Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 Read Online Free PDF Page B

be kept, and all the best things had been sold years since. But a good
wine was lugged up from the cellar, and a host of candles fired.
    “I cannot stay with you long,” said Oloru. “But I will
return shortly. Then he will be with me.”
    “What can you mean?” cried the widow in horror.
    “What you think I mean? I intend to bring Lak Hezoor
the magician home with me, to be our guest. He will sit here and we will dance
attendance on him. He will see my two sisters and lust after both of them.”
    The sisters
shrank. The elder said, uncertainly, “Do you jest with us, brother?” But the
widow cried, “He has gone mad!”
    Oloru laughed at
that. He flung up his arms, and looked some while at the spiders’ webs in the
rafters. “Do you not trust me, dear Mother? I, your only son?”
    A cold breath
seemed then to blow through the hall. The candles felt it and sank. The women
felt it and they trembled. But then Oloru brought his gaze down from the
rafters and he said gently, “It is perilous, this enterprise, but I must do it.
Once it might have been done another way, easier, and more gaudy. But as things
are now, I require such means as you.”
    “What are you saying?” asked the widow.
    Oloru seemed
puzzled. “I hardly know. But this I will promise—no harm shall come to any of
you, I swear. What shall I swear on?”
    The three women eyed him in dismay
and fascination. At last the mother said, “Swear on your life.”
    “My life? No, on something better than that. I will
swear it, by the power of love.”
    The candles straightened up. The coldness went away as
if it had heard enough.
    “What are we saying?” asked the mother. “This is all
nonsense.”
    “No, Mother.
Never was a fact more sure.” And he sprang to his feet. “Now I leave you. By
midmorning we shall be here, I with that monster, and all the parasites who
cling about the monster, and the dangerous fiends that wait on him. Be ready.”
And he darted out of the hall through the door into the courtyard. When they
hurried after him he was nowhere to be seen. The elder sister stole to the
opened gate. “What is that creature which runs into the trees?” But the night
and the forest were very black. It might have been nothing at all.
     
    Lak Hezoor the magician-prince woke from his stupor
and turned about on the cushions. There in the entry to the tent stood a shape,
pale and dark, whose eyes seemed cast from far millennia of nights and stars.
Lak Hezoor spoke at once a word of power, to detain this visitor, for he sensed
a supernatural quality. But even in that instant it was gone.
    “A demon,” said
Lak Hezoor. “One of Azhrarn’s tribe. Or did I dream it?”
    “A dream,” said a
charming voice. “What would demons be doing here?”
    “Sorcery attracts them.
It is well known.”
    “But there has been no
sorcery.”
    “The forest stinks of it. Besides, tell me what I am, Oloru.”
    “My master,” said Oloru, who was seated by him on the
cushions. “Sun of my life. And a mighty magician. I perceive my error,
glamorous lord. Of course the demons follow you as sheep the shepherd.”
    Lak Hezoor only
grinned at this banter. Plainly Oloru had not seen the demon, lacking the
ability or else asleep . . . or only intent on playing with a
curious brass toy he seemed now to have about him, a sort of rattle, which he
shook up and down.
    “Where did you come by
that?”
    “In the forest, master
of masters.”
    “What were you doing
there, my child?”
    “Giving back to the earth what the earth had earlier
given me. How changed was the wine I returned her!”
    “Well, it will soon be daylight,” said Lak Hezoor, and
he began to fondle the hair and body of his companion.
    “I wonder,” said
Oloru, “how my kindred do at home. I wonder how it is with them.” And then he
said, “Imagine I am prostrate on the road at your feet. Imagine I say: She,
and she, are my sisters. One is fifteen and one thirteen years of age. Both