by Tanith Lee
“Recount to me then,” said Tavir, “your learning. It is mine by right.”
“Not so,” said the body in the coral. “By your decision to seek rebirth, you have forfeited anything of mine.”
“But had I not lived in you, you would have learned nothing!”
“And now you have vacated me, you must learn all again, by dint of labor and groans,” replied the body, with the utmost complacence.
Tavir struck his fist in rage upon the block. The motion was slowed by water, yet its intent was bruising, and so bruised. The coral complained.
“I have learned this,” said Tavir, “to respect the life of others. I believe you to have been indifferent to all lives but your own.”
“You,” said the coral in an injured tone, “have merely acquired sickly sentiment, a fault it had previously taken you many years to be rid of.”
“You do not know me; do not presume.”
“And you do not recollect; presume neither.”
“By my spells, I can return within you,” said Tavir, “and experience again what I was, and collect up any superfluous knowledge you may, debatably, retain.”
At his threat, the body in the coral turned uncommunicative. Tavir, with a grimace, between fascinated interest and deep chagrin, drew aside a way, and began to prepare himself for such sorcery as would be needed.
Azhriaz was not far off, and had listened to all that went on. Now she could have wished to transform herself to her proper feminine shape, but she believed this must entail an airless passage in the sea, its laws being as they were and inimical to her. So she did not venture change, but went to Tavir as she was, a tiny little mote in a teardrop of fragrant atmosphere.
“Tavir,” she said, sending her words into his brain, for his ears would be deaf to her, “do not re-enter the coral. Only consider how you have dreamed of the imprisonment, and how that dream has lured you to the spot. Now the thing taunts you, and you are driven to become its prisoner again—that which was your prior body has the stronger claim; there you lived the mostest time, and, too, it is immortal and endures, and even speaks of itself as a proud man does—”
But Tavir did not heed, and perhaps he did not hear, for now he made a magic that shone about him much brighter than the luminants in the roof. And even as Azhriaz warned him, there came a swirling, and a flush as if a huge lamp took light. And then it fluttered out, and only the marine half-light lingered.
Azhriaz, who had known and wielded such power on the land that men cowered in terror at the mention of it, now looked down and knew herself powerless. Tavir lay on the smeared mosaics and silver of the floor. The water fingered his hair; his eyes were shut. The soul had gone, back through the coral into the former body, which it knew better, and which had signaled and called and finally pulled it in by a long fine leash.
“I have been then a servant,” said Azhriaz. “My purpose was to bring you here, to this, as your charioteer would have brought you, or your riding ass. And for payment I have had three kisses. My thanks, Tavir.”
“My name,” said the voice from the coral, “is not Tavir. That is Tavir, there on the ground. As for kisses, he kissed you well. I have his new memories to add to the old. But that life is only a mirage. It has been joyful enough to be a youth, and spry and agile in the horizontal art, but age and immobility have their compensations. The adventurous existence will inevitably pall, for the man who thinks.”
“Traitor,” said Azhriaz. “I will not attempt your rescue. Lie on the floor, greenlocks, and rot, and lie and think in your coral, and rot also. You are one more fool.” And when she had said this, Azhriaz saw the corals and the water and the whole dim hall begin to flush again with light. A most poignant excitement went through her, for she imagined Tavir was fighting his way back to her, and she eagerly braced herself to help him. But then she saw, with a heart-sinking not only due to sorrow, that this light was not the same as the first. It came thick and fast, as if wine or blood was poured. It had a reddish glare. The moon or the sun, rising under the sea—
She knew what it was. She felt a strange dark fear, and also a wretched wish to yield herself—and with that an urge to do battle. And again the despair of Simmurad, and of all her confused and blazing years, mired her round, and she hesitated, questioned herself, whether she might be lost.
But it was not in her, after all, to do nothing. And so she spun about, and away from the ghostly ghostless citadel, toward the only chance to hand, the demon ship.
Chuz had failed her, and Azhrarn had dismissed her. Of mortals, Dathanja had barely spared her a glance, though her beauty rocked the world, and for Tavir—Tavir was dead.
