by C. L. Moore
He jerked impatiently at the hampering hood of the cloak. ‘May I take this off?’ he said. ‘Are we safe here?’
She laughed with a short, metallic sound. ‘Safe!’ she said ironically. ‘But take it off if you must. I’ve gone too far now to stop at trifles.’
And as the rich folds parted and slid away from his leather browness she in turn stared in quickened interest at what she had seen only in a half-light before. He was almost laughably incongruous in this jewel-box room, all leather and sunburn, and his scarred face keen and wary in the light of the lantern swinging from its silver chain. She looked a second time at that face, its lean, leathery keenness ad the scars that ray-guns had left, and the mark of knife and talon, and the tracts of wild years along the spaceways. Wariness and resolution were instinct in that face, there was ruthlessness in every line of it, and when she met his eyes a little shock went over her. Pale, pale as bare steel, colourless in the sunburnt face. Steady and clear and no-coloured, expressionless as water. Killer’s eyes.
And she knew that this was the man she needed. The name and fame of Northwest Smith had penetrated even into these mother-of-pearl Minga halls. In its way it had spread into stranger places than this, by strange and devious paths and for strange, devious reasons. But even had she never heard the name (nor the deed she connected it with, which does not matter here), she would have known from this scarred face, these cold and steady eyes, that here stood the man she wanted, the man who could help if any man alive could.
And with that thought, others akin to it flashed through her mind like blades crossing, and she dropped her milk-white lids over the sword-play to hide its deadliness, and said, ‘Northwest … Smith,’ in a musing murmur.’
‘To be commanded,’ said Smith in the idiom of her own tongue, but a spark of derision burned behind the courtly words.
Still she said nothing, but looked him up and down with slow eyes. He said at last:
‘Your desire—?’ and shifted impatiently.
‘I had need of a wharfman’s services,’ she said, still in that breathing whisper. ‘I had not seen you, then. … There are many wharfmen along the seafront, but only one of you, oh man of Earth—’ and she lifted her arms and swayed towards him exactly as a reed sways to a lake breeze, and her arms lay lightly on his shoulders and her mouth was very near …
Smith looked down into the veiled eyes. He knew enough of the breed of Venus to guess the deadly sword-flash of motive behind anything a Venusian does, and he had caught a glimpse of that particular sword-flash before she lowered her lids. And if her thoughts were sword-play, his burnt like heat-beams straight to their purpose. In the winking of an eye he knew a part of her motive – the most obvious part. And he stood there unanswering in the circle of her arms.
She looked up at him, half incredulous not to feel a leather embrace tighten about her.
‘Qu’a lo’val?’ she murmured whimsically. ‘So cold, then, Earthman? Am I not desirable?’
Wordlessly he looked down at her, and despite himself the blood quickened in him. Minga girls for too many centuries had been born and bred to the art of charming men for Northwest Smith to stand here in the warm arms of one and feel no answer to the invitation in her eyes. A subtle fragrance rose from her brazen hair, and the velvet moulded a body whose whiteness he could guess from the flash of the long bare thigh her slashed skirt showed. He grinned a little crookedly and stepped away, breaking the clasp of her hands behind his neck.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You know your art well, my dear, but your motive does not flatter me.’
She stood back and regarded him with a wry, half-appreciative smile.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll have to know much more about all this before I commit myself as far as – that.’
‘You fool,’ she smiled. ‘You’re in over your head now, as deeply as you could ever be. You were the moment you crossed the door-sill at the outer wall. There is no drawing back.’
‘Yet it was so easy – so very easy to come in,’ murmured Smith.
She came forward a step and looked up at him with narrowed eyes, the pretence of seduction dropped like a cloak.
‘You saw that, too?’ she queried in a half-whisper. ‘It seemed so – to you? Great Shar, if I could be sure …’ And there was terror in her face.
‘Suppose we sit down and you tell me about it,’ suggested Smith practically.
