Title: The Warlock Of Sharrador
Author: Fox, Gardner F. (Gardner Francis)
Language: English
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                       The Warlock of Sharrador

                           By GARDNER F. FOX

            _For unremembered eons the Thing had slept. For
            a million years it had quested through the star
            worlds of its dreams, until it lived only as a
           faint legend in the race memories of mankind. But
           now the time had come for man to recall its name,
            and to worship it once again. Noorlythin arose
            and went out into the world of men and robots._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories March 1953.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The McCanahan came awake in the pearl mists of a Senn dawn, staring
upward into the round blue muzzle of a Thorn blaster. The handgun
hung in the air without visible support, its trigger moving slowly
back. In an instant, it would lash out at him with a thousand tares of
destruction.

He whipped the bedclothes into a geyser of silk and moonylon, and dove
naked over the edge of the bed to roll on the floor and turn over and
over. He brought up against the chair where his uniform belt hung, and
fumbled blindly for his service holster.

The blaster spoke in a soft whooosh of yellow flame, and the bedclothes
puffed once, billowing into a thick, reddish smoke. _That would have
been me, instead of the blankets, if the Little People had not come in
my dreams to whisper in my ears of Flaith's loveliness_, the McCanahan
thought, and tore loose his addy-gun.

His wrist steadied, and he touched the stud. The blaster, hung on a
tensor beam, went red, then white, and began to melt in droplets all
over the thick Morrvan carpet of his officer's quarters. The tensor
beam, held by a minute mechanism inbuilt within the handgun's butt, let
loose, and the blistered, melting thing thudded to the floor.

"It was a close thing," Kael McCanahan told himself, sitting there
naked on the floor.

It had been the sfarri who had sent the gun. The sfarri, who hated the
men of Terra with a hate like a fierce, blazing flame, who would not
scruple at assassination to gain their aims.

They were a cold, efficient breed of men, these sfarri. The farflung
Galactic fleet ships of Mother Terra, stretched in a thin line between
the stars, had crossed addy beams and searirays with their slim vessels
a thousand times. Almost always, Terra lost her ships. Almost always,
those far-ranging sfarran ships smashed the eagle-blazoned Terran
cruisers, and fled like laughing ghosts into the black infinity of
space.

No Terran ship had ever captured a living sfarran. Somehow, with the
barbaric philosophy of hara-kari, they committed suicide. It never
failed.

And slowly, but remorselessly, the ships of Terra and the Solar Combine
were pushed back and back, away from the Rim planets and the close
vastness of the Sack worlds that were so rich in every mineral, jewel
and foodstuff known to man, and even in some that Terran man had never
known.

The Solar Command had ordered Kael's father, Sire Patric McCanahan,
Fleet Admiral, with Captain Raoul Edmunds and Commodore Kael McCanahan,
to Senorech, there to make at last parlay with the High Mor who ruled
the Senn. They were to offer alliances and trade agreements.

Too many times, at the foot of the great ruboid throne of the Senn
ruler, had young Kael McCanahan seen the thin, hard lips of the High
Mor twist cruelly as he lashed out at the gray-haired Admiral. Too many
times had the red flush of fury crept up past his tight white uniform
collar with its crimson Commodore braid encrusted thick on its rich
surface, as he listened to the High Mor explaining to his father the
fact that the men of the Solar Command were no match for the relentless
fury of the sfarri.

The High Mor, it was plain, was eager to ally himself with the sfarri.

In return, the sfarri would rid him of these annoying Terrans.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Thorn blaster that lay melting on the thick pile of his officer's
quarters was the opening shot in the extermination program.

The McCanahan let the breath from his lungs in a sudden relief. He sat
with his back propped against the leg of the chair, and the hand that
held his own Thorn shook so that he put his wrist on his naked knee. He
was a tall man, a man grown hard and fit with the mechanical fitness
that was the hallmark of all officers of the Solar Intergalactic
Command. Blond hair was cropped close to the conformations of his head,
giving his face a hard, carven look.

The mark of deep space was in Kael McCanahan's eyes, and in the catlike
walk and movements of his big body. He had been processed as only
Spacefleet officers were processed, in these days of the Empire, with a
cold precision to his mind and a careful hardness to his body.

He came off the floor and began to dress, sliding into the white
uniform with its crimson facings, pushing feet into highly polished jet
boots. His mind went to his father, the Sire Patric McCanahan, who was
Earth representative at the court of the High Mor, overlord of Senorech.

"If they've made their try for me, they've already made it for him," he
told the room.

He buttoned his white jacket that had the golden eagles at collar
and cuffs. He whipped the leather service belt around his middle. He
fastened the black blaster holster to its pivot.

The door opened to a fingerpress, and he was out in the long, metaloid
hall, moving with long strides. A woman came out of the shadows to meet
him, running.

"Kael! Kael--wait!"

It was Cassy Garson, in her white nursing uniform that was always a
little too tight for her curved body. Like many other Earth officers on
the distant planets of the empire, the McCanahan had fond memories of
the Nursing Auxiliary of the Fleet. Cassy Garson had been a lot of fun,
on a dance floor or under the curved canopy of a canalboat, or on the
silken cushions of a reflexifloor.

Her soft hands caught his, and he could feel her body's tremblings
as she came against him. "Kael, you've heard! Oh, Kael, I'm scared!
What'll they do to us?"

"Talk sense, Cassy!" he snapped, knowing his nerves frayed and jumpy
because of the metal thing he had melted in his room. He softened his
voice, and told her of it.

Her dark eyes were frightened things. "They killed your father tonight!
The same way, probably. A Thorn blaster was found a foot from his
gloved hand. It looks like suicide. The High Mor has sent word that
we're to leave. All of us. No more Earthers on Senorech!"

Cassy whispered in the stillness of the corridor, "We've orders to be
aboard the _Eclipse_ by noon. To chart our course for Antares. To get
out of the Rim planets and stay out."

The McCanahan drew a deep breath. His tight collar choked him, and a
vein swelled and throbbed in his hard face. "He's afraid of the sfarri.
Sfar is close to the High Mor's home galaxy. May the gods curse a man
so driven by fear he'd murder a man who wished him nothing but good!"

Cassy shook against him. "Kael, let's rouse the others! We've got to be
on the _Eclipse_ by noon!"

       *       *       *       *       *

There was nothing he could do now, nothing except swallow the bitter
truth that he was running from a fight, that he was leaving his dead
father on an alien planet with not even a shamrock to blow in the
breeze above his grave. His father, one of the Bloody McCanahans, who
had scratched their names on graves from Mars to Makron, who had been
born to the service of the golden eagles, and now lay with no man to
whisper a prayer over his dead body.

McCanahan shook himself like a cat stretching after a sleep. The anger
boiled within him, locked inside his guts by his tight lips. "I'm going
to get his body, Cassy. I'll take it back with us for decent burial."

Her hands tightened until the red nails cut into his flesh. "You're
a fool, Kael McCanahan! A stubborn fool that's walking to his death!
Don't you understand? That's just what the High Mor wants you to do!
He'll have his dragon killers waiting for you, like cats standing at a
mouse-hole in the kitchen flooring!"

