by E. C. Tubb
He had been warned and had ignored the warning and now must pay.
But he was free of her domination.
The pain was bad but he could live with agony which did not kill and it would only take a thought to escape. A little concentration and the mist would vanish and the pain and he would be his own master and able to plan and… and…
The pain! Dear God, the pain!
The screaming went on and he made no effort to stop it.
Made no effort either to halt his weaving and turning in the stinging mist. To have done either would rob his mind of the power to concentrate on a single, overwhelming thought. To escape. To move from this dungeon and Iduna's vengeance and go somewhere else. To escape… escape…
And it happened.
The screaming stopped and the mist vanished and he was, suddenly, in limbo. In a region without shape or form but one filled with the aura of lurking horror. A place-no, The Place. Hell.
He had been naughty and Mommy had punished him and locked him in the dark place where things waited to pounce and eat his eyes and drink their moisture and burrow into his body and there lay their eggs which would hatch and turn into maggots which would gnaw at the living flesh and all the time he wouldn't be able to do anything about it. And there would be ghosts which would come and gibber in his ears and suck at his mind so that when they came for him he would be a shambling idiot And the dark would press close and crush him. And he was blind and would never see again. And there was no sound. And they would forget him and he would die of thirst and starve and have to eat his own hands and be unable to stand even if they did come for, him and would grow into horrible shapes and people would laugh and he would be miserable forever and he hated her… he hated her… he hated her…
The dark place of punishment for a willful child which he had entered. The one filled with the terror of the unknown. A terror he was now sharing and which held all the ghastly fantasies of an imaginative child. Had Iduna ever been locked away in a dark place? Was that why she hated her mother?
Dumarest forced himself to think of Kathryn, to see her face limned before his eyes. A hard face and one which knew little of compassion. The face of a woman who had learned to rule and who would tolerate no weakness in the one she intended should follow her. Spoiled, cossetted, yet Iduna would have felt the weight of the Matriarch's displeasure if she stepped over the line.
And so The Place.
A child's conception of hell-but Dumarest was not a child.
He straightened and rose, feeling solid ground beneath his boots. Overhead the sky began to lighten with a blaze of stars, winking points set in remembered constellations; the Scales, the Archer, the Heavenly Twins. Signs of the zodiac which circled Earth. And the moon. He must not forget the moon.
It glowed in silver luminescence, dark mottlings giving it the appearance of a skull, wisps of brightness haloing it and adding an extra dimension of enchantment. The air which touched his face was soft with summer warmth and carried the odor of growing things. Earth. His world. Earth!
He could create it and be with it and rule it like a god. The hills which rolled endlessly beneath the sky and all covered with woods and forests in which creatures lived and bred. Fields of crops ripening as he watched, rich ears of swollen grain culled from the bounty of the soil. Fruits and seeds and nuts and streams filled with water like wine-all the things of paradise. He could do it. He could make his own world. Why continue the search when there was no need?
"It wouldn't be the same, boy." The captain, sitting on a rock to one side, his head gently shaking in negation. "It just wouldn't be the same."
"It would be as good."
"No. Think about it for a minute and you'll realize why. You thought of fields and forests and streams and warm breezes-was that the Earth you knew? The one you risked death to escape?"
"It could be. It was once."
"Maybe, but you can't be sure of that. Oh, you have clues and they tend to give that impression, but how genuine is it? A world cultivated from pole to pole. Every coast inhabited, every island, every scrap of terrain owned and worked and occupied. Can you even begin to imagine how many people there must have been to achieve that?"
Dumarest glanced at the sky and thought of dawn. The stars paled as the sun warmed the horizon, the moon seeming to gain a transparent unreality as it climbed to cast an orange-ruby-amber sheen over the terrain. In the distance mountains soared, their summits graced with snow. From a copse birds began to greet the new day.
"People," said the captain. Despite the sun his face remained in shadow, the features now growing indistinct. "So many people. How could they ever manage to get along with each other? Not that it matters. You can't create Earth and you know it."
