He turned his back on what was left of Wallagash. There was other danger here. That weasel-thing—he’d heard of them before. Rumour had it that they followed you until you slept, then sucked the life out of you while you dreamed pretty dreams. He’d learned to respect rumour in such matters. He picked up the dead Blueskin’s needle-sword.
“O, Man.”
The voice came from above. It was like the croak of a Martian raven. He looked up. Perched on top of the great scarlet egg was the damnedest creature he had ever seen.
It was the size of a bulldog, with a face like a vampire bat and a head of spiky black hair growing between two spreading ears. It was as black as sin, with short, kinky wool growing all over its potbellied body down to the ankles of its double-jointed legs. Its feet were two-toed claws, bare black skin over knuckly bone. And wrapping it like a leather cape were two huge bat’s wings whose hooked wrists stuck up above its head like furled flags.
It had eyes like blood-red soup plates with pin-prick pupils. One of them swiveled to stare up into the shadows above them; the other regarded him unwinkingly.
“I am Shag, a Murath,” the thing croaked.
~ * ~
Moran had heard of the Muraths. “Gollywogs,” space hogs called them. They were the true native race of Tantalus, held in slavery by the few semicivilised Blueskins who had their black stone cities on the strip of fen land beyond the Mountains of the Night. Few humans had ever visited them, and fewer had returned, for while the citified Blueskins lacked some of the unpleasant habits of their savage brethren, they were inclined to be touchy and had some unpleasant tendencies toward atavism.
“Do not touch the sheetag,” the clipped voice went on. “It will scream and arouse the Stalker. I can escape. I can bring help.”
Sheetag—that was the weasel thing. But what did this padded cell have to do with the Stalkers? What had happened, anyway?
“Where are we?” Moran demanded. “What’s this all about?”
The little creature rustled its wings impatiently. “Must we talk?” it asked. “Very well, this is the egg of a Stalker. This is its incubation pouch. Perhaps the egg will hatch and the young of the Stalker will eat us. Perhaps it will do something else. I do not know. Nobody knows. I know that I can escape if you help. You will come here please.”
Moran shrugged. Half his life had been spent in space and the planets that rattled around in space. He’d given up balking at screwy situations long ago. He crammed his shoulders into the space behind the big red egg, wedged his knee against its pebbly surface, and began to climb.
Against his back the black plush wall of the room pulsed with a rhythm quite different from the lurch and sway he had felt before. It was like a great artery, throbbing with the incessant pulse of life. What if it was an artery? What if this was the brooding pouch of a Stalker, as Shag had said? Then what in the name of Heaven must a Stalker be like?
The Murath thrust out a long-toed foot and hauled him up on the rounded top of the egg. It had no hands, only the two great wings. They must have had a spread of twenty feet. No wonder the creature’s chest stuck out like the keel of a yacht.
He had to stoop because of the ceiling. The black fur lining stopped opposite his knees. Leathery black skin covered two bands of muscle that closed the pouch. He put his hand up. They were warm, like flesh. They were flesh. It was true.
The gollywog’s hideous face swiveled toward him. “You can make an opening,” it observed passionlessly. “You are strong. I will crawl out. I am small. I will bring help. I can fly.”
One scrawny claw kicked at the bands of muscle above his head. “The pouch is weak here. You are strong. You will make it open. You will hold it until I escape. I can fly. I will bring help.”
Moran stiffened his legs, and braced both hands where the gollywog had pointed. Sure—he’d open up, if it could be done. As for letting the little rat make his getaway alone, that was something else. He gritted his teeth and heaved. With surprising ease the walls of muscle parted. He thrust his shoulders into the gap, hitched his knees against the opposite side, and shoved.
He was in starlight. Fifty feet below drifted a sea of swirling, heaving clouds. Above, a vast black naked body blotted out the stars. This was a Stalker! This thing that walked on mountains!
