Enchantress of Venus
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 9
He crossed the square, moving very carefully through the red murk, and presently he saw her.
It was not hard to find her. There was one temple larger than all the rest. Stark judged that it must once have faced the entrance of the fallen building, as though the great figure within was set to watch over the scientists and the philosophers who came there to dream their vast and sometimes terrible dreams.
The philosophers were gone, and the scientists had destroyed themselves. But the image still watched over the drowned city, its hand raised both in warning and in benediction.
Now, across its reptilian knees, Zareth lay. The temple was open on all sides, and Stark could see her clearly, a little white scrap of humanity against the black unhuman figure.
Malthor stood beside her. It was he who had been tolling the votive bell. He had stopped now, and Zareth’s words came clearly to Stark.
“Go away, go away! They’re waiting for you. Don’t come in here!”
“I’m waiting for you, Stark,” Malthor called out, smiling. “Are you afraid to come?” And he took Zareth by the hair and struck her, slowly and deliberately, twice across the face.
All expression left Stark’s face, leaving it perfectly blank except for his eyes, which took on a sudden lambent gleam. He began to move toward the temple, not hurrying even then, but moving in such a way that it seemed an army could not have stopped him.
Zareth broke free from her father. Perhaps she was intended to break free.
“Egil!” she screamed. “It’s a trap...”
Again Malthor caught her and this time he struck her harder, so that she crumpled down again across the image that watched with its jewelled, gentle eyes and saw nothing.
“She’s afraid for you,” said Malthor. “She knows I mean to kill you if I can. Well, perhaps Egil is here also. Perhaps he is not. But certainly Zareth is here. I have beaten her well, and I shall beat her again, as long as she lives to be beaten, for her treachery to me. And if you want to save her from that, you outland dog, you’ll have to kill me. Are you afraid?”
Stark was afraid. Malthor and Zareth were alone in the temple. The pillared colonnades were empty except for the dim fires of the sea. Yet Stark was afraid, for an instinct older than speech warned him to be.
It did not matter. Zareth’s white skin was mottled with dark bruises, and Malthor was smiling at him, and it did not matter.
Under the shadow of the roof and down the colonnade he went, swiftly now, leaving a streak of fire behind him. Malthor looked into his eyes, and his smile trembled and was gone.
He crouched. And at the last moment, when the dark body plunged down at him as a shark plunges, he drew a hidden knife from his girdle and struck.
Stark had not counted on that. The slaves were searched for possible weapons every day, and even a sliver of stone was forbidden. Somebody must have given it to him, someone...
The thought flashed through his mind while he was in the very act of trying to avoid that death blow. Too late, too late, because his own momentum carried him onto the point...
Reflexes quicker than any man’s, the hair-trigger reactions of a wild thing. Muscles straining, the centre of balance shifted with an awful wrenching effort, hands grasping at the fire-shot redness as though to force it to defy its own laws. The blade ripped a long shallow gash across his breast. But it did not go home. By a fraction of an inch, it did not go home.
While Stark was still off balance, Malthor sprang.
They grappled. The knife blade glittered redly, a hungry tongue eager to taste Stark’s life. The two men rolled over and over, drifting and tumbling erratically, churning the sea to a froth of sparks, and still the image watched, its calm reptilian features unchangingly benign and wise. Threads of a darker red laced heavily across the dancing fires.
Stark got Malthor’s arm under his own and held it there with both hands. His back was to the man now. Malthor kicked and clawed with his feet against the backs of Stark’s thighs, and his left arm came up and tried to clamp around Stark’s throat. Stark buried his chin so that it could not, and then Malthor’s hand began to tear at Stark’s face, searching for his eyes.
Stark voiced a deep bestial sound in his throat. He moved his head suddenly, catching Malthor’s hand between his jaws. He did not let go. Presently his teeth were locked against the thumb-joint, and Malthor was screaming, but Stark could give all his attention to what he was doing with the arm that held the knife. His eyes had changed. They were all beast now, the eyes of a killer blazing cold and beautiful in his dark face.
There was a dull crack, and the arm ceased to strain or fight. It bent back upon itself, and the knife fell, drifting quietly down. Malthor was beyond screaming now. He made one effort to get away as Stark released him, but it was a futile gesture, and he made no sound as Stark broke his neck.
He thrust the body from him. It drifted away, moving lazily with the suck of the currents through the colonnade, now and again touching a black pillar as though in casual wonder, wandering out at last into the square. Malthor was in no hurry. He had all eternity before him.
Stark moved carefully away from the girl, who was trying feebly now to sit up on the knees of the image. He called out, to some unseen presence hidden in the shadows under the roof,
“Malthor screamed your name, Egil. Why didn’t you come?”
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