The Star Magicians

13. BEFORE THE EMERALD THRONE

SOMEHOW THEY had not noticed it before, but a dozen yards from where they stood a great boulder of glittering green crystal rose sheer from the mirror-like pave. It heaved its sparkling, jagged, rough-hewn mass up to tower above them in the dim, mysterious light. Like a boulder-vast jewel it was, or an iceberg of mystic green, splintered by the action of time into a million flashing facets.

The uppermost tier was sculptured into the shape of a rugged, throne-like chair. Upon this sat—Niamh.

From throat to heel She was draped in lucent, misty voluminous robes of delicate gauze, in hue the faintest shade of pearly, opaline green. Against the ambiguous and elusive color of Her draperies, Her flesh formed a striking contrast. For truly was She called “The Green Goddess” … the flawless skin of long, slender hands and calm, classic, inhumanly perfect face were as if molded from pallid green jade. The rest of Her body was hidden, swathed in opalescent gauze, although they could discern the rise and fall of Her breasts, and the long, cat-like curve of hip, thigh and leg where the tenuous fabric was caught up more tightly about Her.

The first thing that seized them with awe, however, was Her incredible size. She loomed above them like some stupendous statue, a Colossus of pure jade. Even seated, they could see that when She rose to Her full height She must stand nearly three times the height of a full-grown man.

In this unusual mingling of female grace and beauty with male majesty and strength, the Green Woman seemed like some Warrior-Queen of heroic legend, some superb Amazon.

Her hair was darkest emerald, yet more delicate than silk. It seemed, to Calastor’s amazed thoughts, like emerald jewels spun into gossamer by the magic loom of some Necromancer. As tenuous as a vapor, it was unbound, floating about her massive head like a dim halo of misty green flames … and where a curling thread of drifting strand caught the light, it flashed with metallic luster, glittering with pinpoints of jeweled radiance, as if, webbed within the mesh of Her locks, glittered a thousand netted stars of emerald flame.

It was, however, Her face that seized their fascinated attention. Gaping despite himself, Drask of the Varkonna knew he had never before looked on a face of such super-human beauty. Like a great mask of exquisite milky jade, smoothly molded by a sculptor of supernal genius, it was the apex of perfection, beyond comparison with mortal beauty. A deep, broad and lofty brow, unmarred by the slightest wrinkle, rose above level, winging brows. Large eyes, tip-tilted, set deep and wide-apart, whose pupils were dazzling-dark, weird disks of blackish emerald, within whose depths of gloom far fires glimmered. And darkly emerald, too, the proud arched bow of Her full, velvet lips.

Niamh’s face blended pride with a godlike serenity … fiery, inconceivably violent passions, banked beneath a chill and awful peace. Her beauty was so intense, so overwhelming, that it was almost a thing of terror. Observing it, Calastor knew at last what the Ancient poet meant by “the awful beauty of the dispassionate Divine.”

When She spoke, it startled them all. Rapt, they had stared at the dazzling glory of Her, seated motionless, towering above them like some idol, throned on a giant jewel, as if She were insensate stone. The unwavering, lifeless perfection of Her face was shattered when She spoke, for emotion animated it. It was as if, suddenly, a great statue were to speak.

“I have summoned you here to observe My justice, and to hear My judgment.”

Her voice, too, was beyond the human. Sweet, clear, sharp—a singing music, inhumanly pure. A voice that could only be uttered from a throat of crystal, Calastor mused.

“Drask, Warlord of the Star Rovers, Chief of the Clan Varkonna—step before Me.”

His eyes narrowing, the Warlord boldly swaggered forward, spreading his legs in an insolent poise and resting his hands on his hips as he tilted back his head to look up into the superhuman face above him.

“You are virile, strong, a leader. Intelligence is yours— of a kind—and the power to stir and command men. Greatness could have been yours, yes, and a lofty name to ring down the annals of time.”

“Greatness is mine, Lady,” he said boldly. “By what right, what authority, do you presume to judge me—”

She laughed, a crystalline mockery, chiming with cold mirth.

“By My right. By My authority!”