The Murath’s bristling head pushed up beside his legs. It climbed out and perched precariously on the lip of the pouch, staring owlishly out over the panorama of mountain crags that rose about them. The Stalker was deep in the heart of the unknown ranges, and every swing stride was bearing them farther. Then below sounded a shrill, piercing scream of rage. Thesheetag! The stalker stopped.
~ * ~
Two vast bat wings spread before him and Shag dived spinning into space. His tiny body swung like a grape between his great black wings. They flapped slowly, ponderously, lifting him higher and higher above the encircling peaks, carrying him with each beat farther from the colossal body of the Stalker. Then out of the rolling cloud-sea burst a shape from nightmare—the second Stalker!
Two hundred feet—three hundred—how could he measure it in that phantom light? Only the weak gravity of Tantalus could spawn so monstrous a thing. The mists boiled about its shoulders, about its waist, about its plodding legs. Legs like the massive columns of centuries-old trees. A body broad as an ether ship, squat, bent, blotting out the sky. A head peaked and misshapen, with glowing yellow eyes like gibbous moons. And arms like the flails of Death himself, striking like mighty serpents at the tiny winging shape!
Some updraft from the steepled crags caught the Murath and spun him upward like a leaf. The smiting talons swept harmlessly beneath him; he rocked dizzily in the boiling air currents, then tilted his giant wings and slid like a drifting shadow into the abyss.
Again that vast claw struck—and missed. The winged dot swerved deftly from its path. The black wings folded and Shag fell like a plummet into the seething mists. Only furrows left by raking talons showed where he had been.
A spasm shook the wall of muscle against which Morarn was braced. Spurted like a melon seed from between the closing lips of the pouch, he sprawled over emptiness while the clouds rushed up to meet him. Then out of nowhere came a giant, glistening hand that caught him, crushed him, thrust him kicking into oblivion.
It seemed that he came swimming up out of unfathomable depths. A glassy wall stretched over him, barring him from the light. He beat at it with his fists—burst through and yelled with all the pent-up agony of bursting lungs. His feet were under him, firm on solid stone, and he shouted blind defiance at God and man.
He saw the sprawling city of the Stalkers.
Walls of splintered rock soared upward into the clouds. He stood a thousand feet above the valley floor, on a terrace of cut stone, with the grotesque hovels spread before him like children’s blocks rolled on a table top. Slabs of gray granite, toppled together and chinked with blocks of softer stone. Barrows of heaped boulders, covered with baked mud. Walled in crannies of the living rock, black with damp and dirt and decay, And beyond an endless labyrinth of smooth-cut blocks, ruined and desolate, stretching out mile after mile across the valley floor.
A city—and the memory of a city.
Giants had built it when Tantalus was young. Giants dwelt now in the hovels that huddled in the shadow of its colossal walls. Giants vaster and more terrible than anything in men’s dreams, dwarfed by a glory that was dead and forever lost.
Steps climbed from the valley, each tread thrice a tall man’s height. At their foot the Stalkers stood. There was a score of them—all that remained of the race that had raised the city of the plain. Their bodies were a mockery of man’s, their arms dangling, simian things with three-clawed hands, their feet splayed, cloven hoofs. Their heads were like the twisted wedge of an earthly Brazil nut, the flat, curved bases turned ahead, the sloping sides meeting in a bony ridge that ran in a frill of jagged bone down their massive backs. An eye was set in each slant-face, great faceted yellow jewels p
eering out of pockets in the rubbery black flesh. A beaklike mouth split the forward apex of the wedge, and from its scarlet lips came a humming like the purr of a giant cat.
Behind him sounded an answering trill, shrill, sweet—and terrible!
~ * ~
Moran spun in his tracks. Pylons of cut stone rose on either hand, framing a mighty gateway in the cliffs. Beyond them, cut out of the gorge’s floor, was a pit, blocking it from wall to wall. A pit—and in the pit a toad!
