Classic Audiobook Collection - The Jewel of Bas by Leigh Douglass Brackett ~ Full Audiobook [scifi]

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

The Jewel of Bas by Leigh Douglass Brackett audiobook. Genre: scifi On a harsh, half-forgotten world where legends walk as close as hunger, Ciaran the wandering minstrel and Mouse his sharp-eyed, sharp-fingered wife live by wit, song, and whatever can be stolen back from those who hoard. One evening on the edge of the Forbidden Plains, a campfire tale turns real: the Kalds, savage servants of the sleeping boy-god Bas, drag the pair toward Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life, where Bas lies dreaming beside the Jewel of Bas, a relic said to hold a destiny for all mankind. Inside the mountain, Ciaran and Mouse find not holy mystery but a ruthless system of chains and labor, ruled by cold intelligences that wear the shape of men. As captives vanish and a vast machine rises in the depths, the couple must gamble everything on escape, on unlikely allies, and on the dangerous question at the heart of every myth: what happens when the god you fear is real, and might not care if mortals live or die? Blending romance, grit, and uncanny science, Brackett spins a swift planetary adventure about love, survival, and the price of immortality. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:20:35) Chapter 02 (00:42:43) Chapter 03 (01:03:10) Chapter 04 (01:23:16) Chapter 05 (01:50:35) Chapter 06 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Jewel of Boss by Lee Douglas Brackett. Part 1 Mouse stirred the stew in the small iron pot. There wasn't much of it. She sniffed and said, You could have stolen the bigger joint. We'll go hungry before the next town. Hmm, Siron grunted lazily.

Anger began to curl in Mouse's eyes. I suppose it's all right with you if we run. out of food, she said sullenly. Ciron leaned back comfortably against a moss-grown boulder, and watched her with lazy gray eyes. He liked watching mouse. She was a head shorter than he, which made her very short indeed, and as thin as a young girl. Her hair was black and wild, as though only wind ever combed it.

Her eyes were black, too, and very bright. There was a small red thief's brand between them. She wore a ragged crimson tunic, and her bare arms and legs were as brown as his own. Cioron grinned. His lip was scoured, and there was a tooth missing behind it. He said, It's just as well. I don't want you getting fat and lazy. Mouse, who was sensitive about her thinness, said something pungent and threw the wooden plate at him.

sierra drew his shaggy head aside enough to let it by and then relaxed stroking the harp on his bare-brown knees it began to purr softly sierron felt good the heat of the sun-balls that floated always lazy in a reddish sky made him pleasantly sleeping and after the clamor and crushed of the market squares in the border towns the huge high silence of the place was wonderful he and mouse were camped on a tongue of land that licked out from the phrygian hills down into the coastal plains of atlantaia a short cut but only gipsies like themselves ever took it To Ciorans left, far below, the sea spreads sullen and burning, cloaked in a reddish fog. To his right, also far below, were the forbidden plains, flat, desolate and barren, reaching away and away to the up curving rim of the world, where Cioran's sharp eyes could just make out a glint of gold, a mammoth peak reaching for the sky. Mouse said suddenly.

Is that it, Kiri? Ben Biaatha, the Mountain of Life? Ciaran struck a shivering cord from the harp. That's it. Let's eat, said Mouse. Scared? Maybe you want me to go back. Maybe you think a branded thief is it good enough for you.

Well, I can't help where I was born or what my parents were. And you'd have a brand on your ugly face, too, if you hadn't just been lucky. She threw the ladle. This time her aim was better, and Ciaran didn't duck quite in time. It clipped his ear. He sprang up looking murderous and started to heave it back at her, and then suddenly mouse was crying, stamping up and down and blinking tears out of her eyes.

All right, I'm scared. I've never been out of a city before. and besides, she looked out over the silent plain to the distant glint of Ben Biatha. Besides, she whispered, I keep thinking of the stories they used to tell, about Boss the immortal and his androids, and the gray beasts that served them, and about the stone of destiny. Ceron made a contemptuous mouth. Legends, old wives' tales, songs to give babies a pleasant shiver.

A small glint of Everest came into his gray eyes. But the stone of destiny, it's a nice story, that one. A jewel of such power that owning it gives a man rule over the whole world. He squinted out across the barren plain. "'Someday,' he said softly. "'Maybe I'll see if that one's true.' "'Oh, Kiri,' Mouth came and caught his wrists in her small strong hands. "'You wouldn't. It's forbidden, and no one that's gone into the forbidden plains has ever come back.'

"'There's always a first time,' he grinned. "'But I'm not going now, Mousie. I'm too hungry.' She picked up the plate silently and ladle stew into it and set it down. Ciaron laid his harp down and stretched. A tough, wiry little man with legs slightly bandy and a good-natured hard face. He wore a yellow tunic even more ragged than mouses. They sat down. Ceron ate noisily with his fingers.

Mouse fished out a hunk of meat and nibbled it moodily. A breeze came up, pushing the sunballs around a little and bringing tatters of red fog in off the sea. After a while, Mouse said, Did you hear any of the talk in the market squares, Keri? He shrugged. They gabble. I don't waste my time with it. All along the border countries, they are saying the same thing.

People who live or work along the edge of the forbidden plains have disappeared. Whole towns of them, sometimes. one man falls into a beast pit said siaraan impatiently and in two weeks of gossip the whole country has vanished forget it but it's happened before kiri a long time ago a long time ago some wild tribe living on the plains came in and got tough and that's that sierra Sieron wiped his hands on the grass and said angrily, If you're going to nag all the time about being scared, he caught the plate out of her hands just in time. She was breathing hard, glaring at him. She looked like her name, and cute as hell.

Ceron laughed. Come here, you. She came, sulkily. He pulled her down beside him and kissed her and took the harp on his knees. Mouse put her head on his shoulder. Sieron was suddenly very happy. He began to draw music out of the harp. There was a lot of distance around him, and he tried to fill it up with music,

a fine free spade of it out of the thrumming strings. Then he sang. He had a beautiful voice, clear and true as a new blade, but soft. It was a simple tune about two people in love. Siron liked it. After a while, Mous reached up and drew his head around, stroking the scar on his lip, so he had to stop singing. She wasn't glaring any longer. Ceron bent his head.

His eyes were closed, but he felt her body stiffened against him, and her lips broke away from his with a little gasping cry. Kiri, Kri, look! He jerked his head back, angry and startled. Then the anger faded. There was a different quality to the light, the warm, friendly, reddish sunlight that never dimmed or faded. There was a shadow spreading out in the sky over Bin Biafah.

It grew and widened, and the sun-balls went out one by one, and darkness came toward them over the forbidden plains. They crouched, clinging together, not speaking, not breathing. An uneasy breeze sighed over them, moving out. Then, after a long time, the sun-ball sparked, then burned again, and the shadow was gone. Ciaran dragged down an unsteady breath. He was sweating, but where his hands and mouses touched locked together, they were cold as death. What is it, Kiri?

I don't know. He got up, slain. the harp across his back without thinking about it. He felt naked suddenly up there on the high ridge, stripped and unsafe. He pulled mouse to her feet. Neither of them spoke again. Their eyes had a queer, stunned look. This time it was Ciaran that stopped, with a stew-pot in his hands,

looking at something behind mouse. He dropped it and jumped in front of her, pulling the wicked knife he carried from his girdle. The last thing he heard was her wild scream. But he had enough time to see, to see the creatures climbing up over the crest of the ridge beside them fast and silent and grinning, to ring them in with wands tipped at the points with opals like tiny sunballs. They were no taller than mouse, but thick and muscular, built like men. Gray animal fur grew on them like the body-hens.

of a hairy man, lengthening into a coarse mane over the skull. Where the skin showed it was gray and wrinkled and tough. Their faces were flat, with black animal nose buttons. They had sharp teeth, gray with a bright, healthy grayness. Their eyes were blood pink without whites or visible pupils. The eyes were the worst. Ceron yelled and slashed out with his knife. One of the gray brutes danced in on lithe quick feet and touched him on the neck with its jeweled

wand. Fire exploded in Ciaran's head, and then there was darkness, pierced by mouse's scream. As he slid down into it, he thought, There calls, the beasts of legend that served Boss, the immortal, and his androids. Owls that guarded the forbidden plains from man. Ceron came to, on his feet and walking. From the way he felt he'd been walking a long time, but his memory was vague and confused.

He had been relieved of his knife, but his harp was still with him. Mouse walked beside him. Her black hair hung over her face, and her eyes looked out from behind it, sullen and defiant. The gray beasts walked in a rough, circle around them, holding their wands ready. From the way they grinned, Sieron had an idea they hoped they'd have an excuse for using them.

With a definite uneasy shock, Sierron realized that they were far out in the barren waste of the forbidden plains. He got a little closer to Mous. Hello. She looked at him. You in your shortcuts! So all that talk in the border towns was just gabble, huh? So it's my fault.

If that isn't just like a woman, Siron made an impatient gesture. All right, all right, that doesn't matter now. What does matter is where are we going and why. How should I— Wait a minute, we're stopping. The calls warned them with their wands to stand. One of the grey brutes seemed to be listening to something that Sierron couldn't hear. It gestured and the party started off again in a slightly different direction.

After a minute or two a gully appeared out of nowhere at their feet. From up on the ridge the Forbidden Plains had looked perfectly flat, but the gully was fairly wide and cut in clean like a sword gash, hidden by a slight roll of the land. They scrambled down the steep bank and went along the bottom. Again with an uneasy qualm, Siron realized. they were headed in the general direction of Ben Biatha. The old legends had been gradually lost in the stream of time, except to people who cared for such things or made a living from singing about them like

Ciaran. But in spite of that, Ben Biatha was taboo. The chief reason was physical. The plains, still called forbidden, ringed to the mountains like a protective wall, and it was an indisputable fact whether you like it or not. not, that people who went out onto them didn't come back. Hunger, thirst, wild beasts, or devils. They didn't come back.

That discouraged a lot of traveling. Besides, the only reason for attempting to reach Ben Biatha was the legend of the stone of destiny, and people had long ago lost faith in that. Nobody had seen it. Nobody had seen Boss the immortal, who was its god and guardian, nor the Androids that were his servants, nor the calls that were slaves to both of them. Long, long ago, people were supposed to have seen them. In the beginning, according to the legends, Boss the immortal had lived in a distant place,

a green world where there was only one huge sunball that rose and set regularly, where the sky was sometimes blue and sometimes black and silver, and where the horizons curved down. The manifest idiocy of all that still tickled people, so they like to hear songs about it. Somewhere on that green world, somehow, Boss had acquired the flaming stone that gave him the power of life and death and destiny. There were a lot of conflicting and confused stories about trouble between Boss and the inhabitants of the funny world with the sky that changed like a woman's fancy.