How loud the deathly avenues were glowing now, as if they burned there in the sea. Azhriaz fled into her vessel, and next the vessel fled. For behind the reddening of the water, on her scent, came again Yabael the Bloody and the Second-Scorched, that hound of the gods, the hunter.
12
BUT IT WAS Ebriel who walked the mountaintops of the eastern corner.
There were higher crags beyond Simmurad; the sea had not covered them. They overlooked the basin of the ocean, and reflected in it, that was all. When the long dawns warmed them, they beamed, but there was something disquieting in them always. Their peaks masked, and maybe led to, the world’s very edge. They were a part of the last fence that ringed the earth. Who could tell what it would mean to travel over them and to the end of them—who could risk the venture?
Even the angel restricted his pacing, he kept to the inner places, though World’s Brink, and chaos itself, could surely be nothing to him.
The sunset came and went quick as a careless kiss. Night and a few spare stars tricked out the sky.
The Malukhim gleamed on in the dark. He seemed to be looking down into the ocean, as a man looks for the rising of fish.
“You are not waiting there for me,” said Dathanja, as he came up the midnight mountain slope, “but it is I who arrive.”
The angel turned, and now looked at Dathanja. Even in blackness, the eyes of Ebriel shone, for the light remained within him constantly.
Dathanja came on. He approached the angel, nearer and more near, until he was within three feet of him.
There were many powers left to Dathanja. He used them. He said:
“Ebriel, do you stand in my way? There has been a conflict. Let us not re-enact it, inadequately. I am no demon. And you are not the mightiest of the Sun-Created; you are not Melqar, who came from the fire last.”
Then Ebriel, with a whisper of his wings, moved aside. It was a gesture of economy and beauty. Dathanja went by him, and reached the crown of the slope, where the mountain opened to loom above the lake of sea.
He was still a mage when he wished it. He cast his mind into the deeps, like a line. His thoughts, nothing else, walked under the ocean, and through that sunken city there. He, too, had learned economy.
There was a lurid radiance down below. He perhaps did notice it, but gave it no attention, though, all the while, it heightened. He had other business.
The awareness of Dathanja came then into a hall, where there were columns of coral (flushed now very red). And there began to be a stirring in the water.
Zhirek, it said, in several voices. See how the murderer slinks back to gloat on his legendary deed.
The thoughts, the mind of Dathanja, ignoring that too, went about and scanned every column with care. A multitude of personalities responded, chaffering and beguiling. But they lived in the limestone as snails do in their shells, and were comfortable: They had evolved their own destiny. It was not these upon whom he had worked the vengeance of King Death. And of the eternal souls which he had incarcerated, all were gone. But one.
And this one presently came and tapped him, as it were, on the shoulder, a human mind and thoughts like his own, essence and personality together. “Here I repose,” it said, insufferably. And, once the inner eye of Dathanja regarded it, it added, “You are not as you were. I observe your sense of debt.
You must set me free then.”
“I accept that I must.”
“And at once, if you please.” In some hundreds of years, in one sort or another, this being had stayed used to getting its own way.
Nothing was said, either, of the feelings of Uhlume, Lord Death, in whose name the work had been accomplished. There would seem to be some assumption a few centuries had healed his wounds.
Up on the mountain, Dathanja murmured.
Below, from the russet dimness his awareness glimmered out.
“Wait, you dog!” snapped the personage in the coral. As the trap split, it was disgorged, and flailed with blathering outcry into the ocean. “Oh base jackal! I cannot swim—” But next a recollection, for what had he been, this one, in the interim, but a gilled sea prince of Tirzom. So, out of the depths of Simmurad the final captive floundered, breathing water and not breathing it, drowning and not drowned. Vestiges of immortality still on him, just, yet no longer an immortal, soul cut loose, returned, staying separate: a testy, cunning, age-old refugee. “How red the sea is. Was the sea here always red? Not so. Something is afoot. Some angry reddened rushing thing. What does Tavir make of it?” (Thumping and leafing through that relinquished body’s memory, as if through a muddled library. Followed by an outraged shriek and more energetic labors to surface.) “The angel—the brazen destroyer—oh, you dog-jackal of a Zhirek, to desert me here—what release is this you give me—”
Dathanja, calm as the night, the Malukhim, day in night, they beheld something plump up through the skin of the sea, far below. It bobbed and sank, it scudded and blundered and shook its fists. Then, remembering, it howled a phrase of the ancient thaumaturgy that had once earned it a niche in Simmu’s city—and was vaulted high into the air on a carpet with chicken wings.
