Drask growled at Tonguth warningly … and then Abdekiel floundered into a similar mishap. Since the globes of force had snatched them from the control room of the nomad fleet flagship, the shaman had shrunken in upon himself. The cold, acid force of his mind had withered, ebbed. His great bald Buddha-face of yellow fat had shriveled. Now, as he stumbled along, mumbling to himself, a sudden start of superstitious terror flayed him as he saw a nodding clump of waxen lily-pale flowers whose pallid blossoms turned slowly as he passed … swiveled as if to watch him. Turning to gape with terror at this unearthly sight he walked into a tree with stunning force.
Tonguth stopped short, running a dry tongue over dry lips. He gripped his sword-hilt so tightly his knuckles whitened from the pressure.
“I … could swear that tree was not there, just a moment before,” he said hoarsely.
“No, it was not,” Calastor agreed gravely.
Running a flabby hand over his bruised face, the shaman turned haggard eyes on them.
“She … plays with us … like a great emerald cat… .” he whispered.
Then a soft, half-heard music began … a liquid rippling as from some insubstantial, airy harp. The sleepy tune drifted about them gently, caressingly. They could almost discern a pattern in the melody … but never quite. It seemed to draw them forward … forward… . The hypnotic music pulled their stumbling feet on, as the trees gave way and the sparkling crystal gates of Diomahl, the City of Green Magic, lay open before them.
The music rose to a surge of invisible harps—and with it a dense, emerald fog enshrouded them, cutting off their sight. Calastor reached out through the blinding mists that swirled and boiled about them, struck through with drifted rays of green radiance … and felt Lurn clasp his hand.
“I—cannot—see!” the Warlord said, raggedly.
“Do not move, or we will lose each other. Remain calm,” the serene voice of the Magister advised. Although they stood still, so violently did the green smoke whirl and wheel about them that they seemed to feel the giddy vertigo of some unseen motion. And then—
One second they were stumbling and staggering in the spinning world of green mist; in the next instant it was whipped away, vanishing into—nowhere. Dazed, blinking, they looked about them.
The garden was—gone!
They stood in the center of a great domed hall whose faceted walls of sheerest emerald lifted above them into vague, infinite heights. Far above their heads, the vaulted roof was lost in thronged shadows. The walls of the vast empty hall shimmered with ghostly pale light, as if the stupendous chamber were carven from the hollow heart of some inconceivable super-emerald.
The immense acre of floor was paved in some mirror-like, glistening, translucent green stone in which tiny star-like atoms of light sparkled in microscopic galaxies.
Now the light strengthened. They could see that the emerald walls were faintly veined, like marble, with a dim tracery of thread-thin gold … a sprawling web of glittering light that spread over the crystal facets of the wall like some weird arabesque, some monstrous labyrinth of glowing lines, spelling out a cosmic riddle, or tracing the potent figures of some galactic Pentacle of Power over the entire inner surface of the vast room… .
It held their eyes—even the attention of the serene Magister. The pattern seemed almost recognizable, gripping their fascinated attention, forcing their eyes to trace and retrace the curious, near-meaningful angles of the golden maze, therein to read the secret meaning of the design whose structure and pattern just barely seemed to elude their minds, a meaning that hovered on the borders of conscious thought, like a half-forgotten Word of stupendous import that trembled almost on the tips of their tongues.
A burst of crystal laughter rang against their concentration, shattering tt to a thousand shards of broken thought.
The chiming bells of icy amusement shocked them like a sudden sluice of chill water, snapping the thread of their thought, breaking abruptly the weird, hypnotic pull of the wall-pattern, and they spun about to see—
Her.
“You are welcome to Diomahl,” said the Goddess of Green Magic.
13.
BEFORE THE EMERALD THRONE
SOMEHOW THEY had not noticed it before, but a dozen yards from where they stood a great boulder of glittering green crystal rose sheer from the mirror-like pave. It heaved its sparkling, jagged, rough-hewn mass up to tower above them in the dim, mysterious light. Like a boulder-vast jewel it was, or an iceberg of mystic green, splintered by the action of time into a million flashing facets.
The uppermost tier was sculptured into the shape of a rugged, throne-like chair. Upon this sat—Niamh.
From throat to heel She was draped in lucent, misty voluminous robes of delicate gauze, in hue the faintest shade of pearly, opaline green. Against the ambiguous and elusive color of Her draperies, Her flesh formed a striking contrast. For truly was She called “The Green Goddess” … the flawless skin of long, slender hands and calm, classic, inhumanly perfect face were as if molded from pallid green jade. The rest of Her body was hidden, swathed in opalescent gauze, although they could discern the rise and fall of Her breasts, and the long, cat-like curve of hip, thigh and leg where the tenuous fabric was caught up more tightly about Her.
The first thing that seized them with awe, however, was Her incredible size. She loomed above them like some stupendous statue, a Colossus of pure jade. Even seated, they could see that when She rose to Her full height She must stand nearly three times the height of a full-grown man.
In this unusual mingling of female grace and beauty with male majesty and strength, the Green Woman seemed like some Warrior-Queen of heroic legend, some superb Amazon.
Her hair was darkest emerald, yet more delicate than silk. It seemed, to Calastor’s amazed thoughts, like emerald jewels spun into gossamer by the magic loom of some Necromancer. As tenuous as a vapor, it was unbound, floating about her massive head like a dim halo of misty green flames … and where a curling thread of drifting strand caught the light, it flashed with metallic luster, glittering with pinpoints of jeweled radiance, as if, webbed within the mesh of Her locks, glittered a thousand netted stars of emerald flame.
It was, however, Her face that seized their fascinated attention. Gaping despite himself, Drask of the Varkonna knew he had never before looked on a face of such super-human beauty. Like a great mask of exquisite milky jade, smoothly molded by a sculptor of supernal genius, it was the apex of perfection, beyond comparison with mortal beauty. A deep, broad and lofty brow, unmarred by the slightest wrinkle, rose above level, winging brows. Large eyes, tip-tilted, set deep and wide-apart, whose pupils were dazzling-dark, weird disks of blackish emerald, within whose depths of gloom far fires glimmered. And darkly emerald, too, the proud arched bow of Her full, velvet lips.
Niamh’s face blended pride with a godlike serenity … fiery, inconceivably violent passions, banked beneath a chill and awful peace. Her beauty was so intense, so overwhelming, that it was almost a thing of terror. Observing it, Calastor knew at last what the Ancient poet meant by “the awful beauty of the dispassionate Divine.”