by C. L. Moore
"He's called Yarol," Smith said curtly.
"Yes—Yarol. Well, we may find means to make you a taller man, Yarol. You would like that, eh? We have a little device—a ladder which I got from the Count of Görz when he visited me last summer—and the Count is clever in these things."
"He does not speak your tongue," Smith interrupted.
"No? It is not strange—he looks as though he came from a far land indeed. I have never seen a man like him." Her eyes were puzzled. She half turned her shoulders to them, toying with a sword that lay on a table at her side, and said without looking up, "Well, your story. Let's have it. And—yes, I'll give you one more chance at living—if you're lying, go now. None will stop you. You are strangers. You do not know Joiry—or Joiry's vengeance."
Over her shoulder she slanted into Smith's eyes a level glance that burnt like the stab of lightnings. Hell-fires flickered in it, and despite himself Smith knew a sudden crawl of unease. Yarol, though he did not understand the words, whistled between his teeth. For the heartbeat no one spoke. Then very softly in Smith's ear a voice murmured,
"She has the Starstone. Say the spell of the Gateway!"
Startled, he glanced around. Jirel did not stir. Her lion-yellow eyes were still brooding on him with a gaze that smoldered. Yarol was watching her in fascination. And Smith realized abruptly that he alone had heard the cracked quaver of command in—yes, in Franga's voice! Franga, the warlock, whispering through some half-opened door into infinity. Without glancing aside at Yarol he said in the ripples of High Venusian, "Get ready—watch the door and don't let her out."
Jirel's face changed. She swung around from the table, her brows a straight line of menace. "What are you muttering? What devil's work are you at?"
Smith ignored her. Almost involuntarily his left hand was moving in the queer, quick gesture of the spell. Phrases in the unearthly tongue that Franga had taught him burned on his lips with all the ease of his mother-tongue. Magic was all about him, guiding his lips and hands.
Alarm blazed up in Jirel's yellow eyes. An oath smoked on her lips as she lunged forward, the sword she had been toying with a gleam in her fist. Yarol grinned. The heat-gun danced in his hand, and a white-hot blast traced a trail of fire on the rug at Jirel's feet. She shut her red lips on a word half uttered, and twisted in midair, flinging herself back in swift terror from this sudden gush of hell-flame. Behind her the door burst open and men in armor clanged into the room, shouting, dragging at their swords.
And then—down swept the shadow over the noisy room. Cloudy as the sweep of the death-angel's wings it darkened the sunny air so that the ray from Yarol's gun blazed out in dazzling splendor through the gloom. As if in the misted depths of a mirror Smith saw the men in the door shrink back, mouths agape, swords clattering from their hands. He scarcely heeded them, for in the far wall where a moment before a tall, narrow window had opened upon sunlight and the green hills of Earth—was a door. Very slowly, very quietly it was swinging open, and the black of utter infinity lay beyond its threshold.
"Hai—s'leli—Smith!" Yarol's warning voice yelled in the darkness, and Smith threw himself back in a great leap as he felt a sword-blade prick his shoulder. Jirel sobbed a furious curse and plunged forward, her sword and sword-arm a single straight bar. In the dimness Yarol's gun hand moved, and a thin beam of incandescence burned bright. Jirel's sword hissed in midair, glowed blindingly and then dripped in a shower of white-hot drops to the stone floor. Her momentum carried her forward with a hilt and a foot of twisted steel still gripped in her stabbing hand, so that she lunged against Smith's broad chest thrusting with the stump of the ruined sword.
His arms prisoned her, a writhing fury that sobbed wild oaths and twisted like a tiger against him. He grinned and tightened his arms until the breath rushed out of her crushed lungs and he felt her ribs give a little against his chest.
Then vertigo was upon him. Dimly he realized that the girl's arms had gone round his neck in a frantic grip as the room swayed—tilted dizzily, amazingly, revolving as through on a giant axis—or as if the black depths of the Gateway were opening under him... he could not tell, nor was he ever to understand, just what happened in that fantastic instant when nature's laws were warped by strange magic. The floor was no longer solid beneath his feet. He saw Yarol twisting like a small sleek cat as he stumbled and fell—fell into oblivion with his gun hand upflung. He was falling himself, plunging downward through abysses of dark, clasping a frightened girl whose red hair streamed wildly in the wind of their falling.
