by Tanith Lee
“Delusions,” said he haughtily, though he stepped back a pace. “You cannot dissuade me with that.”
It was a kind of creature, not wholly identifiable, shapeless and sinuate, most like a serpent, but standing upright, and with glowing eyes. And the serpent said to the prince of the ghouls: “Pardon me, beloved. How have I offended you? Come, embrace me. We shall have much love, and then I shall die for you and you shall consume my succulent, tender flesh.”
“Your trick disgusts me,” said the ghoul, yet haughty, and yet standing back a pace for every pace the monstrous serpent flowed toward him. “Put on your rightful shape.”
“So I have,” said the monster, “to enhance your delight.”
Then the ghoul prince drew a curved blade from its sheath at his thigh. It was not the weapon he had intended to loose on her, though they lived as neighbors.
“It seems I must slay you at once.”
“Do so,” the monster answered. “If you can.”
At this, the ghoul swung his blade upward and down upon the apparition. And the blade, taken long since from the burial mound of an ancient ruler, split in three pieces.
“Delusions,” repeated the monster softly, and it began to wind itself lovingly about the ghoul prince, even as he struggled out a thin dagger and stabbed at its eyes, but the dagger melted and ran on the floor all molten. “I have known one who is the master of such, and he taught me many lessons. Delusion and delirium—O Prince-Portioner, which portion shall be yours?”
And by now the monster, whatever it might be—illusion, delusion, figment of delirium—had completely entwined the prince of the ghouls, so he could not move hand or foot, nor any limb. And it squeezed and strangled him so he had not even the breath to cry aloud for aid. He could only glare into its unnatural eyes and gasp, “Discommode me as you will, you may not kill me.”
“How you wound me,” said the hallucination (and now it had, most ironically, a voice like the voice of a handsome youth named Oloru). “You smash my heart in fragments, to speak in this way of my amorous clasp.”
And with that it wrung the last whisper of air from the ghoul and let him fall senseless—not dead, as a mortal man must have died in that grip, only, as he had mentioned, “discommoded.” Though rather more than somewhat.
Sovaz stood over him. If she had changed her shape, or merely caused him to see and experience such a shape in lieu of her own, certainly it was a strong sorcery, and the first of its sort she had practiced on or through her own flesh. Now she flinched at an awareness of victory, how it must be, and how it would alter her, too, more surely than the form of the reptile.
To the ghoul prince she said, and though senseless, he heard her, “Alas for you and yours that I was brought here. I will cast down your city and all your people, and with them those you have corrupted to your ways. No vulnerable spot? One. The very thing you vaunt, there is your undoing. That which you are shall destroy you.”
Demon pride, to the pride of the boastful ghouls a mountain to a pebble. Capture, rape, slay, devour her? She, the child of utter bright and utter dark? And she had other griefs and rages. This, the last drop of water which overspills the cistern.
She walked from the antique rotting cubby of lust, and meeting the monkey thing that had been standing guard there, she raised one finger and it was crushed into a pile of cinders. As she crossed the floors beyond, the scrabbling dribbling watchers at the windows gaped and squeaked. Being stupid witless beings, some tried even to come down and get in her way. Then Sovaz clapped her hands. Lightning bolts sprang from her palms and whipped these lesser ghouls away and left them in black heaps. The last of the monkey slaves she met leaped in terror for roof tops and sewers to escape her.
Leaving the palace, she continued to walk aboveground. She was a strange sight in Shudm, not fitting. Again and again her way was barred, she was menaced, so as she walked, the route became littered with dead scorched things.
She retraced her steps through the black streets, under the platforms and the pillars of lies. Overhead, the sky of night was dull, save now and then catching some red sheen. The noises of the city were as before, though louder, for the revelry was reaching its height. The various sights she saw, high in windows, deep in doorways, under arches, behind grills—these sights shall not be written down.
But as she drew near the gates by which old Jadrid had brought her in, there came the rattle and roar of wheels behind her.
Sovaz went on, she came to the place before the gates, and into the tall gateway itself, and there she waited.
