Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (20 page)

Over the day-smitten towers and walls of Shudm (uglier by day, all
its black filth and spiritual garbage too openly displayed), the air began to
sing and to ripple, and then grow oppressively silent and motionless. And then
the air hardened, like cooling lava. And like lava, the air darkened, until it
let in the fierce glare of the sun, but nothing else. Nothing—no lesser light,
no noise, no breath of wind or vapor, neither dust nor rain—no wisp of
anything. Even the vagrant corpse-eater birds could no longer get in, or out.
Shudm had been sealed. Like a tomb. Above, and also beneath. Even the labyrinth
of catacombs and tunnels was later found to be blocked up, by those inhabitants
who shortly attempted them.

Inside—not simply a dome but an egg of leaden crystal, there was
Shudm now, and the afternoon went by, and sunset, which was true dawn to the
ghouls, and night, and midnight. And in the first overcast minutes of the new
morning, there was not one sensible thing in the city that did not know it had
been trapped.

The atmosphere, thick with smokes and aromas, turned swiftly stale
and choking; long before sunrise they panted, and the more humanly feeble of
their number sank down.

Then they tried obvious and inventive ways, by ordinary or magical
means, of escape. And failed. And called out to whatever gods they owned. (It
is maintained that some of them worshiped Naras, Queen Death, down in the
Innerearth.) But whoever it was they called to did not answer. Then they raged
and lamented, and the roar and moan of this was heard in distant places, not
least maybe on the plain beyond, where Sovaz waited, now seated on a smooth
high rock.

It is said Sovaz kept vigil there for many months, for a year,
watching over the fate of Shudm of the ghouls. That sometimes she journeyed
nearer and looked through the tall poreless sides of the egg, and witnessed
herself what went on. Or else, climbing to a higher rock, she called the hawks
of passage and asked them, “What are they doing now, in Shudm?” And the hawks
told her what they did.

But otherwise, word has it that Sovaz left the vicinity, resuming
it would seem her search for Chuz, who was Oloru and mad. She did not therefore
watch their plight but only sometimes imagined it, or summoned up a view of it.
How, locked in with only each other, and that eternal hunger of theirs which
was their boast (and vulnerability), the ghoul race soon came to butchering and
partaking of the only available meat. Firstly their mortal pets who were slaves
and destined for it anyway, and next their mortal pets—their parents, who were
not. Their partly mortal children they preyed on after that. But at last none
were left to them save their own kind. So they fell to upon their brothers and
sisters, and in the end they came to hacking at their own bodies. Nor did any
resurrect, or if they did, it came again to the same pass, till they were wise,
and stayed dead. And finally the black birds picked at the bones of what was
left, which was not much.

So she paid them out strictly for thinking her only a girl,
whether she watched or not, Sovaz-Azhriaz, Azhrarn’s daughter.

And one night, perhaps seven months after the day of the sealing
of Shudm, Sovaz met another woman on a descending mountain road. The river
which had gone by the city still moved below, down in a chasm, but here it was
pure, and the mountains were bone-picked clean, in the starlight. The woman
had, however, hair of poppy-red, and she crouched on a stone, casting no
shadow. She might have been a ghost, or not. She held up her hand, on which
gold rings shone (and there was gold on her feet and her neck, and in her
tangled hair, but her clothes were rags that barely covered her).

“My son,” said this woman. (Liliu?) “You killed him.”

“How do you know?” inquired Sovaz. “Did Jadrid scream some
prophecy of it to you, when your son’s knife was in his vitals? And was Jadrid
then sad or merry?”

“In my heart I saw my son’s death, and the name of the murderess
is carried by the night wind.”

“What is that son to you?” said Sovaz. “You died at his birth.”

“My child,” said the woman. And she clasped her hands, and her
claws clicked together. “I gave my life that he might have life.”

“So, even your people love their children. Apples of fire. O
dearest Father, how is it you can deny me anything?” And at the acid music of
this cry, even the ghoul ghost faded and shrank into the stone and was gone.
And conceivably in any case, Sovaz too was subject to delusions, and the ghost
only one such.

