Golden Blood (13 page)

Smooth, unrailed, the walk was less than two feet wide. Below was the sheer and awful void, shining immensities golden-green with dizzying depth.

A professional acrobat, with trained sense of balance, would have found the crossing no feat at all. But Price reeled. He felt a moment of nausea, had to shut his eyes to recover his balance.

He tried not to look into the pit, tried to keep his eyes on the yellow-rimed stone at his feet. But the abyss drew his gaze with a sinister fascination.

He hurried, sometimes half running. His stomach was queerly light. Cold sweat
pearled
his face. He was panting, gripping his fists until nails cut into palms.

Dizziness seized him again, a sickening wave of it. He stopped to recover himself. Fiercely he willed to forget the yawning, misty void. He tried to think of Aysa. Of the night the Arabs had captured her and bartered her to Joao de Castro. Of their midnight escape from the caravan. Of their sweet, brief days in the hidden garden of Anz.

Head clear again, he hastened on.

Price was midway across the gulf when he was first definitely aware of the sleep descending upon him. When he first came into the thicker golden vapor he had noticed a curious tickling in his nostrils, a shortness of breath.

Now sleep was overcoming him like a rising sea. His limbs were suddenly weary, leaden-heavy. Weights pressed down his eyelids. His brain was slow and confused.

Alarmed, he stumbled on through xanthic fog.

With a sigh of vague relief, he staggered across a gold-frosted floor, safely beyond the chasm. He had gained the niche. But the sleep of the thick yellow mist was beating upon him in waves. Beating him down… down… down…

With chill certainty of dread, he knew that he could not keep awake to cross that fearsome bridge again, where a single false step would send him hurtling into limitless space.

He tried to pull himself together, surveyed the great niche. Its floor was semi-circular, with a radius of perhaps forty feet; and black, yellow-frosted rock arched above the recess.

Within it stood four great oblong slabs of gold-rimed stone, like massive tables. Three of them were empty. But on the fourth lay a sleeping figure, wrapped in garments that glittered with fine crystals of gold.

An eager, poignant pain in his heart, Price ran to the slab, and looked fearfully down at the quietly breathing figure.

The sleeper was Aysa.

The girl’s lovely face, like her garments, was covered with fine crystals of yellow frost. His heart checked with sudden despair, Price tenderly brushed one cheek. To his vast relief, the dust of gold came away, leaving soft white skin.

Perhaps she was being slowly transformed to living metal. But if so, the uncanny change was not yet apparent.

“Aysa!
Aysa! Wake up!” he called, and shook her; but she did not stir.

The aureate vapor was obviously somniferous. The girl was sunk in the same unnatural slumber that he felt descending upon himself.

He lifted her body. It was completely relaxed, surrendered to oblivion. She was warm, breathing regularly. But he could not wake her.

Black despair fell upon him, made only keener by the possession of the lovely girl in his arms. He had found her—only to find with her inevitable defeat. But for the increasing influence of the soporific vapor, he could have carried her out and up to clear air, where she might wake normally. But he dared not set out across the narrow bridge, with the frightful risk that his abnormal slumber would hurl them both to death.

Price was still standing beside the slab of stone, Aysa’s shoulders lifted in his arms, fighting the sinister sleep of the golden mist, and staring across the bridge he did not dare attempt to cross, when he saw Malikar.

The black whip still coiled in his hand, the red-robed priest was striding across the floor beyond the abyss, toward the end of the bridge.

Price’s first impulse was to drop the girl, try to hide. Then he was sure that the golden man must already have seen him. And, if not, he would immediately observe that Aysa had been moved, the yellow dust brushed from her face.

Carefully he laid the unconscious girl back upon the rock table. He waited at the end of it, standing, fingers on the helve of the ancient ax. Malikar reached the bridge and started across.

Grim despair rose in Price’s breast, and mute, helpless rage at fate. Why must this insidious sleep steal upon him, just when he had won his way to the girl? Why must Malikar return just now, to crown disaster? The Durand luck—was it mocking him?

