Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (36 page)

Behind the light and the upheaval, a monster swam.

It seemed most like a whale, of giant proportions. Smooth as a
silken egg, and, seen by its own corona, of a sea-washed silver. The mouth of
the whale gaped slowly as it swallowed the water. Everything was sucked in,
helplessly—fish, fish nests, loosened tendrils, grazing worms, and straying
flowers. Yet, from the stem of the giant, a crystalline defecation almost
spontaneously shot them all forth again in a tremendous gush. What tales these
animalcules might hasten home to tell. How they had been eaten by a whale,
flailed through its guts, and emerged unscathed once more into the mothering
ocean. The whale, meanwhile, never ceased to ingest the sea, and to expel the
sea in drafts of purest flatulence.

Above the maw of it, two eyes beamed wide, both round and bright,
but one only with a black vertical pupil in it.

So the unconscionable thing went on, staring and causing affright
and picaresque heroics along the trench.

Now and then its one vertical pupil moved, and even crossed from
one eye into the other. Azhriaz (the pupil) looked out upon the water world
which the lamps of her ship revealed to her.

When the blast of annihilation rocked the ship and plunged it
downward into these deeps, she was stunned, her brain, like the ship, whirling.
Then she had called on Chuz inadvertently, and even once almost cried out a
word which had no meaning for her (which word was “Father”). Soon enough the
deep-sea ark steadied. Then the Goddess arose from the bottom of it and shook
off her feebleness.

She would not consider her City, wiped like dirt from the earth by
an angel rag. She would not consider how she rode under the waves. She stood
before the casement eye of the fish-whale-ship and frowned upon submarine marvels.
Nor would she consider these. She was alone. She was a Goddess. This was the
sea. Well, well.

The craft progressed, when not by means of preset mantras, through
an engine in its entrails, Drin-built, which gasped in fluid and expelled it,
so making for a tireless forward propulsion. Within the hub was a palatial
suite, to which the Drin had pretentiously added examples of their finest or
most obtuse smithery. This included, ringed about the main chamber, a series of
grotesque silver heads. Like the whale, these
breathed.
And
by breathing, gulped away the stale air, puffed out, suitably scented, the
reviving gases of the dry land.

Whatever the submarine sailor wished, she had only to demand it. A
quantity of genies seemed to have been hammered in with the rivets. Should she
need a sumptuous repast, music, one more satin pillow for her couch, these
attendants supplied the item. They additionally guided the vessel and
maintained it. Azhriaz was asked to do nothing, either with her magic or her
wits. Sometimes, her new servants might be glimpsed: tinted wisps, bodiless
spirals of smoke, protruding delicate hands, or half-seen childish faces.
Whatever were they? Efflorescences of Vazdru science, or the uncouth Drindra in
the process of refinement—it was not to be guessed.

The sea had its own masters. . . . Fate had warned
her, if she had even needed such a hint. Though she had cast illusion on it
once, now she was the ocean’s uninvited guest.

“Why,” said Azhriaz imperiously, to her part-seen servitors, “do
these depths have color? They are always in the dark.”

A genie flittered forth.

“O Mistress,” said it, “the sea-folk are magicians. They came
beneath millennia since and learned to prosper here, after a spat with the
gods. It was they, then, who made the vegetation colorful.”

“Again, why?”

“Because the sea peoples value lights. They go about with them,
and then they can admire the colors, which they enticed for this purpose.”

When she slept, after her questionings, banquets, on silk and
satin, she dreamed of cities flattened and the death of men. Not Vazdru dreams,
not artistic. She woke screaming. She called the genies and had music, or
stood in the eyes of her ship, regarding the water, and put sleep from her like
a faithless friend.

They
say she traveled in the sea for a month or a year.

The oceanic trench continued for a time. It was a sort of valley
of the region, and mountains soared above and beyond it, cliffs of aqueous
purple granites, out of whose steep caves weird fish-mammals peered, and mooed
at the ship, unheard. The crests of these stupendous mountains, thousands of
feet overhead, might break the sea as little islands.

