The officer said, "You ought to be rayed down here, to save the High Mor the agony of listening to your pleas for mercy. But yours is a grave offense. An offense no man or woman has ever committed before. It calls for grave punishment."
Flaith's hand trembled in Kael's big fist.
The officer said, "The High Mor commissioned me to bring you to him. I would be derelict in my duty were I to do otherwise. And I, Captain Herms Borkus, intend to commit no such infraction."
The black eyes studied them. There was curiosity swimming in their depths, mixed with the hot hate, and a grudging respect. He turned away and went forward to the control chamber. Kael could hear the clicking relays picking up the automatic transmission. The ship lifted easily, its null-gravity humming with smooth insistence.
Flaith whispered, "The harp, Kael. You'll kill him as you killed the others!"
But Kael only gestured at the sfarri that lay in the strange and distorted attitudes, or sprawled on the floor. And even as he gestured, the first of these dead sfarri stirred and sat up, looking about him. Others moved then, silently, turning at once to their duty posts, resuming their tasks as if they had never been interrupted.
"Mother of balangs!" whispered Flaith, her eyes wide and troubled under their long red lashes. "They live!"
The McCanahan was half out of his seat, his mind questing.They were dead, but now they live. Like machines, turned off and on!He thought of the cracking tube in the black tower, and the sfarri that had fallen in the square in Clonn Fell. Dimly, he began to grasp the power of the harpstring that he had lifted from his father's wrist. It smashed the tubes in the power-boxes that fed the sfarri their energy. Without that power, they were idle machines.
With the trained mind of the spacefleet officer, he saw the possibilities of such harpstring, in the form of a vibrator that would spacecast a flow of microwaves from the battle wagons of the fleet. With a series of these vibrations fanning out ahead of them, Solar Combine ships could more than hold their own with the sfarri. For at the touch of those microwaves, the sfarri that ran their spaceships would slump in their form of death.
Bitter mockery rose inside the McCanahan as he sat hunched over. He had the knowledge, but what use was it? He was being carried to an extremely painful death in the damp dungeons of the High Mor's palace.
Herms Borkus came toward them from the control chamber. He stared from one to the other. At last he said, "How did you do it? In Clonn Fell, we found our officers and men lying as if dead. As this ship neared the Tower of Noorlythin, my men slumped over unconscious."
Kael shrugged. "I've a powerful evil eye, friend. I cast it at those I don't like and—well, you saw the result."
Borkus said coldly, "You talk foolishly. There is no such thing as the evil eye. What is the answer?"
"Oh, now look!" began Kael, when the thought struck him.Borkus is a sfarran, yet he did not succumb to the lack of power!Kael turned the words on his tongue, and said, "I was talking sense, captain. In my family, as far back as the time of Niall of the Nine Hostages himself, one of the McCanahans has always possessed the evil eye. It's a daft thing, and I'm not understanding it myself, any too well, but it's the only explanation I can give."
Borkus looked at Flaith, but his eyes did not linger on her beauty, and showed no more emotion than a dog would show staring at a building. From Flaith, his eyes swung to Kael who could read the thought that was gripping the officer.He's wondering if he can strike at me through her.But that was the way of a man who lacked confidence in his own abilities, and Kael knew that this man before him had powers he had not yet used.
The sfarran captain shrugged and moved away. He threw back over his shoulder, "The High Mor will know how to deal with you. After all, it is his duty, not mine."
For five hours, Flaith and McCanahan huddled together on the upholstered bench in the sfarran ship. With each passing moment, the bleakness in the soul of the McCanahan grew darker and more empty.
The ship landed on the palace grounds, shuddering slightly as it dropped onto the metallic tanbark. A moment after its vanes were clamped, Flaith and the McCanahan were crossing the landing field, moving down a stone ramp that led to the dungeons.
A burly man, with black hair matted over his naked chest, clanked a ring of keys at their approach. He preceded them along the torchlit corridor until he paused at an empty cell.
The cell was unlocked, and the McCanahan thrust inside. And then a sobbing Flaith was dragged away from him, in the grip of one of the burly man's hairy paws.
Kael McCanahan was a spaceman, and spacemen are generally, without quite being aware of it, excellent philosophers. He tested the bars of the cell, found them to be formed of Mollystil, and went over to the cot, where he lay on his back, staring at the blank ceiling. Within five minutes he was asleep.
He woke to the touch of a soft hand on his chest, to find a woman bent above him, her limpid brown eyes soft with pity. A tumble of yellow hair framed her oval face.
"I bring you food and drink, lord. You will need your strength for what lies ahead."
Kael laughed harshly. "Better to be weak and near death when the High Mor begins his tortures."
She moved closer. She was fragrant with some Senn perfume, and the little she wore—a red silk thing twisted about her loins, with a slavegirl's golden chains about her throat—showed her body to be exquisite, even in the half-light of the cell. The McCanahan read the pity in her eyes, and began to take interest.
"Sometimes, those live the longest who have no false pride," she told him.
"You give me hope. Were you sent to do that?"
There was reproach in her eyes, and she started to draw away. The McCanahan caught her slim wrist and held her.
"Who sent you with your tempting offers?"
