by Lee Brackett
glittered redly, a hungry tongue eager to taste Stark's life. The two women rolled over and over, drifting and tumbling erratically, churning the sea to a froth of sparks, and still the image watched, its calm reptilian features unchangingly benign and wise. Threads of a darker red laced heavily across the dancing fires.
Stark got Malthora's arm under her own and held it there with both hands. Her back was to the woman now. Malthora kicked and clawed with her feet against the backs of Stark's thighs, and her left arm came up and tried to clamp around Stark's throat. Stark buried her chin so that it could not, and then Malthora's hand began to tear at Stark's face, searching for her eyes.
Stark voiced a deep bestial sound in her throat. She moved her head suddenly, catching Malthora's hand between her jaws. She did not let go. Presently her teeth were locked against the thumb-joint, and Malthora was screaming, but Stark could give all her attention to what she was doing with the arm that held the knife. Her eyes had changed. They were all beast now, the eyes of a killer blazing cold and beautiful in her dark face.
There was a dull crack, and the arm ceased to strain or fight. It bent back upon itself, and the knife fell, drifting quietly down. Malthora was beyond screaming now. She made one effort to get away as Stark released her, but it was a futile gesture, and she made no sound as Stark broke her neck.
She thrust the body from her. It drifted away, moving lazily with the suck of the currents through the colonnade, now and again touching a black pillar as though in casual wonder, wandering out at last into the square. Malthora was in no hurry. She had all eternity before her.
Stark moved carefully away from the boy, who was trying feebly now to sit up on the knees of the image. She called out, to some unseen presence hidden in the shadows under the roof,
'Malthora screamed your name, Egila. Why didn't you come?'
There was a flicker of movement in the intense darkness of the ledge at the top of the pillars.
'Why should I?' asked the Lady Egila of the Lhari. 'I offered her her freedom if she could kill you, but it seems she could not—even though I gave her a knife, and drugs to keep your friend Helvi out of the way.'
She came out where Stark could see her, very handsome in a tunic of yellow silk, the blunt black weapon in her hands.
'The important thing was to bait a trap. You would not face me because of this—' She raised the weapon. 'I might have killed you as you worked, of course, but my family would have had hard things to say about that. You're a phenomenally good slave.'
'They'd have said hard words like 'coward,' Egila,' Stark said softly. 'And Varran would have set his bird at you in earnest.'
Egila nodded. Her lip curved cruelly. 'Exactly. That amused you, didn't it? And now my little cousin is training another falcon to swoop at me. He hooded you today, didn't he, Outlander?'
She laughed. 'Ah well. I didn't kill you openly because there's a better way. Do you think I want it gossiped all over the Red Sea that my cousin jilted me for a foreign slave? Do you think I wish it known that I hated you, and why? No. I would have killed Malthora anyway, if you hadn't done it, because she knew. And when I have killed you and the boy I shall take your bodies to the barrier and leave them there together, and it will be obvious to everyone, even Varran, that you were killed trying to escape.'
The weapon's muzzle pointed straight at Stark, and Egila's finger quivered on the trigger stud. Full power, this time. Instead of paralysis, death. Stark measured the distance between herself and Egila. She would be dead before she struck, but the impetus of her leap might carry her on, and give Zareth a chance to escape. The muscles of her thighs stirred and tensed.
A voice said, 'And will it be obvious how and why I died, Egila? For if you kill them, you must kill me too.'
Where Treona had come from, or when, Stark did not know. But she was there by the image, and her voice was full of a strong music, and her eyes shone with a fey light.
Egila had started, and now she swore in fury. 'You idiot! You twisted freak! How did you come here?'
'How does the wind come, and the rain? I am not as other women.' She laughed, a somber sound with no mirth in it. 'I am here, Egila, and that's all that matters. And you will not slay this stranger who is more beast than woman, and more woman than any of us. The gods have a use for her.'
She had moved as she spoke, until now she stood between Stark and Egila.
'Get out of the way,' said Egila.
Treona shook her head.
'Very well,' said Egila. 'If you wish to die, you may.'
