Dosh trotted down the steps and set off after the Thargians, crunching leaves under his boots. The night was calm but turning cold, and Trumb's disk was almost a perfect circle, so the eclipse would start soon. He could find his way along the path by moonlight. If it had gone by the time he returned, the fires twinkling among the trees would guide him. Snatches of hymns mingled with popular folk songs told how the Free were celebrating the Liberator's triumphant promises. They were showing their faith.
Shamefully, Dosh's faith had not been as strong as it should be. He knew Thargians and how jealously they guarded their borders. He had been very relieved when he heard them promise to let the Free depart unmolested but also very astonished, which he should not have been. He should have trusted more in D'ward and the power of the Undivided.
Catching a glimpse of the envoys in front of him, he slowed down. D'ward had told him to speak to them when they had left the woods and not before. He could hear the mutter of their conversation, the clink of the ephor's armor.
When D'ward rejected their terms, Dosh had been as surprised as everyone else. He should have had more faith. Just why the Liberator had chosen to proceed in the way he had was still a mystery, but he always knew what he was doing. Trust in the One! It would be the Thargians who would be surprised when they heard the message Dosh brought. They would curse, undoubtedly, but they would certainly accept, and it would be fun seeing their faces.
The real mystery was why D'ward had made so much of this mission. He had used the code words that meant Dosh was to obey without question, but it had not been necessary. Dosh would have been overjoyed to undertake this task without that. He could not imagine what problem D'ward had foreseen. Perhaps he had expected something else to happen, or had been considering several plans, and the worst had not happened. Why, then, had he used the code words "Good old days"?
"Dosh, darling?" A figure stepped out of the trees before him, from deep shadow to bright moonlight.
He yelped in horror and reeled back. His heel caught against a root and he fell, landing on his seat with an impact that knocked all the breath out of him. He gaped up at the apparition.
She was stark naked. She was hardly more than a child. She was also very pregnant, her breasts and belly distended. Her golden ringlets hung below her shoulders.
He turned his head away and closed his eyes. "Sister! You must not display yourself like that! It is unseemly. It is contrary to decency."
In midwinter, too! She must be having some sort of brainstorm. He'd heard that imminent motherhood could have strange effects on women. He was not sure if this sort of madness was commonly one of them, but madness was the only possible explanation. She was in need of help. He scrambled to his feet.
She laughed, a laugh like a tinkle of silver. "You always liked me like this before, lover."
Dosh reached out and clutched a tree for support. The roughness of its bark under his hand reassured him that he was awake and not dreaming. The voices of the Thargian embassy had faded into the distance. He stole a quick glance out of the corner of his eye and she was still there. In fact she was closer.
"Go away! Go back to your husband at once!"
"Husband?" She laughed again, nearer than ever. "Don't you remember me, Dosh? After all the happy times we had together?"
He stole another glance—at her face, only her face. It was a very lovely face, soft and fair and smooth. She was much too close. He looked away.
"I have never seen you before in my life!" he squealed.
"Well not like this," she admitted. "This is last year's model. Lovely, isn't she? Or she was. One of the guardsmen did the damage, I think."
Dosh's knees trembled with the shudder of terror and horror that ran through him. Oh, God preserve me!
She laughed again, and somewhere in the deep crypts of his mind, down in the foulness where the nightmares lurk, there was something unbearably familiar about that laugh. "Memories starting to come back, are they?" she teased. "It's easier to wipe them clean than bring them back, but we'll see what we can do. Aren't you going to kiss me?"
Nausea burned in his throat and cramped his gut. He pressed his face against the prickly tree bark. "Go away! In the name of the One True God, I bid you begone!" He began to pray, but silently, so she would not hear how frightened he was. God would hear. God would help him.
After a moment, she said sweetly, "I'm still here, Dosh. Are you sure you don't want to kiss me?"
Never! Never, never again! That sort of sin was all behind him now. He had a job to do, a very important job. D'ward was depending on him. He spun around the tree, bypassing the girl, and sprinted away along the path, stumbling and staggering, trying to fend off the trailing branches but missing some of them, which stung him across the face.
"Goodness, what a hurry!" she trilled, right at his back. "It isn't very good for this body to run like this, Dosh. Suppose it drops its brat right on the path here? And you won't get away from me like this, you know. What a surprise the ephor will have when we turn up together! Will he take your message as seriously as he should, do you suppose?"
Dosh stopped dead. The girl cannoned right into him and wrapped her arms around him, laughing gleefully. He struggled to free himself, and of course she was far stronger than she looked. She weighed as much as he did, and her mountainous belly seemed to get in his way more than in hers. The two of them staggered to and fro, banging into branches and saplings. He cursed between clenched teeth, he tramped on her bare toes, and she just trilled her ghastly mocking laugh. At last he managed to free an arm. He punched her in the face as hard as he could, hurting his knuckles.
She released him and fell back a step. Again she was in full moonlight.
"Darling, does this mean you don't love me any more?" Her smile displayed a missing tooth and blood coursing down her chin from a gashed lip. Her swollen bosom heaved as she panted. "Or are you just remembering how I enjoy rough play? Hit me again. Kick me!"
He was trembling so hard now that he could barely speak. "You are not a god! You are a foul, evil sorcerer—like that pair of mummies that call themselves Visek!"
