The sad purple eyes of the Winged Man brooded on the distant past thoughtfully.
It was the thought of our savants that by adopting a new mode of life in the skies of Laon, we could sever the bonds which bound us, however remotely, to the brutehood from which we had emerged. That we were akin to the lower beasts was ever a thought which rankled in the hearts of my people, he observed ironically. True, a billion years of evolution stood between us and the red, howling murk of our bestial ancestry, and we had progressed far indeed… halfway to the stars. But this was deemed insufficient, and by adopting a new life in the skies, housed in aerial metropolises of a synthetic metal we manufactured by molecular selection from the inert gases of the upper atmosphere, it was believed we should for all time prove our superiority to our origins. It was this insane pride in our accomplishments, and this denial of our common origin among the animal life, that proved in time the fatal flaw in our civilization. For it led in time to the read quest for immortality—for the perfection of the Elixir of Light—of which I have already spoken. And it was this, as you know, which led to our doom and to the eventual extinction of the Kalood race.
“By an odd coincidence,” the Yothian philosopher interrupted, “much the same poison has tainted the mentality of the Skymen. For they have launched themselves upon the same quest for immortality which in time consumed and destroyed the Winged Men of remote aeons. Over uncounted ages their wise men have managed to decipher the inexplicable records left by the Kaloodha, who built the Flying Cities and then abandoned them as their race began to dwindle and die out. And thus the black men have for ages sought to perfect the lost immortality serum of the Kaloodha, although by this time, in their ignorance and mad arrogance, deeming themselves to be gods, they have permitted themselves to forget the Kalood origins both of the Flying Cities and of the Elixir. By now, the pitiful maniacs have managed to convince themselves that they invented the Flying Cities, and that they are gods. In there experiments to perfect the Elixir, they employ we human cattle from The World Below, whom they deem less than beasts. I represent one of the more successful experiments, for they have managed to lengthen my life-span to a full millennium.”
Niamh was horrified.
“Do you mean to say these creatures use men and women as mere laboratory animals?” she demanded.
The frail ancient nodded, sorrow in his deep eyes.
“It is for this reason that we call ourselves the ‘Legion of the Doomed,’ ” he said. “Day after day the blue hawks are sent out to raid the treetop cities and the savage wandering tribes of The World Below. Those who are captured are imprisoned here for the remainder of their lives. They are doomed beyond hope, beyond even fear. Those who die early in the experiments are the lucky ones; their cadavers go to feed the fierce cannibal zawkaw.”
“And… those who do not die?” asked Janchan.
The features of Nimbalim were somber with an ancient sadness.
“For them the future holds nothing but the knife, the organ transplants… the injection, over and over, of nameless fluids… the merciless blaze of the great lamps whose weird radiance brings madness to some, deformity to others… immortality to a few. We have this horror to face, day after day, for the rest of our lives… is it any wonder that we call ourselves the Legion of the Doomed?”
The old man fell silent then, leaving them to their own grim thoughts. And those thoughts were of the same ghastly tenor… that to this doomed life of hopeless terror they, too, were doomed.
That night, as the strange, sourceless illumination dimmed in the great domed hall, they sought their pallets one by one. Nimbalim set out for them places near the corner of the hall wherein he slept himself, together with a few of the youths whom he tutored in his philosophy.
They tossed and turned, weary from the dreadful experiences of the day, but unable to find solace in restful slumbers.
Janchan stared long into the darkness, thinking of the terrible fate to which they were condemned. The two women were in his charge, and he was responsible for them. He grimly determined to go down fighting, rather than to stand by as they were subjected to inhuman experiments at the hands of the black skinned madmen who thought themselves divinities.
But it would be simple to fight and be slain. So simple, in fact, that it was almost a cowardly escape from the doom which now faced them.
The difficult thing—the impossible, the almost heroic thing—would be to live.
To live in a world controlled by maniacs who used human slaves as men use beasts… a world, moreover, from which there was no possible escape.
The Third Book
INTO THE ABYSS
Chapter 9
At the Bottom of the World
While, all unknown to us, these dark and terrible events had enveloped my comrades in the Flying City of Calidar, Klygon and I were descending into the unbroken gloom of that mysterious abyss of unknown horrors which lay at the foot of the sky-tall trees.
Mad with panic from terror of the zawkaw, our dragonfly-steeds, completely beyond control, hurtled downward into the shadows that gathered about the floor of the gigantic forest.
True, I had managed to destroy the immense blue hawk-thing by means of the death-flash. But the small brains of our zaiphs are able to contain but one idea at a time. And a billion years of being preyed upon by the great indigo hunting birds of the treetops had bred deep into the very nature of the zaiphs a blind, unreasoning terror of the monstrous hawks.
The tiny brain of our flying steeds, therefore, contained but one thought.
And that thought was—flight!
Down and down and down they fled, resisting our every effort to bring them under our control. I tugged and jerked on the reins with all my strength, but to little or no avail. Below me, dwindling in the depths, and vanishing from my sight in the gathering gloom, Klygon the Assassin was similarly occupied. But naught that I could do slowed in the slightest the terror-stricken descent of the maddened zaiph.
The dangers that confronted us were very real.
I was not thinking of the shadowy, monstrous horrors which crawled and slithered through the gloom of the ultimate abyss, according to the mythology of the jewelbox cities of the upper terraces. Those slobbering nightmarish monstrosities might or might not exist—I neither knew, nor, at the moment, did I really care.
No—the fear which possessed me was of another, and a very different, danger. And that was simply that, in their panic and madness, the giant insects we rode would dash us to death against the floor of the forest.
Within mere moments, the last faint gleam of daylight would be lost—and we would fly into a region of impenetrable darkness. Whatever obstructions lay beneath us, directly in our path, we would not be able to see, neither could we avoid.
Surely, there might be low branches, or great tangled roots, or even jagged and gigantic stones there at the bottom of the world. Against these our maddened zaiphs, in their blindness, might dash themselves to death.
However, there was nothing we could do to avoid the perils of the black Abyss below.
So we flew down—down—down!
Darkness closed about us-thick, black, and suffocating.
Only with great difficulty do the sunbeams of the Green Star pierce the great veil of clouds which envelop the world whereon I now dwelt.
And the shafts of radiance which do manage to penetrate the silvery clouds that shield the planet from the fierce light of its fiery emerald primary, those beams are transmuted to a dim green-gold luminance as they filter through the immense masses of foliage which are borne up by the branches of the gigantic trees.