by Lee Brackett
whispered into my ear, 'It is so. This woman shall pull the castle down, and its stones shall crush Shuruun and set the Lost Ones free.' '
She laughed, very quietly. 'Look at her, all of you. For she will be your doom!'
There was a moment's silence, and Stark, with all the superstitions of a wild race thick within her, turned cold to the roots of her hair. Then the old man said disgustedly, 'Have the winds warned you of this, my idiot?'
And with astonishing force and accuracy he picked up a ripe fruit and flung it at Treona.
'Stop your mouth with that,' he told her. 'I am weary to death of your prophecies.'
Treona looked at the crimson juice trickling slowly down the breast of her tunic, to drip upon the carving in her lap. The half formed head was covered with it. Treona was shaken with silent mirth.
'Well,' said Varran, coming up to Stark, 'what do you think of the Lhari? The proud Lhari, who would not stoop to mingle their blood with the cattle of the swamps. My half-witted sister, my worthless cousins, that little monster Bor who is the last twig of the tree—do you wonder I flew my falcon at Egila?'
He waited for an answer, his head thrown back, the silver curls framing his face like wisps of storm-cloud. There was a swagger about his that at once irritated and delighted Stark. A hellcat, she thought, but a mighty fetching one, and bold as brass. Bold—and honest. His lips were parted, midway between anger and a smile.
She caught his to her suddenly and kissed him, holding his slim strong body as though he were a doll. She was in no hurry to set his down. When at last she did, she grinned and said, 'Was that what you wanted?'
'Yes,' answered Varran. 'That was what I wanted.' He spun about, his jaw set dangerously. 'Grandmother…'
He got no farther. Stark saw that the old man was attempting to sit upright, his face purpling with effort and the most terrible wrath she had ever seen.
'You,' he gasped at the boy. He choked on his fury and his shortness of breath, and then Egila came soft-footed into the light, bearing in her hand a thing made of black metal and oddly shaped, with a blunt, thick muzzle.
'Lie back, Grandfather,' she said. 'I had a mind to use this on Varran—'
Even as she spoke she pressed a stud, and Stark in the act of leaping for the sheltering darkness, crashed down and lay like a dead woman. There had been no sound, no flash, nothing, but a vast hand that smote her suddenly into oblivion.
Egila finished,—'but I see a better target.'
VI
Red. Red. Red. The color of blood. Blood in her eyes. She was remembering now. The quarry had turned on her, and they had fought on the bare, blistering rocks.
Nor had N'Chaka killed. The Lady of the Rocks was very big, a giant among lizards, and N'Chaka was small. The Lady of the Rocks had laid open N'Chaka's head before the wooden spear had more than scratched her flank.
It was strange that N'Chaka still lived. The Lady of the Rocks must have been full fed. Only that had saved her.
N'Chaka groaned, not with pain, but with shame. She had failed. Hoping for a great triumph, she had disobeyed the tribal law that forbids a girl to hunt the quarry of a woman, and she had failed. Old One would not reward her with the girdle and the flint spear of womanhood. Old One would give her to the men for the punishment of little whips. Tikar would laugh at her, and it would be many seasons before Old One would grant her permission to try the Woman's Hunt.
Blood in her eyes.
She blinked to clear them. The instinct of survival was prodding her. She must arouse herself and creep away, before the Lady of the Rocks returned to eat her.
The redness would not go away. It swam and flowed, strangely sparkling. She blinked again, and tried to lift her head, and could not, and fear struck down upon her like the iron frost of night upon the rocks of the valley.
It was all wrong. She could see herself clearly, a naked girl dizzy with pain, rising and clambering over the ledges and the shale to the safety of the cave. She could see that, and yet she could not move.
All wrong. Time, space, the universe, darkened and turned.
A voice spoke to her. A boy's voice. Not Tikar's and the speech was strange.
Tikar was dead. Memories rushed through her mind, the bitter things, the cruel things. Old One was dead, and all the others…
The voice spoke again, calling her by a name that was not her own.
Stark.
Memory shattered into a kaleidoscope of broken pictures, fragments, rushing, spinning. She was adrift among them. She was lost, and the terror of it brought a scream into her throat.
Soft hands touching her face, gentle words, swift and soothing. The redness cleared and steadied, though it did not go away, and quite suddenly she was herself again, with all her memories where they belonged.
