The Stranger

I washed myself, drank a mug of kamra, and began to go over things in my mind. My predecessors in the cell had died only at night. A coincidence? Or was the reason much simpler—they died at night because they slept at night, like all normal people? And because of me the local ghouls had had to change their schedule? Questions, questions, and no answers.

  But what unnerved me most of all was my own equanimity. For some reason, I was still not afraid of anything. Not of what had already happened, not of what, theoretically, could happen still. Somehow I had become certain that nothing bad would ever happen to me. Not here, nor in any other place. Never. Bravery verging on lunacy. Until recently I had never suffered from such a syndrome. Maybe the secret of my courage was the trick up my sleeve—or at the end of my fingertips: the well-concealed Sir Lonli-Lokli. But maybe the person whose identity I was interested in discovering derived some advantage from dealing with a myopic daredevil? And he was boosting my mood, unbeknown to me?

  For whatever reason, I didn’t fall asleep again that day. Until twilight, I kept pouring myself mugs of kamra, and I read my beloved Encyclopedia, which made me smarter with every line.

  Then I came to understand that events were unfolding precisely in the tradition of fairy tales. The first and second nights I was just teased mildly. Predictably, the real horror was postponed until the “fateful” third night.

  When dusk set in, I was overcome by a heavy somnolence. This was more than strange, since I usually experience an excess of liveliness and energy at that time, regardless of how I spent the day.

  Now, though, I had to stave off sleep, and I didn’t manage very well. I tried to spook myself by summoning up the lurid horrors that lay in wait for me on the far side of my closed eyelids. No use. Even thinking about the unprecedented shame that would cover me if I failed didn’t work. Melifaro’s stinging remarks, Juffin’s consoling gestures, and (the apotheosis) Lady Melamori’s contemptuously pursed lips. Even that didn’t help. A blissful drowsiness enveloped me like a downy pillow, the weapon of choice of a gentle strangler. I was just one wink away from the land of nod.

  A bottle of Elixir of Kaxar saved me from slumber. It was pure luck that I had decided to bring it with me. I had to drink quite a bit. But I’m not complaining—Elixir of Kaxar is not only a powerful tonic, but darned tasty, too.

  Afterward, Juffin explained that drinking the elixir galvanized the force into action. Apparently, the mysterious being decided that if I was using magic only of the eighth degree for self-defense, I was-n’t a force to contend with. My seeming helplessness forced it to take the most thoughtless course of action in all its strange career.

  I didn’t want to argue with Juffin; all the same, it seemed to me that this malevolent chap, fairly unhinged by the loneliness of his transparent existence, just couldn’t wait anymore. It wasn’t a matter of logic at all. The dead Magician wanted to take my life. He was compelled to try—the sooner, the better. Most likely, my “Spark,” or whatever it is, was just the amount or intensity he needed. He had been moving toward his goal for so long already! Drop by drop he had absorbed the strength of those who had ended up in that cell. The time came when Maxlilgl Annox was strong enough to take the first life of another—a life he needed to redeem his own, partly spent, life. Then he was able to claim another, and another . . .

  The last portion made the ghost of the Grand Magician so powerful that he was able to invade the dreams of the inhabitants of the neighboring cells, who were soundly protected by impenetrable walls (for magic of the living, but not for him—the dead). He wanted just one thing: to take as many lives as he needed so that he could resurrect himself once and for all. He was already on the threshold of completing this experiment that lasted a lifetime, with a death thrown into the bargain. He needed only a final gulp of the mysterious and precious substance that goes by the name of the Spark. And for the third night in a row, his tantalizing “gulp” had been almost within his grasp—but wouldn’t fall asleep. Naturally, the old geezer tried to go for broke. I would no doubt have done the same if I had been in his shoes.

  What’s more, no matter what Sir Juffin Hully said, my opponent was very close to getting what he wanted. Much too close for comfort!

  When the silhouette of the intruder materialized like a shadow in the corner of my prison boudoir, I froze in horror. Of course, I had enough information at my disposal to prepare myself for this eventuality. But I wasn’t ready. I was completely unnerved.

