Javanne danced. She raised her arms, wove them down, twisting her body on slender white legs . . . Javanne danced, her face shining with the most reckless passions. A dim shape dropped from above, a beautiful half-creature, and he joined his body to Javanne's in a fantastic embrace. And the crowd below cried, leapt, rolled, tossed, joined together in a swift culmination of their previous antics.

From the rocks T'sais watched, mind under an intensity no normal brain could understand. But—in strange paradox—the sight and sound fascinated her, reached below the warp, touched the dark chords latent to humanity. Etarr looked down at her, eyes glowing blue fire, and she stared back in a tumult of contradictory emotions. He winced and turned away; at last she looked back to the orgy below—a drug-dream, a heaving of wild flesh in the darting firelight. A palpable aura was cast up, a weft in space meshed of varying depravities. And the demons swooped like birds alighting and joined the delirium. Foul face after face T'sais saw, and each burnt her brain until she thought she must scream and die—visages of leering eye, bulbed cheek, lunatic body, black faces of spiked nose, expressions outraging thought, writhing, hopping, crawling, the spew of the demon-lands. And one had a nose like a three-fold white worm, a mouth that was a putrefying blotch, a mottled jowl and black malformed forehead; the whole a thing of retch and horror. To this Etarr directed T'sais' gaze. She saw and her muscles knotted. "There," said Etarr in a muffled voice, "there is a face twin to the one below this hood."

And T'sais, staring at Etarr's black concealment, shrank back.

He chuckled weakly, bitterly . . . After a moment T'sais reached out and touched his arm. "Etarr."

He turned back to her. "Yes?"

"My brain is flawed. I hate all I see. I cannot control my fears.

Nevertheless that which underlies my brain— my blood, my body, my spirit—that which is me loves you, the you underneath the mask."

Etarr studied the white face with a fierce intentness. "How can you love when you hate?"

"I hate you with the hate that I give to all the world; I love you with a feeling nothing else arouses."

Etarr turned away. "We make a strange pair . . ."

The turmoil, the whimpering joinings of flesh and half-flesh, quieted.

A tall man in a conical black hat appeared on the dais. He flung back his head, shouted spells to the sky, wove runes in the air with his arms. And as he chanted, high above a gigantic wavering figure began to form, tall, taller than the highest trees, taller than the sky. It shaped slowly, green mists folding and unfolding, and presently the outline was clear—the wavering shape of a woman, beautiful, grave, stately. The figure slowly became steady, glowing with an unearthly green light. She seemed to have golden hair, coiffed in the manner of a dim past, and her clothes were those of the ancients.