by Lee Brackett
gargoyle on the stones, never speaking, watching with her sad beautiful eyes. She woke a vague foreboding in Stark. There was something awesome in Treona's silent patience, as though she waited the coming of some black doom, long delayed but inevitable. Stark would remember the prophecy, and shiver.
It was obvious to Stark after a while that the Lhari were clearing the building to get at the cellars underneath. The great dark caverns already bared had yielded nothing, but the sisters still hoped. Over and over Conda and Egila sounded the walls and the floors, prying here and there, and chafing at the delay in opening up the underground labyrinth. What they hoped to find, no one knew.
Varran came, too. Alone, and often, he would drift down through the dim mist-fires and watch, smiling a secret smile, his hair like blown silver where the currents played with it. He had nothing but curt words for Egila, but he kept his eyes on the great dark Earthwoman, and there was a look in them that stirred her blood. Egila was not blind, and it stirred her too, but in a different way.
Zareth saw that look. He kept as close to Stark as possible, asking no favors, but following her around with a sort of quiet devotion, seeming contented only when he was near her. One 'night' in the slave barracks he crouched beside her pallet, his hand on her bare knee. He did not speak, and his face was hidden by the floating masses of his hair.
Stark turned his head so that she could see him, pushing the pale cloud gently away.
'What troubles you, little sister?'
His eyes were wide and shadowed with some vague fear. But he only said, 'It's not my place to speak.'
'Why not?'
'Because…' His mouth trembled, and then suddenly he said, 'Oh, it's foolish, I know. But the man of the Lhari…'
'What about him?'
'He watches you. Always he watches you! And the Lady Egila is angry. There is something in his mind, and it will bring you only evil. I know it!'
'It seems to me,' said Stark wryly, 'that the Lhari have already done as much evil as possible to all of us.'
'No,' answered Zareth, with an odd wisdom. 'Our hearts are still clean.'
Stark smiled. She leaned over and kissed him. 'I'll be careful, little brother.'
Quite suddenly he flung his arms around her neck and clung to her tightly, and Stark's face sobered. She patted him, rather awkwardly, and then he had gone, to curl up on his own pallet with his head buried in his arms.
Stark lay down. Her heart was sad, and there was a stinging moisture in her eyes.
The red eternities dragged on. Stark learned what Helvi had meant when she said that the mind broke before the body. The sea bottom was no place for creatures of the upper air. She learned also the meaning of the metal collars, and the manner of Tobal's death.
Helvi explained.
'There are boundaries laid down. Within them we may range, if we have the strength and the desire after work. Beyond them we may not go. And there is no chance of escape by breaking through the barrier. How this is done I do not understand, but it is so, and the collars are the key to it.
'When a slave approaches the barrier the collar brightens as though with fire, and the slave falls. I have tried this myself, and I know. Half paralyzed, you may still crawl back to safety. But if you are mad, as Tobal was, and charge the barrier strongly…'
She made a cutting motion with her hands.
Stark nodded. She did not attempt to explain electricity or electronic vibrations to Helvi, but it seemed plain enough that the force with which the Lhari kept their slaves in check was something of the sort. The collars acted as conductors, perhaps for the same type of beam that was generated in the hand-weapons. When the metal broke the invisible boundary line it triggered off a force-beam from the central power station, in the manner of the obedient electric eye that opens doors and rings alarm bells. First a warning—then death.
The boundaries were wide enough, extending around the city and enclosing a good bit of forest beyond it. There was no possibility of a slave hiding among the trees, because the collar could be traced by the same type of beam, turned to low power, and the punishment meted out to a retaken woman was such that few were foolish enough to try that game.
The surface, of course, was utterly forbidden. The one unguarded spot was the island where the central power station was, and here the slaves were allowed to come sometimes at night. The Lhari had discovered that they lived longer and worked better if they had an occasional breath of air and a look at the sky.
Many times Stark made that pilgrimage with the others. Up from the red depths they would come, through the reeling bands of fire where the currents ran, through the clouds of crimson sparks and the sullen patches of stillness that were like pools of blood, a company of white ghosts shrouded in flame, rising from their tomb for a little taste of the world they had lost.
