Hordes of sextupedal creatures of the species that had provided his breakfast rustled and squealed in the dark aisles of the forest. The way was climbing and, thanks to the greedy creatures chomping every bit of green that dared show, free of underbrush.
Suddenly the hunger-squeals changed in note, intensity and volume. Instinctively Jarvis read fear and warning in the sounds. He paused, alerting his Mag faculties. As a member of the mutant Magnanthropus race, Jarvis possessed powers that differentiated him sharply from his human companions of Earth. He could sense things no ordinary man could see. His mind would reach out and “read” an object by its subliminal tones, apprehended only by the subconscious. It was like the notes of music to him, the “soul-song” of all things living and dead, and was the same as that Song of Power flung forth by the mighty city Surandanish as a guide to his quest.
And now through his consciousness cascaded a rippling melody of rage and hate, a bounding diapason of coarse intensity that seized his vitals in a grip of iron and writhed the flesh at the nape of his neck. He was aware that the squealing creatures were gone, fled into the forest, and all around him was quiet and threatening gloom.
He could not see in his mind the menace confronting him. It was something he had never seen before. He heard its song of rage, but no image evoked itself. Yet he knew that whatever it was lurked just around the fifty-foot diameter of the great tree bole against which he leaned. He knew that the creature sensed him as well as he sensed it. It was tremendous in size; he could not hope to outdistance it in flight. He shot a glance around, seeking some vine or creeper that might have escaped the hungry tusks of the rooting swine-things.
There was a snuffling noise and a thunder of great weights striking the ground. The most malignant horror he had ever seen on a planet of malignant horrors, stalked into his view. It might have been an enormous crocodile, but was not, only giving that impression. Six scaly legs, each as big as a cask, supported the mailed body shoulder-high. Its crocodilian snout was tusked and armored with scale and grew neckless from the body. Leathery, rudimentary wings fluttered at its shoulders; an eight-foot tail tipped with a bouquet of spikes lashed the ground with a rending noise. The creature’s belly was a sickening yellow green, fading to mottle on the legs and surging to scarlet on the scimitar-like claws on the three-toed feet.
The thing stared at Jarvis without blinking its single yellow eye, red-pupilled. Pale green globes, sense organs of some kind, writhed on twin stalks above that baleful orb. The dragon, as it seemed to Jarvis it must be, was stamping its feet and angling its body to lash him with its lethal tail, Jarvis had spotted the vine he wanted—fifty feet away. He felt a sinking sensation. He could never reach it unless… Carefully he removed the axe from his belt, hefting it and gauging the throw. The eye, of course, was the logical target. The axe glistened in the pale forest light as the monstrous, spiked tail swung back for the fatal blow. The blade struck with a gritty thud as Jarvis’ moccasins spurned the humus. Green ichor spurted from the wound; Jarvis bounded to the vine of safety, yanking the cord of his axe.
He swarmed to the branch aloft, deafened by the agonized roars of the monster. He lay on his belly, hugging the rough bark of a limb ten feet through, panting and reeling in his axe. The dragon sensed the pain in its blinded eye as its enemy and made no move for the elusive Earthman. It plunged in earth-shaking circles, lashing itself with its dreadful tail, ripping its mailed hide to shreds with lethal spikes; and Jarvis watched enthralled the most astonishing battle he had ever witnessed as the bellowing thing plunged and literally fought itself to death.
What a strange world was Eloraspon, and how equally strange the seed it spawned—the weird creatures within it! In the three years of his exile upon this incredible world, Jarvis was not yet able to understand it. And yet, he felt strangely comfortable in it. On Earth, he had been a rebel, strait-jacketed in the artificial culture of an effete civilization. He mourned the destruction of the world he had known but believed a better new world might be built upon the rubble of the old—Surandanish! There lay the secrets of the ancient Mighty, the primordial race of Magnanthropus. There lay the future of mankind.
The Brobdingnagian forest spread a leafy canopy a thousand feet above him. The rays of the sun failed to penetrate the screen and his moccasined feet found sure but perilous passage in dim, eternal twilight. The beacon of Surandanish resounded in his soul, else he would have lost his way.
