Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (19 page)

Presently the ghoul said, “And are you not afraid? Do you not
understand your destiny, here?”

Sovaz smiled. The ghoul checked. He was unused to such attitudes.
“You may,” said Sovaz, “tell me what you think it to be.”

“So lovely,” said the ghoul. “I believe I will delay and keep you
one night and day alive. But when another sunset comes, some means will be
devised for your slow death, at which I, and my brothers and sisters, will
preside. Then we will dine upon you, as is our way. But I shall keep this hair,”
said the ghoul fondly, playing with a long coil of it, “to edge some fine robe
I possess. And your beautiful eyes shall be set in crystal. I shall wear them
as rings, and remember you often, and lovingly. Indeed, I may compose a song
upon your merits and render your name immortal. What is your name?”

All about, the others of the fellowship, who had been looking on
jealously, now tittered and whispered. It was not often they asked a dish upon
the table how it was named. An honor for that dish. But the honored one seemed
not to realize her bliss.

“My name is nothing to you,” said Sovaz, “and your song nothing to
me. Nor your night and day of delaying, nor your diet. I am only taking my
leisure here, considering what I shall do with you.”

Then,
there was distinguishable another tone, another voice, in
hers. You are all my daughter, Azhrarn had said. This moment you might hear how
true it was.

Yet the City of Portionings had forgotten Underearth, or thought
itself
to
be demonkind (mankind had occasionally confused the two races). The ghoul
prince only widened his eyes and chuckled, captivated by insolence.

“Does the first sorcery still apply?” inquired Sovaz, in
that
voice still. “Nothing may injure your tribe—fire, blade, stone, bone?”

“Oh, yes, sweetheart. We are impervious to all such.”

“While to the sun you are somewhat inured by reason of your mixed
blood.”

“We tolerate but do not care for the sun, which is an ugly mistake
of the gods.”

“And for your shadows?” said Sovaz, and her voice was nearly
flirtatious.

“Behold,” said the ghoul, and he raised his arm so its black
reflection fell across the torches to a painted screen. “They are now as the
shadows of men, and have no substance. Go scrape at that one with a knife if
you wish, and see.”

“How then,” said Sovaz, “may I kill you? Where is the vulnerable
spot?”

“Ah,” said the ghoul, “do not trouble your pretty head with that.
Ponder rather how I shall deal with you.”

And he took her hand and kissed it and mouthed it, and softly
tongued her flesh. Sovaz did nothing to prevent him. So confident, Shudm city,
not one of them grasped meekness was never so meek.

“Dear Father,” said the ghoul prince, “for this diversion brought
me by you, I will feed you myself, from my own board.”

Jadrid groveled. Yet the little graveworms and beetles, which
still kept house in some of the floor coverings, may have seen his eyes as he
writhed there, upsetting their domestic arrangements. And the eyes of Jadrid
had a peculiar expression.

Sovaz said to the ghoul, “So you instruct humanity that it too
eats human flesh, here?”

“We are never stingy. We feed our flocks and herds as well as we
feed ourselves. And they get a taste for it. The old fellow there, he will be
dreaming of what I shall give him of yours. But I shall keep you all for
myself, and for a certain sister I am affectionate with.”

Then he led her away through the chimneylike hall, while his kin
made signs of humor and envy. They passed then through a door into an
underground tunnel—the city had always been riddled with them, and by means of
them, even in the days of human rule, the ghouls had come and gone about their
business quite discreetly.

It was a black journey they now undertook, but the ghoul prince
saw well in the dark, and, as he could have noted, so did his victim. Behind
them stole only one of the monkey beasts, to guard the prisoner, or to denote
the rank of the prince by its presence. Presently a stair, or a series of
humped shelves, went up. Kicking aside ancient bones, the prince ascended, and
Sovaz followed before the creature at her back should urge her to it. They came
out into the basement of a palace by the river.