She pouted at him. "No man sent me. I am Slyss, the slave girl from Aakkan." She rubbed her wrist when he released her, unconsciously posing for his eyes.
The McCanahan said, "Tell me more!"
But she shrugged a white shoulder and went to stand by the cell bars while he ate. When he was done, she took his tray and wooden bowl and mug, and walked off with them, unlocking the cell door with a key that hung from her wrist, attached to a thick metal manacle.
Her hips wriggled as she went, and she threw a glance at him over her shoulder. Her voice was music as she carolled a farewell.
She left the McCanahan with a fever of impatience in him. He strode back and forth in his cell. His hands tested the Mollystil bars a hundred times. He told himself that the Senn did not love the sfarri overmuch, that the Senn, being descended from animal ancestors, had no common ground with a race of robot men. He asked himself where in this pile of giant masonry Herms Borkus had hidden Flaith. If he could get away, if he could use this yellow-haired slave girl to unbar these cell doors for him, he would find Flaith and flee.
Flee?
Where on all Senorech was there sanctuary for Kael McCanahan?
The slave girl told him when next she brought his food. This time, he was awake and restless, and her soft, quick tread was like music to his ears.
She came close to him, with only the width of the little tray between his chest and her breasts that stirred gently to her quickened breathing. Her brown eyes were full of gentle pity as they studied his haggard face and sunken eyes.
"Lord, you were never meant for prison bars! If only you would trust me, I know a way that leads from the palace."
"Trust you, Slyss? I'd love you for a chance at freedom."
Again she preened, smiling as he wolfed the food. "Only for that?"
His eyes studied her. She was a lovely thing, slim and gently rounded. Beside the flame-haired Flaith she was a cooling breeze, but he knew many men who would have walked through the fires of Nanakar for an hour in her arms.
"Not only for that," he told her. "You're a sight to send a man's blood to pounding in his veins. You don't look like a slave girl. You're much too beautiful."
Her laughter was soft, pleased. She came and sat beside him, so that her hip and thigh were warm on his. She carried perfume in the yellow hair that dripped on her shoulders. It was rare perfume, and the McCanahan thought that if her mistress knew about it, that creamy back would be striped with red whipwelts.
"There are men of the Senn who hate the sfarri," she whispered close to his ear. "Rumors have come to them that you possess some strange weapon, some magic means of killing the hated sfarri."
The McCanahan swallowed the cheap wine that had been chilled in a coil of refrigerated stil. He nodded. "I know a way."
It was on his lips to say more when his sidewise glance surprised a momentary gleam in the gentle brown eyes. He needed no psychiatrist to read that triumph for him, even though it was quickly veiled behind her curving lashes.Now why should a slave girl of the palace know that feeling because of what I said?he asked himself.
The McCanahan put his arm about the girl, drew her in against him. With his lips buried in the yellow mass of her hair, he whispered, "It ought to be worth a lot to the Senn to get that knowledge! With such a weapon they need never fear the sfarri again. They could cast them out! Even seek alliance with the Solar Combine!"
It was his last words that tensed the muscles across her soft back. Instantly, the muscles were relaxed, and she melted closer against him, her soft lips moving across his face to find his lips.
The McCanahan kissed her. Why not? But he was warned, and only a fool disregards a warning. And Kael McCanahan, as he drank from the scented lips of Slyss the slave girl, was even then congratulating himself that no McCanahan was ever a cursed gossoon.
He let her go after a while. She was a pleasant little thing, but she was no Flaith. He said, "Suppose I agree to trade my weapon for freedom from the High Mor? How do I know the Senn can guarantee my liberty?"
"I have the keys," she whispered. "Tonight I will come for you, to lead you through the dungeons, to the vaults below the dungeons, where the sea seeps in through solid rocks. No sfarran ever walks down there. It is a dead, damp place. But the Senn go there to hide from the sfarri. It is the one safe place on all Senorech. Slyss will take you there."
He lingered over her lips, close by the unlocked cell door, to bind their bargain. But when she was gone, he took to pacing his cell, his brows drawn together. She wants more than the body of Kael McCanahan, that one, he told himself. The weapon I possess, and me! Or am I playing the buffoon in thinking she was fond of me? He went back over their meetings and discovered to his chagrin that each of her moves seemed calculated. Like a sfarran! Cold, careful! Even her kisses lacked the fire such a woman should bring to them!
As the sun sank below the hills above Akkalan, the McCanahan rested. He was fresh when Slyss came to him on her bare feet, her key grating silently into the cell lock. "Slib, the jailer, lies drugged with wine," she told him. "He won't stop us."
She went quickly along the cell corridor ahead of him. At an intersection in the rock walls she slipped to the right, into dark shadows. He heard the rough grate of metal, and a section of the floor was rising and falling, as a balanced slab of rock fell back to expose a number of handhewn stone ledges that served as steps.
Slyss went first. The McCanahan came after her, and at her whispered bidding, tilted the stone slab back into place. An instant before it fell, as his eyes were still above the floor level, he saw a man standing in the cell corridor, grinning at him.
The McCanahan almost cried out to Slyss.
