Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (19 page)

But sometimes
she must go elsewhere. To be shut up in isolation for many hours or days, or in
a room where venomous snakes, golden and green, slid up and down, or within a
wall of mirrors where she might see nothing but herself, or inside walls of
darkness where she might see nothing at all. At such tests, one other always
attended, hidden but in earshot. Whoever underwent such a test and could not
bear it had only to cry aloud three times to be set free. But after these
compassionate freedoms came the kindest of all dismissals. Priests must be of
stronger stuff. Or, of
stranger
stuff. For none of these tests were to
gauge force or physical power, but the inner wells, the elasticity of psychic
things. For the testing asked, in substance: Who can make equilibrium in
himself, from dreams and faith alone? With this in mind, all the trials were
just, and accurate.

And the girl
endured. Did not even endure, as such. Strangeness seemed as natural to her as
normalcy had been; perhaps more natural. She approached nothing with
trepidation. Even certain ordeals that had to do with elements of pain—such as
fasting in the guise of starvation—she showed no aversion to. She went to meet
each thing alertly, without hesitation, her eyes wide, her heart open.

The final
stages of the testing were the most obscure. They had to do with perception and
sensitivity. For example, an apple might be brought and set down before the
novice. “What do you see?” would be the question. Some would study the apple
and reply: “This is life. Food in the flesh of it, future food in its pips,
which may be planted in the ground.” Or some would say: “Here is the emblem of
a man—the skin—the flesh; the seeds—which in man are the seeds of his soul.”
The girl took the apple and she smiled. She threw it in the air and caught it
in her hands. Surprising her earnest questioners into consternation, she
lightly said, “Like a ball that children play with.” Surprising her questioners
into profound silence, she said, “Round, as one day the world may be, which now
is flat.”

Late in the
day, they took her to the roof of the tower. They left her by the parapet:
“Keep vigil until the dark has come.”

The desert was
softer in that era than it had been long ago. The day faded behind leaves and
fronds, and the air turned to a sea of blue. Clusters of stars appeared. In the
dusk, the girl heard faint music below her, and a woman’s voice murmured, “Soon
he will return to me.” It was the voice of Jasrin, out of time, which was
heard.

The girl was
not alarmed—never so. All her life, she had been aware of supernatural essences
about her. That she now beheld and heard them more clearly, fined by her
training in that place, was inevitable.

Turning, she
saw, against the sequined sea-sky, a black woman, young, slender and beautiful,
and with her a woman with pale skin and yellow hair. The girl would have
recognized them, from the stories, as the two queens of Nemdur. But she knew
them also by that infallible recognition which attended a mystic sight. The two
women spoke together softly, and walked about the roof. The girl did not catch
their words, (or conceivably the language of the area was greatly altered), and
when they came to her, they walked through her. She felt their passage like a
low summer breeze blowing between her bones and across her blood.

Not all
persons left on the roof witnessed the dark woman and the pale pass by. Only
the most responsive did so, and this was all they saw, this brief scene, for
some reason indelibly impressed upon the bricks and the aura of the
tower—possibly because it was a scene of harmony, out of all those scenes the
tower had been party to, of suffering and insanity, of evil and lament. As one
happy day will stand out in the memory of a year of sadness.

But after the
ghost women had gone away, the girl who was the comet’s child saw a third
figure come walking across the roof.

To be sure,
she did not see him well. There was, in the purpling intensity of the twilight,
something cloudy about him. His purple cloak, also, blended with the rising
water of night, and curious scintillants on the cloak might have been confused
with far, dull stars.

She did not
know this apparition, not even from legend, for hereabouts legends of such as
he had grown corrupt and unrepresentative—as Azhrarn himself would learn. Yet,
not knowing, still she
knew
, and at once she lowered her head and
shielded her eyes.

“Ah,” said he,
in a most musical voice, “so you guess?”

“I do not
guess your name, lord,” said the girl. “But the air ripples like a stream
before you.”

