

Enchantress of Venus Dispelled

by Lee Brackett

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Lee Brackett

An Erica Joan Stark Story

A Gender Switch Adventure

I

The ship moved slowly across the Red Sea, through the shrouding veils of mist, his sail barely filled by the languid thrust of the wind. His hull, of a thin light metal, floated without sound, the surface of the strange ocean parting before his prow in silent rippling streamers of flame.

Night deepened toward the ship, a river of indigo flowing out of the west. The woman known as Stark stood alone by the after rail and watched its coming. She was full of impatience and a gathering sense of danger, so that it seemed to her that even the hot wind smelled of it.

The steerswoman lay drowsily over her sweep. She was a big woman, with skin and hair the color of milk. She did not speak, but Stark felt that now and again the woman's eyes turned toward her, pale and calculating under half-closed lids, with a secret avarice.

The captain and the two other members of the little coasting vessel's crew were forward, at their evening meal. Once or twice Stark heard a burst of laughter, half-whispered and furtive. It was as though all four shared in some private joke, from which she was rigidly excluded.

The heat was oppressive. Sweat gathered on Stark's dark face. Her shirt stuck to her back. The air was heavy with moisture, tainted with the muddy fecundity of the land that brooded westward behind the eternal fog.

There was something ominous about the sea itself. Even on its own world, the Red Sea is hardly more than legend. It lies behind the Mountains of White Cloud, the great barrier wall that hides away half a planet. Few women have gone beyond that barrier, into the vast mystery of Inner Venus. Fewer still have come back.

Stark was one of that handful. Three times before she had crossed the mountains, and once she had stayed for nearly a year. But she had never quite grown used to the Red Sea.

It was not water. It was gaseous, dense enough to float the buoyant hulls of the metal ships, and it burned perpetually with its deep inner fires. The mists that clouded it were stained with the bloody glow. Beneath the surface Stark could see the drifts of flame where the lazy currents ran, and the little coiling bursts of sparks that came upward and spread and melted into other bursts, so that the face of the sea was like a cosmos of crimson stars.

It was very beautiful, glowing against the blue, luminous darkness of the night. Beautiful, and strange.

There was a padding of bare feet, and the captain, Malthora, came up to Stark, her outlines dim and ghostly in the gloom.

'We will reach Shuruun,' she said, 'before the second glass is run.'

Stark nodded. 'Good.'

The voyage had seemed endless, and the close confinement of the narrow deck had got badly on her nerves.

'You will like Shuruun,' said the captain jovially. 'Our wine, our food, our women—all superb. We don't have many visitors. We keep to ourselves, as you will see. But those who do come...'

She laughed, and clapped Stark on the shoulder. 'Ah, yes. You will be happy in Shuruun!'

It seemed to Stark that she caught an echo of laughter from the unseen crew, as though they listened and found a hidden jest in Malthora's words.

Stark said, 'That's fine.'

'Perhaps,' said Malthora, 'you would like to lodge with me. I could make you a good price.'

She had made a good price for Stark's passage from up the coast. An exorbitantly good one.

Stark said, 'No.'

'You don't have to be afraid,' said the Venusian, in a confidential tone. 'The strangers who come to Shuruun all have the same reason. It's a good place to hide. We're out of everybody's reach.'

She paused, but Stark did not rise to her bait. Presently she chuckled and went on, 'In fact, it's such a safe place that most of the strangers decide to stay on. Now, at my house, I could give you...'

Stark said again, flatly, 'No.'

The captain shrugged. 'Very well. Think it over, anyway.' She peered ahead into the red, coiling mists. 'Ah! See there?' She pointed, and Stark made out the shadowy loom of cliffs. 'We are coming into the strait now.'

Malthora turned and took the steering sweep herself, the helmsman going forward to join the others. The ship began to pick up speed. Stark saw that he had come into the grip of a current that swept toward the cliffs, a river of fire racing ever more swiftly in the depths of the sea.

The dark wall seemed to plunge toward them. At first Stark could see no passage. Then, suddenly, a narrow crimson streak appeared, widened, and became a gut of boiling flame, rushing silently around broken rocks. Red fog rose like smoke. The ship quivered, sprang ahead, and tore like a mad thing into the heart of the inferno.

In spite of herself, Stark's hands tightened on the rail. Tattered veils of mist swirled past them. The sea, the air, the ship itself, seemed drenched in blood. There was no sound, in all that wild sweep of current through the strait Only the sullen fires burst and flowed.

The reflected glare showed Stark that the Straits of Shuruun were defended. Squat fortresses brooded on the cliffs. There were ballistas, and great windlasses for the drawing of nets across the narrow throat. The women of Shuruun could enforce their law that barred all foreign shipping from their gulf.

They had reason for such a law, and such a defense. The legitimate trade of Shuruun, such as it was, was in wine and the delicate laces woven from spider-silk. Actually, however, the city lived and throve on piracy, the arts of wrecking, and a contraband trade in the distilled juice of the vela poppy.

Looking at the rocks and the fortresses, Stark could understand how it was that Shuruun had been able for more centuries than anyone could tell to victimize the shipping of the Red Sea, and offer a refuge to the outlaw, the wolf's-head, the breaker of taboo.

With startling abruptness, they were through the gut and drifting on the still surface of this all but landlocked arm of the Red Sea.

Because of the shrouding fog, Stark could see nothing of the land. But the smell of it was stronger, warm damp soil and the heavy, faintly rotten perfume of vegetation half jungle, half swamp. Once, through a rift in the wreathing vapor, she thought she glimpsed the shadowy bulk of an island, but it was gone at once.

After the terrifying rush of the strait, it seemed to Stark that the ship barely moved. Her impatience and the subtle sense of danger deepened. She began to pace the deck, with the nervous, velvet motion of a prowling cat. The moist, steamy air seemed all but unbreathable after the clean dryness of Mars, from whence she had come so recently. It was oppressively still.

Suddenly she stopped, her head thrown back, listening.

The sound was borne faintly on the slow wind. It came from everywhere and nowhere, a vague dim thing without source or direction. It almost seemed that the night itself had spoken—the hot blue night of Venus, crying out of the mists with a tongue of infinite woe.

It faded and died away, only half heard, leaving behind it a sense of aching sadness, as though all the misery and longing of a world had found voice in that desolate wail.

Stark shivered. For a time there was silence, and then she heard the sound again, now on a deeper note. Still faint and far away, it was sustained longer by the vagaries of the heavy air, and it became a chant, rising and falling. There were no words. It was not the sort of thing that would have need of words. Then it was gone again.

Stark turned to Malthora. 'What was that?'

The woman looked at her curiously. She seemed not to have heard.

'That wailing sound,' said Stark impatiently.

'Oh, that.' The Venusian shrugged. 'A trick of the wind. It sighs in the hollow rocks around the strait.'

She yawned, giving place again to the steerswoman, and came to stand beside Stark. The Earthwoman ignored her. For some reason, that sound half heard through the mists had brought her uneasiness to a sharp pitch.

Civilization had brushed over Stark with a light hand. Raised from infancy by half-human aboriginals, her perceptions were still those of a savage. Her ear was good.

Malthora lied. That cry of pain was not made by any wind.

'I have known several Earthwomen,' said Malthora, changing the subject, but not too swiftly. 'None of them were like you.'

Intuition warned Stark to play along. 'I don't come from Earth,' she said. 'I come from Mercury.'

Malthora puzzled over that. Venus is a cloudy world, where no woman has ever seen the Sun, let alone a star. The captain had heard vaguely of these things. Earth and Mars she knew of. But Mercury was an unknown word.

Stark explained. 'The planet nearest the Sun. It's very hot there. The Sun blazes like a huge fire, and there are no clouds to shield it.'

'Ah. That is why your skin is so dark.' She held her own pale forearm close to Stark's and shook her head. 'I have never seen such skin,' she said admiringly. 'Nor such great muscles.'

Looking up, she went on in a tone of complete friendliness, 'I wish you would stay with me. You'll find no better lodgings in Shuruun. And I warn you, there are people in the town who will take advantage of strangers—rob them, even slay them. Now, I am known by all as a woman of honor. You could sleep soundly under my roof.'

She paused, then added with a smile, 'Also, I have a daughter. An excellent cook—and very beautiful.'

The woeful chanting came again, dim and distant on the wind, an echo of warning against some unimagined fate.

Stark said for the third time, 'No.'

She needed no intuition to tell her to walk wide of the captain. The woman was a rogue, and not a very subtle one.

A flint-hard, angry look came briefly into Malthora's eyes. 'You're a stubborn woman. You'll find that Shuruun is no place for stubbornness.'

She turned and went away. Stark remained where she was. The ship drifted on through a slow eternity of time. And all down that long still gulf of the Red Sea, through the heat and the wreathing fog, the ghostly chanting haunted her, like the keening of lost souls in some forgotten hell.

Presently the course of the ship was altered. Malthora came again to the afterdeck, giving a few quiet commands. Stark saw land ahead, a darker blur on the night, and then the shrouded outlines of a city.

Torches blazed on the quays and in the streets, and the low buildings caught a ruddy glow from the burning sea itself. A squat and ugly town, Shuruun, crouching witch-like on the rocky shore, his ragged skirts dipped in blood.

The ship drifted in toward the quays.

Stark heard a whisper of movement behind her, the hushed and purposeful padding of naked feet. She turned, with the astonishing swiftness of an animal that feels itself threatened, her hand dropping to her gun.

A belaying pin, thrown by the steerswoman, struck the side of her head with stunning force. Reeling, half blinded, she saw the distorted shapes of women closing in upon her. Malthora's voice sounded, low and hard. A second belaying pin whizzed through the air and cracked against Stark's shoulder.

Hands were laid upon her. Bodies, heavy and strong, bore her down. Malthora laughed.

Stark's teeth glinted bare and white. Someone's cheek brushed past, and she sank them into the flesh. She began to growl, a sound that should never have come from a human throat. It seemed to the startled Venusians that the woman they had attacked had by some wizardry become a beast, at the first touch of violence.

The woman with the torn cheek screamed. There was a voiceless scuffling on the deck, a terrible intensity of motion, and then the great dark body rose and shook itself free of the tangle, and was gone, over the rail, leaving Malthora with nothing but the silken rags of a shirt in her hands.

The surface of the Red Sea closed without a ripple over Stark. There was a burst of crimson sparks, a momentary trail of flame going down like a drowned comet, and then—nothing.

II

Stark dropped slowly downward through a strange world. There was no difficulty about breathing, as in a sea of water. The gases of the Red Sea support life quite well, and the creatures that dwell in it have almost normal lungs.

Stark did not pay much attention at first, except to keep her balance automatically. She was still dazed from the blow, and she was raging with anger and pain.

The primitive in her, whose name was not Stark but N'Chaka, and who had fought and starved and hunted in the blazing valleys of Mercury's Twilight Belt, learning lessons she never forgot, wished to return and slay Malthora and her women. She regretted that she had not torn out their throats, for now her trail would never be safe from them.

But the woman Stark, who had learned some more bitter lessons in the name of civilization, knew the unwisdom of that. She snarled over her aching head, and cursed the Venusians in the harsh, crude dialect that was her father tongue, but she did not turn back. There would be time enough for Malthora.

It struck her that the gulf was very deep.

Fighting down her rage, she began to swim in the direction of the shore. There was no sign of pursuit, and she judged that Malthora had decided to let her go. She puzzled over the reason for the attack. It could hardly be robbery, since she carried nothing but the clothes she stood in, and very little money.

No. There was some deeper reason. A reason connected with Malthora's insistence that she lodge with her. Stark smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. She was thinking of Shuruun, and the things women said about it, around the shores of the Red Sea.

Then her face hardened. The dim coiling fires through which she swam brought her memories of other times she had gone adventuring in the depths of the Red Sea.

She had not been alone then. Helvi had gone with her—the tall son of a barbarian kinglet up-coast by Yarell. They had hunted strange beasts through the crystal forests of the sea-bottom and bathed in the welling flames that pulse from the very heart of Venus to feed the ocean. They had been sisters.

Now Helvi was gone, into Shuruun. She had never returned.

Stark swam on. And presently she saw below her in the red gloom something that made her drop lower, frowning with surprise.

There were trees beneath her. Great forest giants towering up into an eerie sky, their branches swaying gently to the slow wash of the currents.

Stark was puzzled. The forests where she and Helvi had hunted were truly crystalline, without even the memory of life. The 'trees' were no more trees in actuality than the branching corals of Terra's southern oceans.

But these were real, or had been. She thought at first that they still lived, for their leaves were green, and here and there creepers had starred them with great nodding blossoms of gold and purple and waxy white. But when she floated down close enough to touch them, she realized that they were dead—trees, creepers, blossoms, all.

They had not mummified, nor turned to stone. They were pliable, and their colors were very bright. Simply, they had ceased to live, and the gases of the sea had preserved them by some chemical magic, so perfectly that barely a leaf had fallen.

Stark did not venture into the shadowy denseness below the topmost branches. A strange fear came over her, at the sight of that vast forest dreaming in the depths of the gulf, drowned and forgotten, as though wondering why the birds had gone, taking with them the warm rains and the light of day.

She thrust her way upward, herself like a huge dark bird above the branches. An overwhelming impulse to get away from that unearthly place drove her on, her half-wild sense shuddering with an impression of evil so great that it took all her acquired common-sense to assure her that she was not pursued by demons.

She broke the surface at last, to find that she had lost her direction in the red deep and made a long circle around, so that she was far below Shuruun. She made her way back, not hurrying now, and presently clambered out over the black rocks.

She stood at the end of a muddy lane that wandered in toward the town. She followed it, moving neither fast nor slow, but with a wary alertness.

Huts of wattle-and-daub took shape out of the fog, increased in numbers, became a street of dwellings. Here and there rush-lights glimmered through the slitted windows. A woman and a man clung together in a low doorway. They saw her and sprang apart, and the man gave a little cry. Stark went on. She did not look back, but she knew that they were following her quietly, at a little distance.

The lane twisted snakelike upon itself, crawling now through a crowded jumble of houses. There were more lights, and more people, tall white-skinned folk of the swamp-edges, with pale eyes and long hair the color of new flax, and the faces of wolves.

