His scarred mouth twitched and tightened. He started off across the rolling, barren rise to Ben Beatha—a tough, bandy-legged little man in yellow rags, with a brown, expressionless face and a forgotten harp slung between his shoulders, moving at a steady gypsy lope.
A wind sighed over the Forbidden Plain, rolling the sunballs in the red sky. And then, from the crest of Ben Beatha, the darkness came.
This time Ciaran didn't stop to be afraid. There was nothing left inside him to be afraid with. He remembered the hermit's words:Judgment. Great things moving. Doom and destruction, a shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying.Something of the same feeling came to him, but he wasn't human any longer. He was beyond fear. Fate moved, and he was part of it.
Stones and shale tricked his feet in the darkness. All across the Forbidden Plains there was night and a wailing wind and a sharp chill of cold. Far, far away there was a faint red glow on the sky where the sea burned with its own fire.
Ciaran went on.
Overhead, then, the sunballs began to flicker. Little striving ripples of light went out across them, lighting the barrens with an eerie witch-glow. The flickering was worse than the darkness. It was like the last struggling pulse of a dying man's heart. Ciaran was aware of a coldness in him beyond the chill of the wind.
A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying....
He began to climb Ben Beatha.
V
The stone was rough and fairly broken, and Ciaran had climbed mountains before. He crawled upward, through the sick light and the cold wind that screamed and fought him harder the higher he got. He retained no very clear memory of the climb. Only after a long, long time he fell inward over the wall of a balcony and lay still.
He was bleeding from rock-tears and his heart kicked him like the heel of a vicious horse. But he didn't care. The balcony was man-made, the passage back of it led somewhere—and the light had come back in the sky.
It wasn't quite the same, though. It was weaker, and less warm.
When he could stand up he went in along the passage, square-hewn in the living rock of Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life.
It led straight in, lighted by a soft opaline glow from hidden light-sources. Presently it turned at right angles and became a spiral ramp, leading down.
Corridors led back from it at various levels, but Ciaran didn't bother about them. They were dark, and the dust of ages lay unmarked on their floors.
Down and down, a long, long way. Silence. The deep uncaring silence of death and the eternal rock—dark titans who watched the small furious ant-scurryings of man and never, never, for one moment, gave a damn.
And then the ramp flattened into a broad high passage cut deep in the belly of the mountain. And the passage led to a door of gold, twelve feet high and intricately graved and pierced, set with symbols that Ciaran had heard of only in legend: theHun-Lahun-Mehen, the Snake, the Circle, and the Cross, blazing in hot jewel-fires.
But above them, crushing and dominant on both valves of the great door, was thecrux ansata, the symbol of eternal life, cut from some lustreless stone so black it was like a pattern of blindness on the eyeball.
Ciaran shivered and drew a deep, unsteady breath. One brief moment of human terror came to him. Then he set his two hands on the door and pushed it open.
He came into a small room hung with tapestries and lighted dimly by the same opaline glow as the hallway. The half-seen pictures showed men and beasts and battles against a background at once tantalizingly familiar and frighteningly alien.
There was a rug on the floor. It was made from the head and hide of a creature Ciaran had never even dreamed of before—a thing like a huge tawny cat with a dark mane and great, shining fangs.
Ciaran padded softly across it and pushed aside the heavy curtains at the other end.
At first there was only darkness. It seemed to fill a large space; Ciaran had an instinctive feeling of size. He went out into it, very cautiously, and then his eyes found a pale glow ahead in the blackness, as though someone had crushed a pearl with his thumb and smeared it across the dark.
He was a thief and a gypsy. He made no more sound than a wisp of cloud, drifting toward it. His feet touched a broad, shallow step, and then another. He climbed, and the pearly glow grew stronger and became a curving wall of radiance.
He stopped just short of touching it, on a level platform high above the floor. He squinted against its curdled, milky thickness, trying to see through.
Wrapped in the light, cradled and protected by it like a bird in the heart of a shining cloud, a boy slept on a couch made soft with furs and colored silks. He was quite naked, his limbs flung out carelessly with the slim angular grace of his youth. His skin was white as milk, catching a pale warmth from the light.
