Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (21 page)

‘
Here
the sun shuns,

Unsheathes the wind her claws.

Yet in the gate is one:

Fate remains alone.

Fate with fire-eyes broods at the double doors,

Playing a pipe of bone.

Fate with brown hands unwraps each day,

And casts the husk away,

When each waste night is gone.”

At
which Kheshmet, Lord Fate, left off playing and observed, “The doors, double or
otherwise, are absent. Nor is the pipe of bone.”

“Fourth Lord of Darkness,” said Sovaz, “why are you here?”

“The exalted shall be flung down and the lowly raised on high.
That is fate’s law. Behold Bhelsheved, flung down. I am obliged to call from
time to time, for form’s sake.”

“Why at this hour?”

“You,” said Kheshmet placidly, “have come here to seek your own
fate. And here you will find it. Or partly do so.”

“What is my fate?”

“Do not challenge me, Sovaz-Azhriaz, Azhrarn’s daughter. I do not
know your fate, I merely represent it.”

And getting up, putting away the pipe (which was of pastel jade),
he offered his arm courteously to guide her into the city.

“Permit me,” said Kheshmet, “to show you your mother’s tomb.”

“No,” said Sovaz, and drew back, while the lion snarled and padded
closer.

“Follow then,” said Kheshmet. “Or not.” And he turned mildly in at
the gateway, and onto one of the four roads of the city. “I have a mind to go
there myself. She too, Doonis-Ezael, Moon’s Soul, was a pupil of mine. Indeed,
she had an allegiance to three of us: to madness—it ran in the family; her own
mother was an idiot until the comet cured her—to destiny, and to death. Only
wickedness had nothing to do with Dunizel. So, of course, she became the
mistress of Wickedness.”

Presently, Sovaz entered the gateway after Kheshmet, and did
follow him along the road between the temples and shrines. The lion trotted at
her heels, pausing occasionally to preen its wings.

Here Sovaz had been born. Here she had been carried about and
shown to the people, who believed her, then, to be a god’s progeny, and her
mother the Chosen of that god. The faintest of remembrances lingered, or
returned. Her time in the Underearth, and the throes of sudden physical growth,
had wiped away the pictures and deeds of her beginnings, till only emotion,
bitter, bemused, hurtful, was left.

The sun rose, and blue lights shot from the smashed windows that
nearly matched the eyes of Sovaz.

Kheshmet walked before, and now and then he took up again and
played a trill on the jade pipe. When this happened, the ghosts or memories of
Bhelsheved’s white pigeons transparently poured down from the tower tops to
circle his hands and shaven head. (The lion stared and licked its jaws.)

They reached the gardens of blossom trees beside the heart-lake of
the city. The gardens were a wilderness; only groves of stumps stood there now,
as outside. The water of the lake was unblue, unbright. Probably no fish
remained in it.

“Here is the grave,” said Fate, pointing to the turf beside the
lake.

There was no sign, nothing to show that the ground contained
anything, but Sovaz knew Fate did not lie. Dunizel’s body had found an unmarked
bed; Azhrarn had disdained to cover the beautiful flesh which had betrayed him
for death, or else he could not bring himself to throw over it the black soil.
Some cautious scholar or some simpleton who had pity, or only a sense of
tidiness, saw to it.

Sovaz regarded the turf, then she turned from it, and then turned
back. She sat down by the spot, and laid her hand on the bare earth a moment.
Today she was dressed, or seemed to be, as a young woman, but for traveling,
and she had a knife in her belt, which next she took out. With the knife Sovaz
cut some of her long hair, the way hair was sometimes shorn in mourning in
those lands, and others. Sovaz sprinkled these black curling tresses over the
markerless grave. Soon, black hyacinths began to rise where the hair had
fallen, but Sovaz did not stay to see. She had got up again, and walked away around
the lake.

