People of the Talisman

XIII

There were three towers. Two were roofless, long abandoned. All around these two were ruins, sheathed in ice, and they were the strangest ruins that Stark had ever seen, on a world that was rich in ruins and in strangeness.

The eye could follow even yet the spiderweb pattern of streets, pick out what might have been the market places and the temple squares. All along these streets the hollow skeletons of buildings stood like the shells of fantastic sea-things with their soft flesh all eaten away. The ice made the color blurred and luminous, added a luster to soaring curves and empty arches where they caught the sun.

“Did they build the place all of swords and spear-points?” said Balin, staring.

“Something like it,” Stark said. In that land where stone was the obvious material for building, nothing was made of stone but the great towers. The light and graceful bones of the city were all of metal, colored in some fashion so that the black valley shone with an icy mockery of spring greens and yellows and soft blues, with here and there a spurt of crimson or coral pink. The taller structures had crumpled down. The smaller ones leaned. Nothing had lived there for a very long time.

The third tower was still whole and sound.

Stark looked at it, feeling the cringing, snarling, hateful fear rise in him, and knew that this was how Camar’s tower and all the others beyond the pass had looked in the days of their strength. It was alien. It was arrogant. It was massive and very high, the stonework tapering in close at the top, and on its highest point was a glimmer of something unfamiliar, like a captive star. Only the star did not shed light. It sent out instead a cloudy shimmering, visible more as a distortion in the air than as a definite emanation. The mountain peaks behind it seemed to float.

Underneath that cloudy shimmer, filling almost a third of the valley, was a portion of the city that was not in ruins, although the ruined areas joined it. Obviously all had once been part of the same complex, and obviously the dead parts of the city had once been covered by the same kind of force-field, from the abandoned towers. The line of demarcation was quite clear. The ice and the broken buildings ended at the edge of the field. Beyond there were streets as bare as summer. Arches soared up straight and free. The many-colored walls stood squarely. Nowhere was there any sign of frost, or decay.

Or of life. In all those long avenues, nothing moved. And in all that valley there was no living sound except what the people of Kushat had brought with them.

Stark heard Ciaran laugh, and turned to face her. She was looking past him at the bright-colored desolation.

“It seems,” she said, “that myths die as well as men.”

Stark moved his head as an animal does when it listens to something far off. “There is life there yet.”

He put his hands on the belt and felt the talisman as a point of fire under them.

“There must be life,” said Balin. “Look at the tower. I don’t know what its purpose is, but it still functions. There must be someone—something there to tend it.”

The others caught that up. They were eager, desperate to believe. Balin went on, gesturing at the tower.

“That is power, certainly. Perhaps the very kind of power Ban Cruach brought away with him, though not in that form. What do you think it is, Stark? A defense?”

Stark said slowly, “I think it’s a defense against the ice and cold. See how warm the city looks.”

“And how quiet,” Lugh muttered. “Why should we lie to ourselves? The place is dead. As dead as Ban Cruach.”

Only Stark heard him. The people had begun to crowd and clamor. They shouted for the talisman, and some of them moved on down the slope, too impatient to wait for their leaders. This was their last hope. On it rested everything they had left behind, city, home, the remnants of their families. With the power they might find here they could regain them all. Without it, even though they might buy their lives with Ciaran and go free, they would be only stateless wanderers on the face of Mars, utterly destitute.

“It would be wiser for them to wait here,” Stark said. Balin only shook his head, and Stark did not press the point. Perhaps they knew best what they wanted.

He opened the box and took out the talisman, wrapped in silk. He handed it to Balin.

“It belongs to Kushat,” he said. “Not to me.”

Balin looked at him with wry and bitter mirth. “True. And I thank you for the honor. But I am not Ban Cruach. If I drop the thing, you may have to pick it up.”

He held it stiffly and did not remove the wrappings.

They walked on together, and the people followed them closely. Stark was very conscious of external things, the soft breathing and trampling of the group and the way their voices fell silent, the slippery frost-buckled pavement that replaced the rock under his feet, the lengthening shadow of the western wall of mountains. He was extremely conscious of Ciaran walking behind him, and of Thanis at his side. But there was something else, something he could not put a name to, that he sensed more powerfully than any of these things. He still walked against fear as a man walks against water, just as he had in the pass, in spite of the fact that now he was in open sunlight and clear air.

