The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  “But we will finish it, Steud! We’re unique in the universe, and nothing can stop us. This means the end of boredom, of servitude and imprisonment. With this world in our hands, nothing can stop us!”

  Steud whispered, “Nothing!” Then they moved away, disappearing into the seething clamor of the floor.

  The red hunter said, “What were they talking about?”

  Ciaran shook his head. His eyes were hard and curiously remote. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t like the smell of it, little man. It’s bad.”

  “Yeah.” Ciaran’s voice was very steady. “What happened to Mouse?”

  “She was taken with the others. Believe me, little man—I had to do what I did or they’d have taken you, too. There was nothing you could do to help her.”

  “She—followed the light.”

  “I think so. But I had to run fast.”

  There was a mist over Ciaran’s sight. His heart was slugging him. Not because he particularly cared, he asked, “How did we get away? I thought I saw the big lights come on…”

  “They did. And then they went off again, all of a sudden. They weren’t expecting it. I had a head start. The gray beasts hunt by scent, but in that stewpot there are too many scents. They lost us, and when the lights came on again I saw this niche and managed to climb to it without being seen.”

  He looked out over the floor, scratching his red beard. “I think they’re too busy to bother about two people. No, three.” He chuckled. “The hermit got away, too. He ran past me in the dark, screaming like an ape about revelations and The Light. Maybe they’ve got him again by now.”

  Ciaran wasn’t worrying about the hermit. “Subjugation,” he said slowly. “With this world in their hands, nothing can stop them.” He looked out across the floor of the pit. No guards. You didn’t need any guards when you had a weapon like that light. Frail human cattle driven till they died, and not knowing about it nor caring.

  The world in their hands. An empty shell for them to play with, to use as they wanted. No more market places, no more taverns, no more songs. No more little people living their little lives the way they wanted to. Just slaves with blank faces, herded by gray beasts with shining wands and held by the android’s light.

  He didn’t know why the androids wanted the world or what they were going to do with it. He only knew that the whole thing made him sick—sick all through, in a way he’d never felt before.

  The fact that what he was going to do was hopeless and crazy never occurred to him. Nothing occurred to him, except that somewhere in that seething slave-pen Mouse was laboring, with eyes that didn’t see and a brain that was only an open channel for orders. Pretty soon, like the woman up on the girder, she was going to hit her limit and die.

  Ciaran said abruptly, “If you want to kill a snake, what do you do?”

  “Cut off its head, of course.”

  Ciaran got his feet under him. “The Stone of Destiny,” he whispered. “The power of life and death. Do you believe in legends?”

  The hunter shrugged. “I believe in my hands. They’re all I know.”

  “I’m going to need your hands, to help me break one legend and build another!”

  “They’re yours, little man. Where do we go?”

  “Down that tunnel. Because, if I’m not clear off, that leads to Ben Beatha, and Bas the Immortal—and the Stone.”

  Almost as though it were a signal, the blue glare dimmed and flickered. In the semi-darkness Ciaran and the hunter dropped down from the niche and went into the tunnel.

  It was dark, with only a tiny spot of blue radiance at wide intervals along the walls. They had gone quite a distance before these strengthened to their normal brightness, and even then it was fairly dark. It seemed to be deserted.

  The hunter kept stopping to listen. When Ciaran asked irritably what was wrong, he said:

  “I think there’s someone behind us. I’m not sure.”

  “Well, give him a jab with the wand if he gets too close. Hurry up!”

  The tunnel led straight toward Ben Beatha, judging from its position in the pit. Ciaran was almost running when the hunter caught his shoulder urgently.

  “Wait! There’s movement up ahead…”

  He motioned Ciaran down. On their hands and knees they crawled forward, holding their wands ready.

  A slight bend in the tunnel revealed a fork. One arm ran straight ahead. The other bent sharply upward, toward the surface.

  There were four Kalds crouched on the rock between them, playing some obscure game with human finger bones.

