by Tanith Lee
“It was stones, then, which were thrown at us?”
The final deduction was inevitable. None of them rendered it aloud, but their heads, their faces, their eyes, reverted to the bridge where the girl stood helplessly in her bindings.
While the objects from Chuz’s cloak still rolled and skittered over the mosaic, the notion took hold. The fight had been no fight, the exploding of objects had been a series of miscasts. Men were flinging stones at the harlot. She was being stoned.
The shepherd. The leader. The one to walk before.
They dropped to their knees, scrabbling. They found flints, scatterings of cracked pots; Chuz’s dice they found, illusory or real; they used their knives and their nails to pry up lumps of the mosaic itself. And straightening, they hurled these missiles up across the bridge. Then, seeing they were too far off, rushed nearer, crammed on to the bridges over the lake, and their hands flapped and opened like mouths. Pebbles and stone chips plopped in the lake. Portions of tiles and fragments of wood hit the gold-scaled walls, the temple’s four faces.
The maiden’s guard poured off the bridges. Some dived into the lake and swam for shore.
The crowd could not see if its offerings struck her. She did not stagger, did not fall. To some it seemed her garments were torn, others saw a trace of blood, like a delicate scarlet embroidery, sew itself down her throat. But it was not sufficient. They wanted to hurt her, wanted to hear her screams, for they themselves might be made to scream for this deed. So they scrabbled and cast, again and again.
The philosopher cried tears of anger. He denounced their blasphemy in so polluting the stones. Sickening his very soul, certain of his own band, waxing hysterical and recalling the words of the ghastly woman-thing at the gate, were throwing their own talismans at the girl. Let fly the gods. He cried also for that, as for the death of innocence.
Yet, was she not unharmed, or scarcely harmed? (A faint blue bruise on her shoulder, a flint caught in her hair like a brackish jewel.) The safeguards Azhrarn had set on her, even by day, must have protected her.
And yet.
Nothing scores the diamond save another diamond.
Azhrarn had safeguarded her, this girl he loved, and perhaps nothing could get by those safeguards. Only he, then, could have negated them. Only Azhrarn. Or some thing which was Azhrarn’s. Was of Azhrarn.
The fragments, flints and pebbles hurtled through the air, and Dunizel stood in the rain of them. Her lids were shut; she could not lift her hands to cover her eyes or her face. And now and then the rain slackened briefly as the people dug about for more detritus to hurl, and squabbled over it. And the dice and toys of Chuz, also picked up and thrown—these were less lethal than anything else, since they tended to dissolve in the air, to become petals, or resins or flakes of charred snow. However. With those dice, out of the mantle of Chuz had been dashed one other thing, a thing he had come on and thereafter taken about with him, for it was rare. Very small, it was, this keepsake, yet darkly lambent, and extravagantly hard. It was the black pearl of Vazdru ichor that Chuz had disinterred from the dunes, along with two other identical drops, currently hidden elsewhere. Each of them the blood of Azhrarn,
It was simply a question of chance and time before someone, picking frenziedly at the ground, should snatch up this appallingly significant commodity, snatch it up disregardingly also, since it was so minute, seemed so ineffectual, and then, with a fistful of weightier stuff, fling it at the witch-demoness, at her pale radiance that was like a star.
Who, unwitting, cast her death? It is not recollected. Nor is it fitting that it should be recollected. It was, in the end, like lightning or the sea, a murderer without clemency, or knowledge.
The adamantine drop spun and flew. It pierced her just beneath the breast and tore upward, lodging in her heart. There was a kind of terrible rightness in that. She dropped down at once, not crying out, not even changing her expression or opening her eyes. It was very swift, very complete. It has been said, it may not even have been pain for her, to be pierced by his blood, but pleasure, like a sorcerous kiss which kills. Or maybe the pain was unbearable, as if he had himself come to her and slain her. But it was suddenly done, suddenly over.