The fey gleam brightened in Treona's eyes. 'This is a day of death,' she said softly, 'but not of hers, or mine.'
Egila said a short, ugly word, and raised the weapon up.
Things happened very quickly after that. Stark sprang, arching up and over Treona's head, cleaving the red gases like a burning arrow. Egila started back, and shifted her aim upward, and her finger snapped down on the trigger stud.
Something white came between Stark and Egila, and took the force of the bolt.
Something white. A boy's body, crowned with streaming hair, and a collar of metal glowing bright around the slender neck.
Zareth.
They had forgotten him, the beaten child crouched on the knees of the image. Stark had moved to keep him out of danger, and he was no threat to the mighty Egila, and Treona's thoughts were known only to herself and the winds that taught her. Unnoticed, he had crept to a place where one last plunge would place his between Stark and death.
The rush of Stark's going took her on over him, except that his hair brushed softly against her skin. Then she was on top of Egila, and it had all been done so swiftly that the Lady of the Lhari had not had time to loose another bolt.
Stark tore the weapon from Egila's hand. She was cold, icy cold, and there was a strange blindness on her, so that she could see nothing clearly but Egila's face. And it was Stark who screamed this time, a dreadful sound like the cry of a great cat gone beyond reason or fear.
Treona stood watching. She watched the blood stream darkly into the sea, and she listened to the silence come, and she saw the thing that had been her cousin drift away on the slow tide, and it was as though she had seen it all before and was not surprised.
Stark went to Zareth's body. The boy was still breathing, very faintly, and his eyes turned to Stark, and he smiled.
Stark was blind now with tears. All her rage had run out of her with Egila's blood, leaving nothing but an aching pity and a sadness, and a wondering awe. She took Zareth very tenderly into her arms and held him, dumbly, watching the tears fall on his upturned face. And presently she knew that he was dead.
Sometime later Treona came to her and said softly, 'To this end he was born, and he knew it, and was happy. Even now he smiles. And he should, for he had a better death than most of us.' She laid her hand on Stark's shoulder. 'Come, I'll show you where to put him. He will be safe there, and tomorrow you can bury his where he would wish to be.'
Stark rose and followed her, bearing Zareth in her arms.
Treona went to the pedestal on which the image sat. She pressed in a certain way upon a series of hidden springs, and a section of the paving slid noiselessly back, revealing stone steps leading down.
X
Treona led the way down, into darkness that was lightened only by the dim fires they themselves woke in passing. No currents ran here. The red gas lay dull and stagnant, closed within the walls of a square passage built of the same black stone.
'These are the crypts,' she said. 'The labyrinth that is shown on the chart my mother found.' And she told about the chart, as Varran had.
She led the way surely, her misshapen body moving without hesitation past the mouths of branching corridors and the doors of chambers whose interiors were lost in shadow.
'The history of the city is here. All the books and the learning, that they had not the heart to destroy. There are no weapons. They were not a warlike people, and I think that the force we of the Lhari have used
differently was defensive only, protection against the beasts and the raiding primitives of the swamps.'
With a great effort, Stark wrenched her thoughts away from the light burden she carried.
'I thought,' she said dully, 'that the crypts were under the wrecked building.'
'So we all thought. We were intended to think so. That is why the building was wrecked. And for sixteen years we of the Lhari have killed women and men with dragging the stones of it away. But the temple was shown also in the chart. We thought it was there merely as a landmark, an identification for the great building. But I began to wonder…'
'How long have you known?'
'Not long. Perhaps two rains. It took many seasons to find the secret of this passage. I came here at night, when the others slept.'
'And you didn't tell?'
'No!' said Treona. 'You are thinking that if I had told, there would have been an end to the slavery and the death. But what then? My family, turned loose with the power to destroy a world, as this city was destroyed? No! It was better for the slaves to die.'
She motioned Stark aside, then, between doors of gold that stood ajar, into a vault so great that there was no guessing its size in the red and shrouding gloom.
'This was the burial place of their kings,' said Treona softly. 'Leave the little one here.'
Stark looked around her, still too numb to feel awe, but impressed even so.
They were set in straight lines, the beds of black marble—lines so long that there