IX

He crossed the square, moving very carefully through the red murk, and

presently he saw her.

It was not hard to find her. There was one temple larger than all the

rest. Stark judged that it must once have faced the entrance of the

fallen building, as though the great figure within was set to watch

over the scientists and the philosophers who came there to dream their

vast and sometimes terrible dreams.

The philosophers were gone, and the scientists had destroyed

themselves. But the image still watched over the drowned city, its hand

raised both in warning and in benediction.

Now, across its reptilian knees, Zareth lay. The temple was open on

all sides, and Stark could see her clearly, a little white scrap of

humanity against the black unhuman figure.

Malthor stood beside her. It was he who had been tolling the votive

bell. He had stopped now, and Zareth's words came clearly to Stark.

"Go away, go away! They're waiting for you. Don't come in here!"

"I'm waiting for you, Stark," Malthor called out, smiling. "Are you

afraid to come?" And he took Zareth by the hair and struck her, slowly

and deliberately, twice across the face.

All expression left Stark's face, leaving it perfectly blank except for

his eyes, which took on a sudden lambent gleam. He began to move toward

the temple, not hurrying even then, but moving in such a way that it

seemed an army could not have stopped him.

Zareth broke free from her father. Perhaps she was intended to break

free.

"Egil!" she screamed. "It's a trap...."

Again Malthor caught her and this time he struck her harder, so

that she crumpled down again across the image that watched with its

jewelled, gentle eyes and saw nothing.

"She's afraid for you," said Malthor. "She knows I mean to kill you

if I can. Well, perhaps Egil is here also. Perhaps he is not. But

certainly Zareth is here. I have beaten her well, and I shall beat her

again, as long as she lives to be beaten, for her treachery to me. And

if you want to save her from that, you outland dog, you'll have to kill

me. Are you afraid?"

Stark was afraid. Malthor and Zareth were alone in the temple. The

pillared colonnades were empty except for the dim fires of the sea. Yet

Stark was afraid, for an instinct older than speech warned him to be.

It did not matter. Zareth's white skin was mottled with dark bruises,

and Malthor was smiling at him, and it did not matter.

Under the shadow of the roof and down the colonnade he went, swiftly

now, leaving a streak of fire behind him. Malthor looked into his eyes,

and his smile trembled and was gone.

He crouched. And at the last moment, when the dark body plunged down

at him as a shark plunges, he drew a hidden knife from his girdle and

struck.

Stark had not counted on that. The slaves were searched for possible

weapons every day, and even a sliver of stone was forbidden. Somebody

must have given it to him, someone....

The thought flashed through his mind while he was in the very act of

trying to avoid that death blow. _Too late, too late, because his own

momentum carried him onto the point_....

Reflexes quicker than any man's, the hair-trigger reactions of a wild

thing. Muscles straining, the centre of balance shifted with an awful

wrenching effort, hands grasping at the fire-shot redness as though to

force it to defy its own laws. The blade ripped a long shallow gash

across his breast. But it did not go home. By a fraction of an inch, it

did not go home.

While Stark was still off balance, Malthor sprang.

* * * * *

They grappled. The knife blade glittered redly, a hungry tongue eager

to taste Stark's life. The two men rolled over and over, drifting and

tumbling erratically, churning the sea to a froth of sparks, and still

the image watched, its calm reptilian features unchangingly benign and

wise. Threads of a darker red laced heavily across the dancing fires.

Stark got Malthor's arm under his own and held it there with both

hands. His back was to the man now. Malthor kicked and clawed with his

feet against the backs of Stark's thighs, and his left arm came up and

tried to clamp around Stark's throat. Stark buried his chin so that

it could not, and then Malthor's hand began to tear at Stark's face,

searching for his eyes.

Stark voiced a deep bestial sound in his throat. He moved his head

suddenly, catching Malthor's hand between his jaws. He did not let go.

Presently his teeth were locked against the thumb-joint, and Malthor

was screaming, but Stark could give all his attention to what he was

doing with the arm that held the knife. His eyes had changed. They were

all beast now, the eyes of a killer blazing cold and beautiful in his

dark face.

