"Wheeler and I are for the temple," Lantin told him; "with our friends,
we'll try to hold the hordes in the pit until you come back with Kethra
and his forces. Go, man!"
The pilot cried assent, clicked a switch, and his car had disappeared,
speeding into time after Kethra and his men. And now, under my control,
our own car sped north toward the city of cylinders.
* * * * *
I think that of all our trips in the car, we attained our highest speed
then. Rocketing low above the ground, the landscape beneath us, the
endless billows of ice, seemed to pass beneath us in a white blur. We
shot across the sky like a comet, and in a few minutes the green land
of the Kanlars' country replaced the ice, and then there hove into view
the gleaming white city of cylinders.
I swept down toward the great cylinder that was the temple, and brought
the car to earth in the shelter of a little clump of trees outside the
great building. We sprang out, raced up the ramp, and down the tunneled
entrance into the temple's interior.
The metal floor was not in place, and before us yawned the abyss that
was the shaft leading down to the pit. Away across the temple, standing
on the ring of black flooring that was the shaft's rim, was a group
of men, seemingly tiny, toylike figures there in the empty temple's
immensity. We ran around the black rim toward them.
It was Denham and his three companions, and they ran forward to meet
us, gripped our hands warmly.
"Where are your forces?" asked Denham. "Where are the people of Kom?
The hordes are getting ready to come up from the pit, man! Listen," he
commanded, and I walked to the shaft's edge and looked down.
From far below, muffled by the great distance, yet coming with force to
my ears, there rose a dim roar, the savage shout of thousands of mad
warriors. And above that dull roaring there was the clangor of metal
smiting on metal.
"They're beating down the gate," Denham said, "and in a few minutes
they'll be pouring up that stair. But where is the aid you were to
bring?"
In a few words I explained the battle we had taken part in, and the
pursuit of the Raider into time by Kethra and his men. "We must hold
them in the pit, somehow," I told them, "until Kethra and his forces
come back. If those hordes once get to the temple's roof and seize the
flying-platforms, it means hideous death for all at Kom!"
"Couldn't you close the metal floor of the temple?" suggested Lantin.
"Swing it back in place and close the shaft?"
"But how?" asked Denham. "We've searched but can't find the secret of
the floor, or how it is moved."
"But the collapsible stair!" I put in; "you can fold that back! Lantin
and I did, the night we escaped!"
"Look!" ordered Denham, pointing toward the spot where the little
folding stair had been. I looked, and despair rushed over me. For the
stair had been removed, and instead of it, steps had been cut into the
side of the shaft itself, leading from the spiral stairway in the shaft
to the ring of black flooring on which we stood.
"The guards must have cut those steps after you escaped," said Denham,
"probably because they would not allow anyone to play on them again the
trick you did. We heard of your exploit, in the pit."
Up from the shaft was coming now an increasing clamor, and the
battering on the gate far below had increased in fierceness.
"But how, then, are we to hold them in the pit?" I asked, despairingly.
"A messenger has gone into time after Kethra and his forces, and if we
could only check these hordes until he comes--"
Abruptly the Aztec spoke, calmly, gravely. "We are five," he said,
"five strong swords. And the stair is narrow."
There was a moment of silence, for the idea he broached was stunning in
its audacity. Then D'Alord laughed in sheer delight. "Good!" he cried.
"Why, 'twill be easy! Ixtil is right. We are five blades here, and the
stair is narrow. We'll show them sword-play, eh?"
A sudden reckless excitement burned through me like fire. "Good
enough!" I cried. The Roman broke in on us. "Down the stair, then, at
once! We'll meet them at the very bottom, if possible, and then when
they do force us back up, it will give us a long enough delay for the
aid you speak of to get here."
We ran toward the steps cut in the shaft, but Denham halted us by an
exclamation. "Look!" he cried, pointing some distance along the wall of
the temple. "There are suits of the guards' armor, hanging up. We'll
need them, before we are through today!"
We saw the wisdom of his suggestion, and hastily acted on it, donning
suits of the brazen armor and helmets to match. The Roman alone, who
was already attired very similarly, did not join us.
And now we rushed toward the steps in the shaft's side, and down them
to the beginning of the spiral stair. Down the stair we ran, recklessly
throwing ourselves around the curves of that airy, high-flung pathway.
