Part 2

He put his eye to the broken wall as he reached the great basement cave in this part of the underground citadel beneath the Place. Apparently no guards had been posted here as yet. He lunged against the wall and it clattered down. Then he darted across the slippery muck and sprouting toadstool growth to the hidden entrance to the tunnel leading outside.

Even then he heard the rasp of the scaly black plates of hunting _drogs_, the domesticated long-limbed smaller lizards that the warriors of Arba use in hunting upon the _agan_ jungle's upper terrace for the bat-winged wild lizards and white-fleshed, tender, legless serpents so prized on Arban tables. The black-robed ones had turned their swift _drogs_ upon his trail! His only safety lay in flight.

Almost had he reached the abandoned tower when the hunting _drogs_ were upon him. Even as they reached his heels Ho Dyak cast a despairing glance upward--and saw one of the ancient ventilating shafts that supplied air to this buried way.

He sprang upward and his fingers closed upon a tough _agan_ root. A moment later all four of his hands were gripping other roots and he was climbing carefully up through a rounded shaft.

Below him the hunting _drogs_ leaped high into the air and fell back again, whistling, growling and screaming in their saurian stupid way. Twenty feet he had climbed before a solid mat of _agan_ blocked further upward progress. Ho Dyak clung to the huge hairy white roots and peered about him.

Meanwhile the Place's warriors came swiftly up with their six-limbed lizard beasts. A cry of triumph came up to Ho Dyak.

"Come down, Ho Dyak!" one of them shouted, "and we will not permit the _drogs_ to destroy you."

Ho Dyak laughed shortly. "It is you who will destroy me," he said, "and not the _drogs_. I prefer the _drogs_."

"Surrender, Ho Dyak," cried the man menacingly, "at once, and the One Orst may but take from you your eyes. Delay, and his tame _drogs_ will eat your limbs, one by one, as you yet live."

"I prefer a javelin," mocked Ho Dyak. "The death is clean and merciful."

"Then take it!" shouted the man, drawing back his throwing stick.

But even as a hail of javelins hummed upward Ho Dyak was in motion. He had swung on his shaggy ladder of roots into a ragged crevice in the side of the shaft. And so the javelins buried themselves only in the rubbery coils of _agan_. A howl of rage rolled up through the old ventilating shaft.

Ho Dyak crawled further into the narrow crevice. At every instant he expected to find that the probing roots or stems of the fleshy _agan_ had closed this last hope of escape, but as time passed and the way widened he began to hope. Other tunnels branched off from time to time and he crawled through tepid pools of foul water in which he sensed the wriggling of hideous alien things with scaly-finned limbs and tails. The blackness was total. He groped onward.

* * * * *

And then he fell forward into a blackness that was not total and found himself squatting in the shallow muck of a sullen underground river. Or perhaps that lightless roof overhead was but the matted stems and roots of the sunless vines of the fog seas. He saw a faint luminous glow that came from the river. Thousands of tiny light-producing aquatic plant-animals swarmed in the depths.

He saw a raft of tied buoyant _agan_ stems, huge two-foot sections ten and eleven feet long, and poling it along with a tough spear of hide-bound bone, was a woman in a scant, ragged tunic. At the same instant she saw him.

"In Lalal's name," she demanded, "why do you sit in the water so? Are not there few enough warriors in the two caves of the Outcasts without offering yourself thus freely to the water _slirans_?"

Ho Dyak realized that this was one of the blinded Outcasts, turned out to die in the jungles because they dared question the rule of the One Orst and his priestly underlings.

"I am Ho Dyak," he said, "who is hunted by the black-robed ones, the _orsts_."

"We have heard of you, Ho Dyak," the blind girl said, "and we welcome you to the poor sanctuary of our caves." She poled the raft nearer. "I am Sarn Vod, daughter of Dra Vod."

"Dra Vod is your father!" cried Ho Dyak. "I have heard of him. He built a machine powered by the sap of pressed _agan_ for his boat!"

