The taller of the two figures tossed back its hood, and it was Valarda.
“What d’you want?” he grunted. “After what you had to say back there, I figured there’d be nothing else to say—my Lady.”
His voice was heavy with sarcasm, and she winced at the sound of it. Then she raised her face and looked into his eyes, and that which he saw written in her features, the suffering, the sorrow, made him wish he hadn’t spoken so harshly.
“I want to try to make you understand,” she whispered.
“Well, you can try,” he said gruffly. “Go ahead.”
Her face was wan and pale, and there were lines of strain and weariness about her glorious eyes. She stepped closer to the bars which stood between them—so close that he could smell the spicy scent of her unbound hair, and the warm perfume of her naked flesh.
“I hold my throne with difficulty here,” she whispered. “To wield the power that is my inheritance from the ancient warrior princes of my blood, I must yield on some points. Can you understand that?”
He grinned humorlessly. “My death may be a small point to you, but it’s mighty important to me! But go on, I’m listening.”
Tears glittered in her thick lashes and her voice broke.
“Do you believe, Ryker, that your death is a small matter to me? Has there been naught between us that would suggest otherwise?”
His eyes fell and he grunted something she could not hear. Her eyes were fixed on his half-averted face, pleadingly.
“I have given you my lips, is that nothing? Do you believe that one of my lineage gives of herself lightly? I, who have never loved before—do you believe me to be incapable of love—even for a stranger from another world?”
Something rose within him then, within his heart. Something perilously near to … hope.
He looked at her somberly. “Love? We never spoke of it. You left me alone and among enemies, to die. Do you call that love?”
She nodded bravely. “Yes—love! The love of my people let me overrule the dictates of my heart, there on the isthmus. But you did not die, Ryker. Nor need you die now.”
“Keep talking,” he muttered.
“Listen closely, then. You will be given to the God tomorrow. You and the old man. You will descend into the Holy-of-Holies to stand before the Presence. Whether you live or die depends upon you—upon that which is in your heart. This much I have managed to wring from Lord Thoh and his followers—that we do not ourselves violate the ancient Vow our ancestors took before the God. It is the God alone who will be the cause of your death, if He so chooses!”
Ryker looked at her, thoughtfully. It was difficult to make out whether her god was real or whether she only believed him to be real. He knew so little about this Fire Devil the Lost Nation worshipped. There were so many questions, and so little time!
“We have a chance, then, to come through the ordeal alive?” he asked.
“Yes. Exactly that—a chance, nothing more. Others before you have gone down into the abyss, for one sin or another. Never were they seen alive again, for such was the Judgment of the God. But when you stand before Him, and He reads your heart, it is within His power to let you live. I pray with all of my own heart that it be so …oh, Ryker, Ryker … why did you ever come into my life to trouble me?”
She sagged against the bars, faint with weakness, and his strong arms went about her gently, and there, for the second time, he kissed her warm lips and felt the fragrance of her breath against his face.
“I have asked myself a thousand times how I could give my heart to a man of another race, another world, and I have found no answer for it,” she breathed under his kisses. “Save that you are strong and whole and clean, with a strength the men of my people no longer possess. Oh, Ryker!—my beloved!—when you stand before the God tomorrow—hold my image in your heart!”
“My Lady, it is time for the changing of the guard, and we must be gone,” murmured the other robed figure. And only now did Ryker notice that it was Melandron. She nodded, and stepped back reluctantly from his embrace. Brushing the tears from her face she smiled at him, one small, brave smile.
Then they were gone.
Ryker went slowly back to his pallet and lay there, staring up at the roof of the cell.
Whether he lived or died tomorrow, he had won the love of the most beautiful woman of two worlds. Maybe that meant that dying for her was worthwhile, after all.
Beneath the Temple where Valarda reigned, a great stone stair wound down into the bowels of Mars, And by that mighty stair, Ryker and Herzog descended the following day.
With them went Valarda and Melandron and many others, among these the smiling Lord Thoh and even little Kiki, whom Ryker had not seen before during his brief visit to the City.
The faces of those who escorted the two Earthlings were solemn and they wore the shadow of fear. There was little conversation between the lords. For the most part, they maintained a hushed and reverent silence. Ryker got the feeling that they would all be glad to leave this immense, cavernous space where dwelt eternally the strange and awesome divinity they worshipped.
Only Lord Thoh seemed jubilant and merry.
Ryker himself felt nothing at all. There was nothing in this Abyss, he knew, for he had long ago given up childish beliefs in gods and devils. He had an inkling of what he was about to face, and when they reached at length the bottom of the stair, he grinned bleakly to find his guess correct.
A vast open space lay hidden here far below the crust of Mars, the arched roof far overhead supported by columns of massive stone, like the pillars of some tremendous cathedral.
Roof and walls and columns were alike encrusted with some glittering crystalline, deposit. A dim, sourceless phosphorescence glimmered here in the depths, and this pale, wan luminescence was reflected in the glassy stuff of the mineral encrustation as from a million mirrors, until all of the vast and shadowy emptiness was made ghostly with wandering lights. Like will-o’-the-wisps, vague centers of radiance drifted to and fro between the huge columns, and twinkled in the facets of dangling stalactites, as in the glassy pendants of so many crystal chandeliers.
The floor of the vast, echoing cavern was smooth and regular, no doubt so shaped by the toil of men.
He looked around, admiring the fantastic scene. But there was nothing here to feel afraid of, for nothing lived in this Aladdin’s cave of glittering crystal and twinkling lights.
In the center of the floor was a vast pit whose sides were unnaturally smooth and regular and whose shaft went down to an unguessable depth.
Before this pit three stone spears had been left standing by the workmen who had cleared the cavern floor down to the primal bedrock. Fastened to these stalagmites were bronze shackles and chains.
They had been there a very long time, for they were old and deeply bitten by the teeth of time, green and scaly with verdigris.
Within them hung three skeletons—grisly, gaunt things of dead bone, staring at the pit with sightless, gaping sockets, grinning with mirthless, bony jaws.
These the guards unlocked from their chains, and cast them clattering away.
They chained Ryker and Herzog to the stony spears.
The spears rose from the cavern’s floor on the very brink of the enormous, circular pit. The two Earthlings were bound in such a way that they must face that yawning pit forever … until death came to claim then … or the God to judge them.
Only two they were, and the third stalagmite remained untenanted, its chains hanging loose and empty. Ryker grinned. It was like him to grin in the face of death, and a bit of gallows humor couldn’t hurt.