He was alert as he had not been before, Mag senses probing ahead in the greenish gloom. Things half seen whirred through the air—giant insects with pellucid, lavender wings. Many-footed things, grub-like, armored and scaled, crawled upon limbs and trunks. Jarvis advanced with long sword ready in his hand, ready for danger, half welcoming it.
When he could go no farther for weariness, he lay down in the crotch of a tree and rested, listening to the whir, crunch and stridulant calls of insects. He must have slept without intending, for he awakened to a thrilling note in his Mag consciousness, warning of danger. Even as he struggled to his feet, sword in hand, the foremost of the enemy came clawing over the bulge of a limb.
It was an ant—or a monster similar to the lowly ant he had known on Earth. But this ant was proportioned to the forest in which it lived. It stood four feet high, its color a virulent green. Armor plate of chitin slithered and rasped as the creature advanced, working its mandibles and the terrible stinger at the tip of its pulsing abdomen.
Jarvis swung his sword in a glittering arc. The armored head parted from its thorax with sickening crunch and sailed into space. The thing contracted, legs threshing, and tumbled from the limb.
But the enemy had come not alone. A glance assured Jarvis that the fight had just begun. A score more of the clawed monsters climbed the trunk below in single file, ant fashion, while on the ground a horde of others milled and seethed around the twitching carcass of their fallen fellow, tearing him to pieces.
Jarvis darted a glance around, seeking an avenue of escape. As another of the stridently hued ants clawed its way to the limb, mandibles agape, he hewed again, and the twitching parts plunged to the hungry horde below. They came on fast now, and he swung his blade with both hands, weaving a glittering cage of steel about himself. One after another his attackers plunged from the limb, leaving it slippery with the colorless ichor of their veins. Jarvis’ sword dripped with the stuff and his arms wearied. He fought doggedly, and at every opportunity sought that means of escape he knew he must find soon or die. In a burst of furious energy, he cleared the limb of attackers and leaped to the limb above, scrambling up the roughly-fissured bark of the trunk. He stood erect, sheathing his sword, gauging the distance to the vine he had spotted from below. It was farther away than he had thought, but the relentless enemy gave him no chance to seek another. Armored claws rattled on the trunk just below his feet.
He sprang for the vine, his heart in his mouth. The rough, sinewy creeper whipped between his palms. For an awful, horrifying moment he felt himself falling as his grip slipped; then he clamped his fingers in a grip of steel and the swinging vine carried him over the horrid clack of the ant multitude to another limb.
For hours, it seemed, he fled thus, from vine to vine along the creepered limbs, nostrils cloyed with the stench of rotting humus, muscles flayed with exertion. When the light in the forest began to dim with the fall of night, he halted, probing the twilight with his Mag senses. The enemy was nowhere. He had slept once, and that had almost proved his undoing. Now he must sleep again. He could, with the aid of his Mag senses, have pursued his way through the forest in the dark; but excitement and violence had taxed his energy. He would climb to the top of the forest and there be beyond scent of the dangers that foraged the wood by night.
To an ordinary man, that frightful ascent would have been unthinkable. A thousand feet straight up! His years upon Eloraspon and the hardships he had undergone had developed Jarvis i
n nerve and fiber. Though his face was thin and hawk-like, his body had an athlete’s build. In college, he had excelled in running, broad jumping and fencing. These college-bred skills now meant to him the difference between life and death.
Up and up he climbed, finding hand-and foot-holds in the fissured bark. The sun sank lower in the west. When at last his head cleared the leafy crown of the great tree, he looked out over the forest. Whence he had come, the verdant roof of a hidden world stretched unbroken to the horizon; but when he turned his glance toward the call of Surandanish, his heart leaped with gladness. Only a few miles away lay scrub-covered hills and the misty evidence of altitudinous country beyond.
Then the dark came down with tropic suddenness. Stars twinkled. Jarvis relaxed with satisfaction dropping into instant sleep.
