Eric John Stark

by Leigh Brackett

  To Stark’s ears, it seemed as though there was a thin edge of brittleness in her mockery.

  “You’re a Rama,” he said flatly.

  “But the Ramas were long ago,” she said. “If I were one, I would be very old. How old?”

  He disregarded the derision in her tone. He said, “That’s what I want to know, Berild. How old? A thousand years…ten thousand? How many bodies have you inhabited?”

  Instantly, the moment that he put the thought into spoken words, it seemed immeasurably more horrible to Stark than it had before. Something of that horror must have shown in his face, for he saw a dangerous flash in her eyes.

  “What you say is madness,” she said. “Who has put this thought into your head?”

  “A woman walking in the moonlight,” he muttered. “A woman who threaded her way through walls and doorways that hadn’t been there for centuries, and that she could only know because she remembered them.”

  Berild’s tension seemed to relax a little. She said impatiently, “So that’s it! In the Belly of Stones—you were awake, when I hunted for and found the well.”

  Then she laughed. “Why didn’t you say so, why did you keep it to yourself? I could have told you that it was the secret my father gave me—to walk this way, so many steps, then that way, and so on, until I was where the well was buried. And you thought…” Her laughter came again.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. “You were not measuring your steps—you were groping, remembering.” The shadows were deepening. He took a step toward her, peering into her face. “You’ve been laughing at Kynon all along, haven’t you? The real Rama, laughing at the pretended one?”

  Berild said, in a slow voice that had now no laughter in it at all, “Forget this thing, Eric John Stark. It is madness, and it could be your death.”

  “How many of you are there, Berild? How many have come down through the ages, secretly stealing the bodies of others, laughing at the world that thought they were all gone long ago?”

  In a whisper that was full of infinite menace, Berild said, “I tell you again, forget this.”

  “There would have to be at least two of you, so one could use the Sending On of Mind on the other,” Stark said, and nodded. “And who but the jealous one, the one who said, ‘There is nothing for you in this creature of an hour.’ It is he, isn’t it? Delgaun?”

  In a voice sibilant with passion, Berild said, “I will hear no more of your delusions. Don’t come with me—l want no madman for an escort.”

  And she turned swiftly and left him, almost running down the stair that was in heavy darkness now, and so out of the building.

  Stark stood, his mind awhirl. She had been warm and living, her arms around him that night, but inside the Shunni woman’s vibrant body—a Rama woman of long ago?

  He turned and looked back out the open window. The moons were rising, and their shifting light slanted across the vague desert. Down beneath the cliffs of Sinharat, the far-flung torches of the Drylanders’ camp pricked the gloom, and voices came up on the piping wind, and the squeal of beasts, and the sounds of a sane and normal world. He told himself that he was deluded, obsessed. But he knew that it was not so.

  Looking down there, another thought came slowly to Stark. If it was true, if Berild and Delgaun were Ramas of old, then this barbarian campaign to loot and conquer half of Mars was steered by intelligence as old and evil as Sinharat. Yet Kynon would be the conqueror, the ruler, and he was no Rama. Was that why Berild had become Kynon’s woman, to influence his every move, plotting all the while with Delgaun?

  He turned abruptly around, away from the window. The great, ancient hall was now a well of utter darkness, and the wind that moaned and whispered through it seemed cold with the cold of dead ages. A detestation of the place seized Stark, and he went down the stairs and out of the building, feeling all the way as though eyes watched him in the blackness.

  As he walked through the silent, moon-splashed streets of Sinharat, Stark tried to think. He had to stop Kynon’s plan of conquest—was more bound to do so, if age-old evil was behind it. Should he tell Kynon and the others about Delgaun and Berild?

  They would laugh at him. He had no proof to show them, none in the world.

  But there must be some way. He….

  Stark suddenly stopped walking, all his nerves alert. He listened, turning his head this way and that.

  There was no sound at all, but the wind and its whispering. Nothing moved in the shadow-blotched, moonlit streets of the dead city.

  But Stark was not reassured. His senses had spoken and had told him that someone, something, was stalking him.