Eventually, he was supposed to have gathered up a lot of these inhabitants through the power of the stone, and transported them somehow across a great distance to the world where they now lived. Ciaron had found that children loved these yorns particularly. Their imaginations were still elastic enough, not to see the ridiculous side. He always gave the distance cycle a lot of schmaltz. So, after Boss, the immortal, and his stone of destiny, Had got all these people settled in a new world, Boss created his Androids, Cahafri and Stood, and brought the calls from somewhere out in that vague distance, another world perhaps,

and there were wars and revolts and raiding parties and bitter struggles between Boss and the Androids and the humans for power, with Boss always winning because of the stone. There was a bottomless well of material there for ballots. Ciron used it frequently. But one legend that had always maintained its original shape under the battering of generations was the one about Ben Biatha the Mountain of Life, being the dwelling place of Boss the immortal and his Androids and the Coles. And somewhere under Ben Biatha was the stone whose possession could give a man life eternal

and the powers of whatever God you chose to believe in. Ceron had toyed with that one in spite of his skepticism. Now it looked as though he was going to see for himself. He looked at the calls, the creatures who didn't exist, and found his skepticism shaken. Shaken so hard he felt sick with it, like a man waking up to find a nightmare beside him in the flesh, booting his guts in. If the calls were real, the Androids were real. From the Androids you went to Boss and from Boss to the Stone of Destiny.

Ciron began to sweat with sheer excitement. Mouse jerked her head up suddenly. Kiri, listen. From somewhere up ahead and to the right, there began to come a rhythmic, swinging clank of metal. Underneath it, Ceron made out the shuffle of bear or sandal feet. The calls urged them on faster with their. the jewel-tipped wands. The hot opalescence of the tips struck Ciaron all at once. A jewel fire that could shock a man to unconsciousness, like the blow of a fist just by touching.

The power of the stone, perhaps, the stone of destiny, sleeping under Ben Biatha. The shuffle and clank got louder. Quite suddenly they came to a place where the gully met another one almost at right angles and stopped. The ears of the calls twitched nervously. Moush shrank in closer against Sierran. She was looking off down the new cut. Ceyeron looked too. There were calls coming toward them, about forty of them, with wands.

Walking between their watchful lines were some ninety or a hundred humans, men and women, shackled together by chains run through loops. in iron collars. They were so close together they had to lockstep, and any tip at attacking their guards would have meant the whole column falling flat. Mouse said with vicious clarity, One man falls into a beast pit, and in three weeks of gossip a whole town is gone. Ha!

Siron's scoured mouth got ugly. Keep going, Mousey. Just keep it up. He scowled at the slave gang and added, "'But what the hell is it all about? What do they want us for?' "'You'll find out,' said Mouse. "'You in your short cuts.' Ceron raised his hand.

Mouse ducked and started to swing on him. A couple of calls moved in and touched them apart, very delicately with the wands. They didn't want knockouts this time, just local numbness. Sieron was feeling murderous enough to start something anyway, but a second flick of the wand on the back of his neck took the starch out of him. By that time the slave party had come up and stopped. Sieron stumbled over into the line and let the calls lock the collar around his neck. The man in front of him was huge, with a mane of red hair and cords of muscle on his back

the size of Siron's arm. He didn't have a stitch on but a leather G-string. His freckled red-haired skin was slippery with sweat. Ceron pressed up against him, shut his mouth tight, and began to breathe very hard with his face turned as far away as he could get it. They shackle mouse right in back of him. She put her arms around his waist tighter than she really had to. Ceron squeezed her hands.

End of Part 1 Part 2 of the Jewel of Boss by Lee Douglas Brackett. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Part 2 The calls started the line moving again, using the wands like ox-goats. They shuffled off down the gully, going deeper and deeper into the forbidden plains. Very softly, so that nobody but Ciaran could hear her, mouse whispered. "'These locks are nothing. I can pick them any time.'

Ceron squeezed her hand again. It occurred to him that mouse was a handy girl to have around. After a while she said, "'Kiri, that shadow, we did see it?' "'We did,' he shivered in spite of himself. "'What was it? How should I know? And you better save your breath. looks like a long walk ahead of us.

It was. They threaded their way through a growing maze of cracks in the plain, cracks that got deeper and deeper, so you had to look straight up to see the red sky and the little floating suns. Ceron found himself watching furtively to make sure they were still shining. He wished Mousie hadn't reminded him of the shadow. He'd never been closer to cold, clawing panic than in the same. those moments on the ridge.

The rest of the slave gang had obviously come a long way already. They were tired. But the calls goaded them on, and it wasn't until about a third of the line was being held up bodily by those in front or behind that a halt was called. They came to a fairly wide place where three of the gullies came together. The calls formed the line into a circle, squeezing in on itself, so they were practically sitting in each other's laps, and then stood by watchfully, lolling pink tongues over their bright gray teeth, and letting the wands flash in the dimmed light. Ceron let his head and shoulders

roll over onto Mousie. For some time he had felt her hands working around her own collar, covered by her hair and the harp slung across his back. She wore a rather remarkable metal pin that had other functions that holding her tunic on, and she knew how to use it. Her collar was still in place, but he knew she could slide out of it now any time she wanted. She bent forward over him as though she was exhausted. Her black hair fell over his face and neck. Under it, her small quick hands got busy. The lock snapped quietly, and the huge red-haired man collapsed slowly on top of Ceyron.

His voice whispered, but there was nothing weak about it. He said, "'Now me?' Ceron squirmed and cursed. The vast weight crushed him to silence. "'I'm a hunter. I can hear a rabbit breathing and it's warren. I heard the woman speak.

Free me or I'll make trouble.' Ciaron sighed resignedly, and mouse went to work. Ciaron looked around the circle of exhausted humans. charcoal burners, trappers, hoop-shavers, the lean, tough, hard-bitten riff-ramp of the border wilderness. Even the women were tough. Ceron began to get ideas. There was a man crushed up against them on the other side, the man who had hitherto been at the head of the column.

He was tall and stringy like a hungry cat, and just as mean-looking, hunched over his knees with his face buried in his forearms, and a shrewd. shag of iron-gray hair falling over his shoulders. Ceron nudged him. You. Don't make any sign. Game to take a chance? The shaggy head turned slightly just enough to unveil an eye.

Ciaron wished suddenly he kept his mouth shut. The eye was pale, almost white, with a queer, unhuman look as though it saw only gods or devils and nothing in between. Sieron had met hermits before in his wanderings. He knew the signs. Normally he rather liked hermits, but this one gave him unpleasant qualms in the stomach. The man dragged a rusty voice up from somewhere.

We are enslaved by devils. Only the pure can overcome devils. Are you pure? Ceron managed not to choke. as a bird in its nest, he said, a newly fledged bird, in fact a bird still in the shell. The cold pale eye looked at him without blinking. Ceron resisted an impulse to punch it and said, We have a means of freeing ourselves.

If enough could be freed when the time came, we might rush the calls. Only the pure can prevail against devils. Sieron gave him a smile of beatific innocence. The scar and the missing tooth rather sprawled the effect, but his eyes made up for it in bland sweetness. You shall lead us, father, he cooed. With such purity as yours we can't fail. The hermit thought about that for a moment and then said,

I will pass the word. Give me the fake. Sieron's jaw dropped. His eyes got glassy. The fake, said the hermit patiently, the jiggler. Ceron closed his eyes. Mouse, he said weakly, give the gentleman the picklock. Mouse slid it to him a distance of about two inches.

The red-haired giant took some of his weight off Ciaron. Mouse was looking slightly dazed herself. Hadn't I better do it for you? She asked rather pompously. The her A her cold glance. He bent his head

and brought his hands up between his knees. His collar mate on the other side never noticed a thing, and the hermit beat Mouse's time by a good third.

Ceron laughed. He lay in Mouse's lap and had mild hysterics. Mouse cuffed him furiously across the back of his neck, and even that didn't stop him. He pulled himself up,

looked through streaming eyes at Mouse's murderous small face and bit his knuckles to keep from screaming. The hermit was already quietly at work on the man next him. Ciaron unslung his harp. The gray calls hadn't noticed anything yet. Both mouse and the hermit were very smooth workers. Ceron plucked out a few sonorous minor cords, and the calls flicked their blood-pink eyes at him,

but didn't seem to think the harp called for any action. Siron relaxed and played louder. Under cover of the music, he explained his plan to the big red hunter, who nodded and began whispering to his other color mate. Siron began to sing. He gave them a lament, one of the wild, dark things that the Samarians sang at the beer of a chief, and very appropriate to the occasion. The calls lounged, enjoying the rest.

They weren't watching for it. so they didn't see, as Cioran did, the breathing of the word of hope around the circle. Civilized people would have given the show away, but these were boredom in as wary and self-contained as animals. It was only in their eyes that you could see anything. They got busy, under cover of their huddled bodies and long-haired, bowed overheads, with every buckle and pin they could muster. Mouse and the Hermit passed instructions along the line, and since they were people who were used to using their hands with skill, it seemed as though a fair number of locks might get picked.

The collars were left carefully in place. Sieron finished his limit and was halfway through another when the calls decided it was time to go. They moved in to go the line back into position. Sieron's harp crashed out suddenly an angry challenge, and the close-packed circle split into a furious confusion. Sieron slung his harp over his shoulder and sprang up, shaking off the collar. All around him was the clash of chain metal on rock, the scuple of feet, the yells, and heavy breathing of angry men. The calls came leaping in, their wands flashing. Somebody screamed.

Sieron got a fistful of mouses, schoonick, in his left hand. and started to butt through the Malay. He had lost track of the hermit and the hunter. Then, quite suddenly, it was dark. Silence closed down on the gully. A black, frozen silence with not even a word of breathing in it. Ceron stood still, looking up at the dark sky. He didn't even tremble.

