Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (30 page)

The green butterfly came to him; it brushed by his hair that shone
like midnight waves, it lit upon his hand, strong and pale as a carven stone.
Then it lowered itself until it reached the paving by his foot. There it folded
its wings, and waited.

“Truly, Vasht,” said Azhrarn, and his voice was softer than the
nap of velvet and it lanced to the bone, “you have learned love’s lesson well.
For if any do see her walk the world, love is a hag, worse than plague or
famine, or even Death with his ghostly show. Love in her robe of rags with her
heart torn out and sewn on her breast, love with her eyes wept out and only the
blind sockets staring. Love is a bitch, but she suffers, and so she knows best
how to make all things suffer that she kisses with her sickness. Vasht, I thank
you for this love of yours I do not want, and I give you love’s reward.” And he
put his boot heel down on the butterfly and crushed it.

Now nothing could die in the Underearth, it was said. And demons
were numbered among the immortals. Yet only this remained of Vasht, after
Azhrarn had left that place: an impression, as if of the thinnest jade, seared
into the paving—of a butterfly’s two wings, like the two pieces of a broken
heart.

But in Druhim Vanashta they said, “As he did with her, so he does
with his kingdom.” And some of the Vazdru, a great many of them, put on yellow
clothing—which color to them was the shade of mourning, being like sunlight—and
they stood beneath his walls, and lamented in the seventh tongue of the demons,
out of which their chants and melodies of sorcery were made.

But Azhrarn paid no apparent heed. And they did not then dare
approach him nearer, remembering the reward of Vasht.

They spoke together. They mockingly said, “Where is Azhrarn? Who
has seen him?” And some of them took the shape of black lions, but with yellow
eyes, which eye color, again, was a sign of unease or sorrow or extreme outrage
among their caste. They prowled the black lawns of Azhrarn’s palace, going in
over the walls, and snapped the bronze fish out of the trees, maiming them, so
they flopped horribly in the grass until the fantastic air and emanations of
that area healed them.

At the center of Azhrarn’s garden a fountain played; it was
composed not of water but of fire, scarlet fire that gave neither light nor
heat. But the lion-Vazdru dug deep in the strata of the lawn, and they cast the
turf and soils in upon the fountain, tirelessly, for more than a mortal month.
Until at last the flame was choked and lay under a black compost, which yet
smoldered still in parts like a cold red coal.

But even to this, Azhrarn seemed to pay no heed.

The lion-Vazdru leapt back across the walls and resumed their male
and female forms. Then they rent their yellow clothes and cried in anarchic
voices, “Azhrarn, where is Azhrarn, the Beautiful, the Bringer of Anguish,
Night’s Master?” And they answered themselves stonily thereafter:
“Azhrarn is
dead.”

But
Azhriaz lay on the dragon’s back, and the Eshva combed her hair and sang in
wordless voices. And she heeded them nearly as little as Azhrarn heeded the
Vazdru, miles under her feet.

Years ago, in the first decade of her reign over men, Prince
Wickedness had sometimes paid a visit to his daughter.

In those nights, she had lived in the marble apartments of the
former palace of Nennafir, merely with Qurob’s luxuriousness. Two of Qurob’s
sons had, in that time, attempted to make war on her, but she had destroyed
their armies as a hurricane breaks a branch. And one of Qurob’s female progeny,
who had laid a plot to murder the new Goddess, Azhriaz had fastened to a wheel
of silver that was sorcerously flung about the sky over the city all day, and
hung above the tallest palace tower after sunset. The screams of this wretched
woman became familiar to the ears as the cries of particular indigenous birds,
for, by magic, she was not permitted death. Eventually the victim went mad.
Then Azhriaz had her taken down and sent away into some handy wilderness, with
the reported words: “Go seek your prince.” Various had been the cruelties of
the Goddess in the early years of her reign. At Azhrarn’s instruction she
performed many deeds in order to educate the earth in the viciousness of the
gods, and, more important, their indifference to all human suffering.

Mostly, the visits of the lordly father to the dutiful child
comprised such instructions. Azhriaz had placed for him a silver chair
intricately molded, with a canopy of silk, and with inlaid steps leading up to
it. She kneeled before him, arms crossed on her breast and head bowed. It was a
parody, and soon bored them. Now she was polite and now he had got his way,
they had nothing at all to say to each other. And to be sure, they were like
many a mortal father and daughter in that.

