The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  The man spun about and fled, down a long dim-lit hall. Stark ran him down without effort. He struck once with the barrel of his gun, and the man fell and was still.

  Treon came up. His face had a look almost of exaltation, a queer shining of the eyes that made Stark shiver. He led on, through a series of empty rooms, all somber black, and they met no one else for a while.

  He stopped at last before a small door of burnished gold. He looked at Stark once, and nodded, and thrust the panels open and stepped through.

  12

  They stood inside the vast echoing hall that stretched away into darkness until it seemed there was no end to it. The cluster of silver lamps burned as before, and within their circle of radiance the Lhari started up from their places and stared at the strangers who had come in through their private door.

  Cond, and Arel with her hands idle in her lap. Bor, pummeling the little dragon to make it hiss and snap, laughing at its impotence. Varra, stroking the winged creature on her wrist, testing with her white finger the sharpness of its beak. And the old woman, with a scrap of fat meat halfway to her mouth.

  They had stopped, frozen, in the midst of these actions. And Treon walked slowly into the light.

  “Do you know me?” he said.

  A strange shivering ran through them. Now, as before, the old woman spoke first, her eyes glittering with a look as rapacious as her appetite.

  “You are Treon,” she said, and her whole vast body shook.

  The name went crying and whispering off around the dark walls, Treon! Treon! Treon! Cond leaped forward, touching his cousin’s straight strong body with hands that trembled.

  “You have found it,” he said. “The secret.”

  “Yes.” Treon lifted his silver head and laughed, a beautiful ringing bell-note that sang from the echoing corners. “I found it, and it’s gone, smashed, beyond your reach forever. Egil is dead, and the day of the Lhari is done.”

  There was a long, long silence, and then the old woman whispered, “You lie!”

  Treon turned to Stark.

  “Ask him, the stranger who came bearing doom upon his forehead. Ask him if I lie.”

  Cond’s face became something less than human. He made a queer crazed sound and flung himself at Treon’s throat.

  Bor screamed suddenly. He alone was not much concerned with the finding or the losing of the secret, and he alone seemed to realize the significance of Stark’s presence. He screamed, looking at the big dark man, and went rushing off down the hall, crying for the guard as he went, and the echoes roared and racketed. He fought open the great doors and ran out, and as he did so the sound of fighting came through from the compound.

  The slaves, with their swords and clubs, with their stones and shards of rock, had come over the wall from the cliffs.

  Stark had moved forward, but Treon did not need his help. He had got his hands around Cond’s throat, and he was smiling. Stark did not disturb him.

  The old woman was talking, cursing, commanding, choking on her own apoplectic breath. Arel began to laugh. She did not move, and her hands remained limp and open in her lap. She laughed and laughed, and Varra looked at Stark and hated him.

  “You’re a fool, wild man,” she said. “You would not take what I offered you, so you shall have nothing—only death.”

  She slipped the hood from her creature and set it straight at Stark. Then she drew a knife from her girdle and plunged it into Treon’s side.

  Treon reeled back. His grip loosened and Cond tore away, half throttled, raging, his mouth flecked with foam. He drew his short sword and staggered in upon Treon.

  Furious wings beat and thundered around Stark’s head, and talons were clawing for his eyes. He reached up with his left hand and caught the brute by one leg and held it. Not long, but long enough to get one clear shot at Cond that dropped him in his tracks. Then he snapped the falcon’s neck.

  He flung the creature at Varra’s feet, and picked up the gun again. The guards were rushing into the hall now at the lower end, and he began to fire at them.

  Treon was sitting on the floor. Blood was coming in a steady trickle from his side, but he had the shock-weapon in his hands, and he was still smiling.

  There was a great boiling roar of noise from outside. Men were fighting there, killing, dying, screaming their triumph or their pain. The echoes raged within the hall, and the noise of Stark’s gun was like a hissing thunder. The guards, armed only with swords, went down like ripe wheat before the sickle, but there were many of them, too many for Stark and Treon to hold for long.

