Human Mice of Kordar by Basil Wells - Chapter 1

1941 Stirring Science, Sword & Sorcery Tale

Stirring Science Stories, June 1941

CHAPTER I

“Ready?" hissed the burdened old slave as he staggered, sandals shuffling softly, along the narrow ledge.

"You bet," agreed the low voice of the red-headed young giant directly ahead of him in the line of slaves, "but I wish you were coming along."

"Nonsense!" came the ancient one's whispered snort. "Now remember, when I give the sign, drop . . . "

"Silence," came the savage undertones of an armored urrar's command. "Conversation is forbidden on raid. The bite of a lash will freshen your memories, I promise you."

The young slave's lips tightened into a grim smile. The little man had spoken to him in the sacred tongue of The Place Of The Scarlet Skull, the language from Beyond, known only to the priests and rulers of upland Narth. Consequently the urrar had no inkling of their impending break for freedom.

There was indeed need for caution. A keen-eared, gigantic kruka, the reptilian house-pet of the ponderous eight-limbed city dwellers, lurked in some shadowy corridor or dark corner not far distant. Aroused by the slightest sound, he would launch himself upon the human marauders plundering his master's food cupboard. Few indeed of the raiders would return to their dismal inner catacombs in that event.

Silent as velvet-footed beasts of prey the line of half-naked slaves and their armed guards, the leather armored urrars, moved out through the ragged hole in the looted Toban food cabinet. Along a narrow rough ledge of stone, forty feet above the worn floor slabs of dressed rock, they marched until they reached the twin knotted ends of a dangling rope ladder. Two wooden pegs, driven into crevices between the poorly-matched stone blocks, supported the narrow ladder's burden of men and their bulky packages of plunder.

Once they reached the floor, a short march of but a hundred feet would bring them to a wide crevice between the rocky boulders at the wall's base. Beyond that opening, the devious intricate maze of hollow walls and the great cracks between the vast blocks of stone made a tangled network of snaking corridors throughout the city of Tobe.

Within the gloomy depths of the deeper catacombs a great number of human beings lived, thousands of them, stunted and sunstarved, in story upon story of chill stone dwellings. Smoking great lamps of clay and soft stone burned eternally in the thickly populated area at the city's heart, the smoke rising murkily through the chimney-like upper reaches of the massive honeycombed walls.

The wan-faced men of Tobe lived like scurrying rodents in the musty, tunneled walls. They raided the storehouses and larders of the gigantic hairy Tobans and traded part of their more precious loot to the savage tribes that roamed the Stod Plains and the grim wild valleys of the Dron Hills, for skins and gold.

In all the island continent of Kordar there lived less than a million of the elephantine Toban giants; but about them, within their thick walls and beneath their floors, swarmed unnumbered hordes of tiny human mice. Poison, cunning, spike-studded dead-falls, and the reptilian krukas served to check, but not to halt, their depredations. Nothing remained long secure from the rodent-things that walked upright on two legs.

Tobe, capitol city of all South Kordar, sprawled for a hundred miles along the low banks of the Ulzan River. Tobe was also the chief city of the human parasites, and so the wealth of the outer world flowed steadily into the city within a city. Slaves did all the work—slaves stolen from distant Narth; slaves from the western Iya Plains; slaves from the tropical islands of the Omul Sea. Fierce raiders from the Desert of the Dead to the east kept them well supplied with servants.

Thom Egan, the red-haired slave, knew no other life. His mother had been captured—along with the others of her party—as she journeyed from her father's city in the Iya Plains back to the Narth Plateau and her husband, son of Narth's nuran. She had died shortly after his birth and old Andor Thid, a captive priest of Narth, had taught Thom Egan much of the sacred lore, and the sacred tongue, of the priests of The Place.

Andor Thid and Thom prepared to descend the swaying ladder of braided leather and wooden strips. Two slaves and an armored urrar had already reached the floor while the third slave had almost reached their side. Andor Thid nudged Thom and the younger man's muscles tensed. This was it!

"Urrgh!" he grunted suddenly, and his legs seemed to trip over some unseen obstacle.

He stumbled to his knees and as he did so the bundle of food on his back slid free and rolled over the edge of the rocky ledge. Down it plunged into a battered dish, an eight-foot disc of concave metal, where table scraps were left for the hideous krukas. Gnawed splinters of bone rattled like thunderclaps of doom against the metal sides.

An urrar stood beyond the ladder and now his long slim sword snapped from its sheath.

"For this you die!" he cried, and lunged.

Thom moved a second quicker. He dove for the ankles of the soldier and his broad shoulder snapped against the man's knees. The urrar crashed backward and Over the ledge. A shill cry, and then a sodden thud drifted up from the depths.

Thom swarmed monkey-like over the edge and down the ladder. Andor Thid, behind him, stumbled clumsily and sprawled helplessly across the narrow way, effectively blocking for the instant any pursuit. Two of the urrars hurled their short javelins but their aim was hasty and Thom escaped harm.

Then, from a shadowy corner, two or three hundred feet distant across the vast room, a giant eight-legged lizard-shape raced toward the four men below—the three slaves and the urrar—and the men scattered, but not before the guard and a slave fell before those flailing sharp-clawed forelegs.

The monster bent his spiny-crested head over his broken prey. Bones crunched horribly between fangstudded jaws as he fed.

The bony-plated back and broad flat tail of the kruka were beneath Thom's feet, a scant five feet. shoved hard against the wall and launched himself outward. Then his feet thudded squarely upon that wide back; the kruka whistled a screaming startled blast of rage, and his twenty foot bulk lashed into smashing violence. He leaped and jolted across the dimness of the enormous moonlit chamber, striving vainly to shake that clinging man-creature from his back.