She laid a hand – white as cream, soft as satin – on his arm and drew him to the low divan that circled the room. There was inbred, generations-old coquetry in the touch, but the white hands shook a little.
‘What it it you fear so?’ queried Smith curiously as they sank to the green velvet. ‘Death comes only once, you know.’
She shook her bronze head contemptuously.
‘Not that,’ she said. ‘At least – no, I wish I knew just what it is I do fear – and that is the most dreadful part of it. But I wish – I wish it had not been so easy to get you here.’
‘The place was deserted,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Not a soul along the halls. Not a guard anywhere. Only once did we see any other creature, and that was a slave-girl in the hall just outside your door.’
‘What did she – do?’ Vaudir’s voice was breathless.
‘Dropped to her knees as if she’d been shot. You might have thought me the devil himself by the way she acted.’
The girl’s breath escaped in a sigh.
‘Safe, then,’ she said thankfully. ‘She must have thought you the – the Alendar.’ Her voice faltered a little over the name, as if she half feared to pronounce it. ‘He wears a cloak like that you wore when he comes through the halls. But he comes so very seldom. …’
‘I’ve never seen him,’ said Smith, ‘but, good Lord, is he such a monster? The girl dropped as if she’d been hamstrung.’
‘Oh, hush, hush!’ Vaudir agonized. ‘You mustn’t speak of him so. He’s – he’s – of course she knelt and hid her face. I wish to heaven I had …’
Smith faced her squarely and searched the veiled dark eyes with a gaze as bleak as empty seas. And he saw very clearly behind the veils the stark, nameless terror at their depths.
‘What is it?’ he demanded.
She drew her shoulders together and shivered a little, and her eyes were furtive as she glanced around the room.
‘Don’t you feel it?’ she asked in that half-whisper to which her voice sank so caressingly. And he smiled to himself to see how instinctively eloquent was the courtesan in her – alluring gestures though her hands trembled, soft voice huskily seductive even in its terror. ‘—always, always!’ she was saying. ‘The soft, hushed, hovering menace! It haunts the whole place. Didn’t you feel it as you came in?’
‘I think I did,’ Smith answered slowly. ‘Yes – that feel of something just out of sight, hiding in the dark doorways … a sort of tensity in the air. …’
‘Danger,’ she whispered, ‘terrible, nameless danger … oh, I feel it wherever I go … it’s soaked into me and through me until it’s a part of me, body and soul. …’
Smith heard the note of rising hysteria in her voice, and said quickly:
‘Why did you come to me?’
‘I didn’t, consciously.’ She conquered the hysteria with an effort and took up her tale a little more calmly. ‘I was really looking for a wharfman, as I said) and for quite another reason than this. It doesn’t matter, now. But When you spoke, when I flashed my light and saw your face, I knew you. I’d heard of you, you see, and about the – the Lakkmanda affair, and I knew in a moment that if anyone alive could help me, it would be you.’
‘But what it it? Help you in what?’
‘It’s a long story,’ she said, ‘and too strange, almost, to believe, and too vague for you to take seriously. And yet I know … Have you heard the history of the Minga?’
‘A little of it. It goes back very far.’
‘Back into the beginning – and farther. I wonder if you can unde
rstand. You see, we on Venus are closer to our beginnings than you. Life here developed faster, of course, and along lines more different than Earthmen realize. On Earth civilization rose slowly enough for the – the elementals – to sink back into darkness. On Venus – oh, it’s bad, bad for men to develop too swiftly! Life rises out of dark and mystery and things too strange and terrible to be looked upon. Earth’s civilization grew slowly, and by the time men were civilized enough to look back they were sufficiently far from their origins not to see, not to know. But we here who look back see too clearly, sometimes, too nearly and vividly the black beginning. … Great Shar defend me, what I have seen!’
White hands flashed up to hide sudden terror in her eyes, and hair in a brazen cloud fell fragrantly over her fingers. And even in that terror was an inbred allure as natural as breathing.