The colors and fantastic shapes of the ice-sheathed ruins rose around him, marked off by transverse streets that glittered like ribbons of glass.

“These folk were never part of our past,” said Balin. His voice was small and low, so as not to wake any echoes. He held the talisman tight in his closed hands. “We never built like this, even when the world was young and rich.”

No, thought Stark. No race on Mars ever built like this. I have seen the old, old cities. Jekkara and Valkis of the Sea-Kings, Barrakesh, and sand-drowned ruins by the Wells of Tamboina. I have even seen Sinharat the Ever-Living. But the people who built them were human. Even the Ramas were human, and so the wickedness that clung around Sinharat was human too, and understandable. But no human ever conceived and shaped these curving walls and enormously elongated arches. No human hands ever opened these strange narrow doors. No human mind could endure for long surrounded by this geometry.

I suppose perhaps they might, he added to himself—but I know that they did not. I have heard the voices.

He said aloud, “They once held all the country beyond the Gates of Death. Even the place where Kushat stands. The Festival Stones were once a tower like that one. You can see the ruins of others all through the Norlands.”

“But there are no traces left of any cities like this one.”

“No. The metal would have been carried off and beaten into useful things, every scrap of it, ages gone.”

Balin grunted. The pace of the whole column had imperceptibly slowed and the people were bunched together closely now, very quiet, mothers hanging tight to their children, husbands close to their wives. The avenue they had been following led straight in under the edge of the shimmering cloud. The line of demarcation was close ahead now. Now more than a hundred feet.

Balin gave Stark a queer desperate look. He lifted the talisman as though he might be going to hand it to him, or throw it away. Then he set his jaw tight and said something that Stark could not hear, and he took the silk wrappings away so that the crystal lay bare in his hands.

The people sighed. Thanis gave Balin a look of fierce pride. “Lead us,” she said. He held out the talisman in his cupped palms and walked ahead. Stark ceased to watch Balin. Instead he looked up and on either side, going close behind him, his body tensed like a spring, trying to see through walls and hear through silence and feel through the intangible.

Balin paused under the edge of the cloud and nothing happened, except that after a step or two he halted and said with almost childish surprise, “It’s warm.”

Stark nodded. He was still looking warily around, seeing nothing. The city lay in a kind of summer dream, full of sweet color and soft shadow and the drowsy stillness of sleep. Overhead the sky had vanished in a quivering mirage.

And it was warm. Too warm, after the bitter cold. It gave a feeling of ease and pleasant languor. The people began to loosen their cloaks. Then, as they went on, they laid aside their burdens, piling them neatly together with the unwanted garments, mindful that they would have to be picked up again when they returned.

The avenue was wide. On either side the buildings marched, or on occasion fell back to form an odd-shaped square. Here where they were undamaged and free of ice the strangeness of their shaping was more vividly apparent. They gave an illusion of tallness though actually they were not, being limited by the height of the tower. Some of the structures seemed to have no useful purpose at all. They shot up in twisted spires, or branched in weird spiky arms like giant cacti done in pink and gold, or looped in helical formations, sometimes erect, sometimes lying on their sides. Ornaments, Stark thought, or monuments, perhaps with some religious significance. And then it struck him that they were more like the markers in some monstrous game. It was an unpleasant thought. He did not know why he had it. Then he realized that the odd forms were repeated, distributed throughout the checkerboard streets of the city according to an unknown but definite plan.

Passing close by one of the cactus-shapes, he saw that the metal spikes were long and very sharp, and that there were traces on them of some dark stain.

Thanis’ urgent voice said, “Balin! Balin…”

The talisman had been warming and glowing between his hands. Now it shone softly in the growing dusk, under that unnatural sky. And Balin had stopped. His face was ashen. He was like a man in shock. He made a moaning sound and then by sheer convulsive reflex he flung the talisman away from him, exactly as Stark had long ago in the tower. The crystal rolled a little way and lay gleaming.

The people stood still, appalled. Thanis put her hand on Balin’s shoulder and looked frightenedly at Stark. Ciaran watched from between her guards, attentive as a hawk.

Stark said to Balin, “You heard the voices?”

