The Black Flame

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  "Not yet, Hull," snapped the Princess. "I have still my score to settle with you." She turned back to Olin. "Where do you wander now, Einar?"

  "To N'Orleans. I have some knowledge to give Jorgensen, and I am homesick besides for the Great City."

  He paused. "I have seen Joaquin. Selui has fallen."

  "I know. I ride to meet him tonight."

  "He has sent representations to Ch'cago."

  "Good!" she flashed. "Then there will be fighting." Then her eyes turned dreamy. "I have never seen the saltless seas," she added wistfully, "but I wonder if they can be as beautiful as the blue Gulf beyond N'Orleans."

  But Old Einar shook his thin white hair. "What will be the end of this, Margaret?" he asked gently. "After Ch'cago is taken – for you will take it – what then?"

  "Then the land north of the saltless seas, and east of them. N'York, and all the cities on the ocean shore."

  "And then?"

  "Then South America, I suppose."

  "And then, Margaret?"

  "Then? There is still Europe veiled in mystery, and Asia, Africa – all the lands known to the Ancients."

  "And after all of them?"

  "Afterwards," she replied wearily, "we can rest. The fierce destiny that drives Joaquin surely cannot drive him beyond the boundaries of the world."

  "And so," said Olin, "you fight your way around the world so you can rest at the end of the journey. Then why not rest now, Margaret? Must you pillow your head on the globe of the planet?"

  Fury flamed green in her eyes. She raised her hand and struck the old man across his lips, but it must have been lightly, for he still smiled.

  "Fool!" she cried. "Then I will see to it that there is always war! Between me and Joaquin, if need be – or between me and anyone – anyone – so that I fight!" She paused panting. "Leave me, Einar," she said tensely. "I do not like the things you bring to mind."

  Still smiling, the old man backed away. At the door he paused. "I will see you before I die, Margaret," he promised, and was gone.

  She followed him to the doorway. "Sora!" she called. "Sora! I ride!"

  Hull heard the heavy tread of the fat Sora, and in a moment she entered bearing the diminutive cothurns and a pair of glistening silver gauntlets on her hands, and then she too was gone.

  Slowly, almost wearily, the Princess turned to face Hull, who had as yet permitted no gleam of hope to enter his soul, for he had experienced too much of her mockery to trust the promise of safety Old Einar had won for him. He felt only the fascination that she always bound about him, the spell of her unbelievable black hair and her glorious sea-green eyes, and all her unearthly beauty.

  "Hull," she said gently, "what do you think of me now?"

  "I think you are a black flame blowing cold across the world. I think a demon drives you."

  "And do you hate me so bitterly?"

  "I pray every second to hate you."

  "Then see, Hull." With her little gauntleted fingers she took his great hands and placed them about the perfect curve of her throat. "Here I give you my life for the taking. You have only to twist once with these mighty hands of yours and Black Margot will be out of the world forever." She paused. "Must I beg you?"

  Hull felt as if molten metal flowed upward through his arms from the touch of her white skin. His fingers were rigid as metal bars, and all the great strength of them could not put one feather's weight of pressure on the soft throat they circled. And deep in the lambent emerald flames that burned in her eyes he saw again the fire of mockery – jeering, taunting.

  "You will not?" she said, lifting away his hands, but holding them in hers. "Then you do not hate me?"

  "You know I don't," he groaned.

  "And you do love me?"

  "Please," he muttered. "Is it necessary again to torture me? I need no proof of your mastery."

  "Then say you love me."

  "Heaven forgive me for it;" he whispered, "but I do!"

  She dropped his hands and smiled. "Then listen to me, Hull. You love little Vail with a truer love, and month by month memory fades before reality. After a while there will be nothing left in you of Black Margot, but there will be always Vail. I go now hoping never to see you again, but" – and her eyes chilled to green ice – "before I go I settle my score with you."

