At last they encounter a living creature—a girl of unreal fragility and beauty who calls herself Evaya. She leads them into a hillside corridor and into a vast cavern which houses a dream-world city—a city of lovely colors and graceful, amazing patterns, defying all the laws of physics known to twentieth-century man. Evaya calls the city Carcasilla.
Here the ruler is a being named Flande, who is no more than a great ageless face to Alan Drake and his companions. By telepathic communication Flande attempts to question them, quickly wearies of them—and summons a band of barbarians. In a battle with these ragged barbarians—called the Terasi—Drake is struck unconscious and his companions captured.
For a long time Alan lives in a state of semi-consciousness, aware only that Evaya is tending him and that she and her people bathe him in a fountain in the center of the city. The secret properties of the fountain give him new strength, bring him back to consciousness so endowed that he does not feel hunger or weariness.
From Evaya, whom he finds to be fascinatingly real, Alan learns something of this strange city. It was built and ruled by super-beings known as the Light-Wearers, who conquered the earth and vanished long ago. Evaya, made immortal by the magic fountain, was once a priestess to them, and she tells Alan that lately she has felt a call, a summoning, as if one of the Light-Wearers was somewhere near. Alan realizes that this must be the alien presence sensed by him and his companions.
And then, while they are talking, Evaya is drawn into a spell by a force which Alan, too, can feel. The Light-Wearer is coming! Answering its call, the people of Carcasilla gather before the entrance corridor, and through the corridor comes striding a huge, shapeless figure, its light-robes swirling about it, bursting into the violent daylight of the cavern city.
CHAPTER NINE
The Light-Wearer
ALAN’S confused impressions of the thing were too contradictory to have meaning. Was it monstrously tall? He could not tell, even as it stood there against the black mouth of the disc. Had it been blazingly robed in light against that blackness? He couldn’t be sure. For, here in the light of the city, it was dark—a billowing darkness that swooped down upon its worshipers with a terrible avidity. It enveloped Evaya, who was foremost, in a cloud of nothingness, as if great unseen arms had seized her up in a devouring embrace.
Alan could not stir. His mind had congealed inside his congealed body and he could only stand and stare, drowning in helpless wonder as he watched. For here at last, tangibly before him, was the nameless thing that had haunted all the hours of his awakening and the fathomless hours of his sleep. The questing creature that had run upon his tracks in the mist, the enigmatic watcher from the Citadel, the being whose dreams he had shared altogether too closely, in the long night-time of the ship.
He stared in frozen dismay as Evaya vanished into the cloudy grip of the Alien. Surely the Carcasillians had come to worship, expecting benediction—not this! This avid clutching grasp, as if the creature had been starving for countless centuries . . .
Before the crowd about him could catch its breath the tall, blindingly robed figure—was it dark or light?—had tossed Evaya aside with a gesture almost of impatience, and was striding down upon the next nearest. It swooped and seized and enveloped with motion so incredibly swift that the Carcasillians could not have turned or fled even if they wished. And the great, striding god went through them like a reaper through grain, snatching up, enveloping, hurling aside figure after figure, and flashing on to the next.
Far back in Alan’s brain, behind the helpless horror, the terrible revulsion, the more terrible taint of kinship with this being whose dreams he had known—lay one small corner of detached awareness. In that corner of his mind he watched and reasoned with a coolness that almost matched Sir Colin’s scientific detachment.
“It can’t get at them,” he told himself. “Somehow they’re protected. Somehow the good Light-Wearers gave them armor to wear—like a spiked collar for their pets. Whatever it wants it isn’t getting it here. Not yet . . .”
The stooping and rising and inevitable nearing of that figure almost shook even the cool corner of his brain as it came closer and closer, reaping among the standing rows of Carcasillians. Alan strained vainly at his frozen limbs. Now it was two rows ahead of him. Now it was one—Tall, formless, all but invisible in its robes that were both lightness and dark . . .
