Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth)

by Tanith Lee

The day swelled coldly, grew disappointed in itself, and began to dwindle. Zharet had spoken many times. Her voice was hoarse. Some had remembered her vaguely. But those who connected her to the seventeen murderesses supposed that, like the others, she had died, and was here in spirit form to alarm them. A provocative thought, for surely a spirit might know something they did not.

  By the time the day had reached its edge, there were few who had not heard, or heard of, Zharet’s wailing.

  A well-heeled lord, who prided himself on the interesting specimens he could claim to have entertained at his table, sent his slave to ask Zharet to his tent. Zharet accepted the invitation with hauteur. She went in and sat down among diaphanous curtainings, a conflagration of lamps, some ten or eleven eminent rhetoricians and wise men, and thirty eager guests. Whether she was daunted for so much as a moment was not obvious.

  When they offered her food, she refused it.

  “Shame and anxiety are my meat and drink.”

  When they offered her fruit and wine she declared in her roughened theatrical voice:

  “The sweet grape has become for me the aloe, bringer of bitterness and purging.”

  The guests gorged themselves, listening in fascination to Zharet’s depressing utterances. At length the host prevailed on her to recount her history. She did. She spoke fluently of the demon couching, the ecstasy beyond ecstasy, the murder to which she had been persuaded, her supernatural escape at the hands “Of a great Being, who pitied me.” She did not mention Chuz by name. Chuz had done something to her tongue, most probably, to safeguard his reputation. By implication, however, she made him sound like a heavenly messenger.

  “A wonderful divertissement,” said the lords’ guests, faintly uneasy.

  Rumor ran out of the tent, carried on the evening wind, or by the mouths of those who listened and came away.

  That night was like a seething cauldron. The ingenuous began to doubt. The sophisticates, already yawning over the sameness of Dunizel’s child, roused to the hope of something new. The esthetes debated violently.

  A fish was seen strolling on its fins along the lake shore: Madness was also about.

  In the morning the sun and Zharet rose together and went together across the city. The waves of the crowd poured up and down. The temple emptied in preference for the more peculiar show outside. Zharet’s diatribes were taken for preaching.

  When day waned, a famous philosopher sent his slave to ask Zharet to his tent, that she and he and his fellows might discuss her teachings. She entered the tent and sternly admonished him: “I am only a woman, and you seek to elevate me to the intellectual status of a man. But small surprise, since you think a god may be born in female shape.”

  “How astute she is,” said the men, deeply troubled and gratified.

  Night’s wings closed over Bhelsheved.

  The temple was empty, sacred flames burning bright on its goldwork. On the mosaic floor, near to the golden throne where Dunizel would sit with the child, someone had scrawled the symbol which translates exactly as: ?

  And, in the shadow of that darkness, maybe Azhrarn said to her: “They will abuse you. Now surely you must leave the child and come with me.”

  But still she would not leave the child, nor he consent to take it. But neither would he force her from the place against her will.

  In the morning, the shout was audible: “Zharet! Zharet the Seeress!”

  Zharet answered the shout in a voice which was raucous now as the raven’s. “I am the aloe,” she croaked. “Let me be your medicine. I will purge you of your blindness.” She believed everything she said, even when, as sometimes happened, she glimpsed a ghostly figure in the crowd, wrapped in a damson mantle, grinning at the ground like a death’s head with brazen teeth.

  But as Zharet’s third day in the city merged into the third dusk, a third slave came to her. He was dressed with extraordinary richness and simplicity, yet a curious shifting, like the play of colored flames—perhaps from the fading afterglow—obscured his face.

  He did not speak to her, this man, though all about other servitors clamored, begging her to come to this tent or that. He did not speak, yet his whole stance conveyed the meaning You must come with me.

  “Very well,” said Zharet.

  She was not sure why she had deigned to choose him, he had not even announced his master’s name. But she felt a quickening. It was stronger than the thirst for fame or vengeance. As the walls and the lights and the groves and the clusterings of people were left behind her, she said peremptorily, “Where is the tent of your lord situated?”