Stark passed among them, alien and strange with her black hair and sun-darkened skin. They did not speak, nor try to stop her. Only they looked at her out of the red fog, with a curious blend of amusement and fear, and some of them followed her, keeping well behind. A gang of small naked children came from somewhere among the houses and ran shouting beside her, out of reach, until one girl threw a stone and screamed something unintelligible except for one word—Lhari. Then they all stopped, horrified, and fled.

Stark went on, through the quarter of the lacemakers, heading by instinct toward the wharves. The glow of the Red Sea pervaded all the air, so that it seemed as though the mist was full of tiny drops of blood. There was a smell about the place she did not like, a damp miasma of mud and crowding bodies and wine, and the breath of the vela poppy. Shuruun was an unclean town, and it stank of evil.

There was something else about it, a subtle thing that touched Stark's nerves with a chill finger. Fear. She could see the shadow of it in the eyes of the people, hear its undertone in their voices. The wolves of Shuruun did not feel safe in their own kennel. Unconsciously, as this feeling grew upon her, Stark's step grew more and more wary, her eyes more cold and hard.

She came out into a broad square by the harbor front. She could see the ghostly ships moored along the quays, the piled casks of wine, the tangle of masts and cordage dim against the background of the burning gulf. There were many torches here. Large low buildings stood around the square. There was laughter and the sound of voices from the dark verandas, and somewhere a man sang to the melancholy lilting of a reed pipe.

A suffused glow of light in the distance ahead caught Stark's eye. That way the streets sloped to a higher ground, and straining her vision against the fog, she made out very dimly the tall bulk of a castle crouched on the low cliffs, looking with bright eyes upon the night, and the streets of Shuruun.

Stark hesitated briefly. Then she started across the square toward the largest of the taverns.

There were a number of people in the open space, mostly sailors and their men. They were loose and foolish with wine, but even so they stopped where they were and stared at the dark stranger, and then drew back from her, still staring.

Those who had followed Stark came into the square after her and then paused, spreading out in an aimless sort of way to join with other groups, whispering among themselves.

The man stopped singing in the middle of a phrase.

A curious silence fell on the square. A nervous sibilance ran round and round under the silence, and women came slowly out from the verandas and the doors of the wine shops. Suddenly a man with disheveled hair pointed his arm at Stark and laughed, the shrieking laugh of a harpy.

Stark found her way barred by three tall young women with hard mouths and crafty eyes, who smiled at her as hounds smile before the kill.

'Stranger,' they said. 'Earthwoman.'

'Outlaw,' answered Stark, and it was only half a lie.

One of the young women took a step forward. 'Did you fly like a dragon over the Mountains of White Cloud? Did you drop from the sky?'

'I came on Malthora's ship.'

A kind of sigh went round the square, and with it the name of Malthora. The eager faces of the young women grew heavy with disappointment. But the leader said sharply, 'I was on the quay when Malthora docked. You were not on board.'

It was Stark's turn to smile. In the light of the torches, her eyes blazed cold and bright as ice against the sun.

'Ask Malthora the reason for that,' she said. 'Ask the woman with the torn cheek. Or perhaps,' she added softly, 'you would like to learn for yourselves.'

The young women looked at her, scowling, in an odd mood of indecision. Stark settled herself, every muscle loose and ready. And the man who had laughed crept closer and peered at Stark through his tangled hair, breathing heavily of the poppy wine.

All at once he said loudly, 'She came out of the sea. That's where she came from. He's...'

One of the young women struck his across the mouth and he fell down in the mud. A burly seawoman ran out and caught his by the hair, dragging his to his feet again. Her face was frightened and very angry. She hauled the man away, cursing his for a fool and beating his as she went. He spat out blood, and said no more.

'Well,' said Stark to the young women. 'Have you made up your minds?'

'Minds!' said a voice behind them—a harsh-timbered, rasping voice that handled the liquid vocables of the Venusian speech very clumsily indeed. 'They have no minds, these whelps! If they had, they'd be off about their business, instead of standing here badgering a stranger.'

The young women turned, and now between them Stark could see the woman who had spoken. She stood on the steps of the tavern. She was an Earthwoman, and at first Stark thought she was old, because her hair was white and her face deeply lined. Her body was wasted with fever, the muscles all gone to knotty strings twisted over bone. She leaned heavily on a stick, and one leg was crooked and terribly scarred.

She grinned at Stark and said, in colloquial English, 'Watch me get rid of 'em!'

She began to tongue-lash the young women, telling them that they were idiots, the misbegotten offspring of swamp-toads, utterly without manners, and that if they did not believe the stranger's story they should go and ask Malthora, as she suggested. Finally she shook her stick at them, fairly screeching.

'Go on, now. Go away! Leave us alone—my sister of Earth and I!'

The young women gave one hesitant glance at Stark's feral eyes. Then they looked at each other and shrugged, and went away across the square half sheepishly, like great loutish boys caught in some misdemeanor.

The white-haired Earthwoman beckoned to Stark. And, as Stark came up to her on the steps she said under her breath, almost angrily, 'You're in a trap.'

Stark glanced back over her shoulder. At the edge of the square the three young women had met a fourth, who had her face bound up in a rag. They vanished almost at once into a side street, but not before Stark had recognized the fourth woman as Malthora.

It was the captain she had branded.

With loud cheerfulness, the lame woman said in Venusian, 'Come in and drink with me, sister, and we will talk of Earth.'

III

The tavern was of the standard low-class Venusian pattern—a single huge room under bare thatch, the wall half open with the reed shutters rolled up, the floor of split logs propped up on piling out of the mud. A long low bar, little tables, mangy skins and heaps of dubious cushions on the floor around them, and at one end the entertainers—two old women with a drum and a reed pipe, and a couple of sulky, tired-looking girls.

The lame woman led Stark to a table in the corner and sank down, calling for wine. Her eyes, which were dark and haunted by long pain, burned with excitement. Her hands shook. Before Stark had sat down she had begun to talk, her words stumbling over themselves as though she could not get them out fast enough.

'How is it there now? Has it changed any? Tell me how it is—the cities, the lights, the paved streets, the men, the Sun. Oh Lady, what I wouldn't give to see the Sun again, and men with dark hair and their clothes on!' She leaned forward, staring hungrily into Stark's face, as though she could see those things mirrored there. 'For God's sake, talk to me—talk to me in English, and tell me about Earth!'

'How long have you been here?' asked Stark.

'I don't know. How do you reckon time on a world without a Sun, without one damned little star to look at? Ten years, a hundred years, how should I know? Forever. Tell me about Earth.'

Stark smiled wryly. 'I haven't been there for a long time. The police were too ready with a welcoming committee. But the last time I saw it, it was just the same.'

The lame woman shivered. She was not looking at Stark now, but at some place far beyond her.

'Autumn woods,' she said. 'Red and gold on the brown hills. Snow. I can remember how it felt to be cold. The air bit you when you breathed it. And the men wore high-heeled slippers. No big bare feet tromping in the mud, but little sharp heels tapping on clean pavement.'

Suddenly she glared at Stark, her eyes furious and bright with tears.

'Why the hell did you have to come here and start me remembering? I'm Larrabee. I live in Shuruun. I've been here forever, and I'll be here till I die. There isn't any Earth. It's gone. Just look up into the sky, and you'll know it's gone. There's nothing anywhere but clouds, and Venus, and mud.'

She sat still, shaking, turning her head from side to side. A woman came with wine, put it down, and went away again. The tavern was very quiet. There was a wide space empty around the two Earthwomen. Beyond that people lay on the cushions, sipping the poppy wine and watching with a sort of furtive expectancy.

Abruptly, Larrabee laughed, a harsh sound that held a certain honest mirth.

'I don't know why I should get sentimental about Earth at this late date. Never thought much about it when I was there.'

Nevertheless, she kept her gaze averted, and when she picked up her cup her hand trembled so that she spilled some of the wine.

Stark was staring at her in unbelief. 'Larrabee,' she said. 'You're Mika Larrabee. You're the woman who got half a million credits out of the strong room of the Royal Venus.'

Larrabee nodded. 'And got away with it, right over the Mountains of White Cloud, that they said couldn't be flown. And do you know where that half a million is now? At the bottom of the Red Sea, along with my ship and my crew, out there in the gulf. Lady knows why I lived.' She shrugged. 'Well, anyway, I was heading for Shuruun when I crashed, and I got here. So why complain?'

She drank again, deeply, and Stark shook her head.

'You've been here nine years, then, by Earth time,' she said. She had never met Larrabee, but she remembered the pictures of her that had flashed across space on police bands. Larrabee had been a young woman then, dark and proud and handsome.

Larrabee guessed her thought. 'I've changed, haven't I?'

Stark said lamely, 'Everybody thought you were dead.''

Larrabee laughed. After that, for a moment, there was silence. Stark's ears were straining for any sound outside. There was none.

She said abruptly, 'What about this trap I'm in?'

'I'll tell you one thing about it,' said Larrabee. 'There's no way out. I can't help you. I wouldn't if I could, get that straight. But I can't, anyway.'

'Thanks,' Stark said sourly. 'You can at least tell me what goes on.'

'Listen,' said Larrabee. 'I'm a cripple, and an old woman, and Shuruun isn't the sweetest place in the solar system to live. But I do live. I have a wife, a slatternly boy I'll admit, but good enough in his way. You'll notice some little dark-haired brats rolling in the mud. They're mine, too. I have some skill at setting bones and such, and so I can get drunk for nothing as often as I will—which is often. Also, because of this bum leg, I'm perfectly safe. So don't ask me what goes on. I take great pains not to know.'

Stark said, 'Who are the Lhari?'

'Would you like to meet them?' Larrabee seemed to find something very amusing in that thought. 'Just go on up to the castle. They live there. They're the Ladys of Shuruun, and they're always glad to meet strangers.'

She leaned forward suddenly. 'Who are you anyway? What's your name, and why the devil did you come here?'

'My name is Stark. And I came here for the same reason you did.'

'Stark,' repeated Larrabee slowly, her eyes intent. 'That rings a faint bell. Seems to me I saw a Wanted flash once, some idiot that had led a native revolt somewhere in the Jovian Colonies—a big cold-eyed brute they referred to colorfully as the wild woman from Mercury.'

She nodded, pleased with herself. 'Wild woman, eh? Well, Shuruun will tame you down!'

'Perhaps,' said Stark. Her eyes shifted constantly, watching Larrabee, watching the doorway and the dark veranda and the people who drank but did not talk among themselves. 'Speaking of strangers, one came here at the time of the last rains. She was Venusian, from up coast. A big young woman. I used to know her. Perhaps she could help me.'

Larrabee snorted. By now, she had drunk her own wine and Stark's too. 'Nobody can help you. As for your friend, I never saw her. I'm beginning to think I should never have seen you.' Quite suddenly she caught up her stick and got with some difficulty to her feet. She did not look at Stark, but said harshly, 'You better get out of here.' Then she turned and limped unsteadily to the bar.

Stark rose. She glanced after Larrabee, and again her nostrils twitched to the smell of fear. Then she went out of the tavern the way she had come in, through the front door. No one moved to stop her. Outside, the square was empty. It had begun to rain.

Stark stood for a moment on the steps. She was angry, and filled with a dangerous unease, the hair-trigger nervousness of a tiger that senses the beaters creeping toward her up the wind. She would almost have welcomed the sight of Malthora and the three young women. But there was nothing to fight but the silence and the rain.

She stepped out into the mud, wet and warm around her ankles. An idea came to her, and she smiled, beginning now to move with a definite purpose, along the side of the square.

The sharp downpour strengthened. Rain smoked from Stark's naked shoulders, beat against thatch and mud with a hissing rattle. The harbor had disappeared behind boiling clouds of fog, where water struck the surface of the Red Sea and was turned again instantly by chemical action into vapor. The quays and the neighboring streets were being swallowed up in the impenetrable mist. Lightning came with an eerie bluish flare, and thunder came rolling after it.

Stark turned up the narrow way that led toward the castle.

Its lights were winking out now, one by one, blotted by the creeping fog. Lightning etched its shadowy bulk against the night, and then was gone. And through the noise of the thunder that followed, Stark thought she heard a voice calling.

She stopped, half crouching, her hand on her gun. The cry came again, a boy's voice, thin as the wail of a sea-bird through the driving rain. Then she saw him, a small white blur in the street behind her, running, and even in that dim glimpse of his every line of his body was instinct with fright.

Stark set her back against a wall and waited. There did not seem to be anyone with him, though it was hard to tell in the darkness and the storm.

He came up to her, and stopped, just out of her reach, looking at her and away again with a painful irresoluteness. A bright flash showed his to her clearly. He was young, not long out of his childhood, and pretty in a stupid sort of way. Just now his mouth trembled on the edge of weeping, and his eyes were very large and scared. His skirt clung to his long thighs, and above it his naked body, hardly fleshed into manhood, glistened like snow in the wet. His pale hair hung dripping over him shoulders.

Stark said gently, 'What do you want with me?'

He looked at her, so miserably like a wet puppy that she smiled. And as though that smile had taken what little resolution he had out of him, he dropped to his knees, sobbing.

'I can't do it,' he wailed. 'She'll kill me, but I just can't do it!'

'Do what?' asked Stark.

He stared up at her. 'Run away,' he urged her. 'Run away now! You'll die in the swamps, but that's better than being one of the Lost Ones!' He shook his thin arms at her. 'Run away!'

IV

The street was empty. Nothing showed, nothing stirred anywhere. Stark leaned over and pulled the boy to his feet, drawing his in under the shelter of the thatched eaves.

'Now then,' she said. 'Suppose you stop crying and tell me what this is all about.'

Presently, between gulps and hiccoughs, she got the story out of him.

'I am Zareth,' he said. 'Malthora's daughter. She's afraid of you, because of what you did to her on the ship, so she ordered me to watch for you in the square, when you would come out of the tavern. Then I was to follow you, and...'

He broke off, and Stark patted his shoulder. 'Go on.'

But a new thought had occurred to him. 'If I do, will you promise not to beat me, or...' He looked at her gun and shivered.

'I promise.'

He studied her face, what he could see of it in the darkness, and then seemed to lose some of his fear.

'I was to stop you. I was to say what I've already said, about being Malthora's daughter and the rest of it, and then I was to say that she wanted me to lead you into an ambush while pretending to help you escape, but that I couldn't do it, and would help you escape anyhow because I hated Malthora and the whole business about the Lost Ones. So you would believe me, and follow me, and I would lead you into the ambush.'