The towering, inhuman thing stooped above his head with an avid swoop; its robes fell about him like blindness to shut out the violet day. He felt a vortex of hungry violence sweeping him up. Vertigo—gravity falling away beneath him—
And then a strange, indescribable, long-drawn “Ah-h-h!” of inhuman satisfaction breathing voiceless through his brain. And a probing—eager, ravenous, ruthless—as if intangible fingers were thrusting down all through his mind, his body, among his nerves, into his very soul. They were bruising fingers that in a moment would rip him inside out, bodily and mentally, as a fish might be gutted.
Instinct made him stiffen against them, with a stiffening of more than muscles. His mind went rigid in anger and rebellion, along with his body. And the being that clutched him hesitated. He could feel its surprise and uncertainty, and he struck out into the blindness with futile fists, gasping choked curses that were less words than anger made audible. He was awake now, vividly, painfully awake as he had not been since his first bath in the fountain. And he fought with all the fury that was in him against this devouring thing that was—he knew it now—starving with an inhuman hunger for the life-force he was fighting to protect. This much he knew, in that inviolable corner of the brain where reason still dwelt. This creature was evil made incarnate, and its hunger was diabolic now. It could not touch the Carcasillians; he was its last hope. Its struggles to overpower him were as desperate in their way as his were to be free.
FOR one timeless instant Alan shared its hunger. And he shared its dismay and sorrow. He knew what it was to wake upon a dying world and find only the ruined relics of kinsmen that once had ruled the planet. Ruin and starvation and unthinkable loneliness.
He felt those gutting fingers thrust down along the track of the understanding thoughts, deep into his awareness, ripping and tearing.
He closed his mind like a steel trap against the treacherous sympathy of those thoughts, closed it as if he closed his eyes to shut out a terrible sight. With a brain tight-shut against everything but the danger he must fight, he stiffened against that, probing, ravenous need raging all about him.
And he was holding his own. He sensed that by fighting with every ounce of strength in him, he could hold his own. And when that strength began to fail . . .
The blindness around him rifted now and again in his timeless, furious, voiceless fight. He could catch glimpses of violet light and the awed faces of the Carcassllians, and then dark again. Dark, and the starving desperation of the Alien tearing at him in a vortex of inhuman, demanding need.
And then, suddenly and bewilderingly—the bellow of gunfire.
That half-tangible grip upon him jolted—staggered—slipped away. Alan reeled back upon the slope of the white ramp, too dizzy to see anything clearly, knowing only in this moment that he was free and still alive. And then he heard—or was it a dream again?—a familiar, rasping voice, burred with strong emotion.
“Alan, laddie—gie us yer han’ ! Alan, here I am, laddie! It’s-Colin—here!”
Hard fingers dug into his arm and a ruddy, bearded face, grinning with strain, thrust close to his. “Come awa’, laddie—hurry! Can ye no see they’re angry? Come awa’ !”
Surprise had lost all power over Alan. Sir Colin, miraculously returned from oblivion, was not enough to startle him now. He wrenched away from that urgent grip on his arm, his mind taking up automatically what had been blanked out of it when the Light-Wearer swooped down.
“Evaya—” he said hoarsely, finding his throat raw as if he had been shouting. Perhaps he had, in the blindness and silence of the Alien’s embrace. “Evayar
—”
He had seen her last lying on the white ramp in a crumple of gossamer garments and showering hair. She was still there, but on her feet now and looking down at him still with that face of inhuman ivory, the eyes blank mirrors that reflected only what the Light-Wearer whispered in her brain.
The Light-Wearer! Alan whirled, remembering, not feeling the tug upon his arm as Sir Colin rumbled an urgent warning. He could see the Light-Wearer at the very edge of vision, hovering cloudily down the slope. He did not dare look directly at it. The bewildering thing hurt his very brain as the eyes are hurt by brilliance.
It was the gunfire that had jolted it. He was still half in rapport with the creature from that terrible intimacy of the fingers prying down into his brain. He knew it was hesitating, torn between fear of the crashing thunder again, and that intolerable hunger still driving it on.
He could not bring himself to face it, but he knew when it decided what to do. He looked up at Evaya a moment before her toneless puppet-voice broke the quivering silence. It was the Light-Wearer who spoke, but the people turned to Evaya to hear the words it was putting into her mouth.
