Part 2

"Fear nothing from us," they told him. "Our calling is to heal the bodies and minds of the sick. It was for that mighty Ung Roth Ka came from the greater of the four moons to dwell among men. We care nothing for the quarrels and jealousies of men."

"Though," added the priestess, "as a woman and not a servant of Zo Aldan Ra, I hope you escape safely."

The priest nodded, his eyes twinkling. "We are yet only human. Though we will not use violence yet we can give advice and appeal to our mighty master in your behalf."

Hardan bowed, his hand making the respectful sign of a believer on the great god of healing. "I will bind you before we leave," he said, "unless you will come with us."

The priest shook his head. "There are many sick and fearful in the train," he said, "we remain to aid them."

Hardan turned to Ylda. "After I break your chain slip beneath the wagon and through the grass to the river. I will follow."

He arose and came over to her as though to examine her bonds. His hands clamped the chain and he tested the hand-forged links. One of them twisted and spread apart. Quickly he wrapped a strip of her green cape around either length of chain and her leg.

Ylda slipped away. Hardan busied himself binding the priest and priestess of the only gods and then followed. Almost he had reached the river when the silvery light of the four moons of Osar shone from beneath a pear-shaped cloud above the distant eastern hills.

Instantly the river flats were lighted bright as their beloved Wetlands. And a guard, rousing from his half-sleep in the white brilliance, saw Hardan's moving shape. He cried a warning.

* * * * *

Hardan knew the need for stealth was gone now. He ran to the river bank where Ylda waited, took her hand, and flung himself out into the sluggish muddy stream. He swam directly across and there, taking her in his arms, headed into the vine-tangled growth of scrub _ossa_ and knotty _brel_. And at its edge he halted long enough to send a shout of defiance back at the clustering sarifs.

After that he wasted no more breath. Downstream he threaded his way until a crook in the river piled a welcome wall of blue clay and shale between the camp and them. Here he again took to the river and a few minutes later they were running breathlessly across the moonlit plain beyond toward the hidden maars.

"Tricked them that time," chuckled Hardan, saddling their mounts. "We'll circle eastward toward the Blue Malsalms and then head back toward Aba."

Ylda put her slim fingers on Hardan's arm and squeezed. It told him, more than words, that she was happy to have escaped and that as yet she was breathless.

He lifted her into the saddle and then mounted himself. It was so easy now--a day's ride away from the river and then a southward swing until they could head directly westward back toward Aba and the river trail to the Wetlands....

* * * * *

The rocky escarpment loomed closer and closer as they drove their lathered maars up the boulder-strewn slope. Ylda turned for a hasty glance backward.

"They're gaining, Hardan," she shouted.

"It'll be night soon," Hardan called back, "and the Drylanders fear darkness." But his eyes probed vainly for a way of escape ahead.

His mouth twisted wryly as he recalled his plan of the preceding night. At midday a mounted party of the giant Drylanders, savage yellow-haired, apish brutes, had sighted them and for the last five hours they had found safety only in swift flight. Now, unless a gorge or pass opened in the looming grayness of the brown-splotched cliffs, they were trapped at its base.

Already the triumphant scrawling of the Drylanders sounded in their ears as the ape-things fanned out on either hand. Once that curved line pinned them against the cliff they were trapped, to be killed or, if captured alive, saved for sacrifice to the foul god of the Drylands, Thog Molog.

The sheer escarpment loomed higher and more forbidding as they neared it. Hardan felt his chest grow hollow as the last prospect of escape dwindled. All that remained now was to find a vantage point above their pursuers and sell their lives dearly. To be taken alive was unthinkable.

A huge flat-topped boulder shouldered the cliff, its rim twenty feet above the sandy soil, and toward this Hardan led the way. It was a natural fort that they might hold until darkness clamped down.

Hardan rode his maar close up to the rock, where a crevice split several feet diagonally down the face of the boulder, and swung up from the saddle. A moment later he was crouched on the rock helping Ylda to his side.

Their maars moved away only a few paces and started grazing on the sparse-leaved clumps of ossa and brel at the cliff's base. Hardan turned, facing the cliff, and now he saw an opening in the cliff wall where the boulder's flat rim touched it. It was a low oval of darkness going back deep into the cliff's heart, a cave entrance hid by the great rock.

