The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (7 page)

She tugged. The stone was reluctant, and at last she took her sword in her teeth and put both hands to the lifting. Even then it taxed the limit of her strength, and she was strong as many men. But at last it rose, with the strangest sighing sound, and a little prickle of goose-flesh rippled over her.

Now she took the sword back into her hand and knelt on the rim
of the invisible blackness below. She had gone this path once before
and once only, and never thought to find any necessity in life strong
enough to drive her down again. The way was the strangest she had
ever known. There was, she thought, no such passage in all the world
save here. It had not been built for human feet to travel. It had not
been built for feet at all. It was a narrow, polished shaft that cork-
screwed round and round. A snake might have slipped in it and gone
shooting down, round and round in dizzy circles—but no snake on
earth was big enough to fill that shaft. No human travelers had worn
the sides of the spiral so smooth, and she did not care to speculate on
what creatures had polished it so, through what ages of passage.

She might never have made that first trip down, nor anyone after
her, had not some unknown human hacked the notches which made
it possible to descend slowly; that is, she thought it must have been a
human. At any rate, the notches were roughly shaped for hands and
feet, and spaced not too far apart; but who and when and how she
could not even guess. As to the beings who made the shaft, in long-
forgotten ages—well, there were devils on earth before man, and the
world was very old.

She turned on her face and slid feet-first into the curving tunnel.
That first time she and Gervase had gone down in sweating terror of
what lay below, and with devils tugging at their heels. Now she slid
easily, not bothering to find toeholds, but slipping swiftly round and
round the long spirals with only her hands to break the speed when
she went too fast. Round and round she went, round and round.

It was a long way down. Before she had gone very far the curious
dizziness she had known before came over her again, a dizziness not
entirely induced by the spirals she whirled around, but a deeper,
atomic unsteadiness as if not only she but also the substances around
her were shifting. There was something queer about the angles of
those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she
felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were
somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known.
They led into the unknown and the dark, but it seemed to her
obscurely that they led into deeper darkness and mystery than the
merely physical, as if, though she could not put it clearly even into
thoughts, the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully
angled to lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the
underground—perhaps through time, too. She did not know she was
thinking such things; but all about her was a blurred dizziness as she
shot down and round, and she knew that the way she went took her
on a stranger journey than any other way she had ever traveled.

Down, and down. She was sliding fast, but she knew how long
it would be. On that first trip they had taken alarm as the passage
spiraled so endlessly and with thoughts of the long climb back had
tried to stop before it was too late. They had found it impossible. Once
embarked, there was no halting. She had tried, and such waves of sick
blurring had come over her that she came near to unconsciousness.
It was as if she had tried to halt some inexorable process of nature,
half finished. They could only go on. The very atoms of their bodies
shrieked in rebellion against a reversal of the change.

And the way up, when they returned, had not been difficult. They
had had visions of a back-breaking climb up interminable curves, but
again the uncanny difference of those angles from those they knew
was manifested. In a queer way they seemed to defy gravity, or perhaps
led through some way outside the power of it. They had been sick and
dizzy on the return, as on the way down, but through the clouds of
that confusion it had seemed to them that they slipped as easily up
the shaft as they had gone down; or perhaps that, once in the tunnel,
there was neither up nor down.

The passage leveled gradually. This was the worst part for a human
to travel, though it must have eased the speed of whatever beings
the shaft was made for. It was too narrow for her to turn in, and she
had to lever herself face down and feet first, along the horizontal
smoothness of the floor, pushing with her hands. She was glad when
her questing heels met open space and she slid from the mouth of the
shaft and stood upright in the dark.

Here she paused to collect herself. Yes, this was the beginning of
the long passage she and Father Gervase had traveled on that long-
ago journey of exploration. By the veriest accident they had found
the place, and only the veriest bravado had brought them thus far. He
had gone on a greater distance than she—she was younger then, and
more amenable to authority—and had come back whitefaced in the
torchlight and hurried her up the shaft again.

She went on carefully, feeling her way, remembering what she
herself had seen in the darkness a little farther on, wondering in spite
of herself, and with a tiny catch at her heart, what it was that had
sent Father Gervase so hastily back. She had never been entirely
satisfied with his explanations. It had been about here—or was it a
little farther on? The stillness was like a roaring in her ears.

Then ahead of her the darkness moved. It was just that—a vast,
imponderable shifting of the solid dark. Jesu! This was new! She
gripped the cross at her throat with one hand and her sword-hilt with
the other. Then it was upon her, striking like a hurricane, whirling
her against the walls and shrieking in her ears like a thousand wind-
devils—a wild cyclone of the dark that buffeted her mercilessly and
tore at her flying hair and raved in her ears with the myriad voices
of all lost things crying in the night. The voices were piteous in their
terror and loneliness. Tears came to her eyes even as she shivered with
nameless dread, for the whirlwind was alive with a dreadful instinct,
an animate thing sweeping through the dark of the underground; an
unholy thing that made her flesh crawl even though it touched her
to the heart with its pitiful little lost voices wailing in the wind where
no wind could possibly be.

