The Dying Earth Read online

  But they were upon him; he would be impaled if he sought to climb within the boat. He sprang forward, hewed off the shaft of one spear, chopped at one man's shoulder on the back-sweep, seized the shaft of the third spear, and pulled the man into range of his sword point. The third guard fell back, shouting for help. Ulan Dhor turned, leapt into the boat. The guard rushed forward, Ulan Dhor whirled and met him with the point of his sword in his cheek. Spouting blood and wailing hysterically, the guard fell back. Ulan Dhor threw the lift lever; the boat rose high and moved toward the opening.

  And presently the alarm horn at Cazdal's Temple was adding its harsh yell to the sound from across the city.

  The boat drifted slowly through the sky.

  "Look!" said Elai, grasping his arm. By torchlight men and women crowded and milled in the streets— Greens and Grays, panicked by the message of the horns.

  Elai gasped. "Ulan Dhor! I see! I see! The men in Green! It is possible ... Have they always been ..."

  "The brain-spell has broken," said Ulan Dhor, "and not only for you. Below they see each other, too ..."

  For the first time in memory, Greens and Grays looked at each other. Their faces twisted, contorted. In the flicker of torches Ulan Dhor saw them drawing back in revulsion from each other, and heard the tumult of their cries: "Demon! ... Demon! ... Gray ghost! ... Vile Green Demon!.. "

  Thousands of obsessed torch-bearers sidled past each other, glowering, reviling each other, screaming in hate and fear. They were all mad, he thought—tangled, constricted of brain ...

  As by a secret signal, the crowd seethed into battle, and the hateful yells curdled Ulan Dhor's blood. Elai turned sobbing away. Terrible work was done, on men, women, children—no matter who the victim, if he wore the opposite color.

  A louder snarling arose at the edge of the mob—a joyful sound, and a dozen shambling Gauns appeared, towering above the Greens and Grays. They rended, tore, ripped, and insane hate melted before fear. Greens and Grays separated, and ran to their homes, and the Guans roamed the streets alone.

  Ulan Dhor tore his glance away and held his forehead. "Was this my doing? ... Was this a deed of mine?"

  "Sooner or later it would have happened," said Elai dully. "Unless Earth waned and died first..."

  Ulan Dhor picked up the two tablets. "And here is what I sought to attain—the tablets of Rogol Domedonfors. They pulled me a thousand leagues across the Melantine; I have them in my hands now, and they are like worthless shards of glass ..."

  The boat floated high, and Ampridatvir became a setting of pale crystals in the starlight. In the luminescence of the instrument panel, Ulan Dhor fitted the two tablets together. The marks merged, became characters, and the characters bore the words of the ancient magician:

  "Faithless children—Rogol Domedonfors dies, and so lives forever in the Ampridatvir he has loved and served! When intelligence and good will restore order to the city; or when blood and steel teaches the folly of bridled credulity and passion, and all but the toughest dead:—then shall these tablets be read. And I say to him who reads it, go to the Tower of Fate with the yellow dome, ascend to the topmost floor, show red to the left eye of Rogol Domedonfors, yellow to the right eye, and then blue to both; do this, I say, and share the power of Rogol Domedonfors."

  Ulan Dhor asked, "Where is the Tower of Fate?"

  Elai shook her head. "There is Rodeil's Tower, and the Red Tower the Tower of the Screaming Ghost, and the Tower of Trumpets and the Bird's Tower and the Tower of Guans—but I know of no Tower of Fate."

  "Which tower has a yellow dome?"

  "I don't know."

  "We will search in the morning."

  "In the morning," she said leaning against him drowsily.

  "The morning ..." said Ulan Dhor, fondling her yellow hair.

  When the old red sun rose, they drifted back over the city and found the people of Ampridatvir awake before them, intent on murder.

  The fighting and the killing was not so wild as the night before. It was a craftier slaughter. Stealthy groups of men waylaid stragglers, or broke into houses to strangle women and children.

  Ulan Dhor muttered, "Soon there will be none left in Ampridatvir upon whom to work Rogol Domedonfors' power." He turned to Elai. "Have you no father, no mother, for whom you fear?"

  She shook her head. "I have lived my life with a dull and tyrannical uncle."