Looking down, I saw that the light in the pit was growing, as the dawn
began to flame in the world above, and I glimpsed vaguely through the
rising mists a great horde that eddied and swirled about the bottom of
the stairway. Up to our ears, stronger and stronger, came the clanging
of heavy metal objects striking the barred gate, while there rose at
the same time a savage roar from the pit's blood-thirsty hordes.
We raced on, down and down until I was near to dropping with
exhaustion. And still the Roman sternly spurred us forward, with the
cheering assurance that the farther down we went, the farther up the
hordes would need to press us back. Finally we reached the fourth curve
of the spiral stair above the ground, a height of perhaps two thousand
feet above the pit's floor. And there the Roman halted us.
"We'll make our stand here," he said. The clangor and the roaring
below were deafening, now, and for a few minutes we lay upon the steps
exhausted, then rose to our feet, one by one. Fabrius stood a step
below the rest of us, his heavy shortsword in his hand, calmly looking
down toward the pit. I drew my own rapier, my heart thumping wildly,
but I strove to appear as calm as the Roman. Denham, with elaborate
unmindfulness of the roaring mobs below, drew forth a snuff-box
containing a few grains of the brown powder, and offered us each in
turn a pinch, which we refused, then daintily took some himself.
"Ha, Ixtil," cried D'Alord, slapping the Aztec on the back gleefully,
"this should be a better fight even than those in the pit, eh?" The
chieftain smiled darkly, shifting his saw-toothed sword from hand to
hand, but made no other answer, and the Frenchman turned to me.
"What of him?" he demanded, pointing to Lantin. "He has no sword."
I turned in dismay, for I had forgotten my friend, almost. "You'd best
go back up to the temple's top," I told him. "Wait for the coming of
Kethra, and guide him down to us. You can be no good here, you know, so
don't risk yourself."
The others seconded my suggestion, warmly urging Lantin to return to
the temple's top and await the aid from Kethra, but he refused. "I have
this," he said, showing us an automatic which he had snatched up when
we sprang from the time-car. Finally we compromised by placing him on
the stair some distance behind and above us, where he could use the few
but precious shots in his weapon when it was most necessary to do so.
Now we turned from him, for with a sudden mighty clang the great gate
below went down. There was a tremendous shout, a savage roar of
triumph, and then the tramping of thousands of feet as the hordes in
the pit flooded toward the overturned gate and raced up the stair.
* * * * *
Looking down, we saw them ascending toward us, coming in such
close-packed order that many were crowded from the low-walled stair
and dashed down to death below. But still they came on, a bellowing,
blood-thirsty mob, until they were winding around the stair just across
the spiral from us.
Denham drew his sword, now, and we stepped down so that we stood in a
single line across the stair, the Roman at the center, with D'Alord and
Ixtil on his left side and Denham and me on the other.
And now the hordes surged around the bend of the stair, racing up
toward us. A sudden cry went up from them as they glimpsed us, and
momentarily the human wave sucked back, and the close-packed mob
halted. A moment there was silence, while they stared up at us. I
stole a glance at my companions. The face of Fabrius was stern but
unperturbed, and he gripped his sword firmly, eyeing the mob below
with eagle gaze. D'Alord's face was darkly flushed, his eyes gleaming.
Ixtil leaned forward in a tense, tigerish crouch, while Denham, beside
me, lounged negligently, leaning on his rapier and regarding the crowd
below us with a mocking, contemptuous smile.
Only a moment that silence lasted, while the hordes gazed up at us.
Then, as they saw that we were but five, a beastlike roar went up and
they raced up toward us, vying for the honor of slaying us.
Up, up they came, a sea of ragged figures, a storm of flashing weapons.
A catlike Egyptian and a giant Chinaman were first of that mob, with
behind them the massed weight of the hordes in the pit, pushing up
from far below, to win up to the flying-platforms that would carry them
to the loot of Kom.
As though in a dream, I saw the fierce faces coming up toward us,
and then there was a clash of steel on steel that brought me to my
senses. D'Alord and Fabrius had each leapt forward a step and with two
strokes that were like darting flashes of lightning had struck down the
Egyptian and the Chinaman. Over their bodies came the others, and for
an instant the air seemed thick with darting sword-blades, at which I
whirled and thrust and parried.
