Collected Short Fiction, page 184
Again and again he felt a pain in his ears which he could relieve only by repeated swallowing—an effect, he recognized, of the increased barometric pressure, which otherwise did not trouble him.
He amused himself by attempting to estimate the size of the secret world. In fifteen hours, he thought, he must have dropped at least one hundred miles, even allowing for a slower rate in the denser air. Assuming the green dome to be a true hemisphere, that would make the diameter of its circular floor about two hundred miles.
The first conspicuous detail to emerge from the gray-blue haze in the heavy air was a low bank of white cloud that hung over the eastern half of the disc-shaped world—a wall of white mist shot queerly with bright flame; Motes of clear fire flickered and danced unendingly within it.
Westward he made out presently a great mass of land, curving along the wall of the dome. Dark rugged mountains and plains, he saw, that were splotched with scarlet and blue—colors, he supposed, of vegetation.
Between this land and the mystery of the bright-flecked mist lay a vast reach of sea that was darkly purple, patched with a few black markings, that, he thought, must be islands. He hoped for some wind to carry him toward the land, was presently certain that he would fall, instead, into the purple sea!
The vivid and fantastic coloration of the lost world caused him no surprise; it must have been, he knew, deliberately planned.
Miles had anticipated difficulty in finding Su-Ildra. Bak-Toreg, the insidious priest of the mysterious “Red One,” he knew, would have her imprisoned somewhere. Bak-Toreg wanted to shut her up, the girl had informed him; he dared not yet defy the Lelura, the Flame Folk, to the extent of doing away with her.
It was a queer freak of fate that dropped him almost into the girl’s prison, right, as Miles put it, into Sue’s lap.
He fell into the purple sea, the smothering folds of the parachute collapsing on top of him. He unfastened the harness, dived clear of it, removed his shoes and enough of his clothing to permit him to swim.
The dense air was rather hazy. He could not see far in any direction, but after some time, he distinguished the dark contour of one of the tiny black islands he had noted from above, dim in the haze, and struck out toward it.
It must have been several miles, though, in the strange atmosphere, he was unable to judge distances with any accuracy. At any rate, he was thoroughly exhausted before he reached it.
A jagged pillar of black rock it was, breaking the somberly purple sea with a curling spray of white. Crowning its highest grim pinnacle was a dome of blue, a tiny strange building.
He dragged himself through the rushing surf, let the waves fling him at a corner of the rock, seized it. Desperately he clung to it as the water ebbed away; he climbed, then, and presently found a steep and perilous path, leading up the sharp edge of the rock to the queer small cylinder of the blue house on the pinnacle.
He toiled up, dead with fatigue, and rapped wearily on the door of the strange house. The door, after a little time—it was a curving panel of violet metal—was flung abruptly open. Astonished, there before him, stood Su-Ildra!
The woman of all his dreams. . . . dark eyes that were wistfully blue, and hair that was a copper flame. Vast amazement was first upon her pallid face; it melted into incredulous and transcendent joy.
“Miles!” she sobbed in ineffable wondering gladness. “Miles! I knew yout would come!”
Content, a desire to relax, to give way to his weariness, flowed over Miles in a dark warm flood. He reeled and staggered upon the narrow ledge above the sea, and Su-Ildra helped him through the door.
Already, he had found her! It had been too easy. He had an odd feeling that fate was jesting with him, that he was destined to lose her again as quickly as he had found her.
He was sick with exhaustion. She brought him food, anxious about him. He ate a little, tried to keep awake to talk to her, fell asleep with his head in her arms. When he woke, she was still with him. They were happy—with a happiness embittered with the constant realization that they were both, now, prisoners of Bak-Toreg, both at his mercy—if the priest of the Red One had such a quality.
Once—it was near the end of that brief, bitterly joyous time upon the rock—they were together under the blue dome that capped the blue dwelling. There were many broad windows in it; they could look out across the purple sea and the green-and-silver sky, with its seven high, vari-colored suns. They spent much time there, for there was no space outside to walk.
