Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (41 page)

At this message, the three princes of the Vazdru looked at
Azhrarn, where he lay, to see him wake at once in coldest ferocity. But he did
not wake. So they rode away from Druhim Vanashta, and into the dark
countryside. They passed by the River of Sleep, where the leaden flax grew.
Through meadows they went where crystal flowers brushed the stirrups, and over
water where horses’ hoofs struck like bright bells.

After much traveling, they selected a place which seemed to them
suitable.

They laid Azhrarn inside the velvet cave, on a slab of rock they
found there.

They stood guard thereafter, the three princes, one at the couch
of Azhrarn, and one just within the cave mouth, both with drawn sword; while
the third worked magic, a ritual which, with mankind, would have amounted only
to a prayer. And at certain junctures, he that guarded the couch would take his
turn at constructing this magic, or he at the cave’s mouth would do it. And
once or twice each twilit un-day, one of them would go to the stream where the
opals sprang, and come back with water. . . . And so time passed, a great deal
of it. Time in the Underearth, time on the earth above, and nothing altered in
or about the hill. Till time herself grew weary of making no impression there,
and even she stopped calling on them. Not even the winds of the underworld blew
by. And then at last even the three Vazdru ceased to do anything. They let
ritual fail. They did not go out to the stream, and the cup was left on the
ground by the creeper, and only the dew fell in it with an occasional silver
chink.
One
stood at the head of the couch, and one at its foot. One stood just within the
mouth of the cave. They leaned upon their swords and bowed their heads. Like
icons they became, the Vazdru.

And
nothing
moved then. The blades of the grass, the foliage of the trees, each was static.
There came to be a kind of substance which grew together over the cave’s
entrance, like a membrane.

Only the stream ran on below, with the opals prancing in it.

Once
a cup was dipped in me,
sang the stream,
a cup which had
touched the lips of a young god.
For the stream, being
untutored, did not seem to know the difference between the lords of its own
country and the lords of heaven, nor between youth and immortality.

Who
had
dared
take Azhrarn’s princedom from him? Long long ago, when he had become cinders,
they left the chair vacant, and lamented him the earth over. But he had loved
them then; his cleaving to mankind was just a fad. Now, lovers unloved, they
grew vicious, which condition was an art among the Vazdru.

He was of the princes of Druhim Vanashta, and he had dressed in
yellow. And later, with eyes of cold yellow hate, he was a lion and clawed the
soil of Azhrarn’s garden, and cast in on the fire fountain there the first clod
of dirt that smoored it.

This Vazdru lion sat now in his man’s form, beautiful as night’s
morning at the heart of Azhrarn’s palace, which was iron without, marble
within.

His name was Hazrond. On his hands stared black rubies. No longer
did he dress in the color of the abhorred sun, but in the sable beloved of
demonkind. Yet the sable was slashed across the breast with one band of yellow
silk, heavily fringed and embroidered with yellow jewels and metals (all but
loathsome gold), topaz and amber and bleached bronze.

“Play,” said Hazrond. And some of the Eshva came into the courts
and smote the satin tongues of their seven-stringed harps. The songs were
wonderful, and sad, as befitted the aftermath of a lord’s demise. The Eshva
wept continually and exquisitely. No one stayed them. Many Eshva did not come
anymore into the city, but wandered the outer places, lost in somber dreaming,
their wild hair harp-strung with silver snakes. They were the servants of the
Vazdru, but Hazrond let them be. “They will return in due course,” he said. His
voice was so musical, the flowers which were dying, or attempting to die, in
the gardens, craned their stems toward its notes, and started inadvertently to
live again. The Eshva too raised their pale and flowerlike faces from their
harps. Even far off, on the hills as they wandered, they caught the distant
melody of that voice. In due course, they must, they would return.

The Vazdru were marvelous to look on, nothing in that. But of them
all, Hazrond was of the most marvelous. Perfection perfected. They said, and it
is not sensible to disbelieve them, that of all his caste, after Azhrarn,
Hazrond was the strongest, the most gifted, the most fair. Like Azhrarn, maybe,
as Azhrarn had been in the adolescence of eternity.

