Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (47 page)

But Azhrarn said only: “She is an immortal and she lives. If I owe
her that, let her live then.”

“And I?” said Hazrond, leaning close, that his mouth might brush
the hair of Azhrarn. “May I live also? Or must I die again? Only tell me. I
will do it gladly. I will die for you, I will endure agony for you. I am
yourself, that part of you which loves you best. Only notice me. Here I wait at
your side.”

Azhrarn, putting out his hand, drew Hazrond down, so he lay across
the chair, and so that their bodies pressed one against the other.

“Wait no more.”

Druhim Vanashta, that moon-star of cities, filled by her enchanted
love whispers, her placatory cajolements, Druhim Vanashta felt that lovemaking,
and was made love to, all the vast jewel box of her, and every one of the
demons—they felt the caresses of that love, the fierceness of it, and the
concourses moaned and the towers stretched themselves in ecstasy—for by that
love he returned himself to them. He noticed them. He was theirs, once again,
body, soul—which in him were one.

And for Hazrond, the vessel into which this light and darkness
entered, this night sea, midnight sky, black wine, red fire, the intimation of
sun and of death, the sensations of it passed through him and into the stones
of the city, and into the flesh of those that were there, or perhaps even he
could not have borne the pleasure of it.

As chaos had touched all things, so this piercing harmonic shot
through and through the Underearth. It was an ultimate possession. Druhim
Vanashta, borne upward on a wave, poised in the liquid silver of three seconds
lasting longer than all time, then released, flowing down, sinking, one ambient
sigh.

And when the sigh was sighed out, a green butterfly might be seen,
among the cedars of Azhrarn’s garden. Vasht, reborn by orgasmic psychic quake
out of the paving where Azhrarn’s heel had formerly compressed her.

How fresh the wings of the butterfly. Azhrarn had renounced
mankind. He was the beloved, as in the past. He was the Prince of Demons,
theirs.
No
other’s.

There will come an hour, quite soon as soon is thought of there,
when Vasht also will be noticed. The green wings, at his glance, will be a robe
of silvered green upon the pearl form of a Vazdru princess. His touch, loosing
the clasps of the robe, will turn it black as night—

BOOK THREE:

ATMEH: The Search for Life

PART
ONE:
Lessons

1

DOWN
THE mountain road walked a man clothed in black, and close behind him another
man, more advanced in years and more inventive in dress, this being robes of
ocher scarfed with rubric, tasseled with purple, bordered and trimmed and
dimpled with gold. Gray-headed, this one, under a plumy diadem, lugging a
staff, and with, beneath the other arm, a silken bundle, egg-shaped. . . .
Perhaps a quarter of a mile behind these two, a third person made his way. He
was hooded in a blond mantle, but the noon sun lit ceaselessly upon him, so he
seemed to shine, brighter even than the plumed one with all his gold.

“Now say what you will,” said the revived sage-mage to Dathanja,
who had, for a great while, said entirely nothing. “That night in the first
wretched flea-bitten village, I was aroused near daybreak, aware of an
enormous occurrence. And resorting to sorcerous exercise, I divined a change
had come about. Yet what it was the spell would not divulge. Being practiced,
as I am, in all sorts of occult mathematic, I made calculations. Which informed
me that chaos itself had been breached, and, in securing itself, had violently
brushed the world of organized matter—an impact felt not only in the narrow
confine of the event, but throughout, and to all four quarters. Such a marvel
must have consequences. And how else should this cataclysm have occurred but
through an action of the entity we glimpsed, tearing eastward under the sea?
What was its purpose? Is it destroyed? Meanwhile, that other heavenly bore goes
on following us, day and night. A whole month it has dogged us. My wizardrous
researches—though not you—have told me what the creature is. But it returns no
word to my questions or expostulations. It merely, unmannerly brute that it
is,
shines
upon me.”

Dathanja had paused, as if to listen. The angel, a quarter of a
mile away, paused also. The mage-sage shook his magician’s staff at the angel,
and prepared to harangue one and all.

