Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (18 page)

“You
are stupid now as well as filthy,” said Jadrid, and he plunged the crumpled rag
of severed shadow into a leather sack, and tied the sack’s neck. And when Liliu
came creeping toward him, he kicked her away.

Shortly
the slight weight in the sack was slighter.

And
Liliu lay at his feet, under her black-red hair, shuddering with feeble hate
and weakness.

“Well,
it seems I may not kill you,” said Jadrid then, “but your life will doubtless
be more irksome to you than the quick kindness of a sword. You shall be driven
out into the mountains, or the swamps beyond the river’s delta. There live or
die as you choose.”

“Oh,
Jadrid,” said Liliu, lying under her hair, “you have made nothing of me, and I
am powerless, but there is one further thing you must know.”

“Of
you? I would rather hear the nightbird rattle, or the wind through a grating.”

“Remember,”
said Liliu, “how we boasted, my brothers and sisters and I, in the tomb?”

“That
I shall never forget. May you and your kind be forever accursed. As you are.”

“Remember
how we toasted, in the liquors of men, our success?”

“Foul
bitch, you sicken me. Can I cut out your tongue, now? And shall 1? I have heard
enough.”

“Not
quite enough. Did you never wonder to which success we alluded?”

“Your
ability to deceive mankind.”

“Not
merely. For all its wisdom, my race, so close-bred as it is, cannot bear
children of its own loins, unless the seed of our men be sprinkled in a human
woman’s womb, or the wombs of our women quickened by the seed of human men.”

Jadrid
stood then like the stone. In his hands, her severed shadow shrank lighter and
lighter. Liliu lay before him, seeming shrunken and fragile, too, her hair and
skin very dull, her long talons all broken. But her voice remained to devil
him. Her voice said:

“Oh
Jadrid, you may work against me as you will, but your son is in my body. How
shall you deal with
him
?
”

The third mage
had gone away. The household of the merchant-lord deliberated, and perhaps not
sensibly.

It
is hard for a man to outlaw his firstborn.

They
locked her in an apartment of the lower building. Loyal servants of the
merchant and his son, these tended her. It was quite safe for them to do so.
For sure, the vampire-ghoul-devil Liliu was wasted now, and burning down like a
flame which had no oil to nurture it. Like a blood-red flower without sap, she
paled and failed. Her wits seemed addled, she was an idiot. The merchant’s son
never visited her. But every day the women must make a report to him on how the
child fared within her—for each day, as she flickered and sank, her womb grew
larger. Strangely, the sunlight seemed no longer to trouble her. She had lost
the precious part of herself; there was nothing else to scorch away.

At
length, the labor began, there in the locked room. A while before daybreak, she
brought forth.

They
came to tell Jadrid. The devil-creature was dead, all flaccid, like an empty
garment. Its hair had turned colorless and its teeth fallen out, and when they
moved it the bones clinked together under the loose skin, like coins in a pot.

But
the child—oh the child.

Jadrid
said to his father, “I will go now and look at the child and make my decision.
It has in its veins, after all, the blood of the living dead. How else could
its atoms have unnaturally survived, with the mother’s death, dismemberment,
burning? If it is like her, then it is hers, and must be destroyed.”

And
the merchant, gazing at his son’s cold graven face, did not argue.

So
Jadrid went down through the house and came into the room where now the sun
flamed golden. And there the child lay in a patch of sunlight. It was a
beautiful boy. Flawlessly formed, already with a look of intelligence and
perception in the tiny face, the great eyes. Its skin was transparent pale as
the sheerest paper; its hair, for already there was hair upon its scalp, was
darkest red.

Jadrid
bent over the child, frowning and cruel, and stretched out his hand from which
the forefinger had been bitten. But three sound fingers remained, and the boy
lifted his small arms and, laughing, grasped the middle one of these in both
fists. “Oh my son,” said Jadrid. “You are also mine.”

