Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (43 page)

     and ask them for music and bread.

We have woven our dreams for a cloak,

     our bright towers we have mortared with smoke.

It is Death, it is Death we invoke,

     and the wolves of his pack we have fed.”

At which Azhriaz, turning to speak to him in unfriendliness,
started. For where Tavir had sat, all sea shade and dark, was another young
lord, pale, gold-haired, in a damson garment, with gloves—

But
before even she could catch her breath to curse him, the vision faded.
Unreal
,
thought she,
less friendly yet.
He roams elsewhere, cackling and cawing.
But I take due note. Surely the apparition implies my lovesome lover, touched
by the dawn-decline of Simmurad, is making a pet of madness.

Therefore
she did not upbraid Tavir, but she keenly observed him.
Of
course, he will in some way betray me, abandon me. When I look for a shield, or
a brother, to defend my back, all they that swore to be beside me are gone off
on errands.

“There are knives in your looks,” said Tavir. “Knives of fairest
sapphire. But still knives.”

“If my eyes do not please you,” said Azhriaz, putting her hands
tenderly about his neck, “close them with your kisses.”

This Tavir willingly did.

Their amorous dalliance concluded the day, and seemed to put out
the sun. Sunset was so swift in that region, one moment the sea was green, then
ashen, then black.

Azhriaz, who had held Tavir as a flower holds its own shadow, now
let him go and pretended to sleep. She had sensed, even in the pangs of his
rapture, a restless energy that was not wholly appeased.

Presently, as she had supposed he would, Tavir, despite the most
adoring of parting embraces, left the couch, and went away through the suite.
The sorcery of Azhriaz was always unhampered within her ship: She stole after
him smaller and less visible than a mote of that glory-dust he had elegized.

Soon enough, he stood next the ship’s skin and craved of it an
exit into the sea. And the ship, commanded by Azhriaz to obey him, did so. In a
short while more, Tavir was speeding through the blackness of the drowned city,
airlessly and effortlessly breathing in the manner of the gilled princes of
Tirzom, and accompanied only by a tiny glow of phosphorus, which he had
enchanted from the water to light his path.

Azhriaz was filled by anger, and the unhappy satisfaction of being
in the right. She took up her own sorcery, with two or three sharp words
besides, and clad herself, still little as a mote, in a second mote of air.
Then she sprang after Tavir and the receding light.

If Simmurad was sad by day, how much more depressing in its robe
of night. It was no place for poets, though songs had been made because of it.
True despair is only a blank wall; there must be rage or foolish hope, or at
least a shout, to make anything of it. But Simmurad. Oh, Simmurad.

Yet Tavir swam on, and Azhriaz went after. She foresaw his quest.
Of course, he went to find the one he had been, or believed he had been, if his
dream were a fact.

So, in an hour or less, they came again to that dissolved obelisk,
and passed through the tangle of sea wrack (Tavir hacking the way) into the
citadel.

There had been a domed vault, a floor of mosaic and silver.
Fountains had played, and at great tables, the nightly feast of the immortals.
. . . Now the water feasted. All was blurred by water. And a tainted severe
light fell, from high up, like a rain through rain, where luminous filaments
embroidered the dead choked windows.

Caught by the unmerciful gleam, here they were, the immortal ones
of Simmu’s city. They had won their slice of eternal life by feats of wizardry,
wisdom, or exotic cheek, surgeons and mages, artists and courtesans, the
luscious, the cunning, the unhinged. Now, they were white coral. Simply that.
For these miniature builders of the seas had been industrious over the
centuries. No longer was any shape recognizable, not a feature, nor a gesture.
They were limestone blocks. Where now the flaunting dreams? The water washed
away, the coral makers built. Soon, even the legend would fade, and those that
came here seeking it—they would find melted stones, a few lumps of the coraline
detritus of the sea. They would say, Simmurad, that was some lie we were told.
There is no Simmurad, was never such a place. Nor Simmu, and no theft from
heaven of Immortality for men, no heaven either, no life eternal. Only this and
here and now. Only what we see and can put our hands on. Would there not,
otherwise, be evidence?

