“Here’s one for you!” he said grimly. “Now fight it!”
The girl’s face turned pale and terror stricken. “Oh, no! No!” she murmured. “I’m so tired—so tired!” She turned frightened brown eyes on him. “Then stay, Tom. Don’t distract me now. I need—all my strength.”
It was too late. The second horror had poised itself and struck, glowing mistily against Evanie’s soft bronze hair.
She stood frozen, only a low moan of anguish twisting her lips.
Connor felt a surge of sympathy that not even the insanity-breeding Messenger could overcome.
“Evanie!” he cried huskily. “Oh my God! What is it saying?”
Her eyes were wide and terrified.
“It says ‘Sleep—Sleep!’ It says ‘The world grows dark—your eyes are closing.’ ” She clenched her fists in frenzy. “It isn’t fair! I could fight it off—I could fight both of them off, given time! The Master—the Master wants me—unable—to help you.”
Her eyes grew misty.
Suddenly she collapsed at his feet.
FOR a long minute Connor stared down at her. Then he bent over, gathered her in his arms, and moved out into the darkness toward Urbs.
Evanie was a light burden, but that first mile down the mountain was a torment that was burned into Connor’s jnemory forever. The Messenger was still as he began the return, and he managed well enough by the starlight to follow the trail. But a thousand feet of mountain unevenness and inequalities of footing just about exhausted him.
His breath shortened to painful gasps, and his whole body, worn out after two nights of sleeplessness, protested with aches and twinges. At last, still cradling Evanie in his arms, he sank exhausted on the moss-covered bole of a fallen tree that glowed with misty fox-fire.
Instantly the Messenger took up its distractingly irritating admonition.
“Go back to Urbs!” it clicked deep in his brain. “Go back to Urbs! Go back to Urbs!”
He bore the torment for five minutes before he rose in wild obedience and staggered south with his burden.
But another quarter mile found him reeling and dizzy with exhaustion, lurching into trees and bushes, scratched, torn, and ragged. Once Evanie’s hair caught in the thorns of some shadowy shrub and when he paused to disentangle it, the Messenger took up its maddening refrain. He tore the girl loose with a desperately convulsive gesture and blundered on along the trail.
He was on the verge of collapse after a single mile, and Urbs lay—God only knew how far south? He shifted Evanie from his arms to his shoulder, but the thought of abandoning her never entered his mind.
But the time came when his wearied body could go no further. Letting Evanie’s limp body slide to the ground he closed his eyes in agony as the torturing voice of the Messenger resumed as he dropped beside her.
“I can’t!” he croaked as though the Messenger or its distant controller could hear him. “Do you want to kill me?”
The sublimity of relief! The voice was still, and he relaxed in an ecstasy of rest. He realized to the full the sweetness of simple silence, the absolute perfection of merely being quiet.
He sighed, drawing in great breaths to fill his straining lungs.
He slumped full length to the ground, then, and in a moment was sleeping as profoundly as Evanie herself.
When Tom Connor awoke to broad day a heap of fruit and a shallow wooden bowl of water were beside him. Connor guessed that they had been placed there by the metamorphs that roamed the hills.
They were still loyal to Evanie, watching out for her.
He ate hungrily, then lifted Evanie’s bronze head, tilting the water against her lips. She choked, swallowed a mouthful or two, but moved no more than that.
The damage to his clothing from his plunge through the darkness was slight.
His shirt was torn at sleeves and shoulder, and his trousers were ripped in several places. Evanie’s soft hair was tangled with twigs and burrs, and a thorn had scratched her cheek. The elastic that bound her trouser leg to her left ankle was broken, and the garment flapped loosely. The bared ankle was crossed by a reddened gash.
He poured what remained of the water over the wound to wash away any dirt or foreign substance that might be in it. That was all his surgery encompassed.
CHAPTER XIII
The Trail Back
BY daylight the Messenger was only a blur, visible out of the corner of his eye like a tear in the eye itself. The demon on Evanie’s shoulder was a shifting iridescence no more solid than the heat-waves above a summer road. He stared compassionately down on the still, white face of the girl, and it was at that moment that the Messenger took up its inexorable, clicking chant: “Go back to Urbs! Go back to Urbs!”
