Collected Short Fiction, page 190
Many nights when my feeble body should have been at rest, I sat in the yacht’s tiny radio room until far toward the dawn, receivers on my ears, searching the ether for some word from Miles. And at last my eager persistence met reward!
It was during the middle of a windless night, the Gay Moth furrowing an oily sea to leeward of Lanzarote, when a whisper disturbed the rustle of static on the wave-band Miles had named.
Then I heard the voice of Miles Kendon!
“Good evening, Brandy,” he said, and his familiar tone was as easy as if he spoke merely across a whisky and soda, and not from one hundred miles below. “That is, if it happens to be evening up in your world. My watch stopped—well, some time ago. I haven’t kept track of the time, but it must be a month or so since I left you. Haven’t thought to call you up. Let me know if you happen to be listening.”
Feverishly, I roused Connors, the operator. Not an even breath did I draw until we had the transmitter tuned, and I shouted into it.
“Miles!” I yelled. “Miles-! Where are you? I’m so glad to hear! ‘A month or so!’ It’s been eight months! But tell me what has happened—”
“Good old Brandy,” his voice murmured back. “I knew you’d be listening if I could just catch you at the right time. But eight months! I don’t know where they’ve gone!. . . . Tell me how you are, Brandy. No hurry. We’ve all night.”
I could hear the ringing vitality of his voice, even in the faint whisper of the phones. The sound brought vividly back to me a living picture of Miles—lean, tall, massive of shoulder. I saw his thin face, smiling, yet touched with something grim and given a hint of sardonic malice by the old scar on his temple. A blond Viking, he was, who plunged into the slumbering perils of Xandulu as eagerly as Eric the Red breasted hostile seas.
“You’re in Xandulu, Miles?” I questioned. “You found Su-Ildra?”
“You’re right as a royal flush, Brandy. Right now we’re on Arnac Rock. As for finding Sue, I’ll tell you all about it when we have time. I suppose you’re still drifting about the seven seas on the little old tub?”
All that night I talked to Miles, and below I have tried to set down the story that he told me.
CHAPTER II
The Trap on Arnac Rock
l Of the descent into Xandulu, little need be said. Without untoward incident, Miles flew southward over the great plain of Marrakesh, over the foothills and past the great peak of Tinzar. Again he found that nameless necropolis of strange green stone in the mountainous edge of the Sahara beyond the High Atlas. Just at sunset, on the same day he left me at Algiers, he dived the plane into the Well.
Cutting off the motor to conserve gasoline, he volplaned down the great shaft in silence complete save for the rush of air against his machine, isolated in the gulf between two worlds. Night came above as he glided in a close spiral down the thousand-foot pit, and a few stars burst into the dwindling disk of the sky.
Intense eagerness filled him to reach the end of this phenomenal flight; each new feature of the hidden world brought him more poignant memories of Su-Ildra. Her sweet face and her dark eyes pensive beneath a helmet of coppery hair were living in his mind when the green walls of the Well grew brilliant with the undying day of Xandulu, and he dropped beneath the amazing dome that arches Xandulu.
His heart beat faster when he saw the close-grouped seven suns below, swimming in the blue haze that hangs forever in the heavy air. Pushing the machine into a steeper dive, he flung it screaming down, slipping past them toward the tiny isle of Arnac in the southern sea.
Aral became visible through the haze, the western land of Su-Ildra’s decimated people, crimson with its strange forests. And far in the south lay the dark island of Neng, dwelling of the dread Ryka, the scarlet folk, whose hideous scorpion-god he had slain.
Over the eastern half of the great disk of Xandulu, a bank of white mist clung—milky haze, increasingly alive with evanescent motes of flame. Beneath it, he knew, lay Lelural, land of the Flame-Folk, of the reptilian race, most ancient and mysterious of the dwellers in Xandulu, possessing incredible powers, yet paradoxically unable to cope with the mad threat of Bak-Toreg and his cult of annihilation.
Miles pondered the astounding being, “Alú the Youngest” his ally in the adventure in Neng, whose astounding mastery of space had carried him by an unbelievable method to Algiers.
