The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

overside.
    “No!” Again Torgul’s shout halted the crew. “He shall take the Black Curse with him when he goes to meet the Shadow—and only one can speak that curse. Bring him!”
    Helpless, reeling under their blows, dragged along, Ross was thrown into the Captain’s cabin, confronted by a figure braced up by coverings and cushions in Torgul’s own chair.
    A woman, her face a drawn death’s head of skin pulled tight upon bone, yet a fiery inner strength holding her mind above the suffering of her body, looked at the Terran with narrowed eyes. She nursed a bandaged arm against her, and now and then her mouth quivered as if she could not altogether control some emotion or physical pain.
    “Yours is the cursing, Lady Jazia. Make it heavy to bear for him as his kind has laid the burden of pain and remembering on all of us.”
    She brought her good hand up to her mouth, wiping its back across her lips as if to temper their quiver. And all the time her eyes held upon Ross.
    “Why do you bring me this man?” Her voice was strained, high. “He is not of those who brought the Shadow to Kyn Add.”
    “What—?” Torgul began and then schooled his voice to a more normal tone. “Those were from the sea?” He was gentle in his questioning. “They came out of the sea, using weapons against which we had no defense?”
    She nodded. “Yes, they made very sure that only the dead remained. But I had gone to the Shrine of Phutka, since it was my day of duty, and Phutka’s power threw its shade over me. So I did not die, but I saw—yes, I saw!”
    “Not those like me?” Ross dared to speak to her directly.
    “No, not those like you. There were few…only so many—” She spread out her five fingers. “And they were all of one like as if born in one birth. They had no hair on their heads, and their bodies were of this hue—” She plucked at one of the coverings they had heaped around her; it was a lavender-blue mixture.
    Ross sucked in his breath, and Torgul was fast to pounce upon the understanding he read in the Terran’s face.
    “Not your kind—but still you know them!”
    “I know them,” Ross agreed. “They are the enemy!”
    The Baldies from the ancient spaceships, that wholly alien race with whom he had once fought a desperate encounter on the edge of an unnamed sea in the far past of his own world. The galactic voyagers were here—and in active, if secret, conflict with the natives!
    CHAPTER 11
    Weapon from the Depths
    Jazia told her story with an attention to time and detail which amazed Ross and won his admiration for her breed. She had witnessed the death and destruction of all which was her life, and yet she had the wit to note and record mentally for possible future use all that she had been able to see of the raiders.
    They had come out of the sea at dawn, walking with supreme confidence and lack of any fear. Axes flung when they did not reply to the sentries’ challenges had never touched them, and a bombardment of heavier missiles had been turned aside. They proved invulnerable to any weapon the Rovers had. Men who made suicidal rushes to use sword or battle ax hand-to-hand had fallen, before they were in striking distance, under spraying tongues of fire from tubes the aliens carried.
    Rovers were not fearful or easily cowed, but in the end they had fled from the five invaders, gone to ground in their halls, tried to reach their beached ships, only to die as they ran and hid. The slaughter had been remorseless and entire, leaving Jazia in the hill shrine as the only survivor. She had hidden for the rest of the day, seen the killing of a few fugitives, and that night had stolen to the shore, launched one of the ship’s boats which was in a cove well away from the main harbor of the fairing, heading out to sea in hope of meeting the homing cruisers with her warning.
    “They stayed there on the island?” Ross asked. That point of her story puzzled him. If the object of that murderous raid had been only to stir up trouble among the Hawaikan Rovers, perhaps turning one clan against the other, as he had deduced when he had listened to Torgul’s report of similar happenings, then the star men should have withdrawn as soon as their mission was complete, leaving the dead to call for vengeance in the wrong direction. There would be no reason to court discovery of their true identity by lingering.
    “When the boat was asea there were still lights at the fairing hall, and they were not our