"Let them wait," he growled, but her hand dragged him along the
corridor, to door after door of the fleet barracks. They roused the
honor guard, eighty men in all, the most allowed on Senorech by the
High Mor. Men tumbled from their bunks with sleep glazing their eyes,
but they wakened fast enough, with Cassy and the McCanahan to whip them
into action.

They found Captain Edmunds of the _Eclipse_ half dressed. A small,
chunky man, he showed the years of his service in the crowsfeet at the
corners of his eyes and the faint silver that threaded his curly black
hair.

"I'm sorry, Kael. You're The McCanahan now, but that doesn't mean a
thing, not after what's happened. Get aboard the ship. I'll bring the
men, and whatever they want to take along."

Cassy said, "I've alerted the nurses. They'll be ready at blast-off
time."

Within an hour, it was done. Sober men in white uniforms were filing
out of their quarters by twos and threes, with their warbags slung
over shoulders or hanging by leather thongs from their wrists. They
moved across the city in a body, nurses in their center, their hands
wrapped on the walnut butts of their service blasters.

McCanahan lost himself five minutes before Captain Edmunds took
them out of barracks, toward the silver bullet that was the S.I.C.
_Eclipse_. He stepped from Cassy Garson's side, into an intersecting
corridor, and moved down a flight of steps to the basement. It was
easy, down here among the great heating tubes and dynamos, to stand and
wait until the bootfalls faded. Cassy came once to a ramp, and called,
but her voice echoed hollowly in the cellar unanswered.

Twenty minutes after they were gone across the city, McCanahan was
sliding through the shadows cast by the monolithic buildings, and
moving along the broad avenue flanking the Jaddarak canal. Ahead of him
were the white bulks of the government buildings. Somewhere in those
towering multi-windowed edifices, his father lay dead, with a Thorn
blaster close to his hand.

He reached the high stone wall of the gardens and was hoisting himself
over the red and stone walltop when a dark-faced Senn caught sight
of his Earther uniform and screeched the alarm. The McCanahan cursed
in his throat and dropped to the ground inside the garden, his jet
boots printing their soles deep in the soft loam of a bed of Thallan
sunflowers.

He made for the arched doorway at the near end of the gardens. At a
run he came into the darkness of the groined arches. He knew his way
through these labyrinthine tunnels. With his father, he liked to walk
in the cool corridors where the manacled takkaprots screeched their
birdlike songs and the colored waters of the fountains made a rainbow
of moving brilliance.

The hoarse, brazen pitch of the bry-horns were startling in the
Senorech morning. _They'll be roaming these halls with their blasters
cutting at every shadow_, he thought. _Sooner or later one of the
shadows they shoot at will be mine!_ He had to reach his father's
suite, had to kneel there and do what must be done for Patric
McCanahan, as Patric had done to his own father before him.

They might expect him to come as he was, expect him to fight his way to
his father's side and kneel to whisper a prayer for him over his dead
body. On Earth it would be expected. Expected and guarded against. But
Senorech was not Earth, and on Senorech things were rarely done for
emotional reasons. The McCanahan yanked his Thorn from its sheath as he
slid into a telepetor and twirled a dial. If they were expecting him he
was ready.

Curiously, the suite of rooms was empty, save for the crumpled man
who lay in a white uniform with gold and platinum aigrettes on the
shoulders, and red tykkan braid looped under a crumpled arm. McCanahan
went to his knees, and his lips moved. In the custom of spacemen
everywhere, from the domed tunnels of the Moon to the hellcraters of
humid Brinth, he put his hand to his father's wrist and whispered, "I
swear by the blood that bonds us, you will not have died in vain. I
will make the report, and investigate the reason for your dying."

It was a simple thing, that oath. Many men had spoken it, until it
had become a part of the creed of those who roamed the star world. It
prevented tragedies, and saved lives, for once the reason for a man's
death was known, preventive precautions were taken, so that many men
who otherwise would have died, lived to walk the palm terraces of Mars
and sail the tossing seas of Achernar. The histories of space featured
and explained it, and glamorized its usefulness.

But as the McCanahan let the words trail from his lips, he cursed and
looked down at his palm, where part of his father's wrist had come off,
to stick to it.

He grimaced, and then reason came into his head. His father was
recently dead, no rotting corpse. "Plastiskin," he breathed, and leaned
down, ripping with strong fingers at that wrist, carefully built up to
hide something.

Around his father's wrist was wrapped a length of silvery wire, thin
and fine. The McCanahan leaned forward and untwisted it.

It came away and danced in his fingers, reflecting the blue glow of
the wall mercuri-lamps.

"A harpstring!"

He sat on his ankles and forgot that a mile away the _Eclipse_ was
warming its take-off tubes. "Now why in the name of Brian Born did
father hide such a thing on his wrist? He played no harp, nor anything
else that ever made music!"

       *       *       *       *       *

But this was no time to solve puzzles. With a snap of his fingers, he
rolled up the silvery wire and bound it tight about an ankle, then
thrust his foot back into his service boot. He went to the window and
stared down at the splashing fountains and the sunflower gardens half a
mile below him. The walls were lined with Senn guards, inside and out,
and men with the High Mor's red dragon insignia on their cloaks moved
here and there in the shrubbery, slashing at ferns and jungle vines
with their swords.

"They'll tire of that soon enough," he decided. "Then they'll come
through the palace itself, a floor at a time, working the place over
with the point of a dagger and the muzzle of a Thorn."

They would be expecting him to hide. They would be expecting him to
keep retreating ahead of them until they trapped him high above, in a
cloud-room or on a rooftop. A Senn or a sfarran would act like that.
They would do the smart, the sensible thing.

"Faith, my belly tells me it's the smart thing for myself as well," the
McCanahan muttered. "But my head tells me something else again."

He wandered the rooms of the palace until he found the wallgrille of
an atmosphere tube. With the edge of his service knife, he worked at
the screws until the plate came loose from the wall. He crawled into
the tube and replaced the grate as best he could. Then, sliding and
levering himself from curve to curve of the tube, he began moving
downwards.

When he came to gentle loops in the tubes, he let go and slid. It took
him three hours to get down, but when he came into the cold metal coils
that could duplicate the atmosphere of fifty planets, he was below the
search level, and as good as a free man walking the streets.

"Except for the uniform," he told himself, glancing down ruefully at
the white and gold resplendence of his fleet garb.

In ten minutes he was crawling up through a street grille, and heading
for the space docks.

He was moving up the Avenue of Emblems, with the gleaming bullet that
was the S.I.C. _Eclipse_ towering above the buildings, nosing its point
skyward, still half a mile ahead of him, when he heard the announcers.
The words were just sounds, at first, like the pennons flapping above
his head from the tall poles, each a gift of the United Worlds.

His mind was torn cleanly with a thin, hard grief, for he was
remembering his father, and the way of his smiling and his gentle
voice, and the fun they had shared together on the Klisskahaenay Rapids
in a boat, or in the crisp darkness of space, with the stars beckoning
and his father pointing them out to him. And his handclasp when he left
for the Academy, his letters, his visits at holidays when the needs of
the Empire were relaxed enough to free the Admiral from his cruiser. It
was a good companionship, that of his father and himself, born of their
mutual need when his mother died on Aldebaran.

