by C. L. Moore
On all sides stretched the moving, restless woods, farther than the eye could reach. The grasslands rippled, and over the dim horizon the far mountains beckoned him. Even the mystery of the Temple and its endless twilight began to torment his waking moments. He dallied with the idea of exploring those hallways which the dwellers in this lotus-land avoided, of gazing from the strange windows that opened upon inexplicable blue. Surely life, even here, must hold some more fervent meaning than that he followed now. What lay beyond the wood and grasslands? What mysterious country did those mountains wall?
He began to harry his companion with questions that woke more and more often the look of dread behind her eyes, but he gained little satisfaction. She belonged to a people without history, without ambition, their lives bent wholly towards wringing from each moment its full sweetness in anticipation of the terror to come. Evasion was the keynote of their existence, perhaps with reason. Perhaps all the adventurous spirits among them had followed their curiosity into danger and death, and the only ones left were the submissive souls who led their bucolically voluptuous lives in this Elysium so shadowed with horror.
In this coloured lotus-land, memories of the world he had left grew upon him more and more vividly: he remembered the hurrying crowds of the planets’ capitals, the lights, the noise, the laughter. He saw space-ships cleaving the night sky with flame, flashing from world to world through the star-flecked darkness. He remembered sudden brawls in saloons and space-sailor dives when the air was alive with shouts and tumult, and heat-guns slashed their blue-hot blades of flame and the smell of burnt flesh hung heavy. Life marched in pageant past his remembering eyes, violent, shoulder to shoulder with death. And nostalgia wrenched at him for the lovely, terrible, brawling worlds he had left behind.
Daily the unrest grew upon him. The girl made pathetic little attempts to find some sort of entertainment that would occupy his ranging mind. She led him on timid excursions into the living woods, even conquered her horror of the Temple enough to follow him on timorous tiptoe as he explored a little way down the corridors which did not arouse in her too anguished a terror. But she must have known from the first that it was hopeless.
One day as they lay on the sand watching the lake ripple bluely under a crystal sky, Smith’s eyes, dwelling on the faint shadow of the mountains, half unseeingly, suddenly narrowed into a hardness as bright and pale as steel. Muscle ridged his abruptly set jaw and he sat upright with a jerk, pushing away the girl who had been leaning on his shoulder.
‘I’m through,’ he said harshly, and rose.
‘What—what is it?’ The girl stumbled to her feet.
‘I’m going away—anywhere. To those mountains, I think. I’m leaving now!’
‘But—you wish to die, then?’
‘Better the real thing than a living death like this,’ he said. ‘At least I’ll have a little more excitement first.’
‘But, what of your food? There’s nothing to keep you alive, even if you escape the greater dangers. Why, you’ll dare not even lie down on the grass at night—it would eat you alive! You have no chance at all to live if you leave this grove—and me.’
‘If I must die, I shall,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve made up my mind. I could explore the Temple and so come on it and die. But do something I must, and it seems to me my best chance is in trying to reach some country where food grows before I starve. It’s worth trying. I can’t go on like this.’
She looked at him miserably, tears brimming her sherry eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say a word her eyes strayed beyond his shoulder and suddenly she smiled, a dreadful, frozen little smile.
‘You will not go,’ she said. ‘Death has come for us now.’
She said it so calmly, so unafraid, that he did not understand until she pointed beyond him. He turned.
The air between them and the shrine was curiously agitated. As he watched, it began to resolve itself into a nebulous blue mist that thickened and darkened…blurry tinges of violet and green began to blow through it vaguely, and then by imperceptible degrees a flush of rose appeared in the mist—deepened, thickened, contracted into burning scarlet that seared his eyes, pulsed alively—and he knew that it had come.
An aura of menace seemed to radiate from it, strengthening as the mist strengthened, reaching out in hunger towards his mind. He felt it as tangibly as he saw it—cloudy danger reaching out avidly for them both.