It was like no palace mentioned in the father’s tale. Little had
been; the city was much altered. A riot, or some other mayhem, seemed to have
passed through the building. It was gloomy and unclean, littered with breakages
and also with those tasteless tomb goods the ghoul race loved. Shards of red
glass clung in the windows. Phosphorus sputtered in the lamps. No sooner had
they, by dint of climbing decaying staircases, reached the upper rooms, than by
the shine of such illuminations Sovaz might see bony, hungry faces pressed at
the openwork windows, and hear the scrabbling of long-clawed hands and feet
venturing up the walls.

“Fear nothing from them,” said the ghoul prince. “They are part
children of ours by humans, weaklings, having only a fraction of the true blood
between them. They grow to our desires and appetites, but not to our strengths
and beauties. We permit them to watch us, sometimes. It amuses us.”

But he conveyed Sovaz into a windowless cubby, the door of which
he closed—the monkeylike attendant left outside—and so to a couch of rotting
finery, overhung with curtains of golden stuff.

“Disrobe for me,” he said. “Let me see all the feast I shall
have.”

Then Sovaz smiled once more, and something in that smile caused
the prince to hesitate, though beyond the door, they at the sharded windows
scrabbled and snuffled eagerly.

“As my lord desires,” said Sovaz.

And she untied her sash and unfastened her bodice, and as she did
so, the whole garment fell away, and there emerged out of it something that was
no longer so entrancing to this prince.

“Delusions,” said he haughtily, though he stepped back a pace.
“You cannot dissuade me with that.”

It was a kind of creature, not wholly identifiable, shapeless and
sinuate, most like a serpent, but standing upright, and with glowing eyes. And
the serpent said to the prince of the ghouls: “Pardon me, beloved. How have I
offended you? Come, embrace me. We shall have much love, and then I shall die
for you and you shall consume my succulent, tender flesh.”

“Your trick disgusts me,” said the ghoul, yet haughty, and yet
standing back a pace for every pace the monstrous serpent flowed toward him.
“Put on your rightful shape.”

“So I have,” said the monster, “to enhance your delight.”

Then the ghoul prince drew a curved blade from its sheath at his
thigh. It was not the weapon he had intended to loose on her, though they lived
as neighbors.

“It seems I must slay you at once.”

“Do so,” the monster answered. “If you can.”

At this, the ghoul swung his blade upward and down upon the
apparition. And the blade, taken long since from the burial mound of an ancient
ruler, split in three pieces.

“Delusions,” repeated the monster softly, and it began to wind
itself lovingly about the ghoul prince, even as he struggled out a thin dagger
and stabbed at its eyes, but the dagger melted and ran on the floor all molten.
“I have known one who is the master of such, and he taught me many lessons.
Delusion and delirium—O Prince-Portioner, which portion shall be yours?”

And by now the monster, whatever it might be—illusion, delusion,
figment of delirium—had completely entwined the prince of the ghouls, so he
could not move hand or foot, nor any limb. And it squeezed and strangled him so
he had not even the breath to cry aloud for aid. He could only glare into its
unnatural eyes and gasp, “Discommode me as you will, you may not kill me.”

“How you wound me,” said the hallucination (and now it had, most
ironically, a voice like the voice of a handsome youth named Oloru). “You
smash my heart in fragments, to speak in this way of my amorous clasp.”

And with that it wrung the last whisper of air from the ghoul and
let him fall senseless—not dead, as a mortal man must have died in that grip,
only, as he had mentioned, “discommoded.” Though rather more than somewhat.

Sovaz stood over him. If she had changed her shape, or merely
caused him to see and experience such a shape in lieu of her own, certainly it
was a strong sorcery, and the first of its sort she had practiced on or through
her own flesh. Now she flinched at an awareness of victory, how it must be, and
how it would alter her, too, more surely than the form of the reptile.