Thus Hazrond sat in the chair of Azhrarn, and paced about
Azhrarn’s halls under the caustic windows. He rested his long-lashed eyes, and
tapped his long ringed fingers, did Hazrond, upon the books and adornments of
the palace. He reviewed the hounds and horses in its yards. He waited high up
in the needle’s eyes of the towers, and gazed over the city like an eagle.

Now there is this to be mentioned too, of Hazrond, that he stalks
out suddenly from among the Vazdru, into the mansion of Azhrarn, and assumes
the palace and the city. But until then, nothing is said of Hazrond. Perhaps it
was he that Azhrarn spoke to in the ruby street, pausing in the chariot to
remark that no man saw love and no demon, either. And perhaps he had been
often, this one, with Azhrarn, his charioteer even on the very night the Demon
claimed back his daughter from the earth. And it is possible that when the
yellow was donned in Druhim Vanashta, Hazrond had sought an audience with
Azhrarn and stood before him slightingly. And Azhrarn, preoccupied, had
dismissed Hazrond without comment. And there is one tale, told with hindsight,
that when Azhrarn called the Vazdru to him, before he fought the angel at
Az-Nennafir, Hazrond sent to Azhrarn a finely wrought sword budded with clear jewels,
Drin work, and the sword itself had said: “Hazrond dispatches me to you and
bids you look upon me as your defender, for he himself is engaged elsewhere.”
At which Azhrarn had cursed. And the sword had said: “Hazrond bids me say that
he learned this tactic from his lord, Prince Azhrarn, who rules Druhim Vanashta
in image only, his heart and mind being engaged elsewhere.”

Yet one black flame from a black fire, Hazrond appears at once and
there he is, upon the tower, his black hair streaming, looking about him like
an eagle.

No other of the demons had opposed him. His method was simple. He
walked into the palace and sat down there, and—word getting around—when his
fellows came he nodded, and smiled upon them, as if never another had owned the
house. Until there had been the whisper
—What of Azhrarn?
To
that Hazrond had replied: “Of whom do you speak?”

Had they resigned themselves that the angel had vanquished their
lord? Unarguably, no search was made for him through the Underearth, or above.

Slow but sure, the sad songs flowed away, and the wandering Eshva
on the hills drifted toward the city. While, down by their sluggish lake, the
Drin forges began to flare hotter than for a great time, and now and then the
noise of squeaks and quarrelings arose there, as they made glorious presents to
lay at the new lord’s feet, Hazrond’s feet, and then stole the items from each
other.

And as for the uncouth Drindra, they were in a turmoil, for,
enslaved by Azhriaz and summoned to her, they had not dared tell that her father,
whose aid she invoked, was fallen farther than she. For Hazrond, doubtless he
knew her straitened circumstances in the sea, and that the god-primed Malukhim
had tracked her there. Had he wooed her once, and been rejected? Or did he only
hate her as Azhrarn’s child, a debased demon, partly mortal? (Mortal hatred
being the fashion now, below.)

Certainly Hazrond did not trouble himself at the perils of
Azhriaz.

“Play,” said Hazrond, and the Eshva performed their voiceless
songs, like nightingales of snow. And with the black wings of his cloak folded
about him, Hazrond looked down from the towers of the palace.

11

THE
SWORD of the angel Yabael crashed upon Tirzom Jum.

To those beneath it was apparent as a scarlet blast that smashed
equally both ground and air. The buildings of that city tottered and went down.
But the dome itself, its glass and sorcery riven, exploding, spewed up the
world of atmosphere into the world of sea, amid a million pyrotechnics.

Azhriaz was cast upward too in a plume of black water, green fire,
red steam, and debris of all sorts. Her instinct had been immediately to mesh
herself within a bubble of breathable air. This she succeeded in doing, and in
maintaining, despite the tumult, and presently she located herself inside it
still, and Tavir with her, for a gallant impulse had caused him to seize hold
of her, the moment the Malukhim struck.

