FSF, October-November 2009 Read online

  I fall easily into conversations with strangers; and so it was, as I stood across the street watching strange-looking beings coming and going at the outworlders’ temples, I found myself discussing—warily, at first, then more openly—my attitude toward our current spate of religiosity with a fellow curiosity-seeker, an onlooker who, by the hue of his skin, was probably a native of this region. He was a small, finely built man with brightly gleaming eyes that shined like beacons out of his purple-black face, and he seemed to know which planet each of the different outworld types we were watching had come from. I complimented him on his knowledge, to which he replied, after telling me that his name was Vundafor Thorb and that his home was in the nearby town of Bekadu, that it was his business to know such things: he was an importer whose specialty was supplying these aliens with the foodstuffs and beverages of their native worlds. He said it in a casual way that told me that he actually disliked the presence of all these outworlders in Sippulgar, but that he saw it as a prime business opportunity.

  "My late brother-in-law, I think, took the same attitude toward our new religions,” I said. “I have reason to think he saw all this feverish piety as nothing more than a good thing suitable for exploitation."

  "Oh?” And he gave me a sharp look, as though I had offended him by implying that I thought his own attitude revealed a cynical love of profit, which in fact I did. Not that I saw anything wrong with that. But then he smiled and said, “So he went into the religion business, your brother-in-law?"

  "Apparently so.” And, bit by bit, I told him what little I could: the nature of Melifont's character, his repeated failure in a series of grandiose enterprises, and the final letter telling my wife and me that he had embarked on some new project in Sippulgar, followed in time by the official notice of his disappearance. “I've been given three boxes full of his effects,” I said. “I found a diary in them that I've barely been able to decipher, but which talks about a partner of his named Nikkon Flurivole, and some legal papers indicating that he and this Flurivole were starting a company that was intended to bring ‘spiritual benefits’ to the people of Sippulgar. I translate that as meaning that they were going to trump up some lucrative new religion, don't you?"

  "Surely that must be it,” said my new friend.

  "And in another box was a whole sorcerers’ shop full of the claptrap devices that wizards use—crucibles and alembics and ambivials and whatnot. You know what I mean."

  "Melifont Ambithorn was his name, you said?"

  "Yes. And his partner was Nikkon Flurivole."

  "Indeed. I knew them, actually. Had some business dealings with them, as a matter of fact. A tall, dramatic-looking man, who walked with a limp? And the other one short, round-faced, sleepy-looking?"

  "I don't know anything about the other one. But the tall man with a limp—yes, that was Melifont!” I could have wept with delight. If I had been a believer in any of the new gods, I would have given thanks to him. “What can you tell me about them?” I asked eagerly.

  Thorb shrugged. “Not very much. I sold them velvet hangings for their chapel, two, two-and-a-half years ago. And some very fine carpets. They spared no expense, you know."

  "That would be like Melifont,” I said. “So they had a chapel. What sort of religion were they running?"

  "I don't know much about it. I even forget the name of their creed. There are so many nowadays, you know. I think it was one of the wonder-working ones: predict the future, cure the ailing, maybe even raise the dead. They had quite a following for a while. It all ended badly for them, of course."

  "Tell me!"

  "Well, now, I don't really know. They both disappeared, is all I can say. Loud noises were heard. Outcries in the night. Some say they were carried off by their own demons, creatures they had summoned themselves.” He grinned, flashing teeth white as ivory. “Not that I give much credence to that, of course. Nor, I suspect, would you. But they vanished. Leaving me, I might add, with unpaid invoices to the amount of close to four hundred royals. I recovered what I could from their cult, but I assure you that I'm still out of pocket to the tune of no small sum."

  "You can have that whole box of wizards’ equipment if you like,” I heard myself saying. My offer, the generosity of which took me by surprise, was an indication of the rush of joy I felt just then at actually having through great good luck come across a clue to this mystery. “Some magus might want to purchase it, and that will help you recover the rest of your loss.—Carried off by their own demons, is that the story? Well, hardly likely. Skipping out on their own creditors, I suspect! But at least you've provided me with something to start on. I wonder where I could find some members of their cult to talk to."

