Collected Short Fiction, page 389
A hundred feet beneath Craig and Ann, Maddrey paused. Above the hissing screams of his wheeling reptiles, his mighty voice bellowed at them:
“Come back with me. Repair the Subterrane. Or die—both of you—by the whip!”
Craig held Ann close to him.
“No, Maddrey,” he shouted. “We’ll fight to the finish.”
Ann sensed a new calm in his voice. She felt the steadiness of his arm. Wonder came into her dark, frightened eyes.
“West?” she breathed softly. “You aren’t afraid?”
Craig smiled down at her, briefly. “Something has happened,” he whispered. “It was the same, that time I dived. I am afraid, of course—because he may kill us both. But it’s different. I’m not afraid—of fear.”
The girl made a breathless sob of dread, and he looked back down the rugged slope, at Maddrey. The shaggy, haggard giant had lifted the rust-reddened disruptor disk in both great hands. He was swinging it, threateningly, at the flapping reptiles.
His voice hissed and screamed, in their own strange speech. The monsters squalled and hissed back at him, as if protestingly. But at last a dozen of them came flapping up the slope.
Gripping the copper knife, Craig stepped a little forward. He drew Ann close behind him. Warm against him, her body was quivering with fear.
“Oh, Weston!” she sobbed. “He can’t take us back—not after we’ve come so far!”
The shrieking reptiles dropped upon them. Their acrid, snake-house stench was sickening. Their bright wings whipped up choking dust from the rocks. Half blinded, Craig thrust with the copper blade, slashed and thrust again.
But the monsters evaded his blows. Their dives were always checked, above him. No talon raked him, and he felt no fang. The knife was a feeble weapon, yet the reptiles seemed to fear it.
Then Ann screamed!
Craig wheeled, beneath the threatening wings. And horror paralyzed him. For a diving monster had snatched the girl from behind him. It soared up, with her struggling form dangling from its talons.
Breathless with apprehension, forgetting his own defense, Craig stood staring. For Ann’s sake, he knew, he would surrender. For her, he would become the slave of Maddrey’s madness. He would even repair the Subterrane.
Ann fought desperately, against the talons of the monster. It had gripped her by the shoulders. The worn skins of her clothing ripped. Her long-limbed body fell out of them, white and nude.
Craig’s Heart stopped.
The creature had carried her scores of feet above the rocks. Her naked, helpless body spun in the air, falling. Craig’s horror-dazed mind saw her lovely shape broken hideously, mangled.
She screamed once, in the air.
Then the troglodyte dropped her torn garments. It dived after her. A few feet above the rocks, its talons caught her again, by arm and thigh. It checked her fall, lifted her again.
The green flicker of its wings turned her to a statue of living jade. The strange light shimmered on the curves of her slim body, made full jade bowls of her pointed breasts.
The monster carried her down to Maddrey.
It hovered, in the air, with her green-lit body dangling. The purple-glowing serpent of the whip struck again, and dark marks of pain leapt once more across her jade perfection. Blood looked black, against the green.
She sobbed, piteously.
“Let her go!”
CRAIG was amazed at the clear strength of his shout. Clutching the dull copper blade, he went plunging down the slope, toward Maddrey. Against the giant’s great mace, against the green flame of the disruption ray, and the horde of troglodytes, the copper knife was a futile weapon. But Craig’s old, crippling fear was gone.
Maddrey hissed a command. The winged monster dropped beside him, still clutching the nude, whimpering girl in its talons. Then his great hands leveled the rusty disruptor disk at Craig.
“Stop!” he bellowed. “Or die!”
Craig’s leaping body tensed with expectation of that green, dazzling finger of death. Time had been when its threat might have checked him, with shuddering fear. But now he sprang aside, crouched, ran on.
And Maddrey dropped the disk.
The disruptor weapon was dead, Craig realized elatedly. Useless. The cavern’s hot, humid atmosphere must have corroded the terminals. Maddrey’s dominion of the troglodytes now lay upon an empty threat.
But nothing was wrong with Maddrey’s copper-studded club. Bellowing with rage, he swung it high. Craig darted to meet his lumbering rush.
