The One Orst had laid a trap here for Ho Dyak, that profaner of the sacred place, should he ever return!
One javelin pierced his side and another passed completely through the upper muscles of his left middle arm. A third keen-tipped miniature spear struck the handle of his sword and its copper point blunted harmlessly.
From the gray twilight that was all the day men knew beneath the fog sea, there poured a dozen black-robed fighting men. Swords they carried, some of them two and three, and many of them bore the barbed nooses of woven droghide with which they bound prisoners before they were driven, blinded, from Gorda.
Ho Dyak rushed through the panel of stone into the ancient sealed rampway. He paused long enough here to tear the javelin from his side, and was relieved to find that it had ploughed shallowly across his ribs. Then he raced down the dimly lighted narrow way.
This time he did not attempt to use the opening on the fifteenth level. The corridors of the Place of Lalal would be swarming with black-robed warrior-priests and poorly armed yellow-robed toilers. Instead he raced on down the ramp into the dank stench of the lower levels. For the unused ramp led into the same great underground storage cave that he had entered from the rocky tunnel beneath the city walls.
Bricked-up and partially sealed was its end, and for this reason he had not ascended that way. Signs of his passing must have shown in a litter of chipped cement and displaced yellowish slime had he done so. But now he could shove the wall outward and race toward freedom. What matter, now, if they found a gaping hole in an apparently solid supporting pillar of masonry?
He put his eye to the broken wall as he reached the great basement cave in this part of the underground citadel beneath the Place. Apparently no guards had been posted here as yet. He lunged against the wall and it clattered down. Then he darted across the slippery muck and sprouting toadstool growth to the hidden entrance to the tunnel leading outside.
Even then he heard the rasp of the scaly black plates of hunting drogs, the domesticated long-limbed smaller lizards that the warriors of Arba use in hunting upon the agan jungle's upper terrace for the bat-winged wild lizards and white-fleshed, tender, legless serpents so prized on Arban tables. The black-robed ones had turned their swift drogs upon his trail! His only safety lay in flight.
Almost had he reached the abandoned tower when the hunting drogs were upon him. Even as they reached his heels Ho Dyak cast a despairing glance upward—and saw one of the ancient ventilating shafts that supplied air to this buried way.