She lay on her wings of hair. She looked only asleep. No blood of her own had spread from that awesome, tiny wound. But the jewels and the silverwork he had given her, which had shielded her from everything but that one thing they could not keep out, some or any particle of himself, those magical things grew murky, and their colors and their sheens extinguished, and then they were no more than brittle papers or dead leaves lying on her, and they shriveled, and the flickering wind blew them away.
The ardor of the mob came to an end in much the same fashion. The yelling and the flying of hands and stones.
They were too afraid, too stunned at their own achievement, to go near and see how wonderful she remained, to see the throwing away of this wonder, like a flower torn up by the roots.
Only the sun looked in her face as it slowly declined, and the sun drew the storm cloud over its head. Even the sun, it seemed, could not bear such waste.
CHAPTER 5
Love and Death and Time
One other beheld her, but not in the world, or from the sky. From beneath the earth’s crust, from the hollows of the earth’s inner lands. By staring in a sorcerous glass, smoky, troubled and faulted by the light of day.
They said the glass shattered in a million fragments, like grains of salt. They said that, for aeons after, such fragments, getting under the skins of men, drove them into otherwise unaccountable paroxysms of grief and rage, so they would slay others or themselves. They said that true despair had not been created until that instant of the mirror’s shattering.
It was so quiet in Druhim Vanashta underground that you might hear the faint chime of a leaf falling on the black grass, until all leaves failed to fall.
No demon prince or princess of the Vazdru stirred. They stood among their playthings, their music, their horses and hounds, struck as if to marble and jade. The Eshva froze like winter reeds. The crafty artisan Drin, having crawled beneath their work-benches or behind their braziers, gave up making anything. No fish flew, no bird swam, no dog barked or horse shook its head, and no snake danced. Not even the foliage of the dark trees whispered. Not even the flames of the fountain of red fire in the garden of his palace trembled. No breeze blew. The starless starlight of Underearth itself congealed, and for a moment lost its beauty, like a gorgeous face turning sallow with unimaginable fear.
Druhim Vanashta, which had always been, or which had become, the heart of Azhrarn, had ceased to beat.
It seems he had been awaiting calamity, for surely every time he attempted to persuade her to come away with him, the foreshadow of her danger must have prompted and goaded him. Yet he had not credited it, her death. She was a part of him, and he immortal. He would, no doubt, have wished to immortalize her, though the paths to human immortality were perilous. In his mind, perhaps, he thought of her as already immortal, invulnerable, eternal. And she being more of the soul than most of humankind, the illusion persisted. If truly he had reckoned on her death, he must have taken her from Bhelsheved, with her consent or without it. And yet again, to ignore her will, which in everything else had surrendered itself joyfully and supremely and with such dignity to his—that, too, would have been a sort of blow against her life. Maybe he could not do it.
Whatever the cause or the premonition or the disbelief, she had remained, and they had killed her. And he, powerless for once, had witnessed it.
A second of his time, far less. But time appeared to have stopped in Druhim Vanashta.
He stood above the last few grains of the shattered mirror—the mass of them had swirled away. The ruby windows of his palace bled on him, and the emerald windows wept, and the windows of blackest sapphire bathed him in a shade that was not a color but a dirge.
As if one must not speak of him and how he was, it is only the silence of his city,
the shattered mirror, the blood and mourning of the window glass that are mentioned. Those were the expressions, and he quite expressionless. (Where his fingers brushed the inlaid surface of the table on which the mirror had rested, white smolderings came from the wood.) Expressionless he was, and his dry eyes, like the depth of space wrung of all its stars and glimmerings, might have turned a world to stone.
Then, he drew in one breath, and the breeze stirred again through the city, and the demons stirred with it, and the plants and waters and fires of it. They came to life and felt what he felt, like blades in their sides. And none dared cry aloud.
And when he came from his palace, riding one of the black demon horses, its blue hair furled about him like smoke, none dared call to him, or even kneel to him. His passing was like the passage of death, though Uhlume, Lord Death, had never entered Druhim Vanashta.
Azhrarn rode to the limits of his city, and left its spires and pinnacles behind, that were now like rent swords and long bone needles and splinters, and all seethed in the calcified glare that the magic sublight had become, greenish, sickly, aching, the hues of pain.