  Ulan Dhor turned away. He saw a yellow dome; no other was visible: The Tower of Fate.

  "There." He pointed, turned down the nose of the air-car.

  Parking on a high level, they entered the dusty corridors, found an anti-gravity shaft, and rose to the top-most floor. Here they found a small chamber, decorated with vivid murals. The scene was a court of ancient Ampridatvir. Men and women in colored silks conversed and banqueted and, in the central plaque, paid homage to a patriarchal ruler with a rugged chin, burning eyes, and a white beard. He was clad in a purple and black gown and sat on a carved chair.

  "Rogol Domedonfors!" murmured Elai, and the room held its breath, grew still. They felt the stir their living breath made in the long-quiet air, and the depicted eyes stared deep into their brains ...

  Ulan Dhor said, " 'Red to the left eye, yellow to the right; then blue to both.' Well—there are blue tiles in the hall, and I wear a red coat."

  They found blue and yellow tiles, and Ulan Dhor cut a strip from the hem of his tunic.

  Red to the left eye, yellow to the right. Blue to both. A click, a screech, a whirring like a hundred bee-hives.

  The wall opened on a flight of steps. Ulan Dhor entered, and, with Elai breathing hard at his back, mounted the steps.

  They came out in a flood of daylight, under the dome itself. In the center on a pedestral sat a glistening round-topped cylinder, black and vitreous.

  The whirring rose to a shrill whine. The cylinder quivered, softened, became barely transparent, slumped a trifle. In the center hung a pulpy white mass—a brain?

  The cylinder was alive.

  It sprouted pseudopods which poised wavering in the air. Ulan Dhor and Elai watched frozen, close together. One black finger shaped itself to an eye, another formed a mouth. The eye inspected them carefully.

  The mouth said cheerfully, "Greetings across time, greetings. So you have come at last to rouse old Rogol Domedonfors from his dreams? I have dreamed long and well— but it seems for an unconscionable period. How long? Twenty years? Fifty years? Let me look."

  The eye swung to a tube on the wall, a quarter full of gray powder.

  The mouth gave a cry of wonder. "The energy has nearly dissipated! How long have I slept? With a half-life of 1,200 years—over five thousand years!" The eye swung back to Ulan Dhor and Elai. "Who are you then? Where are my bickering subjects, the adherents of Pansiu and Cazdal? Did they kill themselves then, so long ago?"

  "No," said Ulan Dhor with a sick grin. "They are still fighting in the streets."

  The eye-tentacle extended swiftly, thrust through a window, and looked down over the city. The central jelly twitched, became suffused with an orange glow. The voice spoke again, and it held a terrible harshness. Ulan Dhor's neck tingled and he felt Elai's hand clenching deep into his arm.

  "Five thousand years!" cried the voice. "Five thousand years and the wretches still quarrel? Time has taught them no wisdom? Then stronger agencies must be used. Rogol Domedonfors will show them wisdom. Behold!"

  A vast sound came from below, a hundred sharp reports. Ulan Dhor and Elai hastened to the window and looked down. A mind-filling sight occupied the streets.

  The ten-foot vestibules leading below the city had snapped open. From each of these licked a great tentacle of black transparent jelly like the substance of the fluid roads.

  The tentacles reached into the air, sprouted a hundred branches which pursued the madly fleeing Ampridatvians, caught them, stripped away their robes of gray and green, then whipping them high through the air, dropped them into the great central square. In the chill morni
ng air the populace of Ampridatvir stood mingled naked together and no man could distinguish Green from Gray.

  "Rogol Domedonfors has great long arms now," cried a vast voice, "strong as the moon, all-seeing as the air."

  The voice came from everywhere, nowhere.

  "I'm Rogol Domedonfors, the last ruler of Ampridatvir. And to this state have you descended? Dwellers in hovels, eaters of filth? Watch—in a moment I repair the neglect of five thousand years!"

  The tentacles sprouted a thousand appendages—hard horny cutters, nozzles that spouted blue flame, tremendous scoops, and each appendage sprouted an eye-stalk. These ranged the city, and wherever there was crumbling or mark of age the tentacles dug, tore, blasted, burnt; then spewed new materials into place and when they passed new and gleaming structure remained behind.

