In the days that followed they made steady progress along the route of Haslil through regions now inhabited by worshippers. While they made no effort to conceal themselves—a sure way to rouse suspicions—neither did they make themselves too evident. All towns were first scouted by Basdon, then by-passed. The nights were spent in the open, even on those few occasions when a wayside inn was available.
Meanwhile, Eanna lengthened, slimmed, and blossomed into a beauty beyond Basdon's wildest desires. The memory of the unattainable Belissa bothered him no more, because beside him rode a girl whose dewy freshness more than equaled the total of Belissa's charms.
The trouble was that Eanna also more than equaled Belissa in unattainability.
The swordsman rode on in mingled dejection and grim determination, seldom looking at the young woman who was all too inclined to draw back as if his slightest glance were a brutal assault on her chastity.
Jonker sympathized with his plight, but was of no help. The afflictions of the geas were beyond the powers of his magic. He could only urge Basdon to conduct himself in a manner that would not upset the girl and endanger the mission. And he could only suggest that, while passing through some town, the swordsman might take time for dalliance with some willing female.
Earlier in the journey Basdon might have taken the suggestion, but now he was too obsessed with Eanna to wish for any substitute.
"I will take time for nothing," he replied angrily. "We should reach Oliber tomorrow. Then I will see the two of you safely back to the Hif Hills. Thus, in a matter of thirteen days from now, I will escape the girl's presence and thrust her from my mind."
Jonker shook his head sadly. "You fail to reckon on the days we may spend searching the ruins of Oliber for the talismans. But bear with us, Basdon. Long before you part company with the maiden, your lust will have turned to pity, or perhaps to disgust."
"The pity I feel now, because I can see that she is as unhappy in her affliction as I. But disgust . . ." Basdon shook his head. "Never. Would that it were true."
"It will be, as Laestarp's geas continues its depraved work on the poor child," said Jonker.
Basdon started. "You mean it does not stop? That she will age before our eyes?"
"Not exactly. The geas hastens maturity, which is not the same in all facets as aging. Thus Eanna still has the freshness of a child of six in a body matured to nineteen years. But maturity in time involves processes closely related to aging, and these can kill as readily as aging itself. Also, these processes in an unaged body set up conflicts not ordinarily seen. In most cases, the geas Laestarp imposed on Eanna is fatal in six weeks."
"Just another month, then!" gasped the swordsman in a horrified whisper.
"Yes: Time enough to finish our task and return home, so that her ashes can be scattered by the still kindly breezes of Nenkunal," murmured Jonker.
"You have not told her this?"
"No, and I will not until the disparate forces at work within her make the prospect of an early death a welcome relief."
Early the following morning they by-passed the last inhabited town, with Basdon taking unusual precautions to make it seem he was skirting the evil region of Oliber rather than entering it.
Soon he was leading the magician and girl through a wilderness even more desolate than the Hif Hills. What trees still stood were blackened as if by countless burnings, and the brush was gnarled and stunted.
"How much farther?" he asked Eanna without looking at her.
"I don't know, except that it's close," she said. "Nothing is like it was."
As they advanced such vegetation as there was gradually vanished, as if the soil itself had been poisoned. Rainstorms had taken their toll of the denuded ground. Gullies too steep for climbing frequently blocked their way and had to be skirted.
At last the girl admitted, "I haven't seen anything I knew for a long time. I'm going by the sun. That's all I can do."
"Don't worry," said the magician. "Just do your best, and we'll find it."
They urged their mounts up a rise and onto a rocky plateau where the hardness of the ground had protected it somewhat from erosion.
Before them lay the remains of Oliber-by-Midsea, some thousand yards away. Beyond it, half hidden by a greenish haze, was a murky salt marsh where blue water had once gleamed, as if the sea itself had drawn back, in pious repulsion, from what was now deemed a center of ancient evil.
But the startling sight was not the city or the marsh, but the god-warrior pickets stationed along the outskirts of the ruins. Basdon muttered a curse and loosened his sword in its sheath.
