Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/19

Alison saw a large, compact bundle lying near by. It looked bulky, but be suspected that the man with the green face must be unbelievably strong, since he had carried without sound or effort the helpless five up the steep stone stairway.

The drugged five lay near by in a row, their faces upturned like faces of the dead, to the stars toward which they were to take their unknowing, fatal flight.

The man from Puros seated himself cross-legged on a jutting ledge of rook. Alison followed suit at a little distance. The green face was tilted toward the sky, the green eyes scanning the heavens to the northward, where burned a large, white star, near it a small, red one.

"As one looks from here, Puros lies at the apex of a triangle formed by it and by that red and the larger white star. But the Bird of Space—he will come from the southward."

Gorlog spoke no more. And in the tone of his last remark there had been a difference from the tone he had used to Alison before. A suggestion of superciliousness. Soon, Alison would be one of the cattle of Puros, where the man who had brought him there against his will would be an overlord.

Alison drew closer about him the folds of his silk dressing gown, for the night mountain air was keen. The top of Castle Rock was flat, except for jutting irregularities which indicated its granite structure and showed the erosion of the centuries. But like a mesa, it seemed to stand above the world, apart. A fit spot for a leap off into space!

Slowly the stars swung in their westward march as the world turned toward a new day. A constellation sank from sight; another rose. The aspect of the zenith changed. No moon appeared, for it was the dark of the moon. The white and red stars near which hung Puros, star of doom, shifted toward the west.

Alison's teeth were chattering with cold and dread. He tried to think of the morning, tried to tell himself that at last he was outside of the solid rock, under the sky, with half a chance instead of none at all. He could not. He was under the spell of the green eyes, under the spell of a dreadful, unseen, lightless, dying star up there somewhere in the northern sky.

Hour after hour he held his cramped position and kept vigil with the contorted silent figure that ceaselessly watched the sky. The cold struck deeper, so that he was benumbed. Even his tension and anxiety gave way at last before the cold, so that at the last he drowsed.

And, as he drowsed, the moment arrived.

He felt, rather than saw, a dimming of the starlight. Dulled as were his senses with cold and despair, he forced himself instantly to alertness, and felt his heart beat hard in his breast as his tired eyes opened wide upon the unhelping, pitiless sky.

Something was blotting out the stars!

Black, swiftly moving, gliding nearer and nearer like a shadow of a cloud driven before a mighty wind. But there was no wind. The heavens were utterly still.

There was a great confusion in Alison's mind.

He knew that he sank, half fainting in terror, upon his face, at a little distance from the other five prisoners and their captor. He heard swift movements of the green-faced man, who was dragging his heavy bundle, and then the helpless figures of the five. And yet, all his will could not force him to move. No more than if he had been drugged, like the others. For the matter of that, perhaps he