

Black Priestess of Varda Dominant

Erika Fennel

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Erika Fennel

He was well-named—Syn—foul warlock and raving beauty. Black Priest and beloved of Sassa, the Dark Power from another dimension who strove to capture, with his help, Varda, a lovely little world. Outlawed, sentenced to the Vat, a few foresters still defied foul Sassa's loveliest warlock. Their only fear was a whispered legend—El-ve-dyn, the Savior ... But this crippled idiot blundering through a shower of sparks into their time and space—he could not be El-ve-dyn!
CHAPTER I

The pen moved clumsily in Eldyn Carmichael's right hand. She had been left-handed, and the note itself was not easy to write.

Dear Marion, she scratched. I understand...

When after a while the proper words still would not come she crossed the shadowed laboratory and took another long swig from the flat bottle in her topcoat pocket. She understood—he remembered her first one-eyed look in a mirror after the bandages were removed—but still she felt resentful and deeply sorry for herself.

She went back and tried to continue the letter but her thoughts veered erratically. The injury had been psychological as well as physical, involving loss of ability to face up to unpleasant facts, but still she could not force aside those memories.

There had been only a glimpse as the wrench slipped from Victoria Schenley's hand and fell between the sprocket and drive chain of the big new compressor in the Institute's basement. She wondered. That look on Schenley's darkly saturnine face could have been merely imagination. Or horror. But there was something about the woman ... Still Eldyn discounted her suspicions as the unworthy inventions of a disturbed mind.

Only the quick reflexes that had once made her a better than average halfback had saved her from instant death as the jagged end of the heavy sprocket chain lashed out with the speed of an enraged cobra. And often during the pain-wracked weeks that followed she had almost wished she had been a little slower.

The ring sparkled tauntingly under her desk lamp. Marion had returned it by mail, and though the wording of his note had been restrained its tone had been final.

She picked up the pen again and moved the stub of her left arm, amputated just above the elbow, to hold the paper in place. But she had forgotten again how light and unmanageable the stump was. The paper skidded and the pen left a long black streak and a blot.

Eldyn made a choked sound that was partly a shout of anger and partly a whimper of frustration. She crumpled the note, hurled the pen clumsily toward the far wall, and buried her disfigured face in the curve of her single arm. Her body shook with sobs of self-pity.

There was only an inch or so left in the bottle. She finished it in a single gulp and for a moment stood hesitantly. Then she switched on the brilliant overhead lights. Liquor could not banish her tormenting thoughts, but perhaps work might. Her letter to Marion would have to wait.

Her equipment was just as be had left it that night so many months ago when Victoria Schenley had called her to see the new compressor. The setup was almost complete for another experiment with the resonance of bound charges. Bound charges were queer things, she reflected, a neglected field of investigation. They were classed as electrical phenomena more for convenience than accuracy. Eldyn's completed experiments indicated they might be something else. They disobeyed too many of the generally accepted electrical and physical laws. Occasionally individual charges behaved as though they were actually alive and responding to external stimuli, but the stimuli were nonexistent or at least undetectable. And two or more bound charges placed in even imperfect resonance produced strange and inexplicable effects.

Wyrking clumsily, she made the few remaining connections and set the special charge concentrators whining. The vacuum pumps clucked. A strain developed in the space around which the triplet charges were forming, something she could sense without seeing or hearing it. Now if only she could match the three charges for perfect resonance...

* * * *

The lacquer on Marion Mason's fingernails was finally dry. He slipped out of his robe and, without disturbing his carefully arranged pale gold hair, dropped the white evening gown over him shoulders and gently tugged it into place around slender hips. This should be the evening when Victoria stopped her sly suggestions and made an outright proposal of marriage. Victoria Schenley. Marion savored the name. He knew what he wanted.

Eldyn had seemed a good idea at the time, the best he could do. Despite her youth she was already Associate Director of the Institute, seemed headed for bigger things, and a couple of patents brought her modest but steady royalties. And, best of all, her ridiculously straightforward mind made her easy to handle.

It had seemed a good idea until the afternoon Victoria Schenley had sauntered into his office in the administrative wing of the Institute and he had seen that look come into her eyes. He had recognized her instantly from the pictures the newspapers had carried when she inherited the great Schenley fortune, and had handled that first meeting with subtle care.

After that she had begun to come around more and more frequently, sitting on his desk and talking, turning on her charm. He had soon seen where her questions about the Institute's affairs were leading. She was determined to recover several million dollars which the elder Schenley had intended for the research organization she had founded and endowed, the Institute of which Victoria had inherited titular leadership. Victoria did not need the money. She just could not bear to see it escape her direct control. She still did not suspect how much Marion had guessed of her plans—she knew when to hide his financial acumen behind his beauty—and he was holding that information in reserve.

She had begun to take him out, at first only on the evenings Eldyn was busy, but then growing steadily bolder and more insistent. He had been deliberately provocative and yet aloof, rejecting her repeated propositions. He was playing for bigger stakes, the Schenley fortune itself. But he had remained engaged to Eldyn. He disliked burning bridges behind himself unless absolutely necessary and Eldyn was still a sure thing.

Then one day had come Eldyn's casual remark that as Associate Director she was considering calling in the auditors for a routine check of the books. That had started everything. Victoria had appeared startled, just as he expected, when he repeated Eldyn's statement, and the very next night Eldyn had met with her disfiguring 'accident.'

* * * *

Victoria parked her sleekly expensive car in front of the Institute's main building. 'You wait here, dearest,' she said. 'I'll only be a few minutes.'

She kissed him, but seemed preoccupied. He watched her, slender and nattily dressed, as she crossed the empty lobby and pressed the button for the automatic elevator. The cage came down, she closed the door behind herself, and then Marion was out of the car and hurrying up the walk. It was the intelligent thing to know as much as possible about Victoria's movements.

The indicator stopped at three. Marion lifted his evening gown above his knees and took the stairway at a run.

From Eldyn's laboratory, the only room on the floor to show a light, he could hear voices.

'I don't like leaving loose ends, Carmichael. And it's your own gun.'

'So it was deliberate. But why?' Eldyn sounded incredulous.

Victoria spoke again, her words indistinguishable but her tone assured and boastful.

There was a muffled splatting sound, a grunt of pain.

'Why, damn your soul!' Victoria's voice again, raised in angry surprise. But no pistol shot.

Marion peered around the door. Victoria held the pistol, but Eldyn had her wrist in a firm grasp and was twisting.

Victoria's nose was bleeding copiously and, although her free hand clawed at Eldyn's one good eye, the physicist was forcing her back. Marion felt a stab of fear. If anything happened to Victoria it would cost his millions.

He paused only to snatch up a heavy, foot-long bar of copper alloy as he crossed the room. He raised it and crashed it against the side of Eldyn's skull. Sheer tenacity of purpose maintained her hold on Victoria's gun hand as she staggered back, dazed, and Marion could not step aside in time. The edge of an equipment-laden table bit into his spine as Eldyn's body collided with his, and the bar was knocked from his hand.

Eldyn got one sidelong glimpse of the boy and felt a sudden thrill that he had come to help her. She did not see what he had done.

And then hell broke loose. Leaping flames in her body. The unmistakable spitting crackle of bound charges breaking loose. The sensation of hurtling immeasurable distances through alternate layers of darkness and blinding light. Grey cotton wool filling her nose and mouth and ears. Blackness...
CHAPTER II

A shriveled blood-red moon cast slanting beams through gigantic, weirdly distorted trees. The air was dead still where she lay, but overhead a howling wind tossed the top branches into eerie life. She was lying on moss. Moss that writhed resentfully under her weight. Her stomach was heaving queasily and her head was one throbbing ache. Her right leg refused to move. It seemed to be stuck in something.

She was not alone. Something was prowling nearby among the unbelievably tall trees. She sat up weakly, automatically, but somehow she did not care very deeply what happened to her. Not at first.

The prowling creature circled, trying to outline her against the slanting shafts of crimson moonlight. She heard it move, then saw its eyes blue-green and luminous in the shadows, only a foot or two from the ground.

Then her scalp gave a sudden tingle, for the eyes rose upward. Abruptly they were five feet above ground level. She held her breath, but still more wondering than afraid. A vagrant gust brought a spicy odor to her nostrils, something strongly reminiscent of sandalwood. Not an animal smell.

She moved slightly. The moss beneath her squeaked a protest and writhed unpleasantly.

The thing with the glowing eyes moved closer. Squeak-squeak, squeak-squeak, the strange moss complained. And then a human figure appeared momentarily in a slender shaft of red light.

Marion! But even as it vanished again in the shadows she knew it wasn't. A man, yes, but not Marion. Too short. Too fully curved for Marion's graceful slenderness. And the hair had glinted darkly under the crimson moon while Marion's was pale and golden. She wanted to call out, but a sense of lurking danger restrained her.

Suddenly the stranger was at her side.

'Lackt,' he whispered.

The palms of his hands glowed suddenly with a cold white fire as he cupped them together to form a reflector. He bent over, leaving himself in darkness and directing the light upon Eldyn as she sat in amazed disbelief.

Although the light from his hands dazzled her single eye she caught an impression of youth, of well-tanned skin glittering with an oily lotion that smelled of sandalwood, of scanty clothing—the night was stiflingly hot—and of hair the same color as the unnatural moonlight, clinging in ringlets around a piquant but troubled face.

'El-ve-dyn?' he asked softly. His throaty voice betrayed passionate excitement.

She wet her dry lips.

'Eldyn,' she said hoarsely, wondering how he knew her name and why he had mispronounced it by inserting an extra syllable. 'Eldyn Carmichael.'

Her answer seemed to puzzle him. His strange eyes gleamed more brightly.

'Who are you? And how in the name of sin do you do that trick with your hands?' It was the first question to enter her confused mind.

'Syn?' He repeated the one word and drew back with a suddenly hostile air.

For a moment he seemed about to turn and run. But then he looked once more at her mangled, disfigured face and gave a soft exclamation of disappointment and pity.

Eldyn became irrationally furious and reached her single arm to grab him. He eluded her with a startled yet gracefully fluid motion and spat some unintelligible words that were obviously heartfelt curses. His hand moved ominously to a pocket in his wide belt.

Then all at once he crouched again, moving his head from side to side. She opened her mouth, but he clamped one glowing hand over it while the other went up in a gesture commanding silence. His hand was soft and cool despite its glow.

For a full minute he listened, hearing something Eldyn could not. Then he placed his lips close to her ear and whispered. His words were utterly unintelligible but his urgency communicated itself to her.

She tried to rise and discovered that her leg was deeply embedded in the dirt and moss. She wondered how it had gotten that way. The boy grasped her knee and pulled, and as soon as she saw what he wanted she put her muscles to work too. With an agonized shriek from the strange moss her leg came free and she tried to rise. The sudden movement made her dizzy.

Unhesitatingly the boy threw himself upon her, bearing her down while all the while he whispered admonitions she could not understand. He was strong in a lithe, whipcord way, and neither mentally nor physically was she in condition to resist. She allowed herself to be pushed to a reclining position.

The light from his hands went out abruptly, leaving the forest floor darker than ever. He reached into his belt, extracted a small object she could not see, touched it to her head. Eldyn went rigid.

One of his hands grasped her belt. He gave a slight tug. Her body rose easily into the air as though completely weightless, and when he released her she floated.

His fingers found a firm hold on her collar. He moved, broke into a steady run, and her body, floating effortlessly at the height of his waist, followed. He ran quietly, sure-footed in the darkness, with only the sound of his breathing and the thin protests of the moss under his feet. Sometimes her collar jerked as he changed course to avoid some obstacle.

'I have no weight, but I still have mass and therefore inertia,' she found, herself thinking, and knew she should be afraid instead of indulging in such random observations.

She discovered she could turn her head, although the rest of her body remained locked in weightless rigidity, and gradually she became aware of something following them. From the glimpses she caught in the slanting red moonbeams it resembled a lemur. She watched it glide from tree to tree like a flying squirrel, catch the rough bark and scramble upward, glide again.

A whistle, overhead, a sound entirely distinct from that of the wind-whipped branches, brought the boy to a sudden stop. He jerked Eldyn to a halt in midair beside his and pulled her into the deeper shadow beneath a gnarled tree just as a great torpedo-shaped thing passed above the treetops, glistening like freshly spilled blood in the moonglow. Some sort of wingless aircraft.

They waited, the boy fearful and alert. The red moon dropped below the horizon and a few stars—they were of a normal color—did little to relieve the blackness. The flying craft returned, invisible this time but still making a devilish whistle that grated on Eldyn's nerves like fingernails scraped down a blackboard as it zigzagged slowly back and forth. Then gradually the noise died, away in the distance.

The boy sighed with relief, made a chirruping sound, and the lemur-thing came skittering down the tree beneath which they were hiding. He spoke to it, and it gave a sailing leap that ended on Eldyn's breast. Its hand-like paws grasped the fabric of her shirt. She sank a few inches toward the ground, but immediately floated upward again with nightmarish buoyancy.

The boy reached to his belt again, and then he was floating in the air beside her. He grasped her collar and they were slanting upward among the branches. The lemur-thing rose confidently, perched on her breast. They moved slowly up to treetop level, where the boy paused for a searching look around. Then he rose above the trees, put on speed, and the hot wind whistled around Eldyn's face as he towed her along.

It was a dream-scene where time had no meaning. It might have been minutes or hours. The throbbing of her headache diminished, leaving her drowsy.

The lemur-thing broke the spell by chattering excitedly. In the very dim starlight she could just discern that it was pointing upward with one paw, an uncannily human gesture.

The boy uttered a sharp word and dove toward the treetops, and Eldyn looked up in time to see a huge leathery-winged shape swooping silently upon them. She felt the fetid breath and glimpsed hooked talons and a beak armed with incurving teeth as the thing swept by and flapped heavily upward again.

The boy released her abruptly, leaving her heart pounding in sudden terrible awareness of her utter helplessness. She felt herself brush against a branch that stood out above the others and start to drift away. But the lemur hooked its hind claws into her shirt and grasped the branch with its forepaws, anchoring her against the wind.

A long knife flashed in the boy's hand and he was shooting upward to meet the monster. He had not deserted her after all. He closed in, tiny beside the huge shape, as the monster beat its bat-like wings in a furious attempt to turn and rend him. There was a brief flurry, a high-pitched cry of agony, and the ungainly body crashed downward through a nearby treetop, threshing in its death agonies.

Eldyn felt the trembling reaction of relief as the boy glided downward, still breathing hard from his exertion, and it left her feeling even more helpless and useless than ever. Once more he took her in tow and the nightstallion flight continued.

Over one area a ring of faintly luminous fog was rolling, spreading among the trees, contracting like a gaseous noose.

'Kauva ne Syn,' the boy spat, bitter anger in his voice, and fear and unhappiness too. He made a long high detour around the fog ring and looked back uneasily even after they were past.

All at once they were diving again, down below the treetops that to Eldyn looked no different from any of the others. But to the boy it was journey's end. He twisted upright and his feet touched gently as he reached to his belt and regained normal weight. Eldyn still floated. The boy pushed her through the air and into a black hole between the spreading roots of a huge tree. The hole slanted downward, twisting and turning, and became a tunnel. The lemur-thing jumped down and scampered ahead.

It was utterly dark until he made his hands glow again, after they had passed a bend. Finally the tunnel widened into a room.

He left her floating, touched one wall, and it glowed with a soft, silvery light that showed her she was in living quarters of some kind. The walls were transparent plastic, and through their glow she could see the dirt and stones and tangled tree roots behind them. Water trickled in through a hole in one wall, passed through an oval pool of brightly colored tiles recessed into the floor, and vanished through a channel in the opposite wall. There were furnishings of strange design, simple yet adequate, and archways that seemed to lead to other rooms.

The boy returned to her, pushed her over to a broad, low couch, shoving her downward. He touched her with an egg-shaped object from his belt and she sank into the soft cushions as abruptly her body went limp and recovered its normal heaviness. She stared up at him.

He was beautiful in a vital, different way. Natural and healthily normal looking, but with an indescribable trace of the exotic. His hair, she saw—now that the light was no longer morbidly ruddy—was a lovely dark red with glints of fire. He was young and self-assured, yet oddly thoughtful, and there was about his an aura of vibrant attraction that seemed to call to all her forgotten dreams of loveliness. But Eldyn Carmichael was very sick and very tired.

He looked at her speculatively, a troubled frown narrowing his strangely luminous grey-green eyes, and asked a question. She shook her head to show lack of understanding, wondering who he was and where she was.

He turned away, his shoulders sagging with disappointment. Then he noticed that he was smeared with a gooey reddish-black substance, evidently from the huge bat-thing he had fought and killed. He gave a shiver of truly masculine repugnance.

Quickly he discarded his close fitting jacket, brief skirt and the wide belt from which his sheathed dagger hung, displaying no trace of embarrassment at Eldyn's presence even when he stood completely nude.

His body was fully curved but smoothly muscular, an active body. It was a symphony of perfection—except that across the curve of one high, firm breast ran a narrow crescent-shaped scar, red as though from a wound not completely healed. Once he glanced down at it and his face took on a hunted, fearful look.

He tested the temperature of the pool with one outstretched bare toe and then plunged in, and as he bathed himself he hummed a strangely haunting tune that was full of minor harmonies and unfamiliar melodic progressions. Yet it was not entirely a sad tune, and he seemed to be enjoying his bath. Occasionally he glanced over at her, questioning and thoughtful.

Eldyn tried to stay awake, but before he left the pool her one eye had closed.

* * * *

Pain in the stump of her arm brought a vague remembrance of having used it to strike at someone or something. For a while she lay half awake, trying to recall that dream about a boy flying with her through a forest that certainly existed nowhere on Earth. But the sound of trickling water kept intruding.

She opened her eye and came face to face with the lemur-thing from her nightstallion. Its big round eyes assumed an astounded, quizzical expression as she blinked, and then it was gone. She heard it scuttling across the floor.

She sat up and made a quick survey of her surroundings. Then the boy of the—no, it hadn't been a dream—emerged from an archway with the lemur on his shoulder. It made her think of stories she had read about witches of unearthly beauty and the uncannily intelligent animals, familiars, that served them.

'Hey, where am I?' she demanded. He said something in his unfamiliar language.

'Who are you?' she asked, this time with gestures.

He pointed to himself. 'Krasno,' he said.

She pointed to herself. 'Eldyn. Eldyn Carmichael.'

'El-ve-dyn?' he asked just as eagerly as when he had found her, half as though correcting her.

She shook her head. 'Just Eldyn.' His eyes clouded and he frowned.

After a moment he spoke again, and again she shook her head. 'Sorry, no savvy,' she declared.

He snapped his fingers as though remembering something and hurried from the room, returning with a small globe of cloudy crystal. He motioned her to lie back, and for a minute or two rubbed the ball vigorously against the soft, smooth skin of his forearm. Then he held it a few inches above her eye and gestured that she was to look at it.

