The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  Not the same convicts, of course. The sun-stones didn’t give longevity. Trevor knew how the Korins propagated, stealing women from among the slaves, keeping the male children and killing the female. He laughed again.

  “It isn’t such a good life after all, is it, being a Korin? Even hunting and killing can’t take the taste out of your mouths. No wonder you hate the others! They’re enslaved, all right, but they’re not owned.”

  They would have liked to kill him but they could not. They were forbidden. Trevor looked at them, in the last pale flicker of the afterglow. The jewels and the splendid harness, the bridles of the beasts heavy with gold, the weapons—they looked foolish now, like the paper crowns and glass beads that children deck themselves with when they pretend to be kings. These were not lords and masters. These were only little men, and slaves. And the sun-stones were a badge of shame.

  The cavalcade passed on. Empty streets, empty houses with windows too high for human eyes to look through and steps too tall for human legs to climb. Full dark, and the first stunning crash of thunder, the first blaze of lightning between the cliffs. The mounts were hurrying now, almost galloping to beat the lightning and the scalding rain.

  They were in a great square. Around it was a stiff rectangle of houses, and these were lighted with torchlight, and in the monstrous doorways here and there a little figure stood, a Korin, watching.

  In the exact center of the square was a flat low structure of stone, having no windows and but a single door.

  They reined the beasts before that lightless entrance. “Get down,” said Galt to Trevor. A livid reddish flaring in the sky showed Trevor the Korin’s face, and it was smiling, as a wolf smiles before the kill. Then the thunder came, the downpour of rain, and he was thrust bodily into the doorway.

  He stumbled over worn flagging in the utter dark, but the Korins moved surefootedly as cats. He knew they had been here many times before, and he knew that they hated it. He could feel the hate and the fear bristling out from the bodies that were close to his, smell them in the close hot air. They didn’t want to be here but they had to. They were bidden.

  He would have fallen head-foremost down the sudden flight of steps if someone had not caught his arm. They were huge steps. They were forced to go down them as small children do, lowering themselves bodily from tread to tread. A furnace blast of air came up the well, but in spite of the heat Trevor felt cold. He could feel how the hard stone of the stairs had been worn into deep hollows by the passing of feet. Whose feet? And going where?

  A sulphurous glow began to creep up through the darkness. They went down what seemed a very long way. The glow brightened, so that Trevor could once more make out the faces of the Korins. The heat was overpowering, but still there was a coldness around Trevor’s heart.

  The steps ended in a long low hall, so long that the farther end of it was lost in vaporous shadow. Trevor thought that it must have been squared out of a natural cavern, for here and there in the rocky floor small fumaroles burned and bubbled, giving off the murky light and a reek of brimstone.

  Along both sides of the hall were rows of statues seated in stone chairs.

  Trevor stared at them, with the skin crawling up and down his back. Statues of men and women—or rather, of creatures manlike and womanlike—sitting solemn and naked, their hands folded in their laps, their eyes, fashioned of dull, reddish stone, looking straight ahead, their features even and composed, with a strange sad patience clinging to the stony furrows around mouth and cheek. Statues that would be perhaps twenty feet tall if they were standing, carved by a master’s chisel out of a pale substance that looked like alabaster.

  Galt caught his arm. “Oh, no, you won’t run away. You were laughing, remember? Come on, I want to see you laugh some more.”

  They forced him along between the rows of statues. Quiet statues, with a curiously ghostly look of thoughtfulness—of thoughts and feelings long vanished but once there, different from those of humans, perhaps, but quite as strong. No two of them were alike, in face or body. Trevor noted among them things seldom seen in statues, a maimed limb, a deformity, or a completely nondescript face that would offer neither beauty nor ugliness for an artist to enlarge upon. Also, they seemed all to be old, though he could not have said why he thought so.

  There were other halls opening off this main one. How far they went he had no means of guessing, but he could see that in them were other shadowy rows of seated figures.

