"Yes or no?"
"Yes _and_ no. Zareth and Helvi you may have, if you insist, though the
gods know what you see in that pallid child. As to the other...." She
smiled very mockingly. "I'm no fool, Stark. You're evading me, and two
can play that game."
He laughed. "Fair enough. And now tell me this, witch with the silver
curls--how am I to get at Egil that I may kill him?"
"I'll arrange that."
She said it with such vicious assurance that he was pretty sure she
would arrange it. He was silent for a moment, and then he asked,
"Varra--what are the Lhari searching for at the bottom of the sea?"
She answered slowly, "I told you that we are a proud clan. We were
driven out of the High Plateaus centuries ago because of our pride. Now
it's all we have left, but it's a driving thing."
She paused, and then went on. "I think we had known about the city for
a long time, but it had never meant anything until my father became
fascinated by it. He would stay down here days at a time, exploring,
and it was he who found the weapons and the machine of power which is
on the island. Then he found the chart and the metal book, hidden away
in a secret place. The book was written in pictographs--as though it
was meant to be deciphered--and the chart showed the square with the
ruined building and the temples, with a separate diagram of catacombs
underneath the ground.
"The book told of a secret--a thing of wonder and of fear. And my
father believed that the building had been wrecked to close the
entrance to the catacombs where the secret was kept. He determined to
find it."
Sixteen years of other men's lives. Stark shivered. "What was the
secret, Varra?"
"The manner of controlling life. How it was done I do not know, but
with it one might build a race of giants, of monsters, or of gods. You
can see what that would mean to us, a proud and dying clan."
"Yes," Stark answered slowly. "I can see."
The magnitude of the idea shook him. The builders of the city must have
been wise indeed in their scientific research to evolve such a terrible
power. To mold the living cells of the body to one's will--to create,
not life itself but its form and fashion....
A race of giants, or of gods. The Lhari would like that. To transform
their own degenerate flesh into something beyond the race of men,
to develop their followers into a corps of fighting men that no one
could stand against, to see that their children were given an unholy
advantage over all the children of men.... Stark was appalled at the
realization of the evil they could do if they ever found that secret.
Varra said, "There was a warning in the book. The meaning of it was not
quite clear, but it seemed that the ancient ones felt that they had
sinned against the gods and been punished, perhaps by some plague. They
were a strange race, and not human. At any rate, they destroyed the
great building there as a barrier against anyone who should come after
them, and then let the Red Sea in to cover their city forever. They
must have been superstitious children, for all their knowledge."
"Then you all ignored the warning, and never worried that a whole city
had died to prove it."
She shrugged. "Oh, Treon has been muttering prophecies about it for
years. Nobody listens to him. As for myself, I don't care whether we
find the secret or not. My belief is it was destroyed along with the
building, and besides, I have no faith in such things."
"Besides," mocked Stark shrewdly, "you wouldn't care to see Egil and
Cond striding across the heavens of Venus, and you're doubtful just
what your own place would be in the new pantheon."
She showed her teeth at him. "You're too wise for your own good. And
now good bye." She gave him a quick, hard kiss and was gone, flashing
upward, high above the tree-tops where he dared not follow.
Stark made his way slowly back to the city, upset and very thoughtful.
As he came back into the great square, heading toward the barracks, he
stopped, every nerve taut.
Somewhere, in one of the shadowy temples, the clapper of a votive bell
was swinging, sending its deep pulsing note across the silence. Slowly,
slowly, like the beating of a dying heart it came, and mingled with it
was the faint sound of Zareth's voice, calling his name.