It didn't matter that they were so weary they had barely the strength to get back to the barracks and sleep. They found the strength. To walk again on the open ground, to be rid of the eternal crimson dusk and the oppressive weight on the bosom —to look up into the hot blue night of Venus and smell the fragrance of the liha-trees borne on the land wind…They found the strength.
They sang here, sitting on the island rocks and staring through the mists toward the shore they would never see again. It was their chanting that Stark had heard when she came down the gulf with Malthora, that wordless cry of grief and loss. Now she was here herself, holding Zareth close to comfort his and joining her own deep voice into that primitive reproach to the gods.
While she sat, howling like the savage she was, she studied the power plant, a squat blockhouse of a place. On the nights the slaves came guards were stationed outside to warn them away. The blockhouse was doubly guarded with the shock-beam. To attempt to take it by force would only mean death for all concerned.
Stark gave that idea up for the time being. There was never a second when escape was not in her thoughts, but she was too old in the game to break her neck against a stone wall. Like Malthora, she would wait.
Zareth and Helvi both changed after Stark's coming. Though they never talked of breaking free, both of them lost their air of hopelessness. Stark made neither plans nor promises. But Helvi knew her from of old, and the boy had his own subtle understanding, and they held up their heads again.
Then, one 'day' as the work was ending, Varran came smiling out of the red murk and beckoned to her, and Stark's heart gave a great leap. Without a backward look she left Helvi and Zareth, and went with him, down the wide still avenue that led outward to the forest
VIII
They left the stately buildings and the wide spaces behind them, and went in among the trees. Stark hated the forest. The city was bad enough, but it was dead, honestly dead, except for those neat nightstallion gardens. There was something terrifying about these great trees, full-leafed and green, rioting with flowering vines and all the rich undergrowth of the jungle, standing like massed corpses made lovely by mortuary art They swayed and rustled as the coiling fires swept them, branches bending to that silent horrible parody of wind. Stark always felt trapped there, and stifled by the stiff leaves and the vines.
But she went, and Varran slipped like a silver bird between the great trunks, apparently happy.
'I have come here often, ever since I was old enough. It's wonderful. Here I can stoop and fly like one of my own hawks.' He laughed and plucked a golden flower to set in his hair, and then darted away again, his white legs flashing.
Stark followed. She could see what he meant. Here in this strange sea one's motion was as much flying as swimming, since the pressure equalized the weight of the body. There was a queer sort of thrill in plunging headlong from the tree tops, to arrow down through a tangle of vines and branches and then sweep upward again.
He was playing with her, and she knew it. The challenge got her blood up. She could have caught his easily but she did not, only now and again she circled his to show her strength. They sped on and on, trailing wakes of flame, a
black hawk chasing a silver dove through the forests of a dream.
But the dove had been fledged in an eagle's nest. Stark wearied of the game at last. She caught his and they clung together, drifting still among the trees with the momentum of that wonderful weightless flight.
His kiss at first was lazy, teasing and curious. Then it changed. All Stark's smoldering anger leaped into a different kind of flame. Her handling of his was rough and cruel, and he laughed, a little fierce voiceless laugh, and gave it back to her, and she remembered how she had thought his mouth was like a bitter fruit that would give a woman pain when she kissed it.
He broke away at last and came to rest on a broad branch, leaning back against the trunk and laughing, his eyes brilliant and cruel as Stark's own. And Stark sat down at his feet.
'What do you want?' she demanded. 'What do you want with me?'
He smiled. There was nothing sidelong or shy about him. He was bold as a new blade.
'I'll tell you, wild woman.'
She started. 'Where did you pick up that name?'
'I have been asking the Earthwoman Larrabee about you. It suits you well.' He leaned forward. 'This is what I want of you. Slay me Egila and her sister Conda. Also Bor, who will grow up worse than either—although that I can do myself, if you're averse to killing children, though Bor is more monster than child. Grandfather can't live forever, and with my cousins out
