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

by Tanith Lee

  But at that instant the sky lightened and there was a noise of bells and tabors. The butterflies rippled on the ferns. Youths and maidens ran between the olives and poured their libations at the altar, relating what they had done, then laughingly went away.

  Presently every butterfly in the grove fluttered upward, and came to rest about Dathanja, and some to sit upon his shoulders and his hands. Every butterfly—but one. And this one butterfly rushed to the altar and fed on the blood and tears, and turned black, and then it soared about the grove and alighted on the bough of a tree. Here it folded its wings, and trembled, for it seemed to see at last it was alone.

  For a while, this stasis. Then the one black butterfly shot into the air, and thrust itself upward through the leaves, and battered itself and mangled itself, and floated down dead to the earth. And where it fell, gold spilled and hardened and rounded and became a fruit, all in a few moments. And then the fruit burst wide and from it came the butterfly like a paper the sun had written. And when this had happened, the butterflies flew in ones or twos, or scores, upward into the trees, and left the grove behind. They vanished into the sky like a trail of sparks. But the last butterfly came to Dathanja and looked into his eyes with its own that were like jeweled pins, before it sped away.

  “I see it is a parable,” said the poor girl to Dathanja. “But I cannot read it.”

  “Azhriaz,” said Dathanja, “put off your silly disguise.”

  And sure enough the delusion dropped from her like a veil. There she stood, Night’s Daughter, and she said, “But still I cannot read the parable.”

  “I am not priest or teacher or magician any longer.”

  “All three you are,” she said, “and will ever be.”

  He sighed. He said, “Each finds his own symbols, and can therefore read them. But to another they are the language of a foreign country. So with this grove.”

  “I have said to you,” said Azhriaz, “‘Be a prince in my kingdom,’ and you have spurned the role. What next, Dathanja?”

  “I shall leave your City,” he said.

  “Will you? Do I permit it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Azhriaz said, “I have not told you so. But if I did, where would you go?”

  “Where I am able.”

  “To wander, like all madmen.”

  Azhriaz went to the altar of her shrine. She looked at the liquors there. She spoke a word, and the shrine split. Out of it sprang a bush, which lashed and spat, for every twig of it was a serpent. “Let them offer here now,” she said.

  Dathanja laughed. It had a bitter sound, before the laugh and the bitterness both faded. He got to his feet and he walked from the grove. Azhriaz stood in his path, before him, though she had been at his back.

  “Him you would have served,” she said. “Serve me. Azhrarn’s murky ichor is mingled in my blood. There is not a man or woman in these lands,” she said, “who would not give their lives for three hours’ such service as I propose to you.”

  But he looked at her at last with his blackened eyes. “No,” he said.

  “I can bewitch you,” she said. “Your magic you have renounced, and in any case, I doubt it would match my own.”

  “You can,” he said, “bewitch the world. Where then is the victory in bewitching me?”

  “It is true,” she said. “Go, wherever you will.”

  5

  IF IT WAS the room of wattle, how it had changed. Perhaps the luxury was illusion, or illusion had been the poverty before. There were fountains there that were cascades, of scent not water. There were rugs that were lawns of flowers, draperies that were midnight sky. . . . In the midst a dragon lay asleep. It was a couch, and on the cushions of it, Azhriaz lay in turn, awake, while her maidens combed through her long, long hair with combs of silver. Entirely lovely, these maidens. They were Eshva. And Eshva played music on the moonlit hills of this room, such music, like starshine rippling over glass. Nightbirds came to the opened casements of the valley which was a chamber, insomniac owls, dumbfounded nightingales. The moons of the City passed and repassed the windows like pale lost ships.

  Occasionally now Azhriaz allowed the Eshva to soothe her, like a drug. But the Eshva males who came to her now and then, and whose touches were—to mortals—a life’s desire, these she turned uncivilly away. Some of the Vazdru princes had also come to her, every one most profoundly handsome, but she had laughed at them coldly. She was prejudiced, she said, against her own race. And coldly smiling in return, they left her, the rings glaring on their fingers and the daggers in their belts. A number made mischief, but it was nothing against her powers. Their malices withered at her doors like dying bouquets. They dared not do much—she was Azhrarn’s daughter, and fulfilled his wish in the world. There was a sentence spoken in some crystalline darkness below: Surely she couples with our kind. It is with her lordly father she lies down. This unnovelty reached the hearing of Azhrarn.

