Tanith Lee - Delerium' Mistress

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

Concerning those other histories referred to in Delirium's Mistress:

The stories of Zhirek the Magician, and of Simmu who stole Immortality from the gods, and of the

city Simmurad, are to be found in Death's Master. As are the stories of Narasen and her pact with

Death, and of Kassafeh and hers. And of the dealings of Lylas, too.

The stories of Shezael the Half-Souled, of the poet Kazir and Ferazhin Flower-Born, of Sivesh, of

Zorayas the witch-queen, and of Bakvi the Drin (and, too, of Azhrarn's first meeting with the sun)

are told in Night's Master.

Dunizel's story, and that of her mother, are contained in Delusion's Master, along with the

account of the building— and fall—of the great Tower, Baybhelu.

FOREWORD

IT HAS BEEN recounted* how, in the days of the earth's flatness, Azhrarn, the Prince of Demons,

Night's Master, one of the Lords of Darkness, loved the maiden Doonis-Ezael or Dunizel (Moon's

Soul), a priestess of the holy city Bhelsheved. And that because of the value he set on her (but

mostly, let it be said, to make mischief in those lands, which had angered him), he got her

sorcerously with child.

When this child, a daughter, was born, Dunizel was condemned by her people, who greatly feared,

yet did not fully comprehend, the powers of Azhram. And despite the safeguards her demon lover had

left her, she perished.

Now, her death seemed due to a trick played by another of the Lords of Darkness, Prince Chuz,

whose other name is Madness, Delusion's Master. Therefore Azhrarn, meeting with Chuz, swore they

should thenceforth be enemies, and that, no matter where he might hide himself, Chuz should be

hunted down and the vengeance of the Demon completed on him. Such a thing was very terrible

indeed, that any of the immortal and mighty Lords of Darkness should wage war with each other. "Do

you think I shake at you?" inquired Chuz. Yet it is possible he was not quite sanguine at the

development, for all that.

Dunizel alone had Azhrarn loved; for the child, she had never been more than a game piece to him.

However, he had noted the speculative eye of Chuz upon her. In anguish and fury, then, Azhrarn

bore her to his city of Druhim Vanashta, underground.

^Delusion's Master.

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE:

BOOK TWO:

BOOK THREE:

Sovaz: Mistress of Madness II

Part One—Night Hunting 13

Part Two—Lovers 70

Part Three—Fair Is Not Fair 91

Azhriaz: The Goddess 161

Part One—Matters of Stone 163 Part Two—The War with Sea

and Sky 207

Part Three—Under the Earth 299

Atmeh: The Search for Life 315

Part One—Lessons 317

Part Two—Uncle Death 371

Part Three—The Lotus 392

EPILOGUE:

Three Handsome Sons

407

BOOK ———————————————

ONE Sovaz: Mistress of Madness

PART ONE

f%/tf Hunting

•IT WAS DUSK, and for a while the young man seated on the high roof gazed up into the great

sloping dome of sky. Then he read aloud from his book: "Blue as the dark blue eyes of my beloved,

the twilight fills all heaven. The stars put on their silver dresses and they are fair, but none

as fair as she." His companions lay on their elbows and looked at him, quizzically. He shut the

book and said, "Love, too, is simple madness." At which they made wild gestures of dismissal,

"Love does not exist. 'Love' is the name women, and rheir wretched old fathers, put on the trap of

a ring." "Love is lust. Why make songs about an itch?" The first young man smiled. He was

unusually handsome, pale, very fair, with beautiful eyes the color of low-burning lampshine. In

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repose, there was a sweetness to him. With sweet melancholy, he sighed.

"Ah, poor thing," they said. "What troubles him this evening, our Oloru?"

Oloru said, "An answer, which has no question." "A riddle!" cried the other young men. They

grinned and shouted: "Make us laugh, Oloru."