In a trice, sage and carpet pelted down between the sorcerer and the angel, squawking.
The dialogue was lost. For at this instant, the sea began to cook.
Thunder bellowed from the horizon. The air bristled. A sun of darkest fire arose. Like blood boiling through a vein, the apparition of Yabael came tearing through the water, beneath it, invisible, save as a running gash of ravening scarlet with something man-shaped, vulture-shaped, the gouging beak of it. The mountains shook to their roots, and everywhere avalanches teemed down to splash into the seething ocean. Steam gouted, the waves leapt toward the sky in fear. The world seemed on the verge of ending—
Then it had passed. Like a terrible fever, it drove away, under the very land itself, the crags, all that redness, the bloodstained flare and noise and shuddering. The sea dropped back on itself, turning black. The boomings and moanings died. A quiet fell.
Ebriel had folded up his silent whiteness. Dathanja looked away where the thing had gone, toward the farthest east. The rescued sage was dumb.
As for the chicken-winged carpet, in affright it had laid an egg upon the ground, and leaving it motherless, vanished.
The final sea. It ran under the basements of the mountains. It was the only road. She fled by it, the lost Goddess in her demon ship.
And she knew, flying east and ever east, that there was a limit to her flight. If she had not known, the genies had started up to explain. They foamed about her now, those smoky creatures, as if something were burning. They clasped their slender hands, and their childlike faces were full of woe. They had no nervousness for themselves. It was for her they misgave, presumably, because they were her slaves, and that only proper.
“O Mistress. The earth’s edge. The sea flows out beyond the mountains to nothingness and otherness, into the limbo that surrounds the world.”
“Exactly,” said Azhriaz. “And there is nowhere else to go. Since Simmurad, the channel is too narrow—to fly north or south is to crash against the submarine mountains that abound here. To turn back is to meet red death headlong. May we fly up in the air? The spells of this vessel preclude it. Shall I try alone? Oh, how swiftly then would the destroyer catch me, closer to heaven wherefrom it took its life. But this way, eastward, as you say, is the unknown horror, the opposition to all earthly-living things—therefore also to that which pursues. Even the Malukhim will be discouraged, and draw back.”
But the hunter did not do this. It came on behind like a long roller of blood.
Azhriaz herself withdrew from the eye-windows of her ship. It moved so speedily, like lightning, she could tell very little from the view. She prowled the exquisite belly of the fish-whale. She ordered music, and a feast—the melodies were weird and unharmonious, the food was slops and the wine smoldered. She tried to envisage the boundary of the world. To believe in it. She was not afraid. She was terrified. She had no fear at all. “Chuz,” she said, “1 am your subject, too.” And she threw the melting writhing apples of the feast against the walls where the draperies whined and tore. And she bit her beautiful nails, like a frightened mortal girl.
The ship sped on, through the last channels of earth’s eastern ocean, under the mountains. There was no light down there. Even the water was not quite fluid. The ship began to rustle and to creak in all its joints. The magical lamps expired one by one. The music had the sound of distant screaming.
“O Mistress,” said the genies.
“Be still. If I am to bolt into chaos, then so must that thing which hunts me. Come, sun-hawk!” called Azhriaz into the flickering far-screaming motion, into the deaf un-sea behind, the sightless question before. “Follow, enemy. Follow, and chaos shall swallow you, too.”
Suddenly the genies disappeared. Not a wisp of them remained. And then a ghastly rattling din resounded through the ship. The ultimate lamps died like flowers which break apart.
Blackness came and sat in the ship and in the eyes of Azhriaz, and blackness smiled and said to her: Now look about you.
