“We call ourselves the Eltaroa,” boomed back the thundering thought, “and the Mighty shall live again. They shall again walk the face of Eloraspon! Then indeed will Time be golden and there shall be forever peace upon the face of this world.” The mighty chorus rolled into a paean of promise. “Let the Mighty live, Jeff Jarvis! We shall help you!”
Great, winged bodies hovered in the city glow and the wind of their wings was like a gale that swept the tower. Things hideous to behold dropped from the heights, gripped the parapet with scaled claws, enormous, toothed heads writhing on sinuous necks as they folded their leathery wings.
Thork stood his ground bravely, but with an appealing look toward Jarvis. Valdez clenched and unclenched his fists nervously.
Even Jarvis shrank within himself at the exhalation of doom from these embodiments of that evil that has been Man’s curse throughout all space and all time.
He said in his inmost being, “Eltaroa, friends! The spaces of air are to you as are the walking places to men! Carry my friends upon your backs to the safety of the hills visible there in the light of the moons. There set them down and harm them not.”
“Your wish is law, Son of the Mighty. But what about yourself?”
“I would descend to the street at the foot of this building. The Tharn hold captive a Child of the Mighty—a daughter of Gipar—and another maid who is the daughter of my Tharn companion. I must save them before the Dingir return for the princess to carry her away to Surandanish!”
The winged dragons stirred and hissed. The air above clattered with fluttering shapes. The song of hate rose to a grossly pitched high.
“The Bronze Ones made us as we are,” rolled the collective thought. “The Bronze Ones destroyed the Mighty! They are our enemy and we are theirs.”
Jarvis explained his plan to his companions.
Thork said, “Let me at least accompany you, Jeff Jarvis. We shall arm ourselves from the Lugal’s armory and you may need an extra blade.”
“I shall do this best alone,” Jarvis returned shortly. “Go now and do as I say. The Eltaroa will bear you to safety.”
Moments later, Jarvis stood alone upon the tower, watching his friends wing off into the night. Then he clambered aboard his own mount and encircled the cold, scaly neck with his arms. The Eltaroa lurched and sickening vertigo attacked him as they dropped away from the parapet. Then the breath caught in his throat and his body pressed heavily against the mailed back of the slul and the great wings slammed the air. The slul banked in a wheeling turn, then dropped like an elevator. The wind of their fall ripped at Jarvis to dislodge him, then the wings came down powerfully again and Jarvis felt the intolerable weight of deceleration. Talons ripped the hard-packed surface of the street, and Jarvis slid off to the solider stability of his own legs.
He discovered Rani of Tukulta by accident, after recovering his weapons once more from the Lugal’s armory and pursuing a course through occasionally deserted apartments of the Lugal’s harem. Often he escaped detection by a hair, for the entire level thronged with twittering women moving about at random. Now he was at last trapped, for the rooms on all sides were occupied. Worse, a group of chattering females even now approached this very room! As the door swung open he stepped through the wall into a room hung on all sides from floor to ceiling with a tapestried arras. Luckily, there was space between the arras and the wall, but barely enough for him to stand upright, pressed against the wall at his back. The coarse weave of the arras rasped against his face and he almost feared to breathe lest he be discovered.
His probing Mag senses warned him that two women were in the room, then elation surged through him. One was Rani! She could help him find Ilil! He could even sense what Rani was doing—braiding the hair of the other woman, who was obviously one of the Lugal’s many wives. How could he attract Rani’s attention without alarming the other! A single scream would prove his undoing.
He carefully worked his knife over his shoulder and began to cut a slit in the arras. Slowly…slowly… the material was worked with threads of pure gold and hard to cut. He finally brought an eye to the slit and surveyed the chamber, a boudoir, in which the slave girl worked at her mistress’s hair.
