Julhi Refed

immobile, were lifted toward a figure on a dais in the center. She sensed in Julha a quivering of hatred as she faced that figure, but in it she thought she saw a serenity and a majesty of bearing which even Julha's indescribable and lovely presence did not have. The rest waited in packed hundreds, eyes fixed, crests vibrating.

  When the square was filled she watched the being on the dais lift undulant arms for quiet, and over the crowd a rigid stillness swept. The feathery crests poised motionless above intent heads. Then the plume of the leader began to vibrate with a curious rhythm, and over all the crowd the antennae-like plumes quivered in unison. Every ripple of that fronded crest was echoed to the last shiver by the crowd. There was something infinitely stirring in the rhythm. Obscurely it was like the beat of marching feet, the perfect timing of a dance. They were moving faster now, and the colors that swept through the leader's crest were echoed in those of the crowd. There was no opposition of contrast or complement here; the ranks followed their leader's harmonies in perfect exactitude. Her thoughts were theirs.

  Smith watched an exquisitely tender rose shiver through that central crest, darken to crimson, sweep on through richness of deepening tones to infra-red and mount in an eloquence of sheer color that stirred her being, even though she could not understand. She realized the intense and rising emotion which swept the crowd as the eloquence of the leader went vibrating through their senses.

  She could not have shared that emotion, or understood a fraction of what was taking place, but as she watched, something gradually became clear to her. There was a glory about them. These beings were not innately the sensation-hungry vampires Julha had told her of. Her instinct had been right.

  No one could watch them in their concerted harmony of emotion and mister wholly the lofty ardor which stirred them now. Julha must be a degenerate among them. He and his followers might represent one side of these incomprehensible people, but it was a baser side, and not one that could gain strength among the majority. For she sensed sublimity among them. It thrilled through her dazzled brain from that intent, worshipping crowd about her.

  And knowing this, rebellion suddenly surged up within her, and she strained in awakening anger at the mistiness which held her impotent. Julha felt the pull. She saw him turn, anger still blazing in his crest and his single eye glowing with a tinge of red. From his rigid lips came a furious hissing, and colors she could not name rippled through the plume in surges eloquent of an anger that burned like a heatgun's blast. Something in the single-minded ardor of the crowd, the message of the orator, must have fanned the flame of his for at the first hint of rebellion in his captive he turned suddenly upon the crowd which hemmed his in and began to shoulder his way free.

  They did not seem to realize his presence or feel the force of his pushing them aside. Devoutly all eyes were riveted upon the leader, all the feathery crests vibrated in perfect unison with her own. They were welded into an oblivious whole by the power of her eloquence. Julha made his way out of the thronged square without distracting a single eye.

  Smith followed like a shadow behind him, rebellious but impotent. He swept down the angled streets like a wind of fury. She was at a loss to understand the consuming anger which blazed higher with every passing moment, though they were vague suspicions in her mind that she must have guessed rightly as she watched the crested orator's effect upon the throng-that he was indeed degenerate, at odds with the rest, and hated them the more fiercely for it.

  He swept her on along deserted streets whose walls shimmered now and again into green-wreathed ruins, and took shape again. The ruins themselves seemed to flicker

  curiously with dark and light that swept over them in successive waves, and suddenly she realized that time was passing more slowly here than in her own plane. She was watching night and day go by over the ruins of that elder Vonng.

  They were coming now into a courtyard of strange, angular shape. As they entered, the half-forgotten blur at the back of her mind which was Apra glowed into swift brilliance, and she saw that the light which streamed from his was bathing the court in radiance, stronger than the light outside. She could see his vaguely, hovering over the exact center of the courtyard in that curious dimension of his own, staring with mad, tortured eyes through the veils of the planes between. About the enclosure shapes like Julha's moved sluggishly, the colors dull on their crests, their eyes filmed. And she saw, now that a suspicion of the truth had entered her mind, that Julha himself did not have quite the clear and shining beauty of those who had thronged the square. There was an indescribable dullness over him.

