Clark's gun blazed the last of its clip, and the men stabbing at Quell fell. Link Wilson spurred in, grabbed the Yankee skipper's horse, helped haul the bony seaman up onto it. Then before the guards they had broken through could reach them again, their horses were bolting out through the opened gates. Wild from the battle and unaccustomed gunfire, they plunged for freedom, Clark's and Lurain's steeds jamming momentarily in the narrow opening.
Then they were all out in the open moonlight of the plain, the dark walls and confusion and raging shouts of K'Lamm behind them. Plunging, racing, snorting, the horses galloped wildly over the moonlit sea of grass and brush. The wild uproar of the Red city receded swiftly.
"Which way to Dordona?" cried Clark to Lurain, shouting to her over the rush of wind.
"We follow the way now," she cried. "Due east from here it lies—we go to the river, and along it to my city."
Now the horses were settling to a
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steady, rushing lope as their frenzy of panic quieted a little. Clark turned in the saddle, but there was no sign of pursuit as yet from K'Lamm.
But none of them had escaped unscathed. Mike Shinn had a bleeding cut on his forehead; Blacky Cain had one sleeve slashed to ribbons; the rest all had small cut or stab wounds. Only Ephraim Quell, riding grimly forward with jacket buttoned tightly against the wind, appeared to have escaped without injury.
Clark leaned toward the Dordonan girl riding close beside him. Lorain had a cut across one bare knee, but it was not serious. As they galloped, she looked tautly back to where K'Lamm had dropped from sight in the moonlight.
"They will try to follow but they cannot trail us by night, and they dare not go too close to Dordona in small parties," she said. Then she laughed. "I would like to see Thargo's face now."
Ahead in the dim moonlight there soon loomed vaguely a long, low line of dark trees. It marked the river, and they reached it in a quarter-hour. The dull roar of the stream was loud, as it raced with the swiftness of a mountain-flume toward Dordona.
As they rode along it, heading east, the first gray streak of dawn showed ahead. Clark's hopes were soaring. Every beat of the hoofs brought them nearer to Dordona, where lay the pit that was entrance to the Lake of Life. He'd yet succeed in reaching it—he had the girl's word now that he could descend to it.
Ephraim quell suddenly toppled stiffly from his horse. They reined in hastily and Clark ran to the Yankee's side. Quell's bony face was a ghastly, stiff mask, his eyes closed. From under his coat welled a dark stain, and when Clark ripped the coat open, he saw that
beneath it had been concealed two deep sword-wounds.
"Good God! Quell was badly wounded when he kept the gate from closing, but he said nothing to us!" Clark exclaimed.
Ephraim Quell's glazed eyes flickered at Clark's drawn, tense countenance. A smile glimmered in them.
"I'm—'bout ready to cast anchor," Quell muttered. "Felt the life running out of me, as I rode "
"Quell; you're not dying!" Clark said desperately. "We'll get you to Dordona, and pull you through."
"No, I'm done for," whispered the seaman. "And—I don't mind. Ever since my ship burned and they took my certificate, I—haven't cared much about living."
His glazed eyes fixed on the eastern sky, pale with dawn. A cool breeze had begun to blow from there, stirring the grass. The Yankee skipper's lips moved, almost inaudibly.
"Fair skies and a good wind — today " he whispered. Then his head
lolled laxly, his eyes dull, dead.
Clark let him down and got to his feet. There was a hard lump in his throat but he made his voice harsh.
"Mike—Blacky—keep a watch to the south and west. Link and Morrow and I will bury him."
In the paling dawn, they scooped a grave under a tree beside the roaring river, using a little camp-spade from one of the packs. White mists of morning made everything unreal as they put Ephraim Quell's stiff body into the shallow grave, and covered it.
"Mount! Forward!" Clark ordered.
Again they galloped, hoofs thudding above the river roar, bearing them on through swirling white mists.
"I'm kind of glad," said Link Wilson's drawling voice finally, "that we buried him where he can hear water."