He was beyond that. Black darkness, in a land of eternal. light. Somewhere then a woman screamed with a terrible mad strength, and hell broke loose. Ceron ran. He didn't think about where he was going, only that he had to get away. He was still gripping mouse. Bodies thrashed and blundered and shrieked in the darkness. Twice he and mouse were knocked kicking. It didn't stop them. They broke through, finally, into a clear space. There began to be light again, pale and feeble at first, but flickering back toward normal. They were in a broad gully, kicked smooth on the bottom by the passing of many

feet. They ran down it. After a while, mouse fell, and Ceron dropped beside her. He lay there, fighting for breath, twitching and jerking like an animal with sheer panic. He was crying a little because it was light again. Mouse clung to him, pressing tight as though she wanted to merge her body with his and hide it. She had begun to shake. Keri, she whispered over and over again. Kiri, what was it? Sieron held her head against his shoulder and stroked it.

I don't know, honey, but it's all right now. It's gone. Gone, but it could come back. It had once. Maybe next time it would stay. Darkness and the sudden cold. The legends began crawling through Siron's mind. If Boss the immortal was true, and the stone of destiny was true,

and the stone gave Boss power over life and death of a world, then maybe Boss was getting tired of the world and wanted to throw it away. The rational stubbornness in man that says a thing is not, because it's never been before, helped Ciaran steady down. But he couldn't kid himself that there hadn't been darkness where no darkness had ever been dreamed of before. He shook his head and started to pull mouse to her feet, and then his quick ears caught the sound of someone coming toward them, running, several someone's. There was no place to hide.

Ceron got mouse behind him and waited, half-crowching. It was the hunter, with the hermit loping like a stringy cat at his heels, and a third man behind them both. They all looked a little crazy, and they didn't seem to be going to stop. Ceron said, hey! They slowed down, looking at him with queer, blank eyes. Ceron blew up, because he had to relax somehow. It's all over now.

What are you scared of? It's gone. He cursed them with more feeling that fairness. What about the calls? What happened back there? The hunter wiped a huge hand across his red-bearded face. Everybody went crazy, he said thickly. Some got killed or hurt. Some got away like us. The rest were caught again.

He jerked his head back. They're coming this way. They're hunting us. They hunt by scent, the gray beasts do. Then we've got to get going, Siron turned around. Mouse? You, Mousie, snap out of it, honey. It's all right now. She shivered and choked over her breath,

and the hermit fixed them both with pale, mad eyes. It was a warning, he said, a portent of judgment when only the pure shall be saved. He pointed a bony finger at Sieron. I told you that evil could not pretext. veil against devils. That got through to Mouse, since came back into her black eyes. She took a step toward the hermit and let go.

Don't you call him evil or me either. We've never hurt anybody yet, beyond lifting a little food or a trinket. And besides, who the hell are you to talk? Anybody as handy with a picklock as you are as at plenty of practice. Mouse paused for breath, and Sieron got a look at the hermit's face. His stomach quivered. He tried to shut Mouse up, but she was feeling better and beginning to enjoy herself. She plunged into a detailed analysis of the hermit's physique and heredity.

She had a vivid and inventive mind. Ciaron finally got his hand over her mouth, taking care not to get bitten. Nice going. he said, but we've got to get out of here. You can finish later." She started to heal his shins, and then, quite suddenly, she stopped and stiffened up under his hands. She was looking at the hermit. Ciaron looked too. His insides knotted, froze, and began to do tricks. The hermit said quietly, "'You are finished now.' His pale eyes held them, and there was

nothing human about his gaze or the cold calm of his voice. You are evil, you are thieves, and I know, for I was a thief myself. You have the filth of the world on you and no wish to clean it off. He moved toward them. It was hardly a step, hardly more than an inclination of the body, but Ceron gave back before it. I killed a man. I took a life in sin and anger, and now I have made my peace.

You have not, you will not, and if need comes I can kill again without remorse. He could, too. There was nothing ludicrous about him now. He was stating simple fact, and the dignity of him was awesome. Siron scowled down at the dust. "'Hell,' he said, "'we're sorry, father. "'Mouse has a quick tongue,

"'and we both had a bad scare. "'She didn't mean it. "'We respect any man's conscience.' "'There was a cold, hard silence, "'and then the third man cried out "'with a sort of subdued fury. "'Let's go. "'Do you want to get caught again?'

"'He was a gnarled, naughty, powerful little a man, beginning to grizzle, but not to slow down. He wore a kilt of skins. His hide was dark and tough as leather. His hazel eyes set in nests of wrinkles. The hunter, who had been hearing nothing but noises going back and forth over his head, turned and let off down the gully. The others followed, still not speaking. Sieron was thinking, he's crazy, he's clear off his head. and of all the things we didn't need a crazy hermit heads the list there was a cold spot between his shoulders that wouldn't go away even when he started sweating with exertion the gully was evidently a main trail to somewhere there were many signs of recent passage by a lot of people including an occasional body kicked off to the side and left to dry the little naughty man who was a trapper named ram examined the bodies with a terrible stony look in his eyes.

"'My wife and my first son,' he said briefly. "'The gray beasts took them while I was gone.' He turned grimly away. Ceron was glad when the bodies proved to be the wrong ones. Ram and the Big Red Hunter took turns scaling the cleft walls for a look. Mouse said something about taking to the face of the plain where they wouldn't be hemmed in. They looked at her grimly. "'The gray beasts are up there,' they said.

"'Flancing us. If we go up, they'll only take us and chain us again.' Ciaran's heart took a big, staggering jump. "'In other words, they're hurting us. "'We're going the way they want us to, so they don't bother to round us up.' The hunter nodded professionally. "'Is a good plan.' "'Oh, fine,' snarled Ciaran. what I want to know is, is there any way out?

The hunter shrugged. I'm going on anyway, said Ram, my wife and son. Ceron thought about the stone of destiny, and was rather glad there was no decision to make. They went on at an easy jog-trot. By bits and pieces Ciaran built up the picture, raiding gangs of calls, coming quietly into isolated border villages, combing the brush and the forest for stragglers, where they took the humans or why nobody could guess.

The Red Hunter froze to a dead stop. The others crouched behind him, instinctively holding their breath. The hunter whispered, people, many of them. His flat palm made an emphatic move for quiet. Small, cold prickles flared across Siron's skin, He found Mouse's hand in his and squeezed it. Suddenly, with no more voice than the sigh of a breeze through reckon, the hermit laughed. "'Hah! Judgment!' he whispered.

"'Great things moving. His pale eyes were fay. "'D doom and destruction. A shadow across the world. A darkness and a dying!' He looked at them one by. I won, and threw his head back, laughing without sound, the stringy cords working in his throat. "'And of all you, I alone, have no fear.' They went on, slowly moving without sound in small, shapeless puddles of shadow, thrown by the floating sunballs.

Ceron found himself almost in the lead beside the hunter. They edged around a jog in the cleft wall. About ten feet ahead of them, the cleft floor plunged underground through a low opening, shored with heavy timbers. There were two calls lounging in front of it, watching their wands flash in the light. The five humans stopped. The calls came toward them, almost lazily, running rough gray tongues over their shiny teeth. Their blood-pink eyes were bright with pleasure. Ceron groaned.

This is it. Shall we be brave or just smart?' The hunter cocked his huge fists, and then Ram let go a queer animal moan. He shoved past Ciaran and went to his knees, besides something Ceyeron hadn't noticed before. A woman lay awkwardly against the base of the cliff. She was brown and stringy and not very young,

with a plain good face. A squat, thick-shouldered boy sprawled almost on top of her. There was a livid burn on the back of his neck. They were both dead. Ceron thought probably the woman had dropped from exhaustion, and the kid had died fighting to save her. He felt sick. Ram put a hand on each of their faces.

His own was stony and quite blank. After the first cry, he didn't make a sound. He got up and went for the call nearest to him. End of Part 2. Part 3 of the Jewel of Boss by Lee Douglas Brackett. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Part 3 He did it like an animal, quick and without thinking.

The cold was quick, too. It jabbed the wand at Ram, but the little brown man was coming so fast that it didn't stop him. He must have died in mid-leap, but his body knocked the cold over and bore him down. Sieron followed him in a swift cat leap. He heard the hunter grunting and snarling somewhere behind him, and the thudding of bare feet being very busy.

He lost sight of the other called. He lost sight of everything but a muscular gray arm that was trying to pull a jewel-tipped wand from under Ram's corpse. There was a terrible stink of burning flesh. Ceron grabbed the gray wrist. He didn't bother with it or the arm. He slid his grip up to the fingers, got his other hand beside it, and started wrenching. Bone cracked and split.

Ceron worked desperately from the thumb and the little finger. Flesh tore. Splinters of gray bone came through. Ceron's hand slipped in the blood. The gray beast opened its mouth, but no sound came. Ceron decided that the things were dumb. It was human enough to sweat. Ceron grabbed the wand.

A gray paw, the other one, came clawing for his throat around the bulk of ram's shoulders. He flicked it with the wand. It went away, and Ceron speared the jewel tip down hard against the call's throat. After a while, Mousa's voice came to him from somewhere. It's done, Kiri. No use over cooking it. It smelled done all right. Ceron got up.

He looked at the wand in his hand, holding it away off. He whistled. Mouse said. Stop admiring yourself and get going. The hunter says he can hear chains. Ciaran looked around. The other called lay on the ground. Its neck seemed to be broken.

The body of the squat, dark boy, lay on top of it. The hunter said, He didn't feel the wand. I think he'd be glad to be a club for killing one of them, if he knew it. Ceron said, Yeah, he looked at Mouse. She seemed perfectly healthy. Aren't women supposed to fainted things like this? She snorted.

I was born in the thieves quarter. We used to roll skulls instead of pennies. They weren't so scarce. I think, said Ciaron, the next time I get married I'll ask more questions. Let's go. They went down the ramp, leading under the forbidden planes. The hunter led like a wary beast. Ceron brought up the rear.

They both carried the stolen wands. The hermit hadn't spoke a word or moved a hand to help. It was fairly dark there underground, but not cold. In fact, it was hotter than outside, and got worse as they went down. Ceron could hear a noise like a hundred armorers beating on shields, only louder. There was a feeling of a lot of people moving around but not talking much, and an occasional crash or metallic screaming that Ceron didn't have any explanation for. He found himself not liking it.

They went a fairish way on an easy down slope, and then the light got brighter. The hunter whispered, careful, and slowed down. They drifted like four ghosts through an archway in front. a glow of clear bluish light. They stood on a narrow ledge, just here it was hand-smooth, but on both sides it ran in nature eroded roughness into a jumble of stalactites and wind galleries. Above the ledge in their darkness was the high roof arch, and straight ahead there was just space.