The girl was not afraid. Somehow he knew this, though he dared not turn, dared not wrench his eyes from that hypnotically pulsing scarlet…She whispered very softly from behind him.
‘So I die with you, I am content.’ And the sound of her voice freed him from the snare of the crimson pulse.
He barked a wolfish laugh, abruptly—welcoming even the diversion from the eternal idyll he had been living—and the gun leaping to his hand spurted a long blue breath. The steel-blue dazzle illumined the gathering mist lividly, passed through it without obstruction and charred the ground beyond. Smith set his teeth and swung a figure-eight pattern of flame through and through the mist, lacing it with blue heat. And when that finger of fire crossed the scarlet pulse the impact jarred the whole nebulous cloud violently, so that its outlines wavered and shrank, and the pulse of crimson sizzled under the heat—shrivelled—began to fade in desperate haste.
Smith swept the ray back and forth along the redness, tracing its pattern with destruction, but it faded too swiftly for him. In little more than an instant it had paled and disembodied and vanished save for a fading flush of rose and the blue-hot blade of his flame sizzled harmlessly through the disappearing mist to sear the ground beyond. He switched off the heat, then, and stood breathing a little unevenly as the death-cloud thinned and paled and vanished before his eyes, until no trace of it was left and the air glowed lucid and transparent once more.
The unmistakable odour of burning flesh caught at his nostrils, and he wondered for a moment if the Thing had indeed materialized a nucleus of matter, and then he saw that the smell came from the seared grass his flame had struck. The tiny, furry blades were all writhing away from the burnt spot, straining at their roots as if a wind blew them back, and from the blackened area a thick smoke rose, reeking with the odour of burnt meat. Smith, remembering their vampire habits, turned away, half nauseated.
The girl had sunk to the sand behind him, trembling violently now that the danger was gone.
‘Is—it dead?’ she breathed, when she could master her quivering mouth.
‘I don’t know. No way of telling. Probably not.’
‘What will—will you do now?’
He slid the heat-gun back into its holster and settled the belt purposefully.
‘What I started out to do.’
The girl scrambled up in desperate haste.
‘Wait!’ she gasped. ‘Wait!’ and clutched at his arm to steady herself. And he waited until the trembling had passed. Then she went on. ‘Come up to the Temple once more before you go.’
‘All right. Not a bad idea. It may be a long time before my next—meal.’
And so again they crossed the fur-soft grass that bore down upon them in long ripples from every part of the meadow.
The Temple rose dim and unreal before them, and as they entered blue twilight folded them dreamily about. Smith turned by habit towards the gallery of the drinkers, but the girl laid upon his arm a hand that shook a little, and murmured.
‘Come this way.’
He followed in growing surprise down the hallway through the drifting mists and away from the gallery he knew so well. It seemed to him that the mist thickened as they advanced, and in the uncertain light he could never be sure that the walls did not waver as nebulously as the blurring air. He felt a curious impulse to step through their intangible barriers and out of the hall into—what?
Presently steps rose under his feet, almost imperceptibly and after a while the pressure on his arm drew him aside. They went in under a low,
heavy arch of stone and entered the strangest room he had ever seen. It appeared to be seven-sided, as nearly as he could judge through the drifting mist, and curious, converging lines were graven deep in the floor.
It seemed to him that forces outside his comprehension were beating violently against the seven walls, circling like hurricanes through the dimness until the whole room was a maelstrom of invisible tumult.
When he lifted his eyes to the wall, he knew where he was. Blazoned on the dim stone, burning through the twilight like some other-dimensional fire, the scarlet pattern writhed across the wall.
The sight of it, somehow, set up a commotion in his brain, and it was with whirling head and stumbling feet that he answered to the pressure on his arm. Dimly he realized that he stood at the very centre of those strange, converging lines, feeling forces beyond reason coursing through him along paths outside any knowledge he possessed.
