Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/44

44 similar to our year. One can never fully understand these alien concepts involving a knowledge of the nature of energy and space unknown to us.

Behind us the pursuit had found the water-lock into the caves on the sea bottom, and had followed our ion trail, "smelling" us out painfully through all the turns and branches of the tortuously contrived caverns of the Elder Ones. As they came into sight of our penetrays, we blasted at them with the mighty old cannon, and one by one the ships heated under the fearful force-flows, and exploded under the titanic charges of Jovian lightning thrown right through the living rock. Not a ship escaped to tell where we had run to cover, for we searched, after the battle, for their ion trails left by the jets, and even the guard-ship they had left outside was caught by us. We were safe from the knowledge or pursuit of the hated Patrol. This would be our home now.

When we returned from hunting down the last of the pursuit, and settled again upon the great square-cut fortress in the weird, lost City of Dis, a strange thing happened to us that changed our lives forever from the path in which they had been cut.

As we set up our homes within the great chambers of the fortress, and busied ourselves repairing the ravages that time and some slight corrosion had occasioned to the weapons and life-machinery of the place, as the water flowed again into long unused pipes and fountain bowls about the great city, a strange great voice came into the fortress! It was a giant's voice, and loneliness and despair had ingrained themselves into the timbre of the voice, so that it seemed the soul of the great empty city that spoke.

"I have watched your interloping activity! This is my home, but I have done nothing, for I did not know whether to kill you or not. But now that you have decided to remain, to make a home here, you may as well learn who is the Lord and Master here, and whom it is you will serve."

The titanic strength of the voice, the terrible nature of the character as displayed by the voice, impressed us as no thing ever had before. We searched and found no source—the voice was wholly within our minds, by our finding!

"Where are you and what is this about Lording it over us? We serve no man but our own interests only. Come, show yourself that we may know what you are."

Far below the fortress we heard a great rumbling, and a clanking of chains. We shot a penetray downward, searching, but the ray was blocked by a great mass of impervious metal that is sometimes used to sheath shelter-chambers and war-ships from dis-rays of all kinds.

We followed our ray down and down, by many winding turns, and found at the last a tremendous sealed door. And on the door was written a legend of warning, which we might not wholly read, for it was in a strange language and not the universal Mantong of all space. Heeding it not, we burned off the metal seals of the door, and found within a sight that wrung our hearts, for we still had hearts of a kind then. Ruthless, warlike, grasping we may have been, but still warm human emotions sometimes held us in their sway as well.

VAST giant of a man lay inside, wrapped in endless turns of heavy chains and beside him a food-tablet synthesizer machine showed us what had kept him alive. A water-pipe poured into a fountain at his side. The stench of the place was frightful. As we loosened the giant's chains, he smiled upon us. But there was that about him which should have given us pause, even though we were not men easily given to fear. Horns there were upon his head and a dark and sour face, but such imprisonment does not make for beauty or a cheerful face. We ourselves were dark men, and of a hairy breed, and the cloven hoof upon his right leg—the beast that was crossed into his ancestry sometime in the past we recognized for what it was—the mark of those Titans of the parts of space where they breed with other strange races called the "variform" Titan, a thing we had heard of but had never seen.

We unwrapped the massive chains from about him, for a Titan is known over all space for wisdom, and we could use such knowledge. The while he discoursed in his thought-voice, in phrases and picture symbols strange and outlandish to us, and smacking of a vast antiquity. Of the fate that had come upon him, the mighty Sathanas of Nor. Of Nor, the great space