Author: D. M. Ritzlin; Robert E. Howard; Clark Ashton Smith; A. Merritt; Manly Wade Wellman; Lin Carter; Glenn Rahman; Richard L. Tierney; Bryce Walton
Date: 2020-02-28 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Anthologies; Science Fiction
Description: If you constantly crave tales of swashbuckling heroics and fiendish wizardry, Renegade Swords is for you! Eight fantastic tales have been selected for this anthology, each of them obscure or overlooked in some way. You don’t have to explore darksome crypts to discover incredible ancient treasures—you can find them in Renegade Swords! Stories included: “The House of Arabu” by Robert E. Howard “Necromancy in Naat” (unabridged version) by Clark Ashton Smith “The Woman of the Wood” (previously unpublished version) by A. Merritt “The Slaughter of the Gods” by Manly Wade Wellman “People of the Drago
Publisher: DMR Books

Renegade Swords

Edited by D.M. Ritzlin

Cover art by Brian LeBlanc

Renegade Swords copyright © D.M. Ritzlin 2020

All rights reserved

Cover layout by Michael Greylord

“The House of Arabu,” copyright © Robert E. Howard Properties, LLC, originally appeared in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 18 (1952).

“Necromancy in Naat,” copyright © CASiana Enterprises, The Literary Estate of Clark Ashton Smith, originally appeared in the July 1936 issue of Weird Tales. The version presented here originally appeared in The Last Hieroglyph: Volume Five of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith.

“The Woman of the Wood” originally appeared in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Previously unpublished material © copyright 2020 by Adventure Pulp, LLC. All rights reserved. Printed with permission of Adventure Pulp, LLC.

“The Slaughter of the Gods,” copyright © David Drake, originally appeared in Heroic Visions II (1986).

“People of the Dragon,” copyright © Robert M. Price, originally appeared in the February 1976 issue of Fantastic.

“The Pillars of Hell,” copyright © Robert M. Price, originally appeared in the December 1977 issue of Fantastic.

“The Rune-Sword of Jotunheim,” copyright © Glenn Rahman and Richard L. Tierney, originally appeared in the March 1985 issue of Fantasy Book.

“Princess of Chaos,” originally appeared in the Spring 1947 issue of Planet Stories.

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Introduction

For some people, sword-and-sorcery is just a source of casual amusement. For others, it’s something that strikes a chord within us. Much like Stormbringer hungers for souls, we constantly crave tales of swashbuckling heroics and fiendish wizardry. The adventures of Conan, Elric and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser aren’t enough… we want more!

If you count yourself in that category, Renegade Swords is for you. Eight fantastic tales have been selected for this anthology, each of them obscure or overlooked in some way. Half have not appeared in print since their original publication decades ago. Others are rarely-seen versions of stories by grand masters of fantasy. And one I included simply because it’s a damn good story people don’t talk about enough. Many of these “renegades” are one-offs without any recurring characters, which is a likely explanation for their low profile among fantasy fans.

Much like a stalwart swordsman seeking treasure in darksome crypts, I explored the annals of sword-and-sorcery to bring you some of the best unknown tales in the genre. I ran into quite a few dead ends while trying to pull this off, but thankfully no death traps. I couldn’t have done it alone, however, and I’d like to thank Morgan Holmes for his advice and suggestions. I doubt there’s anyone alive more knowledgeable than Morgan when it comes to S&S.

—D.M. Ritzlin

As Robert E. Howard is the originator of the sword and sorcery genre and its most popular author, it’s odd that one of his finest S&S tales isn’t better known. “The House of Arabu” was never published during Howard’s lifetime. It first appeared in print in 1952 in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 18, bizarrely and needlessly renamed “The Witch from Hell’s Kitchen.” This tale, set in ancient Mesopotamia, is the only one Howard wrote about Pyrrhas the Argive.

The House of Arabu

By Robert E. Howard

To the house whence no one issues,

To the road from whence there is no return,

To the house whose inhabitants are deprived of light,

The place where dust is their nourishment, their food clay,

They have no light, dwelling in dense darkness,

And they are clothed, like birds, in a garment of feathers,

Where, over gate and bolt, dust is scattered.

—Babylonian legend of Ishtar

“Has he seen a night-spirit, is he listening to the whispers of them who dwell in darkness?”

Strange words to be murmured in the feast-hall of Naram-ninub, amid the strain of lutes, the patter of fountains, and the tinkle of women’s laughter. The great hall attested the wealth of its owner, not only by its vast dimensions, but by the richness of its adornment. The glazed surface of the walls offered a bewildering variegation of colors—blue, red, and orange enamels set off by squares of hammered gold. The air was heavy with incense, mingled with the fragrance of exotic blossoms from the gardens without. The feasters, silk-robed nobles of Nippur, lounged on satin cushions, drinking wine poured from alabaster vessels, and caressing the painted and bejeweled playthings which Naram-ninub’s wealth had brought from all parts of the East.

There were scores of these; their white limbs twinkled as they danced, or shone like ivory among the cushions where they sprawled. A jeweled tiara caught in a burnished mass of night-black hair, a gem-crusted armlet of massive gold, earrings of carven jade—these were their only garments. Their fragrance was dizzying. Shameless in their dancing, feasting and lovemaking, their light laughter filled the hall in waves of silvery sound.

On a broad cushion-piled dais reclined the giver of the feast, sensuously stroking the glossy locks of a lithe Arabian who had stretched herself on her supple belly beside him. His appearance of sybaritic languor was belied by the vital sparkling of his dark eyes as he surveyed his guests. He was thick-bodied, with a short blue-black beard: a Semite—one of the many drifting yearly into Shumir.

With one exception his guests were Shumirians, shaven of chin and head. Their bodies were padded with rich living, their features smooth and placid. The exception among them stood out in startling contrast. Taller than they, he had none of their soft sleekness. He was made with the economy of relentless Nature. His physique was of the primitive, not of the civilized athlete. He was an incarnation of Power, raw, hard, wolfish—in the sinewy limbs, the corded neck, the great arch of the breast, the broad hard shoulders. Beneath his tousled golden mane his eyes were like blue ice. His strongly chiselled features reflected the wildness his frame suggested. There was about him nothing of the measured leisure of the other guests, but a ruthless directness in his every action. Whereas they sipped, he drank in great gulps. They nibbled at tid-bits, but he seized whole joints in his fingers and tore at the meat with his teeth. Yet his brow was shadowed, his expression moody. His magnetic eyes were introspective. Wherefore Prince Ibi-Engur lisped again in Naram-ninub’s ear: “Has the lord Pyrrhas heard the whispering of night-things?”

Naram-ninub eyed his friend in some worriment. “Come, my lord,” said he, “you are strangely distraught. Has any here done aught to offend you?”

Pyrrhas roused himself as from some gloomy meditation and shook his head. “Not so, friend; if I seem distracted it is because of a shadow that lies over my own mind.” His accent was barbarous, but the timbre of his voice was strong and vibrant.

The others glanced at him in interest. He was Eannatum’s general of mercenaries, an Argive whose saga was epic.

“Is it a woman, lord Pyrrhas?” asked Prince Enakalli with a laugh. Pyrrhas fixed him with his gloomy stare and the prince felt a cold wind blowing on his spine.

“Aye, a woman,” muttered the Argive. “One who haunts my dreams and floats like a shadow between me and the moon. In my dreams I feel her teeth in my neck, and I wake to hear the flutter of wings and the cry of an owl.”

A silence fell over the group on the dais. Only in the great hall below rose the babble of mirth and conversation and the tinkling of lutes, and a girl laughed loudly, with a curious note in her laughter.

“A curse is upon him,” whispered the Arabian girl. Naram-ninub silenced her with a gesture, and was about to speak, when Ibi-Engur lisped: “My lord Pyrrhas, this has an uncanny touch, like the vengeance of a god. Have you done aught to offend a deity?”

Naram-ninub bit his lip in annoyance. It was well known that in his recent campaign against Erech, the Argive had cut down a priest of Anu in his shrine. Pyrrhas’ maned head jerked up and he glared at Ibi-Engur as if undecided whether to attribute the remark to malice or lack of tact. The prince began to pale, but the slim Arabian rose to her knees and caught at Naram-ninub’s arm.

“Look at Belibna!” She pointed at the girl who had laughed so wildly an instant before.

Her companions were drawing away from this girl apprehensively. She did not speak to them, or seem to see them. She tossed her jeweled head and her shrill laughter rang through the feast-hall. Her slim body swayed back and forth, her bracelets clanged and jangled together as she tossed up her white arms. Her dark eyes gleamed with a wild light, her red lips curled with her unnatural mirth.

“The hand of Arabu is on her,” whispered the Arabian uneasily.

“Belibna!” Naram-ninub called sharply. His only answer was another burst of wild laughter, and the girl cried stridently: “To the home of darkness, the dwelling of Irhalla; to the road whence there is no return; oh, Apsu, bitter is thy wine!” Her voice snapped in a terrible scream, and bounding from among her cushions, she leaped up on the dais, a dagger in her hand. Courtesans and guests shrieked and scrambled madly out of her way. But it was at Pyrrhas the girl rushed, her beautiful face a mask of fury. The Argive caught her wrist, and the abnormal strength of madness was futile against the barbarian’s iron thews. He tossed her from him, and down the cushion-strewn steps, where she lay in a crumpled heap, her own dagger driven into her heart as she fell.

The hum of conversation, which had ceased suddenly, rose again as the guards dragged away the body, and the painted dancers came back to their cushions. But Pyrrhas turned and taking his wide crimson cloak from a slave, threw it about his shoulders.

“Stay, my friend,” urged Naram-ninub. “Let us not allow this small matter to interfere with our revels. Madness is common enough.”

Pyrrhas shook his head irritably. “Nay, I’m weary of swilling and gorging. I’ll go to my own house.”

“Then the feasting is at an end,” declared the Semite, rising and clapping his hands. “My own litter shall bear you to the house the king has given you—nay, I forgot you scorn to ride on other men’s backs. Then I shall myself escort you home. My lords, will you accompany us?”

“Walk, like common men?” stuttered Prince Ur-ilishu. “By Enlil, I will come. It will be a rare novelty. But I must have a slave to bear the train of my robe, lest it trail in the dust of the street. Come, friends, let us see the lord Pyrrhas home, by Ishtar!”

“A strange man,” Ibi-Engur lisped to Libit-ishbi, as the party emerged from the spacious palace, and descended the broad tiled stair, guarded by bronze lions. “He walks the streets, unattended, like a very tradesman.”

“Be careful,” murmured the other. “He is quick to anger, and he stands high in the favor of Eannatum.”

“Yet even the favored of the king had best beware of offending the god Anu,” replied Ibi-Engur in an equally guarded voice.

The party were proceeding leisurely down the broad white street, gaped at by the common folk who bobbed their shaven heads as they passed. The sun was not long up, but the people of Nippur were well astir. There was much coming and going between the booths where the merchants spread their wares: a shifting panorama, woven of craftsmen, tradesmen, slaves, harlots, and soldiers in copper helmets. There went a merchant from his warehouse, a staid figure in sober woolen robe and white mantle; there hurried a slave in a linen tunic; there minced a painted hoyden whose short slit skirt displayed her sleek flank at every step. Above them the blue of the sky whitened with the heat of the mounting sun. The glazed surfaces of the buildings shimmered. They were flat-roofed, some of them three or four stories high. Nippur was a city of sun-dried brick, but its facings of enamel made it a riot of bright color.

Somewhere a priest was chanting: “Oh, Babbar, righteousness lifteth up to thee its head—”

Pyrrhas swore under his breath. They were passing the great temple of Enlil, towering up three hundred feet in the changeless blue sky.

“The towers stand against the sky like part of it,” he swore, raking back a damp lock from his forehead. “The sky is enameled, and this is a world made by man.”

“Nay, friend,” demurred Naram-ninub. “Ea built the world from the body of Tiamat.”

“I say men built Shumir!” exclaimed Pyrrhas, the wine he had drunk shadowing his eyes. “A flat land—a very banquet-board of a land—with rivers and cities painted upon it, and a sky of blue enamel over it. By Ymir, I was born in a land the gods built! There are great blue mountains, with valleys lying like long shadows between, and snow peaks glittering in the sun. Rivers rush foaming down the cliffs in everlasting tumult, and the broad leaves of the trees shake in the strong winds.”

“I, too, was born in a broad land, Pyrrhas,” answered the Semite. “By night the desert lies white and awful beneath the moon, and by day it stretches in brown infinity beneath the sun. But it is in the swarming cities of men, these hives of bronze and gold and enamel and humanity, that wealth and glory lie.”

Pyrrhas was about to speak, when a loud wailing attracted his attention. Down the street came a procession, bearing a carven and painted litter on which lay a figure hidden by flowers. Behind came a train of young women, their scanty garments rent, their black hair flowing wildly. They beat their naked bosoms and cried: “Ailanu! Thammuz is dead!” The throng in the street took up the shout. The litter passed, swaying on the shoulders of the bearers; among the high-piled flowers shone the painted eyes of a carven image. The cry of the worshippers echoed down the street, dwindling in the distance.

Pyrrhas shrugged his mighty shoulders. “Soon they will be leaping and dancing and shouting, ‘Adonis is living!’, and the wenches who howl so bitterly now will give themselves to men in the streets for exultation. How many gods are there, in the devil’s name?”

Naram-ninub pointed to the great zikkurat of Enlil, brooding over all like the brutish dream of a mad god.

“See ye the seven tiers: the lower black, the next of red enamel, the third blue, the fourth orange, the fifth yellow, while the sixth is faced with silver, and the seventh with pure gold which flames in the sunlight? Each stage in the temple symbolizes a deity: the sun, the moon, and the five planets Enlil and his tribe have set in the skies for their emblems. But Enlil is greater than all, and Nippur is his favored city.”

“Greater than Anu?” muttered Pyrrhas, remembering a flaming shrine and a dying priest that gasped an awful threat.

“Which is the greatest leg of a tripod?” parried Naram-ninub.

Pyrrhas opened his mouth to reply, then recoiled with a curse, his sword flashing out. Under his very feet a serpent reared up, its forked tongue flickering like a jet of red lightning.

“What is it, friend?” Naram-ninub and the princes stared at him in surprise.

“What is it?” He swore. “Don’t you see that snake under your very feet? Stand aside and give me a clean swing at it—”

His voice broke off and his eyes clouded with doubt.

“It’s gone,” he muttered.

“I saw nothing,” said Naram-ninub, and the others shook their heads, exchanging wondering glances.

The Argive passed his hand across his eyes, shaking his head.

“Perhaps it’s the wine,” he muttered. “Yet there was an adder, I swear by the heart of Ymir. I am accursed.”

The others drew away from him, glancing at him strangely.

There had always been a restlessness in the soul of Pyrrhas the Argive, to haunt his dreams and drive him out on his long wanderings. It had brought him from the blue mountains of his race, southward into the fertile valleys and sea-fringing plains where rose the huts of the Mycenaeans; thence into the isle of Crete, where, in a rude town of rough stone and wood, a swart fishing people bartered with the ships of Egypt; by those ships he had gone into Egypt, where men toiled beneath the lash to rear the first pyramids, and where, in the ranks of the white-skinned mercenaries, the Shardana, he learned the arts of war. But his wanderlust drove him again across the sea, to a mud-walled trading village on the coast of Asia, called Troy, whence he drifted southward into the pillage and carnage of Palestine where the original dwellers in the land were trampled under by the barbaric Canaanites out of the East. So by devious ways he came at last to the plains of Shumir, where city fought city, and the priests of a myriad rival gods intrigued and plotted, as they had done since the dawn of Time, and as they did for centuries after, until the rise of an obscure frontier town called Babylon exalted its city-god Merodach above all others as Bel-Marduk, the conqueror of Tiamat.

The bare outline of the saga of Pyrrhas the Argive is weak and paltry; it can not catch the echoes of the thundering pageantry that rioted through that saga: the feasts, revels, wars, the crash and splintering of ships and the onset of chariots. Let it suffice to say that the honor of kings was given to the Argive, and that in all Mesopotamia there was no man so feared as this golden-haired barbarian whose war-skill and fury broke the hosts of Erech on the field, and the yoke of Erech from the neck of Nippur.

From a mountain hut to a palace of jade and ivory Pyrrhas’ saga had led him. Yet the dim half-animal dreams that had filled his slumber when he lay as a youth on a heap of wolfskins in his shaggy-headed father’s hut were nothing so strange and monstrous as the dreams that haunted him on the silken couch in the palace of turquoise-towered Nippur.

It was from these dreams that Pyrrhas woke suddenly. No lamp burned in his chamber and the moon was not yet up, but the starlight filtered dimly through the casement. And in this radiance something moved and took form. There was the vague outline of a lithe form, the gleam of an eye. Suddenly the night beat down oppressively hot and still. Pyrrhas heard the pound of his own blood through his veins. Why fear a woman lurking in his chamber? But no woman’s form was ever so pantherishly supple; no woman’s eyes ever burned so in the darkness. With a gasping snarl he leaped from his couch and his sword hissed as it cut the air—but only the air. Something like a mocking laugh reached his ears, but the figure was gone.

A girl entered hastily with a lamp.

“Amytis! I saw her! It was no dream, this time! She laughed at me from the window!”

Amytis trembled as she set the lamp on an ebony table. She was a sleek sensuous creature, with long-lashed, heavy-lidded eyes, passionate lips, and a wealth of lustrous black curly locks. As she stood there naked the voluptuousness of her figure would have stirred the most jaded debauchee. A gift from Eannatum, she hated Pyrrhas, and he knew it, but found an angry gratification in possessing her. But now her hatred was drowned in her terror.

“It was Lilitu!” she stammered. “She has marked you for her own! She is the night-spirit, the mate of Ardat Lili. They dwell in the House of Arabu. You are accursed!”

His hands were bathed with sweat; molten ice seemed to be flowing sluggishly through his veins instead of blood.

“Where shall I turn? The priests hate and fear me since I burned Anu’s temple.”

“There is a man who is not bound by the priest-craft, and could aid you,” she blurted out.

“Then tell me!” He was galvanized, trembling with eager impatience. “His name, girl! His name!”

But at this sign of weakness, her malice returned; she had blurted out what was in her mind, in her fear of the supernatural. Now all the vindictiveness in her was awake again.

“I have forgotten,” she answered insolently, her eyes glowing with spite.

“Slut!” Gasping with the violence of his rage, he dragged her across a couch by her thick locks. Seizing his sword-belt he wielded it with savage force, holding down the writhing naked body with his free hand. Each stroke was like the impact of a drover’s whip. So mazed with fury was he, and she so incoherent with pain, that he did not at first realize that she was shrieking a name at the top of her voice. Recognizing this at last, he cast her from him, to fall in a whimpering heap on the mat-covered floor. Trembling and panting from the excess of his passion, he threw aside the belt and glared down at her.

“Gimil-ishbi, eh?’’

“Yes!” she sobbed, grovelling on the floor in her excruciating anguish. “He was a priest of Enlil, until he turned diabolist and was banished. Ahhh, I faint! I swoon! Mercy! Mercy!”

“And where shall I find him?” he demanded.

“In the mound of Enzu, to the west of the city. Oh, Enlil, I am flayed alive! I perish!”

Turning from her, Pyrrhas hastily donned his garments and armor, without calling for a slave to aid him. He went forth, passed among his sleeping servitors without waking them, and secured the best of his horses. There were perhaps a score in all in Nippur, the property of the king and his wealthier nobles; they had been bought from the wild tribes far to the north, beyond the Caspian, whom in a later age men called Scythians. Each steed represented an actual fortune. Pyrrhas bridled the great beast and strapped on the saddle—merely a cloth pad, ornamented and richly worked.

The soldiers at the gate gaped at him as he drew rein and ordered them to open the great bronze portals, but they bowed and obeyed without question. His crimson cloak flowed behind him as he galloped through the gate.

“Enlil!” swore a soldier. “The Argive has drunk overmuch of Naram-ninub’s Egyptian wine.”

“Nay,” responded another; “did you see his face that it was pale, and his hand that it shook on the rein? The gods have touched him, and perchance he rides to the House of Arabu.”

Shaking their helmeted heads dubiously, they listened to the hoof-beats dwindling away in the west.

North, south and east from Nippur, farm-huts, villages and palm groves clustered the plain, threaded by the networks of canals that connected the rivers. But westward the land lay bare and silent to the Euphrates, only charred expanses telling of former villages. A few moons ago raiders had swept out of the desert in a wave that engulfed the vineyards and huts and burst against the staggering walls of Nippur. Pyrrhas remembered the fighting along the walls, and the fighting on the plain, when his sally at the head of his phalanxes had broken the besiegers and driven them in headlong flight back across the Great River. Then the plain had been red with blood and black with smoke. Now it was already veiled in green again as the grain put forth its shoots, uncared for by man. But the toilers who had planted that grain had gone into the land of dusk and darkness.

Already the overflow from more populous districts was seeping back into the man-made waste. A few months, a year at most, and the land would again present the typical aspect of the Mesopotamian plain, swarming with villages, checkered with tiny fields that were more like gardens than farms. Man would cover the scars man had made, and there would be forgetfulness, till the raiders swept again out of the desert. But now the plain lay bare and silent, the canals choked, broken and empty.

Here and there rose the remnants of palm groves, the crumbling ruins of villas and country palaces. Further out, barely visible under the stars, rose the mysterious hillock known as the mound of Enzu—the moon. It was not a natural hill, but whose hands had reared it and for what reason none knew. Before Nippur was built it had risen above the plain, and the nameless fingers that shaped it had vanished in the dust of time. To it Pyrrhas turned his horse’s head.

And in the city he had left, Amytis furtively left his palace and took a devious course to a certain secret destination. She walked rather stiffly, limped, and frequently paused to tenderly caress her person and lament over her injuries. But limping, cursing, and weeping, she eventually reached her destination, and stood before a man whose wealth and power was great in Nippur. His glance was an interrogation.

“He has gone to the Mound of the Moon, to speak with Gimil-ishbi,” she said.

“Lilitu came to him again tonight,” she shuddered, momentarily forgetting her pain and anger. “Truly he is accursed.”

“By the priests of Anu?” His eyes narrowed to slits.

“So he suspects.”

“And you?”

“What of me? I neither know nor care.”

“Have you ever wondered why I pay you to spy upon him?” he demanded.

She shrugged her shoulders. “You pay me well; that is enough for me.”

“Why does he go to Gimil-ishbi?”

“I told him the renegade might aid him against Lilitu.”

Sudden anger made the man’s face darkly sinister.

“I thought you hated him.”

She shrank from the menace in the voice. “I spoke of the diabolist before I thought, and then he forced me to speak his name; curse him, I will not sit with ease for weeks!” Her resentment rendered her momentarily speechless.

The man ignored her, intent on his own somber meditations. At last he rose with sudden determination.

“I have waited too long,” he muttered, like one speaking his thoughts aloud. “The fiends play with him while I bite my nails, and those who conspire with me grow restless and suspicious. Enlil alone knows what counsel Gimil-ishbi will give. When the moon rises I will ride forth and seek the Argive on the plain. A stab unaware—he will not suspect until my sword is through him. A bronze blade is surer than the powers of Darkness. I was a fool to trust even a devil.”

Amytis gasped with horror and caught at the velvet hangings for support.

“You? You?” Her lips framed a question too terrible to voice.

“Aye!” He accorded her a glance of grim amusement. With a gasp of terror she darted through the curtained door, her smarts forgotten in her fright.

Whether the cavern was hollowed by man or by Nature, none ever knew. At least its walls, floor and ceiling were symmetrical and composed of blocks of greenish stone, found nowhere else in that level land. Whatever its cause and origin, man occupied it now. A lamp hung from the rock roof, casting a weird light over the chamber and the bald pate of the man who sat crouching over a parchment scroll on a stone table before him. He looked up as a quick sure footfall sounded on the stone steps that led down into his abode. The next instant a tall figure stood framed in the doorway.

The man at the stone table scanned this figure with avid interest. Pyrrhas wore a hauberk of black leather and copper scales; his brazen greaves glinted in the lamplight. The wide crimson cloak, flung loosely about him, did not enmesh the long hilt that jutted from its folds. Shadowed by his horned bronze helmet, the Argive’s eyes gleamed icily. So the warrior faced the sage.

Gimil-ishbi was very old. There was no leaven of Semitic blood in his withered veins. His bald head was round as a vulture’s skull, and from it his great nose jutted like the beak of a vulture. His eyes were oblique, a rarity even in a pure-blooded Shumirian, and they were bright and black as beads. Whereas Pyrrhas’ eyes were all depth, blue deeps and changing clouds and shadows, Gimil-ishbi’s eyes were opaque as jet, and they never changed. His mouth was a gash whose smile was more terrible than its snarl.

He was clad in a simple black tunic, and his feet, in their cloth sandals, seemed strangely deformed. Pyrrhas felt a curious twitching between his shoulder-blades as he glanced at those feet, and he drew his eyes away, and back to the sinister face.

“Deign to enter my humble abode, warrior,” the voice was soft and silky, sounding strange from those harsh thin lips. “I would I could offer you food and drink, but I fear the food I eat and the wine I drink would find little favor in your sight.” He laughed softly as at an obscure jest.

“I come not to eat or to drink,” answered Pyrrhas abruptly, striding up to the table. “I come to buy a charm against devils.”

“To buy?”

The Argive emptied a pouch of gold coins on the stone surface; they glistened dully in the lamplight. Gimil-ishbi’s laugh was like the rustle of a serpent through dead grass.

“What is this yellow dirt to me? You speak of devils, and you bring me dust the wind blows away.”

“Dust?” Pyrrhas scowled. Gimil-ishbi laid his hand on the shining heap and laughed; somewhere in the night an owl moaned. The priest lifted his hand. Beneath it lay a pile of yellow dust that gleamed dully in the lamplight. A sudden wind rushed down the steps, making the lamp flicker, whirling up the golden heap; for an instant the air was dazzled and spangled with the shining particles. Pyrrhas swore; his armor was sprinkled with yellow dust; it sparkled among the scales of his hauberk.

“Dust that the wind blows away,” mumbled the priest. “Sit down, Pyrrhas of Nippur, and let us converse with each other.”

Pyrrhas glanced about the narrow chamber; at the even stacks of clay tablets along the walls, and the rolls of papyrus above them. Then he seated himself on the stone bench opposite the priest, hitching his sword-belt so that his hilt was well to the front.

“You are far from the cradle of your race,” said Gimil-ishbi. “You are the first golden-haired rover to tread the plains of Shumir.”

“I have wandered in many lands,” muttered the Argive, “but may the vultures pluck my bones if I ever saw a race so devil-ridden as this, or a land ruled and harried by so many gods and demons.”

His gaze was fixed in fascination on Gimil-ishbi’s hands; they were long, narrow, white and strong, the hands of youth. Their contrast to the priest’s appearance of great age otherwise was vaguely disquieting.

“To each city its gods and their priests,” answered Gimil-ishbi; “and all fools. Of what account are gods whom the fortunes of men lift or lower? Behind all gods of men, behind the primal trinity of Ea, Anu and Enlil, lurk the elder gods, unchanged by the wars or ambitions of men. Men deny what they do not see. The priests of Eridu, which is sacred to Ea and light, are no blinder than them of Nippur, which is consecrated to Enlil, whom they deem the lord of Darkness. But he is only the god of the darkness of which men dream, not the real Darkness that lurks behind all dreams, and veils the real and awful deities. I glimpsed this truth when I was a priest of Enlil, wherefore they cast me forth. Ha! They would stare if they knew how many of their worshippers creep forth to me by night, as you have crept.”

“I creep to no man!” the Argive bristled instantly. “I came to buy a charm. Name your price, and be damned to you.”

“Be not wroth,” smiled the priest. “Tell me why you have come.”

“If you are so cursed wise you should know already,” growled the Argive, unmollified. Then his gaze clouded as he cast back over his tangled trail. “Some magician has cursed me,” he muttered. “As I rode back from my triumph over Erech, my war-horse screamed and shied at Something none saw but he. Then my dreams grew strange and monstrous. In the darkness of my chamber, wings rustled and feet padded stealthily. Yesterday a woman at a feast went mad and tried to knife me. Later an adder sprang out of empty air and struck at me. Then, this night, she men call Lilitu came to my chamber and mocked me with awful laughter—”

“Lilitu?” the priest’s eyes lit with a brooding fire; his skull-face worked in a ghastly smile. “Verily, warrior, they plot thy ruin in the House of Arabu. Your sword can not prevail against her, or against her mate Ardat Lili. In the gloom of midnight her teeth will find your throat. Her laugh will blast your ears, and her burning kisses will wither you like a dead leaf blowing in the hot winds of the desert. Madness and dissolution will be your lot, and you will descend to the House of Arabu whence none returns.”

Pyrrhas moved restlessly, cursing incoherently beneath his breath.

“What can I offer you besides gold?” he growled.

“Much!” the black eyes shone; the mouth-gash twisted in inexplicable glee. “But I must name my own price, after I have given you aid.”

Pyrrhas acquiesced with an impatient gesture.

“Who are the wisest men in the world?” asked the sage abruptly.

“The priests of Egypt, who scrawled on yonder parchments,” answered the Argive.

Gimil-ishbi shook his head; his shadow fell on the wall like that of a great vulture, crouching over a dying victim.

“None so wise as the priests of Tiamat, who fools believe died long ago under the sword of Ea. Tiamat is deathless; she reigns in the shadows; she spreads her dark wings over her worshippers.”

“I know them not,” muttered Pyrrhas uneasily.

“The cities of men know them not; but the wasteplaces know them, the reedy marshes, the stony deserts, the hills, and the caverns. To them steal the winged ones from the House of Arabu.”

“I thought none came from that House,” said the Argive.

“No human returns thence. But the servants of Tiamat come and go at their pleasure.”

Pyrrhas was silent, reflecting on the place of the dead, as believed in by the Shumirians; a vast cavern, dusty, dark and silent, through which wandered the souls of the dead forever, shorn of all human attributes, cheerless and loveless, remembering their former lives only to hate all living men, their deeds and dreams.

“I will aid you,” murmured the priest. Pyrrhas lifted his helmeted head and stared at him. Gimil-ishbi’s eyes were no more human than the reflection of firelight on subterranean pools of inky blackness. His lips sucked in as if he gloated over all woes and miseries of mankind. Pyrrhas hated him as a man hates the unseen serpent in the darkness.

“Aid me and name your price,” said the Argive.

Gimil-ishbi closed his hands and opened them, and in the palms lay a gold cask, the lid of which fastened with a jeweled catch. He sprung the lid, and Pyrrhas saw the cask was filled with grey dust. He shuddered without knowing why.

“This ground dust was once the skull of the first king of Ur,” said Gimil-ishbi. “When he died, as even a necromancer must, he concealed his body with all his art. But I found his crumbling bones, and in the darkness above them, I fought with his soul as a man fights with a python in the night. My spoil was his skull, that held darker secrets than those that lie in the pits of Egypt.

“With this dead dust shall you trap Lilitu. Go quickly to an enclosed place—a cavern or a chamber—nay, that ruined villa which lies between this spot and the city will serve. Strew the dust in thin lines across threshold and window; leave not a spot as large as a man’s hand unguarded. Then lie down as if in slumber. When Lilitu enters, as she will, speak the words I shall teach you. Then you are her master, until you free her again by repeating the conjure backwards. You can not slay her, but you can make her swear to leave you in peace. Make her swear by the dugs of Tiamat. Now lean close and I will whisper the words of the spell.”

Somewhere in the night a nameless bird cried out harshly; the sound was more human than the whispering of the priest, which was no louder than the gliding of an adder through slimy ooze. He drew back, his gash-mouth twisted in a grisly smile. The Argive sat for an instant like a statue of bronze. Their shadows fell together on the wall with the appearance of a crouching vulture facing a strange horned monster.

Pyrrhas took the cask and rose, wrapping his crimson cloak about his somber figure, his horned helmet lending an illusion of abnormal height.

“And the price?”

Gimil-ishbi’s hands became claws, quivering with lust.

“Blood! A life!”

“Whose life?”

“Any life! So blood flows, and there is fear and agony, a spirit ruptured from its quivering flesh! I have one price for all—a human life! Death is my rapture; I would glut my soul on death! Man, maid, or infant. You have sworn. Make good your oath! A life! A human life!”

“Aye, a life!” Pyrrhas’ sword cut the air in a flaming arc and Gimil-ishbi’s vulture head fell on the stone table. The body reared upright, spouting black blood, then slumped across the stone. The head rolled across the surface and thudded dully on the floor. The features stared up, frozen in a mask of awful surprise.

Outside there sounded a frightful scream as Pyrrhas’ stallion broke its halter and raced madly away across the plain.

From the dim chamber with its tablets of cryptic cuneiforms and papyri of dark hieroglyphics, and from the remnants of the mysterious priest, Pyrrhas fled. As he climbed the carven stair and emerged into the starlight he doubted his own reason.

Far across the level plain the moon was rising, dull red, darkly lurid. Tense heat and silence held the land. Pyrrhas felt cold sweat thickly beading his flesh; his blood was a sluggish current of ice in his veins; his tongue clove to his palate. His armor weighted him and his cloak was like a clinging snare. Cursing incoherently he tore it from him; sweating and shaking he ripped off his armor, piece by piece, and cast it away. In the grip of his abysmal fears he had reverted to the primitive. The veneer of civilization vanished. Naked but for loin-cloth and girded sword he strode across the plain, carrying the golden cask under his arm.

No sound disturbed the waiting silence as he came to the ruined villa whose walls reared drunkenly among heaps of rubble. One chamber stood above the general ruin, left practically untouched by some whim of chance. Only the door had been wrenched from its bronze hinges. Pyrrhas entered. Moonlight followed him in and made a dim radiance inside the portal. There were three windows, gold-barred. Sparingly he crossed the threshold with a thin grey line. Each casement he served in like manner. Then tossing aside the empty cask, he stretched himself on a bare dais that stood in deep shadow. His unreasoning horror was under control. He who had been the hunted was now the hunter. The trap was set, and he waited for his prey with the patience of the primitive.

He had not long to wait. Something threshed the air outside and the shadow of great wings crossed the moon-lit portal. There was an instant of tense silence in which Pyrrhas heard the thunderous impact of his own heart against his ribs. Then a shadowy form framed itself in the open door. A fleeting instant it was visible, then it vanished from view. The thing had entered; the night-fiend was in the chamber.

Pyrrhas’ hand clenched on his sword as he heaved up suddenly from the dais. His voice crashed in the stillness as he thundered the dark enigmatic conjurement whispered to him by the dead priest. He was answered by a frightful scream; there was a quick stamp of bare feet, then a heavy fall, and something was threshing and writhing in the shadows on the floor. As Pyrrhas cursed the masking darkness, the moon thrust a crimson rim above a casement, like a goblin peering into a window, and a molten flood of light crossed the floor. In the pale glow the Argive saw his victim.

But it was no were-woman that writhed there. It was a thing like a man, lithe, naked, dusky-skinned. It differed not in the attributes of humanity except for the disquieting suppleness of its limbs, the changeless glitter of its eyes. It grovelled as in mortal agony, foaming at the mouth and contorting its body into impossible positions.

With a blood-mad yell Pyrrhas ran at the figure and plunged his sword through the squirming body. The point rang on the tiled floor beneath it, and an awful howl burst from the frothing lips, but that was the only apparent effect of the thrust. The Argive wrenched forth his sword and glared astoundedly to see no stain on the steel, no wound on the dusky body. He wheeled as the cry of the captive was re-echoed from without.

Just outside the enchanted threshold stood a woman, naked, supple, dusky, with wide eyes blazing in a soulless face. The being on the floor ceased to writhe, and Pyrrhas’ blood turned to ice.

“Lilitu!”

She quivered at the threshold, as if held by an invisible boundary. Her eyes were eloquent with hate; they yearned awfully for his blood and his life. She spoke, and the effect of a human voice issuing from that beautiful unhuman mouth was more terrifying than if a wild beast had spoken in human tongue.

“You have trapped my mate! You dare to torture Ardat Lili, before whom the gods tremble! Oh, you shall howl for this! You shall be torn bone from bone, and muscle from muscle, and vein from vein! Loose him! Speak the words and set him free, lest even this doom be denied you!”

“Words!” he answered with bitter savagery. “You have hunted me like a hound. Now you can not cross that line without falling into my hands as your mate has fallen. Come into the chamber, bitch of darkness, and let me caress you as I caress your lover—thus! —and thus! —and thus!”

Ardat Lili foamed and howled at the bite of the keen steel, and Lilitu screamed madly in protest, beating with her hands as at an invisible barrier.

“Cease! Cease! Oh, could I but come at you! How I would leave you a blind, mangled cripple! Have done! Ask what you will, and I will perform it!”

“That is well,” grunted the Argive grimly. “I can not take this creature’s life, but it seems I can hurt him, and unless you give me satisfaction, I will give him more pain than ever he guesses exists in the world.”

“Ask! Ask!” urged the were-woman, twisting with impatience.

“Why have you haunted me? What have I done to earn your hate?”

