by John Norman
“We will go with you,” said Mul-Al-Ka.
“No,” I said, “you must go to the human kind.”
“Even to those who carried Gur?” asked Mul-Ba-Ta, shivering at the thought of those small round bodies and the strange arms and legs, and eyes.
“They are mutations,” said Misk, “bred long ago for service in the darkened tunnels, now preserved for ceremonial purposes and for the sake of tradition.”
“Yes,” I said to Mul-Ba-Ta, “even to those who carried Gur.”
“I understand,” said Mul-Ba-Ta, smiling.
“Everywhere in the Nest,” I said, “you must go everywhere that there is something human to be found.”
“Even in the Fungus Chambers and the Pastures?” asked Mul-Al – Ka.
“Yes,” I said, “wherever there is something human – wherever it is to be found and however it is to be found.”
“I understand,” said Mul-Al-Ka.
“And I too,” said Mul-Ba-Ta.
“Good,” I said.
With a last handclasp the two men turned and ran toward the exit.
Misk and I stood alone.
“That will mean trouble,” said Misk.
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose it will.”
“And you will be responsible,” said Misk.
“In part,” I said, “but mostly what it means will be decided by Priest-Kings and men.”
I looked up at him.
“You are foolish,” I said, “to go to the Mother.”
“You are foolish,” he said, “to go to the tunnels of the Golden Beetle.”
I drew my sword, lifting it easily from the sheath. It cleared the leather as easily and swiftly as a larl might have bared its fangs. In the blue torchlight I examined the blade and the light coat of oil that protected it. I tried the balance, and dropped the steel back into its sheath. I was satisfied.
I liked the blade which seemed so simple and efficient compared to the manifold variations in sword steel that were possible. I supposed one of the reasons for the short blade was that it could clear the sheath a fraction of a second before a longer blade. Another advantage was that it could be moved with greater swiftness than a longer blade. The primary advantage I supposed was that it allowed the Gorean warrior to work close to his man. The brief reach of the blade tended to be more than compensated for by the rapidity with which it might be wielded and the ease with which it might work beneath the guard of a longer weapon. If the swordsman with a longer weapon could not finish the fight in the first thrust or two he was a dead man.
“Where are the tunnels of the Golden Beetle?” I asked.
“Inquire,” said Misk. “They are well known to all within the Nest.”
“Is it as difficult to slay a Golden Beetle as a Priest – King?” I asked.
“I do not know,” said Misk. “We have never slain a Golden Beetle, nor have we studied them.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It is not done,” said Misk. “And,” he said, peering down at me, his luminous eyes intent, “it would be a great crime to kill one.”
“I see,” I said.
I turned to go but then turned once again to face the Priest – King. “Could you, Misk,” I asked, “with those bladelike structures on your forelegs slay a Priest-King?”
Misk inverted his forelegs and examined the blades. “Yes,” he said. “I could.”
He seemed lost in thought.
“But it has not been done in more than a million years,” he said.
I lifted my arm to Misk. “I wish you well,” I said, using the traditional Gorean farewell.
Misk lifted one foreleg in salute, the bladelike projection disappearing. His antennae inclined toward me and the golden hairs with which the antennae glistened extended towards me as though to touch me. “And I, Tarl Cabot,” he said, “wish you well.”
And we turned, the Priest-King and I, and went our separate ways.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I FIND VIKA
I gathered that I had arrived too late to save Vika of Treve.
Deep in the unlit tunnels of the Golden Beetle, those unadorned, tortuous passages through the solid rock, I came upon her body.
I held the Mul-Torch over my head and beheld the foul cavern in which she lay on a bedding of soiled mosses and stems.
She wore only brief rags, the remains of her once long and beautiful garment, torn and stained by what must have been her terrified flight through these dark, rocky tunnels, running, stumbling, screaming, futilely trying to escape the pursuing jaws of the implacable Golden Beetle.
Her throat, I was pleased to see, no longer wore the collar of a slave.
I wondered if her collar had been the same as that placed on the girl I had seen. If the sizes matched I supposed it would have been. The Priest-Kings often practice such small economies, jealously conserving the inanimate resources of the Nest.
I wondered if the removal of the collar meant that Vika had been freed before being closed within the tunnels of the Golden Beetle. I recalled vaguely that Misk had once said to me that in deference to the Golden Beetle it was given only free women.
The cavern in which she lay reeked of the spoor of the Golden Beetle, which I had not yet encountered. Its contrast with the fastidiously clean tunnels of the Nest of Priest-Kings made it seem all the more repulsive in its filth and litter.
In one corner there were scattered human bones and among them the shards of a human skull. The bones had been split and the marrow sucked from them.
How long Vika had been dead I had no way of judging, though I cursed myself for it would not have appeared to be a matter of more than a few hours. Her body, though rigid in the appearance of recent death, did not have the coldness I would have expected. She was unmoving and her eyes seemed fixed on me with all the horror of the last movement in which the jaws of the Golden Beetle must have closed upon her. I wondered if in the darkness she would have been able to see what had attacked her. I found myself almost hoping that she had not, for it would have been more than enough to have heard it following in the tunnels. Yet I myself I knew would have preferred to see the assailant and so I found myself wishing that this brief, terrible privilege had been Vika of Treve’s, for I remembered her as a woman of courage and pride.
