The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  Hugh said bitterly, “When they were only men, and convicts, we might have beaten them some day, even though they had all the weapons. But when they became the Korins—” He indicated the darkling alcoves of the cave. “This is the only freedom we can ever have now.”

  Looking at Hugh and Jen, Trevor felt a great welling-up of pity, for them, and for all these far-removed children of Earth who were now only hunted slaves to whom this burrow in the rock meant freedom. He thought with pure hatred of the Korins who hunted them, with the uncanny hawks that were their far-ranging eyes and ears and weapons. He wished he could hit them with…

  He caught himself up sharply. Letting his sympathies run away with him wasn’t going to do anybody any good. The only thing that concerned him was to get hold of that sun-stone again and get out of this devil’s pocket. He’d spent half a life hunting for a stone, and he wasn’t going to let concern over perfect strangers sidetrack him now.

  The first step would be getting away from the cave.

  It would have to be at night. No watch was kept then on the ledges, for the hawks did not fly in darkness, and the Korins never moved without the hawks. Most of the people were busy in those brief hours of safety. The women searched for edible moss and lichens. Some of the men brought water from the stream at the canyon fork, and others, with stone clubs and crude spears, hunted the great rock-lizards that slept in the crevices, made sluggish by the cold.

  Trevor waited until the fourth night, and then when Saul’s water party left, he started casually out of the cave after them.

  “I think I’ll go down with them,” he told Jen and Hugh. “I haven’t been down that far since I got here.”

  There seemed to be no suspicion in them of his purpose. Jen said, “Stay close to the others. It’s easy to get lost in the rocks.”

  He turned and went into the darkness after the water party. He followed them down to the fork, and it was quite easy then to slip aside among the tumbled rock and leave them, working his way slowly and silently downstream.

  After several days in the dimness of the cave, he found that the star-shine gave him light enough to move by. It was hard going, even so, and by the time he reached the approximate place where Saul had tried to kill him he was bruised and cut and considerably shaken. But he picked his spot carefully, crossed the stream, and began to search.

  The chill deepened. The rocks that had been hot under his hands turned cold, and the frost-rime settled lightly on them, and Trevor shivered and swore and scrambled, fighting the numbness out of his body, praying that none of the loose rubble would fall on him and crush him. He had prospected on Mercury for a long time. Otherwise he would not have lived.

  He found it more easily than he could have done by day, without a detector. He saw the cold pale light of it gleaming, down among the dark broken rock where Saul had thrown it.

  He picked it up.

  He dandled the thing in his palm, touching it with loving finger tips. It had a certain cold repellent beauty, glimmering in the darkness—a freakish by-product of Mercury’s birth-pangs, unique in the solar system. Its radioactivity was a type and potency harmless to living tissue, and its wonderful sensitivity had made it possible for physicists to explore at least a little into those unknown regions above the first octave.

  In a gesture motivated by pure curiosity he lifted the stone and pressed it tight against the flesh between his brows. Probably it wouldn’t work this way. Probably it had to be set deep into the bone…

  It worked, oh God, it worked, and something had him, something caught him by the naked brain and would not let him go.

  Trevor screamed. The thin small sound was lost in the empty dark, and he tried again, but no sound would come. Something had forbidden him to scream. Something was in there, opening out the leaves of his brain like the pages of a child’s book, and it wasn’t a hawk, or a Korin. It wasn’t anything human or animal that he had ever known before. It was something still and lonely and remote, as alien as the mountain peaks that towered upward to the stars, and as strong, and as utterly without mercy.

  Trevor’s body became convulsed. Every physical instinct was driving him to run, to escape, and he could not. In his throat now there was a queer wailing whimper. He tried to drop the sun-stone. He was forbidden. Rage began to come on the heels of horror, a blind protest against the indecent invasion of his most private mind. The whimpering rose to a sort of catlike squall, an eerie and quite insane sound in the narrow gorge, and he clawed with his free hand at the one that held the sun-stone, tight against his brows.

  He tore it loose.

  A wrench that almost cracked his brain in two. A flicker of surprise, just before the contact broke, and then a fading flash of anger, and then nothing.

  Trevor fell down. He did not quite lose consciousness, but there was an ugly sickness in him and all his bones had turned to water. It seemed a long time before he could get to his feet again. Then he stood there shaking.

  There was something in this accursed valley. There was something or someone who could reach out through the sun-stones and take hold of a man’s mind. It did that to the Korins and the hawks, and it had done it for a moment to him, and the horror of that alien grasp upon his brain was still screaming inside him.

  “But who—?” he whispered hoarsely. And then he knew that the word was wrong. “What—?”

  For it was not human, it couldn’t be human, whatever had held him there wasn’t man or woman, brute or human. It was something else, but what it was he didn’t want to know, he only wanted to get out—out—

  Trevor found that he had begun to run, bruising his shins against rocks. He got a grip on himself, forcing himself to stand still. His breath was coming in great gasps.

  He still had the sun-stone clenched in his sweating palm, and he had an almost irresistible desire to fling the thing away with all his strength. But even in the grip of alien horror a man could not throw away the goal of half a lifetime, and he held it, and hated it.

