Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (13 page)

“Lord,” she
said, looking into the trees, “Lord, I knew you were here and have come out to
seek you.”

Her voice was
beautiful, too.

Azhrarn remained,
scarcely visible if at all, and watched her, and listened to her. Like a
melody, she went on playing for him.

“Lord,” she
said, “I do not guess who you are, but I understand your essence and your
purpose. I know you are here to work us ill, and to exact some due from us,
because we have angered you.”

At that, he
spoke to her, out of the shadows, with some irony.

“How is it
that you know so much?”

She did not
start, either at his voice’s suddenness, or its inherent sorcery. She was not
afraid, not boastful. She answered simply,

“All this I
know, yet do not know how I know it.”

“Riddle-maker,
then.”

She said: “As
a man may scent a fire burning in a neighboring house, just so I felt your
presence in this garden. And as a man may know the nature of fire without
seeing it, thus I know yours.”

“Tell me then
my nature.”

“Cruel, so
cruel, so cruel,” she said. “Relentless, terrible. Your wish to cause pain like
pain itself. Deeper than night, colder than winter, no more to be turned aside
than the moon’s rising.”

“Why seek me
then?” he said.

She lifted her
lamp. She said: “The rigors and disciplines of Bhelsheved’s priesthood have
made me enduring, and I am far stronger than I appear. Yet also I may be easily
hurt. For a great while I might be tortured before death overcame me. These are
my recommendations, for I offer myself as a sacrifice to you. Work out your
rage on me, Lord of Darkness, and spare the people.”

“A sacrifice,”
he said. Was there bitter amusement in his tone? “Men do not respect those who
undergo agony for their sake.”

“Respect is
not my aim.”

“Tell me your
aim.”

“I have told.
To avert your wrath.”

“Can your
little death do so much?”

“Perhaps, if
you make me suffer very much.”

“Are you not
afraid?”

“Yes, Lord.
There would be no satisfaction for you in harming me, did I not fear you.”

“You suppose
me pitiless.”

“I suppose you
are in need of recompense.”

“You are
young,” he said, “to go out of this world like a candle flame.”

“There is
another world I shall go to,” she said, “or maybe I shall return to this one.”

In the black
tower they had crouched to him, thousands on thousands, and asked him for
wickedness and greed. Now one came to him and asked that he kill her in order
that his anger and his need be solaced. And she more lovely than the stars in the
sky.

“Look at me,”
he said, and he stepped from the shade, and she saw him. Long and long she
gazed, and equally as long, let it be said, Azhrarn the Prince of Demons gazed
at her. “And now,” he said at length, “recite again what I am, and how you will
appease me.”

Her hand
shook, and she lowered the lamp, but she laughed very low.

“Forgive me,”
said she. “I knew also your appearance would be godlike, and that you would be
handsome. But now I see your beauty is like the heartbeat of the earth. To the
beauty I imagined, yours is as the sea is to a little drop of water. And how
can such beauty be the wickedness I comprehend you are, Lord of Lords? Oh you,
who would lead us into evil, what a waste it is, for could you not lead the
whole of mankind to joy and goodness by one look of your eyes? Yet, no matter.
You are worth dying for, Lord. The world would die for you herself, I think,
did she know you as truly you are.”

There was
silence then. In all his centuries, who had ever said such things to him? Who
would have thought to, indeed, he being who he was?

Eventually, he
said to her,

“I surmise,
white maiden, you mistake what truly I am.”

At which she
lifted her gaze, as she had lifted her lamp.

“Or do you
mistake yourself?” she said.

His anger came
back to him then. His anger like a blowing out of all the lights of heaven.

“Woman,” he
said, “you are a fool.”

Then he was
gone, and there before her, a black wolf, whose lean head was on fire with
eyes. And the wolf trotted to her and seized in its mouth her hand, and gnawed
to the bone, in a terrible bite, her forefinger. (It is a fact, she must have
discomposed him. He was not generally so crude.)

The girl cried
out, and tears ran from under her lids. The wolf let go of her as soon as it
had torn her, however. Slowly then, and still weeping, she held out to it again
her mutilated hand, urging it silently to resume its ghastly labour.