“Hate?” she tossed her head. “What are the sons of men that we of Shuala should hate or love? When the doom is loosed, it strikes blindly.”

“Then who, or what, loosed the doom of Lilitu upon me?”

“One who dwells in the House of Arabu.”

“Why, in Ymir’s name?” swore Pyrrhas. “Why should the dead hate me?” He halted, remembering a priest who died gurgling curses.

“The dead strike at the bidding of the living. Someone who moves in the sunlight spoke in the night to one who dwells in Shuala.”

“Who?”

“I do not know.”

“You lie, you slut! It is the priests of Anu, and you would shield them. For that lie your lover shall howl to the kiss of the steel—”

“Butcher!” shrieked Lilitu. “Hold your hand! I swear by the dugs of Tiamat my mistress, I do not know what you ask. What are the priests of Anu that I should shield them? I would rip up all their bellies—as I would yours, could I come at you! Free my mate, and I will lead you to the House of Darkness itself, and you may wrest the truth from the awful mouth of the dweller himself, if you dare!”

“I will go,” said Pyrrhas, “but I leave Ardat Lili here as hostage. If you deal falsely with me, he will writhe on this enchanted floor throughout all eternity.”

Lilitu wept with fury, crying: “No devil in Shuala is crueller than you. Haste, in the name of Apsu!”

Sheathing his sword, Pyrrhas stepped across the threshold. She caught his wrist with fingers like velvet-padded steel, crying something in a strange inhuman tongue. Instantly the moon-lit sky and plain were blotted out in a rush of icy blackness. There was a sensation of hurtling through a void of intolerable coldness, a roaring in the Argive’s ears as of titan winds. Then his feet struck solid ground; stability followed that chaotic instant, that had been like the instant of dissolution that joins or separates two states of being, alike in stability, but in kind more alien than day and night. Pyrrhas knew that in that instant he had crossed an unimaginable gulf, and that he stood on shores never before touched by living human feet.

Lilitu’s fingers grasped his wrist, but he could not see her. He stood in darkness of a quality which he had never encountered. It was almost tangibly soft, all-pervading and all-engulfing. Standing amidst it, it was not easy even to imagine sunlight and bright rivers and grass singing in the wind. They belonged to that other world—a world lost and forgotten in the dust of a million centuries. The world of life and light was a whim of chance—a bright spark glowing momentarily in a universe of dust and shadows. Darkness and silence were the natural state of the cosmos, not light and the noises of Life. No wonder the dead hated the living, who disturbed the grey stillness of Infinity with their tinkling laughter.

Lilitu’s fingers drew him through abysmal blackness. He had a vague sensation as of being in a titanic cavern, too huge for conception. He sensed walls and roof, though he did not see them and never reached them; they seemed to recede as he advanced, yet there was always the sensation of their presence. Sometimes his feet stirred what he hoped was only dust. There was a dusty scent throughout the darkness; he smelled the odors of decay and mould.

He saw lights moving like glow-worms through the dark. Yet they were not lights, as he knew radiance. They were more like spots of lesser gloom, that seemed to glow only by contrast with the engulfing blackness which they emphasized without illuminating. Slowly, laboriously they crawled through the eternal night. One approached the companions closely and Pyrrhas’ hair stood up and he grasped his sword. But Lilitu took no heed as she hurried him on. The dim spot glowed close to him for an instant; it vaguely illumined a shadowy countenance, faintly human, yet strangely birdlike.

Existence became a dim and tangled thing to Pyrrhas, wherein he seemed to journey for a thousand years through the blackness of dust and decay, drawn and guided by the hand of the were-woman. Then he heard her breath hiss through her teeth, and she came to a halt.

Before them shimmered another of those strange globes of light. Pyrrhas could not tell whether it illumined a man or a bird. The creature stood upright like a man, but it was clad in grey feathers—at least they were more like feathers than anything else. The features were no more human than they were birdlike.

“This is the dweller in Shuala which put upon you the curse of the dead,” whispered Lilitu. “Ask him the name of him who hates you on earth.”

“Tell me the name of mine enemy!” demanded Pyrrhas, shuddering at the sound of his own voice, which whispered drearily and uncannily through the unechoing darkness.

The eyes of the dead burned redly and it came at him with a rustle of pinions, a long gleam of light springing into its lifted hand. Pyrrhas recoiled, clutching at his sword, but Lilitu hissed: “Nay, use this!” and he felt a hilt thrust into his fingers. He was grasping a scimitar with a blade curved in the shape of the crescent moon, that shone like an arc of white fire.

He parried the bird-thing’s stroke, and sparks showered in the gloom, burning him like bits of flame. The darkness clung to him like a black cloak; the glow of the feathered monster bewildered and baffled him. It was like fighting a shadow in the maze of a nightmare. Only by the fiery gleam of his enemy’s blade did he keep the touch of it. Thrice it sang death in his ears as he deflected it by the merest fraction, then his own crescent-edge cut the darkness and grated on the other’s shoulder-joint. With a strident screech the thing dropped its weapon and slumped down, a milky liquid spurting from the gaping wound. Pyrrhas lifted his scimitar again, when the creature gasped in a voice that was no more human than the grating of wind-blown boughs against one another: “Naram-ninub, the great-grandson of my great-grandson! By black arts he spoke and commanded me across the gulfs!”

“Naram-ninub!” Pyrrhas stood frozen in amazement; the scimitar was torn from his hand. Again Lilitu’s fingers locked on his wrist. Again the dark was drowned in deep blackness and howling winds blowing between the spheres.

He staggered in the moonlight without the ruined villa, reeling with the dizziness of his transmutation. Beside him Lilitu’s teeth shone between her curling red lips. Catching the thick locks clustered on her neck, he shook her savagely, as he would have shaken a mortal woman.

“Harlot of Hell! What madness has your sorcery instilled in my brain?”

“No madness!” she laughed, striking his hand aside. “You have journeyed to the House of Arabu, and you have returned. You have spoken with, and overcome with the sword of Apsu, the shade of a man dead for long centuries.”

“Then it was no dream of madness! But Naram-ninub—” he halted in confused thought. “Why, of all the men of Nippur, he has been my staunchest friend!”

“Friend?” she mocked. “What is friendship but a pleasant pretense to while away an idle hour?”

“But why, in Ymir’s name?”

“What are the petty intrigues of men to me?” she exclaimed angrily. “Yet now I remember that men from Erech, wrapped in cloaks, steal by night to Naram-ninub’s palace.”

“Ymir!” Like a sudden blaze of light Pyrrhas saw reason in merciless clarity. “He would sell Nippur to Erech, and first he must put me out of the way, because the hosts of Nippur cannot stand before me! Oh, dog, let my knife find your heart!”

“Keep faith with me!” Lilitu’s importunities drowned his fury. “I have kept faith with you. I have led you where never living man has trod, and brought you forth unharmed. I have betrayed the dwellers in darkness and done that for which Tiamat will bind me naked on a white-hot grid for seven times seven days. Speak the words and free Ardat Lili!”

Still engrossed in Naram-ninub’s treachery, Pyrrhas spoke the incantation. With a loud sigh of relief, the were-man rose from the tiled floor and came into the moonlight. The Argive stood with his hand on his sword and his head bent, lost in moody thought. Lilitu’s eyes flashed a quick meaning to her mate. Lithely they began to steal toward the abstracted man. Some primitive instinct brought his head up with a jerk. They were closing in on him, their eyes burning in the moonlight, their fingers reaching for him. Instantly he realized his mistake; he had forgotten to make them swear truce with him; no oath bound them from his flesh.

With feline screeches they struck in, but quicker yet he bounded aside and raced toward the distant city. Too hotly eager for his blood to resort to sorcery, they gave chase. Fear winged his feet, but close behind him he heard the swift patter of their feet, their eager panting. A sudden drum of hoofs sounded in front of him, and bursting through a tattered grove of skeleton palms, he almost caromed against a rider, who rode like the wind, a long silvery glitter in his hand. With a startled oath the horseman wrenched his steed back on its haunches. Pyrrhas saw looming over him a powerful body in scale-mail, a pair of blazing eyes that glared at him from under a domed helmet, a short black beard.

“You dog!” he yelled furiously. “Damn you, have you come to complete with your sword what your black magic began?”

The steed reared wildly as he leaped at its head and caught its bridle. Cursing madly and fighting for balance, Naram-ninub slashed at his attacker’s head, but Pyrrhas parried the stroke and thrust upward murderously. The sword-point glanced from the corselet and plowed along the Semite’s jaw-bone. Naram-ninub screamed and fell from the plunging steed, spouting blood. His leg-bone snapped as he pitched heavily to earth, and his cry was echoed by a gloating howl from the shadowed grove.

Without dragging the rearing horse to earth, Pyrrhas sprang to its back and wrenched it about. Naram-ninub was groaning and writhing on the ground, and as Pyrrhas looked, two shadows darted from the darkened grove and fastened themselves on his prostrate form. A terrible scream burst from his lips, echoed by more awful laughter. Blood on the night air; on it the night-things would feed, wild as mad dogs, marking no difference between men.

The Argive wheeled away, toward the city, then hesitated, shaken by a fierce revulsion. The level land lay quiescent beneath the moon, and the brutish pyramid of Enlil stood up in the stars. Behind him lay his enemy, glutting the fangs of the horrors he himself had called up from the Pits. The road was open to Nippur, for his return.

His return? — to a devil-ridden people crawling beneath the heels of priest and king; to a city rotten with intrigue and obscene mysteries; to an alien race that mistrusted him, and a mistress that hated him.

Wheeling his horse again, he rode westward toward the open lands, flinging his arms wide in a gesture of renunciation and the exultation of freedom. The weariness of life dropped from him like a cloak. His mane floated in the wind, and over the plains of Shumir shouted a sound they had never heard before—the gusty, elemental, reasonless laughter of a free barbarian.

Clark Ashton Smith was one of the “big three” writers for Weird Tales, along with Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. While Smith’s fans adore his opulent, exotic prose style, some of his editors were harder to convince of its worthiness, and insisted he make revisions. For example, Smith claimed that Farnsworth Wright forced him to “mutilate the ending” of “Necromancy in Naat” before accepting it. This truncated version appeared in the July 1936 issue of Weird Tales, which the readers voted most popular story of the issue (tied with the first installment of Howard’s “Red Nails”). Approximately thirteen hundred words were cut from Smith’s original. Thanks to the editorial efforts of Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, the original version appeared for the first time in 2010 in The Last Hieroglyph: Volume Five of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, which is the version presented here.

Necromancy in Naat

By Clark Ashton Smith

Dead longing, sundered evermore from pain:

How dim and sweet the shadow-hearted love,

The happiness that perished lovers prove

In Naat, far beyond the sable main.

—Song of the Galley-Slaves.

Yadar, prince of a nomad people in the half-desert region known as Zyra, had followed throughout many kingdoms a clue that was often more elusive than broken gossamer. For thirteen moons he had sought Dalili, his betrothed, whom the slave traders of Sha-Karag, swift and cunning as desert falcons, had reft from the tribal encampment with nine other maidens while Yadar and his men were hunting the black gazelles of Zyra. Fierce was the grief of Yadar, and fiercer still his wrath, when he came back at eve to the ravaged tents. He had sworn then a great oath to find Dalili, whether in slave-mart or brothel or harem, whether dead or living, whether tomorrow or after the lapse of grey years.

The tracks of the slavers’ camels ran plainly toward the iron gates of Sha-Karag, lying many leagues away in the west. Because of similar raidings, the nomads had long been at war with the people of that infamous market-place where women were the chief merchandise. Knowing that the high-walled city was impregnable to assault by his little band of followers, Yadar disguised himself as a rug-merchant; and accompanied by four of his men in like attire, with certain hoarded heirlooms of the tribe for a stock-in-trade, he appeared before the shut gates and was admitted without challenge by the guards.

Listening discreetly to the gossip of the bazaars, he learned that the raiders had not remained in Sha-Karag; but, after selling most of their captives to local dealers, they had gone on without delay toward the great empires of the sunset, taking with them Dalili and her fairest companions. It was said that they hoped to sell Dalili to some opulent king or emperor who would pay a city’s ransom for the wild, rare beauty of the outland princess.

Weary and perilous was the quest to which Yadar and his followers now dedicated themselves. Still disguised as rug-merchants, they joined a caravan that was departing on the route taken by the slavers. From realm to realm they followed a doubtful trail, sometimes led astray by vain rumors.

In Tinarath, hearing that a nomad girl of strange loveliness had lately been purchased by the king, they entered the palace harem on a night of storm, slaying the griffon-like monsters who warded its balconies, and braving the hideous pitfalls that had been set for intruders in the inner halls. They found the girl, who was not Dalili but another of the maidens reaved from Yadar’s people; and swiftly, amid the bewildered hubbub of the awakening palace, they carried her away into the darkness and storm. She knew little of the fate of Dalili, saying that the princess had been parted from her in Tinarath and had gone with the slave-traders toward Zul-Bha-Sair: for the king of Tinarath had refused to pay the vast sum demanded for Dalili.

Now, when they were safely beyond the borders of Tinarath, Yadar sent the girl back toward Zyra with one of his tribesmen; and he and the others resumed their search and were brought near to death amid the springless dunes of the waste lying between Tinarath and Zul-Bha-Sair. And in Zul-Bha-Sair, Yadar learned that Dalili had been offered to the king who, caring not for a sun-dark beauty, had declined to buy her; and, after that, the princess and her captors had gone northward to an undeclared destination. But, before the nomads could follow, Yadar’s companions were seized by a strange fever and died swiftly; and their bodies, according to custom, were claimed by the priesthood of a great temple-dwelling ghoul who was worshipped in that city. So Yadar went on alone, and after much random wandering, he came to Oroth, a western sea-port of the land of Xylac.

There, for the first time in several moons, he heard a rumor that might concern Dalili: for the people of Oroth were still gossiping about the departure of a rich galley bearing a lovely outland girl who had been bought by the emperor of Xylac and sent to the ruler of the far southern kingdom of Yoros as a gift concluding a treaty between these realms.

Yadar, who had almost yielded to despair, was now hopeful of finding his beloved: since, by the description the people had given, he thought that the girl was indeed none other than Dalili. Nothing remained of the precious weavings of the tribe which he had brought with him to sell as merchandise; but, through the sale of his camels, he procured money with which to engage his passage on a ship that was about to sail for Yoros.

The ship was a small merchant galley, laden with grain and wine, that was wont to coast up and down, hugging closely the winding western shores of the continent Zothique and venturing never beyond eyeshot of land. On a clear blue summer day it departed from Oroth with all auguries for a safe and tranquil voyage. But on the third morn after leaving port, a tremendous wind blew suddenly from the low-lying sandy shore they were then skirting; and with it, blotting the heavens and sea, there came a blackness as of night thickened with clouds. The sails and oars could win no headway against the gale, and the vessel was swept far out to sea, going with the blind tempest.

After two days, the wind fell from its ravening fury and was soon no more than a vague whisper; and the skies cleared, leaving a bright azure vault from horizon to horizon. But nowhere was there any land visible, only a waste of waters that still roared and tossed turbulently without wind, pouring ever westward in a cataracting tide that was too swift and strong for the galley to stem. And the galley was borne on irresistibly by that strange current, even as by the hurricane.

Yadar, who was the sole passenger, marvelled much at this thing; and he was struck by the pale terror on the faces of the captain and crew. And, looking again at the sea, he remarked a singular darkening of its waters, which assumed from moment to moment a hue as of old blood commingled with more and more of blackness: though above it the sun shone untarnished. So he made inquiry of the captain, a greybeard from Yoros, named Agor, who had sailed the ocean for forty summers; and the captain answered, with many seafaring oaths:

“This I had apprehended when the storm bore us westwardly: for know now that we have fallen into the grip of that terrible ocean-stream which is called by mariners the Black River. Evermore the stream surges and swiftens toward the fabled place of the sun’s outermost setting, till it pours at last from the world’s rim. Between us now and that final verge, there is no land, saving the evil land of Naat, which is called also the Isle of Necromancers. And I know not which were the worse fate, to be wrecked on that infamous isle or hurled into space with the waters falling eternally from earth’s edge. From either place there is no return for living men such as we. And from the Isle of Naat none go forth except the ill sorcerers who people it, and the dead who are raised up and controlled by their sorcery. In magical ships that breast the full current of the Black River, the sorcerers sail at will to other strands; and beneath their necromancy, to fulfill their wicked errands, the dead men swim without pause for many days and nights whithersoever the masters may send them.”

Yadar, who knew little of sorcerers and necromancy, was somewhat incredulous concerning the matters whereof the captain spoke. But he saw that the blackening waters streamed always more wildly and torrentially toward the skyline, as if pouring adown some submarine slope of earth that steepened to the final rim; and verily there was small hope that the galley could regain its southward course. And he was troubled chiefly by the thought that he should never reach the kingdom of Yoros, where he had dreamt to find Dalili.

All that day the vessel was borne on without respite by the dark seas racing weirdly beneath an airless and immaculate heaven. It followed the silent orange sunset into a night filled with large, unquivering stars; and at length it was overtaken by the stilly flying amber morn. But still there was no abating of the waters; and neither land nor cloud was discernible in the vastness about the galley.

Yadar held little converse with Agor and the crew, after questioning them vainly as to the reason of the ocean’s blackness, which was a thing that no man understood. Despair was upon him; but, standing at the bulwark, he watched the sky and wave with an alertness born of his nomad life. Toward middle afternoon he descried far-off a strange vessel, rigged with funereal purple sails, that drove steadily on an eastering course against the mighty current. At this, he cried out in wonder, calling the captain’s attention to the vessel; and the captain, with a muttering of outlandish oaths, told him that it was a ship belonging to the necromancers of Naat, whose malign magic was more cogent than the tide of the Black River.

Soon the purple sails were lost to vision; but a little later, Yadar perceived certain objects, queerly resembling human heads, that passed in the high-billowing water to the galley’s leeward, as if swimming easily toward Zothique on the route of that necromantic ship. Deeming that no mortal living men could swim thus, and remembering that which the captain had told him concerning the dead swimmers who went forth from Naat, Yadar shivered a little with such trepidation as a brave man may feel in the presence of preternatural things; and he did not speak of the matter. And seemingly the head-like objects were not noticed by any of his companions.

Still the galley drove on, its oarsmen sitting idle at the oars, and the captain standing listless beside the untended helm.

Now, as the sun declined above that tumultuous ebon ocean, it seemed that a great bank of thunder-cloud arose from the west, long and low-lying at first, but surging rapidly skyward with mountainous domes and craggy battlements. Ever higher it loomed, revealing the menace as of piled cliffs and somber awful sea-capes; but its form changed not in the manner of clouds; and Yadar, watching it closely, knew it at last for an island bulking far aloft in the long-rayed sunset. From it, a chill effluence of evil came like a sighing breath; and a shadow was thrown for leagues, darkening still more the sable waters, as if with the fall of untimely night; and in the shadow, the foam-crests flashing upon hidden reefs were white as the bared teeth of Death. And Yadar needed not the shrill, frightened cries of his companions to tell him that this was the terrible Isle of Naat.

Direly the current swiftened, raging, as it raced onward for battle with the rock-fanged shore; and the voices of the mariners, praying loudly to their gods, were drowned by its clamor. Yadar, standing in the prow, gave only a silent prayer to the dim, fatal deity of his tribe; and his eyes searched the towering isle like those of a sea-flown hawk, seeing the bare horrific crags, and the spaces of sullen forest creeping seaward between the crags, and the white mounting of breakers on a shadowy strand. And he discerned, on the lofty downs behind the shore, the furtive scattered roofs of houses pale amid cypress trees that clotted the gloom with funereal umbrage.

Shrouded, and ominous of bale was the island’s aspect, and the heart of Yadar sank like a plummet in unsunned seas. As the galley drew nearer to land, he thought that he beheld people moving darkly, visible in the lapsing of surges on a low beach, and then hidden once more by foam and spindrift. Ere he saw them a second time, the galley was hurled with thunderous crashing and grinding on a reef covered by the torrent waters. The whole forepart of its prow and bottom were broken in, and being lifted from the reef by a great comber, it filled instantly and sank. And of those who had sailed from Oroth in the vessel, Yadar alone leapt free ere its foundering; but, since he was little skilled as a swimmer, he was drawn under quickly and was like to have drowned in the maelstroms of that evil sea.

His senses left him, and in his brain, like a lost sun returned from yesteryear, he beheld the face of Dalili; and with Dalili, in a bright phantasmagoria, there came the happy days that had been ere his bereavement. The visions passed, and he awoke struggling, with the bitterness of the sea in his mouth, and its loudness in his ears, and its rushing darkness all about him. And, as his senses quickened, he became aware of a form that swam close behind him, and arms that supported him amid the waters.

He lifted his head in the twilight, and saw dimly the pale neck and half-averted face of his rescuer, and the long black hair that floated from wave to wave. Touching the body at his side, he knew it for that of a woman. Mazed and wildered though he was by the sea’s buffeting, a sense of something familiar stirred within him; and he thought that he had known, somewhere, at some former time, a girl with like hair and similar curving of cheek; but he could not remember clearly. And, trying to remember, he touched the woman again, and felt in his fingers a strange coldness from her naked body. At this, he wondered a little, but forgot his wonder in the wildness of that sea through which he was borne by the swimmer.

Miraculous was the woman’s strength and skill, for she rode easily the dreadful mounting and falling of the surges. Yadar, floating as in a cradle upon her arm, beheld the nearing shore from the billows’ summits; and hardly it seemed that any swimmer, however able, could win alive through the ponderous cataracting of that surf on the stony strand.

Dizzily, at the last, they were hurled upward, as if the surf would fling them against the highmost crag; but, as if checked by some enchantment, the wave fell with a slow, lazy undulation; and Yadar and his rescuer, released by its ebbing, lay unhurt on a shelfy beach.

Uttering no word, nor turning to look at Yadar, the woman rose swiftly to her feet; and, beckoning the nomad prince to follow, she moved away in the deathly blue dusk that had fallen upon Naat. Yadar, arising and following the woman, heard a strange and eerie chanting of voices above the sea’s tumult, and saw a fire that burned weirdly, with the colors of driftwood, at some distance before him in the dusk. Straightly, toward the fire and the voices, the woman walked in the fashion of a somnambulist, and Yadar, with eyes grown used to that doubtful twilight, saw that the fire blazed in the mouth of a lowsunken cleft between crags that overloomed the beach; and behind the fire, like tall, evilly posturing shadows, there stood the dark-clad figures of those who chanted.

Now memory returned to him of that which the galley’s captain had said regarding the people of Naat and their necromantic practices; and with the memory came misgiving. For the very sound of that chanting, albeit in an unknown language, seemed to suspend the heartward flowing of his veins, and to set the tomb’s chillness in his marrow. And though he was little learned in such matters, the thought came to him that the words uttered were of sorcerous import and power.

Going forward, the woman bowed low before the chanters, in such fashion as a slave, and stood waiting submissively. The men, who were three in number, continued their incantation without pausing, and they seemed not to perceive the presence of Yadar as he entered the firelight. Gaunt as starved herons they were, and great of stature, with a common likeness, as of brothers; and sharply ridged were their faces, where shadows inhabited their hollow cheeks, and their sunk eyes were visible only by red sparks reflected within them from the blaze. And their eyes, as they chanted, seemed to glare afar on the darkling sea and on things hidden by dusk and distance. And Yadar, coming before them, was aware of swift horror and repugnance that made his gorge rise as if he had encountered, in a place given wholly to death, the powerful evil ripeness of corruption.

High leaped the fire as he neared it, with a writhing of tongues that were like blue and green serpents coiling amid serpents of yellow. And the light flickered brightly on the face and breasts of that woman who had saved him from the Black River; and Yadar, beholding her clearly, knew why she had stirred within him a dim remembrance: for she was none other than his lost love, Dalili!

Forgetting the presence of the dark chanters, and the ill renown of that isle to which the seas had brought him, he sprang forward to clasp his beloved, crying out her name in an agony of rapture. But she answered not his cry, and responded to his embrace only with a faint trembling. And Yadar, sorely perplexed and dismayed, was aware of the deathly coldness that crept into his fingers and smote through his very raiment from her flesh.

Mortally pale and languid were the lips that he kissed, and it seemed that no breath emerged between them, nor was there any rising and falling of the wan bosom against his. In the wide, beautiful eyes that she turned to him, he found only a drowsy voidness, and such recognition as a sleeper gives when but half awakened, relapsing quickly into slumber thereafter.

“Art thou indeed Dalili?” he said. And she answered somnolently, in a toneless, indistinct voice, “I am Dalili.”

To Yadar, baffled by mystery, chilled, forlorn and aching, it was as if she had spoken from a land farther away than all the weary leagues of his search throughout Zothique.

Fearing to understand the change that had come upon her, he said tenderly:

“Surely thou knowest me, for I am thy lover, the Prince Yadar, who has sought thee through half the kingdoms of Earth, and has sailed afar for thy sake on the unshored sea.”

And she replied like one bemused by some heavy drug, in a soulless voice, as if echoing his words without true comprehension: “Surely I know thee.” And to Yadar there was no comfort in her reply; and his concernment was not allayed by the parrotings with which she answered all his other loving speeches and queries.

He knew not that the three chanters had all ceased their incantation; and verily, he had forgotten their presence in his finding of Dalili. But as he stood holding the girl closely, the men came toward him, and one of them clutched his arm. And the man hailed him by name and addressed him, albeit uncouthly, in a language commonly spoken throughout many parts of Zothique, saying: “We bid thee welcome to the Isle of Naat, from which no living traveller may return.”

Yadar, feeling a dread suspicion, interrogated the man fiercely: “What manner of beings are ye? And why is Dalili in this place? And what have ye done to her?”

“I am Vacharn, a necromancer,” the man replied readily, “and these others with me are my sons, Vokal and Uldulla, who are also necromancers. We dwell in a house behind the crags, and are attended by the drowned people that our sorcery has called up from the sea to a semblance of life and animation. Among our servants is this girl, Dalili, together with the whole crew of that ship in which she sailed from Oroth. For, like the vessel in which thou camest later, the ship was blown far asea and was taken by the ineluctable Black River, and was wrecked finally on the reefs of Naat. And my sons and I, chanting that powerful formula which requires no use of circle or pentacle, summoned ashore the drowned company: even as we have now summoned the crew of that other vessel, from which thou alone wert saved alive by the necromantic swimmer at our command, for a certain purpose.”

Vacharn ended, and stood peering into the dusk intently; and Yadar at that moment heard behind him a noise of slow footsteps coming upward across the shingle from the surf.

Turning, he saw emerge from the livid twilight the old captain of that merchant galley in which he had voyaged so unwillingly to Naat; and behind the captain were the sailors and oarsmen. With the paces of sleep-walkers they approached the firelight, the sea-water dripping heavily from their raiment and hair, and drooling from their mouths. Some were sorely bruised, and others came stumbling or dragging with limbs broken by the rocks on which that torrential sea had flung them; and on all their faces was the ghastly look of men who have suffered the doom of drowning.

Stiffly, like automatons, they made obeisance in a body before Vacharn and his sons, acknowledging thus their thralldom to those who had raised them from deep death. In their glassily staring eyes there was no recognition of Yadar, no awareness of outward things; and they spoke only in dull, rote-like recognition of certain obscure words addressed to them by the necromancers.

To Yadar, it was as if he too stood and moved like the living dead in a dark, hollow, half-conscious dream. Even thus, walking side by side with Dalili, and followed by those others, he was led by the enchanters through a dusky ravine that wound secretly toward the uplands of Naat. Obediently he went: but in his heart there was small joy at the finding of Dalili; and his love was companioned by a sick despair.

Vacharn lit the way with a brand of driftwood plucked from the fire; and Yadar beheld vaguely, by its flickering, the black and cruel precipices of a steepening gorge, and the dwarfish crooked pines that leaned malignantly from high ledges, as if to cast with wizard hands a malediction upon the wayfarers. Anon a bloated moon rose red as with sanies-mingled blood behind them, over the wild, racing sea; and, ere its orb had cleared to a death-like paleness, they emerged from the gorge on a stony fell where stood the house of the three necromancers.

Long and low-lying was the house, built of dark granite, with crouching wings half hidden amid the foliage of close-grown cypresses. Behind it a cliff beetled, overhanging it starkly; and above the cliff were somber slopes and ridges piled in the moonlight, rising afar toward the mountainous center of Naat.

To Yadar, it seemed that the mansion was a place pre-empted by death: for no lights burned in its portals and windows; and a silence came from it to meet the stillness of the wan heavens. But, when the necromancers neared the threshold, a word was spoken by Vacharn, echoing distantly in the inner halls and chambers; and as if in answer, lamps were illumined suddenly everywhere, filling the house as with monstrous yellow eyes; and people appeared instantly within the portals like bowing shadows. But the faces of these beings were blanched by the tomb’s pallor, and some were mottled with green decay, or marked by the tortuous gnawing of maggots…

Later, in a great hall of the house, Yadar was bidden to seat himself at a table where Vacharn and Vokal and Uldulla were wont to sit alone during their meals. The table stood on a sort of dais formed of gigantic flagstones; and below, in the main hall, the dead were gathered about other tables, numbering nearly twoscore; and among them sat the girl Dalili, looking never toward Yadar. He, though sorely sick at heart, would have joined her, unwilling to be parted from her side: but a deep languor was upon him, as if an unspoken spell had enthralled his limbs, and he could no longer move at his own volition but must obey in all things the will of Vacharn.

Dully he sat, observing with small wonder the grimness and taciturnity of his hosts, who, dwelling always with the silent dead, had apparently assumed no little part of their manner and similitude. And he saw more clearly than before the common likeness of the three: for all, it seemed, were as brothers of one birth rather than parent and sons; and all were like ageless things, being neither old nor young in the fashion of ordinary men.

Yadar could distinguish Vacharn from his sons only by the darker hue of his garments, and the greater breadth of brow and shoulders; and he knew Vokal from Uldulla merely by a sharper pitch of voice and a deeper hollowing of the gaunt cheeks. And more and more was he aware of that weird evil which emanated from the three, powerful and abhorrent as an exhalation of hidden death.

In the thralldom that weighed upon him, he scarcely marvelled at the serving of the strange supper that followed: though meats were brought in by no palpable agency, and wines poured out as if by the air itself; and the passing of the bearers to and fro was betrayed only by a rustle of doubtfully dying footsteps, and a light chillness that came and went.

Mutely, with stiff gestures and movements, the dead began to eat at their laden tables. But the necromancers refrained from the victuals before them, in an attitude of waiting; and Vacharn, in explanation, said to the nomad: “There are still others who will sup with us tonight.” And Yadar, for the first time, perceived that a vacant chair had been set beside the chair of Vacharn.

Then, from an inner doorway, there entered the hall with hasty strides a man of great thews and stature, naked, and brown almost to blackness. Savage of aspect was the man, and his eyes were dilated as if with rage or terror, and little flecks of foam were on his thick purple lips. And close behind him, lifting in menace their heavy, rusted scimitars, there came two liches, like guards who attend a prisoner.

“This man is a cannibal,” said Vacharn. “Our servants have captured him for us in the forest beyond the mountains, which is peopled mainly by such savages.” Then, with a dark irony couching behind the words, he added: “Only the strong and courageous are summoned living to this mansion, and are suffered to eat with my sons and me at our table… Not idly, O Prince Yadar, wert thou chosen for this honor among all who sailed in the merchant galley from Oroth. Observe closely all that follows.”

The giant savage had paused within the threshold, as if fearing the hall’s occupants more than the wicked weapons of his guards. At a signal from Vacharn, one of the liches slashed his left shoulder with the rusty blade, and blood rilled copiously from a deep wound as the cannibal came forward beneath that prompting. Convulsively he trembled, in such wise as a frightened animal, looking wildly to either side for an avenue of escape; and only after a second prompting did he mount the dais and approach the necromancers’ table. But, after certain hollow-sounding words had been uttered by Vacharn, the man seated himself, still trembling, in the chair beside the master, opposite to Yadar. And behind him, with high-raised weapons, there stationed themselves the ghastly guards, whose features were those of men a fortnight dead.

“There is still another guest,” said Vacharn, “a guest who prefers to sup when others have supped. He will come at his own time.”

Without further ceremony, he began to eat, and Yadar, though with little appetence, followed suit. Hardly did the prince perceive the savor of those viands with which his plate was piled; nor could he have sworn whether the vintages he drank were sour or dulcet. For his thoughts were divided between Dalili and the strangeness and horror about him. The utterances of Vacharn, and the presence of the cannibal, and the reason of his own presence at that table, were obscure to him; and he felt in all this the incumbence of an ill mystery. And, seeing that there was no longer a vacant place at the table, he was perplexed by the necromancer’s reference to the coming of still another guest. As he ate and drank, it seemed that his senses were sharpened weirdly, so that he grew aware of eldritch shadows moving between the lamps, and heard the chill sibilance of whispers that checked his very blood. And there came to him, from the peopled hall, every odor that is exhaled by mortality between the recentness of death and the end of corruption. Vacharn and his sons addressed themselves to the meal with the unconcern of those long habituated to such surroundings. But the cannibal, whose fear was still palpable in his features and members, ate only a few scant mouthfuls, and these at the direct prompting of Vacharn, who appeared very solicitous of his guest’s appetite. Blood, in two heavy rills, ran unceasingly down his bosom from his wounded shoulders, and fell at last on the stone flags with an audible dripping. But of this, in his sore terror, he seemed unaware.

Finally, at the urging of Vacharn, who spoke to him in the cannibal’s own language, he was persuaded to drink from a cup of wine that had long stood before him untasted. This wine, Yadar perceived, was not the same that had been served to the rest of the company, being of a violet color, dark as the nightshade’s blossom, while the other wine was a poppy red. Hardly had the man tasted it, when he sank back in his chair with the appearance of one smitten helpless by palsy. The wine-cup, rilling the remnant of its contents, was still clutched in his rigid fingers; there was no movement, no trembling of his limbs; and his eyes were wide open and staring, as if consciousness still remained within him.

A dire suspicion sprang up in Yadar, and no longer could he eat the food and drink the wine of the necromancers. And much was he puzzled by the actions of Vacharn and Vokal and Uldulla, who, abstaining likewise, turned in their chairs and peered steadfastly at a certain portion of the floor behind Vacharn, between the table and the hall’s inner end. Rising a little in his seat, Yadar looked down across the table and saw that all three were staring at a small hole in one of the flagstones, which he had not hitherto perceived. The hole was such as might be inhabited by some tiny animal: but Yadar could not surmise the nature of a beast that burrowed in solid granite.

Now, in a loud clear voice, Vacharn spoke the single word, “Esrit,” as if calling the name of one that he wished to summon. Not long thereafter, two little sparks of fire appeared in the darkness of the hole, and from it sprang a creature having somewhat the size and likeness of a weasel, but even longer and thinner of body. The fur of the creature was a rusted black, and its paws were like tiny hairless hands; and its beaded eyes of flaming fulvous yellow seemed to hold the malign wisdom and malevolence of a demon. Swiftly, with writhing movements that gave it the air of a furred serpent, it ran forward beneath the chair occupied by the cannibal, and began to drink greedily the pool of blood that had dripped down on the floor from his wounds.

Then, while horror fastened upon the heart of Yadar, it leapt to the knees of the huge savage, and thence to his left shoulder, where the deepest wound had been inflicted. And there the thing applied itself to the still bleeding cut, from which it sucked in the fashion of a weasel; and the blood ceased to flow down on the man’s body. And the man stirred not in his chair; but his eyes still widened, slowly, with a horrible glaring, till the balls were isled in livid white; and his lips fell slackly apart, showing teeth that were strong and pointed as those of a shark.

The necromancers had resumed their eating, with eyes attentive on the small bloodthirsty monster; and it came to Yadar that this was the other guest expected by Vacharn. Whether the thing was an actual weasel, or a sorcerer’s familiar, he knew not: but anger followed upon his horror before the plight of the cannibal; and, drawing a sword he had carried through all his travels and voyagings, he sprang to his feet and would have tried to kill the monster. But Vacharn described in the air a peculiar sign with his forefinger; and it seemed that the prince’s arm was suspended in mid-stroke, and his fingers became weak as those of a newborn babe, and the sword fell from his hand, ringing loudly on the dais. Thereafter, as if by the unspoken will of Vacharn, he was constrained to seat himself again at the table.

Insatiable, to all appearance, was the thirst of the weasel-like creature: for, after many minutes had gone by in that hall of abominations, it continued to suck the blood of the savage. And from moment to moment the man’s mighty thews became strangely shrunken, and the bones and taut sinews showed starkly beneath the wrinkling folds of skin. His face was like the chapless face of death, his limbs were lean as those of an old mummy: but the thing that battened upon him had increased in girth only so much as a stoat increases by sucking the blood of some farmyard fowl.

By this token, Yadar knew that the thing was indeed a demon, and was no doubt the familiar of Vacharn. Entranced with terror, he sat regarding it, till the creature dropped from the dry skin and bones of the cannibal, and ran with an evil writhing and slithering to its hole in the flagstone.

