The Kurgal itself was a flat, sandy plain stretching out in every direction as far as the eye could see, level, treeless, a featureless expanse across which whipped a thin, chill wind that keened around their wagon like the sprits of those ancient dead once reputed to haunt this place. Every night, they huddled in furs to ward off the cold.
The twisting burrows of the troglodyte cities of the Kurgal extended for miles underground from the central pyramid of stone which marked the entrance on the surface. Ages old, the pyramids were chosen for roosting places by the slul and each was now a rounded heap of slul-dung. As they came up to the pyramid of Aldaran, the winged horrors, at Jarvis’ suggestion, swooped and dived savagely around them in mock attack. It would look better so, Jarvis thought, particularly if spies of the Bronze Men should be watching.
The Lulu of the Kurgal were runty, half-wild creatures, but they were friendly, and Jarvis was able to procure more provisions and directions to the next nearest city of the Kurgal. He did not plan to go there, but he felt that some falsification of their destination was necessary for the protection of their mission.
Once the pyramid of Aldaran and its roosting horde of slul had dropped below the horizon, Jarvis altered their course to nearly due north, from which direction now came the Song of Surandanish. It was now, when he let it, a throbbing, numbing beat within his consciousness, indicative of its nearness.
Accompanying them skimmed and fluttered thousands of slul and Jarvis communed with them. Once they had sighted the gleaming cliffs that still lay far ahead, said the slul, they must turn again eastward to find the most suitable place for entry into the Dingir-ki.
That point, they found out days later, was the lowest in all the hundreds of miles of the great barrier which was so high that not even the slul could fly over it. Even at this place they could not reach the lip of the massive precipice, but about half way up was the entrance to a cave which they could reach, a dark opening about which fluttered a multitude of scintillant specks, doorway to the Mothering Pits of the Eeima!
Jarvis cut the traces of the issup, turned their heads in the direction of Aldaral, and ordered them to move. They trudged off side by side, nor would they stop until the Aldaralians, perceiving them in their travel alone, rode out to intercept them. They would provide tacit evidence that he and Thork had perished in the desert, victims of the slul. It would not take long for news to spread along the trade routes of Dimgal that this oddly-assorted pair had come to an evil-end on the flat-topped roof of Eloraspon. Eventually, the word was sure to reach the god-like ears of the Bronze Men.
Bundling what weapons and food supplies they could take with them, Jarvis informed the Eltaroa of their readiness. Two of the monsters swooped to a taloned landing. The take-off jarred the breath from Jarvis’ lungs. Leathery wings beat swiftly and the wind whistled, tearing at his grip with fingers of ice. The desert dropped away in spinning circles; the awesome face of the cliff slipped downward. The slul glided in for a landing at the cave mouth.
“We have done what we can, Jeff Jarvis,” communed the horse of Eltaroa. “The Eeima will direct you from here. Do what you must in Surandanish, and free us of our yoke of time!”
Then the slul dropped away from the ledge, volplaning in a long, swooping glide that got them speed for a rapid, circling climb. And back to Jarvis came the horrid soul-song of the Eltaroa, a thrumming diapason of psychic music in chanting rhythm, a sad farewell to something beyond the knowledge of either.
The Eeima swirled around Jarvis and Thork in an ecstatic kaleidoscope of color. To Thork they were silent, save for the flutter of their wings, but Jarvis inwardly perceived their multitude of piping voices borne on the glittering, heart-wrenching melody of their soul-song.
“Welcome, Jeff Jarvis! To the Great Mother shall we take him? Let us take him to the Great Mother—to Eluola, Layer of Eggs, Queen of the Eeima!”