Drask flushed hotly. “If power is your argument for authority—”

“O, Drask—you of all men here should believe in the ancient law that ‘Might is Right.’ Has not your glorious career been one bloody chronicle of the unhampered exercise of brute power? Strong you are, I have said, but ruthless in the employment of that strength. You have no conception of the natural rights of men less strong than you. Hence, your whim, your slightest desire, was sufficient authority for the most cruel and brutal acts! The gifts which you inherited, your position of kingship over your people, the unlimited strength that was yours in the great war-fleets of your fathers, your talents of mind and body—all, all of these have you misused, to the detriment, the destruction of others.”

Her words rang through the mighty chamber like a clarion, cowing the fierce Barbarian.

“On twenty-two planets of man have you sought, with all your lusty force, to crush out the last, flickering sparks of culture and civilization. On Xulthoom, the World of Eternal Mist, I commanded you to advance no further. This command you disobeyed, although I threatened that its disobedience would be punished. Do you remember My words?”

“I—yes, you green Monster!” Drask raged. “You swore to destroy me and my fleet forever! But I yield to no idle threats—I am master of the spaceways. I—and none other!”

Her eyes half-closed, ominously.

“And I am Mistress here, O little man. But My threats were not idle, were they? Your fleets are destroyed. Broken, decimated. Scattered. Fleeing. Is this not truth?”

His hawk-gold eyes flamed with frustrated fury. “Yes,” he growled. “And now you intend to kill me?”

Niamh smiled, a cold flexing of the lips, nothing more.

“No.”

Calastor’s eyes widened.

Lurn gasped.

Drask, strangling his fury, gaped.

“No?” he repeated, warily.

She extended one mighty hand, the first movement of Her body since they had come into Her presence, and they all instinctively shrank back.

From Her outstretched palm a ray of bright leaf-green light sped, bathing Drask’s booted feet in its lambent glow, then flaring out as if it had never been.

Drask struggled to move, but could not. Sweat broke out upon his brow. It was as if his heels had been welded into the mirror-pave.

“No,” She repeated serenely. “You shall never die. I grant you everlasting life. This is the judgment of Niamh.”

Lurn drew in her breath sharply, and caught at Calastor’s white-clad arm. He followed her startled glance, to see—

The Warlord’s boots whitened as if touched to marble by the bolt of green radiance, then became transparent as clear glass! Drask paled, his strong face suddenly haggard. His eyes flickered from side to side, like a hunted animal’s.

“Everlasting life… .” he repeated dully.

The curious transparency was creeping up his long legs. They were like columns of sheer crystal.

“Your mind and ego shall never perish, until the vast Universe of Stars ends at last in the eventual energy-death of balanced entropy,” the Goddess said, in tones coldly dispassionate. “Prisoned in living, indestructable crystal, your identity shall endure for all Eternity to come, and you shall have unending ages to contemplate how prodigally you have wasted the gifts that heredity and fortune gave into your hands.”

The weird crystal transformation crept remorselessly up Drask’s trembling body. It was now above his hips. From the waist down, he was like a glass statue, frozen immobile. His face tightened under the lash of unendurable terror. Death, torture, execution … all these he was strong enough to bear. But not the inhuman doom meted out to him by Her justice.

“No! Goddess—mercy!”

“As much mercy shall be yours as you gave to the undefended worlds crushed beneath your bloody heel,” She said coldly. “And for ages to come, remember all your triumphs, one by one. The helpless planets you looted and sacked … the garden-world of Athnolan … placid Onaldus with its blue hills and yellow skies … Mindanell, the Planet of Fernsmen, and quiet Freihoffer, Scather, and Argion, and shadowy Xulthoom of the Hooded Men.”

The glassy tide crept to his shoulders, spreading down his arms. His face was paper-white, utterly drained of color. He raised his face to the sky, mouth stretched wide in a soundless howl of agony—and froze with that expression forever stamped on living crystal.

The transmutation was complete.

Where one moment before had stood a breathing creature of flesh and blood, now towered a crystal statue of eternal stone.

