Part 7 (1/2)
”Gathol!” exclaimed Tara of Helium ”Lies Gathol close by Manator?”
”Not close, yet still the nearest country,” replied Lan-O ”About twenty-two degrees east, it lies”
Approximately 814 Earth Miles
”Gathol!” murmured Tara, ”Far Gathol!”
”But you are not froirl; ”your harness is not of Gathol”
”I am from Helium,” said Tara ”It is far froirl, ”but in our studies we learned reatness of Helium, we of Gathol, so it seems not so far away”
”You, too, are from Gathol?” asked Tara
”Many of us are froirl ”It is to Gathol, nearest country, that the Manatorians look for slaves reat numbers at intervals of three or seven years and haunt the roads that lead to Gathol, and thus they capture whole caravans leaving none to bear warning to Gathol of their fate Nor do any ever escape from Manator to carry word of us back to Gahan our jed”
Tara of Heliuirl's words aroused memories of the last hours she had spent in her father's palace and the great midday function at which she had met Gahan of Gathol Even now she flushed as she recalled his daring words
Upon her reveries the door opened and a burly warrior appeared in the opening--a hulking felloith thick lips and an evil, leering face The slave girl sprang to her feet, facing him
”What does this mean, E-Med?” she cried, ”was it not the will of A-Kor that this woman be not disturbed?”
”The will of A-Kor, indeed!” and the man sneered ”The will of A-Kor is without power in The Towers of Jetan, or elsewhere, for A-Kor lies now in the pits of O-Tar, and E-Med is dwar of the Towers”
Tara of Heliuirl pale and the terror in her eyes
CHAPTER XII
GHEK PLAYS PRANKS
WHILE Tara of Heliu led to The Towers of Jetan, Ghek was escorted to the pits beneath the palace where he was ihted cha upon the dirt floor near the wall, and set in the wall several rings froths of chain At the base of the walls were several holes in the dirt floor These, alone, of the several things he saw, interested him Ghek sat down upon the bench and waited in silence, listening Presently the lights were extinguished If Ghek could have smiled he would have then, for Ghek could see as well in the dark as in the light--better, perhaps He watched the dark openings of the holes in the floor and waited Presently he detected a change in the air about hiht Ghek have smiled, could he have smiled
Let them replace all the air in the chamber with their most deadly fumes; it would be all the sas, required no air With the rykor it ht be different Deprived of air it would die; but if only a sufficient aas was introduced to stupefy an ordinary creature it would have no effect upon the rykor, who had no objectiveas the excess of carbon dioxide in the blood was not sufficient to prevent heart action, the rykor would suffer only a di agency of the kaldane's brain
Ghek caused the rykor to assuainst the here it ht remain without direction from his brain Then he released his contact with its spinal cord; but re, for the kaldane's curiosity was aroused He had not long to wait before the lights were flashed on arid one of the locked doors opened to admit a half-dozen warriors They approached him rapidly and worked quickly First they re a fetter about one of the rykor's ankles, secured hi fro table to a new position and there bolted it to the floor so that an end, instead of the middle, was directly before the prisoner On the table before him they set food and water and upon the opposite end of the table they laid the key to the fetter Then they unlocked and opened all the doors and departed
When Turan the panthan regained consciousness it was to the realization of a sharp pain in one of his forearas departed as rapidly as they had overcome him so that as he opened his eyes he was in full possession of all his faculties The lights were on again and in their glow there was revealed to theupon the table and gnawing upon his ar his ar, sought to seize his arain It was then that Turan discovered that his weapons had been reer, and pistol The rat charged hi the creature aith his hand thehich to strike a harder blow Again the rat charged and as Turan stepped quickly back to avoid the ht ankle, and as he drew his left foot back to regain his equilibriuht upon a taut chain and he fell heavily backward to the floor just as the rat leaped upon his breast and sought his throat
The Martian rat is a fierce and unlovely thing It isthat of a newborn ht it is coe Airedale terrier Its eyes are small and close-set, and almost hidden in deep, fleshy apertures But its most ferocious and repulsive feature is its jaws, the entire bony structure of which protrudes several inches beyond the flesh, revealing five sharp, spadelike teeth in the upper jaw and the sa the appearance of a rotting face frohed away
It was such a thing that leaped upon the breast of the panthan to tear at his jugular Twice Turan struck it away as he sought to regain his feet, but both times it returned with increased ferocity to renew the attack Its only weapons are its jaws since its broad, splay feet are ar jaws it excavates its winding burrows and with its broad feet it pushes the dirt behind it To keep the jaws from his flesh then was Turan's only concern and this he succeeded in doing until chance gave him a hold upon the creature's throat After that the end was but afroust
Now he turned his attention to a hurried inventory of the new conditions which surrounded hiuely what had happened He had been anaesthetized and stripped of his weapons, and as he rose to his feet he saw that one ankle was fettered to a chain in the wall He looked about the roo wide open! His captors would render his i glimpses of open aisles to the freedom he could not attain Upon the end of the table and within easy reach was food and drink This at least was attainable and at sight of it his starved stomach seemed almost to cry aloud for sustenance It ith difficulty that he ate and drank in moderation
As he devoured the food his eyes wandered about the confines of his prison until suddenly they seized upon a thing that lay on the table at the end farthest from him It was a key He raised his fettered ankle and examined the lock There could be no doubt of it! The key that lay there on the table before him was the key to that very lock A careless warrior had laid it there and departed, forgetting
Hope surged high in the breast of Gahan of Gathol, of Turan the panthan Furtively his eyes sought the open doorways There was no one in sight Ah, if he could but gain his freedom! He would find soain would he leave her until he had won safety for her or death for himself