Eventually a long way off, Ceron made out a wall of rock. There was a pit. It was roughly barrel-shaped. It was deep. It was so deep that Ciaron had to crane over the edge to see bottom. Brilliant blue-white flares made it brighter than daylight about two-thirds of the way up the barrel. There were human beings laboring in the glare.

They were tiny things no bigger than ants from this height. They wore no chains, and Ceron couldn't see any guards. And after the first look, he quit worrying about any of that. The thing growing up in the pit took all his attention. It was built of metal. It rose and spread in intricate swooping curves of shining whiteness, filling the whole lower part of the cavern. Ceyeron stared at it with a curious, numb feeling of awe.

The thing wasn't finished. He had not the faintest idea what it was for, but he was suddenly terror. terrified of it. It was more than just the sheer crushing size of it, or the unfamiliar metallic construction that was like nothing he had seen or even dreamed of before. It was the thing itself. It was power. It was strength.

It was a titan growing there in the belly of the world, getting ready to reach out and grip it and play with it, like mouse gambling with an empty skull. He knew, looking at it, that no human brain in his own scale in time of existence, had conceived that shiny monster, nor shaped one smallest part of it. The Red Hunter said simply, "'I'm scared, and this smells like a trap.' Ceron swallowed something that might have been his heart. "'We're in it, pal, like it or don't, and we'd better get out of sight before that

chain gang runs into us. Off to the side along the rough part of the ledge where there were shadows and holes and pillows of rock seemed the best bet. There was a way down to the cavern floor, a dizzy zigzag of ledges, ladders, and steps. But once on it you were stuck and no cover. They edged off going as fast as they dared. Mouse was breathing rather heavily, and her face was white enough to make the brand show like a blood drop between her brows.

The hermit seemed to be moving in a private world of his own. The sight of the shining giant had brought a queer blaze to his eyes, something Sierran couldn't read and didn't like. Otherwise, he might as well have been dead. He hadn't spoken since he cursed them back in the gully. They crouched down out of sight among the forest of stalactites. Ceron watched the ledge, he whispered. They hunt by scent?"

The hunter nodded. I think the other humans will cover us. Too many scents in this place. But how did they have those two waiting for us at the cave mouth?" Ceron shrugged. Telepathy. Thought transference. Lots of backwater people have it.

Why not the calls?" You don't, said the hunter. Think of them as having human minds. Don't kid yourself. They think all right. They're not human, but they're not true animals. either. Did they think that? The hunter pointed at the pit. No, said Ciaran slowly. They didn't. Then who? He broke off. A quiet. Here they come.

Ceron held his breath, peering one-eyed around Aastalactite. The slave gang, with the Grey Guards, began to file out of the tunnel and down the steep descent to the bottom. There was no trouble left in any of those people. There was no trouble left in any of those people. there were several empty collars. There were also fewer calls. Some had stayed outside to track down the four murderous fugitives, which meant no escape at that end. Ceron got an idea. When the last of the line and the guards were safely over the edge, he whispered,

Come on, we'll go down right on their tails. Mouse gave him a startled look. He said impatiently. They won't be looking back and up, I hope. and there won't be anybody else coming up while they're going down. You've got a better idea by getting down off this bloody perch, spill it. She didn't have, and the hunter nodded. It's good, let's go.

They went like the very devil. Since all were professionals in their own line, they didn't make any more fuss than so many leaves falling. The hermit followed silently. His pale eyes went to the shiny monster in the pit, every opportunity. He was fermenting some idea in his shaggy head. Ceron had a hunch the safest thing would be to quietly trip him off into space.

He resisted it, simply because knifing a man in a brawl was one thing, and murdering an unsuspecting elderly man in cold blood was another. Later, he swore a solemn oath to drop humanitarianism, but hard. Nobody saw them. The calls and the people below were all too busy not breaking their necks to have eyes for anything else. Nobody came down behind them a risk they had had to run. They were careful to keep a whole section of the descent between them and the slave gang. It was a hell of a long way down.

The metal monster grew and grew and slid up beside them and then above them towering against the vault. It was beautiful. Ciron loved its beauty even while he hated and feared its strength. Then he realized that there were people working on it, clinging like flies to its white beams and arches. Some worked with ones, not very different from the one he carried, fusing metal joints in a sparkle of hot light. Others guided the huge metal pieces into place, bringing them up from the floor of the cavern on long ropes and fitting them delicately. With a peculiar dizzy sensation, Siron realized there was no more weight to the metal than if it were

feathers. He prayed they could get past those workers without being seen, or at least without having an alarm spread. The four of them crawled down past two or three groups of them safely, and then one man, working fairly close to the cliff, raised his head and stared straight at them. Sieron began to make frantic signs. The man paid no attention to them. Ceron got a good look at his eyes.

He let his hands drop. He doesn't see us, whispered mouse slowly. Is he blind? The man turned back to his work. It was an intricate fitting of small parts into a pierced frame. Work that in all his wanderings, Ceron had never seen done anywhere in any fashion. He shivered. No, he just doesn't see us.

The big hunter licked his lips nervously, like a beast in a deadfall. His eyes glittered. The hermit laughed without any sound. They went on. It was the same all the way down. Men and women looked at them but didn't see. In one place they paused to let the slave gang get farther ahead. There was a woman working not far out.

She looked like a starved cat, gaunt ribs showing through torn rags. Her face was twisted with the sheer effort of breathing, but there was no expression in her eyes. Quite suddenly, in the middle of an unfinished gesture, she collapsed like wet leather and fell. Ceron knew she was dead before her feet cleared the beam she was sitting on. That happened twice more on the way down. Nobody paid any attention. Mouse wiped moisture off her forehead and glared at Ciron. A fine place to spend a honeymoon.

You and your lousy shortcuts. For once, Ceron had no impulse to cover. The last portion of the descent was covered by the backs of metal lean-toos full of heat and clamor. The four slipped away into dense shadow between two of them, crouched behind a mound of scrap. They had a good view of what happened to the slave gang. The calls guided it out between massive pillars of white metal that held up the gaunt web overhead.

Fires flared around the cliff foot. A hot blue-white glare beat down, partly from some unfamiliar light sources fastened to the girders, partly from the mouths of furnaces hot beyond any heat Ceron had ever dreamed of. men and women toiled sweating in the smoke and glare and never looked at the newcomers in their chains there were no guards the calls stopped the line in a clear space beyond the shacks and waited they were all facing the same way expectant showing their bright gray teeth and rolling their blood-pink eyes siron's gaze followed theirs he got rigid suddenly and the sweat on his sweat on his him turned cold as dew on a toad's back. He thought at first it was a man walking down between the pillars. It was man-shaped, tall and slender and strong, and sheathed from crown

to heels in white mesh metal that shimmered like bright water. But when it came closer, he knew he was wrong. Some animal instinct in him knew even before his mind did. He wanted to snarl and put up his hackles and tuck his tail and run. The creature was sexless. The flesh of its hands and face had a strange unreal texture, and a dusky yellow tinge that never came in living flesh. Its face was human enough in shape, thin with light angular bones, only it was regular and perfect like something done carefully in marble,

with no human softness or irregularity. The lips were bloodless. There was no hair, not even any eyelashes. The eyes in that face were what set Ceyeron's guts to knotting like a nest of cold snakes. They were not even remotely human. They were like pools of oil under the lashless lids, black, deep, impenetrable, without heart or soul or warmth. but wise wise would the knowledge be on humanity and strong with a cold terrible strength and old

there were none of the usual signs of age it was more than that it was a psychic unhuman feel of antiquity a time that ran back and back and still back to an origin as unnatural as the body it spawned Siron knew what it was. He had made songs about the creature and sung them in crowded marketplaces and smoky wine shops. He'd scared children with it and made grown people shiver while they laughed. He wasn't singing now. He wasn't laughing. He was looking at one of the androids of Boss the immortal, a creature born of the mysterious power of the stone with no faintly.

dislinked to humanity in its body or its brain. Ceron knew then, whose mind had created the shiny monster towering above them, and he knew more than ever that it was evil. The android walked out onto a platform facing the slave gang so that it was above them where they could all see. In its right hand it carried a staff of white metal with a round ball on top. The staff and the mesh metal sheath it wore blazed bright silver in the glare. The chained humans raised their heads.

Ceron saw the white-scarred glint of their eyeballs, heard the hard suck of breath and the uneasy clashing of link metal. The calls made warning gestures with their wands, but they were watching the android. It raised the staff suddenly high over its head. The gesture put the ball-top out of Ceyron's sight behind a girder. And then the lights dimmed and went out. For a moment there was total darkness except for the dull marginal glow of the forges and furnaces. Then from behind the girder that hid the top of the staff a glorious opaline light burst out,

filling the space between the giant pillars, reaching out and up into the dim air with banners of shimmering flame. The calls crouched down in attitudes of worship, their blood-pink eyes like Sincere and coals. A trembling ran through the line of slaves, as though a wind had passed across them and shaken them like wheat. A few cried out, but the sounds were muffled quickly to silence. They stood still, staring up at the light.

The android neither moved nor spoke. standing like a silver lance. Ceron got up. He didn't know that he did it. He was distinctly aware of mouse beside him, breathing hard through an open mouth and catching Opeline's sparks in her black eyes. There was other movement, but he paid no attention. He wanted to get closer to the light.

He wanted to see what made it. He wanted to bathe in it. He could feel it pulsing in him, sparkling in his blood. He also wanted to run away, but the desire was stronger than the fear. It even made the fear rather pleasurable. He was starting to climb over the pile of scrap when the android spoke. Its voice was light, clear, and carrying. There was nothing menacing about it, but it stopped Ceyron like a blow in the face, penetrating

even through his semi-drugged yearning for the light. He knew sound. He knew me. mood. He was sensitive to them as his own harp in the way he made his living. He felt what was in that voice, or rather what wasn't in it, and he stopped dead still. It was a voice speaking out of a place where no emotion, as humanity knew the word, had ever existed. It came from a brain as alien and incomprehensible as darkness in a world of eternal light. A brain no human could ever touch or understand, except to feel the cold weight of its strength, and cower as a beast

cowers before the terrible mystery of fire. "'Sleep!' said the android. "'Sleep and listen to my voice. Open your minds and listen.' End of Part three. Part four of the Jewel of Baws by Lee Douglas Brackett. This Libri-Vox recording is in the public domain. Part 4

Through a swimming rainbow haze, Ceron saw the relaxed dull faces of the slaves. You are nothing. You are no one. You exist only to serve, to work, to obey. Do you hear and understand? The line of humans swayed and made a small, moaning sigh.