For a minute or more, nothing was to be seen, or at least to be
deciphered by either of them, beyond each other’s outlines and the margin of
the air bubble.

The ocean was in ferment. It rocked and collapsed and upheaved
itself exactly as the city had done. Arrow flights of fish tore by, slabs of
architecture, but mostly bloodied smokes. While beyond it all, the creature of
destruction showed only as a dull red glare, where even the water
burned.

The
concussion had tossed them far away, Azhriaz, Tavir, that was the inadvertent
helpfulness of it. And by this fluke of nemesis, many escaped. The angel
itself, mindless golem that it was, stood over the blasted mousehole in a long
interlude of triumph, and so the mouse it sought, the demon goddess of all
mice, rode in the upsurge farther and farther to safety. They had been hunting,
it would seem, the Malukhim, at least two of them. Who knows how this one—Yabael
the blood-sworded, the vulture, the second scorched—how he learned to pierce
the sea for her, but learn he did. And, worse than at Nennafir, unreasoning,
he took a cleaver to a mote of light, missed it, and decimated all the other
life around.

They swung now in the bubble, high up amid the greenest water,
over which one might tell the distant earthly dawn was spreading her mantle.
Their arms had stayed about each other, even their hair had coiled and clung,
the magician-prince Tavir, the Goddess Azhriaz, for it was a fearsome thing
they had experienced.

The bubble bobbed them into the top fringes of a wood of weed, and
here, the sea quietening somewhat, they were able to rest. They looked back
toward the city and its cliff, but neither was any longer to be found. Instead,
the sea was full of unnatural scenes. Half a mile away there sailed by, like a
strange ship, the upper tiers and cupola of a tower, seemingly unscathed, and
in the cage of its long windows, Tirzomite sorcerers and scholars were soundlessly
railing against fate. A mile off, whole storeys spun slowly through the water,
on the stairways and roofs of which, or what portions of these remained, lords
and slaves alike scrambled about in fright. Nearer there passed a succession of
islandlike gardens, or the treed walks of the city, coming unraveled, the great
roots alone like trees. Among them three or four octopuses were forcing a way,
darkening the sea with a panic of ink. And nearer yet came floating a princely
bed with painted curtains, and lying on it like a black statue, tethered by her
long yellow tresses, a dead beautiful half-breed, who had not possessed either
the gills or the spells to survive immersion.

“Oh, alas,” said Tavir, staring after her in grief.

“Blame me for it,” said Azhriaz, sullen as a child. “1 am the
reason. The sun-thing lunged at me, and your city was only in the way.”

“You are not the reason. The gods, as ever, are to blame.”

“
I
am a god.”

Tavir shook his green-haired head, and from his lustrous eyes,
tears fell. Then Azhriaz wept also. They wept together in their little globe
of air, which neither needed, while all around those they despaired for
meandered by, some dead, some live and weeping too, for Tirzom Jum, nostalgic
for the earth, had never lost the knack of tears. But the sea, itself all
tears, the story went, the tears the gods shed eons ago at the evil of mankind,
the sea scorned Tirzomite crying and drank their tears and filled their eyes
again with its own.

As for Yabael, seen from the cover of the weed, he was just
visible, for his giant height and girth seemed to have been
lessened—voluntarily, or in the expending of power. There he loomed over a heap
of clinker and glass, above a plain of broken spotted shells, and the smokes
and seaborne ruins revolved around him, and his wings rose flightlessly behind
his fiery head, his soulless eyes saw nothing.

“Let me be gone,” said Azhriaz, “before he wakes out of his dream
of death-lust, and his masters tell him the stroke missed.”

“Your sea vessel is exactly here,” said Tavir. “Fate was on your
side, for the disaster threw you down in this wood, close by.”

“Yes, Fate is kin to me,” said Azhriaz. “One may anticipate an
occasional favor. Blessings on you, dear un-uncle,” added she, with some venom.
And then she whistled, like a silver pipe. And by some means not normal, the
genies of her ship heard her.