The Halfling and Other Stories

by Leigh Brackett

  “It was made long ago,” said Treon, “so that the Lhari and their slaves might come and go and not be seen. Come—and be very quiet.”

  They swam into the tunnel mouth, and down the dark way that lay beyond, until the lift of the floor brought them out of the sea. Then they left their way silently along, stopping now and again to listen.

  Surprise was their only hope. Treon had said that with the two of them they might succeed. More men would surely be discovered, and meet a swift end at the hands of the guards.

  Stark hoped Treon was right.

  They came to a blank wall of dressed stone. Treon leaned his weight against one side, and a great block swung slowly around on a central pivot. Guttering torchlight came through the crack. By it Staik could see that the room beyond was empty.

  They stepped through, and they did so a servant in bright silks came yawning into the room with a fresh torch to replace the one that was dying.

  He stopped in mid-step, his eyes widening. He dropped the torch. His mouth opened to shape a scream, but no sound came, and Stark remembered that these servants were tongueless— to prevent them from telling what they saw or heard in the castle, Treon said.

  The man spun about and fled, down a long dim-lit hall. Stark ran him down without effort. He struck once with the barrel of his gun, and the man fell and was still.

  Treon came up. His face had a look almost of exaltation, a queer shining of the eyes that made Stark shiver. He led on, through a series of empty rooms, all somber black, and they met no one else for a while.

  He stopped at last before a small door of burnished gold. He looked at Stark once, and nodded, and thrust the panels open and stepped through.

  CHAPTER XII

  They stood inside the vast echoing hall that stretched away into darkness until it seemed there was no end to it. The cluster of silver lamps burned as before, and within their circle of radiance the Lhari started up from their places and stared at the strangers who had come in through their private door.

  Cond, and Arel with her hands idle in her lap. Bor, pummeling the little dragon to make it hiss and snap, laughing at its impotence. Varra, stroking the winged creasure on her wrist, testing with her white finger the sharpness of its beak. And the old woman, with a scrap of fat meat halfway to her mouth.

  They had stopped, frozen, in the midst of these actions. And Treon walked slowly into the light.

  “Do you know me?” he said.

  A strange shivering ran through them. Now, as before, the old woman spoke first, her eyes glittering with a look as rapacious as her appetite.

  “You are Treon,” she said, and her whole vast body shook.

  The name went crying and whispering off around the dark walls, Treon! Treon! Treon! Cond leaped forward, touching his cousin’s straight strong body with hands that trembled.

  “You have found it,” he said. “The secret.”

  “Yes.” Treon lifted his silver head and laughed, a beautiful ringing bell-note that sang from the echoing corners. “I found it, and it’s gone, smashed, beyond your reach forever. Egil is dead, and the day of the Lhari is done.”

  There was a long, long silence, and then the old woman whispered, “You lie!”

  Treon turned to Stark.

  “Ask him, the stranger who came bearing doom upon his forehead. Ask him if I lie.”

  Cond’s face became something less than human. He made a queer crazed sound and flung himself at Treon’s throat.

  Bor screamed suddenly. He alone was not much concerned with the finding or the losing of the secret, and he alone seemed to realize the significance of Stade’s presence. He screamed, looking at the big dark man, and went rushing off down the hall, crying for the guard as he went, and the echoes roared and racketed. He fought open the great doors and ran out, and as he did so the sound of fighting came through from the compound.

  file slaves, with their swords and clubs, with their stones and shards of rock, had come over the wall from the cliffs.

  Stark had moved forward, but Treon did not need his help. He had got his hands around Cond’s throat, and he was smiling. Stark did not disturb him.

  The old woman was talking, cursing, commanding, choking on her own apoplectic breath. Arel began to laugh. She did not move, and her hands remained limp and open in her lap. She laughed and laughed, and Varra looked at Stark and hated him.

  “You’re a fool, wild man,” she said. “You would not take what I offered you, so you shall have nothing—only death.”

  She slipped the hood from her creature and set it straight at Stark. Then she drew a knife from her girdle and plunged it into Treon’s side.