And now it was over. No more would he see that smile or listen to that
voice or wonder how it was that his father knew so much more than he
about so many things. They would never hook a lyskansa-fish or blast
a Martian boar with needleguns. They would never find new foods in
restaurants that--

"--under penalty of the red dragon! Repeating! Space Commodore
McCanahan--Kael McCanahan, Earther--is to die on sight. All guards are
hereby warned. McCanahan must not leave Akkalan. He is to be shot on
sight, under penalty of the red dragon! Repeating...."

It sank in after a while. He drew back into the shadows, and the
harpstring tied to his ankle pained him, as if it whispered with his
father's voice. _They're afraid of me and what I can do to them_,
his mind told him. _They don't even dare let me get close to a
spacommunicator panel!_ But why? Why? The McCanahan shook his head
and looked down at himself, neat and trim in the gold and white space
uniform.

"_It's a card with my name on it asking that they shoot me_," he
told the shadows. "_I've got to be rid of it or swallow a dozen
blaster-beams._"

They would be searching the space docks just about now, minutes before
take-off time. They would almost dismantle the ship to find him. And
there would be others, blasters in their hands, stretched all around
the field. They would shoot on sight, to kill, or they would suffer
the fate of the red dragon; and no one in his right mind cared even to
think about that punishment, that took a man a month of agony to die.

McCanahan stripped naked in the shadows and bundled his uniform into
a ball and weighed it with his boots. He made a compact bundle and
threw it up, through the lengthening shadows, onto a low, sloping roof.
Let them find that when they could! Then he turned and ran on the
sun-warmed bricks, away from the field, toward the dirty alleyways that
were the Akkalan slums.

"Now where in the name of the family leprechaun could a man who is
stripped to his buff hope to find a shelter in this unholy town?" he
asked the wind as he ran.

McCanahan thought of Ars Maasen, a little dark man with a colossal
thirst for the pale yellow fire that was Senn wine. His lips twitched
as his memory ran on the nights they had spent together in the low-land
taverns, sampling every liquid that the skills and arts of men could
brew. Ars Maasen traded in lyss furs, and spent his profits faster than
the fierce little desert tycats could breed and run to his traps.

With Ars Maasen he would find Flaith.


                                  II

The cities of the Senorech had been built half a million years ago when
their primates first modelled clay from mud and water. As the years
piled knowledge on their shoulders, their buildings grew and expanded,
but they still showed the heterogeneous planning the first Senn had
put into them. A man could lose himself in the slum quarter, where
the dragon police rarely came, for the High Mor was content to close
his eyes to the manner of a man's profit, providing he paid a good
tax at the end of the year. Under the creaking signs and iron grille
balconies, in the dark street shadows, even a naked man could run free
and unmolested.

He came to a square of light and an open door under a carven tycat.
Carefully he crept closer listening to the song a hundred throats were
bellowing through the smoke and the wine fumes. He came inside on
soundless feet and stood sheltered by a solid oak railing.

Flaith was a breath in a man's throat and a catch at his guts, lovely
in bronze moire, her amber shoulders bared to the curve of her breasts,
the moire slashed teasingly down a naked side to the swell of a white
hip. She leaned on the wooden tabletop, and her slant eyes were clear,
and her crimson hair a flame caught in the blaze of a wall torch.

The McCanahan let his eyes linger on her loveliness, but it was the
little dark man, with the scar across half his face and a full foaming
tankard at his mouth, that he had come to see.

He drew back his arm and threw the pebble he held.

Ars Maasen felt the sting of the rock on his forehead. He lowered his
mug and swore by a dozen gods at the ill manners of men who would toss
rocks in the middle of such a song. And then he felt Flaith's white
fingers, and the dig of her long red nails in his forearm.

"It's Kael!" she whispered. "He's naked and alone!"

"For shame! A fine boy like that and--"

"Hssst, you byblow fool!" she warned. "Go to him and see what he needs!"

She pressed the key to her dressing room into his hand, and when he had
slipped through the men and women toward the door, she stood so the
others could see her. On tiny golden feet she climbed from chair to
tabletop, and her bare arms were amber serpents writhing in the crimson
half-light.

"The Snakes of Slaamsheel," she called to the players, and a roar of
delight went up, for this was an old ballad, and the flame-like Flaith
dancing with skirt to mid-thighs across the tabletops, set the blood
bubbling in a man's veins.

The McCanahan caught the fire of her throaty singing just as Ars
Maasen whipped the cloak off his shoulders and flung it about his chest.

"A full belly, is it?" the dark little man asked. "Wine or Puban ale or
maybe both?"

"I'm sober as the snakes Flaith sings of, and as mean!"

Ars Maasen caught the madness in his voice, and grunted, "Come quickly,
then. This way, across the sill and through the alley to her doorway!"

When they were moving into the shadows of the alley, Kael told him of
his father's death, and of the orders of the High Mor that made him
lower than a Tuuran-peddler. And as the words came through his teeth,
the raw fury that twisted him showed in his eyes. "They blasted him
without a chance for a fight--the way they tried to blast me! Now
they're hunting me for a reason only the Shee fairies could know!"

"Easy, boy. Easy! Talk as you want--it helps ease the pain under your
navel. But don't let the hate shake you so. It blinds a man."

The little trader turned the key in the lock and the stout wooden door
opened inward to a tiny room where an oil lamp cast a dim yellow glare
on a dressing table and stool. Costumes hung from a peg-rack on the
wall above a tycat-skin couch.

"Flaith's room," he muttered. "Only she comes here."

The McCanahan sat on the couch, and with elbows on knees he looked at
the floor and began to swear. He cursed in low Martian, and in fluent
English, in high Centauran and sibilant Antaranese. "May the foul
fiends of Mars' ten hells gnaw his belly! May the imps of Iseen claw
his eyes from now 'til Doomsday! If only Hobgob himself were alive, and
here to fly away over Cureeng with his mean little soul!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Ars Maasen chuckled, and Kael McCanahan bit down on his tongue and
glared hard at him. The little man moved to the dressing table and
lifted a golden carafe. He went to pour the fiery liquid it held, then
turned to glance at the McCanahan. He shook his head and went across
the room and gave him the carafe.

"There are times when a man can't quench a thirst, no matter how much
he drinks. Take it all."

Kael tilted the carafe and let the smokey quistl slide into his mouth.
After a long while he tossed the carafe aside, and drew air into his
lungs. He came to his feet and walked up and down.

"I'll need clothes. Some sort of disguise. I can talk their language
well enough. I'll make out until the heat ebbs away and I can come back
for him. The High Mor! A god and a priest to a god to these heathen
Senn! But he's a man, and man can die, slowly and in great pain, when
he's hated!"

Ars shook his head. "Go away, yes. But forget this vengeance for a long
time. Maybe forever. You'll live longer that way."

Kael put out his hand and lifted the dark man off the floor and shook
him. "He murdered my father! Burned him while he slept, with a Thorn
blaster on a tensor beam! No way to strike back! No chance to fight for
the life he loved!"

He put the little man down and patted his arm. Ars rubbed his chest
where his jerkin had pinched his flesh. "You're a strong man, Kael
McCanahan. But not strong enough to buck the High Mor on Senorech! I
tell you--"

The door came open and Flaith slid in, away from the reek of winey air
and the sound of roaring voices. She closed and locked the door and set
her back to it.