Stars were swirling about them. They were dropping slowly through stars while the air danced and dazzled all around them. Smith had time to catch his breath and flex the muscles of his gun thigh to be sure the comforting weight pressed there before a spongy ground received them softly. They fell like people in a nightmare, slowly and easily, with no jar, upon the strange dim surface of the land beyond the Gateway. Yarol landed on his feet like the cat he was, gun still gripped and ready, black eyes blinking in the starry dark. Smith, hampered by the terrified Jirel, sank with nightmare ease to the ground and rebounded a little from its sponginess. The impact knocked the stump of sword from the girl's hand, and he pitched it away into the blinding shimmer of the star-bright dark before he helped her to her feet.
For once Joiry was completely subdued. The shock of having her sword melted by hell-fire in her very grasp, the dizzying succession of manhandling and vertigo and falling into infinity had temporarily knocked all violence out of her, and she could only gasp and stare about this incredible starlit darkness, her red lips parted in amazement.
As far as they could see the mist of stars quivered and thickened the dim air, tiny points of light that danced all around them as if thousands of fireflies were winking all at once. Half blinded by that queer, shimmering dazzle, they could make out no familiar topography of hills or valleys, only that spongy dark ground beneath them, that quiver of stars blinding the dim air.
Motion swirled the shimmer a little distance away, and Jirel snarled as Franga's dark-robed form came shouldering through the stars, spinning them behind him in the folds of his cloak as he moved forward. His withered features grimaced into a grin when he saw the dazed three.
"Ah—you have her!" he rasped. "Well, what are you waiting for? Take the stone! She carries it on her."
Smith's pale eyes met the warlock's through the star-shimmer, and his firm lips tightened. Something was wrong. He sensed it unmistakably—danger whispered in the air. For why should Franga have brought them here if the problem was no more complex than the mere wrestling of a jewel from a woman? No—there must be some other reason for plunging them into this starry dimness. What had Franga hinted—powers here that were favorable to him? Some dark, nameless god dwelling among the stars?
The warlock's eyes flared at Jirel in a flash of pure murder, and suddenly Smith understood a part of the puzzle. She was to die, then, when the jewel could no longer protect her. Here Franga could wreak vengeance unhampered, once the Starstone was in his hands. Here Joiry was alone and helpless—and the flame of hatred in the wizard's eyes could be quenched by no less than the red flood of her bloody death.
Smith glanced back at Jirel, white and shaken with recent terror, but snarling feebly at the warlock in invincible savagery that somehow went to his heart as no helplessness could have done. And suddenly he knew he could not surrender her up to Franga's hatred. The shift of scene had shifted their relations, too, so that three mortals—he could not think of Franga as wholly human—stood together against Franga and his malice and his magic. No, he could not betray Jirel.
His gaze flicked Yarol's with a lightning message more eloquent than a warning shout. It sent a joyous quiver of tautening along the little Venusian's body, and both men's gun hands dropped to their sides with simultaneous casualness.
Smith said: "Return us to Joiry and I'll get the stone for you: Here—no."
That black glare of murder shifted from Jirel to Smith, bathi
ng him in hatred.
"Take if from her now—or die!"
A smothered sound like the snarl of an angry beast halted Smith's reflexive snatch at his gun. Past him Jirel lunged, her red hair streaming with stars, her fingers flexed into claws as she leaped bare-handed at the warlock. Rage had drowned out her momentary terror, and soldier's curses tumbled blistering from her lips as she sprang.
Franga stepped back; his hand moved intricately and between him and the charging fury the starlight thickened—solidified into a sheet like heavy glass. Jirel dashed herself against it and was hurled back as if she had plunged into a stone wall. The silvery mist of the barrier dissolved as she reeled back, gasping with rage, and Franga laughed thinly.
"I am in my own place now, vixen," he told her. "I do not fear you or any man here. It is death to refuse me—bloody death. Give me the stone."
"I'll tear you to rags with my bare nails!" sobbed Joiry. "I'll have the eyes out of your head, you devil! Ha—even here you fear me! Come out from behind your rampart and let me slay you!"
