Night's Master by Tanith Lee

Many had died for Zoraya's sake, in one way or another.  Some risked themselves on fearful enterprises to gain attention, and perished, some slew themselves at her disfavor, and some she slew herself, for expedience, revenge, or even amusement.  Azhrarn had made her beautiful, and beauty went to her head like strong drink.  Azhrarn had set his seal on her, and something of his fascinated wickedness, his delight in the sport of tangling the plans of mankind, had permeated her bones.

Some years ago I purchased for five dollars at a Half Price Books a 1987 hardcover omnibus edition of the first three volumes of Tanith Lee's Tales of the Flat Earth series.  The time has come to crack it open and read Night's Master, the first of the Tales of the Flat Earth books.  Night's Master first appeared in 1978 as a DAW paperback, and has been reprinted numerous times, including a printing as recent as 2013.  A 1986 paperback printing, with some pretty good interior illustrations by George Barr, is available at the internet archive, so poverty or frugality need not bar you from communing with Lee and her cruel and decadent characters. 

Night's Master is technically a novel, but in form is more like six connected stories, set in the forgotten past when the Earth was still flat and floated on the sea of Chaos.  Beneath the Flat Earth reside demons of tremendous power, and one of the foremost of these beings, the Lord of Darkness known as Prince Azhrarn of the demon city of Druhim Vanashta, is the motivating force behind each of the six stories, though he is not really the main character of most of the individual episodes.  Over the course of the book, Lee develops and describes a whole mythology and even theology, the tone of which is dark, and the themes of which are cruelty, hate, vengeance, and the dangers presented by beauty, love and lust.  The six tales in Night's Master are somewhat reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith's work, and to a lesser extent Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories; many of the characters are horrible people, and many people, including those who do not deserve it, meet horrible fates.

Lee is a skilled writer with a rich imagination and few if any inhibitions, and these qualities are on display to great effect here in Night's Master.  Lee crafts fine sentences, constructs narratives of just the proper length that move at just the right pace, deploys effective metaphors, summons powerful images and inspires surprise and emotion in the reader.  She fills the book with unconventional sex, a diverse array of magic spells and magic items, and a legion of strange beings and fearsome creatures, and all these fantastic, creepy, and disgusting elements, a mix of classic and familiar fantasy ideas (a dragon!) and ideas that feel strange and fresh (a gilded chariot drawn by black dogs with wings!) are compelling.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are giving an enthusiastic thumbs up to Night's Master, one of the most entertaining things I have read in a long time, and if you are a fan of the aforementioned Smith and Vance material, I recommend it to you particularly strongly.  

Five out of five gilded chariots drawn by black dogs with wings!

Below, all you spoiler lovers can find my little (or maybe not so little) summaries of each of the six episodes in Night's Master.  The novel, like 180 pages of text in my Nelson Doubleday hardcover omnibus, is split into three named "books"--"Light Underground," "Tricksters," and "The World's Lure"--and each of these books is split into two "parts;" each of the parts is a more or less self-contained story that is divided into three named "chapters."  It seems odd that the parts don't have their own titles, but there it is.   

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Book One: Light Underground

Part One

This was the tragedy of Sivesh: while he could no longer endure to live in the city below, he knew no other life, and while he yearned for the sun of the world, having left him, he yearned as much for the dark sun of Druhin Vanashta--Azhrarn.

In the first of the episodes, Azhrarn, while visiting the surface world at night, comes upon a woman dying in childbirth.  He torments her, and then, after she expires, notices how beautiful her baby boy is; he takes the tyke down to the underworld with him and names him Sivesh.  Sivesh is raised by Azhrarn's Eshva handmaidens; the Eshva are second rank demons who serve the top rank demons like Azhrarn; these handmaidens appear as beautiful black-haired women with live snakes living in their hair.  When Sivesh reaches sixteen years, the demon prince takes the boy sexually.  Sivesh falls in love with his evil surrogate father, and Azhrarn showers him with gifts; among the gifts, he renders the mortal boy almost unkillable (almost--Azhrarn's magic can do almost anything on land, but he has little power over water, and cannot immunize Sivesh from drowning.)  Azhrarn warns Sivesh to never cross him, but Sivesh, blinded by love and foolishly thinking the demon prince loves him as he, a mortal, loves the prince, does not take this warning as seriously as he ought.