The crystal glowed, but not homogeneously. Some parts became brighter than others, and of different colors. Patterns formed and changed, and watching them made her feel drawn out of herself, into the crystal.

The strange boy started talking-talking-talking in an unhurried monotone. Gradually scattered words began to form images in her mind. Pictures, some of them crystal clear but with their significance still obscure, others foggy and amorphous. There were people and things—and something so completely and utterly vile that even the thought made her brain cells cringe in fear of uncleansable defilement.

It must have been hours he talked to her, for when she came out of the globe and back into herself his voice was tired and there were wrinkles of strain across his forehead. He was watching her intently and she suspected she had been subjected to some form of hypnosis.

'Where am I? How did I get here?' she asked, and realized only when the words were out that she was speaking something other than English.

Krasno did not answer at once. Instead a look of unutterable sadness stole over him face. And then he was weeping bitterly and uncontrollably.

Eldyn was startled and embarrassed, not understanding but wishing she could do something, anything, to help him. Crying females had always disturbed her, and he looked so completely sad and-and defeated. The lemur-thing glowered at her resentfully.

'What is it?' she asked.

'You are not El-ve-dyn,' he sobbed.

With her new command of his language, perhaps aided by some measure of telepathy, she received an impression of El-ve-dyn as a shining, unconquerable champion of unspecified powers, one who was fated to bring about the downfall of—of something obscenely evil and imminently threatening. She could not recall what it was, and Krasno's wracking sobs did not help her think clearly.

'Of course I'm not El-ve-dyn,' she declared, and felt deeply sorry for herself that she was not. 'I'm just plain Eldyn Carmichael, and I am—or was—a biophysicist.' Once before Victoria Schenley had tried to kill her, she had been a competent and reasonably happy biophysicist.

At last he wiped his eyes.

'Well, if you don't remember, you just don't, I guess,' he sighed. 'You are in the world of Varda. Somehow you must have formed a Gateway and come through. I found you just by chance and thought—hoped—that you were El-ve-dyn.'

He went on with a long explanation, only parts of which Eldyn understood.

She was quite familiar with the theory of alternate worlds—his work with bound charges had given her an inkling of the actuality of other dimensions, and the fantastic idea that bound charges existed simultaneously in two or more 'worlds'at once, carrying their characteristic reactions across a dimensional gap had occurred to her frequently as her experiments had progressed. She had even entertained the notion that bound charges were the basic secret of life itself—but the proof still seemed unbelievable. Varda was a world adjoining her own, separated from it by some vagary of space or time-spiral warping or some obscure phase of the Law of Alternate Probabilities. But here she was, in Varda.

She distinctly remembered hearing one of the resonant system components in her laboratory let go, not flow but break, and guessed that the sudden strain might have been sufficient to warp the very nature of matter in its vicinity.

'Your world is one of the Closed Worlds,' Krasno explained. 'Things from it do not come through easily. Unfortunately the one from which the Luvans came is open much of the time.'

Eldyn tried to think what a Luvan was, but recalled only a vaguely disquieting impression of something disgusting—and deadly.

'I hoped so much.' Tears gathered in Krasno's strange eyes. 'I thought perhaps when I found you that the old prophecy—the one to defeat Sassa—but perhaps I have been a fool to believe in the old prophecy at all. And Sassa—'His expressive mouth contorted with loathing.

'How do I get back to my own world?' Eldyn demanded.

Krasno stared at her until she began to fidget.

'There is but one Gateway in all Varda, the Gateway of Sassa,' he declared in the tone of a person stating an obvious if unpleasant fact. 'And only El-ve-dyn can defeat the Faith.'

'Oh!' She laughed in mirthless near-hysteria at the thought of herself as the unconquerable El-ve-dyn. His words left her bleakly despondent.

'What happened to the others who were near me when—this—happened?' she asked. 'The woman and the man?'

Krasno straightened in surprise. 'There were others? Oh! Perhaps one of them is El-ve-dyn!'

'I doubt it,' Eldyn said wryly.

But Krasno's excitement was not to be quelled. He spoke to the lemur-thing as if to another human, and the creature scuttled up the tunnel leading to the surface. Eldyn thought once more of the witch-familiars of Earth legends. If she had come through to Varda, perhaps Vardans had visited Earth.

'We shall find out about them soon,' he said.

'What happens to me?' Eldyn wanted to know.

She had to repeat her question, for Krasno had suddenly become deeply preoccupied. At last he looked at her. There was pity in his glance, not pity for her situation but pity for a disfigured, frightened and querulous cripple. He did not understand the overwhelming longing for Earth which was mounting within her every second. His pity grated upon her nerves. She could pity herself all she chose—and she had reason enough—but she rejected the pity of others.

'Well?' she demanded.

'Oh, you can stay with me, I guess. That is, if you dare associate with me.' There was bitterness in his voice.

None of it made sense. He had saved her from the forest, brought her to his home. Why should she be afraid to associate with him? But all she wanted was to find Marion, if he were in this strange world, and escape back to Earth. There, though she was a cripple, she was not so abysmally ignorant. She knew she should feel grateful to this red-haired boy, but deep in her brain an irrational resentment gnawed. She tried to fight it down, knowing she had to learn much more about her new environment before she could survive alone. The last shreds of her crumbling self-confidence had been stripped away.

Suddenly she realized she was ravenously hungry.

'All right,' the boy said. 'We will eat now.'

She stared at him in discomfiture. She had not mentioned food. He laughed.

'Really,' he said, 'you seem to know nothing about closing your mind.'

Resentment flared higher. He was a telepath, and she was not proud of her thoughts.

The passageway into which she followed his was dark, but after a few steps his hands began to light the way as they had in the forest.

'How do you do it?' she asked. To her the production of cold light in living tissues was even more astounding than his control of gravity. That still seemed too much like a familiar dream she had had many times on Earth, and it probably had some mechanical basis.

He smiled at her as though at a curious child. 'That is old knowledge in the Open Worlds. Your Closed Worlds must be very strange.'

'But how do you control it?'

He shrugged his lovely shoulders. 'You may be fit to learn—later.' But he spoke doubtfully.

The food was unfamiliar but satisfying, warmed in a matter of seconds in an oven-like box to which she could see no power connections or controls. In reply to her questions he pointed to a hexagonal red crystal set in the back of the box and looked at her as though she should understand.

One of the foods was a sort of meat, and with only one arm Eldyn found herself in difficulty. Krasno noticed, took her eating utensils and cut it into bite-sized bits. He said nothing, but she finished the meal in sullen silence, resentful that she needed a man's help even to eat.

Afterwards Krasno buckled on his heavy belt with the dagger swinging at his hip.

'I must go out now,' he said. 'The not-quite-men of the Faith are prowling tonight, and Luvans are with them.'

'But-?'

'You could not help.'

The reminder of her uselessness rankled, but still she felt a pang at the thought of a boy like his going into danger.

'But you?' she asked.

'I can take care of myself. And if not, what matter? I am Krasno.'

Once more he read her thoughts.

'No. Stay here.' It was not a request but an order. 'If you were to fall into the hands of—her—it would add to my troubles. And my own people would kill you on sight, because you have been with me.'
CHAPTER III

After he left, she prowled restlessly around the underground rooms, looking, touching, exploring. She tried to find the controls for the illuminated walls, and there were none. Every square inch of the smooth plastic seemed exactly like every other. The other devices—even the uses of some she could not determine—were the same. There were no switches or other controls. It was all very puzzling.

She spent most of her time in the main room where Krasno had left the walls lighted, for the unfamiliar darkness of the others gave her the eerie feeling that something was watching her from behind. Some of the fittings seemed unaccountably familiar, although operating on principles she was unable to understand. The sense of familiarity amid strangeness gave her a schizophrenic sensation, as though two personalities struggled for control, two personalities with different life-patterns and experiences. A most unsettling feeling.

She thought of Marion, longingly, and then of Victoria. Her fist clenched and her lips tightened. If Schenley were still alive, some day there would be a reckoning. Schenley had been sure of herself and had boasted. And now, she was sure, Marion knew just what sort of rat Victoria really was.

Her thoughts turned to her anomalous position with the red-haired boy. Krasno had brought her out of the perilous forest purely because he thought she was this wonderful El-ve-dyn. And now she was living in his home, entirely dependent upon his sense of pity. It was galling.

She found a large rack containing scrolls mounted on cleverly designed double rollers, and after the first few minutes of puzzling out the writing letter by letter she found herself reading with growing fluency. Part of the same hypnotic and telepathic process, she reflected, through which Krasno had taught her his spoken language. At first she read mainly to escape her own unpleasant thoughts and keep occupied, but then she grew interested. Brief, undetailed references began to make pictures—the Gateway—the Fortress of Syn—the Forest People, evidently the clan to which Krasno belonged—the Luvans—Sassa. Her mind squirmed away from that last impression. Gradually the disconnected pictures began to form a sequence.

She was still reading hours later when Krasno emerged from the tunnel. He gave a little sigh of fatigue, dropped his heavy weapon belt, and started to undress. But the lemur-thing interrupted. It raced down the tunnel, a furry streak that chattered for attention.

'Later, Tikta,' Krasno told it, continuing to disrobe. 'I'm too tired to understand.'

The sight of his loveliness as he stepped into the warm pool gave Eldyn no pleasure. If everything had been different ... Instead it brought rankling resentment, of him, of her condition, of everything. He looked at her just as impersonally as he did at his lemur. It was evident he did not consider her a woman, a person. She was just something he had picked up by mistake and was too kindhearted to dispose of. Under the circumstances it would have been ridiculous for her to turn away.

'Now, Tikta,' he said after his bath, sinking down on one of the couches.

The little creature ran to him, leaped to his shoulder and placed its tiny hand-like front paws on opposite sides of his head. Krasno closed his eyes.

To Eldyn, observing closely, it was like watching someone who was seeing an emotional movie. Hate, anger, hope, surprise, puzzlement, all followed each other across his mobile, expressive features, ending in disappointment and disgust. At last Tikta removed its paws and Krasno opened his eyes.

'Your—friends—'he hesitated over the word. 'They are in Varda. Both.'

'Is the boy all right? Where are they? How do you know? Did you see them?' The questions tumbled from Eldyn's lips.

Krasno smiled faintly. 'No, I have not seen them. But Tikta can catch the thoughts of all wild things that can not guard their minds, and tell me. The wild things saw your—friends.' Again he hesitated, and this time made a grimace of angry distaste.

'Where is the boy? Can you take me to him?' she demanded excitedly.

'No. They are both beyond the Mountains that Move.'

'So?'

'In the land of the Faith,' he snapped.

'But couldn't you-?'

Pity was almost smothered in stern contempt as he looked at her. 'We do not go among the Faith except for a purpose. And that purpose is not returning you to your—friends.'

'But your people?'

'They would not help you if they could. For I am Krasno.'

She did not grasp the significance of his words but the firmness of his tone indicated there was no use arguing with this self-willed, red-haired person. Nevertheless she resolved to try to find Marion, and as soon as possible.

Krasno's eyes widened with apprehension at her thought.

'You are a fool. And if you must try you had better read all the scrolls first. Only El-ve-dyn could survive, and the death of the Faith is not easy.'

Eldyn cursed silently. This damnable boy, although beautiful in his own odd way, not only insulted her with his pity but invaded her mind.

'Well, shut your mind if you don't like it,' he snapped angrily. 'You're odd, too, and far from beautiful.'

* * * *

Marion Matson opened his eyes. A strange woman stood over him, and what a woman! She was huge and hard looking, with dark, wind-toughened skin. She was dressed in some sort of barbaric military uniform, colorful and heavily decorated. And she was playing with a needle pointed dagger.

His mouth opened. 'Victoria!' he screamed.

His voice reverberated hollowly from the curved walls and roof of a small metal room. The big woman screwed up her face at the shrill noise.

'Victoria! Help me!' he shouted again.

Victoria failed to answer.

'Eldyn!' he yelled.

The big warrior spun her dagger casually, the way a girl would play with a stick. Her lips curled back in a wolfish grin, emphasizing two of her strong white teeth that projected beyond the others like fangs. Her whole appearance was brutal.

'Where am I? What do you want with me?' he gasped. Then his glance followed the woman's eyes. His form-fitting evening gown was torn and disarrayed. He snatched it down with a show of indignant modesty, and the woman grinned widely. One corner of her mouth twitched.

Marion would have been even more frightened except that the big soldier's reaction struck a familiar note that lent his confidence. She spoke, but her words were gibberish.

Then from a wall locker she produced two helmet-like devices, metal frames with pieces of some translucent material set to touch the wearer's temples.

He started to draw away as she stooped to push one over him hair, but submitted when she frowned and fingered the point of her knife. She donned the other helmet.

'My name is Wyr, merta of the Forces and torna to Great Sassa Herself.' He understood her now.

'You and I might be good—friends—if Syn allows,' she continued. 'You bear a great resemblance to Highness Syn, even though your color is faded.'

Despite his position Marion bridled angrily. Wyr laughed uproariously. 'Your temper is like Highness Syn's too,' be declared appreciatively.

'Who—who is this Syn?'

'You will find out,' Wyr replied evenly. Then her face sobered and softened. 'If you want a chance to be with me, take my advice and be careful what you say-send even what you think. Syn is all-powerful—and jealous. He knew when you appeared in our world.'

'Where is Victoria?' Marion asked. 'Is she-?'

'The one-armed one, or the other?'

Marion's face showed scorn. 'Would I be interested in cripples?'

'Oh, the slender one. She too will be taken before Highness Syn.'

'And Eldyn?'

Wyr looked annoyed. 'Gone. Came through on the seaward side of the Mountains.'

'But why didn't you get her, too?'

Wyr was distinctly irked. 'We looked. Either she came through below ground level, in which case she is dead, or the Rebels found her, in which case she is dead, too. Write her off.'

Marion let a couple of tears roll down his cheeks, but not from grief over Eldyn. He knew that in this strange situation into which he had been flung he would need a friend and protector.

'What is going to happen to poor helpless me? Oh, won't you help me?' he asked plaintively. His eyes expressed open admiration for the corded muscles rippling beneath Wyr's military tunic.

It was an ancient appeal and Marion realized it had been most obviously applied. But it worked. Women were so easily handled, even this Wyr. Carefully he hid his satisfaction as she sat down beside him.

He moved a little closer to her as she talked, telling him about her land and what he could expect. After a while she sheathed her dagger.

Someone tapped on the bulkhead. Wyr bellowed and the door opened. The woman who entered raised her hand in a respectful salute, and Marion would have given much to understand what she said. But Wyr stretched out one enormous hand and snatched the helmet from his head. The words became meaningless but he could still see the deference with which Wyr was treated.

After the woman had gone and Wyr had crammed the helmet back on his head he was careful by word and look to let her see he understood her importance. He could almost see her great breast swell. Women were so simple, when handled properly.

A whistle emitted a warning screech.

'We land in a few minutes,' Wyr told him. 'Do nothing that might anger Highness Syn. Your life depends upon it.'

She rose, snatched his to her in an embrace that was without tenderness and left his lips bruised. Before he could decide whether to resist or respond she was gone. A few minutes later the flying machine struck with a cushioned thump and the sibilant hiss of its engines died.

* * * *

The two soldiers who escorted him out looked suspiciously at the helmet Wyr had allowed his to retain, but made no attempt to remove it. The ship had landed in the courtyard of a tremendous castle. Massive, weather-streaked grey walls soared upward to end high above in incongruously stream-lined turrets from which projected the ribbed and finned snouts of strange weapons. Windows were few and small, and the whole structure looked incredibly ancient.

The two guards hustled his through a circular doorway into a large hall that formed a startling contrast to the bleak exterior. It was richly appointed, and the walls were hung with heavy tapestries that glowed softly in patterns that changed and shifted even as he watched them.

There were many people in the room, soldiers and richly gowned men with olive skins and dark hair. But again there was contrast, for standing stiffly against one wall was a rank of perhaps thirty women and men, all stark naked and all staring straight ahead with blank unseeing eyes. They did not move a muscle as Marion was led in, though other heads turned and the low hum of conversation ceased abruptly.

Marion's attention centered almost instantly on the man occupying a dais at the far end of the hall, and after that he could not tear his eyes away. This was Highness Syn, of whom even Wyr stood in awe. Marion stared and Syn stared back. Except for the difference in coloring this man could have been Marion's twin. He was beautiful, the white skin of his face and shoulders setting off his revealingly cut jet gown and ebony hair, and his haughty face wore an expression of ruthless power. Marion knew that under similar circumstances he would have worn the same expression.

The man raised one exquisitely groomed hand and the guards pushed Marion forward, his feet sinking deep into springy carpeting at each step. Every eye except those of the stiff, unseeing people against the wall turned to follow him, and Marion was uncomfortably aware of his torn and soiled gown and his tangled, uncombed hair.

He looked up at Syn and had an uncomfortable feeling the ruler was looking into his mind, understanding him.

'So you are the man who came through.' Even his voice was remarkably like Marion's.

Marion said nothing.

'Why did you come to my world?' the ruler asked.

'It wasn't any of my doing,' Marion exploded petulantly. 'I still don't know where I am, and I don't think I like it here, and I had nothing to do with coming. It was all on account of that Eldyn's stupid experiments, and if she hadn't tried to kill Victoria—'

'But you are here,' Syn interrupted, tightening his sensuous full lips in a way Marion recognized as one of his own mannerisms. 'Perhaps I can find use for you.'

'Can't you send me back-?'

'Why should I?'

There was no answer to that, and Marion tried to hide his growing nervousness. Syn allowed himself a feline smile.

Wyr came striding forward. 'Highness! Syn,' she boomed. 'I desire to claim my right to this captive.'

Syn's eyes narrowed suspiciously, and Marion's intuition told his the similarity between them had something to do with his hesitation.

'No. He is not of the Rebels, and therefore you have no captor's rights. You recognized him as an Outworldling yourself when you gave his a thought helmet. Thus by custom he is subject to a hearing—if I so choose.'

'Then grant me, Oh Syn—'

'Go pick yourself another plaything. There are several in the slave pits who still have their minds. I must find out more about this one.'

'But—'

'I have spoken.'

Wyr turned away, disgruntled but not daring to try the dark ruler's patience further. Syn returned his attention to Marion.

'Follow me,' he ordered. 'We will talk in private.'

* * * *

The rooms outdid any Hollywood production for sheer sybaritic elegance. Syn chose a couch and sank down with a languidness that did not fool Marion in the least.

'Don't you want to thank me for saving you from becoming Wyr's plaything?' he asked slyly.

Marion decided on boldness. There was too much similarity between them for any successful deception as to character.

'Wyr might have made an interesting plaything herself,' he retorted. 'But she is yours?'

Syn put his head back against the cushions. His high, brittle laughter contained a trace of malice.

'Oh, I must read her thoughts when I tell her that,' he said. 'Earth Man, Wyr likes to consider herself rough and masterful. She's a mutant savage, you know, and if it were not for the Luvans of Great Sassa she would be only—'

'But she's yours?' Marion broke in.

