Ciaran's gaze followed theirs. He got rigid suddenly, and the sweat on him turned cold as dew on a toad's back.
He thought at first it was a man, walking down between the pillars. It was man-shaped, tall and slender and strong, and sheathed from crown to heels in white mesh metal that shimmered like bright water.
But when it came closer he knew he was wrong. Some animal instinct in him knew even before his mind did. He wanted to snarl and put up his hackles, and tuck his tail and run.
The creature was sexless. The flesh of its hands and face had a strange unreal texture, and a dusky yellow tinge that never came in living flesh.
Its face was human enough in shape—thin, with light angular bones. Only it was regular and perfect like something done carefully in marble, with no human softness or irregularity. The lips were bloodless. There was no hair, not even any eyelashes.
The eyes in that face were what set Ciaran's guts to knotting like a nest of cold snakes. They were not even remotely human. They were like pools of oil under the lashless lids—black, deep, impenetrable, without heart or soul or warmth.
But wise. Wise with a knowledge beyond humanity, and strong with a cold, terrible strength. And old.
There were none of the usual signs of age. It was more than that. It was a psychic, unhuman feel of antiquity; a time that ran back and back and still back to an origin as unnatural as the body it spawned.
Ciaran knew what it was. He had made songs about the creature and sung them in crowded market-places and smoky wine-shops. He'd scared children with it, and made grown people shiver while they laughed.
He wasn't singing now. He wasn't laughing. He was looking at one of the androids of Bas the Immortal—a creature born of the mysterious power of the Stone, with no faintest link to humanity in its body or its brain.
Ciaran knew then whose mind had created the shining monster towering above them. And he knew more than ever that it was evil.
The android walked out onto a platform facing the slave gang, so that it was above them, where they could all see. In its right hand it carried a staff of white metal with a round ball on top. The staff and the mesh-metal sheath it wore blazed bright silver in the glare.
The chained humans raised their heads. Ciaran saw the white scared glint of their eyeballs, heard the hard suck of breath and the uneasy clashing of link metal.
The Kalds made warning gestures with their wands, but they were watching the android.
It raised the staff suddenly, high over its head. The gesture put the ball top out of Ciaran's sight behind a girder. And then the lights dimmed and went out.
For a moment there was total darkness, except for the dull marginal glow of the forges and furnaces.
Then, from behind the girder that hid the top of the staff a glorious opaline light burst out, filling the space between the giant pillars, reaching out and up into the dim air with banners of shimmering flame.
The Kalds crouched down in attitudes of worship, their blood-pink eyes like sentient coals. A trembling ran through the line of slaves, as though a wind had passed across them and shaken them like wheat. A few cried out, but the sounds were muffled quickly to silence. They stood still, staring up at the light.
The android neither moved nor spoke, standing like a silver lance.
Ciaran got up. He didn't know that he did it. He was distantly aware of Mouse beside him, breathing hard through an open mouth and catching opaline sparks in her black eyes. There was other movement, but he paid no attention.
He wanted to get closer to the light. He wanted to see what made it. He wanted to bathe in it. He could feel it pulsing in him, sparkling in his blood. He also wanted to run away, but the desire was stronger than the fear. It even made the fear rather pleasurable.
He was starting to climb over the pile of scrap when the android spoke. Its voice was light, clear, and carrying. There was nothing menacing about it. But it stopped Ciaran like a blow in the face, penetrating even through his semi-drugged yearning for the light.
He knew sound. He knew mood. He was sensitive to them as his own harp in the way he made his living.
He felt what was in that voice; or rather, what wasn't in it. And he stopped, dead still.
It was a voice speaking out of a place where no emotion, as humanity knew the word, had ever existed. It came from a brain as alien and incomprehensible as darkness in a world of eternal light; a brain no human could ever touch or understand, except to feel the cold weight of its strength and cower as a beast cowers before the terrible mystery of fire.
"Sleep," said the android. "Sleep, and listen to my voice. Open your minds, and listen."
4
Through a swimming rainbow haze Ciaran saw the relaxed, dull faces of the slaves.
"You are nothing. You are no one. You exist only to serve; to work; to obey. Do you hear and understand?"
The line of humans swayed and made a small moaning sigh. It held nothing but amazement and desire.
They repeated the litany through thick animal mouths.
"Your minds are open to mine. You will hear my thoughts. Once told, you will not forget. You will feel hunger and thirst, but not weariness. You will have no need to stop and rest, or sleep."