"I can!"
"No. You haven't the skill it would take. You haven't the knowledge and you haven't the time. How long did it take to make the real Earth? Millions of years-it doesn't matter just how many. Ages in which each little scrap of living matter learned to live with other scraps and to become dependent on them and to achieve a balanced harmony. To create a thing which cannot be duplicated anywhere. Earth is unique. You belong to it and you have to find it. Find it, Earl, not construct a replica. Find it… find it… find it…"
"How?" The figure was becoming as indistinct as the face. "How?" demanded Dumarest again. "How?"
"You know." The voice was a sigh. "You know."
"Tell me!"
But he had left it too late. The figure slumped as he touched it to dissolve in a cloud of drifting sparkles which spun and spread and became a patch of cloud.
Alone Dumarest stared at his world. The cloud had gone now, dispersed, a thing as insubstantial as the rest. To create was to waste time playing with toys and yet what else was there to do? Return to Iduna and again play her games and follow her rules? To win dominance-but how could he ever be sure that the girl he ruled was the real person? And how was he ever to get back? How could he break free of the trap he was in; the insidiously attractive world of the Tau?
Chapter Eleven
Nothing!
Kathryn stared bleakly through the transparent partition separating her from Iduna. It was her right to have entered the room and the technicians had assured her there could be no danger of infection, but the risk was one she refused to take. A chill, a fever-to her a temporary indisposition but how could she ever forgive herself if the girl caught the infection? Protected as she was, cosseted, nurtured with the aid of machines, her resistance would be low. It was wiser to keep her distance.
Wiser, but not easy. The child looked so helpless lying on her snow-white bed. So young and so pitifully vulnerable. Kathryn ached to take her in her arms, to run her hand over the rich tresses of her hair, to comfort her, to mother her. An ache made all the more poignant by the dream.
Closing her eyes, she thought about it. A field of dappled flowers, the sun warm in the emerald sky, a soft breeze carrying the perfume of summer. A cloth spread on the sward and all the furnishings of a picnic. And Iduna, running, laughing, playing with a natural, childish grace. A dream so real that she had been reluctant to wake and, waking, had hurried to the room full of hope that Iduna would be sitting up, awake, restored.
Nothing!
Nothing had changed. The slim figure still rested on the soft bed, the eyes closed, the lashes making crescents on the cheeks, the hair a gleaming halo. The dream had been a lie as all dreams were lies. Wishes dragged from the subconscious and given a surrogate life. Illusions which tormented and shattered into the broken mockery of ill-kept promises.
"My lady?" A technician was at her side, face anxious, and Kathryn realized she had been leaning with, her forehead resting against the partition. "Are you well?"
"Yes."
"You look pale. A stimulant, perhaps?"
"No! Nothing!" The woman was being kind and Kathryn softened her tone. "I shall be all right in a moment. A little giddiness, that's all."
"To be expected after your rece
nt illness, my lady. The blood sugar is low but that can easily be rectified. A cup of tisane with glucose will adjust the balance. I will order it immediately."
It was easier not to argue and the tisane did help. Kathryn sipped the hot, sweet fluid in an adjoining chamber barely finishing the cup as Gustav arrived. His expression changed to one of relief as he saw her.
"Kathryn! I understand-"
"That I was sick and wandering and delirious," she interrupted. "How rumor exaggerates. I felt a little giddy and sat down to rest with a cup of tisane. You would like some?" She ordered without waiting for his answer. The technician had been right, the glucose had given her strength, and Gustav looked as if he could use a little. Had he, too, been the victim of dreams?
"You left your bed too soon, my dear," he said. "And will try to do too much too quickly. If the Matriarch cannot set an example of intelligent behavior then who can?"
"Don't nag. Gustav. I wanted to see Iduna." She read the question in his face. "I hoped there would be a change," she explained. "It's been so long now since Dumarest went after her and still we wait."