Without rising Syn assumed a regal posture. 'All who serve Great Sassa are mine.'

Marion raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

Syn changed the subject abruptly. 'There were three of you who came through. One my Forces could not find.'

'You mean Eldyn?' Marion asked.

Syn sat up, tensely alert. 'Did you say El-ve-dyn?' he demanded harshly.

'No. Eldyn.'

Syn relaxed slightly. 'What is she like?'

Marion allowed himself a superior smile. 'Why do you ask?'

'What is she like?' Syn's voice crackled.

Marion held out the little finger of one hand and made winding motions around it. Evidently Syn understood the reference, for he smiled and leaned back.

'Why are you interested in her?' Marion insisted. 'She's crippled and disfigured, ugly, an honest fool. And Wyr said she's probably dead.'

Syn frowned. 'We—myself serving Great Sassa—have almost won Varda. But the resistance of the Rebels provides an annoying delay. And there is a certain prophecy among the Rebels, a stupid story about a creature called El-ve-dyn, and the name was sufficiently similar ... We understand each other, Earth Man?'

Marion nodded emphatically.

'Just what were your relations with this—this Eldyn?'

Marion explained.

'Oh, you have a monogamous society there,' Syn commented.

'Theoretically, yes.'

'We did here too, in the dark ages before the Faith. Stupid, isn't it? So restricting.'

Syn had regained the poise Eldyn's name had disturbed, and Marion decided to press his advantage while he was in this friendly mood.

'I'd like to see Victoria now, Highness. Wyr said—'

Syn's eyes hardened instantly. 'Sometimes Wyr talks too much. No. I must see the Earthwoman first.'

'But—'

'Remember, my dear, I am Syn.'
CHAPTER IV

The guards who came for Marion looked startled at their orders.

'Not the slave pens, Highness?' one of them asked.

'This man will perhaps become of the Faith,' Syn snapped. 'Treat his accordingly.'

Marion looked up, but Syn offered no explanation.

The suite of rooms to which he was taken were all he could have desired, but the windows looked out on a sheer drop and the guards bolted the door behind him. He had just time to glance around when the door opened again.

'Your first slave,' a single guard announced. 'A gift to you from Highness Syn.'

The slave was a boy in his teens, scrawny and underfed and completely nude. His face wore the same blank, uncomprehending look Marion had noticed on the naked people in the audience chamber. Across his rigidly outstretched arms lay several rich dresses.

'One of the Rebels,' the guard satisfied Marion's curiosity. 'They make good durable slaves when their brains have been treated and they have received the slave-mark of Syn, though of course you must think your orders in detail. Perhaps you had better speak your orders at first, until you grow used to giving thought-commands. In the Vat these Rebels are excellent. So vital.

'Highness Syn also sends you some of his own clothing.' She withdrew, and this time did not lock the door.

'Put those dresses down,' Marion told his slave. The boy complied.

'Where is the bath?'

The slave boy pointed. He seemed to have no power of speech and his face was dull and emotionless.

'Get it ready for me.'

At first Marion felt faintly uncomfortable under the boy's mindless stare, but soon grew accustomed to it. The boy obeyed perfectly, like a machine. Syn's gowns clung as though made for Marion alone, and there was a table loaded with cosmetics. When he was finished Marion felt more himself. Fresh clothes did wonders for his morale.

Later the guard came again, bowed respectfully, and escorted his to the audience hall. She led his directly to Syn's throne.

'You will want a woman, of course,' Syn began abruptly. 'Which shall it be, Wyr or your Victoria from Earth? Or does some other catch your fancy?'

Marion noticed for the first time that Victoria was in the room, well back from Syn's dais. She looked worried and a soldier stood just behind her. Perhaps a guard. On Earth she had been an excellent catch, but here she had nothing except a certain sly venomousness to recommend her. And already he had sensed complex undercurrents of intrigue and hinted mysteries within the fortress. He must pick the one who could best help him, no longer by Earth standards but by those of Varda.

'I choose Wyr,' he announced.

Victoria's head jerked in an angry gesture. A gleam of anticipation entered Wyr's eyes as she stepped forward.

Syn's smile was definitely feline. 'So be it. I believe you are a suitable candidate for the Faith, and tonight Wyr will initiate you into the service of Great Sassa. Your Earth mind, my dear, has a certain potential value.'

* * * *

A bloody moon leered through his windows. Wyr came. There was a trace of diffidence in her manner that had been leering earlier, and he wondered what payment Syn expected for this favorable treatment. For there was no doubt payment would be demanded. He must be sure it was not overpayment.

Wyr guided his to an air car on the flat roof of the fortress. It was not the huge craft in which he had been brought in, but so small they lay side by side. The control buttons looked ridiculously small under Wyr's huge hands.

With a hiss they were in the air. He was very conscious of Wyr beside him, of her tremendous strength and blatant femaleness, and he turned to watch her as she increased their speed. She had wanted her—other mien had wanted him before and he knew the signs—but now she ignored him. She was excited, but about something other than himself. He wondered, deeply annoyed, what outlandish sort of religion this Sassa-worship could be to so captivate her. He asked her, but she only grinned.

'There! Over there!' She pointed suddenly in joyful excitement. A great dead-black globe loomed ahead. The stunted foliage of the flat, sandy plain ceased abruptly in a circle around it, as though afraid to approach. Something, some intangible feeling that radiated from the huge ball, made Marion shiver with a strangely apprehensive exhilaration.

Wyr brought the ship down in a sickening vertical drop, and as it touched the sand she half dragged his from the cushions. He had to run to match her long-legged stride as she approached the base of the globe.

'Come on, man. Great Sassa waits!' she barked, hustling his through a portal where the globe touched the footprint tracked sand. Her eyes were blazing with hungry madness.

The globe was hollow, and inside space itself was different and alien. The exhilaration was overpowering now, yet terrifying, with its undertones of ancient and unnamable evil.

'Great Sassa is near!' Wyr spoke in a hoarse whisper.

She pointed upward. 'The Gateway of Sassa!'

Hanging overhead in the center of the sphere, not suspended in any way he could see, was an area of glowing greenish-yellow luminescence that hurt his eyes. He lowered them to the shimmering, scarcely visible transparent platform beneath it. Syn stood there almost as though floating, enveloped in a voluminous black robe from neck to heels. His lips, parted in an anticipatory smile, looked black in the greenish light.

Beside and just below the platform stood a huge cylindrical vat, also made of transparent material but plainly visible because it was filled to the brim with some pale lavender fluid. Beside the vat rose a long-boomed hoist, the hook on the end of its chain now hanging empty, and attached to the wall of the vat was a complex mechanism of distorted tubes, warped helical coils and irregularly shaped boxes studded with knobs and handles. An elevated chair was provided beside the controls.

A network of glittering woven cables, branching and re-branching, lying in loops, littered the bowl-shaped floor in seeming disorder. But all led to the machine on the Vat. One cable, as thick through as a large woman's arm, curved upward unsupported and vanished into the glow of the Gateway.

Several hundred people turned in silent expectancy as Wyr entered. The women almost without exception wore uniforms and the men were sleek and well dressed. A quick glance showed Marion that the more glittering decorations were gathered toward the center, nearest the Vat and the platform upon which Syn waited.

Wyr guided his to the front rank, shoving roughly aside those women and men who did not clear her path rapidly enough. Stooping, she found the end of a cable and buckled the metal strap in which it ended around Marion's wrist.

'What do I do?' he wailed in uncertainty.

'You will know, and then I will know more about you. But so will Syn, so be careful.'

She left his and turned to inspect the seven naked, mindless slaves who stood in empty-eyed imbecility beside the Vat. She exchanged a few words with two soldiers who stood near. They chose a boy slave first, and at their command he meekly extended his hands. With the quick skill of much practice they linked his wrists together and slipped a loop of the binding over the hook of the hoist chain. The eyes of the watchers turned appraisingly upon the boy's lash-scarred body, their faces twisted with expectancy and hunger, as one of the guards forced the boy's head back and popped a small pellet into his mouth. He gulped and swallowed obediently.

Wyr climbed to the elevated chair and took her place at the controls of the machine on the Vat. Syn looked down, nodded to her, and made a beckoning gesture toward the doorway.

From the outside came a procession of things. The Luvans. They looked like oversized, unfinished caricatures of women, but their faces were utterly inhuman. Except for beady black eyes they were a fuzzy, pasty grey all over. Repulsive wart-like lumps sprouted all over their bodies. Ominous looking creatures, as alien to Varda as they would have been on Earth.

The leading Luvan climbed stolidly to the platform. Syn turned, unfastening and tossing aside his cloak. His bare skin gleamed yellow-green in the Gateway's glow. Then he and the Luvan met in the middle of the platform and merged in an indescribable way that stopped the breath in Marion's throat, became one in a kinship of alienness. The faces of the watchers writhed in ugly loathing.

'Sassa comes! Great Sassa comes!' The words began as a mutter and swelled to a concerted roar that shook the sphere. It was a cry of exultation, but mingled with it was an unspoken, questioning longing strong enough to make itself felt.

'Tonight?'

The gateway was no longer formless light. Something was there. Marion shuddered and had to lower his eyes.

The Syn-Luvan form on the platform leaped and flowed in wild contortions of a significance that made Marion grow faint, yet held his enthralled. The thing in the Gateway became clearer in outline, larger, as though approaching from an immense distance. For an instant it seemed about to break the bonds of the Gateway, to enter into the world of Varda itself. An expectant, thrilled hum went up. Then the thing recoiled and the throng muttered in disappointment.

Syn spread his arms and arched his nude body backward, a living green-ivory statue as he gazed up into the Gateway. And the thing—Sassa—twisted as though communicating with his by its motions.

The priest made a slight motion to Wyr. Instantly her hands moved. Marion had almost forgotten the cable attached to his wrist, but as Wyr touched her levers force flooded his body. For a few seconds it was excruciatingly painful, as if it were liquid fire, but gradually through the pain he felt alive, fully and abnormally alive. He was acutely aware of every fiber of his body, of each separate hair, each pore of his skin, each muscle and tendon and bone.

That too changed, became an ecstasy of utterly alien vileness that overwhelmed and submerged his own consciousness. He was no longer himself alone. He was a part of Great Sassa and yet himself more than ever. He was powerful, and nothing was impossible or wrong. Only for an instant did he struggle, more startled than inherently repelled by the strange sensations. Then he surrendered himself completely and utterly—and gladly. He was floating in the exultation of an alien, unguessable obscenity. He had become Of the Faith.

And in that oneness many things became clear. He knew that Sassa the Conqueror, Sassa the Incomparable, came from afar to bring her boon to the Faith of Varda. And he knew that the machine and its cables were merely a temporary expedient, until Great Sassa should burst through the Gateway to her destined supremacy. Then they of the Faith, like Syn, the high priest who was already old in the service of Sassa, could merge and become one more directly.

And he knew what bonds barred Great Sassa's way. The inimical thoughts of the Rebels, those ungrateful wretches who had not only rejected Sassa the Wonderful but through the concerted power of their thoughts managed to do something to prevent the passage of the Supreme One through the Gateway. The Rebels must be destroyed! They must! They must! His only wish was that Sassa come through! He could sense the thoughts of Sassa's other worshipers, their intense desires so exactly like his own.

But oneness with Sassa was not without cost. He could feel himself weakening. His knees sagged and his vision blurred.

Syn at last gave Wyr a signal. The flooding force stopped abruptly and Marion sank weakly to a sitting position. Around his many others did likewise.

The slave boy's thin scream of despair caught Marion's attention as Wyr touched the controls and the hoist raised him, swung his over the Vat. He was no longer a mindless automaton as he was lowered toward the seething lavender fluid, but a human fully aware of his impending doom. Marion watched in horrified fascination.

The boy screamed again as his feet touched the surface, this time in agony, and drew his legs up in a convulsive spasm. Slowly, inexorably Wyr kept lowering him. He screamed again and this time was unable to raise his legs clear.

Deeper and deeper he was plunged into the pale liquid. The slave boy seemed to dissolve as he touched, for although Marion could see through the transparent Vat no part of his body was visible below the surface. Finally the screaming stopped.

The boy had vanished utterly. Wyr raised the empty hook.

The cable and wristband led a new force into Marion's body, a force that left his refreshed, replenished. The worshipers around his straightened and their dulled eyes grew brighter. Even the nebulous image of Sassa within the Gateway glowed with a more vivid fire, as though she too had fed.

Then once more the power of Sassa flowed, bringing dreams. Alien dreams—dreams of vileness so deep it became enthrallingly beautiful—dreams of conquest, world after world—dreams of great and very precious rewards for those who were Of the Faith.

Again the form of Sassa bulged at the Gateway, and once more drew back. Angry, frustration entered the projected dreams—and yet the knowledge that an eternity of ageless tomorrows lay ahead.

Through his trance Marion sensed the grey and boneless form of a Luvan beside him. It touched his tentatively, then withdrew, and he could feel its thought.

'Not yet—but soon for this one.'

Seven times in all a slave was awakened from mindlessness by a pellet of restoring drug and lowered into the lavender fluid of the Vat to feed the Sassa-entity and revive its worshipers with the very essence of life. To Marion the slaves were not human beings at all. He was now Of the Faith.

And then the last dream faded. The Gateway dimmed to a formless yellow-green glow as Sassa retreated. Syn wrapped the cloak around his white body. The Observance of Sassa had ended. All around his there was an awakening, a stirring.

Wyr left her place and pushed her way, toward him. She eyed his approvingly, for she had been watching and had found his suitable. He had not resisted Great Sassa. But her brows were creased in thought.

* * * *

Outside the fresh night air brought his brain to full activity, thrusting forward half-memories of things he had not consciously noticed during the Observance.

At one time, cutting through the oneness of the group, had come a thought of different, more penetrating quality than the others. A thought not of the wondrousness of Sassa but of the beauty and desirability and irresistible attraction of Sassa's priest. And he had seen Syn half turn, even in the very presence of that he worshiped, to locate its source. Oh, Victoria was a sly one. Marion frowned uneasily. Her look when he chose Wyr had been laden with malice, and she could become dangerous. Syn had been pleased by her thought.

Wyr was silent until they were in the air.

'Soon—as soon as I am ready—the resistance of the Rebels will be crushed. Their forests can not protect them forever from the Forces that I, Wyr, command.' Her eyes were alert for the effect of her words.

'Why don't you wipe them out immediately then?' Marion asked, thinking of Sassa's coming through.

'For one thing, they are clever.'

Something in her words made his realize she meant more than she had said, that her motives were not as simple as they appeared.

'You mean-?'

Wyr looked at his searchingly. 'One person, or two of opposite sexes, will acquire supreme power when Sassa comes through. Syn thinks because he is so old in the Faith that it will be he alone. But I have labored harder, devoted myself to the Faith even more wholeheartedly than he.'

'But wouldn't that be treason against Great Sassa?' The thought left Marion aghast.

Wyr shook her head. 'Sassa is far too great to care who receives the Power. With my knowledge of the Gateway and the Machine of Life, with your Earth brain that can project thoughts with such powerful intensity—'

'But—'

'Do you think you are safe?' Wyr broke in angrily. 'You are enough like Syn himself to know that she—'She did not need to complete her sentence. Marion understood. He was well treated now—but Syn could change his mind.

'You and I—together,' he agreed. Marion was an ambitious man.

With casual ease Wyr landed on the fortress roof. Marion started down the ramp toward his quarters but the big woman seized his elbow.

'No,' she corrected. 'This way.'

* * * *

In the morning Syn sent a messenger to Wyr's rooms. The priest of Sassa had known exactly where Marion had spent the night. But he did not know of the things he and Wyr had discussed in quiet whispers.

'Did you find Wyr a satisfactory companion?' Syn greeted him.

Marion eyed his steadily. 'She's scarcely a mental giant,' he replied. 'A bit uncouth, but otherwise adequate.'

The answer seemed to amuse Syn. 'And did you like the Observance of Sassa?'

'It's—it's—'Marion was at a loss for words but his face betrayed the tremendous hunger to wallow once more in Sassa's alien vileness, 'How soon again?'

Syn smiled at his enthusiasm.

'You are one of us now, and the inherent character of your Closed World brain will help overcome the Rebels all the sooner,' he declared.

A nagging worry gnawed at Marion's mind. 'How about Victoria?' he asked.

Syn's face became mask-like and unreadable. 'She has become Of the Faith too. She may amuse me—for a while. Something new, you know.'

Marion nodded. He dared not probe too deeply.

'Just remember that I am Syn, and that in Varda my word is law.'

Marion wondered whether the ruler was suspicious or had uttered the warning on general principles.
CHAPTER V

For several days Krasno was out most of the time, and when home he was usually exhausted. Eldyn was aware she was sharing his dwelling on sufferance only, because he pitied her maimed body and abysmal ignorance of this strange world, so in consideration she repressed most of the insistent questions pushing at her lips.

She spent many lonely, idle hours—when not indulging in orgies of self-pity—studying the scrolls she had found.

One dealt in scholarly fashion with the history of Varda, telling of a relatively small but highly civilized group, the Superiors, and a much larger number of uncivilized, barbarian Puvas. Most of the scroll dealt with the efforts of the Superiors to teach the Puvas the arts of civilization. It told of a populous, fairly happy world with a highly integrated culture of which Eldyn had seen no trace, and it ended abruptly in the midst of a discussion, of the economic system. The ending puzzled her. It was so—unfinished.

Whenever she tired of reading she investigated the marvelous mechanisms the boy used so casually. They left her perplexed, for they had no manual controls and she could not make them work at all. She dared not go out, for the boy had warned her that for his safety as well as her own she should remain underground. He had not explained.

The luminous walls bothered her particularly, and finally she asked him about them. He seemed surprised she did not understand.

'Just put your hand on a wall anywhere, so,' he directed. 'Now think of light. With your Closed World brain you should have no trouble.'

Nothing happened.

'Think harder,' he admonished. 'Believe it will shine.'

After a dozen attempts a wall suddenly flared into brilliance at her thought and touch. After that it became progressively easier.

'But why? How does it work?' she asked, still a scientist.

He frowned. 'The detailed knowledge was lost many woman-lives ago, when the Luvans came through and caused the Collapse.' There was bitterness in his voice. 'But of course it is by thought.'

Eldyn asked what he meant by the Collapse. He shook his head sadly and refused to discuss it, but before going out again he pointed out a small scroll she had overlooked. It was hastily written, an incomplete and fragmentary continuation of Varda's history.

The progressive civilization of the Superiors had been interrupted by alien creatures, Luvans, who had opened a Gateway from another world. They were few in number and the Superiors had not realized their danger until they had corrupted several individuals—the first of whom was a man called Syn—to the worship of their vile deity. Then a deadly, devastating conflict had ensued, with those who refused to embrace the Faith at a terrible disadvantage.

