Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (37 page)

Radio broadcasting apparatus nested nearby. It was necessarily compact, but looked
powerful. This conveyed the wildly discordant bars into the ether, for reception through
any radio receiver.

Pushing in behind Doc, Long Tom indicated with a pointing finger an aerial snaking
up to the inner apex of the bell tower.

Doc Savage strode up, and from his lips issued his trilling sound. Normally, it started
softly, building in volume. Here, it surged out strongly, swiftly building to an arresting
crescendo.

The man at the harp looked up, and his long face broke into lines of shock. Elongated
fingers ceased strumming.

The individual stood up. He was very tall, cadaverous of face the way undertakers
are often pictured as being, but rarely are in life. A bony beak of a nose dominated
his features.

“Prime Minister Ocel,” breathed Fiana Drost.

“At your service,” said the leader of Egallah in an unflappable tone.

Long Tom trained his supermachine pistol on the man.

“Stay away from that thing,” he clipped.

Ocel threw up long-fingered hands. He stood to his full height, which was considerable.
With his bony nose, he gave the impression of a carrion bird.

“I would never dream of disobeying you, my dear sir.” His snapping eyes fell on Fiana
Drost. “I know you. Drost, is it not?”

“Yes. Your signature condemned me to undeserved death.”

Ocel’s head inclined in the direction of Doc Savage. “The proof of your perfidy stands
before us, does it not?”

Fiana swallowed her hot retort. Instead, she met the other’s eyes fiercely.

“This American saved Egallah from the deadly scourge of anthrax,” Fiana pointed out.

“You have interrupted my playing,” Ocel told Doc Savage. His face and voice were glum,
like a person roused from an afternoon nap. He looked quite put out, but not really
angry. His utter calm was disturbing.

“You were giving the order to attack Tazan,” Doc accused.

“Counter-attack,” corrected Ocel smoothly.

“Liar!” snapped Long Tom. “Your poison gas started everything!”

Prime Minister Ocel looked pained. “War between Egallah and Tazan has been a constant
that has endured over many centuries. To talk of starts. Pah! That is nothing.” He
lifted an imperious digit skyward. “Finishing this conflict— Ah. That is everything.”

Doc Savage said firmly, “Your orders will be countermanded. Immediately.”

“No need. You have spoiled them with your interfering whistling.” He spread open hands.
“Now what do we do?”

Doc revealed, “I have reclaimed the darkness-making machine from the Tazans. You no
longer need fear it.”

“Very good. But that is but one thorn in our side. And there are so many that I have
run out of fingers on which to count them.” Ocel smiled thinly.

“If you have not yet heard,” advised the bronze man, “three Tazan bombers have contaminated
the caves south of here with anthrax. Many of your gyroplanes and pilots have been
lost.”

For the first time unhappiness traced the features of Boris Ocel. “The sacred caves!”

Doc nodded. “And all that is locked within them. It will be years before they can
again be inhabited, much less mined.”

Ocel’s shoulders sagged. His voice creaked like an old door closing. “Then it was
all for nothing…?”

“What was?” asked Fiana sharply. “What has this war been about?”

“Why, a very valuable commodity which will turn Ultra-Stygia into an Egallan paradise,”
Ocel purred.

Fiana looked blank. Her questioning eyes went to Doc Savage.

“What is this man saying?”

“The caves of the Marea Negra,” explained Doc Savage, “have been the home for generations
of bats over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Roosting there by day and flying
out at night.”

Fiana grimaced impatiently. “Yes, yes. Of course. Every schoolchild knows that. What
of it?”

“During their roosting period,” explained Doc, “they naturally produced considerable
quantities of guano.”

Fiana Drost blurted, “Guano? I do not know this word….”

“Bat droppings,” supplied Long Tom laconically.

“Thousands of tons of the stuff,” explained Doc, “suitable for processing into commercial
fertilizer. Enough to turn this desolate region into arable land capable of feeding
both nations for many years to come.”

Ocel made a dismissive gesture. “Both!
Tch-tch.
My good fellow. One nation.
Egallah!”

Fiana Drost took a stunned step backward.

“I—we have been fighting a senseless war for—for
bat
droppings!”