Probably, at the beginning, he tested her, to see if she was
faithful to his edict. Once the tests were accomplished, he let her alone.
Next, some of the Vazdru were sent to her and taught her demonic magic—or they
refined her skills and lessoned her in the proper rituals and occult language
that should ornament such art. (As callers, the Vazdru were proud. And she, the
hostess, prouder.) But the mellifluous Eshva came at her whim, to please her.
And the Drin came, to fawn and bring gifts, or to fashion, out of the tributes
of the Empire she had begun to establish, diadems and collars, clockworks,
mechanisms. They built that pillared room of gems (of course), and the gold
room, and those of silver and pearl. And the Drindra she fetched up, too, the
dregs of the Drin, and spoke to them in their gabble, and found access through
them to the bizarre supernatural tips where such weeds and flowerlets burgeoned
as the four things she summoned to tell her of her worth in the world—the man
of brass and the man of alligator legs, the woman-headed horse, the snake-eyed
child. Meanwhile, her human legions milled more and more lands for her bread.

So in the end she dwelled alone, surrounded by everything a third
of the world could bring her, and played at appalling sorceries, while, in her
sprawling Goddessdom, men did incredible mindless evils, each in her name.

For herself, she had done directly very little evil. And what she
had done, mostly, at Azhrarn’s incentive, was her duty. For the rest, accepting
her as a goddess of wickedness and carelessness, men let loose all the rubbish
in themselves for her sake. They supposed she came to them in dreams and
visions and requested of them slaughter, rapine, and sacrifice of animal and
man, suicide, and other items less succulent still. But this she did not do;
they managed it all themselves most adequately. And the delirium which fell on
them like a ravening panther at the invocation of her being—that was their
creature, too.

But Azhrarn, who had made her to chastise the earth, he might have
been said to be satisfied. Yet it appeared he was not so very much concerned,
having set the toy in motion. Once before he had inadvertently unleashed havoc,
and gone elsewhere, to some other interest, and not seen the mess till almost
the last hour of mankind. Now there was no other interest, but regardless, the
mighty endeavor palled. He, who had invented this play, in which millions were
overwhelmed, continents tottered, men perished as autumn leaves in a forest—he
had turned his head away.

And for Azhriaz, the fount of the pandemonium, she lingered on her
couch-dragon, and let her City go about its riots under the high windows. And
lingering in the flesh on the couch, otherwise she passed through a mirror she
had been staring into, and stood before Dathanja on a hill at her kingdom’s
edge.

Brown and barren the hill, even the sky was brown, and a tannic
rain fell, with sometimes a brown frog or two in it.

But Azhriaz came clad in lights, with stars in her hair.

Dathanja, who sat on the hill in the rain, glanced up at her.

“Is your journey charming?” she asked him.

“Perhaps,” he said.

“And do you think of me?” she said.

“It now and then chances that I think of you, for you manifest now
and then, do you not, to remind me?”

“What have you seen since last you looked on me?”

He said, “Misery and want, and fear, and death. I saw a beggar
begging help from a muddy stream. He told me it was as much use to do that as
to beg help of heaven. And I met a girl who lay down and said that I should
rape or murder her at once, as I wished, for she could expect nothing else of
me. And I met a priest who danced in delirium for the Goddess under an altar
piled with the dead pilgrims he had given her. But he found he could not seize
me, since I am yet invulnerable, so he ran away in a poor temper.”

“By day,” said Azhriaz, “you set your face to the sunrise. You
travel always eastward. Now what lies in the east, O Zhirek?”

“I am not Zhirek,” said Dathanja, and his black eyes burned cold,
before the fire and the coldness faded.

“Simmurad lies east,” said Azhriaz, “under the ocean.”

But the rain and the frogs smote down, and Dathanja bowed his dark
head, rather in the way she had bowed her darker head before her lordly father.
So she returned to herself through the mirror.

From the room of landscape and scent, once wood and wattle, the
Eshva women had all gone, leaving behind a glorious wafting inexplicableness.
Someone tootled on a pipe, out in the air below the window, where the moons
were sinking.

“Kingly Kheshmet,” said Azhriaz, “it is a long while since I saw
you. Why are you here?”

