Way of the Gods by Henry Kuttner - HTML preview

CHAPTER VII

Combat

Relentlessly the Mountain which had opened to receive them had closed again, gently and solidly. The little group of captives hung frozen in the very postures of flight, spread-winged, hair still blowing in a wind which no longer moved past them. They were frozen as if in a moment of eternal Now, as if time had ceased to move and their own motions had ceased with it.

And then before them in the opalescent cloud of the Mountain a thin coil of light began to glow.

Swiftly it grew clearer. And Kern looked with the eyes of the body upon that which he had seen before with the eyes of the mind. He felt the malevolence beat out at them before the fire itself came wholly into focus, strong hatred, curiously impersonal. It was the hatred of a Mountain, a cloud, not a human hatred.

The lazy, coiling ribbon moved through the solid fog, the foggy solid glass, somewhere ahead of the captives. It was impossible to gauge distances here, but the thing was close enough to see in every detail. Its slowly writhing coil that drew in and out of its own folds with a leisurely, never-ending motion. Its burning color that was hot to the eye and hot to the perceptive mind with the heat of its consuming hatred.

Something lay within the coils. It was drawing its ribbon-folds caressingly about that something. They could not yet see what.

For an instant or two the great, slow, burning thing moved in its long folds before them, blind and impersonal and hating. But then came a new change. Then it looked at them.

Spots of luminous darkness began to swim slowly through the coils. They came and went. Whenever a coil moved itself to face the captives in the solid glass, eye-spots swam upon that coil, flickering out again as the fiery curve moved on.

It watched. It waited and hated and was silent.

That which lay within it, bathed in the caressing coils, began to move. The coils altered their pattern to leave what they supported visible. And Kern felt a shock of emptiness within him that made the vision blur for a moment. When he looked again it was unmistakable and clear before him.

Bruce Hallam, lying quietly on the supporting coils, his eyes open and regarding them as impersonally as the eyes that came and went upon the ribbons of fire.

“This—” Bruce Hallam said clearly “—is my world.”

The words came to them as if through empty air, with a cold clarity that allowed of no mistake. For it was not wholly Bruce Hallam who spoke. It was a voice of fire too. Hatred and blinding light coiled through the words as it coiled through the fog before their eyes. Two beings spoke with the single voice, but two beings who were now one.

Sudden memory flashed through Kern’s mind. He saw the long-ago, far-away room again, where the little group of mutants had stepped from one universe to another. He saw Bruce opening his steel door upon a waiting world, searching it with his eyes, closing the door again. He understood now. Bruce had known. Somehow, he had known in the single glance which world held kinship for him and which did not.

Bruce, with his mutant’s uncanny skill at creating out of any means at hand the more-than-machinery which would do his bidding, had recognized this world. Kern remembered with shock his own blindness when Elje had described to him what the Mountain’s slaves, under its guidance, could do with any material at hand—how, when they still suspected Kern of complicity with the enemy, they had cleared his room of any matter out of which he might build a weapon to destroy them.

Yes, this world was Bruce Hallam’s—not Kern’s after all. A winged world, yes, but a world under dominance. And Bruce’s was the dominant realm.

All this flashed through his mind with the swiftness of a single thought, while Bruce’s coldly burning words still sounded in their ears. He was remembering how impersonal Bruce had always been, how remote from human feeling, when he heard the cold voice again.

“There is no place in my world for you,” Bruce told them calmly. “There is room only for the winged people—and Me. You come from malleable flesh, a malleable heritage. I can not trust you here. My coming into the world made a cyclone here in the Mountain, drawing out forces better left untouched. I was helpless then. I could not save—myself—until I was out of your reach. The time has come to destroy the last remnants of those who defy me. And you mutants whose flesh I can not control must go with the rest.”

He did not stir, but the coiling flame moved with sudden quickened speed, flowing toward them through the imprisoning glass which held the humans so inflexibly. Bruce, then, was only the voice of this dreadful duo. The ribbon of flame was the body.

A long loop of it moved lazily forward, falling gently like a silk ribbon through air. After it the fiery length followed gracefully, weaving in and out of its own folds, and within the folds, always caressed by them streaming over and around his body, Bruce Hallam moved too, rigidly, supported on the coiling loops, not a muscle of his own limbs stirring.

