alone.
Hele’a stood for a moment in the entrance, blinking almost apologetically and looking from the two groups of priests to Prince Dhich’une. He seemed not to see Harsan or Eyil, but moved slowly forward past them all to face the mouth of the smaller tunnel in the opposite wall.
“He knows and accepts his fate,” Vridekka murmured. “He cannot escape, and suicide or cowardice would give him no dignity in the afterlife. He has chosen the ‘Way of Nchel,’ the Yan Koryani path of resignation to an inexorable doom. He will let us do with him as we will.”
Hele’a now removed his simple tunic, folded it beside him on the floor. Then he knelt and unlaced his high boots, undid the waistband of his kilt, and finally stood naked before them, a stooped, ugly, bandy-legged, ordinary little man of middle years.
Harsan wondered how he could ever have feared him.
Two of the priests arose and laid the Ghatoni down upon his back, spread his limbs, and bound them apart to copper stanchions on the threshold before the farther tunnel. Hele’a’s eyes never left Prince Dhich’une’s face, and when the hierophants had finished their task, he spoke:
“Though I served Yan Kor-for reasons that you may not comprehend-yet never did I any harm to your purposes, mighty Prince.”
“In my game there are no counters which are both white and black.”
“When the unreality of games is laid aside, it can be seen that loyalty, like life and death themselves, is no one simple thing. Our Skeins are complex, of more than just one hue. What you do will have repercussions-a blow begets a blow in return…”
Prince Dhich’une said no more but stooped and rearranged certain ceremonial objects before him upon the floor. The priests along the wall saw to their lanterns. Those who knelt swayed uneasily, shapeless shadows in their heavy robes. Harsan glanced at Eyil and saw that her lips were compressed as- though with pain. He contrived to reach out and take her hand in his, for which she threw him a look that was half of gratitude and half of terror.
The distant note of the Tunkul — gong trembled through the chamber, the last sobbing breath of a dying man.
Prince Dhich’une stirred now. He raised his hands and cried words in a language that Harsan did not know: great, rolling, hollow syllables that reverberated like the strokes of a drum. The kneeling priests took up the litany in a lower key, almost a whisper, and the air thickened with a susurrus of sound, a rising, falling, gently undulating ripple of eery voices.
The amber lantemlight seemed to dim, the air to flow and pulse. Hovering shadows crept down from the walls and twined before them upon the floor. The Prince’s figure grew indistinct, veiled in a sepia haze, and the skull faces of the priests, too, were lost in the gloom, save for a line of bone-white jaw here, a staring black eye-socket there. Harsan felt a pressure upon his eardrums, a soundless presence, a ponderous, purposeful coming forth…
To his horror he realised that his own heart now pounded in time to the rhythmic cadence of the chant! Worse, he understood the words, though he knew that he had never heard that archaic, alien tongue before!
“Worm Lord, Nighted One, Eater at the Tomb’s Repast,
Come forth, Lord, rejoice! Take sustenance from us who live!
Bright wings on high, pearl-dark sea; these are not Thine;
Mountain peak, forest vale; these are not Thy dwelling;
All return, all descend; each comes to heed Thy call!
What has lived must die; what has died is Thine
Crypt-Lord of the encompassing, all-enfolding dark…”
Something moved there, within the farther tunnel. The room reeked with the suffocating odour of moist earth, the cloying fragrances of dissolution.
It was round and hollow, a black circle the thickness of a man’s waist. It grew, and a faint, oily slithering came to Harsan’s ears. The front edges of the thing were soft and pulpy, a mottled, ichor-gleaming brown-grey; they trembled in the tenebrous ochre light. It quested forward, feeling its way along the mucid walls of the passage.
Harsan looked upon the mouth of a great, blind worm.
Something else came squeezing up out of the shaft: another black oval, another eager mouth. And then another.
More of the worm-demon emerged into the chamber, streaked ashen and black and pallid white, delicately bristling cilia behind the shapeless lips wriggling in a dance of their own. The second heard curved up and swung toward the priests along the wall. Prince Dhich’une raised a globe of chiselled copper before it, and it withdrew, the soft mouth making tremulous sucking, gulping motions in the air.
The first head arced down to hover over Hele’a. Wetness dribbled from the worm-mouth to splatter upon the stones by the Ghatoni’s shoulder. There this spittle hissed and smoked and fumed like the deadly fluids of the alchemists. A drop of the liquid clung to Hele’a’s cheek, and Harsan saw the flesh there turn grey, then black, then begin to deliquesce and slough away.
Hele’a shrieked.
More of the slime drooled from the other heads-there were six of them now-viscous gobbets splashing upon the floor. An acrid stench arose, as of burning corpses, but when the liquid had boiled away no trace was left.
A thick drop fell full upon Hele’a’s breast and clung there, sizzling. He yelled another wordless cry, his body bucking and writhing against its bonds. Black liquefaction spread over his skin. His feet hammered the rough stone again and again and again, making the strangely gelid air shiver with the agony of his sacrifice.
One of the worm-heads bowed in horrid imitation of courtly grace. It touched the prisoner’s outstretched arm. There it fastened, pulsated, humped, and disgorged seething, turgid fluid upon the floor. Another mouth found Hele’a’s face, and the bulging, terror-glazed eyes disappeared forever beneath it. The third head sank down upon the Ghatoni’s abdomen. His body jerked, kicked, and then lay still. A stink of burst entrails filled the room, but then this too was gone, replaced by mingled stench of burning and corruption.
Now Harsan observed another terrible thing. Prince Dhich’une stood rigid before the worm-demon, arms outspread and head thrown back as if to receive the benediction of a master. As he watched, the Prince seemed to flicker, to flow, to shift from white-daubed skuil-face to a softer form: a satuminely handsome youth of delicately epicene features, a straight and well-modelled nose, a proud jaw, sallow cheeks, lips which were both full and sensual, a high rounded forehead. Then the image altered again; it became a looming, mighty worm, its gaping mouth swaying out from human shoulders to join in sucking sustenance from the wretched victim on the floor. All three of these seemings mingled and blurred and ran together, as a painter mixes pigments upon a palette, until at last Harsan’s eyes and brain could bear no more, and he wrenched his gaze away.
If the reality of Prince Dhich’une were that slender, studious-appearing youth, then the dry, brown stick-figure he and Eyil knew and this ghastly worm-thing were both aspects, signs of servitude, laid upon the Prince by his god.
Dhich’une had paid most dearly, it would seem, for the immortality he sought.
The taste of vomit and of blood from bitten lips brought Harsan back to himself. Eyil slumped against him, her face buried in his shoulder. He did not know whether she was conscious or not-he hoped not. Vridekka’s teeth were clenched, and the ritual priests held their lanterns with trembling fingers.
Prince Dhich’une alone appeared unmoved. His chanting rose to a final high note and then ceased. He raised the coppery globe again before the twining heads, then a staff of black wood, making convoluted gestures in the air. Reluctantly, affectionately, as a lover leaves his beloved, the worm-thing drew in upon itself, coiled, retreated. There was an ugly, glutinous, sucking sound as it sank back down into its lair.
Two hands and two feet still lay in the shackles upon the threshold, but these ended in blackened, grisly stumps. There was no body between them.
Eyil’s knees gave way, and she would have crumpled to the floor had it not been for Harsan’s supporting arms.
Prince Dhich’une motioned for one of the ritual priests to aid Harsan in carrying Eyil back up the passageway. He turned to depart, and the hierophants and the others followed.