  "I can't help you with that,” he said. “But you might try hunting up their high priest. He's still around, you know. Macola Endrago is the name. He'll tell you a thing or two!"

  * * * *

  Macola Endrago.

  I hurried back to my hotel and pounced on Melifont's journal, which had been becoming gradually less impenetrable to me as I grew more familiar with the idiosyncrasies of his handwriting. Endrago? Endrago? Yes! “M.E. suggests increase in payments.” Could that be anyone else? Their employee, their hired high priest, wanting his salary raised. Then I found the entire name, Endrago, followed by an irritated-looking squiggle. Six pages later, “Macola very difficult today.” My heart was pounding. Again, again, again: M.E., M.E. “A troublesome man. These damned fanatics!” I think the word was fanatics. Another entry: “He is impossible. I cannot cope with his...” The last word of the sentence was unreadable. Scarcely anything in the journal that had to do with Endrago was legible, and what there was was maddeningly incomplete—perhaps the journal was mostly in code, or perhaps Melifont was simply one of those untidy men who could not be bothered to write with care. But I knew that my fortuitous encounter with Vundafor Thorb of Bekadu had set me on the right trail. Already I was beginning to form a hypothesis: this Endrago, this priest, obviously had been an annoyingly contentious man, ever hungry for a greater share in the profits from the fraudulent cult that my wife's brother and his equally shifty friend had put together for the sake of exploiting the naive and easily gulled people of this overly trusting city. Knowing that he was essential to the operation, Endrago must have been forever demanding higher wages for his services, and the two harried partners, perhaps already behind on their bills, had stalled him with one prevarication after another until he had boiled over with rage and murdered them. It would not have seemed implausible, in Sippulgar's present climate of superstition and gullibility, for the priest to claim that he had seen or heard them being torn to pieces by demons who had carried their bodies off to some other sphere. And now the income from the chapel would be all his to keep.

  Vundafor Thorb had taken my offer of Melifont's magical equipment seriously. I suppose I would have done the same if I had been in his position. The next day he came to call for it. I would rather have kept those things to sell on my own behalf, since the costs of my journey to Sippulgar were beginning to mount. But there was no help for it: I had offered, I must make good. And he had brought me the address of the priest Macola Endrago, so I was able, in my mind, to write off the loss of the equipment as the price of this valuable information.

  I knew better than to approach this Endrago immediately and directly. One does not leap hastily upon a murder suspect and shower him with unsupported accusations. Instead I went to the address Thorb had given me—it was in a district in the dreary northeastern part of the city, where the sea breezes did not often reach and the air seemed stale and thick—and carried out some preliminary reconnaissance.

  At a tavern on a back street I invested a couple of crowns in a pot of beer and a plate of sausages, and quickly began to draw the innkeeper, a cheerful, easy sort of man, into conversation. I was, I told him, a traveler from Sisivondal—I saw no use in trying to disguise my northern accent—who had suffered some unspecified family tragedy and had come to Sippulgar
to recover from his loss under the warm tropical sunlight. But I was lonely, terribly lonely, I said, and I felt in need of spiritual counselling. “In Sisivondal,” I said, “we have the creed of the Beholders, and I derive much consolation from their rites. But there is no outpost of that faith here.” I beckoned for a second pot of beer and asked him if he could recommend any place of worship, especially one in this quarter of town, where I might find the solace I needed.

  He offered me five such places. There was the conventicle of this and the sanctuary of that, and the tabernacle of something else, the shrine of yet one more, and, of course, the drum-banging cult of Time the Devourer that was the special favorite of the citizens of golden Sippulgar. I carefully wrote all these down, but I allowed that I was seeking something quieter and more personal, something other than a cult that was built around loud public processions.

  "Well, then, my friend, you should have said so straightaway! What you need is the Temple of Eternal Comfort, where even the sorest heart will find some ease. It's a quiet place, and not as popular as it used to be, but I can vouch for it. Macola Endrago is high priest there, and a kinder, more understanding man you will never hope to find from one end of the world to another."

