The A. Merritt Megapack Read online

  “The Russian had gone fast and far. They talked of Lugur as emperor of all Europe, and Marakinoff under him. They spoke of the green light that shook life from the oldster; and Lugur said that the secret of it had been the Ancient Ones’ and that the Council had not too much of it. But the Russian said that among his race were many wise men who could make more once they had studied it.

  “And the next day I wrestled with a great dwarf named Tahola, mightier far than Valdor. Him I threw after a long, long time, and his back also I broke. Again Lugur was pleased. And again we sat at table, he and the Russian and I. This time they spoke of something these Trolde have which opens up a Svaelc—abysses into which all in its range drops up into the sky!”

  “What!” I exclaimed.

  “I know about them,” said Larry. “Wait!”

  “Lugur had drunk much,” went on Olaf. “He was boastful. The Russian pressed him to show this thing. After a while the red one went out and came back with a little golden box. He and the Russian went into the garden. I followed them. There was a lille Hoj—a mound—of stones in that garden on which grew flowers and trees.

  “Lugur pressed upon the box, and a spark no bigger than a sand grain leaped out and fell beside the stones. Lugur pressed again, and a blue light shot from the box and lighted on the spark. The spark that had been no bigger than a grain of sand grew and grew as the blue struck it. And then there was a sighing, a wind blew—and the stones and the flowers and the trees were not. They were forsvinde—vanished!

  “Then Lugur, who had been laughing, grew quickly sober; for he thrust the Russian back—far back. And soon down into the garden came tumbling the stones and the trees, but broken and shattered, and falling as though from a great height. And Lugur said that of this something they had much, for its making was a secret handed down by their own forefathers and not by the Ancient Ones.

  “They feared to use it, he said, for a spark thrice as large as that he had used would have sent all that garden falling upward and might have opened a way to the outside before—he said just this—‘before we are ready to go out into it!’

  “The Russian questioned much, but Lugur sent for more drink and grew merrier and threatened him, and the Russian was silent through fear. Thereafter I listened when I could, and little more I learned, but that little enough. Ja! Lugur is hot for conquest; so Yolara and so the Council. They tire of it here and the Silent Ones make their minds not too easy, no, even though they jeer at them! And this they plan—to rule our world with their Shining Devil.”

  The Norseman was silent for a moment; then voice deep, trembling—

  “Trolldom is awake; Helvede crouches at Earth Gate whining to be loosed into a world already devil ridden! And we are but three!”

  I felt the blood drive out of my heart. But Larry’s was the fighting face of the O’Keefes of a thousand years. Rador glanced at him, arose, stepped through the curtains; returned swiftly with the Irishman’s uniform.

  “Put it on,” he said, bruskly; again fell back into his silence and whatever O’Keefe had been about to say was submerged in his wild and joyful whoop. He ripped from him glittering tunic and leg swathings.

  “Richard is himself again!” he shouted; and each garment as he donned it, fanned his old devil-may-care confidence to a higher flame. The last scrap of it on, he drew himself up before us.

  “Bow down, ye divils!” he cried. “Bang your heads on the floor and do homage to Larry the First, Emperor of Great Britain, Autocrat of all Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales, and adjacent waters and islands! Kneel, ye scuts, kneel.”

  “Larry,” I cried, “are you going crazy?”

  “Not a bit of it,” he said. “I’m that and more if Comrade Marakinoff is on the level. Whoop! Bring forth the royal jewels an’ put a whole new bunch of golden strings in Tara’s harp an’ down with the Sassenach forever! Whoop!”

  He did a wild jig.

  “Lord how good the old togs feel,” he grinned. “The touch of ’em has gone to my head. But it’s straight stuff I’m telling you about my empire.”

  He sobered.

  “Not that it’s not serious enough at that. A lot that Olaf’s told us I’ve surmised from hints dropped by Yolara. But I got the full key to it from the Red himself when he stopped me just before—before”—he reddened—“well, just before I acquired that brand-new brand of souse.