Weird was the life that now began for Yadar in the house of the necromancers. Upon him there rested by day and night the malign thralldom that had overpowered him during that first supper, and he moved as one who could not wholly awake from some benumbing dream. It seemed that his volition was in some way controlled by those masters of the living dead. But, more than this, he was held by the old enchantment of his love for Dalili: though the love had now turned to a spell of despair.

He ate at the table of the necromancers, and slept in a chamber adjoining that of Vacharn: a chamber unlocked, and without tangible bars to hinder his going. Dully he foresaw the fate designed for him: since Vacharn spoke seldom except with grim ironies, referring to the doom of the cannibal, and of the thirst of the weasel-like familiar, whose name was Esrit. And he learned that Esrit had undertaken to serve Vacharn for a certain term, receiving in guerdon thereof, at the full of each moon, the blood of a living man chosen for redoubtable strength and valor. And it was clear to Yadar that, in default of some miracle, or sorcery beyond that of the necromancers, his days of life were limited by the moon’s period. For, other than himself and the masters, there was no person in all that mansion who had not already passed through the bitter gates of death, thereby becoming unacceptable to Esrit.

Lonely was the house, standing far apart from all neighbors. Other necromancers dwelt on the shores of Naat, served mainly by the people they had evoked from drowning after shipwreck; but betwixt these and the hosts of Yadar there was little intercourse. And beyond the wild mountains that divided the isle, there dwelt only certain tribes of anthropophagi, who warred perpetually with each other in the black woods of pine and cypress, but feared the necromancers and their thralls.

The dead were housed in deep catacomb-like caves of the cliff behind the mansion, lying all night in rows of stone coffins, and coming forth in daily resurrection to do the tasks ordained by the masters. Some were compelled to till the rocky gardens on a slope sequestered from sea-wind; others tended the sable goats and cattle of the isle; and still others were sent out as divers for pearls in the sea that raged and ravened prodigiously, not to be dared by living swimmers, on the bleak atolls and headlands horned with granite. Of such pearls, Vacharn had amassed a mighty store through years exceeding the common span of life. And sometimes, in a ship that sailed contrary to the Black River, he or one of his sons would voyage to Zothique with certain of the dead for crew, and would trade the pearls for such things as their magic was unable to raise up in Naat.

Strange it was to Yadar, to see the companions of his voyage passing to and fro with the other liches, recognizing him not, or greeting him only in mindless echo of his own salutations. And bitter it was, yet never without a dim, sorrowful sweetness, to behold Dalili and speak with her, trying vainly to revive the lost ardent love in a heart that had gone fathom-deep into oblivion and had not returned therefrom. And always, with a desolate yearning, he seemed to grope toward her across a gulf more terrible than the stemless tide that poured forever about the Isle of the Necromancers.

Dalili, who had swum from childhood in the sunken lakes of Zyra, was among those enforced to dive for pearls in that ebon water. Often Yadar would accompany her to the shore and await her return from the mad surges; and at whiles he was tempted to fling himself after her, and find, if such were possible, the peace of very death. This he would surely have done: but, amid the eerie wilderments of his plight, and the grey webs of sorcery woven about him, it seemed that his old strength and resolution were wholly lacking.

Now, night by night, the moon was sharpened above the craggy isle, and it became a heavy scythe and then a thin scimitar. And, after the interlunar dusk, it broadened from a frail saber to a sickle, and, digit by digit, swelled toward the gibbous orb and the plenilune. Yadar, supping with the sorcerers as it changed, was not unregardful of that burrow in the granite flag, from which the weasel-demon, Esrit, had slithered forth to suck the blood of the cannibal. But, beneath his extreme languor and lethargy, he hardly feared that verminous death which would dart upon him at the time of the moon’s fullness.

One day, toward sunset-time, as the month drew to its end, Vokal and Uldulla approached the prince where he stood waiting on a rock-walled beach while Dalili dived after pearls far out in the torrent waters. Speaking no word, they beckoned to him with furtive signs; and Yadar, vaguely curious as to their intent, suffered them to lead him from the beach and by perilous paths that wound from crag to crag above the curving seashore. Ere the fall of darkness, they came suddenly to a small landlocked harbor whose existence had been heretofore unsuspected by the nomad. In that placid bay, beneath the deep umbrage of the isle, there rode a galley with somber purple sails, resembling the ship that Yadar had discerned moving steadily toward Zothique against the full tide of the Black River.

Yadar was much bewondered, nor could he divine why they had brought him to the hidden harbor, nor the import of their gestures as they pointed out the strange vessel. Then, in a hushed and covert whisper, as if fearing to be overheard in that remote place, Vokal said to him:

“If thou wilt aid my brother and me in the execution of a certain plan which we have conceived, thou shalt have the use of yonder galley in quitting Naat. And with thee, if such be thy desire, thou shalt take the girl Dalili whom thou lovest, together with certain of the dead mariners for oarsmen. Favored by the powerful gales which our enchantments will evoke for thee, thou shalt sail against the Black River and return to Zothique… But if thou helpest us not, then shall the weasel Esrit suck thy blood, till the last, least member of thy body has been emptied thereof; and Dalili shall remain forever as the bondslave of Vacharn, toiling for his avarice by day in the dark waters… and perchance serving his lust by night.”

At the promise of Vokal, Yadar felt something of hope and manhood revive within him, and it seemed that the baleful sorcery of Vacharn was lifted from his mind; and an indignation against Vacharn was awakened in him by Vokal’s hintings. And he said quickly: “I will aid thee in thy plan, whatever it may be, if such aid is within my power to give.”

Then, with many fearful glances about and behind him, Uldulla took up the furtive whispering.

“It is our thought that Vacharn has lived beyond the allotted term, and has imposed his authority upon us for an excessive length of years. We, his sons, grow old: and we deem it no more than rightful that we should inherit the stored treasures and the magical supremacy of our father ere age has wholly debarred us from their enjoyment. Therefore we seek thy help in the slaying of the necromancer.”

Though Yadar was somewhat surprised, it came to him after brief reflection that the killing of the necromancer should be held in all ways a righteous deed, and one to which he could lend himself without demeaning his valor or his manhood. So he said without demur: “I will aid thee.”

Then, seeming greatly emboldened by Yadar’s consent, Vokal spoke again in his turn, saying: “This thing must be accomplished ere tomorrow’s eve, which will bring a full-rounded moon from the Black River upon Naat, and will call the weasel-demon Esrit from his burrow. And tomorrow’s forenoon is the only time when we can take Vacharn unaware in his chamber. During those hours, as is his wont, he will peer entranced on a magic mirror that yields visions of the outer sea, and the ships sailing over the sea, and the lands lying beyond. And we must slay him before the mirror, striking swiftly and surely ere he awakens from his trance.”

At the hour set for the deed, Vokal and Uldulla came to Yadar where he stood awaiting them in the mansion’s outer hall. Each of the brothers bore in his right hand a long and coldly glittering scimitar; and Vokal also carried in his left a like weapon, which he offered to the prince, explaining that these scimitars had been tempered to a muttering of lethal runes, and inscribed afterward with unspeakable deathspells. Yadar, preferring his own sword, declined the wizard weapon; and, delaying no more, the three went hastily and with all possible stealth toward Vacharn’s chamber.

The house was empty at that hour, for the dead had all gone forth to their labors; nor was there any whisper or shadow of those invisible beings, whether sprites of the air or mere phantoms, that waited upon Vacharn and served him in sundry ways. In silence and, as they thought, wholly unperceived, the three came to the portals of the chamber, where entrance was barred only by a black arras wrought with the signs of night in silver, and bordered all about with a repetition of the fives names of the archfiend Thasaidon in scarlet thread. The brothers paused before the arras, as if fearing to lift it; but Yadar, unhesitating, held it aside and passed into the chamber; and the twain followed him quickly as if for shame of their poltroonery.

Large and high vaulted was the room, and lit by a dim window looking forth between unpruned cypresses toward the black sea. No flames arose from the myriad lamps to assist that baffled daylight; and shadows brimmed the place like a spectral fluid, through which the vessels of wizardry used by Vacharn, the great censers and alembics and braziers, seemed to quiver and move like animate things. A little past the room’s center, his back to the doorway, Vacharn sat on an ebon trivet before the mirror of clairvoyance, which was wrought from electrum in the form of a huge delta, and was held obliquely aloft by a serpentining copper arm. The mirror flamed brightly in the shadow, as if lit by some splendor of unknown source; and the intruders were dazzled by glimpsings of its radiance as they went forward.

It seemed that Vacharn had indeed been overcome by the wonted trance, for he peered rigidly into the mirror, immobile as a seated mummy. The brothers held back, while Yadar, thinking them close behind him, stole toward the necromancer with lifted blade. As he drew nearer, he perceived that Vacharn held a great scimitar across his knees; and deeming that the sorcerer was perhaps forewarned, Yadar ran quickly up behind him and aimed a powerful stroke at his neck, meaning to hew off the head with that single blow. But, even while he aimed, his eyes were wholly blinded by the strange brightness of the mirror, as though a sun had blazed into them from its depth across the shoulder of Vacharn; and the blade swerved and bit slantingly into the collar-bone, so that the necromancer, though sorely wounded, was saved from decapitation.

Now it seemed likely that Vacharn had foreknown the attempt to slay him, and had thought to do battle with his assailers when they came, and kill the three without injury to himself, by virtue of his superiority in swordsmanship and in magic. But, sitting at the mirror in pretended trance, he had no doubt been overpowered against his will by the weird brilliancy; and was aroused from that mantic slumber only by the lethal biting of Yadar’s sword through flesh and bone.

Fierce and swift as a wounded tiger, he leapt from the trivet, swinging his scimitar aloft as he turned upon Yadar. The prince, still blinded, could neither strike again nor avoid the stroke of Vacharn; and the scimitar clove deeply into his right shoulder, and he fell mortally wounded and lay with his head upheld a little against the base of the snakish copper arm that supported the mirror.

Lying there, with his life ebbing slowly, he beheld how Vokal, who stood somewhat in advance of Uldulla, sprang forward as if with the desperation of one who sees imminent death, and hewed mightily into the neck of Vacharn ere the sorcerer could turn. The head, almost sundered from the body, toppled and hung by a strip of flesh and skin: yet Vacharn, reeling, did not fall or die at once, as any mortal man should have done: but, still animated by the wizard power within him, he ran about the chamber, striking great blows at the parricides. Blood gushed from his neck like a fountain as he ran; and his head swung to and fro like a monstrous pendulum on his breast. And all his blows went wild because he could no longer see to direct them, and his sons avoided him agilely, hewing into him oftentimes as he went past. And sometimes he stumbled over the fallen Yadar, or struck the mirror of electrum with his sword, making it ring like a deep bell.

And sometimes the battle passed beyond sight of the dying prince, toward the dim window that looked seaward; and he heard the strange crashings, as if some of the magic furniture were shattered by the strokes of the warlock; and there were loud breathings from the sons of Vacharn, and the dull sound of blows that went home as they still pursued their father. And anon the fight returned before Yadar, and he watched it with dimming eyes.

Dire beyond telling was that combat, and Vokal and Uldulla panted like spent runners ere the end. But, after a while, the power seemed to fail in Vacharn with the draining of his life-blood. He staggered from side to side as he ran, and his paces halted, and his blows became enfeebled. His raiment hung upon him in blood-soaked rags from the slashings of his sons, and certain of his members were half sundered, and his whole body was hacked and overscored like an executioner’s block. At last, with a dexterous blow, Vokal severed the thin strip by which the head still depended; and the head dropped and rolled with many reboundings about the floor.

Then, with a wild tottering, as if still fain to stand erect, the body of Vacharn toppled down and lay thrashing like a great, headless fowl, heaving itself up and dropping back again, incessantly. Never, with all its rearings, did the body quite regain its feet: but the scimitar was still held firmly in the right hand, and the corpse laid blindly about it, striking from the floor with sidelong slashes, or slicing down as it rose half-way to a standing posture. And the head still rolled, unresting, about the chamber, and maledictions came from its mouth in a pipy voice no louder than that of a child.

At this, Yadar saw that Vokal and Uldulla drew back, as if somewhat aghast; and they turned toward the door, manifestly intending to quit the room. But before Vokal, going first, had lifted the portal-arras, there slithered beneath its folds the long, black, snakish body of the weasel-familiar, Esrit. And the familiar launched itself in air, reaching at one bound the throat of Vokal; and it clung there with teeth fastened in his flesh, sucking his blood steadily, while he staggered about the room and strove in vain to tear it away with maddened fingers.

Uldulla, it seemed, would have made some attempt to kill the creature; for he cried out, adjuring Vokal to stand firm, and raised his sword as if waiting for a chance to strike at the weasel-thing. But Vokal seemed to hear him not, or was too frenzied to obey his adjuration. And at that instant the head of Vacharn, in its rolling, bounded against Uldulla’s feet; and the head, snarling ferociously, caught the hem of his robe with its teeth and hung there as he sprang back in panic fright. And though he sliced wildly at the head with his scimitar, the teeth refused to relinquish their hold. So he dropped his garment, and leaving it there with the still pendant head of his father, he fled naked from the chamber. And even as Uldulla fled, the life departed from Yadar, and he saw and heard no more…

Dimly, from the depths of oblivion, Yadar beheld the flaring of remote lights, and heard the chanting of a far voice. It seemed that he swam upward from black seas toward the voice and the lights, and he saw as if through a thin, watery film the face of Uldulla standing above him, and the fuming of strange vessels in the chamber of Vacharn. And it seemed that Uldulla said to him: “Arise from death, and be obedient in all things to me the master.”

So, in answer to the unholy rites and incantations of necromancy, Yadar arose to such life as was possible for a resurrected lich. And he walked again, with the black gore of his wound in a great clot on his shoulder and breast, and made reply to Uldulla in the fashion of the living dead. Vaguely, and as matters of no import, he remembered something of his death and the circumstances preceding it; and vainly, with filmed eyes, in the wrecked chamber, he looked for the sundered head and body of Vacharn, and for Vokal and the weasel-demon.

Then it seemed that Uldulla said to him: “Follow me;” and he went forth with the necromancer into the light of the red, swollen moon that had soared from the Black River upon Naat. There, on the fell before the mansion, was a vast heap of ashes where coals glowed and glared like living eyes in the moonshine. Uldulla stood in contemplation before the heap; and Yadar stood beside him, knowing not that he gazed on the burnt-out pyre of Vacharn and Vokal, which the dead slaves had built and fired at Uldulla’s direction.

Then, with shrill, eerie wailings, a mighty wind came suddenly from the sea, and lifting all the ashes and sparks in a great, swirling cloud, it swept them upon Yadar and the necromancer. The twain could hardly stand against that wind, and their hair and beards and garments were filled with the leavings of the pyre, and both were blinded thereby. Then the wind went on, sweeping the cloud of ashes over the mansion and into its doorways and windows; and through all its apartments. And for many days thereafter, little swirls of ash rose up like phantoms under the feet of those who passed along the halls; and though there was a daily plying of besoms by the dead at Uldulla’s injunction, it seemed that the place was never again wholly clean of those ashes…

Regarding Uldulla, there remains little enough to be told: for his lordship over the dead was a brief thing. Abiding always alone, except for those liches who attended him, and the ashes that still haunted the mansion, he became possessed by a weird melancholy that turned quickly toward madness. No longer could he conceive the aims and objects of life; and the languor of death rose up around him like a black, stealthy sea, full of soft murmurs and shadow-like arms that were fain to draw him doomward. Soon he came to envy the dead, and to deem their lot desirable above any other. So, carrying that scimitar he had used at the slaying of Vacharn, he went into his father’s chamber, which he had not entered since the raising up of Prince Yadar. There, beside the sun-bright mirror of divinations, he disembowelled himself, and fell amid the dust and the cobwebs that had gathered heavily over all. And, since there was no other necromancer to bring him back even to a semblance of life, he lay rotting and undisturbed forever after.

But in the gardens of Vacharn the dead people still labored, heedless of Uldulla’s passing; and they still kept the goats and cattle, and dived for pearls in the dark, torrent main, even as before.

And Yadar, who had been called from nothingness to a dim, crepuscular state of being, dwelt and toiled with the other liches. He remembered but vaguely the various events that were antecedent to his death; and the fiery days of his youth in Zyra were less than ashes.

The promise made to him by the sons of Vacharn, and his hope of escaping with Dalili, had now lost their meaning; and he knew the death of Uldulla only as the vanishing of a shadow. Yet, with a ghostly yearning, he was still drawn to Dalili; and he followed her during the day, and felt a ghostly comfort in her nearness; and through the night-time he lay beside her, and she was a dim sweetness in his shadowy dreams. The quick despair that had racked him aforetime, and the long torments of desire and separation, were as things faded and forgot; and he shared with Dalili a shadowy love and a dim contentment.

A. Merritt, known as “The Lord of Fantasy” during his lifetime, was one of the most popular authors to appear in Argosy All-Story Magazine. However, during the mid-1920s the direction of Argosy veered away from science fiction and fantasy, instead preferring to focus on Westerns. As a result of this policy Merritt’s fantastic tale “The Woman of the Wood” was rejected. Rather than let it go to waste, Merritt submitted it to Weird Tales. Editor Farnsworth Wright accepted it, and after its publication in the August 1926 issue, it generated a greater amount of favorable reader mail than any other tale to appear in the magazine. Recently a manuscript of a draft surfaced which contained an introduction which was omitted from all versions that made it to print. I thought it would make a perfect inclusion in Renegade Swords. While it would be a stretch to call “Woman of the Wood” sword and sorcery, it does contain violent action as well as a mesmerizing atmosphere. Plus, it’s one of my favorite short stories of all time! I’m proud to provide Merritt fans a chance to read this previously unpublished version.

The Woman of the Wood

By A. Merritt

McKay is a chemist of rather outstanding reputation here and abroad; and member of any number of solemn societies. His discoveries in the little known field of colloidal action have brought him high honors; thousands of men who went through the World War owe their lives to his formula for—

Well, that is as far as I care to go in identifying him, because McKay is not his name. You would have known him in a moment if I had finished that last sentence. But since what I am about to tell is his confession of murder, obviously it would be no friendly act to identify him any more definitely. And my friendship for McKay is very real.

We met in the North Woods while I was botanizing in the Chateaugay region. He wandered into my camp at Ragged Lake, and soon he was constant companion in my tramps about the woods. He had been at it a bit too hard in his laboratory, he told me, and had been ordered by the doctor to rest. Soon he gave up his own camp to share my much more isolated one.

The thing about McKay that most aroused my interest was his extraordinary sensitivity to and love for the trees. To him they were no mere trunks and branches and leaves. It was not very long before I realized that each tree was to him a personality; that it reflected in his mind and image, if not human, at least semi-human. McKay was acutely aware of differences in character even among the same species of trees; that pine was benevolent and jolly; that one austere and monkish; there stood a swaggering bravo and there dwelt a sage wrapped in green meditation; that birch was a wanton—that near her was virginal, still adream.

I would look up from the study of some mosses to find him absorbed in contemplation of a great oak—and it was as though between the two were passing mute communications; understanding, certainly.

He would bind with a surgeon’s care the broken bough of a sapling, or, with that same surgeon’s care, rid a larch of cancerous fungus. There was nothing maudlin about any of it. I grew to understand that McKay recognized and responded to some life of the trees that to me was a closed book; and that because that recognition was unique among men, so, necessarily, were his reactions to it.

He had his own theory—material because of a certain oblique light it throws upon the mystery that made him murderer.

McKay regarded life as a force, an energy, universal as electricity or magnetism. But the life force, he thought, differed from all others inasmuch as it possessed the quality or awareness and particularly of self-awareness—in a word, consciousness. Consciousness was an integral part of the life force; could not be separated from it. Therefore everything that had life was conscious. Not only of itself but of what went on about it.

And every form of matter, believed McKay, everything from rock to man, was dwelling place and conductor of this conscious energy which we name life.

Rocks lived and had awareness, that is consciousness; a sluggish awareness it might be to us—but not necessarily to the rock. So had sand and water and metals and trees. The same life force dwelt within all, only it flowed through all variant forms of matter with varying vibrations, spoke with tongues not to be understood one by the other.

Life expression in trees, thought McKay, was highly complex; might even impinge upon and perhaps enter a dimension wholly unknown to man. Still tree had many points in common with humanity. Trees, like men, had their friendships and their enmities; like men they loved and hated; they had their comedies and their tragedies; their great wars; tree empires had risen and fallen. They were astounding chemists, making sun rays and air in the laboratories of their leaves the mysterious chlorophyll which is the basic stuff on which all organic life feeds.

“In my laboratory,” he would say, “it takes a highly complicated apparatus and a heat of 1300 degrees Centigrade to separate the carbon and oxygen atoms of carbon dioxide. But the tiny laboratories in the cell city of a leaf do it from sunrise to sunset with no difficulty at all. I wish I knew how.”

The life force in the trees, McKay thought, could become manifest in human or partly human shape to a few humans—hence the legends of dryads, tree maids and tree people in the folk memory of every race.

By some odd chance McKay was one whose red life had point of contact with the green life of the woods; could perceive dimly their aspect in that unknown dimension that was part their home; could understand something of their tongue, even.

He was aware of them, as he put it.

“And they—are they aware of you?” I asked him.

So it was that he told me of his crime.

McKay sat on the balcony of the little inn that squatted like a brown gnome among the pines on the eastern shore of the lake. It was a small and lonely lake high up in the Vosges; and yet, lonely is not just the word with which to tag its spirit; rather was it aloof; withdrawn. The mountains came down on every side, making a great tree-lined bowl that seemed, when McKay first saw it, to be filled with the still wine of peace.

The war had just ended; McKay, weary to the bone and weary to wanness in soul, had felt that peace reach out to him as his car slid down into the vast green bowl; felt it reach out to him and caress and quiet him as the pass through which he had come closed behind him.

He seemed to drift like a falling leaf through the clustered woods, to be cradled by gentle hands of the trees.

He had stopped at the little gnome of an inn, and there he had lingered on, day after day, week after week.

The trees had nursed him; soft whisperings of leaves, slow chant of the needled pines, had first deadened, then driven from him the reechoing clamor of the war, its groaning and its wailing. The open wounds of his spirit had closed under their green healing; had closed and become scars; and then even the scars had been covered and buried, as the scars on Earth’s breast are covered and buried beneath the falling leaves of Autumn. The trees had laid green healing hands on his eyes, banishing the pictures of war. He had sucked strength from the green breasts of the hills.

As strength flowed back to him and body and spirit healed, McKay had grown steadily aware that the place was troubled; that its tranquility was not perfect; that there was ferment of fear within it.

It was as though the trees had waited until he himself had become whole before they made this known to him. But now it was as though they were trying to tell him something; there was a shrillness of apprehension, of anger, in the whispering of the leaves, the needled chanting of the pines.

And it was this that had kept McKay at the inn—a definite consciousness of appeal, consciousness of something wrong—something wrong that he was being appealed to right. He strained his ears to catch words in the rustling branches, words that trembled on the brink of his human understanding, striving for articulateness.

Never did they cross that brink.

Gradually he had oriented himself, had focused himself, so he believed, to the point of the valley’s unease.

On all the shores of the lake there were but two dwellings. One was the inn, and around the inn the trees clustered protectively; confidingly; friendly. It was as though they had not only accepted it, but had made it part of themselves.

Not so was it of the other habitation. Once it had been the hunting lodge of long dead lords; now it was half ruined, forlorn. It lay across the lake almost exactly opposite the inn and stood back upon the slope a half mile from the shore. Once too there had been fat fields around it and a fair orchard.

The forest had marched down upon them. Here and there in the fields scattered pines and poplars stood like soldiers guarding some outpost; scouting parties of saplings lurked among the gaunt and broken fruit trees. But the forest had not had its way unchecked; ragged stumps showed where those who dwelt in the old lodge had cut down the invaders, blackened patches of the woodland showed where they had fired the woods.

Here was the conflict he had sensed. Here the green folk of the forest were both menaced and menacing; at war.

The lodge was a fortress beleaguered by the woods, a fortress whose garrison sallied forth with axe and torch to take their toll of the besiegers.

Yet McKay sensed a slow, inexorable pressing on of the forest; he saw it as a green army ever filling the gaps in its enclosing ranks, shooting its seeds into the cleared places, sending its roots out to sap them; and armed always with a crushing patience, a patience drawn from the stone breasts of the eternal hills.

He had the impression of constant regard, of watchfulness, as though night and day the forest kept its myriads of eyes upon the lodge; inexorably, not to be swerved from its purpose.

He had spoken of this impression to the innkeeper and his wife, and they had looked at him oddly.

“Old Polleau does not love the trees, no,” the old man had said. “No, nor do his two sons. They do not love the trees—and very certainly the trees do not love them.”

Between the lodge and the shore, marching down to the verge of the lake was a singularly beautiful little coppice of silver birches and firs. The coppice stretched for perhaps a quarter of a mile, was not more than a hundred feet or two in depth, and it was not alone the beauty of its trees but their curious grouping that aroused McKay’s interest so vividly. At each end of the coppice were a dozen or more of the glistening needled firs, not clustered but spread out as though in open marching order; at widely spaced intervals along its other two sides paced single firs. The birches, slender and delicate, grew within the guard of these sturdier trees, yet not so thickly as to crowd each other.

To McKay the silver birches were for all the world like some gay caravan of lovely demoiselles under the protection of debonair knights. With that odd other sense of his he saw the birches as delectable damsels, merry and laughing—the pines as lovers, troubadours in their green needled mail. And when the winds blew and the crests of the trees bent under them, it was as though dainty demoiselles picked up fluttering, leafy skirts, bent leafy hoods and danced while the knights of the firs drew closer around them, locked arms with theirs and danced with them to the roaring horns of the winds. Almost at such times he heard sweet laughter from the birches, shoutings from the firs.

Of all the trees in that place McKay loved best this little wood; had rowed across and rested in its shade, had dreamed there and dreaming, had heard again elfin echoes of the sweet laughter; eyes closed, had heard mysterious whisperings and the sound of dancing feet light as falling leaves; had taken dream draught of that gaiety which was the soul of the little wood.

And two days ago he had seen Polleau and his two sons. McKay had been dreaming in the coppice all that afternoon. As dusk began to fall he had reluctantly arisen and begun the row back to the inn. When he had been a few hundred feet from shore three men had come out from the trees and had stood watching him—three grim, powerful men taller than the average French peasant.

He had called a friendly greeting to them, but they had not answered it; stood there, scowling. Then as he bent again to his oars, one of the sons had raised a hatchet and had driven it savagely into the trunk of a slim birch beside him. McKay thought he heard a thin wailing cry from the stricken tree, a sigh from all the little wood.

He felt as though the keen edge had bitten into his own flesh.

“Stop that!” he had cried, “Stop it, damn you!”

For answer the son had struck again—and never had McKay seen hate etched so deep as on that face as he struck. Cursing, a killing rage in heart, McKay had swung the boat around, raced back to shore. He had heard the hatchet strike again and again and, close now to the shore, had heard a crackling and over it once more the thin, high wailing. He had turned to look.

The birch was tottering, was falling. But as it had fallen he had seen a curious thing. Close beside it grew one of the firs, and, as the smaller tree crashed over, it dropped upon the fir like a fainting maid in the arms of a lover. And as it lay and trembled there, one of the great branches of the fir slipped from under it, whipped out and smote the hatchet wielder a crushing blow upon the head, sending him to earth.

It had been, of course, only the chance blow of a bough, bent by pressure of the fallen tree and then released as that tree slipped down. But there had been such suggestion of conscious action in the branch’s recoil, so much of bitter anger in it, so much, in truth, had it been like the vengeful blow of a man that McKay had felt an eerie prickling of his scalp, his heart had missed its beat.

For a moment Polleau and the standing son had stared at the sturdy fir with the silvery birch lying up on its green breast and folded in, shielded by, its needled boughs as though—again the swift impression came to McKay—as though it were a wounded maid stretched on breast, in arms, of knightly lover. For a long moment father and son had stared.

Then, still wordless, but with that same acid hatred in both their faces, they had stooped and picked up the other and with his arms around the neck of each had borne him limply away.

McKay, sitting on the balcony of the inn that morning, went over and over that scene; realized more and more clearly the human aspect of fallen birch and clasping fir, and the conscious deliberateness of the fir’s blow. And during the two days that had elapsed since then, he had felt the unease of the trees increase, their whispering appeal become more urgent.

What were they trying to tell him? What did they want him to do?

Troubled, he stared across the lake, trying to pierce the mists that hung over it and hid the opposite shore. And suddenly it seemed that he heard the coppice calling him, felt it pull the point of his attention toward it irresistibly, as the lodestone swings and holds the compass needle.

The coppice called him, bade him come to it.

Instantly McKay obeyed the command; he arose and walked down to the boat landing; he stepped into his skiff and began to row across the lake. As his oars touched the water his trouble fell from him. In its place flowed peace and a curious exaltation.

The mist was thick upon the lake. There was no breath of wind, yet the mist billowed and drifted, shook and curtained under the touch of unfelt airy hands.

They were alive—the mists; they formed themselves into fantastic palaces whose opalescent facades he flew; they built themselves into hills and valleys and circled plains whose floors were rippling silk. Tiny rainbows gleamed out among them, and upon the water prismatic patches shone and spread like spilled wine of opals. He had the illusion of vast distances—the hills of mist were real mountains, the valleys between them were not illusory. He was a colossus cleaving though some elfin world. A trout broke, and it was like Leviathan leaping from the fathomless deep. Around the arc of its body rainbows interlaced and then dissolved into rain of flittering gems—diamonds and azure flame of sapphires, flame-hearted rubies and pearls with souls of cream and rose. The fish vanished, diving cleanly without a sound; the gemmed bows vanished with it; only a little irised whirlpool swirled for an instant where trout and flashing arc had been.

Nowhere was there sound. He let his oars drop and leaned forward, drifting.

In the silence, before him and around him, he felt opening the myriad gateways of an unknown world.

And suddenly he heard the sound of voices, many voices; faint at first and murmurous, louder they became, swiftly, women’s voices, sweet and lilting, and mingled with them the deeper tones of men. Voices that rose and fell in a wild, gay chanting through whose joyesse ran undertones of sorrow and of wrath—as though faery weavers threaded through silk spun of sunbeams black strands dipped in the black of graves and crimson strands stained in the red of raging hearts.

He drifted on, scarce daring to breathe lest even that faint sound break the elfin song. Closer it rang and clearer; and now he became aware that the speed of his boat was increasing, that it was no longer drifting; as though the little waves on each side were pushing him ahead with soft and noiseless palms. His boat grounded, and as its keel rustled along over the smooth pebbles of the beach the song ceased.

McKay half arose and peered before him. The mists were thicker here but he could see the outlines of the coppice. It was like looking at it through many curtains of fine gauze, and its trees seemed shifting, ethereal, unreal. And moving among the trees were figures that threaded among the boles and flitted round them in rhythmic measures, like the shadows of leafy boughs swaying to some cadenced wind.

He stepped ashore. The mists dropped behind him, shutting off all sight of lake; and as they dropped McKay lost all sense of strangeness, all feeling of having entered some unfamiliar world. Rather was it as though he had returned to one he had once known well and that had been long lost to him.

The rhythmic flittings had ceased; there was now no movement as there was no sound among the trees—yet he felt the little woods abrim with watching life. McKay tried to speak; there was a spell of silence on his mouth.

“You called me. I have come to listen to you—to help you if I can.”

The words formed within his mind, but utter them he could not. Over and over he tried, desperately; the words seemed to die before his lips could give them life.

A pillar of mist swirled forward and halted, eddying, half an arm length away. And suddenly out of it peered a woman’s face, eyes level with his own. A woman’s face—yes, but McKay staring into these strange eyes probing his knew that woman’s though it seemed it was that of no human breed. They were without pupils, the irises deer large and of the soft green of deep forest dells; within them sparkled tiny star points of light like mores in a moon beam. The eyes were wide and set far apart beneath a broad, low brow over which was piled braid upon braid of hair of palest gold, braids that seemed spun of shining ashes of gold. Her nose was small and straight, her mouth scarlet and exquisite. The face was oval, tapering to a delicately pointed chin.

Beautiful was that face, but its beauty was an alien one; elfin. For long moments the strange eyes thrust their gaze deep into his. Then out of the mist two slender white arms stole, the hands long, the fingers tapering. The tapering fingers touched his ears.

“He shall hear,” whispered the red lips.

Immediately from all about him a cry arose; in it was the whispering and rustling of the leaves beneath the breath of the winds, the shrilling of the harp strings of the boughs, the laughter of hidden brooks, the shoutings of waters flinging themselves down into deep and rocky pools—the voices of the woods made articulate.

“He shall hear!” they cried.

The long white fingers rested on his lips, and their touch was cool as bark of birch on cheek after some long upward climb through forest; cool and subtly sweet.

“He shall speak,” whispered the scarlet lips.

“He shall speak!” answered the wood voices again, as though in litany.

“He shall see,” whispered the woman and the cool fingers touched his eyes.

“He shall see!” echoed the wood voices.

The mists that had hidden the coppice from McKay wavered, thinned and were gone. In their place was a limpid, translucent, palely green aether, faintly luminous—as though he stood within some clear wan emerald. His feet pressed a golden moss spangled with tiny starry bluets. Fully revealed before him was the woman of the strange eyes and the face of elfin beauty. He dwelt for a moment upon the slender shoulders, the firm small tip-tilted breasts, the willow litheness of her body. From neck to knees a smock covered her, sheer and silken and delicate as though spun of cobwebs; through it her body gleamed as though fire of the young Spring moon ran in her veins.

He looked beyond her. There upon the golden mosses were other women like her, many of them; they stared at him with the same wide-set green eyes in which danced the clouds of sparkling moonbeam motes; like her they were crowned with glistening, pallidly golden hair; like hers too were their oval faces with the pointed chins and perilous elfin beauty. Only where she stared at him gravely, measuring him, weighing him—there were those of these her sisters whose eyes were mocking; and those whose eyes called to him with a weirdly tingling allure, their mouths athirst; those whose eyes looked upon him with curiosity alone and those whose great eyes pleaded with him, prayed to him.

Within that pellucid, greenly luminous air McKay was abruptly aware that the trees of the coppice had a place. Only now they were spectral indeed. They were like white shadows cast athwart a glaucous screen. Trunk and bough, twig and leaf, they arose around him and they were as though etched in air by phantom craftsmen—thin, viveous, unsubstantial; they were ghost trees rooted in another space.

Another space—another dimension? Was that it? Had his eyes and his ears been opened to, his speech attuned to—another space? Another dimension? Was that why those flitting shadows among the mist-wreathed birches and firs of the coppice had taken on substantiality—the trees themselves lost it? Had that litany of scarlet lips and answering wood voices bridged some unguessed abyss of life? Bridged the abyss between the red human life and the green life of the trees?

Suddenly he was aware that there were men among the women; men whose eyes were set wide apart as were theirs; as strange and pupilless as were theirs but with irises of brown and blue; men with pointed chins and oval faces, broad shouldered and clad in kirtles of darkest green; swarthy skinned men muscular and strong, with that same lithe grace of the women—and like them of a beauty alien and elfin.

One and all, women and men, they stared at him.

McKay heard a little wailing cry. He turned. There close behind him lay a girl clasped in the arms of one of the swarthy, green-clad men. She lay upon his breast. His eyes were filled with a black flame of wrath, and hers were misted, anguished. For an instant McKay had a glimpse of the birch old Polleau’s son had sent crashing down into the boughs of the fir. He saw birch and fir as immaterial outlines around the man and girl. For an instant girl and man and birch and fir seemed one and the same.

The scarlet-lipped woman touched his shoulder, and the confusion cleared.

“Is it not most sorrowful—is it not most evil that—she—should die?” the woman said. “She withers,” sighed the woman, and in her voice McKay heard a faint rustling as of mournful leaves. “Now is it not pitiful that she wither—our sister who was so young, so slender and so lovely?”

McKay looked again at the girl. The white skin seemed shrunken; the moon-radiance that gleamed through the bodies of the others in hers was dim and pallid; her slim arms hung listlessly; her body drooped. The mouth too was wan and parched, the long and misted green eyes dull. The palely golden hair lusterless, and dry. He looked on slow death—a withering death.

“May the arm that struck her down wither!” said the green-clad man who held her, and in his voice McKay heard a savage strumming as of winter winds through bleak boughs. “May his heart wither and the sun blast him! May the rain and the waters deny him and the winds scourge him!”

“I thirst,” whispered the girl.

There was a stirring among the watching women. One came forward holding a chalice that was like thin leaves turned to green crystal. She paused beside the trunk of one of the spectral trees, reached up and drew down to her a branch. A slim girl with half-frightened, half-resentful eyes glided to her side and threw her arms around the ghostly bole. The woman with the chalice bent the branch and cut it deep with what seemed an arrow-shaped flake of jade and set white teeth in the branch she held. From the wound a faintly opalescent liquid streamed into the chalice. The slim girl whose arms embraced the phantom tree trembled and from her came a little wail of pain. The opalescent liquid slowly filled the cup. When it was filled the woman beside McKay stepped forward and pressed her own long hands around the bleeding branch. She stepped away and McKay saw that the stream had ceased to flow. She touched the trembling girl and unclasped her arms.

