Ulthar now advised the boy to have the rudder trimmed to offset this new influence on the course, and before the youth could rouse his messenger, who slumbered soundly in the cupola against call, the smooth-tongued Zanadarian volunteered to go back and pass the order along. There was simply no reason why Tomar should have suspected the wily Sky Pirate of treachery, so he accepted the other’s offer and passed down to him the code flag which denoted an official steering command, and which all messengers bore under such circumstances.
But instead of going aft to the rudder station, Ulthar muffled himself in his hooded cloak, which he had donned against the cold winds of this height, and, wordlessly showing the official code flag, had gone down to the wheel decks, unattended except by a skeleton crew at this hour. There, unrecognized in the uncertain light, his few gruff commands given in a disguised voice, Ulthar bade the crewmen go on deck to help unlimber the shroud lines. And once the deck was cleared, he opened a wall cabinet, where a fire ax was kept against emergencies, and proceeded to sever one by one the great cables that carried motive power from the wheels to the hinged wingsections. He had crippled one entire wing and was busily chopping away the cables that controlled the other, when a curious member of the wheel crew descended to question the order, which no one on deck knew anything about.
Ulthar had cut the man down with one blow of the great ax, but others were crowding down the gangway by then, so, leaving the starboard wing only partially damaged, the traitorous Sky Pirate had turned and fled.
And was nowhere to be found, although the crippled ship had been thoroughly searched.
He had simply vanished into thin air!
Tomar had, it was soon discovered, ascended into a very dangerous altitude, higher than any at which we had yet sailed the Jalathadar.
A seasoned and veteran sailor of the skies of Thanator, Ulthar had surely known this, known that at the three-thousand-foot level, subtle but powerful up-drafts from the winding canyons of the mountainous country below can gradually and imperceptibly lift the keel of a Zanadarian ornithopter many hundreds of feet over the hours of darkness. Doubtless his desultory conversation, combined with the efforts required to hold the galleon steady on her course against the buffeting pressure of the cross-winds, had so occupied the young officer’s mind that he had not noticed the sky ship was ascending ever higher at a steady but unobtrusive pace.
Then, timing his action to a nicety, remembering those coded charts of the wind belts of Thanator we had labored fruitlessly without deciphering, Ulthar had at exactly the proper time casually advised the boy officer to ascend a few hundred feet to escape the buffeting winds―which brought the Jalathadar, unbeknownst to any but the cunning Ulthar himself, into a powerful south-to-north windstream, which, at the vessel’s four-thousand-foot level, stood at gale force.
As these grim facts and deductions sank in, Valkar ground his teeth. The calamity was all but disastrous, and while the ship was not completely crippled, she was at least helpless to evade the gale winds which blew her on and on into the unknown north of the world.
With one wing out of action and the other only partially useful, the rudder alone was not sufficient to alter the course of the Jalathadar.
A helpless prisoner of the winds, she flew steadily across the mountain country, drawing farther and farther from her goal. Ahead of her lay leagues of bleak and barren arctic tundra, where no man dwelt and no cities existed.
Ahead lay the glittering ice fields of the polar cap and a horrible death at the ultimate north of the world.
And there was nothing they could do about it.
Dawn broke, flushing the skies of the jungle Moon with pallid gold.
Driven before the merciless fury of the gale wind, the giant ornithopter flew steadily on into the unknown regions of the mysterious north.
In the captain’s cabin, Valkar and the other senior officers pored wearily over the coded charts, striving to figure out a solution to their dilemma.
Unable to assist in the solution of their navigational problems, Lukor and Koja prowled the great ship restlessly, hoping against hope itself that they would somehow stumble upon the hiding place of the traitor, Ulthar.
With them, white-faced, with haunted eyes, went the boy Tomar. Tortured by feelings of guilt for his unconscious complicity in the cunning plot of the treacherous Zanadarian, the young noble suffered acutely. His sufferings were somehow all the more unendurable in that none of his shipmates had as yet uttered the slightest word of condemnation against him. The boy would have felt better, oddly enough, had they hurled accusations at his head, cursing him for a vapid fool.
Instead, they had said nothing at all. Valkar had slapped him on the shoulder in silent sympathy, tousled his hair affectionately, and had muttered a few comforting words to the effect that he should not blame himself for this calamity. Of course, the boy did indeed blame himself―and curse himself for an easily swayed idiot―and would cheerfully have laid down his life, could self-sacrifice have alleviated his responsibility for the disaster in any degree.
Bluff, garrulous, kind-hearted old Lukor, sensing the silent boy’s inward torments, loudly tried to josh him out of his black mood.
“rush, lad, ‘tis not your fault―yonder slick-tongued rapscalion could charm the fish out of the seas with his words! Look how he bemused Prince Valkar with his protestations of innocence, when not a man of the crew but had the slightest doubt that our tall Koja here was correct in his suspicions and that the lying villain tipped poor Jandar over the side when we were taking on water. You mustn’t blame yourself, m’boy.”
The young officer shook his head stubbornly, without a word, but his bright, tearless eyes were eloquent. Even Koja was disturbed by the lad’s eloquent suffering. The gaunt, chitin-clad, ungainly arthopode―so invulnerable to human emotions―touched the boy’s shoulder with an awkward, tentative caress.
“You must listen to Lukor, now. He speaks the truth, you know. No one blames you in the slightest, young Tomar, and it is thus irrational for you to blame yourself.”
“I can’t help it, Lord Koja―Master Lukor―I should have known better than to trust him. But … he was so casual and offhand about it all, and we had spoken several times before. I knew he was an enemy and not to be trusted, but―but―I guess I felt sorry for him, alone among strangers, with no one to give him a kind word. So I just fell into the habit of smiling, and saying hello, and sort of passing the time of day, a little … .”
“Ah, the cunning rascal, to play upon the kindly feelings of a well-meaning boy,” Lukor snarled.
They paused by the deck rail, viewing the barren land ahead, bathed in the brilliant morning light.
“‘Tis a strange land into which we venture, comrades,” said Lukor. “I, for one, know naught of the northlands. What of yourself, friend Koja?”
The towering insectoid stared solemnly out across the bleak tundra toward the glittering ice ramparts on the distant horizon.
“My people inhabit the southernmost portion of the globe, as you know, Lukor, and upon the endless grasslands of the Great Plains of Haratha was I hatched and raised to adulthood. Never do the war parties of my clan venture north of the Grand Kumala, and in all my days I have never journeyed beyond the ramparts of the White Mountains. But my people have vague traditions of the north of the world, the Frozen Land, as we call it. There is naught within those traditions that is the least wholesome.”