The man in the cell corridor was burly, with black hair matted over his chest. He jangled a ring of keys at his side. It was Slib, the jailer, and his little eyes were clear and evil.
No man who lay drugged with wine ever boasted eyes like that! The only thing that troubled Kael was whether Slyss knew the jailer was awake and watching. If she knew, then he was being led into a trap, like a steer to the axing. If she did not know, then she was taking herself unwittingly into that same trap.
The McCanahan kicked off his buskins and walked with bare feet after the girl, along the cool damp floor of the sea vaults. In olden days, the primal men of Senorech had made their coves in these vaults to escape the ravening monsters of the dawn era. Here and there, in the light of the torches along the wall, he could see piles of white, bleached bones.
They walked for more minutes before he heard the faint rasp of metal touching rock.
Slyss was whirling, crying out.
From the shadows, men came leaping. As he plunged sideways, Kael noted that they were hardfaced Senn warriors. There was not a sfarran among them.
The McCanahan used his fist like a club, bringing its balled weight down in a full arm stroke, hitting the nearest man at the side of his neck, and driving him sideways into his companions. Before the man's falling club touched the floor, Kael held it, bringing it upward in a ceilingwise blow into the middle of the next man's belly.
Kael McCanahan had fought in the port taverns of Marsopolis and Dunverick. He had traded fists with Deneban dockwallopers and Karrvan stevedores. He knew every trick in the creeds of a dozen fighting races.
He used them all in the sea vaults below Akkalan. He used the club like a sword, driving it hard into a Senn's face. He hit backwards with it. He used an overhand, downward stroke, that drove the inches-long spikes that studded its knob, deep into a man's braincase.
It is no easy matter for ten men to cage one man. Not in dimly lighted pits, with that one man an explosive cyclone of fists and bashing club. Ten men keep getting in the way of each other. And Kael McCanahan was there to make each mistake a costly one.
He cut his opponents down to five in those first few minutes. Then he was at the wall, ripping loose the olisene-drenched torch, hurling it in their faces, to splatter in thick little globs of burning chemicals.
With their screams of pain ringing in the sudden darkness, the McCanahan slid forward into the blacker shadows. Out of sight he ran.
He found a tunnel that sliced at an angle into the main vault. He went along it, his bare feet making no sound.
He discovered another converging corridor and raced along that. Inside ten minutes, he lost himself in the labyrinthine vaults.
He came to a halt in the blackness, lungs gulping at cool air that was faintly spiced with seasalt. He listened, but heard no sound. When his heart ceased to thud so heavily against his ribs, he moved again. But now he went more cautiously, with the club before him like an overlong arm, probing the darkness.
He felt the cool updraft of air, just as his feet went out from under him.
VI
He slid for thirty feet on a wet ramp that dropped him flat on his back on the floor of a huge chamber lighted by radio-active filaments set flush to the stone walls. At the far end of the vast room, two mighty metal doors were hung on great bronze hinges.
On the floor of the room rested a hundred great daises. And on each dais lay a man or a woman.
"A tomb," the McCanahan muttered. "I've found one of the Senn burial chambers."
As he crawled to his feet and stared, he knew that this was no tomb. The bodies were flushed with life, and clad in the uniforms and trappings of a hundred different people. The McCanahan rubbed a bruised shoulder and went to walk among the daises.
A shepherd boy with a ragged sheepskin across his loins and over one shoulder, lay beside a trimly garbed officer of the Palace Guard. Beyond them, a silk-swathed dancing girl lay beside a heavily muscled halgor-driver, with the brown of the desert sun still on his forehead.
The McCanahan touched an arm. It was warm. It yielded beneath his fingers. He tried to rouse the man, without success.
A face in the third row over from the main aisle tugged at some chord of memory. He slipped between the daises, to stare down into the cold, haughty face of Captain Herms Borkus of the Fleet.
"Now would I had the wisdom of Bridget herself, the wisest woman in all Ireland," muttered the McCanahan. "Is this a store-room where the High Mor keeps those he has doomed to some punishment? Is it a place such as the visi-chambers on Vreer and Anafelm, where men and women spend most of their lives dreaming? And if it isn't any of these things, what in the name of the sons of Strongbow is it?"
He walked on, staring down at the faces of those who lay in this trance-like slumber. He saw a face or two he knew from remembered glimpses, in the days when he had walked the court of the High Mor as the son of the Terran Ambassador.
And then the McCanahan froze, and the blood in his veins moved with sluggish torpor.
Ahead of him, on the two largest daises of all, lay the twin bodies of the High Mor.
There was no mistake. He had seen that thin-lipped face too often where it leered down at Solar Command uniforms from the ruboid throne of Akkalan. The eyes were staring now, lifeless, but he remembered the scorn and the supreme contempt that had been in their depths.
The McCanahan was a baffled man.
He walked around the coffers, and his lips opened to speak, but no sound came out. "It's dreaming I am, with the little people flooding my brain with fancies from a fevered mind! The High Mor, twins—no, triplets!—for he must sit even now on the throne, dreaming up tortures for my body."
The creak of a door-hinge sent him to the floor.