  Ciaran got his weight over his toes and moved fast. The hunter went beside him. Neither of them made a sound. The Kalds were intent on their game and not expecting trouble.

  The two men might have got away with it, only that suddenly from behind them, someone screamed like an angry cat.

  Ciaran’s head jerked around, just long enough to let him see the hermit standing in the tunnel, with his stringy arms lifted and his gray hair flying, and a light of pure insanity blazing in his pale eyes.

  “Evil!” he shrieked. “You are evil to defy The Light, and the servants of The Light!”

  He seemed to have forgotten all about calling the Kalds demons a little while before.

  The gray beasts leaped up, moving quickly in with their wands ready. Ciaran yelled with sheer fury. He went for them, the rags of his yellow tunic streaming.

  He wasn’t quite clear about what happened after that. There was a lot of motion, gray bodies leaping and twisting and jewel-tips flashing. Something flicked him stunningly across the temple. He fought in a sort of detached fog where everything was blurred and distant. The hermit went on screaming about Evil and The Light. The hunter bellowed a couple of times, things thudded and crashed, and once Ciaran poked his wand straight into a blood-pink eye.

  Sometime right after that there was a confused rush of running feet back in the tunnel. The hunter was down. And Ciaran found himself running up the incline, because the other way was suddenly choked with Kalds.

  He got away. He was never sure how. Probably instinct warned him to go in time so that, in the confusion he was out of sight before the reinforcements saw him. Three of the original four Kalds were down and the fourth was busy with the hermit. Anyway, for the moment, he made it.

  When he staggered finally from the mouth of the ramp, drenched with sweat and gasping, he was back on the Forbidden Plains and Ben Beatha towered above him—a great golden Titan reaching for the red sky.

  The tumbled yellow rock of its steep slopes was barren of any growing thing. There were no signs of buildings, or anything built by hands, human or otherwise. High up, almost in the apex of the triangular peak, was a square, balconied opening that might have been only a wind-eroded niche in the cliff-face.

  Ciaran stood on widespread legs, studying the mountain with sullen stubborn eyes. He believed in legend, now. It was all he believed in. Somewhere under the golden peak was the Stone of Destiny and the demigod who was its master.

  Behind him were the creatures of that demigod, and the monster they were building—and a little black-haired Mouse who was going to die unless something was done about it.

  A lot of other people, too. A whole sane comfortable world. But Mouse was about all he could handle, just then.

  He wasn’t Ciaran the bard any longer. He wasn’t a human, attached to a normal human world. He moved in a strange land of gods and demons, where everything was as mad as a drunkard’s nightmare, and Mouse was the only thing that held him at all to the memory of a life wherein men and women fought and laughed and loved.

  His scarred mouth twitched and tightened. He started off across the rolling, barren rise to Ben Beatha—a tough, bandy-legged little man in yellow rags, with a brown, expressionless face and a forgotten harp slung between his shoulders, moving at a steady gypsy lope.

  A wind sighed over the Forbidden Plains, rolling the sunballs in the red sky. And then, from the crest of Ben Beatha, th
e darkness came.

  This time Ciaran didn’t stop to be afraid. There was nothing left inside him to be afraid with. He remembered the hermit’s words: Judgment, Great things moving. Doom and destruction, a shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying. Something of the same feeling came to him, but he wasn’t human any longer. He was beyond fear. Fate moved, and he was part of it.

  Stones and shale tricked his feet in the darkness. All across the Forbidden Plains there was night and a wailing wind and a sharp chill of cold. Far, far away there was a faint red glow on the sky where the sea burned with its own fire.

  Ciaran went on.

  Overhead, then, the sunballs began to flicker. Little striving ripples of light went out across them, lighting the barrens with an eerie witch-glow. The flickering was worse than the darkness. It was like the last struggling pulse of a dying man’s heart. Ciaran was aware of a coldness in him beyond the chill of the wind.

  A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying…

  He began to climb Ben Beatha.

