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want blood for this when he finds out about it. He and his cursed
Low-Canallers have been difficult enough to handle, as it is."
He turned angrily and started back toward the building from which he
had come. Berild gave Stark an unfathomable look as they followed.
There came a sound that made the hair bristle a little on Stark's neck.
It was a murmuring seeming to come from all the silent, dead white city
around them, a sound not human in tone but rising and falling like distant
voices. The morning breeze had begun to blow and the vague whispering
seemed brought by it. Stark did not like it at all.
They went with Kynon into a room of polished marble, with faded
frescoes of the same figures in ancient dress that marched in the carvings
outside. The frescoes were much more faded in some places than in
others, so that only here and there did a shadowy face leap suddenly into
being, prideful and mocking with smiling lips, or a procession pass
solemnly toward some obliterated worship.
Kynon had here a folding wooden desk, with papers scattered on it,
which looked utterly incongruous in this place.
"I sent riders back," Kynon said abruptly, "to search for you. They
didn't find you. You were nowhere near Sinharat. And now you pop up out
of nowhere."
Berild said, "Your riders wouldn't have found us. We came across the
Belly of Stones."
"With one skin of water? It's impossible!"
Berild nodded. "But we had three skins, that were on the packbeast that
Stark caught. They were our life."
So Berild had her secrets from Kynon, and one of them was the hidden
well? Stark was not surprised. She was the kind of woman who would have
many secrets.
But I have my secrets too, Berild. And I will not tell even you how I
saw you walking in the moonlight with too great a knowledge of dead
ages.
"It was not," Berild was saying to Kynon, "exactly a pleasure journey. I
want to rest. Was Fianna saved?"
Kynon came out of some inner abstraction to answer, with a nod, "Yes,
she and most of your things."
Berild left. Kynon's eyes followed her, and when she had gone he looked
at Stark.
"Even with water, only a wild man could have done it," he said. "But
again I warn you curb your wildness, Stark. Especially when Delgaun
comes."
Stark said, "Drylanders and Low-Canallers and outland
mercenaries can you keep them from each other's throats?"
"By all the gods, I'll do it if I have to tear throats out myself!" Kynon
swore viciously. "We can grab a world and only one thing could prevent
it the old feuds that have brought so many brave plans to wreck, in the
past. They'll not wreck my plans!"
They would if he could encompass it, Stark thought He had known from
the time that Ashton had given him his mission of stopping this thing,
that the only possible leverage he would have was the ancient quarrels of
Mars, that his only chance would be to turn these old enemies against
each other. How he would do this, he did not know.
He found that he was swaying, and Kynon saw it and exclaimed, "Go
get some rest before you drop here. I'll say this, that you may be a wild
man but you are indeed a man, to have come the way you did."
He stepped closer and added flatly, "And I'll tell you also, that I don't
quite like men who are as tough or almost as tough as I am. Get out."
Stark went the way he pointed, into a broad and shadowy hallway. The
first room he looked into had a sleeping-pad in the corner. He stumbled to
it and fell, rather than lay down.
But even as he plunged into sleep, he heard the faint echoing whisper
from outside, the uncanny murmurs, rising now into a strange, pulsating
singing of sound that seemed to moan through the whole dead city like a
dirge.
X
STARK AWOKE to find the room in semi-dusk, a narrow shaft of red
sunset light striking in from a high loophole window. He sensed that a
presence had awakened him and then he saw Fianna, sitting on a carved
stone bench across the room. She was looking at him, her eyes serious and
dark.
"You growled, before you awoke," she said. "Like a great beast."
"Perhaps that is what I am," he said.
"Perhaps it is," Fianna said, and nodded. "But if so, I will tell you this,
beast: You have come into a trap."
He got to his feet, every nerve waking to alertness. He went and stood
looking down at her.
"What do you mean, little one?"
"Don't call me 'Little one,' " she flashed. "It is not I who am foolish and
young it is you. If you were not, you would not be in Sinharat."
"But you are here also, Fianna."
She sighed. "I know. It is not a place where I would wish to be. But I
serve the Lady Berild, and must go where she takes me."
He looked keenly down at her for a moment. "You serve her. Yet you
hate her."
She hesitated. "I don't hate her. Sometimes, for all her wickednesses, I
envy her she lives so passionately and fully. But I fear her I fear what she
and Kynon may do to my people."
Eric John Stark feared that too but he did not say so. Instead, he said,
"Being a beast, I'm concerned for my hide. You spoke of a trap."
"It is this," said Fianna. "You are valuable to Kynon, to train his hordes,
when they gather, in outland fighting-skills. But Delgaun and his support
are even more valuable to Kynon. If Delgaun asks your death for Luhar's& "
She did not finish, and Stark finished for her. "Why, then Kynon will
very likely regretfully sacrifice one guerrilla fighter, to keep the
Low-Canallers happy. Thanks for the warning. But this was already in my
mind."
Fianna said hopefully, "You could slip away before Delgaun comes. If
you stole a mount and took water, you could escape."
No, thought Stark. It is the sensible thing to do, if I want to save my
skin, but Simon Ashton will be waiting in Tarak and I can't go to him and
say that I've quit the whole thing, it's just too dangerous.
Besides, he thought, there's something here that I can't understand and
that I must find out. Something&
Fianna, watching his face, said suddenly, "You're going to stay. But
don't give me the lying reasons you're now thinking up. You stay because
of Berild."
Stark smiled. "All women think that men do nothing except for a
woman."
"And all men deny it when it is true," she said. "Tell me, were you and
Berild lovers in the desert?"
"Jealous, Fianna?"
He expected her to sputter resentment at that, but she did not. Instead
an enigmatic, almost pitying look came into her eyes, and she said softly,
"No, not jealous, Eric John Stark. But saddened."
She rose suddenly to her feet and said, formally, "I am sent to bring you
to the Lady Berild."
Stark's eyes narrowed slightly. "With Kynon right here? Will he like
that?"
Fianna smiled mirthlessly. "That's a clever, cautious beast, to think of
that. But Kynon is down in the camp below the city. And the Lady Berild
does not like this place, and lives elsewhere. I will take you."
He went out with her into the great square. There was no one in it at
all, and its sculptured walls and towers rose into the flaring red sunset,
wrapped in a silence that was oppressive. As they walked, their footfalls
sounded loud upon the ancient flagstones, and it seemed to Stark that all
the stones of dead Sinharat that loomed around them were listening and
watching.
The evening wind sprang up and touched his face. Suddenly, he
stopped. He had heard a sound that began as an inaudible vibration and
rose stealthily into his hearing. A whispering, a vast, vague murmuring
that came from everywhere and nowhere, so that it seemed that Sinharat
was not only listening and watching, but was now speaking also.
Of a sudden, the whispering swelled up into musical voices.
Organ-voices, that seemed to come from the very coral on which the city
stood. Flute-voices, from the tall towers that caught the last red light.
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