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was green his way. He stepped out onto the crosswalk.
Before he had taken three steps, he heard a siren. Red lights flaring, a police car sprang out of an alley into the main street. It skidded and swerved with the speed of its turn, then aimed itself straight at Covenant's heart.
He stopped as if caught in the grip of an unseen fist. He wanted to move, but he could only stand suspended, trapped, looking down the muzzle of the hurtling car. For an instant, he heard the frantic scream of brakes. Then he crumbled.
As he dropped, he had a vague sense that he was falling too soon, that he had not been hit yet. But he could not help himself; he was too afraid, afraid of being crushed. After all his self-protections, to die like this! Then he became aware of a huge blackness which stood behind the sunlight and the gleaming store-windows and the shriek of tires. The light and the asphalt against his head seemed to be nothing more than paintings on a black background; and now the background asserted itself, reached in and bore him down. Blackness radiated through the sunlight like a cold beam of night.
He thought that he was having a nightmare. Absurdly, he heard the old beggar saying, Be true. You need not fail.
The darkness poured through, swamping the day, and the only thing that Covenant was sure he could see was a single red gleam from the police car- a red bolt hot and clear and deadly, transfixing his forehead like a spear.

Three: Invitation to a Betrayal

FOR a time that he could only measure in heartbeats, Covenant hung in the darkness. The red, impaling light was the only fixed point in a universe that seemed to seethe around him. He felt that he might behold a massive moving of heaven and earth, if only he knew where to look; but the blackness and the hot red beam on his forehead prevented him from turning away, and he had to let the currents that swirled around him pass unseen.
Under the pressure of the ferocious light, he could feel every throb of his pulse distinctly in his temples, as if it were his mind which hammered out his life, not his heart. The beats were slow- too slow for the amount of apprehension he felt. He could not conceive what was happening to him. But each blow shook him as if the very structure of his brain were under assault.
Abruptly, the bloody spear of light wavered, then split in two. He was moving toward the light- or the light was approaching him. The two flaming spots were eyes.
The next instant, he heard laughter- high, shrill glee full of triumph and old spite. The voice crowed like some malevolent rooster heralding the dawn of hell, and Covenant's pulse trembled at the sound.
“Done it!” the voice cackled. “I! Mine!” It shrilled away into laughter again.
Covenant was close enough to see the eyes clearly now. They had no whites or pupils; red balls filled the sockets, and light moiled in them like lava. Their heat was so close that Covenant's forehead burned.
Then the eyes flared, seemed to ignite the air around them. Flames spread out, sending a lurid glow around Covenant.
He found himself in a cavern deep in stone. Its walls caught and held the light, so that the cave stayed bright after the single flare of the eyes. The rock was smooth, but broken into hundreds of irregular facets, as if the cavern had been carved with an erratic knife. Entrances gaped in the walls around the circumference of the cave. High above his head, the roof gathered into a thick cluster of stalactites, but the floor was fiat and worn as if by the passing of many feet. Reflections sprang through the stalactites above, so that the cluster swarmed with red gleamings.
The chamber was full of a rank stench, an acrid odour with a sickly sweet under-smell- burning sulphur over the reek of rotting flesh. Covenant gagged on it, and on the sight of the being whose eyes had held him.
Crouched on a low dais near the centre of the cave was a creature with long, scrawny limbs, hands as huge and heavy as shovels, a thin,