"Give me the stone." The wizard's voice was calm.
"Return us all to Joiry and I think she'll promise to let you have it." Smith fixed a meaning stare upon Jirel's blazing yellow eyes. She shrugged off the implied advice furiously.
"Never! Yah—wait!" She leaped to Yarol's side and, as he shied nervously away, his eyes mistrustfully on her pointed nails, snatched from his belt the small knife he carried. She set the blade against the full, high swell of her bosom and laughed in Franga's face. "Now—kill me if you can!" she taunted, her face a blaze of defiance. "Make one move to slay me—and I slay myself! And the jewel is lost to you for ever!"
Franga bit his lip and stared at her through the mist of stars, fury glaring in his eyes. There was no hesitancy in her, and he knew it. She would do as she threatened, and—
"The stone has no virtue if not taken by violence or given freely," he admitted. "Lifted from a suicide's corpse, it would lose all value to anyone. I will bargain with you then, Joiry."
"You'll not! You'll set me free or lose the jewel for ever."
Franga turned goaded eyes on Smith. "Either way I lose it, for once in her own land Joiry would die before surrendering it, even as she would here. You! Fulfill your bargain—get me the Starstone!"
Smith shrugged. "Your meddling's spoiled everything now. There's little I can do."
The angry black eyes searched for a long moment, evil crawling in their deeps. They flicked to Yarol. Both men stood on the spongy ground with feet braced, bodies balanced in the easy tautness which characterizes the gunman, hands light on their weapons, eyes very steady, very deadly. They were two very dangerous men, and Smith realized that even here Franga was taking no chances with their strange weapons. Behind them Jirel snarled like an angry cat, her fingers flexing themselves involuntarily. And suddenly the wizard shrugged.
"Stay here then, and rot!" he snapped, swinging his cloak so that the stars swirled about him in a blinding shower. "Stay here and starve and thirst until you'll surrender. I'll not bargain with you longer."
They blinked in the sudden eddy of that starry mist, and when their vision cleared the bent black figure and vanished. Blankly they looked at one another through the drifting stars.
"Now what?" said Yarol. "Shar, but I could drink! Why did he have to mention thirst!"
Smith blinked about him in the swirling brightness. For once he was utterly at a loss. The wizard had every advantage over them in this dim, blinding outland where his god reigned supreme.
"Well, what have we to lose?" he shrugged at last. "He's not through with us, but there's nothing we can do. I'm for exploring a bit, anyhow."
Yarol raked the starry dark with a dubious gaze. "We couldn't be worse off," he admitted.
"Comment?" demanded Jirel, suspicious eyes shifting from one to the other. Smith said briefly,
"We're going to explore. Franga's got some trick in mind, we think. We'd be fools to wait here for him to come back. We—oh, wait!" He snapped his fingers involuntarily and turned a startled face on the surprised two. The Gateway! He knew the spell that opened it—Franga had taught him that. Why not voice the invocation now and see what happened? He drew a quick breath and opened his mouth to speak—and then faltered with the remembered words fading from his very tongue-tip. His fingers rose halfheartedly in the intricate gestures of the spell, groping after the vanished memory as if it could be plucked out of the starmisted air. No use. His mind was as blank of the magical remembrance as if it had never been. Franga's magic worked well indeed.
"Are you crazy?" demanded Yarol, regarding his hesitating ally with an amazed gaze. Smith grinned ruefully.
"I thought I had an idea," he admitted. "But it's no good. Come on."
The spongy ground was wicked to walk on. They stumbled against one another, swearing in a variety of tongues at the blinding air they groped through, the hard going under foot, the wretched uncertainty that kept their eyes scanning the dazzle as they walked.
It was Jirel who first caught sight of the shrunken brown thing. Indeed, she almost stumbled over it, a mummified body, curled up on its side so that its bony knees nearly touched the brown fleshless forehead. Smith turned at her little gasp, saw the thing, and paused to bend over it wonderingly.
It was not pleasant to see. The skin stretched tightly over the bony frame, was parchment-brown, hideously rough in texture, almost as if the hide of some great lizard had been stretched over the skeleton of a man. The face was hidden, but the hands were slender claws, whitish in places where the granulated skin had been stripped from the bone. Wisps of straw-like hair still clung to the wrinkled scalp.
