Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 Read online

  Delirium’s Mistress

  Tales of the Flat Earth: Book Four

  Tanith Lee

  Delirium’s Mistress

  Tales of the Flat Earth: Book Four

  By Tanith Lee

  © 1981

  Kindle edition 2014

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people, or events, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  The right of Tanith Lee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

  Cover Art by John Kaiine

  e

  An Immanion Press Edition published through Kindle

  http://www.immanion-press.com

  [email protected]

  Dedication:

  To Rosemary Hawley Jarman,

  A word-sorceress of the round world.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Concerning those other histories referred to in Delirium’s Mistress:

  The stories of Zhirek the Magician, and of Simmu who stole Immortality from the gods, and of the city Simmurad, are to be found in Death’s Master. As are the stories of Narasen and her pact with Death, and of Kassafeh and hers. And of the dealings of Lylas, too.

  The stories of Shezael the Half-Souled, of the poet Kazir and Ferazhin Flower-Born, of Sivesh, of Zorayas the witch-queen, and of Bakvi the Drin (and, too, of Azhrarn’s first meeting with the sun) are told in Night’s Master.

  Dunizel’s story, and that of her mother, are contained in Delusion’s Master, along with the account of the building—and fall—of the great Tower, Baybhelu.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Forward

  BOOK ONE: Sovaz: Mistress of Madness

  Part One: Night Hunting

  Part Two: Lovers

  Part Three: Fair is Not Fair

  BOOK TWO: Azhriaz: the Goddess

  Part One: Matters of Stone

  Part Two: The War with Sea and Sky

  Part Three: Under the Earth

  BOOK THREE: Atmeh: the Search for Life

  Part One: Lessons

  Part Two: Uncle Death

  Part Three: The Lotus

  EPILOGUE: Three Handsome Sons

  Introduction

  Originally, Delusion’s Master, the third book of the Flat Earth sequence, and precursor of this one, was intended as the first part of Delirium’s Mistress – or, put another way, Delirium’s Mistress was to be the second part of Delusion’s Master. The partially seen outline of both books had been conceived of as a single long novel. All types of writing, for me, as a rule make their own lengths, however. And at the end of what became Delusion’s Master, even I could see that what I had, plus what must come next, would be far too large a volume. (With hard copy, most of us prefer not to get dislocated shoulders from lifting and reading a book.) So Delusion’s Master ended where it does, on an open question. And some while later, Delirium’s Mistress begins with part of the answer to that troubling inquiry: But what is love?

  A few of my novels have been interrupted – less by life than other obsessions; for example, Day By Night by Sabella, or Sung in Shadow by The Silver Metal Lover. Delirium’s Mistress was due to join this group.

  Just before I started back to the Flat Earth, I’d become very intrigued by a character from real Round Earth history. Camille Desmoulins had a small but starring role in the French Revolution. He was the friend of Danton, and initially of Robespierre, a journalist of some talent, a revolutionary of course – he roused the crowd that later took the Bastille – and ultimately an extraordinarily brave and honourable man, refusing to shut up his well-founded criticisms, until silenced by the Guillotine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what I had taken only for a strong interest in him, and the Revolution itself, turned suddenly and grabbed hold of me, more or less body and soul. And so in the end, after I had already written Parts 1 and 2 of the First Book of Delirium’s Mistress (Night Hunting and Lovers), my by then compulsive researches into the France of the late 18th Century – took over. I left Delirium’s Mistress where I had to, and was swallowed, gladly and in terror, by the so-called Real World.

  Given the size of the resultant historical novel, (watch your shoulders, folks!), (514 large close-printed pages; over one thousand in handwritten manuscript), I wrote it pretty fast in around a year. Its name is The Gods Are Thirsty, and it is the only ‘straight’ historical novel I have ever written. Soon after finishing it, in 1984/5, I returned, a stunned wanderer, to Delirium’s Mistress.

  The colossal excitement and the harsh, if non-physical, beating The Gods Are Thirsty had given me, abated in their turn. While the magic of the old/newly resumed work reinstated itself. After the Revolution, where better to run to than the Flat Earth.

  I’m unsure to this day, about thirty years on, if any undercurrents or specific shadows from that historical frenzy infiltrated the subsequent pages of Delirium’s Mistress. Sometimes, I seem to glimpse, on re-reading this work, an element of unusually definite rebellion, or even the fiery Parisian goals of Hope, Justice or Revenge, tracing their way through a distorting mirror, over the more open horizons of the Flat Earth text. And then again, another occasion, nothing of the sort. Certainly, the books could not be more unlike. Aside from my always-preoccupation with the human race, and its passions.

  Luckily for me, and for the peoples in the Flat Earth sequence, death, and even King Death himself, does not end the inner essential life of anything. Death, there, is metamorphosis, never obliteration. How glad Camille would have been, surely, as he mounted the ladder to his execution, to have utterly and truly credited such a concept. His courage is the greater since, most probably, he did not. But otherwise, maybe, the idea that the answer to that question on the nature of love is simply, and significantly, “love is love”, would have rung true for him. I think it might.