  “Maybe he had a hint—maybe he just surmised that I knew a lot more than I did. And he thought Yolara and I were going to be loving little turtle doves. Also he figured that Yolara had a lot more influence with the Unholy Fireworks than Lugur. Also that being a woman she could be more easily handled. All this being so, what was the logical thing for himself to do? Sure, you get me, Steve! Throw down Lugur and make an alliance with me! So he calmly offered to ditch the red dwarf if I would deliver Yolara. My reward from Russia was to be said emperorship! Can you beat it? Good Lord!”

  He went off into a perfect storm of laughter. But not to me in the light of what Russia has done and has proved herself capable, did this thing seem at all absurd; rather in it I sensed the dawn of catastrophe colossal.

  “And yet,” he was quiet enough now, “I’m a bit scared. They’ve got the Keth ray and those gravity-destroying bombs—”

  “Gravity-destroying bombs!” I gasped.

  “Sure,” he said. “The little fairy that sent the trees and stones kiting up from Lugur’s garden. Marakinoff licked his lips over them. They cut off gravity, just about as the shadow screens cut off light—and consequently whatever’s in their range goes shooting just naturally up to the moon—

  “They get my goat, why deny it?” went on Larry. “With them and the Keth and gentle invisible soldiers walking around assassinating at will—well, the worst Bolsheviki are only puling babes, eh, Doc?

  “I don’t mind the Shining One,” said O’Keefe, “one splash of a downtown New York high-pressure fire hose would do for it! But the others—are the goods! Believe me!”

  But for once O’Keefe’s confidence found no echo within me. Not lightly, as he, did I hold that dread mystery, the Dweller—and a vision passed before me, a vision of an Apocalypse undreamed by the Evangelist.

  A vision of the Shining One swirling into our world, a monstrous, glorious flaming pillar of incarnate, eternal Evil—of peoples passing through its radiant embrace into that hideous, unearthly life-in-death which I had seen enfold the sacrifices—of armies trembling into dancing atoms of diamond dust beneath the green ray’s rhythmic death—of cities rushing out into space upon the wings of that other demoniac force which Olaf had watched at work—of a haunted world through which the assassins of the Dweller’s court stole invisible, carrying with them every passion of hell—of the rallying to the Thing of every sinister soul and of the weak and the unbalanced, mystics and carnivores of humanity alike; for well I knew that, once loosed, not any nation could hold this devil-god for long and that swiftly its blight would spread!

  And then a world that was all colossal reek of cruelty and terror; a welter of lusts, of hatreds and of torment; a chaos of horror in which the Dweller waxing ever stronger, the ghastly hordes of those it had consumed growing ever greater, wreaked its inhuman will!

  At the last a ruined planet, a cosmic plague, spinning through the shuddering heavens; its verdant plains, its murmuring forests, its meadows and its mountains manned only by a countless crew of soulless, mindless dead-alive, their shells illumined with the Dweller’s infernal glory—and flaming over this vampirized earth like a flare from some hell far, infinitely far, beyond the reach of man’s farthest flung imagining—the Dweller!

  Rador jumped to his feet; walked to the whispering globe. He bent over its base; did something with its mechanism; beckoned to us. The globe swam rapidly, faster than ever I had seen it before. A low humming arose, changed into a murmur, and then from it I heard Lugur’s voice clearly.

  “It is to be war then?”

  There was a chorus of assent—from the Cou
ncil, I thought.

  “I will take the tall one named—Larree.” It was the priestess’s voice. “After the three tal, you may have him, Lugur, to do with as you will.”

  “No!” it was Lugur’s voice again, but with a rasp of anger. “All must die.”

  “He shall die,” again Yolara. “But I would that first he see Lakla pass—and that she know what is to happen to him.”

  “No!” I started—for this was Marakinoff. “Now is no time, Yolara, for one’s own desires. This is my counsel. At the end of the three tal Lakla will come for our answer. Your men will be in ambush and they will slay her and her escort quickly with the Keth. But not till that is done must the three be slain—and then quickly. With Lakla dead we shall go forth to the Silent Ones—and I promise you that I will find the way to destroy them!”

  “It is well!” It was Lugur.

  “It is well, Yolara.” It was a woman’s voice, and I knew it for that old one of ravaged beauty. “Cast from your mind whatever is in it for this stranger—either of love or hatred. In this the Council is with Lugur and the man of wisdom.”

