COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

“The Dead Man,” by Gene Wolfe, originally appeared in Sir! magazine in 1965. This revised version is copyright © 1987 by Gene Wolfe and originally appeared in Weird Tales, Spring 1988 issue.

“The Dolphin and the Deep,” by Thomas Burnett Swann, originally appeared in Nova #4. Copyright © 1963 by Thomas Burnett Swann.

“Bright Streets of Air,” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, originally appeared in Battle Magic. Copyright © 1998 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Reprinted by permisison of the author.

“The Swordsmen of Varnis,” by Clive Jackson, originally appeared in Slant in 1950.

“The Emperor of Gondwanaland,” by Paul Di Filippo, originally appeared in Interzone. Copyright © 2005 by Paul Di Filippo. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Space-Time for Springers,” by Fritz Leiber, originally appeared in Star Science Fiction Stories #4. Copyright © 1958 by Fritz Leiber.

“Red Nails,” by Robert E. Howard, originally appeared in Weird Tales, July-October 1936.

“Arms and the Woman,” by Lawrence Watt-Evans, originally appeared in Sword & Sorceress XVIII, copyright © 2001 by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Bride of the Man-Horse,” by Lord Dunsany, is taken from The Book of Wonder.

“The Woman,” by Tanith Lee, originally appeared in Clockwork Phoenix. Copyright © 2008 by Tanith Lee. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Dreamtime in Adjaphon,” by John Gregory Betancourt, originally appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Fall 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Power of Prayer,” by Brian Stableford, originally appeared in Paradox #1, Spring 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Brain Stableford. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Black Abbot of Puthuum,” by Clark Ashton Smith, originally appeared in Weird Tales, March 1936.

“Black Hawk of Valkarth” originally appeared in Fantastic Stories, September 1974; © Ultimate Publishing Company Inc. Reprinted by permission of Lin Carter Properties.

“The Devil’s Crypt,” by E. Hoffmann Price, originally appeared in “The Devil’s Crypt” originally appeared in Spicy Mystery Stories, February, 1936. Edited version copyright © 2008 by Wildside Press LLC.

“Vandibar Nasha in the College of Shadows,” by Darrell Schwetizer, originally appeared in Adventures of Sword & Sorcery #7. Copyright © 2000 by Darrell Schweitzer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Secret of Kralitz,” by Henry Kuttner, originally appeared in Weird Tales, October 1936.

“Light,” by Achmed Abdullah, originally appeared in All-Story Weekly, May 18, 1918.

“The Lost Race,” by Robert E. Howard, originally appeared in Weird Tales, January 1927.

“Ringard and Dendra,” by Brian McNaughton, originally appeared in The Throne of Bones. Copyright © 2000 by Brian McNaughton.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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THE DEAD MAN, by Gene Wolfe

When the peasant came out of his house in the morning, the Brahman was sitting cross-legged in the sunshine before his own door. The Brahman was old, and emaciated by fasting in the way often seen in wandering fakirs but seldom in settled members of the highest caste. And although the peasant was early abroad to escape the banter of the women (water-carrying being unfit for a man), the Brahman had been about before him, for when he neared the ford he could see floating in the slack water the marigold wreaths the Brahman had cast in to propitiate the river and the magar and the other powers of the waters.

The magar was a crocodile. Nine days ago it had taken the wife of the peasant’s half-brother as she waded across the ford, so notifying the villagers that the crossing was unsafe again, as it was said to have been in their grandfathers’ time but had not been within living memory.

That same day, his own wife had been bitten on the foot when she kicked a jackal snuffing too near the spot where their son was playing. She had cursed, then laughed at the bloody scratch left by the frightened jackal’s teeth; but next morning her foot was hot to the touch and twice its healthy size. Now, after prayers and poultices of dung, it was better. She could hobble on it, though not far, and cook and care for the child; but it would be long yet before she could bring water, and his mother—who had cried, and shrieked that the gods intended the destruction of the wives of all her sons—was too old.

With a pad on his shoulder, he could carry their largest jar easily, for he was strong man, brown and lean from hard work in the fields of millet and upland rice. Stepping with care so as not to stir the mud, he bent slowly; and where the depth was great enough to take the jar, he filled it with the morning-cool, nearly stagnant water. There was nothing at the ford to disturb the peace of daybreak, though a hundred feet away, where the village stood just above the flood mark, many were stirring into wakefulness.

The magar was not to be seen. The peasant knew well how cleverly a crocodile assumes the very angle and position most natural to a stranded log on a sandbar, and how softly shadow-like it slips through still water without rippling the surface; but it was not there. He shouldered the jar again and began the walk uphill.

He and his fellow villagers, ignorant of the comparative religion of the schools, would cheerfully have killed the magar if they could. Indeed, one of the boatmen had been fishing for it with an iron hook as thick as a man’s thumb hidden in the well-rotted haunch of a goat. Still, until the boatman caught it or they found it far enough from water to be slain with axes and spears, they would have been fools not to try to persuade it to be content with homage from their village and, especially, to move on up or downstream. Possibly in the dry season, when the river would dwindle to a trickle, something might be done. The peasant set down the water jar carefully so as not to waken his family. He heard his mother’s rasping breath; as the jar made a soft chunk on the earthen floor, his wife moaned and moved her arm.

The second jar was smaller and older than the first, with a chipped place at the lip. He took it up and left the dimness of his home again for the brilliance of the street. The house had smelled of smoke; outside a breeze brought the rank, indescribable early-morning smell of second-growth jungle, a jungle cut fifty years before for timber, now growing up again in hardwoods. By the water, the river-odor of rotten vegetation returned, and the gray warmth of dust under his bare feet changed once more to the cold slipperiness of mud.

This time he was not quite so careful, and one of his feet slid a trifle, sending out a slow cloud of fine black sediment. He took two more steps in the direction of the barely perceptible current before bending to fill his jar.

Without warning, his left calf was struck by steel bars, simultaneously from front and rear. A hip-dislocating wrench sent him sprawling in the shallows while the half-filled jar rocked in the waves of his struggle. Because he was a strong man, taller and bigger of bone than most of his people, he had time for one full-throated scream, and time to draw the breath for another, before the water closed over his nose and mouth.

For a few seconds he resisted before instinct, or reason, or the passivity of India and the East made him swallow, hug his chest with his arms, and submit, feeling the dark, cold fingers of the river loose his rag of turban and tangle his long, black hair. Then, as his heart pounded and his ears swelled and the trapped breath tried to burst past his closed throat and locked lips, he fought again, ignoring the pain already creeping into his numbed leg.

When next he came to know our world—may a, that which is not God—it was as a small circle of pale blue far above his eyes. He tried to blink and discovered that he could not, and that his mouth was filled with water and mud (or perhaps with blood) which he could not expel. Even the muscles that controlled the motions of his eyes had forgotten their function, so that he could not direct his gaze to right or left; but he found, in the absence of this ability, that he could treat his field of vision as a window and shift his attention to one side or the other, so as to peer slantwise across his own eyes and examine the edges, where the ghosts of the newly dead and the more material demons flutter away from a man’s view.

He was lying in a dark abscess in the earth, on mud, as his shoulders told him. Toward his feet was the carcass of a young blackbuck, its belly stretched by the rapid decomposition that attacks dead ruminants.

To his left (he strained to see, and in straining felt the vertebrae of his neck move ever so slightly, grating one upon another) nearly hidden in shadow, rose the familiar, undulating curves of a young and not unslender woman lying on her side—the roundness of the head, the concavity of the neck, the rise of the shoulder declining to the waist, and the strong domination of the child-bearing hips tapering to thighs and knees lost in darkness. A drugged and whirling concourse of surmises rushed through his mind, until simultaneously and without consciousness of contradiction he felt that he lay in the palace of a scaled river-spirit and asleep beside his wife.

His attention was drawn from the woman by an alteration in the light, the passage of some dark object across the disk of blue. It came again, hesitated, and returned by the path it had come. This it did three times in what could have been a hundred breaths; and while he watched it, he became aware of a stench indescribably fetid in the air that stirred sluggishly through his nostrils.

The dark object crossed the light for the fourth time, and he saw it to be a leaf at the tip of a twig. Then he understood that his shadowy vault was the den of the magar, hollowed in the mud of the river bank, where he lay with his face beneath the “chimney” providing the minute ventilation necessary to prevent the den from filling with the gases of putrefaction. When the sun rose higher, it would become an oven in which decay would luxuriate and dead flesh rise like dough until the bodies were soft enough to be dismembered easily. He did not connect this with the crocodile’s teeth, which were of piercing shape only, unable to grind or cut; nor with its short front legs, which were unable to reach what its jaws held, although he knew these things.

He knew all these things and the habits of the magar—the rotting-den and the sudden grab at the ford or the rush up from the water—but he was unafraid, though he knew without looking a second time the identity of the woman beside him.. After a long while he rose and began working his way out through the chimney, uncertain even as he did whether he laboriously pushed the earth aside to enlarge the hole or merely drifted through, and up like smoke.

The village was quiet now with the emptiness of noon, when the men were in the fields. He heard sobbing from his house as he dragged his injured leg along the village street, and the softer sound of chanted prayers. Sunlight shone brighter than he could recall having seen it ever before, the dazzle from the dust and the sides of the mud houses so great that he scarcely cast a shadow as he stood in the doorway of his home; neither the young woman, nor the old, nor the Brahman saw him until he entered the gloom of the interior where they sat, though his son ceased his gurgling and stared with wide brown eyes.

When they saw him at last, he could not speak, but looked from face to face, beginning and ending with his wife, conscious of having come to the close of something.

After a moment the Brahman muttered, “Do not address it. It is seldom good to hear what they will say.” He took up a handful of saffron powder from the brass bowl beside him and flung it into the air, calling upon a Name that brought dissolution and release.

BRIGHT STREETS OF AIR, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

In this war of words, my best friend Jessamine has all the advantages. She speaks faster than I, and with more heat.

I set a pansy-decorated teacup in front of her on my kitchen table, then take my place across from her. Westering sun strikes through the window on a bowl of oranges, lifting the true color out of them in a way no other intensity of light can do. Light silvers the cobwebs near the ceiling, too; I hadn’t realized how long it’s been since I dusted. I’m an indifferent housekeeper, but I always have cookies.

A plate of chocolate chip cookies sits between us on the yellow tabletop. I baked them this morning. I love that smell.

I curl my hands around my teacup, treasuring its warmth. The tea I have chosen for myself is smoky and black, with gunpowder notes. Jessamine has chamomile, as she usually does.

As I reach into my pocket to take out the fossilized spell I just found in the hills, Jessamine extracts her palmtop computer from her purse, sets it on the table by her teacup, and flips up the lid so she can stare at the tiny screen. Electronic light the color of foxfire glows on her face. “Wait’ll you hear this one, Ellowyn,” she says. “My best yet. And...”

I lay my spell on the table. It looks unimpressive. They usually do. Just another river-rounded sandstone egg, fine-grained but unremarkable brown, though my fingertips itch from the sparks of potential in it.

“You won’t believe what it does,” says Jessamine.

It is too much to hope that she will be excited by my find. She never is. She has no interest in the past. Her favorite word is upgrade.

“What is it this time?” I ask. “A formula for shrinking parked cars so more can fit into available space? A spell to make everybody’s clocks run just fast enough that people will arrive on time wherever they go? Something to make your VCR understand the exact right moment to start and stop recording so you never lose the first few seconds of a program?”

“Better,” she says.

“You’ve debugged the Internet?”

She bites her lip. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have guessed that big. “Less global than that,” she says.

“But your spells are always global.”

“I made this one especially for you.” She sips her tea.

Tingles of apprehension creep up my back. I don’t like her even considering tailoring a spell for me. We have been friends for ages -- since days of cobblestone roads and horse-drawn vehicles, since men delivered ice and milk to one’s home. We have watched each other’s choices all these years and had our own thoughts.

We come together for tea every week. Jessamine casts her spells out into the world and I cast mine, and we sometimes work at cross purposes, but we try not to cancel each other out. I don’t always approve of what she’s doing, and I know she doesn’t care much about my concerns either, but we almost never speak aloud our doubts. Censoring each other is not something we do.

“Plus, I have a new delivery system,” Jessamine says, smiling down at her tiny computer. “Infrared data transfer.”

She is speaking a language I have no desire to learn.

She taps the screen with a small black stylus, angles the back of the computer toward me, and a red light strobes into my eyes.

It hurts.

Blinking does not stop its invasion. I can see the light even through my eyelids, and I feel old and paper-thin for the first time in a long while.

What is she ensorcelling me with? Does she want to hurt me? Weaken me? Kill me? Only because I’m not sure I like the devicing of this century in all its manifest glory?

I collapse back in my chair, feeling like a marionette with cut strings. The pulsing pain of the red light ceases. For a moment all I feel are myriad aches, screeches from muscles that haven’t scolded me in years.

My mind falls open, like a flower forced by time-lapse photography to bloom.

Then Jessamine’s true assault begins. Snowing down on my unguarded edges, the structure of her reasons, the imprint of her influences, the chemistry of her choices. My mind lies quiet as her beliefs and impulses press down on it, and then I understand everything about her.

I feel her delight and terror in everything newest and next. Her burnished curiosity that wants to poke copper fingers everywhere. Her impatience with anything slower than she.

Her buried fear that if she sits still long enough so many things will catch up to her.

I crank open my eyelids and stare across the table at my friend, and then I am my friend. Her desires shape and restrict me; her joy flares through me and her fears gnaw at my heart. Falling gold and scarlet leaves of memory drift against a celadon green backdrop that is the edge of her consciousness. I can touch any leaf and tumble into one of our yesterdays.

I pick one, let it rest on my palm. It flattens against the skin, a damp silken kiss.

Sixty, seventy years ago. I am back in Brooklyn in the middle of a sweltering summer, and Jessamine and I are sitting side by side on steps in front of a brownstone, holding ice cream cones, mine strawberry and hers chocolate. Except I remember this moment from my own memory, too, and I had the chocolate cone. The ice cream melts faster than we can lick it, flowing down across our fingers, cool and sticky. In this moment we are only girls together without thought, lost in delicious taste, sweating and sticking to each other without caring, reaching across to offer tastes of each others’ cones.

It is a moment most like this present one in how close we feel to one another.

I blink and I am back in my own head. Yet the whole tapestry of Jessamine’s thoughts and motivations still weaves through my mind, inextricably tangled, forcing me to filter past it. I cannot tell where she begins and I end, and I feel hopelessly confused.

Jessamine has come around the table and is standing over me. “Are you all right?” she asks, her amber eyes staring into mine. She leans forward, presses her palm to my forehead. “Ellowyn? Are you all right?”

I shudder deep and long. Webs of foreign feelings drape my thoughts, feelings not my own, feelings that force me to feel them. Thoughts I don’t want to own flicker through my brain.

I stare at my kitchen with stark clarity, see the careless stains on the cupboard doors, dustmice under the outthrust cabinets, spiderwebs in the corners, scratches in the dishes, all the things I don’t mind because I don’t wear my glasses in the house. There is that smell of orange peels rotting in the bag under the sink. I never notice that; I don’t mind mold; things are only doing what they are supposed to do, everything changing into other things across time. But now this odor affronts me.

“Ell? That spell wasn’t supposed to hurt you! Ell?” Jessamine grips my shoulder.

I try to cast the invasion out of my mind, but it is knitted and knotted too tightly to me. I struggle to reclaim myself. Everywhere in me are shards of someone else.

I feel my age. I let out a long breath and stop fighting, and all of Jessamine snaps into place within me. I feel...brisk. I sit upright. I gulp tea. Its smoky taste no longer pleases me, but I know I don’t want chamomile either.

“Are you all right?” Jessamine asks for the fiftieth time, perhaps. Why should I pay attention to her when she is already inside me?

“Leave me alone,” I say. I rise and go to the cupboard, find a tea called Plantation Mint that I usually share with my neighbor James when we play gin rummy on Sunday night and watch 60 Minutes.

That’ll do. I drop a teabag into a new mug. I put the kettle on the stove and turn on the burner. (Where’s the microwave? Oh. I don’t have one. Tomorrow I’ll get one.) I run water into the sink until it’s hot. I dump soap and sponges in, and then I begin to scrub.

It is odd. I wear glasses for distance, and Jessamine doesn’t. I never knew what she saw when she looked at my house, and I never tell her what I think about her chrome and glass furniture or her love of plastic fabrics. A guest doesn’t criticize the host’s house no matter how long they have known each other.

“Ell?” Jessamine shakes my shoulder. “Stop it. What are you doing?”

There is dust everywhere. Housekeeping has never been my strong point. I scrub a film of ancient cat vomit off the linoleum and fight with myself. To care, or not to care? Well, says Jessamine in my head, simplest if we spell it away, and that way both of us can relax.

I sit back, drop the sponge on the floor. My hands flash through a series of mudras. I feel the dust and dirt shifting away to somewhere it can be more comfortable, and my house becomes a strange sacred space outside of the normal world where things will not stain it. Jessamine is happy here.

I, Ellowyn, feel as though I’ve sliced off my roots.

From the living room come the screams of three different cats. I jump up and run there and see that the couch where they usually lie in a furry heap is repelling them. They scramble in air, trying to swim to safety, but the table repels them, and the carpet. They float, claws extended, an inch above the ground. Their cries become more frantic.

“What did I do? What did you do?” I cry, snatching at my frantic cats, who cling and claw and screech.

“Damn, I forgot about cats. This is a people-only house now,” my internal Jessamine says with my mouth.

“Well, stop it! Change it back! Stop it!” I am talking to myself.

“You’ll have to free the hands.” My second voice is an approximation of Jessamine’s, higher and more forceful than my own.

I am supporting Sprite’s hind legs with my right hand. Fleet clings to my shoulders, and Dobro stands on my left forearm, his paws wrapped around my upper arm. They all moan, an eerie, ascending sound like the end of the world.

“What happened?” Jessamine asks from behind me. Her voice is thin with fright.

I turn and force Sprite and Fleet into her arms. “Your silly spell,” I say in my own voice, “your silly banish-dust, repel-pests, eternal-stainfree spell has turned my house into a tomb.” Hands freed, I shape the mudras again in reverse order, stumbling a little because this is not my usual spell method. The Jessamine overlay in my mind prompts me, sighing all the while. She craves cleanliness that is close to hermetic, and now I know why all the way down to my bones. I can remember the apartment where Jessamine lived before we met, filth and cockroaches and rotting food, her mother’s older sister spreading pestilence and chaos everywhere around her in a way that Jessamine did not learn until later was magical.

Such stains, set deep into her image of her childself. Such a compulsion to escape them.

I shape my hands around the final mudra, and my roots regrow; the house is connected to the everyday world once again. The cats, still moaning, drop to the floor and vanish into their safest hiding places.

Jessamine is crying. We both go to the bathroom to put Neosporin on our bleeding scratches and to spell for healing. “Ellowyn, what happened?” Jessamine says.

“You should know,” I say. “It was your spell.”

“It wasn’t supposed to work this way!”

“What did you imagine it would do?” Now, from my view of the inside of her mind, I know what the spell was: a spell of total understanding. I can even ferret out her thinking about it, why she devised it: she is lonely in her passions, and she only wanted me to appreciate them more than I do. We have been getting together for years. We are best friends. Yet, there has been this film between us, areas we have kept separate from each other where we might clash, and finally her frustration about this place where she is still and always alone built to the bursting point.

And, in her straightforward Jessamine way that sometimes frightens me, she reached for what looked like the best solution. Make me understand.

“I thought maybe you’d listen to me,” she says.

I stare at a particularly long cat scratch on my arm and listen to the conflict in my head. My body needs protection. I dab some antibiotic ointment on my index finger and look at the red edges of my wound. My Ellowyn self has sympathy for the microorganisms that have found this entrance into blood heaven, the ones I am about to kill. My Jessamine self is appalled that I even hesitate. I smooth the ointment along the scratch and sigh.

“How can I hear you now?” I ask. “I have voices in my head.”

Her nose is pink with stifled tears. “I’ll uncast it. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it would work like this.”

“You can’t uncast it,” I say, because I know how carefully she built it , and which of the ingredients are permanent. I stare at my face in the mirror, and two people look out of my eyes. I fear that once the Jessamine inside me has time to look around and analyze things, she will gradually send more and more of my true self to sleep and happy dreams until she is all that is conscious in me.

I hate this thought. Fighting has never been my strength, though.

I get the Band-Aids down from the cupboard, and, moving with uncharacteristic determination, slap them onto myself and Jessamine where they will do the most good. Jessamine’s pathological hatred of infection spells out of me as I work. I don’t even think as I mouth these words. I know they have been a mantra for her over the years.

Cats, part of me thinks with disgust. Horrible messy things. No more events like this! We have to get rid of them!

Horror curls through me. The cats are my companions, my friends. They greet me when I return from anywhere. We all live our separate lives in this shared space, and intercept each other for caresses. I love them.

In my head, Jessamine apologizes for her thought, but I know she still thinks it. Finally I understand why the cats never come into the kitchen while Jessamine is visiting me. She has a repel spell for all animals. She cannot rid herself of the conviction that they carry disease.

No. I can’t live like this.

We head back to the kitchen. I make yet another cup of tea, this time English Breakfast, fully loaded with caffeine. While the water heats, I take Jessamine’s little computer, tap the screen with the stylus to find the spell-processing program, scroll through the spell she constructed. It is just as I remembered: Jessamine exact, Jessamine elegant, all parts interlocking so tightly that I can’t get a fingernail in to split it apart. What about transmission errors? I check the data-sent log, and it says SENT OK. Frowning, I set the computer on the table and discover Jessamine staring at me, her face pale.

“What?” I say.

“You know how to use it,” she murmurs, and then I feel the backlash, the Jessamine in my head reflecting the other Jessamine’s outrage at someone even touching this computer, her precious friend, making it do tricks without asking.

“Oh, this makes me tired,” I say. I make my tea and slam the kettle down on the burner, denting its edge, full of rage and fatigue from fighting this self forced on me.

I sit.

I see the egg-shaped spell, golden as earth, that I found in the hills, and a sweet taste touches my tongue.

Before my interior Jessamine can stop me -- I had no idea that she had these shudders under her skin all the time, worries always that edges are not clean, that touch is not safe -- I cradle the spell in my hands. Comfort seeps into me. This spell’s history isn’t entirely clear to me. I only know someone cast it a long time ago, and that it worked beautifully, so beautifully that the Earth reached up and made it into treasure in memory of its power. No spell that hurts anyone ever gets pearled like this.

Part of me wants to fling the ugly, dirty thing from me, banish it from the house. The other part turns the spell over and traces the glyph of welcome on the grainy sandstone surface. Answering warmth wakes under my fingertip. The spell is joyous with its own power. I cup my hands around it and taste its flavor, waiting for the spell to tell me what it does. Juicy sourgrass stems, cinnamon, wheatbread, green grapes -- a harvest spell, of sorts.

Harvest.

What would I plant? What reap?

This experience of having the Other inside me. Already planted. Already grown and flowered. Fruit, unbearable fruit. Can I harvest it now and lay it away?

I stroke the spell, trace some glyphs of inquiry into it. The Jessamine in my head watches, quiet, not protesting.

The red warmth of wine answers my touch. The spell accepts my alterations.

“Will you go quietly?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” she says with my mouth. And past all her fears and worries, I feel the great flood of love she feels for me, the gratitude and exasperation and choked delight and longing, the leaves of so many shared memories, laughter and starlight and wonder, times we pushed each other away but came back, times we asked hard questions and stayed for hard answers, times we surprised each other.

For a moment I think, I can live with this.

Then she says, “Let’s go, Ell. You can’t live with me. You know it and I know it.”

It is her hand in my hand that lifts the stone to my mouth, her lips in my lips that press the opening glyph into the spell’s skin.

The rock melts. The spell opens. Shimmering gold and green light weaves around me, and I see orchards flowering with spring rain, leafing out green with summer’s sun, sturdy and strong from earth, air, water, sunfire, all mixed with each fruit’s own signature. Jessamine grows strong and ripe inside me. For a little while I am afraid that I will be cast into dreams indeed, leaving Jessamine alone in my head.

She grows more, basking in the light, too big now to be contained. I cry aloud as pain flashes through me, and then she is reft from me.

When my eyes clear, I hold a perfect black plum in my hands, and Jessamine is gone from my head.

She stares across the table at me. “What happened?” she whispers, pale and frightened.

“It’s all right,” I say. The spell is gone and I send gratitude after it. I set the plum on the table. I look at the cookies on the plate and sigh with happiness, blessing my singular state. “Don’t ever do that again.”

She picks up her computer, turns it so I can see the spell on the screen. She selects the entire document and hits the delete button. The spell vanishes.

“Take it off the flashcard too,” I say.

Her eyes widen, but she opens the memory storage card and removes the spell from that as well.

It doesn’t matter. If she really wants to, she can reconstruct the spell from scratch. I know better than ever how her mind works now. Anything she spent so much time crafting is etched into her brain.

“I love you,” I say. “But I don’t want to be you.”

She shakes her head. “I understand.”

“You don’t,” I say. “You don’t want to.” I push the plum and it rolls all the way across the table to stop in front of her. “But if you want to know what it was like to be you inside of me, taste this.”

She picks up the plum and stares at me. I remember two girls sitting on a front stoop in Brooklyn. I remember us walking along a seaside street on a misty evening, things silvered with street light and damp, the only warmth her hand in mine.

Sometimes I want never to see her again.

Sometimes I’m so angry with her I want to scream.

She’s my best friend in all the world.

She raises the plum to her mouth and takes a bite.

THE DOLPHIN AND THE DEEP, by Thomas Burnett Swann

I: THE TRITON

From the time I was a small child I have liked to wander. Once, at the age of five, I ran away from my parents’ villa in Caere and followed the road to the necropolis. But the burial mounds frightened me. Carved out of red tufa stone and heaped with soil, they crouched like demons from Avernus. I peered through their narrow entrances and thought of Tuchuicha, the monster with the face of a vulture and the ears of a donkey. Wild roses scratched my legs and a blue-eyed owl cried eerily from a cypress tree. I hid in a nest of cyclamen and fell asleep. My father came in his chariot to find me. “You wander furiously,” he said, “then, like a cub, fall asleep. I will call you Bear.”

In spite of the mishap I soon ran away again, and my coming to manhood served only to legitimize what, for a child, was forbidden. I visited Veil with its cyclopean walls, and proud, drab little Rome, where Tarquin the Proud was ruling a restless people. I visited the Sybarites, who cover their highways with canvas to shade their delicate complexions. I studied the Mysteries at Borsippa, near Babylon, and navigation at Carthage. But wherever I went I dreamed of somewhere else, another city, another sea, and being a young man of wealth and leisure, with parents who humored if not encouraged me, I was able to go where I chose.

Thus it was that I began the last of all my voyages, the longest and by far the most perilous, in search of love. It began, like the other voyages, with a simple wish to explore. My people, the Etruscans, had founded a colony at Adria, on the eastern coast of Hesperia. It was young; it piqued my sense of adventure. I bought passage on a small merchantman, the Turan, and skirting the hostile cities of Magna Graecia, sailed up the coast of Adria. Three days sufficed to show me the town, a mere hamlet of sickly cattle and plain women, with never a sign of Gauls. The real adventure began when I returned south with the Turan. A sudden shore wind swept us away from land and, dead in our path, a jagged island stabbed from the sea. A palace in the style of the old Cretan sea-kings, with white walls, blue pediments, and red columns swelling into bulbous capitals, descended in rooms and courtyards toward the water, and stairways circled down to the lapping waves. Feathery tamarisk trees leaned against the walls and a forest of cedars flanked the lowest stairs.

“I would like to go ashore,” I said. Vel, the captain, looked doubtful.

“These are still Greek waters,” he muttered, fingering his pointed beard. Greeks and Etruscans, I knew, raided each other’s shipping without scruple and then raised cries of piracy.

“If a ship comes, leave me.” I brandished a leather pouch of asses, or gold and silver coins.

“You want the dinghy?” He pointed to the small boat attached to our stern.

“No, I’ll swim.” Already I was stripping off my tunic.

“Watch yourself. Our Lady Turan was struck by lightning last night.” I saw that the ship’s figurehead, the goddess whom the Greeks call Aphrodite, was charred and cracked.

I shuddered. Only a fool ignores an omen. Was the goddess protesting my notorious indifference to love by striking her own statue, as if to say, “The next bolt will not strike wood!”? Unmarried at twenty-five, I was not such a man as Turan took to her heart.

Nonsense, I told myself. The captain has offended her—such a greedy man!—or one of the crew has forsaken a girl in a port. I dove in the water and, skirting a school of dolphins which brazenly barred my path, drew myself into the stairs at the foot of the palace. Turquoise lizards, bright as Egyptian scarabs, scurried over my feet. Sand lay heavy on stone. There were no human footprints; only the tracks of an animal, a deer’s perhaps. I climbed the stairs, my bare feet crunching the sand, and entered the palace beneath a lintel of blue gypsum. At once I stepped into an audience chamber dominated by a tall throne of porphyry. On the painted walls leaped dolphins, bluer than skies after storm, and anemones flowered in submarine meadows. Sunlight from clerestory windows lit motes of dust into tiny embers and kindled the red tile floor into burning coals. The hooves of an animal echoed in a distant corridor.

True to my nickname, Bear, I like to prowl, and room by room I explored the palace. In the highest chamber, swallows had built a nest from mud and leaves. A couch with the feet of a lion hunched in the rear. Vials of brilliant glass—amethyst red, and amber—littered the floor like a burst of mushrooms in a temple garden. On one wall, a slim-waisted athlete vaulted a charging bull; on another, a bare-breasted woman, with coiling black curls, sang to a warrior as he boarded his ship. Her eyes were loving and very sad.

Her sadness—indeed, that of the entire palace, with its air of age and neglect—depressed me. I hurried from the room and the palace and down the great stairway to the sea. I paused on the lowest step to feel the sun on my body and catch its rays in the serpent ring I wore. But shadows, not sun, still held me. I lowered myself in the water and swam for the figurehead of the Lady Turan, whose wooden arms looked warm and hospitable. This time the dolphins, one of them a rare albino, parted to let me pass.

Something grasped my ankle. I kicked vigorously, and freed myself. The opaque waters hid my attacker. Warily I resumed my swim. Again the grappling, gentle but insistent; I turned, lunged below the surface, and rose with a prisoner. He struggled at first, then lay still and looked at me with neither fear nor anger—as if to say, “What now?” It was a boy. His hair, the green of seaweed, was fine and silken; long like mine, but loose instead of bound in the usual fillet. I tried to hide my surprise.

“I was playing that you were my father,” he said.

At twenty-five I could hardly imagine myself the father of a boy who looked about twelve, though with current marriage customs, a bride at twelve, a groom at fourteen, it was not unthinkable.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said. “I followed you when you swam ashore—and waited.”

I released him and treaded water. “No, I don’t mind. But what is my part in the game?”

He showed not the slightest fear of me. “Oh,” he said. “To give chase, which you did splendidly. And then to talk.” He pointed to the island. “Over there. You will be more comfortable.”

I drew myself onto the steps and gave him a hand. He hesitated. “I want to stay in the water.”

“Nonsense. Then I will have to talk down to you.”

He took my hand and thumped beside me. I understood his hesitation. His boy’s body ended with the tail of a fish, green, sparkling and sinuous. In the waters around Hesperia, Tritons were as rare as hippocampi and, in fact, almost extinct. Thus, I had not suspected his identity even when I had seen his hair.

He looked uncomfortable and shyly edged toward the water.

I touched his shoulder. “We haven’t talked yet. I think we have a great deal to tell each other. Do you know, I have always wanted to be a Triton. I love to swim, but my legs get tangled in the water.” To show what I meant, I twisted my legs and floundered over the stairs.

He laughed for the first time. “Yes, I see what you mean. But on land my tail gets tangled!”

“We’ll trade sometime. But now you must tell me your name.”

“Astyanax. I got it out of Homer. A sailor once told me about Prince Hector and how he had a son, Astyanax, whom he loved dearly. Hector hated to go to war because he had to leave his son. He tried not to frighten him with his flashing armor. I thought that if I named myself Astyanax, perhaps I would find a Hector.”

“You have no parents?”

“I lost them in a storm and never found them again. That was three years ago.”

“You’ve been alone since then?”

“Sometimes I follow ships, and the sailors toss me grapes. I have to be careful, though. Some of them want to catch me to show in the ports. What’s your name?”

“Arnth,” I said, “though often I am called Bear.”

“Ah,” he said. “You like to rummage—in palaces and such. Like a bear on the prowl.”

“And then I curl up and sleep.”

“Indeed, you have sleepy eyes. I will certainly call you Bear.” He paused. “Were you looking for Circe?”

“Circe, the enchantress?” I cried. “Is that who lived in the palace?”

“Yes, but you are much too late. A hundred years ago—so the dolphins say—a galley came for her, rowed by pygmies. Bears and rabbits, gathered to say goodbye. She smiled at them and spoke a few words—multiply, don’t eat each other, and that kind of thing. When she boarded the galley, a black boy fanned her with ostrich feathers, and a crimson canopy shielded her from the sun. One of the bears—you will love this part—jumped into the water and swam after her, but she waved him back and disappeared into the misty south.”

“Did the bear get back to shore?”

“Oh, yes. His friends helped him up the stairs. He became, in fact, something of a hero.” He hesitated and smiled sheepishly. “I made up the bear because I thought he would please you.”

“It was a charming touch. But tell me more about Circe. Was she still beautiful? Odysseus knew her many centuries ago.”

“The dolphins say she was like the sun, white and burning. When she left it was the sun sinking into the sea.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“Beyond the Pillars of Hercules.”

“North to the Isles of Tin?”

“South along the coast of Libya.”

“How far?”

“Who knows? To the land of the Gorillae, perhaps.”

My senses reeled. Libya, the continent of mist and jungles, pygmies and giants, griffins and sphinxes, and yes, the hairy, horrible Gorillae. The Phoenicians claim that a Tyrian captain once sailed through the Red Sea and around the continent from east to west, but who can believe such a boast? Whether, as Homer thought, the earth is flat and surrounded by the stream of Ocean, or whether, as the Ionians think, it is shaped like a cone or a sphere, a voyage around Libya is like searching for the Golden Fleece—without the help of Jason.

He looked at me wisely. “You will go to find her?”

“To look for her, perhaps.”

He shook his head. “I wish you were Greek instead of Etruscan.”

“Why?”

“Because I would like to go with you, but you are too sad. Like most Etruscans.”

“Etruscans sad?” I protested. “Our robes are as gay as flowers. We dance and sing even at funerals, and paint our tombs with banquets and chariots.”

“Ah,” he said, “but your eyes are sad. They give you away.”

It was true, of course. In the polished bronze of a mirror, the eyes which met my stare were dark and slanted, like those of my ancestors, the Lydians, and old with accumulated sorrows, with the weight of dead cities, buried and moldering, of battles and tortures and beautiful shameless queens who smiled and shook poison from rings like golden spiders.

He saw that the truth had hurt me. “Except for your eyes,” he added, “you look like”—he searched for words—“a well-kept farm! There is plenty of meat to hide your bones, and your cheeks are as red as apples. Your eyes, of course, don’t belong to the farm. They belong to the woods.” His tail sparkled greenly with drops of sea-water, but his chest and shoulders were as pale as foam. Translucent skin traced the delicate bones of his face, and his green, deep-set eyes looked faintly shadowed, as if he were tired or a little hungry.

I ran my hand through his hair. “Astyanax,” I said, “I must leave you soon. But first come aboard my ship and dine with me.”

He hesitated.

“I am not going to steal you.”

“Perhaps you should.” He plunged in the water. “Hold to my tail,” he called. “I will give you a ride!”

When we reached the side of the ship, the crew and the captain crowded the bulwarks. They threw us a rope and Astyanax, using his tail for propulsion, clambered up the side. When I reached the deck, I found him surrounded by sailors. Three of them, adolescent brothers who swaggered like old salts and went by the name of the Black Rats, eyed him with rudeness.

“You may touch my tail,” he said with dignity. “Everyone wants to.”

The Black Rats snickered in unison and one of them said, “Not us, boy. We can look.” White, thin, with soiled black hair and dirty faces, they resembled unwashed turnips.

“You are wise not to touch him,” I snapped. “Your dirt might rub off.” Vanishing into the cabin, I returned with a bunch of grapes and a rhyton of mild red vine. Astyanax emptied the vessel with a single rapid gulp.

“Drinks like a fish,” the one-eared sailor muttered, but Astyanax ignored the remark and crammed his mouth so full of grapes that he looked like a field mouse gorging himself on grain. All the while, he peered around him at the fixtures of the ship, its furled yellow sail, its wicker cabin, and its deck of Etruscan cypress.

“The goats of Amphitrite are starting to kick,” said the captain impatiently, pointing to the white-capped waves which had begun to slap the bow. “It is time to sail.”

Astyanax ate more slowly. “I would like more grapes,” he said when he had finished the first bunch.

I handed him another bunch. “You must take these with you.”

“I want to join your crew,” he announced.

“It isn’t my crew. I am just a passenger.”

He turned to the captain. “Is there room for another passenger? I can fish and mend sails to pay my passage.”

“Can you stay out of water for days at a time?”

“No,” he admitted. “I dehydrate.”

“Well, then, you can’t be a passenger. Over the side now. The goats are impatient.” Indeed, the ship was rocking from side to side as if she were being slapped by a Cyclops.

He wriggled across the deck. I knelt to lift him over the bulwark. He shook his head. “My tail is adequate.”

Poised on the bulwark, he turned and looked at me. “Thank you for the conversation,” he said, and before I could tell him goodbye, he hit the water.

I helped the men lower the sail—I felt a need to keep busy—and the Turan cut through the goats like a wolf through a flock. I will not look back, I thought. If I mean to find Circe, how can I encumber myself with a fish-tailed boy who eats like a whale?

However, I did look back, sneakily, like a fox that has stolen a pullet. The island had dwindled until the red columns of the palace seemed slender wounds in the white immaculate walls, and yes, Astyanax followed a few hundred feet in our wake. He raised his hand and called, “Bear, goodbye!”

“Lower the sweeps!” I shouted. The sailors looked at the captain, and the captain looked at me.

“Has the moon possessed you?” he growled. “There is nothing to stop for here.”

“You can double my fare,” I said. “I am taking on a friend.” I seized a sweep, a long wooden oar with a blade of double width, and thrust it into the sea. The ship veered sharply to the right.

“Oh, very well,” grumbled Vel. He lowered a sweep on the starboard and returned the ship to its course, with speed considerably reduced.

Astyanax soon overtook us. I threw him a rope and he climbed, laughing, into my arms. I heard him mumble a name.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Hungry,” he said. “I lost my grapes.” I think he really said “Hector.”

I did not suspect the difficulties—dangers, I should say—which hunched like sphinxes along the road to Circe. The trouble started almost at once—not Circe’s part in it; not yet, anyway. I had paid the captain for Astyanax’ passage, and the Triton had kept his promise to fish for the crew. But Vel was not appreciative. First he complained that the fish were small and bony. “Fit for him, perhaps. Not for me.” Then he said, “Tritons are Greek, not Etruscan. How do we know he isn’t spying for pirates?” The mood of the captain soon infected his crew. The Black Rats, petulant as well as soiled, began to grow insufferable. When Astyanax stretched on the deck to take a sunbath, one of them stepped on his tail and then made the limp apology, “Mistook him for a hawser.”

“It looks,” I said to Astyanax, when the Rat had crossed the deck, “as if we may have trouble before Agylla.” Located close to Caere, my home, Agylla was the port where we hoped to find ship and crew to begin our search.

“Don’t worry,” said Astyanax, pointing to a rare white dolphin in the wake of the Turan. “Her name is Atthis. She has been following us ever since Aeaea. A ship with a white dolphin enjoys good luck.”

The luck, it seemed, belonged to the ship and crew but not her passengers. A week after our departure from Aeaea, Astyanax woke me in the middle of the night. I heard him thump noisily onto the floor of our cabin—cabin? It was little more than canvas stretched over timbers, but at least it gave shelter and privacy.

“Are you going for a swim?” I asked.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.

I was well aware that the thump had been deliberate. When he woke in the night, he liked conversation. “Can’t you wait till morning?”

“By then my tail will be stiff.”

I climbed out of bed and threw a cloak across my shoulders. “I’d better go with you and ask Vel to lower our speed. You might lose us in the night.” The vessel was dark except for the fitful burning of a torch enclosed in a dried bladder. It was not usual for ships to sail at night; much more often they dropped anchor in convenient coves and waited for the coming of Thesan, the Lady of the Dawn, whom the Greeks call Eos. But the weather was clear and Vel preferred the sea to the doubtful refuge of a coast which belonged to the Greeks.

With Astyanax in my arms, I stepped from the cabin. Most of the crew was asleep beneath a thick tarpaulin, but Vel and the one-eared sailor, huddled at the prow, were talking and motioning. I waited in the doorway. Something in their tone, a hushed excitement, a hint of conspiracy, warned me to pause and listen. The wind brought words in ominous snatches.

“In Graviscae,” said the one-eared sailor, “…slave market…sell him on the block…Tritons are rare…good price.”

“What about his friend?…can’t sell freeborn Etruscan…”

“Brand him…pass him off as criminal condemned to slavery…”

At first I wanted to laugh. Sell us into slavery? Incredible! My second thought was less reassuring. My travels had never led me to Graviscae, but the captain, no doubt, was known in the port. If he wished to sell us into slavery, who would believe that the Triton did not belong to Vel, and that I myself had begun the voyage as a passenger? In truth Astyanax would bring a handsome price. I had seen a centaur, trapped in the hills, sold to a troop of traveling acrobats who wanted him in their show. As for myself, sleek rather than brawny, I was hardly fit to become an acrobat, field hand, or gladiator, but I knew that Etruscan ladies, bored with their husbands, sometimes bought slaves for purposes other than work. After I was sold, I might convince my master (or mistress) of my true identity, but Astyanax by then would have gone to a different master and I might have lost him for good. The thought of that sea-loving boy as a slave appalled me.

The wind rose to a whistling howl. I did not hear when they meant to take us captive. I stepped back into the cabin and sat on the couch to think.

Astyanax spoke with more excitement than fear. “We shall have to swim for it, Bear!”

“We’re a good ten miles from shore. I can’t swim that far.”

“Not even if I push?”

“Not even then.” I deliberated. “But there’s always the dinghy moored to the stern.”

“Isn’t it a bit—well, undignified? As if one were skulking to safety.”

“Skulking or not, the dinghy is our best chance.” Once ashore, we might fall prey to the Greeks, but even they were preferable to Vel and his Black Rats. I secreted a dagger in my loincloth. Everything else—my chest, my sandals, my sword, even my money pouch—I would have to leave in the cabin.

“What shall we do for provisions?” asked Astyanax, eyeing a bunch of grapes on a table beside the couch.

“Go hungry until we reach the shore.”

He crammed his mouth with grapes.

I lifted the canvas and peered on deck.

“All clear?” he whispered.

“All clear.”

The sides of the cabin hid us from Vel and his friend at the prow and also the navigator manning the sweep at the stern. I gave Astyanax my knife. A strong swimmer, he could match the speed of the Turan and cut the cord which held the dinghy. He clung to my back as I crept under the canvas. At the edge of the ship, I held him over the bulwark and let him slide from my hands. The wind and the waves muffled the sound of his dive. I dove after him. The hull diminished like a black, retreating whale and left me in foam and the almost-darkness of a sickle moon.

By now Astyanax had cut the dinghy’s rope. Still in the water, he thrust the little boat in my direction. I clambered over the edge and gave him a hand. The vanishing ship had left a faint white trail, as if the Lady Moon had walked with phosphorescent sandals.

I slid my fingers along the bottom of the boat. The boards were moist with sea-slime. “There’s no paddle,” I sighed. “We’ll have to trust to the current.”

“Why don’t I push?” He readied himself to dive.

I reached to stop him. “No!” I cried, sensing danger. Perhaps I had seen a movement under the waves.

“But I live in the water,” he protested. “I’m not afraid—“

The sea exploded beside us and a white shape arched above our heads. I ducked and shivered as water showered my neck.

“Atthis!” shouted Astyanax. “I’ll ask her to give us a shove.”

I peered at the water. Low, choppy waves tossed in the feeble moonlight. “Are you sure she’s friendly?” I asked.

As if to answer my question with a resounding “No,” the end of our dinghy shot into the air and Astyanax and I rolled like peas from a pod. The boat slid under the surface and reappeared, capsized and low in the water.

We clung to the keel. Atthis circled us with rapid, lessening loops. It was hard to tell her intention: if she meant to attack or wished to atone for throwing us into the sea. I felt her smooth white snout brush against the soles of my feet, inquisitive, exploratory, as if to examine my skin, feel my pulse, fathom my thoughts. My thoughts at the moment were not charitable. I will kick her, I told myself, if she touches me again. Then I remembered the shark-killing teeth behind her impassive face.

The men on the Turan had seen our accident. The ship had turned and now she bore down on us like a great black Harpy.

“Swim for it,” I pleaded with Astyanax. “They’ll never catch you.”

“Bear,” he reproved, “you don’t expect me to leave you?”

“They won’t hurt me. It’s you they want.”

“We will think of a way to outwit them.”

I gave him a shove from the boat. “Astyanax, go!” He clung to my hand with thin, tenacious fingers. Defeated, I drew him beside me and cradled him with my arm. “Well, then, we shall face them together.”

Vel shouted from the deck. “We’ll run you down unless you surrender peaceably. Both of you.”

Astyanax swore under his breath: “Nethuns, god of the deep, feed him to sharks and cuttlefish!” But he wisely restrained his utterances when the captain threw us a rope.

Hand over hand, he followed me onto the deck. Silent, inscrutable, the white dolphin watched us from the water.

The captain bound our hands. He removed his signet ring, a gold shark with gaping jaws. “Heat it in the torch,” he said to the one-eared sailor, “It will serve as a brand.”

II: THE HALCYON FINDS A CREW

To the north lay Elba, the island of iron and copper; to the east, the port of Graviscae, with quays and canals and red-tile houses laid in terraced rows. Behind the port the twin ridges of Tarquinia jutted against the sky: one a necropolis; one the capital city of Etruria, with walls of mortarless stone and battlemented towers, arched entrances and basalt thoroughfares. Olive groves flanked the ridges, and cypress trees, like bronze inverted cones, shaded the highways which joined Tarquinia to her port.

We moored near the mouth of a canal roofed by a massive barrel vault. Preceded and followed by Black Rats, I descended the ship’s ladder and received Astyanax from the arms of the one-eared sailor. Like the other male slaves in Etruscan cities, I was stripped and barefoot. Nakedness in itself did not embarrass me; Etruscans, used to a climate which discourages excessive clothing, are not a modest people. But nakedness, as now, in the heart of a town, signified shame and the loss of liberty. What was more, I carried on my forearm a brand in the shape of a shark. If I called for help, the entire crew of the Turan would point to the scar and insist that I belonged to Vel, who had the right to sell me. Astyanax, fortunately, had not been branded. Vel did net want to mar him as a curiosity.

Beyond the vault a midday sun blazed on a forest of sails. There was no real harbor, but a network of moles and jetties buttressed the small indentations of the coast, and a multitude of ships lay moored or anchored: Sardinian cargo boats in the shape of plowshares; Tyrian traders redolent of cedar; Greek penteconters, ironically berthed beside the same Etruscan merchantmen which, on the high seas, sometimes fell prey to their speed and their vicious beaked prows. The Etruscan ships, both merchant and war, were broader and taller than the Greek, slower but far more seaworthy in rough waters. Some looked battered, with rent sails and crusted hulls, and I guessed that they must have returned from the stream of Ocean, where the waves were as tall as palaces. I looked frantically for someone I knew—a captain with whom I had sailed, a visitor from Caere. I looked in vain.

Away from the ships, the highways rumbled with chariots hammered from bronze and wooden carts on ponderous wheels of stone. Pedestrians walked the footpaths beside the highways and, bright as coquina shells, paraded their colored robes—Tyrian purple, red of cinnabar, yellow of saffron crocuses—or their silken loin cloths, trimmed with gilt and artfully tapered to flatter the wearer’s hips. I had walked with such crowds in most Etruscan cities; I had worn robes whose color rivaled the halcyon, and I had carried a sword at my side. Women had stared at me, and I had returned their stares indifferently, sleepily, if at all, confident that she whom I sought did not inhabit the city, but waited, patient and dreaming at the end of my furthest voyage. Today I walked as a slave, and the women looked over or through me or at the Triton I carried in my arms. I heard them whisper:

“A Triton!”

“A boy with a tail!”

“And hair to match!”

But no one said, “Look at the man who carries him!”

The Mart of the Slaves was a square in the middle of that larger square, the town marketplace: a small paved island surrounded by the canvas-roofed stalls of farmers selling their grapes and fishermen their tunnies and herring. A low platform, set against a wooden backdrop, rose like the stage of a theater and allowed the slaves to parade or be prodded like actors. We had to wait our turn. Vel, the three Black Rats, and the one-eared sailor shoved me into a circle beside the platform.

A young woman with cinnamon hair, probably a Greek, stood on the block. Nude, she turned at her owner’s prompting to display her full, perfect breasts and the bold flare of her thighs. She looked supremely bored and her eyes seemed to say, “You needn’t expect me to cringe like a pale little virgin. I have been sold before.” Several young gallants were bidding against each other in excited voices. Finally she went for five hundred asses to a youth who stepped forward to claim her with great eagerness and promptly lost his tongue. Embarrassed and diffident, he covered her shoulders with a fine embroidered cloak and led her down from the block. She shook her head, rippling the cinnamon hair, and allowed the cloak to reveal her handsome breasts.

Astyanax, however, did not have eyes for the Greek. He pointed to a lady of fashion whose small leather moccasins tilted up at the toes like the bow of a boat. “Does she grow that way or is it just her shoes?”

Before I could answer his question, a Black Rat jerked him out of my arms and onto the block. I saw with dismay that Astyanax planned to bite him. But he seemed to change his mind, hesitant, no doubt, to risk a fall on his tail. Flanked by two Black Rats, I had to keep my place. Restless daggers jiggled in their hands.

Etruscan aristocrats, both men and women, dominated the audience; poor men could not afford to bid for slaves. Sandwiched among the Etruscans, a party of visiting Romans, in spite of their solemnity and their dignified white togas, ogled Astyanax like red-faced farmers. Rome, after all, is an overgrown village, and villagers gape when they come to the city. Astyanax did not let their rudeness disconcert him. He rocked his tail rhythmically, as a walker swings his arms, and met their stares. In addition to Etruscans and Romans there were two boys, fifteen and sixteen, I judged, whose wheat-colored hair marked them as Gauls or Scandians and probably also as brothers. Their loincloths were gray and tattered; they wore neither rings nor bracelets and their hair, far from the flowing elegance of the wealthy, was short and wind-blown. It was clear that they could not bid, but they looked at Astyanax eagerly, as if they hoped to make friends. He returned their smiles. In spite of his predicament, he had not lost his sense of adventure.

At last Vel himself ascended the block, his pointed beard glittering in the sun, his signet ring flashing sinister fires, and accepted Astyanax from the Black Rat. He turned to face the audience.

“As you see,” he began, “I offer more than a slave to till the fields or carry a lady’s lifter. I offer a Triton fresh from the sea!”

“You make me sound like a mullet,” Astyanax snapped. Vel ignored him. “Fresh from the sea, and free of barnacles.”

“But what does he do?” cried one of the Romans. “He can’t even walk. Could he help me on my farm?”

A practical people, the Romans. They demand that everything have a specific purpose.

Vel stammered. “He—he—“

Astyanax could not contain himself. Glaring at Vel, he took command of the sale. “Do?” he cried. “I fish, swim, boat, and dive for sponges. I mend nets, caulk hulls, and milk sea-cows. I can narrate stories to make a sailor blush. And what is more,” he added with emphasis, “I supply—and provoke—sparkling conversation.”

The Romans craned their necks, arguing among themselves in the ponderous tongue called Latin. The lady with the curved slippers stepped forward demurely and bid in an ear-splitting voice:

“Two hundred asses!”

She explained to the friend beside her, a lady with large bosoms and orange curls, “I want him for the pool in my atrium. Think of the sensation when I have guests! They can make him dive for coins. Besides, he’s so decorative. The green tail, don’t you know. At banquets, I can drape him over a platter to garnish the oysters.”

“Nude?” asked her friend with ill-concealed shock.

“What should he wear, a tunic?” the tilt-toed lady snapped.

“Nude,” muttered her friend. “And telling those salty stories.”

“Three hundred asses,” cried one of the Romans, the one who had asked for the Triton’s accomplishments. When his friends looked at him in consternation, he growled, “You heard him. Says he can milk.”

“Four hundred,” said the lady, stamping her up-turned toes.

“Four hundred and fifty,” said the Roman, bunching his shoulders as if he were about to be charged by the Calydonian boars.

Astyanax looked indignant. “But the wench brought five hundred.”

“Five hundred, then!” cried the lady. Victory shone in her eyes and flushed her cheeks, as if, I thought, she had tippled unmixed wine. With relentless steps she mounted the stairs onto the block. “Baby,” she simpered and held out her braceleted arms. Astyanax, for the first time, looked frankly terrified.

But the lady was not, after all, to have him. One of the yellow-haired boys emerged from the crowd, mounted the block in a single muscular leap, and snatched Astyanax from the threatening jeweled embrace. Tossing him into the crowd where his blond brother waited with outstretched hands, he spun from the block and both brothers, Astyanax between them, vanished as if through the conjurations of Circe. The Black Rats forgot to watch me. Like everyone else, they were dazed by the sudden daring of the theft. Easing rather than springing, I too made my escape.

My first problem was to find a robe, even before I could find Astyanax. The mere fact of my being nude and branded like a slave did not in itself endanger me. On the business of their masters, slaves moved freely throughout the town. But if Vel sent his men to search for me, they would look for a slave and not a man in a cloak. I passed a stall where cloaks were hung on hooks and shoes were laid beneath them—moccasins of kid, sandals with wooden soles, high yellow boots. The shopkeeper was fastening a sword to the side of an elderly aristocrat. The old gentleman threw back his shoulders and attempted to swagger like a conquering general. No one was watching me. Without compunction, almost without fear, in one continuous motion, I lifted a cloak from a hook—red, with a border of yellow griffins poised for flight—and stepped in a pair of moccasins. To tell the truth, I rather enjoyed the theft. I was tired of behaving. I must have caught Astyanax’ sense of adventure.

The moccasins were nondescript, but the cloak identified me as a gentleman and also concealed my brand. Now I could look for Astyanax. Though the town was both large and strange, I could make inquiries. The passage of two boys and a Triton could not have gone unnoticed. The fact remained, however, that Vel and his men could also inquire; that they, too, were searching and sooner or later were sure to cross my path.

I found Astyanax sooner than I had dared to hope. The brothers, one of them holding the Triton, stood on a pier and stared at a round-built ship between two galleys of war. A new ship. Blue of hull, sleek as a dolphin, freshly painted, and fragrant with cedar and cypress, she loomed like a cabin boy’s dream. A ship for wandering; for uncharted seas and fabulous monsters; for finding Circe. But now was hardly the time to admire a ship. Bounding onto the pier, I snatched Astyanax from the arms of the taller brother.

“Bear!” he cried, delighted. “Where have you been?”

“Ve didn’t vant him to be sold,” said the taller brother with a slight Scandian accent. His name, I learned, was Balder; his brother was Frey. Their father had come from frozen Scandia, the land of Odin and Thor, the Thunderer. “That lady might have stuffed him.”

“Ve vanted him for ourselves,” confessed the lesser brother.

I looked nervously down the pier. “Explanations can wait. Now we must take cover.”

But the brothers had more to say. “Vanted him for our animal,” Frey explained. “The Woodpeckers have a goat and the Griffins a Molossian hound.” He seemed to refer to rival street gangs. “I don’t suppose you vould lend him.”

Astyanax brightened with pleasure, like a discus thrower coveted by rival teams. It suddenly occurred to me that he might prefer the company of boys to that of a wanderer like myself.

“Do you want to be their animal?” I asked with a catch in my throat.

He shook his head and turned to the boys. “I’m traveling with Bear.”

“But he’s so elderly,” cried Frey. “He must be—twenty-six!”

“Yes, but he has experience.”

“Twenty-five,” I muttered.

The boys looked at him and then at me. “Be good to him, sir,” said Balder.

“First we must hide him—and us,” I said. Already it was too late. The Black Rats charged us from the street. Quick as a snake, I flicked out a foot and tripped the first of them. He spun toward the ground, recovered himself like a cat, and kicked me in the shin. I swayed on a single leg and balanced Astyanax in front of me. All this time the Triton was swearing and waving his arms. I had not suspected the eloquence of his oaths—I should have, sailors had helped to educate him.

“Zeus, Hera, Ares, Artemis, and Hades,” he swore at the hapless Rat, “blast you with thunderbolts, drown you in whirlpools, feed you to Scylla and Charybdis.” Then, remembering that he was in Etruscan territory, he added Tinia, Uni, Mantus, Vanth, and even a Roman god, Janus. “And may Charon roast your liver in burning asphalt.”

When the Rat charged us again, Astyanax swung from my arms and swatted him with his tail. The Rat reeled to the edge of the pier and, helped on his way by the sudden thrust of my foot, fell into the water. Together, it seemed, Astyanax and I made a formidable combination, a self-propelled battering ram. Flushed with victory, we rolled to help the brothers.

We found that they did not need us. Four young heads, two blond, two black, their hues as opposite as salt and pepper, bobbed in a tempest of limbs. Balder and Frey, at first, fought back to back, but soon they took the offensive and surged like catapults sweeping to storm a battlement. When Frey tottered beneath the blows of a Rat, the resourceful Balder, hurling his own assailant into a heap of overcurious spectators, leaped to succor him, and seconds later the brothers stood in monumental grandeur, crossing their arms like victorious gladiators. Meanwhile, the Rat I had kicked from the pier had clambered out of the water and, looking for a change like a well-washed turnip, slunk into the crowd, where he joined his battered brothers.

“They will go for Vel,” I said. “Now we must really hide.” I looked at the ship and thought, Why not buy her? At the moment I had no money, but a few days’ sailing would bring us to Agylla, the port of Caere, my home. If I could convince the owner of my credit, Astyanax and I could sail on our voyage for Circe, and while we bargained, the ship would hide us from Vel.

Followed by the brothers and still carrying Astyanax, I climbed onto the deck, which sparkled with fresh-hewn timbers of cypress wood.

“Look,” said Astyanax, pointing to the figurehead. “He is just my age!” The figure of a boy, cunningly carved from wood, strained from the prow with his arms outstretched to the wind. “Come,” he seemed to say. “I will lead you to Circe.” I recognized Tages, the boy with an old man’s wisdom, who had stepped from a clod of earth and given Tarchon, our national hero, the sacred books of Etruria.

A young man emerged from the cabin and looked at us with more sadness than surprise, though we must have appeared disreputable, a Triton, two young ruffians with bloodied faces, and a doubtful gentleman with a rich cloak but no other sign of status.

“Is she for sale?” I asked.

“Yes,” he sighed, as if he were putting his wife on the auction block.

A good trader conceals his eagerness—shows himself interested but not avid—and Etruscans, with merchant ships in every sea, are the best of traders. But I had no time in which to dissimulate.

“Your ship has bewitched me,” I said. “I would like to buy her.”

“She is right out of the shipyards at Cosa—built to my own design. But I can’t afford to keep her.” He wore a domed hat and trim red boots which gave him, from a distance, an air of jauntiness. But his large black eyes were mournful even for an Etruscan.

Just then I spied the one-eared sailor, the three Black Rats, and Vel himself advancing down the street. They paused to question a sailor.

“Will you show us the cabin?” I asked quickly. We followed the owner into the cabin. The entire vessel, he told me, was fifty feet long and twelve in width. The cabin, though cramped into eight square feet, held a couch with the legs of a bear, a three-legged brazier, a bronze mirror with a curving handle, and a cabinet of citrus wood from Carthage. Above my head a small clay lamp, owl-shaped and painted black, hung from the wicker ceiling.

I sat on the couch and the young man, whose name was Aruns, sat beside me, or rather slumped, for he seemed on the verge of tears. Lovingly he caressed a cushion.

“Goose feathers sewn in silk,” he said. “You will sleep like a lotus-eater. As you may have guessed, I’m rather fond of my ship—everything about her. But Greek pirates have preyed on my other ships, and now I must sell the queen.”

I touched his shoulder. “If you sell your queen to me, I will treat her royally.” Now came the awkward moment to discuss the terms of payment. “I can’t pay you at once.” I explained, and told him my story without evasion. Finally I threw back my cloak and exposed the brand on my forearm. “If you sail me to Agylla, I can pay you in gold and silver—generously.”

“Of course I believe you,” he said. “Your story is much too preposterous to be invented, and no swindler would travel about with a Triton and two ragamuffins. Besides, I know an Etruscan aristocrat when I see one, brand or no brand. It’s something about the eyes. Their hunger is not for possessions—silks and gems, gardens and tall stone houses. They are used to such things. But what will you do for a crew? I have let mine go, and as for myself, I’ve never been more than a passenger on my ships, though I might help out with a captain to give me orders.”

“I think I can settle that now,” I said. I whispered to Astyanax. Jubilantly he turned to Frey and Balder. “Bear would like you to join our crew.”

“On this ship?” cried Balder. “It has been our dream!” They both hugged me at once, and the four of us, Astyanax in the middle, spun dizzily over the floor.

“Get your things,” I gasped. “If it suits Aruns, we’ll sail with the tide. We won’t even wait to load supplies.”

“We haven’t any things.”

“Tell your parents, then.”

“They died last year—swamp fever.”

I spoke quickly to hide my emotion. “Do you know ships at all?”

“We have sailed as cabin boys around Hesperia.”

“Where are you going?” asked Aruns.

“Beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Around Libya.”

“In search of a wicked enchantress,” Astyanax added.

“Who changes men into animals.” I expected the boldness of our venture to discourage him. If anything it made up his mind.

“May I come with you? I know the Halcyon like a daughter. On such a voyage, I think she will need a father.”

I engaged him at once and promised myself that, after we had found Circe, I would give him back his ship.

“Now I will show you the rest of the Halcyon,” he said.

Aruns stepped from the cabin and, assured that Vel and his men were nowhere in evidence, called us after him. To rest my arms, I deposited Astyanax in a coil of rope and followed Aruns’ finger as he pointed to the red linen sail, heaped at the foot of the mast.

“The tide is with us,” he said. “We have only to raise the sail and man the sweeps.”

“All we need now,” I said, “is a woman for luck. The Argonauts had Atalanta.”

“We have one,” called Astyanax from the bulwark. He pointed to the water. The snowy beak of a dolphin broke the surface. It was Atthis.

“I have just engaged her to be our pilot.”

“Atthis!” I cried. “But she is the one who capsized us and got us captured!”

“She is terribly ashamed, she says. The whole thing was an accident. She meant to surface beside us instead of under us. She has followed all this way to ask our pardon.”

I studied her in the water, remorseful, pleading, and yet without obsequiousness, a proud being humbled to ask forgiveness. If she told the truth, she had done her best to atone for the blunder.

I leaned over the bulwark. “Nice girl,” I said in the tone of a man coaxing his favorite dog. “Would you like to lead us?”

Astyanax whispered in my ear, “You mustn’t call her ‘girl.’ She is five years old—for a dolphin that’s as old as you are. Call her Atthis.”

I looked into her face and saw, for the first time, the dignity of a beak and an airhole. I had treated her like a child or a pet. She was neither, she was indefinably yet incontestably a woman, with pride and high intelligence.

“Atthis,” I said. “You will honor us by becoming our pilot.”

She opened her mouth and uttered a series of barks. “She says yes,” Astyanax interpreted.

“What else?”

“She says, ‘I will pilot Bear and serve him as he deserves.’”

The words were ambiguous, but I took them to be a compliment. “She actually called me Bear?”

“There isn’t a word for bear in her language. She had to improvise. She called you ‘The Furry Prowler’—two barks and a trailing squeak.”

“Now,” I began, “we shall—“

“Go to find Circe,” cried the brothers.

“And supplies,” said Astyanax. “And dinner.”

Our escape, after all, had not been difficult. It was only men who had tried to stop us. The women—and the woman—were still to come. Except Atthis.

III: OUT OF THE INNER SEA

In Agylla we took on supplies and I paid Aruns for the purchase of his ship.

“Remember,” I said, “she still belongs to you.”

We sailed north, hugging the coast of Hesperia. Fishermen rose in their skiffs and stared enviously at our red sail, which caught the sun like a net, and our blue, unbarnacled hull. They saw that a luck-bringing white dolphin not only accompanied but led us, and to share in our luck they shouted the blessings of the sea-god Nethuns, whom the Romans call Neptune. Astyanax manned the sweeps to hold us on course, and carefully scanned the waves, hoping to find his parents or other Tritons. The brothers tended the sail, a square of canvas divided into smaller squares by leather webbing and secured by forestays and afterstays; they set the yards with braces and reefed when a squall blew up, and we came about, tacked or ran with the wind. Aruns was lookout and I, as captain, moved freely about the ship and coordinated my crew. Atthis, of course, was pilot. With a skill beyond any man’s, she kept us from hidden shoals, which the Greeks call “Ants,” and nosed out currents that might increase our speed.

Late every afternoon we moored in a river mouth or a cove, triced the sail, and sent the brothers to bargain with local farmers for the produce of the land—figs, pomegranates, goat’s milk, eggs, chickens—or, in the wilder country, to hunt for boars and gather chestnuts. We built a fire on shore to cook our dinner, ate like seasoned adventurers, and afterward returned to the ship. While a pine-knot torch blazed above our heads, Aruns played double-pipes and the brothers danced, throwing their chins back, curving their hands, and in spite of their size brushing the deck as lightly as deer or conies. Atthis, who listened to the pipes through her tiny earholes, rolled on the surface in rapture. Sometimes Astyanax dove in the water and clung to her dorsal fin. More often he stayed on deck and, with touching wistfulness, watched the feet of the brothers. One of the boys might lift him and leap to the music and Astyanax would sway his arms with the grace of a practiced dancer.

One night, when Aruns had tired of playing the pipes, he bowed his head in thought. We quickly fell silent and hoped for a story, for he knew both Homer and Hesiod, the lore of Tages, the legends of Isis and Set. He had told us how Tarchon, the Lydian prince, had sailed to Hesperia and built a city with roads of basalt and temples raised on platforms; how Charon, the demon, waited for souls in Hades; and how gray-winged Vanth, goddess of fate, brooded above a world she did not love. Tonight he sang about Circe, and his rich, musical voice surged like the wine-dark sea:

Round that place lay the beasts of the mountain, lions and gray wolves

Whom with evil drugs administered Circe had enchanted…

Then the words of Odysseus’ friend, Polites, before he is metamorphosed:

Listen, O friends. One sings within as she weaves at her great loom.

Lovely the song she sings—the whole house throbs with the music—

Goddess it may be she is, or a woman…

Lit by the torch, the mast seemed a burning tree; somewhere ashore a wolf cub howled in hunger and, very close, a lamb bleated in terror. I thought of Circe, the end of all my voyages, the last and loveliest of the will-o’-the-wisps I had chased through twenty-five years. A hyacinth over the hill, a murex at the bottom of the sea: the distant and the perilous. I had sometimes loved in the past, for a week or a month; one girl had tired me with tears, another with laughter; I had tired of red hair and dark and hair the color of barley when the harvesters come with their scythes; and most of all, of the waiting which love demands, the standing still while the moon curves up the sky and birds fly south. But who could weary of Circe? Only Odysseus had left her, because of home.

“Do you think she will turn us into pigs?” asked Balder with shattering suddenness.

“Nonsense,” cried his brother. “Nobody knows such secrets.”

“The Egyptians knew them,” said Aruns. “Hence, their fondness for gods with the heads of jackals or cats. They are said to have taught them to the Cretans, and Circe, of course, is Cretan.”

“You won’t become a pig, Balder,” Astyanax reassured. “A mountain lion, perhaps, with tawny hair and powerful legs.”

Balder did not look consoled. “And Bar will be a bar?” He and Frey, with their Scandian accents, could not pronounce my name.

“Bear will be a prince, and Circe will take him for her lover.”

“Husband, you mean?” asked Balder, shocked.

“Lover,” Astyanax repeated. “Bear is too experienced to tie himself down. Like Odysseus, he will dally and depart.”

I concealed a yawn. Every evening, regardless of the conversation, an urge to sleep possessed me.

“Bear is sleepy,” Astyanax announced. “It is time for bed.”

Aruns and I shared the cabin, he on a reed mat, I on the couch with Astyanax at my feet. When the weather was clear Balder and Frey slept on deck; when it rained they descended to the hold among our supplies, the skins of wine, the great yellow cheeses, the jars of olive oil. In the morning they would smell of cheese and hurry to take a dip before Astyanax could threaten to eat them for breakfast. Atthis dozed on the surface beside the ship, opening her eyes several times a minute to avoid attack by sharks or other killers. The heavy sighs of her airhole, like thunderous snores, were noisily reassuring. I had almost forgotten my early doubts about her.

I stretched on the couch and, before I could fall asleep, felt Astyanax snuggle against my feet. I shivered. As usual he had taken a swim and forgotten to dry himself.

“Bear, what do you think Circe will change me into?”

“What do you want to be?”

“It has nothing to do with what I want. Odysseus’ men didn’t want to be pigs.”

“Maybe you deserve what you want.”

“No,” he said. “Nobody deserves that much.”

Then I fell asleep.

We skirted the coast of Liguria, keeping far from shore to avoid the bushy-haired natives who kidnap sailors and sacrifice them to a bloodthirsty god on Mt. Begos. The brothers grew daily taller, or so it looked, and their pale fair skin became brown with the sun. Aruns forgot to be sad. He persisted in wearing his red domed cap, since his hair was thinning on top, but otherwise he was hardly recognizable. When he scrubbed the Halcyon’s decks or mended her sail, his wistful eyes brightened like those of a parent. He loved her himself and knew her loved by us.

Twenty-six days after our departure from Graviscae, we docked at Massilia, the city of Artemis, and received a warm welcome from the Etruscan garrison, which had recently expelled the Greeks and captured the lucrative wine trade of the interior. Our stores replenished, our hold bulging with wineskins and our deck garlanded with acanthus leaves by the friendly inhabitants, we sailed for the Pillars of Hercules, a month’s voyage from Massilia.

* * * *

The western Pillar, like nothing human or animal, sprawled to the starboard; a thing of rock only, dry, barren, harsh, its limestone face pitted with caves. A single rock, it was said, had barred the access to Ocean till Hercules, bound for Erythea to fetch the cattle of Geryon, had burst it in two and mingled the waters of Ocean with the Inner Sea. But our way was nonetheless blocked. A formidable warship rounded the base of the rock; the lower deck bristled with oars, and the upper deck, hung with shields, glittered with helmeted warriors. Its vicious beak and glaring painted eyes lunged at us through the waves.

“It’s Carthaginian,” I said with a show of relief I did not entirely feel. “We have nothing to fear.” For many years Carthage and Etruria had joined their might by a treaty. While the powerful galleys of Carthage patrolled the Pillars and refused egress to the Greeks, they allowed Etruscans free passage to the Islands of Tin and to frozen Scandia. They had, however, to assure themselves of our identity; Greeks might sail in round-built Etruscan ship.

The galley snaked beside us. Sweat and leather, acrid and sweet at once, assaulted our nostrils. Armor winked in the sun. The shields on the gunwale burned like mirrors of polished bronze. Etruscans take pride in their armor; horsehair plumes wave proudly above their heads. The Carthaginians opposite us, bearded and heavy-browed, wore low plumeless helmets which thoroughly protected their skulls but seemed to say that war is an occupation and not an honor, a duty and not a glory. Where Etruscans temper their melancholy with a passionate zest for the moment, on the battlefield or at the banquet, Carthaginians seem always to walk in darkness, as if the black immensities of their continent have imbued their blood with shadows. They are morbid and humorless, though brilliant warriors and loyal friends.

The ships swayed together in the current. The Carthaginian oarsmen, not slaves but warriors like the men in armor, forestalled a collision with their blades. For a moment I feared that they would use their massive grappling hooks on the spotless decks of the Halcyon, and Aruns clutched a sweep as if to say, “Grapple at your risk!” But the captain was not so heartless. Standing on the upper deck, he called down to us. By now he had assured himself that Aruns and I, at least, were Etruscans. Robes could be borrowed or imitated but our almond eyes assured him of our lineage. The Scandians he seemed to take for slaves, and Astyanax he ignored.

“Bound for the Isles of Tin?” he boomed in a funereal but not unfriendly voice.

“Around Libya to the south,” I replied. It was pointless to tell him that we were following a woman who had preceded us by a hundred years. “A voyage of exploration.”

“Ah,” he said. “Etruria grows cramped at home. New colonies in the offing, eh? But you will find little to interest you in the south. Though I have never sailed there myself, the Numidians say there is nothing but monsters—pygmies and giants and,” he added ominously, “fabulous beasts. Monoceroses, camelopards,”—he eyed Astyanax and lowered his voice—“Tritons, hippogriffs, and sphinxes.”

Aruns shuddered, and even the redoubtable brothers, who had snatched Astyanax out of the arms of Vel and fought the Black Rats without flinching, moved very close to each other.

“Don’t sail near the jungle,” the captain continued. “Hippogriffs lurk in the branches and might mistake your mast for a tree. I urge you to turn back at once—or sail northward, where the men are human even if they paint themselves blue. Why, half your crew are children!”

Frey and Balder looked offended. I hurried to add, “They’re experienced seamen.”

“What is experience against camelopards? It doesn’t keep you from getting eaten, and your slaves, if I may say so, look particularly edible.” To a dark Carthaginian, yellow hair was a marvel. “May Tanit go with you!”

The galley receded, dwindled to a far sea bird skimming the waves. An alien wind puffed our sail and bore us, foolish, frightened, and adventuresome, out of the Inner Sea, which, though large, held friendly ports and courteous captains, and into the stream of Ocean.

* * * *

After the warning of the Carthaginian captain, we had looked for beasts in the shape of monsters. Thus, we were not prepared for a creature so beautiful that Frey, staring, almost fell into the sea and Balder had to catch him by his feet. Then they stood side by side, arms on each other’s shoulders, and stared at the marvel with all the mute wonder of boys whose world had been a narrow peninsula; and I, the experienced traveler, pressed beside them with Aruns and Astyanax.

A forest of sun-drenched cedar trees, like tall green torches, flared into the sky, and the creature—I hesitate to call her a bird—trembled down from the treetops and strutted ostentatiously along a rock-strewn beach, as if to flaunt her orange fires against the dusky forest.

“It must be a phoenix,” I said. “The rarest bird in the world. Yet she isn’t even trying to hide.” I should have suspected a reason behind such boldness. “There’s a cove ahead. Shall we go ashore for a look?”

“I’ll stay aboard,” said Astyanax. “I would hold you back.” He wriggled across the deck and collected a rope which lay at the foot of the mast. “Here,” he said to Balder. “Capture the phoenix. Or else bring me a feather.”

Aruns agreed to stay on the ship with Astyanax. They watched from the deck as we paddled ashore in our dinghy, while Atthis swam in our wake and called goodbye with a whistle. I hated to exclude them from our promised adventure.

Hushed in our boat, we watched the phoenix strut like a queen of Carthage, decked in the barbarous colors of the south. The long graceful legs, black as onyx, the curving, swan-like neck, the plumage billowing a fountain of orange fire: here in truth was the fabled bird of the poets, the bird, so they sang, who ignited her own nest and, perishing among the spicy leaves, arose reborn from the ashes.

We stepped ashore on crumbling coral and broken shells.

“Ah,” sighed Frey. “She is going.”

A brazen queen to the last, unhurried and unembarrassed, she turned from the beach and stalked among the trees. Well, we had not expected her to wait for us.

A few hundred feet ahead of us, beyond the beach and a range of grassy hillocks, the cedar trees chattered with sunbirds, iridescent blue, purple, and green; and little oval nests; with porchlike roofs projecting above their entrances, hung from the branches. The birds were not singing; curious, expectant, altogether fearless, they seemed to be watching us. There was something malevolent about their watchfulness. It seemed that they almost wanted us to capture the phoenix, whose brilliant plumage eclipsed their lesser fires.

We entered the woods where the orange feathers had flickered into green shadows. Fallen needles crunched beneath our sandals and patches of undergrowth pricked us with thorns and burrs. The wide-spreading cedars, clustering needles and cones, broke the sunlight into pools and rivers, and aromatic fragrances tingled in our nostrils. A long-nosed incredible fennec peered at us from a thicket and wriggled his snout in patent mistrust. A gazelle skittered across our path. Where was the phoenix?

“Ve sound like an army,” said Frey. “Ve ought to split up.”

Without waiting for approval, he veered away from our path.

Balder called after him. “Vait, Frey. You can’t go alone. There may be beasts.”

“I am fifteen! I don’t need my bruder everyvere.”

Balder shrugged helplessly. “It is no good to go after him.”

“We have to go after him,” I said. “He may get lost. And the birds—“

The sunbirds were following us. Their reptile eyes smoldered with hatred. They were avid for something to happen, and not, it seemed, to the phoenix.

Balder caught my concern and charged ahead of me, calling his brother’s name: “FREY. Frey. Frey-y-y-y!”

Echoes and silence and then the shrill mockery of the birds.

Again: “FREY. Frey. Frey-y-y-y.”

At last the answer: “Balder! Bar!” Urgent, desperate. A cry for help.

We found him in a clearing where the sun on the grass seemed a pool of fire and we drew up sharply to keep from burning our feet. There were two birds in the clearing, neither of them the phoenix; larger than eagles, as large as men, with the breasts and faces of women. Their black, mottled wings resembled the skin of a snake. Their armless bodies curved into talons and oily feathers. Harpies. Centuries ago they had plagued the Black Sea and harassed Jason and the Argonauts. Like thieves with a bag of gold, roughly yet greedily, they were lifting the now unconscious body of Frey. Balder ran at them and snatched, too late, at his brother’s feet. They circled over his head and cackled harshly, flaunting their capture. The sunbirds piped approval.

Eyes, mouth, nostrils: the features of women, but joined together as if by a child modeling with clay, the eyes unmatched, the mouths twisted, agape, the nostrils projecting into horny beaks. Twisted. That was the word for them. Neither women nor birds, but—Harpies, horrors. Circling a last time, showering us with the fetid oil from their wings, they rose among the treetops, jerkily, and disappeared. The landscape, blackened by their presence, flickered back into greenery.

Except that a Harpy remained, concealed, no doubt, to cover her friends’ retreat. I did not see her until she flew at my head. The first time she brushed me with her wings—caressed, I should say—wetly, intimately. The bare skin of my shoulders crawled with the slime of her. I heard her laugh. The second time she came at my face, talons lowered like hooks from a fishing boat. I stood my ground until she was almost upon me. Ducking under the talons, I whirled and seized her by the back of her legs. She dragged me after her; my sandals skidded along the ground. But I kept my grip until Balder came to my help. He seized my waist, and together we bore her to earth. She writhed fiercely, then, realizing her helplessness, relaxed and looked at us with the arch, simpering smile of an old woman who thinks herself young and beautiful.

“Where have they taken him?” I cried. “Where is your nest?”

Grinning, she remained silent. Balder struck her across the mouth. “I vill kill you unless you tell us.”

The simper became a pout.

“Perhaps she doesn’t understand,” said Balder, eyeing her doubtfully.

“She understands,” I said. “If not the words, the meaning. Kill her, Balder. We’ll find the nest ourselves.”

I had only meant to frighten her, but he took me at my word. He grasped her scrawny neck between his hands—big hands, those of a man, not a boy of sixteen—and began to choke her. By the time I had him stopped, she was ready to show us the nest.

She spoke in a kind of whistling, archaic Greek. “It is not far. I will show you.”

We bound her wings with the cord we had brought for the phoenix. Since she had no arms and needed her legs to stand or walk, she could not attack us with her talons. Pausing to scatter the sunbirds with a few well-aimed rocks, we set off through the forest. Out of the air, the Harpy was slow and clumsy; her vicious power was reduced to a duck-like waddle.

She lost no chance to brush against our bodies. Her grin revealed yellow, rotted teeth. “My name is Podarge,” she whistled. She spoke the name with emphasis, as if she were saying ‘Helen’ or ‘Aphrodite.’ “If you let me go, I will tell my sisters you come as guests. We will give you our favors and send you on your way—your friend as well.”

“Favors?” whispered Balder. “Vhat does she mean?”

“Er, kisses,” I replied, as discreetly as possible.

Balder jerked on her rope. “The favor ve vant is to find my bruder unharmed.”

She walked quietly between us the rest of the way.

The nest of the Harpies, obviously patterned after those of the sunbirds, was a large, flat-topped oval, about the size of a cowshed, suspended from a branch by a thick, knotted cord. The walls were built of twigs and cemented with clay, and the roof which projected above the entrance was woven of rushes. It was not a graceful house. Where the nests of the sunbirds enjoyed the charm of smallness, this outsize counterpart bristled with twigs and bulged with excessive clay. Clumsy hands, it was obvious—or feet, I should say—had done the building. They had not neglected, however, to strip the supporting tree of all its branches except the one which held the nest. Without wings, it would not be easy to reach the nest, seventy feet or more above our heads.

“Call your friends,” I said.

Podarge gave a sharp, sustained whistle, bird-like, and yet with the high keening of a she-wolf. The nest swayed, the single limb groaned in its wooden socket. Two Harpies appeared in the entranceway.

“Return my bruder,” cried Balder. “If you don’t ve vill kill your friend.”

Podarge strained toward her sisters. Her bloodshot eyes widened in supplication. “Listen to them,” she shrilled. “They mean to kill me!”

“Kill her,” screamed the first. “The nest is too small for her now.”

“Kill her,” echoed the sister. Her look was anticipatory.

Podarge’s wings strained at their fetters. Her talons quivered as if they were rending flesh. Her face—well, it was the face of an old, evil woman who has collected crimes as some women collect intaglios and others, bronzes; a woman who, for once, had become the victim instead of the victimizer. She bared the stumps which served her for teeth. Like tree roots torn from a brackish pond, they oozed a yellow liquid.

