Bolt after sizzling bolt clove the impenetrable darkness. With each flash of lightning, one of the Komarians died as if struck down by the levin-bolts of heaven.
Andar looked up in horror and amazement. Atop the monstrous idol of Koroga stood the Warlord. How he had gotten up there was a mystery for which Andar had no solution. But there he stood, and in his hand was clasped a most peculiar weapon. It was a rod of sparkling crystal that blazed from within with captive lightnings. Each time the Warlord levelled the crystal rod, a blast of lightning fire struck from it, and a man died.
Andar had never seen or heard of a zoukar, a death-flash; these were the terrible weapons of the vanished race of Winged Men. Nor could he guess how the enigmatic mastermind of the Barbarians had gotten such a device. But he knew, with a grim certainty that went beyond words, that the zoukar spelt the end of all his hopes.
The bitterness of defeat was like ashes on his tongue. His sword-arm faltered, and fell to his side. From the summit of the idol, the Warlord’s voice echoed down to the embattled troop of swordsmen.
There was mockery in those tones, and a strange note of wild and reckless laughter; a heavy finality, like the ring of death.
“Lay down your arms and surrender, or I will burn you down where you stand!”
Eryon looked over to where Andar stood, and there were tears in the eyes of the older man. “Let us fight on to the end of it, sire,” he urged. But Andar shook his head.
“There is no use,” the Prince said with quiet dignity.
And he cast down his blade upon the tiles.
One by one they were disarmed, by the mere handful of Barbarians who still remained alive in the citadel.
Further resistance would be utterly futile, they knew; for all the while the Warlord stood, smiling with smooth mockery, atop the idol. In his hand, held in negligent carelessness, was the lightning weapon which had ruined their last chances of success, dashing the sweet cup of victory from their lips.
“It was a good fight, my Prince,” Eryon said heavily, as the Barbarians removed his weapons. “You have nothing for which to reprove yourself… ‘twas doomed to failure, I suppose. After all, when in the gory annals of war, seige and conquest, have half a hundred men taken an entire city? Your father would be proud of you this dawn.”
Was it indeed dawn? Andar lifted his head and looked about him wearily; yes, the freshness of morning was on the rising sea-breeze; and the east was pallid as nacre with the rising of the Green Star. The night had seemed but half-over, so swiftly had the time passed.
He doubted if he would live to see the evening of this day.
“We tried and failed, old friend,” he said. “At the very least we made them pay a goodly price in blood and lives and honor—”
“No talking, you scum!” spat the Barbarian nearest to him. Andar looked him straight in the eyes with a cool, level glance; his eyes were unafraid, faintly disdainful. The Barbarian flushed, scowled, and raised a heavy hand to cuff the captive youth across the mouth.
But the blow did not fall.
Puzzled, Andar looked to see why his tormentor had stopped his hand. The Barbarian stood rigid, his face slack-jawed and stupid with astonishment, staring at something far above them. Andar, from his position, could not see it.
He looked up, to find the source of the other’s amazement. And then he gasped in awe, as a vast black shape slid across the sky and settled down upon them—
Chapter 24.
RACE AGAINST TIME
The gigantic serpent, still holding me helplessly pinned in the grip of its coils, went wriggling up the crumbling stony stairs of the ancient ruin. It made as if to enter the black and yawning mouth of the long-abandoned temple.
Suddenly—unaccountably—it paused, lingering on the very threshold. Then it turned and struck, viciously, again and again—struck at something which I could not see!
In its furious writhings, the coils about my middle were loosened. I fell a short distance, to land on the broken stair. I lay there, gasping for breath, sucking the sweet air into my oxygen-starved lungs, numb from head to foot, but grateful to find myself still alive.
The sounds of a terrific battle surged about me on the stair. I could not see anything at all, of course; but from the panting breath of the enraged monster serpent, and from the way it thrashed about, it was obvious that the brute was engaged in a battle to the death with some unimaginable opponent.
I staggered to my knees, groping about. The stone steps were low and broad, thickly grown with lichens and slimy mosses; littered with fallen leaves and bits of carven stone which the remorseless erosion of the ages had loosened from their settings. I began stumblingly to feel my way down the stairs.
The Ssalith uttered a hissing screech of agony and furious rage. Its monstrous fangs closed again and again upon the flesh of its attacker; I could hear the crunching of bones and the meaty sound of flesh being hammered and torn by those tremendous jaws.
Yet, I had not the slightest clue as to the identity of its adversary. Nor had the other beast yet uttered the faintest sound. What could it possibly be, that dwelt here on this isle, huge enough to fearlessly engage one of the most dreaded of predators on this planet. Had this battle taken place miles aloft, in a branch of one of the sky-tall trees, I could have hazarded a guess or two. For the upper realm is made terrible by such enormous monstrosities as the ythid, or scarlet tree-dwelling dragon; to say nothing of titanic albino spiders whom the Laonese called the xoph.
Either of these terrors of the treetops might well afford the monster serpent a worthy adversary in battle.
But we were not in the arboreal regions, but upon a jungle isle. From my own experience as a castaway on just such an island as this, with Shann, the girl whom I had come to love and from whose companionship I had so mysteriously and abruptly been sundered, I knew too sell that no denizens of the upper regions dwelt here in the islands of the sea.
I am unable to explain why the forms of life which inhabit the upper regions of the great trees should differ in so marked a manner from those which dwell upon the jungle-girt islands of the Komarian Sea. But, after all, this is only one of the smaller of many puzzling and inexplicable mysteries which I have thus far encountered upon the World of the Green Star.
If this were a work of extravagant fiction I am writing, and not a sober, factual chronicle of events in which, however, incredible it seems, I have personally played a role, doubtless I would have, or could invent, a scientific reason to allay the questions of my readers. But the resources of the novelist are denied to him who chooses to indite a factual history. All I can do it to assure you that the thing is as much of a puzzle to him who writes these words as it is to him who reads them.
I reached the floor of the grassy glade in which the ancient ruin was built, without molestation. I stood there hesitantly for a long, suspenseful moment, pondering what course of action I should take next.
I had not the slightest idea of where I now stood in relation to the whereabouts of my comrades. Obviously, I was on the interior of the island, since I could smell the sea hut faintly, as it were, through the rank odor of the jungle vegetation. I could not hear the waves as they broke against the beach at all.
But exactly how far into the interior of the unknown isle the monstrous Ssalith had taken me, I was completely ignorant.
Undoubtedly, my friends had wasted no time in plunging into the jungle after me, and were following the trail of the huge serpent which had carried me off, as swiftly as they could. Also, it seemed very likely that the passage of so immense a creature would leave a trail clearly visible to the eyes of any who sought to track it to its lair. For these reasons, I decided that it was probably only a matter of time before Zarqa and Klygon, Janchan and Prince Parimus, would reach this ruin-encumbered glade in search of my whereabouts.