She was a woman to stir the pulse of a man, in her bronze gown with its
slits and deep neck, and the tight fit of its cloth to the swell of her
haunches. Her slant eyes with the long curving lashes, the red fullness
of a moist mouth and the smooth forehead low under the flaming hair had
made her the darling of the quarter. She looked at Kael with her anger
bright in her green eyes, and her lips thinned to a tense line.

"Before you speak, Flaith," said Ars Maasen suddenly, "let me tell you
he isn't drunk, except with hate for the men that killed his father."

When Ars was done with the story she was in front of Kael whispering
softly, "Kael, forgive me! A woman can be a fool! I was one just now,
with the thoughts I had of you."

"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters any more except the man I'm going
to kill some day! They won't let me leave on the _Eclipse_. They're
going to keep me here and hunt me down. And I don't know why!"

Flaith whirled and went to her dressing table. She fumbled at a jar,
lifting the lid and dipping her fingers into jet cream. She said, "I'll
change the look of your face, Kael honey. Wipe away its hardness and
its pain. And somewhere here in all these clothes will be something to
fit you. Ars, look among them!"

For an hour the McCanahan sat while they worked on him, and when the
hour was done, he stared at himself in the mirror and swore by the eye
of Balor himself that no man on all Senorech would know him.

"You're as big and as strong," Ars grinned, studying him. "But you look
like a traveling singer, with those short curls and the shadows under
your eyes. A man who sings to a woman and loves her, and runs with the
dawn!"

Kael snorted, but Flaith nodded.

"A singer or a player of music. Can you use those fingers to coax a
tune from anything but a pretty girl?"

Kael laughed. "And what would a man whose family came from Galway be
playing? I remember a night I sang of love to a woman on a balcony over
the canals of Shar Lir before I put the harp aside and coaxed music
from her flesh."

Flaith flushed and scowled, then bubbled laughter.

"You used a harp, that night, you faithless rheenog! A harp that I
bought and put aside with my tears, like a moonstruck schoolgirl!"

She fumbled in a chest and drew it out. The lamplight caught its thirty
strings and made them glitter. Her fingers stroked it, and her eyes
were tender as she lifted them to his face.

Flaith shrugged her shoulders. "I'm crazy. I'm moonstruck and as mad as
the ghouls that haunt the rim of Braloom! But--I'm going with you!"

And when Kael would have argued, she put her fingers across his lips
and shoved him toward the door.

"Wait outside! Neither you nor Ars nor any man we meet will know Flaith
for the shameless little gypsy she's going to turn into! Do you think I
want those fingers coaxing music from that harp for anybody but me?"


                                  III

The old rock road from Akkalan to the cities of the Inland Seas is
long and broken. Deserts spin their sandy webs across the shards of
its ancient cobblestones. Gaunt black ruins of forgotten cities can be
glimpsed dimly in the fading sunset, at the foot of the Samarinthine
Hills, or standing atop the stone slabs that mark the caravan routes
from Pint to Kanadar. Few used the old stone road, and the few who did
travel it were so wrapped in their own cares--for this was a road much
frequented by criminals and their like--they had no thought for the man
and woman who sat by the edge of a running stream, twenty feet from the
crumbled side of the highway.

Kael's long fingers swept the taut strings of the silver harp, and a
burst of clear sound came flowing forth in a wild, free call. And then
the sound was softening, deepening, and in it was something of the peat
bogs of Iar Connacht, and something of the chill wind that sweeps the
Finnihy from Kenmare to Killarney. A soul wept bitterly in the strings'
twanging, with the tears of Deirdre staining its cheeks, and the
terrors of Strongbow's son clutching its middle.

"Ai, to be like Ossian, with the power to move men to laughter or to
tears with the playing of his fingers on the strings," he whispered to
Flaith, where she lay with her chin pillowed on a white fist, staring
at him. "But a man does what he can with what he must, and I'm not one
for blaming the tool in my hand. It's a good harp."

"It was made by Brith Tsinan," Flaith told him dryly.

The McCanahan opened his eyes at that, and held the harp so as to
admire its fluted curve and ornate column. He touched the strings again
and they wept at the deftness of his touch. He moved them again and
made them laugh.

Flaith wriggled her naked toes to the lilting rhythms he drew from
the strings. Across the star lanes and the paths of distant planets,
men and women had carried these tunes, and though they lay as dust in
their graves, something of their memories sat in Kael McCanahan's
fingers this day.

He made the harp sing of Tara and the great hall of Cormac MacAirt, of
the baying hounds that ran in the hunts at Clonmell, and the cursing
stones of Monasteraden.

The girl rolled on her back in the grass, and the worn cloth of her
blouse grew taut across her breasts. "Teach me words to put to those
songs, Kael McCanahan," she whispered, "and we'll eat well from the
coppers and silver bits we take in the marts like Clonn Fell and
Mishordeen."

"Words? Songs? I don't know anything about those. Make up your own
words while I play to your ears and the sunlight, and the joy of being
alive!"

And at the thought of life, he thought of death, and remembered his
father lying on the floor with a Thorn blaster close at hand, and
remembered Captain Edmunds and Cassy Garson and the rest who had lifted
from Senn in the S.I.C. _Eclipse_, and what had happened to them after
that!

He stood suddenly. The scowl was black across his face as he lifted the
harp. He threw it from him roughly. Its strings screamed angrily as it
skidded across the ground.

"I sit here and play music, and my father calls to me in whatever grave
they gave him! I ought to be thinking of finding the High Mor and
choking the life from his throat with these hands!"

Flaith put her long fingers to her red hair and shook it free to the
breeze. Her slant eyes brooded at him as she remembered that day--weeks
back--when they had stood outside the walks of Akkalan watching the
destruction of the _Eclipse_ under the cruiser beams of the High Mor's
space fleet.

Kael had watched, sick and twisted. "That rotten mother's son ordered
her smashed! He couldn't find me, so he played it safe and killed them
all!"

He went mad for a little while, and Flaith clung to him with sharp
nails digging into his arm and back, screaming in his ear. Only when
she buried her teeth in his neck and tasted blood did he come back to
sanity.

Now, remembering all that, and knowing how the death of his father and
the destruction of the _Eclipse_ ate in his middle with a sort of
sharp, acid bitterness, Flaith watched the McCanahan lift the harp from
where he had flung it. A silvern string was curled up, snapped by the
rocks across which it had skidded.

"Now, how can we replace that?" Kael wondered. And then his fingers
were slipping off his boot and lifting loose the harpstring he had
taken from his dead father's wrist.

"It isn't a d-note," he told Flaith, "but it will have to do. I'll not
touch it oftener than I must."

He attached the string, and tested it with sweeping fingers. He
growled, "Only Ossian himself would know the difference."

The McCanahan brooded less and less in the days that followed, and as
they moved along the road that bent in a wide arc about Drekkora and
beyond the snowtopped hills of Sharn, he slipped back into the Kael
McCanahan she had known in the taverns. Laughter came back to his
lips, and he turned more and more to the harp, coaxing magic from its
strings, that seemed to soothe his spirit.

As he played, Flaith hummed with him, and words came to her lips, words
that matched the wild, clear music, and she sang these words to the
ancient melodies, and at last they came to Clonn Fell.

