Bride of the Dark One Read online

and the music of thepleasure house became the chanting of the priests at the high altar.

  * * * * *

  He stood at the rear of the great Temple, and he had the tonsure andthe black robes, and his name was not Ransome, but Ra-sed.

  He had almost forgotten his Terran name. Forgotten, too, were hisparents, and the laboratory ship that had been his home until thecrash landing that had left him an orphan and Ward of the Temple.

  Red candles burned before the high altar, but terror began just beyondtheir flickering light. It was dark where Ra-sed stood, and he couldhear the cries of the people in the courtyard outside, and feel thetrembling of the pillars, the very pillars of the Temple, and thegroaning of stone on massive stone in the great, shadowed archesoverhead. Above all, the chanting before the altar of the Dark One,rising, rising toward hysteria.

  And then, like a knife in the darkness, the scream, and the strainingto see which of the maidens the sacred lots cast before the altar hadchosen; and the sudden, sick knowledge that it was Dura-ki. Dura-ki,of the soft golden hair and bright lips.

  In stunned silence, Ra-sed, acolyte, listened to the bridal chant ofthe priests; the ancient words of the Dedication to the Dark One.

  The chant told of the forty times forty flights of onyx steps leadingdownward behind the great altar to the dwelling place of the Dark Oneand of the forty terrible beasts couched in the pit to guard Hisslumber.

  In the beginning, Dalir, the Sire, God of the Mists, had gone downwrapped in a sea fog, and had stolen the Sacred Fire while the DarkOne slept. All life in Darion had come from Dalir's mystic union withthe Sacred Fire.

  Centuries passed before a winter of bitter frosts came, and the DarkOne awakened cold in His dwelling place and found the Sacred Firestolen. His wrath moved beneath the city then, and Darion crashed inshattered ruin and death.

  Those who were left had hurled a maiden screaming into the greatest ofthe clefts in the earth, that the bed of the Idol might be warmed byan ember of the stolen Fire. Later, they had raised His awful Templeon the spot.

  So it had been, almost from the beginning. When the pillars of theTemple shook, a maiden was chosen by the Sacred Lots to go down as abride to the Dark One, lest He destroy the city and the people.

  The chant had come to an end. The legend had been told once more.

  They led her forth then--Dura-ki, the chosen one. Shod in goldensandals, and wearing the crimson robe of the ritual, she moved out ofRa-sed's sight, behind the high altar. No acolyte was permitted toapproach that place.

  The chanting was a thing of wild delirium now, and Ra-set placed acold hand to steady himself against a trembling pillar. He heard thedrawing of the ancient bolts, the booming echo as the great stone wasdrawn aside, and he closed his eyes, as though that could shut out thevision of the monstrous pit.

  But his ears he could not close, and he heard the scream of Dura-ki,his own betrothed, as they threw her to the Idol.

  * * * * *

  At the table in the Yarotian pleasure house, Ransome's thin lips werepale. He swallowed his drink.

  The woman opposite him was nearly forgotten now, and when he went on,it was for himself, to rid himself of things that had haunted him downall the bleak worlds to his final night of betrayal and death. Hiseyes were empty, fixed on another life. He did not see the change thatcrossed Irene's face, did not see the cold contempt fade away, to bereplaced slowly with understanding. She leaned forward, lips slightlyparted, to hear the end of his story.

  For the love of golden-haired Dura-ki, the acolyte, Ra-sed, had gonedown into the pit of the Dark one, where no mortal had gone before,except as a sacrifice.

  He had hidden himself in the gloom of the pillars when the others leftin chanting procession after the ceremony. Now he was wrenching at therusted bolts that held the stone in place. It seemed to him that therumbling grew in the earth beneath his feet and in the blackness ofthe vaulting overhead. Terror was in him, for his blasphemy wouldbring death to Darion. But the vision of Dura-ki was in him too,giving strength to tortured muscles. The bolts came away with ametallic screech, piercing against the mutter of shifting stone.

  He was turning to the heavy ring set in the stone when he caught aglimmer of reflected light in an idol's eye. Swiftly he crouchedbehind the great stone, waiting.