“You don’t even have him,” cried Balder, running to the foot of the tree and shaking his dagger at the Harpies. Anger became him. I thought of the god for whom he was named, Balder, the Sun, stalwart and beautiful. He was still a boy, but his rage was titanic and timeless. “If you’ve killed him, I vill burn your tree!”

The Harpies vanished and reappeared with Frey between them. Bruised and semiconscious, he had to lean on their wings to support himself. He stared down dazedly and saw his brother. Recognition, like the sudden flaring of a lamp, lit his face. He held out his hand with infinite trustfulness, as if he expected his brother to reach across air and draw him to safety.

A Harpy spoke. “Burn us, burn your brother. Why not join him instead?”

“If you set him free, you can take me in his place.”

They seemed to deliberate, to view his beauty and measure him against his brother.

“I am taller,” he said. “Stronger. My arms are like hammered bronze.”

A Harpy screamed in triumph. “Pretty boy! Why should we not have both? Throw down your dagger and wait at the foot of the tree. Otherwise, we will cast your brother to the ground.”

Balder looked at me with anguished indecision. “What must I do?” he seemed to ask.

The sly phoenix. The forest of watchful birds. The yellow-haired boy beside the mammoth tree. The black abortions screaming over his head, Frey between them. Were these things real, or the hellish figments of a mind which, nourished on dreams, had darkened to nightmares?

They were real. I shook off my lethargy of horror and ran toward Balder. “No,” I cried. “You must not do what they say!”

Podarge screamed behind me. “Let me go. I will stop them!”

I had to trust her. Trust to her hatred. I struck off her fetters. The air groaned with the massive sweep of wings.

Her sisters shot to meet her like javelins to a stag. The three Harpies met in mid-air and whirled, screaming, over the treetops, a black thundercloud of wings and gashing talons. I ran to Balder, who had started to circle the tree.

“Here,” I said. There were stumps of limbs and hollows left by lightning.

We climbed the tree. I was hardly aware of the bark scraping my skin, of my fingers clawing the bark. Soon we were inching along the limb which held the nest. Balder followed me down the rope to the roof; the twigs and clay sagged beneath our feet. The nest swayed like a wave-tossed ship, and we could not move until it rocked to stillness. We crept down the side, like mice across a cheese, around and under the roof and into the door.

I saw that the nest held a single room, circular, divided by a low partition of stakes. A ladder led from the doorway into a small compartment, where beds of moss surrounded a slab of stone, putrid with rotting meat. Light from cracks in the wail revealed a clay bowl heaped with gems and gold ornaments. I looked in vain for Balder.

Then I saw him, across the nest in the shadows beyond the partition. He must have fallen from the ladder. Two young Harpies, about the size of sea gulls, were trying to claw him. He crouched on his knees and fended off their talons.

I did not wait to descend the ladder. I jumped. A Harpy had fixed her talons in Frey’s arm. I choked her until she released him. Ignoring her claws, I raised her above my head and dashed her to the clay floor. Green blood oozed from both of her ears. Balder, I saw, had disposed of the second Harpy. I did not feel like a murderer.

Balder embraced his brother. For a long moment he held him in his powerful arms.

“I vas very stubborn,” Frey said. “You had to come and get me.”

“You knew ve vould come. Bar and I.”

“Yes. I wasn’t afraid.” He paused. “Much!”

“We must get you out of here.” I said. “Quickly.”

Frey’s strength had begun to return. The sight of his brother was better than healing herbs. We climbed the ladder. The clean air struck us like spray from the sea and cleansed our lungs. I toiled up the porous side of the nest. Secure on the roof, I leaned to give Frey my hand, while Balder remained in the doorway and lifted his brother toward me.

It was then that the Harpies returned. Two of them, one pursued and one—Podarge—pursuing, while blood ran rivulets from her out-thrust claws. The threatened victim, in spite of her imminent peril, flew at Frey. I held him, then I held air. Balder cried his name: “Frey!”

I watched him fall; I wanted to take his place.

Only Podarge could help him.

Her talons caught him, but not to wound. She could not sustain his weight. She could, however, break his fall. In a wide arc, she curved toward earth and released him before she struck. He fell in a clump of bushes, limply but lightly. At once she mounted the sky and, hissing like a cat, grappled again with her sister.

By the time that Balder and I had reached his side, Frey was trying to stand.

“Falling vas easier than climbing down the tree.” He grinned, but a dozen wounds had streaked his body. He looked as if he had run through brambles.

“Where do you hurt?” I asked.

“One big ache.”

Before I could test him for broken bones, the Harpies fell to the ground with a crackle of undergrowth. I picked up a stick and ran to help Podarge. There was no need. The fall had finished her sister, and she herself seemed dying. She lay on her back, blinking, her talons thrust in the air.

“Can we help you?” I asked.

Like a stricken bat she breathed in whistling gasps. “Is she dead?”

“Yes.”

“Both of them, then.”

“You saved my friend.”

“Not for his sake.” The shrill voice had fallen to a whisper. “I did not want to waste him.”

“Waste him?”

The old lust flickered across her face. “Harpies are women. Women need males in order to propagate.” Her eyelids drooped. “Leave me now.”

Frey insisted that he be allowed to walk, but Balder, inflexible, scooped him into his arms. “My bruder for vonce vill do as I say.”

Frey smiled at us. “Bar,” he said, “ye lost the phoenix but ye vill find your Circe.”

“Vill you?” mocked the Harpy.

I looked back at her. “You know about Circe?” I thought of the jewels and gold we had seen in the nest. How had the Harpies come to own them? Why had the phoenix lured us from our ship?

“You know about Circe?” I repeated.

She was dead, smiling evilly.

IV: THE ISLAND OF OLEANDERS

For several days the coast was mountainous, with arc-shaped bays where we moored in the late afternoons and fished for our supper; then it was low and sandy, with dunes like giant turtles scattered at the edge of the sea. On the fifth day after the Harpies, we rounded a promontory beetling with trees, and Astyanax, who had taken Aruns’ place as lookout, called to us from the bow.

“Pygmies,” he pointed. “Swinging in the branches.”

“That’s not pygmies,” Balder snorted. “It’s monkeys! I saw vone in Graviscae vonce. He came on a ship from Egypt.”

“Pygmies,” the Triton repeated. “Monkeys have longer tails.”

“Not all of them,” I explained. “This is the stub-tailed macaque. Notice their puffy cheeks and—“

“Monkeys, then,” he said with composure, and continued his observation.

On the sixth day we came to a marsh of corn-brakes beside a river. Elephants fed on low, scrubby trees and birds hopped from back to back with, apparently, the entire approval of their host. Frey and Balder, who had never seen an elephant, were terrified.

“Fabulous beasts,” Frey muttered. “Do you think they will eat us?”

“You and Balder, perhaps,” said Astyanax. “I am not edible. At least the captain didn’t think so.”

I had to explain that an elephant’s trunk was not, as it looked, a serpent appended to his head, but a sort of elongated nose used like an extra limb.

Near the mouth of the river we anchored for the night. When I reassured the brothers that the elephants would not swim out and throttle them with their trunks, they stripped and went for a swim. Astyanax darted between them, catching prawns with his hands. Some he swallowed and others he flipped on deck for Aruns to clean. I myself withdrew to the cabin.

The couch looked irresistible. Succumbing, I fell asleep and dreamed of Circe. Redolent of myrrh and pine-needles, she leaned above me. “I have waited, my love.” Then she called my name: “Bear.” And again, “Bear.”

I awoke with a start. Astyanax, not Circe, was calling me. Annoyed, I walked on deck. He was still in the water, with Atthis beside him.

“You have been asleep,” he accused.

“No,” I snapped. “Thinking.”

“Atthis has brought you a present.”

He took a bronze-bladed sword from her beak and lifted it into my hands. In the black niello and gold of the hilt, youths and maidens whirled over charging bulls: a Cretan scene. The old sea-kings, a thousand years ago, had explored this very coast, but the sword did not look ancient.

“Where did she find it?” I cried.

“In a sunken galley beyond the mouth of the river.”

“Is the water very deep there?”

“Less than twenty feet, she says.”

“Ask her to show me.”

I straddled her back and held to her dorsal fin. Her tail flashed up and down, up and down, and we foamed toward the sunken ship while Astyanax trailed in our wake. Elephants along the bank, lifting water in their sinuous trunks, stared at us with lordly indolence. Beyond the mouth of the river we paused and circled. Directly below us a galley wavered in the lucid depths. Then Atthis dove. On the floor of the sea, anemones pulsed their tentacles in a purple twilight, and diminutive lantern fish, with rows of luminescent spots, twinkled from our path. In a forest of rockweed a blood starfish curled its crimson legs. Redbeard sponges clung to the planks of the ship, which rested as lightly on the bottom as if it had settled at anchor. We circled the deck and found the cabin, whose roof lay open to the water. Hurriedly we searched the room.

The furnishings were Cretan: a terra cotta priestess with snakes in her hands; a tiny gold frog embedded with pearls; a tall-backed chair in the shape of a throne. I opened a chest and lifted a woman’s robe, with a bell-like skirt, puffing sleeves, and a tight bodice cut low to expose the breasts. For an instant, as the gown unfolded, Circe herself seemed to rise, a ghost, to greet me. Atthis shared my discovery. She caught the skirt in her beak and wrapped it around her flanks, as if to savor its richness and regret its inevitable destruction by the sea. Yes, this was Circe’s ship. It had sunk not hundreds of years ago but less than a hundred and, since there were no skeletons, Circe and her crew had presumably escaped.

My lungs felt like burning asphalt. I mounted Atthis and rose with her to the surface. We dove again. Astyanax retrieved the frog and I found a pair of daggers for Frey and Balder. Then we returned to the Halcyon. Our friends were waiting on deck. Because of the elephants, the boys had hesitated to cook ashore and had gathered stones from the river to make a little oven, where Aruns was baking prawns. Excitedly I told them what we had found.

“It’s unlikely that she turned inland. The land seems too marshy for travel. Probably she built another ship and continued down the coast. We’ll keep on our course.” I gave the brothers their daggers. “For elephants.”

Astyanax gulped and a tear rolled down his cheek. Had he expected a gift?

I laid my hand on his shoulder. “But you came with me. Balder and Frey stayed behind. That’s why I brought them the daggers.”

“It isn’t daggers,” he said. “It’s Atthis. She’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“For good.” He pointed to the river which smoldered like copper in the dying sun, hushed and unmoving.

“She told you?”

“She didn’t have to. I saw it in her eyes when she brought you back to the ship. You have broken her heart.”

“But how? I don’t understand.”

“She brought you a gift. What did you do? Hurried off to the wreck without a thank you. That was all right, she understood your eagerness. But when you came back to the Halcyon, you brought the boys daggers and still gave her nothing. A ring, a lamp, a sandal with antelope straps—anything would have done.”

“But what could she do with such things?”

“Hide them, in a sea-cave. Dolphins have caches, you know, where they keep their treasures—pearls and amber and coral from the floor of the sea, objects fallen from ships or lost in the sand and carried out by the tide. In their journeys from coast to coast, they visit their caves and show them to their friends. You made Atthis feel unwanted—like a Greek wife. She’s always been a little jealous of you anyway.”

“Why should she be jealous? I’m terribly fond of her.”

“Still, you treat her like an animal. Did you know that dolphins have a literature, passed down by word of beak? ‘Hide it if you must, deep as the deepest trireme crusted with coral, but beauty will burn into light.’ Atthis can quote such lines for hours.”

“Find her and bring her back!”

“I don’t know where she is.” He sighed. “She’s probably gone up the coast. Forgive me for saying this, Bear. But people grow terribly fond of you—you’re sleepy and warm and lovable—but sometimes you seem to look right through them. You are always searching for things or going somewhere—if you aren’t asleep. What I’m saying is, you won’t stand still to be loved.”

“But that’s because of my faith,” I protested. “Etruscans, you see, have a terrible fear of death. Most of us go, we believe, to a region of fire and demons. That’s why we hurry so much—one man gives banquets, another races a chariot, another wanders. We want to forget the demons.”

“Forget the demons,” he said, “but not Atthis.”

I looked at the river and the sea. Somewhere a woman waited for me to find her, a sorceress and a queen. Was she worth the dream and the long wandering, the loss of Atthis? Perhaps. But now I was with my friends, the best of whom I had hurt by hurting Atthis. I lifted him onto the bulwark and, with my arm, shielded him against the gathering twilight and the darkness in my own heart.

* * * *

We sailed southward along a coast of forest steppes, where spiny trees, a little like the olive, sparsely strewed the sand. In the small protection of trees, antelopes sought concealment from lions with tangled manes and rawboned bodies. Luck, or at least high spirits, had left us. We sailed slowly, fearful of hidden shoals; we counted dolphins, frolicking in the water, and wished for Atthis. Once, at a great distance, I saw a whiteness on the horizon. Atthis? No, I was seeing what I wished to see. It was foam or a trick of light. No one mentioned her name, but Astyanax looked wistful and Aruns stared at the waves, and I knew what was in their hearts. We had lost our friend.

At night we heard drums and wondered if the natives, who never showed themselves, were signaling our approach to Circe. Or perhaps they beat us a warning: strangers, beware. In desperation we questioned the will of the gods. Aruns, like many Etruscans, knew the arts of augury: reading the liver of a sheep and interpreting the flight of birds or the color, shape, and direction of lightning. In a fringed robe and pointed cap, with a curved stick in his hand, he faced the south and looked for a sign. We had no sheep to yield us its liver; we had seen no birds for several days; but the gods, if indeed they had not forsaken us, might speak through lightning. We waited. The drip of our water clock measured the passage of time. Seconds. Minutes. An hour.

Aruns shook his head. “The gods are sil—“

Blood-red lightning flashed to the right, three times in quick succession.

“Ah,” he groaned. “The triple lightning of Tinia. Danger awaits us.”

* * * *

The forest steppes became desert, humping into the sea like the yellow Nile at flood time. We lived on cheese and a few bony fish, for even the waters were barren. The parties we sent ashore saw nothing but horned vipers and scorpions. There was no rain; we drank our wine unmixed. The sand, blowing from shore, covered our deck with dry coarse grains and scratched our eyes until they reddened and watered. Heat drained us like fever. In the shade we stripped to the skin; in the sun we covered our heads and bodies to prevent exposure.

One morning a vessel barred our path: a dugout canoe with a square sail set on sprits. Twenty paddles flashed in rapid unison and the captain, hurling commands, stood in the bow. The rowers were black and very short—three feet or less, I judged—with enormous heads and Negroid features.

I thought of the pygmies in Homer, the little black men who warred with the iron-billed cranes. But these were women, even the captain, bare of breast, long of hair, with blue paint on their faces. I raised my hand in the universal salutation of good will.

But the pygmies called no greeting. At their sides they wore wooden tubes which looked like blowguns, and they never looked up from their oars.

“Change course,” I shouted to Aruns. “Head for the deep!”

We jibbed and ran with the wind. The dugout changed its course. The pygmies strained at their oars and began a savage chant, and their captain lashed them with shrill, hissing commands. Balder and Frey seized sweeps and used them for oars, but the dugout, with sail and twenty rowers, rapidly overtook us. Like large black spiders, the pygmies could scale our hull and kill us with darts before we could use our swords. Then I saw Atthis between our ships. I thought with horror, It is she who has led them to us.

Thank Nethuns I was wrong. The sea around her erupted with dolphins. They rose behind us with a great thrashing and thrust their beaks against our stern. Scores of them, sleek and glistening, spouting through airholes as if to shout encouragement. The stern rose high in the water, we poised and the timbers shuddered; the mast, like a pine in a storm, creaked and swayed. Then we moved. Swifter than pirate penteconters driven by Boreas, swifter by far than dugouts with pygmy rowers. We clung to the bulwarks to keep our balance. We sucked in air and laughed it out of our lungs. Astyanax held to Tages and caught the spray in his face.

And the dolphins! They were saving our lives but also playing a game. They squealed like children, they plunged and whirled and somersaulted, and one leaped over the vessel, showering foam in his wake. They tried to take turns at pushing but some grew impatient and nosed their friends out of place. And Atthis led them. I wanted to hug her.

The captain of the dugout, waving a blowgun, shouted a final threat. It was strange to hear Greek spat from the lips of a pygmy.

“Seek her at your peril.”

“Tell her to wait for us!” I called.

She crossed her arms and glared at us balefully as the dugout altered course and returned to hug the coast.

Except for Atthis, the dolphins followed the pygmies, no doubt to make sure that they did not change their minds and return to give us chase. Gray-backed gods, the dolphins seemed, swift, powerful, and lordly. We lined the deck and cheered them as they went.

Atthis remained. Astyanax swam to meet her and threw his arms around her neck. “Atthis, you’ve come back to us!” I wanted to go to her myself, but my going must not, like my parting, seem thoughtless and crude. I must go to her partly as suppliant and partly as a friend, indebted but not obsequious; grateful and gracious, with love and a gift which betokened love. I searched my mind for something which, even though belated, should not seem too late. I remembered the gown she had fondled in the sunken galley. I had no gowns or woman’s cloaks, I had no jewels, no bracelets of amber stars nor necklaces of hammered gold. But I owned one object more precious to women than pearls: a bronze mirror with a handle like the neck of a swan.

Mirror in hand, I called to Atthis from the deck. She did not move; she waited on the surface, watchful, poised for flight—and also, no doubt, appraising the mirror. Guessing my intention, Astyanax left her and returned to the ship. I swam to her side.

Treading water, I held the mirror in front of her. She looked at the bronze and, seeing her image, recoiled; she returned, and this time lingered. She tilted her head, she opened her beak, she rolled on her side with an artless and touching vanity. Then, having shown her delight, she spoke her gratitude—and her forgiveness—with a simple and eloquent gesture: she rested her beak on my shoulder.

At last she took the mirror from my hand and dove below the surface—to a sea-cave, no doubt, to hide her treasure. I returned to the ship and waited for her. Hardly had I settled on deck when she reappeared. My crew welcomed her, Balder and Frey with tears. Astyanax offered her a yellow cheese which she took from his hands and swallowed in one large gulp. Aruns was grave, courtly, and yet affectionate. He recited a verse well known to sailors, “Follow the dolphin, fly the shark,” and commended her people for having inspired such a tribute. For me, it was not enough to call to her from the deck. I entered the water and, like Astyanax, threw my arms around her neck.

“Atthis,” I said. “I am often unworthy of my friends. I have been unworthy of you. But you have forgiven me. Dear friend, do you know that I love you?”

I felt the throbbing of her noble heart.

* * * *

We came at dusk to a bay which enclosed a small island. Around the bay stretched yellow arms of the desert, but the island lay green and living, with grassy rocks tumbled along its beaches, with tamarisk trees and oleanders and date palms clustering fruit. Giant cranes, trailing their legs, looped above the trees or plunged after fish in the water. Though we badly needed supplies, we dared not land till morning for fear of the pygmies, whose deadly darts we had glimpsed if not felt. Atthis and two of her friends kept watch around the ship. If a dugout tried to surprise us, the pygmies would find themselves capsized and possibly drowned. We dined meagerly on cheese and wine, but happily, because Atthis had returned to us.

After we had eaten, I made a little speech. I thanked my friends for their loyalty and counted the dangers we had faced: Harpies, pygmies with blowguns, thirst, and near starvation.

“Shall we end our search?” I asked. “Circe, it seems, doesn’t want us.” Of course, I could guess their answer.

“We never expected an invitation,” said Aruns. “Which is the sweetest apple on the tree? The one on the topmost branch, defended by angry bees. As Sappho put it:

At the end of the bough—its uttermost end,

Missed by the harvesters, ripens the apple,

Nay, not overlooked, but far out of their reach,

So with all best things.

It’s the difference between a wife and courtesan. The wife is there; the courtesan, a good one anyway, has to be fetched.”

Frey and Balder looked scandalized at this talk of courtesans. Their Scandian heritage had not prepared them for the realities of Etruscan and Greek society. But Astyanax, without hesitation, agreed with Aruns: “The apple at the end of the end of the bough.”

Then we heard the singing, blown to us from the island, soft, intimate, intimating. Women or goddesses singing in an unknown tongue which somehow spoke to us. To me, they sang of Circe. A powerful enchantress, she climbed the path to her palace. Her robes were like woven sunlight, and malachite moons twinkled above her breasts. A large, sleepy-eyed bear prowled at her heels. To the others, who can say? Of onyx and lapis lazuli; of sandarac heaped on altars; of wings and wind and star giants tall in the sky. What each of them wanted most, a place he had been, a place he was going, a person he loved or wished to love. For a long time we listened in silence. When the voices stopped we had no wish to speak. With nodded goodnights we went to our quarters—Aruns to sleep on deck with Balder and Frey. Astyanax took a swim and afterward stretched at my feet. I pressed his hand; it was chill—from his swim, I thought. I fell asleep.

I awoke to singing. I felt as if wild honey were trickling into my ears. By the light of the owl-shaped lamp above my couch, I saw that Astyanax had gone. Had the music called him? I hurried on deck and circled the ship, scanning the moon-bleached waters. Atthis and two of her friends dozed fitfully on the surface. I roused Aruns. No, he had not seen Astyanax. The singing grew loud and almost fierce; it surged instead of oozed. I thought, He has gone ashore to find the singers. I lowered myself from the gunwale and swam to Atthis.

“Astyanax is gone,” I said. “Will you take me to the island?” Her heart beat wildly; she sensed my fear and throbbed it back to me. With desperate speed we broke the moon’s white mirror.

At last I trailed through the soft sand of the beach, skirted a pool like the rounded pad of a water lily, and climbed over rocks which greened me with their moss. I found the singers. They sat beside an arm of the sea, their long tails coiled in the moonlight like silver cornucopias. Hair—or was it seaweed?—entangled their white shoulders, a forest spilling on marble. One of them held Astyanax in her arms and sang as if to her child. But something trembled behind the coaxing tones: the hint of a scream. I thought of the Cretan arena and athletes gored as they spun above the bulls; of women shrieking with terror and ecstasy.

“Astyanax,” I called. He did not answer. The singers looked at me without expression and then, in a wash of moonlight, I saw their faces. It is true that they were beautiful, with foreheads of perfect alabaster and lips like cinnabar. But their eyes revealed them, a fish’s eyes, cold and lidless. They might have been sharks staring at me through smoky depths; as alien and as evil.

The one with Astyanax raised an object above his head. At first I took it for ivory; no, it was bone, and sharpened into a blade. I lunged and struck her hand. I caught Astyanax in my arms and hurled him, with rough desperation, out of her reach. Her tail, like a coiling asp, entangled my legs and brought me to the ground. Her shark’s eyes held me motionless; her breath smelled of scales and sea-slime, flesh decayed and corrupted. She was strong but clumsy; the sea, not the shore, was her element. I wrenched myself from her paralyzing eyes. I flailed with my arms, and my fingers fell on an object, hard and cold. I grasped it and beat at her face. She gasped, like a fish sucking air, and released me. The object, a human skull, rolled between us. Her sisters tore at my legs but I kicked them viciously—their scales cut my feet—and reached Astyanax. He crouched full-length on the ground, still dazed by the roughness of my thrust. I caught him in my arms and, stumbling over the rocks, reeled toward the beach.

Breathless and spent, we fell onto sand which stretched like a cool moist coverlet. They had not followed us. Beside their pool, they laughed and then they sang. Their song was red like blood.

Astyanax shook in my arms. I held him until he could speak.

“I went for a swim and heard them singing. One of them called my name. ‘Astyanax, my son,’ she said. I swam ashore and wriggled over the rocks. She took me in her arms. I thought she was my mother.”

“They are Sirens,” I said. “A different race from yours. Fish with human faces. She didn’t call your name; she bewitched you to think she had.” I rose to my feet. “Now we must swim to the ship.”

The pygmies leveled their blowguns.

V: CIRCE

I awoke to darkness. Pains knifed me like poison darts. I heard, far away—or close but muffled—the howl of animals—the high, feminine wail of a cat, the baying of dogs, the deep-throated roar of a lion. I groped in the dark for Astyanax. The emptiness seemed a palpable enemy.

“What have you done with my friend?” I shouted. The darkness had no answer. The cold possessed me with damp, enfolding wings…I slept or fainted.

I opened my eyes in a sun-dappled arbor, where trellises rose into jungles of swelling grapes. The scent of the fruit, wounded by insects and oozing purple juices, cloyed my nostrils. I lay on a mat of rushes, and when I sat, the grapes seemed to fly at my face like swarms of hornets. My head cleared slowly; I did not yet trust my feet. Beyond the arbor a three-story house, with a portico of crimson columns, climbed in lavender walls and oblong windows. Rows of brick-colored moons divided the floors, and a date palm leaned like a lintel across the doorway.

At last I struggled to my feet and grasped a trellis. Grape juice moistened my fingers and bees assaulted the stains. Gently I flicked them away—they are valiant creatures and bringers of luck—and steadied my swaying body. Last night I had swum ashore nude; this morning, it seemed, I wore a loincloth, with a large metal ring like a belt which squeezed my waist and cramped my lungs.

Cranes with tufted heads wheeled and slanted above me. Then, with raucous cries, they dropped toward the grass and lowered their long stilt legs. I saw what had drawn them: she came toward me from the house, a girl with a lavender tunic falling above her knees and held at the waist by a girdle of antelope leather. Her hair was like tumbling hyacinths, and yellow crocuses mingled with the flower-like folds. Persephone, I thought. The Greeks call her Maiden, the corn girl, who walks the fields, invisible, and touches the barley into bending gold.

She approached me with the familiarity of long friendship. Her fingers, like the feelers of a snail, whispered over my cheeks.

“Dear guest,” she said, “dear Arnth, are you well? I fear my pygmies were rough. When you charged them like a bear, what could they do but defend themselves?” She spoke the same tongue as the Harpies and pygmies—archaic Greek. Perhaps Odysseus had taught her, and she had taught her friends.

Her face and manner said, “I am your host and equal.” But a great enchantress, however smiling, might blast me with thunderbolts if I failed in respect. I fell to my knees.

“Circe,” I said, “queen and enchantress. What have you done with my friend?”

She touched my shoulders. “He is well and happy,” she said, smiling. “And you mustn’t kneel. If anything, I should kneel to you, who have come so far to find me.” She sat on the grass and, sweet with spikenard, drew me down beside her. “I think you are surprised. You expected—another kind of Circe?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“A temptress with beasts at her side. A woman like the sun who glittered when she walked and burned your eyes. You expected a queen and found—“

“A girl in a lavender tunic with hair like hyacinths.”

“And you are justly disappointed. Your dream is broken. Like an eagle fallen from the sky.”

“No, I am happy. The temptress I could have worshiped. The girl I can love.”

“Love,” she sighed. “Love is a banquet, no? Thrushes and tongues of flamingoes, wine dipped from silver kraters and roses to garland the head. I am not such a banquet, Arnth.”

“Love is also a picnic, where the hills run down to the sea like racing deer. Grape juice in place of wine, grass for a couch, and yellow gagea to garland our brows.”

“Bear,” she said, caressing the word with her lips, “I talked with Astyanax while he ate his breakfast—do you never feed him? He ate like a colt! He told me your secret name. Prowling, sleepy-eyed Bear. Perhaps you will fall asleep in my arms. I should like that, I think. It would mean you trusted me. Do you trust me, Bear?”

The cranes circled us in the grass and their lank shadows fell across our faces. “I am not sure,” I said.

She clapped her hands; a pygmy scuttled from the house with vessels of wine. “Drink,” she said, handing me a silver cup with dancers in raised relief. “The wine will refresh you.”

Phrases whirred in my brain: “With evil drugs administered…” “Round that place lay the beasts of the mountain…” “Goddess it may be she is or a woman.”

“I am not thirsty.”

She laughed, artlessly, playfully, and drank from both of the cups. “Did you think I was giving you poison—the milk of oleanders or the venom of adders? Take your choice. It is wine from my own grapes, sweetened with the manna of tamarisk trees.”

“But the pygmies in the dugout,” I cried. “They came to attack us. The captain shouted, ‘Seek her at your peril.’ And the Sirens last night—“

She answered with patient assurance. “The man who cannot meet obstacles does not deserve my love. I sent the pygmies to test your courage. And the Sirens, you ask? I never meant you to fall into their hands. I tolerate them because they help to defend my island. There are hostile tribes along the coast. My pygmies, you see, are doubtful protectors. I keep their enemies, the cranes, from attacking them. In return they serve me—for the moment.”

I drank the wine and a sudden coolness, like a breeze from the ocean, seemed to blow along my limbs.

“Why did you come here, Bear?”

“To love you.”

“No,” she sighed. “Because I was distant. Because in your heart you believed you would never find me. It is easy to love a dream.”

“But now I have found you.”

“You will tire of me, as you have of others.”

“The others were ghosts.”

“I will try to be more than a ghost. I will build you a house of oleanders, and sunbirds will nest in the walls. I will spin you robes as soft as a spider’s silk. I will give you tamarisk flowers like falling snowflakes, and the hyacinths of my own hair for your fingers to weave into meadows. You shall call me Kore, the Maiden, and forget that other one, Circe. Shall these things hold you, Bear?”

I held her in my arms and her maiden’s slenderness stabbed me with sweet bewilderment, and her hands, like searching swallows, fluttered at my face. I held her, and in my heart summer trembled to spring, but a spring without wandering or need to wander, where boughs of quince put forth their quivering leaves. I buried my face in her tumbled hyacinths and sobbed that beauty and brevity must be inseparable.

Laughing, she drew me into the palace, under the high lintel, from room to courtyard, garden to corridor, from shadows to shadows, fragrance…tapestries blue as waves, and the smell of salt and dunes…sunbirds wheeling in roofless chambers and rushes under our feet…the orange embers of a phoenix throbbing in green dusk—or did I dream, remembering cedar woods? She held my hand, but always she seemed immeasurably far ahead of me, elusive, irrecoverable. She moved to a deep-toned music, neither lyres nor flutes, but drums like a giant heartbeat and the sighing of many waters. It seemed to have no source; it welled from the throats of beasts. I fell among cushions sweet with spikenard and palm-oil, marjoram and essence of thyme. I lay on my back, and her face, like a distant moon, laughed in the sky.

“You have bewitched me,” I said.

Her voice broke the silence like the rasp of an arrow. “I will send supplies and water to your crew. Then you may tell them goodbye.”

I looked at her, astonished. “But I want them to stay with me. They have no home, except Aruns. I am their friend, and you must be.”

Surprise flickered in her eyes. “I like Astyanax. I think I would like your other friends—the white dolphin, Aruns, and the brothers. But they cannot stay with us, Bear. I came here to lose the world. Would you thrust it upon me again? You I have welcomed and loved. Not the others.”

“They are friends,” I said stubbornly. “How can I send them away?”

“Love for a friend”—she shrugged—“need not be eternal. Give it a season, a year, and then forget it. But the love of a man and a woman…Have you seen an island erupt from the sea, with thunder and foam and lashing waves? So love erupts in the heart. Does the sea protest? Does it say to the island, ‘Return to the ocean floor’?”

“Indeed,” I said, springing to my feet, “you have thrust an island into my heart. I reel with the beauty and suddenness of it. But I have other islands, and I will not let you sink them.”

She stood and faced me. “You have made your choice?”

“I chose or was chosen—I am not sure which—before I found you.”

In a sudden burst of sunlight I saw the tightness around her lips, as if laughter were alien to them. And the eyes, were they young after all? In their violet labyrinths, what minotaurs crouched, what captives groped for the light?

“I would have killed you,” she said, “if you had forsaken your friends.” Lightly she pointed to the cranes that watched and circled us. “My birds would have crushed your skull. Their strength is formidable. I have seen them kill pygmies with a single blow of their beaks.”

I stared at her with disbelief. “But you said you loved me—“

“Listen,” she said. “I will tell you why I came here. Before your people sailed to Hesperia, when Egypt straddled the Nile like a golden sphinx, I lived, a queen, in Knossos. It was a time for queens, and for the goddess they served, the Great Mother. On Crete itself and in her far-flung colonies, it was the king who died to make the fields grow fertile, the queen who raised the sacrificial knife. Then came the men from the north, the yellow-haired conquerors, scornful of women, scorning the Goddess, bringing gods of their own, Zeus and Poseidon, Hades and haughty Apollo. Knossos itself fell to their ragged fleet. With the women of my court, I fled to Aeaea. Years passed. Tranquil years. Then they began to find us—lusting captains and swinish mariners, warriors and wanderers—and each in turn, except Odysseus, I met and charmed and enchanted as he deserved. Still they came, and once again I fled—this time to Libya. I lost one ship in a storm—the wreck you found—and built another and sailed at last to the Island of Oleanders. Men have tried to follow me. No man has found me—till now. My friends saw to that, the Harpies, the Sirens, the pygmies. Cruel and misshapen, yes, but loyal to me, loyal to the Goddess. Then you came. My pygmies watched you from the time you met the Harpies. Their jungle drums signaled your approach. At last you reached this island. ‘I will show him his dream,’ I thought. ‘I will show him death.’ But first, as I told you, I spoke with the boy:

“I wish you no harm,” I said. “You may return to the sea.” He looked at me, frightened, but not for himself. I wanted to hold him, that helpless, motherless boy not yet a man, not yet a conqueror, with sea-green eyes and courage beyond his years.

“Have you hurt my friend?” he asked.

“Friend? He will leave you, my dear. He will come to me.”

“No,” he said with absolute certainty. “No. He is Bear!”

Were you really his friend, I asked myself, and therefore worthy to live? I came to you not as your dream but as in your heart you secretly wished me to be. The Corn Maiden. Most men dream of temptresses—and marry maidens. I thought that for me, you would scorn your friends. You have proved me wrong, and I am glad.”

“The house of oleanders,” I said wistfully. “You never meant to build it at all.”

“I am much too late for love. And so were you, dear Bear—I thought. All your life you have steered for the Isles of the Blest. But now, at last, you have chosen the dolphin and not the deep. Go to your friends and never regret your choice. I will send Astyanax after you.”

“Circe,” I asked, “what are you really like? Maiden or enchantress?”

“Let that be my secret. Think of me as the Maiden.”

She clapped her hands. Pygmies sprang from the house and, silent as hunters stalking a lion, led me from the garden. “Bear,” she called.

I turned and faced her. She smiled; hardly a woman she seemed—a girl, no more, with crocuses in her hair.

“I could have loved you—once.”

Above my head the palm trees swelled with dates, and under my sandalless feet, seashells crumbled a path which was somehow soft. At the edge of the bay the pygmies bowed and left me. My ship rode at anchor: bird of loss and bird of finding, of perilous ports and a memorable voyage. I loved the blue of her hull and her red furled sail, the cut of her timbers, the deck house, warm with wicker, and Tages, her wooden god; not because she went but because she was, and for those she carried with her.

Then I heard tears. A young woman crouched on the sand at the edge of the water. Her bare body was whiter than amaranth. Circe’s hair was hyacinths; hers was sunflowers, rippling yellow petals. She cried hopelessly and did not hear me approach.

I knelt beside her. “Why are you crying?” I asked.

She looked at me, appalled, and covered her breasts with her arms. “Bear, Bear,” she sobbed. “She has shrunk me to ugliness and cast me onto the shore. My lovely flanks are hollowed and cupped till I scarcely know myself.”

“Atthis!” I cried, with stunned recognition. “You are changed, not shrunk: You must see yourself as a whole.”

I took her hand and led her, shaken and cowering, to a pool like a lily pad.

She looked at her face in the water, the pillared neck, the limbs and the ivory thighs, and understanding suffused her features, a roseate shadow on snow.

“I—I am one of you,” she said. “A woman?”

“You were always a woman. But now your body matches your heart. Enfolds it like marble ramparts.”

“I am one of you,” she repeated, “and—“

“Beautiful.”

She shook her head. “You say my body matches my heart. But my heart is evil. I tried to harm you, Bear. When I overturned your boat and Vel took you captive.”

“Why did you do that, Atthis?”

“Astyanax had told me you were going to look for Circe. Long before I was born, she was loved by the dolphins. She culled them her Naiades, her Maids of the Deep, and to them she was always The Lady. A white dolphin led her to Libya and then returned to Aeaea to keep it safe from strangers. Ever since, my people have swum those waters, guarding, waiting for her return. As one of the guardians, I did not want you to go and trouble her.”

“And when you had wrecked our boat?”

“I felt ashamed when I saw you in the water. I touched you and knew your heart, gentle and kind. No longer did I wish you harm. But I still did not want you to look for Circe. I followed the Turan to Graviscae.”

“And waited in the harbor until I found a ship?”

“Yes. And joined you, still divided. I thought that you would never find her anyway, and I could be your friend and then lead you home again. But after we found the wreck, I knew we were close to Circe—knew I would have to choose. Loving you both, I kept out of sight until I saw the pygmies. Then I made my choice. Was it too late?”

“Late?” I said. “Time is not hostile, Atthis. At the last minute, the last second, he will turn and smile and say, ‘Love. Forgive. Accept. It is not too late.’ Circe has taught me that. Friendship divided your heart. Not hatred, not anger. I honor you for serving Circe, and love you for choosing me.”

“Bear!” The cry whirred like a discus. He ran toward us on stalwart legs; he raced, he leaped, he kicked his heels in the air. Milkweed whirling in wind-pools, leaves in a river’s eddy, a deer, a rabbit, a boy with wings on his heels. He turned a somersault; laughing, he fell in my arms and called my name.

“And Atthis,” he cried, knowing her at once. “She has changed you too! She has given us legs like Bear. Now he will never leave us!”

Behind us someone laughed, kindly, a little sadly, and an old woman, her face as weathered as tree trunks near the sea, leaned on a cane and waved a slow farewell.

And we went on together.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge with thanks a considerable debt to the following books:

The Life and Times of Tarquin the Etruscan by Carlo Maria Franzero

The Etruscans by M. Pallottino

Ancient Greek Mariners by Walter Woodburn Hyde

The Cruise of the Dolphin by Ferdinand Lallemand

THE SWORDSMEN OF VARNIS, by Clive Jackson

The twin moons brooded over the red deserts of Mars and the ruined city of Khua-Loanis. The night wind sighed around the fragile spires and whispered at the fretted lattice windows of the empty temples, and the red dust made it like a city of copper.

It was close to midnight when the distant rumble of racing hooves reached the city, and soon the riders thundered in under the ancient gateway. Tharn, Warrior Lord of Loanis, leading his pursuers by a scant twenty yards, realized wearily that his lead was shortening and raked the scaly flanks of his six-legged vorkl with cruel spurs. The faithful beast gave a low cry of despair as it tried to obey and failed.

In front of Tharn in the big double saddle sat Lehni-tal-Loanis, Royal Lady of Mars, riding the ungainly animal with easy grace, leaning foward along its arching neck to murmur swift words of encouragement into its flattened ears. Then she lay back against Tharn’s mailed chest and turned her lovely face up to his, flushed and vivid with the excitement of the chase, amber eyes aflame with love for her starnge hero from beyond time and space.

“We shall win this race yet, my Tharn,” she cried. “Yonder through that archway lies the Temple of the Living Vapor, and once there we can defy all the Hordes of Varnis!”

Looking down at the unearthly beauty of her, at the subtle curve of throat and breast and thigh, revealed as the wind tore at her scanty garments, Tharn knew that even if the Swordsmen of Varnis struck him down, his strange odyssey would not have been in vain.

But the girl had judged the distance correctly, and Tharn brought their snorting vorkl to a sliding, tearing halt at the great doors of the Temple, just as the Swordsmen reached the outer archway and jammed there in a struggling, cursing mass. In seconds they had sorted themselves out and came streaming across the courtyard, but the delay had given Tharn time to dismount and take his stand in one of the great doorways. He knew that if he could hold it for a few moments while Lehni-tal-Loanis got the door open, then the secret of the Living Vapor would be theirs, and with it mastery of all the lands of Loanis.

The Swordsmen tried first to ride him down, but the doorway was so narrow and deep that Tharn had only to drive his sword-point upward into the first vorkl’s throat and leap backward as the dying beast fell. Its rider was stunned by the fall, and Tharn bounded up onto the dead animal and beheaded the unfortunate Swordsman without compunction. There were ten of his enemies left, and they came at him now on foot, but the confining doorway prevented them from attacking more than four abreast, and Tharn’s elevated position upon the huge carcass gave him the advantage he needed. The fire of battle was in his veins now, and he bared his teeth and laughed in their faces, and his reddened sword wove a pattern of cold death which none could pass.

Lehni-tal-Loanis, running quick cool fingers over the pitted bronze of the door, found the radiation lock and pressed her glowing opalescent thumb-ring into the socket, gave a little sob of relief as she heard hidden tumblers falling. With agonizing slowness, the ancient mechanism began to open the door; soon Tharn heard the girl’s clear voice call above the clashing steel, “Inside, my Tharn! The secret of Living Vapor is ours!”

But Tharn, with four of his foes dead now, and seven to go, could not retreat from his position on top of the dead vorkl without grave risk of being cut down, and Lehni-tal-Loanis, quickly realizing this, sprang up beside him, drawing her own slim blade and crying, “Aie, my love! I will be your left arm!”

Now the cold hand of defeat gripped the hearts of the Swordsmen of Varnis: two, three, four more of them mingled their blood with the red dust of the courtyard as Tharn and his fighting princess swung their merciless blades in perfect unison. It seemed that nothing could prevent them now from winning the mysterious secret of the Living Vapor, but they reckoned without the treachery of one of the remaining Swordsmen. Leaping backward out of the conflict, he flung his sword upon the ground in disgust.

“Aw, the Hell with it!” he grunted, and unclipping a proton gun from his belt, he blasted Lehni-tal-Loanis and hte Warrior Lord out of existence with a searing energy-beam.

THE EMPEROR OF GONDWANALAND, by Paul Di Filippo

“Hey, Mutt! It’s playtime, let’s go!”

Mutt Spindler raised his gaze above the flatscreen monitor that dominated his desk. The screen displayed Pagemaker layouts for next month’s issue of PharmaNotes, a trade publication for the drug industry. Mutt had the cankerous misfortune to be assistant editor of PharmaNotes, a job he had held for the last three quietly miserable years.

In the entrance to his cubicle stood Gifford, Cody and Melba, three of Matt’s co-workers. Gifford sported a giant foam finger avowing his allegiance to whatever sports team was currently high in the standings of whatever season it chanced to be. Cody had a silver hip flask raised to her lips, imbibing a liquid that Mutt could be fairly certain did not issue from the Poland Springs cooler. Melba had already undone her formerly decorous shirt several buttons upward from the hem and knotted it, exposing a belly that reminded Mutt of a slab of Godiva chocolate.

Mutt pictured with facile vividness the events of the evening that would ensue, should he choose to accept Gifford’s invitation. His projections were based on numerous past such experiences. Heavy alcohol consumption and possible ingestion of illicit stimulants, followed by slurred, senseless conversation conducted at eardrum-piercing volume to overcome whatever jagged ambient noise was passing itself off as music these days. Some hypnagogic, sensory-impaired dancing with one strange woman or another, leading in all likelihood to a meaningless hookup, the details of which would be impossible to recall in the morning, resulting in hypochondriacal worries and vacillating committments to get one kind of STD test or another. And of course the leftover brain damage and fraying of neurological wiring would insure that the demands of the office would be transformed from their usual simple hellishness to torture of an excruciating variety undreamed of by even, say, a team of Catholic school nuns and the unlamented Uday Hussein.

Gifford could sense his cautious friend wavering toward abstinence. “C’mon, Mutt! We’re gonna hit Slamdunk’s first, then Black Rainbow. And we’ll finish up at Captains Curvaceous.”

Mention of the last-named club, a strip joint where Mutt had once managed to drop over five hundred dollars of his tiny Christmas bonus while simultaneously acquiring a black eye and a chipped tooth, caused a shiver to surf his spine.

“Uh, thanks, guys, for thinking of me. But I just can’t swing it. If I don’t get this special ad section squared away by tonight, we’ll miss the printer’s deadlines.”

Cody pocketed her flask and grabbed Gifford’s arm. “Oh, leave the little drudge alone, Giff. It’s obvious he’s so in love with his job. Haven’t you seen his lip-prints on the screen?”

Mutt was hurt and insulted. Was it his fault that he had been promoted to assistant editor over Cody? He wanted to say something in his defense, but couldn’t think of a comeback that wouldn’t sound whiny. And then the window closed on any possible repartee.

Gifford unselfconsciously scratched his butt with his foam finger. “Okay, pal, maybe next time. Let’s shake a tail, ladies.”

Melba winked at Mutt as she walked away. “Gonna miss you, loverboy.”

Then the trio was gone.

Mutt hung his head in his hands. Why had he ever slept with Melba? Sleeping with co-workers was insane. Yet he had done it. The affair was over now, but the awkward repercussions lingered. Another black mark on his karma.

Refocusing on the screen, Mutt tried hard to proof the text floating before him. “Epigenetix-brand sequencers guarantee faster throughput…” The words and pictures blurred into a jittery multicolored fog like a mosh pit full of amoebas. Was he crying? For Christ’s sake, why the hell was he crying? Just because he had to hold down a suck-ass job he hated just to pay his grad-school loans, had no steady woman, hadn’t been snow-boarding in two years, had put on five pounds since the summer, and experienced an undeniable yet shameful thrill when contemplating the purchase of a new necktie?

Mutt knuckled the moisture from his eyes and mentally kicked his own ass for being a big baby. This wasn’t a bad life, and plenty of people had it worse. Time to pull up his socks and buckle down and all that other self-improvement shit.

But not right now. Right now, Mutt needed a break. He hadn’t lied to Gifford and the others, he had to finish this job tonight. But he could take fifteen minutes to websurf his way to some amusing site that would lift his spirits.

And that was how Mutt discovered Gondwanaland.

In retrospect, after the passage of time had erased his computer’s logs, the exact chain of links leading to Gondwanaland was hard to reconfigure. He had started looking for new recordings by his favorite group, Dead End Universe. That had led somehow to a history of pirate radio stations. And from there it was a short jump to micronations.

Fascinated, Mutt lost all track of time as he read about this concept that was totally new to him.

Micronations—also known as cybernations, fantasy countries or ephemeral states—were odd blends of real-world rebellious politics, virtual artsy-fartsy projects and elaborate spoofs. Essentially, a micronation was any assemblage of persons regarding themselves as a sovereign country, yet not recognized by international entities such as the United Nations. Sometimes micronations were associated with real physical territory. The Cocos Islands had once been ruled as a fiefdom by the Clunies-Ross family. Sarawak was once the province of the White Rajas, as the Brooke clan had styled themselves.

With the advent of the internet, the number of micronations had exploded. There were now dozens of imaginary online countries predicated on different philosophies, exemplifying scores of different governmental systems, each of them more or less seriously arguing that they were totally within their rights to issue passports, currency and stamps, and to designate ministers, nobility and bureaucratic minions.

Mutt had always enjoyed fantasy sports in college. Imaginary leagues, imaginary rosters, imaginary games—Something about being totally in charge of a small universe had appealed to him, as an antidote to his lack of control over the important factors and forces that batted his own life around. He had spent a lot of time playing Sims too. The concept of cybernations seemed like a logical extension of those pursuits, an appealing refuge from the harsh realities of career and relationships.

The site Mutt had ended up on was a gateway to a whole host of online countries. The Aerican Empire, the Kingdom of Talossa, the Global State of Waveland, the Kingdom of Redonda, Lizbekistan—

And Gondwanaland.

Memories of an introductory geoscience course came back to Mutt. Gondwanaland was the super-continent that had existed hundreds of millions of years ago, before splitting and drifting apart into the configuration of separate continental landforms familiar today.

Mutt clicked on the Gondwanaland button.

The page built itself rapidly on his screen. The animated image of a spinning globe dominated. Sure enough, the globe featured only a single huge continent, marked with interior divisions into states and featuring the weird names of cities.

Mutt was about to scan some of the text on the page when his eye fell on the blinking time readout in the corner of the screen.

Holy shit! Nine-thirty! He’d be here till midnight unless he busted his ass.

Reluctantly abandoning the Gondwanaland page and its impossible globe, Mutt returned to his work.

Which still sucked.

Maybe worse.

* * * *

The next day Mutt was almost as tired as if he had gone out with Gifford and the gang. But at least his head wasn’t throbbing and his mouth didn’t taste as if he had french-kissed a hyena. Proofing the advertorial section had taken until eleven-forty-five, and by the time he had ridden the subway home, eaten some leftover General Gao’s chicken, watched Letterman’s Top Ten and fallen asleep, it had been well into the small hours of the morning. When his alarm went off at seven-thirty, he had thrashed about in confusion like a drowning man, dragged from some engrossing dream that instantly evaporated out of memory.

Once in the office, Mutt booted up his machine. He had been doing something interesting last evening, hadn’t he? Oh, yeah, that Gondwanaland thing—

Before his butt hit the chair, someone was IMing him. Oh, shit, Kicklighter wanted to see him in his office. Mutt got up to visit his boss.

He ran into Gifford in the hall. Unrepentant yet visibly hurting, Gifford managed a sickly grin. “Missed a swinging time last night, my friend. After her fifth jello shot, Cody got up on stage at Captains. Took two bouncers to get her down, but not before she managed to earn over a hundred bucks.”

Mutt winced. This was more information than he needed about the extracurricular activities of his jealous co-worker. How would it be possible now to work on projects side-by-side with her, without conjuring up visions of her drunkenly shedding her clothing?

Suddenly this hip young urban wastrel shtick, the whole life- is-fucked-so-let’s-get-fucked-up playacting that Mutt and his friends had been indulging in for so long looked incredibly boring and tedious and counterproductive, possibly even the greased chute delivering one’s ass to eternal damnation. Mutt knew with absurd certainty that he could no longer indulge in such a wasteful lifestyle. Something inside him had shifted irrevocably, some emotional tipping point had been reached.

But what was he going to do with his life instead?

Making a half-hearted neutral comment to Gifford—no point in turning into some kind of zealous lecturing missionary asshole Gifford would tune out anyway—Mutt continued through the cube- farm.

Dan Kicklighter, the middle-aged editor of PharmaNotes, resembled the captain of a lobster trawler, bearded, burly and generally disheveled, as if continually battling some invisible Perfect Storm. He had worked at a dozen magazines in his career, everything from Atlantic Monthly to Screw. A gambling habit that oscillated from moderate—a dozen scratch-ticket purchases a day—to severe—funding an Atlantic City spree with money the bank rightly regarded as a year’s worth of mortgage payments—had determined the jagged progression of his resumé. Right now, after some serious rehab, he occupied one of the higher posts of his career.

“Matthew, come in. I just want you to know that I’m going to be away for the next four days. Big industry conference in Boston. With a little detour to Foxwoods Casino on either side. But that’s just between you and me.”

Kicklighter was upfront about his addiction, at least with his subordinates, and claimed that he was now cured to the point where he could indulge himself recreationally, like any casual bettor.

“I’m putting you in charge while I’m gone. I know it’s a lot of responsibility, but I think you’re up to it. This is a crucial week, and I’m counting on you to produce an issue we can all be proud of.”

There were three assistant editors at PharmaNotes, so this advancement was not insignificant. But Mutt cringed at the temporary promotion. He just wanted to stay in his little miserable niche and not have anybody notice him. Yet what could he do? Deny the assignment? Wasn’t such an honor the kind of thing he was supposed to be shooting for, next step up the ladder and all that shit? Cody would’ve killed for such a nomination.

“Uh, fine, Dan. Thank you. I’ll do my best.”

“That’s what I’m counting on. Here, take this list of targets you need to hit before Monday. It’s broken down into ten-minute activity blocks. Say, have you heard the odds on the Knicks game this weekend?”

Back in his cube, Mutt threw down the heavy sheaf of paper with disgust. He just knew he’d have to work through the weekend.

Before he had gotten through the tasks associated with the first ten-minute block, Cody appeared.

“So, all your ass-kissing finally paid off. Well, I want you to know that you haven’t fooled everyone here. Not by a long shot.”

Before Mutt could protest his lack of ambition, Cody was gone. Her angry strut conjured up images of pole-dancing in Mutt’s traitorous imagination.

A short time later, Melba sauntered in and poised one haunch on the corner of Mutt’s desk.

“Hey, big guy, got any plans for Friday night?”

“Yeah. Thanks to Kicklighter, I’ll be ruining my eyesight right here at my desk.”

Melba did not seem put off by Mutt’s sour brusqueness. “Well, that’s too bad. But I’m sure there’ll be some other night we can, ah, hook up.”

Once Melba left, Mutt tried to resume work. But he just couldn’t focus.

So he brought up the Gondwanaland page.

Who was going to tell him he couldn’t? Kicklighter was probably already out the office and halfway to the roulette wheels.

Below the spinning foreign globe was a block of text followed by some hot-button links: IMPERIAL LINEAGE, CUSTOMS, NATURAL HISTORY, POLITICAL HISTORY, ART, FORUMS, and so forth. Mutt began to read the main text.

For the past ten thousand years of recorded history, Gondwanaland’s imperial plurocracy has insured the material well-being as well as the physical, spiritual and intellectual freedom of its citizens. Since the immemorial era of Fergasse I, when the walled communities of the Only Land—prominently, Lyskander, Port Shallow, Vybergum and Turnbuckle—emerged from the state of siege imposed by the roving packs of scalewargs and amphidonts, banding together into a network of trade and discourse, right up until the current reign of Golusty IV, the ascent of the united peoples of Gondwanaland has been unimpeded by war or dissent, despite a profusion of beliefs, creeds, philosophical paradigms and social arrangements. A steady accumulation of scientific knowledge from the perspicacious and diligent researchers at our many technotoria, combined with the practical entrepreneurship of the ingeniator class, has led to a mastery of the forces of nature, resulting in such now-essential inventions as the strato-carriage, storm-dispeller, object-box and meta-palp.

The grateful citizens of Gondwanaland can assume—with a surety they feel when they contemplate the regular rising of the Innermost Moon—that the future will only continue this happy progression…

Fascinated, Mutt continued to scan the introductory text on the main page, before beginning to bop around the site. What he discovered on these dependent pages were numerous intriguing photos of exotic scenes—cities, people, buildings, landscapes, artworks—and many more descriptive and explanatory passages that amounted to a self-consistent and utterly convincing portrait of an alien world.

The Defeat of the Last ’Warg; a recipe for bluebunny with groundnut sauce; The Adventures of Calinok Cannikin, by Ahleucha Mamarosa; Jibril III’s tornado-struck coronation; the deadly glacier apes; the first landing on the Outermost Moon; the Immaculate Epidemic; the Street of Lanternmoths in Scordatura; the voices of children singing the songs of Mourners Day; the Teetering Needle in the Broken Desert; sunlight on the slate roofs of Saurelle; the latest fashion photographs of Yardley Legg—

Mutt’s head was spinning and the clock icon on his screen read noon. Man, people thought Tolkien was an obsessive perfectionist dreamer! Whoever had put this site together was a goddamn fantasy genius! The backstory to Gondwanaland possessed the kind of organic cohesiveness that admitted of the random and contradictory. Why hadn’t the citizens of Balamuth ever realized that they were sitting on a vein of pure allurium until a sheepherder named Thunn Pumpelly fell into that sinkhole? They just hadn’t! A hundred other circumstantial incidents and anecdotes contributed to the warp and woof of Gondwanaland, until in Mutt’s mind the whole invention assumed the heft and sheen of a length of richly embroidered silk.

Mutt wondered momentarily if the whole elaborate hoax was the work of a single creator, or a group effort. Perhaps the name or names of the perps was hidden in some kind of Easter Egg—

The one link Mutt hadn’t yet explored led to the FORUMS. Now he went there.

He faced a choice of dozens of boards on different topics, all listing thousands of archived posts. He arbitrarily chose one—IMPERIAL NEWS—and read a few recent posts in chronological order.

-o-

Anybody heard any reports since Restday from the Liminal Palace on G4’s health? —IceApe113

-o-

The last update from the Remediator General said G4 was still in serious condition. Something about not responding to the infusion of nurse-hemomites. —LenaFromBamford

-o-

Looks like we could be having an Imperial Search soon then. I hope the Cabal of Assessors has their equipment in good working order. When was the last IS? 9950, right? —Gillyflower87

-o-

Aren’t we all being a little premature? Golusty IV isn’t dead yet! —IlonaG

-o-

Mutt was baffled, even somehow a little pissed off, by the intensity of the roleplaying on display here. These people—assuming the posts indeed originated from disparate individuals—were really into this micronation game, more like Renaissance Faire headcases and Civil War reenactors than the art-student goofballs Mutt had envisioned as the people responsible for the Gondwanaland site. Still, their fervent loyalty to their fantasy world offered Mutt a wistful, appealing alternative to his own anomie.

Impulsively, Mutt launched his own post.

-o-

From everything I’ve seen, Golusty IV seems like a very fine Emperor and a good person. I hope he gets better. —MuttsterPrime

-o-

He quit his browser and brought up his word-processor.

Then he resumed trying to fit his life into ten-minute boxes.

* * * *

Kicklighter returned from the Boston trip looking as if he had spent the entire time wrestling rabid tigers. Evidently, his cure had not been totally effective. His vaunted invulnerability to the seductions of Native-American-sponsored games of chance plainly featured chinks. An office pool was immediately begun centered on his probable date of firing by the publisher, Henry Huntsman. Ironically, Kicklighter himself placed a wager.

But all these waves of office scandal washed over Mutt without leaving any impression at all. Likewise, his dealings with his former friends and rivals had no impact on his abstracted equilbrium. Gifford’s unceasing invitations to get wasted, Cody’s sneers and jibes, Melba’s purring attempts at seduction—None of these registered. Oh, Mutt continued to perform his job in a semi-competent, off-handed way. But most of the time his head was in Gondwanaland.

With his new best IM buddy, Ilona Grobes.

Ilona Grobes—IlonaG—had posted the well-mannered, respectful comment about not hastening Golusty IV into his grave. Upon reading Mutt’s similarly themed post, she had contacted him directly.

-o-

MuttsterPrime, that was a sensitive and compassionate sentiment. I’m glad you’re not so thrilled by the prospect of an IS like most of these vark-heads that you forget the human dimension of this drama. I don’t recognize your name from any of the boards. What clade do you belong to? —Ilona G

-o-

That question left Mutt scratching his head. He debated telling Ilona to cut the fantasy crap and just talk straight to him. But in the end he decided to go along with the play-acting.

-o-

Ilona, is my clade really so important? I’d like to think that we can relate to each other on an interpersonal level without such official designations coming between us. —MuttsterPrime

-o-

When Ilona’s reply came, Mutt was relieved to see that his strategy of conforming to her game-playing had paid off.

-o-

How true! I never thought to hear from another Sloatist on this board! I only asked because I didn’t want to give offense if you were an ultra-Yersinian. But it’s so refreshing to dispense with such outdated formalities. Tell me some more about yourself. —IlonaG

-o-

Not much to tell really. I’m an assistant editor at a magazine, and it sucks. —MuttsterPrime

-o-

I’m afraid you’ve lost me there, Muttster. Why would a repository for excess grain need even one professional scurrilator, much less an assistant? And how can a condition or inanimate object “suck?” Where do you live? It must be someplace rather isolated, with its own dialect. Perhaps the Ludovici Flats? —IlonaG

-o-

Mutt stood up a moment and looked toward the distant window in the far-off wall of the cube-farm, seeing a slice of the towers of Manhattan and thereby confirming the reality of his surroundings. This woman was playing some serious games with his head. He sat back down.

-o-

Oh, my home town is no place you’ve ever heard of. Just a dreary backwater. But enough about my boring life. Tell me about yours! —MuttsterPrime

Ilona was happy to comply. Over the next several weeks, she spilled her life story, along with a freight of fascinating details about life in Gondwanaland.

Ilona had been born on a farm in the Ragovoy Swales district. Her parents raised moas. She grew up loving the books of Idanell Swonk and the antic-tableaus (were these movies?) featuring Roseway Partridge. She broke her arm when she was eleven, competing in the annual running of the aurochs. After finishing her schooling, earning an advanced instrumentality in cognitive combinatorics, she had moved to the big city of Tlun, where she had gotten a job with the Cabal of Higher Heuristics. (Best as Mutt could figure, her job had something to do with writing the software for artificial mineral-harvesting deep-sea fish.) Every Breathday Ilona and a bunch of girlfriends—fellow geeks, Mutt conjectured—would participate in zymurgy, a kind of public chess match where the pieces were represented by living people and the action took place in a three-dimensional labyrinth. She liked to relax with a glass of cloudberry wine and the music of Clay Zelta. (She sent Mutt a sample when he said he wasn’t familiar with that artist. It sounded like punk polkas with a dash of tango.)

The more Mutt learned about Ilona, the more he liked her. She might be crazy, living in this fantasy world of hers, but it was an attractive neurosis. The world she and her fellow hoaxers had built was so much saner and exotic than the one Mutt inhabited. Why wouldn’t anyone want to pretend they lived in such a place?

As for the larger outlines of Gondwanalandian society and its finer details, Mutt learned much that appealed to him. For instance, the role of Emperor or Empress was not an inherited one, or restricted to any particular class of citizen. Upon the death of the reigning monarch—whose powers were limited yet essential in the day-to-day functioning of the plurocracy—the Cabal of Assessors began a continent-wide search for a psychic heir. At death, the holy spirit of the ruler—not exactly that individual’s unique soul, but something like free-floating semi-divine mojo—was believed to detach and descend on a destined individual, whose altered status could be confirmed by subtle detection apparatus. And then there was that eminently sensible business about every citizen receiving a lifetime stipend that rendered work not a necessity but a dedicated choice. Not to mention such attractions as the regular state-sanctioned orgies in such cities as Swannack, Harsh Deep and Camp Collard that apparently made Mardi Gras look like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

As for the crisis of Golusty IV’s impending death, the boards remained full of speculation and chatter. The remediators were trying all sorts of new treatments, and the Emperor’s health chart resembled Earth’s stock market’s gyrations, one minute up and the next way down.

Earth’s stock market? Mutt was shocked to find himself so convinced of Gondwanaland’s reality that he needed to distinguish between the two worlds.

With some judicious self-censorship and liberal use of generalities, Mutt was able to convey something of his life and character to Ilona as well, without baffling her further. He made up a lot of stuff too, incidents and anecdotes that dovetailed with Gondwanalandian parameters. Her messages began to assume an intimate tone. As did Mutt’s.

By the time Ilona sent him her picture, Mutt realized he was in love. The photograph clinched it. (It was too painful for Mutt even to dare to think the image might be a fake, the Photoshop ruse of some thirteen-year-old male dweeb.) Ilona Grobes was a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty with a charming mole above quirked lips. If all cognitive combinatorics experts looked like this, Gondwanaland had proved itself superior in the geek department as well. With the photo was a message:

-o-

Dear Mutt, don’t you think it’s time we met in the flesh? The Emperor can’t live much longer, and of course all non-essential work and other activities will be suspended during the moratorium of the Imperial Search, for however long that may take. We could use those leisurely days to really get to know each other better. —IlonaG

-o-

Finally, here was the moment when all charades would collapse, for good or ill. After some deliberation, Mutt attached his own photo and wrote back:

-o-

Getting together would be really great, Ilona. Just tell me where you live, and I’ll be right there! —MuttsterPrime

-o-

You’re such a joker, Mutt! You know perfectly well that I live at Number 39 Badgerway in the Funes district of Tlun! When can you get here? The aerial tramway service to Tlun is extensive, no matter where you live. Here’s a pointer to the online schedules. Try not to keep me waiting too long! And I think your auroch-lick hairstyle is charming! —IlonaG

-o-

Mutt felt his spirits slump. He was in love with a clinically insane person, one so mired in her delusions that she could not break out even when offered genuine human contact. Should he cut things off right here and now? No, he couldn’t bring himself to.

-o-

Let me check those schedules and tidy up some loose ends here, Ilona. Then I’ll get right back to you. —MuttsterPrime

-o-

Mutt was still sitting in a motionless, uninspired funk half an hour later when Kicklighter called him into his office.

All the editor’s photos were off the walls and in cardboard boxes, along with his other personal possessions. The hairy, rumpled man looked relieved.

“I’m outta here as of this minute, kid. Security’s coming to escort me to the front door. But I wanted to let you know that I put in a good word for you to take over my job. Huntsman might not like my extracurricular activities too much, but he’s a good publisher and realizes I know my stuff when it comes to getting a magazine out. He trusts me on matters of personnel. So you’ve got a lock on the job, if you want it. And who wouldn’t? But you’ve got to get your head out of your ass. I don’t know where you’ve been the past few weeks, but it hasn’t been here.”

All Mutt could do was stare at Kicklighter without responding. Scurrilator, he thought. Why would I want to be head scurrilator?

After another awkward minute, Mutt managed to mumble some thanks and good-luck wishes, then left.

He dropped in to Gifford’s cubicle. Maybe his friend could offer some advice.

Gifford looked like shit. His tie was askew, his face pale and bedewed with sweat. There was a white crust around his nostrils like the rim of Old Faithful. He smiled wanly when he saw Mutt.

“Hey, pal, I’d love to talk to you right now, but I don’t feel so good. Little touch of stomach trouble. In fact, I gotta hit the john pronto.”

Gifford bulled past Mutt. He smelled like spoiled yogurt.

Mutt wandered purposelessly through the cube-farm. He found himself at Cody’s box. She glared at him and said, “If you’re here like the rest of them to gloat, you can just get in line.”

“Gloat? About what?”

“Oh, come on, don’t pretend you haven’t heard about the layoffs.”

“No—no, I haven’t, really. I’m—I’m sorry, Cody.”

Cody just snorted and turned away.

Melba wasn’t in her cube. Mutt learned why from an official notice on the bulletin board near the coffee-maker.

-o-

If any employee is contacted by any member of the media regarding the sexual discrimination suit lodged by Ms. Melba Keefe, who is on extended leave until litigation is settled, he or she will refrain from commenting upon penalty of dismissal.…

-o-

Back in his cubicle, Mutt brought up the Gondwanaland web page. The coastline of Gondwanaland bore unmistakeable resemblances to the geography Mutt knew, the way an assembled jigsaw puzzle recalled the individual lonely pieces. As far as he could make out, Tlun was located where Buenos Aires was on Earth.

-o-

Ilona, I’m going to try to reach you somehow. I’m setting out today. Wish me luck. —MuttsterPrime

-o-

Mutt left his cheap hotel—roaches the size of bite-sized Snickers bars, obese hookers smoking unfiltered cigarettes and trolling the corridors 24/7—for the fifth time that day. He carried a twofold map. Before he had left the US, he had printed off a detailed street map of Tlun. He had found a similar map for Buenos Aires and transferred it to a transparent sheet. Using certain duplicate, unvarying physical features such as rivers and the shape of the bay, he had aligned the two. This cartographic construction was what he was using to search for Number 39 Badgerway.

Of course, Buenos Aires featured no such street in its official atlas. And the neighborhood that Ilona supposedly lived in was of such a rough nature as to preclude much questioning of the shifty-eyed residents—even if Mutt’s Spanish had been better than the “¿Que pasa, amigo?” variety. Watched suspiciously by glue-huffing, gutter- crawling juveniles and their felonious elders hanging out at nameless bars, Mutt could only risk a cursory inspection of the Badgerway environs.

After checking out the most relevant district, Mutt was reduced to wandering the city’s boulevards and alleys, parks and promenades, looking for any other traces of a hidden, subterranean, alternative city that plainly didn’t exist anywhere outside the fevered imagination of a handful of online losers, praying for a glimpse of an unforgotten female face graced by a small mole. Maybe Ilona was some Argentinian hacker-girl who had been subliminally trying to overcome her own reluctance to divulge her real whereabouts by giving him all these clues.

But even if that were the case, Mutt met with no success.

He had now been in Argentina for ten days. All costs, from expensively impromptu airline tickets to meals and lodging, had been put on plastic. He had turned his last paycheck into local currency for small purchases, but Mutt’s loan payments had left him no nest egg. And the upper limits on his lone credit card weren’t infinite. Pretty soon he’d have to admit defeat, return the New York, and try to pick up the shambles of his life.

But for the next few days anyhow, he would continue to look for Tlun and Ilona.

Returning today to the neighborhood labeled Funes on the Tlun map, Mutt entered a small café he had come to patronize only because it was marginally less filthy than any other. He ordered a coffee and a pastry. Spreading his map on the scarred countertop he scratched his stubble and pondered the arrangement of streets. Had he explored every possible niche—?

A finger tapped Mutt’s shoulder. He turned to confront a weasly individual whose insincere yet broad smile revealed more gaps than teeth. The fellow wore a ratty Von Dutch t-shirt that proclaimed I KISS BETTER THAN YOU.

“Señor, what is it you look for? Perhaps I can help. I know this district like the breast of my own mother.”

Mutt realized that this guy must be some kind of con-artist. But even so, he represented the best local informant Mutt had yet encountered, the only person who had deigned to speak with him.

Pointing to the map, Mutt said, “I’m looking for this street. Do you know it?”

“Si, seguro! I will take you there without delay!”

Experiencing a spark of hope, Mutt followed the guide outside.

They came to a dank calle Mutt was half-sure he had visited once before. The guide gestured to a shadowy cross-street that was more of a channel between buildings, only large enough for pedestrian traffic. A few yards along, the street transformed into a steep flight of greasy twilit stairs.

“Right down here, señor, you will find exactamente what you are looking for.”

Mutt tried to banish all fear from his heart and head. He summoned up into his mind’s eye Ilona’s smiling face. He advanced tentatively into the claustrophobic cattle-chute.

He heard the blow coming before he felt it. Determined not to lose his focus on Ilona, he still could not help flinching. The blow sent him reeling, blackness seeping over Ilona’s face like spilled tar, until only her smile, Cheshire-cat-like, remained, then faded.

* * * *

Sunlight poured through lacy curtains, illuminating a small cheerful room. On the wall hung a painting which Mutt recognized as one of Sigalit’s studies for his Skydancer series. Mutt saw a vase filled with strange flowers on a nearby small table. Next to the flowers sat a box labeled LIBERTO’S ECLECTIC PASTILLES and a book whose spine bore the legend:

Ancient Caprices, by Idanell Swonk

Mutt lay in what was obviously a hospital bed, judging by the peripheral gadgetry around him, including an object-box and a pair of meta-palps. The blanket covering him diffused an odd yet not unpleasant odor, as if woven from the hairs of an unknown beast. He saw what looked like a call button and he buzzed it.

A nurse hurried into the room, all starched calm business in her traditional tricornered hat and life-saving medals.

Behind her strode Ilona Grobes.

Ilona hung back smiling only until the nurse assured herself that Mutt was doing fine and left. Then Ilona flung herself on Mutt. They hugged wordlessly for minutes before she stood up and found a seat for herself.

“Oh, Mutt, what happened to you? A Junior Effectuator found you unconscious a few feet from my door and brought you here. I was at work. The first thing I knew about your troubles was when I saw your picture on the evening propaedeutic. ‘Unknown citizen hospitalized.’ I rushed right here, but the remediators told me not to wake you. You slept for over thirty hours, right from Fishday to Satyrsday!”

Mutt grabbed Ilona’s hand. “Let’s just say I had kind of a hard time getting to Tlun.”

Ilona giggled. “What a funny accent you have! That’s one thing that doesn’t come across online.”

“And you—you’re more beautiful than any photo. And you smell like—like vanilla icecream.”

Ilona looked shyly away, then back. “I’m sure that’s a compliment, whatever vanilla icecream may be. But look—I brought you some candy, and one of my favorite books.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much for being here.”

No icecream, Mutt thought. He’d be a millionaire by this time next year.

They talked for several hours more, until the sounds of some kind of commotion out in the hall made them pause.

The door to Mutt’s room opened and three men walked in. They were clad in elaborately stitched ceremonial robes and miters, and carried among them several pieces of equipment.

Seeing Mutt’s puzzlement, Ilona explained. “It’s just a team of Assessors. Golusty died yesterday, shortly after your arrival. The Imperial Search has begun.”

One Assessor addressed Ilona. “Citizen Grobes, your testing will take place at your residence. But we need to assess this stranger now.”

“Of course,” Ilona said.

The Assessors approached Mutt’s bedside. “With your permission, citizen—”

Mutt nodded, and they placed a cage of wires studded with glowing lights and delicate sensors on his head like a crown.

SPACE-TIME FOR SPRINGERS, by Fritz Leiber

Gummitch was a superkitten, as he knew very well, with an I.Q. of about 160. Of course, he didn’t talk. But everybody knows that I.Q. tests based on language ability are very one-sided. Besides, he would talk as soon as they started setting a place for him at table and pouring him coffee. Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra ate horsemeat from pans on the floor, and they didn’t talk. Baby dined in his crib on milk from a bottle, and he didn’t talk. Sissy sat at table but they didn’t pour her coffee and she didn’t talk—not one word. Father and Mother (whom Gummitch had nicknamed Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here) sat at table and poured each other coffee and they did talk. Q.E.D.

Meanwhile, he would get by very well on thought projection and intuitive understanding of all human speech—not even to mention cat patois, which almost any civilized animal could play by ear. The dramatic monologues and Socratic dialogues, the quiz and panel show appearances, the felidological expedition to darkest Africa (where he would uncover the real truth behind lions and tigers), the exploration of the outer planets—all these could wait. The same went for the books for which he was ceaselessly accumulating material: The Encyclopedia of Odors, Anthropofeline Psychology, Invisible Signs and Secret Wonders, Space-Time for Springers, Slit Eyes Look at Life, et cetera. For the present it was enough to live existence to the hilt and soak up knowledge, missing no experience proper to his age level—to rush about with tail aflame.

So to all outward appearances Gummitch was just a vividly normal kitten, as shown by the succession of nicknames he bore along the magic path that led from the blue-eyed infancy toward puberty: Little One, Squawker, Portly, Bumble (for purring, not clumsiness), Old Starved-to-Death, Fierso, Loverboy (affection, not sex), Spook, and Catnik. Of these only the last perhaps requires further explanation: the Russians had just sent Muttnik up after Sputnik, so that when one evening Gummitch streaked three times across the firmament of the living room floor in the same direction, past the fixed stars of the humans and the comparatively slow-moving heavenly bodies of the two older cats, and Kitty-Come-Here quoted the line from Keats:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

it was inevitable that Old Horsemeat would say, “Ah—Catnik!”

* * * *

The new name lasted all of three days, to be replaced by Gummitch, which showed signs of becoming permanent.

The little cat was on the verge of truly growing up, at least so Gummitch overheard Old Horsemeat comment to Kitty-Come-Here. A few short weeks, Old Horsemeat said, and Gummitch’s fiery flesh would harden, his slim neck thicken, the electricity vanish from everything but his fur, and all his delightful kittenish qualities rapidly give way to the earthbound single-mindedness of a tom. They’d be lucky, Old Horsemeat concluded, if he didn’t turn completely surly like Ashurbanipal.

Gummitch listened to these predictions with gay unconcern and with secret amusement from his vantage point of superior knowledge, in the same spirit that he accepted so many phases of his outwardly conventional existence: the murderous sidelong looks he got from Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra as he devoured his own horsemeat from his own little tin pan, because they sometimes were given canned cat food but he never; the stark idiocy of Baby, who didn’t know the difference between a live cat and a stuffed teddy bear and who tried to cover up his ignorance by making goo-goo noises and poking indiscriminately at all eyes; the far more serious—because cleverly hidden—maliciousness of Sissy, who had to be watched out for warily—especially when you were alone—and whose retarded—even warped—development, Gummitch knew, was Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here’s deepest, most secret worry (more of Sissy and her evil ways soon); the limited intellect of Kitty-Come-Here, who despite the amounts of coffee she drank was quite as featherbrained as kittens are supposed to be and who firmly believed, for example, that kittens operated in the same space-time as other beings—that to get from here to there they had to cross the space between—and similar fallacies; the mental stodginess of even Old Horsemeat, who although he understood quite a bit of the secret doctrine and talked intelligently to Gummitch when they were alone, nevertheless suffered from the limitations of his status—a rather nice old god but a maddeningly slow-witted one.

But Gummitch could easily forgive all this massed inadequacy and downright brutishness in his felino-human household, because he was aware that he alone knew the real truth about himself and about other kittens and babies as well, the truth which was hidden from weaker minds, the truth that was as intrinsically incredible as the germ theory of disease or the origin of the whole great universe in the explosion of a single atom.

As a baby kitten Gummitch has believed that Old Horsemeat’s two hands were hairless kittens permanently attached to the ends of Old Horsemeat’s arms but having an independent life of their own. How he had hated and loved those two five-legged sallow monsters, his first playmates, comforters and battle-opponents!

Well, even that fantastic discarded notion was but a trifling fancy compared to the real truth about himself!

The forehead of Zeus split open to give birth to Minerva. Gummitch had been born from the waist-fold of a dirty old terry-cloth bathrobe, Old Horsemeat’s basic garment. The kitten was intuitively certain of it and had proved it to himself as well as any Descartes or Aristotle. In a kitten-size tuck of that ancient bathrobe the atoms of his body had gathered and quickened into life. His earliest memories were of snoozing wrapped in terrycloth, warmed by Old Horsemeat’s heat. Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here were his true parents. The other theory of his origin, the one he heard Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here recount from time to time—that he had been the only surviving kitten of a litter abandoned next door, that he had had the shakes from vitamin deficiency and lost the tip of his tail and the hair on his paws and had to be nursed back to life and health with warm yellowish milk-and-vitamins fed from an eyedropper—that other theory was just one of those rationalizations with which mysterious nature cloaks the birth of heroes, perhaps wisely veiling the truth from minds unable to bear it, a rationalization as false as Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat’s touching belief that Sissy and Baby were their children rather than the cubs of Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra.

* * * *

The day that Gummitch had discovered by pure intuition the secret of his birth he had been filled with a wild instant excitement. He had only kept it from tearing him to pieces by rushing out to the kitchen and striking and devouring a fried scallop, torturing it fiendishly first for twenty minutes.

And the secret of his birth was only the beginning. His intellectual faculties aroused, Gummitch had two days later intuited a further and greater secret: since he was the child of humans he would upon reaching this maturation date of which Old Horsemeat had spoken, turn not into a sullen tom but into a godlike human youth with reddish golden hair the color of his present fur. He would be poured coffee; and he would instantly be able to talk, probably in all languages. While Sissy (how clear it was now!) would at approximately the same time shrink and fur out into a sharp-clawed and vicious she-cat dark as her hair, sex and self-love her only concern, fit harem-mate for Cleopatra, concubine to Ashurbanipal.

Exactly the same was true, Gummitch realized at once, for all kittens and babies, all humans and cats, wherever they might dwell. Metamorphosis was as much a part of the fabric of their lives as it was of the insects’. It was also the basic fact underlying all legends of werewolves, vampires, and witches’ familiars.

If you just rid your mind of preconceived notions, Gummitch told himself, it was all very logical. Babies were stupid, fumbling, vindictive creatures without reason or speech. What could be more natural than that they should grow up into mute, sullen, selfish beasts bent only on rapine and reproduction? While kittens were quick, sensitive, subtle, supremely alive. What other destiny were they possibly fitted for except to become the deft, word-speaking, book-writing, music-making, meat-getting-and-dispensing masters of the world? To dwell on the physical differences, to point out that kittens and men, babies and cats, are rather unlike in appearance and size, would be to miss the forest for the trees—very much as if an entomologist should proclaim metamorphosis a myth because his microscope failed to discover the wings of a butterfly in a caterpillar’s slime or a golden beetle in a grub.

Nevertheless it was such a mind-staggering truth, Gummitch realized at the same time, that it was easy to understand why humans, cats, babies, and perhaps most kittens were quite unaware of it. How to safely explain to a butterfly that he was once a hairy crawler, or to a dull larva that he will one day be a walking jewel? No, in such situations the delicate minds of man- and feline-kind are guarded by a merciful mass amnesia, such as Velikovsky has explained prevents us from recalling that in historical times the Earth was catastrophically bumped by the planet Venus operating in the manner of a comet before settling down (with a cosmic sigh of relief, surely!) into its present orbit.

This conclusion was confirmed when Gummitch in the first fever of illumination tried to communicate his great insight to others. He told it in cat patois, as well as that limited jargon permitted, to Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra and even, on the off chance, to Sissy and Baby. They showed no interest whatever, except that Sissy took advantage of his unguarded preoccupation to stab him with a fork.

Later, alone with Old Horsemeat, he projected the great new thoughts, staring with solemn yellow eyes at the old god, but the latter grew markedly nervous and even showed signs of real fear, so Gummitch desisted. (“You’d have sworn he was trying to put across something as deep as the Einstein theory or the doctrine of original sin,” Old Horsemeat later told Kitty-Come-Here.)

But Gummitch was a man now in all but form, the kitten reminded himself after these failures, and it was part of his destiny to shoulder secrets alone when necessary. He wondered if the general amnesia would affect him when he metamorphosed. There was no sure answer to this question, but he hoped not—and sometimes felt that there was reason for his hopes. Perhaps he would be the first true kitten-man, speaking from a wisdom that had no locked doors in it.

Once he was tempted to speed up the process by the use of drugs. Left alone in the kitchen, he sprang onto the table and started to lap up the black puddle in the bottom of Old Horsemeat’s coffee cup. It tasted foul and poisonous and he withdrew with a little snarl, frightened as well as revolted. The dark beverage would not work its tongue-loosening magic, he realized, except at the proper time and with the proper ceremonies. Incantations might be necessary as well. Certainly unlawful tasting was highly dangerous.

The futility of expecting coffee to work any wonders by itself was further demonstrated to Gummitch when Kitty-Come-Here, wordlessly badgered by Sissy, gave a few spoonfuls to the little girl, liberally lacing it first with milk and sugar. Of course Gummitch knew by now that Sissy was destined shortly to turn into a cat and that no amount of coffee would ever make her talk, but it was nevertheless instructive to see how she spat out the first mouthful, drooling a lot of saliva after it, and dashed the cup and its contents at the chest of Kitty-Come-Here.