Jarvis bade Thork wait for him on the ledge and went with the fluttering creatures through rock passages lighted by a greenish, pallid glow from fungus growing on floor and walls. In a subterranean chamber, rock-ceiled higher than a cathedral, he walked carefully to avoid stepping on the grub-like things that crawled everywhere, munching on the fungus. The Mothering Pits where the race of the Eeima was born! Streams of Eeima flitted through the chamber on gauzy butterfly wings, emerging from and entering numerous tunnels that opened off the main concourse. At one such opening, they bade Jarvis stay. Here a double stream fluttered busily, the ones going in empty-handed, each coming out bearing in its hands a tiny egg bound for the incubators.
Then a singing sensation like purling water caressed his mind.
“Welcome, Jeff Jarvis! Eluola bids you welcome to the Mothering Pits. Enter!”
Even had she not identified herself, Jarvis would have recognized that sweet, elfin tone. Lovely Eluola! He remembered her from his first excursion upon this planet, when he had succumbed to her spell of passion and had fallen in love with her and could have killed himself that she stood but a foot in height. But there had been a madness about him then. He was clearheaded now. He entered the chamber and came to a stop, heaviness descending upon his spirit and a sadness flooding his soul at sight of what the beauty he still treasured in his mind had become. Eluola’s answering thought was reproachful.
“Am I so changed, Jeff Jarvis, that your soul recoils at sight of me?”
He made some embarrassed protest and forced himself to look into her face—so sweet once, so lovely. Now it was bloated, her body distended with the weight of eggs aching to be laid. Gone were the beautiful wings of azure and gold; this… this thing…was but a mockery of the beauty he had loved.
But there was no less sweetness in the tone of her thought. “There are other beauties than in the person, Jeff Jarvis. I see beauty in your Sonship to the Mighty, beauty in the children of the Eeima out there in the Pits. There is beauty here underground, in the light of the weed that glows, as well as under the sun. In your heart you grieve—is it for me? I think not, for I am happy. It is for yourself—for what you once were, or thought you were. You are different now, Jeff Jarvis. I feel it in you. You have a hardness and a purpose about you that was never really there before. You have sacrificed something as well as I have. Mine has gone into my race where has yours gone? Can you name the place, Jeff Jarvis?”
His soul stammered inwardly in speechless protest but she continued.
“You need not tell me. I know. I should have known it would be you, but we all thought it was Eamus Brock. I was not even sure of you, even though Brock did fail us, until just now. What you have sacrificed is youth and gladness, because you are more now than a Son of the Mighty. You are dedicated!”
Jarvis felt a great longing pour forth from his soul. “But to what am I dedicated, Eluola? Where do I go from here?”
“From here to Surandanish and the salvation of Eloraspon. Generations to come will bless you, Jeff Jarvis, for you are the answer to the prayers of the generations that have been!”
“But what must I do?”
“If I could tell you, would it make it easier to accomplish? I think not. Besides, I do not know. There is only the ancient legend, that one day a Son of the Mighty will come and free us who are descended of the Mighty of Old from the bondage of Time! It might have been Eamus Brock but it was not. And so it must be you.”
There was such a pathetic eagerness and yearning in Eluola’s thought that he could protest no more. What was it he might do that would benefit the Eeima, the Eltaroa, the Sea People of the far northern continent? If he was to be the savior of a world, he was a poor one, for he had no idea of what he must do.
He could not shake off his depressed feeling, even after he and Thork had departed from the Mothering Pits and picked their way down the forested slope in the Dingir-ki. There was an ancient city, Eluola had told him, which they would come to first, and he fe
lt its song in his being and knew from it that the name of the city was Thanranarova, the City Among the Clouds.
A fairyland of spires and towers it was, that wondrous city of old. It sat upon the ridged shoulders of two great mountains. The gorge between was overspun like cobweb with a fine, golden maze of airy walkways stretching from building to building. In the glimmer of the setting sun, that eldritch pile took on a look of unreality, like a dream city, and dreamlike were Jarvis’ thoughts as he walked those timeless streets among towering relics of the past, looming against a darkling sky.