“Fertilizer,” corrected Ocel. “Highly valuable indeed. Wars have been fought over
much less. Our spies recently discovered this treasure. Thus it became imperative
to reclaim those caverns before the Tazans learned of it.”

Doc Savage interjected, “You neglected to mention that the stuff contains nitrates—a
key ingredient in making gunpowder. Perhaps that is the real reason you covet the
bat caves.”

Fiana Drost looked stricken. Her knees appeared to have turned to water. She staggered
back, weaving.

Long Tom demanded, “Why are you conducting operations from this place?”

“He is too much a coward to do otherwise!” spat Fiana.

“Nonsense!” Ocel retorted. “Only I know how to operate the electric harp that whispers
the orders of Egallan glory. Where better to broadcast them than from a quiet little
church in an obscure hamlet unlikely to be infiltrated by the Tazan Elite Guard, whose
eyes and ears, it seems, have penetrated every fortification in Egallah.”

“As I said,” sneered Fiana, “a coward.”

Prime Minister Boris Ocel made a shape with his mouth preparatory to flinging back
a counterargument. Not a syllable escaped his lips.

Just then windy, whispering sounds filtered through the bell tower’s stone blocks.

“What’s that?” asked Long Tom, shifting his supermachine pistol about.

“Warbats!” crowed Ocel. “My flock has returned to deal with you. Did you really think
that I was so lightly guarded?”

Outside, they heard the sounds of the grotesque bat-ships dropping from the night
sky. Sharp-tined talons landed with a succession of thuds. Next came running feet.

Boris Ocel smiled complacently. “I believe the English phrase for your plight is ‘hopelessly
surrounded.’ No?”

Long Tom eyed Doc. “We can fight our way out.”

Doc Savage strode up to the prime minister and made the man unconscious with a painful
squeeze of his spinal centers. Ocel collapsed into his arms.

“He deserves to die,” said Fiana solemnly.

“No more killing,” said Doc, eyes flashing with a rare anger.

There was a shuttered window on one side of the bell tower. It was shaped like a church
door, and consisted of two wooden shutters. Doc went to it and threw the leaves open.

Below, human bats were converging on the church, creeping through the snow like furtive
ghouls out for a night of grave robbing.

Doc whispered, “Long Tom. Here, please.”

The puny electrical wizard joined the bronze man and trained his compact weapon on
the advancing creatures. In the moonlight, it could be seen that they wore leather
aviator helmets trimmed in squirrel fur, and smoked goggles that helped create the
unpleasant aspect of human bats. Their webbed limbs shuffled as they came.

Long Tom pulled back on the trigger. The weapon hooted, ejector mechanism shuttling
busily. Mercy bullets began striking their leathery forms. The hide might have been
good for fending off the cold in the open cockpit of a gyroplane, but it provided
no protection against the chemically-charged hollow slugs. They stitched sudden holes,
and the bat-men fell in dark heaps of hide.

“Got them all,” Long Tom said with satisfaction.

But that comment was premature. Others were sweeping around and coming in through
the front door and the cellar hatch. They could hear their flap-limbed commotion plainly.

“We can hold the stairs until I run out of ammunition,” Long Tom stated.

Doc shook his head. “No need.”

Striding to the door, Doc removed a handful of grenades from his vest. These were
of several varieties. First he lobbed some of the thin-walled anesthetic globes. They
landed at the bottom of the spiral staircase, broke.

Human bats began dropping where they encountered the invisible, odorless stuff. There
was no protection against it, short of not inhaling.

When he exhausted those, Doc went to the tower door, tossed out a steel grenade, which
he first armed by flicking a tiny lever.

It sailed down the stairs, bounced several times and stopped. Doc retreated.

Detonation came. The old staircase became a splintering ruin, which collapsed in on
itself. Smoke boiled up, filling the gloomy space beneath the tower ceiling.

Long Tom took his fingers out of his ears. “They can’t climb up, but we can’t get
down. Or can we?”

Doc turned to the broadcast booth containing the uncanny-sounding electric harp and
the broadcasting apparatus. He had another device, this one a canister of some type.
It was equipped with a timer. He armed it and tossed it in, closing the booth.

“Let’s go!” he urged.

Hefting Boris Ocel over one shoulder, Doc Savage joined Long Tom at the window, saying,
“The bat-men are all inside the church now.”