“Take them!” cried her voice, with a timbre of inhuman fury in it that was not Evaya’s. Her arm came up in a commanding gesture that carried a dreadful hint of hovering robes—as if her possession were so complete that even the garment of the Light-Wearer were subtly visible around her. “Take them!” the inhuman voice thundered from her lips. (How hideous—how unthinkable—that the voice of a being not made of flesh spoke now through these lips of flesh!)
A low murmur of anger rose obediently among the Carcasillians. They rolled forward toward the two men, blind, hypnotic fury on their faces. Beyond them the half-seen figure of the Light-Wearer shimmered like smoke upon the air. Alan could feel its hunger beating out at him.
One moment more he hesitated’. The memory of Flande had come back and he was searching these blank, threatening faces before him. Was one of them Flande? Or was Flande human at all?
Was he watching imperturbably through the showers of his raining tower?
“Damn ye, mon, wake up!” roared Sir Colin in his ear. “Ye aren’t worth rescuing! Are ye comin’ or aren’t ye?”
Alan shook himself awake. “Yes,” he said. “I’m coming.”
The rising murmur of the Carcasillians sounded louder behind them as they hurried up the ramp. Alan hesitated with a moment’s shuddering memory of the funnel of infinite blackness down which the Light-Wearer had come striding. The thought of entering it was worse than the thought of turning to face what lay behind him. But when he looked the tunnel was no longer there. The great round disc of the gateway opened now upon a passage of gray stone slanting away into dimness outside the violet daylight of Carcasilla’s cavern.
Alan glanced back. Evaya lifted a face rigid as ice to him, a blind stare through which the Light-Wearer looked terribly into his eyes. Sir Colin called, “Hurry, mon!” in a voice that reverberated hollowly from the walls of the low passage outside.
Alan stepped through the gateway and out of Carcasilla.
CHAPTER TEN
The Way of the Gods
THUNDER bellowed from Sir Colin’s gun as Alan cleared the threshold. The noise was deafening; flinders of stone flew from the corridor’s walls as the air re-echoed with the sound of the shot. Alan turned in bewilderment, to see the ruddy Scot’s face of his companion wrinkling in a satisfied grin. “I thought so,” Sir. Colin said, lowering his gun. “Look.” A darkness was thickening over the doorway to Carcasilla. The violet light that poured through it dimmed as they watched, and within moments the barrier of darkness had closed over this gateway to shut them out, as the door of light they had first entered had closed to shut them in.
“It hates noise,” Sir Colin grunted. “And it’s still—maybe not sure of itself. I’ve had to use my gun on the domned thing before.”
Alan did not at once realize the import of the words. He stared at the black circle upon the wall, a closed gate beyond which the Light-Wearer stood alone with Evaya and her people. He knew it did not belong there. The nameless builder of Carcasilla had put up barriers to keep out just such creatures as that. But now the dream-like city belonged to it, and the dream-like people, and Evaya whom he had known so briefly and so well—Evaya, the most dream-enchanted of them all, with her eyes that reflected the Alien thoughts and her body the instrument for Alien commands.
Sir Colin followed his gaze. “It’s all right,” he said. “The Light-Wearer can’t hurt them. You saw that. But it could hurt us. We’re lucky to get away so easily. I doubt if I’d have dared tackle that—that thing—if I hadn’t seen it driven back by the Terasi’s drums.”
Alan looked at him, belated amazement welling up now that the crisis was over. The Scotsman had obviously been through strenuous activity since their parting. Scars and bruises showed through his ragged clothing, and. there were new lines in his haggard face. But the red beard, unkempt and roughly trimmed, jutted with the same arrogant cocksureness.
“The Terasi drums? Those savages—how did you get away from them? And Karen—she’s alive?”
Sir Colin patted the air soothingly with a big hand. “Karen and Mike are both verra much alive, laddie. But we’ll talk as we go. And mind you keep a sharp lookout, too. The Way of the Gods isna so safe for men!”