“It is healed,” said the woman gently. “And it was your turn, little sister. The wound is healed. Soon you will have forgotten.”

The woman with the chalice knelt and set it to the wan, dry lips of she who was—withering. She drank of it, thirstily, to the last drop. The misty eyes cleared, they sparkled; the lips that had been so parched and pale grew red, the white body gleamed as though the waning light had been fed with new.

“Sing, sisters,” she cried, and shrilly. “Dance for me, sisters!”

Again burst out that chant McKay had heard as he had floated through the mists upon the lake. Now, as then, despite his opened ears he could distinguish no words, but clearly he understood its mingled themes—the joy of Spring’s awakening, rebirth, with the green life streaming singing up through every bough, swelling the buds, burgeoning with tender leaves the branches; the dance of the trees in the scented winds of Spring; the drums of the jubilant rain on leafy hoods; passion of Summer sun pouring its golden flood down upon the trees; the moon passing with stately step and slow and green hands stretching up to her and drawing from her breast milk of silver fire; riot of wild gay winds with their mad pipings and strummings; soft interlacing of boughs, the kiss of amorous leaves—all these and more, much more that McKay could not understand since it dealt with hidden, secret things for which man has no images, were in that chanting.

And all these and more were in the measures, the rhythms of the dancing of those strange, green eyed women and brown skinned men; something incredibly ancient yet young as the speeding moment, something of a world before and beyond man.

McKay listened, McKay watched, lost in wonder, his own world more than half forgotten; his mind meshed in a web of green sorcery.

The woman beside him touched his arm. She pointed to the girl.

“Yet she withers,” she said. “And not all our life, if we poured it through her lips, could save her.”

He looked; he saw that the red was draining slowly from the girl’s lips, the luminous life tides waning; the eyes that had been so bright were misting and growing dull once more. Suddenly a great pity and a great rage shook him. He knelt beside her, took her hands in his.

“Take them away! Take away your hands! They burn me!” she moaned.

“He tries to help you,” whispered the green-clad man, gently. But he reached over and drew McKay’s hands away.

“Not so can you help her,” said the woman.

“What can I do?” McKay arose, looking helplessly from one to the other. “What can I do to help?”

The chanting died, the dance stopped. A silence fell and he felt upon him the eyes of all. They were tense—waiting. The woman took his hands. Their touch was cool and sent a strange sweetness sweeping through his veins.

“There are three men yonder,” she said. “They hate us. Soon we shall all be as she is there—withering. They have sworn it, and as they have sworn so will they do. Unless—”

She paused.

“Three men?”—dimly it came to him that she must mean Polleau and his two strong sons—“Three men,” he repeated, stupidly. “But you are many. What can three men do against these stalwart men of yours?”

“No,” she shook her head. “There is nothing we can do. Once we were gay. Now night and day—we fear. And they mean to destroy us. Our kin have warned us. Those three have blade and flame. And against blade and flame we can do nothing.”

“Blade and flame,” echoed the listeners. “Nothing can we do against blade and flame.”

“They will destroy us,” whispered the woman. “We shall wither—all of us—like her, or burn—unless—”

Suddenly she threw white arms around McKay’s neck, her lithe body pressed close to his, her red lips sought and found his mouth and clung there. Through all McKay’s body ran swift, sweet flames, green fire of desire. His own arms went round her, crushed her to him.

“You shall not die!” he cried. “By God, you shall not!”

She drew back her head, looked deep into his eyes.

“They have sworn to destroy us,” she said, “and soon. With blade and flame they will destroy us, these three, unless—”

“Unless?” he asked.

“Unless you—slay them first!” she answered.

A cold shock ran through McKay, chilling the sweet, green fires. He dropped his arm from around the woman; thrust her from him. For an instant she trembled before him.

“Slay!” he heard her whisper—and she was gone.

The spectral trees wavered; their outlines thickened out of immateriality into substance. The green translucence darkened. He had a swift vertiginous moment as though he swung between two worlds. He closed his eyes. The dizziness passed and he opened them, looked around him.

He stood on the lakeward skirts of the little coppice. There were no shadows flitting, no sign of white women nor of swarthy, green-clad men. His feet were on green moss. Gone was the soft golden carpet with its bluets. Birches and firs clustered solidly before him.

At his left was a sturdy fir in whose needled arms a broken birch tree lay withering. It was the birch that Polleau’s son had so wantonly slashed down. For an instant he saw within the fir and birch the immaterial outlines of the green-clad man and the slim girl who withered! For that instant birch and fir and girl and man seemed one and the same. He stepped back, and his hands touched the smooth, cool bark of another birch that rose close at his right.

Upon his hands the touch of that bark was like—was like what? Curiously was it like the touch of the long slim hands of the woman of the scarlet lips!

McKay stood there, staring, wondering, like a man who has but half awakened from dream. And suddenly a little wind stirred the leaves of the rounded birch beside him. The leaves murmured, sighed. The wind grew stronger and the leaves whispered.

“Slay!” he heard them whisper—and again: “Slay! Help us! Slay!”

And the whisper was the voice of the woman of the scarlet lips!

Rage, swift and unreasoning, sprang up in McKay. He began to run up through the coppice, up to where he knew was the old lodge in which dwelt Polleau and his sons. And as he ran the wind blew stronger about him, and louder and louder grew the whispering of the trees.

“Slay!” they whispered. “Slay them! Save us! Slay!”

“I will slay! I will save you!” McKay, panting, hammer pulse beating in his ears, heard himself answering that ever more insistent command. And in his mind was but one desire—to clutch the throats of Polleau and his sons, to crack their necks. To stand by them then and watch them wither—wither like that slim girl in the arms of the green-clad man.

He came to the edge of the coppice and burst from it out into a flood of sunshine. For a hundred feet he ran, and then he was aware that the whispering command was stilled; that he heard no more that maddening rustling of wrathful leaves. A spell seemed to have been loosed from him; it was as though he had broken through some web of sorcery. McKay stopped, dropped upon the ground, buried his face in the grasses.

He lay there marshaling his thoughts into some order of sanity. What had he been about to do? To rush upon those three men who lived in the old lodge and—slay them! And for what? Because that unearthly, scarlet-lipped woman whose kisses he still could feel upon his mouth had bade him! Because the whispering trees of the little wood had maddened him with that same command!

For this he had been about to kill three men!

What were that woman and her sisters and the green-clad swarthy gallants of theirs? Illusions of some waking dream—phantoms born of the hypnosis of the swirling mists through which he had rowed and floated across the lake? Such things were not uncommon. McKay knew of those who by watching the shifting clouds could create and dwell for a time with wide-open eyes within some similar land of fantasy; knew others who needed but to stare at smoothly falling water to set themselves within a world of waking dreams; there were those who could summon dreams by gazing into a ball of crystal, others who found dream-life in saucers of shining ink.

Might not the moving mists have laid those same fingers of hypnosis upon his own mind?—and his love for the trees, the sense of appeal that he had felt so long, his memory of the wanton slaughter of the slim birch have all combined to paint upon his drugged consciousness the fantasms he had beheld?

McKay arose to his feet, shakily enough. He looked back at the coppice. There was no wind now; the leaves were silent, motionless. Reason with himself as he might, something deep within him stubbornly asserted the reality of his experience. At any rate, he told himself, the little wood was far too beautiful to be despoiled.

The old lodge was about a quarter of a mile away. A path led up to it through the ragged fields. McKay walked up the path, climbed rickety steps and paused, listening. He heard voices and knocked. The door was flung open and old Polleau stood there, peering at him through half-shut, suspicious eyes. One of the sons stood close behind him. They stared at McKay with grim, hostile faces.

He thought he heard a faint, far-off despairing whisper from the distant wood. And it was as though the pair in the doorway heard it too, for their gaze shifted from him to the coppice, and he saw hatred flicker swiftly across their grim faces. Their gaze swept back to him.

“What do you want?” demanded Polleau, curtly.

“I am a neighbor of yours, stopping at the inn—” began McKay, courteously.

“I know who you are,” Polleau interrupted, bruskly, “but what is it that you want?”

“I find the air of this place good for me.” McKay stifled a rising anger. “I am thinking of staying for a year or more until my health is fully recovered. I would like to buy some of your land and build me a lodge upon it.”

“Yes, M’sieu?” There was acid politeness now in the old man’s voice. “But is it permitted to ask why you do not remain at the inn? Its fare is excellent and you are well-liked there.”

“I have desire to be alone,” replied McKay. “I do not like people too close to me. I would have my own land, and sleep under my own roof.”

“But why come to me?” asked Polleau. “ There are many places upon the far side of the lake that you could secure. It is happy there, and this side is not happy, M’sieu. But tell me, what part of my land is it that you desire?”

“That little wood yonder,” answered McKay, and pointed to the coppice.

“Ah! I thought so!” whispered Polleau, and between him and his son passed a look of somber understanding.

“That wood is not for sale, M’sieu,” he said.

“I can afford to pay well for what I want,” said McKay. “Name your price.”

“It is not for sale,” repeated Polleau, stolidly, “at any price.”

“Oh, come,” urged McKay, although his heart sank at the finality in that answer. “You have many acres and what is it but a few trees? I can afford to gratify my fancies. I will give you all the worth of your other land for it.”

“You have asked what that place that you so desire is, and you have answered that it is but a few trees,” said Polleau, slowly, and the tall son behind him laughed, abruptly, maliciously. “But it is more than that, M’sieu—oh, much more than that. And you know it, else why should you pay such a price as you offer? Yes, you know it—since you know also that we are ready to destroy it, and you would save it. And who told you all that, M’sieu?” he snarled.

There was such malignance, such black hatred in the face thrust suddenly close to McKay’s, eyes blazing, teeth bared by uplifted lip, that involuntarily he recoiled.

“Only a few trees!” snarled old Polleau. “Then who told him what we mean to do—eh, Pierre?”

Again the son laughed. And at that laughter McKay felt within him resurgence of his own blind hatred as he had fled through the whispering wood. He mastered himself, turned away; there was nothing he could do—now. Polleau halted him.

“M’sieu,” he said, “enter. There is something I would tell you; something, too, I would show you.”

He stood aside, bowing with a rough courtesy. McKay walked through the doorway. Polleau with his son followed him. He entered a large, dim room whose ceiling was spanned with smoke-blackened beams. From these beams hung onion strings and herbs and smoke-cured meats. On one side was a wide fireplace. Huddled beside it sat Polleau’s other son. He glanced up as they entered and McKay saw that a bandage covered one side of his head, hiding his left eye. McKay recognized him as the one who had cut down the slim birch. The blow of the fir, he reflected with a certain satisfaction, had been no futile one.

Old Polleau strode over to that son.

“Look, M’sieu,” he said, and lifted the bandage.

McKay saw, with a tremor of horror, a gaping blackened socket, red-rimmed and eyeless.

“Good God, Polleau!” he cried. “But this man needs medical attention. I know something of wounds. Let me go across the lake and bring back my kit. I will attend him.”

Old Polleau shook his head, although his grim face for the first time softened. He drew the bandages back in place.

“It heals,” he said. “We have some skill in such things. You saw what did it. You watched from your boat as the cursed tree struck him. The eye was crushed and lay upon his cheek. I cut it away. Now he heals. We do not need your aid, M’sieu.”

“Yet he ought not have cut the birch,” muttered McKay, more to himself than to be heard.

“Why not?” asked old Polleau, fiercely; “since it hated him.”

McKay stared at him. What did this old peasant know? The words strengthened his deep stubborn conviction that what he had seen and heard in the coppice had been actuality—no dream. And still more did Polleau’s next words strengthen that conviction.

“M’sieu,” he said, “you come here as ambassador—of a sort. The wood has spoken to you. Well, as ambassador I shall speak to you. Four centuries my people have lived in this place. A century we have owned this land. M’sieu, in all those years there has been no moment that the trees have not hated us—nor we the trees.

“For all those hundred years there have been hatred and battle between us and the forest. My father, M’sieu, was crushed by a tree; my elder brother crippled by another. My father’s father, woodsman that he was, was lost in the forest—he came back to us with mind gone, raving of wood-women who had bewitched and mocked him, luring him into swamp and fen and tangled thicket, tormenting him. In every generation the trees have taken their toll of us—women as well as men—maiming or killing us.”

“Accidents,” interrupted McKay. “This is childish, Polleau. You can not blame the trees.”

“In your heart you do not believe so,” said Polleau. “Listen, the feud is an ancient one. Centuries ago it began when we were serfs, slaves of the nobles. To cook, to keep us warm in winter, they let us pick up the fagots, the dead branches and twigs that dropped from the trees. But if we cut down a tree to keep us warm, to keep our women and our children warm, yes, if we but tore down a branch—they hanged us, or threw us into dungeons to rot, or whipped us till our backs were red lattices.

“They had their broad fields, the nobles—but we must raise our food in the patches where the trees disdained to grow. And if they did thrust themselves into our poor patches, then, M’sieu, we must let them have their way—or be flogged, or be thrown into the dungeons, or be hanged.

“They pressed us in—the trees,” the old man’s voice grew sharp with fanatic hatred. “They stole our fields and they took the food from the mouths of our children; they dropped their fagots to us like dole to beggars; they tempted us to warmth when the cold struck to our bones—and they bore us as fruit a-swing at the end of the foresters’ ropes if we yielded to their tempting.

“Yes, M’sieu—we died of cold that they might live! Our children died of hunger that their young might find root space! They despised us—the trees! We died that they might live—and we were men!

“Then, M’sieu, came the Revolution and the freedom. Ah, M’sieu, then we took our toll! Great logs roaring in the winter cold—no more huddling over the alms of fagots. Fields where the trees had been—no more starving of our children that theirs might live. Now the trees were the slaves and we the masters.

“And the trees knew, and they hated us!

“But blow for blow, a hundred of their lives for each life of ours—we have returned their hatred. With ax and torch we have fought them—

“The trees!” shrieked Polleau, suddenly, eyes blazing red rage, face writhing, foam at the corners of his mouth and gray hair clutched in rigid hands. “The cursed trees! Armies of the trees creeping—creeping—closer, ever closer—crushing us in! Stealing our fields as they did of old! Building their dungeon round us as they built of old the dungeons of stone! Creeping—creeping! Armies of trees! Legions of trees! The trees! The cursed trees!”

McKay listened, appalled. Here was crimson heart of hate. Madness! But what was at the root of it? Some deep inherited instinct, coming down from forefathers who had hated the forest as the symbol of their masters—forefathers whose tides of hatred had overflowed to the green life on which the nobles had laid their taboo, as one neglected child will hate the favorite on whom love and gifts are lavished? In such warped minds the crushing fall of a tree, the maiming sweep of a branch, might appear as deliberate; the natural growth of the forest seem the implacable advance of an enemy.

And yet—the blow of the fir as the cut birch fell had been deliberate! And there had been those women of the wood—!

“Patience,” the standing son touched the old man’s shoulder. “Patience! Soon we strike our blow.”

Some of the frenzy died out of Polleau’s face.

“Though we cut down a hundred,” he whispered, “by the hundred they return! But one of us, when they strike—he does not return, no! They have numbers and they have—time. We are now but three, and we have little time. They watch us as we go through the forest, alert to trip, to strike, to crush!

“But, M’sieu,” he turned bloodshot eyes to McKay, “we strike our blow, even as Pierre has said. We strike at that coppice that you so desire. We strike there because it is the very heart of the forest. There the secret life of the forest runs at full tide. We know—and you know! Something that, destroyed, will take the heart out of the forest—will make it know us for its masters.”

“The women!” The standing son’s eyes glittered, malignantly. “I have seen the women there! The fair women with the shining skins who invite—and mock and vanish before hands can seize them.”

“The fair women who peer into our windows in the night—and mock us!” muttered the eyeless son.

“They shall mock no more!” shouted old Polleau. “Soon they shall lie, dying! All of them—all of them! They die!”

He caught McKay by the shoulders and shook him like a child.

“Go tell them that!” he shouted. “Say to them that this very day we destroy them. Say to them it is we who will laugh when winter comes and we watch their bodies blaze in this hearth of ours and warm us! Go—tell them that!”

He spun McKay around, pushed him to the door, opened it and flung him staggering down the steps. He heard the tall son laugh, the door close. Blind with rage he rushed up the steps and hurled himself against the door. Again the tall son laughed. McKay beat at the door with clenched fists, cursing. The three within paid no heed. Despair began to dull his rage. Could the trees help him—counsel him? He turned and walked slowly down the field path to the little wood.

Slowly and ever more slowly he went as he neared it. He had failed. He was a messenger bearing a warrant of death. The birches were motionless; their leaves hung listlessly. It was as though they knew he had failed. He paused at the edge of the coppice. He looked at his watch, noted with faint surprize that already it was high noon. Short shrift enough had the little wood. The work of destruction would not be long delayed.

McKay squared his shoulders and passed in between the trees. It was strangely silent in the coppice. And it was mournful. He had a sense of life brooding around him, withdrawn into itself; sorrowing. He passed through the silent, mournful wood until he reached the spot where the rounded, gleaming-barked tree stood close to the fir that held the withering birch. Still there was no sound, no movement. He laid his hands upon the cool bark of the rounded tree.

“Let me see again!” he whispered. “Let me hear! Speak to me!”

There was no answer. Again and again he called. The coppice was silent. He wandered through it, whispering, calling. The slim birches stood, passive, with limbs and leaves adroop like listless arms and hands of captive maids awaiting in dull wo the will of conquerors. The firs seemed to crouch like hopeless men with heads in hands. His heart ached to the wo that filled the little wood, this hopeless submission of the trees.

When, he wondered, would Polleau strike? He looked at his watch again; an hour had gone by. How long would Polleau wait? He dropped to the moss, back against a smooth bole.

And suddenly it seemed to McKay that he was a madman—as mad as Polleau and his sons. Calmly, he went over the old peasant’s indictment of the forest; recalled the face and eyes filled with fanatic hate. They were all mad. After all, the trees were—only trees. Polleau and his sons—so he reasoned—had transferred to them the bitter hatred their forefathers had felt for those old lords who had enslaved them; had laid upon them too all the bitterness of their own struggle to exist in this high forest land. When they struck at the trees, it was the ghosts of those forefathers striking at the nobles who had oppressed them; it was themselves striking against their own destiny. The trees were but symbols. It was the warped minds of Polleau and his sons that clothed them in false semblance of conscious life, blindly striving to wreak vengeance against the ancient masters and the destiny that had made their lives one hard and unceasing battle against nature. The nobles were long dead, destiny can be brought to grips by no man. But the trees were here and alive. Clothed in mirage, through them the driving lust for vengeance could be sated. So much for Polleau and his sons.

And he, McKay: was it not his own deep love and sympathy for the trees that similarly had clothed them in that false semblance of conscious life? Had he not built his own mirage? The trees did not really mourn, could not suffer, could not—know. It was his own sorrow that he had transferred to them; only his own sorrow, that he felt echoing back to him from them. The trees were—only trees.

Instantly, upon the heels of that thought, as though it were an answer, he was aware that the trunk against which he leaned was trembling; that the whole coppice was trembling; that all the little leaves were shaking, tremulously.

McKay, bewildered, leaped to his feet. Reason told him that it was the wind—yet there was no wind!

And as he stood there, a sighing arose as though a mournful breeze were blowing through the trees—and again there was no wind!

Louder grew the sighing and within it now faint wailings.

“They come! They come! Farewell, sisters! Sisters—farewell!”

Clearly he heard the mournful whispers.

McKay began to run through the trees to the trail that led out to the fields of the old lodge. And as he ran the wood darkened as though clear shadows gathered in it, as though vast unseen wings hovered over it. The trembling of the coppice increased; bough touched bough, clung to each other; and louder became the sorrowful crying: “Farewell, sister! Sister—farewell!”

McKay burst out into the open. Half-way between him and the lodge were Polleau and his sons. They saw him; they pointed and lifted mockingly to him their bright axes. He crouched, waiting for them to come close, all fine-spun theories gone, and rising within him that same rage which hours before had sent him out to slay.

So crouching, he heard from the forested hills a roaring clamor. From every quarter it came, wrathful, menacing; like the voices of legions of great trees bellowing through the horns of tempest. The clamor maddened McKay; farmed the flame of rage to white heat.

If the three men heard it, they gave no sign. They came on steadily, jeering at him, waving their blades. He ran to meet them.

“Go back!” he shouted. “Go back, Polleau! I warn you!”

“He warns us!” jeered Polleau. “He—Pierre, Jean—he warns us!”

The old peasant’s arm shot out and his hand caught McKay’s shoulder with a grip that pinched to the bone. The arm flexed and hurled him against the unmaimed son. The son caught him, twisted him about and whirled him headlong a dozen yards, crashing through the brush at the skirt of the wood.

McKay sprang to his feet howling like a wolf. The clamor of the forest had grown stronger.

“Kill!” it roared. “Kill!”

The unmaimed son had raised his ax. He brought it down upon the trunk of a birch, half splitting it with one blow. McKay heard a wail go up from the little wood. Before the ax could be withdrawn he had crashed a fist in the ax-wielder’s face. The head of Polleau’s son rocked back; he yelped, and before McKay could strike again had wrapped strong arms around him, crushing breath from him. McKay relaxed, went limp, and the son loosened his grip. Instantly McKay slipped out of it and struck again, springing aside to avoid the rib-breaking clasp. Polleau’s son was quicker than he, the long arm caught him. But as the arms tightened there was the sound of sharp splintering and the birch into which the ax had bitten toppled. It struck the ground directly behind the wrestling men. Its branches seemed to reach out and clutch at the feet of Polleau’s son.

He tripped and fell backward, McKay upon him. The shock of the fall broke his grip and again McKay writhed free. Again he was upon his feet, and again Polleau’s strong son, quick as he, faced him. Twice McKay’s blows found their mark beneath his heart before once more the long arms trapped him. But the grip was weaker; McKay felt that now their strength was equal.

Round and round they rocked, McKay straining to break away. They fell, and over they rolled and over, arms and legs locked, each striving to free a hand to grip the other’s throat. Around them ran Polleau and the one-eyed son, shouting encouragement to Pierre, yet neither daring to strike at McKay lest the blow miss and be taken by the other.

And all that time McKay heard the little wood shouting. Gone from it now was all mournfulness, all passive resignation. The wood was alive and raging. He saw the trees shake and bend as though torn by a tempest. Dimly he realized that the others could hear none of this, see none of it; as dimly wondered why this should be.

"Kill!” shouted the coppice—and ever over its tumult he was aware of the roar of the great forest.

“Kill! Kill!”

He saw two shadowy shapes—shadowy shapes of swarthy green-clad men, that pressed close to him as he rolled and fought.

"Kill!” they whispered. "Let his blood flow. Kill.”

He tore a wrist free. Instantly he felt within his hand the hilt of a knife.

"Kill!” whispered the shadowy men.

"Kill!” shrieked the coppice.

"Kill!” roared the forest.

McKay’s free arm swept up and plunged the knife into the throat of Polleau’s son! He heard a choking sob; heard Polleau shriek; felt the hot blood spurt in face and over hand; smelt its salt and faintly acrid odor. The encircling arms dropped from him; he reeled to his feet.

As though the blood had been a bridge, the shadowy men leaped into materiality. One threw himself upon the man McKay had stabbed; the other hurled upon old Polleau. The maimed son turned and fled, howling with terror. A white woman sprang out from the shadow, threw herself at his feet, clutched them and brought him down. Another woman and another dropped upon him. The note of his shrieking changed from fear to agony; then died abruptly into silence.

And now McKay could see none of the trees, neither old Polleau nor his sons, for green-clad men and white women covered them!

He stood stupidly, staring at his red hands. The roar of the forest had changed to a deep triumphal chanting. The coppice was mad with joy. The trees had become thin phantoms etched in emerald translucent air as they had been when first the green sorcery had meshed him. And all around him wove and danced the slim, gleaming women of the wood.

They ringed him, their song bird-sweet and shrill; jubilant. Beyond them he saw gliding toward him the woman of the misty pillar whose kisses had poured the sweet green fire into his veins. Her arms were outstretched to him, her strange wide eyes were rapt on his, her white body gleamed with the moon-radiance, her red lips were parted and smiling, a scarlet chalice filled with the promise of undreamed ecstasies. The dancing circle, chanting, broke to let her through.

Abruptly, a horror filled McKay. Not of this fair woman, not of her jubilant sisters—but of himself.

He had killed! And the wound the war had left in his soul, the wound he thought had healed, had opened.

He rushed through the broken circle, thrust the shining woman aside with his blood-stained hands and ran, weeping, toward the lake shore. The singing ceased. He heard little cries; tender, appealing little cries of pity; soft voices calling on him to stop, to return. Behind him was the sound of little racing feet, light as the fall of leaves upon the moss.

McKay ran on. The coppice lightened, the beach was before him. He heard the fair woman call him, felt the touch of her hand upon his shoulder. He did not heed her. He ran across the narrow strip of beach, thrust his boat out into the water and wading through the shallows threw himself into it.

He lay there for a moment, sobbing; then drew himself up and caught at the oars. He looked back at the shore now a score of feet away. At the edge of the coppice stood the woman, staring at him with pitying, wise eyes. Behind her clustered the white faces of her sisters, the swarthy faces of the green-clad men.

“Come back!” the woman whispered, and held out to him slender arms.

McKay hesitated, his horror lessening in that clear, wise gaze. He half swung the boat around. But his eyes fell again upon his blood-stained hands and again the hysteria gripped him. One thought only was in his mind now—to get far away from where Polleau’s son lay with his throat ripped open, to put the lake between him and that haunted shore. He dipped his oars deep, flung the boat forward. Once more the woman called to him and once again. He paid no heed. She threw out her arms in a gesture of passionate farewell. Then a mist dropped like a swift curtain between him and her and all the folk of the little wood.

McKay rowed on, desperately. After a while he slipped oars, and leaning over the boat’s side he washed away the red on his hands and arms. His coat was torn and blood-stained; his shirt too. The latter he took off, wrapped it around the stone that was the boat’s rude anchor and dropped it into the depths. His coat he dipped into the water, rubbing at the accusing marks. When he had lightened them all he could, he took up his oars.

His panic had gone from him. Upon its ebb came a rising tide of regret; clear before his eyes arose the vision of the shining woman, beckoning him, calling him… he swung the boat around to return. And instantly as he did so the mists between him and the farther shore thickened; around him they lightened as though they had withdrawn to make of themselves a barrier to him, and something deep within him whispered that it was too late.

He saw that he was close to the landing of the little inn. There was no one about; and none saw him as he fastened the skiff and slipped to his room. He locked the door, started to undress. Sudden sleep swept over him like a wave; drew him helplessly down into ocean depths of sleep.

A knocking at his door awakened McKay, and the innkeeper’s voice summoning him to dinner. Sleepily he answered, and as the old man’s footsteps died away he roused himself. His eyes fell upon his coat, dry now, and the illy erased blood-stains splotching it. Puzzled, he stared at them for a moment—then full memory clicked back into place.

He walked to the window. It was dusk. A wind was blowing and the trees were singing, all the little leaves dancing; the forest hummed its cheerful vespers. Gone was all the unease, all the inarticulate trouble and the fear. The woods were tranquil and happy.

He sought the coppice through the gathering twilight. Its demoiselles were dancing lightly in the wind, leafy hoods dipping, leafy skirts a-blow. Beside them marched their green troubadours, carefree, waving their needled arms. Gay was the little wood, gay as when its beauty had first lured him to it.

McKay hid the stained coat shrewdly in his traveling trunk, bathed and put on a fresh outfit and sauntered down to dinner. He ate excellently. Wonder now and then crossed his mind that he felt no regret, no sorrow even for the man he had killed. Half he was inclined to believe it had all been only a dream—so little of any emotion did he feel. He had even ceased to think of what discovery might mean.

His mind was quiet; he heard the forest chanting to him that there was nothing he need fear; and when he sat for a time that night upon the balcony a peace that was half an ecstasy stole in upon him from the murmuring woods and enfolded him. Cradled by it he slept dreamlessly.

McKay did not go far from the inn that day. The little wood danced gaily and beckoned him, but he paid no heed. Something whispered to wait, to keep the lake between him and it until word came of what lay or had lain there. And the peace still was on him.

Only the old innkeeper seemed to grow uneasy as the hours went by. He went often to the landing, scanning the farther shore.

“It is strange,” he said at last to McKay as the sun was dipping behind the summits. “Polleau was to see me here today. He never breaks his word, or if he could not come he would have sent one of his sons.”

McKay nodded, carelessly.

“There is another thing I do not understand,” went on the old man. “I have seen no smoke from the lodge all day. It is as though they were not there.”

“Where could they be?” asked McKay indifferently.

“I do not know,” the voice was more perturbed. “It all troubles me, M’sieu. Polleau is hard, yes; but he is my neighbor. Perhaps an accident—”

“They would let you know soon enough if there was anything wrong,” McKay said.

“Perhaps, but—” the old man hesitated. “If he does not come tomorrow and again I see no smoke, I will go to him,” he ended.

McKay felt a little shock run through him—tomorrow then he would know, definitely, what it was that had happened in the little wood.

“I would if I were you,” he said. “I’d not wait too long, either.”

“Will you go with me, M’sieu?” asked the old man.

“No!” whispered the warning voice within McKay. “No! Do not go!”

“Sorry,” he said, aloud. “But I’ve some writing to do. If you should need me send back your man; I’ll come.’’

And all that night he slept, again dreamlessly, while the crooning forest cradled him.

The morning passed without sign from the opposite shore. An hour after noon he watched the old innkeeper and his man row across the lake. And suddenly McKay’s composure was shaken, his serene certainty wavered. He unstrapped his field glasses and kept them on the pair until they had beached the boat and entered the coppice. His heart was beating uncomfortably, his hands felt hot and his lips dry. How long had they been in the wood? It must have been an hour! What were they doing there? What had they found? He looked at his watch, incredulously. Less than five minutes had passed.

Slowly the seconds ticked by. And it was all of an hour indeed before he saw them come out upon the shore and drag their boat into the water. McKay, throat curiously dry, deafening pulse within his ears, steadied himself; forced himself to stroll leisurely down to the landing.

“Everything all right?” he called as they were near. They did not answer; but as the skiff warped against the landing they looked up at him and on their faces were stamped horror and a great wonder.

“They are dead, M’sieu,” whispered the innkeeper. “Polleau and his two sons—all dead!”

McKay’s heart gave a great leap, a swift faintness took him.

“Dead!" he cried. “What killed them?”

“What but the trees, M’sieu?” answered the old man, and McKay thought that his gaze dwelt upon him strangely. “The trees killed them. See—we went up the little path through the wood, and close to its end we found it blocked by fallen trees. The flies buzzed round those trees, M’sieu, so we searched there. They were under them, Polleau and his sons. A fir had fallen upon Polleau and had crushed in his chest. Another son we found beneath a fir and upturned birches. They had broken his back, and an eye had been torn out—but that was no new wound, the latter.”

He paused.

“It must have been a sudden wind,” said his man. “Yet I never knew of a wind such as that must have been. There were no trees down except those that lay upon them. And of those it was as though they had leaped out of the ground! Yes, as though they had leaped out of the ground upon them. Or it was as though giants had torn them out for clubs. They were not broken—their roots were bare—”

“But the other son—Polleau had two?” Try as he might, McKay could not keep the tremor out of his voice.

“Pierre,” said the old man, and again McKay felt that strange quality in his gaze. “He lay beneath a fir. His throat was torn out!”

“His throat torn out!” whispered McKay. His knife! The knife that had been slipped into his hand by the shadowy shapes!

“His throat was torn out,” repeated the innkeeper. “And in it still was the broken branch that had done it. A broken branch; M’sieu, pointed like a knife. It must have caught Pierre as the fir fell, and ripping through his throat—been broken off as the tree crashed.”

McKay stood, mind whirling in wild conjecture. “You said—a broken branch?” McKay asked through lips gone white.

“A broken branch, M’sieu.” The innkeeper’s eyes searched him. “It was very plain—what it was that happened. Jacques,” he turned to his man, “go up to the house.”

He watched until the man shuffled out of sight.

“Yet not all is so plain, M’sieu,” he spoke low to McKay, “since in Pierre’s hand I found—this.”

He reached into a pocket and drew out a button from which hung a strip of cloth. They had once been part of that stained coat which McKay had hidden in his trunk. And as McKay strove to speak the old man raised his hand. Button and cloth dropped from it, into the water. A wave took it and floated it away; another and another snatched it and passed it on. They watched it, silently, until it had vanished.

“Tell me nothing,” said the keeper of the inn. “Polleau was a hard man and hard men were his sons. The trees hated them. The trees killed them. The—souvenir—is gone. Only M’sieu would better also—go.”

That night McKay packed. When dawn had broken he stood at his window, looking long at the little wood. It too was awakening, stirring sleepily—like drowsy, delicate demoiselles. He thought he could see that one slim birch that was—what?

Tree or woman? Or both?

Silently, the old landlord and his wife watched him as he swung out his car—a touch of awe, a half-fear, in their eyes. Without a word they let him go.

And as McKay swept up the road that led over the lip of the green bowl he seemed to hear from all the forest a deep-toned, mournful chanting. It arose around him as he topped the rise in one vast whispering cloud—of farewell! And died.

Never, he knew, would that green door of enchantment be opened to him again. His fear had closed it—forever. Something had been offered to him beyond mortal experience—something that might have raised him to the level of the gods of Earth’s youth. He had rejected it. And nevermore, he knew, would he cease to regret.

“The Slaughter of the Gods” is by far the most obscure of Manly Wade Wellman’s tales of Kardios, the last survivor of Atlantis. It’s so little-known, in fact, that the author’s estate wasn’t even aware of it! Unfortunately, by the time we discovered it, it was too late to add it to the DMR Books collection Heroes of Atlantis & Lemuria. Wellman penned five Kardios stories in the late ‘70s (all of which appear in Heroes) before giving the singing swordsman a rest. He brought Kardios back for one final adventure. “Slaughter,” one of the last stories he ever wrote, was published shortly after his death in 1986.

The Slaughter of the Gods

By Manly Wade Wellman

Since Kardios, the last surviving Atlantean, had lost so many valiant friends and lovely ladies in the sudden awful drowning of his home island, he welcomed the comradeship of the fisher-captain Krarr and the crew of the square-sailed craft that put out on a sea he had never dreamed of. He dragged on nets and climbed masts with them, helping how he could. He was tall, tanned, wide-shouldered, black-maned, with the only shaven face aboard. He wore a sleeveless blue tunic, a leopard-skin kilt, a useful-looking sword in a copper-riveted sheath. His harp swung at his back. The whole company liked him.

“We’re headed for a port called Sambarra with our fish, but it’ll take a couple of days,” said bearded Captain Krarr. “When you’re off watch, play that harp and sing to us, and tell us what you’ve been up to.”

Kardios played and sang tunefully, songs of his own making. They liked one that named tyrants and monsters he had met and killed:

“I looked in their evil eyes and they crouched like cravens,

I showed them my sword and they trembled and louted low;

I gave their bones for food to the rats and ravens,

And pray the gods for another and fiercer foe.”

His story: Atlantis had sunk in the sea because Kardios had brought down a forgotten curse by kissing Queen Theona, and he had clung to wreckage for days of storm until, on a distant shore, he came among the giant Nephol tribe and killed a plaguing monster. Then wanderings, until he climbed the dizzy-tall Fufuna range, called the end of the world with only emptiness beyond; but beyond was more of the world, which maybe had no end.

“You’ve come a long, wearisome way,” said Krarr, listening.

“It was too lively to be wearisome,” said Kardios. “I found things to do, things to kill—even a god or so.”

“Can gods be killed?” growled Krarr. “At Sambarra, gods walk around everywhere. Sambarra has no king, only gods. Of course, human subjects to serve them. Sing again.”

Kardios strummed his harp and sang:

“Sambarra, Sambarra, by the sea,

What will you have to show to me?

Will it be wonderful, will it be wise,

Kindness or enmity, truth or lies?”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” confessed Krarr. “I just tie up to the merchant docks, sell my fish, and sail away again. But the men are bringing in another big netful. Let’s go help.”

They sailed the day away, and the night too, under a blazing moon. At sunset of the next day they entered Sambarra’s rock-fenced harbor. Back from the docks stood blocky buildings of stone, rosy and blue and gray, with slender spires and square towers beyond. Among the houses hung a misty vapor. Krarr steered his craft to a pier, where his men made fast with cables around posts. Then Krarr stepped to the pier, and Kardios went with him.

There were merchants, richly cloaked and variously bearded, who came aboard to inspect the fish and make their offers. Krarr argued over prices. Kardios, on the pier, was aware of a babel of tuneful voices, and turned to look.

Half a dozen very attractive women with yellow and red and brown and black hair had come to the waterfront, all smiling and murmuring, and all dressed in garments that clung enticingly to splendid figures. Kardios smiled encouragingly at them.

