by Lee Brackett
honor. You could sleep soundly under my roof.'
She paused, then added with a smile, 'Also, I have a daughter. An excellent cook—and very beautiful.'
The woeful chanting came again, dim and distant on the wind, an echo of warning against some unimagined fate.
Stark said for the third time, 'No.'
She needed no intuition to tell her to walk wide of the captain. The woman was a rogue, and not a very subtle one.
A flint-hard, angry look came briefly into Malthora's eyes. 'You're a stubborn woman. You'll find that Shuruun is no place for stubbornness.'
She turned and went away. Stark remained where she was. The ship drifted on through a slow eternity of time. And all down that long still gulf of the Red Sea, through the heat and the wreathing fog, the ghostly chanting haunted her, like the keening of lost souls in some forgotten hell.
Presently the course of the ship was altered. Malthora came again to the afterdeck, giving a few quiet commands. Stark saw land ahead, a darker blur on the night, and then the shrouded outlines of a city.
Torches blazed on the quays and in the streets, and the low buildings caught a ruddy glow from the burning sea itself. A squat and ugly town, Shuruun, crouching witch-like on the rocky shore, his ragged skirts dipped in blood.
The ship drifted in toward the quays.
Stark heard a whisper of movement behind her, the hushed and purposeful padding of naked feet. She turned, with the astonishing swiftness of an animal that feels itself threatened, her hand dropping to her gun.
A belaying pin, thrown by the steerswoman, struck the side of her head with stunning force. Reeling, half blinded, she saw the distorted shapes of women closing in upon her. Malthora's voice sounded, low and hard. A second belaying pin whizzed through the air and cracked against Stark's shoulder.
Hands were laid upon her. Bodies, heavy and strong, bore her down. Malthora laughed.
Stark's teeth glinted bare and white. Someone's cheek brushed past, and she sank them into the flesh. She began to growl, a sound that should never have come from a human throat. It seemed to the startled Venusians that the woman they had attacked had by some wizardry become a beast, at the first touch of violence.
The woman with the torn cheek screamed. There was a voiceless scuffling on the deck, a terrible intensity of motion, and then the great dark body rose and shook itself free of the tangle, and was gone, over the rail, leaving Malthora with nothing but the silken rags of a shirt in her hands.
The surface of the Red Sea closed without a ripple over Stark. There was a burst of crimson sparks, a momentary trail of flame going down like a drowned comet, and then—nothing.
II
Stark dropped slowly downward through a strange world. There was no difficulty about breathing, as in a sea of water. The gases of the Red Sea support life quite well, and the creatures that dwell in it have almost normal lungs.
Stark did not pay much attention at first, except to keep her balance automatically. She was still dazed from the blow, and she was raging with anger and pain.
The primitive in her, whose name was not Stark but N'Chaka, and who had fought and starved and hunted in the blazing valleys of Mercury's Twilight Belt, learning lessons she never forgot, wished to return and slay Malthora and her women. She regretted that she had not torn out their throats, for now her trail would never be safe from them.
But the woman Stark, who had learned some more bitter lessons in the name of civilization, knew the unwisdom of that. She snarled over her aching head, and cursed the Venusians in the harsh, crude dialect that was her father tongue, but she did not turn back. There would be time enough for Malthora.
It struck her that the gulf was very deep.
Fighting down her rage, she began to swim in the direction of the shore. There was no sign of pursuit, and she judged that Malthora had decided to let her go. She puzzled over the reason for the attack. It could hardly be robbery, since she carried nothing but the clothes she stood in, and very little money.
No. There was some deeper reason. A reason connected with Malthora's insistence that she lodge with her. Stark smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. She was thinking of Shuruun, and the things women said about it, around the shores of the Red Sea.
Then her face hardened. The dim coiling fires through which she swam brought her memories of other times she had gone adventuring in the depths of the Red Sea.
She had not been alone then. Helvi had gone with her—the tall son of a barbarian kinglet up-coast by Yarell. They had hunted strange beasts through the crystal forests of the sea-bottom and bathed in the welling flames that pulse from the very heart of Venus to feed the ocean. They had been sisters.
