The opening he indicated by his nod was closed with heavy doors of wood and kept under perpetual guard. I had often noticed it, but had not known until now that this was, in fact, the way to the upper world.
“I gather, Delgan, that in your opinion we have little chance of escaping by that means?”
Mischief glittered in his bright black eyes.
“Unless you possess remarkable supernatural powers, O Karn, I believe you will find that exit impenetrable,” he said softly. “For beyond that portal lie the pens wherein the atrocious sluth abide; and the sluth feed upon human flesh, whenever they may do so…”
I tightened my jaw grimly, and, beside me, Klygon shivered with an involuntary grimace. For the sluth were the enormous worm-monsters the cave-savages tamed for riding—if “tamed” be the proper word. We certainly had no chance of fleeing through a cavern thronged by the immense, glistening worms, for they could writhe and wriggle many times faster than a man could run.
Like all of our previous conversations on the theme of escape, this one ended in silence and hopeless frustration.
But there must be a way out of the caverns—and I was determined to find it.
It was Klygon’s misfortune, a little while after this, to have been on watch during one of the infrequent invasions of the kraan. The mysterious enemies feared by the cave-savages did not very often make an incursion into the chambers of the degenerate albinos, but when they did it marked the termination of our captivity, in a sense.
As I have remarked earlier in this narrative, the fat white grubs the cave-dwellers herded like cattle required little or no guarding. A day or two after our conversation with Delgan, Klygon was set to watch over the herds while I was assigned the task of tending the fire-pit. My first intimation of the attack came when Klygon, white-faced with terror, burst suddenly into the central cavern, squalling fearfully.
Behind him came a fantastic, clattering horde of chitin-clad monster-ants!
They were the size of elephants, these ants, their dark red armor gleaming with an oily sheen, their gaunt, bristling legs propelling them into the cavern with remarkable speed. There were scores of them, and many crunched in their sharp-toothed mandibles the remnants of the juicy yngoum they had pounced upon in the far cavern. Glittering compound eyes sparkling with cold intelligence, the clattering horde poured into the central cavern, snatching up howling albino savages and ripping them asunder. They moved like lightning and were upon the tribe in a second.
Roaring, some of the savages seized up rude flint-bladed spears and hurled them against the foremost of the attackers, but to little avail. The crablike armor of the kraan were proof to the blades, and, in mere moments the gigantic ants had swarmed over the defenders, slaying most of them.
And then, as suddenly as they had come upon us, the horde of giant ants vanished back into the farther caverns from which they had come. I later learned that, while they possessed a cold, emotionless intelligence perhaps equal to that of the degenerate savages, they were totally unpredictable. They could have invested the cavern in another few moments, and would probably have slain the tribe down to its last member. But some inexplicable message flashed among the scuttling, many-legged monsters, and as if by some prearranged signal, they turned and poured back into the cavern in a chittering horde, and were gone, leaving the herds devastated and perhaps a dozen of the tribe slaughtered.
Klygon fell sobbing at my feet.
“I but nodded off, lad!” he blubbered. “Forty winks is all—and the giant red creatures were upon me, and I ran!”
“You fool, you were supposed to sound the alarm!” Delgan hissed. For once, his urbane elegance had vanished, and his face was a pale, twitching mask of feral rage.
“I know—I know!” Klygon blubbered.
Then a huge dirty hand snatched him to his feet, shook him as a terrier worries a rat, and flung him facedown in the muck of the cavern floor. It was Gor-ya, wild-eyed with rage. Spitting with fury, he began to vent his rage on my small, hapless friend. In one hand the savage chief held a long barbed whip; in the other he clutched my wriggling comrade. The whip rose and fell, whistling through the air. Blood spurted from the flesh of the squealing, kicking little Assassin, and I suddenly understood where Delgan had got those raw, half-healed welts that crisscrossed his back and shoulders.
I lost my head.
I could not endure to watch idly, without intervention, while the brutal Gor-ya whipped Klygon to a pulp.
The cave-man was head and shoulders taller than I, and twice as heavy. His broad, sloping shoulders and long, dangling, apelike arms lent him tremendous strength. I could hardly hope to engage him in battle without a sword or spear or some manner of weapon.
And then the great fire that roared in the shallow pit caught my eye.
Swift as thought, and without conscious volition, I stooped and snatched up a brand from the fire, and sprang upon the growling bully whose whip rose and fell, scattering droplets of blood on the smoky air.
I thrust the flaming brand at his bowed legs, singeing his flesh.
Gor-ya lurched back from the huddled, hapless figure of Klygon, bellowing with surprise and pain.
His little red eyes, bright with rage and blood-lust, peered about, sighting me there with the blazing brand clenched in my hand. With a roar of outraged fury he swung the whip up and brought it hissing upon my breast. Pain licked through my flesh like a tongue of fire.
The logical thing to do would have been to spring backward to avoid the stinging kiss of Gor-ya’s whip. But behind me lay the shallow pit filled with leaping flames.
So I sprang forward, into the reach of his terrible arms.
Dropping the whip, he lunged for me with grasping paws.
If once those calloused paws closed on me, the unequal battle would be over. A half-grown boy, I could not hope to fight the hulking savage on his own terms, hand to hand. Once those hands clamped down on my arms, Gor-ya would maul and maim me, and in his present savage temper, he would either kill me or cripple me with his bare hands.
So I did the only thing there was for me to do—and thrust the burning torch directly into his face.
The matted tangle of his filthy hair caught fire and flared up with a crackling sound and a stench of burning flesh.
Shrieking like a gelded bull, Gor-ya staggered back, beating at his burning mane with scorched and blistering hands. Then he fell wallowing in the muck of the cavern floor, frantically daubing himself with reeking mud to extinguish the flames.
I knelt, dragged the blubbering form of Klygon to his feet, and thrust the whimpering little Assassin into a stumbling, staggering run, fiercely bidding him to get out of the vicinity while he could.
I would have fled myself, hoping to elude the vengeance of Gor-ya in the far tunnels, but I had reckoned without the hulking tribesmen who flocked to the scene. One clouted me from behind with a stone ax or club—I know not which—and the blow sent me to my knees.
Groggy from the smashing impact, I sprawled limply and in the next instant hairy, unwashed bodies fell upon me, pinning me helpless in the grip of many powerful arms, nearly crushing the breath out of me. The torch was torn from my grasp.
A moment later they wrestled me to my feet and I blinked blearily into the enraged features of Gor-ya.
In truth, he was a ghastly sight, his ugly, heavy-browed face a mass of raw burns and blisters, half his shaggy mane burned away, his venomous little eyes mad with killing fury. My heart sank within me then, and I consigned my spirit to the gods, for the face of Gor-ya was murderous and I was helpless and in his power. A quick, brutal death was what I hoped for.
Panting heavily, clenching and unclenching his blistered paws, the shaggy ogrelike chieftain lurched toward me. I had mere moments of life left, and I knew it.