Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (11 page)

He had always known, or
been always capable of knowing. Two abortive hunts, in Underearth and out of
it, had yielded no “kill.” Yet he let the matter of vengeance rest. Let the
matter of escape slip. . . . Now, though he cared no more for
her, Vasht it would seem had had some power to wake in him the old true rages,
spites, lusts, certainties,
schemes,
of his
beginning, that somber primeval “dawn” he had mentioned, shadowy sunrise
lacking a sun. So Azhrarn thought now of Chuz, and of a child which was his,
whose face he did not or could not recall, only the eyes. And presently three
of the Eshva were summoned to him in the shapes of three smoky doves. “Go,”
said Azhrarn, “and find me
that.”

Far and wide, the Eshva flew.

They may have been some
of those formerly sent to serve Azhriaz-Sovaz on the island of the hollow
stone, and this a form of expiation—since they had allowed her to leave that
place without so much as a sigh of warning, so intellectually recumbent had
they grown there. (Catching his sickness?) It is not recorded that Azhrarn
punished any one of them. But they, leaving that sphere of uselessness,
altering, may have wished to be punished, or simply to atone.

Far and wide—

Well then, for some
while, many a blue-eyed dark-haired girl was scared or lured away into the
night, lost there, later found, or not found. . . . “Oh where is
my daughter—sister—bride? Have the demons stolen her?” It must have been an
emblem of theirs, this faulty diligence in searching. Surely they grasped, even
if they had not themselves attended her before, that only one could be the
daughter of Azhrarn, and they would know her at once.

She
was well hidden. They would not find
her
out. Even
they.
For what was she but archsorceress, their mistress as Azhrarn was their master.
As for that other, crazy Chuz, lord of craziness—for a great while he had kept
out of sight behind his own immaculate blind.

Search then, on and on,
they must and did, and chased the black-haired maidens in the woods, and the
handsome lack wits, or men having discrepancies in their looks, one side of the
face beautiful and one deformed. The Eshva were saying by all this, See, we are
searching. Leaving no stone right side up.

In Underearth, Azhrarn
stood by a window of emerald, and through it saw a green-winged thing
fluttering. But all winged things—all things—were green, seen through that
window. Azhrarn did not waste much time upon the sight.

On a stand in that room
there was, or came to be, a book, in size one quarter of the height of a tall
man. Its covers and papers were of thin pure bronze, and decorated with strange
gems whose names are no longer recollected. Azhrarn approached and spoke to
this book. At the words, the pages strayed apart, and turned themselves, and
stopped. Azhrarn glanced into the book, where it now lay open. The images that
were shown there could mean nothing to one unversed in them. Yet Azhrarn
instantly turned from the view, disgusted, apparently, by the ease of
divination.

While to three shadowy
doves, flying high up under the moon, there must have come some special
instruction. For they dived suddenly, as do hunting gulls upon their prey, down
into the well of the world.

2

MANY TALES were told of that return of the Demon’s
child onto the earth. These tales bear all a similarity. It is like a snake’s
dancing, or a beautiful sword which knows it was made not for beauty, but to
harm. Also, it is like a baby playing with her toys, and each toy a man’s life,
or a town burning. And the teasing malign mischiefs have too a sort of immature
hurt and anger in them. It is to be remembered, though she was seventeen years
old in her form, her cunning and her learning were surely older, and over all,
the blossom had been forced. Within herself, she was still a child that had yet
to grow. Or had she ever been such a thing as a child? She was never positively
ovum and seed, only dark light, magic and will—and the fierce love of two
others, which had seemed to exclude her consistently.

So stories gathered like
flocks of birds about her.

But there is another
tale, which says she did not do so much, not then; that in her own way she
lived quietly. And perhaps there is some truth, too, in that, or why had she
been so difficult for the Eshva to find?

