Northwest of Earth (44 page)

But they were no longer piled one upon another in a rough travesty of the city they once had shaped. Some force mightier than any of man’s explosives seemed to have hurled them with such violence from their beds that their very atoms had been disrupted by the force of it, crumbling them into dust. And in the very center of the havoc lay Smith, unhurt.

He stared in bewilderment about the moonlight ruins. In the silence it seemed to him that the very air still quivered in shocked vibrations. And as he stared he realized that no force save one could have wrought such destruction upon the ancient stones. Nor was there any explosive known to man which would have wrought this strange, pulverizing havoc upon the blocks of Illar. That force had hummed unbearably through the living dynamo of Thag, a force so powerful that space itself had bent to enclose it. Suddenly he realized what must have happened.

Not Illar, but Thag himself had warped the walls of space to enfold the twilit world, and nothing but Thag’s living power could have held it so bent to segregate the little, terror-ridden land inviolate.

Then when the Tree’s roots parted, Thag’s anchorage in the material world failed and in one great gust of unthinkable energy the warped space-walls had ceased to bend. Those arches of solid space had snapped back into their original pattern, hurling the land and all its dwellers into—into—His mind balked in the effort to picture what must have happened, into what ultimate dimension those denizens must have vanished.

Only himself, enfolded deep in Thag’s very essence, the intolerable power of the explosion had not touched. So when the warped space-curve ceased to be, and Thag’s hold upon reality failed, he must have been dropped back out of the dissolving folds upon the spot where the Tree had stood in the space-circled world, through that vanished world-floor into the spot he had been snatched from in the instant of the dim land’s dissolution. It must have happened after the terrible force of the explosion had spent itself, before Thag dared move even himself through the walls of changing energy into his own far land again.

Smith sighed and lifted a hand to his throbbing head, rising slowly to his feet. What time had elapsed he could not guess, but he must assume that the Patrol still searched for him. Wearily he set out across the circle of havoc toward the nearest shelter which Illar offered. The dust rose in ghostly, moonlit clouds under his feet.

BY C. L. MOORE AND HENRY KUTTNER

T
HE RIVET-STUDDED OAKEN
door crashed open, splintering from the assault of pike-butts whose thunderous echoes still rolled around the walls of the tiny stone room revealed beyond the wreck of the shattered door. Jirel, the warrior-maid of Joiry, leaped through the splintered ruins, dashing the red hair from her eyes, grinning with exertion, gripping her two-edged sword. But in the ruin of the door she paused. The mail-clad men at her heels surged around her in the doorway like a wave of blue-bright steel, and then paused too, staring.

For Franga the warlock was kneeling in his chapel, and to see Franga on his knees was like watching the devil recite a paternoster. But it was no holy altar before which the wizard bent. The black stone of it bulked huge in this tiny, bare room echoing still with the thunder of battle, and in the split second between the door’s fall and Jirel’s crashing entry through its ruins Franga had crouched in a last desperate effort at—at what?

His bony shoulders beneath their rich black robe heaved with frantic motion as he fingered the small jet bosses that girdled the altar’s block. A slab in the side of it fell open abruptly as the wizard, realizing that his enemy was almost within sword’s reach, whirled and crouched like a feral thing. Blazing light, cold and unearthly, streamed out from the gap in the altar.

“So that’s where you’ve hidden it!” said Jirel with a savage softness.

Over his shoulder Franga snarled at her, pale lips writhed back from discolored teeth. Physically he was terrified of her, and his terror paralyzed him. She saw him hesitate, evidently between his desire to snatch into safety what was hidden in the altar and his panic fear of her sword that dripped blood upon the stones.

Jirel settled his indecision.

“You black devil!” she blazed, and lunged like lightning, the dripping blade whistling as it sheared the air.

Franga screamed hoarsely, flinging himself sidewise beneath the sword. It struck the altar with a shivering shock that numbed Jirel’s arm, and as she gasped a sound that was half a sob of pain and fury, half a blistering curse, he scurried crabwise into a corner, his long robe giving him a curiously amorphous look. Recovering herself, Jirel stalked after him, rubbing her numbed arm but gripping that great wet sword fast, the highlights of murder still blazing in her yellow eyes.

The warlock flattened himself against the wall, skinny arms outstretched.

“Werhi-yu-io!”
he screamed desperately.
“Werhi! Werhi-yu!”

“What devil’s gibberish is that, you dog?” demanded Jirel angrily. “I’ll—”

Her voice silenced abruptly, the red lips parted. She stared at the wall behind the wizard, and something like awe was filming the blood-lust in her eyes. For over that corner in which Franga crouched a shadow had been drawn as one draws a curtain.

“
Werhil
!” screamed the warlock again, in a cracked and strained voice, and—how could she not have seen before that door against whose panels he pressed, one hand behind him pushing it open upon darkness beyond? Here was black magic, devil’s work.

Doubtfully Jirel stared, her sword lowering. She did not know it, but her free hand rose to sign her breast with the church’s guard against evil. The door creaked a little, then swung wide. The blackness within was blinding as too much light is blinding—a dark from which she blinked and turned her eyes away. One last glimpse she had of the gaunt, pale face of Franga, grinning, contorted with hate. The door creaked shut.

The trance that had gripped Jirel broke with the sound. Fury flooded back in the wake of awe. Choking on hot solider-curses she sprang for the door, swinging up her sword in both hands, spitting hatred and bracing herself for the crash of the heavy blade through those oaken panels so mysteriously veiled in the shadow that clung about that corner.