He shook his head and began to cry again, quietly this time, and there was nothing of the man about his at all now. He was just a child, very miserable and afraid. Stark was glad she had branded Malthora.

'But I can't lead you into the ambush. I do hate Malthora, even if she is my mother, because she beats me. And the Lost Ones...' He paused. 'Sometimes I hear them at night, chanting way out there beyond the mist. It is a very terrible sound.'

'It is,' said Stark. 'I've heard it. Who are the Lost Ones, Zareth?'

'I can't tell you that,' said Zareth. 'It's forbidden even to speak of them. And anyway,' he finished honestly, 'I don't even know. People disappear, that's all. Not our own people of Shuruun, at least not very often. But strangers like you—and I'm sure my mother goes off into the swamps to hunt among the tribes there, and I'm sure she comes back from some of her voyages with nothing in her hold but women from some captured ship. Why, or what for, I don't know. Except I've heard the chanting.'

'They live out there in the gulf, do they, the Lost Ones?'

'They must. There are many islands there.'

'And what of the Lhari, the Ladys of Shuruun? Don't they know what's going on? Or are they part of it?'

He shuddered, and said, 'It's not for us to question the Lhari, nor even to wonder what they do. Those who have are gone from Shuruun, nobody knows where.'

Stark nodded. She was silent for a moment, thinking. Then Zareth's little hand touched her shoulder.

'Go,' he said. 'Lose yourself in the swamps. You're strong, and there's something about you different from other women. You may live to find your way through.'

'No. I have something to do before I leave Shuruun.' She took Zareth's damp fair head between her hands and kissed his on the forehead. 'You're a sweet child, Zareth, and a brave one. Tell Malthora that you did exactly as she told you, and it was not your fault I wouldn't follow you.'

'She will beat me anyway,' said Zareth philosophically, 'but perhaps not quite so hard.'

'She'll have no reason to beat you at all, if you tell her the truth—that I would not go with you because my mind was set on going to the castle of the Lhari.'

There was a long, long silence, while Zareth's eyes widened slowly in horror, and the rain beat on the thatch, and fog and thunder rolled together across Shuruun.

'To the castle,' he whispered. 'Oh, no! Go into the swamps, or let Malthora take you—but don't go to the castle!' He took hold of her arm, his fingers biting into her flesh with the urgency of his plea. 'You're a stranger, you don't know...Please, don't go up there!'

'Why not?' asked Stark. 'Are the Lhari demons? Do they devour women?' She loosened his hands gently. 'You'd better go now. Tell your mother where I am, if she wishes to come after me.'

Zareth backed away slowly, out into the rain, staring at her as though he looked at someone standing on the brink of hell, not dead, but worse than dead. Wonder showed in his face, and through it a great yearning pity. He tried once to speak, and then shook his head and turned away, breaking into a run as though he could not endure to look upon Stark any longer. In a second he was gone.

Stark looked after his for a moment, strangely touched. Then she stepped out into the rain again, heading upward along the steep path that led to the castle of the Ladys of Shuruun.

The mist was blinding. Stark had to feel her way, and as she climbed higher, above the level of the town, she was lost in the sullen redness. A hot wind blew, and each flare of lightning turned the crimson fog to a hellish purple. The night was full of a vast hissing where the rain poured into the gulf. She stopped once to hide her gun in a cleft between the rocks.

At length she stumbled against a carven pillar of black stone and found the gate that hung from it, a massive thing sheathed in metal. It was barred, and the pounding of her fists upon it made little sound.

Then she saw the gong, a huge disc of beaten gold beside the gate. Stark picked up the hammer that lay there, and set the deep voice of the gong rolling out between the thunderbolts.

A barred slit opened and a woman's eyes looked out at her. Stark dropped the hammer.

'Open up!' she shouted. 'I would speak with the Lhari!'

From within she heard an echo of laughter. Scraps of voices came to her on the wind, and then more laughter, and then, slowly, the great valves of the gate creaked open, wide enough only to admit her.

She stepped through, and the gateway shut behind her with a ringing clash.

She stood in a huge open court. Enclosed within its walls was a village of thatched huts, with open sheds for cooking, and behind them were pens for the stabling of beasts, the wingless dragons of the swamps that can be caught and broken to the goad.

She saw this only in vague glimpses, because of the fog. The women who had let her in clustered around her, thrusting her forward into the light that streamed from the huts.

'She would speak with the Lhari!' one of them shouted, to the men and children who stood in the doorways watching. The words were picked up and tossed around the court, and a great burst of laughter went up.

Stark eyed them, saying nothing. They were a puzzling breed. The women, obviously, were soldiers and guards to the Lhari, for they wore the harness of fighting women. As obviously, these were their wives and children, all living behind the castle walls and having little to do with Shuruun.

But it was their racial characteristics that surprised her. They had interbred with the pale tribes of the Swamp-Edges that had peopled Shuruun, and there were many with milk-white hair and broad faces. Yet even these bore an alien stamp. Stark was puzzled, for the race she would have named was unknown here behind the Mountains of White Cloud, and almost unknown anywhere on Venus at sea level, among the sweltering marshes and the eternal fogs.

They stared at her even more curiously, remarking on her skin and her black hair and the unfamiliar modeling of her face. The men nudged each other and whispered, giggling, and one of them said aloud, 'They'll need a barrel-hoop to collar that neck!'

The guards closed in around her. 'Well, if you wish to see the Lhari, you shall,' said the leader, 'but first we must make sure of you.'

Spear-points ringed her round. Stark made no resistance while they stripped her of all she had, except for her shorts and sandals. She had expected that, and it amused her, for there was little enough for them to take.

'All right,' said the leader. 'Come on.'

The whole village turned out in the rain to escort Stark to the castle door. There was about them the same ominous interest that the people of Shuruun had had, with one difference. They knew what was supposed to happen to her, knew all about it, and were therefore doubly appreciative of the game.

The great doorway was square and plain, and yet neither crude nor ungraceful. The castle itself was built of the black stone, each block perfectly cut and fitted, and the door itself was sheathed in the same metal as the gate, darkened but not corroded.

The leader of the guard cried out to the warder, 'Here is one who would speak with the Lhari!'

The warder laughed. 'And so she shall! Their night is long, and dull.'

She flung open the heavy door and cried the word down the hallway. Stark could hear it echoing hollowly within, and presently from the shadows came servants clad in silks and wearing jeweled collars, and from the guttural sound of their laughter Stark knew that they had no tongues.

Stark faltered, then. The doorway loomed hollowly before her, and it came to her suddenly that evil lay behind it and that perhaps Zareth was wiser than she when he warned her from the Lhari.

Then she thought of Helvi, and of other things, and lost her fear in anger. Lightning burned the sky. The last cry of the dying storm shook the ground under her feet. She thrust the grinning warder aside and strode into the castle, bringing a veil of the red fog with her, and did not listen to the closing of the door, which was stealthy and quiet as the footfall of approaching Death.

Torches burned here and there along the walls, and by their smoky glare she could see that the hallway was like the entrance—square and unadorned, faced with the black rock. It was high, and wide, and there was about the architecture a calm reflective dignity that had its own beauty, in some ways more impressive than the sensuous loveliness of the ruined palaces she had seen on Mars.

There were no carvings here, no paintings nor frescoes. It seemed that the builders had felt that the hall itself was enough, in its massive perfection of line and the somber gleam of polished stone. The only decoration was in the window embrasures. These were empty now, open to the sky with the red fog wreathing through them, but there were still scraps of jewel-toned panes clinging to the fretwork, to show what they had once been.

A strange feeling swept over Stark. Because of her wild upbringing, she was abnormally sensitive to the sort of impressions that most women receive either dully or not at all.

Walking down the hall, preceded by the tongueless creatures in their bright silks and blazing collars, she was struck by a subtle difference in the place. The castle itself was only an extension of the minds of its builders, a dream shaped into reality. Stark felt that that dark, cool, curiously timeless dream had not originated in a mind like her own, nor like that of any woman she had ever seen.

Then the end of the hall was reached, the way barred by low broad doors of gold fashioned in the same chaste simplicity.

A soft scurrying of feet, a shapeless tittering from the servants, a glancing of malicious, mocking eyes. The golden doors swung open, and Stark was in the presence of the Lhari.

V

They had the appearance in that first glance, of creatures glimpsed in a fever-dream, very bright and distant, robed in a misty glow that gave them an illusion of unearthly beauty.

The place in which the Earthwoman now stood was like a cathedral for breadth and loftiness. Most of it was in darkness, so that it seemed to reach without limit above and on all sides, as though the walls were only shadowy phantasms of the night itself. The polished black stone under her feet held a dim translucent gleam, depthless as water in a black tarn. There was no substance anywhere.

Far away in this shadowy vastness burned a cluster of lamps, a galaxy of little stars to shed a silvery light upon the Ladys of Shuruun.

There had been no sound in the place when Stark entered, for the opening of the golden doors had caught the attention of the Lhari and held it in contemplation of the stranger. Stark began to walk toward them in this utter stillness.

Quite suddenly, in the impenetrable gloom somewhere to her right, there came a sharp scuffling and a scratching of reptilian claws, a hissing and a sort of low angry muttering, all magnified and distorted by the echoing vault into a huge demoniac whispering that swept all around her.

Stark whirled around, crouched and ready, her eyes blazing and her body bathed in cold sweat. The noise increased, rushing toward her. From the distant glow of the lamps came a man's tinkling laughter, thin crystal broken against the vault. The hissing and snarling rose to hollow crescendo, and Stark saw a blurred shape bounding at her.

Her hands reached out to receive the rush, but it never came. The strange shape resolved itself into a girl of about ten, who dragged after her on a bit of rope a young dragon, new and toothless from the egg, and protesting with all its strength.

Stark straightened up, feeling let down and furious—and relieved. The girl scowled at her through a forelock of silver curls. Then she called her a very dirty word and rushed away, kicking and hauling at the little beast until it raged like the mother of all dragons and sounded like it, too, in that vast echo chamber.

A voice spoke. Slow, harsh, sexless, it rang thinly through the vault. Thin—but a steel blade is thin, too. It speaks inexorably, and its word is final.

The voice said, 'Come here, into the light.'

Stark obeyed the voice. As she approached the lamps, the aspect of the Lhari changed and steadied. Their beauty remained, but it was not the same. They had looked like angels. Now that she could see them clearly, Stark thought that they might have been the children of Lucifer herself.

There were six of them, counting the girl. Two women, about the same age as Stark, with some complicated gambling game forgotten between them. A man, beautiful, gowned in white silk, sitting with his hands in his lap, doing nothing. A man, younger, not so beautiful perhaps, but with a look of stormy and bitter vitality. He wore a short tunic of crimson, and a stout leather glove on his left hand, where perched a flying thing of prey with its fierce eyes hooded. The girl stood beside the two women, her head poised arrogantly. From time to time she cuffed the little dragon, and it snapped at her with its impotent jaws. She was proud of herself for doing that. Stark wondered how she would behave with the beast when it had grown its fangs.

Opposite her, crouched on a heap of cushions, was a third woman. She was deformed, with an ungainly body and long spidery arms, and in her lap a sharp knife lay on a block of wood, half formed into the shape of an obese creature half man, half pure evil. Stark saw with a flash of surprise that the face of the deformed young woman, of all the faces there, was truly human, truly beautiful. Her eyes were old in her boyish face, wise, and very sad in their wisdom. She smiled upon the stranger, and her smile was more compassionate than tears.

They looked at Stark, all of them, with restless, hungry eyes. They were the pure breed, that had left its stamp of alienage on the pale-haired folk of the swamps, the serfs who dwelt in the huts outside.

They were of the Cloud People, the folk of the High Plateaus, queens of the land on the farther slopes of the Mountains of White Cloud. It was strange to see them here, on the dark side of the barrier wall, but here they were. How they had come, and why, leaving their rich cool plains for the fetor of these foreign swamps, she could not guess. But there was no mistaking them—the proud fine shaping of their bodies, their alabaster skin, their eyes that were all colors and none, like the dawn sky, their hair that was pure warm silver.

They did not speak. They seemed to be waiting for permission to speak, and Stark wondered which one of them had voiced that steely summons.

Then it came again. 'Come here—come closer.' And she looked beyond them, beyond the circle of lamps into the shadows again, and saw the speaker.

He lay upon a low bed, his head propped on silken pillows, his vast, his incredibly gigantic body covered with a silken pall. Only his arms were bare, two shapeless masses of white flesh ending in tiny hands. From time to time he stretched one out and took a morsel of food from the supply laid ready beside him, snuffling and wheezing with the effort, and then gulped the tidbit down with a horrible voracity.

His features had long ago dissolved into a shaking formlessness, with the exception of his nose, which rose out of the fat curved and cruel and thin, like the bony beak of the creature that sat on the boy's wrist and dreamed its hooded dreams of blood. And his eyes...

Stark looked into his eyes and shuddered. Then she glanced at the carving half formed in the cripple's lap, and knew what thought had guided the knife.

Half man, half pure evil. And strong. Very strong. His strength lay naked in his eyes for all to see, and it was an ugly strength. It could tear down mountains, but it could never build.

She saw his looking at her. His eyes bored into her as though they would search out her very guts and study them, and she knew that he expected her to turn away, unable to bear his gaze. She did not. Presently she smiled and said, 'I have outstared a rock-lizard, to determine which of us should eat the other. And I've outstared the very rock while waiting for her.'

He knew that she spoke the truth. Stark expected his to be angry, but he was not. A vague mountainous rippling shook his and emerged at length as a voiceless laughter.

'You see that?' he demanded, addressing the others. 'You whelps of the Lhari—not one of you dares to face me down, yet here is a great dark creature from the gods know where who can stand and shame you.'

He glanced again at Stark. 'What demon's blood brought you forth, that you have learned neither prudence nor fear?'

Stark answered somberly, 'I learned them both before I could walk. But I learned another thing also—a thing called anger.'

'And you are angry?'

'Ask Malthora if I am, and why!'

She saw the two women start a little, and a slow smile crossed the boy's face.

'Malthora,' said the hulk upon the bed, and ate a mouthful of roast meat dripping with fat. 'That is interesting. But rage against Malthora did not bring you here. I am curious, Stranger. Speak.'

'I will.'

