"I'm going to need your hands, to help me break one legend and build
another!"
"They're yours, little man. Where do we go?"
"Down that tunnel. Because, if I'm not clear off, that leads to Ben
Beatha, and Bas the Immortal--and the Stone."
Almost as though it were a signal, the blue glare dimmed and flickered.
In the semi-darkness Ciaran and the hunter dropped down from the niche
and went into the tunnel.
It was dark, with only a tiny spot of blue radiance at wide intervals
along the walls. They had gone quite a distance before these
strengthened to their normal brightness, and even then it was fairly
dark. It seemed to be deserted.
The hunter kept stopping to listen. When Ciaran asked irritably what
was wrong, he said:
"I think there's someone behind us. I'm not sure."
"Well, give him a jab with the wand if he gets too close. Hurry up!"
The tunnel led straight toward Ben Beatha, judging from its position in
the pit. Ciaran was almost running when the hunter caught his shoulder
urgently.
"Wait! There's movement up ahead...."
He motioned Ciaran down. On their hands and knees they crawled forward,
holding their wands ready.
A slight bend in the tunnel revealed a fork. One arm ran straight
ahead. The other bent sharply upward, toward the surface.
There were four Kalds crouched on the rock between them, playing some
obscure game with human finger bones.
Ciaran got his weight over his toes and moved fast. The hunter went
beside him. Neither of them made a sound. The Kalds were intent on
their game and not expecting trouble.
The two men might have got away with it, only that suddenly from behind
them, someone screamed like an angry cat.
* * * * *
Ciaran's head jerked around, just long enough to let him see the hermit
standing in the tunnel, with his stringy arms lifted and his grey hair
flying, and a light of pure insanity blazing in his pale eyes.
"Evil!" he shrieked. "You are evil to defy The Light, and the servants
of The Light!"
He seemed to have forgotten all about calling the Kalds demons a little
while before.
The grey beasts leaped up, moving quickly in with their wands ready.
Ciaran yelled with sheer fury. He went for them, the rags of his yellow
tunic streaming.
He wasn't quite clear about what happened after that. There was a lot
of motion, grey bodies leaping and twisting and jewel-tips flashing.
Something flicked him stunningly across the temple. He fought in a sort
of detached fog where everything was blurred and distant. The hermit
went on screaming about Evil and The Light. The hunter bellowed a
couple of times, things thudded and crashed, and once Ciaran poked his
wand straight into a blood-pink eye.
Sometime right after that there was a confused rush of running feet
back in the tunnel. The hunter was down. And Ciaran found himself
running up the incline, because the other way was suddenly choked with
Kalds.
He got away. He was never sure how. Probably instinct warned him to
go in time so that, in the confusion he was out of sight before the
reinforcements saw him. Three of the original four Kalds were down and
the fourth was busy with the hermit. Anyway, for the moment, he made
it.
When he staggered finally from the mouth of the ramp, drenched with
sweat and gasping, he was back on the Forbidden Plain, and Ben Beatha
towered above him--a great golden Titan reaching for the red sky.
The tumbled yellow rock of its steep slopes was barren of any growing
thing. There were no signs of buildings, or anything built by hands,
human or otherwise. High up, almost in the apex of the triangular peak,
was a square, balconied opening that might have been only a wind-eroded
niche in the cliff-face.
Ciaran stood on widespread legs, studying the mountain with sullen
stubborn eyes. He believed in legend, now. It was all he believed
in. Somewhere under the golden peak was the Stone of Destiny and the
demigod who was its master.
Behind him were the creatures of that demigod, and the monster they
were building--and a little black-haired Mouse who was going to die
unless something was done about it.
A lot of other people, too. A whole sane comfortable world. But Mouse
was about all he could handle, just then.
He wasn't Ciaran the bard any longer. He wasn't a human, attached to
a normal human world. He moved in a strange land of gods and demons,
where everything was as mad as a drunkard's nightmare, and Mouse was
the only thing that held him at all to the memory of a life wherein men
and women fought and laughed and loved.
His scarred mouth twitched and tightened. He started off across the
rolling, barren rise to Ben Beatha--a tough, bandy-legged little man
in yellow rags, with a brown, expressionless face and a forgotten harp
slung between his shoulders, moving at a steady gypsy lope.
A wind sighed over the Forbidden Plain, rolling the sunballs in the red
sky. And then, from the crest of Ben Beatha, the darkness came.
This time Ciaran didn't stop to be afraid. There was nothing left
inside him to be afraid with. He remembered the hermit's words:
_Judgment. Great things moving. Doom and destruction, a shadow across
the world, a darkness and a dying._ Something of the same feeling came
to him, but he wasn't human any longer. He was beyond fear. Fate
moved, and he was part of it.