Then for one moment arms clasped his neck and a warm, fragrant body pressed against him, and a voice sobbed in his ear.
‘If you must leave me, then go back through the Door, beloved—life without you—more dreadful even than a death like this…’ A kiss that stung of blood clung to his lips for an instant; then the clasp loosened and he stood alone.
Through the twilight he saw her dimly outlined against the Word. And he thought, as she stood there, that it was as if the invisible currents beat bodily against her, so that she swayed and wavered before him, her outlines blurring and forming again as the forces from which he was so mystically protected buffeted her mercilessly.
And he saw knowledge dawning terribly upon her face, as the meaning of the Word seeped slowly into her mind. The sweet brown face twisted hideously, the blood-red lips writhed apart to shriek a Word—in a moment of clarity he actually saw her tongue twisting incredibly to form the syllables of the unspeakable thing never meant for human lips to frame. Her mouth opened into an impossible shape…she gasped in the blurry mist and shrieked aloud…
4
Smith was walking along a twisting path so scarlet that he could not bear to look down, a path that wound and unwound and shook itself under his feet so that he stumbled at every step. He was groping through a blinding mist clouded with violet and green, and in his ears a dreadful whisper rang—the first syllable of an unutterable Word…Whenever he neared the end of the path it shook itself under him and doubled back, and weariness like a drug was sinking into his brain, and the sleepy twilight colours of the mist lulled him, and—
‘He’s waking up!’ said an exultant voice in his ear.
Smith lifted heavy eyelids upon a room without walls—a room wherein multiple figures extending into infinity moved to and fro in countless hosts…
‘Smith! N.W.! Wake up!’ urged that familiar voice from somewhere near.
He blinked. The myriad diminishing figures resolved themselves into the reflections of two men in a steel-walled room, bending over him. The friendly, anxious face of his partner, Yarol the Venusian, leaned above the bed.
‘By Pharol, N.W.,’ said the well-remembered, ribald voice, ‘you’ve been asleep for a week! We thought you’d never come out of it—must have been an awful brand of whisky!’
Smith managed a feeble grin—amazing how weak he felt—and turned an inquiring gaze upon the other figure.
‘I’m a doctor,’ said that individual, meeting the questing stare. ‘Your friend called me in three days ago and I’ve been working on you ever since. It must have been all of five or six days since you fell into this coma—have you any idea what caused it?’
Smith’s pale eyes roved the room. He did not find what he sought, and though his weak murmur answered the doctor’s question, the man was never to know it.
‘Shawl?’
‘I threw the damned thing away,’ confessed Yarol. ‘Stood it for three days and then gave up. That red pattern gave me the worst headache I’ve had since we found that case of black wine on the asteroid. Remember?’
‘Where—?’
‘Gave it to a space-rat checking out of Venus. Sorry. Did you really want it? I’ll buy you another.’
Smith did not answer. The weakness was rushing up about him in grey waves. He closed his eyes, hearing the echoes of that first dreadful syllable whispering through his head…whisper from a dream…Yarol heard him murmur softly:
‘And—I never even knew—her name…’
Dust of Gods
1
“Pass the whisky, N.W.,” said Yarol the Venusian persuasively.
Northwest Smith shook the black bottle of Venusian segir-whisky tentatively, evoked a slight gurgle, and reached for his friend’s glass. Under the Venusian’s jealous dark gaze he measured out exactly half of the red liquid. It was not very much.
Yarol regarded his share of the drink disconsolately.
“Broke again,” he murmured. “And me so thirsty.” His glance of cherubic innocence flashed along the temptingly laden counters of the Martian saloon wherein they sat. His face with its look of holy innocence turned to Smith’s, the wise black gaze meeting the Earthman’s pale-steel look questioningly. Yarol lifted an arched brow.
“How about it?” he suggested delicately. “Mars owes us a drink anyhow, and I just had my heat-gun recharged this morning. I think we could get away with it.”
