In the next fraction of a second I froze, knowing my worse fears had been true, and that other Zarkoon waked and stirred in the cavern world.
For a gigantic winged shadow fell across us as we crouched on the ledge. Ylana looked past me at the flying thing hurtling towards us―and screamed!
Book Three
LOST IN THE JUNGLE COUNTRY
Chapter 11
Winged Death!
As the skiff slid away from the hull beneath the keel of the Jalathadar and caught the up-draft blowing from below, its light, fragile wings shuddered from the impact. The slim little craft bounced―veered away sickeningly―and fell into a steep, descending spiral.
Cursing villainously, Lukor wrenched at the few simple controls, his silver hair whipping in the wind, his eyes watering from the icy gale. He didn’t dare put too much stress on the ailerons or on the rudder-fan, for the full force of these winds could shatter them to fluttering rags in an instant. So, pumping away at the pedals like a madman, he attempted to ride down the wind as if he were in a glider. Within the next few minutes the canny old sword-master learned the tricks of operating the kite-like craft in winds of such velocity, and the ride became smoother and less hard on the nerves.
They glided in a great circle, entirely about the peak, searching the cliffs and ledges below for some sign that Tomar and I had come this way. Precisely what they were looking for, neither of them could have described with any precision―perhaps a fallen garment, a discarded weapon, or the body of an injured Zarkoon. Or our own bodies, I suppose …
However, they found nothing.
Widening their search to include the nearer pinnacles of rock, they flew for some time round and round the peak in ever-broader circles, and through the maze of rocky spires that thrust up against the night like fingers on the hand of a dead colossus. Craning over the sides of the craft, they searched and stared as broken rock and soaring pinnacle slid rapidly by them.
The moonlight was tricky, but it was far less difficult for them than it would have been for me. I am accustomed to the steady, unvarying silver light of a single satellite; they, from birth, were accustomed to the mingled and many-colored illumination of several. At any rate, they saw nothing which seemed to them to point a clue to the way my captors had carried me.
They searched till dawn lit the skies with its sudden, swift, silent explosion of golden radiance. By this time they had reached the broad slopes of the southern face of the larger of the mountains, and it was Koja who spied a fairly smooth and almost level incline on which it looked likely they could set the craft down without undue hazard. Both were by now pretty tired of pumping away at the pedals and Koja, in particular, was stiff and cramped from the narrow confines of the cockpit which was, of course, designed with the proportions of the human buttocks in mind.
So they coasted down and came to an abrupt halt near a jutting spar or splinter of stone, which Lukor lassoed with an adroit flip of the wrist. No more than could the mighty Jalathadar herself, the little skiff could not actually come to land on the surface, for she was as weightless as a helium-filled balloon. Moreover, to skid to a stop on the flint-bestrewn slope might easily puncture the paper-thin pontoons, releasing the levitating gas. So, anchoring the skiff securely to the spar, the two climbed out of the cockpit onto the dual pontoons and sprang lightly to the ground from there, leaving their aerial craft floating about six feet above the slope.
“I’m beginning to think we’re searching in the wrong direction entirely,” Lukor complained. “Not a sign nor token the winged men bore our comrades this way. Or, if they did, they may simply have flown over this part of the mountain as it lay in their path.”
“You believe, then, that the winged ones are still traveling?” Koja rasped in his harsh and droning metallic voice.
Lukor shrugged dispiritedly.
“No, that hardly seems likely, my chitinous friend. A full-grown man and a husky boy must afford quite a burden to even so huge and powerful a creature as a bird-man! No, I’ll wager the monsters have gone to ground somewhere …”
“But where?”
“Ah, that’s the question―where?” Lukor grumbled, tugging his woolen cloak about him against the cold bite of the wind, which bit keenly into old bones at this height. His features set in a glum expression, the gallant master swordsman stared about him at the mighty panorama of mountains which marched away to every side. “Where?” he repeated, thoughtfully.
“Where would you nest, were you a bird-man, Lukor?” asked Koja tonelessly after a time. The Ganatolian adventurer shot him a keen, questioning glance; then his lean-jawed, trim-bearded face became thoughtful.
“Well, now … on some high ledge, mayhap, or up there among those giddy peaks … somewhere like that, I suppose … up where my natural enemies couldn’t reach me.”
“Or in a hole in the ground, perhaps?”
“Eh? What d’you mean by that?”
Koja flexed the knobbed antennae on his brow in a shrug typically Yathoon. “I don’t know; but while tells roost on peaks or ledges, as far as I am aware, yaks roost in caves.” Koja did not refer, of course, to the Tibetan draft-animal, but to a small bat-like denizen of the Callistan caves who bore the identical name, by one of those small, trivial coincidences.
“That looks like quite a large cave over there,” Koja added, pointing. Following the gesture with his gaze, Lukor spied a round black hole of considerable size in a nearby slope. He had not noticed it before, or, if he had, it hadn’t occurred to him to think so large a depression might afford an excellent haven for such as the bird-men. Now that he measured it with his eyes, it looked large enough to conceal dozens or even scores of the flying monsters.
“You may have something there, friend Koja!” he said zestfully, forgetting all about the ache of weary legs and the bone-deep chill of hours spent in the wintry mountain wind. “Let’s take a closer look …”
Scrambling down the slope, the two crouched cautiously by the mouth of the pit and peered within. After the brilliant glare of the Callistan day, it took their eyes some time to adjust to the dim gloom within the aperture, but even without being able to make out much in the way of the details, they could see that the interior of the cavern was truly immense―that, in fact, the whole center of the mountain seemed to have been hollowed out by geological forces.
“Now, then! That’s what I call a proper cavern―why, you could hide a full-sized city down there!”
“And anything large enough to conceal a city ought to be big enough for a whole flight of the Zarkoon to roost in,” Koja remarked solemnly.
It was decided that they would venture into the cavernous subterranean realm and explore it further before venturing on. The two trudged back to the place where they had left the skiff tethered to its spire of rock, boarded the little craft and cast loose the line. By this time it was midmorning and the wind-currents had changed considerably, as the heat of day had by now warmed the air. Koja and Lukor found it a tricky business, trying to maneuver their fragile and ungainly craft into the mouth of the pit, and, once within, found themselves flying blind in a region of dense gloom. It took them some time before their eyes adjusted to the dimness, but when they had, the two found that sufficient illumination seeped through the hole in the roof to enable them to navigate safely within the confines of the cavern-world.