Kern watched them come. He had no idea what would happen when the burning coils touched the first human, but he could feel the white heat of its malevolence flow before it. Helpless, voiceless in the grip of the unyielding glass, he strained fiercely for—for—he did not know what. Only to be free to fight even uselessly against the oncoming enemy.

Sharply the thought in his mind broke in two. He had known this cleavage before, but the utter strangeness of it stunned him for a moment so that his thoughts went blank while something, something stirred incredibly through his body.

The old feeling of change, of unutterable newness, of an unguessed sense opening within him like nothing man ever knew before.

Three times he had known this feeling since he stepped into the winged world. Three times he had crushed it down, fearing and hating it for its threat of making him alien again, alien to the winged people he had hoped would be his own. But this time he did not fight. This time, in the violent, straining effort to break free, he broke instead some barrier which had until now held back the new thing, the something which had burgeoned relentlessly within him ever since he came within the Mountain’s realm.

The glass walls that held him like a prisoner in ice grew dim and vanished. His companions pilloried in glass beside him wavered into darkness. He no longer felt the warmth of Byrna frozen in glass in his arms. Everything was dark—even the slow—coiling ribbons that looped leisurely toward him through solid substance.

And then out of that darkness came light. All about him came light. And it took a long moment for him to discover he was not seeing that light with eyes. He was seeing it—incredibly, impossibly—with his whole body. He saw everything around him in one all-encompassing range.

“This is the way the Mountain sees,” he knew with sudden certainty. How he knew it was not clear; it was a knowledge that came with the new vision. He and the Mountain, they shared a common faculty.

Motion far away caught his fathomless attention and he was looking out through the clouded side of the Mountain and seeing, as if he stood before them, the flight of the oncoming winged men who had followed the fugitives from the eyrie. They were nearly here now, approaching the monstrous cliff as blindly as if they meant to dash themselves to death against it.

With the same all-embracing sight, Kern was aware of the people frozen around him into the glass, and of the looping coils that flowed toward them, and of Bruce Hallam, rigid as an image of stone, moving with the moving ribbons.

But they looked very different now. The people.

He knew their faces, the familiar outlines of their bodies, but he could see through the bodies with his new vision. And the appalling thing he saw was not the structure of bone and muscle and nerve which a part of his mind expected there. These things were only pale shadows upon the—the other.

The people were rings of flat, luminous color, disc upon disc of it, superimposed, overlapping, no two people with the same patterns or the same colors. And he knew that the muscular structure humans are aware of, the skeleton, the nerves, are only a part of what comprises them. Only a part—and not the part important to the Mountain. The Mountain ruled by other means.

Every flying man approaching outside the cliff had one thing in common with his fellows. Each was made up of ring after ring of colors, brilliant arcs and half-moons lying one upon another and in continual delicate shifting motion. But in each, and moving slowly over the rings, a circle of luminous darkness swung. Darkness like the eyes which swam up to the surface of the coiling ribbons that embraced Bruce Hallam. An eye—the eye of the Mountain.

That was the thing the Mountain used in them to transmit its commands, then. The point of contact in each man that made him a slave when the orders came.

There was no such eye in any of the people imprisoned around Kern. He saw his own body with this new vision, rings and discs of color like the rest, and with no dark, circling spot that meant the Mountain owned him.

The Mountain is a creature of glass, he told himself clearly. Its body is this opalescent stuff which is solid or gas as the Mountain wills. It can make tunnels and caverns like open mouths through it and close them again. And its brain, its motivating force, is the ribbon of fire, endless, revolving upon itself in the center. It has many strange senses. One of them I share now.

He thought: When we came here, we somehow brought on a cyclone of violent forces drawn from the Mountain itself. Because Bruce Hallam had an inhuman kinship with the entity which dwells here. But it was an entity so strong, so accustomed to mold the minds of its victims and use them like tools to create other tools, that we ourselves were reshaped without knowing it.

This strange new sense began very early to take shape in me. Kua reacted too, and Byrna. Sam? I don’t know. He’s gone. But as for me, I have changed.

Something stirred mysteriously through his flesh, and without the need to look down, Kern’s horizon-circling vision told him that light had begun to glow in him—fire—long, rolling loops of fire that stretched with incredible flexibility through the solid glass imprisoning him.