In the little silence that followed, Smith caught himself glancing furtively over his shoulder. The room was ominously still. …
Vaudir lifted her face from her hands, shaking back her hair. The hands trembled. She clasped them on her velvet knee and went on.
‘The Minga,’ she said, and her voice was resolutely steady, ‘began too long ago for anyone to name the date. It began before dates. When Far-thursa came out of the sea-frog with his men and founded this city at the mountain’s foot he built it around the walls of a castle already here. The Minga castle. And the Alendar sold Minga girls to the sailors and the city began. All that is myth, but the Minga had always been here.
‘The Alendar dwelt in his stronghold and bred his golden girls and trained then in the arts of charming men, and guarded them with – with strange weapons – and sold diem to kings at royal prices. There has always been an Alendar. I have seen him, once …
‘He walks the halls on rare occasions, and it is best to kneel and hide one’s face when he comes by. Yes, it is best. … But I passed him one day, and – and – he is tall, as you, Earthman, and his eyes are like – the space between the worlds. I looked into his eyes under the hood he wore – I was not afraid of devil or man, then. I looked him in the eyes before I made obeisance, and I – I shall never be free of fear again. I looked into evil as one looks into a pool. Blackness and blankness and raw evil. Impersonal, not malevolent. Elemental … the elemental dreadfulness that life rose from. And I know very surely, now, that the first Alendar sprang from no mortal seed. There were races before man. … Life goes back very dreadfully through many forms and evils, before it reaches the well-spring of its beginning. And the Alendar had not the eyes of a human creature, and I met them – and I am damned!’
Her voice trailed softly away and she sat quiet for a space staring before her with remembering eyes.
‘I am doomed and damned to a blacker hell than any of Shar’s priests threaten,’ she resumed. ‘No, wait – this is not hysteria. I haven’t told you the worst part. You’ll find it hard to believe, but it’s truth – truth – Great Shar, if I could hope it were not!
‘The Origin of it is lost in legend. But why, in the beginning, did the first Alendar dwell in the misty sea-edge castl211ne and unknown, breeding his bronze girls?—not for sale, then. Where did he get the secret of producing the invariable type? And the castle, legend says, was age-old when Far-thursa found it. The girls had a perfected, consistent beauty that could be attained only by generations of effort. How long had the Minga been built, and by whom? Above all, why? What possible reason could there be for dwelling there absolutely unknown, breeding civilized beauties in a world half-savage? Sometimes I think I have guessed the reason …’
Her voice faded into a resonant silence, and for a while she sat blindly at the brocaded wall. When she spoke again it was with a startling shift of topic.
‘Am I beautiful, do you think?’
‘More so than any I have ever seen before,’ answered Smith without flattery.
Her mouth twisted.
‘There are girls here now, in this building, so much lovelier than I that I am humbled to think of them. No mortal man has ever seen them, except the Alendar, and he – is not wholly mortal. No mortal man will ever see them. They are not for sale. Eventually they will disappear.
‘One might think that feminine beauty must reach an apex beyond which it can not rise, but this is not true. It can increase and intensify until – I have no words. And I truly believe that there is no limit to the heights it can reach in the hands of the Alendar. And for every beauty we know and hear of, through the slaves that tend them, gossip says there are as many more, too immortally lovely for mortal eyes to see. Have you ever considered that beauty might be refined and intensified until one could scarcely bear to look upon it? We have tales here of such beauty, hidden in some of the secret rooms of the Minga.
‘But the world never knows of these mysteries. No monarch on any planet known is rich enough to buy the loveliness hidden in the Minga’s innermost rooms. It is not for sale. For countless centuries the Alendars of the Minga have been breeding beauty, in higher and higher degrees, at infinite labour and cost – beauty to be locked in secret chambers, guarded most terribly, so that not even a whisper of it passes the outer walls, beauty that vanishes, suddenly, in a breath – like that! Where? Why? How? No one knows.