It held nothing but amazement and desire. They repeated the litany through thick animal mouths. Your minds are open to mine. You will hear my thoughts. Once told, you will not forget. You will feel hunger and thirst, but not weariness. You will have no need to stop and rest or sleep." Again the litany.

Ceron passed a hand over his face. He was sweating. In spite of himself, the light and the soulless mesmeric voice were getting him. He hid his own jaw with his knuckles, thanking whatever gods there were that the source of the light had been hidden from him. He knew he could never have bucked it. bucked it. More, perhaps, of the power of the stone of destiny? A sudden, sharp rattle of fragments brought his attention to the scrap-heap. The hermit was already halfway over it,

and Mouse was right at his heels. Ceron went after her. The rubble slipped and slid, and she was already out of reach. He called her name in desperation. She didn't hear. him. She was hungry for the light. Ciron flung himself bodily over the rubbish. Out on the floor the nearest culls were shaking off their days of worship. The hermit was scrambling on all fours like a huge gray cat. Mouse's crimson tunic stayed just out of reach. Ceron threw a handful of metal fragments at her back.

She turned her head and snarled at him. She didn't see him. Almost in an automatic reflex. She hurled some stuff at his face, but she didn't even slow down. The hermit cried out. A high, eerie scream. A huge hand closed on Ciaran's ankle and hauled him back. He fought it, jabbing with the wand he still carried.

A second remorseless hand prisoned his wrist. The Red Hunter said, dispassionately. They come. We go. Mouse! Let me go, damn you! Mouse!

You can't help her. We go, quick. Ceron went on kicking and thrashing. The hunter, banged him over the ear, with an exquisite judgment, took the wand out of his limp hand and tossed him over one vast shoulder. The light hadn't affected the hunter much. He'd been in deeper shadow than the others, and his half-animal nerves had warmed him quicker even than Ciaron's.

Being a wise, wild thing he had shut his eyes at once. He doubled behind the metal sheds and began to run in dense shadow. Ceron heard and felt things from a great misty distance. He heard the hermit yell again, a crazy votive cry of worship. He felt the painful jarring of his body and smell the animal rankness of the hunter. He heard mouse scream just once. He tried to move to get up and do something. The hunter slammed him hard across the kidneys. Ceron was aware briefly that the lights were coming on again. After that it got very dark

and very quiet. The hunter breathed in his ear. Quiet. Don't move. There wasn't much chance of Ciaran doing anything. The hunter lay on top of him with one freckled paw covering most of his face. Ceron gasped and rolled his eyes. They lay in a troughed niche of roughstone. There was black shadow on them from an overhang, but the blue glare burned beyond it. Even as he watched, it dimmed and flickered and then steadied again.

High up over his head the shining metal monster reached for the roof of the cavern. It had grown. It had grown enormously, and a mechanism was taking shape inside it, a maze of delicate rods and crystal prisms, of wheels and balances and things Ciaran hadn't any name for. Then he remembered about mouse, and nothing else mattered. The hunter lay on him, crushing him to silence. Ceron's blue eyes blazed.

He'd have killed the hunter, then, if there had been any way to do it. There wasn't. Presently he stopped fighting. Again the red giant breathed in his ear. Look over the edge. He took his hand away. Very, very quietly. Ceron raised his head a few inches and looked over.

Their niche was some fifteen feet above the floor of the pit. Below and to the right was the mouth of a square tunnel. The crowded, sweating confusion of the forges and workshops spread out before them with people swarming like ants after a rain. Standing at the tunnel mouth were two creatures in shining metal sheaths, the Androids of Boss the Immortal. Their clear light voices rose up. up to where Ciaran and the hunter lay.

Did you find out? Failing, as we judged. Otherwise, no change. No change. One of the slim unhumans turned and looked with its depthless black eyes at the soaring metal giant. If we can only finish it in time. The other said, we can, Cahafri, we must. Kofri made a quick impatient gesture.

We need more slaves. These human cattle are frail. You drive them and they die. The calls are doing what they can. Two more chains have just come, but it's still not enough to be safe. I told the beasts to raid further in, even to the border cities if they have to.

It won't help if the humans attack us before we're done." Cahoffrey laughed. There was nothing pleasant or remotely humorous about it. If they could track the calls this far, we could handle them easily. After we're finished, of course, they'll be subjugated anyway." The other nodded. Fainly uneasy, it said, If we finish in time. If we don't.

If we don't, said Cahoffrey, none of it matters. To them, or us, or the immortal Baws. Something that might have been a shudder passed over its shining body. Then it threw back its head and laughed again, high and clear. But we will finish it, stude. We're unique in the universe, and nothing can stop us. This means the end of boredom of service. of servitude and imprisonment.

With this world in our hands, nothing can stop us." Stude whispered, nothing. Then they moved away, disappearing into the seething clamor of the floor. The Red Hunter said, what were they talking about? Ceylon shook his head. His eyes were hard and curiously remote. I don't know. I don't like the smell of it, little man. It's bad. Yeah.

Ceron's voice was very steady. What happened to Mouse? She was taken with the others. Believe me, little man, I had to do what I did or they'd have taken you, too. There was nothing you could do to help her. She followed the light. I think so, but I had to run. fast. There was a mist over Sierra on sight. His heart was slugging him. Not because he particularly cared, he asked.

How did we get away? I thought I saw the big lights come on. They did, and then they went off again all of a sudden. They weren't expecting it. I had a head start. The gray beasts hunt by scent, but in that stew-pot there are too many scents. They lost us, and when the lights came on again I saw this niche and managed to climb to it without being seen."

He looked out over the floor, scratching his red beard. I think they're too busy to bother about two people. No, three, he chuckled. The hermit got away too. He ran past me in the dark, screaming like an ape about revelations and the light. Maybe they've got him again by now. Cioran wasn't worried about the hermit. Subjugation, he said slowly.

With this world in their hands, nothing can stop them. He looked out across the floor of the pit. No guards. You didn't need any guards when you had a weapon like that light. Frail human cattle driven till they died and not knowing about it nor caring. The world in their hands. an empty shell for them to play with, to use as they wanted. No more marketplaces, no more taverns, no more songs,

no more little people living their little lives the way they wanted to. Just slaves with blank faces, herded by gray beasts with shining wands, and held by the Androids light. He didn't know why the Androids wanted the world, or what they were going to do with it. He only knew that the whole thing made him sick, sick all through, in a way he'd never felt before.

The fact that what he was going to do was hopeless and crazy never occurred to him. Nothing occurred to him, except that somewhere in that seething slave-pin, mouse was laboring, with eyes that didn't see in a brain that was only an open channel for orders. Pretty soon, like the woman up on the girder, she was going to hit her limit, and and die." Ceyeron said abruptly, "'If you wanted to kill a snake, what would you do?' Cut off his head, of course." Ceron got his feet under him.

"'The stone of destiny,' he whispered. The power of life and death. Do you believe in legends?' The hunter shrugged. "'I believe in my hands. They're all I know. I'm going to need your hands to help me break one legend and build another. They're yours, little man.

Where do we go? Down that tunnel. Because if I'm not clear off, that leads to Ben Biatha. And Boss the immortal? And the stone. Almost as though it were a signal, the blue glare dimmed and flickered. In the semi-dark to Ciron and the hunter dropped. down from the niche and went into the tunnel.

It was dark, with only a tiny spot of blue radiance at wide intervals along the walls. They had gone quite a distance before they strengthened to their normal brightness, and even then it was fairly dark. It seemed to be deserted. The hunter stopped to listen. When Ceron asked irritably what was wrong, he said, I think there's someone behind us. I'm not sure.

Well, give him a jab with the wand if he gets too close. Hurry up. The tunnel led straight toward Ben Biafah, judging from its position in the pit. Sierran was almost running when the hunter caught his shoulder urgently. Wait, there's movement up ahead. He motioned Sieron down. On their hands and knees they crawl forward, holding their wands ready. A slight bend in the tunnel revealed a fork.

One arm ran straight ahead, the other bent sharply upward toward the surface. There were four calls crouched on the rock between them, playing some obscure game with human finger bones. Tehran got his weight over his toes and moved fast. The hunter went beside him. Neither of them made a sound. The calls were intent on their game and not expecting trouble. The two men might have got away with it.

with it, only that suddenly from behind them someone screamed like an angry cat. Ceron's head jerked around just long enough to let him see the hermit standing in the tunnel, with his stringy arms lifted in his gray hair flying, and the light of pure insanity blazing in his pale eyes. "'Evil!' he shrieked. "'You are evil to defy the light and the servants of the light. He seemed to have forgotten all about calling the call's demons a little while before. The gray beasts leaped up, moving quickly, with their wands ready.

Ceron yelled with sheer fury. He went for them, the rags of his yellow tunic streaming. He wasn't quite clear about what happened after that. There was a lot of motion, gray bodies leaping and twisting and jewel tips flashing. Something flicked him stunningly across the temple. He fought in a sort of detached fog where everything was blurred and distant. The hermit went on screaming about evil and the light. The hunter bellowed a couple of times, things thudded and crashed,

and once Ceron poked his wand straight into a blood-pank eye. Sometime right after that there was a confused rush of running feet back in the tunnel. The hunter was down, and Ceron found himself running up the incline because the other way was suddenly choked with calls. He got away. He was never sure how. Possibly instinct warned him to go in time so that in the confusion he was out of sight before the reinforcement saw him.

Three of the original calls were down and the fourth was busy with the hermit. Anyway, for the moment he made it. When he staggered finally from the mouth of the ramp, drenched with sweat and gasping, He was back on the forbidden plain, and Ben Biafla towered above him, a great golden titan, reaching for the red sky. The tumbled yellow rock when its steep slopes was barren of any growing thing. There were no signs of buildings or anything built by hands, human or otherwise. High up, almost in the apex of the triangular peak, was a square balcony opening that

It might have been only a wind-eroded niche in the cliff face. Ceron stood on wide-spread legs, studying the mountain with sullen, stubborn eyes. He believed in legend now. It was all he believed in. Somewhere under the Golden Peak was the stone of destiny and the demigod who was its master. Behind him were the creatures of that demigod and the monster they were building, and a little black-haired mouse who was going to die unless something was done about it. A lot of other people, too.