       *       *       *       *       *

The stalls that lined the Square of the Balang were hung with priceless
tapestries from the looms of Beinoll and Drithdraga, and were bright
with the potteries of Lamanneen. Men and women of city house and desert
tent brushed through the stalls, fingering the wares, haggling over
prices, dipping into leather purses for stored coins. Many there were
whose fingers waved to the sounds that came from the big fountain in
the square where a tall man sat and played a silver harp.

No man would have known the McCanahan in this brown stranger with the
naked chest gleaming through the rents of his worn, dusty jerkin,
with his loose cloth trousers fastened at naked ankles with metallic
cording. And no man would have known Flaith in the dark-skinned gypsy
wanton, with her midriff bare above her flapping skirt of transparent
teel and below the woven halter that bound her breasts. She was a
gamin who laughed and swayed her hips as she sang, and her eyes flashed
and flirted with the slack-jawed farmers in from fields and furrows.

A sudden jostling took the farmers and the merchants as they listened
to the harpstrings. They made way sullenly for the file of sfarran
warriors who came shouldering a path arrogantly through the press. They
were tall, handsome men, their lean faces swart and dark. They looked
like fighting men, trim in black and gilt field uniforms. Their black
eyes moved everywhere, missing nothing.

Now the sfarran detail was closer to the marble fountain where Kael sat
with Flaith huddled close against him. He could feel the shiver run
through her bare arm where it pressed his side.

She whispered, "They look for us," and her dark eyes surveyed him,
studying his disguise. He could read the approval in them.

The sfarri glanced at them and passed on.

A man cursed softly from the shadows. There was a wild flurry of capes
and sandalled feet. A peddler, with a scraggly gray beard flowing
across his chest, ran like a frightened rat from a group of Kash
cattlemen and into a thick thong of rug merchants from Stig.

"A rykinthus peddler," whispered Flaith.

Kael felt the fury rise in him. The sfarri governed the people of this
planet as they might a herd of cattle. There was no emotion in the
chase. It was hunt and man down, capture him! Take him to the sfarri
tribunal, where an atomic disintor ray would blast him into thick white
powder.

The peddler ran past Kael on shaking legs.

In his darkest eyes Kael read the angry terror that lay deep within
him. Teeth gritted, Kael moved clumsily, bumping into the foremost of
the sfarri pursuers, throwing him off balance. Two others ran into him
and fell heavily to the cobblestones of the square.

The sfarran officer rose, tight-lipped at this clumsiness. His hand
went to the holster of his addy-gun. Kael rammed a fist to his middle
and slid sideways, his harp still in his hand. With a backward lash of
his arm he drove the harp's heavy crown into his temple.

The blow knocked the harp from his hand. He scrambled after it, where
it lay on the cobblestones. His fingers missed as he snatched at it
and swept across the strings. At the harsh, discordant sound that rose
into the air the sfarran officer who had been reaching for him fell
awkwardly to the stones, sprawling lifelessly.

Other sfarri were falling too, as if the breath of life had been blown
from them. They lay here and there beside the fountain, like dead men.

Kael stared dumbly, hearing the shouts of the people of Clonn Fell
falling back from the lifeless sfarri.

Then he whirled and slipped in among the crowding merchants and
farmers, pretending that he was driven by stark terror.

A moment of wild, flurried movement, and he was free, darting behind
a wooden wagon toward the heavy drapes of a carpet stall. Flaith was
shrinking back, also losing herself in the milling mob.

Kael saw her, dove toward her.

She cried out, "What was it? How'd you do it? What killed them?"

"I don't know! We have no time to play guessing games!"

He caught her hand, dragged her into an alleyway where the massive
stone walls of ancient buildings towered high above them. The dark
shadows they cast lay like shielding hands that shrouded them in sudden
darkness.

Flaith panted, "You touched your harp! It made a sound! That must have
done it!"

"I know all that! But for the sake of your unborn children, stop
talking and run!"

       *       *       *       *       *

They went swiftly through the narrow streets, burdened only by the
silver harp. Under a stone archway, Kael swung to the right. A small
figure stood in the doorway, beckoning to them. It was the bearded
peddler Kael had saved from the sfarri.

"This way," the peddler called. "Lunol forgets no man who saves him
from death!"

An oak door opened. From it, a stone stair led down into a pit of
Stygian blackness. The peddler put a hand on Kael's belt, dragging him
down into the gloom. They went swiftly, toward a stream of water that
rushed and gurgled darkly between two narrow paths of brick that jutted
outward from the sheer rock walls.

"The sewer system of Clonn Fell! Quickly, along the ledge! Gods be with
us! If the sfarri follow and clap their hands on us they'll throw us to
their torturers!"

The peddler whimpered in his fear as he scurried along the narrow brick
ledge. Kael and Flaith ran after him. Soon their sandals were wet with
the accumulated filth and slime of centuries. They moved swiftly, with
the dim light of tiny bulbs, high in the domed ceiling, guiding their
feet.

They went for miles through the sewer, deep down under the streets of
Clonn Fell.

When they emerged into bright sunlight, they stood on a wide beach
where the gray, cold waters of the Taganian Sea rolled restlessly.

Flaith sank on a rock, one hand pushing back her thick red hair. Kael
read her weariness in her haggard face.

"Why were the sfarri after you?" he asked the peddler. "What did you
do?"

Lunol shrugged. "I dwell in the Clith Korakam desert that stretches
from the ocean here to the cliffs of Kamm."

Kael frowned his puzzlement.

It was Flaith who explained. "The black tower of Balzel lies in
the Clith Korakam desert. It is a place forbidden to all people of
Senorech."

The old man whimpered his fright. "I saw a man come out of that tower.
It was many months ago. He was a tall man with a bald head and scrawny,
withered arms. And yet there was something in the manner of his
walking, something in the way he held his head, that sent a cold chill
of terror down my spine!

"Since then I have had dreams. Terrible, frightening dreams! Dreams
of places where no man has ever been! The sfarri have been hunting me
since then. It took them a long time to find me, but now--"

Lunol shrugged. "From here it is not far to Clith Korakam. Once I am on
its sands no man will ever be able to find me! I've spent all my life
on those sands. I know them as I know the fingers of my hands."

Kael looked at Flaith. "Sure, they'll be after us, too, now! They know
what we look like. They'll want us for helping this one get away."

"What can we do?"

The old peddler smiled. His swart face lighted under the loose cowl of
his kufiyah.

"Come with me. I will make a home for you on the desert where none
shall ever find you."

Flaith said, "Perhaps they won't know about us. We left the sfarri
lying like dead men, remember!"

Lunol looked his interest.

Kael said, "I touched my harp and the sfarri fell like poisoned
insects. Why they fell I do not know. Do you?"

Lunol shrugged his shoulders. "I am an ignorant man. I do not know
about these things. But this I do know. If we do not go into the
desert, sooner or later the sfarri will find us!"

They set off across the sands, past the high-humped rocks that were
beaten and weathered by the fierce storms that ravaged the planet. They
struggled across the burning wasteland, their throats choked with the
heat and the sand.

The sun glowed down on them, making sweat run in tiny rivers that
plastered their robes to their flesh. The hours went by. Night came,
and they slept where they fell, exhausted.

With the sun, they were up and moving. The days came and went, long
eternities of heat and thirst, through which they plodded in the
shifting sands. They were tiny motes of life against a backdrop of
level, desolate loneliness.