Tavir, having come in, let his torch die. He moved as if he swam
in sleep, about the limestone pillars. It seemed he did not especially remember
any one of them. Should he seek for one in particular, how would he find it?

There was a means.

Suddenly a voice spoke out loudly, there in the sea—through which,
unless sorcerously aided, you could hear nothing at all—sorcerously then.

“Well,” it said, “is liberty good? Pray tell me of it. I forget.”

Tavir, quite naturally, turned and stared about.

“Here I repose,” said the voice. “On your right hand—” And it
directed him zealously on how it should be come at. Tavir followed the
instructions, and after a minute he hung in the water by a pillar of coral
resembling exactly all the rest.

“How is it you can speak?” asked Tavir, himself not with his vocal
cords, but through the mechanics of sea magic.

“Speak? Who says I speak?” retorted the voice. “I impart my
thoughts by an effort of magicianry, as do you. Do you forget also? I am a
mage.”

“By my query I meant to inquire,” said Tavir, “if I am you and you
are me, how is it I am here and you are there, and we have dialogue?”

“Tush,” said the coral block testily. “It seems certain that when
I waned to youth again, as you, I gained in silliness what I relinquished in
years. Pay attention. For this is the mighty theosophic paradox which I, and
other genius sages that the monster Zhirek trapped here, long since grasped.
All men possess souls which are immortal. But some men prefer longevity or
eternality of the body, seeing that with each new life we are forced to undergo
once more the idiocy of birth, childhood, and unknowledge, not to mention the
discomfort of physical demise. For example I, that am you as you were when me,
joined the immortals, partaking of a drop of the divine Elixir. Now, it is
thought,” prated on the block, “that in a mortal made immortal, the soul
infuses the flesh. This may be the case. However, by petrifying the flesh to
stone, Zhirek, in his overcleverness, separated the soul in each of us once
again from the earthly atoms—for no soul can ever be bound indefinitely, being
itself a fabulous thing. Therefore my soul flew out—as, for a truth, did all
the souls of all those prisoned in Simmurad. And, getting itself reborn, it
became the dweller in the body of one Tavir, prince of Tirzom Jum, and of a
scheme of colors, I will say, strikes oddly on my eye.”

“But you,” said Tavir. “If you are not me, who, upon the bones of
our two mothers, are you?”

“Your former body being immortal, it lives still within the coral.
It is a wise sage yet, and has, to boot, the full legion of your former
memories, which you, in your greenness, have forgotten. It is the body,
therefore, which speaks so graciously and intelligently to you, and which calls
itself
I
. As I shall continue to do.”

“Upon my life—or on one of them,” said Tavir. And fell silent.

“Tut, tut,” said the immortal body reprovingly, “if only you had
your sagacity back, you would not waffle in this way.”

“Recount to me then,” said Tavir, “your learning. It is mine by
right.”

“Not so,” said the body in the coral. “By your decision to seek
rebirth, you have forfeited anything of mine.”

“But had I not lived in you, you would have learned nothing!”

“And now you have vacated me, you must learn all again, by dint of
labor and groans,” replied the body, with the utmost complacence.

Tavir struck his fist in rage upon the block. The motion was
slowed by water, yet its intent was bruising, and so bruised. The coral
complained.

“I have learned this,” said Tavir, “to respect the life of others.
I believe you to have been indifferent to all lives but your own.”

“You,” said the coral in an injured tone, “have merely acquired
sickly sentiment, a fault it had previously taken you many years to be rid of.”

“You do not know me; do not presume.”

“And you do not recollect; presume neither.”

“By my spells, I can return within you,” said Tavir, “and
experience again what I was, and collect up any superfluous knowledge you may,
debatably, retain.”