‘And it is that I fear. I have not a fraction of the beauty I speak of, yet a fate like that is written for me – somehow I know. I have looked into the eyes of the Alendar, and – I know. And I am sure that I must look again into those blank black eyes, more deeply, more dreadfully … I know – and I am sick with terror of what more I shall know, soon. …
‘Something dreadful is waiting for me, drawing neater and nearer, I shall vanish, and the girls will wonder and whisper a little, and then forget. It has happened before. Great Shar, what shall I do?’
She wailed it, musically and hopelessly, and sank into a little silence. And then her look changed and she said reluctantly:
‘And I have dagged you in with me. I have broken every tradition of the Minga in bringing you here, and there has been no hindrance – it has been too easy, too easy. I think I have sealed your death. When you first came I was minded to trick you into coming yourself so deeply that perforce you must do as I asked to win free again. But I know now that through the simple act of asking you here I have dragged you in deeper than I dreamed. It is a knowledge that has come to me somehow, out of the air tonight. I can feel knowledge beating upon me – compelling me. For in my terror to get help I think I have precipitated damnation upon us both. I know now – I have known in my soul since you entered so easily, that you will go out alive – that – it – will come for me and drag you down, too. … Shar, Shar, what have I done!’
‘But what, what?’ Smith struck his knee impatiently. ‘What is it we face? Poison? Guards? Traps? Hypnotism? Can’t you give me even a guess at what will happen?’
He leaned forward to search her face commandingly, and saw her brows knit in an effort to find words that would cloak the mysteries she had to tell. Her lips parted irresolutely. ‘The Guardians,’ she said. ‘The – Guardians…’
And then over her hesitant face swept a look of such horror that his hand clenched on his knee and he felt the hairs rise along his neck. It was not horror of arty material thing, but an inner dreadfulness, a terrible awareness. The eyes that had met his glazed and escaped his commanding stare without shifting their focus. It was as if they ceased to be eyes and became dark windows – vacant. The beauty of her face set like a mask, and behind the blank windows, behind the lovely set mask, he could sense dimly the dark command flowing in. …
She put out her hands stiffly and rose. Smith found himself on his feet, gun in hand, while his hackles lifted shudderingly and something pulsed in the air as tangibly as the beat of wings. Three times that nameless shudder stirred the air, and then Vaudir stepped forward like an automaton and faced the door. She walked in her dream of masked dreadfulness stiffly, through the portal. As she passed him he put out a’ hesitant hand and laid it on her arm, and a little s
tab of pain shot through him at the contact, and once more he thought he felt the pulse of wings in the air. Then she passed by without hesitations and his hand fell.
He made no further effort to arouse her, but followed after on cat-feet, delicately as if he walked on eggs. He was crouching a little, unconsciously, and his gun-hand held a tense finger on the trigger.
They went down the corridor in a breathing silence, an empty corridor where no lights showed beyond closed doors, where no murmur of voices broke the live stillness. But little shudders seemed to shake in the air somehow, and his heart was pounding suffocatingly.
Vaudir walked like a mechanical doll, tense in a dream of horror. When they reached the end of the hall he saw that the silver grille stood open, and they passed through without pausing. But Smith noted with a little qualm that a gateway opening to the right was closed and locked, and the bars across it were sunk firmly into wall-sockets. There was no choice but to follow her.
The corridor slanted downward. They passed others branching to right and left, but the silver gateways were closed and barred across each. A coil of silver stairs ended the passage, and the girl went stiffly down without touching the rails. It was a long spiral, past many floors, and as they descended, the rich, dim light lessened and darkened and a subtle smell of moisture and salt invaded the scented air. At each turn where the stairs opened on successive floors, gates were barred across the outlets; and they passed so many of these that Smith knew, as they went down and down, that however high the green jewel-box room had been, by now they were descending deep into the earth. And still the stair wound downward. The stories that opened beyond the bars like honeycomb layers became darker and less luxurious, and at last ceased altogether and the silver steps wound down through a well of rock, lighted so dimly at wide intervals that he could scarcely see the black polished walls circling them in. Drops of moisture began to appear on the dark surface, and the smell was of blade salt seas and dank underground.