“That way lies Aral.” Su-Ildra whispered wistfully, pointing into the hazy nest. “Aral, my country.”
Miles looked at her—slim and tall in light blue silken garments, the dark eyes in her thin oval face pensively blue, coppery glints dancing in her hair beneath the light of the wheeling northern suns.
“It is a beautiful land. A little time ago my people dwelt there, content, tilling their farms in the rich valleys, or hunting upon their eagles. They called me their ruler, for I was keeper of the Sign. But they were happy, peaceful; they had no need of laws or ruler.
“And then the evil power of Neng fell upon us. The red women, and Bak-Toreg, with his evil arts, hunted us, slew us, carried us to Neng to offer to the Red One.
“I escaped for a while, and hid. Then the Sign shone, for the first time m generations. The Flame Folk spoke to me, commanded me to go into the world above. I flew out upon my eagle. There I found you, Miles. And Bak-Toreg brought me back, left me here upon the rock.
“He dared not give me to the Red One, for he still fears the Flame Folk, even though they do nothing.”
CHAPTER II
The Sign
l “The Sign?” Miles questioned, a little bewildered, as always, by talk of the shadowy powers of Xandulu.
Su-Ildra reached inside her garments and drew out a small pouch of dark leather upon a chain of violet metal. From the pouch she took a little roll of white silk—out of the silk she slipped a glistening bit of polished crystal.
Ice-clear, gem-bright, it was in shape a flattened ellipsoid, three inches by one and a half, and no more than a quarter of an inch thick. The girl surrendered it carefully to his hand. He examined it; though perfectly finished, it seemed a very ordinary piece of rock crystal.
Handing it back to Su-Ildra, he said nothing. But with her quick intuition of his thoughts, she divined what was in his mind.
“You think it is nothing,” she whispered, “And so did many of my people. For generations it had been dead—as you see it. We kept it as a sign of the friendship of the Flame Folk—a pledge. They gave it to our fathers when they came into Xandulu.
“Miles,” she whispered solemnly, “I have seen it light. I have seen the Flame Folk in it. It was they who sent me to the world above the sky, to you—”
Her whisper died with a low breathless cry of wonder. The dark eyes were big in the pale oval of her face, and they stared at the crystal. It lay upon her trembling hand. Miles glanced at it and was astounded.
Palely, eerily, the little ellipse was glowing.
Su-Ildra held it higher on her palm, tilted it so that they both could look within it.
“Again it lights,” she breathed. “The Flame Folk once more would speak! Indeed they remember. . . .”
No longer was the crystal clear. Milky cloudiness filled it—white opalescence—a pallid mist, alive with evanescent motes of flame. Vague memory tapped at Miles’ mind at sight of that white, flame-shot cloudiness. He groped for it, and recalled his descent into Xandulu.
White clouds, then, flickering with faint reverberations of unseen flame, had hidden the eastern half of the secret world. Now he guessed that Lelural, the mysterious land of the equally mysterious Flame Folk, lay beneath that white, fire-crossed mist.
That memory came and vanished, and he gazed into the glowing ellipse. The opalescence was clearing. The crystal became again transparent, super-transparent. It became a clear window, and he looked deep into it, through it, and at something far beyond.
A tiny thing, the crystal was, narrower than the small white tremulous palm in which it lay. But the being that Miles saw in it seemed oddly not small, but real and large and very far away.
The creature seemed to be looking at them from the crystal. Miles gazed at it in mute wonder. It was not a reptile, not any familiar reptile, certainly. Yet unmistakably much about it was reptilian. The fire-flecked whiteness of the mist dissolved from about it and left it clearly visible in a place with dark green walls. It stood upright there and watched them.
Its body—as much of its body as Miles could see—was covered with bright scales, emerald, polished, glittering like hard metal. Its arms were scalded, too, virescent; its horny fingers were tipped with slender claws, needle-sharp, incredibly delicate.
