Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (27 page)

Three and thirty years—at the very least—she has ruled a third of
the earth. And she is seventeen still, the immortal Goddess Azhriaz.

Azhriaz finished her work with the wand of ocher, and taking up
instead a wand of brass, she struck the near edge of the drawn symbols three times.

Smolder burst there.

In the smolder stood a man of brass, with brazen hair and batlike
wings. His feet were the claws of an eagle and he had one eye only, set at the
center of his forehead.

“I am here,” said he.

“Speak,” said she.

“There is nothing new,” said the brass man. “I have searched about
and looked diligently and long. Cities burn and men die, as ever. And, as ever,
they call out your name and worship you.”

“Go,” said Azhriaz.

And the smolder perished and the brass man with it, draining down into
the floor.

Then Azhriaz took a wand of leprous turquoise and struck the
symbols three times with that.

And a second smolder shot out, but more like water than smoke.

There was a bluish man-being, with two alligator tails for legs,
and he was horned like the young moon.

“I am here,” he said.

“Speak,” she said.

“There is nothing new,” said the bluish man. “I have searched
about and listened and pried. Harvests are reaped, of corn and flesh. And men
sing always hymns to the Goddess.”

“Go,” said the Goddess.

And he went.

Then she took a wand of ivory and smote with that.

Steam blustered.

A white horse with the head of a woman cavorted in the drawing.

“Here I am,” said she.

“Speak,” said Azhriaz.

“There is nothing new,” said the woman-headed horse.

“Go,” said Azhriaz—

—And the apparition went.

Then Azhriaz the Goddess took a rosebud, a bud of Az-Nennafir,
large as a caldron, and threw it among the symbols. There came at once the slow
explosion of a rose, the bud unfolding, the flower like a flaming torch, blooming,
full-blown, stretched on its veins like a sunshade—till the layers of it
shattered.

And from the heart of the rose there stole a coil of rose-red
incense.

From behind the incense appeared a beautiful maiden child, clad
only in saffron hair, but her eyes were the heads of two snakes.

“Am I here?” asked the child with her rosy mouth. “You are,” said
Azhriaz. “Now tell me of my love.”

“Oh,” said the child, “your love. I have seen him fleeing over
hills when none ran after. I have seen him screaming at the heat of the moon
and lying parched under the sun to be cool. I have seen him pluck thorns and
dress and garland himself in them till his blood made streams on the ground. I
have seen him eat poison and vomit it forth. I have seen him squealing and hopping
through the years, and men curse him and shun him and fling stones and blades.
And after the sun goes down, sometimes some come to him like slender dark
shadows, and tease and torture him, setting the night flowers to sting him and
the forest hares to bite him. And later these shadow ones spit in his face, and
their spit is like a holy blue flame.”

“I would spit upon him, too,” said Azhriaz, but she held her side
as if a knife cut into her. “And does he remember ever that he is a prince?”

“Yes. Then he is worse. Then he makes himself crowns of rusty
nails.”

“And does he ever remember the lovers Oloru and Sovaz?”

“No. Once he passed two lovers in a field, a man and a girl, he
fair, and she raven-headed. But they started up in fear of him. Then he only climbed
a tree and tore the leaves with his teeth, laughing. He does not remember
Oloru. He forgets Sovaz.”

“Go,” said the Witch-Goddess.

But the child lingered.

“Give me a night of time to wander the world,” said the child with
snakes for eyes.

“I will give you nothing. Go, or I will blast you, and with those
powers you know I have.”

“Yes, you are very powerful, exalted mistress. But give me only
then one half of the night to wander, for I am weary of that region wherefrom
you summon me. I watch mad Prince Madness at your bidding, and I glimpse the
world and I long to enter the world with all my essence, not merely with that
little wraith of me that is your servant.”

“I am pitiless,” said Azhriaz. “Have you not heard of it? I am
pitiless even to the pitiless. You shall have no night and no half night in the
world.”

“Give me then but one hour, Mistress of Madness and Delirium, and
I will lead you to a spot downriver where lies a white stone from a desert that
the rushes have captured fast. And the stone shall charm you, for it holds the
dream of one who once spoke aloud a curse against the Prince of Demons.”

Azhriaz lifted her head. Her face was a dagger. She said,
carefully, “Azhrarn, Lord Wickedness, is my peerless father, and I his
obedient heir.”

The child shrank at the voice of Azhriaz and at her look, but
still the child said, “I heard the river singing. The river sang as it caressed
the stone. I only tell the truth.” Azhriaz rose. She stood and gazed upon the
child, who said plaintively, “Give me an hour in the world, and I will guide
you.”

“I need no guide,” said Azhriaz, and she clapped her hands.

At once the ocher markings on the floor blew in the air and the
child with snakes for eyes was caught up by them and dashed away, back into the
psychic junkyard from which she had been sprung.

Azhriaz stood alone in the bare room high in the sky. In her look
were thirty-three years at least of arrogant dominion, of the sea-waves of war
and encompassing unkindness, and of an unremitting chastity. Demon women had
no wombs. The womb of Azhriaz, also a mortal woman’s daughter, was now a closed
dumb winter fruit of ice. She had taken to herself mage-craft, battles, an
empire, but no lover, since Chuz.

Yet she was seventeen years still, as on the eve of their parting.
And still she was a weeping child, within the sparkling jewel of sorcerous
might.

She glanced at the shutters and they clashed wide. Azhriaz took on
the form of a somber moth—she was long since accustomed to such changes.