  The priests came, two of them, bearing torches. Knives flashed asRa-sed sprang, but he wrenched the blade from the hand of the first,buried it in the throat of the second. The man fell with a cry, but astunning blow from behind sent Ra-sed sprawling across the fallenbody. The other priest was on him, choking out his life.

  The last torch fell; and Ra-sed twisted savagely, lashed out blindlywith the long knife. There was a sound of rending cloth, a mutteredcurse in the darkness, and the fingers ground harder into Ra-sed'sthroat. Black tides washed over his mind, and he never remembered thesecond and last convulsive thrust of the knife that let out the lifeof the priest.

  He did remember straining against the ring of the great stone. Theecho boomed out for the second time that night, as the stone movedaway at last, to lay bare the realm of the Dark One.

  Bitterness touched Ransome's eyes as he spoke now, the bitterness of aman who has lost his God.

  "There were no onyx steps, no monsters waiting beneath the stone. Thelegends were false."

  Ransome turned his glass slowly, staring into its amber depths. Thenhe became aware of Irene, waiting for him to go on.

  "I got her out," Ransome said shortly. "I went down into that stinkingpit and I got Dura-ki out. The air was nearly unbreathable where Ifound her. She was unconscious on a ledge at the end of a long slope.Hell itself might have been in the pit that opened beneath it. Ageologist would have called it a major fault, but it was hell enough.When I picked her up, I found the bones of all those others...."

  Irene's green eyes had lost their coldness. She let her hand rest onhis for a moment. But her voice was puzzled.

  "This Dura-ki--she is the woman on the _Hawk of Darion_?"

  Ransome nodded. He stood up. His lips were a hard, thin line.

  "My little story has an epilogue. Something not quite so romantic. Ilived with Dura-ki in hiding near Darion for a year, until a ship camein from space. A pirate ship, with a tall, good-looking Earthman for amaster. I took passage for Dura-ki, and signed on myself as a crewman.A fresh start in a bright, new world." Ransome laughed shortly. "I'llspare you the details of that happy voyage. At the first port of call,on Jupiter, Dura-ki stood at the top of the gangway and laughed whenher Captain Jareth had me thrown off the ship."

  "She betrayed you for the master of the _Hawk of Darion_," Irene saidsoftly.

  "And tonight she'll pay," Ransome finished coldly. He threw down a fewcoins to pay for their drinks. "It's been pleasant telling you mypretty little story."

  "Ransome, wait. I--"

  "Forget it," Ransome said.

  * * * * *

  Mytor's car was waiting, and Ransome could sense the presence of theguards lurking in the dark, empty street.

  "The spaceport," Ransome told his driver. "Fast."

  He thought of the note he had given the crewman to deliver:

  "Ra-sed would see his beloved a last time before he dies."

  "Faster," Ransome grated, and the powerful car leapt forward into thenight.

  * * * * *

  Ships, like the men who drove them, came to Yaroto to die. Threequarters of the spaceport was a vast jungle of looming black shapes,most of them awaiting the breaker's hammer. Ransome dismissed the carand threaded his way through the deserted yards with the certainty ofa man used to the ugly places of a hundred worlds.

  Mytor had suggested the meeting place, a hulk larger than most, acruiser once in the fleet of some forgotten power.

  Ransome had fought in the ships of half a dozen worlds. Now theancient cruiser claimed his attention. Martian, by the cut of herrusted bra
king fins. Ransome tensed, remembering the charge of theMartian cruisers in the Battle of Phoebus. Since then he had calledhimself an Earthman, because, even if his parentage had not given himclaim to that title already, a man who had been in the Earth ships atPhoebus had a right to it.

  He was running a hand over the battered plate of a blast tube whenDura-ki found him. She was a smaller shadow moving among the vast,dark hulls. With a curious, dead feeling in him, Ransome stepped awayfrom the side of the cruiser to meet her.

  "Ra-sed, I could not let you die alone--"

  Because her voice was a ghost from the past, because it stirred thingsin him that had no right to live after all the long years that hadpassed, Ransome acted before Dura-ki could finish speaking. He hit heronce, hard; caught the crumpling body in his arms, and started backtoward Mytor's car. If he remembered another journey in the blacknesswith this woman in his arms, he drove the memory back with the savageblasphemies of a