The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  And then understanding broke upon him, and his laugh of sheer relief echoed almost blasphemously in the silence of the place.

  “The light’s running out,” he said. “Like water, just draining away. That’s all.”

  And the incredible thing was true. That shining lake of light which brimmed the crystal hollow was ebbing, pouring through the door, down the passage, out into the upper air, and darkness, literally, was flowing in behind it. And it was flowing fast.

  “Well,” said Yarol, casting an imperturbable glance upward, “we’d better be moving before it all runs out. Hand me up the box, will you?”

  Hesitantly, Smith unslung the little lacquered steel box they had been given. Suppose they brought him back the dust to weld it from—what then? Such limitless power even in the hands of an eminently wise, eminently sane and balanced man would surely be dangerous. And in the hands of the little whispering fanatic—

  Yarol, looking down from his height, met the troubled eyes and was silent for a moment. Then he whistled softly and said, though Smith had not spoken,

  “I never thought of that... D’you suppose it really could be done? Why, the man’s half crazy!”

  “I don’t know,” said Smith. “Maybe he couldn’t—but he told us the way here, didn’t he? He knew this much—I don’t think we’d better risk his not knowing any more. And suppose he did succeed, Yarol—suppose he found some way to bring this—this monster of the dark—through into our dimension—turned it loose on our worlds. Do you think he could hold it? He talked about enslaving a god, but could he? I haven’t much doubt that he knows some way of opening a door between dimensions to admit the thing that used to be Pharol—it can be done. It has been done. But once he gets it opened, can he close it? Could he keep the thing under control? You know he couldn’t! You know it’d break loose, and—well, anything could happen then.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Yarol again. “Gods! Suppose—”

  He broke off, staring in fascination at the gray dust that held such terrible potentialities. And there was silence for a while in the crystal place.

  Smith, looking upward at the throne and his friend, saw that the dark was flowing in faster and faster. And the light thinned about them, and long streaks of brilliance wavered out behind him as the light ebbed by a racing torrent.

  “Suppose we don’t take it back, then,” said Yarol suddenly. “Say we couldn’t find the place—or that it was buried under debris or something. Suppose we—gods, but it’s getting dark in here!”

  The line of light was far down the walls now. Above them the black night of the underground brimmed in relentlessly. They watched in half-incredulous wonder as the tidemark of radiance ebbed down and down along the crystal. Now it touched the level of the throne, and Yarol gasped as he was plunged head and shoulders into blackness, starring down as into a sea of light in which his own lower limbs moved shimmeringly, sending long ripples outward as they stirred.

  Very swiftly the tide-race ran. Fascinated, they watched it ebb away, down Yarol’s legs, down beyond him entirely, so that he perched in darkness above the outrunning tide, down the heights of the throne, down to touch Smith’s tall head with blackness. Uncannily he stood in the midst of a receding sea, shoulder-deep—waist-deep—knee-deep...

  The light that so short a time before—for so many countless ages before—had brimmed this chamber lay in a shallow, gleaming sea ankle-deep on the floor. For the first time in eons the throne of the Three stood in darkness.

  Not until the last dregs of illumination were snaking along a black floor in rivulets that ran swiftly, like fiery snakes, toward the door, did the two men awake from their wonder. The last of the radiance that must have been lighted on a lost world millions of years ago, perhaps by the hands of the first gods—ebbed doorward. Smith drew a deep breath and turned in the blackness toward the spot where the throne must be standing in the first dark it had known for countless ages. Those snakes of light along the floor did not seem to give out any radiance—the place was blacker than any night above ground. Yarol’s light-tube suddenly stabbed downward, and Yarol’s voice said from the dark,

  “Whew! Should have bottled some of that to take home. Well, what d’you say, NW? Do we leave with the dust or without it?”

  “Without it,” said Smith slowly. “I’m sure of that much, anyhow. But we can’t leave it here. The man would simply send others, you know. With blasting material, maybe, if we said the place was buried. But he’d get it.”

