Golden Blood (11 page)

Was Aysa actually being turned into another monster of gold, by some diabolical chemical? It might easily be a fantastic lie on the snake-man’s part. But the tale had a certain grim plausibility that edged Price’s nerves with alarm.

“Do you know any way,” Price demanded, “that we could get secretly into the mountain?
To where Aysa is?
Is that tunnel always guarded?”

Kreor lay silent again; he trembled.

“Answer me!” Price demanded. “Tell me if you can lead me to where the girl is?”

“The wrath of the snake, and Malikar,” the Arab muttered.

“Remember, you are
dakhile.”

“But I am wounded,” the snake-man protested. “I could never reach the mountain.”

“Your wounds aren’t serious,” Price assured him. “You can walk tomorrow, though perhaps a bit painfully. Speak.”

“You could never get past the gates. They are always locked, and guarded.”

“Is there another way?”

Again the man hesitated, and squirmed on the ground.

“Another way there is, Lord Ira. But perilous indeed.”

“What is it?”

“High on the north wall of the mountain is a crevice. It leads into a great cave. From the cave is a way into the passages that lead down into the golden mist. But great is the peril, Iru. The climb is not easy; above the place of the snake are guards.”

“We are going there,” Price told him levelly, “as soon as you can walk. And unlucky it will be for you if you haven’t told the truth.”

He let the man drink. Bringing food from the tank, he loosened his hands, so that he could eat, and then bound him again.

Price and Sam Sorrows slept and watched by turns that night. As Price sat, leaning against the tank through the long hours of his watch, with the keen desert air about him and the cool stars looking down, he thought a great deal about the course of his adventures in this lost world, about what he should do on the morrow.

In the morning he could ride back to El Yerim in the tank, and the adventure would be over. The Beni Anz, he was certain, would not be willing to fight again under his leadership; old Yarmud would be remembering that he had denied being Iru. And he could hardly join Jacob Garth’s party again, Joao de Castro hating him as he did.

If he turned back, there would be nothing to do save
procure
a camel or two, and strike out for civilization. He could never solve the weird riddles that had confronted him: the mystery of the mirage, of the golden folk. Infinitely worse, he would never see Aysa again.

On the other hand, he could remain with Kreor until the man recovered, and assault the mountain alone. It was a desperate plan. The Arab obviously hated him, would certainly betray him if opportunity presented. And opportunity was almost certain to appear.

The chance that he should ever leave the mountain alive appeared extremely slight. None the less, Price never really hesitated. The decision was inevitable.

“Back at camp by noon,” lanky old Sam Sorrows predicted genially, as they breakfasted in the dawn.

“I’m not going with you,” Price told him.

“What!”

“I’m going to try for the mountain on my own. Going to make that bird in the blue clothes guide me in. We’ll hide around here until he can walk.”

“But, Mr. Durand,” the old man cried, “I—I don’t like to see you try it, sir. I wouldn’t trust that fellow. He’s a—a snake!”

“I don’t trust him. But he’s the only shot.”

Sam Sorrows stared at him, grinned and rose and shook his hand.

“Luck, Mr. Durand.
A crazy thing to do, sir.
But you might make it. I’ll leave you the water-skin, and the grub. And you might find something more up in the trenches.”

Half an hour later the tank went lumbering back toward the oasis. Fastening a halter-rope about his prisoner’s neck, Price loosed his ankles and conducted him to a hiding-place among the tumbled masses of lava half a mile down the
wadi.
Kreor limped and grumbled, but he could walk.

Fastening him again, Price returned and searched the abandoned battlefield for food and water, finding all he could carry.

For two days Price kept the Arab bound, nursing his wounds with painful care.
On the late afternoon of the second day, when Price was sleeping, the man worked loose his bonds.

Disturbed by some obscure warning of danger, perhaps some faint sound of the snake-man’s footsteps or his breathing, Price looked up to see Kreor standing above him, a jagged mass of lava raised in both hands.

18. FROST OF GOLD

SNATCHING at the ancient battle-ax, which he kept always beside him, Price rolled over, away from the boulder in whose shadow he had been lying. The stone came crashing down where his head had been.

