Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (37 page)

The Goddess floated, and looked her fill. She felt her sadness and
her guilt, her confusion in the face of the wishes of others, of eternity—and
one short second.
What
is this city to me?
Should she go to her ship and fire lightnings at it?
I slew Shudm.
She
had given the ghouls to each other to gnaw. She was the daughter of Wickedness.

A blackness was slowly detaching itself from the rocky masonry of
Tirzom Jum. It flowed toward her.

Azhriaz, interrupted in her guilt, becoming aware of it, thought
it mundane. It was a beast resembling a black bladder, with optics of blue,
like a jest at her own garb and eyes. An octopus with the snakes of its
tentacles about it.

“I am not for you,” she said to it, though it could not hear and
would not heed.

It came on, and Azhriaz spread out her hand. A glare ripped
through the water and rapped the octopus smartly, so it was packed off in a
succession of somersaults. In its fury it released a wave of ink into the sea.

She had meant to kill it, and had not done as much. It did not
think her very dangerous, only irksome, and it came on again through the ink.
Then Azhriaz resorted to the magic which would vanish her from that spot and
bring her out inside her safe ship. On earth, it had been hardly more
momentous, this, than to blink her eyelids.

But she was in the sea.

There was a surge that buffeted and slung her down into the sand.
And that was all it did.

Azhriaz kneeled among the shells and felt the sea on her body, and
tasted it in her mouth. Her casting of power had broken wide the bubble.

I
am
invulnerable. I am Vazdru. The ocean cannot murder me.
Yet
the salt sea filled her nostrils, her throat, her lungs, and the agony of it
was not to be borne.
Then
am I less than Zhirek?
she wondered in terror and outrage.

And she cursed her father and her mother, sun and dark, for what
of
this?

Her sight grew blind. The octopus hauled her up into its multitude
of arms.

7

THROUGH
perforated screens and lucid vanes soaked the amphibian dusk of Tirzom Jum: It
was sunset in the world above. Lamps were being lit along the upper levels of
the city, a nightly ritual. Fire was a specialty here. Slaves gracefully slunk
about the palace halls, dipping their tapers to orbs of vitreous and sconces of
verdigris.

Illumined in the sea-dusk lamplight, the court of the king looked
on the animal which had been captured.

Like their cities, the Tirzomites were black, and green. Their
skins were pantherish. The hair that splendored their heads was the hue of
apples, and equally so the not-white whites of their eyes. When they spoke or
laughed (as below water it was not comfortable to do, it subsequently becoming
a fashion up here), the insides of their mouths and their tongues were darkest
green, their teeth like pure green pearls. Other more intimate parts of them
would have been seen to be green, had they revealed them. Cut these persons,
they would shed blood like drops of tourmaline. They were wise, though, not
green that way, the Tirzomites. Educated, clever, and arrogant—and cruel, as
all the peoples of the sea—which was, despite the fashion, no laughing matter.

The king himself sat in his orichalc chair, with his two cats at
his feet. They were of a bibred species, cheetahs that had never tried the
acres of earth, but rather coursed the floor of the waters. They had the fins
of golden carp, and spotted scales for pelts. They had recently hunted sharks;
now they glared at the shackled thing on the carpets below their master’s
feet.

“It is not ill made,” commented one of the courtiers. He spoke in
the language of Tirzom. “Yet, so beautiless.”

“It is truly quite foul,” agreed another. “Yet, it has some value
as a curiosity.”

“It breathes the sea, despite having no gills, and is unharmed.”

“It is a female. It may belong to some other kingdom. With whom
are we at war that might send spies?”

“With three or four states, as is usual. Though their peoples have
just such hideous white skin, they have other proper characteristics of the
ocean races. This creature has none, however hard it breathes water. Besides,
there is the ship. We do not understand the magical mechanics of it, and though
it has been surrounded by our soldiery, it lies still in the woods—we have been
unable to gain access, so strong are the sorcerous protections. We have had
word from Vesh Tirzom that their catapults did it no damage, but that the ship
itself smote back an exploding missile into the city. While from Tirzom Bey
came the message of those who perused the ship when it, or its occupant, slept.
And the message told of workmanship thereon that the forges of mortals do not
produce.”

“Enough,” interrupted the king sharply, and the mer-cheetahs
growled. “We will question the captive thing. It swoons too long. Go, wake it
up.”

“I have awakened,” said a voice from the carpets, and also in the
language of Tirzom.

She reclined, Azhriaz, only as if at leisure before them, not
deigning to stand, let alone to give obeisance. The king she regarded as if he
were some supplicant she had permitted to sit down. The rest she did not bother
with.

It was a truth, she was a goddess and had grown used to homage,
and not to get it irked her. And she had been besides conscious always of her
beauty, if indifferent to it. Here, her white skin was reckoned the depth of
ugliness, overriding all other consideration or feature.

“How is it,” said the king of Tirzom Jum, “that you, a deficient
foreign animal, can speak our tongue?”

“How is it,” said Azhriaz, “that you, so erudite and all-wise, do
not know?”

For another fact, her Vazdru training of recent years had taught
her every tongue of the earth (of which there were seven root languages, and
each of those split into ten sublanguages), and the seven undefiled speech
modes of Underearth. The teaching of these had been a relatively simple thing,
involving touches of nephrite and nacre. . . . Time hanging
heavy in her Goddessdom, however, Azhriaz had summoned the Drindra, and now and
then the Drindra had even breached the seas for her, and brought her relics,
including certain stone tablets or sewn books of the aquatic folk. The
magicianry that pulsed in her very blood had not deserted her; such would be
absurd. Her powers were only severely mitigated by the environment. They
enabled her now, from the linguistics she had formerly studied, to piece
together Tirzom’s vernacular. Indeed, though there were a host of languages
beneath the waves, yet they too sprang from mother roots, and were not so
unfathomable as the sea lords opined.