Gummitch continued to feel a great deal of sympathy for his parents in their worries about Sissy and he longed for the day when he would metamorphose and be able as an acknowledged man-child truly to console them. It was heartbreaking to see how they each tried to coax the little girl to talk, always attempting it while the other was absent, how they seized on each accidentally wordlike note in the few sounds she uttered and repeated it back to her hopefully, how they were more and more possessed by fears not so much of her retarded (they thought) development as of her increasingly obvious maliciousness, which was directed chiefly at Baby … though the two cats and Gummitch bore their share. Once she had caught Baby alone in his crib and used the sharp corner of a block to dot Baby’s large-domed lightly downed head with triangular red marks. Kitty-Come-Here had discovered her doing it, but the woman’s first action had been to rub Baby’s head to obliterate the marks so that Old Horsemeat wouldn’t see them. That was the night Kitty-Come-Here hid the abnormal psychology books.

Gummitch understood very well that Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat, honestly believing themselves to be Sissy’s parents, felt just as deeply about her as if they actually were, and he did what little he could under the present circumstances to help them. He had recently come to feel a quite independent affection for Baby—the miserable little proto-cat was so completely stupid and defenseless—and so he unofficially constituted himself the creature’s guardian, taking his naps behind the door of the nursery and dashing about noisily whenever Sissy showed up. In any case, he realized that as a potentially adult member of a felino-human household he had his natural responsibilities.

Accepting responsibilities was as much a part of a kitten’s life, Gummitch told himself, as shouldering unsharable intuitions and secrets, the number of which continued to grow from day to day.

There was, for instance, the Affair of the Squirrel Mirror.

* * * *

Gummitch had early solved the mystery of ordinary mirrors and of the creatures that appeared in them. A little observation and sniffing and one attempt to get behind the heavy wall-job in the living room had convinced him that mirror beings were insubstantial or at least hermetically sealed into their other world, probably creatures of pure spirit, harmless imitative ghosts—including the silent Gummitch Double who touched paws with him so softly yet so coldly.

Just the same, Gummitch had let his imagination play with what would happen if one day, while looking into the mirror world, he should let loose his grip on his spirit and let it slip into the Gummitch Double while the other’s spirit slipped into his body—if, in short, he should change places with the scentless ghost kitten. Being doomed to a life consisting wholly of imitation and completely lacking in opportunities to show initiative—except for behind-the-scenes judgment and speed needed in rushing from one mirror to another to keep up with the real Gummitch—would be sickeningly dull, Gummitch decided, and he resolved to keep a tight hold on his spirit at all times in the vicinity of mirrors.

But that isn’t telling about the Squirrel Mirror. One morning Gummitch was peering out the front bedroom window that overlooked the roof of the porch. Gummitch had already classified windows as semi-mirrors having two kinds of space on the other side: the mirror world and that harsh region filled with mysterious and dangerously organized-sounding noises called the outer world, into which grown-up humans reluctantly ventured at intervals, donning special garments for the purpose and shouting loud farewells that were meant to be reassuring but achieved just the opposite effect. The coexistence of two kinds of space presented no paradox to the kitten who carried in his mind the twenty-seven-chapter outline of Space-Time for Springers—indeed, it constituted one of the minor themes of the book.

This morning the bedroom was dark and the outer world was dull and sunless, so the mirror world was unusually difficult to see. Gummitch was just lifting his face toward it, nose twitching, his front paws on the sill, when what should rear up on the other side, exactly in the space that the Gummitch Double normally occupied, but a dirty brown, narrow-visaged image with savagely low forehead, dark evil walleyes, and a huge jaw filled with shovel-like teeth.

Gummitch was enormously startled and hideously frightened. He felt his grip on his spirit go limp, and without volition he teleported himself three yards to the rear, making use of that faculty for cutting corners in space-time, traveling by space-warp in fact, which was one of his powers that Kitty-Come-Here refused to believe in and that even Old Horsemeat accepted only on faith.

Then, not losing a moment, he picked himself up by his furry seat, swung himself around, dashed downstairs at top speed, sprang to the top of the sofa, and stared for several seconds at the Gummitch Double in the wall-mirror—not relaxing a muscle strand until he was completely convinced that he was still himself and had not been transformed into the nasty brown apparition that had confronted him in the bedroom window.

“Now what do you suppose brought that on?” Old Horsemeat asked Kitty-Come-Here.

Later Gummitch learned that what he had seen had been a squirrel, a savage, nut-hunting being belonging wholly to the outer world (except for forays into attics) and not at all to the mirror one. Nevertheless he kept a vivid memory of his profound momentary conviction that the squirrel had taken the Gummitch Double’s place and been about to take his own. He shuddered to think what would have happened if the squirrel had been actively interested in trading spirits with him. Apparently mirrors and mirror-situations, just as he had always feared, were highly conducive to spirit transfers. He filed the information away in the memory cabinet reserved for dangerous, exciting and possibly useful information, such as plans for climbing straight up glass (diamond-tipped claws!) and flying higher than the trees.

* * * *

These days his thought cabinets were beginning to feel filled to bursting and he could hardly wait for the moment when the true rich taste of coffee, lawfully drunk, would permit him to speak.

He pictured the scene in detail: the family gathered in conclave at the kitchen table, Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra respectfully watching from floor level, himself sitting erect on a chair with paws (or would they be hands?) lightly touching his cup of thin china, while Old Horsemeat poured the thin black steaming stream. He knew the Great Transformation must be close at hand.

At the same time, he knew that the other critical situation in the household was worsening swiftly. Sissy, he realized now, was far older than Baby and should long ago have undergone her own somewhat less glamorous though equally necessary transformation (the first tin of raw horsemeat could hardly be as exciting as the first cup of coffee). Her time was long overdue. Gummitch found increasing horror in this mute vampirish being inhabiting the body of a rapidly growing girl, though inwardly equipped to be nothing but a most bloodthirsty she-cat. How dreadful to think of Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here having to care all their lives for such a monster! Gummitch told himself that if any opportunity for alleviating his parents’ misery should ever present itself to him, he would not hesitate for an instant.

Then one night, when the sense of Change was so burstingly strong in him that he knew tomorrow must be the Day, but when the house was also exceptionally unquiet, with boards creaking and snapping, taps adrip, and curtains mysteriously rustling at closed windows (so that it was clear that the many spirit worlds, including the mirror one, must be pressing very close), the opportunity came to Gummitch.

Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat had fallen into especially sound, drugged sleeps, the former with a bad cold, the latter with one unhappy highball too many (Gummitch knew he had been brooding about Sissy). Baby slept too, though with uneasy whimperings and joggings—moonlight shone full on his crib past a window shade which had whirringly rolled itself up without human or feline agency. Gummitch kept vigil under the crib, with eyes closed but with wildly excited mind pressing outward to every boundary of the house and even stretching here and there into the outer world. On this night of all nights sleep was unthinkable.

Then suddenly he became aware of footsteps, footsteps so soft they must, he thought, be Cleopatra’s.

No, softer than that, so soft they might be those of the Gummitch Double escaped from the mirror world at last and padding up toward him through the darkened halls. A ribbon of fur rose along his spine.

Then into the nursery Sissy came prowling. She looked slim as an Egyptian princess in her long, thin yellow nightgown and as sure of herself, but the cat was very strong in her tonight, from the flat, intent eyes to the dainty canine teeth slightly bared—one look at her now would have sent Kitty-Come-Here running for the telephone number she kept hidden, the telephone number of the special doctor—and Gummitch realized he was witnessing a monstrous suspension of natural law in that this being should be able to exist for a moment without growing fur and changing round pupils for slit eyes.

He retreated to the darkest corner of the room, suppressing a snarl.

Sissy approached the crib and leaned over Baby in the moonlight, keeping her shadow off him. For a while she gloated. Then she began softly to scratch his cheek with a long hatpin she carried, keeping away from his eye, but just barely. Baby awoke and saw her, and Baby didn’t cry. Sissy continued to scratch, always a little more deeply. The moonlight glittered on the jeweled end of the pin.

Gummitch knew he faced a horror that could not be countered by running about or even spitting and screeching. Only magic could fight so obviously supernatural a manifestation. And this was also no time to think of consequences, no matter how clearly and bitterly etched they might appear to a mind intensely awake.

He sprang up onto the other side of the crib, not uttering a sound, and fixed his golden eyes on Sissy’s in the moonlight. Then he moved forward straight at her evil face, stepping slowly, not swiftly, using his extraordinary knowledge of the properties of space to walk straight through her hand and arm as they flailed the hatpin at him. When his nose-tip finally paused a fraction of an inch from hers, his eyes had not blinked once, and she could not look away. Then he unhesitatingly flung his spirit into her like a fistful of flaming arrows, and he worked the Mirror Magic.

Sissy’s moonlit face, feline and terrified, was in a sense the last thing that Gummitch, the real Gummitch-kitten, ever saw in this world. For the next instant he felt himself enfolded by the foul black blinding cloud of Sissy’s spirit, which his own had displaced. At the same time he heard the little girl scream, very loudly but even more distinctly, “Mommy!”

* * * *

That cry might have brought Kitty-Come-Here out of her grave, let alone from sleep merely deep or drugged. Within seconds she was in the nursery, closely followed by Old Horsemeat, and she had caught up Sissy in her arms and the little girl was articulating the wonderful word again and again, and miraculously following it with the command—there could be no doubt; Old Horsemeat heard it too—“Hold me tight!”

Then Baby finally dared to cry. The scratches on his cheek came to attention, and Gummitch, as he had known must happen, was banished to the basement amid cries of horror and loathing, chiefly from Kitty-Come-Here.

The little cat did not mind. No basement would be one-tenth as dark as Sissy’s spirit that now enshrouded him for always, hiding all the file drawers and the labels on all the folders, blotting out forever even the imagining of the scene of first coffee-drinking and first speech.

In a last intuition, before the animal blackness closed in utterly, Gummitch realized that the spirit, alas, is not the same thing as the consciousness, and that one may lose—sacrifice—the first and still be burdened with the second.

Old Horsemeat had seen the hatpin (and hid it quickly from Kitty-Come-Here), and so he knew that the situation was not what it seemed and that Gummitch was at the very least being made into a sort of scapegoat. He was quite apologetic when he brought the tin pans of food to the basement during the period of the little cat’s exile. It was a comfort to Gummitch, albeit a small one. Gummitch told himself, in his new black, halting manner of thinking, that after all a cat’s best friend is his man.

From that night, Sissy never turned back in her development. Within two months she had made three years’ progress in speaking. She became an outstandingly bright, light-footed, high-spirited little girl. Although she never told anyone this, the moonlit nursery and Gummitch’s magnified face were her first memories. Everything before that was inky blackness. She was always very nice to Gummitch in a careful sort of way. She could never stand to play the game “Owl Eyes.”

After a few weeks Kitty-Come-Here forgot her fears and Gummitch once again had the run of the house. But by then the transformation Old Horsemeat had always warned about had fully taken place. Gummitch was a kitten no longer but an almost burly tom. In him it took the psychological form not of sullenness or surliness but an extreme dignity. He seemed at times rather like an old pirate brooding on treasures he would never live to dig up, shores of adventure he would never reach. And sometimes when you looked into his yellow eyes you felt that he had in him all the materials for the book Slit Eyes Look at Life—three or four volumes at least—although he would never write it. And that was natural when you come to think of it, for as Gummitch knew very well, bitterly well indeed, his fate was to be the only kitten in the world that did not grow up to be a man.

RED NAILS, by Robert E. Howard

1. The Skull on the Crag

The woman on the horse reined in her weary steed. It stood with its legs wide-braced, its head drooping, as if it found even the weight of the gold-tassled, red-leather bridle too heavy. The woman drew a booted foot out of the silver stirrup and swung down from the gilt-worked saddle. She made the reins fast to the fork of a sapling, and turned about, hands on her hips, to survey her surroundings.

They were not inviting. Giant trees hemmed in the small pool where her horse had just drunk. Clumps of undergrowth limited the vision that quested under the somber twilight of the lofty archs formed by intertwining branches. The woman shivered with a twitch of her magnificent shoulders, and then cursed.

She was tall, full-bosomed and large-limbed, with compact shoulders. Her whole figure reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the femininity of her appearance. She was all woman, in spite of her bearing and her garments. The latter were incongruous, in view of her present environs. Instead of a skirt she wore short, wide-legged silk breeches, which ceased a hand’s breadth short of her knees, and were upheld by a wide silken sash worn as a girdle. Flaring-topped boots of soft leather came almost to her knees, and a low-necked, wide-collared, wide-sleeved silk shirt completed her costume. On one shapely hip she wore a straight double-edged sword, and on the other a long dirk. Her unruly golden hair, cut square at her shoulders, was confined by a band of crimson satin.

Against the background of somber, primitive forest she posed with an unconscious picturesqueness, bizarre and out of place. She should have been posed against a background of sea-clouds, painted masts, and wheeling gulls. There was the color of the sea in her wide eyes. And that was at it should have been, because this was Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, whose deeds are celebrated in song and ballad wherever seafarers gather.

She strove to pierce the sullen green roof of the arched branches and see the sky which presumably lay above it, but presently gave it up with a muttered oath.

Leaving her horse tied, she strode off toward the east, glancing back toward the pool from time to time in order to fix her route in her mind. The silence of the forest depressed her. No birds sang in the lofty boughs, nor did any rustling in the bushes indicate the presence of small animals. For leagues she had traveled in a realm of brooding stillness, broken only by the sounds of her own flight.

She had slaked her thirst at the pool, but now felt the gnawings of hunger and began looking about for some of the fruit on which she had sustained herself since exhausting the food originally in her saddlebags.

Ahead of her, presently, she saw an outcropping of dark, flint-like rock that sloped upward into what looked like a rugged crag rising among the trees. Its summit was lost to view amidst a cloud of encircling leaves. Perhaps its peak rose above the treetops, and from it she could see what lay beyond—if, indeed, anything lay beyond but more of this apparently illimitable forest through which she had ridden for so many days.

A narrow ridge formed a natural ramp that led up the steep face of the crag. After she had ascended some fifty feet, she came to the belt of leaves that surrounded the rock. The trunks of the trees did not crowd close to the crag, but the ends of their lower branches extended about it, veiling it with their foliage. She groped on in leafy obscurity, not able to see either above or below her; but presently she glimpsed blue sky, and a moment later came out in the clear, hot sunlight and saw the forest roof stretching away under her feet.

She was standing on a broad shelf which was about even with the treetops, and from it rose a spire-like jut that was the ultimate peak of the crag she had climbed. But something else caught her attention at the moment. Her foot had struck something in the litter of blown dead leaves which carpeted the shelf. She kicked them aside and looked down on the skeleton of a man. She ran an experienced eye over the bleached frame, but saw no broken bones nor any sign of violence. The man must have died a natural death; though why he should have climbed a tall crag to die she could not imagine.

She scrambled up to the summit of the spire and looked toward the horizons. The forest roof—which looked like a floor from her vantage point—was just as impenetrable as from below. She could not even see the pool by which she had left her horse. She glanced northward, in the direction from which she had come. She saw only the rolling green ocean stretching away and away, with just a vague blue line in the distance to hint of the hill-range she had crossed days before, to plunge into this leafy waste.

West and east the view was the same; though the blue hill-line was lacking in those directions. But when she turned her eyes southward she stiffened and caught her breath. A mile away in that direction the forest thinned out and ceased abruptly, giving way to a cactus-dotted plain. And in the midst of that plain rose the walls and towers of a city. Valeria swore in amazement. This passed belief. She would not have been surprized to sight human habitations of another sort—the beehive-shaped huts of the black people, or the cliff-dwellings of the mysterious brown race which legends declared inhabited some country of this unexplored region. But it was a startling experience to come upon a walled city here so many long weeks’ march from the nearest outposts of any sort of civilization.

Her hands tiring from clinging to the spire-like pinnacle, she let herself down on the shelf, frowning in indecision. She had come far—from the camp of the mercenaries by the border town of Sukhmet amidst the level grasslands, where desperate adventurers of many races guard the Stygian frontier against the raids that come up like a red wave from Darfar. Her flight had been blind, into a country of which she was wholly ignorant. And now she wavered between an urge to ride directly to that city in the plain, and the instinct of caution which prompted her to skirt it widely and continue her solitary flight.

Her thoughts were scattered by the rustling of the leaves below her. She wheeled catlike, snatched at her sword; and then she froze motionless, staring wide-eyed at the man before her.

He was almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under his skin which the sun had burned brown. His garb was similar to hers, except that he wore a broad leather belt instead of a girdle. Broadsword and poniard hung from his belt.

“Conan, the Cimmerian!” ejaculated the woman. “What are you doing on my trail?”

He grinned hardly, and his fierce blue eyes burned with a light any woman could understand as they ran over her magnificent figure, lingering on the swell of her splendid breasts beneath the light shirt, and the clear white flesh displayed between breeches and boot-tops.

“Don’t you know?” he laughed. “Haven’t I made my admiration for you plain ever since I first saw you?”

“A stallion could have made it no plainer,” she answered disdainfully. “But I never expected to encounter you so far from the ale-barrels and meat-pots of Sukhmet. Did you really follow me from Zarallo’s camp, or were you whipped forth for a rogue?”

He laughed at her insolence and flexed his mighty biceps.

“You know Zarallo didn’t have enough knaves to whip me out of camp,” he grinned. “Of course I followed you. Lucky thing for you, too, wench! When you knifed that Stygian officer, you forfeited Zarallo’s favor and protection, and you outlawed yourself with the Stygians.”

“I know it,” she replied sullenly. “But what else could I do? You know what my provocation was.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “If I’d been there, I’d have knifed him myself. But if a woman must live in the war-camps of men, she can expect such things.”

Valeria stamped her booted foot and swore.

“Why won’t men let me live a man’s life?”

“That’s obvious!” Again his eager eyes devoured her. “But you were wise to run away. The Stygians would have had you skinned. That officer’s brother followed you; faster than you thought, I don’t doubt. He wasn’t far behind you when I caught up with him. His horse was better than yours. He’d have caught you and cut your throat within a few more miles.”

“Well?” she demanded.

“Well what?” He seemed puzzled.

“What of the Stygian?”

“Why, what do you suppose?” he returned impatiently. “I killed him, of course, and left his carcass for the vultures. That delayed me, though, and I almost lost your trail when you crossed the rocky spurs of the hills. Otherwise I’d have caught up with you long ago.”

“And now you think you’ll drag me back to Zarallo’s camp?” she sneered.

“Don’t talk like a fool,” he grunted. “Come, girl, don’t be such a spitfire. I’m not like that Stygian you knifed, and you know it.”

“A penniless vagabond,” she taunted.

He laughed at her.

“What do you call yourself? You haven’t enough money to buy a new seat for your breeches. Your disdain doesn’t deceive me. You know I’ve commanded bigger ships and more men than you ever did in your life. As for being penniless—what rover isn’t, most of the time? I’ve squandered enough gold in the seaports of the world to fill a galleon. You know that, too.”

“Where are the fine ships and the bold lads you commanded, now?” she sneered.

“At the bottom of the sea, mostly,” he replied cheerfully. “The Zingarans sank my last ship off the Shemite shore—that’s why I joined Zarallo’s Free Companions. But I saw I’d been stung when we marched to the Darfar border. The pay was poor and the wine was sour, and I don’t like black women. And that’s the only kind that came to our camp at Sukhmet—rings in their noses and their teeth filed—bah! Why did you join Zarallo? Sukhmet’s a long way from salt water.”

“Red Ortho wanted to make me his mistress,” she answered sullenly. “I jumped overboard one night and swam ashore when we were anchored off the Kushite coast. Off Zabhela, it was. There was a Shemite trader told me that Zarallo had brought his Free Companies south to guard the Darfar border. No better employment offered. I joined an east-bound caravan and eventually came to Sukhmet.”

“It was madness to plunge southward as you did,” commented Conan, “but it was wise, too, for Zarallo’s patrols never thought to look for you in this direction. Only the brother of the man you killed happened to strike your trail.”

“And now what do you intend doing?” she demanded.

“Turn west,” he answered. “I’ve been this far south, but not this far east. Many days’ traveling to the west will bring us to the open savannas, where the black tribes graze their cattle. I have friends among them. We’ll get to the coast and find a ship. I’m sick of the jungle.”

“Then be on your way,” she advised. “I have other plans.”

“Don’t be a fool!” He showed irritation for the first time. “You can’t keep on wandering through this forest.”

“I can if I choose.”

“But what do you intend doing?”

“That’s none of your affair,” she snapped.

“Yes, it is,” he answered calmly. “Do you think I’ve followed you this far, to turn around and ride off empty-handed? Be sensible, wench. I’m not going to harm you.”

He stepped toward her, and she sprang back, whipping out her sword.

“Keep back, you barbarian dog! I’ll spit you like a roast pig!”

He halted, reluctantly, and demanded: “Do you want me to take that toy away from you and spank you with it?”

“Words! Nothing but words!” she mocked, lights like the gleam of the sun on blue water dancing in her reckless eyes.

He knew it was the truth. No living man could disarm Valeria of the Brotherhood with his bare hands. He scowled, his sensations a tangle of conflicting emotions. He was angry, yet he was amused and filled with admiration for her spirit. He burned with eagerness to seize that splendid figure and crush it in his iron arms, yet he greatly desired not to hurt the girl. He was torn between a desire to shake her soundly, and a desire to caress her. He knew if he came any nearer her sword would be sheathed in his heart. He had seen Valeria kill too many men in border forays and tavern brawls to have any illusions about her. He knew she was as quick and ferocious as a tigress. He could draw his broadsword and disarm her, beat the blade out of her hand, but the thought of drawing a sword on a woman, even without intent of injury, was extremely repugnant to him.

“Blast your soul, you hussy!” he exclaimed in exasperation. “I’m going to take off your—”

He started toward her, his angry passion making him reckless, and she poised herself for a deadly thrust. Then came a startling interruption to a scene at once ludicrous and perilous.

“What’s that?”

It was Valeria who exclaimed, but they both started violently, and Conan wheeled like a cat, his great sword flashing into his hand. Back in the forest had burst forth an appalling medley of screams—the screams of horses in terror and agony. Mingled with their screams there came the snap of splintering bones.

“Lions are slaying the horses!” cried Valeria.

“Lions, nothing!” snorted Conan, his eyes blazing. “Did you hear a lion roar? Neither did I! Listen to those bones snap—not even a lion could make that much noise killing a horse.”

He hurried down the natural ramp and she followed, their personal feud forgotten in the adventurers’ instinct to unite against common peril. The screams had ceased when they worked their way downward through the green veil of leaves that brushed the rock.

“I found your horse tied by the pool back there,” he muttered, treading so noiselessly that she no longer wondered how he had surprized her on the crag. “I tied mine beside it and followed the tracks of your boots. Watch, now!”

They had emerged from the belt of leaves, and stared down into the lower reaches of the forest. Above them the green roof spread its dusky canopy. Below them the sunlight filtered in just enough to make a jade-tinted twilight. The giant trunks of trees less than a hundred yards away looked dim and ghostly.

“The horses should be beyond that thicket, over there,” whispered Conan, and his voice might have been a breeze moving through the branches. “Listen!”

Valeria had already heard, and a chill crept through her veins; so she unconsciously laid her white hand on her companion’s muscular brown arm. From beyond the thicket came the noisy crunching of bones and the loud rending of flesh, together with the grinding, slobbering sounds of a horrible feast.

“Lions wouldn’t make that noise,” whispered Conan. “Something’s eating our horses, but it’s not a lion—Crom!”

The noise stopped suddenly, and Conan swore softly. A suddenly risen breeze was blowing from them directly toward the spot where the unseen slayer was hidden.

“Here it comes!” muttered Conan, half-lifting his sword.

The thicket was violently agitated, and Valeria clutched Conan’s arm hard. Ignorant of jungle-lore, she yet knew that no animal she had ever seen could have shaken the tall brush like that.

“It must be as big as an elephant,” muttered Conan, echoing her thought. “What the devil—” His voice trailed away in stunned silence.

Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the huge mouth.

The head, bigger than that of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground, while the serrated backbone rose higher than Conan could have reached on tiptoe. A long spiked tail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion, trailed out behind.

“Back up the crag, quick!” snapped Conan, thrusting the girl behind him. “I don’t think he can climb, but he can stand on his hind legs and reach us—”

With a snapping and rending of bushes and saplings the monster came hurtling through the thickets, and they fled up the rock before him like leaves blown before a wind. As Valeria plunged into the leafy screen a backward glance showed her the titan rearing up fearsomely on his massive hinder legs, even as Conan had predicted. The sight sent panic racing through her. As he reared, the beast seemed more gigantic than ever; his snouted head towered among the trees. Then Conan’s iron hand closed on her wrist and she was jerked headlong into the blinding welter of the leaves, and out again into the hot sunshine above, just as the monster fell forward with his front feet on the crag with an impact that made the rock vibrate.

Behind the fugitives the huge head crashed through the twigs, and they looked down for a horrifying instant at the nightmare visage framed among the green leaves, eyes flaming, jaws gaping. Then the giant tusks clashed together futilely, and after that the head was withdrawn, vanishing from their sight as if it had sunk in a pool.

Peering down through broken branches that scraped the rock, they saw it squatting on its haunches at the foot of the crag, staring unblinkingly up at them.

Valeria shuddered.

“How long do you suppose he’ll crouch there?”

Conan kicked the skull on the leaf-strewn shelf.

“That fellow must have climbed up here to escape him, or one like him. He must have died of starvation. There are no bones broken. That thing must be a dragon, such as the black people speak of in their legends. If so, it won’t leave here until we’re both dead.”

Valeria looked at him blankly, her resentment forgotten. She fought down a surging of panic. She had proved her reckless courage a thousand times in wild battles on sea and land, on the blood-slippery decks of burning warships, in the storming of walled cities, and on the trampled sandy beaches where the desperate men of the Red Brotherhood bathed their knives in one another’s blood in their fights for leadership. But the prospect now confronting her congealed her blood. A cutlass stroke in the heat of battle was nothing; but to sit idle and helpless on a bare rock until she perished of starvation, besieged by a monstrous survival of an elder age—the thought sent panic throbbing through her brain.

“He must leave to eat and drink,” she said helplessly.

“He won’t have to go far to do either,” Conan pointed out. “He’s just gorged on horse-meat and, like a real snake, he can go for a long time without eating or drinking again. But he doesn’t sleep after eating, like a real snake, it seems. Anyway, he can’t climb this crag.”

Conan spoke imperturbably. He was a barbarian, and the terrible patience of the wilderness and its children was as much a part of him as his lusts and rages. He could endure a situation like this with a coolness impossible to a civilized person.

“Can’t we get into the trees and get away, traveling like apes through the branches?” she asked desperately.

He shook his head. “I thought of that. The branches that touch the crag down there are too light. They’d break with our weight. Besides, I have an idea that devil could tear up any tree around here by its roots.”

“Well, are we going to sit here on our rumps until we starve, like that?” she cried furiously, kicking the skull clattering across the ledge. “I won’t do it! I’ll go down there and cut his damned head off—”

Conan had seated himself on a rocky projection at the foot of the spire. He looked up with a glint of admiration at her blazing eyes and tense, quivering figure, but, realizing that she was in just the mood for any madness, he let none of his admiration sound in his voice.

“Sit down,” he grunted, catching her by her wrist and pulling her down on his knee. She was too surprized to resist as he took her sword from her hand and shoved it back in its sheath. “Sit still and calm down. You’d only break your steel on his scales. He’d gobble you up at one gulp, or smash you like an egg with that spiked tail of his. We’ll get out of this jam some way, but we shan’t do it by getting chewed up and swallowed.”

She made no reply, nor did she seek to repulse his arm from about her waist. She was frightened, and the sensation was new to Valeria of the Red Brotherhood. So she sat on her companion’s—or captor’s—knee with a docility that would have amazed Zarallo, who had anathematized her as a she-devil out of Hell’s seraglio.

Conan played idly with her curly yellow locks, seemingly intent only upon his conquest. Neither the skeleton at his feet nor the monster crouching below disturbed his mind or dulled the edge of his interest.

The girl’s restless eyes, roving the leaves below them, discovered splashes of color among the green. It was fruit, large, darkly crimson globes suspended from the boughs of a tree whose broad leaves were a peculiarly rich and vivid green. She became aware of both thirst and hunger, though thirst had not assailed her until she knew she could not descend from the crag to find food and water.

“We need not starve,” she said. “There is fruit we can reach.”

Conan glanced where she pointed.

“If we ate that we wouldn’t need the bite of a dragon,” he grunted. “That’s what the black people of Kush call the Apples of Derketa. Derketa is the Queen of the Dead. Drink a little of that juice, or spill it on your flesh, and you’d be dead before you could tumble to the foot of this crag.”

“Oh!”

She lapsed into dismayed silence. There seemed no way out of their predicament, she reflected gloomily. She saw no way of escape, and Conan seemed to be concerned only with her supple waist and curly tresses. If he was trying to formulate a plan of escape he did not show it.

“If you’ll take your hands off me long enough to climb up on that peak,” she said presently, “you’ll see something that will surprize you.”

He cast her a questioning glance, then obeyed with a shrug of his massive shoulders. Clinging to the spire-like pinnacle, he stared out over the forest roof.

He stood a long moment in silence, posed like a bronze statue on the rock.

“It’s a walled city, right enough,” he muttered presently. “Was that where you were going, when you tried to send me off alone to the coast?”

“I saw it before you came. I knew nothing of it when I left Sukhmet.”

“Who’d have thought to find a city here? I don’t believe the Stygians ever penetrated this far. Could black people build a city like that? I see no herds on the plain, no signs of cultivation, or people moving about.”

“How can you hope to see all that, at this distance?” she demanded.

He shrugged his shoulders and dropped down on the shelf.

“Well, the folk of the city can’t help us just now. And they might not, if they could. The people of the Black Countries are generally hostile to strangers. Probably stick us full of spears—”

He stopped short and stood silent, as if he had forgotten what he was saying, frowning down at the crimson spheres gleaming among the leaves.

“Spears!” he muttered. “What a blasted fool I am not to have thought of that before! That shows what a pretty woman does to a man’s mind.”

“What are you talking about?” she inquired.

Without answering her question, he descended to the belt of leaves and looked down through them. The great brute squatted below, watching the crag with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. So might one of his breed have glared up at their troglodyte ancestors, treed on a high-flung rock, in the dim dawn ages. Conan cursed him without heat, and began cutting branches, reaching out and severing them as far from the end as he could reach. The agitation of the leaves made the monster restless. He rose from his haunches and lashed his hideous tail, snapping off saplings as if they had been toothpicks. Conan watched him warily from the corner of his eye, and just as Valeria believed the dragon was about to hurl himself up the crag again, the Cimmerian drew back and climbed up to the ledge with the branches he had cut. There were three of these, slender shafts about seven feet long, but not larger than his thumb. He had also cut several strands of tough, thin vine.

“Branches too light for spear-hafts, and creepers no thicker than cords,” he remarked, indicating the foliage about the crag. “It won’t hold our weight—but there’s strength in union. That’s what the Aquilonian renegades used to tell us Cimmerians when they came into the hills to raise an army to invade their own country. But we always fight by clans and tribes.”

“What the devil has that got to do with those sticks?” she demanded.

“You wait and see.”

Gathering the sticks in a compact bundle, he wedged his poniard hilt between them at one end. Then with the vines he bound them together, and when he had completed his task, he had a spear of no small strength, with a sturdy shaft seven feet in length.

“What good will that do?” she demanded. “You told me that a blade couldn’t pierce his scales—”

“He hasn’t got scales all over him,” answered Conan. “There’s more than one way of skinning a panther.”

Moving down to the edge of the leaves, he reached the spear up and carefully thrust the blade through one of the Apples of Derketa, drawing aside to avoid the darkly purple drops that dripped from the pierced fruit. Presently he withdrew the blade and showed her the blue steel stained a dull purplish crimson.

“I don’t know whether it will do the job or not,” quoth he. “There’s enough poison there to kill an elephant, but—well, we’ll see.”

Valeria was close behind him as he let himself down among the leaves. Cautiously holding the poisoned pike away from him, he thrust his head through the branches and addressed the monster.

“What are you waiting down there for, you misbegotten offspring of questionable parents?” was one of his more printable queries. “Stick your ugly head up here again, you long-necked brute—or do you want me to come down there and kick you loose from your illegitimate spine?”

There was more of it—some of it couched in eloquence that made Valeria stare, in spite of her profane education among the seafarers. And it had its effect on the monster. Just as the incessant yapping of a dog worries and enrages more constitutionally silent animals, so the clamorous voice of a man rouses fear in some bestial bosoms and insane rage in others. Suddenly and with appalling quickness, the mastodonic brute reared up on its mighty hind legs and elongated its neck and body in a furious effort to reach this vociferous pigmy whose clamor was disturbing the primeval silence of its ancient realm.

But Conan had judged his distance with precision. Some five feet below him the mighty head crashed terribly but futilely through the leaves. And as the monstrous mouth gaped like that of a great snake, Conan drove his spear into the red angle of the jawbone hinge. He struck downward with all the strength of both arms, driving the long poniard blade to the hilt in flesh, sinew and bone.

Instantly the jaws clashed convulsively together, severing the triple-pieced shaft and almost percipitating Conan from his perch. He would have fallen but for the girl behind him, who caught his sword-belt in a desperate grasp. He clutched at a rocky projection, and grinned his thanks back at her.

Down on the ground the monster was wallowing like a dog with pepper in its eyes. He shook his head from side to side, pawed at it, and opened his mouth repeatedly to its widest extent. Presently he got a huge front foot on the stump of the shaft and managed to tear the blade out. Then he threw up his head, jaws wide and spouting blood, and glared up at the crag with such concentrated and intelligent fury that Valeria trembled and drew her sword. The scales along his back and flanks turned from rusty brown to a dull lurid red. Most horribly the monster’s silence was broken. The sounds that issued from his blood-streaming jaws did not sound like anything that could have been produced by an earthly creation.

With harsh, grating roars, the dragon hurled himself at the crag that was the citadel of his enemies. Again and again his mighty head crashed upward through the branches, snapping vainly on empty air. He hurled his full ponderous weight against the rock until it vibrated from base to crest. And rearing upright he gripped it with his front legs like a man and tried to tear it up by the roots, as if it had been a tree.

This exhibition of primordial fury chilled the blood in Valeria’s veins, but Conan was too close to the primitive himself to feel anything but a comprehending interest. To the barbarian, no such gulf existed between himself and other men, and the animals, as existed in the conception of Valeria. The monster below them, to Conan, was merely a form of life differing from himself mainly in physical shape. He attributed to it characteristics similar to his own, and saw in its wrath a counterpart of his rages, in its roars and bellowings merely reptilian equivalents to the curses he had bestowed upon it. Feeling a kinship with all wild things, even dragons, it was impossible for him to experience the sick horror which assailed Valeria at the sight of the brute’s ferocity.

He sat watching it tranquilly, and pointed out the various changes that were taking place in its voice and actions.

“The poison’s taking hold,” he said with conviction.

“I don’t believe it.” To Valeria it seemed preposterous to suppose that anything, however lethal, could have any effect on that mountain of muscle and fury.

“There’s pain in his voice,” declared Conan. “First he was merely angry because of the stinging in his jaw. Now he feels the bite of the poison. Look! He’s staggering. He’ll be blind in a few more minutes. What did I tell you?”

For suddenly the dragon had lurched about and went crashing off through the bushes.

“Is he running away?” inquired Valeria uneasily.

“He’s making for the pool!” Conan sprang up, galvanized into swift activity. “The poison makes him thirsty. Come on! He’ll be blind in a few moments, but he can smell his way back to the foot of the crag, and if our scent’s here still, he’ll sit there until he dies. And others of his kind may come at his cries. Let’s go!”

“Down there?” Valeria was aghast.

“Sure! We’ll make for the city! They may cut our heads off there, but it’s our only chance. We may run into a thousand more dragons on the way, but it’s sure death to stay here. If we wait until he dies, we may have a dozen more to deal with. After me, in a hurry!”

He went down the ramp as swiftly as an ape, pausing only to aid his less agile companion, who, until she saw the Cimmerian climb, had fancied herself the equal of any man in the rigging of a ship or on the sheer face of a cliff.

They descended into the gloom below the branches and slid to the ground silently, though Valeria felt as if the pounding of her heart must surely be heard from far away. A noisy gurgling and lapping beyond the dense thicket indicated that the dragon was drinking at the pool.

“As soon as his belly is full he’ll be back,” muttered Conan. “It may take hours for the poison to kill him—if it does at all.”

Somewhere beyond the forest the sun was sinking to the horizon. The forest was a misty twilight place of black shadows and dim vistas. Conan gripped Valeria’s wrist and glided away from the foot of the crag. He made less noise than a breeze blowing among the tree-trunks, but Valeria felt as if her soft boots were betraying their flight to all the forest.

“I don’t think he can follow a trail,” muttered Conan. “But if a wind blew our body-scent to him, he could smell us out.”

“Mitra, grant that the wind blow not!” Valeria breathed.

Her face was a pallid oval in the gloom. She gripped her sword in her free hand, but the feel of the shagreen-bound hilt inspired only a feeling of helplessness in her.

They were still some distance from the edge of the forest when they heard a snapping and crashing behind them. Valeria bit her lip to check a cry.

“He’s on our trail!” she whispered fiercely.

Conan shook his head.

“He didn’t smell us at the rock, and he’s blundering about through the forest trying to pick up our scent. Come on! It’s the city or nothing now! He could tear down any tree we’d climb. If only the wind stays down—”

They stole on until the trees began to thin out ahead of them. Behind them the forest was a black impenetrable ocean of shadows. The ominous crackling still sounded behind them, as the dragon blundered in his erratic course.

“There’s the plain ahead,” breathed Valeria. “A little more and we’ll—”

“Crom!” swore Conan.

“Mitra!” whispered Valeria.

Out of the south a wind had sprung up.

It blew over them directly into the black forest behind them. Instantly a horrible roar shook the woods. The aimless snapping and crackling of the bushes changed to a sustained crashing as the dragon came like a hurricane straight toward the spot from which the scent of his enemies was wafted.

“Run!” snarled Conan, his eyes blazing like those of a trapped wolf. “It’s all we can do!”

Sailor’s boots are not made for sprinting, and the life of a pirate does not train one for a runner. Within a hundred yards Valeria was panting and reeling in her gait, and behind them the crashing gave way to a rolling thunder as the monster broke out of the thickets and into the more open ground.

Conan’s iron arm about the woman’s waist half-lifted her; her feet scarcely touched the earth as she was borne along at a speed she could never have attained herself. If he could keep out of the beast’s way for a bit, perhaps that betraying wind would shift—but the wind held, and a quick glance over his shoulder showed Conan that the monster was almost upon them, coming like a war-galley in front of a hurricane. He thrust Valeria from him with a force that sent her reeling a dozen feet to fall in a crumpled heap at the foot of the nearest tree, and the Cimmerian wheeled in the path of the thundering titan.

Convinced that his death was upon him, the Cimmerian acted according to his instinct, and hurled himself full at the awful face that was bearing down on him. He leaped, slashing like a wildcat, felt his sword cut deep into the scales that sheathed the mighty snout—and then a terrific impact knocked him rolling and tumbling for fifty feet with all the wind and half the life battered out of him.

How the stunned Cimmerian regained his feet, not even he could have ever told. But the only thought that filled his brain was of the woman lying dazed and helpless almost in the path of the hurtling fiend, and before the breath came whistling back into his gullet he was standing over her with his sword in his hand.

She lay where he had thrown her, but she was struggling to a sitting posture. Neither tearing tusks nor trampling feet had touched her. It had been a shoulder or front leg that struck Conan, and blind monster rushed on, forgetting the victims whose scent it had been following, in the sudden agony of its death throes. Headlong on its course it thundered until its low-hung head crashed into a gigantic tree in its path. The impact tore the tree up by the roots and must have dashed the brains from the misshapen skull. Tree and monster fell together, and the dazed humans saw the branches and leaves shaken by the convulsions of the creature they covered—and then grow quiet.

Conan lifted Valeria to her feet and together they started away at a reeling run. A few moments later they emerged into the still twilight of the treeless plain.

Conan paused an instant and glanced back at the ebon fastness behind them. Not a leaf stirred, nor a bird chirped. It stood as silent as it must have stood before Man was created.

“Come on,” muttered Conan, taking his companion’s hand. “It’s touch and go now. If more dragons come out of the woods after us—”

He did not have to finish the sentence.

The city looked very far away across the plain, farther than it had looked from the crag. Valeria’s heart hammered until she felt as if it would strangle her. At every step she expected to hear the crashing of the bushes and see another colossal nightmare bearing down upon them. But nothing disturbed the silence of the thickets.

With the first mile between them and the woods, Valeria breathed more easily. Her buoyant self-confidence began to thaw out again. The sun had set and darkness was gathering over the plain, lightened a little by the stars that made stunted ghosts out of the cactus growths.

“No cattle, no plowed fields,” muttered Conan. “How do these people live?”

“Perhaps the cattle are in pens for the night,” suggested Valeria, “and the fields and grazing-pastures are on the other side of the city.”

“Maybe,” he grunted. “I didn’t see any from the crag, though.”

The moon came up behind the city, etching walls and towers blackly in the yellow glow. Valeria shivered. Black against the moon the strange city had a somber, sinister look.

Perhaps something of the same feeling occurred to Conan, for he stopped, glanced about him, and grunted: “We’ll stop here. No use coming to their gates in the night. They probably wouldn’t let us in. Besides, we need rest, and we don’t know how they’ll receive us. A few hours’ sleep will put us in better shape to fight or run.”

He led the way to a bed of cactus which grew in a circle—a phenomenon common to the southern desert. With his sword he chopped an opening, and motioned Valeria to enter.

“We’ll be safe from the snakes here, anyhow.”

She glanced fearfully back toward the black line that indicated the forest some six miles away.

“Suppose a dragon comes out of the woods?”

“We’ll keep watch,” he answered, though he made no suggestion as to what they would do in such an event. He was staring at the city, a few miles away. Not a light shone from spire or tower. A great black mass of mystery, it reared cryptically against the moonlit sky.

“Lie down and sleep. I’ll keep the first watch.”

She hesitated, glancing at him uncertainly, but he sat down cross-legged in the opening, facing toward the plain, his sword across his knees, his back to her. Without further comment she lay down on the sand inside the spiky circle.

“Wake me when the moon is at its zenith,” she directed.

He did not reply nor look toward her. Her last impression, as she sank into slumber, was of his muscular figure, immobile as a statue hewn out of bronze, outlined against the low-hanging stars.

2. By the Blaze of the Fire Jewels

Valeria awoke with a start, to the realization that a grey dawn was stealing over the plain.

She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Conan squatted beside the cactus, cutting off the thick pears and dexterously twitching out the spikes.

“You didn’t awake me,” she accused. “You let me sleep all night!”

“You were tired,” he answered. “Your posterior must have been sore, too, after that long ride. You pirates aren’t used to horseback.”

“What about yourself?” she retorted.

“I was a kozak before I was a pirate,” he answered. “They live in the saddle. I snatch naps like a panther watching beside the trail for a deer to come by. My ears keep watch while my eyes sleep.”

And indeed the giant barbarian seemed as much refreshed as if he had slept the whole night on a golden bed. Having removed the thorns, and peeled off the tough skin, he handed the girl a thick, juicy cactus leaf.

“Sink your teeth in that pear. It’s food and drink to a desert man. I was a chief of the Zuagirs once—desert men who live by plundering the caravans.”

“Is there anything you haven’t done?” inquired the girl, half in derision and half in fascination.

“I’ve never been king of a Hyborian kingdom,” he grinned, taking an enormous mouthful of cactus. “But I’ve dreamed of being even that. I may be too, someday. Why shouldn’t I?”

She shook her head in wonder at his calm audacity, and fell to devouring her pear. She found it not unpleasing to the palate, and full of cool and thirst-satisfying juice. Finishing his meal, Conan wiped his hands in the sand, rose, ran his fingers through his thick black mane, hitched at his sword belt and said:

“Well, let’s go. If the people in that city are going to cut our throats they may as well do it now, before the heat of the day begins.”

His grim humor was unconscious, but Valeria reflected that it might be prophetic. She too hitched her sword-belt as she rose. Her terrors of the night were past. The roaring dragons of the distant forest were like a dim dream. There was a swagger in her stride as she moved off beside the Cimmerian. Whatever perils lay ahead of them, their foes would be men. And Valeria of the Red Brotherhood had never seen the face of the man she feared.

Conan glanced down at her as she strode along beside him with her swinging stride that matched his own.

“You walk more like a hillman than a sailor,” he said. “You must be an Aquilonian. The suns of Darfar never burnt your white skin brown. Many a princess would envy you.”

“I am from Aquilonia,” she replied. His compliments no longer irritated her. His evident admiration pleased her. For another man to have kept her watch while she slept would have angered her; she had always fiercely resented any man’s attempting to shield or protect her because of her sex. But she found a secret pleasure in the fact that this man had done so. And he had not taken advantage of her fright and the weakness resulting from it. After all, she reflected, her companion was no common man.

The sun rose up behind the city, turning the towers to a sinister crimson.

“Black last night against the moon,” grunted Conan, his eyes clouding with the abysmal superstition of the barbarian. “Blood-red as a threat of blood against the sun this dawn. I do not like this city.”

But they went on, and as they went Conan pointed out the fact that no road ran to the city from the north.

“No cattle have trampled the plain on this side of the city,” said he. “No plowshare has touched the earth for years, maybe centuries. But look: once this plain was cultivated.”

Valeria saw the ancient irrigation ditches he indicated, half-filled in places, and overgrown with cactus. She frowned with perplexity as her eyes swept over the plain that stretched on all sides of the city to the forest edge, which marched in a vast, dim ring. Vision did not extend beyond that ring.

She looked uneasily at the city. No helmets or spearheads gleamed on battlements, no trumpets sounded, no challenge rang from the towers. A silence as absolute as that of the forest brooded over the walls and minarets.

The sun was high above the eastern horizon when they stood before the great gate in the northern wall, in the shadow of the lofty rampart. Rust flecked the iron bracings of the mighty bronze portal. Spider webs glistened thickly on hinge and sill and bolted panel.

“It hasn’t been opened for years!” exclaimed Valeria.

“A dead city,” grunted Conan. “That’s why the ditches were broken and the plain untouched.”

“But who built it? Who dwelt here? Where did they go? Why did they abandon it?”

“Who can say? Maybe an exiled clan of Stygians built it. Maybe not. It doesn’t look like Stygian architecture. Maybe the people were wiped out by enemies, or a plague exterminated them.”

“In that case their treasures may still be gathering dust and cobwebs in there,” suggested Valeria, the acquisitive instincts of her profession waking in her; prodded, too, by feminine curiosity. “Can we open the gate? Let’s go in and explore a bit.”

Conan eyed the heavy portal dubiously, but placed his massive shoulder against it and thrust with all the power of his muscular calves and thighs. With a rasping screech of rusty hinges the gate moved ponderously inward, and Conan straightened and drew his sword. Valeria stared over his shoulder, and made a sound indicative of surprize.

They were not looking into an open street or court as one would have expected. The opened gate, or door, gave directly into a long, broad hall which ran away and away until its vista grew indistinct in the distance. It was of heroic proportions, and the floor of a curious red stone, cut in square tiles, that seemed to smolder as if with the reflection of flames. The walls were of a shiny green material.

“Jade, or I’m a Shemite!” swore Conan.

“Not in such quantity!” protested Valeria.

“I’ve looted enough from the Khitan caravans to know what I’m talking about,” he asserted. “That’s jade!”

The vaulted ceiling was of lapis lazuli, adorned with clusters of great green stones that gleamed with a poisonous radiance.

“Green fire-stones,” growled Conan. “That’s what the people of Punt call them. They’re supposed to be the petrified eyes of those prehistoric snakes the ancients called Golden Serpents. They glow like a cat’s eyes in the dark. At night this hall would be lighted by them, but it would be a hellishly weird illumination. Let’s look around. We might find a cache of jewels.”

“Shut the door,” advised Valeria. “I’d hate to have to outrun a dragon down this hall.”

Conan grinned, and replied: “I don’t believe the dragons ever leave the forest.”

But he complied, and pointed out the broken bolt on the inner side.

“I thought I heard something snap when I shoved against it. That bolt’s freshly broken. Rust has eaten nearly through it. If the people ran away, why should it have been bolted on the inside?”

“They undoubtedly left by another door,” suggested Valeria.

She wondered how many centuries had passed since the light of outer day had filtered into that great hall through the open door. Sunlight was finding its way somehow into the hall, and they quickly saw the source. High up in the vaulted ceiling skylights were set in slot-like openings—translucent sheets of some crystalline substance. In the splotches of shadow between them, the green jewels winked like the eyes of angry cats. Beneath their feet the dully lurid floor smoldered with changing hues and colors of flame. It was like treading the floors of Hell with evil stars blinking overhead.

Three balustraded galleries ran along on each side of the hall, one above the other.

“A four-storied house,” grunted Conan, “and this hall extends to the roof. It’s long as a street. I seem to see a door at the other end.”

Valeria shrugged her white shoulders.

“Your eyes are better than mine, then, though I’m accounted sharp eyed among the sea-rovers.”

They turned into an open door at random, and traversed a series of empty chambers, floored like the hall, and with walls of the same green jade, or of marble or ivory or chalcedony, adorned with friezes of bronze, gold, or silver. In the ceilings the green fire-gems were set, and their light was as ghostly and illusive as Conan had predicted. Under the witch-fire glow the intruders moved like specters.

Some of the chambers lacked this illumination, and their doorways showed black as the mouth of the Pit. These Conan and Valeria avoided, keeping always to the lighted chambers.

Cobwebs hung in the corners, but there was no perceptible accumulation of dust on the floor, or on the tables and seats of marble, jade, or carnelian which occupied the chambers. Here and there were rugs of that silk known as Khitan which is practically indestructible. Nowhere did they find any windows, or doors opening into streets or courts. Each door merely opened into another chamber or hall.

“Why don’t we come to a street?” grumbled Valeria. “This palace or whatever we’re in must be as big as the king of Turan’s seraglio.”

“They must not have perished of plague,” sad Conan, meditating upon the mystery of the empty city. “Otherwise we’d find skeletons. Maybe it became haunted, and everybody got up and left. Maybe—”

“Maybe, hell!” broke in Valeria rudely. “We’ll never know. Look at these friezes. They portray men. What race do they belong to?”

Conan scanned them and shook his head.

“I never saw people exactly like them. But there’s the smack of the East about them—Vendhya, maybe, or Kosala.”

“Were you a king in Kosala?” she asked, masking her keen curiosity with derision.

“No. But I was a war chief of the Afghulis who live in the Himelian mountains above the borders of Vendhya. These people favor the Kosalans. But why should Kosalans be building a city this far to the west?”

The figures portrayed were those of slender, olive-skinned men and women, with finely chiseled, exotic features. They wore filmy robes and many delicate jeweled ornaments, and were depicted mostly in attitudes of feasting, dancing, or lovemaking.

“Easterners, all right,” grunted Conan, “but from where I don’t know. They must have lived a disgustingly peaceful life, though, or they’d have scenes of wars and fights. Let’s go up those stairs.”

It was an ivory spiral that wound up from the chamber in which they were standing. They mounted three flights and came into a broad chamber on the fourth floor, which seemed to be the highest tier in the building. Skylights in the ceiling illuminated the room, in which light the fire-gems winked pallidly. Glancing through the doors they saw, except on one side, a series of similarly lighted chambers. This other door opened upon a balustraded gallery that overhung a hall much smaller than the one they had recently explored on the lower floor.

“Hell!” Valeria sat down disgustedly on a jade bench. “The people who deserted this city must have taken all their treasures with them. I’m tired of wandering through these bare rooms at random.”

“All these upper chambers seem to be lighted,” said Conan. “I wish we could find a window that overlooked the city. Let’s have a look through that door over there.”

“You have a look,” advised Valeria. “I’m going to sit here and rest my feet.”

Conan disappeared through the door opposite that one opening upon the gallery, and Valeria leaned back with her hands clasped behind her head, and thrust her booted legs out in front of her. These silent rooms and halls with their gleaming green clusters of ornaments and burning crimson floors were beginning to depress her. She wished they could find their way out of the maze into which they had wandered and emerge into a street. She wondered idly what furtive, dark feet had glided over those flaming floors in past centuries, how many deeds of cruelty and mystery those winking ceiling-gems had blazed down upon.

It was a faint noise that brought her out of her reflections. She was on her feet with her sword in her hand before she realized what had disturbed her. Conan had not returned, and she knew it was not he that she had heard.

The sound had come from somewhere beyond the door that opened on to the gallery. Soundlessly in her soft leather boots she glided through it, crept across the balcony and peered down between the heavy balustrades.

A man was stealing along the hall.

The sight of a human being in this supposedly deserted city was a startling shock. Crouching down behind the stone balusters, with every nerve tingling, Valeria glared down at the stealthy figure.

The man in no way resembled the figures depicted on the friezes. He was slightly above middle height, very dark, though not Negroid. He was naked but for a scanty silk clout that only partly covered his muscular hips, and a leather girdle, a hand’s breadth broad, about his lean waist. His long black hair hung in lank strands about his shoulders, giving him a wild appearance. He was gaunt, but knots and cords of muscles stood out on his arms and legs, without that fleshy padding that presents a pleasing symmetry of contour. He was built with an economy that was almost repellent.

Yet it was not so much his physical appearance as his attitude that impressed the woman who watched him. He slunk along, stooped in a semi-crouch, his head turning from side to side. He grasped a wide-tipped blade in his right hand and she saw it shake with the intensity of the emotion that gripped him. He was afraid, trembling in the grip of some dire terror. When he turned his head she caught the blaze of wild eyes among the lank strands of black hair.

He did not see her. On tiptoe he glided across the hall and vanished through an open door. A moment later she heard a choking cry, and then silence fell again.

Consumed with curiosity, Valeria glided along the gallery until she came to a door above the one through which the man had passed. It opened into another, smaller gallery that encircled a large chamber.

This chamber was on the third floor, and its ceiling was not so high as that of the hall. It was lighted only by the fire-stones, and their weird green glow left the spaces under the balcony in shadows.

Valeria’s eyes widened. The man she had seen was still in the chamber.

He lay face down on a dark crimson carpet in the middle of the room. His body was limp, his arms spread wide. His curved sword lay near him.

She wondered why he should lie there so motionless. Then her eyes narrowed as she stared down at the rug on which he lay. Beneath and about him the fabric showed a slightly different color, a deeper, brighter crimson.

Shivering slightly, she crouched down closer behind the balustrade, intently scanning the shadows under the overhanging gallery. They gave up no secret.

Suddenly another figure entered the grim drama. He was a man similar to the first, and he came in by a door opposite that which gave upon the hall.

His eyes glared at the sight of the man on the floor, and he spoke something in a staccato voice that sounded like “Chicmec!” The other did not move.

The man stepped quickly across the floor, bent, gripped the fallen man’s shoulder and turned him over. A choking cry escaped him as the head fell back limply, disclosing a throat that had been severed from ear to ear.

The man let the corpse fall back upon the bloodstained carpet, and sprang to his feet, shaking like a windblown leaf. His face was an ashy mask of fear. But with one knee flexed for flight, he froze suddenly, became as immobile as an image, staring across the chamber with dilated eyes.

In the shadows beneath the balcony a ghostly light began to glow and grow, a light that was not part of the fire-stone gleam. Valeria felt her hair stir as she watched it; for, dimly visible in the throbbing radiance, there floated a human skull, and it was from this skull—human yet appallingly misshapen—that the spectral light seemed to emanate. It hung there like a disembodied head, conjured out of night and the shadows, growing more and more distinct; human, and yet not human as she knew humanity.

The man stood motionless, an embodiment of paralyzed horror, staring fixedly at the apparition. The thing moved out from the wall and a grotesque shadows moved with it. Slowly the shadow became visible as a manlike figure whose naked torso and limbs shone whitely, with the hue of bleached bones. The bare skull on its shoulders grinned eyelessly, in the midst of its unholy nimbus, and the man confronting it seemed unable to take his eyes from it. He stood still, his sword dangling from nerveless fingers, on his face the expression of a man bound by the spells of a mesmerist.

Valeria realized that it was not fear alone that paralyzed him. Some hellish quality of that throbbing glow had robbed him of his power to think and act. She herself, safely above the scene, felt the subtle impact of a nameless emanation that was a threat to sanity.

The horror swept toward its victim and he moved at last, but only to drop his sword and sink to his knees, covering his eyes with his hands. Dumbly he awaited the stroke of the blade that now gleamed in the apparition’s hand as it reared above him like Death triumphant over mankind.

Valeria acted according to the first impulse of her wayward nature. With one tigerish movement she was over the balustrade and dropping to the floor behind the awful shape. It wheeled at the thud of her soft boots on the floor, but even as it turned, her keen blade lashed down, and a fierce exultation swept her as she felt the edge cleave solid flesh and mortal bone.

The apparition cried out gurglingly and went down, severed through the shoulder, breastbone and spine, and as it fell the burning skull rolled clear, revealing a lank mop of black hair and a dark face twisted in the convulsions of death. Beneath the horrific masquerade there was a human being, a man similar to the one kneeling supinely on the floor.

The latter looked up at the sound of the blow and the cry, and now he glared in wild-eyed amazement at the white-skinned woman who stood over the corpse with a dripping sword in her hand.

He staggered up, yammering as if the sight had almost unseated his reason. She was amazed to realize that she understood him. He was gibbering in the Stygian tongue, though in a dialect unfamiliar to her.

“Who are you? Whence come you? What do you in Xuchotl?” Then rushing on, without waiting for her to reply: “But you are a friend—goddess or devil, it makes no difference! You have slain the Burning Skull! It was but a man beneath it, after all! We deemed it a demon they conjured up out of the catacombs! Listen!”

He stopped short in his ravings and stiffened, straining his ears with painful intensity. The girl heard nothing.

“We must hasten!” he whispered. “They are west of the Great Hall! They may be all around us here! They may be creeping upon us even now!”

He seized her wrist in a convulsive grasp she found hard to break.

“Whom do you mean by ‘they?’” she demanded.

He stared at her uncomprehendingly for an instant, as if he found her ignorance hard to understand.

“They?” he stammered vaguely. “Why—why, the people of Xotalanc! The clan of the man you slew. They who dwell by the eastern gate.”

“You mean to say this city is inhabited?” she exclaimed.

“Aye! Aye!” He was writhing in the impatience of apprehension. “Come away! Come quick! We must return to Tecuhltli!”

“Where is that?” she demanded.

“The quarter by the western gate!” He had her wrist again and was pulling her toward the door through which he had first come. Great beads of perspiration dripped from his dark forehead, and his eyes blazed with terror.

“Wait a minute!” she growled, flinging off his hand. “Keep your hands off me, or I’ll split your skull. What’s all this about? Who are you? Where would you take me?”

He took a firm grip on himself, casting glances to all sides, and began speaking so fast his words tripped over each other.

“My name is Techotl. I am of Techultli. I and this man who lies with his throat cut came into the Halls of Silence to try and ambush some of the Xotalancas. But we became separated and I returned here to find him with his gullet slit. The Burning Skull did it, I know, just as he would have slain me had you not killed him. But perhaps he was not alone. Others may be stealing from Xotalanc! The gods themselves blench at the fate of those they take alive!”

At the thought he shook as with a ague and his dark skin grew ashy. Valeria frowned puzzledly at him. She sensed intelligence behind this rigmarole, but it was meaningless to her.

She turned toward the skull, which still glowed and pulsed on the floor, and was reaching a booted toe tentatively toward it, when the man who called himself Techotl sprang forward with a cry.

“Do not touch it! Do not even look at it! Madness and death lurk in it. The wizards of Xotalanc understand its secret—they found it in the catacombs, where lie the bones of terrible kings who ruled in Xuchotl in the black centuries of the past. To gaze upon it freezes the blood and withers the brain of a man who understands not its mystery. To touch it causes madness and destruction.”

She scowled at him uncertainly. He was not a reassuring figure, with his lean, muscle-knotted frame, and snaky locks. In his eyes, behind the glow of terror, lurked a weird light she had never seen in the eyes of a man wholly sane. Yet he seemed sincere in his protestations.

“Come!” he begged, reaching for her hand, and then recoiling as he remembered her warning. “You are a stranger. How you came here I do not know, but if you were a goddess or a demon, come to aid Tecuhltli, you would know all the things you have asked me. You must be from beyond the great forest, whence our ancestors came. But you are our friend, or you would not have slain my enemy. Come quickly, before the Xotalancas find us and slay us!”

From his repellent, impassioned face she glanced to the sinister skull, smoldering and glowing on the floor near the dead man. It was like a skull seen in a dream, undeniably human, yet with disturbing distortions and malformations of contour and outline. In life the wearer of that skull must have presented an alien and monstrous aspect. Life? It seemed to possess some sort of life of its own. Its jaws yawned at her and snapped together. Its radiance grew brighter, more vivid, yet the impression of nightmare grew too; it was a dream; all life was a dream—it was Techotl’s urgent voice which snapped Valeria back from the dim gulfs whither she was drifting.

“Do not look at the skull! Do not look at the skull!” It was a far cry from across unreckoned voids.

Valeria shook herself like a lion shaking his mane. Her vision cleared. Techotl was chattering: “In life it housed the awful brain of a king of magicians! It holds still the life and fire of magic drawn from outer spaces!”

With a curse Valeria leaped, lithe as a panther, and the skull crashed to flaming bits under her swinging sword. Somewhere in the room, or in the void, or in the dim reaches of her consciousness, an inhuman voice cried out in pain and rage.

Techotl’s hand was plucking at her arm and he was gibbering: “You have broken it! You have destroyed it! Not all the black arts of Xotalanc can rebuild it! Come away! Come away quickly, now!”

“But I can’t go,” she protested. “I have a friend somewhere nearby—”

The flare of his eyes cut her short as he stared past her with an expression grown ghastly. She wheeled just as four men rushed through as many doors, converging on the pair in the center of the chamber.

They were like the others she had seen, the same knotted muscles bulging on otherwise gaunt limbs, the same lank blue-black hair, the same mad glare in their wild eyes. They were armed and clad like Techotl, but on the breast of each was painted a white skull.

There were no challenges or war-cries. Like blood-mad tigers the men of Xotalanc sprang at the throats of their enemies. Techotl met them with the fury of desperation, ducked the swipe of a wide-headed blade, and grappled with the wielder, and bore him to the floor where they rolled and wrestled in murderous silence.

The other three swarmed on Valeria, their weird eyes red as the eyes of mad dogs.

She killed the first who came within reach before he could strike a blow, her long straight blade splitting his skull even as his own sword lifted for a stroke. She sidestepped a thrust, even as she parried a slash. Her eyes danced and her lips smiled without mercy. Again she was Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, and the hum of her steel was like a bridal song in her ears.

Her sword darted past a blade that sought to parry, and sheathed six inches of its point in a leather-guarded midriff. The man gasped agonizedly and went to his knees, but his tall mate lunged in, in ferocious silence, raining blow on blow so furiously that Valeria had no opportunity to counter. She stepped back coolly, parrying the strokes and watching for her chance to thrust home. He could not long keep up that flailing whirlwind. His arm would tire, his wind would fail; he would weaken, falter, and then her blade would slide smoothly into his heart. A sidelong glance showed her Techotl kneeling on the breast of his antagonist and striving to break the other’s hold on his wrist and to drive home a dagger.

Sweat beaded the forehead of the man facing her, and his eyes were like burning coals. Smite as he would, he could not break past nor beat down her guard. His breath came in gusty gulps, his blows began to fall erratically. She stepped back to draw him out— and felt her thighs locked in an iron grip. She had forgotten the wounded man on the floor.

Crouching on his knees, he held her with both arms locked about her legs, and his mate croaked in triumph and began working his way around to come at her from the left side. Valeria wrenched and tore savagely, but in vain. She could free herself of this clinging menace with a downward flick of her sword, but in that instant the curved blade of the tall warrior would crash through her skull. The wounded man began to worry at her bare thigh with his teeth like a wild beast.

She reached down with her left hand and gripped his long hair, forcing his head back so that his white teeth and rolling eyes gleamed up at her. The tall Xotalanc cried out fiercely and leaped in, smiting with all the fury of his arm. Awkwardly she parried the stroke, and it beat the flat of her blade down on her head so that she saw sparks flash before her eyes, and staggered. Up went the sword again, with a low, beast-like cry of triumph—and then a giant form loomed behind the Xotalanc and steel flashed like a jet of blue lightning. The cry of the warrior broke short and he went down like an ox beneath the pole-ax, his brains gushing from his skull that had been split to the throat.

“Conan!” gasped Valeria. In a gust of passion she turned on the Xotalanc whose long hair she still gripped in her left hand. “Dog of Hell!” Her blade swished as it cut the air in an upswinging arc with a blur in the middle, and the headless body slumped down, spurting blood. She hurled the severed head across the room.

“What the devil’s going on here?” Conan bestrode the corpse of the man he had killed, broadsword in hand, glaring about him in amazement.

Techotl was rising from the twitching figure of the last Xotalanc, shaking red drops from his dagger. He was bleeding from the stab deep in the thigh. He stared at Conan with dilated eyes.

“What is all this?” Conan demanded again, not yet recovered from the stunning surprize of finding Valeria engaged in a savage battle with these fantastic figures in a city he had thought empty and uninhabited. Returning from an aimless exploration of the upper chambers to find Valeria missing from the room where he had left her, he had followed the sounds of strife that burst on his dumfounded ears.

“Five dead dogs!” exclaimed Techotl, his flaming eyes reflecting a ghastly exultation. “Five slain! Five crimson nails for the black pillar! The gods of blood be thanked!”

He lifted quivering hands on high, and then, with the face of a fiend, he spat on the corpses and stamped on their faces, dancing in his ghoulish glee. His recent allies eyed him in amazement, and Conan asked, in the Aquilonian tongue: “Who is this madman?”

Valeria shrugged her shoulders.

“He says his name’s Techotl. From his babblings I gather that his people live at one end of this crazy city, and these others at the other end. Maybe we’d better go with him. He seems friendly, and it’s easy to see that the other clan isn’t.”

Techotl had ceased his dancing and was listening again, his head tilted sidewise, dog-like, triumph struggling with fear in his repellent countenance.

“Come away, now!” he whispered. “We have done enough! Five dead dogs! My people will welcome you! They will honor you! But come! It is far to Tecuhltli. At any moment the Xotalancs may come on us in numbers too great even for your swords.”

“Lead the way,” grunted Conan.

Techotl instantly mounted a stair leading up to the gallery, beckoning them to follow him, which they did, moving rapidly to keep on his heels. Having reached the gallery, he plunged into a door that opened toward the west, and hurried through chamber after chamber, each lighted by skylights or green fire-jewels.

“What sort of place can this be?” muttered Valeria under her breath.

“Crom knows!” answered Conan. “I’ve seen his kind before, though. They live on the shores of Lake Zuad, near the border of Kush. They’re a sort of mongrel Stygians, mixed with another race that wandered into Stygia from the east some centuries ago and were absorbed by them. They’re called Tlazitlans. I’m willing to bet it wasn’t they who built this city, though.”

Techotl’s fear did not seem to diminish as they drew away from the chamber where the dead men lay. He kept twisting his head on his shoulder to listen for sounds of pursuit, and stared with burning intensity into every doorway they passed.

Valeria shivered in spite of herself. She feared no man. But the weird floor beneath her feet, the uncanny jewels over her head, dividing the lurking shadows among them, the stealth and terror of their guide, impressed her with a nameless apprehension, a sensation of lurking, inhuman peril.

“They may be between us and Tecuhltli!” he whispered once. “We must beware lest they be lying in wait!”

“Why don’t we get out of this infernal palace, and take to the streets?” demanded Valeria.

“There are no streets in Xuchotl,” he answered. “No squares nor open courts. The whole city is built like one giant palace under one great roof. The nearest approach to a street is the Great Hall which traverses the city from the north gate to the south gate. The only doors opening into the outer world are the city gates, through which no living man has passed for fifty years.”

“How long have you dwelt here?” asked Conan.

“I was born in the castle of Tecuhltli thirty-five years ago. I have never set foot outside the city. For the love of the gods, let us go silently! These halls may be full of lurking devils. Olmec shall tell you all when we reach Tecuhltli.”

So in silence they glided on with the green fire-stones blinking overhead and the flaming floors smoldering under their feet, and it seemed to Valeria as if they fled through Hell, guided by a dark-faced, lank-haired goblin.

Yet it was Conan who halted them as they were crossing an unusually wide chamber. His wilderness-bred ears were keener even than the ears of Techotl, whetted though these were by a lifetime of warfare in this silent corridors.

“You think some of your enemies may be ahead of us, lying in ambush?”

“They prowl through these rooms at all hours,” answered Techotl, “as do we. The halls and chambers between Tecuhltli and Xotalanc are a disputed region, owned by no man. We call it the Halls of Silence. Why do you ask?”

“Because men are in the chambers ahead of us,” answered Conan. “I heard steel clink against stone.”

Again a shaking seized Techotl, and he clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering.

“Perhaps they are your friends,” suggested Valeria.

“We dare not chance it,” he panted, and moved with frenzied activity. He turned aside and glided through a doorway on the left which led into a chamber from which an ivory staircase wound down into darkness.

“This leads to an unlighted corridor below us!” he hissed, great beads of perspiration standing out on his brow. “They may be lurking there, too. It may all be a trick to draw us into it. But we must take the chance that they have laid their ambush in the rooms above. Come swiftly now!”

Softly as phantoms they descended the stair and came to the mouth of a corridor black as night. They crouched there for a moment, listening, and then melted into it. As they moved along, Valeria’s flesh crawled between her shoulders in momentary expectation of a sword-thrust in the dark. But for Conan’s iron fingers gripping her arm she had no physical cognizance of her companions. Neither made as much noise as a cat would have made. The darkness was absolute. One hand, outstretched, touched a wall, and occasionally she felt a door under her fingers. The hallway seemed interminable.

Suddenly they were galvanized by a sound behind them. Valeria’s flesh crawled anew, for she recognized it as the soft opening of a door. Men had come into the corridor behind them. Even with the thought she stumbled over something that felt like a human skull. It rolled across the floor with an appalling clatter.

“Run!” yelped Techotl, a note of hysteria in his voice, and was away down the corridor like a flying ghost.

Again Valeria felt Conan’s hand bearing her up and sweeping her along as they raced after their guide. Conan could see in the dark no better than she, but he possessed a sort of instinct that made his course unerring. Without his support and guidance she would have fallen or stumbled against the wall. Down the corridor they sped, while the swift patter of flying feet drew closer and closer, and then suddenly Techotl panted: “Here is the stair! After me, quick! Oh, quick!”

His hand came out of the dark and caught Valeria’s wrist as she stumbled blindly on the steps. She felt herself half-dragged, half-lifted up the winding stair, while Conan released her and turned on the steps, his ears and instincts telling him their foes were hard at their backs. And the sounds were not all those of human feet.

Something came writhing up the steps, something that slithered and rustled and brought a chill in the air with it. Conan lashed down with his great sword and felt the blade shear through something that might have been flesh and bone, and cut deep into the stair beneath. Something touched his foot that chilled like the touch of frost, and then the darkness beneath him was disturbed by a frightful thrashing and lashing, and a man cried out in agony.

The next moment Conan was racing up the winding staircase, and through a door that stood open at the head.

Valeria and Techotl were already through, and Techotl slammed the door and shot a bolt across it—the first Conan had seen since they had left the outer gate.

Then he turned and ran across the well-lighted chamber into which they had come, and as they passed through the farther door, Conan glanced back and saw the door groaning and straining under heavy pressure violently applied from the other side.

Though Techotl did not abate either his speed or his caution, he seemed more confident now. He had the air of a man who had come into familiar territory, within call of friends.

But Conan renewed his terror by asking: “What was that thing I fought on the stairs?”

“The men of Xotalanc,” answered Techotl, without looking back. “I told you the halls were full of them.”

“This wasn’t a man,” grunted Conan. “It was something that crawled, and it was as cold as ice to the touch. I think I cut it asunder. It fell back on the men who were following us, and must have killed one of them in its death throes.”

Techotl’s head jerked back, his face ashy again. Convulsively he quickened his pace.

“It was the Crawler! A monster they have brought out of the catacombs to aid them! What it is, we do not know, but we have found our people hideously slain by it. In Set’s name, hasten! If they put it on our trail, it will follow us to the very doors of Tecuhltli!”

“I doubt it,” grunted Conan. “That was a shrewd cut I dealt it on the stair.”

“Hasten! Hasten!” groaned Techotl.

They ran through a series of green-lit chambers, traversed a broad hall, and halted before a giant bronze door.

Techotl said: “This is Tecuhltli!”

3. The People of the Feud

Techotl smote on the bronze door with his clenched hand, and then turned sidewise, so that he could watch back along the hall.

“Men have been smitten down before this door, when they thought they were safe,” he said.

“Why don’t they open the door?” asked Conan.

“They are looking at us through the Eye,” answered Techotl. “They are puzzled at the sight of you.” He lifted his voice and called: “Open the door, Xecelan! It is I, Techotl, with friends from the great world beyond the forest!—They will open,” he assured his allies.

“They’d better do it in a hurry, then,” said Conan grimly. “I hear something crawling along the floor beyond the hall.”

Techotl went ashy again and attacked the door with his fists, screaming: “Open, you fools, open! The Crawler is at our heels!”

Even as he beat and shouted, the great bronze door swung noiselessly back, revealing a heavy chain across the entrance, over which spearheads bristled and fierce countenances regarded them intently for an instant. Then the chain was dropped and Techotl grasped the arms of his friends in a nervous frenzy and fairly dragged them over the threshold. A glance over his shoulder just as the door was closing showed Conan the long dim vista of the hall, and dimly framed at the other end an ophidian shape that writhed slowly and painfully into view, flowing in a dull-hued length from a chamber door, its hideous bloodstained head wagging drunkenly. Then the closing door shut off the view.

Inside the square chamber into which they had come heavy bolts were drawn across the door, and the chain locked into place. The door was made to stand the battering of a siege. Four men stood on guard, of the same lank-haired, dark-skinned breed as Techotl, with spears in their hands and swords at their hips. In the wall near the door there was a complicated contrivance of mirrors which Conan guessed was the Eye Techotl had mentioned, so arranged that a narrow, crystal-paned slot in the wall could be looked through from within without being discernible from without. The four guardsmen stared at the strangers with wonder, but asked no question, nor did Techotl vouchsafe any information. He moved with easy confidence now, as if he had shed his cloak of indecision and fear the instant he crossed the threshold.

“Come!” he urged his new-found friends, but Conan glanced toward the door.

“What about those fellows who were following us? Won’t they try to storm that door?”

Techotl shook his head.

“They know they cannot break down the Door of the Eagle. They will flee back to Xotalanc, with their crawling fiend. Come! I will take you to the rulers of Tecuhltli.”

One of the four guards opened the door opposite the one by which they had entered, and they passed through into a hallway which, like most of the rooms on that level, was lighted by both the slot-like skylights and the clusters of winking fire-gems. But unlike the other rooms they had traversed, this hall showed evidences of occupation. Velvet tapestries adorned the glossy jade walls, rich rugs were on the crimson floors, and the ivory seats, benches and divans were littered with satin cushions.

The hall ended in an ornate door, before which stood no guard. Without ceremony Techotl thrust the door open and ushered his friends into a broad chamber, where some thirty dark-skinned men and women lounged on satin-covered couches sprang up with exclamations of amazement.

The men, all except one, were of the same type as Techotl, and the women were equally dark and strange-eyed, though not unbeautiful in a weird dark way. They wore sandals, golden breastplates, and scanty silk skirts supported by gem-crusted girdles, and their black manes, cut square at their naked shoulders, were bound with silver circlets.

On a wide ivory seat on a jade dais sat a man and a woman who differed subtly from the others. He was a giant, with an enormous sweep of breast and the shoulders of a bull. Unlike the others, he was bearded, with a thick, blue-black beard which fell almost to his broad girdle. He wore a robe of purple silk which reflected changing sheens of color with his every movement, and one wide sleeve, drawn back to his elbow, revealed a forearm massive with corded muscles. The band which confined his blue-black locks was set with glittering jewels.

The woman beside him sprang to her feet with a startled exclamation as the strangers entered, and her eyes, passing over Conan, fixed themselves with burning intensity on Valeria. She was tall and lithe, by far the most beautiful woman in the room. She was clad more scantily even than the others; for instead of a skirt she wore merely a broad strip of gilt-worked purple cloth fastened to the middle of her girdle which fell below her knees. Another strip at the back of her girdle completed that part of her costume, which she wore with a cynical indifference. Her breast-plates and the circlet about her temples were adorned with gems. In her eyes alone of all the dark-skinned people there lurked no brooding gleam of madness. She spoke no word after her first exclamation; she stood tensely, her hands clenched, staring at Valeria.

The man on the ivory seat had not risen.

“Prince Olmec,” spoke Techotl, bowing low, with arms outspread and the palms of his hands turned upward, “I bring allies from the world beyond the forest. In the Chamber of Tezcoti the Burning Skull slew Chicmec, my companion—”

“The Burning Skull!” It was a shuddering whisper of fear from the people of Tecuhltli.

“Aye! Then came I, and found Chicmec lying with his throat cut. Before I could flee, the Burning Skull came upon me, and when I looked upon it my blood became as ice and the marrow of my bones melted. I could neither fight nor run. I could only await the stroke. Then came this white-skinned woman and struck him down with her sword; and lo, it was only a dog of Xotalanc with white paint upon his skin and the living skull of an ancient wizard upon his head! Now that skull lies in many pieces, and the dog who wore it is a dead man!”

An indescribably fierce exultation edged the last sentence, and was echoed in the low, savage exclamations from the crowding listeners.

“But wait!” exclaimed Techotl. “There is more! While I talked with the woman, four Xotalancs came upon us! One I slew—there is the stab in my thigh to prove how desperate was the fight. Two the woman killed. But we were hard pressed when this man came into the fray and split the skull of the fourth! Aye! Five crimson nails there are to be driven into the pillar of vengeance!”

He pointed to a black column of ebony which stood behind the dais. Hundreds of red dots scarred its polished surface—the bright scarlet heads of heavy copper nails driven into the black wood.

“Five red nails for five Xotalanca lives!” exulted Techotl, and the horrible exultation in the faces of the listeners made them inhuman.

“Who are these people?” asked Olmec, and his voice was like the low, deep rumble of a distant bull. None of the people of Xuchotl spoke loudly. It was as if they had absorbed into their souls the silence of the empty halls and deserted chambers.

“I am Conan, a Cimmerian,” answered the barbarian briefly. “This woman is Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, an Aquilonian pirate. We are deserters from an army on the Darfar border, far to the north, and are trying to reach the coast.”

The woman on the dais spoke loudly, her words tripping in her haste.

“You can never reach the coast! There is no escape from Xuchotl! You will spend the rest of your lives in this city!”

“What do you mean,” growled Conan, clapping his hand to his hilt and stepping about so as to face both the dais and the rest of the room. “Are you telling us we’re prisoners?”

“She did not mean that,” interposed Olmec. “We are your friends. We would not restrain you against your will. But I fear other circumstances will make it impossible for you to leave Xuchotl.”

His eyes flickered to Valeria, and he lowered them quickly.

“This woman is Tascela,” he said. “She is a princess of Tecuhltli. But let food and drink be brought our guests. Doubtless they are hungry, and weary from their long travels.”

He indicated an ivory table, and after an exchange of glances, the adventurers seated themselves. The Cimmerian was suspicious. His fierce blue eyes roved about the chamber, and he kept his sword close to his hand. But an invitation to eat and drink never found him backward. His eyes kept wandering to Tascela, but the princess had eyes only for his white-skinned companion.

Techotl, who had bound a strip of silk about his wounded thigh, placed himself at the table to attend to the wants of his friends, seeming to consider it a privilege and honor to see after their needs. He inspected the food and drink the others brought in gold vessels and dishes, and tasted each before he placed it before his guests. While they ate, Olmec sat in silence on his ivory seat, watching them from under his broad black brows. Tascela sat beside him, chin cupped in her hands and her elbows resting on her knees. Her dark, enigmatic eyes, burning with a mysterious light, never left Valeria’s supple figure. Behind her seat a sullen handsome girl waved an ostrich-plume fan with a slow rhythm.

The food was fruit of an exotic kind unfamiliar to the wanderers, but very palatable, and the drink was a light crimson wine that carried a heady tang.

“You have come from afar,” said Olmec at last. “I have read the books of our fathers. Aquilonia lies beyone the lands of the Stygians and the Shemites, beyond Argos and Zingara; and Cimmeria lies beyond Aquilonia.”

“We have each a roving foot,” answered Conan carelessly.

“How you won through the forest is a wonder to me,” quoth Olmec. “In bygone days a thousand fighting men scarcely were able to carve a road through its perils.”

“We encountered a bench-legged monstrosity about the size of a mastodon,” said Conan casually, holding out his wine goblet which Techutl filled with evident pleasure. “But when we’d killed it we had no further trouble.”

The wine vessel slipped from Techotl’s hand to crash on the floor. His dusky skin went ashy. Olmec started to his feet, an image of stunned amazement, and a low gasp of awe or terror breathed up from the others. Some slipped to their knees as if their legs would not support them. Only Tascela seemed not to have heard. Conan glared about him bewilderedly.

“What’s the matter? What are you gaping about?”

“You—you slew the dragon-god?”

“God? I killed a dragon. Why not? It was trying to gobble us up.”

“But dragons are immortal!” exclaimed Olmec. “They slay each other, but no man ever killed a dragon! The thousand fighting-men of our ancestors who fought their way to Xuchotl could not prevail against them! Their swords broke like twigs against their scales!”

“If your ancestors had thought to dip their spears in the poisonous juice of Derketa’s Apples,” quoth Conan, with his mouth full, “and jab them in the eyes or mouth or somewhere like that, they’d have seen that dragons are no more immortal than any other chunk of beef. The carcass lies at the edge of the trees, just within the forest. If you don’t believe me, go and look for yourself.”

Olmec shook his head, not in disbelief but in wonder.