“What a handsome stranger!” exclaimed a gorgeous blonde with amphora-curved hips and breasts like twin pleasure domes. “He wears a sword—he must be a hero.”

“What’s your name?” asked another woman, equally exciting of figure, and thunder-black as to her wavy hair.

“I’m Kardios,” he said, strolling toward them. They gathered around him, smiling, bright-eyed.

“Kardios, Kardios,” one repeated his name. “That means a heart. Is your heart warm, Kardios?”

“Always,” he said to one with red hair as she cuddled a bare shoulder to his. “How hospitable are you.”

“Come with us,” she said, and they clustered to shepherd him toward a street that opened between high houses.

They came upon a smooth, violet-colored pavement. More houses looked down from either side. Kardios glanced back the way he had come, and the way he had come was no way at all. For what had been the head of the street was sealed away by yet another silent building, as if it had swung there like a gate.

“What—” he began to say, but nobody was there. The girls had vanished, like girls in a dream.

Something else was coming. Darkly it slouched along the violet pavement. Kardios had encountered many grotesque creatures, but this one demanded rapt, interested attention. It was as big as a cave bear, it moved on four many-jointed, knuckled legs, it was sootily shaggy all over. Its head, square as a box, had a face of a bilious green, eyes like pallid fire, a fanged mouth. It extended arms with claws like a nightmare lobster.

Kardios drew his long silver-pale sword, made of metal from the stars and given him by the grateful Nephol tribe. He whipped it in the air. The creature paused and glared, then squattered toward him.

“Confident, aren’t you?” Kardios addressed it, and as it shot a claw at him, he neatly slashed the claw from its arm. A piercing scream, and his attacker reared upright. Smoothly Kardios sped a lunge at the bald, soft-looking belly. His sword went deeply home, and he drew it upward as he cleared it. The misshapen body floundered down, kicking.

Behind it came another, this time tall and on two big slapping feet. Kardios hopped across the slackening body of his first attacker to face this second. Behind it scurried other abhorrent shapes.

“Here, you brave man!”

It was a woman’s voice, rich and low, from the building next to him.

“Climb up here!”

From a high window dangled a rope woven of red and gold. Kardios darted his sword into its sheath, ran to the rope, and scrambled up it like a squirrel. He dived through the window into a circular room draped in many-colored hangings, decorated with characters he could not read. Its one piece of furniture was a great low couch with a gold-worked black spread, and upon this sat the woman who had invited him to climb.

From toes to throat she was draped in a robe of blue silk confined by a golden belt. Its folds snuggled to what were manifestly alluring curves. Her hair gleamed pale, almost like spun frost. Her oval, point-chinned face had dark blue eyes, just then fixed on Kardios, a short, straight nose with finely flared nostrils, and a red mouth like an appetizing fruit.

“Well,” she said in her rich voice, “do you like what you see?”

“Very much,” Kardios replied honestly. “Thanks for letting me come in.”

“What’s your name? Oh, I know—Kardios. You can call me Iltanie.”

“A beautiful name. Who are you otherwise? I was told that Sambarra has no kings or queens, is ruled by gods.”

“That’s the truth. I happen to be a goddess—one of the seven ruling deities. No, six now—you killed one. I sent those pretty girls to bring you into town, on a whim. I called the gods to see what they might make of you. Mostly they paralyze humans by just scowling at them, but you killed the first one to come within reach.”

Kardios lounged against the hangings. “How could I kill him if he was a god? Aren’t gods immortal?”

Iltanie’s smile was bewitching. “Gods die when their worship stops. Anyway, since you seem to have killed one, perhaps you’re a god of some sort. How did you get to Sambarra?”

Kardios told of his survival of Atlantis, his wanderings over unknown lands, the perils he had met. He dwelt especially on the city of Nyanyanya, and how he had been king there long enough to kill a so-called god Tongbi, and how he had left Nyanyanya a lovely queen called Yola. Iltanie kept smiling.

“You’re going to be welcome here,” she said when he had finished. “Dangerous—our human servants will cower away from you. And you’re a very handsome man.”

“And you’re a very beautiful goddess.”

She rose to her feet, a slim hand gathering her robe. “Goddess,” she repeated. “Would you worship me?”

“Beauty is always worth worshipping,” said Kardios.

“I think I know how to deal with you.”

Iltanie let her robe fall all the way down to the golden belt. From the waist upward she was creamy-pink, abundant of breasts, smooth of flanks. Kardos had to stare. He had to say, “Magnificent!”

She unclasped the belt and dropped the robe the rest of the way. She stood in her symmetrically ample beauty, wearing nothing but a heavily jeweled collar. “Well?” she purred.

“Well, indeed,” said Kardios. He had thrown down his cloak. On it he laid his harp, his sword and belt, doffed his tunic and kilt, and kicked off his shoes. He strode to Iltanie and they sat down together on the couch. She flung her arms around his neck, kissed him swimmingly, and sank down to receive him.

Kardios found her surpassingly adroit at lovemaking, and it was long before they finished with each other and sat up to study each other’s nakedness. “That had to be done,” said Iltanie. “You can call it a religious rite. Now I have you here, and you’ll be useful.”

“Useful? How?”

“With our human population, which obeys and does the work and serves the altars. You’re human—very much—and you can help govern these people, direct them for me. They’ll fear you and obey you. And I’ll keep you happy.” Her eyes twinkled. “Very happy indeed.”

He shook his dark head. “I won’t be staying. I’m going back across the world, to Nyanyanya, where Queen Yola is waiting.”

“But you love me!” she cried, almost an accusation. She caught her robe back around her. “You belong to me, I bought you!”

“We never made any formal sales agreement,” he said, sliding into his clothes. “I belong to nobody. I’m too used to freedom to belong to you.”

He took up his cloak and slung his harp. “Good-bye, Iltanie. You were so hospitable.”

“And you’re going?” she mocked. “Out the window? Look and see what’s there in the street.”

“Something ugly, naturally,” said Kardios. “Or unnaturally. I’ll leave by this door.”

He opened it and stepped through, into the incomprehensible.

The hallway, if it was a hallway, was clouded with some sort of mist, pallid white and stirring. Kardios tried to walk into it—he was hampered, as though by fabric. He cursed under his breath, drew his sword and slashed at the stuff, made a space to step into, slashed again and again. He struggled to go through.

Behind him Iltanie seemed to sing words. The hampering whiteness vanished abruptly. He was in a long, long corridor that stretched to some sort of infinity. Its smooth floor was pale gray, like raw steel. Its walls looked sandy dun, and from them here and there opened black emptinesses, like caves. Toward Kardios waddled a dark, upright something with no head to see, only a mighty sprawl of tentacles. Kardios thought he had seen it in the street. More distant shapes came behind. Kardios moved confidently forward.

“Catch him!” Iltanie was crying, not soft-voiced now. “He’s mine, I bought him!”

Kardios snatched a glance backward. Something was in the corridor there too, and not Iltanie. Where to Kardios’ front moved ungainly, tentacled bulk, behind him crept lithe yellowness with the reddest of eyes, stale teeth in a gaping mouth, outstretched forelimbs armed with daggerlike talons.

“He’s mine!” shrieked Iltanie again.

Both creatures charged, before and behind. They were almost upon Kardios when he flung himself low and scrambled clear, against a wall. There was a crash and clash of sound as the charging things slammed violently together, and Kardios heard both of them scream as he hurried to his feet and lifted his sword.

They clutched in a senseless, flurrying wrestle, neither knowing what was happening. Kardios sped a lightning thrust into the moss-shaggy back of one, whipped his blade in a whining circle and mowed away the tentacles of the other. The two bodies subsided in an unsightly heap, and Kardios moved swiftly past them. Three of Sambarra’s gods in so short a time, not a bad beginning.

Iltanie screamed more orders. A shape whizzed above Kardios, flapping strange wings, and a claw ripped at his tunic. He stabbed upward, felt his point go home, heard a howl of agony, and fell back against the wall.

“Here,” mumbled somebody from beside his foot. “In here.”

A sort of trapdoor opened, low in the wall. Kardios did not stop to wonder, but flung himself down and dived in, head first. He landed in black darkness, on what felt like damp, coarse turf. A hand was on his shoulder.

“Come along, come away, they’ll be after you.”

He scrambled up again, in the dark. His companion held his elbow. “Come.”

He touched a wall. It was of rough stone, and under his feet was the soggy floor. They approached to where Kardios could see a ruddy light ahead. It grew stronger as Kardios’ companion brought him into a cave with splotchy pictures on the walls, centered with a pleasant fire in a pit. All around gathered people dressed in bright colors. Several were pretty girls. Kardios thought he recognized two who had shepherded him into his adventures.

“We’re the human dwellers of Sambarra,” said his guide. “The slaves of the gods.”

He was a lean old man, with a beard as frosty as Iltanie’s hair. He wore a trailing robe of coarse-spun brown. His eyes were wise and kind.

“Slaves?” repeated Kardios. “You’re slaves? But the merchants I saw at the harbor, they looked prosperous.”

“They’re privileged, but they serve the gods by buying and selling. Seven deities rule Sambarra, and we obey.”

“Not seven anymore,” said Kardios. “I seemed to finish four of them, and that leaves only three. I doubt if they were gods.”

“When you fought them, I had hope. That’s why I brought you down here where we live.”

“Here, Algru,” said another man, holding out a scrap of white parchment. “They sent this down.”

The old man called Algru took it and studied it. Kardios saw symbols on the parchment, symbols he could not read. Algru shuffled to an altarlike rock and picked up a rough earthen goblet. He held it out to Kardios. “A very special beer,” he said.

Kardios took the goblet and tasted the beer. “Good,” he said.

“Magic,” said Algru, taking the goblet back. He shoved the parchment in and brooded above it. Kardios saw the characters fading, dissolving. After a moment Algru fished the damp parchment out and drank the beer at one draught. “Now I know what they wrote there,” he said. “They tell us, we must put you back among them or suffer.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll go back among them,” declared Kardios. “I’ve been killing them. Why not finish the job?”

“But they’re all-powerful,” protested Algru. “They can’t be faced or denied.”

“Nonsense, I’ve faced them,” lectured Kardios. “Maybe you should have faced them long ago. They’ve frightened you, crushed you. How?”

“They came into Sambarra and made our fathers serve,” said somebody else. “Made them work, raise crops, build for them, work for them. We’ve never known anything else.”

“Because of fear,” snapped Kardios. “I got free of fear some thousands of miles away. Now, I won’t stop and listen to any more. I’m going outside. I have a few more gods to kill.”

“No earthly weapon—” began Algru.

“My sword isn’t earthly,” Kardios broke in. “It was forged from star metal.”

He drew it and headed back along the rocky passage, his hand groping along the wall. He flung the trapdoor wide. In the corridor writhed a great dark shape that would have been a gigantic snake except for its many squat legs. It lifted its flat head at Kardios. Eyes glowed like sickly green jewels, jowls bulged to betoken poison sacs. It ran out a forked blue tongue, and stared.

“You’re an ugly one too,” Kardios greeted it. “Come on, if you’re coming on.”

The head launched at him. Fangs showed in the roof of the gaping mouth. Kardios flicked his sword and the keen edge reaped away the head, halfway down the neck. An agonized scramble and the body came against the head. Suddenly the head was back in place, an instantaneous healing. The snaky body trundled forward on its legs. Kardios decided on something.

“Come in, the door’s open,” he invited, and fell back in the dark passage. His foe writhed after him and darted its head again.

Kardios leaped high above the stroke, came down astride the wriggling body and slashed downward. He cut the thing in two and frantically kicked damp mud and debris between the two pieces. Kardios danced back, clear of it. Algru came behind him with a blazing torch.

“See!” cried Algru. “See!”

The severed halves strove, could not join with that clutter between them. They subsided. As Kardios and Algru watched, they went motionlessly limp.

“Dead,” said Kardios. “I didn’t let it make itself whole again. That makes five of your gods that proved they weren’t gods after all. Now, let me get out there.”

He slid himself into the corridor. Something waited there, but only for a moment. It spread murky, membranous wings, slid up into the air and fled. It was gone, up a chimneylike hollow in the ceiling, before Kardios could make out its shape.

“Sensible monster!” he jeered after it. “That’s six gone, where’s the seventh?”

The seventh was farther along the corridor, running uncouthly but swiftly. Kardios took a step, as if to pursue. The shape seemed to liquefy, to stop being a shape, to go into a mist that rose too, that sought the ceiling hollow and vanished into it.

Kardios stood still and mopped his sweaty brow with his forearm. Algru was in the open with him. Others peered out and then slowly emerged in their turn.

“They fled from you,” said Algru. “Fled from Sambarra. Kardios, you banished them. You’re our ruler now, give us your commands.”

Kardios laughed and shook his black-maned head.

“Don’t you see?” he rallied Algru. “They weren’t gods, not for a moment—only monsters, and they had to be faced. You’re not slaves any more. Take over here, Algru. You act and talk like a sensible man. Maybe you and your people can make Sambarra amount to something.”

Algru started to speak, but Kardios strode along the corridor, the way he had come. He had carried his harp all through this, and now he swept its strings and marched to his own music. He sang:

“You called yourselves gods in Sambarra, you thought

You were mighty and fearful and wise;

But your rule in Sambarra is come unto naught,

Sambarra is free of your lies…”

Up ahead, a timid figure in a blue robe—Iltanie. He came to her, still fingering his harp.

“Now you’ll kill me,” she said, her voice dull at last.

“I’ll kill nobody so beautiful,” said Kardios. “But I advise you to get out of Sambarra.”

Her blue eyes were on him, sad and weary. Her frosty hair drooped.

“Let me theorize about you,” he said cheerfully. “You’re a sorceress—you can live lifetimes, cast spells, all that. You picked up some unsightly monsters and came here and made the people think you were deities. But I came here and demonstrated the nature of reality, and your monster friends overreached themselves—tried to frighten me and couldn’t.”

She said nothing, only shook her head unhappily.

“As for you,” Kardios went on, “trying to be a goddess is too rich for your blood. My friendly advice is to go ply your sorceress trade somewhere else. Maybe you’ve learned not to take men like me for granted.”

Her robe drooped from a beautifully turned shoulder, perhaps on purpose.

“Kardios,” she whispered, “you and I could have had such a good time together.”

“We did have a good time together, a little while ago. I’ll make a bargain with you. Let’s both leave Sambarra.”

“Agreed,” she said, and walked slowly away.

Kardios went back to the room where they had made love, swung out the window, and slid down the cord. The street was open to the sea again. On a dock, Krarr waved to him.

“Where have you been?” demanded Krarr sharply. “We’ve sold our fish—got good prices—and we want to sail with this coming tide.”

“Sail where?” Kardios asked.

“Back to the coast where we found you, back to where the fishing’s so good.”

“Put me ashore there. I have it in mind to go back on my way through the world I’ve roamed. Go back to Nyanyanya, where Queen Yola rules and perhaps wonders what’s happened to me.”

Krarr stroked his beard. “Just what did happen to you, in Sambarra?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re at sea. It’s quite a tale, so get prepared to believe it.”

These days it seems like Lin Carter is more respected as an editor than an author. However, at times he was capable of penning some very fine works of fantasy, such as the novel Lost World of Time. Of course, with a bibliography as massive as Carter’s, it’s easy to overlook some gems. His two tales of a savage tribe known as the People of the Dragon, for example, are among his best but remain relatively unknown. The tribesmen and the prehistoric world they inhabit are very similar to those found in Robert E. Howard’s “The Valley of the Worm.” Carter’s concept for the series was to have each story take place approximately a generation after the previous—an interesting idea, which makes it all the more unfortunate that only two were written. We present both of them here: “People of the Dragon,” which has never before been reprinted, and its sequel “The Pillars of Hell.”

People of the Dragon

By Lin Carter

I

Out of the North

My name is Junga. I am the youngest of the three sons of Gomar, the mighty hunter; and my people are the People of the Dragon. Or so, at least, we call ourselves, after that red, bearded star that burns like a signal torch down the southern skies, ever leading us onwards, who ever follow. In the time of my grandfather, Zorm the Wise, it first shone in the wintry skies above our lost homeland which now lies buried deep beneath the eternal snows. It was in the time of the White Winter that it first appeared and blazed in those forgotten skies, calling my fathers forth from the valley wherein my people had dwelt from Time’s forgotten dawn.

The snows had fallen thick and yet lay deeply piled, and still unmelted, from the winter before. The herds our hunters sought for meat were thinned by the unending winter, and the foliage whereon the beasts fed were scrawny and frostbitten. The people of my tribe went hungry then, and the cold winds blew ever at the mouths of the caves, and the old folk died of the coughing sickness, one by one, and many the newborn babe was exposed to the elements on the hillslopes because there was not enough meat for the strong and living, much less the newly-born.

Those were harsh times; cruel times; for oft have I heard my grandsire tell of them, he that lives yet but is lean and hardy for all his length of years. Men starved and women wept, or sat dry-eyed and stony-hearted, crooning to the dead babes they clasped against their shrunken breasts. Children fought, naked and snarling, like starving curs over scraps of meat. Ever the snows fell, blocking the ways between the mountains. Ever the winds blew cold as a whetted knife, freezing the blood in our veins, chilling the very marrow in our bones. And then the wolves came down from the windy heights, to slink among the caves—and never in the memory of a living man (my grandsire, Zorm, would say) had this occurred before.

Grim and terrible were the battles my fathers fought, knee-deep in the numb, red-splattered snow, defending the women and the children, the old and the sick, against ravening wolves, who grew ever bolder, maddened by starvation, until they strove to enter the very caves of my people, to rend and tear hot flesh from the living.

And then one night when a howling gale had torn the snow-heavy clouds away to bare the merciless stars, the Red Star blazed above, that no man’s eye had looked upon in all the generations of men. Burning bright it was, like scarlet fire, with a long writhing streamer of flame behind it, for all the world like a dragon’s serpent-length and serpent-tail. And it was Zorm, my grandsire, who heard it hissing to him in his troubled dreams: Arise! the Dragon Star whispered, Take thy people, and go forth into the south, for the Great Ice cometh down upon the valley of thy fathers, that shall never lift for a thousand years of time. Go forth, I bid thee, south and ever south, and I shall fly ever down the skies before thee, and I shall bring thee at last to a warm and golden land of eternal summer that fronts upon a blue and smiling sea… a sweet and verdant country, like a garden, where the ripe fruit droppeth from the heavy-laden branch, and none need ever suffer from the gnawings of hunger, nor the pangs of thirst, nor shiver to the chilly kiss of the wintry wind.

Whether it was but a dream or a true vision sent from the Gods of the North, Zorm my grandsire spake thus to the people, and they rose up and took their furs and skins, their stony axes and flint-bladed spears, and all that they possessed, and departed from the place of their fathers, and wended their long way south and ever south, down from the mountains of the wintry north, following the visions of Zorm the Wise, and the Red Star that flew down the skies before them, leading them on like a streaming torch borne in the invisible hands of a friendly god. My father, Gomar, was but a boy in the day of the rising-up and the going-forth of my people, the People of the Dragon; and I, his son, was born on the great march and have never seen the lost land of my fathers. Nor shall I ever, while the world lasts.

II

The Plains of Thune

But I would speak of what befell me in my fourteenth year, when the People had come down at last out of the great mountains, and were crossing the measureless plains we called the Land of Thune for that there were flat and level as the Stone Table in the old myth, wherein Thune, the sun lord, was slain by the Demon of Winter, only to rise again, reborn with spring.

The People had waxed in number since the time of our going-forth; then we had been but three-and-twenty, and Thom the Strong, firstborn of the sons of Zorm, had been our chief. Now were we near fifty in number, and Thom-Ra, the brother of Thom, led us on the march. Gray of mane and beard was Thom-Ra, with tall sons went ever at his right hand, but still a mighty warrior for all that he was in his prime. At his left hand went mine own father, Gomar, for they were brothers, albeit my sire was the youngest of the sons of Zorm, who lived yet, and was now known as Zorm the Wise.

The thick furs of cave-bear and snow-wolf we had put by, once we were come down from the mountains with their ice-choked passes and their wintry winds. It was Tuma the Limping, the clever, the Lame One, had bethought him of scraping the fur from the hides so that we went clothed now but in the hides of beasts. For the Plains of Thune were milder and not so cold as had been the windswept and snowy heights. And the warriors and the hunters wore still the necklace of fangs that were the mark of manhood to the men of my tribe, and had ever been.

I, a mere youth, was not yet attained to an age whereat I might strive for the mark of manhood, but my brothers, Jord and Karth, wore about their strong throats the coveted necklace of the fangs of the great cave bear. Youth though I was, I had the strong thews of my father, gliding over the heavy bones of our kind, and the clear tanned hide and raw yellow hair and cold blue eyes of my blood from time immemorial. We were mighty then, tireless in the hunt, and powerful in war.

But the level plains of long sere grass, they were strange and new to us and we knew not the ways thereof. At the time whereof I speak, we had marched south for seven days and had found no game and little water, and hunger gnawed at us and made tempers short and men take risks they might otherwise have been too wary to attempt. For we knew nothing of this land nor of the dangers peculiar to it, as I shall shortly show.

When the last of the dried meat was gone, and the water low in the leather bottles, our huntsmen ranged far and ever farther afield, searching for game. What beasts might dwell here amidst the endless plains we could not guess, but beasts somewhere there must surely be, for else the Dragon Star and the visions of Zorm would not have led us hither.

By night we lay huddled together for warmth, body close to body, trying to ignore the emptiness of our bellies and the dryness in our mouths. None complained and none whimpered, for we were a hardy people; only the babes cried a little against their mothers’ breasts. Fire we had brought with us at the beginning of the great march south, fire from the Undying Flame that the women tended ever and that was never allowed to die out. It had been Zar, the great-great-grandsire of Zorm—Zar, the first chief of our tribe—had first learned the secret of making fire. For that reason was the sacred fire of the tribes watched over and guarded thereafter down through the generations, called the Flame of Zar. But his secret, which had to do with the striking together of certain rocks, had perished with him under the trampling feet of the hairy mammoth. And, within my own time, the flame we had brought with us in a bowl of hollowed stone, had been drowned in a sudden rainstorm. No longer did any, even Zorm the Wise, who was the descendant of Zar in the fourth generation, remember the secret of fire. Therefore did we huddle for warmth together under the thick grasses amidst the windy plains, naked and shivering in our hides. And more than a few people had cause of nights to grumble against the cleverness of Tuma the Limping for that, at his behest, we had scraped the thick, warm fur from the hides we wore.

Foremost of the hunters of the tribe was my mighty father, Gomar. He and my brothers had gone forth at dawn earlier to seek for game. But with the setting of the sun they had not returned, though all else, including mine uncle, Thom-Ra the chief, had come back from the hunt, and empty-handed.

III

The Vision of Zorm

For worry after my father and my brothers, I, Junga, could not sleep that night. And neither did my grandsire, Zorm, find easeful slumber. The sleep of the aged is thin as the blood in their veins, I knew, but as my grandsire lay curled against me, his bony frame gaunt in my arms, which I wrapped about him so that he might take warmth from my young flesh and hot blood, I felt him tremble betimes and betimes cry out.

Towards the mid of night, he spake suddenly in a voice clear and strong, and I startled from my half-doze at his cry.

“Gomar, my son! Venture not into the marshy places! Turn back therefrom, and thy sons with thee! Beware the Oozy Thing—the ghastly stench of it, and the bottomless hunger! Turn thy steps away from the deep places, or the Father of Slime will drink thy strong blood and suck the flesh from thy bones—Aiiee!”

With this last, he shrieked and woke trembling and staring about into the dark with eyes filled with fear. But when I asked of him the meaning of his words, it was as if they had been spake by another, for he remembered them not. He knew only that a black and doom-fraught dream had seized upon him as he drowsed. When I told him the words he had uttered in the dream, he grew agitated and distraught. Mayhap it had been a vision of warning, sent him by the Gods of the North, who ever and anon spake to him in his slumbers. The thought that my father and my brothers were in danger roused me and I rose from my bed and took up my flint spear and stone knife and the great axe that was used only in war. Nor did my grandsire seek to stay me.

“East-away, child, in a marshy place, the danger lurks,” he quavered, pointing with one frail arm. “Nor know I how the knowledge cometh to me—but fly like the very wind, young Junga, if ever thou wouldst see thy kin alive!”

I passed through the huddled sleepers to where Thom-Ra, the chief, lay amidst his sons and his women. At my approach the younger of the sons of Thom-Ra roused. Taller than I, and older by two years, and mightier of thew than I, was Charn, the chief’s son. But ever was I fleeter of foot than he, and keener of eye, wherefore he admired me for those things wherein I was more skillful than he, as I admired him for those skills of his, and we had ever been friends.

“Whither at this dark hour, Junga?” he asked me, and I told him of the vision of Zorm and of my fears. He tugged at the few tufts of yellow hair that, as yet, sparsely adorned his chin.

“Ever from our fathers’ time have the things seen in his dreams by Zorm the Wise proven true and sent by the Gods,” he mused. “If peril lurks amidst the plains, we must know of it. And my uncle and thy father are the boldest of all our huntsmen, and must not perish. Come, I will go with thee.” And Charn took up his weapons and came to my side.

“Whatever danger the Plains of Thune conceal, we shall face it together, Junga, thou and I!” he said stoutly; and my heart warmed to him then and there; and for all the rest of our lives did we cleave together, Charn and I, as we had been brothers born out of the same womb.

We left the camp and struck due east, in the direction from which the sun would rise. Nor did we loiter on the way, but like the wind we ran; nor did I ease my pace so that he could keep abreast of me, but flew on ever before him while he strove manfully to attain my speed.

Black was the sky in that doomful hour, and thick with clouds, and thunder growled like a surly beast upon the heights. Ever and anon, lightning flashed amidst the high-piled clouds, and we knew a storm was brewing. All the more reason, then, to speed my pace, before the winds grew and the rains came down to obliterate my father’s spoor upon the long grasses.

In the days of my youth I could run all day, swift as a bird, tireless as the invisible wind. We were mighty men in the days of my youth, iron of arm, and with an unyielding and an untiring strength like the stone of the mountains that had cradled the birthplace of my race. Such men dwell not upon the earth now, as strode the wide ways of the world when Charn and I were in the fullness of our youth.

Fleet though we were, we were too late.

IV

The Horror in the Pit

Ere ever we had found the marshy place, the storm broke above us. Wind tore with shrieking voice through our yellow hair, which not yet was woven into the long braid of manliness, and tugged at the strip of hide we wore about our naked loins. Cold rain lashed our backs and shoulders like icy whips and blinded us so that we stumbled and could not see our footing. But the flames of heaven blazed on the hearths of the Gods, and by its intermittent flaring we saw boggy ground ahead, and low hummocks of scabrous grass, and black pools in betwixt, and recognized this as the place dreamt of in the vision of Zorm.

Here we went slowly and on cautious feet, Charn and I, not knowing what peril might lurk herein. We avoided the black pools and inky rivulets, leaping from hummock to hummock, ever wary and holding our weapons at the ready. And I called aloud my father’s name and the names of my tall brothers, in my clear young voice. But no answering call came out of the pouring dark.

We came at last to the brink of a great shallow pit, like the bed of a vanished lake. But it was empty of water, that lake, though a slick coating of black mud, or something very like unto mud, lay along the bottom of the depression. I peered over the brink and gazed therein… and my heart froze within my breast at what I saw pitifully tumbled about upon the floor of the pit.

They were the bones of men, three men, and one larger of size and older than the other twain; and still clasped about the bones of its neck was the triple-stranded necklace of bear’s fangs that oft I had seen hung about the throat of my father, that mighty hunter. Now he would hunt no more, would Gomar, nor would his tall sons go ever at his side…

At my shoulder, Charn the chief’s son sucked in the breath between his teeth. The whites of his eyes shone wide with terror in the flicker of the storm-fires.

“The bones are stripped bare!” he whispered. “Not a morsel of flesh remains upon them! What manner of beast could have done this to strong men, well-armed and brave? It was no beast did this grisly thing, but a night-devil!”

For a moment I did not reply, for the tears I would not permit to flow from my eyes choked my throat. Then I growled in a low tone that, beast or devil, I would slay the thing had done this, or be slain by it. Mayhap the Gods heard my vow, for thunder crashed and lightning struck to fire a dead tree that stood not far off amidst the marshes, and it burned like a torch held in a giant’s hand.

“Vengeance I will pursue later,” I said. “First I must care for my dead.” And this we did, side by side, after the few and simple rites of our tribe. The raw and naked bones of my brethren and my sire we fetched up out of that black and slimy pit, piled them on a pyre made of dry grasses, and touched the pyre to flame with a bough torn from the burning tree. They flared up like dry twigs in a conflagration, the bones of my father and his sons, and that was a strange thing to see, for new bones burn poorly. Perchance it was the black slime wherewith they were bedrabbled that made them flare like dry tinder.

The smoke of the funeral pyre rose to heaven, bearing with it the ghosts of my father and my brothers on their long journey to the second life. They would join the ghosts of their ancestors in the country beyond the clouds, and dwell in bliss forever, purged of all crimes done in this life by their passage through the purifying flames. I made my farewells in silence, and Charn, my friend, stood at my side, his hand upon my shoulder. Above us, the storm died away and the stars stared down, coldly curious. Then I took up my weapons and prepared for the hunt.

“We part here, my friend,” I said. “Bear word back to Zorm of how his son and grandsons perished; say to him also that the last of his blood goes forth to seek vengeance or to die.”

“If Zorm shall hear the tale of it, it shall be from your own lips, Junga, my brother,” said Charn quietly. “For I shall go with you to face what cometh.”

“This is not your fight, but mine,” I said.

“I have made it mine,” he spake. And then tears that I had held back rose to blur my vision and for some little time I could not speak, but only clasped his shoulder blindly, with a pressure that said what I could not.

And we went forward together, bearing a burning branch to light the way before us while we tracked the beast to its lair.

V

Father of Slime

In truth it was not hard to follow, that trail. For when the beast had heaved itself up out of the pit the black ooze had clung to it, or so it seemed, so that it left a track of bedrabbled slime whereby we tracked it swiftly. Strange they were, those tracks. I, who have hunted the white tiger of the heights and cave-bear and the ghost-gray wolves of the snow country have never seen a trail more oddly marked.

Charn saw the strangeness of it, too. “It seems to squirm along upon its belly as if it had no legs,” he grunted. “See, Junga, my brother, there are no marks of pads or claws or hoofs in this soft mud! Naught but the trail of wriggling slime… is it some monster worm we follow, do you think, or some great serpent?”

“It was no serpent sucked the bones of my father clean,” I growled. But his words sent a thrill of uncanny horror through me like a sudden chill. We were little more than savages in those days, and had seen little of the mighty world, its wonders and its mysteries, and our heads were full of the tales of night demons and monsters, whereof the old women whisper round the cave fires on stormy nights. Thinking of these unwholesome things made the flesh creep upon my arms and my nape-hairs prickle and lift. But I went on, bearing ever in mind that whatever can kill a man is solid and real, and can itself be killed.

Or so I thought at the time.

We came upon it quite suddenly, not long thereafter.

We had come to the edge of another bowl-like depression in the marshy ground, but this one was full to the brim with black water, or with some other fluid black as ink and stinking like the breath from an open grave.

Charn wrinkled his nose at this stench. “Foul water must it be, to smell so bad as this,” he murmured, bending curiously over the motionless surface of the black fluid.

I know not what it was made me put my hand out suddenly to stay him. But I caught his arm and thrust him back, and in so doing, saved him from a death more terrible than ever a man of our tribe has dreamed in his grisliest nightmare.

For the black fluid rippled—stirred—and rose in a slow, horrible wave that shaped itself into a ropy arm of glistening, quivering black jelly. And this black tentacle of living slime groped at the space where Charn had been a heartbeat before.

“Gods of my fathers!” he cried. “It is a thing of slime—slime that lives, and moves, and—kills!”

In truth, it was the father of all slime, a living mass of quivering obscenity, vast enough to mire and swallow down a wooly mammoth in his prime. We shrank before it, retreating to a grassy hummock, and the heaving mass slopped up and over the brink of the hollow and flowed towards us like a living wave.

I flung my spear directly into the mass, but it passed through the stinking jelly without dealing it hurt nor harm. A tentacle shaped itself and whipped out towards me, but I hewed through it with my stone axe, and, severed clean, it fell to twitch and wriggle upon the lank grass like a great worm. But only for a moment did it hold its shape. In the next instant it had burst into a black puddle that trickled back to the parent mass, joined into it and was instantly absorbed.

We had thrown both our spears by now, and Charn had flung his axe into the heaving shape of slime, wherein it sunk without a trace. Save for my axe, and the flint knives twisted into the thongs that bound our strips of hide about our loins, we were defenseless.

So we retreated further, our knees trembling, our faces livid with terror. A droplet of the slime-stuff had touched my bare breast, where it clung, burning like liquid fire. I bent and caught up cold wet mud and smeared it on the burnt place with shaking hands. Now I knew what it was had stripped bare the bones of my father, for the stinking ooze of the slime-thing seared the flesh of men like some unholy acid.

Charn yowled and struck out suddenly with his stone dagger as a ropy extrusion of slime whipped out at him. The member withdrew, his blade still in it. And then a tentacle came slithering out at me and I struck with my axe, and howled like a singed cur as the slime stung my fingers.

“What black hell is this country the Dragon Star has led us into,” cried Charn, “where even the slime can rise up against a man?” I had no answer to make.

“Save your breath,” I said, “for running.”

VI

Junga the Light-Bringer

But we did not run very far, after all. For swiftlier far than our feet the living wave of black ooze flowed over the ground, and before the white moon broke free from her tangle of clouds we had gained the top of a hummock and found ourselves ringed in. The slime-beast, like a living river, had flowed around the base of the hummock, to join and melt into itself in one circle of slithering death.

And now we were unarmed, for all we had to defend ourselves with was the stone knife at my waist.

“This is the end of it, my brother,” I panted. “I told you to go back to the camp, but you would not listen.”

“I regret nothing,” he said stoutly (though naked terror was in his eyes). “No man should face a death like this alone, without a comrade at his side. Our ghosts shall wander forever, side by side…”

But not in the country beyond the clouds, I thought to myself as the slime came lapping up the slope to suck us down, for our spirits have not been purged of crime in the purifying flames of the pyre. The thought of the flaming funeral pyre reminded me of the burning branch I still bore in my hand and which, in my haste and in the extremity of my terror, I had not thought to cast away. Staring into the red flames I thought, for one mad moment, to turn the torch upon Charn and myself, that we might die a clean death by fire and that our ghosts, cleansed in that fire, might journey beyond the clouds to join our ancestors in the second life. But it was for a moment only that the madness clamored within my brain.

For Charn screamed, a raw-throated yell of unreasoning horror, as a black and glistening wave rose up before him and I sickened at the putrid breath of the thing that oozed up to engulf him and to suck him down in horror. And in that instant a single thought crashed through my fear-crazed mind.

For I remembered how the beslimed bones of my father had flared up like tinder in the funeral pyre—!

Howling the war-cry of the People, I sprang forward and shoved Charn behind me with a powerful sweep of my arm.

And in the same moment I thrust the burning bough directly into the Father of Slime.

Then it was that we twain gazed into the naked heart of hell… for flames ran crazily over the heaving, glistening tide of putrid jelly… and the thing blazed up like an inferno!

In a heartbeat we were walled about with living flame. It writhed and wriggled like a maddened tangle of worms, sheathed in that web of burning flame. And as it burned, it died; and as it died, it—screamed!

Never, while the world lasts, do I wish to hear such a cry again! A high-pitched squeal—a piping sound, like a newborn babe, mewling and whimpering in fear as it dies, not understanding what is happening to it, not having felt the sting and bite of pain before… ah, Gods, that innocent, baby-cry goes whimpering through my darkest dreams to this very hour!

We leaped over the burning slime to the safe ground beyond, and stood, clutching each other, gaping like madmen upon the horror of its death-throes. By the time dawn paled the east, naught was left of the hideous thing but a rubbery, burnt scum and flames that smouldered amongst the scruffy grass. And I was numb with awe and with the wonder of it.

Perchance it was that in Time’s gray dawn some accident of nature had touched life within a droplet of slime within the depths of the steaming fens or oozy seas. And the slime fed upon wriggling life, absorbed that which it fed upon, and grew in bulk thereby. Grew vast and vaster still, over ages, till the lake or fen or marsh wherein it had been born was too small to contain it, so it had heaved itself ashore, to feed on beasts and men, growing ever greater and greater, until at length it had become the monstrous enormity that we had stumbled upon in our ignorance and folly.

World-old and world-evil, perhaps, was the Father of Slime… older by unthinkable ages than the race of men… mayhap it was even the first-begotten of all living things on this earth—and a naked savage with a burning branch had brought it to its doom! Irony of ironies, a thing older perchance than the very mountains of the north, and slain by a boy scarce fourteen.

Together, wearily, we trudged back across the plains, Charn my brother, and I. To where the People of the Dragon huddled together on the unknown plain, fearful of what the day might bring, strangers in a world of mysteries and terrors.