  He left his palace and went slowly through his city underground. He said nothing to any of those extraordinary subjects of his, as they bowed before him, but a shadow fell, and in the faces of some he looked, and their Vazdru hearts turned to water. Finally, one of the magnificent princes of the Vazdru came out and met Azhrarn’s chariot in a thoroughfare of black ruby.

  “Lord of lords,” said the prince. “I am told you take exception to a jest of ours. But you are Wickedness. Why does wickedness perturb you?”

  Azhrarn said, “Do you question me?”

  The prince said, “By philosophical mortals, who are ants, incest is not counted a sin, Lord of lords, when willingly performed and inducing no mishap. Is it that you are ashamed, O Terrible One, to have caused so little terror lately? Is it the slightness of the sin which angers you?”

  Azhrarn leaned from his chariot and set one hand on this prince’s shoulder. The whole street turned chill as if snow had fallen. “Let mortals,” said Azhrarn, “err or philosophize as they wish. She that was born of me is not my lover. I am not the clay of humankind, and their muck does not stick to me.”

  Then the prince said softly, though he shook, “Do not be angry with one who loves you.”

  “Love?” said Azhrarn. “There is no such commodity. There is carnality, our plaything. There is worship, and there is obsession. Death you may see walking the world, and Fate, and Delusion, too, in a form I have kindly lent him. But no man sees love, and no demon sees it.” The prince who had accosted Azhrarn closed his eyes. Azhrarn took his hand from the prince’s shoulder, but the prince remained as if turned to ice, there in the ruby street.

  Later Azhrarn came to the shore of an ironine lake where the Drin forges dully thudded and infrequently chimed. Activity was sluggish. The Drin, recently disliking the sorrowful climate of Underearth, spent much time abroad on the earth above, in the employ of the foremost sorcerers, whom they tricked and wheedled and ultimately wrecked wherever possible. But some Drin came now and rubbed against the chariot wheels of Azhrarn.

  “There is a rumor,” said Azhrarn. “Who began it?”

  The Drin squeaked and squabbled. Several made up fantastic lies to gain his notice only for a perilous moment. But one crept near and touched the black-and-silver sole of Azhrarn’s boot. “An insect flits about the gardens of your city, and sometimes it makes a small sound. I can never understand the voice, but some do, and from this source all kinds of rumors start. The insect is green in color, and on its wings is the symbol which, in the Vazdru High Tongue, is the letter V.”

  Then Azhrarn went up to his palace again and into a tower like a silver needle. Standing in the eye of it, he summoned her, and she came. Vasht, who had been herself his lover once, Vasht blasted to the shape of a tiny green-winged leaf, at the transmitted memory of that other love of his—by the one who now said: No man sees love, no demon sees it.

  “I discover,” said Azhrarn, Night’s Master, one of the Lords of Darkness, “that Vasht is green-winged not only through her pain, but also with jealousy and ignorance.�
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  The butterfly shimmered in the air.

  “Do you still imagine that we may be reconciled in love, Vasht?” said Azhrarn. It was a fact, his voice had no love in it.

  The butterfly started toward him. It paused.

  “You love me,” said Azhrarn. “How much?”

  The green butterfly came to him; it brushed by his hair that shone like midnight waves, it lit upon his hand, strong and pale as a carven stone. Then it lowered itself until it reached the paving by his foot. There it folded its wings, and waited.

  “Truly, Vasht,” said Azhrarn, and his voice was softer than the nap of velvet and it lanced to the bone, “you have learned love’s lesson well. For if any do see her walk the world, love is a hag, worse than plague or famine, or even Death with his ghostly show. Love in her robe of rags with her heart torn out and sewn on her breast, love with her eyes wept out and only the blind sockets staring. Love is a bitch, but she suffers, and so she knows best how to make all things suffer that she kisses with her sickness. Vasht, I thank you for this love of yours I do not want, and I give you love’s reward.” And he put his boot heel down on the butterfly and crushed it.