Something of that, this sea lord now seemed unwillingly to
comprehend.

“Then you are,” said he, “by the terms of the earth, a great
sorceress.”

“I am, by the terms of the earth, a peerless goddess.” At this,
the court of the king laughed extravagantly.

The king put on a stern face.

“We eschew the gods here, though we respect them. You have neither
the manner nor the aspect of a god.” Azhriaz met the king’s cat eyes
unrelentingly, but she knew, with sulky amusement, that this argument was irrefutable.
Here, the Goddess of Nennafir was not much.

“I will,” she said, “out of tact at your ignorance, dispense with
my holy titles. I shall only inform you of my royalty. I am Azhriaz, the Prince
of Demons’ daughter.” The king started. The court whispered. And, for their
parts, the mer-cheetahs lowered themselves onto their bellies, as if unsure
whether to snarl or purr.

Presently the king of Tirzom Jum said this: “Azhrarn we know of,
and between all our kind and his there exists
a
compact
of truce for he is mighty in his way, but we also, as he would himself
confirm.”

“You,” said Azhriaz, “are mere magicians, and were human once. It
is the sea itself, this element you have wedded, which so swells your power.
Shipwreck you
a
few years on the land, there would be another song.”

At this the courtiers put their hands to their daggers, and many
discussed loudly killing this upstart foreign
thing
at
once. Or, if it might not be killed, of distressing it in other ways.

Then Azhriaz laughed, not from humor, but because she saw it was
idiomatic. “I am invulnerable,” she said. “I can breathe the sea, though to me
it is anathema. What do you suppose you may do to me?” And she rose to her
feet, and clad herself by her magic in the trappings of her earthly godhead. It
impressed them, this vulgarity, as she had divined it might. “Consider also,”
said Azhriaz, “if you attempt to harm me, my father may forgo his truce with
you. Have you, such bold warriors as you claim to be, ever fought a war with
the Vazdru? Insult me, and the joy shall be yours.”

Then a man came to the king and muttered in his ear. This one wore
a long robe of black, and on his breast hung a pectoral of green bones.

Azhriaz attended to the mutter. She waited till the man drew back
and then she said to the king, “Your scholar tells you, if I am Azhrarn’s, I
must prove it.”

“The request is not unjust.”

“My father,” said Azhriaz, “has his own affairs to tend to. I may
call to him, and he not hear the cry, no, not for some while. Rest assured,
nevertheless, that at length he will hear it, and that if you have
inconvenienced me, it may not gladden him.”

“You have made your threat,” said the king, “and your boast. We
are ready to extend all politeness to you, provided you demonstrate yourself
worthy. Any cunning witch, who had gained an ability for breathing water, might
come here and say what you have said. Should we be gentle with you for
Azhrarn’s sake, and the parenthood be discovered as a lie—such, too, might
offend the Prince of Demons.”

‘‘To call to him requires a spell,” said Azhriaz.

“I shall set at your disposal my own mage-chamber, and only I and
my scholars shall be by.”

“Let me do it, then,” said Azhriaz. But her heart beat heavily,
and cold.

They
ascended on foot—it was all the rage to walk, since elsewhere in the sea one
did not—between high-pillared roofs of the palace. It was night on earth, and
night in the domed city. Stars had also been lit, far up in the dome, by
slaves, who must climb bizarre scaffolding each sunset to do it, and often fell
to their deaths on the streets below. The king strolled amid burning torches,
and now and then paused beside some flowering shrub—for the upper city was
mantled with plants, to supplement and enhance the air. “Sample this bloom,” he
said to Azhriaz, so courteous now it boded ill, for it seemed he thought he
could be lavish with such manners; soon there would be no need for them. And
Azhriaz said, “Pretty enough, king. But black flowers remind me of pathetic
human death.” “Oh, Death,” said the king of Tirzom Jum. “We believe he is a
relative of ours, sprung from our stock but debased. His green hair and eyes
whitened in disgust at his exile to dry land.” “I deduce you have never met the
Lord Uhlume,” said Azhriaz, who had not properly met him either. “For you are
only black as the black men of the earth are black.” “Theirs is a
red-blackness,” said the king, contemptuously. “Or a brown blackness, or the
purple black of damsons.” “And you are only black as jet,” said Azhriaz. “But
the Lord Uhlume, my un-uncle, is black as
black
is
black, and no other.”

The mage-chamber of the king lay a long distance up in the dome.
It was a sphere of obsidian stuff, windowless, and held by three towers in
claws of brackish brass.

The king, and seven of his chosen scholars, entered, with Azhriaz,
and the door was shut on them.

No sooner had this happened than soft light filled the sphere.

“All is at your disposal,” said the king. “Commence.”

“Stand back some way,” said she. “Such things may occur as will
dazzle or scorch you.”

“Pray do not be afraid for
us.”

Yet, back they stood, and made eight figures against the curving
wall. Azhriaz went to the wide room’s center, and was alone.

Mortals called to Azhrarn by means of demon pipes, either given,
filched, or come across. Then he did not commonly answer. Only myth said that
he did. With those he loved, such artifacts were rarely necessary. With
Dunizel, in the final months of their liaison, a thought would have brought him
to her side. And it must be he had longed for this thought, but she, for the
sake of his child (for in her own way, she was adamant against his proposed
employment of it), had resisted. And now she was dead, and Azhriaz had been put
to use exactly as he vowed—

What did Azhriaz need then, his unloved child, to call her father?

Nothing.

Yet she stood in the sea king’s mage-chamber, and made a vast
show. To attract Azhrarn’s attention, to flatter him, maybe. Or only to delay
the inevitable.