"Well, come along," said Yarol impatiently. "Certainly he can't help us, or harm us either."
Silently assenting, Smith swung on his heel. But some instinct—the little tingling danger-note that whispers in the back of a spaceman's head—made him turn. The position of the recumbent figure had changed. Its head was lifted, and it was staring at him with swollen, glazed eyes.
Now the thing should have been dead. Smith knew that, somehow, with a dreadful certainty. The face was a brown skull-mask, with a vaguely canine cast, and the nose, although ragged and eaten away in places, protruded with a shocking resemblance to a beast's muzzle.
The limbs of the horror twitched and moved slowly, and the skeletal, tattered body arose. It dragged itself forward among the whirling star-motes, and instinctively Smith recoiled. There was something so unutterably dreary about it, despite the dreadful attitude of hunger that thrust its beast's head forward, that he sickened a little as he stared. From Jirel came a little cry of repugnance, quickly muffled.
"We'd better get out of here," said Smith harshly.
Yarol did not speak for a moment. Then he murmured, "There are more of the things, N. W. See?"
Hidden by the starry mists close to the ground, the ghastly things must have been closing in upon them with that hideous dreary slowness for the past several minutes. They came on, scores of them veiled in stars, moving with a dreadful deliberation, and none of them stood upright. From all sides they were converging, and the dancing motes lent them a curious air of nightmare unreality, like carven gargoyles seen through a fog.
For the most part they came on hands and knees, withered brown skull-faces and glaring bulbous eyes staring blindly at the three. For it seemed to Smith that the beings were blind; the swollen eyes were quite whitish and pupilless. There was nothing about them that savored of the breathing flesh which they so hideously caricatured save the terrible hunger of their approach, made doubly hideous by the fact that those rotting jaws and parchment-dry bellies could never satisfy it by any normal means.
The deformed muzzles of some of them were twitching, and Smith realized abruptly what instinct had led them here. They hunted, apparently, by scent. And their circle was closing in, so that the three humans, recoiling before that creeping, dryly rustling approach, stood very close together now, shoulder to sho
ulder. Smith felt the girl shudder against him, and then give him a swift sidelong glance, hot with anger that she should have betrayed weakness even for a moment.
A little hesitantly he drew his heat-gun. There was something a bit incongruous about the very thought of shooting at these already dead things. But they were coming closer, and the prospect of contact with those brown, scaling bodies was so repulsive that his finger pressed the trigger almost of its own volition.
One of the approaching horrors toppled over, the left arm completely burned from its body. Then it regained its balance and crawled onward with a crab-like sidewise motion, the severed arm forgotten behind it, although the skeleton fingers writhed and clawed convulsively. The creature made no outcry, and no blood flowed from the wound.
"Shar!" breathed Yarol. "Can't they—die?" His gun jarred and bucked in his hand. The head of the nearest horror became a blackened, cindery stub, but the thing betrayed no pain. It crawled on slowly, the nimbus of swirling stars like a malefic halo about the burned remnant of a head.
"Yarol!" said Smith sharply. "Double strength—we'll cut a path through them. Follow us, Jirel." Without waiting for an acknowledgment he flicked over a lever on his heat-gun's muzzle, and sent the searing ray flaming through the dark.
The stars danced more swiftly, troubled. Smith sensed a quick, intangible menace in their aroused motion. It was as though something, drowsy and dreaming, had awakened suddenly from slumber to confront the intruders in this strange land. Yet nothing happened; the stars raced back from the heat-ray's beam, but the crawling monsters paid it no attention, even though they blackened into cinders as they crept. The dry, rustling hordes of them advanced straight into the heat-gun's path, and crisped into ruin—and crunched under the feet of their destroyers into fragments that twitched and squirmed with unquenchable animation too hideous to be called life.
Yarol and Smith and Jirel moved forward over brittle black things that still moved and crunched and crept beneath their feet. The two heat-guns hissed softly, mowing a path. Jirel's yellow eyes dwelt speculatively on Smith's brawny back, and once she touched Yarol's dagger sheathed at her side. But she made no hostile move.