  One last thing about this book you are holding (hopefully having not dislocated any shoulders) is the identity of the Fifth Lord of Darkness. No one, so far, seems to have spotted him accurately, and told me, though he does, as I’ve said before, have a cameo late in this novel. For those of you who haven’t guessed and are curious, he appears on the last pages of the Part entitled The War With Sea and Sky. His aspect and provenance may be evident from the surrounding effects: A hand – a great sleeve – a million stitches coming undone. Perhaps the most powerful of the Five Lords, and the most fearsome, a personification of that material from which all things come. And his name is________?

  Tanith Lee

  2013

  FOREWORD

  IT HAS BEEN recounted how, in the days of the earth’s flatness, Azhrarn, the Prince of Demons, Night’s Master, one of the Lords of Darkness, loved the maiden Doonis-Ezael or Dunizel (Moon’s Soul), a priestess of the holy city Bhelsheved. And that because of the value he set on her (but mostly, let it be said, to make mischief in those lands, which had angered him), he got her sorcerously with child.

  When this child, a daughter, was born, Dunizel was condemned by her people, who greatly feared, yet did not fully comprehend, the powers of Azhrarn. And despite the safeguards her demon lover had left her, she perished.

  Now, her death seemed due to a trick played by another of the Lords of Darkness, Prince Chuz, whose other name is Madness, Delusion’s Master. Therefore Azhrarn, meeting with Chuz, swore they should thenceforth be enemies, and that, no matter where he might hide himself, Chuz should be hunted down and the vengeance of the Demon com
pleted on him. Such a thing was very terrible indeed, that any of the immortal and mighty Lords of Darkness should wage war with each other. “Do you think I shake at you?” inquired Chuz. Yet it is possible he was not quite sanguine at the development, for all that.

  Dunizel alone had Azhrarn loved; for the child, she had never been more than a game piece to him. However, he had noted the speculative eye of Chuz upon her. In anguish and fury, then, Azhrarn bore her to his city of Druhim Vanashta, underground.

  BOOK ONE

  Sovaz: Mistress of Madness

  PART ONE: Night Hunting

  1

  IT WAS DUSK, and for a while the young man seated on the high roof gazed up into the great sloping dome of sky. Then he read aloud from his book: “Blue as the dark blue eyes of my beloved, the twilight fills all heaven. The stars put on their silver dresses and they are fair, but none as fair as she.” His companions lay on their elbows and looked at him, quizzically. He shut the book and said, “Love, too, is simple madness.”

  At which they made wild gestures of dismissal.

  “Love does not exist. ‘Love’ is the name women, and their wretched old fathers, put on the trap of a ring.”

  “Love is lust. Why make songs about an itch?”

  The first young man smiled. He was unusually handsome, pale, very fair, with beautiful eyes the color of low-burning lampshine. In repose, there was a sweetness to him. With sweet melancholy, he sighed.

  “Ah, poor thing,” they said. “What troubles him this evening, our Oloru?”

  Oloru said, “An answer, which has no question.”

  “A riddle!” cried the other young men. They grinned and shouted: “Make us laugh, Oloru.”

  And all at once the eyes of Oloru glittered like the eyes of a night-hunting fox. He sprang to his feet, curled over, next dropped in a ball, next lifted his whole body straight in the air, supporting himself by one hand, palm down, on the roof. Then he began, on this one hand, to hop about, crying out all the while in a raucous irritated voice: “Oh, how tiresome this is. You would think by now the gods could have invented a better way for a man to travel.”

  The companions, duly diverted, laughed, applauded, and called the entertainer names. Oloru went on hopping, though one of his fine silk gloves was by now probably quite ruined. He hopped to the western parapet, and here his slim upside-down body wavered, so the stars seemed juggled between his feet. “Behold,” said Oloru, “here the sun fell over.” And he toppled sideways through blue dusk and stars, and right across the parapet, and vanished.

  The remaining young men on the tavern roof leapt to their feet with yells of horror, upsetting wine jars and other paraphernalia. Oloru was a favorite of their lord, one of the magician-princes of this city. To take this powerful man the tale of said Oloru, smashed on the cobbles seven stories below, was not a charming notion.

  But rushing to the parapet and leaning over, they could be sure of nothing in the narrow alley but the gathering of darkness.

  Elsewhere, the city spread around them under the sky, its terraces pearl-strung with lamps, its towers bright-eyed with lit windows. Nowhere in that city could they be safe if they once angered their prince, Lak Hezoor. While close at hand rose the palace of this very lord, each of its spires made into a somber candle by the cresset ablaze on its roof, and each cresset seeming now to glare over at them intently.

  Consternation. Some ran onto the stair, meaning to descend and search the street on foot. Others were already making up excuses for a violent death that had nothing whatever to do with them. In the midst of this, suddenly Oloru stepped out of a climbing fruit tree that spread its branches along the eastern parapet.

  “Yes, love is madness,” said Oloru. “As all things are madness. Piety, wickedness, pleasure, sorrow—every one an insanity. Indeed, to live at all—”

  “Oloru!” cried the young men. Two of them ran forward as if to thrash him.

  Oloru shrank back against the tree. He lifted both hands in their gemmed gloves, to shield himself. “No—forgive me, my friends—what have I done to anger you?”