The Tharn woman was lovely. It was difficult for Jarvis to reconcile her strictly human beauty with the ugliness of the Tharn, but he remembered that Thork had told him only the males were addicts of the drug. She was looking in a silver mirror and this reflected to him the creamy beauty of her bosom and her face cast in the mold of a professional charmer with high, arched brows, shadowed eyes and scarlet painted lips.
“What think you, Rani,” she said in studied, elegant tones. “Will my lord the Lugal choose my arms for his comfort tonight?”
“A fool were he to choose otherwise,” replied the girl diplomatically.
In the mirror, Jarvis saw the woman’s lips curl with a look of scorn.
“Fool, indeed!” she snarled. “That Giparian wench has enchanted him!”
“What a shame,” murmured Rani, “that he neglects his harem for every pretty face that is brought before him!”
Jarvis smiled at Rani’s deliberate attempt to create trouble for the Lugal. But the time was ripe for action. He dared not hesitate too long. Quickly he slit the arras deeply enough to admit him into the chamber. As he stepped through, Rani turned and looked him full in the face. Her eyes flashed an instantaneous look of recognition, then she whirled upon her mistress and began to strangle her with her own braids.
“This one will not cry out!” she spoke tersely over her shoulder.
At once, Jarvis gagged the Tharn woman with a strip torn from her own garment and Rani released the braid. They bound the struggling woman with scarves and laid her on her own bed.
Jarvis smiled into her blazing eyes. “Lie quietly and no harm will come to you.” He turned to Rani. “Quickly, now! Where is Ilil?”
“I will lead you to her!”
“Good! Which way?” She pointed and, before the horrified gaze of the Tharn woman, they strode together through the solid wall.
They could not take the most direct route, but went by deserted chambers and corridors in a round-about way that lost much time. But at last they stepped into a magnificent apartment in which Ilil sat alone. At sight of Jarvis, her lovely eyes widened, her cheeks blanched and she swayed as if to fall. Jarvis sprang forward and caught her in his arms, pressing his mouth to hers in a passionate avowal of love.
“My love, my love!” she murmured. “I had lost all hope!”
“So might I, were it not for my love for you,” he returned and kissed her again. Then he held her at arm’s length. “But come—we shall not be safe here for long…”
Even as he spoke, there was a clatter of accoutrements outside the door as the guards sprang to attention. A shout echoed in the corridor: “Open up! Make way for the exalted Lugal, Zag-ab-Shab of Kullab!”
A key grated in the massive lock at the same instant that Jarvis and his companions stepped through the wall into the neighboring apartment.
CHAPTER IX
Within the hour, the trio were riding out of Drahubba on dil from the stable of the royal guard and both Ilil and Rani were girded with weapons destined for the hands of Thork and Valdez. The slul, still fluttering overhead in the light of the twin moons, were a blessing, for the streets were deserted and they had clear passage into the hills outside the city.
At the ground level, the lay of the land took on a different aspect than it had presented from the top of the tower. Jarvis was not sure upon which jutting foothill he had instructed the slul to deposit his companions. They rode up rocky slopes and down twisting canyons while Jarvis’ Mag senses probed far, but he found no sign of them. The sky in the east paled; Nanna and Munus dipped above mountain peaks. By sun-up, Jarvis realized, companies of Thorn warriors on swift dil would
be scouring the hills for them.
“I remember this canyon,” Rani said, looking about in the gathering daylight. “The Tharn brought me through here on the way to Drahubba. There is a cave…”
“If you can remember where you saw it,” Jarvis said, “we can hide there through the day. But we’d better find it fast!”
“I think…it was high up on the hill,” Rani faltered. “I remembered the Tharn seemed frightened when we went by it. That seemed peculiar to me, because they have a reputation for fearing nothing. They called it the lair of the… the elyisha!”
“I heard that word only tonight,” Ilil put in. “One of the Lugal’s women made a remark—‘the only good thing about the Night of the Slul is that even the horrid elyisha dares not leave its hole in the ground!’”