Azhrarn shares his recreations with his little boyfriend, for example, bringing him along when he hunts down and tortures the souls of mentally ill men that are drawn to the underworld while their bodies sleep on the surface.  He begins taking Sivesh to the surface, to the world of the boy's fellow mortals, to participate in more of his stimulating pastimes, foremost of which are the artful and creative robbery, torture and murder of helpless humans.  One night these diversions keep them on the surface until the approach of dawn.  Azhrarn, like all demons, hates the sun and wants to flash home, but Sivesh's mortal soul craves the sun which he has never seen, and so Azhrarn gives his boy lover permission to stay on the surface for one day.

After a day spent in the sunlight, the black cities and dark countryside of the underworld hold no beauty for Sivesh.  Azhrarn builds Sivesh a fantastic palace and creates for him a wife, Ferazhin Flower-Born, a beautiful woman grown from a seed stolen from the surface and planted in the soil of the underworld.  For a year these inducements keep Sivesh in Druhim Vanashta, but for a year only.  At the end of the year Sivesh returns to the surface to live among his fellow mortals.

Azhrarn contrives an elaborate revenge on the boy lover who has rejected him, a trap that preys on Sivesh's love of beauty and takes advantage of his vulnerability to drowning.

Part Two

A collar constructed in ambition and pride and jeweled with sorrow could only stir up greed and smiling fury, and bring weeping after.

In this part Lee offers us insight into the lives of the lowest race of demons, the Drin, and gives us a sex scene between a male Drin and a female giant spider.  This sex scene, and numerous scenes of murder, are played slyly for laughs, but Lee also presents us a sincere picture of selfless true love.

The ugly little Drin, all male, are metal workers, and the most ambitious among them fashions a unique necklace, a silver collar decorated with jewels that are the tears of Ferazhin Flower-Born, a being consigned to the underworld who misses the husband who abandoned her and as he did craves the sun she has never seen.  The Drin hopes to impress Azhrarn with this spectacular piece of jewelry, and gain special privileges thereby, and Azhrarn punishes his hubris by rejecting the collar; he summons a male Eshva to deliver the masterwork to the surface world.  There, it wreaks havoc among the mortals, its beauty and the magic inherent in it making men and women covet it so passionately that they murder each other in pursuit of it.  Eventually the necklace falls into the custody of a monster snake; the serpent defends the necklace from all comers, and as the centuries pass a carpet of the bones of those who sought the collar grows about the giant snake's perch.

Finally, a blind man with magical powers comes by; this kind and comely man, Kazir, selfless and thus immune from the attractions of the necklace, develops a rapport with the serpent, comforts the lonely reptile.  The snake, old and weary of its sad life of violence, gratefully expires.  Kazir's powers allow him to read the history of the collar by touching it, and he learns of the sadness of Ferazhin Flower-Born and falls in love with her and becomes determined to go to the underworld and rescue her.

After much questing Kazir meets a witch who can send his soul down to the underworld so he can meet Ferazhin.  By dint of his wisdom, compassion, and ability as a poet and singer, Kazir negotiates with Azhrarn for Ferazhin's liberation from the underworld.  Kazir and Ferazhin live a happy year together in the sunlight, and then the cruel and resentful Azhrarn works a terrible revenge on them; but so great is their love, so puissant Kazir's powers and so resilient Ferazhin as a flower-born being, that the lovers  are able to foil Azhrarn's designs.

Book Two: Tricksters

Part One

Something of her had survived the three icy fires, the cruel scourge, the desertion through death, the gouging rape.  But what had survived was an iron stick, and frost-bitten harder than the frozen reeds and the cold trees.