“It was because of the dragons that our ancestors took refuge in Xuchotl,” said he. “They dared not pass through the plain and plunge into the forest beyond. Scores of them were seized and devoured by the monsters before they could reach the city.”

“Then your ancestors didn’t build Xuchotl?” asked Valeria.

“It was ancient when they first came into the land. How long it had stood here, not even its degenerate inhabitants knew.”

“Your people came from Lake Zuad?” questioned Conan.

“Aye. More than half a century ago a tribe of the Tlazitlans rebelled against the Stygian king, and, being defeated in battle, fled southward. For many weeks they wandered over grasslands, desert and hills, and at last they came into the great forest, a thousand fighting-men with their women and children.

“It was in the forest that the dragons fell upon them and tore many to pieces; so the people fled in a frenzy of fear before them, and at last came into the plain and saw the city of Xuchotl in the midst of it.

“They camped before the city, not daring to leave the plain, for the night was made hideous with the noise of the battling monsters through the forest. They made war incessantly upon one another. Yet they came not into the plain.

“The people of the city shut their gates and shot arrows at our people from the walls. The Tlazitlans were imprisoned on the plain, as if the ring of the forest had been a great wall; for to venture into the woods would have been madness.

“That night there came secretly to their camp a slave from the city, one of our own blood, who with a band of exploring soldiers had wandered into the forest long before, when he was a young man. The dragons had devoured all his companions, but he had been taken into the city to dwell in servitude. His name was Tolkemec.” A flame lighted the dark eyes at mention of the name, and some of the people muttered obscenely and spat. “He promised to open the gates to the warriors. He asked only that all captives taken be delivered into his hands.

“At dawn he opened the gates. The warriors swarmed in and the halls of Xuchotl ran red. Only a few hundred folk dwelt there, decaying remnants of a once great race. Tolkemec said they came from the east, long ago, from Old Kosala, when the ancestors of those who now dwell in Kosala came up from the south and drove forth the original inhabitants of the land. They wandered far westward and finally found this forest-girdled plain, inhabited then by a tribe of black people.

“These they enslaved and set to building a city. From the hills to the east they brought jade and marble and lapis lazuli, and gold, silver, and copper. Herds of elephants provided them with ivory. When their city was completed, they slew all the black slaves. And their magicians made a terrible magic to guard the city; for by their necromantic arts they recreated the dragons which had once dwelt in this lost land, and whose monstrous bones they found in the forest. Those bones they clothed in flesh and life, and the living beasts walked the earth as they walked it when Time was young. But the wizards wove a spell that kept them in the forest and they came not into the plain.

“So for many centuries the people of Xuchotl dwelt in their city, cultivating the fertile plain, until their wise men learned how to grow fruit within the city—fruit which is not planted in soil, but obtains its nourishment out of the air—and then they let the irrigation ditches run dry, and dwelt more and more in luxurious sloth, until decay seized them. They were a dying race when our ancestors broke through the forest and came into the plain. Their wizards had died, and the people had forgot their ancient necromancy. They could fight neither by sorcery nor the sword.

“Well, our fathers slew the people of Xuchotl, all except a hundred which were given living into the hands of Tolkemec, who had been their slave; and for many days and nights the halls re-echoed to their screams under the agony of his tortures.

“So the Tlazitlans dwelt here, for a while in peace, ruled by the brothers Tecuhltli and Xotalanc, and by Tolkemec. Tolkemec took a girl of the tribe to wife, and because he had opened the gates, and because he knew many of the arts of the Xuchotlans, he shared the rule of the tribe with the brothers who had led the rebellion and the flight.

“For a few years, then, they dwelt at peace within the city, doing little but eating, drinking, and making love, and raising children. There was no necessity to till the plain, for Tolkemec taught them how to cultivate the air-devouring fruits. Besides, the slaying of the Xuchotlans broke the spell that held the dragons in the forest, and they came nightly and bellowed about the gates of the city. The plain ran red with the blood of their eternal warfare, and it was then that—” He bit his tongue in the midst of the sentence, then presently continued, but Valeria and Conan felt that he had checked an admission he had considered unwise.

“Five years they dwelt in peace. Then”—Olmec’s eyes rested briefly on the silent woman at his side—“Xotalanc took a woman to wife, a woman whom both Tecuhltli and old Tolkemec desired. In his madness, Tecuhltli stole her from her husband. Aye, she went willingly enough. Tolkemec, to spite Xotalanc, aided Tecuhltli. Xotalanc demanded that she be given back to him, and the council of the tribe decided that the matter should be left to the woman. She chose to remain with Tecuhltli. In wrath Xotalanc sought to take her back by force, and the retainers of the brothers came to blows in the Great Hall.

“There was much bitterness. Blood was shed on both sides. The quarrel became a feud, the feud an open war. From the welter three factions emerged—Tecuhltli, Xotalanc, and Tolkemec. Already, in the days of peace, they had divided the city between them. Tecuhltli dwelt in the western quarter of the city, Xotalanc in the eastern, and Tolkemec with his family by the southern gate.

“Anger and resentment and jealousy blossomed into bloodshed and rape and murder. Once the sword was drawn there was no turning back; for blood called for blood, and vengeance followed swift on the heels of atrocity. Tecuhltli fought with Xotalanc, and Tolkemec aided first one and then the other, betraying each faction as it fitted his purposes. Tecuhltli and his people withdrew into the quarter of the western gate, where we now sit. Xuchotl is built in the shape of an oval. Tecuhltli, which took its name from its prince, occupies the western end of the oval. The people blocked up all doors connecting the quarter with the rest of the city, except one on each floor, which could be defended easily. They went into the pits below the city and built a wall cutting off the western end of the catacombs, where lie the bodies of the ancient Xuchotlans, and of those Tlazitlans slain in the feud. They dwelt as in a besieged castle, making sorties and forays on their enemies.

“The people of Xotalanc likewise fortified the eastern quarter of the city, and Tolkemec did likewise with the quarter by the southern gate. The central part of the city was left bare and uninhabited. Those empty halls and chambers became a battleground, and a region of brooding terror.

“Tolkemec warred on both clans. He was a fiend in the form of a human, worse than Xotalanc. He knew many secrets of the city he never told the others. From the crypts of the catacombs he plundered the dead of their grisly secrets—secrets of ancient kings and wizards, long forgotten by the degenerate Xuchotlans our ancestors slew. But all his magic did not aid him the night we of Tecuhltli stormed his castle and butchered all his people. Tolkemec we tortured for many days.”

His voice sank to a caressing slur, and a faraway look grew in his eyes, as if he looked back over the years to a scene which caused him intense pleasure.

“Aye, we kept the life in him until he screamed for death as for a bride. At last we took him living from the torture chamber and cast him into a dungeon for the rats to gnaw as he died. From that dungeon, somehow, he managed to escape, and dragged himself into the catacombs. There without doubt he died, for the only way out of the catacombs beneath Tecuhltli is through Tecuhltli, and he never emerged by that way. His bones were never found and the superstitious among our people swear that his ghost haunts the crypts to this day, wailing among the bones of the dead. Twelve years ago we butchered the people of Tolkemec, but the feud raged on between Tecuhltli and Xotalanc, as it will rage until the last man, the last woman is dead.

“It was fifty years ago that Tecuhltli stole the wife of Xotalanc. Half a century the feud has endured. I was born in it. All in this chamber, except Tascela, were born in it. We expect to die in it.

“We are a dying race, even as were those Xuchotlans our ancestors slew. When the feud began there were hundreds in each faction. Now we of Tecuhltli number only these you see before you, and the men who guard the four doors: forty in all. How many Xotalancas there are we do not know, but I doubt if they are much more numerous than we. For fifteen years no children have been born to us, and we have seen none among the Xotalancas.

“We are dying, but before we die we will slay as many of the men of Xotalanc as the gods permit.”

And with his weird eyes blazing, Olmec spoke long of that grisly feud, fought out in silent chambers and dim halls under the blaze of the green fire-jewels, on floors smoldering with the flames of Hell and splashed with deeper crimson from severed veins. In that long butchery a whole generation had perished. Xotalanc was dead, long ago, slain in a grim battle on an ivory stair. Tecuhltli was dead, flayed alive by the maddened Xotalancas who had captured him.

Without emotion Olmec told of hideous battles fought in black corridors, of ambushes on twisting stairs, and red butcheries. With a redder, more abysmal gleam in his deep dark eyes he told of men and women flayed alive, mutilated and dismembered, of captives howling under tortures so ghastly that even the barbarous Cimmerian grunted. No wonder Techotl had trembled with the terror of capture. Yet he had gone forth to slay if he could, driven by hate that was stronger than his fear. Olmec spoke further, of dark and mysterious matters, of black magic and wizardry conjured out of the black night of the catacombs, of weird creatures invoked out of darkness for horrible allies. In these things the Xotalancas had the advantage, for it was in the eastern catacombs where lay the bones of the greatest wizards of the ancient Xuchotlans, with their immemorial secrets.

Valeria listened with morbid fascination. The feud had become a terrible elemental power driving the people of Xuchotl inexorably on to doom and extinction. It filled their whole lives. They were born in it, and they expected to die in it. They never left their barricaded castle except to steal forth into the Halls of Silence that lay between the opposing fortresses, to slay and be slain. Sometimes the raiders returned with frantic captives, or with grim tokens of victory in fight. Sometimes they did not return at all, or returned only as severed limbs cast down before the bolted bronze doors. It was a ghastly, unreal nightmare existence these people lived, shut off from the rest of the world, caught together like rabid rats in the same trap, butchering one another through the years, crouching and creeping through the sunless corridors to maim and torture and murder.

While Olmec talked, Valeria felt the blazing eyes of Tascela fixed upon her. The princess seemed not to hear what Olmec was saying. Her expression, as he narrated victories or defeats, did not mirror the wild rage or fiendish exultation that alternated on the faces of the other Tecuhltli. The feud that was an obsession to her clansmen seemed meaningless to her. Valeria found her indifferent callousness more repugnant than Olmec’s naked ferocity.

“And we can never leave the city,” said Olmec. “For fifty years no one has left it except those—” Again he checked himself.

“Even without the peril of the dragons,” he continued, “we who were born and raised in the city would not dare leave it. We have never set foot outside the walls. We are not accustomed to the open sky and the naked sun. No; we were born in Xuchotl, and in Xuchotl we shall die.”

“Well,” said Conan, “with your leave we’ll take our chances with the dragons. This feud is none of our business. If you’ll show us to the west gate we’ll be on our way.”

Tascela’s hands clenched, and she started to speak, but Olmec interrupted her: “It is nearly nightfall. If you wander forth into the plain by night, you will certainly fall prey to the dragons.”

“We crossed it last night, and slept in the open without seeing any,” returned Conan.

Tascela smiled mirthlessly. “You dare not leave Xuchotl!”

Conan glared at her with instinctive antagonism; she was not looking at him, but at the woman opposite him.

“I think they dare,” stated Olmec. “But look you, Conan and Valeria, the gods must have sent you to us, to cast victory into the laps of the Tecuhltli! You are professional fighters—why not fight for us? We have wealth in abundance—precious jewels are as common in Xuchotl as cobblestones are in the cities of the world. Some the Xuchotlans brought with them from Kosala. Some, like the fire-stones, they found in the hills to the east. Aid us to wipe out the Xotalancas, and we will give you all the jewels you can carry.”

“And will you help us destroy the dragons?” asked Valeria. “With bows and poisoned arrows thirty men could slay all the dragons in the forest.”

“Aye!” replied Olmec promptly. “We have forgotten the use of the bow, in years of hand-to-hand fighting, but we can learn again.”

“What do you say?” Valeria inquired of Conan.

“We’re both penniless vagabonds,” he grinned hardily. “I’d as soon kill Xotalancas as anybody.”

“Then you agree?” exclaimed Olmec, while Techotl fairly hugged himself with delight.

“Aye. And now suppose you show us chambers where we can sleep, so we can be fresh tomorrow for the beginning of the slaying.”

Olmec nodded, and waved a hand, and Techotl and a woman led the adventurers into a corridor which led through a door off to the left of the jade dais. A glance back showed Valeria Olmec sitting on his throne, chin on knotted fist, staring after them. His eyes burned with a weird flame. Tascela leaned back in her seat, whispering to the sullen-faced maid, Yasala, who leaned over her shoulder, her ear to the princess’s moving lips.

The hallway was not so broad as most they had traversed, but it was long. Presently the woman halted, opened a door, and drew aside for Valeria to enter.

“Wait a minute,” growled Conan. “Where do I sleep?”

Techotl pointed to a chamber across the hallway, but one door farther down. Conan hesitated, and seemed inclined to raise an objection, but Valeria smiled spitefully at him and shut the door in his face. He muttered something uncomplimentary about women in general, and strode off down the corridor after Techotl.

In the ornate chamber where he was to sleep, he glanced up at the slot-like skylights. Some were wide enough to admit the body of a slender man, supposing the glass were broken.

“Why don’t the Xotalancas come over the roofs and shatter those skylights?” he asked.

“They cannot be broken,” answered Techotl. “Besides, the roofs would be hard to clamber over. They are mostly spires and domes and steep ridges.”

He volunteered more information about the “castle” of Tecuhltli. Like the rest of the city it contained four stories, or tiers of chambers, with towers jutting up from the roof. Each tier was named; indeed, the people of Xuchotl had a name for each chamber, hall, and stair in the city, as people of more normal cities designate streets and quarters. In Tecuhltli the floors were named The Eagle’s Tier, The Ape’s Tier, The Tiger’s Tier and The Serpent’s Tier, in the order as enumerated, The Eagle’s Tier being the highest, or fourth, floor.

“Who is Tascela?” asked Conan. “Olmec’s wife?”

Techotl shuddered and glanced furtively about him before answering.

“No. She is—Tascela! She was the wife of Xotalanc—the woman Tecuhltli stole, to start the feud.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Conan. “That woman is beautiful and young. Are you trying to tell me that she was a wife fifty years ago?”

“Aye! I swear it! She was a full-grown woman when the Tlazitlans journeyed from Lake Zuad. It was because the king of Stygia desired her for a concubine that Xotalanc and his brother rebelled and fled into the wilderness. She is a witch, who possesses the secret of perpetual youth.”

“What’s that?” asked Conan.

Techotl shuddered again.

“Ask me not! I dare not speak. It is too grisly, even for Xuchotl!”

And touching his finger to his lips, he glided from the chamber.

4. Scent of Black Lotus

Valeria unbuckled her sword-belt and laid it with the sheathed weapon on the couch where she meant to sleep. She noted that the doors were supplied with bolts, and asked where they led.

“Those lead to adjoining chambers,” answered the woman, indicating the doors on right and left. “That one”—pointing to a copper-bound door opposite that which opened into the corridor— “leads to a corridor which runs to a stair that descends into the catacombs. Do not fear; naught can harm you here.”

“Who spoke of fear?” snapped Valeria. “I just like to know what sort of harbor I’m dropping anchor in. No, I don’t want you to sleep at the foot of my couch. I’m not accustomed to being waited on— not by women, anyway. You have my leave to go.”

Alone in the room, the pirate shot the bolts on all the doors, kicked off her boots and stretched luxuriously out on the couch. She imagined Conan similarly situated across the corridor, but her feminine vanity prompted her to visualize him as scowling and muttering with chagrin as he cast himself on his solitary couch, and she grinned with gleeful malice as she prepared herself for slumber.

Outside, night had fallen. In the halls of Xuchotl the green fire-jewels blazed like the eyes of prehistoric cats. Somewhere among the dark towers, a night wind moaned like a restless spirit. Through the dim passages, stealthy figures began stealing, like disembodied shadows.

Valeria awoke suddenly on her couch. In the dusky emerald glow of the fire-gems she saw a shadowy figure bending over her. For a bemused instant the apparition seemed part of the dream she had been dreaming. She had seemed to lie on the couch in the chamber as she was actually lying, while over her pulsed and throbbed a gigantic black blossom so enormous that it hid the ceiling. Its exotic perfume pervaded her being, inducing a delicious, sensuous languor that was something more and less than sleep. She was sinking into scented billows of insensible bliss, when something touched her face. So supersensitive were her drugged senses, that the light touch was like a dislocating impact, jolting her rudely into full wakefulness. Then it was that she saw, not a gargantuan blossom, but a dark-skinned woman standing above her.

With the realization came anger and instant action. The woman turned lithely, but before she could run Valeria was on her feet and had caught her arm. She fought like a wildcat for an instant, and then subsided as she felt herself crushed by the superior strength of her captor. The pirate wrenched the woman around to face her, caught her chin with her free hand and forced her captive to meet her gaze. It was the sullen Yasala, Tascela’s maid.

“What the devil were you doing bending over me? What’s that in your hand?”

The woman made no reply, but sought to cast away the object. Valeria twisted her arm around in front of her, and the thing fell to the floor—a great black exotic blossom on a jade-green stem, large as a woman’s head, to be sure, but tiny beside the exaggerated vision she had seen.

“The black lotus!” said Valeria between her teeth. “The blossom whose scent brings deep sleep. You were trying to drug me! If you hadn’t accidentally touched my face with the petals, you’d have— why did you do it? What’s your game?”

Yasala maintained a sulky silence, and with an oath Valeria whirled her around, forced her to her knees and twisted her arm up behind her back.

“Tell me, or I’ll tear your arm out of its socket!”

Yasala squirmed in anguish as her arm was forced excruciatingly up between her shoulder blades, but a violent shaking of her head was the only answer she made.

“Slut!” Valeria cast her from her to sprawl on the floor. The pirate glared at the prostrate figure with blazing eyes. Fear and the memory of Tascela’s burning eyes stirred in her, rousing all her tigerish instincts of self-preservation. These people were decadent; any sort of perversity might be expected to be encountered among them. But Valeria sensed here something that moved behind the scenes, some secret terror fouler than common degeneracy. Fear and revulsion of this weird city swept her. These people were neither sane nor normal; she began to doubt if they were even human. Madness smoldered in the eyes of them all—all except the cruel, cryptic eyes of Tascela, which held secrets and mysteries more abysmal than madness.

She lifted her head and listened intently. The halls of Xuchotl were as silent as if it were in reality a dead city. The green jewels bathed the chamber in a nightmare glow, in which the eyes of the woman on the floor glittered eerily up at her. A thrill of panic throbbed through Valeria, driving the last vestige of mercy from her fierce soul.

“Why did you try to drug me?” she muttered, grasping the woman’s black hair, and forcing her head back to glare into her sullen, long-lashed eyes. “Did Tascela send you?”

No answer. Valeria cursed venomously and slapped the woman first on one cheek and then the other. The blows resounded through the room, but Yasala made no outcry.

“Why don’t you scream?” demanded Valeria savagely. “Do you fear someone will hear you? Whom do you fear? Tascela? Olmec? Conan?”

Yasala made no reply. She crouched, watching her captor with eyes baleful as those of a basilisk. Stubborn silence always fans anger. Valeria turned and tore a handful of cords from a nearby hanging.

“You sulky slut!” she said between her teeth. “I’m going to strip you stark naked and tie you across that couch and whip you until you tell me what you were doing here, and who sent you!”

Yasala made no verbal protest, nor did she offer any resistance, as Valeria carried out the first part of her threat with a fury that her captive’s obstinacy only sharpened. Then for a space there was no sound in the chamber except the whistle and crackle of hard-woven silken cords on naked flesh. Yasala could not move her fast-bound hands or feet. Her body writhed and quivered under the chastisement, her head swayed from side to side in rhythm with the blows. Her teeth were sunk into her lower lip and a trickle of blood began as the punishment continued. But she did not cry out.

The pliant cords made no great sound as they encountered the quivering body of the captive; only a sharp crackling snap, but each cord left a red streak across Yasala’s dark flesh. Valeria inflicted the punishment with all the strength of her war-hardened arm, with all the mercilessness acquired during a life where pain and torment were daily happenings, and with all the cynical ingenuity which only a woman displays toward a woman. Yasala suffered more, physically and mentally, than she would have suffered under a lash wielded by a man, however strong.

It was the application of this feminine cynicism which at last tamed Yasala.

A low whimper escaped from her lips, and Valeria paused, arm lifted, and raked back a damp yellow lock. “Well, are you going to talk?” she demanded. “I can keep this up all night, if necessary.”

“Mercy!” whispered the woman. “I will tell.”

Valeria cut the cords from her wrists and ankles, and pulled her to her feet. Yasala sank down on the couch, half-reclining on one bare hip, supporting herself on her arm, and writhing at the contact of her smarting flesh with the couch. She was trembling in every limb.

“Wine!” she begged, dry-lipped, indicating with a quivering hand a gold vessel on an ivory table. “Let me drink. I am weak with pain. Then I will tell you all.”

Valeria picked up the vessel, and Yasala rose unsteadily to receive it. She took it, raised it toward her lips—then dashed the contents full into the Aquilonian’s face. Valeria reeled backward, shaking and clawing the stinging liquid out of her eyes. Through a smarting mist she saw Yasala dart across the room, fling back a bolt, throw open the copperbound door and run down the hall. The pirate was after her instantly, sword out and murder in her heart.

But Yasala had the start, and she ran with the nervous agility of a woman who has just been whipped to the point of hysterical frenzy. She rounded a corner in the corridor, yards ahead of Valeria, and when the pirate turned it, she saw only an empty hall, and at the other end a door that gaped blackly. A damp moldy scent reeked up from it, and Valeria shivered. That must be the door that led to the catacombs. Yasala had taken refuge among the dead.

Valeria advanced to the door and looked down a flight of stone steps that vanished quickly into utter blackness. Evidently it was a shaft that led straight to the pits below the city, without opening upon any of the lower floors. She shivered slightly at the thought of the thousands of corpses lying in their stone crypts down there, wrapped in their moldering cloths. She had no intention of groping her way down those stone steps. Yasala doubtless knew every turn and twist of the subterranean tunnels.

She was turning back, baffled and furious, when a sobbing cry welled up from the blackness. It seemed to come from a great depth, but human words were faintly distinguishable, and the voice was that of a woman. “Oh, help! Help, in Set’s name! Ahhh!” It trailed away, and Valeria thought she caught the echo of a ghostly tittering.

Valeria felt her skin crawl. What had happened to Yasala down there in the thick blackness? There was no doubt that it had been she who had cried out. But what peril could have befallen her? Was a Xotalanca lurking down there? Olmec had assured them that the catacombs below Tecuhltli were walled off from the rest, too securely for their enemies to break through. Besides, that tittering had not sounded like a human being at all.

Valeria hurried back down the corridor, not stopping to close the door that opened on the stair. Regaining her chamber, she closed the door and shot the bolt behind her. She pulled on her boots and buckled her sword-belt about her. She was determined to make her way to Conan’s room and urge him, if he still lived, to join her in an attempt to fight their way out of that city of devils.

But even as she reached the door that opened into the corridor, a long-drawn scream of agony rang through the halls, followed by the stamp of running feet and the loud clangor of swords.

5. Twenty Red Nails

Two warriors lounged in the guardroom on the floor known as the Tier of the Eagle. Their attitude was casual, though habitually alert. An attack on the great bronze door from without was always a possibility, but for many years no such assault had been attempted on either side.

“The strangers are strong allies,” said one. “Olmec will move against the enemy tomorrow, I believe.”

He spoke as a soldier in a war might have spoken. In the miniature world of Xuchotl each handful of feudists was an army, and the empty halls between the castles was the country over which they campaigned.

The other meditated for a space.

“Suppose with their aid we destroy Xotalanc,” he said. “What then, Xatmec?”

“Why,” returned Xatmec, “we will drive red nails for them all. The captives we will burn and flay and quarter.”

“But afterward?” pursued the other. “After we have slain them all? Will it not seem strange to have no foe to fight? All my life I have fought and hated the Xotalancas. With the feud ended, what is left?”

Xatmec shrugged his shoulders. His thoughts had never gone beyond the destruction of their foes. They could not go beyond that.

Suddenly both men stiffened at a noise outside the door.

“To the door, Xatmec!” hissed the last speaker. “I shall look through the Eye—”

Xatmec, sword in hand, leaned against the bronze door, straining his ear to hear through the metal. His mate looked into the mirror. He started convulsively. Men were clustered thickly outside the door; grim, dark-faced men with swords gripped in their teeth—and their fingers thrust into their ears. One who wore a feathered headdress had a set of pipes which he set to his lips, and even as the Tecuhltli started to shout a warning, the pipes began to skirl.

The cry died in the guard’s throat as the thin, weird piping penetrated the metal door and smote on his ears. Xatmec leaned frozen against the door, as if paralyzed in that position. His face was that of a wooden image, his expression one of horrified listening. The other guard, farther removed from the source of the sound, yet sensed the horror of what was taking place, the grisly threat that lay in that demoniac fifing. He felt the weird strains plucking like unseen fingers at the tissues of his brain, filling him with alien emotions and impulses of madness. But with a soul-tearing effort he broke the spell, and shrieked a warning in a voice he did not recognize as his own.

But even as he cried out, the music changed to an unbearable shrilling that was like a knife in the eardrums. Xatmec screamed in sudden agony, and all the sanity went out of his face like a flame blown out in a wind. Like a madman he ripped loose the chain, tore open the door and rushed out into the hall, sword lifted before his mate could stop him. A dozen blades struck him down, and over his mangled body the Xotalancas surged into the guardroom, with a long-drawn, blood-mad yell that sent the unwonted echoes reverberating.

His brain reeling from the shock of it all, the remaining guard leaped to meet them with goring spear. The horror of the sorcery he had just witnessed was submerged in the stunning realization that the enemy were in Tecuhltli. And as his spearhead ripped through a dark-skinned belly he knew no more, for a swinging sword crushed his skull, even as wild-eyed warriors came pouring in from the chambers behind the guardroom.

It was the yelling of men and the clanging of steel that brought Conan bounding from his couch, wide awake and broadsword in hand. In an instant he had reached the door and flung it open, and was glaring out into the corridor just as Techotl rushed up it, eyes blazing madly.

“The Xotalancas!” he screamed, in a voice hardly human. “They are within the door!”

Conan ran down the corridor, even as Valeria emerged from her chamber.

“What the devil is it?” she called.

“Techotl says the Xotalancas are in,” he answered hurriedly. “That racket sounds like it.”

With the Tecuhltli on their heels they burst into the throne room and were confronted by a scene beyond the most frantic dream of blood and fury. Twenty men and women, their black hair streaming, and the white skulls gleaming on their breasts, were locked in combat with the people of Tecuhltli. The women on both sides fought as madly as the men, and already the room and the hall beyond were strewn with corpses.

Olmec, naked but for a breechclout, was fighting before his throne, and as the adventurers entered, Tascela ran from an inner chamber with a sword in her hand.

Xatmec and his mate were dead, so there was none to tell the Tecuhltli how their foes had found their way into their citadel. Nor was there any to say what had prompted that mad attempt. But the losses of the Xotalancas had been greater, their position more desperate, than the Tecuhltli had known. The maiming of their scaly ally, the destruction of the Burning Skull, and the news, gasped by a dying man, that mysterious white-skin allies had joined their enemies, had driven them to the frenzy of desperation and the wild determination to die dealing death to their ancient foes.

The Tecuhltli, recovering from the first stunning shock of the surprize that had swept them back into the throne room and littered the floor with their corpses, fought back with an equally desperate fury, while the door-guards from the lower floors came racing to hurl themselves into the fray. It was the death-fight of rabid wolves, blind, panting, merciless. Back and forth it surged, from door to dais, blades whickering and striking into flesh, blood spurting, feet stamping the crimson floor where redder pools were forming. Ivory tables crashed over, seats were splintered, velvet hangings torn down were stained red. It was the bloody climax of a bloody half-century, and every man there sensed it.

But the conclusion was inevitable. The Tecuhltli outnumbered the invaders almost two to one, and they were heartened by that fact and by the entrance into the mélée of their light-skinned allies.

These crashed into the fray with the devastating effect of a hurricane plowing through a grove of saplings. In sheer strength no three Tlazitlans were a match for Conan, and in spite of his weight he was quicker on his feet than any of them. He moved through the whirling, eddying mass with the surety and destructiveness of a gray wolf amidst a pack of alley curs, and he strode over a wake of crumpled figures.

Valeria fought beside him, her lips smiling and her eyes blazing. She was stronger than the average man, and far quicker and more ferocious. Her sword was like a living thing in her hand. Where Conan beat down opposition by the sheer weight and power of his blows, breaking spears, splitting skulls and cleaving bosoms to the breastbone, Valeria brought into action a finesse of swordplay that dazzled and bewildered her antagonists before it slew them. Again and again a warrior, heaving high his heavy blade, found her point in his jugular before he could strike. Conan, towering above the field, strode through the welter smiting right and left, but Valeria moved like an illusive phantom, constantly shifting, and thrusting and slashing as she shifted. Swords missed her again and again as the wielders flailed the empty air and died with her point in their hearts or throats, and her mocking laughter in their ears.

Neither sex nor condition was considered by the maddened combatants. The five women of the Xotalancas were down with their throats cut before Conan and Valeria entered the fray, and when a man or woman went down under the stamping feet, there was always a knife ready for the helpless throat, or a sandaled foot eager to crush the prostrate skull.

From wall to wall, from door to door rolled the waves of combat, spilling over into adjoining chambers. And presently only Tecuhltli and their white-skinned allies stood upright in the great throne room. The survivors stared bleakly and blankly at each other, like survivors after Judgement Day or the destruction of the world. On legs wide-braced, hands gripping notched and dripping swords, blood trickling down their arms, they stared at one another across the mangled corpses of friends and foes. They had no breath left to shout, but a bestial mad howling rose from their lips. It was not a human cry of triumph. It was the howling of a rabid wolf-pack stalking among the bodies of its victims.

Conan caught Valeria’s arm and turned her about.

“You’ve got a stab in the calf of your leg,” he growled.

She glanced down, for the first time aware of a stinging in the muscles of her leg. Some dying man on the floor had fleshed his dagger with his last effort.

“You look like a butcher yourself,” she laughed.

He shook a red shower from his hands.

“Not mine. Oh, a scratch here and there. Nothing to bother about. But that calf ought to be bandaged.”

Olmec came through the litter, looking like a ghoul with his naked massive shoulders splashed with blood, and his black beard dabbled in crimson. His eyes were red, like the reflection of flame on black water.

“We have won!” he croaked dazedly. “The feud is ended! The dogs of Xotalanc lie dead! Oh, for a captive to flay alive! Yet it is good to look upon their dead faces. Twenty dead dogs! Twenty red nails for the black column!”

“You’d best see to your wounded,” grunted Conan, turning away from him. “Here, girl, let me see that leg.”

“Wait a minute!” she shook him off impatiently. The fire of fighting still burned brightly in her soul. “How do we know these are all of them? These might have come on a raid of their own.”

“They would not split the clan on a foray like this,” said Olmec, shaking his head, and regaining some of his ordinary intelligence. Without his purple robe the man seemed less like a prince than some repellent beast of prey. “I will stake my head upon it that we have slain them all. There were less of them than I dreamed, and they must have been desperate. But how came they in Tecuhltli?”

Tascela came forward, wiping her sword on her naked thigh, and holding in her other hand an object she had taken from the body of the feathered leader of the Xotalancas.

“The pipes of madness,” she said. “A warrior tells me that Xatmec opened the door to the Xotalancas and was cut down as they stormed into the guardroom. This warrior came to the guardroom from the inner hall just in time to see it happen and to hear the last of a weird strain of music which froze his very soul. Tolkemec used to talk of these pipes, which the Xuchotlans swore were hidden somewhere in the catacombs with the bones of the ancient wizard who used them in his lifetime. Somehow the dogs of Xotalanc found them and learned their secret.”

“Somebody ought to go to Xotalanc and see if any remain alive,” said Conan. “I’ll go if somebody will guide me.”

Olmec glanced at the remnants of his people. There were only twenty left alive, and of these several lay groaning on the floor. Tascela was the only one of the Tecuhltli who had escaped without a wound. The princess was untouched, though she had fought as savagely as any.

“Who will go with Conan to Xotalanc?” asked Olmec.

Techotl limped forward. The wound in his thigh had started bleeding afresh, and he had another gash across his ribs.

“I will go!”

“No, you won’t,” vetoed Conan. “And you’re not going either, Valeria. In a little while that leg will be getting stiff.”

“I will go,” volunteered a warrior, who was knotting a bandage about a slashed forearm.

“Very well, Yanath. Go with the Cimmerian. And you, too, Topal.” Olmec indicated another man whose injuries were slight. “But first aid to lift the badly wounded on these couches where we may bandage their hurts.”

This was done quickly. As they stooped to pick up a woman who had been stunned by a war-club, Olmec’s beard brushed Topal’s ear. Conan thought the prince muttered something to the warrior, but he could not be sure. A few moments later he was leading his companions down the hall.

Conan glanced back as he went out the door, at that shambles where the dead lay on the smoldering floor, bloodstained dark limbs knotted in attitudes of fierce muscular effort, dark faces frozen in masks of hate, glassy eyes glaring up at the green fire-jewels which bathed the ghastly scene in a dusky emerald witch-light. Among the dead the living moved aimlessly, like people moving in a trance. Conan heard Olmec call a woman and direct her to bandage Valeria’s leg. The pirate followed the woman into an adjoining chamber, already beginning to limp slightly.

Warily the two Tecuhltli led Conan along the hall beyond the bronze door, and through chamber after chamber shimmering in the green fire. They saw no one, heard no sound. After they crossed the Great Hall which bisected the city from north to south, their caution was increased by the realization of their nearness to enemy territory. But chambers and halls lay empty to their wary gaze, and they came at last along a broad dim hallway and halted before a bronze door similar to the Eagle Door of Tecuhltli. Gingerly they tried it, and it opened silently under their fingers. Awed, they started into the green-lit chambers beyond. For fifty years no Tecuhltli had entered those halls save as a prisoner going to a hideous doom. To go to Xotalanc had been the ultimate horror that could befall a man of the western castle. The terror of it had stalked through their dreams since earliest childhood. To Yanath and Topol that bronze door was like the portal of Hell.

They cringed back, unreasoning horror in their eyes, and Conan pushed past them and strode into Xotalanc.

Timidly they followed him. As each man set foot over the threshold he stared and glared wildly about him. But only their quick, hurried breathing disturbed the silence.

They had come into a square guardroom, like that behind the Eagle Door of Tecuhltli, and, similarly, a hall ran away from it to a broad chamber that was a counterpart of Olmec’s throne room.

Conan glanced down the hall with its rugs and divans and hangings, and stood listening intently. He heard no noise, and the rooms had an empty feel. He did not believe there were any Xotalancas left alive in Xuchotl.

“Come on,” he muttered, and started down the hall.

He had not gone far when he was aware that only Yanath was following him. He wheeled back to see Topal standing in an attitude of horror, one arm out as if to fend off some threatening peril, his distended eyes fixed with hypnotic intensity on something protruding from behind a divan.

“What the devil?” Then Conan saw what Topal was staring at, and he felt a faint twitching of the skin between his giant shoulders. A monstrous head protruded from behind the divan, a reptilian head, broad as the head of a crocodile, with down-curving fangs that projected over the lower jaw. But there was an unnatural limpness about the thing, and the hideous eyes were glazed.

Conan peered behind the couch. It was a great serpent which lay there limp in death, but such a serpent as he had never seen in his wanderings. The reek and chill of the deep black earth were about it, and its color was an indeterminable hue which changed with each new angle from which he surveyed it. A great wound in the neck showed what had caused its death.

“It is the Crawler!” whispered Yanath.

“It’s the thing I slashed on the stair,” grunted Conan. “After it trailed us to the Eagle Door, it dragged itself here to die. How could the Xotalancas control such a brute?”

The Tecuhltli shivered and shook their heads.

“They brought it up from the black tunnels below the catacombs. They discovered secrets unknown to Tecuhltli.”

“Well, it’s dead, and if they’d had any more of them, they’d have brought them along when they came to Tecuhltli. Come on.”

They crowded close at his heels as he strode down the hall and thrust on the silver-worked door at the other end.

“If we don’t find anybody on this floor,” he said, “we’ll descend into the lower floors. We’ll explore Xotalanc from the roof to the catacombs. If Xotalanc is like Tecuhltli, all the rooms and halls in this tier will be lighted—what the devil!”

They had come into the broad throne chamber, so similar to that one in Tecuhltli. There were the same jade dais and ivory seat, the same divans, rugs and hangings on the walls. No black, red-scarred column stood behind the throne-dais, but evidences of the grim feud were not lacking.

Ranged along the wall behind the dais were rows of glass-covered shelves. And on those shelves hundreds of human heads, perfectly preserved, stared at the startled watchers with emotionless eyes, as they had stared for only the gods knew how many months and years.

Topal muttered a curse, but Yanath stood silent, the mad light growing in his wide eyes. Conan frowned, knowing that Tlazitlan sanity was hung on a hair-trigger.

Suddenly Yanath pointed to the ghastly relics with a twitching finger.

“There is my brother’s head!” he murmured. “And there is my father’s younger brother! And there beyond them is my sister’s eldest son!”

Suddenly he began to weep, dry-eyed, with harsh, loud sobs that shook his frame. He did not take his eyes from the heads. His sobs grew shriller, changed to frightful, high-pitched laughter, and that in turn became an unbearable screaming. Yanath was stark mad.

Conan laid a hand on his shoulder, and as if the touch had released all the frenzy in his soul, Yanath screamed and whirled, striking at the Cimmerian with his sword. Conan parried the blow, and Topal tried to catch Yanath’s arm. But the madman avoided him and with froth flying from his lips, he drove his sword deep into Topal’s body. Topal sank down with a groan, and Yanath whirled for an instant like a crazy dervish; then he ran at the shelves and began hacking at the glass with his sword, screeching blasphemously.

Conan sprang at him from behind, trying to catch him unaware and disarm him, but the madman wheeled and lunged at him, screaming like a lost soul. Realizing that the warrior was hopelessly insane, the Cimmerian sidestepped, and as the maniac went past, he swung a cut that severed the shoulder-bone and breast, and dropped the man dead beside his dying victim.

Conan bent over Topal, seeing that the man was at his last gasp. It was useless to seek to stanch the blood gushing from the horrible wound.

“You’re done for, Topal,” grunted Conan. “Any word you want to send to your people?”

“Bend closer,” gasped Topal, and Conan complied—and an instant later caught the man’s wrist as Topal struck at his breast with a dagger.

“Crom!” swore Conan. “Are you mad, too?”

“Olmec ordered it!” gasped the dying man. “I know not why. As we lifted the wounded upon the couches he whispered to me, bidding me to slay you as we returned to Tecuhltli—” And with the name of his clan on his lips, Topal died.

Conan scowled down at him in puzzlement. This whole affair had an aspect of lunacy. Was Olmec mad, too? Were all the Tecuhltli madder than he had realized? With a shrug of his shoulders he strode down the hall and out of the bronze door, leaving the dead Tecuhltli lying before the staring dead eyes of their kinsmen’s heads.

Conan needed no guide back through the labyrinth they had traversed. His primitive instinct of direction led him unerringly along the route they had come. He traversed it as warily as he had before, his sword in his hand, and his eyes fiercely searching each shadowed nook and corner; for it was his former allies he feared now, not the ghosts of the slain Xotalancas.

He had crossed the Great Hall and entered the chambers beyond when he heard something moving ahead of him—something which gasped and panted, and moved with a strange, floundering, scrambling noise. A moment later Conan saw a man crawling over the flaming floor toward him—a man whose progress left a broad bloody smear on the smoldering surface. It was Techotl and his eyes were already glazing; from a deep gash in his breast blood gushed steadily between the fingers of his clutching hand. With the other he clawed and hitched himself along.

“Conan,” he cried chokingly, “Conan! Olmec has taken the yellow-haired woman!”

“So that’s why he told Topal to kill me!” murmured Conan, dropping to his knee beside the man, who his experienced eye told him was dying. “Olmec isn’t as mad as I thought.”

Techotl’s groping fingers plucked at Conan’s arm. In the cold, loveless, and altogether hideous life of the Tecuhltli his admiration and affection for the invaders from the outer world formed a warm, human oasis, constituted a tie that connected him with a more natural humanity that was totally lacking in his fellows, whose only emotions were hate, lust, and the urge of sadistic cruelty.

“I sought to oppose him,” gurgled Techotl, blood bubbling frothily to his lips. “But he struck me down. He thought he had slain me, but I crawled away. Ah, Set, how far I have crawled in my own blood! Beware, Conan! Olmec may have set an ambush for your return! Slay Olmec! He is a beast. Take Valeria and flee! Fear not to traverse the forest. Olmec and Tascela lied about the dragons. They slew each other years ago, all save the strongest. For a dozen years there has been only one dragon. If you have slain him, there is naught in the forest to harm you. He was the god Olmec worshipped; and Olmec fed human sacrifices to him, the very old and the very young, bound and hurled from the wall. Hasten! Olmec has taken Valeria to the Chamber of the—”

His head slumped down and he was dead before it came to rest on the floor.

Conan sprang up, his eyes like live coals. So that was Olmec’s game, having first used the strangers to destroy his foes! He should have known that something of the sort would be going on in that black-bearded degenerate’s mind.

The Cimmerian started toward Tecuhltli with reckless speed. Rapidly he reckoned the numbers of his former allies. Only twenty-one, counting Olmec, had survived that fiendish battle in the throne room. Three had died since, which left seventeen enemies with which to reckon. In his rage Conan felt capable of accounting for the whole clan single-handed.

But the innate craft of the wilderness rose to guide his berserk rage. He remembered Techotl’s warning of an ambush. It was quite probable that the prince would make such provisions, on the chance that Topal might have failed to carry out his order. Olmec would be expecting him to return by the same route he had followed in going to Xotalanc.

Conan glanced up at a skylight under which he was passing and caught the blurred glimmer of stars. They had not yet begun to pale for dawn. The events of the night had been crowded into a comparatively short space of time.

He turned aside from his direct course and descended a winding staircase to the floor below. He did not know where the door was to be found that let into the castle on that level, but he knew he could find it. How he was to force the locks he did not know; he believed that the doors of Tecuhltli would all be locked and bolted, if for no other reason than the habits of half a century. But there was nothing else but to attempt it.

Sword in hand, he hurried noiselessly on through a maze of green-lit or shadowy rooms and halls. He knew he must be near Tecuhltli, when a sound brought him up short. He recognized it for what it was—a human being trying to cry out through a stifling gag. It came from somewhere ahead of him, and to the left. In those deathly-still chambers a small sound carried a long way.

Conan turned aside and went seeking after the sound, which continued to be repeated. Presently he was glaring through a doorway upon a weird scene. In the room into which he was looking a low rack-like frame of iron lay on the floor, and a giant figure was bound prostrate upon it. His head rested on a bed of iron spikes, which were already crimson-pointed with blood where they had pierced his scalp. A peculiar harness-like contrivance was fastened about his head, though in such a manner that the leather band did not protect his scalp from the spikes. This harness was connected by a slender chain to the mechanism that upheld a huge iron ball which was suspended above the captive’s hairy breast. As long as the man could force himself to remain motionless the iron ball hung in its place. But when the pain of the iron points caused him to lift his head, the ball lurched downward a few inches. Presently his aching neck muscles would no longer support his head in its unnatural position and it would fall back on the spikes again. It was obvious that eventually the ball would crush him to a pulp, slowly and inexorably. The victim was gagged, and above the gag his great black ox-eyes rolled wildly toward the man in the doorway, who stood in silent amazement. The man on the rack was Olmec, prince of Tecuhltli.

6. The Eyes of Tascela

“Why did you bring me into this chamber to bandage my leg?” demanded Valeria. “Couldn’t you have done it just as well in the throne room?”

She sat on a couch with her wounded leg extended upon it, and the Tecuhltli woman had just bound it with silk bandages. Valeria’s red-stained sword lay on the couch beside her.

She frowned as she spoke. The woman had done her task silently and efficiently, but Valeria liked neither the lingering, caressing touch of her slim fingers nor the expression in her eyes.

“They have taken the rest of the wounded into the other chambers,” answered the woman in the soft speech of the Tecuhltli women, which somehow did not suggest either softness or gentleness in the speakers. A little while before, Valeria had seen this same woman stab a Xotalanca woman through the breast and stamp the eyeballs out of a wounded Xotalanca man.

“They will be carrying the corpses of the dead down into the catacombs,” she added, “lest the ghosts escape into the chambers and dwell there.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” asked Valeria.

“I know the ghost of Tolkemec dwells in the catacombs,” she answered with a shiver. “Once I saw it, as I crouched in a crypt among the bones of a dead queen. It passed by in the form of an ancient man with flowing white beard and locks, and luminous eyes that blazed in the darkness. It was Tolkemec; I saw him living when I was a child and he was being tortured.”

Her voice sank to a fearful whisper: “Olmec laughs, but I know Tolkemec’s ghost dwells in the catacombs! They say it is rats which gnaw the flesh from the bones of the newly dead—but ghosts eat flesh. Who knows but that—”

She glanced up quickly as a shadow fell across the couch. Valeria looked up to see Olmec gazing down at her. The prince had cleansed his hands, torso, and beard of the blood that had splashed them; but he had not donned his robe, and his great dark-skinned hairless body and limbs renewed the impression of strength bestial in its nature. His deep black eyes burned with a more elemental light, and there was the suggestion of a twitching in the fingers that tugged at his thick blue-black beard.

He stared fixedly at the woman, and she rose and glided from the chamber. As she passed through the door she cast a look over her shoulder at Valeria, a glance full of cynical derision and obscene mockery.

“She has done a clumsy job,” criticized the prince, coming to the divan and bending over the bandage. “Let me see—”

With a quickness amazing in one of his bulk he snatched her sword and threw it across the chamber. His next move was to catch her in his giant arms.

Quick and unexpected as the move was, she almost matched it; for even as he grabbed her, her dirk was in her hand and she stabbed murderously at his throat. More by luck than skill he caught her wrist, and then began a savage wrestling-match. She fought him with fists, feet, knees, teeth, and nails, with all the strength of her magnificent body and all the knowledge of hand-to-hand fighting she had acquired in her years of roving and fighting on sea and land. It availed her nothing against his brute strength. She lost her dirk in the first moment of contact, and thereafter found herself powerless to inflict any appreciable pain on her giant attacker.

The blaze in his weird black eyes did not alter, and their expression filled her with fury, fanned by the sardonic smile that seemed carved upon his bearded lips. Those eyes and that smile contained all the cruel cynicism that seethes below the surface of a sophisticated and degenerate race, and for the first time in her life Valeria experienced fear of a man. It was like struggling against some huge elemental force; his iron arms thwarted her efforts with an ease that sent panic racing through her limbs. He seemed impervious to any pain she could inflict. Only once, when she sank her white teeth savagely into his wrist so that the blood started, did he react. And that was to buffet her brutally upon the side of the head with his open hand, so that stars flashed before her eyes and her head rolled on her shoulders.

Her shirt had been torn open in the struggle, and with cynical cruelty he rasped his thick beard across her bare breasts, bringing the blood to suffuse the fair skin, and fetching a cry of pain and outraged fury from her. Her convulsive resistance was useless; she was crushed down on a couch, disarmed and panting, her eyes blazing up at him like the eyes of a trapped tigress.

A moment later he was hurrying from the chamber, carrying her in his arms. She made no resistance, but the smoldering of her eyes showed that she was unconquered in spirit, at least. She had not cried out. She knew that Conan was not within call, and it did not occur to her that any in Tecuhltli would oppose their prince. But she noticed that Olmec went stealthily, with his head on one side as if listening for sounds of pursuit, and he did not return to the throne chamber. He carried her through a door that stood opposite that through which he had entered, crossed another room and began stealing down a hall. As she became convinced that he feared some opposition to the abduction, she threw back her head and screamed at the top of her lusty voice.

She was rewarded by a slap that half-stunned her, and Olmec quickened his pace to a shambling run.

But her cry had been echoed, and twisting her head about, Valeria, through the tears and stars that partly blinded her, saw Techotl limping after them.

Olmec turned with a snarl, shifting the woman to an uncomfortable and certainly undignified position under one huge arm, where he held her writhing and kicking vainly, like a child.

“Olmec!” protested Techotl. “You cannot be such a dog as to do this thing! She is Conan’s woman! She helped us slay the Xotalancas, and—”

Without a word Olmec balled his free hand into a huge fist and stretched the wounded warrior senseless at his feet. Stooping, and hindered not at all by the struggles and imprecations of his captive, he drew Techotl’s sword from its sheath and stabbed the warrior in the breast. Then casting aside the weapon he fled on along the corridor. He did not see a woman’s dark face peer cautiously after him from behind a hanging. It vanished, and presently Techotl groaned and stirred, rose dazedly and staggered drunkenly away, calling Conan’s name.

Olmec hurried on down the corridor, and descended a winding ivory staircase. He crossed several corridors and halted at last in a broad chamber whose doors were veiled with heavy tapestries, with one exception—a heavy bronze door similar to the Door of the Eagle on the upper floor.

He was moved to rumble, pointing to it: “That is one of the outer doors of Tecuhltli. For the first time in fifty years it is unguarded. We need not guard it now, for Xotalanc is no more.”

“Thanks to Conan and me, you bloody rogue!” sneered Valeria, trembling with fury and the shame of physical coercion. “You trecherous dog! Conan will cut your throat for this!”

Olmec did not bother to voice his belief that Conan’s own gullet had already been severed according to his whispered command. He was too utterly cynical to be at all interested in her thoughts or opinions. His flame-lit eyes devoured her, dwelling burningly on the generous expanses of clear white flesh exposed where her shirt and breeches had been torn in the struggle.

“Forget Conan,” he said thickly. “Olmec is lord of Xuchotl. Xotalanc is no more. There will be no more fighting. We shall spend our lives in drinking and lovemaking. First let us drink!”

He seated himself on an ivory table and pulled her down on his knees, like a dark-skinned satyr with a white nymph in his arms. Ignoring her un-nymphlike profanity, he held her helpless with one great arm about her waist while the other reached across the table and secured a vessel of wine.

“Drink!” he commanded, forcing it to her lips, as she writhed her head away.

The liquor slopped over, stinging her lips, splashing down on her naked breasts.

“Your guest does not like your wine, Olmec,” spoke a cool, sardonic voice.

Olmec stiffened; fear grew in his flaming eyes. Slowly he swung his great head about and stared at Tascela who posed negligently in the curtained doorway, one hand on her smooth hip. Valeria twisted herself about in his iron grip, and when she met the burning eyes of Tascela, a chill tingled along her supple spine. New experiences were flooding Valeria’s proud soul that night. Recently she had learned to fear a man; now she knew what it was to fear a woman.

Olmec sat motionless, a gray pallor growing under his swarthy skin. Tascela brought her other hand from behind her and displayed a small gold vessel.

“I feared she would not like your wine, Olmec,” purred the princess, “so I brought some of mine, some I brought with me long ago from the shores of Lake Zuad—do you understand, Olmec?”

Beads of sweat stood out suddenly on Olmec’s brow. His muscles relaxed, and Valeria broke away and put the table between them. But though reason told her to dart from the room, some fascination she could not understand held her rigid, watching the scene.

Tascela came toward the seated prince with a swaying, undulating walk that was mockery in itself. Her voice was soft, slurringly caressing, but he eyes gleamed. Her slim fingers stroked his beard lightly.

“You are selfish, Olmec,” she crooned, smiling. “You would keep our handsome guest to yourself, though you knew I wished to entertain her. You are much at fault, Olmec!”

The mask dropped for an instant; he eyes flashed, her face was contorted and with an appalling show of strength her hand locked convulsively in his beard and tore out a great handful. This evidence of unnatural strength was no more terrifying than the momentary baring of the hellish fury that raged under her bland exterior.

Olmec lurched up with a roar, and stood swaying like a bear, his mighty hands clenching and unclenching.

“Slut!” His booming voice filled the room. “Witch! She-devil! Tecuhltli should have slain you fifty years ago! Begone! I have endured too much from you! This white-skinned wench is mine! Get hence before I slay you!”

The princess laughed and dashed the bloodstained strands into his face. Her laughter was less merciful than the ring of flint on steel.

“Once you spoke otherwise, Olmec,” she taunted. “Once, in your youth, you spoke words of love. Aye, you were my lover once, years ago, and because you loved me, you slept in my arms beneath the enchanted lotus—and thereby put into my hands the chains that enslaved you. You know you cannot withstand me. You know I have but to gaze into your eyes, with the mystic power a priest of Stygia taught me, long ago, and you are powerless. You remember the night beneath the black lotus that waved above us, stirred by no worldly breeze; you scent again the unearthly perfumes that stole and rose like a cloud about you to enslave you. You cannot fight against me. You are my slave as you were that night—as you shall be so long as you live, Olmec of Xuchotl!”

Her voice had sunk to a murmur like the rippling of a stream running through starlit darkness. She leaned close to the prince and spread her long tapering fingers upon his giant breast. His eyes glared, his great hands fell limply to his sides.

With a smile of cruel malice, Tascela lifted the vessel and placed it to his lips.

“Drink!”

Mechanically the prince obeyed. And instantly the glaze passed from his eyes and they were flooded with fury, comprehension and an awful fear. His mouth gaped, but no sound issued. For an instant he reeled on buckling knees, and then fell in a sodden heap on the floor.

His fall jolted Valeria out of her paralysis. She turned and sprang toward the door, but with a movement that would have shamed a leaping panther, Tascela was before her. Valeria struck at her with her clenched fist, and all the power of her supple body behind the blow. It would have stretched a man senseless on the floor. But with a lithe twist of her torso, Tascela avoided the blow and caught the pirate’s wrist. The next instant Valeria’s left hand was imprisoned, and holding her wrists together with one hand, Tasacela calmly bound them with a cord she drew from her girdle. Valeria thought she had tasted the ultimate in humiliation already that night, but her shame at being manhandled by Olmec was nothing to the sensations that now shook her supple frame. Valeria had always been inclined to despise the other members of her sex; and it was overwhelming to encounter another woman who could handle her like a child. She scarcely resisted at all when Tascela forced her into a chair and drawing her bound wrists down between her knees, fastened them to the chair.

Casually stepping over Olmec, Tascela walked to the bronze door and shot the bolt and threw it open, revealing a hallway without.

“Opening upon this hall,” she remarked, speaking to her feminine captive for the first time, “there is a chamber which in old times was used as a torture room. When we retired into Tecuhltli, we brought most of the apparatus with us, but there was one piece too heavy to move. It is still in working order. I think it will be quite convenient now.”

An understanding flame of terror rose in Olmec’s eyes. Tascela strode back to him, bent and gripped him by the hair.

“He is only paralyzed temporarily,” she remarked conversationally. “He can hear, think, and feel—aye, he can feel very well indeed!”

With which sinister observation she started toward the door, dragging the giant bulk with an ease that made the pirate’s eyes dilate. She passed into the hall and moved down it without hesitation, presently disappearing with her captive into a chamber that opened into it, and whence shortly thereafter issued the clank of iron.

Valeria swore softly and tugged vainly, with her legs braced against the chair. The cords that confined her were apparently unbreakable.

Tascela presently returned alone; behind her a muffled groaning issued from the chamber. She closed the door but did not bolt it. Tascela was beyond the grip of habit, as she was beyond the touch of other human instincts and emotions.

Valeria sat dumbly, watching the woman in whose slim hands, the pirate realized, her destiny now rested.

Tascela grasped her yellow locks and forced back her head, looking impersonably down into her face. But the glitter in her dark eyes was not impersonable.

“I have chosen you for a great honor,” she said. “You shall restore the youth of Tascela. Oh, you stare at that! My appearance is that of youth, but through my veins creeps the sluggish chill of approaching age, as I have felt it a thousand times before. I am old, so old I do not remember my childhood. But I was a girl once, and a priest of Stygia loved me, and gave me the secret of immortality and youth everlasting. He died, then—some said by poison. But I dwelt in my palace by the shores of Lake Zuad and the passing years touched me not. So at last a king of Stygia desired me, and my people rebelled and brought me to this land. Olmec called me a princess. I am not of royal blood. I am greater than a princess. I am Tascela, whose youth your own glorious youth shall restore.”

Valeria’s tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. She sensed here a mystery darker than the degeneracy she had anticipated.

The taller woman unbound the Aquilonian’s wrists and pulled her to her feet. It was not fear of the dominant strength that lurked in the princess’ limbs that made Valeria a helpless, quivering captive in her hands. It was the burning, hypnotic, terrible eyes of Tascela.

7. He Comes from the Dark

“Well, I’m a Kushite!”

Conan glared down at the man on the iron rack.

“What the devil are you doing on that thing?”

Incoherent sounds issued from behind the gag and Conan bent and tore it away, evoking a bellow of fear from the captive; for his action caused the iron ball to lurch down until it nearly touched the broad breast.

“Be careful, for Set’s sake!” begged Olmec.

“What for?” demanded Conan. “Do you think I care what happens to you? I only wish I had time to stay here and watch that chunk of iron grind your guts out. But I’m in a hurry. Where’s Valeria?”

“Loose me!” urged Olmec. “I will tell you all!”

“Tell me first.”

“Never!” The prince’s heavy jaws set stubbornly.

“All right.” Conan seated himself on a nearby bench. “I’ll find her myself, after you’ve been reduced to a jelly. I believe I can speed up that process by twisting my sword-point around in your ear,” he added, extending the weapon experimentally.

“Wait!” Words came in a rush from the captive’s ashy lips. “Tascela took her from me. I’ve never been anything but a puppet in Tascela’s hands.”

“Tascela?” snorted Conan, and spat. “Why, the filthy—”

“No, no!” panted Olmec. “It’s worse than you think. Tascela is old—centuries old. She renews her life and her youth by the sacrifice of beautiful young women. That’s one thing that has reduced the clan to its present state. She will draw the essence of Valeria’s life into her own body, and bloom with fresh vigor and beauty.”

“Are the doors locked?” asked Conan, thumbing his sword edge.

“Aye! But I know a way to get into Tecuhltli. Only Tascela and I know, and she thinks me helpless and you slain. Free me and I swear I will help you rescue Valeria. Without my help you cannot win into Tecuhltli; for even if you tortured me into revealing the secret, you couldn’t work it. Let me go, and we will steal on Tascela and kill her before she can work magic—before she can fix her eyes on us. A knife thrown from behind will do the work. I should have killed her thus long ago, but I feared that without her to aid us the Xotalancas would overcome us. She needed my help, too; that’s the only reason she let me live this long. Now neither needs the other, and one must die. I swear that when we have slain the witch, you and Valeria shall go free without harm. My people will obey me when Tascela is dead.”

Conan stooped and cut the ropes that held the prince, and Olmec slid cautiously from under the great ball and rose, shaking his head like a bull and muttering imprecations as he fingered his lacerated scalp. Standing shoulder to shoulder the two men presented a formidable picture of primitive power. Olmec was as tall as Conan, and heavier; but there was something repellent about the Tlazitlan, something abysmal and monstrous that contrasted unfavorably with the clean-cut, compact hardness of the Cimmerian. Conan had discarded the remnants of his tattered, blood-soaked shirt, and stood with his remarkable muscular development impressively revealed. His great shoulders were as broad as those of Olmec, and more cleanly outlined, and his huge breast arched with a more impressive sweep to a hard waist that lacked the paunchy thickness of Olmec’s midsection. He might have been an image of primal strength cut out of bronze. Olmec was darker, but not from the burning of the sun. If Conan was a figure out of the dawn of Time, Olmec was a shambling, somber shape from the darkness of Time’s pre-dawn.

“Lead on,” demanded Conan. “And keep ahead of me. I don’t trust you any farther than I can throw a bull by the tail.”

Olmec turned and stalked on ahead of him, one hand twitching slightly as it plucked at his matted beard.

Olmec did not lead Conan back to the bronze door, which the prince naturally supposed Tascela had locked, but to a certain chamber on the border of Tecuhltli.

“This secret has been guarded for half a century,” he said. “Not even our own clan knew of it, and the Xotalancas never learned. Tecuhltli himself built this secret entrance, afterwards slaying the slaves who did the work; for he feared that he might find himself locked out of his own kingdom some day because of the spite of Tascela, whose passion for him soon changed to hate. But she discovered the secret, and barred the hidden door against him one day as he fled back from an unsuccessful raid, and the Xotalancas took him and flayed him. But once, spying upon her, I saw her enter Tecuhltli by this route, and so learned the secret.”

He pressed upon a gold ornament in the wall, and a panel swung inward, disclosing an ivory stair leading upward.

“This stair is built within the wall,” said Olmec. “It leads up to a tower upon the roof, and thence other stairs wind down to the various chambers. Hasten!”

“After you, comrade!” retorted Conan satirically, swaying his broadsword as he spoke, and Olmec shrugged his shoulders and stepped onto the staircase. Conan instantly followed him, and the door shut behind them. Far above a cluster of fire-jewels made the staircase a well of dusky dragon-light.

They mounted until Conan estimated that they were above the level of the fourth floor, and then came out into a cylindrical tower, in the domed roof of which was set the bunch of fire-jewels that lighted the stair. Through gold-barred windows, set with unbreakable crystal panes, the first windows he had seen in Xuchotl, Conan got a glimpse of high ridges, domes and more towers, looming darkly against the stars. He was looking across the roofs of Xuchotl.

Olmec did not look through the windows. He hurried down one of the several stairs that wound down from the tower, and when they had descended a few feet, this stair changed into a narrow corridor that wound tortuously on for some distance. It ceased at a steep flight of steps leading downward. There Olmec paused.

Up from below, muffled, but unmistakable, welled a woman’s scream, edged with fright, fury, and shame. And Conan recognized Valeria’s voice.

In the swift rage roused by that cry, and the amazement of wondering what peril could wring such a shriek from Valeria’s reckless lips, Conan forgot Olmec. He pushed past the prince and started down the stair. Awakening instinct brought him about again, just as Olmec struck with his great mallet-like fist. The blow, fierce and silent, was aimed at the base of Conan’s brain. But the Cimmerian wheeled in time to receive the buffet on the side of his neck instead. The impact would have snapped the vertebrae of a lesser man. As it was, Conan swayed backward, but even as he reeled he dropped his sword, useless at such close quarters, and grasped Olmec’s extended arm, dragging the prince with him as he fell. Headlong they went down the steps together, in a revolving whirl of limbs and heads and bodies. And as they went Conan’s iron fingers found and locked in Olmec’s bull-throat.

The barbarian’s neck and shoulder felt numb from the sledge-like impact of Olmec’s huge fist, which had carried all the strength of the massive forearm, thick triceps and great shoulder. But this did not affect his ferocity to any appreciable extent. Like a bulldog he hung on grimly, shaken and battered and beaten against the steps as they rolled, until at last they struck an ivory panel-door at the bottom with such an impact that they splintered it its full length and crashed through its ruins. But Olmec was already dead, for those iron fingers had crushed out his life and broken his neck as they fell.

Conan rose, shaking the splinters from his great shoulders, blinking blood and dust out of his eyes.

He was in the great throne room. There were fifteen people in that room besides himself. The first person he saw was Valeria. A curious black altar stood before the throne-dais. Ranged about it, seven black candles in golden candlesticks sent up oozing spirals of thick green smoke, disturbingly scented. These spirals united in a cloud near the ceiling, forming a smoky arch above the altar. On that altar lay Valeria, stark naked, her white flesh gleaming in shocking contrast to the glistening ebon stone. She was not bound. She lay at full length, her arms stretched out above her head to their fullest extent. At the head of the altar knelt a young man, holding her wrists firmly. A young woman knelt at the other end of the altar, grasping her ankles. Between them she could neither rise nor move.

Eleven men and women of Tecuhltli knelt dumbly in a semicircle, watching the scene with hot, lustful eyes.

On the ivory throne-seat Tascela lolled. Bronze bowls of incense rolled their spirals about her; the wisps of smoke curled about her naked limbs like caressing fingers. She could not sit still; she squirmed and shifted about with sensuous abandon, as if finding pleasure in the contact of the smooth ivory with her sleek flesh.

The crash of the door as it broke beneath the impact of the hurtling bodies caused no change in the scene. The kneeling men and women merely glanced incuriously at the corpse of their prince and at the man who rose from the ruins of the door, then swung their eyes greedily back to the writhing white shape on the black altar. Tascela looked insolently at him, and sprawled back on her seat, laughing mockingly.

“Slut!” Conan saw red. His hands clenched into iron hammers as he started for her. With his first step something clanged loudly and steel bit savagely into his leg. He stumbled and almost fell, checked in his headlong stride. The jaws of an iron trap had closed on his leg, with teeth that sank deep and held. Only the ridged muscles of his calf saved the bone from being splintered. The accursed thing had sprung out of the smoldering floor without warning. He saw the slots now, in the floor where the jaws had lain, perfectly camouflaged.

“Fool!” laughed Tascela. “Did you think I would not guard against your possible return? Every door in this chamber is guarded by such traps. Stand there and watch now, while I fulfill the destiny of your handsome friend! Then I will decide your own.”

Conan’s hand instinctively sought his belt, only to encounter an empty scabbard. His sword was on the stair behind him. His poniard was lying back in the forest, where the dragon had torn it from his jaw. The steel teeth in his leg were like burning coals, but the pain was not as savage as the fury that seethed in his soul. He was trapped, like a wolf. If he had had his sword he would have hewn off his leg and crawled across the floor to slay Tascela. Valeria’s eyes rolled toward him with mute appeal, and his own helplessness sent red waves of madness surging through his brain.

Dropping on the knee of his free leg, he strove to get his fingers between the jaws of the trap, to tear them apart by sheer strength. Blood started from beneath his fingernails, but the jaws fitted close about his leg in a circle whose segments jointed perfectly, contracted until there was no space between his mangled flesh and the fanged iron. The sight of Valeria’s naked body added flame to the fire of his rage.

Tascela ignored him. Rising languidly from her seat she swept the ranks of her subjects with a searching glance, and asked: “Where are Xamec, Zlanath and Tachic?”

“They did not return from the catacombs, princess,” answered a man. “Like the rest of us, they bore bodies of the slain into the crypts, but they have not returned. Perhaps the ghost of Tolkemec took them.”

“Be silent, fool!” she ordered harshly. “The ghost is a myth.”

She came down from her dais, playing with a thin gold-hilted dagger. Her eyes burned like nothing on the hither side of Hell. She paused beside the altar and spoke in the tense stillness.

“Your life shall make me young, white woman!” she said. “I shall lean upon your bosom and place my lips over yours, and slowly—ah, slowly!—sink this blade through your heart, so that your life, fleeing your stiffening body, shall enter mine, making me bloom again with youth and with life everlasting!”

Slowly, like a serpent arching toward its victim, she bent down through the writhing smoke, closer and closer over the now motionless woman who stared up into her glowing dark eyes— eyes that grew larger and deeper, blazing like black moons in the swirling smoke.

The kneeling people gripped their hands and held their breath, tense for the bloody climax, and the only sound was Conan’s fierce panting as he strove to tear his leg from the trap.

All eyes were glued on the altar and the white figure there; the crash of a thunderbolt could hardly have broken the spell, yet it was only a low cry that shattered the fixity of the scene and bought all whirling about—a low cry, yet one to make the hair stand up stiffly on the scalp. They looked, and they saw.

Framed in the door to the left of the dais stood a nightmare figure. It was a man, with a tangle of white hair and a matted white beard that fell over his breast. Rags only partly covered his gaunt frame, revealing half-naked limbs strangely unnatural in appearance. The skin was not like that of a normal human. There was a suggestion of scaliness about it, as if the owner had dwelt long under conditions almost antithetical to those conditions under which human life ordinarily thrives. And there was nothing at all human about the eyes that blazed from the tangle of white hair. They were great gleaming disks that started unwinkingly, luminous, whitish, and without a hint of normal emotion or sanity. The mouth gaped, but no coherent words issued—only a high-pitched tittering.

“Tolkemec!” whispered Tascela, livid, while the others crouched in speechless horror. “No myth, then, no ghost! Set! You have dwelt for twelve years in darkness! Twelve years among the bones of the dead! What grisly food did you find? What mad travesty of life did you live, in the stark blackness of that eternal night? I see now why Xamec and Zlanath and Tachic did not return from the catacombs— and never will return. But why have you waited so long to strike? Were you seeking something, in the pits? Some secret weapon you knew was hidden there? And have you found it at last?”

That hideous tittering was Tolkemec’s only reply, as he bounded into the room with a long leap that carried him over the secret trap before the door—by chance, or by some faint recollection of the ways of Xuchotl. He was not mad, as a man is mad. He had dwelt apart from humanity so long that he was no longer human. Only an unbroken thread of memory embodied in hate and the urge for vengeance had connected him with the humanity from which he had been cut off, and held him lurking near the people he hated. Only that thin string had kept him from racing and prancing off forever into the black corridors and realms of the subterranean world he had discovered, long ago.

“You sought something hidden!” whispered Tascela, cringing back. “And you have found it! You remember the feud! After all these years of blackness, you remember!”

For in the lean hand of Tolkemec now waved a curious jade-hued wand, on the end of which glowed a knob of crimson shaped like a pomegranate. She sprang aside as he thrust it out like a spear, and a beam of crimson fire lanced from the pomegranate. It missed Tascela, but the woman holding Valeria’s ankles was in the way. It smote between her shoulders. There was a sharp crackling sound and the ray of fire flashed from her bosom and struck the black altar, with a snapping of blue sparks. The woman toppled sidewise, shriveling and withering like a mummy even as she fell.

Valeria rolled from the altar on the other side, and started for the opposite wall on all fours. For Hell had burst loose in the throne room of dead Olmec.

The man who had held Valeria’s hands was the next to die. He turned to run, but before he had taken half a dozen steps, Tolkemec, with an agility appalling in such a frame, bounded around to a position that placed the man between him and the altar. Again the red fire-beam flashed and the Tecuhltli rolled lifeless to the floor, as the beam completed its course with a burst of blue sparks against the altar.

Then began the slaughter. Screaming insanely the people rushed about the chamber, caroming from one another, stumbling and falling. And among them Tolkemec capered and pranced, dealing death. They could not escape by the doors; for apparently the metal of the portals served like the metal veined stone altar to complete the circuit for whatever hellish power flashed like thunderbolts from the witch-wand the ancient waved in his hand. When he caught a man or a woman between him and a door or the altar, that one died instantly. He chose no special victim. He took them as they came, with his rags flapping about his wildly gyrating limbs, and the gusty echoes of his tittering sweeping the room above the screams. And bodies fell like falling leaves about the altar and at the doors. One warrior in desperation rushed at him, lifting a dagger, only to fall before he could strike. But the rest were like crazed cattle, with no thought for resistance, and no chance of escape.

The last Tecuhltli except Tascela had fallen when the princess reached the Cimmerian and the girl who had taken refuge beside him. Tascela bent and touched the floor, pressing a design upon it. Instantly the iron jaws released the bleeding limb and sank back into the floor.

“Slay him if you can!” she panted, and pressed a heavy knife into his hand. “I have no magic to withstand him!”

With a grunt he sprang before the woman, not heeding his lacerated leg in the heat of the fighting-lust. Tolkemec was coming toward him, his weird eyes ablaze, but he hesitated at the gleam of the knife in Conan’s hand. Then began a grim game, as Tolkemec sought to circle about Conan and get the barbarian between him and the altar or a metal door, while Conan sought to avoid this and drive home his knife. The women watched tensely, holding their breath.

There was no sound except the rustle and scrape of quick-shifting feet. Tolkemec pranced and capered no more. He realized that grimmer game confronted him than the people who had died screaming and fleeing. In the elemental blaze of the barbarian’s eyes he read an intent deadly as his own. Back and forth they weaved, and when one moved the other moved as if invisible threads bound them together. But all the time Conan was getting closer and closer to his enemy. Already the coiled muscles of his thighs were beginning to flex for a spring, when Valeria cried out. For a fleeting instant a bronze door was in line with Conan’s moving body. The red line leaped, searing Conan’s flank as he twisted aside, and even as he shifted he hurled the knife. Old Tolkemec went down, truly slain at last, the hilt vibrating on his breast.

Tascela sprang—not toward Conan, but toward the wand where it shimmered like a live thing on the floor. But as she leaped, so did Valeria, with a dagger snatched from a dead man; and the blade, driven with all the power of the pirate’s muscles, impaled the princess of Tecuhltli so that the point stood out between her breasts. Tascela screamed once and fell dead, and Valeria spurned the body with her heel as it fell.

“I had to do that much, for my own self-respect!” panted Valeria, facing Conan across the limp corpse.

“Well, this cleans up the feud,” he grunted. “It’s been a hell of a night! Where did these people keep their food? I’m hungry.”

“You need a bandage on that leg.” Valeria ripped a length of silk from a hanging and knotted it about her waist, then tore off some smaller strips which she bound efficiently about the barbarian’s lacerated limb.

“I can walk on it,” he assured her. “Let’s begone. It’s dawn, outside this infernal city. I’ve had enough of Xuchotl. It’s well the breed exterminated itself. I don’t want any of their accursed jewels. They might be haunted.”

“There is enough clean loot in the world for you and me,” she said, straightening to stand tall and splendid before him.

The old blaze came back in his eyes, and this time she did not resist as he caught her fiercely in his arms.

“It’s a long way to the coast,” she said presently, withdrawing her lips from his.

“What matter?” he laughed. “There’s nothing we can’t conquer. We’ll have our feet on a ship’s deck before the Stygians open their ports for the trading season. And then we’ll show the world what plundering means!”

ARMS AND THE WOMAN, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

“It’s not as if we didn’t know this one was coming,” Uril said loudly as he stumbled over a rock that protruded from the mud. “The books are very clear, and the astrologers confirmed the date.”

“We should have done something sooner,” Staun grumbled. “If we’d been sent out a little sooner we wouldn’t have to rush like this. We could have gotten there before it started raining, and we wouldn’t have to hurry. Why did the Council leave it until the last minute?”

“Because they’re a bunch of squabbling old fools,” Captain Lethis said as he pushed aside a dripping branch that hung low over the overgrown road. “We were supposed to be here days ago, but they wasted time arguing about who should go, and how many, chosen how, and who should pay for it all, and a dozen other details, until all of sudden they realized that the prophesied date was almost upon us.”

“If the Undead Lord gets loose because of their delays, I swear I’ll cut a few of their throats,” Staun said.

“And if he does I won’t lift a hand to stop you,” Lethis agreed. “But let’s not let it come to that, shall we?” He turned and beckoned to the stragglers, bellowing, “Come on, you!”

The other soldiers, with much cursing and grumbling, picked up the pace a little; behind them came a ragged little crowd of others, tagging along.

Officially the Council had chosen ten men for this errand, but altogether, including friends, helpers, family, and assorted camp-followers, there were almost thirty people slogging through the Forbidden Marsh in the pouring rain, making their way toward the ruins of Haridal Keep. There had been almost fifty when they left the Citadel two days before.

Near the rear of the party, a young woman named Siria was listening to the complaints and thinking that the score who had abandoned the quest were the sensible ones. After all, if this worked the way it was supposed to, there probably wouldn’t be much to see or do; the legends said that whoever wore the magical armor that the wizard Karista had given King Derebeth sixteen hundred years ago would be immune to the black sorcery of the Undead Lord, and could therefore easily strike the monster down before his resurrection was complete, sending him back to the grave for another four hundred years.

If it was really that quick, Siria doubted she would have a chance to ingratiate herself with anyone--she could be charming, given time, but she might not have that time.

And she really didn’t have anything to offer other than charm. These past two years since her father’s death she had used up everything else—not that there had been much to begin with. She was too small to keep up the land her father had worked, not strong enough to work it, and the lord had sent her away, giving the land to a husky young man more suited to farming.

Since then she had wandered hither and yon, looking for a place, and had found none. What she had found was that soldiers were often generous with a pretty girl, especially when they had just done something strenuous and dangerous and were feeling proud of themselves.

She hoped that this particular job would qualify, that the soldiers would find errands for her along the way, and when the Undead Lord was properly dispatched that they would invite her to join their celebration.

It shouldn’t be dangerous. The stories and written records from before the Extermination, left by the wizards who had dominated the world back then, were fairly clear about what needed to be done.

The earliest report of the Undead Lord dated back sixteen centuries, to a time when the world was awash in chaos and powerful magic—nothing like the quiet present day. That first time King Derebeth had disposed of the Undead Lord after a long, fierce struggle, and everyone had thought that was the end of it—but four hundred years later, when certain stars aligned properly, the creature had reappeared. After some messy delays the legendary Kurlus of Amoritan had retrieved Derebeth’s armor, not to mention the sacred Sword of Light, and dealt with the problem.

Eight hundred years ago the local wizards had been ready—even though magic was already in decline astrology was in full flower by then, and they had known the exact time when the Undead Lord would rise again. They were waiting, with a mercenary warrior by the name of Porl already wearing the armor and wielding the sword, and the Undead Lord had scarcely begun to materialize before being dispersed. The whole thing was over in a few minutes, according to the reports.

Four hundred years ago there had been some doubt about whether the Undead Lord would put in another appearance, and matters had been complicated by the Third Lodrian War, but a party of soldiers had been waiting. A Lieutenant Rusran had worn the armor and dealt the required blow.

Again, it just took a few moments.

So there wouldn’t be much to see unless something went wrong and the Undead Lord was able to restore himself fully to life—and in that case, anyone in the area stood a good chance of winding up dead or ensorcelled. Siria did not care for that possibility—but she didn’t expect it to arise. Captain Lethis and his men would see to that. They were the best that the Council had had on hand, and would surely handle this nasty business quickly and efficiently. They had all handled pre-Extermination relics before.

While she had supposedly come along to run errands beforehand, Siria was mostly looking forward to a time when the Undead Lord was safely gone. Once Captain Lethis and his men had the job done, no matter how easy it proved to be, they’d be feeling good, and might be generous with a woman who helped them feel better. The Council paid its soldiers well—especially when left-over magic was involved. The world was still cluttered with this sort of remnant of the bad old days before the Extermination, and the Council did not stint those brave souls who helped dispose of these menaces. Lethis and his men would have fat purses when this was done, even though sending the Undead Lord off to another four hundred years in limbo did not appear especially difficult or dangerous.

Of course, there might be unknown dangers. Siria had heard that the accounts of the previous manifestations were not as detailed as the Council might have wished—there was a mention in the record of the Undead Lord’s third appearance that the wizards had had some brief difficulty in finding a suitable candidate before choosing Porl, but there was no explanation of what the selection criteria had been. The report from the Lodrian Wars mentioned in passing that Rusran was given the job at the last minute when his commanding officer, a Captain Orilik, proved unable to do it, but again, there was no explanation of why Orilik wasn’t up to the task.

And of course, since the Extermination there were no wizards or sorcerers to ask for more details—they were all long gone. Only their written records and the scattered bits of magic remained.

This lack of clear, detailed information had worried the Council somewhat, and that was why they were sending ten of their finest, rather than two or three volunteers; it wouldn’t do to have no one in the party fit to wear the armor.

Lightning flashed, followed all too closely by a sudden clap of thunder; a moment later the rain turned from a drizzle to a torrent.

“Oh, enough!” a woman to Siria’s right exclaimed. “If they want me, they can find me back in Splittree.” She turned around and began slogging in the other direction.

As if that were a signal a handful of the party turned back, as well—but the ten soldiers kept on marching forward, and Siria stayed with them, as did a dozen others. After all, Siria had no place to go back in Splittree, no family waiting for her anywhere, and she was already soaked to the skin.

Uril, the big bushy-bearded pikeman from the Stoneford Marches, paused and looked back at the shrinking of their retinue. Siria smiled at him, and he smiled back.

That was promising—when this was done maybe he would spend some money on her, buy her a good dinner back in Splittree perhaps. She had been thinking that the group turning back were probably the smart ones, that she was a fool to stay, but Uril’s smile prompted her to reconsider. Uril would soon have money to spend, and she would not be particularly demanding; he might keep her around for quite some time, which would certainly be preferable to approaching strangers in inns and taverns.

And she was surely already as drenched as she could get...

That was when she slipped and fell face-first in the mud.

Before she even realized properly what had happened Uril had her arm and was lifting her back to her feet.

“Thank you,” she mumbled, looking down at the huge brown smear down the front of her frock and hoping there was no damage that wouldn’t wash out.

“You’re quite welcome,” Uril said. “You’ll want to be a little more careful up ahead—it’s just as slippery and a good bit steeper.”

Siria muttered something, she didn’t know exactly what, and turned away, ostensibly to brush the mud from her frock, but really to hide her blush. Here she had wanted to impress Uril as someone charming, someone who would be good company, and then, right in front of him...

Well, there was nothing to be done about it now.

Uril turned away and marched on through the marsh, and a moment later Siria followed, ignoring the snickers of the others. She kept to herself after that, apart from the rest of the group; she had no desire to turn those snickers into open laughter by letting them see her take another tumble.

Half an hour later the trees thinned enough to give them a clear view of Haridal Keep, former home to assorted necromancers and monsters. Captain Lethis and his men marched on, undaunted, but some of the others stopped and whispered.

Siria couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she could imagine. Haridal Keep, even after sixteen hundred years, was impressively forbidding. The castle had been built atop a huge mass of bare stone that thrust up from the earth, and some of the walls had not been built atop the outcropping, but carved directly from it. The towers had long since crumbled, and the battlements were broken and uneven, but most of the walls still stood straight and strong.

“I think I’ll wait here,” a plump woman declared loudly. “It’ll all be over by sundown, won’t it?”

A chorus of discussion arose, reached a quick crescendo, then died away as most of the party began to settle down under the trees, spreading canvas from branch to branch to keep off the rain.

Siria hesitated—it would be good to get under shelter—but then slogged on, following the ten chosen soldiers. Staying with the others, constantly displaying her soiled frock, would be too embarrassing.

Besides, she was curious to see the inside of Haridal Keep, and what the famous magical armor and sword looked like, and whether the Undead Lord would actually appear.

It was only when the party reached the long crumbling stair up to the castle gate that she realized that she was the only one besides the soldiers who had come this far. She hesitated before setting foot on the steps. Maybe she shouldn’t be here. She didn’t really belong with these professional heroes when they were going about their job.

“Come on,” Uril called, waving to her from a dozen steps up.

“Captain Lethis won’t mind?” Siria asked.