  The friends gathered menacingly. Oloru was at all times the veriest coward. They knew he would be terrified by a threat or a raised fist. So they berated him, and he grew paler and paler and shrank back into the slender arms of the fruit tree. He explained, stammering somewhat, that he had caught the stonework under the parapet and thus eased himself along the side of the building, unseen, to the tree. Here he had clambered once more to safety. He had not meant to annoy them, only to amuse. They allowed him to go on and on, enjoying his faltering musical voice, his eyes swimming and full of tears of anxiety. In the end, when they had squeezed him sufficiently, and it seemed only the fragile tree kept him on his feet, they relented, flung their arms around him, kissed him and smoothed his golden hair, swearing they forgave him anything, he was so dear to them. Then he tremblingly laughed. He thanked them. When they asked, he took up a lyre of gilded wood and sang for them exquisitely. His voice was so beautiful, in fact, that here and there round about shutters opened quietly. Lovers and losers together leaned into the night, to catch the flavor of Oloru’s song.

  “In the lyre-land, string and chord.

  Bring me music in a word.

  Bring me magic in a look;

  For your eyes are like a sword.

  And your smile is like a bird

  Singing from an ancient book . . .”

  And “How you flatter me, Oloru,” someone said. “But you always do flatter better than any other, and perfectly in key.”

  Lak Hezoor the magician-prince, clad in dark finery, and with two guards behind him, had come up on the roof very silently. He and his minions could move most quietly, when they wished, and such noiseless arrivals were a habit of his. In this way he often happened on his courtiers at their various and more intimate games. All had grown careful, even in the most frenzied acts of the flesh, to think, and if necessary to speak, well of their lord. Shadowy as his raiment was his long curled hair, and on the gloved hands of Lak Hezoor jewels burned dark as the night had now become. Two great leashed hounds, by contrast blond as Oloru, stared about them, quivering with abstract eagerness for things to chase and rend.

  The young men had all obeised themselves. But it was Oloru the magician-prince raised in his arms and kissed on the lips, without haste.

  “We are going hunting tonight,” said Lak Hezoor.

  Those on the roof who had had other plans for the evening quickly dismissed them from their minds. Only Oloru was heard to say plaintively, “My lord, I hate to see anything killed—”

  “Then, sweetheart,” said Lak Hezoor, “at the supreme moments of the death you may hide your face in my mantle, and not look.”

  The moon was rising in the hour the hunt set out. It was a full moon that night, and certain exhalations and smokes of the sorcerously tempered city made her appear unusually large, so she dwarfed the towers as she hung above them. She blushed, too, standing there over that place, and drew a cloud around herself. But her feverish light burned through, and laved the black horses and the black or white hounds of Lak Hezoor, and flashed on the loudly blowing horns, the knives and jewels, and in all the host of eyes.

  The city disgorged the hunt, its gates flying wide before it without a command needing to be given. Beyond, a long paved road opened through the plain. To either side of the road ran lush fields and groves and vineyards, but off to the west was hill country and a forest many centuries older. Strange stories were told of the forest. Men wandered in there and were never seen again, or other things, not men at all, wandered out of it, sometimes having human shape, and sometimes not. But the magician-masters of the city found the forest tempted them from time to time. Particularly it tempted Lak Hezoor, who was intellectually obsessed by night and all dark things, just as his flesh was inflamed equally by examples of exceptional paleness.

  It was a time of harvesting, and now and then the hunt, riding hard and savagely as if already in pursu
it of the quarry, passed by some firelit camp of people, or some village set near the road. Then all the lowly folk gathered there would rush forward to the road’s edge, calling aloud praises on the magician-princes, and on Lak Hezoor in person if they recognized him. It would not have been sensible to do otherwise. Seldom, however, did Lak Hezoor pay any attention. It happened, though, when the upswept black walls of the forest were less than a mile ahead, that the sorcerer lord did spy something that checked him. There in a meadow a tallow lamp had been hung from a pole, with a kneeling man under it. Close by a girl was tied to a tree. In the faint lamplight, she shone pale as a pearl, and her long ash-brown hair, woven with white flowers, was her only garment.

  When Lak Hezoor drew rein, his company with him, the man ran up and kneeled again on the road.

  “Speak,” said Lak Hezoor.

  “She is my sister’s daughter, just fifteen years of age, a virgin.”

  Lak Hezoor sat his horse and looked over at the girl, while his courtiers slyly and fawningly smiled at him and at each other.

  “Once,” said the lord Lak, “maidens were left in this way to entice dragons. Are you expecting any dragons?”

  “No—oh, no, mighty Hezoor. It is just the wish of the girl’s heart to give you a moment’s diversion, that is all.”

  Lak Hezoor dismounted. He walked away over the meadow to the tree where the girl hung as if half-dead of terror. For a second more the magician was visible, leaning to his dragon’s prey. Then a fan of blackness spread there, occluding both of them. While in the blackness a dull reddish snake of fire seemed to twist, and sparks burst, hurting the eyes of any who still peered in that direction. Once, twice, a sharp scream pierced the sorcerous veil, but nothing else of sight or sound.