  To be absolutely honest, I was terrified. And I didn’t know how to bring myself to my senses, even though the appearance of the intruder was more funny than fearsome. The ghost of the Grand Magician was exceedingly small in stature. This was the result of his disproportionate physique—an enormous head; a powerful, muscular torso; and stumpy little legs with feet as small as a child’s.

  A comical figure, to be sure; but the brown, wrinkled face of the intruder made an entirely different impression. He had huge blue eyes, a high forehead, and the finely chiseled nose and nostrils of a predator. His long hair, and a beard of the same length, branched out in a multitude of tiny braids—most likely, an ancient fashion. Well, it’s hard to keep up with the trends from a prison cell. Especially for a ghost, I thought. This observation was very much in my style, and it suggested that things weren’t really so bad.

  Having mastered my fear, though, I realized that something worse was happening. I was paralyzed. I couldn’t budge. I stood there gazing dully at the reluctant recluse—I was lucky I didn’t fall flat on my face. Do something, you moron! shouted the clever little fellow inside me. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much influence over the rest of me. Do something already! This is for real! Move it!

  Nothing helped.

  I knew exactly what I needed to do: free Lonli-Lokli with a few energetic shakes of my hand. But even this rudimentary action was too much for me—this fatal thumbing my nose, so to speak, at the night visitor. I was helpless in this situation. It was no longer up to me. I realized that I was goner.

  “Your name is Perset. You are a piece of life. I’ve been looking for you,” the ghost whispered. “I have come to you down a long road—one end was prison, the other the grave. And only the wind cried ‘Oooooooh!’; but still I came.”

  He came, you understand. I’d rather he not speak at all, this unsung symbolist poet. A person who burdened his interlocutor with such trite and highfalutin turns of phrase upon first meeting was absurd. I decided to refuse the burden. Besides, I had written better dialogs when I was eighteen. I didn’t know how, but I was determined to get the better of him.

  At that moment, something utterly bizarre began happening to me. I felt that I was starting to “harden” again. It seemed to me that I had turned into a small, hard apple—one of those that only a seven-year-old boy can munch on (since boys that age are known to chew on everything that comes their way).

  Then I had a completely mad thought—I began thinking that there was no way a grownup man like my opponent was going to munch on the hard, bitter apple that I had somehow become. This delirious notion seemed to me to be so self-evident that there was no way around it. And this restored my belief in my own powers. To be honest, I had completely forgotten about my human nature and about the human problems that beset me. We sour green apples live our own inscrutable, carefree lives . . .

  My guest began to grimace. He wore the expression of a person who has been wandering around for the last twenty-four hours with a mouthful of vinegar and unripe persimmon. The ancient fellow grew quite upset—and at that very moment the little green apple became a person again. And the person acquired the ability to act. He gave his left hand a good shake—a single deft motion was all it took. In the middle of the prison cell stood Sir Lonli-Lokli.

  “You brought Thumbkins!” Maxlilgl cried with indignation.

  It was as if we had agreed on the rules of battle beforehand, and I had breached the hypothetical contract.

  “You’re not Perset!” the ghost added vehemently. Evide
ntly, he was still hoping that I would feel ashamed of my behavior and stuff Sir Shurf back in the closet. I think Sir Annox had become considerably softer over the past years of associating only with defenseless, frightened inmates.

  “Don’t ‘Perset’ me!” I growled.

  The ghost’s confusion was palpable. Sir Shurf needed time to peel off his protective gloves, covered with runes. While the dead Magician and I were squaring off, Lonli-Lokli managed to carry out the necessary preparations. The brilliant light from his death-dealing hands illuminated the cell walls, and life seemed all of a sudden to be a devilishly simple and precious matter. A story with an untold number of happy endings—take your pick.

  I didn’t even suspect that my chances for staying alive were still approaching zero.