With a single gliding movement, Price was on his feet, swinging up the ax. The Arab made to leap forward, then, realizing his helplessness against the ax, stopped and folded his arms and stood staring at Price with mad hatred in his eyes.

Resolutely, Price met his eyes, motionless.

“Slay me, Iru,” the Arab muttered. “Strike, that I may be gathered into the abyss of the snake.”

“Nothing doing.
But tonight you are going to take me to Aysa. If you are able to murder me you are able to walk. We have plenty of moonlight. If you try any tricks it will be time enough to split your head.”

The man assented with an apparent meekness that Price found disturbing.

“Very well, Iru. Since the gods awakened you, I shall not attempt to betray you again.”

Price knotted the halter-rope about the man’s neck, to preclude any attempt at flight. They finished the remaining water and food, and then set off across the lava-fields, toward the basaltic mass of the mountain, looming dark in the moonlight.

It was five miles directly to the mountain; perhaps eight or nine by the route they took around to the north cliffs. Price held the rope, forced his guide to walk in front. The man limped somewhat, and it was past midnight when they reached the precipice.

The moon was low; it was dark in the shadow of the mountain. It would be impossible, Kreor said, to make the climb in darkness. They lay down to rest on bare lava. The Arab breathed loudly, and seemed to sleep, while Price kept his grasp on the ax, and fought slumber.

He held the rope tight. Toward dawn it loosened; he knew Kreor was creeping upon him, and jerked the rope. The Arab sprawled on the rock beside him, protesting that he had risen merely to stretch his muscles.

With the first light of day they started inching a perilous way up a narrow chimney between basalt columns. The snake-man went first, Price following, the rope tied around his waist so that he could use both hands.

Half an hour of difficult climbing found them three hundred feet up the face of an almost vertical cliff. Kreor, above, gained a narrow edge where he could stand with hands free, and began a furious attempt to untie the knot at his throat.

Cunningly, he had chosen a moment when Price required all his fingers and toes to cling to the rock. It was a desperate race, with life for the stake; the rope untied, Kreor could readily push Price to a fall of several hundred feet.

Price drew himself up with reckless haste. The Arab loosened the first knot; but Price, in anticipation of something of the kind, had tied several.

At last, trembling and panting from his effort, Price reached a crevice where he could free a hand. He seized the rope, jerked on it, almost precipitating the snake-man from the ledge.

“Lead on,” Price commanded. “And keep the rope tight.”

Snarling with baffled hate, the Arab wriggled crabwise into a narrow crack above the ledge. Following him, but keeping the rope taut, Price reached the ledge, and slipped through the crevice into a tiny, gloomy cavern.

Kreor led the way from one damp, black chamber into another. Light of day was swiftly lost; the darkness became abysmal. Walls and roof and floor were rugged, uneven stone. Sometimes the passages were difficult to push through. Twice they had to crawl for a distance upon hands and knees.

Again and again Price warned his guide to keep the rope tight. He kept asking the man whispered questions, so that the answers would reveal his whereabouts.

They came at last into a larger cavern. Price could not estimate its size in the utter darkness, but the faint sounds of their movements came whispering back to straining ears as if from the walls of a vast chamber.

Price counted two hundred and sixty paces, as the Arab, at the end of the stretched rope, led him through mystic darkness. He was attempting to remember distances and direction of turns, so that if he indeed found Aysa, he could bring her safely out.

“Here we enter the passage, Iru,” Kreor said.

“Will there be men near?”

“I think not. These passages are remote.”

“Come back this way.”

Price tugged at the rope, led the man back into the cavern. Kreor uttered a howling scream.

“Silence!”
Price hissed. “I’m not going to kill you. Lie down!”

He struck a match to see that the man had obeyed. Then he gagged him, with a handkerchief in his mouth and a
kafiyeh
tied around his head.

“Get up,” he ordered. “And lead on to Aysa. I’ll turn you loose if I get out with her.”

