Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (38 page)

She knew her phantasms could not reach her here. So she invented
phantasms, which flooded the area, moping and meowing, and some, in psychic
fright at being created in such a spot, psychically made psychic water on the
floor. Thereafter, many magic fireworks were let off. And in the wake of the
colorful confusion, Azhriaz summoned the Drindra, that she knew must come, for
several of them she had chained to her as her slaves, a deed the Vazdru could
accomplish.

The Drindra came. What a sight
they
were.

****Note to Vera: The paragraph below should be a footnote
attached to above sentence:

While the name
Drin
may be roughly translated
as meaning “they that have no women”—the Drin kind being only of the male
sex—the subname
Drindra
would seem to mean “they that have no women—and no wits.” This statement, while
not strictly veritable, yet provides some notion of Drindra looks and personality.
**End Footnote

Foremost stood a great clod-hopping thing with a lion’s body,
horse’s feet, the head of an owl, and the tail of a pony—which tail was plaited
with ribbons. It made noises harmonious with its appearance, but additionally
vocalized the gabble-slang of the fellowship. There were also others, in the
forms of bears crossed with bats or dragons, oxen with dogs, toads with goats
and gazelles, and parrots having long hairy hind legs.

Azhriaz, seeing the sea king shrink in (laughing) loathing,
addressed the Drindra twice over, once in their gabble, and once in the tongue
of Tirzom.

“Valiant servants, you have braved the seas for me. Say who I am.”

The ridiculous owl-lion spoke for the rest, who augmented its
oratory by emphatic grunts, burps, and squawks.

“You are she that is
his
child.”

Azhriaz glanced at the king, but the king, spurningly shrinking
and holding his nose, evidenced either no understanding of the slang, or no
belief in its import.

Azhriaz said to the Drindra: “Know me then. Now, take me hence.”

At this, though she spoke only in the gabble, guessing a trick the
king grew alert and his scholars with him, and they too began to weave
glimmering sorceries in the air.

But the Drindra boiled and burbled. The lion-owl said in a hiss,
“O Mistress, O Lovely One, it may not be. These are the oceans, and have other
laws. For all your power, and ours, you or we can do nothing here that goes
against
their
plans.”

“Fools,” said Azhriaz, with a lashing glance, so the Drindra
rolled in a debauch of agony across the psychic urinations on the ground. “Go
away then, and tell my father what you have told me. And say to Azhrarn the
Beautiful, his daughter is here in threatened peril, and she requests he will
come to save her from it.”

At these words the Drindra entered paroxysm. They writhed and
screamed and raved and hooted and brayed, until the mage-sphere quaked.

“Alas, alas,” said the owl-lion, blushing with anxiety.

“
Alas?
Go
do my bidding,” said Azhriaz.

“No, it cannot be done,” said the Drindra. “Alas, alas.”

And so saying, in a storm of fur and feathers and uproar, they
disappeared, and left her there.

Azhriaz waited a while in the silent chamber, and the black-green
king of Tirzom Jum gave her space to wait, out of his victory.

No other demon manifested. The Drindra did not return. While their
cry of
Alas,
their cry of
No,
these had somehow an all-pervasive meaning to be understood by any.

Eventually: “It seems he does not deign to come to you,” said the
king. “Or else, as you have said, he is
—busy
at other affairs.”

Azhriaz pointed at the floor of the chamber. A brightness wrenched
from her hand and struck the paving and cracked it. That she could do. But in
another moment, one of the scholar-mages had muttered, and the crack healed,
might never have been. This
they
could do.

Azhriaz turned. She went to the king and looked in his face.

“Behold, your captive,” said the Goddess Azhriaz.

Some
days and nights went by before they decided her fate. At first they kept her at
the court, as an interesting freak. They mocked her, but she would not answer
or seem to hear. Or sometimes she did answer more cleverly than they cared for.
Finding they might tether her with spelled cords, they did it. She broke the
cords. They retied them. She broke them. It grew tiresome. She seemed aloof, as
if she lived within a pane of steely glass. They did not know if she was
afraid, or angry, or in despair. They did not know if she feared them, or
admired them properly. It seemed perhaps she did not. Her equivocal vulnerability
infuriated them, and her useless powers, and her ugly beauty. She quickly
ceased to please. Since such a captive could never be let free, what was to be
done with the wretched thing?

The scholar in black and bones muttered again to his king. Azhrarn
had not claimed the woman, yet patently she was supernatural. Best be a
fraction cautious. Cast her down, yet leave a margin in offense. Do nothing
irretrievable.

So, in the end, Azhriaz, the Demon’s Daughter, the
Goddess-on-Earth, was thrown out of the palace of Tirzom Jum, and left on the
middle streets of the city, a destitute foreign beggar.

The
middle streets lay between the air of the dome and the waters of the lower
streets. Being neither completely watery, therefore, nor aristocratically
gaseous, they were reckoned a slum. Here too were to be found the semi-magical
tubes by means of which the air from above was cleansed and revitalized, and
the large cubicles via which it was necessary to journey from the wet habitat
to the dry one, or the reverse. And in the middle streets, about these valves
and pipes and the inadvertent canals they sometimes formed, the outcasts of the
city lived.

Since the sea races were all descended of magicians, even the
lowest of the low among them had some magic aptitude or skill. (For this very
cause, the slaves of the undersea regime were for the most part sub-breedings
between men and fish, or stolen human stock adapted to the watery life. For the
mage-aristos preferred the service of beings that could work no spells, and had,
preferably, no true intelligence.)

