And what he had taken for mail of sapphire and emerald were scales. They overlapped like those of the armadillo. From their burnished surfaces and edges the sun struck out the jewel glints.
The creature turned its head upon its short, bull neck. It seemed to stare straight at Graydon. He saw fiery red eyes set in a sloping, bony arch of broad forehead. Its muzzle was that of a crocodile, but smaller and blunted. The jaws were studded with yellow, pointed fangs.
The rider drew up beside it. Like the others, the creature he rode was a true dinosaur. It was black scaled and longer tailed, with serpentine neck thicker than the central coil of the giant python.
The rider was a man of Suarra's own race. There was the same ivory whiteness of skin, the more than classic regularity of feature. But his face was stamped with arrogance, indifferent cruelty. He wore a close–fitting suit of green that clung to him like a glove, and his hair was a shining golden. He sat upon a light saddle fastened at the base of the long neck of his steed. Heavy reins ran up to the jaws of the jetty dinosaur's small, snake–like head.
Graydon's glasses dropped from his shaking hand. What manner of man was this who hunted with dinosaurs for dogs and a dinosaur for steed!
He looked toward the base of the monolith where the scarlet thing had crouched. It was no longer there. He caught a gleam of scarlet in the high grass not a thousand feet away. The thing was scuttering toward the rim—
There was a shrieking clamor like a thousand hissing fumaroles. The pack had found the scent, were leaping forward like a glittering green and blue comber.
The scarlet thing jumped up out of the grasses. It swayed upon four long and stilt–like legs, its head a full twelve feet above the ground. High on these stilts of legs was its body, almost round and no bigger than a halfgrown boy's. From the sides of the body stretched two sinewy arms—like human arms pulled out to twice their normal length. Body, arms and legs were covered with fine scarlet hair. Its face, turned toward its pursuers, Graydon could not see.
The pack rushed upon it. The thing hurled itself like a thunderbolt straight toward the rim.
Graydon heard beneath him a frantic scrambling and scratching. Gray hands came over the edge of the road, gripping the rock with foot–long fingers like blunt needles of bone. They clutched and drew forward. Behind them appeared spindling, scarlet–haired arms.
Over the edge peered a face, gray as the hands. Within it were two great unwinking round and golden eyes.
A man's face—and not a man's!
A face such as he had never seen upon any living creature…yet there could be no mistaking the humanness of it…the humanness which lay over the incredible visage like a veil.
He thought he saw a red rod dart out of air and touch the face—the red rod of Suarra's motley–garbed attendant Whether he saw it or not, the clutching claws opened and slid away. The gray face vanished.
Up from the hidden slope arose a wailing, agonized shriek, and a triumphant hissing. Then out into the range of his vision bounded the black dinosaur, its golden–haired rider shouting. Behind it leaped the pack. They crossed the plain like a thunder cloud pursued by emerald and sapphire lightnings. They passed into the forest, and were gone.
Suarra stepped out of the tree shadows, the three adventurers close behind her, white–faced and shaking. She stood looking where the dinosaurs had disappeared, and her face was set, and her eyes filled with loathing.
"Suarra!" gasped Graydon. "That thing—the thing that ran—what was it? God—it had the face of a man!"
"It was no man," she shook her head. "It was a—Weaver. Perhaps he had tried to escape. Or perhaps Lantlu opened a way for him that he might be tempted to escape. For Lantlu delights in hunting with the Xinli—" her voice shook with hatred—"and a Weaver will do when there is nothing better!"
"A Weaver? It had a man's face!" It was Soames, echoing Graydon.
"No," she repeated. "It was no—man. At least no man as you are. Long, long ago his ancestors were men like you—that is true. But now—he is—only a Weaver."
She turned to Graydon.
"Yu–Atlanchi by its arts fashioned him and his kind. Remember him, Graydon—when you come to our journey's end!"
She stepped out upon the path. There stood the cowled figure, waiting as tranquilly as though it had never stirred. She called to the white llama, and again took her place at the head of the little caravan. Soames touched Graydon, arousing him from the troubled thought into which her enigmatic warning had thrown him.
"Take your place, Graydon," he muttered. "We'll follow. Later I want to talk to you. Maybe you can get your guns back—if you're reasonable."
"Hurry," said Suarra, "the sun sinks, and we must go quickly. Before to–morrow's noon you shall see your garden of jewels, and the living gold streaming for you to do with it as you will—or the gold to do as it wills with you."
She looked the three over, swiftly, a shadow of mockery in her eyes. Soames' lips tightened.
"Get right along, sister," he said, sardonically. "All you have to do is show us. Then your work is done. We'll take care of the rest."
She shrugged, carelessly. They set forth once more along the rimmed path.
The plain was silent, deserted. From the far forests came no sound. Graydon strove for sane comprehension of what he had just beheld. A Weaver, Suarra had named the scarlet thing—and had said that once its ancestors had been men like themselves. He remembered what, at their first meeting, she had told him of the powers of this mysterious Yu– Atlanchi. Did she mean that her people had mastered the secrets of evolution so thoroughly that they had learned how to reverse its processes as well? Could control—devolution!
Well, why not? In man's long ascent from the primeval jelly on the shallow shores of the warm first seas, he had worn myriad shapes. And as he moved higher from one form to another, changing to vertebrate, discarding cold blood for warm, still was he kin to the fish he caught today, to the furred creatures whose pelts clothed his women, to the apes he brought from the jungles to study or to amuse him. Even the spiders that spun in his gardens, the scorpion that scuttled from the tread of his feet, were abysmally distant blood–brothers.
When St. Francis of Assisi had spoke of Brother Fly, Brother Wolf, Brother Snake, he had voiced scientific truth.
All life on earth had a common origin. Divergent now and Protean shaped, still man and beast, fish and serpent, lizard and bird, ant and bee and spider, all had come from those once similar specks of jelly, adrift millions upon millions of years ago in the shallow littorals of the first seas. Protaebion, Gregory of Edinburgh had named it—the first stuff of life from which all life was to develop.
Were the germs of all those shapes man had worn in his slow upward climb still dormant in him?
Roux, the great French scientist, had taken the eggs of frogs and, by manipulating them, had produced giant frogs and dwarfs, frogs with two heads and one body, frogs with one head and eight legs, three–headed frogs with legs numerous as centipedes'. And he had produced from these eggs, also, creatures which in no way resembled frogs at all.
Vornikoff, the Russian, and Schwartz, the German, had experimented with still higher forms of life, producing chimera, nightmare things they had been forced to slay—and quickly.
If Roux and the others had done all this—and they had done it, Graydon knew—then was it not possible for greater scientists to awaken those dormant germs in man, and similarly create—such creatures as the scarlet thing? A spider–man!