Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (40 page)

But it seems the young couple have a furtive glance. Why has the
elemental never struck at
them
?

Well, Tavir has done a thing or two in that quarter. He has said
to
him,
“Do
not touch her. One touch leads to another.” He has said to
her,
“One touch of his hand and you are will-less. Run away.” And the young prince
has touched her and the princess has not run away. And after much persuasion,
denial, acquiescence, doubt—on both sides—and not even a prayer to aid them,
since their kind does not reverence the gods, Tavir has had the smug joy of
seeing them embraced upon a couch of spilled potions and unsaid exorcising
spells.

And after this, all air and aspiration, Tavir keeps watch. While,
all ire and perspiration, the old pedant does likewise.

And one night the princess is agitated, and Tavir peers in at her
womb, as the pedant peers in at a window. Tavir’s gaze passes easily through
black pearl flesh and heart-of-apple bones, and sees in the sweet and secret
inner room, a bud no larger than an eyelash’s tip. The view of the pedant is impeded
by a lattice.

(Mine,
quoth Tavir, staking claim to what he has seen, unimpeded by anything, so all
the wandering entities, wisps, and psychic wiggles in the cosmic crowd scene
should be aware who owned the vacant lot.)

But the princess is revealing her delicate condition to the
prince, who clasps his inamorata, and swears to protect her. “By a spell of my
mother’s,” adds the prince, “I might rid you of this burden.”

Rid?
Burden?
crows Tavir inaudibly, hitting against the ceiling once again.

Unwitting ally, the pedant chooses this moment to fall through the
lattice.

“Villain!” says he to the prince, who is helping him up. “Did I
not all this while suspect it was you yourself set that fiendly thing on me, to
gain entry to both my house and my wife?”

And stick awave, he is howling now for his retainers, and so
forces the lovers to flee into the night of sea-murmurous Tirzom Jum. From one
rich house to another, richer, they go. And at the threshold of the second, the
princess says to the prince, “Long since a genie divined for me that I should
bear a son. It is fate.”

Which leaves the way free for love and birth, and the bruised,
battered, bitten old husband to instigate legal proceedings. And this, after
some to-do, he does.

Worse than all other hurts, that one.

Spitting and choking with rage, the toothless pedant, before nine
judges: “I divorce her, the ingrate. I divorce her, the slut. I divorce her,
and the craven thief is welcome to the baggage.” After which he went home to
his mansion.

Tavir, who was by now nearing the end of his dream and vaguely
guessed as much, had intended to hasten straight back to his mother—having
decorously overseen the divorce. She was at this time big with the fine garment
destined to be his. At any minute, it seemed to the anxious expectant child,
the interior call might reach him. Then he must rush in and rouse the foetus
from its soullessness, blend with it, and pass out with it to seek the light of
life. Yet, something made Tavir stay awhile with the pedant, to see what he would
do, and he had done indeed, only as imagined.

There he sat in his library, huffing and muttering, referring to
this sage and that one on the inconstancy of women, their worthlessness and
wickedness. Until, all at once he laid the books aside and tears rolled from
his eyes, so the watching soul was astonished at it.

“Alas,” said the old husband. “Now I am alone. Was it not enough
that I must suffer the shame of impotence, which even my magic could not cure,
then that I must meet her and love her in old age when I repelled her? Yes, bad
enough, this. And the harsh means and words I used to conceal my shame and the
lies I told her and the scrolls I misquoted, bad, too. But now she is gone, and
I am a laughingstock, and will die loveless. I deserve no better, and no better
did I get.”

Then Tavir, having had all his own way, was also ashamed. He
approached the pedant quietly, and even so, from intuitive memory, the old
fellow braced himself for some pinch or nip. But Tavir said at his ear, “Hush.
Do not grieve. There is no death. In fifty years you will be younger than you
are today, and there will be many loves to comfort you. Let her go; she
deserves a life. Read your books and revel in your learning. Who knows but next
time you may be the handsomest of all men—or,” and here Tavir slyly smiled,
“the prettiest of all women.”