  The old woman shrieked and shrieked, and was suddenly still.

  Helvi burst in through the press, with a knot of collared slaves. The fight dissolved into a whirling chaos. Stark threw his gun away. He was afraid now of hitting his own men. He caught up a sword from a fallen guard and began to hew his way to the barbarian.

  Suddenly Treon cried his name. He leaped aside, away from the man he was fighting, and saw Varra fall with the dagger still in her hand. She had come up behind him to stab, and Treon had seen and pressed the trigger stud just in time.

  For the first time, there were tears in Treon’s eyes.

  A sort of sickness came over Stark. There was something horrible in this spectacle of a family destroying itself. He was too much the savage to be sentimental over Varra, but all the same he could not bear to look at Treon for a while.

  Presently he found himself back to back with Helvi, and as they swung their swords—the shock-weapons had been discarded for the same reason as Stark’s gun—Helvi panted, “It has been a good fight, my brother! We cannot win, but we can have a good death, which is better than slavery!”

  It looked as though Helvi was right. The slaves, unfortunately, weakened by their long confinement, worn out by overwork, were being beaten back. The tide turned, and Stark was swept with it out into the compound, fighting stubbornly.

  The great gate stood open. Beyond it stood the people of Shuruun, watching, hanging back—as Treon had said, they would wait and see.

  In the forefront, leaning on his stick, stood Larrabee the Earth-man.

  Stark cut his way free of the press. He leaped up onto the wall and stood there, breathing hard, sweating, bloody, with a dripping sword in his hand. He waved it, shouting down to the men of Shuruun.

  “What are you waiting for, you scuts, you women? The Lhari are dead, the Lost Ones are freed—must we of Earth do all your work for you?”

  And he looked straight at Larrabee.

  Larrabee stared back, his dark suffering eyes full of a bitter mirth. “Oh, well,” he said in English. “Why not?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, and the bitterness was gone. He voiced a high, shrill rebel yell and lifted his stick like a cudgel, limping toward the gate, and the men of Shuruun gave tongue and followed him.

  After that, it was soon over.

  They found Bor’s body in the stable pens, where he had fled to hide when the fighting started. The dragons, maddened by the smell of the blood, had slain him very quickly.

  Helvi had come through alive, and Larrabee, who had kept himself carefully out of harm’s way after he had started the men of Shuruun on their attack. Nearly half the slaves were dead, and the rest wounded. Of those who had served the Lhari, few were left.

  Stark went back into the great hall. He walked slowly, for he was very weary, and where he set his foot there was a bloody print, and his arms were red to the elbows, and his breast was splashed with the redness. Treon watched him come, and smiled, nodding.

  “It is as I said. And I have outlived them all.”

  Arel had stopped laughing at last. She had made no move to run away, and the tide of battle had rolled over her and drowned her unaware. The old woman lay still, a mountain of inert flesh upon her bed. Her hand still clutched a ripe fruit, clutched convulsively in the moment of death, the red juice dripping through her fingers.

  “Now I am going, too,” said Treon, “and I am well co
ntent. With me goes the last of our rotten blood, and Venus will be the cleaner for it. Bury my body deep, stranger with the fierce eyes. I would not have it looked on after this.”

  He sighed and fell forward.

  Bor’s little dragon crept whimpering out from its hiding place under the old woman’s bed and scurried away down the hall, trailing its dragging rope.

  Stark leaned on the taffrail, watching the dark mass of Shuruun recede into the red mists.

  The decks were crowded with the outland slaves, going home. The Lhari were gone, the Lost Ones freed forever, and Shuruun was now only another port on the Red Sea. Its people would still be wolfs-heads and pirates, but that was natural and as it should be. The black evil was gone.

  Stark was glad to see the last of it. He would be glad also to see the last of the Red Sea.

  The off-shore wind set the ship briskly down the gulf. Stark thought of Larrabee, left behind with his dreams of winter snows and city streets and women with dainty feet. It seemed that he had lived too long in Shuruun, and had lost the courage to leave it.