  Treon reeled back. His grip loosened and Cond tore away, half throttled, raging, his mouth flecked with foam. He drew his short sword and staggered in upon Treon.

  Furious wings beat and thundered around Stalk’s head, and talons were clawing for his eyes. He reached up with his left hand and caught the brute by one leg and held it. Not long, but long enough to get one clear shot at Cond that dropped him in his tracks. Then he snapped the falcon’s neck.

  He flung the creature at Varra’s feet, and picked up the gun again. The guards were rushing into the hall now at the lower end, and he began to fire at them.

  Treon was sitting on the floor. Blood was coming in a steady trickle from his side, but he had the shock-weapon in his hands, and he was still smiling.

  There was a great boiling roar of noise from outside. Men were fighting there, killing, dying, screaming their triumph or their pain. The echoes raged within the hall, and the noise of Stark’s gun was like a hissing thunder. The guards, armed only with swords, went down like ripe wheat before the sickle, but there were many of them, too many for Stark and Treon to hold for long.

  The old woman shrieked and shrieked, and was suddenly still.

  Helvi burst in through the press, with a knot of collared slaves. The fight dissolved into a whirling chaos. Stark threw his gun away. He was afraid now of hitting his own men. He caught up a sword from a fallen guard and began to hew his way to the barbarian.

  Suddenly Treon cried his name. He leaped aside, away from the man he was fighting, and saw Varra fall with the dagger still in her hand. She had come up behind him to stab, and Treon had seen and pressed the trigger stud just in time.

  For the first time, there were tears in Treon’s eyes.

  A sort of sickness came over Stark. There was something horrible in this spectacle of a family destroying itself. He was too much the savage to be sentimental over Varra, but all the same he could not bear to look at Treon for a while.

  Presently he found himself back to back with Helvi, and as they swung their swords—the shock weapons had been discarded for the same reason as Stark’s gun—Helvi panted, “It has been a good fight, my brother! We cannot win, but we can have a good death, which is better than slavery!”

  It looked as though Helvi was right. The slaves, unfortunately, weakened by their long confinement, worn out by overwork, were being beaten back. The tide turned, and Stark was swept with it out into the compound, fighting stubbornly.

  The great gate stood open. Beyond it stood the people of Shuruun, watching, hanging back—as Treon had said, they would wait and see.

  In the forefront, leaning on his stick, stood Larrabee the Earthman.

  Stark cut his way free of the press. He leaped up onto the wall and stood there, breathing hard, sweating, bloody, with a dripping sword in his hand. He waved it, shouting down to the men of Shuruun.

  “What are you waiting for, you scuts, you women? The Lhari are dead, the Lost Ones are freed—must we of Earth do all your work for you?”

  And he looked straight at Larrabee.

  Larrabee stared back, his dark suffering eyes full of a bitter mirth. “Oh, well,” he said in English. “Why not?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, and the bitterness was gone. He voiced a high, shrill rebel yell and lifted his stick like a cudgel, limping toward the gate, and th
e men of Shuruun gave tongue and followed him.

  After that, it was soon over.

  They found Bor’s body in the stable pens, where he had fled to hide when the fighting started. The dragons, maddened by the smell of the blood, had slain him very quickly.

  Helvi had come through alive, and Larrabee, who had kept himself carefully out of harm’s way after he had started the men of Shuruun on their attack. Nearly half the slaves were dead, and the rest wounded. Of those who had served the Lhari, few were left.

  Stark went back into the great hall. He walked slowly, for he was very weary, and where he set his foot there was a bloody print, and his arms were red to the elbows, and his breast was splashed with the redness. Treon watched him come, and smiled, nodding.

  “It is as I said. And I have outlived them all.”

  Arel had stopped laughing at last. She had made no move to run away, and the tide of battle had rolled over her and drowned her unaware. The old woman lay still, a mountain of inert flesh upon her bed. Her hand still clutched a ripe fruit, clutched convulsively in the moment of death, the red juice dripping through her fingers.