"This I did not anticipate," hissed Jonker, alarmed.
"Who are they?" asked Eanna.
"God-warriors," said Basdon. "They've seen us, I believe. Yes, some of them are mounting."
"Shall we make a run for safety?" asked the magician.
Basdon frowned in thought. "Perhaps Eanna could escape on my horse, but our other mounts are too slow."
"Where would I go? Who would . . . who would . . . ?" protested the girl.
"Never mind," grunted Basdon. "We won't try that, and we won't run. We'll go ahead and see what happens." He jogged his horse into a sedate walk toward a gathering of ten warriors who now barred the way.
"Running would be useless, I suppose," sighed Jonker.
"What will they do to us?" hissed the terrified girl.
"Who knows?" Basdon replied. "Nothing until after they take us. Magician, have your rod ready, but out of sight!"
Basdon was not particularly dismayed by the prospect of battle against totally overwhelming odds. As a fighting man, he had long been reconciled to the likelihood of an early and violent end. And what better time than now, when death would bring the end to bitterness, frustration, and burning eyes?
Nor, he realized, did he have reason to regret the sharing of his fate with Jonker and Eanna. The old magician was an anachronism, a regret-burdened leftover of a happier age, striving absurdly for a re-flowering of The Art in a ridiculously distant future. As for the girl, a quick death would cost her nothing but a single month of increasing pain and misery.
Thus he rode into the presence of the enemy with a feeling of calm and confidence such as he had not known for years. This, it occurred to him, was what he had been seeking for a long time.
"Hold!" bellowed the officer of the warriors. "What business have you here, swordsman?"
"The business of the god," Basdon replied brashly, his hand on his sword hilt.
"Ah?" The officer looked past him to give Jonker a fleeting glance and Eanna a lingering stare, under which the girl flinched. The officer grinned. "And who are these?" he demanded.
"Who do they appear to be?" Basdon snapped back.
The officer grimaced with quick anger, then seemed to think better of it. "Very well, you may pass. You will not need a guide, I trust." He gave the ruins behind him a fearful glance as he said the latter.
"We can find our way," Basdon replied almost automatically. In an astonished daze, he jogged his horse forward as the warriors drew apart to make way for him and his companions.
When they had ridden into the edge of the ruins, well out of the hearing of the warrior guards, Jonker murmured in amazed admiration, "Beautifully done, swordsman! I thought you were baiting the officer into the immediate slaughter of us all, but instead . . . here we are! But I confess that I'm totally mystified!"
"So am I," grumbled Basdon, still in a condition of shock at being alive. "I expected no better than you."
Jonker stared at him. "There must be some explanation."
Crossly, Basdon replied, "I don't even know why warriors would be here, much less why they would let us pass."
"I know where we are!" exclaimed Eanna, the fearful encounter with the guards pushed from her mind by the sight of familiar landmarks. "The gold thing we want to get is in that building, deep down!" She was pointing to a hulking structure most of which still stood among the crumbled wreckage of the city.
They directed their mounts to it, and when they were in its shadow Basdon saw why it had not been pulled down with the others. It was constructed of stones too massive to move without extreme difficulty and much labor, and too tough to pound down with ordinary rams.
But when Basdon got off his horse and led the way inside, he saw that it was a hollow shell from the ground up.
"We must uncover a stairway or tunnel leading downward," said Jonker, looking around at the thick rubble as if he had no idea where to begin.
A darker than average pile of stone caught Basdon's eye. He picked his way through the litter to its side, where he bent and picked up a rock.
"Damp," he said to the others who had followed him. "Someone else has tried to uncover something here, very recently." He dropped the rock, drew his sword, and crept around the pile until he reached the edge of a gaping black hole. "Stairs," he said softly to Jonker.
The magician peered into the darkness. "Who could be down there?"
"I know of one way to find out," said the swordsman. He took a step down into the darkness, ducked his head away from the overhanging ledge of loose rock, and continued down the stairs. He could hear the magician and the girl following close behind him.
