Northwest of Earth (46 page)

The blade fell to her side. Something wet trickled stickily down Smith’s neck inside the leather collar. So keen was that blade he had not known himself scratched. He said coldly,

“Why should I lie? I can’t get the treasure alone—you can help me win it. I came to you for aid.”

Unsmilingly she bent toward him across the table, sheathing her dagger. Her body was one sweep of flowing grace, of flowing strength, slim as a sword-blade, as she half knelt among the broken meats upon the board. Her yellow eyes were cloudy with doubt.

“I think there is something more,” she said softly, “something you have left untold. And I have a memory now of a yelling warlock who fled from my blade, with certain—threats …”

The yellow eyes were cold as polar seas. She shrugged at last and stood up, her gaze sweeping down over the long table where men and women divided their time between feasting and fascinated staring at the tableau by the tablehead.

“Bring him up to my apartment,” she said to Smith’s captors. “I’d learn more of this—treasure.”

“Shall we stay to guard him?”

Jirel’s lips curled scornfully.

“Is there a man here who can best me with steel—or anything else?” she demanded. “Guard yourselves, you cravens! If you brought him in without getting a poniard in the belly, I can safely talk to him in the heart of Joiry’s stronghold. Well, don’t stand there gaping—go!”

Smith shrugged off the heavy hand laid on his shoulder.

“Wait!” he said crisply. “This man goes with me.”

Jirel’s eyes dwelt on Yarol with a velvety, menacing appraisal. Yarol’s sidelong black stare met hers eloquently.

“Brawny wench, did I say?” he murmured in the liquid cadences of High Venusian. “
Aie
—the Minga maidens were not more luscious. I’ll kiss that pretty mouth of yours before I go back to my own time, lady! I’ll—”

“What is he saying—he gurgles like a brook!” Jirel broke in impatiently. “He is your friend? Take them both, then, Voisin.” Jirel’s apartment lay in the top of the highest tower of Joiry, at the head of a winding stone stairway. Lofty-roofed, hung with rich tapestries, carpeted with furs, the place seemed to Smith at once alien and yet dearly familiar with a strange, heart-warming familiarity. Separated from his own time by dusty centuries, yet it was earth-sprung, earth-born, reared on the green hills of his home planet.

“What I need,” said Yarol carefully, “is some more Minga-liqueur. Did you see how that hell-cat looked me over? Black Pharol, I don’t know if I’d sooner kiss her or kill her! Why, the damned witch would run her sword through my gullet on a whim—for the sheer deviltry of it!”

Smith chuckled deep in his throat. “She’s dangerous. She—”

Jirel’s voice behind him said confidently,

“Wait beyond the door, Voisin. These two strangers may visit our dungeons, after all. This little one—how are you named?”

“He’s called Yarol,” Smith said curtly.

“Yes—Yarol. Well, we may find means to make you a taller man, Yarol. You would like that, eh? We have a little device—a ladder which I got from the Count of Görz when he visited me last summer—and the Count is clever in these things.”

“He does not speak your tongue,” Smith interrupted.

“No? It is not strange—he looks as though he came from a far land indeed. I have never seen a man like him.” Her eyes were puzzled. She half turned her shoulders to them, toying with a sword that lay on a table at her side, and said without looking up, “Well, your story. Let’s have it. And—yes, I’ll give you one more chance at living—if you’re lying, go now. None will stop you. You are strangers. You do not know Joiry—or Joiry’s vengeance.”

Over her shoulder she slanted into Smith’s eyes a level glance that burnt like the stab of lightnings. Hell-fires flickered in it, and despite himself Smith knew a sudden crawl of unease. Yarol, though he did not understand the words, whistled between his teeth. For the heartbeat no one spoke. Then very softly in Smith’s ear a voice murmured,

“She has the Starstone. Say the spell of the Gateway!”

Startled, he glanced around. Jirel did not stir. Her lion-yellow eyes were still brooding on him with a gaze that smoldered. Yarol was watching her in fascination. And Smith realized abruptly that he alone had heard the cracked quaver of command in—yes, in Franga’s voice! Franga, the warlock, whispering through some half-opened door into infinity. Without glancing aside at Yarol he said in the ripples of High Venusian, “Get ready—watch the door and don’t let her out.”

