Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 (54 page)

“But,” said Atmeh, “I have been left unmolested by you.”

“You slept,” said the angel. His eyes burned out of the silhouette
of him, each a savage topaz, and each not like the eyes of an eagle—but like
the eagle itself. “Now you waken, and come here, as is right, that we may meet
in combat. And so, at your awakening, I perceived you would.”

“To fight is an emblem,” said Atmeh. “Must you have it, Sun-Born?
Must
you?”

“Behold. The sword is from the scabbard,” he said. “When I have
sheathed it, the matter will be done. Until that hour, then.”

“I am an immortal,” she said. “And you, I think. We may transmute,
but not perish.”

“All lives are so. It has been discussed before. Such things do
not obviate our combat.”

“Impoverished Ebriel,” said Atmeh, with the flash of dark and
anger in her eyes, or perhaps just the last flash of the sinking sun, “you are
only a fool.”

As the evening moved over the hill to meet the coal-blue wall of
the mountains, it found two warriors there. An angel, the sun-holding citrines
of his breastplate, golden hair and sword. And Atmeh become Sovaz again, or
Azhriaz, in mail the color of the mountain’s face, night hair, sword of metal
like a pale twilight. And the evening glimmered across them, then passed on.
But they stayed, and they fought.

How they fought.

It was related that, from a hundred miles off, men saw the
ignition of those blows a quarter of the way up the night sky. It was related,
that when the swords smote each other, an arc of brilliance tore out. And
sometimes the hill itself was struck, or the air, and lava burst from the one
and boiling steam from the second. And then again the sword of each of them
might strike home into the body of the opponent. At this, the atmosphere itself
must have caught its breath with agony. But they, one an elemental thing, the
other scarcely less, agonized or otherwise, healed in an instant, or did not
need medicine. It was like the former fight in many ways, that between Azhrarn
and Melqar, save for the mutual woundings, but then these two were younger. As
with that former conflict, it is nearly useless to describe it. It was
inexplicable, it was an affront to every mortal warrior who ever dueled. An
emblem, as she said.

Midnight passed over the hill in the wake of evening and mere
night.

Atmeh fell back, and leaned on her sword. Though she might fight
until daybreak, all day till sunset, all night till dawn (forever, as he had
said), yet she allowed herself to be weary, almost to sink with weariness—of
the soul if not the body.

“If you would rest,” said Ebriel, in the Eshva speech, “do so.”

“Fool,” said Atmeh, aloud, in the voice of Azhriaz, “resting and
toiling till time’s end.
Fool.
And I a fool to permit
this.” Then she dropped down on the earth, her eyes shut. Her soul was so weary
it had drained her body.

The angel stood nearby, to guard her if the need arose. She was
valuable to him. She was his reason, after all, for existence. But presently,
as if she had inhaled strength from the hill, Atmeh opened her eyes again. She
lay and looked up at the angel in the starlight.

“Ebriel, bargain with me. There is some kinship between us; we
both have sunfire in our veins. Now if I can strike you three times, and not
myself be smitten, before the sun returns—the sun who is directly father and
mother to you, and indirectly a grandparent to me—if I can do that, will you grant
me a boon?”

Ebriel regarded his adversary. His eyes grew peculiarly lambent,
as though he had come to love her. Of course, they were sworn foes; perhaps he
had.

“Since we shall contend forever, it is reasonable that we should
be courteous, and play such games as you submit. Smite me three times unsmitten
before sunrise, and your boon I will grant, provided it is in my scope.”

“Oh, believe it,” said Atmeh, and she smiled, for she had heard—at
long last—a fallible trace of earthliness in his choice of phrase.

The strife on the hill then changed its tone, seeing it now had a
purpose.

