"Nothing."

"You were going to tell me about how you are really a very honorable
man. Why don't you? You have an hour before it will be time to betray
the woman from the _Hawk of Darion_."

Ransome shrugged, and his voice returned her mockery.

"If I told you that I had been an acolyte in the Temple of the Dark
One, and that I was condemned to death for blasphemy, committed for
love of a woman, would you like me better?"

"I might."

"Ten years ago," Ransome said. He talked, and the mighty walls of the
Temple reared themselves around his mind, and the music of the
pleasure house became the chanting of the priests at the high altar.

* * * * *

He stood at the rear of the great Temple, and he had the tonsure and
the black robes, and his name was not Ransome, but Ra-sed.

He had almost forgotten his Terran name. Forgotten, too, were his
parents, and the laboratory ship that had been his home until the
crash landing that had left him an orphan and Ward of the Temple.

Red candles burned before the high altar, but terror began just beyond
their flickering light. It was dark where Ra-sed stood, and he could
hear the cries of the people in the courtyard outside, and feel the
trembling of the pillars, the very pillars of the Temple, and the
groaning of stone on massive stone in the great, shadowed arches
overhead. Above all, the chanting before the altar of the Dark One,
rising, rising toward hysteria.

And then, like a knife in the darkness, the scream, and the straining
to see which of the maidens the sacred lots cast before the altar had
chosen; and the sudden, sick knowledge that it was Dura-ki. Dura-ki,
of the soft golden hair and bright lips.

In stunned silence, Ra-sed, acolyte, listened to the bridal chant of
the priests; the ancient words of the Dedication to the Dark One.

The chant told of the forty times forty flights of onyx steps leading
downward behind the great altar to the dwelling place of the Dark One
and of the forty terrible beasts couched in the pit to guard His
slumber.

In the beginning, Dalir, the Sire, God of the Mists, had gone down
wrapped in a sea fog, and had stolen the Sacred Fire while the Dark
One slept. All life in Darion had come from Dalir's mystic union with
the Sacred Fire.

Centuries passed before a winter of bitter frosts came, and the Dark
One awakened cold in His dwelling place and found the Sacred Fire
stolen. His wrath moved beneath th