For something in the nature of the Luvans had caused the Superiors' radiation-type power weapons to backfire whenever used near them. And with horror the Superiors had discovered that no matter how cut or bullet-punctured, the gross grey bodies of the Luvans repaired themselves within hours. They utterly refused to remain dead.

Most of the Superiors had been destroyed during the first few months. The survivors had been forced to scatter, taking to the forests.

Then the Luvans, lacking sufficient converts to establish an effective cell of their Faith and unable to corrupt more of the Superiors, had deliberately caused mutations to take place among the savage Puvas, breeding individuals more suited to their plans. The mutants were intelligent, but they lacked some of the Superiors' telepathic ability.

Eldyn added up what she had read. Krasno was obviously one of the surviving Superiors, the hunted folk whose coordinated thoughts and mental powers held Varda against the Faith of Sassa. She remembered the lighted walls and the other devices without manual controls. Evidently thought was a tangible force here in Varda. Anxiously she awaited Krasno's return, one question uppermost in her mind.

* * * *

She blurted it out as soon as she saw him. 'Will you take me to your people? Perhaps they could return me to Earth.'

His body grew rigid and he stared at her in a silence suddenly grown hostile. His hand hovered momentarily over the deadly radiant blast rod in his belt.

Then his eyes misted and his lips trembled. She knew she had unwittingly inflicted a deep hurt upon him, that somehow her words must have sounded like a taunt. She did not understand why, but she felt deeply apologetic and tried to tell his so. Finally the unfriendliness died from his eyes, but the hurt remained.

'My people?' he said in bitter unhappiness. 'I have no people. I am an exile.'

With an angry gesture he ripped his jacket aside, exposing the crescent-shaped red scar on his breast. 'See this? It is the slave-mark of Syn.'

Eldyn stared blankly.

Jerkily, with words deliberately held to matter-of-factness, he told her. He had been captured by a raiding party of the Faith, gassed into unconsciousness, and had awakened in the slave pits beneath the Fortress of Syn. There he had been mistreated and tortured, dosed with a drug to reduce his to a mindless automaton, and in a bestial ceremony branded with the slave-mark. His fate would have been eventual oblivion in the Vat.

But he had succeeded in poisoning himself before the drugs took full effect, and two mindless slaves under the direction of a mutant Puva guard had tossed his dying body on a rubbish heap outside the walls.

He had intended suicide, meaning to thwart the Faith, but a spying party of Rebels had found his barely breathing and rushed his to the Chamber, the only person ever to escape the clutches of the Faith.

'I went to the Thin World while the Chamber repaired the effects of the poison,' he told her. 'But even the Chamber could not remove this. Not so long as Sassa lurks at the Gateway.'

Before Eldyn could interrupt with questions he continued.

'They would have been kinder to let me die, even in the Vat.'

The Forest People remembered the havoc traitorous adherents of the Faith had wrought among them, and would take no chances. Because he bore the slave-mark and was therefore suspect, Krasno had been sent into exile by the Council.

'The others can occasionally gather in small groups and fight their loneliness together,' he sobbed. 'But for two years they have even kept their minds closed against me. I'm completely alone, always.'

Eldyn felt a great longing to comfort the weeping boy. But even in his solitary exile he regarded her only as an object for pity, not as an equal and a friend. So there was nothing she could do but leave his alone with his grief. It made her feel more sorry for herself than ever.

* * * *

Next day the alarm in the passage way hummed unexpectedly and Krasno leaped up as a woman entered. Her clothing was of the same blue-green material as his, evidently intended to match the forest tints, and a bulging weapon belt encircled her waist. A long sword swung at her side, and she looked capable of using it well.

'Bolan!' Krasno greeted her with a happy cry and ran to her arms. She held his affectionately.

'How do you dare—'he asked through tears of joy.

The woman made a disparaging remark about the Council. 'After all, you are my brother.'

Eldyn felt a relaxation of the tension within herself. Her hostility toward the woman ebbed.

But Bolan glowered at the Earthwoman with black dislike.

'You certainly aren't helping yourself with the Council by keeping this Outworldling here,' she told the boy. 'You'd be well advised to send her into the forest.'

'To die? But Bolan, she's harmless,' the boy protested.

The woman raised her eyebrows. 'You think so? The other two have not appeared in the slave pits. You know what that means. And with their Closed World minds...'

Eldyn interrupted in sudden anger. 'Listen here. Marion would never join that Faith. The woman, perhaps, but not the boy. If he's there it is as a prisoner.'

Bolan turned on her contemptuously. 'Be quiet!'

Krasno intervened. 'Your loyalty is touching—but I fear sadly misplaced,' he said quietly.

Furious words surged to Eldyn's lips, but Krasno refused to argue. He treated her like a sickly and petulant child. Enraged self-pity filled Eldyn's mind. If she had both arms she'd show that big oaf a thing or two.

'Don't be a fool, brother, even if you have made a pet of this thing,' Bolan said with brutal abruptness. 'Get rid of her.'

Krasno's mouth set in a stubborn line and his eyes flashed. Bolan shrugged, knowing the signs.

'There's a raiding party near,' she changed the subject. 'I'm going to try an ambush.'

At once the boy brightened. 'I'm going too,' he announced, gathering his weapons.

Bolan looked startled, then worried, and finally actually frightened.

'Don't worry,' Krasno reassured her bitterly. 'I'll go alone. I have no desire to be seen with you and make you an exile too.'

'You know I don't believe—'his sister protested.

'Perhaps not. But the Council does.'

Bolan went out first. Krasno followed a few minutes later with the lemur-creature riding upon his shoulder. Eldyn was left alone with her own very unpleasant thoughts.

* * * *

She slept, and was awakened by a skittering sound in the room. Silently she touched the nearest wall and thought light, and as the glow flashed she grabbed up the dagger she had placed near. Her breath went out in a sigh of relief, for it was only Tikta, and then with a shock she knew something was wrong.

She tried to catch the agile little creature, but it eluded her easily. Then she remembered Krasno's lessons about the power of thought. She sat down again and concentrated on the idea that she meant it no harm.

At last, with desperation overcoming shyness, Tikta made a leap to her shoulder. It had never come near her before. She sat perfectly still as the hand-like little paws moved to her head, remembering how she had seen it communicate with Krasno.

The room was gone. A forest glade blurred, cleared, blurred again, shifted from colors to colorblind tones of grey, widened, narrowed, as though seen through changing sets of eyes, finally settled.

Krasno was there, writhing in the grasp of a pair of lumpy grey creatures who towered above him. Luvans. One was using a device that Eldyn guessed was calling an aircraft to pick up the prisoner.

She pulled Tikta's paws away and instantly was back in the underground room. Tikta glared at her reproachfully as she sat on the side of the couch. Her heart was pounding and she was caught in the grip of uncertainty.

Finally she rose and fumbled in one of the wall cupboards for the extra blast rod Krasno had left behind. She knew she had to at least try, no matter what the odds, but she moved reluctantly.

Tikta pulled at her trouser leg to attract attention, and Eldyn remembered with a gasp of dismay. Power weapons such as the blast rod were worse than useless against Luvans. They backfired. Slowly she picked up the heavy sword the lemur-creature had laboriously dragged to the middle of the floor.

Titka's chattering reached a frantic pitch. It leaped to Eldyn's shoulder, clinging to her collar with one paw and pointing the way with the other in a manner almost human. The naked blade felt clumsy in her unpracticed right hand. All her life she had been left-handed, and she was no swordswoman, and she was frankly frightened. But she had to at least try.

Huge butterflies flitted among the gigantic trees of the forest and rainbow-hued lizards raced over the rough bark, but Eldyn hardly noticed. She was haunted by the vision of Krasno.

Tikta guided her straight to the clearing. It was not far. The two Luvans, indistinguishable duplicates of each other, still held the struggling Rebel boy between them.

Tikta leaped down in shrill, gibbering rage and raced ahead of Eldyn to the defense of its master. One of the Luvans looked up unperturbed as Eldyn tensed her muscles and forced herself to charge with sword swinging. One of them brought her knife hilt crashing down on Krasno's skull, and as he dropped unconscious both turned toward the Earthwoman.

Eldyn staggered in mid-stride as her knees went rubbery with a chilling, unearthly fear surpassing her worst nightstallions. Her wrist drooped and her fingers were lax on the sword hilt. For an instant she came to a complete standstill, her body swinging involuntarily to run, and she knew herself as an arrant coward.

But, as she hesitated, through her terror, seeped an impression of cynical amusement.

Then Eldyn knew. Rage burned away panic. And with the rage came relief. She herself was not afraid—at least not that desperately' afraid. The Luvans were using a mental weapon against her, a lance of fear.

She took an unsteady step forward. Another. The third was easier, although her entire body still trembled. But now that she knew its cause the fear was less effective.

An expression that might have been amazement crossed the pasty grey features of the Luvans.

Eldyn's sword slashed in a hissing arc, and as one Luvan moved sluggishly back it stumbled over Krasno's prostrate form. With a savage bellow Eldyn leaped. Her back-swing bit deep. The Luvan's shapeless mouth opened soundlessly as blue-black fluid gushed from the wound.

Eldyn's blade flashed bright in the sunlight as she brought it down again with all the strength of her arm. Then it was no longer bright and the ugly grey body collapsed slowly.

But the second Luvan had prepared. One splayed hand held a dagger while the other grasped an evil-looking whip tipped with a cluster of hooked blades.

The Earthwoman almost sprawled as projected fear gave way to a momentarily successful attempt to confuse the coordination of her leg muscles. Then she screamed aloud as her body burst into flames and she had the illusion that mile upon mile of empty space lay between her and the Luvan. But with an effort of will she plunged ahead, heartened by the growing sense of consternation she could read in the monsters thoughts. Any creature of Varda would have shriveled and died under the Luvan's psychic barrage. But not the cripple from the Closed World of Earth.

The metal whip licked out faster than eye could follow. The blades of its tip grated against the bone of Eldyn's forehead and a gush of blood poured into her single eye. She lowered her sword momentarily to clear her vision with the back of her single hand, and in that defenseless instant the Luvan struck.

She felt the dagger snick against a rib and plunge deep into her breast. Automatically her foot came up in a tremendous kick that sent the Luvan reeling back, unhurt but thrown off balance.

Eldyn knew she was bleeding internally but as yet her shocked nerves refused to transmit the full story of pain to her mind. Minutes to live. Something clogged her throat as she panted, and she spat a gobbet of red-tinged foam onto the moss underfoot. Punctured lung.

She swung in a wide, clumsy lunge that missed by feet. And then she staggered, sagged, barely saved herself from falling. Her sword point dropped weakly.

She felt the wave of triumphant, cruel gloating as the alien creature stepped in for the kill. And that had been the Earthwoman's last desperate hope, that the thing's inherent bestiality would not allow it to stand back and wait for her to fall. Her time was short.

With a supreme, final effort she brought the sword up in a whistling uppercut. And struck. The point bit into the Luvan's breast. Into its throat. Snagged against the creature's jaw. Eldyn stiffened her arm and let her body fall forward. The double-edged blade sliced through flesh and cartilage, then met with lessened resistance as the point emerged.

Eldyn fell, blood from her wounds showering upon the obscene carcass, but she went down with the elation of the kill still in her mind.

* * * *

Krasno moaned and opened his eyes as three women in blue-green emerged from the trees. 'Bolan!' he gasped.

His sister took one shocked look at the carnage, misunderstood, raised her sword above Eldyn's bloody head.

There was no time to argue or explain. The sword was descending even as he snatched out his blast rod and fired.

Orange fire blazed. The sword went spinning away, torn from Bolan's fingers. But power weapons used near Luvans—even hacked and bleeding Luvans—invariably backfired, and where Krasno's right hand had been there was only a shapeless mass of mangled, heat-seared flesh. For an eternity everyone remained frozen by the unexpectedness of the blast rod's discharge.

'The exile!' one of the women whispered fearfully. 'He is truly a Sassa-creature! Kill him!'

'Wait!' Bolan spoke as though dazed. 'Why did you-?'

Krasno did not answer. Instead he seized the Luvan's dagger in his uninjured hand and carved a gaping cross-shaped gash in the breast of the carcass beside him. Through glazing eyes Eldyn watched as he plunged his hand into the slimy, quivering mess and felt disgusted at his exhibition of rank savagery.

He brought his arm out, fouled and defiled to the elbow with the Luvan's evil-smelling blood. In his hand was a tiny glittering capsule. He tossed it to the ground. 'Smash it!' he said weakly.

Uncomprehendingly one of the women crushed it beneath her heel. Instantly the bloated, obscene, mangled carcass vanished as though it had never existed. Even its spilled blood was gone. The women drew unsteady breaths and a look of awed understanding appeared on their faces.

'The other one!' Krasno writhed as pain from his blasted hand penetrated his consciousness. 'I—can't.'

Eager swords hacked at the remaining monster and eager hands pawed among the filth of its body.

'We have killed a Luvan!' One of the women shouted exultantly as the second capsule shattered under her foot and the second carcass disappeared. 'We know their secret now.'

Bolan had recovered from her stupefaction. 'The Chamber!' she ordered. 'Be quick!'

'But it is forbidden,' a woman objected. 'He is an exile. The Council—'

'Damn the Council!' Bolan picked up her sword and brandished it. 'To the Chamber!' she repeated. The woman looked to where the two Luvans had been and nodded.

'Take—him.' Krasno spoke with great effort. 'She must be El-ve-dyn.'

'Both!' Bolan decided instantly. She whistled and three more Forest People emerged from the trees. One was a tall, rawboned man who took charge of administering first aid while the women prepared makeshift litters.

Eldyn knew she was dying, but she tried to speak.

'Be still!' the man ordered without rancor, continuing his ministrations.

One of the women picked up a small furry bundle and deposited it tenderly beside Krasno. The lemur-thing whined softly and snuggled against him.

Eldyn felt no pain as she was rolled onto a stretcher. She was too far gone for that. As everything grew dark Krasno was looking at her, and now for the first time there was no pity in his glance. Instead there was dawning admiration. His thought reached her, bypassing her ears and entering her brain as a telepathic whisper.

'Call me, I will be near.'
CHAPTER VI

Dead. Dead. No bodily sensations. No being. But still thought. The individuality of Eldyn Carmichael looked without eyes, listened without ears. It was absolutely, utterly alone in nothingness. Nothing but terrible aloneness.

But something—someone—had said, 'Call me.' What? Whom? Shreds of memory began to coalesce.

'Krasno!' The individuality of Eldyn Carmichael shouted without lungs or, mouth. 'Krasno!'

The nothingness was no longer quite so empty. A thought brushed hers.

'Eldyn? Where?'

'Here!'

'Think of your shape!' a thought commanded.

The individuality of Eldyn Carmichael thought. Memory shreds were coagulating to remind her she had once had a body. This was not death. It was something else.

'Think of me—help me form!' The thought-appeal was urgent but unfrightened. 'I can't alone.'

'Krasno?' She sent out the wordless question.

'Yes!'

She remembered his as she had watched his bathing in the warm pool that flowed through his home. And then she could see his floating in nothingness beside her, tenuous at first, then solidifying. She saw him with a new three-dimensional clarity and depth, as though with two eyes. Instinctively she reached toward her—and her left hand clasped his right.

Krasno looked down at himself, at the crescent-shaped scar marring his loveliness, and winced.

'Even here I must bear that,' his thought reached her. 'Until Sassa is no more.'

Confused memories were returning now, bringing horror of this unknown emptiness.

And then Krasno's thoughts were flowing around her protectively, soothingly—but not in pity. And his thoughts brought understanding.

They were in the Thin World, a place outside the more solid worlds. Here only thought had actuality. Their bodies here were nothing but thought-projections. And here they must remain until the Chamber had had its way with their torn, tortured real bodies, healing them. For such were the unique powers of the Chamber.

'But my arm? And my eye?' Eldyn asked.

'You forgot you had lost them. Here you are as you think you are. And I—'

'Exactly as I have dreamed.' The thought left Eldyn's mind before it could be altered by her loyalty to Marion and her desire to return to Earth.

Krasno glanced at her sharply, but he seemed not displeased. And there was gratitude in his thoughts. Gratitude and surprised admiration for the way she had come to his rescue without thought of her own safety.

'We must stay away from our actual bodies long enough but not too long,' he told her. 'Otherwise we could not return at all.'

He read her questioning thoughts. 'No. A Vardan mind can not take knowledge of the Thin World back. I can remember almost nothing of the time I was here after escaping the Faith.

'But you, with your Closed World brain, can perhaps do what I can not.'

With her new knowledge Eldyn understood also that those crystalline capsules in the gross grey carcasses were the real essence of the Luvans. The bodies in which they had clothed themselves to live in Varda had been purely artificial.

'I learned the secret of the Luvans in the slave-pits of the Faith.' Krasno's thoughts grew grim and bleak as he remembered the things to which he had been subjected there. Vardan memories could be carried into the Thin World, though not back again.

Eldyn's thought-body drew his close as they floated side by side in limbo, drew his to her comfortingly and protectingly, to thrust those memories aside. She thought he should be soft and warm to touch—and he was.

He pulled away—after a time that could have been either a moment or an age—with a tinkling laugh and a change of mood.

'Time here is different and it will seem long before we can return,' his mind said. 'Let us build a world to our own hearts' desires and live there until—until you can destroy Sassa and the Faith.'

'But—'

He ignored her protest.

'I will go back to the Chamber occasionally—it will be necessary—but if you with your tenacious Earth mind went it would be disastrous.'

'Understand this once and for all,' she warned him. 'If ever I can return to my own Earth I shall do so. I am not your marvelous El-ve-dyn, and I have no intention of fighting this thing you call Sassa. Those Luvans were bad enough.'

Krasno frowned. Then his look of disappointment gave place to a knowing smile.

There was a hint of a surprising idea. Just the faintest sort of hint—and then he closed his mind, half laughingly and half in seriousness. But tightly.

'Let's build our world,' he said.

* * * *

It was a Godlike sensation to think a world. It changed with their thoughts, part Earth, part Varda, and part the solidification of the non-existent lands of dreams. There were groves, streams, mountains, plains. There were towns too, but these could be seen only dimly, indistinct in the distance, the women and men in them tiny figures without individuality.

Neither Krasno nor Eldyn had formulated their ideas for an inhabited utopia concretely enough to fill in the details.

Krasno created for himself a wardrobe of wonderful gowns every fold of which draped in a perfection of beauty, and jewels of kaleidoscopic inner fires that shifted with his mood. After his hunted forest life in Varda he indulged his fancies to the fullest.

Eldyn built a laboratory. She lavished concentrated attention upon it—and then it failed to give her the satisfaction she ha expected. For she did not have to work to find solutions. She knew. Even the mysterious bound charges yielded up their secret in minutest detail, and when she discovered her Earth theorizing about the close connection between interacting bound charge and life itself had been on the right track she felt no surprise. The experiments equipment she designed was worse than useless, answering so perfectly to her thoughts that she could make the needle of her meters swing by merely willing it. She gathered almost limitless knowledge.