“There are supernatural creatures in our woods,” they
said, in the surrounding villages and towns. Why? How do you know it?
“Travelers have been set on. One came here in a lather, he had seen starry
lights which followed him.” “And another woke up from a noon sleep in a glade,
to find he had the ears of an ass!”

Sometimes, when the wind
blew, exotic aromas flowed on it out of the wood, or the sound of music or
bells. Animals avoided certain parts of the wood, or else wilfully ran off to
them. Seven merchants, riding hard for a town just before nightfall, declared
an
object
—which might have been a velvet
carpet some fifteen feet up in the air, with two dim shining figures seated on
it—had whizzed over their heads. Some girls who went out one dawn to gather
edible fungi, arrived at a break in the trees and saw suddenly, as if it broke
through the sky with the sun, a high magnificent house of white marble and
flashing gold. But even as they stood astonished, the mansion disappeared, and
all they could make out was a little old ruined cottage on a slope half a mile
away.

Supposedly then
sometimes a cottage, sometimes a mansion, the dwelling place of Oloru and
Sovaz. On cold nights, a fire on a rough hearth with a copper pot suspended
over it, crooked shutters fastened closed, a straw pallet under fleeces—or a
towering hearth with stone pillars, scented braziers and swinging lamps, magic
food conjured to an inlaid table, a bed five yards across and canopied with
silver tissue. And in summer, a herb garden with wild roses, a park with
fountains springing at the skies.

One afternoon, late in
the day, when the sun had entered the western quarter and the air was plum
yellow, a traveler came up through the woods and paused to look at the cottage
on the slope. The trees fell away around the incline, so the old tipsy cottage
roof showed plainly. Still, something in the yellow air deceived, for there
would appear to be a second outline behind the first, several roofs where there
was one, each taller, and all glittering.

Now seldom did travelers
take this track, since it lay in the wrong direction for the nearest towns of
the region. But those who might have ventured here, seeing the mirage, would
have rubbed their eyes, sworn, and hurried off. This traveler, seeing it,
laughed.

Sounds carried in those
parts.

Far up in an arbor of
ivory, on a flat roof girded by golden railings, a young man and a young woman
raised their blond and sable heads.

“What strange bird is
that?”

“Not a bird,” said
Oloru, “an orange beetle, which is crawling up from the trees toward the
house.”

Sovaz gazed from her roof’s pinnacle. She frowned.
Presently she descended three marble stairways in her silks and came to open a
warped wooden door in a home-spun dress.

There on the sunken
doorstep sat a man. He was clad in a beggar’s garment of dull reddish orange,
much stained and rent, a fold of which he had drawn over his bowed head. Beside
him lay a beggar’s bowl, curiously gilded, and in his hand he held a staff of
greatly rotted wood.

Sovaz did not speak, she
waited. After a moment the man murmured, “Alms, kindness, succor.” His voice
was beautiful, yet unknown. Sovaz said nothing, though she stood as still as
the hidden marble. “Be charitable to me,” said the beggar. “Who knows but one
day your lot may be mine and you too must go entreating pity through the world.
Once I was a king. Now regard me. Alms, succor, kindness.” And then, very low,
he laughed again his startling laugh, which was like the cry of some wild bird.
“Who, after all,” said he, “can escape cruel fate?”

Then Sovaz grimaced—had
she been a cat, you would have said she laid flat her ears and hissed at him.
She stood aside and flung open the wooden door, which almost fell off at the
impact, and which altered to a silver door set with golden images.

“Poor destitute,” said
Sovaz mockingly, “enter my modest abode.”

Then the man got up and passed into the house.

It was all grandeur
again, with glassy floors, and pierced by rays of light daggering through it
from the large windows. On a stair of marble sat Oloru, idly striking chords
on a lyre. When he had regarded the traveling beggar, these chords came very
sour. Oloru said, “Can one go nowhere to evade one’s wretched relations?”

