Human Mice of Kordar by Basil Wells - Chapter 4

1941 Stirring Science, Sword & Sorcery Tale

Stirring Science Stories, June 1941

CHAPTER IV

Thom's chest filled with the cold sweet air of Narth. He was home at last. Scarce a mile distant, soaring high above the rolling brown and green of the other hills, rose the barren, rounded, red bulk of the Scarlet Skull. Great splotches of black roughly duplicated the empty eye-sockets and the nasal cavity of a skull, and a gaping long cavern-mouth opened where the grinning jaws should have been.

The dusty caravan route, along which the colorful party of traders drove their snow-white stods, wound close up to the Scarlet Skull before it entered the wide stone streets and dark alleys of high-walled Narth at the hill's foot.

"The Holy Place!" breathed Andor Thid as he plodded wearily along at Thom's side. "Pray to The Flame that we be not too late."

Thom regarded the half-healed wounds that scarred his body and the tattered remnants of his leather armor. Up ahead Lyan and squat Tolab trudged slowly along through swirling reddish dust clouds. It had been a weary, bloody trail.

"Andor Thid," said Thom, "do you think we can enter The Place? If the priests have somehow exiled my grandmother, as Thun Tuga told us, I will not be allowed to reach The Seat."

"We may have to fight," admitted the wrinkled priest grimly, "but when you reveal yourself before the people of Narth they will all rally to your support. Until we have reached The Place, however, you had best wear your helmet and take another name.

When the time is ripe your flaming torch of hair will let the people know you."

Thom settled his claw-and-club-battered helmet tighter upon his head as the great metal gates swung wide to admit the little caravan. Through the cobbled streets the party wended its way. Knots of laughing, brown-skinned children raced alongside and from the unshuttered windows dark-haired women and men stared curiously down at these strangely garbed men from the distant southlands.

They came at last to the central plaza and set about looking for lodging and food.

Two bits of jeweled gold purchased fresh garments for them all; paid for rooms in a squalid alley hostel, and left a heaping handful of oval reddish coins as well.

Andor Thid slipped out to find his friends of twenty years before, warning the others to keep close to their rooms until his return.

“It is as I feared," the little priest said on his return late that evening. "Dugar Kon, the high priest, has indeed seized the throne of Narth by treachery—to say nothing of murdering your father and poisoning your grandfather. A treacherous, slippery snake of a man he is. Unina, your grandmother, was exiled because the sign of The Flame was not in her hair.

"But he knows nothing of your existence, even as a slave. He believes that he destroyed the last of the nurans when your father was slain.

"I have told my friends to bring armed men to The Place tomorrow. We are not too late. The Time has not yet come. You will make yourself known to the whole assemblage in The Place and be acclaimed our prince. Then let Dugar Kon try to explain his seizure of your throne!"

A vast stream of Narthians, devout men, women and children from the distant cities and grasslands of the far-flung country, wound up the narrow road before the grinning gigantic Skull the following day. For more than half a score of days had they made their pilgrimage to the heights to await the coming of The Flame—and with nightfall returned to the city of Narth.

Into the gaping cavern maw of the hill the way led and climbed a thousand steps, hewn from the living rock, to the summit and The Place.

Among those slow-moving worshipers, armed men mingled, obedient to the command of Andor Thid's friends. And with them too climbed the four from the distant gloomy corridors of mighty Tobe.

The steps ended atop the sloping red dome of the great red hill. The glaring scarlet walls of The Place spread before them. The pilgrims crowded into the vast inner courtyard and pressed close about the central area where The Seat From Beyond rested beneath the clear skies opening overhead.

The four from Tobe slowly made. their way into the front ranks of the assemblage. Andor Thid hissed angrily and pointed toward the great, glass-enclosed Seat. A scarlet-robed priest sat stiffly erect upon its ancient leather cushions.

"Dugar Kon!" he whispered, "awaiting the flood of wisdom and power that The Flame will bestow upon him."

Fires burned on great altars about The Seat, and scarlet-robed priests ringed them about, their voices chanting a weird hymn imploring The Flame to come. The Time must indeed be very near, thought Thom, for their eyes were fixed intently upon The Seat.