CHAPTER II
The perilous forest behind him, Jarvis walked the following morning among the hills he had seen the night before. High in the blue bowl of the sky fluttered glistening shards of color, a swarm of spinning, airborne creatures it delighted Jarvis to see. These were Eeima, tiny creatures a foot high in perfect human shape, darting in ecstasies of love upon resplendent butterfly wings of intermingled hues. Descendants of the ancient Mighty, the Eeima had evolved as a race into a concept—a pure concept of joy and carnal love.
These planed from sun-drenched heights and circled above him, dipping, diving and calling out soundless greeting to his Mag senses.
“Welcome, Jarvis! Eluola sends greetings, bids Jarvis welcome. Hasten, Jarvis, to Surandanish. But beware, beware! Danger is great!”
“Eluola!” he cried inwardly. “Where is she?”
“Eluola—Eluola is now Great Mother of the Eeima, Jarvis. Eluola flits no more in the sun… Layer of Eggs is Eluola. But she greets you through us. When the Old Mother died, Eluola we chose to take her place. It is a great honor, a great duty she performs. She commanded us to watch for you, to offer our help to the Son of the Mighty, to him whose soul-song is like to the Song of Power.”
The message did not come to him in words but in pictures shot with shards of incandescent color. Again he saw in his mind the phosphorescently lit cavern somewhere beneath the surface of Eloraspon, which the Eeima called the Mothering Pits, and grub-like things which were the larvae of the Eeima wriggling upon rock walls and floor, feeding upon glowing fungus. Throughout the vast nursery, Eeima flitted on gossamer wings, busily attending the young.
The picture faded as the Eeima fluttered away in a cloud of dazzling color, drifting with the wind. The last he saw of them from a low hilltop was a swirling mass of glitter and hue, darting above the distant forest.
Beyond the range of hills, the land developed a broken topography with a few stunted trees, sparse brush and large boulders scattered in profusion. The beacon of Surandanish drew Jarvis directly across this terrain and he sought no easier route.
Debouching from a rocky defile upon a sandy plain, his Mag consciousness warned him of danger and he froze in his tracks. A strident, subliminal buzzing ripped through his being as if it had been sound.
At his left was a rugged buff with talus and towering boulders at its base. From behind the nearest came the blood-chilling apprehension that plucked his nerves like violin strings. He staggered and almost fell from the psychic force then shuttered his Mag mind against it and straightened.
The thing he saw as he peered from his rocky shelter was even worse than the frightening apprehension he had had of it. It was a many-legged, scarlet horror twenty feet in length. It rattled cruelly barbed, triple-jointed limbs as it lunged again and again at a dark opening low down in the face of the bluff. Even as Jarvis looked, it thrust a grasping claw into the cave-mouth. At once there came a flash of light against the dark of the cave and the repellent thing lunged backward, two feet of severed claw rattling on the rocks. It hissed thunderously with rage and pain.
That flash of light—it could only have been a blade of steel, slashing in a desperate arc! Was it possible…? No, he could not believe it. Men as he knew them did not exist native to Eloraspon. Yet he had to know. He braved again the horror of the monster’s hideous soul-song and probed the cave quickly. There was a creature in there—a human creature—frightened and at bay.
He wished himself at the top of the bluff, where he might hurl boulders down upon the scarlet monster. But that was out of the question. The quarry in the cave could not hold out that long. Something must be done soon and it was typical of Jarvis that his mind resorted to a method of direct attack.
He unsheathed his long sword and stepped cautiously from concealment. The thing’s attention was fixed wholly upon the cave and he had a moment to consider his next move. In spite of its great length, the scarlet horror was fragilely constructed. Behind its large head armed with antennae and horny mandibles writhed a segmented body barely six inches through. Each segment was equipped with a pair of flailing, chitin-armored legs scarcely thicker than twigs.
The Earthman picked his target and set out on a run, swinging the blade over his head. The writhing, wriggling thing danced in front of him and Jarvis danced too, like a boxer, on the balls of his feet. Then quick as a spurt of dust he leaped in and severed the creature in the middle with one clean blow.