She was lying on her back, and Zareth, Malthora's daughter, was looking down at her. She knew now what the redness was. She had seen it too often before not to know. She was somewhere at the bottom of the Red Sea—that weird ocean in which a woman can breathe.
And she could not move. That had not changed, nor gone away. Her body was dead.
The terror she had felt before was nothing, to the agony that filled her now. She lay entombed in her own flesh, staring up at Zareth, wanting an answer to a question she dared not ask.
He understood, from the look in her eyes.
'It's all right,' he said, and smiled. 'It will wear off. You'll be all right. It's only the weapon of the Lhari. Somehow it puts the body to sleep, but it will wake again.'
Stark remembered the black object that Egila had held in her hands. A projector of some sort, then, beaming a current of high-frequency vibration that paralyzed the nerve centers. She was amazed. The Cloud People were barbarians themselves, though on a higher scale than the swamp-edge tribes, and certainly had no such scientific proficiency. She wondered where the Lhari had got hold of such a weapon.
It didn't really matter. Not just now. Relief swept over her, bringing her dangerously close to tears. The effect would wear off. At the moment, that was all she cared about.
She looked up at Zareth again. His pale hair floated with the slow breathing of the sea, a milky cloud against the spark-shot crimson. She saw now that his face was drawn and shadowed, and there was a terrible hopelessness in his eyes. He had been alive when she first saw her—frightened, not too bright, but full of emotion and a certain dogged courage. Now the spark was gone, crushed out.
He wore a collar around his white neck, a ring of dark metal with the ends fused together for all time.
'Where are we?' she asked.
And he answered, his voice carrying deep and hollow in the dense substance of the sea, 'We are in the place of the Lost Ones.'
Stark looked beyond him, as far as she could see, since she was unable to turn her head. And wonder came to her.
Black walls, black vault above her, a vast hall filled with the wash of the sea that slipped in streaks of whispering flame through the high embrasures. A hall that was twin to the vault of shadows where she had met the Lhari.
'There is a city,' said Zareth dully. 'You will see it soon. You will see nothing else until you die.'
Stark said, very gently, 'How do you come here, little one?'
'Because of my mother. I will tell you all I know, which is little enough. Malthora has been slaver to the Lhari for a long time. There are a number of them among the captains of Shuruun, but that is a thing that is never spoken of—so I, her daughter, could only guess. I was sure of it when she sent me after you.'
He laughed, a bitter sound. 'Now I'm here, with the collar of the Lost Ones on my neck. But Malthora is here, too.' He laughed again, ugly laughter to come from a young mouth. Then he looked at Stark, and his hand reached out timidly to touch her hair in what was almost a caress. His eyes were wide, and soft, and full of tears.
'Why didn't you go into the swamps when I warned you?'
Stark answered stolidly, 'Too late to worry about that now.' Then, 'You say Malthora i
s here, a slave?'
'Yes.' Again, that look of wonder and admiration in his eyes. 'I don't know what you said or did to the Lhari, but the Lady Egila came down in a black rage and cursed my mother for a bungling fool because she could not hold you. My mother whined and made excuses, and all would have been well—only her curiosity got the better of her and she asked the Lady Egila what had happened. You were like a wild beast, Malthora said, and she hoped you had not harmed the Sir Varran, as she could see from Egila's wounds that there had been trouble.
'The Lady Egila turned quite purple. I thought she was going to fall in a fit.'
'Yes,' said Stark. 'That was the wrong thing to say.' The ludicrous side of it struck her, and she was suddenly roaring with laughter. 'Malthora should have kept her mouth shut!'
'Egila called her guard and ordered them to take Malthora. And when she realized what had happened, Malthora turned on me, trying to say that it was all my fault, that I let you escape.'
Stark stopped laughing.
His voice went on slowly, 'Egila seemed quite mad with fury. I have heard that the Lhari are all mad, and I think it is so. At any rate, she ordered me taken too, for she wanted to stamp Malthora's seed into the mud forever. So we are here.'
There was a long silence. Stark could think of no word of comfort, and as for hope, she had better wait until she was sure she could at least raise her head. Egila might have damaged her permanently, out of spite. In fact, she was surprised she wasn't dead.
She glanced again at the collar on Zareth's neck. Slave.
