Marion Bradley - The Fall Of Atlantis

They were standing by then in a precise triangle, Deoris with the shining sphere cradled in her raised hand, the chela braced defensively as if he held an uplifted sword. There was something defensive in Riveda's own attitude; he was not sure of his own motives. It was partly curiosity that had led him to this trial, but mainly a desire to test his own powers, and those of this girl he had trained—and those of the stranger, whose mind was still a closed book to Riveda.

With a slight shrug, the Adept shifted his own position somewhat, completing a certain pattern of space between them ... instantly he felt an almost electric tension spring into being. Deoris moved the sphere a very little; the chela altered the position of only one hand.

The patterned triangle was complete!

Deoris began a low crooning, a chant, less sung than intoned, less intoned than spoken, but musical, rising and falling in rhythmic cadences. At the first note of the chant, the chela sprang to life. A start of recognition leaped in his eyes, although he did not move the fraction of an inch.

The chant went into a weird minor melody; stopped. Deoris bent her head and slowly, with a beautiful grace and economy of motion, her balanced gestures betraying her arduous practices, sank to her knees, raising the crystal sphere between her hands. Riveda elevated the rod ... and the chela bent forward, automatic gestures animating his hands, so slowly, like something learned in childhood and forgotten.

The pattern of figures and sound altered subtly; changed. Amber lights and shadows drifted in the crystal sphere.

Riveda began to intone long phrases that rose and fell with a sonorous, pulsating rhythm; Deoris added her voice in subtle counterpoint. The chela, his eyes aware and alert for the first time, his motions automatic, like the jerky gestures of a puppet, was still silent. Riveda, tautly concentrated on his own part in the ritual, flickered only the corner of a glance at him.

Would he remember enough? Would the stimulus of the familiar ritual—and that it was familiar to him, the Adept had no doubts—be sufficient to waken what was dormant in the chela's memory? Riveda was gambling that Reio-ta actually possessed the secret.

The electric tension grew, throbbed with the resonance of sound in the high and vaulted archway overhead. The sphere glowed, became nearly transparent at the surface to reveal the play of coiled and jagged flickers of color; darkened; glowed again.

The chela's lips opened. He wet them, convulsively, his eyes haunted prisoners in the waxen face. Then he was chanting too, in a hoarse and gasping voice, as if his very brain trembled with the effort, rocking in its cage of bone.

No, Deoris reflected secretly, with the scrap of her consciousness not entirely submerged in the ceremonial, this rite is not new to him.

Riveda had gambled, and won. Two parts of this ritual were common knowledge, known to all; but Reio-ta knew the third and hidden part, which made it an invocation of potent power. Knew it—and, forced by Riveda's dominant will and the stimulus of the familiar chant on his beclouded mind, was using it—openly!

Deoris felt a little tingle of exultation. They had broken through an ancient wall of secrecy, they were hearing and witnessing what no one but the highest Initiates of a certain almost legendary secret sect had ever seen or heard—and then only under the most solemn pledges of silence until death!

She felt the magical tension deepen, felt her body prickling with it and her mind being wedged open to accept it. The chela's voice and movements were clearer now, as memory flooded back into his mind and body. The chela dominated now: his voice was clear and precise, his gestures assured, perfect. Behind the mask of his face his eyes lived and burned. The chant rushed on, bearing Deoris and Riveda along on its crest like two straws in a seething torrent.

Lightning flickered within the sphere; flamed out from the rod Riveda held. A vibrant force throbbed between the triangled bodies, an almost visible pulsing of power that brightened, darkened, spasmodically. Lightning flared above them; thunder snapped the air apart in a tremendous crashing.

Riveda's body arched backward, rigid as a pillar, and sudden terror flooded through Deoris. The chela was being forced to do this—this secret and sacred thing! And for what? It was sacrilege—it was black blasphemy—somehow it must be stopped! Somehow she must stop it—but it was no longer in her power even to stop herself. Her voice disobeyed her, her body was frozen, the restless sweep of tyrant power bore them all along.

The unbearable chanting slowly deepened to a single long Word—a Word no one throat could encompass, a Word needing three blended voices to transform it from a harmless grouping of syllables into a dynamic rhythm of space-twisting power. Deoris felt it on her tongue, felt it tearing at her throat, vibrating the bones of her skull as if to tear them to scattering atoms ...

Red-hot fire lashed out with lightning shock. White whips of flame splayed out as the Word thundered on, and on, and on ... Deoris shrieked in blind anguish and pitched forward, writhing. Riveda leaped forward, snatching her to him with a ferocious protectiveness; but the rod clung to his fingers, twisting with a life of its own, as if it had grown to the flesh there. The pattern was broken, but the fire played on about them, pallid, searing, uncontrollable; a potent spell unleashed only to turn on its blasphemers.

The chela, frozenly, was sinking, as if forced down by intense pressure. His waxen face convulsed as his knees buckled beneath him, and then he jumped forward, clutching at Deoris. With a savage yell, Riveda lashed out with the rod to ward him away, but with the sudden strength of a madman, Reio-ta struck the Adept hard in the face, narrowly avoiding the crackling nimbus of the rod. Riveda fell back, half-conscious; and Reio-ta, moving through the darting lights and flames as if they were no more than reflections in a glass, caught Deoris's chewed hands in his own and tore the sphere from them. Then, turning, he gave the staggering Riveda another swift blow and wrenched the rod from him, and with a single long, low, keening cry, struck rod and sphere together, then wrenched them apart and flung them viciously into separate ends of the room.

The sphere shattered. Harmless fragments of crystal patterned the stone tiles. The rod gave a final crackle, and darkened. The lightning died.

Reio-ta straightened and faced Riveda. His voice was low, furious—and sane. "You filthy, damned, black sorcerer!"

III

The air was void and empty, cold grey again. Only a faint trace of ozone hovered. Silence prevailed, save for Deoris's voice, moaning in delirious agony, and the heavy breathing of the chela. Riveda held the girl cradled across his knees, though his own shaking, seared hands hung limply from his wrists. The Adept's face had gone bone-white and his eyes were blazing as if the lightning had entered into them.

"I will kill you for that someday, Reio-ta."

The chela, his dark face livid with pain and rage, stared down darkly at the Adept and the insensible girl. His voice was almost too low for hearing. "You have killed me already, Riveda—and yourself."

But Riveda had already forgotten Reio-ta's existence. Deoris whimpered softly, unconsciously, making little clawing gestures at her breast as he let her gently down onto the cold stone floor. Carefully Riveda loosened the scorched veils, working awkwardly with the tips of his own injured hands. Even his hardened Healer's eyes contracted with horror at what he saw—then her moans died out; Deoris sighed and went limp and slack against the floor, and for a heart-stopping instant Riveda was sure that she was dead.

Reio-ta was standing very still now, shaken by fine tremors, his head bent and his mind evidently on the narrow horizon between continued sanity and a relapse into utter vacuity.