Accordingly, over the years his reputation among them remained intact and only grew bigger. It became clear to him none of them knew the ‘magnificent tryst’ had never happened. His fellow majicians only knew he was ensconced out of reach on high in the remote mountain by will of the Master. His new legendary title mocked his former thirst for fame, as he was known all over the territory and lands beyond as, ‘The Great Majus’, ‘The Mountain Sage’, ‘The Enlightened One.’ Much was made of reinterpreting his Chaldean name, ‘Mi-sha-Baltshazar,’ as a question, ‘Who is what Baltshazar is?’ as if it both exalted him and also posed the high riddle whose answer they were meant to discover.
And so it went. For more than a decade they’d kept arriving, triumphant visitors suddenly materializing, or knocking for entry from beneath the hatch, concerned to present only the highest-sounding questions they could think of: “What is the way to greatest power?” “What is the final mystery of death?” “What is the true worth of existence?” “Are you the Baltshazar himself?” – when what he longed for instead were people without tattoos and with simpler brains who’d show mere happiness on seeing him for once and who’d want to talk petty school gossip instead of marvelling at the fully tattooed face they saw in front of them. A flourish of vultures and crows below the balcony let him know when less canny ones had mistakenly tried to scale the cliff.
Fortunately it wasn’t hard to keep discharging the ruse, – they mistook silence for wisdom – short answers seemed like pithy ones. He threw the askers back on themselves, “Each life is a mystery path to be walked, work out the true steps behind you to see your future end,” “Pursuing is its own answer, unknowing the greatest knowing of all,” “To stay poised in one’s center, free of desires, – there is the cosmic Self,” and their pride stopped them from admitting they didn’t know what to do with the information. He hid the dreadful fact that their beliefs would one day mean nothing, as Evil itself showed up to harvest its dupes.
Once, though, a humbler one, an adept still with a heart, caused Hamar to take him by the shoulders and hold him to the tale of the goat-horned monster, “Believe me I tell you! Blind fool, for the love of your soul, wake up!,” but the man only recoiled, and Hamar realized then that no taster of hidden wonders would ever accept that the devil was their real source, and certainly never that he was the end point of their high search, or even of the creature being as he truly was, – to have all the abilities they could ever possibly have and reach mastery, to their lofty mind, seemed the ultimate for humans.
In what little pride Hamar had left he never told the young man, as the adept went back the way he came, that so simple a thing as entry and exit was way beyond the Mountain Sage.
Every time they asked their questions Hamar felt the peck of the awful truth about his own fate, yet again. Was the Master laughing every time? That awful laugh!
Oddly, being stripped of his powers seemed to cruelly make him as sensitive as any ordinary human to other powers all around him. Fear always did that in anyone. The place continued to be as full of resident demons, big and small, as was the Academy, and from the start they kept up their random ambush, – not only with manifestations, but with atmospheres, plus new tormenting thoughts and feelings about his weakness, about his stupidity, his uselessness, – biting accusations to make him backtrack on all his thoughts to justify himself, unsuccessfully, and end with depression. He knew panics and doubts and fears bombarding him unmercifully until he felt his mind was a tighter cell than the cave. Always, were worries and moral conundrums that spiralled with no conclusions, – especially when he lay down in bed, so that he was robbed of sleep for nights on end.
Just as the Academy had worked to shape him, so this place worked to undo him. He was reduced to a coward’s life from always fearing what a new noise meant, or that something was about to emerge across from him in the rooms, in having to keep checking from the corners of his eyes for disappearing forms, wrong shadows. He jumped with fright whenever a big black crow sometimes landed, cawing, on the balcony wall. Once, he broke out in icy sweat when he walked in on a disembodied leg rotating near the ceiling, – old tricks known in the Academy, but doubly demoralizing when he saw them like any village beggar-boy would, now.
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