanders the world even yet as a kind of holy man or bard, singing little songs, listening to long silences, trying to make sense out of the ways of heroes, which in the end don’t make any sense, and are only songs and silences.

For I tell you, Garadis, that it didn’t make any sense at all, that it wasn’t something you’d conventionally expect at the end of a song or a saga, that dog-boy Grion, the one with the bloody ear, alone perceived that the terrible face before him — the skull-thing with the fiery eyes — was a mask, and with the last of his strength he reached up and pulled off that mask and shouted to our Host, the Gray Neighbor, the Crowned One, Lord of the Silent Grave, et cetera et cetera, I know your name for it is very common, for you are Death! And he spoke not merely the simple word “death,” which anyone might say when telling of the death of a beetle or a dog or a man, but the true and secret name of Death, which may only be formed in the speech of those already dead, in the universal language of the Underworld. Possibly some ghost whispered it into his bloody ear.

Then he put the mask onto his own face, and the startled visage he saw before him (as he looked out of the fiery eyesockets) was, at first, his own, as if he were looking into a mirror. Then it became another, a very, very old and tired face, wearied with the countless centuries and countless deaths of all mankind, who, though he could not say it because of some limitation placed upon him by his condition, wanted above all else to be relieved of the task and burden of his office, to be set free. For that, he would give anything.

He had been attempting to contrive this result for a very long time. His stratagem had not worked out quite as he’d planned, but it had worked.

So he was set free, and his spirit vanished rejoicing into the darkness between the worlds, and even I hear it not.

And Grion, who was the real hero in the end, took on all the burdens of suffering mankind; for Grion became Death, and Death had won the game, and could therefore decide the conditions of his victory. He let Mazantes go, out of old loyalty, I suppose.

But Grion stands before you now, Garadis. Yes, my face is a mask. Yes, I take it off. You are afraid? You see a skull and fiery eyes? I take that off too, for I wear many masks. Now you see . . . yourself? That’s how it works. In the very end, when your black seed has ripened, Death comes before you wearing your own face. You think you’re looking in a mirror, just for an instant.

Then the final mask comes off.

Look, I have the seed in my hand.

 

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Darrell Schweitzer has been publishing weird and fantastic fiction for a long time. He had a story in the prestigious WHISPERS magazine in 1973. His first novel, THE WHITE ISLE, which is heroic fantasy, was serialized in FANTASTIC in 1980. Recently PS Publications has brought out a 2 volume retrospective of his career, THE MYSTERIES OF THE FACELESS KING and THE LAST HERETIC (2020). A more recent collection is THE CHILDREN OF CHORAZIN (Hippocampus Press, 2023). He co-edited WEIRD TALES between 1988 and 2007.