"Come," said Andor Thid, and proudly he stepped out from the concealment of the crowd.

As he moved forward his dull black cloak of dyed stod-hair fell from his bowed old shoulders and he stood revealed in the red robes of a priest. Thom came to stand beside him.

The eyes of the encircling throng swung away from The Seat toward these two bold figures who dared profane the sacred inner area. Then Thom flung off his own cloak and slipped the battered leather helmet from his head.

A ray of sunlight slanted from the central open courtyard fell upon his fiery shock of hair—Andor Thid had craftily planned it so and he raised his hand for silence.

A great sigh of pent-up emotion rippled through the massed ranks. Many of them flung themselves upon their faces and cried out loudly that The Flame had come in the person of Thom Egan. The priests turned from their contemplation of The Seat and their swords dragged uncertainly from the harnesses beneath their long scarlet robes.

Then Dugar Kon, the high priest, sensing the imminent collapse of many years of crafty scheming in a moment, flung himself from the cushioned seat within The Seat, and his long bony finger pointed at Thom.

"He is not an Egan!" he screeched above the swelling tumult of the frenzied throng. "He is an imposter! His hair is false-dyed! Destroy these profaners of the sacred Place!"

Thom Egan and the old priest strode swiftly through the milling dazed ranks of the priests toward The Seat. Behind them came Tolab and Lyan and the grim ranks of armed men from the city of Narth. Some few of the priests joined the inpouring forces and formed a protective ring of steel about their nuran and The Seat. Unarmed Narthians poured inward between the smoking altars to ally themselves with that thin inner line.

The high priest raced to a lever set in the side of one of the altars and a great slab of stone, ten feet square and pivoted in its middle, upreared from the floor. A deep pit opened on the outer side and wide stone steps opened on the inner side of the slab. In an instant his fellows had followed his example and the twin circles of men about The Seat were walled in by a thick barrier of stone.

More priests came pouring up from the depths below, up the stone steps beside the altars, until they greatly outnumbered Thom's little group. They closed in. Swords began to bite and human blood dyed the scarlet stones of the courtyard a deeper red. Unarmed men snatched weapons from the lax fingers of dying men. Needleblades shattered beneath the impact of other swords.

The fighting surged backward and forward across the slippery stones. No more priests climbed from the underground tunnels beneath the place; and now Thom saw that the odds were slowly evening. The priests were not skilled in the use of weapons as were his men. If the Narthians outside the barrier could procure weapons and hasten to their aid The Place would soon be theirs.

Thom's sword snapped off at the hilt as two flailing blades hammered across it. He tore another from its sheath in a priest's ribs and drove. its slim point through one foe's heart. The other priest sprang backward as Thom came at him, slipped on the floor, and his neck gashed open upon the edge of a sword wedged in a dead man's body.

He saw Lyan gamely warding off the swords of two scarlet-robed priests and sprang to her side. In a moment he had run one of them through and turned to engage her other foe.

He was too late. Already Lyan's slim sword had pierced that priestly throat. She flashed a tight-lipped smile at him and Thom grinned in response. Then they were both attacked by two new enemies.

"The Flame!" roared the bull voice of Tolab. "It has come!"

"The Flame! The Flame!" old Andor Thid and all the loyal men cried.

Abruptly the fighting was at an end. Sudden awe gripped them all. The priests' weapons clattered to the floor and they slunk backward toward the stone steps from below.

A narrowing beam of brilliant white flame stabbed down, centering full upon The Seat, turning it into a radiantly gleaming jewel of white living flame. Dugar Kon plunged toward The Seat across the huddled bodies of the dead and through the dazed defenders of Thom. Then Tolab, the outlaw, swung his hairy arm in a mighty arc; his sword flashed end over end, and Dugar Kon went down, the sword-hilt projecting squarely from between his shoulder-blades.

"Sit in The Seat, Thom Egan!" cried Andor Thid.

"Sit in The Seat, Nuran of Narth!" shouted the bloody warriors and loyal priests.

Thom Egan looked at Lyan, straight, slim and proud beside him. Here was fit mate for Thom Egan the prince, or Thom Egan the slave. He took her hand in his and opened the rounded transparent door of The Seat. Turning he lifted his reddened blade in salute to his subjects.