He rode into the sable countryside, among the silver trees. A mile from the city, the horse stumbled. It sank beneath him slowly, and died of Azhrarn’s invisible unexpressed agony.
After the death of the horse, which was not an actual death, since the horses of Druhim Vanashta were no more than half corporeal, Azhrarn went on alone. He strode through a landscape as unnerving as it was fair, and saw none of it. Hillsides clad in crystal blooms, rills and streams which gushed with zircons, a far line of cliffs rosy as if at sunset, but unaltering; he heeded nothing.
In his brain a clock ticked inexorably. It told the hours in the world above his head. It told how the sun of that world stepped toward the horizon.
He may have considered Lord Death, but Uhlume had no power over the dead once they had achieved that state, save those dead which belonged to him. Or Azhrarn may have considered Prince Chuz, but Chuz and his games were like distant objects; difficult to fill the eye with them.
There was a forest whose trunks were black, and from whose black boughs soft black fur was growing, while in the soil between the trees were pale yellow primroses which themselves were luminous, and flushed the trees with light. Into this forest Azhrarn took himself, and wrapped its blackness about him. And the forest commenced to sing, because it could not weep, a melody without any absolute beginning, or any positive end, a melody like air, that, if it might be reproduced, would kill life with sadness.
That was expression, too, for he neither spoke nor gestured. He did not express emotion. His kingdom must express it for him.
But then the sun of the earth above found the brink of the world, and the forest dazzled and snarled as if a meteor had ripped through it. Azhrarn was gone, upward, to Bhelsheved, where men had slain one that he loved.
Stricken abruptly with awareness, the crowd had run away and left Dunizel alone on the exquisite white bridge to the west of the golden temple.
The crowd had indeed, by sunset, deserted Bhelsheved altogether, save for a few idiotic or insensitive ones, who still ambled disconsolately about the colonnades. There were also the priests, who yet dithered in their cells, bleating at a sense of psychic doom. The storm held, too, in the sky, dully booming, casting handfuls of wind against the fanes, and tearing the litter left behind on the streets.
The sun, stepping from the last stair into the place below the world, stabbed one prolonged hellish magenta ray back across the world. Iron purple churned in the east, and blackness, which would presently conquer everything.
The girl lay, her feet pointing toward the sunset’s end.
A final flare, and the sun was gone, leaving only its moody embers after it for the wind to sweep up. Night stood instead at the girl’s feet, looking down at her.
Night’s Master, Prince of Demons, Lord of Darkness—who had been powerless, for all his power, and was powerless now, save to justify one of those other names of his, one of those blacker names.
Then he kneeled and raised her, and stood up again, holding her across his body. What he did was so strange. He leaned and kissed the lids of both her eyes, which then softly lifted, and her glorious lifeless eyes looked out at him in a semblance of awakening. But then the silver lashes drew the lids down again.
He carried her off the bridge and into that garden by the lake where she had come to him when first he entered Bhelsheved. He set her on the cold brittle grass, and then he turned from her, and gazed away across the night-stained water of the lake.
To the Eshva, sorrow was, like love, a rapture, an art. They would swim in sorrow, drown in it, drink and grow drunken, those children of dream and shade. But to the Vazdru, sorrow could only be mended in blood. The Vazdru would seldom mourn, as rarely could they weep. And he, who had come to rule them, more Vazdru than the Vazdru, he could do neither. Small wonder his country must express his agony and despair. For he could not. His pain was inexpressible. Like one that would scream but had no voice, or one who was wounded with some dreadful internal wound that no physician could come at to heal, so he was. Azhrarn who invented carnal love, and cats, and the most profound intricacies of evil, so he was and so he suffered.
His face was so white it seared the darkness like a fire, and his dry unreadable eyes—be glad they are not to be read—made the darkness meager and faded by their blackness.
Aloud he said, but gently: “Bhelsheved I will thrust back into the earth which vomited it. And the lands of Bhelsheved I will leave a bottomless crater that shall not grow one living shoot until ten centuries are forgotten.”
