Again the whip leapt out, with a sharp report. In his red anger Price was unconscious of the pain. But the skin on his chest was slashed open as if with a knife.
Still he ran on, fists doubled to drive into Malikar’s body.
As if endowed with malignant life, the whip reached out again, coiled around his ankles. Tripped by it, he stumbled, fell heavily.
As he staggered to his feet, the lash drew a cold line of pain across his naked back. Again he stumbled forward.
The long lash went round and round his body, pinioning his arms. Malikar jerked it, sent him spinning once more to the floor.
As Price dragged himself to his feet, he saw that the golden tiger had entered the long hall behind him. In its black
howdah
sat Vekyra, the yellow woman, watching him with slanted, tawny-green eyes—detached, impersonal,
pitiless
.
Again the lash fell across his shoulders, like a slashing blade. Price heard Malikar chuckle thickly, in evil, sadistic pleasure. He turned and ran reeling back at the priest, grasping with vain hands at the living, torturing whip.
22. VEKYRA’S GUEST
PRICE’S savage rage against his torturer was drowned in the blood that ran thickly down his naked body from the slashes of the whip. He realized suddenly that he was merely giving Malikar the pleasure of killing him, uselessly.
He checked his last charge at the golden man, stood motionless in the long hall, beneath the shaded electric lights that were so weirdly incongruous among the baffling wonders of this forgotten land.
Again the whip touched him, drew blood like a flashing blade; involuntarily he flinched. But he folded his arms and stood staring at Malikar.
“Enough, Mr. Durand?” the golden man mocked him.
Price bit his lip, said nothing.
Malikar gestured to the snake-men who had brought him into the room. They closed upon him—to take him back to the dank horror of the dungeon, he knew. And he knew he was not likely to leave it again, living.
Price turned, and saw the tiger again. Colossal golden cat, elephantine in bulk, it stood in the middle of the hall. The yellow woman, Vekyra, was leaning over the side of its black
howdah,
watching Price with odd speculation in her greenish eyes.
Desperate, illogical hope came to him abruptly. He knew that the woman and Malikar were at loggerheads. He had seen their duel for the control of the golden serpent. Vekyra, he suspected, was not delighted by Malikar’s passion for Aysa.
Running suddenly ahead of his guards, toward the tiger, he cried:
“Vekyra, won’t you help me? Can you see me buried alive?”
It was a hopeless prayer. She had watched while Malikar plied the whip. And he had seen no pity on her oval face.
Sick from the pain of his bleeding wounds, dizzy, reeling, Price was clutching at the last, futile straw of hope.
“Oh, Vekyra, you will help me! One so beautiful—”
At the last she smiled, brightly, enigmatically. Her greenish eyes showed interest, but no pity for him.
Price’s guards hesitated behind him, keeping a respectful distance from the yellow tiger. Malikar roared after them: “Take the dog on to his dungeon!”
That harsh command had the effect upon Vekyra that Price had tried for in vain. The oblique eyes flashed maliciously green. She smiled down again.
“Stranger, you are my guest,” her silvery voice spoke. “Mount with me.”
She darted a venomous glance at Malikar.
“The man is mine,” snarled the golden priest. “If I command that he rots in the dungeon, there he rots.”
“Not,” Vekyra insisted with a poisoned smile, “if I take him to my palace.”
“Forward!” bellowed Malikar.
“Seize the man.”
Timidly the blue-robes advanced.
“Touch him,” Vekyra assured them sweetly, “and the tiger dines well this night.”
They paused, looking fearfully back at Malikar.
The golden priest strode down across the hall, the long whip, red with Price’s blood, writhing and hissing before him like a living serpent. The snake-men scattered toward the walls.
Vekyra laughed, and her laughter was chiming, silvery, mocking.
“Perhaps your whip can master the snake, O Priest,” she called, “but not Zor, I think. The tiger has been mine too long.”
Malikar hesitated visibly; but he came on toward Price, the whip twisting and cracking angrily before him.
Hardly able to stand, Price staggered toward the tiger. His raw wounds throbbed intolerably. Nausea and weakness almost overwhelmed him, the result of long days of hardship as much as of his present pain and loss of blood. The floor of the long hall swam and rocked, the high electric lights floated in fiery circles.
