The Halfling and Other Stories

by Leigh Brackett

  He saw that he had caught a girl.

  Her hair was black and her eyes were two dark points of fire looking at him over the rim of his hand. He held her so for a moment, watching the empty doorway, listening. Then he whispered.

  “Stop struggling and I’ll take my hand away. But if you make a sound I’ll kill you!”

  She nodded. Cautiously he lifted his hand from her face. He saw a pointed chin, a red mouth drawn into what was almost a snarl—a cat-face, predaceous, startled, capable.

  Only for a moment did he see that face. Then it softened and the cat-look was gone, and the hardness, so that he thought he had only imagined them. Her expression now was as sweet and plaintive as the voice that whispered:

  “Why do you treat me so? Don’t you remember me—Arika?”

  “Arika,” he repeated slowly. And again, “Arika?” His fingers tightened on her arms. “No, I don’t remember you, Arika.” He began to shake her, not meaning to, hardly knowing that he did so. “I don’t remember you. I don’t remember anything. Who am I? Tell me who I am!”

  Soft pity welled in the dark eyes. “It was so before. But I thought you would remember me. I came only four nights ago to tell you that your escape was arranged.”

  She touched him, pleading. “Don’t shake me so. I don’t know who you are or where you came from or even why you’re here. I only know you’re human and a captive and—I hate the Numi.”

  With a part of his mind he heard that and was conscious of a crushing disappointment. But his brow was drawn and he stared at her, saying, “Night? This is night?”

  “You must have heard the gong.”

  “Night!” His gaze turned to the shaft of light. Tentatively he formed the word, “Darkness.”

  He felt the girl quiver. “Don’t say that word. It’s evil like the Numi. Let me go—we’ll talk later when it’s safe. Come now, we have a long way to go before the day-gong.”

  Slowly he released her. The full impact of what she had said about escape reached him. He had a terrible desire to be out of this cage of stone, yet he was afraid somehow of the world he had seen below the window-slit, the world that seemed so strangely wrong.

  “Night,” he said again.

  Sunset, dusk and dark. A man walking in the dusk, going— somewhere….

  His head swam and for a moment he thought the veil had lifted. He cried out hoarsely, “Fen… my name… Fen!” Then he covered his face with his hands and whispered, “I don’t know. I can’t remember. It’s all gone.”

  She picked up that syllable and used it. “You will remember—Fenn. But you must come now. I’m only a temple slave. If they catch me…” She finished with a shudder and added, “You’ll never have another chance.”

  She pulled at his hand and he suffered himself to be led through the iron door into a corridor shrouded in utter darkness. In his mind he turned the word Fenn over and over and still he did not know.

  Somehow it was worse than being nameless to be called by a name that had no meaning.

  The girl Arika guided him surely. The corridor was short, little more than a landing. Then there were steps, cut in the living rock and leading steeply downward.

  When they reached the foot of the steps Arika’s hand stayed him. “Make no sound,” she whispered. “There is danger here.”

  She moved forward a few cautious steps. Fenn could see nothing in the complete blackness. Then a crack of somber light appeared and widened slowly and he saw that a block of stone had swung soundlessly on a pivot, revealing an opening large enough for a man to pass through.

  Arika made again an intense gesture of silence. She stepped through the doorway and Fenn followed. Behind him the block of stone swung shut and became an indistinguishable part of a massive wall.

  Arika gave him a quick bright glance as though seeking acknowledgment of her cleverness and he gathered that the stone block, with the passage and cell beyond it, were very secret things that she should not have known existed.

  They stood now in a space no more than three feet wide. Behind them was the wall. Before them was a hanging of some heavy black stuff. Overhead both wall and hanging vanished upward into shadow.

  The girl beckoned him on, keeping close to the wall lest she should brush against the hangings and disturb them. Fenn copied her every movement with great care. The air was heavy and still and there was a quality in the silence that set his nerves prickling.