For a brief moment he mused on the fact that he was acting with the foolhardiness of a man angered because death had passed him by. A man the sting had missed on the first try, now eager to give death another chance.
The darkness underground was not complete, even though the stairs doubled back as they descended three flights. At the bottom Basdon saw why.
"Light down this hallway," he muttered over his shoulder.
"Yes, but neither firelight nor daylight," Jonker whispered.
A muffled, regular thudding sound suddenly started up in the direction of the light.
"I . . . I think that noise is close to where the thing is," Eanna said shakily.
"Then that's where we're going," said Basdon. He strode down the hallway, which was longer than he had judged from the apparent dimness of the light. The thudding was almost thunder loud and the light nearly blinding in the darkness when he reached the door from which the illumination poured and stepped through.
The glistening figure with the heavy sledge whirled away from the wall which he was beating down and glared ominously at the swordsman.
"Sacrilege!" he stormed. "No man enters the god's presence unbidden! Prepare to die, warrior, and for your spirit to burn lingeringly in . . ."
The tremendous voice fell silent for an instant as Jonker and Eanna came into the light behind Basdon.
The swordsman stepped aside for them, never taking his eyes from the unbelievable figure before him.
The sledge-wielder was man in form, but to a man as a horse is to a pony. The difference was not so much in size as in molding and strength. Heavy muscles on thick-boned arms and legs seemed almost to glow with power, and the mighty chest gave the feeling that it could suck the room empty of air in one quick breath. The shape of the breechclout, the sledge-wielder's only garment, evidenced a maleness as vast as the musculature.
Now he displayed his formidable white teeth in a broad smile as his eyes gleamed at Eanna.
"So!" he rumbled: "The travelers from Nenkunal have arrived, unwittingly bringing me a well-prepared tidbit!"
Basdon glanced at the staring magician and girl. "He's the god Vishan," he muttered.
"The renegade god-warrior still recognizes his god," remarked Vishan in high amusement, leaning on the handle of his sledge. "It is well, criminal, that you thoughtfully dispatched the spirit of one Laestarp to the keeping of We Who Own All. And well too that those of Us who received him mistook him briefly for one of Ourselves. Their examination of him revealed that evil still remained in my realm, buried in these ruins . . . and also that evil lurked in the craven soul of a lard-bellied magician and a bloodshot-eyed deserter."
"Why, he's one of the Great Necromancers!" muttered Jonker in dismay.
"I am one of We Who Own All," Vishan reproved sternly.
"You don't own me," the magician retorted with a show of courage Basdon had not expected.
"Ah, but I will very soon. You and the deserter. Already I own the tidbit." Vishan laughed. "Look at her!"
The swordsman glanced at Eanna and found her gazing raptly at the face of the god. Her expression stunned him, and his eyes felt like twin flames.
"Come stand before me, tidbit," the god commanded.
The girl moved forward like a sleepwalker. Basdon lurched to grab her and pull her back, but was detained by the sudden firm grip of the magician on his wrist.
Rapidly Jonker hissed in his ear: "I do lust for vengeance, swordsman! Will you help me get it?"
Basdon swallowed hard and nodded, only half attentive to the magician's words as he watched Eanna approach the carnate god.
"Then we will attack him as we did Laestarp," whispered Jonker. Again Basdon nodded, gripped his sword tightly and moved forward.
Vishan's eyes moved from the girl to the swordsman, and glittered with impatience. "You would interrupt my pleasure, trivial mosquito, for as long as it takes to swat you? Very well! Die!"
Basdon stumbled momentarily as a blast of energy swirled at him and around him. He was not harmed. He lurched forward once more.
Jonker bellowed furiously, "You are embodied, necromancer, which limits your magic to such as I can counter!"
"Presumptuous upstarts!" roared Vishan, now thoroughly enraged. "Very well, renegade, my muscles and hammer against your stringy tendons and childish blade! Come to the first of a thousand miserable deaths I mean to watch you suffer!"
