They struggled against each other, at first evenly matched. He moved his body to one side, and when she threw her weight across to counter him, he rolled with her off the couch. Locked together they crashed on to the malachite floor, but she was under him and bore the brunt of his weight. Just for an instant the grip of the muscles deep within her slackened at the shock. He used the lapse to drive himself further inside, trying to reach her centre. She tightened instantly, holding him out.

I

I THE QUEST

They strained against each other silently, pitting all their forces, holding each other in precarious equilibrium.

He felt her summon her reserves and gathered his own in readiness.

Then she launched herself against him in a psychic avalanche. She was forcing a breach in his defences, breaking through into the secret places of his soul. He could feel his body yielding to her. Once again, gloating triumph lit her eyes. He reached down and closed his fist over the Periapt of Lostris that still hung at his throat. In his mind he conjugated the word of power: Mensaar! His manroot leapt with the impulse, and she cried out incoherently as she felt it. 'Kydash! Ncube!' he shouted. A bolt of psychic power flashed from the Periapt. Like a lightning strike, it flung Eos from the breach in his soul. Once again they held each other at bay, their strength evenly matched. Locked in each other's flesh they lay as still as figures carved in ivory.

The oil in the lamps burnt low, the flames guttered and went out. The only light in the chamber came through the shaft high in the roof above.

That light faded as the sun set behind the mountains, and left them in darkness to continue the battle. All through the night they were braced against each other in the hellish coupling, his manroot buried inside her, her muscles clamped on it remorselessly, no longer organs of procreation and pleasure but deadly weapons.

When the dawn light seeped through the shaft in the roof, it found them still locked together. As the light strengthened, he could see into her eyes. In their depths he discerned the first flutter of panic, like the wings of a trapped bird beating against the bars of its cage. She tried to shutter them from him, but he held her eyes as she held his sex. Both were far past the borders of exhaustion. There was nothing left in either but the will to hold out. She had locked her long legs round his hips, and her arms round his back. He clasped her buttocks in one hand, pulling them on to him. His right hand, still clutching the Periapt of Lostris, was clenched at the small of her back. Very carefully, so that he did not alert her, he eased open the lid of the locket with his thumbnail and the chip of red stone fell into his palm.

He pressed the stone against her spine, and felt it grow hot as it turned its power back on to her. She screamed, a long despairing wail, and struggled weakly, pumping her sex like bellows in a desperate effort to expel him. He timed his thrusts to her spasms. Each time she relaxed he drove in deeper. He reached the final barrier and, with one last mighty effort, pierced it.

She collapsed under him, moaning and gibbering. He covered her

mouth with his own and thrust his tongue down her throat, stifling her cries. He rampaged through the inner sanctum of her being, tearing open the coffers in which her knowledge and power were locked away'and draining the contents. As he did so, his own strength flooded back, multiplied a hundredfold by what he took from her.

He stared into her unspeakably lovely face, into those magnificent eyes, and saw them change. Her mouth gaped, drooling silver ropes of saliva. Her eyes turned opaque and dull as pebbles. Like a lump of wax held close to a flame, her nose broadened and coarsened. Her glowing skin faded to sallow yellow, became desiccated and as rough as the scaly hide of a reptile. It puckered into deep creases at the corners of her lips and eyes. The vibrant curls fell out of her hair, leaving it straight and flecked with dry skin from her scalp.

Taita was still buried inside her, drawing in the torrent of astral and psychic substance that flowed from her, like the waters of a burst dam.

There was such a vast quantity that the flood continued hour after hour. The ray of sunlight from the shaft in the ceiling had crept across the malachite tiles and reached the centre mark of noon before Taita felt the flow weaken and shrivel. At last it dried up completely. He had taken all there was. Eos was drained and empty.

Taita allowed his manroot to deflate and slither out of her. He rolled off her and stood up. His sex was swollen, bruised and rubbed raw in places. He suppressed the pain and went to the silver jug of water on the table beside her couch. He drank deeply, then sat on the edge of her couch, watching her as she lay on the floor.

She breathed harshly through her open mouth. Her eyes were fixed in a blind stare on the roof of the chamber as her body began to swell. Like a corpse left in the sun, her belly ballooned as though filling with the gases of decay. The slim arms and legs bloated. The flesh puffed, soft and shapeless as a bladder of butter. Taita watched as her flesh billowed until her limbs disappeared in the pasty white folds. Only her head remained, tiny in comparison with the rest of her.

Gradually her swollen body filled half of the chamber. Taita jumped off the couch and backed against the wall to give her space to expand.

She had taken on the shape of a queen termite lying in her royal cell in the centre of a mound. She was trapped within her own flesh, able to move only her head, the rest of her pinned down by her own grossness.

She would never be able to escape from this cavern. Even if the trogs returned to help her, they could never drag her through the narrow rock passages and tunnels into the open air. .

A dreadful stench permeated the cavern. A thick, oily fluid oozed from the pores of Eos's skin and ran down her carcass, each drop pale green with the sheen of putrescence. The nauseating odour clogged Taita's throat and smothered his lungs. It was the smell of rotting corpses: the victims of her murderous appetites, the unborn babes she had torn from the womb and the young mothers who had carried them; the bodies of those who had perished in the famines, droughts and plagues she had bred and loosed upon the nations; the warriors who had died in the wars she had incited and commanded; the innocents she had condemned to the gallows and the garotte; the slaves who had perished in her quarries and mines. It was compounded by the fetor of an immense evil that issued from her mouth with every rasping breath she exhaled. Even Taita's control of his senses wavered under its miasma. Keeping as far from her as the confines of the cavern would allow, he moved along the wall towards the mouth of the tunnel.

An ominous sound brought him up short. It was as though a gigantic porcupine was rattling its quills in warning. Eos's grotesque head rolled towards him and her eyes focused upon his face. Her features were ravaged so no trace of her beauty remained. Her eyes were deep, dark pits. Her lips had retracted to expose her teeth, like those of a skull. Her features were ineffably ugly, the true mirror of her twisted soul. She spoke in a croak, harsh as the cawing of carrion crows: 'I shall persist,' she said.

He reeled back at the rankness of her breath, then braced himself and looked steadily into her eyes: 'The Lie will always persist, but so will the Truth. There will never be an end to the struggle,' he replied.

She closed her eyes and spoke no more. Only her breathing rumbled in her throat.

Taita found his cloak, then slipped through the green chamber into the passage that led to the outer air. As he came out into her secret garden, the sunlight was striking the top of the cliff but it left the depths of the crater in shadow. He looked around carefully for any evidence of Eos's trogs, searching for their auras, but there was none.