  The wall curved and curved, it seemed, without end and they crept mouselike in that narrow space behind the black curtain that was as endless as the wall.

  Fenn was consumed with a great curiosity as strong as his unease. At last Arika stopped and he brought his mouth close to her ear, pointing to the curtain.

  “What is beyond it?” he breathed.

  She hesitated. Then she smiled, a rather wicked smile. Without touching the hanging she studied it until she found the place where two sections overlapped. Very slowly, very carefully, she drew the edges apart the merest crack so that he might see through.

  He looked out into a vault of glimmering darkness. How large it was, how high, he could not tell but it seemed to stretch up and away as high as the sky and as wide as half the Earth. And again painful submerged memories wrenched at him.

  He knew that it was all a cheat. The black hangings covered ordinary walls of stone and the upper vault also would be shrouded in the somber cloth. But the black “sky” burned with points of diamond fire, blazing, magnificent and sown so thick that all the space below was filled with a pale shining, reflected back from peaks and plains of purest white.

  Fenn knew that the peaks were only painted on the black cloth and that beneath the white substance underfoot there was only stone. But a shivering of awe and recognition ran through him and a terrible giddiness that made him reel.

  Somewhere, sometime before he had seen those fires in the night sky and known a whiteness on the Earth!

  Arika’s voice whispered in his ear, softer than thought. “This is the Temple of Eternal Night. See them sleeping there, the Numi priests, trying to appease their own dark gods?”

  He saw them then and all sense of recognition or kinship vanished. Whatever night or winter he had known, it had not part with this!

  On pallets of white fur they slept, row upon row, the ones she had called the Numi priests. And they were not men.

  Or were they? Their form was like his own except that the bodies of the Numi had a look of tremendous toughness and strength, more like the bodies of lions than of men. And like lions they were furred. He could see the soft gleaming pelts of them, their long hair and their silken beards. They were beautiful, lying there in their sleeping strength.

  Some were light and some were dark and some were reddish and some gray, exactly as color runs in the human hair. And in spite of their strength and their gleaming fur there was nothing beastlike about them. Rather they seemed to Fenn to be above men like himself, as he was above the brutes.

  It was their faces, he thought—their cold wise cruel beautiful faces, so full of knowledge and power even in sleep.

  A terrible anger swept suddenly over him. He had seen faces like that before. His clouded mind could not remember where but he knew that they were the faces of torment, of pain, of loss.

  He lifted up his eyes then to the fireshot vault, the darkness and the glistening hills. He saw the awful savagery of that cunningly wrought landscape, the remote uncaring sky and the white peaks sharp as fangs to rend the flesh—a landscape that hated man.

  A revulsion of fear and loathing shook him. He stepped back, turning his face away, and Arika dropped the edges of the curtain. He saw that she was still smiling that strange smile full of secret thoughts.

  She turned, her fingers gliding surely over the stones of the wall. Presently another silent door swung open and he followed her onto yet another lightless stairway, going down.

  The descent was very long. Arika counted the treads with great care. Several times she guided him over tra
ps, balanced stones that would have triggered death upon him had he stepped on them. Once he thought he heard her drop some soft thing as though deliberately but he did not speak to disturb her counting.

  When at last they stood on the level again she laughed a little shakily and said, “The Numi built the temple with human slaves and then took care to kill them all so that the passages should be unknown. But we humans are clever too in our way.”

  She was proud of herself. Fenn laid a grateful hand on her shoulder. But his mind was on other things.

  “Arika,” he said, “what are the Numi?”

  He could feel her staring at him and when she spoke her tone held incredulity. “Surely you haven’t forgotten them?”

  “But I have,” he said. I have forgotten them and the world and myself. I live now but did I live before? When and where and how did I live before?

  His hand tightened on Arika’s shoulder. She seemed to understand and she did not rebuke him. “Numi means in their language New Men,” she told him quietly. “They are the race that came from out of the Great Dark to conquer us. And you and I aren’t free of them yet.”

