He slid for thirty feet on a wet ramp that dropped him flat on his back
on the floor of a huge chamber lighted by radio-active filaments set
flush to the stone walls. At the far end of the vast room, two mighty
metal doors were hung on great bronze hinges.
On the floor of the room rested a hundred great daises. And on each
dais lay a man or a woman.
"A tomb," the McCanahan muttered. "I've found one of the Senn burial
chambers."
As he crawled to his feet and stared, he knew that this was no tomb.
The bodies were flushed with life, and clad in the uniforms and
trappings of a hundred different people. The McCanahan rubbed a bruised
shoulder and went to walk among the daises.
A shepherd boy with a ragged sheepskin across his loins and over one
shoulder, lay beside a trimly garbed officer of the Palace Guard.
Beyond them, a silk-swathed dancing girl lay beside a heavily muscled
halgor-driver, with the brown of the desert sun still on his forehead.
The McCanahan touched an arm. It was warm. It yielded beneath his
fingers. He tried to rouse the man, without success.
A face in the third row over from the main aisle tugged at some chord
of memory. He slipped between the daises, to stare down into the cold,
haughty face of Captain Herms Borkus of the Fleet.
"Now would I had the wisdom of Bridget herself, the wisest woman in all
Ireland," muttered the McCanahan. "Is this a store-room where the High
Mor keeps those he has doomed to some punishment? Is it a place such as
the visi-chambers on Vreer and Anafelm, where men and women spend most
of their lives dreaming? And if it isn't any of these things, what in
the name of the sons of Strongbow is it?"
He walked on, staring down at the faces of those who lay in this
trance-like slumber. He saw a face or two he knew from remembered
glimpses, in the days when he had walked the court of the High Mor as
the son of the Terran Ambassador.
And then the McCanahan froze, and the blood in his veins moved with
sluggish torpor.
Ahead of him, on the two largest daises of all, lay the twin bodies of
the High Mor.
There was no mistake. He had seen that thin-lipped face too often where
it leered down at Solar Command uniforms from the ruboid throne of
Akkalan. The eyes were staring now, lifeless, but he remembered the
scorn and the supreme contempt that had been in their depths.
The McCanahan was a baffled man.
He walked around the coffers, and his lips opened to speak, but no
sound came out. "It's dreaming I am, with the little people flooding
my brain with fancies from a fevered mind! The High Mor, twins--no,
triplets!--for he must sit even now on the throne, dreaming up tortures
for my body."
The creak of a door-hinge sent him to the floor.
He stared at the opening door, and smothered a curse in his throat when
he saw the slave girl, Slyss of Aakan, glide into the room. She was
alone. She went to an empty pier and lay upon her back.
And now the hair at the base of the McCanahan's neck stood straight up,
for something was rising from all along her body. A something that was
white and bright and dazzling, and from where he lay, Kael could feel
the utter coldness of the thing.
"Noorlythin!" his numbed brain told him, and he hid his eyes.
He heard a faint tinkling, such a sound as he had heard once before,
when he floated between the stars among the Doyen. He looked, and the
swirling white radiance that was Noorlythin was settling down on one of
the bodies of the High Mor, and the High Mor was sitting up, chafing at
wrists and fingers, swinging his legs to the floor.
In the ancient legends of Terra, there was mention of an Arabic ruler,
one Haroun al Raschid, who went in disguise among his people, that he
might learn their thoughts and their way of living. It came to the
McCanahan as he lay here that Noorlythin was such a one, but he used no
simple disguises. He took the body of a man, or the body of a woman,
and possessed it.
Kael retched silently, remembering the caresses he had given the slave
girl. That _thing_ had been inside her, controlling the pity in her
eyes, the poses of her body. It had been Noorlythin who had led him
into the vaults below the castle, for some reason he did not yet know.
It had been Herms Borkus, seeking the secret of his harp. He knew now
why the smashing of the tube in the great machine had not shut off his
lack of motive power, as it had the robotlike bodies of the sfarran
crew.