An uncomfortable feeling filled Miles—it seemed almost a premonition—that the conflict of dread and ancient forces which had involved him was not yet done. True, the Red One was dead—but the gigantic scorpion had been no more than a symbol. Bak-Toreg still lived, with the power of his mad religion of destruction yet in full tide behind him.
Had the yellow-faced priest abandoned his insane design? Miles knew in his heart that he had not.
The abrupt black rock of Arnac grew out of the purple sea, and the tiny blue cylinder of the house, the prison, perched upon its highest crag, at last was visible. The somber, strange-hued sea was almost ominously still. Miles brought his craft down easily upon the metallic surface and safely close in the lee of the rode.
He swam ashore with a line. The sea plane made secure, he scrambled up a knife-edge of black, brine-crusted stone to the tiny blue edifice where he and the lovely Su-Ildra had drained the bittersweet cup of their brief joy, before the insidious hand of Bak-Toreg tore them apart.
Deadly stillness overhung the rock and Miles’s heart paused as he neared the summit, for he saw that the metal door of the strange house was vacantly open.
“Sue!” he panted as he staggered desperately for the few remaining yards. “Sue! You all right, Sue?”
No sound, no movement came from the cylinder of blue porcelain.
Miles burst through the yawning door, searched the silence-haunted lower rooms.
“Sue!” he shouted despairingly, leaping up the stair to the broad, many-windowed room on the upper floor where had been spent their hours of happiest communion, and where the invading sphere of the yellow priest had reached them.
“Sue! Where are you, kid?”
The upper room was also still.
The gaping hole tom in the blue wall by the attacking instrumentalities was unrepaired, and through the ragged opening came the weary whisper of a dying breeze. Far beneath, the purple sea was a dead and somber plain. Through the crystal ovals of the great north windows streamed the rays of the clustered suns, splashing the floor with mingled strange colors.
“Sue! I know you’re here! No use hiding from me, kid!”
He ran across the room.
On a couch, where it had been hidden from him as he stood at the head of the stair, he found the still white form.
The white body was motionless, unbreathing, covered to the shoulders with a sheer silken coverlet. The oval face was pallid and fixed; the dark abundant lashes were lying like shadows on the blanched cheeks. The long hair was loose in a splendid torrent, falling across one delicate shoulder, almost to the floor.
“Sue!” Agony shook his voice. “Oh, Sue!”
Fearfully, with a trembling hand, he touched the exposed fair shoulder.
His hand encountered no human flesh.
A cold, hard surface, like glass, met his fingers—the surface of a lifeless, painted image.
His dazed mind paused. What was this?—a deceptive likeness of his beloved as she might lie in death. What did it mean? And what had become of Sue? Had the yellow priest spirited her away, leaving this mocking dummy in her place? Why? Where was Su-Ildra?
Miles seized the arm of the figure.
It was light, evidently but a hollow shell.
Then he leapt back, and the fragile thing slipped from his nerveless fingers to shatter like glass on the floor. His eyes were riveted upon the couch, on something that had been covered by the silken sheet—a writhing, unfolding mass of bright, copper-hued coils. It looked like a tangle of thin wire, suddenly alive.
Ends reached out of the glistening, stirring tangle—ends flattened into little disks and glowing faintly, as if powdered with golden dust. Long gleaming tendrils that reached out like copper wire changed by some dread alchemy into living vines, growing incredibly.
Miles did not understand. But he knew that here was something hellish—some devilish work of the yellow priest, this amazing likeness of Su-Ildra and the stirring mass of metallic filaments.
A tiny golden disk reached his bare wrist. The touch of it seared like incandescent metal.
Startled from his brief paralysis of wonderment, Miles cried out and snatched away his arm. He turned and tried to run toward the door, but the one second of bewilderment had held him too long.
He felt his feet wrapped in a tangle of the sinister coppery strands. Searing pain stabbed at his calves and ankles at a score of points; he stumbled, fought in vain to keep his balance, then fell at full length on the floor.
