Sword of the Seven Suns: Gardner F. Fox SF Collection (Illustrated). Gardner F. Fox
the pain that wracked him, he drove his fingers into the meshed wires and tugged and rearranged them.
A hump of ground rose between his hands; flung the ribboned globe from him, sent it rolling like a rubber ball on the trough of sea-waves. Whimpering, Grim went after it, dragging himself along.
He caught it, held it close to his chest. His hand grabbed a wire—
The pain was gone. Grim lay panting, grinning. Tlokine knelt, staring, whispering, "The Change—it's all around us—but where we are, there isn't any Change!"
There was a radius of thirty feet where the ground lay frozen in its strange formations, an island in the midst of the hub that was the globe. Grim got to his feet. He held the globe in hands that shook weakly with the reaction. Tlokine went to the horses, soothed and stroked them. After a while the horses got to their legs.
They mounted. From the distant island where they watched, Althaya and Black Randolph screamed their rage. But Grim only laughed and waved an arm. With the globe in his hands, he rode the chestnut over the motionless ground, while all around him the earth rocked and bubbled and thrust itself upward into terrible contortions.
"It's like a magic symbol," whispered Tlokine, staring at the ribboned globe.
"People would have called this a magic land, once," said Grim. "But it's sheer science that makes the Change—and sheer science that knows the key to counteract it."
They went straight across the magic land, riding without fear of the Storm that swept outside the circumference of their enchanted circle. As they moved, the circle of safety moved with them, with the globe as its hub. The faster they went, the faster moved the circle.
Grim flung a hoarse laugh between his white teeth. He said, "At this rate, we'll leave Randolph so far behind, he'll never get us."
He turned in his saddle to look behind him—
* * * * *
And saw the pirate and the redheaded priestess scarcely five hundred yards away, flying after them. Black Randolph held a disintegrator in his hand. As he came within the radius of a needle-tower, he took careful aim at it and blasted the ribboned globe atop it into drifting powder.
And, as he came, Randolph was destroying the towers of change!
Tlokine cried out, pointing, "The path to the Dark Temple!"
Huge rock cliffs loomed up before them, towering like a giant's twisted play-things where he might have dropped them. Spires and points of sandstone, ridges of granite and volcanic tuffs, rimrock and crumbled talus; they made fantastic colors where the sun caught them. And running straight between the boulders was a crimson road, smooth as placid water.
Grim cried, "Go on ahead. I'll hold them off. If that Kohonnes of yours has any power at all—tell him this is the time to use it!"
Grim brought his foot against the bay's rump, sent it racing terrified onto the scarlet road. Clinging to the reins, Tlokine had no time to cry her refusal to leave Grim. The bay took her away fast, leaving Grim alone.
Randolph shouted, "I have you now, Thorssen. Don't hope for a blast of my disintegrator, either. You're going back to that altar. Eight days I said—and eight days it still is!"
Grim kicked his feet free of the stirrups and leaped to the rock. Putting his hands flat on the stone, he swung himself to the first ledge, then to the second. With booted toes and clinging fingers, he pulled himself straight up the face of the cliff.
Randolph howled; threw himself like a madman at the cliff. He came after the Viking, rasping spaceoaths beneath his breath. Grim caught a blurred glimpse of Althaya spurring her roan along the scarlet roadway, closing the distance between Tlokine and herself.
Rock shattered above him. Grim stared at a boulder coming loose under the blast of a disintegrator pellet; came bouncing downward. Grim flattened himself, hearing Black Randolph cry, "It'll knock you down to my level, Thorssen."
The boulder struck on a lip of stone and went bounding beyond him. Grim drew a breath and climbed faster. He came to a flat section that topped the surrounding bluffs. He scrambled onto it as a blast from Randolph's disintegrator caught the rocklip that he was on and sent it flying.
He lay dazed, knowing the pirate was climbing after him, but unable to do anything about it. He opened his mouth and gulped in air, hearing a steady roaring in his ears. He knelt, stood up; and still the roaring swelled and grew. He finally recognized it as a waterfall.
Black Randolph swung over the edge of the cliff and came charging across its flat top, head down. His fists were balled into great clubs. Grim shook his head, got to a knee and then to both feet, waiting.
The pirate's charge was irresistible. It lifted Grim up and threw him backwards. He pummeled at the pirate, drove hard knuckles into his jaw and chest. But Randolph laughed in his throat and hammered back.
For one instant they stood locked, knee to knee. Their fists drove pain and agony into each other's ribs and bellies. Then Grim weakened. The long ride, the space crash, the wild flight took their fee. His legs buckled under the weariness that laid hot bands around them. He toppled, went down—
Black Randolph came for him in a low dive.
Grim closed his hand on a solid rock hump and lifted his feet. He threw them up in the manner of the ancient savatte. His foot caught Black Randolph in the chest and lifted him up and flung him high over him.
The pirate screamed. Grim turned; knelt on the edge of the cliff wall and saw the pirate falling, turning and twisting, into a deep gorge where a wide river flowed like a blue ribbon between crumpled rocks, fed by a tumbling waterfall.
Grim drew a deep breath and got to his feet. Far beneath him, at the end of the narrow crimson road, he could see a great black temple, with a door like a gaping mouth. Tlokine was in that temple, and Althaya—and the thing they both called Kohonnes.
Grim began to run.
* * * * *
The two women faced each other at the foot of the bulking black machine that was their god.
"Here now you will die," breathed Althaya.
"Kohonnes will not let me die. He will save me. It is you—who have been traitress to him—who will pay by going back to the breath...."
And above them, above the black hair and the red, the hundred eyes of the machine began to glow, and the muted throbbing went out from its bowels and touched its metal sides; and the god Kohonnes came to life.
* * * * *
Grim slipped and staggered the last twenty feet down the side of the sheer grey rock. He landed on the crimson road, fifty feet from the mouthlike entrance to the Temple. He went at a lurching run, forgetting his weariness, thinking only of a lovely girl with white skin and green eyes and hair the color of a raven-wing.
He swung into the dark, cool interior; was dimly aware of slender black onyx columns lifting a hundred feet toward a dark ceiling.
Grim stopped. A voice reverberated in the Temple.
"You have disobeyed, Althaya. You—"
"Don't threaten me, Kohonnes! At this moment my people are coming. They will attack when I give the word. They will come in here and kill the girl and make you yield your secret to me. Then Althaya will have power unimaginable. Black Randolph—"
"—is dead," said Grim. "He fell into the gorge."
Grim stared upward. A black machine bulked huge and dark in the shadows. From a hundred facets, green bulb-lights glowed. Grim heard the machinery moving, saw the bulbs grow brighter as power poured into the thing.
"Who are you, Kohonnes?" he cried out in space patois.
"Eh? What's that?