What to do but plunge into a lie? “I learned something from-from the manuscript. It was too powerful, too far advanced in sorcery, for a student of my Circle.”
The lines of worry softened around her lips. “By your expression, it was very advanced indeed, my love! Your face-no great beauty that it is-was like a temple gargoyle.”
He bent to pick up the shattered jug, holding it carefully to save whatever wine was still inside.
“I am only a grammarian. Sometimes a mastery of nouns and verbs does not qualify one to cope with what those words denote.” He had now regained full control. He said, “Come, great lady, speak no more of my dry and dusty work. All will wait until tomorrow. We shall eat and drink, and then, mayhap, I shall show you some other magic more appealing to our liking.”
They lay together upon his sleeping mat, but the acts of love did not come easily to him. Every time he closed his eyes he saw again those terrible visions of ancient death.
At length she rose, nude and supple in the lamplight, and glided over to the table. Before he could intervene she had picked up the white metal sphere. It came apart in her hands, and she made a surprised sound.
“It breaks in two! Oh, I hope I have not ruined it, Harsan!”
He saw from her face that she had received no message from the sphere. He made a reassuring gesture, and she put it down to examine the silvery rod. The manuscripts she did not touch, for it was plain that they had been carefully arrayed upon the table, ready for final ordering. She came back to him, knelt, and rubbed a rounded breast against his shoulder.
“You were holding that globe when I entered, Harsan. Did your manuscripts tell you what it is?”
Was she prying now, or just curious?
“Ah-not entirely.” That much was true. “The powers of the ancients are not so easily unravelled.”
She stretched around to kiss him, and desire for her rekindled. “Oh, Harsan, this thing that you have learned- it will be worth a great Labour of Reverence, will it not? They will initiate you into some high Circle! Will they give you money as well?” Delightful fingers sketched caresses along his body. “If so, then you could pay compensation to my clan for me. Lord Retlan cares little about me, and he would let me go. I have lands of my own near Tumissa, and we could go there and live.” This was the first Harsan had heard of her personal lands, but it was not unlikely. She took his face between her palms. “Oh, my love, let me help you! I long to see you out of this dingy place. Together, we-”
There was a noise in the corridor beyond the anteroom.
They both leaped apart. Harsan snatched up his kilt, and Eyil her street-cloak.
“The guards,” he began.
But it was not the guards. The door opened a crack, and a hand came through, open and reaching, as though feeling for the latch.
Then, to Harsan’s thunderstruck surprise, the hand slid down the edge of the door. The fingers clutched spasmodically and lay inert upon the flagstones.
He flung the door wide. A figure huddled there upon the threshold. It wore neither the grey of Thumis nor the blue armour of the guards.
A blue and gold headdress rolled at his feet.
“Reshmu! Gutenu!” he shouted. There was something terribly wrong here.
He shot a swift glance up the corridor but saw no one. Then he bent and turned the body over.
He looked down into the sightless eyes of Kurrune the Messenger.
A bit of parchment protruded from the dead hand. Automatically Harsan retrieved it, opened it. His eyes refused to focus upon the words written there. He was stunned. Who had done this thing? Who dared to violate the temple? Where were the guards?
He threw a wild look back at Eyil. She stood against the far wall of the inner chamber, wide-eyed, her cloak crumpled about her naked shoulders.
A weapon. He wanted a weapon. His eye fell upon the silvery metal rod. Better that than nothing. He snatched it up.
Now he heard a step in the corridor outside. A figure lurched toward him from the shadows, and he backed away. Then came a surge of relief, for it was the older guard, dark-visaged Gutenu.
Yet there was something amiss with him. He seemed to drag himself along the wall as though swimming against an invisible current. Wetness trickled from his hand and left a splotchy trail upon the stones. Blood? No, it was transparent. Water-?
The man staggered forward, looking all the while at Harsan with huge, wondering eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but pale, frothy, pink fluid gushed from it instead. Then he seemed to collapse inward upon himself, as a Hmelu — bladder filled with water is pricked by children. His features deflated, wrinkled, shrivelled…
Gutenu fell, still spewing liquid. He lay still.
Eyil screamed and pointed. Harsan looked down at the body of Kurrune beneath his feet to see the man’s mouth slowly opening. Perhaps the Messenger still lived? Then his tongue protruded.-But no, that was no tongue, for it glistened brown and waved this way and that, questing, in the air.
It was a great worm!
Another appeared in the man’s eye-socket, pushing the staring eye aside as though it were a stopper in a bottle. Pustules burst forth here and there upon his limbs, and other ugly, blind heads emerged. The body seemed to dance with a macabre life of its own as one and then another flat, glutinous creature wriggled forth to lie gorged and squirming upon the flagging.
Harsan gave a wordless cry and leaped back. His teeth were clenched to keep them from chattering, and the silver rod shook in his fingers.
Now he saw another terrible thing. The body of Gutenu lay sprawled where it had fallen, but all of the liquid from it had run together into a viscous pool. Before his horrified eyes this seemed to coagulate, congeal, and rise up into thin, reaching tentacles of translucent, pink-dripping water.
He slammed the door of the antechamber, smashed with the rod at a slimy brown worm which had somehow got through, rushed back into the inner room, and shut the door of that as well. The work table he dragged over as reinforcement. Eyil huddled terrified in the comer.
He shouted, hoping that the little ducts that carried away the lamp smoke would bring his voice to those in the temple above. He knew even as he did so that this was useless. The place was as solid as a tomb.
He heard the outer door go. Then the inner door bulged inward as something ponderous thudded against it. A sheen of water seeped beneath, and a liquescent tentacle felt along the wall. Harsan seized one of the lamps, dashed its oil down upon the floor matting, and set it ablaze with the lamp wick. The tentacle withdrew. The door bulged in again, splintering and screeching.
The fire crackled along the doorsill, and for a moment there was silence. Eyil stared at him with fear-wide eyes. Nothing moved.
Then the door bowed in again with an explosive crack. Harsan held the table against it with all his strength, but his feet slipped backwards as inexorably as if he pitted himself against the rising of the sun.
The door gave at last. The ancient hingeplates screamed and then snapped off. The thick Tiu — wood panel crunched in against the table.
“Eyil-help me! Help me hold the table!” Her strength would add but little, yet what else was there to do?
“Give them the relics, Harsan! The relics! That is what they seek-otherwise it is our lives!”
He flashed her a dark look. “How do you know what ‘they’ seek?”
“There is no time for that now. Believe only that this is no sending of mine! Give them what they desire or we are dead!”
Any reply was cut short. The top of the door leaned in, and then the whole panel was dragged backward out of its frame. The table, Harsan and Eyil behind it, was sent skidding across the room.
They looked upon a creature of nightmare.
It was tall and manlike, but never had it been spawned by humankind. Rolls of mottled, pasty-white skin hung about its arms in doughy folds. The head was round, hairless, marked with blotches and nodules. Two huge, saucer-like eyes glared from beneath deep ridges of waxy-pale cartilage, and lappets of tissue hung down its cheeks like curtains of oily pudding. Instead of a nose, a greyish-white beak opened and closed in the middle of the thing’s face, emitting a stench of nauseous decay.
