Collected Short Fiction, page 381
The hollow, musty voice of the gnarled warlock grated: “I concur.”
With his rosy baby-smile, Minos turned to Ariadne. “And you, vessel of Cybele, who is daughter of the Dark One?”
BREATHLESS, Theseus watched her. The green eyes came slowly to him. Some tremor of her body made the white dove shift its balance. But her eyes remained remote and cold, and her golden voice said faintly:
“I concur.”
The dancing eyes of Minos came back to Theseus and the tall bulk of Talos, waiting rigidly behind him.
“The gods concur.” Laughter sparkled in his liquid voice. “Now let the door to the Labyrinth be opened, so that the prisoner may cross the threshold of the Dark One to face his judgment.”
Talos moved startlingly, like a statue abruptly animated. But Ariadne, with an imperious little gesture of her bare white arm, froze him into inert bright metal again.
“Wait,” she said. “I’ve a gift for the prisoner.”
Minos and Daedalus turned swiftly upon her. The pink, cherubic features of Minos forgot their dimpled smile, and the seamed dark face of the high priest twisted into a mask of frightful wrath. Protesting whispers hissed.
From beside her on the black throne, Ariadne lifted a long roll of papyrus.
“This is a copy of the ‘Book of the Dead,’ ” said her even golden tones, “that was brought by the Pharaoh’s ambassadors. It is intended for the guidance of the soul beyond the gates of death.” Her laugh was a tinkle of mockery, and the green eyes were cold. “I believe that Captain Firebrand will have use for it.”
The merry eyes of Minos and the hollow, flaming ones of Daedalus peered at her doubtfully. Minos made a little, impatient bouncing motion on his black throne. The rusty voice of the warlock croaked:
“The prisoner has no need of it. It is the custom that men should meet the Dark One as they came from his daughter, naked, with empty hands. And even the soul required no guidance beyond the Dark One’s dwelling, for it will be consumed.”
But the pink, chubby body of Minos was shaken with abrupt merriment. “My daughter jests,” he sobbed. “Remember, the prisoner is her enemy. Let him take the scroll of death—and go ahead to use it!”
The slim white arm of Ariadne’s extended the scroll’s long cylinder. Theseus came forward silent, and took it, contriving not to betray its unexpected weight. He searched her white, lovely features for some hint of understanding. Her face remained a serene, proud mask.
“Go, pirate,” she said. “The Labyrinth is open.”
Already shivering to the abrupt penetrating chill that had invaded the black hall, Theseus slowly turned. He saw that Talos had stooped to grasp a huge bronze ring-bolt fastened to one of the great square basalt blocks that paved the floor, was lifting.
Gleaming bronze limbs and torso splendid with bunched swelling muscles, Talos heaved mightily. The huge stone came slowly up, before the dais. A dark, acrid fetor rose up from the black space beneath, and a stillness of awful dread fell upon the hall.
Theseus saw that the priests were blanched and shuddering. The visage of Daedalus was a dark, stony mask; Ariadne’s face was white, frozen, and Minos had ceased to smile. Theseus himself felt a weak sickness of terror.
Something in that dank stench loosened his knees and poured cold fear dust down his spine. It was a hint of something more than cold and wet and endless dark and ancient rot, a reek of something—monstrous!
The straining body of Talos made muffled ringing sounds, like the thrum of muted strings, and at last the grinding stone came fully upright. The pallid priests silently leveled their lances, and the great, urgent hand of Talos reached out, hot with his effort.
Theseus glanced back at the three on the dais. He managed a mocking grin, and waved the papyrus scroll at them, casually. He turned, and spat deliberately into the dark pit beneath the lifted stone, and walked casually toward it.
Yet he was shivering. He pressed the scroll against his side, to stop the shaking of it. He came to the brink of the pit. In the faint reflected light, he saw stone steps, leading down.
He bent, placed his hands on the brink, and dropped upon the stair. Waving the scroll in farewell, under the flaming yellow eves of Talos, he walked down into that sharp and ancient fetor.
