The heavy spear rolled from an already dead hand and the man fell loosely across the wide sill as Tharn worked his way upward past the limp body.
Three more attempts were made by those within to bring down the climbing cave man. On each occasion Trakor, standing like a rock amid a shower of deadly weapons that struck every where about him, brought down the would-be killer.
Tharn was only a few feet from the roof's edge now, his naked feet and long-fingered hands finding foot—and hand-holds where Trakor would have sworn none existed.
Trakor, watching, groaned with sudden fear. Barely visible in the flickering light of torches below, a figure appeared at the roof's edge directly above Tharn's rising form. In the figure's hands was a heavy spear and the arm holding it swept aloft preparatory to skewering Tharn on its point.
Even as Trakor witnessed this, an arrow from his bow was flashing up toward that menacing warrior. But the combination of bad light, distance and the necessity for haste was too great a handicap for success, and the arrow whizzed wide of its mark.
Again Trakor groaned. There was no time for a second shot. Tharn was doomed to die.
And in that second a slender figure appeared at the roof's edge beside the would-be assassin and threw itself headlong against him. The man staggered back under the impact, his spear falling from his hand, then turned and closed with the newcomer.
As the two of them teetered there on the thin strip of stone forming the roof's edge, Tharn's strong hands closed about that same edge and he rose to his feet. He saw who it was that had saved his life: Dylara, daughter of Majok.
Even as he raced forward to save the girl he loved from being thrown into the void below, Tharn knew he was too late. Voicing a scream of fear, Dylara reeled back and toppled into space!
As her feet left the roof, Tharn threw himself headlong in a direction parallel with the edge, one arm out-thrust, the other bent to check his fall. For one agonizing second the reaching hand encountered only air; then his fingers brushed against cloth, closed like a snapped trap, and as his muscular frame crashed against the roof's edge, a sudden jerk against his outstretched arm told him he had checked Dylara's fall.