  Statues. Endless numbers of statues, down here in the darkness underneath the city…

  He stopped, bracing himself against his captors, gripping the hot rock with his bare feet.

  “This is a catacomb,” he said. “Those aren’t statues, they’re bodies, dead things sitting up.”

  “Come on,” said Galt. “Come on, and laugh!”

  They took him, and there were too many to fight. And Trevor knew that it was not them he had to fight. Something was waiting for him down in that catacomb. It had had his mind once. It would—

  They were approaching the end of the long hall. The sickly light from the fumaroles showed the last of the lines of seated figures—had they died there like that, sitting up, or had they been brought here afterward? The rows on each side ended evenly, the last chairs exactly opposite each other.

  But against the blank end wall was a solitary seat of stone, facing down the full gloomy length of the hall, and on it sat a manlike shape of alabaster, very still, the stony hands folded rigidly upon the stony thighs. A figure no different from the others, except…

  Except that the eyes were still alive.

  The Korins dropped back a little. All but Galt. He stayed beside Trevor, his head bent, his mouth sullen and nervous, not looking up at all. And Trevor stared into the remote and somber eyes that were like two pieces of carnelian in that pale alabaster face, and yet were living, sentient, full of a deep and alien sorrow.

  It was very silent in the catacomb. The dreadful eyes studied Trevor, and for just a moment his hatred was tempered by a strange pity as he thought what it must be like for the brain, the intelligence behind those eyes, already entombed, and knowing it.

  “A long living and a long dying. The blessing and the curse of my people.”

  The words were soundless, spoken inside his brain. Trevor started violently. Almost he turned to flee, remembering the torture of that moment in the canyon, and then he found that while he had been staring, a force as gentle and stealthy as the gliding of a shadow had already invaded him. And he was forbidden.

  “At this range I do not need the sun-stones,” murmured the silent voice within him. “Once I did not need them at all. But I am old.”

  Trevor stared at the stony thing that watched him, and then he thought of Jen, of Hugh lying dead with a dead hawk in the dust, and the strangeness left him, and his bitter passion flared again.

  “So you hate me as well as fear me, little human? You would destroy me?” There was a gentle laughter inside Trevor’s mind. “I have watched generations of humans die so swiftly. And yet I am here, as I was before they came, waiting.”

  “You won’t be here forever,” snarled Trevor. “These others like you died. You will!”

  “Yes. But it is a slow dying, little human. Your body chemistry is like that of the plants, the beasts, based upon carbon. Quick to grow. Quick to wither away. Ours was of another sort. We were like the mountains, cousin to them, our body cells built of silicon, even as theirs. And so our flesh endures until it grows slow and stiff with age. But even then we must wait long, very long, for death.”

  Something of the truth of that long waiting came to Trevor, and he felt a shuddering thankfulness for the frailty of human flesh.

  “I am the last,” whispered the silent voice. “For a while I had companionship of minds, but the others are all gone before me, long ago.”

  Trevor had a nightmare vision of Mercury, in some incalculable future eon, a frozen world taking its last plunge into the burned-out sun, bearing
with it these endless rows of alabaster shapes, sitting in their chairs of stone, upright in the dead blackness underneath the ice.

  He fought back to reality, clutching his hatred as a swimmer clings to a plank, his voice raw with passion and bitterness as he cried out.

  “Yes, I’ll destroy you if I can! What else could you expect after what you’ve done?”

  “Oh, no, little human, you will not destroy me. You will help me.”

  Trevor glared. “Help you? Not if you kill me!”

  “There will be no killing. You would be of no use to me dead. But alive you can serve me. That is why you were spared.”

  “Serve you—like them?’ He swung to point to the waiting Korins, but the Korins were not waiting now, they were closing in on him, their hands reaching for him.

  Trevor struck out at them. He had a fleeting thought of how weird this battle of his with the Korins must look, as they struck and staggered on the stone paving beneath the looming, watching thing of stone.

