That which is spoken by God-the-Sun is life.

That which is spoken by the Devil is death.

Abraxas, however, speaks the venerable and also accursed word, which is life and death at once.

Abraxas generates truth and falsehood, good and evil, light and darkness with the same word and in the same deed. Therefore Abraxas is truly the terrible one.

He is magnificent even as the lion at the very moment when he strikes his prey down. His beauty is like the beauty of a spring morn.

Indeed, he is himself the greater Pan, and also the lesser. He is Priapos.

He is the monster of the underworld, the octopus with a thousand tentacles, he is the twistings of winged serpents and of madness.

He is the hermaphrodite of the lowest beginning.

He is the lord of toads and frogs, who live in water and come out unto the land, and who sing together at high noon and at midnight.

He is fullness, uniting itself with emptiness.

He is the sacred wedding;

He is love and the murder of love;

He is the holy one and his betrayer.

He is the brightest light of day and the deepest night of madness.

To see him means blindness;

To know him is sickness;

To worship him is death;

To fear him is wisdom;

Not to resist him means liberation.

God lives behind the—

The perfectus suddenly fell silent. The priest’s gaze was riveted on the rear door of the church and one by one the congregation swiveled their necks to see what or who had interrupted the service.

I’d never seen a dragoman alone and I’d never seen one close up like this. Both new experiences were unsettling.

He—I use the pronoun loosely since dragomen had no sex—was about my height but he had much larger eyes, much larger ears, no lips to speak of, no teeth visible, no real chin, a long tapered nose, and a queerly shaped head, his forehead sloped back along a cranium that seemed to have been malformed rearward until it blended with the long synaptic filaments that trailed on the floor behind now with a faint metallic rustling. His fingers were far too long, as if they had at least one extra joint and perhaps more, and disturbingly spatulate. His feet were flat and too broad—he had no toes and I could hear puckery suckerish sounds as he strode across the broad paving stones of the barn-church. His legs were too long, jointed oddly, and gave the false impression of being almost boneless. He was hairless and naked, of course, and as he passed my pew I saw how his skin glistened wetly, coarsely, like molded wax. He had no nipples. I could see how a waxy fold of loose skin folded down from his lower abdomen to cover whatever orifices he had for urination and excretion; it is common knowledge that dragomen have no real genitals and thus are more neuter than hermaphroditic.

He stopped at Kemp’s pew and, bending oddly from the waist, leaned toward the leader of our troupe. The dragoman’s voice was as high and flat as a young child’s without any of a child’s charm. “The Heresiarch bids you to perform tonight at the Archon keep. Have your people dressed and prepared for transport at the moment the winds drop on the hour of the third mine shift.”

He may have said something else, but if so the words were lost in the explosion of surprised murmuring and shifting in the church.

“This is our chance,” whispered Heminges as the men crowded into one of the Muse’s two makeup and costuming rooms that afternoon.

“Chance?” said Gough. Kemp and Condella had decided that we were doing the Scottish Play, over Burbank’s protests and Alleyn’s and Aglaé’s indifference.

“To strike,” said Heminges. He was costuming himself for the role of Duncan.

Gough rolled his eyes.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. I was already terrified at the thought of performing before the Archons; I didn’t need Heminges’s revolution fantasies and conspiracies that night.

“I’ve never heard of a troupe being invited to perform before Archons before… in their keep,” whispered Heminges.

“You never heard of it before, because it’s never happened before,” said Old Adam. He was to be Banquo tonight. His favorite role was as Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Adam had been to more Bard Rendezvous on Stratford and performed in more competitions there than any of us, even Kemp and Burbank. He knew more lore than anyone else in the Earth’s Men.

“Then it is perfect,” hissed Heminges as he applied his bald wig.

“Perfect for what, for Christ’s sake? We can’t do anything up there… but put on the show, I mean. If we did… if we did…”

“The pain synthesizers,” rumbled Coeke. “For the rest of our lives and then some.”

Heminges showed his thin, tight Iago smile. “When we take the Muse to the keep, we set thrust to full burn, then take off before—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Heminges,” said Burbank, who’d come closer without us noticing. “We’re not taking the ship up there. The dragoman told Kemp that we were to be fully dressed and have all our props ready by… less than an hour from now… and a gravity sledge is going to take us the six miles to the castle. Do you really think the Archons would let us get a weapon… or anything that could be used as a weapon… anywhere near the keep?”

Heminges said nothing.

“I don’t want to hear another word of your silly revolution fantasies,” snapped Burbank, his voice as mad-strong as Hamlet’s speaking to Gertrude. “If you play this particular brand of sick make-believe again—one more word—I swear by Abraxas that we’ll leave you behind on this godforsaken rock.”

It looked as if two thirds of the arbeiters and doles not at work in the mines showed up to watch us leave on the gravity sledge. It was easy to understand why they were curious. In all the centuries they and their ancestors had been on this rock, the only thing that left from the human city to be taken to the keep were dead bodies to be hauled to the Archon spaceport to await transshipment to Earth.

There was a funeral barge up there now. We’d followed it through the Pleroma to this world and had planned to follow it out in three days to the next planet on our tour.

From the look on the silent arbeiters’ faces as we floated past the city and up the road carved into rock toward the highlands, they didn’t expect us to return from the keep alive. Perhaps we didn’t either. But the excitement was real. It had been the unanimous opinion of Kemp, Condella, Burbank, Pope, Old Adam, and the other senior members of the troupe that no traveling Shakespearean group had ever been invited to perform before the Archon before. We had no idea what to expect.

The dragoman who’d come to the church—if it was the same one, they all looked alike to me—was in the control cab of the sledge with various Archon cabiri and we were on the open freight pallet behind, where the human coffins were usually carried, so there was no chance for further conversation with the dragoman. The cabiri that the Archons had designed for the Muse and other old human spacecraft I’d seen—Shakespearean troupe, perfecti, and physiocrat—were more huge metal-spider than organic, but I noticed more patches of flesh and real hands and even a mouth, more lipped and human-looking than the dragoman’s, on the cabiri in the sledge cab. The flesh, lips, teeth, fingers, and the rest looked as if they had come from a human-being parts bin. This was disturbing.

It was also disturbing to be in full costume and makeup so long before the performance. We carried along any changes in costume we’d need and a few props—chairs, a table, daggers, and the like—but no backdrops or scenery.