Soon some chariots dashed in view. Horses pulled them, the phantoms it was said the ghouls could make by flinging horseskin over bones and animating the assemblage. In the chariots were whirlings of sparks, which quickly resolved to the figures of the ghoul princes and princesses. Drawing rein, they stood and leered at Sovaz and pointed with their taloned fingers. While at their backs the multitude of their half-and quarter-breeds came snuffling. The ghoul princes cried from their chariots: “We thank you for the novelty of this chase. But now we shall take and rend you.”
Sovaz said, “Approach then, take and rend.”
At which the ghouls became mirthful and said, “We only savor the moment. Good wine should not be gulped.”
But Sovaz said, “I am glad you are here to bid me farewell.”
And she turned and struck the gate one blow with her slim fist—but at the blow a flame bloomed upward and the gate crumpled like a paper.
As this happened, some of the ghouls flung spears at Sovaz, but the spears spun in midflight, and plunged back toward the chariots. The phantom horses reared. One prince fell with his own spearhead between his ribs. As he did so he screamed “Tomorrow I will live again—then let her beware of me!”
“Oh, tomorrow,” said Sovaz.
But the gate now entirely disintegrated, and she went out of it.
The ghouls chased her a considerable length over the barren plain by night. But though she walked on her naked feet and they rode like the whirlwind in their chariots, they could not make up the gap, and besides, flames and thorns and storms of stones burst up in their path, and they swerved madly and in all directions, or else were overthrown.
So she left them, and so she might have left them. But so she did not leave them.
Sovaz stood on the plain beyond Shudm, as the sun rose.
She raised her white arms, as if she persuaded the sun upward from its sleep in chaos deep below the flat hollow earth.
All the hours of morning she communed with the sun, or seemed to. Her mother had held this gleam in her very veins; her father had once outstared it, as it blasted him to ash. There was such ambivalence in the relation of Sovaz to the sun, but still, she communed with it, or seemed to, until midday. It may have been a part of the magic she made, or only a chastisement of herself, a purgation before the spell was fashioned.
Though it lay miles off, no doubt by one such as Sovaz a glimpse of the city might be obtained. Or else she only visualized the city.
Over the day-smitten towers and walls of Shudm (uglier by day, all its black filth and spiritual garbage too openly displayed), the air began to sing and to ripple, and then grow oppressively silent and motionless. And then the air hardened, like cooling lava. And like lava, the air darkened, until it let in the fierce glare of the sun, but nothing else. Nothing—no lesser light, no noise, no breath of wind or vapor, neither dust nor rain—no wisp of anything. Even the vagrant corpse-eater birds could no longer get in, or out. Shudm had been sealed. Like a tomb. Above, and also beneath. Even the labyrinth of catacombs and tunnels was later found to be blocked up, by those inhabitants who shortly attempted them.
Inside—not simply a dome but an egg of leaden crystal, there was Shudm now, and the afternoon went by, and sunset, which was true dawn to the ghouls, and night, and midnight. And in the first overcast minutes of the new morning, there was not one sensible thing in the city that did not know it had been trapped.
The atmosphere, thick with smokes and aromas, turned swiftly stale and choking; long before sunrise they panted, and the more humanly feeble of their number sank down.
Then they tried obvious and inventive ways, by ordinary or magical means, of escape. And failed. And called out to whatever gods they owned. (It is maintained that some of them worshiped Naras, Queen Death, down in the Innerearth.) But whoever it was they called to did not answer. Then they raged and lamented, and the roar and moan of this was heard in distant places, not least maybe on the plain beyond, where Sovaz waited, now seated on a smooth high rock.
It is said Sovaz kept vigil there for many months, for a year, watching over the fate of Shudm of the ghouls. That sometimes she journeyed nearer and looked through the tall poreless sides of the egg, and witnessed herself what went on. Or else, climbing to a higher rock, she called the hawks of passage and asked them, “What are they doing now, in Shudm?” And the hawks told her what they did.
