by Tanith Lee
The galley, only slightly supernatural, had boiled and bubbled, and sorcery gushed in. By the hour the heavens began to ignite and roar, and splintered stardust showered, a curious thing lay in the harbor, with the Drin swarming over it.
They must have plumbed the shelves of the seas, to get the model right. Or they had gone out by moonlight and attracted the blue-skinned dolphins and the umber whales. Or maybe some had plummeted amid the reefs, popping out to scare polyps and to become amorous with reserved females of many legs, and wish to court them in their shells, and not have the space, and so come back above the sea bulging with information and unsatisfied longings. . .
Some great fish had been the inspiration of design. Quite properly, for where such fishes swam, there this ship would go swimming, presently.
It was said to be glamorous, and more so than the original galley which had vanished somehow into it. For the revolting Drin could make nothing that was not wonderful.
But there was scarcely a means of regarding the new ship at this juncture, what with the river now in spate, and with the sky every now and then exploding. It must suffice to say that there it was.
Azhriaz, standing upon the bank, was no longer clad as empress or warrior-prince, but plainly, in black. And but for her beauty she seemed slight and small, unfit for a world of such drama.
Finally one of the Drin came to her, and lying on his face, put the tip of a finger to her ankle.
The girl looked down.
“Supreme Mistress, we have done all he told us to do. The sorceries are gelled, without and within. The rivets closed. All secure. Come now, board the vessel, I entreat you. There is only half a glassful of the lovesome darkness left.”
“But,” she said, and glanced about her, “who is to be with me?”
“None is needed.”
“The City—” said Azhriaz.
“Let go the City. He will hang cities on your white brow like pearls.”
“A vast quantity of lives,” said Azhriaz. Her face was white indeed.
The Drin, puzzled, gobbled politely at the bank. What should she care for human lives, the Demon’s daughter? Though, even he, once—
“Beloved of Glooms and Shades,” said the Drin at last, “we seek only to serve you and so him. Come aboard.”
Then, Azhriaz glanced at the sky, where the lightnings came and went and all the clockworks had perished.
“What causes that?”
“The Great Quarrel, Mistress of Delirium.”
“Whose?” she said, childlike.
“Oh come aboard,” pleaded the Drin. “Have pity on us.”
“You? Have pity on you, but on no mortal? And he is embattled with sun-creatures? Not for my sake,” said Azhriaz, beginning to drift toward the metal fish in the river. “It is his game, of course, and he does not like to lose.”
There was, in the fish-vessel’s side, a round high door. Azhriaz the Goddess went up to the door through the scalded air, and the Drin chittered. But at the doorway she said, “And where is Chuz?” Not loudly enough that they, who were deaf in any case from all the millennia of hammerings, could hear. “And my mother? Where is she? And cold Dathanja, that priest from a womb-temple of rock—where? I am alone.”
Then she went inside the mysterious ship. The mysterious door shut tight.
It is not to be thought they contended as men who are skilled with swords. They fought in the way of what they were, dark and light, earth and ether, though something too in the way of dragons, and something in the way of a tempest turned upon itself.
The first blows, even if they slew stars, were foreplay. They danced, as lovers do, along the edge of death, Azhrarn the Demon, Melqar the angel. And the strokes of the black sword were lilting, nearly tender, and the Sun-Created—who had no soul, no purpose but the will of the gods—seemed induced by the presence of this adversary to copy and to match him. So the Malukhim also played, and the sword of golden whiteness teased, tempted, and the last agonized stellar objects shivered to bits nearby.
And somewhere in this terrifying prologue, the inn roof fell away or was destroyed, and then they moved in the sky an instant, and then they passed into some place within the night, or beside it, a second dimension as close to the world as the skin to the skull. And close enough certainly that the incendiaries of conflict tore through and cracked the moons, now, like plates.
There is this to be borne in mind. Azhrarn had announced: I say nothing of the gods. They are not here.