  Now nothing could die in the Underearth, it was said. And demons were numbered among the immortals. Yet only this remained of Vasht, after Azhrarn had left that place: an impression, as if of the thinnest jade, seared into the paving—of a butterfly’s two wings, like the two pieces of a broken heart.

  But in Druhim Vanashta they said, “As he did with her, so he does with his kingdom.” And some of the Vazdru, a great many of them, put on yellow clothing—which color to them was the shade of mourning, being like sunlight—and they stood beneath his walls, and lamented in the seventh tongue of the demons, out of which their chants and melodies of sorcery were made.

  But Azhrarn paid no apparent heed. And they did not then dare approach him nearer, remembering the reward of Vasht.

  They spoke together. They mockingly said, “Where is Azhrarn? Who has seen him?” And some of them took the shape of black lions, but with yellow eyes, which eye color, again, was a sign of unease or sorrow or extreme outrage among their caste. They prowled the black lawns of Azhrarn’s palace, going in over the walls, and snapped the bronze fish out of the trees, maiming them, so they flopped horribly in the grass until the fantastic air and emanations of that area healed them.

  At the center of Azhrarn’s garden a fountain played; it was composed not of water but of fire, scarlet fire that gave neither light nor heat. But the lion-Vazdru dug deep in the strata of the lawn, and they cast the turf and soils in upon the fountain, tirelessly, for more than a mortal month. Until at last the flame was choked and lay under a black compost, which yet smoldered still in parts like a cold red coal.

  But even to this, Azhrarn seemed to pay no heed.

  The lion-Vazdru leapt back across the walls and resumed their male and female forms. Then they rent their yellow clothes and cried in anarchic voices, “Azhrarn, where is Azhrarn, the Beautiful, the Bringer of Anguish, Night’s Master?” And they answered themselves stonily thereafter: “Azhrarn is dead.”

  But Azhriaz lay on the dragon’s back, and the Eshva combed her hair and sang in wordless voices. And she heeded them nearly as little as Azhrarn heeded the Vazdru, miles under her feet.

  Years ago, in the first decade of her reign over men, Prince Wickedness had sometimes paid a visit to his daughter.

  In those nights, she had lived in the marble apartments of the former palace of Nennafir, merely with Qurob’s luxuriousness. Two of Qurob’s sons had, in that time, attempted to make war on her, but she had destroyed their armies as a hurricane breaks a branch. And one of Qurob’s female progeny, who had laid a plot to murder the new Goddess, Azhriaz had fastened to a wheel of silver that was sorcerously flung about the sky over the city all day, and hung above the tallest palace tower after sunset. The screams of this wretched woman became familiar to the ears as the cries of particular indigenous birds, for, by magic, she was not permitted death. Eventually the victim went mad. Then Azhriaz had her taken down and sent away into some handy wilderness, with the reported words: “Go seek your prince.” Various had been the cruelties of the Goddess in the early years of her reign. At Azhrarn’s instruction she performed many deeds in order to educate the earth in the viciousness of the gods, and, more important, their indifference to all human suffering.

  Mostly, the visits of the lordly father to the dutiful child comprised such instructions. Azhriaz had placed for him a silver chair intricately molded, with a canopy of silk, and with inlaid steps leading up to it. She kneeled before him, arms crossed on her breast and head bowed. It was a parody, and soon bored them. Now she was polite and now he had got his way, they had nothing at all to say to each other. And to be sure, they were like many a mortal father and daughter in that.

  Probably, at the beginning, he tested her, to see if she was faithful to his edict. Once the tests were accomplished, he let her alone. Next, some of the Vazdru were sent to her and taught her demonic magic—or they refined her skills and lessoned her in the proper rituals and occult language that should ornament such art. (As callers, the Vazdru were proud. And she, the hostess, prouder.) But the mellifluous Eshva came at her whim, to please her. And the Drin came, to fawn and bring gifts, or to fashion, out of the tributes of the Empire she had begun to establish, diadems and collars, clockworks, mechanisms. They built that pillared room of gems (of course), and the gold room, and those of silver and pearl. And the Drindra she fetched up, too, the dregs of the Drin, and spoke to them in their gabble, and found access through them to the bizarre supernatural tips where such weeds and flowerlets burgeoned as the four things she summoned to tell her of her worth in the world—the man of brass and the man of alligator legs, the woman-headed horse, the snake-eyed child. Meanwhile, her human legions milled more and more lands for her bread.

