Part 1

BLACK PRIESTESS OF VARDA

By ERIK FENNEL

She was well-named--Sin, foul witch and raving beauty, Beloved of Sasso, the Dark Power striving to capture, with her help, a lovely little world. Their only fear was a whispered legend--Elvedon, the Savior.... But this crippled idiot blundering through a shower of sparks into their time and space--_he_ could not be Elvedon!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1947. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The pen moved clumsily in Eldon Carmichael's right hand. He had been left-handed, and the note itself was not easy to write.

_Dear Margaret_, he scratched. _I understand_ ...

When after a while the proper words still would not come he crossed the shadowed laboratory and took another long swig from the flat bottle in his topcoat pocket. He understood--he remembered his first one-eyed look in a mirror after the bandages were removed--but still he felt resentful and deeply sorry for himself.

He went back and tried to continue the letter but his thoughts veered erratically. The injury had been psychological as well as physical, involving loss of ability to face up to unpleasant facts, but still he could not force aside those memories.

There had been only a glimpse as the wrench slipped from Victor Schenley's hand and fell between the sprocket and drive chain of the big new compressor in the Institute's basement. He wondered. That look on Schenley's darkly saturnine face could have been merely imagination. Or horror. But there was something about the man.... Still Eldon discounted his suspicions as the unworthy inventions of a disturbed mind.

Only the quick reflexes that had once made him a better than average halfback had saved him from instant death as the jagged end of the heavy sprocket chain lashed out with the speed of an enraged cobra. And often during the pain-wracked weeks that followed he had almost wished he had been a little slower.

The ring sparkled tauntingly under his desk lamp. Margaret had returned it by mail, and though the wording of her note had been restrained its tone had been final.

He picked up the pen again and moved the stub of his left arm, amputated just above the elbow, to hold the paper in place. But he had forgotten again how _light_ and unmanageable the stump was. The paper skidded and the pen left a long black streak and a blot.

Eldon made a choked sound that was partly a shout of anger and partly a whimper of frustration. He crumpled the note, hurled the pen clumsily toward the far wall, and buried his disfigured face in the curve of his single arm. His body shook with sobs of self-pity.

There was only an inch or so left in the bottle. He finished it in a single gulp and for a moment stood hesitantly. Then he switched on the brilliant overhead lights. Liquor could not banish his tormenting thoughts, but perhaps work might. His letter to Margaret would have to wait.

His equipment was just as he had left it that night so many months ago when Victor Schenley had called him to see the new compressor. The setup was almost complete for another experiment with the resonance of bound charges. Bound charges were queer things, he reflected, a neglected field of investigation. They were classed as electrical phenomena more for convenience than accuracy. Eldon's completed experiments indicated they might be--something else. They disobeyed too many of the generally accepted electrical and physical laws. Occasionally individual charges behaved as though they were actually alive and responding to external stimuli, but the stimuli were non-existent or at least undetectable. And two or more bound charges placed in even imperfect resonance produced strange and inexplicable effects.

Working clumsily, he made the few remaining connections and set the special charge concentrators whining. The vacuum pumps clucked. A _strain_ developed in the space around which the triplet charges were forming, something he could sense without seeing or hearing it. Now if only he could match the three charges for perfect resonance....

* * * * *

The lacquer on Margaret Mason's fingernails was finally dry. She slipped out of her robe and, without disturbing her carefully arranged pale gold hair, dropped the white evening gown over her shoulders and gently tugged it into place around slender hips. This should be the evening when Victor stopped his sly suggestions and made an outright proposal of marriage. Mrs. Victor Schenley. Margaret savored the name. She knew what she wanted.

Eldon had seemed a good idea at the time, the best she could do. Despite his youth he was already Associate Director of the Institute, seemed headed for bigger things, and a couple of patents brought him modest but steady royalties. And, best of all, his ridiculously straightforward mind made him easy to handle.

