The big hunter licked his lips nervously, like a beast in a deadfall.
His eyes glittered. The hermit laughed without any sound. They went on.
It was the same all the way down. Men and women looked at them, but
didn't see.
In one place they paused to let the slave-gang get farther ahead. There
was a woman working not far out. She looked like a starved cat, gaunt
ribs showing through torn rags. Her face was twisted with the sheer
effort of breathing, but there was no expression in her eyes.
Quite suddenly, in the middle of an unfinished gesture, she collapsed
like wet leather and fell. Ciaran knew she was dead before her feet
cleared the beam she was sitting on.
That happened twice more on the way down. Nobody paid any attention.
Mouse wiped moisture off her forehead and glared at Ciaran. "A fine
place to spend a honeymoon. You and your lousy shortcuts!"
For once Ciaran had no impulse to cuff her.
* * * * *
The last portion of the descent was covered by the backs of metal
lean-tos full of heat and clamor. The four slipped away into dense
shadow between two of them, crouched behind a mound of scrap. They had
a good view of what happened to the slave gang.
The Kalds guided it out between massive pillars of white metal
that held up the giant web overhead. Fires flared around the cliff
foot. A hot blue-white glare beat down, partly from some unfamiliar
light-sources fastened in the girders, partly from the mouths of
furnaces hot beyond any heat Ciaran had ever dreamed of.
Men and women toiled sweating in the smoke and glare, and never looked
at the newcomers in their chains. There were no guards.
The Kalds stopped the line in a clear space beyond the shacks and
waited. They were all facing the same way, expectant, showing their
bright grey teeth and rolling their blood-pink eyes.
Ciaran's gaze followed theirs. He got rigid suddenly, and the sweat on
him turned cold as dew on a toad's back.
He thought at first it was a man, walking down between the pillars. It
was man-shaped, tall and slender and strong, and sheathed from crown to
heels in white mesh metal that shimmered like bright water.
But when it came closer he knew he was wrong. Some animal instinct in
him knew even before his mind did. He wanted to snarl and put up his
hackles, and tuck his tail and run.
* * * * *
The creature was sexless. The flesh of its hands and face had a strange
unreal texture, and a dusky yellow tinge that never came in living
flesh.
Its face was human enough in shape--thin, with light angular bones.
Only it was regular and perfect like something done carefully in
marble, with no human softness or irregularity. The lips were
bloodless. There was no hair, not even any eyelashes.
The eyes in that face were what set Ciaran's guts to knotting like
a nest of cold snakes. They were not even remotely human. They were
like pools of oil under the lashless lids--black, deep, impenetrable,
without heart or soul or warmth.
But wise. Wise with a knowledge beyond humanity, and strong with a
cold, terrible strength. And old. There were none of the usual signs
of age. It was more than that. It was a psychic, unhuman feel of
antiquity; a time that ran back and back and still back to an origin as
unnatural as the body it spawned.
Ciaran knew what it was. He had made songs about the creature and
sung them in crowded market-places and smoky wine-shops. He'd scared
children with it, and made grown people shiver while they laughed.
He wasn't singing now. He wasn't laughing. He was looking at one of the
androids of Bas the Immortal--a creature born of the mysterious power
of the Stone, with no faintest link to humanity in its body or its
brain.
Ciaran knew then whose mind had created the shining monster towering
above them. And he knew more than ever that it was evil.
The android walked out onto a platform facing the slave-gang, so that
it was above them, where they could all see. In its right hand it
carried a staff of white metal with a round ball on top. The staff and
the mesh-metal sheath it wore blazed bright silver in the glare.
The chained humans raised their heads. Ciaran saw the white scared
glint of their eyeballs, heard the hard suck of breath and the uneasy
clashing of link metal.
The Kalds made warning gestures with their wands, but they were
watching the android.
It raised the staff suddenly, high over its head. The gesture put the
ball top out of Ciaran's sight behind a girder. And then the lights
dimmed and went out.
For a moment there was total darkness, except for the dull marginal
glow of the forges and furnaces. Then, from behind the girder that hid
the top of the staff a glorious opaline light burst out, filling the
space between the giant pillars, reaching out and up into the dim air
with banners of shimmering flame.
The Kalds crouched down in attitudes of worship, their blood-pink eyes
like sentient coals. A trembling ran through the line of slaves, as
though a wind had passed across them and shaken them like wheat. A few
cried out, but the sounds were muffled quickly to silence. They stood
still, staring up at the light.
The android neither moved nor spoke, standing like a silver lance.
Ciaran got up. He didn't know that he did it. He was distantly aware
of Mouse beside him, breathing hard through an open mouth and catching
opaline sparks in her black eyes. There was other movement, but he paid
no attention.
He wanted to get closer to the light. He wanted to see what made it. He
wanted to bathe in it. He could feel it pulsing in him, sparkling in
his blood. He also wanted to run away, but the desire was stronger than
the fear. It even made the fear rather pleasurable.
He was starting to climb over the pile of scrap when the android spoke.
Its voice was light, clear, and carrying. There was nothing menacing
about it. But it stopped Ciaran like a blow in the face, penetrating
even through his semi-drugged yearning for the light.
He knew sound. He knew mood. He was sensitive to them as his own harp
in the way he made his living. He felt what was in that voice; or
rather, what wasn't in it. And he stopped, dead still.
It was a voice speaking out of a place where no emotion, as humanity
knew the word, had ever existed. It came from a brain as alien and
incomprehensible as darkness in a world of eternal light; a brain no
human could ever touch or understand, except to feel the cold weight of
its strength and cower as a beast cowers before the terrible mystery of
fire.
"Sleep," said the android. "Sleep, and listen to my voice. Open your
minds, and listen."