"In, quickly," he ordered Ylda, "before the Drylanders arrive."

And hardly had they reached that welcome shelter than the huge warriors came thundering up to the cliff.

At sight of the empty saddles the Drylanders growled their amazement, their guttural meager speech carrying excited overtones of superstitious terror. Hardan understood enough of their brutish gabble to learn that they believed their monster god, Thog Molog, had carried them away.

Then keen tiny eyes discovered the flat-roofed boulder and a moment later their shadowy hiding place was discovered. Instantly the hushed mutterings and moans of awe changed to roars of rage. They came swarming up over the rock.

Hardan met them with arrows and spears. The first wave of attackers fell back, only to launch a second and more powerful assault. This time they swung up to the boulder-top together and the Wetlander dropped back into the cave-mouth, his twin swords bared.

The apish giants crouched down and came raging at him, only to be spitted on his flashing blades until the opening was choked with bloody chilling flesh. Their comrades dragged the bodies backward and once the orifice was cleared flung themselves at him again.

His swords bit deep, drinking the life of Drylander after Drylander until at last the assault ceased. Darkness had fallen and the great brutes had lost their stomach for further battle. So they withdrew, taking their dead with them, and built three fires of dry brush and cactus about the uprear of the huge rock.

"And that's that tonight," panted Hardan, wiping his swords mechanically of the blood that smirched their keen blades.

In the darkness Ylda's soft hands ran over his arms and chest searching for wounds. His blood ran hot as her soft flesh met his.

"You're untouched!" she cried, unbelieving.

"Had all the advantage," Hardan scoffed. "But if we're here when the sun rises again--we won't be so lucky."

Ylda peered out, her eyes reading the purpose of the three fires. Placed so they effectively ruled out any escape in the darkness, the Drylanders on guard would see instantly any movement atop the rock. Her breath caught in her throat and she clung to Hardan's sweat-damp body.

"We'll try the cave," Hardan told her thickly, very conscious of her intimate nearness. "It may have another entrance higher or beyond the cliff."

Roughly he broke away from the girl and started back into the darkness, his swords probing the gloom. And behind him he heard the girl following. The floor was uneven, rough patches of rock, and so, she stumbled before she had come a dozen paces.

After that her hand clung to his crossed sword-belts as the way climbed gradually higher.

Echoes of their passage grew more distant. The cavern roof and walls must be drawing away on all sides. Hardan licked his dry lips and the parched dryness of his vurth-padded body sapped his strength. They halted for a moment to finish the last of their water bags and munch a tough strip of dried ulfo meat before pushing on.

"We must find water soon," whispered Ylda faintly, "or I am finished."

And a short distance further along Hardan felt her fingers slip from their grip on his belt. She lay silent and limp on the rocky floor, her soft skin harsh and dry as the Dryland hills, and her cracked lips moaning.

He lifted her and staggered onward. His years in the Drylands had toughened his flesh and lungs to withstand the arid violence of the grasslands for several hours, but even yet he must sleep in or near water at night. He suffered mightily, his lungs on fire and his throat a dust-rasping channel. Like a man in a grotesque nightmare of torture he felt his wooden limbs move uncertainly far below him.

Only when the stars were above him and he felt the welcome fluidity of water about his parched ankles did he halt and lower the girl. The water was chill but his thirsty body sucked at it greedily.

III

The huge ringed sun of Osar was yet hugging the rim of the ragged Malsalm's peaks to the east when he awoke, shivering despite the thick dampness of his vurth-stuffed covering. Behind him, wedged against the rocky shelf and protected by a down-curving slab of rock, huddled Ylda.

He slipped off his thick shell and heaped it on the girl's sleeping body for additional warmth and stepped out, naked as go the men of the Upper Seas in their moist-walled cities and lush meadows. As yet the sun was not too warm for his sleek-furred flesh.

They had come up from the cliff to a narrow long plateau atop it. A shallow rocky lake was at their feet and a stream came down from a snow-capped peak in the southern distance to feed its chill moistness. Abruptly he remembered the cave and the yellow-haired Dryland giants who trailed them.

