Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (27 page)

Carnal love.
It was their art, their genius. No coin but has two sides.

So the
delicate tracery of fingers was, one moment, exquisite delirium, next the fine
lines drawn by a razor; her internal pangs—a mounting euphoria, a ghastly quake
within her flesh.

They pierced
her, each of those who, unseen, attended on her. And the piercing was now a
wonder, and now a blade, a spike. They tongued her, mouthed her—the epitome of
delight, the gnawing of wolves.

Up the
stairway of thrilling horror and disemboweling paroxysm they danced and dragged
her.

At last, even
though her mouth was stoppered, once more she screamed.

She had
formerly known three ecstasies. There were countless others. Ecstasies like
knives, ecstasies like the volcano’s heart. Through each orgasmic vortex they
thrust her. She passed through the eyes of many needles, each one narrower than
the last.

At the seventh
gate, shrieking, she died.

In the cool
gray light before the dawn, the corpse of Zharet, a cage from which a frantic
soul had torn its way, lay on the sand. Her limbs pointed at the four corners
of the earth, splayed and deformed. Her face was the representation of all
mortifying spasms, petrifying to any human that might see it. Her body bore no
other marks.

As the light
waxed, a young man could be discerned, kneeling beside her, as if he mourned,
his blond hair falling like a stream of smoke across his cheek.

“Ah, no,
un-brother,” said Chuz. “You do not play fairly with me at all. Ah,
no
,
un-brother. Poor girl,” said Chuz to Zharet’s corpse. “Tell me, poor girl, what
am I? Am I madness? Yes.” Chuz sighed. “Your sinews have not stiffened yet,”
said Chuz to Zharet’s corpse.

Chuz came to
his feet. He turned his shoulder to Zharet, lying on the sand. He pondered.
“Who, after all, is less sane than Lord Death?” And then over his shoulder, he
snarled: “Get up, you slut, and obey me.”

And Zharet’s
corpse, its limbs still rigidly splayed, its toes and fingers clenched, its
eyes clenched shut, its mouth clenched wide, lumbered upright behind him.

“Ah, no,
un-brother,” repeated Chuz, so charmingly, so musically, that the wind
lessened, trying to emulate his tones. “Ah
no
.”

CHAPTER 4

Dice

The infant, divine or
demon, being a month old, could walk, and as she did so her long curling hair
swept the earth. As yet, she did not say anything. She was more Eshva than
Vazdru at this season, telling things and asking them with her eyes. In the sun
she grew white under her translucent pallor, drew her tresses over herself like
a robe, occasionally seemed to weep—without tears. Patently only the genes
Dunizel had imparted to her, the saving virtue of the solar comet, kept her
from enormous harm. She did not like the sun, abhored high noon, but was not
blasted.

She had none
of the softness or pudginess of the baby. Already she resembled a very small
child of two years.

There was
slight privacy for the mother and her daughter now. The only decided privacy
they had ever enjoyed had been when the child was still in the womb. However,
in Dunizel’s improvised lavish apartment, they would sometimes have leisure to
sit, and Dunizel would still recount stories, or conspire in strange silent
games with the child, involving colored beads, or the forms made by the
curtaining. Now and then, on an overcast day, they might journey up to a
secluded part of the temple roof, a shielded area set between two golden
parapets. Here, in a golden alley, the blotted sky of a desert winter above,
the child might run about, playing with a ball of silk like a cat, while
Dunizel watched her. Unlike the sun, gold seemed not to offend the Demon’s daughter.
Once or twice, indeed, she would disappear, as if by sorcery, into some
intimate interstice of the metal-scaled masonry. Dunizel would allow her to
absent herself for lengthy periods of time, only eventually seeking her,
quietly saying the name by which she had called the child: Soveh. Perhaps a
coincidence, perhaps an unconscious or psychic memory that Dunizel also, at her
genesis, had gone by such a name. Certainly, Azhrarn had not revealed this
detail. Nor had he himself attempted to name the child, to which he gave no
notable attention, and which he seemed to detest.