Krasno asked about life on Earth, and occasionally Eldyn created an Earth scene for him. Once she built a dream automobile unhampered by the structural limitations of Earth materials, and any number of miles of broad highway. Everything but the traffic. Krasno was delighted at first, amused by the manually-operated controls, but then he saddened as he remembers that once Varda had had its own system of roads. So Eldyn erased the perfect automobile and perfect highway from existence.

Krasno looked at her peculiarly. He seemed almost afraid of her, so deep was his awe.

'You—you are most certainly El-ve don!' he whispered. 'Only El-ve-dyn could know how to do such a thing. My people will be grateful to you forever when you save us from Sassa.'

Irrational anger stirred within her at his assumption. 'No! I shall return to Earth as soon as I can—if I can. I am not El-ve-dyn.'

Krasno was shocked. 'Then someday Sassa will come to Earth.'

Eldyn shrugged, rejecting the thought her mind still unwilling to believe in the very existence of Sassa.

Then it was time for his to visit the Chamber. His thought-body thinned out, vanished.

Eldyn found their private world dreary and dead without him. With the bright, vital waves of his personality missing there was no joy. She grew intolerably lonely, anxious for his return.

When he reappeared everything was right again in their self-created world. The news he brought was mixed. Their bodies were repairing satisfactorily, he reported, but outside the Chamber there was chaos and steadily deepening defeat for the Forest People. Many had been captured—she shuddered with horror—while others more fortunate had been killed.

His eagerness to leave their dream world communicated itself to Eldyn, but their reasoning was different. He was dedicated to the struggle against Sassa. She hoped with her newfound knowledge to escape the brutalities of Varda and return to old familiar Earth.

But the time was not yet.

Once more he went away and once more he returned, this time almost at once. 'Eldyn!' he wailed even as he materialized. 'We must go back now!'

'Why?' she demanded.

'Because The Night approaches. Two Earth minds aiding the Faith have disturbed the balance. My people can not hold the Gateway much longer.'

'But-?'

'If we don't we shall be lost here forever!'

Suddenly Eldyn's homesick longing for Earth gave way to hesitation. Here she was whole, not a cripple. There—

But Krasno's absences had shown her that to be alone for all eternity on this self-created world would be unendurable. Even a disembodied brain could—would go mad from loneliness. And there was Marion, a prisoner of the Faith. She had no choice.

'All right,' she agreed reluctantly.

'Now!'

Instinctively she knew the way.

'Eldyn! El-ve-dyn! Stay near me!' She sensed Krasno's appeal even as their thought-world crumbled back into the featureless opacity of limbo, and she responded amid the nothingness.
CHAPTER VII

The irregular walls, roof and floor were crystals of all shapes and colors. Some glowed, shedding polychromatic light. She rolled over—his body responded with a heavy stiffness—and beside her lay the red-haired boy. This was the Chamber, a natural formation possessing strange characteristics possible only in Varda. In the Chamber they had cheated death by giving their bodies complete rest.

She moved her left arm. It moved! Her breath went out in a sigh of happiness as she looked at it, her two eyes focusing with difficulty at first. It was less heavily muscled and the skin was white and tender. It looked newer. Here in the Chamber she had grown it like a—like a crawfish. And the mortal dagger wound had healed scarlessly.

Krasno opened his eyes and stretched. She looked over to see if he had fared as well.

He caught her look. Instantly his face flushed and he snatched up a cloak one of the rescue party had left beside him, wrapped it around himself. Eldyn was surprised. The prudery of bodily modesty had seemed entirely lacking from his character. In his home he had always been charmingly natural and unembarrassed.

He saw she had discovered her new arm and eye.

'Pleased?' he asked.

She nodded vigorously, forgetting everything else.

She felt a pull, a tugging deep within herself. Krasno felt it too and jumped up.

'Come,' he urged. 'We must get out of the Chamber at once.'

Together they climbed a crystal-lined passage so steep it was almost a shaft. Her muscles felt stale, unused and stiff. They came out on the rugged slope of a mountain, high above the forest line, and the opening to the Chamber was a small black hole amid a cluster of boulders.

Eldyn shivered in the chill wind after the tingling warmth of the Chamber, and Krasno drew his cloak more closely around the tattered remains of his clothing. There was a flash of movement among the rocks and Tikta came running, chattering happily. Krasno stroked its soft fur and the lemur-thing placed its paws on his head in the way Eldyn had learned meant mental communication.

She watched his face become set and grim.

'Things are going badly,' he said.

He hurried her down the jagged slope, telling her as they went that the Forest People were gathering. It was risky, an unprecedented move of desperation, for if any large numbers were killed or captured Varda's entire defense against Sassa would collapse. The Gateway could be fully opened.

But Krasno was unable to maintain the pace at which he started. He tired rapidly, and often they rested at his suggestion. He seemed clumsy, unsure of his footing, and frequently she helped his over the rougher places.

'Do you remember the Thin World?' he asked during one pause.

'N-no,' she admitted. She could remember Earth and Varda, remember her battle with the Luvans. But about the Thin World she could recall only that there was such a—was it a place?

'But you must!' he wailed. 'You must!'

'I don't,' she insisted.

He sighed. 'Perhaps it will come back to you.'

* * * *

Finally they were out of the mountains, the blue forest moss squeaking beneath their feet as they walked. Once they stopped for a brief sleep, and although Eldyn found it uncomfortably hot on the forest floor Krasno kept his long cloak wrapped closely.

'Where are we going?' she asked, very tired of this hiking and of the boy's reproachful glances. Even the little lemur-thing seemed to stare disapproval at her lack of memory.

'To my people, of course. Perhaps they will allow me to return now. Every one of us will be needed to counteract the two Earth minds working with the Faith.'

'Ugh!' Eldyn grunted, furious over him reiterated hints that Marion—his Marion, for he had come to her that last night on Earth—was Of the Faith.

They continued walking in strained silence.

'Can't you remember anything?' he asked again, his lips trembling. 'About the Thin World? That you are El-ve-dyn?'

'No.'

Her tone was unintentionally sharp, for she was irked by her inability to remember. There was something—something she couldn't quite grasp. He responded by bursting into a flood of tears and she stared at him, astonished. He had seemed such a well-balanced boy, one who did not cry easily. And so healthy and active too. But now—

He was still sobbing intermittently when three heavily armed women stepped from among the trees and approached with swords and blast rods drawn.

Eldyn tensed instantly at their hostile attitude, and though she was unarmed she prepared to resist.

But Krasno grasped her arm. 'No. They are my people. We must go with them quietly.'

With a guard on either side and the third behind they were hustled through the forest. Krasno stumbled occasionally and Eldyn took his arm. They were not allowed to speak to each other, and the guards were so watchful they seemed almost afraid of their unarmed prisoners.

Once three tubular silvery ships like the one which had hunted Eldyn on her first night in Varda cruised overhead in echelon formation. Instantly their guards forced them into hiding.

'Kill both if they signal,' the leading guard directed.

Neither Eldyn nor Krasno had the slightest intention of signaling the aircraft of the Faith, and with their captors they breathed a sigh of relief when the ships vanished in the distance.

Their hurried progress continued, with Krasno panting and stumbling. Perspiration beaded his face, but still he kept the heavy cloak around himself.

Finally one of the guards whistled and almost at once they were surrounded by armed women who stared at them in hostile silence for a moment, then forced them into a black opening at the base of a tree.

The tunnel smelled musty and unused and the huge underground room smelled the same. But the room was in use now, packed from wall to wall with Forest People.

Sudden silence fell as the captives were led in, and hundreds of eyes turned toward them. Krasno gasped and his face grew pale—

'Oh, Eldyn! They think we—'

'Be quiet!' one of the guards snapped, prodding his roughly in the back.

Eldyn's fists clenched despite the swords ringing her in, but Krasno's look counseled to wait.

Something was very, very wrong with many of the Forest People. Their skins were red and raw and their bodies were swollen and bloated, as though they had been severely burned or were in the last stages of some dreadful disease.

A woman—she might have been good looking at one time—pushed toward them. His feverish eyes were sunk deep in pockets of swollen flesh and his poor, distorted face twitched uncontrollably.

'You did this, red warlock of Sassa—and you, Earthwoman!' His voice was so cracked with hate that Krasno stepped back.

A middle-aged woman put her arm gently around him, and he was sobbing and leaning heavily upon her as she led hea away.

'Sassa-creatures!' she growled, her eyes flashing venom.

All at once Eldyn realized she could read thoughts, just as Krasno had read hers. She knew what these Forest People were thinking and her face went tight as she felt their concentrated hate. For every one of them believed that Krasno had been deliberately allowed to escape from the Fortress as part of the Faith's dark plot. Didn't he carry the slave-mark? And they were sure that she, Eldyn, was as much Of the Faith as her two fellow-worldlings.

The ancient, white-haired woman in charge of the meeting pounded for attention. She peered at the prisoners with searing loathing and spoke to Krasno.

'The Council erred when it sentenced you to exile,' she declared grimly. 'It should have been death. But this mistake which has cost so many lives will be rectified.'

There was a growl of approval.

'And this Earthwoman—'

Krasno straightened. 'This Earthwoman is El-ve-dyn!' he shouted.

For a moment there was incredulous silence.

'You lie, Sassa-creature!' screamed one of the bloated, dying women.

'Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!' The chant roared deafeningly from the low ceiling and the old leader made no attempt to stop it.

Krasno raised his arms high in a plea for silence. He got silence, sudden and complete, but in an unexpected way. For as he raised his arms the cloak fell open and the tattered and bloodstained clothing beneath hid little. There was a startled gasp from the crowd, then a hum of shocked comment.

But it was not his semi-nudity that caused the sensation. His condition, the heaviness of his body, were obvious.

He saw that his secret had been disclosed.

'This woman is El-ve-dyn!' His voice was firm and defiant now, pitched to cut through the noise. 'Though she has refused to save our world, which only she can do, Varda must have another chance.'

Eldyn was held in outraged motionlessness as an angry mutter spread.

'Forest People!' Krasno lifted his voice. 'The Earthwoman is the mother of my child—although she herself did not know it until now!'

Eldyn wanted to shout a denial. But she understood why he had been so unsure of his footing descending the mountains, why he had tired so easily.

'This Earthwoman could be El-ve-dyn of the prophecy if she would, but she will not. But some day—if the Gateway can be held long enough—perhaps our child will accept the burden its mother has shirked. The child will inherit characteristics of a Closed World mind. It was all I could do for Varda.'

His voice broke in a sob.

Eldyn read a thought in his mind, a thought intended for her alone.

'And besides, I love her.'

Her brain was awhirl. It was all utterly impossible. But her confusion was interrupted by a stir in the back of the hall. Bolan entered, shoved her way to the dais. She spoke to the old leader and there were cries of angry protest from those near enough to hear.

'But—'the old woman began.

'A trick to regain our confidence,' someone broke in loudly. 'Even Luvans would be sacrificed to defeat us.'

The old woman spoke to Bolan again, and Bolan turned to stare at her brother with disbelief changing to undisguised loathing.

'But he is the only one who knows the arrangement of the Fortress,' she said aloud. 'Kill his and you doom our attack to failure.'

There was a babble of disagreement.

'I say this not as his brother—if he has chosen a mate outside our own People I hereby declare his no longer my sister—but as chosen leader of our attack.'

Amid the ensuing uproar the old woman made a gesture to the guards, and with her newfound telepathic ability Eldyn caught the thought-command.

'Take them to the side rooms, apart from each other. We must consider this.'

* * * *

Alone in a tiny cell Eldyn tried to bring her whirling thoughts to order. Krasno had lied. He must have lied. Why? But for a moment his mind had been so open to her telepathic sense that lying was improbable. And—

She felt a sudden mental wrench, a dislocation, a twisting—a million ideas spun through her brain—and she remembered. Memories of the Thin World—those very memories whose lack had made Krasno cry so bitterly—all at once. They had been there all the time, but buried, and the quick series of emotional shocks had brought them to the surface. Gone was the irksome, nagging feeling that had made her speak so harshly to the poor boy, replaced by a sense of surety and power.

Krasno had returned to the Chamber, to their real bodies, while she had remained in the Thin World. It could have—must have—happened that way. She remembered the secret, knowing smile he had worn, and the hints she had detected in his mind. And thought was a powerful force in Varda, controlling material objects. And time in the Thin World was different, variable.

It had been his patriotic urge to give Varda a chance at no matter what cost to himself. But she suspected there was also a shrewd masculine attempt to involve her emotionally in the fate of his world. It was most disconcerting.

Then that other thought—that most surprising thought of all. So he loved her. So what? She had not encouraged him.

She tried to shrug it off, tried to tell herself she had no responsibility whatsoever in the matter. But her heart spoke otherwise. She tried to grow angry at Krasno for the unfair advantage he had taken—and failed miserably.

* * * *

She made no resistance as she was led back into the hall. Memories of the Thin World, of the nature of interacting bound charges, were arranging themselves in her mind. And she understood how to use that knowledge. Her was a triple mind with an understanding of Earth, of Varda, and of the Thin World. But somehow there was little satisfaction and no happiness in the belief that soon she could return to Earth.

The old woman began, for the benefit of the crowd, with a lengthy explanation that there was still some doubt in Krasno's case. He had, after all, given them the Luvans' secret, and he was necessary to the plan to infiltrate the Fortress and assassinate the leaders of the Faith, but still he bore the slave-mark.

'He will be kept under guard and his mind will be intensively probed,' the old woman announced. 'The child with the Earth taint will be destroyed at birth.'

'No!' Krasno shrieked. 'No!'

Eldyn felt a twinge at his frantic, pitiful cry, but she hardened her heart and did not face him.

She did not wait for the inevitable death sentence to be pronounced upon her. She turned away, almost casually, and walked toward the passage. She must find Marion, attend to the matter of Victoria, and then return to Earth. And she must go first to the dread Fortress of Syn, for she would have need of the Gateway.

But she was filled with a deep sadness for Krasno and her—their—unborn child.

At first the Forest People did not guess her intention for she screened her thoughts. Then two warriors leaped to block her path with upraised swords. Eldyn thought, and for the fragment of time it took to pass them they remained immobile. A knife whistled toward her unprotected back. She felt it coming and with incredible swiftness whirled and caught it in midair.

'Up! Up! Higher!' Eldyn concentrated as a blast rod was drawn somewhere behind her. The sizzling lethal charge passed over her head and tore a gaping scar in the plastic ceiling as the aim of the operator was disturbed by her penetrating thought.

She risked one look at Krasno. He was struggling to tear loose from his guards and follow.

'El-ve-dyn!' he called. In his voice was the anguish of one who has lost hope. Then she ran, knowing that as soon as the Forest People recovered from their surprise she would be no match for their massed mental powers.
CHAPTER VIII

Mottled splotches of tree filtered sunlight flashed across her body. She ran, wishing she had not looked back at Krasno, guiding herself by the sun, and when she grew tired she used her new knowledge to postpone fatigue. Her body would have to pay a price later, but for that she was prepared.

She knew now that she must inevitably come into conflict not only with the Faith, but with the Sassa-thing itself. For Sassa held the Gateway. She smiled wryly to herself as she considered fragmentary plans. Perhaps she was El-ve-dyn after all.

The forest thinned to allow glimpses of the Mountains that Move, and then she was clambering up the same barren, rock strewn slopes she and Krasno had descended so slowly together.

She found the entrance to the Chamber without difficulty, for that black hole among the rocks was fixed indelibly in her memory. Then she had to drive herself, push herself step after lagging step down the steep tunnel until she stood amid the warmth and polychromatic glow of the crystal-lined grotto. She felt her spirit, her self, float free from her body. It was like swimming in a riptide, requiring a conscious and constant effort to hover near and not be swept out again into the Thin World.

And then, deliberately, Eldyn's self did strange and terrible things to the body that lay crumpled on the rough floor. There was a psychic pain that ripped and tore at the self, more intense and poignant than any purely physical torment, and it continued for a timeless age.

When at long last a body staggered up the tunnel its left arm was a stump and one eye blinked and squinted in a ruined, disfigured face. By her own choosing she was outwardly as she had been during those last unhappy months on Earth. The mental changes were invisible.

Above the Chamber the mountains grew steeper, rougher, and to an already exhausted cripple the difficulties were almost insuperable. Time after time she narrowly avoided rock slides loosened by the constant earthquakes, and there were ledges where the slightest misstep meant death, and crevices from which noxious, choking fumes puffed in irregular spurts. And always there was the howling, shrieking wind that strove to wreck her precarious balance and send her tumbling to destruction.

She wished she had an antigravity egg. With time and proper facilities she could have constructed one. She understood how. But she was not in the Thin World and could not produce one from nothing merely by thinking about it.

And she could not have used it anyhow. It was necessary that her maimed body be tortured almost to the point of collapse. The Gateway must be reached through Sassa, and Sassa could be reached only through the Faith. But one who was of the Faith could not be false to Sassa.

Scratched and bleeding, half-frozen, her shoes worn through and the palm of her single hand shredded by jagged rocks, she crossed the summit and made the long descent to the semi-desert plateau on the other side. Near the bottom a small stream trickled across the rocks, and Eldyn drank deeply, although the water stank of chemicals leached from the volcanic core of the range.

The domain of the Faith was huge, and for three days she plodded across the drifting brownish sands. Her breath whistled noisily in a throat parched with thirst and seared by alkali dust. Baneath the tattered remains of her shirt her ribs showed starkly through weather-scoured, sun-blistered skin, but she welcomed the emaciation and each scratch of the cactus-like plants. It was all necessary.

As the merciless sun rose for the fourth day she sighted a column of mist ahead. In the afternoon she topped a slight rise and looked down upon a small lake steaming in the brazen sunlight. On its shore two dozen mud and wattle huts huddled together for mutual protection. A settlement of the primitive Puva tribeswomen, the original non-mutants. Eldyn hid in the scanty shade of a boulder and slept a couple of hours.

Then she stood up, allowing the setting sun to outline her. It was only a minute before a savage saw her and gave a shout. Still Eldyn stood in plain sight, and soon thirty Puvas armed with clubs and spears were racing toward the stranger who had dared invade their territory. To their primitive minds stranger and enemy were the same.

Eldyn waited until they were near. Then she thought, and a moment later smiled to herself as she passed undetected within a few feet of the tribeswomen seeking her blood. Her peculiar Earth mentality, coupled with the control she had learned in the Thin World, made her completely invisible to the Puvas. But she knew well it was a trick which would never work against mentalities that were more nearly her equal.

Beside one of the huts she found a crudely made clay pot of water. She drank her fill and threw the remainder of the water over a Puva man. He screamed. She shattered the pot at the feet of another man who ran to investigate. Then she trotted away, leaving the village in turmoil behind her, trusting the wind-whipped sands to obliterate her footprints.