That huge gong sobbed again behind him; the priests were chanting. The stone ground. There was a dull and mighty crash. And all light was cut off, as the many tons of the basalt door fell back into place.
XVII.
THESEUS stood motionless for a time upon those stone steps that he could no longer see. The air about him was a cold, stagnant fluid. It stung his nostrils with that reek of ancient putrescence, troubled him with that foul hint of something—living.
The mighty jar of the falling stone rang for a space in his ears, and then he felt the silence. He knew that the men and the lesser gods of Crete must be moving out of the black-walled hall. But not even the tread of Talos came to him through the portal and the floor.
The silence was solid, frightful.
Even in the utter dark, however, and despite that appalling, paralyzing stillness, he sought a ray of hope. For he had passed the three walls of Crete, and now he stood, still living, in the domain of the Dark One.
The Dark One, he knew—or fear of the Dark One—was the real ruler of Crete. If the hungry toil-drawn thousands obeyed the edicts of Minos, and starved their children to pay tithes and taxes, and offered them to perish in the games, it was through that fear.
Theseus stood unbowed within the entrance to the god’s dwelling, and he was not empty-handed. He had felt the unexpected weight within the papyrus scroll, when Ariadne gave it to him. Now, when his eager fingers broke the seal and ripped it open, they found a thing they well knew—the polished hilt of the Falling Star!
The steel blade had been taken by the Etruscans who first captured him, by his own design, in the street of Ekoros. He had not expected to feel it in his hand again. He made a hissing stroke through the musty dark, and breathed his thanks to Aradiane.
Gripping the sword, he started down the slippery steps.
“Well, Falling Star,” he whispered, “if we are fated to rot and rust here, at least we’ll seek the Dark One first—and find out if bright steel will cut the stuff that Cretan gods are made of!”
His groping hands could span the rough-hewn passage, reach the arch above. The slope was sharply down, so that the steps were narrow. He went slowly, counting the steps and testing each carefully before he set his full weight upon it.
After sixty steps there was a small square landing and a turning in the passage; after sixty more, another. Upon the third landing his foot crushed something brittle, and his exploring fingers found two crumbling skeletons.
He thought that the more delicate bones must have been a woman’s. The two sets were intermingled, as if their owners had perished in a final long embrace. Oddly, the man’s skull and a few others of the larger bones were missing.
Theseus left the remains and went on down, wondering what might be upon the fourth landing. Again he counted fifty-eight steps. But, where the fifty-ninth had been, there was—nothing.
Almost, moving with too great confidence, he had lost his balance. He recovered himself, and climbed one step back. He could feel a faint current of fetid air, rising beyond that invisible brink. Faintly, his ears caught a whisper of moving water, somewhere far below.
He tried to shout, to explore the space before him with the sound of his voice. His first effort brought only a rasping croak. Resolutely he put down the monstrous fear that this half-expected chasm had planted in him, and called out hoarsely:
“Greeting, Dark One!”
FOR A LONG TIME there was no echo at all, as if Theseus’ voice had fallen against some muting curtain. At last, however, the reverberations of his shout came rolling back, amplified and distorted, from a thousand ragged distant ledges. He knew that there was a cavern before him, vast and deep.
Reaching out carefully, he explored the walls with his fingers as far as he could reach. Smooth stone extended in every direction. He could discover no possible way of climbing up or aside, and even the questing tip of his sword could reach no possible footing before him or below.
He knew, now, why the unknown man and woman had chosen to die upon the landing. He guessed, too, why part of their bones were gone—and that he had not been the first to follow them.
Their bones, he thought, might be useful to him also.
Climbing back to the landing, he gathered up the woman’s skull and an armful of bones. He counted and tested the slime-covered steps again, and came back to the one above the last, and dropped the man’s thigh bone over the brink.
It struck no ledge to which he could dare to drop. For a long time no sound at all came back from the chasm. Then there was a faint and distant splash, that whispered eerily against the unseen walls.
Patiently, he dropped other bones at different point along the step, and then began tossing them in different directions. All of them fell for a long time, as the first had done, and splashed faintly, until he tossed the skull.