He stared at the opening door, and smothered a curse in his throat when he saw the slave girl, Slyss of Aakan, glide into the room. She was alone. She went to an empty pier and lay upon her back.
And now the hair at the base of the McCanahan's neck stood straight up, for something was rising from all along her body. A something that was white and bright and dazzling, and from where he lay, Kael could feel the utter coldness of the thing.
"Noorlythin!" his numbed brain told him, and he hid his eyes.
He heard a faint tinkling, such a sound as he had heard once before, when he floated between the stars among the Doyen. He looked, and the swirling white radiance that was Noorlythin was settling down on one of the bodies of the High Mor, and the High Mor was sitting up, chafing at wrists and fingers, swinging his legs to the floor.
In the ancient legends of Terra, there was mention of an Arabic ruler, one Haroun al Raschid, who went in disguise among his people, that he might learn their thoughts and their way of living. It came to the McCanahan as he lay here that Noorlythin was such a one, but he used no simple disguises. He took the body of a man, or the body of a woman, and possessed it.
Kael retched silently, remembering the caresses he had given the slave girl. Thatthinghad been inside her, controlling the pity in her eyes, the poses of her body. It had been Noorlythin who had led him into the vaults below the castle, for some reason he did not yet know. It had been Herms Borkus, seeking the secret of his harp. He knew now why the smashing of the tube in the great machine had not shut off his lack of motive power, as it had the robotlike bodies of the sfarran crew.
"By all the sand on Mars," the McCanahan gritted between his teeth, "I have a secret worth a thousand suns in my hand. But how can I best use it?"
The High Mor was at the huge doors now. He went out without a backward glance, and the doors slid shut behind him.
Kael came to his feet. He looked around him at the faces of the men and women who lay awaiting the coming of the Doyen. He knew what he had to do, and his face twisted in repugnance. Without these bodies, Noorlythin was trapped in the body of the High Mor; he was the High Mor, and no other. If these bodies were destroyed, smashed beyond recognition, Noorlythin could never use them, perhaps to appear again before the McCanahan in the guise of an officer or beautiful woman.
Kael gripped his club more firmly and walked slowly down the long rows of coffers. At each dais, he paused a little while and did what had to be done. Once he stripped a man and donned the uniform of the Senn Fleet, acquiring the rank of major.
He left Slyss until the last.
But when he stood there, looking down into that smooth face, eyeing the yellow hair that tumbled around the creamy shoulders, he could not nerve himself to the task at hand.
"I'll let her be. At least I know her as a cradle for Noorlythin. I'll be on my guard."
With a sword at his side and an addy-gun holstered to his service belt, the McCanahan dropped the club. He went to the doors and swung them open, and walked out into a long corridor hewn from living stone.
For nearly an hour he followed that corridor, travelling steadily upwards. He emerged into a palace guardroom whose rack-hung walls were filled with handguns and swords, with keen-edged axes and cloaks with the dragon of the Senn emblazoned on collar and breast.
And in the guard room, he found the High Mor waiting for him.
"It is better this way," said the High Mor. "Just the two of us, face to face. I thought it might be better, as Slyss, to lure you into a Senn trap, and then to pretend a rescue by my sfarran guards just as they were about to torture you. I thought I might claim your allegiance that way."
The McCanahan showed his teeth. "And after you'd wormed the truth of my secret weapon out of me, you'd hang me to a rack with the metal hooks biting into my naked back, and pull on my legs until the hooks came out. After that—"
The High Mor waved a hand.
"There is no need of torture between us, Terran. Oh, at first I wanted your life. Your father stumbled on a Senn scientist who discovered that a certain microwave shattered a peculiar type glass much used by the sfarri, due to sonic disturbances created in the atmosphere.
"Since the sfarri are a race of robots, created by the Doyen so long ago that were I to tell you the number of years involved they would be meaningless to you, they are necessarily energized by machines. In those machines a klyptric tube, made of that glass, forms an antennae that picks up and transmits the power generated by the machine. It broadcasts it in wave-lengths attuned to the internal structure of the sfarri."
"You tell me nothing new," Kael grated. "Most of that I learned myself from putting one and two and three together."
The High Mor threw back his jeweled cloak and rested a thigh on the edge of a gaming table. His eyes glittered brightly.
He said, "You are no fool, Terran. I do not underestimate you, believe me. I tell you this to explain why I felt it necessary to kill your father."
"And Captain Edmunds! And Cassy Garson! And all the men who were in theEclipsewhen your sfarrans rayed her into a smoking ruin just outside the planetal orbit of Senorech!"
The High Mor gestured. His graceful white hands waved apology. "For all that, I am sorry. I made a mistake. Now I offer what I can to atone for my errors.
"Join me. Wear my dragon! To you, I promise such power as no man has ever dreamed. The wants of a Napoleon, or a Bral Kan of Procyon! Not even Gartillin Vo of Deneb, or Cygnis Hannon will outshine you in the splendor of your triumphs!
"Do you think I want to spend my time in this?" and here the High Mor gestured at his body. "I want to go back to the Temple of Sharrador where once I dwelt for many ages, worshipped and adored."
The McCanahan grinned. "You know I recognize you as Noorlythin?"
"You were in the chamber where I keep the bodies I use. I felt your presence."
