Boyce shifted the sword in his right hand. Irathe laughed.
“A sword against—Them?”
“No,” Boyce said. “Against you, Irathe.” The blade lifted—hung poised to slash her throat.
She faced him unafraid.
“What of your love, then? Harm me—and she will be harmed. Kill me, and she dies.” Boyce lowered the sword.
“Unless you’re lying.”
“Try it and see. Do you dare?”
“No,” he said. “But I can go back to my own world, I still have that crystal. I can take her with me.”
“Try it.”
He turned away. The Oracle followed willingly enough, though her face was void of expression. He glanced back at Irathe, and saw something in her eyes that made him halt.
“Wait!” she said. “The crystal—”
He took a long stride back toward her, the sword raised again.
“I’d forgotten! You were trying to control me through it, weren’t you? But—” He hesitated. “You couldn’t do it. Is that it? You’ve lost your power!”
“Not while you live!” Irathe blazed at him. “I am not that weak!”
“You tried to control my mind,” he said. “And it didn’t work. Why?”
“There was something fighting against me . . . I have felt that ever since you came to the throne-room. I—listen!”
The air shivered around them. A thin, high keening sound rang in Boyce’s ears, like that ringing in the head which cannot be shaken away. Now it grew louder, clearer. There was in it the tinkling of tiny bells. And a faint chill like no chill he had ever felt except when—
“They come!” Irathe cried. “Sooner than I thought. Oh, there’s danger here for you both—for everyone but me!” Her laughter was. high and triumphant and Boyce had the fleeting thought that in its sound he heard something of tinkling sweetness like the bells They rang. Already she laughed with a voice like Theirs.
The floor shook.
Irathe glanced at the Oracle, standing serenely, hands clasped, icy eyes upon Boyce with a flicker of fire behind the ice, as if memory might be flowing slowly, softly back into that frozen mind.
“The bond is weaker between Kerak and the City while she remains here,” Irathe said abstractedly. “You feel that? A pitching like the roll of waves under the City? These lands have been pent up a long while as the City rode at anchor with Kerak for a mooring.” She laughed again, recklessly.
“What a storm underfoot we should have if the mooring snapped!”
Darkness was gathering in the air of the room. Boyce glanced up and saw through the great glass dome above them a scurry of motion in the City, men and women hurrying to shelter in any palace or temple or tavern that would receive them. The streets were clearing for Them.
“Now we shall finish!” Irathe cried. “They come who made me into two—and who will enchain this One of me so that she can never again hope to control my mind.” She leaned closer and her red lip curled up in a scornful smile as she gazed into her own face frozen to the color of ice and marble.
“You thought to rule me!” she said softly. “Oh, I knew your thoughts! Remember, we were one when this man loved us. I could feel your treachery moving beneath my own mind like snakes squirming underfoot. You thought to build up the power that could take control from me when we are next made one. Oh yes, I know why! It was love that woke your envy of my strength. Love for him. He’s mine now.
“Listen—you hear the bells? They come, who split us into two—and will deal at my command with you! Prepare yourself, my sister—my more than sister! These moments are your last Are you ready for the enchantment that will make you forever the marble thing you now only seem to be?”
CHAPTER XV
The Way Back
HE swung to Boyce, her black hair flying wide. Her face was a blaze of triumph and joyous evil. Her eyes upon his were a violet flame in the darkness and the chill of the room. They sought his eyes, fixed there—he felt an irresistible pull as if she were drawing out his very mind through the meeting of their gaze. Blackness darker than the gathering gloom around them swam through his brain. And then—
Laughter echoed through the great hail. They turned, even the Oracle. Boyce was dizzy for an instant at the sudden release of the bond between Irathe’s gaze and his. Then he saw, down the long aisle, a motion among the pillars. As the wild laughter rang out again he saw the tiger-beasts of the Huntsman sliding toward them with their beautiful pouring motion, golden eyes lambent in the dimness.
