“That is a lie! My soul is already ransomed! My mind is the more powerful. It has already halted yours. It is conquering yours. It is seizing your mind and enslaving it. It is mastering your will, Sanang! Your mind bends before mine. You know it! You know it is bending. You feel it is breaking down!”
Sanang’s eyes began to glitter but his pale brown face had grown almost white.
“I slew you once—in the Wood of the White Moth,” he said huskily. “There is no resurrection from such a death, little Heavenly Azure. Look upon me! My soul and yours are one!”
“You are looking upon my soul,” she said.
“A lie! You are in your body!”
The girl laughed. “My body lies asleep in the Ritz upon my husband’s bed,” she said. “My body is his, my mind belongs to him, my soul is already one with his. Do you not know it, dog of a Yezidee? Look upon me, Sanang Noïane! Look upon my unwounded hands! My shroud lies at your feet. And there lie the knives that could not pierce my heart! I am thrice clean! Listen to my words, Sanang! There is no other god but God!”
The young man’s visage grew pasty and loose and horrible; his lips became flaccid like dewlaps; but out of these sagging folds of livid skin his voice burst whistling, screaming, as though wrenched from his very belly:
“May Erlik strangle you! May you rot where you stand! May your face become a writhing mass of maggots and your body a corruption of living worms!
“For what you are doing to me this day may every demon in hell torment you!
“Have a care what you are about!” he screeched. “You are slaying my mind, you sorceress! You have seized my mind and are crushing it! You are putting out its light, you Yezidee witch!—you are quenching the last spark—of reason—in—me——”