And all at once the eyes of Oloru glittered like the eyes of a night-hunting fox. He sprang to his

feet, curled over, next dropped in a ball, next lifted his whole body straight in the air,

supporting himself by one hand, palm down, on the roof. Then he began, on this one hand, to hop

about, crying out all the while in a raucous irritated voice: "Oh, how tiresome this is. You would

think by now the gods could have invented a better way for a man to travel."

DELIRIUM'S MISTRESS

The companions, duly diverted, laughed, applauded, and called the entertainer names. Oloru went on

hopping, though one of his fine silk gloves was by now probably quite ruined. He hopped to the

western parapet, and here his slim upside-down body wavered, so the stars seemed juggled between

his feet. "Behold," said Oloru, "here the sun fell over." And he toppled sideways through blue

dusk and stars, and right across the parapet, and vanished.

The remaining young men on the tavern roof leapt to their feet with yells of horror, upsetting

wine jars and other paraphernalia. Oloru was a favorite of their lord, one of the magician-princes

of this city. To take this powerful man the tale of said Oloru, smashed on the cobbles seven

stories below, was not a charming notion.

But rushing to the parapet and leaning over, they could be sure of nothing in the narrow alley but

the gathering of darkness.

Elsewhere, the city spread around them under the sky, its terraces pearl-strung with lamps, its

towers bright-eyed with lit windows. Nowhere in that city could they be safe if they once angered

their prince, Lak Hezoor. While close at hand rose the palace of this very lord, each of its

spires made into a somber candle by the cresset ablaze on its roof, and each cresset seeming now

to glare over at them intently.

Consternation. Some ran onto the stair, meaning to descend and search the street on foot. Others

were already making up excuses for a violent death that had nothing whatever to do with them. In

the midst of this, suddenly Oloru stepped out of a climbing fruit tree that spread its branches

along the eastern parapet.

"Yes, love is madness," said Oloru. "As all things are madness. Piety, wickedness, pleasure,

sorrow—every one an insanity. Indeed, to live at all—"

"Oloru!" cried the young men. Two of them ran forward as if to thrash him.

Oloru shrank back against the tree. He lifted both hands in their gemmed gloves, to shield

himself. "No—forgive me, my friends—what have I done to anger you?"

The friends gathered menacingly. Oloru was at all times the veriest coward. They knew he would be

terrified by a

Sovaz: Mistress of Madness

threat or a raised fist. So they berated him, and he grew paler and paler and shrank back into the

slender arms of the fruit tree. He explained, stammering somewhat, that he had caught the

stonework under the parapet and thus eased himself along the side of the building, unseen, to the

tree. Here he had clambered once more to safety. He had not meant to annoy them, only to amuse.

They allowed him to go on and on, enjoying his faltering musical voice, his eyes swimming and full

of tears of anxiety. In the end, when they had squeezed him sufficiently, and it seemed only the

fragile tree kept him on his feet, they relented, flung their arms around him, kissed him and

smoothed his golden hair, swearing they forgave him anything, he was so dear to them. Then he

tremblingly laughed. He thanked them. When they asked, he took up a lyre of gilded wood and sang

for them exquisitely. His voice was so beautiful, in fact, that here and there round about

shutters opened quietly. Lovers and losers together leaned into the night, to catch the flavor of

Oloru's song.

' 'In the lyre-land, string and chord, Bring me music in a word. Bring me magic in a look; For

your eyes are like a sword, And your smile is like a bird Singing from an ancient book. ..."

And "How you flatter me, Oloru," someone said. "But you always do flatter better than any other,

and perfectly in key."

Lak Hezoor the magician-prince, clad in dark finery, and with two guards behind him, had come up

on the roof very silently. He and his minions could move most quietly, when they wished, and such

noiseless arrivals were a habit of his. In this way he often happened on his courtiers at their

various and more intimate games. All had grown careful, even in the most frenzied acts of the

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flesh, to think, and if necessary to speak, well of their lord. Shadowy as his raiment was his

long curled hair, and on the gloved hands of Lak Hezoor jewels burned dark as the night had now

become. Two great leashed hounds, by

DELIRIUM'S MISTRESS

Sovaz: Mistress of Madness

contrast blond as Oloru, stared about them, quivering with abstract eagerness for things to chase

and rend.

