All around them stood the populace of Atalantaya, dark eyed and dark haired as they were, Derek and Welf and Garekyn and Kapetria. But there came the Great One with the unearthly attributes of the god.
"Our mistake, you see," said the Parents, "because he has come to believe that he is a god."
In his hands the Great One held an oval object, shimmering in the sunlight, and all around the Great One the people were crying out, pointing, cheering, bowing to him, and calling out their praise. All around them in the windows of the high buildings and towers were faces turned to see the Great One. People stood way above on the rooftops looking down on the freshly turned field that lay ready for the object which the Great One now planted in the moist, fragrant soil.
Suddenly everyone was singing, singing in a rolling wordless melody. People put their arms around one another and began to sway as they sang. Kapetria put her arm around Derek, her familiar smile flashing warmly on him. And Derek held tight to Garekyn. And the fountains poured forth their water, raining down on the oval as the oval began to grow larger and larger and then to break open, its thin casing peeled back as if into a collection of petals out of which the great tall glistening shoots began to grow.
"But does the singing make it happen?" Derek asked Kapetria.
"No, beloved," she said. "It's entirely chemical. All of this is chemical. Everything you see here is chemical. But don't you see the genius of it? He is making the common people feel a part of it; he has given them a ritual so that they are united in it. Oh, he has been so clever, so very clever."
The Great One stood back with his thumbs hooked in his leather belt watching them all as they sang and danced, his eyes moving up the towers across from him to the thousands of beings clustered on all those terraces and in all those windows. How proud he was, how happy. Tears hovered in his eyes. He stood there, weight on his left foot, the other leg relaxed, his long blue tunic hanging loose around him, such richly colored wool, splendidly stitched with golden acorns at the hem, and so bright the buckle that sparkled on his belt and the buckles on his shoulders. How he gloried in it, and then his eyes fixed on Derek and even for Derek he smiled.
Amel.
The great clear shoots of luracastria were spreading out now, broadening, growing thicker, and then transforming themselves into great sheets of clear shimmering material rising higher and higher and growing wider and wider as the immense surrounding crowd began to cheer as well as sing.
Derek stood amazed watching the building grow out and upwards, watching walls and windows rising and forming in front of him, seeing the entire interior and exterior of the tower unleashed from the oval as if its birth into growth couldn't be stopped. It was like seeing a great tree grow from a seed in a matter of minutes, thrusting forth its mighty limbs, its tiniest leaves, its flowers, its seeds.
Everywhere the people laughed, shouted, and pointed, punctuating the waves of singing which never stopped. Up and up went the tower until it was now as tall as all the others, a splendid edifice of doorways and balconies and windows, grown out of the oval which was now lost beneath it, as its tentacles anchored themselves deep in the earth. Derek could hear them. Why, the thing had been growing downwards as surely as it had grown upwards.
"Behold the luracastria," said one of the people beside them. "I see you don't know what it is. Everything in the center of Atalantaya is built of luracastria, behold luracastria--in one form or another, even the great dome is luracastria."
Derek was so happy. So very happy. How could anyone want to destroy all this, destroy the Great One, destroy all these people, these happy multitudes, these souls whose songs rose Heavenward under the dome? It was unthinkable to him, as unthinkable to him as the idea of his own death. A fear took hold of him, so terrible that he began to tremble.
It was fading. No, I don't want to go. I want to be with you, Kapetria. Hold tight to me! Kapetria, I'm alive, I exist still. Where are you! Find me. Welf, Garekyn, find me.
Darkness.
Blackness.
No sound from his own heart. Yes, a human would be dead now. He knew this, but it seemed to take forever for him to know it again, and know it was finished, and he would have his mind and his body back.
Surely Rhoshamandes had let him go. But Derek couldn't feel anything, neither up nor down, or right or left. But his brain was working. The cells in his bone marrow were working.
"But I have killed him!"
"No, believe me, you have not. He looks dead; he sounds dead; he feels dead. But he's not dead. Just be patient. The thing is not dead. It's what happens to him when he's assaulted; he loses consciousness; he stops breathing; but he's not dead."
Silence. Then the fragrance of the room again, damp stone, the soot from the little fireplace for which there was neither wood nor coal. The smell of the blood drinkers, of skin that had been in the sun to burn it by day as they slept so they could pass for human, and the scents of their clothes and their perfume. The smell of books, of old pages. Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,
passing through nature to eternity. Well, not me.
"It tasted like human blood, the finest of human blood, only it was thicker, and a little sweeter. Just a little..."
"Yes."
"It has nutrients that human blood does not have."
"Perhaps. But I don't know what the Hell they are. It lasts longer."
"What is this creature?"
"It would be nice to have an entire stable of such creatures, wouldn't it?" Roland laughed. And laughed. How Derek hated that laugh. "And look at it, the blood's already being regenerated. Look at his hands, his fingers, his nails."
Something touched Derek but he couldn't locate the sensation. All through him he felt tingling and the tingling was Derek.
But they continued to talk. And his soul recorded every heartless word they spoke.