  He moved on, after a moment, heading toward the distant glow of light that came from Kynon’s palace in the great square. But after a dozen steps he suddenly froze again.

  This time, he heard it. A scutter and scuffle of feet, back down the narrow street in the shadows.

  Stark put his hand on his gun and his voice rang down the street. “Come out!”

  A stooping figure came out of the shadow, toward him. For a moment he did not realize that this was the tall barbarian chieftain, Freka, for the man was hunched, bent forward.

  Then as Freka came across a bar of moonlight, Stark saw his face, slack-jawed, grinning, inexpressibly repulsive. He knew then. Freka, the addict of an ancient vice, was a long way into Shanga, and in his animalism he cared not in the least about the gun facing him. He cared only about his brute hatred.

  “Go back,” Stark said softly. “I’ll kill you.”

  But he knew that he could not, that the threat was an empty one. If he killed Freka he would incur the death penalty himself.

  With a flash of insight, Stark realized the neatness of the trap. Delgaun had set it, without a doubt—no one else would have brought Freka the Shanga lamp. Whoever of the two killed the other, must himself die by Kynon’s decree. Delgaun could not lose.

  Stark suddenly took to his heels and ran. He ran in the direction of the distant torch-glow. If he could get that far, so that Kynon and the others saw Freka pursuing and attacking him….

  He did not get that far. Freka, half an animal, could run as fast as he, and faster. With an animal-like sound, he caught up to Stark, and his long arms went around Stark’s head, and his teeth sank into the back of Stark’s neck.

  Stark, feeling himself going down, dived to the pavement to help the movement. The side of his head rang on the time-worn cobbles and he felt half-stunned but he kept on rolling in a somersault that shook off the thing on his back. It shook the gun out of his hand, also. He scrambled to his feet.

  Freka, mewing, reached from the street where he had fallen and his long arms grabbed Stark’s knees and pulled him down again.

  A kind of horror possessed Stark. He had been called a half-beast, in his lifetime, but the thing he fought was all beast.

  The teeth were trying for his throat. Stark’s hand grabbed the long hair of the barbarian and snapped his head back. Still holding Freka’s hair, he banged his head onto the cobbles.

  Freka still clawed and mewed, and a shivering conviction that this creature was invulnerable came to Stark. He heard vague voices yelling somewhere. ln a kind of hysterical fury he banged Freka’s head again and again on the cobblestones.

  The voice of Kynon roared close by, and Stark was hauled to his feet and blinked his eyes at the tossing torches.

  “He’s murdered Freka—give me a spear!” screamed a Shunni warrior.

  Stark saw other tribesmen, all with fury on their faces, and saw also the horrified face of Walsh, and then Kynon’s head blotted out the others as Kynon came close to him.

  “I warned you, Stark!”

  “The man was in Shanga, he was an animal set upon me!” gasped Stark. “And I know who set him! Delgaun…”

  The flat of Kynon’s great hand cracked across his mouth and he
reeled backward. Hard hands held him when he would have struck back.

  “Blood for Freka’s blood!” the Shunni warrior was screeching to Kynon. “Unless all the men of Shun see this man die, we do not march with you!”

  “You will see it,” Kynon said. “All will see it. And yours, brother, will be the weapon that wipes out Freka’s blood.”

  Stark, raging, roared to Kynon. “You idiot! Pretending to the Rama knowledge, while all the time you’re a puppet dangled by…”

  A spear-shaft hit Stark on the back of his head and he fell into blackness.

  He came to in a place of cold, dry stone. There was an iron collar around his neck, and a five-foot chain ran from it to a ring in the wall. The cell was small. A gate of iron bars closed the single entrance. Beyond was a well, with other cell doors around it, and above were thick stone gratings. He guessed that the place was built beneath some inner court of the palace.

  A torch lit the room. There were no other prisoners. But there was a guard, a thick-shouldered barbarian who sat on what looked like an execution block in the center of the well, with a sword and a jug of wine. It was the Shunni warrior who had screamed for a spear, and he looked at Stark, and smiled.

