Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (44 page)

Even the angel restricted his pacing, he kept to the inner places,
though World’s Brink, and chaos itself, could surely be nothing to him.

The sunset came and went quick as a careless kiss. Night and a few
spare stars tricked out the sky.

The Malukhim gleamed on in the dark. He seemed to be looking down
into the ocean, as a man looks for the rising of fish.

“You are not waiting there for me,” said Dathanja, as he came up
the midnight mountain slope, “but it is I who arrive.”

The angel turned, and now looked at Dathanja. Even in blackness,
the eyes of Ebriel
shone,
for
the light remained within him constantly.

Dathanja came on. He approached the angel, nearer and more near,
until he was within three feet of him.

There were many powers left to Dathanja. He used them. He said:

“Ebriel, do you stand in my way? There has been a conflict. Let us
not re-enact it, inadequately. I am no demon. And you are not the mightiest of
the Sun-Created; you are not Melqar, who came from the fire last.”

Then Ebriel, with a whisper of his wings, moved aside. It was a
gesture of economy and beauty. Dathanja went by him, and reached the crown of
the slope, where the mountain opened to loom above the lake of sea.

He was still a mage when he wished it. He cast his mind into the
deeps, like a line. His thoughts, nothing else, walked under the ocean, and
through that sunken city there. He, too, had learned economy.

There was a lurid radiance down below. He perhaps did notice it,
but gave it no attention, though, all the while, it heightened. He had other
business.

The awareness of Dathanja came then into a hall, where there were
columns of coral (flushed now very red). And there began to be a stirring in
the water.

Zhirek
,
it
said, in several voices.
See how the murderer slinks
back to gloat on his legendary deed.

The thoughts, the mind of Dathanja, ignoring that too, went about
and scanned every column with care. A multitude of personalities responded,
chaffering and beguiling. But they lived in the limestone as snails do in their
shells, and were comfortable: They had evolved their own destiny. It was not
these upon whom he had worked the vengeance of King Death. And of the eternal
souls which he had incarcerated, all were gone. But one.

And this one presently came and tapped him, as it were, on the
shoulder, a human mind and thoughts like his own, essence and personality
together. “Here I repose,” it said, insufferably. And, once the inner eye of
Dathanja regarded it, it added, “You are not as you were. I observe your sense
of debt. You must set me free then.”

“I accept that I must.”

“And at once,
if
you please.” In some
hundreds of years, in one sort or another, this being had stayed used to
getting its own way.

Nothing was said, either, of the feelings of Uhlume, Lord Death,
in whose name the work had been accomplished. There would seem to be some
assumption a few centuries had healed his wounds.

Up on the mountain, Dathanja murmured.

Below, from the russet dimness his awareness glimmered out.

“Wait, you dog!” snapped the personage in the coral. As the trap
split, it was disgorged, and flailed with blathering outcry into the ocean. “Oh
base jackal! I cannot swim—” But next a recollection, for what had he been,
this one, in the interim, but a gilled sea prince of Tirzom. So, out of the depths
of Simmurad the final captive floundered, breathing water and not breathing it,
drowning and not drowned. Vestiges of immortality still on him, just, yet no
longer an immortal, soul cut loose, returned, staying separate: a testy,
cunning, age-old refugee. “How red the sea is. Was the sea here always red? Not
so. Something is afoot. Some angry reddened rushing thing. What does Tavir make
of it?” (Thumping and leafing through that relinquished body’s memory, as if
through a muddled library. Followed by an outraged shriek and more energetic
labors to surface.) “The angel—the brazen destroyer—oh, you dog-jackal of a
Zhirek, to desert me here—what release is this you give me—”

Dathanja, calm as the night, the Malukhim, day in night, they
beheld something plump up through the skin of the sea, far below. It bobbed and
sank, it scudded and blundered and shook its fists. Then, remembering, it
howled
a phrase of the ancient thaumaturgy that had once earned it a niche in Simmu’s
city—and was vaulted high into the air on a carpet with chicken wings.