“Why would he? Come on and get out of the rain—assuming there’s any roof left in this drafty old ruin!”

Quickly, Siria scampered up the steps.

If nothing else, this got her feet out of the clinging, slippery mud that had made the journey so miserable. That alone made it worth the effort.

The main gate was a heap of broken stone; the soldiers simply marched over it, but Siria, with her much shorter legs, had to clamber awkwardly. Uril glanced back at her and hesitated, as if he might come to her aid, but she determinedly didn’t meet his gaze as she picked her way through the mess.

Past the gate was an empty stone courtyard, and then a gap in the yard-thick wall that had once divided the courtyard from the great hall. That gap had once had an archway and door in it, but they were long gone, the arch crumbled, the stones above it fallen away leaving an opening that was as broad as a farmer’s wagon at the base, and that widened to three times that at the top.

There was no roof, no shelter from the rain, in the great hall. Siria brushed wet hair from her eyes to see Captain Lethis standing there, consulting a document, with the other nine men gathered about him.

“The entrance to the crypt was behind the high table,” Lethis said. “That would be that way.” He pointed to one end of the room, but how he made his choice Siria could not guess. She followed along as the men marched across the ruined hall and began poking through the rubble that filled one end.

“Here,” Staun said, as he uncovered a black opening.

“Right,” Lethis said. “We’ll need a light.”

“Light it once you’re inside, out of the rain,” Uril suggested.

“Good idea,” Staun agreed, and Lethis nodded. Then they began climbing down into that lightless pit, one by one. Siria heard a splash, and quiet cursing, and muttered comments, as the ten men vanished into the hole.

She hesitated. That opening did not look inviting at all—but she had come this far, and what was the point of standing in the rain?

And then a faint orange glow appeared in the blackness as someone got a light going, and she realized from how brightly it shone that the daylight, not very strong to begin with, was fading—the afternoon must be almost over, the sun nearing the horizon. She would be waiting in the dark soon no matter where she was; she might as well go on.

Cautiously, she climbed over the stones and lowered herself into the hole.

Strong hands reached up and grabbed her waist, and she yelped with fright before realizing that it was Uril, helping her down.

A moment later she was standing in a tunnel with the soldiers, a tunnel where the low spots in the uneven floor were flooded to various depths. Three of the men held lanterns that thinned, but did not fully disperse, the surrounding gloom.

“This way,” Captain Lethis said, pointing. As he started walking, and the others fell into step behind him, he asked, “Did anyone get a look at the sun before we came down here?”

“Couldn’t see it through the clouds,” Staun grumbled. “I told you we waited too long.”

The captain did not bother replying; instead he broke into a trot down the passage.

The others followed him through what seemed to Siria a senseless maze of passages and tunnels, dark corridors of rough stone with broken floors and barrel-vaulted ceilings. She had to run to keep up.

At least, she thought as she stumbled around the fourth or fifth corner, she was out of the rain.

And then they were in the chamber they sought, and she almost fell down the half-dozen steps that led into it.

The soldiers were already arranging themselves around the contents of the chamber—a black stone sarcophagus that gleamed as if freshly polished, and beside it a dusty, sagging wooden chest.

Staun prodded the chest with the toe of his boot, and one side caved in.

“Rotted through,” he said.

“It’s four hundred years old,” Uril pointed out. “That’s from the Third Lodrian War.”

“Get it open,” Lethis ordered. “If it’s not the armor and sword, it probably says where they are.”

“You think the Undead Lord is in this?” Fellan asked, pointing at the sarcophagus.

“If he’s not, then we’re in trouble, because I don’t know where else he could be,” Lethis replied, as Staun knelt and tugged at the lid of the chest.

The lock pulled free of crumbling wood and the chest opened, revealing a long, narrow oilcloth bundle, a rolled and tied parchment, and a tangle of rotting wool threads and dully-gleaming metal. Lethis promptly snatched up the parchment, while Staun prodded gingerly at the mess of wool and metal.

“This is it,” Lethis said, as he unrolled the parchment and read it. “Someone had terrible handwriting, and it’s in Old Mardish, but it definitely mentions King Derebeth, and that’s the word for armor.” He turned to one of the other soldiers. “Grulli, you know some Old Mardish, don’t you?”

“A little,” Grulli said, accepting the parchment. He squinted at it and held it closer to a lantern as he read, then nodded. “It says the Undead Lord will rise today, and must be stopped with the Sword of Light wielded by a person wearing the armor of King Derebeth.” He lowered the parchment and gestured at the box. “That’s the sword and armor, and the Undead Lord will appear in the sarcophagus.”

Staun lifted out the bundle of metal and unfolded it, tearing away the dessicated remnants of the wool to reveal a mail shirt of bizarre and ancient design that somehow, despite centuries of neglect, showed not a speck of rust or corrosion.

Other than the odd pattern of links and the lack of aging, it was a very ordinary mail shirt, with no magical aura that Siria could see. She hoped whatever spell was on it still worked.

“Captain, it’s up to you to choose who wears it,” Staun said. He looked at the shirt. “I don’t think it will fit me.”

The others gathered around and stared at the mail shirt; Siria, who had been watching from the bottom step rather than setting foot in the crypt itself, came forward as well, peering around the soldiers for a closer look at the miraculous garment.

“It does look a little small,” Uril said.

“No one ever said Derebeth was a big man,” Lethis said. “I suppose ancient heroes came in all sizes.”

“Captain,” Uril said nervously, “maybe ancient heroes came in all sizes, but we don’t. We’re all big men. I don’t think any of us can get that thing on.”

Lethis looked suddenly worried. “Maybe it will magically expand on the right person,” he said. “Staun, try it on.”

Staun obeyed, pulling the mail over his head, but his hamlike hands would not fit in the sleeves, and the tunic would not fit over his broad shoulders. He lifted the metal shirt off again and passed it to Grulli.

While Grulli struggled with the garment, Staun unwrapped the Sword of Light from the oilcloth bundle. Siria stared in awe at the gleaming, ivory-hilted weapon; it shone in the dim glow of the lanterns as if it were in direct sunlight, sparkling like freshly-polished silver. This weapon clearly was magic; it had all the glamour the mail lacked.

“There’s no problem with the sword, anyway,” Staun remarked, as he hefted it.

Grulli had no more success with the mail shirt than Staun had; he passed it on to Uril.

After Uril came Lethis, then Mokor, then Fellan, and so on. By the time the eighth of the ten was struggling unsuccessfully to don the shirt everyone in the room had become aware of an odd whistling sound.

“It’s coming from the tomb,” Uril said, stepping back.

“We have the Sword of Light,” Staun said. “Why don’t we try to dispose of the Undead Lord with that, even without the armor?”

“It doesn’t look as if we have much of a choice,” Lethis said, as Orpac gave up and passed the armor on to Kael--who was the largest of them all, and the armor had shown no signs of any unnatural expansion.

“At least now we know why Porl and Rusran got the job,” Uril said. “They must have been runts.”

Siria, unnoticed by the men, grimaced at that. As a “runt” herself, she suddenly felt a new empathy for those heroes of old.

“Captain, maybe if we open the coffin and I go at whatever’s inside with the sword...” Staun suggested.

“Do it,” Lethis agreed, as Kael handed the shirt to Worna, the last of the ten carefully-chosen warriors. Staun stepped up to the side of the sarcophagus with the sword in his right hand, and reached for the lid with his left.

“Captain, I don’t know...” Uril began.

“Do you have a better idea?” Lethis demanded.

“Maybe,” Uril said. He pointed at Siria, who was trying hard to stay well out of the way. “It might fit her.”

The whistling sound was growing louder and deeper, and suddenly the lid lifted from the black sarcophagus, rising unsupported into the air. The whistling turned into the roar of a great wind, and the three lanterns flickered and dimmed. To Siria it seemed not so much as if the light faded as if darkness poured in from somewhere, like oily smoke.

“Worna,” Lethis ordered, “throw her the shirt.”

Worna struggled to get his right arm out of the shirt so he could obey.

Staun thrust the Sword of Light into the darkness beneath the sarcophagus lid—then screamed, and snatched it back. Siria stared in horror—something black, like an animate liquid, was crawling up Staun’s arm, wrapping itself around his wrist and elbow.

Staun’s grip loosened, and the Sword of Light fell from his hand, to bounce on the edge of the sarcophagus and land ringing on the stone floor.

The sarcophagus lid fell away to the other side and landed with a deep, thick thump that shook the stone floor.

“Oh, blast,” Lethis said. “All right...”

And then he stopped and stood motionless and silent.

Staun, too, was now frozen, and Uril, and Fellan.

And Worna finally had the mail shirt off.

“You, wench!” he called. “Here!” And he balled the shirt up and flung it at Siria.

She ducked, letting it hit the wall behind her. She turned, snatched it up, and by the time she turned back a shape was forming in the air above the open coffin—a shape that was black and vaguely manlike, but not quite human. The only distinct feature that was visible as yet was a pair of red eyes that seemed to glow as they scanned across the men in the room.

“Oh, Holy Mother,” Siria gasped, clutching the mail shirt to her chest.

At that the red gaze suddenly swung in her direction, and she lifted up the shirt to cover her face.

Even through the protective mail, she could feel the thing’s displeasure.

She began bunching up the mail, struggling to get the shirt over her head.

“I can’t believe this,” she said to no one. “We’re all as good as dead—I’m no hero! I’m just a poor orphan girl. Even if I get this thing on, all I can do is run for help, and by the time anyone gets back here...”

She didn’t complete the thought.

She pulled the shirt on—it fit fairly well, in fact. Her arms slid easily into the sleeves, and her head popped through the neck.

And she almost wished it hadn’t. All the ten men, the Council’s ten best warriors, were turning toward her now, their expressions dazed and flat. The shape in the air was thickening, becoming more solid.

“You can’t hurt me!” Siria said, but her voice trembled.

Staun bent down and picked up the Sword of Light, but he did not use it against the Undead Lord; he didn’t even look at the black thing. Instead he hefted it and took a step toward Siria.

She swallowed. Maybe the Undead Lord could hurt her—he couldn’t harm her directly while she wore the armor, but the Sword of Light could probably hack right through the mail.

And even if it couldn’t cut the magic armor, it could cut her exposed throat, or split her skull.

“Staun,” she said, “drop the sword! Please!”

“Woman,” Staun said, in a strained and unnatural voice, “you are all that stands between the Undead Lord and his freedom.”

Siria swallowed again.

It was true, she knew. The Council had left it until too late and had sent the wrong men, and the Undead Lord was materializing—had materialized, really. In a few moments he would be completely revived, and it would probably take a war to stop him—if anything in these wizardless post-Extermination times could stop him!

Staun took another step toward her, and another—and to either side others were joining him, forming a line, trapping Siria against one wall of the chamber.

She had no weapon, no way to fight them—and even if she could, what good would that do against the Undead Lord?

But if she just stood here, Staun would kill her, and the Undead Lord would be free. She looked up, over Staun’s shoulder at the thing hanging there, at the red eyes that watched her every move.

She was no warrior—but she had fought a few, in her own way. She had never been on a battlefield, but more than once she had been face to face with drunken soldiers who wanted their way with her.

She had been defending herself from rape then, not death, but the methods she had used then were all she had.

Staun stepped forward, sword rising to strike—and she slid suddenly down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, her legs thrust out before her, knees bent.

Startled, Staun checked his thrust and pulled the sword back. Puzzled, he lowered his gaze.

He was moving very slowly and stupidly, Siria saw. That was surely, she thought, because he was doing what the Undead Lord wanted, rather than what he wanted.

She flung herself forward, between Staun’s legs; before he could react she had rolled over onto her back and taken aim.

“I’m sorry, Staun,” she said. Then she kicked as hard as she could, with her leg fully extended.

Her foot hit soft tissue, and Staun’s breath came out in an astonished and agonized whoosh. He crumpled forward, dropping the Sword of Light.

Siria whirled and grabbed for the Sword, snatched it away and pulled herself out from beneath poor Staun’s crumpling form.

The others were turning, trying to surround her, but they, too, were slow and stupid, as if wading heavy-laden through deep water. She rolled clear, still clutching the sword, then leapt to her feet and ran toward the sarcophagus.

The Undead Lord glowered down at her, and a voice spoke from nowhere, inside her head.

You will not defeat me, it said. Not again! I will not be...

Then she plunged the Sword of Light into the black shape above the sarcophagus.

It exploded; black vapor swept over her, snatching her breath away, and she fell backward, gasping. She landed sitting on the floor, legs splayed, left hand behind her hip—but her right hand still held the Sword of Light, and she still wore King Derebeth’s armor. She did not lose consciousness, or collapse further; instead she sat, dazed, for a moment, while the vapor dissipated and the menace of the Undead Lord passed away for another four centuries.

And then it was all over, and she had a bruise on her right hip and had skinned several knuckles. Her foot hurt, and her eyes stung. Somewhere behind her Staun was rolling on the floor, moaning.

“Well,” Captain Lethis said at her left shoulder, “I suppose we had better get the lid back on that thing, then pack up the sword and mail for next time.”

“This time,” Uril said, “I think we had better make sure everyone knows just what a skinny little fellow King Derebeth was!”

Siria looked up at Uril, but could not yet find her breath to speak.

“You were very brave, young lady,” Lethis said. “And clever, too.”

“You probably saved our lives,” Fellan added.

Still looking at Uril, Siria managed to say, “Then perhaps someone could buy me a dinner when we get back to Splittree.”

“Well, it won’t be Staun,” Orpac said. “I don’t think he’ll want anything to do with any women for awhile, and I’m sure he won’t want you around!”

“I’m sorry,” Siria said, turning to look over her shoulder. Staun was now sitting with his back against the wall, still breathing raggedly.

“Don’t be,” Uril said. “As Fellan said, you saved us all.”

Siria looked up at him again. “Then you’ll buy me that dinner?”

Uril laughed. “You can buy your own,” he said.

Siria shook her head. “No, I can’t,” she began.

“Yes, you can,” Uril said. “Once we get back to the Citadel, anyway. You’ve just earned yourself full pay for this errand—hadn’t you realized?”

Startled, Siria looked at Lethis, who was helping Grulli and Worna lift the stone lid of the sarcophagus back into place.

“Of course,” Lethis said. “And you’ll be offered a place at the Citadel. It’s the usual reward for disposing of dangerous magic. The Council prefers to keep anyone who can handle themselves that well where they can watch them.”

Siria’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged.

That meant no more begging. No more cozying up to men she didn’t like in order to scrounge a meal.

Her mouth closed; then she said, “But that’s at the Citadel.”

Uril laughed again. “Fine,” he said. “Then I’ll buy you dinner in Splittree. And maybe we’ll talk a little, get to know each other. Here you’ve saved my life and I don’t even know your name!”

“Siria,” Siria said, with the broadest smile she had allowed herself in ages. “And I think I’d like that.

THE BRIDE OF THE MAN-HORSE, by Lord Dunsany

In the morning of his two hundred and fiftieth year Shepperalk the centaur went to the golden coffer, wherein the treasure of the centaurs was, and taking from it the hoarded amulet that his father, Jyshak, in the years of his prime, had hammered from mountain gold and set with opals bartered from the gnomes, he put it upon his wrist, and said no word, but walked from his mother’s cavern. And he took with him too that clarion of the centaurs, that famous silver horn, that in its time had summoned to surrender seventeen cities of Man, and for twenty years had brayed at star-girt walls in the Siege of Tholdenblarna, the citadel of the gods, what time the centaurs waged their fabulous war and were not broken by any force of arms, but retreated slowly in a cloud of dust before the final miracle of the gods that They brought in Their desperate need from Their ultimate armoury. He took it and strode away, and his mother only sighed and let him go.

She knew that today he would not drink at the stream coming down from the terraces of Varpa Niger, the inner land of the mountains, that today he would not wonder awhile at the sunset and afterwards trot back to the cavern again to sleep on rushes pulled by rivers that know not Man. She knew that it was with him as it had been of old with his father, and with Goom the father of Jyshak, and long ago with the gods. Therefore she only sighed and let him go.

But he, coming out from the cavern that was his home, went for the first time over the little stream, and going round the corner of the crags saw glittering beneath him the mundane plain. And the wind of the autumn that was gilding the world, rushing up the slopes of the mountain, beat cold on his naked flanks. He raised his head and snorted.

“I am a man-horse now!” he shouted aloud; and leaping from crag to crag he galloped by valley and chasm, by torrent-bed and scar of avalanche, until he came to the wandering leagues of the plain, and left behind him for ever the Athraminaurian mountains.

His goal was Zretazoola, the city of Sombelenë. What legend of Sombelenë’s inhuman beauty or of the wonder of her mystery had ever floated over the mundane plain to the fabulous cradle of the centaurs’ race, the Athraminaurian mountains, I do not know. Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this spring-tide of current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song. So it may be that Shepperalk’s fabulous blood stirred in those lonely mountains away at the edge of the world to rumours that only the airy twilight knew and only confided secretly to the bat, for Shepperalk was more legendary even than man. Certain it was that he headed from the first for the city of Zretazoola, where Sombelenë in her temple dwelt; though all the mundane plain, its rivers and mountains, lay between Shepperalk’s home and the city he sought.

When first the feet of the centaur touched the grass of that soft alluvial earth he blew for joy upon the silver horn, he pranced and caracoled, he gambolled over the leagues; pace came to him like a maiden with a lamp, a new and beautiful wonder; the wind laughed as it passed him. He put his head down low to the scent of the flowers, he lifted it up to be nearer the unseen stars, he revelled through kingdoms, took rivers in his stride; how shall I tell you, ye that dwell in cities, how shall I tell you what he felt as he galloped? He felt for strength like the towers of Bel-Narana; for lightness like those gossamer palaces that the fairy-spider builds ’twixt heaven and sea along the coasts of Zith; for swiftness like some bird racing up from the morning to sing in some city’s spires before daylight comes. He was the sworn companion of the wind. For joy he was as a song; the lightnings of his legendary sires, the earlier gods, began to mix with his blood; his hooves thundered. He came to the cities of men, and all men trembled, for they remembered the ancient mythical wars, and now they dreaded new battles and feared for the race of man. Not by Clio are these wars recorded; history does not know them, but what of that? Not all of us have sat at historians’ feet, but all have learned fable and myth at their mothers’ knees. And there were none that did not fear strange wars when they saw Shepperalk swerve and leap along the public ways. So he passed from city to city.

By night he lay down unpanting in the reeds of some marsh or a forest; before dawn he rose triumphant, and hugely drank of some river in the dark, and splashing out of it would trot to some high place to find the sunrise, and to send echoing eastwards the exultant greetings of his jubilant horn. And lo! the sunrise coming up from the echoes, and the plains new-lit by the day, and the leagues spinning by like water flung from a top, and that gay companion, the loudly laughing wind, and men and the fears of men and their little cities; and, after that, great rivers and waste spaces and huge new hills, and then new lands beyond them, and more cities of men, and always the old companion, the glorious wind. Kingdom by kingdom slipt by, and still his breath was even. “It is a golden thing to gallop on good turf in one’s youth,” said the young man-horse, the centaur. “Ha, ha,” said the wind of the hills, and the winds of the plain answered.

Bells pealed in frantic towers, wise men consulted parchments, astrologers sought of the portent from the stars, the aged made subtle prophecies. “Is he not swift?” said the young. “How glad he is,” said children.

Night after night brought him sleep, and day after day lit his gallop, till he came to the lands of the Athalonian men who live by the edges of the mundane plain, and from them he came to the lands of legend again such as those in which he was cradled on the other side of the world, and which fringe the marge of the world and mix with the twilight. And there a mighty thought came into his untired heart, for he knew that he neared Zretazoola now, the city of Sombelenë.

It was late in the day when he neared it, and clouds coloured with evening rolled low on the plain before him; he galloped on into their golden mist, and when it hid from his eyes the sight of things, the dreams in his heart awoke and romantically he pondered all those rumours that used to come to him from Sombelenë, because of the fellowship of fabulous things. She dwelt (said evening secretly to the bat) in a little temple by a lone lakeshore. A grove of cypresses screened her from the city, from Zretazoola of the climbing ways. And opposite her temple stood her tomb, her sad lake-sepulchre with open door, lest her amazing beauty and the centuries of her youth should ever give rise to the heresy among men that lovely Sombelenë was immortal: for only her beauty and her lineage were divine.

Her father had been half centaur and half god; her mother was the child of a desert lion and that sphinx that watches the pyramids;—she was more mystical than Woman.

Her beauty was as a dream, was as a song; the one dream of a lifetime dreamed on enchanted dews, the one song sung to some city by a deathless bird blown far from his native coasts by storm in Paradise. Dawn after dawn on mountains of romance or twilight after twilight could never equal her beauty; all the glow-worms had not the secret among them nor all the stars of night; poets had never sung it nor evening guessed its meaning; the morning envied it, it was hidden from lovers.

She was unwed, unwooed.

The lions came not to woo her because they feared her strength, and the gods dared not love her because they knew she must die.

This was what evening had whispered to the bat, this was the dream in the heart of Shepperalk as he cantered blind through the mist. And suddenly there at his hooves in the dark of the plain appeared the cleft in the legendary lands, and Zretazoola sheltering in the cleft, and sunning herself in the evening.

Swiftly and craftily he bounded down by the upper end of the cleft, and entering Zretazoola by the outer gate which looks out sheer on the stars, he galloped suddenly down the narrow streets. Many that rushed out on to balconies as he went clattering by, many that put their heads from glittering windows, are told of in olden song. Shepperalk did not tarry to give greetings or to answer challenges from martial towers, he was down through the earthward gateway like the thunderbolt of his sires, and, like Leviathan who has leapt at an eagle, he surged into the water between temple and tomb.

He galloped with half-shut eyes up the temple-steps, and, only seeing dimly through his lashes, seized Sombelenë by the hair, undazzled as yet by her beauty, and so haled her away; and, leaping with her over the floorless chasm where the waters of the lake fall unremembered away into a hole in the world, took her we know not where, to be her slave for all centuries that are allowed to his race.

Three blasts he gave as he went upon that silver horn that is the world-old treasure of the centaurs. These were his wedding bells.

THE WOMAN, by Tanith Lee

1 - The Suitor

Down the terraces of the Crimson City they carried her, in her chair of bone and gold.

The citizens stood in ranks, ten or twenty men deep.

They watched.

Some wept.

Some, suddenly oblivious of the guards, thrust forward shouting, calling, a few even reciting lines of ancient poetry. They were swept back again. As if a steel broom could push away the sea of love.

But Leopard did none of these things.

He simply stood there, looking at her. At Her. He thought, and even as he thought it he chided himself, telling himself he was quite mad to think it, that her eyes for one tiniest splinter of a fractured second—met his. Knew his—knew him. Knew Leopard.

But then the chair, borne by its six strong porters, had gone by.

All he could see were the scarlet, ivory and gold of its hood, and the wide shoulders of the last two bearers.

Many of the citizens had fallen on the ground, lamenting and crying, cursing, begging for death. Like a tree which had withstood a lightning strike, Leopard remained on his feet. He was upright in all senses, bodily, mentally, in character and in his moral station. Also sexually.

For he had seen her. At last. His predestined love.

The Woman.

* * * *

In the village where he had grown up, the birth of Leopard had been a great disappointment. He had been aware of a coldness among his family from an early age. By the time he was six, his mother was dead of bearing another son, and Leopard began to see neither he, nor his newcomer brother, were liked.

One day, when he was a little older, and had been playing ‘catch’ with the boys on the flat earthen street, under the tall rows of scent trees, Leopard heard one of the village’s pair of ancient hags muttering to her sister: “Accursed, that boy. And, too, the infant boy that came after him.”

“Why’s that?” quacked the second hag.

“Ah. The mother was frightened by a leopard when she carried that older one. So he was turned into something useless.”

“And the infant?”

“Think of his name,” said the first hag.

Then both old women nodded and creaked away into their hut. Leopard felt ashamed. He had vaguely thought he was called Leopard for the beast’s silken handsomeness and dangerous hunter’s skills. It would seem not. While his poor little brother, Copper Coin—had Mother been scared by a piece of money?

Copper Coin, however, rather than cursed, actually proved very useful later on, when he became popular for his beauty, and their family grew both respected and well-off.

Today, several years after, Leopard removed himself from the crowd and strode away along the wide white streets of the Crimson City, to the wine-house Copper Coin now owned. Leopard had a thing of wonder to tell Copper. Leopard’s heart buzzed and sang within him.

* * * *

A single enormous scent tree reared outside the wine-house; it was somewhere in the region of three hundred feet tall. At this season it rained down orange blossoms that smelled of incense and honey.

Patrons sat in the courtyard to catch the perfume on their hair, skin and clothes. And while they did this, of course, ate and drank. Trade was bustling.

Inside, Leopard had to wait. His beautiful brother was occupied for another quarter of an hour with a favoured client.

Leopard drank hot green alcohol and ate two or three river shrimps roasted with pepper. Seeing who he was, the food and drink were on the house.

Then the client, dreamy-eyed and flushed, rattled down from the upper apartment. He passed Leopard without seeing him though Leopard had met the man before. He was a prince of the High Family of the Nine, immensely rich, always courteous and good-natured. But also he was crazily in love with Copper, and usually came out of the bedroom in a trance, between shining joy and dark despair. This morning Leopard sympathized. For now he, Leopard, was also insane with love.

The servant took Leopard upstairs.

Copper, just fresh from the bath and belted in a dressing-gown of embroidered white silk, lay on a couch. His hair, worn some inches longer than any merely male man would wear it, coiled over his shoulders, gleaming black as sharkskin.

“Gorgeous as ever,” remarked Leopard, between praise and banter. “Prince Nine tottered down, almost dead of love.”

“So I should think. We were together three hours. It wouldn’t look good for me, would it, if he pranced out bored and burping. But you,” added Copper, “you’re pale as a marble death-stone.”

Leopard stared at Copper. Then Leopard went and kneeled at his brother’s feet and laid his head in Copper’s lap. Murmuring gently, Copper stroked Leopard’s own hair, shortly thick as a cat’s fur. There was nothing sexual between them. Copper had become like a mother-sister for Leopard at about the same time Copper also found his own inner femaleness.

“Ssh, what is it, darling?”

“Oh gods of the seventy hells—“

“Don’t invoke that uncouth nasty mob.”

“The eleven heavens then. Oh Copper, Copper—Did you know?”

“Know what, my baby?”

“She was shown in the city today.”

“The Woman? Gods, yes, I’d forgotten. No wonder half my best lads’ clientele, was absent. Damn it, there was I cursing them. And they too stupid to remind me.”

Leopard shook, but with laughter.

He sat up and gazed into his brother’s exquisite and suprised face.

“Listen, Copper. I applied.”

“You—my own spirit! When?”

“Last Rose Moon.”

“Three months ago? And all this while you never told me—“

“I was afraid I’d be thrown out from the first examination. But I passed them all.”

Copper sank back on the cushions, fanning himself.

“Wait, sweetheart. You go too fast. I’m staggered as an old hag on her last legs.”

Leopard gripped his hand. Glowing with pride, he detailed every contest he had entered, and passed, always well, and often with the brilliant coloured inks of his competency and genius marked on the scroll. There had been reading and writing, in which, though village taught, he had had the luck of erudite masters, and the added learning Copper had later bought for him. There had been philosophy and debating too, humour and drama. There had been the art of painting, and the arts of war—cross-bow, staff, moon-sword and bare fist. Finally he had had to compose a love poem of four lines only, each line containing only four words. Leopard modestly said he did not believe his own work one twelfth as good as others he had seen inscribed on the judges’ parchment, but by then he had also been physically examined by physicians and dentists, some of his skin and hair, his urine, blood and saliva scientifically evaluated. Lastly his semen was checked, having been gathered after the use of a certain drug and a dream, as he had thought, of The Woman herself. Only the finalists of the examinations were ever given this hallucinogen, but after it he could not recall what she had been like, the goddess of his orgasm. Now, naturally, he need not wonder for today he had seen her in person. Her eyes had—surely? unbelievably?—rested on him in turn.

In a restrained tone Copper observed, “And they allowed you to stand close to the road where she travels by in her chair. Only finalists may stand so near. Or the most wealthy, they say, who can afford to buy places. But, Leopard, my sweet one—these contests concerning The Woman occur only once every year—“

“I know. And now you know why I’ve lived in this city for a year, the parasite beneficiary of your bounty, and never a hard word from you though I earned myself not even a single bit of lead.”

“I’ve plenty,” said Copper, “why should I mind—yet Leopard—Leopard—“

Leopard raised his proud young head. “Say nothing to bring down my mood. Nothing. Don’t tell me how many others have almost won her, yet failed the Ultimate Test. Say nothing of that.”

Copper lowered his eyes. The kohl on his long lashes glistened. They might have been wet with tears. “I say only this. One hundred men have died, in only the brief years I was here in the Crimson City, because of The Woman, and the Ultimate Test.”

“I love her,” said Leopard.

When he spoke of love, which was a common enough word and a concept often enough employed, love’s very soul seemed to brush across Copper’s elegant reception chamber.

Copper Coin had been named, at birth, for the copper coin their mother had bribed an itinerant hag to fix in the neck of her womb and stopper her, following the previous birth of Leopard. It was rumoured their mother had told the hag, “I can endure no more. I can bear no more.” But the hag, though a villainess, had nevertheless been also either inept or cunning, and the coin had not saved Mother from conceiving, carrying and ejecting her last son, even if his advent killed her.

Copper had always, though glad to have been given life, felt very sorry for their mother.

Not himself desiring women, which he found a blessing, Copper had space to respect and pity them. Even the old ones—especially they perhaps. And even The Woman, maybe, the demon-goddess, cold and distant as some far off planet, whose surface, if ever one did reach her, smashed men like brittle dragonflies on her rocks of razor and adamant.

* * * *

The sky was green as young-grape wine.

Alone, Leopard stood on the roof of his lodging. Below, his city room, a cell equipped with a pillow, a writing-stand, and the fixtures for elimination and ablution in one corner, had also a ladder which had often led him up here.

He watched evening stars like molten silver burst from the greenness. So love was. So it seared forth from the dusk of life.

Leopard had dimly heard of The Woman in the Crimson City since the age of six. But at sixteen he heard with more than his ears. Thereafter he had had only one goal, which he kept secret from all who knew him closely, until this day.

Now Copper had been informed. And now Leopard had beheld, in flesh, not two arm’s length away in front of him, The Woman.

Oh, to win her, to retain her—which must be impossible.

Yet to see, to have, and then to lose her—also impossible.

In the balance of the gods of balances, his weighted hopes and dreads must lie level tonight.

He had visited various temples about the city, sometimes passing other finalists he recognized, or they him, each man nodding politely, heart hidden yet well understood. He had travelled the white streets for miles, and made his offerings lavish, financed by Copper’s generosity. And Copper had said nothing more. And yet, at their parting, Copper’s perfect eyes truly had been full of tears, like diamond pearls. Such beauty.

If only Leopard had loved men, as Copper did.

But no. Leopard loved women—loved The Woman.

Nothing else would do.

Even if so many other hundred thousand men had perished, Leopard believed he alone would prevail. He would pass the Ultimate Test, have her and keep her. Him she would love. But too, of course, he knew such a thing could never be. He could only become one more shell smashed upon her steely beach. One more dead, useless man.

2 - The Lover

Unlike the dusk, the dawn was a peach. The moisture of it put out the blazing stars yet lit the lioness of the sun, who leapt up high above the city.

“Oh, Sun Lady, give me my dream...”

Leopard climbed the three hundred marble steps to the Palace. He did this alone. For no finalist of the examinations ever made his final journey in company with any others.

Leopard noticed, despite the haze which seemed to envelope him, and the burning turmoil inside him, how the huge vistas of the city fell away and away. Long avenues and dwellings with roofs of carmine, purple or jade-green tiles; squares where fountains restfully played and gold and amber fish swam in pools among the lotuses; gardens of scent trees or sculpted pines and cedars...the world of the city, flawless and mathematical, grew less significant, nearly of no importance. So death must be, decided Leopard, strong enough he did not need to pause on the great stair for breath, only now and then to glance back and downward. For death too would be to leave the colourful world of life, ascending to some heavenly plain—or otherwise falling, of course, into some abysmal hell.

His reflections then were quite appropriate.

Who climbed this stair to the Palace of The Woman would indeed afterwards enter a heaven, or a hell.

At the vast doors guards were absent. Servants drew him in like a welcome guest.

For many hours he was prepared, bathed and massaged, dressed in costly robes, given to eat and drink light and ethereal foods of great nourishment and strange pale wines.

Leopard grew calm through these ministrations, but in the way of one deeply shocked by some colossal calamity or happiness. Even though such an event still lay before him.

Of the other finalists there was never any sign, and no mention. This day, this night, were unique to Leopard, as to each finalist there was given always one such passage of hours in light and darkness.

During which he would undergo the Ultimate Test, and win or lose The Woman, and his life.

In the last recent years, a hundred dead, Copper had told him. Leopard had been amazed there were so few. None had ever won her. None.

In the afternoon, flocks of pink birds flew round and round the upper arches of the Palace where Leopard was now standing. He did not see them.

Before him lay a door of bronze inlaid with gold.

It opened after only half an hour.

No one remained on the gallery save Leopard, and in the room beyond the door, there would be only one. She.

He seemed to move through air, weightless as a ghost. He crossed the threshold. The door drew slowly shut at his back.

* * * *

The Woman sat on a golden chair, with her feet on a footstool shaped like a crouching elephant.

Her hands rested on her knees. Every finger had a ring of silver or gold and assorted jewels. She wore also a wig of indigo hair, plaited with blue gems.

She seemed neither pleased or dismayed at the sight of Leopard. He found he could not fathom her expression. But then he was stunned by her wonderfulness, by her female aura and her sexual glory.

He greeted her ritually, and musically spoke aloud for her his four line poem, then knelt on the patterned floor to await her commands.

Silence snowed heavy as old blossoms.

He smelled incense and perfume from his clothing.

Partly afraid to go on gazing at her, he stared at the floor and the painted animals there began to waver before his eyes.

“Oh, get up,” she barked suddenly in a hoarse high little voice. “Rise from your knees before you faint. So many of you do. How I dislike this fainting. Get up!”

Unsteadily yet quite gracefully Leopard obeyed her.

“Your poem’s thought clever,” she said. “That use of the one word see three times, then a fourth time but altered. How admirable. I suppose. Well,” she said. She reached her small plump hand towards a silver side-dish and selected a sugared plum. She ate it slowly, looking at him.

And her cold-sheened eyes slid over him. They were entirely expressionless, like pieces of opaque black slate. Over and over him the slate eyes slid.

How wondrous she was.

Oh gods, he could hardly bear it—and already in a kind of desolation, fearful she did not like him, even so his sex was upright and ready, the most potent weapon of love.

“Come here then,” she said. “Since you must.”

He went to her, stood there, standing once again in every sense.

“Well,” she said, her shrill voice rather more dull, “take off your garments. Let me see what you are, you—what do they call you?—Leopard?” And at this, his name, she laughed, more shrilly, like a flute warped by rain.

And yet he laughed as well, vibrantly, loving her mockery even, loving her, and burning.

Naked, Leopard was a man like a perfect statue, made of satiny tawny wood polished smooth as glass. Wide-shouldered, slim, every muscle well-developed yet lean. He shone in the icon of his body, which had the form of both fighter and dancer. On his chest the two jewels of his nipples, themselves erect, were the colour of the purest beer. At his groin the short black pelt resembled, in its silkenness, the thick silk hair upon his head. And from his groin also rose his succulent phallus, blushing and firm as the most edible fruit. He had no flaw. And his face too was a marvel. Where his brother Copper was transcendently lovely, Leopard was incandescently handsome. And while his parted lips—he was breathless with terror and lust—revealed the whiteness of his teeth, his large dark eyes revealed the flames of longing, and perhaps some aspect of his soul.

The woman regarded him with care. Then she pushed herself off her seat and puttered all around him. She observed him front, sidelong and back, scarcely blinking. Were her own eyes pitiless? Like a reptiles? Surely merely a trick of westering light.

She was not tall, The Woman.

The top of her blue-wigged head was level only with Leopard’s ribcage.

Behind him still, she grunted.

He was afraid to turn, in case this sound of hers indicated some annoyance—or disappointment—dismissal. He trembled.

Out of one of his luminous eyes a single tear dropped like silvery jasper. Yet even now his eloquent phallic erection stood its ground. His brain and heart might quake; this rose-gold warrior, primed with battle-juice, was too forthright and too wise yet to surrender.

Perhaps—could it be?—its instinct, if not the man’s, had picked up from the short round woman who patrolled the vicinity of Leopard’s splendour, some secret scent of answering desire...

“Oh,” eventually said The Woman, at Leopard’s back, “very well, then. Over there. The room behind the lacquer doors.”

“Lady—do you mean—“

“I mean we’ll go to the couch and do what’s to be done.”

And then The Woman turned and waddled away, and Leopard, dipped in fires, followed her.

* * * *

Among his self-educations, which as an adult had come to include singing, fighting, drama and philosophy. Leopard had not neglected to add the arts of love. He had learned these, as with the others, from the best teachers, who taught him everything at one remove. And he had then practiced all alone, over and over. “Beware,” they had told him. “If ever you should enact these things with a real subject—that is with a woman—it will be as it is also when you fight. For in love too your lover, male or female, is unwittingly your opponent, striving to overthrow you. But you must subdue your ardour and yourself remain the master. And, whereas in battle you must kill with force and pain, in sex you must kill with delight. That death’s a very different matter.”

And Leopard, his goal—her—had fully learned and then practiced with total dedication.

Now therefore, even as he saw The Woman take off her clothes, even her wig so her hair fell forth, he kept the confidence of a great mage, whose power sweeps in on him at his instruction. The more mighty the odds against self-control, the more mightily controlled now might Leopard be.

So at last, assured, he went to her, and leaning over her, measured and gaged her with his learned hands and fiery eyes.

* * * *

Three hours was the time Copper had quoted for his companion, Prince Nine.

But Leopard and The Woman entered a timeless zone. Which in fact lasted the rest of the day, all one night, and some space of the subsequent morning.

Leopard coaxed and seduced and adored and magnified The Woman. With acts not words he laved her body with caresses, used on her a musician’s hands, a poet’s mouth like velvet, a tongue like streams and feathers and bees, a sexual organ like a magician’s tireless and world-ordering wand. Again and again he brought her to the prolongued spasm of ecstasy. Sometimes even she might emit a squeak of pleasure, though generally she was noiseless in culmination, only the ripples of her loins and belly giving evidence of achievement. How he loved her.

Her fat, barrel-shaped form with its sallow, coarse, slightly blotchy carapace of skin. Her shapeless breasts. The thin hair that meagrely clad both her head and the heavenly, wide gate between her short legs. He loved her spatulate hands and ridged nails, and the nails of her toes from which the paint had worn, leaving them like ten square and striated rocks. He loved her teeth, which were so charmingly discoloured, and her sugar-sour breath. The ordinary non-profundity of her face. Her arrogance and indifference he loved too, though they lashed him with tragic fear of failure. And her gelid eyes. Even these—though they condemned him, surely.

Ah gods, even in victory over the reluctant, grudging climaxes of her body, Leopard at last heard the lament of approaching defeat.

Long before the night wore out, the red dawn—no longer peach but bloodied wine—he knew in his heart’s heart he had not won her. And never could. None could.

None.

3 - The Reject

All that day-night-day, Copper paced his apartment.

It comprised three rooms and a private courtyard on the roof. He went from one area to another, climbing up, descending, walking, turning. Now and then he touched something. A small statue of a dancing lion, a cup of black onyx, a little dagger of twisted wood Leopard had carved and given him when Copper was only five years old.

Copper wept. Chided himself and blotted up his tears. Cursed Fate and The Woman, cursed life and the world. Flung himself in a chair, wrote down his thoughts without coherence, got up and paced again, wept again, chided and blotted and cursed—again. Again.

Gods knew, if only Leopard had loved only men. There were male men who did so. Some of Copper’s nicest ‘lads’ were like that, and those like Copper, if not pretty enough to make their way, came to such gallants for solace. One indeed had married a male man from Copper’s wine-house, and they had lived happy now three whole years.

But Leopard was only Man.

So many men, despite dalliances with their own gender, were only—Men.

And so: The Woman of the Crimson City.

Copper knew, despite his hopes and wishes, and Leopard’s glamour and virtue, that The Woman would not want him for long. She had never wanted any of the ones who devoted their dreams to her and then passed all the required examinations but one. For to meet and make love with The Woman was the Ultimate Test. No man had ever passed it. Evidently. Or she would not be there still, hung like an over-ripe yellow fruit, cruel and evil with her thorns, on the tree of human longing.

How the gods must hate mankind, to do this to them.

The hours ground away under Copper’s pacing, weeping and cursing.

About sunfall, the man he had sent to watch the Palace’s Lower Gate, bounded up Copper’s stair and beat on the door.

“What’s happened, Heron?”

But Heron was crying. His tears spoke loudly, in an uncouth bellow.

“So then,” said Copper, gripping in his own emotion, “did he emerge from the Gate?”

“Yes, oh yes—oh gods, I’ve seen old gentlemen whose white beards brushed the earth, whose backs were humped with age like a camel’s—and they walked more sprightly than your brother, lovely Leopard.”

“Where did he take himself?”

“Towards the bank of the river—“

“And—?”

“And my companion, Lamplit, our best runner as you know, sped after and caught him. Then Tomorrow, my other friend from next door, ran up too. They took hold of him and are bringing him here now. But slowly. He can barely move, Copper Coin.”

Copper whispered a curse then that curled up the air of the apartment. The sun too seemed to wither in it and threw herself off over the precipice of the horizon. Dusk veiled everything. Nightingales and tweet-birds sang from the tall scent tree outside.

One more hour later, when the sky was black and the bright windows and rosy lanterns of the city showed the path, Lamplit and Tomorrow helped Leopard into Copper’s reception chamber.

“Drink this.”

“Nothing. Please. Give me nothing.”

“Darling Leopard. It’s myself offers the drink. Look. Do you see me? Your brother.”

“I see you, dear. But take the cup away. The dead need no food, no water.”

Finally, persuaded to one sip, the kindly soporific in the drink took its effect.

Leopard was laid on the second bed, his head on pillows of silk.

But even sleeping, his face was old, and ruinous. He looked like a man who must soon die.

The physician came. This doctor was of high quality and learning, but once Copper told him why Leopard was distressed and ill the physician bowed his head. “I shall do whatever I am able. But I also had a brother once. This was thirteen years ago. He too went after The Woman, and won through to her. When she cast him out he lived only two months. We watched him night and day in case he tried to poison or hang himself. But in the end, without assistance of bane or rope or blade, he simply died. It was through his death I set myself to learn medicine, to understand the windings of the human intellect. But I doubt I can help you or your brother.”

“She’s vilely wicked,” said Copper, “The Woman. A demoness sent up from the hells to destroy us.”

“Perhaps,” said the physician.

Then Leopard woke up and the physician set to work on him. Seven days, and the nights between them, trudged by.

Then seven more.

Copper went on with his usual duties, but refused all those clients he normally had pleasure with. He explained to them privately that he could experience no pleasure at this time. Only Prince Nine was permitted to arrive frequently, and he simply to talk with Copper, gratis, to steady him and try to ease his sorrow.

In the end Leopard began to be seen. He would walk in the courtyard or sit there quietly on his own. At evening, sometimes, he would dine at the communal table of the wine-house, if not in Copper’s apartment.

Regular customers treated him with care, and with respect and sympathy. If they were jealous of his having been a finalist, and briefly winning The Woman and lying with her, they curbed themselves. Decidedly they could see where his moment of success had afterwards dragged and abandoned him. He seemed quite soulless. He seemed part dead.

One evening a newcomer entered the wine-house, and sat down at the main table. He was an older man, of fine physical appearance, and perhaps a philosopher.

He spoke directly to Leopard, in an actor’s clear voice. “So you are the unlucky fellow who fucked the great bitch in the Palace?” he said.

Instantly silence deafened the room.

Heron, who had been eating, got up without a word and went straight to knock at Copper’s door, despite the fact Copper was just then entertaining a prince of the High Family of the Ninety-Two.

Leopard however raised his head and looked at the newcomer.

“I am he. But she is not a bitch. She is beautiful, and by me beloved, and will be so until the day of my ending.”

“Very well,” agreed the philosopher, if so he was. “Very well. Maybe she is a bitch since only circumstances have made her one. As also time has made her older and fatter. But I think a snake gave her such cold eyes.”

Leopard lowered his gaze. He did not reply. The philosopher went on, in his clear and reasonable voice, “Surely you, or some of you here, at the very least, must understand why men venerate and think such a creature wonderful?”

A man cried out: “Because she is The Woman.”

“Just so,” said the philosopher. “The only woman. That is,” he amended, “the only known woman yet living in our city, or in the existing world, who has not yet died of the excessive bearing of male children, or grown into an ancient hag.” A vast sigh, nearly a groan, curdled from the room-full of men. It passed on into the courtyard, where the other men had, many of them, risen and come to see who spoke such words. It drifted up to balconies of the wine-house and surrounding buildings, and was echoed back from them. It fled along the white streets and found some kind of other echo always there, in every masculine throat, in every masculine mind. For there were only men in the Crimson City, as the philosopher had stated. Men who were feminine or men who were male, and some who were gifted with both states, and those who were young or old. Or there were a few old, old women who had somehow survived relentless decades of child-bearing, scorned and sworn at on every occasion, which had been by now every occasion without exception, that they had produced, rather than a daughter, yet another son.

Beyond the Crimson City, did the curdling echo of the groan strike out even there, like a cold fist beating on the surface of a cold metal gong, and the reverberation unfurling, on and on? Probably so. For in all the land about, in the towns and villages, in the farthest places, still there were only the differing types of men, male men and female men, or men of both persuasions, and young men, and old men, and dead men in graves with death-stones over them like white fallen pieces of the lonely masculine moon.

And even the hags maybe heard the sigh, the groan. Even the dead women in their own graves that bore each the symbol of the barren blazing sun, the dead women burned away by bearing only men.

While outside the borders of this land, the other lands. All the same. All, all, the same.

For some years ago, about the time that the mother of Leopard and Copper Coin had herself died, the very last of all the women yet able to conceive a child, had perished.

With the last of such deaths, all chance of change died too.

And now there were only the men and the hags. And the female sun. And She. The Woman in the Palace.

* * * *

When Copper tore down the stair, Prince Ninety-Two deserted above in the upper rooms, it was Tomorrow who ran quickly and caught hold of him.

“Stay, Copper—stay, stay—look there. Do you see?” And Copper halted, and his pale face went more pale and his eyes widened.

For there Leopard was, held in the arms of an unknown newcomer to the house, a man neither old nor young, but handsome and well-dressed, perhaps a philosopher, and with an actor’s voice. Leopard was weeping his heart out as, since returning here, he had not wept. And the philosopher raised his face and glancing at Copper said, softly, “Don’t fear it. I am his brother too, his brother in this most bleak of miseries. For I also, long before, was a finalist in the Crimson City. I also won The Woman, lay with her, lost her, failed at the Ultimate Test. A man who wandered in an earthly hell some while. But sense came back to me, and that hell faded. I lived. As Leopard may live. There is more to life than love. I am the proof, am I not, that not all men die who fail with her.”

Copper felt his heart clutch, as if a dagger had gone into it. For he sensed that here at last might be the single other man in all the world who could give back to Leopard a reason for existence. And passionate hope had stabbed at Copper’s heart, and bitter envy had cloven it.

“Do what you must,” said Copper. And offered the stranger his most beautiful and generous smile.

Then he kissed his brother on one temple, and left him in the keeping of the unknown man. And in the hands of the gods too, where all things may lie, whether they wish it or not.

4 - The Woman

High above the terraced streets, the squares and courtyards and gardens, The Woman stood in a long room without a single window, lit only by tall lamps in the shape of flowers. She wore a plain garment, her hair tied back in a knot. She was barefoot on the cool painted floor. Once pink birds had sung here. But one day she had opened a door and let them go free. They had never entirely forsaken her. They still flew about the upper arches and nested in the roofs. How wonderful, she had always thought, The Woman, their magical power of flight.

* * * *

How old was she when first they brought her here? Quite young, she believed. Five, seven?

She had never been certain of her age.

She was the first and last daughter of a peasant woman called This Fern.

This Fern had birthed The Woman, and been made the heroine of her village, for only recently that year the otherwise last known female child, a girl of eleven years, had died in the far north, of stomach trouble.

But This Fern also soon died, after a bear attacked her at the edge of the forest. Everyone hunted the bear, to kill it, but it was gone, and so of course was This Fern. The Woman had only been two years old then. She could not remember her mother, though they had given her her mother’s possessions; her festival robe and her festival shoes, her wooden comb and earrings of tin, and one of her teeth, which had been knocked from her mouth ages before and preserved in a small black box.

These artefacts The Woman still possessed. Now she kept them in a chest of carved and perfumed cedar-wood inlaid with silver, and with a ruby on its clasp.

Men in authority had brought The Woman to the Crimson City. In the Palace she was trained, vigorously and often unkindly, to be a woman. That is. an important woman. That is, The Only Woman.

When, at the age of fifteen, she had fallen in love, of fancied she had done so. with one of her malely inclined tutors, he was beaten almost to death and exiled from the city.

His own feelings she never learned.

Probably he was as crazily infatuated as she.

But she was never sure, nor if he recovered from the beating and the exile.

At sixteen she began to be shown in the city.

Then, seeing young men sometimes of extraordinary attractions, gazing at, or fainting at the sight of her, she herself often lost her heart.

But she had been thoroughly lessoned by then in her role, and theirs. Since seemingly—and soon irrevocably and definitely—she was the last young human of her gender—only those with the highest qualities of looks and skills would ever be allowed to approach her.

During this era. The Woman still had one female attendant, a hag who had been almost seventy when The Woman first met her.

The hag, Ochre, was never very polite and never pleasant to her charge, let alone affectionate. The Woman supposed Ochre had been selected for her unappealing acidity because, after all, Ochre was ancient, all of her kind were by then, and must soon die. Bereavement of her would therefore be less distressing.

But the hag was presently caught anyway mixing ground glass into The Woman’s food.

Taken off to be stoned somewhere or other below the Palace. Ochre screeched that The Woman was a demoness, a curse not a blessing on the city. After this, inevitably, no further hags served in the Palace.

Later, when the first waves of lovers, having passed spectacularly well in the examiniations, began to approach The Woman and she, as instructed, made love with them—initially loathing the act, which hurt her and also seemed grotesque—another unfortunate thing was discovered. The Woman did not ever conceive. Since tests had been made as well on the semen of all the young male lovers, and it was both wholesome and fertile, the fault must lie with The Woman’s body. But as she was The Woman, and the last woman of all women, it was concluded it could not be her fault, even after several quite horrible procedures to which she was subjected in order to ‘awake’ her womb, proved useless. A general decision asserted that the wicked hag Ochre, prior to the episode with the glass, had already succeeded in somehow poisoning The Woman and so negating her reproductive knack.

With maturity The Woman learned to enjoy the sexual act.

In the beginning, she herself read manuals of love—she had been taught to read—and practiced such arts with the waves of lovers. But their frenzies of joy and gratitude frightened her.

She ceased to be active during sex, even restricting her cries at climax, for a similar reason.

At the start she had continued to fall in love and to wish to make a permanent union with this man or that.

But in the Palace the men in authority, who by that time grew old themselves, male hags who frequently went absent in death, had told her she might never choose any man above another. To choose one over all the rest would doubtless see him murdered. At best the city would riot and lose its collective mind.

Originally it seemed, the rite of the examinations to find the best, and the making of love between that best and herself, had been organized in the hope of children. Some of which, if the gods were tender, might be daughters.

But of course Ochre, or something or other, had forestalled that plan.

Now therefore the Woman’s only value was in her female presence, which must at intervals be revealed, offered and given to occasional males.

Until her own demise, this was all The Woman was to be for.

A vision, a goal, a sop. And a method of the most vicious rejection.

Partly she was to represent hope, still, and partly she was to teach that all women were worthless, evil, thus unregrettable. While the dying out of the human race, which now almost without a doubt was unavoidable, could be blamed on the female kind. Also too, perhaps, she was to demonstrate that death, and the death of humanity, might be no bad thing.

In these elements she was like a goddess.

For gods were cruel. They made hells as well as heavens, and all the earthly ills.

* * * *

Having walked about for a while in the restful windowless room, The Woman sat down on an ivory bench.

She drank a little apricot wine.

She ate a sugar biscuit.

The enormous and never ending depression that now informed most of her days, and usually sleepless nights, came crouching up the floor and rubbed its flank against her consciousness.

Listlessly, resistlessly, she greeted it.

She did not want the riches of the Palace, nor the extreme—unreal—power she had been given. She did not really even want sex any more, let alone the intermittant torrents of young men who came to her, singing poetry, caressing and coaxing, their delicious kisses less than the momentary sweetness of a biscuit.

She might love none. She loved none.

She might choose none. She chose none.

She sent them away, and they threw themselves in the river and drowned, or slit open their veins or swallowed venom.

Oh, she did not dare give her heart now to any man. She would be loving a ghost. A thousand ghosts. Death itself.

So. The Woman did not want wealth or sex or ecstasy or worship or love.

Was there anything then that she wanted, longed for?

Yes. Yes.

The Woman wanted her mother. Sometimes even The Woman would daydream that This Fern, fresh up from her grave, would walk into the room. She would not be phantom, nor skeleton. She would not even be old. No, no, This Fern would be about The Woman’s own age. Whatever age that was.

But it was more than that, of course. Not only that she wanted the mother she had never known. It was women—Woman—The Woman wanted. Not for sexual love, never that. But... to talk to. To laugh with. To be with. Oh gods, women about her, easy and familiar, different and the same. Desire? Entirely. The desire of the lonely one for its other self. Here in the Palace high above the Crimson City and the world, The Woman sat on her bench of bone, pining, lamenting, slowly dying—for her own kind.

Gods who see me

When her I see,

See I have become

As a seeing god.

—Translated from the poem by Leopard

DREAMTIME IN ADJAPHON, by John Gregory Betancourt

Dreamtime came quickly in the last days of Adjaphon, for then we did not know the end approached, and we were drunk from our power and our success. Abroad, our armies marched again, this year in war against the Heron King to the far East, and the priests of our god-patron, Tokos-Dien, predicted nothing but success.

If the days seemed golden, perhaps they truly were. The wealth from a dozen newly conquered lands flowed through Adjaphon’s gates, and the thousand eyes of Tokos-Dien painted on the roof of every building looked down and seemed to bless us all.

I was the son of a cobbler. Jad, my mother called me, but my father called me Jadred, which was a man’s name, for I was thirteen that summer and could have joined the Emperor’s army had I chosen, like so many of my childhood friends had already chosen. In battle there is glory, they had said, and they had gone to win that glory, along with a share of the Heron King’s treasure.

But I did not go, for I was thin and slight, and most took me for a boy of eight, though I was indeed thirteen and a man. I knew my weakness: in battle I would have been slain by the first enemy soldier I faced, just as I had been beaten up by every boy my own age I’d ever fought. Perhaps I was a coward, but I do not think so. I was being realistic. My death could not possibly have served the Emperor’s purposes.

Once I had prayed to Tokos-Dien for a man’s body, strong and tall, promising to serve in his army if he would help me, but I received no answer. Perhaps it was just as well. I was not meant to be a soldier.

The beginning thing, in the dreamtime, was the dream. It came to me one night. In the dream I had wings like a bird but was not a bird myself. I soared over a ravaged land, with crops long-trampled into the ground by feet and hooves, with farmhouses tumbled to ruins, with mills and barns and outbuildings razed to the ground. People were running everywhere, panicked, shouting and screaming, but I could not hear their voices. Then I looked up and saw fires burning across the whole of the horizon, even on empty ground where there was nothing to burn, and running before the flames came the greatest troops of our Emperor, throwing down their weapons, casting off their armor. The men’s faces blurred in the heat, rippling like paper-hangings on a windy day, but I thought I glimpsed my best friend, Savil, who had gone to join the fight against the Heron King three months before.

“Savil!” I called, but he did not pause. Then the flames were upon him, and I could not bear to see more.

I woke, gasping, the bitter taste of smoke still in my lungs. My brother Aghen stirred beside me, but did not wake. I forced myself to silence.

Bright images of those dream-fires still lingered in my eyesight, as though I had been there, as though I had actually seen Savil die. I shuddered at the thought, then denied it. It had only been a nightmare, I told myself, and made signs of aversion to keep away evil.

After that I could not rest, could not lie still. I rose and went to the window in only my nightgown, threw open the wooden shutters, and gazed down into the street.

In those days it was said Adjaphon never slept: merchant caravans moved through the city’s gates like an endless serpent, bringing all manner of fabulous animals and weavings and trinkets and slaves to the marketplace at every hour of the day and night. But at this moment,oddly, there was only a single man in a hooded cloak standing there. He leaned on his staff and seemed to peer up at me, and where his face should’ve been I saw only blackness.

“Jadred,” I thought I heard him say, “you are called.”

Quickly I shuttered the window and barred it. Had the man truly spoken, or was it another part of my dream? He seemed to have been waiting for me. I could not rid myself of that thought. And the moon was bright enough; why hadn’t I seen his face?

I stood there beside the window for a long time, feeling the cold of the floor beneath my feet, feeling my heart beating in my throat.

That was the start of the end, in the dreamtime of Adjaphon, though I did not know it yet.

* * * *

My father’s shop consisted of three rooms. The largest of these was the workroom, where flat sheets of leather lay bundled up against the two largest walls and the sweet, musty smell of tanning-cream was so thick you could almost see it. Here my younger brothers and sisters and I cut leather strips and thongs from patterns every morning. In the afternoon my mother and father sewed them into sandals and boots—mostly boots these days, boots for the Emperor’s army, since the purchasing agents always came to my father’s shop first.

The second room was for storage, mostly of leather but also of finished goods not yet on display. It was small and dark.

The third room opened out onto the street. Finished boots and sandals of every design and size imaginable filled it. They hung in strings from the rafters, from pegs in the walls, from intricately carved wooden racks in the center of the room. Here my mother and father sat during the morning hours, speaking with those who came in to buy or to gossip, laughing and joking, or just watching the parade of passers-by in their few idle moments.

Early that afternoon I heard many feet enter the shop at once, and my father’s welcoming call cut short.

“Where is Jadred, your son?” a loud voice cried. “Tokos-Dien has called him.”

My mother screamed. I stood, shoving back my chair, looking at my two brothers, at my four sisters. None of them said a word; none of them moved. They stared at me, their eyes wide.

Abruptly the curtain to the workroom swept aside. A middle-aged man in the gold robes of a priest of Tokos-Dien ducked through the doorway. He was tall and his features had a proud, chiseled look to them, almost as though he were made of stone. Behind him moved a tide of underpriests in blue robes, and all manner of other servants of the god-patron.

Only the priest’s eyes moved as he surveyed the room. When his gaze fell on me, he knelt. “It is you,” he said. “You are the dreaming one.” He said it with such awe and reverence that I did not know how to begin to reply. And yet as he said it I also knew what he meant: my dream the night before had been more than a dream. It had been a vision sent by Tokos-Dien for purposes only the god-patron or the god-patron’s priests could ever fathom.

“Please,” I said. I licked my lips. I didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to abandon my parents or the safety of their home. “Please,” I said again. “What do you want of me?”

“I want nothing,” the priest said. “It is Tokos-Dien who calls you.”

He rose, and at his gesture, the underpriests came in around him, as though a floodgate had been let loose. They ushered my brothers and sisters from the room and blocked the way so my parents could not enter nor see. Then their servants stripped my clothes away and I stood there naked and shivering while they chanted over me.

“You are called,” the priest kept telling me. “You are called.”

I tried to run as an underpriest began to shave my head, and his knife opened a shallow gash beside my ear so that blood ran quickly. The priest grabbed me and hugged me to him, talking like a farmer soothing a frightened beast. His robes were smothering, full of odd spicy smells. I struggled, but his grip was too strong, and his voice had begun to lull me. In moments everything became a blur of sight and sound. Distantly I felt myself being shaved all over, then dressed in gold robes like the priest’s. Finally I felt myself being carried out into the street.

I am called.

My parents were huddled in the corner of the display room, my brothers and sisters clutched tight. They dared not protest, I knew.

I am called.

The underpriests trundled me into a golden carriage. The prist climbed in beside me, still whispering his soothing, mind-numbing words. Someone clicked to the horses and we were off in a mad rush down the street. The servants were running ahead, clearing the way for us, and I felt a cold, sick fear at the thought of what was to come.

How could Tokos-Dien have called me? Surely I was unworthy. I didn’t want to go. I longed for release, wished I were dead, wished I had never been born. The god-patron seemed to have singled me out for particular punishment or persecution. In that moment I learned what it was to hate—to hate the god-patron’s priests, and to hate Tokos-Dien himself. Mostly I hated Tokos-Dien; young as I was, I knew the priests were only servants doing their master’s will.

Once, long before, I had prayed to Tokos-Dien for help, for a man’s body, when I was a child and everyone my age had beaten me. He had not answered then. Why had he sent a vision to me now?

That, too, was part of the beginning of the end.

* * * *

My first days in the Temple of Tokos-Dien were the most painful of my life. I refused to speak of my vision; rather, I denied it, said I had seen nothing, heard nothing, done nothing. They should let me go, I said. They should let me return to my mother and my father and my life as a cobbler’s son.

To their credit, they did not believe me. Finally, on the eighth day, they locked me in a small room, and priest after priest came in to question me, to prod and probe my mind. They did not let me sleep or rest or eat or drink.

On the second day of their questioning I croaked my confession: “Yes!” I cried. “I saw a vision!” And, after I had drunk and eaten, I babbled of all that I had seen.

The priests transcribed my every word and went away to study what I had said. They left me by myself, in a locked room, with a soft bed and as much food and drink as I could possibly want. I should have been happy, I know, but instead I cursed Tokos-Dien. I did not expect a reply,and there came none.

That night I dreamt a second time, and in this dream I was floating down a river on my back. It was dark here, but somehow I could see. A mountain loomed ahead, and the river ended in a vast whirlpool. I knew without a doubt that I would enter the whirlpool and be sucked down into the underworld, where Tokos-Dien rules. Somehow the god-patron was bringing me to him.

There were hundreds—thousands—of soldiers’ corpses floating down the river around me. Turning my head, I noticed Savil bobbing to my left. I almost failed to recognize him. His skin was white as a slug’s belly, his body bloated by the corrosion of death to nearly twice its normal size. But there was a smile on his face, and though he was dead,he seemed happy. Tokos-Dien had called him, too, but in a different way.

Standing alongside the river were men with staffs. These, I knew,were the servants of the god-patron. They used their staffs to keep the corpses from coming to rest against the river’s banks.

One of them reached out and hooked my shoulder, pulling me over to him. I found I could move, suddenly, and stood. The water ran from my shaved head and priestly robes in rivulets. I walked to the bank.

The man—if man he was—had no face. There was only blackness inside the folds of his hood. He leaned on his staff and said, “You are called, Jadred. Will you serve the god-patron?”

“Why does he want me?” I whispered.

“He is a god. His reasons are beyond your comprehension, or any mortal’s. It is merely enough that he wants you.”

“Why does he not just take me?”

“You must go of your own free will. Enter the river and it will bear you to him.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Do you realize what you are saying? The anger of a god is a fearsome thing. Do you wish to anger him?”

“I want to go home,” I said. “I want Savil alive. I want everything back the way it was!”

“So be it,” he said, with a cold finality…and, I thought, with a touch of a sorrow.

* * * *

I awoke in my bed, beside my brother Aghen, in our little room over our father’s shop. I was dressed in my nightgown, and when I touched my head, I felt my hair once more, thick and long. But there was also a scar beside my ear: the place where the underpriest had cut me.

It was early, but the street was eerily silent. I felt too much joy at being home, at being safe, to worry about anything, though.

Finally I heard a crier approaching, shouting the news.

“Defeat at Solcena!” he cried. “Two thousand dead! The Heron King is marching on Foltrene!

I sat up, startled, bewildered. Foltrene was scarcely a day’s journey away. How could the Heron-King have reached it so quickly? How had the Adjaphon’s great armies ever been defeated?

A shiver went through me. Roughly, I shook my brother awake. “Aghen! Tell me the news! How did the Heron King defeat our army?”

He stirred and mumbled, but finally he sat up. “Idiot,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes. “Lemme alone.”

I demanded the history of the war, and when he finally saw I wouldn’t let him sleep until I knew, he told me. Told me how the Heron King had gathered thirty thousand men in a time of peace and attacked our furthest borders. Told me how the Heron King’s soldiers had swept into Adjaphon’s outlying cities like an unstoppable tidal wave. Told me how the Heron King’s god-patron, Tokos-Dien, promised nothing but victory while the priests in our temples, the temples of Condja-Dien, the god of the fields and harvest, predicted nothing but death.

And as he spoke I remembered all these things; but I also remembered another time, another place, when Tokos-Dien had blessed Adjaphon and nothing could hold back our Emperor’s armies.

I tried not to sleep that night for fear of dreams, but when I finally dozed off, I saw only blackness. Tokos-Dien had truly abandoned me.

* * * *

The next morning the news was worse. Foltrene had fallen in a matter of hours. My mother wept and my father tried to comfort her, but could not. My younger brothers and sisters huddled in their beds. Only I moved through the house almost untouched by the news. It had such an air of unreality about it that I hadn’t yet grasped all it meant.

Outside, panic ruled Adjaphon’s streets, as a last few people fought their way to the one open gate. There was a rumor of safety to the South; they would follow that rumor, though they would most likely be overtaken by the Heron King’s army along the way. There was surely no safety in Adjaphon, they said, or anywhere nearby.

I wandered the streets myself for a time, easing my way through little knots of arguing people. It was strange to see rooftops of bare tile and slate, without the thousand eyes of Tokos-Dien painted on them. Everywhere I went the shops and houses were closed and shuttered. It would not be long, everyone said, before the Heron King’s forces attacked. His scouts had already been sighted.

I came upon Savil. He was hobbling on crutches toward the southern gate, a pack on his shoulder, a look of weary hopelessness on his face. When I saw him, I abruptly remembered the horse trampling him three years before. He had not been able to join the army, even though he’d wanted to. But at the same time I also remembered the proud day he’d enlisted, though it seemed more like a dream. He had come back and showed me his uniform, his sword, his shield with the thousand eyes of Tokos-Dien painted on it.

The anger of a god is a fearsome thing.

I embraced him, said, “I’m sorry,” and ran away before he could reply.

I found myself near the temple of Tokos-Dien. I ran up the wide steps and into the huge altar chamber, where prayers were held and sacrifices made. Only everything was different now; it had become a temple to Condja-Dien, I saw. Plants grew in wild abundance; it was more a garden than a building, but that only made sense, for Condja-Dien was god-patron of harvests and growing things.

I heard a scuffle and a scream from one of the side rooms, then a grim looking captain from the Emperor’s private guard came out, followed by a handful of his men. Their swords were bloody. I stared, shocked, bewildered.

“It was the Emperor’s orders,” the captain said at last, in a strangled voice, as if that excused him. “The priests foretold the Emperor’s death this morning.”

“Oh,” I said. Then: “I came to pray.”

“Go ahead, for all the good it will do.” He headed for the door, followed by his men, and they marched down the steps to the street, armor jingling.

I realized then that I had come to pray—to Tokos-Dien. I’d never meant for all this to happen, never meant for Adjaphon to fall or the Emperor to die or Savil to be crippled. I thought of my mother weeping and my brothers and sisters huddled in their beds, waiting for the Heron King’s soldiers to break down the doors to our home.

The anger of a god is a fearsome thing. I shuddered. It seemed mad that Tokos-Dien had done all this because I had refused his calling. I hated him for that pettiness, but I feared him more now and did not dare to speak my hatred. Had I been offered the choice again, I would have gone, and willingly, into the whirlpool to answer my calling and serve him.

This temple, though, had one of the highest towers in the city. I climbed it, carefully avoiding the corpses of priests on the steps. From the top of the tower I could see clearly over Adjaphon’s walls.

On the horizon an army was assembling, columns of troops lining up, the leaders on their horses, others holding aloft the proud banners of Tokos-Dien—I could just make them out—so they fluttered overhead. The mass of soldiers stretched right and left for what seemed like miles. I did not doubt that the Heron King had thirty thousand men or more at his command.

“Stop it,” I whispered. “Stop it and I’ll serve you.”

There was no answer. Somehow, I had expected none.

Throughout the day I stood there and watched the Heron King’s forces gather. The smoke from their campfires darkened the sky. That night, the lights in their camp seemed to wink like a million stars fallen to land.

Then I wept and I prayed and I pleaded with the Tokos-Dien, the god-patron I knew, to spare Adjaphon. And when he did not answer I no longer cursed him. I grew silent and thought about all that had happened. If the Emperor had known I was the cause Adjaphon’s downfall, he would have killed me rather than the priests. It was almost a funny thought. I did not laugh.

* * * *

With dawn came the attack. As men with ladders rushed the walls, as battering-rams attacked all six gates, balls of fire came hurtling into the city from the Heron King’s catapults. Soon flames were leaping everywhere throughout the city.

I could not bear to watch. I turned away, buried my head in my hands, and tried to shut out the sounds of fighting.

Ages passed. The buildings burned and I could hear the crackle of flames and smell the acrid smoke. Bands of the Heron King’s soldiers roved the streets, looting, raping, destroying everything of beauty. Finally the temple itself was on fire. I felt the heat and looked up.

There was a man in a hooded cloak standing before me, leaning on his staff. I could not see his face.

“What do you want of me?” I cried. “What more is there?”

He shook his head. “Adjaphon’s time had come. If you had answered your calling and served Tokos-Dien, it would not have mattered. The god-patron would have found another to deny him, and this city would still be dying, only you would not remember the past or the glory Adjaphon once had.”

I made no answer; there could be no answer. I was just a tool, a pawn in Tokos-Dien’s game. I realized that now. It made me ache inside with a hurt that no amount of time could ever heal.

The god-patron’s servant said, “He calls you now. Will you go with him?”

Slowly, I nodded. Perhaps that would help end the suffering. Perhaps it would spare my parents and my brothers and sisters and my friends some little measure of pain. Perhaps. But I did not think so. Tokos-Dien is not merciful.

* * * *

I am floating down a dark river, and around me are the bodies of the Emperor’s soldiers newly-dead in the battle. The Heron King has won, and perhaps for a time his city will flourish. But Tokos-Dien is quick to bore, and soon he will favor another, and then the Heron King’s lands will fall to a different conqueror and the cycle will start anew.

I weep not for proud Adjaphon, which died a sorrowful death; I weep for Tokos-Dien. Or perhaps I weep for those who now serve him. A god-patron without mercy is a terrible curse.

Perhaps I shall say that to him. I have nothing left to lose. When the whirlpool drags me under, I shall be reborn. Adjaphon will never die so long as I remember her. Perhaps this is not an end, but a beginning. Perhaps the dreamtime will end and all will be reborn.

I doubt it. But we shall see. We shall see.

THE BLACK ABBOT OF PUTHUUM, by Clark Ashton Smith

Let the grape yield for us its purple flame,

And rosy love put off its maidenhood:

By blackening moons, in lands without a name,

We slew the Incubus and all his brood.

— Song of King Hoaraph’s Bowmen

* * * *

Zobal the archer and Cushara the pikebearer had poured many a libation to their friendship in the sanguine liquors of Yoros and the blood of the kingdom’s enemies. In that long and lusty amity, broken only by such passing quarrels as concerned the division of a wine-skin or the apportioning of a wench, they had served amid the soldiery of King Hoaraph for a strenuous decade. Savage warfare and wild, fantastic hazard had been their lot. The renown of their valor had drawn upon them, ultimately, the honor of Hoaraph’s attention, and he had assigned them for duty among the picked warriors that guarded his palace in Faraad. And sometimes the twain were sent together on such missions as required no common hardihood and no disputable fealty to the king.

Now, in company with the eunuch Simban, chief purveyor to Hoaraph’s well-replenished harem, Zobal and Cushara had gone on a tedious journey through the tract known as Izdrel, which clove the western part of Yoros asunder with its rusty-colored wedge of desolation. The king had sent them to learn if haply there abode any verity in certain travelers’ tales, which concerned a young maiden of celestial beauty who had been seen among the pastoral peoples beyond Izdrel. Simban bore at his girdle a bag of gold coins with which, if the girl’s pulchritude should be in any wise commensurate with the renown thereof, he was empowered to bargain for her purchase. The king had deemed that Zobal and Cushara should form an escort equal to all contingencies: for Izdrel was a land reputedly free of robbers, or, indeed, of any human inhabitants. Men said, however, that malign goblins, tall as giants and humped like camels, had oftentimes beset the wayfarers through Izdrel, that fair but ill-meaning lamiae had lured them to an eldritch death. Simban, quaking corpulently in his saddle, rode with small willingness on that outward journey; but the archer and the pike bearer, full of wholesome skepticism, divided their bawdy jests between the timid eunuch and the elusive demons.

Without other mishap than the rupturing of a wine-skin from the force of the new vintage it contained, they came to the verdurous pasture-lands beyond that dreary desert. Here, in low valleys that held the middle meanderings of the river Vos, cattle and dromedaries were kept by a tribe of herders who sent biannual tribute to Hoaraph from their teeming droves. Simban and his companions found the girl, who dwelt with her grandmother in a village beside the Vos; and even the eunuch acknowledged that their journey was well rewarded.

Cushara and Zobal, on their part, were instantly smitten by the charms of the maiden, whose name was Rubalsa. She was slender and of queenly height, and her skin was pale as the petals of white poppies; and the undulant blackness of her heavy hair was full of sullen copper gleamings beneath the sun. While Simban haggled shrilly with the cronelike grandmother, the warriors eyed Rubalsa with circumspect ardor and addressed to her such gallantries as they deemed discreet within hearing of the eunuch.

At last the bargain was driven and the price paid, to the sore depletion of Simban’s moneybag. Simban was now eager to return to Faraad with his prize, and he seemed to have forgotten his fear of the haunted desert. Zobal and Cushara were routed from their dreams by the impatient eunuch before dawn; and the three departed with the still drowsy Rubalsa ere the village could awaken about them.

Noon, with its sun of candent copper in a blackish-blue zenith, found them far amid the rusty sands and iron-toothed ridges of Izdrel. The route they followed was little more than a footpath: for, though Izdrel was but thirty miles in width at that point, few travelers would dare those fiend-infested leagues; and most preferred an immensely circuitous road, used by the herders, that ran to the southward of that evil desolation, following the Vos nearly to its debouchment in the Indaskian Sea.

Cushara, splendid in his plate-armor of bronze, on a huge piebald mare with a cataphract of leather scaled with copper, led the cavalcade. Rubalsa, who wore the red homespun of the herders’ women, followed on a black gelding with silk and silver harness, which Hoaraph had sent for her use. Close behind her came the watchful eunuch, gorgeous in particolored sendal, and mounted ponderously, with swollen saddlebags all about him, on the gray ass of uncertain age which, through his fear of horses and camels, he insisted on riding at all times. In his hand he held the leading-rope of another ass which was nearly crushed to the ground by the wine-skins, water-jugs and other provisions. Zobal guarded the rear, with unslung bow, slim and wiry in his suiting of light chain mail, on a nervous stallion that chafed incessantly at the rein. At his back he bore a quiver filled with arrows which the court sorcerer, Amdok, had prepared with singular spells and dippings in doubtful fluids, for his possible use against demons. Zobal had accepted the arrows courteously but had satisfied himself later that their iron barbs were in no wise impaired by Amdok’s treatment. A similarly ensorceled pike had been offered by Amdok to Cushara, who had refused it bluffly, saying that his own well-tried weapon was equal to the spitting of any number of devils.

Because of Simban and the two asses, the party could make little speed. However, they hoped to cross the wilder and more desolate portion of Izdrel ere night. Simban, though he still eyed the dismal waste dubiously, was plainly more concerned with his precious charge than with the imagined imps and lamiae. And Cushara and Zobal, both rapt in amorous reveries that centered about the luscious Rubalsa, gave only a perfunctory attention to their surroundings.

The girl had ridden all morning in demure silence. Now, suddenly, she cried out in a voice whose sweetness was made shrill by alarm. The others reined their mounts, and Simban babbled questions. To these Rubalsa replied by pointing toward the southern horizon, where, as her companions now saw, a peculiar pitch-black darkness had covered a great portion of the sky and hills, obliterating them wholly. This darkness, which seemed due neither to cloud nor sandstorm, extended itself in a crescent on either hand, and came swiftly toward the travelers. In the course of a minute or less, it had blotted the pathway before and behind them like a black mist; and the two arcs of shadow, racing northward, had flowed together, immuring the party in a circle. The darkness then became stationary, its walls no more than a hundred feet away on every side. Sheer, impenetrable, it surrounded the wayfarers, leaving above them a clear space from which the sun still glared down, remote and small and discolored, as if seen from the bottom of a deep pit.

“Ai! ai! ai!” howled Simban, cowering amid his saddlebags. “I knew well that some devilry would overtake us.”

At the same moment the two asses began to bray loudly, and the horses, with a frantic neighing and squealing, trembled beneath their riders. Only with much cruel spurring could Zobal force his stallion forward beside Cushara’s mare.

“Mayhap it is only some pestilential mist,” said Cushara.

“Never have I seen such mist,” replied Zobal doubtfully. “And there are no vapors to be met with in Izdrel. Methinks it is like the smoke of the seven hells that men fable beneath Zothique.”

“Shall we ride forward?” said Cushara. “I would learn whether or not a pike can penetrate that darkness.”

Calling out some words of reassurance to Rubalsa, the twain sought to spur their mounts toward the murky wall. But, after a few swerving paces, the mare and the stallion balked wildly, sweating and snorting, and would go no farther. Cushara and Zobal dismounted and continued their advance on foot.

Not knowing the source or nature of the phenomenon with which they had to deal, the two approached it warily. Zobal nocked an arrow to his string, and Cushara held the great bronze-headed pike before him as if charging an embattled foe. Both were more and more puzzled by the murkiness, which did not recede before them in the fashion of fog, but maintained its opacity when they were close upon it.

Cushara was about to thrust his weapon into the wall. Then, without the least prelude, there arose in the darkness, seemingly just before him, a horrible, multitudinous clamor as of drums, trumpets, cymbals, jangling armor, jarring voices, and mailed feet that tramped to and fro on the stony ground with a mighty clangor. As Cushara and Zobal drew back in amazement, the clamor swelled and spread, till it filled with a babel of warlike noises the whole circle of mysterious night that hemmed in the travelers.

“VeriIy, we are sore beset,” shouted Cushara to his comrade as they went back to their horses. “It would seem that some king of the north has sent his myrmidons into Yoros.”

“Yea,” said Zobal... “But it is strange that we saw them not ere the darkness came. And the darkness, surely, is no natural thing.”

Before Cushara could make any rejoinder, the martial clashings and shoutings ceased abruptly. All about it seemed that there was a rattling of innumerable sistra, a hissing of countless huge serpents, a raucous hooting of ill-omened birds that had foregathered by thousands. To these indescribably hideous sounds, the horses now added a continual screaming, and the asses a more frenzied braying, above which the outcries of Rubalsa and Simban were scarce audible.

Cushara and Zobal sought vainly to pacify their mounts and comfort the madly frightened girl. It was plain that no army of mortal men had beleaguered them: for the noises still changed from instant to instant, and they heard a most evil howling, and a roaring as of hellborn beasts that deafened them with its volume.

Naught, however, was visible in the gloom, whose circle now began to move swiftly, without widening or contracting. To maintain their position in its center, the warriors and their charges were compelled to leave the path and to flee northwardly amid the harsh ridges and hollows. All around them the baleful noises continued, keeping, as it seemed, the same interval of distance.

The sun, slanting westward, no longer shone into that eerily moving pit, and a deep twilight enveloped the wanderers. Zobal and Cushara rode as closely beside Rubalsa as the rough ground permitted, straining their eyes constantly for any visible sign of the cohorts that seemed to encompass them. Both were filled with the darkest misgivings, for it had become all too manifest that supernatural powers were driving them astray in the untracked desert.

Moment by moment the gross darkness seemed to close in; and there was a palpable eddying and seething as of monstrous forms behind its curtain. The horses stumbled over boulders and outcroppings of ore-sharp stone, and the grievously burdened asses were compelled to put forth an unheard-of speed to keep pace with the ever-shifting circle that menaced them with its horrid clamor. Rubalsa had ceased her outcries, as if overcome by exhaustion or resignation to the horror of her plight; and the shrill screeches of the eunuch had subsided into fearful wheezing and gasping.

Ever and anon, it seemed that great fiery eyes glared out of the gloom, floating close to earth or moving aloft at a gigantic height. Zobal began to shoot his enchanted arrows at these appearance, and the speeding of each bolt was hailed by an appalling outburst of Satanic laughters and ululations.

In such wise they went on, losing all measure of time and sense of orientation. The animals were galled and footsore. Simban was nigh dead from fright and fatigue; Rubalsa drooped in her saddle; and the warriors, awed and baffled by the predicament in which their weapons appeared useless, began to flag with a dull weariness.

“Never again shall I doubt the legendry of Izdrel,” said Cushara gloomily.

“It is in my mind that we have not long either to doubt or believe,” rejoined Zobal.

To add to their distress, the terrain grew rougher and steeper, and they climbed acclivitous hillsides and went down endlessly into drear valleys. Anon they came to a flat, open, pebbly space. There, all at once, it seemed that the pandemonium of evil noises drew back on every hand, receding and fading into faint, dubious whispers that died at a vast remove. Simultaneously, the circling night thinned out, and a few stars shone in the welkin, and the sharp-spined hills of the desert loomed starkly against a vermilion afterglow. The travelers paused and peered wonderingly at one another in a gloom that was no more than that of natural twilight.

“What new devilry is this?” asked Cushara, hardly daring to believe that the hellish leaguers had vanished.

“I know not,” said the archer, who was staring into the dusk.”

“But here, mayhap, is one of the devils.”

