The Quest - Smith Wilbur (читаем книги онлайн бесплатно TXT) 📗
'Alas!' He shook his head mournfully. 'I would not know how to begin.'
'Then let me instruct you.'
Naked she was even more handsome than when she was clothed. She had wide hips, large resilient breasts and big dark nipples. When she lay on her back on his sleeping mat, spread her thighs and guided him into her he was taken off-guard by the heat and the clinging oleaginous embrace of her secret flesh. He came perilously close to spending himself before they had begun in earnest. With a huge effort he regained control of himself and his body. Now he was able to profit from all his practice and self-training. He blocked out his own sensations and concentrated on reading her aura in the way a mariner reads a chart of the oceans.
He used it to divine her needs and wants before she became aware of them. He made her cry out and whimper. He made her screech like a condemned woman on a torture table. She spasmed and her whole body convulsed. She pleaded with him to stop, then begged him never to stop.
'You are killing me,' she sobbed at last. 'In the holy name of the goddess, I can go on no longer.' But he went on and on.
She was weakening, unable to meet his thrusts. Her face was wet with tears and sweat. Dark shadows of fear fell across her eyes. 'You are a devil,' she whispered. 'You are the devil himself.'
'I am the devil that you, Hannah and others like you have created.'
She was ready at last. There was no resistance left in her. He held her down, pinning her deeply. Her body and mind were open to him.
He covered her mouth with his, forcing her lips open, then arched his back and, like a pearl diver taking a long last breath before plunging below the surface, he drew it all out, her strength, her wisdom and her knowledge, her triumphs and defeats, her fear and her deeply buried guilt. He took everything she had and left her empty on the mat. Her
breathing was quick and shallow, her skin pale and translucent as wax.
Her eyes stared ahead unblinking, but saw nothing. He sat beside her through the rest of that night, reading her memories, learning her secrets, truly coming to know her.
The dawn light was filtering into the room when at last she stirred and rolled her head from side to side. 'Who am I?' she whispered weakly.
'Where am I? What has happened to me? I can remember nothing.'
'You are a person named Lusulu, but you have wrought great evil in your life. You were tormented by guilt. I have taken it and all else from you. But there is nothing of yours that I wish to keep. I am giving it back to you, especially the guilt. In the end it will kill you, and you so richly deserve that death.'
As he spread her again and knelt over her, she tried to fight him off but she did not have the strength. As he entered her for the second time she screamed, but the scream burbled in her throat and did not reach her lips. When he was deep in her, he took another deep breath and strained.
He expelled it all back into her in a single long ejaculation. After he had finished, he uncoupled from her and went to bathe himself.
When he came back into the sleeping chamber she was pulling on her tunic. She gave him one look of stark terror, and he saw that her aura was shredded. She stumbled to the door, pulled it open and scuttled into the passage. The sound of her running feet receded.
He felt the first twinge of pity for her, but he recalled all her heinous crimes and it fell away. Then he thought: But she has made retribution in small part by teaching me how I must deal with her mistress, the great witch.
Day after day and week after week, he waited patiently for the invitation from Eos that he knew must come. Then, one morning, he awoke with the familiar sense of well-being and expectation.
'The witch is summoning me to her lair,' he told himself. On the terrace overlooking the lake he ate a frugal breakfast of dates and figs as he watched the sun break through the morning mist and clothe the walls of the crater with golden light. Apart from the servants he saw nobody: not Hannah, Rei, or Assem. He was relieved by this: he did not trust himself to come face to face with one of them so soon after the revelations contained in the scroll from the secret room. Nobody
accosted him or attempted to restrain him when he left the building and set out for the gates of the upper gardens.
He walked slowly, taking his time to assemble and review his forces.
The only reliable intelligence he had about Eos was the description Demeter had given him. He was able to run over it word for word as he walked. So complete were his powers of recall that it was as if the old man was speaking to him again.
If she is threatened she can change her appearance as a chameleon does, Demeter's voice said in his ears, and Taita remembered the manifestations he had encountered at the grotto: the imp, the pharaoh, the gods and goddesses and his own self.
Yet vanity is among her multitudinous vices. You cannot imagine the beauty she is able to assume. It stuns the senses and negates reason. When she takes on this aspect no man can resist her wiles. The sight of her reduces even the most noble soul to the level of a beast. Taita cast his mind back to his sighting of Eos in the operating room at the sanatorium. He had not glimpsed her face through the black veil, but such was her beauty that even unseen it had flooded the room.
Despite all my training as an adept I was not able to restrain my basest instincts. Demeter spoke again, and Taita hearkened to him. I lost the ability and the inclination to reckon consequences. For me, in that moment, nothing but her existed. I was consumed by lust. She toyed with me, like the winds of autumn with a dead leaf. To me it seemed she gave me everything, every delight contained in this world. She gave me her body. Taita heard again his tormented groans as he went on: Even now the memory drives me to the brink of madness. Each rise and swell, enchanted opening and fragrant cleft . . . I did not try to resist her, for no mortal man could do so.
Will I be able to do so? Taita wondered.
Then Demeter's most dire warning echoed in his head: Taita, you remarked that the original Eos was an insatiable nymphomaniac, and that is so, but this other Eos outstrips her in appetite. When she kisses, she sucks out the vital juices of her lover, as you or I might suck out the juices from a ripe orange. When she takes a man between her thighs in that exquisite but infernal coupling she draws out of him his very substance. She takes from him his soul.
His substance is the ambrosia that nourishes her. She is as some monstrous vampire that feeds on human blood. She chooses only superior beings as her victims, men and women of Good Mind, servants of the Truth, a magus of illustrious reputation or a gifted seer. Once she detects her victim, she runs him down as relentlessly as a wolf harries a deer.
As she has done to me. Taita reflected.'
She is omnivorous. Those were the words of Demeter who had known her as no living man ever could. No matter age or appearance, physical frailty or imperfection. It is not their flesh that feeds her appetites, but their souk. She devours young and old, men and women. Once she has them in her thrall, wrapped in her silken web, she draws from them their accumulated store of learning, wisdom and experience. She sucks it out through their mouths with her accursed kisses. She draws it out from their loins in her loathsome embrace.
She leaves only a desiccated husk.
The witch's minions, Hannah, Rei and Assem, had regenerated Taita's missing organs for one reason only; to enable Eos to destroy him, body, mind and soul. He crushed down the terror that threatened to rise like a tidal wave and sweep him away.