He slept deeply. He might almost have been dead, except for the slight rise and fall of his breathing. His head was rolled over so that he faced Ciaran, his cheek pillowed on his upflung arm.
His hair, thick, curly, and black almost to blueness, had grown out long across his forearm, across the white fur beneath it, and down onto his wide slim shoulders. The nails of his lax hand, palm up above his head, stood up through the hair. They were inches long.
His face was just a boy's face. A good face, even rather handsome, with strong bone just beginning to show under the roundness. His cheek was still soft as a girl's, the lashes of his closed lids dark and heavy.
He looked peaceful, even happy. His mouth was curved in a vague smile, as though his dreams were pleasant. And yet there was something there....
A shadow. Something unseen and untouchable, something as fragile as the note of a shepherd's pipe brought from far off on a vagrant breeze. Something as indescribable as death—and as broodingly powerful. Ciaran sensed it, and his nerves throbbed suddenly like the strings of his own harp.
He saw then that the couch the boy slept on was a hugecrux ansata, cut from the dead-black stone, with the arms stretching from under his shoulders and the loop like a monstrous halo above his head.
The legends whispered through Ciaran's head. The songs, the tales, the folklore. The symbolism, and the image-patterns.
Bas the Immortal was always described as a giant, like the mountain he lived in, and old, because Immortal suggests age. Awe, fear, and unbelief spoke through those legends, and the child-desire to build tall. But there was an older legend....
Ciaran, because he was a gypsy and a thief and had music in him like a drunkard has wine, had heard it, deep in the black forests of Hyperborea where even gypsies seldom go. The oldest legend of all—the tale of the Shining Youth from Beyond, who walked in beauty and power, who never grew old, and who carried in his heart a bitter darkness that no man could understand.
The Shining Youth from Beyond. A boy sleeping with a smile on his face, walled in living light.
Ciaran stood still, staring. His face was loose and quite blank. His heartbeats shook him slightly, and his breath had a rusty sound in his open mouth.
After a long time he started forward, into the light.
It struck him, hurled him back numbed and dazed. Thinking of Mouse, he tried it twice more before he was convinced. Then he tried yelling. His voice crashed back at him from the unseen walls, but the sleeping boy never stirred, never altered even the rhythm of his breathing.
After that Ciaran crouched in the awful laxness of impotency, and thought about Mouse, and cried.
Then, quite suddenly, without any warning at all, the wall of light vanished.
He didn't believe it. But he put his his hand out again, and nothing stopped it, so he rushed forward in the pitch blackness until he hit the stone arm of the cross. And behind him, and all around him, the light began to glow again.
Only now it was different. It flickered and dimmed and struggled, like something fighting not to die. Like something else....
Like the sunballs. Like the light in the sky that meant life to a world. Flickering and feeble like an old man's heart, the last frightened wing-beats of a dying bird....
A terror took Ciaran by the throat and stopped the breath in it, and turned his body colder than a corpse. He watched....
The light glowed and pulsed, and grew stronger. Presently he was walled in by it, but it seemed fainter than before.
A terrible feeling of urgency came over Ciaran, a need for haste. The words of the androids came back to him:Failing, as we judged. If we finish in time. If we don't, none of it matters.
A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying. Mouse slaving with empty eyes to build a shining monster that would harness the world to the wills of non-human brains.
It didn't make sense, but it meant something. Something deadly important. And the key to the whole mad jumble was here—a dark-haired boy dreaming on a stone cross.
Ciaran moved closer. He saw then that the boy had stirred, very slightly, and that his face was troubled. It was as though the dimming of the light had disturbed him. Then he sighed and smiled again, nestling his head deeper into the bend of his arm.
"Bas," said Ciaran. "Lord Bas!"
His voice sounded hoarse and queer. The boy didn't hear him. He called again, louder. Then he put his hand on one slim white shoulder and shook it hesitantly at first, and then hard, and harder.
The boy Bas didn't even flicker his eyelids.
Ciaran beat his fists against the empty air and cursed without any voice. Then, almost instinctively, he crouched on the stone platform and took his harp in his hands.
