The Marward's garments stirred to a vagrant draft, shifting in a silver ripple across his massive chest. But a chest of human flesh no longer. The Orion jewels had gone, dissolved into air like dreams, and before the silent Marward lay the empty settings, flaunting their remaining simpler jewels in barren poverty, but the loss no longer troubled Gion. Beneath his simple robe his flesh shone with a thousand lustrous lights, his muscles ridged with Phidian carving in purest emerald green. His deep-sunk eyes were topaz gold, shot through with jetting bits of white, and his startled lips were purple as fire-shot jade. His massive head was translucent through and through, a vein-sprayed sculpture in Venusian glass where truant silver bubbles froze in silent thunder as they burst. His hands were coral white, the bones within curling to and fro like vagrant bits of scarlet ruby, all caught and held forever in one eternal crash of living color. The Jewels of Orion had but changed their form, burst from the ancient golden settings to plunge and explode and freeze anew in living human flesh. Gion, Marward of Jupiter, had become himself a jewel. Slowly Kurland sheathed his blaster. "Our work is done, Irene. And by the Marward himself." She looked up at him, pale-faced, dark-eyed, watchful. "I could have told him as much." Her eyes fell to the table, to the four boxes remaining unopened, then rose to his. "Must I tell you?" He slowly picked up the boxes, weighing their priceless, deadly contents. "My crew is caged back there in those side corridors, near those ships. We'll take them and go. There's nothing to hold us ... now." His hand touched her shoulder. "You will come with us?" She smiled, and gestured toward the boxes that held the Jewels of Orion. There was a pause, and his face slowly paled. But his eyes never left her. He nodded slowly, then extended the boxes to her. "A Marward couldn't hold them, and I've been an outlaw too long." But her hands gently repulsed his offer. There was color again in her damp cheeks, a rushing glowing tide of color that warmed her cold body like wine. "We'll deliver them to the authorities. But, until then--hold them for me, Kurland." His eyes glittered as he laid the leaden boxes suddenly on the table and his hands were rough upon her shoulders. "So you make an honest pirate out of me, Irene? You give me name and ship again, you trust me as you would trust any decent sailorman? Then take the consequences!" And his lips were hard and fierce on hers, his arms crushed tight about her ragged body. She stiffened, then slowly relaxed, her eyes laughing into his. "Did I pardon you for less?" End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Death From Orion, by W. J. Matthews