The Valley of the Flame, Henry Kuttner [ready player one ebook .TXT] 📗

knees. He struggled to regain his feet. Janissa, glancing back, saw what had happened, and with a little cry, ran back to help him.

A nightmare shape, scaled and horned like a medieval demon, sprang at her—caught her in its grip.

Cursing, Raft plunged forward, heedless of the creature on his back. His fist smashed out into the face of the monster. It was driven back, screaming in a thin, high-pitched wail of agony.

That was the signal. From all around the devils of Paititi swooped and lumbered and dragged themselves toward the intruders. Raft went down under the weight of foul-smelling bodies. He was blind with nausea and hatred and revulsion. His fists hammered a pulpy flesh, and the shrieking grew to a shrill crescendo.

That sickening odor almost choked him. The touch of the monsters against his skin was loathsome. They felt like fungoid things, like dead creatures raised to a ghastly similitude of life. And the faces were ghoulish demons.

Craddock came back to use as a spear a fallen stalactite he had picked up. Raft was relieved of his burden for a moment. He staggered up, looking for Janissa.

He saw her, in the midst of a group of monsters.

He had enough reasoning power left to find another fallen spike of stone before going to her rescue. The creatures, interbred and degenerate, were physically weak, but they had the advantage of numbers, and Raft realized that the sheer weight of those deformed bodies could press him down and smother him. His lips lifted in a snarl, he charged forward, stabbing with his improvised spear.

He felt flesh tear. He heard the squealing redouble in volume. The monsters came at him like a wave. They had the feeble malevolence of rats. As he went down on his back he tried desperately to turn, to shield the precious burden he carried—and failed.

He heard the machine’s crash as it was crushed against the rock beneath him.

There was only hopelessness then, and blind hatred, and a feeling that he was drowning in floods of evil, living flesh. But he fought on. The remnants of the machine were ripped from his back. He lashed about him savagely with the sharp stalactite, till at last he had cleared a little space free of the monsters.

As he stood there, panting and half-naked, he saw that they had fought their way almost to the door. But at his feet coils and broken crystal and twisted metal told of the wreck of the machine that could save Paftiti.

One thing remained whole—a footlong cylinder of burnished alloy. It was the safety fuse that controlled the device’s stimulating power. Raft snatched it up and thrust the tube into his belt.

“Brian,” Craddock called. “Here!”

Raft lifted his spear and rushed. The monsters had learned the menace of that_ sharp_ spike of stone by now, and there was a little flurry as they gave back. Janissa was with Craddock, the two of them back to back, though the girl was unarmed. But she was bristling with fury, her hands clawed, like a cat roused to anger.

“The door,” Raft said. “Open it, Janissa.”

He cut a red path for her. The worst danger was the flying monsters. More than once Raft swung up his weapon in time to rip the flesh of a swooping demon that came rushing down at him from the violet depths above. He fought on, grimly silent, conscious only of those devil-masks, distorted and horrible, glaring at him, spouting crimson as he struck, screaming in thin, wailing agony.

“Brian!” Janissa shrilled. “The door!”

He saw with surprise that it lay open. Craddock, white hair flying, broke through with a stumbling rush. Together the two charged that waiting portal.

They reeled through it. Raft whirled, thrust out at a pressing horde of monsters, as Janissa’s hand swept out.

The oval door closed—barring the cavern.

The high screaming gave place to silence.

“They smashed the machine,” Raft said hopelessly.

CHAPTER XIV. RAFT CHOOSES

CRADDOCK WAS PANTING with excitement. His eyes were tired looking and weary.

“You saved the safety fuse,” he said. “Maybe that’s enough. If Parror’s machine is a duplicate of the one we built, maybe we have a chance, even yet.”

“It has to be, unless the man’s a complete fool,” Raft said. “But if we can stop him before he wakens the Flame, that’d be even better.” He caught himself and laughed. “Parror’s probably behind us, not ahead of us. If he passed through that cavern, they’d have broken his gadget too.”

“Unless he knew another route,” Janissa put in somberly. She tried to adjust her tattered garments, with fastidious, feline delicacy. Raft thought, watching her, even now she’s half cat.

Then something quivered through the air about them, a burning shaking vibration that raced through their bodies, quickening the living flesh and was gone. A low thunder faded into silence.

White-faced, Janissa turned to Raft. Her hands went out helplessly.

“The Flame!” she said. “It—wakes!”

With a curse, Raft sprinted forward, the others at his heels. To fail now, so close to success, would be intolerable. The tunnel was miles long, it seemed.

It ended at last, though not before that warning vibration had rushed in deep thunder through them twice more. Each time the effect was stronger. Each time the force grew more vital, more alive.

Janissa fumbled at the door, searching for the key. At last, the panel slipped away and was gone.

They stepped out on a small balcony of rock, from which, a curving ramp twisted down to—to what?”

It was dark, too dark to make out details clearly. Emptiness, it seemed, stretched far out above and below them.

Yet there was light. It was too faint to be more than a hint, or else it was too far away below him. Raft leaned on that dizzy railing and stared down, down, down almost to the bottom of the world, an immeasurable gulf in which one flicker of brilliance gleamed.

But it was not vertigo that struck Raft then. It was fear.

