This room was near the top of the Bit-Hessee 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 Bar-Ibithni, striking down walls and gates and men who stood in the path, installing Bit-Hessee 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 Rat-Hole 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 Bit-Hessee. 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.
So I proceeded, staggering along roughly northward, and overhead the wreck black stacks of Hessu’s port staggered in rhythm with my stride.
The heat of the day came, a slaty pressuring of low sky. Once something shrilled in the marsh among the towering fern-trees. And once, between the buildings, I sank to my knees in a gaping mouth of mud, and dragged myself free with difficulty.
I saw no men and no beast. Neither did I reach the dock or the shore.
At last I lay down in the shade of a wall, full length in the muck and reeds, with no watch for enemies. (He was everywhere. Why trouble to look out for him?) Their Power contained mine. They kept me in. I had fled the warren and was now caged on the surface. I muttered with a sort of fever, dozed, and tossed about, a pitiful object if there had been any to take pity.
When I recovered myself, the light was fading in slashes of madder and bronze behind the crossed swords of upper foliage and the broken roofs. Something shifted against me, and