Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (56 page)

Yet there remained such as Kiras, who were claimed to be in
service, by turn, to Kassafeh, and thus some path for macabre commerce was left
open.

As the blue-mantled traveler, Soul-Flame, Atmeh, had said, she
might have found ingress to Uhlume’s retreat, wherever it was, and burst in on
him, but she chose good manners. Thereafter, though, she did not waste too wide
a while on Kiras’s utter lack.

Soon enough then, Kiras was in a closet of the temple one side of
a lopped pillar, and Atmeh the other, and between them on the pillar-drum, a
little wheel of yellowed bone upon a stand of iron. Kiras had struck the wheel
and it spun, around and around, on and on. Minutes whirled away upon it, and
hours.

Night had come and cloaked the temple. Later the moon bathed it,
and the carvings splashed themselves over with the moonlight, the nymphs
philandered with each other, and the camels munched the iris flowers—which bit
them back. (And still the wheel spun, and Kiras sat one side of it and Atmeh
the other.) Then the red forests of morning blossomed. The sun galloped up
heaven. The temple carvings kept still. “We are stone,” they told the sun. “We
cannot move.” The cloud lake boiled and purled under a heliotrope sky. (And the
wheel spun. Atmeh sat like a stone girl off the temple wall. But Kiras muttered
loudly as a yell: “See, she does not hear. See, see, no one attends.”) In the
afternoon all the birds delivered from Kiras’s dress ran races in the ether, or
began to build nests on the roofs. “We are still snakes,” they told the temple,
and they stretched and wriggled their long necks. “We shall lay eggs—what else
does a snake do?” But the temple no more believed the birds than the sun
believed the temple carvings who said they never moved—for if the sun now and
then met the moon, she perhaps informed him of what went on by night. (And the
wheel spun.) Then the sun set. Under a nectarine sky, far out on the cloud sea,
one golden cloud appeared in the air.
And the wheel stopped spinning.

The golden cloud drifted in and indoors, and came to rest between
the two women in the temple closet. The cloud grew itself to be a woman,
shawled in a golden veil. Only her eyes were visible. First they were dark,
then pale and feral.

Kiras obeised herself. But the apparition of Kassafeh the
Changeable-Eyed regarded only Atmeh.

“In the past,” said the apparition, well tutored now, it would
seem, “I did not care for your kind.”

“I am also half mortal, rather in the manner of yourself,” said
Atmeh. “And besides, once also you hated Lord Death.”

The apparition’s eyes turned black, then violet.

“I did not come here to talk of myself,” said she. “Your problem?”

“There is a hidden thing I would learn. Since it concerns mortal
death, Death may know the answer. Therefore, I would attend him.”

“He will allow it,” said Kassafeh, or Kassafeh’s image. “He has
entrusted me to tell you so. He will meet you below, in the old place, his
kingdom at the world’s core. Do you know your way?”

“I am also half demon,
not
in your manner,”
said Atmeh. “While, in most things, there is more than one way. Which will
offend him the least, please him the most?”

“Pleasure and offense are small items to such as he. But I believe
it might satisfy him if you should go down to him as your demon self. For that
is what you would be shot of, is it not, your immortal part, the very thing
which lends you any claim on him?”

“Oh, Kassafeh,” said Atmeh, “you are an immortal. That is your
road. Do not begrudge me mine because it is unalike.”

Then Kassafeh closed her eyes—upon the lids of which were painted
eyes of gold that changed to green—and she dissolved.

Atmeh got up, and looked upon Kiras, who lay along the floor.

“Be kinder, Kiras. Recollect, for every seventy travelers that
seek you, and that you distress, there may come another like myself. Yet not so
temperate as I. On the understanding you will remember my warning, I restore to
you your arts.”

Kiras spoke softly then.

“I will remember.”

And when Atmeh had left her, Kiras constructed a robe of crystals
for herself, and walked like a dancer. But later, when the birds laid their
eggs, she stole some, and these hatched snakes. . . .