He sighed, lifted the girl in arms still aching, and took up his laborious journey. Yard by yard he trudged along the uneven trail. When the blood began to pound in his ears he rested again, and the silent Messenger on his shoulder remained silent. Only when his strength had returned did its voice take up the admonition.
Connor hated the Master now, hated him for these past hours of torture, and for the pallor of Evanie’s cheeks, and her body limp in his arms.
The sun rose higher, struck down burning rays on his body. The perspiration that dampened his clothes was warm and sticky while he toiled along, and clammily cold while he rested. Shiny beads of it were on the brow of the unconscious girl, while his own face was covered with trickling rivulets that stung his eyes and bore salty drops to his lips. And the air was hot—hot!
Staggering south, resting, plowing on again, it was near sunset when he approached the Weed village where they had emerged from the pneumatic tube. A man digging before a cottage stared at him and fled through the door. On the steps of the building that housed the tube, half a dozen idlers moved hastily within, and he glimpsed the panic-stricken nondescript who had released him from the freight cylinder.
Connor strode wearily to the steps and deposited Evanie. He glared at the pale faces beyond the door.
“I want food,” he snapped. “And wine. Do you hear? Wine!”
Someone slipped timidly past him. In a moment he was back with coarse brown bread and cold meat, and a bottle of the tart wild grape wine of the region. Connor ate silently, realizing that eyes peered at him from every window. When he had finished, he poured wine between Evanie’s lips. It was the only nourishment he could give her.
“You in there!” he called. “Can any of you release us from these things?”
Evidently, that was a mistake. There was a terrified rustling within and a hurried exodus from some other door. The Messenger took up its refrain with maddening promptness. Abandoning hope of aid, once again he picked up Evanie and tramped into the darkness.
The demon on his shoulder finally let him sleep. It was just dawn when he awoke, and scarcely had he opened his eyes on this second morning of his tortuous trek when the clicking voice resumed its chant. He made no attempt to resist it, but rose and struggled on with his burden. Now he followed a clay road on which he could avoid tearing thorns and branches.
No more than a mile from the village he topped a rise to view a wide black highway, perhaps the same over which he and Jan Orm and Evanie had sped to Urbs—just two days ago! He found the rubbery surface somewhat less tiring and managed a little more distance between rests. But the journey was painfully slow. Yet the Messenger never hurried him. He was permitted ample rest.
NOW and again vehicles hummed past, mostly giant trucks. Occasionally a speeding machine slowed as if to stop, but one glimpse of the mistiness on his shoulder sent the driver whizzing on. No one, apparently, dared association with the bearer of that dread badge of the Master’s enmity. It was with amazement, therefore, that Connor saw a truck actually stopping, and heard a cheerful invitation to “Come on in!”
He clambered laboriously into the cab, placing Evanie on the seat beside him, holding her against him. He thanked the driver, a pleasant-featured youth, and relaxed, silent.
“Weed trouble, eh?” the driver asked. He stared at Connor’s shoulder.
“Say, you must be a pretty important Weed to rate a Messenger.” He glanced sideward at Connor and suddenly grinned. “I know you now! You’re the fellow that carried the beam when hell popped Sunday. Lord! Stood right up to the beam!” In his tone was deep admiration.
Connor said nothing.
“Well, you’re in for it, all right,” the youth resumed cheerfully. “You blew down some of the Master’s men, and that’s bad!”
“What did he do with the others?” Connor asked gloomily. “They couldn’t all get away.”
“He only picked up the leaders. Nine of ’em. Vision didn’t say what he did. Papers say he released some of ’em. Girl who thinks she looks like the Princess.”
Maris, thought Connor. And Evanie was the tenth of the decemvirate. He himself was tossed in for good measure. Well, perhaps he might bargain for Evanie’s release. After all, he had something to trade.