  He told himself that whatever it was that reached through the sun-stones could not use them unless they were against the forehead, close to the brain. The thing couldn’t harm him if he kept it away from his head.

  A terrible thought renewed Trevor’s horror. He thought of the Korins, the men who wore sun-stones set forever in their brows. Were they, always and always, in the icy, alien grip of that which had held him? And these were the masters of Jen’s people?

  He forced that thought away. He had to forget everything except how to get free of this place.

  He started at once, still shaken. He couldn’t go far before daylight, and he would have to lie up in the rocks through the day and try to make it to the valley wall the next night.

  He was glad when daylight came, the first fires of sunrise kindling the peaks that went above the sky.

  It was at that moment that a shadow flickered, and Trevor looked up and saw the hawks.

  Many hawks. They had not seen him, they were not heeding the rocks in which he crouched. They were flying straight up the ravine, not circling or searching now but going with a sure purposefulness, back the way he had come.

  He watched them uneasily. There were more than he had ever seen together before. But they flew on up the ravine without turning, and were gone.

  “They weren’t looking for me,” he thought. “But…”

  Trevor should have felt relieved, but he didn’t. His uneasiness grew and grew, stemming from an inescapable conclusion.

  The hawks were going to the cave. They were heading toward it in an exact line, turning neither to right nor left, and this time they were not in any doubt. They, or whoever or whatever dominated them, knew this time exactly where to find the fugitives.

  “But that’s impossible,” Trevor tried to tell himself. “There’s no way they could suddenly learn exactly where the cave is after all this time.”

  No way?

  A thing was forcing its way up into Trevor’s anxious thoughts, a realization th
at he did not want to look at squarely, not at all. But it would not be put down, it would not stop tormenting him, and suddenly he cried out to it, a cry of pain and guilt, “No, it couldn’t be! It couldn’t be through me they learned!”

  It fronted him relentlessly, the memory of that awful moment in the canyon when whatever had gripped him through the sun-stone had seemed to be turning over the leaves of his brain like the pages of a book.

  The vast and alien mind that had gripped his in that dreadful contact had read his own brain clearly, he knew. And in Trevor’s brain and memories it had found the secret of the cave.

  Trevor groaned in an agony of guilt.

  He crawled out of his rock-heap and began to run back up the ravine, following the path the hawks had taken. There might still be time to warn them.

  Stumbling, running, he passed the canyon fork. And now from above him in the canyon he heard the sounds he dreaded—the sounds of women screaming and men shouting hoarsely in fury and despair. Farther on, over the rocks, scrambling, slipping, gasping for breath, he came to the cave-mouth and the sight he had dreaded.

  The hawks had gone into the cave and driven out the slaves. They had them in the canyon now, and they were trying to herd them together and drive them down toward the lava beds. But the slaves were fighting back.

  Dark wings beat and thundered in the narrow gorge between the walls of rock. Claws struck and lashing tails cut like whips. Men struggled and floundered and trampled each other. Some died. Some of the hawks died too. But the people were being forced farther down the canyon under the relentless swooping of the hawks.

  Then Trevor saw Jen. She was a little way from the others. Hugh was with her. He had shoved her into a protecting hollow and was standing over her with a piece of rock in his hands, trying to beat off a hawk. Hugh was hurt badly. He was not doing well.

  Trevor uttered a wild cry that voiced all the futile rage in him, and bounded over a slope toward them.

  “Hugh, look out!” he yelled. The hawk had risen, and then had checked and turned, to swoop down straight at Hugh’s back.

  Hugh swung partly around, but not soon enough. The hawk’s claws were in his body, deep. Hugh fell down.

  Jen was screaming when Trevor reached them. He didn’t stop to snatch up a rock. He threw himself onto the hawk that had welded itself to Hugh’s back. There was a horrid slippery thrashing of wings under him, and the scaly neck of the thing was terribly strong between Trevor’s hands. But not strong enough. He broke it.

  It was too late. When his sight cleared, Jen was staring in a strange wild way at the man and hawk lying tangled together in the dust. When Trevor touched her she fought him a little, not as though she saw him really, not as though she saw anything but Hugh’s white ribs sticking out.

  “Jen, for God’s sake, he’s dead.” Trevor tried to pull her away. “We’ve got to get away from here.”

  There might be a chance. The black hawks were driving the humans down the canyon a little below them now, and if they could make the tumbled rocks below the cliff, there was a chance.

  4

  He had to drag Jen. Her face had gone utterly blank.

  In the next minute he realized that they would never reach the rocks, and that there was no chance, none at all. Back from the winged whirl that was driving the humans, two of the hawks came darting at them.

  Trevor swung Jen behind him and hoped fiercely that he could get another neck between his hands before they pulled him down.

  The dark shadows flashed down. He could see the sun-stones glittering in their heads. They struck straight at him…

  But at the last split second they swerved away.

  Trevor waited. They came back again, very fast, but this time it was at Jen they struck, and not at him.

  He got her behind him again in time. And once more the hawks checked their strike.

