by Talbot Mundy
“You kill him.”
Grim did not hesitate. He stooped over the two, on one knee, holding out his right hand. Dorje laid a knife on it, flat on the palm. Grim’s fingers closed; he plunged the knife in, withdrew it, wiped it on the bearskin, passed it back to Dorje and then set his face close to the Cockney’s as if listening for breath or heart-beats.
“Quite dead,” he remarked, getting up.
“Conshpirator,” said Dorje. “Thish way.”
Grim followed him. Vasantasena followed Grim. The rest of us were herded by the airship crew and driven along the platform toward the blue-lit ball; but I was never close enough to that thing to be able to describe it, except that it appeared to be semi-transparent. We came to a rough gap in the wall, and as we were herded through that I had a chance to look back. I could no longer see the Cockney, although the other man’s body lay face downward where it had been.
Then the shed went pitch-dark with a suddenness that made one’s ear-drums throb with the instinctive leap to relieve a dead sense with a live one. It was even darker in that passage we had entered. Two of our custodians shouted and ran, I suppose to get the light turned on again. The remaining four began to drive us along the passage. Two of them had crowbars; one could understand those even better than the hoarse commands they uttered, although I think Jeff understood their speech. Baltis slipped in front of me to save herself from being prodded. Jeff’s voice — sharp and sudden:
“Keep behind me!”
He burst back past me like a gun-team going into action. Jeff is a projectile in the instant when he abandons patience and the art of peace. I heard his fist thud like a battering-ram. No crowbar fell — not that time — Jeff had that one, and it almost struck me as he slung with it to crack skulls. It was the second crowbar, dropped by a man whose brains splashed like an egg-yolk, that rolled against my shins. Henri de la Fontaine Coq seized it. There were four men down in front of us and Jeff was in the gap in the wall — shadow against darkness — just discernible. I picked up Baltis to keep her feet out of the blood that might be oozing underfoot; she let herself be carried but kept calling “Henri! Henri!” until Chullunder Ghose shouted:
“Look out, Rammy sahib! Oh, my—”
His shout saved Jeff’s life. The two guards who had run when the light went out came creeping back. They rushed Jeff suddenly. Warned by Chullunder Ghose, he did the unexpected — stepped forward instead of back into the gap — then turned and let them have it. There were undoubtedly other men not far away, but for the moment it felt as if we stood alone in dark infinity. There was not a sound except the moaning of wind on the shed roof, but there was a sensation in front of us as if eternity were moving sideways, toward the left. Alternatively, we were being moved toward the right.
“Are we all dead? Let us hope so,” said Chullunder Ghose. “How painless was the passing! What killed us?”
“Baltis!” That was Grim’s voice. He was invisible. On the heels of that talk about death the suggestion was bloodcurdling; it was vox et praeterea nihil. Even Baltis, not much given to alarm of that sort, shuddered and pressed against me. However, it was Grim, not his ghost; he stepped toward us — another shadow, no more visible than Jeff’s.
“Are you there, Baltis? You and the Frenchman get into the airship.”
Henri de la Fontaine Coq took Baltis by the arm and hurried her. He shook her. Suddenly a pin-prick of light gave us something to focus on. It was a struck match. Someone lighted a candle — inside the airship, and one could tell then what had moved and made the night seem to be sliding apart. The airship’s nose was no longer fast to anything. That Cockney was standing beside the controls with his hand on a lever. Two doors, on the far side, had been closed and several men were screwing up the bolts of the forward door on our side, but they were having difficulty because the slightest pressure seemed to make the ship move. Grim spoke French then:
“Coq, you and Baltis help him to get the ship outside about a mile away, and wait for us. You may need all your skill to make him wait for us. He hasn’t the slightest notion who I am. Don’t tell him. If you keep him mystified—”
Coq hurried away with Baltis and the airship started backward, with a door wide open and one door only partly fastened almost before they could jump through the opening. It swung so that its nose just missed us, and there was a great difference now that the power was on. It struck the wall within six feet of where Grim was standing and brought down probably a ton of debris, bounded off and struck the far wall, but it was too dark to see how much damage it did over there. Then the candle went out, but we could see the airship — a black blot moving against starlight — acting something like a fish that has not yet struck but feels the first discomfort of a baited hook. It was either damaged, or else the man in bearskin did not fully understand the controls.
