The Valley of the Flame - Henry Kuttner (a book to read .TXT) 📗

into the dark chamber; the sound of laughter, and flaunting bright cloaks, and clashing steel. The music pirouetted into a gay, lilting dance.

Heavily the king’s voice broke in. The music sank to a whisper.

“There was a man who loved this woman. He took her for his own. And she laughed. Laughed—knowing power as well as beauty, growing drunken at the thought of ruling Paititi. Of ruling the man who was the king.”

Proud, triumphant, the song rose. Ivory arms gleamed.

“And her eyes fell upon a man who was not a king. But she knew that in her arms, any man might be the emperor of the universe, and the equal of the gods. Nor was she wrong. If her embrace meant death, death would be sweet poison.”

Tinkling, mocking laughter, and an undertone of sadness in the music now.

“She was faithless,” the king said, his words falling heavily as stones into the still air. “Those lips were faithless. And the arms of Yrann sought another, and the white body of Yrann yearned too.”

The song hushed almost to silence.

“Long ago. Very long ago. Now she is no longer faithless. Nor is the king sorrowful. Maidens dance before him. They ask his love, but he has none to give. His love is for Yrann, most beautiful of all womankind, and she—she loves him now.”

Tender, obedient, the oboe murmured softly.

“But the king is mad,” the quiet, cool voice said, and the music died into stillness. “There was a red hour long ago when the madness entered into him. That hour will not pass, Yrann, and love and madness dwell forever side by side.”

For a long time, there was no sound but the faint vibration of the cataract making the castle tremble in its iron grip.

“We speak together, Yrann and I, of things forgotten and things that are not forgotten,” the king said at last. “But music is her tongue now.” His voice changed. “Yrann must not die, though Paititi does. I think that you hold a certain answer in your hand, Craddock, and whether I let you open your grip upon that great secret is something I cannot tell yet. We must talk first. There are many questions.”

For the first time Raft spoke. He moistened his lips.

“One question has to be settled first,” he said.

“And that is?”

“I’m not Craddock.”

The eyes watched him. Raft plunged on.

“I tried to tell your soldier, Vann, but he didn’t believe me. I don’t know what story Parror had. It must have been a good one. For Craddock’s in Parror’s castle now, his captive. I came here to rescue Dan Craddock. and my name is Brian Raft.”

“I cannot believe that.”

“Why should I lie?” Raft asked. “What could I gain?”

“You might have many reasons. And yet Parror is clever too. If he had wanted to gain time, he might use deception.”

“Janissa knows who I am. The girl in Parror’s castle.”

“But will Janissa speak the truth?” Darum asked. “Her mind is like a wind, changing and changing. Tell me your story, then. It may be a lie, or it may not. But I will listen.”

Raft talked. He marshaled his thoughts as clearly as he could, though the ruddy dimness of the room played strange tricks on his nerves. When he had finished, the glowing eyes of King Darum were half-closed.

“Go,” Darum said.

Raft hesitated. The deep voice sounded again, more commandingly.

“Go, I said. We will speak again later. Now I must test your story.”

Raft stood up. From the half-glimpsed figure at Darum’s feet that exotic, haunting music breathed out again. Caressing, gentle, and indefinably sad.

The king’s eyes watched him.

Stumbling, Raft moved across the chamber. He felt the velvet folds of the curtain against his face. He lifted it, stepped under its soft drape. Behind him light flared. The music rose shrilly. Raft half-turned.

On a dais strewn with cushions Darum was standing, his face hidden as he looked down at the figure at his feet. Nor had Raft’s guess been wrong as to the loveliness of those ivory limbs, that half-veiled beautiful body. But Yrann’s face was not veiled.

And her face was—horror.

Into Raft’s mind flashed unbidden memory of the cruel-taloned gauntlet he had seen on the king’s hand. Something terrible and savage and mad had destroyed the beauty of Yrann’s face, leaving her goddess body untouched.

The king looked up. His eyes met Raft’s.

Raft stepped backward into the corridor and let the shielding curtain fall into place.

CHAPTER VII. DREAD FLAME

HIS WATCH said minutes had passed, but Raft knew that it had been hours since his interview with the lord of Paititi. Impatiently he waited in his apartment, left alone with his puzzled thoughts. He could not fathom the trick of the door, and Vann, after escorting him back here, had not reappeared. From the balustraded porch nothing could be seen but the torrent pouring lazily into the abyss below.

The room was sterile. It was beautiful, luxurious, but it held nothing that aroused Raft’s interest. Inaction was twanging his nerves into tense irritability. He seemed the only thing not frozen into semi-stasis in this strange land.

A long time had passed when from beyond the window he heard his name called softly. He knew the voice. A stir of excitement quickened him as he hastily stepped out on the balcony. But there was nothing.

Only falling water. Lazy falling water.

“Brian!” The low call came again. “Brian Raft!”

He leaned over the rail, and found himself looking down into the soft, familiar face of Janissa. The aquamarine eyes were darker now, almost purple. She was clinging to grips and footholds on the castle’s wall, crannies where it seemed not even a squirrel could find lodgment.

