The Face in the Abyss by Abraham Merritt (ebook e reader .TXT) 📖

me. My blackness is not that of the Dark One, yet I, too, am subtle. But it may be that you know nothing of this Dark One—eh, lad?”

He paused, eyes shrewd.

“Some little I have heard of him,” answered Graydon, cautiously.

“Eh, some little you have heard of him! Well, and what did that little make you think of him?”

“Nothing!” answered Graydon, quoting an Aymara proverb that holds certain obscurely improper implications, “nothing that would make me want to sit cheek by jowl and break eggs with him.”

“Ho! ho!” roared the giant, and swung his bar dangerously close. “But that is good! I must tell Huon that—”

“And besides,” said Graydon, “is he not the enemy of— her?” He lifted the bracelet.

Black Regor checked his laughter; gave an order to the

guard.

“Walk beside me,” he told Graydon. Looking back before obeying, he saw one of the two Indians pick up his rifle gingerly, and both of them take up the march

on each side of the burro. He wondered uneasily, as he tried to match Regor’s strides, whether he had locked the gun before dropping it; then decided that he had.

A graver doubt began to grow. He had been building up a fabric of hope based on the idea that Huon, whoever he might be, was bitter enemy of Lantlu, would welcome his aid and help him in return for it. And he had intended to tell him the whole story of his encounter with Suarra, and what had followed. Now this seemed too naive of him. The situation was not so simple as all that. After all, what did he know of these people with their sinister arts— their spider-folk and their lizard-folk and God alone knew what other monstrosities?

And what, after all did he really know of that utterly weird, incredible creature—the Snake Mother?

Graydon felt a momentary despair. He resolutely put it aside. He would have to recast his ideas, that was all. And he had few enough minutes in which to do it. Better make no plans at all until he met this Huon, and had a chance to gauge him.

A sharp challenge brought him back to alertness. Before him the corridor was barred by immense doors of the black metal. Guarding them was a double file of the yellow-kilted soldiers, the first rank made up of spears, and the second of archers bearing long metal bows. They were captained by a thick-set, dwarfish Indian whose double ax almost dropped from his hand as he caught sight of Graydon.

To him Regor whispered. The captain nodded, and stamped upon the floor. The valves of the great door separated, folds of filmy curtains like a waterfall of cobwebs through which an amber sun was shining billowing out between them.

“I go to tell Huon of you,” rumbled Regor. “Wait patiently.” He melted within the webs. The door closed silently behind him.

And silently Graydon waited; silently the yellow-kilted guards stared at him, and long minutes passed by. A bell sounded; the great doors parted. He heard a murmur from beyond the webs. The captain beckoned to the two Indians. Driving the burro before him they passed into the hidden

room. A still longer time, and then once more the bell and the opened door. The captain signaled, and Graydon walked forward and through the webs.

His eyes were dazzled by what seemed sunlight flooding through amber glass. Details sharpened. He had a vague impression of walls covered with tapestries of shifting hues. He blinked up, and saw that the roof of the chamber was of the same polished stone as the corridors, amber colored instead of black, and that the intenser light came from denser spirals of the radiant swirling corpuscles.

A woman laughed. He looked toward the laughter—and leaped forward, the name of Suarra on his lips. Some one caught him by the arm and held him back—

And suddenly he knew that this laughing woman was not Suarra.

She lay stretched upon a low couch, head raised and resting upon one long white hand. Her face was older, but still it was the exquisite twin of Suarra’s, and like Suarra’s was her cloudy midnight hair. There the resemblance ended. Upon that lovely face was a mockery alien to the sweetness of the girl. There was a touch of cruelty upon the perfect lips, and something of inhuman withdrawal in the clear dark eyes—nothing of the tenderness within Suarra’s; something, rather, of what he had seen on the face of Lantlu when the dinosaur pack had sighted the Scarlet Weaver. A slender white foot swung over the edge of the couch, negligently balancing upon a toe of a silken sandal.

“Our unbidden guest seems impetuous, Dorina,” came a man’s voice, speaking the Aymara. “If simple tribute to your beauty, I applaud. Yet to me it seemed to savor something of—recognition.”

The speaker had risen from a chair at the head of the couch. His face was of that extraordinary beauty which seemed the heritage of all this strange race. The eyes were the deep blue that usually promises friendliness, but there was none of it in them now. Like Regor, his ruddy hair was filleted with amber. Under the white, toga-like robe that covered him, Graydon sensed the body of an athlete.

“You know I am no Dream-maker, Huon,” drawled

the woman. “I am a realist. Where but in dreams could I have met him? Still, although no Dreamer—perhaps—had

I known—”

Her voice Was faintly languishing, but there was malicious mockery in the glance she gave Graydon. Huon flushed, his eyes grew bleak; he spoke one sharp word. Immediately, Graydon’s chest was encircled as though by a vise, crushing his ribs, stifling him. His hands flew up to break that grip, and closed on a thin, stringy arm that seemed less flesh than leather. He twisted his head. Two feet above him was a chinless, half-human face. Long, red elf locks fell over its sharply sloping forehead. Its eyes were round and golden, filled with melancholy; filled, too, with intelligence.