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"Yeah," muttered Mike Shinn. "Quell was a good guy. He was a great guy."
An hour later, Lurain suddenly reined in her horse and pointed eagerly ahead.
"There is Dordona!"
Five miles ahead rose the eastern wall of the great crater, the mighty, looming barrier of the mountains. Close under the frowning cliffs brooded ancient, crumbling Dordona. Black, silent, brooding like a withered ancient who has long ago fallen from greatness, it lay in the chill white mists, strange contrast to the city from which they had come.
Behind the black battlements of an encircling wall whose top had crumbled at places, rose a mass of antique towers and roofs of dull black stone, weathered by the winds and rains of ages. Under a water-gate in the dilapidated wall ran the roaring, mill-race river they had followed. It ran straight toward a building at the center of the city, a huge black dome that towered two hundred feet into the air.
The gates in the black wall were pushed open as they approached. Soldiers in black armor waved their swords in the air and yelled joyful greetings to Lurain, riding now at the head of the little troop. And as they rode on into the city, from somber, crumbling buildings poured men and women with shouts of gladness.
"Lurain! The princess Lurain has returned!" they shouted.
Clark Stannard, looking about keenly, saw that indeed Dordona had long passed the zenith of its glory. Many of the black stone buildings were untenanted, falling to ruins. Green grass grew between the blocks of black paving in the streets.
And the people pouring forth were not nearly so numerous as the Reds, he saw. Clark sensed despair under their momentary joy, read hopelessness on their pale faces, the hopelessness of great fear.
"Say, we'll be the white-haired boys in
this joint for bringing back the girl," Mike Shinn said happily.
"There aren't enough men here to defend this city properly," Lieutenant Morrow told Clark keenly. "The place is too big now for its population, and the wall hasn't been kept up."
Clark nodded grimly. "From what Thargo said, the population of this place has been steadily dwindling for a long time."
"We go to the Temple of the Shaft," Lurain called to Clark. "My father, the lord Kimor, will be there."
They rode after her toward the huge, black-domed temple that brooded at the center of the city. It loomed massively in front of them, incomparably the largest and most ancient building they had seen in this land. For it was old, the stone paving in front of it worn deep by ages of tramping feet, its slot-windows crumbling at the edges.
Guards took their horses, and swung open the high bronze doors of the temple. Lurain led the way inside, her slim, boyish figure striding with her sheathed sword rattling on the stone floor. Clark and his men, following her inside, paused for a moment, thunderstruck.
The interior of the temple was one colossal room, dim and dusky and vast, its only illumination shafts of sunlight from the slot-like windows. And it was throbbing and quivering to a thunder of bellowing sound that was deafening, an unbroken, tremendous roar of waters.
The racing river from outside ran right into the temple, through a gap in one wall. The waters rushed with blinding speed across the floor of the vast room, in a deep, wide canal, toward a round, black opening a hundred feet across that yawned at the center of the floor. Into this gaping abyss, the river tumbled with a reverberating thunder.
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Clark and his men moved nearer the pit, stood on the very edge of the abyss. He peered down into an impenetrable darkness that seemed to go down to the bowels of the earth. He could make out that the vertical sides of the pit were of rough rock, in which had been carved the steps of a narro
w, spiraling stair. The head of this stair was closed by a barred gate guarded by Black warriors. And the raging cataract of waters, leaping out over the edge of the pit, tumbled down its center in a tremendous waterfall, dropping into the dark.
"Good God! this must be the way down to the cavern far below—to the Lake of Life!" exclaimed Clark, stupefi-edly.
"Say, I don't hanker to go down there," said Mike Shinn, awed. "It looks to me like the doorway down to purgatory."
Lurain was coming around the edge of the pit now, bringing with her a half-dozen Dordonan men in black armor.
"My father, Stannar!" she said.
Clark turned to confront Kimor, the ruler of Dordona.
Kimor was sixty years old, at least, a tall, arrow-straight, superbly muscled man with white hair and pointed white beard, and fierce, shaggy white eyebrows over keen, watchful blue eyes.