Her skin seemed slightly dry but not desiccated.
Because of the lack of coldness in the body I listened for a long time for a heartbeat. Holding her wrist I felt for the slightest sign of a pulse. I could detect neither heartbeat nor pulse.
Though I had hated Vika of Treve I would not have wanted this fate to be hers, nor could I believe that any man, even those whom she had injured, could have wished it to be so. As I looked upon her now I felt strangely sad, and there was nothing left in my bosom of the bitterness with which I had earlier regarded her. I saw her now as only a girl, surely too innocent for this, who had met the Golden Beetle and had in consequence died one of the most horrible of deaths. She was of the human kind and whatever might have been her faults, she could not have deserved this grotesque, macabre fate, the jaws and cavern of the Golden Beetle. And looking upon her I now realised too that somehow, not fully understanding, I had cared for her.
“I am sorry,” I said, “I am sorry, Vika of Treve.”
Strangely there did not seem to be severe wounds on her body.
I wondered if it were possible that she had died of fear.
There were no lacerations or bruises that might not have been caused by her flight through the tunnels. Her body and arms and legs, though cut and injured, were neither torn nor broken.
I found nothing that could have caused her death unless perhaps a small puncture on her left side, through which some poison might have been injected.
There were, however, though I could not conceive of how they could have killed her, five large round swellings on her body. These extended in a line along her left side, reaching from the interior of her left thigh to her waist to a few inches below
her shoulder. These swellings, hard, round and smooth, seemed to lie just beneath the skin and to be roughly the size of one’s fist. I supposed they might have been some unusual physiological reaction to the poison which I conjectured had been injected into her system through the small, livid puncture, also on her left side.
I wiped the back of my forearm across my eyes.
There was nothing I could do for her now, save perhaps hunt for the Golden Beetle.
I wondered if I could bury the body somewhere, but dismissed the thought in view of the stony passages I had just traversed. I might move it from the filth of the Golden Beetle’s den but it, until the creature itself was slain, would never be safe from its despoiling jaws. I turned my back on Vika of Treve, and carrying the torch left the cavern. As I did so I seemed almost to hear a silent, horrible, pleading shriek but there was of course no sound. I returned and held the torch and her body was the same as before, the eyes fixed with the same expression of frozen horror, so I left the chamber.
I continued to search the stony passages of the tunnels of the Golden Beetle but I saw no sign of the creature.
I held my sword in my right hand and the Mul-Torch in my left.
When I made a turn I would take the hilt of the sword, in order to protect the blade, and scratch a small sign indicating the direction from which I had come.
It was a long, eerie search, in the blue light of the Mul – Torch, thrusting it into one crevice and another, trying one passage and then the next.
As I wandered through these passages my sorrow for Vika of Treve struggled with my hatred for the Golden Beetle until I forced myself to clear my head of emotion and concentrate on the task at hand.
But still, as the Mul-Torch burned lower and I yet encountered no sign of the Golden Beetle, my thoughts turned ever and again to the still form of Vika lying in the cavern of the Golden Beetle.
It had been weeks since I had last seen her and I supposed it would have been at least days since she had been closed in the tunnels of the Golden Beetle. How was it that she had been captured only so recently by the creature? And if it were true that she had only been captured so recently how would she have managed to live in the caverns for those days?
Perhaps she might have found a sump of water but what would there have been to eat, I wondered? Perhaps, I told myself, she, like the Slime Worm, would have been forced to scavenge on the previous kills of the Beetle but I found this hard to believe, for the condition of her body did not suggest an ugly, protracted, degrading battle with the worms of starvation.
And how was it, I asked myself, that the Golden Beetle had not already feasted on the delicate flesh of the proud beauty of Treve?
And I wondered on the five strange protuberances that nested so grotesquely in her lovely body.
And Misk had said to me he thought I would be too late for it was near hatching time.
A cry of horror from the bottom of my heart broke from my lips in that dark passage and I turned and raced madly back down the path I had come.
Time and time again I stumbled against outcroppings of rock and bruised my shoulders and thighs but never once did I diminish my speed in my headlong race back to the cavern of the Golden Beetle. I found I did not even have to stop and search for the small signs I had scratched in the walls of the passages to guide my way for as I ran it seemed I knew each bend and turn of that passageway as though it had suddenly leaped alive flaming in my memory.
I burst into the cavern of the Golden Beetle and held the torch high.
“Forgive me, Vika of Treve!” I cried. “Forgive me!”
I fell to my knees beside her and thrust the Mul-Torch into a space between two stones in the floor.
From her flesh at one point I could see the gleaming eyes of a small organism, golden and about the size of a child’s turtle, scrambling, trying to pull itself from the leathery shell. With my sword I dug out the egg and crushed it and its occupant with the heel of my sandal on the stone floor.
Carefully, methodically, I removed a second egg. I held it to my ear. Inside it I could hear a persistent, ugly scratching, sense the movement of a tiny, energetic organism.