His body felt very heavy. His breathing was slow, difficult; the yellow mist still tickled his nostrils. His eyes were leaden. And waves of sleep beat about him, long slow breakers from the ocean of oblivion.

He fought to keep his eyes open, focussed on the burly yellow priest striding so confidently across the bridge. He struggled for mastery over his body, even to deal one blow with Iru’s ax. But the breakers of sleep rolled higher… flowed over him… drew him down into oblivion.

21. AT THE MERCY OF MALIKAR

FROM the sleep of the yellow fog, Price woke upon utter darkness. Stripped naked, he lay upon a little pile of straw or coarse
grass, that
was painful to his skin. Leaping up in uncomprehending alarm, he drove his head against a low stone ceiling.

Dazed, he sank back to his knees, and explored the narrow space about him with his hands. It was a narrow dungeon, some four feet wide and seven long, the roof so low that he could not stand. The walls were cold stone, roughly hewn. The door was a metal grating, through which breathed stagnant, vitiated air. His exploring fingers found nothing in the cell save the pile of moldy straw.

Sickness of despair settled upon him. He was the helpless captive of Malikar. The fact that his misfortune might have been foreseen from the beginning of his mad adventure in the mountain made it no easier to accept.

He tried to shake the metal grille. It seemed immovable; he could not even rattle it. He shouted through it, then. His voice echoed strangely through dark corridors, until it was swallowed in silence.

Baffled, helpless, he flung himself down again on the straw. He was hungry. His mouth was dry and bitter with thirst.

He was entombed within the mountain, apparently forgotten. A man marooned upon an alien planet would not be more completely isolated, he thought—and would at least have the advantage of interesting surroundings to divert his attention.

Time crept past, unnumbered weary hours, while he endured the torture of thirst and hunger, and plumbed the ultimate desolation of despair.

He slept again, and green light awakened him, streaming through the bars. Three blue-robed men were without, armed with pikes and
yataghans,
one carrying a green-flaring torch.

One of them unlocked the grille, pushed through two pottery bowls, of which
one held water
, the other a stew of meat thickened with flour. While the men waited, Price drained the one, avidly attacked the other.

When the bowls were empty, the snake-men unlocked the door again; one commanded harshly: “Come!”

They conducted him along the dark corridor, up a sloping, spiral way like that he had followed down to the serpent’s lair, and finally through a wide, arched passage into an amazing room.
A long chamber, hewn from the mountain’s black volcanic mass.
A score of feet wide, three times that long, with high, vaulted ceiling. The first thing about it that struck Price as strange was that it was illuminated by shaded electric lamps.

Along either wall stood a dozen snake-men, in blue, rigid, staring straight before them, armed with pikes and
yataghans.

In the farther end of the room sat Malikar. Beneath a cluster of frosted electric globes, he sat behind a heavy mahogany
desk, that
might have come from some Manhattan office. Upon the desk was an electric fan, whirring noisily, and beside it lay the long black whip with which the priest had castigated the snake.

In crimson robe and skull-cap, the yellow man sat with thick golden hands resting on the desk. The strange eyes in his harsh face, shallow, tawny, watched Price from the moment of his entrance.

Along the stone wall behind Malikar were green-painted steel filing-cabinets, bookcases filled with volumes bound in the Occidental style, and a long bench scattered with scientific instruments—compound microscope, balances, test-tubes, reagents, camera, brass telescope.

Above was a large wall-map of the world, dated 1921, with the imprint of a famous American publishing house.

Those scraps of Western civilization were as amazing to Price as any of the weird wonders he had encountered in the hidden land. And Malikar seemed to read his astonishment, as the snake-men stopped him before the desk.

“Surprised to find me a cosmopolitan, eh?” the yellow priest asked, in his hard, dead voice. And the language was English.

“Yes,” Price said. “I’m surprised.”

“You are English, aren’t you?”

“American.”

“Ah. I visited New York ten years ago.
An interesting city.”

Price stared at him.

“I’ve been going abroad rather frequently, since about the time of the fall of Rome,” the yellow man added. “My last trip was in 1921-22. I spent a few months at Oxford and Heidelberg, to acquaint myself with the latest developments of your crude civilization, and returned home around the world, by way of your country. I use a disguise, of course, that I don’t find necessary here.

