Golden Blood (7 page)

“Come forth, woman!” he shouted harshly.

Aysa made no reply.

The yellow man snatched a torch from one of his cowering men, and pushed boldly into the tomb. Price stepped to meet him in the doorway.

The flat yellow eyes held fear for a moment, incredulous amazement. Then Malikar leered grimly, came on.

“Kalb ibn kalb!”
he snarled, in the same oddly accented Arabic that Aysa spoke. “Iru can not rest? I can put him back to sleep!”

He flung the flambeau to the floor between them, where its green flame still flared, unextinguished. In both hands he lifted the great spiked mace.

Price struck with the yellow ax, a short, chopping swing at the red skull-cap. The golden man stepped quickly back, into the shelter of the doorway. The shimmering ax-blade slipped harmlessly in front of his face, but his own blow was diverted; he could not swing the mace in the narrow doorway.

The golden man charged through the opening again, and Price began chanting the ax-song Aysa had taught him. Once more he saw fear in the shallow, tawny eyes. From one of the blue-robes came a shaken cry of terror.

After an instant’s hesitation, Malikar leapt into the tomb.

Moving to the rhythm of his chant, Price gave ground before the threatening mace, whirled the battle-ax aloft, put all his strength into a swing at the red skull-cap. Put too much strength into the blow!

He felt the ominous cracking of the age-dried helve, as the ax came down, knew in an instant of sickening tragedy what had happened.

A fatal
snap,
and the haft was light in his hands, a useless, brittle stick. The broad-edged head clattered to the floor of the tomb, as Price fell back in dismay, the ax-song dead.

A queer, hurt feeling was in his heart. He had been betrayed. The Durand luck had failed him.

An unpleasant grin of surprised triumph on his yellow face, Malikar sprang forward, lifting his great, spiked club deliberately, to crush the skull of his disarmed foe.

With a sharp little cry of pain and rage, Aysa leapt forward, under the descending mace. The slender dagger flashed in her hands.

Malikar checked the blow, reached out a massive, red-sleeved, golden arm, seized her lifted wrist. The dagger clattered from her helpless fingers, and Malikar flung her, with careless, brutal strength, toward the waiting blue-robes beyond the door.

Price sprang at the yellow man, swinging a blow with his fist. The mace came down over his head. It was a short, one-armed blow. And Price ducked, flung up the oval shield. The mace crashed through his defense, and splintering fire exploded in his head.

Price sat up in the cold, musty darkness of the subterranean tomb. The torches were gone. He was very thirsty; in his dry mouth was a bitter, metallic taste. He knew that he had been unconscious for many hours.

He fumbled about. No other living thing was in the tomb. But he struck something large and smooth and imperfectly
round, that
rolled rattling across the floor.

Fighting down icy panic, he stumbled to the doorway. A smooth, unbroken, surface of cold stone opposed him. Wildly, he ran his fingers over the tight-fitting slab. Then he remembered that the massive stone door of the vault had swung inward, and that it had no knob on the inside.

He was sealed in Iru’s tomb!

11. THE TIGER’S TRAIL

AFTER a time Price gave up his frantic attempts to force the vault’s locked door, and sank back exhausted on the chill stone floor of the ancient tomb.

Panic was near, the red, blind insanity of terror. His body was a-tremble, clammy with sudden sweat. He found himself beating with his hands on the polished cold stone, and the vault was full of his hoarse, useless shouts.

A quiet voice in his brain bade him sit down, and conserve his strength, and think. His situation was extreme, almost melodramatic—locked in a tomb, in the catacombs beneath Anz, beneath a sand-whelmed city centuries lost. Fear-nerved struggles would get him nowhere. He must collect his scattered senses, think.

He dared not hope for outside aid. Malikar and his acolytes, departing with the captive Aysa, had obviously left him here to die. The vault must be opened by
his own
efforts. And he had not long for the task; the air was already vitiated. His lungs were gasping in the musty stuff with great gulps; his head rang and roared. Already half
suffocated,
he was still dazed from Malikar’s final blow.

Pressing his hands to his throbbing head, Price tried to think. He must take stock of his prison.
If he could find some tool…

Anxiously he fumbled for his matches, felt the little box. With a sigh of relief he struck a light, peered about the tiny square chamber. Among scattered human bones he saw the broken helve of the ax, then the shining golden head of it, at the door. The oval shield was near, the heavy yellow mail still upon his body.

Abruptly giddy from the splitting pain in his head, he leaned on the cold wall, and lighted a cigarette with the dying match. The smoke cleared his brain a little; it hid the musty charnel odor of the vault. But still his head throbbed, still his mouth was bitter and dry.

