Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4

by Tanith Lee

  The man who had brought the lord his niece waited patiently, eyes lowered. The courtiers sipped wine from golden flasks, petted their horses, discussed fashions and gambling.

  Lak was not long over his transaction. Quite abruptly he returned through the black screen, calm and undisheveled as if he had paused to taste some fruit from a wayside bush. The sorcerous screen began to die at once behind him. There showed now something pallid flung on the ground, motionless, amid torn hair and broken flowers.

  “What did you hope from me?” asked Lak Hezoor of the patiently waiting uncle. “Not anything much, I trust, for she was very disappointing.”

  “No—oh, no. Nothing but to please you, lord.”

  “Well, I was not greatly pleased. But you meant for the best. I will not chastise you. Are you content with that?”

  “Mighty lord, I am your generosity’s slave.”

  As they galloped away, a backward glance revealed the man bending over the paleness in the grass, which did not answer him even when he gave it blows.

  “Now, my Oloru,” said the magician-prince as they rode up to the tall gates of the forest, “you seem downcast.”

  “I?” said Oloru. “I was only devising a poem to honor you.”

  “Ah,” said Lak Hezoor. “That is well. Later you shall tell it me.”

  The depths of the forest, then. Not its heart; it was so old, so labyrinthine, the forest—who could enter the heart of it, save some lost traveler in one of the sinister tales? Or else, perhaps, the forest had many hearts, each slowly and mesmerically beating, its rhythm growing a fraction slower and an iota more strong for every passing century.

  Certainly, there were portions of the forest where its atmosphere seemed especially and profoundly charged. In one of these spots there was a pool of unknown deepness where the animals of the forest, whatever they might be, would steal to drink. Although it was said that any man who drank the waters of the forest would be changed at once into just such an animal himself—a deer, a wolf, a sprite, or some monstrous creature that had no name.

  All about the pool was blackness, but through the colossal roof-beams of the trees there showed the rim of the moon. She was no longer blushing but cold now, and her snowy fire turned the mysterious water to a solid white mirror one might think to walk on.

  Thrice, Lak Hezoor’s men had started deer. Pale as ghosts they sprang away, and the hunt madly pursued them. Torchlight crackled through the boughs. Shouting and whooping tore the curtains of leafy air. Sometimes the noise and tumbling speed and spilling lights disturbed curious birds—or winged things of some sort—which rose away into the higher tiers of the branches. On occasion disembodied eyes were lit, and as quickly extinguished. As for the quarry, twice it vanished without trace. But when the third deer broke from cover, Lak Hezoor cast a shining ray about it like a net. Try as it would then, bolt and swerve and seem to fly, the deer could not break free of his magic. Loudly it panted, and groaned like a woman in childbirth, so the hair of the magician’s courtiers bristled on their necks. But at length the deer stumbled and the torrent of the hounds swept over it.

  Though a female, it was a huge beast, this deer. So the hunting party was satisfied, for the moment, and made their way into the clearing, to the pool like solid mirror, and dared each other to taste of the water, but none of them did. Instead they lolled on the rugs and bolsters the servants of Lak Hezoor put down for them, and drank wine in glass goblets that the fires turned to golden tears.

  Lak Hezoor himself oversaw the gutting of the deer, and now and then himself threw portions of its entrails to his favorites among the shivering dogs. Nearby, Oloru leaned on a tree, his face averted, and his gloved hand lightly over his nose and mouth.

  “Come, be my hound, beloved, and I will throw you a piece of its liver,” said Lak Hezoor.

  Oloru shuddered, looked at his lord under long lashes, and away.

  When Lak Hezoor lost interest in the bloody work, he went to sit among the cushions and fires. He beckoned Oloru to follow him.

  “Now sing for me the song you were making in my honor,” said Lak Hezoor.

  “It is not finished,” said Oloru, in an offhand way.

  Lak Hezoor turned one of the rings on his left hand. It dazzled a searing ray—it was this very ring which had cast the net about the deer and so weakened and killed it. The ring had done as much for men.

  “I give Oloru,” said Lak Hezoor, “three of his own heartbeats to complete the song. And since his heart now beats very fast, I think the time is already up.”

  Oloru lowered his eyes that were like smoky amber. He sang, sweetly, swiftly, and with utmost clarity:

  “Our lord found a girl in a field.