Azhrarn, long,
long ago, had submitted himself to agony, in that single unswerving sacrifice
which had been his, and by this action he had defeated Hatred in one of its
most mighty forms. Now the hatred of Azhrarn was what this priestess offered
her sacrifice to curtail.

Those who
share a similarity of adventures, are in some ways brother and sister.

The man, not
the wolf, caught up her hand again—the wolf had vanished.

At his touch
either her pain left her, or mingled with the exquisite sensation which the
touch of Azhrarn could induce. He held her in one arm. With the long squared
nail of his middle finger, he slit his own demon’s skin, from the first joint
of the thumb to the last. It was the second time he had spilled his blood
through Bhelsheved, save now it did not spill. He pressed that nigrescently
glowing ichor against her own humanly bleeding hand. In an instant, her flesh
began to heal. In seven instants she was whole and without a scar.

Still he held
her, and presently he said to her, more quietly even than the noise of the
leaves all about: “My blood is now mixed with yours. Will that burnish you with
my wickedness, moon girl, I wonder.”

“Fire and
water do not mix,” she whispered, “one extinguishes the other.” Her pain was
gone, but as if she felt it still, she leaned on him, all her light weight, and
billows of her pale hair streamed over the blackness of his garments.

“You will not
do as a sacrifice,” he said to her. “You are, after all, too fair to spoil.”

“But you will
spare Bhelsheved?”

“I have
already fashioned a sword that will smite this Gods’ Jar. In a year, or ten, or
twenty. Even now, the foundations of your religion decay. And do you still
think me other than I am, my child? Other than a Prince of Demons?”

But she,
stunned by his embrace, as mortals tended to be, had sunk into a sort of
sleeping faint or trance, lying against him, her head on his breast, her hair
splashed over him like a river out of the moon.

Yet Azhrarn
knew well enough that something had passed away from him with his blood, and
that though the blood of the Vazdru might transmute, it did not fade, nor would
it extinguish hers.

He picked her
up in his arms, and the little lamp dropped from her grasp—somehow, all this
time, she had kept a grip on it. Then he spoke a cunning word, and they were
gone from the lakeside, he and she together.

He took her to
a region of the desert of which nothing is known, though many an area, in later
days, was pointed out as the place.

Maybe palms
towered up there, and water glimmered. Or maybe there was no tree, no water,
only the tides of the sands, coming in and going out like breath at the will of
the wind.

He laid her
down then, on the carpets of moss or grass or dust, and he himself lay upon
her. But though he lay with her, he did not do so in the carnal sense. He
stared into her eyes with a demon’s stare that never blinked, and her eyes,
meeting his, chained by his, ceased also to blink, only reflecting his. And in
this way, they were through the night, un-moving, like stones laid one on
another, in a bizarre ecstasy of utter stasis. And it seemed to the young
priestess that his blood actually ran through both their bodies, and that their
flesh came to be no longer separate, nor their minds, nor their souls—her soul,
and what in him passed for a soul, his immortality.

Only when a
vague half-note of color soaked through the east did he draw away from her, but
still it seemed to her, even then, she felt the pressure of him yet, and the
caress of his hair which had brushed her cheeks.

“I must leave
you,” he said, “for dawn is near. Where would you have me take you?”

“To
Bhelsheved, since it is my home.”

“Come then,”
he said. And he drew her up, and by his magic returned her to the blossom
garden by the lake. Where, arriving, she found herself alone, and the broken
lamp guttered out on the soil, as the sun split the horizon.

Her name was Dunizel,
which, in that language, was Moon’s Soul. Seven languages there were in the
Underearth, and seven master languages upstairs on the earth. But of these
latter seven each possessed a subdivision of ten, so that there were in reality
seventy languages spoken by men. But the demons knew all of them, and so
Azhrarn knew her name and its meaning. Perhaps he read it from her brain; she
had not mentioned it aloud. He knew, doubtless, her history, also, though it
would scarcely have mattered to him. His lovers had been as various as their beauty,
the children of kings, of slaves; even once the child of one who was a corpse.

