John Norman - Counter Earth01 - Tarnsman Of Gor

by Tarnsman Of Gor(Lit)

  It was as a warrior of Gor that I arose and donned the black helmet and the garments of the Caste of Assassins. I loosened my sword in its sheath, set my shield on my arm, and grasped my spear. My steps were determined when I left the tent. I strode meaningfully to the great tarn cot at the entrance to Mintar's compound and demanded my tarn.

  The tarn was brought into the open. He gleamed with health and energy. Still, the days in the tarn cot, gigantic though it was, must have been confining for that Ubar of the Skies, my tarn, and I knew he would relish flight, the chance to pit his wings once again against the fierce winds of Gor. I stroked him with affection, surprised at the fondness I felt for the sable monster.

  I tossed the tarn keeper a golden tarn disk. He had done his job well. He stammered, holding it out to me, for me to take it back. A golden taro disk was a small fortune. It would buy one of the great birds themselves, or as many as five slave girls. I climbed the mounting ladder and fastened myself in the saddle, telling the keeper that the coin was his. I suppose it was a gesture, nothing but a gesture, but, pitiful though it might be, it pleased me, and, to be honest, I did not expect to live to spend the coin. "For luck," I said. Then, with the first flush of joy I had felt in weeks, I brought the great bird soaring into the sky.

  18

  In the Central Cylinder

  As THE TARN CLIMBED, I saw the camp of Pa-Kur, the ditches, the double walls of Ar with siege engines like leeches fastened to the inner wall, and, approaching the city, Pa-Kur's long lines of chanting garrison troops, the morning sun flashing on their metal, their march measured by the beat of taro drums. I thought of Marlenus who, if he survived, might be able to see much of the same sight from the arrow ports of the Central Cylinder. I felt sorry for him, knowing that that sight, if any, would crush the heart of the fierce Ubar. His feelings toward Talena I could not conjecture. Perhaps, mercifully, he did not know what was to be her fate. I knew that I must try to rescue her. How much I would have given to have had Marlenus and his men at my side, few though they might be!

  Then, as if the pieces of a puzzle had suddenly, unexpectedly, snapped into shape, a plan sprang into my head. Marlenus had entered the city. Somehow. I had puzzled on this for days, yet now it seemed obvious. The robes of the Afflicted. The Dar-Kosis Pits beyond the city. One of them, one of those pits, must be a blind; one of them must allow an underground access to the city. Surely one of those pits had been prepared years ago by the wily Ubar as an escape route or emergency exit. I must find that pit and tunnel, somehow fight my way to his side, enlist his support.

  But first, as part of my plan, I raced my tarn directly for the walls of Ar, swiftly passing the slow procession on the plains below. In a matter of perhaps less than a minute I hovered over the summit of the interior wall near the great gate. As soldiers scattered madly beneath me, I brought the tarn down. No one ventured to repel me. All were silent. I wore the garb of the Caste of Assassins, and on the left temple of the black helmet was the golden slash of the messenger.

  Without leaving the back of the tarn, I demanded the officer in charge. He was a dour, hard-bitten man with white hair cropped short. He had gray eyes that looked as though they had seen action and hadn't flinched. He approached sullenly. He did not enjoy being summoned by an enemy of Ar, and in particular by one who wore the habiliments of the hated Caste of Assassins.

  "Pa-Kur approaches the city," I cried. "Ar is his."

  The guards were silent. At a word from the officer a hundred spears would have sought my heart.

  "You welcome him," I said scornfully, "by opening the great gate, but you have not retracted the tarn wire. Why is this? Take it down in order that his tarnsmen may enter the city unimpeded."

  "That was not in the conditions of surrender," said the officer.

  "Ar has fallen," I said. "Obey the word of Pa-Kur."

  "Very well," said the officer, gesturing to a subordinate. "Lower the wire."

