At the end of five minutes, his body felt sated with pleasure; he was like a starving man who has eaten an enormous meal. When he stood up again, his naked body was glowing as if a thousand points of light were sparkling over the surface of the flesh. He dropped into the chair — an old-fashioned wooden armchair with a cushion attached to its seat — and allowed himself to relax with a deep sigh. His heart seemed to have slowed to half its normal speed.
Now, at least, he understood why the assassins had brought the girl with them. She was their source of energy, the renewer of their vitality. While his body had been in contact with hers, he had even been able to sense the presence of those other men who had preceded him. He experienced no sense of jealousy; it was her business to give energy — she was willing to give to anyone who could receive it from her.
And now, with a sudden flash of insight, he also understood why Veig had behaved so strangely in the girl’s presence. Surely it must be because his brother had somehow sensed that she had the power to renew his depleted energies? This thought awakened a surge of hope and optimism. His own sense of glowing vitality convinced him that this girl could cure Veig’s sickness — that it would be a simple matter for his brother to draw energy from her body until his own vital powers had been restored. . . This thought so excited Niall that he started to his feet and had taken a stride toward the door before remembering that he was naked. Then, as he started to pull on his tunic, he remembered the old man’s warning about impatience — he had paid the price of ignoring it once already today. The thought sobered him; he dropped the tunic on the floor and sat down again.
When he gazed at the sleeping girl, he felt a mixture of pity and gratitude. She carried within her the secret of life; yet men had seized her for their own purposes, and turned her into a kind of milch-cow. As she lay with closed eyes, she looked like a corpse; the spots of color had vanished from her cheeks, and her breathing was hardly visible. When he probed her mind, it was like entering primeval darkness, without even a flicker of the unconscious life of dreams. Earlier in the day, when he had entered the mind of the girl in the hospital, he had been aware of her sleeping consciousness, like a faint glow on the horizon. In this girl’s mind, there was merely emptiness, like eternal night.
He suddenly experienced a powerful desire to express his gratitude, to return to her a little of the brimming vitality that she had allowed him to absorb, and which had, in turn, raised his own vitality to a still higher level. The mat of lakeweed had half-slipped from her body, and it had the effect of making her seem somehow pathetic and abandoned, as if she had been thrown there from a passing cart. Niall leaned forward and removed it, then turned it over and replaced it on her body. Then he once again lay on top of her, resting his weight on his elbows. Yet his position made him feel uncomfortable; it seemed somehow oddly wrong. He slipped off her and lay beside her on the bed; then, placing one arm under her waist, and the other on her buttock, he lifted her until she was resting on top of him. She was surprisingly light, but the completely relaxed state of her body made it difficult to keep her in position; he had to reach down and straighten her legs, then readjust the mat between them, and hold her in position with his hands on both buttocks. Her face turned sideways, so that her cheek rested against his mouth.
Niall allowed himself to relax into a state of total receptivity, until his consciousness was like an empty vessel. He realized now why his first contact had produced a subtle sense of discord. He had been expecting to absorb energy from her, and this was opposed by the polarity of the mat. Moreover, he had been lying on top of her, and the mat was designed to conduct energy upward, against the force of gravity. Now all he had to do was to use the mat to absorb some of the energy that was now throbbing inside him; he did this by imagining that the energy was accumulating in the skin of his chest and thighs. At a certain point, he imagined that the energy was being absorbed from him by the cool and slippery lakeweed, and, as this happened, he felt this process taking place. A moment later the skin of her face became warm as it rested against his lips.
The process of giving energy was, in an obvious sense, the opposite of the process of receiving it. Yet in another way, they were curiously similar. To begin with, their individual identities dissolved away, and united like two raindrops. This union turned them, in effect, into lovers, as if they had mutually given themselves to one another. In some primitive sense, he had become her husband. Giving became an intense pleasure — so intense that, a few moments later, he experienced a compulsion to repeat the process, once again summoning energy into the skin of his chest and thighs, and then allowing it to pass into her through the lakeweed. He was aware as he did so that he was repeating some deep universal process that had existed since the beginning of time.
The third time he repeated the transmission, he became aware that she was responding. The pleasure of receiving vital energy was stirring her back into wakefulness. In the darkness of her consciousness, he could sense a glow like the rising dawn. A moment later, her breathing faltered, and he had to make an effort to control his own excitement and calm the beating of his heart. She stirred, as if in her sleep, and moved her head, so that her lips were now resting directly against his. He could feel the fluttering of her eyelids, and the lips parted.
A moment later he screamed aloud in pain as her teeth sank into his lower lip. In his state of total concentration, the shock was like an explosion inside his head. Even when he twisted sideways and she fell on to the bed, she continued to bite until he thought her teeth would meet through his flesh. A frantic push released him, and she fell off the bed and on to the floor. He scrambled off the bed, half-expecting her to attack him. But her position on the floor — face downward, with one leg twisted under the other — remained unchanged.
His first reaction was anger. The pain was agonizing, and tears were running down his cheeks and mingling with the blood that ran onto his chest. He seized her garment, which still lay on the floor, and pressed it to his lower lip. When the cloth had absorbed most of the blood, he cautiously prodded the torn flesh with the tip of one finger, at the same time probing from inside with his tongue. To his relief, his tongue and fingertip failed to meet through the flesh. But the lip itself was already swelling, as if from a violent blow.
He turned her over roughly with his foot. As she flopped onto her back, he observed that her eyes were now open. The mouth was also open, and a trickle of blood, mixed with saliva, ran down her face. The gray flesh reminded him of the corpse he had seen that morning in the hospital, and his heart suddenly contracted with fear. If she was dead, he had destroyed his last link with the magician. He dropped on his knees beside her, but his heart was pounding so violently that it was impossible to achieve the relaxation necessary to probe her mind. Instead, he seized her wrist and tried to take her pulse; when he failed to find it, he suddenly became convinced that she was dead, and experienced a cold sense of despair. He bent his head and placed his ear against her left breast. A moment later, as his own breathing became calmer, he was able to detect a faint pulse. The relief was so enormous that he closed his eyes, and expelled his breath in a long sigh.
He slid both hands underneath her, and lifted her onto the bed. A thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth, and although he knew it was his own blood, the sight disturbed him. He wiped it off with his handkerchief, then closed the staring eyes.
Now that his alarm had subsided, he was able to probe her mind. As he expected, it was totally blank, without any hint of consciousness. He stared down at her, frowning with perplexity. His first assumption had been that she had awakened, recognized him as an alien presence, and instinctively attacked him. But in that case, she would still be awake — or at least show some sign of reviving consciousness.