Neither mother
nor daughter was properly human. What they thought, or the bond between them,
is not easy to decipher. It appears that Dunizel, in her determination not to
abandon, displayed a fundamental maternal reaction. The child, by her antics,
displayed trust, also fundamental. And yet, the perfect prenatal liaison was no
more. The child had been born, drunk Eshva blood, given evidence of her
demoniac qualities. Azhrarn’s daughter, despite his neglect.

Today was
overcast by storm, the sun dim, but the strength of the winds themselves had
not penetrated to Bhelsheved. The child was dancing, attractively and
lunatically, in the gold alley on the roof of the temple. Dunizel reclined nearby.
Observing her face, one could see an intense silence at the depth of its
loveliness. She must have been thinking of Azhrarn, her parting from him, with
which he constantly tantalized and attempted to overcome her resolve. She had
not seen him in five nights. Knowing she had only to speak his name aloud in
the darkness to bring him to her side, she knew, too, that to do so would be to
acknowledge surrender to his wish that the child be unconsidered as anything
save the tool of his wickedness. It is conceivable Dunizel had pictured the
consequence, a tiny figure seated on the bright chair so much too big for it,
casting homicidal lightnings from her fists. “I will make her more fearful than
dragons,” he had said. No, Dunizel would not resign her child (hers, also,
hers) to such an advent. She could not call to him.

She examined
the silver and the gems that ornamented her, his gifts, imbued with his
protections of her. She wore no golden thing. Maybe she considered the demon
city. Every night the sun sank into a limbo under the world, but could she, the
comet’s child, endure the sunless country underground?

Bhelsheved was
unusually still all about, yet not peacefully so. This, too, Dunizel must have
felt. She may have deduced herself and the child as the source of some second
storm gathering beneath the sky. If she did, or if Azhrarn had warned her, it
had not diverted her intention of remaining.

In the leaden noon, the child Soveh came and sat down by Dunizel, looking into her face. Soveh raised
her hands and caught at Dunizel’s platinum hair. There was no clumsiness in
this gesture. Soveh was couth, coordinated beyond her years. Dunizel leaned
closer to facilitate the exploration. She seldom talked to the child,
respecting, save when she told stories, Soveh’s Eshva element which had not yet
attempted its voice. For there is little doubt such an infant could have talked
a few hours after its birth, if it had had the mind.

Suddenly a
door was opened onto the roof, and men appeared at the far end of the golden alley.
They were important notaries of a new hierarchy—that which had taken over the
management of temple affairs when the Servants of Heaven wilted. Now, however,
they had brought with them a priest and priestess, fear-eyed and thin as sticks
from their spiritual anorexia.

“Dunizel,
Favored Among Women,” declared one of the notaries, “some controversy has come
about. Accusations have been made. A woman emerged from the desert, of vast
learning and religious power, and she chastised us for holding false beliefs.
And despite her anger, she herself was loudly praised for the clarity of her
arguments. Now she has vanished. We are concerned, and request that you will
come into the temple, where the ablest among us will solicit answers of you, on
a number of points.”

Dunizel rose,
gathering the child with her. As in her village, so in Bhelsheved, she had
never replied negatively to any proper thing.

She went down
with them into the body of the temple, and the escort kept their distance, and
avoided the uncannily and totally focused eyes of the child.

There were
over two hundred men present below, to interrogate the woman who might be the
mother of a goddess, but most probably was the harlot of demons—so far and so
assured and so unnerved had the doubt gone and become, the sown seed of the
aloe.

She had been
interrogated long ago, in the ancient tower, before she had become a priestess,
before she had entered Bhelsheved. She looked no different now, save for the
child on her lap.

The child’s
face was quite unchildlike. She observed, she seemed to listen. She did not
grow restless.

One spoke.