Now Helvi was gone, into Shuruun. She had never returned.
Stark swam on. And presently she saw below her in the red gloom something that made her drop lower, frowning with surprise.
There were trees beneath her. Great forest giants towering up into an eerie sky, their branches swaying gently to the slow wash of the currents.
Stark was puzzled. The forests where she and Helvi had hunted were truly crystalline, without even the memory of life. The 'trees' were no more trees in actuality than the branching corals of Terra's southern oceans.
But these were real, or had been. She thought at first that they still lived, for their leaves were green, and here and there creepers had starred them with great nodding blossoms of gold and purple and waxy white. But when she floated down close enough to touch them, she realized that they were dead—trees, creepers, blossoms, all.
They had not mummified, nor turned to stone. They were pliable, and their colors were very bright. Simply, they had ceased to live, and the gases of the sea had preserved them by some chemical magic, so perfectly that barely a leaf had fallen.
Stark did not venture into the shadowy denseness below the topmost branches. A strange fear came over her, at the sight of that vast forest dreaming in the depths of the gulf, drowned and forgotten, as though wondering why the birds had gone, taking with them the warm rains and the light of day.
She thrust her way upward, herself like a huge dark bird above the branches. An overwhelming impulse to get away from that unearthly place drove her on, her half-wild sense shuddering with an impression of evil so great that it took all her acquired common-sense to assure her that she was not pursued by demons.
She broke the surface at last, to find that she had lost her direction in the red deep and made a long circle around, so that she was far below Shuruun. She made her way back, not hurrying now, and presently clambered out over the black rocks.
She stood at the end of a muddy lane that wandered in toward the town. She followed it, moving neither fast nor slow, but with a wary alertness.
Huts of wattle-and-daub took shape out of the fog, increased in numbers, became a street of dwellings. Here and there rush-lights glimmered through the slitted windows. A woman and a man clung together in a low doorway. They saw her and sprang apart, and the man gave a little cry. Stark went on. She did not look back, but she knew that they were following her quietly, at a little distance.
The lane twisted snakelike upon itself, crawling now through a crowded jumble of houses. There were more lights, and more people, tall white-skinned folk of the swamp-edges, with pale eyes and long hair the color of new flax, and the faces of wolves.
Stark passed among them, alien and strange with her black hair and sun-darkened skin. They did not speak, nor try to stop her. Only they looked at her out of the red fog, with a curious blend of amusement and fear, and some of them followed her, keeping well behind. A gang of small naked children came from somewhere among the houses and ran shouting beside her, out of reach, until one girl threw a stone and screamed something unintelligible except for one word—Lhari. Then they all stopped, horrified, and fled.
Stark went on, through the quarter of the lacemakers, heading by instinct toward the wharves. The glow of the Red Sea pervaded all the air, so that it seemed as though the mist was
full of tiny drops of blood. There was a smell about the place she did not like, a damp miasma of mud and crowding bodies and wine, and the breath of the vela poppy. Shuruun was an unclean town, and it stank of evil.
There was something else about it, a subtle thing that touched Stark's nerves with a chill finger. Fear. She could see the shadow of it in the eyes of the people, hear its undertone in their voices. The wolves of Shuruun did not feel safe in their own kennel. Unconsciously, as this feeling grew upon her, Stark's step grew more and more wary, her eyes more cold and hard.
She came out into a broad square by the harbor front. She could see the ghostly ships moored along the quays, the piled casks of wine, the tangle of masts and cordage dim against the background of the burning gulf. There were many torches here. Large low buildings stood around the square. There was laughter and the sound of voices from the dark verandas, and somewhere a man sang to the melancholy lilting of a reed pipe.
A suffused glow of light in the distance ahead caught Stark's eye. That way the streets sloped to a higher ground, and straining her vision against the fog, she made out very dimly the tall bulk of a castle crouched on the low cliffs, looking with bright eyes upon the night, and the streets of Shuruun.
Stark hesitated briefly. Then she started across the square toward the largest of the taverns.
There were a number of people in the open space, mostly sailors