There hung the dark curtain of death-in-life and beyond it was life-in-death to be fronted. Ashake held high her head as if she already wore the initiate’s crown of victory. Her hand moved, closed upon the curtain and drew it aside. With the courage of a warrior she stepped out into the deep dark.
This was her last trial. By years of training, or learning to know herself and the depths of her thoughts even when they were unpleasant to face, she had been prepared for this moment, to be pitted against the fears from which those thoughts were born. For none can wield the Power until they can command themselves fully.
She was ready.…
But something else struggled in her. Not her fear, no. This was urgent, a warning. Ashake hesitated within that all-enveloping dark, tried to understand.
This—this she had done before! She was being made to relive the past by some force outside herself. And that force had only one reason, that through her it could learn secrets which none who knew them must ever reveal.
What was truth, what was a dream? Was this a false warning sent to her as a test? She had no real knowledge of what an initiate faced, save that it would try her to the utmost. And was the beginning of such a test the suggestion that it was not the truth but a lie?
She raised her hands to her head, knew that they were shaking with the tension building in her.
Truth—lie? Which, oh, which?
Panic—she must not panic! She was Ashake of the Blood, one destined since birth to walk this path. Therefore, the truth must be tested by the one way she had been taught. She disciplined her mind, forced away the panic, sought those guides that should stand ready at her call.
They were clear as she pictured them. But, they were not there! Once more she tried. There was nothing, nothing at all, nor could she sense that in-gathering of Power which should have drawn about her.
So, this was not as it should be. But—what had happened? She swayed as she stood, fighting the force that would have moved her on—that coercion came from without, was not born of her own will!
She was Ashake. Who dared play such a perilous game with one of the Blood? Who dared challenge the Rod and the Key?
She was Ashake … she was … she was …
Identity itself blurred. Ashake? No, then who? She thought she moaned, and yet did not hear her cry ring through this utter dark.
She was Ashake! She must be, for if she set aside Ashake—then there would be a stranger, and one could not live as a stranger. No, this assault was part of something that sought to spy, through her, on the secrets of the Upper Way. And with that answer, a steadiness spread through her giddy mind. Who dared use her so? There was only one—Khasti!
As if his name in her mind shattered some spell, the dark, the ritual hallway disappeared. She stood now in the open under the hot sun of the northern desert. Before her lay the battered walls of the oldest shrine. She hurried (or seemed to skim the ground as if she flew rather than touched foot to the sand and grit) toward that.
Here was the temple, battered by time and by the ancient enemies, yet still it stood. Apedemek, whom the ignorant claimed she and her clan worshipped, yet whose great statue stood as only a reminder of something else that could never be caught and held in any stone, no matter how skillful the artist, stood facing her.
The blind eyes stared out above her head, the hands grasping Rod and Key were above her too. Yet the talismen were not stone. They glowed with life, pulsed with force. She had only to reach out and grasp them. Then all that was of the dark would not dare to contain her. Up she reached, straining farther and farther, yet her fingertips could not even touch the end of the Rod. Furiously she struggled, knowing in her mind just how the power of the Rod must be wedded to the power of the Key by the initiate and what would come of such a mating.
She was Ashake, she alone had the right to touch the things of the Past. Within her the Power swelled, as she knowingly drew upon it, for it would seem that as she used it in her need, so did it grow and flow. She was Ashake.
Now the shrine wavered before her eyes as if it were a painting on fabric. Vast rents appeared from side to side. It tore and was gone, leaving her facing—nothing, an emptiness—that strove to invade her mind, wash free all she knew, even her own identity. No!
She drew upon the Power, pulled it about her as one might pull a cloak against the force of a storm. The emptiness could not reach her. For she was Ashake.
She saw that emptiness in turn break, not tear slowly, as had the shrine, but shatter in an instant. Objects faced her. She was neither in the hall of the temple, nor in the northern desert, she was—
The cage!
And beyond that barrier, Khasti watched her narrow-eyed.
Tallahassee was a little dazed. Still she knew what he had tried to do to her. He would have learned the sacred, the forbidden, by making her relive her initiation in a dream. That he could have sent her so far as he had into the past was frightening—but she had won!
“You are stronger than I thought,” he said slowly. “But not too strong. This time I took you to the threshold, the next you shall step across it. Let thirst and hunger weaken your body, and you cannot so well hold out against me.”
She made him no answer. Why should she? He stated the terms of their struggle and those she must face.
“I wonder …” he continued musingly. “There is something in you that I do not yet understand, and it is not born of your nature. For this thing registers in spite of your stubbornness. Listen well, Great Lady, I have resources beyond any you can comprehend in this world—”
For the first time she spoke then. “This world? Are you then of another world, Khasti?”
He frowned. Perhaps he had made a mistake. If he had, he decided quickly it did not matter, for he answered her.
“There are worlds upon worlds, Great Lady. Does not your own ‘learning’”—and he made of that word a sneer—“hint at such?”