Behind them, leaning on the leash, the Huntsman same in his tiger-striped garments. Blood smeared his pale face, and he was laughing as he came—but not from mirth. Boyce remembered Irathe’s words. Yes, it might be madness, that wild, mirthless sound that echoed among the pillars. But a cold madness, that knew its own power.
“It was you, then—in the crystal—fighting my will!” Irathe cried furiously. “You dared, Jamai—”
He came on, laughing deep in his throat.
“I? Was it Jamai? Or was it the Huntsman? I have two selves, Irathe, even as you. You should know that! William Boyce, I owe you thanks. Never before have I found the secret way to the throne. Till I looked into your mind through the crystal, I had not known that the King was dead. I had not even known that I was dead!”
“Jamai!” Irathe shrilled.
“Even you, Irathe, are vulnerable. You are afraid. All of us are afraid of something—death, or pain, or magic. Because you are sane—even you, Irathe—but I have lost my vulnerability. I had not known it before, but I know now.
“How can a man love good and evil—fire and ice—and stay sane? You were wise to make the choice you did. It meant death, but death is better than life. I made the other choice. I have followed Irathe through all the hells in all the universe!”
A shadow darkened above the crystal globe. The white mists gathered closer overhead, clustering about the hemisphere to hide the City’s roofs below. Kerak, far and small, was hidden by the pallid veils.
“Jamai!” Irathe cried again, and he smiled.
“No, Irathe,” he said, his voice dropping. “It is the end. I love you, and I love the Oracle. I will not see her enslaved to your evil will. I know what evil is in you.
“But I would not see her gain power over you again, because then she would look at me, and know the evil that has flowered within me since she saw me last. Both you and she must die, Irathe—and for all I care, all the worlds may die with you!”
Irathe’s mouth curved. “I have summoned Them. You are too late—much too late.”
The shadow was like thunderheads above the crystal roof, darkening the great room. Jamai roared with laughter.
“Let Them come!” he shouted. “Let Them slay! I know the answer now—and it is Death! Kill and be killed! I am wiser than you all, for I am mad—and I say the answer is Death!”
It was almost too dark now to see, but Boyce could make out the sudden upward sweep of a tiger-striped arm, and the whip of the loosened leash. And he could see the instantaneous forward sweep of the two long, low, powerful bodies at the Huntsman’s knee. His laughter seemed to madden them, and their screaming snarl of rage echoed the curious snarl in his own voice as they launched themselves forward toward the throne where the dead King sat.
Dimly Boyce saw the beautiful, screaming faces of the beasts, met the glow of their luminous eyes—and sprang forward before the Oracle, swinging his sword.
It was too dark to see the tiger-things, though they were almost upon him. It was too dark to see the two girls or the throne or the pillars, and the Huntsman’s mad laughter rang disembodied through the blackness. There was a singing in Boyce’s ears, a sound of tiny bells very near . . .
A hot-breathed snarl sounded in his face. He heard claws click on pavement as the beast launched itself at his throat. Of itself, the sword swung in his hands. It met hard, muscular resistance that held for a moment and then seemed to fall away, left and right over the razor-edge of the
blade.
There was a sudden, hot reek of blood in the air, but he was scarcely aware of it. For now shadows moved through the dark, and it seemed to Boyce that his flesh moved with them, shudderingly, on his bones. Cold struck into his mind and his body, numbing, paralyzing . . .
AN ICY wind rushed past him, swaying the darklike curtains before it. Briefly, dimly, the dark parted. He saw in care terrible glancing flash a robed figure moving as no human figure ever moved.
He saw Irathe facing it, her arms flung high, her black hair swirling wide on the blast, her face dazzling. He saw one more thing—a second snarling figure before him, crouching for a leap, lips wrinkled back over curved fangs as it glared at him out of wild, mad eyes.
Then the darkness closed in again, like dropping curtains. Through it he could hear Irathe’s voice, high and shrill, speaking words whose very sound was a meaningless blasphemy to the ear. No human tongue was ever meant to shape such sounds.