A spider-man!

Another stringy arm covered with scarlet hair circled his throat. A third caught him under the knees and lifted him on high.

He heard a roar of protest from Regor. Blindly, he struck out at the chinless face close to his, and as he struck, the purple stones in the golden bracelet flashed like a tiny streak of fire. He heard a grunt from the spider-man, a sharp cry from Huon.

He felt himself falling, falling ever faster through blackness—then felt and heard no more.

CHAPTER X. Outlaws of YuAtlanchi

HIS SENSES were struggling back; a gusty voice was shouting wrathfully.

“He wears the ancient symbol of the Mother. He passes her Watchers. He routs the stinking Urd who serve the Dark One, spittle on his name! Each alone enough to win a hearing! I tell you again, Huon, here was a man to be received with courtesy; one who had a tale to tell and that tale a matter of concern not only to you but all the Fellowship. And you toss him to Kon, unheard! What of Adana when she learns of it? By every jeweled scale of her coils, we have yearned lustily enough for her aid, and never broken through her indifference! This man might have won her to us!”

“Enough, Regor, enough!” It was Huon’s voice, depression in it.,

“It is not enough,” stormed the giant. “Was it the Dark One bade you do this? By the Lord of Lords, the Fellowship must deal with you!”

“You are right, of course, Regor. It is your duty to summon the Fellowship, if you think best. I am sorry and I am ashamed. When the stranger awakens from his swoon, and indeed I am sure it is no worse, I will make amends to him. And the Fellowship, not I, shall decide what is to be done with him.”

“All of which does not seem to flatter me,” said Dorina, sweetly suave, and too sweetly. “Do you hint, Regor, that I am an agent of the Dark One, for clearly it was I who gave the impulse to Huon’s rage?”

“I hint nothing—” began the giant, and was interrupted by Huon.

“Dorina, I will answer that. And I say to you that it is no unfamiliar doubt to me. Be careful that some time you do not change that doubt to certainty. For then I will kill you, Dorina, and there is no power in YuAtlanchi, nor above it nor below it, that may save you.”

It was said calmly enough, but with a cold implacability.

“You dare say that, Huon—”

Graydon knew that more of truth often enters ears thought closed than those believed open. Therefore he had kept quiet, listening, and mustering his strength. A quarrel among these three could not help him. He groaned, and opened his eyes, and thereby silenced whatever had been on the woman’s tongue to say. He looked up into Huon’s face, in which was nothing but concern; at Dorina, her black eyes blazing, long white hands clenched to her breast in effort to control her rage.

His eyes fell upon a scarlet figure beyond them both. It was Kon, the spider-man, and Graydon forgot his danger and all else, contemplating him.

He was something that might have stepped out of one of Durer’s nightmare fantasies of the Witches’ Sabbath, stealing from the, picture into reality through a scarlet bath. And yet there was nothing demonic, nothing of the Black Evil, about him. Indeed, he was touched with a grotesque charm, as though created by a master in whom the spirit of beauty was so vital that even in shaping a monster it could not be wholly lost.

The spider-man’s head hung three feet above Huon’s. The torso, the body, was globular, and little bigger than a lad’s. The round body was supported on four slender stiltlike legs; from the center of it stretched out two more, longer by half than the others and terminating in hands or claws whose fingers, delicately slender and needle pointed, were a foot in length.

He had no neck. Where head joined body there was a pair of small arms whose terminations were like the hands of a child. And over these hands was the face, chinless and earless, framed in matted red locks. The mouth was human, the nose a slender beak. Except for face and hands

and feet, which were slate gray, he was covered with a vivid scarlet down.

But the eyes, the great lidless lashless eyes of phosphorescent gold, were wholly human in expression, sorrowful, wondering, and apologetic, too—as though Huon’s present mood were reflected in them. Such was Kon, highest of all his kind in YuAtlanchi, whom Graydon was destined to know much more intimately.

He staggered up, Regor’s arm supporting him. He looked straight at the woman.

“I thought,” he muttered, “I thought—you were— Suarra!”

The anger flew from Dorina’s face; it sharpened, as though with fear; Huon’s grew intent; Regor grunted.

“Suarra!” breathed the woman, and loosed her clenched hands.

If Suarra’s name brought fear to her, and Graydon felt a fleeting wonder at that, it carried no such burden to

Regor.

“I told you, Huon, that this was no ordinary matter,” he cried jubilantly, “and here is still another proof. Suarra whom the Mother loves—and he is friend of Suarra! Ha— there is purpose here, a path begins to open—”

“You go a little too fast along it,” broke in Huon warningly, yet with a certain eagerness, a repressed excitement He spoke to Graydon.

“For what has occurred, I am sorry. Even if you are an enemy—still I am sorry. Our welcome to strangers is never too cordial, but this ought not to have happened. I can say no more.”

“No need,” answered Graydon, a bit grimly. “If not too

cordial, at