In her room, Domaris lay as one lifeless, too weak even to struggle. Garments and bed-linen alike were stained with blood. Two Grey-robes stood, one on either side of the bed; there was no one else in the room, not even the saving presence of a slave-woman. Later, Cadamiri was to learn that Elis had stubbornly remained with her cousin most of the day, defying Karahama's reported threats and doing her ineffectual best—but the air of authority with which the Grey-robes had presented themselves had misled her; she had been persuaded, at last, to leave Domaris to them.
One of the Grey-robes turned as the Guardian entered. "Ah, Cadamiri," he said, "I fear you come too late."
Cadamiri's blood turned to icy water. These men were not Healers and never had been, but Magicians—Nadastor and his disciple Har-Maen. Clenching his teeth on angry words, Cadamiri walked to the bed. After a brief examination he straightened, appalled. "Clumsy butchers!" he shouted. "If this woman dies, I will have you strangled for murder—and if she lives, for torture!"
Nadastor bowed smoothly. "She will not die—yet," he murmured. "And as for your threats . . ."
Cadamiri wrenched open the door and summoned the escort of Priests. "Take these—these filthy sorcerers!" he commanded, in a voice hardly recognizable as his own. The two Magicians allowed themselves to be led from the room without protest, and Cadamiri, through half-clenched teeth, called after them, "Do not think you will escape justice! I will have your hands struck off at the wrists and you will be scourged naked from the Temple like the dogs you are! May you rot in leprosy!"
Abruptly Har-Maen swayed and crumpled. Then Nadastor too reeled and fell into the arms of his captor. The white-robed Priests jumped away from them and made the Holy Sign frantically, while Cadamiri could only stare, wondering if he were going mad.
The two Grey-robed figures rising from the floor, meek and blank-eyed in oddly-shrunken robes, were—not Har-Maen and Nadastor, but two young Healers whom Cadamiri himself had trained. They stared about them, dumb and smitten with terror, and quite obviously oblivious to everything that had happened.
Illusion! Cadamiri clenched his fists against a flood of dread. Great Gods, help us all! He gazed helplessly at the quivering, confused young novice-Healers, controlling himself with the greatest effort of his life. At last he said hoarsely, "I have no time to deal with—with this, now. Take them and guard them carefully until I . . ." His voice faltered and failed. "Go! Go!" he managed to say. "Take them out of my sight!"
Almost slamming the door shut, Cadamiri went again to bend over Domaris, baffled and desolate. His sister Guardian had indeed been cruelly treated by—by devils of Illusion! With a further effort, he put rage and sadness both aside, concentrating on the abused woman who lay before him. It was certainly too late to save the baby—and Domaris herself was in the final stage of exhaustion: the convulsive spasms tearing at her were so weak it seemed her body no longer had the strength even to reject the burden of death.
Her eyes fluttered open. "Cadamiri?"
"Hush, my sister," he said in a rough, kindly voice. "Do not try to talk."
"I must—Deoris—the Crypt . . ." Twisting spasmodically, she dragged her hands free of the Guardian's; but so exhausted was she that her eyes dropped shut again on the tears that welled from them, and she slept for a moment. Cadamiri's expression was soft with pity; he could understand, as not even Rajasta would have. This, from infancy, was every Temple woman's ultimate nightmare of obscene humiliation—that a man might approach a woman in labor. When Elis had been bullied into leaving her, her mind—sick and tormented—had receded into some depth of shame and hurt where no one could reach or follow her. Cadamiri's kindness was little better than the obscene brutality of the sorcerers.
When it was clear that there was no more that he could do, Cadamiri went to the inner door and quietly beckoned Arvath to approach. "Speak to her," he suggested gently. It was a desperate measure—if her husband could not reach her, probably no one could.
Arvath's face was pinched and pallid. He had waited, wracked by fear and trembling, most of the day, seeing no one save Mother Ysouda, who hovered about him for a time, weeping. From her he had learned for the first time of the dangers Domaris had deliberately faced; it had made him feel guilty and confused, but he forgot it all as he bent over his wife.
"Domaris—beloved—"
The familiar, loving voice brought Domaris back for a moment—but not to recognition. Agony and shame had loosed her hold on reason. Her eyes opened, the pupils so widely distended that they looked black and blind, and her bitten-bloody lips curved in the old, sweet smile.
"Micon!" she breathed. "Micon!" Her eyelids fluttered shut again and she slept, smiling.
Arvath leaped away with a curse. In that instant, the last remnant of his love died, and something cruel and terrible took its place.
Cadamiri, sensing some of this, caught restrainingly at his sleeve. "Peace, my brother," he implored. "The girl is delirious—she is not here at all."
"Observant, aren't you?" Arvath snarled. "Damn you, let me go!" Savagely, he shook off Cadamiri's hands and, with another frightful curse, went from the room.
Rajasta, still standing in the courtyard, unable to force himself to go, whirled around with instant alertness as Arvath reeled staggering out of the building.
"Arvath! Is Domaris . . . ?"
"Domaris be damned forever," the young Priest said between his teeth, "and you too!" He tried to thrust his way past Rajasta, too, as he had Cadamiri; but the old man was strong, and determined.
