A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 45: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE NINTH LIFE 45 Sh SSS SSS Ss Sys SSS i SS ss SS St showed him a series of lines graven in the underside. “The name of the man who made them,” she explained. ‘“Nefer-An, a craftsman who lived and worked in the street of the silversmiths in Thebes, in the days of Hatshepsu. His secret of temper- ing glass died with him—he was a secret man. There are vessels like these in the tomb of Nitocris the beautiful—vessels of this glass that bends, wrought to hold her unguents.”’ “And you know where that tomb is?” He took up the other glass, and with a finger and thumb on opposite edges of the rim pressed it; the glass yielded as if it were paper, became oval, and sprang back to its circular form as he released it. “You see, no magic,” she said. “Just one little facet of the knowledge that this world of yours has not discovered. And the tomb—yes, pour the drinks—what if I do know where Nitocris lies?” He filled the glasses: the mixture foamed up and stilled to clarity, and Kefra took up her glass. He said: “You might cause a sensation by revealing it— upset accepted theories about Nitocris.” She said, very coldly, “That I, Kefra, a priestess of Abydos, should cause the desecration of the dead of Egypt!” “You are right, of course,” he said, very soberly. She smiled, her brief angef at an end. pO we drink,” she said, and raised her glass, “to the kindly mystery that men miscall death, life unending beyond time.’ He said—‘‘Since I don’t feel quite like that, I drink to you, Kefra,” and emptied the little glass at a draught, as she too drank. GEE put down her empty glass beside his on the tray, and pointed him to one of the two chairs at the table. An odd tingling went through his body, an almost momentary sensation of fiery heat, yet it was not unpleasant. Again he had the sense of an intense stillness that he had known before the fire in her drawing room, a stillness as of the cessation of all life about him—so still it was, except for the movements she made, that all the world might have been brought to a pause. He asked: “What was that we drank?” rather suspiciously. “Tf I told you, you would be no wiser,” she said, as Saleh, entering, served them with oysters packed in crushed ice, and stayed to fill them a glass each of a dry, still, white wine. “That man of yours,” Gees said, when he had gone out again, “if you don’t mind my asking—is he old, or young?” “Neither.” “He killed—what was her name—Sadie Hillman.” “No, he did not,” she said quietly. “She was the eighth life.” He said: “I suppose, if I asked you to explain—” and stopped. Saleh entered to serve them again, and she kept silence till he had gone. Later, Gees realized that he had eaten and en- joyed the fool, but with no awareness. She said: “If you, at the beginning of your life as a man, had been offered all that was offered me when I accepted the covenant, life and beauty enduring, desire of me only as I willed, and a shield be- tween me and harm—if these had been offered you—”’ “Placed as you were, you could only accept.” “T told you a story—I did not ask your belief,” she said’ coldly. “T admit that you could only accept,” he insisted. “Desiring to keep myself inviolate from Menkau-Ra,” she added. “It was not for me, then, to know the price I must pay. I have told you how once, when the man of my love and the child of my body had been claimed as parts of that price, I sought death and found it denied me. Again in a later day—in this place here! —I sought it, and again it was not for me. For Sekhmet, seeing into this far future, made the covenant not for my good, but for her own, and I must pay all the price of what I gained, as and when she has need of that price.” “I begin to understand,” he said—and again Saleh, entering, made a pause in which he thought over her explanation. “That for long ages she had no need of me,’ Kefra went on when they were alone again, “and made no demand that I should render up myself to her. When she had need, she took, and thus renewed herself—for accursed she is, now, and all evil, no good remaining to her. This dis who was once her priestess, know.” O <Si€O comicbhoo