Having left the ocean brink above drowned Simmurad, they had gone
south westward. Or, Dathanja had done so and the mage, attaching himself, had
done so too, while Ebriel, for unrevealed motives, followed. They kept to the
crags, though the roseate shadings of the sea-mouthed eastern reaches were soon
bled out. More ordinary, these dry uplands, and here and there were isolate
human habitations. Dathanja took his way among them quietly, asking nothing
but often given, nevertheless, food, or what shelter there might be. They were
innocent, these wayside people, seeming young as the land, with large eyes
cloudless as the eyes of loved children. They would bring Dathanja water or
milk in a stone jar or rough clay dipper, sit to watch him, and sometimes then
usher up to him their infants, and Dathanja would put his hands on them a moment,
as if to bless. In one place, there was a baby with sore skin. Dathanja took it
from its mother, unasked, unasking, undenied. He patted the baby with the fawn
dust, all over, and then carried it to the stream and washed off the dust and
the sore skin with it, and there the baby lay, gurgling and brand-new, quite
cured. The mage took huge exception to this and berated Dathanja—who, since he
no longer recognized the name of Zhirek, the sage would call by no name at all.
“You,
look how you debase the brotherhood of magicians. Could you not, you who have
sunk Simmurad, have healed the brat by the touch of one finger—by a single
utterance? Why this quack’s preamble?” Dathanja said, “A parable is sometimes
necessary.” “Errant rubbish!” warbled the sage-mage. “Why,” said Dathanja, “do
you put on clothing when the sun is so hot?” Missing the point willfully, the
mage-sage lectured Dathanja for five miles—they had by now left that particular
village far behind—on the merits of voguish attire, especially when it was
created by illusion, and so toned the sorcerous muscles.

And with no comment, Ebriel paced slowly after them.

In other villages, and at occasional lonely huts, many small
wonders were performed by Dathanja. He proceeded with the modicum of show, yet
generally by means of a symbol, as with the baby. A woman who wept because the
well was dry was told to weep into the well—and water filled it, salt at first,
then sweet. A missing copper pot was located by arranging the other copper
implements of the house by the doorstep, and presently, out of some brambles,
along came bowling the pot to join their meeting. Everything was performed with
care and gentleness. Dathanja made no exhibitions of passionate tenderness, and
none of aversion. If it pleased him to heal the sick, if it brought him joy to
help his fellow men, you could not have said. He did these things as a man
might sweep his yard, a needful, simple incident, neither onerous nor fabulous,
important only in omission. (Everything the angel watched also, from his
distance, stilly.) And the ingenuous ones of the mountain lands, they received
the benison from Dathanja as it was given, thanking him without the word,
smiling, not shouting.

But the sage-mage shouted. His exclamations rattled along the goat
paths and the roads made only by the treading of feet. He had established for
himself a title, compound of his former name and that of the sea prince he had
been in Tirzom. Tavrosharak, that was he. And he toted the heavy egg his
chicken-carpet had laid in witless fright, always grumbling at its weight, but,
“One does not leave such significant deposits lying. No, no, some priceless
gadget will be hatched, no doubt. For this reason, too, I must keep it against
my person every hour, to warm it.” At night, amid the blank bare peaks,
Tavrosharak fashioned a bed with posts and canopy, and slept with the
silk-packed egg held close. And now and then he rolled on it in sleep and
awakened unpeacefully. Sometimes Dathanja would depart during the night, and
the Malukhim, Ebriel, apparently more intent upon Dathanja than upon the
mage-sage, would also go by like a straight pale flame. Roused by this, the
magician would aggravatedly tramp after, or, summoning up some conveyance from
thin air, whirl upon them out of the skies. For days at a stretch Tavrosharak
rode in a chariot pulled by dragons, and bearing down on Ebriel was always
dissatisfied that the blond figure would neither get out of his way nor stay in
it, being somehow one second before the chariot and then behind it, not a
sublime (hidden) feather ruffled.