“Here she came to him, living,” Sovaz murmured aloud as she
walked, “and here she came to him, dead. Here they spoke and here they loved
and here he swore to destroy the country and here she dissuaded him.” Then
Sovaz stood still and looked down deep into the lake. The four bridges
reflected in it, and the temple at their meeting—everything wrecked and robbed
though it was. Then the lion reflected in it, having flown up in the air after
the ghost birds. And then Fate, who had come to stand beside her. At this,
Sovaz saw her own reflection, and that of Kheshmet in his vivid garment. Yet
the images trembled and changed. They seemed to be not those of a girl and a
man, or one who took on a man’s form—but first a white column and a column of
yellow-red, thereafter a white flame and a copper flame—but then two young men
shone upward from the water. They were not distinct, but the hair of one was
the color of apricots, and of the other, black.

By whatever means, Sovaz knew them from their stories—Simmu, who
stole immortality from the gods, and Zhirek the Magician, one of the greatest
of his kind, for he had learned the magic of the sea peoples, a thing not often
achieved.

“Do you see as I see?” inquired Sovaz.

“Perhaps not,” said Fate. “Yet if something unusual has appeared,
it will be to do with me. I am its harbinger. “

When he spoke, the image of Simmu faded, and only the reflection
of Kheshmet rippled in the water. But that of Zhirek continued before Sovaz.

“The fate of Zhirek the Magician,” she said then. “What was it?”

“He had been blessed or cursed with invulnerability, but
immortality he spurned. He would have taken service with your father, but
Azhrarn refused him, for reasons only speculated upon. Eventually Zhirek, who
could not die as he then much wished to do, took contrary service instead with
Uhlume, Lord Death.”

“The tale is an ancient one. Surely, though invulnerable and
long-lived, Zhirek will by now be ended?”

“It seems to me,” said Fate, musingly, “that though Zhirek is dead
in all ways, of intellect, heart, and mind, his invulnerable health and
vitality have not yet surrendered him. Somewhere, he does live, or rather,
does exist. And he is mad, naturally. The awful punishment of Simmu, whom
Zhirek always loved and distrusted and so hated, made sure of it. It is the
insanity of Zhirek, maybe, which attracts the idea of him to you. Some nuance
of your lover’s?”

Sovaz picked up a pebble immediately and threw it in the lake, and
the indistinct image of Zhirek vanished.

“But you speak to me of my own fate, Kheshmet. Where is it?”

At that, the image of Kheshmet in the lake also vanished, and
Kheshmet with it.

Sovaz smiled in anger. They were all tricksters and wraiths and
gaudy showmen, these male part unrelatives of hers.

Up in the sky, the winged lion wheeled fantastically, catching
bird ghosts in its mouth—which tasted of sugary smoke, but always somehow
evaded swallowing.

Sovaz wandered about the desert city. But she was careful to avoid
those sites which it seemed to her she had visited with her mother, nor did she
go back to Dunizel’s grave.

In the heat of the day, Sovaz lay down in a temple court, under a
porch, and slept. She dreamed Zhirek stood before her in a priest’s robe, with
a collar of jewels. The stories made much of his eyes, which had been the color
of blue water in a green shade, or green water under a sky of dusk. But his
eyes were darker now, all shadow. He said to her coldly, “It was in my nature
to do good, but I gained an evil reputation, and justly. I did much wickedness.
Forget the voice of your mother, who told you Azhrarn was the darling of the
world, who formed the first cats for a jest, and invented love. Go and do
wickedness as I did. No one can escape destiny. It runs behind and before. It
is in the breath and the blood.”

“And where now,” Sovaz asked of him in the dream (a human enough
dream, no Vazdru abstraction), “where now do you dwell, diligently performing
wickedness to please your conception of destiny?”

“I do nothing now, I am nothing now. Neither wicked nor virtuous.
And I have no look of who I was, no powers, and no name.”

“How is it that you know of me.”

“I do not. It is you who know of me.”

When Sovaz woke, the sun was setting. She called the winged lion,
and they sped up into the sunset, which turned their paleness blood-red, and
made the hair of Sovaz a storm cloud. And they flew over the desert and over
all those lands, toward a far-off shore where two seas ran together and were
one.

She
had announced to him she would never seek him, never obey or pay homage, until
seas were fires, winds seas, the earth glass, “and the gods come down on
ladders to lick the feet of men.” And Azhrarn had said no more.