"I have chosen my ranu," he said simply. "Where I go, she goes too."

Then they stepped inside the narrow compartment and Thom carefully latched the door. Fearfully Lyan crept into Thom's arms and hid her eyes against his chest. Thom's lips thinned and whitened. Blood pounded at his temples and a strange sense of unreality engulfed his senses.

Throbbing vibration wracked The Seat with ever-increasing intensity. Strange fire seemed to crackle and snap throughout the little compartment and the hair of their bodies rose stiffly erect with the waxing electric power that pervaded The Seat. The blaze of white flame grew until they could no longer see the inner courtyard of The Place about them. Then The Seat and all the world about them seemed to be expanding, bursting outward with the violence of an exploding bubble.

Lyan clung close to Thom, little frightened sobs choking in her throat. And Thom stared grimly ahead into nothingness, into The Beyond, until blackness clamped down upon his brain. . .

The Seat flashed upward along the funnel-shaped Flame, expanding into a vastness incomprehensible to the awed men of Narth. Then it was gone.

CHAPTER V

“Quite the Casanova, our friend Tom," a gruff voice was saying in the sacred tongue of The Beyond. "He's gone less than five minutes and returns with a charming, barbarically clad young woman. Knocked about a bit too, I see."

"The wretch!" snapped another indignant voice. "If our engagement had not already been announced I—I'd . . ."

"I wonder," the first voice was puzzled, "how he received these wounds, some of them half-healed already? Can there really be a speeding-up of time in the atomic universe to which he was flashed?"

"He looks different, somehow," a third voice, a deep pleasant man's voice said. "Good Lord, Sterret, did you see these extra limbs beneath his arm-pits and above his hips? Atrophied arms and legs! Tom had nothing of that sort on his body! This is not Tom Egan!"

"The girl, too!" cried the feminine voice from a distance, "has extra limbs. That means that Tommy is trapped somewhere down inside that nasty little chunk of rock! Father, do something quick!"

Thom's eyes opened slowly. He was lying on a couch in a brilliantly lighted room. An elderly gray-haired man—he of the gruff voice—a yellow-haired pretty young woman, and a homely, broad-shouldered young man, all of them clad in strange ugly garments, bent over him. Across the room he could see The Seat, hedged about by a gleaming array of strange equipment, and sitting dazedly in a deep chair beside it was Lyan.

"Lyan!" he cried as he came to his feet and started across the room.

The homely young man hurried to his side and held him upright.

"Lean on me," he said.

That evening the girl and the homely young man sat together in the garden. A wan half-moon, a single moon, skidded behind a cloud and darkness claimed Earth. The girl snuggled closer in the gloom.

"A hundred years," the young man was saying reflectively, "passed during those four minutes. Tom married, had children, built cities, won an empire, and died. He taught his people to treasure the diminishing cell—The Seat as Thom calls it—and permit none but an Egan to enter it. Somehow he discovered that a minute of Earthly time equaled twenty-five years of Kordarian time, and every Time, as he called it, awaited the arrival of the expanding rays. His sons and grandsons were instructed as to the true origin of The Seat and The Flame that was to come.

"But by some inexplicable quirk of fate his great-grandson never learned the truth. Blindly, he entered the cell with Lyan, his queen, and was flashed back here to our laboratory. Had Tom not placed a record of his experiences and discoveries in Kordar within the compartment we would know almost nothing about that invisible atomic world."

"I suppose the two freaks will want to go back," yawned the girl.

"They're going back tonight," the homely young man said shortly. "This world would hold no interest for them. Almost I wish I were going back with them. . . The changes that hundreds of years will make in Kordar!"

"Let's not talk about such dull things," the girl pouted. "Let's enjoy the moon. See, it's coming out again." She cuddled closer to his shoulder.

"I never did like Tommy much. Always spouting outlandish gibberish about science, and atoms. I'm glad he's dead. . . Tiss me, Tiss me, bid, bad mans!"

The homely young man shoved her angrily away. "There are no empty-headed, baby-talking, fickle blondes in Narth. Nothing but brunettes. I'm going back with Thom and Lyan!"

END