by Tanith Lee
Beneath the ship, pastures of white anemones stretched down toward the suburbs. On the pastures herds of elephantine lobsters were browsing. Mermen shepherds glanced up and made averting gestures at the metal whale. From the beginning, the sea kings had bred such slaves. They wore garlands of salty barnacles on their weed-wild hair, and carried knives of coral and electrum, but they were timid and ingenuous.
Azhriaz did not stay her vessel. It swam on, until it hung in the funnel of green sun close to the city of the sea lords. The black-crow sharks had dispersed, the chariots withdrawn. Nothing stirred.
Azhriaz interrogated the genies, and learned from them that the light came down via a system of lenses arranged higher up to catch and focus the sun. But as they spoke, another genie trickled out like paint in milk.
“O Mistress,” this genie exclaimed, and pointed with its long-fingered hands.
Far across the city an apparatus had elevated on one of the arches. Now it lurched and the water tore. Burning darkness with a train of bubbling white came rushing upon the ship. A catapult had been fired.
“Do not exert yourself,” chorused all the genies to Azhriaz. “It is not required.”
At this moment a pore of the ship sorcerously opened and a levinbolt sped forth. It intercepted the missile from the catapult some distance off, and hurled it away so that, erupting and ablaze, the ball crashed back on the black city. Fire and smolder poured into the water at that point like blood.
Another ball had, however, already been launched at them.
“We fight no more,” said Azhriaz. “We will run away.”
The genies chirruped.
“It is unnecessary, Mistress. All that they send we can destroy, and level their proudest towers maybe.”
“Just so,” said Azhriaz. “And angels do that. We will not fight but fly.”
The genies obeyed her. They seemed neither sorrowful nor glad, not even surprised at her curious whim.
The mantras were activated and the metal whale dived from the sea-skies of that city like lightning. The second missile flung itself harmlessly by below, and was lost in wet green space.
She had come among the cities of Tirzom of the eastern oceans. She did not know it, but would learn. Black and beauteous were these cities, and between them lay the fertile plains and marine woods of the shallower shelves. All which territory the Tirzomites claimed.
Jungles of kelp and branching coral afforded cover for the ship as Azhriaz stole upon the hem of each metropolis. She saw the black cupolas and pinnacles of olivine, as the shy fish saw them.
My father is not here to guide me, said Azhriaz to herself. I need do nothing. I need not make war. And her dreams of battered Nennafir—which had become mixed with others of the ghoul city Shudm—were eased.
Yet, though she hid modestly, many in those sea cities of magicians knew that something passed. And some crept upon it, more crafty in their forests than Azhriaz. By their own abnormal means, the sister capitals of that country sent news and warning of the thing which trespassed there.
All this time, the ship ascended as the ocean floor itself went up. And soon it was possible to tell in those waters the traffic of night with day above, as the aquascape faded or grew bright.
One day the waters were very clear and most crystal green. The subsea ark was nosing among the glades of a great weed wood, when the shining eyes of it, one with a slender pupil, saw away over the plains beyond a tall rock, and on the rock’s top a city. It happened that this was Tirzom Jum, Capital of all the capitals in that part of the world.
Even from a distance, one could tell it was a city of especial size and import, while a colossal silvery half moon rested over the crown of it, the two points going down among the walls.
Azhriaz questioned the genies. The genies, their wells of knowledge seemingly floorless, replied that certain of the sea peoples—though thoroughly acclimated to the ocean—had a nostalgia for the airs of earth. And these they might distill and set to play in various chambers or gardens of their dwellings. It would appear that this city (and despite the floorless wells, the genies did not, it seems, know enough to name it) had given over to earth air whole sections of its upper streets. They were contained, therefore, under a dome of magical glass.
Azhriaz said, “I should like to see it.”
The genies told her she did so.
‘‘Closer to hand.”
The genies told her the ship would go closer to the city.
“No,” said Azhriaz. “I do not mean to make war—this ship is taken as a threat. I will go out alone.”
The genies gazed upon her with their vague childlike eyes. Their incorporeal concentration was such that Azhriaz asked of them: “What now?”