Eanna said in a voice ringing with passion: "I am yours, my god and master!"
Vishan looked aside at her as he raised his sledge against the swordsman. "Yes. I'll enjoy you at my leisure," he said, returning his attention to his enemy.
"Your joy will be my delight," Eanna almost sang, "the pain you inflict my glory, my degradation and destruction by you my pride and uplift, the ruination of my body the salvation of my spirit, the . . ."
She had unfastened her dress and now let it drop to the floor. Basdon gasped, and Vishan himself seemed surprised when she suddenly pressed her bare body against his side.
In a blind rage Basdon lunged. The agile Vishan moved his sledge up quickly and the swordsman's thrust was deflected with a sharp clang of metal on metal. As the god brought his weapon down, he shoved the butt of the handle hard into the pit of Eanna's stomach. She stumbled back to fall to the floor, choking for breath, while the god snapped at her, "Stay out of the way!"
But even as Vishan was knocking the girl aside, Basdon was lunging again, this time to bring blood. His sword pierced the god's right forearm, and passed between the two bones. Vishan's roar of pain was deafening. He raised the sledge, jerking Basdon, clinging grimly to his stuck sword, completely off his feet. The pain that movement created brought another howl from the god as the blade suddenly slipped free and was flung, along with the swordsman, into the rubble six feet away.
Basdon, stunned and badly bruised, leaped staggeringly to his feet, trying to set himself for the god's assault.
But Vishan was not attacking. He was gazing in tortured wonder at his bleeding arm.
"It's only a wound," Basdon snarled hoarsely. "Come get another."
From across the room Jonker chortled, "How does it feel, necromancer, not to be allowed out of a body in pain? The strength of my art has shrunken, but the power of my rod is still sufficient to keep you trapped in your body! You cannot shift an inch away from its pain, and direct it from outside! So suffer, spawn of darkness, suffer!"
Vishan's eyes darted frantically between swordsman and magician for an instant, then he made a dash for the latter. Basdon ran after him and slashed at the mighty left arm, which was just launching the sledge in a one-handed swing at the magician. The weapon slipped from the god's numbed fingers to slam clatteringly against the wall twenty feet away.
Vishan was disarmed.
He backed away, making strange guttural sobs, as Basdon advanced on him. The swordsman's lips were drawn tight in the vicious grin of a killer at work.
"Not quick!" Jonker shouted demandingly. "Slay him slowly, swordsman! Much may depend on it!"
Basdon did not know or care what depended on the slowness of Vishan's death, but he liked the idea. He was a small cat with a sharp claw, torturing playfully a giant, fearful mouse. First one leg, then watch and listen while the mouse screeches and tries to hop away. Then slash the metal claw into the other leg. The mouse screams and falls. It looks up at the small cat with glazed eyes, and lays still. Rake the claw shallowly across its belly! Ah! That makes it an active toy again!
"That's enough, Basdon!" Jonker was shouting in his ear. "That's enough!"
Slowly the little cat faded and Basdon blinked his scorching eyes and let tension flow from alert nerves. "All right," he mumbled thickly.
He looked around the room and saw Eanna painfully pushing herself up to a sitting position, where Vishan had knocked her. She did not give him a glance as her attention focused on the dying body of the god.
Jonker was saying: "Total physical death won't come for perhaps ten minutes yet, but his spirit would already be gone if I would allow it. Did you know, swordsman, that a soul hardly ever stays with a body to the point of death? It almost always departs seconds or even minutes ahead of that, to escape the trauma." He chuckled. "When Vishan tries to rejoin his colleagues beyond earth, this should leave him such a gibbering idiot of a spirit that he won't be able to explain what happened to him! Why, they might not even recognize him, and think he's merely another poor, battered human soul!"
"No!" screamed Eanna.
She was on her feet suddenly, launching herself at the magician.
"Evil murderers!" she lashed as she tried to tear Jonker's rod from his hands. "Let him go! Release my god!"
Jonker twisted, trying to put his body between the rod and the violent girl. "Eanna! Stop it!" he yelped. "Pull her away, swordsman!"