That struck something before him, and almost level with the step. It tolled, with a thin, hollow, bumping sound, and the bumping ceased, and finally there was another tiny splash.
Several other bones struck that uneven surface, and some of them remained there. Not even by extending the point of the sword as far as it would reach, could Theseus touch anything. But, at last, when his ears and the tossed bones had told him all they could, he crouched and swung his arms and leaped flat-footedly.
For an instant he thought that he was falling short, and he had a hideous sick awareness of the deep black abyss beneath. Then he came sprawling down upon an uneven point of rock, and slid, and at last caught himself upon its projections.
Creeping at first upon bruised hands and torn knees, Theseus explored the ledge to which he had leaped. It was a narrow spur of rock, he found, thrusting out toward the bottom of that black stair.
The way through the dwelling of the Dark One was clearly thick-set with peril. The most of those thrust into the Labyrinth, he thought, must perish in this chasm he had passed.
Was the justice of the Dark One merely—death?
Lying there on the jagged damp spur, waiting for breath and strength, Theseus tried to recall all his knowledge of the Dark One. The deity was sometimes represented, he knew, as a gigantic monstrous thing, half bull and half human. For a moment he shuddered with dread of some such fearful entity. But he gripped the Falling Star.
“We have killed bulls,” he whispered to the blade, “and men! Why not the Dark One?”
He rose to bare bleeding feet and started climbing the spur, tapping with the point of the sword like a blind man with a cane. Sharp edges cut his feet again, and his naked body shivered and grew numb with cold.
The spur brought him to a sheer ragged wall. There was no ledge that he could follow to either side, and he thought that this path had led to nowhere but death.
But he was alive, and hope would not die in him. Presently his exploring fingers found a slanted fissure, and he began to climb, carrying the Falling Star in his teeth. Progress was slow. His limbs were soon trembling with the strain of lifting his body by inadequate purchases. He felt that he was near the limit of exhaustion, when he came to a roof that jutted out above his head.
There was no passage upward.
He knew that he had no strength to climb back to the spur—nor was there much reason to return. Presently, he thought, his aching fingers and toes would relax and slip. There would be another splash, unheard, from that black water.
He clung to the rock, however, and a breath of stale unsunned air touched his face like a ghostly wing. He clambered aside, and the current became stronger. He reached the lip of a narrow passage, and pulled himself through it, and came to a flat place where he could rest.
For a long time he lay there, breathing wearily, rubbing at aching muscles. At last he tried to rise, and drove his head painfully against the tip of a sharp stalactite, and crept on hands and knees to explore this new cavern.
He followed a winding gallery of water-carved limestone, that presently became tall enough so that he could walk Again, and tap his way with the sword. There were narrow fissures that he could just squirm through, abrupt drops that he clambered down or skirted, cold pools that he had to swim.
Stone and water had fashioned strange formations. One, that his lacerated hands explored, was shaped queerly like an immense bull’s head. A projecting boulder formed the head itself, and two curving stalagmites were like horns. The rock mass beneath held an odd suggestion of a gigantic human body.
That strange natural symbol of the Dark One stood in a wide cavity in a long endless gallery. Theseus dislodged a limestone fragment. The rattle of it rolled ominously against an unseen vault, and came back queerly amplified, so that it sounded like the far-off bellow of a monstrous bull.
The cave was a natural temple. If indeed, Theseus thought, he was destined to meet the Dark One, it should have been here. He was shuddering to an uncontrollable sense of supernormal dread. But nothing tangible challenged him.
At last he found an exit, and went on.
FOR AN endless time, Theseus wandered through unending passages. He squirmed through fissures that tore his skin. He leaped unseen crevasses. For a space he was hungry, and the hunger passed, leaving only a light-headed weakness. Once he slept, woke chilled and stiff. Thirst tortured him, and he drank from a bitter pool.
Always he went on.
Then his foot knocked a pebble over a ledge, and the sound rolled above him, swelled into an angry bellow. He felt an ominous familiarity in the contours of the slope beneath his feet. And his groping fingers found that rugged anthropomorphic stone that had the head and horns of a colossal bull.
