There is no swifter way to make an enemy of a woman. You may tell her she is a clod or a bitch; as long as you lust for her, it will be forgiven. But say she is the wonder of the world and show her cold loins, and she will hate you till the sun goes out. This I understood well enough, but reckoned Lellih not much, if her people were a little more. It was, in any case, plain honesty, and put to the test would not alter.

  She said nothing further, and I, too, kept quiet

  There had been a prophecy for ninety-odd years in BitHessee; the priest spoke of it later. Like many a conquered people made slaves, beggars, and outcasts in their own land, they were dreaming of a savior who would redeem them from the oppressor, and reinstate the ancient Empire of Hessek over a million graveyards of dead Masrians. Their former gods, who had failed them, they cast down, even Hessu the sea demon, mythological founder of BitHessee itself. Though Hessek sailors and salves still offered lip service

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  and perfunctory offerings to deities of ocean, field, and weather, no scrap of this natural religion lingered over the marsh in the old city. As the metropolis went to ground in darkness, so did its mysteries.

  Hessek was aged, used up, decaying. It began to be said that when the barren tree put on green the savior of Hessek would come-a cynical enough maxim under the circumstances, which grew more naive and auspicious as the years of thralldom marched by. Yet Lellih, the barren tree, had put on again her green girlhood. Inadvertently, I had fulfilled their dream with that game of mine, which had used her as its pawn. I had thought, when she came whispering to me of her youth in the Grove, that her gods had put her in my hand. Maybe they had.

  The Inner Chamber seemed to lie at the core of the cemetery, accessible via a labyrinth of passages that passed among various boneyards and tomb closets, where piled skulls leered in the half-light and the air was putrid.

  I expected some menacing of freakish greeting at the end of the journey, and was not disappointed. An arch revealed to me a large space packed about the walls with black priests and ragged Bit-Hessians, and deserted at its center, where burned a tall bronze tripod lamp of the open Hessek sort. Lellih passed in before me, and the priest with his unpleasant pet. As I entered, a screaming shout emanated from the throng and split the hollow roof in echoes. It had in it the pent-up hysteria I had heard women break into in a death chant among the tribes. I did not like the noise of it much, and missed the words of the cry till they came again. What they were yelling over and over was: Eiullo y’ei S’ulloo-Kem! (“The invisible god is made visible in his son!)

  I had named myself a god more than once; I had had my reasons. But to confront this fanatic horde and hear that shouting chilled me through. It was like standing in one of the powder cellars of Eshkorek’s cannon and striking flints.

  I thought, I am on trial here. If I fail them, they will go mad, and if I am what they want, this same madness explodes in my face. I did not know what test they meant to set me. It might be anything, judging by their demented fervor.

  The priest brought silence by raising his arms, and the jewels in Lellih’s girdle splashed green and red fires up onto her breast and neck as she bent above the tripod lamp.

  The floor at the center of the chamber was figured in a white circle of running beasts and muddied over with brown

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  stains; blood, no doubt. In the strange agitation of the light Lellih was conjuring the beasts seemed to run, each snapping at the animal in front. It put me in mind of a herd running headlong to escape the stinging of a swarm of gadflies… . Something in the circle drew me. I felt the pull of it, and I said to myself, Ican match any power of theirs. And of my own will (I imagined), I chose to enter the circle of running beasts, and wait there for what might come to me.

  Tell yourself, as you will, that you are god and demon. Come in the presence of either, and you see your error. To this day, I do not know if he was really there with me, their devil-deity, master of the dark. Perhaps the conjuration was so ancient, so much a part of Hessek, that it had become convincing, or maybe the insistence of their frantic belief had truly caused the thing to be, as pearl forms about grit in the oyster’s shell.

  The white beasts ran, real now, three-dimensional and upright. I could smell their odor, feel their warmth, and see the spit fleck from their jaws.