As a combatant, Atmeh was capricious, cunning, and swift. Perfect
coordination and vision were hers—which in themselves made her a peerless
swordswoman. The adroitness may have been inherent in her, for the Vazdru
sorcerer-princes were sorcerous also in many types of martial skill. And
perhaps, in the years of her bored goddesshood, she had had herself, for
diversion, trained by her war captains in the crafts of affray public or
personal. Yet she did not engage in this fight with a format either female or
masculine. Her attitude was not human. Neither, of course, was that of the
Malukhim—which doubtless would have slain a human swordsman, and one of
uncommon cleverness, inside seven seconds.

Three hours of darkness were unspent.

In the first hour, a crescent bow of moon, having cast its quiver
of light, went down, and as it did so, Atmeh came close to the Malukhim, and
lowered her sword.

As Ebriel’s moon-outshining blade leaped toward her heart, Atmeh
said, “You are beautiful, Sun-Created,” in the voice of Azhriaz, and Ebriel’s
stroke was missed—in surprise it would appear: Who would think to say or be so
bold as to say such words to an angel? And as he missed the stroke, the blade
of the demoness clove through his right arm (not at all wounding it), and she
said,
“One.”

The angel drew away. He stared at her, the white eagle of heaven.

They fought the rest of the hour, then, and by her competence she
did not let him touch her. But in the second hour before dawn, she spoke again
to him, in the voice of Sovaz. “If you were only a man, Ebriel, there is a way
you might overcome me. There is a way you might pierce me, and kill me too, for
a little while. Do you know of this way?”

“Do not attempt to trick me again,” said the angel. His wings
opened like towering fans, and Atmeh sprang beneath his sword and clipped the
left wing a glancing blow.

“Two,”
said Atmeh. “You trick yourself. I know your kind does not lie down in love.
Nor loves in any other posture. Save for this.”

Then they battled like two hawks that have fallen from the sky,
like two lynxes above meat. They battled like a man and a woman finally, in
that old battle each sex knows, yet without the flavor of desire.

And three times, despite her finesse, the angel almost struck her,
negating her double assault upon him. Twice, chance saved her, small things—a
rock that turned her foot (she who never stumbled) and flung her from the zone
of the stroke, or a sudden gust of shale from the hill which, tossed against
his sword, deflected it. (Chance? Her Uncle Kheshmet?) But one time she herself
spun up in the air to escape, and did Ebriel forget wingless things might also
fly?

In the east, the night wore thin.

Abruptly the girl drooped, her body, the slim cruel arm, and the
weapon of blue metal. “Enough,” she said. “Enough.”

Ebriel in his turn let down his sword.

“Let me rest,” said Atmeh, in the voice of the child Soveh. And
she sank to the earth and closed her eyes once more. Her body lay boneless as
her long hair. There seemed no vitality in her.

Ebriel stood for a space, looking at her. Then, lifting his eyes,
he gazed toward the east, where the first magnificence began. And in that
moment, Atmeh cast herself upward, fast as lightning, and she came against him
and thrust her sword all its length into him, through the very heart of him, if
he had had one. And next minute the sun rose and showed each of their
incredible faces, and lit their amazing eyes.

“Beloved,” said Atmeh, “demons are not to be trusted. And mortals,
neither. And I am both.
Three,
Ebriel. I have won. You owe
me my boon.” And she kissed his mouth, briefly, in the way a bird alights upon
a bough where it knows it may not linger.

But Ebriel laughed. He
laughed.
Aloud, and beautifully. He said to her: “I award it you, then. What must I do?”

Atmeh said, “We will construct a truce. During this, we will go
together and seek your two brothers. Yabael, the Sword of Blood, the
Second-Scorched, torment of the ocean. Melqar, the third out of the sun, the
Sword of Snow, he that the Prince of Demons strove with.”

“To this I agree,” said Ebriel.

And now he
spoke,
aloud, as a man does, and
Atmeh smiled again.

There rose up the sky then, with the unjealous sun, the
Sun-Created on his wings and the demon-created, wingless, in a cloud of hair.

They knew where to seek Yabael. They could know almost anything.
(Though that also may have been true of mankind, and yet may be true.) Thus
over the mountain peaks they went, and down the lands beyond where the earth
smelled pungent as a spicery, and so from sugar to salt, and to the cup brim of
the sea. And here they plunged, and descended from azure to green ember, and
from that to dimness. There they found a niche in a mighty cliff and stood waiting,
breathing the water, yet circumspect, since the oceans’ laws were different.