Vekyra leaned forward in the
howdah.
She whispered to the tiger; one great ear slanted back to listen.
Then the colossal golden beast advanced upon Malikar, crouching, hind legs drawn forward. It growled menacingly. The sound was a sullen roar, filling the great hall with throbbing fury.
Malikar stopped; the hissing lash dropped to the floor.
“Woman!” his voice grated, hard with hate, “you will pay for this. You think I will not whip you because you are of the golden blood?”
“I know you will not whip me—because you can not!”
“Know now that you are no longer priestess of the snake—nor can ever be again. Another has been chosen.”
That other, Price knew, was Aysa.
“Of that I had learned already,” the woman responded, cold wrath in her silver tones. “But perhaps I have found another to be priest of the snake and master of the golden folk. Was not Iru once as great as Malikar?”
She gestured toward Price with a slim golden arm.
“That whelp is not Iru,” snarled the priest. “He is but a lying pretender, who rifled the king’s tomb.”
“And was Malikar not once a lying pretender?” the silver voice inquired acidly. And it took a note of warning: “Guard well your new priestess, Malikar, lest she fall into the pit, or perchance feed the snake, instead of worshipping it.”
Again Vekyra leaned forward, calling something into the tiger’s ear. The gigantic yellow beast crouched until its tawny belly touched the floor. With lithe grace the woman leapt from the
howdah.
Running to Price’s side, she slipped off the loose green cloak above her close-fitting tunic, wrapped it about his bleeding shoulders.
“Come!” she whispered urgently in his ear. “Mount, before yon slave-driver devises more evil!”
Reeling uncertainly, Price turned with her toward the crouching tiger. A slim, bare yellow arm slipped about his smarting shoulders. Vekyra, amazingly strong, lifted him into the great
howdah,
where he fell back gratefully among the cushions.
Malikar ran back to his desk, hammered a great bronze gong behind it, whose screaming reverberations filled the hall with insistent clamor of alarm. Vaguely, his head spinning with pain and exhaustion, Price was aware of shouting and the clangor of arms along distant passages.
Vekyra, leaping easily into the
howdah
beside him, called again into the tiger’s ear. The great beast surged to its feet with irresistible strength, with one smooth effort, far unlike the awkward lurching of a rising camel.
Vekyra shouted again, and the animal wheeled and ran from the room, the
howdah
swaying upon its back like a boat grasped in a mighty current.
Behind, Malikar bellowed ominously, “Woman, you shall taste my whip for this. And the dog upon which you defile your hands shall—”
Then they were outside in a dark passage, illuminated only by occasional flaring cressets—the electric lights appeared to have been restricted to the one room. It was eight feet wide, nearly twice that high; but there was none too much room for the racing tiger.
“We must hasten,” Vekyra whispered, her voice edged with alarm, “or Malikar will have the gates closed, and shut us out of my palace.”
A great, yellow-fringed ear was cupped back to listen, as Vekyra called another command. The tiger surged forward more swiftly, until Price’s sensations were those of sheer flying. Around a sharp corner it flung, plunged swaying up a sloping way.
Ahead, Price saw an incandescent rectangle of sky, almost blindingly blue to eyes sensitized by the surrounding gloom.
Vekyra reached down among the cushions beside her, found a short, oddly shaped metal bow. Snatching an arrow from a full quiver fastened in the corner of the
howdah,
she nocked it, sat waiting alertly.
Dark hastening figures were suddenly visible in the bright, enlarging rectangle ahead. Then it was narrowing. Shrill squealing of pulleys reached Price’s ears. Great valves of yellow metal, he saw, were swiftly closing.
Vekyra drew her arrow to the head. Price heard the singing
twang
of the bow, and ahead, a sharp cry. The screech of pulleys ceased.
The tiger slipped through the space between the half-closed gates, so narrow that the
howdah’s
fastenings scraped. And they burst into sunlight so bright that Price, for a time, could see nothing.
Weak and dizzy, he sank back among the cushions, drawing an arm across his eyes. Then he felt Vekyra’s smooth arms slipped beneath his shoulders.
“Be ye welcome,” she whispered, “to my castle of Verl. Rest, and fear nothing, for you
are
Vekyra’s guest.”
