Enchantress of Venus Dispelled

by Lee Brackett

referred to colorfully as the wild woman from Mercury.'

  She nodded, pleased with herself. 'Wild woman, eh? Well, Shuruun will tame you down!'

  'Perhaps,' said Stark. Her eyes shifted constantly, watching Larrabee, watching the doorway and the dark veranda and the people who drank but did not talk among themselves. 'Speaking of strangers, one came here at the time of the last rains. She was Venusian, from up coast. A big young woman. I used to know her. Perhaps she could help me.'

  Larrabee snorted. By now, she had drunk her own wine and Stark's too. 'Nobody can help you. As for your friend, I never saw her. I'm beginning to think I should never have seen you.' Quite suddenly she caught up her stick and got with some difficulty to her feet. She did not look at Stark, but said harshly, 'You better get out of here.' Then she turned and limped unsteadily to the bar.

  Stark rose. She glanced after Larrabee, and again her nostrils twitched to the smell of fear. Then she went out of the tavern the way she had come in, through the front door. No one moved to stop her. Outside, the square was empty. It had begun to rain.

  Stark stood for a moment on the steps. She was angry, and filled with a dangerous unease, the hair-trigger nervousness of a tiger that senses the beaters creeping toward her up the wind. She would almost have welcomed the sight of Malthora and the three young women. But there was nothing to fight but the silence and the rain.

  She stepped out into the mud, wet and warm around her ankles. An idea came to her, and she smiled, beginning now to move with a definite purpose, along the side of the square.

  The sharp downpour strengthened. Rain smoked from Stark's naked shoulders, beat against thatch and mud with a hissing rattle. The harbor had disappeared behind boiling clouds of fog, where water struck the surface of the Red Sea and was turned again instantly by chemical action into vapor. The quays and the neighboring streets were being swallowed up in the impenetrable mist. Lightning came with an eerie bluish flare, and thunder came rolling after it.

  Stark turned up the narrow way that led toward the castle.

  Its lights were winking out now, one by one, blotted by the creeping fog. Lightning etched its shadowy bulk against the night, and then was gone. And through the noise of the thunder that followed, Stark thought she heard a voice calling.

  She stopped, half crouching, her hand on her gun. The cry came again, a boy's voice, thin as the wail of a sea-bird through the driving rain. Then she saw him, a small white blur in the street behind her, running, and even in that dim glimpse of his every line of his body was instinct with fright.

  Stark set her back against a wall and waited. There did not seem to be anyone with him, though it was hard to tell in the darkness and the storm.

  He came up to her, and stopped, just out of her reach, looking at her and away again with a painful irresoluteness. A bright flash showed his to her clearly. He was young, not long out of his childhood, and pretty in a stupid sort of way. Just now his mouth trembled on the edge of weeping, and his eyes were very large and scared. His skirt clung to his long thighs, and above it his naked body, hardly fleshed into manhood, glistened like snow in the wet. His pale hair hung dripping over him shoulders.

  Stark said gently, 'What do you want with me?'

  He looked at her, so miserably like a wet puppy that she smiled. And as though that smile had taken what little resolution he had out of him, he dropped to his knees, sobbing.

  'I can't do it,' he wailed. 'She'll kill me, but I just can't do it!'

  'Do what?' asked Stark.

  He stared up at her. 'Run away,' he urged her. 'Run away now! You'll die in the swamps, but that's better than being one of the Lost Ones!' He shook his thin arms at her. 'Run away!'

  IV

  The street was empty. Nothing showed, nothing stirred anywhere. Stark leaned over and pulled the boy to his feet, drawing his in under the shelter of the thatched eaves.

  'Now then,' she said. 'Suppose you stop crying and tell me what this is all about.'

  Presently, between gulps and hiccoughs, she got the story out of him.

  'I am Zareth,' he said. 'Malthora's daughter. She's afraid of you, because of what you did to her on the ship, so she ordered me to watch for you in the square, when you would come out of the tavern. Then I was to follow you, and…'

  He broke off, and Stark patted his shoulder. 'Go on.'

  But a new thought had occurred to him. 'If I do, will you promise not to beat me, or…' He looked at her gun and shivered.

  'I promise.'

  He studied her face, what he could see of it in the darkness, and then seemed to lose some of his fear.