“This way,” Grim said then. “Quickly — quietly!”
He led us to the opening through which he had recently followed Dorje; he was just visible against the night sky at the shed’s open end. In the darkness on the far side there were sounds of trouble, as if the airship hurt several men when it crashed the far wall. Stones were being shifted. There was someone groaning. Grim led through a doorway and along a passage, pausing at the far end and Chullunder Ghose said:
“They are after us! I heard — Krishna! — men went to the opening we just came out of!”
Grim shot an iron door and bolted it. It was darker then than doom; it felt solid; but Grim struck a match.
“Where’s Dorje?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Lord God! We’ve a fat chance!”
“I came back to save you fellows. That Cockney is a man who escaped from a death cell fifteen years ago when he was awaiting execution for murder. He’s tough. When I saw he was shamming hurt I drove the knife into the dead man’s body. Then I whispered to him to take the airship out and wait for us. There’s a chance in fifty he’ll do that. I believe it was he who put the light out — cut off a magnetic field and released the ship’s nose from that ball at the end of the shed. But he’s a bad egg. We can’t depend on him. He may go over to the babus, and we’ve got to beat that outfit before daylight.”
Someone shook the iron door. Grim paused, listened, then went on speaking:
“They won’t try to force that without Dorje’s orders. He’s still master of this corner of the buildings.”
He struck another match and looked at each of us. The soma had enlarged his eyes in some way, but he seemed unexcited — more calm than ever.
“He has sent Vasantasena with a message to his women. I don’t know how many they are, or where they are, but he appears to count on them. I don’t know what the message is, or what its purpose is. But he was feeling confident again, and when he had sent her with the message he boasted to me that he had ordered all of you killed. I think he thought the soma would make me as much a devil as it has him. I accused him of breaking faith. He tried to kill me with his own hand, but I struck first — not hard — hit him in the face. Then he ran one way, I the other to save the fellows and to make him think I had escaped.”
“For God’s sake, why didn’t you kill him?” Jeff asked.
“Because I need his help to wreck his whole works.”
“He’ll be on the qui vive now,” said Jeff.
“He was that already. We’ve a better chance as things are. And I think I shook him badly. He may be a bit dazed. Otherwise, why should he run? Our first job is to wreck his plant, then kill him. From now on, kill — don’t hesitate. Kill anyone but Dorje. Wreck his bug’s nest. Him we kill last.”
CHAPTER 41. “Good-bye, old man.”
Few conspiracies succeed unless the key-note is sheer simplicity. Even then they succeed because other men overlook such dangers as a blind man might be counted on to see. We were blind conspirators; and we had to be simple. There was nothing else under the stars that we possibly could be.
Grim led through gloom until we
found an open door into a passage lined with cell doors and lighted by one oil lamp. We knew then we were in a monastery. At the far end the passage turned a corner. Near the middle of the passage was a Tibetan stairway, which consists of a single wooden upright with cross-pieces nailed to it. We took that and climbed into a room that had a door which opened on a long roof with a waist-high parapet. There was a set-back and the building went one floor higher, Tibetan in every line, with overhanging semi-Chinese eaves. The undressed stone wall was vaguely blue with light reflected from below where the breast-shaped ovens were with their long slots like gashes in Halloween pumpkins, near the bottom of each of the thirty or forty, or perhaps more — I had no time to count them.
We walked to the eastern end of the long roof, where it jutted out and we could see the full length of the south wall. There we saw the airship, hardly a thousand feet up and behaving curiously, slowly going forward and then backward; twice, when it swayed beam on to the worrying wind, it seemed almost to roll over, but it was only a shadow against the stars and very difficult to observe. On the whole, it suggested a fish that had taken the hook and had struck and was already weakening. Chullunder Ghose spoke:
“Dekko! I see him, sahibs!”