But Dunizel’s
mother had been an imbecile, drooling and incoherent, an idiot-girl who would
stagger about the streets of her village, tearing out her filthy hair,
scratching the house walls with her ragged nails.

CHAPTER 2

The Magical Engine

The idiot girl, certainly,
had never made the journey to holy Bhelsheved. Otherwise, usually she was let
roam as she wished, or when she grew rough, she might be trapped in a net and tied
up to a post like a dog until her passion abated. Most of her violence was
directed at herself; she never assaulted another, only sometimes she would rip
washing where it hung to dry on bushes, or steal fruit from the trees. The
village was piously forbearing with her, even throwing her the scraps of food
which kept her alive. And there was a tradition, when there should be a wedding
or a funeral, of putting out on the street by the tethering post—if she was
tied there that day or no—a mug of beer or thin wine. But, though it did these
things, the village felt itself befouled by her, considered her a curse the
gods had visited on it for some wrongdoing in the past. When they treated her,
as they reckoned, well, they hoped thereby to win the favor of heaven, which
would then remove her, or strike her dead.

But she did
not die, the idiot girl. And none dared kill her, though sometimes they threw
pebbles or struck her.

One year, a
few months before the harvest, a magus came to dwell in an old mansion on the
hill above the village. He announced he had retreated from the cities in order
to study his arts in peace, and he was besides a devout and gods-fearing man.
The village accepted him as a blessing, just as they accepted the idiot as a
curse. However, he had little to do with them, being occupied with his
experiments. Now and then a roar would rise from the roof of the mansion, but
these sounds were not in themselves apparently injurious. Once or twice, a
villager knocked on the brass-bound door which had been affixed to the
mansion’s portals, but received no reply. And once only, a shepherd, seeing the
magus out walking with his servant on the hillside, hurried up and begged the
wiseman to alleviate an ache he had in one of his teeth. But the magus seemed not
to hear, and passed on, his long robes, sewn with extraordinary symbols,
brushing the grass. The servant, however, turned about, and when the mage was
some way off addressed the shepherd.

“Which tooth
is that?” inquired the servant.

The shepherd,
agog, opened his lips and pointed at the offending canine.

“Oh, I shall
see to that for you,” declared the magician’s servant, and swinging up his
staff, he knocked the tooth out of the shepherd’s mouth, and two good fellows
with it.

Leaving the
shepherd howling, the servant, howling also, with uncouth mirth, lolloped after
his oblivious master.

Now at this
time this servant began to prove himself as much a curse to the village as any
other they had had. Repulsive in appearance, and unclean of person, he was kept
by the magician for his prodigious strength as a guard, and also out of some
perverse wish the intellectual had conceived to observe such a type about his
work. His mind being on higher matters and himself protected from the servant’s
horridness, the magician failed to notice what went on elsewhere.

Firstly, the
servant was given to playing obscure jokes upon the villagers. He would tie the
genitals of the billy goats together, for example, and when the goatherd came
running at their bawling, the servant pounced on him and tied him up with them
too, in a similar manner. On one occasion, the wretch crawled down through a
chimney, having previously put out the fire beneath by urinating on it, and
fell out into an old woman’s house and terrified her almost into a fit. Next he
surprised a woman bathing in a pool. There would have been small doubt as to
the outcome of that, save she was the reed-cutter’s wife, and had intended to
cut reeds herself, and was therefore able to pull a knife from among her
clothes, which item she stuck in the servant’s thigh. At this reception he
hobbled away yelling. That night, as the woman cooked her husband’s supper, a
tarnished copper bird flew through her window and said sternly to her: “I speak
for the magician, and he asks, Why did you stab my servant?” The woman was
alarmed, but her man came up and put her behind him, and he said to the bird:
“Let your master consider this. When a woman as pretty as mine is able to come
close enough to stick a knife in such a part of a man as ugly and noisome as
that servant of his, then she must have some reason for her act, and he must
have some reason for being so close.” At these words, the bird put its head
under its wing as if embarrassed, and the husband added, “Suggest to your
master that he keep the oaf in check. Though we are in awe of a magus, the scum
that serves him shall have his throat sliced presently.”