And
as he took up the baby in his arms, the sun ripened in the window like an apple
of fire.

4

“NOW,”
BEGAN the storyteller, “when some years had gone by—”

“Enough,” said Sovaz. “Your story is predictable, and the
remainder I discern. Darkness has grown pale, listening to you.”

It was a fact. Another morning was near.

The man, though, looked angrily at Sovaz, who had by now broken
all her bonds, and sat before him in that rock hole like night’s bright symbol.

“If you can fathom the rest, then say the rest,” he muttered.

“Very well. Though some of the fraternity of nine perished, some
did not, while all the babies were sentimentally spared. These then grew
up”—she spoke of this strangely, cruelly; she had had no childhood herself—“and
less and less were the foolish parents able to refuse them. At last these ghoul
children came to adult estate, and each exercised all the habits of the ghoul
parent, and next drove the human parents out, or suborned them, took charge of
the city, and warped or won it to their own graveyard ways. And they have by
now no doubt spawned other ghoul infants by consent, seduction, and rape. And
meanwhile they renamed the place for their manner of portioning the dead they
devour, and other spoil they take. And you, old man, are Jadrid, once the
wife-seeker.”

“Woman,” he said, “do you jeer at me? You have snapped the cords
we bound you with, but we have greater magics. Mighty is Shudm, City of the
Portioners. It draws hosts and companies to itself, to be its fodder. They come
they know not why. Fat merchants and brawny robbers, the entourage of lady and
sage, Shudm sucks them in across the plain. Shudm is always hungry and always
fed. But even the lone traveler is welcome. And I will be rewarded for you.
Look. Where is the omission from my finger? I have none. As a gift, my son gave
to me the digit of an emperor, and this finger has been mine some years, though
this priceless ring, another of his gifts, hides the adhesion.”

“Since you are yet your son’s friend,” said Sovaz, “why warn me
from the way?”

“That is my humanity,” said old Jadrid. “Such mobs arrive, we can
afford now and then to be merciful. But the stubborn ones and the jeering ones
we take to them, even into the ghoul city of Shudm, for their pleasure.”

And then the rags fell from him and from his accomplices. They
were clad in some magnificence, of a tawdry sort, but many of them were
revealed as crouching monkey things, not men at all. Then Jadrid spoke to the
ropes that had bound Sovaz, and they coiled about her and held her fast again,
and at another word of his they became steel.

“You are a witch,” said Jadrid with venom, “but your small sorcery
cannot match the sorcery of
their
kind. As I have discovered.
Come now. We are going to the city.” At that the monkey creatures snatched
Sovaz and bore her away, by leaping bounds, down the sheer mountain ledges
toward the plain. A human girl might well have died of fear. But Sovaz kept her
own counsel, made no resistance, and uttered no word.

All
day tirelessly they traveled over that blanched bare plain, until, near sunset,
they reached a great cemetery. Every tomb of it was despoiled and the earth
upturned everywhere, and bones hanging in the trees. Beyond this horrid area
stood up the city walls, with the river beyond, but the river was thick and
dull, though the red dying of the sun smeared on it. High in the fading sky
carrion birds wheeled around, and in the dead trees where the bones hung, and
on the wrecked tombs, such birds had chosen their perches, and stood watching
with baleful eyes, and one or two of them held perhaps in its beak a human
hand, or a hank of human hair.

And the closer you came to the city, the better you heard the
sounds of it, the wild strains of pipes and cymbals, or laughter, or loud
cries. And its smell filled the atmosphere, of burning resins and sticky oils,
and smoke, and under and over all, the tincture of death.

The gates of the city were shut, but it seemed Jadrid had been
spied approaching, and in a few moments, the portal was drawn wide. They went
through, the old man and his company of men and unmen, with Sovaz hurried along
in their midst.

