Part 5

For hours I speculated on the thing, but could find no rational explanation for it, nor would the Norseman enlighten me. Finally I gave it up as a mystery beyond me, and strove to banish it from my mind.

Two more days dragged out, days that were like weeks to me. I felt that I must soon go mad, if I were longer imprisoned. And then, sharply ending the monotony of dreary hours, there came a summons, a summons that in the end proved to be a call to an adventure utterly undreamed of by Lantin or myself.

_CHAPTER 10_

THE TEMPLE OF THE RAIDER

All that day I had sensed a tense activity outside, and many times there was the tramp of feet down the corridor outside our cell, as companies of the guards came and went. As sunset came, I stood beside the transparent wall and watched its brilliant colors fade from the sky.

Overhead, now, the aircraft of the Kanlars were flickering continuously past, all heading toward the giant cylinder that stood at the city's center, and when I scrambled up a little higher against the wall, to get a glimpse of the street, I saw that that street was crowded with masses of the armored guards and the staring-eyed slaves, all pressing on toward the same building.

Darkness came, and the noise of activity outside died away, so that it seemed that all the city around us was deserted, nor was there any sound from the building above us. For all of two hours after the darkness, we sat there, listening, waiting. Once I thought I heard a distant ringing music, but decided that my ears had been deceived. Then, abruptly, there was the stamp of sandals on the floor of the corridor, and we heard the doors of the cells along it being opened.

Our own was flung wide, as we rose, and I saw that a score of the guards waited outside, their leader ordering us to come out, which we were glad enough to do. Once in the corridor, I found Denham and the others of the group I had met before, shackled to each other, wrist to wrist, in a single file. The Northman and myself were fettered to the end of the line, and then we set out, a long file of guards on each side of us, marching us down the corridor and outside the building.

The big street up which I had come before was utterly deserted, as we turned into it. I looked back along its length, lit with the crimson bulbs, a winding serpent of red light that stretched away out into the country beyond the city, out to where our time-car lay hidden in the hills. At the thought of it, so fierce a desire seized me to win back to it, and my own time, that had I not been shackled I would have made a break for freedom down the empty street. But as it was, I had no choice, and followed the others in our fettered line down the wide street toward the gigantic cylindrical building at its end.

That great pile seemed to loom higher and higher as we drew near it. Brilliant, winking lights along its sides outlined it against the gloom of night, a huge, erect cylinder of smooth stone, its flat top all of a thousand feet in width, and nearly a half-mile above the ground. Obscured as the immense edifice was by the darkness, yet the vague glimpses I got of its sky-flung walls staggered me. And we were being marched directly toward it.

A quarter-mile from the building, the flat street we followed ended, changed to a wide, smooth ramp that led up toward the giant edifice in a slight upward slant. We went up that ramp, the guards still on either side, till we stood under the very shadow of the gigantic, perpendicular walls, and now I saw that the ramp led up to and through a wide, high-arched entrance cut in the building's side, much like the entrance of the cylindrical building where I had been prisoned.

We passed up and through that arched entrance, and were in a long tunnel, similarly arched, and cut through solid, seamless stone. It was a hundred feet in length, and as we passed on down its length it came to me that this must be the thickness of the great building's sides. The idea was too prodigious for speculation, even, and I shook it off, peering ahead toward the tunnel's end, where a ruddy light flooding down from above marked that end.

A few moments, and we had reached the tunnel's mouth, and emerged from it into the vast cylinder's interior. I swept one startled glance around that interior, then felt myself staggering, reeling, falling. The immensity of the place was soul-shaking, bearing down on me with a weight that seemed physical, crushing my thoughts down into nothing but dazed awe and terror.

I had imagined the building's interior to be divided, partitioned into apartments, but instead, the whole interior was one titanic room, shaped by the outside walls and roof, its sides looming up, dimly and vaguely, into a hazy darkness that hid their upper parts from view. Along the sides were many of the light-emitting bulbs, but these merely burned red holes in the dimness that surrounded the building's interior, rather than illuminated it.

Starting at the wall, and extending twenty feet out toward the center of the room, the floor was of black stone, a flat, continuous ring of smooth material that circled the whole room. Inside of this ring was the real floor, a single, huge disk of burnished metal, smooth as ice and as seamless, over nine hundred feet in diameter. And except for ourselves, who stood on the black ring near the entrance, there was nothing whatever on black circle or burnished floor, no people, tables, altar, nothing but the immense expanse of smooth metal and the comparatively thin black circle that surrounded it.