Sovaz walked on along the track. That night she came upon him that
had been her lover—Oloru, Chuz, Madness—in a cave of the mountains.

5

WHY
HAD SHE sought him still? She had known how it must be. It is not always
possible to behave intelligently, or even to avoid the pain an unintelligent
act will bring. The child sees the fire bright on the hearth and feels the heat
of it, but must touch the flame and burn herself before she is certain.

In this way Sovaz came to the cave mouth and passed into the fire.

At first, there was only a lump of darkness in the dark, which
moved.

Sovaz stood motionless, but she made light blossom.

The lump of darkness huddled down out of the light, and it mumbled
a noise, but in no language.

“Speak to me,” said she. “I command it.”

And then the dark lump lumbered upright and came out at her, and
stopped a pace away and capered, tearing at itself with nails the ghouls would
not have disdained.

There was nothing anymore of Oloru, nothing but the bloodshot eyes
and filthy hair held a memory and made it obscene. Of Chuz, there
was
some evidence. Every line of face and body—of the very spine and muscles—seemed
to have altered. The back hunched, the arms dangled or lunged, the legs
buckled, the feet splayed. The mouth formed itself into a rictus, squawked,
relaxed, formed another rictus and another subhuman cry. It drooled and foamed
and bit at its own gray warty skin. It did not like itself. Or anything. This
then, her lover and protector.

Sovaz showed no hint of an emotion. She was like staring ice.

She said, contemptuously, “Greetings, Master of Delusions, Lord of
Darkness, Prince Chuz. You are all of your own left side now, it seems, the
side you kept from me, a male hag gone crazy. Come, where are the finger-snakes
and the thumb-fly that cracks its feelers? Where is the brass rattle that
sounded through Bhelsheved when my mother died, or the jawbones of an ass which
declaim?”

At this, Madness the madman brayed. The cave recoiled, and the
night. Sovaz only remarked, “A fine love gift for my father. Unbrothers, each
closer than ever either was to me. Fool. Do your penance then. I will no more
bother you.”

And having said this, attempting no argument or counterspell, she
went out of the cave.

But behind her the thing was scampering, not to follow her but to
go higher up the walls of the mountains. As it fled it shrieked and gibbered,
and laughed—at her?

“Oh,” whispered Sovaz, “oh, Chuz, be hated of me.”

They say the smoke of burning rose from her footsteps awhile, as
she walked on over the descending road.

In
the morning she came down at last to the delta of the river. The teeth of the
mountains sank in this ground, and where the rocks gave way to swamp, reeds
grew tall as the tallest men, and the most slender of them were as thick around
as a man’s strong wrist. As the winds blew, the reeds wailed, or clashed
angrily like swords.

All day Sovaz wended across this land, and all night, when a faint
flushed moon glowed through the vapors and behind the reeds. And, though she
had left him so instantly and with such words, the image of Oloru stayed at her
side. She ached with her pain, yet nothing in the swamp dared to trouble her,
not the great-winged insects nor the long-headed hunting dogs; the wildfowl
feeding out on the waters rose like flung shawls at her coming, and hastened
away.

At dawn, when the dull russet moon went out and a dim russet sun
stole up from the earth, Sovaz stood looking at her reflection in a pool, one
straight beautiful reed among the rest that were crooked and stark.

“Be vile,” Sovaz admonished the terrain of the delta. “Beauty is
no use.”

Just then a second (damson-colored) sun began to rise—out of the
pool. It was a lotus, and as it came up shimmering, it opened wide as an
offering hand. And on the palm of the lotus lay one single unlikely object: a
die of amethyst.

Twice it had been tendered previously. Out of the heart-lake of
Bhelsheved, for the unborn child, when Chuz volunteered to be her uncle. And
later, in the heart-temple of Bhelsheved, to the born child. The first time
Azhrarn refused the gift on her behalf. The second, she had left it lying. But
now she was a woman, and alone, and she reached into the lotus’s heart and took
the amethyst die. At which the lotus itself flickered and was no more.