“To offer a warning,” said Kheshmet, integrating in the midst of
the room, and putting away the pastel pipe. He was arrayed solely as a king,
and blared so bright that the room filmed over and reverted to wood and wattle.

“You have warned me previously. Is it sensible Fate can give
warnings?”

“You see he does so,” said Fate. “Besides, you are sorceress
enough to divine your likely destiny, without any clue from me. My apparition
is superfluous here, though here, as everywhere, I pay my respects from time to
time. Therefore I appear to you as a king and present the warning modestly, as
a keepsake.”

“Warn me, then,” said Azhriaz.

“In one direction, the sea,” said Kheshmet. “In another, the sky.
Though you may conquer all the world, the seas have their own masters, who may
be your equals. And the ether is the floor of others who, stepping there, begin
to notice you.”

Azhriaz looked at Fate with some attention.

“I beheld the building of Baybhelu Tower,” said Kheshmet. “Few saw
me, so circumspectly did I comport myself, and such florid cousins there were
about besides, Lords of Darkness thick on the ground as beetles when a stone
has been disturbed. Nevertheless, the Tower rose, to breach heaven, and heaven
bethought itself, and stirred, only as a feather stirs on a pigeon’s back when
it sleeps. But because of that feather, Baybhelu fell down with a crash that
rocked the world.”

“I,” said Azhriaz, “do not build so high. I excavate rottenness,
digging downward.” Her face expressed disgust as she said this.

Kheshmet said, “You are a goddess, and adored as such, and you
have the powers of what you claim to be. What will the gods think of that?”

But, musingly, she said, “In the east,
Simmurad . . .”

Kheshmet came close. “Not east, but in your eyes, I was wont to
see Chuz like an amber figurine. Now I see Zhirek who is Dathanja, like a
figurine of black basalt. When will the blue come clear again in your blue
eyes, Goddess-on-Earth, Soveh-Sovaz?”

But Azhriaz reached out, and with a laugh she plucked the tiny
chameleon from Kheshmet’s sceptered staff. It came to her a furiously growling
orange, then lay upon her palm white as a dove, making a purring noise.

Kheshmet smiled; he allowed her to fondle the lizard. He was an
uncle of sorts to her, after all, and the rest of the family did not seem to
have been too familial with her.

In a while they went up, King Fate, Night’s Daughter, and the
chameleon, to observe sunrise at Az-Nennafir.

The sun rose like a bud unfurling.

Fate snapped his fingers, and against its disk, the glory of the
great nightmare of a City crumbled, and only its skeleton remained, the heights
smashed, like Baybhelu, the tall temples and mansions roofless, and gaunt
dragons moved over the desolation, and carrion birds with dusty eyes blew out
of a desert that had been parks and palaces.

“Where the gods shall walk,” said Kheshmet, “perhaps
metaphorically. But at each footfall, another tower falls.” Then he moved his
hand across the scene, and the City returned, quite whole.

“It seemed to me once,” said Azhriaz, “that I might one day die.”

“Ah, Soveh-Sovaz,” said Kheshmet, taking the lizard up onto his
staff in the moment before he vanished, “for more centuries than you could ever
dream of, so, it has seemed to me, shall I.”

PART TWO: The War with Sea and Sky

1

AS
USUAL, it was a clear winter morning in Upperearth.

Nothing ever changed there, or very little. The ground of heaven
was sky, and the sky of heaven was sky, and time, like the sky, hung everywhere
and did not move and did not stay still. Tomorrow might be yesterday, and next
year three mortal centuries ago. But to the gods this gave no cause for
concern—and men never came there, or would never come there,
perhaps. . . . Thin blue morning, lit crisp-to-brittle by an
unseen sun which neither rose nor set, never shifted, yet shone from all sides.
Not cold, nor hot, that endless day. It described the Well of glass, containing
the fluid of Immortality, which Simmu once had contrived to borrow from, and in
which, once, Azhrarn had spat—making the leaden liquid sparkling and beautiful
for a second or so. Against the Well, the two fearsome one-eyed Guardians
slept, in their gray cloaks. The story went there had been long before, or
would be long in the future,
three
Guardians. The third
had been, would be, lost, in some curious maneuver, defending the Well (unnecessary),
or falling in the Well (unlikely), or falling through the floor of heaven (less
likely), or by incurring the displeasure of the gods: unthinkable.