When the cigarette was gone he lit another match, and examined the door, a massive slab of hewn and polished granite, cleverly hung, so that metal lock and hinges were concealed. On the outside there was a golden knob. But its smooth black inner surface was unbroken.

Forcing himself to deliberate and unhurried movement, he picked up the head of the golden ax. Wrapping his handkerchief about the blade to protect his fingers, he attacked the door with the picklike point opposite the cutting edge.

The hidden mechanism of the lock, he reasoned, must be contained in a cavity in the stone, at the level of the golden knob. The shell of granite covering it would be relatively thin; it might be possible to break it away.

The stone was obdurate, his tool clumsy. His head drummed with pain, and the air was rapidly becoming unbreathable. Gasping for breath, he reeled as he worked, occasionally striking a match to estimate his progress.

For a time
that seemed hours
he toiled, when another man might have cursed and dropped his tool and flung himself down to die. The idea of defeat, of failure, was not in Price Durand’s nature. He had a vast confidence that the Durand luck—though it had so recently betrayed him—would come to his rescue, if he just kept fighting.

Thought of Aysa, as much as his own safety, spurred him on.
He knew that he loved the brown-haired, gayly brave fugitive. She was his, by some immutable law of life. Her captivity filled him with savage resentment.

Ringing hollow beneath the ax-point, the shell of rock cracked at last. Rapidly, then, it crumbled beneath his blows. Holding a match in one hand, he manipulated the bronze levers and tumblers of the ancient lock.

Staggering and blind with fatigue and asphyxiation, he slid back the great bolt, swung the door inward, and pitched through the opening into the cleaner air of the open catacombs.

In delirious joy he sucked in the air that had once seemed musty and stale, until he was able to light one of the torches he and Aysa had brought into the crypts. Then taking up the ax and the oval shield, he found the stair, and climbed wearily back to the surface.

Price laughed weakly and uncertainly, for pure joy, when he came into the hot, white noonday light of the hidden garden. He stood a while in the sun, half blind, drinking up the blazing radiance, the warm fresh air.

Presently he stumbled to the fountain and washed his mouth and drank. Collapsing upon the grass beside the pool, he dropped into the sleep of complete exhaustion.

Upon the dawn of a clear, still day, he woke, ravenously hungry. His head was clear again, the bruise of Malikar’s mace subsiding. As he found food from the slender remaining store, and ate, his mind was busy with the problem of Aysa’s rescue.

It was characteristic of Price that he did not pause to wonder whether he could liberate the girl. His only problem was
how.

It was in the soft earth where water had overflowed from the pool that he found the tiger’s tracks, after he had eaten. At first he could not think what had made them, they were so amazingly huge. Though shaped like those of any cat, they were large as an elephant’s.

Eagerly he followed the deep prints along the side of the garden, out of the walled court, and off among the sand-heaped ruins of Anz. The wind had not yet moved sufficient sand to efface them.

At once he determined to follow the tiger’s trail. That, surely, would be the shortest path to Aysa. He did not pause to reflect upon the dangers and difficulties that might lie before him, except in order to prepare to meet them. He did not consider his probable failure; procrastination was not in his nature, for Price was a man of action.

Delay would mean disaster. The loose red sand, flowing almost like a liquid beneath the wind, would soon obliterate the prints. But he had to make a few preparations before taking the trail.

First he searched the oasis for a stick of hardwood, carved out a new helve and fitted it to the golden ax, which was now his only weapon.

Then he saddled the two camels, which had regained much of their lost strength upon the lush vegetation of the oasis, and packed the full water-skins, and a bundle of green forage, upon Aysa’s beast.

Mounting his own
hejin
and leading the other, he rode out of the hidden oasis where he had found the zenith of happiness and the nadir of despair, rode through the shattered piles of sand-leaguered Anz, and over a yellow-red dune that had conquered the black walls.

All day he followed the gigantic tracks.
Straight northward they led him, across a billowing sea of crescent hills.
The trail, at first, was easy enough to follow. But in the blazing afternoon a breath of wind arose, furnace-hot, and the obliterating drift-sand crept rustling before it.

By sunset the trail was hardly distinguishable.
A dozen times Price lost it on the upward slope of a dune, only to pick it up again in the hollow beyond.
At dusk he had to stop.

The camels were weary. They had not completely recovered from the terrible journey to Anz. And Price, in his desperate haste, had urged them on unsparingly. He fed them the green forage, ate and drank meagerly, and rolled himself in his blanket, praying that the wind would stop.

It blew harder, instead. All night dry sands whispered with the desert’s ghostly voice, mockingly, as if they taunted Price with Aysa’s fate at the hands of the golden Malikar. Long before dawn the trail was swept out completely.

