Part 31 (1/2)

Alone, unnoticed, they had departed from the City of Ice on a small flying platform similar to the one they had used before. The night had pa.s.sed; day, with a new warmth to the sun, came again. Flying low, with Tarrano in a grim, moody silence, and Elza staring downward.

The aural lights were overhead when at the last Tarrano brought the platform to rest. A thick, luxuriant forest. Huge trees with rope-like roots and heavy vines. Others with leaves like the ears of an elephant.

And the ground hidden by almost impenetrable underbrush.

They had landed in a tiny glade beside a dank marsh of water, where ferns shoulder high were embanked. It was dark, the stars and the tints of the auroral lights were barely distinguishable through the ma.s.s of foliage overhead. Elza gazed around her fearsomely. The air was heavy, oppressive. Redolent with the perfume of wild flowers and the smell of mouldering, steaming soil.

”All in good time. Lady Elza,” Tarrano repeated. ”You will know where we are presently; we are closer to human habitation than you would think.”

Elza's heart pounded. As they were descending she had noticed a glow of light in the sky ahead. As though by intuition now, she seemed to realize that they were not far from the Great City. Her thoughts leaped to me--Jac Hallen--there in Maida's palace. Tarrano's grim, sinister purpose was as yet unknown to her. But she guessed that in it, danger impended for me--for all of us in the Great City.

_”Jac! Danger! Jac! Danger!”_

Her thoughts instinctively reiterated the two words uppermost in her mind. And I think that it was just about then when they awakened me.

Leaving the vehicle, Tarrano commanded Elza to follow him; and he began picking his way through the jungle. A light was in his hand; it penetrated but a short distance. A quivering beam of yellow light; then Elza saw that upon occasion, as Tarrano's finger slid a lever, the beam narrowed, intensified to a bright lavender. And now where it struck, the vegetation withered. Blackened, sometimes burst into tiny flame, and parted thus before them as they advanced.

The jungle was silent; yet, as Elza listened, beneath the crackle of the burning twigs she could hear the tiny myriad voices of insect life.

Startled voices as the heat of Tarrano's beam struck them. Rustling leaves; breaking twigs; things scurrying and sliding away, unseen in the darkness.

Once or twice a cras.h.i.+ng--some monster disturbed in his rest plunging away. Again, a slithering bulk of something, undulating its path through the thickets. All unseen. Save once. Looking upward, Elza caught a gleam of green eyes overhead. A triangle of three baleful spots of phosph.o.r.escent green. Her murmur of fright caused Tarrano to glance upward. His lavender, beam, grown suddenly larger, swung there with a hiss. Falling from above came a pink body. A bloated body, square, with squat, twisted legs; a thing larger than a man. A grotesque naked monstrosity almost in human form. A travesty--gruesome mockery of mankind. A face, three-eyed...

The thing lay writhing in the underbrush, mouthing, mumbling and then screaming--the shrill scream of death agony. And the horrible smell of burning flesh as Tarrano's light played upon it...

”Come away, Lady Elza. I'm sorry. I had hoped to avoid an affair such as this.”

Sickened, shuddering, Elza clung close to Tarrano as he led her onward.

An hour or more; and now Elza could see in the distance the lights of the Great City.

_”Jac! Danger! Jac! Danger!”_

The idea of thought-transference had come to her. With all the power of her mind she was thinking her warning to me, praying that it might reach me.

”Single-handed, Lady Elza. You shall see now how, single-handed, I make impossible any attack upon Tarrano.”

In her abstraction Elza had almost forgotten herself and Tarrano; his voice reached her--his voice grim and with a gloating, sinister triumph in it. He was bending to the ground. Elza saw that they had come to an open s.p.a.ce--an eminence rising above the forest. Underfoot was a stony soil; in places, bare black rock with an outcropping of red, like the cinnabar from which on Earth we melt the _Heavy-metal_.[23]

[Footnote 23: Quicksilver.]

Tarrano faced her. ”Nature, my Lady Elza, is fair to my purpose. I knew I would find some such deposit as this.” He turned his face to one side attentively, and darted his light--harmlessly yellow now--to where a lone tree showed its great leaves beginning to waver in a night breeze.

”Nature is with us! See there, my Elza! A wind is coming--a wind from us to--them!”

The breeze grew--a breeze blowing directly over the forest to where in the distance the lights of the Great City showed plainly. Tarrano added:

”I had thought to create the wind.” He tapped his belt. ”Create the wind to carry our onslaught. But you see, it is unnecessary. Nature is kind, and far more efficacious than our man-made devices.”

_”Jac! Danger!”_ She stood there in the breeze, watching Tarrano--his purpose as yet no more than guessed--praying that I might receive her warning.