So Drask of the Varkonna, the most feared Warlord of the Rovers since the dark age of Shandalar the Red, came at last to his doom … a doom that would become a whispered legend for a thousand years.

They stood in a breathless silence. The face of the Goddess, far above them, brooded down on Her awful handiwork.

And the shaman screamed.

Gasping and slobbering out hysterical words, he fell groveling at the foot of the Emerald Throne. Gone now, once and for all, was the Buddha-like mask of impenetrable calm that had hidden for years the scorching furnace of ambition, greed, envy and lust that was his secret heart.

“Spare me … mercy, O Mighty One! I will repent … punish not my … O Gods of …”

Her cool, amused voice cut off his babblings like a swift knife-stroke.

“Shaman of the Fourth Circle, Abdekiel of Yoth Zembis the Planet of Sorcerers, fear not—your punishment shall be a different one.”

His face ghastly with terror, he looked up at Her and the Green Goddess smiled down at his wet, quivering face.

“You are unlike Drask in all ways,” She said softly. A faint beam of hope gleamed in the little slitted eyes of the shaman. He wet his thick lips with a darting tongue.

“Yes! Yes!” Abdekiel stammered eagerly. “He was brutal, cruel—I am not! I am timid—helpless—I obeyed his commands—I could do naught else! I—”

“You gutless worm!” Forgetting his own superstitious awe, burly, bluff Tonguth stamped forward, booted heels ringing on the shimmering pave. “Face up to your punishment like a man—cease whimpering and slithering about on your fat guts like some slimy serpent! My Master, Drask, was what you lusted to be and would have been, had you enough iron manhood in your blood to stiffen your spine! Stand up and take what comes!”

The fat shaman only groveled, hiding his face between fat hands from Tonguth’s wrath. The Chieftain spat contemptuously.

” ‘A gutless worm’ … apt, Barbarian,” the Goddess said, with a cryptic smile. “Abdekiel, as I said, you are no Drask. Where he was at least bold, strong and courageous, you are a weakling. Lust for power and conquest boils in your brain no less fiercely than in his. But where he reached out and took with fearless hands, caring not if blood be shed in the process, nor even if some of it be his own … your way is different. The poison in the chalice … the sly, whispered word … the insidious hints … lacking even the manhood of the dagger in the back from behind. Drask was a force of destruction, a thing to fear. You are utterly despicable!”

She reached out her mighty green arm.

“Become as Tonguth hailed you—a crawling worm! This is the judgment of Niamh… .”

The green ray of weird light sprang from her extended palm to bathe the huddled, moaning figure of the shaman.

There came a flash of blinding light.

When they blinked the dazzle from their eyes, the sprawling form of Abdekiel was gone … and, in its place, they saw a repulsive thing: the huge, glistening, bulging form of a giant worm flopped and writhed in sluggish torment, weaving its hideous blind head from side to side as if to seek escape, wallowing in the stinking slime its squalid flesh exhuded!

“Live, a human intellect, imprisoned in this loathsome slug! And now, begone—you foul my floors!”

Her great hand gestured, and the repulsive thing was wafted by invisible force through the air, vanishing into dimness, beyond Diomahl into the most distant forests of the Green World.

Now Tonguth stood alone in the place of judgment. All fear was shorn from him now—he was beyond horrors. He stood tall, shoulders thrown back, hands by his sides—yet not arrogantly, as had Drask, but quietly, waiting. And his face was calm, accepting whatever fate was decreed for him without protest or argument. Something there was of a certain nobility about the bearded Barbarian, unglimpsed until that moment.

She regarded him, from Her awful height.

“Tonguth var-Yordha, Chieftain of the Clan of Yordhanna.”

“Aye, Majesty,” Tonguth acknowledged. His tone was humble, but he did not bend his head.

“You are strong, hardy, bold. Bravery is yours, yes, and cruelty as well. Your hands are bloody with the gore of many hundreds. Your soul reeks with the stains of murder, rapine, pillage. But your cruelty is the honest cruelty of the savage, who knows no better. Your murders were done in battle, man to man or ship to ship. Your life is steeped in violence … but I have no quarrel with violence. War and death are a part of Nature. The strong batter down the weak, so that the race may breed true and clean. Crimes of excess are not yours. The lust for unlimited conquest and unending power that goaded the Warlord Drask to inhuman extents is not in you. In you I find a strong, crude and warlike manhood—but war, I say, is not of itself an evil thing, but a part of the universal process.”