"Aye," agreed the girl, "and his reward was blindness. Of the three hundred Outcasts in our rocky caves a hundred are sightless."

"You can see!" Ho Dyak burst out. He was looking into the beautiful slim face of the girl. She was more beautiful than Mian Ith had ever been. From that moment Ho Dyak forgot the faithless One Orst's daughter....

"Of course," agreed the girl, laughing. "I was born after my father was taken into the hidden village of the Outcasts."

They sat close together, then, in the raft, and Ho Dyak opened his mind to the mind of the girl. She in turn opened her mind to him. It was not long that they sat thus but when Sarn Vod took up the pole of bone again they had found that they loved one another.

Never before had Ho Dyak allowed another to probe into the remoter recesses of his brain. But he knew that she could be trusted. Her childlike acceptance of him even before he opened his thoughts to her convinced him of that.

"I will go with you to the camp of the Earthman," she told Ho Dyak softly, as they neared the upreared hillock of soft gray rock from which their two cave homes had been laboriously scraped.

"It is good," agreed Ho Dyak, "and later, when we have found a secure place, I will come back for your people. The Outcasts will be the first to share with us the wisdom of the Ancients."

Sarn Vod flashed him a quick mental caress as the raft grounded in the shelter of an overhanging ledge. He stepped to take her in his arms, and halted as a giant of a man groped toward them. Where his eyes had been there were now but empty sockets.

"My father," said the girl, "Dra Vod!"

"And my father as well," said Ho Dyak, leaping to the blind man's side, and his two middle arms locked with the elbows of Dra Vod's short middle arms.

Dra Vod's own powerful webbed fingers gripped Ho Dyak's elbows in return as their minds interlocked in greeting for a brief moment.

So it was that two days later Ho Dyak and his mate, Sarn, climbed the chill slopes above the lowlands and came to the highlands. With them came two of the Outcasts, young hunters who wished to see the world above the fog sea.

Ho Dyak wore the space suit that he had cached far below in a rocky cliff's creviced wall, and Sarn and the two Outcasts wore as many and more garments than Ho Dyak had worn long days before.

As they came through the last shreds of the watery vapor that flooded the bowl of the Sea of Thol, one of the young Outcast warriors was in the lead. Suddenly he uttered a short, choked cry and fell, toppling back into the mist. And the rocks around them rattled with copper-tipped javelins.

"Quick!" shouted Ho Dyak. "It is the black-robed ones, the priests! They have been lying in wait for us!"

* * * * *

Back into the welcome protection of the fog sea the Outcasts plunged, but now there were only three of them. For one thing was Ho Dyak grateful: the thinning network of _agan_ afforded no safe footing for the hunting _drogs_.

"We die?" questioned Sarn quietly, and Ho Dyak laughed back at her. They were resting for a moment, listening.

"Not so long as my sword arms last," he said, "and of arms I have four."

"But they will follow us along the rim," objected Sarn. "When we climb upward again they will see us."

"They are cold and hungry," Ho Dyak told her, "and there are none too many of them. If we can reach the plateau safely we can fight them off, until we reach the rocket ship of the Earthman."

"We will be safe with the rocket rifle of Nelson to protect us," agreed Sarn.

Ho Dyak started along the thick stalks of _agan_ again, his arms gripping the interlacing of rubbery greenish stems on his right. And behind him came Sarn and the young Outcast.

By nightfall they had moved a matter of two miles further along the left wall of the barrier cliffs. The lone moon of Thrane had not as yet lifted above the horizon and so they climbed silently upward into an almost complete darkness. Out of the fog sea they made their way, and safely into the dense jungle growth spreading at this point.

Sarn was chilled to the bone, and the young warrior's thick lips were blue with cold. The temperature of the lower plateau had dropped to almost a hundred degrees with the coming of dusk, ninety degrees below that of the lowlands. And so Ho Dyak followed a small stream, warmer than the usual upland streams, up to a rocky bluff where steaming water rolled white vapor into the growing moonlight of the jungle clearing. By some good fortune the hot spring gushed up in the heart of a small cavern and the two Outcasts were not forced to lie in the almost-boiling water.