The pedant staunchly sighed, wiped his eyes, and selected a book
of lore.

Then the calling sounded for Tavir, and leaping up he darted
away—but even as he did so, he
woke.

9

AFTER
SHE had listened to all this, seated with her chin upon her hand, Azhriaz
awarded Tavir a rare courtesy. She drew from a table a jar of sea-colored wine
and poured it into two glass goblets. The wine was, or seemed, quite real.
Maybe one of the rabble, who admired her as a quaint animal, had brought her
the gift.

“A truth for a truth?” inquired Tavir. “You seem to say that you
believe my dream is a reality.”

“Perhaps.”

“Because of this dream,” he said, “I learned the unfairness of
treating with others as if they are only shadows. “

“And so pity cuckolded spouses, and catch down-plummeting slaves
in the street.”

“And reckon none should be held in our city against her will.”

“I might leave at once,” said Azhriaz carelessly. “Save, like you,
I begin to dislike the shedding of mortal tears and blood. I will not make war
on Tirzom.”

“Nor will your demon servants, who are no altruists at all. Did
they not tell you? You are a prisoner here.”

“Unproven,” said Azhriaz. But she poured the wine from her goblet
on the floor, untasted, while in the goblet of Tavir the cool liquid began to
bubble and smoke.

Tavir put the wine aside. “One other thing,” he said.

“I thought,” said she, “you would be all night coming to it.”

“Upon your ship, which the lords here have taken from you, there
is a sorcerous impression. Of a journey eastward. Of a human city smothered in
sea.”

“Simmurad. Where the immortals who defied Lord Death were turned
to coral, even as they lived, and left to brood forever on the fact.”

“And in my dream,” began the Prince Tavir.

“You were at first confined alive inside a limestone case, in a
sea-surged palace.”

“Can it be,” said Tavir, “my soul, refusing to be held within the
stagnant immortal body, escaped it, and came here for rebirth?”

“What are souls? I have no soul,” said Azhriaz. “I am Vazdru, an
immortal myself. Nor did the immortals of Simmurad, either, have a soul left
between them. Immortality devours the spirit, fusing it with the flesh.”

“Is such a doctrine false?”

Azhriaz said, “Rather say to me what you mean to say.”

Tavir glanced at the bubbling wine in momentary irritation, and
spoke a word to it, at which glass and contents shattered into thin air.

“I am curious to look on Simmurad,” he said. “But though my
parents are entombed and I have no kindred to whom I must defer, the
conventions of Tirzom and the edict of the king would not favor me in such
travel. I should be prevented, and perhaps taken for an enemy of the state.
Yet, now there is your sorcerous ship, capable of such speeds our own magicians
are surprised. Once aboard, who could catch up with me?”

“My ship will not obey you.”

“So I guessed. Nor are you able to approach it.”

“I might,” said she, “take on some illusion and go there at once,
unseen by the guards of your king.”

“There are other guards about the ship than fleshly ones. They
would detect you. You know it, and have not gone there. Only a prince of the
city, such as myself, could subdue the magics of Tirzom.”

“I do not know,” said Azhriaz, “that I am inclined to leave this
charming domicile. I am quite comfortable. No. Let your princely brothers keep
my ship they cannot use. I will stay here and live quietly.”

“What is that sound?” asked Tavir, turning toward the outer door.

“Another hapless slave falling to the street? Go out and catch
him.”

But this was not the fall of a slave. Some other thing bore down
on them, with a taut, rumbling drone. Presently the upper levels of Tirzom Jum
quivered underfoot and all about. The foundations of the black palaces were
vibrating above, and the street of the white-skinned house trembled as if in
fear.

Then came a frightful booming impact. The walls of Azhriaz’s
building, of which she had just spoken so much praise, collapsed—as did those
of a thousand other dwellings. The atmosphere itself had addled. Draperies and
cups, things literal and phantom, burst through the air.