With a fearful, avid quickness, the bright strands bound him. Even as he made his first attempt to rise, thin hard wires reached about his arms and shoulders, drew themselves cruelly tight. From a thousand points about his body stabbed agonizing pain as the little golden disks greedily sought his flesh.
The coils were about his throat. He could no longer breathe. He gasped. In his ears was a roaring. Fiery pains touched his cheeks; he felt sharp wires cutting into them. Darkness thundered down upon him, shattered with cruel lightnings of pain.
His staggering brain struggled to understand what was happening. This was the work of Bak-Toreg. It was a trap! The image of Su-Ildra had been a lure to bring him within reach of this frightful, unbelievable destroyer of living wire.
He writhed and shuddered and fought blindly at the merciless amazing net that had enfolded him. Ten thousand piercing pains were drowned in the night of oblivion. Where was Su-Ildra, he thought?. . . . what had been done with her?. . . .
CHAPTER III
“We Are Done”
l For Miles there was no sensation of transition. He had no sense even that time had passed. One second he was in the house on Arnac Rock being swiftly strangled by the tightening coppery strands. The next—so it seemed—he was safely free of them, standing erect, his tortured lungs filling with fresh air. Yet even in that first moment, he knew he was no longer on the rock.
“What—what was the thing?” he muttered as breath came back to him, his mind dwelling on the writhing horror of the grasping metallic coils, to the exclusion of his new surroundings.
“Bak-Toreg calls it the vine of doom. It is but one more fruit of the science of horror that he and his priests still nurture in the temples of their dead god—evil life, lust of destruction, breathed into hard metal. It is based on a complex metal life-cell. You are the first who has escaped the vine.”
That answer came not in spoken words, but in the silent rush of thought—through direct contact with a brain that knew no limitations in Matter or Space.
His attention for the first time on his surroundings, Miles started and swung himself around.
He stood upon a narrow high terrace, his feet buried in a yielding carpet of blue-flowering moss. Beside him leapt up the milky, polished walls of a sky-piercing tower into an unbroken canopy of white, flame-flecked mist. The terrace was rimmed with a low parapet of glistening, snowy stone. Beyond it, at a dizzy distance below, was an undulating field of blue.
Here and there about the blue rolling expanse plunged up other towers of crystal white, slim pylons, incredibly lofty. They were far apart, many so far distant that they were but ghosts, shrouded in fireshot mist.
Upon the tapering spire of each structure burned a globe of pure flame, a swirling sphere of opalescence, from which glowing, polychromatic motes danced incessantly away to increase the swarming specks of light that swam through the overhanging mist.
This, Miles knew, must be a city. Like the blue city of Neng, like the shattered necropolis of green stone above the Well, it was a city of immense, solitary pylons. But these white towers were higher than any buildings he had seen or imagined and this metropolis was far vaster than Neng—how large it was he could not know, for all the edges of it were obscured in the mist.
And the spinning globes of mingled colors, burning on the white pinnacles and feeding the mist with their spawn of many-hued dancing particles, brought the city a bewildering strangeness.
Silence brooded heavily upon blue plains and low hills; the Cyclopean white towers seemed at first completely lifeless. The city was overhung with an atmosphere of loneliness and solitude that properly belongs only to the desert and the wide sea.
All this Miles saw in an instant, and the desolation and despair of the city flowed in upon him like the tide of a cold ocean.
“Indeed the dwelling of the Flame-Folk must seem silent and deserted to one used to the mad torrent of life as it flows in the world above. For but one now clings to the rotten thread of life for a thousand who once dwelt here.”
Again Miles was startled by the voiceless and instantaneous impact of thought upon his mind. He turned nervously and saw, standing near him by the white parapet, the first living being he had seen in this eldritch city.
The creature was taller than a man. Erect, graceful with a smooth ophidian smoothness, its body was covered with tiny green scales that were like flakes of bright emerald. Its long arms also were scaled and the small green hand resting upon the snowy parapet, whose fingers were tipped with delicate crimson claws.