It had seemed a good idea until the afternoon Victor Schenley had sauntered into her office in the administrative wing of the Institute and she had seen that look come into his eyes. She had recognized him instantly from the pictures the newspapers had carried when he inherited the great Schenley fortune, and had handled that first meeting with subtle care.

After that he had begun to come around more and more frequently, sitting on her desk and talking, turning on his charm. She had soon seen where his questions about the Institute's affairs were leading. He was determined to recover several million dollars which the elder Schenley had intended for the research organization he had founded and endowed, the Institute of which Victor had inherited titular leadership. Victor did not need the money. He just could not bear to see it escape his direct control. He still did not suspect how much Margaret had guessed of his plans--she knew when to hide her financial acumen behind her beauty--and she was holding that information in reserve.

He had begun to take her out, at first only on the evenings Eldon was busy, but then growing steadily bolder and more insistent. She had been deliberately provocative and yet aloof, rejecting his repeated propositions. She was playing for bigger stakes, the Schenley fortune itself. But she had remained engaged to Eldon. She disliked burning bridges behind herself unless absolutely necessary and Eldon was still a sure thing.

Then one day had come Eldon's casual remark that as Associate Director he was considering calling in the auditors for a routine check of the books. That had started everything. Victor had appeared startled, just as she expected, when she repeated Eldon's statement, and the very next night Eldon had met with his disfiguring "accident."

* * * * *

Victor parked his sleekly expensive car in front of the Institute's main building. "You wait here, dearest," he said. "I'll only be a few minutes."

He kissed her, but seemed preoccupied. She watched him, slender and nattily dressed, as he crossed the empty lobby and pressed the button for the automatic elevator. The cage came down, he closed the door behind himself, and then Margaret was out of the car and hurrying up the walk. It was the intelligent thing to know as much as possible about Victor's movements.

The indicator stopped at three. Margaret lifted her evening gown above her knees and took the stairway at a run.

From Eldon's laboratory, the only room on the floor to show a light, she could hear voices.

"I don't like leaving loose ends, Carmichael. And it's your own gun."

"So it was deliberate. But why?" Eldon sounded incredulous.

Victor spoke again, his words indistinguishable but his tone assured and boastful.

There was a muffled splatting sound, a grunt of pain.

"Why, damn your soul!" Victor's voice again, raised in angry surprise. But no pistol shot.

Margaret peered around the door. Victor held the pistol, but Eldon had his wrist in a firm grasp and was twisting. Victor's nose was bleeding copiously and, although his free hand clawed at Eldon's one good eye, the physicist was forcing him back. Margaret felt a stab of fear. If anything happened to Victor it would cost her--millions.

She paused only to snatch up a heavy, foot-long bar of copper alloy as she crossed the room. She raised it and crashed it against the side of Eldon's skull. Sheer tenacity of purpose maintained his hold on Victor's gun hand as he staggered back, dazed, and Margaret could not step aside in time. The edge of an equipment-laden table bit into her spine as Eldon's body collided with hers, and the bar was knocked from her hand.

Eldon got one sidelong glimpse of the girl and felt a sudden thrill that she had come to help him. He did not see what she had done.

And then hell broke loose. Leaping flames in his body. The unmistakable spitting crackle of bound charges breaking loose. The sensation of hurtling immeasurable distances through alternate layers of darkness and blinding light. Grey cotton wool filling his nose and mouth and ears. Blackness.

II

A shriveled blood-red moon cast slanting beams through gigantic, weirdly distorted trees. The air was dead still where he lay, but overhead a howling wind tossed the top branches into eerie life. He was lying on moss. Moss that _writhed_ resentfully under his weight. His stomach was heaving queasily and his head was one throbbing ache. His right leg refused to move. It seemed to be stuck in something.

He was not alone. Something was prowling nearby among the unbelievably tall trees. He sat up weakly, automatically, but somehow he did not care very deeply what happened to him. Not at first.

