Night's Master Read online

  Night’s Master

  Tales of the Flat Earth: Book One

  Tanith Lee

  Night’s Master

  Tales of the Flat Earth: Book One

  By Tanith Lee

  © 1980

  Kindle edition 2013

  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

  An Immanion Press Edition published through Kindle

  http://www.immanion-press.com

  [email protected]

  Dedication

  To Hylda Lee, my mother,

  in thanks for the first fading horse.

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION by Tanith Lee

  BOOK ONE: Light Underground

  PART ONE

  1. A Mortal in Underearth

  2. Sunshine

  3. The Night Mare

  PART TWO

  4. Seven Tears

  5. A Collar of Silver

  6. Kazir and Ferazhin

  BOOK TWO: Tricksters

  PART ONE

  1. The Chair of Uncertainty

  2. King Zorashad’s Daughter

  3. The Starry Pavilion

  PART TWO

  4. Diamonds

  5. A Love Story

  6. Love in a Glass

  BOOK THREE: The World’s Lure

  PART ONE

  1. Honey Sweet

  2. Shezael and Drezaem

  3. Night’s Sorcery

  PART TWO

  4. The Anger of the Magicians

  5. A Ship With Wings

  6. The Sun and the Wind

  INTRODUCTION

  by Tanith Lee

  In those days, (back in the mid 1970s) my own world, rather than becoming flat, had opened out into a Paradise, rich with possibility, and finally—at least for a while—secure. DAW Books, under the command of Donald A. Wollheim, had published my novels The Birthgrave, The Storm Lord, and Don’t Bite the Sun. Swiftly followed by sequels to Birthgrave and DBTS, and a new novel, Volkavaar. I had been able to give up the day jobs and concentrate on the only work I liked (loved) and was good at, writing.

  At the time, I still lived with my parents. This was partly because formerly I’d been unable to afford to live anywhere else—most of the employment I took was poorly paid; but also because I enjoyed their company. My father and I had a strong intellectual rapport. He had even taught me to read when I, aged almost eight, and what would now be recognized as slightly dyslexic, had remained untaught at the ghastly schools I attended. My mother and I had an incredible relationship, magical and enlightening and including, among the rest, pure craziness. She it was too who typed all my first books, the only person ever able to decipher my long-hand writing.

  That Sunday afternoon, post the washing-up, and my father away, (working by then in a telephone exchange, he was hardly ever home until Sunday evenings) she and I sat playing one of many invented word games. Suffice it to say this one involved clues in the form of enigmatic phrases. These, when suitably broken down, punned or realigned, rendered up famous names.

  It was a warm afternoon. Outside the sky was blue. And the cat, having given up on trying either to undo the fridge door, or persuade us we had forgotten to give him lunch (some hope!) had left the building. My mother’s turn: she spoke the phrase-clue. Till then I’d been winning. Not now. Not only couldn’t I figure it out, the phrase itself had such an impactful ring I was totally distracted.

  The answer, actually, was the name of the gorgeous movie (and by then TV) actress, Googi Withers. It was easy, when you knew at last that you broke the code this way: Go O gigi (gee-gee) plus Withers, i.e. shrivel, decay, decline. Or, Go nought horse shrivels-decays-declines. OR, as was the phrase she had coined: Go nowhere on a horse that fades.

  Once I gave in, and had had the answer explained, I told my mother and myself, (or something told me), that there was a story in this phrase. In fact of course, there was book—a whole series—in it.

  As is quite usual with me, the moment I put pen to paper, a tidal wave of places and characters rushed through. But two aspects of Night’s Master, and of the entire succession of books, perhaps, should be noted.