  Not with cash but with malice he bought her.

  He took her behind a black shield,

  But one fact he has surely revealed:

  He makes love as another makes water.”

  For a troupe so loud, the assemblage now proved itself capable of a vast silence. With their eyes and mouths open, men stared at Oloru, goblets halfway to their lips and frozen. By the pavilion of sable satin, the servitors of the magician-prince, which some said were themselves not quite human, stood blank-visaged as ever, yet every hand now rested on the hilt of a long knife.

  Having recited, Oloru looked into the face of his lord, smiling a little, and Lak Hezoor looked back at him with the same smile exactly. Then Lak Hezoor stood up, and Oloru also arose. Lak Hezoor snapped his fingers, and out of the air itself appeared his sword, and slid into his grasp. Lak Hezoor extended the cruel bright blade until the tip of it touched Oloru on the breast.

  “Now I shall kill you,” said Lak Hezoor. “It will be thorough but slow. Indeed, you shall fight me for your death. You will have to earn it.”

  And Lak Hezoor spoke a sorcerous word and a second blazing sword fell into the hand of Oloru, who, whiter than the moon in the pool now, dropped the weapon at once.

  “Pick it up,” said Lak Hezoor. “Pick up the sword, my child, and we will dally a while. Then I will cut you up for chops for my dogs, an inch at a time.”

  “My—lord—” whispered Oloru, standing shaking above the fallen sword, “it was a jest, and I—”

  “And you shall die for your jest. For it did not make me laugh, my Oloru, so something else is needed to entertain me.

  “Oh gracious lord—”

  “Pick up the sword, dear heart. Pick it up.”

  “I beg you—”

  “Pick it up. Why should it be said I kill my friends unarmed?”

  “Then I will leave it lying—”

  “Then I will kill you defenseless after all.”

  Oloru covered his face with his hands. Under the torches he, like the glassware, seemed made of pale precious gold, and of tears, too.

  “Forgive me, oh forgive me—” he cried.

  Lak Hezoor grinned, pulled down Oloru’s hands, and pointed to the sword lying in the grass.

  “Look at that, pick up that, and die with it.”

  Oloru looked one long last minute at the sword, and then he dropped down in the grass beside it and lay there, in a dead faint, at the feet of Lak Hezoor.

  At this, the magician did laugh. He flung one glance across his silent court. It cut them with such contempt and indifference, and under that with such implicit threat, it was as if he had sliced at each of them with the blade he held. Then the blade vanished, and with it the other in the grass; all about the hands of the prince’s minions left their knives. Lak Hezoor lifted Oloru in his arms and walked away with him and into the sable pavilion, out of their sight.

  Out of sight of any but his prince then, Oloru the jester and poet presently revived. He came to himself on the magician’s silks, his face turned on the magician’s embroidered pillows, the weight of Lak Hezoor already upon him.

  “You, my treasure, who dare insult me as no other does,” murmured Lak Hezoor, resting his face also down on the pillow, so his black eyes glared into the amber eyes of Ol
oru and their lips almost met at each word. “But I forgive you. For you know you lied.”

  “O my soul, my body’s watchman, you were absent when this citadel was invaded,” said Oloru. Lak Hezoor smiled cruelly at him, for this was very true.

  “Tell me of demons,” said Lak Hezoor, as his sinuous body stirred and curved, heavy as a python, upon and within his third prey of the night. “Tell me of Azhrarn, Night’s Master, the Bringer of Anguish.”

  Oloru spoke softly, sometimes without breath.

  “They say a king’s daughter, a sorceress, called to him by means of a token Azhrarn once gave his lover, a beautiful boy, Sivesh, or as some say, Simmu. And when the Demon came to her, this sorceress, it was in a pavilion with a ceiling of blackness and jeweled stars, where winds and clouds moved, but only by mage-craft. Azhrarn mistook the pavilion’s roof for the sky, as he was intended to, and thought he should gain fair warning of sunrise, for the sun slays demons, they say. They say—” (Here Oloru broke off. But: “Say on, my Sivesh, my Simmu,” insisted Lak Hezoor.) “Then—trapped by the witch, the sun having risen unseen beyond the pavilion’s false night, Azhrarn must deal with her and grant her all she wished: power, riches, beauty beyond all beauty—beauty—” (And here Oloru could say no more, only cling to the pillows, his spine arched, and his throat, and through his golden lashes the tears running like silver ribbons.)