With sullen reluctance, Kreor led the way from the rugged cavern to a smooth-floored, narrow tunnel. Cool damp air flowed outward through it; it was, Price supposed, intended for ventilation.

A hundred and eighty
paces,
and the snake-man turned to the left. They entered a wider passage, still completely dark. With a sure step the Arab led the way down it.

Green light glowed suddenly on a black wall before them; shadows danced in it, magnified, fantastic.

With a jerk of the rope, Price stopped his guide.

“What’s that?” he demanded. Then, realizing that Kreor could not reply: “Let’s get out of sight. Quick!”

The man stood still. Price was helpless. He had no idea which way to seek safety. And any struggle to make the Arab do his bidding would alarm whoever was approaching.

Three men in hooded robes of blue entered the dark hall, fifty yards ahead, from an intersecting passage. Two carried long, yellow-bladed pikes; the third, a torch flaring with a queer, vivid green flame.

Kreor made a futile attempt to scream through his gag. Price jerked savagely on the rope, and fondled the helve of his ax.

The three paused in the tunnel, the torch-bearer speaking. The two pike-men laughed a little, as if at some idle jest. And then the three started on in the opposite direction.

The green light, flickering on walls and floor and roof, framed them.
Dark figures in a little square of green.
The square grew small. Then the light was gone; the passage had turned.

“Lead on,” Price whispered. “And don’t try again to give the alarm.”

Again they were advancing in the darkness. The Arab seemed to require no light. Price kept the rope tight, counted paces. Kreor turned again to the left, into a passage that sloped sharply downward and curved smoothly to the left.

The slope, Price estimated, was one foot in four. By counting his paces, he could roughly calculate the amount of actual descent.

When he first became aware of the yellow light, they had descended eight hundred yards along the inclined passage. That meant that the spiral tunnel had carried them some six hundred feet downward, and perhaps three hundred feet below the level of the surrounding plain.

A vague, golden radiance, at first almost imperceptible.
As they descended through the silent passage, the Arab leading sullenly at the end of his rope, it became denser, became a yellow fog of tiny, xanthic atoms, dancing endlessly.

He could see the walls of the passage, now, black basalt of the old volcano’s core, smoothly chiseled, the tool marks almost undistinguishable. The tunnel was perhaps eight feet wide, somewhat higher, curving downward in a great spiral.

They were, by Price’s estimate, two hundred feet lower in the yellow-lit passage, when they passed the end of a horizontal tunnel. When they were only a few yards beyond, Price heard voices from below.
A man’s and a woman’s.
Sharp, excited, angry.

“Come back,” he snarled to Kreor.

He made the Arab enter the horizontal way. It was the same size as the other. Lucent, glistening yellow mist filled it with shadowless, xanthic radiance.

Golden mist.
The phrase throbbed suddenly in Price’s brain. The snake-man had told him that Aysa slept, deep in the mountain, in golden vapor that was changing her to living metal. Was this weird light his golden mist? Was his fantastic story true?

As Price followed the sullen Arab along the tunnel, he noticed an extraordinary thing about its walls. They were covered with yellow frost. Over the smoothly hewn, jet-black basalt was a rime of glittering crystals, a delicate tracery of golden flakes. Even the floor was dusted with it. Golden frost!

It was amazing. The gleaming crystals, he knew, must have been deposited from the yellow mist. That meant that the mist was some volatile compound of actual, metallic gold, formed, probably, in the natural laboratory of the volcanic fissures beneath the mountain.

Price roughly understood the process of petrification, in which every minutest cell and tissue of an animal may be perfectly replaced with mineral, to endure as geologic records for a million years. It was easy enough to see how such a process might turn an animal—or a human being—into gold.

But could it take place without destroying life?

Obviously not, if the tissues were replaced with pure gold.
But this yellow vapor was not pure gold. To exist in the form of vapor at such temperatures, it must be roughly as volatile as water.

Water is the basis of life, of all protoplasmic compounds. Was this yellow mist a compound of gold, distilled in the vast natural retort of the
volcano, that
could replace the water in the body, without upsetting any chemical balance? The idea was astonishing, but not impossible.