It was mid-afternoon before they looked down on Kaatskill, and Connor realized in astonishment the distance over which they must have flashed in the freight tube. Then he forgot all else as Urbs Minor appeared with its thousands of towers and, far across the valley, the misty peaks that were the colossus, Greater Urbs.
The truck kept to the ground level. The mighty buildings, shielded by the upper streets from sight, were less spectacular here, but their vast bases seemed to press upon the ground like a range of mountains, until Connor wondered why the solid earth did not sink beneath their weight. Millions upon millions of tons of metal and masonry—and all of it as if it rested on his own brain, so despondent did he feel.
Presently they were on Palace Avenue. Even the ground level of that mighty street was crowded. Connor already knew its almost legendary reputation. What the Via Appia was to Rome, or Broadway to America of yore, Palace Avenue now was to the world. Main street of the planet; highway of the six—no, the seven—continents. For Antarctica was an inhabited continent now.
When the unbelievably magnificent Twin Towers came into clean view the truck came to a halt. Connor climbed out and turned to pick up Evanie.
“Thanks,” he said. “You made the road to hell a lot easier.”
The youth grinned.
“ ’S nothing. Good chances, Weed. You’ll need ’em!”
Connor turned for the long ascent to the Palace. He trudged up the interminable flight of steps, passing crowds of Urbans who stared and gave him wide passageway. He moved close under the great, brooding, diorite statue of Holland, into the north doorway of the Palace, where a guard stepped hastily aside to admit him.
THROUGH a door to his right came the clatter and rustle of voices and machines, engaged in the business of administering a world government. To his left was a closed door, and ahead the hall debouched into a room so colossal that at first it seemed an illusion.
He strode in. Along the far wall, a thousand feet away, was a row of seats—thrones, rather—each on a dais or platform perhaps ten feet above the floor, and each apparently occupied.
Perhaps fifty of them. Before the central one stood a group of people, and a few guards flanked it. Then, as he approached, he realized that all but the central throne were occupied only by images, by cleverly worked statues of bronze. No—two central thrones held living forms.
He pushed his way roughly through the knot of people, carefully deposited Evanie on the steps ascending to the seat, and glared defiantly at the Master.
For a moment, so intent was his gaze at the man he had come bitterly to hate, through all the torture of his forced trip, that he did not shift his eyes to the figure who sat beside the Master. The Princess of whom he had heard, he supposed—the beautiful cruel Margaret of Urbs who, with her brother, ruled with an iron hand.
But he was not interested in her now. Her immortal brother claimed all his attention, all his defiance. Just for a breath, though, Connor’s eyes did flicker in her direction—and instantly he stood stockstill, frozen, wondering if at last he had lost his mind. For here, before his staring eyes, was the most incredible thing he had come upon in all this incredible new world! And what held him spell-bound was not so much the utter, unbelievable, fantastic beauty of the woman—or girl—who sat upon the throne of Urbs, as was the fact that he knew her! Gazing at her, frozen in utter surprise and fascination, Tom Connor knew in that moment that the cruel Margaret of Urbs and the inky-haired, white-robed girl with whom he had spent those unforgettable moments in the wild-wood outside the village of Ormon were one and the same!
There could be no possible doubt of that, though in her emerald green eyes now was no friendly light as she looked down at him haughtily. In that same manner she might show her distaste for some crawling thing that had annoyed her. But not even her changed expression, not even her rich garb that had replaced her white robe of sylvan simplicity, could alter the fact that here before Tom Connor was his woman of the woods, his girl of mystery, the girl who had unfolded to him the history of this more and more astonishing age into which Fate had drawn him.
Not by the slightest flicker of a long, black, curling eyelash did she show that she had even seen Connor before. But even in his own quick resentment that swiftly followed his frozen moment of surprise, the man from another age uncomfortably realized that her fascination for him, the sway of her bewildering beauty, was as great as it had been the first moment he had gazed upon her.
His own predicament—Evanie—everything—was forgotten, as if he were hypnotized.