  The cry, rather forlorn, to lower the wire was echoed along the length of the walls and from tower to tower. Soon the great winches were in motion and, foot by foot, the frightful netting of tarn wire began to sag. When it reached the ground, it would be sectioned and rolled. I was not, of course, concerned with facilitating the entry of Pa-Kur's tarnsmen who, as far as I knew, did not even constitute a portion of the garrison force, but I was concerned with opening the sky over the city in case 1, and others, might be able to utilize it as a road to freedom.

  I spoke once more, in haughty tones. "Pa-Kur wishes to know if the false Ubar, Marlenus, still lives."

  "Yes," said the officer.

  "Where is he?" I demanded.

  "In the Central Cylinder," growled the man.

  "A prisoner?" .,

  "As good as a prisoner."

  "See that he does not escape," I said.

  "He will not escape," said the man. "Fifty guardsmen will see to that."

  "What of the roof of the cylinder," I asked, "when the tarn wire is down?"

  "Marlenus will not escape," repeated the officer, adding in a surly tone, "unless he can fly."

  "Perhaps you will retain your humor when you writhe on an impaling spear," I said. The eyes of the man narrowed, and he regarded me with hatred, for he well knew what was to be the fate of the officers of Ar..

  "Where," I asked, "shall Pa-Kur take the daughter of the false Ubar to be executed?"

  The officer pointed to a distant cylinder. "The Cylinder of Justice," he said. "The execution will take place as soon as the girl can be presented." The cylinder was white, a color Goreans often associate with impartiality. More significantly, it indicated that.the justice dispensed therein was the justice of Initiates.

  There are two systems of courts on Gor-those of the City, under the jurisdiction of an Administrator or Ubar, and those of the Initiates, under the jurisdiction of the High Initiate of the given city; the division corresponds roughly to that between civil and what, for lack of a better word, might be called ecclesiastical courts. The areas of jurisdiction of these two types of courts are not well defined; the Initiates claim ultimate jurisdiction in all matters, in virtue of their supposed relation to the Priest-Kings, but this claim is challenged by civil jurists. There would, of course, in these days be no challenging the justice of the Initiates. I noted with repulsion that on the roof of the Cylinder of Justice there shimmered a public impaling spear of polished silver, some fifty feet high, gleaming, looking like a needle in the distance.

  I took the taro into the air again. I had managed to bring down the tarn wire of Ar; I had learned that Marlenus still lived and held a portion of the Central Cylinder, and I had found out when and where the execution of Talena was supposed to take place.

  I streaked from the walls of Ar, noting with dismay that the procession of Pa-Kur was only a short distance from the great gate. I could see the tharlarion on which he rode, the figure of the Assassin, and the slip of a girl, in her white robe, who, beside the animal, walked like a Ubara, though barefoot and chained to its saddle. I wondered if Pa-Kur might be curious to know who was the rider of that solitary sable tarn which flashed above his head.

  In what seemed like an hour, but must have been no more than three or four minutes, I was behind the camp of Pa-Kur and searching for the dreaded Dar-Kosis Pits, those prisons in which the Afflicted may freely incarcerate themselves and be fed, but from which they are not allowed to depart. There were several, easily visible from above because of their broad, circular form, much like a great well sunk in the earth. When I came to one, I would bring the tare lower. When I had completed my search, I had found only one pit deserted. The others were dotted with what appeared, from the height, to be yellow lice-the figures of the Afflicted. Boldly, giving no thought to the possible danger of lingering infection, I dropped the tarn into the deserted pit.

  The giant landed on the rock floor of the circular pit, and I looked upward, my glance climbing the sheer, artificially smoothed sides of the pit, which stretched perhaps a th
ousand feet above me on all sides. In spite of the breadth of the pit, perhaps two hundred feet, it was cold at the bottom, and as I looked up, I was startled to note that, in the blue sky, I could see the dim pinpricks of light which, after dark, would become the blazing stars above Gor. In the center of the pit a crude cistern had been carved from the living rock and was half filled with cold but foul water. As nearly as I could determine, there was no way in and out of the pit except on tarn back. I did know that sometimes the pathetic inmates of Dar-Kosis Pits, repenting their decision to be incarcerated, had managed to cut footholds in the walls and escape, but the labor involved-a matter of years-the death penalty for being discovered, and the very risk of the climb made such attempts rare. If there was some secret way in and out of this particular pit, assuming it was the one prepared by Marlenus, I did not see what it was and had no time to conduct a thorough investigation.

