The most deliciously hilarious thing about our escape was, of course, the manner in which we had turned the tables on our prideful and super-confident captors. Chief among whom was the self-styled “Empress of Callisto.” The captor had herself become the captive, and we had reversed our roles with a vengeance! We would not have been human if the situation had not delighted us so.
As for Zamara, the poor girl was wild and frothing with fury. She fought and fought, wriggling like a wildcat, in a futile struggle against the silken scarves wherewith I had hastily but stoutly bound her wrists and ankles when I dropped from the ceiling to seize her at her vanity table.
It had been Zamara’s pleasure to seize and bind us and carry us off unceremoniously. But now the tables had turned, and it was the divine Empress who had been snatched up, securely trussed, and tossed into the basket, to be whisked away to an unguessable fate.
A lifetime of unbridled pride and vaunting ambition had made the red-skinned young woman a thoroughly spoiled brat. This was probably the first time since childhood that any hand had been raised in violence against her pampered and princely person. She fought, kicked, and squirmed against her bonds until her furious strength was exhausted. Then she gave way to her misery, and loosed a storm burst of tears. Relenting, Darloona bade us remove her gag, but when Ergon stooped to do so she sunk her sharp white teeth in the flesh of his hand and bespattered us with a torrent of curses that would have won her the awed admiration of a longshoreman.
We let her rant and rage and weep as she would, ignoring it, for in truth the wind whipped away the worst part of her sulphurous language. Little Glypto, doubtless a connoisseur of oaths, sat fascinated, drinking it all in. Doubtless he committed to memory some of the more anatomically ingenious of her suggestions as to our ancestry and personal habits, wherewith to regale his criminous compatriots when next he mingled among the lower classes of the Thieves’ Quarter.
But we were humane in our treatment of Zamara, and I loosened her bonds and made her as comfortable as I could, without of course freeing her hands.
“You stinking horeb’s dung! You spittle of diseased maggots! You reeking gob of slime cast by a filthy reptile! You vile and loathsome offspring of a self-impregnating xanga! You toad’s-dropping-you offal of garbage-devouring zulths! You-you-you dare touch with your fetid paws the sacred person of the divine Empress to whom the Lords of Gordrimator have given the very world!”
She raved on, tears pouring down smudged and dirty cheeks. I, of course, paid no attention to her tempestuous tongue. The poor girl was more than half mad, of course, to take unto herself divine prerogatives. Listening, Darloona half smiled.
“Perhaps we should replace the gag after all,” she grinned.
Dawn broke, a blaze of gold. I went to the rim of the basket and stared about. Beneath us rushed an unknown country, wooded hills and vast rolling meadows. It looked nothing at all like the level plains that stretched between Tharkol and Shondakor: had the winds perchance carried us in the opposite direction―further into the east? The maps of the known surface of Thanator ended a few leagues to the east of Tharkol; beyond the borders of the known hemisphere stretched the unexplored and unmapped vastnesses of the far side of Callisto, which remained a region of shadowy and legended mystery.
For hours the balloon had flown through the darkness, a helpless plaything of the winds. How far had the winds carried us in that time, and in which direction?
And the winds still howled at gale force! If we were indeed traveling east, we would be borne into the unknown further side of the jungle Moon before we could manage to descend!
just then Ergon called my name.
I looked to where he stood across the basket from me, craning his head back, staring up into the sky, a strained expression on his froglike visage.
“What’s the matter now?” I asked. “Haven’t we got enough trouble?”
“It would seem that more lies in store for us,” he said grimly. “Look!”
I looked up … to see a hideous, bat-winged shape hurtling down upon us from the brilliant regions of the upper sky.
It was a gigantic Ghastozar―the most dreaded predator of the skies of Thanator.
And it was coming straight for us―
Chapter 8
The Terror of the Skies
“Aiiiiii!” Glypto shrieked, cowering on the floor of the basket, curling into a ball as if to make of himself the smallest possible target.
As for myself, my heart sank into my boots, and stayed there. I did not in the least blame the scrawny little rascal for squealing like a stuck pig as the flying monster swept down upon us.
For the ghastozar is one of the most horrible of the many grisly monstrosities that prowl the jungle Moon. A flying reptile with vast membranous wings and terrible claws, it resembles nothing so closely as the terrific flying dragon of Earth’s remote dawn age―the dread pterodactyl.
It measures fully twenty feet from fanged snout to barbed and viciously-whipping tail, and the steely power of its gliding thews is such that it has been known to rip a fully grown deltagar to shreds. Since a deltagar is a monster resembling two or three saber-toothed tigers rolled into one ferocious avalanche of murderous fury, you can easily form an estimate of how formidable was the flying doom that now swept down upon us.
There was literally nothing we could do to protect ourselves. We were armed only with the swords and daggers Ergon had stripped from the guards before he tossed them over the parapet, and against the fury of the mighty ghastozar, these were as so many toothpicks. If the Tharkolians had been aimed with bows and arrows or with the light throwing spear used by Ku Thad huntsmen, it would have been quite a different story. Then we should have had at least a fighting chance against the winged dragon-monster of the skies. And a fighting chance is all I have ever asked of the inscrutable fate that rules our destiny.
But they had not been so armed, and our chances of fighting off the ghastozar were slim, and our hopes for survival few.
Ergon knew this as well as I: we exchanged a grim look, but did not discuss the situation aloud in order to spare the women unnecessary fear. And now I regretted having carried off Zamara, thus exposing her to this horrible danger. The poor, deluded Tharkolian princess was mad, and had made herself our implacable enemy, but, having been lucky enough to escape from her clutches, and having by now left the city of Tharkol far behind, it was cruel of us to have thrust her into such peril. She could no longer do us ill, and I have never had the heart for vengeance.
Perhaps most of all, in a way, I regretted that little Glypto had been carried off with us and now faced a hideous doom in the jaws of the monster ghastozar. The little rogue had done us no ill at all, had in fact been the very instrument of our escape, and it was a sorry recompense for his services. But there was nothing I could do about it now, and soonvery soon―my regrets would end as would my life.
As these thoughts spun through my brain the flying monster hurtled past us, curved about and flew towards us again. I do not know why the brute had not struck us on his first passage: he was hunting, which meant he was hungry. And we were prey.
Again he flashed past us without striking, and this time he halted and flapped around us in a slow circle, turning his hideous beaked head first to the one side then to the other, peering at us with little red eyes in which ravenous blood lust vied oddly with a hesitancy I did not understand.