It wasn't because he expected to do anything with it. It was simply that harping was as natural to him as breathing, and what was inside him had to come out some way. He wasn't thinking about music. He was thinking about Mouse, and it just added up to the same thing.
Random chords at first, rippling up against the wall of milky light. Then the agony in him began to run out through his finger-tips onto the strings, and he sent it thrumming strong across the still air. It sang wild and savage, but underneath it there was the sound of his own heart breaking, and the fall of tears.
There was no time. There wasn't even any Ciaran. There was only the harp crying a dirge for a black-haired Mouse and the world she lived in. Nothing mattered but that. Nothing would ever matter.
Then finally there wasn't anything left for the harp to cry about. The last quiver of the strings went throbbing off into a dull emptiness, and there was only an ugly little man in yellow rags crouched silent by a stone cross, hiding his face in his hands.
Then, faint and distant, like the echo of words spoken in another world, another time:
Don't draw the veil. Marsali—don't...!
Ciaran looked up, stiffening. The boy's lips moved. His face, the eyes still closed, was twisted in an agony of pleading. His hands were raised, reaching, trying to hold something that slipped through his fingers like mist.
Dark mist. The mist of dreams. It was still in his eyes when he opened them. Grey eyes, clouded and veiled, and then with the dream-mist thickening into tears....
He cried out, "Marsali!" as though his heart was ripped out of him with the breath that said it. Then he lay still on the couch, his eyes, staring unfocused at the milky light, with the tears running out of them.
Ciaran said softly, "Lord Bas...."
"Awake," whispered the boy. "I'm awake again. Music—a harp crying out.... I didn't want to wake! Oh, God, I didn't want to!"
He sat up suddenly. The rage, the sheer blind fury in his young face rocked Ciaran like the blow of a fist.
"Who waked me? Who dared to wake me?"
There was no place to run. The light held him. And there was Mouse. Ciaran said:
"I did, Lord Bas. There was need to."
The boy's grey eyes came slowly to focus on his face. Ciaran's heart kicked once and stopped beating. A great cold stillness breathed from somewhere beyond the world and walled him in, closer and tighter than the milky light. Close and tight, like the packed earth of a grave.
A boy's face, round and smooth and soft. No shadow even of down on the cheeks, the lips still pink and girlish. Long dark lashes, and under them....
Grey eyes. Old with suffering, old with pain, old with an age beyond human understanding. Eyes that had seen birth and life and death in an endless stream, flowing by just out of reach, just beyond hearing. Eyes looking out between the bars of a private hell that was never built for any man before.
One strong young hand reached down among the furs and silks and felt for something, and Ciaran knew the thing was death.
Ciaran, suddenly, was furious himself.
He struck a harsh, snarling chord on the harpstrings, thinking of Mouse. He poured his fury out in bitter, pungent words, the gypsy argot of the Quarters, and all the time Bas fumbled to get the hidden weapon in his hands.
It was the long nails that saved Ciaran's life. They kept Bas from closing his fingers, and in the meantime some of Ciaran's vibrant rage had penetrated. Bas whispered:
"You love a woman."
"Yeah," said Ciaran. "Yeah."
"So do I. A woman I created, and made to live in my dreams. Do you know what you did when you waked me?"
"Maybe I saved the world. If the legends are right, you built it. You haven't any right to let it die so you can sleep."
"I built another world, little man. Marsali's world. I don't want to leave it." He bent forward, toward Ciaran. "I was happy in that world. I built it to suit me. I belong in it. Do you know why? Because it's made from my own dreams, as I want it. Even the people. Even Marsali. Even myself.
"They drove me away from one world. I built another, but it was no different. I'm not human. I don't belong with humans, nor in any world they live in. So I learned to sleep, and dream."
He lay back on the couch. He looked pitifully young, with the long lashes hiding his eyes.
"Go away. Let your little world crumble. It's doomed anyway. What difference do a few life-spans make in eternity? Let me sleep."
Ciaran struck the harp again. "No!Listen...."