A long crevice rifted the floor of the miniature tableland not far from the lake's brim. Perhaps in the rainy season the overflow of the lake found escape there, but now it was dry, a crude staircase dipping down into the gloomy abyss that was the cave they had traversed. Hardan sensed the immensity of the void beneath, the whole cliff must be a honeycomb of caverns and subterranean passages.

The sound of horny bare feet and the rubbing of metal on the leather of harness warned him that the Drylanders had overcome their aversion of the darkness enough to trail them. He caught a glimpse of a moving blob of blackness that could only be them a hundred feet and more below.

Hardan laughed. The rift was walled with heaps of rocky debris, boulders brought down from the poles in glacial eras and sections of splintered igneous rock. He put his arm and shoulder against them and heaved. He sang lustily as he worked.

One after another they fell, the smaller ones entering the crevice and bounding downward to rip the climbing Drylanders from their hold; the others clogging forever the way from below. He rolled a last rounded boulder of green-shot basaltic origin and turned, hand at his sword.

Ylda was standing there, his vurth-padded garment's ugliness in her extended hands. She smiled, her eyes warm in the shadow of her wide-rimmed quilted headgear of vurth. Suddenly Hardan was aware of the growing intensity of the morning sunlight parching his down-covered flesh. In his excitement he had forgotten the blistering sun.

He slipped quickly into the coverall-like covering, its dampness doubly welcome after his exposure to the deadly atmosphere of the Drylands, and went with her to the rim of the narrow flat-roofed ridge where they had climbed.

"We can't go back, Ylda," he told her, his hand pointing out the way they had come up across the arid lands from the Isr River.

Ylda's eyes swung northward and then on around to the south again. She shuddered and Hardan sensed her terror of this molten naked hell of tortured rock and waterless slope that hemmed them in.

"We'll follow this stream up to its source," he went on after a moment, "and then find another that flows westward toward the Gron or the Aba. Nothing to it."

The girl's lips twisted in a tremulous attempt at a smile.

"Hardan," she said, "before you start back with me I must tell you why I was held captive by the rebelling sarifs."

Hardan shook his head, his mind raging. There could be only one reason for her to be in chains. Nitka Porn had wanted her and until she would consent to be his woman she might escape. That could be the only truth, he thought, and he wanted to hear nothing about it.

"But I must tell you, Hardan, before you--before we--leave the mountains. I was going to Lake Gron to meet my lover. He is a Consar, Serid Jern."

"Serid Jern!" snapped out Hardan. "That beak-nosed gray-haired old wastrel! You mean you--he was your lover?"

"But let me explain. It's not what you think. There is nothing wrong. He is a Consar and my father...."

"Enough." Hardan jerked her along by the arm. "I wish to hear no more about it. You are young and knew no better. When we reach Aba I will carry you away in the lawful manner."

Ylda's slight body stiffened and she pulled away from Hardan angrily. "Don't touch me again, ever!" she cried.

Hardan shrugged and headed off up the lake toward the stream that fed it. If the obstinate little sarif girl wanted to follow him let her. He had almost forgotten that he was born into an impoverished Consar family, these last few years, but now he remembered the vast social gulf between them. Yet he would gladly have given up his rank had Ylda agreed to mate with him.

And now she scorned him. It was as though she were the Consar and he the sarif. The months she must have spent with the priests and priestesses of Ung Roth and Zo Aldan had given her a false conception of a woman's place on Osar.

Let her have her soft-bellied old lover in Gron Lake. She'd get her fill of battling the half-dozen other sarif girls he'd collected there already....

Hardan's knuckles whitened on the handles of his swords, and he cursed all the Serid Jerns of the Wetlands.

* * * * *

Abruptly he came to a halt. Beside the rough trail he followed a peculiar-looking dwarfish creature lay sleeping at the stream's brink. His body was hairless, save on the top of his skull and under his nose and on his cheeks, and he was weaponless save for a short thick bow and a club. A cloak of muddy green covered his tattered unpadded coveralls.