"You are overwrought or drunken, my son!" said Rajasta sorrowfully. "Speak not so bitterly! Domaris has done a brave thing, and paid with her child's life—and her own may be demanded before this is over!"
"And glad she was," said Arvath, very low, "to be free of my child!"
"Arvath!" Rajasta's grip loosed on the younger Priest as shock whitened his face. "Arvath! She is your wife!"
With a furious laugh, he pulled free of Rajasta. "My wife? Never! Only harlot to that Atlantean bastard who has been held up all my life as a model for my virtue! Damn them both and you too! I swear—but that you are just a stupid old man . . ." Arvath let his menacing fist fall to his side, turned, and in an uncontrollable spasm of retching, was violently sick on the pavement.
Rajasta sprang to him, murmuring, "My son!"
Arvath, fighting to master himself, thrust the Guardian away. "Always forgiving!" he shouted, "Ever compassionate!" He stumbled to his feet and shook his fist at Rajasta. "I spit on thee—on Domaris—and on the Temple!" he cried out in a breaking falsetto—and, elbowing Rajasta savagely aside, rushed away, into the gathering darkness.
II
Cadamiri turned to see a tall and emaciated form in a grey, shroud-like garment, standing a little distance from him. The door was still quivering in its frame from Arvath's departure; nothing had stirred.
Cadamiri's composure, for the second time that day, deserted him. "What—how did you get in here?" he demanded.
The grey figure raised a narrow hand to push aside the veil, revealing the haggard face and blazing eyes of the woman Adept Maleina. In her deep, vibrant voice she murmured, "I have come to aid you."
"You Grey-robe butchers have done enough already!" Cadamiri shouted. "Now leave this poor girl to die in peace!"
Maleina's eyes looked shrunken and sad then. "I have no right to resent that," she said. "But thou art Guardian, Cadamiri. Judge by what you know of good and of evil. I am no sorceress; I am Magician and Adept!" She stretched her empty, gaunt hand toward him, palm upward—and as Cadamiri stared, the words died in his throat; within her palm shone the sign he could not mistake, and Cadamiri bent in reverence.
Scornfully, Maleina gestured him to rise. "I have not forgotten that Deoris was punished because she aided one no priestess might dare to touch! I am—hardly a woman, now; but I have served Caratra, and my skill is not small. More, I hate Riveda! He, and worse, what he has done! Now stand aside."
Domaris la
y as if life had already left her—but as Maleina's gaunt, bony hands moved on her body, a little voiceless cry escaped her exhausted lips. The woman Adept paid no more heed to Cadamiri, but murmured, musingly, "I like not what I must do." Her shoulders straightened, and she raised both hands high; her low, resonant voice shook the room.
"Isarma!"
Not for nothing were true names kept sacred and secret; the intonation and vibration of her Temple name penetrated even to Domaris's withdrawn senses, and she heard, though reluctantly.
"Who?" she whispered.
"I am a woman and thy sister," Maleina said, with gentle authority, calming her with a hand on the sensitive centre of the brow chakra. Abruptly she turned to Cadamiri.
"The soul lives in her again," she said. "Believe me, I do no more than I must, but now she will fight me—you must help me, even if it seems fearful to you."
Domaris, all restraint gone, roused up screaming, in the pure animal instinct for survival, as Maleina touched her; Maleina gestured, and Cadamiri flung his full weight to hold the struggling woman motionless. Then there was a convulsive cry from Domaris; Cadamiri felt her go limp and mercifully unconscious under his hands.
With an expression of horror, Maleina caught up a linen cloth and wrapped it around the terribly torn thing she held. Cadamiri shuddered; and Maleina turned to him a sombre gaze.
"Believe me, I did not kill," she said. "I only freed her of . . ."
"Of certain death," Cadamiri said weakly. "I know. I would not have—dared."
"I learned that for a cause less worthy," said Maleina, and the old woman's eyes were wet as she looked down at the unconscious form of Domaris.
Gently she bent and straightened the younger woman's limbs, laid a fresh coverlet over her.
"She will live," said Maleina. "This—" she covered the body of the dead, mutilated child. "Say no word about who has done this."
Cadamiri shivered and said, "So be it."
Without moving, she was gone; and only a shaft of sunlight moved where the Adept had stood a moment before. Cadamiri clutched at the foot of the bed, afraid that for all his training he would fall in a faint. After a moment he steadied himself and made ready to bear the news to Rajasta; that Domaris was alive and that Arvath's child was dead.
Chapter Six
THE PRICE
I
They had allowed Demira to listen to the testimony of Deoris, wrung from her partially under hypnosis, partially under the knowledge that her sworn word could not be violated without karmic effect that would spread over centuries. Riveda, too, had answered all questions truthfully—and with contempt. The others had taken refuge in useless lies.
All this Demira endured calmly enough—but when she heard who had fathered her child, she screamed out between the words, "No! No, no, no . . ."
"Silence!" Ragamon commanded, and his gaze transfixed the shrieking child as he adjured solemnly. "This testimony shall bear no weight. I find no record of this child's parentage, nor any grounds save hearsay for believing that she is daughter to any man. We need no charges of incest!"
