There were three thieves at Golgotha, he thought to himself with grim irreverence. Of course, one of them was no thief… .
The shackles were locked, and it was all over but the dying. That would be a slow, tedious business, but thirst and hunger would do the trick in time. There would be a lot of time, thought Ryker. All the time in the world.
He wondered vaguely how long their bones would hang in these chains, until tossed aside to make room for the next condemned men. Not that it mattered much.
The Martians are much given to ritual, but in this case there was none at all. Once they had seen the two men chained to the stone spears on the brink of the pit, they turned about and went back by the way they had come. It was as if they were, all of them, anxious to leave this dreadful place of wandering lights and faint echoes and crawling shadows.
Valarda looked one last time into Ryker’ s grim, glowering eyes. Her face was pale and pinched, her warm lips colorless, but hope glowed in her eyes. Then she dropped thick lashes to hide the naked candor of her gaze, and vanished from Ryker’s line of sight.
The others filed past, some glancing at him curiously, others averting their eyes as if ashamed of what had been done here.
Thoh gave his victim one bright glance of cold mockery, and an ironic wave of his hand as if to say goodbye, before he, too, began to ascend the stair.
Ryker and Doc stood there in the chains for a long time without speaking, until the last far, faint echo of shuffling feet died into silence far above them.
And they were left alone with only their thoughts to keep them company.
And shadows, and echoes, and vague, wandering lights.
Forever …
Forever is a long time. And here there was no way of measuring time.
After a while their arms and the muscles of back and shoulders began to ache from the strain of the awkward position in which the two men were chained.
After a while the torment ebbed, as if flesh had endured all it could, and numbness crept in, dulling the agony.
After a time the numbness, too, faded, and they could feel nothing at all in their arms. It was as if they were being slowly turned into men of stone, like the faceless Giants who had warded and watched the walls of Zhiam.
Thirst, too, became a torment. But hours—or days—later, they became unaware of thirst.
They were bound in too uncomfortable a position to be able to sleep. Every time their consciousness faded, and they sagged forward in the chains, the sharp bite of the scale bronze shackles knifing into the flesh of their wrists roused them.
They found their minds wandering. Ryker thought of soft beds and cool gardens and dewy goblets of wine and splashing fountains for a while. Then his mind seemed to drift away into waking dreams. Faces rose into his memory that he had long forgotten, the faces of friends and of foes. For a time he played in the summery garden of that white frame house, in the shadows of tall trees, with the small black and white dog. Even that dream faded and fled away at length, and his mind became blank and gray and empty… .
Suddenly a faint sound broke the trance that gripped Ryker’s dreaming mind. Something broke his vague reverie.
He turned his head to the right, ignoring the sting of pain in stiff muscles. Doc hung in the chains, his face pale and empty, his head sagging upon his bony breast, silvery wisps of hair disordered. He was unconscious, or dead. Either way, it was better so.
But the sound which had disturbed Ryker had not come from that source.
There it was again! A faint scuffle, the clatter of stone against stone.
From behind him …
And sweat came popping out all over Ryker’s nearly-naked body, as a thought of pure horror crashed into his numb brain.
What if there were rats down here ?
From dim, half-conscious dreaming, he came suddenly, terribly awake. Fully conscious how, his mind ablaze with merciless clarity, he remembered that the subterranean caverns of the Southlands were tunneled and teeming with the huge carnivorous rodents the Martians hunted for orthavva furs … rats the size of small dogs, they were, he knew.
And the blood congealed in his veins as the sheer, hopeless horror of his predicament burst upon his mind in all its implications.
Surely, in all the annals of human experience, there was no more ghastly way of dying than being devoured alive by rats.
That faint scuffle sounded again behind him.
Then something touched the back of his leg and Ryker almost fainted.
In the next split-second he nearly fainted again, but this time from a different emotion. For he felt like one snatched from the burning floor of Hell and set down amidst the gardens of Paradise.
For, just behind him, Kiki said, “Do you yet live, man?”
23. The Sacrifice
The boy was weary and bedraggled and travel stained, and he had been weeping, for tears tains were visible beneath his green eyes where they had cut through the coating of dust.
He was entirely naked, gray with dust from head to foot, with a smudge on his cheek, or possibly a bruise. His feet were dirty with stains of crushed mold or lichen, and rough, sharp stones had cut those little feet until they bled.
He left wet red marks on the stone floor as he limped to where Ryker hung in the chains.
Ryker stared down at the dusty, bedraggled lad, eyes wide with unbelief and filled with the dawning of hope. He had never been fond of the mischievous imp. Now he felt that he had never been so glad to see anyone in his entire life.
The boy wound his arms around Ryker’s waist and buried his dusty head against Ryker, and made strange, hoarse, coughing sounds. At first he could not identify these noises. Then it came to him that the boy was trying to sob, but that his throat was dry with dust, as dry as Ryker’s own.
“Kiki … why are you here?” he croaked through dry lips. The boy lifted his head to peer into Ryker’s face with eyes wild, yet curiously dull.
“They have come into the City,” he said tonelessly. “The Outlanders. My Lady has fallen from power. Prince Thoh leads the men, now, and he has condemned My Lady to face the God.”
“Prince Thoh it is now, is it?” rasped the big man heavily, twitching his cracked lips into a ghastly caricature of a smile.
Then the meaning of Kiki’s words hit him, and he stiffened.
They meant to hang Valarda in the chains on the third stone spear.
They meant her to die the slow, awful death to which he and Doc were condemned.
Ryker growled, deep in his chest, like an animal. Through the dusty tangle of his disordered locks, his eyes glared like the eyes of a lion. Suddenly, weariness and stiffness and pain left him. He felt filled with a terrible strength, a strength of fury and desperation.
“The chains, boy,” he gasped. “Get them off me … break them, cut them … get me loose!”
After a time, Kiki gave up the futile attempt to free Ryker from his chains, and collapsed in a sobbing heap at the feet of the Earthling.
Even though corrosion had eaten deeply into the hard bronze of the shackles, neither Ryker’s strength nor Kiki’s cunning and agile fingers could free the tall man of his bonds.
The Earthling looked down at the boy huddled at his feet, his hard face gentle.
“It’s all right, Kiki. Don’t cry. You did the best you could.”
“It wasn’t good enough,” the boy said in a choked voice.
“Maybe not. But you did the very best you could, and that’s all anybody can do—their best.”