“I will tell
you who I am. I am your lunacy,” said Chuz, Delusion’s Master, Prince Madness,
one of the five Lords of Darkness. “For you
are
mad, my dear, in
following this vocation. Even your goodness is a craziness. But then, all the
very good are mad, just as the very wicked are mad. In fact, there is hardly
any difference between the holy and the profane, save in their ideals and their
deeds. Both are fanatics. Both are ruthless. Tomorrow you will be sent to your
temple. Before long, your fate will find you out. Do you wonder what it might
be? No,” added Chuz suddenly, “do not look at me. You have glanced, inspect no
further. I understand the temptation is strong, but I would not have you any
more than a fraction my subject. I will accordingly muffle my face.”

“For that I
thank you,” said the girl. “Sensing your power, I comprehend you are generous.”

“It is not my
motive to enslave you. Another will come to you in due course. Which may be
his
madness, I believe, a delusion beyond all others he, though not I, have
achieved in the world. Would you have his name? Best not. My third cousin,
three times removed through the black dynasties of night. Less kin to me than a
lizard is, but nearer to me than one grain of sand to another. And you will
know him, too. I think you are mad enough, my darling, to pity him a little. And
how he will stare at that!”

The edge of
the cloak, damson-colored as the sky now was, brushed like a long wing over the
dusty roof before her. She saw the stars of it were bits of broken glass. And
she heard the rattle of dice in the moment that he vanished.

Those who
questioned her after were perplexed.

“It was
perhaps the temptation of a demon, which failed,” they said. “Or can it have
been an occult proclamation, some messenger of the gods?”

Whatever it
was, next day they conducted her to salt-white Bhelsheved, to the hibiscus
towers, the lake of turquoise mirror that matched her eyes. She was a
priestess. They named her Dunizel, Soul-of-the-Moon.

In her bubble
of crystal, now she floated by others in similar bubbles, (yet not the same,
not at all), everyone magically adrift in the currents of the heavenly city,
that Upperearth-on-Earth.

Friendships
were rarely made here. Inner joys were woven, introvert candles kindled, divine
eccentricities. Religion was the flower, and they the bees which visited and revisited,
their sole purpose to make spiritual honey with which to sweeten the sourness
of the outer world. Bhelsheved the beehive.

So, in her
calm, waiting loveliness, her iridescent steely innocence, she dwelled for
three years. Until the scent of somber fire came to her in the night, and she
knew the wicked thing burning there like a lamp of black flame. And coming out,
she found him, Azhrarn, whom Chuz had named her fate.

CHAPTER 5

An Image of Light and Shadow

The sun had come up over
the world, and Dunizel, Moon’s Soul, had been returned to the blossom garden by
the sacred lake of Bhelsheved. And he who had lain over her, yet not with her,
the marvelous weight of him, not in the least heavy or oppressive, yet of a
substance that had seemed to combine with her own flesh, he had gone back to
his city of Druhim Vanashta, underground.

That demon
metropolis, lit eternally by the light of the Underearth, which was neither sun
nor moon nor stars, yet most like starlight—though brighter—bright as a sun
composed of shadow—and yet milder—more like the moon, yet not the moon, for
colors palely glowed and swarthily smoked there. . . . Did
Druhim Vanashta seem fair to him, when he reentered there, into its lambency
and its altered time?

The towers
were still as tall and slender, still as fantastically ornamented, the lacelike
parapets still holding their arrow shafts of burning jewels, the windows their
multi-hues of glass and crystal and corundum. The walls still rose like blades,
or curved like half-closed wings. The brass and silver, jade and porcelain and
platinum were still purely wonderful to behold. The gardens and the parks of
spangled black, where fish sang in the filigree trees and birds swam in the
pools and flowers chimed like bells, had not altered, would never alter, never
could. And the glamorous citizens passed up and down there, bowing, obeising
themselves to Azhrarn, each one fabulous, his subjects, all of them in love
with him, for demons seldom served anything they did not worship, and Azhrarn
they worshipped and to spare. It is pleasant to be loved.

