Collected short fiction, p.185
Collected Short Fiction, page 185
Upon them descended the evil power of Bak-Toreg. Miles cursed himself for his helplessness. There was nothing he could do. They could neither flee nor fight. . . . Su-Ildra held his arms. Her fingers sank deep into them, but staring across the dark sea, he was unaware of their pressure.
A swarm of bright sparks swam in the silvered malachite of the sky. Larger they grew, until they were a cluster of shining globes sweeping down upon the rock, as if upon an invisible wind.
Miles unconsciously slipped an arm about Su-Ildra. Her slim body was tense, trembling a little. She glanced up at him in brief concern, a brief warm smile upon her pale face, and then looked quickly back at the approaching globes.
Shimmering bubbles of violet flame, they were—yard-thick spheres of energy, projected, directed, by the yellow priest from the far city of Neng—the uncanny instrumentalities called the “thousand faces” that had snatched Su-Ildra away from Miles in the outer world.
Miles anticipated the faces before he could actually distinguish them. Their horror had been burned into his mind—flat masks, yellow and ancient, twisted with timeless evil—the eyes of them paradoxically, horribly limpid and benevolent, twinkling golden.
They had fastened the windows—futile defense! Nothing else could be done. They could only stand and wait. . . . body to body. . . . heart to thudding heart closer in peril than they had ever been. Su-Ildra’s face was white. She was trembling; she had bit through her lip, so that it was bright with blood. But she unfalteringly stood beside Miles as the bright globes came on.
Violet spheres swarmed above the house, and the shrill vibration of them came through the walls like the humming of insistent insects. They were at the windows—bright bubbles of flame, seeking entrance. The panes rattled as if shaken by unseen hands.
Then splintering bolts of blinding green flame stabbed at the house. A window shattered crashingly. The blue porcelain about it crumbled, fell in rotten lumps. The virescent lightnings ceased, and a globe came sailing into the room.
The two did not retreat from it; they stared in helpless, scornful hate at the strange intruder that filled the room with its thin, monotonous screaming. Behind the curved iridescent surface was the face of Bak-Toreg, a seamed mask of triumphant evil.
Miles pushed the girl back behind him and stepped to meet the sphere. An amazing attraction seized him; he was drawn swiftly off the floor and into the shining globe. It swelled to receive him and the yellow face vanished from it.
Bathed in violet light, Miles hung in the sphere. For a moment, he did not try to move; he was paralyzed with wonder and dread. The room about him looked oddly tinged with violet, as did Su-Ildra’s tense, horror-stricken face.
Then he struggled. He found that a barrier had dosed about him—a transparent, violet shell. A vibrant wall, it must have been, of sheer force held in equilibrium; yet it was effective as a wall of steel. A flying bubble, the sphere imprisoned him. In vain did he kick at it, batter his fists against it until they bled.
Su-Ildra broke from her trance of dread, ran toward him. She beat upon the barrier. Watching her agonized face through the violet screen, he saw her lips move, but no sound of her voice came through the shell.
Then the bubble sailed out through the hole in the wall.
Miles looked back as he was carried away. The house was a tiny blue cylinder on the rock with Su-Ildra’s despairing face watching through a ragged opening. She waved at him. The rock dropped away behind, was merely a black fleck it upon the purple sea.
The other spheres swarmed close. Staring at Miles in hideous triumph from each of them, was the drawn yellow visage of Bak-Toreg, thin lips snarling back from jetty teeth, golden eyes softly inquiring.
The black point of Arnac Rock became indistinguishable upon the purple plane. The spheres flew on beneath the seven suns. And at last, a tawny smudge of land rose out of the eternal mists of Xandulu, and the clustered globes sank above an island city.
l The isle was circular; a low broad plateau surrounded a steep and rugged black mountain. Its shape, it came to Miles, was a little like a hat the plain being the very broad brim, and the mountain the high, conical crown.
The city was built upon the plain; there was no building upon the mountain—which was indeed surrounded by a bare strip of level land, as if its dark, beetling obsidian precipices were shunned by the people of the city.