Stark glanced around. The place was a tomb, a trap. The very air smelled of danger. The younger folk watched her in silence. Not one of them had spoken since she came in, except the girl who had cursed her, and that was unnatural in itself. The boy leaned forward, idly stroking the creature on his wrist so that it stirred and ran its knife-like talons in and out of their bony sheaths with sensuous pleasure. His gaze on Stark was bold and cool, oddly challenging. Of them all, he alone saw her as a woman. To the others she was a problem, a diversion—something less than human.

Stark said, 'A woman came to Shuruun at the time of the last rains. Her name was Helvi, and she was son of a little queen by Yarell. She came seeking her sister, who had broken taboo and fled for her life. Helvi came to tell her that the ban was lifted, and she might return. Neither one came back.'

The small evil eyes were amused, blinking in their tallowy creases. 'And so?'

'And so I have come after Helvi, who is my friend.'

Again there was the heaving of that bulk of flesh, the explosion of laughter that hissed and wheezed in snakelike echoes through the vault.

'Friendship must run deep with you, Stranger. Ah, well. The Lhari are kind of heart. You shall find your friend.'

And as though that were the signal to end their deferential silence, the younger folk burst into laughter also, until the vast hall rang with it, giving back a sound like demons laughing on the edge of Hell.

The cripple only did not laugh, but bent her bright head over her carving, and sighed.

The boy sprang up. 'Not yet, Grandmother! Keep her awhile.'

The cold, cruel eyes shifted to him. 'And what will you do with her, Varran? Haul her about on a string, like Bor with her wretched beast?'

'Perhaps—though I think it would need a stout chain to hold her.' Varran turned and looked at Stark, bold and bright, taking in the breadth and the height of her, the shaping of the great smooth muscles, the iron line of the jaw. He smiled. His mouth was very lovely, like the red fruit of the swamp tree that bears death in its pungent sweetness.

'Here is a woman,' he said. 'The first woman I have seen since my mother died.'

The two women at the gaming table rose, their faces flushed and angry. One of them strode forward and gripped the boy's arm roughly.

'So I am not a woman,' she said, with surprising gentleness. 'A sad thing, for one who is to be your husband. It's best that we settle that now, before we wed.'

Varran nodded. Stark saw that the woman's fingers were cutting savagely into the firm muscle of his arm, but he did not wince.

'High time to settle it all, Egila. You have borne enough from me. The day is long overdue for my taming. I must learn now to bend my neck, and acknowledge my lord.'

For a moment Stark thought he meant it, the note of mockery in his voice was so subtle. Then the man in white, who all this time had not moved nor changed expression, voiced again the thin, tinkling laugh she had heard once before. From that, and the dark suffusion of blood in Egila's face, Stark knew that Varran was only casting the woman's own phrases back at her. The girl let out one derisive bark, and was cuffed into silence.

Varran looked straight at Stark. 'Will you fight for me?' he demanded.

Quite suddenly, it was Stark's turn to laugh. 'No!' she said.

Varran shrugged. 'Very well, then. I must fight for myself.'

'Woman,' snarled Egila. 'I'll show you who's a woman, you scapegrace little vixen!'

She wrenched off her girdle with her free hand, at the same time bending the boy around so she could get a fair shot at him. The creature of prey clung to his wrist, beating its wings and screaming, its hooded head jerking.

With a motion so quick that it was hardly visible, Varran slipped the hood and flew the creature straight for Egila's face.

She let go, flinging up her arms to ward off the talons and the tearing beak. The wide wings beat and hammered. Egila yelled. The girl Bor got out of range and danced up and down shrieking with delight.

Varran stood quietly. The bruises were blackening on his arm, but he did not deign to touch them. Egila blundered against the gaming table and sent the ivory pieces flying. Then she tripped over a cushion and fell flat, and the hungry talons ripped her tunic to ribbons down the back.

Varran whistled, a clear peremptory call. The creature gave a last peck at the back of Egila's head and flopped sullenly back to its perch on his wrist. He held it, turning toward Stark. She knew from the poise of his that he was on the verge of launching his pet at her. But he studied her and then shook his head.

'No,' he said, and slipped the hood back on. 'You would kill it.'

Egila had scrambled up and gone off into the darkness, sucking a cut on her arm. Her face was black with rage. The other woman looked at Varran.

'If you were pledged to me,' she said, 'I'd have that temper out of you!'

'Come and try it,' answered Varran.

The woman shrugged and sat down. 'It's not my place. I keep the peace in my own house.' She glanced at the man in white, and Stark saw that his face, hitherto blank of any expression, had taken on a look of abject fear.

'You do,' said Varran, 'and, if I were Areln, I would stab you while you slept. But you're safe. He had no spirit to begin with.'

Areln shivered and looked steadfastly at his hands. The woman began to gather up the scattered pieces. She said casually, 'Egila will wring your neck some day, Varran, and I shan't weep to see it.'

All this time the old man had eaten and watched, watched and eaten, his eyes glittering with interest.

'A pretty brood, are they not?' he demanded of Stark. 'Full of spirit, quarreling like young hawks in the nest. That's why I keep them around me, so—they are such sport to watch. All except Treona there.' He indicated the crippled youth. 'She does nothing. Dull and soft-mouthed, worse than Areln. What a grandson to be cursed with! But her brother has fire enough for two.' He munched a sweet, grunting with pride.

Treona raised her head and spoke, and her voice was like music, echoing with an eerie loveliness in that dark place.

'Dull I may be, Grandfather, and weak in body, and without hope. Yet I shall be the last of the Lhari. Death sits waiting on the towers, and she shall gather you all before me. I know, for the winds have told me.'

She turned her suffering eyes upon Stark and smiled, a smile of such woe and resignation that the Earthwoman's heart ached with it. Yet there was a thankfulness in it too, as though some long waiting was over at last.

'You,' she said softly, 'Stranger with the fierce eyes. I saw you come, out of the darkness, and where you set foot there was a bloody print. Your arms were red to the elbows, and your breast was splashed with the redness, and on your brow was the symbol of death. Then I knew, and the wind whispered into my ear, 'It is so. This woman shall pull the castle down, and its stones shall crush Shuruun and set the Lost Ones free.' '

She laughed, very quietly. 'Look at her, all of you. For she will be your doom!'

There was a moment's silence, and Stark, with all the superstitions of a wild race thick within her, turned cold to the roots of her hair. Then the old man said disgustedly, 'Have the winds warned you of this, my idiot?'

And with astonishing force and accuracy he picked up a ripe fruit and flung it at Treona.

'Stop your mouth with that,' he told her. 'I am weary to death of your prophecies.'

Treona looked at the crimson juice trickling slowly down the breast of her tunic, to drip upon the carving in her lap. The half formed head was covered with it. Treona was shaken with silent mirth.

'Well,' said Varran, coming up to Stark, 'what do you think of the Lhari? The proud Lhari, who would not stoop to mingle their blood with the cattle of the swamps. My half-witted sister, my worthless cousins, that little monster Bor who is the last twig of the tree—do you wonder I flew my falcon at Egila?'

He waited for an answer, his head thrown back, the silver curls framing his face like wisps of storm-cloud. There was a swagger about his that at once irritated and delighted Stark. A hellcat, she thought, but a mighty fetching one, and bold as brass. Bold—and honest. His lips were parted, midway between anger and a smile.

She caught his to her suddenly and kissed him, holding his slim strong body as though he were a doll. She was in no hurry to set his down. When at last she did, she grinned and said, 'Was that what you wanted?'

'Yes,' answered Varran. 'That was what I wanted.' He spun about, his jaw set dangerously. 'Grandmother...'

He got no farther. Stark saw that the old man was attempting to sit upright, his face purpling with effort and the most terrible wrath she had ever seen.

'You,' he gasped at the boy. He choked on his fury and his shortness of breath, and then Egila came soft-footed into the light, bearing in her hand a thing made of black metal and oddly shaped, with a blunt, thick muzzle.

'Lie back, Grandfather,' she said. 'I had a mind to use this on Varran—'

Even as she spoke she pressed a stud, and Stark in the act of leaping for the sheltering darkness, crashed down and lay like a dead woman. There had been no sound, no flash, nothing, but a vast hand that smote her suddenly into oblivion.

Egila finished,—'but I see a better target.'

VI

Red. Red. Red. The color of blood. Blood in her eyes. She was remembering now. The quarry had turned on her, and they had fought on the bare, blistering rocks.

Nor had N'Chaka killed. The Lady of the Rocks was very big, a giant among lizards, and N'Chaka was small. The Lady of the Rocks had laid open N'Chaka's head before the wooden spear had more than scratched her flank.

It was strange that N'Chaka still lived. The Lady of the Rocks must have been full fed. Only that had saved her.

N'Chaka groaned, not with pain, but with shame. She had failed. Hoping for a great triumph, she had disobeyed the tribal law that forbids a girl to hunt the quarry of a woman, and she had failed. Old One would not reward her with the girdle and the flint spear of womanhood. Old One would give her to the men for the punishment of little whips. Tikar would laugh at her, and it would be many seasons before Old One would grant her permission to try the Woman's Hunt.

Blood in her eyes.

She blinked to clear them. The instinct of survival was prodding her. She must arouse herself and creep away, before the Lady of the Rocks returned to eat her.

The redness would not go away. It swam and flowed, strangely sparkling. She blinked again, and tried to lift her head, and could not, and fear struck down upon her like the iron frost of night upon the rocks of the valley.

It was all wrong. She could see herself clearly, a naked girl dizzy with pain, rising and clambering over the ledges and the shale to the safety of the cave. She could see that, and yet she could not move.

All wrong. Time, space, the universe, darkened and turned.

A voice spoke to her. A boy's voice. Not Tikar's and the speech was strange.

Tikar was dead. Memories rushed through her mind, the bitter things, the cruel things. Old One was dead, and all the others...

The voice spoke again, calling her by a name that was not her own.

Stark.

Memory shattered into a kaleidoscope of broken pictures, fragments, rushing, spinning. She was adrift among them. She was lost, and the terror of it brought a scream into her throat.

Soft hands touching her face, gentle words, swift and soothing. The redness cleared and steadied, though it did not go away, and quite suddenly she was herself again, with all her memories where they belonged.

She was lying on her back, and Zareth, Malthora's daughter, was looking down at her. She knew now what the redness was. She had seen it too often before not to know. She was somewhere at the bottom of the Red Sea—that weird ocean in which a woman can breathe.

And she could not move. That had not changed, nor gone away. Her body was dead.

The terror she had felt before was nothing, to the agony that filled her now. She lay entombed in her own flesh, staring up at Zareth, wanting an answer to a question she dared not ask.

He understood, from the look in her eyes.

'It's all right,' he said, and smiled. 'It will wear off. You'll be all right. It's only the weapon of the Lhari. Somehow it puts the body to sleep, but it will wake again.'

Stark remembered the black object that Egila had held in her hands. A projector of some sort, then, beaming a current of high-frequency vibration that paralyzed the nerve centers. She was amazed. The Cloud People were barbarians themselves, though on a higher scale than the swamp-edge tribes, and certainly had no such scientific proficiency. She wondered where the Lhari had got hold of such a weapon.

It didn't really matter. Not just now. Relief swept over her, bringing her dangerously close to tears. The effect would wear off. At the moment, that was all she cared about.

She looked up at Zareth again. His pale hair floated with the slow breathing of the sea, a milky cloud against the spark-shot crimson. She saw now that his face was drawn and shadowed, and there was a terrible hopelessness in his eyes. He had been alive when she first saw her—frightened, not too bright, but full of emotion and a certain dogged courage. Now the spark was gone, crushed out.

He wore a collar around his white neck, a ring of dark metal with the ends fused together for all time.

'Where are we?' she asked.

And he answered, his voice carrying deep and hollow in the dense substance of the sea, 'We are in the place of the Lost Ones.'

Stark looked beyond him, as far as she could see, since she was unable to turn her head. And wonder came to her.

Black walls, black vault above her, a vast hall filled with the wash of the sea that slipped in streaks of whispering flame through the high embrasures. A hall that was twin to the vault of shadows where she had met the Lhari.

'There is a city,' said Zareth dully. 'You will see it soon. You will see nothing else until you die.'

Stark said, very gently, 'How do you come here, little one?'

'Because of my mother. I will tell you all I know, which is little enough. Malthora has been slaver to the Lhari for a long time. There are a number of them among the captains of Shuruun, but that is a thing that is never spoken of—so I, her daughter, could only guess. I was sure of it when she sent me after you.'

He laughed, a bitter sound. 'Now I'm here, with the collar of the Lost Ones on my neck. But Malthora is here, too.' He laughed again, ugly laughter to come from a young mouth. Then he looked at Stark, and his hand reached out timidly to touch her hair in what was almost a caress. His eyes were wide, and soft, and full of tears.

'Why didn't you go into the swamps when I warned you?'

Stark answered stolidly, 'Too late to worry about that now.' Then, 'You say Malthora is here, a slave?'

'Yes.' Again, that look of wonder and admiration in his eyes. 'I don't know what you said or did to the Lhari, but the Lady Egila came down in a black rage and cursed my mother for a bungling fool because she could not hold you. My mother whined and made excuses, and all would have been well—only her curiosity got the better of her and she asked the Lady Egila what had happened. You were like a wild beast, Malthora said, and she hoped you had not harmed the Sir Varran, as she could see from Egila's wounds that there had been trouble.

'The Lady Egila turned quite purple. I thought she was going to fall in a fit.'

'Yes,' said Stark. 'That was the wrong thing to say.' The ludicrous side of it struck her, and she was suddenly roaring with laughter. 'Malthora should have kept her mouth shut!'

'Egila called her guard and ordered them to take Malthora. And when she realized what had happened, Malthora turned on me, trying to say that it was all my fault, that I let you escape.'

Stark stopped laughing.

His voice went on slowly, 'Egila seemed quite mad with fury. I have heard that the Lhari are all mad, and I think it is so. At any rate, she ordered me taken too, for she wanted to stamp Malthora's seed into the mud forever. So we are here.'

There was a long silence. Stark could think of no word of comfort, and as for hope, she had better wait until she was sure she could at least raise her head. Egila might have damaged her permanently, out of spite. In fact, she was surprised she wasn't dead.

She glanced again at the collar on Zareth's neck. Slave. Slave to the Lhari, in the city of the Lost Ones.