  5

  The stone was rough and fairly broken, and Ciaran had climbed mountains before. He crawled upward, through the sick light and the cold wind that screamed and fought him harder the higher he got. He retained no very clear memory of the climb. Only after a long, long time he fell inward over the wall of a balcony and lay still.

  He was bleeding from rock-tears and his heart kicked him like the heel of a vicious horse. But he didn’t care. The balcony was man-made, the passage back of it led somewhere—and the light had come back in the sky.

  It wasn’t quite the same, though. It was weaker, and less warm.

  When he could stand up he went in along the passage, square-hewn in the living rock of Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life.

  It led straight in, lighted by a soft opaline glow from hidden light-sources. Presently it turned at right angles and became a spiral ramp, leading down.

  Corridors led back from it at various levels, but Ciaran didn’t bother about them. They were dark, and the dust of ages lay unmarked on their floors.

  Down and down, a long, long way. Silence. The deep uncaring silence of death and the eternal rock—dark titans who watched the small furious ant-scurryings of man and never, never, for one moment, gave a damn.

  And then the ramp flattened into a broad high passage cut deep in the belly of the mountain. And the passage led to a door of gold, twelve feet high and intricately graved and pierced, set with symbols that Ciaran had heard of only in legend: the Hun-Lahun-Mehen, the Snake, the Circle, and the Cross, blazing in hot jewel-fires.

  But above them, crushing and dominant on both valves of the great door, was the crux ansata, the symbol of eternal life, cut from some lustreless stone so black it was like a pattern of blindness on the eyeball.

  Ciaran shivered and drew a deep, unsteady breath. One brief moment of human terror came to him. Then he set his two hands on the door and pushed it open.

  He came into a small room hung with tapestries and lighted dimly by the same opaline glow as the hallway. The half-seen pictures showed men and beasts and battles against a background at once tantalizingly familiar and frighteningly alien.

  There was a rug on the floor. It was made from the head and hide of a creature Ciaran had never even dreamed of before—a thing like a huge tawny cat with a dark mane and great, shining fangs.

  Ciaran padded softly across it and pushed aside the heavy curtains at the other end.

  At first there was only darkness. It seemed to fill a large space; Ciaran had an instinctive feeling of size. He went out into it, very cautiously, and then his eyes found a pale glow ahead in the blackness, as though someone had crushed a pearl with his thumb and smeared it across the dark.

  He was a thief and a gypsy. He made no more sound than a wisp of cloud, drifting toward it. His feet touched a broad, shallow step, and then another. He climbed, and the pearly glow grew stronger and became a curving wall of radiance.

  He stopped just short of touching it, on a level platform high above the floor. He squinted against its curdled, milky thickness, trying to see through.

  Wrapped in the light, cradled and protected by it like a bird in the heart of a shining cloud, a boy slept on a couch made soft with furs and colored silks. He was quite naked, his limbs flung out carelessly with the slim angular grace of his youth. His skin was white as milk, catching a pale warmth from the light.

  He slept deeply. He might almost have been dead, except for the slight rise and fall of his breathing. His head was rolled over so that he faced Ciaran, his cheek pillowed on his upflung arm.

  His hair, thick, curly, and black almost to blueness, had grown out long across his forearm, across the white fur beneath it, and down onto his wide slim shoulders. The nails of his lax hand, palm up above his head, stood up through the hair. They were inches long.

  His face was just a boy’s face. A good face, even rather handsome, with strong bone just beginning to show under the roundness. His cheek was still soft as a girl’s, the lashes of his closed lids dark and heavy.

  He looked peaceful, even happy. His mouth was curved in a vague smile, as though his dreams were pleasant. And yet there was something there…

  A shadow. Something unseen and untouchable, something as fragile as the note of a shepherd’s pipe brought from far off on a vagrant breeze. Something as indescribable as death—and as broodingly powerful. Ciaran sensed it, and his nerves throbbed suddenly like the strings of his own harp.

  He saw then that the couch the boy slept on was a huge crux ansata, cut from the dead-black stone, with the arms stretching from under his shoulders and the loop like a monstrous halo above his head.