A whole sane, comfortable world. But mouse was about all he could handle just then. He wasn't see around the board any longer. He wasn't a human attached to a normal human world. He moved in a strange land of gods and demons, where everything was as mad as a drunkard's nightmare. and mouse was the only thing that held him at all to the memory of a life wherein men and women fought and laughed and loved his scarred mouth twitched and tightened he started off across the rolling barren rise to ben biafah a tough bandy-legged little man in yellow rags with a brown expressionless face and a forgotten harp slung between his shoulders moving at a steady gipsy-lope a wind sighed a wind sighed a little man in yellow rags with a brown expressionless face and a forgotten harp slung between his shoulders moving at a steady gypsy lobe

A wind sighed over the forbidden plain, rolling the sunballs in the red sky, and then, from the crest of Ben Biatha the darkness came. This time Ceron didn't stop to be afraid. There was nothing left inside him to be afraid with. He remembered the hermit's words. Judgment, great things moving, doom and destruction, a shadow across the world, a Darkness and a dying. Something of the same feeling came to him, but he was a human any longer.

He was beyond fear. Fate moved, and he was part of it. Stones and Shell tricked his feet in the darkness. All across the forbidden plain there was night, and a wailing wind and a sharp chill of cold. Far, far away, there was a faint red glow in the sky, where the sea burned with its own fire. Ciron went on. Overhead then the sunballs began to flicker.

Little striving ripples of light went out across them, lighting the barrens with an eerie witch glow. The flickering was worse than the darkness. It was like the last struggling pulse of a dying man's heart. Ceron was aware of a coldness in him beyond the chill of the wind. A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying. He began to climb Bin Beatha. End of Part 4.

Part 5 of the Jewel of Boss by Lee Douglas Brackett. This Libre box recording is in the public domain. Part 5 The stone was rough and fairly broken, and Ciron had climbed mountains before. He crawled upward through the sick light and the cold wind that screamed and fought him harder the higher he got. He retained no very clear memory of the climb, only after a long, long time he fell inward over the wall of a balcony and lay still. He was bleeding from rock tears, and his heart kicked him like the heel of a vicious horse, but he didn't care. The balcony was man-made.

The passage back of it led somewhere, and the light had come back in the sky. It wasn't quite the same, though. It was weaker and less warm. When he could stand up, he went in along the passage, square hewn in the living rock of Ben Biafah, the mountain of life. It led straight in, lighted by a soft opylene glow from hidden light source. Presently it turned at right angles and became a spiral ramp leading down. Corridors led back from it at various levels, but Ceyeron didn't bother about them.

They were dark, and the dust of ages lay unmarked on their floors. Down and down a long, long way. Silence. The deep uncaring silence of death and the eternal rock. Titans who watched the small, furious, ant-scurryings of man, and never, never for one moment, gave a dam. And then the ramp flattened into a broad-high passage, cut deep in the belly of the mountain. And the passage led to a door of gold, twelve feet high and intricately graved and pierced,

set with symbols that Ceyeron had heard of only in legend. The Hun Lahoun Mehan, the snake, the circle, and the cross, blazing in hot jewel fires. But above them, crushing and dominant on both valves of the great door was the crooks on Sata. The symbol of eternal life cut from some lustreless stone so black it was like a pattern of blindness on the eyeball. Shivered and drew a deep unsteady breath. One brief moment of human terror came to him.

Then he set his two hands on the door and pushed it open. He came into a small room hung with tapestries and lighted dimly by the same opaline glow as the hallway. The half-seen pictures showed men in beasts and battles against a background at once tantalizingly familiar and frighteningly alien. There was a rug on the floor. It was made from the head and hide of a creature Ceyeron had never even dreamed of before, a thing like a huge tawny cat with a dark mane and great shining fangs.

Ceron patted softly across it and pushed aside the heavy curtains at the other end. At first there was only darkness. It seemed to fill a large space. Ceron had an instinctive feeling of size. He went out into it very cautiously, and then his eyes found a pale glow ahead in the blackness, as though someone had crushed a pearl with his thumb and smeared it across the dark. He was a thief and a gypsy. He made no more sound than a wisp of cloud drifting toward it.

His feet touched a broad, shallow step, and then another. He climbed, and the pears. pearly glow grew stronger and became a curving wall of radiance. He stopped just short of touching it on a level platform high above the floor. He squinted against its curdled milky thickness trying to see through. Wrapped in the light, cradled and protected by it like a bird in the heart of a shining cloud, a boy slept on a couch, made soft with furs and colored silks. He was quite naked.

His limbs flung out carelessly with the slim angular grace of his youth. His skin was white as milk, catching a pale warmth from the light. He slept deeply. He might almost have been dead, except for the slight rise and fall of his breathing. His head was rolled over so that he faced Ceyeron, his cheek pillowed on his upflung arm. His hair, thick, curly and black, almost to blueness, had grown out long across his forearm, across the white fur beneath it, and down onto his wide, slim shoulders.

The nails of his lax hand, palm up above his head, stood up through the hair. They were inches long. His face was just a boy's face, a good face, even rather handsome, with strong bones just beginning to show under the roundness. His cheek was still soft as a girl's. The lashes of his clothes lids dark and heavy. He looked peaceful, even happy. His mouth was curved in a vague smile, as though his dreams were pleasant.

And yet there was something there. A shadow. Something unseen and untouchable. Something as fragile as the note of a shepherd's pipe brought from far off on a vagrant breeze. Something as even. indescribable as death and as bruningly powerful. Ciron sensed it, and his nerves throbbed suddenly like the strings of his own harp. He saw that the couch the boy slept on was a huge crooks on Sata, cut from the dead black stone,

with the arms stretching from under his shoulders and the loop like a monstrous halo above his head. The legend whispered through Ciaran's head, The songs, the tales, the folklore, the symbolism, and the image patterns. Boss the immortal was always described as a giant, like the mountain he lived in, and old, because Immortal suggests sage. Oh, fear and unbelief spoke through those legends, and the child desire to build tall. But there was an older legend. Ceron, because he was a gypsy and a thief, and had music in him like a drunkard has wine, had heard it, deep in the black forest of Hiboria, where even gypsy seldom go.

The oldest legend of all, the tale of the shining youth from beyond, who walked in beauty and power, who never grew old, and who carried in his heart a bitter darkness that no man could understand. The shining youth from beyond. A boy sleeping with a smile on his face, walled in living light. Ceron stood still, staring. His face was loose and quite blank. His heartbeats shook him slightly, and his breath had a rusty sound in his open mouth.

After a long time he started forward into the light. It struck him, hurled him back, numbed and dazed. Thinking of mouse, he tried it twice more before he was convinced. Then he tried yelling. His voice crashed back at him from the unseen walls, but the sleeping boy never stirred, never altered even the rhythm of his breathing. After that, Ceron cried. Crouched in the awful laxness of impotency, and thought about mouse, and cried.

Then, quite suddenly, without any warning at all, the wall of light vanished. He didn't believe it, but he put his hand out again, and nothing stopped it, so he rushed forward in the pitch blackness until he hit the stone arm of the cross, and behind him and all around him, the light began to glow again. Only now it was different. It flickered and dimmed and struggled, like something fighting not to die, like something else.

Like the sunballs. Like the light in the sky that meant life to a world. Flickering and feeble like an old man's heart. The last frightened wing beats of a dying bird. A terror took Cerell. Aron by the throat, and stopped the breath in it, and turned his body colder than a corpse. He watched. The light glowed and pulsed and grew stronger.

Presently he was walled in by it, but it seemed fainter than before. A terrible feeling of urgency came over Ceron, a need for haste. The words of the Androids came back to him. Failing as we judged, if we finish in time, if we don't. None of it matters. A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying, mouse slaving with empty eyes to build a shiny monster that would harness the world to the wills of non-human brains. It didn't make sense, but it meant something, something deadly important.

And the key to the whole mad jumble was here, a dark-haired boy dreaming on a stone, cross." Siron moved closer. He saw then that the boy had stirred very slightly, and that his face was troubled. It was as though the dimming of the light had disturbed him. Then he sighed and smiled again, nestling his head deeper into the bend of his arm. "'Boss!' said Siron. "'Lord boss!'

His voice sounded hoarse and queer. The boy didn't hear him. He called again, louder. Then he put his hand on one slim white shoulder and shook it hesitantly at first, and then hard and harder. The boy boss didn't even flicker his eyelids. Ceron beat his fists against the empty air and cursed without any voice. Then, then, almost instinctively, he crouched on the stone platform and took his harp in his

hands. It wasn't because he expected to do anything with it. It was simply that harping was as natural to him as breathing, and what was inside him had to come out some way. He wasn't thinking about music. He was thinking about mouse, and it just added up to the same thing. Random chords at first, rippling up against the wall of Milky Light. Then the agony in him began to run out threw his fingertips onto the strings, and he sent it thrumming strong across the still air. It sang, wild, and savage, but underneath it there was the sound of his own heart-breaking and the fall of tears. There was no time.

There wasn't even any Ceron. There was only the harp, crying a dirge for a black-haired mouse and the world she lived in. Nothing mattered but that. Nothing would ever matter. Then, finally, there wasn't anything left for the harp to cry about. The last quiver of the strings went throbbing off into a dull emptiness, and there was only an ugly little man in yellow rags, crouched silent by a stone cross, hiding his face in his hands.

Then, faint and distant, like the echo of word spruce, spoken in another world, another time. Don't draw the veil, Marsali. Don't! Ciaran looked up, stiffening. The boy's lips moved. His face, his eyes still closed, was twisted in an agony of pleading. His hands were raised, reaching, trying to hold something

that slipped through his fingers like mist. Dark mist. the mist of dreams. It was still in his eyes when he opened them. Grey eyes, clouded and veiled, and then with the dream mist thickening into tears, he cried out, Marsali!

As though his heart was ripped out of him with the breath that said it. Then he lay still on the couch, his eyes staring unfocused at the milky light, with the tears running out of them. Ceron said softly, "'Lord Boss.' "'Awake,' whispered the boy. "'I'm awake again.

"'Music, a harp, crying out. "'I didn't want to wake. "'Oh, God, I didn't want to!' "'He sat up suddenly. "'The rage, the sheer, blind fury in his young face "'rocked Ciaron like the blow of a fist. "'Who wait me? "'Who dared to wake me?

"'There was no place to run.' "'The light held him. and there was mouse. Ceron said, I did, Lord Boss. There was need to. The boy's gray eyes came slowly to focus on his face. Ceron's heart kicked once and stopped beating.

