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Several days after Noim’s departure some guilty impulse drove me to the Stone Chapel. To fill the time until Jidd could see me, I roamed the halls and byways of the dark building, pausing at altars, bowing humbly to half-blind scholars of the Covenant holding debate in a courtyard, brushing away ambitious minor drainers who, recognizing me, solicited my trade. All about me were the things of the gods, and I failed to detect the divine presence. Perhaps Schweiz had found the godhood through the souls of other men, but I, dabbling in selfbaring, somehow had lost that other faith, and it did not matter to me. I knew that in time I would find my way back to grace under this new dispensation of love and trust that I hoped to offer. So I lurked in the godhouse of godhouses, a mere tourist.
I went to Jidd. I had not had a draining since immediately after Schweiz first had given me the Sumaran drug. The little crooknosed man remarked on that as I took the contract from him. The pressures of the Justiciary, I explained, and he shook his head and made a chiding sound. “You must be full to overflowing,” Jidd said. I did not reply, but settled down before his mirror to peer at the lean, unfamiliar face that dwelled in it. He asked me which god I would have, and I told him the god of the i
Did I fear that? On rare occasions I had held things back from drainers out of shame, but never out of fear of betrayal. Naive I was, and I had full faith in the ethics of the godhouse. Only now, suddenly suspicious, with that suspicion having been planted by Jidd himself, did I mistrust Jidd and all his tribe. Why did he want to know? What information was he after? What could I gain, or he, by my revealing my source of the drug? I replied tautly, “One seeks forgiveness for oneself alone, and how can telling the name of one’s companion bring that? Let him do his own confessing.” But of course there was no chance that Schweiz would go to a drainer; thus I had come down to playing wordgames with Jidd. All value had leaked from this draining, leaving me with an empty husk. “If you would have peace from the gods,” Jidd said, “you must speak your soul fully.” How could I do that? Confess the seduction of eleven people into selfbaring? I had no need of Jidd’s forgiveness. I had no faith in his good will. Abruptly I stood up, a little dizzy from kneeling in the dark, swaying a bit, almost stumbling. The sound of distant hymn-singing floated past me, and a trace of the scent of the precious incense of a plant of the Wet Lowlands. “One is not ready for draining today,” I told Jidd. “One must examine one’s soul more closely?’ I lurched toward the door. He looked puzzledly at the money I had given him. “The fee?” he called. I told him he could keep it.
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The days became mere vacant rooms, separating one journey with the drug from the next. I drifted idle and detached through all my responsibilities, seeing nothing of what was around me, living only for my next communion. The real world dissolved; I lost interest in sex, wine, food, the doings of the Port Justiciary, the friction between neighboring provinces of Velada Borthan, and all other such things, which to me now Were only the shadows of shadows. Possibly I was using the drug too frequently. I lost weight and existed in a perpetual haze of blurred white light. I had difficulties in sleeping, and for hours found myself twisting and shifting, a blanket of muggy tropical air clamping me to my mattress, a haggard insomniac with an ache in his eyeballs and grittiness under his lids. I walked tired through my days and blinking through my evenings. Rarely did I speak with Loimel, nor did I touch her, and hardly ever did I touch any other woman. I fell asleep at midday once while lunching with Halum. I scandalized High Justice Kalimol by replying to one of his questions with the phrase “It seems to me—” Old Segvord Helalam told me I looked ill, and suggested I go hunting with my sons in the Burnt Lowlands. Nevertheless the drug had the power of bringing me alive. I sought out new sharers, and found it ever more easy to make contact with them, for often now they were brought to me by those who had already made the i
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Sometimes, unexpectedly, in the blank dead time between one communion and another, I underwent a strange confusion of the self. A block of borrowed experience that I had stowed in the dark depths of my mind might break loose and float up into the higher levels of consciousness, intruding itself into my own identity. I remained aware of being Ki