  Then the floor dropped from under me, not suddenly, more as if it melted. And I was alone in a place without light or sound, and he was there with me.

  I did not see him, or hear him, this being they called Shaythun, Shepherd of Swarms, but I was aware of him, instantaneously, like a breathing next to my ear. I remember I gathered my Powers against him, like a hedge of thorn dragged around the krarl to keep the wolves out. But this was a wolf I could not keep away. There is no man so holy that you cannot find one black thought or one black deed in him, however small. And that deed or that thought is the gate through which devils, like the devil of Hessek, come and go. I began to see, without light, and hear, without sound. Out of smoke, another smoke poured. It was composed of a million tiny atoms that I saw to be his creatures. Winged beetles, flies, black moths, locusts, and below these, the grounded messengers of his kingdom, the maggots and the worms, the spider-folk hanged on their wires of steel. They fell and crawled across the inside of my shuttered eyes like rain across a paper window-blind. I seemed to have no choice but to admit the illusion; my Power was chained or numbed by the pressure of Hessek’s worship, and because I had no positive fear with which to fight.

  After a moment the insect vision passed and the featureless half-dark with it.

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  I was in the Inner Chamber, which was now empty save for the ring of white beasts. No longer mobile, they had turned their great heads to look at me. Running, they had resembled lions somewhat in the body, but those heads were more like the heads of horses, though far heavier and scrolled with flesh about the neck, and the short legs, muscular pillars beneath the low-slung bellies, ended in five-toed pads. Their smell was of the swamp’s beginning, some hot initiating ooze now centuries cold.

  They stared, lolling their thick brown tongues like dogs after the hunt.

  Then a darkness came between me and the beasts-a shadow growing up on the air. I knew it was not the Hessek’s ungod, for he was not to be visualized, despite their shrieking. Real or phantom, he had no actual masculine shape, which this presence did. I realized suddenly that my own mental energy, held in check by the religious passion of BitHessee, had turned in upon itself, and produced some archetype of my own brain, as if to counter theirs.

  I believed him, for an instant, to be the mirror image of myself.

  A tall man, large boned, hard and lean, tanned very dark, his blue-black hair long as mine had been when I was a brave among the krarls, if more kempt than mine. He wore black, and black rings on his hands. His face was mine, yet not mine, some difference in the eyes and mouth; most would never note it. My blood clamored in my head and my sinews loosened.

  I forgot Hessek. There was a salt tingle in my mouth, terror that was not terror churning in my guts, and I faltered out the words as a child would falter them.

  “Vazkor. My father.”

  He did not answer me. But, ghost or hallucination, he gazed at me as if he saw me. Nothing in the past, no dream or reverie, had prepared me for this, not even the promise and the fiery shadow on the island. He seemed live enough to touch. But I went no nearer to him.

  “My king, I have not forgotten. I swore a vow. I will keep it.” My legs trembled and the sweat rushed down me. “What do you want of me, other than I am sworn to?”

  From being solid before me, he began to disintegrate, which was now unnerving and horrible.

  “I cried out, “Wait-tell me what it is you wish. Javhovor-king-Father-“

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  But he was gone, and through the place where he had stood, so finely noble and so evident, a great barred cat leaped toward my throat.

  I rolled across the ground, wrestling a tiger, in my hand the knife they had not taken from me. I slashed the neck of the tiger, and its scalding blood ran on my breast, all this in a daze with my mind crying out in me still.

  The cry burst upward but was not mine.

  I was on my feet, within the circle of painted white animals at the center of the Hessek cemetery. The flame of the tripod lamp blazed up, showing me a crowd on their knees all about, immemorial groveling of men before their gods. Lellih also was outstretched, and the beetle-decorated priest, and one more figure lying near me. I had not killed a tiger after all, but the lunatic on the leash who thought himself one. This was their true form of sacrifice, to lower a human into a beast and then cut his neck veins, and I had officiated for them-the bloody knife was back in my belt.