The young men had all obeised themselves. But it was Oloru the magician-prince raised in his arms

and kissed on the lips, without haste.

"We are going hunting tonight," said Lak Hezoor.

Those on the roof who had had other plans for the evening quickly dismissed them from their minds.

Only Oloru was heard to say plaintively, "My lord, I hate to see anything killed—"

"Then, sweetheart," said Lak Hezoor, "at the supreme moments of the death you may hide your face

in my mantle, and not look."

The moon was rising in the hour the hunt set out. It was a full moon that night, and certain

exhalations and smokes of the sorcerously tempered city made her appear unusually large, so she

dwarfed the towers as she hung above them. She blushed, too, standing there over that place, and

drew a cloud around herself. But her feverish light burned through, and laved the black horses and

the black or white hounds of Lak Hezoor, and flashed on the loudly blowing horns, the knives and

jewels, and in all the host of eyes.

The city disgorged the hunt, its gates flying wide before it without a command needing to be

given. Beyond, a long paved road opened through the plain. To either side of the road ran lush

fields and groves and vineyards, but off to the west was hill country and a forest many centuries

older. Strange stories were told of the forest. Men wandered in there and were never seen again,

or other things, not men at all, wandered out of it, sometimes having human shape, and sometimes

not. But the magician-masters of the city found the forest tempted them from time to time.

Particularly it tempted Lak Hezoor, who was intellectually obsessed by night and all dark things,

just as his flesh was inflamed equally by examples of exceptional paleness.

It was a time of harvesting, and now and then the hunt, riding hard and savagely as if already in

pursuit of the quarry, passed by some firelit camp of people, or some village set near the road.

Then all the lowly folk gathered

there would rush forward to the road's edge, calling aloud praises on the magician-princes, and on

Lak Hezoor in person if they recognized him. It would not have been sensible to do otherwise.

Seldom, however, did Lak Hezoor pay any attention. It happened, though, when the upswept black

walls of the forest were less than a mile ahead, that the sorcerer lord did spy something that

checked him. There in a meadow a tallow lamp had been hung from a pole, with a kneeling man under

it. Close by a girl was tied to a tree. In the faint lamplight, she shone pale as a pearl, and her

long ash-brown hair, woven with white flowers, was her only garment.

When Lak Hezoor drew rein, his company with him, the man ran up and kneeled again on the road.

"Speak," said Lak Hezoor.

"She is my sister's daughter, just fifteen years of age, a virgin."

Lak Hezoor sat his horse and looked over at the girl, while his courtiers slyly and fawnirigly

smiled at him and at each other.

"Once," said the lord Lak, "maidens were left in this way to entice dragons. Are you expecting any

dragons?"

"No—oh, no, mighty Hezoor. It is just the wish of the girl's heart to give you a moment's

diversion, that is all."

Lak Hezoor dismounted. He walked away over the meadow to the tree where the girl hung as if half-

dead of terror. For a second more the magician was visible, leaning to his dragon's prey. Then a

fan of blackness spread there, occluding both of them. While in the blackness a dull reddish snake

of fire seemed to twist, and sparks burst, hurting the eyes of any who still peered in that

direction. Once, twice, a sharp scream pierced the sorcer-ous veil, but nothing else of sight or

sound.

The man who had brought the lord his niece waited patiently, eyes lowered. The courtiers sipped

wine from golden flasks, petted their horses, discussed fashions and gambling.

Lak was not long over his transaction. Quite abruptly he returned through the black screen, calm

and undisheveled as if he had paused to taste some fruit from a wayside bush. The sorcerous screen

began to die at once behind

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DELIRIUM'S MISTRESS

him. There showed now something pallid flung on the ground, motionless, amid torn hair and broken

flowers.

"What did you hope from me?" asked Lak Hezoor of the patiently waiting uncle. "Not anything much,

I trust, for she was very disappointing."

