With Reio-ta's assistance, he had taken her to a hidden chamber beneath the Grey Temple, but he dared not leave her there for long. To still her continual moans he had mixed a strong sedative, as strong as he dared, and forced her to swallow it; she had fallen into restless sleep, and while her fretful whimperings did not cease, the potion blurred her senses enough to dull the worst of the agony.
With a sting of guilt Riveda found himself thinking again what he had thought about Micon: Why did they not confine their hell's play to persons of no importance, or having dared so far, at least make certain their victims did not escape to carry tales?
He would have let Reio-ta die without compunction. As Prince of Ahtarrath, he had been legally dead for years; and what was one crazy chela more or less? Deoris, however, was the daughter of a powerful priest; her death would mean full and merciless investigation. Talkannon was not one to be trifled with, and Rajasta would almost certainly suspect Riveda first of all.
The Adept felt some shame at his weakness, but he still would not admit, even to himself, that he loved Deoris, that she had become necessary to him. The thought of her death made a black aching within him, an ache so strong and gnawing that he forgot the agonies in his seared hands.
II
After a long, blurred nightmare when she seemed to wander through flames and lightning and shadows out of half-forgotten awful legends, Deoris opened her eyes on a curious scene.
She was lying upon a great couch of carven stone, in a heap of downy cushions. Above was fixed one of the ever-burning lamps, whose flame, leaping and wavering, made the carved figures on the rails of the couch into shapes of grotesque horror. The air was damp and rather chilly, and smelled musty, like cold stone. She wondered at first if she were dead and laid in a vault, and then became aware that she was swathed in moist, cool bandages. There was pain in her body, but it was all far away, as if that swaddled mass of bandages belonged to someone else.
She turned her head a little, with difficulty, and made out the shape of Riveda, familiar even with his back to her; and before him a man Deoris recognized with a little shiver of terror—Nadastor, a Grey-robe Adept. Middle-aged, gaunt, and ascetic in appearance, Nadastor was darkly handsome and yet forbidding. Nor was he robed now in the grey robe of a Magician, but in a long black tabard, embroidered and blazoned with strange emblems; on his head was a tall, mitered hat, and between his hands he held a slight glass rod.
Nadastor was speaking, in a low, cultured voice that reminded Deoris vaguely of Micon's: "You say she is not saji?"
"Far from it," Riveda answered dryly. "She is Talkannon's daughter, and a Priestess."
Nadastor nodded slowly. "I see. That does make a difference. Of course, if it were mere personal sentiment, I would still say you should let her die. But . . ."
"I have made her SA#kti SidhA#na."
"Within the restraints you have always burdened yourself with," Nadastor murmured, "you have dared much. I knew that you had a great power, of course; that was clear from the first. Were it not for the coward's restrictions imposed by the Ritual . . ."
"I am done with restraints!" Riveda said savagely. "I shall work as I, and I alone, see fit! I have not spared myself to gain this power and no one—now—shall curtail my right to use it!" He raised his left hand, red and raw and horribly maimed, and slowly traced a gesture that made Deoris gasp despite herself. There could be no return from that; that sign, made with the left hand, was blasphemy punishable by death, even in the Grey Temple. It seemed to hang in the air between the Adepts for a moment.
Nadastor smiled. "So be it," he said. "First we must save your hands. As for the girl—"
"Nothing about the girl!" Riveda interrupted violently.
Nadastor's smile had become mockery. "For every strength, a weakness," he said, "or you would not be here. Very well, I will attend her."
Deoris suddenly felt violently sick; Riveda had mocked Micon and Domaris just that way.
"If you have taught her as you say, she is too valuable to let her womanhood be sapped and blasted by—that which has touched her." Nadastor came toward the bed; Deoris shut her eyes and lay like death as the Black-robe drew away the clumsy bandages and skillfully dressed the hurts with a touch as cold and impersonal as if he handled a stone image. Riveda stood close by throughout, and when Nadastor had ended his ministrations, Riveda knelt and stretched one heavily bandaged hand to Deoris.
"Riveda!" she whispered, weakly.
His voice was hardly any stronger as he said, "This was not failure. We shall make it success, you and I—we have invoked a great power, Deoris, and it is ours to use!"
Deoris longed only for some word of tenderness. This talk of power sickened and frightened her; she had seen that power invoked and wished only to forget it. "An—an evil power!" she managed to whisper, dry-mouthed.
He said, with the old concentrated bitterness, "Always babbling of good and evil! Must everything come in ease and beauty? Will you run away the first time you see something which is not encompassed in your pretty dreams?"
Shamed and defensive as always, she whispered, "No. Forgive me."
Riveda's voice became gentle again. "No, I should not blame you if you are fearful, my own Deoris! Your courage has never failed when there was need for it. Now, when you are so hurt, I should not make things any worse for you. Try to sleep now, Deoris. Grow strong again."