At his threat, the body in the coral turned uncommunicative.
Tavir, with a grimace, between fascinated interest and deep chagrin, drew aside
a way, and began to prepare himself for such sorcery as would be needed.

Azhriaz was not far off, and had listened to all that went on. Now
she could have wished to transform herself to her proper feminine shape, but
she believed this must entail an airless passage in the sea, its laws being as
they were and inimical to her. So she did not venture change, but went to Tavir
as she was, a tiny little mote in a teardrop of fragrant atmosphere.

“Tavir,” she said, sending her words into his brain, for his ears
would be deaf to her, “do not re-enter the coral. Only consider how you have
dreamed of the imprisonment, and how that dream has lured you to the spot. Now
the thing taunts you, and you are driven to become its prisoner again—that
which was your prior body has the stronger claim; there you lived the mostest
time, and, too, it is immortal and endures, and even speaks of itself as a
proud man does—”

But Tavir did not heed, and perhaps he did not hear, for now he
made a magic that shone about him much brighter than the luminants in the roof.
And even as Azhriaz warned him, there came a swirling, and a flush as if a huge
lamp took light. And then it fluttered out, and only the marine half-light
lingered.

Azhriaz, who had known and wielded such power on the land that men
cowered in terror at the mention of it, now looked down and knew herself
powerless. Tavir lay on the smeared mosaics and silver of the floor. The water
fingered his hair; his eyes were shut. The soul had gone, back through the
coral into the former body, which it knew better, and which had signaled and
called and finally pulled it in by a long fine leash.

“I have been then a servant,” said Azhriaz. “My purpose was to
bring you here, to this, as your charioteer would have brought you, or your
riding ass. And for payment I have had three kisses. My thanks, Tavir.”

“My name,” said the voice from the coral, “is not
Tavir. That
is
Tavir, there on the ground. As for kisses, he kissed you well. I have his new
memories to add to the old. But that life is only a mirage. It has been joyful
enough to be a youth, and spry and agile in the horizontal art, but age and
immobility have their compensations. The adventurous existence will inevitably
pall, for the man who thinks.”

“Traitor,” said Azhriaz. “I will not attempt your rescue. Lie on
the floor, greenlocks, and rot, and lie and
think
in
your coral, and rot also. You are one more fool.” And when she had said this,
Azhriaz saw the corals and the water and the whole dim hall begin to flush
again with light. A most poignant excitement went through her, for she imagined
Tavir was fighting his way back to her, and she eagerly braced herself to help
him. But then she saw, with a heart-sinking not only due to sorrow, that this
light was not the same as the first. It came thick and fast, as if wine or blood
was poured. It had a reddish glare. The moon or the sun, rising under the sea—

She knew what it was. She felt a strange dark fear, and also a
wretched wish to yield herself—and with that an urge to do battle. And again
the despair of Simmurad, and of all her confused and blazing years, mired her
round, and she hesitated, questioned herself, whether she might be lost.

But it was not in her, after all, to do nothing. And so she spun
about, and away from the ghostly ghostless citadel, toward the only chance to
hand, the demon ship.

Chuz had failed her, and Azhrarn had dismissed her. Of mortals,
Dathanja had barely spared her a glance, though her beauty rocked the world,
and for Tavir—Tavir was dead.

How loud the deathly avenues were glowing now, as if they burned
there in the sea. Azhriaz fled into her vessel, and next the vessel fled. For
behind the reddening of the water, on her scent, came again Yabael the Bloody
and the Second-Scorched, that hound of the gods, the hunter.

12

BUT
IT WAS Ebriel who walked the mountaintops of the eastern corner.

There were higher crags beyond Simmurad; the sea had not covered
them. They overlooked the basin of the ocean, and reflected in it, that was
all. When the long dawns warmed them, they beamed, but there was something disquieting
in them always. Their peaks masked, and maybe led to, the world’s very edge.
They were a part of the last fence that ringed the earth. Who could tell what
it would mean to travel over them and to the end of them—who could risk the
venture?