"Strangers, you are welcome!" he told Clark. "My daughter has told me how you helped her escape K'Lamm and bring us warning of the attack which Thargo plans for three days hence. We expected no attack for weeks—there is hardly time to prepare.
"We of Dordona will be grateful for your help in the coming battle." Kimor continued. "Lurain informs me you are from outside the mountains, and bear weapons of great and strange power. You can aid us much, and any reward we can give you will be yours."
"Why, we ask but one reward," Clark said, looking puzzledly at Lurain. "It is what I told your daughter—that we be allowed to go down that stair in the pit to the Lake of Life, and bring back a flask of its waters. For that reward, we have joined you."
Kimor's fierce face turned dead-white as he heard. His eyes blazed fire of outraged, fanatical fury, and he ripped out his sword from its sheath. And from the Dordonans behind him came wrathful, raging cries as they too drew their weapons, their faces contorted.
"You ask that?" thundered Kimor to Clark. "You ask leave from us to commit the supreme sacrilege that no man may commit and live? Your very request is a sacrilege to this Temple of the Shaft! Nobles of Dordona, kill these men for their blasphemy!"
10. Down the Stair
Blacky Cain's gun leaped into his hands, and the others followed his example swiftly as the Dordonan warriors leaped forward with upraised swords, wild wrath on their faces.
"Don't shoot!" Clark yelled tensely.
For Lurain had sprung in front of the charging nobles and her fanatical father, halting them with an urgent gesture.
"Wait!" she cried. "These are strangers from outside our land—they do not know that it is blasphemy they speak. They will not ask for such a thing when they understand that it is a sacrilege."
"So this," Clark grated to the girl, "is how you keep the bargain you made with me!"
"I do not understand you, stranger," she said coldly, and turned back to Kimor. "You will forgive their ignorance, father?"
"They should be slain for such blasphemy," said Kimor fiercely. But slowly,
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reluctantly, he sheathed his sword, and said, "They are forgiven because they are strangers who know not the law. But let them repeat their blasphemy, let them even but glance at the sacred shaft, and it shall mean their deaths."
"Looks like the girl's double-crossed us," rasped Blacky Cain. "Shall we try to crash our way down into that pit? It looks like suicide to me to go down that damned stair, but we'll do it if you say."
"Put away your guns," Clark said quickly to the gangster and the others. "There are too many of them here for us, and the whole city would come running. Later on, we may be able to enter the pit."
Then he turned back to Kimor and Lu-rain. The girl showed no sign of emotion as she met his bitterly accusing gaze.
"We withdraw our request, since it is against your law," Clark told the fierce old Dordonan ruler.
"Well that you do," said Kimor grimly, "for I tell you no man for ages has been permitted to enter the sacred shaft."
He continued, "You shall be given a dwelling for your use, and food and wine. If you wish to help us against the Reds, your help is welcome. But whether you help or not, you cannot go near this pit. You are forbidden from now on to enter this temple, under pain of death."
"We understand," Clark said tightly. His gaze again sought Lurain's face, charged with his bitter scorn.
Two of the black-armored warriors, at Kimor's command, led Clark and his men out of the temple. They conducted them along the crumbling streets, whose occupants watched the strangers curiously.
Clark's thoughts were bitter. Lurain had tricked him neatly—had had no intention of fulfilling the promise she had made him. They were here in Dordona, but as far from the shining lake as ever.
The two Dordonan guides left them
outside a weathered, one-story building of black stone, with a promise that food and drink would be brought them. The interior of the building, they found when they entered, was one of dark, gloomy rooms, its furniture and floor covered with dust, everything here exuding antiquity.
"Just as lief bed down in a mausoleum!" grunted Mike Shinn in disgust as he tossed his pack into a corner and sat down.
"What," Lieutenant Morrow asked Clark keenly, "are we going to do now?"
"We're going to get into that pit, somehow, by force or stealth," Clark declared. "We'll wait until tonight, steal into the temple, and overpower the guards at the head of the stair. Then we can get down the shaft, and I think they're too superstitious to pursue us."