Jarvis grunted. If there was superstition connected with the cave, so much the better. He hoped fervently Rani’s memory was not at fault. The dil, urged on by rein and the spurs built into the stirrups, leaped and skipped up the rocky slope, splashing through the shallows of the tumbling stream in the canyon, sometimes detouring around falls and rapids. As the sun rose, mantling snowy peaks with a first flush of pink, they found the cave they sought. Nor was it too soon. Already Jarvis heard behind them the noise of pursuit and sensed many Tharn astride laboring dil.
Whatever the elyisha, reputed to dwell in the cave, might be, it could be no more of a menace than the bloodthirsty Tharn tracking them. Jarvis rode at full speed directly into the cave mouth, sword and hand, followed by the women.
Leaving their mounts, Jarvis urged his companions back from the cave mouth, into the dark, snaky corridor that dipped down into the bowels of the planet. Behind a heap of boulders, he threw himself flat and pulled the women down beside him.
“If the Tharn come in,” he said, “we can either retreat farther into the cave or stand and fight. But if, as Rani says, they fear this place, they may not even try to enter.”
Outside the cave there was a burst of noise—shouting Tharn, thundering dil, and clattering equipment. Jarvis heard the Lugal Zag-ab-Shab roaring at his warriors to enter the cave and cursing them as they held back.
A new voice rang out and Jarvis recognized in its tone the authority of the Dingir. He wondered how the Lugal had reacted when the Dingir had returned. Right now, they seemed to be in command, but no more successful at urging the warriors into the cave.
Jarvis had tried to probe the tortuous gut writhing into the mountain, but the perception he had had of what lay far below made him sick with dread. What kind of horror could the elyisha be that even the dreadful Tharn feared to face it?
Jarvis turned to exploring the walls of their prison with his Mag senses. Darkness shrouded their surroundings, but his perception saw plainer than sight. He leaped upon the rocks behind them and climbed toward the ceiling. There was an opening in the rock! From the narrow fissure fanned a cool breeze—it must open on daylight above!
“Come quickly!” he whispered to his companions. “Here is a way out!”
He let them enter ahead of him, then squeezed himself between the tight-drawn lips of rock just as the light entering the cave mouth dimmed as it was blocked by the bodies of half a dozen giant Bronze Men surrounding the Lugal Zag-ab-Shab himself. They advanced with cautious steps and drawn swords.
The fugitives huddled in the fissure, not daring to breathe. Below them, the Dingir party halted.
“If they have gone farther than this,” protested the Lugal, “they will never come out alive. That is what you want, isn’t it?”
“It is not for you to decide what we want or do not want,” retorted one of the Bronze Men. “You angered us when you flouted our authority last night. The next time will be your last. And if you had succeeded as you planned with the princess of Gipar, we would have killed you when we returned!”
“They must have gone farther in,” said another Bronze Man. They gathered in a huddle just under the fissure and traded comments in a language strange to Jarvis’ ears. The Lugal stood nervously aside by himself, straining his huge, saucerish eyes to peer into the blackness of the cave.
“Let us return,” he grumbled. “We can make camp in the canyon until nightfall. When the elyisha stirs with the fall of night, they will have to come out—if they are still alive!”
The party retreated, leading the fugitives’ dil out into the open.
“What shall we do now?” Ilil whispered, stirring cramped limbs.
“Between what lies below and what awaits outside,” Jarvis replied, “there is no place else to go but up. Let me by and I will lead.”
It was an ordeal to squeeze by the two women in the cramped space of the fissure. Jarvis began to climb, probing for handholds in the dark with his Mag senses, offering advice to the two below in low tones. Slowly they toiled upward. Sometimes the fissure so narrowed that it was all Jarvis could do to squeeze through. Then it would widen again and they mounted ever upward.
There was no sense of time in this subterrene blackness. How long or how far they climbed, Jarvis could not guess. After a while, he could pass on no more climbing directions. The only sound was the scraping of their feet, or the occasional ring of axe or sword upon the stone wall. They stopped many times to rest, bodies braced across the chimney. Jarvis’ hands were raw, his knees and back bruised. The women must be suffering agonies from the climb, but neither voiced a word of complaint.