The outer wall having ceased to be, Azhriaz might look forth, and
directly into the street, where a scene of mingled terror and astound went on,
all under a peculiar light. Upward from the thoroughfare the palace-sides
ascended their four hundred feet; beyond the dearly lit stars within the dome,
and after these, and that, the sea, in which soft night had lain but lay no
more.

There instead, plastered and flickering like a muddy fire all
about the dome, was a type of burning meteor dashed from heaven. So huge it
was, so ravenously ablaze, for some while you did not tell it had the body of a
man—a giant man, all burned himself to bloodiest bronze, with darkly blazoned
wings that beat, like ten hundred vultures, with hair like the many-rayed
comet, his mindlessly beautiful and savage face pressed so nearly upon the
encapsulated city, just as a pitiless child presses and stares upon a jar of
ants. Oh what a face it was, alight itself with the great eyes of a storm. But
worse than all, upraised through the sea, a red flame, blistering and sizzling,
reflecting bloodstained glare upon the street and all the streets of Tirzom
Jum: the swollen sword of the giant-grown Yabael, second of the Malukhim, a
sword of blood and smoke coming down like screaming thunder on the city.

10

FIRE
IN the air, fire in the sea. The earth cratered by it. The gods were angry. Or
had been. Or had felt that they ought to be. A sword in the world’s heart—

Deeper than the earth, however, deeper than the sea, and a little
deeper yet, down into the shady demon country—what swords are glittering there?

See, like a sword, a male body in the black velvet sheath of a
hill.

The eyes of Azhrarn were open, like two pools that had no floor.
They mirrored, but did nothing else. The lids, the lashes, they never stirred.
He breathed, so slowly, depthlessly, it was not evident. The pulses of demons,
detectable by their own kind, were not detected by those three that guarded him
still.

Once or twice, in what would have been the space of a day, an
evening day of Underearth, one of these three would go out of the deep cave,
from its recess of velure moss, through the curtains of creeper. Descending
through the trees that clad the hill, the Vazdru warrior came to a stream where
opals blushed and sang and sprang in the current like fish. Taking some of this
water in a silver cup, the demon would return again up the hill, into the cave,
and rest the cup against the mouth of Azhrarn. Perhaps, though liquid was not
essential to demon life, the waters of Underearth were, to its inhabitants,
restorative. Or possibly the act of moistening the lips, or of accepting the
drink—had he done so—was a necessary symbol. But Azhrarn did not seem to drink,
as he did not seem to breathe or to live.

They had brought him here, those three princes who stayed loyal to
him in the face almost of the sun itself. At the gates of this land, summoning
the black-blue horses, they had lifted him and carried him—and the skin of
Azhrarn burned them. He had touched the sun-thing, the Malukhim. He had touched
sunlight in a morning sky and fallen from heaven like a severed star—

As they neared Druhim Vanashta, its slender spires on the horizon,
a presence blew upward in their path.

The horses shied. The Vazdru clenched their brows in maddened
anger, for they had cause enough already to be desperate. The apparition was
pallid, with eyes like cornflowers through a mist, and its golden hair hung
down its back. If it was masculine, or a female, is unresolved. Some say it was
the ghost of Sivesh, or of another youth who had been the beloved of Azhrarn.
Or yet that it was a woman, one he had destroyed or ruined, who spoke in
vengeful satisfaction. Others named it for Dunizel. Others said it was all of
these persons, and more. To the frenzied demon princes, doubtless it took a
form, perhaps out of history or the future. Or it may have been only a
safeguard of Azhrarn’s magic, autonomously alerted, in a shape of
energy—shapeless.

It said: “Do not go on to Druhim Vanashta. Azhrarn’s city is his
city no more. They have said of him:
He is dead.
And
now they say,
Let
him be dead.
Others of the Vazdru have usurped him. Go elsewhere, wherever you
will, but do not go on to Druhim Vanashta. His moon has set.”