In a trice, sage and carpet pelted down between the sorcerer and
the angel, squawking.

The dialogue was lost. For at this instant, the sea began to cook.

Thunder bellowed from the horizon. The air bristled. A sun of
darkest fire arose. Like blood boiling through a vein, the apparition of Yabael
came tearing through the water, beneath it, invisible, save as a running gash
of ravening scarlet with something man-shaped, vulture-shaped, the gouging beak
of it. The mountains shook to their roots, and everywhere avalanches teemed
down to splash into the seething ocean. Steam gouted, the waves leapt toward
the sky in fear. The world seemed on the verge of ending—

Then it had passed. Like a terrible fever, it drove away, under
the very land itself, the crags, all that redness, the bloodstained flare and
noise and shuddering. The sea dropped back on itself, turning black. The
boomings and moanings died. A quiet fell.

Ebriel had folded up his silent whiteness. Dathanja looked away
where the thing had gone, toward the farthest east. The rescued sage was dumb.

As for the chicken-winged carpet, in affright it had laid an egg
upon the ground, and leaving it motherless, vanished.

The
final sea. It ran under the basements of the mountains. It was the only road.
She fled by it, the lost Goddess in her demon ship.

And she knew, flying east and ever east, that there was a limit to
her flight. If she had not known, the genies had started up to explain. They
foamed about her now, those smoky creatures, as if something were burning. They
clasped their slender hands, and their childlike faces were full of woe. They
had no nervousness for themselves. It was for her they misgave, presumably,
because they were her slaves, and that only proper.

“O Mistress. The earth’s edge. The sea flows out beyond the
mountains to nothingness and otherness, into the limbo that surrounds the
world.”

“Exactly,” said Azhriaz. “And there is nowhere else to go. Since
Simmurad, the channel is too narrow—to fly north or south is to crash against
the submarine mountains that abound here. To turn back is to meet red death
headlong. May we fly up in the air? The spells of this vessel preclude it.
Shall I try alone? Oh, how swiftly then would the destroyer catch me, closer to
heaven wherefrom it took its life. But this way, eastward, as you say, is the
unknown horror, the opposition to all earthly-living things—therefore also to
that which pursues. Even the Malukhim will be discouraged, and draw back.”

But the hunter did not do this. It came on behind like a long
roller of blood.

Azhriaz herself withdrew from the eye-windows of her ship. It
moved so speedily, like lightning, she could tell very little from the view.
She prowled the exquisite belly of the fish-whale. She ordered music, and a
feast—the melodies were weird and unharmonious, the food was slops and the wine
smoldered. She tried to envisage the boundary of the world. To believe in it.
She was not afraid. She was terrified. She had no fear at all. “Chuz,” she
said, “1 am your subject, too.” And she threw the melting writhing apples of
the feast against the walls where the draperies whined and tore. And she bit
her beautiful nails, like a frightened mortal girl.

The ship sped on, through the last channels of earth’s eastern ocean,
under the mountains. There was no light down there. Even the water was not
quite fluid. The ship began to rustle and to creak in all its joints. The
magical lamps expired one by one. The music had the sound of distant screaming.

“O Mistress,” said the genies.

“Be still. If I am to bolt into chaos, then so must that thing
which hunts me. Come, sun-hawk!” called Azhriaz into the flickering
far-screaming motion, into the deaf un-sea behind, the sightless question
before. “Follow, enemy.
Follow,
and chaos shall swallow
you, too.”

Suddenly the genies disappeared. Not a wisp of them remained. And
then a ghastly rattling din resounded through the ship. The ultimate lamps died
like flowers which break apart.

Blackness came and sat in the ship and in the eyes of Azhriaz, and
blackness smiled and said to her: Now look about you.

But Azhriaz covered her eyes with her hands.

Then every noise stopped. The ship grew soundless. It grew
motionless. It hung suspended.

Azhriaz kneeled down. She held her breath.