I looked up, and saw for the first time the people of the city. Cut in the thickness of the prodigious walls of the building were broad balconies, one above the other, ringing the building's interior as far up as I could see in the haze that hung above, and in these balconies were the dwellers of the city, Kanlars, guards and slaves. The lowest balcony, which was only a few feet above the floor, jutted forth in a smaller square gallery, a little away from where I stood, and in this projecting square sat three of the bright-haired Kanlars, the oldest-appearing men I had yet seen among them, two garbed in long robes of solid crimson while the other's garment was of deepest black. They sat there calmly, looking away across the big floor toward the great hall's other side. This lowest gallery, and the three directly above it, were filled with the Kanlars, while in the unnumbered galleries above these were the armored guards and the slaves. The only entrance to these galleries that I could see was a single narrow, winding stairway, a spiral stairway that began on the black circle of stone near the wall and slanted up from balcony to balcony, circling the building's sides several times as it spiraled up, and evidently leading up to the very roof of the place.

While I surveyed the scene, other ragged groups like our own had entered, escorted by guards, until a considerable number of us had been collected there near the entrance. Now one of the crimson-robed figures who sat in the gallery that jutted out from the lowest balcony, rose and uttered an order. My knowledge of the Kanlar language was too rudimentary for me to understand him, but when he had finished and resumed his seat, a delighted murmur swept over the massed crowds in the balconies.

Before I had time to speculate, the captain of the guards who watched us snapped out brief orders, and immediately eight of our number ran out of the center of the metal floor, where they at once drew their weapons and faced each other, in four individual combats.

In a few minutes, the four duels were over, but only three of the contestants came back from the floor's center. To my surprize, then, instead of being re-shackled to the rest of us, the three were handed armor and weapons like that of the other guards, which they donned at once. I began to understand now the purpose of these combats. Evidently the bravest fighters were weeded out in preliminary duels, such as I had taken part in, and the survivors of these first battles were then pitted against each other, the victors being adjudged worthy to enter the company of the guards. But where were these ragged fighters brought from?

The combats went on, always eight men battling at once, and I saw that our number was growing smaller very rapidly. Neither Denham nor I had yet been called on to fight, but my heart was beating rapidly, for I expected each time to be among the next eight. The blades clashed on, at the floor's center, and group after group went out from us, either to return and don the armor of the guards or to be dragged off the floor by slaves, dead or dying. The Kanlars in the lower balconies laughed and chatted as the ragged fighters on the floor slew each other, the massed guards above shouted their approval at each shrewd blow, and the fighting continued until finally but ten of our number were left, and by a freak of chance, both Denham and I were of that ten.

The fights on the floor ended, one by one, and swiftly the guards unshackled eight of our number and thrust them out onto the floor. I stood appalled. For the two who were left were myself and the Englishman!

While the swords clicked and flashed out on the floor, I stood in a daze, dismayed at the ironical trick which fate had played me. Of all the men in the city, I must fight the one whom alone I knew and liked. In a space of seconds, it seemed, the four fights on the floor had ended, and the fetters on my wrists were loosed. Together, hesitantly, Denham and I walked out onto the floor. Shouts of applause and encouragement came down from the balconies, for ours was the last fight, and the spectators wanted an exciting one.

* * * * *

Standing there at the very center of the huge building, Denham and I faced each other. Simultaneously we grasped the hilts of our rapiers, half drew them, and then, with a common impulse, slammed the blades back down into their sheaths. Without speaking, my companion stepped over and flung an arm across my shoulders, then tilted up his head and favored the spectators in the balconies with an insolent stare.

A howl of rage went up as it became evident that we would not fight each other. A torrent of taunts and execrations poured down on us from above, but we continued to lounge, arm in arm, as nonchalantly as possible.

Out from the black edge of the floor rushed a half-dozen of the guards, who seized us and hurried us off the floor, amid a storm of abuse from above. Instead of returning with us to the entrance, the guards led us toward the bottom of the spiraling stair and there stationed themselves beside us.

The angry cries in the balconies silenced, now, and a strange stillness filled the great hall. Music began, single, thrilling notes, like dropping peals of sound. Swiftly the lights began to dim, the glowing bulbs in the walls waning until all things in the vast room were wrapped in shadowy dusk.

The chiming music ceased, and over all that mighty fane was absolute silence, with no sound from Kanlars, guards or slaves. Then, in the little projecting gallery where he sat, the black-robed oldster rose and spoke.

His deep, heavy voice rolled out over the vast room with awesome effect, breaking as it did the unearthly silence. He was chanting, uttering an invocation or prayer. The words came to my ears, thick and blurred, so that I understood few of them. But the effect was one of utter solemnity--the darkness, the massed, silent crowds above, and that one deep voice speaking on, rising and falling.