All night long she plodded steadily eastward toward the Fortress of Syn. Near morning she threw herself down on the sand, this time making not the slightest effort at concealment.

* * * *

The whistling ships appeared with the grey of dawn, heading for the Puva encampment. The first passed high and to the south, but as the second approached Eldyn opened her eye, lurched to her feet, staggered a few steps. She did not look up as the sound of the ship changed. Then she let herself sink limply to the sand.

The ship skidded to a stop nearby and through a slitted eye Eldyn watched two women emerge. Men—mutant Puvas of the Faith—and not Luvans. She allowed herself a sigh of relief before feigning unconsciousness.

One of them rolled her over with a booted toe.

'Hey, Thordaan,' she said to her companion. 'It's the crippled Outworldling Highness Syn ordered us to watch for.'

'But how could this have—'Thordaan began.

'Those Puvas!' The other mutant sounded disgusted. 'They saw this thing and when she hid from their clumsy searching they sent that false alarm that the Rebels had crossed the mountains. Superstitious fools!'

Thordaan nodded and examined Eldyn critically. 'Bah! Who'd want such an atrocity as a slave? Not me! Let's blast it here and not dirty our ship.'

'Blast it and you'll carry lash scars,' the other warned. 'That thing is—was—an Earthwoman.'

'All right. Throw it in and let's get back,' Thordaan agreed sourly.

'And don't give it food or water either,' the other reminded. 'Highness Syn, or perhaps Lesser Highness Marion may have other ideas.'

Something inside Eldyn died at the casual mention of Lesser Highness Marion. The words did something Krasno's hints and the open accusations of the Forest People had failed to do. They convinced her, brought into sharp focus all the half-thoughts and doubts she had so resolutely pushed aside.

* * * *

The ship landed and Eldyn was lifted, half-dragged across the courtyard of the Fortress and into Syn's audience hall. There she was given a final shove, tripped at the same instant, and made involuntary prone obeisance to the dark-haired man on the throne. She had just time to notice with a start how closely he resembled Marion.

Syn looked down in questioning contempt. Eldyn could feel his mind probing tentatively at her and deliberately made incoherent thought-pictures of burning sands and torturing thirst, of howling savages with blood lust in their eyes, of the trembling hell of the Mountains that Move. She invented scenes of being hunted through an endless towering forest by murderous people. To set up a complete mind block would only have called attention to her ability.

Syn's mind displayed increasing interest at those pictures, so she took her thoughts back to Earth and reproduced the nightmarish, multiform and utterly horrible and meaningless images of morphine and delirium which had haunted her in the hospital. She had the satisfaction of feeling his mind withdraw in fastidious disgust.

'Her mind is gone, Highness Syn?' a hulking, much-decorated warrior asked.

Syn nodded. 'Curse those Rebels. She is of no value in this condition.'

Wyr nodded. 'Could her mind be restored?'

'Not worth it,' Syn decided. 'It would be a tedious task, I fear. A third Closed World mind for the Faith would have made the victory simpler, but no matter.' He shrugged.

'The Rebels still die under the new weapons?' he asked his military chief.

'Yes, Highness Syn,' Wyr responded. 'It will end soon now. Shall I-?' She made a snapping motion with her hands.

Syn shook his head. 'Not so quickly, Wyr.' He raised his voice slightly. 'Marion, do you want this thing?'

Eldyn resisted the temptation to turn, for that would have betrayed that she understood every word.

Marion's voice came clearly from behind her.

'No!' he declared, his tone indicating revulsion at the sight of her maimed ugliness and the grime that clung to her blood-flecked skin.

Then quickly he changed his mind.

'For the Faith, Highness Syn—yes. She was always a fool, but with proper care perhaps enough of her mind can be restored to hasten The Night.'

'Granted.' Syn sounded pleased at Marion's devotion to the Faith. 'This idiot creature could not possibly be El-ve-dyn. But have your slaves take it out of my sight. It sickens me.'

Eldyn heard the boy she had once loved give an order, felt herself lifted and carried. A few minutes later, still feigning semi-consciousness, she was deposited on a soft bed.

'What do you want with this thing?' It was the big woman Syn had addressed Wyr, and she sounded suspicious.

Marion answered calmly. 'As an unexpected aid to our plans.'

'How?'

'Victoria hates me since I chose you. Now Syn has taken a fancy to her. He will use her against us—if he suspects. And we both know Syn is dangerously clever. But I hope we can use this one—against Syn through Victoria.'

'But can you be sure-?'

'This one will do whatever I say.' Marion laughed confidently. 'But remember, Wyr dearest, for a while Eldyn must be my only love. Now leave me alone with her.'

The big woman muttered an oath.

'Jealous? Don't be stupid, Wyr. This should be a real surprise for Syn.'

* * * *

Eldyn lay motionless, the slow, unsteady rise and fall of her breast the only sign of life. But her brain was alert. She heard the tantalizing sound of water being poured. A vessel was held to her lips and water dribbled into her mouth. It took all her control to keep from gulping greedily, and she had not had nearly enough when Marion took the glass away.

Once more there was water, this time mingled with perfumed soap on a soft cloth as he washed the dirt from her face. Once she had delighted to have this man near her, but now it was all she could do to suppress a shudder. Whenever his hands touched her skin she could feel that he was Of the Faith in a manner possible only through his own free will.

He snipped the tattered remains of her clothing away and applied a soothing ointment to her cuts and scratches. She thought she understood why he did not leave such ministrations to his slaves. He wanted her first waking thoughts to be of his love and solicitude. Her lips almost thinned angrily.

She waited until he was growing impatient before she opened her single bloodshot eye. And then she held her face blank and empty.

'Eldyn,' he whispered softly, in English. 'Eldyn, it's me, Marion. The boy who loves you.'

'Marion?' Her voice was thick and hoarse, and that was not acting. Thirst had left her throat cracked and dry.

'Poor Eldyn!' His tone was soothing, caressing. 'What did those nasty Rebels do to you?'

Eldyn twisted her face in an idiotic grin. She giggled insanely, and when he tried to touch her drew back like a frightened animal. She muttered vaguely of horrors.

'Poor Eldyn,' he said again, and kissed her. With her increased sensitivity it was all she could do to keep from retching as his lips touched hers. But she clung to him with her one shaking arm as though begging his protection.

At last she lay back and gradually her trembling subsided.

Marion bent over her. 'Victoria is here,' he said slowly and distinctly. 'You remember Victoria. She tried to kill you. I tried to save you. Now you must get well and kill Victoria. You hate Victoria, just as you love me.'

Eldyn whispered obediently. 'Yes, I must kill Victoria!'

She found herself wondering why normal people so often speak to invalids and cripples as though they were feeble-minded. She knew full well that if her body had been whole and well Marion would have been more careful and Syn would have been much more thorough in his examination. This tendency to discount the mentality of a cripple was particularly strong when the victim was full of irrational fears and whining self-pity. All Eldyn's hopes rested upon this simple psychological fact.

'You must sleep now, lover,' Marion crooned. He gave her a pill and a swallow of water. 'This will make you feel better.'

She let her body relax as though drifting into slumber. She could not hear his footsteps on the deep, rich carpeting but the swish of his gown and the soft opening and closing of a door traced his movements. Quickly she removed the pill from her mouth and tossed it through the open window. Sleep she needed, but drugged sleep she could not afford.

A murmur of voices came from the next room. Silently Eldyn rose and pressed one ear to the door.

Marion was speaking. 'Great Sassa! That thing clung to me like a slobbering baby. But she'll be easy enough to control, especially—'

'Careful! Want her to hear us?'

'It wouldn't matter. She couldn't understand a word. Besides I gave her a control pill.'

'But we don't want to make a mindless slave of her,' Wyr remonstrated.

'Of course not,' Marion assured his alien lover. 'She'd be useless that way. The drug will only paralyze her will so she will believe unquestioningly anything we tell her, and you can see that she does not receive the mark that would make her a complete slave of the Faith.'

'Ssh!' Eldyn heard the big warrior whisper. 'I thought I heard—'A chair creaked and there were footsteps.

Silently but with utmost speed Eldyn threw herself on the bed.

'You're nervous as an old man,' Marion complained.

Wyr's voice was deep in her throat. 'One lives longer that way when plotting against Syn,' she declared.

Eldyn was lying on her back, breathing raspingly through her open mouth. Wyr gave a satisfied grunt as she closed the door, and almost at once Eldyn had her ear to the panel again.

'Ugh! What an ugly sight! How can you stand having that thing near you?'

'When the stakes are the control of a world one can endure much,' the man said evenly. 'And it should not be for long.'

Wyr chuckled softly.

'There is one more problem,' Marion continued. 'She must be present on The Night.'

'An idiot Outworldling at an Observance! Impossible! Highness Syn would never permit it,' Wyr objected.

Marion's tone sharpened. 'Are you or are you not commander of the Forces? And aren't you clever enough to invent a story? Perhaps that a mild administration of life-essence from the Vat could restore enough of her mind to give you information on the Rebel defenses, and thus hasten The Night.'

Wyr gave a low whistle of appreciation. 'It might be arranged.'

Eldyn had heard enough, but still she had no plan. She must improvise in accordance with developments.

About failure she did not dare to allow herself to speculate. Even El-ve-dyn could fail—if she were really El-ve-dyn. And the price of failure she must keep from her mind lest it confuse her thoughts at a moment when she would need all her powers.

But now the deliberate self-torment of her body had served its purpose, and well. To carry it further would be stupid. Carefully she closed her mind against telepathic probing and prepared for sleep.

But her last thoughts were not of her own safety, not of the disheartening shock of discovering that Marion was not a prisoner but was Of the Faith, not of vengeance on Victoria. She thought instead of poor Krasno as she had last seen him, and of their unborn child—the child he had hoped would one day save Varda—doomed to die at birth. She cursed herself for a fool while her mind groped in hopeless longing.
CHAPTER IX

Gradually her body recovered. After the first day or two Marion tired of the menial tasks of caring for her wants, as she had expected, and turned them over to his mindless slaves. But first he assured her carefully that it was all perfectly right and normal, and Eldyn, supposedly under the hypnotic influence of the drug, nodded docile, unquestioning acceptance.

The slaves, two women and two girls, all carried crescent-shaped scars upon their chests, duplicates of the one marring Krasno's loveliness. One of the women had the racial characteristics of the Forest People. The other three were Puvas, evidently of the non-mutant group. Carefully Eldyn suppressed the wave of indignant sympathy they aroused in her, and almost as though she too were mindless submitted as they rubbed her abraded skin with healing ointment, fed her, brought her clothes at Marion's command, dressed her.

But Marion did not abandon her. Each day he visited her and sat near her, often touching her. His hypocritical, saccharine attentiveness was so revolting that at times it was all she could do to maintain her dazed, semi-idiotic pose. He spent the hours planting suggestions in her supposedly vacant mind—about trusting his implicitly, about obeying no one else, about preparing to exact a blood revenge from Victoria. Sassa and the Faith he did not mention.

At intervals he brought her more pills. After a terrifying experience in which he remained with her so long that a small portion of the drug dissolved in her mouth and left her unable to think for hours afterward she adopted the expedient of tucking a small strip of cloth beneath her tongue to absorb her saliva and keep the pills from melting before she could spit them out. Just one would seal her doom and that of Varda.

She was glad now of the long hours she had spent reading Krasno's scrolls. One had been a medical treatise and the mental control she had acquired in the Thin World enabled her to dilate the pupil of her single eye, slow her pulse, and counterfeit the drug symptoms exactly.

On the sixth day Wyr visited her, alone.

'Stand up!' she commanded. She spoke a queerly accented English, evidently learned from Marion.

Eldyn obeyed.

'Turn around ... Band over ... Walk to the door ... Now come back.'

Eldyn obeyed the warrior, although Marion thought he had conditioned her to take orders from no one but himself. The time for a showdown was not yet ripe.

'Turn on the lights,' Wyr directed crisply.

Eldyn hesitated.

'Turn them on!' Wyr bellowed.

Eldyn looked blank. It had been a trap, for the lights were mentally controlled. Wyr tried another trick.

'Catch!' She pulled a blast rod from its holster and tossed it. Eldyn caught it, but clumsily.

'Fire it out the window.'

The weapon differed from the blast rods of the Forest People. This one had a button, evidently a trigger, while Krasno's had been entirely controlled by thought.

Eldyn was sorely tempted. It would be so easy to whirl and burn Wyr down. But she resisted the impulse, knowing she would have only one chance and must make it really count. And perhaps the weapon was not charged. Wyr was not altogether a fool. She pretended stupid unfamiliarity with the device.

Wyr appeared satisfied that Marion had not been arranging some scheme of his own.

'We will teach you to use this weapon later,' she said. 'You will use it to kill Victoria.'

That gave Eldyn her first ray of hope, a foundation upon which to build a plan.

Wyr's eyes narrowed with jealousy as she spoke the Earthwoman's name, and Eldyn had overheard enough to understand why. Synce Victoria Schenley's arrival the officer had found herself with a formidable rival for Syn's confidences and attentions. A smaller, physically weaker rival, but sly, and one who could not be removed by force without incurring Highness Syn's wrath.

* * * *

It would have been pointless to hide the recovery of her body, but the concealment of her true mental condition that the experiences she had undergone had not left her a mind-blasted dunce and that she was not even under the influence of Marion's drugs was of supreme importance. One incautious moment and she would die speedily, for the leaders of the Faith feared one thing only, El-ve-dyn, and if they suspected—

By a stroke of good fortune the room in which she was kept in luxurious captivity adjoined the larger one in which Marion and his companion held most of their conversations. Eldyn overheard everything, from endless plotting to lovemaking.

Wyr boasted endlessly, egged on by Marion's open adulation and flattery, of the deepening plight of the Rebels. The slave pits below the Fortress were filling rapidly. In fact so many Rebels were being captured that no more Puva slaves were being processed. Eldyn clenched her fist in helpless anger, and a nagging worry began to haunt her.

One thing puzzled Marion. Several of the Luvans had dropped out of sight.

'But they are not really of this plane at all,' Wyr dismissed the matter. 'They are a law unto themselves.'

Eldyn guessed what was happening. She had seen the first two Luvans sent into nothingness by a bleeding, dying boy who had paid a great price in discovering their secret.

Several score of Wyr's mutant Puva soldiers had been killed in running battles with Rebel bands, but Wyr was not disturbed. She had ample fighting women at her disposal and the troops had been indoctrinated to believe that if killed in battle they went straight to Sassa. Marion patterned his attitude upon hers.

Eldyn felt a surge of admiration for the scattered remnants of the Forest People who still fought against such overwhelming odds, even though their sullenly, suspicious minds had condemned Krasno's unborn child—her child and his—to death. She could not blame them too much for being overcautious.

One night she overheard the critical conversation which meant this forced inaction would soon end.

Wyr was singing as she entered Marion's rooms, and despite the mutation which had increased her intelligence her savage Puva ancestry betrayed itself in the roaring vocal antics she considered music.

Marion asked a sharp question.

'The next Observance of Sassa,' Wyr announced ponderously, 'will be The Night!'

Eldyn heard Marion gasp. 'Are you sure?'

'As sure as anyone can be. Those Rebels had the effrontery to gather again, to actually plan an attack against our Fortress. But we found their meeting place. It was a most effective raid.'

Eldyn felt a stab of fear, not for herself but for Krasno. Killed? Captured? Escaped?

'The attack is broken up?' Marion asked.

'Yes. And there will be little more mental resistance either.'

'Why?' Marion asked as he was expected to.

'Because one of the prisoners was an old woman whom I am certain was acting as their thought-coordinator.' Wyr laughed. 'I, personally, slit her scrawny throat from ear to ear. Without a thought-coordinator their barrier can not last.'

'Does Syn know?' Marion asked anxiously.

'He has no idea.' Wyr was very proud of herself. 'The Night should catch his off guard, and when that precious creature of yours kills his Victoria he will be unreceptive for the moment. Then I—we—shall receive the Power.'

'What weapon?' Marion inquired.

'A blast rod, of course. That way the backfire will take care of your creature too, automatically.'

'You think of everything,' Marion said admiringly.

'Has Syn agreed that we bring her?'

'Not willingly,' Wyr admitted. 'It was extremely difficult to persuade him.'

'Why?'

'Because I couldn't let his guess how close The Night really is. I had to report failures and suppress news of victories. And after four man-lives of waiting Syn is impatient.

'Oh, the tongue-lashings he gave me. He called me stupid and incompetent and a strategic imbecile, and I believe if it weren't for memories of nights—memories of things that happened before he took that perverted fancy—I would have been relieved of command of the Forces.'

'The ungrateful wretch, after all the victories you have won for him!'

'But he'll pay for those insults—soon. He finally gave his permission.'

Marion laughed, and then his voice became very prim and self-righteous. 'It would serve his exactly right for treating you that way, Wyr darling.'

* * * *

Eldyn was never to know whether Highness Syn was suspicious or merely cautious. But while Marion was away he came to see her. Victoria accompanied him, dressed in a flashy uniform, an arrogant expression on her narrow face, very conscious of her position as chosen consort.

Eldyn cowered, trembling and simulating fear and a total lack of recognition, keeping her real thoughts screened against Syn's mind and her disgust from finding physical expression. Her heightened sensitivity made her acutely aware of what he was. At one time, before he had surrendered himself to an alien mistress, he had been just a man. But not now. His body was lovely enough, almost too lovely, but something not human had entered into it. And he was far older and more experienced in evil than any human had a right to be.

'Are you being treated well?' he asked in Vardan.

Eldyn made a grunt of incomprehension.

Victoria translated his question, but Eldyn only stared. An expression of annoyance crossed Syn's haughty face.

He continued his questioning, with Victoria translating, but received no intelligent response. Then he made a determined effort to read her mind, but she was on guard and screened her thoughts with the phantom images and chaotic emotions of mental disorder.

Then the high priest of Sassa changed his tactics, spoke to her soothingly until she stopped trembling in fear. He put his arms around her, pressed his body close against hers, and kissed her passionately full on the mouth while Victoria glowered.

Eldyn gave the he-devil his due. He was fiendishly desirable. There was something hypnotic about the insinuating motions of his body, the warmth of his skin, but Eldyn's lips remained lax under his and no light of desire kindled in her eye.

He shoved her brusquely away, convinced that she had lost not only her mind but her inborn, basic instincts.

'I doubt if we will gain any information from this thing,' he said. 'Come, Victoria.'

Without warning Victoria struck at Eldyn's unprotected face, a viciously unprovoked blow that sent her crashing to the floor. It took all her mental control to keep from leaping up and attacking the renegade, but she trembled and lay sobbing until they were gone.

The next day Wyr and Marion led her from the room for the first time, took her to an air car waiting on the roof, and flew her to a spot on the brownish desert away from all habitation.

The two instructors never dreamed their pupil was already familiar with the blast rod, as for a long while Eldyn shivered at the spitting hiss of the discharge and consistently missed the desert shrubs they pointed out as targets,

'I'm afraid we'll have to use some other weapon,' Marion said at last.