Great webbed paws were bowed under its bleached white belly. Its flat, warty head hung level with the terrace where he stood. Its golden eyes blinked sleepily, hypnotically, at the little group that cowered at the pit’s edge—the creatures of the pouch.
Fear froze them in their tracks—fear and the fascination of those burning eyes. They swayed on their feet to the murmuring rhythm of the Stalkers, to the shrill piping of the monster toad. But now that crooning trill stopped short. Instantly one of the little pink things turned and ran. Faster than sight the toad’s pale tongue licked out—and it was gone. Again from the valley he heard the exultant mutter of the Stalkers.
Pictures were racing through Moran’s brain. Pictures of Earth, and he a boy, sprawled flat in the cool green grass beside a little stream, watching a toad eat ants. Time after time that lightning-swift tongue had struck, and each time an ant vanished. But always an ant that moved!
An ant that moved! Moran’s muscles tensed. Billion on billions of miles separated this colossal monster from the little, harmless toads of Earth, but perhaps the force of evolution that had given them life had acted in the same way on this mad, black world. Perhaps this toad too saw only things that moved.
Slowly, slowly his fingers crept across his thigh, behind his back, where his knife should be. It came loose in his fingers and that hand crept slowly back. Eyes on the toad’s great jeweled ones, he waited for that moment when its deadly trill would cease. Soon now—
Before it came he flipped the knife. It spun in a shining arc, stood quivering in the furry shoulder of the weasel-thing. With a scream of rage it spun, leaping like a black arrow toward him, but the toad was quicker. Its tongue licked out—was gone—and with it the sheetag. In that instant Moran sprang.
Five great strides took him to the pit’s edge. Legs that had not faltered under accelerations of five gravities flung him into space. Feet first he struck between the toad’s great, staring eyes. He slipped, fell to his knees, then before the monster’s sluggish brain could know what had happened was on his feet and running, leaping, rolling on the gorge’s rocky floor. Behind him the purring of the Stalkers rose to an angry buzz. He heard their great hoofs pounding on the stairs, the slap of the toad’s webbed paws on the pit’s walls as it turned. Scrambling to his feet he began to run.
The ravine twisted upward between sheer walls of solid rock. The floor was worn smooth by the tread of countless naked feet during endless years. Two hundred feet above him he could see the black smears where generations of Stalkers had rubbed their sooty shoulders against the rock. Below, at a man’s height, were other smears where other, smaller things had gone. What was it that drew them, here in the desolate heart of the ranges?
As he climbed he began to feel the wind. The valley of the Stalkers was sheltered, but now he was rising above the level of the bounding cliffs, close under the cloud blanket, and as he advanced the force of the wind increased until he was leaning against a howling gale. It was raining again, a slow drizzle, and the fine droplets stung his face and bare body, washing away the mud that had caked on them.
By the time he reached the summit of the pass he was crawling on all fours, digging his fingers into crannies of the rock, hugging the walls of the ravine for what little shelter they afforded. He was in the midst of the clouds now, so that he groped his way through an unpenetrable fog, lit from above by the weird blue light of distant Sirius.
On and on he crawled, driven now by a blind determination that seemed to have been born of the wind and the fog. Whatever happened, he would not turn back. Something there ahead called him as it had called countless other beings of many worlds through untold centuries.
At last the path led down. An icy rivulet ran ankle-deep in the groove that was worn in the soft slate by the plodding of many feet through many years. Soon he was below the clouds again, and the gorge was widening and deepening into a canyon whose fluted walls were a great harp on which the winds played dolefully. How far he had come from the valley of the Stalkers and their monstrous toad-god, he did not know. Nor did he care. There ahead, near now, was—something.
~ * ~
Ahead a natural archway spanned the gorge. It had been shaped into a gateway through which the wind screamed, a window above emptiness through which poured a flood of violet light. Battling his way foot by foot against the tempest, Moran came to the gateway and looked through.
