To the right, she had said. Towards the Place of Darkness. I hurried out of the village in the direction she indicated, towards the distant gleam of Mercer"s armor, rapidly being lost in the gloom.
"I"m coming, Mercer!" I called to him. "Delay them as much as you can.
You"re going faster than I can."
"I can"t help myself much," replied Mercer. "Doing what I can.
Strong--they"re devilish strong, Taylor. And, at close range, I can see you were right. They have true gill-covers; their noses are rudimentary and--"
"The devil take your scientific observations! Drag! Slow them down.
I"m losing sight of you. For heaven"s sake, drag!"
"I"m doing what I can. d.a.m.n you, if I could only get a hand free--" I realized that this last was directed at his captors, and plunged on.
Huge, monstrous growths swirled around me like living things. My feet crunched on sh.e.l.led things, and sank into soft and slimy creeping things on the bottom. I cursed the water that held me back so gently yet so firmly; I cursed the armor that made it so hard for me to move my legs. But I kept on, and at last I began to gain on them; I could see them quite distinctly, bending over Mercer, working on him....
"Do your best, Taylor," urged Mercer desperately. "We"re on the edge of a sort of cliff; a fault in the structure of the ocean bed. They"re tying me with strong cords of leather. Tying a huge stone to my body.
I think they--" I had a momentary flash of the scene as Mercer saw it at that instant: the horrid noseless face close to his, the swart bodies moving with amazing agility. And at his very feet, a yawning precipice, holding nothing but darkness, leading down and down into nothingness.
"Run quickly!" It was Imee. She, too, had seen what I had seen. "That is the Place of Darkness, where we take those whom the Five deem worthy of the Last Punishment. They will tie the stone to him, and bear him out above the Blackness, and then they will let him go!
Quickly! Quickly!"
I was almost upon them now, and one of the six turned and saw me.
Three of them darted towards me, while the others held Mercer flat upon the edge of the precipice. If they had only realized that by rolling his armored body a foot or two, he would sink ... without the stone.... But they did not. Their brains had little reasoning power, apparently. The attaching of a stone was necessary, in their experience; it was necessary now.
With my left hand I unhooked my light; I already gripped my knife in my right hand. Swinging the light sharply against my leg, I struck the toggle-switch, and a beam of intense brilliancy shot through the gloom. It aided me, as I had thought it would; it blinded these large-eyed denizens of the deep.
Swiftly I struck out with the knife. It hacked harmlessly into the shark-skin garment of one of the men, and I stabbed out again. Two of the men leaped for my right arm, but the knife found, this time, the throat of the third. My beam of light showed palely red, for a moment, and the body of the Rorn toppled slowly to the bed of the ocean.
The two shark-faced creatures were hammering at me with their fists, dragging at my arms and legs, but I plunged on desperately towards Mercer. Myriads of fish, all shapes and colors and sizes, attracted by the light, swarmed around us.
"Good boy!" Mercer commended. "See if you can break this last flask of acid, here at my waist. See--"
With a last desperate plunge, fairly dragging the two Rorn who tugged at me, I fell forward. With the clenched steel talons of my right hand, I struck at the silvery flask I could see dangling from Mercer"s waist. I hit it, but only a glancing blow; the flask did not shatter.
"Again!" commanded Mercer. "It"s heavy annealed gla.s.s--hydrocyanic acid--terrible stuff--even the fumes--"
I paid but slight heed. The two Rorn dragged me back, but I managed to crawl forward on my knees, and with all my strength, I struck at the flask again.
This time it shattered, and I lay where I fell, sobbing with weakness, looking out through the side window of my head-piece.
The five Rorn seemed to suddenly lose their strength. They struggled limply for a moment, and then floated down to the waiting sand beneath us.
"Finish," remarked Mercer coolly. "And just in time. Let"s see if we can find our way back to the _Santa Maria_."
We were weary, and we plodded along slowly, twin trails of air-bubbles like plumes waving behind us, rushing upwards to the surface. I felt strangely alone at the moment, isolated, cut off from all mankind, on the bottom of the Atlantic.
"Coming to meet you, all of us," Imee signaled us. "Be careful where you step, so that you do not walk in a circle and find again the Place of Darkness. It is very large."
"Probably some uncharted deep," threw in Mercer. "Only the larger ones have been located."
For my part, I was too weary to think. I just staggered on.
A crowd of slim, darting white shapes surrounded us. They swam before us, showing the way. The five patriarchs walked majestically before us; and between us, smiling at us through the thick lenses of our headpieces, walked Imee. Oh, it was a triumphal procession, and had I been less weary, I presume I would have felt quite the hero.
Imee pictured for us, as we went along, the happiness, the gratefulness of her people. Already, she informed us, great numbers of young men were clearing away the bodies of the dead Rorn. She was so happy she could hardly restrain herself.
A dim skeleton shape bulked up at my left. I turned to look at it, and Imee, watching me through the lights of my head-piece, nodded and smiled.
Yes, this was the very hulk by which she had been swimming when the shark had attacked her, the shark which had been the cause of the accident. She darted on to show me the very rib upon which her head had struck, stunning her so that she had drifted, unconscious and storm-tossed, to the sh.o.r.e of Mercer"s estate.
I studied the wreck. It was battered and tilted on its beam ends, but I could still make out the high p.o.o.p that marked it as a very old ship.
"A Spanish galleon, Mercer," I conjectured.
"I believe so." And then, in pictured form, for Imee"s benefit, "It has been here while much time pa.s.sed?"
"Yes." Imee came darting back to us, smiling. "Since before the Teemorn, my people were here. A Rorn we made prisoner once told us his people discovered it first. They went into this strange skeleton, and inside were many blocks of very bright stone." She pictured quite clearly bars of dully-glinting bullion. Evidently the captive had told his story well.
"These stones, which were so bright, the Rorn took to their city, which is three swims distant." How far that might be, I could not even guess. A swim, it seemed, was the distance a Teemorn could travel before the need for rest became imperative. "There were many Rorn, and they each took one stone. And of them, they made a house for their leader." The leader, as she pictured him, being the most hideous travesty of a thing in semi-human form that the mind could imagine: incredibly old and wrinkled and ugly and gray, his noseless face seamed with cunning, his eyes red rimmed and terrible, his teeth gleaming, white and sharp, like fangs.
"A whole house, except the roof," she went on. "It is there now, and it is gazed at with much admiration by all the Rorn. All this our prisoner told us before we took him, with a rock made fast to him, out over the Place of Darkness. He, too, was very proud of their leader"s house."
"Treasure!" I commented to Mercer. "If we could find the city of the Rorn, we might make the trip pay for itself!"
I could sense his wave of amus.e.m.e.nt.
"I think," he replied, "I"d rather stand it myself. These Rorn don"t appeal to me."
It was over half an hour before we were at last free of our diving suits.
The first thing Captain Bonnett said:
"We"ve got to get to the surface, and that quickly. Our air supply is running d.a.m.nably low. By the time we blow out the tanks we"ll be just about out. And foul air will keep us here until we rot. I"m sorry, sir, but that"s the way matters stand."