Stealthy whispering movements below seemed to confirm this supposition.

Doc said, “We will jump outside and outflank them.”

Fiana flung back defiance. “I am not jumping.”

Doc eyed her, hesitated. “Very well. You will be safe here, if you stand as far from
the booth as possible. We will return for you. There is more to say on the subject
of John Sunlight.”

“I know no more about his fate than you. It is the truth.”

“We will discuss that later,” returned Doc.

“And after that, what will become of me?”

“We have a special place to which you can be sent.”

Fiana’s eyes narrowed to dark slits. “I do not like the sound of that.”

“It is a good place,” Doc assured her. “You will have a new life.”

Fiana said nothing to that.

HOOKING one leg over the sill, Doc Savage slid out, dropped. His mighty leg muscles
cushioned his fall. He did not lose his balance, even with Ocel as burden.

Long Tom followed, landing cat-like on both feet. He swept his superfirer muzzle about,
found no targets. Disappointment sucked in his sallow cheeks.

“Now what?” he breathed.

Doc went to the great front portal of the church and slammed it shut.

That was when the grenade went off. It was not a powerful thing, but it made the old
stone edifice tremble briefly. Smoke spurted from the solitary tower window.

In reality, Doc had unleashed a grenade that sprayed a strong acid over the broadcast
booth. A modest concussion was necessary to spread the stuff. The smoke was the result
of the acid rapidly consuming the apparatus.

A lone bat flew out. A real one. Evidently, it had been roosting in some chink within.

The detonation was very noisy and this caused the bat-men to come rushing out in panicky
arm-flapping confusion.

Between them, Doc and Long Tom overcame their leathery foes without having to exert
any great effort. They used their fists for the most part. Cracking jaws, Doc and
Long Tom laid them out in untidy piles.

When they were done, Long Tom spanked his hands together. “They look kinda scary,
but they’re not much.”

“Pilots,” agreed Doc. “No more, no less.”

When the smoke began to clear, Doc Savage entered the sanctuary and went to the ruined
staircase. He called up.

“Miss Drost. You may come down now.”

Silence.

“Miss Drost.”

“Maybe her eardrums got ruptured when the grenade let go,” Long Tom suggested.

Doc said, “The booth appeared bulletproof. Otherwise, I would have forced her to follow.”

Doc Savage decided he could scale the rubble and transfer to the stone inner wall.
He did this, climbing the last part like a spider. Then he disappeared from sight.

The haunting trilling sound, which was a thing unique to Doc Savage, wafted down shortly
thereafter. It possessed a marked quality of sadness this time. The sound went on
for an unusually long time, as if Doc failed to realize that he was making it. Eventually,
it trailed off, although ghostly echoes of it continued to persist in the bell tower’s
peculiar acoustics.

The bronze man remained out of sight for so long that Long Tom began to worry.

“Everything O.K. up there?” he called out.

Silence.

Long Tom cupped his hands around his mouth and tried again. “Doc. What are you doing?”

“Cutting her down.”

“Cut—”

When Doc Savage reappeared, he was bearing the limp form of Fiana Drost. She was enwrapped
in her black cape. A ragged-ended segment of it was wound around her neck, unpleasantly
knotted and remindful of a hangman’s noose.

Long Tom made an awkward sound. “Ahr-r-r.”

Doc lowered her down, employing his grapple and silk line, which he had wound about
her black-shrouded body. More than anything, Fiana Drost resembled a bedraggled bat
huddled in its own ebony wings.

Long Tom caught her, saw the bloodless pallor of her face and knew the awful truth.

“Suicide!” he gulped.

Doc dropped beside him, face grimly metallic.

“Evidently, she did not wish to have a better life,” he said quietly.

THEY interred her in the graveyard behind the old church, smoothing over the spot
with new-fallen snow. Neither man spoke over the little mound. No one knew quite what
to say. Nothing seemed appropriate for the troubled daughter of the wicked John Sunlight.

By the time the simple ceremony was finished, Prime Minister Ocel began stirring.
Doc Savage helped him along by releasing him from the spell he had inflicted. Ocel
looked around him dazedly. Dark eyes blinked.

“Where are my men?” he croaked out.