'Shut up!' she screamed. 'You shut up! What do you know about MEN? You couldn't, because you're barely more than an ape yourself. Go back to your beloved hill-people, and eat rotten meat in the dirt!' But here she paused, remembering her purpose. And through the heat of the first real hatred she had ever felt for him, came the cold touch of poise in the act of betrayal, and she knew with a twisted thrill what it was to surrender to Evil. 'But if you're really worried,' she said placidly, 'Wait for me at the Vale of the Obelisk. I'll meet you there at noon, to tell you of our love-making. And then we'll say goodbye, forever.' She strode out, and left him shaking. He fell to his knees and wept, much as William had screamed, to find his lover dead. He was alone in a dark cave, too small and dank for a man..... * William did not wake, because he had not slept. He told himself that he was letting it build inside him, mounting toward the kill. But in truth he was far beyond even that. The amphetamines he had injected though every voice of body and mind cried against it, ate him like a cancer. He had lost all control. This would be an act of vengeance, but not his vengeance. Somewhere in the mincer of pain and loss he had become the very thing he had fought all his life against, what he swore he would never become: an instrument in someone else's, someTHING else's hands. He could not admit this. He could not admit, or think, of anything. For his mind was no longer his own. Not by a conscious act of submission--- He gave a violent cry and hurled a bottle at the crumbling half-wall. As it shattered, as he saw the broken glass and knew what it could do to human flesh, he remembered his purpose. In large, painful gulps he drained most of a second bottle, letting the wine take the place of blood in his veins. He would be Master yet. The sun was up and it was day. He would have her, and then destroy her. Then destroy himself. Nothing else mattered, and Nothing never needed justification. It simply was, the only truth: the hole when the bottom fell out. It was the naked razor, stalking through the streets, cutting out men and women at random. Letting some grow fat for its later pleasure. Wantonly hewing the poor, who though possessed of a greater capacity for suffering, had reached the limits of endurance and could be tortured no more. He had become a willing servant of the thing he had always fought, and feared. But he did not care. He did not care. * When he came to her, as arranged, there was a moment when Sylviana saw what Kalus had seen: a wild, desperate hunger in his eyes, that could no longer feed on things which the earth gave as food. They wanted not flesh, but blood, not nourishment, but to mock the very act of nourishment. They could not be fed, or appeased, any more than one could quench the rape of napalm fire.