Gather Darkness - Illustrated, page 5
Pygmy figures in home-woven drab, scarlet-robed dolls of priests, cobblers, horses, carts, and wares, all complete— a sizeable portion of the Great Square, without the surrounding architecture.
Only now, instead of the Great God, the archpriests of the Apex Council brooded over it.
Up from the three smaller depressions rose stubby columns of light, yellow, green, blue, violet, fluctuating slightly but incessantly in height and saturation of color—indicative of the massed changes in the major neuro-emotional responses of the crowd.
There rose the hum and babble of pygmy voices, the clatter of tiny hoofs, the squeak of wooden wheels.
The scene in the Great Square was repeating itself.
Cousin Deth thrust his now-giant arm into the moving solidograph, momentarily intensifying, then shattering the illusion. His fingers negligently poked at and into two tiny-robed figures.
“Jarles and Chulian,” he explained. “In a few moments well give you their voices in full intensity.”
Goniface leaned back with satisfaction. He was studying the expressions on the faces of the peering archpriests—eerily lit masks seeming to hang against the distanceless blackness beyond the table. But now and then he looked at the solidograph.
It was at the moment of the first accusation of Witchcraft—the violet column concerned with fear, repulsion, and similar emotions had jumped abruptly and gone wan—that he chanced to note her face.
Almost, he jerked forward and grabbed at it.
But he caught himself in time, and only leaned forward idly, as if it were his momentary fancy to take a closer look.
It couldn’t be.
But there it was. That little coldly purposeful face, more perfect than any cameo, with its dark, fine-spun doll’s hair. Not identically the same, of course, as the one printed in his memory. But if you allowed for the years and the maturing the years would have brought—
Geryl. Knowles Geryl.
But Chulian had referred to her by another name. What was it ? Sharlson Naurya.
It was as if some long-locked door in Goniface’s mind groaned and reverberated, straining against the hinges with a formless pressure from the other side.
He looked across the table toward the yellowish caricature that was Deth’s face in the darkness, caught the beady black eyes. Deth melted backward, was gone.
Goniface stood up quietly and walked behind the chairs, as. though he were tired of sitting. Then he moved away from the table.
He sensed Deth’s presence beside him, caught the thin, bony wrist in his hand, and whispered very faintly into Deth’s ear:
“The woman I sent Chulian to arrest. Sharlson Naurya. Find her. Take her from Chulian if he has her. But find her. Make her my secret prisoner.”
And then, like an afterthought “Unharmed^ mind you, at least until I have seen and spoken with her.”
In the darkness Cousin Deth smiled crookedly.
III.
For a moment Brother Chulian thought a shadow was scuttling toward him between the cobbles. He jerked away so that his halo reeled tipsily across the lightless street and his Inviolability field bumped that of his companion.
“I slipped;” he gasped unconvincingly, “Some nasty Commoner must have thrown out greasy slops.”
The other priest did not reply. Fervently Chulian hoped that he would not mind turning right at the next corner. It was a little longer that way, but you didn’t have to pass the haunted house.
To his relief the fellow turned right without being asked.
Of course, the house wasn’t really haunted, Chulian reminded . himself quickly. That would be the sheerest nonsense. But it was such an ugly place, and the Commoners told such unpleasantly grotesque stories about it at confession.
Why did the Commoners have to have such narrow, twisty streets, and why was there such a strict curfew, Chulian complained to himself, as if it were somehow the Commoners’ fault. Like a city of the dead. Not a person stirring, not a light showing, not a sound. Of course, all those rules were the laws of the Hierarchy, he remembered unwillingly. Still, there ought to be some provision for cases like this—say a law that the Commoners ought to listen for priests, coming at night and be ready to set out lighted torches. A halo hardly gave you enough light to keep from tripping over things!
Like twin will-o’-the-wisps the two circular violet glows bobbed through the crazily curving trenches in darkness that were the streets of Megatheopolis.