  I’d been reading a lot of Oscar Wilde, always a favourite of mine, just before the famous phrase that Sunday. And I am certain that essences of Wilde’s lushly ornamental perspective colour the opus, and influence its ambience of Arabian-Nights-meets-Every-Myth-Under-the-Sun. Additionally, Wilde is surely one of the most erotic writers who ever lived. His oeuvre is embued by aching sensualities, both hetero- and homosexual, and all the more potent, maybe, for the confinement (mostly, and sometimes only just) inside the corset of 1800s censorship. This sexual current also informs NM, almost from the first page, and renders up a world consciousness that is normally bi-sexual, and which occasionally erupts into far bawdier escapades, not excluding spiders or, (in a later volume) the ocularly challenged.

  The second aspect, and likely the most unique feature for the writer, of this and the succeeding books, is the nature of world flatness.

  I had for some years before the hour when I began NM, been intrigued by the notion of a flat earth. I think I heard of it first at any length via TV pronouncements from the Flat Earth Society—who knows, they could be right, after all. And obviously, due to my obsessions with legend, theosophy and history, I’d come across the FE scenario already. I’d had a plan for some while to set a fantasy in such a world that truly was like a plain or a plate. But when Azhrarn entered, in the very first line of NM, he brought with him not only his titles, charisma and credentials but the backdrop of a four-edged world, lying beneath a heaven of indifferent gods—who made Man by mistake—and above an exquisite underworld ‘hell,’ peopled by demons who were not nearly indifferent enough.

  The formulation of the Flat Earth must have gone on in what I now call the Backbrain of my mind. Deep in there, behind the everyday necessities and anxieties, and behind even the fount of inspiration and insane delight that mark, for me, stages of all my work, some colony of cunning and insubstantial backroom boys, (and girls) were, and are, laboring always. Evidently they did so even in the 1970s, solving plot lines, building my empires of paper and ink. And they, it seems, not I, made the world of Night’s Master.

  I wrote the first story, then, which now appears as the three first tales of this book. Then the sequel to that story arrived. And after the sequel, other developments. In the end, the volume was complete, leading through its disparate adventures to an ultimate set of events, which sprang legitimately from all the rest.

  Now I forget how long I took to write it all, but I know it wasn’t that long—a couple of months, probably.

  After which, everything seemed completed. But not so very much later another development occurred to me. Besides, I, or someone, had invented a whole new world to play in. I had to go back... but this, of course, is another story.

  Tanith Lee

  2009

  A sample page of Tanith Lee’s handwritten notes, including “a sketch of the actual structure of the Flat Earth,” circa 1982. “I used both fountain pen—dipping in ink rather than cartridge, which I prefer—and biro,” says the author.

  BOOK ONE

  Light Underground

  PART ONE

  1. A Mortal in Underearth

  One night, Azhrarn Prince of Demons, one of the Lords of Darkness, took on him
, for amusement, the shape of a great black eagle. East and west he flew, beating with his vast wings, north and south, to the four edges of the world, for in those days the earth was flat and floated on the ocean of chaos. He watched the lighted processions of men crawling by below with lamps as small as sparks, and the breakers of the sea bursting into white blossoms on the rocky shores. He crossed, with a contemptuous and ironic glance, over the high stone towers and pylons of cities, and perched for a moment on the sail of some imperial galley, where a king and queen sat feasting on honeycomb and quails while the rowers strained at the oars; and once he folded his inky wings on the roof of a temple and laughed aloud at men’s notions of the gods.

  As he was returning to the world’s center an hour before the sun should rise, Azhrarn the Prince of Demons heard a woman’s voice weeping as lonely and as bitter as the winter wind. Filled with curiosity, he dropped to earth on a hillside as bare as a bone, beside the door of a wretched little hut. There he listened, and presently took on his man’s shape—for, being what he was, he could assume any form he wished—and went in.

  A woman lay before the exhausted flames of her dying fire, and he could see at once that she, as was the habit of mortals, was dying too. But in her arms she held a new-born child, covered by a shawl.

  “Why do you weep?” Azhrarn inquired in fascination as he leant at the door, marvelously handsome, with hair that shone like blue-black fire, and clothed in all the magnificence of night.

  “I weep because my life has been so cruel, and because now I must die,” said the woman.