Another valley lay below him, carved out of many-colored sandstone by the fury of the winds. Weird columns of red and orange rose from its barren floor, and the black slits of dry arroyos channeled its painted walls. Dykes of volcanic rock angled across it in an insane labyrinth, the softer shales and sandstones eaten away from around them, leaving them like the cyclopean tumbled ramparts of a city of the winds.
He did not see the weird beauty of that painted garden. He did not see the black dots that were caves in the gray limestone that underlay the painted rocks. He looked beyond, at the Black Hole of Tantalus—and the thing that gave it birth.
Opposite him the wind-carved minarets drew back from a road of purple quartz that formed a slowly rising ramp across the valley floor. Closing the valley’s eastern end rose a cliff of black obsidian, splintered into a myriad of knife-edged facets by the terrific forces that had raised it from the depths of the planet. At its foot gaped the abyss.
Ten miles it must have been, between the obsidian wall and the rock of its nearer lip. Out of it poured a torrent of violet light, striking back with countless scintillant spear-shafts from the broken cliff. Above it the clouds spun back in the mighty whirlpool of the Black Hole, through which streamed the cosmic forces of the abyss that could suck a ship out of space against all the power of a hundred drumming jets. And where the road of amethyst met its edge there rose a shaft of clear crystal, six-sided, blunt-tipped, thirty feet and more from base to tip, through which the light from the planet’s heart beat in a shower of fiery radiance. A giant crystal of pure, clear quartz, and at its heart a cavity, a bubble, in which floated a thin black speck that was—something.
The path led down through the maze of steepled rocks. At the first turn the abyss was lost to sight. It was then he saw the dwellers in the caves.
There were perhaps thirty of them, of a dozen races and worlds. There were Blueskins from Tantalus’ own reeking jungles, and leather-bellied dwarfs from the red deserts of Mars. There were three-eyed, six-armed drogas from the twin worlds of Alpha Centauri, and octopus-armed lizards who inhabited the last of the six planets that circled Sirius. There was the tiny form of a Murath, one great wing burned away by a ray-blast. And old and young, short and tall, there were men of Earth!
They stood on the slope in front of the caves, gaunt and silent, eyeing him dourly. Moran tugged at his belt where a gun should be and squared his naked shoulders. They didn’t seem overjoyed at the sight of him. Food was probably scarce here, and he was another mouth to cut down their rations. Well—they’d take him, and they’d like it!
As he came down from the rocks their line split to let him through. He felt a prickling at his spine as he passed between them, but no one moved to harm him. At the mouth of the largest cave he turned, his arms folded, his back to a great block of fallen stone.
“Now then,” he demanded, “let’s have it.”
~ * ~
One man stepped forward from the rest, a Negro with the fine features and silky hair that meant Venusian blood.
“You’re new here,” he said tonelessly. “You’re big and maybe you feel big.
Maybe you’ll have ideas about doing things, and about who’ll do them. I wouldn’t if I was you.”
A grin came on Moran’s bronzed face. He knew this kind of talk. “I might at that,” he admitted. “And what would you gentlemen be thinking you might do about it?”
Three others aligned themselves with the black man. One was a Martian, with the shoulders and dangling arms of a bull ape. The other two were men his own size, or bigger.
“We’ve laws here,” the Martian hissed. “We have ways of keeping them. There are four of us who see to that. You will eat when we tell you and what we tell you. You will sleep where we say and do what work we say. That is the law here, and you will obey it.”
“Is it now?” Moran’s thumbs were in his belt, and he teetered appraisingly on his toes. “So that’s the way of it—little to eat and a devil of a lot too many to eat it. There’ll be rations, I’m thinking, and the four of you to share them out when the time comes.” He let his gaze wander insolently over the sullen faces of the crowd and back to the four who confronted him. “Now then, have you ever held the thought to make it five?”
Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03] Page 29
