Flaith!
He turned to find her stretched on her back, her eyes regarding him
wistfully. A shred of her gypsy costume was caught over one shoulder,
falling away from the push of her nearly bared breasts. The thin stuff
at her waist hugged round hips and full upper thighs. The breath caught
in the McCanahan's throat as his eyes ran over her.
She was a woman to steal the breath of a man from his lungs, and send
his senses running in a saraband. She was the dream of every lonely
spaceman at his battle station, of every thul-prospector hanging to a
wandering asteroid with fingers and a suction clamp. With her red hair
frothing over the witchery of her cream-skinned shoulders, she was
Deirdre herself, the perfect woman.
Something of his tangled senses came to Flaith and she laughed, with
the throaty womanness of her pleased at the worship in his eyes.
In the middle of her laughter, a shadow came and lay on the yellow
flooring between them.
A sfarran officer stood tall and lean in the open doorway of the tower,
a glittering Thorn blaster in his right hand.
* * * * *
The officer regarded them coldly. It came to Kael as he stood dumbly
returning that hard glance, that he had never seen a sfarran smile.
"You will come with me at once."
He stood sideways to the green marble doors, giving them room to pass
him. Flaith scrambled to her feet; eyeing the gesture with which the
officer moved his blaster. The McCanahan bent and lifted his harp, and
thrust it into the black sack that had once belonged to dead Lunol the
peddler.
Then he was walking with Flaith out the pylon gateway of the tower,
across the hot sands toward the black hull of a sleek sfarran cruiser.
He was midway through the hatch when he paused, staring.
There were sfarran men and officers inside the ship, but they were
slumped over queerly, in distorted postures and attitudes. He had seen
the sfarri like that in Clonn Fell, when he had plucked at the strings
of his harp. But here he had not struck those strings!
Last night he had played for Flaith and Lunol. And when he had played,
a tube in the great, glistening tower machine had cracked into a
thousand different fragments.
That breaking tube might have summoned up Noorlythin from whatever hell
he dwelt.
"Move in, Earther," said the officer behind him.
Kael went with Flaith, at the officer's orders, to an upholstered bench
set against a panelled wall. The officer brooded at them, and they
could read the raw hate that lay deep in his black eyes.
The officer said, "You ought to be rayed down here, to save the High
Mor the agony of listening to your pleas for mercy. But yours is a
grave offense. An offense no man or woman has ever committed before. It
calls for grave punishment."
Flaith's hand trembled in Kael's big fist.
The officer said, "The High Mor commissioned me to bring you to him.
I would be derelict in my duty were I to do otherwise. And I, Captain
Herms Borkus, intend to commit no such infraction."
The black eyes studied them. There was curiosity swimming in their
depths, mixed with the hot hate, and a grudging respect. He turned away
and went forward to the control chamber. Kael could hear the clicking
relays picking up the automatic transmission. The ship lifted easily,
its null-gravity humming with smooth insistence.
Flaith whispered, "The harp, Kael. You'll kill him as you killed the
others!"
But Kael only gestured at the sfarri that lay in the strange and
distorted attitudes, or sprawled on the floor. And even as he gestured,
the first of these dead sfarri stirred and sat up, looking about him.
Others moved then, silently, turning at once to their duty posts,
resuming their tasks as if they had never been interrupted.
"Mother of balangs!" whispered Flaith, her eyes wide and troubled under
their long red lashes. "They live!"
The McCanahan was half out of his seat, his mind questing. _They were
dead, but now they live. Like machines, turned off and on!_ He thought
of the cracking tube in the black tower, and the sfarri that had fallen
in the square in Clonn Fell. Dimly, he began to grasp the power of the
harpstring that he had lifted from his father's wrist. It smashed the
tubes in the power-boxes that fed the sfarri their energy. Without that
power, they were idle machines.