And in this way, by this pious formality, he made pretense he did not know it was against the gods he fought. Such then the gods, as he had said, that even Azhrarn was politic. But yet again the Malukhim, though not in precise terms his equals, yet they were sufficiently puissant. And they were sun-beings, while the substance of demon stuff could not endure the sun—
The first and second angels, Ebriel, Yabael, had risen and gone up the sky, sentinel now on two precipices of masonry, one westward and one to the east. They waited there, and did nothing. Only they gazed inward behind their eyes, after the dueling of their fellow. For the Vazdru, they also stood high up, their mailed feet on black air. They kept between the two angels and the fabric of the other dimension, guarding the gate in absolute if inexplicable ways. They were pale as dead men, the Vazdru. They had not been among those in the underlands who put on yellow discontent. When Azhrarn called them, they galloped after him on their steeds of night, without one word.
The sky rang and coruscated.
Flung upward on the forming cumulus, great shadows, one coldest black, one boiling white.
The two swords met now not to kiss or woo. They scraped, rammed, impacted, mauled each other, clashed free, spraying fire. The clouds and vapors of that inner alter-place were tattered by the onslaught. The two antagonists bore no mark of having been touched, either by the other. Yet the swords themselves would seem to be living things, containing and sustained by the force of what wielded them. Each metal length sang and throbbed as if with hidden blood. Phalluses of spiritual death, then, organs of ungeneration.
Suddenly (miles away, next door through the thin skin separating the dimensions of night and fight) came the shining whistle of a silver Vazdru pipe. No less than a signal: The re-erected ship was whole, and had been boarded: moved. Time was vanquished—yet time conquered. For the pipe said also that dawn, invisible, perceived in other fashion, dawn walked up the stairway to the earth.
It would appear the Malukhim, too, read the message. On the towers they opened wide their wings and turned their heads, Ebriel, Yabael, eastward. And Melqar opened also his wings, and like a spear of smoking snow, he whirled upon Azhrarn. The two swords embraced for the last, and split each other lengthways. The dying weapons, fixed together by the blow, smashed downward, gouging a channel through the churning dark.
Then Melqar had grasped Azhrarn by the shoulder and about the waist. Azhrarn in his turn caught the Malukhim by his wrist and by the rim of one foamy sinuous wing.
They were exact in stature, tall and slender, yet with a strength no mortal could attain, be he a giant of his tribe. Their features were alike, perhaps, in transcendence. In no other way.
There was no struggle, not a movement now. The muscular tonicity of each denied any further act to his opponent. They were locked, breast to breast and eye to eye, in stasis, but the foliage of their hair, the very garments that were on their bodies, streamed back as if from the thrust of a hurricane.
Again—far off, within the hollow of the ear—the Vazdru pipe shrieked its urgent summons.
Azhrarn spoke quietly to the angel.
“I have gained what I wished. It is my notion now to depart. Am I to take you with me?”
And then the angel also spoke. He had no voice, and so he thieved the voice of Azhrarn, though the darkness of its notes was altered, pitched from that golden throat.
“Descend with me,” said the angel Melqar, “and all your kingdom will be blighted.”
“You are too boas
tful,” said Azhrarn. “Only a little ground will char.”
“You cannot take me there,” the angel said. “I will detain you until sunrise.”
“You cannot detain me,” said Azhrarn. “Take you there I shall.”
And then, where they had grappled, was a black whirlwind with a white, a fiery avalanche with an avalanche of ink. These forces plunged and enwrapped, mingled, burst into a column that spun, that writhed and ribboned and was many-headed as a bush of cobras. Then, the tumult ended. And there they were once more, the angel and the demon, locked together, eye flaming upon eye, unchanged.
“Then,” said Azhrarn, “I cannot.”
He smiled. Gently, he let go the wing of the angel, and next the wrist. He stood in the angel’s arms.
Azhrarn said, “One bright flower has unfolded in the east.”
The angel said nothing now.
Azhrarn spoke once more, but to the Vazdru. He said: “Go.”