  The slave half turned, and she caught an image of his face. He was handsome. She shivered. Before she could ask again, the tent was in front of them. It was coal-black, and like a coal seemed shot with incendiary effulgence. Was this some trick of Chuz’s devising? She had never really detected who or what Chuz was, other than her guide, her spiritual aide, to whom, by right of her suffering, she was entitled. But also she hated Chuz, for he had shown her the uncharitable facts of her destiny. She glared at the black pavilion, but as she did so some of the drapery folded away.

  Enter, said the slave, but still without speech.

  Rosy and somnolent, the lamps in the pavilion, burnishing things of dark metal, pale marble, heavy silk. Richer than the rich man’s tent, more inspiring than the tent of the philosopher.

  Zharet found she had gone in. The instant she had done so a bemusement seemed to come on her. She was reminded of the vision of truth in the garden. A cup was set in her hand. Before she knew what she did, she had sipped—and choked. Thick gall was in the cup. No, not gall. The juice of an aloe.

  She resolved, mindlessly, to fly the place, and saw one stood before the entrance to the tent, slender and smiling and beautiful, with a sword of blue steel naked in his hands.

  “But you are not to die by a sword,” said a voice, gently, marvelously, in her ear. “You are to die more cruelly. More horribly. You are to die of what you hungered for. Upon a sword of a different kind, pierced to the soul and shrieking.”

  Zharet flung about again, seeking the owner of this voice. No one was near. It might have been the voice of Azhrarn. They say it was.

  She had, besides, the space for no more than one swift terrified glance, before a multitude of hands fastened on her, invisibly. No longer was she the demented murderess, the haughty seer. She was a young woman, fearing torture. And, knowing none could hear her, or save her, for clearly she had been brought among demons, yet she screamed. Maybe she even screamed for Chuz, by whatever name she had come to know him, which undoubtedly was not the real one. Undoubtedly, too, the tent had been secreted by magic, or else removed into some other dimension. Chuz could not have located it, nor did he.

  Thus at first she screamed, at the initial clutch of the torturers, but in a brace of seconds her screams became very small amazed whimperings, for the hands of the torturers were caressing her, and the caresses began to produce in her twisting shudders of irresistible pleasure. And then again she sensed, (thoughtless, by instinct alone, for the shreds of her reason were already driven away like dogs), that this pleasure was to be the torture. At that she would have screamed again, but cold voluptuous tricklings and boiling flinchings of feeling had already closed her throat.

  Carnal love. It was their art, their genius. No coin but has two sides.

  So the delicate tracery of fingers was, one moment, exquisite delirium, next the fine lines drawn by a razor; her internal pangs—a mounting euphoria, a ghastly quake within her flesh.

  They pierced her, each of those who, unseen, attended on her. And the piercing was now a wonder, and now a blade, a spike. They tongued her, mouthed her—the epitome of delight, the gnawing of wolves.

  Up the stairway of thrilling horror and disemboweling paroxysm they danced and dragged her.

  At last, even though her mouth was stoppered, once more she screamed.

  She had formerly known three ecstasies. There were countless others. E
cstasies like knives, ecstasies like the volcano’s heart. Through each orgasmic vortex they thrust her. She passed through the eyes of many needles, each one narrower than the last.

  At the seventh gate, shrieking, she died.

  In the cool gray light before the dawn, the corpse of Zharet, a cage from which a frantic soul had torn its way, lay on the sand. Her limbs pointed at the four corners of the earth, splayed and deformed. Her face was the representation of all mortifying spasms, petrifying to any human that might see it. Her body bore no other marks.

  As the light waxed, a young man could be discerned, kneeling beside her, as if he mourned, his blond hair falling like a stream of smoke across his cheek.

  “Ah, no, un-brother,” said Chuz. “You do not play fairly with me at all. Ah, no, un-brother. Poor girl,” said Chuz to Zharet’s corpse. “Tell me, poor girl, what am I? Am I madness? Yes.” Chuz sighed. “Your sinews have not stiffened yet,” said Chuz to Zharet’s corpse.