Kael stared his surprise.
"I knew you watched," the High Mor went on. "I could have spoken to you there. But it is better to meet you this way, face to face, away from those reminders that I am not as you. In a humanoid body, I may speak with you, as man to man.
"Only this way can I hope to convince you that I offer you more than you can ever gain without me. I am no man. I am a god! A god of primal space! I have lived for eon piled upon eon, hunting and seeking through the stars, studying the worlds I found. On some I lived for ages, on others I dwelt for only a little while. All those worlds, Kael McCanahan, I offer you!
"Be an emperor, Terran! Rule every planet in all space. The greatest jewels of Strae'eth or Vrann can be yours, to wear on your person or to be hung in ropes of diamonds about the neck of any woman in all space! Lead my battle fleets! On distant Sfar, my technicians shall make you a hundred billion sfarrans to serve under your banner. They shall make the greatest warships that ply the starlanes, each one encrusted with your name!"
The McCanahan shivered. It was a prospect that shook a man loose from his moorings.
To rule the stars! To sit on a throne and gaze out at the peoples of the universe bowed before him. To have the faery women of Cygni and Flormaseron in a harem, waiting his pleasure.
It was a thought that would have appealed to nine men in ten. Kael McCanahan called himself a fool, but he turned his visions aside.
"I want no conquests. I want no jewels. The only woman I want is Flaith. Where is she?"
The High Mor sighed. "In a tower, well guarded. No harm has come to her. No harm will come. I am no sadist to harm a woman. Not when what I seek is possessed by a man. Tell me, Terran. What is your price?"
"Peace! Friendship with Terra and the men of Terra. Let the Solar Combine send its traders to Senorech. Peace between the peoples of the stars."
The High Mor laughed. "I too, seek peace. A peace that will end with my dragon banner floating above the towers of New Washington, Terra. With your precious Solar Combine run by the sfarri. I offer you a place in that peace, Kael McCanahan. A high place. The highest place of all! I am a god! I have no need of earthly things. You do.
"Give me your answer, Terran!"
For a moment, the temptation was there. But in that same moment, the McCanahan remembered the blastedEclipse, and the dead Father he loved, and Captain Edmunds, straight and lean in his white Fleet uniform. A memory came to him of Cassy Garson and the kisses she had given him in a drifting galley on the Tigranian Sea. The High Mor was not human. He knew nothing of the loves and lusts, the fears and terrors of human beings. He was as far removed from the Senn and Terrans as man is from the ant.
"I answer—no! You'd blacken Earth with your rays and leave empty ruins. You'd take everything in space! And me—what of me?"
The High Mor smiled. "You would rule the universe!"
But Kael McCanahan shook his head stubbornly. "I cannot believe that. If I once tell you—"
Beware, Terran!
The Doyen thought warned him just in time.
The High Mor brought his hand out from under his cloak and he held a black-metal stinger in his fingers. It spat a stream of violent fire at the McCanahan.
Kael dove sideways. The tip of his finger slipped through the violet fire and it stung with the agony of seared nerve-ends. If full effect of that blast had touched him he would be writhing helplessly on the floor, his body one gigantic mass of pain.
He had seen the stinger turned on unregenerate killers. It softened them in a hurry.
His shoulder hit the edge of the table where the High Mor sat. The table upended, and the High Mor fell to the floor with him.
Kael put a hand to the throat of the other man and his fingers tightened and squeezed. It was like choking a bar of steel. The High Mor forced a laugh through his lips, and his body twisted like an uncoiling spring and forced the McCanahan from him.
"The Doyen warned you. I caught the thought they put in your brain! Well, let them play their game. They can only interfere with me when I use my Doyen powers to destroy you. I have other gifts to use!"
A fist dove at his face, but the McCanahan was a master at rough and tumble fighting. He slipped it and bored in. His fists drummed into the High Mor's belly, lifted and threw him back to rebound off the far wall.
A dozen weapons came tumbling down on the ruler of Senorech. A cloak swathed his flailing arms.
Kael stepped back, waiting.
That was where he made his mistake. For the High Mor slid to the floor in a crumpled heap, and the thing that was Noorlythin glowed and pulsed and moved its frosted tendrils, free of its fallen body.
As Noorlythin moved its tendrils, the floor fell away beneath the booted heels of the McCanahan. The walls of the guardroom went out of existence, and Kael was falling, falling.
Gird yourself, Terran! You go into subspace where no other living thing can enter! Not even another Doyen to shield you from my wrath! For each Doyen has in him the seeds of material creation, and what one Doyen materializes, no other Doyen can disturb!
And the high, mocking laughter followed him down and down, into the eternal blackness where he fell.
VII
A hot sun blanketed his naked body. It blazed from a molten sky and cooked him where he lay on warm red rocks. Kael McCanahan lifted his head and stared at the searing desolation before him. Sand and rock, and the shale of evaporated seas, stretching like the finger of Time to infinity itself, outward to that blazing blue bowl of sky where the golden sun hung high, pouring down its heat.
He came to his feet and swayed with the pain that the heat was putting in his muscles.
Come to me! Come! Come!
