Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) (8 page)

It was only
much later that they noted he had spoken of mankind as “you,” and not as “we.”

When he had
finished, an uncanny thing occurred. Although the air was still, a wind came,
without sound and hardly any motion, and blew out the lights in each of the
lamps, and smothered all the flames round about, so that suddenly the whole
area was in blackness, but for the glints of the stars, millions of miles away.

In the
blackness, he was gone. And, relighting their fires, they were glad of his
departure, though they did not know him for Azhrarn. Some indeed, weighing
their rage above their unease, set out to search for him, for the philosophers
vowed such a blasphemer must be scourged.

It is
conceivable that they had already scourged Azhrarn, centuries of this
particular scourge, they and their forebears. Although it is unarguably true he
had no right to take the attitude with them that he did. No rights at all to
his righteous anger, he who had played games with humankind for eons, and
before humankind, who knows but that he had not played games with the little
creatures that crawled from the seas of chaos aboard the flat, four-cornered
earth, the minuscule sparks and atomies with which mortal life had begun. And
having played so often with them—like a child who fears to lose its toys—so he
had seen the loss of them. He had once sacrificed himself to save the world
because without the world to torment and tangle, he knew his own immortality
would be dull. Or so they said, the poets, the songs, the stories.

Certainly, he
had known for centuries that his act had been mislaid, set at the wrong door,
that of Upperearth. But certainly now, demonstrated so vigorously, their
forgetfulness stung him, the shock all the more violent for being delayed,
perhaps. If he beheld this frenzied worship of the indifferent gods and was
jealous, how much more bitter to find himself unremembered—worse—remembered
wrongly. Azhrarn the Beautiful, to be recalled as
shambling
and
hideous
. Maybe it was this slight upon his vanity that had the most
incensed him.

Or could it be
that this Lord of Fear had committed, for whatever selfish reason, an act of
unique and total love, and some part of him had expected to be loved for it?
And now he discovered he was not. Discovered that he was laughed at.
Discovered, more terrible than anything, his own unrealized, erroneous
expectation.

Several bands of young men
went searching through the campment for the blasphemer. They carried staves and
sticks, and some had knives ready, and one or two had the long bull-hide whips
they had brought with them on this journey to alarm lions and men alike.

“How shall it
be,” they had said to each other, “that we should gain the holy city with this
wretch walking free in our midst? Does the city not sing a welcome as men
approach it? And surely will it not groan with anger if this devil goes near?
Let us hurry after him and beat him.”

So they
searched up and down and round and about, causing a great commotion,
overturning cooking pots and the fragile supports of tents, blundering among
the goats and the sheep, frightening the children and the young girls, and all
the time uttering furious oaths and threats.

At first,
there was not a sign of the stranger. He might have dissolved into the air or
been changed into sand. Then they began to catch glimpses of him—at this
turning, or that; among the shadows between two pavilions; crossing through a
pen of animals, not disturbing them any more than the passage of night itself.
Yet, whenever the pursuers pursued, the stranger was no more to be seen.

There were
three brothers, full of wine and religion and with a whip apiece, and soon they
lost patience with their fellows and broke away to hunt on their own.

“I believe,”
said the youngest, “the old venerable philosopher could get us some special
relic of Bhelsheved from the priests, some gold talisman, perhaps, if we bring
this villain to justice.”

“Very
unlikely,” said the middle brother. “But who knows what blessings the gods
themselves will heap on the heads of whoever champions them?”

“One thing,”
said the oldest brother, twitching the whip he carried, “I have a suspicion the
blasphemer is also a mage, and a shape-changer. How else has he eluded us so
long?”

Just at this
moment, they entered an open unfrequented place between the tents. There in the
starlight, on the charcoal darkness of the sand, stood the one they sought.

At sight of
him, the youngest brother immediately uncoiled and lashed out with his whip. As
if it were a falling scarf, the stranger raised one hand and caught the whip’s
savage tongue, and so held it.

The young man
was astounded. No shout of pain had attended the stranger’s weird action, and
now another astonishment was in progress. A cool wild light had sprung from the
stranger’s grip, and began to glide, pulsating, down the length of the whip.
The youngest brother glared at this light, perceived its direction, which was
toward himself, and made to let go the whip’s handle, at which he found he
could not. Learning this, he was the one to yell aloud, but no sooner had he
yelled than the thread of light ran into the handle. Intuitively he braced
himself for pain, for the glow along the whip resembled a sort of stilly
pouring lightning. But then the force of the light passed into his hand, and at
once he knew it to be no pain at all, but an exquisite pleasure. Through
knuckles, wrist and forearm, elbow joint and upper arm the sensation raced like
silver wires, so into breast and torso, into limbs and loins and spine and
skull. With a moan, the youngest brother fell to the earth, and presently his
ecstasy caused him to faint.

At that,
Azhrarn let go the end of the whip and the light died in it.

The two older
brothers, gaping, now at their swooning kindred, now at the magician, declined
any further aggressive moves, and lowered their arms, so the lengths of hide
straggled in the sand.

“You observe,”
said Azhrarn eventually, “that I have returned you delight for injury.”

“We observe,”
said the oldest brother, “that you are a sorcerer.”

“Oh, how you
flatter me,” said Azhrarn. His voice was cold, too cold for them to understand
how cold it was, seeming warmer than it was, just as ice can burn.

“A magician
would travel in state,” protested the middle brother stupidly, “with his
servants and his riches. Or come riding through the sky on a black horse winged
like a raven.”

On the sand,
the fainting brother revived, and murmured, “He is not a magician, but a god.”

Such are the
credentials of pleasure.

But Azhrarn
turned his shoulder, and walked through the fabric of the evening as if through
a narrow door, and was gone again.

