"It smells like a harlot's dream!" he muttered sourly, "probably intended to make us more attractive to whatever kind of creature it is that's coming after us!"
The attendants had hurried away with their buckets of oil, and now the crowds in the grandstand and on the plain settled down to wait. They were in holiday mood, laughing and talking in their shrill voices.
Then a black dot appeared high up in the sky. A murmur of anticipation ran over the crowd. The dakta came plummeting earthward as its super-keen senses saw and smelled the attractive bait waiting below. The thing, as it came near, was like some figment from a nightmare. It had a reptilian body between a twenty-foot spread of leathery wings, and a long beak with a double row of pointed teeth. One of the things that Gerry had seen flying over that lonely sea when he first brought the Viking down through the canopy of clouds that covered the planet of Venus!
"So that is a dakta!" Angus muttered, "bonny little creature!"
The winged lizard checked its flight momentarily some ten feet off the ground, directly above one of the captive Amazons. Then he dove down. The girl screamed and twisted away to the length of her tether, and the toothed beak just missed her. The first of the hunters fired as the dakta whirled and lashed out again, but the bullet exploded off to one side.
Gripping the writhing Amazon with his beak and his clawed feet, the dakta flapped his great wings and soared upward again. Two more of the hunters fired together. One of the explosive bullets missed entirely, the other blew one of the girl's legs to pieces but did not harm the monster that held her.
Then Lansa tossed aside his green robe and stood up. Gerry saw that he held a ray-tube, either one from the Stardust or one of the new ones he now claimed to be able to make in Giri-Vaaka. The tube slanted upward. Murky light played around its muzzle. The dakta gave a shrill and almost human scream. Then it dropped its mangled victim and fell twitching to the ground. Its leathery skin was turned black where the ray-blast had struck it. Along the edge of the field, the close packed crowds broke into wild cheering and Lansa acknowledged it with a condescending gesture of one upraised arm.
The hunt went on. Sometimes the dakta came singly, sometimes in pairs. The hunters had the range better now, and dropped them consistently. On several occasions the flying lizards were brought down before they had time to seize a victim at all, but most of the time one of the prisoners was killed or mortally wounded before the dakta was slain. A Green Man tethered to the stake next beyond Closana had been ripped about the throat by the raking teeth of a dakta's bill, and was breathing with a sort of gurgling moan as he bled to death. So far, that was the nearest that one of the flying lizards had come to Gerry or his two companions.
And then Gerry saw the thing for which he had been watching. There was a streak of fire along the eastern horizon. The blast of speeding rocket tubes! A cigar shaped hull of gleaming blue and silver came streaking across the saffron sky with a trail of smoke behind it. The Viking had come!