COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 442
He caught her in his arms, and again he was vividly aware of her blown-glass strength and fragility.
"What is it?" he asked frantically.
"Flande—" she told him in a slow, drugged voice. "Flande—must be—watching. Listening to—our talk. He will not let me—tell you—about him ... I'm afraid, A-lahn—A-lahn dearest—the Light-Wearer ..."
She relaxed in his arms with the utter limpness of death itself, though he could still feel breath stirring her ribs gently against his arm.
So—Flande had struck.
Well, it had been as good a way as any, he supposed, to summon him into Flande's presence. This—this strange little whisper far back in his mind was not really necessary. He would have gone anyhow.
But it was not Flande who called.
Another voice—an alien voice—was summoning in the deepest depths of his brain. And beside him, Evaya stirred. "Yes, lord, yes," he heard her murmuring softly, in a voice entirely without inflection. "Yes, lord—it shall be done."
And she sat up stiffly. Her eyes were enormous, staring straight ahead, their pupils blackening the violet iris. Alan said sharply, "Evaya! Evaya!" and tried to shake her out of that mirror-eyed stare. She was as rigid as ivory under his hands. Even her face was ivory, not flesh, its delicacy frozen as if by some inward congealing of the mind. And she rose to her feet.
She went forward with deliberate steps. And Alan, bemused by Flande's power, could do nothing but follow, knowing with a dreadful certainty what was happening because of the stir deep in his own brain ...
So long as she remained awake and mistress of herself, Evaya had kept her mind closed to that distant call. But when Flande put his sleep upon her to stop her revealing words, he had opened the gateway of her priestess mind ...
Alan was scarcely aware of their passage through Carcasilla. That stirring in the roots of his brain blinded and deafened him to everything but the slim, cloudy figure moving stiffly on ahead, over the fantastic bridges, the spiraled streets, toward a distant spot which they both knew well ... too well.
Before the great black circle where the light-veiled statue stood, Evaya paused. Alan paused behind her, a dozen paces away. The calling in his mind was very powerful now. A ravenous call, bellowing soundlessly from somewhere dangerously near.
Evaya touched something at the feet of the blinding statue, and quite suddenly a great flare of brilliance shot out all around the figure. It was like the blare of a struck gong, shivering out in a great wave over Carcasilla. If there could be such a thing as sound made visible, this was it.
Behind him, he heard the rising murmur of many soft voices, drawing near. All Carcasilla whispering its surprise, whispering perhaps with the awakening of memories buried deep behind the forgetfulness of many sleeps. Alan turned slowly and with infinite effort, for some inhibitory power was drugging his nerve-centers now and spreading through his body from that summoning in the brain.
The people of Carcasilla were answering the call. By tens, by scores, by hundreds, they came. Alan had not guessed before how many dwellers the city had. And when the last gossamer-robed citizen joined the crowd, and the wondering murmurs rose in a susurus all around them—exactly then, without turning, Evaya lifted her arms. Perhaps she touched some switch. Alan could not tell what.
She was facing the great circle of darkness upon the wall. Her arms were lifted, and her face. Her voice, clear and toneless as a bell, rang out over the assembly.
"Enter to your people, Light-Wearer and Lord."
A shiver seemed to run over the surface of the black disc on the wall. It was less disc than opening now. The opening to a long, dark tunnel ... Far down it something moved—brightly shimmering ...
Alan knew that it was infinitely far away. But it was rushing nearer with breathtaking speed. Each stride of its long legs—if these were legs—carried it shockingly nearer, as if it covered leagues with every step. The light-robes swirled around its devouring strides ...
It was near—it was almost upon them. It hovered, monstrous and glowing in the mouth of the tunnel, filling the high black circle of its disc ...
And then, with one great swoop, it burst into the violet daylight of Carcasilla.
-
ALAN'S confused impressions of the thing were too contradictory to have meaning. Was it monstrously tall? He could not tell, even as it stood there against the black mouth of the disc. Had it been blazingly robed in light against that blackness? He couldn't be sure. For, here in the light of the city, it was dark—a billowing darkness that swooped down upon its worshippers with a terrible avidity . It enveloped Evaya, who was foremost, in a cloud of nothingness, as if great unseen arms had seized her up in a devouring embrace.
Alan could not stir. His mind had congealed inside his congealed body, and he could only stand and stare, drowning in helpless wonder as he watched. For here at last, tangibly before him, was the nameless thing that had haunted all the hours of his awakening and the fathomless hours of his sleep. The questing creature that had run upon his tracks in the mist, the enigmatic watcher from the Citadel, the being whose dreams he had shared altogether too closely, in the long night-time of the ship.
He stared in frozen dismay as Evaya vanished into the cloudy grip of the Alien. Surely the Carcasillians had come to worship, expecting benediction—not this! This avid clutching grasp, as if the creature had been starving for countless centuries ...
Before the crowd about him could catch its breath, the tall, blinding robed figure—it was dark or light?—had tossed Evaya aside with a gesture almost of impatience, and was striding down upon the next nearest. It swooped and seized and enveloped with motion so incredibly swift that the Carcasillians could not have turned or fled even if they wished. And the great, striding god went through them like a reaper through grain, snatching up, enveloping, hurling aside figure after figure, and flashing on to the next.