But to love—

Demons did
little in the paltry way of men. Their passions, as they themselves, were like
the sheerness of great lights. They had probably invented sexuality, physical
love. They could not have invented such a thing if love itself had not been to
them some sort of key to the world’s heart. But fire consumes, eating itself
with what it feeds on.

Once, he had
taken another, as a child, even into the demon city, had watched him grow there
like a plant, like a young tree, and, at the first Azhrarn had said to him: “I
do not give my love lightly, but once given it is sure.” Which was not quite
exact. Inventories of the liaisons of Azhrarn might be drawn up, some of them
very light, very casual, the stuff of a mortal year, a day in Druhim Vanashta.
But love has many houses, many countries. All exist, then and now, and for as
long as what lives can see and feel and think. For love is, too, a product of
thought. While it seems to destroy reason, yet nothing that
cannot
in
some mode reason, can ever love.

Azhrarn went
about his city and about its gardens and outer environs, in the changeless
morning-evening, dawn-dusk of Underearth’s sublumination.

Those who saw
him, responding to his moods, as always, sensed in him an obsession with
everything, and with nothing, or with something other than that underground
place. They had been aware formerly of his cold anger. They had been primed to
serve him in this anger, and had already done so when the sorcerous tower of
blackness and lights had risen in the desert. Yet now the princely caste of the
demons, the Vazdru, said one to another: “Our lord no longer requires our
service. He has happened upon something which he will engage alone.” And
knowing, by a sort of empathy, what that something must be, they knew also the
sharp gorgeous jealousy of their kind.

Even in
attainment, to love may encompass pain. Beyond the moment of fulfillment, who
can ignore other moments that lie in wait, moments of doubt, of unlucky possibility?
Truly, most of Azhrarn’s lovers, (mortals), had betrayed him—not, it is sure,
by cleaving to another in his stead, since such was virtually inconceivable—but
rather by disappointing him, failing him, ceasing to surprise or entrance him.
Or by hankering after some other thing and wishing for it as mightily as they
wished to keep his liking. And as love’s supreme law is that nothing must be of
such value as itself, that hankering of theirs each time lost them his regard,
and, usually, their lives. For demons tended to kill those who failed them,
less from vengeance than a desire to tidy up the trailing loose ends of an
affair. (Rotten food is not cherished, but burnt or thrown away.)

At the center
of the garden of Azhrarn’s palace, a fountain played, a fountain of red fire
that was neither hot nor illuminating, yet most beautiful for all that.

He seated
himself on the sable lawn by the fountain, Azhrarn the Prince of Demons. The
jet and topaz wasps played about the transparent flowers, and sometimes he
watched them. His people did not directly approach him, but once an Eshva woman
went by, one of the handmaidens of his palace, feeding the gentle winged fish
in the trees from a silver basket. Azhrarn observed the woman, who, like all of
demonkind, was superlatively lovely. He examined her loveliness with pleasure,
but it seemed he equated her with the flowers and shrubs of the garden. It
became clear from his glances at this Eshva, that if he visualized a woman, it
was Dunizel he saw.

How strange it
was. The sun could sear him to ashes; Dunizel was the child of a solar comet.
Perhaps, not strange at all.

But days and
nights were passing on the earth. Seven days, and twice seven days. A month
passed. Two months, and a third month began.

He had not
gone back to her. He had sent her no sign. Though the time of his lower world
was unlike that of her world above, yet he could measure both, and match them
to a second. He knew how long ago he had left her. Thus, he thought of her, but
did not seek her out. Could it have been he was reluctant, thinking she would
disappoint him, her attraction less, waning like the moon? Could it have been
some other thing he doubted, some aspect of himself? No easy matter to
interpret such a heart and brain as his. But he did not go back to her until
the midst of the third month.