“O Mistress, though you are Night’s Daughter, and though you are a Goddess-Witch, yet, these are the kingdoms of the ocean.”
“Will my mage-craft not avail me here?”
“Perhaps,” they said.
“Then, let me see.”
A pore of the ship loosed her, like a dark tear. She had made herself a bubble of air, inside which she stood. And when she moved the bubble clung about her and went with her. The air of the bubble stayed fresh, renewing itself constantly, and in its wake drifted other slighter bubbles sloughed from the whole. Delicious with the Vazdru breath of Azhriaz, they danced among the fish and the fish lovingly pursued them.
Azhriaz rejoiced in her sudden freedom. She had not thought to venture out before. But long inactivity—as once before—had worn her down, making her depression weigh the heavier. She played about the passing creatures, and though she could not touch them through the bubble, nor they her, she gazed into their eyes and made circles around them, chased them, allowed them to give chase to her.
The plains below Tirzom Jum were of the sheerest sand, where lay incredible shells. Striped and spotted they were, like ocelots, creamy and resinous as amber, or whorled like the spikes of unicorns, or pure as the thinnest porcelain—and of every color imaginable. Azhriaz paused over these, and contemplated piercing the bubble a moment to take up some of the most beautiful or strange. But the murmuring of the genies clouded her mind. The ship was her protection. She would not risk undoing her magic in the liquid element. Could it be she might not then be able to reinstate the spell? And although it was inconceivable she should drown, the living breathless struggle was a horrible idea. She had never doubted her powers before, never had cause.
Yet she idled on, and soon the rock cliff of the city loomed above her.
It was a fact, the Tirzomites were nostalgic, in a scornful way, for the earth. The sun itself, though removed through layers of water and sky, might incoherently be seen here. On the earth it must be high noon, for a faint goldenness burned in the apex of the waters, and under the rock a little frill of shadow lay on the sand.
Azhriaz drifted up the cliff with caution, keeping her distance from the city. Midway along its slopes, ornate buildings began to appear, black as jet, with lynx-eyed windows. She glimpsed the momentum of vehicles, and sea-blown clouds that were enormous trees. . . . Like a child she stared at this, and kept away, and would not fight.
One third below the cliff’s summit, the curious dome began. It too was a bubble, transparent, discernible only by the crescent gleam of filtered sunlight limning its curve. Under the dome, up in the air and gilded peridot light, were the massive oval archways of the architecture of Tirzom, and the streets and steps needful where swimming had no place, the stalking towers and emerald minarets.
The Goddess floated, and looked her fill. She felt her sadness and her guilt, her confusion in the face of the wishes of others, of eternity—and one short second. What is this city to me? Should she go to her ship and fire lightnings at it? I slew Shudm. She had given the ghouls to each other to gnaw. She was the daughter of Wickedness.
A blackness was slowly detaching itself from the rocky masonry of Tirzom Jum. It flowed toward her.
Azhriaz, interrupted in her guilt, becomi
ng aware of it, thought it mundane. It was a beast resembling a black bladder, with optics of blue, like a jest at her own garb and eyes. An octopus with the snakes of its tentacles about it.
“I am not for you,” she said to it, though it could not hear and would not heed.
It came on, and Azhriaz spread out her hand. A glare ripped through the water and rapped the octopus smartly, so it was packed off in a succession of somersaults. In its fury it released a wave of ink into the sea.
She had meant to kill it, and had not done as much. It did not think her very dangerous, only irksome, and it came on again through the ink. Then Azhriaz resorted to the magic which would vanish her from that spot and bring her out inside her safe ship. On earth, it had been hardly more momentous, this, than to blink her eyelids.
But she was in the sea.
There was a surge that buffeted and slung her down into the sand. And that was all it did.
Azhriaz kneeled among the shells and felt the sea on her body, and tasted it in her mouth. Her casting of power had broken wide the bubble.
I am invulnerable. I am Vazdru. The ocean cannot murder me. Yet the salt sea filled her nostrils, her throat, her lungs, and the agony of it was not to be borne. Then am I less than Zhirek? she wondered in terror and outrage.
And she cursed her father and her mother, sun and dark, for what of this?