  But even as he had that thought, the moment of struggle ended. An imperious command hit his brain, and black oblivion closed down upon him like the sudden clenching of a fist.

  5

  Darkness. He was lost in it, and he was not himself any more. He fled through the darkness, groping, crying out for something that was gone. And a voice answered him, a voice that he did not want to hear…

  Darkness. Dreams.

  Dawn, high on the blazing mountains. He stood in the city, watching the light grow bright and pitiless, watching it burn on the upper walls and then slip downward into the streets, casting heavy shadows in the openings of door and window, so that the houses looked like skulls with empty eyeholes and gaping mouths. The buildings no longer seemed too big. He walked between them, and when he came to steps he climbed them easily, and the window ledges were no higher than his head. He knew these buildings. He looked at each one as he passed, naming it, remembering with a long, long memory.

  The hawks came down to him, the faithful servants with the sun-stones in their brows. He stroked their pliant necks, and they hissed softly with pleasure, but their shallow minds were empty of everything but that vague sensation. He passed on through the familiar streets, and in them nothing stirred. All through the day from dawn to sunset, and in the darkness that came afterward, nothing stirred, and there was a silence among the stones.

  He could not endure the city. His time was not yet, though the first subtle signs of age had touched him. But he went down into the catacombs and took his place with those others who were waiting and could still speak to him with their minds, so that he should not be quite alone with the silence.

  The years went by, leaving no traces of themselves in the unchanging gloom of the mortuary halls.

  One by one those last few minds were stilled until all were gone. And by that time age had chained him where he was, unable to rise and go again into the city where he had been young, the youngest of all…Shannach, they had named him—The Last.

  So he waited, alone. And only one who was kin to the mountains could have borne that waiting in the place of the dead.

  Then, in a burst of flame and thunder, new life came into the valley. Human life. Soft, frail, receptive life, intelligent, unprotected, possessed of violent and bewildering passions. Very carefully, taking its time, the mind of Shannach reached out and gathered them in.

  Some of the men were more violent than the others. Shannach saw their emotions in patterns of scarlet against the dark of his inner mind. They had already made themselves masters, and a number of these frail sensitive brains had snapped out swiftly because of them. “These I will take for my own,” thought Shannach. “Their mind-patterns are crude, but strong, and I am interested in death.”

  There had been a surgeon aboard the ship but he was dead. However, there was no need of a surgeon for what was about to be done. When Shannach had finished talking to the men he had chosen, telling them of the sun-stones, telling them the truth, but not all of it—when those men had eagerly agreed to the promise of power—Shannach took complete control. And the clumsy convict hands that moved now with such exquisite skill were as much his instruments as the scalpels of the dead surgeon that they wielded, making the round incision and the delicate cutting of the bone.

  Who was the man that lay there, quiet under the knife? Who were the ones that bent above him, with the strange stones in their brows? Names. There are names and I know them. Closer, closer. 1 know that man who lies there with blood between his eyes…

  Trevor screamed. Someone slapped him across the face, viciously and with intent. He screamed again, fighting, clawing, still blinded by the visions and the dark mists, and that voice that he dreaded so much spoke gently in his mind, “It’s all over, Trevor. It is done.”

  The hard hand slapped him again, and a rough human voice said harshly, “Wake up. Wake up, damn it!”

  He woke. He was in the middle of a vast room, crouched down in the attitude of a fighter, shivering, sweating, his hands outstretched and grasping nothing. He must have sprung there, half unconscious, from the tumbled pallet of skins against the wall. Galt was watching him.

  “Welcome, Earthman. How does it feel to be one of the masters?”

  Trevor stared at him. A burning flood of light fell in through the tall windows so high above his head, setting the sun-stone ablaze between the Korin’s sullen brows. Trevor’s gaze fixed on that single point of brilliance.

  “Oh, yes,” said Galt. “It’s true.”

  It struck Trevor with an ugly shock that Galt’s lips had not moved, and that he had made no audible sound.

