Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (30 page)

He rode into
the sable countryside, among the silver trees. A mile from the city, the horse
stumbled. It sank beneath him slowly, and died of Azhrarn’s invisible
unexpressed agony.

After the
death of the horse, which was not an actual death, since the horses of Druhim
Vanashta were no more than half corporeal, Azhrarn went on alone. He strode
through a landscape as unnerving as it was fair, and saw none of it. Hillsides
clad in crystal blooms, rills and streams which gushed with zircons, a far line
of cliffs rosy as if at sunset, but unaltering; he heeded nothing.

In his brain a
clock ticked inexorably. It told the hours in the world above his head. It told
how the sun of that world stepped toward the horizon.

He may have
considered Lord Death, but Uhlume had no power over the dead once they had
achieved that state, save those dead which belonged to him. Or Azhrarn may have
considered Prince Chuz, but Chuz and his games were like distant objects;
difficult to fill the eye with them.

There was a
forest whose trunks were black, and from whose black boughs soft black fur was
growing, while in the soil between the trees were pale yellow primroses which
themselves were luminous, and flushed the trees with light. Into this forest
Azhrarn took himself, and wrapped its blackness about him. And the forest
commenced to sing, because it could not weep, a melody without any absolute
beginning, or any positive end, a melody like air, that, if it might be
reproduced, would kill life with sadness.

That was
expression, too, for he neither spoke nor gestured. He did not express emotion.
His kingdom must express it for him.

But then the
sun of the earth above found the brink of the world, and the forest dazzled and
snarled as if a meteor had ripped through it. Azhrarn was gone, upward, to
Bhelsheved, where men had slain one that he loved.

Stricken abruptly with
awareness, the crowd had run away and left Dunizel alone on the exquisite white
bridge to the west of the golden temple.

The crowd had
indeed, by sunset, deserted Bhelsheved altogether, save for a few idiotic or
insensitive ones, who still ambled disconsolately about the colonnades. There
were also the priests, who yet dithered in their cells, bleating at a sense of
psychic doom. The storm held, too, in the sky, dully booming, casting handfuls
of wind against the fanes, and tearing the litter left behind on the streets.

The sun,
stepping from the last stair into the place below the world, stabbed one
prolonged hellish magenta ray back across the world. Iron purple churned in the
east, and blackness, which would presently conquer everything.

The girl lay,
her feet pointing toward the sunset’s end.

A final flare,
and the sun was gone, leaving only its moody embers after it for the wind to
sweep up. Night stood instead at the girl’s feet, looking down at her.

Night’s
Master, Prince of Demons, Lord of Darkness—who had been powerless, for all his
power, and was powerless now, save to justify one of those other names of his,
one of those blacker names.

Then he
kneeled and raised her, and stood up again, holding her across his body. What
he did was so strange. He leaned and kissed the lids of both her eyes, which
then softly lifted, and her glorious lifeless eyes looked out at him in a
semblance of awakening. But then the silver lashes drew the lids down again.

He carried her
off the bridge and into that garden by the lake where she had come to him when
first he entered Bhelsheved. He set her on the cold brittle grass, and then he
turned from her, and gazed away across the night-stained water of the lake.

To the Eshva,
sorrow was, like love, a rapture, an art. They would swim in sorrow, drown in
it, drink and grow drunken, those children of dream and shade. But to the
Vazdru, sorrow could only be mended in blood. The Vazdru would seldom mourn, as
rarely could they weep. And he, who had come to rule them, more Vazdru than the
Vazdru, he could do neither. Small wonder his country must express his agony
and despair. For he could not. His pain was inexpressible. Like one that would
scream but had no voice, or one who was wounded with some dreadful internal
wound that no physician could come at to heal, so he was. Azhrarn who invented
carnal love, and cats, and the most profound intricacies of evil, so he was and
so he suffered.

His face was
so white it seared the darkness like a fire, and his dry unreadable eyes—be
glad they are not to be read—made the darkness meager and faded by their blackness.

Aloud he said,
but gently: “Bhelsheved I will thrust back into the earth which vomited it. And
the lands of Bhelsheved I will leave a bottomless crater that shall not grow
one living shoot until ten centuries are forgotten.”

The night in
the garden seemed to recoil at his words. These were his powers, if he had been
powerless before. The night and the soil and the trees and the atmosphere
itself knew and believed him, and that piece of the world shrank on its bones.

“Not one
smallest, most feeble shoot,” he said, so gently, gently. “And of men, not one
until twice ten centuries are torn from the pages of the world’s book. And
many, many more.”

Pitch black
was Bhelsheved now, and no star showing. The buffets of the storm were stifled,
for it, too, was afraid. The lake was without reflection. Not a light or a hope
of light anywhere, while he stood and tasted the promise he had made, vintage
poison in his mouth.

And then, a
light. Unexpected, slender and frail, moving along the margin of the lake,
toward him.

Azhrarn looked
at that light, and he cursed it, for it evoked a memory of how she had first
come to him in just such a way, bearing the firefly lantern along the shore.
But at his curse, incredibly, the light sprang up more strongly, as if he had
blessed it, and now it seemed to speed toward him.

At the last
instant, he knew. He stepped from the trees, and thus he waited, and the
shimmering light came up to him, and it was Dunizel, or her ghost, her soul,
come back from that misty region beyond the world, to which, in those days,
souls expired. And she was like herself, save she was translucent as the
thinnest porcelain. The night showed through her, through her young skin, her
swan-white hair, through her beauty so faithfully, so pathetically reproduced.

And, “Lord,”
she said, “I knew you were here and have come out to seek you.” Just as she had
said it to him in the beginning.