She could never die. Yet death was so close. No relative of hers,
no handsome uncle who might bargain. True death, the facts of it. And she was
alone.

Then there was a bang that seemed to crack the world itself. And
the ship soared upward—so fast that everything was left behind, the metal
bodywork, the magical rivets, flesh and bones—and faster and faster, until even
thought and breathing lay crushed beneath—and she heard, the black-haired girl
alone in blackness, miles off and eons under her, her own voice crying out,
like the voice of the infant that still she was and yet had never been:
“Mother—O my mother help me! Mother! Mother! O my mother!”

But untenable Nothingness or Somethingness had closed upon the
ship. Chaos, or whatever chaos was at the hem of the earth. It gripped, and
even as it gripped, it recoiled.

Mother help me
—

And now the ship plunged downward, as if into a bottomless abyss.
Or into one.

This is death. And I cannot die. I shall live death forever
—

A hand held the ship. A hand so huge, so vast, the ship lay tiny
there as a shell upon a beach. The hand, weighing the ship, its contents. It
could not be a hand at all. Nor, in the black, a face, stooping, staring,
somehow seen unseen. Two eyes whose centers were the spinning voids that had
no name, have none, the depth from which the seeds of matter spring, the
toiling of planets unborn, the sleep of worlds that are done. The tinder box of
life, the eyes, empty and full and overbrimmed and open wide. And the face in
profile now, its brow all time, its features shifting like pale sands along the
slope of space. The mouth breathing out pale flame, a word, a wish. And the
hand curving back, as the hand of a boy might curve to fling away a little
stone—

But as the hand rises, the great sleeve comes with it, a curling
wave with the galaxies caught in the folds—

And under the colossal curving and curling, a redness is running,
directly there, like a torn seam.

The great sleeve sweeps over to meet the running red of the
tearing seam, meets with it, envelops. Fire and unfire curdling and a million
stitches coming undone.

There was a moment of pure electrics, coronas, sunbursts, novas.
Each one voiceless and without color. Thereafter there commenced a deep soft
thunder. It stretched and mounted and passed through volume, into a sound that
was no sound at all.

Soundless then, the eruption. The world arched its back, the sky
leaned. For a second all matter heaved toward oblivion, or new life, which was
the same. (Even heaven cratered supposedly, and flakes of sky scattered like
plaster.) And then the balance swung again. Smoothly, everything came to
rest, like a gentle wheel which runs down.

Shaken like a bag of salt, earth’s substance settled. Like salt,
every grain in a fresh place, yet salt still, thinking itself unaltered.

And the huge hand, with nothing in it now, returning into the
forms of unform from which it had conceived itself. No eyes to see, no voids of
spinning things. Seeping away. Ceaseless. Ceased.

To
the ends of the earth, in the remotest places, drowsy, half asleep, the rumor
yawned and sleepily said, Something has gone on in the night. But nothing had
happened, surely, for the world looked no different. The trees wore their
necklaces of fruit, the goats gave up their milk, now and then with a kick to
go with it, the young girls combed their hair and put blossoms and beads in it.
The wise men, poring over their scrolls and globes of quartz, in tall towers,
shook their heads, puzzled, dissatisfied.

If all are changed, who will feel change in the air?

Is mankind safe? Yes.

Is the world whole? Yes.

Is the earth still flat? It is.

PART THREE: Under the Earth

1

HAZROND,
Prince of Demons, took on him, for diversion, the shape of a great black eagle.
East and west he flew, beating with his vast wings, north and south, to the
four edges of the world. He watched the lighted processions of men crawling by
below, and crossed, with a cool glance, over the high stone pylons of cities.
Once he folded his inky wings on the roof of a temple. “He has not taught you
anything, then,” said the wings, the feathers, the eyes—everything but the
voice of Hazrond. “Even he, Azhrarn the Beautiful, with his educational plan.
But mankind cannot learn. Behold, dead lord, they are still worshiping the
gods, though they know now the gods care nothing for them.”