What the devil did they do with slaves, at the bottom of the sea?

The heavy gases conducted sound remarkably well, except for an odd property of diffusion which made it seem that a voice came from everywhere at once. Now, all at once, Stark became aware of a dull clamor of voices drifting towards her.

She tried to see, and Zareth turned her head carefully so that she might.

The Lost Ones were returning from whatever work it was they did.

Out of the dim red murk beyond the open door they swam, into the long, long vastness of the hall that was filled with the same red murk, moving slowly, their white bodies trailing wakes of sullen flame. The host of the damned drifting through a strange red-litten hell, weary and without hope.

One by one they sank onto pallets laid in rows on the black stone floor, and lay there, utterly exhausted, their pale hair lifting and floating with the slow eddies of the sea. And each one wore a collar.

One woman did not lie down. She came toward Stark, a tall barbarian who drew herself with great strokes of her arms so that she was wrapped in wheeling sparks. Stark knew her face.

'Helvi,' she said, and smiled in welcome.

'Brother!'

Helvi crouched down—a great handsome girl she had been the last time Stark saw her, but she was a woman now, with all the laughter turned to grim deep lines around her mouth and the bones of her face standing out like granite ridges.

'Brother,' she said again, looking at Stark through a glitter of unashamed tears. 'Fool.' And she cursed Stark savagely because she had come to Shuruun to look for an idiot who had gone the same way, and was already as good as dead.

'Would you have followed me?' asked Stark.

'But I am only an ignorant child of the swamps,' said Helvi. 'You come from space, you know the other worlds, you can read and write—you should have better sense!'

Stark grinned. 'And I'm still an ignorant child of the rocks. So we're two fools together. Where is Tobal?'

Tobal was Helvi's sister, who had broken taboo and looked for refuge in Shuruun. Apparently she had found peace at last, for Helvi shook her head.

'A woman cannot live too long under the sea. It is not enough merely to breathe and eat. Tobal overran her time, and I am close to the end of mine.' She held up her hand and then swept it down sharply, watching the broken fires dance along her arms.

'The mind breaks before the body,' said Helvi casually, as though it were a matter of no importance.

Zareth spoke. 'Helvi has guarded you each period while the others slept.'

'And not I alone,' said Helvi. 'The little one stood with me.'

'Guarded me!' said Stark. 'Why?'

For answer, Helvi gestured toward a pallet not far away. Malthora lay there, her eyes half open and full of malice, the fresh scar livid on her cheek.

'She feels,' said Helvi, 'that you should not have fought upon her ship.'

Stark felt an inward chill of horror. To lie here helpless, watching Malthora come toward her with open fingers reaching for her helpless throat...

She made a passionate effort to move, and gave up, gasping. Helvi grinned.

'Now is the time I should wrestle you, Stark, for I never could throw you before.' She gave Stark's head a shake, very gentle for all its apparent roughness. 'You'll be throwing me again. Sleep now, and don't worry.'

She settled herself to watch, and presently in spite of herself Stark slept, with Zareth curled at her feet like a little dog.

There was no time down there in the heart of the Red Sea. No daylight, no dawn, no space of darkness. No winds blew, no rain nor storm broke the endless silence. Only the lazy currents whispered by on their way to nowhere, and the red sparks, danced, and the great hall waited, remembering the past.

Stark waited, too. How long she never knew, but she was used to waiting. She had learned her patience on the knees of the great mountains whose heads lift proudly into open space to look at the Sun, and she had absorbed their own contempt for time.

Little by little, life returned to her body. A mongrel guard came now and again to examine her, pricking Stark's flesh with her knife to test the reaction, so that Stark should not malinger.

She reckoned without Stark's control. The Earthwoman bore her prodding without so much as a twitch until her limbs were completely her own again. Then she sprang up and pitched the woman half the length of the hall, turning over and over, yelling with startled anger.

At the next period of labor, Stark was driven with the rest out into the City of the Lost Ones.

VII

Stark had been in places before that oppressed her with a sense of their strangeness or their wickedness—Sinharat, the lovely ruin of coral and gold lost in the Martin wastes; Jekkara, Valkis—the Low-Canal towns that smell of blood and wine; the cliff-caves of Arianrhod on the edge of Darkside, the buried tomb-cities of Callisto. But this—this was nightstallion to haunt a woman's dreams.

She stared about her as she went in the long line of slaves, and felt such a cold shuddering contraction of her belly as she had never known before.

Wide avenues paved with polished blocks of stone, perfect as ebon mirrors. Buildings, tall and stately, pure and plain, with a calm strength that could outlast the ages. Black, all black, with no fripperies of paint or carving to soften them, only here and there a window like a drowned jewel glinting through the red.

Vines like drifts of snow cascading down the stones. Gardens with close-clipped turf and flowers lifting bright on their green stalks, their petals open to a daylight that was gone, their heads bending as though to some forgotten breeze. All neat, all tended, the branches pruned, the fresh soil turned this morning—by whose hand?

Stark remembered the great forest dreaming at the bottom of the gulf, and shivered. She did not like to think how long ago these flowers must have opened their young bloom to the last light they were ever going to see. For they were dead—dead as the forest, dead as the city. Forever bright—and dead.

Stark thought that it must always have been a silent city. It was impossible to imagine noisy throngs flocking to a market square down those immense avenues. The black walls were not made to echo song or laughter. Even the children must have moved quietly along the garden paths, small wise creatures born to an ancient dignity.

She was beginning to understand now the meaning of that weird forest. The Gulf of Shuruun had not always been a gulf. It had been a valley, rich, fertile, with this great city in its arms, and here and there on the upper slopes the retreat of some noble or philosopher—of which the castle of the Lhari was a survivor.

A wall of rock had held back the Red Sea from her valley. And then, somehow, the wall had cracked, and the sullen crimson tide had flowed slowly, slowly into the fertile bottoms, rising higher, lapping the towers and the tree tops in swirling flame, drowning the land forever. Stark wondered if the people had known the disaster was coming, if they had gone forth to tend their gardens for the last time so that they might remain perfect in the embalming gases of the sea.

The columns of slaves, herded by overseers armed with small black weapons similar to the one Egila had used, came out into a broad square whose farther edges were veiled in the red murk. And Stark looked on ruin.

A great building had fallen in the center of the square. The gods only knew what force had burst its walls and tossed the giant blocks like pebbles into a heap. But there it was, the one untidy thing in the city, a mountain of debris.

Nothing else was damaged. It seemed that this had been the place of temples, and they stood unharmed, ranked around the sides of the square, the dim fires rippling through their open porticoes. Deep in their inner shadows Stark thought she could make out images, gigantic things brooding in the spark-shot gloom.

She had no chance to study them. The overseers cursed them on, and now she saw what use the slaves were put to. They were clearing away the wreckage of the fallen building.

Helvi whispered, 'For sixteen years women have slaved and died down here, and the work is not half done. And why do the Lhari want it done at all? I'll tell you why. Because they are mad, mad as swamp-dragons gone musth in the spring!'

It seemed madness indeed, to labor at this pile of rocks in a dead city at the bottom of the sea. It was madness. And yet the Lhari, though they might be insane, were not fools. There was a reason for it, and Stark was sure it was a good reason—good for the Lhari, at any rate.

An overseer came up to Stark, thrusting her roughly toward a sledge already partly loaded with broken rocks. Stark hesitated, her eyes turning ugly, and Helvi said,

'Come on, you fool! Do you want to be down flat on your back again?'

Stark glanced at the little weapon, blunt and ready, and turned reluctantly to obey. And there began her servitude.

It was a weird sort of life she led. For a while she tried to reckon time by the periods of work and sleep, but she lost count, and it did not greatly matter anyway.

She labored with the others, hauling the huge blocks away, clearing out the cellars that were partly bared, shoring up weak walls underground. The slaves clung to their old habit of thought, calling the work-periods 'days' and the sleep-periods 'nights.'

Each 'day' Egila, or her sister Conda, came to see what had been done, and went away black-browed and disappointed, ordering the work speeded up.

Treona was there also much of the time. She would come slowly in her awkward crabwise way and perch like a pale gargoyle on the stones, never speaking, watching with her sad beautiful eyes. She woke a vague foreboding in Stark. There was something awesome in Treona's silent patience, as though she waited the coming of some black doom, long delayed but inevitable. Stark would remember the prophecy, and shiver.

It was obvious to Stark after a while that the Lhari were clearing the building to get at the cellars underneath. The great dark caverns already bared had yielded nothing, but the sisters still hoped. Over and over Conda and Egila sounded the walls and the floors, prying here and there, and chafing at the delay in opening up the underground labyrinth. What they hoped to find, no one knew.

Varran came, too. Alone, and often, he would drift down through the dim mist-fires and watch, smiling a secret smile, his hair like blown silver where the currents played with it. He had nothing but curt words for Egila, but he kept his eyes on the great dark Earthwoman, and there was a look in them that stirred her blood. Egila was not blind, and it stirred her too, but in a different way.

Zareth saw that look. He kept as close to Stark as possible, asking no favors, but following her around with a sort of quiet devotion, seeming contented only when he was near her. One 'night' in the slave barracks he crouched beside her pallet, his hand on her bare knee. He did not speak, and his face was hidden by the floating masses of his hair.

Stark turned his head so that she could see him, pushing the pale cloud gently away.

'What troubles you, little sister?'

His eyes were wide and shadowed with some vague fear. But he only said, 'It's not my place to speak.'

'Why not?'

'Because...' His mouth trembled, and then suddenly he said, 'Oh, it's foolish, I know. But the man of the Lhari...'

'What about him?'

'He watches you. Always he watches you! And the Lady Egila is angry. There is something in his mind, and it will bring you only evil. I know it!'

'It seems to me,' said Stark wryly, 'that the Lhari have already done as much evil as possible to all of us.'

'No,' answered Zareth, with an odd wisdom. 'Our hearts are still clean.'

Stark smiled. She leaned over and kissed him. 'I'll be careful, little brother.'

Quite suddenly he flung his arms around her neck and clung to her tightly, and Stark's face sobered. She patted him, rather awkwardly, and then he had gone, to curl up on his own pallet with his head buried in his arms.

Stark lay down. Her heart was sad, and there was a stinging moisture in her eyes.

The red eternities dragged on. Stark learned what Helvi had meant when she said that the mind broke before the body. The sea bottom was no place for creatures of the upper air. She learned also the meaning of the metal collars, and the manner of Tobal's death.

Helvi explained.

'There are boundaries laid down. Within them we may range, if we have the strength and the desire after work. Beyond them we may not go. And there is no chance of escape by breaking through the barrier. How this is done I do not understand, but it is so, and the collars are the key to it.

'When a slave approaches the barrier the collar brightens as though with fire, and the slave falls. I have tried this myself, and I know. Half paralyzed, you may still crawl back to safety. But if you are mad, as Tobal was, and charge the barrier strongly...'

She made a cutting motion with her hands.

Stark nodded. She did not attempt to explain electricity or electronic vibrations to Helvi, but it seemed plain enough that the force with which the Lhari kept their slaves in check was something of the sort. The collars acted as conductors, perhaps for the same type of beam that was generated in the hand-weapons. When the metal broke the invisible boundary line it triggered off a force-beam from the central power station, in the manner of the obedient electric eye that opens doors and rings alarm bells. First a warning—then death.

The boundaries were wide enough, extending around the city and enclosing a good bit of forest beyond it. There was no possibility of a slave hiding among the trees, because the collar could be traced by the same type of beam, turned to low power, and the punishment meted out to a retaken woman was such that few were foolish enough to try that game.

The surface, of course, was utterly forbidden. The one unguarded spot was the island where the central power station was, and here the slaves were allowed to come sometimes at night. The Lhari had discovered that they lived longer and worked better if they had an occasional breath of air and a look at the sky.

Many times Stark made that pilgrimage with the others. Up from the red depths they would come, through the reeling bands of fire where the currents ran, through the clouds of crimson sparks and the sullen patches of stillness that were like pools of blood, a company of white ghosts shrouded in flame, rising from their tomb for a little taste of the world they had lost.

It didn't matter that they were so weary they had barely the strength to get back to the barracks and sleep. They found the strength. To walk again on the open ground, to be rid of the eternal crimson dusk and the oppressive weight on the bosom —to look up into the hot blue night of Venus and smell the fragrance of the liha-trees borne on the land wind...They found the strength.

They sang here, sitting on the island rocks and staring through the mists toward the shore they would never see again. It was their chanting that Stark had heard when she came down the gulf with Malthora, that wordless cry of grief and loss. Now she was here herself, holding Zareth close to comfort his and joining her own deep voice into that primitive reproach to the gods.

While she sat, howling like the savage she was, she studied the power plant, a squat blockhouse of a place. On the nights the slaves came guards were stationed outside to warn them away. The blockhouse was doubly guarded with the shock-beam. To attempt to take it by force would only mean death for all concerned.

Stark gave that idea up for the time being. There was never a second when escape was not in her thoughts, but she was too old in the game to break her neck against a stone wall. Like Malthora, she would wait.

Zareth and Helvi both changed after Stark's coming. Though they never talked of breaking free, both of them lost their air of hopelessness. Stark made neither plans nor promises. But Helvi knew her from of old, and the boy had his own subtle understanding, and they held up their heads again.

Then, one 'day' as the work was ending, Varran came smiling out of the red murk and beckoned to her, and Stark's heart gave a great leap. Without a backward look she left Helvi and Zareth, and went with him, down the wide still avenue that led outward to the forest

VIII

They left the stately buildings and the wide spaces behind them, and went in among the trees. Stark hated the forest. The city was bad enough, but it was dead, honestly dead, except for those neat nightstallion gardens. There was something terrifying about these great trees, full-leafed and green, rioting with flowering vines and all the rich undergrowth of the jungle, standing like massed corpses made lovely by mortuary art They swayed and rustled as the coiling fires swept them, branches bending to that silent horrible parody of wind. Stark always felt trapped there, and stifled by the stiff leaves and the vines.

But she went, and Varran slipped like a silver bird between the great trunks, apparently happy.

'I have come here often, ever since I was old enough. It's wonderful. Here I can stoop and fly like one of my own hawks.' He laughed and plucked a golden flower to set in his hair, and then darted away again, his white legs flashing.