And then it was gone. In that one flash of an instant it vanished,
leaving no whisper to commemorate its passage. Only in the heart
of it could one hear the sad little voices wailing or the wild shriek of
the wind. She found herself standing stunned, her sword yet gripped
futilely in one hand and the tears running down her face. Poor little
lost voices, wailing. She wiped the tears away with a shaking hand
and set her teeth hard against the weakness of reaction that flooded
her. Yet it was a good five minutes before she could force herself on.
After a few steps her knees ceased to tremble.

The floor was dry and smooth underfoot. It sloped a little
downward, and she wondered into what unplumbed deeps she had
descended by now. The silence had fallen heavily again, and she
found herself straining for some other sound than the soft padding
of her own boots. Then her foot slipped in sudden wetness. She
bent, exploring fingers outstretched, feeling without reason that the
wetness would be red if she could see it. But her fingers traced the
immense outline of a footprint—splayed and three-toed like a frog’s,
but of monster size. It was a fresh footprint. She had a vivid flash of
memory—that thing she had glimpsed in the torchlight on the other
trip down. But she had had light then, and now she was blind in the
dark, the creature’s natural habitat....

For a moment she was not Jirel of Joiry, vengeful fury on the trail of a devilish weapon, but a frightened woman alone in the unholy dark. That memory had been so vivid.... Then she saw Guillaume’s scornful, laughing face again, the little beard dark along the line of his jaw, the strong teeth white with his laughter; and something hot and sustaining swept over her like a thin flame, and she was Joiry again, vengeful and resolute. She went on more slowly, her sword swinging in a semicircle before every third step, that she might not be surprised too suddenly by some nightmare monster clasping her in smothering arms. But the flesh crept upon her unprotected back.

The smooth passage went on and on. She could feel the cold walls on either hand, and her upswung sword grazed the roof. It was like crawling through some worm’s tunnel, blindly under the weight of countless tons of earth. She felt the pressure of it above and about her, overwhelming, and found herself praying that the end of this tunnel-crawling might come soon, whatever the end might bring.

But when it came it was a stranger thing than she had ever
dreamed. Abruptly she felt the immense, imponderable oppression
cease. No longer was she conscious of the tons of earth pressing about
her. The walls had fallen away and her feet struck a sudden rubble
instead of the smooth floor. But the darkness that had bandaged her
eyes was changed too, indescribably. It was no longer darkness, but
void; not an absence of light, but simple nothingness. Abysses opened
around her, yet she could see nothing. She only knew that she stood
at the threshold of some immense space, and sensed nameless things
about her, and battled vainly against that nothingness which was all
her straining eyes could see. And at her throat something constricted
painfully.

She lifted her hand and found the chain of her crucifix taut and
vibrant around her neck. At that she smiled a little grimly, for she
began to understand. The crucifix. She found her hand shaking
despite herself, but she unfastened the chain and dropped the cross
to the ground. Then she gasped.

All about her, as suddenly as the awakening from a dream, the
nothingness had opened out into undreamed-of distances. She stood
high on a hilltop under a sky spangled with strange stars. Below she
caught glimpses of misty plains and valleys with mountain peaks
rising far away. And at her feet a ravening circle of small, slavering,
blind things leaped with clashing teeth.

They were obscene and hard to distinguish against the darkness of
the hillside, and the noise they made was revolting. Her sword swung
up of itself, almost, and slashed furiously at the little dark horrors
leaping up around her legs. They died squashily, splattering her bare
thighs with unpleasantness, and after a few had gone silent under the
blade the rest fled into the dark with quick, frightened pantings, their
feet making a queer splashing noise on the stones.

Jirel gathered a handful of the coarse grass which grew there and
wiped her legs of the obscene splatters, looking about with quickened
breath upon this land so unholy that one who bore a cross might
not even see it. Here, if anywhere, one might find a weapon such as
she sought. Behind her in the hillside was the low tunnel opening
from which she had emerged. Overhead the strange stars shone. She
did not recognize a single constellation, and if the brighter sparks
were planets they were strange ones, tinged with violet and green
and yellow. One was vividly crimson, like a point of fire. Far out over
the rolling land below she could discern a mighty column of light.
It did not blaze, nor illuminate the dark about. It cast no shadows.
It simply was a great pillar of luminance towering high in the night.
It seemed artificial—perhaps manmade, though she scarcely dared
hope for men here.

She had half expected, despite her brave words, to come out upon
the storied and familiar red-hot pave of hell, and this pleasant, starlit
land surprised her and made her more wary. The things that built the
tunnel could not have been human. She had no right to expect men
here. She was a little stunned by finding open sky so far underground,
though she was intelligent enough to realize that however she had
come, she was not underground now. No cavity in the earth could
contain this starry sky. She came of a credulous age, and she accepted
her surroundings without too much questioning, though she was a
little disappointed, if the truth were known, in the pleasantness of the
mistily starlit place. The fiery streets of hell would have been a likelier
locality in which to find a weapon against Guillaume.