Before sunrise Price saddled the
hejins
again, and rode on in the same direction that the trail had led him, driving the jaded animals to the limit of their endurance.

That afternoon his own mount fell down upon the hot sand and died.
He gave most of the remaining water to Aysa’s dromedary, and rode on, into the unknown north. From the next dune he looked back at the white shape sprawled in the sun… a hardy beast; it had served him well and he regretted to leave so… and he rode on over the crest.

Some time on the next day—the shadow of the desert’s madness was already descending upon him; he never remembered whether it was morning or afternoon—he came out of the dunes, upon a vast flat plain of yellow clay.

Upon that, he reasoned with the dull effort that precedes delirium, the giant tracks would not have been obliterated by the wind. After an hour’s riding back and forth, he found the enormous prints again, and followed them doggedly across the clay-pan.

The water was all gone that night. He lay down near the camel, in a dry
wadi.
His mouth was swollen and dry; he was too thirsty to sleep. But even if he could not sleep, he dreamed.
Dreamed that he was back with Aysa at the lost oasis, drinking from the stone-rimmed pools and plucking fresh fruit.
The dreams verged oddly into reality. He caught himself speaking to Aysa, and woke again with a start to his desolate surroundings.

Day came, and he rode on. The fevered dreams did not stop. He was back in Anz, with the lovely Aysa. He was with her in the deep tomb of Iru, fighting Malikar. He was back in the camp on the road of skulls freeing her from the clutches of Joao de Castro.

But through all the visions of his half-delirium, a single idea reigned in his spinning brain. A fixed purpose dominated him. And he urged the flagging camel northward, along the trail of a gigantic tiger.

Again the trail became more difficult to follow. The clay was flinty, harder; the great feet had left but slight impressions. In the afternoon the hard yellow pan gave way to bare black lava, to a flat, volcanic plateau whose sharp-edged, fire-twisted rocks were hard going for the foot-sore camel, and upon which the golden tiger had left no mark.

There the tracks were hopelessly lost. Price abandoned any attempt to find traces of the huge pads, and rode straight on over the rocky terrain, into the north. Night came, and moonless darkness. And still he urged the half-dead dromedary on, toward the pole-star, glittering pale above the desert horizon.

Polaris danced and beckoned and taunted. Strange pageantries of madness appeared and dissolved upon the star-lit desert. And Price rode on. Sometimes he forgot the reason, and wondered what he would find beneath the star. But still he rode on.

12. “THE ROCK OF HELL”

PRICE woke in the dawn, chilled and shivering beneath his blanket. The emaciated
hejin
sprawled beside him. He staggered to his feet, trying in vain to recall when he had stopped, and saw the mountain.

In the cold, motionless desert air, it looked very near, only a few miles across the barren, black volcanic plain, a mountain shaped like a truncated cone, rugged, steep-walled. On its summit was a bright coronal, a golden crest that exploded into scintillant splendor when the first sunlight touched it.

Price feared at first that it was mirage or delirium; but complete sanity had come back to him for a little while, with the chill of the dawn, and he knew the mountain was no dream. And it was too early for mirage; the mountain was too motionlessly real.

He remembered the old Arab’s story of a black mountain,
Hajar Jehannum,
or “Rock of Hell,” upon which golden
djinn
dwelt in a palace of yellow metal.

The parchment of Quadra y Vargas, the old Spanish soldier of fortune, came back to his mind, with its fantastic account of golden folk—“idols of gold that live and move”—dwelling upon a mountain in
la casa dorado,
and worshipped like gods by the people of the oasis below.

It had all seemed impossible. But he had seen the golden tiger, and its yellow riders, had fought with Malikar, and followed the tiger’s trail for grim long days. Now here was the mountain, with its crown of gold.
Impossible.
But was it, like so many impossible things, true?

He goaded the staggering, grumbling
hejin
to its feet, climbed into the saddle, and rode on, toward the mountain. Aysa had been taken there, he knew, upon the golden tiger, by her yellow captor. And there he was going after her. It might not be easy to find her and set her free, but he was going to do it. If he himself failed, there was yet the Durand luck.

All day he went on toward the mountain. Sometimes the camel reeled and staggered. Then he dismounted and stumbled along on foot, driving it for a distance, until it could rest.

The grim lava tableland seemed to stretch out as he advanced. But at sunset he could distinguish the towers and spires of the glittering castle, shimmering, splendid, drawing him with resistless fascination.

Once more he toiled on, far into the night. At dawn the black rock seemed no nearer, but merely larger. Its black walls, of columnar basalt, frowned precipitously grim. They seemed unscalable. Price, in the more lucid periods of his brain-fevered advance, wondered how the castle could be reached.