The others now saw that a muffled figure was approaching them, bearing a lit lantern made of some kind of translucent horn. At some distance behind the figure, lights appeared suddenly in a square dark mass which none of the party had discerned before. This mass was evidently a large building with many windows.

The figure, drawing near, was revealed by the dim yellowish lantern as a black man of immense girth and tallness, garbed in a voluminous robe of saffron such as was worn by certain monkish orders, and crowned with the two-horned purple hat of an abbot. He was indeed a singular and unlooked-for apparition: for if any monasteries existed amid the barren reaches of Izdrel, they were hidden and unknown to the world. Zobal, however, searching his memory, recalled a vague tradition he had once heard concerning a chapter of negro monks that had flourished in Yoros many centuries ago. The chapter had long been extinct, and the very site of its monastery was forgotten. Nowadays there were few blacks anywhere in the kingdom, other than those who did duty as eunuchs guarding the seraglios of nobles and rich merchants.

The animals began to display a certain uneasiness at the stranger’s approach.

“Who art thou?” challenged Cushara, his fingers tightening on the haft of his weapon.

The black man grinned capaciously, showing rows of discolored teeth whose incisors were like those of a wild dog. His enormous unctuous jowls were creased by the grin into folds of amazing number and volume; and his eyes, deeply slanted and close together, seemed to wink perpetually in pouches that shook like ebon jellies. His nostrils flared prodigiously; his purple, rubbery lips drooled and quivered, and he licked them with a fat, red, salacious tongue before replying to Cushara’s question.

“I am Ujuk, abbot of the monastery of Puthuum,” he said, in a thick voice of such extraordinary volume that it appeared almost to issue from the earth under his feet. “Methinks the night has overtaken you far from the route of travelers. I bid you welcome to our hospitality.”

“Aye, the night took us betimes,” Cushara returned dryly. Neither he nor Zobal was reassured by the look of lust in the abbot’s obscenely twinkling eyes as he peered at Rubalsa. Moreover, they had now noted the excessive and disagreeable length of the dark nails on his huge hands and bare, splayed feet: nails that were curving, three-inch talons, sharp as those of some beast or bird of prey.

It seemed, however, that Rubalsa and Simban were less abhorrently impressed, or had not noticed these details: for both made haste to acknowledge the abbot’s proffer of hospitality and to urge acceptance upon the visibly reluctant warriors. To this urging, Zobal and Cushara yielded, both inwardly resolving to keep a close watch on all the actions and movements of the abbot of Puthuum.

Ujuk, holding the horn lantern aloft, conducted the travelers to that massive building whose lights they had discerned at no great distance. A ponderous gate of dark wood swung open silently at their approach, and they entered a spacious courtyard cobbled with worn, greasy-looking stones, and dimly illumined by torches in rusty iron sockets. Several monks appeared with startling suddenness before the travelers, who had thought the courtyard vacant at first glance. They were all of unusual bulk and stature, and their features possessed an extraordinary likeness to those of Ujuk, from whom, indeed, they could hardly have been distinguished save by the yellow cowls which they wore in lieu of the abbot’s horned purple hat. The similarity extended even to their curved and talon-like nails of inordinate length. Their movements were fantasmally furtive and silent. Without speaking, they took charge of the horses and asses. Cushara and Zobal relinquished their mounts to the care of these doubtful hostlers with a reluctance which, apparently, was not shared by Rubalsa or the eunuch.

The monks also signified a willingness to relieve Cushara of his heavy pike and Zobal of his ironwood bow and half-emptied quiver of ensorceled arrows. But at this the warriors balked, refusing to let the weapons pass from their possession.

Ujuk led them to an inner portal which gave admission to the refectory. It was a large, low room, lit by brazen lamps of antique workmanship, such as ghouls might have recovered from a desert-sunken tomb. The abbot, with ogre-like grinnings, besought his guests to take their place at a long massive table of ebony with chairs and benches of the same material.

When they had seated themselves, Ujuk sat down at the table’s head. Immediately, four monks came in, bearing platters piled with spicily smoking viands, and deep earthen flagons full of a dark amber-brown liquor. And these monks, like those encountered in the courtyard, were gross ebon-black simulacra of their abbot, resembling him precisely in every feature and member. Zobal and Cushara were chary of tasting the liquor, which, for its odor, appeared to be an exceptionally potent kind of ale: for their doubts concerning Ujuk and his monastery grew graver every moment. Also, in spite of their hunger, they refrained from the food set before them, which consisted mainly of baked meats that neither could identify. Simban and Rubalsa, however, addressed themselves promptly to the meal with appetites sharpened by long fasting and the weird fatigues of the day.

The warriors observed that neither food nor drink had been placed before Ujuk, and they conjectured that he had already dined. To their growing disgust and anger, he sat lolling obesely, with lustful eyes upon Rubalsa in a stare broken only by the nictitations that accompanied his perpetual grinning. This stare soon began to abash the girl, and then to alarm and frighten her. She ceased eating; and Simban, who had been deeply preoccupied till then with his supper, was plainly perturbed when he saw the flagging of her appetite. He seemed for the first time to notice the abbot’s unmonastic leering, and showed his disapproval by sundry horrible grimaces. He also remarked pointedly, in a loud, piercing voice, that the girl was destined for the harem of King Hoaraph. But at this, Ujuk merely chuckled, as if Simban had uttered some exquisitely humorous jest.

Zobal and Cushara were hard put to repress their wrath, and both itched hotly for the fleshing of their weapons in the abbot’s gross bulk. He, however, seemed to have taken Simban’s hint, for he shifted his gaze from the girl. Instead, he began to eye the warriors with a curious and loathsome avidity, which they found little less insupportable than his ogling of Rubalsa. The well-nourished eunuch also came in for his share of Ujuk’s regard which seemed to have in it the hunger of a hyena gloating over his prospective prey.

Simban, obviously ill at ease, and somewhat frightened, now tried to carry on a conversation with the abbot, volunteering much information as to himself, his companions, and the adventures which had brought them to Puthuum. Ujuk seemed little surprised by this information; and Zobal and Cushara, who took no part in the conversation, became surer than ever that he was no true abbot.

“How far have we gone astray from the route to Faraad?” asked Simban.

“I do not consider that you have gone astray,” rumbled Ujuk in his subterranean voice, “for your coming to Puthuum is most timely. We have few guests here, and we are loth to part with those who honor our hospitality.”

“King Hoaraph will be impatient for our return with the girl,” Simban quavered. “We must depart early tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is another matter,” said Ujuk, in a tone half unctuous, half sinister. “Perhaps, by then, you will have forgotten this deplorable haste.”

Little was said during the rest of the meal; and, indeed, little was drunk or eaten; for even Simban seemed to have lost his normally voracious appetite. Ujuk, still grinning as if at some uproarious jest known only to himself, was apparently not concerned with the urging of food upon his guests.

Certain of the monks came and went unbidden, removing the laden dishes, and as they departed, Zobal and Cushara perceived a strange thing: for no shadows were cast by the monks on the lamplit floor beside the moving adumbrations of the vessels they carried! From Ujuk, however, a heavy, misshapen umbrage fell and lay like a prone incubus beside his chair.

“Methinks we have come to a hatching place of demons,” whispered Zobal to Cushara. “We have fought many men, thou and I, but never such as wanted wholesome shadows.”

“Aye,” muttered the pike-bearer. “But I like this abbot even less than his monks: though he alone is the caster of a shade.”

Ujuk now rose from his seat, saying: “I trow that ye are all weary and would sleep betimes.”

Rubalsa and Simban, who had both drunk a certain amount of the powerful ale of Puthuum, nodded a drowsy assent. Zobal and Cushara, noting their premature sleepiness, were glad they had declined the liquor.

The abbot led his guests along a corridor whose gloom was but little relieved by the flaring of torches in a strong draft that blew stealthily from an undetermined source, causing a rout of wild shadows to flitter beside the passers. On either hand there were cells with portals shut only by hangings of a coarse hempen fabric. The monks had all vanished, the cells were seemingly dark, and an air of age-old desolation pervaded the monastery, together with a smell as of moldering bones piled in some secret catacomb.

Midway in the hall, Ujuk paused and held aside the arras of a doorway that differed in no wise from the rest. Within, a lamp burned, depending from an archaic chain of curiously linked and fretted metal. The room was bare but spacious, and a bed of ebony with opulent quiltings of an olden fashion stood by the farther wall under an open window. This chamber, the abbot indicated, was for the occupancy of Rubalsa; and he then offered to show the men and the eunuch their respective quarters.

Simban, seeming to wake all at once from his drowsiness, protested at the idea of being separated in such wise from his charge. As if Ujuk had been prepared for this, and had given orders accordingly, a monk appeared forthwith, bringing quilts which he laid on the flagged floor within the portals of Rubalsa’s room. Simban stretched himself promptly on the improvised bed, and the warriors withdrew with Ujuk.

“Come,” said the abbot, his wolfish teeth gleaming in the torchlight. “Ye will sleep soundly in the beds I have prepared.”

Zobal and Cushara, however, had now assumed the position of guardsmen outside the doorway of Rubalsa’s chamber. They told Ujuk curtly that they were responsible to King Hoaraph for the girl’s safety and must watch over her at all times.

“I wish ye a pleasant vigil,” said Ujuk, with a cachinnation like the laughter of hyenas in some underground tomb.

With his departure, it seemed that the black slumber of a dead antiquity settled upon all the building. Rubalsa and Simban, apparently, slept without stirring, for there was no sound from behind the hempen arras. The warriors spoke only in whispers, lest they should arouse the girl. Their weapons held ready for instant use, they watched the shadowy hall with a jealous vigilance: for they did not trust the quietude about them, being well assured that a host of foul cacodemons couched somewhere behind it, biding the time of assault.

Howbeit, nothing occurred to reconfirm them in such apprehensions. The draft that breathed furtively along the hall seemed to tell only of age-forgotten death and cyclic solitude. The two began to perceive signs of dilapidation in walls and floor that had heretofore escaped their notice. Eery, fantastical thoughts came to them with insidious persuasion: it seemed that the building was a ruin that had lain uninhabited for a thousand years; that the black abbot Ujuk and his shadowless monks were mere imaginations, things that had never been; that the moving circle of darkness, the pandemonian voices, that had herded them toward Puthuum, were no more than a daymare whose memory was now fading in the fashion of dreams.

Thirst and hunger troubled them, for they had not eaten since early morn, and had snatched only a few hasty drafts of wine or water during the day. Both, however, began to feel the oncreeping of a sleepy hebetude which, under the circumstances, was most undesirable. They nodded, started and awoke recurrently to their peril. But still, like a siren voice in poppy-dreams, the silence seemed to tell them that all danger was a bygone thing, an illusion that belonged to yesterday.

Several hours passed, and the hall lightened with the rising of a late moon that shone through a window at its eastern end. Zobal, less bedrowsed than Cushara, was awakened to full awareness by a sudden commotion among the animals in the courtyard without. There were neighings that rose to a frenzied pitch, as if something had frightened the horses; and to these the asses began to add their heavy braying, till Cushara was also aroused.

“Make sure that thou drowsest not again,” Zobal admonished the pike-bearer. “I shall go forth and inquire as to the cause of this tumult.”

“Tis a good thought,” commended Cushara. “And while thou art gone, see to it that none has molested our provisions. And bring back with thee some apricots and cakes of sesame and a skin of ruby-red wine.”

The monastery itself remained silent as Zobal went down the hall, his buskins of link-covered leather ringing faintly. At the hall’s end an outer door stood open, and he passed through it into the courtyard. Even as he, emerged, the animals ceased their clamor. He could see but dimly, for all the torches in the courtyard, save one, had burnt out or been extinguished; and the low gibbous moon had not yet climbed the wall. Nothing, to all appearance, was amiss: the two asses were standing quietly beside the mountainous piles of provisions and saddlebags they had borne; the horses seemed to drowse amicably in a group. Zobal decided that perhaps there had been some temporary bickering between his stallion and Cushara’s mare.

He went forward to make sure that there was no other cause of disturbance. Afterward he turned to the wineskins, intending to refresh himself before rejoining Cushara with a supply of drinkables and comestibles. Hardly had he washed the dust of Izdrel from his throat with a long draft, when he heard an eery, dry whispering whose source and distance he could not at once determine. Sometimes it seemed at his very ear, and then it ebbed away as if sinking into profound subterranean vaults. But the sound, though variable in this manner, never ceased entirely; and it seemed to shape itself into words that the listener almost understood: words that were fraught with the hopeless sorrow of a dead man who had sinned long ago, and had repented his sin through black sepulchral ages.

As he harkened to the sere anguish of that sound, the hair bristled on the archer’s neck, and he knew such fear as he had never known in the thick of battle. And yet, at the same time, he was aware of deeper pity than the pain of dying comrades had ever aroused in his heart. And it seemed that the voice implored him for commiseration and succor, laying upon him a weird compulsion that he dared not disobey. He could not wholly comprehend the things that the whisperer besought him to do: but somehow he must ease that desolate anguish.

Still the whispering rose and fell; and Zobal forgot that he had left Cushara to a lone vigil beset with hellish dangers; forgot that the voice itself might well be only a device of demons to lure him astray. He began to search the courtyard, his keen ears alert for the source of the sound; and, after some dubitation, he decided that it issued from the ground in a corner opposite the gateway. Here, amid the cobbling, in the wall’s angle, he found a large slab of syenite with a rusty metal ring in its center. He was quickly confirmed in his decision: for the whispering became louder and more articulate, and he thought that it said to him: “Lift the slab.”

The archer grasped the rusty ring with both hands, and putting forth all his strength, he succeeded in tilting back the stone, albeit not without such exertion as made him feel that his very spine would crack. A dark opening was exposed, and from it surged a charnel stench so overpowering that Zobal turned his face away and was like to have vomited. But the whisper came with a sharp, woeful beseeching, out of the darkness below; and it said to him: “Descend.”

Zobal wrenched from its socket the one torch that still burned in the courtyard. By its lurid flaring he saw a flight of worn steps that went down into the reeking sepulchral gloom; and resolutely he descended the steps, finding himself at their bottom in a hewn vault with deep shelves of stone on either hand. The shelves, running away into darkness, were piled with human bones and mummified bodies; and plainly the place was the catacomb of the monastery.

The whispering had ceased, and Zobal peered about in bewilderment not unmixed with horror.

“I am here,” resumed the dry, susurrous voice, issuing from amid the heaps of mortal remnants on the shelf close beside him. Startled, and feeling again that crisping of the hairs on his neck, Zobal held his torch to the low shelf as he looked for the speaker. In a narrow niche between stacks of disarticulated bones, he beheld a half-decayed corpse about whose long, attenuate limbs and hollow body there hung a few rotten shreds of yellow cloth. These, he thought, were the remnants of a robe such as was worn by the monks of Puthuum. Then, thrusting his torch into the niche, he discerned the lean, mummy-like head, on which moldered a thing that had once been the horned hat of an abbot. The corpse was black as ebony, and plainly it was that of a great negro. It bore an aspect of incredible age, as if it had lain there for centuries: but from it came the odor of newly ripe corruption that had sickened Zobal when he lifted the slab of syenite.

As he stood staring down, it seemed to Zobal that the cadaver stirred a little, as if fain to rise from its recumbent posture; and he saw a gleaming as of eyeballs in the deepshadowed sockets; and the dolorously curling lips were retracted still farther; and from between the bared teeth there issued that awful whispering which had drawn him into the catacomb.

“Listen closely,” said the whispering. “There is much for me to tell thee, and much for thee to do when the telling is done.

“I am Uldor, the abbot of Puthuum. More than a thousand years ago I came with my monks to Yoros from Ilcar, the black empire of the north. The emperor of Ilcar had driven us forth, for our cult of celibacy, our worship of the maiden goddess Ojhal, were hateful to him. Here amid the desert of Izdrel we built our monastery and dwelt unmolested.

“We were many in number at first; but the years went by, and one by one the Brothers were laid in the catacomb we had delved for our resting place. They died with none to replace them. I alone survived in the end: for I had won such sanctity as ensures longevous days, and had also become a master of the arts of sorcery. Time was a demon that I held at bay, like one who stands in a charmed circle. My powers were still hale and unimpaired; and I lived on as an anchorite in the monastery.

“At first the solitude was far from irksome to me, and I was wholly absorbed in my study of the arcana of nature. But after a time it seemed that such things no longer satisfied. I grew aware of my loneliness, and was much beset by the demons of the waste, who had troubled me little heretofore. Succubi, fair but baneful, lamiae with the round soft bodies of women, came to tempt me in the drear vigils of the night.

“I resisted... But there was one she-devil, more cunning than the others, who crept into my cell in the semblance of a girl I had loved long ago, ere yet I had taken the vow of Ojhal. To her I succumbed; and of the unholy union was born the half-human fiend, Ujuk, who has since called himself the abbot of Puthuum.

“After that sin, I wished to die... And the wish was manifoldly strengthened when I beheld the progeny of the sin. Too greatly, however, had I offended Ojhal; and a frightful penance was decreed for me. I lived... and daily I was plagued and persecuted by the monster, Ujuk, who grew lustily in the manner of such offspring. But when Ujuk had gained his full stature, there came upon me such weakness and decrepitude as made me hopeful of death. Scarce could I stir in my impotence, and Ujuk, taking advantage of this, bore me in his horrid arms to the catacomb and laid me among the dead. Here I have remained ever since, dying and rotting eternally—and yet eternally alive. For almost a millennium I have suffered unsleepingly the dire anguish of repentance that brings no expiation.”

“Through the powers of saintly and sorcerous vision that never left me, I was doomed to watch the foul deeds, the hell-dark iniquities of Ujuk. Wearing the guise of an abbot, endowed with strange infernal powers together with a kind of immortality, he has presided over Puthuum through the centuries. His enchantments have kept the monastery hidden... save from those that he wishes to draw within reach of his ghoulish hunger, his incubus-like desires. Men he devours; and women are made to serve his lust... And still I am condemned to see his turpitudes; and the seeing is my most grievous punishment.”

The whisper sank away; and Zobal, who had listened in eldritch awe, as one who hears the speech of a dead man, was doubtful for a moment that Uldor still lived. Then the sere voice went on:

“Archer, I crave a boon from thee; and I offer in return a thing that will aid thee against Ujuk. In thy quiver thou bearest charmed arrows: and the wizardry of him that wrought them was good. Such arrows can slay the else-immortal powers of evil. They can slay Ujuk—and even such evil as endures in me and forbids me to die. Archer, grant me an arrow through the heart: and if that suffice not, an arrow through the right eye, and one through the left. And leave the arrows in their mark, for I deem that thou canst well spare so many. One alone is needed for Ujuk. As to the monks thou hast seen, I will tell thee a secret. They are twelve in number, but...”

Zobal would scarcely have believed the thing that Uldor now unfolded, if the events of the day had not left him beyond all incredulity. The abbot continued:

“When I am wholly dead, take thou the talisman which depends about my neck. The talisman is a touchstone that will dissolve such ill enchantments as have a material seeming, if applied thereto with the hand.”

For the first time, Zobal perceived the talisman, which was an oval of plain gray stone lying upon Uldor’s withered bosom on a chain of black silver.

“Make haste, O archer,” the whispering implored.

Zobal had socketed his torch in the pile of moldering bones beside Uldor. With a sense of mingled compulsion and reluctance, he drew an arrow from his quiver, notched it, and aimed unflinchingly down at Uldor’s heart. The shaft went straightly and deeply into its mark; and Zobal waited. But anon from the retracted lips of the black abbot there issued a faint murmuring: “Archer, another arrow!”

Again the bow was drawn, and a shaft sped unerringly into the hollow orbit of Uldor’s right eye. And again, after an interval, there came the almost inaudible pleading: “Archer, still another shaft.”

Once more the bow of ironwood sang in the silent vault, and an arrow stood in the left eye of Uldar, quivering with the force of its propulsion. This time there was no whisper from the rotting lips: but Zobal heard a curious rustling, and a sigh as of lapsing sand. Beneath his gaze the black limbs and body crumbled swiftly, the face and head fell in, and the three arrows sagged awry, since there was naught now but a pile of dust and parting bones to hold them embedded.

Leaving the arrows as Uldor had enjoined him to do, Zobal groped for the gray talisman that was now buried amid those fallen relics. Finding it, he hung it carefully at his belt beside the long straight sword which he carried. Perhaps, he reflected, the thing might have its use ere the night was over.

Quickly he turned away and climbed the steps to the courtyard. A saffron-yellow and lopsided moon was soaring above the wall, and he knew by this that he had been absent overlong from his vigil with Cushara. All, however, seemed tranquil: the drowsing animals had not stirred; and the monastery was dark and soundless. Seizing a full wine-skin and a bag containing such edibles as Cushara had asked him to bring, Zobal hurried back to the open hall.

Even as he passed into the building, the arras-like silence before him was burst asunder by a frightful hubbub. He distinguished amid the clamor the screaming of Rubalsa, the screeching of Simban, and the furious roaring of Cushara: but above these, as if to drown them all, an obscene laughter mounted continually, like the welling forth of dark subterrene waters thick and foul with the fats of corruption.

Zobal dropped the wine-skin and the sack of comestibles and raced forward, unslinging his bow as he went. The outcries of his companions continued, but he heard them faintly now above the damnable incubus-like laughter that swelled as if to fill the whole monastery. As he neared the space before Rubalsa’s chamber, he saw Cushara beating with the haft of his pike at a blank wall in which there was no longer a hempen-curtained doorway. Behind the wall the screeching of Simban ceased in a gurgling moan like that of some butchered steer; but the girl’s terror-sharpened cries still mounted through the smothering cachinnation.

“This wall was wrought by demons,” raged the pike bearer as he smote vainly at the smooth masonry. “I kept a faithful watch—but they built it behind me in a silence as of the dead. And a fouler work is being done in that chamber.”

“Master thy frenzy,” said Zobal, as he strove to regain the command of his own faculties amid the madness that threatened to overwhelm him. At that instant he recalled the oval gray touchstone of Uldor, which hung at his baldric from its black silver chain; and it came to him that the closed wall was perhaps an unreal enchantment against which the talisman might serve even as Uldor had said.

Quickly he took the touchstone in his fingers and held it to the blank surface where the doorway had been. Cushara looked on with an air of stupefaction, as if deeming the archer demented. But even as the talisman clicked faintly against it, the wall seemed to dissolve, leaving only a rude arras that fell away in tatters as if it too had been no more than a sorcerous illusion. The strange disintegration continued to spread, the whole partition melted away to a few worn blocks, and the gibbous moon shone in as the abbey of Puthuum crumbled silently to a gapped and roofless ruin!

All this had occurred in a few moments; but the warriors found no room for wonder. By the livid light of the moon, which peered down like the face of a worm-gnawed cadaver, they looked upon a scene so hideous that it caused them to forget all else. Before them, on a cracked floor from whose interstices grew desert grasses, the eunuch Simban lay sprawled in death. His raiment was torn to streamers, and blood bubbled darkly from his mangled throat. Even the leather pouches which he bore at his girdle had been ripped open, and gold coins, vials of medicine and other oddments were scattered around him.

Beyond, by the half-crumbled outer wall, Rubalsa lay in a litter of rotted cloth and woodwork which had been the gorgeously quilted ebon bed. She was trying to fend off with her lifted hands the enormously swollen shape that hung horizontally above her, as if levitated by the floating wing-like folds of its saffron robe. This shape the warriors recognized as the abbot Ujuk.

The overwelling laughter of the black incubus had ceased, and he turned upon the intruders a face contorted by diabolic lust and fury. His teeth clashed audibly, his eyes glowed in their pouches like beads of red-hot metal, as he withdrew from his position over the girl and loomed monstrously erect before her amid the ruins of the chamber.

Cushara rushed forward with leveled pike ere Zobal could fit one of his arrows to the string. But even as the pike-bearer crossed the sill, it seemed that the foully bloated form of Ujuk multiplied itself in a dozen yellow-garmented shapes that surged to meet Cushara’s onset. Appearing as if by some hellish legerdemain, the monks of Puthuum had mustered to assist their abbot.

Zobal cried out in warning, but the shapes were all about Cushara, dodging the thrusts of his weapon and clawing ferociously at his plate-armor with their terrific three-inch talons. Valiantly he fought them, only to go down after a little and disappear from sight as if whelmed by a pack of ravening hyenas.

Remembering the scarce credible thing that Uldor had told him, Zobal wasted no arrows upon the monks. His bow ready, he waited for full sight of Ujuk beyond the seething rout that mangled malignantly back and forth above the fallen pike-bearer. In an eddying of the pack he aimed swiftly at the looming incubus, who seemed wholly intent on that fiendish struggle, as if directing it in some wise without spoken word or ponderable gesture. Straight and true the arrow sped with an exultant singing; and good was the sorcery of Amdok, who had wrought it: for Ujuk reeled and went down, his horrid fingers tearing vainly at the shaft that was driven nigh to its fledging of eagle-quills in his body.

Now a strange thing occurred: for, as the incubus fell and writhed to and fro in his dying, the twelve monks all dropped away from Cushara, tossing convulsively on the floor as if they were but shaken shadows of the thing that died. It seemed to Zobal that their forms grew dim and diaphanous, and he saw the cracks in the flagstones beyond them; and their writhings lessened with those of Ujuk; and when Ujuk lay still at last, the faint outlines of the figures vanished as if erased from earth and air. Naught remained but the noisome bulk of that fiend who had been the progeny of the abbot Uldor and the lamia. And the bulk shrank visibly from instant to instant beneath its sagging garments, and a smell of ripe corruption arose, as if all that was human in the hellish thing were rotting swiftly away.

Cushara had scrambled to his feet and was peering about in a stunned fashion. His heavy armor had saved him from the talons of his assailants; but the armor itself was scored from greaves to helmet with innumerable scratches.

“Whither have the monks gone?” he inquired. “They were all about me an instant ago, like so many wild dogs worrying a fallen aurochs.”

“The monks were but emanations of Ujuk,” said Zobal. “They were mere fantasms, multiple eidola, that he sent forth and withdrew into himself at will; and they had no real existence apart from him. With Ujuk’s death they had become less than shadows.”

“Verily, such things are prodigious,” opined the pikebearer.

The warriors now turned their attention to Rubalsa, who had struggled to a sitting posture amid the downfallen wreckage of her bed. The tatters of rotten quilting which she clutched about her with shamefast fingers at their approach, served but little to conceal her well-rounded ivory nakedness. She wore an air of mingled fright and confusion, like a sleeper who has just awakened from some atrocious nightmare.

“Had the incubus harmed thee?” inquired Zobal anxiously. He was reassured by her faint, bewildered negative. Dropping his eyes before the piteous disarray of her girlish beauty, he felt in his heart a deeper enamorment than before, a passion touched with such tenderness as he had never known in the hot, brief loves of his hazard-haunted days. Eyeing Cushara covertly, he knew with dismay that this emotion was shared to the fullest by his comrade.

The warriors now withdrew to a little distance and turned their backs decorously while Rubalsa dressed.

“I deem,” said Zobal in a low voice beyond overhearing of the girl, “that thou and I tonight have met and conquered such perils as were not contracted for in our service to Hoaraph. And I deem that we are of one mind concerning the maiden, and love her too dearly now to deliver her to the captious lust of a sated king. Therefore we cannot return to Faraad. If it please thee, we shall draw lots for the girl; and the loser will attend the winner as a true comrade till such time as we have made our way from Izdrel, and have crossed the border of some land lying beyond Hoaraph’s rule.”

To this Cushara agreed. When Rubalsa had finished her dressing, the two began to look about them for such objects as might serve in the proposed sortilege. Cushara would have tossed one of the gold coins, stamped with Hoaraph’s image, which had rolled from Simban’s torn moneybag. But Zobal shook his head at the suggestion, having espied certain items which he thought even more exquisitely appropriate than the coin. These objects were the talons of the incubus, whose corpse had now dwindled in size and was horribly decayed, with a hideous wrinkling of the whole head and an actual shortening of the members. In this process, the claws of hands and feet had all dropped away and were lying loose on the pavement. Removing his helmet, Zobal stooped down and placed with it the five hellish-looking talons of the right hand, among which that of the index finger was the longest.

He shook the helmet vigorously, as one shakes a dicebox, and there was a sharp clattering from the claws. Then, he held the helmet out to Cushara, saying: “He who draws the forefinger talon shall take the girl.”

Cushara put in his hand and withdrew it quickly, holding aloft the heavy thumbnail, which was shortest of all. Zobal drew the nail of the middle finger; and Cushara, at his second trial, brought forth the little finger’s claw. Then, to the deep chagrin of the pike-bearer, Zobal produced the dearly coveted index talon.

Rubalsa, who had been watching this singular procedure with open curiosity, now said to the warriors:

“What are ye doing?”

Zobal started to explain, but before he had finished, the girl cried out indignantly: “Neither of ye has consulted my preference in this matter.” Then, pouting prettily, she turned away from the disconcerted archer and flung her arms about the neck of Cushara.

BLACK HAWK OF VALKARTH, by Lin Carter

1

Blood on the Snow

The flames of sunset died to glowing coals in the crimson west. Slowly, the brooding skies darkened overhead, and the first few stars glared down upon a scene of terrible carnage.

It was a great valley in the land of Valkarth in the Northlands, beyond the Mountains of Mommur, where the cold black waves of Zharanga Tethrabaal the Great Northern Ocean lashed a bleak and rock-strewn coast.

Although it was late spring, snow lay thick upon the valley. It was trampled and torn, and here and there bestrewn with motionless black shapes. These were the bodies of men and women and children, clad in furs and leather harness, clasping broken weapons in stiff, dead hands. In their hundreds they lay sprawled and scattered amid the trampled snow, and against its dirty grey their blood was crimson.

The battle had begun at the birth of the day and with day’s end it, too, had ended. All the long, weary day the warriors and hunters and chieftains of the Black Hawk nation had stood knee-deep in the snows and fought with iron blade and wooden club and stone axe against the enemies that had crept upon them in the night. One by one they had fallen, and now no single man lived or moved upon the gore-drenched snows of Valkarth. They had not died easily, but they had died; and very many of their foes lay beside them in the black sleep of death.

The valley was like a charnel-pit. And the stars looked down, wonderingly.

They had been a mighty people. The men were tall, strong- thewed, with thick black manes and virile, golden eyes. The women were deep-breasted, their unshorn hair worn in heavy braids, their strong white bodies clad in belted furs against the bite of wintry winds. They had fought beside their men, the women of the Black Hawk clan, or back-to-back, and they, too, had heaped their dead before them. In the end they had gone down fighting; and their young, too, children scarce old enough to walk, had died with bloody knives clenched in their small fists.

Life in the bleak Northlands of Lost Lemuria was one unend ing struggle against grim Nature, ferocious beasts, and no less savage men. The weaklings and the cowards died young: this nation had been strong, and it had died hard; but in the end it had died.

By one great rock a tall and stalwart warrior had taken his last stand. He had set his back against that rock and with his great sword he had hewn and hewn until the snowy slope before him was buried beneath the corpses of those who had come up against him. They had cut him down with arrows at the last, no longer daring to come within the reach of that terrible blade; at that, it had taken five arrows to kill him. He lay now with his broad shoulders still flat against the rock, his square-jawed face grim in death as in life, snow and blood daubed on his thick grey mane and beard. The wife of his youth lay beside him, a bear-spear still held in her cold hands, her head resting lightly against his shoulder. They had cut her down with an axe, and two of her tall sons and her young daughter lay near.

The name of the dead warrior had been Thumithar; he had been a chieftain of the clan, of direct descent in the male line from the hero Valkh—Valkh the Black Hawk, Valkh of Nemedis, the seventh of the sons of Thungarth of the first Kingdoms of Man. The war bards of the tribe, the old, fierce-eyed sagamen, told it had been Valkh who had founded the Black Hawk nation in time’s grey dawn. And the great broadsword that lay still clasped in the dead fingers of Thumithar was none other than Sarkozan itself, the very Sword of Valkh.

He had been a wise chieftain, had Thumithar, just and strong. And a great war-leader, and a mighty hunter.

He would hunt no more, would Thumithar, with his tall sons at his side.

* * * *

In that grim panorama of death, one indeed yet lived. He was a scrawny boy, scarce fifteen, naked save for a ragged clout and a cloak of furs slung about bare shoulders. They were broad, those shoulders, but stooped with weariness now, and they bore a burden of sorrow, heavy for one so young to bear.

Blood was bright on the brown hide of his deep chest, and some of it was the blood of the foemen he had fought and slain, but much of it was his own. He limped through the bloody snow, dragging one foot behind him, and, now and again, he paused to look at this dead face and that one. He knew many of them, the dead faces; but he did not find the one he was looking for.

At last he came up to the place where the grey-maned warrior had taken his last stand, and the limping boy flinched at the sight of that dead face in the starlight. And the serene face of the woman that lay beside the dead man wrung a sharp cry from the white lips of the boy.

He crumpled into the snow before them on his knees and he hid his face in his hands. Tears leaked slowly through the blood-encrusted fingers, and he wept there at last—he who had not wept before.

His name was Thongor.

2

The Cairn in the Valley

After a time the boy climbed wearily to his feet and stood staring at the ruin of his world. In repose, he had the same grim-jawed face as his father, the same heavy, unshorn mane—save his was yet untouched with grey. His eyes glared golden like the eyes of lions, under scowling black brows. He had long, rangy legs, and strong arms seamed with scars, some of which were raw wounds.

In the crush and swirl of battle, he had been swept away from his father and his mother and his brothers. All day he had fought alone, with the tigerish fury of a young berserker, and many of the enemy had fallen before his murderous wrath. When his old sword broke in his hands, he had fought on with the stub, then with rocks clawed up from the snowy ground—finally, with his bare fingers and his strong white teeth.

He had taken a deep wound on the breast, and lesser wounds on thigh and shoulder and brow. He was splattered with blood from head to foot, although he had stemmed the bleeding with snow until the wounds were numb.

The Snow Bear warriors had clubbed him down and beaten him to earth and left him for dead. That was their only mistake.

For he had not died.

He had slowly climbed back from the Shadowlands into the realm of the living again, to find night fallen and the battle over and the terrible valley silent with its dead. Slowly, dragging his injured foot behind him, he had searched among the fallen until at last he had found that which he sought. And now he knew what he must do.

He cleared away a patch of earth, clawing back the snow, and he laid out the bodies of his mother and father beside the bodies of his older brothers and his younger sister.

He set their weapons beside them. All but the great sword of his father, the mighty broadsword Sarkozan; that he took, for he would need it.

He kissed their cold lips one last time in farewell.

Then he began to pile the stones upon them.

There must be many stones, else the beasts would feed upon them in the night. Although he was bone-weary, and sick with loss of blood, he dragged the great stones one by one upon them, heaping up a tall cairn until it stood higher than a grown man. Then, and only then, did he rest; and by then he was shaking with exhaustion.

It would stand for the rest of time, that cairn, to mark the place where Thumithar of the Valklings had fallen. Or until the mighty continent itself, riven asunder with earthquake, was drowned beneath the cold waves of the sea.

He sang the warrior’s song over them, his clear young voice sharp and strong and strange to hear in that deathly silence.

* * * *

The black sky lit with cold glory as the great golden Moon of old Lemuria rose up over the edges of the world to flood the bleak land of Valkarth with her light. In the cold flame of the moonlight, he saw that the cairn was high and strong. The white bears would not claw it asunder, nor the grey wolves, to feast on what lay beneath.

At the thought, his jaws tightened and his lips clamped together. For the white bear of the Northlands was the totem beast of the enemy clan who had worked this day’s red ruin, even as the black hawk of the skies was his own tribal totem.

He hated the mighty ulth, the white bear of the snow countries, and had often hunted him down the bleak hills of this wintry land. And now he had another reason for that hatred.

The cairn was done; and he was finished here.

But there was one last task the dead had set upon him.

And its name was Vengeance.

3

Horror on the Heights

He gathered up his gear and was ready to depart. From the dead, he took what he needed, nor did it bother him to plunder them. They were the men of his race, and the blood that lay strewn upon the snows about them, that same blood ran hot and fierce in his own veins. They would not begrudge him what he needed of them. Nor would they need it any longer.

From one he took the black leather trappings that were warriors’ harness, the leather yoke studded with discs of brass that fitted about the throat to protect the shoulders, the affair of buckled straps and the great brass ring that shielded the midsection from the flat of a blade, the iron-studded girdle worn low about the hips, the heavy boots, the broad-bladed dagger and the twin leather bottles, one filled with water and one with wine. His sword he slid into its worn old scabbard, which he clipped to a baldric and slung it across his chest so that the scabbard hung high between his shoulders.

He was not truly of age to don warriors’ harness, for he had not yet undergone initiation into the rights of manhood by the old shaman of his nation. Nor would he now, for the garrulous old tosspot lay dead across the vale, having slain a dozen Snow Bear warriors with a two-handed axe before they had cut him down. Had not this day befallen, Thongor would with summer have gone up into the high mountains, there to dwell alone amid the heights, drinking the water of melted snow and eating only what he could slay with his bare hands; there would he have dwelt for forty days until the vision of his totem came to him and he learned his secret name.

Now that would never be. But manhood was upon him without the old rites.

Vengeance is for men. It is not a task for boys.

* * * *

Half the night was worn away. He crossed the valley and climbed the hills, ignoring the pain in his injured foot. Strong red wine had warmed his numb flesh and it drove new strength and vigor through his tired frame. The cold, thin air of the heights cleared his throbbing head and the exertion of the ascent made the blood tingle in his veins.

There would be time enough to rest, later, when the deed was done.

If he lived…

The Moon was high in the heavens now; the night sky was black as death and the stars blazed like diamonds strewn on dark velvet. He thought of nothing as he climbed, neither of the dead he had left behind him in the valley, nor of those he went to kill, but merely of setting his foot upon first one rock and then upon a higher one until at last he came to the crest and the wide world fell away beneath him to every side and the stars seemed very near.

Here a saddle-shaped depression sloped between twin hill- crests, thick with virgin snow. It had fallen here, perhaps, when the world was young and fresh and the Gods still went among men to teach them the nine crafts and the seven arts.

He began to wade through the snow between the twin peaks. With each step he stirred snows that had lain for a thousand years, and the crystals swirled up before him like ancient ghosts awakened by the step of a rash intruder into places better left undisturbed.

His nape-hairs prickled and the flesh of his forearms crept. He had a sense that something was aware of his coming, that something—roused.

The cold breath of fear blew along his nerves, and it was colder than any snow. One hand went to his breast where a fetish of white stone lay over his heart, suspended about his neck on a thong. He muttered aloud the name of Gorm, his god.

And terror woke, roaring!

Was it a sudden gust of wind which raised the snow before him in a whirling cloud—a cloud that shaped itself into a mighty, towering form—a phantom-thing of numb snow that reared up before him on legs like tree-trunks, hunched shoulders massive and monstrous, huge paws raised to crush and tear, dripping jaws agape, red eyes of madness glaring into his?

He fell into a fighting stance and the great blade was alive and singing in his hand, starlight glittering on the blue steel, acid-etched sigils blazing with eerie fires.

The thing came lumbering towards him. And he knew no steel could slay it, for it did not really live.

4

Vengeance in the Night

The gigantic, white, hulking monster was almost upon the boy now. He knew it for an ulth, a snow bear, but twice the girth and height of any ulth ever seen by mortal eyes before.

He knew also that it was a ghost-thing, that demon of the snows. For there poured from it a freezing cold, inhuman and magical. The sheen of perspiration on his bronze limbs froze like a thin sheath of glass upon his body. The icy breath of those fanged jaws panted in his face and he felt it go dead and numb as if he wore a mask of snow.

A red haze thickened before his eyes, blinding him. Each breath he drew was like fire stabbing in his lungs, cold fire, black yet burning. He fought against the cold that coiled about him, swung Sarkozan high, glittering against the stars, and hewed and cut at the ghost-bear. But from each stroke he took hurt, for a wave of stunning cold went through him as the steel blade touched the lumbering monster of snow.

He fought on, knowing death was near; flesh could not long endure such cold. His heart was a frozen thing in his breast; his very blood congealed in his veins; he could no longer breathe, for to draw in each breath was as painful as a blade of ice driven deep into his lungs. But he fought on, and would fight until he fell.

A piercing cry cut through him from above.

Through snow-thick lashes he peered up to see a weird and fantastic shape, black and be-winged, beating against the stars.

He could not see it clearly—a moving blackness, blotting out the starlight—its eyes like golden fire, brighter than any star, and moonlight glittering on beak and outstretched claws.

It fell like a thunderbolt from above, swept by him like a whirlwind, and swung down upon the white bear-thing with a scream of fury.

The mountains shook as the two came together, and the stars were blotted out.

Ragged black wings beat with cyclone force. Shaggy white jaws roared and crunched. Scythe-sharp black claws caught at the white breast and tore it asunder. The white thing moaned, and toppled, and came apart in chunks of broken snow.

The black shape whirled about and glared at the boy for the space of a single heartbeat.

And black eyes stared deep into his golden ones.

Then the black wings spread and caught the wind and it was gone. Thongor lay gasping in the snow, the sword fallen from his nerveless hand.

Agony lanced through him as circulation returned to his half-frozen body. Hot blood went pumping through numb flesh; he shook his head dully, trying to waken his sluggish, frozen brain.

He had attained manhood, after all.

He had gone up on the heights alone, and there the vision had come to him, and he had seen his totem-beast, and learned his True Name.

And he was blest above all the warriors of his tribe since time began: for the beast of his vision was the Black Hawk of Valkarth itself, the symbol of his race. And he knew then that his destiny would be stranger and more wondrous and more terrible than that of other men.

And he had seen a prophecy, too.

He had seen the Black Hawk fight and slay the Snow Bear. The ghost-beasts had fought there on the windy heights near to the blazing stars, and from that fight the Black Hawk had borne away the victory.

He drank down cold wine and rested for a time.

Then he went on, to make the prophecy come true.

* * * *

It was the month of Garang in late spring, and the thaws had begun. The great snow that lay thick upon the heights and that cumbered the steep slope of the cliffs was rotten and lay loose, water trickling here and there. When he crossed over to the other side of the ridge he could look down on the valley where the tents of the Snow Bear tribe stood out black against the snow, which reddened, now, to the first shafts of dawn.

They were weary after the long battle, the Snow Bear warriors—those of them that had survived. They had killed and killed and come away with the Black Hawk treasure of mammoth-ivory and red gold and with those of the Black Hawk women and girl-children who had not been fortunate enough to die beside their men.

They had feasted long, drunk deep, and caroused lustily and late, the victorious Snow Bear warriors. And now they slept heavily, gorged on meat and blood and wine and womanflesh.

From that sleep they would not awaken.

For a long moment the boy stood, arms folded against his breast, looking down on the camp.

His face was grim and expressionless, like a mask cast in hard bronze. He was a boy in years, but the iron of manhood had entered his soul. He knew what he must do; the spirits of the dead called to him in the windy silence, and he hearkened, and bent to the task.

With the great sword he began to cut the snow away.

It was not hard to do; the growing warmth of a Northlands spring had done half the job for him. The broken masses of snow began to roll down the steep, high slopes; as they came whirling down, they broke more snow loose, and each mass became a greater mass, until at last a mountain of heavy snow poured like a ponderous white river down the cliffs to collide in thunder on the floor of the valley below.

They had put up their tents close under those cliffs, the Snow Bear warriors, to block away the wind. Now it was snow that came down upon them, not wind, and by the time the avalanche came thundering down upon the tents it weighed many tons.

It crushed them into the earth, smothered them and their treasure and the ruined, broken, empty-eyed women they had taken captive; and in that thundering white fury not one lived.

The tribes of Valkarth have a simple faith.

Only those brave warriors who face the foe, and fight, and fall in battle, only their bold spirits are borne by the War Maids to the Hall of Heroes, to feast eternity away before the throne of Father Gorm.

And what of they that die by accident in gross and drunken slumber? The shamans shrug and do not say. But they do not die the death of men, the death of warriors; the Hall of Heroes does not open to such as they. Their miserable souls slink cringing through the grey mists and cold shadows of the Underworld forever.

The vengeance of Thongor was completed.

5

Red Dawn

Morning lit the east and the stars fled, one by one, before the red shafts of dawn.

When Thongor had made certain that not a single foe had survived the avalanche, he turned away and set his face to the sun.

The task was accomplished and he had lived.

Where, now, would he go? To a valley of corpses and an empty hut, whose walls would ring no more to his father’s joyous laughter and his mother’s quiet, crooning songs?

Not there; he could not go back.

But where, then? No other tribe would take him in, for life in the Northlands was a grim, bleak struggle for existence, and every mouth that was fed meant that another must go hungry.

His people were extinct; there was nowhere for him to go.

And then it was that a verse from the old warriors’ song he had sung over his father’s grave for a dirge returned to him. And he thought of the Southlands, of the Dakshina, the lush jungle-countries that lay beside the warm waters of the Gulf, beyond the Mountains of Mommur to the south.

There, bright young cities glittered in the bold sun, with green gardens, and laughing girls. There, fiery kings and princes contended in mighty wars, and kingdoms lay ripe and ready for the taking. He thought of gold and gems, of fruit warm from the sun, of whirling battles on the green plains, of dark-eyed, barbaric women…

And he set the great broad sword back in its scabbard, and drank deep of the red wine, watching dawn rise up over the edges of the world to fill the land with light; and he set his face towards the south, that last of the Black Hawk warriors.

And he passed from sight, down the hill-slope, striding with long steps towards the place where the great range of purple mountains marched across the world from west to east.

His heart lifted within him, for the night was over. And as he strode from view, he lifted his voice and sang again that warriors’ song…

Out there, beyond the setting sun,

Are kingdoms waiting to be won!

And crowns, and women, gold and wine—

Courage! And hold the battleline!

THE DEVIL’S CRYPT, by E. Hoffmann Price

I.

Satan’s Footprints

Guidebook tourists to Southern France concentrate on Biarritz; but those who love unspoiled antiquity prefer Bayonne, that gray-walled city that basks in the warmth of the Pyrenees and guards the road to Spain. The moat that girdles the citadel is dry, and the drawbridges are no longer serviceable; but at sunrise, when the Lachepaillet Wall and the cathedral spires seem floating on banks of low-lying river mists from the Nive and the Adour, Bayonne is a hashish dream rather than a city.

France and Spain, England and Navarre, have contended for possession of that fortress; and before them, the Moors occupied that old city which was once the encampment of Roman legions; but it is only at night that one remembers the crypts and passages that undermine the citadel, and senses that the soil, which for centuries has drunk the blood of defender and invader alike, is still thirsty.

Bayonne is an old gray sphinx, somnolently smiling through the veils of her mystery.

Two men emerged from the Lachepaillet Gate as the cathedral clock struck eleven. They were bareheaded, and in full evening dress. Davis Barrett, the younger, was tall, bronzed, and rugged as the massive masonry of the walls. The elder was grizzled, with fine, stern features and bristling, close-cropped hair, which gleamed white in the moonlight. It was no promenade to continue a private discussion that would have been disturbed by the laughter and music and tingling glasses in José Guevara Millamediana’s luxurious apartment; they walked with expectant, searching alertness; and the elder was perturbed, as though he feared to find what they sought.

“Why,” demanded Barrett, “do you think you’ll find Louise here, of all places?”

“Her apartment, just a block from Don José’s, must have been her destination, but she’s not there. And since she left without her cloak, she must have intended to return in a few minutes. As it is —”

D’Artois shrugged, regarded his friend. Barrett glanced up toward the parapet along which ran rue Lachepaillet.

“She could have slipped,” he admitted.

“Precisely, my friend,” replied Pierre d’Artois. “With a bit too much of Don José’s wine—a moment of dizziness, a misstep in the mist—there’s no guard rail up there.”

Barrett agreed. It was logical; yet he sensed that his companion had withheld more than he had expressed. He shivered in anticipation of the end of what had started as a casual courtesy to allay the misgivings of Yvonne Marigny concerning the unduly prolonged absence of her sister, Louise.

They bounded the swelling curve of the bastion that marks the turn of the wall toward the Gate of Spain. Barrett’s heart and breath for a moment stopped as he abruptly halted, frozen by the horror that confronted them.

The gray sphinx had lifted her veil, and revealed not her seduction, but her terror and darkness.

A woman lay on the sandy bottom of the dry moat. Fright had so hideously transfigured her face that it was her scarlet gown and blue-black hair and silver lamé slippers rather than the olive-tinted features which Barrett recognized. He saw how Louise Marigny had died, and tried to convince himself that it was illusion, and the fantasy of a moon-haunted night.

“Pierre—look at her throat! Look at —” His voice cracked, and for a moment failed. Louise Marigny’s throat had been terribly mangled, as by a beast of prey. Barrett resolutely denied the thoughts that followed his first impression.

D’Artois, his seamed features pale and drawn, nodded.

“My friend, look again. You have seen but half of it.”

Barrett wondered what further horror there could be; but his gray eyes followed the old man’s commanding gesture and saw the footprints of that which had roamed by moonlight.

Man, beast, or devil, its feet were webbed; yet for all the resemblance of the tracks to those of some monstrous aquatic fowl of aeons past, there was that which suggested a hybrid combining the feet of an anthropoid with those of a web-footed bird, or bird-like reptile.

“And the prints end after a few paces,” muttered d’Artois.

“It might have jumped to the bank,” countered Barrett, making a final effort to lend a touch of sanity to the outrageous implications of the suddenly ending trail.

D’Artois shook his head.

“Impossible. Facing the way its tracks indicate, it would have had to clear the moat by leaping crabwise. It must have flown away.”

“Good Lord! A bird with feet that large! Or a winged reptile—couldn’t possibly be!” Barrett was thinking of the pterodactyl, that flying, reptilian slayer which has been extinct for uncounted thousands of years.

D’Artois for a moment studied the uncanny trail.

“Something worse than any honest reptile,” he muttered somberly. Then, to Barrett: “Let’s notify the Sûreté. At once.”

Barrett was glad to leave that sinister spot; but as d’Artois turned: “Pierre, one of us should watch here until the police arrive.”

“There is no time to waste in courtesies to the dead,” he countered. “And I may need your assistance. Allons!”

And presently, passing the Lachepaillet Gate, they ascended the slope, skirted the parapet, then turned down rue Tour de Sault, near whose end was the 13th-Century ruin which d’Artois had restored and modernized, making of it a town house wherein he was not only comfortable, but content in being in the heart of the old city he loved so well.

D’Artois led the way to his study on the second floor, stepped to the telephone, and called the Prefect of Police. The machine gun sputter of d’Artois’s French was too much for Barrett, but he caught a phrase from time to time, and the incredulous horror of the Prefect’s voice as it filtered faintly from the receiver.

“He will make plaster casts of the footprints; he will measure the stride; he will look for bits of hair, thread, lint,” d’Artois enumerated as he replaced the instrument. Then, with an expansive gesture, “but he will find nothing!”

Barrett set down the decanter of Vieux Armagnac, whose level he had appreciably pulled down while listening to d’Artois remarks. The fiery liquor burned out the chills that had raced up and down his spine.

“You haven’t much respect for the Prefect,” he said with something approaching a smile. D’Artois’s extensive studies in criminology and psychology at times made him critical of the Sûreté.

“This is something which transcends scientific crime detection,” the old man countered. “It is not a case of an assassin disguising his feet with something which will leave an outlandish footprint. Yet that is what Monsieur le Préfet will attempt to prove, and he will fail.

“But I will approach from another angle.”

As he spoke, d’Artois, with swift gesture, swept his desk clear of its accumulated debris. Then he laid out a sheet of paper and with a compass drew a circle which he divided into twelve equal sectors. That done, he took from a bookcase a thin volume whose pages were divided into columns. It was an ephemeris.

“Mon ami,” explained d’Artois in response to Barrett’s exclamation, “astronomical tables are not exclusively used for navigation. An ephemeris, you recollect, is also used by astrologers.”

“I am inquiring into the planetary aspects. In the meantime, do you swill the rest of my brandy. Your stomach doubtless needs settling.”

Barrett selected a cigar from d’Artois’s humidor; then, his curiosity overcoming him, he peered over the old man’s shoulder, watching him enter astrological symbols in the twelve sectors of the circle. The cigar had accumulated less than an inch of ash when d’Artois thrust back his chair.

“I see more than murder and mutilation,” he declared. “I see a sinister configuration that cries out of an old and malignant magic. Neptune, in the Eighth House, indicates death by strange spiritual causes. And look at the position of Saturn, the lord of those who follow subterranean pursuits; Uranus, the sovereign of thaumaturgists and black magicians; and over all is the evil aspect of the moon, the mother of sorcery.”

“Still and all, Pierre,” interjected Barrett, perplexed by the astrological jargon, “you’ve only repeated what we already know. We saw it was uncanny and horrible. Anyway, this astrology business —”

“Has been degraded by charlatans, I grant,” snapped d’Artois. “But it is none the less a true science, and only limited by the intelligence of the investigator.

“I am looking into the background of this monstrous crime. And the first move is to seek underground, a black magician working in some of the hidden vaults beneath the city. Check up on all those known or suspected of having occult connections. Thus we have already eliminated all common criminals, n’est-ce pas?”

Barrett, impressed by his friend’s solemnity, conceded the point, outrageous as it was to hear a sane, hard-bitten old soldier and scholar to speak of black magic as an actual menace; but d’Artois’s ensuing assertion left Barrett too astonished even to protest.

“And the first of these devil mongers and dabblers in the occult that I will investigate is our charming host of the evening, Don José. He is the head of a clique that has gathered in Bayonne. On the surface, they seem to be harmless cranks who babble of telepathy, mysticism, and the like; but tonight’s tragedy confirms my contention that modern Bayonne is living up to its ancient reputation for being a nest of malignant occultists and necromancers!”

“Good God, Pierre!” Barrett finally contrived to ejaculate. “Why—that’s utterly impossible —”

“So was the gruesome tragedy in the moat,” retorted d’Artois, his blue eyes cold and glittering as sword points by moonlight. “And wait till I tell you the rest: Yvonne and Louise are twins. If there is one iota of truth in astrology, Yvonne will succumb, or at the best, narrowly escape the doom that overtook her sister.

“Their horoscopes, while, of course, not identical, would be so similar that both would be susceptible to the occult evil that is stalking tonight. The stars have warned us. You watch the living while I set out to trip up the monster responsible for that ghastly crime. Hurry—before it’s too late!”

Barrett’s last remnant of skepticism melted before his friend’s unwavering conviction. He followed d’Artois to the street, and through the river mists that billowed from the Nive and marched up rue Tour de Sault like a phantom army.

II.

The Beast from the Crypt

D’ Artois’s car was parked near Don José’s house. “I will not only need it tonight,” explained d’Artois as they hurried along rue Lachepaillet, “but we must also get Mademoiselle Yvonne—get her away from that party. That Spaniard —”

“But I don’t see how he could be connected with it,” contended Barrett. “He was there, all the time, among his guests. Yvonne just stepped out for a moment for a breath of air, or —”

“Imbécile!” snorted d’Artois. “That’s just the point: Don José being always in sight of his guests gives him a perfect but deceptive alibi.”

“But that doesn’t prove —”

“Of course it proves nothing. But if you’d read that fellow’s book on Tibetan magic, and heard the rumors of his doings near the roof of the world, you would think twice, pardieu!

“Alone, I am handicapped. But fortunately there is in Bayonne an occultist who can help me. A profound scholar whose researches can perhaps save the day: Sidi Abdurrahman, an Oriental mystic and Chêla, a disciple of an occult Adept.”

Barrett shuddered as they passed the bastion of the Lachepaillet wall and heard the detectives, already on the case, and the crisp, incisive voice of the Prefect who had appeared to take charge in person. And then, presently, they heard music, and laughter, the mirth of Don José’s guests. Barrett nerved himself to ascend the stairs and enter the glow of lights and the mocking presence of gaiety.

Yvonne, they learned, had left Don José’s house only a few minutes after d’Artois and Barrett had gone in search of Louise.

“Por Dios, Señor,” said the courtly Spaniard, ”she fancied her sister was ill and went home to join her. I trust that you will present my compliments and regrets to the lovely Louise. I am indeed sorry that she had to leave so early. Is it possible that she may return for her wrap?”

Don José was mocking them; and Barrett, remembering d’Artois dreadful surmises, sought to deny the thought that Yvonne, like her sister, had gone out into the mist and the moonlight to meet a horrible death; nor was he reassured by the fierce glitter in d’Artois’s eyes and the twitch of his waxed moustache as he paused a moment before replying, “I will take her wrap, and leave it on my way past their apartment.”

D’Artois and the Spaniard regarded each other as though they had crossed swords instead of glances; and during the exchange Barrett sensed a sudden tension, a current of deadly animosity, like a dagger biting through a shroud of silk. He saw Don José’s cheeks for an instant lose their olive tint; and the dark eyes, troubled by the frosty, unwavering stare of d’Artois, seemed eager to shift.

“Sacré salaud! hissed d’Artois, ”you know she will never need her wrap. I am busy this evening—and you know why. But I will meet you, with sword or pistol. Soon.”

Don José recoiled before the insult and the vague accusation. Then he shrugged, smiled blandly, twisted his black moustache.

“Señor, I have not the least idea why you insult me, or what you are implying. Neither am I interested. But if you live long enough, and your courage is equal to the occasion, I will be happy to meet you with any weapons you may prefer.”

The stilted, formal speech would have seemed absurd to Barrett had he not sensed the deadly, blazing hatred that flashed for an instant from Don José’s eyes.

“Mordieu, cordieu, pardieu!” retorted d’Artois, advancing a pace. “If anything happens to Mademoiselle Yvonne, I will not meet you with weapons—I will dismember you by hand.”

They exchanged bows with punctilious formality; and then d’Artois turned and led the way to the Mercedes.

“I am more than ever convinced that in some way he’s responsible. He, or one of his devil mongering clique,” declared d’Artois as he took the wheel.

“But how could he? It’s utterly incredible —”

“Science scoffs at sorcery, glibly explains its manifestations as hysterical hypnosis,” countered d’Artois. “But that does not make it any the less magic. Remember what you saw in the moat and how the horoscope confirmed our first impressions. Certainly I am at loss, but Sidi Abdurrahman’s years of study will solve the riddle.

“Maybe,” conceded Barrett, “you’re right. Oddly enough, your remarks didn’t puzzle him as they should have.”

“By no means strange,” retorted d’Artois as they drew up before the apartment of the two sisters. “He knew that I knew.”

A sturdy, white-haired Basque maid admitted them. Yvonne Marigny received them in the living room. Her olive skin was deadly pale, and her dark eyes burned with an unnatural light.

“Yes. The Sûreté notified me, just a few minutes after I arrived,” she said with a calmness that was more devastating than any outburst of grief. “I had a premonition of evil when Louise slipped out for a breath of air. And when I sent you to look for her—mon Dieu! It was too late.”

“But why did you leave before we returned?”

Yvonne shook her head.

“I don’t know. Just an irresistible urge to get away. To go home. Like the instinct that urges an animal to creep off to its den and die.”

She shuddered, made a perplexed, despairing gesture.

“So…you were almost driven from there,” said d’Artois, speaking very slowly, and glancing meaningly at Barrett. Then his eyes flashed toward the windows and their closely spaced wrought-iron bars. He nodded approvingly; and Barrett caught the unspoken thought.

“Mon vieux, do you stay here with Mademoiselle Yvonne. I am going to get Sidi Abdurrahman. He lives out beyond the Mousserole Wall, not far off the river road.”

Then, as Barrett accompanied him to the door, he continued in a whisper, “The same strange, unreasoning compulsion that sent Louise to her death may send Yvonne wandering by moonlight. Don’t let her out of the house. Hold her. Tie her, if necessary!”

The door clicked closed behind d’Artois; and a moment later they heard the soft whir of gears.

The proximity of tragedy depressed Barrett. He resolutely directed his eyes away from the barred window, and the moon-drenched mists beyond, and sought to banish the memory of what he had seen in the moat; but a strange fascination forced him to gaze into the ghastly glamour of the night. Barrett shivered, rose from his chair, intending to draw the shades to screen that ill-omened view. Yvonne nodded, sensing his motive, and smiled wanly through the tears that glistened in her dark eyes.

“Monsieur Barrett,” said Yvonne, “this is all so terribly unreal…it is like an awful nightmare. It seems as though all the evil that has ever existed is concentrating about us.”

Thus she described the feeling that Barrett had vainly sought to dispel. He had assured himself that it was but natural for Yvonne, grief-stricken and horrified as she was, to infect him with her own emotions; and yet, that reassurance by no means convinced him.

He noted that the lights were dimming. He frowned perplexedly, and resumed his seat, instead of drawing the shade.

“Bum voltage regulation,” he insisted; but Barrett’s intuition told him that the trouble was not electrical. Then he saw that wisps of mist were swirling and drifting in through the window.

Yvonne stared into the coals of the grate, whose ardent glow had suddenly cooled. The girl herself had become lethargic, as though her spirit had left her. For a moment Barrett felt utterly alone. It was as though Yvonne were a lovely simulacrum and not a woman who shrank shuddering into the depths of her spacious chair.

Gray vapors swirled and surged through the room. A chilling breeze urged the mist whorl into sweeping spirals; mists that came neither from the Nive nor the Adour, nor any earthly river. Barrett thought again of d’Artois’s solemn declaration, “Saturn, the lord of subterranean places, Neptune, who governs strange spiritual enemies, and malignant Uranus, rule this night.”

Barrett stepped to the center of the room, where he could see the double windows that overlooked the Lachepaillet Walk. He saw a monstrous shape peering at him as, perched on the sill, it clutched the window-bars and slowly wrenched them apart.

The walls had become obscured with dense, vibrant mist banks, so that only in the center of the room was any light left. The incandescent lamps were now a dull, somber red that vainly sought to filter through the surging haze.

The creature’s feet identified it as the monster of the moat.

Barrett saw now what had torn Louise’s throat and drunk her blood, then taken three long strides and —

It had spread its membranous bat-wings and soared into the moonlight, and thence to whatever unknown hell had sent it forth. The face was anthropoid, but malignant, beyond the bestial wrath of any honest ape. The body was hybrid, neither reptilian nor simian: a blasphemy and an outrage whose hideously confused anatomy was all the more abhorrent in its mingling of hair and scales.

The feet were almost human at the heel, but branched into three claw-like toes, joined by webs. Beast it was, yet bird, and reptile. The hands were similarly formed, with arms long enough to accommodate the broad sweep of the membranous wings.

Barrett knew that the creature had no thought for him. He knew that he could then and there stride safe and harmless through the ever-thickening mist banks, past the somber, vengeful forms that leered out of the haze, and pass on, unmolested. The beast ignored him. It advanced with a slow, fluent, serpentine motion that was entirely out of accord with its grotesque, awkward bulk. It paused, ready to spring forward and rend Yvonne’s throat, mutilate her as it had her sister.

The Basque maid, alarmed by Yvonne’s single shriek of mortal terror, came running in, stared in incredulous horror. Then she screamed and collapsed on the threshold.

As the monster lunged toward Yvonne, who was paralyzed by the apparition, Barrett seized a heavy chair and lashed out, shattering it across the simian skull. The beast recoiled, sank back to its haunches, shook its head as though bewildered.

Barrett stood for an instant regarding the fragments that remained in his grasp. Then in a flare of rage born of terror and outraged reason, he charged, driving the splintered stumps full into the monster’s face.

The assault was vain. He had disconcerted the beast more than he had shaken it. It lashed out with arms that reached almost to its ankles, and enfolded Barrett with its shroud of membranous wings. It screeched and hissed in inarticulate fury. Its long carnivorous teeth sought his throat, even as Barrett, beyond terror or reason, evaded the fangs and sought to throttle the beast, and tear it to pieces with his bare hands.

It was a mad dream of combat in a steaming, prehistoric jungle. The reptilian exhalation of the monster, its squeaking, gibbering wrath and the stifling embrace of its wings, drove Barrett to an insane rage. The thing was strong, but not beyond the strength of human wrath spurred to frenzy; and the very horror of its presence stirred up reserves of destructive fury whose force was dimly echoed in Barrett’s ears as he heard the splintering of furniture that crashed and fell into fragments as he and the monster rolled and leaped, broke, and closed in again, seeking each other’s throat.

And yet for all his rage-inspired strength and agility, Barrett vainly sought to rend that tough, scaly body which yielded instead of tearing or breaking as he applied in succession, one after another savage trick of wrestling, and murderous holds practiced by Japanese experts. Though, it could not quite overcome Barrett, it resisted the full flame of his fury. Its endurance was unflagging, and its counter attacks fresh and vigorous as from the start. It seemed to gain strength from Barrett’s blood, which streamed from a score of cuts and scratches and long, ragged furrows gouged by its teeth.

Barrett’s strength at last was consumed by the futility of his rage. As in a confused dream, his mind began double-tracking: one half still a vortex of flaming wrath, the other impersonally pondering on d’Artois’s astrological observations. He knew that this division of consciousness heralded the end of his resistance; and exerting an ultimate, despairing effort, sought to sink his teeth into the monster’s throat. But the mists blackened, and the enemy evaded him. His arms clutched a void of abysmal coldness shot with burning flashes of scarlet and orange and dazzling, metallic blue. Then it seemed that he was falling swiftly through unbounded space…and as from a great distance he heard a long drawn wail of uttermost terror.

III.

The Savor of Blood

When Barrett finally regained consciousness he saw that the lights were bright again. D’Artois, kneeling at his side, was sponging his wounds.

“…all in the approach,” a calm, deep voice was saying. “Your friend—though God alone knows how—withstood the beast by pure force of will to slay. But that was misguided effort.”

Barrett with a sudden effort propped himself up on his elbow to confront the person who so lightly disposed of that nightmare battle with that monster from an unknown hell; but his strength was unequal to his curiosity, and he sank back to the floor.

D’Artois helped him to his feet. Barrett, still dazed, for a moment had assumed that d’Artois’s presence left victory to be taken for granted; but a second glance at his friend’s grim features and despair haunted eyes told him the truth.

“Where is she?” he demanded, stubbornly resisting his fears. “Good Lord, did it —”

And then Barrett saw d’Artois’s companion, Sidi Abdurrahman. Despite the freshness of the occultist’s bronzed skin, he seemed incredibly ancient. Barrett’s first impression was that some solemn Assyrian colossus had come to life. The neatly trimmed, square-cut beard added to the resemblance; only the tall miter was lacking. For an instant Barrett’s despair subsided; and then he remembered that d’Artois had failed.

“Where is she?” he repeated. “We can’t stand here, idle.”

“We do not know—yet,” replied the Chêla, unperturbed by Barrett’s impatient outburst. “But there are ways of finding out. First, be so good as to clear the floor.”

Barrett shot a dubious glance at d’Artois. His friend’s answering nod was reassuring. And while they cleared away the wreckage of the furniture, Sidi Abdurrahman laid off a circle which he subdivided into seven sectors, and about which he drew a concentric circle.

“As I was saying a few moments ago,” resumed the occultist, “fighting that monster was misdirected effort. We must find its master; for even though we destroyed the beast, body and soul, he would create —”

“Soul?” exclaimed Barrett. “That —”

“Yes. We are confronted by the recrudescence of an ancient evil that began among the Black Magicians of Atlantis. It is written in the occult records: The Atlanteans had become magicians who created monsters with the strength of the brute and the cunning of the savage; and these they ensouled with the most malignant of elementals, who became guards and messengers, the terrible symbols of the power of the Kings of Darkness.

“To bind these dread beings more closely to their service, they offered them sacrifices of slain animals and slain men. Fifty thousand years passed: and then the Dragons of Wisdom sent a doom forth from Holy Shamballah.“

“Is that creature fifty thousand years old?” wondered Barrett.

The Chêla smiled and shook his head.

“That is only the time during which the Black Masters were at the height of their power. They were destroyed something like 850,000 years ago when the word went forth from Shamballah. And as it was done then, so must we do now: make the slave betray the master,” continued Sidi Abdurrahman as he drew a seven-pointed star in the innermost circle.

“We will bribe and drug that monster with blood. It shall find its doom in the very evil by which it has lived all these ages; it cannot resist the bait; and instead of warning its master, it will lead us to him.”

“For a Mohammedan,” whispered Barrett as the Chêla reached for a small copper bowl which he had brought with him, “he certainly is unorthodox.”

“Mordieu! Who said he was a Moslem?” countered d’Artois. “His name signifies nothing. He gets his knowledge from study of occult records which are the fountainhead of learning, and transcend race and religion.”

Sidi Abdurrahman set the bowl at the center of the circles; then he cast into it the contents of a small packet: a fine, bluish powder.

That done, he drew a dagger, saying, “This will be its last drink of blood! And it cannot refuse the bait; for such is the law of its kind.”

But before the keen blade touched the vein of the Chêla’s forearm, Barrett interposed.

“Let me in on this,” he said, thrusting forward his own arm.

“No. I have an old debt to pay. One contracted in a former life, by a former failure. Just is the Wheel, and unswerving and this is my debt.”

With the evening’s earlier madness, Barrett found the occultist’s reference to a previous incarnation entirely rational. He stepped back as the blade bit, and the old man’s blood spurted redly into the copper bowl.

When the bowl was filled to the brim, d’Artois stepped forward and with a handkerchief and lead pencil devised a tourniquet to check the flow.

They watched the occultist bow ceremonially to the cardinal points of the compass, and make ritual gestures. They heard him intone, “The hour has struck, and the black night is ready…let their destiny be accomplished.…”

And then Barrett could no longer understand the Chêla’s utterance. The sonorous, majestic intonation was in a tongue so foreign and archaic that it seemed not even remotely related to any speech of mankind.

They stood, poised and expectant, watching the copper bowl and the blood that glowed like a monstrous carbuncle. They became aware of another presence in the room. A grayish vapor finally coalesced above the red surface; and then as Sidi Abdurrahman’s great voice thundered the ultimate, triumphant syllables of that age-old occult chant, the materialization became complete.

Barrett started in sudden alarm as he recognized at the center of the circle the same beast which had so nearly overcome him; but it was now translucent and unsubstantial, a phantom replica of the living horror. It knelt submissively, wings folded over its back as though it were a bird of prey subdued and garbed in the mockery of human form; and as with bestial eagerness it lapped up the bowl of blood, its body seemed to become more dense. A musty, reptilian stench pervaded the room.

When the bowl was empty, Sidi Abdurrahman’s arm flashed out in a commanding gesture. The monster shrank as from the touch of red hot iron, then stepped from the circle.

D’Artois slipped an automatic pistol into Barrett’s hand. The cold metal reminded him that at least a shred of reality remained.

“There will be men, later,” d’Artois explained. Then, anticipating Barrett’s question: “When this is over, I will tell you the answer—if we survive.”

The grotesque procession filed down the hall and to the deserted rue Lachepaillet. The monster shambled down the street and at the end of some fifty yards, crossed toward the parapet, then stepped into a narrow doorway. They followed it down a steep, rubbish-littered stairway that led to a vaulted chamber which, by the beam of d’Artois’s flashlight, Barrett recognized as a long untenanted dungeon; and then, on its hands and knees, the apparition crept through a low archway. It emerged on the bottom of the moat.

“Ah…this is not entirely a surprise,” muttered d’Artois as he noted the direction taken by their spectral guide. “And we’ll soon see whether Don José is its master.”

After passing Porte d’Espagne, they ascended the steep bank of the moat, and thence toward the somber grove at the Spring of St. Léon, where their spectral guide turned toward a casemate which was barely visible in the shadow of a solitary, gigantic tree.

Sidi Abdurrahman halted at the entrance of the casemate. His majestic features were tense; and the fixity of his gaze betokened the concentration whereby he maintained his control of the monster. The occultist gestured toward the passageway which led straight into the heart of the knoll that rose from the level of the clearing.

“Part of Vauban’s fortifications?” wondered Barrett, as by the beam of d’Artois’s flashlight they stepped into the darkness.

“For a distance, yes,” agreed d’Artois. “But before we are through, we will enter a place which neither Vauban nor any other honest engineer ever built.”

Although the apparition was faintly luminous in the darkness, Barrett was certain that the Chêla followed it by some sense other than the five which normal humanity has.

“How did he call that thing out of thin air?” whispered Barrett, to whom the entire uncanny proceeding seemed like the fantasy of a nightmare.

“He provided it with a body, very much as a spiritualistic medium furnishes the substance for a materialization,” explained d’Artois. “Its visible form is made up of part of the etheric double which every living creature has. And in order to maintain the form that the creature is using, Sidi Abdurrahman is exerting a tremendous effort, and drawing on an incredible reserve of psychic and physical energy. Few can endure the strain of lending too much vital force: which accounts for the eventual collapse of most spiritualist mediums.

“The force that animates this materialization of the monster is the elemental spirit that ensouled the body of the beast that killed Louise. This which we now see is not its physical body; and thus, being bound in an artificially created etheric form, the elemental cannot warn its master of our approach—ah…we’re getting somewhere!”

The passageway had opened into what seemed to be a squad room for that portion of the outer defenses of the citadel. Sidi Abdurrahman and his guide had passed through an opening which pierced the further wall of the chamber.

“This is where Vauban’s work ends,” muttered d’Artois. “Beyond—God alone knows!”

The opening had been roughly cut through the masonry. Beyond it was a low tunnel whose spade-marked walls showed that it had been recently dug. At the end of a dozen paces it terminated at the upper landing of a staircase which was not the work of any military engineer. It had been relieved of the earth which had buried it for uncounted ages—brought to light again by the black master who had sent death stalking in the moonlight.

An aura of incalculable antiquity oppressed them as they stepped to the threshold of the blackness below.

Flight succeeded flight, until they arrived in a vaulted passage whose walls were buttressed with pilasters of masonry whose prodigious bulk dwarfed the mighty columns of Karnack.

“Good Lord!” whispered Barrett, awed by the monumental architecture. “It looks as though we’ve gone beyond time and reason and —”

“Mon ami,” countered d’Artois grimly, “the evening is young. Listen —”

Far ahead of them, out of the age-old darkness, came the muttering of drums and the wailing of pipes. Sidi Abdurrahman halted, gestured.

“He will stay here to hold the messenger,” explained d’Artois. “Allons!”

As they advanced along the passage they heard chanting, and the antiphonal responses of a ritual. And finally, as they rounded a turn, the corridor opened into a vault which was pervaded by a vibrant bluish glow.

The dome, supported by colossal pillars, swelled high above those who flitted to and fro in the satanic twilight of great glowing orbs whose quivering radiance was beclouded by fumes that rose stiflingly sweet from tall censer-tripods. They were warped and gnarled, those subterranean dwellers, long-armed, hairy survivors of a race that had vanished aeons before man in his present form appeared.

One among them, however, was tall and towering, and resplendent in a robe that flamed and coruscated as though woven of gems; and on his head he wore a conical miter of beaten silver. At his gesture the drumming and piping subsided and the acolytes ranged themselves on each side of an arch that pierced the further extremity of the vault. The arch was veiled by a heavy damask drape of crimson shot with gold.

“The master of the show,” whispered d’Artois. And then, as the tall, resplendent leader turned: “And I was right—Don José!”

The dabbler in forbidden arts had finally descended to become high priest of those subterranean beast-men. Barrett shuddered as he thought of what their food might be, since they did not appear by daylight to eat of what grew beneath the sun. He wondered whether they had always lived in those archaic vaults, or whether they had but recently been revived from suspended animation —

And then the crimson drapes parted like flames torn by the breath of some nether hell. Barrett knew then that Sidi Abdurrahman had guided them well.

In the niche exposed by the parting of the gold-shot curtains was a lotus blossom carved of rock that glistened with the glassy luster of lacquer-ware. In the heart of the black lotus sat Yvonne, eyes veiled by her long lashes, arms crossed on her breast, head slightly inclined. Her fine features had the tranquility of the drugged, or of the quiet dead.

Barrett’s hand flashed to his pistol butt as he gathered himself to spring from the concealing shadows; but d’Artois restrained him.

“They will cut us to pieces with their knives,” whispered the old man. “This calls for strategy.”

The odds were twenty to one. Though they emptied their pistols and extra clips, the survivors could still overwhelm them; and the enemy had to be exterminated if Yvonne were to be taken from that satanic vault.

“Then let’s go back and get reinforcements,” suggested Barrett.

D’Artois shook his head.

“Maybe, maybe not. Better see what this show signifies. We might not be able to return in time to —”

“What’s that—over there?” demanded Barrett. “Good Lord! Did it get away from Sidi Abdurrahman?”

He indicated something that stirred in the shadow of a pillar at the right of the altar; and then he saw that despite its similarity to the beast which had overcome him, it was distinctly another creature.

“A new monster about to be ensouled by an elemental, to be a companion to the one that killed Louise,” explained d’Artois. “And Yvonne is here to provide the blood offering—remember Sidi Abdurrahman’s remarks?”

“Let’s go out blazing!” growled Barrett; but again d’Artois restrained him.

“Not yet,” murmured d’Artois. “We have to get her out of here.”

But despite the calmness of his voice, his features were pale, and perspiration cropped out on his forehead as in desperation he searched his brain for some device to accomplish the impossible. Sidi Abdurrahman, holding the first monster helpless, was out of the question as an ally; but now, if ever, they needed that great occultist’s aid.

“He won’t fail us,” d’Artois said. “And we’ll see our moment.…”

Two acolytes were advancing toward the altar. One had a bowl of burnished copper, the other, a long-bladed knife. And as they took their posts, Don José began chanting.

“Bal-Taratan, come forth! Bal-Karadîn, come forth! From the blackness and from Avichi, Dark Lords, come forth!”

The braying and bellowing of strange wind instruments and the savage thunder of drums was bestial as the sluggish shape that crouched whimpering by the altar, awaiting the elemental that was to emerge from Avichi, the eighth and nethermost hell.

“God…that’s awful,” muttered Barrett as he watched the weaving gestures of Don José and his acolytes.

Brass clanged. The deep, hoarse, booming blasts of horns shook the vault. Mists were writhing like phantom serpents basking in the rays of a phantom sun that revived them from the chill of night.

“Bal-Taratan! Bal-Karadîn! I open the Gateway! I mark the Path!” intoned Don José, his voice rich and clear above that lustful bellowing and the sharp clack-clack of pebbles rattled in a yellowed skull. The acolytes, gesturing now like automatons, stared glassily, unaware of the shapes that were becoming visible.

“Bal-Taratan! Bring him forth! Bal-Karadîn! Bring him forth! I have a house for him! And for him I have food! Ia Bal-Taratan! Ia Bal-Karadîn!”

And as Don José paused at the enunciation of the names of the Lords of the Eighth Hell, the acolytes hissed a phrase that was a dying, evil echo of those dread words.

“A feast of blood! A drink of blood!”

The acolytes responded, “Yea, the fumes of blood! The fumes, and the savor!”

The mist was now thicker, and its coldness had become folds of reptilian foulness. D’Artois and Barrett crouched in the angle of the pilaster, stricken by the sorcery of that evil chant. The terrific blasting of that awful rhythm had numbed and paralyzed body and mind.

“Yea, the fume of blood, and its savor!” thundered the chorus.

They were weaving a red symphony. Blood…blood…red mists shot with streaks of blackness that coruscated, and blackness that flamed! There was a stirring and chirping and twittering, and the flapping as of monstrous wings beating the upper air of the vault.

D’Artois’s cheeks were gray, and Barrett’s face was distorted from the acute physical misery induced by that terrific reiteration and weaving of words. His teeth were clenched, and sweat poured from his brow.

The words of the chant now became strange syllables whose fusion and blending gave a meaning that transcended language, striking into the very souls of the two who crouched in the shadows, binding them with a hideous fascination.

The bowl was ready. And the knife was rising.…

IV.

The Lords of Fire

A solemn command came from the chaos of sound: “Bring him forth, Bal-Taratan! Bal-Karadîn!”

Don José’s voice was the final assault to pierce the veil, and open the Gateway for the elemental that was to possess that hideous body; but it served still another purpose. D’Artois flinched from the anguish of the impact; the shock wrenched into life his numbed muscles, his stupefied brain; and his wrath, suddenly released, sent his hand flashing to his holster —

“Smack-smack-smack!” The acolyte with the knife pitched forward. The one who held the bowl dropped to the flags.

“Gardez-vous!” shouted d’Artois, with his left hand jerking Barrett to his feet. “Pick them off! Steady, now!”

The ranks of the acolytes wavered before the deadly fire, broke in panic.

“Missed him!” growled Barrett, as Don José flattened behind a pedestal and a bullet ricocheted, whining into the shadows.

The enemy reformed and charged, knives advanced. They flashed forward like serpents, darting and zigzagging, hunched forward in a crouch.

Some jerked suddenly upward as a slug pitched them end for end.

Others, riddled, charged on, to collapse within a pace of their mark.

But many lived.

“Give me a clip!”

“Fini!” snapped d’Artois. “Take a knife —

His pistol for another instant chattered like a machine gun; then came a sudden silence. The enemy paused, wondering; then they understood, and closed in.

Hoarse breathing, and the slip-slip of bare feet that wove in and out, devil-dancers darting back and forth with flickering blades.

“Too many,” gasped Barrett, during a breathing space when the fury of their concerted assault drove the enemy back in momentary panic. “Get us—yet—get that—get José —”

D’Artois, master swordsman, might with his uncanny skill bore through the press and close in with the high priest. No other resource remained.

But the voice of Don José urged his beast-men to the attack, and the overwhelming wave surged resistlessly forward.

“Back!” yelled d’Artois. “Before they surround us. Into the niche. Ca!”

Even as he spoke, he flashed forward—then back, and on guard again, blade dripping afresh, hand ready to strike again, slash through some weak spot in the dense line.

Another command from Don José. The attack withdrew, and he advanced to parley.

“Ah…d’Artois,” he said, “since steel will not dislodge you, let us try —”

Suddenly his dark eyes became fixed, and his hands made rhythmic gestures. D’Artois and Barrett, caught off guard by the unaccountable action of their empty-handed enemy, faltered for an instant, perplexed. Despite the wrath of battle, their instincts for a moment restrained their attack on an unarmed man.

D’Artois was the first to recover.

“Rush him!” he cried, leaping forward. But he had waited too long.

Flames began lapping up from the paving in a crescent that imprisoned d’Artois and Barrett in its semicircle. The fires slowly converged, inch by inch, hungry blue flame relentlessly advancing.

