The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series (27 page)

The Professor described the uncanny mental influence which, by his own experience, he knew the monstrous leeches were able to exert over their prey.

“Hypnotized, you mean, Doc? But—can an insect (I guess the Sluaggh are insects) hypnotize a human being?”

We were talking English, the two of us, while the others listened without comprehension; the Zanthodonian tongue did not have a sufficiently sophisticated vocabulary to include such terms as “hypnotize” and “insect.”

The old boy mused, tugging on his stiff, wiry spike of white beard.

“More nearly akin to the paralysis-inducing fascination the gaze of a serpent is said to exert over birds,” he said, trying to define the unique sensation. “Caught and held in the cold, unwinking gaze of those horrid red eyes, you seem to lose all will and volition, my boy. Ice-cold tendrils slither through your brain, numbing the centers of will and activity…the cold numbness spreads to your arms and legs—”

With a little cry, he gave up trying to describe it.

“You will have to experience it for yourself, to appreciate just what it is like,” he said lamely. I set my jaw grimly.

“No thanks, I would rather not,” I said crisply.

During this brief lull in our conversation, Hurok spoke up, a slow, hesitant question.

“Hurok wonders why the Sluaggh will feast on ourselves next, when the caverns are filled with panjani slaves, who seem to have lived here all their lives.”

Potter nodded cripsly, and beamed fondly on the great fellow. He was fascinated by Hurok, and during their brief captivity together here in the cavern city had become quite attached to him. After all, it was rather an unique experience for a modern paleontologist to strike up a friendship with a genuine Neanderthal man. As well, every time Hurok by word or deed demonstrated the consequence of rational thought, by asking an intelligent and logical question, the Professor was delighted. (You will remember his theory that our most remote ancestors possessed the same potential intelligence we enjoy.)

“Ahem! A most pertinent query, my good friend. I have heard the Gorpaks talking and, although their clipped, staccato dialect is a
little
difficult to follow until you become accustomed to it, it seems the answer goes thusly: the cavern folk have, indeed, lived here for generations, captive of the Gorpaks and their own lords, the Sluaggh; they are born and bred to slavery, and, by now, have become completely docile. We, on the other hand—the Gorpaks call us ‘surfacefolk’—were not born and bred in captivity, and are anything but docile. The Gorpaks regard us with suspicion and, perhaps, a twinge of apprehension. We are quarrelsome, restive, unruly, and have been known to fight back and to strive for freedom from our pens. Thus, whenever one of us surfacefolk is taken prisoner by the Gorpaks, we are fed to the Sluaggh as quickly as possible, so as to minimize our potential for danger and hostile activities, such as striving to stage a slave revolt or a mass escape or something.”

I could see the sense of it, but the future still looked appalling.

“How long have we got?”

The old scientist shrugged. “I do not know.”

* * * *

After labor and feeding, we were penned for the sleep period in the dungeon. This was an enormous single room in which dwelt others besides the Professor, Hurok, One-Eye and myself.

There were fifteen of them, all told, and they were savages in every wise quite similar to Tharn and his people, being stalwart and tall, the men brawny and majestic of feature, the women splendid and healthy specimens. All had blond hair and the clear blue eyes of Tharn and his countrymen; however, they were not from Thandar but from another tribe or nation of the Cro-Magnon stock. Their land they called Sothar
[1]
—but in which direction it might be found, they were not able to describe in words. The people of Zanthodon have, by and large, something akin to a homing sense: generally, they unerringly head in the direction they want to go; but they have no words for the cardinal points of the compass and only a vague sense of actual distance. Anything beyond a march of “ten wakes” to them is infinitely far off.

I first became acquainted with the people of Sothar through one Rukh, a grizzled, gray-bearded chieftain of the scouts of that tribe. We were set to toiling together at various tasks and found some opportunities to converse without being noticed by the Gorpaks. Under such circumstances as these, it seemed, the natural hostility and suspicion between all of the several tribes or nations of the Underground World were more or less relaxed. Strangers in confronting the same peril, it seems, are considered comrades.

Rukh pointed out to me the Omad of his tribe, a magnificent figure of a man called Garth, who stood almost as tall as Tharn of Thandar himself. Among the other Sotharians in captivity were the old wise man or shaman of the tribe, a personage called Coph, who bore a marked resemblance to Professor Potter, being skinny and white-bearded and baldish.

Nian, the wife of Garth, was also among the captives, a superb woman in her prime, who toiled at the most filthy and degrading tasks without a word of protest or revulsion, maintaining a calm serenity of spirit that was truly admirable. Their daughter, Yualla, was a slim, ravishingly gorgeous girl of perhaps fourteen.