A barbed claw raked him, ripping through his leather shirt and scalding his ribs with pain. He leaped back, but the thing did not fall in the throes of death. Instead, the rear half, the half without head or brain, rolled twisting on the sandy desert floor for thirty yards, kicking up a cloud of dust, then sprang to the clawed tips of its stick-like legs and fled away into the desert. The other half reared itself upright upon four of its remaining legs and whirled upon Jarvis, the great head towering above him, mandibles clashing, facetted eyes glittering, slashing at him with cruel, curved claws.
“The head, stranger! Strike at the head or we both are lost!”
The shout, seeming to come to him in English, galvanized the Earthman. He dropped his sword, fumbling at his belt for his axe as he leaped backward. The blade left his hand cleanly, glittering against the sky, and crashed against the hideous, scarlet head. Chitin plates shattered like eggshell; greenish ichor gushed. The monster toppled, kicking and writhing in the agony of death.
“Well fought, stranger! I owe my life to you!”
A warrior picked his way down the talus, a startling figure clad in breastplate and beehive helmet of glittering, silvery metal; a flowing blue cloak was shrugged over one shoulder; a sword filled one hand, a bow the other, and a quiver of feathered arrows jogged at his hip.
“My arm, fighting man!” cried the warrior, holding it out with forearm bent parallel to the breastplate.
Jarvis took the arm, gripped the other’s bicep in warm response, then stepped back hastily, picking up his sword. He looked up at the warrior with a strange expression.
“You are no man!” he said.
“And if I am a woman,” replied the warrior proudly, “what difference does that make, so long as I am a warrior too? I am Ilil, princess of Gipar, daughter of the Lugal Elmam. How are you called, stranger, and whence come you?”
“I am Jeff Jarvis of Earth,” he replied, “which is another world than this. How is it that you speak my language? Are there other Earthmen here?”
She looked puzzled. “Your language, Jeff Jarvis? All upon Eloraspon speak the same language, so what is strange? Earth and Earthmen I have never heard of before. Rather should you have asked me why I have been so stupid as to venture into the Desert of the Ultul!”
“Is that an ultul?” Jarvis nodded toward the still twitching carcass.
“Yes, and let us be gone. The part that escaped will bring back more of its kind.”
* * * *
They backtracked to the scrub-covered hills, walking side by side. Jarvis appraised his companion with covert glances. She appeared unshaken by her near-f
atal encounter with the ultul and talked without reserve in what sounded to him like crisp, well-accented English. Her helmet covered her hair and most of her face, but what he saw he found well-proportioned, with wide-set eyes of brown and a pleasing expression.
“Five days ago, the Tharn attacked my ship off the coast of Dimgal,” she said. “We had anchored in a cove to escape the storm that comes by night. I preferred to sleep ashore and had taken my royal guard and two of my women with me. I was awakened by shouts and the clash of arms. The beach swarmed with Tharn. The commander of my guard armed me and hastened me into the forest with my women, assuring me a quick and easy victory over the Tharn. Brave man! He knew better and died knowing it. Of all my company, only I and my two women escaped.”
“And where are they now?” Jarvis asked.
“Poor things! They could not climb quickly enough to escape the dristl of the Hashurgal—the dragons of the Great Forest.” There was distress in her tone and Jarvis dropped the subject.
“What were you doing on the Desert of the Ultul?” he asked.
She gave him a smiling, sidelong glance. “I saw you on my trail this morning. I thought you a Tharn that had trailed me from the beach. I chose the desert for flight, as no Tharn will tread where the ultul roam.”
“I was not following you,” he said. “I am going to Surandanish and the way appears to lead across the desert. I came upon you by accident.”
“Well for me that you did!” she replied. “But across the deadly desert is no route to Surandanish, which lies even more remote than my own land of Gipar. We travel now in Kullab, which is Tharn-land, and the Tharn are enemies of Gipar.”
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 69