“Hold your breath and dive through!”

“No!” shouted d’Artois, seizing Barrett by the shoulder. “It’ll burn us to cinders. Elemental fires!”

Barrett did not understand; but he read the desperation in d’Artois’s eyes.

“Resist his will. Fight his thought! If you fear, you are lost!”

“What do you mean —”

“Do as I say or you’re lost—she’s lost!”

Barrett was dismayed by that uncanny, marching flame. Above his wavering crest burned the fixed, malignant eyes of Don José. The madness of that awful night had reached its climax when blue flames were exhaled by solid flagging. But when he saw that d’Artois’s gaze was fixed, and his features composed, he gained courage.

“I defy your will and your power with my will and my force!” he heard d’Artois tensely whispering. The low murmur became rhythmic as drumbeats, and inexorable as fate. And Barrett began to repeat d’Artois’s words, halfheartedly at first, then confidently.

“I defy your will with my will, your power with my power!” he repeated.

Suddenly he felt a strange thrill of triumph surge up from within him; and for an instant the psychic concussion of the liberated force, shook him, and his dry eyes blinded as he blinked, caught a sobbing breath, and repeated, “I defy you, my will against your will.…”

He saw that the flames no longer advanced. The intolerable heat scorched and singed, but no longer increased.

The flames retreated—only by the breadth of a finger—but they retreated, beaten back by will that fought will.

And then Barrett faltered, cracking under the terrific strain.

“Can’t make it…I’m done in!”

They heard a cry of triumph from beyond the wall of flame. Don José knew that his victims were helpless, and stood waiting for the fires to close in. D’Artois and Barrett exchanged despairing glances.

“Try it!” muttered Barrett. “It’ll roast us anyway —”

D’Artois nodded, and his fingers closed on the haft of his red knife, but his occult knowledge assured him that the blade would fuse from the terrific heat.

Don José’s exultation, however, was checked as a mighty voice thundered from the passageway, “my will against your will, and my power against your power!“

It was awful in its richness and volume. Sidi Abdurrahman was chanting as he advanced, solemn, prodigious-seeming as a descending doom—a colossus of power stalking across the Border.

“I have returned to accomplish where once I failed. You escaped me, ages ago, when the Dragons of Wisdom proclaimed the black night of doom for lost Atlantis. I failed, but in the many lives I have lived since then, I have gained power against your power, and will against your will!”

Don José made a gesture. Then he found his voice, and uttered a command. The flames wavered as he spoke, then surged high as his followers clustered about him. They resisted the Chêla’s awful will—but in vain. The tips of the crescent of fire drew from the wall. Don José had lost command of the weapon he had devised; it lived on by the force that the Chêla concentrated. Flight was futile; space is nonexistent in occult combat. And the beast-men and their chief made their last desperate resistance as the flaming crescent reversed its curvature, enfolding them in its terrific embrace.

There was no outcry—only a hissing and crackling that endured but an instant. Then came the dreadful stench of searing flesh as flame, hungrier than any earthly fire, lapped with deadly swiftness, roaring, as winds lashing monstrous cliffs. A column of awful radiance burned for a moment with adamantine brilliance.

When their dazzled eyes had become accustomed to the ensuing dimness, d’Artois and Barrett emerged from their niche and strode over the blistering tiles. They were careful not to look at the spot where the flames had centered.

Sidi Abdurrahman’s august features were still transfigured, but the power was leaving him. It was only with an effort that he kept his feet as, smiling wanly, he made a gesture of benediction.

“This is the end of an old feud that started many lives ago. I was not ready for this meeting—but to save her—and you—I spoke. The Occult Masters sought to help—did help —”

He gasped, caught his breath, and with difficulty resumed, “they warned me—I could not endure the test—since I could not—receive all the force they were sending. But I could not decline —”

D’Artois caught the Chêla as he collapsed. The silence for a moment was unbroken save for the bestial whimperings of the wounded who had dropped short of the vortex of flame.

“We can do nothing for Sidi Abdurrahman,” said d’Artois. “Get Yvonne—quick! Before we all go mad!”

* * * *

AS THE SUN rose, Yvonne, revived from the drugs of the satanic ritual and quite unharmed, heard d’Artois’s narrative. Barrett, bandaged and smarting from his wounds, answered her weary smile, then turned to his friend:

“Pierre, I’m still stumped by a few things.”

“Only a few?” countered the old man with a flash of good-humored irony that for a moment struggled through the somber memory of death’s double thrust at a lovely girl and a great-hearted occultist.

“Where did he get that awful body for the elemental spirit?”

“The crypts beneath the city,” said d’Artois, “have spawned strange broods. Monstrous hybrids, perhaps archaic survivals of lost Shâlmali, revived from suspended animation by Don José. But that is an occult rather than a scientific problem.”

“After all,” said Barrett, “the final riddle is, why did anyone with Don José’s talents dabble in such ghastly studies? What motive —”

“He was following the tradition of the Black Brotherhood,” replied d’Artois. “He was moved by the lust for power given by the services of elementals. He needed familiar spirits to help him further his pursuit of dark arts. Blood alone would bind them to his will; and you know to what lengths he went.”

Yvonne shuddered at the evening’s memories, then interposed, “But why did your friend’s heroism end fatally?”

“At the best, I can only guess,” admitted d’Artois. “Despite his great learning, he was only a Chêla, not a full initiate. Thus he could not endure the forces which he called forth, and he knew that he could not. Yet he accepted the challenge.

“He created a psychic explosion whose repercussion literally blasted him to pieces. Not his physical body, but his vital forces, which were unable to withstand the strain of mastering that elemental fire.”

D’Artois paused. The silence was acute; and for a moment it seemed that they felt the presence of Sidi Abdurrahman. Finally Barrett spoke.

“He mentioned other lives —”

“According to the traditions of his order,” resumed d’Artois, “he believes in reincarnation. And it seems that in some former existence he failed in his duty, so that in the lives that followed, he sought to redeem himself.

“He stood there in the vault, holding the captured elemental a prisoner. He was oblivious to his surroundings; but when Don José called the fires down on us, the psychic impact aroused Sidi Abdurrahman and brought to his consciousness the presence of an age-old enemy of all mankind.

“But whatever the reason and however science may try to explain it, we owe our survival to Sidi Abdurrahman.”

D’Artois cleared his throat, rose, stepped to the door.

“I am an old man,” he said, “and vengeance leaves me weary. Let me therefore leave you in good hands while I rout out Monsieur le Préfet. I will have him dynamite the entrance of that accursed vault, so that no matter how ominous the stars may be, there will be no more archaic survivals coming forth in search of victims.”

And Barrett, regarding Yvonne Marigny, knew that when grief had received its due, untroubled moonlight on the Lachepaillet Wall would make the Gray Sphinx of the Pyrenees more alluring than before.

VANDIBAR NASHA IN THE COLLEGE OF SHADOWS, by Darrell Schwetizer

I

When his enemy’s servant gave him the bronze coffer shaped like a human hand, Vandibar Nasha accepted the gift politely. He did not have to open it to know that it contained the severed hand of one of his own servants, who had died hideously in a cellar beneath the enemy’s house.

The other had taken Vandibar’s piece, but the game would continue. That a little blood seeped through the hinge and stained his sleeve was the only cause for true offense. It was inelegant and unworthy, and Vandibar was, if nothing else, a fastidious man, who maintained about his person and his house a sense of unadorned, even austere, but undeniable elegance.

He gazed across the glittering sea of his guests, as they surged over the roof-garden in the twilight, beneath swaying paper lanterns. He spied his enemy, Radaces, by the punchbowl, dressed like a peacock in heat, a jumble of jewelry and multi-colored silks and, indeed, billowing feathers, his face painted and slightly streaked with intricate black and silver spirals. Radaces leaned away from the crowd, conversing with a man in a tarnished sun-mask.

Vandibar pressed gently toward them, pausing to greet guests, to laugh at their witticisms, to sample delicacies, even once stooping as a child prattled something in his ear. But still he made his way, and by the time he reached Radaces, the man in the tarnished mask was gone, something Vandibar noted with concern. He knew, though he was not supposed to, who that person was: a prince up from the Delta on an intrigue.

He confronted Radaces, still holding the hand-shaped coffer. Their eyes met. Radaces leaned forward, that none might overhear, and said, “It is death between us now.”

“I know that. I’ve found you out.”

Radaces laughed softly, and waved his hand to indicate the crowd in attendance, “But we must maintain appearances.”

“Yes, of course.”

So they stood together, host and illustrious guest, smiling at the assembled nobility of Elandisphon, the City of the River’s Bend. Above, a brilliant moon shone. It was a Goddess Moon, Shedelvendra’s Lantern, marking the springtime and the river’s rising. Therefore tonight was a time of celebration, of renewals and new unions, and, especially, of maintaining appearances.

Both he and Radaces pretended not to notice a certain young couple seated among the tumbling vines against the far wall. Vashimur, who was Vandibar’s son, furtively held the hand of Tatiane, daughter of Radaces.

Suddenly there came a commotion from the great stair that led up from the inner court of Vandibar’s house. Everyone whirled about, including Radaces.

Then Vandibar touched his enemy on the shoulder with the brazen hand. Radaces turned, startled, and Vandibar whispered, “I think it is death coming.”

Radaces’s face went pale for just an instant. But everyone was laughing as eight slaves, hugely-muscled, sweat-drenched (but perfumed), bore a palanquin up among the guests, set it down, and pulled back the canopy to reveal a cooked and stuffed crocodile bedecked with pearls, crowned with a silver wreath, its claws sheathed in gold. Vandibar’s crier announced the advent of Surat-Hemad, Lord of Death, the Devouring God, whose mouth is the night sky, whose teeth are the stars.

A murmur of amazement rippled through the crowd.

On this night, however, the crier continued, the Devourer was to be himself devoured, for the springtime is a celebration of new life.

Flower-masked page-boys ran through the crowd, handing out forks. One of the slaves produced an enormous knife and began carving.

At the first touch of the blade, flames exploded from the crocodile’s mouth. There were astonished shouts and a couple of screams. But the slave blew the flames out in a single breath, and everyone applauded, if nervously, and began devouring the Devourer.

Radaces smiled weakly. “A brilliant jest.”

“Yes. Isn’t it? But more your style than mine. I designed it with you in mind.”

“That doesn’t change anything.”

“Nothing ever does.”

Much later the dance began, and a priest and priestess whirled in the circle which had been cleared for them, their respective green and yellow streams trailing fantastically as the two of them embraced in imitation of the sacred coupling of Bel-Hemad, who brings the rain, and Shedelvendra his consort; only then could Vandibar Nasha slip away down a marble, spiralling staircase, past a stone trellis covered with night-blooming, almost luminescent flowers, into the empty lower garden.

Only then could sorcery come to him, almost as a distraction.

Even here, in the quiet, familiar place to which he had retreated, as he sat on a marble bench by the edge of a stone pool; even here, alone in the dark, as the sounds of dinner-party faded into a murmur only occasionally punctuated by a voice or a note of music louder than the rest—a squeal of laughter or a cymbal clashing—even here, Vandibar Nasha maintained perfect decorum.

He sat quietly in the perpetual twilight of the garden, among the night-blooming flowers, by the edge of the pool, where the water like polished ebony perfectly mirrored the sky. He did not yield to rage, or to fear, or to laughter. He sat with the bronze hand in his lap, and it seemed that, ever so subtly, something opened within his mind, like a shutter left slightly ajar; and a single dark moth fluttered in out of the night.

There. Like that.

He looked up with a start, as if he’d been pricked. But he was alone. The distant music and voices whispered like a tide. Tree branches creaked gently in the night breeze.

The stars rippled. He gazed, not at the sky, but into the pool, as if that dark thing already lodged inside him gave him this instruction, and reassured him that one day, but not yet, he would be ready to look up and behold this miracle directly.

For now it was as if the earth were no more than the floor of a great hall, and he had opened a portal, and now gazed into the infinity below.

The stars in the pool shone more brilliantly than he had ever seen them before. They drifted back and forth, like gems set in a dark velvet hanging which billows with a sudden breeze.

Faces appeared behind the stars, huge and fierce, wild in their aspect, with terrible eyes. He knew that these were not the gods, but the Shadow Titans, shadows cast by the gods on the first evening of creation, which rose and came to life, which even the gods feared, but which sorcerers adored, for sorcerers are abominations which serve the abominable.

He knew that if he were to turn his head and look up at them directly, he would die.

But he was already a sorcerer. That was enough.

In that instant of realization, he was exultant. He would swiftly take care of Radaces. No sorcerer would ever have to suffer such a fool.

Besides, with Radaces out of the way, Vashimur could marry Tatiane, and all the wealth of the house of Radaces would be joined to that of the house of Nasha.

Therefore Vandibar became a sorcerer, by unknown means, toward an unknowable end, and he knelt by the pool and prayed to the reflected Titans, and offered to them thanksgiving. He was not afraid.

He heard the Titans whispering. They told him what to do. He opened the bronze coffer eagerly, fumbling with the latch, heedless of any possible venomed edges or similar childish devices. He washed the severed hand of his murdered servant in the starry water. Blood swirled over the faces of the Titans, obscuring them briefly.

With an ornamental pin from his collar, he carved a certain sign and the name of RADACES on the back of the hand.

He placed the thing on the surface of the water. It stood up on pale fingers and scurried like a water-striding insect across the pool and into the garden on the other side. He heard it rustling among the leaves for a few seconds and then it was gone.

Once more he gazed into the reflected stars, and a voice within him spoke through his lips. The Titans replied in the language of corpses, that universal speech of the afterworld in which sorcerers, alone among living men, are conversant. For the moment, Vandibar understood little. He was like a small child eavesdropping on adults. Yet the understanding came, a remembrance, not of a dream, but of an earlier life before the dream which had been his life up to this point, from which he had now suddenly awakened.

Then the water splashed and the Titans disappeared. Someone addressed him in a soft voice, in a stiffly formal manner mimicking the corpse-language, but in Deltan with a bad provincial accent.

“Art thou, then, Vandibar Nasha, who holds the doom of Radaces in his hand?” Here what might have been an impudent snicker, and the tone and accent changed. “If you will pardon the expression.”

Vandibar looked up, furious, then incredulous to see what seemed to be a child seated on the opposite side of the pool, splashing his bare feet in the water; a ragged boy of early teens, with a round face and large, dark eyes.

It wasn’t one of his servants, whom he would have had beaten within an inch of his life for such an outrage. It had to be some starveling beggar, whom he could have killed.

But he realized that he hadn’t heard anyone approach, and now the boy spoke in the true death-speech.

“Thou art indeed that Vandibar Nasha, whose name is known in the land of ghosts, whose deeds are told by the dead around their cold fires.”

Sometimes, Vandibar knew, when the game takes an incomprehensible turn, one must keep on playing, no matter what, merely to survive, and hope for advantage to appear later. Therefore he answered, “I am.”

The boy reverted to Deltan, his accent far worse, his manner casual. “Oh, I thought so.”

“But I don’t understand. What deeds? What stories?”

“All that are and shall be, for among the dead there is no time, as it is for the sorcerer, who swims in eternity like a fish in the sea, rising to the surface only when he chooses.”

A moment of silence followed. Vandibar closed the empty hand-coffer and floated it in the pool, rippling the surface gently.

“I am Sekenre,” said the boy, “not of this place, but of Reedland, also a sorcerer and therefore an abomination as you are; perhaps your ally, perhaps your foe, but unlikely to be your friend, for it is a fantastically rare thing for a sorcerer to have a friend.”

Some part of Vandibar’s mind felt sudden, irretrievable loss, as if he’d just dropped a particularly precious gem into the sea without realizing he’d done so until it was too late. He was a man who loved as well as hated. Was this boy saying he was now beyond all that?

He dismissed the thought. “You could be just a lunatic.”

The boy closed his hands, then opened them slowly. Blue flames danced on his palms without apparently burning him.

“I demand to know why thou hast come,” said Vandibar Nasha firmly, startled that he had used the corpse-language.

Sekenre’s voice shifted again. His accent was gone. Someone else seemed to speak through him. “Only to show you what you have already done, Oh dread sorcerer, Vandibar Nasha.”

“What have I done? I haven’t done anything.”

Sekenre in this new voice replied only, “Radaces,” and accented again, said, “Come with me.”

Vandibar rose and followed him. The boy walked noiselessly, lighting the way with blue fire in an outstretched hand. They came to the stone trellis and the stair. Vandibar hesitated. He wasn’t going to appear before his guests in such company.

But Sekenre continued, barefoot on stone, quiet as a ghost, and he could only follow.

He heard no voices, no music, no sound at all, and was astonished to find the roof-garden deserted, the canopies rolled up, the furniture cleared away. Dead leaves rustled across the pavement in a faint breeze. The moon, which had been full tonight, was now well past, and low in the east, though the hour must have been quite late.

His mind wasn’t working right. He couldn’t reason. He merely accepted. Such details were not clues, but portents, part of a vision.

His breath came in white puffs. The air was cold, as in winter.

Sekenre said nothing. In the moonlight, Vandibar Nasha saw that his initial estimation had been wrong. This wasn’t a beggar child: skinny, but not emaciated; his trousers roughly torn off just below the knees and his tunic several sizes too large, but not ragged; his face clean and his hair trimmed. An ordinary forum brat, then; but that was one more falsehood, another mask.

And the voice of sorcery within himself seemed to ask, What mask do you wear, Vandibar Nasha?

Sekenre shivered in the cold, the blue flame flickering as his hand trembled. When they descended the further stairway, which lead to a covered passage bypassing the house, there was ice on the steps.

Yet when they emerged into the street, the moon was gone, and warm rain poured over the pavement in muddy rivulets, swirling around the boy’s bare ankles. The fire in his hand did not go out. Vandibar followed him down steep, cobblestone streets, tier after tier, as the city extended down to the river like a carpet flung over a flight of stairs.

By the time they reached the forum, the rain had stopped. The air was hot and stifling. Mist rose from the pavement like smoke. The temples of the gods all around them silent and empty, the stone colossi on the rooftops gazing down blindly through the thick haze. For just an instant there was a hint of a crescent moon, but then it was gone.

So the two of them reached the house of Radaces in utter darkness, but for the almost lightless flames flickering through the fingers of Sekenre’s half-closed hand.

Here again, Vandibar hesitated, thinking of proprieties, imagining how ridiculous he must look in his sodden, ruined gown, with his fine shoes now muddy and squishing as he walked, his hair plastered to his face.

Sekenre, dripping beside him, sneezed loudly. “We must go in,” he said.

“Yes, we must.”

Sekenre touched the door with fire. The door swung silently inward. Vandibar followed, into the darkened house, through what he knew to be a gaily-frescoed atrium, where just a year earlier, it had been Radaces’s turn to greet guests at the Festival of the River’s Rising.

Now there was only gloom and the only sound was of his squishing shoes.

They came upon what seemed to be a naked, hugely muscled, pot-bellied man. He took it for a statue, but then the apparition lurched forward, drawn by Sekenre’s light, and he saw it more clearly: bloated, hideously pale like one long drowned, wearing some kind of animal mask.

The long jaws opened, and Vandibar knew it was no mask at all, but the true face of one of the evatim, the messengers of the death-god Surat-Hemad, which crawl up out of the river to devour corpses. No one ever sees them except when he is about to die, or when someone very close to him as died, or perhaps in the midst of deepest sorcery.

For the first time, Vandibar Nasha was truly afraid. He wished he could go back, that the vision would end, that none of this had ever happened. He was almost ready to apologize to Radaces.

But Sekenre pressed on. Vandibar reached out and took the boy’s free hand, for comfort, fully aware of the absurdity of the gesture. But Sekenre did not pull away.

“Why hast thou come?” said the monster in the death-speech. “This is my master’s house now.”

“This is the house of the lord Radaces,” said Sekenre, in an almost naive tone, Vandibar thought, in that barbarous up-country accent of his.

The monster seemed to understand him, and bowed with mock courtesy, continuing in the death-speech, “Then proceed, honored guests. The lord’s wife and children await thee within.”

“What about Radaces?” said Sekenre.

But the creature only bowed again and shuffled aside, its clawed feet scraping the tile floor, its long tail dragging.

Vandibar felt increasing helplessness as Sekenre led him deeper into the house, as if this were a terrible dream from which he wanted so desperately to awaken, and the voice of sorcery inside his heart told him, Never, never, shalt thou awaken from this dream, even beyond thine own death, until the ending of time and the deaths of the gods themselves, a thousand times never.

All of the lower rooms were empty, all the servants gone. They ascended a great marble stair, Sekenre silent, Vandibar cringing as his wet shoes made sucking sounds. Another of the evatim waited at the top, this one on all fours like a crocodile. Sekenre whispered something Vandibar could not hear. The creature shuffled aside to let them pass.

Upstairs on the landing, they found the youngest daughter of Radaces, aged four or five, torn apart as if she had been savaged by dogs. The lord’s younger son hung by his ankles in the bedroom, gutted like a pig that has been slaughtered.

On the balcony overlooking the central garden, the wife of his enemy sat on a bench, hazing into nothingness, holding what must have been her youngest daughter Tatiane in her arms. It must have been that same slender girl of fifteen or sixteen, whom Vandibar’s son Vashimur secretly loved. But he couldn’t be sure. Her head was gone, and her blood had spread out at her mother’s feet like a sea of black oil.

Sekenre stepped back to avoid the blood. He held up his blue flame. Vandibar gasped, then turned and wept as he saw that the lady’s eyes had been gouged out. Her fingers were bloody. Perhaps she had done it to herself, to escape such sights. Her breath came in hoarse gasps, sobbing long since exhausted, and incredibly she began to sing almost inaudible, incoherent snatches of some lullaby as she rocked Tatiane back and forth. It was a small mercy that she was mad, but only a small one.

And Sekenre said, without irony, but in hard, unaccented Deltan, “Are these not the fruits of victory, for which the sorcerer Vandibar Nasha has so long striven?”

Furious, his voice breaking, Vandibar yanked the boy aside and would have hurled him into the garden below.

“No! No! It’s all wrong!”

“But it was all your doing.”

“Liar!”

“Look for yourself.”

Sekenre turned his head and Vandibar followed his gaze. Something stirred at the lady’s feet, swimming in blood like an enormous and ungainly spider. It was a severed human hand. The sign and name Vandibar had cut into it now glowed blue, the color of Sekenre’s flame.

Revolted, Vandibar let go of Sekenre and kicked the thing away. Then he caught the boy by the shoulder and shook him. “No. I didn’t mean it this way. Take me away quickly!”

II

All the while as they walked back through the deserted city, through the hot, steamy night, through the cool spring rain which sent the mud swirling around their ankles, in the chilly winter air, as the moon rose and set, crescent, gibbous, full, waning, Vandibar raved. He debated with himself. You did these things. No, you did not. They didn’t happen at all. They are a dream. You can undo them. You’re a sorcerer now, aren’t you? No, that is a dream too.

In the midst of all this Sekenre turned to him and said in his accented, little boy’s voice, “What kind of a monster is Vandibar Nasha?”

Weeping, the other replied, “A terrible monster indeed.”

They walked on some more, and Vandibar’s words poured out in a babbling torrent, and only after a long time did he realize that they had not seen the corpse of Radaces anywhere.

“I think he has escaped this particular holocaust,” said Sekenre as if he knew what Vandibar was thinking, his voice once more hard and his Deltan flawless. “Sorcerers can be elusive.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like trying to nail down quicksilver.”

“That’s not what I ask!”

“You and he are evenly matched.”

“Sekenre, help me!”

The boy’s voice reverted to the softer tone and the accent that Vandibar had somehow come to trust. It was therefore some comfort when Sekenre said, “Yes, I’ll do whatever I can.”

But there was no comfort at all when the boy guided him up the last street, to the smoldering ruins of his own house, where the walls had been breached and broken, and the bodies of his servants lay beneath the fallen timbers. A part of the roof-garden remained, and there Vandibar found his son Vashimur crucified on two of those same timbers, naked and bloody and near to death, already whimpering deliriously in the language of the dead.

In that same tongue, Vandibar addressed him, gently. “It’s only a dream. Think that you’ll soon wake up and it’ll all be over.”

But the head of Takida, Vandibar’s wife, glared down at him from a stake. The eyes opened and burned with blue fire. The mouth tried to form words, but lacking breath, could not speak them, yet the meaning was clear enough, and they called Vandibar liar.

All around them, the evatim crawled on all fours like beasts, sometimes reaching up to snap at Vashimur’s nail-pierced feet.

And Vashimur spoke only one more word in reply, clearly pronouncing the name of Tatiane.

Then Vandibar covered his face with his ruined gown and allowed himself to be led into the lower garden, by the pool. Only there, out of sight of his wife and son, did he think it proper to grab Sekenre and try to break his neck. He, Vandibar, was a tall man, over fifty but still strong. Sekenre weighed nothing. He could snap him like a twig. He screamed in all his pent-up rage and tried to do exactly that, but Sekenre slipped from his grasp like quicksilver, and stood apart from him, gasping.

“Think, Vandibar Nasha. Think what it means to kill a sorcerer. His sorcery doesn’t die. It lives on inside you. You become what you have slain, devouring your foe, so that everything you loathe about him becomes part of you.”

“I loathe only myself.”

“And not Radaces?”

“Radaces also.”

Sekenre began to pace back and forth, hands clasped behind his back, his manner that of a much older man, and his voice changed yet again, to an accent and a tone Vandibar had never heard before.

“Ah, now we are getting somewhere. You still hate Radaces, even if you hate yourself. Yes. I cannot tell you how to undo what has been done, but perhaps it can be deflected, or, more precisely, delayed in its effects. Do not doubt that in the end you will burn for it in terrible fire, and for what Radaces has done.”

“And he too?”

“You are evenly matched.”

Wearily, Vandibar sat down on the marble bench beside the pool. “I see that I can’t go back, only forward. Very well. Tell me more.”

And the other within Sekenre discoursed, in a dry, stern voice, on the nature of sorcery and its relation to time, repeating much that had been said before, about swimming outside of the normal flow of events, or perhaps beneath it, only surfacing into the lives of ordinary men at chosen intervals. Vandibar understood very little, at least right away. But there was another image, which made more sense.

Sekenre worked a few tiles loose from the edge of the pool, and held them in his hand, arranged in a line, a single black tile second in the sequence among the white.

The black tile was the day of suffering, of the deaths of all Vandibar loved, and the white were the days of their lives, and his own.

Sekenre, or the person who wore Sekenre like a cloak, looked up at him and smiled, and the expression on his face was utterly inscrutable, perhaps cynical, perhaps genuinely offering hope, perhaps beyond anything he had words to describe.

The boy rearranged the tiles until the black one came last.

“You can’t get rid of it,” he said, “but you can place it differently.”

In that instant, Vandibar Nasha heard something incredible.

Music and laughter came from the roof-garden above him. He rose from the bench and hurried away from Sekenre, and ran up the stairway by the trellis. He didn’t care how he looked in his muddy gown, and when he reached the top, in full moonlight, on a warm spring night, he was as elegantly garbed as he had ever been.

He gazed in amazement at the swarming guests, at their gaudy robes and masks and feathers, and spied Vashimur and Tatiane furtively holding hands over by the punch bowl. He waded into the crowd, almost oblivious, making only perfunctory replies to any who spoke to him, and came upon Radaces seated on the bench in the shadows, against the far wall amid the vines.

He sat down beside him. For an instant, the two of them silently surveyed all before them.

“I cannot forgive,” said Radaces at last.

“Not can I.”

“Then we are agreed.”

“It is death between us.”

At that moment, the revellers broke out in riotous laughter and applause as muscular slaves delivered a stuffed crocodile, and everyone devoured the Devourer with silver forks.

Later Vandibar rose and joined with all the others, even with Radaces, in the great dance which concluded the evening, to celebrate the holy union of Bel-Hemad, god of the springtime, and Shedelvendra, the Lady of the Lantern.

The fat poet Agetirae was too drunk for all that whirling and circling. He had to be led away discreetly. Everyone else departed more graciously, presenting the host with a final gift.

Radaces gave Vandibar a coffer shaped like a human hand, which Vandibar accepted graciously.

Later still, after everyone had gone to bed, he awoke in his own bed, trembling. Takida, his wife, stirred beside him.

“What is it?” she said.

“I dreamed…terrible things.”

“Go back to sleep. It’s just vapors.”

“It’s probably something like that,” he muttered, but he instead got up, wrapping himself in the same elegant gown he had worn to greet his guests.

He walked out onto the roof garden in his bare feet. It was nearly dawn. The moon hung low in the west, almost touching the desert beyond the river. The city lay dark and silent.

A few of his servants were still sweeping up, carrying away benches, and taking down the now extinguished lanterns.

He called a boy over to him and told him to run down into the city, to the house of Lord Radaces.

“Now, Master?”

“Yes, now. I want you to tell me if his house is still there and if all is well.”

The young servant looked at him strangely. “They’ll all be in bed.”

Vandibar fished a silver coin out of his pocket, and held it up. The servant’s eyes widened.

“This will be for you if you do exactly what I tell you.” He picked up a slate one of the waiters had used, rubbed it clean with his sleeve, and made a sign with chalk. In some other time, in the midst of his terrible dream, he had carved that sign with a pin into the dead flesh of a severed hand. “Make this sign on Lord Radaces’s door. It’s a joke between us. He’ll understand. Now go.”

The servant took the chalk and went.

Vandibar returned to bed, then arose at the usual hour and breakfasted. But the servant did not return. In the middle of the morning, a parcel arrived, wrapped in silk, sealed with the emblem of Lord Radaces.

Vandibar took it alone into his study. There he broke the seal and pulled away the wrapping. Inside was a beautifully lacquered box. The sign inlaid on it in mother-of-pearl was that same one he had intended to be written on his enemy’s door.

Inside the box was a bloody nail.

III

“So Radaces has countered you,” said Sekenre, by the pool, regarding the nail. The water rippled in the darkness, and the Shadow Titans appeared.

“You said that I would burn in a terrible fire.”

“Every act of sorcery has a price, and that price is usually pain, but that pain, the consequences of your actions, can often be put off, even as tiles may be rearranged. Your son will one day die in great agony, as you saw him do, and he will die a young man, but this does not mean that he can’t first grow to be an old one, happy and prosperous, surrounded by wealth and friends, by his sons and grandsons. It doesn’t mean he can’t live happily to be a hundred, only that one day, when his death is upon him, he may find himself snatched from his deathbed, made young again, and nailed to a cross. That much cannot be prevented. The rest can perhaps be contrived.”

“And the children of Radaces?”

“The same for them. And for his wife. And yours. It is admittedly only a partial solution.”

“But how?”

“You must counter Radaces every time.”

Therefore Vandibar Nasha rose and returned to his garden party, on that spring night beneath the full moon. There he greeted his guests, saw Vashimur and Tatiane slip away as if no one had noticed them, and leaned beside Radaces against a railing, looking out over the city.

“It is death between us.”

“Yes, it is.”

And when the feast was done and the other guests departed, Vandibar Nasha bade Lord Radaces tarry, and led him into the house, into a large, empty room hung with tapestries to muffle any sound, and there he plunged a dagger into his enemy’s back. But Radaces wriggled off the blade like quicksilver and became a serpent, whipping his coils around Vandibar to crush him. Vandibar in turn became a shaft of molten iron, and the serpent fell away, its flesh steaming. It reared up, its hood spread to reveal the face of Radaces, contorted almost out of recognition by rage.

“I…shall never…forgive.”

“Nor I,” said Vandibar Nasha. The injury is too great.”

The serpent dissipated like smoke and was gone.

* * * *

Then Vandibar Nasha pored over certain arcane books, and sorcery grew within him like a cancer. Each night he slipped out of bed and went into his study, lit a lamp, and waited until Sekenre came to him, padding silently on the polished floor. Sometimes the boy brought him more books, massive codices with iron locks which could only be opened with a touch and a whispered word; sometimes scrolls which seemed to unroll out of the air into endless length, then roll up again into nothing, invisible. Or he would discourse in many voices, in a babble of tongues, all of which Vandibar came to understand.

Together they raised up spirits. Together they questioned the dead about the secrets of the living.

They prayed to the Shadow Titans, together, and then looked up into the sky and beheld them in their true aspects, not as reflections in the pool.

And once or twice, though Vandibar was sure Sekenre was testing him, the other seemed merely a skinny, scruffy boy with a bad foreign accent, who was alone and wanted company, and asked Vandibar to tell him some story of his own life, of how it was before he became a sorcerer that night in the garden.

Vandibar told such stories, though he did not know if he was giving the right answer, or what the test was.

Once Vandibar offered Sekenre a plate of particularly fine, sweet cakes. The boy sniffed them cautiously, almost as an animal would, then devoured them greedily, oblivious to all else, licking his fingers clean.

His dark eyes revealed nothing.

Many times Vandibar worked to build some apparatus, or peered into murky jars at flopping, wriggling captive things which screamed back at him in tiny, but distinctly human voices; or he merely read, and Sekenre sat across from him and waited.

Sekenre was one more riddle to figure out. The simple questions made Vandibar laugh. Why couldn’t a powerful sorcerer afford shoes? Was it an ascetic discipline, or a mere disguise, since a barefoot street child would be underestimated by his enemies?

The deeper mysteries intrigued him. Once the boy had let slip that he had once met a certain king of the Delta, and the name he gave was one Vandibar knew only from history. There was also the matter of the deep scars on the boy’s bare legs, which almost formed a kind of writing. And the palms of his hands were seared almost featureless, and part of one of his ears was missing, like that of an alley cat who has gotten into one too many fights.

His manner was often gentle. Certainly Vandibar never saw him angry, but at times it seemed that Sekenre, or some of the selves which he contained or could become, were dead to all feeling.

Often Vandibar looked up and realized it was almost dawn, and that the boy was gone.

And yet, too, as the sorcerer swims below the surface of time, and emerges into the duration of men’s lives only at points of his own choosing, after long nights of labor, Vandibar Nasha awoke in bed each morning beside his wife, fully rested. Each morning, sorcery seemed a fading dream. Each day his study was filled only with familiar books and carvings. His household servants came and went. He looked out a window. He saw his son Vashimur riding a horse around and around in the exercise yard. The youth was growing tall and strong, and Vandibar was proud of him.

It was as if he lived three lives simultaneously. Each night he studied or labored with Sekenre. Each night he slept beside his wife. And each night, too, he returned to the garden party at the Spring Festival, where he stood beneath the full moon and greeted his guests, and spied his enemy among them, and the ritual words were passed: “It is death between us.”

Each night the two of them fought, devising and countering new strategies. Once he found the roof garden party populated only by corpses in feathered masks. They dropped their masks at a signal from Radaces. But Vandibar caused the sun to rise suddenly, and the corpses melted away like mist. Then the ordinary guests emerged from shadows and departed, a little startled that they had let the whole night past without realizing how late it was.

Once there was only ice, the house, garden, the guests, even the moon and stars made of shimmering, almost luminous ice, and the contest between Vandibar and Radaces was to find the single tiny flame hidden somewhere, which meant both life and destruction for the whole world.

Vandibar found it rising out of the palm of his own hand. But Radaces blew on it, and the fire leapt up to devour the entire city of Elandisphon. Vandibar’s mind was filled with the screams of the countless dying. He felt each of those deaths. He drowned in remorse and pain. And he rose up, transcending any feeling at all, beyond to conscience and compassion, and rearranged the white and black tiles of countless lives into such patterns as suited him.

In some other newly-cut channel of time, he and Sekenre both walked barefoot on the surface of the Great River, in the night’s darkness as the gray stars of the otherworld looked down, and they guided the souls of the slain into the land of the dead, one by one, speaking to each the words of passage.

He took aside the ghosts of his murdered servants, the one who had lost a hand, the boy who had not returned, and others. Of these, in a hushed, secret voice, he asked forgiveness.

So the people of the city both lived out their individual lives and died their individual deaths, and perished together in flames on a single night, while Vandibar Nasha held those flames back from his own house with upraised hands, pushing them back like an impossible tide.

All of these things were true at once. He understood that now.

He and Radaces directed armies against one another from atop mountains. Perched on the backs of enormous, black and silver birds, they fought above the clouds. Higher still, the gods and titans battled, like hugely-cast shadows of Vandibar Nasha and Lord Radaces. It was a combative dance between the two of them, whirling, whirling, striking out to kill or to parry, until the two became as one, and Vandibar Nasha peered deep into the mind and heart of Lord Radaces, and beheld only himself there, as if in a labyrinth of mirrors.

And, greeting one another among the guests on the rooftop, they passed between one another polite words, and treacherous gifts, and poisons.

Sorcery was a craving now, a lust Vandibar could not control. Only briefly, during half-dreamed mornings when he woke up beside Takida, could he remember that man who had once been. More briefly still, he wondered what had ever become of that fellow.

Yet when he awoke, that other Vandibar Nasha, who was an exemplary lord of Elandisphon, progressed through a separate life, troubled by terrible dreams of Vandibar the sorcerer.

His wife Takida grew lined in the face, gray-haired, then silver, then white. Vashimur grew to be a man and married Tatiane, daughter of Lord Radaces. The wedding feast was held at the house of Radaces, who greeted his guests in the frescoed atrium, as the benevolent gods gazed down from the rooftops of the temples nearby.

Among the gifts exchanged was a bronze coffer shaped like a human hand, which Lord Radaces presented to Vandibar Nasha.

Takida aged. Vashimur had three sons by Tatiane, all of whom were strong, wild boys who ran through the house making lots of noise. Soon the firstborn of them appeared to be about as old as Sekenre’s, or even older.

Vandibar remained as he was, as did Lord Radaces. There were gray streaks in both men’s beards, but not more than before. Neither lost the vigor of his stride. People remarked on this at first, then looked after them furtively and began to make signs after them as they had passed, to ward off evil. Fewer guests came to either house.

Vandibar held back the tide, but he couldn’t hold it forever. One night, after the garden party had ended, when the last of the guests had departed, he came upon his wife’s head impaled upon a stake, while around him the ruins of the house smoldered.

Takida opened her eyes, which burned with blue fire. This time she spoke in the language of the dead, which requires no breath to utter.

“Husband, what is this abomination that thou hast done?”

He could only reply, helplessly, in his own language, “I don’t know. Once I did. It was clear. But it isn’t anymore.”

Radaces stood beside him. Their eyes met, but no words passed. Weeping, Vandibar covered his face with his muddy gown and rushed into the house, which was not burnt. He climbed into bed beside Takida, who stared up at the ceiling with blind eyes and muttered something in her sleep, as if she were shouting in a dream.

When he slept, he dreamt of a man—or perhaps several men—called Vandibar Nasha, but when he awoke in the morning he could not recall any of the details, distracted as he was by the discovery that Takida had died in the night and lay still, staring at the ceiling, with a tiny stream of blood staining her upper lip.

He slid his hand around her neck gently, to reassure himself that her head had not been cut off; but somewhere else, he was sure, it had, and he wept, knowing that.

Many years later, word came that Lord Vashimur, aged about seventy—that same one who was reputed to have a father younger than he, if one believed such stories—had been thrown from his horse and killed.

But Vandibar found young Vashimur amid the ruins of his house, naked and crucified, with the evatim at his feet.

In his final pain, the youth cried out in the corpse-speech, “Where is my father? Thou art not he, but some other, evil thing.”

Radaces was there. He and Vandibar merely gazed at one another, and after a while Vandibar said, “Come with me and let us make an end.”

IV

Together they descended into the lower garden, but the garden was dead, and the pool filled with dust. They followed that dust as the wind bore it, across an endless plain toward a bloody sun that lingered on the horizon before them but never set. Amid terrible storms they struggled, Radaces bracing Vandibar and Vandibar lifting up Radaces when he fell. It seemed, several times, that they came into various countries and settled there, living out whole lives as amicable neighbors before rising again to resume the endless quest. It seemed, too, that they were enemies and fought in the darkness, amid terrible transformations.

Yet neither could conquer the other, for all each sought out some fatal weakness in the mirrored depths of the other’s soul, during those quiet times when they lived side by side and interpreted one another’s dreams.

Together, they mourned murdered children and wives, and were comforted by the remembrance of the lives of those children and wives lived out to the full in some impossible interval before the counting of days came to the inevitable black tile.

“We are swimming just below the surface of time,” said Radaces, “and we carried them along in the ripple of our passage.”

“As long as we could,” said Vandibar.

The two of them wept together, and were transformed, and fought.

“I don’t know how to stop,” said Vandibar.

“Nor do I.”

Then Radaces told how Sekenre had come into his house each night, bringing books of magic, and Vandibar told the same. Neither raged that Sekenre was a traitor, false to both of them, for they had reached that point in sorcery which is beyond passion, which is only doing because there are things to be done.

When they found Sekenre at last, he was seated on a marble bench by the dry pool in a dead garden, scuffing one bare foot idly in the dust. The red sun shone dully, low in the west.

The boy sat with his other foot up on the bench. He held various pens and brushes between ink-stained toes. He was writing something in a book. When the two sorcerers approached, he held up the book to them, revealing a beautifully illuminated page of text, in swirling, delicate script.

“What kind of abomination is Sekenre?” demanded Lord Radaces.

“Indeed, that is what we must know,” said Vandibar Nasha.

Sekenre closed and covered the book carefully, placing a blotting cloth over the page he had been working on. He put pens, brushes, and ink bottles away in a leather bag. Then he stared at his own hands and said, in his own, heavily accented, adolescent’s voice, but in a distracted manner, “I don’t think Sekenre is an abomination at all. But he contains abominations, and they, in turn, have committed abominations. Sekenre is a boy who never got to grow up. Did you know that in Reedland, where Sekenre was born, the children go barefoot, while the young men who have passed through the rite of manhood wear shoes? The father must lead the son, unless the father is negligent, in which case the son remains forever a child. Sekenre’s father was worse than negligent, though he, or part of him anyway, loved his son deeply. Vashtem was a sorcerer of great wisdom and evil. He caused his son Sekenre to murder him. That was part of his plan. Therefore Vashtem the sorcerer awoke in the mind of Sekenre, for to slay a sorcerer is to become a sorcerer, and Vashtem became Sekenre and Sekenre became Vashtem, and he became many others, whom his father had slain before, whom he had occasion to slay afterward. They all mixed together, like paints in a pot. Sekenre learned, slowly and painfully, that in order to remain Sekenre he had to remain as he once was. Therefore Sekenre is forever a child of fifteen who wants to be good, and who wants to grow up. It’s not going to happen.”

Vandibar Nasha and Lord Radaces both drew daggers, but no ordinary weapons. These were forged of that metal which only dragons may fetch from the cores of suns.

“Release us,” said Radaces. “Let us be what we once were.”

“Or else die,” said Vandibar Nasha.

Sekenre rippled like quicksilver and stood behind them. Both of them turned. He shook his head sadly. For just an instant, his expression was that of a little boy who has made a mess and is terribly sorry, but can’t do anything about it. Then his manner changed, and he seemed older, and he spoke without an accent.

“Once that single instant has passed in which you open yourself to sorcery, there is no going back. You cannot say that when this is all over you will resume your former life, because it will never be over.”

Vandibar, fingering his dagger, said, “But we are still apprentices. I’ve read that to truly become a sorcerer, you have to attend the College of Shadows, and there take a master, learn everything you can, and in the end, as a graduation exercise, you have to overcome and kill the master, thus becoming the other sorcerer.”

“Or else the master kills the student, and the result is much the same,” said Radaces.

“There is one difference,” said Sekenre. “The winner is the jar, containing the loser.”

“I understand further,” said Vandibar, “that I have been attending this college for a long time, that it is all around me, and has been ever since that first night in the garden. It is different for each individual sorcerer.”

“But we have not yet graduated,” said Radaces, holding his dagger in a firm, clenched fist. “I think it’s time we do.”

Sekenre merely shrugged and sat down on the bench again. He got out his book and pretended to ignore them.

Vandibar and Radaces both stepped forward.

“Then you must discover who your master is,” Sekenre said, not looking up as the two of them paused and glanced at one another uncertainly. “Each student may encounter any number of teachers, but he has only one master, whose heart and mind he comes to know as intimately as his own, with whom he shares the great majority of exercises, sparring, countering one another as both grow in sorcery. Don’t mistake the master for the attendant, who merely brings what is wanted and leads you to the places of learning.”

Then, heedless of them, Sekenre got out his pens and brushes and began writing on opposite pages the tales of Vandibar Nasha and of Lord Radaces, both sorcerers of great renown. But when he reached a certain point, he stopped, because he didn’t know how either story was to end.

Vandibar and Radaces stood by the edge of the empty pool. They wept, naming their wives and children long gone. They comforted each other as best they could, and then they looked into one another’s eyes, and each clenched his dagger firmly.

“It is death between us, old friend,” said Vandibar Nasha.

THE POWER OF PRAYER, by Brian Stableford

When the great plague arrived in the lush farmlands and market towns of Central Aquitania, forty years before its conquest by Charles the Great, panic swept downstream through the valley of the Dordogne even more rapidly than the disease itself.

Aquitania had then been a Catholic country for more than two centuries, although the descendants of Clovis were well enough aware of the fact that their ancestor’s conversion of his kingdom had been made for political reasons, in imitation of a stratagem once successfully employed by the Roman emperor Constantine. There were some among the Aquitanians, even at eight generations removed, who thought it unbecoming of conquerors to be so slavish in their imitation of the manners and pretensions of those they had conquered, and were therefore careful to maintain older beliefs and rituals alongside those of the Roman church.

“It was, after all, the Goths who triumphed over Constantine’s descendants,” the secret heretics argued. “Should the descendants of Clovis not be proud of their Gothic heritage?”

These proud men understood well enough that history was securely in the custody of the churchmen, but they were also prepared to be proud of their refusal to learn to write. For this reason, no matter what the churchmen recorded for the benefit of posterity, the great upsurge of religious sentiment and devotion provoked by the panic that came rushing down the Dordogne was by no means confined to the established churches.

This is not to say, of course, that the churches were not full, or that the convents did not enjoy a sudden influx of pious novices. Monasteries and nunneries alike doubled their personnel overnight, and their superiors were very glad to be so richly deluged with gifts and bequests. Alas, when the plague arrived, hot on the heels of the panic, the newly-repopulated convents and recently-swollen congregations of the riverside towns were as comprehensively decimated as the remote villages and hamlets where the habits of confession and communion had never becoming deeply entrenched.

Far upriver, in the foothills of what is nowadays called the Massif Central, there was then a small market town named Coramdram, which has long since vanished from the map. The people of Coramdram and its environs were sharply reminded, by more than a score of exceedingly ugly deaths, of the duties which they owed to all the gods who might protect them. Prayer was a duty that Coramdram’s Christians and pagans alike had been rather apt to neglect, but the Christians, at least, resumed it without suffering too many pangs of conscience; human vanity is ever-ready to assume that a good God will always be on hand, patiently awaiting the attention of His followers during those intervals when other occupations seem far more important.

Perhaps the Christians were correct in this assumption, and the streets of Coramdram would have been profusely littered with rotting corpses had the Lord not extended His mercy to a reasonable extent—but people rarely count their misfortunes accurately, nor do they often agree on the final sum. Those who consider that they have endured far more than their fair share of disaster are outnumbered only by those who think that their neighbors have had far more than a just allotment of good luck. The moral arithmetic of human existence is always inclined to overestimate an individual’s own immediate aches and pains, while refusing to acknowledge all but the most fatal afflictions of others. Perhaps it is this imperfection in the artistry of calculation that is responsible for the continued popularity of deities whom Christians deem far less worthy of worship than their own jealous God.

At any rate, there were some in Coramdram—as there invariably were in those days, whenever the Visitor of Plague and Pestilence set his footprint upon a recently-Christianized region—who preferred to address their placatory prayers to the gods that had been theirs for hundreds of generations rather than a mere eight.

In the opinion of the church’s historians, these heretics were addressing the plague-demon’s immediate superior, Satan, instead of the Lord who had cast that fallen angel into the depths—but that was not the way the unrepentant followers of Gothic tradition saw their own situation. In their eyes, the author of the disaster was merely one god among a company of equals, none of whom was any better or worse disposed towards humanity than the rest.

Why should one pray to a good God for protection, the pagans’ reasoning went, when even a blind man could clearly see that evil was a more powerful force than good in the world of men? What good could it do to beg Jesus Christ and the martyred saints to provide a shield against disease, given that not one of them had been able to defend himself or herself against the direst misfortune? Was it not more sensible to cut out all mediators and go straight to the source of the trouble? Was it not more reasonable, instead of asking that an entire street, or a whole town, or even a region should be spared, to pray instead that the disease would strike down everyone except for one’s own immediate family? Surely, the pagans thought, the god of plague and pestilence must be grateful for such prayers, given that they offered a welcome endorsement to his overall strategy—which was always to spare a few while killing the many, in order that he might find each of his old haunts deliciously repopulated whenever he chanced to pass that way again.

One of the careful folk who assessed the situation in these terms was Ophiria, wife of the ruddy-faced harness-maker Remy Brousse, Indeed, Ophiria went even further than others whose philosophy ran along the same lines, because she did not trouble to accommodate Remy in her prayers for salvation. Quite the reverse: the advent of the plague seemed to her to offer a welcome chance of deliverance from a marriage which had come to seem unbearably tedious. When she offered up her secret prayers to the god of pestilence, therefore, she took care to include Remy in the list of names of those she would most like to see breaking out in horrible spots, seething with fever, streaming mucus from every orifice and writhing in hideous agony.

Ophiria’s list was quite long, because Coramdram was the kind of town in which everybody—even those who were scornfully excluded from the best gossiping-circles—knew everybody else’s name. Because she was a scrupulous person, she never allowed herself the luxury of any casual omission or forgetful abbreviation. On the other hand, by way of ameliorating what some of her neighbors might think unwarranted malice, she never specifically mentioned buboes among the afflictions she wished upon her more distant acquaintances.

Even Ophiria’s closest acquaintances—none of whom was sufficiently close as to think of her as a friend—would have been surprised to discover the extent of her disaffection from her husband. Remy Brousse was not cruel or quarrelsome, nor was he given to adulterous liaisons. By the standards of the region at the head of the Dordogne valley, that was sufficient to make him an unusually good and devoted husband. His only marital crime, if crime it could be reckoned, was to have allowed himself to become extremely fat and rather indolent.

There were corpulent wives in Coramdram who would not have reckoned the former item as an unforgivable sin, but Ophiria had remained as slender throughout their marriage as the day she was wed, when her late mother-in-law had been unkind enough to judge her unpromisingly thin. An indolent husband is always reckoned undesirable even by an indolent wife, but Ophiria was far more energetic than the average—perhaps surprisingly so, for one of her meager dimensions. Had she borne her husband any children she might have lost her energy as well as her trim figure, but the marriage was barren.

Remy Brousse was a popular man in the district in spite of his indolence, because he was very ingenious with his hands. Although he did not like to work hard he did take considerable delight in working cleverly; he took as much pride in the ease with which he accomplished a task as in the perfection of the result.

“It is the glory and privilege of mindful beings,” Remy often told his clients, “that we may accomplish our ends without breaking our backs or sweating away our bodily mass.” This saying was repeated far and wide along the Dordogne—perhaps even as far as Bordeaux—in a relatively good-humored manner.

Remy had another saying too, which had an equal bearing on his popularity, which was: “Necessity is the mother of improvisation.” He said this because he was not a man to walk far in search of conventional materials when there was something close to hand that could be pressed into service. In a region where leather was reckoned expensive, he was always able—and perfectly willing—to make harnesses for poorer folk from rope, or cord, or anything else which came conveniently to hand.

Alas, this virtue, like his others, went unappreciated by Remy Brousse’s bitter spouse, who had an instinctive dislike of any object or instrument that had not been formed from its proper material, according to its proper pattern.

At the time when the great plague came to Coramdram the Brousses had been married for nineteen years. Ophiria, having recently passed her thirty-fourth birthday, felt that old age had not yet marked her irredeemably, but knew that cruel time would not leave her unmolested for many years longer. She knew, too, that if she were to obtain a second husband more to her taste, she would need better bait than her narrow face. Given that her husband’s shop would make a very attractive marriage-portion for an ambitious leather-worker, she felt that her own necessity required a certain amount of improvisation. This factor also entered into the equation whose solution was expressed in her devout prayers to the god of plague and pestilence, causing her not merely to mention Remy’s name in her prayers but to give special prominence to it.

“Please, please, please take my husband Remy, even if you take no one else I have identified as a suitable sacrifice,” Ophiria would say, whenever she reached the end of her exhaustive list. “He has become useless and burdensome to me, but he would make a fine and fleshy morsel for one such as you—and it is surely the glory and privilege of divinity that a god such as yourself may accomplish your ends without bending your back or shedding a single bead of sweat.”

The church’s historians would dispute the identity of the being which responded to this prayer, but whether it was a member in good standing of a pantheon of peers or merely one of Satan’s imps, it did as it was asked. Remy Brousse fell dreadfully ill with the plague.

First the unfortunate harness-maker broke out in horrible spots, which turned into hot sores that drove him mad with their unquenchable itching. Then he developed a seething fever, which exported acrid moisture from his shriveling flesh by the gallon. His every orifice began to drip mucus—most of it grey-green in color, except when it was mingled with blood, when it became blue-black. All the while he writhed in hideous agony. The only mercy was that his armpits and groin remained free of buboes—but even that, in the end, only served to prolong his suffering for a day or two longer than was strictly necessary.

While she watched the corpulent body of her husband fade gradually away, as if the flesh were melting from his bones—which observation she was careful to make from a safe distance—Ophiria took some trouble to pose as a devoted Christian widow-to-be. There were several reasons for this precaution, of which the first and foremost was that worshippers of a god of pestilence need to be even more secretive than usual in a time of plague. Ophiria had always been suspected by her neighbors of being the sort of person who might pray to a dubious god, and there was not a man or woman in Coramdram who would not have been glad of a scapegoat upon whom they could vent their righteous anger against the ravages of the disease. Supplementary to that fundamental caution, however, was Ophiria’s knowledge that if she hoped to obtain a new and better husband, she had to advertise herself—much more carefully than she had contrived to do heretofore—as a devoted and loyal wife. For these reasons, she set herself to outdo her neighbors in her public displays of grief, although this was not an easy thing to do when there was not a family in the district that had not suffered its own grievous losses.

Perhaps, in addition to these practical considerations, Ophiria actually began to feel slight stings of guilt and remorse while her husband came nearer and nearer to his end. It is, after all, never pleasant to observe—even from a respectful distance—the many ways in which disease and decay can maltreat a man. If so, her improvisations of grief might have contained at least a tiny measure of necessity.

When the death-cart paused outside the door of Remy Brousse’s harness-shop, so that his body might be collected and ferried to the hastily-dug and abruptly-consecrated pit that was to serve as a collective grave for all Coramdram’s plague-victims, Ophiria commenced to make loud protestations against the unkindness of the cruel demon who had robbed her of all that she held dear in the world. When the cart pulled away again she followed it through the streets, weeping and wailing in a prodigious manner.

Because the pit had been dug on the far side of the town, and because the route that the death-cart followed through the streets was so circuitous, Ophiria had to walk for miles, but she never faltered in her keening. She was joined in due course by other wives, and by mothers and grandmothers too, but the competition they provided only spurred her on to greater efforts.

Hundreds of people—almost every one of whom was named on her secret list—saw Ophiria following Remy Brousse’s body. If they were surprised by the fact that a woman as thin as she could cry so effusively, they only had to remind themselves that she had always been an uncommonly energetic woman. Even the most snobbish and scornful among them must have felt a pang of sympathy as they saw how badly she had reacted to her loss.

“Perhaps, after all,” a few good Christians whispered to their neighbors, “Ophiria Brousse was not as unloving as she sometimes seemed. Perhaps she was one of those unhappy souls who are incapable of giving voice to their true feelings until the worst comes to the worst, and then must endure in a few desperate hours the irresistible flood of emotions pent up for years.”

Ophiria heard more than one such comment, and was greatly gratified to discover that her performance was appreciated. Never one to proceed by half-measures, she decided to carry the masquerade through to its limit. When the cart reached the pit and Remy Brousse’s body was thrown in on top of a hundred others, she cast herself upon the ground and beat the turf with her fists. When the priest of the parish and the town’s mayor decided that the pit could hold no more and would have to be filled in, she hurried to the rim for one last lingering look at her beloved—and when the spade-men began to seal the grave, every clod that fell wrung a moan from her emaciated lips.

Nor was that enough for her; unlike her late husband, Ophiria believed that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing properly. On the next day, the widow went to the church on the hill above the place where her late husband and a hundred others lay, to join the throng of mourners. Like the wives of other men, and the mothers and grandmothers who had lost children, she was clad entirely in black, with no shoes on her feet. Like these others, she went after hearing mass to kneel upon the freshly-turned earth, directly atop the place where she had seen her husband’s dead body set upon the terrible heap. Like all the other widows, she cried and cried and cried.

Even Ophiria’s energy began to flag in the end, but she carried on regardless, forcing more tears to come in floods by surreptitiously pinching her tenderest flesh between her sharp fingernails. Her voice was very conspicuous in lamenting the vile injustice of the world, and the awful cruelty of the demon which had sent the plague—but within her secret thoughts, she made her apologies and gave abundant thanks to the Visitor of Decay, who had taken such care in answering the most fervent of all her prayers.

On the first and second days after Remy Brousse’s death, this performance proceeded exactly as his widow had planned, and won more than a few admiring and sympathetic glances from those fortunate enough to witness it. On the night that followed the second day, Ophiria paused to wonder whether she might now have done enough, not merely to allay suspicion but also to establish her worth as a potential wife for some unlucky widower—but she liked to do things properly, and she decided that a person as completely lacking in indolence as herself owed it to her audience to continue the pantomime for one more day.

The following morning, Ophiria got up bright and early and put on her black dress. Leaving her shoes beside the hearth, she walked yet again to the church, where she heard another morning mass sung by a sadly-depleted choir. Afterwards, she went to the grave which Remy Brousse shared with so many of his erstwhile clients and friends. She knelt down on the darkened earth, exactly as she had done twice before, at the very spot where Remy Brousse’s buried body lay. When the tears did not begin to flow spontaneously, she carefully mustered her resources, and pinched herself bruisingly, sobbing in a heart-ending manner.

The other mourners who had taken up their stations immediately after hearing mass looked sideways at the sound of Ophiria’s sobbing, but they paid her little enough heed. They had seen and heard it all before, and they had their own aching grief to nurse. No sooner had Ophiria begun to moisten the earth with her false tears, however, than the earth sealing the mass grave was disturbed by a horrid churning and wriggling.

Ophiria recoiled in dire alarm, but she was too late to regain her feet. She turned heads readily enough when she screamed—and this time, once the eyes of the other mourners were fixed upon her, they could not easily be torn away.

It seemed to the dizzied Ophiria that a monstrous earthworm had coiled itself around each of her wrists, holding her tightly and making certain that she remained on her knees. Another graveworm appeared, and then another, each one longer by far than any she had ever seen before—and then the worms began to crawl upon her body, climbing up her prisoned arms to her shoulders, neck and face.

The sensation of having such creatures crawling on her flesh filled Ophiria with the purest horror, and she tried to scream even louder, but she could not do it. She discovered that she was already screaming as loud as she possibly could; there was no further margin to be exploited or explored when the worms began to extend themselves over her terror-stricken face, around her skinny neck, and into her thin blonde hair.

Had she been less confused, Ophiria might have been able to feel, if not to see, that the worms that had arranged themselves about her head and shoulders were combining their bodies like the threads in a cord or a rope. The resultant amalgamation was further entwined into the shape of a bridle and rein. More worms—many, many more—were winding themselves about her waist to form a girth-strap, while a huge mass of them was accumulating on her bent back to form a kind of living saddle.

It did not matter that Ophiria could not feel or see any of this, for she could not possibly have given further expression to the horror of it. She had exhausted her capacity for screaming now—and also her capacity for weeping, moaning, crying and groaning.

While the looping graveworms bound her hands to the moist brown earth Ophiria could not even stand up, let alone run away—but that was a temporary inconvenience. The worms that held her down were quick to release their grip as soon as their multitudinous kin had crowded a sufficient wormy mass on to the makeshift saddle to depict the form of a small but conspicuously well-rounded rider.

By this time, it did not matter that Ophiria Brousse was no longer able to scream, because the other mourners at the mass grave had seen and understood what was happening. Even those who had been grieving the longest had plenty of screams still in reserve.

Where Ophiria’s peculiar rider took her, when it began lambasting her with its whip of worms, no one ever discovered—but she was never seen in Coramdram again.

Her neighbors shook their heads, and speculated as to the reasons for the Widow Brousse’s fate. What judgment the church’s historians might have delivered must remain forever unknown, because none of the scribes in the troubled convents of Aquitania ever found the time to write it down, so we are free to speculate that they would probably have proffered the incident as evidence of Satan’s continuing war against the devout. Ophiria’s illiterate neighbors, however, were inclined to whisper different interpretations, confident that the opinions would vanish on the wind and never return to haunt them.

Some of these whispers suggested that Ophiria Brousse must have been driven mad by grief, and brought by her extremity to curse the god of pestilence far too loudly for his liking, with the result that he had taken a cruel revenge. Others, equally numerous, hazarded the guess that she had simply cried a little too loudly and too long, and that some other member of the pantheon of peers who was less fond of the sounds of grief than the god of pestilence had become so irritated that he had improvised a means to shut her up. Whichever side of the argument the doubters favored, however, the great majority were prepared to agree that, although it is a perfectly understandable error for a widow to grieve too much for the husband she has lost, it is an error nevertheless.

Once the plague had passed on and the death-rate in Coramdram reverted to its normal pedestrian pace, the affairs of the town soon reverted to their ordinary course. Although the strange flight of Ophiria Brousse was not forgotten, it became a thing that people did not care to discuss, and her name was never mentioned again by anyone in the neighborhood. Remy Brousse’s name, on the other hand, was often heard on the lips of those who remembered him regretfully—of which there were many, for he was sorely missed, not only in the town but in the surrounding districts.

Remy Brousse’s favorite maxims were often quoted in the course of such remembrance, and they continued to be quoted long afterwards, although—like all the most precious elements of oral tradition—they were gradually detached from any attribution to their source. His name was not entirely lost, however; it was separately preserved as the core of a self-contained item of folklore.

Long after all those people who had ever seen him alive had gone to their separate graves, there were men in Coramdram who did not hesitate to express the firm opinion that there never was an artisan in all of Aquitania who was cleverer with his fingers than Remy Brousse, nor any man in the entire world who could weave useful harnesses out of such unpromising materials.

THE SECRET OF KRALITZ, by Henry Kuttner

I awoke from profound sleep to find two black-swathed forms standing silently beside me, their faces pale blurs in the gloom. As I blinked to clear my sleep-dimmed eyes, one of them beckoned impatiently, and suddenly I realized the purpose of this midnight summons. For years I had been expecting it, ever since my father, the Baron Kralitz, had revealed to me the secret and the curse that hung over our ancient house. And so, without a word, I rose and followed my guides as they led me along the gloomy corridors of the castle that had been my home since birth.

As I proceeded there rose up in my mind the stern face of my father, and in my ears rang his solemn words as he told me of the legendary curse of the House of Kralitz, the unknown secret that was imparted to the eldest son of each generation—at a certain time.

“When?” I had asked my father as he lay on his death-bed, fighting back the approach of dissolution.

“When you are able to understand,” he had told me, watching my face intently from beneath his tufted white brows. “Some are told the secret sooner than others. Since the first Baron Kralitz the secret has been handed down——”

He clutched at his breast and paused. It was fully five minutes before he had gathered his strength to speak again in his rolling, powerful voice. No gasping, death-bed confessions for the Baron Kralitz!

He said at last, “You have seen the ruins of the old monastery near the village, Franz. The first Baron burnt it and put the monks to the sword. The Abbot interfered too often with the Baron’s whims. A girl sought shelter and the Abbot refused to give her up at the Baron’s demand. His patience was at an end—you know the tales they still tell about him.

“He slew the Abbot, burned the monastery, and took the girl. Before he died the Abbot cursed his slayer, and cursed his sons for unborn generations. And it is the nature of this curse that is the secret of our house.

“I may not tell you what the curse is. Do not seek to discover it before it is revealed to you. Wait patiently, and in due time you will be taken by the warders of the secret down the stairway to the underground cavern. And then you will learn the secret of Kralitz.”

As the last word passed my father’s lips he died, his stern face still set in its harsh lines.

* * * *

Deep in my memories, I had not noticed our path, but now the dark forms of my guides paused beside a gap in the stone flagging, where a stairway which I had never seen during my wanderings about the castle led into subterranean depths. Down this stairway I was conducted, and presently I came to realize that there was light of a sort—a dim, phosphorescent radiance that came from no recognizable source, and seemed to be less actual light than the accustoming of my eyes to the near-darkness.

I went down for a long time. The stairway turned and twisted in the rock, and the bobbing forms ahead were my only relief from the monotony of the interminable descent. And at last, deep underground, the long stairway ended, and I gazed over the shoulders of my guides at the great door that barred my path. It was roughly chiseled from the solid stone, and upon it were curious and strangely disquieting carvings, symbols which I did not recognize. It swung open, and I passed through and paused, staring about me through a gray sea of mist.

I stood upon a gentle slope that fell away into the fog-hidden distance, from which came a pandemonium of muffled bellowing and high-pitched, shrill squeakings vaguely akin to obscene laughter. Dark, half-glimpsed shapes swam into sight through the haze and disappeared again, and great vague shadows swept overhead on silent wings. Almost beside me was a long rectangular table of stone, and at this table two score of men were seated, watching me from eyes that gleamed dully out of deep sockets. My two guides silently took their places among them.

And suddenly the thick fog began to lift. It was swept raggedly away on the breath of a chill wind. The far dim reaches of the cavern were revealed as the mist swiftly dissipated, and I stood silent in the grip of a mighty fear, and, strangely, an equally potent, unaccountable thrill of delight. A part of my mind seemed to ask, “What horror is this?” And another part whispered, “You know this place!”

But I could never have seen it before. If I had realized what lay far beneath the castle I could never have slept at night for the fear that would have obsessed me. For, standing silent with conflicting tides of horror and ecstasy racing through me, I saw the weird inhabitants of the underground world.

Demons, monsters, unnamable things! Nightmare colossi strode bellowing through the murk, and amorphous gray things like giant slugs walked upright on stumpy legs. Creatures of shapeless soft pulp, beings with flame-shot eyes scattered over their misshapen bodies like fabled Argus, writhed and twisted there in the evil glow. Winged things that were not bats swooped and fluttered in the tenebrous air, whispering sibilantly—whispering in human voices.

Far away at the bottom of the slope I could see the chill gleam of water, a hidden, sunless sea. Shapes mercifully almost hidden by distance and the semi-darkness sported and cried, troubling the surface of the lake, the size of which I could only conjecture. And a flapping thing whose leathery wings stretched like a tent above my head swooped and hovered for a moment, staring with flaming eyes, and then darted off and was lost in the gloom.

And all the while, as I shuddered with fear and loathing, within me was this evil glee—this voice which whispered, “You know this place! You belong here! Is it not good to be home?”

I glanced behind me. The great door had swung silently shut, and escape was impossible. And then pride came to my aid. I was a Kralitz. And a Kralitz would not acknowledge fear in the face of the devil himself!

* * * *

I stepped forward and confronted the warders, who were still seated regarding me intently from eyes in which a smoldering fire seemed to burn. Fighting down an insane dread that I might find before me an array of fleshless skeletons, I stepped to the head of the table, where there was a sort of crude throne, and peered closely at the silent figure on my right.

It was no bare skull at which I gazed, but a bearded, deadly-pale face. The curved, voluptuous lips were crimson, looking almost rouged, and the dull eyes stared through me bleakly. Inhuman agony had etched itself in deep lines on the white face, and gnawing anguish smoldered in the sunken eyes. I cannot hope to convey the utter strangeness, the atmosphere of unearthliness that surrounded him, almost as palpable as the fetid tomb-stench that welled from his dark garments. He waved a black-swathed arm to the vacant seat at the head of the table, and I sat down.

This nightmare sense of unreality! I seemed to be in a dream, with a hidden part of my mind slowly waking from sleep into evil life to take command of my faculties. The table was set with old-fashioned goblets and trenchers such as had not been used for hundreds of years. There was meat on the trenchers, and red liquor in the jeweled goblets. A heady, overpowering fragrance swam up into my nostrils, mixed with the grave-smell of my companions and the musty odor of a dank and sunless place.

Every white face was turned to me, faces that seemed oddly familiar, although I did not know why. Each face was alike in its blood-red, sensual lips and its expression of gnawing agony, and burning black eyes like the abysmal pits of Tartarus stared at me until I felt the short hairs stir on my neck. But—I was a Kralitz! I stood up and said boldly in archaic German that somehow came familiarly from my lips, “I am Franz, twenty-first Baron Kralitz. What do you want with me?”

A murmur of approval went around the long table. There was a stir. From the foot of the board a huge bearded man arose, a man with a frightful scar that made the left side of his face a horror of healed white tissue. Again the odd thrill of familiarity ran through me; I had seen that face before, and vaguely I remembered looking at it through dim twilight.

The man spoke in the old guttural German. “We greet you, Franz, Baron Kralitz. We greet you and pledge you, Franz—and we pledge the House of Kralitz!”

With that he caught up the goblet before him and held it high. All along the long table the black-swathed ones arose, and each held high his jeweled cup, and pledged me. They drank deeply, savoring the liquor, and I made the bow custom demanded. I said, in words that sprang almost unbidden from my mouth:

“I greet you, who are the warders of the secret of Kralitz, and I pledge you in return.”

All about me, to the farthermost reaches of the dim cavern, a hush fell, and the bellows and howlings, and the insane tittering of the flying things, were no longer heard. My companions leaned expectantly toward me. Standing alone at the head of the board, I raised my goblet and drank. The liquor was heady, exhilarating, with a faintly brackish flavor.

And abruptly I knew why the pain-racked, ruined face of my companion had seemed familiar; I had seen it often among the portraits of my ancestors, the frowning, disfigured visage of the founder of the House of Kralitz that glared down from the gloom of the great hall. In that fierce white light of revelation I knew my companions for what they were; I recognized them, one by one, remembering their canvas counterparts. But there was a change! Like an impalpable veil, the stamp of ineradicable evil lay on the tortured faces of my hosts, strangely altering their features, so that I could not always be sure I recognized them. One pale, sardonic face reminded me of my father, but I could not be sure, so monstrously altered was its expression.

I was dining with my ancestors—the House of Kralitz!

My cup was still held high, and I drained it, for somehow the grim revelation was not entirely unexpected. A strange glow thrilled through my veins, and I laughed aloud for the evil delight that was in me. The others laughed too, a deep-throated merriment like the barking of wolves—tortured laughter from men stretched on the rack, mad laughter in hell! And all through the hazy cavern came the clamor of the devil’s brood! Great figures that towered many spans high rocked with thundering glee, and the flying things tittered slyly overhead. And out over the vast expanse swept the wave of frightful mirth, until the half-seen things in the black waters sent out bellows that tore at my eardrums, and the unseen roof far overhead sent back roaring echoes of the clamor.

And I laughed with them, laughed insanely, until I dropped exhausted into my seat and watched the scarred man at the other end of the table as he spoke.

“You are worthy to be of our company, and worthy to eat at the same board. We have pledged each other, and you are one of us; we shall eat together.”

And we fell to, tearing like hungry beasts at the succulent white meat in the jeweled trenchers. Strange monsters served us, and at a chill touch on my arm I turned to find a dreadful crimson thing, like a skinned child, refilling my goblet. Strange, strange and utterly blasphemous was our feast. We shouted and laughed and fed there in the hazy light, while all around us thundered the evil horde. There was hell beneath Castle Kralitz, and it held high carnival this night.

* * * *

Presently we sang a fierce drinking-song, swinging the deep cups back and forth in rhythm with our shouted chant. It was an archaic song, but the obsolete words were no handicap, for I mouthed them as though they had been learned at my mother’s knee. And at the thought of my mother a trembling and a weakness ran through me abruptly, but I banished it with a draft of the heady liquor.

Long, long we shouted and sang and caroused there in the great cavern, and after a time we arose together and trooped to where a narrow, high-arched bridge spanned the tenebrous waters of the lake. But I may not speak of what was at the other end of the bridge, nor of the unnamable things that I saw—and did! I learned of the fungoid, inhuman beings that dwell on far cold Yuggoth, of the cyclopean shapes that attend unsleeping Cthulhu in his submarine city, of the strange pleasures that the followers of leprous, subterranean Yog-Sothoth may possess, and I learned, too, of the unbelievable manner in which Iod, the Source, is worshipped beyond the outer galaxies. I plumbed the blackest pits of hell and came back—laughing. I was one with the rest of those dark warders, and I joined them in the saturnalia of horror until the scarred man spoke to us again.

“Our time grows short,” he said, his scarred and bearded white face like a gargoyle’s in the half-light. “We must depart soon. But you are a true Kralitz, Franz, and we shall meet again, and feast again, and make merry for longer than you think. One last pledge!”

I gave it to him. “To the House of Kralitz! May it never fall!”

And with an exultant shout we drained the pungent dregs of the liquor.

Then a strange lassitude fell upon me. With the others I turned my back on the cavern and the shapes that pranced and bellowed and crawled there, and I went up through the carved stone portal. We filed up the stairs, up and up, endlessly, until at last we emerged through the gaping hole in the stone flags and proceeded, a dark, silent company, back through those interminable corridors. The surroundings began to grow strangely familiar, and suddenly I recognized them.

We were in the great burial vaults below the castle, where the Barons Kralitz were ceremoniously entombed. Each Baron had been placed in his stone casket in his separate chamber, and each chamber lay, like beads on a necklace, adjacent to the next, so that we proceeded from the farthermost tombs of the early Barons Kralitz toward the unoccupied vaults. By immemorial custom, each tomb lay bare, an empty mausoleum, until the time had come for its use, when the great stone coffin, with the memorial inscription carved upon it, would be carried to its place. It was fitting, indeed, for the secret of Kralitz to be hidden here.

Abruptly I realized that I was alone, save for the bearded man with the disfiguring scar. The others had vanished, and, deep in my thoughts, I had not missed them. My companion stretched out his black-swathed arm and halted my progress, and I turned to him questioningly. He said in his sonorous voice, “I must leave you now. I must go back to my own place.” And he pointed to the way whence we had come.

I nodded, for I had already recognized my companions for what they were. I knew that each Baron Kralitz had been laid in his tomb, only to arise as a monstrous thing neither dead nor alive, to descend into the cavern below and take part in the evil saturnalia. I realized, too, that with the approach of dawn they had returned to their stone coffins, to lie in a death-like trance until the setting sun should bring brief liberation. My own occult studies had enabled me to recognize these dreadful manifestations.

I bowed to my companion and would have proceeded on my way to the upper parts of the castle, but he barred my path. He shook his head slowly, his scar hideous in the phosphorescent gloom.

I said, “May I not go yet?”

He stared at me with tortured, smoldering eyes that had looked into hell itself, and he pointed to what lay beside me, and in a flash of nightmare realization I knew the secret of the curse of Kralitz. There came to me the knowledge that made my brain a frightful thing in which shapes of darkness would ever swirl and scream; the dreadful comprehension of when each Baron Kralitz was initiated into the brotherhood of blood. I knew—I knew—that no coffin had ever been placed unoccupied in the tombs, and I read upon the stone sarcophagus at my feet the inscription that made my doom known to me—my own name, “Franz, twenty-first Baron Kralitz.”

LIGHT, by Achmed Abdullah

Beneath the sooty velvet of the New York night, Tompkins Square was a blotch of lonely, mean sadness.

No light loungers there waiting for a bluecoat’s hickory to tickle their thin, patched soles; no wizened news vendor spreading the remnants of his printed wares about him and figuring out the difference between gain on papers sold and discount on those returned unsold; no Greek hawker considering the advisability of beating the high cost of living by supping on those figs which he had not been able to sell because of their antiquity; no maudlin drunk mistaking the blur in his whisky-soaked brain for the happy twilight of the foggy green isle.

For Tompkins Square is both the soul and the stomach—possibly interchangeable terms—of those who work with cloth and silk and shoddy worsted, with needle and thread, with thimble and sewing-machine, those who out of their starved, haggard East-Side brains make the American women—the native-born—the best dressed in all the world. Sweatshop workers they are: men from Russia and Poland, men from the Balkans, from Sicily, Calabria, and Asia Minor; men who set out on their splendid American adventure, not for liberty, but for a chance to earn enough to keep body and soul together—and let the ward boss and the ward association attend to the voting, including the more or less honest counting of votes.

Work—eat—sleep—and lights out at ten! Such is the maxim of the neighborhood, since lights cost money, and money buys food.

Thus Tompkins Square on that night, as on all nights, was sad and dark and tired and asleep. Just the scraggly, dusty trees, the empty benches, and a shy gleam of the half-veiled moon where it struck the fantastic, twisted angle of a battered municipal waste-paper receptacle, or a bit of broken bottle glass that was trying to drown its despair in a murky puddle.

On the north side of the square stood the tenement house with the lighted window—like a winking eye—directly beneath the roof, high up. The house was gray and pallid; incongruously baroque in spots, distributed irregularly over its warty façade, where the contractor had got rid of some art balconies and carved near-stone struts left over from a bankrupt Bronx job. It towered over the smug red-brick dwellings—remnants of an age when English and German were still spoken thereabouts—with thin, anemic arrogance, like a tubercular giant among a lot of short, stocky, well-fleshed people; sick, yet conscious of his height and the dignity that goes with it.

HE SAW the lighted window as he crossed the square from the south side, and sat down on one of the benches and stared at it.

Steadily he stared, until his eyes smarted and burned and his neck muscles bunched painfully.

For that glimmering light, gilding the fly-specked pane, meant to him the things he hated, the things he had cheated and cursed and ridiculed—and, by the same token, longed for and loved.

It meant, to him, life—and the reasons of life.

It meant to him humanity and the faith of humanity: which is happiness. The right to happiness! The eternal, sacerdotal duty of happiness!

Happiness?

He laughed. Why—damn it!—happiness was a lie. Happiness was hypocrisy. It meant the dieting of man’s smoldering, natural passions into an artificial, pinchneck, thin-blooded Puritanism. It spelled the mumming of the thinking mind—the mind that was trying to think—into the speciosities of childish fairy-tales. It was a sniveling reminder of pap-fed infancy.

The only thing worthwhile in life was success—which is selfishness. Selfishness sprawling stark-contoured and unashamed, sublimely unself-conscious, serenely brutal—a five-plied Nietzscheism on a modern business basis which acknowledged neither codified laws nor principles.

It had been the measure and route of his life, and—he whipped out the thought like something shameful and nasty, like a nauseating drug which his mind refused to swallow—it had cheated him.

Yes, by God! It had cheated him, cheated him!

For, first, it had given him gold and power and the envy of men, which was sweet.

Then, as a jest of Fate’s own black brewing, it had taken everything away from him overnight, in one huge financial crash, and had made of him what he was tonight: gray, middle-aged, bitter, joyless—and a pauper. It had brought him here, to Tompkins Square, and had chucked him, like a worn-out, useless rag, into this dusty, sticky bench whence he was staring at the lighted window, high up.

He wondered what was behind it, and who?

Three days earlier he had come to New York with ten dollars—his last ten dollars—in his pocket. He had taken a room in this tenement-house, and every night he had sat on the bench and had stared at the warty, baroque façade.

Always it had been dark. Always the tenants, the hard-working people who lived there, had turned out their lights around ten o’clock with an almost military regularity that reminded him of barracks and a well-disciplined boarding-school.

He knew most of them. For they had talked to him, on stairs and landings and leaning from windows, with the easy garrulousness of the very poor who can’t be snobs since they are familiar with each other’s incomes and flesh-pots. They had lifted the crude-meshed veils of their hearts and hearths and had bidden him look—and all he had seen had been misery.

He checked the thought.

No! That wasn’t true!

He had also seen love and friendship, and fine, sweet faith—and that was why he hated them—why he pitied and despised them.

Faith—love—friendship! To the devil with the sniveling, weak-kneed lot of ’em! They spelled happiness—and happiness did not exist—and —

Happiness!

The thought, the word, recurred to his brain with maddening persistency. It would not budge.

Happiness.

“Why, happiness is behind that lighted window!” The idea came to him—almost the conviction.

But what happiness? And whose?

He speculated who might be up there, in the garret room squeezed by the flat roof. He tried to picture to himself what might be shimmering behind that golden flash.

Perhaps it was Fedor Davidoff, the little hunchbacked Russian tailor, with the fat, golden-haired, sloe-eyed wife. He might be celebrating the coming of freedom to his beloved Russia. Or he might be sitting up late to finish some piece of work—to earn extra money. For his wife was expecting a child. He had three already, curly-haired, straight-backed. But he wanted more —

“Children make happiness, eh?” he used to say.

Or—wait! Perhaps it was Peter Macdonald, the artist, dreaming over his lamp and his rank, blackened pipe, and deliberating with himself where he would live—upper West Side or lower Fifth—when the world should have acknowledged his genius and backed up the opinion with solid cash. Peter had lived now for over three months in the tenement-house. “Like the neighborhood—bully atmosphere—marvelous greens and browns,” was the reason he gave. But the other tenants smiled. They knew that Peter lived there because his room cost him only two dollars a week, and because he took his meals with the Leibl Finkelsteins on the first floor for three dollars more.

Perhaps a pair of lovers. Enrique Tassetti, the squat, laughing Sicilian, who had taken to himself a bride of his own people. They would have spent fifty cents for a bottle of Chianti, another fifty for bread and mushrooms and oil and pepper to turn into a dish worthy of a Sicilian—or a king.

Again it might be Donchian, the Armenian, burning the midnight oil over the perfection of the mysterious invention of which he spoke at times, after having worked with needle and thread since six o’clock in the morning; or old Mrs. Sarah Kempinsky, reading and rereading the letter which her soldier son had sent her from France; or —

What did it matter?

Whoever was sitting behind that lighted window was happy—happy—and the man’s imagination choked, his mind became flushed and congested.