Behind rose the greater glow of the Sanctuary. To Chulian it seemed like some warm hearth from which he had been unfairly pushed out into the cold. Why did they have to pick on him for jobs like this ? He was just an innocent clerk, bothering no one. All he asked from life was peace and comfort, a decent supply of his favorite goodies, a chance to sit in bed—at this moment he could almost feel the cushiony softness—and watch his favorite solido-graphic books read themselves, and now and again a bit of special fun.
Who in the world could be so cruel as to object to that?
It all came from his miserable luck at having been paired off with Jarles, he told himself pityingly. That sullen, nasty fellow! If he hadn’t been paired with Jarles, he wouldn’t have been forced into this wild plot, which he didn’t understand and which seemed to have been designed solely to bring trouble and danger into a world that would go so smoothly if everyone were more like Brother Chulian!
Even then it would have been all right if he hadn’t been so foolish as to mention those extra marks to Goniface. But if he hadn’t told, they’d probably have found out, and he’d have been punished.
Witchmarks! Chulian shivered. Almost he could see them burning in the white flesh of that nasty girl. Why did some Commoner girls have to be brazen and sulky? Why couldn’t they all be gentle and docile?
And now he was going to have to see her again and arrest her.
Witchmarks! He wished he could stop thinking about them. As part of his priestly education he had read a book about the Middle Ages of Dawn Civilization and its primitive Witchcraft. A witchmark was supposed to be where a witch suckled her familiar. A familiar was supposed to be a little helper, given her by Satan—Sathanas.
Of course, it had all been nonsense then, and was nonsense now.
But why had Goniface called the girl a witch when he had heard of the extra marks, and sent Chulian to arrest her?
Chulian didn’t really want to know the answer. He didn’t want to be a Third Circle priest. He just wanted to be left in peace. If he could only make them understand that!
His companion nudged him into attentiveness, pointing at a rectangle of deeper blackness in the irregular rubble-and-plaster wall. They had arrived.
Chulian rapped loudly against the rough wooden door. When your fingers wore the Gloves of Inviolability you could hardly hurt them.
“Open in the name of the Great God and his Hierarchy!” he commanded, his reedy voice amplified by the silence.
“The door is not barred. Open it yourself,” came the quiet, muffled, gently mocking answer.
Chulian bristled. Such insolence! But then they had come to arrest the girl, not to teach her manners. He jerked the latchstring and pushed.
The room was dimly and unevenly lit by the flickering of a thrifty fire. Faint coils of smoke, escaping from the fireplace, writhed about lazily, some of them eventually finding their way out through the tiny square air hole in the low ceiling. Chulian’s companion coughed.
Before the fireplace a shuttle was moving busily through the threads of a large loom, weaving some darkishly figured fabric.
Its uninterrupted, jumpy rhythm made Chulian uneasy. He hesitated and shot a quick glance at his companion. Side by side, close together, they moved forward until they could see the other side of the loom and Sharlson Naurya.
She was wearing a close-fitting dress of gray homespun. Her wrapt eyes seemed to be looking not so much at her work as through it, though her busy fingers never hesitated. Was it only threads she was weaving. Chulian wondered, or something else—something bigger?
With almost a guilty start, he realized of whom she reminded him. Only a suggestion, of course— Still, there was in her face the same dark strength, the same sense of hidden yet limitless purpose, as he had just seen, and cringed before, in the archpriest Goniface.
After a moment she turned her head and looked at them. But there was no change in her expression—as if they were merely part of that bigger, invisible fabric she had been weaving. Without haste she tucked the shuttle into the warp and stood up facing them, folding her hands at her waist.
“Sharlson Naurya,” Chulian intoned solemnly but a trifle jerkily, “we come, inviolable emissaries of the Hierarchy, to do the bidding of the Great God.”
Her green eyes smiled at that, if eyes can smile. But what Chulian wondered was what those eyes saw when they looked past him. Brazen girl! What right had she to take this so calmly!
