FOR a moment Brother Chulian thought a shadow was scuttling toward him in the deep grooves between the cobbles. He jerked away so that his halo reeled tipsily across the lightless street and his inviolability field bumped that of his companion.
“I slipped,” he gasped unconvincingly. “Some nasty commoner must have thrown out greasy slops.”
The other priest did not reply. Fervently Chulian hoped that he would not mind turning right at the next corner. It was a little longer that way, but you didn’t have to pass the haunted house. To his relief the fellow turned right without being asked.
Of course, the house wasn’t really haunted, Chulian reminded himself quickly. That would be the sheerest nonsense. But it was such an ugly old relic of the Golden Age and the commoners told such unpleasantly grotesque stories about it at confession. Why did the commoners have to have such narrow, twisty streets and why was there such a strict curfew, Chulian complained to himself, as if it were somehow the commoners’ fault. Like a city of the dead. Not a person stirring, hot a light showing, not a sound. Of course, all those rules were the laws of the Hierarchy, he remembered unwillingly. Still, there ought to be some provision for cases like this-say a law that the commoners ought to listen for priests coming at night and be ready to set out lighted torches. A halo hardly gave you enough light to keep from tripping over things!
Like twin will-o'-the-wisps, the two circular violet glows bobbed through the crazily curving trenches in darkness that were the streets of Megatheopolis. Behind rose the glow of the Sanctuary. To Chulian it seemed like a warm hearth from which he had been unfairly pushed out into the cold. Why did they have to pick on Mm for jobs like this? He was just an innocent clerk, bothering no one. All he asked from life was peace and comfort, a decent supply of his favorite goodies, a chance to lie in bed-at this moment he could almost feel its cushiony softness-and watch his favorite solidographic books read themselves, and now and again a bit of special fun with a Fallen Sister.
Who in the world could be so cruel as to object to that?
It all came from his miserable luck at having been paired off with Jarles, he told himself. That sullen fellow! If he hadn’t been paired with Jarles, he wouldn’t have been forced into this wild plot, which he didn’t understand and which seemed to have been designed solely to bring trouble and danger into a world that would go so smoothly if everyone were more like Brother Chulian!
Even then it would have been all right if he hadn’t been so foolish as to mention those extra marks to Goniface. But if he hadn’t told, they’d probably have found out and he’d have been punished.
Witchmarks! Chulian shivered. Almost he could see them burning in the white flesh of that nasty girl.Why did some commoner girls have to be brazen and sulky? Why couldn’t they all be gentle and docile?
Witchmarks! He wished he could stop thinking about them. As part of his priestly education he had read a book about the Middle Ages of the Dawn Civilization and its primitive Witchcraft. A witchmark was supposed to be where a witch suckled her familiar. A familiar was supposed to be a little helper given her by Satan-Sathanas.
Of course, it had all been nonsense then and was nonsense now. But why had Goniface called the girl a witch when he had heard of the extra marks, and sent Chulian to arrest her?
Chulian didn’t really want to know the answer. He didn’t want to be a Third Circle priest. He just wanted to be left in peace. If he could only make them understand that!
His companion nudged him into attentiveness, pointing at a rectangle of deeper blackness in the irregular rubble-and-plaster wall. They had arrived.
Chulian rapped loudly against the rough wooden door. When your fingers wore the Gloves of Inviolability you could hardly hurt them.
“Open in the name of the Great God and his Hierarchy!” he commanded, his reedy voice amplified by the silence.
“The door is not barred. Open it yourself,” came the quiet, muffled, gently mocking answer. Chulian bristled. Such insolence! But then they had come to arrest the girl, not to teach her manners. He jerked the latchstring and pushed.
The room was dimly and unevenly lit by the flickering of a thrifty fire. Faint coils of smoke, escaping from the fireplace, writhed about lazily, some of them eventually finding their way through the tiny square air hole in the low ceiling. Chulian’s companion coughed. Before the fireplace a shuttle was moving busily through the threads of a large loom, weaving some darkly figured fabric.
Its uninterrupted, snake’s-head rhythm made Chulian uneasy. He hesitated and shot a quick glance at his companion. Side by side, close together, they moved forward until they could see the other side of the loom and Sharlson Naurya.
She was wearing a closefitting dress of gray homespun. Her rapt eyes seemed to be looking not so much at her work as through it, though her busy fingers never hesitated. Was it only cloth she was weaving, Chulian wondered, or something else-something bigger?
With almost a guilty start, he realized of whom she reminded him. Only a suggestion, of course- Still, there was in her face the same dark strength, the same sense of hidden yet limitless purpose, as he had just seen, and cringed before, in the archpriest Goniface. After a moment she turned her head and looked at them. But there was no change in her expression-as if they were merely part of that bigger, invisible fabric. Without haste she tucked the shuttle into the warp and stood facing them, folding her hands at her waist.
“Sharlson Naurya,” Chulian intoned solemnly, but a trifle jerkily, “we come, inviolable emissaries of the Hierarchy, to do the bidding of the Great God.”
Her green eyes smiled at that, if eyes can smile. But what Chulian wondered was what those eyes saw when they looked past him. Brazen girl! What right had she to take this so calmly!
He drew himself up.
“Sharlson Naurya, in the name of the Great God and his Hierarchy, I arrest you!”
She bent her head. And now there was something twisted and evil about the way her eyes smiled. She suddenly spread her hands outward from her waist.
“Run, Puss!” she cried with an almost mischievous urgency. “Tell the Black Man!”