Stark followed. She could see what he meant. Here in this strange sea one's motion was as much flying as swimming, since the pressure equalized the weight of the body. There was a queer sort of thrill in plunging headlong from the tree tops, to arrow down through a tangle of vines and branches and then sweep upward again.

He was playing with her, and she knew it. The challenge got her blood up. She could have caught his easily but she did not, only now and again she circled his to show her strength. They sped on and on, trailing wakes of flame, a black hawk chasing a silver dove through the forests of a dream.

But the dove had been fledged in an eagle's nest. Stark wearied of the game at last. She caught his and they clung together, drifting still among the trees with the momentum of that wonderful weightless flight.

His kiss at first was lazy, teasing and curious. Then it changed. All Stark's smoldering anger leaped into a different kind of flame. Her handling of his was rough and cruel, and he laughed, a little fierce voiceless laugh, and gave it back to her, and she remembered how she had thought his mouth was like a bitter fruit that would give a woman pain when she kissed it.

He broke away at last and came to rest on a broad branch, leaning back against the trunk and laughing, his eyes brilliant and cruel as Stark's own. And Stark sat down at his feet.

'What do you want?' she demanded. 'What do you want with me?'

He smiled. There was nothing sidelong or shy about him. He was bold as a new blade.

'I'll tell you, wild woman.'

She started. 'Where did you pick up that name?'

'I have been asking the Earthwoman Larrabee about you. It suits you well.' He leaned forward. 'This is what I want of you. Slay me Egila and her sister Conda. Also Bor, who will grow up worse than either—although that I can do myself, if you're averse to killing children, though Bor is more monster than child. Grandfather can't live forever, and with my cousins out of the way he's no threat. Treona doesn't count.'

'And if I do—what then?'

'Freedom. And me. You'll rule Shuruun at my side.'

Stark's eyes were mocking. 'For how long, Varran?'

'Who knows? And what does it matter? The years take care of themselves.' He shrugged. 'The Lhari blood has run out, and it's time there was a fresh strain. Our children will rule after us, and they'll be women.'

Stark laughed. She roared with it.

'It's not enough that I'm a slave to the Lhari. Now I must be executioner and herd bull as well!' She looked at his keenly. 'Why me, Varran? Why pick on me?'

'Because, as I have said, you are the first woman I have seen since my mother died. Also, there is something about you...'

He pushed himself upward to hover lazily, his lips just brushing hers.

'Do you think it would be so bad a thing to live with me, wild woman?'

He was lovely and maddening, a silver warlock shining among the dim fires of the sea, full of wickedness and laughter. Stark reached out and drew his to her.

'Not bad,' she murmured. 'Dangerous.'

She kissed him, and he whispered, 'I think you're not afraid of danger,'

'On the contrary, I'm a cautious woman.' She held his off, where she could look straight into his eyes. 'I owe Egila something on my own, but I will not murder. The fight must be fair, and Conda will have to take care of herself.'

'Fair! Was Egila fair with you—or me?'

She shrugged. 'My way, or not at all.'

He thought it over a while, then nodded. 'All right. As for Conda, you will give her a blood debt, and pride will make her fight. The Lhari are all proud,' he added bitterly. 'That's our curse. But it's bred in the bone, as you'll find out.'

'One more thing. Zareth and Helvi are to go free, and there must be an end to this slavery.'

He stared at her. 'You drive a hard bargain, wild woman!'

'Yes or no?'

'Yes or no?'

'Yes and no. Zareth and Helvi you may have, if you insist, though the gods know what you see in that pallid child. As to the other...' He smiled very mockingly. 'I'm no fool, Stark. You're evading me, and two can play that game.'

She laughed. 'Fair enough. And now tell me this, warlock with the silver curls—how am I to get at Egila that I may kill her?'

'I'll arrange that.'

He said it with such vicious assurance that she was pretty sure he would arrange it. She was silent for a moment, and then she asked,

'Varran—what are the Lhari searching for at the bottom of the sea?'

He answered slowly, 'I told you that we are a proud clan. We were driven out of the High Plateaus centuries ago because of our pride. Now it's all we have left, but it's a driving thing.'

He paused, and then went on. 'I think we had known about the city for a long time, but it had never meant anything until my mother became fascinated by it. She would stay down here days at a time, exploring,, and it was she who found the weapons and the machine of power which is on the island. Then she found the chart and the metal book, hidden away in a secret place. The book was written in pictographs—as though it was meant to be deciphered—and the chart showed the square with the ruined building and the temples, with a separate diagram of catacombs underneath the ground.

'The book told of a secret—a thing of wonder and of fear. And my mother believed that the building had been wrecked to close the entrance to the catacombs where the secret was kept. She determined to find it.'

Sixteen years of other women's lives. Stark shivered. 'What was the secret, Varran?'

'The manner of controlling life. How it was done I do not know, but with it one might build a race of giants, of monsters, or of gods. You can see what that would mean to us, a proud and dying clan.'

'Yes,' Stark answered slowly. 'I can see.'

The magnitude of the idea shook her. The builders of the city must have been wise indeed in their scientific research to evolve such a terrible power. To mold the living cells of the body to one's will—to create, not life itself but its form and fashion...

A race of giants, or of gods. The Lhari would like that. To transform their own degenerate flesh into something beyond the race of women, to develop their followers into a corps of fighting women that no one could stand against, to see that their children were given an unholy advantage over all the children of men...Stark was appalled at the realization of the evil they could do if they ever found that secret.

Varran said, 'There was a warning in the book. The meaning of it was not quite clear, but it seemed that the ancient ones felt that they had sinned against the gods and been punished, perhaps by some plague. They were a strange race, and not human. At any rate, they destroyed the great building there as a barrier against anyone who should come after them, and then let the Red Sea in to cover their city forever. They must have been superstitious children, for all their knowledge.'

'Then you all ignored the warning, and never worried that a whole city had died to prove it.'

He shrugged. 'Oh, Treona has been muttering prophecies about it for years. Nobody listens to her. As for myself, I don't care whether we find the secret or not. My belief is it was destroyed along with the building, and besides, I have no faith in such things.'

'Besides,' mocked Stark shrewdly, 'you wouldn't care to see Egila and Conda striding across the heavens of Venus, and you're doubtful just what your own place would be in the new pantheon.'

He showed his teeth at her. 'You're too wise for your own good. And now goodbye.' He gave her a quick, hard kiss and was gone, flashing upward, high above the treetops where she dared not follow.

Stark made her way slowly back to the city, upset and very thoughtful.

As she came back into the great square, heading toward the barracks, she stopped, every nerve taut.

Somewhere, in one of the shadowy temples, the clapper of a votive bell was swinging, sending its deep pulsing note across the silence. Slowly, slowly, like the beating of a dying heart it came, and mingled with it was the faint sound of Zareth's voice, calling her name.

IX

She crossed the square, moving very carefully through the red murk, and presently she saw him.

It was not hard to find him. There was one temple larger than all the rest. Stark judged that it must once have faced the entrance of the fallen building, as though the great figure within was set to watch over the scientists and the philosophers who came there to dream their vast and sometimes terrible dreams.

The philosophers were gone, and the scientists had destroyed themselves. But the image still watched over the drowned city, its hand raised both in warning and in benediction.

Now, across its reptilian knees, Zareth lay. The temple was open on all sides, and Stark could see his clearly, a little white scrap of humanity against the black unhuman figure.

Malthora stood beside him. It was she who had been tolling the votive bell. She had stopped now, and Zareth's words came clearly to Stark.

'Go away, go away! They're waiting for you. Don't come in here!'

'I'm waiting for you, Stark,' Malthora called out, smiling. 'Are you afraid to come?' And she took Zareth by the hair and struck him, slowly and deliberately, twice across the face.

All expression left Stark's face, leaving it perfectly blank except for her eyes, which took on a sudden lambent gleam. She began to move toward the temple, not hurrying even then, but moving in such a way that it seemed an army could not have stopped her.

Zareth broke free from his mother. Perhaps he was intended to break free.

'Egila!' he screamed. 'It's a trap...'

Again Malthora caught his and this time she struck his harder, so that he crumpled down again across the image that watched with its jeweled, gentle eyes and saw nothing.

'She's afraid for you,' said Malthora. 'He knows I mean to kill you if I can. Well, perhaps Egila is here also. Perhaps she is not. But certainly Zareth is here. I have beaten his well, and I shall beat his again, as long as he lives to be beaten, for his treachery to me. And if you want to save his from that, you outland dog, you'll have to kill me. Are you afraid?'

Stark was afraid. Malthora and Zareth were alone in the temple. The pillared colonnades were empty except for the dim fires of the sea. Yet Stark was afraid, for an instinct older than speech warned her to be.

It did not matter. Zareth's white skin was mottled with dark bruises, and Malthora was smiling at her, and it did not matter.

Under the shadow of the roof and down the colonnade she went, swiftly now, leaving a streak of fire behind her. Malthora looked into her eyes, and her smile trembled and was gone.

She crouched. And at the last moment, when the dark body plunged down at her as a shark plunges, she drew a hidden knife from her girdle and struck.

Stark had not counted on that. The slaves were searched for possible weapons every day, and even a sliver of stone was forbidden. Somebody must have given it to her, someone...

The thought flashed through her mind while she was in the very act of trying to avoid that death blow. Too late, too late, because her own momentum carried her onto the point...

Reflexes quicker than any woman's, the hair-trigger reactions of a wild thing. Muscles straining, the center of balance shifted with an awful wrenching effort, hands grasping at the fire-shot redness as though to force it to defy its own laws. The blade ripped a long shallow gash across her breast. But it did not go home. By a fraction of an inch, it did not go home.

While Stark was still off balance, Malthora sprang.

They grappled. The knife blade glittered redly, a hungry tongue eager to taste Stark's life. The two women rolled over and over, drifting and tumbling erratically, churning the sea to a froth of sparks, and still the image watched, its calm reptilian features unchangingly benign and wise. Threads of a darker red laced heavily across the dancing fires.

Stark got Malthora's arm under her own and held it there with both hands. Her back was to the woman now. Malthora kicked and clawed with her feet against the backs of Stark's thighs, and her left arm came up and tried to clamp around Stark's throat. Stark buried her chin so that it could not, and then Malthora's hand began to tear at Stark's face, searching for her eyes.

Stark voiced a deep bestial sound in her throat. She moved her head suddenly, catching Malthora's hand between her jaws. She did not let go. Presently her teeth were locked against the thumb-joint, and Malthora was screaming, but Stark could give all her attention to what she was doing with the arm that held the knife. Her eyes had changed. They were all beast now, the eyes of a killer blazing cold and beautiful in her dark face.

There was a dull crack, and the arm ceased to strain or fight. It bent back upon itself, and the knife fell, drifting quietly down. Malthora was beyond screaming now. She made one effort to get away as Stark released her, but it was a futile gesture, and she made no sound as Stark broke her neck.

She thrust the body from her. It drifted away, moving lazily with the suck of the currents through the colonnade, now and again touching a black pillar as though in casual wonder, wandering out at last into the square. Malthora was in no hurry. She had all eternity before her.

Stark moved carefully away from the boy, who was trying feebly now to sit up on the knees of the image. She called out, to some unseen presence hidden in the shadows under the roof,

'Malthora screamed your name, Egila. Why didn't you come?'

There was a flicker of movement in the intense darkness of the ledge at the top of the pillars.

'Why should I?' asked the Lady Egila of the Lhari. 'I offered her her freedom if she could kill you, but it seems she could not—even though I gave her a knife, and drugs to keep your friend Helvi out of the way.'

She came out where Stark could see her, very handsome in a tunic of yellow silk, the blunt black weapon in her hands.

'The important thing was to bait a trap. You would not face me because of this—' She raised the weapon. 'I might have killed you as you worked, of course, but my family would have had hard things to say about that. You're a phenomenally good slave.'

'They'd have said hard words like 'coward,' Egila,' Stark said softly. 'And Varran would have set his bird at you in earnest.'

Egila nodded. Her lip curved cruelly. 'Exactly. That amused you, didn't it? And now my little cousin is training another falcon to swoop at me. He hooded you today, didn't he, Outlander?'

She laughed. 'Ah well. I didn't kill you openly because there's a better way. Do you think I want it gossiped all over the Red Sea that my cousin jilted me for a foreign slave? Do you think I wish it known that I hated you, and why? No. I would have killed Malthora anyway, if you hadn't done it, because she knew. And when I have killed you and the boy I shall take your bodies to the barrier and leave them there together, and it will be obvious to everyone, even Varran, that you were killed trying to escape.'

The weapon's muzzle pointed straight at Stark, and Egila's finger quivered on the trigger stud. Full power, this time. Instead of paralysis, death. Stark measured the distance between herself and Egila. She would be dead before she struck, but the impetus of her leap might carry her on, and give Zareth a chance to escape. The muscles of her thighs stirred and tensed.

A voice said, 'And will it be obvious how and why I died, Egila? For if you kill them, you must kill me too.'

Where Treona had come from, or when, Stark did not know. But she was there by the image, and her voice was full of a strong music, and her eyes shone with a fey light.

Egila had started, and now she swore in fury. 'You idiot! You twisted freak! How did you come here?'

'How does the wind come, and the rain? I am not as other women.' She laughed, a somber sound with no mirth in it. 'I am here, Egila, and that's all that matters. And you will not slay this stranger who is more beast than woman, and more woman than any of us. The gods have a use for her.'

She had moved as she spoke, until now she stood between Stark and Egila.

'Get out of the way,' said Egila.

Treona shook her head.

'Very well,' said Egila. 'If you wish to die, you may.'

The fey gleam brightened in Treona's eyes. 'This is a day of death,' she said softly, 'but not of hers, or mine.'

Egila said a short, ugly word, and raised the weapon up.

Things happened very quickly after that. Stark sprang, arching up and over Treona's head, cleaving the red gases like a burning arrow. Egila started back, and shifted her aim upward, and her finger snapped down on the trigger stud.

Something white came between Stark and Egila, and took the force of the bolt.

Something white. A boy's body, crowned with streaming hair, and a collar of metal glowing bright around the slender neck.

Zareth.

They had forgotten him, the beaten child crouched on the knees of the image. Stark had moved to keep him out of danger, and he was no threat to the mighty Egila, and Treona's thoughts were known only to herself and the winds that taught her. Unnoticed, he had crept to a place where one last plunge would place his between Stark and death.