Again the litany. Ciaran passed a hand over his face. He was sweating. In spite of himself the light and the soulless, mesmeric voice were getting him. He hit his own jaw with his knuckles, thanking whatever gods there were that the source of the light had been hidden from him. He knew he could never have bucked it.
More, perhaps, of the power of the Stone of Destiny?
A sudden sharp rattle of fragments brought his attention to the scrap heap. The hermit was already half way over it.
And Mouse was right at his heels.
Ciaran went after her. The rubble slipped and slid, and she was already out of reach. He called her name in desperation. She didn't hear him. She was hungry for the light.
Ciaran flung himself bodily over the rubbish. Out on the floor, the nearest Kalds were shaking off their daze of worship. The hermit was scrambling on all fours, like a huge gray cat.
Mouse's crimson tunic stayed just out of reach. Ciaran threw a handful of metal fragments at her back. She turned her head and snarled at him. She didn't see him. Almost as an automatic reflex she hurled some stuff at his face, but she didn't even slow down. The hermit cried out, a high, eerie scream.
A huge hand closed on Ciaran's ankle and hauled him back. He fought it, jabbing with the wand he still carried. A second remorseless hand prisoned his wrist.
The red hunter said dispassionately, "They come. We go."
"Mouse! Let me go, damn you! Mouse!"
"You can't help her. We go, quick."
Ciaran went on kicking and thrashing.
The hunter banged him over the ear with exquisite judgment, took the wand out of his limp hand and tossed him over one vast shoulder. The light hadn't affected the hunter much. He'd been in deeper shadow than the others, and his half-animal nerves had warned him quicker even than Ciaran's. Being a wise wild thing, he had shut his eyes at once.
He doubled behind the metal sheds and began to run in dense shadow.
Ciaran heard and felt things from a great misty distance. He heard the hermit yell again, a crazy votive cry of worship. He felt the painful jarring of his body and smelled the animal rankness of the hunter.
He heard Mouse scream, just once.
He tried to move; to get up and do something. The hunter slammed him hard across the kidneys. Ciaran was aware briefly that the lights were coming on again. After that it got very dark and very quiet.
The hunter breathed in his ear, "Quiet! Don't move."
There wasn't much chance of Ciaran doing anything. The hunter lay on top of him with one freckled paw covering most of his face. Ciaran gasped and rolled his eyes.
They lay in a troughed niche of rough stone. There was black shadow on them from an overhang, but the blue glare burned beyond it. Even as he watched it dimmed
and flickered and then steadied again.
High up over his head the shining metal monster reached for the roof of the cavern. It had grown. It had grown enormously, and a mechanism was taking shape inside it; a maze of delicate rods and crystal prisms, of wheels and balances and things Ciaran hadn't any name for.
Then he remembered about Mouse, and nothing else mattered.
The hunter lay on him, crushing him to silence. Ciaran's blue eyes blazed. He'd have killed the hunter then, if there had been any way to do it. There wasn't. Presently he stopped fighting.
Again the red giant breathed in his ear: "Look over the edge."
He took his hand away. Very, very quietly, Ciaran raised his head a few inches and looked over.
Their niche was some fifteen feet above the floor of the pit. Below and to the right was the mouth of a square tunnel. The crowded, sweating confusion of the forges and workshops spread out before them, with people swarming like ants after a rain.
Standing at the tunnel mouth were two creatures in shining metal sheathes—the androids of Bas the Immortal.
Their clear, light voices rose up to where Ciaran and the hunter lay.
"Did you find out?"
"Failing—as we judged. Otherwise, no change."
"No change." One of the slim unhumans turned and looked with its depthless black eyes at the soaring metal giant. "If we can only finish it in time!"
The other said, "We can, Khafre. We must."
Khafre made a quick, impatient gesture. "We need more slaves! These human cattle are frail. You drive them, and they die."
"The Kalds . . ."
"Are doing what they can. Two more chains have just come. But it's still not enough to be safe! I've told the beasts to raid farther in, even to the border cities if they have to."
"It won't help if the humans attack us before we're done."
Khafre laughed. There was nothing pleasant or remotely humorous about it.
"If they could track the Kalds this far, we could handle them easily. After we're finished, of course, they'll be subjugated anyway."
The other nodded. Faintly uneasy, it said, "If we finish in time. If we don't . . ."
"If we don't," said Khafre, "none of it matters, to them or us or the Immortal Bas." Something that might have been a shudder passed over its shining body. Then it threw back its head and laughed again, high and clear.
"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 bell
owed 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.
Sea Kings of Mars Page 7