At that, the
pain in him, like the raw edge of a sword, most probably became like the pain
of seven swords, and seven acids on their points. He answered her with an anger
so cold no live thing could have borne to hear it.

“Be glad, now,
White Maiden. You would not obey me, but would cleave to this place, and it has
destroyed you, and shall be destroyed in its turn.”

“And why will
you destroy Bhelsheved?” asked the soul of Dunizel. “Is it to avenge my death?”

“What else,”
he said, and turned from her. It was not often he concealed his face, save for
trickery, and this was not trickery.

“Then,” she
said, “do not destroy Bhelsheved for my sake. I need no vengeance. I shall
live, as you see, though not as formerly. Of all souls, mine is vital and sure
of existence, for the soul of the sun visited me in the womb.”

She knew
herself at last, so it seemed.

“Why will you
plead for an anthill?” he said, dismissing her self-knowing, for it no longer
concerned him, or he appeared to think it did not. “Those that slew you deserve
no kindness of yours.”

“For them?”
she asked. Her voice came between the trees, into the shadow where she had not
followed him. “It is not for them, but for you that I plead, my beloved, you,
the truth of my life and always that truth, even beyond the gate of death. For
when you strike men and slaughter them, and ruin the earth and lay it waste,
then it is some part of yourself you are striking, slaughtering, ruining,
laying waste. You are greater than your own kind. You are above them. One
morning—and advisedly, my love, I speak of day to you—you will set your
wickedness aside like a rich garment you are weary of.”

“Do not,” he
said, “say these things to me, or I will blast this spot with a bane that shall
ensure its death ten million years.”

“Then, you
will blast yourself. And, though I am beyond the world, your pain will become
my pain. You will blast me, also.”

“Begone,” he
said. “You merit no pity. You threw away your life.”

“My life
continues, elsewhere, or here, for maybe I shall come back to the world, in
some future time. And if so, the light by which I shall find my way will be the
light of you.”

“What I would
have given you, you put aside. Spilled wine, Dunizel. You never learned its
sweetness.”

“Then teach it
me,” she said.

He laughed
then, beautifully and cruelly, in the shadow.

“Woman,” he
said, “you are cobwebs and smoke. Go be lessoned in love by the phantasms cringing
in the outer nothingness.”

And then her
hand came upon his arm, weightless as a leaf, yet he felt it, as if it had been
of flesh.

He might see
her, even now, her dead whiteness lying between the stems of the trees. Yet at
his side he could also discover her, as she had been, standing before him, no
longer transparent, but finely opaque, lit only by her inner brilliance. If
anything, she was more lovely than she had been, if such a thing is possible,
and maybe it is not.

“The soul is a
magician,” she said to him, “and this you know. But my soul more than
another’s, since I am the comet’s child. And because your blood once mingled
with mine. For a space, I can put on the seeming of flesh, but only for a
little while, for the hours of one night. Even my soul, which loves you and
draws its strength from love, can do no more than that. If you would send me
away at once, you have only to close your heart to me. If that is your desire,
I will not grieve at it. I will leave you without regret, and love you always.”

“Your body is
mirage only,” he said. “Do you think me such a poor mage I would not know
that?”

“My body is
composed of love. Love me, and you, even you, will tell no difference between
illusion and reality, for in this case they are one.”

Then he touched
her face with his hands. His touch, like notes of music; she grew at once more
vivid, sure and real. No human man could have possessed her as she was. But
neither she, nor her love, nor her lover, were human.

“The time is
too short,” he said. “One mortal night.”

“No, for you
are the master of time. One night may be a thousand years. I fear the joy I
will know with you.”

“Fear rather
the parting beyond it,” he said, and it was as if he told her that he himself
feared that parting.

“There is no
parting,” she said. “I am always with you, and I shall be with you, as now,
once more in some other age. But do not destroy this place. For without this
place, you might have gone by me in the darkness. Put out the light of
Bhelsheved, and there may be then some other place, in some later time, where
you may not find me.”

Azhrarn looked
at her, at her face held between his hands; then he bowed his head and kissed
her. The earth all about seemed to tell from that kiss that his determination
to destroy had been relinquished. Love and hate thrown in the balance, love had
outweighed everything, as once before, long ago, and that time he himself had
died.

Her body, that
was more soul than flesh, meeting with his that was of supernatural atoms,
light with dark, their mouths meeting, their hands, even their hair entwining,
binding them, caused to flow away from them a delirious ambience as if from the
glow or heat of a fire.

The whole area
responded, throbbing to that inaudible resonance. Lands also lived. This one
had been promised annihilation, and love had woken there instead.

The storm
melted, sighing. Stars poured through, seeming to rain upon each other. The
scale of love ascended through the earth and away from the earth. Time ceased,
as in Druhim Vanashta time had ceased. One night became a thousand years. One
act of love became all acts of love, past, or of the future.

And yet, it
was as nothing to that other love which might have passed between them.

While in the
heart-temple, on its golden chair, unremembered, too small to climb down, the
Demon’s daughter, wide awake, aware of the currents and the waves of love
spinning in the night, and how it was not part of them.

The dawn came to
Bhelsheved, as it seemed, reluctantly, and shyly, and pale, as if after many
years of sunlessness. The city, opening to that sunrise, had a pure and almost
formless look, like something very new, or else something which had been washed
clean of all its past, the accretions that had grown up on it. The storm winds
had swept the dirt from its streets. The naked trees were like dark silver.
Even the desert was serene and stroked with color by the sun. Like a woman who
has known a peerless and encompassing love, so the land lay, and so the sun
flowed up over the land.