by Tanith Lee
The mage-chamber of the king lay a long distance up in the dome. It was a sphere of obsidian stuff, windowless, and held by three towers in claws of brackish brass.
The king, and seven of his chosen scholars, entered, with Azhriaz, and the door was shut on them.
No sooner had this happened than soft light filled the sphere.
“All is at your disposal,” said the king. “Commence.”
“Stand back some way,” said she. “Such things may occur as will dazzle or scorch you.”
“Pray do not be afraid for us.”
Yet, back they stood, and made eight figures against the curving wall. Azhriaz went to the wide room’s center, and was alone.
Mortals called to Azhrarn by means of demon pipes, either given, filched, or come across. Then he did not commonly answer. Only myth said that he did. With those he loved, such artifacts were rarely necessary. With Dunizel, in the final months of their liaison, a thought would have brought him to her side. And it must be he had longed for this thought, but she, for the sake of his child (for in her own way, she was adamant against his proposed employment of it), had resisted. And now she was dead, and Azhriaz had been put to use exactly as he vowed—
What did Azhriaz need then, his unloved child, to call her father?
Nothing.
Yet she stood in the sea king’s mage-chamber, and made a vast show. To attract Azhrarn’s attention, to flatter him, maybe. Or only to delay the inevitable.
She knew her phantasms could not reach her here. So she invented phantasms, which flooded the area, moping and meowing, and some, in psychic fright at being created in such a spot, psychically made psychic water on the floor. Thereafter, many magic fireworks were let off. And in the wake of the colorful confusion, Azhriaz summoned the Drindra, that she knew must come, for several of them she had chained to her as her slaves, a deed the Vazdru could accomplish.
The Drindra came. What a sight they were.
****Note to Vera: The paragraph below should be a footnote attached to above sentence:
While the name Drin may be roughly translated as meaning “they that have no women”—the Drin kind being only of the male sex—the subname Drindra would seem to mean “they that have no women—and no wits.” This statement, while not strictly veritable, yet provides some notion of Drindra looks and personality. **End Footnote
Foremost stood a great clod-hopping thing with a lion’s body, horse’s feet, the head of an owl, and the tail of a pony—which tail was plaited with ribbons. It made noises harmonious with its appearance, but additionally vocalized the gabble-slang of the fellowship. There were also others, in the forms of bears crossed with bats or dragons, oxen with dogs, toads with goats and gazelles, and parrots having long hairy hind legs.
Azhriaz, seeing the sea king shrink in (laughing) loathing, addressed the Drindra twice over, once in their gabble, and once in the tongue of Tirzom.
“Valiant servants, you have braved the seas for me. Say who I am.”
The ridiculous owl-lion spoke for the rest, who augmented its oratory by emphatic grunts, burps, and squawks.
“You are she that is his child.”
Azhriaz glanced at the king, but the king, spurningly shrinking and holding his nose, evidenced either no understanding of the slang, or no belief in its import.
Azhriaz said to the Drindra: “Know me then. Now, take me hence.”
At this, though she spoke only in the gabble, guessing a trick the king grew alert and his scholars with him, and they too began to weave glimmering sorceries in the air.
But the Drindra boiled and burbled. The lion-owl said in a hiss, “O Mistress, O Lovely One, it may not be. These are the oceans, and have other laws. For all your power, and ours, you or we can do nothing here that goes against their plans.”
“Fools,” said Azhriaz, with a lashing glance, so the Drindra rolled in a debauch of agony across the psychic urinations on the ground. “Go away then, and tell my father what you have told me. And say to Azhrarn the Beautiful, his daughter is here in threatened peril, and she requests he will come to save her from it.”
At these words the Drindra entered paroxysm. They writhed and screamed and raved and hooted and brayed, until the mage-sphere quaked.
“Alas, alas,” said the owl-lion, blushing with anxiety.
“Alas? Go do my bidding,” said Azhriaz.
“No, it cannot be done,” said the Drindra. “Alas, alas.”
And so saying, in a storm of fur and feathers and uproar, they disappeared, and left her there.
Azhriaz waited a while in the silent chamber, and the black-green king of Tirzom Jum gave her space to wait, out of his victory.
No other demon manifested. The Drindra did not return. While their cry of Alas, their cry of No, these had somehow an all-pervasive meaning to be understood by any.
Eventually: “It seems he does not deign to come to you,” said the king. “Or else, as you have said, he is—busy at other affairs.”
Azhriaz pointed at the floor of the chamber. A brightness wrenched from her hand and struck the paving and cracked it. That she could do. But in another moment, one of the scholar-mages had muttered, and the crack healed, might never have been. This they could do.
Azhriaz turned. She went to the king and looked in his face.
“Behold, your captive,” said the Goddess Azhriaz.