The chant rose higher, thinner, like the were cramped like ice around the hilt of his ears and his brain except when the shriek of that icy wind drowned them out.
The cold was in his bones now. His hands were cramped like ice around the hilt of his sword. Hearing that feral snarl, he swung it up with infinite effort A lithe, beastsmelling body thudded against him. Claws raked his thigh, and the snarl was in his very ear. Furiously, struggling against the cold, he flung it off, slashing downward—missed.
Now the chant of Irathe’s strangely changed voice, resonant with that insistent bell-sound, filled all the darkness. And he sensed even through the cold and his confusion a motion among the robed, unseen figures—a motion he knew because his flesh told him by its shuddering shrink when They drew near.
With one last despairing effort he lifted the sword as he heard that snarl again. This time it struck home. The snarl was a howl. A body thudded to the floor and was silent. The figures were closing in around him, and he knew that when they reached him, he would die.
One last thing remained. He could not reach Irathe to silence her triumphant chant, but the Oracle stood at his back. He could reach her.
He could kill her.
She at least need never be captive again to the black evil of her twin self. And if the Oracle died—perhaps—Irathe too might die. It was a forlorn and desperate thing he meant to do, but he knew in his frozen horror and revulsion that it was best for them all.
She was very near, within reach of his arm. He touched her—for the first time. He had wondered often before now if she would be marble to the touch, cold, hard. She was not cold. For an instant it bewildered him, and then he knew. He was himself so paralyzingly cold in this unnatural icy dark that even marble might seem warm to him.
And as he drew her toward him, his arm closing about her shoulders, he felt her giving slowly, almost reluctantly, to his pull, her body bending as he brought her within reach of his sword.
He shortened his grip upon it. In the deadly dark he laid its sharp edge against her throat.
She did not stir. But he could hear her quickened breathing.
Very gently he bent his head and kissed her for the first time and the last his conscious memory would ever know. And under his lips he felt warmth and life come slowly back into the Oracle of Kerak. Slowly, softly out of that distant place in which she had dwelt so long, the Oracle of Kerak returned to the world of the living.
Against his mouth her lips moved. Against his heart her heart stirred—beat more strongly. In his arms her body that had been marble relaxed into flexible, living flesh. The tie between them which Irathe herself had brought into being was a cord that drew her irresistibly through the gates of forgetfulness and enchantment. She stirred, sighed—
The spell broke!
She wrenched free and was gone into the darkness. And as she moved, it seemed to Boyce that Irathe’s voice faltered. For an instant assurance went out of it and she stumbled in the midst of a phrase. Suddenly he thought he understood. They were the two halves of a single being.
Irathe in all her vivid aliveness had drained from that other self the very stuff of life itself. When living returned to the Oracle, it could come from no other source than Irathe. She must have felt her own power sink within her at the abrupt upward surge of strength in the Oracle.
Now suddenly in the icy darkness a new voice sounded—a clear, cool voice, very sure, chanting that blasphemous tongue which Irathe still spoke. Almost in chorus for a moment the two voices chanted, one cool and not strong, but gaining in strength, the other rich and high, brimming with passion—but fading a little as the new tones sounded through the dark.
But it was not a chorus. Strophe and antistrophe rang through the icy hall. And at the chant of that new, clear speech, Boyce thought the cold began to ebb a little. He could move again—not much, but a little. Blindly he stumbled forward.
VOICE fought against voice. The two who had been one woman battled in the dark. And Boyce knew now the truth behind that battle. For Irathe was not, after all, the one human creature who could command Them. She was only half of that one being who alone spoke Their tongue with human lips. The Oracle too knew the chant, knew They must obey it. And in the dark the Oracle chanted on, her voice gaining little by little in volume as it strove with Irathe’s.
Groping, Boyce touched something warm and breathing. Even in the darkness, he could not be mistaken who it was. He seized her waist, and Irathe struck out at him fiercely, pausing in her chant. The Oracle’s voice soared instantly in the pause, strength surging up in it.