"By all the sand on Mars," the McCanahan gritted between his teeth, "I
have a secret worth a thousand suns in my hand. But how can I best use
it?"
The High Mor was at the huge doors now. He went out without a backward
glance, and the doors slid shut behind him.
* * * * *
Kael came to his feet. He looked around him at the faces of the men
and women who lay awaiting the coming of the Doyen. He knew what he
had to do, and his face twisted in repugnance. Without these bodies,
Noorlythin was trapped in the body of the High Mor; he was the High
Mor, and no other. If these bodies were destroyed, smashed beyond
recognition, Noorlythin could never use them, perhaps to appear again
before the McCanahan in the guise of an officer or beautiful woman.
Kael gripped his club more firmly and walked slowly down the long rows
of coffers. At each dais, he paused a little while and did what had
to be done. Once he stripped a man and donned the uniform of the Senn
Fleet, acquiring the rank of major.
He left Slyss until the last.
But when he stood there, looking down into that smooth face, eyeing
the yellow hair that tumbled around the creamy shoulders, he could not
nerve himself to the task at hand.
"I'll let her be. At least I know her as a cradle for Noorlythin. I'll
be on my guard."
With a sword at his side and an addy-gun holstered to his service belt,
the McCanahan dropped the club. He went to the doors and swung them
open, and walked out into a long corridor hewn from living stone.
For nearly an hour he followed that corridor, travelling steadily
upwards. He emerged into a palace guardroom whose rack-hung walls were
filled with handguns and swords, with keen-edged axes and cloaks with
the dragon of the Senn emblazoned on collar and breast.
And in the guard room, he found the High Mor waiting for him.
"It is better this way," said the High Mor. "Just the two of us, face
to face. I thought it might be better, as Slyss, to lure you into a
Senn trap, and then to pretend a rescue by my sfarran guards just as
they were about to torture you. I thought I might claim your allegiance
that way."
The McCanahan showed his teeth. "And after you'd wormed the truth of my
secret weapon out of me, you'd hang me to a rack with the metal hooks
biting into my naked back, and pull on my legs until the hooks came
out. After that--"
The High Mor waved a hand.
"There is no need of torture between us, Terran. Oh, at first I wanted
your life. Your father stumbled on a Senn scientist who discovered that
a certain microwave shattered a peculiar type glass much used by the
sfarri, due to sonic disturbances created in the atmosphere.
"Since the sfarri are a race of robots, created by the Doyen so long
ago that were I to tell you the number of years involved they would
be meaningless to you, they are necessarily energized by machines. In
those machines a klyptric tube, made of that glass, forms an antennae
that picks up and transmits the power generated by the machine. It
broadcasts it in wave-lengths attuned to the internal structure of the
sfarri."
"You tell me nothing new," Kael grated. "Most of that I learned myself
from putting one and two and three together."
The High Mor threw back his jeweled cloak and rested a thigh on the
edge of a gaming table. His eyes glittered brightly.
He said, "You are no fool, Terran. I do not underestimate you, believe
me. I tell you this to explain why I felt it necessary to kill your
father."
"And Captain Edmunds! And Cassy Garson! And all the men who were in the
_Eclipse_ when your sfarrans rayed her into a smoking ruin just outside
the planetal orbit of Senorech!"
The High Mor gestured. His graceful white hands waved apology. "For all
that, I am sorry. I made a mistake. Now I offer what I can to atone for
my errors.
"Join me. Wear my dragon! To you, I promise such power as no man has
ever dreamed. The wants of a Napoleon, or a Bral Kan of Procyon! Not
even Gartillin Vo of Deneb, or Cygnis Hannon will outshine you in the
splendor of your triumphs!
"Do you think I want to spend my time in this?" and here the High Mor
gestured at his body. "I want to go back to the Temple of Sharrador
where once I dwelt for many ages, worshipped and adored."