“Dunizel,
Favored of Women. The god who fathered your infant, comes to you only by night,
and in secret. Is this not so?”

“Yes,” she
answered. “But if you know it to be so, why do you ask me?”

Another spoke.

“The
visitation has begun to trouble us, holy maiden. For if he comes only by night,
is it then that he is a being of darkness?”

“Yes,” she
said. “And can you not have realized this?”

“But the
darkness, holy maiden, is synonymous with all dark things. With deeds of
mischief and hidden ill.”

Dunizel did
not speak.

It was
difficult, after all, to exclaim out loud what had been whispered.

But yet
another spoke.

“There was one
who came among us once, and only by night, who brought unquiet thoughts,
baseness, treachery and murder. If your lover is a god, Dunizel, what is his
nature, other than the nature of night and of deceitful shadow?”

Again, Dunizel
did not speak.

“You must
reply!” They shouted, another and another of them.

The child
looked at them, and Dunizel looked at them, both with their blue eyes like a
turquoise lake or sky, until the shouting ceased.

But: “To be
mute will not protect you,” yet another stated eventually. “In this instance,
dumbness implies guilt.”

“Inform her,”
some cried, “of what her guilt is reckoned to be.”

“Why, of lying
with demons. Of bearing from her womb a perverse entity. Of the pretense
thereafter that these things were sacred and wholesome, which were an offense
to heaven.”

“I have
pretended nothing,” she said then. “You have declared my lover was a god, you
have told me what I have brought forth, and the essence of my child. You. Not
I.”

She was so
calm. She accused them of nothing.
Their
accusations slid from her like
water passing over glass. Though she must have known this day, this hour, might
come, must come, with all its peril, she had not been able to renounce her
fate, nor would she now. There was no cleverness, no cunning in her, for she
had no use for such devices, and perhaps they could not have saved her from
this.

“Tell us
then,” they said to her, a multitude of voices, dying away, making room for one
voice, or two, that were the collective voices of all, “Tell us the title and
the name of your unearthly husband.”

There were
many ways she might have evaded them. She was wise enough, she was cool and
still. And yet, and yet, how could she deny his name? They had only to question
her, which they had never done, to learn the truth.

“He is a Lord
of Darkness,” she said to them gravely. “He is named Azhrarn.”

There followed
a dreadful absence of all sound.

But after a
long, long while there started up a last voice, which said quaveringly to her:
“Can you be so poisonous, so damnable? Do you not loathe this thing you have
consorted with to the shame of all humanity?”

And to that
she might have said so very much. She might have recited the litany of love,
she might have grown proud, or tragic, or even doubted herself, perhaps, with
the face of her own kind turned against her utterly. It was also noon, night far away. He could in no way come to her. She might have implored their mercy.
But Dunizel did none of these things. She looked upon the two hundred men,
their aversion and their might. And gently she said to them: “The lord Azhrarn
is the reason for my life.”

It was as if
she had flung fire into their midst.

The seventy men who had
come from the desert, moving oddly over the dunes and along the ridges, were
quite unlike those two hundred men within the heart-temple, those two hundred
dressed in finery, oiled and combed and perfumed and ornamented, who now
screeched prayers and imprecations, who beat their hands on the floor, who
presently sent for servants, guards, slaves to bind the human demoness in their
midst, bind her with cords of silk, and all the while in dread of night and he
who might return to save her then.

No, truly, the
seventy from the desert were unlike those.

For they wore
humble garments. Some were clean and some stank, but none were oiled or
perfumed. Most bizarre, too, was their mode of advance, which in each case was
hesitant, although hesitant in a remarkably purposeful manner.

Now one would
stop. He would circle round something. Now another would stop. He would make a
sign, he would kneel down. He would kiss a thing upon the sand. What could it
be? A stone. He had trodden on it, and now he kissed it, murmuring. And the
murmur? This way: “Oh exalted one, forgive my vile heel, which has bruised
you.”