  Yarol’s beam shifted, a white blade in the dark, to the gray, enigmatic mound beside him. In the glare of the Tomlinson tube it lay inscrutably, just as it had lain for all the eons since the god forsook it—waiting, perhaps, for this moment. And Yarol drew his gun.

  “Don’t know what that image was made of,” he said, “but rock or metal or anything else will melt into nothing in the full-power heat of a gun.”

  And in a listening silence he flicked the catch. Blue-white and singing, the flame leaped irresistibly from is muzzle—struck full in an intolerable violence of heat upon that gray mound which had been a god. Rocks would have melted under the blast. Rocket-tube steel would have glowed molten. Nothing that the hands of man can fashion could have resisted the heat-blast of a ray-gun at full strength. But in its full blue glare the mound of dust lay motionless.

  Above the hissing of the flame Smith heard Yarol’s muttered “Shar!” of amazement. The gun muzzle thrust closer into the gray heap, until the crystal began to glow in the reflected heat and blue sparks spattered through the darkness. And very slowly the edges of the mound began to turn red and sullen. The redness spread. A little blue flame licked up; another.

  Yarol flipped off the gun-catch and sat watching as the dust began to blaze. Presently, as the brilliance of it grew stronger, he slid down from his pedestal and made his precarious way along the slippery crystal to the floor. Smith scarcely realized that he had come. His eyes were riveted on the clear, burning flame that was once a god. It burned with a fierce, pale light flickering with nameless evanescent colors—the dust that had been Pharol of the utter darkness burning slowly away in a flame of utter light.

  And as the minutes passed and the flame grew stronger, the reflections of it began to dance eerily in the crystal walls and ceiling, sending long wavers downward until the floor was carpeted with dazzles of flame. An odor of unnamable things very faintly spread upon the air—smoke of dead gods... It went to Smith’s head dizzily, and the reflections wavered and ran together until he seemed to be suspended in a space while all about him pictures of flame went writhing through the dark—pictures of flame—nebulous, unreal pictures waving across the walls and vanishing—flashing by uncertainly overhead, running under his feet, circling him round from wall to wall in reeling patterns, as if reflections made eons ago on another world and buried deep in the crystal were waking to life at the magic touch of the burning god.

  With the smoke eddying dizzily in his nostrils he watched—and all about him, overhead, underfoot, the strange, wild pictures ran blurrily through the crystal and vanished. He thought he saw mighty landscapes ringed by such mountains as none of today’s world know... he thought he saw a whiter sun than has shone for eons, lighting a land where rivers thundered between green banks... thought he saw many moons parading across a purple night wherein shone constellations that haunted him with familiarity in the midst of their strangeness... saw a green star where red Mars should be, and a far pin-prick of white where the green point that is Earth hangs. Cities reeled past across the crystal darkness in shapes stranger than any that history records. Peaks and spires and angled domes towered high and shining under the hot white sun—strange ships riding the airways... He saw battles—weapons that have no names today blasting the tall towers into ruins, wiping great smears of blood across the crystal—saw triumphant marches where creatures that might have been the forerunners of men paraded in a blaze of color through shining streets... strange, sinuous creatures, half
seen, that were men, yet not men... Nebulously the history of a dead and forgotten world flared by him in the dark.

  He saw the man-things in their great shining cities bowing down before a—something—of darkness that spread monstrously across the white-lit heavens... saw the beginnings of Great Pharol... saw the crystal throne in a room of crystal where the sinuous, man-formed beings lay face down in worshipping windrows about a great triple pedestal toward which, for the dazzle and the darkness of it, he could not turn his eyes. And then without warning, in a mighty blast of violence, all the wild pictures in the flickering flamelight ran together and shivered before his dizzied eyes, and a great burst of blinding light leaped across the walls until the whole great chamber once more for an instant blazed with radiance but a radiance so searing that it did not illuminate but stunned, blinded, exploded in the very brains of the two men who watched...

  In the flash of an instant before oblivion overtook him, Smith knew they had looked upon the death of a world. Then, with blinded eyes and reeling brain, he stumbled and sank into darkness.

  Blackness was all about them when they opened their eyes again. The fire on the throne had burnt away into eternal darkness. Stumblingly they followed the white guidance of their tube-lights down the long passage and out into the upper air. The pale Martian day was darkening over the mountains.