  They came to the end of the short passage. Arika stopped and he heard her draw a deep breath. “Go carefully, Fenn,” she whispered. “If we can pass the tomb of the Numi kings we’ll be safe.”

  She opened the third pivoted door of stone.

  Fenn stepped after her into a low square chamber lighted by a golden lamp that burned upon a tripod. The dressed blocks of the wall were hung with golden wreaths and inscribed with the names of men. Fenn thought at first this was the tomb Arika had mentioned. Then he looked through an archway that had been hidden from him by the outswung door.

  Arika’s murmur reached him. “In here are the names of the honored ones, the favorites. There is the place of the kings.”

  Fenn glided forward to peer cautiously around the side of the arch. The space beyond was empty of life, steeped in a drowsing silence and a haze of red-gold light that came softly through hidden openings.

  It was a large space. It was grand and strong and somehow insolent in its sheer lack of adornment, as though the Numi needed nothing but themselves. And around its walls of somber stone were ranked the kings of the New Men, embalmed and dressed in their crimson robes, buried upright in pillars of clear-shining crystal, a solemn company too proud to bend their necks even to the Lord of Death.

  It seemed to Fenn that the bearded kings looked at him from out their upright crystal coffins and smiled with their handsome mouths, a chill and secret smile.

  He heard Arika breathe a deep sigh. “The gods are with us, Fenn. Come on.”

  He had no desire to linger there. The human-unhuman faces of the dead filled him with a kind of horror. He followed more than halfway to the great arch at the far end when they heard the stamp of hoofs and the jingle of harness outside and then the sound of voices.

  They remained poised for a moment, frozen. There were a number of voices. Many feet moved sharply in the dust and the horses stamped and snorted. Fenn glanced at Arika.

  Her dark eyes had the fear of death in them but her mouth was set hard. “Back into the alcove, Fenn—and pray!”

  CHAPTER III The Trap

  Rigid and still as the dead kings they stood, pressed back into the corners on either side of the arch. By moving his head a little Fenn could see a part of what went on in the tomb.

  They were all Numi who entered. Some of them wore the harness of soldiers and these remained by the outer door. Two came on, a man and a woman, walking slowly along the lines of crystal pillars.

  The man was golden-bearded, dressed in black robes frosted with silver. The woman held herself regally, moving with the deliberate pace of age. She was gowned and cloaked in purple and her hair was white. Fenn noted that her face was as smooth as Arika’s. It was haughty and sorrowful and her eyes were quite mad.

  Neither of them spoke. They came on until Fenn thought surely they were not going to stop short of the alcove. Then the man—Fenn guessed from his robes that he was a priest— inclined his head and drew back, leaving the woman standing alone before the crystal-sheathed body of a tall king, big and black-bearded, with an eagle look about him even in death.

  For what seemed an endless time she stood there, her mad eyes studying the face of the dead king. Then she spoke. “You never change, my husband. Why do you not change? Why do you not grow old as I do?”

  The king regarded her with a lightless agate gaze and did not answer.

  “Well,” she said, “no matter. I have much to tell you. There is trouble in your kingdom, trouble, always trouble, and no one will listen to me. The human cattle grow insolent and your son, who does not fill your throne, my lord, is soft and will not punish them.”

  Her voice droned on and on, full of disquiet. An eerie qualm crept over Fenn. It began to seem to him that the dead king had a curious air of listening.

  The priest had withdrawn himself beyond Fenn’s vision. The soldiers stood motionless by the outer door, bored and heavy-eyed. Fenn looked at Arika. The expression of catlike ferocity he had surprised before in the cell was on her face again—and this time there was no mistaking it. Her hands opened and closed like the flexing of claws and her body was drawn with tension.

  Fenn began to sweat.

  The Numi queen talked. She told of endless slights and injuries, of the misdeeds and follies of the courts. She was a vain, spiteful old woman, mad as a March wind, and she would not have done with talking.

  Arika’s lips moved. She made no sound but Fenn could read the words as she shaped them.

