Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (55 page)

They covered now a notable distance, Atmeh and Ebriel, beating
through the sky. The sun entered the west and vanished. The roof above went
black and the moon—herself wingless yet traversing air—crossed heaven. The
stars bloomed in their parks, which were only visible at night (for the stars
did
not
move, as they had in Dathanja’s parable). Through the dark, as the day, the
angel and the demoness flew on. And when day came back, flew still.

For though either of them might have reached any earthly place
instantly, in an eye’s blink, the psychic shrouding about Melqar did not allow
this. It demanded of them a slowness, an attempt. There must be arrival rather
than mere advent.

No source describes the route. They tell of days and nights, sun,
moon, stars, and distance. No road or geographic clue. Well, then. One cannot
presume too much.

It was a high place, inevitably. It was a mountain in the middle
of a waste or desert, which maybe, centuries before, had been the bed of an
enormous lake or landlocked sea. Where the water had gone who could say, but
gone it was, and only the mountain poured statically skyward.

Atmeh and Ebriel put down upon the mountain, just below the
summit, and climbed to a platform that lay out under the sunlight like an altar
table.

At the center of this platform, which was neither long nor wide,
there glowed a kind of mound of faintly honey-colored crystal. But it was not
that at all. It had been made from heat and cooling and the ethereal breath
that flowed against the mountain’s thin atmosphere, out of a creature which
reclined there, and which had always breathed, or which had learned to breathe.

Under the shining quartz, Melqar. He slept deeply, he slept a sort
of death. His excellence, in sleep, dazzled through the mound and seared the
eyes. His eyes were shut. The extraordinary wings lay beneath and by him,
framing him in the muscular feathers of gigantic swans. His right hand rested
across his breast and gripped lightly yet completely, even unconscious, a sword
of snow. It had formed from the light he had wielded, or from his own unusual
flesh. The sword was Melqar, Melqar the sword. Yet, he slept.

“Is he waiting, perhaps?” said Atmeh. “For the orders of the gods.
For something as crucial. For the end of earth.”

Ebriel gazed upon the last of his kindred. Ebriel’s face told
nothing. Then his eyes half-shuttered themselves.

“Your second lesson is, as was the first,” said Atmeh, “that the
Malukhim may change. And they may pursue fruitlessness. And they may achieve
nothing but a race, or a slumber. But the third lesson is also here, Ebriel,
child of the sun. He does not start up, does he, this one, to fight with me? He
grips the sword, yet does not lift it against me.” And she struck the quartz
three blows. “Wake and do battle with me!” But Melqar only slept in the sheen
of the sun through honey crystal. He did not stir. “Ebriel,” said Atmeh, in the
voice of Atmeh. “The gods forget and that is all they do. Men forget, yet men
remember even in forgetfulness. I am half demon, and immortal. I will tell you
how I mean to proceed. I shall seek to lose my immortality, that fabulous gift
for which men have murdered one another. I will strive to be only mortal. For
now I know too much to learn the rest. And the rest I must learn, for it is so
much more than all I know. It is my mother’s blood which understands this. My
quest, Ebriel, is not to be a goddess, or a demon. But to be a human thing
which lives, and dies—and is reborn. To slough my immortality—will be to gain
it. To search for true life, Ebriel, that is my hope, to find my soul.
Therefore, make peace with me.”

Ebriel turned from the contemplation of his brother. He opened his
eyes wide and looked at Atmeh.

He saw a lovely girl, dressed in a blue garment belted with a cord
of silvery metal, her black hair falling about her, and in her face the
absurdity and joy of what she had said.

And Ebriel, for heaven was dumb and deaf and high above, raised
his bright sword, and broke it in two pieces, and threw them away into the dead
lake. But where they entered the earth, glittering waters bubbled up, and
flowers came out like small suns, to look about them with their purple eyes.

Ebriel flew up into the sky, beating his wings against the lowest
floor of the Upperearth, and he changed himself into an eagle then, and the
sunlight hid him.