  JULHI

  Northwest Smith 05

  Weird Tales – October 1935

  THE TALE OF Smith’s scars would make a saga. From head to foot his brown and sunburnt hide was scored with the marks of battle. The eye of a connoisseur would recognize the distinctive tracks of knife and talon and ray-burn, the slash of the Martian drylander cring, the clean, thin stab of the Venusian stiletto, the crisscross lacing of Earth’s penal whip. But one or two scars that he carried would have baffled the most discerning eye. That curious, convoluted red circlet, for instance, like some bloody rose on the left side of his chest just where the beating of his heart stirred the sun-darkened flesh...

  In the starless dark of the thick Venusian night Northwest Smith’s pale steel eyes were keen and wary. Save for those restless eyes he did not stir. He crouched against a wall that his searching fingers had told him was stone, and cold; but he could see nothing and he had no faintest idea of where he was or how he had come there. Upon this dark five minutes ago he had opened puzzled eyes, and he was still puzzled. The dark-piercing pallor of his gaze flickered restlessly through the blackness, searching in vain for some point of familiarity. He could find nothing. The dark was blurred and formless around him, and though his keen senses spoke to him of enclosed spaces, yet there was a contradiction even in that, for the air was fresh and blowing.

  He crouched motionless in the windy dark, smelling earth and cold stone, and faintly—very faintly—a whiff of something unfamiliar that made him gather his feet under him noiselessly and poise with one hand against the chill stone wall, tense as a steel spring. There was motion in the dark. He could see nothing, hear nothing, but he felt that stirring come cautiously nearer. He stretched out exploring toes, found the ground firm underfoot, and stepped aside a soundless pace or two, holding his breath. Against the stone where he had been leaning an instant before he heard the soft sound of hands fumbling, with a queer, sucking noise, as if they were sticky. Something exhaled with a small, impatient sound. In a lull of the wind he heard quite distinctly the slither over stone of something that was neither feet nor paws nor serpent-coils, but akin to all three.

  Smith’s hand sough his hip by instinct, and came away empty. Where he was and how he came there he did not know, but his weapons were gone and he knew that their absence was not accidental. The something that was pursuing him sighed again, queerly, and the shuffling sound over the stones moved with sudden, appalling swiftness, and something touched him that stung like an electric shock. There were hands upon him, but he scarcely realized it, or that they were no human hands, before the darkness spun around him and the queer, thrilling shock sent him reeling into a blurred oblivion.

  When he opened his eyes again he lay once more upon cold stone in the unfathomable dark to which he had awakened before. He lay as he must have fallen when the searcher dropped him, and he was unhurt. He waited, tense and listening, until his ears ached with the strain and the silence. So far as his blade-keen senses could tell him, he was quite alone. No sound broke the utter stillness, no sensation of movement, no whiff of scent. Very cautiously he rose once more, supporting himself against the unseen stones and flexing his limbs to be sure that he was unhurt.

  The floor was uneven underfoot. He had the idea now that he must be in some ancient ruins, for the smell of stone and chill and desolation was clear to him, and the breeze moaned a little through unseen openings. He felt his way along the broken wall, stumbling over fallen blocks and straining his senses against the blanketing gloom around him. He was trying vainly to recall how he had come here, and succeeding in recapturing only vague memories of much red segir-whisky in a nameless dive, and confusion and muffled voices thereafter, and wide spaces of utter blank—and then awakening here in the dark. The whisky must have been drugged, he told himself defensively, and a slow anger began to smolder within him at the temerity of whoever it was who had dared lay hands upon Northwest Smith.

  Then he froze into stony quiet, rigid in mid-step, at the all but soundless stirring of something in the dark near by. Blurred visions of the unseen thing that had seized him ran through his head—some monster whose gait was a pattering glide and whose hands were armed with the stunning shock of an unknown force. He stood frozen, wondering if it could see him in the dark.