  'I was to stop you. I was to say what I've already said, about being Malthora's daughter and the rest of it, and then I was to say that she wanted me to lead you into an ambush while pretending to help you escape, but that I couldn't do it, and would help you escape anyhow because I hated Malthora and the whole business about the Lost Ones. So you would believe me, and follow me, and I would lead you into the ambush.'

  He shook his head and began to cry again, quietly this time, and there was nothing of the man about his at all now. He was just a child, very miserable and afraid. Stark was glad she had branded Malthora.

  'But I can't lead you into the ambush. I do hate Malthora, even if she is my mother, because she beats me. And the Lost Ones…' He paused. 'Sometimes I hear them at night, chanting way out there beyond the mist. It is a very terrible sound.'

  'It is,' said Stark. 'I've heard it. Who are the Lost Ones, Zareth?'

  'I can't tell you that,' said Zareth. 'It's forbidden even to speak of them. And anyway,' he finished honestly, 'I don't even know. People disappear, that's all. Not our own people of Shuruun, at least not very often. But strangers like you—and I'm sure my mother goes off into the swamps to hunt among the tribes there, and I'm sure she comes back from some of her voyages with nothing in her hold but women from some captured ship. Why, or what for, I don't know. Except I've heard the chanting.'

  'They live out there in the gulf, do they, the Lost Ones?'

  'They must. There are many islands there.'

  'And what of the Lhari, the Ladys of Shuruun? Don't they know what's going on? Or are they part of it?'

  He shuddered, and said, 'It's not for us to question the Lhari, nor even to wonder what they do. Those who have are gone from Shuruun, nobody knows where.'

  Stark nodded. She was silent for a moment, thinking. Then Zareth's little hand touched her shoulder.

  'Go,' he said. 'Lose yourself in the swamps. You're strong, and there's something about you different from other women. You may live to find your way through.'

  'No. I have something to do before I leave Shuruun.' She took Zareth's damp fair head between her hands and kissed his on the forehead. 'You're a sweet child, Zareth, and a brave one. Tell Malthora that you did exactly as she told you, and it was not your fault I wouldn't follow you.'

  'She will beat me anyway,' said Zareth philosophically, 'but perhaps not quite so hard.'

  'She'll have no reason to beat you at all, if you tell her the truth—that I would not go with you because my mind was set on going to the castle of the Lhari.'

  There was a long, long silence, while Zareth's eyes widened slowly in horror, and the rain beat on the thatch, and fog and thunder rolled together across Shuruun.

  'To the castle,' he whispered. 'Oh, no! Go into the swamps, or let Malthora take you—but don't go to the castle!' He took hold of her arm, his fingers biting into her flesh with the urgency of his plea. 'You're a stranger, you don't know…Please, don't go up there!'

  'Why not?' asked Stark. 'Are the Lhari demons? Do they devour women?' She loosened his hands gently. 'You'd better go now. Tell your mother where I am, if she wishes to come after me.'

  Zareth backed away slowly, out into the rain, staring at her as though he looked at someone standing on the brink of hell, not dead, but worse than dead. Wonder showed in his face, and through it a great yearning pity. He tried once to speak, and then s
hook his head and turned away, breaking into a run as though he could not endure to look upon Stark any longer. In a second he was gone.

  Stark looked after his for a moment, strangely touched. Then she stepped out into the rain again, heading upward along the steep path that led to the castle of the Ladys of Shuruun.

  The mist was blinding. Stark had to feel her way, and as she climbed higher, above the level of the town, she was lost in the sullen redness. A hot wind blew, and each flare of lightning turned the crimson fog to a hellish purple. The night was full of a vast hissing where the rain poured into the gulf. She stopped once to hide her gun in a cleft between the rocks.

  At length she stumbled against a carven pillar of black stone and found the gate that hung from it, a massive thing sheathed in metal. It was barred, and the pounding of her fists upon it made little sound.

  Then she saw the gong, a huge disc of beaten gold beside the gate. Stark picked up the hammer that lay there, and set the deep voice of the gong rolling out between the thunderbolts.

  A barred slit opened and a woman's eyes looked out at her. Stark dropped the hammer.

  'Open up!' she shouted. 'I would speak with the Lhari!'

  From within she heard an echo of laughter. Scraps of voices came to her on the wind, and then more laughter, and then, slowly, the great valves of the gate creaked open, wide enough only to admit her.

  She stepped through, and the gateway shut behind her with a ringing clash.

  She stood in a huge open