Stones and shale tricked his feet in the darkness. All across the
Forbidden Plains there was night and a wailing wind and a sharp chill
of cold. Far, far away there was a faint red glow on the sky where the
sea burned with its own fire.
Ciaran went on.
Overhead, then, the sunballs began to flicker. Little striving ripples
of light went out across them, lighting the barrens with an eerie
witch-glow. The flickering was worse than the darkness. It was like the
last struggling pulse of a dying man's heart. Ciaran was aware of a
coldness in him beyond the chill of the wind.
_A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying...._
He began to climb Ben Beatha.
V
The stone was rough and fairly broken, and Ciaran had climbed mountains
before. He crawled upward, through the sick light and the cold wind
that screamed and fought him harder the higher he got. He retained no
very clear memory of the climb. Only after a long, long time he fell
inward over the wall of a balcony and lay still.
He was bleeding from rock-tears and his heart kicked him like the heel
of a vicious horse. But he didn't care. The balcony was man-made, the
passage back of it led somewhere--and the light had come back in the
sky.
It wasn't quite the same, though. It was weaker, and less warm.
When he could stand up he went in along the passage, square-hewn in the
living rock of Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life.
It led straight in, lighted by a soft opaline glow from hidden
light-sources. Presently it turned at right angles and became a spiral
ramp, leading down.
Corridors led back from it at various levels, but Ciaran didn't bother
about them. They were dark, and the dust of ages lay unmarked on their
floors.
Down and down, a long, long way. Silence. The deep uncaring silence of
death and the eternal rock--dark titans who watched the small furious
ant-scurryings of man and never, never, for one moment, gave a damn.
And then the ramp flattened into a broad high passage cut deep in the
belly of the mountain. And the passage led to a door of gold, twelve
feet high and intricately graved and pierced, set with symbols that
Ciaran had heard of only in legend: the _Hun-Lahun-Mehen_, the Snake,
the Circle, and the Cross, blazing in hot jewel-fires.
But above them, crushing and dominant on both valves of the great
door, was the _crux ansata_, the symbol of eternal life, cut from some
lustreless stone so black it was like a pattern of blindness on the
eyeball.
Ciaran shivered and drew a deep, unsteady breath. One brief moment of
human terror came to him. Then he set his two hands on the door and
pushed it open.
He came into a small room hung with tapestries and lighted dimly by the
same opaline glow as the hallway. The half-seen pictures showed men and
beasts and battles against a background at once tantalizingly familiar
and frighteningly alien.
There was a rug on the floor. It was made from the head and hide of a
creature Ciaran had never even dreamed of before--a thing like a huge
tawny cat with a dark mane and great, shining fangs.
Ciaran padded softly across it and pushed aside the heavy curtains at
the other end.
* * * * *
At first there was only darkness. It seemed to fill a large space;
Ciaran had an instinctive feeling of size. He went out into it, very
cautiously, and then his eyes found a pale glow ahead in the blackness,
as though someone had crushed a pearl with his thumb and smeared it
across the dark.
He was a thief and a gypsy. He made no more sound than a wisp of cloud,
drifting toward it. His feet touched a broad, shallow step, and then
another. He climbed, and the pearly glow grew stronger and became a
curving wall of radiance.
He stopped just short of touching it, on a level platform high above
the floor. He squinted against its curdled, milky thickness, trying to
see through.
Wrapped in the light, cradled and protected by it like a bird in the
heart of a shining cloud, a boy slept on a couch made soft with furs
and colored silks. He was quite naked, his limbs flung out carelessly
with the slim angular grace of his youth. His skin was white as milk,
catching a pale warmth from the light.
He slept deeply. He might almost have been dead, except for the slight
rise and fall of his breathing. His head was rolled over so that he
faced Ciaran, his cheek pillowed on his upflung arm.
His hair, thick, curly, and black almost to blueness, had grown out
long across his forearm, across the white fur beneath it, and down onto
his wide slim shoulders. The nails of his lax hand, palm up above his
head, stood up through the hair. They were inches long.
His face was just a boy's face. A good face, even rather handsome, with
strong bone just beginning to show under the roundness. His cheek was
still soft as a girl's, the lashes of his closed lids dark and heavy.
He looked peaceful, even happy. His mouth was curved in a vague smile,
as though his dreams were pleasant. And yet there was something
there....
A shadow. Something unseen and untouchable, something as fragile as the
note of a shepherd's pipe brought from far off on a vagrant breeze.
Something as indescribable as death--and as broodingly powerful. Ciaran
sensed it, and his nerves throbbed suddenly like the strings of his own
harp.
