Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

The musicians moved again, entering, and Eden’s party matched them to form a procession. The rest of the worshipers remained behind in the courtyard.

Ahead, Eden saw candlelight through a dimness, and he smelled incense. Advancing into the theatrically shadowy interior, he realized that there were dark doors in the walls at either hand as well as a tall, narrow silver pair directly ahead. All of them were closed. The bright pair to the chamber’s rear was elaborately embossed with abstract, curving designs amid which the candles’ light swam like bright fish in a garden pond.

They continued until they were well inside. When the music grew slower they halted. A small draft ceased and they knew that the doors had been closed behind them.

They stood for a long while, waiting, listening to the music, preparing themselves spiritually as they had been taught. Abruptly then, the music ceased and the silver doors began, slowly, to open. A moment later, he could see that there was something very bright behind them.

Above the music of the lost that might be reclaimed, Death heard Mizar’s cry. The bone woman whose hand he held came apart as the howl was broken off, and he rose and turned three times in a circle, widdershins, but the sound had been too brief to determine its source. He walked then to the twilit crest of a hill, held forth a pale hand and captured the cry.

Too brief, too brief to take him all the way. Yet— He cast it before him down the farther slope and followed its echo. As he walked the twilight flickered about him and the hillside grew level and he moved in a brightness of full day down a busy thoroughfare where none took notice of him save for a single, old woman who turned and stared into his eyes. He reached out and touched her shoulder, not ungently, and she slumped to the pavement. He continued on, not looking back, and turned right at the next corner.

The city faded and he walked across a lake. Several fish turned belly up and floated to the top as he passed. When he reached the farther shore he came to a field and began walking through it.

Partway through the field, he halted. Red-and-yellow flowers bloomed about him, save in a patch to his left where a multitude hung withered upon their stalks. He directed his gaze in their direction, and after a moment a patch of black rose from one of these and fluttered to a fresh blossom in full bloom. A few moments later, the flower began to droop.

“Alioth,” he said then. “Come to me.”

The black butterfly rose from the wilting flower and fluttered across the space between them to light upon his extended finger.

“Hi, boss. Fancy meeting you here.” ‘

“It was not, really, a matter of chance,” Death responded.

“Didn’t think it was. Just making conversation.”

The dark figure nodded. Alioth could never tell when Death was amused.

“For that matter, I might even venture a guess as to why you’re out and about in the flesh, so to speak,” Alioth ventured, still wondering. “I heard Mizar’s howl, too.”

“Ah!”

“Yes, but broken off after only a moment.”

“Indeed. It was too brief for me to respond properly. I was hoping that, from your position in the scheme of things, you might have been able to obtain a better notion as to its direction.”

“I am not certain,” Alioth replied. “But it did seem to phase from a more central locale.”

“Then let us take a look,” Death said, and he raised his other arm.

Landscapes swept by them at such a rapid rate that Alioth was unable to sort them. And the pace increased until it was only a succession of lights and darks, then blacks and whites, and finally a throbbing grey. Alioth knew that his master scanned everything that passed, however.

Their course took upon it a spiral aspect then, and the sequence through which they had just passed was reversed. When they halted, Death stood at the base of an enormous mountain whose top was lost to sight beyond the clouds.

Death leaned to examine a small crater. Alioth fluttered above it, dipped down into it.

“Piece of reddish cable embedded in the side here, Lord.”

Death dropped soundlessly into the hole and extended a hand. He removed the object from the wall, raised it, studied it.

“One of Mizar’s tails,” he said. “I wonder what aspect of him it represents?”

He rose up out of the hole then and followed a line of footsteps which lightened as they went and then vanished after a double-dozen paces.

“He appears to have made his way into another space.” Death lowered himself and extended a hand above the final tracks. He moved it in a slow circle. His hand and arm vanished and returned, vanished and returned as he did so. “Continued through many,” he said, “fading, fading. Gone.”

Death rose, glanced upward. Glanced back down.

“What happened to him?” Alioth asked.

“Speculation is fruitless at this point,” he replied.

Death threw back his head and howled. The sky was darkened, and a passing flock of birds fell dead at his feet. The earth began to tremble, from there out through the spaces of Virtu.

Jagged bolts of lightning played about Mount Meru as the wailing continued, and the ground was cracked and fissured at its base. The entire mountain was swayed imperceptibly, and grasses withered and trees fell down. Lakes overflowed their bounds, and rivers ran backwards.

When he had ceased he waited. For a long, long while he waited. But there was no response.

From his hilltop vantage Donnerjack could view the sea in several directions as well as the work in progress below him. Considerable digging had gone on, he understood, for the better part of the week. The foundation was now in place, and he compared its actuality with the print on the pad screen he held in his hand. He turned to the woman at his side.

“It is what I have asked for, thus far,” he said. “It seems to be moving along right on schedule, too. Any thoughts?”

“I am happy to be here,” she replied. “It is so strange, so different… Yes, it must be good.”

“I was afraid that the isolation—”

“No, that’s good, too,” she said. “I want it. I want a long time of it, after—after that other.”

He nodded.

“We will check back again periodically as it grows into our home. And when we tire of it we can always walk in your world.”

“Though it is not exactly my world any longer.”

“Both will always be your worlds, Ayra.”

“Yes, and it will be good. There is so much I wish to learn of this place—of both places, really. And I wish to help you with your work. I have a unique perspective.”

“Yes,” he said, taking her small hand in his burly one. “Perhaps you can.”

During the months that followed they visited the isle regularly, watching the black castle in its growth. It seemed impossible to know exactly what it had looked like in an earlier incarnation, so Donnerjack had been free in his designs, incorporating what features he would from existing structures of a similar nature. It grew tall, dark, and more than a little formidable against its bleak backdrop, though it was plumbed and heated to modern rather than medieval standards and contained lines of fiber-optic cable as well as concealed microwave antennas.

And they would walk through it as it grew—he, tapping joints with his stick; she, running her fingertips over surfaces—and they would smile and nod to each other. If it were not raining, they would stand on their hilltop for a time and look down on it. They watched the flyers come and go, bearing materials and labor, and then they would go away themselves to one of their honeymoon apartments in some other country to pass the time.