  Macola Endrago! All roads seemed to lead to Macola Endrago!

  I felt as though I had reached into my purse and come forth with the winning ticket for the Sisivondal municipal lottery.

  I found the Temple of Eternal Comfort without much difficulty: it was a ten-minute walk from the tavern. Despite its resonant name, it was drab and unprepossessing: a long, bare, narrow room, probably a converted shop, with a simple painted sign above its door. I saw none of the carpets and velvet hangings of which Vundafor Thorb had spoken, only some rows of wooden benches. He must have repossessed his merchandise. No one was there but a haggard, weary-looking man in shabby clothes, who was slowly sweeping the chapel floor.

  I said that I wanted to speak with the priest Macola Endrago.

  "He comes toward evening,” the man said. “What sort of business do you have with him?"

  Once again I explained that I was a stranger in Sippulgar, lonely and in need of healing, and told him that a sympathetic innkeeper had suggested I come here.

  The man, who identified himself as the sexton of the chapel, Graimon Sten by name, looked surprised at that. “We get very few new communicants these days,” he said. “We have had certain difficulties, you know. Because of what happened here. But that ought not to discourage you. Macola Endrago will give you the help you need."

  I maintained my guise of ignorance. “Because of what happened here? And what was that?"

  The sexton Graimon Sten hesitated a moment. Then he said, with a slight twitch of his lips, “Our founders have left us, and no one knows where they are. That shouldn't be of any real concern: we still have our Macola Endrago, who is the heart and soul of our faith. But of course, when there's the least hint of scandal about a chapel, or even what is suspected to be scandal—"

  "Yes, the innkeeper I mentioned did speak highly of this Endrago.—But what's this about a scandal? The founders—what about them? They've left you, you say?” Trying to sound merely casually curious, I said, “Left you to go where? And why did they go?"

  Plainly the entire topic was distressing to him. He looked downward, concentrating pointedly on his sweeping. But I persevered.

  "They disappeared. Not a trace.” He paused, still avoiding my glance. Then he said, almost under his breath, “One story has it that they were murdered by a member of the congregation who held a grudge against them. His wife had died, and he was sick with grief and asked them to bring her back from the dead. He was willing to pay a huge sum of money if they would. They promised to do it, so it's said. But they couldn't."

  "So he went insane and killed them? You think that's what happened to them?"

  "I don't think anything,” the sexton said. He looked up and let his eyes meet mine, but only for a moment. “Nobody pays me to think. I told you because you asked. Listen, it's just something that I heard someone say."

  "Someone reliable?"

  "How would I know. It sounds pretty wild to me. The man is still a communicant here. He doesn't have the look of a murderer about him."

  I risked pressing him a little harder. “Even so: is it possible that the story's true?"

  "It's possible that anything's true. Life is full of disappointments; anger may rise up in the most surprising people. And restoring the dead was never any part of our creed here. If that was what he expected, he didn't have any chance of getting it, did he? And that could have upset him. But what does it matter? The men are gone. We struggle on without them. Macola Endrago will be here in two hours, and I know he will give your soul the ease it needs."

  * * * *

  Now I had three theories: that Macola Endrago had murdered Ambithorn and Flurivole in a dispute over money, that one of their own communicants had killed them in rage because they had failed to perform a miracle for him, or that they had indulged in some rash conjuring-up of demons and had been destroyed by the very spirits they had summoned. The Endrago theory was supported to some extent by my brother-in-law's own journal. The sexton had not put forth the angry-communicant theory with much conviction, in fact did not seem really to believe it at all. And the third, the carried-off-by-demons notion, I rejected out of hand, of course. Which left the Endrago theory as the only likely one.

  But five minutes in the presence of Macola Endrago and I knew that all my conjectures about him were wrong. The man was a saint.