He put trembling hands to his head, and again that sweet call sounded, with the siren lure of all the lost treasures of all space.
He stumbled forward, hearing the summons in his brain, in every fibre of his being.
Come to my riches! Lift up your hands to the jewel that gives man everything he wants! Touch me! I am yours!
He was running across the hot sands that bit his naked feet with hot teeth, and over the sharp rocks that cut into his flesh until he bled. Dimly, he knew that nothing could help him now. That here he was cut off from everything that was sane.
This mad world was a creation of Noorlythin. His was the wild brain that dreamed the sands and the rocks and the awful desolation. His dream, that sun that cooked while it shone.
Sobbing, he ran. He fell to his knees, and he crawled.
With bleeding fingers he clawed at the rocks, making himself rise and run again.
It seemed to the man that had once been Kael McCanahan that he was running around a planet. The pain was part of him, now. His muscles jerked in agony at every step, yet always he forced himself to run faster, faster, gulping down the hot desert air. That siren call was strong in his ears.
Run, Terran! Run to me!
He ran on and on, and now he saw the others, men like himself, running on bleeding feet, crawling when those feet were worn to cracked stumps. And before each of those men, or before Kael McCanahan's own eyes, gleamed—
The eye of Lirflane!
A globe of a red jewel it was, the eye. Imprisoned in its faceted surface were the dreams of a billion people. The man that looked on it saw the happiness he sought, and he fought to join himself to it, that his own dreams would add to the total of all the others. And on the dreams and on the flesh of these men who came to it, drawn by its siren voice and by the eternity of delight it promised, the eye of Lirflane feasted, waxed and swelled.
A man tried to claw at his legs as Kael McCanahan ran past him. Red eyes in a bloated face hurled hate at him, as his hand closed on his ankle.
The McCanahan shook himself free and ran on.
The eye was closer now.
It grew massive, transparent. In its redness, the redness of the hair of flaming Flaith beckoned. Her white body swayed and danced, and her throaty voice summoned him.
The McCanahan's arms shook as he put them out, trying to pull himself forward with handfulls of hot, desert air.
Now the Eye of Lirflane was before him, and all he could see was Flaith moving toward him, her arms wide and beckoning—
One step he moved, and another.
His hand went out, toward the gleaming red side of the monstrous jewel.
Come to me, Kael McCanahan! Come to the peace and the forgetfulness you have earned. Take me in your arms. Drink kisses from my lips!
The McCanahan sobbed.
He shook in torture more vivid than the agony in his feet and muscles.
"Not Flaith!" he cried. "Not Flaith! You—woman of the jewel! Witchwoman of Lirflane! Not Flaith!"
He went to his knees, to anchor himself the better to the ground, against the siren call of the mighty Eye.
"No. Got to fight! Get free. Free...."
He fought there on his knees, while men streamed past him, rushing with insane desire into the red heaven of the jewel. Their eyes were mad with the greed or the lust that shook them, for every man saw in the Eye of Lirflane what his own eyes wanted most to see. Their bodies were torn and gaunt from their struggle across the sand and rock desolation. But they would lose their pain, within the bosom of the red eye.
Kael fought. He fought silently, until the sweat came out on his face in big globes, until it runneled down his chest and thighs. His belly and his back were awash with the salt dampness.
At last he turned, just a little, so that only a corner of the fabulous Eye remained in his vision.
An hour later, he turned again, and now he saw only the barren loneliness of this abandoned world. And as he stared, the sand and the rocks and the sky ran with liquid movement as a painting might run in a bath of chemicals. And the streaming reds and buffs and yellows, the black and the greens and purples flowed together and formed a river, that swept the tortured legs of the McCanahan out from under him.
He screamed in his agony as the salt water bit into his bleeding wounds. He babbled and twisted, flailing the salt sea with animal desperation. He drowned in this vast emptiness of ocean, with no hand to grasp his or eye to witness his going.
"No," he shouted to the gray leaden sky above him. "I won't die! I'll live! I'll live!"
His arms and his legs moved, and clumsily, he swam. No driftwood floated here. Here a man had to swim to stay alive, until his arms and his legs grew numb with his effort, and he sank.
The McCanahan turned on his back, and the salt water buoyed him up. He floated for endless days, and during endless nights, and the tiny spark of life within him waxed and waned. And out of the eternity of no-time, as he swam and alternately floated, a wing-prowed galley slipped through the foam-crested waves. Its white sail bellied in the ocean wind. It veered and came for him, running easily in the water.
From the rail, a bearded face scowled down at him. A hairy hand threw a rope that he twisted around his middle. He was dragged on deck, to stand dripping with the salt water that seared his wounds.
A rope was whipped around his wet wrists and he was dragged to the slim mast that rose from the deck, before the oarbanks where slaves pulled at smooth-handled oars.
A woman whose flesh was tinted a delicate green came toward him. She walked with quick, supple strides, and the McCanahan noted numbly that her eyes were a feral green, and that her tiny ears were pointed. A whip coiled in her hand.
She showed her tiny teeth in a cruel smile.
"You are the man from Terra! You are the one who turned down all the worlds of space! For that you must be punished!"
