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

>Snarling, as helpless in the grip of murder-lust as Parror himself, Raft surged to his knees, with an effort not even his enemy’s strength could resist. Nothing existed, for a flashing, crimson second, but that red-stained claw.

He caught Parror’s arm in a judo grip, and broke it with savage fury.

For a moment he held the man motionless. That was.enough. The power of the Flame healed bone and tissue, but Parror’s wrist and lower arm jutted out at an impossible angle.

But he fought on, with teeth and nails and feet, though Raft’s fingers were clawed deep into his throat. Inexorably, with the blind savagery of his kind, he fought on until not even the Flame could bring life back to his strangled body.

Then Raft looked up.

Far across the cavern stood the machine on its tripod, perilously close to the Flame itself. And moving painfully toward it, like a man breasting a strong wind, was Craddock.

Craddock?

Something about that shape made Raft catch his breath. The outline was altering even as he watched. Raft remembered Craddock’s maimed hands, and the power that had destroyed them, the same star-born energy that now thundered through the cavern in burning ecstasy of awareness.

The figure still gripped the fuse-cylinder.

Raft got to his feet. He began to run after Craddock, but the distance was too great. Nearly at the machine now, the figure was fantastic.

It was not Craddock. It was not even human any more.

The living flesh boiled and altered and flowed under the monstrous force that could create whole universes. Something utterly inhuman, at last, stumbled and dragged itself forward into the full blaze of the radiation.

And yet there was a human purpose.

It reached the machine. For an instant it crouched there, adjusting the fuse. Beyond it, Curupuri shouted in cataclysmic fury as the fires poured torrentially up from the abyss. One instant of utter madne’ss, while the power of universes, of galaxies, stooped and touched that cavern —

One instant—and then the thunders died.

The Flame pulsed once, twice, and sank. With a sigh almost

human, the fires of life dwindled and dropped into the great gulf.

There remained, far below, a point of light, burning with unquenchable fires!

Harnessed!

The fire that had come from beyond the stars was harnessed.

Tamed—chained—by the flesh to which it had once, long ago, given life….

Janissa stirred.

Fear came into her eyes. She raised herself against Raft’s supporting arm to look around questioningly. Then her gaze came back to Raft’s.

“It’s over, Janissa,” he said. “The Flame sleeps.”

“The machine is working?”

“Yes. Parror had made a duplicate of ours, after all. But he didn’t have the safety fuse. Once Craddock inserted that, it worked.”

“But, Craddock?”

“He’s dead,” Raft said quietly. “He died, I suppose, because he had to. The man who once wakened the Flame died to quell it again. This time, I think, the danger is over forever.”

She watched him.

“I tested the machine,” he said. “It’s exactly what’s needed. The First Race were right, after all. They waited too long to build their own machine, or they’d never have become monsters. Anyway, the Flame will burn, will send out its radiations, at this normal rate forever.”

“Normal?”

Raft nodded. “I altered the adjustment. Not to the danger-point, but so that metabolism in Paititi will be same as metabolism in my own world. There’s no barrier now. The talismans aren’t necessary.”

“I can live in your world? It won’t be—slow?” “Your world or mine, Janissa,” he said. “You can choose.” But she had chosen already. And so had Raft. He had made his decision long ago, he thought, the first time he had seen Janissa’s face in the little mirror. She had drawn him across the miles into the lost land where the Flame from infinity had burned and, after all, there was no choice. What problems the future might hold could be solved, somehow.

“We need not go back through the cavern of the monsters,” she said. “There is a way to reach the unseen road from here.”

Raft’s lips found hers.

But he was thinking: My world will be strange to you, Janissa. I will make you happy, if I can. And I think I can, for I love you.

But will you turn back, sometimes, and remember? Will you remember Paititi, and the great trees that hold up the sky? Will you remember the castle above Doirada Gulf, where the white cloud from the cataract hangs forever in the sky?

Will the heritage of the jaguar stir in your blood, Janissa, to memories I cannot share? Or will you find contentment in my world?

Silently Raft let Janissa guide him toward the way that led to freedom, and to a destiny he could not foretell. But the girl’s hand lay warm in his, and that, for the while, was enough of an answer for them both.