Page 110

There, only ten feet away, stood the other--unchanged--a lone robed figure in the night, looking around her with a drifting gaze, a glinting drifting gaze at leaves, at trees, at creatures moving in the high branches, at the moon far above the compound.

"Now, you must do it!" roared the Voice. "Do to her what you have done to her sister, and take the brain from her and into yourself. Do it!" The Voice was screaming.

Benedict stood beside him, clinging to him.

Rhosh saw the bloody machete in Benedict's right hand. But he didn't reach for it. The sorrow was knotted inside him, twisted, like a rope pulled tight around his heart. He couldn't speak. Couldn't think.

I have done wrong. I have done unspeakable wrong.

"I'm telling you, do it now," said the Voice in a tone of perfect desperation. "Take me into your body! You know how to do this! You know how it was done to Akasha. Do it now. Do it as you did to that one! Do it. I must be freed from this prison. Are you mad? Do it!"

"No," said Rhosh.

"You betray me now? You dare? Do as I tell you."

&nb

sp; "I can't do it alone," Rhosh said. For the first time he realized he was trembling violently all over, and a blood sweat had broken out on his face and on his hands. He could feel his heart knocking in his throat.

The Voice had given way to cursing, babbling, screaming.

The mute woman stood there unchanged. Then the distant cry of a bird seemed to waken her, and she bowed her head just a little to the left, towards Rhosh, as though she were looking upwards for that bird, that bird outside the wire mesh of the garden.

Slowly she turned and walked slowly away from Rhosh through the gentle crowd of fern and palm, her feet making a soft unhurried trudging sound in the soil. A kind of humming came from her. On she moved, away from him.

The Voice was crying. The Voice was weeping.

"I tell you I cannot do it without help," Rhosh said. "I need help. The help of that vampire doctor if I'm to do it, don't you see? What if I start to die when she does, what if I can't do what Mekare did when she killed Akasha! I can't do it."

The Voice whimpered, and sobbed. It sobbed like a broken and defeated thing. "You are a coward," the Voice whispered. "You are a miserable coward."

Rhosh made his way to a chair. He sat down, leaning forward, his bloody arms clutching his chest. And I have done unspeakable evil. How can I live now after what I've done?

"What do we do?" asked Benedict frantically.

Rhosh scarcely heard him.

Evil. Without question. Evil by all I've ever held to be right or just or good.

"Rhosh," Benedict pleaded.

Rhosh looked up at him, struggling to focus, to think.

"I don't know," Rhosh said.

"Khayman is coming," said the Voice miserably. "Will you let him murder you without a fight?"

It was an hour before Khayman appeared.

They had buried Maharet's remains. They lay in wait, the two on either side of the door, both armed now with the machetes from the garden.

Khayman returned weary and listless, windblown and sad, and came into the room like a laborer so tired from his work that he couldn't even seek a chair to rest. For a long moment, he stood there breathing slowly and evenly with his hands at his sides.

Then he saw the dark greasy bloodstains all over the mud floor. He saw the soot, the ashes.

He saw the earth churned up where she had been hastily buried.

He looked up and then he spun around, but he had no chance.