  There was a silence. Then came the priestess’s voice, sullen but—beaten.

  “It is well!”

  “Let the three be taken now by Rador to the temple and given to the High Priest Sator”—thus Lugur—“until what we have planned comes to pass.”

  Rador gripped the base of the globe; abruptly it ceased its spinning. He turned to us as though to speak and even as he did so its bell note sounded peremptorily and on it the colour films began to creep at their accustomed pace.

  “I hear,” the green dwarf whispered. “They shall be taken there at once.” The globe grew silent. He stepped toward us.

  “You have heard,” he turned to us.

  “Not on your life, Rador,” said Larry. “Nothing doing!” And then in the Murian’s own tongue. “We follow Lakla, Rador. And you lead the way.” He thrust the pistol close to the green dwarf’s side.

  Rador did not move.

  “Of what use, Larree?” he said, quietly. “Me you can slay—but in the end you will be taken. Life is not held so dear in Muria that my men out there or those others who can come quickly will let you by—even though you slay many. And in the end they will overpower you.”

  There was a trace of irresolution in O’Keefe’s face.

  “And,” added Rador, “if I let you go I dance with the Shining One—or worse!”

  O’Keefe’s pistol hand dropped.

  “You’re a good sport, Rador, and far be it from me to get you in bad,” he said. “Take us to the temple—when we get there—well, your responsibility ends, doesn’t it?”

  The green dwarf nodded; on his face a curious expression—was it relief? Or was it emotion higher than this?

  He turned curtly.

  “Follow,” he said. We passed out of that gay little pavilion that had come to be home to us even in this alien place. The guards stood at attention.

  “You, Sattoya, stand by the globe,” he ordered one of them. “Should the Afyo Maie ask, say that I am on my way with the strangers even as she has commanded.”

  We passed through the lines to the corial standing like a great shell at the end of the runway leading into the green road.

  “Wait you here,” he said curtly to the driver. The green dwarf ascended to his seat, sought the lever and we swept on—on and out upon the glistening obsidian.

  Then Rador faced us and laughed.

  “Larree,” he cried, “I love you for that spirit of yours! And did you think that Rador would carry to the temple prison a man who would take the chances of torment upon his own shoulders to save him? Or you, Goodwin, who saved him from the rotting death? For what did I take the corial or lift the veil of silence that I might hear what threatened you—”

  He swept the corial to the left, away from the temple approach.

  “I am done with Lugur and with Yolara and the Shining One!” cried Rador. “My hand is for you three and for Lakla and those to whom she is handmaiden!”

  The shell leaped forward; seemed to fly.

  CHAPTER XXII

  The Casting of the Shadow

  Now we were racing down toward that last span whose ancientness had set it apart from all the other soaring arches. The shell’s speed slackened; we approached warily.

  “We pass there?” asked O’Keefe.

  The green dwarf nodded, pointing to the right where the bridge ended in a broad platform held high upon two gigantic piers, between which ran a spur from the glistening road. Platform and bridge were swarming with men-at-arms; they crowded the parapets, looking down upon us curiously but with no evidence of hostility. Rador drew a deep breath of relief.

  “We don’t have to break our way through, then?” There was disappointment in the Irishman’s voice.

  “No use, Larree!” Smiling, Rador stopped the corial just beneath the arch and beside one of the piers. “Now, listen well. They have had no warning, hence does Yolara still think us on the way to the temple. This is the gateway of the Portal—and the gateway is closed by the Shadow. Once I commanded here and I know its laws. This must I do—by craft persuade Serku, the keeper of the gateway, to lift the Shadow; or raise it myself. And that will be hard and it may well be that in the struggle life will be stripped of us all. Yet is it better to die fighting than to dance with the Shining One!”

  He swept the shell around the pier. Opened a wide plaza paved with the volcanic glass, but black as that down which we had sped from the chamber of the Moon Pool. It shone like a mirrored lakelet of jet; on each side of it arose what at first glance seemed towering bulwarks of the same ebon obsidian; at second, revealed themselves as structures hewn and set in place by men; polished faces pierced by dozens of high, narrow windows.

