“The voryasen!” whispered old Ooloo. As I was dragged out with a great shouting and much buffeting I heard her say, “Jikai, Jikai,” and I thought she sobbed.
We warriors always felt a trifle contemptuous of Ochs with their little round shields when it came to combat; but I think I can trace my emergence of a better feeling for them from that encounter with old Ooloo there in the fetid caves of the Phokaym.
Clouds drifted across the sky and She of the Veils, the fourth moon, shone more fitfully even than usual, while the first moon, almost twice the size of our own moon, the Maiden with the Many Smiles, was already setting far across the Owlarh Waste.
The collection of food and the production of tools and utensils were the primary concerns of the crushed-down people, both men and half-men, under the despotic rule of the Phokaym. Tonight was to be a spectacle night, an occasion when the risslaca Phokaym emphasized their absolute power. A man was to be tossed to the voryasen. Consequently, so I gathered, more torches than usual were lit, painfully gathered by the slaves from the waste, twisted and gnarled branches they had so painfully gathered set alight gleefully by the Phokaym to illuminate their celebrations. I saw stone jugs passing from claw to claw as the Phokaym gathered. Their scales glittered in the torchlight. It was difficult to distinguish just what was armor and what was their own scaly hide. I was dragged toward the stone lip of a great pit. Above the pit an arrangement of wooden supports lashed together projected, like the boom of a crane. The Phokaym crowded toward this pit. I was hoisted upside down and my lashed ankles were fastened by a rope painstakingly woven from dry stems. Torchlight glared upon the scene, ruddy and orange, streaming light and driving weird shadows cavorting among the rocks and the stunted bushes.
Up I swung, twisting and turning, upside down, hanging from the rope. The boom moved and turned and I was carried out over the pit. I looked down.
A voryas is a form of risslaca one might imagine in nightmare, part crocodile, part tylosaurus, a giant fang-filled mouth, all jaw and muscle, and an agile scaly body and bludgeoning tail, that one would do well never to imagine, even in nightmare, let alone care to encounter. Bound and helpless, with all my weapons about me and unable to use them, I swung upside down above a water-filled pit crawling with the saurian horrors.
They lifted from the surface of the water, hissing and spitting, their jaws wedges of fangs, their eyes red and wicked and glaring upon me with voracious intent.
The Phokaym had fun.
They kept paying out the rope and lowering me down toward the surface of the water so that the voryasen would leap up at me, giant scaled forms gleaming dully emerald and amber, surging upward to fall back, baffled, hissing their rage, as the rope was hastily hauled in. Up and down I went, and the voryasen leaped and hissed, and the world turned scarlet from the thrum of blood in my head and my eyes threatened to start from their sockets, and my body grew numb. By a stupendous effort I managed to jackknife my body and look upward. A Phokaym, his teeth glinting as carnivorously as any voryas in the pit below, held out a blazing torch. He was touching the fizzing and sputtering torch to the rope holding my bound body above the pit.
Furiously I struggled with the blood-red cords, but they would not yield. If I could swing, I could reach the timber support of the boom from which I hung suspended. The smells, the shrieks, the whole cacophony of noises spurted up to rumble and roil in my head. I was helpless. Below me the carnivorous water-predators saw the flame of the torch and their hissing redoubled. They knew what would happen when the torch burned through the rope. They knew!
I was sweating now; everything whirled about me. One crunch of those gigantic fanged jaws below and I would be cut into two bloody halves.
There could be no last-minute rescue. There was no one within a hundred dwaburs who could aid me now — no one anywhere on this wild and savage world of Kregen.
The pit yawned beneath my dangling head. Torchlight splintered back from the scales and the eyes of the voryasen below. Now their hissing bounced back in magnified echoes from the pit walls. I craned up again — the rope was burning!
I could see the frayed and blackened strands parting, one by one, curling out like spent matches. The torchlight burned into my eyes.
The shrieking and yelling of the Phokaym deafened me.
I swung. .
My mouth was wide open, but I was not yelling.
This might be the end of it all, of all the high dreams I had had, here on Kregen, of winning my princess and of taking her to my palace and estates in Zenicce, of once more riding with my loyal clansmen across the great plains of Segesthes. .
I swung. .
The world dizzied before my swimming eyes. Smoke and flame mingled and blinded me. But I could see the fire of burning rope, see the strands parting, see the evil flickering flame gnawing through the only thing that supported me above the fangs and jaws of those merciless risslacas below. . I saw — I saw the last strand burn, the rope part and break and then I yelled-
At this point the tapes from Africa end.
The following narrative picks up the story later on in Prescot’s life on Kregen. It begins in the middle of a sentence.
The end of the last cassette came with a noise — a sound — of such unimaginable ferocity as to chill me to the heart when I first heard it, and which I hesitate to play over again. After that the tape spins emptily through the heads. Whatever it was that made that frightful sound, I have grave doubts that even the African jungle harbors its creator.
The beginning of the fresh cassette is garbled and there is some confused noise as of laughter and — I guess — the popping of champagne corks. This, as I think you who have followed the saga of Prescot this far will agree, is well in keeping.
The writer who has been giving me invaluable assistance in editing these tapes, a distinguished author with an international reputation, when he heard this portion observed, with what I took to be wry admiration: “Dray Prescot has successfully pulled off one of the oldest classical cliches in the book.”
“Of course,” I told him. “That’s Dray Prescot’s style.”
I do wonder, though, if we will ever be privileged to hear what failed to record at the beginning of this tape. Just how did Dray Prescot do it? Those of you who have followed his saga so far will have no doubts whatsoever that he could do it. .
And, there is the yellow fang of the Phokaym Prescot gave to Pando to act as a clue. . Alan Burt Akers
. . bringing me up out of the light doze into which I had fallen and this time louder and more urgent. I opened my eyes and cursed and stretched out a hand across the wide rumpled bed where the fused jade and ruby light from the twin suns threw a miniature landscape of mountain and valley. The light glinted back from the hilt of my rapier as I took it up into my fists. Again the scream knifed up the narrow black-wood stairs of The Red Leem. I cursed, and groaned, for my legs were still rubbery and my head throbbed as though an impiter smote me with his coal-black wings.
“What in the name of Makki-Grodno’s diseased armpit is going on?” I yelled. By the time the third scream ripped out I recognized Tilda’s voice. I staggered a little, and gripped onto the bedpost. The wooden floor with its scattered rugs of bright Walfarg weave swayed under me like the deck of a frigate blockading Brest. I shook my head. I had my old scarlet breechclout wrapped around my middle and my rapier in my fist. Hastily I snatched up the main-gauche and started for the door. The door burst open and young Pando appeared, his hair wild, his eyes reflecting more of the red light than the green, his whole body animated with anger and furious defiance. He shouted at me, his words tumbling over one another, a little dagger in his fist that shook with his passion.