Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (34 page)

The sky rang and coruscated.

Flung upward on the forming cumulus, great shadows, one coldest
black, one boiling white.

The two swords met now not to kiss or woo. They scraped, rammed,
impacted, mauled each other, clashed free, spraying fire. The clouds and vapors
of that inner alter-place were tattered by the onslaught. The two antagonists
bore no mark of having been touched, either by the other. Yet the swords
themselves would seem to be living things, containing and sustained by the
force of what wielded them. Each metal length sang and throbbed as if with
hidden blood. Phalluses of spiritual death, then, organs of ungeneration.

Suddenly (miles away, next door through the thin skin separating
the dimensions of night and fight) came the shining whistle of a silver Vazdru
pipe. No less than a signal: The re-erected ship was whole, and had been
boarded: moved. Time was vanquished—yet time conquered. For the pipe said also
that dawn, invisible, perceived in other fashion, dawn walked up the stairway
to the earth.

It would appear the Malukhim, too, read the message. On the towers
they opened wide their wings and turned their heads, Ebriel, Yabael, eastward.
And Melqar opened also his wings, and like a spear of smoking snow, he whirled
upon Azhrarn. The two swords embraced for the last, and split each other
lengthways. The dying weapons, fixed together by the blow, smashed downward,
gouging a channel through the churning dark.

Then Melqar had grasped Azhrarn by the shoulder and about the
waist. Azhrarn in his turn caught the Malukhim by his wrist and by the rim of
one foamy sinuous wing.

They were exact in stature, tall and slender, yet with a strength
no mortal could attain, be he a giant of his tribe. Their features were alike,
perhaps, in transcendence. In no other way.

There was no struggle, not a movement now. The muscular tonicity
of each denied any further act to his opponent. They were locked, breast to
breast and eye to eye, in stasis, but the foliage of their hair, the very
garments that were on their bodies, streamed back as if from the thrust of a
hurricane.

Again—far off, within the hollow of the ear—the Vazdru pipe
shrieked its urgent summons.

Azhrarn spoke quietly to the angel.

“I have gained what I wished. It is my notion now to depart. Am I
to take you with me?”

And then the angel also spoke. He had no voice, and so he thieved
the voice of Azhrarn, though the darkness of its notes was altered, pitched
from that golden throat.

“Descend with me,” said the angel Melqar, “and all your kingdom
will be blighted.”

“You are too boastful,” said Azhrarn. “Only a little ground will
char.”

“You cannot take me there,” the angel said. “I will detain you
until sunrise.”

“You cannot detain me,” said Azhrarn. “Take you there I shall.”

And then, where they had grappled, was a black whirlwind with a
white, a fiery avalanche with an avalanche of ink. These forces plunged and
enwrapped, mingled, burst into a column that spun, that writhed and ribboned
and was many-headed as a bush of cobras. Then, the tumult ended. And there they
were once more, the angel and the demon, locked together, eye flaming upon eye,
unchanged.

“Then,” said Azhrarn, “I cannot.”

He smiled. Gently, he let go the wing of the angel, and next the
wrist. He stood in the angel’s arms.

Azhrarn said, “One bright flower has unfolded in the east.”

The angel said nothing now.

Azhrarn spoke once more, but to the Vazdru. He said:
“Go.”

Not for anything would they leave him. They prevaricated there,
the other side of the dimensional partition, until the eastern edge of the sky
began to grin. And then, cursing themselves, fled. They could not bear the
fireball of the sun.

But he, he had outstared the sun. He had been incinerated into
ashes. And from the ashes, risen again.

“Here is your mother,” he said finally to the angel, but in a tone
all music. “That which formed you, warm and dear to you. For me, she has only
hate. You will see.”

The angel did not loosen his hold. He clenched Azhrarn to him, and
the swan wings beat slowly, and the eyes burned on and on, the gold upon the
black.

Then the curtain of that second dimension melted, and only the air
over the city was about them, pierced below by its towers and terraces. The
lens or the sorcery that had tinted the sky, this had been smashed. The
atmosphere swirled with motes, with clouds and steams and enchanted clockwork
debris, but through it all, and through the piercing towers, inexorable, came
day.

The horizon overbrimmed, and out of the light stabbed suddenly the
sun.

Azhrarn and the angel hung in the midst of the morning and flamed
together—and in that instant, Melqar, he the gods made, loosed his hold.

There was a flash, a spasm of blackness. Azhrarn was gone.
Swan-hawk Melqar wheeled across the dawn. Expressionless, he alighted on
another high place, the winged warrior of heaven. His eyes were so golden now,
they seemed sightless, opaque as blackest onyx.

In
those ultimate phases of strife, the angel had become a mimic, in the manner of
most newborn things. He mimicked the flirting swordplay of Azhrarn, next its
violence. When he must speak at last, he mimicked the vocal range of Azhrarn,
and facing him, was like a mirror image, a shadow’s gleaming shadow. So, as
Azhrarn loosed his hold on Melqar, Melqar, become so imitative, had slowly been
impelled also to loose hold. Azhrarn’s strategy.

But. The sun had come up. It stared upon them—upon
both.
In
that gale of light, Azhrarn had blazed—but was not extinguished. This was
impossible. It mocked the laws and the lore of demonkind and of mankind alike.
It must therefore be discounted and reported differently. Thus: Azhrarn had
tricked the angel. He fled as the Vazdru had fled a moment before the sun’s
disk came visible. Truth must be silent with her cry: Not so, not so, the sun
discovered him. And he—he flamed for a split second as golden-white as
Melqar—and at this phenomenon, deceived or amazed, or purely upon some
instinct still ripe in his beautiful and soulless shell, Melqar released the enemy.
Since the enemy, shade and shadow and night and black wickedness
—was also the
sun.