At this the visitor
raised his head and the fold of cloth fell back from it. He was altogether a
strange sight. Tanned, as if in a vat, from much journeying in various
weathers, his head was like a bronze icon, for it was shaved of all hair. The
bizarre robe he wore now seemed the rich color of the blood orange, and you saw
that every stain upon it formed a most intricate and pleasing pattern, just as
did every tear in it, as though each had been skilfully painted on or cut out.
The begging bowl was not merely gilded, it was evidently gold, and dappled with
somber jewels. His staff of rotten driftwood, too, was elaborately carved and
had budded dark gems, and up it ran a slender ginger lizard, to perch on his
shoulder, and look about with eyes of fiery jasper. The eyes of the man were
rimmed with gold, blazed with it; their hue was not to be seen, nor was it easy
to meet his gaze—indeed, more trouble than it was worth.

Oloru sighed, and lowered
his lashes.
Chuz
said, “Unwelcome, uncousin.
Or are you an unbrother to me? I am inclined to forget.”

“Our relationship is
often deemed a close one,” conceded the traveler.

“Why are you here?” said
Chuz by means of Oloru, and he threw a golden die at the lizard, which caught
it in its mouth.

“Do not feed my pet,”
said the traveler, and extracted the die, which, in his grasp, turned to ash
and sifted to the floor. His nails were golden also, and very long. The lizard
rumbled like a tiny lion, balefully, at Chuz. “Why am I here? Why not? I must
pass everywhere at all times. You see me in this place. Others concurrently
perceive me elsewhere. And even you have not left the earth particularly sane
by your apparent retreat. Some essence of you, too, mad Prince Chuz, roves and
roars the world about.”

During this exchange,
Sovaz had stood to one side, watching and listening. Now she spoke again.

“I know you,” she said,
“and do not know you. A beggar king? You named yourself, did you not, at the
door?”

The man turned and
inclined his head to her, smiling. A golden diadem evolved upon his hairless
burnished skull. The lizard looked up at it and purred like a kitten.

“Which name did I use?”

“Fate.”

“Then I am Fate.”

“King Fate, one of the
Lords of Darkness,” said Sovaz, and she swept him a scornful bow such as some
young warrior might have made him, though every line of her was woman. “A
gentle reminder that even I will not elude you?”

“Oh, come. Have you
spent so long with
him,
and learned nothing?
I am only the symbol of the name. Like poor exhausted Death, tramping about the
earth with his carrion baskets, longing to get back to the quiet soft arms of
his handmaiden, Kassafeh. Or like that very one, there, who has gone mad
himself to prove he exists and is real,
not
only a symbol. While under our feet this instant there prowls another, your own
father, Wickedness. But he was always different. He firstly existed, and then
took on the rôle. We humble others the rôle itself has created.”

“What nonsense is this
peculiar fellow talking?” inquired not Chuz, but Oloru, languidly. “It seems
he presumes on the maxim ‘Enough is never enough.’”

But Fate, if so he was (and so he would seem to be),
looked at Sovaz and said, “He is close behind you.”

“Who is that?”

“Azhrarn. Who else.”

“Fate warns me of my
fate. Does unhumbly rôle-playing Prince Wickedness wish to kill me?”

“How could he? How could
he wish it?”

“You are mistaken,” said
Sovaz. “He has no interest in me.”

Fate looked about.
Politely, he examined the hall of the wondrous mansion, touching the tapestries
and crystal cups. The tiny lizard mewed and jumped down to chase sunbeams on
the floor. And here, leaving the aura of its master, it took on the tints of
sun and floor, becoming nearly transparent, for it was changeable, too, a
chameleon.

“Are you then,” said
Sovaz to Fate, “Azhrarn’s messenger?”

“Do I, a king, with my
own kingly business to attend to, seem likely to perform duties for another?”

“Discuss your own
business with me, then.”

“I am here,” said Fate
simply and not unkindly. “You have glimpsed me. And that is all which is
needed.”

And so saying, he
summoned the lizard again to his staff, and moving into a dagger of westering
light, he became one with it, and vanished.