[Illustration: _Stark voiced a deep bestial sound in his throat._]

There was a dull crack, and the arm ceased to strain or fight. It bent

back upon itself, and the knife fell, drifting quietly down. Malthor

was beyond screaming now. He made one effort to get away as Stark

released him, but it was a futile gesture, and he made no sound as

Stark broke his neck.

He thrust the body from him. It drifted away, moving lazily with the

suck of the currents through the colonnade, now and again touching a

black pillar as though in casual wonder, wandering out at last into the

square. Malthor was in no hurry. He had all eternity before him.

Stark moved carefully away from the girl, who was trying feebly now

to sit up on the knees of the image. He called out, to some unseen

presence hidden in the shadows under the roof,

"Malthor screamed your name, Egil. Why didn't you come?"

There was a flicker of movement in the intense darkness of the ledge at

the top of the pillars.

"Why should I?" asked the Lord Egil of the Lhari. "I offered him his

freedom if he could kill you, but it seems he could not--even though I

gave him a knife, and drugs to keep your friend Helvi out of the way."

He came out where Stark could see him, very handsome in a tunic of

yellow silk, the blunt black weapon in his hands.

"The important thing was to bait a trap. You would not face me because

of this--" He raised the weapon. "I might have killed you as you

worked, of course, but my family would have had hard things to say

about that. You're a phenomenally good slave."

"They'd have said hard words like 'coward', Egil," Stark said softly.

"And Varra would have set her bird at you in earnest."

Egil nodded. His lip curved cruelly. "Exactly. That amused you, didn't

it? And now my little cousin is training another falcon to swoop at me.

She hooded you today, didn't she, Outlander?"

He laughed. "Ah well. I didn't kill you openly because there's a

better way. Do you think I want it gossiped all over the Red Sea that

my cousin jilted me for a foreign slave? Do you think I wish it known

that I hated you, and why? No. I would have killed Malthor anyway, if

you hadn't done it, because he knew. And when I have killed you and

the girl I shall take your bodies to the barrier and leave them there

together, and it will be obvious to everyone, even Varra, that you were

killed trying to escape."

The weapon's muzzle pointed straight at Stark, and Egil's finger

quivered on the trigger stud. Full power, this time. Instead of

paralysis, death. Stark measured the distance between himself and Egil.

He would be dead before he struck, but the impetus of his leap might

carry him on, and give Zareth a chance to escape. The muscles of his

thighs stirred and tensed.

A voice said, "And it will be obvious how and why _I_ died, Egil? For

if you kill them, you must kill me too."

* * * * *

Where Treon had come from, or when, Stark did not know. But he was

there by the image, and his voice was full of a strong music, and his

eyes shone with a fey light.

Egil had started, and now he swore in fury. "You idiot! You twisted

freak! How did you come here?"

"How does the wind come, and the rain? I am not as other men." He

laughed, a sombre sound with no mirth in it. "I am here, Egil, and

that's all that matters. And you will not slay this stranger who is

more beast than man, and more man than any of us. The gods have a use

for him."

He had moved as he spoke, until now he stood between Stark and Egil.

"Get out of the way," said Egil.

Treon shook his head.

"Very well," said Egil. "If you wish to die, you may."

The fey gleam brightened in Treon's eyes. "This is a day of death," he

said softly, "but not of his, or mine."

Egil said a short, ugly word, and raised the weapon up.

Things happened very quickly after that. Stark sprang, arching up and

over Treon's head, cleaving the red gasses like a burning arrow. Egil

started back, and shifted his aim upward, and his finger snapped down

on the trigger stud.

Something white came between Stark and Egil, and took the force of the

bolt.

Something white. A girl's body, crowned with streaming hair, and a

collar of metal glowing bright around the slender neck.

Zareth.

They had forgotten her, the beaten child crouched on the knees of the

image. Stark had moved to keep her out of danger, and she was no

threat to the mighty Egil, and Treon's thoughts were known only to

himself and the winds that taught him. Unnoticed, she had crept to a

place where one last plunge would place her between Stark and death.