I broke this egg too, stamping it with my heel, not stopping until what squirmed inside was dead.
The next three eggs I disposed of similarly.
I then took my sword and wiped the oil from one side of the blade and set the shining steel againsts the lips of the girl from Treve. When I removed it I cried out with pleasure for a bit of moisture had formed on the blade.
I gathered her in my arms and held her against me.
“My girl of Treve,” I said. “You live.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
THE GOLDEN BEETLE
At that instant I heard a slight noise and looked up to see peering at me from the darkness of one of the tunnels leading from the cavern, two flaming, luminous eyes.
The Golden Beetle was not nearly as tall as a Priest-King, but it was probably considerably heavier. It was about the size of a rhinoceros and the first thing I noticed after the glowing eyes were two multiply hooked, tubular, hollow, pincerlike extensions that met at the tips perhaps a yard beyond its body. They seemed clearly some aberrant mutation of its jaws. Its antennae, unlike those of Priest-Kings, were very short. They curved and were tipped with a fluff of golden hair. Most strangely perhaps were several long, golden strands, almost a mane, which extended from the creature’s head over its domed, golden back and fell almost to the floor behind it. The back itself seemed divided into two thick casings which might once, ages before, have been horny wings, but now the tissues had, at the points of touching together, fused in such a way as to form what was for all practical purposes a thick, immobile golden shell. The creature’s head was even now withdrawn beneath the shell but its eyes were clearly visible and of course the extensions of its jaws.
I knew the thing before me could slay Priest-Kings.
Most I feared for the safety of Vika of Treve.
I stood before her body my sword drawn.
The creature seemed to be puzzled and made no move to attack.
Undoubtedly in its long life it had never encountered anything like this in its tunnels. It backed up a bit and withdrew its head further beneath the shell of its fused, golden wings. It lifted its hooked, tubular jaws before its eyes as though to shield them from the light.
It occurred to me then that the light of the Mul-Torch burning in the invariably dark tunnels of its domain may have temporarily blinded or disoriented the creature. More likely the smell of the torch’s oxidation products suddenly permeating its delicate antennae would have been as cacophonous to it as some protracted, discordant bedlam of noises might have been to us.
It seemed clear the creature did not yet understand what had taken place within its cavern.
I seized the Mul-Torch from between the stones where I had placed it and, with a great shout, thrust it towards the creature’s face.
I would have expected it to retreat with rapidity, but it made no move whatsoever other than to lift its tubular, pincerlike jaws to me.
It seemed to me most unnatural, as though the creature might have been a living rock, or a blind, carnivorous growth.
One thing was clear. The creature did not fear me nor the flame.
I withdrew a step and it, on its six short legs, moved forward a step.
It seemed to me that it would be very difficult to injure the Golden Beetle, particularly when its head was withdrawn beneath the shell of its enclosing wings. This withdrawal on its part, of course, would not in the least prevent it from using its great jaws to attack, but it would, I supposed, somewhat narrow the area of its sensory awareness. It would most certainly limit its vision but I did not suppose that the Golden Beetle, any more than a Priest-King, much depended on this sense. Both would be quite at home, incomprehensibly to a visually oriented organism, in utter darkness. On the other hand I could hope that somehow the sensory field of the antennae might be similarly, at
least partially, restricted by their withdrawal beneath the casing of the fused, horny wings.
I slipped my sword into its sheath and knelt beside Vika’s body, not taking my eyes off the creature who stood about four yards distant.
By feeling I closed the lids of her eyes in order that they might no longer stare blindly out with that look of frozen horror.
Her body was stiff yet from the venom which had induced the paralysis, but now, perhaps becaused of the removal of the five eggs, it seemed somewhat warmer and more yielding than before.
As I touched the girl the Beetle took another step forward.
It began to hiss.
This noise unnerved me for a moment because I had been used to the uncanny silence of Priest-Kings.
Now the Beetle began to poke its head out from beneath the shelter of those domed, golden wings and its short antennae, tifted with golden fluff, thrust out and began to explore the chamber.
With my right hand I lifted Vika to my shoulder and stood up.
The hissing now became more intense.
Apparently the creature did not wish me to remove Vika from the cavern.
Walking backwards, Vika on my shoulder, th Mul-Torch in my hand, I slowly retreated from the cavern of the Golden Beetle.
When the creature, following me, crawled over the pile of soiled moss and stems on which Vika had lain, it stopped and began to poke among the shattered remains of the eggs I had crushed.
I had no notion of the speed of the creature but at this point I turned and began to jog away down the passage, back toward the entrance tunnels of the Golden Beetle. I hoped, considering the size and shape and probable weight of the creature, and the comparative tininess of its legs, that it would not be able to move quickly, at least not for a sustained period.
About an Ehn after I had turned and began to move away from the cavern, Vika on my shoulder, I heard from the cavern one of the strangest and most horrifying sounds I had ever heard in my life, a long, weird, frantic, enraged rush of sound, more than a rush of air, more than a wild hiss, almost a cry of pain, of comprehension and agony.