Tonguth faced her unblinking, but doubt and puzzlement showed in his expression.

She smiled—nor was it Her coldly august smile as of before. This smile—did it hint at a trace of softer, more human warmth? Perhaps.

“Moreover, I find in you one high, redeeming and even noble trait. Unselfishly, with a devotion and a loyalty I could almost find within Myself to praise, did you serve him whom fate made your Master. Devotion misguided and ignorant—doglike—but still unselfish.”

Tonguth said slowly, “What does this mean, Lady?”

“It means I find but little evil in you. Go. You are free.”

Tonguth blinked, as one dazed, and turned a baffled look at Calastor, Lurn, and the Magister, who stared back at him blankly, but with a dawning trace of a smile. He turned again to the Goddess.

“No … punishment?”

She laughed, this time with only a touch of mockery. “Oh, yes, Barbarian. Punishment—of a kind. Tonguth of the Yordhanna, I bestow upon you Lordship over the Star Rovers, or what is left of them. You are their King—but not Warlord, for they and you are done now with conquest.”

He swung his great shaggy head, like a dazed bear. “I—am—King?” he repeated slowly.

“By my will. You will not find it to your own, I warrant. For now you must lead your broken people back to the Rim of the Galaxy from whence they sprang, ages agone. You shall guide them to their forgotten kingdoms, quell the disobedience in them, force them to tame again those cold and barren worlds as did their ancestors. Those worlds are yours and your descendants’ forever. Farm them. Build cities. And leave them never again!”

“Aye … aye, Lady, but … this is reward … kingship … not punishment!”

She regarded him with quiet amusement that softened the cold planes of Her unearthly face, infusing it for a moment with a very human warmth.

“Nay, Tonguth, for it is punishment of a very special and very cruel kind, as you shall discover in years to come! For now you must learn to lead, rather than being led. You must think … and plan for what is best … and command, where you have been commanded. While your people feast and enjoy their feasting, you shall stay awake night after night, in council-chamber and judgment-hall, puzzling out the baffling and enigmatic rules of justice, and mercy, and reason, and foresight, and … kingliness. This is your doom. This is the judgment of Niamh.”

“And I am … free to go?” he said thoughtfully, as if still not fully comprehending.

She nodded, rippling the floating veils of Her metallic mane.

“And take with you this gift,” She said, “this crystal statue of curiously lifelike design, the work of an Immortal Hand. Set it up in the center of your city. It is more than a work of art, my little friend. It shall stand, for your people and forever, a monument to the folly of cruel and limitless ambition … an indestructible symbol of the doom that awaits the conqueror. Treat it reverently, for it bears within it a human soul in unbelievable and unending torment. Look upon it daily … and remember the falling ships, the blasting beams, the proud cities crushed to gore-splashed rubble, the hordes of naked slaves led to the block or the arena of death. Do not hide it away, as the guilty man hides from the sting of conscience, but have it ever before your eyes. For this, too, is part of your … punishment.”

A globe of force snapped into existence, encompassing both Tonguth and the glassy thing that had been Drask the mighty Warlord. It floated up weightlessly from the shining pave … up into the green, shadowy dimness of the air that glowed with vague, submerged light … up, up into the astounding height of the Jade Tower … and was gone.

Calastor knew that it was sent on its mysterious way, flashing faster than light, faster than thought itself, through the unthinkable immensity of interstellar space, to join the shattered remnants of the Star Rover’s fleet … bearing within its sphere of force the crystal hell that imprisoned a tortured soul, and the mortal flesh that was a living man, and, perhaps, now somewhat more of a man … a man with a new-born conscience … a man learning the beginnings of the terrible responsibility each man bears for his brother man… .

A man at last beginning to think.

“And now, you three are left,” the Goddess’ cool voice broke in on his wondering thoughts. “Now we come to your judgment… .”