For minutes the voice rumbled on, then abruptly ceased. There was another full minute of the strange silence, and a tremendous ringing note sounded. Even after it had died, the echoes of it beat in my ears like ghostly carillons of tiny, elfin chimes. And as it died away, there was a heavy, grating sound and the whole vast metal floor abruptly sank down some six feet into what appeared to be a gigantic smooth-walled shaft, then slid sidewise with another grating jar, vanishing into some aperture prepared for it. And where the floor had been was now a tremendous circular abyss, a straight-sided pit of such titanic depth that, looking down into it, I fell weakly to my knees and was seized with sudden nausea.

I stood on the very edge of the abyss, on the ring of black flooring that was its rim. And down from that rim, the stone sides of the great shaft fell smoothly to an unguessed depth. Far, far below, I seemed to see glimmering lights that winked faintly. And I saw, too, that the spiral staircase which circled the great room's interior from floor to roof continued on down beneath the floor and circled around and around this circular chasm in the same way, winding down into the unguessed depths below.

I felt Denham pulling me back from the edge of the shaft, beside which I lay. Dimly I realized that all in the great building were now chanting, rolling forth the same invocation as the black-robed leader. Far above, now, at the very ceiling or roof of the cylinder, a light burgeoned out, a burning purple beam that clove its light down through the dim haze and shadows around it. A moment it hung there, then there was a faint sigh of wind, a puff of icy air, and down, straight down from the vast hall's roof, there raced like a misty plummet--the Raider!

It flashed down until it hung on a level with myself, in midair, poised at the very center of the circular abyss and floating there effortlessly. It hung there, its gray mass changing, fluxing, interlacing, while at its center hung the three little orbs of purple light, steady and unwinking. From all the massed thousands on the balconies a sigh of worship went up.

The chant rolled out, louder, fiercer, and through it sounded another single ringing note. There was another whistle of wind, and the three purple orbs of the Raider flashed to green, while the solid but fluxing mass of it changed to a spinning cloud of gray vapor, that swirled rapidly around the central lights. Another fierce gust of wind smote me, and abruptly the Raider had vanished.

Up in the balconies the chant went on, repeated again and again. I saw a sea of white faces above, all turned down toward the spot where the Raider had disappeared. Minutes passed. The chanting went on, low, vast and deep-toned.

Came another buffeting breeze, a tempest of shrill wind-sounds, and with startling suddenness the Raider reappeared, flashing back into being at the same spot where it had vanished, above the center of the abyss. Again the green orbs changed to purple, and its cloudy mass contracted to the shifting but solid form it had occupied before. But now, held in its shapeless self, were men, who hung helpless in its grasp. It drifted over to the marble edge of the abyss, and loosed the men it held, then moved back to the pit's center.

The chanting swelled out, exultant, and I saw the men thus loosed struggle to their feet and look around with utter awe and terror. They were five in number, three in short white tunics who looked like men of ancient Greece, the other two wizened little figures with dark skin and long, wispy mustaches, either Huns or Tartars.

Again a ringing note cut through the chanting, and as if in obedience the Raider rose, floated up toward the vast hall's roof, whence it had come. It disappeared there, the purple light burned for a moment and vanished, and the chanting finally ceased.

The bulbs glowed out, at once, and light filled the place. The crowds in the balconies began to leave, streaming down the narrow staircase toward the floor. Before they reached it, however, guards had reached and fettered the five men the Raider had left on the pit's edge, and they now brought them over and shackled them also to Denham and me.

Our little group stood now on the very edge of the abysmal shaft. Some twenty feet below us there was a little landing, from which the stair started, spiraling down and around the shaft, into the darkness below. I wondered momentarily how the landing was reached, but my wonder ceased as a guard touched a lever in the wall, causing a little metal stair to unfold swiftly from the side of the shaft itself, a light little series of steps that connected the black marble ring of flooring with the landing below.

At an order from the guards we stepped onto it, down it to the landing and on down the spiral stair, which was cut in the solid rock of the great shaft's sides. Looking back, I saw the steps down which we had come fold back into the wall, and a moment later the light from above was shut out as the great metal floor of the temple swung back into position above us with a grating clash.

Our only light now was from bulbs set in the smooth wall along the down-winding stair, and these gave hardly enough light to show us the next steps. A low wall about a yard in height, pierced with an ornamental design of openings, was our only protection from the abyss on our left. Yet the guards still marched us on, around and around the great shaft, in a tremendous, falling spiral, down, down....

_CHAPTER 11_

THE CITY OF THE PIT

Soon a dim pearly light began to show far below us, a light that puzzled me. In the world above, I knew, it must be dawn, but how this was connected with the growing light below, if it was so connected, baffled me.