He told Bas about the slave-gangs, the androids, the shining monster in the pit—and the darkness that swept over the world. It was the last that caught the boy's attention.
He sat up slowly. "Darkness? You! How did you get to me, past the light?"
Ciaran told him.
"The Stone of Destiny," whispered the Immortal. Suddenly he laughed. He laughed to fill the whole dark space beyond the light; terrible laughter, full of hate and a queer perverted triumph.
He stopped, as suddenly as he had begun, and spread his hands flat on the colored silks, the long nails gleaming like knives. His eyes widened, grey windows into a deep hell, and his voice was no more than a breath.
"Could that mean that I will die, too?"
Ciaran's scarred mouth twitched. "The Stone of Destiny...."
The boy leaped up from his couch. His hand swept over some hidden control in the arm of the stone cross, and the milky light died out. At the same time, an opaline glow suffused the darkness beyond.
Bas the Immortal ran down the steps—a dark-haired, graceful boy running naked in the heart of an opal.
Ciaran followed.
They came to the hollow core of Ben Beatha—a vast pyramidal space cut in the yellow rock. Bas stopped, and Ciaran stopped behind him.
The whole space was laced and twined and webbed with crystal. Rods of it, screens of it, meshes of it. A shining helix ran straight up overhead, into a shaft that seemed to go clear through to open air.
In the crystal, pulsing along it like the life-blood in a man's veins, there was light.
It was like no light Ciaran had ever seen before. It was no color, and every color. It seared the eye with heat, and yet it was cold and pure like still water. It throbbed and beat. It was alive.
Ciaran followed the crystal maze down and down, to the base of it. There, in the very heart of it, lying at the hub of a shining web, laysomething.
Like a black hand slammed across the eyeballs, darkness fell.
For a moment he was blind, and through the blindness came a soft whisper of movement. Then there was light again; a vague smeared spot of it on the pitch black.
It glowed and faded and glowed again. The rusty gleam slid across the half-crouched body of Bas the Immortal, pressed close against the crystal web. It caught in his eyes, turning them hot and lambent like beast-eyes in the dark of a cave-mouth.
Little sparks of hell-fire in a boy's face, staring at the Stone of Destiny.
A stone no bigger than a man's heart, with power in it. Even dying, it had power. Power to build a world, or smash it. Power never born of Ciaran's planet, or any planet, but something naked and perfect—an egg from the womb of space itself.
It fought to live, lying in its crystal web. It was like watching somebody's heart stripped clean and struggling to beat.
The fire in it flickered and flared, sending pale witch-lights dancing up along the crystal maze.
Outside, Ciaran knew, all across the world, the sunballs were pulsing and flickering to the dying beat of the Stone.
Bas whispered, "It's over. Over and done."
Without knowing it, Ciaran touched the harpstrings and made them shudder. "The legends were right, then. The Stone of Destiny kept the world alive."
"Alive. It gave light and warmth, and before that it powered the ship that brought me here across space, from the third planet of our sun to the tenth. It sealed the gaps in the planet's crust and drove the machinery that filled the hollow core inside with air. It was my strength. It built my world;myworld, where I would be loved and respected—all right, and worshipped!"
He laughed, a small bitter sob.
"A child I was. After all those centuries, still a child playing with a toy."
His voice rang out louder across the flickering dimness. A boy's voice, clear and sweet. He wasn't talking to Ciaran. He wasn't even talking to himself. He was talking to Fate, and cursing it.
"I took a walk one morning. That was all I did. I was just a fisherman's son walking on the green hills of Atlantis above the sea. That was all I wanted to be—a fisherman's son, someday to be a fisherman myself, with sons of my own. And then from nowhere, out of the sky, the meteorite fell. There was thunder, and a great light, and then darkness. And when I woke again I was a god.
"I took the Stone of Destiny out of its broken shell. The light from it burned in me, and I was a god. And I was happy.I didn't know.
"I was too young to be a god. A boy who never grew older. A boy who wanted to play with other boys, and couldn't. A boy who wanted to age, to grow a beard and a man's voice, and find a woman to love. It was hell, after the thrill wore off. It was worse, when my mind and heart grew up, and my body didn't.