She lifted him up, and her whisper became soft, seductively caressing, as she added, extravagantly: “I am your slave.”
23. THE GOLDEN FOLK
FOR a few minutes, Price lay completely relaxed, supported by Vekyra’s arm, as the tiger swayed forward. Hot, blinding sunlight drenched
him,
strangely grateful to one unexpectedly delivered from the black dungeons of Malikar. Its penetrating force was mildly stimulating. Presently he moved to sit up, stirred by curiosity about this amazing, mountain-crowning palace.
Gorgeous wonders of Oriental gardens burst upon him. The tiger was pacing across a wide court, surrounded with walls and colonnades of refulgent gold and gleaming white marble. Dark, lush grass edged crystal pools, where white doves splashed joyously. Graceful palms flung high their emerald, tufted masses. Bright-flowering shrubs tinctured the air with cool fragrance.
About the broad court rose the gold-and-alabaster towers of Verl.
Lacy balconies above vivid gardens, supported by slender, twisted columns.
High, trefoil-arched windows, peering domes and slim minarets.
The architecture was typically Arabic; but all was snowy marble, shining gold.
In the white dazzle of the afternoon sun the splendors of the place would have been painful, but for the cool green shadows of the gardens.
Deliberately the golden tiger carried the swaying
howdah
along a gravel path, beneath an arcade of palms. Price stared about him in silent wonder. The scene was so like his dreams of many cruel days that he felt suddenly that it must be illusion, madness,
mirage
.
Had his old delirium returned?
Summoning a desperate strength, he turned fiercely to the woman beside him in the
howdah,
seized a bare, golden arm,
peered
into her face. Her skin gleamed like pale gold; it felt somehow metallic. But it was warm and yielding beneath his fingers; he felt under it firm, vibrant muscles.
“Woman of gold,” he demanded, “are you real?”
The face was strange.
Oval.
Exotically lovely.
The color of pale gold, framed in hair of ruddy gold.
The slightly slanted eyes were greenish, like the tiger’s. Behind heavy golden lashes, they were enigmatic, inscrutable.
“More real than you are, Iru.
For I am gold, and you are frail flesh. For I was as I am now, when Anz was living, and her people teeming millions. And I shall be as I now am when your bones are as the bones of Anz.”
She smiled, and he read a baffling challenge in her eyes.
“Maybe so, old girl,” Price muttered in English. “But I call your bluff, and I’ll play the game.”
His fighting
will could
keep back oblivion no longer. A sea of night flowed over him, and he sank back in Vekyra’s arms.
Price awoke within the most magnificent—if perhaps not the most comfortable—room that he had ever occupied, huge and lofty, the broad doorway arched and silken-curtained. The marble floor was thick-strewn with rugs, deep-piled, dull-red and blue. High walls were milky alabaster, paneled with gold.
From his elaborate, canopied bed he could look through wide, unglazed windows, over the basalt walls of Verl, to the dark lava plateau half a mile below, which stretched away beyond the green mark that was the oasis of El Yerim, to tawny wastes of flat red desert beyond, to shimmering horizons smoky in hot distance.
Price was surprised by his sense of well-being, and by the fact that his whip-cuts were completely healed. Such recovery could not have taken place in one day. He guessed, and Vekyra later admitted, that he had lain for some days in oblivion induced by her healing drugs. For
she
, it seems, was something of a chemist and physician.
Somewhat to Price’s confusion, he found six personal attendants waiting in the vast room on the day he woke. They were young women, tall, rather attractive, with the dark hair, thin lips, and aquiline noses that bespoke Arabic blood. They wore short, dark-green tunics, and each carried at her waist a long, crooked-bladed, golden
jambiyah.
On the forehead of each was the yellow brand of the snake.
They brought him white silken robes (his own garments were still in Malikar’s possession), offered him food, water and wine. He tried a little to talk to them; but though they seemed pathetically eager to serve him, they avoided his questions.
Still feeling languid, without energy, he made no effort to leave the great room until late afternoon, when Vekyra came to call upon him. Her slim, pale-golden figure was cased in dark forest-
green,
her red-gold hair fell in a flaming cascade. The slant of her dark-lidded eyes gave a hint of mystery to her oval face.