  The truth dawned on Trevor. The hawks were deliberately refraining from hurting him.

  “Whoever gives them their orders, the Korins or that Other, doesn’t want me hurt!”

  He caught up Jen in his arms and started to run again toward the rocks.

  Instantly the hawks struck at Jen. He could not swing her clear in time. Blood ran from the long claw-marks they left in her smooth, tanned shoulders.

  Jen cried out. Trevor hesitated. He tried again for the rocks, and Jen moaned as a swift scaly head snapped at her neck.

  So that’s it, Trevor thought furiously. I’m not to be hurt, but they can drive me through Jen.

  And they could, too. He would never get Jen to the concealment of the rocks alive, with those two wide-winged shadows tearing at her. He had to go the way they wanted or they would leave her as they had left Hugh.

  “All right!” Trevor yelled savagely at the circling demons. “Let her alone! I’ll go where you want.”

  He turned, still carrying Jen, plodding after the other slaves who were being herded down the canyon.

  All that day the black hawks drove the humans down the watercourse, around the shoulder of basalt and out onto the naked sun-seared lava bed. Some of them dropped and lay where they were, and no effort of the hawks could move them on again. Much of the time Trevor carried Jen. Part of the time he dragged her. For long vague periods he had no idea what he did.

  He was in a daze in which only his hatred still was vivid, when he felt Jen pulled away from him. He struggled, and was held—and he looked up to see a ring of mounted men around him. Korins on their crested beasts, the sun-stones glittering in their brows.

  They looked down at Trevor, curious, speculative, hostile, their otherwise undistinguished human faces made strangely evil and other-worldly by the winking stones.

  “You come with us to the city,” one of them said curtly to Trevor. “That woman goes with the other slaves.”

  Trevor glared up at him. “Why me, to the city?”

  The Korin raised his riding whip threateningly. “Do as you’re ordered! Mount!”

  Trevor saw that a slave had brought a saddled beast to him and was holding it, not looking either at him or the Korins.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

  He mounted and sat waiting, his eyes bright with the hatred that burned in him, bright as blown coals. They formed a circle around him and the leader gave a word. They galloped off toward the distant city.

  Trevor must have dozed as he rode, for suddenly it was sunset, and they were approaching the city.

  Seeing it as he had before, far off and with nothing to measure it against but the overtopping titan peaks, it had seemed no more than a city built of rock. Now he was close to it. Black shadows lay on it, and on the valley, but half way up the opposite mountain wall the light still blazed, reflected downward on the shallow sky, so that everything seemed to float in some curious dimension between night and day. Trevor stared, shut his eyes, and stared again.

  The size was wrong.

  He looked quickly at the Korins, with the eerie feeling that he might have shrunk to child-size as he slept. But they had not changed—at least, relative to himself. He turned back to the city, trying to force it into perspective.

  It rose up starkly from the level plain. There was no gradual guttering out into suburbs, no softening down to garden villas or rows of cottages. It leaped up like a cliff and began, solemn, massive, squat, and ugly. The buildings were square, set stiffly along a square front. They were not tall. Most of them were only one story high. And yet Trevor felt dwarfed by them, as he had never felt dwarfed by the mightiest of Earth’s skyscrapers. It was an unnatural feeling, and one that made him curiously afraid.

  There were no walls or gateways, no roads leading in. One minute the beasts padded on the grass of the open plain. The next, their claws were clicking on a stone pave and the buildings closed them in, hulking, graceless, looking sullen and forlorn in the shadowed light. There was no sound in them anywhere, no gleaming of lamps in the black embrasures of cavernous doors. The last furious glare of the
hidden sun seeped down from the high peaks and stained their upper walls, and they were old—half as old, Trevor thought, as the peaks themselves.

  It was the window embrasures, the doors, and the steps that led up to them that made Trevor understand suddenly what was wrong. And the latent fear that had been in him sprang to full growth. The city, and the buildings in it, the steps and the doors and the height of the windows, were perfectly in proportion, perfectly normal—if the people who lived there were twenty feet high.

  He turned to the Korins. “You never built this place. Who built it?”

  The one called Galt, who was nearest him, snarled, “Quiet, slave!”

  Trevor looked at him, and at the other Korins. Something about their faces and the way they rode along the darkening empty street told him they too were afraid.

  He said, “You, the Korins, the lordly demigods who ride about and send your hawks to hunt and slay—you’re more afraid of your master than the slaves are of you!”

  They turned toward him pallid faces that burned with hatred.

  He remembered how that other had gripped his brain back in the canyon. He remembered how it had felt. He understood many things now.

  He asked, “How does it feel to be enslaved, Korins? Not just enslaved in body, but in mind and soul?”

  Galt turned like a striking snake. But the blow never fell. The upraised hand with the heavy whip suddenly checked, and then sank down again. Only the eyes of the Korin glowed with a baleful helplessness under the winking sun-stone.

  Trevor laughed without humor. “It wants me alive. I guess I’m safe, then. I guess I could tell you what I think of you. You’re still convicts, aren’t you? After three hundred years. No wonder you hate the slaves.”