Sovaz looked closely at the die, turning it in her fingers. It was
unmarked, as they often were, the dice Chuz bore about with him, yellow,
purple, black. And yet, there was a kind of shadow-marking on the sides. It had
fallen, this gem, into the possession of those who later fought over it and
tried to fight with Chuz over it—and in the flurry, the death of Dunizel had
been prefigured and inaugurated.

They had stoned her, that religious crowd at Bhelsheved. The
stones had done no harm. Then some hand chanced upon another thing—a tiny bit
of darkest adamant. It was a drop of Vazdru blood, the blood of Azhrarn
himself, lost some while since in the desert, found there by Chuz, kept by Chuz,
and now seemingly loosed by him. The drop of blood, the only element which
could make nothing of the safeguards Azhrarn had set on Dunizel, pierced
through all psychic shields, and killed her.

But perhaps this purple gem was another of the dice of Prince Chuz,
nothing to do with that particular event. Dice were ever about him. Had he not
been himself a topaz die, for the sake of Sovaz?

Whatever the facts, a strange token of love. For love token it
was.

When the dusk came down again, Sovaz still walked among the reeds
and swamp. The die was hidden in her clothes, her thoughts concealed behind her
eyes. Yet it was an amethystine dusk, the waters and the sky, and the vague
moon, all tinged mauvely with that undemonstrated matter.

Near midnight, the girl paused and slept a space. In her sleep,
she must have remembered a dream her mother once shared with her in the
womb—for being not created in the usual way, the spiritual essence had come
early to the flesh, and lived in the mother’s body longer than in the general
manner, and so learned things of the mother as it waited. Waking, Sovaz called
a beast to her, out of some other realm, or out of some forgotten land of the
earth, or simply from refashioned atoms of the air. It flew high over the
moon’s face, then swept down, frightening the waterfowl and setting the wild
dogs to howling. When it settled on the ground it was a winged lion of abnormal
size, pale as curds, with a bluish mane and eyes of gold, and having a silent
thinking face, as wise as a human philosopher’s; wiser. This Dunizel had
dreamed. Now Dunizel’s daughter conjured it.

Sovaz mounted the lion’s back, and sat down cross-legged between
the wide wings.

Where would she go? Her brain murmured to the lion’s mind. And its
owl-eagle wings, white-tipped, powerful as winds, bore them up into the sky,
and left the delta and all that country far below and miles behind.

Dreams. Where would she go but to Bhelsheved?

6

A
FEW YEARS had passed, not many, since that night they said pieces of the moon
crashed on the earth: the night Dunizel died, and Azhrarn declared his war on
Chuz, and confiscated the blue-eyed child. Yet in this brief time, the white
flower had withered in the desert.

Holy Bhelsheved, the gods’ jar, had had a darkening future from
that instant Azhrarn first took against the place. The city was uninhabited
when one came on it now, in the twilight dawn, as the last stars put out their
tapers, and only the queen-star blazed on in the east. Bhelsheved’s
flower-towers were empty hives. Sand piled in gusts along the marble streets,
and no sorcerous mechanism anymore brushed it away. It was the same with the
singing roads which had led there over the dunes (they sang no more), and in
the groves outside the trees had died or been chopped down, and the statues
were rubble, or filched. The very gates had been broken and stolen from for
their richness, and the sky-colored windows of the fanes broken or taken, too.
No treasure was left. Nothing had stayed sacrosanct. The heart-temple was
despoiled with the rest, even the golden altar furniture had been carted off.
Various persons had muttered that such a robbery would invite a divine curse,
but they were already under it: the curse being of Azhrarn’s making. Its ruin
was not epic, only utter. A cracked jar now, useless.

Yet, in the pale gateway, King Kheshmet sat in a vivid robe,
playing on a pipe.

Something crossed between the morning star and the earth. It was
the winged lion speeding over. It alighted a short stretch from the gateway,
and Sovaz glided from its back. King Kheshmet, however, did not raise his eyes.
The shrill of the pipe went on. And Sovaz, standing near enough her shadow
touched his robe’s orange edge, recited: