II
Sometimes Deoris wondered why she had never had even the hope of a child by Riveda. She asked him why more than once. His answer was sometimes derisive laughter, or a flare of exasperated annoyance, occasionally a silent caress and a distant smile.
She was almost nineteen when his insistence on ritual gesture, sound, and intonation, grew exacting—almost fanatical. He had re-trained her voice himself, until it had tremendous range and an incredible flexibility; and Deoris was beginning, now, to grasp something of the significance and power of sound: words that stirred sleeping consciousness, gestures that wakened dormant senses and memories ...
One night, toward the low end of the year, he brought her to the Grey Temple. The room lay deserted beneath its cold light, the grayness burning dimly like frost around the stone walls and floors. The air was flat and fresh and still, soundless and insulated from reality. At their heels the chela Reio-ta crept, a voiceless ghost in his grey robes, his yellow face a corpse-like mask in the icy light. Deoris, shivering in thin saffron veils, crouched behind a pillar, listening fearfully to Riveda's terse, incisive commands. His voice had dropped from tenor to resonant baritone, and Deoris knew and recognized this as the first storm-warning of the hurricane loose in his soul.
Now he turned to Deoris, and placed between her trembling hands a round, silvery sphere in which coiled lights moved sluggishly. He cupped the fingers of her left hand around it, and motioned her to her place within the mosaicked sign cut into the floor of the Temple. In his own hand was a silvered metal rod; he extended it toward the chela, but at its touch Reio-ta made a curious, inarticulate sound, and his hand, outstretched to receive it, jerked convulsively and refused to take the thing, as if his hand bore no relation to its owner's will. Riveda, with an exasperated shrug, retained it, motioning the chela to the third position.
They were standing by then in a precise triangle, Deoris with the shining sphere cradled in her raised hand, the chela braced defensively as if he held an uplifted sword. There was something defensive in Riveda's own attitude; he was not sure of his own motives. It was partly curiosity that had led him to this trial, but mainly a desire to test his own powers, and those of this girl he had trained—and those of the stranger, whose mind was still a closed book to Riveda.
With a slight shrug, the Adept shifted his own position somewhat, completing a certain pattern of space between them ... instantly he felt an almost electric tension spring into being. Deoris moved the sphere a very little; the chela altered the position of only one hand.
The patterned triangle was complete!
Deoris began a low crooning, a chant, less sung than intoned, less intoned than spoken, but musical, rising and falling in rhythmic cadences. At the first note of the chant, the chela sprang to life. A start of recognition leaped in his eyes, although he did not move the fraction of an inch.
The chant went into a weird minor melody; stopped. Deoris bent her head and slowly, with a beautiful grace and economy of motion, her balanced gestures betraying her arduous practices, sank to her knees, raising the crystal sphere between her hands. Riveda elevated the rod ... and the chela bent forward, automatic gestures animating his hands, so slowly, like something learned in childhood and forgotten.
The pattern of figures and sound altered subtly; changed. Amber lights and shadows drifted in the crystal sphere.
Riveda began to intone long phrases that rose and fell with a sonorous, pulsating rhythm; Deoris added her voice in subtle counterpoint. The chela, his eyes aware and alert for the first time, his motions automatic, like the jerky gestures of a puppet, was still silent. Riveda, tautly concentrated on his own part in the ritual, flickered only the corner of a glance at him.
Would he remember enough? Would the stimulus of the familiar ritual—and that it was familiar to him, the Adept had no doubts—be sufficient to waken what was dormant in the chela's memory? Riveda was gambling that Reio-ta actually possessed the secret.
The electric tension grew, throbbed with the resonance of sound in the high and vaulted archway overhead. The sphere glowed, became nearly transparent at the surface to reveal the play of coiled and jagged flickers of color; darkened; glowed again.
The chela's lips opened. He wet them, convulsively, his eyes haunted prisoners in the waxen face. Then he was chanting too, in a hoarse and gasping voice, as if his very brain trembled with the effort, rocking in its cage of bone.
No, Deoris reflected secretly, with the scrap of her consciousness not entirely submerged in the ceremonial, this rite is not new to him.
Riveda had gambled, and won. Two parts of this ritual were common knowledge, known to all; but Reio-ta knew the third and hidden part, which made it an invocation of potent power. Knew it—and, forced by Riveda's dominant will and the stimulus of the familiar chant on his beclouded mind, was using it—openly!
Deoris felt a little tingle of exultation. They had broken through an ancient wall of secrecy, they were hearing and witnessing what no one but the highest Initiates of a certain almost legendary secret sect had ever seen or heard—and then only under the most solemn pledges of silence until death!
She felt the magical tension deepen, felt her body prickling with it and her mind being wedged open to accept it. The chela's voice and movements were clearer now, as memory flooded back into his mind and body. The chela dominated now: his voice was clear and precise, his gestures assured, perfect. Behind the mask of his face his eyes lived and burned. The chant rushed on, bearing Deoris and Riveda along on its crest like two straws in a seething torrent.
Lightning flickered within the sphere; flamed out from the rod Riveda held. A vibrant force throbbed between the triangled bodies, an almost visible pulsing of power that brightened, darkened, spasmodically. Lightning flared above them; thunder snapped the air apart in a tremendous crashing.
Riveda's body arched backward, rigid as a pillar, and sudden terror flooded through Deoris. The chela was being forced to do this—this secret and sacred thing! And for what? It was sacrilege—it was black blasphemy—somehow it must be stopped! Somehow she must stop it—but it was no longer in her power even to stop herself. Her voice disobeyed her, her body was frozen, the restless sweep of tyrant power bore them all along.
The unbearable chanting slowly deepened to a single long Word—a Word no one throat could encompass, a Word needing three blended voices to transform it from a harmless grouping of syllables into a dynamic rhythm of space-twisting power. Deoris felt it on her tongue, felt it tearing at her throat, vibrating the bones of her skull as if to tear them to scattering atoms ...
Red-hot fire lashed out with lightning shock. White whips of flame splayed out as the Word thundered on, and on, and on ... Deoris shrieked in blind anguish and pitched forward, writhing. Riveda leaped forward, snatching her to him with a ferocious protectiveness; but the rod clung to his fingers, twisting with a life of its own, as if it had grown to the flesh there. The pattern was broken, but the fire played on about them, pallid, searing, uncontrollable; a potent spell unleashed only to turn on its blasphemers.
The chela, frozenly, was sinking, as if forced down by intense pressure. His waxen face convulsed as his knees buckled beneath him, and then he jumped forward, clutching at Deoris. With a savage yell, Riveda lashed out with the rod to ward him away, but with the sudden strength of a madman, Reio-ta struck the Adept hard in the face, narrowly avoiding the crackling nimbus of the rod. Riveda fell back, half-conscious; and Reio-ta, moving through the darting lights and flames as if they were no more than reflections in a glass, caught Deoris's chewed hands in his own and tore the sphere from them. Then, turning, he gave the staggering Riveda another swift blow and wrenched the rod from him, and with a single long, low, keening cry, struck rod and sphere together, then wrenched them apart and flung them viciously into separate ends of the room.