Maleina caught Demira in her arms, pressing the golden head to her shoulder, holding the girl close, with an agonized, protective love. The look on the woman's face might have belonged to a sorrowing angel—or an avenging demon.
Her eyes rested on Riveda, seeming to burn out of her dark, gaunt face, and she spoke as if her voice came from a tomb. "Riveda! If the Gods meted justice, you would lie in this child's place!"
But Demira pulled madly away from her restraining hands and ran screaming from the Hall of Judgment.
All that day they sought her. It was Karahama who, toward nightfall, found the girl in the innermost sanctuary of the Temple of the Mother. Demira had hanged herself from one of the crossbeams, a blue bridal girdle knotted about her neck, her slight distorted body swaying horribly as if to reprove the Goddess who had denied her, the mother who had forsworn her, the Temple that had never allowed her to know life. . . .
Chapter Seven
THE DEATH CUP
I
Silence . . . and the beating of her heart . . . and the dripping of water as it trickled, drop by slow drop, out of the stone onto the damp rock floor. Deoris stole through the black stillness, calling almost in a whisper, "Riveda!" The vaulted roof cast the name back, hollow and guttural echoes: "Riveda . . . veda . . . veda . . . eda . . . da. . . ."
Deoris shivered, her wide eyes searching the darkness fearfully. Where have they taken him?
As her sight gradually became accustomed to the gloom, she discerned a pale and narrow chink of light—and, almost at her feet, the heavy sprawled form of a man.
Riveda! Deoris fell to her knees.
He lay so desperately still, breathing as if drugged. The heavy chains about his body forced him backward, strained and unnaturally cramped . . . Abruptly the prisoner came awake, his hands groping in the darkness.
"Deoris," he said, almost wonderingly, and stirred with a metallic rasp of chains. She took his seeking hands in hers, pressing her lips to the wrists chafed raw by the cold iron. Riveda fumbled to touch her face. "Have they—they have not imprisoned you too, child?"
"No," she whispered.
Riveda struggled to sit up, then sighed and gave it up. "I cannot," he acknowledged wearily. "These chains are heavy—and cold!"
In horror, Deoris realized that he was literally weighed down with bronze chains that enlaced his body, fettering hands and feet close to the floor so that he could not even sit upright—his giant strength oppressed so easily! But how they must fear him!
He smiled, a gaunt, hollow-eyed grimace in the darkness. "They have even bound my hands lest I weave a spell to free myself! The half-witted, superstitious cowards," he muttered, "knowing nothing of magic—they are afraid of what no living man could accomplish!" He chuckled. "I suppose I could, possibly, bespeak the fetters off my wrists—if I wanted to bring the dungeon down on top of me!"
Awkwardly, because of the weight of the chains and the clumsiness of her own swelling body, Deoris got her arms half-way around him and held him, as closely as she could, his head softly pillowed on her thighs.
"How long have I been here, Deoris?"
"Seven days," she whispered.
He stirred with irritation at the realization that she was crying softly. "Oh, stop it!" he commanded. "I suppose I am to die—and I can stand that—but I will not have you snivelling over me!" Yet his hand, gently resting upon hers, belied the anger in his voice.
"Somehow," he mused, after a little time had passed, "I have always thought my home was—out there in the dark, somewhere." The words dropped, quiet and calm, through the intermittent drip-dripping of the subterranean waters. "Many years ago, when I was young, I saw a fire, and what looked like death—and beyond that, in the dark places, something . . . or some One, who knew me. Shall I at last find my way back to that wonderworld of Night?" He lay quiet in her arms for many minutes, smiling. "Strange," he said at last, "that after all I have done, my one act of mercy condemns me to death—that I made certain Larmin, with his tainted blood, grew not to manhood—complete."
Suddenly Deoris was angry. "Who were you to judge?" she flared at him.
"I judged—because I had the power to decide."
"Is there no right beyond power?" Deoris asked bitterly.
Riveda's smile was wry now. "None, Deoris. None."
Hot rebellion overflowed in Deoris, and the right of her own unborn child stirred in her. "You yourself fathered Larmin, and insured that taint its further right! And what of Demira? What of the child you, of your own free will, begot on me? Would you show that child the same mercy?"
"There were—things I did not know, when I begot Larmin." In the darkness she could not see the full grimness of the smile lurking behind Riveda's words. "To your child, I fear I show only the mercy of leaving it fatherless!" And suddenly he raised up in another fit of raving, heretical blasphemies, straining like a mad beast at his chains
; battering Deoris away from him, he shouted violently until his voice failed and, gasping hoarsely, he fell with a metallic clamor of chains.
Deoris pulled the spent man into her arms, and he did not move. Silence stole toward them on dim feet, while the crack of light crept slowly across her face and lent its glow at last to Riveda's rough-hewn, sleeping face. Heavy, abandoned sleep enfolded him, a sleep that seemed to clasp fingers with death. Time had run down; Deoris, kneeling in the darkness, could feel the sluggish beating of its pulse in the water that dripped crisply, drearily, eroding a deep channel through her heart, that flowed with brooding silence . . .