Fear plain and simple, and reasonless. He knew that feeling.

Once, in Madagascar, he had had to go through a guard-hut where sentries were sleeping. A noise, a false move, would have meant spears through his body. He had known then that they were going to waken. He had felt it, with every bit of his mind and every inch of his skin.

Like that. Something down below, where the light was, so vitally alive that he felt himself standing on its palm.

And something more as well. It was the jungle. Or the life that makes up the jungle. Steaming, fertile Amazon forests, roaring rivers, all that teeming, tremendous life that stirs in the green moist heat of the tropics. Blind and terrible and hungry—there in the abyss burned the energy that rages in the heart of the great nebulae, the destroyer and the awakener—Curupuri!

“The Flame sleeps,” Janissa breathed.

But in the depths was a distant brightening. A low sound, below the threshold of hearing almost, deepened and grew louder. It became an intolerable thunder, crashing out like the roaring birth-pains of a god.

From that gulf that dropped toward the heart of the world—far down—very far below—rose the Flame.

It expanded and lifted, a spear, a tower, a mountain of purest brilliance burning with intolerable fires. It was the essence of life. Raft felt himself, his whole body, swinging toward that kindling torch.

His mind swept toward it. His soul swung out across the abyss.

The thunder crashed deafeningly against the walls. The Flame brightened, blazed and towered—pulsing with eagerness—mad with delight—with ecstasy of living.

Beneath him, Raft saw, was a darker shape. Two shapes. The silhouette of a man, standing beside a machine that was curiously familiar.

Parror! And the device he had built from the First Race’s records!

As the Flame brightened, Raft sprang toward the descending ramp. He raced down it, praying that he would be in time. That unchecked violence—Parror might not recognize the symptoms, blinded as he was with egotism—but Raft knew that the Flame was wakening uncontrolled.

The spark in the amulet had not reacted in this manner.

The galactic force of a nebula—raging unchecked in Paititi. Perhaps loosed on the whole world!

Down he raced, toward his quarry, while the fires brightened. They blazed with supernal brilliance and began to fade.The column of light slowly sank unwillingly. The thunders subsided.

Now Raft stood on the glassy, transparent floor of the cave. He looked down once, and reeled dizzily. He was standing unsupported above a gulf that dropped down to earth’s burning center.

He dashed toward Parror. And Parror ran to meet him.

The light came from below, casting curious shadows on the man’s face. Raft saw he was wearing one of the talon-gauntlets, snarling silently as he charged. Raft had no objection to killing Parror, but quelling the Flame was more important. He slowed, pulling the safety fuse from his belt.

“Parror!” he shouted, in the stillness as the thunders died. “Your machine’s out of control! This will restrain it.”

Parror did not even hear. He was lost in a berserk bloodthirst, blind and nearly insane with the demon’s rage that Raft had seen before. His clawed fingers, tipped with sharp steel, slashed at Raft’s face.

Raft did not duck quickly enough. His cheek was laid open, agonizing pain darting through him. The fuse spun from his grasp.

He closed with Parror or tried to. That agile body leaped out of reach. Again the claw ripped down, and again. A blaze of pain stung Raft’s chest and side. Raft struck out savagely, but Parror eluded his driving fists.

Thunder crashed. The light from below brightened.

The Flame leaped from its bondage, bellowing with delight!

The fires surged up—poured up—sprang high as though trying to return to their interstellar cradle.

Again the claw reached out.

Raft felt a razor drawn across one eye, and sight was suddenly altered. Half-blinded, his cheek torn to the bone, his nose almost ripped away, he sent blow after blow at his elusive enemy.

Janissa ran in, threw herself between them.

Parror balled his fist and struck her hard and clean upon the jaw. The girl was flung back, to crumple motionless on that glassy floor.

“You taught me that, Raft,” Parror purred.

Raft mouthed frenzied curses. If he could only get his hands on that smiling devil, sink his fingers into that bearded neck.

Intolerably bright blazed the Flame. The thunders raved and crashed within the cavern. This time the star-kindled fires did not sink.

Higher they rose, and higher—questing—eager. Wakening from slumber to a life beyond the conception of earthly minds!

Suddenly, amazingly, Raft could see from both eyes again. The agony in face and body was gone. The dripping of blood had stopped. He saw a look of amazement cross Parror’s face.

The radiations from the Flame healed. They rejuvenated living tissue with miraculous speed. They hastened life.

Craddock’s voice cried something. Raft could make out only a word or two through the thunder, but he saw Craddock, thirty feet away, running toward the distant machine. In Craddock’s hand was a footlong cylinder Raft recognized.

Raft never knew what Parror thought was happening. He saw the cat-man whirl, cry out in a thick, furious voice, and take one step after Craddock.

One step. No more. For then Raft had him.

But it was not easy. Raft had never battled a jaguar, but he was battling one now. The mad, raging fury that filled Parror had turned him into a wild beast. The eyes were all green now, blazing with hatred and bloodthirst. Writhing, struggling, gasping, the two crashed down together.

The Flame rose ever higher. The thunders were an intolerable ache drumming against Raft’s skull. That shadowless, intergalactic light burned into his brain.

The claw tore at his face, and instantly the wounds healed.