ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York 36, N.Y. CAPTIVES OF THE FLAME Copyright ©, 1963, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved Printed in U.S.A. This is for Marilyn, of course. SAMUEL R. DELANY considers Captives of the Flame to be the first of a trilogy dealing with the same epoch and characters. It is, however, his second published novel, his first being The Jewels of Aptor , Ace Book F-173, which has received considerable acclaim. A young man, resident in New York City, Delany

The green of beetles' wings ... the red of polished carbuncle ... a web of silver fire. Lightning tore his eyes apart, struck deep inside his body; and he felt his bones split. Before it became pain, it was gone. And he was falling through blue smoke. The smoke was inside him, cool as blown ice. It was getting darker. He had heard something before, a ... voice: the Lord of the Flames .... Then: Jon Koshar shook his head, staggered forward, and went down on his knees in white sand. He blinked. He

Silent as a sleeping serpent for sixty years, it spanned from the heart of Telphar to the royal palace of Toromon. From the ashes of the dead city to the island capital, it connected what once had been the two major cities, the only cities of Toromon. Today there was only one. In Telphar, it soared above ashes and fallen roadways into the night. Miles on, the edge of darkness paled before the morning and in the faint shadow of the transit ribbon, at the edge of a field of lava, among the whisper

It had been silent for sixty years. Then, above the receiving stage in the laboratory tower of the royal place of Toromon, the great transparent crystal sphere glowed. On the stage a blue haze shimmered. Red flame shot through the mist, a net of scarlet, contracting, pulsing, outlining the recognizable patterning of veins and arteries. Among the running fires, the shadow of bones formed a human skeleton in the blue, till suddenly the shape was laced with sudden silver, the net of nerves that hel

The Devil's Pot overturned its foul jelly at the city's edge. Thirteen alleys lined with old stone houses was its nucleus; many of them were ruined, built over, and ruined again. These were the oldest structures in Toron. Thick with humanity and garbage, it reached from the waterfront to the border of the hive houses in which lived the clerks and professionals of Toron. Clapboard alternated with hastily constructed sheet-metal buildings with no room between. The metal rusted; the clapboard sagge

She made a note on her pad, put down her slide rule, and picked up a pearl snap with which she fastened together the shoulder panels of her white dress. The maid said, "Ma'am, shall I do your hair now?" "One second," Clea said. She turned to page 328 of her integral tables, checked the increment of sub-cosine A plus B over the n th root of A to the n th plus B to the n th, and transferred it to her notebook. "Ma'am?" asked the maid. She was a thin woman, about thirty. The little finger of her le

A few hours earlier, Geryn gave Tel a kharba fruit. The boy took the bright-speckled melon around the inn, looking for Alter. Unable to find her, he wandered onto the street and up the block. Once a cat with a struggling gray shape in its teeth hurtled across his path. Later he saw an overturned garbage can with a filigree of fish bones ornamenting the parti-colored heap. Over the house roofs across the street, the taller buildings and towers of Toron paled to blue, with sudden yellow rectangles

The Duchess of Petra said, "Now, your first direct assignment will be ..." Then, the sudden green of beetles' wings; the red of polished carbuncle; a web of silver fire; lightning and blue smoke. Columns of jade caught red light through the great crack in the roof. The light across the floor was red. Jon felt that there were others with him, but he could not be sure. Before him, on a stone platform, three marble crescents were filled with pulsating shadows. Jon Koshar looked at them, and then aw

The news service of Toromon in the city of Toron was a public address system that flooded the downtown area, and a special printed sheet that was circulated among the upper families of the city. On the mainland it was a fairly accurate brigade of men and women who transported news orally from settlement to settlement. All announced simultaneously that morning: Crown Prince Kidnaped King Declares War! In the military ministry, directives were issued in duplicate and redelivered in triplicate. At

There was a roaring in the air. Let cried out and ran forward. Then shadow. Then water. His feet were slipping on the deck as the rail swung by. Then thunder. Then screaming. Something was breaking in half. Jon and Arkor got him out. They had to jump overboard with the unconscious Prince, swim, climb, and carry. There were sirens at the dock when they laid him on the dried leaves of the forest clearing. "We'll leave him here," Arkor said. "Here? Are you sure?" Jon asked. "They will come for him.

Clea Koshar had been installed in her government office for three days. The notebook in which she had been doing her own work in inverse sub-trigonometric functions had been put away in her desk for exactly fifty-four seconds when she made the first discovery that gave her a permanent place in the history of Toromon's wars as its first military hero. Suddenly she pounded her fist on the computer keys, flung her pencil across the room, muttered, "What the hell is this!" and dialed the military mi

During the next couple of hours, two people died, miles apart. "Don't be silly," Rara was saying in the inn at the Devil's Pot. "I'm a perfectly good nurse. Do you want to see my license?" The white-haired old man sat very straight in his chair by the window. Blue seeped like liquid across the glass. "Why did I do it?" he said. "It was wrong. I—I love my country." Rara pulled the blanket from the back of the chair and tucked it around the stiff, trembling shoulders. "What are you talking about?"

The green of beetles' wings ... the red of polished carbuncle ... a web of silver fire, and through the drifting blue smoke Jon hurled across the sky. Then blackness, intense and cold. The horizon was tiny, jagged, maybe ten feet away. He reached a metal out and crawled expertly (not clumsily. Expertly!) across a crevice, but slowly, very slowly. The sky was sharp with stars, though the sun was dim to his light-sensitive rind. Like a sliding cyst, he edged over the chunk of rock that spun somewh

In the laboratory tower of Toron, the transparent bubble above the receiving stage brightened. In shimmering haze on the platform, the transparent figures solidified. Then Alter and Tel slipped beneath the rail on the stage and dropped down to the floor (Alter still wore the hospital robe and the cast on her left arm) while Arkor, Jon, and Petra used the metal stairway to descend. A battery of relays snapped somewhere and the scarlet heads of forty-nine switches by the window snapped to off. The