Like my ancestor, Zar, I bore in my left hand the gift of fire to them who had lost it in the black night of fear.

And in my heart I bore to them another gift, that was like light to the black night of ignorance. For I brought to my tribe the knowledge that nothing there is in all the world that can slay a man, that men cannot slay.

We went unto them, side by side, under the morning.

The Pillars of Hell

By Lin Carter

I

In the Land of Silence

For many a long and weary year have we wandered down across the world, following a red star with a trail of flame like a crimson dragon of the skies. It was in the time of my great-grandsire, Zorm, that we rose up from the land of our fathers amidst the great mountains of the north, and took the first step on the endless trail which has led us ever south. Down from the wintry peaks of the Roof of the World we came, fleeing before the chill breath of the Great Ice, following the Dragon Star like a burning beacon, and the vision of a warm and golden land of fruit-burdened boughs and eternal slumber.

Hard has been the trail we followed, and many the fellow-tribesman who has fallen by the wayside, prey to the strange and uncanny perils of these new lands unknown to us. I, Jugrid the son of Junga the Light-Bringer, have seen many fall, to rise no more. Thom-Ra, our stalwart chief, fell in my childhood before the thunderous hooves of the great mastodon, while we traversed the trackless Plains of Thune; and his son, Zuruk, who was chief after him, I saw die before the assault of the Brown Men of the Plains. Now it is Charn, brother of Zuruk, who leads us on—Charn, the boyhood friend of my own father, Junga.

My grandsire, Gomar the Hunter, was a boy when our tribe rose up and left the valley of our ancestors; my father, Junga, was born during the long trek through the snow-bound mountains; and I, Jugrid, first saw the light of day on the Plains of Thune. Long, I say, long has been our journeying, and the end is not yet.

When I was just entered into my sixteenth year we came at last out of the measureless Plains and left the windswept tundra behind us forever. We crossed a range of wooded hills, forded a rushing river, and entered upon a land strange and new to us, a land where sparse patches of scrubby grass withered and died before the hot breath of the panting wind. A land of sere and desert sand which Zorm the Ancient, who yet lived, named the Land of Silence.

Yes, the aged seer, Zorm, yet lived. One hundred and eleven summers had he seen, the oldest of men, although now he was but skin and bones and could not walk but must be carried in a litter of skins. Blind he was, but as his outer sight faded, his gaze turned inwards, the better to read the visions sent him by the Gods.

This land we were entered upon now was a strange, dead land of crimson sand and rolling dunes, with never a green leaf or a spear of living grass to rest the eyes upon. Truly was it called the Land of Silence, for the air was motionless here: no winds blew, storms never came, and no birds sang. Silent as the grave was this weird, rolling land of crimson sands, and our hearts grew faint within our breasts that we must cross this drear and desert waste. But cross it we must and we would, for ever the Dragon Star burned like a bearded flame in the southern skies, beckoning us on, and we are the People of the Dragon.

But the men of the tribe muttered and grumbled, and the women whispered of night-terrors and Things that glibbered from the shadows of the sands—as women will always whisper, while the world lasts. Charn, the chief, they said, was young and inexperienced… a wiser man, they hinted, would have sought a way around the wastes of crimson sand, rather than plunging into this uncanny Land of Silence, where the People would perish of thirst.

But Junga, my father, spoke up for Charn the chief, and bade the people obey his behest; and Junga, my father, commanded the respect of all, for it was he who had slain the dreadsome Slime-beast amidst the marshes of Thune, and he, the Light-Bringer, who had brought the gift of fire back to the camping-place of the People. And Zorm, like a ghost, whispered from his litter that the Way of the Dragon lay across the crimson sands of the Land of Silence, not around them. And so we went on as Charn the chief had commanded, though there were still those who grumbled and were unconvinced. Among these, the loudest was Kugar the Cunning, the scrawny and ill-kempt son of Tuma the Limping.

From of old had there been enmity between Kugar and myself, for that ever on the hunt he hung back and was never to be found in the forefront of the chase, where danger was, preferring the rear, where men such as he were safe. And I think he envied me my swelling thews and rippling muscles, the square cut of my jaw and the fearless glint of my blue eyes. For he was hunched and flabby and ill-favored; especially was he not favored by the women, although he found many an excuse to be with them. And oftentimes he made my blood seethe when he cast his oily, smirking eyes upon the dark-haired girl, Athala… Athala of the green cat’s-eyes and the lissom body… Athala, whom I hungered to make my own.

But that is another story…

II

Men who Vanish in the Night

For nearly a moon had we trudged ever south across the silent sands of this accursed land, and no living thing had we seen in all this time, save for high-flying carrion birds, who circled lazily against the blue zenith, and, once, a hissing reptile as crimson as the sands which hid him.

We had fallen upon this lizard-beast, hacking with our stone axes and thrusting our long spears, for our supplies of game were nigh exhausted, and fresh meat, even the meat of monster lizards, would not be ill fare. But the thing was hard to slay, and long in the dying, as are all its cold-blooded kind. And there was some nameless venom in its claws and long fangs that gave a dire illness to men, that they fell ill of the sweating sickness and were long in the dying.

Charn the chief, who had ever gone in the first rank of our warriors in the time of battle, was one of those the venomous claws of the giant lizard-thing had raked ere it died. Now he lay lashed to a litter, raving of a burning fever, shielded from the rays of the sun by tattered skins draped over poles, and tended by the sharp-tongued Thora, his unwed sister. And, until the chief perished, or grew well enough to lead us on, we could go no further, and must camp in this place of naked red rocks, where a scant trickle of sour water ran through a parched gully.

And ever Kugar and his cronies muttered dire things about our lingering in this accursed place… that we should all die here under the fangs of the lizard-things, or of the fever, or of thirst, when the trickle of water dried up. But we paid little attention to Kugar’s premonitions of doom, dismissing them as we dismiss the croakings of old women.

Until dawn broke and four men of the tribe were missing from their sleeping skins.

They had not been carried off by marauding beasts or by men, nor had they wandered singly away, as men will sometimes wander in the spell of an evil dream. This we knew because the prints of their feet could clearly be seen in the smooth red sand: one by one, they had risen up from their pallets and gone striding off into the desert, into the east. But where, and for what purpose? And why did they not return? None could answer these questions, not even blind Zorm the Ancient, to whom the Gods gave counsel in dreams.

We were troubled and fearful and kept close to our camp in the rocky gorge all that day, save for my father, Junga, and the most skillful and tireless of our huntsmen. They ranged far to the east, but found no sign of the missing men… found nothing at all, save for a kind of ruin where pillars or columns rose from the shifting sands, pillars such as might have once borne up the roof of an ancient temple in time gone by.

By that point, said my father, the slow sifting of the sands had blurred the footprints of our missing tribesmen beyond the following.

Kugar muttered grim omens, and said that were it not for the sickness of our chief, we could be swiftly gone from this accursed place where men rise up from their beds and walk in their dreams to an unknown death. And one of his cronies, Nuba the One-Eyed, grinned suggestively, and added—

“If Charn, our chief, is too ill to lead us, let us give the chieftainship to wise and clever Kugar. Only until Charn the chief has recovered his strength, of course…”

Junga my father grunted, and spat in the sand between his feet. “If ever the chieftainship is given to Kugar, I think me Charn shall die swiftly, and in the night, of a strange malady,” he growled, one massive hand closing about the haft of his mighty axe. “Here we stay until our chief recovers his strength and can lead us forth.”

“And if more of our people wander off in the night, O Junga? What then?” leered Nuba, while Kugar stood and glared unspeakingly nearby. My father shrugged.

“We shall set guards about the camp, so that none may pass into the sands unseen,” he said. “If Nuba is so concerned with the well-being of the tribe, he may take the first watch himself.”

Nuba snarled, heavy lips peeling back to show rotting yellow teeth, his one squint-eye glancing fearfully about, bright as the gaze of a cornered rat. But his bluff was taken, and the watch was his.

III

Death Strikes from the Shadows

None of us went easy to our sleeping-skins that night, and even those who did slept a troubled sleep, roiled with horrible dreams. My father had set four guards to patrol the edges of the camp, with Nuba to the western side thereof, and Khomar, my boyhood friend and brother to Athala, the dark-haired girl who filled my dreams, to the southern border of the gulley.

At the mid of night he roused me from my sleep and bade me go to the relief of Khomar. I rose sleepily, donned my tunic and buskins of rawhide, cinched my girdle of woven thongs about my waist and took up my spear.

From where he lay, huddled beneath his furs near the fire, the gaunt and wasted form of my great-grandsire, Zorm, stirred and rose on one fleshless arm, supported by Azad, the fatherless and orphaned boy who tended to his needs whenever I or my father was not there. “Grandson Junga,” the aged man whispered, “give the child the great axe…” My father hesitated, then bent to obey. Slowly he unwrapped the mighty war-axe of polished stone which had gone ever at the side of his own father, Gomar the Hunter. Great was the massy stone, bound by rawhide thongs to a five-foot wooden haft, and so terrible was the weight thereof that it could crush even the skull of the great horned bison of the Plains like an eggshell with a single blow. For a moment my father stood, frowning, chewing on his thick ruff of yellow beard, weighing the great axe in his hands. He had borne it from beside the bones of his father, who had died under the Slime-beast twenty summers ago.

“Give him the Axe of Zar of the Flame,” crooned the eerie voice of blind Zorm from his cradle of skins, “that wast borne in war by Kuma the son of Zar, and by Tugar, Kuma’s son, and by the first five chieftains of the People.”

“I shall obey your words, Ancient One,” said my father, bowing his head. “But this is the Axe of war—”

“This is war, my grandson,” came that eerie whisper, “when death strikes from the shadows, and men walk in their sleep to a nameless doom!”

My blood chilled in my veins at that weird whisper, and the flesh crept on my forearms. But I took up the Axe of my family, and went to join the guards.

And found them gone.

When I reached the place whereat Junga my father had posted Khomar the brother of Athala, I found no one there. For a moment I stood baffled, but unafraid, thinking he had perchance gone a ways apart to relieve nature behind a rock. But then my breath caught in my throat and my heart froze in my breast: for there amidst the sands some little distance off, caught in the rays of the rising moon, I saw his long spear with its glinting blade in the cold light.

There was no mistaking it, that spear, for it was one of the new spears fashioned by the clever craft of old Tuma, with its blade of beaten copper. Only a few of these did we have as yet, for Tuma had mastered the secret of copper-metal after our brush with the Brown Men of the Plain, who went so-armed with the soft metal, which cut cleaner and deeper than did our old spears with blades of chipped flint.

I picked up the spear, turning it over and over in my hands, then bent to search the crimson sands with keen, quick eyes. There had been no struggle here, that much was plain to see, for the sand was undisturbed. Only the prints of Khomar’s buskins in a straight row, leading off from this place step by step into the east.

From the shadow of night, at moon-rising, the unknown death had struck again. And this time the victim had been Khomar, Khomar the laughing, the merry-of-heart, the friend of my boyhood…

With my heart heavy in my breast, I ran back to the pallet of Junga my father, to give the alarm and to rouse the camp. And when all were roused and counted, it was seen that of the four guards whom Junga had set to watch the perimeter of the camp, three were missing. All had dropped their weapons and strode off into the east, as if summoned by a Call they could not withstand or refuse. Only Nuba had escaped the doom which had befallen the other guards. Shamefacedly, he snarled that he had stepped aside to relieve himself in the shadow of a rock and must have been thus disposed when the fatal moment fell.

“At least,” smiled Kugar the son of Tuma, “let us rejoice and give thanks that the Doom of the Silent Land has not taken from us the brave and valiant Nuba, as it has three other men—whose deaths be upon the spirit of Junga, and none other. For had we done as I, Kugar, suggested, we should be gone far from this evil place where men die in the night!”

“Another hath died in the night, O Kugar,” whispered a thin voice from beside the fire. Slowly and painfully the gaunt and wasted figure of Zorm the Ancient lifted itself with one bony arm wrapped about the slender shoulders of the boy Azad. A face white and fleshless as a skull, with milky and sightless eyes, rose into the firelight.

“What means the Ancient One?” murmured Kugar uneasily.

“Look to Charn the chief,” said my great-grandsire. And Junga my father cried out as one stricken by an arrow and turned pale as death.

IV

The Fangs of Gorah

In truth he was not dead, was Charn the chief, but he was not far from it. Some unknown hand had thrown his sleeping furs over his face, muffling his nostrils from the life-giving air, and he was very near to death when the swift feet of my father came to the lean-to, and threw aside the hides, and found him thus.

Thora, his sharp-tongued shrew of a sister who had tended him in his illness, set up a shrill wailing clamor. She had slept deeply and heard nothing in the night, she whimpered, tearing her hair and beating her breast. Kugar made a great show of comforting the distraught woman.

Swiftly, my father Junga bore the wasted body of his friend out into the open air and laid him down close to the fire so that he might take comfort from the warmth thereof. Pale and spent and gasping for breath was our chief, and the death-sweat glistened wetly on his drawn, suffering face. Frail and thin were the strong arms, once mighty of thew and tireless in battle, and strengthless and feeble were the long legs of Charn, which once had outpaced the very wind. Glorious in his manhood had been Charn, the son of Thom-Ra. But that was in the splendor of his youth, long ere the venom of the crimson sand-lizard had crept into his veins to waste his heavy limbs and drink his strength away to feebleness.

Old Tuma the Lame One, Kugar’s sire, was clever in the ways of healing. He laid one ear against the panting breast of Charn the chieftain, then rose, shaking his head, his white locks brilliant in the moonlight.

“He is far gone,” muttered the old man. “Almost has his spirit set forth on the ghost-road, bound for the second life.”

Yes, in truth he was very near death. The suffocation he had known under the heavy skins had goaded his laboring heart into a desperate racing. And every throb of his pulse, it seemed, drew the lizard’s poison closer to his heart. His life was to be measured but in minutes; and Charn the chieftain had no son of his loins to wear the fang-necklace of the leaders of the People after he was gone to join his fathers.

“My time is short,” gasped Charn. “Lift me up, so that all of the People may hear. And clasp my hand, Junga, friend and companion of my youth!” Tears streaming from his blue eyes to mingle with the yellow bristle of his beard, my father knelt to support with his arms the failing strength of Charn.

“I have no son to follow me,” he said. “Take, therefore, for your chief after I am gone, Junga the Light-Bringer, he who slew the Father of Slime amidst the Plains, he who brought back to you the gift of fire.”

A murmur of approval ran through the People, for my mighty sire was liked and respected by all. Or almost all…

For Nuba—him who was absent from his guard-post at the time the Doom came for the other guards—him who was absent at about the same time some unknown hand had muffled the face of the stricken Charn in thick furs, seeking to snuff out his feeble life—spoke up scornfully from the shadows:

“Why Junga, who is past his prime, rather than the clever-witted Kugar, here, who is young, and who speaks for many?” he interrupted.

“Be silent of tongue, you yelping cur—for all that Kugar be my own flesh and blood,” snapped the white-haired Tuma where he knelt. And Nuba grumbled into silence.

“First,” panted Charn, in his slow voice, struggling for every breath, “because it is my will, and because I am your chief, the son of Thom-Ra, the son of Zorm the Ancient. And secondly, because Junga is second only to me in claim of blood-lineage, for that he, too, is the son of a son of Zorm, the wise and ancient chief who ruled the People ere we departed out of the valley of our ancestors. Take, then, O Junga, my brother, the seven-stranded necklace from about my throat—”

Junga my father did so. And with his own hands, with the last of his strength, Charn fastened the necklace of chieftainship about my father’s throat. So I became the son of a chief.

Then he sank back lifelessly in my father’s arms. Yet still his white lips worked as if striving to speak. My father bent close to catch the words.

“We will… hunt together… side by side… O my brother… in the country beyond the clouds… someday—”

And thus he died in my father’s arms.

Gently my father laid him out and crossed his hands upon his breast, clasping his copper-bladed spear. And the women set his war-axe beside him, and put his flint knife in his girdle. Then they heaped dry grasses about him, and sticks of wood, and with his own hands my father took up a burning branch from the fire and touched to flame the pyre of Charn. The flames roared up about his body, to cleanse his spirit of his crimes, that it might drift up with the rising smoke, stainless and pure from the purifying flames, to rise up to the country beyond the clouds to reside with the spirits of his fathers forever.

And about the strong throat of Junga hung the seven-stranded necklace of the fangs of Gorah, the white tiger of the snows.

The warriors of our race, when they are come to the age of manhood, were wont in the olden time to go forth alone and bare-handedly upon the mountain to trap and slay the great cave-bear, returning with the claws of their kill threaded on a thong about their neck, as men and full-fledged warriors. Today, as there are no cave-bears in this strange southern clime, the young men thread colored stones upon a thong. But the chieftains of our race, the first of whom was Zar of the Flame, must fight the dreaded snow-tiger. Seven chiefs in our line, from Zar himself to Thom-Ra, the father of Zuruk and Charn, slew the Terror of the Snows, and returned with the Fangs of Gorah about their throat.

That seven-stranded necklace was my father’s now, and I would wear it in my time.

If any of us came alive out of the Land of Silence!

V

The Watcher in the Night

Day was upon us before the body of Charn had fallen to ash. We broke our fast on meagre fare, and after I had seen to the comfort of my great-grandsire, I repaired to the place where Niora, the widowed mother of Athala and the vanished Khomar had slept. They had no man of their kin to hunt for them and I had ranged far into the desert at dawn, and had been fortunate enough to bring down one of the lumbering carrion-birds with my spear.

This I cast down before the knees of the woman, Niora, where she knelt dry-eyed before her fire. “Here is meat for the living, mother of the friend of my boyhood,” I said somberly. She looked up at me through the coils of her hair, and her face, still beautiful although drawn with pain and toil, was weary.

“My thanks to you, Jugrid, chief’s son,” she said dully. “But I have no belly for it, I, whose son lies somewhere amidst the sands, his flesh unburnt in the sacred fire, his spirit earthbound forever, never to join his fathers beyond the clouds. But thank you, chief’s son, for your kindness.”

I bowed, and went to where Athala stood not far off, listlessly rolling up the sleeping-furs. Even in her sorrow she was more lovely than a springtide morning. I touched her arm.

“He was my brother, too,” I said awkwardly. She nodded, saying nothing, too weary for tears.

“If but one might live,” she sighed, “why must it be Nuba the One-Eyed skulker, rather than tall Khomar, the swift, the bold, the laughing—” Then she choked back a sob and I let my arm gently encircle her shaking shoulders.

“This very night,” I swore, “Khomar shall be avenged!”

She flashed me a look of scorn, green eyes flashing.

“You boast like a raw boy, not a warrior and a chief’s son,” she said fiercely. “Come to me again when you have deeds to show, not empty words!” And with that she turned on her heel and went to tend her mother.

Even in her anger, she was more beautiful than the dawn.

That night the chief, my father, posted his guards. He would have set me among them, but I pled a gashed foot and showed him my heel red with blood. He gave me a puzzled look, but held his tongue; although I think he doubted me, and was surprised and hurt at my cowardice.

The blood on my heel was from the bird I slew at dawn, a bit of whose gore I had scraped up in a hollow bit of stone.

That night, before the moon’s rising, I crept from my sleeping furs and did on my leather tunic and buskins, and armed myself. At the last, remembering the words which Zorm the Ancient had spake the night before, I took from amongst its wrappings the great Axe of Zar and bound it across my back. Then I crept into the darkness, as stealthily as ever crept forth the tiger of the snows.

At the head of the stony gulch in which the People camped was a tall rock rising up into the stars. This rock I reached and none there were that saw me go. Then did I scale it carefully, unto the top, where the stone was flat and smooth. There I stretched out so that I could watch the guards who watched the camp, without myself being seen by any.

For a long while naught betid, and I caught myself falling into a doze, wherefrom I jerked awake, cursing the weakness of the flesh. To keep myself awake thenceafter, I closed my fingers into a fist about the sharp blade of my flint knife until the keen, whetted stone bit into my palm. The sting of the cut kept me wakeful, and whenever drowsiness came over me, I but clenched the knife tighter until the bite of the blade into my flesh stung me to wakefulness again.

And then, about the mid of night, just as the moon rose up over the far edge of the world to flood the Land of Silence with its sheen of light, I was witness to a strange and awful thing.

For the moon rose… and as it rose there rose as well a weird and distant singing… a faёrie song, such as perchance the spirits hearken to in the country beyond the clouds… a thin and eerie song, seductive and languid, promising unheard-of pleasures, strange bliss, unholy raptures such as the flesh has seldom known…

As I watched, myself enrapt as they, the guards turned their heads to listen, and let fall their spears from nerveless hands, and turned to stride away into the desert. And I with them, no less ensorcelled than were they…

I was brought up short, with a stinging shock, at the brink of the huge stone whereon I had crouched. One step more and I would have toppled to the rock-strewn sands far below. Cold globules of sweat burst from my brow and my hands felt clammy as I realized how nearly had I come to succumbing to the same weird enchantment as had beguiled my fellow-tribesmen.

Thinking of their peril made me search the moonlit wastes for a glimpse of them. And there they were, striding like sleepwalkers out into the east.

And then my heart froze. For striding along in their wake was Athala, my beloved, as drugged in dreams as they!

VI

At Moon’s-Rising

I knew not how it came to be that Athala was wakeful at this hour, and chanced to have heard the singing of that siren-song. Mayhap, sorrowing for her brother, she had not been able to sleep, and, tossing and turning wakefully, had heard the haunting music in the night.

But, whatever the why and how of it, there she was, stumbling along in the rear of the dreaming guards as they went blindly to meet their mysterious Doom.

I half-climbed, half-fell down the sheer side of the great rock until my feet crunched into high-strewn sand at its base. Then I ran after the sleepwalkers, no longer fearful of being seen. A few swift strides had brought me up to where Athala walked. I caught her by one arm and called her name, but she did not seem to hear me or to feel my touch, but pulled away and continued walking into the east, into the rising moon.

Again I caught up to her and seized her two arms in the iron grip of my hands and shook her, and called her name, striving to waken her from this tranced slumber. She woke not, but writhed and fought like a wildcat in my grip until she had torn free, whereupon she continued stumbling along, like one deep in dreams.

And so I followed close upon her heels, filled with a dreadful desire to see the thing that called to her in the night, the unseen singer of that weird, elfin song that lured men to their death amidst the crimson sands, under the risen moon.

Ever and anon the dreamful spell wove itself about my own brain, till, benumbed, it sank towards slumber. But when that chanced I clenched my fist ever and again about the flint knife whose naked blade I clasped still in my fist.

As we drew further and further from the camp of the People, and nearer and nearer to the Singer of that uncanny song, I was forced to clench my fist again and again on that knife, now black with blood, tighter and tighter until the hot blood ran down my hand and dribbled from my fingers into the parched and silent sands.

But the bitter kiss of the blade drove the fogs of enchantment from my brain and kept me wakeful and wary.

Now we drew nigh unto the place of the ruins whereof my father had spoken. And when I saw the columns thrusting up as if to impale the round orb of the moon, I saw a weird and wondrous thing—

By the sunlight of day, my father had told us, the pillars of the ruin were like dully-polished stone, heavy and opaque as any other kind of rock.

But, by night, and the moonfire streaming through them, they were glittering shafts of scarlet crystal, with smoky and vaporish whorls moving slowly within them, coiling and uncoiling, and threaded through with glinting motes like fiery and evil stars.

And I bethought me, then and there, of the burning pillars that hold up the roof of hell in one of the dire myths related of old by Chonda the Teller-of-Tales, the fourth of our ancient chiefs, who was the very father of Zorm himself.

The Pillars of Hell! … aye, such, indeed, they might well prove to be…

One by one, the ensorcelled guards stumbled like sleepwalkers, blank of face and empty of eye, into the smoky red glare of those crystal columns; and all the time that seductive faёrie music sang in our ears its sweet and deathly song… and I, alone of we six, was able to resist the siren-call of that hellish singing!

Now the foremost of the guards came stumbling up to press his face against the cold glassy surface of the nearer of the glowing crystal columns.

As he did so there came coiling in slow and heavy whorls a dense vapor from the dry sands which were heaped about the base of the Pillars. A thick, oily vapor that flowed and coiled and glided like running fluid or slithering serpents. The tentacles rose to twine about him as he stood, spread-eagled against the lucence of the pillar—in whose glimmering depths, now, the uncanny witch-fires burned bright and ever brighter, till their crimson flames flared like the dawnward sun itself, and his form was silhouetted blackly against the scarlet blaze.

Then he shrieked.

And I stood, frozen and trembling, whimpering curses between gritted teeth, as the oily vapor coiled about him and ate the leathern tunic from his body and the flesh from his bones and crumbled the very bones themselves into a powdery ash!

Until there was nothing of the pitiful wretch left at all, but the flint-bladed knife he had worn at his waist and the necklace of smooth stones clasped about his throat. These dropped into the soft sands at the base of the column and sank from sight as the thick smoke-serpent sank back into the sands, replete.

And the coiling, smoky whorls within that Pillar churned violently; and the glinting motes blazed up like mad stars; and the singing of the Pillars rose to an unearthly pitch.

Guard after guard went stumbling forward to clasp the cold glassy column to his breast, as one crazed with some unholy lust, and to be consumed utterly, to a thin sifting of ash, as in an invisible bath of flames—and, may the Gods forgive me!—I stood by, rooted to the spot, like one frozen stiff with unbelieving horror, and did naught to save them.

And then it was Athala who glided on swaying feet into that cold, unholy embrace—

VII

The Madness of Jugrid

Then it was as if the spell which had held me fixed to that spot as if rooted there—snapped.

I sprang forward, roaring, I was half-mad with terror, I am not ashamed to say it, for in my youth we were a simple tribe, ignorant and superstitious, our brains stuffed full of old wives’ tales of night-devils and mist-demons and black spirits of the killing frost. Thus it was that the thick hair of my mane lifted from my scalp and my eyeballs nigh started from their sockets and my lips were drawn back in a tigerish snarl of berserk rage and I foamed at the mouth like a madman.

But the red murk of fury which rose roaring within my brain broke the chains of numb inaction which had held me ensorcelled, and I leaped forward like a charging cave-bear. One hand reached out to snatch Athala back from the brink of doom. And so terrific was the strength that rose within my maddened thews that I hurled the girl a dozen strides away with a single thrust.

Then straight and true I hurled my long spear with its keen blade of beaten copper against the column and its whirling witch-fires. It glanced away, not even scarring the tough crystal.

I ripped my flint knife from my waist, snarling like a mad wolf, the foam dripping from my bared teeth. Again and again, roaring with mingled rage and loathing, fury and terror, I drove my knife into the column until the blunted blade broke to flying shards.

Baffled, I slunk back, growling deep in my chest, my eyes glaring like coals under the tangle of my shaggy mane.

And then, in the red murk of my madness, I bethought me of the Axe, the great stone Axe of Zar, which I wore strapped across my broad young shoulders. With trembling, fumbling fingers I pawed and tore at the thongs that bound it, snapping and snarling… and now Athala, numb and bedazzled, came staggering to her feet again, and went stumbling into the evil embrace of that Pillar of Hell, an unnatural passion smiling in her face and gleaming from her dark eyes!

Flat against the slick crystal of the hellish column she pressed her lissom body, her warm white breasts flattened against the cold, lucent stone. I reached out and tore her away and struck her across the face with the back of my hand. Before the shock of that stinging buffet the panting lust faded from her eyes and the tender Athala of old peered forth therefrom again, bewildered and fearful. I shouted something at her, and never afterwards could I recall the words I spake, but she sank to her knees in the red sand and buried her sobbing face in her hands, slim shoulders shaking as she wept.

The uncanny music sang in my ears, benumbing my brain, weaving its web of witchery to ensnare my soul. I howled aloud—like a maddened wolf, seeking to drown out that eerie song. And I wrapped the fingers of both hands about the long haft of the great Axe, and took my stand, and swung the Axe back over my shoulders. Then, with all the steely strength in arms and back and shoulders, I swung the whistling blade of Zar’s Axe against the scarlet thing of singing crystal.

The music broke abruptly into a shrill keening, as of dread! For black cracks ran here and there through the shining stuff of the Pillar, and my blow had gouged out a jagged chunk of the glistening, lucent stone.

Again and again I swung the great Axe against the shuddering column of crumbling glass, and now it screamed and moaned, like the wailing of tortured women. Red fury possessed me utterly; I growled deep in my breast, and Athala tells that my eyes glared forth from the tangle of my wet locks like the red glare of a beast in the bloodlust of the kill.

Shard after shard I cut away, and ever the black and jagged cracks tore through the tottering column until it fell, smashed to shivering fragments, at my feet.

And as the broken column fell to bestrew the crimson sands with its glittering shards, Lo! the witch-fires died within it, and its wail fell to a keening, then a whimper, then—naught but silence.

But I fought on.

And after an eternity, my roaring berserker madness ebbed and my wits returned to me again. I found myself prone on the dry desert sands, every trembling and exhausted and aching limb bedewed with cold perspiration. My head was pillowed on the lap of the girl, Athala. Her warm tears were like rain on my face. But softer still were her sobbing kisses.

I came lurching and stumbling to my feet, swaying with weariness, feeling the pull and drag of strained and quivering sinews. My head swam with tiredness and my brain felt dull and numb and every inch of my body ached abominably.

But the four tall Pillars of Hell lay in shattered ruin amidst the sands, and already their slick and glassy substance was worn and pitted as they flaked away, crumbling to dust, no longer embued with the uncanny force of their devilish magic.

They would sing no more, those grisly relics of a forgotten race. No longer would they lure to their cold embrace the children of men.

Wearily I bent to retrieve the great Axe where it had fallen from my exhausted hands. Then, with one arm about the trembling shoulders of Athala, I turned my staggering feet towards the encampment of my people and the tent of the chief, my father; and I bore with me a tale of such a strange and chilling horror that never would it fade from the memory of the People of the Dragon. Never, while the world lasts!

When I saw the title “The Rune-Sword of Jotunheim” I knew it had to be good. Thankfully the story more than lived up to my expectations. My only disappointment was that Glenn Rahman and Richard Tierney penned no other tales of Hadding the Norseman and the giantess Alfhild! If “Rune-Sword” had spawned a series of short stories and novels, surely Hadding and Alfhild would be among the most revered sword-and-sorcery characters today. But that was not to be, and we only have the one—which is better than none, at least!

The Rune-Sword of Jotunheim

By Glenn Rahman and Richard L. Tierney

Behind the broken door, Sjael Olgudson lay dead.

His fingers gripped an unbloodied axe; his features were twisted in a frozen stare of agony. Nearby, his wife and daughter also lay in the awkward contortions of death. Even the livestock, whose pens shared the long, low farmhouse with the family, were lifeless in their straw bedding.

Hadding the Northman, broadsword in hand, scanned the shadows for the killer of his old friend. Yet, though the family had evidently perished behind the barred door of their home, no assassin was anywhere to be seen.

“What’s wrong, my jarl?” The call came from outside—a female voice, powerful yet soft, like a wind through the firs.

The Northman returned through the door of the death-house and looked up at the giantess. As tall as three men she stood, her sleeveless mail tunic glimmering with a strange sheen, her dark locks fluttering like a plume of smoke in the chill winter breeze.

“The Olgudsons are murdered!” said Hadding, blue eyes glaring under scowling brows, lips drawn back in a grim snarl that his bronze beard could not hide. “Make yourself small, Alfhild; I have need of your sorcerous learning.”

The giantess nodded and raised her arms, and a shimmering light seemed to ripple over her titanic figure; her awesome form began to change like melting wax. Hadding watched, fascinated. Though used to the magic of Jotunheim since childhood, he still marveled to see it at work.

In moments Alfhild had assumed the form of a handsome shield-maiden—as it pleased her to do when walking in the diminutive world of Midgard. Now, half a head shorter than Hadding himself, she stepped around him and entered the house. Hadding followed, and watched her as she stooped to examine the bodies on the floor for any mark of violence.

“This is witchcraft,” she stated finally. “It seems we have not yet outrun Prince Svipdag’s savage allies.”

Hadding shook his head. “I don’t know. My stepbrother is an honorable man in his own strange way; this is not like his work.”

“They died less than an hour ago,” Alfhild said. “Their flesh is still warm.”

Hadding grunted nervously, fingering his sword. “Did someone know we would be seeking shelter from my father’s old sword-companion? Yet, no—for if so, why did one with such knowledge not strike at us directly instead of slaughtering this old and defenseless pair? If only Sjael’s dead lips could name his killer!”

Alfhild was silent for an interval, then asked very seriously: “Do you truly wish that your friend might tell us, in his own words, what befell him?”

Hadding looked askance at his fair companion. He had not made his wish with conscious purpose, but…

“You mean—work rune-magic?”

“Aye,” said Alfhild. “Yet consider well, for the act is not without danger. The angry dead can do great harm to a conjurer.”

“I cannot believe Sjael ever bore me or mine ill will,” said Hadding. “Moreover, I mean to avenge him!”

“Then I will write my runes—and ask you a favor in return.”

“A favor?”

“Yes… no, rather say that I will express—a desire.”

Hadding was puzzled by her hesitancy. “Name it.”

“Ever since Odin first brought you to the house of Vagnhofde, my father, I have sensed a fate between us. Now I know that I sensed truly. Hadding… I wish us to be wed.”

The jarl was silent for a space, as if considering his answer carefully. He hoped the supernatural shield-maid could not hear the sudden beating of his heart. When at last he spoke it was in an even voice, with words that would appeal to reason.

“Alfhild, for nigh twenty years we have been friends and comrades, like brother and sister—but we are different creatures. It is said men were made from wood and giants from frost. When I am gray and crippled with age, you will yet retain your youth and strength and beauty. A match between Midgard and Jotunheim bodes well for no one. And even were it not so, I am a landless fugitive with to right to claim your allegiance.”

“You do me wrong, my jarl,” she replied slowly. “I have never sought release from your service. But if that is what you wish, I will return to my father’s house. Yet, rather than leave you beset by evil sorceries, I will cast my runes in your cause one more time.”

“That would please me, my dear friend,” the Northman said quietly, a touch of sadness in his voice.

Without saying more, Alfhild drew the knife from the scabbard strapped to her naked thigh and sliced a piece of bark out of a birch log beside the fireplace. Taking a quill from the wing of a goose that had perished with its master, she sharpened it. Then, opening a vein in Sjael Olgudson’s arm, the shield-maid dipped her quill into the warm blood and deftly used it to draw rune-symbols across the white bark. Once having dried them with her breath, she pried open the old soldier’s jaws and packed the bark under his cold tongue.

“By the third white rune given to Midgard and Jotunheim by the god Heimdall,” Alfhild chanted, “I call back your nar from Hel, O Sjael Olgudson, and compel you to give answer!”

A chill swept over the room. Then, even as Hadding and Alfhild waited breathlessly, Sjael’s dead eyes rolled in their sockets. Slowly—with stark malevolence—they glowed yellow and focused upon Alfhild. Hadding moved toward the lich impulsively, but the shield-maid thrust her arms out in front of him. Then she addressed the corpse in a clear, imperious tone:

“Do you know Hadding, son of Halfdan—him who stands beside me?”

Without the slightest movement of lips a voice rasped out from Sjael’s cadaver, like iron grating over stone: “Aye, fool, I know Hadding. He shall belong to me anon—even as you already do, daughter of Vagnhofde.”

“What means he?” blurted Hadding. “He speaks not like the old friend I knew—”

“Be silent!” hissed Alfhild. “We have been tricked—Sjael is possessed by a demon. He means us no good, Hadding!”

Hadding snarled impatiently. “Speak, demon!” he commanded. “What is your name?”

“I am Volund,” said the rasping voice. “Remember me when you are suffering the villain’s torments in Niflehel!”

“What do you mean, Alfhild is yours—?”

“She is mine—and Jotunheim’s!” The corpse gave a death rattle; the glow faded from its eyes and it was silent.

Hadding drew his sword.

“Don’t!” warned Alfhild. “The thing is gone. Do not outrage the body of your friend.”

“Is it as he says?” demanded Hadding.

The giantess nodded gravely. “The rune parted the wall between Hel and Midgard, that which safeguards the living from the vengeance of the dead.”

“Who is this Volund?” demanded the Northman.

“An elven prince,” Alfhild told him, “a magician without peer amongst his race. Once his clan competed unsuccessfully with another for the favor of the gods, crafting wondrous weapons for the armory of the Aesir. The insult of the gods’ judgement drove Volund mad. He rebelled against the Aesir—only to be struck down by Thor’s hammer.”

Hadding scowled. “Let us leave his accursed place,” he urged.

Alfhild gave a brief, sad laugh. “Why, my jarl? Here we have food aplenty, and shelter from the winter wind. We must guard our strength if we mean to outstrip Svipdag’s savage huntsmen on the morrow.”

“But the demon may—”

She swept aside his protests. “Be cheerful! I shall draw my strongest runes to ward off danger; more than that cannot be done. Where the dead are concerned, no place on Midgard or Jotunheim is safer than any other.”