  It was my own fault, of course. I had never had to deal with retired Grand Magicians. I foolishly assumed that there was no hurry in killing him. My vanity demanded that I deliver this mistake of nature to the House by the Bridge and drop it screaming and kicking at Sir Juffin’s feet. How I was going to capture a ghost I had no idea. But then again, I had had a miserable, third-rate education. I didn’t have classes in the foundations of metaphysics, either in high school—which I got through on a wing and prayer—or in college, from which I was unceremoniously expelled. I shared my half-baked thoughts on the matter with my colleague—but Sir Shurf is the most disciplined creature in the universe. As he saw it, I was the leader of the operation. Consequently, my orders had to be summarily carried out. Even the most half-baked ones.

  Lonli-Lokli’s paralyzing right hand did not achieve the desired effect. Instead of freezing submissively to the spot, the ghost began to increase in size, threatening to assume gigantic proportions. At the same time, he became increasingly transparent. It all happened so quickly that within the fraction of a second his indistinct head was hovering somewhere up near the ceiling.

  “Stupid Thumbkins!” Maxlilgl Annox screeched. “He knows not how to kill! Begone, Thumbkins!”

  And without paying any more heed to Lonli-Lokli, the thick mist, which by now had almost lost its human form, lunged at me. It managed to touch me—a cold, damp, sticky pudding—that’s what it felt like. The touch left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, for some reason, and the cold pain that shot through my body was such that I still can’t imagine how I survived it.

  I didn’t even lose consciousness. Instead, I screamed at the top of my lungs:

  “Liquidate him!”

  Sinning Magicians! Where was my head?

  As though from a great distance, I watched Lonli-Lokli join his remarkable hands together and cross his forefingers. This promising gesture had no visible consequences, though. Another tormenting second passed. I didn’t understand a thing. Why didn’t Shurf kill him? The human pudding was already thickening around me.

  And then another improbable thing happened. It was like the icing on the cake of this bewitched night. The shining fingers of Lonli-Lokli drew the outline of a wondrous curve in the darkness, and a waterfall came crashing down on us. Tons of cold water swallowed up the transparent silhouette. I still didn’t understand what was happening, but I turned my face to the refreshing streams of water. A good wash was surprisingly welcome right then.

  Our opponent, however, turned out to have a very tenacious vitality. Of course, the water wasn’t able to do serious harm to him, although it did engender another metamorphosis. After his bath, the ghost began shrinking at an alarming rate. As huge and transparent as he had just been, he now became tiny and dense.

  My insights into astronomy are catastrophically limited. I don’t even know what super-dense heavenly bodies are called. That they are “dwarves” I know for certain. But whether they’re “white,” or “black” I have no clue. Our dwarf was, in any case, white, a miniscule homunculus, shining with the same blinding whiteness as Lonli-Lokli’s hands reaching out for him. In spite of his miniature stature, he looked very threatening.

  “You were mistaken, Sir Max,” my imposing partner remarked evenly. “Water can’t harm him.”

  “I, mistaken?! Wherever did you get the idea that water would do the trick?!”

  “But you yourself told me to liquify him!”

  “Sinning Magicians, Shurf! Liquidate, not liquify! It means to kill! And the sooner the bet—”

  I broke off in mid-sentence. Suddenly I couldn’t go on. I wasn’t up to talking anymore. The tiny creature glittered in the air, very close to my face. It was muttering something. The bastard’s putting a spell on me, I thought indifferently. I didn’t have the strength to resist him . . .

  . . . I was blinded by the bright light of the sun. I was standing beneath the spreading branches of a tree, and an unkempt girl, milky-white, as short in stature as Sir Maxlilgl Annox, was offering me an apricot. “Accept the gift of a fairy, Perset!” Why, I don’t know myself, but I took it and bit into it. The fruit was worm-ridden. A pale little caterpillar slipped into my wide-open mouth and dove into the tender depths of my gullet. I felt its sharp jaws pierce the sensitive membranes. Poison began coursing through my body, filling me with weak nausea. I should probably have died of pain and disgust, but a blinding hatred filled me, and I began to shout. I shouted so violently and fiercely that it set a rushing wind in motion. Leaves, scorched dry, began falling from the tree, and the milk-white girl, her face distorted from horror, slithered through the withered grass, hissing like a viper. Finally, I spit out the poisonous caterpillar at the feet of Lonli-Lokli, who wasn’t in that garden at all; and then the glaring light began to subside.