"And they said I was no god, but a blasphemy, a freak.
"The priests of Dagon, of all the temples of Atlantis, spoke against me. I had to run away. I roamed the whole earth before the Flood, carrying the Stone. Sometimes I ruled for centuries, a god-king, but always the people tired of me and rose against me. They hated me, because I lived forever and never grew old.
"A man they might have accepted. But a boy! A brain with all the wisdom it could borrow from time, grown so far from theirs that it was hard to talk to them—and a body too young even for the games of manhood!"
Ciaran stood frozen, shrinking from the hell in the boy-God's agonized voice.
"So I grew to hate them, and when they drove me out I turned on them, and used the power of the Stone to destroy. I know what happened to the cities of the Gobi, to Angkor, and the temples of Mayapan! So the people hated me more because they feared me more, and I was alone. No one has ever been alone as I was.
"So I built my own world, here in the heart of a dead planet. And in the end it was the same, because the people were human and I was not. I created the androids, freaks like myself, to stand between me and my people—my own creatures, that I could trust. And I built a third world, in my dreams.
"And now the Stone of Destiny has come to the end of its strength. Its atoms are eaten away by its own fire. The world it powered will die. And what will happen to me? I will go on living, even after my body is frozen in the cold dark?"
Silence, then. The pulsing beat of light in the crystal rods. The heart of a world on its deathbed.
Ciaran's harp crashed out. It made the crystal sing. His voice came with it:
"Bas! The monster in the pit, that the androids are building—I know now what it is! They knew the Stone was dying. They're going to have power of their own, and take the world. You can't let them, Bas! You brought us here. We're your people. You can't let the androids have us!"
The boy laughed, a low, bitter sound. "What do I care for your world or your people? I only want to sleep." He caught his breath in and turned around, as though he was going back to the place of the stone cross.
VI
Ciaran stroked the harpstrings. "Wait...." It was all humanity crying out of the harp. Little people, lost and frightened and pleading for help. No voice could have said what it said. It was Ciaran himself, a channel for the unthinking pain inside him.
"Wait—You were human once. You were young. You laughed and quarrelled and ate and slept, and you were free. That's all we ask. Just those things. Remember Bas the fisherman's son, and help us!"
Grey eyes looking at him. Grey eyes looking from a boy's face. "How could I help you even if I wanted to?"
"There's some power left in the Stone. And the androids are your creatures. You made them. You can destroy them. If you could do it before they finish this thing—from the way they spoke, they mean to destroy you with it."
Bas laughed.
Ciaran's hand struck a terrible chord from the harp, and fell away.
Bas said heavily, "They'll draw power from the gravitic force of the planet and broadcast it the same way. It will never stop as long as the planet spins. If they finish it in time, the world will live. If they don't...." He shrugged. "What difference does it make?"
"So," whispered Ciaran, "we have a choice of a quick death, or a lingering one. We can die free, on our own feet, or we can die slaves." His voice rose to a full-throated shout. "God! You're no god!You're a selfish brat sulking in a corner. All right, go back to your Marsali! And I'll play god for a minute."
He raised the harp.
"I'll play god, and give 'em the clean way out!"
He drew his arm back to throw—to smash the crystal web. And then, with blinding suddenness, there was light again.
They stood frozen, the two of them, blinking in the hot opalescence. Then their eyes were drawn to the crystal web.
The Stone of Destiny still fluttered like a dying heart, and the crystal rods were dim.
Ciaran whispered, "It's too late. They're finished."
Silence again. They stood almost as though they were waiting for something, hardly breathing, with Ciaran still holding the silent harp in his hand.
Very, very faintly, under his fingers, the strings began to thrum.
Vibration. In a minute Ciaran could hear it in the crystal. It was like the buzz and strum of insects just out of earshot. He said:
"What's that?"
The boy's ears were duller than his. But presently he smiled and said, "So that's how they're going to do it. Vibration, that will shake Ben Beatha into a cloud of dust, and me with it. They must believe I'm still asleep." He shrugged. "What matter? It's death."
Ciaran slung the harp across his back. There was a curious finality in the action.
