Mildred made out: “To temple you must go where waits Rasasfa… to sacrifice other person not yourself. Will result for us much benefit… much learning.”
The sounds changed, becoming more rapid and less distinct, with a tone of stern command. Perhaps a hypnotic suggestion was being administered. At any rate she could not remember its nature or import when the being withdrew the instrument.
Her captors drew her upright. Their clammy touch made her shudder. Mildred’s arms were supported while a reptile mask, not blue but whitish, was fastened over her face. She became aware for the first time that she had been quite naked, when a short pale dress was draped around her. Then they led her from the room through an open doorway and up several flights of coiling stairs and along endless dim corridors.
Somewhere the hilt of a stained, blackish, upward-pointing knife was placed in her hand, and her fingers were clasped tightly around it by cold reptile pressure. She could not recall why, or for what purpose, she was to use it. But a strong sense of predestination was upon her, and a feeling that she would be enlightened in due time.
Light opened before her at a turn in the corridor. She was led through a high broad doorway into a vast edifice where a reptile being, taller than any she had yet seen, stood before an open alcove which gave forth a golden glimmering. The alcove’s entrance looked like a huge broad keyhole. The being held in his hand a sickle-butted dart. The walls of the alcove behind him seemed inlaid with oblique oblongs of yellow mosaic, and the floor was partly littered with unnamable objects.
Mildred was half-pushed, half-carried, and made to stand on an indented pedestal at the right hand of the armed entity. She faced a deeply bowing congregation of reptilians in the nave, which appeared lit by sunlight between pillars at the rear.
Still bewildered, she perceived that a man had entered at the left and had paused in front of the dart-bearer. For a while she failed to realize that the man was Jon: his features seemed blurred with the faces of others she had known, had liked or disliked in former years. An impulse of sudden hatred made her raise the black knife, and she was about to fling it toward him.
She never knew what checked her. Perhaps the hypnotic command implanted in her mind had suddenly been reversed. She paused, while the dart-bearer lifted his weapon and hurled it violently at Jon, piercing his shirt at the side as he dodged agilely with muscles trained by a multitude of tasks.
Something (perhaps a remaining part of the hypnosis) told her that the dart-bearer was Rasasfa, priest of an ultra-planetary sect. She leapt from the pedestal and stabbed him deeply in the side. Almost simultaneously, in his convulsive struggles, he scratched her breast with the dart-point before he dropped.
Jon and Mildred both underwent a strange hallucination, identical in all details, which they could never afterward forget. They had the sense of falling immeasurably, plunging through uncharted depths and dimensions, to hang insecurely poised on the verge of an alien hell, from which pointed flames, obscenely writhing monsters, dragon-like creatures with several heads and bodies, reached upward around their feet and sometimes over-towered them, breathing a fetid stench. Not the least horror was Rasasfa, standing close at hand, and thrusting with his dart at the monsters. And they, in turn, seemed to assail him with a special menace and venom, looming far up and lengthening fantastically into the skyless vault. He paid no attention to the humans, appearing oblivious of their presence.
At last the lurid glow, like ashen embers, dimmed in the depths. The figures grew vaporous, and broke up like wind-blown clouds, trailing and mingling and finally vanishing. Jon and Mildred stood alone on the precipice, which tottered and fell apart.
They awoke in the nave. The crowd had vanished. The reptile had dropped his dart but was still writhing. Pierced in a vital part by Mildred’s knife, he was dying very slowly, as snakes die.
They found their way from the temple, meeting no one. Jon had picked up the dart and carried it. The sun had abandoned the skies, leaving a multitude of stars, among which hung the nebula. Using a small pocket-compass, of which his captors had not deprived him, they left the city. The place lay entirely dark and silent, as if deserted by its inhabitants; and quitting its narrow, tortuous streets, they returned toward the mountains. They surmised that the slaying of Rasasfa had wrought profound terror. Doubtless the people had believed him a supernatural or immortal being.
They traveled across a semi-desert land. The sun finally rose, and leaned over them, warm until evening. They followed the compass toward a magnetic pole in what they liked to believe was the north. The air was very cold at night, and they slept a few hours in each other’s arms.
Fearing pursuit, they peered often backward at the city, which sank gradually on the horizon. Presently they found the tracks of the reptile people going city-ward from the mountains, often deeply printed because of the weight of the unconscious humans whom they carried. No doubt there were other cities in this world; but Jon and Mildred were glad to forgo any curiosity concerning them. Their one experience had been enough for several lifetimes.
They had suffered severely from thirst and hunger during that outward trip. There had been a few brackish pools from which they drank sparingly, hoping that the contents were rain-water; and a few bushes bearing a sourish red fruit of which they ate a small amount.
Late in the second afternoon the footsteps led them to the hollow in which Jon had been digging when they were captured by the falling net. Their tools and sacks and thermos lay where they had left them, their captors plainly thinking these appurtenances of no particular account. They saw with relief that the space-flier still occupied its shelf above.
The coffee was still warm in the thermos. They gulped some of it down eagerly. Then Jon resumed his digging while Mildred remained on the ridge watching the remote city, which seemed to waver and flicker like a mirage. Jon had filled one of the sacks with crude carborundum and was beginning to uncover the zysturium when Mildred cried out in warning. Hastily he climbed the ridge beside her, taking with him the dart-weapon and a pistol snatched from his pack.
A half dozen of the reptile men, climbing noiselessly, were hard upon them. All were armed with darts. They paused uncertainly when Jon brandished Rasasfa’s weapon, as if realizing its weird powers and superiority to their own. Then they resumed their advance. Jon dropped two of them with the pistol, which was a sort of flame-thrower, and short-ranged. The others fell back and concealed themselves behind boulders. They had estimated closely the range of the flame-thrower.
“Take over while I get some of the zysturium,” Jon instructed, giving Mildred the pistol. She obeyed, while Jon finished laying bare the needed element and partly filled his other sack. He attached the tools and sacks to his shoulder-band, and telling Mildred to follow, began his escalade toward the space-flier.
It was a close race, especially in rounding the cataract. He heard the snap and hiss of the pistol and Mildred’s cry of triumph as at least one of their pursuers fell back.
At length, half blinded by sweat, with heart and lungs heaving stertorously, he was climbing the flier’s ladder. Pushing his loads through the manhole, he hung at one side, and made sure that Mildred preceded him, snatching the pistol from her hand as she went past. One of the reptile-men had started to mount the ladder, but dropped into the ravine when Jon fired. Jon went through the manhole and made fast the outer and inner lids.
They worked on their repairs for much of that night, hearing the baffled cries of the reptiles and the futile crash of their weapons against the hull and windows.