He drew himself up.
“Sharlson Naurya, in the name of the Great God and his Hierarchy, I arrest you!”
She bent her head. And now there was something twisted and evil about the w ay her eyes smiled. She suddenly spread her hand outward from her waist.
“Run, Puss!” she cried with an almost mischievous urgency. ‘‘Tell the Black Man !”
A glittering talon ripped at the waist the gray homespun of her dress—from within. There was a rapid disturbance of the cloth. Then through the slit something wriggled and sprang.
Something furry, big as a cat, but more like a monkey, and incredibly lean.
Like a swift-scuttling spider it was up the wall and across the ceiling, clinging effortlessly.
Chulian’s muscles froze. With a throaty gasp his companion lunged out an arm. From the pointing finger crackled a needle of violet light, scorching a shaky, zigzag track in the crude plaster of wall and ceiling.
The thing paused for a moment in the air hole, looking back. Then it was gone, and the violet beam spat futilely through the air hole toward the black heavens, where one star glittered.
But Chulian continued to stare upward, his slack jaw trembling. He had gotten one look at the tiny face. Not when the thing moved, for then it had been only a rippling blur, but when it paused to glance back.
Not all the features of a face had been there. Some were missing and others seemed somehow telescoped into each other. And the fine fur encroached on them.
Nevertheless, where the features showed through the fur. they were white, and, in spite of all distortions, they were a peering, chinless, hellish, but terribly convincing caricature of the features of Sharlson Naurya.
And the fur had been of exactly the same shade as her dark hair.
Finally Chulian looked back at her. She had not moved. Still stood there smiling with her eyes.
“What was that thing?” he cried. It was much more a frightened appeal than a demand.
“Don’t you know ?” she asked gravely.
A priest was supposed to know everything.
She reached for a shawl hanging from the end of the loom. “I am ready.” she said. “Aren’t you going to take me to the Sanctuary?”
Chulian started at the word. The Sanctuary! Of course! Things like this couldn’t happen in the Sanctuary.
Not things like familiars.
Things like familiars were unreal— did not exist.
But in that case he had just watched the unreal scuttle across the ceiling.
And something from the world of is not had slashed the strong homespun of Sharlson Naurya’s dress.
“Come, daughter!” he commanded, blustering instinctively. “You are under arrest. We must swiftly convey you to the Sanctuary!”
“I will go with you,” Sharlson Naurya answered quietly, “as far as you dare.”
And pulling her shawl around her, she walked toward the door.
It seemed darker than ever outside, and dead still. If any Commoners had heard the disturbance, they had not come out to investigate. Of course, that was the law, but Chulian wished it weren’t, or that some Commoner would break it —just this once. Or if only they would meet up with a patrol of deacons!
Through the narrow, uneven streets hurriedly bobbed the two violet halos, straining toward the beacon-glow of the Sanctuary.
If only the girl wouldn’t walk so slowly! Of course, they could hurry her up—each had an elbow in one of his puffed hands—but somehow Chulian didn’t like the idea of hurting her, especially since she was otherwise so docile. After all, that thing of hers was somewhere up on the roofs, perhaps following them. At any moment he might look up and see a tiny anthropoid muzzle poked over an edge, outlined against the stars.
When they got to the Sanctuary, things would be different!
Lightless doorways, lightless mouths of other streets, marched past them. At the next corner they must turn to the left to avoid the haunted house, Chulian reminded himself. This was no time to be passing such a place.
But when they got to the turn, the street to the left was walled—stuffed solid—with blackness.
Not the star-hazed blackness through which they had been passing, but blackness utter and complete, making the rest seem gray.
Nothing more.
Chulian looked sideways past the girl at Brother Arolj’s face, sickly under the glowing halo, and caught an answering panicky glance.
In a rush, so they wouldn’t be able to flinch, they plunged into the blackness, the girl between them.