A crenellated wall of black stone skirted the top of the cliffs—a wall apparently useless, for half a mile of sheer precipice hung below it. Within rose the piles of the unattainable castle.
The blazing fulgor of gold, and the brilliant white of alabaster.
Twisted domes and turrets.
Slim towers.
Balconied minarets.
Broad roofs and pointed spires. Yellow
gold,
and white marble.

The high castle was not all of gold. But even so, the value of the yellow metal blazing from it was incalculable, Price knew. The treasure before his eyes might rival in value the monetary gold in the vaults of
all the
world.

But gold meant nothing, now, to Price Durand. He was fighting back the mists of madness, battling vision and delirium, ignoring the tortures of exhaustion, of thirst that parched his whole body. He was seeking a girl.
A girl with gay violet eyes, whose name was Aysa.

Again he was riding on. The bloody, implacable sun rose once more, on his right, and flooded the lava plain with cruel light. The brief sanity of the dawn deserted, and madness of thirst rode back upon stinging barbs of radiation.

It was some time later in the day that the
hejin
lifted its white, snake-like neck, and looked eastward, with more of life than it had displayed for days. Thereafter it tried continually to turn aside. But Price, with merciless
mas’hab
stick, drove it on toward the mountain.

After a time he could make out men standing upon the high black walls. Tiny dolls in blue.
Little more than moving blue specks.
But he thought they were jeering at him, taunting him with Aysa’s captivity, with their walled security upon the cliffs. He found himself cursing them, in a voice that was a whispering croak.

Then, again, when he was nearer the mountain, men rode to meet him.
Men in hooded robes of blue, upon white racing-camels.
Nine of them, armed with long, yellow-bladed pikes, and golden
yataghans.

Price drove his staggering
hejin
on toward them, whispering insane curses. He knew that they were branded with the mark of the golden snake, that they were the human slaves of the golden man, of Malikar, who had stolen Aysa.

They stopped on the bare lava before him, and awaited his coming.

With a thin arm he lifted the golden ax that was slung to the pommel of his saddle. Trying in vain to goad his dromedary to a trot, he advanced, croaking out the syllables of the ax-song of Iru.

And abruptly the nine whirled, as if in consternation, before this gaunt, golden-armored warrior upon a reeling skeleton of a camel, and fled back toward the mountain, and around it.

Price’s mount was still trying to turn off toward the right, but he followed on after the nine. They left him far behind, but at last he rounded the sheer shoulder of crystalline basalt, that leapt up in colossal hexagonal columns toward the bright castle, and came to the east side of the mountain.

The men were again in view, sitting still upon their camels and looking apprehensively back, when Price came around the mountain. They delayed a little longer, and then retreated again. They rode directly into the mountain.

Again Price followed. At the top of a short slope he saw a square black tunnel in the cliff, the opening of a horizontal shaft driven straight into the basalt.

He started up the lava slope. The
hejin
fell weakly to its knees, and refused to get up again. Price got out of the saddle, took the golden ax and the yellow oval shield, and started on afoot.

A heavy clang of metal reached his ears, and he saw that the mouth of the tunnel had vanished. In its place was a square of bright gold, inlaid in the black mountain wall.

It was madness. He knew that he had driven himself harder than a man, by rights, can go. He knew that he could not longer trust his senses. Perhaps, after all, there had been no tunnel. The men who fled might have been figments of delirium.

But he reeled on up the slope, in the bright mail of Iru, with the ax and the buckler of the old king of Anz.

He came to the yellow square in the basaltic mountain’s flank. His eyes had not deceived him; there had been a tunnel. Golden gates had closed it. He saw the seam down the middle, the massive hinges on either side. Broad panels of yellow gold, twenty feet high, smooth, polished so that he could see his reflection in them.

He
paused
an instant, wondering. Was this Price Durand?
This thin, stern figure, with staring, sunken, glassy eyes.
With black, swollen lips.
With madness and death upon a wild and haggard face.
Was Price Durand this gaunt specter in golden mail, carrying the arms of a king centuries dust?

The wonder at himself came and fled, like any idea of his desert-maddened brain—like any idea save the one that did not
change,
the single idea that he must find Aysa.

Then his croaking voice was demanding in Arabic that the golden doors be opened. He heard a subdued stirring beyond the xanthic panels, but they did not move.

He whispered the ax-song of Iru, and hammered upon the mocking golden valves with the battle-ax. And yet they did not open.

Still he beat upon the gates, and shrilled dry-voiced curses, and croaked Aysa’s name. And shining silence taunted him.

Then the dominating purpose that had driven him through terrible days was broken. His reason found sanctity in madness from suffering in a land too cruel for life. And Price was left the creature of delirium.