  The legends whispered through Ciaran’s head. The songs, the tales, the folklore. The symbolism, and the image-patterns.

  Bas the Immortal was always described as a giant, like the mountain he lived in, and old, because Immortal suggests age. Awe, fear, and unbelief spoke through those legends, and the child-desire to build tall. But there was an older legend…

  Ciaran, because he was a gypsy and a thief and had music in him like a drunkard has wine, had heard it, deep in the black forests of Hyperborea where even gypsies seldom go. The oldest legend of all—the tale of the Shining Youth from Beyond, who walked in beauty and power, who never grew old, and who carried in his heart a bitter darkness that no man could understand.

  The Shining Youth from Beyond. A boy sleeping with a smile on his face, walled in living light.

  Ciaran stood still, staring. His face was loose and quite blank. His heartbeats shook him slightly, and his breath had a rusty sound in his open mouth.

  After a long time he started forward, into the light.

  It struck him, hurled him back numbed and dazed. Thinking of Mouse, he tried it twice more before he was convinced. Then he tried yelling. His voice crashed back at him from the unseen walls, but the sleeping boy never stirred, never altered even the rhythm of his breathing.

  After that Ciaran crouched in the awful laxness of impotency, and thought about Mouse, and cried.

  Then, quite suddenly, without any warning at all, the wall of light vanished.

  He didn’t believe it. But he put his hand out again, and nothing stopped it, so he rushed forward in the pitch blackness until he hit the stone arm of the cross. And behind him, and all around him, the light began to glow again.

  Only now it was different. It flickered and dimmed and struggled, like something fighting not to die. Like something else…

  Like the sunballs. Like the light in the sky that meant life to a world. Flickering and feeble like an old man’s heart, the last frightened wing-beats of a dying bird…

  A terror took Ciaran by the throat and stopped the breath in it, and turned his body colder than a corpse. He watched…

  The light glowed and pulsed, and grew stronger. Presently he was walled in by it, but it seemed fainter than before.

  A terrible feeling of urgency came over Ciaran, a need for hast
e. The words of the androids came back to him: Failing, as we judged. If we finish in time. If we don’t, none of it matters.

  A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying. Mouse slaving with empty eyes to build a shining monster that would harness the world to the wills of nonhuman brains.

  It didn’t make sense, but it meant something. Something deadly important. And the key to the whole mad jumble was here—a dark-haired boy dreaming on a stone cross.

  Ciaran moved closer. He saw then that the boy had stirred, very slightly, and that his face was troubled. It was as though the dimming of the light had disturbed him. Then he sighed and smiled again, nestling his head deeper into the bend of his arm.

  “Bas,” said Ciaran. “Lord Bas!”

  His voice sounded hoarse and queer. The boy didn’t hear him. He called again, louder. Then he put his hand on one slim white shoulder and shook it hesitantly at first, and then hard, and harder.

  The boy Bas didn’t even flicker his eyelids.

  Ciaran beat his fists against the empty air and cursed without any voice. Then, almost instinctively, he crouched on the stone platform and took his harp in his hands.

  It wasn’t because he expected to do anything with it. It was simply that harping was as natural to him as breathing, and what was inside him had to come out some way. He wasn’t thinking about music. He was thinking about Mouse, and it just added up to the same thing.

  Random chords at first, rippling up against the wall of milky light. Then the agony in him began to run out through his fingertips onto the strings, and he sent it thrumming strong across the still air. It sang wild and savage, but underneath it there was the sound of his own heart breaking, and the fall of tears.

  There was no time. There wasn’t even any Ciaran. There was only the harp crying a dirge for a black-haired Mouse and the world she lived in. Nothing mattered but that. Nothing would ever matter.

  Then finally there wasn’t anything left for the harp to cry about. The last quiver of the strings went throbbing off into a dull emptiness, and there was only an ugly little man in yellow rags crouched silent by a stone cross, hiding his face in his hands.