  She raised her gauntleted hand. "This for your treachery!" she said, and struck him savagely across his right check. Blood spouted, there would be scars, but he stood stolid. "This for your violence!" she said, and the silver gauntlet tore his left check. Then her eyes softened. "And this," she murmured, "for your love!"

  Her arms circled him, her body was warm against him, and her exquisite lips burned against his. He felt as if he embraced a flame for a moment, and then she was gone, and a part of his soul went with her. When he heard the hooves of the stallion Eblis pounding beyond the window, he turned and walked slowly out of the house to where Vail still crouched beside her father's body. She clung to him, wiped the blood from his cheeks, and strangely, her words were not of her father, nor of the sparing of Hull's life, but of Black Margot.

  "I knew you lied to save me," she murmured. "I knew you never loved her."

  And Hull, in whom there was no falsehood, drew her close to him and said nothing.

  But Black Margot rode north from Selui through the night. In the sky before her were thin shadows leading phantom armies, Alexander the Great, Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, and clearer than all, the battle queen Semiramis. All the mighty conquerors of the past, and where were they, where were their empires, and where, even, were their bones? Far in the south were the graves of men who had loved her, all except Old Einar, who tottered like a feeble grey ghost across the world to find his.

  At her side Joaquin Smith turned as if to speak stared, and remained silent. He was not accustomed to the sight of tears in the eyes and on the cheeks of Black Margot.

  (All conversation ascribed to the Princess Margaret in this story is taken verbatim from an anonymous volume Published in Urbs in the year 186, called "Loves of the Black Flame." It is credited to Jacques Lebeau, officer in command of the Black Flame's personal guard.)

  BOOK TWO

  THE BLACK FLAME

  CHAPTER ONE

  PENALTY AND AFTERMATH

  THOMAS MARSHALL CONNOR was about to die. The droning voice of the prison chaplain gradually dulled his perception instead of stimulating his mind. Everything was hazy and indistinct to the condemned man. He was going to the electric chair in just ten minutes to pay the supreme penalty because he had accidentally killed a man with his bare fists.

  Connor, vibrantly alive, vigorous and healthy, only twentysix, a brilliant young engineer, was going to die. And, knowing, he did not care. But there was nothing at all nebulous about the gray stone and cold iron bars of the death cell. There was nothing uncertain about the split down his trouser leg and the shaven spot on his head.

  The condemned man was acutely aware of the solidarity of material things about him. The world he was leaving was concrete and substantial. The approaching footsteps of the death guard sounded heavily in the distance.

  The cell door opened, and the chaplain ceased his murmuring. Passively Thomas Marshall Connor accepted his blessings, and calmly took his position between his guards for his last voluntary walk.

  He remained in his state of detachment as they seated him in the chair, strapped his body and fastened the electrodes. He heard the faint rustling of the witnesses and the nervous, rapid scratching of reporters' pencils. He could imagine their adjectives"Calloused murderer"... "Brazenly indifferent to his fate."

  But it was as if the matter concerned a third party.

  He simply relaxed and waited. To die so quickly and painlessly was more a relief than anything. He was not even aware when the warden gave his signal. There was a sudden silent flash of blue light. And thennothing at all.

  So this was death. The slow and majestic drifting through the Stygian void, borne on the agel
ess tides of eternity.

  Peace, at lastpeace, and quiet, and rest.

  But what was this sensation like the glimpse of a faint, faraway light which winked on and off like a star? After an interminable period the light became fixed and steady, a thing of annoyance. Thomas Marshall Connor, slowly became aware of the fact of his existence as an entity, in some unknown state.

  The senses and memories that were his personality struggled weakly to reassemble themselves into a thinking unity of beingand he became conscious of pain and physical torture.

  There was a sound of shrill voices, and a stir of fresh air. He became aware of his body again. He lay quiet, inert, exhausted. But not as lifeless as he had lain forhow long?