Catching his breath, Raft leaned down, extending his arm. But Janissa murmured a quick warning.

“Get a cushion, Brian. Bring it. No, I’m safe enough here. Do as I say.”

He hesitated, turned, and hurried back into the room, where he snatched up the nearest cushion and carried it out with him. Janissa had not moved. Her slim body was flattened against the stone.

“Hold it by a corner. Yes, that’s it. And lower it toward me, very carefully. Don’t lose your grip on it.”

Raft obeyed. There was a sudden whir and a flash of steel, and the cushion was almost torn from his hand. From the smooth wall beneath the railing a fan of sharp blades had leaped out, one of them impaling the pillow as Janissa’s flesh would have been pierced had she continued her climb.

Her teeth showed in a smile.

“Now it’s safe, I think. Give me your hand.” With feline agility she clambered up, writhing between the swords so that no blade or edge touched her. On the balcony she shook herself, patted her hair, and took the cushion from Raft.

“You’re alone? I thought you would be. I asked questions before trying this climb.”

“You might have been killed,” Raft said, looking down into dizzying emptiness where the slow cataract poured into bottomless deeps and the slower mist wreathed up in a swaying tower; Then he turned to the girl and, as he met her smile, he felt a little dizziness that did not come from vertigo.

This was the face that had drawn him over miles of river and jungle almost as unerringly as Craddock’s trail had drawn him. No one, he thought, could have looked once upon this delicate, soft, malicious little creature and not wanted to look again.

In their first meeting he had been tired and bewildered. Today he could gaze more clearly into the aquamarine eyes and the gay, yet prim face of this contradictory girl. He stared frankly, trying to make the clear gaze waver.

Janissa laughed.

“We’ve met before, remember?” she jibed.

Raft grinned.

“Sorry. It was just—Do your people here know how beautiful you are?”

“Men of all races must be very much alike,” Janissa parried demurely. “We must think about you just now, Brian Raft. You’re in trouble.”

“Trouble you walked out on, I remember.” He did not mean to let her attractiveness blind him to that memory.

She shrugged lithely.

“What could I do then? Now I’ve walked in again, and you must forgive me.”

He glanced over the balcony rail and shuddered. “You certainly did take a long chance. Lucky you weren’t killed.”

“Not by a fall. Not my race! Though if you hadn’t been here to spring the trap, I might have had some trouble. Let’s go in. We may be seen from another balcony.”

She stepped through the window, stared around, and tossed the slashed cushion away. “Now we can talk.”

Raft followed her, seeing how supple was the movement of her round, smooth limbs as they glided beneath velvety garments. She tilted him a sweetly wicked smile over one shoulder and shook the cloudy tiger-striped hair. There was a mound of silken cushions against the nearer wall. She laid a hand on Raft’s arm and drew him down beside her to a cross-legged seat among them.

“We have much to tell each other,” she said. “And perhaps not a very long time to do it in.”

“You’ll have to start, then. Remember, I don’t know anything at all.”

“I suppose not,” Janissa murmured. There was a soft roughness to her voice when she lowered it, a luxuriant roughness, like a purr. “Not even Craddock knew, really, though he—created—our race. And now he does not remember certain things. So Parror will have to build a device that—”

“Suppose you start at the beginning,” Raft interrupted her. “First, where is Paititi? On my own planet?”

“Yes. We know that, for some of us have gone through the unseen road to the jungle land outside. Not many, and only guardians, like Parror and myself. I went once and only once. It was horrible. Your world is frozen. Nothing moves.

“When we meet others outside, you know, we have to force ourselves to do everything as slowly as people in a nightmare. Otherwise we’d be only a blur when they looked at us. But we cannot live long outside Paititi, unless we carry something of the Flame with us.”

“The Flame?” Raft echoed. “The Flame?”

“The Flame is the source of all life,” Janissa said soberly. “In our whole land there are only two amulets that hold a little fiery seed of the Flame itself. We do not know how to make them. These two are very old, our heritage from the ancient race that lived here before us.” Her eyes narrowed. “Parror has one. I should have the other. It’s my right as Guardian. But the king claims it, and—well, never mind. I have my plans. The time is coming when—”

“Please,” Raft broke in. “First tell me about this business ‘of speed, and your people moving faster than ours. Why?”

“The Flame is sinking,” Janissa said in a somber voice. “That is why Parror sought out Craddock. You see, Paititi was not always as it is now. In the old days, generations lived and died during the day, and other generations in a night. And before that, hundreds of generations in a day. The cycle slows now. Water moves faster than in the days of our fathers. Our memories go back a long way. We have written records, but certain things we had to guess. Before we were human, long, long ago, another race dwelt in Paititi.

“That race built these castles. Men and women not of our species but akin to yours, strong and wise and happy, dwelt in this land and lived beneath the Flame. Then the Flame sank and slept.”

Raft scowled.

“That race died?”

“It did not die.”

“What happened to it?”

She looked away.

“As you came through the unseen road, you must have seen a cavern there—a dark place