Far back in Alan's brain, behind the helpless horror, the terrible revulsion, the more terrible taint of kinship with this being whose dreams he had known—lay one small corner of detached awareness. In that corner of his mind he watched and reasoned with a coolness that almost matched Sir Colin' s scientific detachment. "It can't get at them," he told himself. "Somehow, they're protected. Somehow, the good Light-Wearers gave them armor to wear—like a spiked collar for their pets. Whatever it wants it isn't getting it here. Not yet ..."
The stooping and rising and inevitable nearing of that figure almost shook even the cool corner of his brain as it came closer and closer, reaping among the standing rows of Carcasillians. Alan strained vainly at his frozen limbs. Now it was two rows ahead of him. Now it was one—Tall, formless, all but invisible in its robes that were both lightness and dark ...
The towering, inhuman thing stooped above his head with an avid swoop, its robes fell about him like blindness to shut out the violet day. He felt a vortex of hungry violence sweeping him up. Vertigo—gravity falling away beneath him—
And then a strange, indescribable, long-drawn "Ah-h-h!" of inhuman satisfaction breathing voiceless through his brain. And a probing—eager, ravenous, ruthless—as if intangible fingers were thrusting down all through his mind, his body, among his nerves, into his very soul. They were bruising fingers that in a moment would rip him inside out, bodily and mentally, as a fish might be gutted.
Instinct made him stiffen against them, with a stiffening of more than muscles. His mind went rigid in anger and rebellion, along with his body. And the thing that clutched him hesitated. He could feel its surprise and uncertainty, and he struck out into the blindness with futile fists, gasping choked curses that were less words than anger made audible. He was awake now, vividly, painfully awake as he had not been since his first bath in the fountain. And he fought with all the fury that was in him against this devouring thing that was—he knew it now—starving with an inhuman hunger for the life-force he was fighting to protect.
This much he knew, in that inviolable corner of the brain where reason still dwelt. This creature was evil made incarnate, and its hunger was diabolic now. It could not touch the Carcasillians; he was its last hope. Its struggles to overpower him were as desperate in their way as his were to be free.
For one timeless instant Alan shared its hunger. And he shared its dismay and sorrow. He knew what it was to wake upon a dying world and find only the ruined relics of kinsmen that once had ruled the planet. Ruin and starvation and unthinkable loneliness.
He felt those gutting fingers thrust down along the track of the understanding thoughts, deep into his awareness, ripping and tearing.
He closed his mind like a steel trap against the treacherous sympathy of those thoughts, closed it as if he closed his eyes to shut out a terrible sight. With a brain tight-shut against everything but the danger he must fight, he stiffened against that probing, ravenous need raging all about him.
And he was holding his own. He sensed that. By fighting with every ounce of strength in him, he could hold his own. And when that strength began to fail ...
The blindness around him rifted now and again in his timeless, furious, voiceless fight. He could catch glimpses of violet light and the awed faces of the Carcasillians, and then dark again. Dark, and the starving desperation of the Alien tearing at him in a vortex of inhuman, demanding need.
And then, suddenly and bewilderingly—the bellow of gunfire.
That half-tangible grip upon him jolted—staggered—slipped away. Alan reeled back upon the slope of the white ramp, too dizzy to see anything clearly, knowing only in this moment that he was free and still alive. And then he heard—or was it a dream again?—a familiar, rasping voice, burred with strong emotion.
"Alan, laddie—gie us yer han'! Alan, here I am, laddie! It's Colin—here!"
Hard fingers dug into his arm, and a ruddy, bearded face, grinning with strain, thrust close to his. "Come awa', laddie—hurry! Can ye no see they're angry? Come awa'!"
Surprise had lost all power over Alan. Sir Colin's miraculous return from oblivion, was not enough to startle him now. He wrenched away from that urgent grip on his arm, his mind taking up automatically what had been blanked out of it when the Light-Wearer swooped down.
"Evaya—" he said hoarsely, finding his throat raw, as if he had been shouting. Perhaps he had, in the blindness and silence of the Alien's embrace. "Evaya—"
He had seen her last lying on the white ramp in a crumple of gossamer garments and showering hair. She was still there, but on her feet now, and looking down at him still with that face of inhuman ivory, the eyes blank mirrors that reflected only what the Light-Wearer whispered in her brain.
The Light-Wearer! Alan whirled, remembering, not feeling the tug upon his arm as Sir Colin rumbled an urgent warning. He could see the Light-Wearer at the very edge of vision, hovering cloudily down the slope. He did not dare look directly at it. The bewildering thing hurt his very brain as the eyes are hurt by brilliance.
It was the gunfire that had jolted it. He was still half in rapport with the creature from that terrible intimacy of the fingers prying down into his brain. He knew it was hesitating, torn between fear of the crashing thunder again, and that intolerable hunger still driving it on.
He could not bring himself to face it, but he knew when it decided what to do. He looked up at Evaya a moment before her toneless puppet-voice broke the quivering silence. It was the Light-Wearer who spoke, but the people turned to Evaya to hear the words it was putting into her mouth.