These fifteen were all that were believed to have survived of the folk of Sothar; their village or encampment had been destroyed in the eruption of one of the many volcanoes that thrust smoky cones into the steamy, humid air of the Underground World. They had hastily fled the eruption, and had looked on helplessly from a high vantage point as the lava flows from the volcano had burnt and buried what remained of their village. Then, commencing a long trek toward the sea of the Sogar-Jad, hoping to find a new and safer land far from the volcano country, they had at length entered the regions adjacent to the Peaks of Peril, and had been ambushed by the Gorpaks, who apparently launched slave raids into the surface world on occasion, if only to replenish their stock of slaves, which would otherwise have dwindled rapidly before the rapacious hunger of the Sluaggh.

With another of the men of Sothar I struck up an acquaintance, and this was a fine-looking warrior named Varak, who seemed to be about my own age and who possessed a quality of good-natured and playful humor that I admired. To be merry under such dire circumstances would be difficult for the happiest of men.

To another of the warriors of Sothar, however, I took an instant dislike. This was a sallow, thin-lipped fellow named Murg, who was always sidling up obsequiously to the Gorpak overseers with much cringing and bowing, and engaging them in conspiratorial, whispered conversations.

Every nation, race and class have their informers and quislings. I very much suspected that Murg was such. Varak, who thought the best of everyone, did not believe my estimate of Murg’s character to be the truth, and Garth himself shrugged it off, saying that each of us must survive as best we can in the slave pens, and that Murg, although not much of a warrior or hunter, was a remarkably clever fellow.

* * * *

And so I waited, biding my time for some opportunity to occur or for some splendid plan to dawn upon me. For I had not the slightest intention of yielding to hopelessness and accepting these conditions. It is not in me to give up without a fight; neither was it in the Professor or Hurok. Even One-Eye, sadistic bully though he certainly was, proved brave enough in battle. And if the Sotharians were anything like their distant cousins, the men of Thandar, they, too, would fight even a completely hopeless battle, rather than die in the hideous embrace of the crawling leech things.

I would personally prefer to die in battle, facing my foes and doing my utmost, rather than to succumb to the Sluaggh without hope or opposition.

In other words, what we had here was a pretty decent nucleus for a slave revolt. We were sixteen men and three women, and two of the men, of course, were Drugars—superb fighting machines, larger and stronger and heavier than the rest. Although two of the men, the Professor and old Rukh, were relatively elderly and frail, neither was exactly useless in a fight; indeed, the Professor was pretty good in a scrap, once he stopped studying the flora or fauna or whatever, and managed to lose his temper. I have once seen him dress down and thoroughly cow a full-grown grymp, or triceratops, which was about the size of a Mack truck.

That
takes guts!

During our sleep periods, unless the wary Gorpak guards were so close that they might be able to overhear our conversation, we managed to discuss the ways and means of escape. Sometimes, when the guards were lax or were otherwise occupied, we could exchange a few muttered remarks during the communal eating period.

Before we had merely begun to explore the problem, however, everything quite suddenly changed. For the better, in some ways, but in others, for the worse.…

On that particular occasion, the Professor, Varak, Yualla, One-Eye, myself and one of the Sotharian warriors whose name I am afraid I have forgotten, but which was something like Thusk, were assigned to sweeping out and mopping up a sector of the caverns which heretofore none of us had seen.

While we were tackling the grime and filth, One-Eye all the while grumbling and griping, for he hated being put to “work fit only for shes,” as he put it, another work party of slaves was led past us by a squad of Gorpaks. At the sight of these strangers little Yualla started and gasped, and Varak, for once, lost his good-humored banter in exchange for a cry of amazement. It was evident that among these other captives they recognized the faces of friends of theirs, fellow-Sotharians they had believed dead in the disaster which had so swiftly overtaken the village.

I paid little attention to their emotion after the first instant. For my heart leaped up with a gasp of wondrous relief—

Among the Sotharians were Jorn the Hunter and Darya, my beloved
.

As her eyes met mine she, too, uttered a cry of rapturous joy; then her glorious eyes misted with tears and her face fell in despondency, even as did my own as much the same thought flashed through our minds at the same instant:

I thrilled to the knowledge that she was alive and seemingly unhurt.

But rather would I have known her dead, than to see her here, in the ghastly den of the Sluagghs.

CHAPTER 14

They Search for Darya

Under the command of Achmed, first mate of the
Red Witch
, the search parties landed here and there along the beach in the longboats. The Moorish officer hastened to divide his men into groups of six, dispatching them to search the beach, the glade and the edges of the jungles which loomed nearby for any signs of the savage youth or the girl he had so boldly rescued from the very arms of Kâiradine Redbeard.