The rabble of the bottom air levels of Tirzom Jum was exotic.
There were pride-stung illegitimates of the princes, and revengeful lamenting
legitimates flung from high places for some crime, or by the connivance of enemies.
And there were schizophrenic half-blood Tirzomites, got by mistakes with other
peoples, some even with pale skins, which made them targets for aversion and
abuse.

Azhriaz fitted but too well inside the messy nest, and made slight
stir.

There was a sloping street that lay beneath the steep, windowless,
back black walls of three palaces, whose tops flowered into apertures, and
proper existence, some four hundred feet or so farther up. High over the street
crossed bridges, where slaves teemed, day and night, on their onerous duties.
Sometimes they also dropped in the street, when falling from the nightly
star-lighting half a mile overhead. The dwellers in the street found it easy to
avoid being flattened by these downfalls. One heard the screaming from a long
way off, and the bothersome sound of a fleshly object driving through
atmosphere. The persons in the street took cover accordingly, though sometimes
their possessions were crushed. The passage of a falling slave was never
impeded by any of the bridgework: It repelled each flailing body by magic. The
princes did not wish even their lower avenues to be spoiled by corpses. Once
the body had arrived in the street and was still, there was a universal
stealing out to rob the cadaver of any worthwhile thing. And in this way, the
street in which the star-lighters fell so regularly was considered something of
a prize.

The rabble of Tirzom was aesthetic. A man might barter a dish of
food for a dainty carving, then the food-gainer change his mind, and clutch the
other to him: “No, no, better hunger of the belly than a starved soul. Retrieve
your slops, and return my valuable.” Before the robbery of a dead slave, too,
the thieves might pause a moment to consider the angle of its limbs, if it had
died couthly. The facts were related presently to those who had the job of
collecting such corpses and disposing of them. Most were fed to the octopus
guards of the city, to help them keep a taste for man-flesh. Presumably those
who had expired at a pretty angle fared no better.

Azhriaz built herself a house at the street’s nether end. It was
not made of debris, shells, or the hides of sharks, as were the other
dwellings. It was made of bricks, and swank. What was solid she had formed by
marshaling her powers, and then dressed it by the same powers to look every way
grander than it was. The house had a white skin, and casements of painted glass
in blue and deep red—the height of unacceptable unfashion in the green-black
city.

“Who is that haughty subwoman?”

“She is a hostage-spy from some inferior nation. She came here in
a ship of metal which is kept in durance, at the whim of our wonderful damnable
lords, accursed be they, and blessed above all others.”

“I have heard it said they could not best her.”

“Nor could she them. Here she is. She cannot escape. She is
trapped here forever.”

“She has no gills and would drown in water.”

“No. There is a tank in her house, large as a room and full of
sea, and she swims there submerged, or dances, and fish accept tidbits from her
fingers. This has been seen through her windows.”

“She has said she is Vazdru. I think she lies, for I am not
convinced there are such things as demons.”

‘‘And I said a spell as I emptied my bladder against her house
wall. The bricks are in reality black.”

“Also, however, urine turns to lilies where it touches them.”

The
rabble began to visit Azhriaz in her queenly house. So she entertained demoted
sages and sacked lords—who wore tatters and behaved rudely out of gall. And
thieves she received, who preyed on the higher city or the lower wet city, and
who garbed themselves like princes and had such sumptuous social graces it was
impossible to converse with them. And there came also exiles to the
white-skinned house (which had every day more fair white lilies blooming on it,
for insolence provokes insolence, and a great quantity of liquid was drunk
thereabouts). All the exiles were pale, some green of hair, some blue, and some
had fishy eyes, or were scaled, and one even had a fishtail under her long
robe, though she pretended she was only lame and her litter-bearers had no
tongues.

Azhriaz entertained each and every one with insulting illusory
magnificence, like idiot children. Delicacies of the dry earth were served by
unseen attendants. Musics played and the air dripped with fragrances of land,
sandalwood, balsam, and nard.

One golden-green midday, a lord’s mistake, aristocratically black,
but dun of hair, came to Azhriaz and talked with her.

“I might increase your station,” said Azhriaz at the fifth bowl of
illusory but intoxicant wine. “Placed as I am, I cannot do it. But, when I am
gone from here . . . Do you know of any way I might take a brief
holiday out of Tirzom Jum?”

“You say,” said the mistake, “you are a demon’s daughter. Trapped
here hopelessly, as you also are, do you long for the vile Underearth?”

“I do not,” said Azhriaz, canceling the wine. “The viler customs
here intrigue me more.”

Later, when the greener afternoon began, a pale-skinned pale-eyed
thief stepped in. His face was painted black, and his gills gilded.

“I have thought over your earlier question to me, regarding a
holiday. That is superfluous, for I have decided to take you under my
protection, when your every day will be a holiday of joy. You shall be my
mistress. Since we are both blasted with pallor, you do not offend me so very
much.”

“How generous you are,” said Azhriaz. “Pray go and be generous
some otherwhere.”

But in the green dusk of Tirzom, a young black man, with green
dusk too for hair, approached the gate.

Up aloft the stars were being lit, and soon there came the shriek
and rush of a slave falling to his death.

The princely visitor looked about. Several of the denizens of the
street were hastening to move their valuables out of harm’s way.

Louder and louder the impending rush of the fall, and thinner and
thinner the cries of the victim, almost senseless with horror.

The black lord moved away from the gate of Azhriaz and out into
the street’s center. The rabble, who already stared at him for his hateful
perfection, nudged each other.
“It is Tavir
,”
they said.

The shadow of the falling one filled the street.