A brutal-faced man in medieval chain-armor was my nearest opponent,
and as I realized the fact, he swung up his heavy sword for a crashing
stroke. But while he raised the cumbrous weapon, I darted out my rapier
and he fell with a spreading red stain at his throat. A white-robed,
sallow man thrust at me with a long spear, over his body, but the sword
of the Roman flashed down and cut the head from the spear, then flashed
again and the man went down. A dozen blades glinted off my armor and
helmet, and I thrust out savagely and blindly, felt the blade pierce
through flesh and blood, once, twice. And now, shaken by our first
fierce resistance, the mob fell back a little, while we stood panting,
surveying the scene of that first clash.
At our feet lay a dozen or more men, dead or dying. As yet none of us
had been wounded, with the exception of D'Alord, who was bleeding from
a cut on the back of his wrist. The narrowness of the stairway had been
our salvation, since only a few men at a time could come at us, and
these were hampered by the press of those behind them.
But I saw that the battle had only begun. The mob was again surging
up toward us, more fiercely than before. I glanced back up the stair,
but there was no sign of Kethra's forces. Then I turned my attention
back to the oncoming hordes, for already our blades were clashing with
theirs.
A succession of savage faces appeared before me, confused and changing,
and I thrust until my wrist was tired to numbness. I heard, even above
the clash of blades and shouts of our opponents, the voice of D'Alord,
who was mocking his opponents in rapid French, disparaging their skill
and crying out when he beat down their guard. And, soaring high over
all the other sounds of the battle, rose a weird, piercing cry, the
battle-cry of the Aztec.
"Alalala!" he shouted. "Alalala! Alalala!"
The stairs at our feet became slippery with blood, choked with bodies,
and we gave back a few steps. This gave us further advantage, for we
stood on firm, dry footing, while those who came at us slipped and
fell on the smooth metal of the steps below us, smeared as it was with
the life-blood of their fellows. Yet they came on, ever on, forced us
around and around the spiral, up, up, ever up the stair.
We were forced up until we had entered the shaft and the wall on our
right gave us added support. In the semi-darkness of the shaft, too,
it was harder for those coming at us to see us, while they were more
plainly visible to us against the light of the pit below.
A ragged, squint-eyed little man crept under the legs of those battling
us, and jabbed at me with a javelin. In the confusion of battle we had
shifted in position until I was now next to the low wall that kept us
from the abyss. Now, as the javelin stabbed up at me, I stooped swiftly
beside the low barrier, and with a flashing stroke across his neck,
finished my squint-eyed opponent. But as I started to rise again, a
great figure loomed above me, a giant black who swung up above his
head a heavy, horn-hafted ax. He was standing on the low wall itself,
balancing himself for a crashing down-stroke of the ax, which I could
not resist.
He uttered a fierce cry, whirled the ax about over his head, and swung
it down toward me, but as his arm started that downward motion there
was a sharp crack from the stair above, and he toppled down into the
abyss. In the very nick of time, Lantin's shot had saved me.
But on came the hordes, pushing us up and up by sheer weight of
numbers, until it seemed madness that five men should thus stand
against thousands. Around and around the up-spiraling stair they forced
us, so that sometimes we fought on one side of the shaft and sometimes
on another. Now and then, sated with fighting, they would draw back for
a few moments, and this gave us precious intervals of rest, but always
they came on again, always they pushed us up. Man after man of them
hurtled down to death in the pit, for as the hordes came on they threw
their own dead and dying over the rail into the abyss, so that the
stair might be unencumbered.
We were very near to the temple floor by now, and I was bleeding from a
dozen flesh-wounds, nor were the rest of us in better case. Ixtil had
a great cut in one cheek, and Fabrius had been wounded in the leg by
a thrown spear. D'Alord, too, was a bloody figure, and had ceased to
jeer at his adversaries, fighting now in grim silence. Alone among us,
Denham remained virtually unscathed, and he fought on unchanged. His
slender, needlelike rapier flashed here and there with wonderful speed
and precision, always stabbing at the exact right spot, with the exact
force needed. And he still smiled scornfully as his blade dealt death.
A half-dozen times Lantin's pistol had saved one of us from death,
barking out a grim message when we were pressed too close. But now we
were becoming ever more weary, were being pressed ever more swiftly up
by fresh opponents, with the weight of the hordes behind them. All down
the great spiral, clear to the floor of the pit, the stair was crowded
with the hordes, pressing us ever upward, their own weight and numbers
hampering with deadly effect those who were nearest us, and who were
pushed forward with no chance for choosing their thrusts.