But otherwise, word has it that Sovaz left the vicinity, resuming it would seem her search for Chuz, who was Oloru and mad. She did not therefore watch their plight but only sometimes imagined it, or summoned up a view of it. How, locked in with only each other, and that eternal hunger of theirs which was their boast (and vulnerability), the ghoul race soon came to butchering and partaking of the only available meat. Firstly their mortal pets who were slaves and destined for it anyway, and next their mortal pets—their parents, who were not. Their partly mortal children they preyed on after that. But at last none were left to them save their own kind. So they fell to upon their brothers and sisters, and in the end they came to hacking at their own bodies. Nor did any resurrect, or if they did, it came again to the same pass, till they were wise, and stayed dead. And finally the black birds picked at the bones of what was left, which was not much.
So she paid them out strictly for thinking her only a girl, whether she watched or not, Sovaz-Azhriaz, Azhrarn’s daughter.
And one night, perhaps seven months after the day of the sealing of Shudm, Sovaz met another woman on a descending mountain road. The river which had gone by the city still moved below, down in a chasm, but here it was pure, and the mountains were bone-picked clean, in the starlight. The woman had, however, hair of poppy-red, and she crouched on a stone, casting no shadow. She might have been a ghost, or not. She held up her hand, on which gold rings shone (and there was gold on her feet and her neck, and in her tangled hair, but her clothes were rags that barely covered her).
“My son,” said this woman. (Liliu?) “You killed him.”
“How do you know?” inquired Sovaz. “Did Jadrid scream some prophecy of it to you, when your son’s knife was in his vitals? And was Jadrid then sad or merry?”
“In my heart I saw my son’s death, and the name of the murderess is carried by the night wind.”
“What is that son to you?” said Sovaz. “You died at his birth.”
“My child,” said the woman. And she clasped her hands, and her claws clicked together. “I gave my life that he might have life.”
“So, even your people love their children. Apples of fire. O dearest Father, how is it you can deny me anything?” And at the acid music of this cry, even the ghoul ghost faded and shrank into the stone and was gone. And conceivably in any case, Sovaz too was subject to delusions, and the ghost only one such.
Sovaz walked on along the track. That night she came upon him that had been her lover—Oloru, Chuz, Madness—in a cave of the mountains.
5
WHY HAD SHE sought him still? She had known how it must be. It is not always possible to behave intelligently, or even to avoid the pain an unintelligent act will bring. The child sees the fire bright on the hearth and feels the heat of it, but must touch the flame and burn herself before she is certain.
In this way Sovaz came to the cave mouth and passed into the fire.
At first, there was only a lump of darkness in the dark, which moved.
Sovaz stood motionless, but she made light blossom.
The lump of darkness huddled down out of the light, and it mumbled a noise, but in no language.
“Speak to me,” said she. “I command it.”
And then the dark lump lumbered upright and came out at her, and stopped a pace away and capered, tearing at itself with nails the ghouls would not have disdained.
There was nothing anymore of Oloru, nothing but the bloodshot eyes and filthy hair held a memory and made it obscene. Of Chuz, there was some evidence. Every line of face and body—of the very spine and muscles—seemed to have altered. The back hunched, the arms dangled or lunged, the legs buckled, the feet splayed. The mouth formed itself into a rictus, squawked, relaxed, formed another rictus and another subhuman cry. It drooled and foamed and bit at its own gray warty skin. It did not like itself. Or anything. This then, her lover and protector.
Sovaz showed no hint of an emotion. She was like staring ice.
She said, contemptuously, “Greetings, Master of Delusions, Lord of Darkness, Prince Chuz. You are all of your own left side now, it seems, the side you kept from me, a male hag gone crazy. Come, where are the finger-snakes and the thumb-fly that cracks its feelers? Where is the brass rattle that sounded through Bhelsheved when my mother died, or the jawbones of an ass which declaim?”
At this, Madness the madman brayed. The cave recoiled, and the night. Sovaz only remarked, “A fine love gift for my father. Unbrothers, each closer than ever either was to me. Fool. Do your penance then. I will no more bother you.”