With a cold sickness in his heart, and a tremor of unquenchable terror, he knew that all his wanderings had brought him around a futile circle, back to this dark temple that was older than the race of men.
Had the Dark One been his guide?
A strong heart and the Falling Star might prevail against wood and brass and even wizardry—but not against the nameless, formless, voiceless shadow of power that haunted this unceasing dark.
So Theseus was hopelessly thinking, when a fearful voice spoke to him. It reverberated against the unseen vault, swelled until it was as mighty as the bellow of some colossal bull, and vet articulated words:
“Welcome, mortal, to my eternal abode! I have waited long for you. For I am hungered from fasting, and I thirst for a man’s blood.”
Theseus stood lifeless. That supernal bellowing voice held an incredible familiarity. Something moved in the darkness, however, before he could grasp that impossible recognition. It rushed upon him.
In a blind instinctive effort at defense, the nerveless arm of Theseus flung up the Falling Star. It rang against something hard. Something smooth and round and pointed came thrusting past sword and arm, and stabbed into his side.
It was like a monstrous goring horn.
TO BE CONCLUDED.
Hindsight
The fate of worlds may hang on tiny things, which, if altered—wouldn’t alter anything!
SOMETHING was wrong with the cigar.
But Brek Veronar didn’t throw it away. Earth-grown tobacco was precious, here on Ceres. lie took another bite off the end, and pressed the lighter cone again. This, time, imperfectly, the cigar drew—with an acrid, puzzling odor of scorching paper.
Brek Veronar—born William Webster, Earthman—was sitting in his big, well-furnished office, adjoining the arsenal laboratory. Beyond the perdurite windows, magnified in the crystalline clarity of the asteroid’s synthetic atmosphere, loomed a row of the immense squat turret forts that guarded the Astrophon base—their mighty twenty-four-inch rifles, coupled to the Veronar autosight, covered with their theoretical range everything within Jupiter’s orbit. A squadron of the fleet lay on the field beyond, seven tremendous dead-black cigar shapes. Far off, above the rugged red palisades of a second plateau, stood the many-colored domes and towers of Astrophon itself, the Astrarch’s capital.
A tall, gaunt man, Brek Veronar wore the bright, close-fitting silks of the Astrarchy. Dyed to conceal the increasing streaks of gray, his hair was perfumed and curled. In abrupt contrast to the force of his gray, wide-set eyes, his face was white and smooth from cosmetic treatments. Only the cigar could have betrayed him as a native of Earth and Brek Veronar never smoked except here in his own locked laboratory.
He didn’t like to be called the Renegade.
Curiously, that whiff of burning paper swept his mind away from the intricate drawing of a new rocket-torpedo gyropilot pinned to a board on the desk before him, and back across twenty years of time. It returned him to the university campus, on the low yellow hills beside the ancient Martian city of Toran—to the fateful day when Bill Webster had renounced allegiance to his native Earth, for the Astrarch.
Tony Grimm and Elora Ronee had both objected. Tony was the freckled, irresponsible redhead who had come out from Earth with him six years before, on the other of the two annual engineering scholarships. Elora Ronee was the lovely dark-eyed Martian girl—daughter of the professor of geodesics, and a proud descendant of the first colonists—whom they both loved.
He walked with them, that dry, bright afternoon, out from the yellow adobe buildings, across the rolling, stony, ocher-colored desert. Tony’s sunburned, blue-eyed face was grave for once, as he protested.
“You can’t do it, Bill. No Earthman could.”
“No use talking,” said Bill Webster, shortly. “The Astrarch wants a military engineer. His agents offered me twenty thousand eagles a year, with raises and bonuses—ten times what any research scientist could hope to get, back on Earth.” The tanned, vivid face of Elora Ronee looked hurt. “Bill—what about your own research?” the slender girl cried. “Your new reaction tube! You promised you were going to break the Astrarch’s monopoly on space transport. Have you forgotten?”