The buildings were all of a glistening, translucent, richly blue material, that for want of a better name Miles called porcelain. Like those of the ruined green city above the Well, they were tall, slender, and spaced very far apart—better described as towers or as pylons than as mere houses.
At various levels, these lofty perpendicular walls were set back to form terraces which served as landing stages for the flying disks of violet metal of which Miles saw thousands gliding about the city. The very extensive spaces between the pylons was partly paved with blue and largely covered with trees and shrubs of fantastic shape and color.
Riding the disk-fliers, or idling upon high terraces, or hastening along the azure paves, Miles saw countless multitudes of the people of Neng, the red race. The women were like gigantic Amazons, carrying weapons armored in violet metal. The men were smaller, almost dwarfish by contrast, clad almost universally in the black robes that were the mark of devotion to the Red One.
This was Neng, city of the Ryka, seat of the Red One’s power!
For some little time, the violet globe in which Miles was imprisoned hung motionless, level with the tops of the looming blue pylons; and many of the disc-ships glided near him. The smaller spheres left and streamed away toward the top of the nearest building.
The slender spire of this pylon, Miles saw, was crowned with a curious dome of violet metal, and through that dome projected a colossal barrel, like the tube of a great telescope. One by one, the violet bubbles were swallowed by the open, yawning mouth of this cylinder. They were returning, Miles was sure, into the unknown mechanism that had given them being, and maintained and directed them upon their far mission. Bak-Toreg, he knew, must be beneath that dome, surrounded with the instrumentalities of a mad science of destruction that had risen to menace the very planet!
Presently the sphere carried him onward toward the dark looming mass of the central peak. Covering a full square mile, the mountain reared its tallest ebon pinnacle a full two thousand feet into the gray-green sky. Its overhanging cliffs were peculiarly rugged, and save for a few tiny patches of green vegetation in high crevices, it seemed barren of all life.
Then Miles saw the theatre and the scorpion.
At the foot of the mountain was a semicircular pit, the black cliff facing him forming the straight side of it. The curved wall was a structure of blue porcelain, and above that wall rose tier upon tier of seats that faced the ebon precipice across the pit.
Upon the jet-black mountain wall in front of the seats, was a scene that checked his breath with wonder, slowed his heart with instinctive fear—a colossal, strange mosaic, inlaid in the rock. It portrayed a woman in the fatal embrace of a scarlet scorpion.
Vividly real against the glistening, dark background of polished volcanic glass, the figures were gigantic, hundreds of feet in height. In the execution of them was a startling actuality that made Miles tremble with foreboding horror. Struggling, helpless, the woman was held fast in the cruel great pincers of the crimson monster whose armored tail was arched up over its back, bringing the barbed tip of its sting against her shrinking body. Upon her white face and in the attitude of her straining limbs had been caught an intensity of agonized horror that, Miles felt, it would be maddening long to behold.
The flying globe sank into the pit, paused a few feet above the firm, packed clay of its floor. And then the transparent violet walls—whose adamantine hardness had made Miles’s knuckles bleed were changed again to impalpable mist. He fell out of the bright sphere and sprawled on the clay. When he got up, it was gone.
Semi-circular, the pit was two hundred feet along the straight side. Smooth as a great screen, the dark cliff with the hideous picture upon it rose a thousand feet into the greenish-gray sky. The curving wall of blue porcelain on the other side, beneath the seats, was forty feet high, quite unclimbable.
The hard clay floor was bare. The seats were empty. Miles could see nothing save vacant pit, empty seats, the weirdly terrible mosaic on the mountain, and the seven vari-colored suns wheeling in the hazy greenish sky.
CHAPTER IV
The Bright Visitant
l Miles remained in the pit while the suns revolved six times—nearly two days. During that time he had two visitors. The first was a man robed in black who came to the edge of the blue porcelain wall and lowered a basket containing three square loaves of dark bread, a cluster of fruits resembling purple grapes hypertrophied to the size of small oranges, and a blue jar full of water.