The flawless walls of Thanranarova, unmarked by door or window, bespoke the fact that never here had set the foot of man. It was as if Thanranarova remained a shrine, a sacred place, a sanctuary given over to Time for the worship of an ancient dream.
It seemed profane to walk those holy streets, deep with the detritus of ages and lighted by a glow that had come into being before the dinosaurs populated Earth.
Night had fallen on the Kurgal and here at its edge, cold pierced to the bone. A thin wind blew from snowfields argent in the glow of twin moons. Blasphemous as it seemed to him to enter one of these silent crypts, it was necessary, or they would surely freeze.
Thork stood silent with wonder inside the building, and the splendor of it took even Jarvis’ breath away. Everything was there—rugs, furnishings, even paintings on the walls—exactly as it had been in the ages of the Mighty! Here was a living reminder of what that great race had been like! Jarvis fingered the fine stuff of fabrics and wondered who kept them up. Was it the Bronze Men? What were they to the Mighty that they had maintained this pile in living condition throughout countless millennia? They did not live here themselves. Thanranarova was deserted. Was it in Surandanish alone the Dingir dwelt?
Weariness of bones and body precluded exploration. Jarvis relaxed upon a couch but remained nervously awake until he moved to the floor, where he dropped off at once into dreamless sleep.
A thrill of danger from his Mag senses alerted him hours later. Or was it a sound he had heard? He rose to his feet like a panther. Someone had crossed this room while he slept. He was sure of it. Thork was awake, too, looking up questioningly at the Earthman.
“We had a visitor,” Jarvis said succinctly.
“Something awakened me,” returned the Tharn. “It might have been your getting up.”
Jarvis went to the wall of the central shaft and probed through. He returned to Thork’s side, whispering.
“A couple of Dingir in the shaft. They must have passed through this very room without spotting us.”
“Do you think they know we are here?”
“I think if they did,” Jarvis said grimly, “we would not be discussing it now. Come along.”
Again he probed through the shaft wall. “They are gone now.” He stepped through the wall, followed by Thork. The shaft was engineered the same as those they had seen in Drahubba—an infinity of balconies, circling upward and plunging down. Jarvis raced to the edge of the balcony and peered over, casting his senses beyond his sight. He drew back with a look of surprise.
“They descended the shaft!”
Thork peered cautiously over. “How could they do that?”
“I don’t know, but I sensed them down there. The floor of the shaft must be a mile down. They floated to it and walked off!”
He felt that he was on the verge of discovering a tremendous secret. It was obvious now that this central well in every building was a tremendous elevator shaft. The balconies ringing it in profusion were landing stages, one at each floor level. Had the Mighty ascended and descended in elevator cars? The Dingir had used nothing of the sort. Who were the Dingir? Were they, too, descendants of the Mighty—or perhaps they were the Mighty themselves? But he knew that was not so, for their minds had responded no more to the probe of his Mag senses than did the minds of ordinary men, which he could not contact at all.
Jarvis said, “I discovered how the Mighty opened their walls with the power of will. Using this shaft must be the same.”
Without hesitation, before Thork’s horrified gaze, he stepped off the balcony into the emptiness of space. He hung motionless in mid-air, smiling at the Tharn.
“That’s it!” he exclaimed. “You will yourself to hover or to go down or up and some force in the shaft takes care of the rest.”
He sank out of Thork’s sight, then rose again, far above his head, then lightly descended to the landing stage.
“I think it will work with both of us if you so much as hold my hand,” he said.
He grasped the Tharn’s hand and both of them drifted lightly up from the stage. Thork gasped, then grinned crookedly around his tusks.
“Are you game to go to the bottom?” he asked. “I, for one, should like to see where those Bronze Men went!”
They drifted downward, under perfect control of the Earthman’s mind. Jarvis let them down slowly at first while he tested his control, then let their speed of descent increase, but not too swiftly. He did not want to frighten Thork into letting go.
“I have taken some falls in my time,” Thork said with a tusked grin, “but never so slowly. I am a feather!”