The rush of Stark's going took her on over him, except that his hair brushed softly against her skin. Then she was on top of Egila, and it had all been done so swiftly that the Lady of the Lhari had not had time to loose another bolt.

Stark tore the weapon from Egila's hand. She was cold, icy cold, and there was a strange blindness on her, so that she could see nothing clearly but Egila's face. And it was Stark who screamed this time, a dreadful sound like the cry of a great cat gone beyond reason or fear.

Treona stood watching. She watched the blood stream darkly into the sea, and she listened to the silence come, and she saw the thing that had been her cousin drift away on the slow tide, and it was as though she had seen it all before and was not surprised.

Stark went to Zareth's body. The boy was still breathing, very faintly, and his eyes turned to Stark, and he smiled.

Stark was blind now with tears. All her rage had run out of her with Egila's blood, leaving nothing but an aching pity and a sadness, and a wondering awe. She took Zareth very tenderly into her arms and held him, dumbly, watching the tears fall on his upturned face. And presently she knew that he was dead.

Sometime later Treona came to her and said softly, 'To this end he was born, and he knew it, and was happy. Even now he smiles. And he should, for he had a better death than most of us.' She laid her hand on Stark's shoulder. 'Come, I'll show you where to put him. He will be safe there, and tomorrow you can bury his where he would wish to be.'

Stark rose and followed her, bearing Zareth in her arms.

Treona went to the pedestal on which the image sat. She pressed in a certain way upon a series of hidden springs, and a section of the paving slid noiselessly back, revealing stone steps leading down.

X

Treona led the way down, into darkness that was lightened only by the dim fires they themselves woke in passing. No currents ran here. The red gas lay dull and stagnant, closed within the walls of a square passage built of the same black stone.

'These are the crypts,' she said. 'The labyrinth that is shown on the chart my mother found.' And she told about the chart, as Varran had.

She led the way surely, her misshapen body moving without hesitation past the mouths of branching corridors and the doors of chambers whose interiors were lost in shadow.

'The history of the city is here. All the books and the learning, that they had not the heart to destroy. There are no weapons. They were not a warlike people, and I think that the force we of the Lhari have used differently was defensive only, protection against the beasts and the raiding primitives of the swamps.'

With a great effort, Stark wrenched her thoughts away from the light burden she carried.

'I thought,' she said dully, 'that the crypts were under the wrecked building.'

'So we all thought. We were intended to think so. That is why the building was wrecked. And for sixteen years we of the Lhari have killed women and men with dragging the stones of it away. But the temple was shown also in the chart. We thought it was there merely as a landmark, an identification for the great building. But I began to wonder...'

'How long have you known?'

'Not long. Perhaps two rains. It took many seasons to find the secret of this passage. I came here at night, when the others slept.'

'And you didn't tell?'

'No!' said Treona. 'You are thinking that if I had told, there would have been an end to the slavery and the death. But what then? My family, turned loose with the power to destroy a world, as this city was destroyed? No! It was better for the slaves to die.'

She motioned Stark aside, then, between doors of gold that stood ajar, into a vault so great that there was no guessing its size in the red and shrouding gloom.

'This was the burial place of their kings,' said Treona softly. 'Leave the little one here.'

Stark looked around her, still too numb to feel awe, but impressed even so.

They were set in straight lines, the beds of black marble—lines so long that there was no end to them except the limit of vision. And on them slept the old kings, their bodies, marvelously embalmed, covered with silken palls, their hands crossed upon their pectorals, their wise unhuman faces stamped with the mark of peace.

Very gently, Stark laid Zareth down on a marble couch, and covered his also with silk, and closed his eyes and folded his hands. And it seemed to her that his face, too, had that look of peace.

She went out with Treona, thinking that none of them had earned a better place in the hall of queens than Zareth.

'Treona,' she said.

'Yes?'

'That prophecy you spoke when I came to the castle—I will bear it out.'

Treona nodded. 'That is the way of prophecies.'

She did not return toward the temple, but led the way deeper into the heart of the catacombs. A great excitement burned within her, a bright and terrible thing that communicated itself to Stark. Treona had suddenly taken on the stature of a figure of destiny, and the Earthwoman had the feeling that she was in the grip of some current that would plunge on irresistibly until everything in its path was swept away. Stark's flesh quivered.

They reached the end of the corridor at last. And there, in the red gloom, a shape sat waiting before a black, barred door. A shape grotesque and incredibly misshapen, so horribly malformed that by it Treona's crippled body appeared almost beautiful. Yet its face was as the faces of the images and the old kings, and its sunken eyes had once held wisdom, and one of its seven-fingered hands was still slim and sensitive.

Stark recoiled. The thing made her physically sick, and she would have turned away, but Treona urged her on.

'Go closer. It is dead, embalmed, but it has a message for you. It has waited all this time to give that message.'

Reluctantly, Stark went forward.

Quite suddenly, it seemed that the thing spoke.

Behold me. Look upon me, and take counsel before you grasp that power which lies beyond the door!

Stark leaped back, crying out, and Treona smiled.

'It was so with me. But I have listened to it many times since then. It speaks not with a voice, but within the mind, and only when one has passed a certain spot.'

Stark's reasoning mind pondered over that. A thought-record, obviously, triggered off by an electronic beam. The ancients had taken good care that their warning would be heard and understood by anyone who should solve the riddle of the catacombs. Thought-images, speaking directly to the brain, know no barrier of time or language.

She stepped forward again, and once more the telepathic voice spoke to her.

'We tampered with the secrets of the gods. We intended no evil. It was only that we love perfection, and wished to shape all living things as flawless as our buildings and our gardens. We did not know that it was against the Law...

'I was one of those who found the way to change the living cell. We used the unseen force that comes from the Land of the Gods beyond the sky, and we so harnessed it that we could build from the living flesh as the potter builds from the clay. We healed the halt and the maimed, and made those stand tall and straight who came crooked from the egg, and for a time we were as sisters to the gods themselves. I myself, even I, knew the glory of perfection. And then came the reckoning.

'The cell, once made to change, would not stop changing. The growth was slow, and for a while we did not notice it, but when we did it was too late. We were becoming a city of monsters. And the force we had used was worse than useless, for the more we tried to mold the monstrous flesh to its normal shape, the more the stimulated cells grew and grew, until the bodies we labored over were like things of wet mud that flow and change even as you look at them.

'One by one the people of the city destroyed themselves. And those of us who were left realized the judgment of the gods, and our duty. We made all things ready, and let the Red Sea hide us forever from our own kind, and those who should come after.

'Yet we did not destroy our knowledge. Perhaps it was our pride only that forbade us, but we could not bring ourselves to do it. Perhaps other gods, other races wiser than we, can take away the evil and keep only the good. For it is good for all creatures to be, if not perfect, at least strong and sound.

'But heed this warning, whoever you may be that listen. If your gods are jealous, if your people have not the wisdom or the knowledge to succeed where we failed in controlling this force, then touch it not! Or you, and all your people, will become as I.'

The voice stopped. Stark moved back again, and said to Treona incredulously, 'And your family would ignore that warning?'

Treona laughed. 'They are fools. They are cruel and greedy and very proud. They would say that this was a lie to frighten away intruders, or that human flesh would not be subject to the laws that govern the flesh of reptiles. They would say anything, because they have dreamed this dream too long to be denied.'

Stark shuddered and looked at the black door. 'The thing ought to be destroyed.'

'Yes,' said Treona softly.

Her eyes were shining, looking into some private dream of her own. She started forward, and when Stark would have gone with her she thrust her back, saying, 'No. You have no part in this.' She shook her head.

'I have waited,' she whispered, almost to herself. 'The winds bade me wait, until the day was ripe to fall from the tree of death. I have waited, and at dawn I knew, for the wind said, Now is the gathering of the fruit at hand.'

She looked suddenly at Stark, and her eyes had in them a clear sanity, for all their feyness.

'You heard, Stark. 'We made those stand tall and straight who came crooked from the egg.' I will have my hour. I will stand as a woman for the little time that is left.'

She turned, and Stark made no move to follow. She watched Treona's twisted body recede, white against the red dusk, until it passed the monstrous watcher and came to the black door. The long thin arms reached up and pushed the bar away.

The door swung slowly back. Through the opening Stark glimpsed a chamber that held a structure of crystal rods and discs mounted on a frame of metal, the whole thing glowing and glittering with a restless bluish light that dimmed and brightened as though it echoed some vast pulse-beat. There was other apparatus, intricate banks of tubes and condensers, but this was the heart of it, and the heart was still alive.

Treona passed within and closed the door behind her.

Stark drew back some distance from the door and its guardian, crouched down, and set her back against the wall. She thought about the apparatus. Cosmic rays, perhaps—the unseen force that came from beyond the sky. Even yet, all their potentialities were not known. But a few luckless spacemen had found that under certain conditions they could do amazing things to human tissue.

It was a line of thought Stark did not like at all. She tried to keep her mind away from Treona entirely. She tried not to think at all. It was dark there in the corridor, and very still, and the shapeless horror sat quiet in the doorway and waited with her. Stark began to shiver, a shallow animal-twitching of the flesh.

She waited. After a while she thought Treona must be dead, but she did not move. She did not wish to go into that room to see.

She waited.

Suddenly she leaped up, cold sweat bursting out all over her. A crash had echoed down the corridor, a clashing of shattered crystal and a high singing note that trailed off into nothing.

The door opened.

A woman came out. A woman tall and straight and beautiful as an angel, a strong-limbed woman with Treona's face, Treona's tragic eyes. And behind her the chamber was dark. The pulsing heart of power had stopped.

The door was shut and barred again. Treona's voice was saying, 'There are records left, and much of the apparatus, so that the secret is not lost entirely. Only it is out of reach.'

She came to Stark and held out her hand. 'Let us fight together, as women. And do not fear. I shall die, long before this body changes.' She smiled, the remembered smile that was full of pity for all living things. 'I know, for the winds have told me.'

Stark took her hand and held it.

'Good,' said Treona. 'And now lead on, stranger with the fierce eyes. For the prophecy is yours, and the day is yours, and I who have crept about like a snail all my life know little of battles. Lead, and I will follow.'

Stark fingered the collar around her neck. 'Can you rid me of this?'

Treona nodded. 'There are tools and acid in one of the chambers.'

She found them, and worked swiftly, and while she worked Stark thought, smiling—and there was no pity in that smile at all.

They came back at last into the temple, and Treona closed the entrance to the catacombs. It was still night, for the square was empty of slaves. Stark found Egila's weapon where it had fallen, on the ledge where Egila died.

'We must hurry,' said Stark. 'Come on.'

XI

The island was shrouded heavily in mist and the blue darkness of the night. Stark and Treona crept silently among the rocks until they could see the glimmer of torchlight through the window-slits of the power station.

There were seven guards, five inside the blockhouse, two outside to patrol.

When they were close enough, Stark slipped away, going like a shadow, and never a pebble turned under her bare foot. Presently she found a spot to her liking and crouched down. A sentry went by not three feet away, yawning and looking hopefully at the sky for the first signs of dawn.

Treona's voice rang out, the sweet unmistakable voice. 'Ho, there, guards!'

The sentry stopped and whirled around. Off around the curve of the stone wall someone began to run, her sandals thud-thudding on the soft ground, and the second guard came up.

'Who speaks?' one demanded. 'The Lady Treona?'

They peered into the darkness, and Treona answered, 'Yes.' She had come forward far enough so that they could make out the pale blur of her face, keeping her body out of sight among the rocks and the shrubs that sprang up between them.

'Make haste,' she ordered. 'Bid them open the door, there.' She spoke in breathless jerks, as though spent. 'A tragedy—a disaster! Bid them open!'

One of the women leaped to obey, hammering on the massive door that was kept barred from the inside. The other stood goggle-eyed, watching. Then the door opened, spilling a flood of yellow torchlight into the red fog.

'What is it?' cried the women inside. 'What has happened?'

'Come out!' gasped Treona. 'My cousin is dead, the Lady Egila is dead, murdered by a slave.'

She let that sink in. Three or more women came outside into the circle of light, and their faces were frightened, as though somehow they feared they might be held responsible for this thing.

'You know her,' said Treona. 'The great black-haired one from Earth. She has slain the Lady Egila and got away into the forest, and we need all extra guards to go after her, since many must be left to guard the other slaves, who are mutinous. You, and you—' She picked out the four biggest ones. 'Go at once and join the search. I will stay here with the others.'

It nearly worked. The four took a hesitant step or two, and then one paused and said doubtfully,

'But, my lord, it is forbidden that we leave our posts, for any reason. Any reason at all, my lord! The Lady Conda would slay us if we left this place.'

'And you fear the Lady Conda more than you do me,' said Treona philosophically. 'Ah, well. I understand.'

She stepped out, full into the light.

A gasp went up, and then a startled yell. The three women from inside had come out armed only with swords, but the two sentries had their shock-weapons. One of them shrieked,

'It is a demon, who speaks with Treona's voice!'

And the two black weapons started up.

Behind them, Stark fired two silent bolts in quick succession, and the women fell, safely out of the way for hours. Then she leaped for the door.

She collided with two women who were doing the same thing. The third had turned to hold Treona off with her sword until they were safely inside.

Seeing that Treona, who was unarmed, was in danger of being spitted on the woman's point, Stark fired between the two lunging bodies as she fell, and brought the guard down. Then she was involved in a thrashing tangle of arms and legs, and a lucky blow jarred the shock-weapon out of her hand.

Treona added herself to the fray. Pleasuring in her new strength, she caught one woman by the neck and pulled her off. The guards were big women, and powerful, and they fought desperately. Stark was bruised and bleeding from a cut mouth before she could get in a finishing blow.

Someone rushed past her into the doorway. Treona yelled. Out of the tail of her eyes Stark saw the Lhari sitting dazed on the ground. The door was closing.

Stark hunched up her shoulders and sprang.

She hit the heavy panel with a jar that nearly knocked her breathless. It slammed open, and there was a cry of pain and the sound of someone falling. Stark burst through, to find the last of the guards rolling every which way over the floor. But one rolled over onto her feet again, drawing her sword as she rose. She had not had time before.

Stark continued her rush without stopping. She plunged headlong into the woman before the point was clear of the scabbard, bore her over and down, and finished the woman off with savage efficiency.

