Night of Light

When these ceased, there was a group of lonely statues, of past Yesses and Alguls. These also had jewels for eyes, set in such a fashion that they seemed to follow Carmody as he passed their owners. One of the Alguls sent a chill through Carmody, so evil was his stare.

He hurried past the Algul to the rampart at the edge of the roof, near the statue of a Yess. This, too, gave him a start and a chill, since he recognized the features of the god he had murdered so many years ago. Only now, it did not seem so long ago. It was as if he had just left him, because Yess held a half-eaten candle in his hand and there was a red wound upon his forehead and one ear was half shot off. Carmody tried to ignore the reminder of the man he had once been.

He looked out over the ramparts at the city of Rak. Around the horizon, distant and huge fires burned. The haze above the flames was a light purple, and it seemed to coil and writhe. Snakes, octopuses, rags of faces appeared, dissolved, and re-formed into new images. The fires, he knew, were coming from the recently built suburbs surrounding the massive stone heart of the old city. The wooden houses were burning to the ground, and the firemen were dead, fighting for their lives and souls, or else had helped touch off the flames themselves.

From far below, cries rose. There were screams, shouts, bellows, and, now and then, the punctuation marks of small-arms. The firing from the besieging Algulists immediately below had ceased. Perhaps they had turned on each other and were fighting with the weapons they had been born with—or those they had developed in the metamorphoses the Night sometimes brought.

The flicker of the sun around the curve of the planet gripped him then, as if the star’s great hands had twisted a cord around him and pulled both ends. He felt squeezed, and he thought he would burst.

“John Carmody!” wailed a voice, far off and plaintive. “Evil John Carmody!”

It was the voice of Mrs. Fratt.

He looked to his right, for it sounded as if she stood somewhere at the distant end of the rooftop. But there was no one there.

“Carmody! I want my son back! My eyes!”

He began shaking, for he fully expected her to materialize out of the air as Mary had done. But there was no hardening of the atmosphere, only the mauve flickerings.

Again the voice keened. “You are a killer, John Carmody! You began as one and you end as one!”

“Mrs. Fratt,” he said aloud, then he stopped. He left the roof and went down in the gravcage to the room in which Lieftin had died.

The others were sitting on chairs around a great round table that had not been there before.

Carmody asked Yess for permission to speak and told them of the voice.

“You feel guilty because of Mrs. Fratt,” Yess said. “You know that at the time you should have continued to try to talk her out of her vengeance. But you panicked and allowed your old reflexes to take over.”

“I couldn’t go on any longer with persuasion,” the priest said heatedly. “She was not alone. Abdu would have insisted she carry through or, if she had refused, he would have carried it through himself.”

“If you believed that in your i

“I am not a saint!” Carmody said loudly.

Yess did not reply. There was silence for a minute.

The men and women at the table brooded with their eyes fixed on their wine cups and the half-eaten cakes made in the image of the Seven Fathers. The priests and priestesses sitting on one side of the table or scattered throughout the huge chamber were mute or else conversed in whispers.

Finally, Tand raised his head and spoke.

“Don’t despair, John. All of us who have gone through more than one Night have experienced these things. We call them ‘residues.’ You may go through seven Nights and still not be cleansed of them.

“In fact, and I do not say this to frighten you but to acquaint you with reality, which is in essence a variety of potentialities...”

He stopped, cleared his throat, and smiled. “I’ll try not to be too long-winded. There have been cases, exceedingly rare, of what we call retroconversion. The most famous, infamous rather, is that of Ruugro. He was one of the Fathers of the previous Yess. During the seventh Night after the previous Yess was conceived, Ruugro switched over. No one knows why or how, but he became an Algulist. And he almost effected the birth of a new Algul before he was killed.”

“Then we’re never safe?” Carmody said.

“Every breath of life draws in good and evil,” Yess said.”Strife accompanies a man with each step. There is no letup.”

“Has a Yess ever become an Algul?” the bishop said.

“Never,” Yess replied. “But then the sons of Boonta, though they may die, are not mortal.”

As the long Night wore on, Carmody tried to sort out his thoughts about Yess, and found that he could not. How could the god of “good,” if he were what he claimed to be, cause this devastation? He was roused from his thoughts by a priest who spoke to Yess. “Son of Boonta, the Algulists are massing before the Temple. They may be getting ready to attack.”

Yess nodded and went to the table on which stood the golden candlestick holder in the form of a coiling serpent. The candle that should have been there was missing. That long time ago, Carmody had so thoroughly destroyed the body of the murdered Yess with his panpyric, only a few ashes had been left. These had been mixed with the wax of the trogur bird, but the present Yess had eaten all of the tiny candle several Nights before.

Seeing the empty holder, Carmody felt guilty for a moment. He was aware that the Kareenans thought the new Yess imbibed divinity and spiritual power from eating the ashes of the old Yess and that Carmody’s act had robbed them of this sacrament. Yet, though he knew that the Kareenans were conscious of what he had done and must resent the act, he had not heard a word of reproach.

Yess, standing by the table, touched the candleholder with his hand as if he thought he would, at least, derive some strength from its former associations. He raised his head, shut his eyes, and began to chant. He prayed thus in the ancient language permitted to the gods alone.

Tand held one of Carmody’s hands and a priestess held the other. All except Yess were linked thus. They stood side by side, the entire line forming a crescent whose center was behind Yess and whose horns curved outward past him and then a little inward. From the begi

Sweat trickled down Carmody’s armpits and over his ribs. The iciness and the static charge—the aura of panic—grew stronger. His heart thudded, and his legs quivered. He felt that the walls were about to peel away in a flood of utterly cold light—light that would not only blind his eyes, but would fill the deepest and darkest recesses of his body and that entity he called his soul so full of icy luminescence that reason and the senses could not tolerate it.

“Steady!” Tand murmured. “I, too, feel it, but you must stand! If you don’t, you are lost! And so are we! Boonta does not condone weakness!”