“What is it that you want?” demanded Tavrosharak, diving upon the
angel time and again. “Is it some message from the gods you must deliver? It
is too bad,” added Tavrosharak, jouncing along in his car beside Dathanja, the
dragons hissing and cavorting. “Why will the thing not speak to me?” And,
wishing to lecture Dathanja, and finding charioteering incommodious for the
purpose, he would slough the chariot. “So much bouncing,” he averred, “may
curdle this egg.”

Thus they progressed. Then came the noon they stepped onto a road
which men had made not with their feet, but with their hands. Walking along it,
Tavrosharak complained about chaos and Ebriel, and Dathanja paused, and Ebriel
paused, as if to listen.

But it was not to listen.

A mountain rose on the near horizon, higher than its brothers.
Azure it was, half submerged in the sky, but near the pinnacle there was a
glistening disturbance, and now and then a shaft of light streamed from it, and
tore across heaven like a wide-shot star.

“As I have said,” declared Tavrosharak, but at this instant, the
glistening on the mountain caught also his eye.

“I am,” said Tavrosharak, “bound to go near, and to investigate.
There may be a miracle or a treasure.” He gazed at Dathanja. “But you,” said
Tavrosharak, winningly, “bold sorcerer, fearless—as the earth knows, even of
Lord Wickedness and Lord Death. . . . Should it not be you who will climb the
mountain first?”

Dathanja spoke to Tavrosharak. “I saw enough of miracles and
treasures long past. You are starved of them, perhaps. The mountain does not
itself lure me.”

“Ah, now, excellent
Dathanja
—”
began Tavrosharak. Just then a stunning light, like a second sunrise, opened at
their backs, ascended, fanned over their heads with a hurricane rush of wings.
The Malukhim, unmantled, a flying flambeau, sped up the mountain.

“He has followed us because we led him to some spot he wished to
come at,” said Tavrosharak, after a swift thaumaturgic calculation. “This I
perceive clearly now. And therefore, as we have led him here, we also have been
led. Something has pulled us hither. Come, dear Zhirek—that is, dauntless
Dathanja—you, more than I, the sun-beast has trailed. You more than I,
therefore, were drawn here. The miracle is yours to claim. Dare you refuse it?
You are a mighty healer, all compassion. Oh best Dathanja, go up the mountain
and render aid or counsel. I promise I shall be close. At your shoulder.”

Dathanja had not attended to any of this, but to the flight of the
Malukhim he had. And now he felt an inexplicable hand laid on his heart and
mind, which hand, before, had only beckoned. Dathanja had been aware that something
drew him. He had not and did not resist. Only the weak need fear and avoid
temptation. And possibly to this man, now, there was a serene happiness in each
surrender, since no longer thereby could he lose himself.

He murmured, a syllable only. And then he lifted as if he too were
winged, and went after the angel, shadow behind flame.

The summit of the mountain was a cone, beaten to translucence by
weather and the sheer proximity to heaven. It refracted the afternoon, and abetted,
like a mirror, the other conflagration which went on beneath. There was a
natural terrace, tined with thin copses of rock. In this unlikely cradle,
buzzing and flashing with strange emissions, lay a battered shattered thing,
part melted silver on a huge crushed cage of bronze and steel, its sides stoven
in, its design unrecognizable. Yet all about the area, a mile or more, lay
shapes and shards and chips and crystals of freakish formation, and wide
spilled stains that tingled with eccentric colors, sheens, and odors. Over all
throbbed a kind of effulgent pulse, which every so often erupted. Yet these
antics, visible as they had been from thousands of feet below, were
nevertheless growing more feeble with every minute.

The Malukhim Ebriel had alighted eastward on one of the rocky
tines, and with folded wings and golden mask of face, looked down on the
monstrous wreck. Dathanja, in turn, stood to the west, under the cone, and
there surveyed the scene.

Tavrosharak, speeding up the mountain now saddled athwart a quirky
dragon, called instructively to them both: “Behold, it is some mighty magic
craft which has foundered, maybe fallen from the air. Beware a detonation.”

It was, of course, the demon ship of Azhriaz the Goddess, not
dropped from air but somehow ejected from ocean, chaos-riddled, wholly defunct.