The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (8 page)

When she had cleansed her sword on the grass and wiped her legs
clean, she turned slowly down the hill. The distant column beckoned
her, and after a moment of indecision she turned toward it. She had no
time to waste, and this was the likeliest place to find what she sought.

The coarse grass brushed her legs and whispered round her feet.
She stumbled now and then on the rubble, for the hill was steep,
but she reached the bottom without mishap, and struck out across
the meadows toward that blaze of faraway brilliance. It seemed to
her that she walked more lightly, somehow. The grass scarcely bent
underfoot, and she found she could take long sailing strides like one
who runs with wings on his heels. It felt like a dream. The gravity
pull of the place must have been less than she was accustomed to,
but she only knew that she was skimming over the ground with
amazing speed.

Traveling so, she passed through the meadows over the strange,
coarse grass, over a brook or two that spoke endlessly to itself in a
curious language that was almost speech, certainly not the usual gurgle
of earth’s running water. Once she ran into a blotch of darkness, like
some pocket of void in the air, and struggled through gasping and
blinking outraged eyes. She was beginning to realize that the land was
not so innocently normal as it looked.

On and on she went, at that surprising speed, while the meadows skimmed past beneath her flying feet and gradually the light drew nearer. She saw now that it was a round tower of sheeted luminance, as if walls of solid flame rose up from the ground. Yet it seemed to be steady, nor did it cast any illumination upon the sky.

Before much time had elapsed, with her dream-like speed she had almost reached her goal. The ground was becoming marshy underfoot, and presently the smell of swamps rose in her nostrils and she saw that between her and the light stretched a belt of unstable ground tufted with black reedy grass. Here and there she could see dim white blotches moving. They might be beasts, or only wisps of mist. The starlight was not very illuminating.

She began to pick her way carefully across the black, quaking
morasses. Where the tufts of grass rose she found firmer ground, and
she leaped from clump to clump with that amazing lightness, so that
her feet barely touched the black ooze. Here and there slow bubbles
rose through the mud and broke thickly. She did not like the place.

Halfway across, she saw one of the white blotches approaching
her with slow, erratic movements. It bumped along unevenly, and at
first she thought it might be inanimate, its approach was so indirect
and purposeless. Then it blundered nearer, with that queer bumpy
gait, making sucking noises in the ooze and splashing as it came. In
the starlight she saw suddenly what it was, and for an instant her
heart paused and sickness rose overwhelmingly in her throat. It was
a woman—a beautiful woman whose white bare body had the curves
and loveliness of some marble statue. She was crouching like a frog,
and as Jirel watched in stupefaction she straightened her legs abruptly
and leaped as a frog leaps, only more clumsily, falling forward into
the ooze a little distance beyond the watching woman. She did not
seem to see Jirel. The mud-spattered face was blank. She blundered
on through the mud in awkward leaps. Jirel watched until the woman
was no more than a white wandering blur in the dark, and above the
shock of that sight pity was rising, and uncomprehending resentment
against whatever had brought so lovely a creature into this—into
blundering in frog leaps aimlessly through the mud, with empty mind
and blind, staring eyes. For the second time that night she knew the
sting of unaccustomed tears as she went on.

The sight, though, had given her reassurance. The human form
was not unknown here. There might be leathery devils with hoofs and
horns, such as she still half expected, but she would not be alone in her
humanity; though if all the rest were as piteously mindless as the one
she had seen—she did not follow that thought. It was too unpleasant.
She was glad when the marsh was past and she need not see any longer
the awkward white shapes bumping along through the dark.

She struck out across the narrow space which lay between her
and the tower. She saw now that it was a building, and that the light
composed it. She could not understand that, but she saw it. Walls and
columns outlined the tower, solid sheets of light with definite bound
aries, not radiant. As she came nearer she saw that it was in motion,
apparently spurting up from some source underground as if the light
illuminated sheets of water rushing upward under great pressure. Yet
she felt intuitively that it was not water, but incarnate light.

She came forward hesitantly, gripping her sword. The area around the tremendous pillar was paved with something black and smooth that did not reflect the light. Out of it sprang the uprushing walls of brilliance with their sharply defined edges. The magnitude of the thing dwarfed her to infinitesimal size. She stared upward with undazzled eyes, trying to understand. If there could be such a thing as solid, non-radiating light, this was it.

4

She was very near under the mighty tower before she could see the details of the building clearly. They were strange to her—great pillars and arches around the base, and one stupendous portal, all molded out of the rushing, prisoned light. She turned toward the opening after a moment, for the light had a tangible look. She did not believe she could have walked through it even had she dared.

When that tremendous portal arched over her she peered in,
affrighted by the very size of the place. She thought she could hear
the hiss and spurt of the light surging upward. She was looking into a
mighty globe inside, a hall shaped like the interior of a bubble, though
the curve was so vast she was scarcely aware of it. And in the very
center of the globe floated a light. Jirel blinked. A light, dwelling in
a bubble of light. It glowed there in midair with a pale, steady flame
that was somehow alive and animate, and brighter than the serene
illumination of the building, for it hurt her eyes to look at it directly.