  “You should not have slept so long, outlander.” he said. “For you have only three hours till morning. And when morning comes, you will die on the great stair, where all the men of Shun can see.”

  He drank from the jug, and set it down, and smiled again.

  “Death comes easily if the thrust is sure,” he said. “But if the thrust wobbles, death is very slow, and very painful. I think yours will be slow.”

  Stark did not answer. He waited, with the same unhuman patience he had shown when he waited for his captors under the tor.

  The man on the block laughed, and raised the jug again.

  Stark’s eyes narrowed slightly. He saw the movement of a shadow, in the darkness beyond the drinking man.

  He thought he knew who it was that came to this place so stealthily. Delgaun would make very sure that he never stood upon the great stair, to shout mad accusations to the Drylanders before he died.

  He thought that he had not even three hours, now.

  XIII

  Then, as though she had suddenly taken shape there, Fianna stood in the shadows behind the Shunni. Her young face was very pale, but her hand did not tremble as she brought up the little gun she held.

  The gun coughed, and the Shunni warrior pitched forward and lay without moving, while his sword rattled along the stone floor. The jug, upset, sent out bright crawling loopings of red.

  Fianna stepped over the body and unlocked the iron collar with a key she took from her girdle.

  Stark took her slender shoulders between his hands. “Listen, Fianna. It could be your death if it becomes known that you have done this.”

  She gave him a deep, strange look. In the dusky light, her proud young face was unfamiliar, touched with something fey and sad. He wished that he could see her eyes more clearly.

  “I think that the death of many things is close,” she said. “Tonight is a black and evil time in Sinharat, which has known so much of darkness and evil. And I risked freeing you because I think you are my only hope—perhaps the only hope of Mars.”

  He drew her to him, and kissed her, and stroked her dark head. “You’re too young to concern yourself with the destiny of worlds.”

  He felt her tremble. “The youth of the body is only illusion, when the mind is old.”

  “And is yours old, Fianna?”

  “Old,” she whispered. “As old as Berild’s.”

  The words vibrated away and were lost in silence. But to Stark, it seemed that suddenly a world-deep abyss had been opened between him and this girl who looked up at him from dark, unguessable eyes.

  “You too?” he whispered.

  “I, too,” she said, “am of the Twice-Born, the Ramas. Even as those whom you know as Berild and Delgaun.”

  He could not quite take it in. He stared at her in silence, and then he asked, “But, then, how many of you are there?”

  Fianna shook her head. “I am not sure, but I think only we three are left. And now you know why I follow Berild and serve her. She and Delgaun have the secret of the Sending On of Minds, the true secret. They know where the Crowns of the Ramas are hidden, somewhere here in Sinharat, and I do not know that. They give me life, from one lifetime to another, so that I have lived only at their caprice. And that has been a long, long time.”

  Without realizing it, Stark had let his hands fall from her and had stepped back. Fianna looked up at him and said, not resentfully but sadly, “I do not blame you. I know what we have been. The ever-young, the ever-living immortals, the stealers of others’ lives. It was wrong, wrong, the thing that began here in Sinharat long ago. I have known it was wrong, through all these changing lives. But I will tell you this—most evilly powerful of all addictions is the addiction to life.”

  Stark stepped forward and again he took her head between his hands. “Whatever you are and have been, Fianna, I think you are my friend.”

  “Your friend, and the friend of all the Dryland tribesmen from whom I—the real I—sprang. They must not march, and drown Mars and themselves in blood. Will you help me?”

  “It is why I am here,” he said.

  “Then come with me,” said Fianna. She stirred the Shunni’s body with her foot. “Bring that. It must not be found here.”

  Stark heaved the body over his shoulder and followed the girl through a twisting maze of corridors, some pitch dark, some feebly lighted by the moons. Fianna moved as surely as though she were in the main square at high noon. There was the silence of death in these cold tunnels, and the dry, faint smell of eternity.

  At length Fianna whispered, “Here. Be careful.”