Not for anything would they leave him. They prevaricated there, the other side of the dimensional partition, until the eastern edge of the sky began to grin. And then, cursing themselves, fled. They could not bear the fireball of the sun.
But he, he had outstared the sun. He had been incinerated into ashes. And from the ashes, risen again.
“Here is your mother,” he said finally to the angel, but in a tone all music. “That which formed you, warm and dear to you. For me, she has only hate. You will see.”
The angel did not loosen his hold. He clenched Azhrarn to him, and the swan wings beat slowly, and the eyes burned on and on, the gold upon the black.
Then the curtain of that second dimension melted, and only the air over the city was about them, pierced below by its towers and terraces. The lens or the sorcery that had tinted the sky, this had been smashed. The atmosphere swirled with motes, with clouds and steams and enchanted clockwork debris, but through it all, and through the piercing towers, inexorable, came day.
The horizon overbrimmed, and out of the light stabbed suddenly the sun.
Azhrarn and the angel hung in the midst of the morning and flamed together—and in that instant, Melqar, he the gods made, loosed his hold.
There was a flash, a spasm of blackness. Azhrarn was gone. Swan-hawk Melqar wheeled across the dawn. Expressionless, he alighted on another high place, the winged warrior of heaven. His eyes were so golden now, they seemed sightless, opaque as blackest onyx.
In those ultimate phases of strife, the angel had become a mimic, in the manner of most newborn things. He mimicked the flirting swordplay of Azhrarn, next its violence. When he must speak at last, he mimicked the vocal range of Azhrarn, and facing him, was like a mirror image, a shadow’s gleaming shadow. So, as Azhrarn loosed his hold on Melqar, Melqar, become so imitative, had slowly been impelled also to loose hold. Azhrarn’s strategy.
But. The sun had come up. It stared upon them—upon both. In that gale of light, Azhrarn had blazed—but was not extinguished. This was impossible. It mocked the laws and the lore of demonkind and of mankind alike. It must therefore be discounted and reported differently. Thus: Azhrarn had tricked the angel. He fled as the Vazdru had fled a moment before the sun’s disk came visible. Truth must be silent with her cry: Not so, not so, the sun discovered him. And he—he flamed for a split second as golden-white as Melqar—and at this phenomenon, deceived or amazed, or purely upon some instinct still ripe in his beautiful and soulless shell, Melqar released the enemy. Since the enemy, shade and shadow and night and black wickedness—was also the sun.
Truth is at the door, howling and stamping her foot. Truth is not always decorous.
Then best botch up an explanation. Say this: Azhrarn had met with the sun before, and the first meeting, which killed him outright, and from which, being immortal, he resurrected, toughened his supernatural fibers. A second meeting, since it was so brief, he could by a feather’s breadth endure.
Besides, go down now after him, into his kingdom of eternal night that-is-not-night-at-all. Behold. Is Azhrarn kindred of the day?
They were able, the Vazdru, to enter their underworld at any point of the earth above. Yet, wherever on earth they were, their arrival was always at the same spot, directly outside the three gates of Azhrarn’s territory. It was a matter of discretion. One may assume Azhrarn himself was not confined by the rule—however, on this occasion, the rule had had its effect.
He is on the borders of his own lands, at the base of the first outer gate, that of agate. He lies like some wonderful discarded toy, one arm upflung over his head. The plates of mail are cloven from his body. There is no wound, not even a scratch or trace of blood upon the peerless flesh. Yet, through the pale clear sheath of it, you see the glimmer of jewelry knives, the bones of Azhrarn, Prince of Demons.
Three of the Vazdru kneel beside him—the others have been lost, sun-struck ash, or else have run farther to conceal their shame at leaving him. These three remain, snarling, like great cats that smell burning, and are afraid.
4
AND IN THE world the sun, coming to Az-Nennafir, brought darkness.