"There's a way from here into the pit. Where is it?"
Bas pointed across the open space. Ciaran started walking. He didn't say anything.
Bas said, "Where are you going?"
"Back to Mouse," said Ciaran simply.
"To die with her." The crystal maze bummed eerily. "I wish I could see Marsali again."
Ciaran stopped. He spoke over his shoulder, without expression. "The death of the Stone doesn't mean your death, does it?"
"No. The first exposure to its light when it landed, blazing with the heat of friction, made permanent changes in the cell structure of my body. I'm independent of it—as the androids are of the culture vats they grew in."
"And the new power source will take up where the Stone left off?"
"Yes. Even the wall of rays that protected me and fed my body while I slept will go on. The power of the Stone was broadcast to it, and to the sunballs. There were no mechanical leads."
Ciaran said softly, "And you love this Marsali? You're happy in this dream world you created? You could go back there?"
"Yes," whispered Bas. "Yes. Yes!"
Ciaran turned. "Then help us destroy the androids. Give us our world, and we'll give you yours. If we fail—well, we have nothing to lose."
Silence. The crystal web hummed and sang—death whispering across the world. The Stone of Destiny throbbed like the breast of a dying bird. The boy's grey eyes were veiled and remote. It seemed almost that he was asleep.
Then he smiled—the drowsy smile of pleasure he had worn when Ciaran found him, dreaming on the stone cross.
"Marsali," he whispered. "Marsali."
He moved forward then, reaching out across the crystal web. The long nails on his fingers scooped up the Stone of Destiny, cradled it, caged it in.
Bas the Immortal said, "Let's go, little man."
Ciaran didn't say anything. He looked at Bas. His eyes were wet. Then he got the harp in his hands again and struck it, and the thundering chords shook the crystal maze to answering music.
It drowned the faint death-whisper. And then, caught between two vibrations, the shining rods split and fell, with a shiver of sound like the ringing of distant bells.
Ciaran turned and went down the passage to the pit. Behind him came the dark-haired boy with the Stone of Destiny in his hands.
They came along the lower arm of the fork where Ciaran and the hunter had fought the Kalds. There were four of the grey beasts still on guard.
Ciaran had pulled the wand from his girdle. The Kalds started up, and Ciaran got ready to fight them. But Bas said, "Wait."
He stepped forward. The Kalds watched him with their blood-pink eyes, yawning and whimpering with animal nervousness. The boy's dark gaze burned. The grey brutes cringed and shivered and then dropped flat, hiding their faces against the stone.
"Telepaths," said Bas to Ciaran, "and obedient to the strongest mind. The androids know that. The Kalds weren't put there to stop me physically, but to send the androids warning if I came."
Ciaran shivered. "So they'll be waiting."
"Yes, little man. They'll be waiting."
They went down the long tunnel and stepped out on the floor of the pit.
It was curiously silent. The fires had died in the forges. There was no sound of hammering, no motion. Only blazing lights and a great stillness, like someone holding his breath. There was no one in sight.
The metal monster climbed up the pit. It was finished now. The intricate maze of grids and balances in its belly murmured with the strength that spun up through it from the core of the planet. It was like a vast spider, making an invisible thread of power to wrap around the world and hold it, to be sucked dry.
An army of Kalds began to move on silent feet, out from the screening tangle of sheds and machinery.
The androids weren't serious about that. It was just a skirmish, a test to see whether Bas had been weakened by his age-long sleep. He hadn't been. The Kalds looked at the Stone of Destiny and from there to Bas' grey eyes, cringed, whimpered, and lay flat.
Bas whispered, "Their minds are closed to me, but I can feel—the androids are working, preparing some trap...."
His eyes were closed now, his young face set with concentration. "They don't want me to see, but my mind is older than theirs, and better trained, and I have the power of the Stone. I can see a control panel. It directs the force of their machine...."
He began to move, then, rapidly, out across the floor. His eyes were still closed. It seemed he didn't need them for seeing.
People began to come out from behind the sheds and the cooling forges. Blank-faced people with empty eyes. Many of them, making a wall of themselves against Bas.