  Looking about, I saw several of the caves dug into the walls of the pit, which, at least in most pits, house the inmates. In desperate, frustrated haste, I examined several of them; some were shallow, little more than scooped out depressions in the wall, but others were more extensive, containing two or three chambers connected by passageways. Some contained worn sleeping mats of cold, moldy straw, some contained a few rusted metal utensils, such as kettles and pails, but most were completely empty, revealing no signs of life or use at all.

  After I emerged from one of these caves, I was surprised to see my tarn across the pit, his head tilted to one side, as if puzzled. He then reached his beak out to an apparently blank wall and withdrew it, repeating this three or four times, and then began to walk back and forth, snapping his wings impatiently.

  I raced across the pit. I began to examine the wall with fierce closeness. I scrutinized every inch and ran my hands carefully over every portion of its smooth surface. Nothing was revealed to my eyes or to my touch, but there was the almost imperceptible odor of tarn spoor.

  For several minutes I examined the blank wall, sure that it held the secret of Marlenus's entrance into the city. Then, in frustration, I backed slowly away, hoping to see some lever or perhaps some suspicious crevice higher in the escarpment, something that might play its role in opening the passage I was sure lay hidden somewhere behind that seemingly solid mass of stone. Yet no lever, handle, or device of any kind revealed itself.

  I widened my search, wandering about the walls, but they seemed sheer, impenetrable. There seemed to be no place in which a lever or handle might be concealed. Then, with a shout of anger at my stupidity, I ran to the shallow cistern in the center of the pit and fell on my stomach before the chill, foul water. I thrust my hand into the slimy water, desperately examining the bottom.

  My hand clutched a valve, and I turned it fiercely as far as it would go. At the same time from the escarpment came a smooth, rolling sound as a great weight was effortlessly balanced and lifted by hydraulic means. To my amazement, I saw that an immense opening had appeared in the wall. An enormous slab, perhaps fifty, feet square, had slid upward and backward, revealing a great, dim, squarish tunnel beyond, a tunnel large enough for a flying tarn. I seized the tam reins and drew the beast into the opening. Inside the door I saw another valve, corresponding to the one hidden under the water of the cistern. Turning it, I closed the great gate behind` me, thinking it -wise to protect the secret of the tunnel as long as possible.

  Inside, the tunnel, though dim, was not altogether dark, being lit by domelike, wire-protected energy bulbs,., spaced in pairs every hundred yards or so. These bulbs, invented more than a century ago by the Caste of Builders, produce a clear, soft light for years without replacement. I mounted the tarn, who was visibly uneasy in this strange environment. Without much success, by hand and voice, I tried to soothe the beast's apprehensions. Perhaps I spoke as much for my. own benefit as his. The first time I hauled on the one-strap, the bird would not move; the second time he lifted into flight, almost immediately scraping the ceiling of the tunnel with his wings, protesting shrilly. My helmet protected me as my head was roughly dragged against the granite of the ceiling. Then, to my pleasure, instead of alighting, the tam dropped a few feet down from the ceiling and began to streak through the tunnel, the energy bulbs flashing past me to form in my wake a gleaming chain of light.

  The end of the tunnel widened into a vast chamber, lit by hundreds of energy bulbs. In this chamber, though empty of human beings, was a monstrous tam cot, in which some twenty gigantic, half-starved taros huddled separately on the tarn perches. As soon as they saw us, they lifted their heads, as if out of their shoulders, and regarded us with fierce attention. The floor of the tam cot was littered with the bones of perhaps two dozen tarns. I reasoned that the taros must be those of the men of Marlenus, left in the tarn cot when he entered the city. He had been cut off. Left without care for weeks, the tares had had nothing to feed upon but one another. They were wild now, crazed by hunger into uncontrollable predators.

