" 'I would die, surely I would die, I thought. Then came a moment of blindness! Silence. It had killed me, I was certain. I should rise again, should I not? Yet suddenly I opened my eyes; I sat up off the floor as if no attack had befallen me; and I saw so clearly! Khayman, the glaring torch in his hand!-the trees of the garden-why, it was as if I had never truly seen such simple things for what they were! The pain was gone completely, from inside and from my wounds as well. Only the light hurt my eyes; I could not endure its brilliance. Yet I had been saved from death; my body had been glorified and made perfect. Except that-' And there she stopped.
"She stared before her, indifferent for a moment. Then she said, 'Khayman has told you all the rest.' She looked to the King who stood beside her, watching her; trying to fathom the things she said, just as we tried to fathom them.
" 'Your spirit,' she said. 'It tried to destroy us. But something else had happened; some great power has intervened to triumph over its diabolical evil.' Then again her conviction deserted her. The lies stopped on her tongue. Her face was suddenly cold with menace. And sweetly she said: 'Tell us, witches, wise witches. You who know all the secrets. What is the name for what we are!' "Mekare sighed. She looked at me. I knew she didn't want to speak now on this thing. And the old warning of the spirits came back. The Egyptian King and Queen would ask us questions and they would not like our answers. We would be destroyed. - . -"Then the Queen turned her back. She sat down and bowed her head.
And it was then, and only then, that her true sadness came to the fore. The King smiled at us, wearily. 'We are in pain, witches, he said. 'We could bear the burden of this transformation if only we understood it better. You, who have communed with all things invisible; tell us what you know of such magic; help us if you will, for you know that we never meant to harm you, only to spread the truth and the law.'
"We did not dwell on the stupidity of this statement-the virtue of spreading the truth through wholesale slaughter and so forth and so on. But Mekare demanded that the King now tell what he could recall.
"He spoke of things which you-all of you seated here-surely know. Of how he was dying; and how he tasted the blood from his wife which had covered his face; and of how his body quickened, and wanted this blood, and then how he took it from his wife and she gave it; and then he became as she was. But for him there was no mysterious cloud of blood. There was no thing running rampant within him. The thirst, it's unbearable,' he said to us. 'Unbearable.' And he too bowed his head.
"We stood in silence for a moment looking at each other, Mekare and I, and as always, Mekare spoke first;
" 'We know no name for what you are,' she said. 'We know no stories of such a thing ever happening in this world before. But it's plain enough what took place.' She fixed her eyes upon the Queen. 'As you perceived your own death, your soul sought to make its swift escape from suffering as souls so often do. But as it rose, the spirit Amel seized it, this thing being invisible as your soul was invisible; and in the normal course of things you might have easily overcome this earthbound entity and gone on to realms we do not know.
" 'But this spirit had long before wrought a change within himself; a change that was utterly new. This spirit had tasted the blood of humans whom he had pierced or tormented, as you yourself have seen him do. And your body, lying there, and full of blood despite its many wounds, had life still.
" 'And so the spirit, thirsting, plunged down into your body, his invisible form still wedded to your soul.
" "Still you might have triumphed, fighting off this evil thing as possessed persons often do. But now the tiny core of this spirit- the thing of matter which is the roaring center of all spirits, from which their endless energy conies-was suddenly filled with blood as never in the past.
" 'And so the fusion of blood and timeless tissue was a million times magnified and accelerated; and blood flowed through all his body, both material and nonmaterial, and this was the blood cloud that you saw.
" 'But it is the pain you felt which is most significant, this pain which traveled through your limbs. For surely as inevitable death came to your body, the spirit's tiny core merged with the flesh of your body as its energy had already merged with your soul. It found some special place or organ in which matter merged with matter as spirit had already merged with spirit; and a new thing was formed.'
" 'Its heart and my heart,' the Queen whispered. 'They became one.' And closing her eyes, she lifted her hand and laid it on her breast.
"We said nothing, for this seemed a simplification, and we did not believe the heart was the center of intellect or emotion. For us, it had been the brain which controlled these things. And in that moment, both Mekare and I saw a terrible memory-our mother's heart and brain thrown down and trampled in ashes and dust.
"But we fought this memory. It was abhorrent that this pain should be glimpsed by those who had been its cause.
"The King pressed us with a question. 'Very well,' he said, 'you've explained what has happened to Akasha. This spirit is in her, core wedded perhaps to core. But what is in me? I felt no such pain, no such scurrying demon. I felt... I felt only the thirst when her bloodied hands touched my lips.' He looked to his wife.
"The shame, the horror, they felt over the thirst was clear.
" 'But the same spirit is in you, too,' Mekare answered. There is but one Amel. Its core resides in the Queen, but it is in you also.'
" 'How is such a thing possible?' asked the King.
" 'This being has a great invisible part,' Mekare said. 'Were you to have seen it in its entirety, before this catastrophe took place, you would have seen something almost without end.'
" 'Yes,' the Queen confessed. 'It was as if the net covered the whole sky.'
"Mekare explained: 'It is only by concentrating such immense size that these spirits achieve any physical strength. Left on their own, they are as clouds over the horizon; greater even; they have now and then boasted to us that they have no true boundaries, though this is not likely the truth.'
"The King stared at his wife.
" 'But how can it be released!' demanded Akasha.
"Yes. How can it be made to depart!' the King asked.
"Neither of us wanted to answer. We wondered that the answer was not obvious to them both. 'Destroy your body,' Mekare said to the Queen finally. 'And it will be destroyed as well.'
"The King looked at Mekare with disbelief**Destroy her body!' Helplessly he looked at his wife.
"But Akasha merely smiled bitterly. The words came as no surprise to her. For a long moment, she said nothing. She merely looked at us with plain hatred; then she looked at the King. When she looked to us, she put the question. 'We are dead things, aren't we? We cannot live if it departs. We do not eat; we do not drink, save for the blood it wants; our bodies throw off no waste any longer; we have not changed in one single particular since that awful night; we are not alive anymore.'
"Mekare didn't answer. I knew that she was studying them; struggling to see their forms not as a human would see them but as a witch would see them, to let the quiet and the stillness collect around them, so that she might observe the tiny imperceptible aspects of this which eluded regular gaze. Into a trance she fell as she looked at them and listened. And when she spoke her voice was flat, dulclass="underline"
" 'It is working on your body; it is working and working as fire works on the wood it consumes; as worms work on the carcass of an animal. It is working and working and its work is inevitable; it is the continuance of the fusion which has taken place; that is why the sun hurts it, for it is using all of its energy to do what it must do; and it cannot endure the sun's heat coming down upon it.'