2

WHAT
WAS it, of course, but mere politeness when calling on a relative, to journey
in family resemblance and name?

She had called down from the hills her mount, the winged lion with
the philosopher’s face. Then rode upon it to some spot deep or high. And there
she drew upon herself the persona of Azhriaz, and she stamped her foot—or some
say she pulled up a tall gray weed which grew there—and the earth cracked, it
parted. And again mounting the lion, she spoke to it, and bound it by
safeguards, and even by a garland of her own hair.

Then like a flung spear they descended.

Down, down, through galleries of rock and soil, through veins of
water, mineral arteries, and the grass roots of all the world. Down, down,
through a shadow and a sheen, through a sluggish cold lava flow which might
have been a deadly languorous river—and which was—down, down, through the last
strands of ordinary matter, bursting the final links with day or time or the
mundanely beating heart of life—

And made landfall as a spear would, hitting firm upon a surface
ground, in Innerearth, the sphere of mortal death—if only in ignorant parlance.

Innerearth
was the way it always was and had always been. Nothing new, or seldom, was ever
said of its general landscaping. There is sometimes virtue in repetition.

Atmeh-Azhriaz stood upon a plain, and about the plain were rolling
hills with, here and there, another plain beyond, and on the left hand a range
of cliffs. The color of this land was gray; the plain was a desert of gray
dust, the cliffs were lead, and the hills stone, and where their shadows fell
they were black. Above, the sky of Innerearth was dull white and might be
described also as comfortless—though none of the prospect was remotely cozy. No
sun or moon or stars were lit here. The sky did not change, only occasionally a
cloud blew over it like a handful of cinders. And though, through the deaf
blankness, there sometimes sounded thundering wind, it had barely the strength
to push these clouds before it.

Now, the winged lion, whatever it actually was, remained a
creation of the earth above, and so it was a sort of inverted ghost in the
deathland. It cast no shadow, and its step could disturb none of the gray mosses
or dull pebbles underfoot. It seemed, too, disinclined to fly, as if it doubted
the miserable sky could keep it up, and certainly there were no air currents
sturdy enough to fill its wings.

Atmeh spoke soothingly to the lion, and it set about a walk, she
riding its back, cross-legged between the folded wings. And she, being what she
was, cast a shadow, as the cliffs and hills did, long, slender, and pitch-black
upon the ground.

They walked a long while. The sky did not alter, there was no
specific time.

They roamed between the cliff shades, and over the stony hills,
and by a sky-white river on whose edges grew petrified poppy husks,
depressingly gray as all the rest.

But eventually, having followed the river a whileless while, there
began to be visible on the horizon a bank of dark cloud, which was not cloud at
all, nor stone, nor shadow. But a forest, and of full-blown trees.

Illusion was previously rife down here. It had been the key and
the clue to survival for those living corpses who were the guests of Lord
Death. From thin air might be constructed anything. Yet to one such as Atmeh it
was amply evident that neither illusion, delusion, nor delirium of any kind had
made the forest. It had seeded. It had matured. It
lived.

Lion and lady entered the trees.

There were black pines, whose quills bore the faintest blush of
blueness, cedars denser black, but vaguely bloomed with viridian. Silver-gilt
and prone to clink, yet they were cones that hung on the boughs or littered the
ground, where a dark moss grew that budded swarthily.

Among the live thickets too were stirrings. Birds showed
themselves that did not fly, but stalked along the branches. They were like
ravens, but their beaks were flushed, their eyes prisms. And where the trees
thinned, you came on pools of sea-green water—and from the basins pairs of
leopards were drinking, in coats of black spotted by broken rings of gold. They
raised their canine masks at the lion, which growled, then lowered them to
drink again. In their ears were precious drops the color of the water. And once
a peacock crossed the forest floor before the rider and her mount, with eyes of
polished turquoise in his tail. They were the immortal animals of Simmurad,
maybe. Had Uhlume not presented them to Naras, when he razed the city?