With the trained mind of the spacefleet officer, he saw the
possibilities of such harpstring, in the form of a vibrator that would
spacecast a flow of microwaves from the battle wagons of the fleet.
With a series of these vibrations fanning out ahead of them, Solar
Combine ships could more than hold their own with the sfarri. For at
the touch of those microwaves, the sfarri that ran their spaceships
would slump in their form of death.
Bitter mockery rose inside the McCanahan as he sat hunched over. He
had the knowledge, but what use was it? He was being carried to an
extremely painful death in the damp dungeons of the High Mor's palace.
* * * * *
Herms Borkus came toward them from the control chamber. He stared from
one to the other. At last he said, "How did you do it? In Clonn Fell,
we found our officers and men lying as if dead. As this ship neared
the Tower of Noorlythin, my men slumped over unconscious."
Kael shrugged. "I've a powerful evil eye, friend. I cast it at those I
don't like and--well, you saw the result."
Borkus said coldly, "You talk foolishly. There is no such thing as the
evil eye. What is the answer?"
"Oh, now look!" began Kael, when the thought struck him. _Borkus is a
sfarran, yet he did not succumb to the lack of power!_ Kael turned the
words on his tongue, and said, "I was talking sense, captain. In my
family, as far back as the time of Niall of the Nine Hostages himself,
one of the McCanahans has always possessed the evil eye. It's a daft
thing, and I'm not understanding it myself, any too well, but it's the
only explanation I can give."
Borkus looked at Flaith, but his eyes did not linger on her beauty, and
showed no more emotion than a dog would show staring at a building.
From Flaith, his eyes swung to Kael who could read the thought that was
gripping the officer. _He's wondering if he can strike at me through
her._ But that was the way of a man who lacked confidence in his own
abilities, and Kael knew that this man before him had powers he had not
yet used.
The sfarran captain shrugged and moved away. He threw back over his
shoulder, "The High Mor will know how to deal with you. After all, it
is his duty, not mine."
For five hours, Flaith and McCanahan huddled together on the
upholstered bench in the sfarran ship. With each passing moment, the
bleakness in the soul of the McCanahan grew darker and more empty.
The ship landed on the palace grounds, shuddering slightly as it
dropped onto the metallic tanbark. A moment after its vanes were
clamped, Flaith and the McCanahan were crossing the landing field,
moving down a stone ramp that led to the dungeons.
A burly man, with black hair matted over his naked chest, clanked a
ring of keys at their approach. He preceded them along the torchlit
corridor until he paused at an empty cell.
The cell was unlocked, and the McCanahan thrust inside. And then a
sobbing Flaith was dragged away from him, in the grip of one of the
burly man's hairy paws.
Kael McCanahan was a spaceman, and spacemen are generally, without
quite being aware of it, excellent philosophers. He tested the bars of
the cell, found them to be formed of Mollystil, and went over to the
cot, where he lay on his back, staring at the blank ceiling. Within
five minutes he was asleep.
He woke to the touch of a soft hand on his chest, to find a woman bent
above him, her limpid brown eyes soft with pity. A tumble of yellow
hair framed her oval face.
"I bring you food and drink, lord. You will need your strength for what
lies ahead."
Kael laughed harshly. "Better to be weak and near death when the High
Mor begins his tortures."
She moved closer. She was fragrant with some Senn perfume, and the
little she wore--a red silk thing twisted about her loins, with a
slavegirl's golden chains about her throat--showed her body to be
exquisite, even in the half-light of the cell. The McCanahan read the
pity in her eyes, and began to take interest.
"Sometimes, those live the longest who have no false pride," she told
him.
"You give me hope. Were you sent to do that?"
There was reproach in her eyes, and she started to draw away. The
McCanahan caught her slim wrist and held her.
"Who sent you with your tempting offers?"
She pouted at him. "No man sent me. I am Slyss, the slave girl from
Aakkan." She rubbed her wrist when he released her, unconsciously
posing for his eyes.