“You arel” the girl laughed, although closer to tears of relief than to honest mirth. She cocked a thumb at his dirty face and lean ribs. “You were skinny and bony of knee even before,” she said, grinning impishly. “But look at you nowl I can count every rib! Captivity certainly doesn’t agree with you.”
The boy bit his lower lip in embarrassment. Then a reluctant grin tugged at the corners of his mouth.
Things, at last, were back to normal, thought To. mar to himself. He could not help but derive a certain comfort from the notion, difficult as it was to stand there, awkward and dirty and almost naked, and face her mischievous grin.
Chapter 2
FOOTPRINTS IN THE DUST
ALL about the two youngsters surged the fury of battle, for the attack on Kuur was at its height. The final outcome of the struggle still hung in the balance and only time would tell whether the mad assault on the citadel of the Mind Wizards would result in victory or defeat for the valiant warriors of the Three Cities.
Wasting but little time greeting my old friends and comrades, I, Jandar, swiftly marshaled the newly freed captives into a fighting force, hoping to take the defenders of Kuur from the rear. Weapons we found aplenty in the guardroom, and in less time than it would take me to describe, we were armed with glittering longswords.
With my American friend, Lankar, at my side, and the giant othode who had given his heart to the Earthling close behind, I led the assault against the rear of the citadel defenders. Most of the warriors from the further hemisphere were still battling their way down through the tunnels, and it was slow going, for the Mind Wizards had deployed their flesh robots in such a manner as to make the attackers pay dearly for every hall and chamber taken.
We thrust against the rear of this bastion of living flesh, and at once became far too busy to think about what might be happening to those at our own rear.
Had it not been so, I would have no tale to tell and this book would never have been written …
THE savage girl was armed, as already told, with twin knives, but Tomar bore a heavy-bladed, cutlasslike sword which Ergon had handed him when the cache of weapons had been broken into and distributed among the former captives.
The sword was not exactly to Tomar’s liking, and thus, for a moment, he hesitated and remained behind, although his every instinct clamored to join the fight. The blade was thick and difficult to wield, and in his hands he feared it would make a clumsy weapon. Noticing his hesitation, and correctly interpreting the cause thereof, Ylana offered him one of her long, thin, stilettolike knives. This offer the boy declined, not wishing to deprive the jungle Maid of one-half of her arms. The girl tossed her curls impatiently, then glanced thoughtfully at the further end of the hall.
“There was a storeroom of weapons at the fore of the cellblock,” she remarked. “Perhaps there will be another such at the rear. It’s worth a try, and it will only take us a moment.”
Tomar agreed and the two hurried to the far end of the stone-floored corridor. And there, indeed, they found a similar room, long and narrow and highceilinged, whose walls were thickly hung with a variety of weapons, including many kinds of swords, dirks, and spears with which they were both unfamiliar.
“If these are the weapons which the Kuurians stripped from their captives,” the boy observed, as he selected a slim-bladed rapier more fitted to one his size, and swished it back and forth for a moment to try the weight and balance, “then the Mind Wizards must have taken hundreds of prisoners over the years.”
Ylana repressed a faint shudder of distaste.
“Our friends are even now battling against the re. suits of their misfortune in being captured by the little yellow men,” she said grimly.
Tomar gave her a questioning glance, then realized what the girl referred to. “The giant men … ” he murmured, a slight grimace of disgust on his features.
“Monsters would be a better name for them,” the girl said. “Some of them have four arms, and none of them are easy to kill!”
Tomar nodded with distaste. “The Mind Wizards made them out of parts of their captives,” the boy said grimly. “They were cut apart and sewn together again, parts of one being added onto the bodies of others. It’s horrible … we thought that was probably how me were going to end up, too, once the little fiends were finished gathering information from our memories …”
“How did they do that?” the girl inquired.
“They can listen to your thoughts just like you can listen to my voice,” the boy replied. “And they can also dig deeper into your mind and explore all of your memories. I don’t quite understand it, myself, but that’s the way they are.”
The girl shivered. “They don’t sound human,” she said faintly. Then she added, “Come to think of it, they don’t exactly look human, either!”
By this, Ylana probably referred to the dwarfish size and wrinkled, hairless skin of the Kuurians, which was of a distinct lemon-yellow hue. No race remotely resembling the Kuurians had hitherto been known. Nor, for that matter, had a blond, white-skinned race such as the jungle savages of Ylana’s own tribe. Their antecedents remained unknown, and this occurred to Tomar, but he thought it tactless to comment upon it in the presence of the jungle Maid, and therefore held his tongue.
“What’s this?” inquired the girl curiously, pointing to a hairline crack in the stone wall at the farther end of the long, narrow storeroom.
“Looks like a door of some kind, cut into the rock,” said Tomar, studying it. After a little tugging and poking, the boy discovered the trick to opening it. Peering within, he saw nothing of interest, merely a bare, stone-walled cubicle the size of a closet, empty of everything save for dust, which had settled thickly upon the floor like a feathery carpet.
He shrugged. “An unused storage space, I guess. Let’s go, Ylana, or the fight will be over before we get a chance to blood our weapons.”
“Mine are blooded already,” the girl grinned, displaying her two knives, which were scummed with scarlet from hilt to point. “But I’m willing to give you a chance to display your prowess―if anyl”
The boy flushed, but said nothing. He was accus. tomed by now to the girl’s teasing, and could but rarely think of a good rejoinder. He knew she was merely creating mischief, for during their earlier adventures together there had been enough fighting.
Closing the stone slab that concealed the unused cubicle, he left the storeroom and the two went to join their friends in the fight for freedom.
“There’s one Mind Wizard I’d dearly love to meet up with,” the boy said grimly, as they engaged battle at one end of a row of warriors.
“Who’s that?”
“Zhu Kor,” Tomar said. “He was the creature who interrogated me and some of the others in my cell…”
The girl parried a sword stroke skillfully, and sank her other knife to its hilt in the bowels of her opponent, who fell gasping. “Did he … torture you?” she asked in a faint whisper.
Tomar shook his head as his sword slashed air then enemy flesh.
“Not torture, exactly,” the boy said slowly. “But to have someone else pawing through your mind, fondling your memories, digging into secret places … well … it isn’t fun, exactly.”
Remembering the experience, he paled, then set his jaw resolutely, and redoubled his efforts to down opponents. He fought furiously, his blade weaving a shimmering curtain of steel before him. It was as if he fought Zhu Kor, instead of merely lumbering flesh robots.
Ylana asked no further questions. A mind-probe, she guessed, must be a distasteful violation of the most private places of the mind, a sort of mental rape. The thought that this evil thing had been done to the boy who now fought at her side, and whom she knew to be brave and manly and chivalrous, enraged her. She bent to her work, and felt a glow of inward satisfaction when her flickering knives pierced the guard of the creature she fought, and slit its throat from ear to ear. It was almost as if she were helping to revenge the things done to the boy for whom she felt a certain fondness she was not always willing to admit, even in the depths of her own heart.