"But they'll be waitin' for us when we come back up," reminded Link Wilson. "That is, if we do come back up."
"It will be up to us then to fight our way through them," Clark said grimly. He added bitterly, "Lurain broke her bargain with us; so our promise to help them in the coming war no longer holds. If we get back up with the flask of water from the lake, we'll get out of Dordona as soon as we can."
The day passed slowly. Clark Stan-nard and his men went out into the streets of the crumbling black city for a time. Apparently they sauntered idly, but in reality were mapping a route to the temple, one that they could follow with less chance of being observed. He noticed the Dordonan people now shunned them, looking at them in half-veiled hate. News of their blasphemy had apparently spread in the city.
Night fell, and Clark watched the moon rise over the ancient city. Then after some hours had passed, he led the
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others into the dark back rooms of their dwelling, intending to slip out that way. But as he entered the darkness there, he glimpsed a moving figure in the blackness. Instantly he leaped at the other, grasped him by the throat.
"It's a spy!" he grated. "If they've found out what we're planning, we're sunk." And he rasped in the language of Dordona to his prisoner, "One shout and you die."
"Release me — I will not shout," gasped a voice.
"Lurain!" he exclaimed. "What in the world "
He dragged the girl over to one of the windows, where the moonlight illuminated her white, strange face and distended eyes.
"What are you doing, spying on us?" Clark demanded, his face hardening as he remembered.
"No, I came to fulfill the promise I made you, to lead you down to the holy lake!" she gasped. Her words poured forth in a torrent as Clark stood in stunned surprize. "Stannar, why did you tell my father Kimor you wished to descend to the lake? That was madness!"
"But you had promised me that you would see that I got down the shaft," Clark said bewilderedly.
"You do not understand," Lurain told him. "I made that promise, yes—but what I meant was that I would secretly take you down the shaft; for if my father knew of it he would slay us instantly for the sacrilege—yes, even me, his daughter. I thought you understood that and would be silent about the lake until I could fulfill my promise."
"Lord,* I've misjudged you, Lurain," Clark told her impulsively. "Come to think of it, it was rather asinine of me to blurt out my whole business without making sure how things stood. But I hadn't
had time to think, I guess, in the rush of our escape."
"And I had to pretend ignorance when you reproached me," she said. "But I have come now, Stannar. I shall fulfill my promise and take you down to the cavern of the Lake of Life. The sin will be on my head, not on my father and people. And my sin will be expiated, for surely the Guardians will slay us down there for our sacrilege."
She was trembling violently, though her voice was steady. Clark Stannard stared at her, frowning.
"You believe that?—believe we're both going to die down there, Lurain? And yet you're willing to keep your promise?"
"Yes," the girl told him. "I gave you my word, and you brought warning to Dordona as you promised. My death matters not,"
Clark suddenly put his arms around her, and as he held her quivering figure he could feel the pounding of her heart.
"Lurain, you're not going to die—■ neither of us will die," he told her reassuringly. "There are no Guardians down there—that is legend only. Even if they were there, I have my weapon."
She said nothing, but he knew she was convinced of the futility of all human weapons against those mysterious warders. He turned to his four men, who had listened tensely in the dark room.
"You'll stay here," Clark told them. "I should be back by morning with the waters from the lake, if all goes well."
"Why don't we go with you?" Blacky demanded.
But when Lurain understood the question, she shook her head. "No, I promised but to take you, Stannar. Your men would only be destroyed down there as we will be, and their help will be needed here when Thargo comes to attack Dordona."
"Remember, you're bound by my W.T.—6
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promise to help these Blacks against Thargo," Clark told his men, "whether or not I return."
Then Clark brought from his pack the leaden flask he had brought so far, along such a dangerous trail in preparation for this time. He paused then for a moment, before the silent quartet.
"Good luck, boys, if I don't come back," he said.
Weird Tales volume 30 number 04 Page 16