Jirel’s face changed. She swung around from the table, her brows a straight line of menace. “What are you muttering? What devil’s work are you at?”

Smith ignored her. Almost involuntarily his left hand was moving in the queer, quick gesture of the spell. Phrases in the unearthly tongue that Franga had taught him burned on his lips with all the ease of his mother-tongue. Magic was all about him, guiding his lips and hands.

Alarm blazed up in Jirel’s yellow eyes. An oath smoked on her lips as she lunged forward, the sword she had been toying with a gleam in her fist. Yarol grinned. The heat-gun danced in his hand, and a white-hot blast traced a trail of fire on the rug at Jirel’s feet. She shut her red lips on a word half uttered, and twisted in midair, flinging herself back in swift terror from this sudden gush of hell-flame. Behind her the door burst open and men in armor clanged into the room, shouting, dragging at their swords.

And then—down swept the shadow over the noisy room. Cloudy as the sweep of the death-angel’s wings it darkened the sunny air so that the ray from Yarol’s gun blazed out in dazzling splendor through the gloom. As if in the misted depths of a mirror Smith saw the men in the door shrink back, mouths agape, swords clattering from their hands. He scarcely heeded them, for in the far wall where a moment before a tall, narrow window had opened upon sunlight and the green hills of Earth—was a door. Very slowly, very quietly it was swinging open, and the black of utter infinity lay beyond its threshold.

“
Hai—s’leli
—Smith!” Yarol’s warning voice yelled in the darkness, and Smith threw himself back in a great leap as he felt a sword-blade prick his shoulder. Jirel sobbed a furious curse and plunged forward, her sword and sword-arm a single straight bar. In the dimness Yarol’s gun hand moved, and a thin beam of incandescence burned bright. Jirel’s sword hissed in midair, glowed blindingly and then dripped in a shower of white-hot drops to the stone floor. Her momentum carried her forward with a hilt and a foot of twisted steel still gripped in her stabbing hand, so that she lunged against Smith’s broad chest thrusting with the stump of the ruined sword.

His arms prisoned her, a writhing fury that sobbed wild oaths and twisted like a tiger against him. He grinned and tightened his arms until the breath rushed out of her crushed lungs and he felt her ribs give a little against his chest.

Then vertigo was upon him. Dimly he realized that the girl’s arms had gone round his neck in a frantic grip as the room swayed—tilted dizzily, amazingly, revolving as through on a giant axis—or as if the black depths of the Gateway were opening under him… he could not tell, nor was he ever to understand, just what happened in that fantastic instant when nature’s laws were warped by strange magic. The floor was no longer solid beneath his feet. He saw Yarol twisting like a small sleek cat as he stumbled and fell—fell into oblivion with his gun hand upflung. He was falling himself, plunging downward through abysses of dark, clasping a frightened girl whose red hair streamed wildly in the wind of their falling.

Stars were swirling about them. They were dropping slowly through stars while the air danced and dazzled all around them. Smith had time to catch his breath and flex the muscles of his gun thigh to be sure the comforting weight pressed there before a spongy ground received them softly. They fell like people in a nightmare, slowly and easily, with no jar, upon the strange dim surface of the land beyond the Gateway. Yarol landed on his feet like the cat he was, gun still gripped and ready, black eyes blinking in the starry dark. Smith, hampered by the terrified Jirel, sank with nightmare ease to the ground and rebounded a little from its sponginess. The impact knocked the stump of sword from the girl’s hand, and he pitched it away into the blinding shimmer of the star-bright dark before he helped her to her feet.

For once Joiry was completely subdued. The shock of having her sword melted by hell-fire in her very grasp, the dizzying succession of manhandling and vertigo and falling into infinity had temporarily knocked all violence out of her, and she could only gasp and stare about this incredible starlit darkness, her red lips parted in amazement.

As far as they could see the mist of stars quivered and thickened the dim air, tiny points of light that danced all around them as if thousands of fireflies were winking all at once. Half blinded by that queer, shimmering dazzle, they could make out no familiar topography of hills or valleys, only that spongy dark ground beneath them, that quiver of stars blinding the dim air.