Some days and nights went by before they decided her fate. At first they kept her at the court, as an interesting freak. They mocked her, but she would not answer or seem to hear. Or sometimes she did answer more cleverly than they cared for. Finding they might tether her with spelled cords, they did it. She broke the cords. They retied them. She broke them. It grew tiresome. She seemed aloof, as if she lived within a pane of steely glass. They did not know if she was afraid, or angry, or in despair. They did not know if she feared them, or admired them properly. It seemed perhaps she did not. Her equivocal vulnerability infuriated them, and her useless powers, and her ugly beauty. She quickly ceased to please. Since such a captive could never be let free, what was to be done with the wretched thing?
The scholar in black and bones muttered again to his king. Azhrarn had not claimed the woman, yet patently she was supernatural. Best be a fraction cautious. Cast her down, yet leave a margin in offense. Do nothing irretrievable.
So, in the end, Azhriaz, the Demon’s Daughter, the Goddess-on-Earth, was thrown out of the palace of Tirzom Jum, and left on the middle streets of the city, a destitute foreign beggar.
The middle streets lay between the air of the dome and the waters of the lower streets. Being neither completely watery, therefore, nor aristocratically gaseous, they were reckoned a slum. Here too were to be found the semi-magical tubes by means of which the air from above was cleansed and revitalized, and the large cubicles via which it was necessary to journey from the wet habitat to the dry one, or the reverse. And in the middle streets, about these valves and pipes and the inadvertent canals they sometimes formed, the outcasts of the city lived.
Since the sea races were all descended of magicians, even the lowest of the low among them had some magic aptitude or skill. (For this very cause, the slaves of the undersea regime were for the most part sub-breedings between men and fish, or stolen human stock adapted to the watery life. For the mage-aristos preferred the service of beings that could work no spells, and had, preferably, no true intelligence.)
The rabble of the bottom air levels of Tirzom Jum was exotic. There were pride-stung illegitimates of the princes, and revengeful lamenting legitimates flung from high places for some crime, or by the connivance of enemies. And there were schizophrenic half-blood Tirzomites, got by mistakes with other peoples, some even with pale skins, which made them targets for aversion and abuse.
Azhriaz fitted but too well inside the messy nest, and made slight stir.
There was a sloping street that lay beneath the steep, windowless, back black walls of three palaces, whose tops flowered into apertures, a
nd proper existence, some four hundred feet or so farther up. High over the street crossed bridges, where slaves teemed, day and night, on their onerous duties. Sometimes they also dropped in the street, when falling from the nightly star-lighting half a mile overhead. The dwellers in the street found it easy to avoid being flattened by these downfalls. One heard the screaming from a long way off, and the bothersome sound of a fleshly object driving through atmosphere. The persons in the street took cover accordingly, though sometimes their possessions were crushed. The passage of a falling slave was never impeded by any of the bridgework: It repelled each flailing body by magic. The princes did not wish even their lower avenues to be spoiled by corpses. Once the body had arrived in the street and was still, there was a universal stealing out to rob the cadaver of any worthwhile thing. And in this way, the street in which the star-lighters fell so regularly was considered something of a prize.
The rabble of Tirzom was aesthetic. A man might barter a dish of food for a dainty carving, then the food-gainer change his mind, and clutch the other to him: “No, no, better hunger of the belly than a starved soul. Retrieve your slops, and return my valuable.” Before the robbery of a dead slave, too, the thieves might pause a moment to consider the angle of its limbs, if it had died couthly. The facts were related presently to those who had the job of collecting such corpses and disposing of them. Most were fed to the octopus guards of the city, to help them keep a taste for man-flesh. Presumably those who had expired at a pretty angle fared no better.
Azhriaz built herself a house at the street’s nether end. It was not made of debris, shells, or the hides of sharks, as were the other dwellings. It was made of bricks, and swank. What was solid she had formed by marshaling her powers, and then dressed it by the same powers to look every way grander than it was. The house had a white skin, and casements of painted glass in blue and deep red—the height of unacceptable unfashion in the green-black city.
“Who is that haughty subwoman?”
“She is a hostage-spy from some inferior nation. She came here in a ship of metal which is kept in durance, at the whim of our wonderful damnable lords, accursed be they, and blessed above all others.”
“I have heard it said they could not best her.”
“Nor could she them. Here she is. She cannot escape. She is trapped here forever.”
“She has no gills and would drown in water.”
“No. There is a tank in her house, large as a room and full of sea, and she swims there submerged, or dances, and fish accept tidbits from her fingers. This has been seen through her windows.”
“She has said she is Vazdru. I think she lies, for I am not convinced there are such things as demons.”
‘‘And I said a spell as I emptied my bladder against her house wall. The bricks are in reality black.”
“Also, however, urine turns to lilies where it touches them.”
The rabble began to visit Azhriaz in her queenly house. So she entertained demoted sages and sacked lords—who wore tatters and behaved rudely out of gall. And thieves she received, who preyed on the higher city or the lower wet city, and who garbed themselves like princes and had such sumptuous social graces it was impossible to converse with them. And there came also exiles to the white-skinned house (which had every day more fair white lilies blooming on it, for insolence provokes insolence, and a great quantity of liquid was drunk thereabouts). All the exiles were pale, some green of hair, some blue, and some had fishy eyes, or were scaled, and one even had a fishtail under her long robe, though she pretended she was only lame and her litter-bearers had no tongues.