To the east and to the west and at the center of the sky, now, the angels took their posts. The day itself was so strange and horrible that even thick-witted man had ascertained it boded ill. Over the huge cloud-pointing City, thirteen kingdoms’ width and length of it and more, the dawn had turned to blood and the sun to tarnish.
The groaning and the screaming, the prayers—useless and known to be useless—the exhortations, scrabbling attempts at exodus, the burrowings that would yield no safety, the ecstasies of madness and immolation—each and all occurred: the correct paraphernalia of catastrophe. But, seen from the heavens, what was it but a fomentation in a hill of termites? That which is so small cannot be important.
From the fair sword of Ebriel there beamed a line of sunflower light, and from the rust-tinctured sword of Yabael a spurting stem like gore. The sword of Melqar not being about him, he spread his left hand, and from the very palm of it a white ray pillared forth, and met the others, and there was a sound, not loud, yet audible perhaps to the earth’s four corners. A sound like no other, and after this sound, a soundlessness, on earth and in heaven.
There came down first a rain of dirt and large stones, and hail which flamed. Seen from the sky, the destruction was solely a pretty pattern.
After the rain of boulders, filth and fire, a fog more dense than night; that too went down upon the lands of the City. And it swallowed them. They were gone.
Then the three Malukhim lifted their heads, feeling for the purchase in their unminds of the wishes of the gods, or for that premier wish. For by now who was to say that the gods had not already forgotten what they wanted, the angels they made, the Goddess they had disapproved of, everything—and, soon to be disturbed, by a vague bang far below, would wax displeased a minute at the interruption.
But the Malukhim, primed automata, did not lose track of their mission.
There came a detonation. There came a brightness. They were one. They cut out a piece of the substance of everything, and were finished.
When the finish passed, there was no aftershock, no afterglow. Nothing. And beneath the heavens, nothing also. A dull cavity, going from one horizon’s edge to another, with a faint movement of dust about it, hard and featureless, blank, and void. Not a fleck of interest in it. Not a speck of life. Az-Nennafir.
Then, in the uncolored sky, the blaze of the angels winked out. They had dealings elsewhere.
Only smitten sky then, and the dead pit in the world’s side.
They remarked this of Az-Nennafir:
They said, We are rotten and will revel in rottenness. And rottenness was theirs.
Then they said, See how vile we are and how well we deserve punishment. And punishment heard them talking.
And they said, We are helpless before destiny, let us have no hope for ourselves. Let us be sophisticated and say to Death: See, we are doomed, let doom claim us. We are waiting. And Death listened
.
Invoke and be answered.
And the worst of their sins was the sin of default.
There was then no more ghastly place than that crater, after the dust had settled.
What of the fish-ship and the Goddess-girl? Her city of wickedness had been, in traditional mode, razed by the outraged gods, and in a cataclysm vital enough to dig a hole through the surface of the world. Could even an immortal thing survive intact this escapade?
Because she had already had built the great galley of decks and oars, and her magic was woven through it, a kind of spirit or astral element had come to be in it, which the Drin were then able to employ, and which therefore eased their labor.
The Drin were moreover artificers of genius, the magics powerful, while the ship had besides a kind of double life upon and about it.
As the Vazdru pipe gave its warning, the ship already fled. It had two means of motivation, and of these it used the second, to which the Drin, before they vanished, ordered it. This means was solely sorcerous. The ship ran fast as lightning, which was all the speed of which it was capable. It broke through the river at this rate, and had reached the egress to the sea, even as Azhrarn stood eye to eye with Melqar. And when the sun came and the duel so oddly ended, the ship forged eastward through the western sea, and as it went, it dived. It hid itself under the waves, but even there, it ran.
The boulders and hail fell, but behind it. And the black fog fell. And last, the light. Where by now the ship had taken itself, that final thud was not heard. There was only a quiver that hollowed all the water out, so the most abysmal oceanic caverns twanged at it, and the spiny corals cracked, and little sea animals, only catching a whiff of the indecipherable noise immediately died and left the husks of their small bodies fluttering in the currents, like the leaves on winter streams.