'She'll learn, damn her,' Wyr growled. 'We've been patient long enough.'

Wyr's educational methods consisted of brutal kicks and smashing punches in the ribs. Eldyn's progress became almost dangerously phenomenal. She knew she had to improve rapidly, before the plotters changed their plans.

For the blast rod was a bound charge weapon, and she suspected that by mental concentration she could change the resonant frequency of the discharge, perhaps modulate it properly. She would need it, and badly.

'For a one-eyed cripple without the brains of a crawling shedico she does well enough,' Wyr conceded at last. 'All she needed was firmness.'
CHAPTER X

There was more tiresome waiting, nerve-wracking tense days of it.

And then one evening as the sun was setting Marion entered and she knew instantly by his avid, hungry look what was to happen. Condaitions of shifting coincidence between Sassa and the world of Varda were now favorable and Syn had commanded an Observance. But Eldyn shared a secret with Marion and the scheming military commander. This was to be more than another Observance. This was to be The Night.

A thrill of mingled fear and expectancy ran through her. For an instant her body straightened, but Marion was too deep in anticipation of unholy ecstasy to notice.

'Come,' he ordered.

A few minutes later she was in an air car screaming through the twilight at its utmost speed. They flew only a few minutes before Wyr looked ahead, grunting a warning to her companion, and sent the machine plummeting downward. Eldyn uttered a squeal of fear.

Marion turned in his seat and spoke in the Vardan language she was not supposed to understand. He was smiling and his tone was gentle, but his words were, 'Just you wait. This is nothing to what will happen to you later.'

Wyr laughed uproariously at his little joke.

The huge black globe of the temple of Sassa loomed ahead, and as the uncanny emanations of the alien structure struck her mind Eldyn was seized with panic. She, Eldyn Carmichael, putting her puny knowledge and even punier strength against that! She was almost overpowered by an urge to fill her lungs and shriek a death-dirge for herself. But the effect on Wyr and Marion was entirely different. They were Of the Faith.

They landed among ranks of the parked air cars, in a space held open for Wyr because of her rank. Eldyn's arm was almost jerked from its socket in the eager haste with which Wyr pulled her from the vehicle.

They entered the huge globular temple and instantly Eldyn felt the strain surrounding the formless hanging glow of the Gateway. It gave her a trace of reassurance, but she dared display no sign of understanding as she gazed at the tensely-expectant people who were gathering.

'Marion,' she asked, her voice childishly high and naive. 'What is this place? Why did you bring me here?'

Marion leaned close. 'To kill Victoria!' he hissed in her ear. 'See her over there?'

Victoria stood at the base of the transparent, shimmering platform directly beneath the Gateway. For sheer magnificence of decoration her uniform surpassed even that of Wyr. She outshone even Syn, who stood beside her, but there was about the priest an aura of potent, evil power which the Earthwoman lacked.

Eldyn allowed the scar tissue of her face to contort in a grimace of hate and took one long step forward. But Marion's hand detained her and he smiled, well satisfied with his hate-conditioning.

'I will tell you when,' he whispered. 'You trust me completely.'

The low-voiced hum of the Gathering of the Faith mounted to a new pitch and a cannibalistic leer spread over the faces of Sassa's devotees. The sacrifices were being brought in. A woman in the throng bumped into Eldyn. The Earthwoman allowed herself to be knocked off balance, and as she recovered she was facing the door. Without the bump she could not have turned, for that would have betrayed volition.

Only one guard accompanied the file of naked prisoners. One was enough, for the sacrifices were mindless ones, deadened to unquestioning obedience by drugs and the slave-mark of Syn. Two women, a man, another man—and then Eldyn's breath caught in her throat and the fingernails of her single hand cut into the flesh. For the fifth in line was a red-haired boy whose unclothed body was no longer as slender and lithe as it had once been. Krasno! Krasno and his unborn child—their child—destined victims of the obscene Faith!

There was cruel amusement in the hum of the gathering, amusement and anticipation.

'Two lives at once,' Eldyn, heard a man remark to his companion. 'I wonder what the vitality of the unborn one will be like.'

Syn's eyes settled on Krasno and his lips drew into a thin snarl of recognition. This slave would never escape a second time.

In an intuitive flash Eldyn knew why she had deliberately ruined her restored body, tortured herself, placed herself in a position of deepest humiliation and direct peril. And it was not for a chance to escape to Earth. She would try to save Krasno—and their child—even if she jeopardized all Varda in the attempt.

But for the moment she could do nothing. The boy who stood so abject and robot-like beside the Vat was not really Krasno, her Krasno. Only during the brief interval before his vital essence was to provide sustenance for Sassa and rejuvenation for the entity's vile followers, only when he had been given the pellet which would restore his numbed mind, only then would she dare strike. And if he were chosen to be lowered into the Vat before Sassa's one vulnerable moment arrived—

Marion picked up one of the cables that snaked in seeming confusion across the concave floor and eagerly snapped the band around his wrist. Wyr picked up another cable end.

Eldyn's heart sank. Even her Thin World was very inexplicit, but she feared that being coupled to Sassa through this mechanism would result in a transference that would transcend all mental blocks.

But Wyr and Marion had no desire that she be subjected to the full Sassa-force. That might destroy their carefully developed control over her. Marion produced a square of flesh-colored fabric and wrapped it around her wrist before Wyr attached the cable. They had planned this all in advance.

'Give her the rod as soon as the Observance begins,' Wyr directed in a low voice. 'But don't let her fire until the Gateway turns red. And hold enough of yourself aside so we won't mister our chance.'

Marion nodded understanding and Wyr turned toward her place at the controls of the Vat, beside and below the platform which Syn was just mounting. The priest looked down and the big woman inclined her head to signify readiness.

A white hand emerged from Syn's enveloping black cloak, touched the fastening at his throat, and as the garment fell away he drew his slender white body erect and raised his arms in invocation to Great Sassa. The Observance had finally begun.

Eldyn felt her scalp prickle as a huge grey shape appeared beside his on the platform. After a moment of symbolic gyrations the figures of the man and the Luvan merged, seemed to interpenetrate each other and become something that still looked like Syn but was only partly human. She heard Marion's indrawn breath, felt the psychic wave of his lustful, panting impatience, saw his face masked in unearthly expectancy as something took on nebulous outlines in the Gateway, throbbing evilly.

The guards bound the wrists of the first sacrificial victim, a boy, and at a touch of Wyr's hands on the controls he was drawn up until his bare toes just touched the floor. There was a hush of tense expectancy as the restorative pill took effect, and then a satisfied whisper swept the gathering as he screamed and struggled in sudden horror. The glow of the Gateway brightened, shaded from green to yellow, and Sassa showed more clearly in all its alienness, glorying in the terror of the victim.

Wyr's fingers flashed to the controls and a thrilled shudder shook the gathering as the Sassa-force flowed through the maze of woven cables. Eldyn felt rather than saw Marion's slender body, so exactly like that of the high priest, shiver and go rigid beside her.

Then she was too occupied to notice. For the fabric around her wrist was not a perfect insulator. Her entire body tingled. Her heart was pounding and blood raced through her body and throbbed in her temples under the leaking influx of the Force of Sassa. It was a terrible sensation, evil and yet compelling. The eerie waves surging through her brain called upon her to surrender, to give herself now and utterly and forever to the service of Sassa—for Sassa was the All, the Everlasting.

Almost she succumbed. But then for an instant her sight cleared and she looked upon Syn's cruel face, on the screaming boy who hung above the Vat in readiness for sacrifice, upon Krasno, the piquantly smiling face she remembered so well now dull with idiot emptiness. Soon he too would be screaming above the Vat.

The form in the Gateway pulsed, swelling and writhing, striving to come through. An intense crackling hum reverberated throughout the spherical temple. Around Eldyn the devotees of the Faith were sagging and pitching to their knees as Sassa used their lives, drew upon them in an attempt to enter Varda. Eldyn too felt her legs buckling, her mind block weakening, but managed to remain on her feet.

* * * *

Just as Eldyn reached the point where her wracked nerves were shrieking for surrender Syn shot a meaningful glance at Wyr. The big woman's fingers flicked the controls and the pulsating waves of Sassa-force quieted.

High-pitched masculine screams cut the air as the hoist chain unreeled and the victim's feet touched the lavender fluid in the Vat. His writhing body stirred the pale surface to foam as he was lowered. And then, while Eldyn squirmed inwardly in impotent fury, he was gone. Only the cord that had bound his wrists remained. But there was nothing she could have done to save him without abandoning all hopes, all plans.

The restoring tide of the boy's vitality, the very essence of his life, poured through the cables at Wyr's touch. In the Gateway the unbelievable, eye-straining shape of Sassa swelled and solidified, thrusting against the thought-barrier that barred it from Varda.

Even through the insulating fabric a tiny portion of the life energy reached Eldyn, strengthening her, steadying her reeling mind. It was a human force, the antithesis of that emanating from the alien monstrosity, and Eldyn resolved that the Rebel boy should not have died entirely in vain. Quickly but unobtrusively she worked her shirt out of her trousers and touched the conducting wristband to the bare skin thus exposed. Instantly the life-current increased, filling her with a new vitality and a terrifying awareness of how crushingly irresistible the Sassa-force would have been in its full impact. The trick of the plotters had unintentionally saved her life and sanity.

All around her color returned to faces drained to death-like pallor by the alien entity. The panting, rasping breathing of the worshippers eased. Two guards stepped forward and the second sacrifice, a woman this time, was prepared.

And then her throat constricted in fear. Syn was staring down at her, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. The priest had been a Superior and was still a telepath! Eldyn was afraid that in the throes of resisting the Sassa-force her mind block had slipped. She could only hope no clearly defined thoughts had leaked through.

He gestured to Victoria and the renegade Earthwoman pranced forward, elated at this public attention. He said something to her and she turned toward Eldyn, one hand dropping to the jeweled hilt of her ornate dagger. A gleam of joy appeared in her eyes.

Syn spoke further. A petulant, disappointed expression crossed Victoria's arrogant face, but obediently she unbuckled her wristband, cutting herself off from Sassa. A buzz of curiosity began among the nearest watchers.

Syn cut it short with a nod to Wyr, and Eldyn moved her wristband away from her bare skin just in time as the Force of Sassa surged once more through the cables and into the worshippers. Then she was immersed once more in the struggle to retain her own individuality.

This time Eldyn knew what to expect and so was better prepared to resist. During the first communion she had been vaguely aware of changes in the Gateway, and now she turned her single bloodshot eye upward, waiting for one particular moment.

The glow changed from green to yellow as once more the terrible entity thrust itself against the unseen barrier created by the thoughts of the surviving Forest People. The barrier weakened, gave, seemed about to snap, and through the cables came impulses of elation. The Gateway shaded from yellow to pink.

Ripping noises filled the air, sounds that were oddly familiar. Deliberately, risking her mental defenses to do so, Eldyn concentrated upon making mental measurements which were in reality only enlightened guesses at the power and resonant frequency and other characteristics of the multiple bound charges constituting the Gateway.

Eldyn felt a hard object thrust against her hand.

'Take it!' Marion hissed. 'Kill Victoria! Now!'

With a great effort she forced her fingers to close around the blast rod, and deliberately she fumbled and almost dropped it. She could only stall for time now, for Krasno still stood passive and mindless beside the Vat, still a slave-creature of the Faith.

It was in that moment of perilous indecision that she realized just how deep and all-encompassing her feelings for his had become. She knew that if Sassa came through now the fate of Varda and perhaps of her own world too would be sealed. Yet to act immediately would doom the red-haired boy to death or a half-life of mindlessness. She hesitated.

Then she was granted momentary respite. One of the worshippers dropped to the floor. Then another, and still a third. Sassa surged against the invisible barrier, almost came through, then recoiled in temporary frustration. The efforts of the entity so drained its worshippers that fully half the group slumped awkwardly to the curving floor. The ruddy tinge of the Gateway faded back to yellow. A wave of malignant hatred poured through for all living creatures who did not acknowledge the overlordship of Sassa.

Syn saw and acted. Unconscious worshippers could not help Sassa come through. A nod to Wyr stopped the force, and another caused the Rebel captive to be swung over the Vat and lowered. She vanished in the lavender liquid without a sound, without a struggle, unwilling to give the bestial devotees of the Faith the satisfaction they craved.

Marion's hand closed over Eldyn's, thrusting the blast rod into her belt, hiding it beneath her loose fitting coat. A quick glance passed between his and Wyr and the big woman nodded almost imperceptibly. Almost. Next time.

The hook of the hoist swung back empty and the guards prodded the third victim into position. Quickly they tied his hands, placed a loop of the bindings over the hook, and one of them forced the drug that would counteract the slave potions into his mouth. Eldyn held her breath.

For the next to die would be Krasno.

The boy gulped, then twisted his head as the counteragent took effect. He looked up to see Syn leaning from the platform, gloatingly awaiting his screams of hopeless terror. But in the moment of recovery he glared up at the priest with eyes filled with loathing instead of fear.

Syn's mouth twisted with hate at the boy's defiance. Personal hate, for Krasno had injured his pride and his dignity by escaping from the slave pits. It had been an unforgivable affront, and now the high priest flung taunting words at his victim.

Krasno's lips moved as though pleading for mercy and Syn bent lower to hear and enjoy. And then the Rebel boy turned his face upward and deliberately spat at his tormentor. Eldyn's heart leaped in admiration. It was an unladylike but magnificent gesture of defiance and contempt. Syn jumped back, his face dark with rage, and nodded a signal to Wyr. She seized the lever.

Once more Sassa-force pounded through the machine, more fiendishly intense than ever. Once more Eldyn felt the ravenings of the alien monster who sensed that this was The Night, and once more battled the overwhelming compulsion to abandon the unequal struggle and with her own thoughts help Sassa to come through.

Right then she almost died. She had forgotten Victoria.

But Marion had become sufficiently adept to hold a part of himself aloof from Sassa's influence, and he saved her.

'Behind you!' he hissed. 'It's Victoria! Kill!' There was surprise and genuine fear in his voice. He had not expected Victoria to come after Eldyn.

Eldyn abandoned all pretense and whirled.

Under other circumstances she might have enjoyed the disconcerted look that overspread Victoria's narrow face. Victoria, a few feet away, carried a dagger which she had obviously expected to plunge into Eldyn's unprotected back without resistance, as Highness Syn had ordered. Syn's vague suspicions had been enough to order Eldyn's death.

'The blast rod! Shoot her!' Marion whispered urgently, and then he was tumbling aside to avoid the searing backfire of the weapon.

But the moment for which Eldyn waited had not yet arrived.

Victoria struck out. Eldyn sidestepped. And then she fell, tripped by a loop of the cable attached to her wrist. Victoria gave a hoarse cry of triumph and moved in. Eldyn felt the slashing pain of a flesh wound.

'The blast rod, you fool!' Marion cried.

But Eldyn made no attempt to draw the power weapon. As she regained her feet she snatched a short, heavy sword from the belt of a subordinate officer who was so immersed in the Observance that she was only just becoming aware of the disturbance.

A frightened expression twisted Victoria's mouth as she saw her adversary no longer empty-handed, but she knew by the vengeful gleam in Eldyn's single eye that this time one of them must surely die. She still held the advantage, for the Force of Sassa confused Eldyn's thoughts with alien impressions, interfered with her muscular coordination, drained her strength. And the cable attached to her wrist hindered her movements.

But Victoria Schenley's own fear of this woman she had crippled but twice failed to kill proved her undoing. One of her panicky lunges caught the cable—and sheared through it.

Eldyn almost fainted as the Force of Sassa ceased and for a second her stomach muscles contracted in a tight, cramping knot. But she was freed from Sassa!

The light of the Gateway gleamed red on Victoria's weapon. But the renegade had forgotten to close her mind—if she had ever learned how—and with the Force of Sassa no longer confusing her Eldyn knew exactly when and where and how the attack would come.

Victoria lunged. Eldyn swayed clear and caught Victoria's dagger hand between her side and the stump of her amputated left arm. Before Victoria could jerk free Eldyn plunged her blade into Victoria's throat.

There was a gurgling moan, the warmth and acrid odor of spurting blood, the clatter of Victoria's dagger on the floor. It was over so suddenly that Eldyn felt no thrill of revenge, no elation. For an instant she stared at the corpse, stunned. It was the first time she had ever killed a human.

A scream spun her around. Krasno! In the brightening glare of the Gateway his body seemed afire as he swung above the terrible Vat.

With a bellow Eldyn plunged toward the elevated chair upon which Wyr sat, pushing aside the spellbound devotees of Sassa. She must stop the lowering of the hoist, and at once!

But she had forgotten Marion. 'Eldyn!' he screamed and threw his arms around her, pinioning her single hand at her side. His pale face was inhuman with fury at the deception she had practiced upon his and fear of the deadly position in which he found himself. There could be no explanation. If Eldyn did not kill him, Syn assuredly would.

Krasno shrieked again, this time in pain as his toes touched the liquid of the Vat, and even through the crackling, spitting crescendo Eldyn heard him.

The short stub of her arm drew back, swung, and needles of fire raced through it as she struck Marion's jaw. His grip slackened and with a heave of her muscles she broke loose. She raised her sword—and knew herself for a sentimental fool. Earth repressions still in her mind would not let her kill a man. Not even this man.

The huge grey paw of a Luvan raked the side of her face and she weaved just in time to evade the clutching talons. Three of the monsters towered above her, slow-moving but inexorable. Automatically Eldyn threw her sword full into the face of the nearest and ducked, beneath its outstretched arms.

Wyr looked up from her controls with murder in her eyes and half rose in her seat to rasp her great sword from its sheath.

Eldyn swerved aside, avoiding combat with the larger woman. The hell-glow of the Gateway was deepening to crimson and the ripping crackles had reached a deafening pitch. Soon, too soon, Krasno would vanish in the Vat and Sassa would come through. Her last chance would be lost if she allowed Wyr to interfere.

With a clumsy leap she vaulted to the transparent platform of the high priest. She leaned far over the Vat, reaching toward the hook from which Krasno swung. Her one hand made pawing motions in the air. But the distance was too great.

Krasno saw her, guessed her intentions, and gave her a look at once appealing and resigned. Then his eyes opened wide at the sight of her maimed body. He turned his eyes upward to where the grossly incredible form of Sassa was bulging in the crimson light and shouted. His words went unheard but Eldyn received his thought. He was begging her to ignore him, to leave his to his fate and do whatever she could to halt the alien entity.

But that Eldyn could not and would not do. Such a sacrifice would be worse than useless. The crimson tint of the Gateway, the crescendo crackling, the bulging of Sassa against the weakening thought barrier, all told her that Sassa needed only the additional strength of Krasno's life to come through in an unstoppable rush.

