court. Enclosed within its walls was a village of thatched huts, with open sheds for cooking, and behind them were pens for the stabling of beasts, the wingless dragons of the swamps that can be caught and broken to the goad.
She saw this only in vague glimpses, because of the fog. The women who had let her in clustered around her, thrusting her forward into the light that streamed from the huts.
'She would speak with the Lhari!' one of them shouted, to the men and children who stood in the doorways watching. The words were picked up and tossed around the court, and a great burst of laughter went up.
Stark eyed them, saying nothing. They were a puzzling breed. The women, obviously, were soldiers and guards to the Lhari, for they wore the harness of fighting women. As obviously, these were their wives and children, all living behind the castle walls and having little to do with Shuruun.
But it was their racial characteristics that surprised her. They had interbred with the pale tribes of the Swamp-Edges that had peopled Shuruun, and there were many with milk-white hair and broad faces. Yet even these bore an alien stamp. Stark was puzzled, for the race she would have named was unknown here behind the Mountains of White Cloud, and almost unknown anywhere on Venus at sea level, among the sweltering marshes and the eternal fogs.
They stared at her even more curiously, remarking on her skin and her black hair and the unfamiliar modeling of her face. The men nudged each other and whispered, giggling, and one of them said aloud, 'They'll need a barrel-hoop to collar that neck!'
The guards closed in around her. 'Well, if you wish to see the Lhari, you shall,' said the leader, 'but first we must make sure of you.'
Spear-points ringed her round. Stark made no resistance while they stripped her of all she had, except for her shorts and sandals. She had expected that, and it amused her, for there was little enough for them to take.
'All right,' said the leader. 'Come on.'
The whole village turned out in the rain to escort Stark to the castle door. There was about them the same ominous interest that the people of Shuruun had had, with one difference. They knew what was supposed to happen to her, knew all about it, and were therefore doubly appreciative of the game.
The great doorway was square and plain, and yet neither crude nor ungraceful. The castle itself was built of the black stone, each block perfectly cut and fitted, and the door itself was sheathed in the same metal as the gate, darkened but not corroded.
The leader of the guard cried out to the warder, 'Here is one who would speak with the Lhari!'
The warder laughed. 'And so she shall! Their night is long, and dull.'
She flung open the heavy door and cried the word down the hallway. Stark could hear it echoing hollowly within, and presently from the shadows came servants clad in silks and wearing jeweled collars, and from the guttural sound of their laughter Stark knew that they had no tongues.
Stark faltered, then. The doorway loomed hollowly before her, and it came to her suddenly that evil lay behind it and that perhaps Zareth was wiser than she when he warned her from the Lhari.
Then she thought of Helvi, and of other things, and lost her fear in anger. Lightning burned the sky. The last cry of the dying storm shook the ground under her feet. She thrust the grinning warder aside and strode into the castle, bringing a veil of the red fog with her, and did not listen to the closing of the door, which was stealthy and quiet as the footfall of approaching Death.
Torches burned here and there along the walls, and by their smoky glare she could see that the hallway was like the entrance—square and unadorned, faced with the black rock. It was high, and wide, and there was about the architecture a calm reflective dignity that had its own beauty, in some ways more impressive than the sensuous loveliness of the ruined palaces she had seen on Mars.
There were no carvings here, no paintings nor frescoes. It seemed that the builders had felt that the hall itself was enough, in its massive perfection of line and the somber gleam of polished stone. The only decoration was in the window embrasures. These were empty now, open to the sky with the red fog wreathing through them, but there were still scraps of jewel-toned panes clinging to the fretwork, to show what they had once been.
A strange feeling swept over Stark. Because of her wild upbringing, she was abnormally sensitive to the sort of impressions that most women receive either dully or not at all.
Walking down the hall, preceded by the tongueless creatures in their bright silks and blazing collars, she was struck by a subtle difference in the place. The castle itself was only an extension of the minds of its builders, a dream shaped into reality. Stark felt that that dark, cool, curiously timeless dream had not originated in a mind like her own, nor like that of any woman she had ever seen.