  “Be still, be still! Gods above, make her be still and go! If we don’t get into the city before the day-gong we are lost, both of us, and all because she won’t shut up!”

  Presently she went from prayers to curses and still the old queen talked.

  Arika glanced from time to time at Fenn and her eyes were desperate. Fenn himself began to feel the pressure of moments passing. He did not clearly understand the reason but Arika’s fury was convincing enough.

  Fenn’s legs began to ache with standing in one place. The sweat trickled down his breast and back. It came to him that the air was hot and the old queen’s unending words filled it like a swarm of bees.

  Abruptly she said, “I am tired. And I do not think you listen. I shan’t stay any longer. Good night, my lord!”

  She turned and moved away in a whispering of purple robes, The priest appeared, hovering discreetly at her,elbow. The guard formed ranks.

  Fenn glanced at Arika and her eyes warned him to be still. He found time to wonder what sort of girl she was and why she should be taking these risks for him.

  The woman, the priest and the guards went out of the tomb.

  Fenn’s knees grew weak with relief. He remained where he was, listening to the sounds that reached him from outside. At last he sighed.

  “They’ve gone now, Arika. Hear the horses?”

  She nodded. “The old sow! I’ve heard that she comes here often at night to talk to him. But why, of all nights—!”

  “We’re all right now,” said Fenn soothingly.

  And as he spoke the priest returned alone into the temple.

  He was moving fast, a man who has got rid of a confining duty and is on his way to better things. He reached out and struck one of the crystal pillars so that it rang and all the others picked up the sound and gave it back like the distant chiming of bells. The priest laughed. He strode on, straight for the alcove, and this time there was no hope. He was going up into the temple by the stairway in the rock.

  As though they were doing it of themselves Fenn felt his muscles twitch and tighten. He held his breath that there should be no warning sound. Arika’s eyes were two black narrow sparks and he saw that one hand had fallen to the girdle of yellow cloth she wore above her waist.

  The priest came through the archway, and Fenn made his leap from behind.

  He got one arm around the Numi’s neck and his t
highs locked tight around his loins. He had gauged the strength of the priest by the strength of a strong man and any man would have been borne over forward by the rush and the weight. But Fenn had forgotten that the Numi were not men.

  He had not realized that anything living could be so strong. The body under the black robes seemed not of flesh, but of granite and whalebone and steel. Instead of falling as he should have done the priest threw himself backward, crushing Fenn beneath him on the stone floor.

  The breath went out of him in a sickening grunt. His skull rang on the stone and for a moment he thought he was done for. From somewhere above him he heard Arika’s voice and knew it had a deadly urgency but he could not grasp the words.

  He was suddenly aware that he hated this golden-furred creature he had between his hands.

  It was a hatred without memory or reason. But it was so red and furious that he found himself growling like a beast, forgetful of everything except that he was going to kill. New strength poured into him and a terrible excitement. He locked his thighs tighter and made of his arm an iron vise to shut off voice and breath and the moving blood. He was no longer conscious of Arika. He had forgotten escape. There was nothing in the world but this straining powerful golden body that he was going to destroy.

  They were out of the alcove, thrashing among the crystal pillars where the red-robed kings looked down and watched them. The strength of the Numi priest was a wonderful thing. Fenn thought it was like trying to pinion a storm wind or ride the crest of a flood.

  Their lunging bodies rolled and crashed against the ringing pillars. The robes of the Numi wrapped them both and presently there were stains of crimson against the black and silver. Fenn would not relax his grip. He was oblivious to pain. He knew that if he once let go he was lost and he would not let go.

  The fingers of the priest clawed at his legs, threatened to tear the living muscle from his arms. He set his teeth in the gold-furred flesh and tasted blood and tightened, tightened, tightened the pressure of his limbs.

  “Fenn!”

  It was Arika’s voice, far off, Arika, calling, touching him, urging. He was getting tired. He could not hold on much longer. Why did she bother him now before the priest was dead?