Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth)

Delusion’s Master

Tales of the Flat Earth: Book Three

Tanith Lee

Delusion
’s Master

Tales of the Flat Earth: Book Three

By Tanith Lee

© 1981

Kindle edition 2013

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and
events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real
people, or events, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

The right of Tanith Lee to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design
and Patents Act, 1988.

Cover
Art by John Kaiine

Interior
illustration by Tanith Lee

An Immanion Press Edition published through Kindle

http://www.immanion-press.com

[email protected]

Table of Contents

Introduction by Tanith Lee

Prologue: The Tower of
Baybhelu

Part One: The Souring of
the Fruit

Chapter 1: Storytellers

Chapter 2: All About
Bhelsheved

Chapter 3: Night Works

Part Two: Soul-of-the-Moon

Chapter 1: A Sacrifice

Chapter 2: The Magical
Engine

Chapter 3: Sunfire

Chapter 4: Moonflame

Chapter 5: An Image of
Light and Shadow

Part Three: The Bitterness
of Joy

Chapter 1: Seventeen
Murderesses

Chapter 2: Mother and
Daughter

Chapter 3: The Aloe

Chapter 4: Dice

Chapter 5: Love and Death
and Time

INTRODUCTION

The start of this book was
a little odd, for me. I knew it was coming up to be done, but the prologue
turned out so insistent it wouldn’t wait, sprang on me, flapping multi-coloured
wings and bellowing. When that happens, if at all possible, I find it’s best to
agree. So I gladly wrote the prologue, a story in its own right. After which I
went back to other work already in progress, and to so-called real life.

I was then in
the process of buying my own first, very small house. A lovely place, with an
extra, tiny area I could use for a workroom. There was space throughout too for
all the books and plants I was already amassing. Even a garden, about the size
of a large dining table, which had trees, and backed onto a wild orchard. Also
it was only ten minutes walk from my parents’ flat, and as I’ve said, I liked
their company. I was thirty-two.

So, with one
thing and another, following its prologue,
Delusion’s Master
was not
returned to for some months. I recall the first line of the second beginning
(Chapter 1—Storytellers) coming to me as I walked through the wintry park,
looking at a flaming sunset.

Accordingly,
re-entering the book, I re-met Chuz, Prince Madness, whose aspect was beauty
and ugliness and the unreason and overthrow of either.

Chuz. (His
name, by the way, rhymes its “U” with the compressed “U” of such words as
“pull,” or “fulfill.”) Unlike the previous leading males of
Night’s Master
and
Death’s Master
, Chuz seems to be not only an attribute that becomes
a being, and so, indirectly, a hero, but eventually the clay that forms an
actual protagonistic hero—though this mortalesque potential is more evidently
achieved in Volumes 4 and 5—
Delirium’s Mistress
and
Night’s Sorceries
.
While it is
Azhrarn
(contrasuggestively?) who becomes the true heroic
lead of Chuz’s eponymous book.

My mother was
always an influence on my work. (My father also, though generally less
directly.) Both of them now and then contributed flashes of insight, or ideas.
But my
Mother’s
influence was often there behind the scenes simply
because she had first brought me into the realms of myth, fantasy and legend.
The heroine then of
Delusion’s Master
owes a definite amount to Hylda
Lee. Physically as well. Both my parents were beautiful to see, a state they
maintained into age. But the part-unearthly Dunizel (pronounced “
Dune
-izz-el”),
without any doubt, has a look of my mother when young—excepting only my mother
was never a
natural
blonde, and her eyes were not blue but a very dark
green.

Until I left
home, I’d always read my work to her as I wrote it. Aside from being a
wonderful and receptive audience she was a first-class Second Editor. She also,
as I’ve often mentioned, could read my appalling badly-spelled hand-written MSs
(they remain as bad, or worse), and type them into completely legible copy. By
the time I moved into the new house and started to assemble my private world
there, she had already begun to type
Delusion’s Master
, since I had
finished it literally on the cusp of leaving the flat. However, due to all the
flurry of departure I hadn’t finished reading the novel to her. We had then
jointly decided she would type it, and take in that way the last third of the
book; here and there this had happened before. She knew the plot, of course,
that
I’d told her as soon as
I
knew.

She never did,
though, reach the end of this novel. Her general health had been difficult for
many years, but nothing staggeringly dangerous, it seemed. But in August of
1980 she died.

Of familial
grief I won’t speak here, it isn’t my place. Of my own I can say only this. I
deeply loved my mother yet I never deeply mourned her. Her loss became merely a
part of me, a constant that never prevents my thinking of her with joy, or
relishing my memories; an essential Presence—that is
missing
. Yet still
there. She remains mine and, I believe, somewhere Else—her
own
.

For those
reasons then, although Hylda Lee caused the inception of the Flat Earth
Sequence, and therefore its first book (
Night’s Master
), was and is
dedicated to her,
Delusion’s Master
, in all its own different ways, is
essentially
hers
.

Ever and
always.

Tanith
Lee

2011

PROLOGUE

The Tower of Baybhelu

A mile from the enameled
walls of the city, where the desert lay gleaming like golden glass, a beautiful
woman sat in a stone tower, and she played with a bone.