“Yes.” Balin caught his breath and straightened up, but his face was still bloodless. “Clearly, in here.” He touched his head. “I heard them louder and louder and all of a sudden I understood. I understood them, Stark.” He looked around at the enclosing buildings, afraid with no ordinary fear. “This is an evil place.” He shouted at the people. “Go back! Get out. Get out!”

He started to run. Stark caught him. The people hung on the edge of panic. He said to them, “Wait. Stay together.” They milled uncertainly. Those in the back were too far away to see or know what was happening. They only knew that something was wrong. A woman’s voice cried out, shrill with fear. In desperation Stark spoke to Lugh and Rogain. “Keep them together! If we start running we’re lost.” They left Ciaran and went rapidly down the line, shouting in brisk, authoritative voices although both of them were white around the lips. Stark looked at Ciaran. “Here is your chance. Take it if you will.”

She shook her head and smiled, holding up her bound hands. Her eyes looked past him at the city.

Stark shook Balin and said fiercely, “Will you stand now?”

“I’ll stand,” he whispered. “But we must go, Stark. We must get out.”

“All right. But wait.”

Stark went to where the talisman lay. He knew now what it was, and that took some of the terror out of it. Even so his hands shook as he picked it up. If it had not been for all the lives that might depend on it, he would have let it stay where it was till doomsday.

The thing glowed and glimmered in his hands. He looked at it, and the voices burst inside his skull.

Not true voices. Probably these creatures had physical voices, but the crystal was not designed to carry them. It transmitted the thought-words that had to come before the spoken ones. At first they were a weird jumble, amplification of the tiny chitterings he had heard from so far away. Their unhumanness then had shocked him into breaking contact. Now it was overwhelming. Because he knew that his own selfish survival depended on it as well as everybody else’s, he fought it out this time. He hung on until the voices slipped suddenly over the edge of comprehension.

He understood them. Partly. No human would ever understand all of what these minds were thinking and talking about. But he understood enough. The crystal was unselective. It brought him all the flying fragments of speech within its range. Stark’s mind became a sort of camera obscura looking on nightmare, where narrow doorways opened into bright-lit chambers, briefly flashing, each one a shard of lost sanity, each one shining with the phosphorescence of decay. And each one gleeful. That was the worst of it. The laughter. They were happy, these creatures. Terribly happy.

Most of them. Not all. Some of them were disturbed. Some of them had become aware.

Alarm broke the contact for him this time, at least enough that he could push the voices back. He clawed desperately for a grasp at the real world again, not easy since the real world that surrounded him was their world and so not immediately recognizable. There was a pale blur close to him that seemed familiar. It resolved itself gradually into Thanis’ face.

“It’s too late to go,” he said. “They know we’re here.”

He turned to speak to Balin and the others. At the back of the line a woman screamed abruptly. Men’s voices followed, crying out harshly. Lugh appeared, not quite running. “Stark,” he said, and pointed. “Stark…”

Stark moved aside, where he could see down the long wide avenue past the line of march.

Back beyond the pink-and-gold structure with the bloodstained spikes, five figures had appeared in the street. Three of them held longish tubes with globed ends that might be weapons. They were very tall, these figures, towering over the people of Kushat, towering even over Stark, but they were excessively slender and they moved with swaying motion like reeds before the wind. They were dressed in an assortment of bright-colored garments and queer tall caps that exaggerated their elongated narrow skulls. Their skin was a pale golden color, stretched tight over a structure of facial bones that seemed to be all brow and jaw with little in between but two great round eyes like dark moons.

They did not speak. They only stood and held the weapons and stared at the people of Kushat.

Thanis caught her breath in a little cry. Stark looked around.

Six thin tall creatures fluttering in rainbow silks moved out to stand across the way. Four of them held tubes.

One of them spoke. His voice was a kind of high-pitched fluting, quite musical, like the call of some strange bird. The talisman brought the meaning of the sounds clearly to Stark.

“Our weapons are invincible. We can destroy you all. Ban Cruach protects us! His promise and his talisman!”

There was a moment’s pause, a moment that seemed a hundred years long to Stark as he stared in astonishment.

Then he shouted, “Ban Cruach!”

He walked toward them, holding out the talisman.