She stood on the threshold and stared, not quite daring to venture
in. And as she hesitated a change came over the light. A flash of
rose tinged its pallor. The rose deepened and darkened until it took
on the color of blood. And the shape underwent strange changes.
It lengthened, drew itself out narrowly, split at the bottom into two
branches, put out two tendrils from the top. The blood-red paled again,
and the light somehow lost its brilliance, receded into the depths of the
thing that was forming. Jirel clutched her sword and forgot to breathe,
watching. The light was taking on the shape of a human being—of a
woman—of a tall woman in mail, her red hair tousled and her eyes
staring straight into the duplicate eyes at the portal....

“Welcome,” said the Jirel suspended in the center of the globe, her
voice deep and resonant and clear in spite of the distance between
them. Jirel at the door held her breath, wondering and afraid. This was
herself, in every detail, a mirrored Jirel—that was it, a Jirel mirrored
upon a surface which blazed and smoldered with barely repressed
light, so that the eyes gleamed with it and the whole figure seemed to
hold its shape by an effort, only by that effort restraining itself from
resolving into pure, formless light again. But the voice was not her
own. It shook and resounded with a knowledge as alien as the light-
built walls. It mocked her. It said,

“Welcome! Enter into the portals, woman!”

She looked up warily at the rushing walls about her. Instinctively
she drew back.

“Enter, enter!” urged that mocking voice from her own mirrored
lips. And there was a note in it she did not like.

“Enter!” cried the voice again, this time a command.

Jirel’s eyes narrowed. Something intuitive warned her back, and
yet—she drew the dagger she had thrust in her belt and with a quick
motion she tossed it into the great globe-shaped hall. It struck the
floor without a sound, and a brilliant light flared up around it, so
brilliant she could not look upon what was happening; but it seemed
to her that the knife expanded, grew large and nebulous and ringed
with dazzling light. In less time than it takes to tell, it had faded out
of sight as if the very atoms which composed it had flown apart and
dispersed in the golden glow of that mighty bubble. The dazzle faded
with the knife, leaving Jirel staring dazedly at a bare floor.

That other Jirel laughed, a rich, resonant laugh of scorn and
malice.

“Stay out, then,” said the voice. “You’ve more intelligence than I
thought. Well, what would you here?”

Jirel found her voice with an effort.

“I seek a weapon,” she said, “a weapon against a man I so hate that
upon earth there is none terrible enough for my need.”

“You so hate him, eh?” mused the voice.

“With all my heart!”

“With all your heart!” echoed the voice, and there was an
undernote of laughter in it that she did not understand. The echoes
of that mirth ran round and round the great globe. Jirel felt her cheeks
burn with resentment against some implication in the derision which
she could not put a name to. When the echoes of the laugh had faded
the voice said indifferently,

“Give the man what you find at the black temple in the lake. I
make you a gift of it.”

The lips that were Jirel’s twisted into a laugh of purest mockery; then all about that figure so perfectly her own the light flared out. She saw the outlines melting fluidly as she turned her dazzled eyes away. Before the echoes of that derision had died, a blinding, formless light burned once more in the midst of the bubble.

Jirel turned and stumbled away under the mighty column of the tower, a hand to her dazzled eyes. Not until she had reached the edge of the black, unreflecting circle that paved the ground around the pillar did she realize that she knew no way of finding the lake where her weapon lay. And not until then did she remember how fatal it is said to be to accept a gift from a demon. Buy it, or earn it, but never accept the gift. Well—she shrugged and stepped out upon the grass. She must surely be damned by now, for having ventured down of her own will into this curious place for such a purpose as hers. The soul can be lost but once.

She turned her face up to the strange stars and wondered in what
direction her course lay. The sky looked blankly down upon her with
its myriad meaningless eyes. A star fell as she watched, and in her
superstitious soul she took it for an omen, and set off boldly over the
dark meadows in the direction where the bright streak had faded.
No swamps guarded the way here, and she was soon skimming along
over the grass with that strange, dancing gait that the lightness of the
place allowed her. And as she went she was remembering, as from
long ago in some other far world, a man’s arrogant mirth and the press
of his mouth on hers. Hatred bubbled up hotly within her and broke
from her lips in a little savage laugh of anticipation. What dreadful
thing awaited her in the temple in the lake, what punishment from
hell to be loosed by her own hands upon Guillaume? And though her
soul was the price it cost her, she would count it a fair bargain if she
could drive the laughter from his mouth and bring terror into the eyes
that mocked her.

Thoughts like these kept her company for a long way upon her
journey. She did not think to be lonely or afraid in the uncanny
darkness across which no shadows fell from that mighty column
behind her. The unchanging meadows flew past underfoot, lightly as
meadows in a dream. It might almost have been that the earth moved
instead of herself, so effortlessly did she go. She was sure now that she
was heading in the right direction, for two more stars had fallen in the
same arc across the sky.

The meadows were not untenanted. Sometimes she felt presences
near her in the dark, and once she ran full-tilt into a nest of little yap
ping horrors like those on the hilltop. They lunged up about her with
clicking teeth, mad with a blind ferocity, and she swung her sword in
frantic circles, sickened by the noise of them lunging splashily through
the grass and splattering her sword with their deaths. She beat them
off and went on, fighting her own sickness, for she had never known
anything quite so nauseating as these little monstrosities.