Wheel of Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

strip of what was either strangely woven or embroidered fabric. This was indeed a museum!
    Her host might have had the ability to read her awed thought, for he flung out one hand in an exaggerated flourish to indicate the closest of those niches. It held a slender figure of grotesque fashioning in the form of a woman whose lower limbs melted into what was clearly the rough barked column of a tree. Her upflung arms were half branch, small leaves depending from the tips of her fingers, while her long hair swirled above her head to form more strings of the same cleverlyformed leaves.
    The whole was in soft color, the leaves green with a faint sheen of gold at their edging, while the body, in its most human part, was wholly of that precious metal yet with a ruddiness added. The tiny eyes in the female’s oval face were open, and some trick of the niche light caught a glint there, gem-hard in brilliancy—while the features of her near-human countenance held an expression mingling wild ecstacy with age-old sadness.
    Gwennan stared, caught by all the imagination which she had so suppressed through the years from childhood. To her—though it was undoubtedly done by some trick of the clever lighting—there was a suggestion that those leaves trembled, that there was a faint rippling of the hair. It was as if she looked through a window or peephole into another world where abode forms of life far removed from all which she knew, yet in its way life which was permanent and intelligent.
    “Ah, so you like Myrrah?” That question broke the spell the figure had laid on her. Gwennan blinked, flushed. She had allowed her naivete to show—which was irritating and she disliked him the more for reading her so quickly, for his subtle mockery at her open wonder. There was something in him which she continued to sense as vaguely wrong, slanted, which, in a way she did not understand, threatened her. But she was not able yet to define her emotions. Rather she shied from this unusual probing which part of her mind appeared to want to do.
    “Myrrah?” She made a question of that name.

    “Fair daughter of trees—what men once called a nymph.” Tor Lyle turned his attention apparently wholly to the figurine, for which Gwennan was glad. “A fine piece of work, is it not? We do not even know the artist. However, viewing it one can believe those old legends that once even trees possessed souls (if one might term them that) and could manifest another identity at will. You have viewed Myrrah—now come and tell me what you think of Nikon. They may not have been modeled by the same artist—but there is a kind of likeness in technique—yes, there is a decided likeness.”
    She followed him to the next niche. There was a second figure, not this time half rooted in a massive trunk of wood. Instead its lower limbs were well apart, bisected in an entirely human fashion. Only where the feet might have been there were elongated appendages—toeless—resembling broad flippers. The skin was silver in hue and the concealed light skillfully revealed tiny overlapping scale which clothed it. It leaned a little forward, its arms outstretched in a curve as if to embrace something. Those slender arms ended in paws from which extended huge claws, cruelly displayed as if preparing to rend what the creature strove so to reach. To add to the impression of menace, the head was also hunched between the wide shoulders and the whole impression was one of avid desire to attack.
    The head was a troubling mingling of caricature of human and simian. There was no hair, but rather a ragged crest of skin running from the mid point of the low forehead to the nape of the neck, standing erect. Those eyes were bulbous,the nose flat, with only a hole to mark its position. While the slightly gaping mouth, above a nearly chinless jaw, was open to show white points of teeth which gathered and reflected the light with unwholesome clarity. It was monstrous, a nightmare thing, alien