At last we reached the stair's end, and stood on the black ring of
flooring around the abyss. When we could no longer hold them from
emerging onto that flooring, we suddenly turned and ran toward the
other spiral stair which circled the interior of the cylindrical
temple, winding from balcony to balcony up to the building's roof.
And there our fight began anew, for when the hordes emerged into
the temple they did not stream outside into the city, as I had
hoped, but continued to press us up toward the roof, where were the
flying-platforms that would carry them to the rich loot of mighty Kom.
They could have had freedom, but it was not enough. They were thirsty
for the riches awaiting them at Kom. So not a man of them left the
temple, all combining to force us up the narrow stair that spiraled up
the temple's interior, a replica of the one in the shaft, though much
smaller, and the only road to the building's roof.
They were pressing us closely, now, and we could hardly keep to our
feet. Then, a hundred feet from the ceiling of the great building,
a shout of triumph went up from the hordes, for D'Alord went down,
stunned by a blow on the head from a great mace. Fabrius rushed forward
to drag him back, and was himself struck down by a blow from the same
club. It seemed that our fight was over, then and there, when there
came a sharp rattle of shots from behind and some six or seven of our
opponents went down, felled by the last shots of Lantin's pistol.
Involuntarily the mob fell back for a few steps, and we seized the
opportunity to drag D'Alord and the Roman to their feet. Fabrius was
unhurt and D'Alord had only been stunned, quickly reviving. And now,
as the mob below hung for a moment hesitant, not knowing how many more
shots Lantin had at his disposal, two men sprang out of their number
and faced us.
One was a lithe, brown-skinned Malay, who waved a gleaming kris aloft
and called to the rest to resume the attack. But the other it was
who held my gaze, a blond giant with long, waving hair, who shouted
fiercely and waved a battle-ax aloft, calling to his companions to
follow him to the attack.
It was Cannell!
Cannell, for whom we had come across the centuries! Cannell, whom we
had seen seized by the Raider and taken, whom we had searched for in
vain in the city of the pit. There was a great, half-healed wound on
his temple, and his eyes were alight with blood-lust, so that I could
see that he knew us not.
I was brushed aside, and someone sped by me from above. It was Lantin,
and before we could stop him he had passed us and had raced down the
intervening steps toward Cannell, his face alight at seeing the friend
we had come through time to rescue.
"Cannell!" he cried, rushing toward him with hands outstretched. We
looked in that instant to see him slain, but no blow was struck, the
mob seeming paralyzed by astonishment. I saw Lantin reach out to
Cannell, saw the blood-lust leave him; his eyes cleared as he looked at
Lantin, the past coming back to him over his time in the bloody pit.
He dropped his ax and took a step toward Lantin, his face alight with
recognition. Then we uttered a helpless groan, for the Malay, who stood
at the low rail behind Lantin, had recovered from his surprize and now
swept up his curved blade over Lantin's head.
I shouted, and started down toward Lantin, but knew myself too late to
ward off that blow. Cannell looked, saw the upflung, menacing blade,
and uttered a great shout. He had no weapon in his hand, but with one
great bound he leapt up toward the Malay, gripped him in his arms,
and then the two swayed, toppled, fell, hurtled down into the abyss,
twisting and turning, locked in a death-grip, down through the temple's
interior, down into the darkness of the vast shaft below, down to the
pit-floor far beneath.
I was down to Lantin now, grasped him and dragged him back, and before
the massed hordes recovered from their astonishment, he was behind
us. They turned now, saw, and howled their rage, racing up toward our
waiting swords.
A torrent of raging swords, they pushed us up until we stood at the
stair's end. Behind us was a high, vaulted room, and at its other side
the stair continued, leading still up. We turned, ran across that room,
the triumphant horde behind us, and when we reached the stair at the
room's other side, turned again and faced them.
Up through a half-dozen such rooms they forced us, through dim, great
halls with patterns of fire on their walls, with unguessed, looming
mysteries lurking in their shadows, vaguely glimpsed by me as we ran
through them. The lair of the Raider, those dim halls, I knew. And, at
last, the narrow stair from one of them emerged onto the roof itself,
and we stood at the point where that stair opened onto the great, flat
roof, barring the way of the hordes in our final stand.