  “If your life has been cruel, you should be glad to leave it, therefore dry your tears, which will, in any case, avail you nothing.”

  The woman’s eyes grew dry indeed, and flashed with anger almost as vividly as the coal-black eyes of the stranger.

  “You vileness! The gods curse you that you come mocking me in my last moments. All my days have been struggle and torment and pain, but I should perish without a word if it were not for this boy that I have brought into the world only a few hours since. What is to become of my child when I am dead?”

  “That will die, too, no doubt,” said the Prince, “for which you should rejoice, seeing he will be spared all the agony you tell me of.”

  At this the mother shut her eyes and her mouth and expired at once, as if she could no longer bear to linger in his company. But as she fell back, her hands left the shawl, and the shawl unfolded from the baby like the petals of a flower.

  A pang of indescribable profundity shot through the Prince of Demons then, for the child was of an extraordinary and perfect beauty. His skin was white as alabaster, his fine hair the color of amber, his limbs and features formed as carefully and wonderfully as if some sculptor had made him. And as Azhrarn stood gazing at him, the child opened his eyes, and they were of darkest blue, like indigo. The Prince of Demons no longer hesitated. He stepped forward and took up the child and wrapped it in the folds of his black cloak.

  “Be consoled, O daughter of misery and wailing,” said he. “You have done well by your son, after all.”

  And he sped up into the sky in the shape of a storm cloud, the child still nestled to him like a star.

  Azhrarn carried the child to that place at the earth’s center where mountains of fire stood up like thin ragged and enormous spears against a sky of perpetual thunder and dark. Over everything lay the crimson smoke of the mountains’ burning, for almost every crag held a craterous pit of flame. This was the entrance to the demons’ country, and a spot of awful beauty where men seldom if ever came. Yet, as Azhrarn sped over in his shape of cloud, he heard the child chuckle in his arms, unafraid. Presently the cloud was sucked into the mouth of one of the tallest mountains, where no flame burned but there was only a deeper darkness.

  Down fled the shaft, through the mountain and beneath the Earth, and with it flew the Prince of Demons, Master of the Vazdru, the Eshva and the Drin.

  First, there was a gate of agate which burst open at his coming and clanged shut behind him, and after the gate of agate, a gate of blue steel, and last a terrible gate all of black fire; however, every gate obeyed Azhrarn. Finally he reached Underearth and came striding into Druhim Vanashta, the city of the demons, and, taking out a silver pipe shaped like the thighbone of a hare, he blew on it, and at once a demon horse came galloping and Azhrarn leaped on its back and rode faster than any wind of the world to his palace. There he gave the child into the care of his Eshva handmaidens, and warned them that if any harm befell the boy their days in Underearth would be no longer pleasant for them.

  And so it was in the city of demons, in Azhrarn’s palace, that the mortal child grew up, and from the earliest all the things that he knew and which, therefore, became to him familiar and natural, were the fantastic, brooding and sorcerous things of Druhim Vanashta.

  All around was beauty, but beauty of a bizarre and amazing sort, though it was all the beauty the child saw.

  The palace itself, black iron without, black marble within, was lit by the changeless light of the Underearth, a radiance as colorless and cool as earthly starlight, though many times more brilliant, and this light streamed into the halls of Azhrarn through huge casements of black sapphire or somber emerald or the darkest ruby. Outside lay a garden of many terraces where grew immense cedars with silver trunks and jet-black leaves, and flowers of colorless crystal. Here and there was a pool like a mirror in which swam bronze birds, while lovely fish with wings perched in the trees and sang, for the laws of nature were immensely different beneath the ground. At the center of Azhrarn’s garden a fountain played; it was composed not of water but of fire, a scarlet fire that gave neither light nor heat.

  Beyond the palace walls lay the vast and marvellous city, its towers of opal and steel and brass and jade rising up into the glow of the never-altering sky. No sun ever rose in Druhim Vanashta. The city of demons was a city of darkness, a thing of the night.