“We all know there are worlds beyond. Look upon the stars which are suns. Many of those warm worlds we cannot see,” she returned calmly. But she was inwardly uncertain, he was getting too close, too close to Tallahassee, who had slept while Ashake had fought her dream battle, but she was now awake.
“Your legends,” Khasti continued thoughtfully. “What say they of such worlds, Great Lady?”
Ashake shrugged. “Why ask me, Khasti? You must have made yourself familiar with those long ago. Would you tell me now that you come from such a world? Do you expect me to look upon you as a god because you might have knowledge such as we have not? Knowledge varies, it is of many kinds, comes from different sources. Yours is built on what lies about us in this room. It is not ours, nor would any man of our kin be fitted to use it. Therefore, I can believe that it may be unearthly—”
His frown had deepened as he looked at her.
“Such a thought does not alarm you then?”
“Why should it?” she returned. “Did you believe that I would say you were a demon as might those unlearned? There is that in you which is not kin—nor are you like anything we have heard of among the barbarians. Thus you must have come from a place we know not, the proof being that you stand here and now to meddle dangerously in our affairs.” Again she shrugged.
“Meddle dangerously in your affairs.” He caught up her phrase. “Yes, that is how you would see it, I suppose. But what if I have much to offer you—”
“No merchant offers trade upon the point of a sword,” she snapped and was pleased to see the answering flash from his eyes. Ah, she had indeed pricked him then. “You want not a bargain with us, you want the Empire. For what reason I do not know yet, unless there is such a boiling of desire to rule within you that you must seize all you can, as a greedy beggar stuffs his mouth with both hands and then reaches quickly for more. Why are you now so frank with me, Khasti? Is it because you have not broken me as quickly as you thought to do? Is there some time limit on your meddling?”
He was silent and she knew a small surge of tri
umph. If that guess were only right! What time limit, and set by whom, and for what purpose? She had the questions, but who would give her the answers? For she believed in this exchange she had brought more out of him than any other in Amun knew.
She had angered him, but she did not care.
“For a female you are quick with words, bold words—”
“Among your kin then, Khasti, are those of my sex considered the lesser? That is a barbarian belief. I hear that their women in the north are wed to become the possessions of the men. With us it is not so. Does that anger you a little?”
“It angers me not at all. It merely amazes me that your men are such spiritless fools as to allow such a way of life to continue,” he said coldly, in spite of the anger she sensed in him. “It is well known that the female mind is inferior—”
“Inferior to what, Khasti?” She had the last word with that, for he did not answer, but turned and strode away. She waited until the door closed behind him, alert to any other move he might make toward the box. It had been the force of the box that had drawn her to the brink of remembering her initiation, thus almost supplying him with some knowledge he pried for.
She was alone once more. He had left the water trickling from the pipe in the sink. Her mouth was dry. Now also her stomach begun to proclaim its emptiness. She folded both arms across it, hugging herself, as if by touch alone she could persuade herself that she was not hungry.
If she could only have talked Idieze into trying that row of buttons. One of the four must release the cage. She remained sealed here at Khasti’s pleasure. She tried to occupy her mind with the hints he had dropped. Was he really from off-world? Ashake memory had produced some very ancient tales of “Sky Lords” of incredible learning who had visited Khem of the Two Lands thousands of years ago. Tallahassee’s memory was ready to babble less intelligently of flying saucers, and the speculations concerning ancient spacemen giving impetus to the beginnings of civilization in that time and world.
Or could Khasti have slipped through another rift in spacetime such as had entrapped her, merely stepped from another world like this, but one that had followed a different pattern of history? It did not really matter—he was not only here, but well prepared to engraft on Amun his own pattern of living.
She was thirsty! The trickling of the water … And she was empty enough to feel weak. How long could she stand up to this? She could not even be sure how long she had been here. That period of induced unconsciousness might have been prolonged past her judgment of time. How long could she last?
Her headache came from the strong light as well as lack of food. And it would seem that her brave fight against the demands of her body was nearly lost. Once more she rested her forehead on arms crossed over her upheld knees. She was very close to the sleep of complete exhaustion.
There was a cold touch on one elbow, a tingling that spread from that point of contact up her arm. She had felt something like that before. Her mind seemed sluggish. What?…
She made herself look up. This time her extra sense had been too dulled to alert her. Outside the cage coiled that serpent thing, and it had again inserted a tendril to make contact with her.
Even her fear arose slowly, and she could not make the effort to avoid the thing. It clung to her flesh. And now it seemed no longer so wispy, so tenuous. In dull horror, Tallahassee watched the thread turn milky and opaque. At the same time she realized that it was drawing strength from her in some way. Down that thread traveled the opaque suggestion of new solidity. She reached out her other hand desperately trying to break its hold on her. But she could not. It remained, sucking, sucking.
Tallahassee began to cry weakly. For all her brave words to Khasti, her struggle to remain herself, this she could not fight any longer. She was too worn from the earlier struggle to defend herself.