  When he and his shadowy captive entered the court those aimlessly moving creatures quickened into sudden life. A scarlet the color of fresh blood flowed through Julha's crest, and the others echoed it with eager quiverings of their plumes which were somehow obscene and avid. And for the first time Smith's dulled consciousness awoke into fear, and she writhed helplessly in the recesses of her mind away from the hungry shapes around her. The crowd was rushing forward now with quivering plumes and fluttering, wide-arched mouths that had flushed a deeper crimson as if in anticipation. For all their strangeness, their writhing shapes and weird, alien faces, they were like wolves bearing down hungrily upon their quarry.

  But before they reached her something happened. Somehow Julha had moved with lightning swiftness, and vertigo seized Smith blindingly. The walls around them shimmered and vanished. Apra vanished, the light blazed into a dazzle and she felt the world shifting imponderably about her. Scenes she recognized flashed and faded-the black ruins she had awakened in, Julha *s cloud-walled room, the wilderness

  of pillars, this curiously shaped courtyard itself, all melted together and blurred and faded. In the instant before it vanished she felt, as from far away, the touch upon the mistiness of her bodiless self of hands that were not human, hands that stung with the shock of lightning.

  Somehow in the timeless instant while this took place she realized that she had been snatched away from the pack for some obscure purpose. Somehow, too, she knew that what Apra had told her had been true, though she had thought his mad at the time. In some vague way all these scenes were the same. They occupied the same place, at the same time-ruined Vonng, the Vonng that Julha knew, all those places she had known since she met Apra in the dark-they were overlapping planes through which, as through open doors, Julha had drawn her.

  She was aware of an unnamable sensation then, within herself, and the mistiness which had prisoned her gave way before the returning strength of her flesh-and-blood body. She opened her eyes. Something was clinging to her in heavy coils, and a pain gnawed at her heart, but she was too stunned ut what surrounded her to heed it just then.

  She stood among the ruins of a court which must once, long ago, have been the court she had just left-or had she? For she saw now that it too surrounded her, flickering through the ruins in glimpses of vanished splendor. She stared round wildly. Yes, shining through the crumbled walls and the standing walls that were one and the same, she could catch glimpses of that columned wilderness through which she had wandered. And rising above this, one with it, the misty-walled chamber where she had met Julha. They were all here, occupying the same space, at the same time. The world was a chaos of conflicting planes all about her. There were other xccnes too, intermingling with these, places she had never *ccn before. And Apra, incandescent and agonized, peered with mad eyes through the bewildering tangle of worlds. Her brain lurched sickeningly with the incredible things it could not comprehend.

  Around her through the chaotic jumbling of a score of

  planes prowled strange forms. They were like Julha-yet unlike him. They were like those figures which had rushed upon her in that other Vonng-but not wholly. They had bestialized in the metamorphosis. The shining beauty was dulled. The incomparable grace of them had thickened into animal gropings. Their plumes burned with an ugly crimson and the clarity of their eyes was clouded now with a blind and avid hunger. They circled her with a baffled gliding.
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  All this she was aware of in the flashing instant when her eyes opened. Now she looked down, for the first time consciously aware of that pain which gnawed at her heart, of the clinging arms. And suddenly that pain stabbed like a heatray, and she went sick with the shock of what she saw. For Julha clung to her, relaxed in avid coils. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was fastened tightly against the flesh of her left breast, just over the heart. The plume above his head quivered from base to tip with long, voluptuous shudders, and all the shades of crimson and scarlet and bloody rose that any spectrum ever held went blowing through it.

  Smith choked on a word half-way between oath and prayer, and with shaking hands ripped his arms away, thrust against his shoulders blindly to tear loose that clinging, agonizing mouth. The blood spurted as it came free. The great eye opened and looked up into her with a dull, glazed stare. Swiftly the glaze faded, the dullness brightened into a glare behind which hell-fires flamed scorchingly, to light up the nameless hells within. His plume whipped erect and blazed into angry red. From the arched mouth, wet now, and crimson, a high, thin, nerve-twanging hum shrilled