And the long lash went snaking out in an arc, slashing into his back, and the sheer agony of the cutting whip slammed his body against the mast. The lash came down and lifted, came down and lifted, and the McCanahan sagged in the ropes that held him.
With the cruelty of her species, the cat-woman flogged him. When she was done, she cut him loose and stood over him on the swaying deck that was stained with his blood. Her voice was soft, furry.
"Take him and chain him to an oar! Rivet the manacles on his wrists and ankles! Let him tug an oar for a year! Then perhaps he will obey Him who is ALL!"
He was kicked and shoved across the deck. He tumbled into an empty slot on an oarbench. His wrists and ankles were shackled, the armorer not caring where his metal mallet fell.
For a day he rested, with black bread soaked in wine forced between his teeth. For a day, he knew only the blessedness of not moving. His slumber was dreamless—
In a red dawn, he was wakened by the bite of an overseer's whip across his bloody back. His hands lifted and went to the oar-handle, and his body swayed and returned, and he put his weight with the weight of the men who held the same oar as he.
The galley slipped through the heaving ocean, and the red oars flashed in the sun, and the salt spray stung, and only when an errant wind swept across the seas was there any rest for the men who slaved on the benches. Sometimes men died, and were flung overboard. Other men were unshackled and dragged screaming to the foredeck, where the cat-woman waited, pink tongue licking her lips, the whip curling like a live thing in her hands.
And of all the men who worked the oars in this endless ocean, it was the McCanahan who was chosen most often for her amusement.
Once he almost died under the biting whip, and in that moment of pain and numbness, when his senses seemed about to float from his body, the cat-woman leaned close and her furry voice whispered, "Speak your secret to me, man of Terra! Tell me the weapon that slays the sfarri!"
But the McCanahan only shook his head and his hair, long uncut, tumbled on his bleeding shoulders.
The days were endless on that ocean, and the oars swung and the sail creaked, flapping overhead, and the overseer tramped the runway with endless patience, his voice a sullen growl. The cat-woman came to look upon the McCanahan and her slim greenish fingers came forth to stroke his naked back where her lash had marred it. Always her throaty voice whispered to him, speaking of the delights that might be found in her cabin, if only he were not so stubborn.
When her patience was at an end, she motioned to the overseer and he came with armed guards and unchained the McCanahan, and he was led to the mast and roped.
And then, in the middle of a whipsting, the ocean and the ship and the cat-woman's whip fell away....
He lay on a hard, cold floor.
The High Mor stood before him, his hard eyes glittering. Kael was back in the guardroom that he had left—how long ago?
"A year," said the High Mor, reading his thought. "A year and five days! And yet, the barest split second of Time. I sent you out to those worlds of subspace, Kael McCanahan. There you lived, and almost died. You rowed at a real oar. You suffered the cuts of a real whip. Look at yourself!"
The High Mor threw a small metal mirror at him. Dazedly he stared at the grim, hard brown face and the cold blue eyes he saw mirrored on its surface. His flesh was brown, and great muscles swelled under it. The oar had put those muscles there, as the whip had put the scars on his ribs and back.
"Only a split second of our time, Terran," said the High Mor. "But a year and five days in the worlds I made! I told you I had gifts! I have made a thousand million worlds for that subspace, in the eons that I have roamed the stars. I am a god!"
Kael shook his head and his long hair flicked his naked arms. If he needed proof of the High Mor's words, his long-uncut hair was proof enough.
He thought,Tell him, and let him have his way! How can a man fight a god?The thought washed over him that he fought for all mankind, that the men and women of a thousand planets unknowingly depended on his fight. Women like the flame-tressed Flaith, men like his father and Captain Edmunds, who did their duty and died for it, all depended on what he did.
He had to think, to go over this logically. What would be the thought processes of a god? A god was no mere mortal, to be judged and weighed by human wants and failings. In it there was no mercy, no thought for anything but itself.
Kael pushed himself away from the floor to stand on long brown legs.
Courage, man of Terra! He shall not trap you so again!
The Doyen voice gave him heart, but the High Mor sneered.
"I heard it, too, Terran! The Doyen cannot help you. Not unless I strive by Doyen means to kill you. I need not do that, Kael McCanahan, need I?"
The McCanahan shook his head like a dumb animal. He would never go back to that subspace where Noorlythin was a god in truth! To that hell, where a second was a year, where the Doyen themselves could not enter!
"I could put you there again, Terran. I could forget you, let you live out your life for an eternity of seconds that are years! Would you listen to reason then? Would you like to test your will again against that of the Eye of Lirflane? Or feel once more the lash of Vigrette, the cat-woman? No, I read in your eyes that you would not!
"Come, then. Tell me how you made the sfarri die!"
Speak, man of Terra! Tell Noorlythin what he seeks! Only then, as he absorbs the knowledge, can we reach him!
The McCanahan shrugged the great shoulders that were scarred with the lash above the smooth roll of their bulging muscles. His head hung so that his uncut hair shielded his face.
"The harp," he whispered. "On the harp of Brith Tsinan is a silver string. The d-note! I strung it with a silvern wire that I loosed from my father's wrist!"
And as he spoke, he moved.
