Twenty years in the grey catacombs, buried in the silence and the eternal dark.
He recognized the inevitable. He was used to inevitables—hunger, pain, loneliness, the emptiness of dreams. He had accepted a lot of them in his time. Yet he made no move to surrender. He looked out at the desert and the night sky, and his eyes blazed, the desperate, strangely beautiful eyes of a creature very close to the roots of life, something less and more than man. His hands found a shard of rock and broke it.
The leader of the four men rode slowly toward the tor, his right arm raised.
His voice carried clearly on the wind. "Eric John Stark!" he called, and the dark man tensed in the shadows.
The rider stopped. He spoke again, but this time in a different tongue. It was no dialect of Earth, Mars or Venus, but a strange speech, as harsh and vital as the blazing Mercurian valleys that bred it.
"Oh N'Chaka, oh Man-without-a-tribe, I call you!"
There was a long silence. The rider and his mount were motionless under the low moons, waiting.
Eric John Stark stepped slowly out from the pool of blackness under the tor.
"Who calls me N'Chaka?"
The rider relaxed somewhat. He answered in English, "You know perfectly well who I am, Eric. May we meet in peace?"