He rose and moved cautiously toward the opposite end of the table where lay the coveted key The fettered ankle halted his first step, but he stretched at full length along the table, extending eager fingers toward the prize They almost laid hold upon it--a little more and they would touch it He strained and stretched, but still the thing lay just beyond his reach He hurled himself forward until the iron fetter bit deep into his flesh, but all futilely He sat back upon the bench then and glared at the open doors and the key, realizing now that they were part of a well-laid sche because it inflicted no physical suffering
For just a , then he gathered hiether, his brows cleared, and he returned to his unfinished meal At least they should not have the satisfaction of knowing how sorely they had hit hi the table along the floor he could bring the key within his reach, but when he essayed to do so, he found that the table had been securely bolted to the floor during the period of his unconsciousness, Again Gahan s
When the warriors had departed from the prison in which Ghek was confined, the kaldane crawled from the shoulders of the rykor to the table Here he drank a little water and then directed the hands of the rykor to the balance of it and to the food, upon which the brainless thing fell with avidity While it was thus engaged Ghek took his spider-like way along the table to the opposite end where lay the key to the fetter Seizing it in a chela he leaped to the floor and scurried rapidly toward the ainst the wall, into which he disappeared For long had the brain been conte these burrow entrances They appealed to his kaldanean tastes, and further, they pointed a hiding place for the key and a lair for the only kind of food that the kaldane relished--flesh and blood
Ghek had never seen an ulsio, since these great Martian rats had long ago disappeared froreatly relished by the kaldanes; but Ghek had inherited, almost unimpaired, every memory of every ancestor, and so he knew that ulsio inhabited these lairs and that ulsio was good to eat, and he knehat ulsio looked like and what his habits were, though he had never seen him nor any picture of him As we breed animals for the transmission of physical attributes, so the Kaldanes breed themselves for the trans memory and the power of recollection, and thus have they raised e term instinct, above the level of the threshold of the objective mind where it may be commanded and utilized by recollection Doubtless in our own subjective minds lie many of the ie upon our consciousness in dreaestions that we have before experienced some transient phase of our present existence Ah, if we had but the power to recall theotten story of the lost eons that have preceded us We arden of His stars whileidea within His mind
Ghek descended into the burrow at a steep incline for sohtful network of burrows! The kaldane was elated This indeed was life! He oal as you could to the kitchen of your own hooal lay at a low level in a spheroidal cavity about the size of a large barrel Here, in a nest of torn bits of silk and fur lay six baby ulsios
When the reat spider-like creature, which she i to attack only to be met by powerful chelae which seized and held her so that she could not ed her throat toward a hideous ht have re time, since there was ample food for many days; but he did not do so Instead he explored the burrows He followed them into many subterranean chah walls to rooeniously devised traps, and he found poisoned food and other signs of the constant battle that the inhabitants of Manator waged against these repulsive creatures that dwelt beneath their hos
His exploration revealed not only the vast proportions of the net-work of runways that apparently traversed every portion of the city, but the great antiquity of the majority of them Tons upon tons of dirtti doard a tunnel of great size and length he sensed before him the thunderous rush of subterranean waters, and presently ca onward, no doubt, the length of a world to the buried sea of Oenerations of ulsios pushed their few handsful of dirt in the excavating of their vast labyrinth
For only a ly ais were in reality proor and singleness of design He followed such runways as appeared to terminate in the pits or other chambers of the inhabitants of the city, and these he explored, usually from the safety of a burrow's ht was not there He s and covered remarkable distances in short periods of ti rewarded with immediate success, he decided to return to the pit where his rykor lay chained and look to its wants As he approached the end of the burrow that ter just within the entrance of the runway that heit As he did so he saw the figure of a warrior appear suddenly in an opposite doorway The rykor sprawled upon the table, his hands groping blindly for aze in sudden astonisho wide and an ashen hue replace the copper bronze of his cheek He stepped back as though someone had struck him in the face For an instant only he stood thus as in a paralysis of fear, then he uttered a sain was it a catastrophe that Ghek, the kaldane, could not s the room he crawled to the table top and affixed himself to the shoulders of his rykor, and there he waited; and who h he could not smile, possessed not a sense of humor? For a half-hour he sat there, and then there ca corridors of stone He could hear their arainst the rocky walls and he knew that they came at a rapid pace; but just before they reached the entrance to his prison they paused and advanced more slowly In the lead was an officer, and just behind him, wide-eyed and perhaps still a little ashen, the warrior who had so recently departed in haste At the doorway they halted and the officer turned sternly upon the warrior With upraised finger he pointed at Ghek
”There sits the creature! Didst thou dare lie, then, to thy dwar?”
”I swear,” cried the warrior, ”that I spoke the truth But a roveled, headless, upon this very table! And may my first ancestor strike me dead upon the spot if I speak other than a true word!”
The officer looked puzzled The men of Mars seldom if ever lie He scratched his head Then he addressed Ghek ”How long have you been here?” he asked
”Who knows better than those who placed me here and chained me to a wall?” he returned in reply
”Saw you this warrior enter here a few minutes since?”
”I saw him,” replied Ghek
”And you sat there where you sit now?” continued the officer
”Look thou to ht I sit!” cried Ghek ”Art the people of thy city all fools?”
Three other warriors pressed behind the two in front, craning their necks to view the prisoner while they grinned at the discomfiture of their fellow The officer scowled at Ghek
”Thy tongue is as venomous as that of the she-banth O-Tar sent to The Towers of Jetan,” he said