Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 Read Free Page A

wolf, a sprite, or some
monstrous creature that had no name.
    All about the pool was
blackness, but through the colossal roof-beams 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 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 heartbeats to complete the song. And since his heart
now beats very fast, I think the time is already up.”
    Oloru lowered his
eyes that were like smoky amber. He sang, sweetly, swiftly, and with utmost
clarity:
    “Our lord found a girl in a field.
    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