The ribbon of fire upon which Bruce’s body rode paused in its motion, hesitated, almost drew back. Kern felt dimly its surprise and its strange, inhuman hatred. But only dimly, for his own mind was too stunned with this final revelation to let any other feeling through.

Too malleable, he thought despairingly—flesh too malleable to hold its own form under the irresistible altering pull that was the Mountain. And now through the icy glass which held the humans rigid, two shapes of coiling flame turned lazily over and over—one shape supporting a human body and glowing incandescent with malevolence, the other still too amazed for emotion, but stretching its new limbs of fire with a sort of reluctant, voluptuous luxury as the endless ribbon rolled in convolutions of flame in and out of its own length. A strange, inhuman luxury, this, to stretch upon the firm, permeable glass, moving through it as light might move, in a dimension of its own.

Hatred like a blast of furnace-heat struck upon Kern’s new awareness with an impact that jolted him out of this bewildering mental fog. Hate and fear. He had felt that blast before, invisibly in the voids of thought, and terror had come with it so that he fled blindly to escape. But this time fear did not follow after the hate. This time he welcomed conflict.

“Now we’re equals—matched equals,” he told himself, and felt even in this moment of danger and surprise the utter difference of his own mind through which thoughts moved slowly and clearly, like his new limbs through the solidity of the glass. If he had ever owned a body of flesh and blood, it was his no longer. If his mind had ever dwelt there and shaped its thoughts to the contours of brain and skull, they were shaped no longer. This was new, new, terrible and wonderful beyond human understanding.

Slow exultation began to burn in him as he rolled the great coils of fire which were his body toward that which until now had dwelt here alone. Now the Mountain had a double mind—if the fiery ribbon was indeed the mind of the thing—but moving still through a single gigantic body of opalescent glass. And within that vast body, the doubled mind moved upon itself in suicidal combat.

Hatred was a bath of flame that engulfed him as their farthest coiling loops touched—touched and engaged with sudden violence. But Kern was not afraid now, not repelled. With a surging lunge he tested the strength in that shape which was the twin of his own. The ribbons writhed and strained. Then they paused for a moment and drew back in mutual consent. And simultaneously, as if hurled by a single mind, lunged forward again.

This time the fiery limbs entangled until their full endlessly revolving lengths were wholly engaged with one another and the two identical shapes of rolling fire strove furiously together in a single knot that boiled with ceaseless motion.

Hatred burned and bubbled all around Kern’s awareness as he strove coil against coil with the enemy. But it did not touch him any more. He felt no fear. And when he began to realize that he could not vanquish this being by strength alone, not even then did he feel fear. Emotion was gone from him. Coil by coil he tested the thing he strove with, and coil by coil he found it braced irresistibly against his greatest strength. He could not swerve it by a single loop.

But it could not swerve him. Matched in strength as they were in shape, the two creatures of flame lay for a moment upon the clouded ice, limb straining against limb in a perilous balance that permitted of no motion.

Then, very delicately, the awareness that had been Kern reached out with a sense he had not until this moment known he possessed, and touched the frozen body of Bruce Hallam. For he knew now that he and this enemy were too perfectly matched for either to prevail, unless one or the other found a lever by which his adversary could be overthrown.

Was it Bruce? Gently, and then with increasing pressure, he tried that rigid, unyielding body which had once been human. There was nothing—nothing. Not even the discs of overlapping color which the still-human exhibited to his new sight moved through Bruce’s limbs. He was solid, unmoving, a shape of nothingness, and no sense could touch him. No, Bruce was not the source through which strength might be drained from the enemy.

What, then? Kern asked himself with passionless consideration. And the answer came clearly and unhurried, as if it had waited only this query to reply.

The winged men waiting outside the mountain—that was the answer.

Almost outstripping the thought, his sight and his strange new senses leaped to the surface of the Mountain. There the slaves hung on stretched wings, tilting to the updrafts from below, circling and soaring and waiting in mindless obedience for the command that would release them from their mental thrall.

Once he had seen them as winged humans fighting with fanatic violence. Now they were only shapes of overlapping discs, full of slowly turning motion, and in each the Eye of the Mountain swimming leisurely over the surface of the colors.

The Eye, he thought. The Eye!