“Way of the Gods?” Alan followed the Scotsman’s gesture along the shadowy, ruinous corridor stretching before them. Once it might have been wider and higher, but it could never have been ornate, he thought. Now the broken walls gaped into darkness here and there, blocking the pavement with fallen stones. “What gods?” he asked. “Why?”’
“They call it that—the Terasi, I mean. And the gods were the Light-Wearers, of course. Didn’t ye learn anything at all in Carcasilla?”
“I know that much, sure,” Alan said, following Sir Colin over the broken stones that heaped the corridor floor. Here in the semi-twilight of ruin, Carcasilla’s perfection seemed like a dream already. But it was hard to leave. He looked back over his shoulder at the closed black gateway upon the wall.
“It’s the best way, laddie,” Sir Colin said gruffly. “Come along. You’ll realize that when I tell you what’s happened. And keep your eyes open as we go.”
“What do you expect?” Alan glanced uneasily about in the dimness.
“Anything at all. This was a—a sort of experimental laboratory for the Light-Wearers once. The Carcasillians are one result. There were others.” He nodded toward a gap in the wall, darkness within it. “Something used to live there, I suppose. And there, and there. Carcasilla’s the last perfect experiment, but not all the others died at once.”
Nothing moved but the rubble, under their feet. But the dark doorways were numerous now, and Alan felt uneasily that things were watching as they stumbled over the stones. “What’s happened?” he demanded. “Where’s Karen? And Mike?”
“Back in the Terasi cavern, laddie.”
“Prisoners?”
Sir Colin laughed. “No. At least—not Terasi prisoners. But I’m thinking we may all be prisoners of the Alien, my boy, and not quite realize it yet . . . No, the Terasi aren’t quite the savages they look. We found that out. It was our guns that saved us, you see. Not as threats or as weapons, but as a sort of promise instead. A promise of knowledge. They’re hungry and thirsty for knowledge, these savages of the tunnels. So at first they kept us alive to learn the secret of the guns—how to make them, where they came from, why they work. They had to teach us their language for that. Ye’ve been missing a long while, laddie.”
“You learned their language?”
“Enough. And now we’re allies—against the Alien.” He shrugged heavily. “Yes, we have a verra grave task ahead of us, laddie. The rebuilding of a world, perhaps. But we’ll talk about that later. Here—we can go faster now.”
THE floor before them was a road of shimmering gray metal. No, two roads, separated by a low curbing. Alan heard a rushing s
ound and felt wind drying the sweat upon his face.
“The Way of the Gods,” Sir Colin rumbled. “Follow me now, laddie. Careful does it.”
He stepped over gingerly upon the gray road. Instantly his heavy body rose weightless into the air, drifting forward as if upon the current of a slow stream. Over his shoulder he grinned and beckoned. “Come!”
Alan braced himself and stepped uncertainly forward. He felt a giddy vertigo that nauseated him briefly. He shot past Sir Colin in the grip of the invisible air-river, and went dizzily along the tunnel, trying to right himself. Over and over, heels over head. Then Sir Colin’s hand, steadying him.
“Don’t struggle. Relax now. There. The current’s faster toward the middle.”
“What-is it?” Alan had fallen into a swimmer’s position, head lifted, facing in the. direction of the current’s flow. Sir Colin drifted beside him. The tunnel walls moved past them with increasing speed, a soft murmuring of air in their ears.
“That gray stuff on the floor must cut off gravitation to some extent. Not too much or we’d smash against the roof. The force is angled forward, so we’re carried with it. It’s a river, Alan. A river of force. The Light-Wearers used it when they traveled the Way of Gods. It’s one of the few things that still works in this god-forsaken place. This, and Carcasilla . . . Tell me about it, laddie. What’s happened since we left?”
And so Alan told him, drifting along over the gray ribbon of the roadway, through the ruins and the darkness of the dead world. It did not take very long. Sir Colin was silent for awhile as they floated on along the whispering river of air. Then, “Flande,” he murmured. “I had wondered about him. Perhaps some day we’ll learn the truth. But. for the rest, it fits—yes, it fits verra well! I’ve learned a good deal since we came here, laddie.”
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