He turned one last solemn gaze on me before vanishing from my sight. And he spoke one last farewell.
"The Lords of Gordrimator be with you, Jandar! Do not attempt to help me. Now you must seek your own freedom―"
"Koja!" I cried.
His last words were: "Save yourself! And thus I discharge my uhorz―"
And then they dragged him from the window.
I hung between earth and heaven, wishing there was something I could do to help him. But then the snarling visage of a guard thrust through the grating, the silver luminance of Ramavad gilding his copper helm while he jabbed a long spear at my legs.
It would do Koja no good if I were slain or captured. I kicked free of the louver and clambered up over the edge of the roof. The grating I let slam back: it caught the guard full in the face and I heard him fall with thump and clatter.
Safe on the roof, I climbed to my feet and looked around me. A feeling of grim despair possessed my heart. Never in all my months on Thanator had I been so completely alone as at this moment.
My only friend in the hands of the guards of Zanadar, I was alone and without a weapon in a strange, unfamiliar city, surrounded by enemies.
9. I ESCAPE FROM THE SLAVE PENS
The roof was flat and bare. Two of the airy skywalks connected it to adjoining structures. But before I could even begin to make my way towards one of them, I was under attack and fighting for my life.
The strident clamor of an alarm gong sounded within the huge building. And now, racing across the roof to challenge me came a burly guard, his dark cloak floating out behind him like immense wings, the naked glitter of a rapier in his hand.
I was unarmed and nearly naked, but I ducked under his stroke. The sword sang past my ear as I drove my fist into his belly. He doubled over, grunting, and I lifted his heels two inches off the roof with a right to the jaw. He fell heavily, his head wobbling loosely, and I saw that I had slain him.
I had known that my muscular strength was far superior to that of the Yathoon arthropods, but I had not realized my superiority to the human natives as well. The gravity of Thanator is somewhat less than that of Earth: not much, but there is a discernible difference. But it would seem that even that slight variance makes a measurable increase of strength in one born and raised under the heavier gravitational pull. For my blow had broken the fellow's neck.
I had no time just then to mourn the guard's demise, even if I had felt the inclination. I am no pacifist, and in fact I am perfectly ready and willing to kill an enemy seeking to strike down an unarmed man with a swordblade, especially when that man is myself. I bent over his body and began stripping him, exchanging my ragged slave clout for his high-necked, open-throated leathern tunic with the blazon of Zanadar on the breast. Where there is one guard there may soon be two, and if I must fight for my life and freedom I prefer doing it clad in fighting harness.
In half a minute I had donned his tunic, buskins, girdle, baldric, helmet, and cloak. Wrapping my old loincloth about his middle, I tipped his corpse over the edge of the roof and heard him thud against the cobbles far below. The discovery of a slave corpse by guards seeking an escaped slave might delay pursuit by an appreciable fraction of time, perhaps permitting me to complete my escape.
In the pallor of moonlight I hoped to pass scrutiny as a Zanadorian. The copper helm would cover my unusual yellow hair and the eye-shield of the helm would hide my blue eyes, and there was nothing I could do about the tan of my skin except hope that no one would notice.
I crossed the roof swiftly and made a remarkable discovery.
The guard had landed here in a two-man flying gig, which was tethered to a mooring post towards the rear of the roof.
I had not seen one of these miniature ornithopters before, and thus I consumed some moments of precious time examining it. It did not bear a very close resemblance to the enormously larger frigates, and of course it was not powered by slaves at the wheel, since it was only twelve feet long. The craft looked for all the world like a kayak, an enclosed canoe. It rose high in prow and poop, with a curved and ornamental bowsprit like that of a Venetian gondola. Instead of having a bilge compartment filled with the levitating gas, it had an airtight double hull that rendered it completely weightless. The wingspan was twenty-two feet from tip to tip, and the gig obviously did not fly by flapping the vans, for, although they were hinged and could be operated by foot pedals which communicated via external cables to a pulley arrangement on the van-tips, mere pedaling action alone could not suffice. I assumed the gig was more of a glider than a true ornithopter, and that it rode the strong updrafts of the mountaintop city.
I suppose it was suicidally foolish of me to attempt to fly the thing. But I climbed in, cast off the bowline, settled my feet against the pedals, and began testing the controls as an updraft whirled me away from the rooftop.
I was in a vile, self-recriminatory mood, and did not hold my life to any great account just then. It proved a good thing that this was so, for before the rooftop vanished beneath me I saw guards come pouring out of a trapdoor to scour the area for me.
Like a leaf caught in a millrace, I was whirled between tall tapering towers. The curved span of airy skywalks flashed past, one of them narrowly missing me. I could well have wrecked the gig during those first few minutes, but luckily I did not.
The controls were simplicity itself. Levers controlled the pitch of the ailerons and the rear vertical rudder fin. The jointed wingtips served to turn the craft in midair as desired. Whatever the nature of the buoyant gas held within the hollow space inside the double hull, it had remarkable lifting power and rendered the gig completely weightless. Never have I had so completely the sensation of flying; it was like a dream, wherein you are unconscious of weight or of effort, but flit about at will.
As soon as I had familiarized myself with the controls, I swung her bowsprit about and headed for the Middle City. If the swiftness with which I mastered the craft seems uncanny, I must confess I have had some experience piloting gliders in Switzerland, and that I fully grasped the principles of glider flight.
Doubtless my decision to quit the Lower City was a wise one. Lukor later heard that my substitution of the guard's body for my own allayed for at least an hour suspicion that I had escaped. It was not until the Slavemaster had been roused from his sodden slumbers, shortly before dawn, that my escape was confirmed. For of course the guard, being a native Zanadarian, lacked my yellow hair, blue eyes, and tan skin. And I also learned that even after it had been discovered that one of the wheel slaves had made a successful escape from the pens, no one dreamed he had made his way up into the Middle City, and the search for my whereabouts was confined to the lower levels on the theory that I had found a hiding place in some hovel. The spans leading to the Middle City are heavily guarded against thieves from the slum regions below, and hence it did not seem possible that I had crossed over undetected. No one knew at first of the theft of the gig.
I achieved the tiers of the Middle City, but only by a hairsbreadth. A chance gust swept me against the carved gryphons and gargoyles on an ornamental balcony with a resounding crash which breached my hull. I did not need the scream of escaping gas to know my craft no longer was airworthy, for she was settling sluggishly and I barely had time to hop out on one of the bridges before she lost buoyancy altogether and fell like a stricken gull into the dark chasms between the huge structures.