He was quite unconscious of his surroundings. The stillness of the streets seemed magical, the loneliness absolute. Only from very far came sounds: the Elevated rattling with a steely, throaty sob; a surface-car clanking and wheezing; a hoarse Klaxon blaring snobbishly; a stammering, alcoholic voice throwing the tail-end of a gutter song to the moist purple veils of the night.

But he did not hear.

He was conscious only of the lighted window, high up. It seemed to glitter nervously, to call to him, to stretch out, as if trying to communicate to him an emotion it had borrowed by contact with something—with somebody.

That was just the trouble. He wondered who that somebody was, what that something might be. Whoever it was, it seemed urgent, clamorous. Silently clamorous. His subconsciousness grew thick with amazement and wonder and doubt. It surged up—crowded, choking, tumultuous.

The lighted window!

What was behind it? What was its riddle?

* * * *

He knew that he must find out, and so he rose, crossed the street, entered the house, and was up the stairs three steps at the time.

He found the room without any trouble, and opened the door. He did not knock.

He stepped inside; and there, on the bed, he saw a motionless figure, faintly outlined beneath a plain white sheet, a tall candle burning yellow at the foot of the bed, another at the head.

He crossed over, lifted a corner of the sheet, and looked. And he saw the face of a dead man. It was calm and serene and unutterably happy.

Then it dawned upon him:

The man on the bed was himself.

THE LOST RACE, by Robert E. Howard

Cororuc glanced about him and hastened his pace. He was no coward, but he did not like the place. Tall trees rose all about, their sullen branches shutting out the sunlight. The dim trail led in and out among them, sometimes skirting the edge of a ravine, where Cororuc could gaze down at the treetops beneath. Occasionally, through a rift in the forest, he could see away to the forbidding hills that hinted of the ranges much farther to the west, that were the mountains of Cornwall.

In those mountains the bandit chief, Buruc the Cruel, was supposed to lurk, to descend upon such victims as might pass that way. Cororuc shifted his grip on his spear and quickened his step. His haste was due not only to the menace of the outlaws, but also to the fact that he wished once more to be in his native land. He had been on a secret mission to the wild Cornish tribesmen; and though he had been more or less successful, he was impatient to be out of their inhospitable country. It had been a long, wearisome trip, and he still had nearly the whole of Britain to traverse. He threw a glance of aversion about him. He longed for the pleasant woodlands, with scampering deer, and chirping birds, to which he was used. He longed for the tall white cliff, where the blue sea lapped merrily. The forest through which he was passing seemed uninhabited. There were no birds, no animals; nor had he seen a sign of human habitation.

His comrades still lingered at the savage court of the Cornish king, enjoying his crude hospitality, in no hurry to be away. But Cororuc was not content. So he had left them to follow at their leisure and had set out alone.

Rather a fine figure of a man was Cororuc. Some six feet in height, strongly though leanly built, he was, with gray eyes, a pure Briton but not a pure Celt, his long yellow hair revealing, in him as in all his race, a trace of Belgae.

He was clad in skillfully dressed deerskin, for the Celts had not yet perfected the coarse cloth which they made, and most of the race preferred the hides of deer.

He was armed with a long bow of yew wood, made with no especial skill but an efficient weapon; a long bronze broadsword, with a buckskin sheath; a long bronze dagger and a small, round shield, rimmed with a band of bronze and covered with tough buffalo hide. A crude bronze helmet was on his head. Faint devices were painted in woad on his arms and cheeks.

His beardless face was of the highest type of Briton, clear, straightforward, the shrewd, practical determination of the Nordic mingling with the reckless courage and dreamy artistry of the Celt.

So Cororuc trod the forest path, warily, ready to flee or fight, but preferring to do neither just then.

The trail led away from the ravine, disappearing around a great tree. And from the other side of the tree, Cororuc heard sounds of conflict. Gliding warily forward, and wondering whether he should see some of the elves and dwarfs that were reputed to haunt those woodlands, he peered around the great tree.

A few feet from him he saw a strange tableau. Backed against another tree stood a large wolf, at bay, blood trickling from gashes about his shoulder; while before him, crouching for a spring, the warrior saw a great panther. Cororuc wondered at the cause of the battle. Not often the lords of the forest met in warfare. And he was puzzled by the snarls of the great cat. Savage, blood-lusting, yet they held a strange note of fear; and the beast seemed hesitant to spring in.

Just why Cororuc chose to take the part of the wolf, he himself could not have said. Doubtless it was just the reckless chivalry of the Celt in him, an admiration for the dauntless attitude of the wolf against his far more powerful foe. Be that as it may, Cororuc, characteristically forgetting his bow and taking the more reckless course, drew his sword and leaped in front of the panther. But he had no chance to use it. The panther, whose nerve appeared to be already somewhat shaken, uttered a startled screech and disappeared among the trees so quickly that Cororuc wondered if he had really seen a panther. He turned to the wolf, wondering if it would leap upon him. It was watching him, half crouching; slowly it stepped away from the tree, and still watching him, backed away a few yards, then turned and made off with a strange shambling gait. As the warrior watched it vanish into the forest, an uncanny feeling came over him; he had seen many wolves, he had hunted them and had been hunted by them, but he had never seen such a wolf before.

He hesitated and then walked warily after the wolf, following the tracks that were plainly defined in the soft loam. He did not hasten, being merely content to follow the tracks. After a short distance, he stopped short, the hairs on his neck seeming to bristle. Only the tracks of the hind feet showed: the wolf was walking erect.

He glanced about him. There was no sound; the forest was silent. He felt an impulse to turn and put as much territory between him and the mystery as possible, but his Celtic curiosity would not allow it. He followed the trail. And then it ceased altogether. Beneath a great tree the tracks vanished. Cororuc felt the cold sweat on his forehead. What kind of place was that forest? Was he being led astray and eluded by some inhuman, supernatural monster of the woodlands, who sought to ensnare him? And Cororuc backed away, his sword lifted, his courage not allowing him to run, but greatly desiring to do so. And so he came again to the tree where he had first seen the wolf. The trail he had followed led away from it in another direction and Cororuc took it up, almost running in his haste to get out of the vicinity of a wolf who walked on two legs and then vanished in the air.

The trail wound about more tediously than ever, appearing and disappearing within a dozen feet, but it was well for Cororuc that it did, for thus he heard the voices of the men coming up the path before they saw him. He took to a tall tree that branched over the trail, lying close to the great bole, along a wide-flung branch.

Three men were coming down the forest path.

One was a big, burly fellow, vastly over six feet in height, with a long red beard and a great mop of red hair. In contrast, his eyes were a beady black. He was dressed in deerskins, and armed with a great sword.

Of the two others, one was a lanky, villainous-looking scoundrel, with only one eye, and the other was a small, wizened man, who squinted hideously with both beady eyes.

Cororuc knew them, by descriptions the Cornishmen had made between curses, and it was in his excitement to get a better view of the most villainous murderer in Britain that he slipped from the tree branch and plunged to the ground directly between them.

He was up on the instant, his sword out. He could expect no mercy; for he knew that the red-haired man was Buruc the Cruel, the scourge of Cornwall.

The bandit chief bellowed a foul curse and whipped out his great sword. He avoided the Briton’s furious thrust by a swift backward leap and then the battle was on. Buruc rushed the warrior from the front, striving to beat him down by sheer weight; while the lanky, one-eyed villain slipped around, trying to get behind him. The smaller man had retreated to the edge of the forest. The fine art of the fence was unknown to those early swordsmen. It was hack, slash, stab, the full weight of the arm behind each blow. The terrific blows crashing on his shield beat Cororuc to the ground, and the lanky, one-eyed villain rushed in to finish him. Cororuc spun about without rising, cut the bandit’s legs from under him and stabbed him as he fell, then threw himself to one side and to his feet, in time to avoid Buruc’s sword. Again, driving his shield up to catch the bandit’s sword in midair, he deflected it and whirled his own with all his power. Buruc’s head flew from his shoulders.

Then Cororuc, turning, saw the wizened bandit scurry into the forest. He raced after him, but the fellow had disappeared among the trees. Knowing the uselessness of attempting to pursue him, Cororuc turned and raced down the trail. He did not know if there were more bandits in that direction, but he did know that if he expected to get out of the forest at all, he would have to do it swiftly. Without doubt the villain who had escaped would have all the other bandits out, and soon they would be beating the woodlands for him.

After running for some distance down the path and seeing no sign of any enemy, he stopped and climbed into the topmost branches of a tall tree that towered above its fellows.

On all sides he seemed surrounded by a leafy ocean. To the west he could see the hills he had avoided. To the north, far in the distance, other hills rose; to the south the forest ran, an unbroken sea. But to the east, far away, he could barely see the line that marked the thinning out of the forest into the fertile plains. Miles and miles away, he knew not how many, but it meant more pleasant travel, villages of men, people of his own race. He was surprized that he was able to see that far, but the tree in which he stood was a giant of its kind.

Before he started to descend, he glanced about nearer at hand. He could trace the faintly marked line of the trail he had been following, running away into the east; and could make out other trails leading into it, or away from it. Then a glint caught his eye. He fixed his gaze on a glade some distance down the trail and saw, presently, a party of men enter and vanish. Here and there, on every trail, he caught glances of the glint of accouterments, the waving of foliage. So the squinting villain had already roused the bandits. They were all around him; he was virtually surrounded.

A faintly heard burst of savage yells, from back up the trail, startled him. So, they had already thrown a cordon about the place of the fight and had found him gone. Had he not fled swiftly, he would have been caught. He was outside the cordon, but the bandits were all about him. Swiftly he slipped from the tree and glided into the forest.

Then began the most exciting hunt Cororuc had ever engaged in; for he was the hunted and men were the hunters. Gliding, slipping from bush to bush and from tree to tree, now running swiftly, now crouching in a covert, Cororuc fled, ever eastward, not daring to turn back lest he be driven farther back into the forest. At times he was forced to turn his course; in fact, he very seldom fled in a straight course, yet always he managed to work farther eastward.

Sometimes he crouched in bushes or lay along some leafy branch, and saw bandits pass so close to him that he could have touched them. Once or twice they sighted him and he fled, bounding over logs and bushes, darting in and out among the trees; and always he eluded them.

It was in one of those headlong flights that he noticed he had entered a defile of small hills, of which he had been unaware, and looking back over his shoulder, saw that his pursuers had halted, within full sight. Without pausing to ruminate on so strange a thing, he darted around a great boulder, felt a vine or something catch his foot, and was thrown headlong. Simultaneously, something struck the youth’s head, knocking him senseless.

When Cororuc recovered his senses, he found that he was bound, hand and foot. He was being borne along, over rough ground. He looked about him. Men carried him on their shoulders, but such men as he had never seen before. Scarce above four feet stood the tallest, and they were small of build and very dark of complexion. Their eyes were black; and most of them went stooped forward, as if from a lifetime spent in crouching and hiding; peering furtively on all sides. They were armed with small bows, arrows, spears and daggers, all pointed, not with crudely worked bronze but with flint and obsidian, of the finest workmanship. They were dressed in finely dressed hides of rabbits and other small animals, and a kind of coarse cloth; and many were tattooed from head to foot in ocher and woad. There were perhaps twenty in all. What sort of men were they? Cororuc had never seen the like.

They were going down a ravine, on both sides of which steep cliffs rose. Presently they seemed to come to a blank wall, where the ravine appeared to come to an abrupt stop. Here, at a word from one who seemed to be in command, they set the Briton down, and seizing hold of a large boulder, drew it to one side. A small cavern was exposed, seeming to vanish away into the earth; then the strange men picked up the Briton and moved forward.

Cororuc’s hair bristled at the thought of being borne into that forbidding-looking cave. What manner of men were they? In all Britain and Alba, in Cornwall or Ireland, Cororuc had never seen such men. Small dwarfish men, who dwelt in the earth. Cold sweat broke out on the youth’s forehead. Surely they were the malevolent dwarfs of whom the Cornish people had spoken, who dwelt in their caverns by day, and by night sallied forth to steal and burn dwellings, even slaying if the opportunity arose! You will hear of them, even today, if you journey in Cornwall.

The men, or elves, if such they were, bore him into the cavern, others entering and drawing the boulder back into place. For a moment all was darkness, and then torches began to glow, away off. And at a shout they moved on. Other men of the caves came forward, with the torches.

Cororuc looked about him. The torches shed a vague glow over the scene. Sometimes one, sometimes another wall of the cave showed for an instant, and the Briton was vaguely aware that they were covered with paintings, crudely done, yet with a certain skill his own race could not equal. But always the roof remained unseen. Cororuc knew that the seemingly small cavern had merged into a cave of surprizing size. Through the vague light of the torches the strange people moved, came and went, silently, like shadows of the dim past.

He felt the cords of thongs that bound his feet loosened. He was lifted upright.

“Walk straight ahead,” said a voice, speaking the language of his own race, and he felt a spear point touch the back of his neck.

And straight ahead he walked, feeling his sandals scrape on the stone floor of the cave, until they came to a place where the floor tilted upward. The pitch was steep and the stone was so slippery that Cororuc could not have climbed it alone. But his captors pushed him, and pulled him, and he saw that long, strong vines were strung from somewhere at the top.

Those the strange men seized, and bracing their feet against the slippery ascent, went up swiftly. When their feet found level surface again, the cave made a turn, and Cororuc blundered out into a fire-lit scene that made him gasp.

The cave debouched into a cavern so vast as to be almost incredible. The mighty walls swept up into a great arched roof that vanished in the darkness. A level floor lay between, and through it flowed a river; an underground river. From under one wall it flowed to vanish silently under the other. An arched stone bridge, seemingly of natural make, spanned the current.

All around the walls of the great cavern, which was roughly circular, were smaller caves, and before each glowed a fire. Higher up were other caves, regularly arranged, tier on tier. Surely human men could not have built such a city.

In and out among the caves, on the level floor of the main cavern, people were going about what seemed daily tasks. Men were talking together and mending weapons, some were fishing from the river; women were replenishing fires, preparing garments; and altogether it might have been any other village in Britain, to judge from their occupations. But it all struck Cororuc as extremely unreal; the strange place, the small, silent people, going about their tasks, the river flowing silently through it all.

Then they became aware of the prisoner and flocked about him. There was none of the shouting, abuse and indignities, such as savages usually heap on their captives, as the small men drew about Cororuc, silently eying him with malevolent, wolfish stares. The warrior shuddered, in spite of himself.

But his captors pushed through the throng, driving the Briton before them. Close to the bank of the river, they stopped and drew away from around him.

Two great fires leaped and flickered in front of him and there was something between them. He focused his gaze and presently made out the object. A high stone seat, like a throne; and in it seated an aged man, with a long white beard, silent, motionless, but with black eyes that gleamed like a wolf’s.

The ancient was clothed in some kind of a single, flowing garment. One claw-like hand rested on the seat near him, skinny, crooked fingers, with talons like a hawk’s. The other hand was hidden among his garments.

The firelight danced and flickered; now the old man stood out clearly, his hooked, beak-like nose and long beard thrown into bold relief; now he seemed to recede until he was invisible to the gaze of the Briton, except for his glittering eyes.

“Speak, Briton!” The words came suddenly, strong, clear, without a hint of age. “Speak, what would ye say?”

Cororuc, taken aback, stammered and said, “Why, why—what manner people are you? Why have you taken me prisoner? Are you elves?”

“We are Picts,” was the stern reply.

“Picts!” Cororuc had heard tales of those ancient people from the Gaelic Britons; some said that they still lurked in the hills of Siluria, but —

“I have fought Picts in Caledonia,” the Briton protested; “they are short but massive and misshapen; not at all like you!”

“They are not true Picts,” came the stern retort. “Look about you, Briton,” with a wave of an arm, “you see the remnants of a vanishing race; a race that once ruled Britain from sea to sea.”

The Briton stared, bewildered.

“Harken, Briton,” the voice continued; “harken, barbarian, while I tell to you the tale of the lost race.”

The firelight flickered and danced, throwing vague reflections on the towering walls and on the rushing, silent current.

The ancient’s voice echoed through the mighty cavern.

“Our people came from the south. Over the islands, over the Inland Sea. Over the snow-topped mountains, where some remained, to slay any enemies who might follow. Down into the fertile plains we came. Over all the land we spread. We became wealthy and prosperous. Then two kings arose in the land, and he who conquered, drove out the conquered. So many of us made boats and set sail for the far-off cliffs that gleamed white in the sunlight. We found a fair land with fertile plains. We found a race of red-haired barbarians, who dwelt in caves. Mighty giants, of great bodies and small minds.

“We built our huts of wattle. We tilled the soil. We cleared the forest. We drove the red-haired giants back into the forest. Farther we drove them back until at last they fled to the mountains of the west and the mountains of the north. We were rich. We were prosperous.

“Then,” and his voice thrilled with rage and hate, until it seemed to reverberate through the cavern, “then the Celts came. From the isles of the west, in their rude coracles they came. In the west they landed, but they were not satisfied with the west. They marched eastward and seized the fertile plains. We fought. They were stronger. They were fierce fighters and they were armed with weapons of bronze, whereas we had only weapons of flint.

“We were driven out. They enslaved us. They drove us into the forest. Some of us fled into the mountains of the west. Many fled into the mountains of the north. There they mingled with the red-haired giants we drove out so long ago, and became a race of monstrous dwarfs, losing all the arts of peace and gaining only the ability to fight.

“But some of us swore that we would never leave the land we had fought for. But the Celts pressed us. There were many, and more came. So we took to caverns, to ravines, to caves. We, who had always dwelt in huts that let in much light, who had always tilled the soil, we learned to dwell like beasts, in caves where no sunlight ever entered. Caves we found, of which this is the greatest; caves we made.

“You, Briton,” the voice became a shriek and a long arm was outstretched in accusation, “you and your race! You have made a free, prosperous nation into a race of earth-rats! We who never fled, who dwelt in the air and the sunlight close by the sea where traders came, we must flee like hunted beasts and burrow like moles! But at night! Ah, then for our vengeance! Then we slip from our hiding places, ravines and caves, with torch and dagger! Look, Briton!”

And following the gesture, Cororuc saw a rounded post of some kind of very hard wood, set in a niche in the stone floor, close to the bank. The floor about the niche was charred as if by old fires.

Cororuc stared, uncomprehending. Indeed, he understood little of what had passed. That these people were even human, he was not at all certain. He had heard so much of them as “little people.” Tales of their doings, their hatred of the race of man, and their maliciousness flocked back to him. Little he knew that he was gazing on one of the mysteries of the ages. That the tales which the ancient Gaels told of the Picts, already warped, would become even more warped from age to age, to result in tales of elves, dwarfs, trolls and fairies, at first accepted and then rejected, entire, by the race of men, just as the Neanderthal monsters resulted in tales of goblins and ogres. But of that Cororuc neither knew nor cared, and the ancient was speaking again.

“There, there, Briton,” exulted he, pointing to the post, “there you shall pay! A scant payment for the debt your race owes mine, but to the fullest of your extent.”

The old man’s exultation would have been fiendish, except for a certain high purpose in his face. He was sincere. He believed that he was only taking just vengeance; and he seemed like some great patriot for a mighty, lost cause.

“But I am a Briton!” stammered Cororuc. “It was not my people who drove your race into exile! They were Gaels, from Ireland. I am a Briton and my race came from Gallia only a hundred years ago. We conquered the Gaels and drove them into Erin, Wales and Caledonia, even as they drove your race.”

“No matter!” The ancient chief was on his feet. “A Celt is a Celt. Briton, or Gael, it makes no difference. Had it not been Gael, it would have been Briton. Every Celt who falls into our hands must pay, be it warrior or woman, babe or king. Seize him and bind him to the post.”

In an instant Cororuc was bound to the post, and he saw, with horror, the Picts piling firewood about his feet.

“And when you are sufficiently burned, Briton,” said the ancient, “this dagger that has drunk the blood of a hundred Britons, shall quench its thirst in yours.”

“But never have I harmed a Pict!” Cororuc gasped, struggling with his bonds.

“You pay, not for what you did, but for what your race has done,” answered the ancient sternly. “Well do I remember the deeds of the Celts when first they landed on Britain—the shrieks of the slaughtered, the screams of ravished girls, the smokes of burning villages, the plundering.”

Cororuc felt his short neck-hairs bristle. When first the Celts landed on Britain! That was over five hundred years ago!

And his Celtic curiosity would not let him keep still, even at the stake with the Picts preparing to light firewood piled about him.

“You could not remember that. That was ages ago.”

The ancient looked at him somberly. “And I am age-old. In my youth I was a witch-finder, and an old woman witch cursed me as she writhed at the stake. She said I should live until the last child of the Pictish race had passed. That I should see the once mighty nation go down into oblivion and then—and only then—should I follow it. For she put upon me the curse of life everlasting.”

Then his voice rose until it filled the cavern. “But the curse was nothing. Words can do no harm, can do nothing, to a man. I live. A hundred generations have I seen come and go, and yet another hundred. What is time? The sun rises and sets, and another day has passed into oblivion. Men watch the sun and set their lives by it. They league themselves on every hand with time. They count the minutes that race them into eternity. Man outlived the centuries ere he began to reckon time. Time is man-made. Eternity is the work of the gods. In this cavern there is no such thing as time. There are no stars, no sun. Without is time; within is eternity. We count not time. Nothing marks the speeding of the hours. The youths go forth. They see the sun, the stars. They reckon time. And they pass. I was a young man when I entered this cavern. I have never left it. As you reckon time, I may have dwelt here a thousand years; or an hour. When not banded by time, the soul, the mind, call it what you will, can conquer the body. And the wise men of the race, in my youth, knew more than the outer world will ever learn. When I feel that my body begins to weaken, I take the magic draft, that is known only to me, of all the world. It does not give immortality; that is the work of the mind alone; but it rebuilds the body. The race of Picts vanish; they fade like the snow on the mountain. And when the last is gone, this dagger shall free me from the world.” Then in a swift change of tone, “Light the fagots!”

Cororuc’s mind was fairly reeling. He did not in the least understand what he had just heard. He was positive that he was going mad; and what he saw the next minute assured him of it.

Through the throng came a wolf; and he knew that it was the wolf whom he had rescued from the panther close by the ravine in the forest!

Strange, how long ago and far away that seemed! Yes, it was the same wolf. That same strange, shambling gait. Then the thing stood erect and raised its front feet to its head. What nameless horror was that?

Then the wolf’s head fell back, disclosing a man’s face. The face of a Pict; one of the first “werewolves.” The man stepped out of the wolfskin and strode forward, calling something. A Pict just starting to light the wood about the Briton’s feet drew back the torch and hesitated.

The wolf-Pict stepped forward and began to speak to the chief, using Celtic, evidently for the prisoner’s benefit. Cororuc was surprized to hear so many speak his language, not reflecting upon its comparative simplicity, and the ability of the Picts.

“What is this?” asked the Pict who had played wolf. “A man is to be burned who should not be!”

“How?” exclaimed the old man fiercely, clutching his long beard. “Who are you to go against a custom of age-old antiquity?”

“I met a panther,” answered the other, “and this Briton risked his life to save mine. Shall a Pict show ingratitude?”

And as the ancient hesitated, evidently pulled one way by his fanatical lust for revenge, and the other by his equally fierce racial pride, the Pict burst into a wild flight of oration, carried on in his own language. At last the ancient chief nodded.

“A Pict ever paid his debts,” said he with impressive grandeur. “Never a Pict forgets. Unbind him. No Celt shall ever say that a Pict showed ingratitude.”

Cororuc was released, and as, like a man in a daze, he tried to stammer his thanks, the chief waved them aside.

“A Pict never forgets a foe, ever remembers a friendly deed,” he replied.

“Come,” murmured his Pictish friend, tugging at the Celt’s arm.

He led the way into a cave leading away from the main cavern. As they went, Cororuc looked back, to see the ancient chief seated upon his stone throne, his eyes gleaming as he seemed to gaze back through the lost glories of the ages; on each hand the fires leaped and flickered. A figure of grandeur, the king of a lost race.

On and on Cororuc’s guide led him. And at last they emerged and the Briton saw the starlit sky above him.

“In that way is a village of your tribesmen,” said the Pict, pointing, “where you will find a welcome until you wish to take up your journey anew.”

And he pressed gifts on the Celt; gifts of garments of cloth and finely worked deerskin, beaded belts, a fine horn bow with arrows skillfully tipped with obsidian. Gifts of food. His own weapons were returned to him.

“But an instant,” said the Briton, as the Pict turned to go. “I followed your tracks in the forest. They vanished.” There was a question in his voice.

The Pict laughed softly. “I leaped into the branches of the tree. Had you looked up, you would have seen me. If ever you wish a friend, you will ever find one in Berula, chief among the Alban Picts.”

He turned and vanished. And Cororuc strode through the moonlight toward the Celtic village.

RINGARD AND DENDRA, by Brian McNaughton

The most extravagant rumors of the stranger’s ugliness had been nothing but plain truth. A further rumor had yet to be investigated, that he was a fiend whose mother had made a fool of herself with a snake. I dismounted and walked towards him, my hand resting on the hilt of the manqueller that hung by my saddle.

As if we had been chatting all day, he asked, “This used to be the slope of a hill, didn’t it?”

That was obvious. The Sons of Cludd had sheered it right off, leaving the cliff of bare earth that towered above us. I assumed they had planned to build a retaining wall, for destabilizing gullies already scored the cliff, but they had abandoned the picks and shovels that lay rusting about us and run off to hunt witches.

I tried to restart our conversation on a formal basis: “I am Lord Fariel.”

“Of the House of Sleith,” he stated, and I managed not to flinch when he swung his eyes at me. “You didn’t lay your own land waste, did you?”

Except for their extraordinary sadness, his eyes were those of an ordinary old man. It was their setting that had upset everyone, tattoos like the patterned skin of a reptile. Not even his eyelids and his lips had escaped the needle. The scaly effect was accidental, because the details depicted nothing more sinister than exotic flowers and fungi.

However odd, a human garden was pleasanter than a human snake, and I answered him less stiffly: “The Empress wanted the Cluddites out of her hair, so she sent them to fortify the border. They tell me this will be a supply road.”

He nodded absently as he scanned the pines at the top of the cliff, then turned and pondered the hardwood forest on the interrupted slope. He seemed to be looking for lost landmarks.

I said, “You don’t come from here, do you?”

“I do. My wife may have been your kinswoman. Dendra Sleith?”

I gaped as I would at a confessed elf, for he was a creature found only in fireside tales and songs. My Aunt Dendra had long ago been kidnapped on her wedding-night by a woodcutter’s son named: “Ringard?”

“The same.”

My father would have killed him on the spot. Less impetuous relatives would have deferred his death, the better to savor it, but I felt only curiosity about a man whose stature in our provincial gossip was mythic. Disfigurement aside, he was bald and bent and ordinary as an old boot. He looked hard and lean, but so does the oaf who slops out my stables, and nobody would ever sing rousing ballads about him.

He stared at me with the dignity of a hound too weary to fawn or cringe. If I’d struck him, I don’t think he would have been impressed. He had been struck before.

Contrary to his expectations, I was concerned for his safety. “You had better come with me,” I said. “The Cluddites are in the grip of a witch-craze, they’ve misused some of my people already, and your appearance....”

His smile was an angry twitch. “Like many others who served with Lord Azaxiel, I was shipwrecked on the coast of Tampoontam, where the savages gave me the choice of joining their tribe by either adoption or ingestion. You might say that I earned these decorations in the service of our late Emperor.”

The Cluddites wouldn’t say that. They would assume that old Ringard had dined and worshipped in the fashion of his adoptive brothers. Burning an idolatrous cannibal might strike them as a diverting respite from burning witches. While I considered how to warn him tactfully, he asked, “What set them off?”

“One of their preachers, of course. An owl hooted, a wolf howled, the wind sighed among the trees—they don’t like any of that. They’re mostly from Zaxann, this bunch, swineherds and ploughboys, but they seem afraid of the woods.”

“The gulf between a woodsman and a farmer is as great as that between a grand lord like yourself and a common sailor.” He gestured at the raw gap the Holy Soldiers had cut through the hill. “Farmers hate trees.”

While we talked he had led me toward a pile of felled trees, tall as the cliff, that the Cluddites had pushed aside. He circled the heap, climbed it easily as a monkey, peered into it as if searching. Once or twice he called softly, though I could not hear the words.

“Have you lost a dog?”

“No.” He gave no explanation, but he caught the hint that his behavior was odd. He scrambled down and accepted my offer of food and shelter.

* * * *

My household had cheered me for riding forth alone to confront the infamous Snake Man who had scared them even more than the witch-hunt. Their enthusiasm cooled when I brought him home for dinner. My wife and sisters absented themselves from the table and banished the children to the nursery.

The servants who attended him at trembling arm’s length averted their eyes from his fantastic decoration, so I was kept hopping to spare him from being scalded or carved. He was, after all, my long-lost uncle, for kidnapping is an acceptable form of marriage in our part of the world. The social gulf in the couple and Aunt Dendra’s status as someone else’s bride suggested quibbles, but I was no lawyer. He hardly noticed my efforts as he attacked his food in the style of a woodcutter turned sailor and adopted by cannibals. Some of my more legitimate uncles had worse manners.

Finished, unselfconsciously stuffing bread and imperfectly stripped bones into his pockets, he asked, “Do you remember Dendra?”

I had often asked myself that. I think my memory of the fair-haired girl with the sly smile who had joined me in romping with the hounds or making mud-castles, when she should have been practicing the lute or counting her jewels, derived from stories I had been told, and from a portrait I found in a storeroom. I did remember a sudden lack in my life, a moment beyond which my childhood no longer seemed so happy. That, I think, was my only true memory of Dendra.

I wanted to let him talk, so I said merely, “I don’t think so.”

“If you remembered her, you would know,” he stated. “She was ... entirely herself. Her hair was the color of rain when the sun shines.”

While his eyes turned inward, I noticed that the children had defied their mother’s order and were peeking at my fabulous guest from a shadowed gallery. I pretended not to see them. Later, when I should have chased them to bed with assurances that he was only telling a story, I had forgotten them, so I was blamed for their nightmares; and for their fear, not yet overcome, of the woods around our home.

When his silence had continued for some time, I prompted, “Was?”

“Oh, yes. I assume she’s dead. I certainly hope so, for the alternatives are unthinkable.” He treated me again to that angry twitch he used for a smile. “I searched in Crotalorn, but the palace of Dwelphorn Thooz has been eradicated. Even Amorartis Street is gone, buried under the mosaic paving of a spacious new square.”

I called for more wine and suggested, to my everlasting regret, that he begin his story at the beginning.

* * * *

Even as a child (Ringard said), I loved trees and grieved that my father chopped them down so that louts like us could suck hot soup. I would often sneak outdoors at night to avoid sharing the fire. In the hisses and crackles so comforting to everyone else, I heard tiny shrieks of agony.

Each tree was different, even each oak or larm or hemlock from the others of its kind, and I believed that certain trees spoke to me. I followed my father to work each day: not as other small boys would, to play at woodcutter, but to watch with grave disapproval and make sure he left my special friends standing.

It was no use beating this nonsense out of my head, though he tried often enough. He was finally persuaded by one of our neighbors, a woman whose wisdom was ordinarily viewed with suspicion, that I was favored by the godlings who lived in trees. Even my stolid father used charms to fend off the snits of dryads his work might discommode, so the wise woman’s explanation, though not welcome, was accepted. My mother imagined I would grow up to be a priest, and I encouraged her delusion.

As it does to us all, time callused my finer senses. I grew deaf to the voices of trees. I couldn’t bring myself to chop one down, but I would guide the oxen that hauled it out of the forest. I even overcame my qualms about splitting and stacking wood, although that would once have been as distasteful to me as cording human corpses.

One day I was chopping kindling in our yard when I noticed a piece that looked like a wolf—no, not exactly: as if a wolf were trapped in the wood, and I could free it by knocking off the irrelevant parts. It was a very poor likeness that I carved, but my father recognized it. My mother displayed it over the hearth, refusing my pleas to replace it with any of the better figures I was soon making.

In every stick I saw hidden shapes, and I became obsessed with revealing them. My father fretted that I meant to ruin him by turning his valuable firewood into whimsies. I perversely maintained that my carvings had more worth than kindling, that they even justified the sacrifice of living trees. Those captive owls and trout were really there. Why would the gods let me see them, if not to set me the challenge of liberating them?

No one ever thought of selling the results, and my parents began to suspect that my lunacy had returned in a new form. I tried to explain, but talk of freeing wooden captives dismayed them. My mother removed the wolf from its place of honor on the mantel.

I discovered an abandoned hut in the forest where I could steal away to work in peace. Before long the figures had crowded me out, but I squatted at the entrance and liberated still more birds and beasts, demons and men. I was mustering an army to protect me from the demands of the world, and I felt an urgent need to make it ever larger as those demands grew clamorous. A plan was afoot to send me to the Pollian monks in year or so. Loving shapes and patterns as I did, no future held less appeal than adoring the Sun God until he should blind me.

Totally absorbed in my work one day, I was startled out of my wits by a girl’s voice: “Oh, ugh! Why are you making such a filthy beast?”

The wood that came to hand was full of turtles lately, not filthy beasts but well-armored philosophers. I tried to tell her that my subjects chose me, but I was unused to wedging my thoughts into words. As I mumbled and stammered, she roamed through my array of defenders, gawking and disarranging.

“What grotesque rubbish!” she said. “You ought to make only nice things, like this bird, this horse. What’s this?”

“It’s a troll.”

“I thought it was my brother. If you painted them, it might be easier to tell. Wouldn’t they all look nicer if they were painted?”

“No,” I said automatically, but it was an idea that had never entered my head.

“I’ll bring paints tomorrow. You’ll see.”

And she was gone, before I had determined who or quite what she was, apart from one more intolerable intrusion of the world. I thought of gathering my friends together and moving on to a less frequented part of the forest, but that would have taken enormous effort. I should have chased her away, and I angrily honed the sharp words I would speak tomorrow.

She wouldn’t be back, though. She was a mooncalf who had slipped her leash. Paints, indeed! Priests and lords might have paints to splash on their toys, but the people I knew, scrabbling for wood or hides, were lucky to get whitewash for their hovels.

Why should I regret that she was crazy, or that I probably wouldn’t see her again? Because, I told myself, I would never be able to throw insults and rocks at her. Nevertheless I entertained visions of my friends dressed up in pretty paints. I saw her working beside me with her brush, pausing to gaze admiringly at my carving. She would admire me even more when a bear or a wolf came upon us and I scared it off. A girl, I had thought, was only an inferior sort of boy, but now I grew bemused with the differences. The biggest difference was her ability to ruin a whole day’s work with so little effort. No boy had ever done that.

She spoiled my next morning, too, by failing to return. I could only whittle aimlessly. Some of the pieces I found held her face, but I had no talent for exact likenesses of individuals. Her memory changed more the closer I examined it, until I hardly remembered her face at all.

Convinced at last that she wouldn’t come, I had just submerged into my work when she dropped beside me from nowhere. I could have carved myself a more eloquent tongue than the one knotted behind my teeth, but she chattered for both of us as she painted the troll that had recalled her brother: yes, painted, to my astonishment, in the yellow and blue livery of the House of Sleith. The colors of that Tribe were repeated in her untidy clothes and the ribbons of her braids. I guessed she was a thieving servant from the castle.

Some days later she told me a story in which her distracted nurse called for her as “Lady Dendra,” but I shrugged that off. One of the few things I knew about great ladies was that they didn’t run loose in the woods with bare feet and dirty faces. She was even queerer than I was thought to be, but I didn’t hold it against her, for she was my first non-wooden friend.

I carved, she painted my carvings and gave them life. She brought me books with pictures of tigers, griffins, men with black skins and suchlike mythical creatures, all of which I later found hiding in my wood. We made up histories for the figures and played elaborate games with them whose rules evolved daily. She gave me a set of knives that glimmered like the morning star, that cut the toughest oak as if it were fungus. She talked about our living together in the castle of the Sleiths when we were married, where we should have more than enough room to keep my creations out of the rain.

To part with my friends pained me, but I could work such magic in her face with a simple gift that I would often give her figures she liked. When she let it drop that her fourteenth birthday was near, I labored in secret on a family of gnomes I had detected in the stump of a festiron. I freed them perfectly, and when I presented them to her on the eve of her birthday, she was transported. She gave me in return a hug and a kiss, two wonders entirely new. My cheeks burned, my brain floated away like a cloud, to specify only two of the bizarre effects, but she was so dazzled by her gift that she failed to see that I was fatally stricken. She ran off and left me to perish of fever and delirium.

She didn’t appear the next day, nor the next. Her absences had always hurt, but this one was torture. I had so much to tell her, so much to ask her, so much to learn. Would she kiss me again?

On the evening of the third day I was returning home from the forest when I saw that men in leather and iron were roaring in my father’s face while buffeting him about the head, kicking him in the behind and dunking him in the horse trough. Their trappings were yellow and blue, and their questions concerned me and Lady Dendra.

Bawling with outrage, blind with tears, I dashed forth to patter bare fists and feet against iron backs. To my astonishment it was my father who met my attack, and who practiced on me the interviewing techniques he had just learned. My mother ran screaming from the hut—not to rescue me, as my leaping heart believed, but to add the weight of her big red fists to the beating. She screamed questions, alternately incomprehensible or shocking, while the laughter of the castle bullies rattled in my ringing ears.

After the men rode off, my mother said that I would one day thank her for the beating, as it had probably spared me from gelding and garroting, the punishment for “mongrels who sniff at fancy bitches,” but I never did.

When I felt well enough to walk to my private place, it seemed pointless. Lady Dendra wouldn’t be there, only a rabble of dummies. They could all rot, the captives could stay locked in the wood, nothing mattered. But my beautiful knives were there, her gift, and I might fittingly use one to cut my throat. That would certainly show everybody.

When I returned by night she was, incredibly, waiting. She’d run here every time she could elude her new keepers. The gnomes had been our undoing. She had prized them above all her birthday gifts of stallions and silver and silk, and innocently praised my artistry to men who would bellow for their battleaxes when anyone spoke of art. We talked, we wept, we embraced, and this led us to the secrets we had suffered in advance for discovering. My friends stood guard around us in a haze of moonlight that grew brighter than any noon.

We two fools assumed that life would go on as before, and we promised to meet the next day; but when I came home at dawn, soldiers from the castle clattered around our cottage like wasps. Unable to find me, they were inflicting the prescribed punishment on my father, while my mother called down curses on my head. This time I declined to intervene.

I crept back to my hut by a devious route, but the soldiers had stormed straight to it. The grass where I had lain with Dendra was a scorched waste, trampled by hoofs and boots. My faithful friends had stood their ground and diverted the enemy’s wrath. Not one of them remained, no fragment could I recognize in the ashes.

I ran where the woods were too thick and the crags too steep for horses, the legends too frightful for men. I renewed my conversations with the trees, although I did all the talking. With no one to teach me shaving or sewing, my beard sprouted and my clothing burst its seams. The simple folk who glimpsed me screamed and ran away.

The creatures I freed now were weird. I would sometimes leave carvings in exchange when I slithered near the homes of men to steal a pig or a chicken, for Dendra had told me my work had value, but my gifts were mistaken for fetishes of dreadful virulence. At the farms where I left my works, tributes of food and wine would thereafter be placed outside the tightly secured gates with scrawled pleas that I spare the household from further tokens of demonic wrath.

One night I awoke staring, closer than I am to you, into the yellow eyes of a wolf. It stared back for a moment, then fled in terror. I examined myself, my gnarled and battered limbs, my burr-snarled hair, my twisted mind. I had no liking for the creature I had carved from my own being. I had freed a real troll.

In the morning I scrubbed myself with sand and water, hacked away a year’s worth of hair and whiskers, and draped my body in the hides of the spotty cats who had controverted my claim to their kills. I passed among the farms and villages as a solitary hunter, odder perhaps than most of an odd breed, but not implausibly so.

The whirl and clamor of a carnival drew everyone from the countryside, and me with them. Only when I stood beneath the snapping banners of yellow and blue, shielding one ear against drums and horns to hear the shouted answers to my questions, did I understand that the gods had led me to this very seat of the Sleiths on the day of Dendra’s wedding.

I resisted the impulse to dash headlong against stone walls and steel, for the wilderness had taught me patience. No one wanted the friends I had freed during my Savage Period, some would have paid me to put them back in my bag, but many desired the skins I scarcely valued. In an afternoon of bored haggling, I collected more silver than my unlucky father had seen in his whole lifetime. I bought fine clothing and a handsome horse. (At least I thought them fine and handsome, but Dendra later sniggered at both.) Then I waited.

When the last drunken sentry had tumbled into the moat, I strode boldly into the castle and picked my way through a tangle of snoring Sleiths on the elegant stairway. I breasted a wave of fruits and flowers until it burst against the door of the bridal chamber. Inside, a naked man chased Dendra around the blossom-smothered bed. He was so fat and clumsy that he might have pursued her all night if I hadn’t snatched up his traditional bridegroom’s scepter and broken his head with it.

I planned to escape to the wild crags and sunless glens, but Dendra would have none of that. “Let’s go to the city,” she said. “It’s noisy and crowded and not as pretty as the woods, but at least we’ll have bread. And music. And plumbing.”

It was a happy thought. I’m sure our pursuers displaced every boulder and uprooted every bush in the west country, never suspecting that a rogue bumpkin would make for Crotalorn. It wasn’t the imperial capital then, just a provincial city that had been decaying for centuries in the shadow of the mountains, but it was grand enough to awe me. Gazing up at the dome of Ashtareeta’s temple, I lost my balance and sat down heavily on the pavement, to the amusement of all the pinched and foul-mouthed midgets who had been jostling us.

Never having felt its need, Dendra knew even less about money than I did. We used ours to take a fine apartment near Ashclamith Square, where we dined on Lomar melons and worrells’ eggs. I planned to carve and she to paint, until we had earned such wealth and fame that her kinsmen would beg us to forgive them, but we divided our time between making love and gadding about the theaters and fighting-pits. Although we gave our landlord a handsome sum, only a month passed before he surprised us by demanding a second payment. The bailiffs who heaved our things out the window assured us that his was the common practice of the greedy city.

We had nothing but my knives and her paints. Thieves had snatched our clothing, our bedding, even our pots and pans before they hit the street; but, being young, we welcomed our new adventure. We failed to see our future in the wretches who begged for coppers and fought dogs over garbage. It was their hard luck not to be Ringard and Dendra, but we suffered no such handicap.

We debated our prospects, but they shrank when she forbade me to become a hero of the pits and I denied her a career as temple nymph. I could always skin more spotty cats, but the forests they prowled were a long way away. Hugging each other to keep from falling down laughing, we competed to invent grisly details for a ransom note we might send her father.

“We could sell apples,” she said.

“Where would we get apples?”

She pointed. We had wandered into Amorartis Street, where mansions crumbled among gardens run wild. Above our seat at the base of a wall stretched a bough from the orchard within, bent with the weight of fat and glossy apples. Why had the beggars who disputed husks and scraps in the lower town not come and picked them? Because they lacked brains and enterprise, obviously, or they wouldn’t have been beggars. No people, no dogs, no life at all disturbed the street that twisted between leaning walls. We persuaded ourselves that the orchard had been abandoned.

After tramping all five hills of the city without an apricot or a lark’s wing to share, we were more interested in eating the fruit than selling it. I couldn’t reach the apples, so I lifted her to the top of the wall, where she sat and tossed them down to me. Between bites, she twittered of her plan to occupy one of these vacant houses and make money by playing the lute on street-corners.

“Do you know what a lute costs?”

“You could carve one from apple-wood, and—“ Her words ended in a shriek as she fell backwards over the wall.

I was set to laugh, for she had fallen as suddenly and comically as if jerked by an unseen hand, but when I heard nothing more, when she failed to answer my shout, I flew up the face of the wall. In the garden below, a disgusting old man, his hand clamped to Dendra’s mouth, was dragging her into the bushes.

“Oh,” he said, with a grin so false they would have hooted him off the stage of the cheapest theater, “is this lady with you, young fellow?”

Though soiled and tarnished, his robes and ornaments were those of a nobleman, and my father’s fate at the hands of the ruling class was still vivid in my memory, but rage hurled me at him with no second thought. I was the lad who had fought panthers in the mountains, and a snake could have counted on its fingers the heartbeats left to this doddering lecher, but he slipped aside and left me to imprint the ground with my face.

“What an unfortunate fall!” he said, helping me up while I was too dazed to remember my homicidal intent. “Are you all right? I’m so sorry, that wall is so old and neglected it was bound to give way. You won’t sue me, will you?”

Dendra was free, but she didn’t run; my strength had returned, but I didn’t break his neck. I wondered why I had first thought his silver beard tangled and filthy, his kindly smile oily. Fluttering light and shadow among the leaves must have deceived me. We had been deceived, too, in thinking this garden abandoned. Unlike its neighbors, it had been lovingly tended inside its neglected walls. I was dazzled by the strange shapes and colors that rioted around me, dizzied by an almost forceful exhalation of unfamiliar perfumes.

“We should apologize,” Dendra said with the contrite condescension that only a great lady can bring off, “for stealing your apples.”

“Why, then, you must be hungry!” cried Dwelphorn Thooz. “Come, apples are for horses, come inside and eat a proper meal.”

Later it struck me that he’d been stealing my wife, never mind the apples, but she assured me that my fall had rattled my brain. She had fallen, he was helping her, it should have been obvious. She convinced me, for I could hardly believe that such a gracious old gentleman would drag her into the bushes, even though I’d seen him trying.

He led us indoors, where the garden pursued us through rooms capped with bubbles of sweating glass. Dendra trilled over the bizarre surprises around every turn, but I fretted and twitched at the clusters of horse-heads no bigger than my thumbnail, with flossy manes and perfect little teeth, or the vines that stirred restlessly at our approach and erected purple pricks. The sweetness of the blooms was cloying, but it muffled all but the hint of an underlying, fishy odor that might have been nauseous in its unmasked form.

Such misgivings seemed no more urgent than doubts whether I had found ten gold coins or only nine. Our host called for a meal of a dozen exotic dishes, served by oddly listless and abstracted slaves. He could barely contain his outrage that artists like us should be homeless and poor, and he promised us the use of a garden-house that would have been called a palace back home. He praised our work before we had done any.

“How could two young persons, so beautiful, so intelligent, so sympathetic, fail to create anything less than masterpieces?” he demanded, as if I had insulted him by doubting his faith in us.

His own situation was lamentable, he disclosed as we picked our way among the claws and tentacles of sea-creatures and the spikes of vegetables whose flesh was so difficult of access that I feared I was trying, given my ignorance of social graces, to eat table ornaments. He told us he came from Sythiphore, which we had never heard of, but whose natives are victims of slanders on their customs and religion. Had he not denied that his people were descended from sharks, I might have overlooked how widely his eyes bulged in his flat face, or what thin lips he partly masked with his beard.

“You wouldn’t believe the lies my neighbors whispered about me, just because I spend my time reading books and pottering in my garden—”

“Where are they all?” Dendra asked.

“They died, I suppose, or left. We seldom spoke, as I cared nothing for their japes and follies.”

“And why do you read books and potter in your garden?”

“Why, young man, because I’m a passionate botanist! It took study, as well as hard work, to produce the apples that tempted you, and can you deny they were delicious? Do you know of any other gardener who can grow sarcophage or selenotropes in Crotalorn? Have you ever before seen necrophiliums blooming so gloriously any farther north than Fandragord?”

I had to answer no to all these questions, and so did Dendra, who even seemed to understand them.

Only once during the meal did his jollity falter, and I sensed a threat as he said, “I must implore you to spare my beloved trees for your masterpieces, especially those in the Bower by the south wall. The gardens of my absent neighbors can provide you with all the wood you’ll need.”

* * * *

Wandering in his garden the next day, I was amazed by my ignorance. Trees were like members of my family, and yet I could hardly identify one out of every five I saw. The strange ones were indeed strange, like sculptures that called for no further attention from my knives, but they were twisted as if in bondage and torment. Despite the vivid blooms that burst around us, despite the bright sunshine that dappled through unquiet branches, I was oppressed by the feeling that I was straying in darkness through an unknown forest. These trees might have said much to the boy who had understood their language, but I was no longer that boy.

Dendra shared none of my disquiet. She laughed and exclaimed over the beauty of the garden, distinguishing the roses from the pavonias for me, who had never paid much mind to flowers.

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a tree, silly! What a question!”

We had come to the Bower that Dwelphorn Thooz had spoken of, a ring of graceful trees whose branches intertwined above a pool. I was reluctant to enter. The trees disturbed me, the smooth-skinned trees that neither she nor I could name. Whether I was upset by their unfamiliarity, or by some curiosity of their shapes or proportions or arrangement, I couldn’t say. I felt like a dog I once owned, who would gleefully charge a bear but sometimes tremble at the shadow of a passing cloud.

Dendra felt nothing of this. She romped forward through the grass, thick and green despite the gloom of overarching limbs, and dropped to her knees at the edge of the pool. I wanted to call her back, but I wanted even less to evoke the look of sorely-tried noblesse oblige she put on whenever I hinted of omens or intuitions.

She leaned forward to admire her reflection in the pool, and her beauty caught my breath. Clear eyes sparkling in the water-light, pink lips parted, she could have been the naiad who haunted the glade. In the next instant she screamed, and no omen or intuition could have kept me from dashing to her side.

“What is it?”

“Oh—I thought—” She seemed confused, like one roused from a dream. “I thought I saw something in the well.”

I looked. It was in fact a well, perfectly circular and lined with pink stones, its water clearer than the air around us in a shaft of sunlight that pierced the Bower directly overhead. I felt at first that I might reach in and touch the pebbles lying at the bottom. In the next instant I saw intervening shimmers that hinted of fearful depth. The pebbles were boulders. Dizzied by the shift in perspective, I stumbled and almost fell, or—as it seemed then—was almost sucked in.

“No!” I cried when she scooped up the water in her palm, but I was too late to keep her from drinking.

“You’re mad!” she laughed, splashing me.

I thought she might have been right. Swiftly as one of that dog’s dreaded clouds, my vapor had passed. What if the trees did look like men and women stretched on some wizard’s rack that denied the limitations of flesh? I was familiar with such fancies: they were visible only to an artist’s eye. A plain man would have seen only trees.

Several shipboard floggings later curbed the tendency, but in those days I invariably did whatever I was told not to do. I always thought I had a good reason for defying my betters. In this case, I felt a craftsman’s need to test an unfamiliar wood.

“Oh, Ringard!” Dendra sighed when I drew my knife, knowing my ways too well to say more.

The boughs were too high above me, and there were no windfalls in this well-kept garden, so I slipped the knife into the bole of a tree, into what might have been the tormented muscles of a woman’s calf. I recoiled instantly, not just from the sickly feel of the tree’s flesh and the flow of pinkish sap, but from the shrieking in my head. My inner deafness had been suddenly, horribly cured, and I was denounced and importuned by a choir of wailing voices.

“Forgive me!” I cried. The pain of those phantom screams was more than I could bear. The Bower darkened, the tall shapes spun around me like demoniac dancers in a constricting ring.

“Are you ill? Ringard?” Dendra’s voice restored me. I turned into her arms and gripped her. The other voices fell still as leaves in a faltering breeze.

“Let’s go,” I said. “We can find somewhere else to live.”

“Don’t be silly. We can go elsewhere when you’ve sold some of your carvings, if that’s what you really want.”

“At least let’s avoid this Bower. It’s—”

“But I love it! It’s so weird. I think a god must live here.”

“Something must.” I knew better than to argue with her. She could be no less contrary than I.

* * * *

While Dendra happily played at housewife, I sought wood for my work. No sooner had I dropped over the wall to a neighboring garden than I felt a jolting realignment of my senses, like one emerged from the enthrallment of a dark puppet-theater to mix with real people in a daylit street.

It was a jungle floored with sodden leaves, but it grew only normal plants. No fruits or flowers shocked me with their shape or coloring. I breathed in the honest mold and damp as if I had been denied air for a day and a night. If Dendra hadn’t remained behind, I might have kept on walking to the farthest end of the city.

Fallen branches lay everywhere, I had brought an ax to cut them to manageable lengths, and without even trying I saw a hundred shapes—friendly, healthy shapes—begging to be freed. I ignored them and pushed through the undergrowth to the house. It was no airy fantasy of spires and bubbles, but a forthright home of solid timbers. Walking through an open door to find myself among elegant furniture, I feared that the householder would presently seize me for a thief. Then I noticed all the dust, the rain-streaked carpet, the leaves that crackled under my feet.

The inhabitants must have fled without closing the windows or finishing a meal whose desiccated relics cluttered a table. Animals had trooped through to gnaw and claw and defecate, and even as I considered this evidence I was startled by a scurrying rat. Snatching up a handy bit of litter to throw, I dropped it with an oath. It was a human skull.

My first thought was that a derelict had crawled in here to die, but that seemed less likely when I considered the childish proportions of the skull; and when I noticed the other old bones and once-splendid garments that lay near the five chairs around the dining table. Although animals and the weather had disordered it, the picture of diners arrested by death in mid-bite was easy to reconstruct.

Similar sights awaited me in other mansions: a chamber-pot holding the bones of its last user; two lovers twined in an embrace whose moisture and warmth had been anciently sucked into the unloving sky; a child’s hand, melted to an inartistic stain on the half-drawn picture of a tree.

I could stand no more horrors. I ran back, scrambling over walls, stumbling in ditches, remembering only at the last minute to lop off some of the wood that had caught my eye. Death had snatched all these unfortunates with a plague, I told myself, or with poisoned water. That his neighbors had earned the enmity of our host might be purest coincidence, but I nevertheless resolved to quit his hospitality as quickly and politely as I could.

No sooner had I climbed into his garden and breathed its perfumed air than urgency faded. I had no desire to linger here, but I no longer itched to run. A sense of peace beguiled me as I walked the winding path to our fine new house.

That peace vanished when I found that Dendra had gone to bed, where she lay pale and drawn.

“It was that water you drank,” I said. “If ever I saw a well haunted by an evil spirit, that was it. We must leave this place at once. We—”

I saw that she was giggling at me as I paced and fumed. She said, “I didn’t get this way from drinking water.”

“What way?”

“Pregnant.”

I was stunned. I sat and gaped. I had wanted to pour out my adventures in the street of the dead, but now I could not. It was bad enough that our child might be marked by a fish-faced wizard and his demon plants without filling her head with images of rats and skeletons. I pasted a grin on my face, kissed her and made much of her, but for the first time I resisted when she tried to draw me into bed. I told her she looked ill, that she should rest, and this was true, but I wanted to start on the work that would free us.

I labored for hours, fascinated but appalled by the creatures that begged for release. I thought I’d seen a shy rabbit in the wood I had brought home, a dancer from Lilaret, a hound biting its paw. What emerged were a snarling rat, a demon capering on a skull, a ghoul gnawing a bone.

I was surprised to see that Dendra had joined me to paint my demon. She looked well enough, but her glances at me were apprehensive. I had no idea how to explain the work I was doing, so I pretended to be absorbed in it, and soon that was true.

When I next looked up, she had retired. Stretching my fingers, I nearly screamed from the pain. Without noticing, I had worked beyond the limits of flesh. The world outside was gray, stung by the flashes of brilliant blossoms.

She painted while I slept, so that my wares were ready for the public when I rose at noon to breakfast on bananas and figs.

“I wasn’t sure what color to paint that ... thing,” she said, indicating my ghoul.

“Green looks right.”

“You don’t like this place at all, do you?”

Careful not to sound like the grumpy bear she sometimes called me, I said, “I’d be happier if we weren’t beholden to a patron. And you must admit that we’re far from the center of things. Just getting to the theater—”

“I think I need peace and quiet now,” she said. “And this lovely garden—wouldn’t it be so much nicer for a child than a noisy street full of whores and cutthroats, with musicians over our head and opium-eaters next door?”

This was not an entirely unfair picture of our former home, but she’d once praised its urban diversions. I restrained myself from telling her what I knew and suggesting that even our old neighbors on Ashclamith Square would have been preferable to plague-stricken corpses. Though I was horrified by the length of the stay her words implied, I said mildly, “You don’t want to put down roots here.”

She laughed. “That’s exactly what I feel like doing!”

It seemed wiser to get the money we needed to move before we argued about moving. Her lips tasted oddly bitter when I kissed her, like privet leaves. I had heard that pregnant women ate curious things.

Heading for the gate with my armload of carvings, I met Dwelphorn Thooz.

“But what have I done,” he said when I told him where I was going, “that you should deny me the first chance of buying your creations?”

“After all your kindness, I can’t ask you to buy my work.”

“You mean, my kindness has denied me a right enjoyed by the first wretch you meet? Would you oblige me if I were a monster of cruelty? Why then, trolls lusting to couple with infants and posthumes gorged on virgins’ blood will tremble at the whisper of my deeds! Should Dwelphorn Thooz be written on the earth and the word kindness inscribed on the remotest star, the universe will crumple with shame for holding so inapt a juxtaposition.”

I believed he was joking, but how could I know? Reading a Sythiphoran face is impossible, I have since learned, even for the owner of another one. I arranged my pieces on the grass, resigned to the necessity of offering a gift. He seized on the ghoul and scrutinized it from every angle.

“Have you been perambulating our necropolis at midnight, young man?” He studied me even more intently than he had my sculpture. “Where, then, have you seen a ghoul?”

“In the wood,” I said, and explained how I worked.

Excepting Dendra, no one had ever heard me out with such alert interest and apparent comprehension. “Extraordinary,” he said. “And it’s an extraordinary likeness, although the color is wrong. They’re gray, you know.” While I again debated whether he was making fun of me, he said, “Some day we must have a serious talk about your future. Your talent is perhaps greater than I supposed. I had thought of taking on an apprentice....”

“An apprentice botanist?”

“Yes.” He laughed. “Something like that.”

I gave him the ghoul, but then he insisted on buying the other pieces for a sum that staggered me. It so staggered me that I failed to notice that no money changed hands. Instead of real silver from the market, I was left with promised gold from my host. But how could I press him for payment while I accepted his free room and board?

These thoughts crushed me only later, and I was still grinning as he said, “I would highly recommend the water from the Bower to your wife. Strength, grace, stature and long life are the least of the gifts it imparts.”

I blurted, “I hate that place!”

“I thought you might, and so I must warn you to stay away from it. Trees are sensitive, too, you know, and I wouldn’t want my darlings upset by your hostility.” I blushed with guilt for the test I had made with my knife. I think he knew about it. “But I’m sure they would welcome your charming wife. Women are different.” He pinched my arm playfully before scurrying off with the work that had cost me a sleepless night and the strength of my hands.

* * * *

Dendra scoffed at my suspicion that our host had taken my work to keep us from leaving. She scorned my suggestion that he meant us no good.

“You’re just not used to dealing with the upper classes,” she said with an infuriating sniff.

“Polliel spare me from the upper classes, and may Sleithreethra tear out their ribs for needles to knit their shrouds!”

This group included her and all her relatives, and she lectured at length on the proper handling of bumptious churls. I stamped about and grumbled, then attacked my work with a vengeance. My mood soured further when I realized that I was acting just like my father, who would chop trees with especial vigor after quarreling with my mother. I took a perverse pleasure in the pain I inflicted on my cramped hands.

I freed a botched creature like a cross between a man and a shark. Dendra criticized it with slapdash painting, and we both laughed at the absurd result. We ended by embracing tenderly, but I knew that our argument had only been put aside. I had to convince her that this place was unhealthy. Perhaps it was only the light diffused through the plants crowding our windows, but I thought her skin was taking on a greenish tinge.

I worked through the night again. Before dawn I gathered those pieces that Dendra had already painted into a bag and lowered it over the wall into Amorartis Street, where I doubted that any sane footpad would lurk. If our patron again relieved me of my creations on my way to the gate, I would at least have those figures to sell.

As I returned home stealthily, a pale form shimmered from the Bower. I froze, imagining things worse than a human intruder. It was nothing but a man, however, whom I failed at first to recognize in his pasty nakedness as Dwelphorn Thooz. His halting gait was bringing him directly towards me, and I withdrew into the shelter of a plant whose red mouths parted slackly as the darkness faded. Perhaps I could have fled unnoticed, but I was curious to see if his body displayed fishy anomalies.

He looked normal enough, but as he passed close by me I saw that his skin was scored with fresh scratches and welts. A gleam lit his eyes, and a smile flickered on his bruised lips as he muttered a litany of female names. In those days, on the rare occasions when I gave any thought to the topic, the amorous practices of the old amused me; but at that moment my impression that he was stumbling home from an orgy gave me a chill. I stayed in hiding until the sun was fairly risen, desiring a glimpse of the ladies who had frolicked with the ancient lecher, but no one else walked away from the slim and swaying trees of the Bower.

* * * *

I don’t remember if I kissed Dendra goodbye, or what words we said. I was preoccupied with the details of my escape, as I saw it: which pieces I would offer our host if he stopped me, how I would word my refusal if he asked to buy them all. As it happened, I never saw him, and I walked through the gate like a free man. My other bag of sculptures lay undisturbed outside the wall. I slung it over my shoulder and began to whistle as I tramped to the lower town.

My whistle soon dried in the plaza fronting the Temple of Polliel, a notable marketplace for handicrafts. Not just the permanent stalls, but pillars of the surrounding colonnade had been claimed by the craftsmen’s ancestors and passed down to them, or so they maintained with words, fists and feet. Trying to do business here, I was told by a priest whose sanctity cowed my attackers, was like barging into a stranger’s home and sitting down to his place at the table. For a fee, he said, the Temple would assign me a space, but I calculated that the rights to the darkest shadow of the remotest column would cost me more than I would earn if I lived forever.

The gods took note of the priest’s rebuke and heaped my shoulders with a massive weight of dead, hot air that stretched to the very top of their pitiless dome. I wandered into streets undisturbed by merchants and buyers alike, a desert of brick and stone with not one cool tree for shade and no undisputed place to sit down, where householders practiced art criticism with dogs, cudgels and slop-buckets. My carvings seemed hammered from iron, as did my shoes. When the morning crawled into the furnace of afternoon, bloated clouds piled themselves to phantasmagorical heights and blackened the green slopes beyond the city.

Darkness fell long before sunset. Hot air gusted randomly. I knew that a storm was coming, but I clung to my purpose. Even though I managed to sell a few things, I was engaged in folly, for how long could I carve all night and walk all day?

I spoke that question aloud, and I was answered by a crack of thunder that scrambled my bones inside my skin, by rain like a mountain torrent, by chunks of ice that rebounded from the cobblestones to the highest eaves. Bolts of lightning fell as thickly as the hail, and just as close, while I cowered in a doorway and babbled absurd promises to whatever god might protect me.

I had lived through many storms in the open air, and they hadn’t much frightened me; but in the forest, I would know to avoid the oaks and festirons that heaven loves to blast and shelter under a depsad or a beech. In this stone wilderness I knew nothing, I was just a naked target on a battlefield where light and noise fought the final war. The door I clung to gave me no more shelter than a raft on a wild ocean, but I glued my body to its deaf and unyielding panels. Except for continuous shaking, I could no more move than one of my sculptures.

I kept telling myself that storms like this pass quickly, but I was wrong. During those lulls when it gathered its strength for an even wilder assault, the wailing of a distant multitude rose from every direction, led by crazed shrieks from nearer houses. It was no comfort that every other soul in Crotalorn shared my belief that the Last Day had come. The wind ripped slates from the roofs and bricks from the walls to shatter in the street, then tired of finicking vandalism and flung down the building next door. The rain pressed down so hard that the dust from this disaster shot out horizontally to batter me as a blast of gritty mud. I couldn’t hear my own screams, much less any that might have come from the steaming rubble that towered before me.

Whether I fainted or was knocked senseless, I don’t know, but I woke to comparative silence and darkness. The men working on the fallen building were bellowing orders to one another, their picks and shovels clattered and rang, but the noise was thin and unconvincing. They were only a few steps away, but they might have been gnomes laboring on a far mountain.

I watched them dully for a while before I thought of lending a hand. Then I thought of Dendra, and I ran all the way to Amorartis Street through bewildered multitudes who milled in a light drizzle of rain.

* * * *

I knew that our home was empty when I crossed the threshold and felt its ghastly silence, long before I had called through every room and run outside to bellow in the dripping garden.

“Ringard, Ringard, find all your courage, for you have need of it,” said a soft voice at my shoulder.

“What have you done with her?” I screamed at Dwelphorn Thooz.

“I?” Like an enigmatic messenger in a dream, he held up Dendra’s tiny green shoes before my eyes. “Not I, poor boy, the gods! They envied us her company. They snatched her away.”

“Damn you, foul wizard, what are you babbling about?”

“The storm. Didn’t you notice it?” He thrust the shoes at me, and I seized them. The velvet was singed, the silver filigree fused. “She was gathering despodines when the bolt struck.” He burst into convulsive sobs and tore at his hair as he managed to finish: “Those pretty little shoes were all we found.”

His show of grief seemed genuine to me, who had never seen any man but an actor on the stage shed tears. I gripped his hands to keep him from tearing out more of his beard. But my voice was still harsh as I said, “I saw the storm. It blew houses down, but not one petal of your garden is disarranged.”

“We were spared its full fury,” he said, “as sometimes happens. A shower of rain, that one stroke of lightning—and dear Dendra was no more.”

“Take me to her.”

“Haven’t you heard me? Of course you haven’t, forgive me! No human ear can hold such horror. She was totally consumed, or if you wish, assumed bodily into the eternal happiness of Mother Ashtareeta’s arms. Count yourself blessed that no charred bone remains—”

Screaming to blot out such words, I shoved him aside and dashed to the parterre where Dendra had once clapped her hands and exclaimed over the glory of the despodines. I battered them under my feet, I ripped them from their stalks, worthless weeds that still existed while she could not. I roared her name until my throat tore. At last I fell exhausted to my knees in a bare patch. In the darkness I felt only stubble about me, which crumbled to ashes under my hands. I had found the spot where lightning had struck; but only that.

* * * *

The old man gave me a room in his palace, where I stared out a window and ignored the food his slaves brought. He became a familiar object, like a chair whose absence I wouldn’t have noticed. He talked to me at length, he read from books that might have been inspirational, but it was all just words, words, when the only word was Dendra, and that word meant nothing.

One night a storm broke overhead. I was driven to run outside and leap crazily through the garden, shaking my fists at the gods and daring them to take me, too. In the midst of these antics I woke from my long trance and sobbed while the storm thundered and flashed past.

Another man might have fled the scenes that recalled his lost love, but that happy man could have buried all hope with a palpable corpse. This decisive act was denied me. I had only my host’s testimony that he had observed a thunderbolt and found a pair of shoes. Dendra might spring from a flowery thicket at any moment, laughing at the trick she had played. Perhaps the bolt had erased her memory, and she had wandered off, but would return here when she came to her senses. She still lived in my dreams, but they might not follow me among strange scenes and foreign faces. I was chained to the place.

Wood whose captives I had meant to free was brought to me from the garden-house. What captives, I couldn’t remember as I turned the pieces this way and that. I saw nothing but sticks. My knife could only cut big pieces into little ones.

I went out among the gardens of the dead to look for better wood, but nothing in the jumble of lines and curves spoke to me. The only shapes and textures that mattered had been stolen from the universe, leaving chaos.

No trees had ever spoken to me so loudly as those in the Bower. They knew what had happened to Dendra, and I would sooner trust them than my host. I ignored his warning and went there, struggling to hear. I remembered my panic as one remembers a childish game that no longer compels. I sat beside the well, which was only a well, and meditated on the trees, which were only trees.

I looked for the one I had wounded, but I couldn’t find it. I would swear it had been removed, but no gap marred the perfect ring, and I was doubtful where it had stood. If it had been replaced, it had been replaced by a fully grown specimen without disturbing the ancient moss of the surrounding earth.

Its replacement might have been one tree that differed from the others, its lines disfigured by a swelling of the bole probably due to disease or insects. This was curious, for elsewhere in the garden there was no worm in the apple or canker on the rose. I stroked the deformity, thumped it, learned nothing. Inchoate feelings stirred as elusively as tatters of a dream, and I thought for a moment that they signalled the return of my lost hearing, but they were soon still, and I was alone among silent trees.

* * * *

My inability to work shamed me, but my patron never mentioned it. At mealtimes he lectured of plants and their marvelous properties to heal or harm, not seeming to care that I wouldn’t have understood even if I had listened. I watched him, though.

I was most alert when he guided me through his indoor jungles, less to the names and peculiarities of his gorgeous monsters than to the layout of the palace. No one interfered with my prying whenever his duties took him from home, for his dull slaves tended to drowse in his absence, and I was free to explore everything from his fishy kitchens to his fishier bedroom. A priest might have clucked over his queerly illustrated books, but my only concern was for traces of Dendra, and I found none.

Behind the kitchens lay cages of small animals and a pen for goats. Although none of them figured in our menu, the stock was regularly thinned and restored. I learned the reason for this one morning when I assisted the botanist in feeding cats and rabbits to some of his livelier horrors.

“My boy, you’re a marvel! Other prospective apprentices may have shown more aptitude for study, but none of them could abide the glory of nature unveiled. Botany is no field for the squeamish.”

The sight of a shrieking cat gripped by the claws of something whose appearance partook of the orchid and the octopus might have disturbed me in my previous life, but now I merely watched. When I shivered, it was from the question that I spoke as soon as it pierced my mind: “Could one of your specimens eat a human being?”

“What a question! My plants are finer creatures, almost human themselves.”

We had used a noose on a pole to extend the cat to this “finer creature,” but now I leaned into the great tub where it sprawled and thrust my hand among its unoccupied claws. They closed on my wrist, but I was almost disappointed when they released it.

“That’s right, test every assertion for yourself,” he said, thumping me on the back. “You have the makings, sir, of a scientist.”

* * * *

I grew fond of the swollen tree in the Bower, whose deformity subtly altered and enlarged from week to week. It said nothing to me, but I felt almost at peace when I sat leaning against its trunk and listening to the meaningless prattle of its branches.

I came and went stealthily, a trick I knew well. Wizard or not, my host never surprised me, though he once came close.

Sitting against the tree, lost in some reverie of Dendra, I felt a sudden tingle, and I couldn’t say whether the skin of my back or the bark had crawled. Whatever its source, the sensation alarmed me. Not a leaf stirred, and I was struck by the fancy that the trees had fallen still with anticipation. At the same time I glimpsed movement, frighteningly close, a flash of color that I recognized as my host’s robe.

I withdrew into the hedge outside the ring. Just then Dwelphorn Thooz entered with a group of slaves bearing barrels that slopped and gurgled. He muttered endearments as he ladled out portions of raw meat and entrails at the base of each tree.

Although the fate of the cats and rabbits hadn’t disturbed me, I was sickened to see him feeding raw meat to these trees. I had come to love them in spite of my first impression, because Dendra had loved them. I wormed my way backward as quickly and silently as I could.

“You must keep your strength up, my dear,” I heard him saying as I slipped free of the hedge. “You can’t just think of yourself now, you know.”

I cast a last look at the Bower as I skulked off, and saw that the trees, so unaccountably still a moment before, were tossing their heads in the windless air and bending their limbs low as if to feast.

* * * *

The moon glared pitilessly through my window that night, commanding me to be up and doing. When I covered my head with the bedclothes and clenched my eyes, its imprint on my eyelids became the face of Dendra. Springing up and pacing the day-bright room did no good. I felt her breath and smelled her sweetness in the warm breeze from the restless garden. She was near.

Why had he spoken to the tree in just those words, urging it to eat: “You can’t just think of yourself...?” Had that fearful storm taken Dendra, or had it expressed the outrage of the gods at a gross breach of their laws?

I thought I heard a cry. It was a cat, perhaps, a rutting cat, but it would have been the first such cry I had heard from the enchanted garden. No animals ventured there, no birds, not even the insects that my host had told me were so essential to the propagation of plants. I threw on my clothes and thrust my stoutest knife through my belt.

I didn’t dare strike a light as I crept through the palace, but the carnivores stirred all around me. I jumped at shadows, cringed from phantom caresses. I imagined the footsteps of my host in every click and slither from the tubs where the monsters grew, but I took heart from the thought that these loathsome noises masked my own footfalls.

Outside I heard again the screaming I had mistaken for a cat, and ran straight to the Bower. A white thing writhed at the foot of my favorite tree, no longer swollen. I recognized it as a newborn infant, I guessed its origin, but the shock of this blasphemous miracle was driven from my mind by a greater wonder. My talent had returned. Within the tree, pleading for release, I saw Dendra.

Perhaps I should have roused the sorcerer and begged him to reverse the spell. Perhaps I should have sought help from another wizard. Such possibilities occurred to me only later. At the moment I saw nothing but a challenge that I had met thousands of times before, to liberate a captive from wood. I drew my knife and attacked the tree that bound her.

It began to go wrong from the start. The grain of the wood was erratic, its density unfamiliar. I cut too deep, and sap flowed black in the moonlight. Not fluidly, as a human expression would evolve, but as a jolting succession of static images, Dendra’s look changed from elation to horror. I had no way to stop her bleeding until I had freed a human body whose wounds I could bind, so I hacked more desperately, but I only cut her more.

She might know something about the conditions of her enchantment. If she could speak, she might help me free her. I concentrated on her mouth. I shaved and pared with an intensity of concentration and a steadiness of hand that I had never known before as I tried to free her lips, her teeth, her tongue.

As I said, my talent never ran to likenesses of individuals. In this case the pattern lay before me, her very face was visible under my knife and my fingers, and I don’t know where I could have gone wrong, but I did. From the ragged caricature I had made of her mouth, a scream burst forth, a scream strangled by the blood that sprayed over me. In a sudden burst of anger and despair whose onset gave no warning, I drove the heavy blade between her eyes. Sometimes I can delude myself that I did it to cut short her suffering, but it was my own pain that impelled the knife into the wood.

Unable to look at her, I turned my attention to the baby, a perfectly formed boy. I cut the cord and tied it, I washed him in the water of the cursed well, I wrapped him in my shirt and rocked him, but he wouldn’t stop crying. I suspected he was hungry. I turned to his mother. Now I saw nothing but a tree, a dead tree whose drooping branches trailed silky leaves on the moss.

“Oh, you wretched man!” screamed a voice beside me. “You miserable fool! What have you done to my finest creation?”

I didn’t care that I had been discovered, that I had enraged the wizard or that his hulking slaves stood near at hand. I watched the old man’s frothing, stamping rage with curious detachment, and I hardly heard his threats as I noticed that his body held images begging to be freed. The shapes that I saw were those of bones, muscles and entrails, and I seized him in order to liberate each and every one of those images with my knife.

I succeeded brilliantly.

When I came to my senses, I wondered why the slaves had not defended him. They seemed to be lying dead or stunned, but when I examined them, I found that the things I had mistaken for fallen men were nothing but heaps of rotting vegetation. I snatched up the baby and fled, not liking the way the branches thrashed and clawed the face of the moon. As I ran from the Bower, I saw the trees bending as if to feed.

All but one.

* * * *

I left Crotalorn that night, taking only a milk-goat from the wizard’s menagerie to provide for my son. It was my intention to bring him to this castle and claim for him the status of a Sleith, whatever it might cost me.

It was an unfortunate journey. Perhaps goat’s milk disagreed with him, or perhaps my clumsiness and ignorance did, but the baby fretted when he wasn’t screaming. Busybodies pestered me until I found that I could discourage them by explaining, between suppressed coughs, that the poor child’s mother had died of the plague.

He seemed to calm when we came into the forested hills of your domain. I believed that he sensed he was coming home and would soon be in the better care of his maternal relatives. He gurgled and cooed at the trees.

Near the place where you found me today, I paused to collect my thoughts and rehearse the speech that would introduce Dendrard to his grandparents. I bathed him at a spring and set him naked on soft moss while I washed myself. When I returned to pick him up, I found that I could not. The earth gripped him.

I didn’t know what to think. An animal, a snake, something held him to the ground. I pulled, and he screamed more loudly than ever before. I babbled at him, fussed over him and managed to calm him, but at the same time I very gently rolled him to one side to determine how he was caught, and by what.

My knife was out, for I didn’t know what I would see, and I’m glad—I suppose I’m glad—that I refrained from striking at once, for my first sight suggested that the foul tentacle of some underworld creature gripped my child at the base of his spine. What stayed my hand, I think, was Dendrard’s apparent contentment. Not even my screaming changed his look of pure happiness.

Though my hand cringed, I forced it to explore the thing that held my son. I expected a texture of scales, a chill of slime, but the reality was worse. What I felt was the firm pliancy of young wood. No creature had seized my son from the earth. It was he, Dendrard, who gripped the earth with the root sprouting from his backbone.

I stumbled backward, cursing and praying with equal futility. My eyes remained fixed on him, on his calm, empty gaze as he stared up at the blue sky, opening his little fists and spreading his fingers like branches.

I ran. Roots tripped me, branches raked me, trunks battered me. I fought my way free of the angry forest, but the first men I met on the open road were a press-gang from the Lord Admiral’s fleet, wandering far inland in their desperation for recruits. They thought I was mad, but they told me lunacy was no impediment for an oarsman on a trireme, nor were they much impressed by my assumed cough. They had seen real plague, they said, as I would.

I vowed to go back and find Dendrard one day. I never imagined that thirty years would pass. I hadn’t remembered that your lands contained so many hills, so many springs, so many trees. Nor had I foreseen that Cluddites would rearrange the landscape.

* * * *

Ringard’s tale was ended, and so was the wine. The servants had long since gone to bed, but I took him up to the room they had prepared. The candles had burned out; it surprised me to see that the glowing sky made them unnecessary. The forest beyond the window nevertheless looked very dark.

“If you find him,” I said, “what do you propose to do?”

“Listen to his voice—although it’s been a very long time since I last heard the voices of trees, I may have an ear for that of my own son.” He flashed his unpleasant smile. “If not, perhaps I’ll merely sit for a while in his shade.”

I left him, and in the morning he was gone.

* * * *

Several days later I heard that the Snake Man had fallen afoul of the Sons of Cludd. Anyone with a good word to say for an accused witch becomes a suspect, but I felt that the man had a claim on me. And I was curious to learn if any trees had spoken to him.

The smell of burning wood, burning flesh and righteously unbathed bodies led me inerrantly to the Holy Soldiers’ encampment. Easing my horse through a mob draped in white robes and droning dissonant hymns, I bitterly regretted the good old days when my father would set the hounds on Cluddite preachers. Now they were more numerous than those hounds’ fleas, and not even a lord of the House of Sleith would dare to throw one down the stairs if he came calling.

They had transported much of the forest to their camp, stripped the trees of branches, set them in rigid ranks, and decorated each with an unlucky victim. Some were already choking on the smoke of their feet as it rose to their nostrils, but I was not too late. The pyre around the distinctive figure of Ringard lay unlighted.

“Take heart!” I called to him when I came near enough to be heard. “Your nephew is here, Lord Fariel.”

They hadn’t quelled his wit. “I wouldn’t boast of our connection in this company, if I were you.”

Before leaving to seek someone in authority, I asked, “Did you find him? Dendrard?”

“No, fortunately. They would have liked him even less than his father.”

Talking to the victims was forbidden, I learned from the men who rushed up to unhorse me and hustle me before their captain. He was in a good mood—he didn’t smile, of course, they consider that a sin, but he didn’t tie me to a stake—but that was all I could gather from his barbarous accent and Zaxoin turns of phrase, some of which, I believe, he made up as he went along to confuse an unbelieving outlander like me. I did pick the words “talk” and “tree” out of his rapturous gabble, but even if he speaks perfect Frothen, it’s hard to concentrate on the words of a man whose sleeves are decorated with the dried tongues of blasphemers and ears of heretics.

“Wroken word on writhen tree spoken, burn on broken tree witch writhen!” he bawled, winding up his spittle-spraying harangue in fine Cluddite style and gesturing toward the stake where Ringard hung.

I cursed, I wept, I took it less nobly than Ringard himself when the torch dipped and his pyre blossomed up to contain him like a crystal cup. His head twisted, probably to deny these zealots the sight of one more tortured face, but it seemed to me that he was pressing his ear to the stake in an effort to hear a last message from the medium he had loved so much.

Then he turned back toward us, and that face, crawling with unknown flora, held an expression of such torment that it must have gratified even the most jaded of the Holy Soldiers. Yet his words, when they rang across the distance and over the roar of the bonfire, were absurd: “Not the stake! No, no, not the stake!”

It was over quickly enough, although the victim’s sense of time may have differed from mine. The black stake bore a black gnarl, and it was all so much indistinguishable charcoal. The sudden reports that made me cry out were only the eruptions of boiling sap, or marrow.

His last words had puzzled me. He was no imbecile, he had been alert to the end, he had known what they meant to do, so why had he protested against the stake? Trying not just to examine my memory but to relive the moment just past, to catch the words still ringing in my ears, I convinced myself that I had misunderstood him.

A prudent man would have made his exit, but I was so distraught that I seized the chief fanatic and demanded, “What was it he said? Did you hear the man’s last words?”

“’Deafen your ears to the words of wisdom, and to fine phrases be as stone,’” the captain quoted quite clearly from The Book of Cludd, and the import of his hard stare was even clearer.

There was much I would have asked him, but I had outworn my welcome. They kept my horse, my weapons and my clothing to further their good works, and I was forced to pick my cold and painful way through the sighing and creaking forest far longer after dark than I would have liked. Countryman though I am, I had never noticed that the riffle of leaves and clitter of loose bark can sound exactly like human conversations, whispered with earnest intensity. I paused often to listen, but I could identify no single, coherent word, with the doubtful but disturbing exception of my Tribal name: Sleith.

In the days that followed I noticed, too, that certain leaves, when they flashed their pale sides to the bright sun, could suggest hair the color of rain; and that the slim grace of some trees, the firm molding of others, the quality that I can only describe as the joyful nature of still others, stirred memories of a girl who had once romped with me and the hounds when she should have been counting her jewels. If Ringard had been mad, his madness had been metaphorically apt.

And he had surely been mad. The Cluddites had felled hundreds of trees and burned hundreds of victims. Coincidence can be stretched only so far. Yet I had convinced myself that his last words, after he had listened to a cry from the tree they had randomly chosen for him, had not been, “Not the stake!,” but, “Not this stake!”