A glittering talon ripped at the waist the gray homespun of her dress-from within. There was a rapid disturbance of the cloth. Then through the slit something wriggled and sprang. Something furry, big as a cat, but more like a monkey, and incredibly lean. Like a swift-scuttling spider it was up the wall and across the ceiling, clinging effortlessly. Chulian’s muscles froze. With a throaty gasp his companion lunged out an arm. From the pointing finger crackled a needle of violet light, scorching a zigzag track in the crude plaster of wall and ceiling.
The thing paused for a moment in the air hole, looking back. Then it was gone, and the violet beam spat futilely through the air hole toward the black heavens, where one star glittered. But Chulian continued to stare upward, his slack jaw trembling. He had got one look at the tiny face. Not when the thing had moved, for then it had been only a rippling blur, but when it had paused to glance back.
Not all the features of a face had been there. Some had been missing and others had seemed telescoped into each other. And the fine fur had encroached on them. Nevertheless, where the features had showed through the fur, they had been white, and, in spite of all distortions, they had been a peering, chinless, noseless, hellish, but terribly convincing caricature of the features of Sharlson Naurya.
And the fur had been of exactly the same shade as her dark hair. Finally, Chulian looked back at her. She had not moved.
Still stood there smiling with her eyes.
“What was that thing?” he cried. It was much more a frightened appeal than a demand.
“Don’t you know?” she asked gravely. She reached for a shawl hanging from the end of the loom. “I am ready,” she said. “Aren’t you going to take me to the Sanctuary?”
And pulling her shawl around her, she walked toward the door. It seemed darker than ever outside, and dead still. If any commoners had heard the disturbance, they had not come out to investigate. Of course, that was the law, but Chulian wished that some commoner would break it-just this once. Or if only they would meet up with a patrol of deacons!
Through the narrow, uneven streets hurriedly bobbed the two violet halos, straining toward the beacon-glow of the Sanctuary.
If only the girl wouldn’t walk so slowly! Of course, they could hurry her up-each had an elbow in one of his puffed hands-but somehow Chulian didn’t like the idea of hurting her, especially since she was otherwise so docile. After all, that thing of hers was somewhere on the roofs, perhaps following them. At any moment he might look up and see a tiny anthropoid muzzle poked over an edge, outlined against the stars.
When they got to the Sanctuary, things would be different!
Lightless doorways, lightless mouths of other streets, marched past them. At the next corner they must turn to the left to avoid the haunted house, Chulian reminded himself. But when they got to the turn, the street to the left was walled-stuffed solid-with blackness. Not the starhazed blackness through which they had been passing, but blackness utter and complete, making the rest seem gray.
Nothing more.
Chulian looked sideways past the girl at Brother Arolj’s face, sickly under the glowing halo, and caught an answering panicky glance.
In a rush, so they wouldn’t be able to flinch, they plunged into the blackness, the girl between them.
Their halos were extinguished. There was no light whatever. As if out of a wall of ink, they scrambled back again, gasping. For one horrid moment Chulian feared they would be trapped in the blackness forever.
They turned to the right. Blackness filled that street mouth to brimming, too. Yet Sharlson Naurya still stood obediently between them. She could have escaped merely by staying in the blackness-they had both let go of her. Of course, she might be afraid of the blackness, too. But Chulian did not think so.
From the corner of his eye he darted a backward glance. It was as he feared. The blackness had followed them down the street by which they had come.
The only way open was directly ahead, past the haunted house. Something wanted them to pass the haunted house. But it was that or nothing-before the blackness should decide to encroach still farther and swallow them up.
That last fear must have occurred simultaneously to Brother Arolj, for they started forward at a panicky trot, fairly dragging their prisoner between them.
Behind them steadily flowed the wall of blackness, lapping round their heels when they faltered. By the time they reached the little neglected square and the haunted house, they were running. Much taller than the other houses it stood, a landmark of desolation. But Chulian only caught a glimpse of its entirety of crazily sagging, strangely slack walls and drooping circular windows, like pouched and leering eyes. For the blackness suddenly closed in from several directions, like a huge sack, cutting off the way ahead, blacking out the stars, driving them across the rubbly ground toward the mouth of the sack and the wrinkled, oval doorway of the house itself. There Chulian had his one burst of desperate, fear-inspired courage. He pointed his finger at Naurya.
“In the name of the Great God, if you don’t make it go away, I’ll blast you!” he threatened through trembling lips.
Instantly the blackness swooped inward, closing about them like an envelope, bare inches away, half blotting out their view of each other.
“I won’t! I won’t!” Chulian cried out, dropping his hand.
The blackness retreated somewhat.
And now Sharlson Naurya finally smiled at him with her lips. She reached out, and before he realized what she was going to do, slapped his chest smartly at a certain spot. His inviolability field went limp. His halo winked out.
His scarlet robe hung loosely.
She patted his cheek, as one pats the cheek of a child.
His flesh crawled at the gentle touch.
“Goodbye, Little Brother Chulian,” she said, and slipped through the sagging doorway into the haunted house.
The blackness shot back, was not.
And up from the street Cousin Deth came running.
“Your prisoner! Where is she?” he demanded curtly of Chulian.
“Didn’t you see it? That awful blackness?” Chulian countered unsteadily. Cousin Deth drew back from him. “I wasn’t aware you priests were afraid of the dark.”
For a moment Chulian was conscious only that he had been insulted by a mere deacon.
“She went in there!” he retorted angrily. “And if you’re so eager to get her, why don’t you go in after her yourself?”
Cousin Deth turned toward the street.
“Rouse commoners!” he shouted to someone. “Set a cordon round the house!”
Then he turned back to Chulian.
“I shall probably be asked to enter this place tomorrow to cleanse it of evil,” he said. “Since you are so desirous of seeing me enter it, your reverence, I will petition that you be made my priestly director, to guide me.”