  But when the python lay quiet on him and the heavy silken darkness of the tent returned from out of blood-red thunder, Oloru said, “Yet, if she was so great a sorceress, why did she not grant herself these things, why did she not make herself so beautiful? Ah, then, because the genius of her sorcery was built on rage, and rage does not make beauty. And her yearning was for love, so that only love could work miracles upon her, even his love, Azhrarn, that Prince of Demons. And besides, it is not certain any such token could summon him if truly he would not be summoned. Nor must he definitely grant wishes at the summons. Nor could such as he be made a fool of by a ceiling of jewel stars and illusory winds. Unless he had desired the novelty, desired dangers and a snare to befall him. Madness, Lak Hezoor,” said Oloru, “is no respecter of persons. We perceive even the mighty Prince Azhrarn has been its gull. But a short while since, he was mad of love, for love is simple madness. A girl with moon hair and twilight eyes. Love and death and time sweep over all events. And madness sings on top of the dunghill, to the accompanying music of an ass’s jawbones.”

  But Lak Hezoor slept. He lay deep in sleep as if drowning in a muddy river. So he did not see, nor feel, Oloru begin to ease from under him. Nor did he witness, the mighty magician-prince, what finally emerged from the couch, jumped to the floor, and paused there an instant, in the murk of the dying candles.

  Men who drank from the waters of the forest might be altered—to animal or elemental, or to monster. But Oloru had drunk only the best wine. It was not the crystal ichor of the forest, then, which worked this change in him.

  Outside, the magician’s courtiers slept. The servants slept or stood tranced, lacking his bidding. So none started when there stole out from the tent a yellow jackal with dry embers for eyes. It looked about, its mouth agape as if it laughed, then turned and trotted away among the black robes of the trees.

  2

  NIGHT ON the earth, every inch of it, for the earth was flat and up in that domed ceiling of heaven the lamp of day was out. Not a forest of earth then that was not black, not a sea that was not black and ribbed with silver by the moon; not a mountain that was not crowned by stars. But down below, held in the inverted underdome beneath the earth, it was not night, nor was it ever night, there.

  Underearth, the demon country, bloomed in the endless changeless glow that exhaled from its very air. That light, they say, radiant as the sun, subtle as the moon, lovelier than either. And in that light, stretched the landscape of a dark impassioned dream. And, seemingly made of that light, a city rose into the lambency of an indescribable and nonexistent sky.

  The city of the demons was ultimately also changeless. There it glimmered and gleamed and sparkled, putting the marvels of the world to shame. And yet, Druhim Vanashta (whose very name means, if approximately, Who Shines Without the Sun, and More Brightly), Druhim Vanashta had about it a strange shadow, which had nothing to do with the glowing shade of Underearth. It was rather the pall of a desolate and grinding and relentless—and silent—lament: the mourning of Azhrarn.

  Some time had passed on the earth. Years, perhaps. And under it, too, time had passed, the time of demonkind which was not of the same order, though time still. But it was the curse and glory of the Vazdru, that highest caste of the demons, of whom Azhrarn was one, that in time or out of it nothing might ever be forgotten. Not the greatest sweetness. Not the most tearing agony or grief. And the adage ran that the wounded hearts of demons could be salved only by human blood.

  However, he had taken no revenge, Azhrarn, exacted no penalty.

  It is seldom disputed that, of all his many and various loves, he had loved her best, Dunizel, Soul of the Moon. White-haired, blue-eyed as early evening, in whose body he had grown, like a wondrous flower, his child. It is suggested there should be no surprise in the delay or absence of retribution. She had been so gentle, so compassionate. She had taken even that means away from him, for a little while. To think of her and plan deeds of blood was not easy, maybe. No, it was his heart which bled. And his pain which clouded the city.

  Nor did he seek solace in his daughter. It had been his contention from the start, forming the child for wickedness as he had meant to do, that this offspring—though carried in Dunizel’s womb—was all his and only his, the female principle of Azhrarn, whose role and aims were cruelty and maleficence and lies. Therefore it seems he could not bear to look at her now. Could not bear also, conceivably, to look in her eyes, blue as blueness, that were the eyes of her mother.