  “The stones give us a limited ability,” Galt went on, still without speaking aloud. “Not like His, of course. But we can control the hawks, and exchange ideas between us when we want to if the range isn’t too far. Naturally, our minds are open to Him any time he wants to pry.”

  “There’s no pain,” Trevor whispered, desperately trying to make the thing not be so. “My head doesn’t ache.”

  “Of course not. He takes care of that.”

  Shannach? If it isn’t so, how do I know that name? And that dream, that endless nightmare in the catacombs.

  Galt winced. “We don’t use that name. He doesn’t like it.” He looked at Trevor. “What’s the matter, Earthman? Why so green? You were laughing once, remember? Where’s your sense of humor now?”

  He caught Trevor abruptly by the shoulders and turned him around so that he faced a great sheet of polished glassy substance set into the wall. A mirror for giants, reflecting the whole huge room, reflecting the small dwarfed figures of the men.

  “Go on,” said Galt, pushing Trevor ahead of him. “Take a look.”

  Trevor shook off the Korin’s grasp. He moved forward by himself, close to the mirror. He set his hands against the chill surface and stared at what he saw there. And it was true.

  Between his brows a sun-stone winked and glittered. And his face, the familiar, normal, not-too-bad face he had been used to all his life, was transformed into something monstrous and unnatural, a goblin mask with a third, and evil eye.

  A coldness crept into his heart and bones. He backed away a little from the mirror, his hands moving blindly upward, slowly toward the stone that glistened between his brows. His mouth was twisted like a child’s, and two tears rolled down his cheeks.

  His fingers touched the stone. And then the anger came. He sank his nails into his forehead, clawing at the hard stone, not caring if he died after he had torn it out.

  Galt watched him. His lips smiled but his eyes were hateful.

  Blood ran down the sides of Trevor’s nose. The sun-stone was still there. He moaned and thrust his nails in deeper, and Shannach let him go until he had produced one stab of agony that cut his head in two and nearly dropped him. Then Shannach sent in the full force of his mind. Not in anger, for he felt none, and not in cruelty, for he was no more cruel than the mountain he was kin to, but simply because it was necessary.

 
Trevor felt that cold and lonely power roll down on him like an avalanche. He braced himself to meet it, but it broke his defenses, crushed them, made them nothing, and moved onward against the inmost citadel of his mind.

  In that reeling, darkened fortress all that was wholly Trevor crouched and clung to its armament of rage, remembering dimly that once, in a narrow canyon, it had driven back this enemy and broken free. And then some crude animal instinct far below the level of conscious thought warned him not to press the battle now, to bury his small weapon and wait, letting his last redoubt of which he was yet master go untouched and perhaps unnoticed by his captor.

  Trevor let his hands drop limply and his mind go slack. The cold black tide of power paused, and then he felt it slide away, withdrawing from those threatened walls. Out of the edges of it, Shannach spoke.

  “Your mind is tougher than these valley-bred Korins. They’re well conditioned, but you—you remember that you defied me once. The contact was imperfect then. It is not imperfect now. Remember that, too, Trevor.”

  Trevor drew in a long, unsteady breath. He whispered, “What do you want of me?”

  “Go and see the ship. Your mind tells me that it understands these things. See if it can be made to fly again.”

  That order took Trevor completely by surprise. ‘The ship! But why…?”

  Shannach was not used to having his wishes questioned, but he answered patiently, “I have still a while to live. Several of your short generations. I have had too much of this valley, too much of these catacombs. I want to leave them.”

  Trevor could understand that. Having had that nightmare glimpse into Shannach’s mind, he could perfectly understand. For one brief moment he was torn with pity for this trapped creature who was alone in the universe. And then he wondered, “What would you do if you could leave the valley? What would you do to another settlement of men?”

  “Who knows? I have one thing left to me—curiosity.”

  “You’d take the Korins with you, and the hawks?”