“Shushh!”
Grim had seen him already. There was a balcony above a main gate in the middle of the south wall. Dorje stood there, staring at the airship. Even as a shadow amid shadows he was unmistakable, with those spidery legs, and his big head, and his hands behind him.
“Come where he can’t see us. Let us hope he thinks we’re up there in the ship.”
Grim led us back along the roof and we stood for several minutes staring at the macabre scene to westward, trying to map it in our minds. It was unintelligible — an inferno — formless shadows made bewildering by cold blue lights. There was no pattern that the eye could recognize, and no noise. Nevertheless, there was a feeling — a sensation rather than any signs of great activity. At measured intervals a stream of men, who looked like monks in single file, each carrying something heavy on his shoulders, passed near enough to one of the blue lights to be vaguely visible. Someone, somewhere, blew a radong that boomed like a fog-bound steamer whistle; that was followed almost instantly by a crash like the noise of iron ore being loaded, and blue flame leaped from a dark half-acre on the far side of an embankment. But that flare only confused the shadows more than ever, although I did see what looked like a long street of mud-built dwellings, and there was a glimpse for a moment of hundreds of men scurrying like ants in a broken ant-hill. I had glimpsed, too, a huge, black, shapeless building, blind-walled on the outside, with slot-like windows pouring blue light into a maze of courtyards.
“I wonder where they make, or store that poison gas,” said Grim. “They don’t make electricity, they make an alloy that collects it. If I could make that flow into their store of thunderbolts — but where is it?”
“We made a mistake,” said Jeff, “in letting Baltis go. She might have told us.”
“She was the only chance we had,” said Grim, “to keep that airship somewhere near us as a possible line of retreat.”
Chullunder Ghose sighed resignedly. “Retreat? We are all dead men. Let us kiss ourselves good-bye to hope, and act like madmen; that is only sane course. Sanity is madness; madness sanity. To hell with common sense, which would encourage us to try to walk on foot across the whole of Tibet without food or money! No, no, I have pounds Egyptian fifty, with which to buy tickets for Tibetan railroad trains! Or shall we catapult ourselves into that airship. Self, am not good catapultist. I say, let us die as soon as possible, along with Jimmy Jimgrim, in what the U.S.A. Americans would call a champeen all-time-record death pact!”
“That is my job,” Grim answered. “Yours is to do as I tell you. I take first crack at it. If I succeed, you fellows do your fighting damnedest to get home alive. If I fail, Jeff carries on. And if Jeff fails, Crosby carries on. If Crosby fails, Chullunder Ghose, it’s your turn; and if you succeed, then you obey my orders and get home alive if possible.”
He leaned over the parapet — peered into the darkness — stiffened. “Yes,” he said, “I see her.” But how he knew it was Vasantasena is a mystery; the rest of us had glimpsed a shadow flitting amid shadows. “Get that ladder, someone.”
Jeff and I dragged up the Tibetan stairway — lowered it over the parapet — dropped it. Luckily it fell as we intended. Then we lowered Grim by the arms and the ladder fell with him when he was halfway down.
“All right,” he called up, and we heard him set the ladder back against the wall, rooting it firmly.
But the ladder had made a noise. A wooden window-shutter opened and a man came stealthily along the roof with a sword in his hand and a round shield on his left arm. We three ducked into the shadow of the parapet, but he had seen us. I suppose that roof was a forbidden zone — perhaps a place where monks resorted to escape routine. At any rate, he came on like a monitor pursuing small boys. Jeff stepped out to meet him.
The man circled around Jeff, flourishing his weapon, until his back was toward the parapet. Then I, too, stepped out of the shadow, so that he took his eyes off Jeff for a half a second — and Jeff’s fist shot home. I think that fellow broke his back against the parapet, but Jeff’s second blow toppled him over; and at last we had a weapon — one between three of us. Jeff kept it.
Then we heard Grim climbing, speaking in a low voice as he came up the ladder. But when we leaned over the parapet and reached down for his arms Vasantasena gripped our hands. Grim followed her. Vasantasena was a living battery of passion. It was like touching a vibrator.