Near the end of the second day, exhausted by the strain of endless waiting, he threw himself down on the hard clay floor and slept. Grim, overshadowing menace had all but killed his hope. An unarmed prisoner awaiting sacrificial death—how could he ever free Su-Ildra from the implacable power of Bak-Toreg?
He never knew precisely what wakened him, but he sat up suddenly, in full possession of himself, aware of a presence near him. At first he saw nothing; he was on his feet when he found behind him a form taller than a human being, cloaked in white mist through which shone flecks of moving bright flame. Instantly, the flame-shot mist brought him memory of the Flame Folk and of the extraordinary means of communication through the Sign.
“Miles Kendon,” he again felt the impact of a wordless, unspoken message upon his mind, “your time grows short.”
Too dazed to speak, Miles merely stared at the mist-shrouded form.
“I am Alú, the Youngest of the Flame Folk,” resumed the voiceless flow of thought. “I bring you a weapon. This much we can aid you, and no more. Even to prepare the weapon and to plan for you to use it has almost wrecked our minds.
“Because all thought of conflict is destructive to us, we have delayed too long. The Red One—or the fanatic cult of annihilation that has created the Red One for its symbol—menaces the world. You must destroy it. If you fail, Bak-Toreg will know that our power is totally gone. Su-Ildra will follow you to the fangs of the monster, and then all the world! The forging of this weapon has cost the supreme effort of the Flame Folk. We can do no more.”
“Su-Ildra—” Miles stammered, half forgetting his fear of this astounding visitant in concern for the girl. “Is she—”
“Bak-Toreg has left her on the rock. He will not dare harm her—if you can destroy the Red One. You would like to see her?”
“See Sue?” Miles was puzzled. “Of course, if—”
“Then you may, in the same manner in which you see me, who am really not beside you, but in Lelural. It may seem strange to you, yet some of your scientists know already that Space is no real thing, that it is but a barrier the groping mind creates unawares to stop its own advance.”
“How?—” cried Miles, stepping toward the awesome being, in his eagerness.
“Stand still,” came the soundless command.
A white tentacle of mist reached out, caressed his face like a cool breath. For a moment, he could see only shining whiteness, flecked with darting reverberations of bright flame. A peculiar giddiness swayed his body, confused his sense of direction.
The white, fire-pierced mists cleared away. The black mountain and the theater of blue porcelain had vanished. He stood beneath a glistening blue dome and purple seas were running far, far beneath its wide windows.
He was in the house on Arnac Rock. Then he saw Su-Ildra standing listlessly by one of the great windows, staring forlornly across the purple sea. Her lovely face, in profile, looked white and drawn; he saw dark marks beneath her eyes. “Sue!” cried Miles, anxiously. “Sue!” She did not turn; she was not aware of him. He knew, then, that he had spoken back in the pit by the mountain.
“Sue!” he called again. “You must hear me, Sue! Buck up! The world isn’t coming to an end! I love you, Sue! Don’t forget that—and I’m coming back!”
She whirled around then, in quick, half-frightened wonder. She looked at him, through him. Her lips moved and he was faintly aware of her voice.
“Miles! Where are you? I heard you speak to met Are you all right?”
“Of course, Sue! I’m coming back!” Little did Miles dream, when he made that promise, the distance that he would have to go to keep it!
“I’ll wait for you, Miles,” she said. She even smiled a little, and asked, “What else could I do? But where are you? How—” Sight of her dissolved into bright-flecked mist, and the mist was drawn away. Miles was standing alone in the pit below the black mountain and the mist-wrapped figure was gone.
Seconds had passed before he discovered that his right hand was holding something that felt like the handle of a sword. Looking down quickly to see the weapon that “Alú the Youngest” had left him, his eyes could see nothing of it. His fingers seemed closed upon empty air.
An invisible sword! It had the cold feel and the weight of metal. Cautiously he fingered it. Its blade was slender, flexible, two feet long, with an edge so keen that it cut through the skin of his testing thumb. Still he could not see it. It was made of some steel-tough substance more transparent than glass, a substance which neither reflected nor refracted nor absorbed light to make it visible.
