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from that which Man followed. They found a way to perpetuate themselves as stable fields of energy. They abandoned their bodies to live forever as vortices of force. But pure intellect they are not. They carried with them their complete egos, and born of matter they do ever lust after the flesh. Though they can assume its appearance for a time, they cannot return to it unassisted. For ages they did drift aimlessly about this world. Then the arrival of Man stirred them from their quiescence. They took on the shapes of his nightmares to devil him. This is why they had to be defeated and bound, far beneath the Ratnagaris. We could not destroy them all. We could not permit them to continue their attempts to possess the machines of incarnation and the bodies of men. So they were trapped and contained in great magnetic bottles."
    "Yet Sam freed many to do his will," said Tak.
    "Aye. He made and kept a nightmare pact, so that some of them do still walk the world. Of all men, they respect perhaps only Siddhartha. And
with
all men do they share one great vice."
    "That being. . .?"
    "They do dearly love to gamble. . . . They will make game for any stakes, and gambling debts are their only point of honor. This must be so, or they would not hold the confidence of other gamesters and would so lose that which is perhaps their only pleasure. Their powers being great, even princes will make game with them, hoping to win their services. Kingdoms have been lost in this fashion."
    "If," said Tak, "as you feel, Sam was playing one of the ancient games with Raltariki, what could the stakes have been?"
    Yama finished his wine, refilled the glass. "Sam is a fool. No, he is not. He is a gambler. There is a difference. The Rakasha do control lesser orders of energy beings. Sam, through that ring he wears, does now command a guard of fire elementals, which he won from Raltariki. These are deadly, mindless creatures—and each bears the force of a thunderbolt."
    Tak finished his wine. "But what stakes could Sam have brought to the game?"
    Yama sighed. "All my work, all our efforts for over half a century."
    "You mean—his body?"
    Yama nodded. "A human body is the highest inducement any demon might be offered."
    "Why should Sam risk such a venture?"
    Yama stared at Tak, not seeing him. "It must have been the only way he could call upon his life-will, to bind him again to his task — by placing himself in jeopardy, by casting his very existence with each roll of the dice."
    Tak poured himself another glass of wine and gulped it. "
That
is unknowable to me," he said.
    But Yama shook his head. "Unknown, only," he told him. "Sam is not quite a saint, nor is he a fool."
    "Almost, though," Yama decided, and that night he squirted demon repellent about the monastery.
    The following morning, a small man approached the monastery and seated himself before its front entrance, placing a begging bowl on the ground at his feet. He wore a single, threadbare garment of coarse, brown cloth, which reached to his ankles. A black patch covered his left eye. What remained of his hair was dark and very long. His sharp nose, small chin, and high, flat ears gave to his face a foxlike appearance. His skin was tight-drawn and well-weathered. His single, green eye seemed never to blink.
    He sat there for perhaps twenty minutes before one of Sam's monks noticed him and mentioned the fact to one of Ratri's dark-robed Order. This monk located a priest and passed the information to him. The priest, anxious to impress the goddess with the virtues of her followers, sent for the beggar to be brought in and fed, offered new garments and given a cell in which to sleep for as long as he chose to remain.
    The beggar accepted the food with the courtesies of a Brahmin, but declined to eat anything other than bread and fruit. He accepted, too, the dark garment of Ratri's Order, casting aside his begrimed smock. Then he looked upon the cell and the fresh sleeping mat that had been laid for