Motion swirled the shimmer a little distance away, and Jirel snarled as Franga’s dark-robed form came shouldering through the stars, spinning them behind him in the folds of his cloak as he moved forward. His withered features grimaced into a grin when he saw the dazed three.

“Ah—you have her!” he rasped. “Well, what are you waiting for? Take the stone! She carries it on her.”

Smith’s pale eyes met the warlock’s through the star-shimmer, and his firm lips tightened. Something was wrong. He sensed it unmistakably—danger whispered in the air. For why should Franga have brought them here if the problem was no more complex than the mere wrestling of a jewel from a woman? No—there must be some other reason for plunging them into this starry dimness. What had Franga hinted—powers here that were favorable to him? Some dark, nameless god dwelling among the stars?

The warlock’s eyes flared at Jirel in a flash of pure murder, and suddenly Smith understood a part of the puzzle. She was to die, then, when the jewel could no longer protect her. Here Franga could wreak vengeance unhampered, once the Starstone was in his hands. Here Joiry was alone and helpless—and the flame of hatred in the wizard’s eyes could be quenched by no less than the red flood of her bloody death.

Smith glanced back at Jirel, white and shaken with recent terror, but snarling feebly at the warlock in invincible savagery that somehow went to his heart as no helplessness could have done. And suddenly he knew he could not surrender her up to Franga’s hatred. The shift of scene had shifted their relations, too, so that three mortals—he could not think of Franga as wholly human—stood together against Franga and his malice and his magic. No, he could not betray Jirel.

His gaze flicked Yarol’s with a lightning message more eloquent than a warning shout. It sent a joyous quiver of tautening along the little Venusian’s body, and both men’s gun hands dropped to their sides with simultaneous casualness.

Smith said: “Return us to Joiry and I’ll get the stone for you: Here—no.”

That black glare of murder shifted from Jirel to Smith, bathing him in hatred.

“Take if from her now—or die!”

A smothered sound like the snarl of an angry beast halted Smith’s reflexive snatch at his gun. Past him Jirel lunged, her red hair streaming with stars, her fingers flexed into claws as she leaped bare-handed at the warlock. Rage had drowned out her momentary terror, and soldier’s curses tumbled blistering from her lips as she sprang.

Franga stepped back; his hand moved intricately and between him and the charging fury the starlight thickened—solidified into a sheet like heavy glass. Jirel dashed herself against it and was hurled back as if she had plunged into a stone wall. The silvery mist of the barrier dissolved as she reeled back, gasping with rage, and Franga laughed thinly.

“I am in my own place now, vixen,” he told her. “I do not fear you or any man here. It is death to refuse me—bloody death. Give me the stone.”

“I’ll tear you to rags with my bare nails!” sobbed Joiry. “I’ll have the eyes out of your head, you devil! Ha—even here you fear me! Come out from behind your rampart and let me slay you!”

“Give me the stone.” The wizard’s voice was calm.

“Return us all to Joiry and I think she’ll promise to let you have it.” Smith fixed a meaning stare upon Jirel’s blazing yellow eyes. She shrugged off the implied advice furiously.

“Never! Yah—wait!” She leaped to Yarol’s side and, as he shied nervously away, his eyes mistrustfully on her pointed nails, snatched from his belt the small knife he carried. She set the blade against the full, high swell of her bosom and laughed in Franga’s face. “Now—kill me if you can!” she taunted, her face a blaze of defiance. “Make one move to slay me—and I slay myself! And the jewel is lost to you for ever!”

Franga bit his lip and stared at her through the mist of stars, fury glaring in his eyes. There was no hesitancy in her, and he knew it. She would do as she threatened, and—

“The stone has no virtue if not taken by violence or given freely,” he admitted. “Lifted from a suicide’s corpse, it would lose all value to anyone. I will bargain with you then, Joiry.”

“You’ll not! You’ll set me free or lose the jewel for ever.”

Franga turned goaded eyes on Smith. “Either way I lose it, for once in her own land Joiry would die before surrendering it, even as she would here. You! Fulfill your bargain—get me the Starstone!”

Smith shrugged. “Your meddling’s spoiled everything now. There’s little I can do.”