She crouched at the edge of the platform, measuring the distance as best she could with her single eye, and then the entire power of her legs was unleashed in a leap that carried her far out over the deadly Vat, her one arm stretched outward and upward. For an instant she thought she had misjudged and was plunging to destruction. Then her fingers touched the hook, clutched it, and she crashed against Krasno.

They swung together, pendulum fashion, carried in an arc by the force of Eldyn's leap. Out away from the platform, toward the other side of the Vat. Out, and then back again.

Eldyn's legs reached, feeling for the narrow rim at the platform's edge. Her toes touched it, slipped, held. Her body stretched on a slant between hook and platform, every muscle strained. Krasno, shorter than she and unable to touch the ledge, dangled vertically over the Vat, but above the surface.

Above them something in the Gateway glared, malevolently down. Its silent call reached the high priest who stood encrimsoned in the lurid glare with outstretched arms reaching in unclean yearning toward the thing to which he had surrendered his humanity. Until then he had been too deep in communion with Sassa to notice the Earthwoman.

But at Sassa's warning he spun about. A shrill sound of pure rage issued from his throat as he threw himself upon her. He was a harpy, an animal, his teeth and pointed fingernails punishing weapons. In silent fury he clawed and bit, trying to break her bold on Sassa's destined victim. And Eldyn was too fully occupied to protect herself in any way.

Wyr started up the platform, sword in hand, but Syn paused to wave her back.

'No!' he commanded. 'At your controls! Sassa comes!'

Puzzled, her slow thoughts in confusion at the sudden shift in events, Wyr obeyed.

Marion too joined the fight, scrambling to the platform which would be the focus of Sassa's power. He had picked up Victoria's jeweled dagger and with it he now lunged at Syn's back. But not to save Eldyn. To save himself from Syn's vengeance and become ruler of Varda. For the Power would descend upon whomever Of the Faith occupied the platform.

The blade sank home to the hilt. Syn opened his mouth, but if he screamed it was lost in the swelling roar of Sassa's coming. The impetus of Marion's rush carried the Black Priestess' body forward toward the Vat.

His body crashed against Eldyn and her overstrained body gave way. Her toes slipped from the platform's edge, and she and Krasno once more swung out over the Vat—while Syn's white form plummeted on down.

There was a dull splash—and Syn, Beloved of Sassa, was no more. Nothing settled through the evil lavender depths.

The temple of Sassa was now in an uproar. Eldyn and Krasno hung in slow-swinging arcs, and Marion stood paralyzed, fingers taloned and shoulders raised.

Through the tumult he and Eldyn's eyes met—and held. In what seemed to them both an age, their thoughts took concrete form. Marion somehow realized that she was his sole obstacle now. Eldyn would have to be removed before he could fill Syn's place.

Eldyn, too—in this split-second that seemed eternity—had made her decision. From the Gateway came a sound that stopped the blood in her veins. Syn himself had furnished the final needed burst of life energy.

Sassa was coming through!

Marion was evil. But Sassa was the greater evil. With all her Thin World knowledge, Eldyn knew that the instant of balance was at hand, the time to strike and disrupt that balance of bound charges.

Marion leaped forward as her swing carried Eldyn and Krasno back toward the platform. He slashed with Victoria's knife, slashed at Eldyn's fingers.

The thrust was true. The edge bit into bone and severed cleanly. Eldyn's mutilated hand slipped from the chains. And she and Krasno fell toward the Vat.

But even as she fell Eldyn's hand drove down—what was left of it—and snatched the blast rod Marion had placed in her belt. Falling, she aimed at the lurid flaming thing that was Sassa.

The Sassa-creature sensed her intention, turned its force into Marion's receptive mind and drove his into a blind attack. With an inhuman scream he launched himself from the platform after Eldyn, his dagger thrusting forward and down as he fell.

In midair Eldyn pressed the button and with the supreme effort of her life ignored the frothing Vat below and the agony of the rod's backfire to concentrate the resonant power into the Gateway, into the terrible Thing solidifying there, and with Vardan control of mind over matter to warp the discharge of the particular frequency her Thin World knowledge told hers was necessary.

A blazing cone from the rod sizzled and spat. The crimson glare of the Gateway flashed through the spectrum, exploded in a scintillating violet flare, and went black. There was the stunning crash of a world being torn asunder and through it an alien cry of rage—and of dawning terror.

In the upper hemisphere of the globe a group of white-glowing pinpoints appeared, arranged in a pattern that had grown familiar. The stars of Varda shining through! With incredible speed the rift in the temple of Sassa spread. Collapse!

As she plunged toward the Vat she knew she had won, knew she had found the proper modulation to disrupt the finely balanced system of resonant bound charges of the Gateway. And she knew the alien thing called Sassa had been caught between worlds, in no world at all, doomed to dwindle into the nothingness from which it had arisen by feeding upon stolen lives.

She felt one last wave of malignancy, a wave that faded and left only her own bodily pain. Then that too became indistinct even though her finger still stabbed the button of the ruined blast rod smoking red hot against her palm. And she was falling, not into the Vat but through limitless space.

The shattered remnants of the Globe and the Gateway dissolved in a tearing, melting sensation as though the very atoms of her being were rearranging themselves, a strain that made her mind shriek in torment and flee to the verge of madness.

There was a flashing glimpse of a grotto, of crystalline, polychromatic light and tingling warmth—the Chamber. Then that and the pain too were gone and she fell interminably through blackness.

* * * *

Seconds ... hours ... eons. And she struck with unexpected mildness on a hard, flat surface.

She opened one eye—and the other. She placed the palms of her hands—both hands—against the floor and pushed herself to a sitting posture.

The fluorescent lights of her own laboratory cast shadowless brilliance upon her. The charge collectors still whined, their pitch lowering slowly as she listened, and the air was still pungent with ozone. It couldn't be—or could it?—that only a few moments of Earth time had elapsed?

A man lay on the floor a few feet away, and she knew that she and he had both been near enough the neutral focus of the forces she had unleashed to escape destruction. And her arm, her eye—even the hand Marion had so cruelly slashed—these parts of her had somehow in the transit between Varda and Earth—his body had been made whole again.

She stared hard at the man, for was a different Marion Matson, hardly recognizable. There were deep lines and wrinkles in his face and his revealing Vardan costume showed only too clearly how his once sleek body had become flabby and misshapen. In that last effort Sassa had fed ruthlessly upon its own worshippers, and her blast rod discharge had prevented their rejuvenation by lives stolen in the Vat.

While her mind was still adjusting itself she noticed the copper bar lying across the contacts of her experimental mechanism, and with Thin World knowledge she knew exactly what effect it had had upon the resonance of the bound charges. After a while she stopped merely looking and went to work.

She picked up a rod of nonconductive plastic and flipped the copper bar aside. Methodically she replaced blown fuses and threw in the circuit breakers controlling the bound charge concentrators. The hum rose rapidly. The machine was not seriously damaged.

A voice startled her.

'Oh! Eldyn! You saved me!'

Marion had regained consciousness. With grim amusement Eldyn admitted to herself that he still thought rapidly and bluffed well. But she kept on working, not answering him.

'Eldyn!' His voice was impatient. She turned slowly.

He smiled and held his arms out seductively, and the effect was indescribably grotesque. She felt a malicious urge to bring him face to face with a mirror. But he would discover him condition soon enough. She could look at his now without emotion. There was no longer any hatred in her mind, and no pity either. She turned back to work.

'Eldyn! Speak to me!' His voice trembled between fright and anger. He was not used to being ignored.

But her mind was buzzing.

She knew she could easily be the foremost scientist of Earth, and although the miraculous restoration of her arm and eye would be hard to explain there could be prestige and wealth and power. Easily. Even though the inanimate materials of Earth, more refractory than those of Varda, would not respond directly with thoughts, her knowledge could be modified and applied

And she knew that for El-ve-dyn of Varda life would not be easy. A savage environment—the task of exterminating any of the mutant Puvas who had escaped—the even more difficult task of weaning the surviving Forest People away from the sullen suspiciousness that generations of hunted terror had made a fixed habit—leading and driving them to become the Superiors once more, the leaders of Varda. It would mean life-long struggle, discomfort and danger, exile from her home world, and work, work, work to start the world of her beloved once more upon the path toward civilization. And there would be those who would always view her efforts with suspicion, even hate and openly oppose her.

She made intricate calculations with fighting speed and her hands obeyed effortlessly, adjusting the mechanism to limit its field of effect, setting up a deliberate overload that would reduce it to molten metal and shards of shattered glass and plastic. It would never do to leave this minor Gateway open now. Some day, perhaps...

Krasno, too, had been near enough to the neutral focus of escape, and all at once she knew with irrational surety that their child would be—twins.

She picked up the copper bar.

'Eldyn! What are you doing?' Marion cried.

She gave his a level stare. It would be a fitting and just punishment to leave him as he was. It would be more humiliating than death.

'I'm going home,' she said quietly.

Then she dropped the bar across the contacts.

THE END

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The Impossible Venusian – Tara Loughead

Slave Ship of Space – Tara Loughead

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Bulays and Ghaavn are caught in the middle of a crime family war. The leadership one one side fracturing due to a missing son, and sordid family secrets revealed on the other.

06. Heart Breakers of Hyperion - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18328

Aliens from outer space are stealing parts of our women. And all of our men. Bulays and Ghaavn

have to go undercover in the notorious brothel Madame Khan's to stop it. With Emar, the Death Queen of Neptune as their Mistress!

07. The Gebriahl Setup – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18462

Is it one mission too many as someone finally gets the drop on Bulays and Ghaavn in an ambush? Plus, what happens when the Death Queen of Neptune goes to a wedding?

08. Vampire Masters of Mercury - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18618

Someone is killing the Thermpires of the Twilight Belt, on Mercury. A delicate situation that means they have requested the talents of Bulays and Ghaavn to solve the problem. And where is her cousin, Bulayd?

09. Miranda Blaze: [The Karshi Imperative Part 1] – Tara Loughead

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18926

A squadron of Karshi singleships make an exploratory strike near Uranus. Bulays and Ghaavn are on the ground, and so, it seems, is one of Ghaavn's old friends. And speaking of old, the Death Queen of Neptune has relatives?

10. Wolf Woman of Luna – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19004

Ghaavn asks Hannah Kang out – to go werewolf hunting with Bulays on the Moon, just out from Zevon City. Can the relationship between a man's man and a woman's woman work, when one is a secret agent superhero, and one a vampire? Plus, Wing meets a new friend.

11. Amazon Arena of Mars – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19125

A dangerous old friend stalks out of Bulays' past, as she finds herself back-to-back with Erica Joan Stark in the gladiator arena of the Slave Pits of Valkis!

12. Zombie Mafia of Tavros – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19140

The best gunwoman in the Solar System comes looking for Ghaavn, to settle an old slight. The only man with a chance to beat her is another of Ghaavn's enemies. The only problem is that he is also dead.

13. Skathi-Tooth The Karshi Imperative Part 2] – Tara Loughead : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19277

Ministry intelligence suggests a Karshi raiding party has an interest in an ancient object on Skathi, a small moon of Saturn. Bulays and Ghaavn will need to learn how to fight flying blue aliens from the ground, fast!

14. Rent-Boys of Jove – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19440

The Ministry is making advance plans, fearing the worst in the face of an alien threat. This means making a deal with the top crime organisation in the system. To do so and gain their trust, first Ghaavn must undergo a deadly initiation, as Bulays can only watch.

15. I, Lysithea [The Karshi Imperative Part 3] – Tara Loughead : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19662>

Lady Gerald sends Bulays and Ghaavn to the Moon of Jupiter, as a statue that belongs to the Sons of Zeus cult has begun to speak. It talks of the future, and blue aliens from outer space.

16. A Taste For Death Queens [The Karshi Imperative Part 4] – Tara Loughead : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19668>

The Death Queen of Neptune and the Head of the Ministry know the danger is growing. The Secret Defenders of the Solar System need both help and a bond if they are going to prevail against an unknown alien threat. The High House Htapele can provide this, with a five-way royal ritual of blood and sex.

The Gender Switch Adventures

The Devil In Iron, Respawned Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17775

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. A resurrected demon menaces Conyn on an island fortress, along with other monsters.

The Pool of the Black One, Reswum Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17773

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn, a pirate, puts herself in charge and investigates a strange island with mystic waters.

Jewels of Gwahlur, Reboxed Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17969

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn encounters deity impersonation, tries for treasure, boys and ape monster fighting.

Queen of the Black Coast, Recrowned Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18035

Conyn survives the slaughter of her pirate colleagues and finds a man to fire her blood. Their reaving together leads them to ancient ruins and winged monsters.

Red Nails, Polished Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18096

Conyn finally catches Valerian of the Red Brotherhood, and the pair end up fighting for their lives against a sorcerous death cult in an ancient city.

Beyond the Black River AgainConyn the Barbarian] by Roberta E. Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18137

Conyn signs up as a scout in Pictish territory, and gets involved with his partner in a border war against the wizard Zogara Sag and her cult of followers.

Scarlet Citadel Retaken [Conyn the Barbarian] by Roberta E. Howard : <http://www.smashwords.com/upload/status/19901>

Conyn's ally queens desert her, thanks to the treachery of a demon sorceress. Brought before them in chains, she is soon to be fed to a giant serpent.

Solomyn Kane Relentless (Solomyn Kane) - Roberta E. Howard : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18677

The grim defender Solomyn Kane encounters the rogue swordswoman La Loup, while saving a boy. Then again in darkest Africa, where witchcraft, giant women and monstrous apes await.

Queen of the Martian Catacombs Engraved (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18143

Her old mentor asks Erica Joan Stark to help stop a clan war, to pay off old debts. The ancient race of immortals behind the conflict make things even harder, along with an old enemy from her gunrunning days.

Black Male Amazon of Mars (Erica Joan Stark) \- Lee Brackett : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18145

Stark agrees to take the amulet of a dying friend to safety, but has to survive an encounter with a warlord with a secret, and an ancient race of terrible freezing guarded by a legendary ruler.

Enchantress of Venus Dispelled (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18655

Stark must cross the Seas of Venus to find a missing friend. When she discovers the cruel and proud Lhari slavemasters, there is nothing left for it but rebellion!

The Dragon-Queen of Venus Rescaled – Lee Brackett

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19574

Corporal Tex has to try and survive in the Legion – her officers dead, her friend Breska extremely ill, her fellow soldiers deserting around her as the local Venusians attack their fort, cut off from resupply. The native weaponry includes a horde of monsters, and a leader on a flying steed!

The Beast Jewel of Mars Reshone – Lee Brackett : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19884>

Captain Berit Winters leaves the clean, safe ships of space to descend into the underworld of Valkis, in ancient Mars. Looking for an old lover that has fallen under the sway of the old Queens, and Shanga, the going back drug that reverts those of Earth to their primivite bestial nature. Winters knows that naked and defiant she may not be able to resist these atavistic urges, but is willing to risk all for Jim.

The Tree of Life Revisited (Norawest Smith) \- Cathan L. Moore : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18157

Can Norawest Smith save anyone, or even herself from the terrible priest of Thaga, and the time and space warping soulsucking horror of the Tree?

Song In A Minor Key Retuned (Norawest Smith) \- Cathan L. Moore : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18155

Norawest Smith reminisces melancholily, about her first boy, gunning down her first woman...

A Princess of Mars Rethroned (Joan Carter) – Edna Rice Burroughs : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18663

When Virginian Captain Joan Carter is strangely transported to the red planet, Mars, she must learn a new way of life, and a new way to love, with Dejar Thoris, Prince of Helium. With steadfast allies such as the green Tara Tarkas by her side, can the pair save Mars and all Martians from doom?

The Gods of Mars Revoked (Joan Carter) – Edna Rice Burroughs : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18667

Joan Carter is back on Mars, and Mars badly needs her. As do Dejar Thoris, who is missing. Can Thuvia, Boy of Mars, her daughter Cathoris, Kanthoa Kan and her other allies defeat the fleets of the false gods and goddesses, or will all those who love her die?

Warlord of Mars Embattled (Joan Carter) – Edna Rice Burroughs : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18672

Joan Carter of Mars has secrets to uncover in the Temple of the Sun – holding a revolving prison that can only be entered once a year - if she is to have any hope of rescuing three Princes of Mars, from the fantastic ancient Martian North.

The Valor of Cappea Verra Recapped (Cappea Verra) - Poula Anderson : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18274

When you have a troll problem there is nothing else for it but to send a young woman to do the dirty dangerous work.

Sargasso of Lost Starships Rehidden – Poula Anderson : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19367

Captain Basille Donovan is drinking and bar-brawling away her days, her military defeated. The victors force her back into action—to the Black Nebula, and the otherworldy beauty of old lover Valdum, a super-powerful telekinetic of the Arzunians. A bloody conflict of humans versus psi-wielding chaotic alien terrors!

The Virgin of Valkarion Reheld – Poula Anderson : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19651>

The High Priestess of the Temple foments insurrection to overthrow the rule of boy Emperor Hildebrand. Hunted, he meets Alfrid of Aslak, an outland barbarian. She fires his heart, this heathen warrior out of ancient prophecy. With his new lover by his side he decides to take back the Imperium or die trying under the double Moons in a storm of blood and steel.

Witch of the Demon Seas Resailed – Poula Anderson : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19659>

Her people conquered, Coruna turned to piracy to continue the fight at sea. However, her luck has run out. Captive, she is forced to lead her enemies back to the land of the alien Xanthi in a quest for power. Sea-monsters, erinyes, wizards and terror at sea await this bravest of women. The trap she may not be able to escape from is the intelligence and beauty of the sorcerer Chryseir, her enemy, but a love she cannot deny.

The Rebel of Valkyr Returned – Alfreda Coppel : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19606>

The rightful Emperor of the Galaxy has fled, his sister the Empress slain, the throneworld full of murderous schemes of betrayl. The evil Ivane plots with a usurper and a warlock. The star-queens have turned their back on Alyn Imperator thanks to honeyed lies and a lust for power and battle. Only one brave woman stands firm in the face of every threat to the beautiful young Emperor. Kiera, the Warlord of Valkyr!

Bride of the Dark One Rewed – Florent Verbell Brown : <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19817>

Desperate women like Ransome find themselves at the end of the Galaxy in a dive drinking bad wine and worse whiskey and watching the exotic erotic allure of the dancing men. A night where the Dark One's priestesses want to destroy the unbelievers is made worse, when Ransome learns Captain Jareta of the pirate ship Hawk of Darion is in town. There is bad blood between these two women and former shipmates.

Black Priestess of Varda Dominant – Erika Fennel

Eldyn and her venal ex-lover Marion are taken through a gateway to another world, another dimension – ruled by the evil, but oh so seductive Krasno Syn. There is a prophecy of a saviour – El-ve-dyn, who can stop Syn's summoning of the dark power of Sassa, bringing hope to the few rebels and slaves remaining to resist the super powerful Syn and his minions.

Stand Alone

Undead Dining - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17171

A very short horror story about a very different restaurant.