Basdon quickly sheathed his sword and grasped the girl's wrists, tightening his grip until she let go of the rod. Then he drew her away, kicking and screaming, from the magician.
"Keep her away from me until this is finished," said Jonker. Basdon pulled her across the room where, after futile efforts to kick and bite him, Eanna stopped struggling and lapsed into soft sobbing. Fearful that he was hurting her, the swordsman eased his grip on her wrists.
Immediately she was a flurry of motion. She jerked free and ran toward the door to the hallway. "God-warriors!" she screamed. "Come quick!"
"Catch her!" bellowed Jonker.
Basdon dashed after her and caught up with her a short distance down the dark hall. This time he clamped an arm around her waist and held her tightly. She yelled as she squirmed frantically against him.
"Be quiet!" he warned. Her fists were pounding against his bruised chest, and he pulled her close to leave her no room in which to strike.
Then, with her bare body pressed against him, he became indifferent to her weak blows and to her screams.
He carried her down to the floor. Her screams changed in quality but continued as he took her in savage haste.
When it was over, he lay on his back and lifted her limp form onto his, to get her off the rough, cold floor. She lay there in comatose apathy, too exhausted to cry. Basdon, too, was exhausted, and bitter with self-disgust, and with pity for the girl.
Only now, for the first time since he had been the appalled observer to Eanna's reaction to the god Vishan, did the thought occur that her actions were not of her own choosing, but had merely followed the dictates of the universal geas. She could not help but consider herself the property of the gods, of the We Who Own All—property to be kept inviolate from the touch of mere human masculinity.
He hated to think what a lost broken creature his violation had made her. And he wished he had the heart to rise up, seize his sword, and drive it through her heart, thus sparing her a month that his deed of lust could only make a thousand-fold more grievous for her. But he could not.
He was indifferently aware of Jonker coming into the hallway, looking at them for a moment, then returning to the lighted room. Later he heard the thud of stones being moved about, accompanied by the magician's effortful gruntings. But he did not move until the touch of Eanna's body began to stir his desire once more. Then he rose, lifting the girl in his arms, and returned to the room.
The light that had formerly filled it now gleamed through the hole Vishan had been pounding in the wall. Basdon guessed the magician, after enlarging the hole, had taken the light through to search for the buried talismans of The Art.
After a glance at the inert form of Vishan, Basdon carried the girl to the spot where she had dropped her dress. He picked it up and clumsily slipped her into it, then sat cradling her in his arms. Her stained face was peaceful in semi-consciousness; it was a face to remind him forcefully that, in many important respects of mind, this beautiful, demolished woman was in actuality still a child of six years.
He was still sitting there brooding half an hour later when Jonker struggled through the hole in the wall, carrying Vishan's light in one hand and what appeared to be a small, double-handled gold vase in the other.
"Well, I found it," puffed the magician with satisfaction as he brushed himself off. "Now, swordsman, if you can bluff us past the guards with the ease you did before, we will be on our hurried way home."
"What about . . . Eanna?" asked Basdon.
"Um, yes. Well, if she remains as she is now, you could say the god had his way with her, that she will await his future pleasure elsewhere when she recovers." The magician moved closer to touch the girl's forehead and feel her wrist. "However, I fear she will not remain as she is. She's growing alert now, and will certainly betray us to the guards if she has the chance." He shook his head regretfully. "We must leave her here, Basdon."
"I cannot," the swordsman said. "You go, and I will stay."
"Be sensible!" exploded Jonker. "There is nothing she wants from you, nothing you can do for her! Leave her to the morbid pleasure of mourning herself to death over the body of her slain god! It is urgent to the completion of our highly important quest that you come with me, to help protect the talisman on the return to Nenkunal! You must not let us fail now, swordsman, for no good cause!"
"I have no stomach left for good causes, including your own," snapped Basdon. "I'll stay—and mourn for her while she mourns for that hunk of carrion."