The prowling creature circled, trying to outline him against the slanting shafts of crimson moonlight. He heard it move, then saw its eyes blue-green and luminous in the shadows, only a foot or two from the ground.

Then his scalp gave a sudden tingle, for the eyes _rose upward_. Abruptly they were five feet above ground level. He held his breath, but still more wondering than afraid. A vagrant gust brought a spicy odor to his nostrils, something strongly reminiscent of sandalwood. Not an animal smell.

He moved slightly. The moss beneath him _squeaked_ a protest and writhed unpleasantly.

The thing with the glowing eyes moved closer. _Squeak-squeak, squeak-squeak_, the strange moss complained. And then a human figure appeared momentarily in a slender shaft of red light.

Margaret! But even as it vanished again in the shadows he knew it wasn't. A woman, yes, but not Margaret. Too short. Too fully curved for Margaret's graceful slenderness. And the hair had glinted darkly under the crimson moon while Margaret's was pale and golden. He wanted to call out, but a sense of lurking danger restrained him.

Suddenly the stranger was at his side.

"_Lackt_," she whispered.

The palms of her hands glowed suddenly with a cold white fire as she cupped them together to form a reflector. She bent over, leaving herself in darkness and directing the light upon Eldon as he sat in amazed disbelief.

Although the light from her hands dazzled his single eye he caught an impression of youth, of well-tanned skin glittering with an oily lotion that smelled of sandalwood, of scanty clothing--the night was stiflingly hot--and of hair the same color as the unnatural moonlight, clinging in ringlets around a piquant but troubled face.

"El-ve-don?" she asked softly. Her throaty voice betrayed passionate excitement.

He wet his dry lips.

"Eldon," he said hoarsely, wondering how she knew his name and why she had mispronounced it by inserting an extra syllable. "Eldon Carmichael."

His answer seemed to puzzle her. Her strange eyes gleamed more brightly.

"Who are you? And how in the name of sin do you do that trick with your hands?" It was the first question to enter his confused mind.

"Sin?" She repeated the one word and drew back with a suddenly hostile air. For a moment she seemed about to turn and run. But then she looked once more at his mangled, disfigured face and gave a soft exclamation of disappointment and pity.

Eldon became irrationally furious and reached his single arm to grab her. She eluded him with a startled yet gracefully fluid motion and spat some unintelligible words that were obviously heartfelt curses. Her hand moved ominously to a pocket in her wide belt.

Then all at once she crouched again, moving her head from side to side. He opened his mouth, but she clamped one glowing hand over it while the other went up in a gesture commanding silence. Her hand was soft and cool despite its glow.

For a full minute she listened, hearing something Eldon could not. Then she placed her lips close to his ear and whispered. Her words were utterly unintelligible but her urgency communicated itself to him.

He tried to rise and discovered that his leg was deeply embedded in the dirt and moss. He wondered how it had gotten that way. The girl grasped his knee and pulled, and as soon as he saw what she wanted he put his muscles to work too. With an agonized shriek from the strange moss his leg came free and he tried to rise. The sudden movement made him dizzy.

Unhesitatingly the girl threw herself upon him, bearing him down while all the while she whispered admonitions he could not understand. She was strong in a lithe, whipcord way, and neither mentally nor physically was he in condition to resist. He allowed himself to be pushed to a reclining position.

The light from her hands went out abruptly, leaving the forest floor darker than ever. She reached into her belt, extracted a small object he could not see, touched it to his head. Eldon went rigid.

* * * * *

One of her hands grasped his belt. She gave a slight tug. His body rose easily into the air as though completely weightless, and when she released him he _floated_.

Her fingers found a firm hold on his collar. She moved, broke into a steady run, and his body, floating effortlessly at the height of her waist, followed. She ran quietly, sure-footed in the darkness, with only the sound of her breathing and the thin protests of the moss under her feet. Sometimes his collar jerked as she changed course to avoid some obstacle.