They crossed ancient beds of rock, where once, in forgotten eons, a
sea had rolled. Here Kael had to lift and carry Flaith, for her thin
sandals were gone, and her white feet were red with blood where the
stones had cut them.

They went on and on. They stopped at an oasis, here and there, to
quench their thirst in the cool waters of a subterranean spring. They
ate of the dried figs and bits of hard black bread that Lunol carried
in his girdle.

Toward dusk of their sixth day on the desert, Lunol cried out. They
focussed eyes salt-encrusted with dried sweat where his finger pointed.

"There! See yonder, and know Lunol did not lie!"

       *       *       *       *       *

There was livid fear in the eyes of the old peddler as he gestured at
the glistening black pile of the tower lifting upward from the sand. It
was almost as if he expected to see something dark and fearsome slip
from the basalt blocks and come hunting him.

"It's been there for thousands of years," he whimpered. "Even when the
balangs roamed these sands, the tower was there."

Flaith came close to Kael. "I'm frightened! There's something wrong
with it."

Kael snorted and walked forward through the sand, ploughing his way
where the wind had piled thick granules. Flaith ran a few steps after
him, her hand seeking his arm. Behind them, could hear the peddler
moaning.

"I tell you," he chattered, "I've seen it come out of the tower on
clear nights when there wasn't a wind stirring across the sand. It just
moved around, all white and shining, making the sand lift and whirl,
like a storm down off the Barakian hills. It was cold. Terribly cold!
The sand was frozen solid where it had been."

The McCanahan stared at the tower. It was tall, formed of black basalt,
a thick column of rock that was windowless and seemingly doorless.
At the base of the column was a long, low building that stretched on
either side of the tower for forty feet. Two red pylons, carved and
polished, stood like pointing fingers at its ends.

The old peddler was wringing his hands. "It wasn't human, that thing.
It could kill as easy as a harlot winks! Once I saw a hare run past it.
It stretched out a thin wire of that cold white stuff and touched the
rabbit, and the rabbit died. I'm afraid!"

Kael turned and caught the old peddler, yanking him to him.

"You've bleated and brayed ever since we got out of Clonn Fell! Go back
if you want!"

The old man's eyes glazed in his brown face. A wind stirred the wisps
of whitish hair that straggled from under his kufiyah, and the springs
of thin beard that fluttered on his chin. He seemed to shake himself,
and at an effort, his eyes cleared.

"No! No! You saved me from the sfarri. I told you the tower was the
only place where the sfarri never came, on all of Senn. But to go to
the tower, to meet that thing--"

The McCanahan let the old man go, gently. He was ashamed of the burst
of rage that had shaken him. He drew in a lungful of the hot desert
air. He was alone on Senn. His comrades in the _Eclipse_ had been
destroyed. The High Mor was seeking him across a world, and to have
this peddler whimpering his fear in his ears was proving too much.

He said gently, "Sorry, old one! Sooner or later the sfarri will come
here to the tower. After they have searched all Senn. They will find
us. Maybe inside that tower--"

Lunol shivered. "No man can live inside the tower. No man can approach
it. Death strikes down all who try! I've seen too many animals run
close to it and--hofff!--they go up in smoke! There's a band of death
all around it. If you go too close, you'll be the one to turn into
smoke!"

Kael McCanahan shrugged. "As well go up in smoke as die under a Thorn
blaster held in a sfarran hand!"

He went on alone.

Flaith whimpered, watching him. She crouched, her long-nailed fingers
digging into the soft flesh of a white thigh. Her eyes were wide,
frightened.

He went twenty feet, then thirty. He grew smaller, walking across the
flat stretch of dunes toward the great black tower.

As he walked, the McCanahan threw his blaster, fastened on a length of
rope, ahead of him. If some electrical force was probing, it would seek
out the metal of his addy-gun and shatter it.

Nothing happened to the gun.

He walked on and on.

No death struck at him. Now he stood under the shadow of the great
gateway that was formed of a queer, sleek marble that held green fire
frozen beneath its glazed surface. He put a hand on the gate and pushed.

To his surprise, the doorway opened, noiselessly.

Kael moved under the arched gateway, into a region of dim light and
sharp black shadow, where a towering pile of glass and metal bulked
huge in the center of the hall.

And then his legs crumbled beneath him, and Kael McCanahan went down,
onto the tiled yellow flooring of the tower room.


                                  IV

He floated bodiless in space. The stars swirled about him, moving
endlessly in their orbits. This was death, he knew. But it was a
strange form of death, for here and there he could recognize familiar
constellations, saw nebulae and galaxies that he knew.

_This is not Noorlythin!_

The voice swirled about him, rumbling out of the black stretches of
space itself. The McCanahan could feel eyes on him, hidden eyes that
probed at him, lancing through him with the remorseless certainty of a
surgeon's electroniscalpel.

_This is a Terran. A man named McCanahan. He is frightened!_

_He was within the tower. Only Noorlythin could live in that trap of
hell. I do not understand!_

Something touched him, as gently as a Spring breeze off the sea. And
with the touching, the eyes of Kael McCanahan came open to the robed
figures that floated between the stars. He tried to see their faces,
but only a blinding whiteness returned his stare, under the low hoods
of the robes.

_Seek not our faces, Terran. To you, we are as the sun!_

His tongue was thick and swollen. He mumbled. He swallowed, as if to
clear his throat.

"Where am I? Who are you? I walked into the tower and--"

What had happened to him on that yellow floor? His knees had buckled
and he had gone down with an intangible force crushing him. Kael shook
his head.

_We are the Doyen. An ancient race, a race of once-men who have lived
out the span of our lives a million centuries. In that time, we
changed. Our bodies evolved upward from their primal shape, striving
always to progress to that last, final shape of all._

"Noorlythin? He is one of you?"

_Once he was. But Noorlythin could never forget the adoration that was
showered on us by the sfarri. He hungered to be worshipped as a god,
as once he was, many eons ago. Noorlythin turned his back to us, the
Doyen. He has gone back, resuming the primal shapes of the men whose
race is young._

Fear came to McCanahan there among the stars. It crept in through the
unspoken words of the robed things, clutching at his mind with frozen
fingers. He shook uncontrollably before he could assert himself.

"This Noorlythin. You seek him?"

_He has broken the Doyen law. He has become as an animal. With his
powers, he can be a god to any primal race. No primate can stand to
him, and well he knows it. When he is ready, when he has used the
sfarri to conquer all the primal races of the galaxy, he will ascend
into the living sacristy of the Temple of Sharrador. There, once again,
he will be worshipped with living sacrifices, with orgies that only a
primal race can conceive and execute._

The McCanahan said, "You aren't telling me all this just to talk."

_You are a poor servant. Your flesh is weak. Yet must we use you
against Noorlythin!_

"How? How can I help?"

And then all space was shaking, flowing in a liquid stream, inward
toward a whirlpool of light that swam around and around, sucking the
stars and the black deeps of space into its maw. And as the stars and
space flowed faster and faster, so flowed McCanahan stretched and
lengthened and tortured....

       *       *       *       *       *

He sat on the yellow tile of the ancient tower. A tumble of red hair
shifted and tossed before him as Flaith's white hand shook him. Beyond
her, near the open green marble door, stood the peddler. His eyes
burned with the fright in his face.