The blade clanged shiveringly against stone. For the second time, the agonizing shock of steel swung hard against solid rock shuddered up the blade and racked Jirel’s shoulders. The door had vanished utterly. She dropped the sword from nerveless hands and reeled back from the empty corner, sobbing with fury and pain.

“C-coward!” she flung at the unanswering stone. “H-hide in your hole, then, you fiend-begotten runaway, and watch me take the Starstone!”

And she whirled to the altar.

Her men had shrunk back in a huddle beyond the broken door, their magic-dazzled eyes following her in fascinated dread.

“You womanish knaves!” she flared at them over her shoulder as she knelt where the wizard had knelt. “Womanish, did I say? Ha! You don’t deserve the flattery! Must I go the whole way alone? Look then—here it is!”

She plunged her bare hand into the opening in the altar from which streamed that pale, unearthly light, gasped a little, involuntarily, and then drew out what looked like a block of living flame.

In her bare hand as she knelt she held it, and for minutes no one moved. It was pale, this Starstone, cold with unearthly fire, many-faceted yet not glittering. Jirel thought of twilight above the ocean, when the land is darkening and the smooth water gathers into its surface all the glimmering light of sea and sky. So this great stone gleamed, gathering the chapel’s light into its pale surface so that the room seemed dark by contrast, reflecting it again transmuted into that cold, unwavering brilliance.

She peered into the translucent depths of it so near her face. She could see her own fingers cradling the gem distorted as if seen through water—and yet somehow there was a motion between her hand and the upper surface of the jewel. It was like looking down into water in whose depths a shadow stirred—a living shadow—a restlessly moving shape that beat against the prisoning walls and sent a flicker through the light’s cold blue-white gleaming. It was—

No, it was the Starstone, nothing more. But to have the Starstone! To hold it here in her hands at last, after weeks of siege, weeks of desperate battle! It was triumph itself she cradled in her palm. Her throat choked with sudden ecstatic laugher as she sprang to her feet, brandishing the great gem toward that empty corner through whose wall the wizard had vanished.

“Ha, behold it!” she screamed to the unanswering stone. “Son of a fiend, behold it! The luck of the Starstone is mine, now a better man has wrested it from you! Confess Joiry your master, you devil-deluder! Dare you show your face? Dare you?”

Over that empty corner the shadow swept again, awesomely from nowhere. Out of the sudden darkness creaked a door’s hinges, and the wizard’s voice called in a choke of fury.

“Bel’s curse on you, Joiry! Never think you’ve triumphed over me! I’ll have it back if I—if I—”

“If you—what? D’ye think I fear you, you hell-spawned warlock? If you—what?”

“Me you may not fear, Joiry,” the wizard’s voice quavered with fury, “but by Set and Bubastis, I’ll find one who’ll tame you if I must go to the ends of space to find him—to the ends of time itself! And then—beware!

“Bring on your champion!” Jirel’s laughter was hot with scorn. “Search hell itself and bring out the chiefest devil! I’ll lift the head from his shoulders as I’d have lifted yours, with one sweep, had you not fled.”

But she got for answer only the creak of a closing door in the depths of that shadow. And now the shadow faded again, and once more empty stone walls stared at her enigmatically.

Clutching the Starstone that—so legend had it—carried luck and wealth beyond imagination for its possessor, she shrugged and swung round to her soldiers.

“Well, what are you gaping at?” she flared. “Before heaven, I’m the best man here! Out—out—pillage the castle—there’s rich loot of that devil’s servant, Franga! What are you waiting for?” and with the flat of her sword she drove them from the chapel.

“By Pharol, Smith, have you lost your taste for
segir
? I’d as soon have expected old Marnak here to sprout legs!”

Yarol’s cherubic face was puzzled as he nodded toward the waiter who was moving quickly about the little private drinking booth of polished steel in the back of the Martian tavern, placing fresh drinks before the two men, regardless of his artificial limbs—lost, some said, during an illicit amorous visit to the forbidden dens of the spider women.

Northwest Smith frowned moodily, pushing the glass away. His scarred dark face, lighted with the pallor of steel-colored eyes, was morose. He drew deeply on the brown Martian cigarette that smoked between his fingers.

“I’m getting rusty, Yarol,” he said. “I’m sick of this whole business. Why can’t something really worth the effort turn up? Smuggling—gun-running—I’m sick of it, I tell you! Even
segir
doesn’t taste the same.”

“That’s old age creeping up,” Yarol advised him owlishly above the rim of his glass. “Tell you what you need, N. W., a snort of the green Mingo liqueur old Marnak keeps on his top shelf. It’s distilled from
pani
-berries, and one shot of it will have you prancing like a pup. Wait a minute, I’ll see what I can do.”

Smith hunched over his folded arms and stared at the shining steel wall behind Yarol’s vacant chair as the little Venusian slid out of the booth. Hours like these were the penalty of the exiled and the outlaw. Even the toughest of them knew times when the home planet called almost intolerably across the long voids of the spaceways, and all other places seemed flat and dull. Homesickness he would not have admitted to anyone alive, but as he sat there alone, morosely facing his dim reflection in the steel wall, he found himself humming that old sweet song of all Earth’s exiled people, “The Green Hills of Earth”:

Across the seas of darkness
The good green Earth is bright—
Oh, star that was my homeland
Shine down on me tonight…

Words and tune were banal, but somehow about them had gathered such a halo of association that the voices which sang them went sweeter and softer as they lingered over the well-remembered phrases, the well-remembered scenes of home. Smith’s surprisingly good baritone took on undernotes of a homesick sweetness which he would have died rather than admit:

My heart turns home in longing
Across the voids between,
To know beyond the spaceways
The hills of Earth are green…