Northwest of Earth (8 page)

“What is it you fear so?” queried Smith curiously as they sank to the green velvet. “Death comes only once, you know.”

She shook her bronze head contemptuously.

“Not that,” she said. “At least—no, I wish I knew just what it is I do fear—and that is the most dreadful part of it. But I wish—I wish it had not been so easy to get you here.”

“The place was deserted,” he said thoughtfully. “Not a soul along the halls. Not a guard anywhere. Only once did we see any other creature, and that was a slave-girl in the hall just outside your door.”

“What did she—do?” Vaudir’s voice was breathless.

“Dropped to her knees as if she’d been shot. You might have thought me the devil himself by the way she acted.”

The girl’s breath escaped in a sigh.

“Safe, then,” she said thankfully. “She must have thought you the—the Alendar.” Her voice faltered a little over the name, as if she half feared to pronounce it. “He wears a cloak like that you wore when he comes through the halls. But he comes so very seldom …”

“I’ve never seen him,” said Smith, “but, good Lord, is he such a monster? The girl dropped as if she’d been hamstrung.”

“Oh, hush, hush!” Vaudir agonized. “You mustn’t speak of him so. He’s—he’s—of course she knelt and hid her face. I wish to heaven I had …”

Smith faced her squarely and searched the veiled dark eyes with a gaze as bleak as empty seas. And he saw very clearly behind the veils the stark, nameless terror at their depths.

“What is it?” he demanded.

She drew her shoulders together and shivered a little, and her eyes were furtive as she glanced around the room.

“Don’t you feel it?” she asked in that half-whisper to which her voice sank so carelessly. And he smiled to himself to see how instinctively eloquent was the courtesan in her—alluring gestures though her hands trembled, soft voice huskily seductive even in its terror. “—always, always!” she was saying. “The soft, hushed, hovering menace! It haunts the whole place. Didn’t you feel it as you came in?”

“I think I did,” Smith answered slowly. “Yes—that feel of something just out of sight, hiding in dark doorways … a sort of tensity in the air …”

“Danger,” she whispered, “terrible, nameless danger … oh, I feel it wherever I go … it’s soaked into me and through me until it’s a part of me, body and soul …”

Smith heard the note of rising hysteria in her voice, and said quickly.

“Why did you come to me?”

“I didn’t, consciously.” She conquered the hysteria with an effort and took up her tale a little more calmly. “I was really looking for a wharfman, as I said, and for quite another reason than this. It doesn’t matter, now. But when you spoke, when I flashed my light and saw your face, I knew you. I’d heard of you, you see, and about the—the Lakkmanda affair, and I knew in a moment that if anyone alive could help me, it would be you.”

“But what is it? Help you in what?”

“It’s a long story,” she said, “and too strange, almost, to believe, and too vague for you to take seriously. And yet I
know
… Have you heard the history of the Minga?”

“A little of it. It goes back very far.”

“Back into the beginning—and farther. I wonder if you can understand. You see, we on Venus are closer to our beginnings than you. Life here developed faster, of course, and along lines more different than Earthmen realize. On Earth, civilization rose slowly enough for the—the elementals—to sink back into darkness. On Venus—oh, it’s bad,
bad
for men to develop too swiftly! Life rises out of dark and mystery and things too strange and terrible to be looked upon. Earth’s civilization grew slowly, and by the time men were civilized enough to look back they were sufficiently far from their origins not to see, not to know. But we here who look back see too clearly, sometimes, too nearly and vividly the black beginning … Great Shar defend me, what I have seen!”

White hands flashed up to hide sudden terror in her eyes, and hair in a brazen cloud fell fragrantly over her fingers. And even in that terror was an inbred allure as natural as breathing.

In the little silence that followed, Smith caught himself glancing furtively over his shoulder. The room was ominously still …

Vaudir lifted her face from her hands, shaking back her hair. The hands trembled. She clasped them on her velvet knee and went on.

