Free Golden Blood by Jack Williamson Page B

Aysa’s golden dagger, their only remaining weapon, and cut himself a heavy club, in the garden.
    They rested again, lying beside the fountain, until sunset, and then ventured out again, to find what had become of the pilfered weapons. Somewhat refreshed, and driven by haunting fear, they thoroughly explored the sand-heaped, crumbling piles of the lost city, without finding any inhabitants, or, indeed, any habitable place.
    Yet there was no denying that the guns were gone.
    In the dusk they were returning to the sunken garden when Aysa seized Price’s shoulder in a grasp nerved with terror, and pointed silently.
    A strange figure was darting away from the colonnade before the entrance—a tall man, lean as a desert Arab, attired in a long, hooded, burnoose-like robe that was a peculiar shade of blue. As he ran along the platform, sprang off into the sand, Price saw that he carried the stolen rifle.
    A moment he paused, looking back. On his forehead, above his cruel, hatchet face, was a glittering golden brand, the yellow likeness of a coiled serpent. Then he vanished, beyond a broken column.
    “A snake-man,” whispered Aysa, her voice muted with fear.
    “A what?” Price took her trembling hand, looked into her distressed violet eyes.
    “A slave of the snake, under Malikar. The golden man must have known of the prophecy that a woman named Aysa would wake Iru. He guessed that I had fled to Anz, and sent the priest here to capture me.”
    Price was staring at her in some astonishment. Aysa frightened was a new experience to him. As the helpless prisoner of the Macanese she had revealed no fear. He was shocked to see her white-faced, trembling, her violet eyes wide and sick with terror.
    While he himself was much disturbed by the loss of the weapons, he did not believe they were in immediate danger. The blue-robe had fled from them.
    “Buck up, kid,” he told her. “It can’t be that bad. When everything else goes wrong, we still have the Durand luck.”
    She moved toward him a little, and he put his arm around her, still peering alertly into the gloom swift-falling upon the shattered skeleton of the lost city. She drew herself against him with an eager little movement, murmuring softly “M’almé!”
    From that time until the end she was apprehensive, fearful. Shadows of strange dread lurked always in her violet eyes. She tried to forget, to laugh with Price. But her gayety was strained, unnatural, feverish .
     
    A week went by, and the snake-man was seen no more. The two were so near supreme happiness! The oasis was a garden of wonder, supplying all physical needs. They would have been content to forget the outer world, dwell there for ever. Each found in the other a joy never known before, a bliss made only more keenly poignant by the intruding darkness of anxiety.
    In the rear wall of the courtyard was the arched entrance to a long hall of granite, that led back into the sand-heaped, crumbling main pile of the old palace. Near the garden it was bright enough, illuminated by high, unglazed clerestory windows. Farther back, however, the invading sand had completely covered it. It became a dark tunnel into mysterious, buried ruin.
    They had explored it as far as daylight penetrated, and since it furnished the only standing roof available, they made the outer end of it their dwelling.
    Above the end of the hall was a stone tower, still standing, so high that it overlooked the walls of Anz. Price was able to climb its crumbling stairs. Several times daily he ascended, to scan the ruins of Anz and the surrounding desert for Aysa’s enemies.
    On the morning of the ninth day Price saw a tiny speck creeping across the heaving oceans of yellow-reddish dunes, northward. He watched it for an hour, until it had grown to a tiny yellow animal, with a black dot upon its back, running toward the buried city.
    “I see that yellow tiger coming,” he told Aysa, when he rejoined her in the green shadows of the marble-walled