"This is true," she said, looking down at the dark stream flowing over her breast and splashing onto her protruding belly. "It was naughty of D'ward to tell you, but it is true.. That needn't come between us, lover. We can still do all the things we used to do."
"You bewitched me!" His voice broke. Tears of frustration blurred his sight. Memories were starting to writhe in his mind like worms in rotten meat. Naked girls, naked boys . . . Worse, the faces were starting to come back, and the sounds of laughter and screaming and gasping and pleading. "You cast spells upon me. . . ."
She stepped forward. He retreated until he ran into a tree and could go no farther. She was so close that her nipples touched his coat and he could smell her sweat.
"Sometimes I did," she said huskily. "But you didn't really need them. You were the most inventive playmate I have ever had, Dosh. So tough, so versatile, so resilient. You're too old to be Tion now, of course, but we could still have fun together. Even if all we do is just watch the others—"
"Go away!" He closed his eyes. His fists hurt, he was clenching them so hard. "I will have nothing more to do with you ever again!"
"You will if I want you to!" she said sharply. "I can take you away from here before D'ward knows a thing about it. Well, if last year's model doesn't interest you, how about this year's?" A man's voice added, "These ones wear better."
The change of pitch warned Dosh what had happened. Reluctantly he looked. Now Tion was a boy—slim, narrow shouldered, dark haired, and startlingly handsome. Naked, of course. He pursed his lips invitingly.
"Go away!" Dosh screamed. He was powerless against such sorcery, and yet D'ward was relying on him. If he failed to deliver the message, thousands would die and all the Liberator's plans be ruined.
The incarnation shook his head pityingly. "You are being terribly foolish, Dosh. You want to go and tell the ephor that the Liberator was only pretending and really does accept his terms. But you haven't seen what that message is going to do to you, Dosh. D'ward is being very nasty and unfair to poor Dosh. Can't you work it out?"
"What if he is? I don't care! I'd do anything for him because he is my friend, a true friend, not a blood-sucking lecherous monster like you, Tion Sorcerer!"
The boy pouted. "I never treated you any worse than D'ward is treating you now. For your sake, you really shouldn't deliver that message, love."
Dosh clung to the thought that Tion the Youth was evil incarnate. Whatever he wanted was wrong, wrong! To escape by force was impossible, so deception was the only alternative.
"What message should I deliver then?"
"Let's see. You could tell them that D'ward says Thargians are cowards. You could tell them he's calling Ephor Kwargurk a turd in a tin tankard." The boy chuckled and then his eyes narrowed. "Don't try to fool me, love. You never could before, and you're terribly confused at the moment. D'ward is just another sorcerer, like me. That invisible god he's invented doesn't exist. D'ward doesn't even believe in him himself."
"That's not true! You're lying. You're on Zath's side! You want D'ward to die!"
The kid sighed, fluttering his long lashes. "No, love, no! You're wrong again. I am on D'ward's side, believe me! I always was. I had him in my power years ago and I let him go. Didn't you know that? I set you to spy on him, but just out of curiosity. I never tried to stop him, did I?"
Dosh moaned, unable to speak. His mind was whirling like a moth as it tried to find some way out of this. His efforts to pray were being choked off by all those ghastly memories bubbling up in his mind. D'ward had told him many times that the Youth was crazy. He'd said so to Visek, and they hadn't denied it.
"So you see," Tion said, "I really do want to see that horrible Zath dead, and this is the only way to do it. D'ward himself still isn't strong enough. He has to do one of two things. Either he lets the Thargians kill the Free, or he gets help from me and the others—all of us, the Five he has been slandering so nastily. I'd gladly help him, truly I would, but I won't dare to, because I know that the others won't. It would take all of us, all Five together and all our flunkies as well. And that won't ever happen, because none of us trusts the others enough. Somebody would be sure to break faith and help Zath, and then Zath will win."
He reached up a hand to stroke Dosh's cheek. Dosh jerked his head away and banged it on a branch hard enough to make stars fly in front of his eyes.
The boy tweaked Dosh's beard playfully. "You can guess what Zath will do then! It's called the Great Game, lover. The secret is to always choose the winning side, and D'ward isn't the winning side."
"You're lying!"
"No, Dosh, dear, I'm not. So I'm not going to let you deliver that message. We're going to let the Thargians think he meant what he said the first time. The silly boy changed his mind, but they're not going to hear that. You won't understand, but this way D'ward may just have a chance without our help. Zath will outsmart himself, and that will be a very elegant solution."
Dosh tried to lunge past. The kid caught him with one hand and held him like a steel bracket, so his feet shot out from under him and he thought his arm had been jerked from its socket. Tion supported the weight without even tensing his slender muscles. Dosh regained his footing and swung a punch at the beautiful face. He howled as his fist cracked into something as hard as a stone wall. Tion apparently felt nothing at all.
"Oh you do want to play rough games?" He glanced up at the sky and frowned. The light was fading fast as a stain of black spread over Trumb's great disk. Stars were returning.
"Well!" the sorcerer muttered. "Now that's interesting!"
Dosh squirmed, trying to pry the slender fingers loose and failing utterly. Tion ignored him, apparently staring at the eclipse.
"Very interesting! That changes things." The sorcerer chuckled. "All right, Dosh. You go and deliver your message. Stop the massacre if you can."
With that he vanished, fading away even faster than the green moon.