The women were washing his body in the water. Their motions were unpracticed, clumsy.

Aton recoiled. They were zombies!

The axe was on the floor, where he had passed out. He had not achieved the water himself. Was he a zombie, too?

“No!”

Aton jumped up, clambered out of the water, lumbered to the weapon. He slapped a hand on it as though afraid it would wriggle away. He was armed now; he was no zombie.

The women came after him, mechanically. He backed away, hesitant after their kindness to him. He had been destroying them; why had they spared him?

Something touched him. Whirling, Aton saw a man. It was Bossman, standing outside the water. His skin was clear: His eyes were vacant.

Aton knew what he had to do. He lifted the axe.

The attack began. He clenched his mind against it and swung the suddenly heavy axe. The great blade of it strove overhead, ponderous, too massive for his strength. He forced it onward, slowly, guiding it as gravity took leisurely hold and toppled it down. It came to rest at last in Bossman’s skull, and he fell, fell.

I have paid my debt to you, and—I’m sorry.

The force of the attack lay on him like a smothering blanket, but as he staggered back it eased again. The dead women lay all around; only the two who had revived him were animate. He could kill them—

And wander through the endless caverns of Chthon, alone. Was this the way it was to end? And if he succumbed, eventually, to zombi-ism, who would there be to kill him?

What had the love of Malice led him into?

“Truce,” The cracked voice came from the pool behind him. He had forgotten the black-haired woman, the last holdout.

She was rising from the water. He was not alone!

She approached him, moving with the awkward gait of the possessed. Her eyes stared straight ahead.

The last of the zombie conquests was coming to him, easy prey for axe or fist. What did it mean?

“Truce,” it repeated.

It could talk. There was intelligence behind the Myxo half-death! The skull without the crossbones.

Now it was ready to parley.

18

Aton held the axe, unwilling to take the action that would leave him entirely alone and lost in the caverns. Intelligence, even malevolent intelligence, was a more promising opponent than solitude.

“Truce,” he agreed.

The woman-thing stopped before him listlessly. “Do not kill,” it said.

The zombie-master wanted to save its remaining conquests! He had a bargaining point. His mind explored the possibilities.

“Who are you?” he asked, not really concerned, but needing to gain time for further thought. Could he win his freedom through this thing?

The figure’s eyes blinked. She backed away, eyes on the axe. “What happened?” she asked plaintively. “Why are you—”

She had thrown off the possession! “You don’t remember?”