  So the child grew. He played about the marble halls and plucked the crystal flowers and slept in a bed of shadows. For company he had the curious phantom creatures of the Underearth, the bird-fish, and the fish-birds, also his demon nurses with their pale and dreamy faces, their misty hands and voices, their ebony hair in which serpents twined sleepily. Sometimes he would run to the fountain of cold red fire and stare at it, and then he would say to his nurses: “Tell me stories of other places.” For he was a demanding though an endearing child. Nevertheless, the Eshva women of Druhim Vanashta could only stir softly at this plea, and weave between their fingers pictures of the deeds of their own kind, for the world of men was to them like a burning dream, of no consequence except to make delightful enchantment in, and wickedness, which to them was not wickedness at all, merely the correct order of things.

  One other being came and went in the life of the child, and he was not so easily accounted for as the fair nonsensical women with their tender snakes. This was the handsome, tall and slender man who would come in suddenly with a sweeping of his cloak like the wings of an eagle, and his blue-black hair and his magical eyes, who would stay only for a second, glance smiling down at him, and then be gone. No opportunity to ask this wonderful person for stories, though the child felt sure that he would know every story there might be, no space in fact to do more than mutely offer his look of worship and love, before the eagle-wing cloak had borne its wearer away.

  The time of demons did not at all resemble human time. By comparison, a mortal life flashed by like the span of a dragonfly. Therefore while the Prince of Demons went about his own midnight business in the world of men and out of it, the child, glancing up, seemed to see the man in the inky cloak only once or twice a year, while Azhrarn had perhaps gone to the nursery, as it were, twice a day. Nevertheless, the child did not feel neglected. Worshipping, he claimed no right to ask for any favor—indeed, did not even think of such a thing. As for Azhrarn, the frequency of his visits indicated his great interest in the mortal boy, or, in any event, his great interest in
what he had guessed the boy would become.

  So the child grew up to be a youth of sixteen years.

  The Vazdru, the aristocracy of Druhim Vanashta, sometimes watched him walking on the high terraces of their lord’s palace, and one might observe: “That mortal is indeed most beautiful; he shines like a star.” And some other would answer, “No, more like the moon.” And then some royal demoness would laugh softly and say, “More like another light of the earth sky, and our wondrous Prince had best he careful.”

  Beautiful the young man was, just as Azhrarn had foreseen. Straight and slim as a sword, white of skin, and with his hair like shining red amber and his evening eyes, it is certain there were few so exceptional in Underearth, and fewer still in the world above.

  One day, as he walked in the garden under the cedars, he heard the Eshva handmaidens sigh and bow from the waist like a grove of poplars in the breeze, which was their form of homage to their Prince. And turning eagerly, the young man beheld Azhrarn standing on the path. It seemed to the mortal that this special visitor had been absent far longer than before; perhaps some more than usually complex venture had kept him on earth, the twisting of some gentle mind or the downfall of some noble kingdom, so that possibly four or five years of the young man’s life had gone by without his seeing him. Now his dark glory burned there so tremendously that the mortal had an impulse to shield his eyes from it, as from a great light.

  “Well,” said Azhrarn, Prince of Demons, “it appears I chose excellently that night on the hill.” And coming closer, he put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and smiled at him. And that touch was like a spear thrust of pain and joy, and the smile like the oldest enchantment of time, so that the mortal could say nothing, only tremble. “Now you will listen to me,” said Azhrarn, “for this is the only harsh lesson I shall teach you. I am the ruler of this place, this city and this land, and also I am the master of many sorceries and a Lord of Darkness, so that the things of the night obey me, whether on earth or under it. Nevertheless, I will give you many gifts not generally bestowed on men. You shall be to me my son, my brother and my beloved. And I will love you; for such as I am, I do not give my love lightly, but once given it is sure. Only remember this, if ever you make an enemy of me, your life shall be as dust or sand in the wind. For what a demon loves and loses he will destroy, and my power is the mightiest you are ever likely to know.”