A great cold stillness breathed from somewhere beyond the world and walled him in, closer and tighter than the milky light. Close and tight, like the packed earth of a grave. A boy's face, round and smooth and soft, no shadow even of down on the cheeks, the lips still pink and girlish, long dark lashes, and under them, grey eyes, old with suffering, old with pain, old with an age beyond human understanding, eyes that had seen birth and life and death in an endless stream, flowing by just out of reach, just beyond hearing, eyes looking out between the bars of a private hell that was never built for any

man before. One strong young hand reached down among the furs and silks and felt for something, and Ceron knew the thing was death. Ceron suddenly was furious himself. He struck a harsh, snarling cord on the harp-strings, thinking of mouse. He poured his fury out in bitter-pungent words. the gypsy argot of the quarters, and all the time Boss fumbled to get the hidden weapon in his hands. It was the long nails that saved Ciaran's life.

They kept Boss from closing his fingers, and in the meantime some of Ciaran's vibrant rage had penetrated. Boss whispered, you love a woman? Yeah, said Ciaran, yeah. So do I. A woman I created and made to live in my dreams. Do you know what you did when you waked me? Maybe I save the world. If the legends are right, you built it.

You haven't any right to let it die so you can sleep. I built another world, little man. Marsali's world. I don't want to leave it. He bent forward towards Ciaran. I was happy in that world. I built it to suit. me. I belong in it. Do you know why? Because it's made from my own dreams as I want it. Even the people.

Even more sally. Even myself. They drove me away from one world. I built another, but it was no different. I'm not human. I don't belong with humans. Not in any world they live in. So I learned to sleep and dream. He lay back on the couch. He looked pitifully young with the long lashes hiding his eyes. Go away. Let your little whirl crumble. It's doomed anyway.

What difference to a few lifespans make an eternity? Let me sleep. Ciaran struck the harp again. No. Listen. He told Boz about the slave gang. the androids, the shining monster in the pit, and the darkness that swept over the world. It was the last that caught the boy's attention. He sat up slowly. Darkness?

You, how did you get to me past the light? Ceron told him, The Stone of Destiny, whispered the immortal. Suddenly he laughed. He laughed to fill the whole dark space beyond the light, terrible laughter, full of hate, and a queer perverted triumph. He stopped as suddenly as he had begun, and spread his hands flat on the colored silks, the long nails gleaming like knives. His eyes widened, gray windows into a deep hell, and his voice was no more than a breath.

Could that mean that I will die, too? Cioran's scarred mouth twitched. The stone of destiny, the boy leaped from his couch. His hand swept over some hidden control in the arm of the stone cross, and the Milky Light died out. At the same time, an opaline glow suffused the darkness beyond. Boss the immortal ran down the steps, a dark-haired, graceful boy, running naked in the heart of an opal. Sieron followed. They came to the hollow core of Ben Biafah,

a vast pyramidal space cut in the yellow rock. Boss stopped, and Sieron stopped behind him. The whole space was laced and twined and webbed with crystal, rods of it, screens of it, meshes of it. A shining helix ran straight up overhead into a shaft that seemed to go clear through to open air. In the crystal, pulsing along it like the life-blood in a man's veins, there was light. It was like no light Ciaran had ever seen before. It was no color and every color. It seared the eye with heat, and yet it was cold and pure like still

water. It throbbed and beat. It was alive. Ciaran followed the crystal maze down and down to the base of it. There, in the very heart of it, lying at the hub of a shining web, lay something. Like a black hand slammed across the eyeballs, darkness fell. For a moment he was blind and through the blindness came a soft whisper of movement. Then there was light again, a vague smeared spot of it on the pitch black. It glowed and faded and glowed again. The rusty gleam slid across the half-crouched body of Boss the immortal, pressed close against

the crystal web. It caught in his eyes, turning them hot and lambent like beast-eyes in the dark of a cave mouth, like sparks of hellfire in a boy's face, staring at the stone of destiny. A stone, no bigger than a man's heart, with power in it. And dying, it had power. Power to build a world or smash it. Power never born of Ceron's planet or any planet, but something naked and perfect, an egg from the womb of space itself.

It fought to live, lying in its crystal web. It was like watching somebody's heart stripped clean and struggling to beat. The fire in it flickered and flared, sending to the fire. pale witchlights dancing up along the crystal maze. Outside, Siron knew. All across the world the sunballs were pulsing and flickering to the dying beat of the stone. Boss whispered, It's over, over and done. Without knowing it, Seeran touched the harp springs and made them shudder.

The legends were right then. The stone of destiny kept the world alive. Alive. It gave light and warmth, and before that it powered the ship that brought me here across space, from the third planet of our sun to the tenth. It sealed the gaps in the planet's crust and drove the machinery that filled the hollow core inside with air. It was my strength.

It built my world, my world, where I would be loved and respected. All right, and worshipped. He laughed a small, bitter sob. A child I was. After all these centuries, still a child playing with a toy. His voice rang out louder across the flickering dimness. A boy's voice clear and sweet. He wasn't talking to Ceyeron.

He wasn't even talking to himself. He was talking to fate and cursing it. I took a long walk one morning. That was all I did. I was just a fisherman's son walking on the green hills of Atlantis above the sea. That was all I wanted to be, a fisherman's son, some day to be a fisherman myself, with sons of my own. And then, from nowhere out of the sky the meteorite fell.

There was thunder and a great light and then darkness. And when I woke again, I was a god. I took the stone of destiny out of its broken shell. The light from it burned me, and I was a god, and I was happy. I didn't know. I was too young to be a god. A boy who never grows older. A boy who wanted to play with other boys and couldn't.

A boy who wanted to age, to grow a beard in a man's voice, and find a boy who wanted to age, and and find a woman to love. It was hell after the thrill wore off. It was worse when my mind and heart grew up and my body didn't. And they said I was no God but a blasphemy, a freak. The priest of Dagon, of all the temples of Atlanta spoke against me. I had to run away. I roamed the whole earth before the flood, carrying the stone. Sometimes I ruled for centuries, a god king, but always the people tired of me and rose against me. They hated me, because I lived forever and never grew old. A man they might have accepted, but a boy. A brain with all the wisdom it could borrow from time grown so far from theirs that it was hard to talk to them, and a body

too young even for games of manhood. Ceron stood frozen, shrinking from the hell in the boy God's agonized voice. So I grew to hate them, and when they drove me out I turned on them and used the power of the stone to destroy. I know what happened to the cities of the Gobi to Ankor and the temples of Mayapon. So the people hated me more, because they feared me more, and I was alone. No one has ever been alone as I was. So I built my own world here in the heart of a dead planet, and in the end it was the same

because the people were human and I was not. I created the Androids, freaks like myself, to stand between me and my people, my own creatures that I could trust, and I built a third world in my dreams. And now the stone of destiny has come to the end of its strength. its atoms are eaten away by its own fire the world had powered will die and what will happen to me i will go on living even after my body is frozen in the cold dark silence then the pulsing beat of light in the crystal rods the heart of a world on its death-bed cyeron's harp crashed out it made the crystal sing his voice came with it boss the monster's monster in the pit that the Androids are building. I know now what it is. They knew the stone was dying. They're going to have power of their own and take the world. You can't let them,

Boss. You brought us here. We're your people. You can't let the Androids have us." The bar laughed a low, bitter sound. What do I care for your world or your people? I only want to sluble. leap. He caught his breath in and turned around as though he was going back to the place of the Stone Cross. End of Part 6 and 7. Of the Jewel of Boss by Lee Douglas Brackett.

This Libri-Vox recording is in the public domain. Part 6. Cioran stroked the harp strings. Wait. It was all humanity crying out of the harp. The little people lost and frightened and pleading for help. No voice could have said what it said. It was Ciaran himself, a channel for the unthinking pain inside him.

Wait, you were human once. You were young. You laughed and quarreled and ate and slept, and you were free. That's all we ask, just those things. Remember boss the fisherman's son? Gray eyes looking at him. Gray eyes looking from a boy's face. How could I help you even if I wanted to?

There's some power left in the stone, and the androids are your creatures. You made them. You can destroy them. If you could do it before they finish this thing, from the way they spoke they mean to destroy you with it. Boss laughed. Siron's hand struck a touch. terrible chord from the harp and fell away. Boss said heavily,

They'll draw power from the graphitic force of the planet and broadcast it the same way. It will never stop as long as the planet spins. If they finish it in time, the world will live. If they don't, he shrugged. What difference does it make? So, whispered Sieron, we have a choice of a quick death are a lingering one. We can die free on our feet, or we can die slaves. His voice rose to a full-throated shout. God, you're no God. You're a selfish brat sulking in a corner. All right, go back

to your Marsali, and I'll play God for a minute. He raised the harp. I'll play God and give him the clean way out. He drew his arm back to throw, to smash the crystal web, and then, with blinding suddenness, there was light again. They stood frozen, the two of them blinking in the hot opalescence. Then their eyes were drawn to the crystal web. The stone of destiny still fluttered like a dying heart, and the crystal rods were dim. Ceron whispered, It's too late. They're finished. Silence again.

They stood almost as though they were waiting for something, hardly breathing, with Sierran still holding the silent harp in his hand. Very, very faintly, under his fingers the strings began to thrum. Vibration. In a minute Sieron could hear it in the crystal. It was like the buzz and strum of insects just stop. of earshot. He said, What's that?

The boy's ears were duller than his, but presently he smiled and said, So that's how they're going to do it. Vibration that will shake Ben Biafah into a cloud of dust and me with it. They must believe I'm still asleep." He shrugged. What matter? It's death." Siron slung the harp across his back.

There was a curious finality in the action. There's a way from here into the pit. Where is it? Boss pointed across the open space. Ciaran started walking. He didn't say anything. Boss said, where are you going? Back to mouse, said Ciaran simply, to die with her.

The crystal maze hummed eerily. I wish I could see more Sully again. Ceron stopped. He spoke over his shoulder without expression. The death of the stone doesn't mean your death, does it? No. The first exposure to its light when it landed, blazing with the heat of friction, made permanent changes in the cell structure of my body.

I'm independent of it as the Androids are of the culture vats they grew in. And the new power source will take up where the stone left off? Yes. Even the wall of rays that protected me and fed my body while I slept will go on. The power of the stone was broadcast to it and to the sunballs. There were no mechanical leads. Ceron said softly, "'And you love this, Marsali?

