“It was revealed to us in the great mirror of the Daughter of Darkness, whom we worship, that the ancient spirit of Hia would return to this temple with a magic sign of motherhood which would undo our work in the world. Cazotl, our chief, and I, his servant, then came to degrade and darken the maiden Hia, so that she might forget, as other women have forgotten, this sign which threatens our power. But the magic of this place is stronger than ours: Cazotl was overpowered by his own evil flung back on him by one stronger than our strongest—one who must have mastered our own magic to do it. Many of our number have set out to find the magic which controls our own in this place, but none of them has ever returned. I, too, was struck and crawled away to die, but recovered, and came here to find Hia and destroy her.”
“The sign is already given,” I said. “Hear me and understand: the sign of motherhood, of birth and remembering, is already given. What does that mean to you?”
“It means that our power is doomed. Our ancient enemies, the giants in what men call Good, will be born again upon the earth. These strong ones can only come back by means of the pure white magic of the woman. It has been the aim of our Brotherhood from earliest times to bind woman down in darkness, to narrow her mind, to degrade and blind her lest she should recall this magic. But now the sign is given, and we are doomed.”
“And what is your punishment?”
“We have no punishment,” he said. “Punishment exists only for those who have a spark of good left in them. We have severed all connection with that. Remorse, the hell of those who vacillate between good and evil, has no existence for us.”
“But you can suffer physical pain?” I exclaimed.
“Yes; pain and pleasure are in our bodies,” he replied.
“Then before you go out into darkness”—my words hissed out in a voice that sounded strange to my own ears—“you must suffer. You cannot act except in obedience to my voice; but you are conscious, acutely conscious in all your body, to feel what my words will work in you. You cannot stir from this spot, neither can you move a limb nor yet cry out. Servant of the Vile Brotherhood of Huo, hear your punishment. You have a raging fire in your vitals, so that your blood seethes and hisses through your veins. For one hour as we count time, this fire will rage through your being with the most horrible pain. In the darkness before you, you will see the face of a great timepiece, and every second as marked there shall seem to you like the time that passes between sunset and sunset, fully stretched out and crammed with agony. Yet you will neither faint nor fall, but endure the whole.”
My voice was the voice of cursing, and, as the last words echoed round the cavern walls and finally died away on shapeless granite lips in the high vaults overhead, I recoiled at the awful nature of the thing I had uttered. The torch fell from my fingers; then, in the darkness that ensued, I staggered and fell backwards into the water in the great basin.
I struck out for the rim, but no sooner had I drawn myself up than I was startled by another voice than my own in the darkness near by.