Perhaps a mile below the cliff, a tall city of the sea people lay
on the sand, built of shells. Its skies were doved by white whales, that
mysteriously sang an endless song, which, by magic alone, under the water,
could be heard.

Soon one of these marvelous pale beings came drifting from the
city where their music was prized above the captured gold of men. It came to
the niche and gazed in at Atmeh and the angel. Its eyes were small for the size
of it, yet huge by any other gauge, and sapphire-blue.

“Travelers,” said the whale, or rather, it sang these words to
them, and politely in a language of earth, that they might understand it
better, “as I see you hear me, and as I see you breathe in ocean, I conclude
you are great in magery. But do not go out of the cliff for a while. Shortly, a
comet of the sea will journey by. This obliterates whatever comes in its
path.”

“White Lord, we thank you,” said Atmeh, singing, Vazdru that she
was, a song to complement his own. “What of the city there, and of your own
people?”

“A magic protects the city, of which our singing is an
ingredient.” And having told her this, the whale swam back again among the
others, and resumed his portion of the endless song.

Perhaps one twelfth of an hour later, a vast bloody glow diffused
in the sea, and a fearsome noise that was no noise, but the cliff thrummed and
rumbled at it, and from the plains beneath spouts of sand sheered up. It moved
so quickly, the comet, there was slight warning of its imminence. It came all
at once on the stages of its flight, and suddenly it came now on this one.
Everything was drowned in redness, and rocked and griped to its roots, and
through the sea came a burning fiery sword, shapeless yet awful, and with a
lashing tail of flame. This then, Yabael.

Whatever ability the second of the Malukhim had had to reason—it
was gone, as shape was gone. Chaos had blended with Yabael, that compendium of
ether and sun, sparking the complementary sprinkle of chaos already in his
atoms. And Yabael became a savage little sun that hunted the water for prey it
did not remember—and in the event raced by that very prey, Atmeh, and by
Ebriel, its kin, and by the city, whose towers rippled—and away on the
circling, blind chase.

As the fires died, the water softened from scarlet to silver, the
whales sang on. The shell metropolis stood.

Atmeh looked into the face of Ebriel. It told her nothing. She
spoke, by the Eshva means.

“Yabael is the first lesson I offer you. It is possible even for
the Malukhim to alter, or for change to be forced on them. And, too, it is
possible for the Malukhim to continue in a hopeless task, which, like the
stricken tree, will bear no fruit.”

Ebriel’s face told her nothing, but his eyes burned with the fire
of the comet, red within gold.

“You cannot follow him, beloved. You cannot change as he has done.
Come. Up to the world again.”

Up to the world they sprang. And the seas parted about them as
though every princess of the waters had flung the contents of her jewel casket
at the sun.

They could discover almost anything: They discovered where to seek
Melqar. Nevertheless, this discovery was not so easy as the first, for while
Yabael’s comet raged, the substance of Melqar had grown vastly quiet.

Melqar, last from the solar melting pot, Melqar the sun of
midsummer dawning. He that fought with the Demon. He that had, for a time,
vanquished the Demon. He that had, finding Azhrarn also a light in the sunrise,
let Azhrarn go down into the earth and the dark. Or was beguiled into doing so,
in certain stories. Or did so for reasons less and more obscure. Melqar who
stole the voice of Azhrarn to speak with. Melqar who, when the fight was done,
stood on a tower of Az-Nennafir with sightless-seeming orichalc eyes, and
sheared the City through with a blade of whiteness let from his hand itself.
But what then?

When Azhrarn lay in the Underearth, what of the angel who caused
it? And when Azhrarn, salvaged by the fire of his garden, which might be of the
essence of his own immortal fire, when Azhrarn retrieved his power, threw down
his enemy and made him a lover again—where was Melqar then?