"Take them!" cried her voice, with a timbre of inhuman fury in it that was not Evaya's. Her arm came up in a commanding gesture that carried a dreadful hint of hovering robes—as if her possession were so complete that even the garment of the Light-Wearer were subtly visible around her. "Take them!" the inhuman voice thundered from her lips. (How hideous—how unthinkable—that the voice of a being not made of flesh spoke now through these lips of flesh!)
A low murmur of anger rose obediently among the Carcasillians. They rolled forward toward the two men, blind, hypnotic fury on their faces. Beyond them the half-seen figure of the Light-Wearer shimmered like smoke upon the air. Alan could feel its thunder beating out at him.
One moment more, he hesitated. The memory of Flande had come back, and he was searching these blank, threatening faces before him. Was one of them Flande? Or was Flande human at all? Was he watching imperturbably through the showers of his raining tower?
"Damn ye, mon, wake up!" roared Sir Colin in his ear. "Ye aren't worth rescuing! Are ye comin' or aren't ye?"
Alan shook himself awake. "Yes," he said. "I'm coming."
The rising murmur of the Carcasillians sounded louder behind them as they hurried up the ramp. Alan hesitated with a moment's shuddering memory of the funnel of infinite blackness down which the Light-Wearer had come striding. The thought of entering it was worse than the thought of turning to face what lay behind him.
But when he looked, the tunnel was no longer there. The great round disc of the gateway opened now upon a passage of gray stone slanting away into dimness outside the violet daylight of Carcasilla's cavern.
Alan glanced back. Evaya lifted a face rigid as ice to him, a blind stare through which the Light-Wearer looked terribly into his eyes. Sir Colin called, "Hurry, mon!" in a voice that reverberated hollowly from the walls of the low passage outside.
Alan stepped through the gateway and out of Carcasilla.
-
THUNDER bellowed from Sir Colin's gun as Alan cleared the threshold. The noise was deafening; flinders of the stone flew from the corridor's walls as the air reechoed with the sound of the shot. Alan turned in bewilderment, to see the ruddy Scot's face of his companion wrinkling in a satisfied grin. "I thought so," Sir Colin said, lowering his gun. "Look."
A darkness was thickening over the doorway to Carcasilla. The violet light that poured through it dimmed as they watched, and within moments the barrier of darkness had closed over this gateway to shut them out, as the door of light they had first entered had closed to shut them in.
"It hates noise," Sir Colin grunted. "And it's still—maybe not sure of itself. I've had to use my gun on the domned thing before."
Alan did not at once realize the import of the words. He stared at the black circle upon the wall, a closed gate beyond which the Light-Wearer stood alone with Evaya and her people. He knew it did not belong there. The nameless builder of Carcasilla had put up barriers to keep out just such creatures as that. But now the dream-like city belonged to it, and the dream-like people, and Evaya whom he had known so briefly and so well—Evaya, the most dream-enchanted of them all, with her eyes that reflected the Alien thoughts and her body the instrument for Alien commands.
Sir Colin followed his gaze. "It's all right," he said. "The Light-Wearer can't hurt them. You saw that. But it could hurt us. We're lucky to get away so easily. I doubt if I'd have dared tackle that—that thing—if I hadn't seen it driven back by the Terasi's drums."
Alan looked at him, belated amazement welling up now that the crisis was over. The Scotsman had obviously been through strenuous activity since their parting. Scars and bruises showed through his ragged clothing, and there were new lines in his haggard face. But the red beard, unkempt and roughly trimmed, jutted with the same arrogant cocksureness.
"The Terasi drums? Those savages—how did you get away from them? And Karen—she's alive?"
Sir Colin patted the air soothingly with a big hand. "Karen and Mike are both verra much alive, laddie. But we'll talk as we go. And mind you keep a sharp lookout, too. The Way of the Gods isna so safe for men!"
"Way of the Gods?" Alan followed the Scotsman's gesture along the shadowy, ruinous corridor stretching before them. Once it might have been wider and higher, but it could never have been ornate, he thought. Now the broken walls gaped into the darkness here and there, blocking the pavement with fallen stones. "What gods?" he asked. "Why?"
"They call it that—the Terasi, I mean. And the gods were the Light-Wearers, of course. Didn't ye learn anything at all in Carcasilla?"
"I know that much, sure," Alan said, following Sir Colin over the broken stones that heaped the corridor floor. Here in the semi-twilight of ruin, Carcasilla's perfection seemed like a dream already. But it was hard to leave. He looked back over his shoulder at the closed black gateway upon the wall.
"It's the best way, laddie," Sir Colin said gruffly. "Come along. You'll realize that when I tell you what's happened. And keep your eyes open as we go."
"What do you expect?" Alan glanced uneasily about in the dimness.
"Anything at all. This was a—a sort of experimental laboratory for the Light-Wearers, once. The Carcasillians are one result. There were others." He nodded toward a gap in the wall, darkness within it. "Something used to live there, I suppose. And there, and there. Carcasilla's the last perfect experiment, but not all the others died at once."