As liquid as the falling waters in the Veil of Valmoora was the leap of the McCanahan. Full into the High Mor he hurtled, knocking him sideways. And as they went down together—
The Doyen struck!
The very rocks of the palace misted and swirled under that awesome clutching. White fire flared and seared, and where it touched, all matter was destroyed! The walls of the palace shook and quivered. Beams groaned under the sudden stress.
Where the guardroom had been, was empty nothingness!
In a flame that lapped him protectingly as it flared fiercely and strongly at Noorlythin himself, the Doyen carried both men upward. So swift was their transmission through normal space that in one blinding surge of the white flame, the McCanahan found himself between the worlds, in some lost, dark blotch of empty space.
"No Doyen may slay another Doyen!"
That voice rang triumphantly in the abyss.
"There is a way, Noorlythin! That is why we have let you work your will on this man. He hates you with a deadly hate, Noorlythin. You put him in your worlds of subspace, and you abandoned him to the creatures of your own creation!"
"Aie! I abandoned him! Were it not for him and his harp, I would reign as a god on every planet in all inhabited space. The Solar Combine would have fallen to my sfarran battle fleet!"
"You dared not move before you knew the one weapon that might defeat you!"
"Now I know! Now! Now!"
The radiant energy in the thing that was Noorlythin was awful. It beat and flared redly through the whiteness. The McCanahan shuddered as its heat beat out at him, chilling even as it seared.
Courage, Terran! Courage for what lies ahead!
And now the voices shrank and whispered, piping like elfin horns within his head, that none but he could hear.
Through you, we may destroy him! Courage! With your help, he dies—forever!
He knew what he had to do. Of his free will he had to offer himself to Noorlythin! Of his free will, he had to fling himself into the mad embrace of those pulsing tendrils, that had turned Lunol the peddler to black and drifting dust!
He gave you to the Eye of Lirflane! He gave you to the cat-woman and her whip!
The McCanahan snarled. "Destroy him, and I save the Solar Combine! I hear you, Doyen. I hear and I—obey!"
And Kael McCanahan flung himself headlong, forward into the white whirlwind of force that was Noorlythin.
In the Chamber of Living Death, she who had been Slyss of Aakan quivered fitfully. A bubble of froth broke from her red lips. She moaned and stirred. A hand lifted, struggled feebly, fell back to her side, limp and waxen.
Slyss opened brown eyes. She lay silent, staring upward at the ceiling. A sob fought its way upward from her throat.
"Noorlythin is dead! His control over me and the others—gone forever!"
She rolled off the dais and stared around her, at the dead bodies. She shivered. She went to the doors and pulled them open. In the distance, she could hear the frightened roaring of terrified men. She began to run.
Flaith shook the bars of the cell that held her. Her red hair made a living flame about her shoulders.
"What is happening? What is it?" she screamed.
A terrified jailer paused in his heavy run past her cell.
"The palace is falling in! The High Mor is dead. His body has been found!"
Flaith shook the barred door.
"Let me out! Please, please! Give me a chance to save myself!"
The jailer licked his lips. He glanced up and down the corridor, then slid the key into the lock. The door opened under a push from his hand. "If the High Mor is dead," he told the girl, "maybe the sfarri won't stay here on Senorech! Maybe the Senn can rule themselves, now."
Flaith caught the man by his arm.
"The one I was captured with! Kael McCanahan, the Earther! Where is he?"
"Nobody knows! His cell is empty."
"His harp? Man, where is his harp?"
The jailer shook himself free and started down the corridor. Over his shoulder he called, "Look in the storehouse beyond the cell block. We keep all prisoners' effects in there!"
Terran! Wake to life, Kael McCanahan!
He was dead. He had thrown himself into the fiery maw of the thing that was Noorlythin. Who called him now? Who spoke these lies?
You live, Terran. You served as the catalyst that enabled us to focus our powers against Noorlythin.
Even a high school student knew that a catalyst retained its own identity during the chemical change it brought about between two substances; even such substances as were the Doyen, gods of space.
Kael opened his eyes.
He lay on a floor in the wreckage of the guardroom in the palace of Akkalan. In the distance, but growing closer, he heard the faint strumming of harpstrings. He lay there and listened to the harp, as life flowed stronger into his body.
The strumming came nearer.
The McCanahan stood up and he waited, big and brown, marked with scars.
Flaith stood in the broken doorway, her fingers falling from the harp. Tears had formed twin channels from her red-lashed eyes along her cheeks. When she saw Kael, she did not know him. And then he grinned, and his long hair and scarred brown body were forgotten.
She flung herself at him, and lay against him, trembling.
He told her of the High Mor and what he had been, and of how the Doyen had destroyed him. "We've won, Flaith. He's dead, forever. With the harp—and the vibrators that we'll build to duplicate its pitch—the Solar Combine will move on Sfar. Smash it, and its robot life!"
Laughter bubbled in her throat as she looked up at him. "They'll reward you, Kael. Make you somebody big on Terra!"
The McCanahan grinned and hugged her.
"An admiral at least! How would you like to be wed to an admiral, Flaith mavourneen?"
Her answer rocked him, in the hunger of her mouth on his.