  “Poor Larrabee,” he said to Helvi, who was standing near him. “He’ll die in the mud, still cursing it.”

  Someone laughed behind him. He heard a limping step on the deck and turned to see Larrabee coming toward him.

  “Changed my mind at the last minute,” Larrabee said. “I’ve been below, lest I should see my muddy brats and be tempted to change it again.” He leaned beside Stark, shaking his head. “Ah, well, they’ll do nicely without me. I’m an old man, and I’ve a right to choose my own place to die in. I’m going back to Earth, with you.”

  Stark glanced at him. “I’m not going to Earth.”

  Larrabee sighed. “No. No, I suppose you’re not. After all, you’re no Earthman, really, except for an accident of blood. Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Away from Venus, but I don’t know yet where.”

  Larrabee’s dark eyes surveyed him shrewdly. “‘A restless, cold-eyed tiger of a man’, that’s what Varra said. He’s lost something, she said. He’ll look for it all his life, and never find it”

  After that there was silence. The red fog wrapped them, and the wind rose and sent them scudding before it.

  Then, faint and far off, there came a moaning wail, a sound like broken chanting that turned Stark’s flesh cold.

  All on board heard it. They listened, utterly silent, their eyes wide, and somewhere a woman began to weep.

  Stark shook himself. “It’s only the wind,” he said roughly, “in the rocks by the strait.”

  The sound rose and fell, weary, infinitely mournful, and the part of Stark that was N’Chaka said that he lied. It was not the wind that keened so sadly through the mists. It was the voices of the Lost Ones who were forever lost—Zareth, sleeping in the hall of kings, and all the others who would never leave the dreaming city and the forest, never find the light again.

  Stark shivered, and turned away, watching the leaping fires of the strait sweep toward them.

  The Woman From Altair

  1 Ahrian

  What a great day it was for everybody, when David came home from deep space. It was a day that will remain for a long while on the calendar of the McQuarrie family, marked heavily in red.

  We had driven down to the spaceport to meet him—myself, and Bet, who was David’s and my sister, just out of college, and David’s fiancee, a Miss Lewisham. The Miss Lewisham had family but no money, and David had both, and that was as far as it went. She was one of these handsome, shallow-eyed babes as perfectly machined as a chunk of bakelite, and just as human. Bet thought she was terrific. She had spent hours getting herself up to be as like her as possible, but it was all in vain. Bet’s hair still behaved like hair, and blew.

  The spaceport was swarming. Interplanetary flight had long ago ceased to be a thing of breathless wonder to the populace, but star-ships were still new and rare, and the men who flew them were still heroic. Word had gone out that the Anson McQuarrie was due in from somewhere beyond the Pleiades, and there were thousands of people backed up behind the barricades. I remember that there were flags, and somebody had prepared a speech.

  “Isn’t it wonderful” said Bet, around a lump in her throat. “And all for David.”

  “There are some other men on that ship, too,” I said.

  “Oh, you always have to be so nasty,” she snapped. “David’s the captain, and the owner, too. And he deserves the reception.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, “and what’s more, David himself would be the last to disagree with you.”

  Officials were opening a way for us, and I shoved Bet along it with the Miss Lewisham, who headed like a homing duck for the TV cameras. At about that moment a feminine voice hailed us, and Bet whirled around, crying out, “Marthe!”

  An extremely attractive young woman detached herself from a group of obvious reporters and joined us.

  “I’m going to be quite shameless,” she announced, “and presume on an old school friendship.”

  I liked the way she grinned and practically dared me to throw her out of the family circle. I should have done so, but didn’t because of that cheeky grin, and that’s how Marthe Walters came to be mixed up in this mess. I wished so desperately afterward that I had pushed her face in. But how is one to know?