Her sight grew blind. The octopus hauled her up into its multitude of arms.
7
THROUGH perforated screens and lucid vanes soaked the amphibian dusk of Tirzom Jum: It was sunset in the world above. Lamps were being lit along the upper levels of the city, a nightly ritual. Fire was a specialty here. Slaves gracefully slunk about the palace halls, dipping their tapers to orbs of vitreous and sconces of verdigris.
Illumined in the sea-dusk lamplight, the court of the king looked on the animal which had been captured.
Like their cities, the Tirzomites were black, and green. Their skins were pantherish. The hair that splendored their heads was the hue of apples, and equally so the not-white whites of their eyes. When they spoke or laughed (as below water it was not comfortable to do, it subsequently becoming a fashion up here), the insides of their mouths and their tongues were darkest green, their teeth like pure green pearls. Other more intimate parts of them would have been seen to be green, had they revealed them. Cut these persons, they would shed blood like drops of tourmaline. They were wise, though, not green that way, the Tirzomites. Educated, clever, and arrogant—and cruel, as all the peoples of the sea—which was, despite the fashion, no laughing matter.
The king himself sat in his orichalc chair, with his two cats at his feet. They were of a bibred species, cheetahs that had never tried the acres of earth, but rather coursed the floor of the waters. They had the fins of golden carp, and spotted scales for pelts. They had recently hunted sharks; now they glared at the shackled thing on the carpets below their master’s feet.
“It is not ill made,” commented one of the courtiers. He spoke in the language of Tirzom. “Yet, so beautiless.”
“It is truly quite foul,” agreed another. “Yet, it has some value as a curiosity.”
“It breathes the sea, despite having no gills, and is unharmed.”
“It is a female. It may belong to some other kingdom. With whom are we at war that might send spies?”
“With three or four states, as is usual. Though their peoples have just such hideous white skin, they have other proper characteristics of the ocean races. This creature has none, however hard it breathes water. Besides, there is the ship. We do not understand the magical mechanics of it, and though it has been surrounded by our soldiery, it lies still in the woods—we have been unable to gain access, so strong are the sorcerous protections. We have had word from Vesh Tirzom that their catapults did it no damage, but that the ship itself smote back an exploding missile into the city. While from Tirzom Bey came the message of those who perused the ship when it, or its occupant, slept. And the message told of workmanship thereon that the forges of mortals do not produce.”
“Enough,” interrupted the king sharply, and the mer-cheetahs growled. “We will question the captive thing. It swoons too long. Go, wake it up.”
“I have awakened,” said a voice from the carpets, and also in the language of Tirzom.
She reclined, Azhriaz, only as if at leisure before them, not deigning to stand, let alone to give obeisance. The king she regarded as if he were some supplicant she had permitted to sit down. The rest she did not bother with.
It was a truth, she was a goddess and had grown used to homage, and not to get it irked her. And she had been besides conscious always of her beauty, if indifferent to it. Here, her white skin was reckoned the depth of ugliness, overriding all other consideration or feature.
“How is it,” said the king of Tirzom Jum, “that you, a deficient foreign animal, can speak our tongue?”
“How is it,” said Azhriaz, “that you, so erudite and all-wise, do not know?”
For another fact, her Vazdru training of recent years had taught her every tongue of the earth (of which there were seven root languages, and each of those split into ten sublanguages), and the seven undefiled speech modes of Underearth. The teaching of these had been a relatively simple thing, involving touches of nephrite and nacre. . . . Time hanging heavy in her Goddessdom, however, Azhriaz had summoned the Drindra, and now and then the Drindra had even breached the seas for her, and brought her relics, including certain stone tablets or sewn books of the aquatic folk. The magicianry that pulsed in her very blood had not deserted her; such would be absurd. Her powers were only severely mitigated by the environment. They enabled her now, from the linguistics she had formerly studied, to piece together Tirzom’s vernacular. Indeed, though there were a host of languages beneath the waves, yet they too sprang from mother roots, and were not so unfathomable as the sea lords opined.
Something of that, this sea lord now seemed unwillingly to comprehend.