In truth, Achmed was reluctant to pursue this task. Not only did he consider the expenditure of so much time and energy upon what was, after all, merely another woman—in no wise, according to Achmed’s way of thinking, very different from any other young woman—foolish and unwise, but, as well, certain trepidations colored his thinking.

Seventh sons of seventh sons, such as the huge, burly Moorish first mate with the shaven bullet-head, receive eerie and inexplicable premonitions from the Unknown concerning those events yet to come from the womb of unborn time. And, over the long and sanguinary years of his piratical career, Achmed had seen such onimous foreshadowings proven accurate often enough to have learned to trust them.

And the cold worm of fear coiled within the strong and valiant heart of Achmed of El-Cazar. Something whispered to his inner ear that this rash expedition in pursuit of an unimportant, although lovely, young woman, would bring down upon the officers and crewmen of the
Red Witc
h a swift and thorough doom.

But such men as Kâiradine Redbeard, called Barbarossa, are both capricious and imperious, and seldom will they brook any interference with the direction of their will or desire. And such was surely the case with the
reis
or captain of the corsair galley: Achmed had seen men flogged to the bone for less than the disobedience he now wistfully entertained in his heart.

Failure was one thing; disobedience quite another. And none could be so ruthless or so cruel in meting out swift punishment as Kâiradine Redbeard, called Barbarossa.

So, with foreboding gnawing at his heart, the Moor stood on the shore, watching with keen and wary eyes as his men went about their search. He made a flamboyant, even barbaric, figure as he stood there, burly arms folded upon his naked breast, heavy brows lowering in a frown of displeasure. Achmed of El-Cazar was a huge man and heavily built, with broad, powerful shoulders and a bull-like chest. He wore an open vest of red felt with gold froggings, loose, baggy pantaloons of pale green silk, their bottoms tucked into the tops of short, calf-high boots with curling toes, made of scarlet leather. A wide sash of vermilion and mustard yellow was wound around and around his waist; therein was thrust a curved and long-bladed scimitar resembling a cutlass from the Spanish Main, a brace of hooked daggers, and a pouch of green leather fashioned from the hides of reptiles.

His head was shaven bald, with a thick, brutal neck, an underslung jaw, broad, full-lipped mouth. His eyes were hard and wary. Although he thought of himself as a Moor, and was descended from that people, during the generations his ancestors had dwelt here in Zanthodon, many racial strains had entered his blood; instead of the inky-black complexion you or I would envision upon utterance of the word “Moor,” Achmed possessed a coffee-colored skin and, among his features, only his wide, thicklipped mouth suggested a Negroid ancestry.

Jeweled rings were upon his strong fingers; great hoops of burnished gold bobbled from the lobes of his ears; armlets of bronze and gold were clasped about his massive arms; a necklace of polished but, of course, uncut opals glimmered upon his deep chest.

Only a few men or women of Moorish descent were to be found among the Barbary pirates of El-Cazar; for the most part, not counting slaves and harem captives, the folk of the corsairs’ stronghold were Arab to one or another degree. The few of Moorish ancestry were to some extent looked down upon, because of the “taint” of Negroid blood in their veins—that being the way the other Barbary pirates thought of the admixture.

Of all his people, Achmed alone had achieved a position of some prominence among the Arab corsairs. This position he prized, as his proximity to the person of Kâiradine Redbeard afforded him vast influence among those who would otherwise have accounted him of little importance and hardly worth the cultivating.

Only one other of his people, a dancing girl called Zoraida, had risen so high in the ranks of the Barbary pirates as had Achmed of El-Cazar. And she was one of the women who belonged to Kâiradine.

Zoraida was his rival for the companionship of the powerful lord of El-Cazar. Were Achmed to fail in this mission, or to skimp in his duties on this assignment, thereby earning the swift and merciless displeasure of his master, it would afford the lithe and voluptuous dancing girl limitless pleasure.

Achmed did not intend to fail, or to disobey.

But always there whispered to him that inner voice which urged him to avoid the search for the girl and the savage youth, for the shadowy and mysterious doom in which that search would surely end.

Erelong, one of his men approached the place where Achmed stood scowling and deep in thought, to report. He was a lean, famished-looking scoundrel called Tarbu, whose long, shaven, lank-jawed face was rendered sinister and villainous by a zigzag scar which ran from the corner of one eye to the corner of his thin-lipped mouth, raising one corner of his mouth into a perpetual and menacing leer. He was dressed in a torn blouse of white silk, open to the navel, whose voluminous sleeves hung loosely about his scrawny torso. His bony legs were trousered in fawn-colored leather, much stained with sea water, spilt wine, and old scabs of dried gravy, which breeches were tucked into high sea boots with silver buckles.