The club came down. Craig caught it with a stiffened arm. He slashed with the copper blade at the great hairy hand that clutched it. Howling with pain, Maddrey dropped the club.
His bleeding fingers snatched for the purple whip. Viciously it lashed out. Craig slashed again with the copper blade. The glowing, venomed serpent dropped lifeless on the rocks. Maddrey stood with the butt in his red hand.
A slow, stupid bewilderment came over his black-bearded face.
“Make them turn her loose!” Craig gasped.
Maddrey flung away the whipstock, clenched his red empty hands.
“No!” he bellowed. “The trogs can take you!”
He stumbled back from the menace of Craig’s copper blade, screaming and hissing in the language of the reptiles. The monsters dropped about him, in a baleful circle. They flapped green wings for balance, and blinked malignant eyes at Craig.
But they didn’t attack.
Gripping the knife, Craig advanced suddenly upon the monster that held the naked girl. Croaking and spitting evilly, it released her and retreated. Lovely as an awakened statue of green jade, she ran trembling back to Craig. He gave her his jacket.
“Weston!” Her whisper was electric with hope. “They’re afraid of you!”
Gray eyes shining, Craig nodded.
“Yes, they’re afraid. They’ll never attack mankind.”
He stepped confidently toward the glowering giant.
“Maddrey!” His voice was low and even. “I’ve been afraid of you. I used to obey your orders, because I was afraid. It was fear that drove us up the river. But now I’m not afraid of you, any more.
“I could kill you, Maddrey.”
His thumb was testing the copper blade.
“But I’m not even afraid to let you live,” he added softly. “You may go back, if you like. And take your monsters with you!”
Maddrey’s clenched hands opened. Suddenly he was trembling. Wild, blood-shot, his eyes rolled about the circle of hissing, blinking troglodytes.
Maddrey was afraid!
He fell on his knees and began to sob:
“I want to go with you! Please take me with you! The trogs want to keep me. I can never escape them—unless you take me. But they’re afraid of you. They would let me go with you.”
“What’s this?” Craig gasped. “You aren’t the master?”
Maddrey whimpered, on his knees.
“They found out long ago that the disruptor disk was dead,” he whispered. “And they knew that you had built it. That made them set you above me. And they have feared you, since you killed one of them and fed it to the water spiders.
“They want to keep me, for a slave.”
THE blinking troglodytes were flapping and hopping closer. Maddrey cowered away from them. His sobbing voice rose to a fear-tortured shriek:
“Don’t let them carry me back!”
Craig was touched with pity. He looked at Ann, saw compassion on her white face.
“You may stay with us, Maddrey,” he said. “If you like. But the way out is blocked. Perhaps we’ll never—”
The ring of troglodytes stalked closer upon Maddrey. They flapped and blinked at him, cackled and hissed and screamed. He flung himself flat on the rocks, shrieking:
“Don’t—don’t let them—”
The clamoring circle closed upon him. Maddrey’s frantic cries changed to the language of the troglodytes. Green wings flapped heavily, and the dread swarm lifted. Maddrey’s big body hung limply from great black talons.
So the troglodytes departed.
They glided down toward the scarlet, foam-flecked darkness of the river. They passed the thundering white pillar of the fall. They soared over the flat, hostile wall of shining jungle beyond.
The one that carried Maddrey wearied. Another flew close, and took the burden. They became black motes. They vanished, returning with their human slave to the far-off dwelling-pits beyond the scarlet sea.
Solemnly, Craig drew Ann to him, and kissed her.
“We are free,” he told her gravely. “Even if we die here, we won’t be afraid again.”
Presently they searched once more for some crevice in the ancient rock-fall that blocked the way. They found none. Ann was growing hopeless and depressed again, when Craig led the way back to the rusty disruptor disk that Maddrey had flung away.
“It’s dead,” she said wearily. “It doesn’t work.”
“The terminals probably just need cleaning,” he told her. “If Maddrey had known—”
He repressed a little shudder.
They carried the disk back down into the glow of the jungle. Craig took it apart, scraped the terminals. He assembled it again, touched the switch. A dazzling lance of emerald stabbed down into the jungle.