Azhriaz entertained each and every one with insulting illusory magnificence, like idiot children. Delicacies of the dry earth were served by unseen attendants. Musics played and the air dripped with fragrances of land, sandalwood, balsam, and nard.
One golden-green midday, a lord’s mistake, aristocratically black, but dun of hair, came to Azhriaz and talked with her.
“I might increase your station,” said Azhriaz at the fifth bowl of illusory but intoxicant wine. “Placed as I am, I cannot do it. But, when I am gone from here . . . Do you know of any way I might take a brief holiday out of Tirzom Jum?”
“You say,” said the mistake, “you are a demon’s daughter. Trapped here hopelessly, as you also are, do you long for the vile Underearth?”
“I do not,” said Azhriaz, canceling the wine. “The viler customs here intrigue me more.”
Later, when the greener afternoon began, a pale-skinned pale-eyed thief stepped in. His face was painted black, and his gills gilded.
“I have thought over your earlier question to me, regarding a holiday. That is superfluous, for I have decided to take you under my protection, when your every day will be a holiday of joy. You shall be my mistress. Since we are both blasted with pallor, you do not offend me so very much.”
“How generous you are,” said Azhriaz. “Pray go and be generous some otherwhere.”
But in the green dusk of Tirzom, a young black man, with green dusk too for hair, approached the gate.
Up aloft the stars were being lit, and soon there came the shriek and rush of a slave falling to his death.
The princely visitor looked about. Several of the denizens of the street were hastening to move their valuables out of harm’s way.
Louder and louder the impending rush of the fall, and thinner and thinner the cries of the victim, almost senseless with horror.
The black lord moved away from the gate of Azhriaz and out into the street’s center. The rabble, who already stared at him for his hateful perfection, nudged each other. “It is Tavir,” they said.
The shadow of the falling one filled the street.
The lord raised his arms, spoke a word of power, and caught the slave in his grasp. To any but a magician it was a feat impossible. But to a magician, nothing so very much. He did not even stagger, nor shift from one silk-clad foot to another. He put the slave down upon the way, uninjured and gazing at him. The rabble were moved to unapproving impressed applause. The lord took no note of this, and little of the slave, beyond a nod. The fine green head was turned again to the gate of Azhriaz, and in another minute he had returned to it and entered the courtyard of the house. Azhriaz had come out on a balcony and looked down on him.
He bowed gracefully as a thief.
“Madam,” said he, “may I come in?”
Azhriaz said nothing, but the door opened and stood wide.
8 The Story of Tavir’s Dream
“I AM TAVIR, a prince of Tirzom Jum. Because our high caste is so uniform in coloring and so symmetrical of physiognomy, to an alien we are often indistinguishable from each other. You will not remember me.”
“Indeed that is true, that I do not remember you. But the lapse is due solely to my uninterest in the ways of your kind. You are, however, doubtless an intimate of your king. We shall not discuss my notion to holiday outside his domain.”
Prince Tavir smiled. In his green locks were woven the blackest agates; on his black fingers and in the lobes of his well-shaped black ears burned the greenest agates. His shirt was vermilion, which was not the vogue at all.
“I had heard,” he said, “the entertainment in this house was lavish.”
Azhriaz clapped her hands. Stringed instruments rilled, incenses uncoiled from sudden lamps, pitchers of wine came sailing through the air.
Azhriaz clapped her hands again. All vanished.
“You will be entertained better,” said Azhriaz, “by your king. Why are you here?”
“If you will indulge me, I will speak first of a dream I have had continually since childhood.”
“Speak on,” said Azhriaz, “my indulgence being immaterial.”
But Tavir gazed at her and spoke seriously, as to a respected equal. And Azhriaz sparred with him no further.
Thus, he told her of his dream, which was this:
That he, a creature able to breathe both water and air, had drowned. There he stood, his
lungs bulging with saline liquid and drawing neither in or out, and his skull seeming flooded too, yet not his brain. His mind worked on in a dreamy way. And it came to him he was a statue, fossilized to limestone, which had endured there in the depths for centuries, and was, moreover, one of a company. Like a crowd of petrified ghosts they were, feet planted in an old mosaic, and dimly, on the shores of sight (for the eyes of these statues did not move), were vistas of a wrecked palace. The ocean bustled in and around, and went off again, and with it fish, and long cold sea serpents. Sometimes some wandering aquamite would pause among the statues, and make its home in a convenient crevice—the dip between a woman’s breasts, a fold of rocky robe or hair, or the cupped palm of a hand forever open. But even these slithery nomads did not remain. Altogether, the statue-Tavir concluded, this was no life for an adventurous spirit.
At last, the sense that he should leave his jail became so insistent that he made as if to run away. And in that instant he did run, and found himself at large and at liberty. At first this surprised him. Then he came to see that it was some mental or astral part which had slipped the leash. The stony body stayed behind, blank-faced, and would not look at him. He was glad to be rid of it. It was so good to move about after the endless years, and he darted through the sea, losing all awareness of place or time, or even of self, flighty as a fish.