This weapon had been left him, then, with which to slay the Red One—whatever the Red One might prove to be. He practised a little, swinging it at an imaginary foe. It soon occurred to him, as he became accustomed to the novelty of its invisibility, that it might prove rather an unsatisfactory weapon; he wished that “Alú” had been able to provide him a good automatic pistol.
l It was not long after that Miles became aware of a vast increasing hum of human voices. The red-skinned Ryka were soon filing in endless lines along the aisles of the great theater above him, filling the innumerable seats—huge, violet-armored women, vermilion-red; dwarfish, paleskinned men in black.
Miles was standing in the middle of the pit trying to hold the invisible blade in such a manner that his attitude would not reveal it. Countless eyes rested upon him, cold, curious, hostile—none of them sympathetic, none friendly. They were like an oppressive burden. They probed him like needles. Some of them, he feared, must discover the invisible blade, if only from the position of his hand.
He faced the seats, grimly, boldly. He laughed at the menacing thousands and fiercely resolved that he would give them no opportunity to express their challenging scorn.
For nearly an hour the seats were filling. At last, the aisles were vacant and the deep-toned murmur of the assembled tens of thousands was hushed expectantly. Innumerable eyes left Miles, and moved to a blue tower that rose immediately above the pit at the foot of the ranks of seats.
Upon that tower had appeared aged, yellow-visaged Bak-Toreg, swathed in the black robes that hid his shrunken body to his feet. In his hand was a great yard-long key of violet metal.
His voice amazingly deep, his manner slow and ceremonial, he began a measured chant. Solemn, awful, his voice rolled across the hushed great theater. At intervals he paused, and from the worshiping myriad came a thunderous response, fearful with the wildness of its fanatic madness. Upon the voice of the throng rode devouring terror side by side with insane, joyous ecstasy.
As the uncanny ceremony continued, Bak-Toreg lifted the great key and held it solemnly above his head. At last the ritual appeared to have reached a climax. Tense, expectant silence fell once more upon the theater.
Bak-Toreg turned slowly from the crowd toward the mountain and made a strange slow gesture with the bright key. Then he inserted it in some mechanism that rose from the top of the tower beside him and turned it with a harsh, grating sound that rang across the silent space like a strident, ominous scream of fatal warning.
Miles noticed, then, that the eyes of the multitude were shifting toward the black mass of the mountain behind him; he turned, to see a surprising thing. The mountain was no longer black. Over it had spread a ghostly silvery radiance that ran like white flame up every high pinnacle. As he watched, a soft bright mist swathed the mountain in increasing brilliance, hiding the dread representation of the woman and the red scorpion upon the cliff.
Then the mountain seemed to dissolve. It faded into a bright phantom of itself, became a cloud of grey mist. And out of that cloud materialized—the temple!
The temple of the Red One!—a vast, squat edifice, spreading black-pillared wings over the whole space where the mountain had been. Huge and square and deadly black, its columns were covered with deep-graven figures unthinkably and obscenely hideous; they were smeared with the slime of decay, crumbling, rotten.
Level with the hard clay floor of the pit in which Miles stood, the courtyard of the temple stretched far back across the space from which the mountain had vanished, toward the colossal thick black horrors that were the colonnades.
That immense space was carpeted with ghastly white—with the bones and the round, grinning skulls of the innumerable victims of the Red One!
CHAPTER V
The Scarlet Scorpion
l Inured as he had become to astonishment at the weird wonders of Xandulu, Miles was struck motionless with horror upon the amazing disappearance of the mountain and the coming of the black and sinister temple.
His mind at first refused to accept it; he had a fleeting idea that the change had been trickery, hypnotism, illusion. But the evident physical reality of the temple and of the untold thousands who had offered their lives there—the latter attested by a stench of dry decay that swept in a nauseating wave of corruption from the white charnel field—countenanced no such theory.
Explanation for the thing—so Miles later reasoned it—can be sought only in yet unproved theories of interlocking space, of interpenetrating matter keyed to a different pitch of vibration, throbbing through our world, unseen, unfelt, unguessed save by the most daring of our physicists.
