Bedside continued: “You have so conveniently forgotten your incestuous passions. Careful!” he rapped as Aton moved. “I would not kill you so long as Chthon needs you, but you would not find my surgery entirely painless.”

This was Bedside’s final effort. Could he nullify it? The man was infernally clever.

“There in your spotel,” Bedside whispered intently. “That’s when you did it. Chthon knows. That’s when you had the minionette alone, knowing what she was.” The bright eye-lenses glittered in the green glow, just above the pointing blade. “That’s when you raped your moth—”

The knife clattered to the floor as minion struck with the strength and speed of telepathy. Bedside stared at the thing he had loosed, a living chimera. “Pray to your god for help!” it whispered, hot teeth poised, talon fingers barely touching the bulging eyeballs, ready to nudge them redly out of their sockets. “Perhaps it will help you die.”

They remained in frozen tableau, the young warrior and the old. Then the chimera faded. Aton let the man fall, unharmed. “I am not what I was,” he said, “and I was never the physical chimera. I will not kill you for distorting what you do not understand.”

Bedside lay where he had fallen, at Aton’s feet. The menace in him was gone; he was a tired old man. “You have slain your chimera.”

“I have slain it.”

“I return to Chthon in the morning. You are free.”

Aton went to the port and swung out, feet searching for the ladder.

“Let me speak for a moment as a man,” Bedside said, halting Aton’s descent. “Chthon desires your service, not your demise. There is no resentment. Chthon will help you to win your other battle.”

“No.”

“Listen, then. Had I had a woman like your Coquina to love me, I would never have needed Chthon. She broke my arm, eleven months ago—I had not thought she knew your fighting art—but she is a woman you cannot replace. You will lose her, unless—”

Aton dropped down to the ground and began to move away. “Think, think of the date!” Bedside cried after him. “And of the hvee! Otherwise...” But his voice was lost in the rapid distance.

Eighteen