He saw then that the couch the boy slept on was a huge _crux ansata_,
cut from the dead-black stone, with the arms stretching from under his
shoulders and the loop like a monstrous halo above his head.
The legends whispered through Ciaran's head. The songs, the tales, the
folklore. The symbolism, and the image-patterns.
Bas the Immortal was always described as a giant, like the mountain
he lived in, and old, because Immortal suggests age. Awe, fear, and
unbelief spoke through those legends, and the child-desire to build
tall. But there was an older legend....
Ciaran, because he was a gypsy and a thief and had music in him like
a drunkard has wine, had heard it, deep in the black forests of
Hyperborea where even gypsies seldom go. The oldest legend of all--the
tale of the Shining Youth from Beyond, who walked in beauty and power,
who never grew old, and who carried in his heart a bitter darkness
that no man could understand.
The Shining Youth from Beyond. A boy sleeping with a smile on his face,
walled in living light.
Ciaran stood still, staring. His face was loose and quite blank. His
heartbeats shook him slightly, and his breath had a rusty sound in his
open mouth.
After a long time he started forward, into the light.
It struck him, hurled him back numbed and dazed. Thinking of Mouse, he
tried it twice more before he was convinced. Then he tried yelling. His
voice crashed back at him from the unseen walls, but the sleeping boy
never stirred, never altered even the rhythm of his breathing.
After that Ciaran crouched in the awful laxness of impotency, and
thought about Mouse, and cried.
Then, quite suddenly, without any warning at all, the wall of light
vanished.
* * * * *
He didn't believe it. But he put his his hand out again, and nothing
stopped it, so he rushed forward in the pitch blackness until he hit
the stone arm of the cross. And behind him, and all around him, the
light began to glow again.
Only now it was different. It flickered and dimmed and struggled, like
something fighting not to die. Like something else....
Like the sunballs. Like the light in the sky that meant life to
a world. Flickering and feeble like an old man's heart, the last
frightened wing-beats of a dying bird....
A terror took Ciaran by the throat and stopped the breath in it, and
turned his body colder than a corpse. He watched....
The light glowed and pulsed, and grew stronger. Presently he was walled
in by it, but it seemed fainter than before.
A terrible feeling of urgency came over Ciaran, a need for haste. The
words of the androids came back to him: _Failing, as we judged. If we
finish in time. If we don't, none of it matters._
A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying. Mouse slaving with
empty eyes to build a shining monster that would harness the world to
the wills of non-human brains.
It didn't make sense, but it meant something. Something deadly
important. And the key to the whole mad jumble was here--a dark-haired
boy dreaming on a stone cross.
Ciaran moved closer. He saw then that the boy had stirred, very
slightly, and that his face was troubled. It was as though the dimming
of the light had disturbed him. Then he sighed and smiled again,
nestling his head deeper into the bend of his arm.
"Bas," said Ciaran. "Lord Bas!"
His voice sounded hoarse and queer. The boy didn't hear him. He called
again, louder. Then he put his hand on one slim white shoulder and
shook it hesitantly at first, and then hard, and harder.
The boy Bas didn't even flicker his eyelids.
Ciaran beat his fists against the empty air and cursed without any
voice. Then, almost instinctively, he crouched on the stone platform
and took his harp in his hands.
It wasn't because he expected to do anything with it. It was simply
that harping was as natural to him as breathing, and what was inside
him had to come out some way. He wasn't thinking about music. He was
thinking about Mouse, and it just added up to the same thing.
Random chords at first, rippling up against the wall of milky light.
Then the agony in him began to run out through his finger-tips onto the
strings, and he sent it thrumming strong across the still air. It sang
wild and savage, but underneath it there was the sound of his own heart
breaking, and the fall of tears.
There was no time. There wasn't even any Ciaran. There was only the
harp crying a dirge for a black-haired Mouse and the world she lived
in. Nothing mattered but that. Nothing would ever matter.
Then finally there wasn't anything left for the harp to cry about. The
last quiver of the strings went throbbing off into a dull emptiness,
and there was only an ugly little man in yellow rags crouched silent by
a stone cross, hiding his face in his hands.
Then, faint and distant, like the echo of words spoken in another
world, another time:
_Don't draw the veil. Marsali--don't...!_
Ciaran looked up, stiffening. The boy's lips moved. His face, the eyes
still closed, was twisted in an agony of pleading. His hands were
raised, reaching, trying to hold something that slipped through his
fingers like mist.
Dark mist. The mist of dreams. It was still in his eyes when he opened
them. Grey eyes, clouded and veiled, and then with the dream-mist
thickening into tears....
He cried out, "_Marsali!_" as though his heart was ripped out of him
with the breath that said it. Then he lay still on the couch, his eyes,
staring unfocused at the milky light, with the tears running out of
them.