Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (31 page)

The priesthood
had emerged from their cells to stare at the sky. Those remaining by the walls
gave thanks to the gods. And the caravans which had been running headlong from
the city, driven by terrors they scarcely comprehended, had stopped still in
their tracks. They had been spared the retribution of the night. Heaven had
protected the righteous. Fooled by the dawn that followed the night of love and
sorrow, they had got the story wrong again, and wrongly they would tell it, for
a number of years to come.

Nonetheless,
Bhelsheved that day stayed mostly vacant. Merely an ancient beggar, scavenging
about the four streets, and apparently perturbed at the lack of rubbish, who
reached the temple door and unhopefully peered in.

Huge and empty
the temple seemed. Only the vague glintings of the morning water of the lake
went over its walls, and dappled the sides of the enormous beasts that framed
the altar.

Then two
turquoises, two twilights, ignited in the midst of the tall throne that had
been the harlot’s chair.

The beggar
started. In the gloom, he could make out no other thing. Suddenly, he recalled
the demon child, and squeaking, he hastened from the temple.

On the bridge
he caught a glimpse of a young nobleman in a damson robe, but the beggar did
not care for the look of him, either, and did not pause to whine for coins.

No one else
came near the temple all that dulcet day, though Chuz hung about there, and now
and then fish walked out of the lake on their fins.

At sunset,
Chuz entered the temple and crossed the mosaic with a cat’s-paw tread. He came
up to the chair where, throughout the day, the blue-eyed child had lain on its
belly, staring at him through the doorway.

Chuz was
attired somewhat differently. On his left foot he wore a shoe, and on his left
hand a glove of smooth purple cloth. The left side of his face was masked by a
half-face of the blondest bronze, a face that matched the fleshly handsome side
exactly. His hair was concealed. He was now a most beautiful, if quite abnormal
sight.

“Pretty
child,” said Chuz, to Dunizel’s daughter, Soveh, “I will conduct you from this
uninteresting fane.”

The child,
Soveh, lowered her eyes, much in the manner of Chuz himself, though not for the
same reason.

“Should you
not,” said Chuz, “wish to behold your inheritance? Do not be alarmed. I will
shield you from the dregs of the sun, though it is almost out. I waited until
sunset, from courtesy to you. I regret your mother and father have been called
away on business. As your uncle, I propose to adopt you. In token of good
faith, here is a gift.”

The blue
jewels came up again, and focused on an amethyst one. It was the die.

Soveh did not
take the die, but she regarded it, and as she did so, Chuz regarded her, and it
might be noted that both his extraordinary optics were covered by sorcerous lenses
of white jade, and black jet, and amber, that precisely mimicked a splendid
pair of natural eyes. From a slight distance, one might be deceived entirely.
Chuz had come out in his best, and no mistake, to woo the daughter of Azhrarn.

But still she
did not take his gift, though she glanced at him occasionally, without mistrust
or trepidation, while the day’s last spangles perished on the threshold.

“This is most
hurtful,” lamented Chuz eventually. And, perhaps intending to provoke her, he
turned his back to her. And found himself face to face with Azhrarn the Prince
of Demons, who had that instant come up through the lake and the floor to stand
seven paces away.

Chuz did not
seem abashed. He smiled delightfully, and the bronze mask smiled with him in
complete coordination.

“Well,” said
Chuz, “I am not, it transpires, to play uncle after all. And I thought you had
forgotten her, despite what it cost you to bring her about.”

Azhrarn’s face
was hard to be sure of. Cloud seemed to enfold him. But his eyes smote through
the cloud. Few but Chuz would have been ready to meet them.

“You and I,”
said Azhrarn, “un-brother, un-cousin, are now also un-friends.”

“Oh, is it so?
You sadden me.”

“Oh, it is so.
And you shall be saddened, even if I must hunt you over the world’s edges to
come at you.”

“I see you
condemn me out of hand. You suppose I incited the stone-worshippers
deliberately to attack me, that my toys might be scattered and the lethal thing
with them. Yet who permitted the whip to cut his palm and the three drops of
his blood to fall and change to adamant?”

“Chuz,” said
Azhrarn so quietly he was barely to be heard, yet not a mote of dust that did
not hear him, “find a deep cave and burrow into it, and there listen for the
baying of hounds.”

“Do you think
I shake at you?” Chuz said idly. “I am only the world’s servant. I have done my
duty. And you, my dear, have known madness. Did you relish it?”

Azhrarn’s face
came from the cloud; it was the face of a black leopard, a cobra, a lightning
bolt.

“There is a
war between us,” Azhrarn said. “And I have done you the kindness of informing
you.”

“I admire you
too well to wrangle.”