Between the mountainous peaks of the City she beat her way, past
the stupendous colored windows with bold lights behind, and the darkened panes
that reflected back the moons. To such calumnies as were practiced all about,
she paid no heed, as she paid no heed to the suicides and butcheries
perpetrated in her name, and seemingly at her instruction.

Her parchment wings were strong, but presently she settled on the
water of the river, a black swan with one hyacinthine ring of plumage at her
throat.

In this guise, she caught the strand of the river’s song which
pertained to the pillar of stone.

She followed then that strand, and came to the net of the rush
iris.

One by one, the moons were going down in the west, and they lit
bright pathways on the river. In the shadows the iris crowns showed black as
the swan herself, but the stone was pallid.

Azhriaz moved up along the length of it, until she reached the
curving blackened blemish. Here she felt the pulse of something pounding slowly
and insistently on and on.

It
is a heart,
the heart of Azhriaz informed her.

The sorcerously embued water, washing the pillarbone, stony dry so
long, had already worked magic on it. There had come about a loosening, the
rock letting go what lay in it—or what lay there letting go the stone of its
hiding place.

Like an insect prisoned in white amber, the being in the stone.
Yet alive, in certain ways, since unable so far to be dead.

And there was the scent of a madness grown luminous and calm
through its brush with eternity.

The swan came close and touched the eye of the stone with her
nacre beak.

There was neither crack nor crumbling. There was a sigh. In the
water a further darkness flowed like blood. A cavity showed in the white, and
the stone, losing balance, turned over.

It lay face down among the irises, and then, its buoyancy and its
soul quite gone from it, mourned by a storm of bubbles, the pillar dropped down
and down to the river’s floor.

And the last of the sinking moons was able to describe, adrift in
the rushes’ net and three handspans underwater, the naked body of a man, white
as the stone, but for the black hair flowering at his loins and pillowing his
head and shoulders.

His eyes were shut. The lids of them said,
Do not waken me,
clear as if it had been printed there. The lips were firm; the nostrils waxed
and waned, breathing the water with no trouble.

He had known the depths of water before, and perhaps recalled it.
But he did not stir.

And the last moon fell, and when it had fallen, Azhriaz took her
own form, and stood in the dark on the river.

There was a desert place, where even the powders and the dusts had
ground away to nothing. This was the site he had chosen for his exile.

He had climbed one of its pillars of stone, and entered a fracture
there. He sat down on the bone floor and he bowed his head, and so he stayed
for many years.

By day the sun beat in at him, by night the blue winds. He ate
only what came to him, which was the air; he drank the dew, the infrequent
rain. He lived because deprivation could not kill him, any more than a spear or
a sea or a flame. But he became a blackened wire and his beauty left him.

Men visited him, and birds of prey. Both stubbed their intentions
on the walls of his invulnerability and despair. Death came to him only in
sleep, those fearsome sleeps the Lord Uhlume had granted him in return for
erstwhile service—slumber like a tomb. And this way of sleeping wiped his brain
clean of everything at last. Even guilt and anguish and agony of mind were
gradually spent, and almost forgotten.

Then one night demons came to taunt and seduce the hermit in the
fractured stone. And in their vicious play, perhaps only by accident, he
discovered a curious redemption from blame. The splinter of steel he had
driven in through his invulnerable heart was, he discovered, only a nightmare.
Where he had spread venom, gardens flourished. His curse became a blessing.

Then he wept. He wept away the final vestige of himself. And when
that ended, he curled himself within the stone. The blackness of the deeds he
had done sealed him round, but it was charred and vitrified, with all the
energy gone out of it, though it lay heavy on him as most rubble does.

Invulnerable, stone-dead, he lived, lived on, while the hurricanes
of centuries blew by.

Till they hacked down the pillar and brought it to Az-Nennafir,
and a boy dreamed Dunizel came and told him to cut that one stone free, and the
stone rolled into the river and among the rushes. And so lay there until
Azhriaz came upon it.

The
boy who dreamed had not known the legends. But Dunizel, the priestess of
Bhelsheved, had known esoteric lore, and most myths, both veritable and false,
and she had related stories to her child in the womb. Azhriaz was schooled.

Azhriaz stood on the river now, like a tall lily. She wore after
all one jewel—a square of amethyst inside a little silver cage, fastened on a
hair-fine silver chain. It reposed and warmed between her breasts, but now she
had plucked it out, and held the jewel to her lips, as if she kissed or
requested council. Then she let go the jewel again and the velvet covered it.

“You may sleep no longer,” she said to the pale, dark man under
the surface of the river. “That is over.”

The closed lids of the eyes said to her: What is over? I may sleep
for ever. I am unknown.

“You breathe the water,” she said. “Any peasant who ever heard the
tale, would know you. You are the one made a pact with the people of the sea,
and broke the pact, but not before you had learned their magic.”

Then his eyelids raised themselves.

They had been once but were no more the sky-reflecting color of
the oasis, those eyes. Now, they were black.

He had shriveled and shrunk and become a rock. Rebirthed, he had
again the youthful physical being of a man, but though this was a handsome man
enough, still the beauty of his first life was gone, with the green-blue of the
eyes.

“
I
did none of those things you speak of,” said the man,
perhaps truthfully, sitting up in the net of rushes, cleaving water to breathe
air. His thick wet hair streaked him now like ink, and water drops flickered on
his lashes. But his eyes were hard stones, well tutored how to be. He was,
ironically, of the racial coloring of the demons he had once attempted to
serve. But as unlike demonkind, even in his handsomeness, as dead coal is
unlike the lit volcano.

“Then, if you are not who I say, say who you are,” mockingly
prompted Azhriaz.