In the first chapter of this part we meet King Zorashad, conqueror and tyrant.  A magic amulet he wears renders him undefeatable, and he takes over sixteen other countries and declares himself a god and demands worship.  His arrogance attracts the notice of Azhrarn, who comes by to humiliate him and destroy his amulet.  Without this magic item, Zorashad is vulnerable, and those sixteen other states rise up and overthrow him, treating his family as he treated the families of those he defeated.  Only one of Zorashad's relatives survives, an infant girl, his thirteenth daughter, who is carried off by a faithful nurse.  The nurse dies on the road, and the baby is disfigured, but rescued by a holy hermit, a cave-dwelling priest known for his ability to work good magic to heal the sick and foster the crops of the locals.

The second and third chapters describe this orphaned princess's maturation and corruption.  The hermit raises the disfigured girl, hiding her from the cruelty of the world, but one day when the kindly priest is off doing his good works, the current king, who was installed in the seat of the girl's despotic father after his destruction, comes by to torment the girl, making sport of her ugliness and whipping her.  More tragedies ensue, the hermit's passing from old age, and then the rape of the now teenaged girl by a wandering pedlar.  Driven by resentment of mankind, the ugly girl names herself after her father and studies black magic--as Zorayas the witch she launches a campaign of revenge!  Her tormentors are destroyed, and she wins her father's throne; then, clad in armor that conceals her disfigurement, she reconquers those sixteen nations.  Zorayas then figures out how to summon Azhrarn (she has her demon servants retrieve a magical artifact from the centuries-old watery grave of Sivesh) and cunningly negotiates with the demon prince; impressed by her, Azhrarn uses his magic to make her beautiful, straightening her crooked limbs and erasing her scars, and becomes her lover.

Part Two

"A frightful thing is love."

Out in the desert live two aristocratic brothers, Jurim and Mirrash, inheritors of a hoard of cursed diamonds.  They have heard rumors of Zorayas, the witch queen who has sex with demons, and while romantic Jurim is fascinated by the stories of this weird figure, stern and prudent Mirrash fears her.  Zorayas comes by and, determined to lay low all men, seduces naïve Jurim; in no time Jurim has given her all the family's diamonds, throwing his entire household and community into poverty.  Zorayas returns to her capital, leaving Jurim to waste away from a broken heart.

Mirrash goes to Zorayas's city to beg for mercy from the witch queen, and to seek aid of wizards and priests who might be able to free his lovesick brother from the queen's spell.  These worthies provide the brothers no succor, but Mirrash does meet a storyteller who relates to him a tale about a Drin who fell in love with a heartless snake; presumably this is an allegory of Jurim's relationship with Zorayas, and Mirrash comes to believe the storyteller may be the ghost of his and Jurim's father, and that the story offers a clue of how best to fight Zorayas.          

The third chapter of Book Two, Part Two, describes how Mirrash learns magic himself and deploys it, and his own cunning, in an effort to free the world from the evil of Zorayas.

Book Three: The World's Lure

Part One

The girl had refused him twice now, and in two guises.  Mortals did not refuse Azhrarn.  His voice, his eyes, his touch produced an alchemy that thrilled their nerves, infatuated them, outlawed their wills.  But Bisuneh struggled, and her struggle had ceased to entertain him.  Her virtue had become a silken sheath to rip, her beauty a cup to drain.

Bisuneh is a beautiful and innocent young woman, the daughter of a scholar, engaged to marry the handsome and admirable son of a scholar.  Azhrarn comes to seduce her, in the form of a man, and then in the form of a woman, and she resists him both times.  So he conceives a terrible revenge upon her.  Bisuneh and her husband couple on their wedding night, but when she wakes in the morning she finds in her bed a horrifying monster!  In answer to her cries her relatives lay the the monster low with sword blows and take the body to a barren region of the countryside and set fire to it--everybody thinks the monster devoured Bisuneh's husband and that they have slain it, but, in fact, the monster is the husband, transformed by Azhrarn's sorcery into an almost unkillable beast!  The sword cuts and fire cannot destroy him, only inflict upon him a terrible agony!