“Then you are,” said he, “by the terms of the earth, a great sorceress.”
“I am, by the terms of the earth, a peerless goddess.” At this, the court of the king laughed extravagantly.
The king put on a stern face.
“We eschew the gods here, though we respect them. You have neither the manner nor the aspect of a god.” Azhriaz met the king’s cat eyes unrelentingly, but she knew, with sulky amusement, that this argument was irrefutable. Here, the Goddess of Nennafir was not much.
“I will,” she said, “out of tact at your ignorance, dispense with my holy titles. I shall only inform you of my royalty. I am Azhriaz, the Prince of Demons’ daughter.” The king started. The court whispered. And, for their parts, the mer-cheetahs lowered themselves onto their bellies, as if unsure whether to snarl or purr.
Presently the king of Tirzom Jum said this: “Azhrarn we know of, and between all our kind and his there exists a compact of truce for he is mighty in his way, but we also, as he would himself confirm.”
“You,” said Azhriaz, “are mere magicians, and were human once. It is the sea itself, this element you have wedded, which so swells your power. Shipwreck you a few years on the land, there would be another song.”
At this the courtiers put their hands to their daggers, and many discussed loudly killing this upstart foreign thing at once. Or, if it might not be killed, of distressing it in other ways.
Then Azhriaz laughed, not from humor, but because she saw it was idiomatic. “I am invulnerable,” she said. “I can breathe the sea, though to me it is anathema. What do you suppose you may do to me?” And she rose to her feet, and clad herself by her magic in the trappings of her earthly godhead. It impressed them, this vulgarity, as she had divined it might. “Consider also,” said Azhriaz, “if you attempt to harm me, my father may forgo his truce with you. Have you, such bold warriors as you claim to be, ever fought a war with the Vazdru? Insult me, and the joy shall be yours.”
Then a man came to the king a
nd muttered in his ear. This one wore a long robe of black, and on his breast hung a pectoral of green bones.
Azhriaz attended to the mutter. She waited till the man drew back and then she said to the king, “Your scholar tells you, if I am Azhrarn’s, I must prove it.”
“The request is not unjust.”
“My father,” said Azhriaz, “has his own affairs to tend to. I may call to him, and he not hear the cry, no, not for some while. Rest assured, nevertheless, that at length he will hear it, and that if you have inconvenienced me, it may not gladden him.”
“You have made your threat,” said the king, “and your boast. We are ready to extend all politeness to you, provided you demonstrate yourself worthy. Any cunning witch, who had gained an ability for breathing water, might come here and say what you have said. Should we be gentle with you for Azhrarn’s sake, and the parenthood be discovered as a lie—such, too, might offend the Prince of Demons.”
‘‘To call to him requires a spell,” said Azhriaz.
“I shall set at your disposal my own mage-chamber, and only I and my scholars shall be by.”
“Let me do it, then,” said Azhriaz. But her heart beat heavily, and cold.
They ascended on foot—it was all the rage to walk, since elsewhere in the sea one did not—between high-pillared roofs of the palace. It was night on earth, and night in the domed city. Stars had also been lit, far up in the dome, by slaves, who must climb bizarre scaffolding each sunset to do it, and often fell to their deaths on the streets below. The king strolled amid burning torches, and now and then paused beside some flowering shrub—for the upper city was mantled with plants, to supplement and enhance the air. “Sample this bloom,” he said to Azhriaz, so courteous now it boded ill, for it seemed he thought he could be lavish with such manners; soon there would be no need for them. And Azhriaz said, “Pretty enough, king. But black flowers remind me of pathetic human death.” “Oh, Death,” said the king of Tirzom Jum. “We believe he is a relative of ours, sprung from our stock but debased. His green hair and eyes whitened in disgust at his exile to dry land.” “I deduce you have never met the Lord Uhlume,” said Azhriaz, who had not properly met him either. “For you are only black as the black men of the earth are black.” “Theirs is a red-blackness,” said the king, contemptuously. “Or a brown blackness, or the purple black of damsons.” “And you are only black as jet,” said Azhriaz. “But the Lord Uhlume, my un-uncle, is black as black is black, and no other.”