  Perhaps I could use them.

  Somehow I must liberate Marlenus. I knew that when I entered the palace my presence would be inexplicable to the guardsmen and that I would not long be able to pass myself off as a herald of Pa-Kur, certainly not when it became clear that it was my intention to depart with Marlenus. Therefore, impossible though it might seem, I must devise some plan to scatter or overcome his besiegers. As I pondered, the fragments of a plan took form in my mind. Surely I was now beneath the Central Cylinder, and the embattled Marlenus and his men were somewhere above me, sealed off by the guardsmen of Ar. At the top of a broad series of stairs I saw the door that must lead to the Central Cylinder and noted with satisfaction that its dimensions were large enough to permit the passage of a tarn. Fortunately, almost at the foot of the stairs lay one of the gates of the taro cot.

  I took my taro-goad and dismounted. I climbed the stairs that led to the portal into the cylinder, turned the valve, and as soon as the portal began to move, raced down to the tarn cot and swung open that barred gate which lay nearest the foot of the stairs. I stood back, partly shielding myself with the gate. In less than a few seconds the first of the scraggy tarns had lit on the floor of the cot and poked his ugly head through the door. His eyes blazed as he saw me. To him, I was food, something to be killed and eaten. He stalked toward me, around the gate. I struck at him with the taro-goad, but the instrument seemed to have no effect. The darting beak lunged at me again and again; the great claws grasped. The taro-goad was tom from my hand.

  In that instant a great black shape hurtled into the fray, and the tarn had met his match. Ripping savagely with his steel-shod talons, slashing with his scimitar like beak, my sable war tam in a matter of seconds left the attacking tam a shuddering heap of feathers. With one of the great steel-shod talons on the body of his fallen foe, my tarn emitted the challenge scream of his kind. The other tarns, poking out of the tarn cot, seemed to hesitate and then to notice the open door into the cylinder.

  At that moment, to his own misfortune, a passing guardsman of Ar discovered the opened door that had mysteriously appeared in the wall of the first floor of the Central Cylinder. He stood framed for a moment in the doorway and shouted, a shout half of discovery, half of mortal fear. One of the starved tarns, with a leap and stroke of his wings, lunged upward, catching the man in his beak. The man screamed horribly. Another taro reached the portal and tried to pull the body from the beak of its possessor.

  There was another shout from within, and several more guardsmen rushed to the opening. Immediately the hunger-wild tarns surged upward, eager for flesh. The tarns, all of them, entered the cylinder, the palace of Marlenus. In the great hall I could hear the fearful noise of unnatural carnage, the screams of the men, the screams of the tarns, the hiss of arrows. the wild blows of wings and talons. I heard someone shout, a weird, terrified cry, "Taros!" An alarm bar, a hollow metal tube struck by hammers, began to ring in frenzy.

  In two or three minutes I led my own tam up the stairs and through the opening. I was sick at
the sight that confronted me. Some fifteen tarns were feeding on the remains of a dozen or so guardsmen, detaching and devouring limbs. Several tams were dead; some were flopping about awkwardly on the marble floor, pierced by arrows. There were no living guardsmen in sight. Those who had survived had fled from the room, per haps up the long, wide, circling stairwell that climbed the inside of the cylinder.

  Leaving my tarn below, I climbed the stairs, my sword drawn. When I reached that portion of the stairwell adjoining the upper floors, devoted to the private use of the Ubar, I saw some twenty or thirty guardsmen, behind them a barricade of tile and taro wire which they had erected. It was not simply that my sword was drawn. To them, my presence was unauthorized, and my Assassin's garb, far from being a safe-conduct, was an incitement to attack. Some of the guardsmen had undoubtedly fought below with the tarns. They were drenched with sweat; their clothing was torn; their weapons, drawn, were red with blood. They would associate me with the tarn attack. Without waiting to call for my identity or engage in any protocol whatever, they raced toward me.