The trees soon divulged a road of grape-dusk marble, which spilled
into a valley beyond. Pylons towered by the road, obelisks of smooth
translucent black, and on either side, and throughout the valley, such standing
stones arose, some in groups, others isolate, and between and around twisted
marble avenues. The valley otherwise was all lawn, a turf of blackest green,
like ivy. Black mansions clustered about on it, where the pylons did not. It
might be a town of the dead. At the valley’s farther end, up under the mindless
sky, was a sable palace with inky columns braceleted by gold, and slashed in
lizardine windows and windows salamander. Albino poplars ranked like white
feathers by the walls. There were gardens blotted by scarlet plants, and trees
whose fruit looked poisonous. Before the high portico a three-legged stand of
silver held a bowl of fire, which streamed up smut, ceaselessly and seemingly
without purpose.

In the stories, Death’s domicile had been a simple affair. But in
the stories of Naras, neither had her palace been this way. For she recreated
the substance of her earthly life here, or had meant to, they said. Possibly
the essential nature of Innerearth had corrupted her work. Or had she grown
enamored of the new state over the old?

Naras had outstayed her thousand years, so much was positive.
Naras, Queen Death—what was the modest title Narasen of Merh, to that?

Atmeh paused above the valley. A tributary of the blanched river
ran before the palace, and the palace reflected in it, and the fire-smut, the
windows, the poplars. Nothing moved about the house, nor in the town. If all
the prior guests had departed, no more had been garnered.

Atmeh urged the lion on, down the marble road.

As they passed, not a grass blade shifted.

At the river, Atmeh dismounted. She tethered the lion by sorcery
to the limb of a venomous damson tree. As she walked on alone, the insolent
fruits of these trees fell into her very hands, to tempt her, but she only let
them go. She crossed the river by walking on the water, and when she did so,
two or three of the poplars bowed down to her. The liquid itself smoldered at
her footsteps. Conversely, the smoking fire at the door went out.

Ebony inlaid with ivory, the doors. They swung inward, and Atmeh
entered the silent hall of her un-uncle, King Uhlume, Master of the Dead, one
of the Lords of Darkness.

Yes, there would seem to have been a compromise. The hall was this
way: Grim stone hung with the pelts of things which could not die (somehow),
banners from wars unfought (surely?), burnished weapons, carpets and draperies
that delicate fingers of earth had woven and embroidered, their dyes oddly
altered, their patterns changeable—

The floor, like the doors, was inlaid with ivory, but this was the
internal scaffolding of men and beasts and fishes, tibias, ribs, pelvises,
craniums, the last with gems in their eyes.

Between pillars girdled gold, the court of Death, men and women
young and antique together, posed to gaze at the one who now came in—but
through the bodies of these courtiers, as through the floor, you might see—not
to a skeleton, but to an emptiness. They were phantoms, these lingerers. Souls
and flesh, both were gone, and the psychic residue had worn thin as old
gloves.

However, at the hall’s far end, a quarter of a mile perhaps from
the door, rose two mighty chairs of whitest bone. Bone-white hounds lay at
their carven feet, and black hounds, and one hound that was pastel blue.

In one chair sat a woman, and in the other a man. She wore a gown
the color milk would be, if it were blue. Her skin was black as black would be,
if black were blue. Her eyes were lighter blue, but that was the whites of
them, and at their centers shrilled infernos of yellow. On her grape-purple
hair—like the marbles and windows—was a queen’s diadem, and like the pillars
she was ringed by gold, save her right hand, which was as much a skeleton as
anything sunk in the floor. This then, Naras, Queen Death.

But in the other chair was a man of the blackest skin, the whitest
hair, clad in white and unjeweled. His eyes were two tears, two openings into
bright fog, two nothingnesses—

“Lordly Uncle,” said Atmeh, “I extend my homage.”

“Despite your misapprehension of our relationship,” said Uhlume,
“you are well-mannered. You did not learn it from the Vazdru.”