Boyce’s arms swept around Irathe. Her nails ripped his cheek. He dragged her close, prisoning her arms, one palm clamping across her mouth. It was like holding one of the tiger-beasts. Her knee drove up viciously; she writhed in his arms and he tightened his grasp until it seemed as though her ribs must collapse under the pressure. But she could not speak.
The Oracle’s voice poured forth that inhuman chant, clear and strong. It was a command—and an entreaty.
Darkness was paling around them. Over Irathe’s twisting head, Boyce saw robed figures moving in an intricate ritual about the marble-white girl whose voice still echoed through the room. He saw, and looked away, setting his teeth against the shudders that racked him whenever his eyes even glancingly crossed those hidden shapes.
But something was happening.
In his arms Irathe suddenly froze. Something brushed past, a touch that exhaled cold, and Boyce was for a moment weak with horror at the touch. Then a single ringing sound like a struck gong vibrated through the lifting dimness.
And from Boyce’s arms he felt Irathe—melt . . .
When he could see again, the room was clear. He was not wholly aware of the great surging lift and fall of the floor beneath him, for one thing held his gaze like a spell of sorcery. And there was sorcery indeed in her violet eyes and the vividness of the smiling face beneath her iron crown.
“Do you know me now—my dear, oh, my dear—do you know me now?”
He was not sure of his own body any more. He took one forward step as the floor pitched beneath him, not daring to believe the strange evidence of his own stunned mind.
“We are one again now,” the sweet, familiar voice was saying. And he did remember, from long ago and from another world. His heart was beating suffocatingly as he crossed the heaving floor toward her, holding out uncertain hands.
Her warm fingers clasped them. It was the face he knew tilting to his now—vivid and alive as Irathe, yes, potent for evil as Irathe—but not evil. All the strength was there, but under the control the Oracle had always known.
She thrust herself between his arms and laid the crowned head back to lift her lips to his, smiling as she had smiled so long ago, on Earth.
Yes, he remembered now. This was the real Irathe . . .!
The pitch of the floor beneath them interrupted the kiss. She drew back and looked anxiously about them.
“We must go,” she said. “I wish—but unless you mean to stay here foreve
r, we must go quickly.”
He followed her glance. Through the crystal ceiling, clear now except for the drift of mist outside, he could see the City roofs and the mountains beyond them, with Kerak crowning the heights. And Kerak was slipping slowly backward. The mountains moved—no, not the mountains, but the City.
“The bond is broken.” the girl in his arms said. He could not quite think of her as Irathe, though he knew it was truly her name now. “I’m no longer an anchor to hold the City here and the tide is pulling us out and away. What do you think we should do, William Boyce?”
He dropped one arm from her to touch his belt where a faint chill from the crystal struck through his clothing. Yes, it was still there.
“Go back,” he said. “Back to Earth, if we can.”
She nodded.
“Yes, I hoped for that This City is no place for me now. My place is with you—if you want that?”
He grinned and dropped his head to reassure her, but she smiled, pushing him gently away.
“Later, later, my darling. We—look.”
He turned his head. Then in an awed voice he said, “Jamai!”
And yet it was no startling thing he saw. Terrible, yes, and tragic, but somehow not strange in this strange and lawless place.
On the high throne of the Sorcerer King the Huntsman sat. The King’s yellow-robed body lay at his feet on the heaving floor. The Huntsman’s chin was on his chest and his face was turned toward them as they stood before the throne. But the Huntsman’s eyes did not see them. His eyes were fixed upon the bright face of madness and he saw no other sight.
They left him there, stumbling as they went over the pitching floor, his dead beasts lying about the throne and the dead King at his feet.
THROUGH the mist they stumbled, over ground that swelled and sank beneath their feet like the tides of a solid sea. Great gaps opened and closed again with a screaming of rock far underground. The depths groaned beneath them.
“Hurry!” Boyce heard himself gasp as the ground shook itself and rose in a mountainous billow that sank as they began the climb up its slope. “It isn’t far now—only a little way. I remember that cliff. It’s the one I came through.”
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