* * *

Troubles weighed on Hadding’s conscience like stones upon the cairn of a prince. He, and his father Halfdan before him, had led tribes of Aesir-followers against the rebel Svipdag, son of Hadding’s stepmother. Having dwelt for a time in Jotunheim after Halfdan had perished, the jarl had returned at the bidding of Odin to rally his people once more.

But when the armies met on the field of Bironu, they saw above them a battle of supernatural forms—Vanir and Aesir—contending enormously in the starlight. Then, with the triumph of the Vanir in Heaven, the day was lost for Odin’s children on Midgard. Hadding and Alfhild had fled the gory battlefield alone—the forests behind them alive with foemen howling for their blood and avid for the bounty on Hadding’s head.

Now, as he slept, the jarl relived again the slaughter of every friend he had failed…

Suddenly he snapped awake at the sound of tearing wood and wattle. Sitting up, he glimpsed a huge mass working its way down through the dark ceiling. Quickly he rolled into the near corner, locking his fingers around the hilt of his broadsword, then looked urgently for Alfhild—and saw her bathed in the shimmering light of her mail even as the massive invader from above dropped between them.

Knowing only that the intruder was an enemy, Hadding launched himself furiously at the groping thing. “Odin!” he roared, swinging his blade.

The invader deftly evaded him, then surged forward like a moving wall and hurled him back. Hadding was sent crashing into the wood rails that separated the animal stalls from the family’s quarters, breaking off the topmost rail with the force of his impact.

Staggered, gasping for breath, he heard Alfhild’s shout, saw her titanic white arms wrapped desperately around the dusky intruder. The giantess had assumed the largest size and strength the low house would allow, and was wrestling wildly with the awesome creature. Then, against the sheen of her mail, Hadding was able to discern the outline of the thing—an enormous scaly hand, each of whose fingers was easily the size of a man!

“It’s a demon sent by Volund!” cried Alfhild, her giant’s voice thundering. “Cut off its hand!”

Hadding sprang forward and swung his blade savagely. This time the keen edge sliced into the attacker’s hard scales and the hand lurched in pain, gushing out a thick ichor darker than blood. Where the discharge touched the Northman’s face and arms it scalded him like lava. Roaring in agony, he fell rolling to the floor, unable to rise. The demon-venom seeping through his blistering skin was driving him down a fiery tunnel to a black abyss of unconsciousness. Faintly he saw Alfhild pinioned like a white bird in a fowler’s fist and lifted through the torn roof—heard her screams grow speedily faint with increasing distance…

* * *

When Hadding’s mind cleared, the pain was gone. The dim embers of the fire pit had waxed into a crackling blaze, casting a ruddy glow over the ruin of Sjael’s hut.

Something glided between the light and the corner where the Northman lay. Quickly he groped for his weapon in the shadows—but then the figure came fully out into the illumination, and recognition froze Hadding’s sword-arm like a blast of winter.

Beyond the litter of wood and wattle a cloaked man stood, his tall outline suggesting both great strength and age. From the shadow of his dark cowl shone one tiny light, like a beacon on a far horizon.

“Odin!”

“So surprised?” asked the figure. “You called my name.”

Hadding stared, first awed, then feeling anger. “You!” he exclaimed bitterly. “I’ve called your name a thousand times, and you come only now—when friends, countrymen, and throne are lost. I fought for the Aesir, yet you gods chose to give victory to fools, murderers, and cowards!”

“Never to cowards,” replied the god, his single eye glittering. “Nor should you so accuse me, for I have endured great battles to come to your aid. Now another battle waits for you—and therefore I have removed your injuries, lest they contribute to your defeat.”

It was true, Hadding realized. The venom-burns gave him no pain, and the skin that had been so blistered was now nearly as smooth as a maiden’s own. He rose unsteadily.

“A devil named Volund has stolen Alfhild and murdered Sjael Olgudson,” he rumbled, taking a step toward the cowled figure. Then, though the god gave no gesture of warning, something in his aura of majesty told Hadding not to approach closer.

“The very good and the very evil often escape the halls of Hel,” said Odin. “The powers of Jotunheim have conjured this vile being out of his place of punishment. Volund’s body is long dead, slain by Thor’s hammer; he has returned now as an uvaettir, a spirit bent on vengeance on those it hated in life.”

“It laid a trap for us,” said the jarl. “It possessed Sjael’s corpse. But why—”

“He slew the Olgudsons and took Alfhild only to strike at you. And you interest him only because he would destroy the Aesir. You, Hadding Halfdanson, are one of the few who still champion our worship and defend our shrines against the people of the Vanir. Should our cause be defeated in Midgard, and we thereby denied worship and sacrifice, it would be a short fall to defeat in Heaven, then Ragnarök.

“Now, listen: Volund has forged the sword Gambantein—aye, even as long ages ago his kinsman Sindre fashioned the hammer Mjollnir. He has made his stronghold in Jotunheim, where the gods do not rule, and has protected it with mighty runes of blackness; he intends to use Gambantein to lead the giants thence into Asgard. That sword was forged by the most learned magician of Jotunheim for one purpose only—to take the life of the gods. Only a mortal stands a chance of evading Volund’s spells and defeating Gambantein; and only one mortal has been challenged to enter the uvaettir’s domain.”

“Is that indeed my destiny?” asked Hadding, staring into Odin’s beacon eye.

“Your destiny is the same as my own—death at Ragnarök, darkness everlasting. But whether that day is this one or a later one, my son, depends entirely upon you.”

Hadding swore: “For taking Alfhild, for murdering Sjael Olgudson, I would pursue the nithing into Niflehel itself, let alone Jotunheim! Yet, how may I challenge a foe even Thor cannot?”

“For any hour of your choosing you may be like a god yourself, one whom even Volund may not lightly challenge.” Odin drew a sealed drinking horn out of his blue robes. “This is a cup of Fann’s brewing, the drink of the einherjen—the resurrected warriors of Valhalla. Drink it when you must.”

Hadding took the horn from the god’s hand. It was cut with runes and wrapped about by a carved dragon. It tingled against his palm, as if the energy of a thunderstorm were sealed within it.

Then Odin took a sword and scabbard from around his own waist. “No mortal iron can resist the keen edge of Gambantein. Therefore take this blade; Volund forged it himself when he was a friend and retainer of Asgard.”

Hadding received the weapon into his hands, and marveled at the lightness of its heft. As he stared wonderingly at the runes gleaming along the length of the broadsword, he asked: “Will you take me to Jotunheim, my lord, across the River Ocean?”

Odin’s assenting reply came in a sonorous whisper, originating somewhere other than the windswept farmer’s hut. The jarl raised his eyes—and saw that he was no longer in Sjael Olgudson’s home.

* * *

A distant jingling of mail drew Hadding’s attention to the far end of the strange, lofty hall into which a sorcerous will had carried him. The jarl was prepared to see Odin once more, but realized instantly that this armored shape was not his.

The man—if man it was—rested imperiously on a thronelike chair. His whole head was concealed in a silver mask-helm, whose rigid features were brought to life only by ruby-like eyes that scintillated eerily in the light of many torch-flames. His limbs were encased in silver and a coat of mail protected his torso; not an inch of his actual body could be seen.

“Are you the devil-elf called Volund?” Hadding demanded, moving toward the armored figure, but also sidling toward a rack of weapons he had noticed.

The stranger leaned forward, and its armor gave out a strange bell-like tone as it moved.

“You were a fool, Hadding, to follow your woman from Midgard where I had little power over you. I could slay you with a gesture—but what would it profit me to send you thus to Asgard in a Valkyrie’s arms? No, rather would I have Odin see you plunge howling to the inglorious darkness of Niflehel, useless to him and a disgrace to your ancestors.”

“By the power of Odin,” Hadding growled, moving closer, “I swear I’ll send you back to the hell you crawled out of!”

Volund made no move to ward off the advancing jarl. “Little you know of hells, once-born man. When your soul plummets to the underworld, despised of man and god, demons shall drive you toward your reckoning with rods of thorns. Before the damned reach their home of torture, they are cursed to see the region of bliss they will never know—Mimir’s Fountain, the splendid dwelling of Balder, the golden hall of Sindre’s race, and the regions where Night rests. From thence they cross the black mountain wall to Niflehel, whose gates are guarded by monstrous dogs. Finally the condemned wretches must drink a magic venom, by means of which they lose their earthly shape and assume a form no less terrible than that of the winged demons that fly with them through Niflehel’s foggy space to their place of torment.”

Hadding had come next to a rack of spears while Volund spoke. Now he suddenly seized a javelin and shouted: “Hel-path treader, let the arm of Hadding Halfdanson speed you on your return journey!” The missile hurtled from his hand, passed through the seated figure, struck the back of the throne with a loud thud, and stopped there, shuddering.

Then, rapidly, the image of Vound faded, giving off a peal like silvery laughter.

The uvaettir had shown himself only in illusion! Rage boiled like poison in Hadding’s throat and he looked savagely around the room for sight of his opponent. Then he heard Alfhild’s scream.

The cry came echoing out of a dark arch. Immediately the jarl sprinted to it and plunged within. He quickly lost the light, but followed the corridor’s sinuous turns by keeping his left hand on the cold rheumy wall while clasping the elven blade in his rock-hard right fist.

It was all so strange, for until Volund took her, Hadding had never seen the giantess endangered, nor in need of his own strength—so puny in comparison to her own. Shame at the coldness he had so long and so unfairly shown her turned to a hot desire for revenge in his veins, and his blade all but screamed for the blood of her tormentor.

When he had groped along for many yards, he suddenly sighted a smoky reflection off the tunnel wall ahead. He hurried forward and reached the side archway through which the light issued. A choking wave of decay-laden air stopped his rush.

In front of him was a round torchlit chamber, like the interior of a large cistern—whose floor was covered by a clutter of old corpses, about a score of them.

“Help me, Hadding!” cried the shield-maid.

Anger fired the Northman as he saw one living form struggling amidst the dead—Alfhild, human-sized, spread-eagled on her naked back, chained down to four large iron staples that had been pounded deep into the foul earth.

“Alfhild!” Hadding shouted, scrambling over the worm-riddled liches to the giantess’ side. Aye, she was again wearing the slight form of a human shield-maiden. In her natural guise, Alfhild had oft broken bonds stronger than these for mere sport.

She looked up at the jarl with anxious relief as he examined the chains that shackled each wrist and ankle to the cold soil. Then, despite the shadows, Hadding discerned the angry sear-mark in the white skin of her hip.

“Volund has placed a black rune upon me,” she moaned. “I cannot shed this shape, either to break my manacles or to slip from them!”

With all the gentleness his rough hands could manage, Hadding stroked away her tears, then tried his strength against the chains. They did not budge.

As he pulled futilely at the iron links, Alfhild tensed in sudden horror. Something cold and foul threw a chokehold around Hadding’s muscular neck and wrestled him to his back.

Wallowing in a nauseous bed of sloughed-off, putrefying flesh, Hadding grappled his attacker around the waist and heaved it against the wall. He heard a skull crunch. Then he leapt erect, stunned to realize he had wrestled a corpse. He had not knocked the sorcerous life out of it, for already it was picking itself up—as were several other liches that inhabited Alfhild’s prison-room

They were haughbonder, the Northman realized—the dead that rise to feed on the living—new tokens of Volund’s perverse magic!

“Hadding!” shrilled Alfhild. “Slay me quickly! Save yourself!”

The jarl sprang roaring into the midst of the haughbonder, knocking a mass of them off their trembling legs. His whirling elf-blade sheared one dead man’s face from crown to chin, exposing the corpse-worms burrowing just under the fetid surface. Again and again he hacked into the vile flesh of his slow-moving foes, hewing limbs, heads, and entrails from their nerveless owners—but as quickly as one lich collapsed, two more would quicken and rise. Then one, awakening under Hadding’s very feet, grasped his ankles and brought him down into the slime.

The creatures piled atop the Northman, raking him with claws, teeth, and ancient rusted daggers. Bellowing, he struggled up in the midst of their foulness, an unaccustomed panic beginning to wax within his breast. Twisting and wrenching from side to side, throwing his adversaries off in awkward knots, he fought free of them and rose from the rot and mold—then saw the way to escape up the tunnel unblocked. One rapid dash and he would be free of that vault of horror. His muscles were tightening for that final rush… when Alfhild screamed and he remembered that it was not for himself alone that he fought.

“Odin!” Hadding cried. He hurled himself at the liches between himself and Alfhild. His berserk strokes sheared off flesh and severed heads that leered with maggot-filled eyes. When he reached the shield-maid, he saw blood rilling out of a wound on her belly—and out of the moldy lips of the haughbui which had inflicted it. Roaring with rage, Hadding hacked the lich in two and stood over Alfhild—while the dead men untangled themselves from their ungainly sprawls.

In that brief lull, the Northman grimly noted that the last of the corpses had awakened. Fortunately, many of them had been crippled in the fight and could now only crawl like broken insects through the mud and slime—yet even these wormed intently toward him to renew the struggle, while Hadding’s strength was nearly spent.

Then he felt a tingling against his right hip, and realized that he and Alfhild still had one chance left—the one Odin had offered. With grim determination Hadding seized the drinking horn on his belt, broke the seal, and took the draught in one gulp.

The Fann brew burned in his mouth like fire, raging down his throat—and energizing his limbs! The burning vanished in a moment, and with it all the weariness the fight had wrought in him. Now he was ready to hew apart any number of these undead things with a cheer to Odin on his lips! He gripped his sword tightly…

Suddenly an iron axe thudded to the slime; one of the liches, whose entrails dangled from his rent belly to his knees, had fumbled it. The thing sank weakly down, while on the other side of the room another collapsed, curling up and lying utterly still, unmoving save for the parasites that crawled over it. A second weapon fell, then a third—and Hadding saw that all around him the haughbonder were slowing, stiffening, and returning to the soulless sleep which Volund’s magic had interrupted, their corrupt life-force evidently unable to withstand even the mere presence of his new power.

Silently thanking Odin for the unexpected reprieve, Hadding stepped to Alfhild and gripped one of her chains, feeling his newfound energy surging within him. He gave a strong, steady pull; the chain held rigid as a bar for an instant, then broke with a loud snap. Quickly he dispensed similarly with the other three shackles, then put his arm around Alfhild and helped her rise. The giantess touched her bite-wound gingerly; Hadding pushed away her hands, whose wrists were still encircled with iron bracelets, and examined it. The wound did not look deep, nor was the bleeding profuse.

The shield-maid appeared stunned, beside herself. “Come,” Hadding said. Gently he picked her up and carried her into the darkness of the tunnel until the ruddy glow of Volund’s audience hall could be seen ahead.

The Northman advanced cautiously; the jingle of silver armor sounded from the doorway ahead. Carefully he laid Alfhild down in the shelter of the tunnel mouth, then strode forth and tore a buckler from its peg on the wall.

“Is that you, prince of the damned,” yelled Hadding as the sound of silver armor continued to peal, “or are you still hiding behind a coward’s illusions? Slay me now if you can, like you slew Sjael Olgudson—or I will surely destroy you!”

A huge shadow glided across the hall’s oaken floor, then an armored figure strode into Hadding’s view, a heavy scabbard nodding at its waist.

“My sorcery cannot wind through Odin’s charm,” said Volund, “though you had fled the haughbonder, abandoning your comrade to doom, he would have lifted his protecting hand and let me send you to a craven’s death in Niflehel. If Valhalla must be your abode, so be it! You shall return no more to Midgard to fight the battles of the Aesir.” So saying, the silvery form drew a long blade from its scabbard; shadows hung over its heavy length, dimming even the bright torchlight behind it.

Hadding tensed for combat. For a moment Volund stood rock-still—then attacked swiftly. Nimbly the jarl evaded the stroke and countered; the elf-lord’s silver armor rang faintly as the point of Hadding’s rune-blade just scratched it.

The combatants separated, then circled, maneuvering for position. Abruptly their swords clashed, the frenzied clangor of elven metal echoing like a peal of thunder over Jotunheim. In that instant, Hadding’s foot caught in a white bearskin on the floor, and Volund brought Gambantein down in a mighty chop. Barely in time the jarl caught the stroke on his haft guard, but his knees buckled under the impact. Desperately he slammed his buckler into his opponent’s chest, staggering Volund and thereby managing to break free.

But the Hel-prince instantly re-exerted his sorcerous strength and, slowly, with bitter resistance, Hadding was forced to give ground. The clash of rune-graven steel built into a deafening clangor. Now the Northman felt even his god-given strength faltering under Volund’s monstrous power. One of Hadding’s return-strokes came a hair’s breadth slow; the elf-lord took the advantage and brought Gambantein down in a stroke that would have shattered the Northman’s helm like a clamshell had he not interposed his buckler in time. The mighty blow knocked Hadding to his back, and the sundered shield fell useless from his arm. In that instant of helplessness Hadding saw the silver-sheathed forearms raise Gambantein for the killing stroke—

Then, even as the Hel-blade began its descent, a clangorous peal rang out and the death blow went awry, the great sword turning aside and biting into the oaken floor beside Hadding. Volund shrieked and lashed out with his left arm, sidewise; the gauntleted hand struck the center of the buckler Alfhild held, sending her sprawling to the floor. The mace with which she had struck Volund, thereby saving Hadding’s life, went clattering across the oaken planks.

Instantly the Hel-prince turned back and seized Gambantein, wrenching it free. The wood had prisoned the weapon only an instant, but that was time enough for Hadding to act. Roaring to Odin, he brought his rune-blade crashing down across Volund’s helmet, shattering one of the ruby lenses that hid the sorcerous being’s eyes from view.

Volund staggered backwards. Hadding followed up his advantage relentlessly, dealing blow after determined blow—but even as he laid into the silver armor with all his strength he sensed that his enemy was not fighting back. Suddenly Volund collapsed, striking the wood with a thunderous clamor.

Hadding moved swiftly, intending to strip off the helm and slit his foe’s throat. Before he found the lacings, the empty eye socket of the mask commenced to well with a yellowish slime. Aghast, Hadding drew back and looked on in bafflement as the mail coat collapsed and the escaping fluid formed a large puddle on the floor. Then the substance began to fade, but before it vanished completely it took on the aspect of a monstrous, tentacled worm.

Hadding felt Alfhild press up close to him. “If that is what the Hel-draft made of him,” she murmured, “small wonder that Volund would not scruple to see the world destroyed at Ragnarök!”

The Northman looked down at her. The blow she had taken from Volund had seemingly done her no damage. The bite in her more-than-human flesh had already closed.

“I still have the black rune upon me,” she said ruefully, touching her incised skin, “and I can think of no master of dark sorcery with power greater than Volund’s to remove it. I am not human, but neither am I giantess. I am a creature without a place—save perhaps the shelter of my father’s stonehouse in Jotunheim.”

“No, my lovely one,” said Hadding gently. “Until the rune is removed, you are too small and frail to dwell in Giantland. Rather would I guard you with my own strong arm—as queen of Gothtejod.”

“Well done, my son!” said one standing behind the pair.

* * *

They whirled toward the voice—and beheld the cowled figure of Odin regarding them.

“You have saved the nine worlds for another day—and perhaps more,” said the god, picking up Gambantein from the floor.

“What will become of the sword?” Hadding asked, staring at the black blade in Odin’s great hands.

Odin scowled, as if pondering dark thoughts; his single eye glinted with a strange light. “One day it shall lead the hosts of Jotunheim to victory,” he said finally. “By the runes used in its making, that is a destiny we cannot alter. Until then, however, it shall be a peace-offering to the Vanir. Frey shall be its guardian. The Vanir will accept it as a binding gift of friendship rather than face it as a weapon in the hands of the Aesir.”

“But if peace comes to Heaven,” asked Hadding, “what of our war with Svipdag?”

“I enjoin the men of the Aesir to lay down their arms. Frey shall give a like command to Svipdag and the people of the Vanir.”

Hadding frowned. “Then is the blood that was spilled in this long struggle to be forgotten—unavenged?”

But his question fell on empty walls. Odin had already vanished.

Nor were these the bleak walls of Volund’s stronghold. Hadding, and Alfhild beside him, had come home to the warm halls of the jarl of Gothtejod.

In the late 1940s and ‘50s fantasy was out of fashion and science fiction was all the rage. Fortunately for sword-and-sorcery aficionados, Planet Stories would occasionally publish Robert E. Howard-inspired tales of adventure in the guise of science fiction, with lost or alien technology standing in for magic. Poul Anderson and Leigh Brackett were two notable authors who dealt in this subgenre. One of the zaniest, most over-the-top stories of this type is Bryce Walton’s “Princess of Chaos.” The tale begins with Moljar, a half-Terran half-Martian barbarian, being forced to fight monstrous beasts in a Venusian arena for the amusement of the catwoman Princess Alhone. In short order the arena is attacked by Mistmen, and… well, I won’t recount all the wild twists and turns of the plot. Walton never penned a second tale of Moljar, and I think it’s safe to say why: How could he top “Princess of Chaos?”

Princess of Chaos

By Bryce Walton

Moljar planted his columnar legs wide apart beside the dying saurian and blinked blood and sweat from his eyes. Only slightly strained after three hours of the Red Moon Games, his seven foot height of Terran-Martian muscles gleamed damply in the blazing arc lights of the Colosseum. His lungs sucked hungrily at the dense Venusian air as he waited for whatever would next be sent against him, the champion of them all.

Through sweat-blurred vision he watched the climbing tiers of eager spectators, a high curvature outlined against the crimson mist. Red Moon Games! Bi-monthly slaughter, ordered by the Princess Alhone when the unnatural filtering of the reflected sun’s rays spread a carmine glow through the fog.

The grey sands of the arena were daubed with sprawled forms of monsters and men alike. Out of the shambles, Moljar’s black barbarian eyes shone as they swung up to fix on the Princess Alhone where she sat with a retinue in her private observation box. Her grey-furred, semi-human body glimmered softly beneath the blue-glowing effulgence that always bathed her in its royal cold light.

Her heavily jeweled paw raised, dropped. The signal.

A roar of sadistic anticipation swelled, echoing from the misty range of hills, beyond Venus Port, out across the Sea of Mort that washed its marble walls.

Moljar shifted toward the gates. His hands flexed about the alloy bar. At Princess Alhone’s gesture, the gates across the arena lifted. The monstrous beast, somewhat resembling a Mesozoic saber-tooth tiger of Terra, charged out straight for Moljar in a blinding burst of speed and power.

The half-breed swung the pitiful weapon which had jokingly been granted him, a five-foot length of compressed alloy. It cracked against the giant cat’s skull. Moljar leaped aside as the beast plunked on its face, rolled in a flurry of sand and blood. Tendrils of gore oozed from its shattered skull as it lumbered erect and charged again, erratically now, circling and leaping down toward the arena’s far end, blinded and roaring with pain.

A sigh of ecstasy rose up in a long drone from the spectators—a polyglot of Solarians who had paid eighty credits for this night of vicarious bloodlust. Wealthy interplanetary aristocrats and cartel magnates, Mercurian and Martian speculators, Terran monopolists, adventurers and adventuresses from many worlds, muckers from the asteroid mines. All imagining themselves to be Moljar tonight. All hating him because he was a half-breed.

Of the half-thousand prisoners who had been marched into the amphitheater—a few Terran mutants, many half-breeds, and space pirates who couldn’t pay enough hush-hush credits—only three remained standing. The Terran girl mutant, Mahra, who had helped him slay the saurian and who had rare courage. Himself. And Gasdon, the Martian pirate, who, barehanded, was still battling the giant squid in the arena’s synthetic quagmire. His yellow body was a panting, straining bulk beyond the tendrils of sulphur dioxide that bubbled up through the fog.

Moljar felt the Terran girl’s hot breath on his neck as he waited for the pain-maddened cat to scent him down. His glittering eyes turned and met hers. Her silver mutant’s hair glowed beneath the merciless glare of the flood lights. Her full, yet agile body wriggled in its brief trappings in nervous preparation for the cat’s rapid return from the end of the arena. But when she spoke to Moljar her lips curled with obvious distaste.

“You fight well, for a half-breed,” she said.

His teeth shone white in what might have been either a laugh or a snarl. “Go to your Martian outlaw. Gasdon’s of pure blood. If he’ll have you—mutant!”

She laughed sharply like shimmering glass. “I’m Mahra. I stand alone.”

“You’ll die alone,” said Moljar, “if you stand by me.”

She tossed her head. The cat was bearing down, shrieking in blind hate. “You think you’ve won, barbarian. Wait ‘til the kristons are turned loose on us.”

“I wait,” said Moljar simply. “I’ve waited a long time, and I can wait forever. And someday I’ll kill her. Alhone’s pelt I’ll have and give to my people to whom I pledged it.”

His blood-spattered arm swept aside as the giant cat ploughed past it in its sightless, pounding charge. He swung his bar again. It crunched through tissue and bone and brain, and the cat dropped suddenly like a stone. Its sleek gold and black body shivered and twitched as it died.

He planted a sandaled foot on the carcass and raised his face toward the Princess Alhone’s royal booth. Reluctantly, a smattering of applause rose. Princess Alhone’s silkily furred body was standing now. Motionless.

Moljar’s voice rang out clear through the mist. “Moljar waits for worthy opposition. He is bored.”

“Dirty half-breed dog!” howled a voice. Thousands joined in a thunder of obscene and filthy epithets.

Moljar laughed loudly. He saw Alhone’s slim alien form tense as the saber-tooth’s had before a charge. And he began walking toward her across the blood-stained sands.

He paused as she raised a jeweled paw again. Moljar’s eyes narrowed as the almost invisible vibrational force-wall rose up before the spectators and the rim of the vast arena.

“Kristons!” screamed Mahra behind him. “The wall protects the audience.”

He heard the high whirring whine of the huge tri-winged, armor-plated insects as they were released into the arena. They dove and circled, maddened by the miasmic death vapor overhanging the stadium.

Like a trapped beast, the half-breed turned this way and that. Beads of sweat stood out on his heaving chest. He wiped his sweat-slippery hands on his leather tunic, then dried them in the sand, before he gripped his alloy bludgeon again. Then with the long eerie cry of the wild desert tribes he sprang into the air to meet the hurtling drive of the kriston that had singled him out.

The blinding speed of its wings distorted his perspective. The alloy bar, caught in their blurring motion, spun from his stunned hands. He cursed as he fell beneath its flight.

Dimly, he heard the joyous roaring of the throngs who watched him fall. As he rolled aside he heard Mahra’s frightened scream. He felt the spearing slash of the kriston’s poisonous barbed fang. His arms whipped out, hands closed on the horned tip. He was on his feet heaving outward. He felt tendons rip and a sudden freedom as the tongue tore from the kriston’s throat. Its death cry sounded like escaping steam.

He was running toward the outcast Terran girl who was dodging the worrying darting movements of another kriston. He swung the grotesque whip-like tongue of the one he had slain as he ran.

He stopped. The creature attacking Mahra suddenly became a lifeless charred hulk. The other kristons were plunging into the sand, smoking, burning. His eyes swung up. The force-wall was gone. The heat ray on the roof landing above the catacombs had destroyed the kristons before their work was done. The heat ray was only used for emergencies. What had moved the Anghorians to save them?

Miraculously, the three still lived. Moljar, Mahra, and the Martian outlaw Gasdon who had blinded the squid by punching out its eyes. Having no scent faculties it was flapping tentacles helplessly in its phosphorescent bog.

An aimless hum of fear and hysteria exploded outward from the throng. They were fleeing from the stands, trampling, yelling frantically, some burning their way through the choked exits of the Colosseum. They were jammed in its elevators, blocking its corridors and archways.

Gasdon came running toward Moljar and the girl. His towering body, dripping mucous from the squid battle, was as large as Moljar’s, but lacked its agility and integration of movement. His ugly face was twisted in fanatical purpose.

“Now we fight!” he shouted. “For her! I’ve wanted to meet Moljar, the half-breed freak, before witnesses who will testify to your defeat.”

Mahra laughed. “Morons. I’ll choose my own lover. And I certainly can’t imagine him being either of you!”

“What witnesses will see you, Gasdon?” asked Moljar. “They run for their lives. Their pure hearts pump thin water.”

A loudspeaker blared:

THE MISTMEN! VENUS PORT IS UNDER ATTACK. TAKE TO THE JUNGLES. MISTMEN HAVE DESTROYED VENUS PORT COMMUNICATIONS. THEY ARE SACKING, PLUNDERING, KILLING. FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES! THE MISTMEN! VENUS PORT HAS BEEN ATTACKED AND…

Mahra trembled with uncontrollable fears. Her mutant’s mind clouded over with the significance of the descending terror. Gasdon, his egomaniacal feud with Moljar forgotten for the moment, shivered, and his green eyes probed the thick cloud blanket.

Moljar’s intuitive senses stirred darkly. Mistmen. Scourge of Venus, super-scientific pirates, they appeared mysteriously out of the fogs to loot and kill. Protected by force shields of thick grey, impenetrable mists, they appeared in sudden ruthless violence, sacked, slew, and vanished into the unknown land that spawned them.

Now, they were actually attacking Venus Port!

The stands were empty, except for the dead and dying who had been trampled or burned by the stampeding crowds. They and the Princess Alhone, amid her personal bodyguard. She was standing now, her slender, evil grace swaying in the ever-present blue glow.

She motioned to Moljar. He trembled. “This is the time,” he said very low in his throat like a growling dog. “I have waited long.”

He strode across the reddened sands toward her. Her yellow cat-eyes veiled her study of his approach. Her feral body leaned tautly as it waited. The half-breed looked up. She was only fifteen feet above him; he could leap the distance.

Her high mewing voice said, “They have dared attack Venus Port! If they continue, they will soon be undisputed rulers of my planet. Soon, with such boldness, the Mistmen might even rule the system. Moljar, would you like freedom?”

He shrugged. “Can a half-breed ever be free?”

“On Venus, I have but to speak to make any being free.”

“Try telling the Mistmen that,” said Moljar boldly. “They’ll soon be here.”

“I’ve never, in all the places I have been, seen quite such a magnificent fool as you, Moljar. Anyway, our communications are cut off. If a man could get through to Anghore, bring back a force… my scientists in Anghore have been perfecting a new vibro-generator as a weapon. Perhaps it is completed now. The Mistmen have never been attacked. They surprise, throw up detectors and shut off communications, and disappear before any reinforcements can arrive.”

Moljar’s fingers quivered for her slim throat. But his voice seemed calm. “Could one get through their detectors to Anghore?”

“You perhaps could. If you can, Moljar, I’ll make you a Guard of Anghore.”

Stolid as was the half-breed’s neural circuit, the sudden statement momentarily shocked him. It was rumored that Alhone chose certain fighters to go to Anghore. But that he, a contemptible half-breed should be promised a position as Alhone’s personal guard…

“Why me?” he was saying.

“In these games I have seen the best fighters of three worlds. But I have never seen anyone fight as you fought tonight.”

A series of thunderous explosions rocked the stadium. A brilliant pyrotechnic display glittered fantastically through the thick cloud layers above Venus Port. The Mistmen were storming the city with customary thorough and savage efficiency. The crying of a helpless city in pain rose and fell in an aimless pattern of terror.

Moljar noted the energy guns held in the hands of the Anghorians surrounding their princess. This was not the time. One aggressive move from him, and he would be annihilated on the spot. If he accepted her proposition, got through to Anghore and was rewarded as she promised, then he would surely eventually be placed in a foolproof position to kill her. Time meant nothing. He had worked and waited many years. Many more would not matter—if they led to the fulfilment of his pledge. Only her death mattered. Revenge. Her pelt, well cured and soft, presented to his tribesmen.

The Mistmen were sweeping toward the Colosseum. The roar of their advance increased rapidly. He must decide.

Anghore. Over this outlaw world of bloodlust and savagery, ruled Alhone. Thousands of his kind who had migrated here had been slain under her sanction. But who, or what, was Alhone? What and where was Anghore? Out of the numerous strange and unexplored lands of Venus she might have come. No one knew. There was only a name. Anghore. Anghore that lay somewhere across the Sea of Mort.

A few claimed to have seen Anghore—from a distance. A jumble of towers spearing into the mist higher than the mountain peaks. Only Princess Alhone and her ferocious minions knew of it. And no one talked with them.

Alhone ruled slave followers with weapons of basic energies as strange in origin as Alhone herself. Followers who, in return for their unquestioning, dogged devotion, held positions of great personal power. In their rich trappings, they ruled over private little spheres of influence, answering only to Alhone.

Who was Alhone?—Where was Anghore?—What would he become should he accept this offer? None of these things mattered. Sometime, somewhere, he would have the opportunity to strip that soft furred hide from her quivering body—and no personal price he might pay would be too dear.

“Well, Moljar,” she was saying. “Doesn’t my offer interest you?”

He controlled himself well as he nodded. “I’ll go to Anghore, wherever it is.”

Her round pink face crinkled. “You are so certain, barbarian. Few have crossed the Sea of Mort. It is well-named.”

“I will go to Anghore,” he repeated.

“Then you should hurry. The Mistmen are outside the stadium now, and I’m sure they would like to find us here. At the other end of the stadium, above the catacombs, is the gyro-scout. For emergencies in the games,” she laughed. “It has seldom been used. Take it. Its directional beam is already set for Anghore. It will take you directly there. If you have the key.”

Moljar flexed his shoulders. His eyes were narrow, suspicious. No one ordinarily could break through the Mistmen’s detector bands. Then how could he? He shrugged. At least he would be free for a while.

Alhone removed the gleaming yellow stone from one of her semi-webbed fingers. She dropped it to him. “This will open the gyro to you. It will function only under this stone’s influence. It will also, if you reach my castle, open the gates into Anghore. You shall be rewarded, Moljar—bountifully.”

His eyes fastened on her throat. “Yes,” he said. “I depend on it.” He slipped the vibrant, throbbing yellow stone on his smallest finger. He stepped back and then a tremendous blast of energy surged against him. The blue field which enveloped the Anghorians was beginning to fade. A stabbing pain lanced up his spine, up into his brain, to explode there in a flash of wrenching agony. He stumbled, went down.

The blue field blurred, swirled, deepened in color. It became a vortex of violently churning silver shot with fire. A nauseous weakness spread through him. The Anghorians, the stadium, the whirling blue fires, all faded.

He opened his eyes slowly. It was raining. A few fat warm drops were spattering down, then a curtain of water spilled from the stadium wall. Shamefully he climbed to his feet, shook his head, looked about warily for Mistmen.

If he had blanked out it had only been for a few seconds. The blue field was gone. And with it, Alhone and her sycophants. Instinctively, he jerked his hand up. The yellow key-ring was gone. He bellowed bitterly. And a laugh answered. Gasdon!

He turned. The Martian outlaw had one arm around the struggling Terran girl. She was biting and striking and cursing, but with no effect. She writhed helplessly under his arm. There was a yellow flash on the outlaw’s other hand as it raised, clutching an alloy bar. Gasdon had taken the key!

The half-breed swept a defense bar from a gladiator’s stiff dead hand. Gasdon laughed fearless scorn, threw the girl from him, and met Moljar’s rush with his own bar upraised. They crashed together with a dull clang, parted, struck again. They circled warily, feinting, parrying, thrusting…

Mahra’s scream rang out. “The Mistmen! Coming into the arena!”

Moljar’s eyes darted toward her. Beyond, far across the sands, were a number of grey vaporous spheres. Within their depths, dim shapes, indistinct, blurred, moved in a steady ferocious intent toward the three.

“Fight!” yelled Gasdon. He charged toward Moljar again. His face was twisted insanely. “We’re doomed anyway. Defend yourself!” His broad yellow face glowed with obsession as he sprang. His alloy bar whirled in a singing arc, which was unwise. Moljar dropped beneath the level of the bar, punched savagely with the end of his own. Gasdon screamed hoarsely as the blunt end sank into his solar plexus. He staggered back, trying to lift the bar. Moljar swung downward, sank his bar halfway through the Martian outlaw’s heavy skull.

Quickly Moljar retracted the yellow ring. He yelled at the girl. Then they were running together across the death-littered amphitheater. Rays of force might have burned them down easily, but for some reason not then known to Moljar, the Mistmen did not fire.

They darted through an unguarded archway, up through level after level. They were still running easily when they reached the roof landing above the catacombs where the monsters of the games were kept. The long low hangar’s panel slid open when the ring was applied to its invisible photo-electronic reaction mechanism. The gyro-scout’s panel and instruments also were activated by the ring of Alhone.

Moljar hesitated, grinned at the girl. Her silver hair shone like dewed metal. “You are following me? A half-breed? A slave?”

“I’m not following anyone, not in the sense you mean. I’m with you, that’s all. I’d have to fight alone, otherwise. That would hardly be intelligent of me, would it?”

“Hardly,” he said. “Come on.” The gyro-scout lifted automatically, straight up through increasingly thick cloud layers, until it shot suddenly forward, straight like a bullet across Venus Port and above the Sea of Mort.

A radabeam and an automatic pilot was in complete control. Moljar turned to the Terran mutant. Her taut face was trying to pierce the dense sheath of cloud.

“This is a strange dream, Mahra.”

“Dream?” She turned her weird eyes on him briefly.