  When the shrill voices sounded again, Connor opened unseeing eyes and stared at the blackness just above him. After a space he began to see, but not to comprehend. The blackness became a jagged, pebbled roof no more than twelve inches from his eyesrough and unfinished like the under side of a concrete walk.

  The light became a glimmer of daylight from a point near his right shoulder.

  Another sensation crept into his awareness. He was horribly, bitterly cold. Not with the chill of winter air, but with the terrible frigidity of intergalactic space. Yet he was onno, in, earth of some sort. It was as if icy water flowed in his veins instead of blood. Yet he felt completely dehydrated. His body was as inert as though detached from his brain, but he was cruelly imprisoned within it. He became conscious of a growing resentment of this fact.

  Then, stimulated by the shrilling, piping voices and the patter of tiny feet out there somewhere to the right, he made a tremendous effort to move. There was a dry, withered crackling soundlike the crumpling of old parchmentbut indubitably his right arm had lifted!

  The exertion left him weak and nauseated. For a time he lay as in a stupor. Then a second effort proved easier. After another timeless interval of struggling torment his legs yielded reluctant obedience to his brain. Again he lay quietly, exhausted, but gathering strength for the supreme effort of bursting from his crypt.

  For he knew now where he was. He lay in what remained of his grave. How or why, he did not know. That was to be determined.

  With all his weak strength he thrust against the left side of his queer tomb, moving his body against the crevice at his right. Only a thin veil of loose gravel and rubble blocked the way to the open. As his shoulder struck the pile, it gave and slid away, outward and downward, in a miniature avalanche.

  Blinding daylight smote Connor like an agony. The shrill voices screamed.

  " 'S moom!" a child's voice cried tremulously. " 'S moom again!"

  Connor panted from exertion, and struggled to emerge from his hole, each movement producing another noise like rattling paper. And suddenly he was free! The last of the gravel tinkled away and he rolled abruptly down a small declivity to >est limply at the bottom of the little hillside.

  He saw now that erosion had cut through this burial groundwherever it wasand had opened a way for him through the side of his grave. His sight was strangely dim, but he became aware of half a dozen little figures in a frightened semicircle beyond him.

  Children! Children in strange modernistic garb of bright colors, but nevertheless human children who stared at him with wideopen mouths and popping eyes. Their curiously cherubic faces were set in masks of horrified terror.

  Suddenly recalling the terrors he had sometimes known in his own childhood, Connor was surprised they did not flee. He stretched forth an imploring hand and made a desperate effort to speak. This was his first attempt to use his voice, and he found that he could not.

  The spell of dread that held the children frozen was instantly broken. One of them gave a dismayed cry: "Aaah! 'S a specker!"

  In panic, shrieking that cry, the entire group turned and fled. They disappeared around the shoulder of the eroded hill, and Connor was left horribly alone. He groaned from the depths of his despair and was conscious of a faint rasping noise through his cracked and parched lips.

  He realized suddenly that he was quite nakedhis shroud had long since moldered to dust. At the same moment that full comprehension of what this meant came to him, he was gazing in horror at his body. Bones! Nothing but bones, covered with a dirty, parchmentlike skin!

  So tightly did his skin cover his skeletal framework that the very structure of the bones showed through. He could see the articulation at knuckles, knees, and toes. And the parchment skin was cracked like an ancient Chinese vase, checked like aged varnish. He was a horror from the tomb, and he nearly fainted at the realization. After a swooning space, he endeavored to arise. Finding that he could not, he began crawling painfully and laboriously toward a puddle of water from the last rain. Reaching it, he leaned over to place his lips against its surface, reckless of its potability, and sucked in the liquid until a vast roaring filled his ears.

  The moment of dizziness passed. He felt somewhat better, and his breathing rasped a bit less painfully in his moistened throat. His eyesight was slowly clearing and as he leaned above the little pool, he glimpsed the specter reflected there. It looked like a skulla face with lips shrunken away from the teeth, so fleshless that it might have been a death's head.