Behind us, on the great expanse of the roof, were low-walled, oval
platforms of metal, great of size, stacked one upon another. Enough
flying-platforms, I knew, to carry all the hordes below us down to
the loot of Kom. And the foremost of our opponents saw them also, and
yelled with savage triumph.
If we had fought fiercely before, we battled like supermen now, in
a last spurt of energy. Our swords clicked and flashed like swift
shuttles, weaving strands of death from enemy to enemy, as we used all
the mad strength of despair to hold back the hordes for a last moment.
"_Mordieu!_" shouted D'Alord. "This is the end, comrades!"
I turned to answer him, then halted. From above, from the sun-flooded
air of early morning, had sounded a long, rising shriek of wind, a
piercing whistle of a rising gale. A fierce burst of wind struck us,
and cold, ice-cold, flooded through my heart. There was a thundering
of wind-sounds above, another buffeting gust of cold air, and then
appeared abruptly, a hundred feet above us, the Raider!
"God!" muttered Lantin, behind me. The blades of our enemies and
ourselves had ceased to clash, and with a common impulse we gazed up.
The Raider's swirling mists contracted suddenly, his three orbs of
green changed to purple, and he drifted gently, tauntingly, down toward
us.
* * * * *
A howl of triumph went up from the hordes on the stair. Away down and
around the spiraling stairway it went, down all their packed masses,
down into the shaft to the pit itself, all taking up and passing on
that savage, exultant shout.
For we had lost. Kethra had lost. The Raider had somehow eluded him, in
time, and had come back to destroy us and to loose his hordes on the
flying-platforms, to send them down to Kom in a rain of death, while
Kethra vainly searched time for the Raider. We had lost.
Slowly, slowly, the Raider came down toward us, while the hordes below
us watched with delighted expectancy. Spinning, twisting, it sank down
until it hung a scant twenty feet above us, and we waited, helpless,
for the destroying flashes from the central orbs.
Suddenly D'Alord stepped forward, and uttering a yell of defiance, he
picked a sword from the floor, whirled it around his head and sent it
hurtling spear-wise up toward the Raider.
It fell back, missed by yards. And now the gray, shapeless mass of the
Raider spun and laced with inconceivable rapidity, while down upon us
darted flash on flash of purple, destroying fire, from the central orbs.
The flashes fell short! Between us and the Raider was hanging a veil
of transparent black, a tenuous black net that was suspended in midair
above us, and against which the purple flashes splashed and stopped.
I turned swiftly, and a little behind and above me was hovering the
air-boat of Kethra. It moved toward us, and we stepped on it. And in
that same instant, there appeared in the air all around us, above and
around the temple and the Raider, score on score of the air-boats,
crowded with the men of Kom.
From them darted a hundred black nets like the one that hung before
us. The black veils closed upon the Raider, contracted, and while he
spun and changed and twisted with mad speed, the veils contracted
still until they were a black ball five feet across, in which he was
prisoned. Then, from Kethra's air-boat and from all around us, there
darted flash on flash of orange flame, which struck the black ball,
burned fiercely for a moment, and then vanished. In the air there
drifted only a shining mist, and then that too was swept away!
Now, from all the hovering air-boats came the thrumming of the
sound-rays, directed at the temple and the city, from all the scores of
cars that hung above that city. The ground beneath pitched, heaved up
torturedly, and then the city collapsed, sank down with a thundering,
ear-splitting roar into the great pit that lay beneath, the earth over
the cavern being shattered by the disintegrating vibrations of the
sound-rays.
All the city, with the great temple below us, crashed down, and
vanished in a mighty cloud of dust. The dust hung, cleared,
disappeared. And beneath lay nothing but a great depression in the
earth, a vast, raw bowl in the earth's surface, with here and there
a white fragment showing in the brown earth. Under that huge sunken
bowl, I well knew, lay the city of the cylinders, with its Kanlars and
soulless slaves, and under it, too, lay the city of the pit, and the
people of the pit, the thousands of fierce warriors who had pressed us
up the stair so savagely, seeking to carry destruction and death down
to a peaceful city.
Standing there on Kethra's car, we surveyed the scene in silence. And
there was silence all around us, for from all the massed cars came no
word or shout, the men on them gazing down into the torn depression
below as though loth to believe that their victory was won at last, the
evil menace of the Raider crushed forever. So we looked, there in the
hushed silence.
In the east, the sun was rising higher ... higher....
_CHAPTER 18_