The night in the garden seemed to recoil at his words. These were his powers, if he had been powerless before. The night and the soil and the trees and the atmosphere itself knew and believed him, and that piece of the world shrank on its bones.
“Not one smallest, most feeble shoot,” he said, so gently, gently. “And of men, not one until twice ten centuries are torn from the pages of the world’s book. And many, many more.”
Pitch black was Bhelsheved now, and no star showing. The buffets of the storm were stifled, for it, too, was afraid. The lake was without reflection. Not a light or a hope of light anywhere, while he stood and tasted the promise he had made, vintage poison in his mouth.
And then, a light. Unexpected, slender and frail, moving along the margin of the lake, toward him.
Azhrarn looked at that light, and he cursed it, for it evoked a memory of how she had first come to him in just such a way, bearing the firefly lantern along the shore. But at his curse, incredibly, the light sprang up more strongly, as if he had blessed it, and now it seemed to speed toward him.
At the last instant, he knew. He stepped from the trees, and thus he waited, and the shimmering light came up to him, and it was Dunizel, or her ghost, her soul, come back from that misty region beyond the world, to which, in those days, souls expired. And she was like herself, save she was translucent as the thinnest porcelain. The night showed through her, through her young skin, her swan-white hair, through her beauty so faithfully, so pathetically reproduced.
And, “Lord,” she said, “I knew you were here and have come out to seek you.” Just as she had said it to him in the beginning.
At that, the pain in him, like the raw edge of a sword, most probably became like the pain of seven swords, and seven acids on their points. He answered her with an anger so cold no live thing could have borne to hear it.
“Be glad, now, White Maiden. You would not obey me, but would cleave to this place, and it has destroyed you, and shall be destroyed in its turn.”
“And why will you destroy Bhelsheved?” asked the soul of Dunizel. “Is it to avenge my death?”
“What else,” he said, and turned from her. It was not often he concealed his face, save for trickery, and this was not trickery.
“Then,” she said, “do not destroy Bhelsheved for my sake. I need no vengeance. I shall live, as you see,
though not as formerly. Of all souls, mine is vital and sure of existence, for the soul of the sun visited me in the womb.”
She knew herself at last, so it seemed.
“Why will you plead for an anthill?” he said, dismissing her self-knowing, for it no longer concerned him, or he appeared to think it did not. “Those that slew you deserve no kindness of yours.”
“For them?” she asked. Her voice came between the trees, into the shadow where she had not followed him. “It is not for them, but for you that I plead, my beloved, you, the truth of my life and always that truth, even beyond the gate of death. For when you strike men and slaughter them, and ruin the earth and lay it waste, then it is some part of yourself you are striking, slaughtering, ruining, laying waste. You are greater than your own kind. You are above them. One morning—and advisedly, my love, I speak of day to you—you will set your wickedness aside like a rich garment you are weary of.”
“Do not,” he said, “say these things to me, or I will blast this spot with a bane that shall ensure its death ten million years.”
“Then, you will blast yourself. And, though I am beyond the world, your pain will become my pain. You will blast me, also.”
“Begone,” he said. “You merit no pity. You threw away your life.”
“My life continues, elsewhere, or here, for maybe I shall come back to the world, in some future time. And if so, the light by which I shall find my way will be the light of you.”
“What I would have given you, you put aside. Spilled wine, Dunizel. You never learned its sweetness.”
“Then teach it me,” she said.
He laughed then, beautifully and cruelly, in the shadow.
“Woman,” he said, “you are cobwebs and smoke. Go be lessoned in love by the phantasms cringing in the outer nothingness.”
And then her hand came upon his arm, weightless as a leaf, yet he felt it, as if it had been of flesh.
He might see her, even now, her dead whiteness lying between the stems of the trees. Yet at his side he could also discover her, as she had been, standing before him, no longer transparent, but finely opaque, lit only by her inner brilliance. If anything, she was more lovely than she had been, if such a thing is possible, and maybe it is not.