She reached toward him, sick for his touch, for some word of love or reassurance—but suddenly, with a terrifying violence, Riveda burst into a fit of raving blasphemy. He cursed, shouting, straining with an almost rabid wrath, calling down maledictions in a foul litany in which several languages seemed to mix in a pidgin horrible to hear, and Deoris, shocked and frightened beyond her limits, began to weep wildly. Riveda only stopped when his voice failed him hoarsely, and he flung himself down on the couch beside her, his face hidden, his shoulders twitching, too exhausted to move or speak another word.
After a long time Deoris stirred painfully, curving her hand around his cheek which rested close to hers. The movement roused the man a little; he turned over wearily and looked at Deoris from wide, piteous eyes in which steaks of red showed where tiny veins had burst.
"Deoris, Deoris, what is it that I've done to you? How can I hold you to me, after this? Flee while you can, desert me if you will—I have no right to ask anything more of you!"
She tightened her clasp a little. She could not raise herself, but her voice was trembling with passion. "I gave you that right! I go where you go! Fear or no fear. Riveda, don't you know yet that I love you?"
The bloodshot eyes flickered a little, and for the first time in many months he drew her close and kissed her, with concentrated passion, hurting her in his fierce embrace. Then, recollecting himself, he drew carefully away—but she closed her weak fingers around his right arm, just above the bandage.
"I love you," she whispered weakly. "I love you enough to defy gods and demons alike!"
Riveda's eyes, dulled with pain and sorrow, dropped shut for a moment. When he opened them, his face was once again composed, a mask of unshakable calm. "I may ask you to do just that," he said, in a low, tense voice, "but I will be just one step behind you all the way."
And Nadastor, unseen in the shadows beyond the arched door of the room, shook his head and laughed softly to himself.
III
For some time Deoris alternated between brief lucid moments and days of hellish pain and delirious, drugged nightmares. Riveda never left her side; at whatever hour she awakened, he would be there, gaunt and impassive; deep in meditation, or reading from some ancient scroll.
Nadastor came and went, and Deoris listened to all they said to one another—but her intervals of consciousness were so brief and painful at first that she never knew where reality ended and dreams began. She remembered once waking to see Riveda fondling a snake which writhed around his head like a pet kitten—but when she spoke of it days later, he stared blankly and denied it.
Nadastor treated Riveda with courtesy and respect, as an equal; but an equal whose education has been uncouthly remiss and must be remedied. After Deoris was out of danger and could stay awake for more than a few minutes undrugged, Riveda read to her—things that made her blood run cold. Now and again Riveda demonstrated his new skill with these manipulations of nature, and gradually Deoris lost her personal fear; never again would Riveda allow any rite to get out of control through lack of knowledge!
With only one thing was Deoris at odds: Riveda had suddenly become ambitious; his old lust for knowledge had somehow mutated into a lust for power. But she did not voice her misgivings over this, lying quiet and listening when he talked, too full of love to protest and sure in any case that if she protested he would not listen.
Never had Riveda been so kind to her. It was as if his whole life had been spent in some tense struggle between warring forces, which had made him stern and rigid and remote in the effort to cleave to a line of rectitude. Now that he had finally abandoned himself to sorcery, this evil and horror absorbed all his inborn cruelty, leaving the man himself free to be kind, to be tender, to show the basic simplicity and goodness that was in him. Deoris felt her old childlike adoration slowly merging into something deeper, different . . . and once, when he kissed her with that new tenderness, she clung to him, in sudden waking of an instinct as old as womanhood.
He laughed a little, his face relaxing into humorous lines. "My precious Deoris . . ." Then he murmured doubtfully, "But you are still in so much pain."
"Not much, and I—I want to be close to you. I want to sleep in your arms and wake there—as I have never done."
Too moved to speak, Riveda drew her close to him. "You shall lie in my arms tonight," he whispered at last. "I—I too would have you close."
He held her delicately, afraid to hurt by a careless touch, and she felt his physical presence—so familiar to her, so intimately known to her body, and yet alien, altogether strange, after all these years a stranger to her—so that she found herself shy of the lover as she had never been of the initiator.
Riveda made love to her softly, with a sensitive sincerity she had not dreamed possible, at first half fearful lest he bring her pain; then, when he was certain of her, drawing on some deep reserve of gentleness, giving himself up to her with the curious, rare warmth of a man long past youth: not passionate, but very tender and full of love. In all her time with Riveda she had never known him like this; and for hours afterward she lay nestled in his arms, happier than she had ever been in her life, or would ever be again, while in a muted, hoarse, hesitant voice he told her all the things every woman dreams of hearing from her lover, and his shaking scarred hands moved softly on her silky hair.
Chapter Eleven
THE DARK SHRINE
I
Deoris remained within the subterranean labyrinth for a month, cared for by Riveda and Nadastor. She saw no other person, save an old deaf-mute who brought her food. Nadastor treated Deoris with a ceremonious deference which astonished and terrified the girl—particularly after she heard one fragment of conversation . . .
