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, I can 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 Bit-Hessee, 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.