She crumpled on the floor, moaning a little. Still the thing fed—if you could call this vampire-draining feeding. Then, before she blacked out entirely, it loosed hold. Wonderingly, she saw something else appear in the air before that shimmer, which she identified with Akini. It was milky white and it was a hand. A hand that ended at the wrist. Its fingers were now being flexed as if about to be put to use.
Her mouth open a little in astonishment, Tallahassee pulled herself up on her knees. The hand was moving away from her, propelled through the air as if it had been given some task it must do. The outline kept changing, as if to hold it in shape was almost too great a task.
But it was before the cabinet now—nearing the row of buttons. Another dream? Perhaps one evoked by Khasti to further torment her and drain her obstinate strength so that he could make her wholly his tool?
The hand darted forward. She could not see from her cage just what it had done. But certainly there was no change in the wire mesh about her and, for a moment, she knew a deep disappointment. If the hand thing had not intended to kill, she had hoped a little that it might be here to help. Only—nothing had happened. She was as securely pent as ever.
While the hand was fading, the strange stuff of which it was formed sloughed away from the shape of fingers into wisps. It was moving again, shapeless though it was, not back toward her cage, but rather to the near table. For a moment, as long as it took for her to blink twice, it hung above the smaller cage that imprisoned the Rod and Key.
Could it be?…
Tallahassee’s heart lurched within her. Perhaps she was not free—as yet—but that other … She watched the shifting blob, which the hand had melted into, pass through the mesh of the smaller cage, make a dart at the Rod and as swiftly recoil, not only recoil but become dispersed into nothingness.
There was a feeling of shock in the air. Akini was gone, driven away by the very force he—it—had attempted to use. But what had he done at the control box? Perhaps turned off whatever unseen defensive mechanism Khasti had set up to protect what had been stolen?
Ashake—Ashake knew what could be done. If Tallahassee surrendered completely to Ashake there might be a chance. But if she so surrendered could she ever regain herself?
Only—now she believed that even such a loss as that was worth a chance to escape. She closed her eyes, summoned Ashake memory defiantly, opened her mind to what the other had to give.
Ashake crouched down. Her body was feeble, it was true, but she could still draw upon some inner energy, enough, she prayed, to do what must be done. She fixed her stare on the jeweled head of the Rod.
“Come to me!” she commanded with all the strength left at her command. “Come to me!”
Slowly the Rod arose from the surface on which it lay, the lighter end sloping upward ahead of the heavy, begemmed top. Now it was pointing upward at a sharp angle, the tip aimed at the woven wires of its cage.
“Come to me!”
The tip touched the cage mesh. There was no reaction. Sweat streamed down Ashake’s face, lay wet in her armpits, on the palms of her hands.
“Come to me!”
The tip of the Rod exerted more and more force against the cage. Ashake fought to give it all she had in her. Then the cage tilted, fell to one side with a clatter. And, since it was bottomless, the Rod was free. It whirled around and swooped through the air, aiming straight at Ashake as she called it.
Like a lance it struck the side of her own cage. There was a brilliant flare, which made her cry out as the backlash of radiance struck her. But she had had time to shield her eyes. When she dared to look again she saw that the Rod lay on the floor. But where it had dashed against the cage there was a black patch in which holes appeared to spread. The metal was rotting swiftly as might a broken fungus.
Now she looked beyond that growing hole to the Key and raised a hand weakly.
“Come!” she called for the fifth time.
The Key arose, slower and more sluggishly, since she called now from the very dregs of her failing strength. But it obeyed her, moving in jerks through the air and settling at last in the trembling palm she held out to it.
Th
e hole in the screen was open enough to let her through. And at the touch of the Key new strength flowed into her. She crawled out into the open, stooped to pick up the Rod, and then, with her weapons in hand, stood to her full height and looked around.
Such a use of the Power had set up a troubling in the whole atmosphere. If there were any within this building who possessed a scrap of the Talent, they would be warned. She waited, using the force renewed in her from the talismen of her people, to listen, not with her ears, but her mind.
She could pick up no instant response to the waves of energy she had projected. But she owed a debt, whether the other had meant to save her or had only been working to liberate the Rod. And debts, for one of those who walked the Upper Ways, lay heavy.
“Akini?” With mind, not voice, she sought the creature who had come to her rescue. She did not know what he wanted with Rod or Key. But manifestly it was not to put them in Khasti’s hands, for all that labor had been to free them.
But there was only mind-silence. When Akini had striven to reach the Rod had he—it—been blasted forth to extinction? Somehow Ashake did not believe it.
She tottered toward the sink with its trickle of water from the pipe. Gathering both Rod and Key into a single hand, she held the other under that less-than-finger-wide stream. It filled the hollow of her palm, and she brought the liquid to her lips, sucking carefully, doing this many times until her thirst was at last quenched.
Hunger was still with her but that must wait until she could find food. Purposefully now she started for the door, waveringly at first because of weakness, but each moment that she held the precious talismen it decreased a little, so at last she walked with much of her old, determined stride.