“Will he come
to me today?” she asked the bone, rocking it in her arms like a child. “Or will
he seek me tonight? All the stars will shine, but he will shine more brightly.
For sure, he dare not come by day, for he would outshine the sun. The sun would
die of shame, and the whole world grow dark. But oh, he will come. Nemdur,”
said the beautiful woman, “Nemdur, my lord.”

Her name was
Jasrin; Nemdur was the king whose city stood one mile to the east. Once, he had
been her husband. No longer.

When the day
began to go, folding its robes around it, slipping from the desert silently,
Jasrin called for her women. There were only two attendants now, one very old,
and one a young girl. Both pitied her, but she barely noticed them. Nor did she
notice the loathing behind their pity. At the door below, brawny men, armed
with swords and axes, maintained watch, charged to keep danger out, or in. Palm
trees, with fronds of brazen green, enclosed the tower, and a little pool was
spread there like a piece fallen from the sky. At sunset, the girl ran down to
the pool and drew water for her mistress’s bath. Presently Jasrin bathed, and
was perfumed and anointed. The old woman combed Jasrin’s desert-colored hair,
and plaited jewels into it, as Jasrin instructed her. A garment of silk was put
on Jasrin’s body and golden slippers on her feet. All the while, Jasrin kept a
firm hold of the bone. She had some cause for this. It was the bone of her
child.

“Prepare the
feast,” Jasrin said to her attendants. “Soon my lord Nemdur will arrive.”

The attendants
obeyed her, as best they could. They laid the tables with embroidered napkins
and set out plates of silver, and put cooked meats on them, bread, fruits and
sweetmeats. They placed wine ready in silver vessels packed about with ice.

“Make music,”
said Jasrin.

The girl took
a stringed instrument and plucked notes from it like sharp crystal sighs.

Jasrin leaned
at the window. She looked toward the city a mile away along the darkened slopes
of the desert.

Above, the
still stars blazed. Jasrin looked for blazing stars which moved, lamps and
torches proceeding from the city of Sheve, the procession which would bring her
lord to her.

“Soon,” she
said to the bone of her dead child, “soon he will return to me. His hair like
bronze, his strength like the sun, his eyes like the stars. He will lie with
me, and his mouth will be wine, his loins fire. Oh, the music he will make in
me, and I will be only an instrument for that music. And in that music, I shall
conceive. I shall become big with you, my child; you will be born again.”

But if the
bone heard her, it paid no heed. If the night heard her, it paid none. And if
Nemdur, the king, where he sat in his palace with his new queen, if he heard
her, then he stopped his ears.

At midnight, Jasrin screamed. She flung the bone from her into a corner. She began to tear
her skin and her hair, and her two attendants ran to her, and they prevented
her. Jasrin had grown so weak even an old woman and a slender girl could
restrain her—they were, besides, well practiced. This happened every night.

And, as on
every night, Jasrin wept for many hours. Every night was wept away in her
tears, till in the pastel moments before dawn she slept a little, and waking,
called for her child. And then the girl would bring her the bone and Jasrin
would rock the bone and hold it to her breast.

As the sun
rose, Jasrin asked the bone again: “Will he come to me today? Or will he seek
me tonight?”

But Nemdur
would never come to her.

She had been
sixteen when she was wed to him. She had lived till then in a kingdom of many
waters, of rivers, lakes, waterfalls, fountains. Green hills were piled above
green valleys, skies overlaid a mosaic of green foliage. When they told her she
must go from this green velvet land to a land of raw amber, Jasrin had wept, in
the manner of one at ease among waters, facile with their use. Obedient,
wretched and afraid, she had gone to the man who was to be her husband, and she
had fixed her eyes on the green ground she must leave. While with gentle strong
fingers he lifted the veil from her face, it was as if the sun shone in on her.
Slowly she raised her eyes, and beheld Nemdur was the sun, and the sun dried
her weeping with his smile.

Nemdur was
beautiful, a young lion. His hair glinted bright as metal shavings, his eyes
were the pale burning slate of desert air. When he saw his bride, he had smiled
at her because he was pleased by her loveliness. He had wished to be pleased;
now, she wished only to please him.

She rode to
Sheve in a carriage that tinkled with silver discs, her hair cascading, her
eyes brimming not with tears, but love. She was the princess of all waterfalls.
In the palace, behind the doors of the bedchamber, Nemdur taught her of another
land where fire and liquid mingled.

Soon, she was
heavy with his child. Nemdur loaded her with other gifts, necklets of gold,
silver mirrors, bracelets of sapphire, ropes of pearls. He had made for her a
garden where lotuses lay like swans on the shallow pools, a water garden in the
midst of a desert. He sent her the pelt of a lion he himself had slain, a
mantle in which to wrap his son when it was born. So much he sent, but he
himself did not come to her any more. The child made her big, cumbersome and
ugly. Nemdur, free as sand or sunlight, went in to other women. His appetite
was large, and his tastes various. The child had merely hastened an inevitable
desire in him for change. Certainly, there was yet room in his heart for
Jasrin, but also room for others, and in his bed, room for a world of women.