He sprang upward and his fingers closed upon a tough agan root. A moment later all four of his hands were gripping other roots and he was climbing carefully up through a rounded shaft.
Below him the hunting drogs leaped high into the air and fell back again, whistling, growling and screaming in their saurian stupid way. Twenty feet he had climbed before a solid mat of agan blocked further upward progress. Ho Dyak clung to the huge hairy white roots and peered about him.
Meanwhile the Place's warriors came swiftly up with their six-limbed lizard beasts. A cry of triumph came up to Ho Dyak.
"Come down, Ho Dyak!" one of them shouted, "and we will not permit the drogs to destroy you."
Ho Dyak laughed shortly. "It is you who will destroy me," he said, "and not the drogs. I prefer the drogs."
"Surrender, Ho Dyak," cried the man menacingly, "at once, and the One Orst may but take from you your eyes. Delay, and his tame drogs will eat your limbs, one by one, as you yet live."
"I prefer a javelin," mocked Ho Dyak. "The death is clean and merciful."
"Then take it!" shouted the man, drawing back his throwing stick.
But even as a hail of javelins hummed upward Ho Dyak was in motion. He had swung on his shaggy ladder of roots into a ragged crevice in the side of the shaft. And so the javelins buried themselves only in the rubbery coils of agan. A howl of rage rolled up through the old ventilating shaft.
Ho Dyak crawled further into the narrow crevice. At every instant he expected to find that the probing roots or stems of the fleshy agan had closed this last hope of escape, but as time passed and the way widened he began to hope. Other tunnels branched off from time to time and he crawled through tepid pools of foul water in which he sensed the wriggling of hideous alien things with scaly-finned limbs and tails. The blackness was total. He groped onward.