Under the table he laid a hopeful hand on his gun. Smith grinned and shook his head.
“Too many customers,” he said. “And you ought to know better than to start anything here. It isn’t healthful.”
Yarol shrugged resigned shoulders and drained his glass with a gulp.
“Now what?” he demanded.
“Well, look around. See anyone here you know? We’re open for business—any kind.”
Yarol twirled his glass wistfully and studied the crowded room from under his lashes. With those lashes lowered he might have passed for a choir boy in any of Earth’s cathedrals. But too dark a knowledge looked out when they rose for that illusion to continue long.
It was a motley crowd the weary black gaze scrutinized—hard-faced Earthmen in space-sailors’ leather, sleek Venusians with their sidelong, dangerous eyes, Martian dry landers muttering the blasphemous gutturals of their language, a sprinkling of outlanders and half-brutes from the wide-flung borders of civilization. Yarol’s eyes returned to the dark, scarred face across the table. He met the pallor of Smith’s no-colored gaze and shrugged.
“No one who’d buy us a drink,” he sighed. “I’ve seen one or two of ’em before, though. Take those two space-rats at the next table: the little red-faced Earthman—the one looking over his shoulder—and the drylander with an eye gone. See? I’ve heard they’re hunters.”
“What for?”
Yarol lifted his shoulders in the expressive Venusian shrug. His brows rose too, quizzically.
“No one knows what they hunt—but they run together.”
“Hm-m.” Smith turned a speculative stare toward the neighboring table. “They look more hunted than hunting, if you ask me.”
Yarol nodded. The two seemed to share one fear between them, if over-the-shoulder glances and restless eyes spoke truly. They huddled together above their segir glasses, and though they had the faces of hard men, inured to the space-way dangers, the look on those faces was curiously compounded of many unpleasant things underlying a frank, unreasoning alarm. It was a look Smith could not quite fathom—a haunted, uneasy dread with nameless things behind it.
“They do look as if Black Pharol were one jump behind,” said Yarol. “Funny, too. I’ve always heard they were pretty tough, both of ’em. You have to be in their profession.”
Said a husky half-whisper in their very ears, “Perhaps they found what they were hunting.”
It produced an electric stillness. Smith moved almost imperceptibly sidewise in his chair, the better to clear his gun, and Yarol’s slim fingers hovered above his hip. They turned expressionless faces toward the speaker.
A little man sitting alone at the next table had b
ent forward to fix them with a particularly bright stare. They met it in silence, hostile and waiting, until the husky half-whisper spoke again.
“May I join you? I couldn’t help overhearing that—that you were open for business.”
Without expression Smith’s colorless eyes summed up the speaker, and a puzzlement clouded their paleness as he looked. Rarely does one meet a man whose origin and race are not apparent even upon close scrutiny. Yet here was one whom he could not classify. Under the deep burn of the man’s skin might be concealed a fair Venusian pallor or an Earthman bronze, canal-Martian rosiness or even a leathery dryland hide. His dark eyes could have belonged to any race, and his husky whisper, fluent in the jargon of the spaceman, effectively disguised its origin. Little and unobtrusive, he might have passed for native on any of the three planets.
Smith’s scarred, impassive face did not change as he looked, but after a long moment of scrutiny he said, “Pull up,” and then bit off the words as if he had said too much.
The brevity must have pleased the little man, for he smiled as he complied, meeting the passively hostile stare of the two without embarrassment. He folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. The husky voice began without preamble, “I can offer you employment—if you’re not afraid. It’s dangerous work, but the pay’s good enough to make up for it—if you’re not afraid.”
“What is it?”
“Work they—those two—failed at. They were—hunters—until they found what they hunted. Look at them now.”
Smith’s no-colored eyes did not swerve from the speaker’s face, but he nodded. No need to look again upon the fear-ridden faces of the neighboring pair. He understood.