  Chuz came to his feet. He turned his shoulder to Zharet, lying on the sand. He pondered. “Who, after all, is less sane than Lord Death?” And then over his shoulder, he snarled: “Get up, you slut, and obey me.”

  And Zharet’s corpse, its limbs still rigidly splayed, its toes and fingers clenched, its eyes clenched shut, its mouth clenched wide, lumbered upright behind him.

  “Ah, no, un-brother,” repeated Chuz, so charmingly, so musically, that the wind lessened, trying to emulate his tones. “Ah no.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Dice

  The infant, divine or demon, being a month old, could walk, and as she did so her long curling hair swept the earth. As yet, she did not say anything. She was more Eshva than Vazdru at this season, telling things and asking them with her eyes. In the sun she grew white under her translucent pallor, drew her tresses over herself like a robe, occasionally seemed to weep—without tears. Patently only the genes Dunizel had imparted to her, the saving virtue of the solar comet, kept her from enormous harm. She did not like the sun, abhored high noon, but was not blasted.

  She had none of the softness or pudginess of the baby. Already she resembled a very small child of two years.

  There was slight privacy for the mother and her daughter now. The only decided privacy they had ever enjoyed had been when the child was still in the womb. However, in Dunizel’s improvised lavish apartment, they would sometimes have leisure to sit, and Dunizel would still recount stories, or conspire in strange silent games with the child, involving colored beads, or the forms made by the curtaining. Now and then, on an overcast day, they might journey up to a secluded part of the temple roof, a shielded area set between two golden parapets. Here, in a golden alley, the blotted sky of a desert winter above, the child might run about, playing with a ball of silk like a cat, while Dunizel watched her. Unlike the sun, gold seemed not to offend the Demon’s daughter. Once or twice, indeed, she would disappear, as if by sorcery, into some intimate interstice of the metal-scaled masonry. Dunizel would allow her to absent herself for lengthy periods of time, only eventually seeking her, quietly saying the name by which she had called the child: Soveh. Perhaps a coincidence, perhaps an unconscious or psychic memory that Dunizel also, at her genesis, had gone by such a name. Certainly, Azhrarn had not revealed this detail. Nor had he himself attempted to name the child, to which he gave no notable attention, and which he seemed to detest.

  Neither mother nor daughter was properly human. What they thought, or the bond between them, is not easy to decipher. It appears that Dunizel, in her determination not to abandon, displayed a fundamental maternal reaction. The child, by her antics, displayed trust, also fundamental. And yet, the perfect prenatal liaison was no more. The child had been born, drunk Eshva blood, given evidence of her demoniac qualities. Azhrarn’s daughter, despite his neglect.

  Today was overcast by storm, the sun dim, but the strength of the winds themselves had not penetrated to Bhelsheved. The child was dancing, attractively and lunatically, in the gold alley on the roof of the temple. Dunizel reclined nearby. Observing her face, one could see an intense silence at the depth of its loveliness. She must have been thinking of Azhrarn, her parting from him, with which he constantly tantalized and attempted to overcome her resolve. She had not seen him in five nights. Knowing she had only to speak his name aloud in the darkness to bring him to her side, she knew, too, that to do so would be to acknowledge surrender to his wish that the child be unconsidered as anything save the tool of his wickedness. It is conceivable Dunizel had pictured the consequence, a tiny figure seated on the bright chair so much too big for it, casting homicidal lightnings from her fists. “I will make her more fearful than dragons,” he had said. No, Dunizel would not resign her child (hers, also, hers) to such an advent. She could not call to him.

  She examined the silver and the gems that ornamented her, his gifts, imbued with his protections of her. She wore no golden thing. Maybe she considered the demon city. Every night the sun sank into a limbo under the world, but could she, the comet’s child, endure the sunless country underground?

  Bhelsheved was unusually still all about, yet not peacefully so. This, too, Dunizel must have felt. She may have deduced herself and the child as the source of some second storm gathering beneath the sky. If she did, or if Azhrarn had warned her, it had not diverted her intention of remaining.