The ship had turned already eastward, as much as the valley
permitted. Azhriaz had not given any direction, but the earlier ship of oars
and sail had been bound on an easterly voyage; its spirit, held in this one,
bore the impress still, and the genie crew humored the motive. Eventually the
floor of the valley-trench sloped upward. The ship accordingly ascended.

Between the shadowy heights appeared, then, a cup of glowing
water, into which the ship propelled itself. Azhriaz, in the whale’s sinister
eye, presently saw she had come upon a city of the sea peoples.

There were many of these, and most of them different. This one lay
in a honeycomb of grape-green sunlight, that seemed to spill straight down
through the thick tons of ocean aloft. It was a black and iridescent city, very
tall, with enormous arches and apertures set stories up. Black shapes that
might be sharks hovered in its “skies,” and here and there some chariot or
other conveyance sparkled as it soared across the aqueducts.

Beneath the ship, pastures of white anemones stretched down toward
the suburbs. On the pastures herds of elephantine lobsters were browsing.
Mermen shepherds glanced up and made averting gestures at the metal whale. From
the beginning, the sea kings had bred such slaves. They wore garlands of salty
barnacles on their weed-wild hair, and carried knives of coral and electrum,
but they were timid and ingenuous.

Azhriaz did not stay her vessel. It swam on, until it hung in the
funnel of green sun close to the city of the sea lords. The black-crow sharks
had dispersed, the chariots withdrawn. Nothing stirred.

Azhriaz interrogated the genies, and learned from them that the
light came down via a system of lenses arranged higher up to catch and focus
the sun. But as they spoke, another genie trickled out like paint in milk.

“O Mistress,” this genie exclaimed, and pointed with its
long-fingered hands.

Far across the city an apparatus had elevated on one of the
arches. Now it lurched and the water tore. Burning darkness with a train of
bubbling white came rushing upon the ship. A catapult had been fired.

“Do not exert yourself,” chorused all the genies to Azhriaz. “It
is not required.”

At this moment a pore of the ship sorcerously opened and a
levinbolt sped forth. It intercepted the missile from the catapult some
distance off, and hurled it away so that, erupting and ablaze, the ball crashed
back on the black city. Fire and smolder poured into the water at that point
like blood.

Another ball had, however, already been launched at them.

“We fight no more,” said Azhriaz. “We will run away.”

The genies chirruped.

“It is unnecessary, Mistress. All that they send we can destroy,
and level their proudest towers maybe.”

“Just so,” said Azhriaz. “And angels do that. We will not fight
but fly.”

The genies obeyed her. They seemed neither sorrowful nor glad, not
even surprised at her curious whim.

The mantras were activated and the metal whale dived from the
sea-skies of that city like lightning. The second missile flung itself
harmlessly by below, and was lost in wet green space.

She
had come among the cities of Tirzom of the eastern oceans. She did not know it,
but would learn. Black and beauteous were these cities, and between them lay
the fertile plains and marine woods of the shallower shelves. All which
territory the Tirzomites claimed.

Jungles of kelp and branching coral afforded cover for the ship as
Azhriaz stole upon the hem of each metropolis. She saw the black cupolas and
pinnacles of olivine, as the shy fish saw them.

My
father is not here to guide me,
said Azhriaz to herself.
I
need
do nothing. I need not make war.
And her dreams of battered
Nennafir—which had become mixed with others of the ghoul city Shudm—were eased.

Yet, though she hid modestly, many in those sea cities of
magicians knew that something passed. And some crept upon it, more crafty in
their forests than Azhriaz. By their own abnormal means, the sister capitals of
that country sent news and warning of the thing which trespassed there.

All this time, the ship ascended as the ocean floor itself went
up. And soon it was possible to tell in those waters the traffic of night with
day above, as the aquascape faded or grew bright.