Truth is at the door, howling and stamping her foot. Truth is not
always decorous.

Then best botch up an explanation. Say this: Azhrarn had met with
the sun before, and the first meeting, which killed him outright, and from
which, being immortal, he resurrected, toughened his supernatural fibers. A
second meeting, since it was so brief, he could by a feather’s breadth endure.

Besides, go down now after him, into his kingdom of eternal night
that-is-not-night-at-all. Behold. Is Azhrarn kindred of the day?

They were able, the Vazdru, to enter their underworld at any point
of the earth above. Yet, wherever on earth they were, their arrival was always
at the same spot, directly outside the three gates of Azhrarn’s territory. It
was a matter of discretion. One may assume Azhrarn himself was not confined by
the rule—however, on this occasion, the rule had had its effect.

He is on the borders of his own lands, at the base of the first
outer gate, that of agate. He lies like some wonderful discarded toy, one arm
upflung over his head. The plates of mail are cloven from his body. There is no
wound, not even a scratch or trace of blood upon the peerless flesh. Yet,
through the pale clear sheath of it, you see the glimmer of jewelry knives, the
bones of Azhrarn, Prince of Demons.

Three of the Vazdru kneel beside him—the others have been lost,
sun-struck ash, or else have run farther to conceal their shame at leaving him.
These three remain, snarling, like great cats that smell burning, and are
afraid.

4

AND
IN THE world the sun, coming to Az-Nennafir, brought darkness.

To the east and to the west and at the center of the sky, now, the
angels took their posts. The day itself was so strange and horrible that even
thick-witted man had ascertained it boded ill. Over the huge cloud-pointing
City, thirteen kingdoms’ width and length of it and more, the dawn had turned
to blood and the sun to tarnish.

The groaning and the screaming, the prayers—useless and known to
be useless—the exhortations, scrabbling attempts at exodus, the burrowings that
would yield no safety, the ecstasies of madness and immolation—each and all
occurred: the correct paraphernalia of catastrophe. But, seen from the heavens,
what was it but a fomentation in a hill of termites? That which is so small
cannot be important.

From the fair sword of Ebriel there beamed a line of sunflower
light, and from the rust-tinctured sword of Yabael a spurting stem like gore.
The sword of Melqar not being about him, he spread his left hand, and from the
very palm of it a white ray pillared forth, and met the others, and there was a
sound, not loud, yet audible perhaps to the earth’s four corners. A sound like
no other, and after this sound, a soundlessness, on earth and in heaven.

There came down first a rain of dirt and large stones, and hail
which flamed. Seen from the sky, the destruction was solely a pretty pattern.

After the rain of boulders, filth and fire, a fog more dense than
night; that too went down upon the lands of the City. And it swallowed them.
They were gone.

Then the three Malukhim lifted their heads, feeling for the
purchase in their unminds of the wishes of the gods, or for that premier wish.
For by now who was to say that the gods had not already forgotten what they
wanted, the angels they made, the Goddess they had disapproved of,
everything—and, soon to be disturbed, by a vague bang far below, would wax
displeased a minute at the interruption.

But the Malukhim, primed automata, did not lose track of their
mission.

There came a detonation. There came a brightness. They were one.
They cut out a piece of the substance of everything, and were finished.

When the finish passed, there was no aftershock, no afterglow.
Nothing. And beneath the heavens, nothing also. A dull cavity, going from one
horizon’s edge to another, with a faint movement of dust about it, hard and
featureless, blank, and void. Not a fleck of interest in it. Not a speck of
life.
Az-Nennafir.

Then, in the uncolored sky, the blaze of the angels winked out.
They had dealings elsewhere.

Only smitten sky then, and the dead pit in the world’s side.

They remarked this of Az-Nennafir:

They
said,
We are rotten and will revel in rottenness.
And rottenness
was theirs.

Then
they said,
See how vile we are and how well we deserve punishment.
And punishment
heard them talking.

And
they said,
We are helpless before destiny, let us have no hope for
ourselves. Let us be sophisticated and say to Death: See, we are doomed, let
doom claim us. We are waiting.
And Death listened.

Invoke and be answered.

And the worst of their sins was the sin of
default.

There was then no more ghastly place than that crater, after the
dust had settled.

What
of the fish-ship and the Goddess-girl? Her city of wickedness had been, in
traditional mode, razed by the outraged gods, and in a cataclysm vital enough
to dig a hole through the surface of the world. Could even an immortal thing
survive intact this escapade?

Because she had already had built the great galley of decks and
oars, and her magic was woven through it, a kind of spirit or astral element
had come to be in it, which the Drin were then able to employ, and which
therefore eased their labor.

The Drin were moreover artificers of genius, the magics powerful,
while the ship had besides a kind of double life upon and about it.

As the Vazdru pipe gave its warning, the ship already fled. It had
two means of motivation, and of these it used the second, to which the Drin,
before they vanished, ordered it. This means was solely sorcerous. The ship
ran fast as lightning, which was all the speed of which it was capable. It
broke through the river at this rate, and had reached the egress to the sea,
even as Azhrarn stood eye to eye with Melqar. And when the sun came and the
duel so oddly ended, the ship forged eastward through the western sea, and as
it went, it dived. It hid itself under the waves, but even there, it
ran.

The boulders and hail fell, but behind it. And the black fog fell.
And last, the light. Where by now the ship had taken itself, that final thud
was not heard. There was only a quiver that hollowed all the water out, so the
most abysmal oceanic caverns twanged at it, and the spiny corals cracked, and
little sea animals, only catching a whiff of the indecipherable noise
immediately died and left the husks of their small bodies fluttering in the
currents, like the leaves on winter streams.