She began to speak in hard, vibrating whispers to Chullunder Ghose. Grim broke her news to us:
“His women are all dead. Killed by his babus, as he calls them. Gassed. They were Dorje’s spy system. He had them here, there, everywhere; but they met as a matter of routine in a central place she calls the bibi-kana. They were trapped in there.”
“She says,” said Chullunder Ghose, “is this a war on women? First my women — now his. I also am a woman. It is my war.”
Grim put a hand on her shoulder. I expected her to throw it off indignantly, or at least to shrink away from him, because Vasantasena’s ancient calling is a cult, in India, that sets a chartless no-man’s-land between East and West. But they had both drunk soma. They were neither of them any longer bound by unessentials; from opposite directions they had met in mutual understanding, with the same aim, the same view-point. Jeff and I felt like outsiders, and Chullunder Ghose came close to us, putting in words what both of us knew but neither of us could have said:
“I tell you, he and she can see like eagles. And we look to them like trifles. And we are! It took a prostitute to measure Jimmy Jimgrim’s consciousness. Self shall be same henceforth. But it is too late. She has left us like dogs in the dust of a bicycle built for two!”
Grim hardly noticed us. He kept his arm around Vasantasena, talking to her in a low voice. They led; we followed through the window that the swordsman had left open, Jeff pausing there a moment to remove the shutter from its hinges and leave open a line of retreat. Long, lamp-lit corridors. Cell doors. Great gloomy rooms, some occupied, some empty. Men like mediaeval monks in shabby brown cloaks, who seemed to take for granted we were Dorje’s men — who else could we have been? — looked up from their work. They appeared to be measuring liquid, drop by drop, into tiny phials and there was — nauseating smell — not much of it, but enough to suggest an unwashed morgue. A burly ruffian with daggers at his waist came out of a door and blocked our passage for a moment, but Vasantasena knew a word that passed us instantly. He stepped back. He seemed to expect something — perhaps a present. But it was praise he craved. He beckoned. Jeff, Chullunder Ghose and I together peered into the passage he had come from. We followed him in, and I wish we had not.
It was a short passage. It led to a gallery that surrounded a stone- walled place of torture and abominable death. There had been human vivisect
ions there — recently. The evidence was spread on tables — hung on hooks on the wall. Jeff went berserker furious. That ruffian was probably not Dorje’s executioner; he seemed to lack enough intelligence to have done all that investigating of the human nerves. Jeff gave him debit on the doubt; he seized him by the waist and hurled him to the stone floor thirty feet below, and there we left him — dead or not yet dead, I don’t know.
No guards in front of Dorje’s room. There was a man inside who opened at Vasantasena’s knock. It was a big room hung with oriental rugs, warmed by two braziers, lighted by oil lamps. At the far end was a dais, beneath a canopy. A sick man lay on it — a Chinaman, so old and feeble that he was hardly more than skin and bone, although his eyes were like a child’s, alight with mischievous intelligence. He looked up once, then took no further notice of us; he was studying a gold plate, eight inches by ten, and an eighth of an inch thick, inscribed with characters that no one to whom I have shown it has been able to read. In fact, no scientists believe it is an ancient plate, it looks so new, but they are puzzled by the purity of the metal; they appear to think I made the plate myself, and that the characters are nonsense that I etched into the gold in order to create a sensation. It is the only loot I took from Dorje’s place — unless food is loot, and it was not I who took that.
They were packing up food in a room at the back of the dais. Dorje watched them. Stuff like German sausage, highly concentrated — stuff that in infinitesimal quantities conserves strength, even at enormous altitudes.
“Take some,” said Grim with one glance at us. Then Dorje turned and stared; and anyone could tell what ailed him. He craved soma. He was waiting for it. I suppose those monks in gloomy rooms were measuring the drops that should be mixed into the final compound. There was a table, near the dais, spread with glass tubes and a scale with a set of fractional weights; there was also a heavy glass flask. Probably they did the final mixing on that table.