One day the waters were very clear and most crystal green. The
subsea ark was nosing among the glades of a great weed wood, when the shining
eyes of it, one with a slender pupil, saw away over the plains beyond a tall
rock, and on the rock’s top a city. It happened that this was Tirzom Jum,
Capital of all the capitals in that part of the world.

Even from a distance, one could tell it was a city of especial
size and import, while a colossal silvery half moon rested over the crown of
it, the two points going down among the walls.

Azhriaz questioned the genies. The genies, their wells of
knowledge seemingly floorless, replied that certain of the sea peoples—though
thoroughly acclimated to the ocean—had a nostalgia for the airs of earth. And
these they might distill and set to play in various chambers or gardens of
their dwellings. It would appear that this city (and despite the floorless
wells, the genies did not, it seems, know enough to name it) had given over to
earth air whole sections of its upper streets. They were contained, therefore,
under a dome of magical glass.

Azhriaz said, “I should like to see it.”

The genies told her she did so.

‘‘Closer to hand.”

The genies told her the ship would go closer to the city.

“No,” said Azhriaz. “I do not mean to make war—this ship is taken
as a threat. I will go out alone.”

The genies gazed upon her with their vague childlike eyes. Their
incorporeal concentration was such that Azhriaz asked of them: “What now?”

“O Mistress, though you are Night’s Daughter, and though you are a
Goddess-Witch, yet, these are the kingdoms of the ocean.”

“Will my mage-craft not avail me here?”

“Perhaps,” they said.

“Then, let me see.”

A
pore of the ship loosed her, like a dark tear. She had made herself a bubble of
air, inside which she stood. And when she moved the bubble clung about her and
went with her. The air of the bubble stayed fresh, renewing itself constantly,
and in its wake drifted other slighter bubbles sloughed from the whole.
Delicious with the Vazdru breath of Azhriaz, they danced among the fish and the
fish lovingly pursued them.

Azhriaz rejoiced in her sudden freedom. She had not thought to
venture out before. But long inactivity—as once before—had worn her down,
making her depression weigh the heavier. She played about the passing
creatures, and though she could not touch them through the bubble, nor they
her, she gazed into their eyes and made circles around them, chased them,
allowed them to give chase to her.

The plains below Tirzom Jum were of the sheerest sand, where lay
incredible shells. Striped and spotted they were, like ocelots, creamy and
resinous as amber, or whorled like the spikes of unicorns, or pure as the
thinnest porcelain—and of every color imaginable. Azhriaz paused over these,
and contemplated piercing the bubble a moment to take up some of the most
beautiful or strange. But the murmuring of the genies clouded her mind. The
ship was her protection. She would not risk undoing her magic in the liquid
element. Could it be she might not then be able to reinstate the spell? And
although it was inconceivable she should drown, the living breathless struggle
was a horrible idea. She had never doubted her powers before, never had cause.

Yet she idled on, and soon the rock cliff of the city loomed above
her.

It was a fact, the Tirzomites were nostalgic, in a scornful way,
for the earth. The sun itself, though removed through layers of water and sky,
might incoherently be
seen
here. On the earth it must be high noon, for a faint goldenness burned in the
apex of the waters, and under the rock a little frill of shadow lay on the
sand.

Azhriaz drifted up the cliff with caution, keeping her distance
from the city. Midway along its slopes, ornate buildings began to appear, black
as jet, with lynx-eyed windows. She glimpsed the momentum of vehicles, and
sea-blown clouds that were enormous trees. . . . Like a child
she stared at this, and kept away, and would not fight.

One third below the cliff’s summit, the curious dome began. It too
was a bubble, transparent, discernible only by the crescent gleam of filtered
sunlight limning its curve. Under the dome, up in the
air
and
gilded peridot light, were the massive oval archways of the architecture of
Tirzom, and the streets and steps needful where swimming had no place, the
stalking towers and emerald minarets.