"I have no weight, but I still have mass and therefore inertia," he found himself thinking, and knew he should be afraid instead of indulging in such random observations.

He discovered he could turn his head, although the rest of his body remained locked in weightless rigidity, and gradually he became aware of something following them. From the glimpses he caught in the slanting red moonbeams it resembled a lemur. He watched it glide from tree to tree like a flying squirrel, catch the rough bark and scramble upward, glide again.

A whistle, overhead, a sound entirely distinct from that of the wind-whipped branches, brought the girl to a sudden stop. She jerked Eldon to a halt in mid-air beside her and pulled him into the deeper shadow beneath a gnarled tree just as a great torpedo-shaped thing passed above the treetops, glistening like freshly spilled blood in the moonglow. Some sort of wingless aircraft.

They waited, the girl fearful and alert. The red moon dropped below the horizon and a few stars--they were of a normal color--did little to relieve the blackness. The flying craft returned, invisible this time but still making a devilish whistle that grated on Eldon's nerves like fingernails scraped down a blackboard as it zigzagged slowly back and forth. Then gradually the noise died away in the distance.

The girl sighed with relief, made a chirruping sound, and the lemur-thing came skittering down the tree beneath which they were hiding. She spoke to it, and it gave a sailing leap that ended on Eldon's chest. Its handlike paws grasped the fabric of his shirt. He sank a few inches toward the ground, but immediately floated upward again with nightmarish buoyancy.

The girl reached to her belt again, and then she was floating in the air beside him. She grasped his collar and they were slanting upward among the branches. The lemur-thing rose confidently, perched on his chest. They moved slowly up to treetop level, where the girl paused for a searching look around. Then she rose above the trees, put on speed, and the hot wind whistled around Eldon's face as she towed him along.

It was a dream-scene where time had no meaning. It might have been minutes or hours. The throbbing of his headache diminished, leaving him drowsy.

The lemur-thing broke the spell by chattering excitedly. In the very dim starlight he could just discern that it was pointing upward with one paw, an uncannily human gesture.

The girl uttered a sharp word and dove toward the treetops, and Eldon looked up in time to see a huge leathery-winged shape swooping silently upon them. He felt the foetid breath and glimpsed hooked talons and a beak armed with incurving teeth as the thing swept by and flapped heavily upward again.

* * * * *

The girl released him abruptly, leaving his heart pounding in sudden terrible awareness of his utter helplessness. He felt himself brush against a branch that stood out above the others and start to drift away. But the lemur hooked its hind claws into his shirt and grasped the branch with its forepaws, anchoring him against the wind.

A long knife flashed in the girl's hand and she was shooting upward to meet the monster. She had not deserted him after all. She closed in, tiny beside the huge shape, as the monster beat its batlike wings in a furious attempt to turn and rend her. There was a brief flurry, a high-pitched cry of agony, and the ungainly body crashed downward through a nearby treetop, threshing in its death agonies.

Eldon felt the trembling reaction of relief as the girl glided downward, still breathing hard from her exertion, and it left him feeling even more helpless and useless than ever. Once more she took him in tow and the nightmare flight continued.

Over one area a ring of faintly luminous fog was rolling, spreading among the trees, contracting like a gaseous noose.

"_Kauva ne Sin_," the girl spat, bitter anger in her voice, and fear and unhappiness too. She made a long high detour around the fog ring and looked back uneasily even after they were past.

* * * * *

All at once they were diving again, down below the treetops that to Eldon looked no different from any of the others. But to the girl it was journey's end. She twisted upright and her feet touched gently as she reached to her belt and regained normal weight. Eldon still floated.

The girl pushed him through the air and into a black hole between the spreading roots of a huge tree. The hole slanted downward, twisting and turning, and became a tunnel. The lemur-thing jumped down and scampered ahead.

It was utterly dark until she made her hands glow again, after they had passed a bend. Finally the tunnel widened into a room.