  It was the priest who crept to me on his knees. He grasped my foot and mouthed it, and I kicked him away and broke a tooth for him. He looked up at me, not appearing to register his hurt.

  “It is proved,” he said. “The Power of the circle revealed it, as it must. Your guiding principle, the burning shadow.” He whispered, “You are Shaythun made manifest, Shaythun made flesh. Command us.”

  “Be thankful I don’t kill you,” I said, low as he.

  “Kill me. I am ready. I offer myself to the death you will give me, Shaythun-Kem.”

  Lellih had raised her white face also. She tore open the gauzy linen and scored her breasts with her nails, her lips parted and the vipers glinting in her hair. She offered me other things, choosing to forget what I had said to her.

  “Command me,” the priest repeated.

  “Then take me to this lodging your men brought me over the marsh to find.” I got this out in as prosaic a voice as I could muster. The blood, the magic, the corpse-smell, and the shifting light were sending me faint as any silly girl. I had had enough, and meant to have no more.

  The priest rose and bowed and obeyed me.

  I came into the room and found it unoccupied, clean and wholesome-smelling after the other. A couch with rugs stood by the wall. I fell on it, and into the gray country of sleep.

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  A dream woke me, the dream of a white cat, drinking my blood.

  I started up into a confusing twilight, and saw, crouched at my feet, the selfsame monster from the dream. There is a terror unlike any other; it eats the mind. But it was the dawn in the room, broadening, and in a second I saw the thing for what it was, and kept my sanity. In a white robe, a white veil over her hair if not her face, Lellih the priestess ceased to be my private haunting come to devour me.

  This room was near the top of the BitHessee warren, presumably, and sunup was finding a high thin window under the beams and filling it with a sugar-pink confectionery of rays. Lellih stretched in the fountain of the pink morning, letting the veil fall, and the loose robe after it.

  “See how pretty you made me. But, oh, Vazkor, I should not like to have such dreams.”

  I comprehended immediately that she knew the dream, in all its detail. No doubt I had cried out aloud in my sleep, but the conviction came on me that she had read my thoughts, unperturbed, as yesterday I had read Ki’s with such uneasiness. In that upper room I experienced again the draining energy of something ancient and perverse. For all my avowals of strength, my healing had failed me here, and I had entered that circle of theirs as the cattle go to the butcher’s shed, and more willingly. If I let go my caution their Power would creep in on me to sap my own, to make me part of them and their belief.

  Lellih laughed, showing me her nakedness.

  “They gave me the treasures of Ancient Hessek to wear the Serpent Crown and the Girdle of Fires, but I have more fabulous treasures, do I not? Don’t hesitate,” she said. “He is to visit you with his green face, but I have instructed him to be slow. You have time to lie with me before he arrives.” She came crawling up the length of me as I lay there, like the embodiment of that other thing I felt steal in on my mind.

  Presently she hissed in my ear, “Sorem the Masrian is your lover, then, Vazkor Shaythun-Kem. You should have made me a boy, like Thei.”

  “Take your weight off me, priestess, or I’ll send you back to your god, who you say is my father, with this knife.”

  “Oh, a knife, is it?” she whispered. “That is all you are able to stick in me? And such a tribal barbarian still, equipped to slay with light, yet preferring a thief s blade.”

  I thrust her aside and held her and hit her, so her head

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  rolled on her neck, for it did not suit me to be afraid of a woman. It seemed she had read my past with the rest, to know my origin.

  “Your people revere me. You had better get the habit.”

  She looked back at me. Her eyes were all surface, like polished iron, without depth. One cheek was red from the blow, and she put her hand to it, gently, as I have seen girls tend a sick baby or a kitten. Indeed there was nothing of the old Lellih left in her. Though she was the figurehead of a faith, I saw in that instant that she alone of her heritage set no store by me as a messiah. I had every one of the clues then, and missed them.