Like a new, unguessed arm his awareness shot out and plunged into the nearest spot of darkness which swam over the colored discs. Plunged in—groped for contact—and tapped a source of flame. Up through the arm the flame leaped, and into Kern’s body of matching flame. Almost imperceptibly he felt the straining coils of the enemy give beneath the pressure of his own.

Another, and another and another of the flying shapes gave up its tiny source of fire, and Kern’s strength grew with each. The combat which had hung motionless in mutual violence now writhed suddenly into action again as the balance was destroyed. But the fury of the enemy seemed to double too as it felt itself bent backward upon its own fiery coils.

What had been combat before the stasis turned into abrupt turmoil now. The two ribbons of flame convulsed together, lashing and whipping into an incandescent fury of struggle. And Kern knew in a timeless moment or two that even this was not enough. He must find some last source of power to give him the victory.

The arm with which he had robbed the flying men of their Eyes groped, plunged deeper, seeking more power within them. And amazingly, found it.

For an instant Kern could not understand why strength in a full, deep tide flowed into him as the light began to fail in his enemy. And then he understood, and a surge of triumph for the first time glowed through his whole being.

For in giving its strength to its slaves, that it might command them, the Enemy had opened a channel which ran both ways. And in draining the slaves, Kern found himself draining the Enemy itself—reaching back and back through each slave into the source from which that strength came.

From a score, a hundred channels, the Mountain must have felt its own power drain away. Its power, but not its hate. Kern could feel the sheer, inhuman malevolence burning about him in great washes of flame as the strength of the coils against his grew steadily weaker. The fire sank down within it, dimming and fading as the creature bled its own power away—bled flame, and slowly, slowly died!

The turning ribbons of light no longer moved against Kern’s awareness. His limbs engulfed not a luminous involuted band, but a thin, pale hatred which fell apart as he drew his own body back. It fell apart into a tiny rain of droplets, each of them dancing with its own seed of hate. Twinkling, fading, and the hatred fading with them, until they were gone.

Kern felt change all about him, in the substance of the Mountain itself. A vast, imponderable shifting of the clouded glass, a falling apart of the atoms which composed it, as its soul of fire had fallen. The opalescent stuff was a fog—a mist—a thin, dissipating gas which no longer supported him. The cold of clear air struck terribly upon his fiery limbs as the Mountain dissolved from about him. He convulsed upon himself in a knot of flame that seemed to consume itself and to cease—to cease—

Everything was blank around him. Neither dark nor light, but void. He hung motionless upon nothing. He was no longer a shape of flame. He was no longer a shape of flesh. He was nothing, nowhere.

This was infinity, where time was not. For milleniums, he thought, he drifted there upon oblivion. Milleniums, or moments!

From far away a something began to be. He did not recognize it—he knew only that where nothingness had been, now there was a something. He heard a call. That was it, a call, a sound of incredible sweetness.

A voice? Yes, it was a voice of sheer melody, saying a name. He did not know the name.

“Kern—Kern,” it cried. The syllable had no meaning to him, but the sweetness of the voice that shaped it gradually began to rouse him from his stupor. Over and over the syllable sounded, and then with a sudden blaze of awareness he knew it for what it was.

“My name!” he thought with amazement. “My own name!”

The mind came back into him, and he knew. Like Bruce Hallam, he had hung frozen and empty from the touch of the all-consuming fire which had been himself. Like Bruce, he had been emptier than death.

“Kern, Kern, come back,” wailed the voice of impossible sweetness. He knew it now. Byrna’s voice, lovely as a siren’s magical song, summoning him back to the living.

He heard a voice of impossible sweetness, and slowly, slowly, he felt warmth return to him.

Slowly, slowly, he felt warmth return to him. Slowly he drew his mind together again, and then his body came back around him, and with infinite effort he lifted the eyelids that shut out the world.

He lay on a hillside in the full warm tide of the sunlight which poured down from an empty sky. There was no Mountain any more. No vertiginous thunderhead of glass towering up the zenith, casting its pale shadow across the world. Someone bent over him, holding her wings to shut the sun’s glare from his eyes. Her wings glistened.

Tentatively he flexed his own. And then strength came back with a magical rush to him, and he sat up with a strong beat of his pinions that almost lifted him from the ground. All around him smiling faces watched in the shadow of their wings.

And he knew that he was free at last, and the winged world was free. And he was no longer alien.