see the frail form of a young girl in a torn and ragged dress; she was barefoot
and her ear was bleeding where one jewelled earring had been torn from the lobe.
She was struggling in the iron grip of a huge burly black-bearded man, and the
first thing Lythande saw was the hand gripped around the girl’s thin, bony
wrist, dragging her; two fingers missing and the other cut away to the first
joint. Only then – when it was no longer needed – did Lythande see the blue star
between the black bristling brows, the cat-yellow eyes of Rabben the Half
handed!
Lythande knew him of old, from the Temple of the Star. Even then Rabben had been
a vicious man, his lecheries notorious. Why, Lythande wondered, had the Masters
not demanded that he renounce them as the price of his power? Lythande’s lips
tightened in a mirthless grimace; so notorious had been Rabben’s lecheries that
if he renounced them, everyone would know the Secret of his Power.
.
For the powers of an Adept of the Blue Star depended upon a secret. As in the
old legend of the giant who kept his heart in a secret place outside his body,
and with it his immortality, so the Adept of the Blue Star poured all his
psychic force into a single Secret; and the one who discovered the Secret would
acquire all of that adept’s power. So Rabben’s Secret must be something else …
Lythande did not speculate on it.
The girl cried out pitifully as Rabben jerked at her wrist; as the burly
magician’s star began to glow, she thrust her free hand over her eyes to shield