To the ghoul prince she said, and though senseless, he heard her,
“Alas for you and yours that I was brought here. I will cast down your city and
all your people, and with them those you have corrupted to your ways. No
vulnerable spot? One. The very thing you vaunt, there is your undoing. That
which you are shall destroy you.”

Demon pride, to the pride of the boastful ghouls a mountain to a
pebble. Capture, rape, slay, devour her? She, the child of utter bright and
utter dark? And she had other griefs and rages. This, the last drop of water
which overspills the cistern.

She walked from the antique rotting cubby of lust, and meeting the
monkey thing that had been standing guard there, she raised one finger and it
was crushed into a pile of cinders. As she crossed the floors beyond, the scrabbling
dribbling watchers at the windows gaped and squeaked. Being stupid witless
beings, some tried even to come down and get in her way. Then Sovaz clapped her
hands. Lightning bolts sprang from her palms and whipped these lesser ghouls
away and left them in black heaps. The last of the monkey slaves she met leaped
in terror for roof tops and sewers to escape her.

Leaving the palace, she continued to walk aboveground. She was a
strange sight in Shudm, not fitting. Again and again her way was barred, she
was menaced, so as she walked, the route became littered with dead scorched
things.

She retraced her steps through the black streets, under the
platforms and the pillars of lies. Overhead, the sky of night was dull, save
now and then catching some red sheen. The noises of the city were as before,
though louder, for the revelry was reaching its height. The various sights she
saw, high in windows, deep in doorways, under arches, behind grills—these
sights shall not be written down.

But as she drew near the gates by which old Jadrid had brought her
in, there came the rattle and roar of wheels behind her.

Sovaz went on, she came to the place before the gates, and into
the tall gateway itself, and there she waited.

Soon some chariots dashed in view. Horses pulled them, the
phantoms it was said the ghouls could make by flinging horseskin over bones and
animating the assemblage. In the chariots were whirlings of sparks, which
quickly resolved to the figures of the ghoul princes and princesses. Drawing
rein, they stood and leered at Sovaz and pointed with their taloned fingers.
While at their backs the multitude of their half-and quarter-breeds came
snuffling. The ghoul princes cried from their chariots: “We thank you for the
novelty of this chase. But now we shall take and rend you.”

Sovaz said, “Approach then, take and rend.”

At which the ghouls became mirthful and said, “We only savor the
moment. Good wine should not be gulped.”

But Sovaz said, “I am glad you are here to bid me farewell.”

And she turned and struck the gate one blow with her slim fist—but
at the blow a flame bloomed upward and the gate crumpled like a paper.

As this happened, some of the ghouls flung spears at Sovaz, but
the spears spun in midflight, and plunged back toward the chariots. The phantom
horses reared. One prince fell with his own spearhead between his ribs. As he
did so he screamed “Tomorrow I will live again—then let her beware of me!”

“Oh, tomorrow,” said Sovaz.

But the gate now entirely disintegrated, and she went out of it.

The ghouls chased her a considerable length over the barren plain
by night. But though she walked on her naked feet and they rode like the
whirlwind in their chariots, they could not make up the gap, and besides,
flames and thorns and storms of stones burst up in their path, and they swerved
madly and in all directions, or else were overthrown.

So she left them, and so she might have left them. But so she did
not leave them.

Sovaz
stood on the plain beyond Shudm, as the sun rose.

She raised her white arms, as if she persuaded the sun upward from
its sleep in chaos deep below the flat hollow earth.

All the hours of morning she communed with the sun, or seemed to.
Her mother had held this gleam in her very veins; her father had once outstared
it, as it blasted him to ash. There was such ambivalence in the relation of
Sovaz to the sun, but still, she communed with it, or seemed to, until midday.
It may have been a part of the magic she made, or only a chastisement of
herself, a purgation before the spell was fashioned.

Though it lay miles off, no doubt by one such as Sovaz a glimpse
of the city might be obtained. Or else she only visualized the city.