“What else? A half-breed, child of a Terran woman and a Martian outlaw, travels across the sea of death with an outcast mutant.” He shook his head. “And for Alhone we fly. For Alhone, the she-monster whom no one knows, to Anghore where no one has ever been and returned.”

“Is it far across this death trap?”

“I’ve heard that in miles it is only perhaps a hundred. But in perils—”

The girl said abruptly, angrily, “For Alhone! You’re crazy! If we can take control from the automatic pilot, we could—”

“We cannot do that,” said Moljar. “We would only crash down there. It’s bad… down there.”

She fell silent. The atomic motor whirled almost silently, driving them toward Anghore.

“There is great mystery here,” said Moljar. “We seem guided by forces beyond our control. Some powerful, invisible wind.”

Curious, nervous, Mahra’s rummaging uncovered weapons beneath the gyro’s seats. Two electro-blasters and a duelling dagger. They each took a pistol, and she gave the half-breed the long slim knife. Then, when she sat down, her bare shoulder rubbed slightly against him. And remained there.

His flesh tingled. His hand gripped the electro-gun tighter in his hand. “Why do the Terrans hate you mutants so much?” he asked. “Are the rumors about you mutants’ deadly powers true?”

She sighed. “Perhaps some of them are true. Anyway the Normals are very scared of us. That’s why they isolate and scourge us. We can rule them when we decide we want to.”

“Will you want to?”

“Perhaps, someday. When the time is right.”

“I am neither ruled, nor do I wish to rule,” said Moljar.

“You half-breeds are a strange tribe. Too bad you must all be such barbarians, such savages.”

He smiled grimly. “We are what we were made. Somehow, the offspring of a Martian-Terran union results in much larger, much longer-living stock. We were envied. Much as you mutants are on Terra, blessed with double-life compared to Normals. We were driven into the deserts, reviled, imprisoned, beaten. There aren’t many of us left. Of those thousands who sought to migrate here and find freedom, Alhone’s games wiped out all but a few hundred.”

Her voice sharpened. “You found her attractive! You know you did! You swore to avenge your people and bring her pelt back to Mars. Instead, you run errands for her!”

His shaggy black head turned. His eyes blazed with hate into hers. “That alien slut! It was a way out of Venus Port. It will lead me to her again. I could do nothing there.”

She sulked. He sensed the slight trembling of her arm against his, and smiled. “My vows cannot change. Someday her pelt will hang in Ankhar’s trophy cave.”

She screamed. Her lips quivered as she raised a hand over her face. “Will you?” Her voice shrilled. “A gruoon!”

Moljar’s stomach knotted. He had not even time to fire. The giant flying croc was plunging straight into them. There was a tearing impact. The gyro wabbled. Then the controls went dead. The little ship buckled, vibrated as though the winged crocodile was trying to devour it, rend it with its claws. Then the crushed blades released their hold, and the gyro spun down in a fluttering spiral.

Moljar had time to jam his electro-gun and a small magnetic compass into a bag of waterproof plastic and belt it to his waist before they crashed violently into the Sea of Death.

II

The tribes from which Moljar came were fatalists. Moljar accepted the fact that he was face to face with imminent death. Very well. If there was a way out, he would find it. If not, he would go on to Khles, where dead warriors go. And from Khles, he would fight his way into the eternal paradise of Perlarh.

He had expected the gyro to float at least a few minutes. But it sank almost immediately. The shock of the crash had knocked Mahra unconscious; pulling her against the suction as the gyro went under was a herculean task. The crumbled wreckage went down. It left only a tiny whirlpool in its wake.

Mahra’s consciousness returned quickly after a few dunkings in the tepid water. She was in his arms, her silver hair floating out over the dull glassy sheen of the water. He treaded easily, looking about. They could see a few hundred meters but beyond that narrow radius, the cloud blankets became an impenetrable fog. Patches of seaweed, lichen and rotting debris floated silently by on the torpid water, giving off a phosphorescent glow that reflected weirdly against the backdrop of mist.

Nature seemed to have stopped breathing. The air was heavy, oppressive. And the high humidity and heat, unrelieved by any wind, was weighty and pressed on them.

“Can you swim?” he asked.

“Quite well.” Her hands were on his shoulders. They clung a moment, then shoved away.

Treading water now as easily as he, she asked, “How long do you give us to live? Not that it matters.”

“The future is a mystery to me,” he said. “Maybe a second. Maybe a hundred years.”

“But you’ll admit we’ve no chance now! Soon hordes of sea monsters will scent us out. Surely you’ll not deny that this time you will go to meet your barbaric gods!”

“Who knows?”

She cursed him thoroughly. “You’re mad.”

“I am Moljar.”

She sighed resignedly. “You say that like omnipotence would say ‘I’m God’.”

“It is enough for me. Who can say they know of more than themselves? I simply know I am Moljar. I live. I have purpose. The pelt of Alhone. A pledge I must keep. Beyond that—nothing.”

She tossed wet hair from her eyes. “Maybe your barbaric code is best after all. The System’s returned to barbarism. Decay, ruin. Why not a philosophy to fit it? I rather like you. If you only weren’t a half-breed.”

He grinned. “If you only were not a mutant.” His eyes caught a dark, flat floating object some distance away. A blurred, indistinct outline. He pointed.

“Looks like something large enough to float us,” she said. Then she cried out suddenly and pointed over his shoulder.

His knife was in his hands as his legs churned him around in the brackish water. The sea-serpent’s flat head arched high above them, dripping an avalanche of weed and water upon their upturned faces. Its sleek, sinuous body shot upward, a monster with fanged jaws and darting forked tongue, with bulging eyes, and bony head and snout.

“Keep diving,” yelled Moljar. “It won’t open its mouth underwater.” He watched her surface dive like a fish, then followed himself just as the bullet-like head of the hissing hydrophidian slashed down.

Its massive length coiled and uncoiled savagely about them. The water was a churning white foam. Moljar tried repeatedly to sink his knife into the underbelly of the serpent. But it was like soft but tough plastic, only slightly resilient.

He broke surface, gasped great gulps of the dense air. He saw Mahra and pointed to the right toward the flat raft object they had seen floating there. He yelled. “Keep diving and swimming toward that.” Then he went under again as the serpent’s head slapped into the water where his own head had been.

It was a world of phosphorescent glimmerings like monstrous fireflies, bubbling and coruscating about his staring eyes as he battled the boiling currents stirred by the serpent. He swam until his lungs were shrieking with agony, then came up again for air. He was only a few feet this time from the floating area. It looked like a collected mass of debris now.

He swam frantically toward it. If he could get up out of the water, he could break out his electro-gun. He looked around for the girl. Her head bobbed up. But still some distance from him. The hydrophidian hissed angrily and struck again. Her silver hair disappeared beneath the serpent’s mouth.

He drew himself up onto the raft. He had a quick second of appraisal as he tore the gun from its plastic wrappings. The raft was solid, very buoyant, and membranaceous. Its surface was glossy and veined like the broad leaves of the swamp lilies.

How thick this raft was, how it was made, or how much more of it there was Moljar had no time to think about. But he did know it was alive!

The girl came up a few meters from him this time. Her arms moved weakly. Her face was deathly pale and her eyes pleaded silently beneath the bizarre strands of her silver hair. She again started to sink wearily down as the serpent hissed hungrily and struck.

This time it would have feasted. However Moljar’s electro-gun crackled, and its lethal charges burned the monster’s glistening length into pieces. They fell writhing in separate anguish all around the girl, crimsoning the water to a thick red.

He lifted her easily up onto the raft-creature. She sank down in a dripping an exhausted heap.

“For a half-breed,” she whispered between gasps, “you have courage.” Then she closed her eyes. The raft rippled and bucked slightly as something huge stirred against its bottom.

The night hours before morning were illuminated, a strange twilight of phosphorescence. They sat in the middle of the organic raft and waited tensely. The stirring beneath it had grown more violent.

“Man isn’t the only highly adaptable animal—not even the most ingenious.” The girl’s tone was pedantic, amazingly learned. Moljar nodded surlily, not so interested, apparently, in lectures. He edged toward the girl until their shoulders touched. She paused. Continued.

“The animal that built this raft for itself is hiding beneath it now. The serpent frightened it. Soon it will have to come up for air.”

“How do you know so much,” he growled.

“Earth University of Interplanetary Fauna,” she said.

He sneered. “A mutant!”

“My parents dyed my hair, and with another name I got by for a while. I was going to be a field worker but they caught up with me. They always do. Anyway, as I was saying, this creature is much like an ianthina, or snail, of Earth. It breathes through a siphon, or tubular proboscis. It uses this siphon to suck in air with which it builds these rafts for itself, to keep its heavy body and shell afloat. It’s an adventurer like you, Moljar. It spends its life floating or sailing about like a ship.”

Moljar grunted. He moved one corded arm behind her. She shifted a little.

“Very interesting thing,” she said. “Biology. When this ianthina decides to build its raft, it exudes a sticky mucous over the surface of the sea, layer after layer of it. Then it draws air into its siphon and permits the bubbles to escape beneath the mucous to which they cling. These air sacks imprison the air as the mucous hardens. And we have this very strong raft, a life boat with air tanks. Aren’t we lucky?”

The raft jolted violently. “Are we?” said Moljar. “Maybe it does not want to share its raft.”

A number of tentacles slithered up and over the edge of the raft. Two antenna with slimy knobs stood up and quivered at Moljar.

The girl tried to ignore the sight. “But this raft is better than any man has ever been able to build.” Her voice tightened as more of the ianthina surged into view. “This snail can make more bubbles at will, and it can enlarge its raft whenever it wants to.”

There was a sudden upsurging height of gigantic pink-fleshed bulk. It rose up until it towered over its raft. A little above the level of the water they could see its brilliantly colored spiral shell-house gleaming olive-green with streaks and spots of purple, violet and black.

The body of the ianthina continued to exude outward from its shell. From it a thick tendon of flesh spread out to either side to form the framework of its raft, an integral part of its giant body.

“We’ve got to get this craft moving some way toward Anghore,” said Moljar.

She stared at him, open mouthed, and then said, “Is that all? How will you summon your genii, or is that you?”

He shrugged. “It must be done. We are wasting time. First we must burn this shell away from the raft. It encumbers us.”

She was shaking her head as he crouched on his knees, leveling the gun at a point beneath the ianthina’s waving antenna. He was about to press the stud, then cursed and fell sidewise beneath the long descending squeal.

Attracted by the glow of the ianthina, a monstrous bat had dived suddenly toward them from somewhere up in that dense grey curtain. Neither of them saw its giant webbed wings until it fanned them like an abrupt deadly wind.

“Burn it!” screamed Mahra, as the bat’s hideous evilly grinning mouth opened to reveal several rows of teeth, and its gleaming red eyes bored toward them through the mist. “I lost my electro in the water.”

Moljar was shaking his head. He tossed her the blaster. “You. Burn the ianthina free from the raft.” The bat had sped by, circled, was returning. “This bat can do us some good!”

Moljar stood up and met the sweep of the bat’s flexing claws. Just in time he leaped upward between them, and clutched the bat’s thick furred belly. He felt the ratty teeth clack shut behind him as he was raised upward into the swirling vapor.

His nose curled, and he choked with the stench of the beast’s vermin-infested fur. Then, still gripping the coarse hair with one hand, he raised his knife with the other. A quick long slash brought a fearsome scream hissing in his face. He slashed again and again until the probing blade found the beast’s heart.

Gore spilled over him as he clung to the now wet hair. It got too slippery to hold. He grabbed the flailing claws as the gasping, thrashing creature plummeted seaward. The bat’s body flopped into the water not far from the raft. It beat futilely with one foot, spinning in weakening frothing circles. Suddenly it was dead.

Moljar worked frantically against time. The blood would attract every kind and condition of sea monster. He hacked and strained at the joint where the huge wing joined the body. The stench almost overpowered him as he floundered about. But finally the great ribbed wing came free. Moljar’s breath was coming in deep gusts as he dragged himself up onto the raft and pulled part of the wing up after him. He sat on it to anchor it while he rested.

He looked at the girl. She nodded. “You’re pretty brave, for a half-breed.”

He grunted breathlessly.

She came close and handed him his blaster. “I burned it away. I burned its ganglia first, which it used for a brain. Then I severed the tendons which fastened it to its float. Anything else?”

Moljar was up again now, hacking at the thick tough surface of one end of the raft. “Yes. Watch that bat wing. Don’t let it slide away. It is what we must have to reach Anghore.”

“What are you doing now? And what’s the wing for?”

He answered carelessly, “I’m going to make us a sail from the wing. It is almost a perfect sail of its kind. I figure the gyro brought us halfway across the sea. Maybe we have a third of the way to go. I have a compass and I saw what direction we were following before we crashed. With a fair wind, and luck, we should reach shore within a day.”

She stared with no attempt, now, to conceal her admiration for the barbarian. “For a half-breed,” she said, “you’ve got a brain.”

Moljar said nothing. He had finished digging the hole in the surface of the raft. He next cut long strips of leather from his tunic for rigging. The twenty-foot-high leading edge of the bat’s wing, a high curving spar, he stepped deeply in the hole, like a mast. Soon they were moving through the fantastic sea before a slight, lethargic breeze.

Their blaster protected them many times from the countless varieties of sea and air creatures that constantly attacked them. Moljar devised a sea-anchor by cutting off one of the air sacks from beneath the raft, and tying it to one end of a long leather rope. When the wind blew in the wrong direction, he threw out the sea-anchor.

There was little difference between night and day, except that the phosphorescence dimmed and was replaced by a grayer, more sickly light. And the high, gracefully-curved membrane of the bat’s ribbed wing arched above them like the bizarre rigging of the junks that ply the Martian canals between the ruins of Phreer and Sumph-Logan. Black, with veins of dried blood, it caught the wind and tautened like the black sails of ancient pirate craft.

But though they could fight the monsters that flew and swam about them they could not fight the sea itself. The sea is cunning. It can bide its time, and spring with more violence than the greatest beast. The wind was its ally.

It was late the following afternoon that Mahra’s hypersensitive nerves detected the distant pounding of the surf against high crags. They both visualized the dark mountains of Maghrone where the dull spires and minarets of Anghore towered up from its granite sea wall thousands of feet into the mist.

The thunderous surf grew in volume to a steady roaring as their makeshift craft bore them shoreward.

Then, abruptly, Moljar’s nostrils quivered. He leaped to his feet and his black mane matted and curled as his eyes strained upward. “The cloud layers,” he said. “Look!”

Each cloud layer was moving rapidly in different directions. “A storm!” cursed Moljar. “The wind and sea will pulp us on the rocks!”

Mahra cowered down, clutching at the floor of the raft. One hand gripped the bone mast of the bat’s wing. She reached up the other, and Moljar’s broad yellow hand closed over it, and held in it a silent bond.

The sound of the descending storm came from afar. It rose higher and higher, reaching the pitch of a thousand shrieking giants. A colossal comber bore towards them, lifting up, and up. Their eyes followed its curling summit, helpless, bold pygmies. A wall of blue, foaming with white, like a mad beast, translucent as they saw it towering up through the swirling vapor. Then it collapsed over them.

Moljar’s hand gripped hers. A vise that all the frenzied pounding of the ocean could not break. As the tons of water crushed them down, shattered the raft, hurled it away like chaff, their hands were locked. Their ears rang. Their minds cried out and were smothered. Coughing, blinded, they were absorbed by the sea.

III

The desert tribes of Mars cling to ancient superstitions. When a warrior dies, his body can only go on to Khles. A grotesque land of trial by brute strength by which the victorious can move upward through succeeding plains, and finally into the fairer lands of Perlarh.

So when Moljar’s battered consciousness returned somewhat, his crackled lips whispered it gently, with awe. “Khles… Khles… Khles…” Then he snapped open his burning eyes.

He was on his side on harsh gravel and grey sand. The sea, calm and glassy again, washed gently at his sandaled feet. He stiffened his aching legs, and a lassitude went through him, like one might imagine upon awakening from death. He raised his right hand and the brilliant, sentient aliveness of the yellow stone caught the filtered Venusian morning, and momentarily blinded him. He shifted his eyes and saw that he still gripped Mahra’s hand.

Her long smooth body, bruised and lacerated and encrusted with salt, breathed with a slow, erratic rhythm. Her other arm lay across her high firm breasts and her slim fingers rested on his forearm.

He turned his head up the beach. It might well have been the hell-lands of Khles that towered there. The smooth sloping expanse of gray sand ended sharply in a wall of granite, cracked and hoary with age. It went straight upward, higher than Moljar could see.

The girl groaned, raised on an elbow. He turned. They looked silently at each other a moment, before turning their eyes back to the colossal sea wall. Simultaneously their eyes caught the broad towering gate of dull black metal.

“Anghore,” she whispered.

His hand dug into the sand. His lips were thin lines of dark wire. “It is magic,” he said. “Even the gods are prejudiced against half-breeds, or I’d say they lent their strength to ours.”

“Only evil gods would guide us to this place,” she said.

“We have our gods who are not known exactly for benevolence. Lumphoor. Ghyx.”

Moljar climbed stiffly to his feet and lifted Mahra. They stretched sore, wrenched muscles. They ate the ample meat from the many types of shells strewing the beach, and all the time they had been eyeing the giant, formidable barrier. Then, with silent accord, they walked up to it and stood dwarfed before it.

“You can leave me here,” said Moljar. “I have pledged. I must return to kill Alhone. But you are free.”

“In this jungle? Free for death! I’ll stick a while longer, half-breed.”

Her hand crept to his as he raised the yellow ring-key. A faint humming, a hollow metallic clang, and the gates slid to either side into their granite walls.

They stepped through into a massive cavern. A cold maw of twilight, green haze and smooth arching walls veined with ruby red and gold. Mahra cried out softly, and Moljar cursed as the two giant furred male Anghorians ran toward them.

Each wore a long straight sword and a slender dagger at his side. Their pink cat-faces masked cold, sadistic evil. Alien. One reached out a paw-like hand at Mahra. His almost lipless mouth slid open, and the incongruous whining speech mewed its travesty of human tones.

“This woman has not been called. She does not belong here.” He turned to his fellow. “Take her to the Matrix. Ghils is experimenting with the seventh plain. She will be useful there.

“You are to come with me,” he said, turning to Moljar.

The half-breed’s hand rested on his dagger. He had fallen instinctively into a half-crouch. “How did you know I was coming here?”

“You will learn many things about Anghore. You have much to learn.”

“I’m stubborn about my subjects, and my instructors,” growled Moljar. And, as the other Anghorian stepped toward Mahra, Moljar leaped at his throat.

As his left hand clutched the corded body, his right hand whipped the catman’s dagger free. It rested harshly now against the furred man’s broad silken chest.

“Do not touch the girl,” he warned in the small pointed ear.

The other catman said evenly, “A dangerous act. But excusable. You have not yet learned the formalities of Anghore.” He moved in a blinding blur of speed. Mahra gasped, as his body streaked across her vision like a flash of light.

Moljar went back. The catman thudded against him. His head cracked against the stone wall, and the red tint of the glowing stones deepened to a more personal crimson. He cursed harshly. These catmen could move! Shaking the dimness from his head, he tried to grip the Anghorian’s writhing body. His dagger raised and fell, but only found hard stone. He blinked, trying to clear his eyes of fog, and his own blood.

He heard Mahra’s savage, despairing yells, and caught a glance of her struggling in the other catman’s corded arms. He heaved upward. The catman flew off him like a filthy conscience. Moljar flattened against the wall, his dagger crossed before him.

And when the catman leaped again, the half-breed was prepared. His clearing vision focused this time on its feral darting movements, and he met that pink snarling face with a long right slash. The pink face crunched, smeared. The big body sheared around, buckled, plunged down. It twitched, and its paws swept about searching for Moljar. Moljar kicked the face until the body stopped moving.

The other Anghorian released the girl. He drew his sword and eased toward Moljar.

A voice said with cruel, morbid interest, “Bring the half-breed to me alive, Akare. Or you will accompany the girl to the seventh plain.”

Involuntarily, Moljar yelled, “Princess Alhone!”

Whining, squealing laughter echoed through the vaulted cavern. Baffled, the barbarian whirled around searching for the voice. It seemed without source.

“Alhone,” he said again desperately. “You here! How?”

The gloating laughter again. “I have never left Anghore, mighty Moljar, since it was built for me. You and all the other fools outside Anghore have seen only my projections. You are foolish to fight now. Allow Akare to bring you to me. Leave the freak girl. I wait.”

“Wait,” said Moljar. “The girl stays with me.”

There was a long painful pause before the Princess Alhone spoke again. “You have passed the many tests that only a few survive.”

“Tests?” said Moljar.

“The Red Moon Games are but testing grounds. The survivors become my warriors here. You are welcome, Moljar. You will be the greatest among them. But this—this girl has signed herself away to the seventh plain by entering here. You had better accept this compromise, Moljar. You have much to gain. Otherwise, both of you will go to the seventh plain together. I would hate to lose you, Moljar. I would make you a Jehlak of my Guards. Forget the girl. Accept. You will be far greater than those who have scorned you. They will be your slaves.”

He hesitated, then said, “I am Moljar. I only compromise when it pleases me. The girl stays with me. I care nothing for your plains, whatever they are. Send us to the seventh, the thousandth. It means nothing to Moljar.”

The voice mewed merciless laughter. “Your rugged independence has ended, half-breed. You can be overpowered instantly by any one of many of our energy weapons. There is much duelling here, so, by decree, only swords are worn. Otherwise my warriors would soon decimate themselves. But for stubborn aliens we have other methods.”

“Is talk and crazy laughter one of them?” said Moljar. “I am not impressed.”

He turned. His eyes sought Mahra’s. She stood proud and tall, her breasts moving with controlled breathing. Only her eyes held deep, crawling fear. Here was dirty mystery. Alhone and her minions who had watched the Red Moon slaughters—a three-dim projection from her eyrie here at Anghore. He remembered again that all her public appearances had been surrounded by the blue glow. His brains spun. He shook his blood-encrusted hair.

His decision was a natural projection of his own character. He could not have acted otherwise. He moved in a sudden leap sidewise. One arm encircled the startled catman’s neck. The Anghorian could have eluded him, and offered battle. But he had not. Apparently he awaited direction from Alhone. He held his dagger to the quivering side. The fur was silky, soft beneath his fingers, inviting violence.

He raised his head and shouted, “Moljar waits. Does the girl stay with me? We will die before we part.”

The voice was a petulant whine now. “Fool. You will not die. You are here to serve me. I am not served by corpses.”

Akare made a quick, lightning-like jerk from Moljar’s grasp. The half-breed sank his dagger in to the hilt, ripped sidewise. Then he leaped away, covering the girl against the wall. A stream of bright thin blood spurted from Akare’s pulsing side as he crawled toward the far side of the cavern, mewing with pain.

Mahra’s hands clutched Moljar’s shoulders as they crouched against the coruscating colors of the veined granite. Her breath came in short, jerking gusts. “For a half-breed,” she breathed, “you have honor.”

Her hands stiffened, dug into his skin. Moljar’s hair bristled on his neck. Intuitively, he raised his dagger, though it was a useless, silly gesture now.

From the far side of the cavern, moving ghost-like from a massive opening, a dense vaporous sphere floated toward him. It eddied and pulsed, and in its center was the dim outline of a human shape encased in plastic, its head helmeted by a faint glowing light.

“A Mistman!” Mahra gasped. “Moljar…”

The half-breed had not time to think. Capture or death would find him moving, though there seemed no hope in it.

A yellow beam of light slashed outward from the man in the sphere. Moljar dropped beneath it. But it caught the girl full. His eyes saw her stiffen into a hard stone manikin and tumble forward. From his hands and knees he sprang upward like a maddened beast, straight toward the pulsing heart of the Mistman’s vaporous shell.

There was one rending burst of pain. Then an explosion that seemed to shatter his brain. Its million floating fragments drifted through blackness.

IV

He was aware of low chanting rhythms, the blood heating throb of unknown instruments. He stirred and found himself wallowing in a bed of incredible depth and softness. Heady scents that twisted his soul with sweet pain floated across his face, and his wild barbarian heart was instinctively repelled by the suggestion of sensual, soft decadence.

When he opened his eyes, oscillating lights bathed him in sense-drunkening sweetness that sickened even as it lured. He turned his head. A boudoir out of the abyss of a drug dream. Black drapes littered with flashing jewels. A black floor that seemed to undulate with sentient life, mosaicked in red veins. Weirdly-plumaged birds with serpent’s heads hissed in a golden cage.

And Alhone stood by his couch and sang to him.

When she spoke, her voice had been unpleasantly whiny and shrill. But now, singing the dissonant cries of some alien song, it was high and piercingly sweet like a violin’s cry. Small furred breasts rose and fell gently as she sang. Lithe hips swayed. Her cat’s eyes searched his with a cruel dreaminess, and, for him, there was no malice there.

Small, delicate, fine-limbed monster from an alien hell. At her command thousands had died horribly during the Red Moon Games. Trampled, drained of blood, shredded by talons, poisoned by fangs, tortured, flayed and inflicted with unspeakable indignities worse than pain. Yet she possessed the sadist’s love of beauty, of decadent riches, luxury, sensual surroundings, and love.

He arose with one fluid motion and faced her. His body had been bathed and scented with perfumed oils. His trappings were new, the grey leather of the Anghorians. A long sword swung at his side.

“The Mistmen are yours,” he said. “And this has all been a trap to get me here?”

“Yes. You are mine now, as are all the others. We have ways here to control the heart and the mind of those who are not quite willing to accept me. I have employed these methods often.”

He inhaled deeply. His chest swelled. And a wave of almost overpowering ecstasy swept him in a surging tide of passion. How many years he had waited for this one supreme, delectable moment of revenge!

And now he was alone with her. And there was nothing to stand in his way. Or was there? She was no fool. She must have protection. He could see nothing.

His eyes clouded as he looked at her. That haughty body would soon writhe and scream under his hands. And before she died she would know the full meaning of torture.

But first he would learn the nature of this mystery. “Where is Mahra?” he said. “And what is the seventh plain?”

“Our scientists call them plains,” she ignored the first question. “But they are really worlds coexistent with this one. We have explored six of these worlds. This, Venus, is the sixth. I and my kind came here from the second.”

Moljar blinked. His barbarian mind was quick to accept the strange and the marvelous. It was not at all unbelievable that these Anghorians had come not only from another world, but from another dimension of existence. A coexistent world. It was only unexpected.

“All matter and all chronosophy are one and concomitant,” she said. She swayed toward him. “Our scientists perfected the Matrix which can synthesize matter to any of these various worlds or plains. It changes the consistency of the atom, much as a lens magnifies objects to fit the perspective of your eye.”

No longer able to control himself, Moljar stepped to meet her, flexing his hands and trembling violently. She must not get suspicious until it was too late. Until he had her between his hands.

“And why do you stay on Venus? Why do you kill us, and ravish this world?”

“My world was drab, colorless, uninteresting. It was so dull there. Our civilization destroyed the past which was lawless and exciting. I came here. And from the Red Moon Games I have gathered about me here and Anghore all the greatest warriors in the System. It was wise of me, do you not think so, Moljar? The planets themselves helped me. Terra and Mars weeded out the best by isolating the half-breeds and mutants. Then out of these, I select the very best, by a process of elimination during the Red Moon Games. From the best among the survivors of the Games I choose the Mistmen. And from the Mistmen I choose you, Moljar, to rule by my side. The Mistmen can conquer the Universe.”

“Many have dreamed of such a conquest,” said Moljar.

“This is no dream. We have inexhaustible power on our side. Weapons we can unleash that would stun the System into passive madness. Defense they have no conception of. And, if we had to, we could fight from the vantage of other plains of being, of which the dullards of the Solar Worlds have no concept, though these countless worlds flourish all about them. Work by my side, Moljar.”

“Why me?” said the half-breed. “I am not of your kind.”

“No Anghorian could stand against you with equal weapons, Moljar. The best of two worlds flows in your veins. Your heart is metal fibre, and your brain has never known fear. Nor could it ever understand defeat. There is no other who could stand by your side. And when I tire of the empire we shall build, and move on to other plains of entertainment, you may stay and rule. You can be King of a Universe, Moljar.”

“None of which is so important as keeping my pledge,” said Moljar. He clutched at her slim, throbbing throat, but again he had forgotten the extra-system origin of these non-humans. Her body was an unspringing coil. She landed lightly ten feet away. A high piercing shriek of frenzied rage and frustration sputtered from her pink, snarling face.

“Savage!” she finally said as he came toward her. “You have gone too far!”

“Not far enough yet,” said Moljar. He leaped after her. She eluded him as he dodged after her doggedly. She sprang this way and that like a forest cat. And finally she stopped and her fingers briefly touched the wall. Panels slid noiselessly apart.

“You asked about the girl,” she spat. “Look!”

Moljar froze. There was a square there revealed. A mass of electronic equipment. Parts were vaguely familiar, but overall arrangement completely beyond the grasp of his barbaric desert mind. Within a column of light stood Mahra, looking at him. Fine glowing filaments imprisoned her.

Somehow, through the weirdly glowing strands that would send her into some hellish land only Alhone could name, she managed a wan smile. Beyond the glowing filaments, grey-furred catmen moved dials and studied gauges and charts.

“Wait!” cried Alhone’s grotesque mewling face. “Turn off the matrix power. Do not send the girl yet. Moljar wishes to accompany her to hell!”

V

The three catmen complied without comment. They apparently were highly specialized brains, incapable of normal reaction. Their faces reflected mechanical minds, specially bred, unemotional. Moljar’s narrowed eyes followed the motions of one as he turned the dials. The light faded from around the girl. The filaments faded to a rusty brown. Mahra’s eyes turned, looked directly into Alhone’s. A shiver went through Moljar at the strange glow that emanated from them.

Clanking of steel spun him around. The Anghorians whom Alhone had summoned were crashing into the small room, and Moljar sprang to meet them. His sword whipped free, darted, an invisible arc. He killed the first one who came within reach before the Anghorian’s sword could move, his straight blade splitting the pink skull.

He saw one raise a peculiar looking device like an electro-gun, though smaller. He heard Alhone’s shrill cry, “Swords only! I would watch him fight once again. Before he goes away.”

Others joined the Anghorians. Martians. Terrans. Half-breeds. Their eyes were dull, and they fought without heart.

Moljar sidestepped a thrust, even as he parried one slash, and slipped under a third. His black eyes glittered like a basilisk’s and his lips froze in the Martian tribal smile without mercy.

His sword darted past a blade that sought to parry. It sheathed a foot of its length in a Martian’s belly. He gasped agonizedly and went to his knees. And another, a Terran, swept past him, lunging savagely, raining blow on blow so furiously that Moljar countered only with superhuman effort. He retreated warily before the cursing, sweating, yammering warriors, coolly parrying thrusts and strokes and watching for his chances to kill. When possible he kept articles of furniture between him and his attackers, while his sword circled, fluid light.

They were dying one by one. Moljar sensed something wrong. Why? Surely Alhone had seen enough of this final exhibition. Soon it would be too much. Already only two of her Guards remained. And they were wary, not aggressive, playing for time. They were waiting for Alhone’s order to employ their energy weapons. But as he charged in, flailing, slashing, she was withholding that order. Why?

Moljar parried one wild catman’s blade easily and, on the rebound, felt his sword crunch, saw the catman fall to the side with his neck cut half through. But move though he might, he was too late to defend himself completely against the second and remaining Guard. He parried slightly, the sword struck a glancing blow across his head, and bit deep into his shoulder. A red mist gathered over his eyes. He lifted his blade like heavy metal, very slowly it seemed, saw it sink as slowly into the Terran’s skull. It stuck there. Moljar, through a welter of sweat and blood, tried to withdraw it as the dead man sank down to his knees. But his weight pulled the sword, gently, it seemed, from Moljar’s nerveless fingers.

He turned and lurched toward the Matrix. The scientists were standing in shocked frozen stances. The filaments about Mahra’s body were still cold. Her strangely bright eyes remained fixed on Alhone’s. Moljar staggered around, shaking his head, fighting the whirling darkness that threatened to choke out the light.

The Princess Alhone’s eyes were wide, staring, as though hypnotized. Her body was leaning forward in a taut arc. Her hands were spread outward as though attempting to ward off some invisible power. Her mouth was open, twisting, but only faint unintelligent gibberish spattered out. But there was still a mad fanatic fire as she sprang at him, her taloned paws outspread, slashing at his face. He scooped up a long sword as she screamed.

“The Matrix! Turn it on and go. Send the girl to hell alone!”

He swung her arms aside, agony lancing his bleeding shoulder. As she twisted off balance, he wrapped one arm about her, and swung her off her feet, just as another detail of Guards hurtled toward him.

“Tell them to get out,” he said. “Or I’ll kill you.”

She knew he would anyway, but she preferred less immediacy. He lifted his other arm, thrust the dripping sword point against her breast. She coughed something from her straining throat, and the Guards retreated hastily. The panel closed behind them.

“Tell your scientists—” he began, and stopped as her mewling laughter interrupted him.

He looked into the Matrix. The filaments were glowing purple. But the scientists were gone! He dragged Alhone’s writhing body after him into the mass of equipment. A gigantic maze of meaningless tubes, wires, bulbs, dials, buttons and switches and coils. He cursed blindly. He could not turn off the Matrix!

“Mahra! Mahra!” Her body was faintly stirring beyond the now singing and vibrating filaments.

Between peals of piercing, whistling laughter, Alhone was shrieking, “She will go to the seventh plain! The she-devil!”

Moljar could destroy the Matrix, but only a burning cataclysm could result from such an act. At least, even in the seventh plain, she would be alive for a while, and perhaps he could bring her back.

Mahra was on her knees, now on her feet, swaying. She turned. Moljar flinched. Those eyes. They blazed, and held. She had gone mad. With a savage roar of pent up blind hot rage, Moljar clutched Alhone’s neck and began squeezing it slowly. All his suppressed hate, his frustration, the years and perils of his long, long, quest, his longing for revenge, was in the terrible strength of his fingers… but, without any logical reason, a thought entered his mind, restrained his hands… a faint far sound, but one of screaming urgency…

Don’t, Moljar. Let her live.

He sobbed in frustrated rage. It was deviltry. He tried again to squeeze that throbbing neck, but his fingers remained frozen. Then the mental voice in his brain repeated, Let her live, Moljar. This is Mahra. Let her live. She knows the Matrix. Mahra…

He staggered back, blinking, shaking his head. He dropped Alhone. Her body thudded on the crimsoned floor. She raised up stiffly, her eyes staring widely, her arms trembling. She walked stonily to the Matrix and turned a dial. The Matrix’s shrill humming, now almost beyond his auditory range, died slowly as the glow of the filaments faded.

Alhone adjusted some other part of the complex panel. The filamented threads lifted slowly until Mahra could crawl beneath them. She ran sobbing, and Moljar took her easily into the folds of his red dripping arms.

Alhone had turned. She looked at Mahra with that indescribable hatred burning a raw-edged flame in her eyes.

“So you mutants, some of you anyway, are telepathic. That is why the Normals fear you so. I am helpless here. Now. There is nothing for me to do but escape.” Her hands spun the dials as she talked. “I go to whatever plain waits my pleasure. I am tired of this one.” She looked at Moljar through veiled eyes. “I have seen all I can see here.”

While the filament threads dropped down, she ran beneath them. They began to glow, rapidly now, for the last time.

“I won’t let her escape me now,” said Moljar. “Even if we have to die with her.” He hurled his heavy long sword directly into the blazing heart of the Matrix.

There was a crackling, then a thunderous growing roar of stupendous unleashed power. A blinding, glaring explosion sent Mahra and Moljar hurtling backward. Stunned, they staggered to their feet, supporting each other, groped for the panel out of the room.

A globe of burning white energy was expanding rapidly, eating up wall and metal and air with thirsting ferocity.

It devoured its own base and plummeted downward through the towering heights of Anghore. Burning, blasting, eating, destroying. It ate straight down into the bowels of Venus beneath the Mountains of Maghrone.

Through the trembling, smoking chaos, the tottering ruins of Anghore, Moljar and Mahra blindly fought their way. The towering gateway was blasted as though by a tremendous electronic charge; they ran through the cavern and over the twisted gates and far up the beach of grey sand before they finally paused, panting, and looked back.

Anghore was a smoke-belching crater. A thundering volcano of bursting energy.

They stood breast to breast, looking at each other. Half-breed and mutant. Outcasts. Scourged. Excluded and estranged. The hated and feared. Her eyes half-closed beneath his. Her lips parted slightly, and her body was soft.

“No wonder the Terran Normals are so fearful of you mutants,” said Moljar. “The rumors are true. You can control minds!”

She nodded, eyes still almost closed. “Some of us can, sometimes. It isn’t easy.”

“Then why do you not rule them? If you can.”

“If we feel like it, maybe we shall. Some day. When the time is right. Besides, we only want to rule those who deserve to be ruled.”

His arms tightened. She submitted with a strange, eager smile to the pressure of his muscles. “Well,” he said softly. “Is the time right? And do I deserve the honor?”

Against his, her lips answered.

ALSO AVAILABLE

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