As Jarles activated the door of his private apartment in the crypts, he frowned at the Fourth Circle emblazonment mistily reflected in its gleaming surface. Goniface had rewarded him insufficiently, considering the importance of the service he had rendered. Still, Asmodeus had escaped. As always, it caused him a bitter pang to remember that Asmodeus would not have escaped had not that other, puerile Jarles managed to seize control of his body and bleat out a warning. But he should consider himself lucky that his hideous slip had not been brought to light. Having entered the apartment, his first concern was to reactivate the lock. It irked him somewhat that Cousin Deth had been given sole credit, in public, for capturing the witches. However, as Goniface had told him, it was undoubtedly best that he work in secret for the present. Save for Goniface’s private following, no priest had any inkling of his return to the Hierarchy, let alone the awakening of his true personality.
In any case he had some compensations for this temporary obscurity, he decided, glancing around him. He passed through a second room, as sumptuously furnished as the first, and entered a third, reactivating all locks behind him.
On a couch, pale face upturned, eyes closed, hands folded as in death, lay Sharlson Naurya. He looked at her for a while. Then, with a mild, stimulative beam of anti-paralysis quality he dispelled her unconsciousness. Her eyes opened. He read in them a hate that he interpreted half as a compliment.
She sensed the interpretation. She said, slowly and distinctly, “You incredible, disgusting egotist.”
He smiled. “Not egotist. Realist.”
“Realist!” Contempt gave strength to her utterance.
“You’re no more a realist now than when you were a blind and stubborn idealist. You’re a fiction villain! I suppose that every blundering idealist who hasn’t been brought face to face with the hard facts of life carries, at the back of his mind, a sneaking suspicion that villainy is a very dashing and romantic thing. When your mind turned turtle, or when they turned it for you, your new personality was necessarily fabricated out of all your fragmentary romantic notions of villainy-unlimited ambition and conceit, absolute lack of emotion, and all the rest of the supervillain ideology!”
She paused. Her eyes opened wider, in incredulous loathing. “You like me to talk about you that way, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Certainly. Because I’m a realist. Experience has taught me how close hate is to love.”
“Another cheap romantic fallacy!” Anger made her tremble. “Realist! Can’t you understand that you’re behaving like a book? Have you no conception of the risks you are running in this game you’re trying to play, according to some romantic code of villainy, with men like Goniface?
Realist! Look at your insane recklessness in bringing me here. What will happen to you when Goniface finds out?”
He smiled. “It was necessary to bring you here. There was no one to whom I could entrust you. And who would think of looking for you here? Moreover, Goniface trusts me. He doesn’t dream that, while serving him, I plot against him.”
She glared at him. “What if I should reveal myself?”
“You won’t be able to. And even if you could, you wouldn’t. Because you’d know it meant instant death for you, by order of the World Hierarch. That’s the beauty of the arrangement.
“Speaking of Goniface,” he continued, “why don’t you tell me why he wants you killed? You must know something about him that would endanger his position if revealed. Why not tell me what it is? Then we’ll be able to drag him down together, after the present emergency is past.”
She looked away from him.
“Come now, you’re being very unrealistic,” he continued, persuasively. “Don’t you realize what I’m offering you? In any case, you should be a little grateful to me for saving you from so many unpleasantnesses. This morning your former associates were put to the torture.”
He nodded confirmingly. “Oh, yes, and you may expect a bit of a change in your friend the Black Man if you ever happen to see him again. Today he was well enough to be taken to Brother Dhomas.”
“You mean they intend to-“ She tried to push herself up.
“To awaken him to a state of realistic self-interest? Yes. So you see, Naurya, the Witchcraft is done for. Just a matter of time. And that means there’s no longer any point in your remaining loyal to it. Surely that must be obvious to you.”
For a long time she just looked at him. Then she asked him, in a strange voice, “Do you ever dream now?”
For once he did not smile. “No,” he said flatly.
Slowly she shook her head, keeping her eyes fixed on him. “Oh, yes, you do.”
“Dreams mean nothing,” he said coldly. “They are unreal.”
“They’re as real as anything else,” she shot back at him.
“And they merely mean conscience.”
For a fraction of a second her gaze slipped past him. Suspiciously he turned. Nothing there but the locked door.
“Conscience is only social pressure,” he told her, tense without quite knowing why, “the impulse to submerge your ego in that of the herd, and do what other people want you to because you’re afraid of their censure. Realistic self-interest frees a person from the childish restrictions of conscience.”
“Are you sure of that, Jarles? What about your dreams? Conscience may be partly what you say it is, but it’s more than that. It’s hearkening to the wisest thoughts that have occurred to minds of the human race.”
“Do you seek to persuade me to that shadowy unreality called virtue? Next you’ll be talking of ideals!”
“Certainly I’ll talk about ideals! For it’s ideals that torment you when you dream. I saw you grow, Jarles. I saw your ideals grow. Maybe they grew too fast for their roots. But though they’ve been toppled and broken up and shoved down into the depths of your subconscious mind, they’re still there, Jarles-a private hell in your own mind, and just a door between it and your consciousness. And at night the door opens.”
In the nick of time, an involuntary sideways wavering of her vision warned him. He dodged and struck out as the little furred horror struck suddenly at him-from nowhere, it seemed. The razor claws slashed his cheek instead of the throat beneath the ear. His flailing arm chanced to catch the thing and hurl it across the room. In the moment before it recovered itself, his wrath ray blasted out and almost cut it in two. There was a great splatter of blood, much more than could have been expected from such a creature.
He darted over to it, then recoiled from the incredibly frail monster whose big eyes, glazed by death, goggled up at him. For a moment he had the incredible conviction that he had somehow killed Sharlson Naurya.
He looked back at her. She had struggled up into a sitting position, but there further strength failed her. She was not crying, but her shoulders were racked by an emotion that seemed mingled of unappeasable hate and a dry, anguished grief.
“This creature meant that much to you?” he asked sharply. He glanced quickly back at it. A look of sudden, almost incredulous understanding tightened his features. “I think I’ve got it,” he said slowly, more to himself than to her. “Although I’m no biologist, I think I’ve realized the secret of the familiars. And that will be very welcome news to the World Hierarch.”
“You’ve killed Puss,” he heard her say. The words were like little stones.
“Your sister, in a sense, I believe?” He smiled. “Well, she tried to kill me, while you held my attention, so that’s all square. Don’t think I harbor resentment. This discovery will put a new emblazonment on my robe-and another shovel of earth from the grave we’re digging for the Witchcraft.”
He looked at her, blood dripping from his cheek. “I rather like your nerve and your ruthlessness,” he said. “We’ll get along very well together after you’ve been fixed. Oh, haven’t I mentioned that? Well, after the present emergency is passed and we’ve attended to Goniface one way or another, I’ll have Brother Dhomas turn your mind right side up.”
She made one more attempt to rise, and failed. She could only say, each word seeming to choke her, “You dirty, little storybook villain.”
He nodded, smiling. “That’s right,” he said, and turned the paralysis beam on her.