The green beam stabbed its uncanny-way through the black barrier of granite. They made torches, and packed a little food that they found in Maddrey’s canoe. Eagerly, they climbed into the forbidding darkness of the caverns.
For a long time they clambered up through utter, choking blackness. They wandered through endless labyrinthine corridors, where their torches flickered against unimaginable crystal splendor. They forded cold black rivers. They swam the length of an icy lake.
Their food was gone. The last torch went out. They crept blindly ahead, hungry, weary, desperate. They stumbled upon the lip of some unthinkable abyss, and the disruptor disk was lost.
They climbed black boulder-slopes. Climbed vertical ledges. Climbed narrow chimneys. Climbed into an eternal nightmare of weary despair. Climbed and staggered, climbed and rested, climbed and wept. And climbed.
Then came the time when Craig sniffed the long-forgotten aroma of tobacco, and came fumbling in the dark upon the butt of a cigarette. Beyond it, they found a low curb of stone, a smooth, well-trodden trail.
Eagerly, incredulous, they stumbled upward.
Light met them, and magical human voices.
They came upon a tall man in uniform, leading an awed and foot-sore throng.
“Yes, sir,” the ranger-guide was informing a perspiring and somewhat apprehensive merchant, “the Carlsbad Cavern is the largest in the world. Just below us is the Big Room. It is 348 feet high, 625 feet wide, and over 4,000 feet long—”
THE ranger’s mouth fell open. He staggered back against the merchant. A curious whisper ran through his flock. A fat woman shrieked and fainted. Craig grinned.
“We’ve been lost in the caves,” he said. “Some of them, below, are even larger than the Big Room. We’ve been lost a long time. We need food and clothing. And Ann is very tired. We’ve no money, but—”
Ann laughed at him, gaily, saying: “But we will have money!”
She loosened the black shining mass of her hair, and found a little pouch, made from the skin of that great lizard that Craig had killed with the copper knife. She unrolled the pouch. Out poured four splendid moons of scarlet opalescence.
“Pearls!” gasped Craig. “Redpearls! But—where—?”
“They were in the shells you dived for,” she told him. “I hid them when I found them—so that we couldn’t go back to Maddrey’s whip!”
Laughing softly, she sank into his arms.
“I’ll forgive you, this time,” whispered Craig. “But, any more deceit—” She shuddered deliciously.
The rangers helped them up the trail, into bright New Mexico sun. Craig asked the date, and learned that it had been four years since the Subterrane carried them into the Earth.
The Reign of Wizardry
PART III
In the days of Crete, the Mighty! Theseus—hero of Greek legend—finds the secret of the Dark One, the Minotaur—
Before Greece was more than a wilderness, where semisavage tribes were struggling upward toward real civilization, the Island of Crete was the center of a mighty empire. Babylon was slipping downward, Egypt in one of her low periods—and Minos, Emperor of Crete, ruled the world.
A thousand years, legends said, he had wiled—and certainly he had ruled longer than the memory of any man. Three “walls” defended his empire, made Minos impregnable; the wooden walls of his navy, the brass wall of Talos, the Man of Brass, which, somehow, the wizardry of Minos had animated, and, finally, the wall of pure wizardry that had made Knossos, his capital, inviolable.
Theseus, a Greek forced to wander as an outlaw by the power of the Cretan armies and navies, was a pirate preying on Crete’s trade—and slipping through their navy’s defenses to attack again and again. Known as Captain Firebrand for his flaming hair, his whole aim in life is the destruction of Knossos, and its two cruel masters: Minos and the Minotaur, the half-bull, halfman creature, the Dark One of whom all—Cretan and Greek alike—live in unholy fear. Deep beneath the palace of Knossos, in the Labyrinth which is death and sacrifice to the Dark One to enter, lies the greatest power of Minos—fear! Fear of being sent to the Dark One!
Captain Firebrand captures a ship on which he finds a wizened, fearful little wizard, one Snish, who can, by magic, make himself appear in any form he desires. But Snish’s spells, as Snish himself humbly admits, are weak ones. And since the Cretans have a monopoly of magic, furiously persecuting anyone who attempts to break in on their monopoly, Snish is fleeing constantly, but fruitlessly. He is pursued by ill luck and storms brought on by Cretan magicians. Snish’s spell of disguise can be broken, unfortunately, by close contact or a. kiss.