Their halos were extinguished. There was no light whatever.
As if out of a wall of ink, they scrambled back again, gasping. For one horrid moment Chulian feared they would be trapped in the blackness forever.
They turned to the right. Blackness filled that street mouth to brimming, too.
Chulian did not dare look directly behind him, mainly from fear, but partly because he still retained some shreds of priestly pride in the presence of the girl.
For Sharlson Naurya still stood obediently between them. She could have escaped merely by staying in the blackness—they had both let go of her. Of course, she might be afraid of the blackness, too. But Chulian did not think so.
From the corner of his eye he darted a backward glance. It w>as as he feared. The blackness had followed them down the street by which they had come.
The only way open was directly ahead, past the haunted house. Something wanted them to pass the haunted house. But it was that or nothing—before the blackness should decide to encroach still further and swallow them up.
That last fear must have occurred simultaneously to Brother Arolj, for they started forward at a panicky trot, fairly dragging their prisoner between them.
Behind them steadily flowed the wall of blackness, lapping round their heels when they faltered. By the time they reached the little neglected square and the haunted house, they were running.
Much taller than the other houses it stood, a landmark of desolation. But Chulian only caught a glimpse of its entirety of crazily sagging, strangely slack walls and drooping circular windows, like pouched and leering eyes. For the blackness suddenly closed in from several directions, like a huge sack, cutting off the w>ay ahead, blacking out the stars, driving them across the rubbly ground tow?ard the mouth of the sack— and the wrinkled, sphincterlike doorway of the house itself.
There Chulian had his one burst of desperate, fear-inspired courage. He pointed his finger at Naurya.
“In the name of the Great God, if you don’t make it go away, I’ll blast you!” he threatened through trembling lips.
Instantly the blackness swooped inward, closing about them like an envelope, bare inches away, half blotting out their view of each other.
“I won’t! I won’t!” Chulian cried out, dropping his hand.
The blackness retreated somewhat.
And now Sharlson Naurya finally smiled at him with her lips. She reached out, and before he realized what she was going to do, slapped his chest smartly at a certain spot.
His Inviolability field went limp. His halo winked out. His deflated scarlet robe hung loosely.
She patted his cheek, as one pats the cheek of a child. His flesh crawled at the gentle touch.
“Good-by, Little Brother Chulian,” she said, and slipped through the sagging doorway into the haunted house.
The blackness shot back, was not.
And up from the street Cousin Deth came running.
“Your prisoner! Where is she?*’ he demanded curtly of Chulian.
“Didn’t you see it? That awful blackness ?” Chulian countered unsteadily.
Cousin Deth drew back from him. “I wasn’t aware you priests were afraid of the dark.”
Like cold water or a slap in the face, the insult quenched Chulian’s fears. It stung. For a moment he was conscious only that he had been insulted by a mere deacon.
“So your prisoner—a girl—managed to escape from you ?” Deth was staring speculatively past Chulian at the sagging doorway,
“She went in there!” Chulian retorted angrily. “And if you’re so eager to get her, why don’t you go in after her yourself?”
In reply, Cousin Deth only stared at him venomously, but under that stare Brother Chulian wilted.
Cousin Deth turned toward the street.
“Rouse Commoners!” he shouted to someone. “Set a cordon round the house!”
When he turned back to Chulian, his stare was still as stonily venomous.
“I shall probably be asked to enter this place tomorrow to cleanse it of evil,” he said. “Since you are so desirous of seeing me enter it, your reverence, I will ask that you be made my assistant, to accompany me.”
IV.
The guiding hands left Jarles, after a slight, momentary tightening of their grip, which seemed to mean, “Stay there!” He felt the edge of a box or bench against the calves of his legs, but he did not sit down.
Gradually the faintest suggestion of his surroundings was revealed to Jarles, like a midnight picture deftly painted by a master artist in brief phosphorescent strokes against a black surface tinged with violet.