She and Riveda had grown by degrees into a tender companionship like nothing the girl had ever known. He had no black, surly moods now. On this day he had remained near her for some time, translating some of the ancient inscriptions with an almost lewd gaiety, coaxing her to eat with all sorts of playful little games, as if she were an ailing child. After a time, for she still tired quickly, he laid her down and drew a blanket of woven wool over her shoulders, and left her; she slept until she was wakened by a voice, raised a little as if he had forgotten her in his annoyance.
". . . all my life have I held that in abhorrence!"
"Even within the Temple of Light," Nadastor was saying, "brothers and sisters marry sometimes; their line is kept pure, they want no unknown blood which might bring back those traits they have bred out of the Priest's Caste. Children of incest are often natural clairvoyants."
"When they are not mad," said Riveda cynically.
Deoris closed her eyes again as the voices fell to a murmur; then Riveda raised his voice angrily again.
"Which of Talkannon's . . . ?"
"You will wake the girl," Nadastor rebuked; and for minutes they spoke so softly that Deoris could hear nothing. The next thing she caught was Nadastor's flat statement, "Men breed animals for what they want them to become. Should they scatter the seed of their own bodies?" The voice fell again, then surged upward: "I have watched you, Riveda, for a long time. I knew that one day you would weary of the restraints laid on you by the Ritual!"
"Then you knew more than I," Riveda retorted. "Well, I have no regrets—and whatever you may think, no scruples in that line. Let us see if I understand you. The child of a man past the age of passion, and a girl just barely old enough to conceive, can be—almost outside the laws of nature . . ."
"And as little bound by them," Nadastor added. He rose and left the room, and Riveda came to look down at Deoris. She shut her eyes, and after a moment, thinking her still sleeping, he turned away.
II
The burns on her back and shoulders had healed quickly, but the cruel brand on her breasts had bitten deep; even by the time she was able to be up again, they were still swathed in bandages which she could not bear to touch. She was growing restless; never had she been so long absent from the Temple of Light, and Domaris must be growing anxious about her—at the very least, she might make inquiries.
Riveda soothed her fear a little.
"I have told a tale to account for you," he said. "I told Cadamiri that you had fallen from the sea-wall and been burned at one of the beacon fires; that also explained my own hurt." He held out his hands, free now of bandages, but terribly scarred, too stiff even to recover their old skill.
"No one questions my ability as Healer, Deoris, so they did not protest when I said you must be left in peace. And your sister—" His eyes narrowed slightly. "She waylaid me today in the library. She is anxious about you; and in all truth, Deoris, I could give no reason why she should not see you, so tomorrow it would be well if you left this place. You must see her, and reassure her, else . . ." he laid a heavy hand on her arm, "the Guardians may descend on us. Tell Domaris—whatever you like, I care not, but—whatever you do, Deoris, unless you want me to die like a dog, let not even Domaris see the scars on your breasts until they are wholly healed. And Deoris, if your sister insists, you may have to return to the Temple of Light. I—I grieve to send you from me, and would not have it so, but—the Ritual forbids any maiden of the Light-born to live among Grey-robes. It is an old law, and seldom invoked; it has been ignored time and time again. But Domaris reminded me of it, and—I dare not endanger you by angering her."
Deoris nodded without speaking. She had known that this interlude could not last forever. In spite of all the pain, all the terror, her new dread of Riveda, this had been a sort of idyll, suspended in nothingness and wrapped in an unexpected certainty of Riveda's nearness and his love; and now, already it was part of the past.
"You will be safest under your sister's protection. She loves you, and will ask no questions, I think." Riveda clasped her hand in his own and sat without moving or speaking for a long time; at last, he said, "I told you, once, Deoris, that I am not a good man to trust. By now I imagine I have proved that to you." The bitter and despondent tone was back in his voice. Then, evenly and carefully, he asked, "Are you still—my Priestess? I have forfeited the right to command you, Deoris. I offer to release you, if you wish it."
As she had done years ago, Deoris let go of his hand, dropped to her knees and pressed her face to his robes in surrender. She whispered, "I have told you I will defy all for you. Why will you never believe me?"
After a moment, Riveda raised her gently, his touch careful and light. "One thing remains," he said in a low voice. "You have suffered much, and I—I would not force this on you, but—but if not tonight, a year's full cycle must go by before we can try again
. This is the Night of Nadir, and the only night on which I can complete this."
Deoris did not hesitate even a moment, although her voice shook a little. "I am at your command," she whispered, in the ritual phrase of the Grey-robes.
III
Some few hours later, the old deaf-mute woman came. She stripped Deoris, bathed and purified her, and robed her in the curious garments Riveda had sent. First a long, full robe of transparent linen, and over this a tabard of stiffly embroidered silk, decorated with symbols of whose meaning Deoris was not wholly certain. Her hair, now grown thick and long, was confined in a silver fillet, and her feet stained with dark pigment. As the deaf-mute completed this final task, Riveda returned—and Deoris forgot her own unusual garb in amazement at the change in him.
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