  So in the end she dwelled alone, surrounded by everything a third of the world could bring her, and played at appalling sorceries, while, in her sprawling Goddessdom, men did incredible mindless evils, each in her name.

  For herself, she had done directly very little evil. And what she had done, mostly, at Azhrarn’s incentive, was her duty. For the rest, accepting her as a goddess of wickedness and carelessness, men let loose all the rubbish in themselves for her sake. They supposed she came to them in dreams and visions and requested of them slaughter, rapine, and sacrifice of animal and man, suicide, and other items less succulent still. But this she did not do; they managed it all themselves most adequately. And the delirium which fell on them like a ravening panther at the invocation of her being—that was their creature, too.

  But Azhrarn, who had made her to chastise the earth, he might have been said to be satisfied. Yet it appeared he was not so very much concerned, having set the toy in motion. Once before he had inadvertently unleashed havoc, and gone elsewhere, to some other interest, and not seen the mess till almost the last hour of mankind. Now there was no other interest, but regardless, the mighty endeavor palled. He, who had invented this play, in which millions were overwhelmed, continents tottered, men perished as autumn leaves in a forest—he had turned his head away.

  And for Azhriaz, the fount of the pandemonium, she lingered on her couch-dragon, and let her City go about its riots under the high windows. And lingering in the flesh on the couch, otherwise she passed through a mirror she had been staring into, and stood before Dathanja on a hill at her kingdom’s edge.

  Brown and barren the hill, even the sky was brown, and a tannic rain fell, with sometimes a brown frog or two in it.

  But Azhriaz came clad in lights, with stars in her hair.

  Dathanja, who sat on the hill in the rain, glanced up at her.

  “Is your journey charming?” she asked him.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “And do you think of me?” she said.

  “It now and then chances that I think of you, for you manifest now and then, do you not, to remind m
e?”

  “What have you seen since last you looked on me?”

  He said, “Misery and want, and fear, and death. I saw a beggar begging help from a muddy stream. He told me it was as much use to do that as to beg help of heaven. And I met a girl who lay down and said that I should rape or murder her at once, as I wished, for she could expect nothing else of me. And I met a priest who danced in delirium for the Goddess under an altar piled with the dead pilgrims he had given her. But he found he could not seize me, since I am yet invulnerable, so he ran away in a poor temper.”

  “By day,” said Azhriaz, “you set your face to the sunrise. You travel always eastward. Now what lies in the east, O Zhirek?”

  “I am not Zhirek,” said Dathanja, and his black eyes burned cold, before the fire and the coldness faded.

  “Simmurad lies east,” said Azhriaz, “under the ocean.”

  But the rain and the frogs smote down, and Dathanja bowed his dark head, rather in the way she had bowed her darker head before her lordly father. So she returned to herself through the mirror.

  From the room of landscape and scent, once wood and wattle, the Eshva women had all gone, leaving behind a glorious wafting inexplicableness. Someone tootled on a pipe, out in the air below the window, where the moons were sinking.

  “Kingly Kheshmet,” said Azhriaz, “it is a long while since I saw you. Why are you here?”

  “To offer a warning,” said Kheshmet, integrating in the midst of the room, and putting away the pastel pipe. He was arrayed solely as a king, and blared so bright that the room filmed over and reverted to wood and wattle.

  “You have warned me previously. Is it sensible Fate can give warnings?”

  “You see he does so,” said Fate. “Besides, you are sorceress enough to divine your likely destiny, without any clue from me. My apparition is superfluous here, though here, as everywhere, I pay my respects from time to time. Therefore I appear to you as a king and present the warning modestly, as a keepsake.”