As they had waited for years and it hadn't really been all that long since the man had entered the Tau. Not really long-but, dear God, long enough!
She heard the thin ringing and looked down and realized the cup in her hand was rattling against the saucer. A sure betrayal of the trembling of her hand which in turn was a betrayal of her over-strained nerves. The waiting. Always the waiting and, already, she was sure there could be no hope. Dumarest would follow the others into insanity and death. A condemned slave who had gambled and lost-what did it matter how they treated his body?
Gustav looked at her as she rose. "Kathryn?"
"Something Tamiras mentioned," she said. "Electronic stimulation of muscle and sinew. If we use electroshock therapy on Dumarest the impact might produce an interesting reaction."
"No." Rising, he caught her arm, talking as he followed her from the room. "Kathryn, you can't. The man is at our mercy. To sear his brain with current-no! No, I won't allow it!"
"You won't allow it?" You? For a moment her eyes held him and he was reminded that she was the Matriarch and he a lower form of life. "Your wishes have nothing to do with it. My orders will be obeyed. We have waited too long as it is."
"And his brain? You could destroy it with what you intend."
"A chance he must take."
"And our word? Your word as Matriarch?"
"Dumarest is a slave who merited death. He was offered a chance to redeem himself. As yet he has failed to do that. I have beeen patient long enough." Too long and now patience was over. Why didn't Gustav understand? "He is expendable," she reminded. "If he should die what have we to lose?"
He looked odd lying on the bed. An appararent contradiction as a wild creature looked out of place when held in a cage. Standing, watching the technicians as they fussed about their business, Kathryn studied the hard lines of the face, the mouth, the jaw. The face which had looked so bleak and the mouth so cruel when he had held her at his mercy. An animal fighting to survive-could she blame him for that? And could he blame her for having the same attributes as himself? She was a mother fighting for her child and if she had to kill for Iduna's sake then she would not hesitate.
"All ready, my lady." A technician straightened from where she had been applying electrodes to Dumarest's skull. Others snaked from his torso, stomach and groin, a mesh of wire set to monitor his every physical and mental reaction. To one side a machine waited, a battery of pens hovering over an endless roll of paper, and panels studded with dials and telltales added to the laboratory-like appearance, of the room. "I suggest we commence with a short burst of high-level current applied directly to the thalamic area."
"Wait!"
"You have another suggestion?" She had denigrated her consort and regretted it. Now Kathryn wished to make amends. "Gustav?"
"Just wait," he begged. "Make more tests on minor physical stimuli. Try hypnotic therapy. Try drugs-but don't rush to burn his brain."
The technician was affronted. She said, stiffly, "We are not ignorant savages and neither are we sadistic torturers. Stimulus applied to the area I have specified has resulted in beneficial results in a great majority of cases of personality maladjustment."
"A great majority," said Gustav. "And the others? Cabbages? Mindless idiots who would be better dead? Can you honestly claim to know exactly what you are doing?" He turned to Kathryn as she made no answer. "At least the woman is honest. She would be more so if she admitted that her treatment was like throwing a jigsaw up into the air. It sometimes could fall into a new and pleasing shape but more often it lands as a jumble."
"You're wasting time, Gustav."
"We have time. A day, a week, a year even, what does it matter? Dumarest is surviving which is more than the others did. By this time they were idiots, already dying, some even already dead. He could have found Iduna and be leading her back to us. Kathryn-dare you risk our daughter for the sake of a little more delay?"
A good argument and she pondered it, looking at the wire-wreathed man on the bed. A dedicated servant fighting on her behalf or a self-seeking mercenary only out for what he could get? Neither, she decided, but a man who was doing what had to be done.
"My lady?" The technicians were waiting. Kathryn looked at her hands, the knuckles, the gleam of the polished nails. "Shall we begin?"
"An hour," said Kathryn. "We'll give him an hour."