Its head was plainly reptilian, yet strangely beautiful; and something about it—perhaps only its obvious intelligence and sympathy—struck Miles as human. It possessed a singular beak, broad, curved, gleaming with the brilliance of ruby lacquer. The green-armored skull was hooded with a gay carapace of scarlet scales.
Oval and lidless and surprisingly large, its intensely black eyes shone with a light that was surely the glow of Mind; there was kindness in them, and weariness of time unthinkable, and sad laughter. Tiny and far-off as this curious being seemed in the crystal, Miles felt in those eyes a curious directness and understanding.
Those lidless eyes, he knew, had seen all existence. Their gaze had penetrated to the ends of Space. They had looked back to the Beginning, they had seen through the veil of the Future. Much they had found to interest them, much to rouse sorrow and laughter and fear, much to weary them, and nothing to make them hope. For they were tired and infinitely wise, and the quivering flame of hope was not in them.
Its wings were the being’s strangest feature. Wings, alone, could Miles term them; yet he doubted that they had ever been intended for flight. Like a drooping robe of thin, transparent stuff, they sprang from the shoulders of the creature and fell about its green-scaled body. Diaphanously transparent, they shimmered with veined flame, living, restlessly flowing. Miraculous membranes, golden and blue and softly violet, they folded the being in a mantle of fire.
This creature, Miles instinctively knew, must be the flower of the Age of Reptiles, as Man is the climax of the Age of Mammals.
l “It is Alú the Youngest of Lelural,” whispered Su-Ildra. “Lean near, Miles. He would speak with you.”
Blankly wondering, a little bit frightened, Miles brought his face closer to the tiny ellipse in the girl’s hand where the vision glowed so strangely bright. He looked at the reptilian being and the oval dark eyes met his intelligently.
Then a voice was impinging upon his mind. It was not sound; he did not hear it. It did not even express itself in words, but in the very stuff of thought itself. Without a language, even without pictures, it brought its meaning clearly to him.
“Miles Kendon, you are surprised. Empty your mind of fear, for we have a matter of grave import to tell you. Why should you be astonished, when even with the young science of the world above, men can talk across the world and even see each others’ features by the crude mechanisms that sometime may grow into such an instrument as the Sign? Is this more wonderful than the Well, and the green dome, and the seven suns?”
Miles tried a grin, and muttered, “Okay. Talk.”
“Listen well—for the future of the planet may depend upon you and your life and the life of the woman by you. For we, the Flame Folk, have let live the seed of evil until it has made a great and hideous weed that seeks to grasp the whole earth in the black tentacles of its roots.
“As you already understand, the Flame Folk were once great. When your fathers were yet climbers in the forests we mastered the world without—or such part of it as we needed. We accomplished all that your race has done, and most of what you only dream of doing.
“Age upon age we ruled the planet, until we were weary of reigning. For know that races have youth and decline and death, even as have nations and men. Decline came upon us, and we no longer cared to conquer, but only to live.
“Then came the periodic age-long waning of the sun, and the cruel descent of the Ice upon the earth. To escape the cold and the ever-greater difficulties of life upon the surface, we spent the last constructive energy of our dwindling kind in the forming of Xandulu.
“Another age have we dwelt here, until our decline is near the brink of death. And yet we cling to life; we desire not to be destroyed. That is why we speak to you.
“Two other races were growing into the fulfillment of life when we left the world above—your race and another that you know only in your traditions of Atlantis and Lemuria. In order that their young arts might not be lost beneath the ice, we brought into Xandulu those of each race who wished to come with us and gave them two lands where they might live until the departing of the ice.
“The red race above grew wicked and was slain by the evil of its own creation.
And that evil, together with the peril of the ice, brought your own kind back into the shadow of barbarism from which you are only now creeping forth.
“In Xandulu, the two races changed also. The Ara became but hunters and peaceful farming folk, their budding science forgotten in the simple joys of life. The Ryka cherished their wisdom, but they consecrated it to a new mad god of destruction, of death and pain.
“The Ara forgot the outer earth. But the Ryka, the red folk, kept alive memory of the world above. Ever they planned to return, not to settle and build new nations, but to satiate their lust of destruction, to set the heel of their evil Red One upon the new people without.