The cavorting mad progress of the lizard monster brought him opposite the narrow opening in the room's wall. Thom suddenly released his grip on the serrated bony ridges along the kruka's back and slid down off the broad, flipper-like tail. Wildly he dashed for the safety of that slim crevice even as the spattt of the creature's heavy tail came close beside his heels.

The kruka spun about with catlike speed for so giant a creature, and his broad-snouted, serrated jaws split hideously wide above Thom's retreating back. Then Thom was inside the room's hollow wall. The kruka shrieked and moaned in frustrated rage, while his huge razor-edged toenails ripped and scraped at unyielding stone.

Thom raced away down the uneven blackness of the corridor. Like a blind man he knew every inch of this familiar unlighted way. At times he hurried along a narrow passage a hundred feet above the floor level, and again, he advanced through a dipping wide tunnel that narrowed and expanded weirdly in a series of connected rocky chambers.

Later, when he had passed the gates and entered the outer, little-known ways, where outlaws and escaped slaves lurked, he would move with greater caution.

"The Obstinate dron!" muttered Thom. "Why does he not fall asleep?"

Thom crouched in the shallow shelter of a projecting shoulder of grayish cut stone. Beyond that narrowing of the corridor a large cavern opened a great sunken cup of stone some hundred feet in diameter, with a domed ceiling of stained rock high overhead—and there flickering torches illuminated the rusty red bars of the double metal gates at the further end of the cave. Only that gate, one of twenty that guarded the inner domain of the human mice, barred him from freedom.

A sleepy sentry nodded before the thick wooden door of the guard-cave. Beyond that door a half-dozen other urrars might be sleeping or playing jakka with the five, colored triangles of bone, but of them all only the guard was of interest to Tom. If he would only fall asleep...

"Why am I in this situation?" mused Thom. "Is it because Andor Thid told me that I must return to Narth before The Time, or is it because I wanted freedom? By The Flame, I believe it was the latter!

"The Time and the Seat From Beyond, that Andor Thid speaks so reverently of, sound like some priestly mummery to me."

Andor Thid had revealed to him that he was a nuran, a prince, in far off Narth. His flaming red hair; his freckled skin, and his great height marked him as a being set apart from the other men of Kordar. In all Kordar none but an Egan bore the blazing mark of The Flame in his hair.

The old priest had told him how, a century before, his great-grandfather, the first red-haired Egan in Kordar, had arrived from The Beyond in a strange glass-roofed seat. He had landed atop the barren red slope of a rounded solitary hill, and in after years he had built a Place, Temple Of The Scarlet Skull, upon that very spot. He had declared that The Seat was sacred and none but an Egan might ever touch it.

That first Egan had united the warring tribes of the Narth Plateau into a peaceful prosperous nation. He had not taught them all of his knowledge from The Beyond, for they were not ready for it. Little by little he had revealed to them the wisdom of The Flame.

Every twenty-five years Egan, the nuran, and later his son, also a red-haired Egan, had come to sit in The Seat and await the coming of The Flame from the heavens. But the strange power from the sky had never come to bathe The Seat with a radiance unearthly.

Now the fourth twenty-five year period was drawing to a close. The Time drew near. Recently, captured slaves from Narth told of the assassination of Thom's father, the nuran, shortly after the sudden death of his father. An ambitious priest in The Place Of The Scarlet Skull was blamed for the assassination but there was no proof. Thom's grandmother, Unina, from distant Llol, now ruled all Narth. But she was not an Egan. Her hair was dark and she knew not the sacred tongue of The Beyond. There was no red-headed Egan to sit in The Seat and listen to the voice of The Flame when The Time was come.

"May The Flame blast you!" growled the young man as he saw the guard lift his drowsy head and grind knotted fists into his eyes.

The urrar's mouth split wide in a prodigious yawn and then he was on his feet. Thom cursed the sentinel's restlessness. He must reach that gate, unbar it, and slip through. To be recaptured meant the loss of both his eyes.

He heaved a sigh of relief and his clenched fists unknotted. The urrar was shambling slowly away from the guard-cave's entrance toward the tunnel and Thom. Thom's fingers flexed expectantly. This was a welcome, though unexpected, turn of events.

As the warrior came opposite, the weight of Thom's hurtling body drove the breath from his lungs and then the slave's sinewy fingers choked off any feeble outcry he might have made. Three times Thom's clenched right fist thudded against the sentry's exposed jaw, all the pent-up hatred of his years of slavery in the blow; then the man's body went limp and senseless beneath him.

Hurriedly Thom stripped the many-layered tunic of stiff leather and the metal-scaled shirt off the body of the urrar. He took the long, needle-like sword and the plain crossed belts that supported the blade and its matching dagger. Then he wrenched the heavy leather helmet from the sentry's head and pulled it down over his own skull.

He had turned to cross the lighted stretch of corridor when the faint sound of footsteps approaching along the passage behind him reached his ears. He spun about again, sword lifted and steady, as a man limped slowly out of the grayness of the tunnel.

"Andor Thid!" he exclaimed softly, dropping his sword-tip and rushing to the old man's side. "You too escaped!"

"Yes," the exhausted old priest said, "I escaped. A Toban giant, aroused by the clamor of the kruka, came into the room with a plank in one of his hands. We were forced to escape as best we could. I hid beneath the table until the beast and the Toban went away. Then I came after you."

"I am glad you are with me," said Thom. "The outside world is as much of a mystery to me as the secrets of The Beyond. But come, let us escape through the gates before we talk more."

"An excellent idea, my Nuran," agreed the wrinkled oldster.

A moment later the rusty gates swung protestingly open and the two slaves dashed through to the second barrier. Before the urrars within their snug cave-barracks realized what had happened they were racing away down the debris-littered passage beyond and then the Stygian gloom swallowed them up.