  "Oh, God!" he called out aloud, and his voice croaked like that of a sick raven. "What and where am I!"

  In the back of his mind all through this weird experience, there had been a sense of something strange aside from his emergence from a tomb in the form of a living scarecrow. He stared up at the sky.

  The vault of heaven was blue and fleecy with the whitest of clouds. The sun was shining as he had never thought to see it shine again. The grass was green. The ground was normally earthy. Everything was as it should bebut there was a strangeness about it that frightened him. Instinctively he knew that something was direfully amiss.

  It was not the fact that he failed to recognize his surroundings. He had not had the strength to explore; neither did he know where he had been buried. It was that indefinable homing instinct possessed in varying degree by all animate things. That instinct was out of gear. His time sense had stopped with the throwing of that electric switchhow long ago? Somehow, lying there under the warming rays of the sun, he felt like an alien presence in a strange country.

  "Lost!" he whimpered like a child.

  After a long space in which he remained in a sort of stupor, he became aware of the sound of footsteps. Dully he looked up. A group of men, led by one of the children, was advancing slowly toward him. They wore brightly colored shirtsred, blue, violetand queer baggy trousers gathered at the ankles in an exotic style.

  With a desperate burst of energy, Connor gained his knees. He extended a pleading skeletonlike claw.

  "Help me!" he croaked in his hoarse whisper.

  The beardless, queerly effeminatelooking men halted and stared at him in horror.

  " 'Assim!" shrilled the child's voice. " 'S a specker. 'S dead."

  One of the men stepped forward, looking from Connor to the gaping hole in the hillside.

  "Wassup?" he questioned.

  Connor could only repeat his croaking plea for aid.

  " 'Esick," spoke another man gravely. "Sleeper, eh?"

  There was a murmur of consultation among the men with the bright clothes and oddly soft, womanlike voices.

  "T' Evanie!" decided one. "T' Evanie, the Sorc'ess."

  They closed quickly around the half reclining Connor and lifted him gently. He was conscious of being borne along the curving cut to a yellow country road, and then black oblivion descended once more to claim him.

  When he regained consciousness the next time, he found that he was within walls, reclining on a soft bed of some kind. He had a vague dreamy impression of a girlish face with bronze hair and features like Raphael's angels bending over him. Something warm and sweetish, like glycerin, trickled down his throat.

  Then, to the whispered accompaniment of that queerly slurred English speech, he sank into the blissful repose of deep sleep
.

  CHAPTER TWO

  EVANIE THE SORCERESS

  THERE WERE SUCCESSIVE intervals of dream and oblivion, of racking pain and terrible nauseating weakness; of voices murmuring queer, unintelligible words that yet were elusively familiar.

  Then one day he awoke to the consciousness of a summer morning. Birds twittered; in the distance children shouted. Clear of mind at last, he lay on a cushioned couch puzzling over his whereabouts, even his identity, for nothing within his vision indicated where or who he was.

  The first thing that caught his attention was his own right hand. Paperthin, incredibly bony, it lay like the hand of death on the rosy coverlet, so transparent that the very color shone through. He could not raise it; only a twitching of the horrible fingers attested its union with his body.

  The room itself was utterly unfamiliar in its almost magnificently simple furnishings. There were neither pictures nor ornaments. Only several chairs of aluminumlike metal, a gleaming silvery table holding a few ragged old volumes, a massive cabinet against the opposite wall, and a chandelier pendant by a chain from the ceiling.

  He tried to call out. A faint croak issued.

  The response was startlingly immediate. A soft voice said, "Hahya?" in his ear and he turned his head painfully to face the girl of the bronze hair, seated at his side. She smiled gently.

  She was dressed in curious green baggy trousers gathered at the ankle, and a brilliant green shirt. She had rolled the full sleeves to her shoulders. Hers was like the costume of the men who had brought him here.

  "Whahya?" she said softly.