Miles’s astonished gaze went to the green-armored head. It was crowned with a bright crest of scarlet. A long beak curved from what he must consider the face, and above it two eyes looked unwinkingly at him.
Large eyes, limpid and black, they were, and they held him. In them was the vibrant glow of mind, shadow of sorrow and undying light of laughter, the burden of weariness and the tenderness of love.
Miles knew at once that they were the eyes of Alú the Youngest of the Flame-Folk, whom he had first seen in the enigmatic bit of crystal Su-Ildra called the sign.
“Yes, I am Alú,” his thought was read and silently confirmed. “I saw you stumble into the yellow priest’s trap and brought you here to cheat him of his triumph—for a time.”
Miles could not cease staring at the reptilian being.
From the narrow green shoulders fell the glorious appendages that he could only call wings. Silken-thin membranes, flushed with soft flame, they fell to the blue moss at the being’s feet—a mantle of wondrous color, of rose and gold and delicate blue.
They lifted a little as Miles watched, expanded shimmering with strange life. It seemed to him that they drew tiny sparks of flame from the mist.
“These organs are unfamiliar to you,” came once more the swift, apt flow of unspoken thought. “They gather from the air, for the use of our bodies, the energy generated in the towers. Your scientists already anticipate such etheric transmission of force.”
Miles stepped back a little across the soft blue moss and stared at the reptilian being. Such an apparition would once have numbed him with amazement and terror. But life amid the slumbering wonders of Xandulu had hardened him to the weird and the inexplicable. Three times before, when he had encountered Alú, he had been impressed with the generosity and consideration of the Lelura.
The strangeness of the creature inspired worship rather than fear. In a moment, Miles had overcome his first astonishment and the great concern of his adventure in Xandulu was again foremost in his mind.
“Su-Ildra!” he cried. “I came down to the rock for her. I thought I had found her—ill, perhaps dead. But it was just a dummy with that damned vine hidden by it. Do you know—”
He stepped toward Alú again and his voice was husky with pleading.
The great black eyes stared from the strange face, solemn with compassion. The reptilian being did not answer. Miles touched a green scaled arm and looked up into the huge soft eyes.
“Tell me!” he implored. “You must know!”
l The crested head bent down and the slender green hand, with its needle-like claws, was lifted tenderly from the parapet to Miles’s shoulder.
“The knowledge can give you only pain,” came voicelessly. “Better that you should forget. I can tear from your memory the sheet upon which Xandulu and Su-Ildra are written. I can do that and set you back in your own world. That would be better.”
“No!” cried Miles. “No! God knows that I don’t want to forget. What has happened to Sue? Tell me!”
The great eyes were shadowed with increasing sorrow.
“Then you must share the pain of knowledge.
“We hoped that the mad designs of Bak-Toreg and his priests would be abandoned with the destruction of their god whom you slew in the temple at Neng. But that was not to be.
“Bak-Toreg has kept his hold upon his followers. He preaches to them that the scorpion-god has but made the sacrifice that is demanded of all, that the Red One has but gone ahead into oblivion to prepare a way for the faithful who are to follow with all the earth. Now he plans to culminate the design of ages, to sweep the whole world into an orgy of ruin that is to end with the annihilation of the planet!
“And the priest plans first to destroy Lelural and all of us.
“We cannot fight him, for the instinct of combat left us ages ago. Even to think of violence is painful, destructive to our minds. And Bak-Toreg realizes our weakness to the full.
“Yet he fears us. He knows that in Lelural are secrets never uncovered by the science of ruin that grows rank in the temples of the Red One. He fears that yet those secrets may balk his design, though we ourselves cannot oppose him.
“And it was fear of you, Miles Kendon, as much as hatred of you for your destruction of his scorpion-god, that caused him to lay the trap for you on Arnac Rock. For he knows that you, with your elemental instincts of battle, will not cease to oppose him until you are dead.
“Even now, Bak-Toreg has gathered his powers of terror to descend upon our ancient city and wipe out even the soil upon which it stands!
“Lelural is to be crushed first beneath them. Then all the races of the upper world.”