“The Minga,” she said, and her voice was resolutely steady, “began too long ago for anyone to name the date. It began before dates. When Far-thursa came out of the seafog with his men and founded this city at the mountain’s foot he built it around the walls of a castle already here. The Minga castle. And the Alendar sold Minga girls to the sailors and the city began. All that is myth, but the Minga had always been here.

“The Alendar dwelt in his stronghold and bred his golden girls and trained them in the arts of charming men, and guarded them with—with strange weapons—and sold them to kings at royal prices. There has always been an Alendar. I have seen him, once …”

“He walks the halls on rare occasions, and it is best to kneel and hide one’s face when he comes by. Yes, it is best s… But I passed him one day, and—and—he is tall, tall as you, Earthman, and his eyes are like—the space between the worlds. I looked into his eyes under the hood he wore—I was not afraid of devil or man, then. I looked him in the eyes before I made obeisance, and I—I shall never be free of fear again. I looked into evil as one looks into a pool. Blackness and blankness and raw evil. Impersonal, not malevolent. Elemental … the elemental dreadfulness that life rose from. And I know very surely, now, that the first Alendar sprang from no mortal seed. There were races before man … Life goes back very dreadfully through many forms and evils, before it reaches the well-spring of its beginning. And the Alendar had not the eyes of a human creature, and I met them—and I am damned!”

Her voice trailed softly away and she sat quiet for a space, staring before her with remembering eyes.

“I am doomed and damned to a blacker hell than any of Shar’s priests threaten,” she resumed. “No, wait—this is not hysteria. I haven’t told you the worst part. You’ll find it hard to believe, but it’s truth—truth—Great Shar, if I could hope it were not!”

“The origin of it is lost in legend. But why, in the beginning, did the first Alendar dwell in the misty sea-edge castle, alone and unknown, breeding his bronze girls?—not for sale, then. Where did he get the secret of producing the invariable type? And the castle, legend says, was age-old when Far-thursa found it. The girls had a perfected, consistent beauty that could be attained only by generations of effort. How long had the Minga been built, and by whom? Above all, why? What possible reason could there be for dwelling there absolutely unknown, breeding civilized beauties in a world half-savage? Sometimes I think I have guessed the reason …”

Her voice faded into a resonant silence, and for a while she sat staring blindly at the brocaded wall. When she spoke again it was with a startling shift of topic.

“Am I beautiful, do you think?”

“More so than any I have ever seen before,” answered Smith without flattery.

Her mouth twisted.

“There are girls here now, in this building, so much lovelier than I that I am humbled to think of them. No mortal man has ever seen them, except the Alendar, and he—is not wholly mortal. No mortal man will ever see them. They are not for sale. Eventually they will disappear …”

“One might think that feminine beauty must reach an apex beyond which it can not rise, but this is not true. It can increase and intensify until—I have no words. And I truly believe that there is no limit to the heights it can reach, in the hands of the Alendar. And for every beauty we know and hear of, through the slaves that tend them, gossip says there are as many more, too immortally lovely for mortal eyes to see. Have you ever considered that beauty might be refined and intensified until one could scarcely bear to look upon it? We have tales here of such beauty, hidden in some of the secret rooms of the Minga.”

“But the world never knows of these mysteries. No monarch on any planet known is rich enough to buy the loveliness hidden in the Minga’s innermost rooms. It is not for sale. For countless centuries the Alendars of the Minga have been breeding beauty, in higher and higher degrees, at infinite labor and cost—beauty to be locked in secret chambers, guarded most terribly, so that not even a whisper of it passes the outer walls, beauty that vanishes, suddenly, in a breath—like that! Where? Why? How? No one knows.”

“And it is that I fear. I have not a fraction of the beauty I speak of, yet a fate like that is written for me—somehow I know. I have looked into the eyes of the Alendar, and—I know. And I am sure that I must look again into those blank black eyes, more deeply, more dreadfully … I know—and I am sick with terror of what more I shall know, soon …”

“Something dreadful is waiting for me, drawing nearer and nearer. Tomorrow, or the next day, or a little while after, I shall vanish, and the girls will wonder and whisper a little, and men forget. It has happened before. Great Shar, what shall I do?”

