When She spoke, it startled them all. Rapt, they had stared at the dazzling glory of Her, seated motionless, towering above them like some idol, throned on a giant jewel, as if She were insensate stone. The unwavering, lifeless perfection of Her face was shattered when She spoke, for emotion animated it. It was as if, suddenly, a great statue were to speak.
“I have summoned you here to observe My justice, and to hear My judgment.”
Her voice, too, was beyond the human. Sweet, clear, sharp—a singing music, inhumanly pure. A voice that could only be uttered from a throat of crystal, Calastor mused.
“Drask, Warlord of the Star Rovers, Chief of the Clan Varkonna—step before Me.”
His eyes narrowing, the Warlord boldly swaggered forward, spreading his legs in an insolent poise and resting his hands on his hips as he tilted back his head to look up into the superhuman face above him.
“You are virile, strong, a leader. Intelligence is yours— of a kind—and the power to stir and command men. Greatness could have been yours, yes, and a lofty name to ring down the annals of time.”
“Greatness is mine, Lady,” he said boldly. “By what right, what authority, do you presume to judge me—”
She laughed, a crystalline mockery, chiming with cold mirth.
“By My right. By My authority!”
Drask flushed hotly. “If power is your argument for authority—”
“O, Drask—you of all men here should believe in the ancient law that ‘Might is Right.’ Has not your glorious career been one bloody chronicle of the unhampered exercise of brute power? Strong you are, I have said, but ruthless in the employment of that strength. You have no conception of the natural rights of men less strong than you. Hence, your whim, your slightest desire, was sufficient authority for the most cruel and brutal acts! The gifts which you inherited, your position of kingship over your people, the unlimited strength that was yours in the great war-fleets of your fathers, your talents of mind and body—all, all of these have you misused, to the detriment, the destruction of others.”
Her words rang through the mighty chamber like a clarion, cowing the fierce Barbarian.
“On twenty-two planets of man have you sought, with all your lusty force, to crush out the last, flickering sparks of culture and civilization. On Xulthoom, the World of Eternal Mist, I commanded you to advance no further. This command you disobeyed, although I threatened that its disobedience would be punished. Do you remember My words?”
“I—yes, you green Monster!” Drask raged. “You swore to destroy me and my fleet forever! But I yield to no idle threats—I am master of the spaceways. I—and none other!”
Her eyes half-closed, ominously.
“And I am Mistress here, O little man. But My threats were not idle, were they? Your fleets are destroyed. Broken, decimated. Scattered. Fleeing. Is this not truth?”
His hawk-gold eyes flamed with frustrated fury. “Yes,” he growled. “And now you intend to kill me?”
Niamh smiled, a cold flexing of the lips, nothing more.
“No.”
Calastor’s eyes widened.
Lurn gasped.
Drask, strangling his fury, gaped.
“No?” he repeated, warily.
She extended one mighty hand, the first movement of Her body since they had come into Her presence, and they all instinctively shrank back.
From Her outstretched palm a ray of bright leaf-green light sped, bathing Drask’s booted feet in its lambent glow, then flaring out as if it had never been.
Drask struggled to move, but could not. Sweat broke out upon his brow. It was as if his heels had been welded into the mirror-pave.
“No,” She repeated serenely. “You shall never die. I grant you everlasting life. This is the judgment of Niamh.”
Lurn drew in her breath sharply, and caught at Calastor’s white-clad arm. He followed her startled glance, to see—
The Warlord’s boots whitened as if touched to marble by the bolt of green radiance, then became transparent as clear glass! Drask paled, his strong face suddenly haggard. His eyes flickered from side to side, like a hunted animal’s.
“Everlasting life… .” he repeated dully.
The curious transparency was creeping up his long legs. They were like columns of sheer crystal.
“Your mind and ego shall never perish, until the vast Universe of Stars ends at last in the eventual energy-death of balanced entropy,” the Goddess said, in tones coldly dispassionate. “Prisoned in living, indestructable crystal, your identity shall endure for all Eternity to come, and you shall have unending ages to contemplate how prodigally you have wasted the gifts that heredity and fortune gave into your hands.”
The weird crystal transformation crept remorselessly up Drask’s trembling body. It was now above his hips. From the waist down, he was like a glass statue, frozen immobile. His face tightened under the lash of unendurable terror. Death, torture, execution … all these he was strong enough to bear. But not the inhuman doom meted out to him by Her justice.
“No! Goddess—mercy!”
“As much mercy shall be yours as you gave to the undefended worlds crushed beneath your bloody heel,” She said coldly. “And for ages to come, remember all your triumphs, one by one. The helpless planets you looted and sacked … the garden-world of Athnolan … placid Onaldus with its blue hills and yellow skies … Mindanell, the Planet of Fernsmen, and quiet Freihoffer, Scather, and Argion, and shadowy Xulthoom of the Hooded Men.”
The glassy tide crept to his shoulders, spreading down his arms. His face was paper-white, utterly drained of color. He raised his face to the sky, mouth stretched wide in a soundless howl of agony—and froze with that expression forever stamped on living crystal.
The transmutation was complete.
Where one moment before had stood a breathing creature of flesh and blood, now towered a crystal statue of eternal stone.
So Drask of the Varkonna, the most feared Warlord of the Rovers since the dark age of Shandalar the Red, came at last to his doom … a doom that would become a whispered legend for a thousand years.
They stood in a breathless silence. The face of the Goddess, far above them, brooded down on Her awful handiwork.
And the shaman screamed.
Gasping and slobbering out hysterical words, he fell groveling at the foot of the Emerald Throne. Gone now, once and for all, was the Buddha-like mask of impenetrable calm that had hidden for years the scorching furnace of ambition, greed, envy and lust that was his secret heart.
“Spare me … mercy, O Mighty One! I will repent … punish not my … O Gods of …”
Her cool, amused voice cut off his babblings like a swift knife-stroke.
“Shaman of the Fourth Circle, Abdekiel of Yoth Zembis the Planet of Sorcerers, fear not—your punishment shall be a different one.”
His face ghastly with terror, he looked up at Her and the Green Goddess smiled down at his wet, quivering face.
“You are unlike Drask in all ways,” She said softly. A faint beam of hope gleamed in the little slitted eyes of the shaman. He wet his thick lips with a darting tongue.
“Yes! Yes!” Abdekiel stammered eagerly. “He was brutal, cruel—I am not! I am timid—helpless—I obeyed his commands—I could do naught else! I—”
“You gutless worm!” Forgetting his own superstitious awe, burly, bluff Tonguth stamped forward, booted heels ringing on the shimmering pave. “Face up to your punishment like a man—cease whimpering and slithering about on your fat guts like some slimy serpent! My Master, Drask, was what you lusted to be and would have been, had you enough iron manhood in your blood to stiffen your spine! Stand up and take what comes!”