And like a
wisp of vapor, Chuz was gone, though somewhere an ass brayed wrackingly, three
times.

Then Azhrarn
stood looking at the child he had made, and dismissed, and at length returned
for. He had been a careless and unaffectionate father, and now he was a remote
and frankly fearsome one.

But when he
stretched out his pale ringed hand to the child, without hesitation, she set
her own hand in it.

“Your name,”
he said to her, “shall be Azhriaz. All shall know you are my daughter. And each
of the petty kingdoms of the earth will belong to you, and you will rule them
in the way of what you are or what you shall be.”

And then the
temple was filled by blackness, and in that blackness he too was gone, and he
bore her away with him. And it is said pieces of the moon fell that night and
crashed upon the world.

But out on the
wide plains of the desert, in the remaining calm of the afterglow, Prince Chuz was
walking to and fro over the silken dunes that were still lined with rose, as if
the loving dawn had come back again that never could come back.

A little to
the east of him, a star had darted out, and sometimes he looked at the star,
but he was waiting for another, and presently she arrived.

She walked
across the dunes toward him, and her blowing hair was the color of the desert,
and her garments were sewn with gold, but the star shone through her forehead.
Like Dunizel, this was a ghost.

She was far
from the old tower, was Jasrin, the tower she had haunted, and far from the
city of Sheve where once she had been Nemdur’s queen. And although she was not
a soul, but only the lost reflection of one, yet she seemed somewhat astonished
to find herself so removed from those known landmarks. But then, seeing Chuz,
she recognized him with gladness and unease, and she checked, and just the
evening wind moved on about her draperies. And then she lifted her hand and in
it there was a bone, the bone of her child which she had inadvertently slain in
her envious insane love of her lord.

“No further,
Jasrin,” said Chuz. “For you may give me the bone now.”

Jasrin, or
that essence of Jasrin that the apparition was, hesitated there, musing.
Memories of hundreds of years of penance may have come to her, a self-imposed
and inadvertent penance, when her ghost had lamented, going on with the deadly
routine of longing and guilt and misery that had been her life. Perhaps even a
memory that the bone had also fled her, as happiness had, fled to Chuz,
accusing her of her crime against it. And that this, therefore, was merely a
ghost of the bone, as she herself was a ghost of a ghost. And did she now sense
her imprisonment was done? Jasrin, who had loved Nemdur and killed her child out
of that love. But now another woman had come to Sheve, and loved there a lord
more exalted than any king of the earth, and had in turn, by protecting his
child, herself been slain. The balance.

“Madness
redresses all balances. Give me the bone,” Chuz said again. And Jasrin came to
him and held out the insubstantial thing, and Chuz took it from her.

And Jasrin
smiled, or that paring of her which was stranded there, that smiled, and
smiling she was no more. The bone had vanished in the instant she let go of it;
that Chuz had finished the gesture of acceptance was simply politeness.

Thereafter, he
strode on, his mantle, dyed like the evening, flapping around him, and his
blond hair now slipping almost boyishly from its concealment, though the other
less appealing hair kept modestly from view. As he strode, the ass’s jawbones
spoke to him.

“Love is
everywhere, and the death of love,” they clicked and muttered. “And time, which
is built of the histories of death and love. Death and time I concede and
acknowledge.”

Chuz,
forgetting his eyes, like half his face, were also masked, lowered them.

“But what,”
demanded the jawbones, with sinister insistency, “is
love?
”

About the Author

Tanith Lee
was born in 1947, in London, England. After non-education at a couple of schools,
followed by actual good education at another, she received
wonderful
education at the Prendergast Grammar School until the age of 17. She then
worked (inefficiently) at many jobs, including library assistant, shop
assistant, waitress and clerk, also taking a year off to attend art school at
age 25. In 1974 (curious reversal of her birthdate) DAW Books of America
accepted 3 of her fantasy/ SF novels, (published in 1975/ 6), and thereafter 23
of her books, so breaking her chains and allowing her to be the only thing she
effectively could: a full-time writer.

Since then she has written 77 novels, 14 collections, and over 300
short stories, plus 4 radio plays (broadcast by the BBC) and 2 scripts for the
TV cult UK SF series
Blake’s 7
. Her work, which has been translated into
over 17 languages, ranges through fantasy, SF, gothic, YA and Children’s Books,
contemporary, historical and detective novels, and horror. She was awarded the
prestigious title of Grand Master of Horror 2009. She has also won major awards
for several of her books/ stories, including the August Derleth Award for
Death’s
Master,
the second book in the Flat Earth series.

She lives near the South East coast of England with her husband, writer-photographer-artist John Kaiine. And two tuxedo cats of
many charms, whose main creative occupations involve eating, revamping the
carpets, and meowperatics.