by Tanith Lee
And having heard them, to each one he said: “I will put the opportunity into your own hands. Do with it as you desire.”
And so he did, later. And in some glass of Underearth presumably he watched them then seize these opportunities to force and to enslave, to utilize the smothering pillow or the poisoned meat, or the unguarded confidence or somebody’s ill-luck. But that was to come.
Having reduced them to the vilest part of themselves, he wrapped his cloak of armored jewels about him, and as he did so, the whole of that night sky in the tier was wrapped about him, and he and it were folded from sight, and black nothing engulfed the humans who had worshipped him.
When they roused, they were in the camp again, that camp outside Bhelsheved. Everyone supposed then he had dreamed, and that only he had gone after the Eshva thieves, trodden on lilies and through stained glass trees, scaled up the black ghost tower and met there a god of the dark, and gained a gift from him.
And only some who went out early saw the peculiar upheaval of the sands, as if an army had tramped eastward and then tramped back. And they refrained from comment. The tower itself, naturally, disappeared before dawn could wither it.
It was only years after, when the results of death and mayhem had come home to roost on this unhappy people, that they admitted to each other their dreams of that night, and compared them, and grew cold. By then their religion was corrupt, and their faith a sham, and when they went to Bhelsheved it was habit and greed and holiday and nothing else. The sweet fruit of religion and faith had soured, had rotted. The sweet fruit was no more.
There were, naturally, a handful who did not travel to the phantom tower that night. Of these, one was a young murderer, later found by his two brothers, hanged from a tree in the groves by the length of a whip. And one was a tan-haired girl, turning a pin in her fingers, who, deep in the reverie of a demon lover, missed the demons who had stolen the Relic, and so had not cared to run after the robbers. And thirdly were a philosopher and his followers, who were busy worshipping stones.
As for the Relic itself, like the three dark gems formed from the blood of Azhrarn when the whip cut open his palm, it lay hidden under the robe of the desert. Unlike the three gems of blood, the shards of the Relic were never located.
PART TWO
Soul-of-the-Moon
CHAPTER 1
A Sacrifice
He had demoralized the pilgrims. He had yet to deal with Bhelsheved’s priesthood. Eradication, the sigil of demonkind in matters of requital. Not one brick to be left whole. Not one lamp alight.
The people had gone in their thousands, plague-carriers of disillusion and gray mischief, away from the white shrine in the desert. Gone with their burned-out torches, treading heavily, dreaming harsh dreams. And the holy city closed its four gates of ivory and steel and polished stones. Thus shut up, its water held within, it could have withstood an interminable siege. As well. Though none had yet attempted to sack this treasure house, there might now come a time when some would attempt it. But that was for the darkening future. For this while, serene, unearthly, the snow-hill of Bhelsheved slept under a dying moon.
And, under that wisp of moon, a panther prowled around the walls. Around and around. Passing the gleaming gates, the mountain sides of glazed blocks, passing under the veil of trees and through the groves, where petals were dashed on its pelt. Around and around Bhelsheved the panther circled, seven times seven times.
He was considering, Night’s Master, the interesting flavor of retribution. And considering too, perhaps, the smart of that strange wound they had given him. For it is worth repeating that they must, astonishingly, have hurt him a great deal, and that in oblique fashion he was vulnerable to humankind. His involved acts of vengeance, his complex acts of evil—could it be possible?—were like those elegant flourishes and underlinings with which insecure men bolstered up their signatures on parchment.
After the forty-ninth circuit, the night swallowed the great cat.
Three seconds after, Azhrarn stood on the pastel shore of the heart-lake at the core of Bhelsheved.
In the moonlight, the golden temple was silver, the turquoise water was a sheet of tumbled black sky, reflecting the four curving bridges in its mirror. A garden ran down here, to the mosaic rim above the lake, and the trees exuded their scent and had sprinkled the sugar of their blossoms everywhere. Somewhere a nocturnal bird was singing. It did not guess who listened, or it might have fallen quiet.
An hour or more he stood there, brooding. A mortal hour, which to him might have been only a moment. As he mused, occasional images formed in the water near his feet, the representations of what his brain devised, altering as his musings altered. And some of these depictions were not good to see.
The deadly moon rested on her elbow overhead.
A strand of whiteness moving in the water, brighter than the moon, might have seemed at first the passage of a swan, then of a flame. Yet, tracing its origin to the farther shore, you saw it was neither of these.
A female figure walked about the lake, following the winding of its bank, the pallor of her garments and her hair copied faithfully in the water. In her right hand she carried a little lamp, the greenish color of a firefly.
Azhrarn waited in the shadow under the trees. Perhaps he smiled. Perhaps he recalled the innocent beast which, going after him into the desert, had met a lion.
Certainly, she would not guess that anyone was here, save her own kindred of the temples, chaste and modest and simpleminded creatures she might accost without misgiving.
Like these, too, she would be comely. The priests were selected for their charms.
Slender as a wand she was, her waist looked narrow enough to be snapped in the hands, yet supple as willow. Her feet picked their way like small white birds. Her walk was music. Her hair which, in most of her calling, by the temple law, was bleached and tinted to enhance its pallid glisten, seemed altogether too fine, too pale, too starry to be anything but natural. And very long her hair was; in repose it would robe her, the tips of it touching the ground. But as she moved, so featherlike and sheer it was, it lifted, blowing behind her like white wings.
Her dress was a gown of the temple, gauzy stuff with iridescent fringes. Tiny blue scintillants, which in the moonlight flashed like igniting flints, were embroidered on her bodice. Each breast, the cup of a flower, stirred softly beneath.
He had discerned her beauty from across the lake. Yet her beauty drew nearer to him as she did, like an approaching song.
She walked through the broadcast blossoms, her white wings at her back, the green gem of light in her hand. The loveliness of her face opened before him as a door opens.
Demons were beautiful. Rarely did mortals rival such beauty as was the commonplace of Druhim Vanashta. Azhrarn had known and toyed with and corrupted and broken most of the mortal beauty that there was. One woman he had himself made beautiful, who had been thereafter, in her time, a wonder of the earth.
But this white beauty was new to Azhrarn. He could not fathom it, nor find its floor, could not measure or dismiss it, could not deduce of what order it had come. Be sure then, it intrigued him.
So utterly motionless he had grown, she would, by no means available to men, have seen him or told that any was there. Yet, unerringly she came forward, and when she was within ten paces of him, she stopped. She looked between the trees at the area of ground he occupied. Her eyes were wide, and slanted a fraction upward at their outer corners. In color they were the turquoise of the lake, and like the lake by night they had turned dark and held reflections.
“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 garde
n 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.