She left him floating, touched one wall, and it glowed with a soft, silvery light that showed him he was in living quarters of some kind. The walls were transparent plastic, and through their glow he could see the dirt and stones and tangled tree roots behind them. Water trickled in through a hole in one wall, passed through an oval pool of brightly colored tiles recessed into the floor, and vanished through a channel in the opposite wall. There were furnishings of strange design, simple yet adequate, and archways that seemed to lead to other rooms.

The girl returned to him, pushed him over to a broad, low couch, shoving him downward. She touched him with an egg-shaped object from her belt and he sank into the soft cushions as abruptly his body went limp and recovered its normal heaviness. He stared up at her.

She was beautiful in a vital, _different_ way. Natural and healthily normal looking, but with an indescribable trace of the exotic. Her hair, he saw--now that the light was no longer morbidly ruddy--was a lovely dark red with glints of fire. She was young and self-assured, yet oddly thoughtful, and there was about her an aura of vibrant attraction that seemed to call to all his forgotten dreams of loveliness. But Eldon Carmichael was very sick and very tired.

She looked at him speculatively, a troubled frown narrowing her strangely luminous grey-green eyes, and asked a question. He shook his head to show lack of understanding, wondering who she was and where he was.

She turned away, her shoulders sagging with disappointment. Then she noticed that she was smeared with a gooey reddish-black substance, evidently from the huge bat-thing she had fought and killed. She gave a shiver of truly feminine repugnance.

Quickly she discarded her close fitting jacket, brief skirt and the wide belt from which her sheathed dagger hung, displaying no trace of embarrassment at Eldon's presence even when she stood completely nude.

Her body was fully curved but smoothly muscular, an active body. It was a symphony of perfection--except that across the curve of one high, firm breast ran a narrow crescent-shaped scar, red as though from a wound not completely healed. Once she glanced down at it and her face took on a hunted, fearful look.

She tested the temperature of the pool with one outstretched bare toe and then plunged in, and as she bathed herself she hummed a strangely haunting tune that was full of minor harmonies and unfamiliar melodic progressions. Yet it was not entirely a sad tune, and she seemed to be enjoying her bath. Occasionally she glanced over at him, questioning and thoughtful.

Eldon tried to stay awake, but before she left the pool his one eye had closed.

* * * * *

Pain in the stump of his arm brought a vague remembrance of having used it to strike at someone or something. For a while he lay half awake, trying to recall that dream about a girl flying with him through a forest that certainly existed nowhere on Earth. But the sound of trickling water kept intruding.

He opened his eye and came face to face with the lemur-thing from his nightmare. Its big round eyes assumed an astounded, quizzical expression as he blinked, and then it was gone. He heard it scuttling across the floor.

He sat up and made a quick survey of his surroundings. Then the girl of the--no, it hadn't been a dream--emerged from an archway with the lemur on her shoulder. It made him think of stories he had read about witches of unearthly beauty and the uncannily intelligent animals, familiars, that served them.

"Hey, where am I?" he demanded.

She said something in her unfamiliar language.

"Who are you?" he asked, this time with gestures.

She pointed to herself. "Krasna," she said.

He pointed to himself. "Eldon. Eldon Carmichael."

"El-ve-don?" she asked just as eagerly as when she had found him, half as though correcting him.

He shook his head. "Just Eldon." Her eyes clouded and she frowned.

After a moment she spoke again, and again he shook his head. "Sorry, no savvy," he declared.

She snapped her fingers as though remembering something and hurried from the room, returning with a small globe of cloudy crystal. She motioned him to lie back, and for a minute or two rubbed the ball vigorously against the soft, smooth skin of her forearm. Then she held it a few inches above his eye and gestured that he was to look at it.

The crystal glowed, but not homogeneously. Some parts became brighter than others, and of different colors. Patterns formed and changed, and watching them made him feel drawn out of himself, into the crystal.