When he was about to despair of ever finding an end to this tortuous worm-hole, he fancied he saw the blackness of the pit turning gray above. He redoubled his effort. A moment later he crawled out upon the sandy floor of a small cavern and turned to help his companions to safety.
A quick glance around revealed the hopelessness of their position. The cavern was wholly enclosed with no entrance save the one through which they had come and another—a small hole in the ceiling through which streamed daylight—fifteen feet above their heads!
He sat down upon the sandy floor to rest his aching muscles. He had had no food since yesterday morning and his body felt the lack.
“We can always go back down,” he said without enthusiasm. “By tomorrow they will consider we have fallen foul of the elyisha and will go away.”
The thought of retracing that perilous path downward in the dark was no source of encouragement to any. Ilil and Rani lay collapsed wordless beside him, blowing the hair back from their heated faces in the way women have, whatever their world of origin. And thus they rested. Jarvis did not attempt to tell the passing hours, noting only that the light in the roof-opening was at last slowly dimming.
Then suddenly a brittle sound reached his ears from above. A clumsy foot had kicked a rock. He leaped to his feet and his Mag senses probed…
“Thork!” he called. “Valdez! Here we are!”
An ugly, tusked blue face looked down on them through the hole in the ceiling, joined a moment later by the face of Valdez.
“It’s dark in there!” Valdez said. “We can’t see you.”
“Stand away from the hole,” Jarvis said. “I will throw my axe up and you can pull us out with the cord!”
Minutes later, the cave-bound trio stood once again in the light of day, gripping their rescuers and rejoicing with exclamations of delight. By nightfall they were miles from the cave of the elyisha and on their way through the mountains to Gipar.
“Lucky I stumbled on that hole in the ground years ago,” Thork had told them. “When we saw you riding into the cave with the Tharn after you, I knew you would find the chimney in the rock. We would have got to you sooner, except we had to go a long way around to avoid the Tharn.”
They forged almost due east for weeks. They picked a road among mountainous crags, traversed breath-taking gorges slashed in the native rock, paralleled torrents thundering in the defiles, climbed precipitous cliffs, and rounded the sho
ulders of mountains on narrow ledges. They lived off the country, depending on Jarvis’ boomerang, axe or knife to fell their game.
Valdez and Rani spent their time together, and Jarvis knew that it was only a pretext—but a splendid one—when the Peruvian asserted he made much of the girl’s company only to learn the language of Eloraspon. And Jarvis frequented Ilil’s presence most of the time, which left Thork pretty much to himself, grim and taciturn but stumping along, doing more than his share in dressing game, preparing meals, and helping his companions over rough spots in the road.
Thork was big. Thork was strong. His looks and his aloneness put him just a little outside the social circle. Only Jarvis sensed the bitterness eating at the heart of the blue giant. He walked sometimes by the side of his own daughter, to whom he could not speak a fatherly word. He approached the borders of his own country, which he dared not enter. He was Tharn, and at no time in his decade of exile had he felt it more keenly than now.
They were a travel-stained lot that bore down at long last upon an outpost of the Giparian border guard. They were weary, garbed in the shaggy pelts of game animals, for their clothing had long since worn and torn to shreds. The hair and beards of the Earthmen were long and tangled.
They viewed the dome-topped stone hut of the outpost from the crest of a ridge, saw the banner flying above it, and broke into a run. He knew the reason for such construction now—the slul. After a few running steps, Jarvis slowed, looked around. Where was Thork? He called.
Valdez laid a hand on his arm. “I have learned enough Elorasponese to understand his story as he told it to me, Jeff. Don’t make the parting hard for him.”
Jarvis shook free of the Peruvian’s grip and hastened back the way they had come, calling out Thork’s name. The blue giant had halted in the shadow of a copse.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 74