  Thus he had brought her to his country but sent her far off from his haunts. And left her there, far off.

  There was a vast tidal lake, or a small inland sea—either or both. It lay, in a man’s reckoning, three days’ journey from the demon city, yet of course in demonic parlance three days have no meaning at all. It was as near, or as distant, as will could make it.

  In the crystal air of the Underearth, the waters of the lake, too, were like crystal. So clear they were, it was possible to see right to their floor, which looked to be a long way down. Here shapes moved, seeming weeds and sands, and winged fish flying. But though the water was transparent, the passage of the tide made vision uncertain. How there came to be a tide was itself unsure. The water obeyed, perhaps, the drag of the hidden moon of earth so many miles overhead; or else the drag of some other hidden moon beneath, in the substance of chaos which flowed beyond and about all things, earth or Upperearth, or the subterrain.

  From the crystal sea-lake rose islands. Many were slender, of a circumference only big enough a bird might try to perch there, had there been birds. Several were the size of earthly ships, and masted and sailed with heavy midnight trees that drooped down into the water, but not reflecting in it, since it was so clear. Then again, in places smooth tall pillars of rock went up, thousands of feet high, like windowless towers. In all of them, the little rocks and the great, burning colors pulsed and faded, swelled and went out and ignited again. And the sea-lake did mirror these colors, so it seemed stained here with wine, and here with a flickering dark lamplight, and there with translucent heliotrope, like the blood of the gods themselves.

  Somewhere in the midst of the water and the fantastic rocks, one island lay which was of larger horizontal scope and different appearance. It did not throb with colors; only a mist normally surrounded it, so it seemed like a phantom, not entirely present in the lake, as, indeed, maybe it was not.

  To view this island, one must pass within the mist, which had never been done. Those that dwelled there had preceded the fashioning of the mist. No one had visited the island, or come away from it, since then.

 
; She lived inside a hollow stone, the daughter of Azhrarn.

  That the stone was beautiful in its cold pure way did not much concern her, if at all. It was a cliff of quartz galleried and windowed and staired apparently by random erosions, pierced by a hundred caves. The light which never altered gamboled and slid about the cliff, and winked from each of its facets. The pearly mist stole in from the sea and threaded through the openings, so the whole edifice seemed to float. And sometimes a wind fluttered in and out, and then the cliff played weird chiming, thrumming notes, as if the structure were one huge instrument of strings and pipes.

  Two of the greater caves had become rooms. They were furnished—at the order of Azhrarn, probably, how else? Yet if it was his doing, he had not come to look at the results. Draperies hung there and carpets, and silks lay thick on the ground, and lamps rested in the air which would light themselves at a whim, not to give illumination, but to tint and highlight something or other. These rooms had windowpanes of painted glass that showed pictures which occasionally altered, telling stories, if any had observed them.

  In an annex there was a crimson bed with columns of deep-red jade, and filmy curtains.

  Here lay a doll on its back, all white in a dress of white tissue, save the black hair blacker than blackness, that curled around her and down onto the floor, and the open eyes so blue they seemed half blinded by their own color. Did she, looking through those sapphire lenses, see a world shaded by them also to blue? Who could tell? Who would ask? Certainly she would not say. For she had never spoken, no, not even when in the world with her mother. Vazdru child, yet she had had that way of the demon Eshva, the servants, the handmaidens of the Vazdru. The Eshva did not communicate save with eyes, with touch, with the rhythm of their breathing—yet having such intensity in this mode that they might be said to have spoken. Those few mortals who spent childhood in their company (Sivesh, the lover of Azhrarn, for example; Simmu, who once mastered Death) were heard after to refer to Eshva voices. . . . But it was a figure of speech, it seems. For the daughter of Azhrarn, she too had known Eshva. They had attended her birth. They had given her demon blood to drink, and steeped her in an enchanted smoke. Brought here to the island and the hollow cliff, a band of Eshva had come with her, to serve and tend her. But these Eshva pined. Far from Azhrarn, whom they loved beyond all things, far from the burning dream of the world that was their dancing floor, they moved like shadows, and their tears fell. Their tears which said: I despair. They entered a sort of living death, these immortal beings. The singing cliff seemed full of sad songs.