  Feet whispered over the stone very near him, and something breathed pantingly, and a hand brushed his face. There was a quick suck of indrawn breath, and then Smith’s arms leaped out to grapple the invisible thing to him. The surprise of that instant took his breath, and then he laughed deep in his throat and swung the girl round to face him in the dark.

  He could not see her, but he knew from the firm curves of her under his hands that she was young and feminine, and from the sound of her breath that she was near to fainting with fright.

  “Sh-h-h,” he whispered urgently, his lips at her ear and her hair brushing his cheek fragrantly. “Don’t be afraid. Where are we?”

  It might have been reaction from her terror that relaxed the tense body he held, so that she went limp in his arms and the sound of her breathing almost ceased. He lifted her clear of the ground—she was light and fragrant and he felt the brush of velvet garments against his bare arms as unseen robes swept him—and carried her across to the wall. He felt better with something solid at his back. He laid her down there in the angle of the stones and crouched beside her, listening, while she slowly regained control of herself.

  When her breathing was normal again, save for the faint hurrying of excitement and alarm, he heard the sound of her sitting up against the wall, and bent closer to catch her whisper.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Northwest Smith,” he said under his breath, and grinned at her softly murmured “Oh-h!” of recognition. Whoever she was she had heard that name before. Then,

  “There has been a mistake,” she breathed, half to herself. “They never take any but the—space-rats and the scum of the ports for Julhi to—I mean, to bring here. They must not have known you, and they will pay for that mistake. No man is brought here who might be searched for—afterward.”

  Smith was silent for a moment. He had thought her lost like himself, and her fright had been too genuine for pretense. Yet she seemed to know the secrets of this curious, unlit place. He must go warily.

  “Who are you?” he murmured. “Why were you so frightened? Where are we?”

  In the dark her breath caught in a little gasp, and went on unevenly.

  “We are in the ruins of Vonng,” she whispered. “I am Apri, and I am condemned to death. I thought you were death coming for me, as it will come at any instant now.” Her v
oice failed on the last syllables, so that she spoke in a fading gasp as if terror had her by the throat and would not let her breathe. He felt her trembling against his arm.

  Many questions crowded up to his lips, but the most urgent found utterance.

  “What will come?” he demanded. “What is the danger?”

  “The haunters of Vonng,” she whispered fearfully. “It is to feed them that Julhi’s slaves bring men here. And those among us who are disobedient must feed the haunters too. I have suffered her displeasure—and I must die.”

  “The haunters—what are they? Something with a touch like a live wire had me awhile ago, but it let me loose again. Could that have been—”

  “Yes, one of them. My coming must have disturbed it. But as to what they are, I don’t know. They come in the darkness. They are of Julhi’s race, I think, but not flesh and blood, like her. I—I can’t explain.”

  “And Julhi—?”

  “Is—well, simply Julhi. You don’t know?”

  “A woman? Some queen, perhaps? You must remember I don’t even know where I am.”

  “No, not a woman. At least, not as I am. And much more than queen. A great sorceress, I have thought, or perhaps a goddess. I don’t know. It makes me ill to think, here in Vonng. It makes me ill to—to—oh, I couldn’t bear it! I think I was going mad! It’s better to die than go mad, isn’t it? But I’m so afraid—”

  Her voice trailed away incoherently, and she cowered shivering against him in the dark.

  Smith had been listening above her shuddering whispers for any tiniest sound in the night. Now he turned his mind more fully to what she had been saying, though with an ear still alert for any noises about them.

  “What do you mean? What was it you did?”

  “There is a—a light,” murmured Apri vaguely. “I’ve always seen it, even from babyhood, whenever I closed my eyes and tried to make it come. A light, and queer shapes and shadows moving through it, like reflections from somewhere I never saw before. But somehow it got out of control, and then I began to catch the strangest thought-waves beating through, and after a while Julhi came—through the light. I don’t know—I can’t understand. But she makes me summon up the light for her now, and then queer things happen inside my head, and I’m ill and dizzy, and—and I think I’m going mad. But she makes me do it. And it grows worse, you know, each time worse, until I can’t bear it. Then she’s angry, and that dreadful still look comes over her face—and this time she sent me here. The haunters will come, now—”