“A five hundred pound feather if you let go of my hand!”
Thork sobered and forebore looking down. Jarvis was thinking. The Dingir, he remembered, had used a small, wand-like object to open the wall in Drahubba. They must have some other mechanical means of utilizing the elevator shaft. Perhaps his questions would be answered somewhere far below.
Across his thoughts cut the warning of his Mag senses, like the whir of a rattlesnake, Jarvis stiffened.
“The Dingir are ascending the shaft—and they’ve spotted us!” He looked around for a balcony to land on, but the wall of the shaft was smooth, polished and glowing. They were far below the bottom-most landing stage and the Dingir were ascending fast. Nor dared he reverse his own direction with speed for fear of losing his grip on Thork.
“We shall have to fight them,” Jarvis said grimly. “Swing around with your back to mine and hang on!”
Back to back, each gripping the other with his left hand behind him, the pair plummeted down the shaft. Their swords slithered from their scabbards.
CHAPTER XII
There was no way to avoid a conflict. The Dingir arrowed upward, directly toward them. In seconds, they had closed in, circling with drawn blades.
“Let go the Tharn, Jeff Jarvis!” called one of them. “His presence outrages these premises! It is you alone we want!”
The Dingir, unencumbered, and more familiar with the ways of the shaft, could outmaneuver Jarvis with ease. He brought himself and Thork to a hovering halt. He did not deign to reply but held his blade ready, a look of determination on his lean, craggy face. He was using the opportunity to study the Bronze Men and he saw that each maneuvered with one hand on a button-studded box attached to his belt.
“The belt-box is their vulnerable spot, Thork,” he muttered over his shoulder. “Strike for it.”
The Dingir closed in solemnly, feinting with their blades. Jarvis turned to meet one, presenting Thork to the other. The circumstances of battle were weird and exasperating. The Dingir darted in and out like angry bees and Jarvis was sure that at least a half dozen times his antagonist had stopped just short of running him through. But he had no time to wonder now why his opponent failed to press his advantages. He was too busy slashing for the box at the other’s belt.
Quickly Jarvis realized that there was a pattern to the Dingir’s blade work that repeated itself over and over, like an exercise being learned by rote. He could foresee where the menacing point would be, and he parried with ease—then suddenly slashed at the Dingir’s belt. The leather parted and fell away and the Bronze Man plummeted floor-ward without a sound or glance of reproach.
After that, it wa
s easy to best the other one. In moments, the second Dingir was plunging to join his companion at the bottom of the pit a half mile below.
The brief combat had tired Jarvis and he breathed heavily. The enemy had not been so careful in regard to Thork and the Tharn’s blood, trickling over his hand, made it difficult for them to hold together.
“I’ve been hurt worse eating with a knife,” protested the giant at Jarvis’ concern. “Just let’s get down to the bottom!”
Reaching the floor of the pit, Jarvis went over to one of the smashed enemy, repressing a repugnance for blood. But there was none to be seen. The Dingir lay scattered in pieces, but not a drop of blood had been shed. He called Thork over. The giant ticked a tusk with his thumbnail.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said in response to Jarvis’ question. “There is nothing on Eloraspon that does not bleed something, whether it be red or green. These things are like shellfish!”
Jarvis felt a shiver traverse his spine and his brain teemed with all he had heard concerning the Dingir. Who were they? What were they? What was their purpose?
“Surely you have guessed the truth by now, Jeff Jarvis!” said a quiet voice behind them.
Jarvis whirled. A Bronze Man stood alone ten paces away, the twin of the one he had slain with his axe in Drahubba. His hand drifted to his sword.
“Please,” said the Bronze Man with uplifted hand and a saturnine expression that passed for a smile. “Not again! Yes, I am the one you slew before the eyes of the Lugal of Kullab. When I appeared whole before him again, he lost his ideas of rebellion. He knows now that the Dingir are immortal…and so do you, Jeff Jarvis!”
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 76