With morning they marched eastward to the jungle meadow where the spaceship's shattered bulk lay. The spaceship was empty. Ho Dyak saw that the helicopter was gone from the cargo hold, and with it many supplies. Nelson and the girl had thought he was not returning and gone in search of the ancient gateway that might pierce through to Earth!

Ho Dyak turned his eyes toward the mud-daubed hut of stones he had abandoned. His eyes widened at the sight of steam rising from its dome. Could they be--? No, it was impossible. Shattered though it was, the spaceship afforded better protection for Nelson and Marta than the igloo. Then who--?

Immediately, Ho Dyak knew the answer. The black-robed _orsts_ had taken over the igloo! And they were not yet aware of the presence of the Outcasts.

He returned to the hidden Outcasts, his mate and the young warrior, but with him he carried a rocket rifle that Nelson had thoughtfully left behind.

"Come," he told the warrior, "we will drive the black-robed ones from our hut. With the Earthman's gun they will be helpless before us."

They marched side by side, two warriors from the fog sea, toward the rocky dome from which the plumes of white steam jetted. At last the priests saw them and came pouring from their warm shelter.

"Go back to the Place of Lalal," ordered Ho Dyak.

The black-robed, thick-padded bodies of the seven priestly fighting men shook with laughter. These two outcasts ordered them to retreat! They plunged ahead.

The rocket gun whirred and an explosion ripped two of the priest-warriors into tatters. Ho Dyak reloaded and fired, and a third warrior dropped. And then the tiny battery that fired the rocket shell went dead! The third rocket shell did not blast into the attacking men.

Ho Dyak flung down the useless weapon and drew his sword. Javelins could not pierce his space suit, only a sword could crush through to his body. His other hand was busy with his throwing stick and javelins, and he cursed the two limbs of the Earthmen that prevented his middle pair of arms from being used.

Four of the enemy faced the two of them at the last, and their weapons clashed together. Ho Dyak fought with the strength of despair, and downed one of the black-robed ones, but then he was battling three swordsmen. The young Outcast had fallen.

Suddenly a shadow fell upon the fighting men from above. An explosion sounded and a priestly warrior fell, and then another. The sole survivor raced madly away toward the fog sea's welcome shelter and Ho Dyak was glad to let him escape. He would carry the word of the terrible weapons of Earth to the watchers along the rim.

The spaceship's helicopter settled slowly to the ground. Ho Dyak hurried toward the little ship's cabin and at the same time he saw Sarn come stumbling from the jungle toward them.

"Nick of time," grinned Nelson, and behind him Ho Dyak could see Marta Gosden's startled bloodless face.

"Right you are," Ho Dyak assured the Earthman. "And how did the search for a gateway to Earth go?"

"We're not worrying about that for the present," said Nelson. "You need us, Ho Dyak, and I think we need you too. We're staying here on Thrane for a long time."

"I am glad," Ho Dyak flashed. "In centuries to come all Thrane will bless you."

"That's so much jet dust," scoffed Nelson. "But we did find a canyon, several miles deep, Ho Dyak, a sort of fog lake, where you may be able to live normally, and above it, on the second plateau we found an ideal spot for our own home."

He squeezed Marta's shoulder as she slipped past him. Then he was beside her as she greeted Sarn. Ho Dyak smiled as he felt the friendly spirit that was instantly kindled between these women of two strange races.

"She is lovely!" cried Marta to Ho Dyak and Nelson, "and so miserable. Run to the ship, Glade, and bring another space suit."

Yes, thought Ho Dyak, with the knowledge of two races his ivory-skinned race might once again spread up over the fertile chill plateaus of Thrane. Already he loved the mighty vistas of clear air here above the fog sea. Never again would he be satisfied with the circumscribed grayness of a fog-bound world....