And now we reached the end of the shaft down whose sides we had come. It ended abruptly, and below on each side lay a great open space, obscured by drifting clouds of mist. But the stair did not end with the shaft. It dropped straight on down, a free, unsupported spiral of gleaming metal, winding down into the obscuring mists that hid its lower length. It was an eery thing to see, that gigantic twisted stairway, like a great corkscrew, vanishing down into the mists, like some pathway of the gods from heaven to earth. And it could hardly have been hung there by less than gods, I thought. No metal or material ever known to me would have been able thus to hold its unsupported weight in the form of this stair, yet there it was, seemingly tossed there in godlike indifference to the laws of mechanics. In its way, it was as great a wonder as the great building above. As that thought came to me, the light around us began to grow, to redden like the sunrise, and the mists cleared, drifted away in masses, vanished. And there, beneath me, lay the pit.

I can only describe that pit by saying that it was like the inside of a round, squat bottle, the neck of the bottle being the shaft down which I had come. This great cavern below me was roughly circular in shape, all of four miles in diameter, and a mile from its level floor to its glowing roof. For that roof was glowing. Looking up at it as we marched on down, I saw that set in it were scores of brilliant globes of glass, from which a flood of growing light, golden light, sunlight, _daylight_, was pouring down.

I saw now that the spiral stair down which we marched reached down to the pit's floor, and touched it near its center. And I saw, too, that all of the great cavern's floor, from one towering side to another, was covered with mass on mass of white, roofless buildings, of all shapes, covering the floor of the pit and huddling closely beneath the perpendicular walls of smooth rock.

At the center of this great mass of buildings, directly below us, was a great open clearing, or plaza, and it was there that the stairway touched the pit's floor. And from this plaza, clear to the circling walls, nine streets branched out, radiating in every direction like the spokes of a wheel. Along those streets moved great masses of men, and these were the dwellers in the city, the people of the pit.

So it was that I looked first on the city of the pit, the city of the Raider, and its people, over whom his shadow had been cast. And, looking, I wondered if there in the massed crowds below were Lantin and Cannell, and if it were possible to find them, here.

Again our guards ordered us forward, and we marched on. But now only a low wall on each side protected us from the abyss, and there was no wall on the right side against which to cling. But our guards seemed to mind this not at all, and I judged that they had made many trips up and down the stair, to be thus hardened to its dangers.

As we descended, Denham explained to me in a low voice the origin of the lights on the roof. These were merely lenses of a kind, he said, which diffused into the cavern real sunlight brought from above. I had already seen and puzzled at the glass globes set on pedestals through the city of cylinders above, but now saw their purpose. Those globes received the sunlight, transmitted it in some unknown fashion down to the globes on the roof, which gave it forth again. Thus it was that day and night in the pit were the same as in the world above, and the light there waxed and waned in accordance with the rising and setting of the sun which these people never saw.

We drew closer and closer toward the ground, and now I saw that at the stair's end, where it touched and debouched on the pit's floor, it was closed by a high, heavy gate of metal, barred and spiked, and that on our own side of this gate was a force of some fifty of the guards, armed with long spears and also with curious little cylinders of shining metal which they carried in their belts, and which I guessed were weapons of a kind unknown to myself.

As we came down toward them, these guards drew aside and unlocked the big gate. Our own captors unshackled us, and then pushed us through it unceremoniously, so that we stood in the clearing or plaza. And the gate was quickly shut and locked behind us.

Standing there, I forgot all else in the fascination of the scene around me. Across the open plaza, which was smoothly floored with stone, a great multitude of people were coming and going, and it was that shifting throng that held my gaze. For in it were men of every race and land and time, men of the far past and men of my own time, all seized and brought here by the Raider to mix and mingle in one vast, variegated throng. Even that first glance showed me that there must be thousands, tens of thousands of men prisoned in this gigantic under-city, and it showed me, too, that even as among the guards and slaves above, there were no women. All were comparatively young men, few being over middle age, and nearly all had the appearance of warriors.

Men of a thousand different centuries passed and repassed there before my eyes, men who had been flashed through the ages and brought there by the same alien being that had seized Cannell before my eyes, and that had seized, only a few hours before, the five newcomers who had come down the great stair with Denham and me.

For these, these crowds and masses of men that choked the streets and squares and buildings of this city of hell, these were the spoils of the Raider, gathered together for some unholy purpose of his own, and prisoned here in the pit, far beneath the city of the Kanlars. In a living panorama of the past, they streamed by me, a brilliant, barbaric throng.

Many of them were unknown in race to me, but many others I could recognize by their dress or features. There were Egyptians, shaven-headed men in long white robes, strangely aloof and silent in that noisy gathering. They carried short swords and bows, and I noticed that every one of the figures that passed before me wore weapons of some sort. I saw Assyrians, here and there, ravagers of the ancient world, wolf-faced, black-bearded men with burning eyes, clad in strange armor.