“Seeing the hateful madness of their faith, we forbade the Ryka to go out. Like them, we see no Hope in all the cosmos. Death and cold and stillness are the end, for all. But we find matter for-laughter; and even in sorrow there is sweetness. We would not hasten the end.
“Their mad priesthood courted forbidden knowledge of the sciences of destruction. They seek to overwhelm the earth with a wave of red conquest, to offer all life on the altar of the Red One. Their final aim is to destroy the whole planet, when they may—and already their evil science grasps at the dread discovery that will enable them to shatter the solid earth!
“The faith of the Red One is an insane faith of annihilation.
“The Flame Folk are weak, near the abyss of death. We still possess the great science that formed Xandulu. But we have lost the vigor, the will, to use it. Bak-Toreg has defied our power; he had laid waste Aral, that was under our protection.
“And we cannot fight him. We have reached a state in the development of mind when violence is impossible. We have lost all primitive vigor and the instinct of combat. We cannot—even to save ourselves and the planet itself—we cannot make war!
“You, Miles Kendon, must be our champion.”
“Eh?” Miles was amazed. He looked away from the strange bright figure in the shining ellipse, smiled absently at the lovely girl beside him, glanced through the windows of the blue-walled room, at the lonely purple sea beneath a sky of silvered emerald.
At last, over-riding his sense of strangeness and his awe, he spoke at the ellipse.
“You can hear me? Well, let’s get this straight. You want me to fight Bak-Toreg and the others? There’s a chance to smash them?—to get Sue out of their power?”
“You understand. Victory will not be easy. It is far from certain. The evil power of Bak-Toreg has grown too long. We will give our aid, but all depends upon you.”
“What must I do?” demanded Miles.
“You must destroy the Red One,” came the soundless reply.
“The Red One—”
“The Red One is a god of destruction, created by the priests of the Ryka to be the symbol and the avatar of their belief in annihilation. Every member of their cult must sooner or later throw himself to the fangs of the Red One, as his supreme gesture of faith—and the final goal of the cult is the destruction of the planet, the blotting out of all life, in the name of the Red One.
“Miles Kendon,” the wordless message continued, “you left Bak-Toreg in Aral. He has long been back in Neng. He has hesitated to touch you, knowing you to be so near Su-Ildra and hence to the Flame Folk. But again he dares to defy us!
“Even now the arm of his power is reaching out to carry you to Neng. He plans to offer you to the Red One, Miles Kendon. You must go to meet his fangs and slay that foul spawn of the priests. For it is a symbol of the mad cult, and its destruction alone will stay the tide of ruin they plan.
“The death of the Red One will halt them. It will give us a chance to turn them aside from their hideous design. And what means more to you, Miles Kendon, it will save Su-Ildra. For if we allow the Red One to destroy you, then Bak-Toreg will know our power is a jest, and Su-Ildra will follow you to its fangs.
“This I, Alú the Youngest, tell you in the name of the Flame Folk.”
Swiftly the crystal clouded with fireshot opalescence that veiled the bright reptilian figure. The mistiness cleared and very soon the little ellipse was again perfectly transparent, apparently a very ordinary fragment of polished quartz.
Miles and Su-Ildra waited in the tiny house upon the rock for the striking of the sinister hand of Bak-Toreg—waited for the battle with the shadowy terrors of a world that was half paradise and half nightmare. Heavy upon Miles weighed the brooding doom of Xandulu, a sense of elder power, lurking, inexorably menacing.
CHAPTER III
The City of Blue Porcelain
l Miles and Su-Ildra stood beneath the azure dome, gazing fearfully through the wide ovals of its windows which were glazed with hinged panels of an unbreakable glass. Upon the black base of the rock below, the purple sea roared white; the tawny waste of it stretched desolate to silver-green horizons. High to northward hung the seven suns, their mingled beams falling through the windows to make upon the floor fantastic shadows fringed with polychromatic bands.
