Free The Best of Planet Stories, No. 1 by editor Leigh Brackett Page B

wanted to kill Rann and save Crom Dhu, and being so willing to die to accomplish either."
    "That's a lot of thinking. Yeah, and what about that promise you made?"
    "It will be kept."
    Starke gave him a hand. "Linnl, you're okay. If I ever get back to Earth, so help me, I'll never bait a hook again and drop it in the sea." It was lost to Linnl. Starke forgot it, and went on, laughing. There was an edge of hysteria to it. Relief. You got booted around for days, people milled in and out of your mind like it was a bargain basement counter, pawing over the treads and convolutions, yelling and fighting; the woman you loved was starved on a ship masthead, and as a climax a lady with green eyes tried to make you a filling for an accident-mangled body. And now you had an ally.
    And you couldn't believe it.
    He laughed in little starts and stops, his eyes shut.
    "Will you let me take care of Rann when the time comes?"
    His fingers groped hungrily upward, closed on an imaginary figure of her, pressed, tightened, choked.
    Linnl said, "She's yours. I'd like the pleasure, but you have as much if not more of a revenge to take. Come along. We start now. You've been asleep for one entire period."
    Starke let himself down gingerly. He didn't want to break a leg off. He felt if someone touched him he might disintegrate.
    He managed to let the tide handle him, do all the work. He swam carefully after Linnl down three passageways where an occasional silver inhabitant of the city slid by.
    Drifting below them in a vast square hall, each gravitating but imprisoned by leg-shackles, the warriors of Falga looked up with pale cold eyes at Starke and Linnl. Occasional discharges of light-fish from interstices in the walls passed luminous, fleeting glows over the warriors. The light-fish flirted briefly in a long shining rope that tied knots around the dead faces and as quickly untied them. Then the light-fish pulsed away and the red color of the sea took over.
    Bathed in wine, thought Starke, without humor. He leaned forward.
    "Men of Falga!"
    Linnl plucked a series of harp-threads.
    "Aye." A deep suggestion of sound issued from a thousand dead lips.
    "We go to sack Rann's citadel!"
    "Rann!" came the muffled thunder of voices.
    At the sound of another tune, the golden hounds appeared. They touched the chains. The men of Falga, released, danced through the red sea substance.
    Siphoned into a valve mouth, they were drawn out into a great volcanic courtyard. Starke went close after. He stared down into a black ravine, at the bottom of which was a blazing caldera.
    This was the Source Life of the Red Sea. Here it had begun a millennium ago. Here the savage cyclones of sparks and fire energy belched up, shaking titanic black garden walls, causing currents and whirlpools that threatened to suck you forward and shoot you violently up to the surface, in cannulas of force, thrust, in capillaries of ignited mist, in chutes of color that threatened to cremate but only exhilarated you, gave you a seething rebirth!
    He braced his legs and fought the suction. An unbelievable sinew of fire sprang up from out the ravine, crackling and roaring.
    The men of Falga did not fight the attraction.
    They moved forward in their silence and hung over the incandescence.
    The vitality of the Source grew upward in them. It seemed to touch their sandaled toes first, and then by a process of shining osmosis, climb up the limbs, into the loins, into the vitals, delineating their strong bone structure as mercury delineates the glass thermometer with a rise of temperature. The bones flickered like carved polished ivory through the momentarily film-like flesh. The ribs of a thousand men expanded like silvered spider legs, clenched, then expanded again. Their spines straightened, their shoulders flattened back. Their eyes, the last to take the fire, now were ignited and glowed like candles in refurbished sepulchers. The chins snapped up, the entire outer skins of their bodies broke into