  “Now I am going, too,” said Treon,” and I am well content. With me goes the last of our rotten blood, and Venus will be the cleaner for it. Bury my body deep, stranger with the fierce eyes. I would not have it looked on after this.”

  He sighed and fell forward.

  Bor’s little dragon crept whimpering out from its hiding place under the old woman’s bed and scurried away down the hall, trailing its dragging rope.

  Stark leaned on the taffrail, watching the dark mass of Shuruun recede into the red mists.

  The decks were crowded with the outland slaves, going home. The Lhari were gone, the Lost Ones freed forever, and Shuruun was now only another port on the Red Sea. Its people would still be wolf’s-heads and pirates, but that was natural and as it should be. The black evil was gone.

  Stark was glad to see the last of it. He would be glad also to see the last of the Red Sea.

  The off-shore wind set the ship briskly down the gulf. Stark thought of Larrabee, left behind with his dreams of winter snows and city streets and women with dainty feet. It seemed that he had lived too long in Shuruun, and had lost the courage to leave it.

  “Poor Larrabee,” he said to Helvi, who was standing near him. “He’ll die in the mud, still cursing it.”

  Someone laughed behind him. He heard a limping step on the deck and turned to see Larrabee coming toward him.

  “Changed my mind at the last minute,” Larrabee said. “I’ve been below, lest I should see my muddy brats and be tempted to change it again.” He leaned beside Stark, shaking his head. “Ah, well, they’ll do nicely without me. I’m an old man, and I’ve a right to choose my own place to die in. I’m going back to Earth, with you.”

  Stark glanced at him. “I’m not going to Earth.”

  Larrabee sighed. “No. No, I suppose you’re not. After all, you’re no Earthman, really, except for an accident of blood. Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Away from Venus, but I don’t know yet where.”

  Larrabee’s dark eyes surveyed him shrewdly. “‘A restless, cold-eyed tiger of a man,’ that’s what Varra said. He’s lost something, she said. He’ll look for it all his life, and never find it.”

  After that there was silence. The red fog wrapped them, and the wind rose and sent them scudding before it.

  Then, faint and far off, there came a moaning wail, a sound like broken chanting that turned Stark’s flesh cold.

  All on board heard it. They listened, utterly silent, their eyes wide, and somewhere a woman began to weep.

  Stark shook himself. “It’s only the wind,” he said roughly, “in the rocks by the strait.”

  The sound rose and fell, weary, infinitely mournful, and the part of Stark that was N’Chaka said that he lied. It was not the wind that keened so sadly through the mists. It was the voices of the Lost Ones who were forever lost—Zareth, sleeping in the hall of kings, and all the others who would never leave the dreaming city and the forest, never find the light again.

  Stark shivered, and turned away, watching the leaping fires of the strait sweep toward them.

  THE LAKE OF THE GONE FOREVER

  CHAPTER I Landing on Iskar

  In his cabin aboard the spaceship Rohan, Rand Conway slept— and dreamed.

  He stood in a narrow valley. On both sides the cliffs of ice rose up, sheer and high and infinitely beautiful out of the powdery snow. The darkling air was full of whirling motes of frost, like the dust of diamonds, and overhead the shining pinnacles stood clear against a sky of deepest indigo, spangled with great stars.

  As always the place was utterly strange to Conway and yet, somehow, not strange at all. He began to walk forward through the drifting snow and he seemed almost to know what he was seeking around the bend of the valley.

  Fear came upon him then but he could not stop.

  And as always in that icy place his dead father stood waiting. He stood just as he had years ago, on the night he died, and he spoke slowly and sadly the words he had spoken then to his uncomprehending small son.

  “I can never go back to Iskar, to the Lake of the Gone Forever.”

  Tears dropped slowly from under the closed lids of his eyes and the echo went to and fro between the cliffs, saying, “… Lake of the Gone Forever… Gone Forever…”

  Conway crept on, trembling. Above him the golden stars wheeled in the dark blue sky and the beauty of them was evil and the shimmering turrets of the ice were full of lurking laughter.