Ciaran cried out, "Mouse...!"
She was there. Her body was there, thin and erect in the crimson tunic. Her black hair was still wild around her small brown face. But Mouse, the Mouse that Ciaran knew, was dead behind her dull black eyes. Ciaran whispered, "Mouse...."
The slaves flowed in and held the two of them, clogged in a mass of unresponsive bodies.
"Can't you free them, Bas?"
"Not yet. Not now. There isn't time."
"Can't you do with them what you did with the Kalds?"
"The androids control their minds through hypnosis. If I fought that control, the struggle would blast their minds to death or idiocy. And there isn't time...." There was sweat on his smooth young forehead. "I've got to get through. I don't want to kill them...."
Ciaran looked at Mouse. "No," he said hoarsely.
"But I may have to, unless.... Wait! I can channel the power of the Stone through my own brain, because there's an affinity between us. Vibration, cell to cell. The androids won't have made a definite command against music. Perhaps I can jar their minds open, just enough, so that you can call them with your harp, as you called me."
A tremor almost of pain ran through the boy's body.
"Lead them away, Ciaran. Lead them as far as you can. Otherwise many of them will die. And hurry!"
Bas raised the Stone of Destiny in his clasped hands and pressed it to his forehead. And Ciaran took his harp.
He was looking at Mouse when he set the strings to singing. That was why it wasn't hard to play as he did. It was something from him to Mouse. A prayer. A promise. His heart held out on a song.
The music rippled out across the packed mass of humanity. At first they didn't hear it. Then there was a stirring and a sigh, a dumb, blind reaching. Somewhere the message was getting through the darkness clouding their minds. A message of hope. A memory of red sunlight on green hills, of laughter and home and love.
Ciaran let the music die to a whisper under his fingers, and the people moved forward, toward him, wanting to hear.
He began to walk away, slowly, trailing the harp-song over his shoulder—and they followed. Haltingly, in twos and threes, until the whole mass broke and flowed like water in his wake.
Bas was gone, his slim young body slipping fast through the broken ranks of the crowd.
Ciaran caught one more glimpse of Mouse before he lost her among the others. She was crying, without knowing or remembering why.
If Bas died, if Bas was defeated, she would never know nor remember.
Ciaran led them as far as he could, clear to the wall of the pit. He stopped playing. They stopped, too, standing like cattle, looking at nothing, with eyes turned inward to their clouded dreams.
Ciaran left them there, running out alone across the empty floor.
He followed the direction Bas had taken. He ran, fast, but it was like a nightmare where you run and run and never get anywhere. The lights glared down and the metal monster sighed and churned high up over his head, and there was no other sound, no other movement but his own.
Then, abruptly, the lights went out.
He stumbled on, hitting brutally against unseen pillars, falling and scrambling in scrap heaps. And after an eternity he saw light again, up ahead.
The Light he had seen before, here in the pit. The glorious opalescent light that drew a man's mind and held it fast to be chained.
Ciaran crept in closer.
There was a control panel on a stone dais—a meaningless jumbled mass of dials and wires. The androids stood before it. One of them was bent over, its yellowish hands working delicately with the controls. The other stood erect beside it, holding a staff. The metal ball at the top was open, spilling the opalescent blaze into the darkness.
Ciaran crouched in the shelter of a pillar, shielding his eyes. Even now he wanted to walk into that light and be its slave.
The android with the staff said harshly, "Can't you find the wave length? He should have been dead by now."
The bending one tensed and then straightened, the burning light sparkling across its metal sheath. Its eyes were black and limitless, like evil itself, and no more human.
"Yes," it said. "I have it."
The light began to burst stronger from the staff, a swirling dangerous fury of it.
Ciaran was hardly breathing. The light-source, whatever it was, was part of the power of the Stone of Destiny. Wave lengths meant nothing to him, but it seemed the danger was to the Stone—and Bas carried it.
The android touched the staff. The light died, clipped off as the metal ball closed.
"If there's any power left in the Stone," it whispered, "our power-wave will blast its subatomic reserve—and Bas the Immortal with it!"