"Kael! You were so still. I thought you dead!"

She helped him to his feet. He swayed, almost retching with the pain
that spasmed his muscles. Flaith was a blur of white before him. He put
his hands to her soft shoulders, and his fingers dug in. He held to
her, as to reality.

Slowly the floor solidified and steadied beneath his buskined feet. The
pain slid away, slowly, then with greater speed.

"Out there," he said thickly. "Things. Bright things. Maybe made
of energy itself. They spoke to me. Told me about something named
Noorlythin. It was as if I was suspended in space itself. Want me to
help them."

Flaith came against him until the hard tips of her breasts burned his
naked chest. Her voice was a flow of terrified sound.

"The Doyen! They are the Doyen! We on Senn always thought they were
just a myth, like the balangs! They are gods, Kael! The gods of all
space!"

The McCanahan grunted. "Well, gods or not, they want to make a servant
out of me. They want me to help them round up some character named
Noorlythin."

From the doorway the peddler groaned. His eyes rolled in his head. A
white froth bubbled on his lips.

"Noorlythin, the evil! Noorlythin, who lived in the olden days, when
all Senorech worshipped him with blood sacrifices. Even today, on the
altar in the Temple of Krebb, the dark stains are still there!"

The McCanahan turned away to stare upward at the great metal machine
that bulked monstrous in the dim light. It was formed of black steel
and silvery chrome. Its tubes and power relays were inset under thin
glass globules so that it resembled a gigantic, transparent-backed
spider. High above its arching shell, reaching upward into the dimness
of the tower itself, were half a hundred floating, glowing balls that
danced and spun in the wind eddies.

Stretching on either side of the central hall were wide corridors,
their walls lined by glass bubbles that projected outward like bulging
eyes.

The McCanahan moved toward the near corridor, his eyes caught by a
scene within one of the glassine bubbles. Flaith followed him, afraid
to be alone.

They halted before a curving prism, discovering it to be a dioramic
window that seemed to peer into the heart of a distant planet. Flaith
whispered, "It's the planet Sfar! I'd know those cold-faced men
anywhere!"

Frozen, tiny faces stared back at them from a great, white city, set
like a jewel on the shore of a wide, blue sea. The little figures were
caught in a locked moment of time, attending to their duties. Some
moved with weapons, some drove sleek monocars.

"There's something about them," Kael muttered, scowling. "They're so
perfect! They make every move count as if it would be their last. Each
of them is long and lean, with bright, keen eyes that never miss a
thing!"

Flaith put a hand on the glassine bubble, leaning closer, staring down
at the magnified scene. "It's funny, but--"

Her slant eyes slid sideways at the McCanahan, amusement swimming
in them. "I've noticed something that I thought _you'd_ see, Kael
McCanahan!"

His eyes studied the girl in front of him as she cocked her head at
him. Even in her tattered garments, through which the McCanahan caught
disturbing glimpse of white, rounded flesh, the redhaired Flaith was a
tantalizing morsel of womanhood. He put out a long arm and drew her in
against him.

"Och, now what would I have been missing that you, with your cat's
eyes, have seen?"

She shrugged elaborately. "If you haven't missed them, I won't tell--"

"Shades of Bridget na Gablach! Their women!"

"They have no women! No man of Senorech has ever seen a sfarran girl.
Rumor says that they shelter them because of their loveliness. But if
this a diorama of the sfarran planet, and there are no women, then--"

Kael grunted. "You and your crazy theories! Look, woman! See for
yourself. There are women there. There must be women!"

But though they hunted along all that corridor, staring at the
sfarran world and its divers shapes and colors, its desert storms and
wind-tossed seas, its magnificent white cities that looked like milky
jewels, they found no woman.

For two hours they hunted, until the McCanahan discovered that by
moving a red lever he could make the scenes within the bubbles come
to life. The tiny men moved, as if released from a frozen tomb. They
walked and piloted their vessels, and went about their tasks. Yet even
so, no woman appeared.

"It's some sort of televisic communicator," the McCanahan muttered,
"that's spacecasting across a billion billion miles of space."

"They have no hospitals, either," said Flaith in a troubled voice.

"Now what will you be meaning by that?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The redhead smiled wryly. "Even in this advanced day and age on
Senorech, Kael my darling, women still go to hospitals to have their
babies!"

The McCanahan scowled. "And if there are no hospitals, they'll have
their brats at home, won't they?"

"Brats, indeed!" flared Flaith, whirling, chin high.

"Peace, peace," grinned Kael. "It's only teasing I was. But I begin to
see your drift, mavourneen. No women, no hospitals, no children. Then
the sfarri are not human. Or maybe it's because they're ovopoid. Maybe
they're sexless, like an amoeba, or maybe they fertilize themselves and
lay an egg to hatch a little sfarran."

"There are no little sfarri. All are grown men. Every last one."

McCanahan brooded with his lower lip thrust out. "No little ones. No
coibche to bind a man and a woman in holy matehood. No women, even, to
comfort a man when he's sad with loneliness. Then they aren't human,
with no heart in their chests to beat a little faster at the kiss from
a woman's lips. And if they have no hearts, they must be--

"_Robots!_"

The McCanahan walked in his excitement, taking long steps that drew
him past the metal machine with its glass-encased tubes and wirings.
"_Robots!_ No wonder they're perfect! No wonder it is that none has
ever been caught by a Terran battle fleet for questioning! Being
robots, they destroy themselves before capture. And being robots, too,
they fight with the same mechanized, incredible fury that's smashed a
dozen war fleets between Achernar and Sol."

The McCanahan was warming to his subject. "We fought the sfarri across
a score of galaxies, ever since my grandfather Rhoderick--bless his
memory!--first crossed atomic disintegration beams with their cruisers.
They've pushed us back, away from the Rim planets. Everywhere our
paths have met, there's been bloody war. Bloody? Ha! There's been no
blood spilled on their side. Just cogs and wheels and wire!"

Flaith tossed back a lock of reddish gold hair from before her eyes.
"You killed them in Clonn Fell. You slew them when you touched your
harp strings! The sound did it."

"The harp of Brith Tsinan. Aie! It had the silver string that I took
from my father's wrist attached to it. Do you remember how I broke the
other, when I threw the harp on the road from Akkalan? Where is the
harp, Flaith?"

The old peddler came shuffling forward from the doorway, dropping his
shoulder to loosen the strap that held the black sack to his back. From
the sack the bright silver harp tumbled into the McCanahan's eager
fingers.

He lifted the harp and set it to his shoulder. His hands played across
the strings, and the wild sharp peal of the strings swept up and
through the tower.

In answer to the high, keening notes, a tube in the great metal machine
spanged shrilly. The tinkle of broken glass was loud in the sudden
silence as Kael dropped his fingers from the quivering harp strings.

Lunol, the peddler, cried out harshly, his face a wet mass of sweating
fear. Flaith screamed high and shrill. Her bare arm lifted and pointed.

The McCanahan whirled, and his harp fell from numb fingers.

Bright and blazing, like the core of a giant sun, a whirling mass of
fiery matter whirled and quivered, pulsing before the great machine.
Its incandescence was blinding, brilliant. They could read the fury in
the flame of its sentient heart. They needed no voice to tell them.