  She slid from the couch, drew up her robe, and laced it with the odd side lacings the Hesseks affected. The veil she let down over her face and hid her look in its white smoke, and went out.

  The beetle-priest entered a moment later. He had been waiting on her as she bad him.

  He kneeled at once on the floor, and I instructed him to rise. I took a high-handed attitude, for my nerve was gone, and I would gladly have been in most spots but there. I asked him straight out what he wanted. He bowed and recounted the legend of Hessek. He spoke of the savior I must be, who would lead the outcasts from the swamp through the wide white streets of BarIbithni, striking down walls and gates and men who stood in the path, installing BitHessee at the hub of the Heavenly City and in the Crimson Palace of the Emperor, made crimson indeed by a liberal spillage of Masrian blood.

  As he intoned all this, the betles, following his facial movements, scurried on his cheeks and brow. It was a strange thing, for I could see he genuinely reckoned me what he called me-the Shaythun-Kem, god-made-visible-while imagining he might yet instruct me as the instrument of Old Hessek. Thus a real messiah would be, I suppose, the hammer of his people’s hope rather than a man.

  I say this now, calmly. At the hour, a sea of panic was sweeping in on me. I felt the burden of their demand and their hunger, their malice, their ungovernable hate. To be five years old and surrounded by foes out of a nightmare, that is what set on me in that high room of the swamp city.

  There went across my inner eye that scene in the docks as it must have been: Charpon murdered simply because he op-

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  posed me-the flint in his brain their gift to me, like the bloody crow, the tiger man.

  My only weapon remained constant: mundane, flat logic.

  “Are you finished?” I said to the priest. He lowered his head. “Good. Listen, then. I’m not your prophet, neither your savior. I am the sorcerer Vazkor. No religion and no religious power will alter it. You may fear me. I’ll allow you that, since I can kill the pack of you, when and how I please. But for a leader, search elsewhere.”

  He did not glance at me. “Why have you come among us? Why have you done as you have if you are not the one we wait for?”

  “Ask Shaythun,” I said. “Now. Step away from the door.”

  He stood rooted and murmured, “I cannot, my master. You must stay with us. You are ours.”

  I moved toward him, and he straightened and grappled me about the waist.

  He was a muscular man. His breath smelled from some drug or incense, and through his open lips I saw the tooth I had chipped. I did not want to use the Power on him. The sorcery of this hell seemed to feed from mine. I had played at being Shaythun, and I had augmented Shaythun’s influence in doing it. I had gazed inside the skull of Ki; Lellih had scoured my own. A demon’s shadow had remodeled itself as my father’s. Loose the energy of death here now, and, I wildly surmised, it would assume another form to destroy me.

  So I wrestled the priest and struck him from me. He gripped my legs to pull me down, and I leaned and stabbed him. (“Tribal barbarian . , . equipped to slay with light … preferring a thief’s blade.”) He groaned like a man turning in slumber, and let me go.

  Outside, the corridor lifted itself upward to the left, as I had dimly remembered from the previous night. Dayglow suggested itself on the slope of the wall. I ran toward it, and no one prevented me.

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  9

  Despite my hubris and my ability, I went to the RatHole of the south under Hessek witching, and I abandoned it part crazy. No man is weaker than one who believes himself invincible, and even the sting of little wasps can kill, when they gather in great numbers.

  I found myself, after an interval, wandering among the ruined upper tiers of BitHessee. How I got above I had forgotten, and how I should escape across the uncertain swamps and lagoons I could not for some while reason out. Eventually I recollected Hessek’s boats stowed along the fringe of the silted dock, and the ships’ graveyard where, if other plans failed, some beggarly raft could be constructed from oddments. To walk on water I never contemplated. I wished just then very much to be merely human. An eye seemed to be watching me, the eye of Old Hessek. Be Shaythun and I should call Shaythun. I shuddered from fatigue and horror, and could not pull my wits and impulses together.