But Azhriaz covered her eyes with her hands.
Then every noise stopped. The ship grew soundless. It grew motionless. It hung suspended.
Azhriaz kneeled down. She held her breath.
She could never die. Yet death was so close. No relative of hers, no handsome uncle who might bargain. True death, the facts of it. And she was alone.
Then there was a bang that seemed to crack the world itself. And the ship soared upward—so fast that everything was left behind, the metal bodywork, the magical rivets, flesh and bones—and faster and faster, until even thought and breathing lay crushed beneath—and she heard, the black-haired girl alone in blackness, miles off and eons under her, her own voice crying out, like the voice of the infant that still she was and yet had never been: “Mother—O my mother help me! Mother! Mother! O my mother!”
But untenable Nothingness or Somethingness had closed upon the ship. Chaos, or whatever chaos was at the hem of the earth. It gripped, and even as it gripped, it recoiled.
Mother help me—
And now the ship plunged downward, as if into a bottomless abyss. Or into one.
This is death. And I cannot die. I shall live death forever—
A hand held the ship. A hand so huge, so vast, the ship lay tiny there as a shell upon a beach. The hand, weighing the ship, its contents. It could not be a hand at all. Nor, in the black, a face, stooping, staring, somehow seen unseen. Two eyes whose centers were the spinning voids that had no name, have none, the depth from which the seeds of matter spring, the toiling of planets unborn, the sleep of worlds that are done. The tinder box of life, the eyes, empty and full and overbrimmed and open wide. And the face in profile now, its brow all time, its features shifting like pale sands along the slope of space. The mouth breathing out pale flame, a word, a wish. And the hand curving back, as the hand of a boy might curve to fling away a little stone—
But as the hand rises, the great sleeve comes with it, a curling wave with the galaxies caught in the folds—
And under the colossal curving and curling, a redness is running, directly there, like a torn seam.
The great sleeve sweeps over to meet the running red of the tearing seam, meets with it, envelops.
Fire and unfire curdling and a million stitches coming undone.
There was a moment of pure electrics, coronas, sunbursts, novas. Each one voiceless and without color. Thereafter there commenced a deep soft thunder. It stretched and mounted and passed through volume, into a sound that was no sound at all.
Soundless then, the eruption. The world arched its back, the sky leaned. For a second all matter heaved toward oblivion, or new life, which was the same. (Even heaven cratered supposedly, and flakes of sky scattered like plaster.) And then the balance swung again. Smoothly, everything came to rest, like a gentle wheel which runs down.
Shaken like a bag of salt, earth’s substance settled. Like salt, every grain in a fresh place, yet salt still, thinking itself unaltered.
And the huge hand, with nothing in it now, returning into the forms of unform from which it had conceived itself. No eyes to see, no voids of spinning things. Seeping away. Ceaseless. Ceased.
To the ends of the earth, in the remotest places, drowsy, half asleep, the rumor yawned and sleepily said, Something has gone on in the night. But nothing had happened, surely, for the world looked no different. The trees wore their necklaces of fruit, the goats gave up their milk, now and then with a kick to go with it, the young girls combed their hair and put blossoms and beads in it. The wise men, poring over their scrolls and globes of quartz, in tall towers, shook their heads, puzzled, dissatisfied.
If all are changed, who will feel change in the air?
Is mankind safe? Yes.
Is the world whole? Yes.
Is the earth still flat? It is.
PART THREE: Under the Earth
1
HAZROND, Prince of Demons, took on him, for diversion, the shape of a great black eagle. East and west he flew, beating with his vast wings, north and south, to the four edges of the world. He watched the lighted processions of men crawling by below, and crossed, with a cool glance, over the high stone pylons of cities. Once he folded his inky wings on the roof of a temple. “He has not taught you anything, then,” said the wings, the feathers, the eyes—everything but the voice of Hazrond. “Even he, Azhrarn the Beautiful, with his educational plan. But mankind cannot learn. Behold, dead lord, they are still worshiping the gods, though they know now the gods care nothing for them.”