  Down each facade a stairway fell, broken by small landings on which a door opened; they dropped to a broad ledge of greyish stone edging the lip of this midnight pool and upon it also fell two wide flights from either side of the bridge platform. Along all four stairways the guards were ranged; and here and there against the ledge stood the shells—in a curiously comforting resemblance to parked motors in our own world.

  The sombre walls bulked high; curved and ended in two obelisked pillars from which, like a tremendous curtain, stretched a barrier of that tenebrous gloom which, though weightless as shadow itself, I now knew to be as impenetrable as the veil between life and death. In this murk, unlike all others I had seen, I sensed movement, a quivering, a tremor constant and rhythmic; not to be seen, yet caught by some subtle sense; as though through it beat a swift pulse of—black light.

  The green dwarf turned the corial slowly to the edge at the right; crept cautiously on toward where, not more than a hundred feet from the barrier, a low, wide entrance opened in the fort. Guarding its threshold stood two guards, armed with broadswords, double-handed, terminating in a wide lunette mouthed with murderous fangs. These they raised in salute and through the portal strode a dwarf huge as Rador, dressed as he and carrying only the poniard that was the badge of office of Muria’s captainry.

  The green dwarf swept the shell expertly against the ledge; leaped out.

  “Greeting, Serku!” he answered. “I was but looking for the coria of Lakla.”

  “Lakla!” exclaimed Serku. “Why, the handmaiden passed with her Akka nigh a va ago!”

  “Passed!” The astonishment of the green dwarf was so real that half was I myself deceived. “You let her pass?”

  “Certainly I let her pass—” But under the green dwarf’s stern gaze the truculence of the guardian faded. “Why should I not?” he asked, apprehensively.

  “Because Yolara commanded otherwise,” answered Rador, coldly.

  “There came no command to me.” Little beads of sweat stood out on Serku’s forehead.

  “Serku,” interrupted the green dwarf swiftly, “truly is my heart wrung for you. This is a matter of Yolara and of Lugur and the Council; yes, even of the Shining One! And the
message was sent—and the fate, mayhap, of all Muria rested upon your obedience and the return of Lakla with these strangers to the Council. Now truly is my heart wrung, for there are few I would less like to see dance with the Shining One than you, Serku,” he ended, softly.

  Livid now was the gateway’s guardian, his great frame shaking.

  “Come with me and speak to Yolara,” he pleaded. “There came no message—tell her—”

  “Wait, Serku!” There was a thrill as of inspiration in Rador’s voice. “This corial is of the swiftest—Lakla’s are of the slowest. With Lakla scarce a va ahead we can reach her before she enters the Portal. Lift you the Shadow—we will bring her back, and this will I do for you, Serku.”

  Doubt tempered Serku’s panic.

  “Why not go alone, Rador, leaving the strangers here with me?” he asked—and I thought not unreasonably.

  “Nay, then.” The green dwarf was brusk. “Lakla will not return unless I carry to her these men as evidence of our good faith. Come—we will speak to Yolara and she shall judge you—” He started away—but Serku caught his arm.

  “No, Rador, no!” he whispered, again panic-stricken. “Go you—as you will. But bring her back! Speed, Rador!” He sprang toward the entrance. “I lift the Shadow—”

  Into the green dwarf’s poise crept a curious, almost a listening, alertness. He leaped to Serku’s side.

  “I go with you,” I heard. “Some little I can tell you—” They were gone.

  “Fine work!” muttered Larry. “Nominated for a citizen of Ireland when we get out of this, one Rador of—”

  The Shadow trembled—shuddered into nothingness; the obelisked outposts that had held it framed a ribbon of roadway, high banked with verdure, vanishing in green distances.

  And then from the portal sped a shriek, a death cry! It cut through the silence of the ebon pit like a whimpering arrow. Before it had died, down the stairways came pouring the guards. Those at the threshold raised their swords and peered within. Abruptly Rador was between them. One dropped his hilt and gripped him—the green dwarf’s poniard flashed and was buried in his throat. Down upon Rador’s head swept the second blade. A flame leaped from O’Keefe’s hand and the sword seemed to fling itself from its wielder’s grasp—another flash and the soldier crumpled. Rador threw himself into the shell, darted to the high seat—and straight between the pillars of the Shadow we flew!