"No—oh, no. Nothing but to please you, lord."

"Well, I was not greatly pleased. But you meant for the best. I will not chastise you. Are you

content with that?"

"Mighty lord, I am your generosity's slave."

As they galloped away, a backward glance revealed the man bending over the paleness in the grass,

which did not answer him even when he gave it blows.

"Now, my Oloru," said the magician-prince as they rode up to the tall gates of the forest, "you

seem downcast."

"I?" said Oloru. "I was only devising a poem to honor you."

"Ah," said Lak Hezoor. "That is well. Later you shall tell it me."

The depths of the forest, then. Not its heart; it was so old, so labyrinthine, the forest—who

could enter the heart of it, save some lost traveler in one of the sinister tales? Or else,

perhaps, the forest had many hearts, each slowly and mesmerically beating, its rhythm growing a

fraction slower and an iota more strong for every passing century.

Certainly, there were portions of the forest where its atmosphere seemed especially and profoundly

charged. In one of these spots there was a pool of unknown deepness where the animals of the

forest, whatever they might be, would steal to drink. Although it was said that any man who drank

the waters of the forest would be changed at once into just such an animal himself—a deer, a wolf,

a sprite, or some monstrous creature that had no name.

All about the pool was blackness, but through the colossal roofbeams of the trees there showed the

rim of the moon. She was no longer blushing but cold now, and her snowy fire turned the mysterious

water to a solid white mirror one might think to walk on.

Thrice, Lak Hezoor's men had started deer. Pale as ghosts they sprang away, and the hunt madly

pursued them. Torchlight crackled through the boughs. Shouting

Sovaz: Mistress of Madness 19

and whooping tore the curtains of leafy air. Sometimes the noise and tumbling speed and spilling

lights disturbed curious birds—or winged things of some sort—which rose away into the higher tiers

of the branches. On occasion disembodied eyes were lit, and as quickly extinguished. As for the

quarry, twice it vanished without trace. But when the third deer broke from cover, Lak Hezoor cast

a shining ray about it like a net. Try as it would then, bolt and swerve and seem to fly, the deer

could not break free of his magic. Loudly it panted, and groaned like a woman in childbirth, so

the hair of the magician's courtiers bristled on their necks. But at length the deer stumbled and

the torrent of the hounds swept over it.

Though a female, it was a huge beast, this deer. So the hunting party was satisfied, for the

moment, and made their way into the clearing, to the pool like solid mirror, and dared each other

to taste of the water, but none of them did. Instead they lolled on the rugs and bolsters the

servants of Lak Hezoor put down for them, and drank wine in glass goblets that the fires turned to

golden tears.

Lak Hezoor himself oversaw the gutting of the deer, and now and then himself threw portions of its

entrails to his favorites among the shivering dogs. Nearby, Oloru leaned on a tree, his face

averted, and his gloved hand lightly over his nose and mouth.

"Come, be my hound, beloved, and I will throw you a piece of its liver," said Lak Hezoor.

Oloru shuddered, looked at his lord under long lashes, and away.

When Lak Hezoor lost interest in the bloody work, he went to sit among the cushions and fires. He

beckoned Oloru to follow him.

"Now sing for me the song you were making in my honor," said Lak Hezoor.

"It is not finished," said Oloru, in an offhand way.

Lak Hezoor turned one of the rings on his left hand. It dazzled a searing ray—it was this very

ring which had cast the net about the deer and so weakened and killed it. The ring had done as

much for men.

"I give Oloru," said Lak Hezoor, "three of his own

DELIRIUM'S MISTRESS

heartbeats to complete the song. And since his heart now beats very fast, I think the time is

already up."

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Oloru lowered his eyes that were like smoky amber. He sang, sweetly, swiftly, and with utmost

clarity:

"Our lord found a girl in afield,

Not with cash but with malice he bought her.

He took her behind a black shield,

But one fact he has surely revealed:

He makes love as another makes water."