Now Sovaz stood on the seas’ shore and she summoned illusion to
her, and illusion hurried to attend.

Inside an hour, a terrible sight was to be seen in that area. The
two seas which joined had become an ocean of raging arson over which lightnings
flashed and crackled. While from the east and north had flown two winds, and
they were salt waters, and waves curled through them, and they swept against
the land in breakers, roaring, with thin green fish whirled in their midst. And
the land itself chipped and splintered, for it was glass, and under the surface
you might see through the mineral trenches to laval pits and the bones of
beasts and men some centuries old, all caught as if in crystal resin. Last of
all, in the center of the frantic scene, a glowing ladder seemed to uncoil
between the lightning and the tempest, and drop down until it touched the glass
of the earth. Here stood some ragged dirty savage men with their mouths open in
astonishment, and out of the heavens came flitting beings neither male nor
female, shining facsimiles of the gods. And the pretend-gods, reaching the
make-believe men, bowed low and busily lapped their filthy toes.

Near moonrise, though the moon was not to be seen in the
confusion, a dark smolder might be espied rushing upward through the crystal
ground. Sovaz kneeled, crossed her hands on her breast, and bowed her head, in
the attitude of an extreme docility.

Suddenly some of the glass shattered, and a pillar of black fire
burst out. For a moment it towered there against the flames and torrent of sky
and sea, and then it died down and a man had filled its place, folded in a
black cloak. He glanced about him some minutes.

“I acknowledge your joke,” he said. “You are truly Vazdru. You
will go to any length, however sumptuous or cataclysmic, in order solely to
avoid the words:
It
appears
I
am at fault.”

Sovaz, kneeling, hands crossed, head bowed, said clearly, “It
appears I am at fault.”

Azhrarn snapped his fingers, and the winds let go their water on
the ocean, which was quenched to sea again. Freed, the winds sped away to the
north and east corners of the world. The earth grew solid and dense. It put on
sands and grasses and rock. The figures of gods and humans disappeared, and the
heavenly ladder became a silver necklace wound in the veil of the rising moon.

Sovaz still kneeled, her head still bowed.

“You were clever enough to engage my attention,” said Azhrarn.
“What do you want?”

“I will do your bidding,” velvetly said Sovaz. “I will atone for
my insults. I will revere and adore you. I am your slave.”

“Changed heart,” velvetly said Azhrarn, “tell me why.”

At that Sovaz looked up and gazed at him, but not into his face,
with unvelvet pride and unfriendliness. “There is no escape,” she said. “You
made me for your purpose. I will fulfill your purpose.”

“You have grown to hate mankind.”

“Those I would love or hate are beyond my love or hate. I hate
none, and I love none. But I am respectful. I am a dutiful daughter. I cut my
hair and left flowers on my mother’s grave. And I kneel to you.”

“Get up,” said Azhrarn.

And he turned from her and beckoned to the air, and out of it came
the winged lion. It had taken refuge from the maelstrom of illusions so high up
in the ether, its ruff and tail and wings were trickled by tinkling essences of
the stars. Or else sky elementals had thrown these collected essences over it,
like a bucket of slops, in order to chase the big cat out of their yards. It
made landfall beside Sovaz, and regarded her with its grave wise eyes.

Then a chariot came, up from the earth. The edge of the sea seemed
to catch alight again at its coming. Of bronze the chariot was, but inlaid all
over with silver, with pearls set in and stones of clearest blue, thickest
black. Three horses drew it, and they were jet-black with a blue streaming
frost on them of manes and tails, and the bits, and the reins and shafts, and
the chariot-pole, all ran with silver things and things of diamond, with
moonstones and colorless beryls like ice. A Vazdru held the skittish team,
making them prance, and then making them grow still as stone. He did this with
panache, flaunting his skill. And when once the horses were stones, he looked
long at Sovaz, marveling and startled, charmed and irritated. Then, having
rendered Azhrarn extreme obeisance, he tendered the woman an exquisite bow. She
had seen not much of this upper caste of the demons, her own kin. But the
Vazdru, all of them, loved beauty, and were envious of anything favored by
their lord.