Silence. And then in the pitch darkness a coal began to glow.
It came closer. It grew brighter, and a smudged reflection behind and above it became the head and shoulders of Bas the Immortal.
The android whispered, "Stronger!Hurry!"
A yellowish hand made a quick adjustment. The Stone of Destiny burned brighter. It burst with light. It was like a sunball, stabbing its hot fury into the darkness.
The android whispered, "More!"
The Stone filled all the pit with a deadly blaze of glory.
Bas stopped, looking up at the dais. He grinned. A naked boy, beautiful with youth, his grey eyes veiled and sleepy under dark lashes.
He threw the Stone of Destiny up on the dais. An idle boy tossing stones at a treetop.
Light. An explosion of it, without sound, without physical force. Ciaran dropped flat on his face behind the pillar. After a long time he raised his head again. The overhead lights were on, and Bas stood on the dais beside two twisted, shining lumps of man-made soulless men.
The android flesh had taken the radiation as leather takes heat, warping, twisting, turning black.
"Poor freaks," said Bas softly. "They were like me, with no place in the universe that belonged to them. So they dreamed, too—only their dreams were evil."
He stooped and picked up something—a dull, dark stone, a thing with no more life nor light than a waterworn pebble.
He sighed and rolled it once between his palms, and let it drop.
"If they had had time to learn their new machine a little better, I would never have lived to reach them in time." He glanced down at Ciaran, standing uncertainly below. "Thanks to you, little man, they didn't have quite time enough."
He gestured to a staff. "Bring it, and I'll free your Mouse."
VII
A long time afterward Mouse and Ciaran and Bas the Immortal stood in the opal-tinted glow of the great room of thecrux ansata. Outside the world was normal again, and safe. Bas had left full instructions about controlling and tending the centrifugal power plant.
The slaves were freed, going home across the Forbidden Plains—forbidden no longer. The Kalds were sleeping, mercifully; the big sleep from which they would never wake. The world was free, for humanity to make or mar on its own responsibility.
Mouse stood very close to Ciaran, her arm around his waist, his around her shoulders. Crimson rags mingling with yellow; fair shaggy hair mixing with black. Bas smiled at them.
"Now," he said, "I can be happy, until the planet itself is dead."
"You won't stay with us? Our gratitude, our love...."
"Will be gone with the coming generations. No, little man. I built myself a world where I belong—the only world where I can ever belong. And I'll be happier in it than any of you, because it is my world—free of strife and ugliness and suffering. A beautiful world, for me and Marsali."
There was a radiance about him that Ciaran would put into a song some day, only half understanding.
"I don't envy you," whispered Bas, and smiled. Youth smiling in a spring dawn. "Think of us sometimes, and be jealous."
He turned and walked away, going lightly over the wide stone floor and up the steps to the dais. Ciaran struck the harpstrings. He sent the music flooding up against the high vault, filling all the rocky space with a thrumming melody.
He sang. The tune he had sung for Mouse, on the ridge above the burning sea. A simple tune, about two people in love.
Bas lay down on the couch of furs and colored silks, soft on the shaft of the stone cross. He looked back at them once, smiling. One slim white arm raised in a brief salute and swept down across the black stone.
The milky light rose on the platform. It wavered, curdled, and thickened to a wall of warm pearl. Through it, for a moment, they could see him, his dark head pillowed on his forearm, his body sprawled in careless, angular grace. Then there was only the warm, soft shell of light.
Ciaran's harp whispered to silence. The tunnel into the pit was sealed. Mouse and Ciaran went out through the golden doors and closed them, very quietly—doors that would never be opened again as long as the world lived.
Then they came into each other's arms, and kissed.
Rough, tight arms on living flesh, lips that bruised and breaths that mingled, hot with life. Temper and passion, empty bellies, a harp that sang in crowded market squares, and no roof to fight under but the open sky.
And Ciaran didn't envy the dark-haired boy, dreaming on the stone cross.
[1]Transcriber's note: text missing from original: The red hunter froze to a dead stop.
[1]Transcriber's note: text missing from original: The red hunter froze to a dead stop.