  In the leaden noon, the child Soveh came and sat down by Dunizel, looking into her face. Soveh raised her hands and caught at Dunizel’s platinum hair. There was no clumsiness in this gesture. Soveh was couth, coordinated beyond her years. Dunizel leaned closer to facilitate the exploration. She seldom talked to the child, respecting, save when she told stories, Soveh’s Eshva element which had not yet attempted its voice. For there is little doubt such an infant could have talked a few hours after its birth, if it had had the mind.

  Suddenly a door was opened onto the roof, and men appeared at the far end of the golden alley. They were important notaries of a new hierarchy—that which had taken over the management of temple affairs when the Servants of Heaven wilted. Now, however, they had brought with them a priest and priestess, fear-eyed and thin as sticks from their spiritual anorexia.

  “Dunizel, Favored Among Women,” declared one of the notaries, “some controversy has come about. Accusations have been made. A woman emerged from the desert, of vast learning and religious power, and she chastised us for holding false beliefs. And despite her anger, she herself was loudly praised for the clarity of her arguments. Now she has vanished. We are concerned, and request that you will come into the temple, where the ablest among us will solicit answers of you, on a number of points.”

  Dunizel rose, gathering the child with her. As in her village, so in Bhelsheved, she had never replied negatively to any proper thing.

  She went down with them into the body of the temple, and the escort kept their distance, and avoided the uncannily and totally focused eyes of the child.

  There were over two hundred men present below, to interrogate the woman who might be the mother of a goddess, but most probably was the harlot of demons—so far and so assured and so unnerved had the doubt gone and become, the sown seed of the aloe.

  She had been interrogated long ago, in the ancient tower, before she had become a priestess, before she had entered Bhelsheved. She looked no different now, save for the child on her lap.

  The child’s face was quite unchildlike. She observed, she seemed to listen. She did not grow restless.

  One spoke.

  “Dunizel, Favored of Women. The god who fathered your infant, comes to you only by night, and in secret. Is this not so?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “But if you know it to be so, why do you ask me?”

  Another spoke.

  “The visitation has begun to trouble us, holy maiden. For if he comes only by night, is it then that he is a being of darkness?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And can you not have realized this?”

  “But the darkness, holy maiden, i
s synonymous with all dark things. With deeds of mischief and hidden ill.”

  Dunizel did not speak.

  It was difficult, after all, to exclaim out loud what had been whispered.

  But yet another spoke.

  “There was one who came among us once, and only by night, who brought unquiet thoughts, baseness, treachery and murder. If your lover is a god, Dunizel, what is his nature, other than the nature of night and of deceitful shadow?”

  Again, Dunizel did not speak.

  “You must reply!” They shouted, another and another of them.

  The child looked at them, and Dunizel looked at them, both with their blue eyes like a turquoise lake or sky, until the shouting ceased.

  But: “To be mute will not protect you,” yet another stated eventually. “In this instance, dumbness implies guilt.”

  “Inform her,” some cried, “of what her guilt is reckoned to be.”

  “Why, of lying with demons. Of bearing from her womb a perverse entity. Of the pretense thereafter that these things were sacred and wholesome, which were an offense to heaven.”

  “I have pretended nothing,” she said then. “You have declared my lover was a god, you have told me what I have brought forth, and the essence of my child. You. Not I.”

  She was so calm. She accused them of nothing. Their accusations slid from her like water passing over glass. Though she must have known this day, this hour, might come, must come, with all its peril, she had not been able to renounce her fate, nor would she now. There was no cleverness, no cunning in her, for she had no use for such devices, and perhaps they could not have saved her from this.

  “Tell us then,” they said to her, a multitude of voices, dying away, making room for one voice, or two, that were the collective voices of all, “Tell us the title and the name of your unearthly husband.”

  There were many ways she might have evaded them. She was wise enough, she was cool and still. And yet, and yet, how could she deny his name? They had only to question her, which they had never done, to learn the truth.