You're happy in this dream world you created? You could go back there?' "'Yes,' whispered boss. "'Yes, yes!' Ceron turned. Then help us destroy the Androids. Give us our world and we'll give you yours. If we fail, well, we have nothing to lose. Silence. The crystal web hummed and sang. Death whispered across the world. The stone of destiny throbbed like the breast of a dying bird. The boy's gray

eyes were veiled and remote. It seemed almost that he was asleep. smiled. The drowsy smile of pleasure he had worn when Ciaron found him dreaming on the stone cross. "'Marsali!' he whispered. "'Marsali!' He moved forward, then, reaching out across the crystal web. The long nails on his fingers scooped up the stone of destiny, cradled it, cached it in. Boss the immortal said, Let's go, little man." Ceron didn't say anything. He looked at Boss.

His eyes were wet. Then he got the harp in his hands again and struck it, and the thundering cord shook the crystal maze to answering music. It drowned the faint death whisper, and then, caught between two vibrations, the shining rod split and fell with a shiver of sound like the ringing of distant bells. Sierran turned and went down the passage to the pit. Behind him came the dark-haired boy with the stone of destiny in his hands. They came along the lower arm of the fork where Siron and the hunter had fought the

calls. There were four of the gray beasts still on guard. Sierran had pulled a wand from his girdle. The calls started up and Siron got ready to fight them, but Boss said, Wait. He stepped forward. The calls watched him with their blood, pink eyes, yawning and whimpering with animal nervousness. The boy's dark gaze burned.

The gray brutes cringed and shivered and then dropped flat, hiding their faces against the stone. Telepaths, said Boss to Ceron, are obedient to the strongest mind. The Androids know that. The calls weren't put there to stop me physically, but to send the Androids warning. if I came. Ceron shivered. So they'll be waiting? Yes, little man.

They'll be waiting. They went down the long tunnel and stepped out on the floor of the pit. It was curiously silent. The fires had died in the forges. There was no sound of hammering, no motion. Only blazing lights and a great stillness, like someone holding his breath. There was no one in sight.

The metal monster climbed up the pit. It was finished now. The intricate maze of grids and balances in its belly murmured with the strength that spun up through it from the core of the planet. It was like a vast spider, making an invisible threat of power to wrap around the world and hold it to be sucked dry. An army of calls began to move. on silent feet out from the screening tangle of sheds and machinery.

The Androids weren't serious about that. It was just a skirmish, a test to see whether Boss had been weakened by his age-long sleep. He hadn't been. The calls looked at the stone of destiny, and from there to Boss's gray eyes, cringed, whimpered, and lay flat. Boss whispered. Their minds are closed to me, but I can feel. The Androids are working, preparing some trap.

His eyes were closed now, his young face set with concentration. They don't want me to see, but my mind is older than theirs, and better trained. And I have the power of the stone. I can see a control panel. It directs the force of their machine. He began to move then, rapidly, out across the floor. His eyes were still closed. It seemed he didn't need them for seeing.

People began to come out from behind the shed and the cooling forges. Blank-faced people with empty eyes. Many of them making a wall of themselves against Boss. Ceron cried out. Mouse! She was there. Her body was there, thin and erect in the crimson tunic. Her black hair was still wild around her small brown face.

But mouse, the mouse that Ciaran knew, was dead behind her dull black eyes. Ceron whispered, "'Mouse!' The slaves flowed in and held the two of them, clogged in a mass of unresponsive bodies. "'Can't you free them, boss?' "'Not yet, not now. There isn't time. Can't you do with them what you did with the calls? The Androids control their minds through hypnosis.

If I fought that control, the struggle would blast their minds to death or idiocy, and there isn't time. There was sweat on his smooth, young forehead. I've got to get through. I don't want to kill them. Ceron looked at Mouse. No, he said hoarsely. But I may have to unless—

Wait. I can channel the power of. of the stone through my own brain, because there's an affinity between us. Vibrations, cell to sell. The Androids won't have made a definite command against music. Perhaps I can jar their minds open just enough, so that you can call them with your harp as you called me. A tremor, almost of pain, ran through the boy's body.

Lead them away, Ceron. Lead them as far as you can. Otherwise, many of them will die, and hurry. Boss raised the stone of destiny in his clasped hands and pressed it to his forehead, and Ciron took his harp. He was looking at Mouse when he sat the strings to singing. That was why it wasn't hard to play as he did. It was something from him to Mouse, a prayer, a promise, his heart held out on a song.

The music rippled out across the packed mass of humanity. At first they didn't hear it. Then there was a stirring and a sigh, a dumb-blind reaching. Somewhere the message was getting through the darkness clouding their minds, a message of hope, a memory of red sunlight on green hills, of laughter and home and love. Siron let the music die to a whisper under his fingers, and the people moved forward toward him, wanting to hear. He began to walk away slowly.

Thrilling the harp song over his shoulder, and they followed, haltingly, intues and threes, until the whole mass broke and flowed like water in his wake. Boss was gone, his slim young body slipping fast through the broken ranks of the crowd. Siron caught one more glimpse of mouse before he lost her among the others. She was crying without knowing or remembering why. If Boss died, if Boss was defeated, she would never know nor remember. Ceron led them as far as he could, clear to the wall of the pit. He stopped playing.

They stopped, too, standing like cattle, looking at nothing, with eyes turned inward to their clouded dreams. Ceron left them there, running out alone across the empty floor. He followed the direction Boss had taken. He ran fast, but it was like a nightmare where you run and run and never get anywhere. The lights glared down, and the metal monster sighed and churned high up over his head, and there was no other sound, no other movement but his own. Then, abruptly, the lights went out. He stumbled on, hitting brutally against unseen pillars, falling and scrambling in scrapheaps,

and after an eternity he saw light again up ahead. The light he had seen before, here in the pit, the glorious opalescent light that drew a man's mind and held it fast to be chained. Ceron crept closer. There was a control panel on a stone dais, a meaningless jumbled mass of dials and wires. The android stood before it.

One of them was bent over, its yellowish hands working delicately with the controls. The others stood erect beside it, holding a staff. The metal ball at the top was open, spilling the opalescent blaze into the darkness. Ceron crouched in the shelter of a pillar, shielding his eyes. Even now he wanted to walk into that light and be its slave. The android with the staff, said harshly, "'Can't you find the wavelength? He should have been dead by now.' The bending one tensed and then straightened. The burning lights sparkled across its metal sheath.

Its eyes were black and limitless, like evil itself and no more human. Yes, it said, I have it. The light began to burst stronger from the staff, a swirling, dangerous fury of it. Ceron was hardly breathing. The light source, whatever it was, was part of the power of the stone of destiny. Wave lengths meant nothing to him, but it seemed the danger was to the stone, and Boss carried it. The android touched the staff. The light died, clipped off as the metal ball closed.

"'If there's any power left in the stone,' it whispered, "'our power wave will blast its subatomic reserve and boss the immortal with it.' Silence. And then in the pitch darkness a coal began to glow. It came closer. It grew brighter, and a smudged reflection behind and above it became the head and shoulders of Boss the immortal. The android whispered,

Stronger! Hurry! A yellowish hand made a quick adjustment. The stone of destiny burned brighter. It burst with light. It was like a sunball. stabbing its hot fury into the darkness. The android whispered,

More! The stone filled all the pit with a deadly blaze of glory. Boss stopped, looked up at the dais. He grinned. A naked boy, beautiful with youth, his gray eyes veiled and sleepy under dark lashes. He threw the stone of destiny up on the dais, an idle boy tossing stones at a treetop.

Light! An explosion of it without sound, without physical force. Ceron dropped flat on his face behind the pillar. After a long time he raised his head again. The overhead lights were on, and Boss stood on the dais beside two twisted, shiny lumps of man-made, soulless men. The android flesh had taken the radiation as leather takes heat, warping, twisting, turning black. Poor freaks, said Boss softly.

They were like me, with no place in the universe that belonged to them. So they dreamed, too. Only their dreams were evil. He stooped and picked up something. A dull dark stone, a thing with no more life nor light than a water-worn pebble. He sighed and rolled it once between his palms and let it drop. If they had had time, to learn their new machine a little better. I would never have lived to reach them in time."

He glanced down at Ciaran, standing uncertainly below. Thanks to you, little man, they didn't have quite time enough. He gestured to a staff. Bring it, and I'll free your mouse. Part 7. A long time afterward, Mouse and Ceyeron and Boss the immortal stood in the opal-tinted glow of the great room of the crooks on Sata. Outside the world was normal again and safe. Boss had left full instructions about controlling and tending the centrifugal power plant. The slaves were freed, going home across the forbidden plains, forbidden no longer. The calls were sleeping, mercifully, the big sleep from which they would never wake. The world was

free for humanity to make or more on its own rest. responsibility. Mouse stood very close to see Aron, her arm around his waist, his around her shoulders. Crimson rags mingled with yellow, fair shaggy hair mixing with black. Boss smiled at them. Now, he said, I can be happy until the planet itself is dead. You won't stay with us? Our gratitude, our love, will be gone with the coming generations.

No, little man. I built myself a world where I belong, the only world where I can ever belong, and I'll be happier in it than any of you, because it is my world, free of strife and ugliness and suffering, a beautiful world for me and Marsali. There was a radiance about him that Ciaran would put into a song someday, only have understanding. I don't envy you, whispered Boss and smiled, youth smiling in a spring dawn. Think of us sometimes, and be jealous. He turned and walked away, going lightly over the wide stone floor and up the steps to the dais.

Ciron struck the harpstrings. He sent the music flooding up against the high bolt, filling all the rocky space with a thrumming melody. He sang, the tune he had sung for mouse on the ridge above the burning sea. A simple tune, about two people in love. Boss lay down on the couch of furs and colored silks, soft on the shaft of the stone cross. He looked back at them once smiling. One slim white arm raised in a brief salute and swept down across the black stone. The milky light rose on the platform.

It wavered, curdled, and thickened to a wall of warm pearl. Through it for a moment they could see him. His dark head pillowed on his forearm. His body sprawled in careless angular grace. Then there was only the warm, soft shell of light. Ciaran's harp whispered to silence. The tunnel into the pit was sealed. Mouse and Ceron went out through the golden doors and closed them very quietly.

that would never be opened again as long as the world lived. Then they came into each other's arms and kissed. Rough, tight arms on living flesh, lips that bruised and breaths that mingled hot with life. Temper and passion, empty bellies, a harp that sang in crowded market squares, and no roof to fight under but the open sky. And Ceron didn't envy the dark-haired.

boy, dreaming of the Stone Cross. End of Part 7. End of The Jewel of Boss. By Lee Prackett.