However, with the help of one of Snish’s disguising spells, Theseus, by a ruse and the help of one of Snish’s ill luck storms, gets past Crete’s navy, passes even Talos, the Man of Brass, and reaches the city of Knossos in time for the games.
The games, in honor of the Dark One, are open to any contestant. If lie wins three bouts—against man, bull, and “gods”—he displaces Minos, becomes the ruler of Crete, and takes Ariadne, Minos’ daughter, as his queen. The games have, however, been going on for a thousand years—and Minos still rules. They are quite adequately “fixed.”
However, with some aid from Snish at critical instants—his spells aren’t strong enough to last long against the Cretan “gods”—their prime magicians, Minos, Ariadne, and Daedalus, Minos’ adviser and chief magician, Theseus, still in his magic-disguised form, sufficiently unfixes the games to win them!
Determined to destroy the ruining, deadening reign of wizardry and fear Minos has imposed over all the then-known world, Theseus, still in his disguised form, goes to take formally the crown of Crete from Minos at the ceremonial banquet.
And at the ceremony, Ariadne kisses him—and Snish’s disguising spell is broken. Having won the games in the disguised form, the revealed Theseus was not the winner—and is taken to the dungeons as the pirate Captain Firebrand, with a death penalty on his flaming head!
By a ruse, however, Theseus gets Admiral Phaistro, commander of the Cretan navy, to come to see him, and bring with him little Snish, the magician. In the darkness of the dungeon, with the aid of one of Snish’s spells, Theseus assumes the admiral’s guise, while the admiral is forced to assume Theseus’.
As the admiral, Theseus visits Ariadne at the Temple of Cybele, where Ariadne is high priestess. Ariadne, something of a magician herself, recognizes Theseus despite his disguise—and admits she loves him! Instead of giving him a Way, _she gives him a tiny cylinder which, she says, is the key to the magic that protects the mighty palace city of Knossos, as proof of her love. Feeling himself unsafe, Theseus hides the cylinder deep in a crack in the massive rock on which the Temple of Cybele is built, and seeks to leave.
But somehow, Admiral Phaistro has resumed his natural appearance, and has succeeded in escaping from the dungeon, while, because of his close contact with Ariadne, Theseus’ disguising spell has been broken.
Again he is captured, but now is taken before Minos, Daedalus, Minos’ chief magician, and—Ariadne! Sitting as a high court, they condemn him to the Labyrinth of the Dark One—the fabled man-bull, who, legend says, eats both body and soul of his victims!
Before he goes down, Ariadne, seemingly in mockery, gives him a rolled parchment—the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Talos, the brass giant, lifts a mighty block of stone from the floor, and reveals the dark pit that is the entrance to the Labyrinth.
Theseus goes down, to wander in the absolute blackness of a vast, intricate limestone cavern. Hopelessly lost, in absolute dark, he wanders on, waiting momentarily the attack of the Dark One—his only hope the fact that he found his own sword, the Falling Star, was wrapped in the parchment Ariadne had given him. Finally, in his wandering, he finds a single vast cavern room, in the center of which, his sense of touch tells him, is a stalagmite formation that resembles a vast, squatting manlike thing with a massive bull-head, with two rough, knobby horns. This then, is the legendary Dark One who rules all Crete by pure fear! A lump of limestone drippings!
And as he has at last determined that the Dark One doesn’t exist—a voice speaks to him out of the darkness, and a huge, rough horn grazes his side!
XVIII.
THAT terrible horn grazed his naked flesh and hinged again. But Theseus, automatically fended the second thrust away from his body with the Falling Star. For the horn came in like a heavy pike, and the instinct of many battles taught him how to deal with it, even in the darkness.
The Dark One fought like a man. Even the little grunt of effort, as the horn made its third ripping thrust, sounded queerly human—until the echo of the unseen dome amplified it into a far-off bellow.
Grim confidence returned to Theseus. A god that fought like a man could be slain like a man. He gripped the steel sword, let that smooth lunging point slide once more past his body, and thrust where a man must be to hold it.