Then the end of the hall was reached, the way barred by low broad doors of gold fashioned in the same chaste simplicity.
A soft scurrying of feet, a shapeless tittering from the servants, a glancing of malicious, mocking eyes. The golden doors swung open, and Stark was in the presence of the Lhari.
V
They had the appearance in that first glance, of creatures glimpsed in a fever-dream, very bright and distant, robed in a misty glow that gave them an illusion of unearthly beauty.
The place in which the Earthwoman now stood was like a cathedral for breadth and loftiness. Most of it was in darkness, so that it seemed to reach without limit above and on all sides, as though the walls were only shadowy phantasms of the night itself. The polished black stone under her feet held a dim translucent gleam, depthless as water in a black tarn. There was no substance anywhere.
Far away in this shadowy vastness burned a cluster of lamps, a galaxy of little stars to shed a silvery light upon the Ladys of Shuruun.
There had been no sound in the place when Stark entered, for the opening of the golden doors had caught the attention of the Lhari and held it in contemplation of the stranger. Stark began to walk toward them in this utter stillness.
Quite suddenly, in the impenetrable gloom somewhere to her right, there came a sharp scuffling and a scratching of reptilian claws, a hissing and a sort of low angry muttering, all magnified and distorted by the echoing vault into a huge demoniac whispering that swept all around her.
Stark whirled around, crouched and ready, her eyes blazing and her body bathed in cold sweat. The noise increased, rushing toward her. From the distant glow of the lamps came a man's tinkling laughter, thin crystal broken against the vault. The hissing and snarling rose to hollow crescendo, and Stark saw a blurred shape bounding at her.
Her hands reached out to receive the rush, but it never came. The strange shape resolved itself into a girl of about ten, who dragged after her on a bit of rope a young dragon, new and toothless from the egg, and protesting with all its strength.
Stark straightened up, feeling let down and furious—and relieved. The girl scowled at her through a forelock of silver curls. Then she called her a very dirty word and rushed away, kicking and hauling at the little beast until it raged like the mother of all dragons and sounded like it, too, in that vast echo chamber.
A voice spoke. Slow, harsh, sexless, it rang thinly through the vault. Thin—but a steel blade is thin, too. It speaks inexorably, and its word is final.
The voice said, 'Come here, into the light.'
Stark obeyed the voice. As she approached the lamps, the aspect of the Lhari changed and steadied. Their beauty remained, but it was not the same. They had looked like angels. Now that she could see them clearly, Stark thought that they might have been the children of Lucifer herself.
There were six of them, counting the girl. Two women, about the same age as Stark, with some complicated gambling game forgotten between them. A man, beautiful, gowned in white silk, sitting with his hands in his lap, doing nothing. A man, younger, not so beautiful perhaps, but with a look of stormy and bitter vitality. He wore a short tunic of crimson, and a stout leather glove on his left hand, where perched a flying thing of prey with its fier
ce eyes hooded. The girl stood beside the two women, her head poised arrogantly. From time to time she cuffed the little dragon, and it snapped at her with its impotent jaws. She was proud of herself for doing that. Stark wondered how she would behave with the beast when it had grown its fangs.
Opposite her, crouched on a heap of cushions, was a third woman. She was deformed, with an ungainly body and long spidery arms, and in her lap a sharp knife lay on a block of wood, half formed into the shape of an obese creature half man, half pure evil. Stark saw with a flash of surprise that the face of the deformed young woman, of all the faces there, was truly human, truly beautiful. Her eyes were old in her boyish face, wise, and very sad in their wisdom. She smiled upon the stranger, and her smile was more compassionate than tears.
They looked at Stark, all of them, with restless, hungry eyes. They were the pure breed, that had left its stamp of alienage on the pale-haired folk of the swamps, the serfs who dwelt in the huts outside.
They were of the Cloud People, the folk of the High Plateaus, queens of the land on the farther slopes of the Mountains of White Cloud. It was strange to see them here, on the dark side of the barrier wall, but here they were. How they had come, and why, leaving their rich cool plains for the fetor of these foreign swamps, she could not guess. But there was no mistaking