For a troupe so loud, the assemblage now proved itself capable of a vast silence. With their eyes

and mouths open, men stared at Oloru, goblets halfway to their lips and frozen. By the pavilion of

sable satin, the servitors of the magician-prince, which some said were themselves not quite

human, stood blank-visaged as ever, yet every hand now rested on the hilt of a long knife.

Having recited, Oloru looked into the face of his lord, smiling a little, and Lak Hezoor looked

back at him with the same smile exactly. Then Lak Hezoor stood up, and Oloru also arose. Lak

Hezoor snapped his fingers, and out of the air itself appeared his sword, and slid into his grasp.

Lak Hezoor extended the cruel bright blade until the tip of it touched Oloru on the breast.

"Now I shall kill you," said Lak Hezoor. "It will be thorough but slow. Indeed, you shall fight me

for your death. You will have to earn it."

And Lak Hezoor spoke a sorcerous word and a second blazing sword fell into the hand of Oloru, who,

whiter than the moon in the pool now, dropped the weapon at once.

"Pick it up," said Lak Hezoor. "Pick up the sword, my child, and we will dally a while. Then I

will cut you up for chops for my dogs, an inch at a time."

"My—lord—" whispered Oloru, standing shaking above the fallen sword, "it was a jest, and I—"

"And you shall die for your jest. For it did not make me laugh, my Oloru, so something else is

needed to entertain me."

"Oh gracious lord—"

Sovaz: Mistress of Madness

"Pick up the sword, dear heart. Pick it up."

"I beg you—"

"Pick it up. Why should it be said I kill my friends unarmed?"

"Then I will leave it lying—"

."Then I will kill you defenseless after all."

Oloru covered his face with his hands. Under the torches he. like the glassware, seemed made of

pale precious gold, and of tears, too.

"Forgive me, oh forgive me—" he cried.

Lak Hezoor grinned, pulled down Oloru's hands, and pointed to the sword lying in the grass.

"Look at that, pick up that, and die with it."

Oloru looked one long last minute at the sword, and Lnen he dropped down in the grass beside it

and lay there, : r. a dead faint, at the feet of Lak Hezoor.

At this, the magician did laugh. He flung one glance across his silent court. It cut them with

such contempt and indifference, and under that with such implicit threat, it was as if he had

sliced at each of them with the blade he held. Then the blade vanished, and with it the other in

the grass; all about the hands of the prince's minions left their knives. Lak Hezoor lifted Oloru

in his arms and walked away with him and into the sable pavilion, out of their -:jht.

Out of sight of any but his prince then, Oloru the jester and poet presently revived. He came to

himself on the magician's silks, his face turned on the magician's embroidered pillows, the weight

of Lak Hezoor already upon ":m.

"You, my treasure, who dare insult me as no other does," murmured Lak Hezoor, resting his face

also down on the pillow, so his black eyes glared into the amber eyes of Oloru and their lips

almost met at each word. "But I forgive you. For you know you lied."

"O my soul, my body's watchman, you were absent when this citadel was invaded," said Oloru. Lak

Hezoor smiled cruelly at him, for this was very true.

"Tell me of demons," said Lak Hezoor, as his sinuous body stirred and curved, heavy as a python,

upon and within

DELIRIUM'S MISTRESS

his third prey of the night. "Tell me of Azhrarn, Night's Master, the Bringer of Anguish."

Oloru spoke softly, sometimes without breath.

"They saw a king's daughter, a sorceress, called to him by means of a token Azhrarn once gave his

lover, a beautiful boy, Sivesh, or as some say, Simmu. And when the Demon came to her, this

sorceress, it was in a pavilion with a ceiling of blackness and jeweled stars, where winds and

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file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/Tanith%20Lee%20-%20D\elirium's%20MistressUC%20-%20TFtFE%234.txtAUTHOR'SNOTEConcerningthoseotherhistoriesreferredtoinDelirium'sMistress:ThestoriesofZhirektheMagician,andofSimmuwhostoleImmortalityf\romthegods,andofthecitySimmurad,aretobefoundinDeath'...

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