Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams by C. L. Moore

out her hands. And as he took them he felt once more the hideous slimy waves course through him, and plunged again into the heaving hell. And as before the clean darkness flashed over them in a breath, and then she dropped his hands and they were standing in the archway looking into the velvet-hung room they had left — it seemed eons ago.
    He watched as waves of blinding weakness flooded over her from that supreme effort. Death was visible in her face as she turned to him at last.
    “Come — oh, come quickly,” she whispered, and staggered forward.
    At her heels he followed, across the room, past the great iron gateway, down the hall to the foot of the silver stairs. And here his heart sank, for he felt sure she could never climb the long spiral distances to the top. But she set her foot on the step and went upward resolutely, and as he followed he heard her murmuring to herself,
    “Wait — oh, wait — let me reach the end — let me undo this much — and then — no, no! Please Shar, not the black slime again. . . . Earthman, Earthman!” 
    She paused on the stair and turned to face him, and her haggard face was frantic with desperation and despair.
    “Earthman, promise — do not let me die like this! When we reach the end, ray me! Burn me clean, or shall I go down for eternity into the black sinks from which I dragged you free. Oh, promise!”
    “I will,” Smith's voice said quietly. “I will.”

    And they went on. Endlessly the stairs spiraled upward and endlessly they climbed. Smith's legs began to ache intolerably, and his heart was pounding like a wild thing, but Vaudir seemed not to notice weariness. She climbed steadily and no more unsurely than she had come along the halls. And after eternities they reached the top.
    And there the girl fell. She dropped like a dead woman at the head of the silver spiral. Smith thought for a sick instant that he had failed her and let her die uncleansed, but in a rnoment or two she stirred and lifted her head and very slowly dragged herself to her feet.
    “I will go on — I will, I will,” she whispered to herself. “ — come this far — must finish—” and she reeled off down the lovely, rosily-lit hallway paneled in pearl.
    He could see how perilously near she was to her strength's end, and he marveled at the tenacity with which she clung to life though it ebbed away with every breath and the pulse of darkness flowed in after it. So with bulldog stubbornness she made her wavering way past door after door of carven shell, under rosy lights that flushed her face with a ghastly mockery of health, until they reached the silver gateway at the end. The lock had been removed from it by now, and the bar drawn.
    She tugged open the gate and stumbled through.
    And the nightmare journey went on. It must be very near morning, Smith thought, for the halls were deserted, but did he not sense a breath of danger in the still air?
    The girl's gasping voice answered that half-formed query as if, like the Alendar, she held the secret of reading men's minds.
    “The — Guardians — still rove the halls, and unleashed now — so keep your ray-gun ready, Earthman. . . .”
    After that he kept his eyes alert as they retraced, stumbling and slow, the steps he had taken on his way in. And once he heard distinctly the soft slither of — something — scraping over the marble pavement, and twice he smelt with shocking suddenness in this scented air a whiff of salt, and his mind flashed back to a rolling black sea. . . .
    But nothing molested them.

    Step by faltering step the hallways fell behind them, and he began to recognize landmarks, and the girl's footsteps staggered and hesitated and went on gallantly, incredibly, beating back oblivion, fighting the dark surges rolling over her, clinging with tenacious fingers to the tiny spark of life that drove her on.
    And at long last, after what seemed hours of desperate effort, they reached the blue-lit hallway at whose end the outer