  Many-armed tentacles gathered the litter of ages; when loaded they snapped high through the air, a monstrous catapult, flinging the rubbish far out over the sea. And wherever was gray paint or green paint a tentacle ground off the color, sprayed new various pigments.

  Down every street ran the tremendous root-things and offshoots plunged into every tower, every dwelling, every park and square—demolishing, stripping, building, clearing, repairing. Ampridatvir was gripped and permeated by Rogol Domedonfors as a tree's roots clench the ground.

  In a time measured by breaths, a new Ampridatvir had replaced the ruins, a gleaming, glistening city— proud, intrepid, challenging the red sun.

  Ulan Dhor and Elai had watched in a half-conscious, uncomprehending daze. Was it possibly reality; was there such a being which could demolish a city and build it anew while a man watched?

  Arms of black jelly darted over the hills of the island, threaded the caves where the Gauns lay gorged and torpid. It seized, snatched them through the air, and dangled them above the huddled Ampridatvians—a hundred Gauns on a hundred tentacles, horrible fruits on a weird tree.

  "Look!" boomed a voice, boastful and wild. "These whom you have feared! See how Rogol Domedonfors deals with these!

  The tentacles flicked, and a hundred Gauns hurtled —sprawling, wheeling shapes—high over Ampridatvir; and they fell far out in the sea.

  "The creature is mad," whispered Ulan Dhor to Elai. "The long dreaming has addled its brain."

  "Behold the new Ampridatvir!" boomed the mighty voice. "See it for the first and last time. For now you die! You have proved unworthy of the past—unworthy to worship the new god Rogol Domedonfors. There are two here beside me who shall found the new race—"

  Ulan Dhor started in alarm. What? He to live in Ampridatvir under the thumb of the mad super-being?

  No.

  And perhaps he would never be so close to the brain again.

  With a single motion he drew his sword and hurled it point-first into the translucent cylinder of jelly—transfixed the brain, skewered it on the shaft of steel.

  The most awful sound yet heard on Earth shattered the air. Men and women went mad in the square.

  Rogol Domedonfors' city-girding tentacles beat up and down in frantic agony, as an injured insect lashes his legs. The gorgeous towers toppled, the Ampridatvians fled shrieking through cataclysm.

  Ulan Dhor and Elai ran for the terrace where they had left the air-car. Behind they heard a hoarse whisper —a broken voice.

  "I—am not—dead—yet! If all else, if all dreams are broken—I will kill you two . .."

  They tumbled into the air-car. Ulan Dhor threw it into the air. By a terrible effort a tentacle stopped its mad thrashing and jerked up to intercept them. Ulan Dhor swerved, plunged off through the sky. The tentacle darted to cut them off.

  Ulan Dhor pressed hard down on the speed lever, and air whined and sang behind the craft. And directly behind came the wavering black arm of the dying god, straining to touch the fleeting midge that had so hurt it.

  "More! More!" prayed Ulan Dhor to the air-car.

  "Go higher," whispered the girl. "Higher—faster—"

  Ulan Dhor tilted the nose; up on a slant flashed the car, and the straining arm followed behind—a tremendous member stretching rigid through the sky, a black rainbow footed in distant Ampridatvir.

  Rogol Domedonfors died. The arm snapped into a wisp of smoke and slowly sank toward the sea.

  Ulan Dhor held his boat at full speed until the island disappeared across the horizon. He slowed, sighed, relaxed.

  Elai suddenly flung herself against his shoulder and burst into hysteria.

  "Quiet, girl, quiet," admonished Ulan Dhor. "We are safe; we are forever done of the cursed city."

  She quieted; presently: "Where do we go now?"

  Ulan Dhor's eyes roved about the air-car with doubt and calculation. "There will be no magic for Kandive. However, I will have a great tale to tell him, and he may be satisfied ... He will surely want the air-car. But I will contrive, I will contrive ..."

  She whispered, "Cannot we fly to the east, and fly and fly and fly, till we find where the sun rises, and perhaps a quiet meadow where there are fruit trees ..."

  Ulan Dhor looked to the south and thought of Kaiin with its quiet nights and wine-colored days, the wide palace where he made his home, and the couch from which he could look out over Sanreale Bay, the ancient olive trees, the harlequinade festival-times.