And having said this, attempting no argument or counterspell, she went out of the cave.
But behind her the thing was scampering, not to follow her but to go higher up the walls of the mountains. As it fled it shrieked and gibbered, and laughed—at her?
“Oh,” whispered Sovaz, “oh, Chuz, be hated of me.”
They say the smoke of burning rose from her footsteps awhile, as she walked on over the descending road.
In the morning she came down at last to the delta of the river. The teeth of the mountains sank in this ground, and where the rocks gave way to swamp, reeds grew tall as the tallest men, and the most slender of them were as thick around as a man’s strong wrist. As the winds blew, the reeds wailed, or clashed angrily like swords.
All day Sovaz wended across this land, and all night, when a faint flushed moon glowed through the vapors and behind the reeds. And, though she had left him so instantly and with such words, the image of Oloru stayed at her side. She ached with her pain, yet nothing in the swamp dared to trouble her, not the great-winged insects nor the long-headed hunting dogs; the wildfowl feeding out on the waters rose like flung shawls at her coming, and hastened away.
At dawn, when the dull russet moon went out and a dim russet sun stole up from the earth, Sovaz stood looking at her reflection in a pool, one straight beautiful reed among the rest that were crooked and stark.
“Be vile,” Sovaz admonished the terrain of the delta. “Beauty is no use.”
Just then a second (damson-colored) sun began to rise—out of the pool. It was a lotus, and as it came up shimmering, it opened wide as an offering hand. And on the palm of the lotus lay one single unlikely object: a die of amethyst.
Twice it had been tendered previously. Out of the heart-lake of Bhelsheved, for the unborn child, when Chuz volunteered to be her uncle. And later, in the heart-temple of Bhelsheved, to the born child. The first time Azhrarn refused the gift on her behalf. The second, she had left it lying. But now she was a woman, and alone, and she reached into the lotus’s heart and took the amethyst die. At which the lotus itself flickered and was no more.
Sovaz looked closely at the die, turning it in her fingers. It was unmarked, as they often were, the dice Chuz bore about with him, yellow, purple, black. And yet, there was a kind of shadow-marking on the sides. It had fallen, this gem, into the possession of those who later fought over it and tried to fight with Chuz over it—and in the flurry, the death of Dunizel had been prefigured a
nd inaugurated.
They had stoned her, that religious crowd at Bhelsheved. The stones had done no harm. Then some hand chanced upon another thing—a tiny bit of darkest adamant. It was a drop of Vazdru blood, the blood of Azhrarn himself, lost some while since in the desert, found there by Chuz, kept by Chuz, and now seemingly loosed by him. The drop of blood, the only element which could make nothing of the safeguards Azhrarn had set on Dunizel, pierced through all psychic shields, and killed her.
But perhaps this purple gem was another of the dice of Prince Chuz, nothing to do with that particular event. Dice were ever about him. Had he not been himself a topaz die, for the sake of Sovaz?
Whatever the facts, a strange token of love. For love token it was.
When the dusk came down again, Sovaz still walked among the reeds and swamp. The die was hidden in her clothes, her thoughts concealed behind her eyes. Yet it was an amethystine dusk, the waters and the sky, and the vague moon, all tinged mauvely with that undemonstrated matter.
Near midnight, the girl paused and slept a space. In her sleep, she must have remembered a dream her mother once shared with her in the womb—for being not created in the usual way, the spiritual essence had come early to the flesh, and lived in the mother’s body longer than in the general manner, and so learned things of the mother as it waited. Waking, Sovaz called a beast to her, out of some other realm, or out of some forgotten land of the earth, or simply from refashioned atoms of the air. It flew high over the moon’s face, then swept down, frightening the waterfowl and setting the wild dogs to howling. When it settled on the ground it was a winged lion of abnormal size, pale as curds, with a bluish mane and eyes of gold, and having a silent thinking face, as wise as a human philosopher’s; wiser. This Dunizel had dreamed. Now Dunizel’s daughter conjured it.
Sovaz mounted the lion’s back, and sat down cross-legged between the wide wings.