The Book of the Beast by Tanith Lee Page A

was also her love, the reason she had lived at all.
    The decision of unthinking love was an insanity and it made her bold, perhaps for the first time in her existence.
    She left her futile stitchery, and walked slowly, as if with an invited purpose, up through the house.
    She had begun to learn its thoroughfares almost by default. She knew the situation of that other room, in which her lord slept, when not with his wife. She must go northerly, towards the most ancient portion of the building. She passed servants, but none challenged her. To them, she was a lady, a facet of d’Uscaret, however slight. Long corridors lit by windows, hung with tapestry, and quartered with carven benches, gave on thinner darker lanes, whose windows had no glass but only bars, whose occasional tapestries rotted. No longer did any servants appear. There was a dull silence. Yet she did not lose her way. For in the wilderness there was still some sign of habitation, or passage. Here and there a landmark of a great chest, even the mossy blackened hangings—for elsewhere the corridors were closed by grilles of spiderweb, the floors seas of dust—empty of anything human, limitlessly undisturbed.
    So she found her way to a twisting stair she had once or twice heard described. It was the path into the tower-top, the Bird Tower they called it: doves had been kept there once. Now Heros dwelled in the apartment, as if upon a rock in that desert of wasted corridors and rooms.
    The door was abruptly above her. On its timber, a falcon’s mask in iron, and an iron ring.
    As she put her hand on it she realised the door would be locked fast. She would have to sit down under the door-sill and await his return.
    But the door gave at a pressure on the ring, without even a resistance.
    That frightened her. She saw at once all her temerity in daring to invade the sanctum where no servant, no kindred, would enter unasked.
    Yet it was too late, for the chamber opened before her, all its mystery, its spell, for it was his.
    She stepped straight off the stair into the room.
    It seemed to her the cell of a scholar. The bed was narrow and low, with a footstool by it, and a plain chest. No evidence of luxury was in these things. But across the floor, beneath a high, round, glassed window, that showed only air, was a table laid with a feast of objects and books, with measures and globes, the bones of hideous creatures mounted up as if they lived, weird instruments of .alchemy and science.
    There, on that board, his interest and his commitment were spread. She knew immediately, and with the jealous pang of a rival.
    Between the table and the wall a three-paned triptych had been raised upon a stand.
    Peering over the items on the table, careful to dislodge nothing, Helise did not pay the painting much attention. But then something in the angle of it, catching the window light against the shadow of the wall, caught her eye. It was his, of his choosing. She went to see.
    How strange then, these images after all, strange as anything maybe in the room, or stranger…
    In the first painted panel was a fang-like mountain side parting a ravenous sky. A procession of men and women had ascended, with livid torches; they stood like mindless things, staring into the clouds.
    Something with black wings was carrying off a young girl in white. From her lolling limbs and head there streamed draperies and hair, and a wreath of flowers went tumbling earthwards. This ominous tableau was titled in gilt: Nuptiae .
    In the second panel, the scene was a bedchamber by night, a vast couch where something lay asleep. In the foreground, holding back the curtains with one hand, and tilting in the other an antique, flaming lamp, a pale girl leaned forward, her slenderness rigid in lines of anxiety and expectation, endeavouring to see—
    This picture was labelled: Noli me spectare .
    Helise knew now what the triptych portrayed. It was the legend of Cupido and Psyche. The maiden had been left as a