She wailed it, musically and hopelessly and sank into a little silence. And then her look changed and she said reluctantly,

“And I have dragged you in with me. I have broken every tradition of the Minga in bringing you here, and there has been no hindrance—it has been too easy, too easy. I think I have sealed your death. When you first came I was minded to trick you into committing yourself so deeply that perforce you must do as I asked to win free again. But I know now that through the simple act of asking you here I have dragged you in deeper than I dreamed. It is a knowledge that has come to me somehow, out of the air tonight. I can feel knowledge beating upon me—compelling me. For in my terror to get help I think I have precipitated damnation upon us both. I know now—I have known in my soul since you entered so easily, that you will not go out alive—that—
it
—will come for me and drag you down too … Shar, Shar, what have I done!”

“But what, what?” Smith struck his knee impatiently. “What is it we face? Poison? Guards? Traps? Hypnotism? Can’t you give me even a guess at what will happen?”

He leaned forward to search her face commandingly, and saw her brows knit in an effort to find words that would cloak the mysteries she had to tell. Her lips parted irresolutely.

“The Guardians,” she said. “The—Guardians …”

And then over her hesitant face swept a look of such horror that his hand clenched on his knee and he felt the hairs rise along his neck. It was not horror of any material thing, but an inner dreadfulness, a terrible awareness. The eyes that had met his glazed and escaped his commanding stare without shifting their focus. It was as if they ceased to be eyes and became dark windows—vacant. The beauty of her face set like a mask, and behind the blank window, behind the lovely set mask, he could sense dimly the dark command flowing in …

She put out her hands stiffly and rose. Smith found himself on his feet, gun in hand, while his hackles lifted shudderingly and something pulsed in the air as tangibly as the beat of wings. Three times that nameless shudder stirred the air, and then Vaudir stepped forward like an automaton and faced the door. She walked in her dream of masked dreadfulness, stiffly, through the portal. As she passed him he put out a hesitant hand and laid it on her arm, and a little stab of pain shot through him at the contact, and once more he thought he felt the pulse of wings in the air. Then she passed by without hesitation, and his hands fell.

He made no further effort to arouse her, but followed after on cat-feet, delicately as if he walked on eggs. He was crouching a little, unconsciously, and his gun-hand held a tense finger on the trigger.

They went down the corridor in a breathing silence, an empty corridor where no lights showed beyond closed doors, where no murmur of voices broke the live stillness. But little shudders seemed to shake in the air somehow, and his heart was pounding suffocatingly.

Vaudir walked like a mechanical doll, tense in a dream of horror. When they reached the end of the hall he saw that the silver grille stood open, and they passed through without pausing. But Smith noted with a little qualm that a gateway opening to the right was closed and locked, and the bars across it were sunk firmly into wall-sockets. There was no choice but to follow her.

The corridor slanted downward. They passed others branching to right and left, but the silver gateways were closed and barred across each. A coil of silver stairs ended the passage, and the girl went stiffly down without touching the rails. It was a long spiral, past many floors, and as they descended, the rich, dim light lessened and darkened and a subtle smell of moisture and salt invaded the scented air. At each turn where the stairs opened on successive floors, gates were barred across the outlets; and they passed so many of these that Smith knew, as they went down and down, that however high the green jewel-box room had been, by now they were descending deep into the earth. And still the stair wound downward. The stories that opened beyond the bars like honeycomb layers became darker and less luxurious, and at last ceased altogether and the silver steps wound down through a well of rock, lighted so dimly at wide intervals that he could scarcely see the black polished walls circling them in. Drops of moisture began to appear on the dark surface, and the smell was of black salt seas and dank underground.

And just as he was beginning to believe that the stairs went on and on into the very black, salt heart of the planet, they came abruptly to the bottom. A flourish of slim, shining rails ended the stairs, at the head of a hallway, and the girl’s feet turned unhesitatingly to follow its dark length. Smith’s pale eyes, searching the dimness, found no trace of other life than themselves; yet eyes were upon him—he knew it surely.