curls fell out of her hair, leaving it straight and flecked with dry skin from her scalp.
Taita was still buried inside her, drawing in the torrent of astral and psychic substance that flowed from her, like the waters of a burst dam.
There was such a vast quantity that the flood continued hour after hour. The ray of sunlight from the shaft in the ceiling had crept across the malachite tiles and reached the centre mark of noon before Taita felt the flow weaken and shrivel. At last it dried up completely. He had taken all there was. Eos was drained and empty.
Taita allowed his manroot to deflate and slither out of her. He rolled off her and stood up. His sex was swollen, bruised and rubbed raw in places. He suppressed the pain and went to the silver jug of water on the table beside her couch. He drank deeply, then sat on the edge of her couch, watching her as she lay on the floor.
She breathed harshly through her open mouth. Her eyes were fixed in a blind stare on the roof of the chamber as her body began to swell. Like a corpse left in the sun, her belly ballooned as though filling with the gases of decay. The slim arms and legs bloated. The flesh puffed, soft and shapeless as a bladder of butter. Taita watched as her flesh billowed until her limbs disappeared in the pasty white folds. Only her head remained, tiny in comparison with the rest of her.
Gradually her swollen body filled half of the chamber. Taita jumped off the couch and backed against the wall to give her space to expand.
She had taken on the shape of a queen termite lying in her royal cell in the centre of a mound. She was trapped within her own flesh, able to move only her head, the rest of her pinned down by her own grossness.
She would never be able to escape from this cavern. Even if the trogs returned to help her, they could never drag her through the narrow rock passages and tunnels into the open air. .
A dreadful stench permeated the cavern. A thick, oily fluid oozed from the pores of Eos's skin and ran down her carcass, each drop pale green with the sheen of putrescence. The nauseating odour clogged Taita's throat and smothered his lungs. It was the smell of rotting corpses: the victims of her murderous appetites, the unborn babes she had torn from the womb and the young mothers who had carried them; the bodies of those who had perished in the famines, droughts and plagues she had bred and loosed upon the nations; the warriors who had died in the wars she had incited and commanded; the innocents she had condemned to the gallows and the garotte; the slaves who had perished in her quarries and mines. It was compounded by the fetor of an immense evil that issued from her mouth with every rasping breath she exhaled. Even Taita's control of his senses wavered under its miasma. Keeping as far from her as the confines of the cavern would allow, he moved along the wall towards the mouth of the tunnel.
An ominous sound brought him up short. It was as though a gigantic porcupine was rattling its quills in warning. Eos's grotesque head rolled towards him and her eyes focused upon his face. Her features were ravaged so no trace of her beauty remained. Her eyes were deep, dark pits. Her lips had retracted to expose her teeth, like those of a skull. Her features were ineffably ugly, the true mirror of her twisted soul. She spoke in a croak, harsh as the cawing of carrion crows: 'I shall persist,' she said.
He reeled back at the rankness of her breath, then braced himself and looked steadily into her eyes: 'The Lie will always persist, but so will the Truth. There will never be an end to the struggle,' he replied.
She closed her eyes and spoke no more. Only her breathing rumbled in her throat.
Taita found his cloak, then slipped through the green chamber into the passage that led to the outer air. As he came out into her secret garden, the sunlight was striking the top of the cliff but it left the depths of the crater in shadow. He looked around carefully for any evidence of Eos's trogs, searching for their auras, but there was none.
He knew that, with her destruction, they had been deprived of a guiding intelligence. They had crept mindlessly into the tunnels and passages of the mountain to die.
The air was cold and clean. He breathed it deeply with relief, washing the stench of Eos from his lungs as he went to the pavilion beside the
L
black pool. He took his seat on the bench where he had sat with her when she was still young and beautiful. He pulled the leather cloak round his shoulders. He expected to find himself exhausted and wasted by his ordeal but elation filled his being. He felt strong and indefatigable.
At first this bewildered him, until he understood that he was charged with the power and energy he had taken from the witch. His mind soared and expanded as he began to explore the mountainous accumulations of knowledge and experience that now filled him. He could look back over the millennium that Eos had existed, back to the beginning time.
Every detail was fresh. He was able to fathom her lusts and desires as though they were his own. He was amazed by the depths of her cruelty and depravity. He had not understood the nature of true and utter evil until now when it had been clearly revealed to him. There was so much to learn from her that he knew it would take him a natural lifetime to examine even a small part of it.
The knowledge was seductive in a vile and loathsome way, and he knew at once that he must condition himself to resist its addictive fascination, lest it corrupt him too. There was dire danger that the grasp of so much evil might turn him into a monster of her like. He was humbled by the thought that the cognizance he had wrested from the witch, added to his own arsenal, had made him now the most powerful man on earth.
He rallied his powers and began to lock away the vast body of foul matter in the deep warehouses of his memory, so that he would not be haunted and sullied by it but could retrieve any part as he required it.
In addition to the evil, he had now in his possession an equal or greater quantity of wholesome learning which might be infinitely beneficial to himself and humanity. He had taken from her the keys to the natural mysteries of ocean, earth and heaven; of life and death; of destmction and regeneration. All this he held in the forefront of his mind where he could explore and master it.
The sun had set and night had passed before he had assembled and rearranged all this in his mind. Only then was he conscious of his creature needs: he had not eaten for days, and although he had drunk, he was thirsty. He now knew the layout of the witch's lair as if he had lived in it for as long as she had. He left the crater and went back into the rocky warren, finding his way unerringly into the storerooms, pantries and kitchens from which the trogs had served Eos. He ate sparingly of the best fruits and cheeses and drank a cup of wine. Then, refreshed, he
returned to the pavilion. Now his foremost concern was to make contact with Fenn.
He composed himself and made his first cast across the ether, calling to her clearly and openly. At once he