Whatever it once had been, it was a dark city now, Shudm. The
streets were black, narrow, straight, and of many corner turnings, and on each
side blind black stone platforms went up, and the black tiers of the buildings,
out of which dark windows stared. Here and there dark columns arose, carved
and gilded, and bearing the writing of several tongues—which Sovaz might read,
but which told only the lineage and legends of the ghouls, whom they had
conquered and how mighty they were—in terms that seemed always lying. And
sometimes, set in the walls were grinning or silently howling masks made of
black bronze, with the greenish corpse phosphorus inside them. From the doors
and porticos of palaces and temples, or the buildings which had been such in
the days when men ruled the city, issued terrible groans and screamings and the
notes of blades, whips, mallets, and other instruments of torture and butchery.

Few persons traversed the streets. Those that passed were muffled
and veiled, but as Jadrid’s gang went by, there would come a glint of eyes or
pallid greedy snouts turning to look after. Now and then a livid hand would
pluck at Jadrid’s sleeve, and the nails of the hand would be long and pointed.
But Jadrid never halted, nor his attendants, and the captive was borne on with
them. It was a route they had borne many captives, no doubt. Soon, some of the
veiled and muffled ones stole after them, hissing to each other softly, pawing
the darkness, but respectfully not slinking very near.

What did she think, Sovaz, having allowed herself to be brought to
this grisly slough?

Make no mistake, her thoughts were not those of a frightened girl,
or even of a sly and arrogant sorceress. Pressured by the emanations of this
hellhole, her brain had become purely demonic. She was all demon, now. Therefore,
not to be read.

At length they came into an open square which descended on one
side to the sewerlike river. The space was dominated by a huge black edifice,
lacking windows and all apertures but an entrance, this being formed as a vast
and mindless face, and in the face a gaping mouth crowded by fangs of stone.
Within was a red light. And up the stair to it, and through and under the
fanged mouth, and into the redness, they bore Sovaz. And so into a hall more
like a colossal chimney than any other thing, the walls of it soaring up to a
roof lost beyond the hectic flames of the torches that burned there. But now
and again a shadow crossed the vault above and a shriek came down, or a dry
black feather: The carrion birds of the city flew freely also here. The lower
part of the hall was decorated with every gaudy and expensive item imaginable
that might be obtained from the hoard of a sarcophagus. Among the inlaid
screens and gemmy hangings, on carved couches and embroidered rugs, sat or lay
a quantity of men and women, all alike for their paleness and their dark
cinnabar hair. Their clothing, though costly, was as rabidly unaesthetic as the
rest. Some even affected graveclothes. (It was perhaps foolish to expect good
taste among ghouls.) Their pet slaves, who walked or crawled about among them,
were naked, that the owners might the better caress and savor the flesh,
sometimes even gently biting at it. One of the ghoul princes had stationed
himself before a ten-foot pitcher of glass within which a woman had been
drowned in wine. She floated, in a cloud of hair, and the ghoul prince, turning
a tap in the side of the glass, drew a cup of this concoction. But having
sampled it, he declared the brew not yet ready to be drunk.

From which it would appear these, who had human blood mingled with
the other, could tolerate wine and such human refreshments, though their
preference was clearly for traditional delicacies. Likewise, no doubt, the sun
did not harm or inconvenience them very much (in the story, the baby had been
left lying in a patch of sunlight), though, no doubt again, they avoided the
rays on principle if left to themselves—there was a decided sense of the new
day in the night-time city, sunset being still dawn to them. (Part demon, all
demon at this moment,
she
could hardly miss it.)

But now the ghoul who had tasted the wine turned and gazed fixedly
at Jadrid. Jadrid fell down on his face.

“Beloved son,” whined Jadrid, “see what dainty I found for you, in
the mountains.”

“By my dead mother’s shadow,” said the ghoul, “you have earned for
yourself a sojourn in the city by this. For all the thousands I have sampled,
here is one in thousands.” And he came to Sovaz at once and looked at her and
stroked her.