Hardan stirred the sleeping creature with his toe and it sat up. He spoke to it in Tarnish, and in the scanty tongue of the great Dryland Apes. And at this the sunken monkeylike little eyes blinked with a certain measure of intelligence. It rose to its meager six feet of height and faced him.

"I am called Kern Rensom," he cried shrilly. "I am from Aarth," his puny arm made an indefinite circling motion. "Long ago we came to Osar to conquer it all."

Hardan grinned. "Little Drylanders like you better keep hid or the winged soraps will carry you off. You couldn't lick a couple of bladts."

The little Aarthman's arms and body flashed into movement so swift that Hardan could not see what was happening. He felt himself flying through the air and jolted down a dozen paces away, his breath gone. He heard Ylda's amused laughter, and the sound spurred him to bound to his feet and leap toward the little man.

Ylda cried out in protest--the Aarthman had drawn no weapon but stood with arms folded--and Hardan's pace slowed. He could not run through a man who would not protect himself.

"Take up your club!" he cried savagely, "or one of my swords!"

The little man grinned impishly, his wide mouth red in the uncouth tangle of his scrubby brown whiskers.

"Try to hit me," he invited.

Hardan's anger overcame his scruples. He swung his right hand sword in an arc that would have bit a respectable nick out of the Aarthman's shoulder. And the sword seemed to freeze in midair!

He fought against the paralysis that froze his muscles. Sweat salted his face and body as he threw all his strength into the effort, but he could not stir. Nor could he move his legs or the other arm. After a long moment of struggle he recognized his efforts were useless and ceased his frantic mental commands. And in that instant his body was free again.

"Are you a man or one of the devil-things of Thog Molog?" he demanded fearfully, sheathing his blade.

"I am like yourself, Hardan Synn," said the little man, amused. "But I have mental power that you of Osar cannot comprehend. It is the only weapon of Aarth we are permitted to use."

"You--you called me by name!" Hardan cried out. "Now I know you are of Thog Molog's foul brood. Only a devil-thing could be at once so puny and so hideous."

"You are wrong, Hardan," and now Kern Rensom used words that were a blend of Dryland and Wetland speech. "I can look into your mind and understand what you think. Even now I can tell you that you misjudge Ylda Rusla."

"No!" broke in the girl, "please keep silent, strange man."

Kern Rensom shrugged. "As you wish," he said. He turned to Hardan again.

"Perhaps you can come with me to my home valley before returning to Aba." He laughed at the unspoken refusal in Hardan's brain. "We have a small lake in the crater covered with an upper sea of vurth," he added.

"Why not?" demanded Ylda. "For too long have I breathed the harsh upland air. To move unencumbered through the soft dampness of the vurth sea would be heaven."

Hardan nodded doubtfully. "Very well," he said. "But remember it means the revolting sarifs may escape beyond the Blue Balsalms."

"I hope they do," flashed Ylda, "and you do too. Most of the sarifs are good people. Even if Nitka Porn and a few others escape punishment the innocent ones will escape."

"That's settled then." Hardan turned to the Aarthman. "Lead off, Kern Rensom."

* * * * *

And so they started off eastward across the mountains and bare reddish-veined slopes of the blue ridges, the tiny Aarthman leading. All forenoon they walked, pausing often beside the stream to soak their padded garments and gather the sparse scattering of brown-husked berries from bushes in the sheltered angles of the little watercourse.

Toward noon they left the swift little stream and crossed a steep slope of treacherous yellow shale and broken rock to a slope that carried them down toward a vast sunken bowl, an extinct crater, in whose heart the misty outlines of a small lake nestled grayly. That it was roofed with vurth there could be no question, and thereafter Hardan forgot most of his suspicions that the stranger meant them evil.

"It was there," Kern Rensom said, his finger pointing out a squatty ovoid of darker rock, "that our ship from beyond the stars landed. It was broken, and all save two women and one man died."

"You came from up there?" demanded Ylda. "Then you are of the race of the true gods, Zo Aldan and Ung Roth?"

The Aarthman shook his head. "No, we are mortals. I have read your mind and learned about your gods. Perhaps your gods, too, were mortals from another world who landed here safely on Osar."