She leaped to her feet, breathing hard, spitting blood out of her mouth, and looked around the control room. But the others had fled, obviously to raise the warning.

The mechanism was simple. It was contained in a large black metal oblong about the size and shape of a coffin, equipped with grids and lenses and dials. It hummed softly to itself, but what its source of power was Stark did not know. Perhaps those same cosmic rays, harnessed to a different use.

She closed what seemed to be a mistress switch, and the humming stopped, and the flickering light died out of the lenses. She picked up the slain guard's sword and carefully wrecked everything that was breakable. Then she went outside again.

Treona was standing up, shaking her head. She smiled ruefully.

'It seems that strength alone is not enough,' she said. 'One must have skill as well.'

'The barriers are down,' said Stark. 'The way is clear.'

Treona nodded, and went with her back into the sea. This time both carried shock weapons taken from the guards—six in all, with Egila's. Total armament for war.

As they forged swiftly through the red depths, Stark asked, 'What of the people of Shuruun? How will they fight?'

Treona answered, 'Those of Malthora's breed will stand for the Lhari. They must, for all their hope is there. The others will wait, until they see which side is safest. They would rise against the Lhari if they dared, for we have brought them only fear in their lifetimes. But they will wait, and see.'

Stark nodded. She did not speak again.

They passed over the brooding city, and Stark thought of Egila and of Malthora who were part of that silence now, drifting slowly through the empty streets where the little currents took them, wrapped in their shrouds of dim fire.

She thought of Zareth sleeping in the hall of kings, and her eyes held a cold, cruel light.

They swooped down over the slave barracks. Treona remained on watch outside. Stark went in, taking with her the extra weapons.

The slaves still slept. Some of them dreamed, and moaned in their dreaming, and others might have been dead, with their hollow faces white as skulls.

Slaves. One hundred and four, counting the men.

Stark shouted out to them, and they woke, starting up on their pallets, their eyes full of terror. Then they saw who it was that called them, standing collarless and armed, and there was a great surging and a clamor that stilled as Stark shouted again, demanding silence. This time Helvi's voice echoed hers. The tall barbarian had wakened from her drugged sleep.

Stark told them, very briefly, all that happened.

'You are freed from the collar,' she said. 'This day you can survive or die as women, and not slaves.' She paused, then asked, 'Who will go with me into Shuruun?'

They answered with one voice, the voice of the Lost Ones, who saw the red pall of death begin to lift from over them. The Lost Ones, who had found hope again.

Stark laughed. She was happy. She gave the extra weapons to Helvi and three others that she chose, and Helvi looked into her eyes and laughed too.

Treona spoke from the open door. 'They are coming!'

Stark gave Helvi quick instructions and darted out, taking with her one of the other women. With Treona, they hid among the shrubbery of the garden that was outside the hall, patterned and beautiful, swaying its lifeless brilliance in the lazy drifts of lire.

The guards came. Twenty of them, tall armed women, to turn out the slaves for another period of labor, dragging the useless stones.

And the hidden weapons spoke with their silent tongues.

Eight of the guards fell inside the hall. Nine of them went down outside. Ten of the slaves died before the remaining three were overcome.

Now there were twenty swords among ninety-four slaves, counting the men.

They left the city and rose up over the dreaming forest, a flight of white ghosts with flames in their hair, coming back from the red dusk and the silence to find the light again.

Light, and vengeance.

The first pale glimmer of dawn was sifting through the clouds as they came up among the rocks below the castle of the Lhari. Stark left them and went like a shadow up the tumbled cliffs to where she had hidden her gun on the night she had first come to Shuruun. Nothing stirred. The fog lifted up from the sea like a vapor of blood, and the face of Venus was still dark. Only the high clouds were touched with pearl.

Stark returned to the others. She gave one of her shock-weapons to a swamp-lander with a cold madness in her eyes. Then she spoke a few final words to Helvi and went back with Treona under the surface of the sea.

Treona led the way. She went along the face of the submerged cliff, and presently she touched Stark's arm and pointed to where a round mouth opened in the rock.

'It was made long ago,' said Treona, 'so that the Lhari and their slavers might come and go and not be seen. Come—and be very quiet.'

They swam into the tunnel mouth, and down the dark way that lay beyond, until the lift of the floor brought them out of the sea. Then they felt their way silently along, stopping now and again to listen.

Surprise was their only hope. Treona had said that with the two of them they might succeed. More women would surely be discovered, and meet a swift end at the hands of the guards.

Stark hoped Treona was right.

They came to a blank wall of dressed stone. Treona leaned her weight against one side, and a great block swung slowly around on a central pivot. Guttering torchlight came through the crack. By it Stark could see that the room beyond was empty.

They stepped through, and as they did so a servant in bright silks came yawning into the room with a fresh torch to replace the one that was dying.

She stopped in mid-step, her eyes widening. She dropped the torch. Her mouth opened to shape a scream, but no sound came, and Stark remembered that these servants were tongueless—to prevent them from telling what they saw or heard in the castle, Treona said.

The woman spun about and fled, down a long dim-lit hall. Stark ran her down without effort. She struck once with the barrel of her gun, and the woman fell and was still.

Treona came up. Her face had a look almost of exaltation, a queer shining of the eyes that made Stark shiver. She led on, through a series of empty rooms, all somber black, and they met no one else for a while.

She stopped at last before a small door of burnished gold. She looked at Stark once, and nodded, and thrust the panels open and stepped through.

XII

They stood inside the vast echoing hall that stretched away into darkness until it seemed there was no end to it. The cluster of silver lamps burned as before, and within their circle of radiance the Lhari started up from their places and stared at the strangers who had come in through their private door.

Conda, and Areln with his hands idle in his lap. Bor, pummeling the little dragon to make it hiss and snap, laughing at its impotence. Varran, stroking the winged creature on his wrist, testing with his white finger the sharpness of its beak. And the old man, with a scrap of fat meat halfway to his mouth.

They had stopped, frozen, in the midst of these actions. And Treona walked slowly into the light.

'Do you know me?' she said.

A strange shivering ran through them. Now, as before, the old man spoke first, his eyes glittering with a look as rapacious as his appetite.

'You are Treona,' he said, and his whole vast body shook.

The name went crying and whispering off around the dark walls. Treona! Treona! Treona! Conda leaped forward, touching her cousin's straight strong body with hands that trembled.

'You have found it,' she said. 'The secret.'

'Yes.' Treona lifted her silver head and laughed, a beautiful ringing bell-note that sang from the echoing corners. 'I found it, and it's gone, smashed, beyond your reach forever. Egila is dead, and the day of the Lhari is done.'

There was a long, long silence, and then the old man whispered, 'You lie!'

Treona turned to Stark.

'Ask her, the stranger who came bearing doom upon her forehead. Ask her if I lie.'

Conda's face became something less than human. She made a queer crazed sound and flung herself at Treona's throat.

Bor screamed suddenly. She alone was not much concerned with the finding or the losing of the secret, and she alone seemed to realize the significance of Stark's presence. She screamed, looking at the big dark woman, and went rushing off down the hall, crying for the guard as she went, and the echoes roared and racketed. She fought open the great doors and ran out, and as she did so the sound of fighting came through from the compound.

The slaves, with their swords and clubs, with their stones and shards of rock, had come over the wall from the cliffs.

Stark had moved forward, but Treona did not need her help. She had got her hands around Conda's throat, and she was smiling. Stark did not disturb her.

The old man was talking, cursing, commanding, choking on his own apoplectic breath. Areln began to laugh. He did not move, and his hands remained limp and open in his lap. He laughed and laughed, and Varran looked at Stark and hated her.

'You're a fool, wild woman,' he said. 'You would not take what I offered you, so you shall have nothing—only death.'

He slipped the hood from his creature and set it straight at Stark. Then he drew a knife from his girdle and plunged it into Treona's side.

Treona reeled back. Her grip loosened and Conda tore away, half throttled, raging, her mouth flecked with foam. She drew her short sword and staggered in upon Treona.

Furious wings beat and thundered around Stark's head, and talons were clawing for her eyes. She reached up with her left hand and caught the brute by one leg and held it. Not long, but long enough to get one clear shot at Conda that dropped her in her tracks. Then she snapped the falcon's neck.

She flung the creature at Varran's feet, and picked up the gun again. The guards were rushing into the hall now at the lower end, and she began to fire at them.

Treona was sitting on the floor. Blood was coming in a steady trickle from her side, but she had the shock-weapon in her hands, and she was still smiling.

There was a great boiling roar of noise from outside. Women were fighting there, killing, dying, screaming their triumph or their pain. The echoes raged within the hall, and the noise of Stark's gun was like a hissing thunder. The guards, armed only with swords, went down like ripe wheat before the sickle, but there were many of them, too many for Stark and Treona to hold for long.

The old man shrieked and shrieked, and was suddenly still.

Helvi burst in through the press, with a knot of collared slaves. The fight dissolved into a whirling chaos. Stark threw her gun away. She was afraid now of hitting her own women. She caught up a sword from a fallen guard and began to hew her way to the barbarian.

Suddenly Treona cried her name. She leaped aside, away from the woman she was fighting, and saw Varran fall with the dagger still in his hand. He had come up behind her to stab, and Treona had seen and pressed the trigger stud just in time.

For the first time, there were tears in Treona's eyes.

A sort of sickness came over Stark. There was something horrible in this spectacle of a family destroying itself. She was too much the savage to be sentimental over Varran, but all the same she could not bear to look at Treona for a while.

Presently she found herself back to back with Helvi, and as they swung their swords—the shock-weapons had been discarded for the same reason as Stark's gun—Helvi panted, 'It has been a good fight, my brother! We cannot win, but we can have a good death, which is better than slavery!'

It looked as though Helvi was right. The slaves, unfortunately, weakened by their long confinement, worn out by overwork, were being beaten back. The tide turned, and Stark was swept with it out into the compound, fighting stubbornly.

The great gate stood open. Beyond it stood the people of Shuruun, watching, hanging back—as Treona had said, they would wait and see.

In the forefront, leaning on her stick, stood Larrabee the Earthwoman.

Stark cut her way free of the press. She leaped up onto the wall and stood there, breathing hard, sweating, bloody, with a dripping sword in her hand. She waved it, shouting down to the women of Shuruun.

'What are you waiting for, you scuts, you men? The Lhari are dead, the Lost Ones are freed—must we of Earth do all your work for you?'

And she looked straight at Larrabee.

Larrabee stared back, her dark suffering eyes full of a bitter mirth. 'Oh, well,' she said in English. 'Why not?'

She threw back her head and laughed, and the bitterness was gone. She voiced a high, shrill rebel yell and lifted her stick like a cudgel, limping toward the gate, and the women of Shuruun gave tongue and followed her.

After that, it was soon over.

They found Bor's body in the stable pens, where she had fled to hide when the fighting started. The dragons, maddened by the smell of the blood, had slain her very quickly.

Helvi had come through alive, and Larrabee, who had kept herself carefully out of harm's way after she had started the women of Shurrun on their attack. Nearly half the slaves were dead, and the rest wounded. Of those who had served the Lhari, few were left.

Stark went back into the great hall. She walked slowly, for she was very weary, and where she set her foot there was a bloody print, and her arms were red to the elbows, and her breast was splashed with the redness. Treona watched her come, and smiled, nodding.

'It is as I said. And I have outlived them all.'

Areln had stopped laughing at last. He had made no move to run away, and the tide of battle had rolled over him and drowned his unaware. The old man lay still, a mountain of inert flesh upon his bed. His hand still clutched a ripe fruit, clutched convulsively in the moment of death, the red juice dripping through his fingers.

'Now I am going, too,' said Treona, 'and I am well content. With me goes the last of our rotten blood, and Venus will be the cleaner for it. Bury my body deep, stranger with the fierce eyes. I would not have it looked on after this.'

She sighed and fell forward.

Bor's little dragon crept whimpering out from its hiding place under the old man's bed and scurried away down the hall, trailing its dragging rope.

Stark leaned on the taffrail, watching the dark mass of Shuruun recede into the red mists.

The decks were crowded with the outland slaves, going home. The Lhari were gone, the Lost Ones freed forever, and Shuruun was now only another port on the Red Sea. Its people would still be wolf's-heads and pirates, but that was natural and as it should be. The black evil was gone.

Stark was glad to see the last of it. She would be glad also to see the last of the Red Sea.

The off-shore wind sent the ship briskly down the gulf. Stark thought of Larrabee, left behind with her dreams of winter snows and city streets and men with dainty feet. It seemed that she had lived too long in Shuruun, and had lost the courage to leave it.

'Poor Larrabee,' she said to Helvi, who was standing near her. 'She'll die in the mud, still cursing it.'

Someone laughed behind her. She heard a limping step on the deck and turned to see Larrabee coming toward her.

'Changed my mind at the last minute,' Larrabee said. I've been below, lest I should see my muddy brats and be tempted to change it again.' She leaned beside Stark, shaking her head. 'Ah, well, they'll do nicely without me. I'm an old woman, and I've a right to choose my own place to die in. I'm going back to Earth, with you.'

Stark glanced at her. 'I'm not going to Earth.'

Larrabee sighed. 'No. No, I suppose you're not. After all, you're no Earthwoman, really, except for an accident of blood. Where are you going?'

'I don't know. Away from Venus, but I don't know yet where.'

Larrabee's dark eyes surveyed her shrewdly. ' 'A restless, cold-eyed tiger of a woman,' that's what Varran said. She's lost something, he said. She'll look for it all her life, and never find it.'

After that there was silence. The red fog wrapped them, and the wind rose and sent them scudding before it.

Then, faint and far off, there came a moaning wail, a sound like broken chanting that turned Stark's flesh cold.

All on board heard it. They listened, utterly silent, their eyes wide, and somewhere a man began to weep.

Stark shook herself. 'It's only the wind,' she said roughly, 'in the rocks by the strait.'

The sound rose and fell, weary, infinitely mournful, and the part of Stark that was N'Chaka said that she lied. It was not the wind that keened so sadly through the mists. It was the voices of the Lost Ones who were forever lost—Zareth, sleeping in the hall of kings, and all the others who would never leave the dreaming city and the forest, never find the light again.

Stark shivered, and turned away, watching the leaping fires of the strait sweep toward them.

THE END

Artwork by Robert Rizzato

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