  She put out a hand to guide him but Stark’s eyes were like a cat’s in the dark. He made out a space where the rock with which the ancient builders had faced these subterranean ways gave place to the original coral.

  Ragged black mouths opened in the coral, entrances to some unguessed catacombs beneath. Stark consigned the body to the nearest pit, but he kept the sword with which the Shunni warrior had planned to kill him.

  “You will need it,” Fianna said.

  Stark listened to the distant sliding echoes from the pit, and shivered. He had so nearly finished there himself. He was glad to follow Fianna away from that place of darkness and silent death.

  He stopped her in a place where a bar of moonlight came splashing through a great crack in the tunnel roof. He said, “You want my help in preventing the march and the conquest. But only Kynon’s death can prevent that.”

  “Kynon stands in danger of worse than death, tonight,” she said. “We go to save him.”

  Stark roughly caught her wrist. “Save Kynon? But he planned this bloody thing…he is the man who will lead it!”

  Fianna shook her head. “He will not lead it, though he will seem to do so. And he did not plan it, for that was the doing of Delgaun and Berild, who put the plan into Kynon’s head.”

  “There are lies everywhere,” said Stark. “I am tangled up in lies. Tell me the truth.”

  “The truth of Delgaun and Berild is this,” said Fianna. “They are tired of wandering secretly through the ages of the world. Even Berild has wearied of living for pleasure only, and longs for power. They, the Twice-Born, should rule the short-lived peoples. So they conceived their plan for empire.

  “Berild it was who subtly put into Kynon’s mind the idea of using the legended secret of the Sending On of Minds, the lure of immortality, as a bait to lure the fighting-men, to rally Drylanders and Low-Canallers together. Kynon, always ambitious and eager for power, seized upon that. He prepared the hoax, and with the promise of the Crowns, he has gathered the men. It was Delgaun who suggested bringing in the outlanders, and their weap
ons. More outland vultures will come, drawn by the smell of loot, if the first conquest succeeds. And Delgaun and Berild will use them to keep the Martian tribes in check, and to prop their evil rule.”

  Stark thought about Knighton and Walsh of Terra, Themis and Arrod of Mercury and Callisto Colony. He thought of others like them, and what they would do with their talons hooked in the heart of Mars. He thought of Delgaun’s yellow eyes.

  He said, “You speak of Delgaun and Berild ruling—but would they dare get rid of Kynon, whom all look on as leader?”

  Fianna looked at him pityingly. “You don’t understand. They will not get rid of Kynon physically. It will still be Kynon whom the tribesmen hail and follow as their leader.”

  Still Stark could not comprehend. “What do you mean? Kynon may have been influenced, but he’s not one to dance to anyone’s bidding.”

  “I said, they will not get rid of Kynon physically,” Fianna repeated.

  Stark began to understand, and a cold sickness rose in him. “You mean—the Sending On of Minds?”

  The sickness in Stark became a shuddering repulsion, as from a nightmare. He suddenly felt a violent hatred for this ancient, evil world and of the black things that came up from its past.

  “Do you understand now why I need your help?” Fianna was saying. “This final wickedness must not happen. If Delgaun takes the body of Kynon, he’ll use it to lead the Drylanders to bloody ruin. You have to help me prevent that.”

  Stark looked at her, and asked thickly, “Where?”

  “Berild’s quarters. Kynon is there now, in the trap. Delgaun has gone to bring the Crowns of the Ramas from their hiding-place.”

  Stark gripped the Shunni sword and said, “Take me there the shortest way.”

  “Not quite the shortest, but the safest. Come!”

  She led him through labyrinthine underground ways, a dark maze that twisted and turned and seemed to go on forever. And he saw things on the way that he had not dreamed existed under the dead pile of Sinharat.

  One great cavern was lighted vaguely by a globe of cold green fire that stood upon a pedestal in a corner. It cast a livid glow over masses of piled and jumbled and incomprehensible objects. There were massive silvery wheels and targes, weird reticulations of dusty metal rods, brazen beaks that had once adorned the prows of ships, in the old days when Sinharat was an island rising arrogantly from the rolling ocean.