Jonker sighed. "You fought the geas within yourself with valor and determination, swordsman," he said sorrowfully. "But fighting at length wears away strength. Yours is now gone, and the geas controls you as surely as it controls that poor child in your arms."
Basdon realized this was true. He said nothing.
With another sigh Jonker turned away. He walked to where a large block of stone provided a makeshift table, and placed the light on it along with some other odds and ends which he drew from beneath his robe. Basdon watched with dull interest as the magician began working with the stuff.
"You are obliging me to use something very precious—and very consumable—that I found while seeking the talisman a moment ago. I had no idea such an item still existed. Certainly it is the last, and was preserved only by the proximity of the talisman. I would have kept it for an occasion of great need, but . . ." the magician shrugged his shoulders, " . . . perhaps no greater need than that of this moment will arise. For once, I wish I could envision the near future, the years of my own life . . ."
"What are you talking about?" demanded Basdon, half in worry and half in annoyance, rubbing hard at his eyes which were paining mercilessly.
"This," said Jonker, pulling a small ball of translucent green from his robe and placing it carefully on the rock. "And this!" He tapped a protuberance on the support of the light, which flicked out immediately.
But there was no darkness. Whiteness was everywhere. Not whiteness to see by. In fact, Basdon's surroundings were totally invisible to him. There was just whiteness . . . in front of his eyes, above his eyes, below them . . . in back of them . . . everywhere whiteness . . . that kept getting whiter.
The location of the whiteness, he realized, was in his mind. And there, in the midst of all that brilliance, pictures began to race fleetingly past. He recognized none as being events from his life, but he sensed they were all experiences his spirit had known somewhere in the vastness of time:
He was confronting a huge spear-bearing gladiator who (for some unseen reason) it was absolutely vital that he slay. But before he could set himself with sword and shield the enemy had plunged the spear through him. He was dying, but could not let himself die. Defeat was unthinkable. Thus, in his agony, his identity suddenly twisted and shifted to become the spearman and victor.
Ah! he thought in the instant between the vanishing of that scene and the appearance of the next. So that is why I foolishly thrust with my sword, as if it were a spear, when I should slash! In his fight with Laestarp's weredogs and again in the battle with Vishan, that habit had nearly gotten him killed. He realized it would not happen again.
The scenes flashed by, too numerous to count, often too hurried to be clearly defined. Then:
Whiter than white, the glowing form of a woman . . . Eanna? . . . Belissa? . . . She was both and neither, a composite of all feminine beauty. But she was not his; rather, he was hers! Her property. Her worshipper, along with dimly sensed legions of others. He lusted for but could not touch her perfection, and his lust was her excuse. The arm of the goddess reached down, and two fingertips, hotter than all the suns, touched and seared his eyes. He fled into blind, pain-filled darkness.
The bitch! he cursed. But . . . but . . . He grunted with the realization. She hadn't been a woman at all! She was a hypnotic construct, a product of outrageously advanced and depraved magic, used to enslave through false beauty!
Shortly thereafter the whiteness faded to gray, then went black. Basdon was aware of the girl stirring in his arms, and of fumbling sounds from Jonker. Then Vishan's light came on.
The swordsman looked down at the girl's face, and saw her eyes were open and looking at him. He smiled at her, wondering why, if she were conscious, she was not pulling away from him.
"Your eyes are blue and white," she said wonderingly. "They used to be red."
He had not noticed before. The burning was gone. That did not seem of any importance. "Your eyes are also blue and white, and beautiful," he replied.
"Do you know you hurt me, out in the hall?" she asked.
"Yes, I know. I'm very sorry. I won't do that to you again, I promise."
"You will, too," she contradicted him. "Or you better. I'll get mad at you if you don't."
She pulled herself up to him and kissed him on the mouth, then giggled.
In delighted wonder, Basdon threw Jonker a questioning look.
"All geases are broken for both of you," said the magician, looking regretfully at a small pile of greenish ash on his makeshift table. "I wonder how many thousands of years will pass before that can be said of any other human beings."