  What I really admire in our Master Who Snuffs Out Unnecessary Lives is his unflappability. He won’t be caught out! While I was wandering through the sunny fields of my nightmare, the guy did what had to be done. He finally put his death-dealing left hand into action—something he should have done straight off. In such cases, everything goes off without a hitch. Whether you’re a human being, or a ghost, or a Magician-knows-what, death will be easy and instantaneous.

  Then this remarkable fellow pulled on his protective gloves, and with the dexterity of a professional nurse poured the remains of the Elixir of Kaxar into my mouth.

  “It’s very helpful in cases like this, Max, so drink up. I regret that I didn’t understand your order properly. I concluded that you were talking about a new method of destruction by water. It cost me considerable effort to get him wet. Here in Xolomi, even I have a hard time working wonders—although Sir Juffin, naturally, gave me special training.”

  From the Elixir of Kaxar I not only came to, I also cheered up—a clear sign of an overdose.

  “A method of destruction by water—Sinning Magicians! How could that be expected to work? Why water? You should have just pissed on him! That would have killed him, I’m sure! Loki, have you never tried pissing on a ghost?”

  “Sir Max,” my savior protested in an injured tone, “my name is not Loki, but Lonli-Lokli. Until now you have always managed to pronounce it correctly. I would hope that the ability will return to you in the near future.”

  The poor chap had decided, apparently, that I was as big a dunderhead as Melifaro.

  “That was no slip of the tongue, Sir Shurf. I was simply reminded of a menacing god whose name resembles yours. Please don’t take offense, my friend.”

  “I’ve never heard of a god by the name of Loki,” he admitted in surprise. “Do your fellow tribespeople worship him?”

  “Some of them, anyway,” I didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. “We of the Barren Lands have a multitude of divinities, you know. Everyone believes whatever he wants to. Every second nomad is a high priest. And some chaps, myself included, don’t believe in anything in particular, but take a lively interest in everything.”

  “It isn’t secret knowledge, is it?” Lonli-Lokli inquired. “You could enlighten me about these matters?”

  “Yes, I can,” I nodded resolutely. “For you—I’d do anything.”

  For the next hour and a half, over the cold
remains of the excellent prison kamra, I waxed eloquent on the subject of Scandinavian mythology, passing it off as legend of the Barren Lands.

  I must give Sir Shurf his due—the Scandinavian epic was very much to his liking. He especially liked Odin, the chief of the gods and dead heroes, who brought the honey of poetry to earth. The Master Who Snuffs Out Unnecessary Lives viewed poetry with profound reverence, if not outright trepidation.

  Inspired either by the unexpectedness of our shared literary passions or by overindulgence in Elixir of Kaxar, I patted my imposing colleague on the back. I had forgotten that in the Unified Kingdom this gesture is only allowed to close friends. Luckily for me, Sir Shurf didn’t object to this official acknowledgment of our newly established friendly footing. Indeed, he seemed very flattered.

  Then it occurred to me that I had no idea what obligations my status as close friend of Sir Lonli-Lokli would entail. Here in Echo there must be myriad peculiar rites and customs surrounding true friendship. I decided I’d have to consult Juffin about it. Let him teach me how to be a friend here. And I’d write it down in my notebook and try to check every move I made against it. I just hoped that in the next hour and a half I wouldn’t offend him; that would be just like me.

  Finally we finished our divinity tutorial and began sending signals to the world outside the cell. We were immediately released and led to the commander’s office. They fed us an excellent breakfast and plied us with fresh, hot kamra. It was wonderful. When I began to feel quite chipper again, I hastened to relieve my curiosity.

  “Tell me, Shurf. How did you pass the time when you were small? I’m not asking about your childhood, of course. I mean when you were hidden from prying eyes in my tightly clenched fist.”

  “Time?” Lonli-Lokli asked with a shrug. “Time, Sir Max, passed as it always does. During these few hours I even managed to work up an appetite.”

  “What? Few hours!”