Atmeh walked down the mountain.

She walked over the bare tiles of the waste which soon might fill
with water and flowers.

She walked some while, and then she made sorcery. A beast soared
to the ground. It was the winged lion of her past, or another that was its
twin, blue-maned and philosophical of face, “Dear friend,” said Atmeh, “do you
know me?” The lion bowed and licked her hand. Then she mounted it, for she was
tired at last. And they, too, flew away.

PART TWO: Uncle Death

1

ON THE SHORE of a sea stood a deserted temple.

Those that came there, and infrequently some did come to that
place, descended a stairway of hills. The beach was of fine pumice, which
glinted. The sole thing that stood up on it was the temple, whose domes were
like a collection of beehives. Beyond, the sea surged with curious tides. From
a distance it looked merely peculiar. But getting closer, you saw it was an
ocean of cloud which foamed and creamily ran in and out on the shore. From some
subterranean vent these mists poured up, or were now and then sucked down. On
occasion, the tide was so far out that a hard bare pastry of rock might be
seen, into which heat and moisture had formed the loose pumice.

Late in the day, under a pomegranate sky, a traveler moved along
the beach and entered an arch before the temple. Under that vault, carved with
maidens, camels, iris flowers, and dragon-winged bats, hung a bell of black
bronze. The traveler rang the bell, which clanged.

But the clangor died away along the shore, and was forgotten
there. The sea of cloud smoked. The sky deepened, and a star appeared.

Unanswered, but with no show either of disappointment or
impatience, the traveler seated him- or herself (mantled, booted, it might be a
youth or a woman) under the arch, and leaned upon a big stone bat there.

Presently the bat spoke.

“What do you seek?”

“One,” said the traveler, in a female voice most musical, “who
reputedly abides in this spot. A sorceress, that in these lands they call
Kiras.”

“Just so,” said the bat. “Pray do not lean upon my belly. From
time to time I become fleshly, and fly by night and feed. My stomach is now
full of digesting mangoes and plums. You will, besides, find my left wing more
comfortable.” (The traveler obliged the bat. The wing was not more comfortable,
but for graciousness’ sake, she made no comment on the fact.) “For Kiras, she
is here and I am her slave. She bids me inquire what business you have with
her.”

“The same that all have who search her out. You are her slave, she
is another’s, and that other the slave of one I wish to visit.”

“Tush,” said the bat, “Kiras is not a slave. She serves, and she
that Kiras serves, serves also, yet
she
is more a familiar
and consort than a servant, to that One you refer to. Who, in any case, is not
visitable. I must warn you, everyone will take umbrage at your description.”

“Unfortunate,” said the traveler. And she gave the bat an affable
tap. It fell from the arch and became fleshly alive, and chittered with relief
at the transformation. In a short while, seemingly unremembering its task as
interrogator, it zoomed, burping, into the twilight.

Shutters flashed open in a dome of the temple.

“Who,” squawked a woman’s voice, “rashly tampers with my
creatures?”

“Invite me in,” said the traveler. “You shall learn.”

“Oh, some arrogant sorceress, is it?” cried the raucous one at the
window. “Let you be instructed. I am twice your age, and am a paragon of my
art. Besides, I boast a powerful connection.”

“Well, well,” said the traveler. “How pleasant for you all that
must be. You need have no fear, then, to unfasten your gates to me.”

“Overbearing brat that you are, can you not even penetrate one
little door?”

“So be it,” said the traveler.

And standing up, she walked toward the dome where the window
gaped. As she did this, the very temple wall itself, with all its carvings
exclaiming aloud in shocked surprise, flew wide.

Kiras, the paragon, withdrew. The traveler passed up the avenue
and in by the wall, which closed at her back.

The temple was in foxy darkness. It whispered, perhaps only with
the discussions of the carved creatures therein.

Great spiders, large and brachial as copper chandeliers, hung in
luminescent webs from the roof, and stared at the traveler from a multitude of
cool intelligent eyes.