The oldest
brother went to the spot where the Prince of Demons had disappeared, and,
looking down, he saw three dark glowing gems lying on the earth. Like the
blackest of rubies they lay there, already harder than obsidian, and he, with
an embarrassed terror he could not explain, hastily kicked sand over them,
burying them. He could not have said what these jewels were, yet surely some
part of him had known they were no less than three drops of precious Vazdru
blood spilled from the fingers of Azhrarn. For when he reached and caught the
whip, he who could have shielded himself from any weapon or force, save that
one sheer force that was the sun itself—by which he had once died to save the
world—had not shielded himself, but taken the ringing blow, cutting as any
knife, across his palm.

It was a
symbol, possibly, his token to the earth that she herself had cut at him.
Truly, truly, he had been wounded that night, and not alone in the hand.

CHAPTER 2

All About Bhelsheved

The sweet and succulent
fruit of faith:

From east and
west, from north and south, once a year the peoples came, and gathered all
about Bhelsheved. The old had seen it many times, the very young recognized it
from hearsay. Ancient Sheve, which lay beneath it, had been called The Jar, for
its sources of water. Bhelsheved was “The city the gods made from a jar.” Yet
some also named it Moon City, for it was white as the moon.

By day, in the
distance, across the tawny sand and against the blue of the ether, the
whiteness of Bhelsheved was like a glorious omission of color, so children,
seeing it for the first, sometimes inquired, “Who has torn the sky?” By night,
burning like a cliff of salt, across the dunes, the city seemed to emit its own
radiance. Only those who approached it from the west, the true moon rising
behind it, saw Bhelsheved darker, as if in eclipse, yet even this was the
darkness of pure silver.

Being
approached and used by men only at one brief season of the year, the few days
of the festival of worship, the city had never been soiled. The smokes that
rose there, of incense and holy fire, were not enough to smirch it. Even during
the ingathering, none entered the city to profane it with the common practices
of living. Instead, the camps of humanity were spread out in vast and
multitudinous disorder, each and all terminating no less than a hundred paces
from the outer walls. The gates stood open then at all hours of day and night,
but those who came through them came as guests merely, calling on the gods in
their home, bringing gifts and compliments. Never overstaying their welcome.
The feastings and sports and contests that took place were conducted always
outside, always one hundred paces or more from Bhelsheved’s whiteness. She was
so lovely, and so choice, that city, they never argued against the ban. And she
repaid them, in her way. Every year, when they returned to her, it seemed she
had grown lovelier.

About a mile
from the city paths welled like water out of the desert. These paths were
broad, all alike, and all paved with curious stones, regular, smooth and
glistening. Sand blew now and then across these paths, but always it cleared
itself again. No path which led to the city was ever buried in the drifts, nor
even partially obscured for more than a moment. Half a mile from the city,
lines of trees, perfectly shaped and manicured, sprang up beside the paths, so
that suddenly those worshippers who traveled in the bald heat of the day
progressed along avenues of green and liquid shade. A quarter of a mile from
the city, little fountains appeared at the wayside, and little cisterns, in the
forms of dainty indigenous animals or peculiar beasts out of myth, and all
carved from the milk-white stone of Bhelsheved itself.

By now, the
city’s walls dominated the horizon. The slopes of a mountain covered with snow,
such was the impression the walls gave. At their feet, luxuriant groves of
trees, at this season all in blossom, nearly as white as the walls. Above the
walls, the cones and steeples seemed to tremble like white towers of hibiscus,
white hyacinths, and the white birds streamed from tower to tower, like bees in
search of nectar.

There were
four great gates, facing to the four quarters of the world. These gates were
each of three shades of whiteness: the harsh white of steel, set with panels
the gentle sallow white of ivory, and studded with enormous polished pallid
zircons.

As the people
approached, the city sang to them. Initially, in the distance, a faint, faint
sound which, as they drew nearer and nearer, grew louder and louder, swelling
to greet them. The song was a melodious yet uncanny thrumming—a thunder which
whispered, the buzzing of a thousand wasps in a hive of glass—

The
processions poured in across the shining sandless paths to Bhelsheved, and the
extraordinary hymn foamed from the pristine cauldron of the city. When they
reached their hundred paces of proximity, the hymn dissipated in the sky.

They stood in
wonder, the visitors, a wonder which was never decreased, listening to the
quiet which followed the song, beneath the unmelting hill of desert snow, birds
flashing over the hibiscus minarets.

“It is like a
city of the gods,” men declared, unaware the gods possessed no cities, nor
wished to possess them.

And those who
reached Bhelsheved by night also heard the song unfold from the city into the
sky, like a pillar of invisible, audible steam. And by night, the domes were
lit, great ghostly pearls, and the night flowers bloomed in the groves, and the
air surged with perfumes, which came and went like spirits.

Thus, the
exterior of Bhelsheved.

Within, it was
this way:

Entering at
one of the four tall gates, the worshipper found himself on a wide straight concourse,
paved on this occasion in mosaics of the most pastel marbles, none of which
depicted either scene or pattern, but nebulous swirlings, like those of vapors
or clouds. Such an ethereal road led from each of the four gates, toward the
heart of the city. And on all sides of the four roads stood temples pressed
close to each other, as in a mortal city houses would have pressed close. Some
of the buildings were massive, pouring up their flowerlike snow domes into the
sky, shot with windows internally lit and of a heavenly blue glass, each window
itself set in the form of a flower or a leaf or some abstract shape that hinted
at supernal reveries. Some of the buildings were delicate and small, alabaster
figurines, crystal pinnacles. Pleated stairways went up and down like the keys
of strange instruments. Colonnades led in and out, their pillars carved like
women or like trees. Trees which were real blossomed inside the city as out. If
a wind blew, a snowstorm of petals fell.