“By the way, I believe you followed my route in here from the sea?”

“You mean the road of skulls?”

“Precisely.
The human skull is an enduring marker, with high visibility—
But
now I’d like some information about yourself, and the circumstances to which I am indebted for your call.”

Price flushed at the mocking irony in his dead, cold tones.

“What’s your name?”

“Price Durand.”

“You are aware that you have been mistaken for an ancient ruler named Iru—whose tomb you appear to have rifled?”

“Perhaps so.”

The shallow, tawny eyes regarded Price fixedly.

“Mr. Durand, you might explain the purpose of your visit.”

Price hesitated, decided to speak. There was no need of caution; nothing could make his circumstances any more hopeless.

“I was looking for Aysa. The girl you abducted.”

“I am glad you are honest, at least,” the golden man mocked him. “But, unfortunately for you, the young woman has been selected to fill a higher destiny than you planned for her. She is to be priestess of the snake—and my consort.”

“Are you turning her to gold?” Price demanded flatly, controlling his anger.

“The snake would accept no ordinary human as its priestess,” Malikar informed him, tauntingly. “She must be of the golden blood.

“Don’t you understand the transformation? The yellow mist in the lair of the snake is a rare auriferous compound, formed in the volcanic heart of the earth. Condensing upon the walls of the temple, it forms yellow frost.

“When inhaled into a living body, this compound replaces the water in the protoplasm, forming a living substance, the color of
gold, that
is far stronger and more enduring than common flesh.”

“And you expect Aysa to give herself to you?” Price angrily demanded. “You know she hates you—deservedly!”

“I fear her regard for me is not of the kindest,” Malikar leered. “But once of the golden blood, she will not easily escape me. She can not seek death. Taming her may be pleasant sport—and time is nothing to the lucky immortals. She will learn to love me.”

Malikar leaned forward, chuckling throatily, evilly. He picked up the heavy black whip on the desk, ran the thin lash of it through his yellow fingers, gloatingly, suggestively.

Red rage flared up in Price at thought of lovely Aysa, locked in a golden body from which she could not escape, the slave and plaything of this leering yellow demon.

He glared at Malikar, speechless with anger, longing savagely to sink his fingers into the yellow priest’s thick neck.

Suddenly the golden man bent, opened a drawer of the desk, and produced a delicate brush and a small bottle of what appeared to be liquid, flowing gold. Setting brush and vial on the desk, he looked up at Price with flat, inscrutable, yellowish eyes.

“Mr. Durand,” he said suavely, “I am going to offer you an unusual opportunity. I can make use of your services in exterminating the foolish gold-seekers that came with you in here.”

“Will you free Aysa—” Price began eagerly.

“No,” Malikar grated shortly. “But I give you one chance to save your pitiful life.”

“And that is—”

“Here is your choice: Swear allegiance to the snake, and to me, priest of the snake. I will paint the symbol of the snake upon your
forehead,
spare your life to the service of the snake.”

“I’ll do nothing of the kind—”

“This is your choice,” repeated Malikar, with grim irony. “Become slave of the snake, and live. Or you shall be the slave of
this
snake”—he lifted the black coils of the whip—“and die in the dungeon!”

The gloating, jeering cruelty of the hard, flat voice snapped Price’s control of himself. Red anger swept him. Naked as he was, he turned upon the snake-man beside him, snatched the golden-bladed pike from his dumfounded grasp, and leapt savagely toward the red-robed man behind the desk.

Two guards seized him before he had moved three steps.

Malikar sprang from behind the big desk, chuckling unpleasantly and drawing the whip’s thin lash through his fingers.

“Loose the dog,” he snapped at the guards, in Arabic.

They released Price, leapt back to the walls.

Again he darted forward, the pike uplifted.

The thin black length of the whip reached out, writhing like a living tentacle. It did not touch Price; it wrapped around the wooden haft of the pike.

The weapon was snatched from Price’s hand, flung across the floor. Still he ran forward, fists clenching, driven by blind, mad rage at this suave, taunting golden demon.