Niamh the Fair slid from the saddle to the greensward and lay there numbly for a time. The disastrous and tragic turn of events which had turned their escape into yet another nightmare of captivity, separating her forever (as she supposed) from her friends and former comrades, left her dazed and apathetic. She had seen the sparkling bolt of force that struck the skysled; she had watched with horror as the crippled craft swerved into the foliage of the great trees, careening crazily; even if Prince Janchan, Zarqa the Kalood and the aged philosopher, Nimbalim, had not died when the bolt struck their craft, surely their death had followed swiftly when the craft had crashed into the trees.
She was now completely alone and friendless, as she had been once before; before her eyes, the mighty form of her hero and lover, the great champion Chong, had been struck down by a traitor’s blow during their desperate escape from the Secret City. If anything, her present situation was even more desperate and completely hopeless. So far had she wandered, that she had not the slightest idea in which part of the world she now was. Wherever she was, surely she was thousands of leagues from her own city of Phaolon. Even the wise old sage of her court, Khin-nom, had not known of the existence of this mysterious, unknown sea.
Even worse, she was on a savage jungle isle; at the mercies of a depraved maniac who regarded her and her companion as mindless beasts, formed in a weird mockery of humanity; to be ruthlessly disposed of at will. Her situation was precarious and replete with perils.
Rousing herself from her despondency, the resourceful girl determined to explore the jungle. Perhaps she might find a hiding-place wherein she might seclude herself against discovery; or perhaps within the lush verdure she hoped to stumble upon some manner of weapon with which to defend herself against the fury of Ralidux.
She stepped into the dense growth of brush which grew at the jungle’s edge and vanished from view.
Ralidux bore the unconscious Arjala into the gloom of the jungle aisles. Although he had never before seen such surroundings as these, having spent the interminable centuries of his immortality in the synthetic environment of the Flying City, he wasted scarcely a single glance on the wild, untamed vegetation through which he progressed.
His entire being was concentrated upon the voluptuous form of the helpless young woman he held clasped against his breast. The last vestiges of reason had deserted the black immortal by now; lust blazed up within him, consuming his last tenuous grip on his sanity as if in a conflagration.
The wall of trees parted, revealing a dim glade and a limpid pool whose cool, fresh, crystalline waters bubbled up from hidden springs. Depositing his limp burden on the grassy margin of this pool, he bent, dampened the hem of his garment in the chill waters, and began bathing the face of the unconscious woman.
In a moment or two, Arjala stirred. Her thick lashes parted and she gazed about her in wonderment. Beyond the pool, half-buried in jungle foliage, lay huge blocks of stone and broken columns carven with curious symbols in an unknown language. It was these ruins which first caught her attention. To her dazed mind, it seemed as if she had awakened from her swoon only to find herself immersed in a strange, marvelous dream. The last thing she could remember was that long, nightmarish flight through the moonless dark, crushed helplessly in the arms of the beautiful black madman who had carried both herself and the Princess Niamh out of the sky city astride his monstrous winged steed. Now she woke, if indeed she was awake, to find herself in a wild, disordered garden of tropical growths such as she had never envisioned, not even in her wildest fancies.
Trees she had known had soared into the heavens like god-built pillars supporting the sky. But these trees that ringed the glade where she lay were curiously dwarfed, rising to merely two or three times the height of a full-grown man. And what were these peculiar ruins that lay strewn about, half-buried under roots and bushes? Never had she heard of cities built of stone. In the treetop regions where her race customarily made its abode, deposits of stone were unknown. The cities of the Laonese were made of crystals—a tough, resilient material derived from the sap of the sky-tall trees among whose upper branches the cities of her race were built.
But as a priestess of the Inner Temple, as an Initiate of the Secret Mysteries, she was privy to certain antique lore preserved by the priestly scribes and archivists. Thus, she recognized certain of the stony glyphs as the work of a prehistoric race whose origins were shrouded in mystery, as was their eventual doom; a race her people held in the highest degree of awe, and whom they knew only as “the Ancient Ones.”
She half-rose from her recumbent position to examine the enigmatic ruins more closely. Then it was that her wandering gaze fell upon the magnificent form of the half-naked black Calidarian. He stood motionless as an eidolon of jet, watching her lissome movements with eyes of cold yet burning quicksilver—eye within which there blazed no spark of pity or humanity—eyes fierce with unholy hunger and with the pure frenzy of desire.
It was Ralidux! So she had not dreamt it all, but was still at the mercies of the mad immortal who had conceived a consuming passion for her loveliness!
She fell back on the cushion of the sward, half-faint at her discovery. As she did so, a mad lust flared up in the immobile features of the Skyman and he sprang upon her as a wild beast springs upon his shrinking prey.
Chapter 7.
ALTAR OF THE SERPENT-GOD
Even as had Arjala, Niamh marvelled at the strangeness of the jungle foliage. That trees should grow so small seemed to her both wondrous and inexplicable. Still and all, this was a portion of the world thoroughly unknown to her and her kind; it was perhaps only natural that in such strange regions nature should adopt forms other than those familiar to her.
She wondered at brilliant flowers like jungle orchids, that grew in a variety of hues bewildering and bizarre—flame orange, virulent scarlet, cat’s-eye yellow—and at blossoms striped, speckled and mottled with patches of velvety black. Their heady odor intoxicated her senses, even as she exclaimed in astonishment over their smallness. The blossoms known to her, that grew wild upon the mighty boughs of the towering trees, were often the size of mature humans. True, in the roofed gardens of Phaolon, horticulturists had bred flowers as minutely small as these through patient cultivation and grafting; but to find such miniscule flowers blossoming in the jungle was startling to her.
And then it was that she came upon the Temple—for a Temple it could only be.
It loomed above the dwarfish tangle of the trees, walls of crumbling, sculptured stone bedizened with weird and curious ornamentation. Stone faces leered and grinned above the lintels of door, gate and window; faces with fanged maws or cruel beaks instead of mouths, with bulging, inhuman brows crowned with sharp horns, or curling locks like serpents. Some had two eyes, some three or four or seven; some bore but one glaring organ amidst their brows, which stared cycloptically down at the wondering girl.
Niamh, too, was an Initiate of the Secret Mysteries. She knew something of the lore of that vanished race, rumored to have existed on the extremities of the planet during its youth. They had been contemporaries of the Winged Ones, of the Kaloodha, of Zarqa’s long-extinct people, had the mysterious Ancient Ones. Alone among the many denizens of the World of the Green Star, they had built their habitations upon the surface of the planet, rather than aloft amidst the branches of the gigantic trees.
A flight of stone steps rose steeply from the floor of the jungle to the threshold of the carven gate, which yawned blackly open. Vines and lianas shrouded the bottom-most steps, and dead leaves were blown into the corners of the stairs. Time had pried apart the stones whereof the stairs were built, and saplings grew amidst the steps, thrusting the stones awry.