Hardan's ears tingled at such heresy. And yet he was forced to admit what the little man said was logical. He knew that many of the wisest Wetlanders did not believe in Thog Molog and the devil-things, nor did he suppose the Drylanders believed in the power of Zo Aldan and Ung Roth. It was true the two gods had come from the outer moons in a strange metallic ship.

"Why then," he asked, "did you not conquer the Drylands? Was it not for that you came to Osar?"

Kern Rensom tugged at his scrubby beard. "We were too few at first. And when there were a thousand of us we tried to use the weapons and tools we had sealed away, but we had forgotten. All the juice that powered them had seeped away. Nor could we repair them."

"But you have books," insisted Hardan. "They would tell you."

The little man was shamefaced. "While we waited; hunting, building our city, and tilling our fields, we forgot how to read. For many centuries we have lived on a level but little above that of the Drylanders."

Hardan swore with amazement. Despite their wonderful mental power these Aarthmen were little better than ignorant savages. Perhaps if he could bring a few wise men from the Wetlands to this valley and have them work with the Aarthmen they could reconstruct that forgotten language and learn to build ships that flew in the air.

With great ships like theirs the journey from Wetland to Wetland would be simple and all Osar would be opened to them. No longer would they be forced to haul sleeping tanks of water by slow wagons across the dry-grassed plains....

* * * * *

The trail wound aimlessly, it seemed to Hardan, down into the vast circular abyss of the crater. And after a time, as they neared the lower slopes, he saw the Aarthman scratch his shaggy brown head in apelike fashion, and stop.

"You've lost your way," he told Kern.

Kern Rensom nodded. "I escaped from a small band of Roons, the Drylanders who dwell on the slopes above our craters, two days ago. I was hunting on the northern side and was forced to circle southward to where you found me."

"But if we continue downward we must come to your city," Hardan said, puzzled. "Why do you hesitate?"

"All Smeth Valley is surrounded by a high wall, Hardan, built by my people. But on the southern inner slope for more than a mile an ancient, higher wall was there. A wall circling down to the lake.

"Since we came to Smeth Valley only a few men have ventured beyond that wall, and of them all only one returned--a madman!"

"You think we are approaching that section then?" Hardan laughed and his hands found comforting grip on his sword hilts. "Nothing could lie beyond there save deserted ruins," he scoffed.

"Perhaps we could walk along the wall's rim," Kern said, disregarding Hardan's laughter, "until we passed the walled-in section. The ridges on either side crowd up to the wall so it would be our only path."

"That'd be better than climbing up again," agreed Hardan.

And so, a dozen tortuous bends in the deepening ravine they followed, later, they fronted the soaring smooth-jointed face of a gigantic wall. At their feet the dry bed of the ravine ended in solid granite, and on either hand the ravine's walls lifted sheer for fifty feet and more.

Try as they would they could not climb the craggy walls. Apparently they were to be forced to return back along the way they had come and find some new path to the lower crater depths.

Ylda cried out and pointed to the lower part of the pierced vertical slab set in the wall before them. The scanty flow of freshets here in the uplands had slowly worn away a larger hole, a process that must have consumed unthinkable centuries, until even a Wetland warrior could have wriggled through.

Hardan nodded. He too had seen the opening but did not want to suggest using it. The Aarthman's fantastic tale had affected him more than he cared to admit. Now he knelt down and thrust his head carefully through the orifice.

"Just a grassy slope," he called back, his voice loud with relief. "Down by the lake there's a jumble of rock slabs and columns, could be a city. Not even any trees until the upper sea begins."

He withdrew his head and slid through feet-first, dropping into a deep wide rocky pocket gouged out by the ravening mountain torrents. Ylda followed, slipping into his arms easily, but her face turned away stiffly as he set her on her feet. Hardan growled and turned away, disgusted at the little sarif's continued show of dislike.

"Hurry up, Kern Rensom," he said.

The Aarthman's be-whiskered face appeared. Under that brushy brown stubble his brown skin had paled to a strangely green shade.

"I don't know," he said uncertainly. "The Drylanders claim this is the abode of Thog Molog. I've seen crude pictures of their god. It's a many-armed ghastly monster bigger than a Drylander's communal _yad_."

* * * * *