He held out a girdle to her. Carved of wooden links, it was bound with crimson cords knotted in odd patterns. Runes were incised in the wood, and for a moment some instinct surged up in Deoris, and her fingers refused to touch the thing.
Riveda, more sternly, said, "Are you afraid to wear this, Deoris? Must we waste time with a lengthy explanation?"
She shook her head, chastened, and began to fasten it about her body—but Riveda bent and prevented her. With his strong, scarred hands he cinctured it carefully about her waist, tying the cords into a firm knot and ending with a gesture incomprehensible to her.
"Wear this until I give you leave to take it off," he told her. "Now come."
She almost rebelled again when she saw where he was taking her—to the terrible shrouded Crypt of the Avatar, where the Man with Crossed Hands lay, continually bound. Once within, she watched, frozen, as Riveda kindled ritual fire upon the altar which had been dark for a million years.
In his deepest voice, blazing in his symbolic robes, he began to intone the invocatory chant and Deoris, recognizing it, knew in trembling terror what it invoked. Was Riveda mad indeed? Or splendidly, superbly courageous? This was blackest blasphemy—or was it? And for what?
Shivering, she had no real choice but to add her own voice to the invocation. Voice answered voice in dark supplication, strophe and antistrophe, summoning . . . entreating... .
Riveda turned abruptly to the high stone altar where a child lay, and with a surge of horror Deoris saw what Riveda held in his hands. She clasped her own hands over her mouth so that she would not scream aloud as she recognized the child: Larmin. Karahama's son, Demira's little brother—Riveda's own son ...
The child watched with incurious drugged eyes. The thing was done with such swiftness that the child gave only a single smothered whimper of apprehension, then fell back into the drugged sleep. Riveda turned back to the terrible ceremony which had become, to Deoris, a devil's rite conducted by a maniac.
Nadastor glided from the shadows, unbound the little boy, lifted the small senseless figure from the altar-stone and bore it from the Crypt. Deoris and Riveda were alone in the Dark Shrine—the very shrine where Micon had been tortured, alone with the Unrevealed God.
Her mind reeling with the impact of sound and sight, she began to comprehend if not the whole, then the drift of the blasphemous ritual: Riveda meant nothing less than to loose the terrible chained power of the Dark God, to bring the return of the Black Star. But there was something more, something she could not quite understand ... or was it that she dared not understand?
She sank to her knees; a deathly intangible horror held her by the throat, and though her mind screamed No! No-no-no-no! in the grip of that hypnotic dream she could not move or cry out. With a single word or gesture of protest she could so distort and shatter the pattern of the ritual that Riveda must fail—but sound was beyond her power, and she could not raise a hand or move her head so much as a fraction to one side or the other ... and because in this crisis she could not summon the courage to defy Riveda, her mind slid off into incoherence, seeking an escape from personal guilt.
She could not—she dared not understand what she was hearing and seeing; her brain refused to seize on it. Her eyes became blank, blind and though Riveda saw the last remnant of sanity fade from her wide eyes, it was with only the least of his attention; the rest of him was caught up in what he did.
The fire on the shrine blazed up.
The chained and faceless image stirred ...
Deoris saw the smile of the Man with Crossed Hands leering from the distorted shadows. Then, for an instant, she saw what Riveda saw, a chained and faceless figure standing upright—but that too swam away. Where they had been a great and fearful form hulked, recumbent and swathed in corpse-windings—an image that stirred and fought its bonds.
Then Deoris saw only an exploding pinwheel of lights into which she fell headlong. She barely knew it when Riveda seized her; she was inert, half-conscious at best, her true mind drowned in the compassionate stare of the Man with Crossed Hands, blinded by the spinning wheel of lights that whirled blazing above them. She knew, dimly, that Riveda lifted and laid her on the altar, and she felt a momentary shock of chill awareness and fear as she was forced back onto the wet stone. Not here, not here, not on the stone stained with the child's blood ...
But he isn't dead! she thought with idiotic irrelevance, he isn't dead, Riveda didn't kill him, it's all right if he isn't dead ...
IV
As if breaking the crest of a deep dark wave, Deoris came to consciousness suddenly, sensible of cold, and of pain from her half-healed burns. The fire on the shrine was extinguished; the Man with Crossed Hands had become but a veiled darkness.
Riveda, the frenzy gone, was lifting her carefully from the altar. With his normal, composed severity, he assisted her to rearrange her robes. She felt bruised and limp and sick, and leaned heavily on Riveda, stumbling a little on the icy stones—and she guessed, rightly, that he was remembering another night in this crypt, years before.
Somewhere in the labyrinth she could hear a child's distant sobs of pain and fright. They seemed to blend with her own confusion and terror that she put her hands up to her face to be sure that she was not crying, whether the sounds came from within or without.
At the door of the room where she had lain all during her long illness, Riveda paused, beckoning the deaf-mute woman and giving her some orders in sign-language.
He turned to Deoris again, and spoke with a cold formality that chilled her to the bone: "Tomorrow you will be conducted above ground. Do not fear to trust Demira, but be very careful. Remember what I have told you, especially in regard to your sister Domaris!" He paused, for once at a loss for words; then, with sudden and unexpected reverence, the Adept dropped to his knees before the terrified girl and taking her icy hand in his, he pressed it to his lips, then to his heart.
"Deoris," he said, falteringly. "O, my love—"
Quickly he let go her hand, rose to his feet and was gone before the girl could utter a single word.
BOOK FOUR: Riveda
" ... common wisdom has it that Good has a tendency to grow and preserve itself, whereas Evil tends to grow until it destroys itself. But perhaps there is a flaw in our definitions—for would it be evil for Good to grow until it crowded Evil out of existence?
" ... everyone is born with a store of knowledge he doesn't know he possesses. ... The human body of flesh and blood, which has to feed itself upon plants and their fruits, and upon animal meats, is not a fit habitation for the eternal spirit that moves us—and for this, we must die—but somewhere in the future is the assurance of a new body-type which can outlast the stones which do not die. ... The things we learn strike sparks, and the sparks light fires; and the firelight reveals strange things moving in the darkness... . The darkness can teach you things that the light has never seen, and will never be able to see. . . .
"Unwilling to continue a merely mineral existence, plants were the first rebels; but the pleasures of a plant are limited to the number of ways in which it can circumvent the laws governing the mineral world... . There are poisonous minerals that can kill plants or animals or men. There are poisonous plants that can kill animals or men. There are poisonous animals (mostly reptiles) which can kill men—but man is unable to continue the poisonous chain, poison other creatures though he may, because he has never developed a means for poisoning the gods... ."