Bisuneh gives birth to her husband's child, but Azhrarn's devilry is at work here as well.  The sword of an Eshava has severed in twain the soul fated to tenant the body of Bisuneh's daughter, and the child is born with only the female half of her soul; the male half of the soul the demon directs to animate the stillborn baby of a poor shepherd and his wife who live in a kingdom far from Bisuneh's town.  With only half a soul, Bisuneh's daughter Shezael is beautiful, but emotionless and passive, deaf and dumb; with no love forthcoming from her child, Bisuneh resigns from the world, cutting her hair and joining a stern convent.  While Shezael grows up passive due to the lack of the male half of a soul, the shepherd's son Drezaem grows up volatile and manic, violent and dangerous, dull-witted but strong and fast, he having only the active male half of a soul.  (Behold the gender binary, wokies!  Forty-year-old books are a window into the mindsets of other worlds.)

A dragon is terrorizing the countryside of the kingdom into which Drezaem was born, and the king's men are seeking a champion to fight it.  Many men have been conscripted to face the dragon, and all have been killed.  Drezaem, now fifteen, is enlisted to challenge the wyrm, and his fight with the foul-breathed creature is both gruesome and hilarious, a highlight of Night's Master.  The king gives the imbecilic fighting machine that is Drezaem a mansion and a harem of twenty-five girls, and Drezaem becomes the kingdom's greatest hero, invincible in war and in wrestling matches against foreign champions.

Through a fateful concatenation of events, Shezael and Drezaem, two halves of a single soul living hundreds of miles apart, learn of each other, and these two mute dimwits are drawn together like magnets, enduring all manner of dangerous adventures in their unfathomable but irresistible desire to reunite.  Will they overcome the efforts of the evil demon prince Azhrarn to prevent their reunion?

Part Two

"My powers are expanding.  I will see to it.  None shall be happy, for I was never happy.  None shall live, for I never had a chance at life.  None shall love, save in the grave, for that is where my lover couches."

Bisuneh's husband has been crawling around and groaning for a hundred years in monster form, his life as a human being forgotten in his pain and misery.  Everyone shuns the barren area in which his groans can be heard out of fear, but then a powerful wizard, a fearless man of prodigious learning, comes along.  When he hears the monster he uses his magic to capture it and turn it back into a man.  The man cannot really speak and has forgotten his own name, so the magician names him Qebba.

Qebba's ordeal has charged his body with magic, and he has powers and abilities no ordinary man has.  The wizard finds him a useful assistant, and trains him in sorcery.  Uh oh, Qebba stumbles upon some magic which restores his memory--he remembers how he was once a happy young man with a beautiful wife, and how this perfect life was stolen from him before it had hardly begun, and he declares war on the world, seeking revenge on everybody!  He sets up his own sorcerous home base on a little island, from which he wages a war of magic upon the wizard who restored his humanity.  The wizard eventually imprisons Qebba under a sorcerous barrier, and Qebba dies of old age.  But his hate for the world is so great it lives on!  When the wizard finally dies himself, the barrier falls, and Qebba's hate spreads throughout the world, feeding on the native hate of humankind, and then, as it grows, exacerbating human hatred until the entire world is in a frenzy of irrational war, threatening the extinction of the human race!

Azhrarn and the other demons are distraught--without humanity to torment, life will lose its savor!  Azhrarn must preserve the human race, the plaything that gives his evil existence meaning!  He travels to the world above the Earth, where live the aloof and indifferent gods who created mankind; so aloof are they that Azhrarn finds them unwilling to lift a finger to save humanity.  So, in a sort of parody of Christian belief, Azhrarn sacrifices himself to destroy Qebba's hate.  With hate and the Lord of Darkness gone, an Age of Innocence spreads over the world, a period in which there is little crime and little war and humankind prospers.  But such a time cannot last.  The demons of the underworld mourn the loss of Azhrarn, and contrive a way to raise him from the dead, exploiting the wombs of seven human virgins whose innocence has been tainted by the lust of a man and their own covetousness.