_Noorlythin!_

The sunburst of brilliance lifted, shuddering. It foamed and grew,
incandescent in the sheer brilliance of the white fire that burst and
bloomed within it.

A thin stream of fire reached out, touched Lunol and laved him in its
blinding whiteness.

And Lunol shrank in upon himself, grew smaller, almost tiny within the
bubble of brilliance that held him. He grew, then. Expanded suddenly.
And where Lunol and the hungry white fire had been was just blackened
smoke, drifting across the yellow floor.

Flaith turned her face in against Kael's chest. Her fingers bit their
nails convulsively into his flesh. Her body shook so badly that its
trembling moved the McCanahan as he stood on firmly planted legs.

Another pencil of fire stabbed out.

Stabbed out, and--

Halted!

In midair it halted, spreading across an invisible wall of nothingness
that was erected before the McCanahan and the girl he held.

There was puzzlement in the pulsing of the thing, in the blind, angry
dartings of the pencil-beam of flame. It moved to the floor, and
quested upward to the ceiling. It darted from wall to wall, seeking to
penetrate the barrier that sheltered its victims.

And now the amazement was gone. The white fire burned lower, as if
afraid.

In sheer anger, that made it blaze so brightly that Kael cried out and
lifted a hand to hide his face, the thing stabbed again. And again,
hungrily, raging with insane fury.

_The Doyen shelter you! Only the Doyen could stand against the power of
my will!_

McCanahan could feel the anger fall away before the fear that ate at
the thing. Almost, he could hear its thoughts. Perhaps it wanted him to
hear his thoughts.

_They can save you for a little while. But they cannot shelter you
forever. Not from Noorlythin-the-Doyen can they save you forever! I
shall work my will on you yet, man of Terra! You will crawl on bloody
stumps for legs, waving handless arms for mercy! Begging me with
tongueless mouth for the boon of death!_

It came to McCanahan that the thing spoke out of the grip of its own,
paralysing terror. It mouthed threats to bolster its own esteem.

Kael put his mind to the task and forced a laugh between his lips. He
made his laugh mocking, challenging.

"You'll never kill me, Noorlythin! I am servant to the Doyen. Such as
the Doyen protect those whom they select to serve them!"

The thing that was Noorlythin pulsated like a stream of cobwebs caught
in a mad wind. It lifted and shook, swirled and bellied.

And then, suddenly, it was quiet. It hung a foot above the yellow tile,
barely moving. And the inertia of the thing was more frightening than
all its blinding brilliance.

_The Doyen play the game according to its rules. They will not let me
harm you with my Doyen powers. Only by other gifts can I let the life
from your body, Terran! So be it!_


                                   V

And the thing was gone, blanking instantly from sight with nothing left
behind to show its presence but a bit of black dust stirring restlessly
on the tiling as a breeze came in off the desert and moved down the
long corridor.

"Poor Lunol," whispered Flaith. "Oh, the poor old man!"

The McCanahan lifted his harp and stared dumbly at its glittering
surface of polished silver. "The string from my father's wrist broke
the tube in the machine. It summoned up Noorlythin from--from wherever
he was hidden."

"How can you use that knowledge?" wondered Flaith.

Kael shook his head. "I don't know yet. But I will. Somehow, I'll find
out the truth." He lifted his head and peered about the great tower.
"And where better to begin than here?"

They ate dried meat plucked from Flaith's girdle-pouch, chewing on
hard black bread. And then they slept, with Flaith cuddled against the
McCanahan's length, with his own head pillowed on an arm, both of them
stretched at the foot of the great metal machine.

It was the McCanahan who stirred first, rising from the soft body of
the girl, carefully so as not to disturb her. He wandered about the
tower, studying the strange machines that glistened at him from the
shadows. A man would need a dozen lifetimes to understand these things,
he told himself. He would find no help from them.

He tried to fight the pall of bitter despair that lay across his
shoulders. He was the servant of the gods of space, caught up by them
to hunt out and punish another god.

Laughter touched his lips; but the bitterness in it stung like acid.

How does one fight a god? How does one go about killing a thing that is
made only of white, radiant energy? A thing that by a mere touch of the
blazing brightness that comprises it, can blast him and all his kind to
a black dust that shifts restlessly across a floor, flung by an errant
breeze!

His fists were clenched until the knotted muscles of his forearms
ached. "I can't do it," he told the machines. "I'm only a man. I can't
fight against a god!"

Deep within him, he knew that someone had to make this fight, that
someone from one of the thousands of Terran worlds had to face
Noorlythin, had to stand to him and his awesome power, or the human
race itself would go down, crushed and torn and flung into nothingness,
as a sand castle went down before the relentless roll of the ocean.

When that happened, the sfarri and the Senn would expand, would lift
their faery castles and their monstrous, monolithic palaces, where now
Terran buildings stood. And those of the Senn would have their pick of
the women of Earth.

Of women like--

Flaith!

He turned to find her stretched on her back, her eyes regarding him
wistfully. A shred of her gypsy costume was caught over one shoulder,
falling away from the push of her nearly bared breasts. The thin stuff
at her waist hugged round hips and full upper thighs. The breath caught
in the McCanahan's throat as his eyes ran over her.

She was a woman to steal the breath of a man from his lungs, and send
his senses running in a saraband. She was the dream of every lonely
spaceman at his battle station, of every thul-prospector hanging to a
wandering asteroid with fingers and a suction clamp. With her red hair
frothing over the witchery of her cream-skinned shoulders, she was
Deirdre herself, the perfect woman.

Something of his tangled senses came to Flaith and she laughed, with
the throaty womanness of her pleased at the worship in his eyes.

In the middle of her laughter, a shadow came and lay on the yellow
flooring between them.

A sfarran officer stood tall and lean in the open doorway of the tower,
a glittering Thorn blaster in his right hand.

       *       *       *       *       *

The officer regarded them coldly. It came to Kael as he stood dumbly
returning that hard glance, that he had never seen a sfarran smile.

"You will come with me at once."

He stood sideways to the green marble doors, giving them room to pass
him. Flaith scrambled to her feet; eyeing the gesture with which the
officer moved his blaster. The McCanahan bent and lifted his harp, and
thrust it into the black sack that had once belonged to dead Lunol the
peddler.

Then he was walking with Flaith out the pylon gateway of the tower,
across the hot sands toward the black hull of a sleek sfarran cruiser.

He was midway through the hatch when he paused, staring.

There were sfarran men and officers inside the ship, but they were
slumped over queerly, in distorted postures and attitudes. He had seen
the sfarri like that in Clonn Fell, when he had plucked at the strings
of his harp. But here he had not struck those strings!

Last night he had played for Flaith and Lunol. And when he had played,
a tube in the great, glistening tower machine had cracked into a
thousand different fragments.

That breaking tube might have summoned up Noorlythin from whatever hell
he dwelt.

"Move in, Earther," said the officer behind him.

Kael went with Flaith, at the officer's orders, to an upholstered bench
set against a panelled wall. The officer brooded at them, and they
could read the raw hate that lay deep in his black eyes.

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. That _thing_ had 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 the
_Eclipse_ when 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 blasted _Eclipse_, 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.



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Warlock Of Sharrador" ***

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