The defenses were yielding and soon the battle would be over. In the flare of rolling explosions the castle glittered like a solid gem, turrets and spires limned in flame, the triple arch a fading challenge flung against the sky. Shadows clustered over the meadow and in the gloom things raced and rustled and reared with vibrant clickings. Other shapes of nightmare met them, struggles culminating in dissolution, new menaces rising from the ashes of the old. The air quivered with the pulse and throb of war.
A war of fantasy which Dumarest directed from the summit of a mountain, hurling shafts and javelins of destruction against Iduna and her host, sending the figments of his imagination to stalk the terrors created by hers.
It had escalated from small beginnings; troops of armed and armored men riding, charging, falling to rise again. To be stiffened with the sinews of modern destruction which he knew all too well; the mercenary bands in which he had served providing the template for new armies more savage and vicious than those born from romantic imagery. Then they, in turn, yielded to images of delirium; horrors such as he had first experienced in the Tau, the product of buried fears and whispered fantasies; men with triple heads and spined hides, birds like lizards, dragons spouting fire, spiders which dropped from the clouds and stung like scorpions.
War which waged with unremitting fury and turned the area into a cratered and fuming waste in which the castle alone stood untouched and shining with an inner, lambent glow.
Dumarest hurtled toward it at a thought.
"Iduna! Will you yield?"
Serpents lanced toward him where he stood facing the arched doorway now blocked by the upraised drawbridge. They darted from the battlements, writhing streamers of flame which seared and hissed and fell to the foot of the hemisphere of protection he maintained about his person. From the soil darted things with many legs which scrabbled and reared to fall in puffs of ash and his guardians blasted them.
Things of the mind-when all else had been tried what more terrible than the creatures of childish terrors?
"Iduna! Yield!"
"No!" She stood on the highest battlement and her hair was a pennon of midnight glory. "Earl, I won't let you win!"
A game-always to her everything was a game and she was right. What else could life be but a game with death as the inevitable winner? A gamble to see how long it could be extended and how much accomplished in the time so won.
But Dumarest had had enough of childish games.
To win. To beat her to her knees. To make her surrender her will and
then to discover how to lead them both from the Tau. One way to escape, perhaps, the other he preferred not to think about.
"Iduna!"
She was stubbornly defiant. Soldiers sprang like weeds from the ground to be mown down and left in winnowed heaps and piles of bizarre armor and shapes and weapons. Dumarest fired a torpedo at the triple arch and saw the sky explode in searing, blue-white flame which died to leave the arch untouched, the air filled with drifting motes of burning destruction.
"Iduna?"
"This is silly, Earl." Again she appeared to lean over the glistening stone. "We haven't any rules and neither of us can beat the other. Of course I could-"
And he was deep underground with fires glowing at his feet and only the bubble of protection allowing him to breathe. Then he was back on the surface.
"-But it's no good. Why did you leave me, Earl?"
"I didn't like where you put me."
"It was only for a little while. You'd upset me and I was angry but I'm not angry now. Come and have some tisane."
Come into my parlor …
"Earl?"
"Why not? Lower the drawbridge and I'll come inside and we can talk. I've thought of something really nice we can do."
"Something new?" The woman stood upright as the child within her clapped her hands. "That's lovely! Hurry, Earl! Hurry!"
The skies quieted as he crossed the lowered drawbridge, the sound and fury of war muttering into a calm tranquility as he mounted the stairs to where Iduna waited on the battlements. Shamarre was attending her, the beast at her side and others thronged close; men with bandaged wounds, women with haggard faces. Warriors and their ladies who changed even as he watched into bland courtiers and simpering maidens.
"The game, Earl! Tell me about the new game!"
Iduna was dressed as a warrior queen, retaining the scaled armor which molded itself to her body, the cloak of shimmering silk adorned with abstract devices. Her head was bare and her hair flowed in rippling tresses. Watching her, Dumarest concentrated on seeing the child; catching glimpses of a long-legged girl dressed up in her mother's clothing. Flashes which dimmed against the immediate impression of firm flesh and rounded limbs-the child as she imagined herself to be. The woman she had become.