  He passed into the shadows under the sheathed rocks that hid the end of the valley and as he did so the dead man cried out in a voice of agony, “I can never go back to Iskar!”

  And the cliffs caught up the name and shouted it thunderously through the dream.

  Iskar! Iskar!

  Rand Conway started up in his bunk, wide awake, shaken and sweating as always by the strangeness of that vision. Then his hands closed hard on the edge of the bunk and he laughed.

  “You couldn’t go back,” he whispered to the man dead twenty years. “But I’m going. By heaven, I’m going, at last!”

  It seemed to him that the very fabric of the ship murmured the name as it rushed on into deep space, that the humming machines purred it, that the thundering jets bellowed it.

  Iskar! Iskar!

  A savage triumph rose in Conway. So many times he had awakened from that dream to hopelessness—the hopelessness of ever reaching his goal. So many times, in these years of hard dangerous spaceman’s toil, the lost little world that meant power and riches had seemed remote beyond attainment.

  But he had hung on, too stubborn ever quite to give up. He had waited and planned and hoped until finally he had made his chance. And he was on his way now to the place that his father had lost and never regained.

  “Iskar!”

  Conway started up, his face swiftly losing its brooding look. That wasn’t just an echo of his dream. Someone was shouting the name outside his cabin door.

  “Conway! Rand Conway! We’ve sighted Iskar!”

  Of course! Why else would the jets be thundering? He had been half asleep still, not to know it at once. He sprang up and crossed the dimly lighted cabin, a tall man, very lean and hard, yet with a certain odd grace about him, a certain beauty in the modeling of his bones. His eyes, of a color somewhere between grey and blue, were brilliant with excitement and full of a wolfish hunger.

  He flung open the door. The glare from the corridor set him to blinking painfully—an inherited sensitivity to light was his one weakness and he had often cursed his father for passing it on to him. Through a dancing haze he saw Peter Esmond’s mild good-looking face, as excited as his own.

  Esmond said something, but Conway neither heard it nor cared what it was. He pushed past him and went with long strides down the passage and up the ladder to the observation bridge.

  It was dark up there under the huge
port. Immediately everything came clear to his vision—the blue-black sky of the Asteroid Belt, full of flashing golden stars where the little worlds caught the light of the distant Sun.

  And ahead, dead ahead, he saw the tiny misty globe that was Iskar.

  He stood for a long time, staring at it, and he neither moved nor spoke except that a deep trembling ran through him.

  Close beside him he heard Charles Rohan’s deep voice. “Well, there’s the new world. Quite a thrill, eh?”

  Instantly Conway was on his guard. Rohan was no fool. A man does not make forty million dollars by being a fool and it was going to be hard enough to get away with this without tipping his hand to Rohan now.

  Inwardly he cursed, not Rohan, but his daughter Marcia.

  It was she who had talked her father into going along to see about opening up trade with Iskar. Rohan controlled the lion’s share of trade with the Jovian Moons and the idea was logical enough. Marcia’s interest, naturally, was not financial. It was simply that she could not bear to be parted from Esmond and there was no other way for her to go with him.

  Conway glanced at Marcia, who was standing with her arm around her fiance. A nice girl. A pretty girl. Ordinarily he would have liked her. But she didn’t belong here and neither did Rohan—not for Conway’s purposes.

  Esmond alone he could have handled easily. Esmond was the Compleat Ethnologist to his fingertips. As long as he had a brand-new race to study and catalogue he would neither know nor care what other treasures a world might hold.

  Now that he looked back on it the whole chain of circumstances seemed flimsy and unsure to Conway—his meeting with Esmond on a deep-space flight from Jupiter, the sudden inspiration when he learned of Esmond’s connection with the Rohans, the carefully casual campaign to get the ethnologist interested in the unknown people of Iskar, the final business of producing his father’s fragmentary notes to drive Esmond quite mad with longing to see this inhabited world that only one other Earthman had ever seen.