“Greetings, sisters,” said the traveler politely, and the spiders,
who did not imagine themselves associates of Kiras, bowed. Moving each her
eight furry arms subtly, they spun more light upon their looms.

But just then Kiras entered, bringing light with her.

Seven unsupported torches of red fire roared about her, to reveal
she was dressed in snakes, which hissed, and that her headdress was the spiny
skull of some monster dug out from the shore, but set with jewels for feminine
vanity. In age, she was some twenty years. But her eyes were eldritch, and her
voice uncommonly
loud.

“Upstart!” began screaming she, for she was used to sorts of
reverence. “On your knees! If you will not respect me, then you must my lady,
from whose name my own is adapted.”

The traveler put off her hood, and her black hair cascaded around
her, and to the floor indeed. Demurely she kneeled.

The witch Kiras took note of the cascade, for such quantities of
hair often denoted some superhuman power or cleverness. She nonetheless
screeched, “Now say who you are.”

“My name is Atmeh. I have a weird kinship with your mistress’s
master. He is by way of being an un-uncle of mine, my father being something of
an un-cousin of his.”

Kiras was now truly taken aback. But she squalled out:

“If you have fathers and uncles who are Lords of Darkness, why
approach any of them through an intermediary?”

“To observe all proper forms,” replied Atmeh, without rancor. “My
uncle, the kingly Uhlume, has never formally made my acquaintance. It is a
fact, I might find a means to go instantly into his presence. But I choose to
knock.”

“It is all lies, that,” quoth Kiras, who though she served the
wily and the wonderful, was herself neither. “Take
this
for
your sauce—”

And pointing toward Atmeh, Kiras produced a swarm of gigantic
stinging hornets, which tore upon the suppliant.

Atmeh arose, and opening her hands, she gathered the hornets in a
silver net. And the hornets were golden flowers, whose perfume filled the
temple.

Then Kiras (a stupid girl, and no mistaking it) clapped her palms
noisily together, and up from the paving there billowed a hideous beast, the precursor,
maybe, of her headgear. It pawed the floor and rushed upon Atmeh.

But Atmeh sang a single note, and the beast became a swath of
silk, which draped her in becoming folds.

Kiras now backed a step. But even so she raised her arm to try
again, and in that moment Atmeh seemed to grow impatient. She spoke a word, and
all Kiras’s magic left her. There she stood, garbed in snakes and skull, and
unable to summon a solitary mote of dust. Then Kiras lamented from fright and
humiliation.

“You shall have your toys again,” said Atmeh, “but for now, I have
left you only one ability, to call your lady, Kassafeh.”

“She will not heed me,” cacophonously sobbed Kiras, on the paving
herself now. “She is
his
courtesan, she is
his
very
wife
—She
may be busy.”

“Oblige me,” said Atmeh, “by attempting it.”

And she altered the snakes of the witch’s dress to birds—and with
much singing they all, every one, flew rejoicingly away and left her, naked and
afraid, under her monster skull.

It
was beyond doubt that, at this era, Death’s methods had been revised. No
longer, as in the legends, would he deal quite directly with humankind—or if he
did, it was done most secretively. Gone the days, and nights, it would seem,
when men saw him stride by them along the highways, and thanked their gods at
the escape. And gone the days of bargaining, when, for access to some emperor’s
tomb, or in order to meet the reanimate form of one deceased, mortals sold a
thousand years of their time, post-mortem, to King Uhlume. Some odd happenings
had gone on in the Innerearth, which was, or had been, his kingdom. There was a
Queen Death also ruling down there, men said, Naras, that certain
death-obsessive races worshiped. But for Kassafeh, who had been the handmaiden
of Death, she had grown dearer and more dear to him. And the tale ran now that
Death did not dwell below the earth, but somewhere upon it, in an unnormal
house on wheels belonging to his beloved, or else in some best-avoided
fastness—fashions change. Even in mythology.