  He was very tall, very thin, almost frail, a spidery, fleshless figure of a man, older than I had expected. His dark Sippulgaru skin seemed to have faded with the years to a light pale violet. He had a long rectangular face from which emanated the kindest of smiles and a gaze of the utmost gentleness and benevolence, and he was surrounded by such an aura of love and warmth and purity that at the mere sight of him I felt a crazy yearning to drop to my knees before him and kiss the hem of his threadbare robe. There was no mistaking his goodness: that sort of thing can't be counterfeited. He held out both his hands to me and clasped them about mine, and murmured some sort of blessing in the softest, most whispery of voices. The Temple of Eternal Comfort might have been the shameless concoction of two callous entrepreneurs in quest of easy money, but this man Endrago, I knew at once, was the embodiment of true holiness, sincere in his beliefs, genuinely good. How my brother-in-law must have hated him! In every aspect of his character, by word and deed, this Endrago had displayed the greatest possible contrast to his employers’ crass materialistic ways.

  I trust such flashes of insight when they come to me. Confronted with such incontrovertible sanctity, I was unable to spin any false stories about my visit to Sippulgar. I simply told him that my wife had asked me to come here to learn the details of her brother Melifont's fate. “Ah,” said Macola Endrago softly, softly: a mere faint gust of breath. “How sad it was! They summoned the irgalisteroi, your Melifont and his friend; and the irgalisteroi destroyed them. I had warned them, again and again: these spirits are real, they are dangerous. They would not listen. They thought they could use the irgalisteroi for their private profit. But they wove the spells better than they knew, and they were punished terribly for their greed and their impetuousness. As a man of your sort is surely aware, it is hard to protect fools from their own folly."

  "The irgalisteroi?"

  "Yes. Proiarchis, it may have been whom they invoked. Or Remmer, more likely. I came in just as it was ending. I heard the screams: the most terrible cries of agony, they were, and there was the sound of the atmosphere collapsing around them—it is like thunder, you know, thunder right there in the room. The air grows dark. The whole world seems to shake. The sky itself is split apart. I opened the door and found that the two men had already been carried off. If I had arrived any sooner, I would have died with them."

  "You will pardon me, father,” I said, “but I am only a merchant of Sisivondal, a
plain worldly man, and I know nothing of supernatural matters. Proiarchis, Remmer, irgalisteroi—these names are only names to me."

  "Ah,” he said again. “Of course."

  And he told me. There are, he explained, three classes of demons. That was the word he used, demons, and what he meant by it was the inhabitants of the invisible world, a concept that seemed not to have any fantastical connotations for him: he accepted without the least hint of skepticism the presence of unknown and unknowable worlds immediately adjacent to our own. These demons were the original prehistoric inhabitants of our planet, before even the Shapeshifters had come here. In ancient times the Shapeshifters had mastered them, though, confining them under powerful spells. The valisteroi, he said, were a group that had somehow escaped those spells and live now beyond the sphere of the sun, invulnerable to all conjuring. The kallisteroi, who dwell between the sky and the Great Moon and have a certain degree of freedom of action, are sympathetic to us and will sometimes agree to do services for us when properly asked by the adept; in any case they never do harm. And then there are the irgalisteroi, the demons of the subterranean world, who can be compelled to perform many duties, but who are angry, dangerous beings entirely capable of turning on an unskillful summoner and destroying him.

  It says much for the spiritual force that lay behind this saintly man's mild demeanor and the incantatory power of his gentle voice that I was able to accept as factual data, for the moment, all that he was telling me about these various categories of nonexistent phantoms. As he spoke I went leaping ahead of him to the conclusion that Ambithorn and Flurivole, perhaps as a drunken irresponsible prank or possibly with the wild hope of discovering that the irgalisteroi actually were real and could be commanded to heap them with riches, had incautiously brought some potent demon out of the land of the invisible, using a borrowed spell, but had not been able to control it. Not only didn't I doubt his belief in such entities, I think I felt, just for the moment, under the irresistible strength of his incandescent sincerity, some belief in them myself. “I can give you a glimpse of them,” he said. “I would prefer not to meddle with Remmer or Proiarchis myself, though if I brought them here they might confirm what I have told you of your brother-in-law's end. But I can call up for you some of the less dangerous spirits, if you are curious about such things: Minim, say, who restores lost knowledge, or Ruhid, who brings relief from fever. Theddim, if you wish, who can control the coursing of the blood through our hearts—"