  Bet was offering explanations. “Marthe was a senior when I was a freshman, Rafe. Remember? That was when I was going to be a journalist.” She rushed through the introductions, and memory clicked.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “You’re the Marthe Walters who does those profile sketches for Public.”

  “It’s honest work, but it’s a living.”

  “You’ve come to the right place. My brother has the devil and all of a profile.”

  She cocked her head on one side and gave me a peculiarly intelligent look. “Yours isn’t so bad. And come to think of it, I’ve never heard of you.”

  “I’m the forgotten McQuarrie,” I said. “The one who didn’t go to space.”

  All this time we were being assisted onward to the place that had been reserved for the family. Bet was burbling, the Miss Lewisham was being statuesque and proud, and this bright-eyed intruder, Marthe, was thinking questions and trying to devise a politic way of asking them.

  “You’re David’s older brother?”

  “Ancient.”

  “And you’re a McQuarrie, and you didn’t go to space.” She shook her head. “That’s like being a fish, and refusing to swim.”

  “It’s not Rafe’s fault,” said Bet, with that touch of womanly pity she could get in her voice sometimes. “How soon will he land, Rafe? I just can’t wait!”

  I was trying to figure out what color Marthe’s eyes were. I got them pegged for blue, and then there was some change in the light or something, and they were green as sea-water.

  “Surely,” she said, “you didn’t wash out.”

  “No, it was noisier than that. I crashed. It was a light plane, but it came down heavy.”

  “He was on his way to the spaceport from the Academy,” said Bet sadly. “He had his papers and everything, and was going out on his first voyage as a junior officer. The disappointment nearly killed Father, Rafe being the oldest son and everything. But then, he still had David.”

  “I see,” said Marthe. She smiled at me, and this time it wasn’t cheeky, but the sort of smile a man would like to see more of. “I’m sorry. I thought that walking stick was pure swank.”

  “It is,” I told her, and laughed. “I think that’s what really disgusts the family—I’m healthy as a horse. I only carry the thing to remind them that I’m supposed to be frail.”

  They were in radio communication with the Anson McQuarrie. The reports of position kept coming in, and an amplifier blatted them out. Men ran around looking harried, a million voices chattered, necks craned, the tension built up. The towers of Manhattan glittered mightily in the distance. Marthe and I talked. I think we talked about her.

  A
great roar went up. Bet screamed in my ear. There was a perfect frenzy of sound for a few moments, and then there was silence, and in it the sky split open like tearing silk. A speck of silver came whistling down the cleft, growing rapidly, becoming a huge graceful creature with tarnished flanks and star-dust on her nose, and pride in every rivet. Oh, she was beautiful, and she settled light as a moonbeam on the landing field that had been cleared of any lesser craft. The Anson McQuarrie was home.

  I noticed then that Marthe had not been watching the ship at all. She was watching me.

  “You,” she said, “are a rather puzzling person.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “I don’t like a book that has the whole story on the first page.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then you won’t like David. Come along. And oh, yes, any time you want to catch up on your reading—”

  “There he is!” shrieked Bet. “There’s David!”

  The barricades were keeping back the crowds, and officials were forming a second line of defense against the mob of reporters. We, the family, were allowed to be first with our greetings. The under-hatch had opened in that vast keel, the platform was run out, and a tall figure in absolutely impeccable uniform bad emerged onto it. Bands played, thousands cheered, the TV cameras rolled, and David lifted his hand and smiled. A handsome beggar, my brother, with all the best points of the McQuarrie stock. I think he was a little annoyed when Bet flung herself up the steps and onto his neck. She mussed his collar badly.

  I waved. The Miss Lewisham mounted to the platform, showing her splendid legs. She held out her arms graciously, prepared to grant David the dignified kiss due a hero from his future wife. But David gave her a horrified look as though he had forgotten all about her, and his face turned six different shades of red.

  He recovered magnificently. He caught those outstretched hands and shook them warmly, at the same time getting her off to one side so smoothly that she hardly realized it. Before she could say anything, he had spoken, to the world at large, with boyish pride.