The rush of Stark's going took him on over her, except that her hair

brushed softly against his skin. Then he was on top of Egil, and it had

all been done so swiftly that the Lord of the Lhari had not had time to

loose another bolt.

Stark tore the weapon from Egil's hand. He was cold, icy cold, and

there was a strange blindness on him, so that he could see nothing

clearly but Egil's face. And it was Stark who screamed this time, a

dreadful sound like the cry of a great cat gone beyond reason or fear.

Treon stood watching. He watched the blood stream darkly into the sea,

and he listened to the silence come, and he saw the thing that had been

his cousin drift away on the slow tide, and it was as though he had

seen it all before and was not surprised.

Stark went to Zareth's body. The girl was still breathing, very

faintly, and her eyes turned to Stark, and she smiled.

Stark was blind now with tears. All his rage had run out of him with

Egil's blood, leaving nothing but an aching pity and a sadness, and a

wondering awe. He took Zareth very tenderly into his arms and held her,

dumbly, watching the tears fall on her upturned face. And presently he

knew that she was dead.

Sometime later Treon came to him and said softly, "To this end she was

born, and she knew it, and was happy. Even now she smiles. And she

should, for she had a better death than most of us." He laid his hand

on Stark's shoulder. "Come, I'll show you where to put her. She will be

safe there, and tomorrow you can bury her where she would wish to be."

Stark rose and followed him, bearing Zareth in his arms.

Treon went to the pedestal on which the image sat. He pressed in a

certain way upon a series of hidden springs, and a section of the

paving slid noiselessly back, revealing stone steps leading down.

X

Treon led the way down, into darkness that was lightened only by the

dim fires they themselves woke in passing. No currents ran here. The

red gas lay dull and stagnant, closed within the walls of a square

passage built of the same black stone.

"These are the crypts," he said. "The labyrinth that is shown on the

chart my father found." And he told about the chart, as Varra had.

He led the way surely, his misshapen body moving without hesitation

past the mouths of branching corridors and the doors of chambers whose

interiors were lost in shadow.

"The history of the city is here. All the books and the learning, that

they had not the heart to destroy. There are no weapons. They were not

a warlike people, and I think that the force we of the Lhari have used

differently was defensive only, protection against the beasts and the

raiding primitives of the swamps."

With a great effort, Stark wrenched his thoughts away from the light

burden he carried.

"I thought," he said dully, "that the crypts were under the wrecked

building."

"So we all thought. We were intended to think so. That is why the

building was wrecked. And for sixteen years we of the Lhari have killed

men and women with dragging the stones of it away. But the temple was

shown also in the chart. We thought it was there merely as a landmark,

an identification for the great building. But I began to wonder...."

"How long have you known?"

"Not long. Perhaps two rains. It took many seasons to find the secret

of this passage. I came here at night, when the others slept."

"And you didn't tell?"

"No!" said Treon. "You are thinking that if I had told, there would

have been an end to the slavery and the death. But what then? My

family, turned loose with the power to destroy a world, as this city

was destroyed? No! It was better for the slaves to die."

He motioned Stark aside, then, between doors of gold that stood ajar,

into a vault so great that there was no guessing its size in the red

and shrouding gloom.

"This was the burial place of their kings," said Treon softly. "Leave

the little one here."

Stark looked around him, still too numb to feel awe, but impressed even

so.

They were set in straight lines, the beds of black marble--lines so

long that there was no end to them except the limit of vision. And on

them slept the old kings, their bodies, marvelously embalmed, covered

with silken palls, their hands crossed upon their breasts, their wise

unhuman faces stamped with the mark of peace.

Very gently, Stark laid Zareth down on a marble couch, and covered her

also with silk, and closed her eyes and folded her hands. And it seemed

to him that her face, too, had that look of peace.

He went out with Treon, thinking that none of them had earned a better

place in the hall of kings than Zareth.

"Treon," he said.

"Yes?"

"That prophecy you spoke when I came to the castle--I will bear it out."