Wazirs

"Our wazir is gone too long from us, Muni." Muni gazed into the red earthen floor, knelt before the synod. "Lord Iluud's duty is here with us and we've had much need of him," the counselor woman pressed on. "What is it that so preoccupies your master?" Muni licked his lips to speak, and found he was shaking in fits before the small council. I must appear calm, he thought. Already he was too afraid to meet the counselors' eyes, his own still ruddy from the last bout of weeping. He knew the synod was in terrible want for their trusted wazir, and by rights they could not summon his master here to them, but Muni hadn't expected to be requested himself. Paupers, commoners and servants were rarely permitted beyond the highest gate of the Red Thumb's ziggurat. "Esteemed council, I have leave to speak freely to you?" The words did not come easily to Muni, and when they did come they wet his eyes. "Look upon us and tell it true." Muni raised a pretty face, abandoning control of his unbidden tears.

"In truth, I fear deeply for the wazir."

Iluud was a kind master. Loving and permissive, he made Muni feel valued beyond his station as concubine. He fed Muni from his own dishes at his own table, he often sought Muni's peculiar sense of humor when he came home cheerless, and his lusts were exalting and incessant. But now it seemed the wazir had disengaged. He had withdrawn from Muni and from his responsibilities. In small ways at first, and then entirely. The man Muni loved had passed eight days now shut in the ambry room of his apartments, barring entry to all except to receive food and drink.

It began with the looking glass. A gift to the wazir of the Red Thumb from a wazir of the Bands. An honor and a token of good faith between their people. It was a long and ornate plane of delicate metal, polished by eastern sorceries until it would emulate the image of a man who stood before it. Or so said Iluud. Muni had yet to see the thing, his master guarded it jealously. The wazir had been humored by his gift in the first days after its arrival, and Muni saw that his master would begin to change his appearance in a hundred little ways. Each day his Iluud spent a few minutes more in the mirror to dress than the last. Minutes turned to hours and Muni wondered. But he still commanded his lord's affection in the evenings then. They'd hold each other and delight in their laughter and pillow talk. Then Muni sensed a worry in his lover. The pair deserted their inhibitions around each other long in the past, and it pained Muni that his confidant would keep quiet a thing that troubled him now. Desire swelled in him, made desperate by insecurity, and Muni poured fierce new passion upon Iluud. But the wazir only pulled away. 

One night Muni was surprised to wake in the early hours alone. Curious noise emanated from the ambry. When he forsook the silk beddings to go in search, Muni heard a frightened sound from out of the darkness, and an approaching patter of footfall. Iluud half ran into the bedchamber, nude and unsettled. "The glass," the wazir's voice faltered. He buried his face in Muni's chest, composure crumbling away. "It's wrong!" he stammered through racking, gulping sobs.

Muni soothed his beloved in a tender embrace. In the looking glass, the wazir said, his reflection had been false. Half lit in the flitting red glow of candlelight, Iluud had brought a hand to his face, and the hand in the mirror was backward. A palm where the back should be. As the wazir blinked at it, the man in the metal shut his eyes tight, and pupils scurried beneath their lids like a man's deep in dreaming. "You haven't slept," Muni assured him, combing fingers through satin hair. "Your weariness plays tricks on you." But deep in his bowels Muni felt a chill that seeped through him as wine bleeds up a cloth, his mouth went dry and then he knew that his love had seen it surely.

From then on Iluud spent more time than not in his mirror, and soon abandoned the world outside of it. He wore no clothes and would not see Muni, or anyone. Muni was left to occupy his master's bed alone every night. A fetid stench of illness spread through the apartments when the wazir began to relieve himself where he stood. And Muni was powerless to help him, wounded, forgotten, and forbidden entry.

"If this is the truth of it, boy," said an old man of the synod, "then the wazir must be saved from his madness. You will go to him even against his command, with guards to protect you, and you will take him gently from the mirror or you will take it from him in force." Muni went ahead of the guard into the wazir's chambers, quiet as he could. He heard nothing. No more fervent whispers, none of the incessant tapping on the glass that he had grown accustomed to ignoring. He crept to the ambry chamber and found Iluud sleeping in his own filth, his head shaved clean, hair strewn about in stinking puddles of waste.

Muni moved to seize the looking glass, and stopped dead in his tracks to meet it. Stood on a chest of drawers, it was beautifully wrought silver, filigree framed the face of it that was polished to a perfect sheen. But he did not find his image there. He saw only the wall behind him, and stood arrested in his confusion. Then he glimpsed it. In the mirror, crouched down behind the dresser, his own wide brown eyes peered up at him. And as soon as he'd seen it, the man in the metal ducked out of sight.