  He said, "Elai, you will like Kaiin."

  6. GUYAL OF SFERE

  GUYAL OF SFERE had been born one apart from his fellows and early proved a source of vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void which ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his birth, a harrassment visited on the child in a spirit of sardonic mockery, so that every occurrence, no matter how trifling, became a source of wonder and amazement. Even as young as four seasons he was expounding such inquiries as:

  "Why do squares have more sides than triangles?"

  "How will we see when the sun goes dark?"

  "Do flowers grow under the ocean?"

  "Do stars hiss and sizzle when rain comes by night?"

  To which his impatient sire gave such answers as:

  "So it was ordained by the Pragmatica; squares and triangles must obey the rote."

  "We will be forced to grope and feel our way."

  "I have never verified this matter; only the Curator would know."

  "By no means, since the stars are high above the rain, higher even than the highest clouds, and swim in rarified air where rain will never breed."

  As Guyal grew to youth, this void in his mind, instead of becoming limp and waxy, seemed to throb with a more violent ache. And so he asked:

  "Why do people die when they are killed?"

  "Where does beauty vanish when it goes?"

  "How long have men lived on Earth?""

  "What is beyond the sky?"

  To which his sire, biting acerbity back from his lips, would respond:

  "Death is the heritage of life; a man's vitality is like air in a bladder. Poinct this bubble and away, away, away, flees life, like the color of fading dream."

  "Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty."

  "Some say men rose from the earth like grubs in a corpse; others aver that the first men desired residence and so created Earth by sorcery. The question is shrouded in technicality; only the Curator may answer with exactness."

  "An endless waste."

  And Guyal pondered and postulated, proposed and expounded, until he found himself the subject of surreptitious humor. The demesne was visited by a rumor that a gleft, coming upon Guyal's mother in labor, had stolen part of Guyal's brain, which deficiency he now industriously sought to restore.

  Guyal therefore drew himself apart and roamed the grassy hills of Sfere in solitude. But ever was his mind acquisitive, ever did he seek to exhaust the lore of all around him, until at last his father in vexation refused to hear further inquiries, declaring that all
knowledge had been known, that the trivial and useless had been discarded, leaving a residue which was all that was necessary to a sound man.

  At this time Guyal was in his first manhood, a slight but well-knit youth with wide clear eyes, a penchant for severely elegant dress, and a hidden trouble which showed itself in the clamps at the corner of his mouth.

  Hearing his father's angry statement Guyal said, "One more question, then I ask no more."

  "Speak," declared his father. "One more question I grant you."

  "You have often referred me to the Curator; who is he, and where may I find him, so as to allay my ache for knowledge?"

  A moment the father scrutinized the son, whom he now considered past the verge of madness. Then he responded in a quiet voice, "The Curator guards the Museum of Man, which antique legend places in the Land of the Falling Wall—beyond the mountains of Fer Aquila and north of Ascolais. It is not certain that either Curator or Museum still exist; still it would seem that if the Curator knows all things, as is the legend, then surely he would know the wizardly foil to death."

  Guyal said, "I would seek the Curator and the Museum of Man, that I likewise may know all things."

  The father said with patience, "I will bestow on you my fine white horse, my Expansible Egg for your shelter, my Scintillant Dagger to illuminate the night. In addition, I lay a blessing along the trail, and danger will slide you by so long as you never wander from the trail."

  Guyal quelled the hundred new questions at his tongue, including an inquisition as to where his father had learned these manifestations of sorcery, and accepted the gifts: the horse, the magic shelter, the dagger with the luminous pommel, and the blessing to guard him from the disadvantageous circumstances which plagued travellers along the dim trails of Ascolais.

  He caparisoned the horse, honed the dagger, cast a last glance around the old manse at Sfere, and set forth to the north, with the void in his mind athrob for the soothing pressure of knowledge.

  He ferried the River Scaum on an old barge. Aboard the barge and so off the trail, the blessing lost its puissance and the barge-tender, who coveted Guyal's rich accoutrements, sought to cudgel him with a knoblolly. Guyal fended off the blow and kicked the man into the murky deep, where he drowned.