Instead of a gauzy white robe that was in itself revealing, but with a touch of poetry and mysticism, she now wore the typical revealing costume of Urbs—rose bodice, and short kirtle of golden scales. And that hair of hers—never would Connor forget it—so black that it glinted blue in the light. Nor would he even forget her skin, so transparently clear, with its tint like the patina over ancient silver-bronze.
Looking at her now, Connor could see how Maris might claim a resemblance, but it was no more than the resemblance of a candle to the sun. Evanie was beautiful, too, but her loveliness was that of a human being, while the beauty of this girl who sat upon a throne was unearthly, unbelievable, immortal.
SHE sat with her slim legs thrust carelessly before her, her elbow on the arm of her chair, her chin in her cupped hand, and gazed indifferently from strange sea-green eyes into the vastness of the giant chamber. Never once did she glance at Connor after her first swift distasteful survey.
Her exquisite features were expressionless, or expressive only of complete boredom. Though there did seem to Connor that there was the faintest trace of that unforgettable mockery in the set of her perfect lips. Before he could tear his gaze away from her she moved slightly. With the movement something flamed on her breast—a great flower of seven petals that flashed and glistened in a dozen colors, as if made of jewels.
It took all of Connor’s will power to keep his eyes from her, even though in that moment of long silence that had fallen in the throne room with his entry, he was resenting her, loathing her for what she was—instead of what he had thought her to be.
Deliberately he faced the Master, head up, defiant. Let the Master—let his Princess sister—do what they pleased. He was ready for them!
CHAPTER XIV
The Master
THE man at whom Connor stared, the man whose features he had seen before on Evanie’s coin, seemed no older than the middle twenties. He was dark-eyed, and his black hair fell in a smooth helmet below his ears.
The eyes were strange, piercing, shrewd, as if they alone had aged, as if they were the receptacles of these centuries of experience. The mouth was set in a thin, cold line and yet, strangely enough, there was a faintly humorous quirk to its corners. Or not so strangely, either, decided Connor. A man must have a sense of humor to survive seven centuries.
And then a deep, resonant voice sounded as the Master spoke.
“I see, Thomas Connor,” he said ironically, “that
you received my Messenger hospitably.”
“And this is little Evanie!” His voice changed. “Good blood,” he mused. “The mingling of the blood of Martin Sair with that of Montmerci.”
Connor glared belligerently. “Release us from these vicious Messengers of yours, will you?” he demanded angrily. “We’re here.”
The Master nodded mildly, and spoke briefly into a mouthpiece on a black table beside him. There was a moment’s pause, then a tingling shock as the unbound energies of the Messenger grounded through Connor’s body. Evanie quivered and moaned as the thing on her shoulder vanished, but she lay as quiet as ever.
Connor shook himself. Free! He flashed an angry frown at the impassive Master, but his eyes kept straying back to the Princess, who still not even glanced at him after that one first instant.
“Well,” said the Master quietly, “your revolution was a trifle abortive, wasn’t it?”
“Up to now!” snapped Connor.
His hatred suddenly overwhelmed him. The impulse for revenge shook him bodily. Swiftly stooping, he snatched Evanie’s revolver from her belt, and held the trigger while twelve shots spat full at the Master’s face in a continuous steaming roar.
The steam moved lazily away. The Master sat without change of expression, uninjured, while from far above a few splinters of glass from a shattered skylight tinkled about him. Of course, Connor reflected bitterly, the man would be protected by an inductive field. Glass had been able to pass through that inductive field, where Connor’s bullets could not, but their glass was a dielectric.
He cast the empty gun aside and stared sullenly at the man on the throne. Then, despite his efforts, his gaze was again drawn to the Princess.
She was no longer looking abstractedly into vacancy. At the crash of the shots she had shifted slightly, without raising her chin from her hand, and was watching him. Their glances crossed. It warlike the tingle of the Messenger’s discharge to him as he met the cool green eyes, inscrutable and expressionless and utterly disinterested. And in them was no slightest hint of recognition! For reasons of her own she did not mean to recognize him. Well, two could play at that game.
The Complete Margaret of Urbs Page 8