This cliff limited the view to the left, but to the right Gordon could see some of the mountains which flanked Mount Erlik Khan, and the valley far below them wandered southward away to a pass in the distance, a notch in the savage rampart of the hills.
“This is life for you, El Borak,” said Yogok, pointing to the pass. “Three miles from the spot where we now stand this trail leads down into the valley where there is water and game and rich grass for the horses. You can follow it southward beyond the pass for three days’ journey when you will come into country you know well. It is inhabited by marauding tribes, but they will not attack a party as large as yours. You can be through the pass before the Kirghiz round the mountain, and they will not follow you through it. That is the limit of their country. Now let me go.”
“Not yet; I’ll release you at the pass. You can make your way back here easily and wait for the Kirghiz, and tell them any lie you want to about their goddess.”
Yogok glared angrily at Gordon. The American’s eyes were bloodshot, the skin stretched taut over the bones of his face. He looked like a man who had been sweated in hell’s fires, and he felt the same way. There was no reason for Yogok’s strident objections, except a desire to get out of the company of those he hated as quickly as possible.
In Gordon’s state a man reverts to primitive instincts, and the American held his thrumming nerves in an iron grip to keep from braining the priest with his gun butt. Dispute and importunities were like screaming insults to his struggling brain.
While the priest squawked, and Gordon hesitated between reasoning with him or knocking him down, the Turkomans, inspired by the gold and food, and eager for the trail, began to crowd past him. Half a dozen had emerged on the ledge when Gordon noticed them, and ordering Orkhan to bring Yogok along, he rode past those on the ledge, intending to take the lead as usual. But one of the men was already out to the path, and could neither turn back nor hug the wall close enough to let Gordon by.
The American, perforce, called to him to go ahead, and he would follow, and even as Gordon set his horse to the trail a volley of boulders came thundering down from above. They hit the wretched Turkoman and swept him and his horse off the trail as a broom sweeps a spider from a wall. One of the stones, bouncing from the ledge, hit Gordon’s horse and broke its leg, and the beast screamed and toppled over the side after the other.
Gordon threw himself clear as it fell, landed half over the edge, and clawed a desperate way to safety with Yasmeena’s screams and the yells of the Turkomans ringing in his ears. There was nothing seen to shoot at, but some of them loosed their rifles anyway, and the volley was greeted by a wild peal of mocking laughter from the cliffs above.
In no way unnerved by his narrow escape, Gordon drove his men back into the shelter of the cave. They were like wolves in a trap, ready to strike blind right and left, and a dozen tulwars hovered over Yogok’s head.
“Slay him! He has led us into a trap! Allah!”
Yogok’s face was a green, convulsed mask of fear. He squalled like a tortured cat.
“Nay! I led you swift and sure! The Kirghiz could not have reached this side of the mountain by this time!”
“Were there monks hiding in these cells?” asked Gordon. “They could have sneaked out when they saw us coming in. Is that a monk up there?”
“Nay; as Erlik is my witness! We work the gold three moons in the years; at other times it is death to go near Mount Erlik. I know not who it is.”
Gordon ventured out on the path again and was greeted by another shower of stones, which he barely avoided, and a voice yelled high above him:
“You Yankee dog, how do you like that? I’ve got you now, damn you! Thought I was done for when I fell into that fissure, didn’t you? Well, there was a ledge a few feet down that I landed on. You couldn’t see it because the sun wasn’t high enough to shine down into it. If I’d had a gun I’d have killed you when you looked down. I climbed out after you left.”
“Ormond!” snarled Gordon.
“Did you think I hadn’t wormed anything out of that monk?” the Englishman yelled. “He told me all about the paths and Mount Erlik after I’d caved in some of his teeth with a gun barrel. I saw old Yogok with you and knew he’d lead you to Erlik. I got here first. I’d have barred the door and locked you out to be butchered by the fellows who’re chasing you, but I couldn’t lift the bars. But, anyway, I’ve got you trapped. You can’t leave the cave; if you do I’ll mash you like insects on the path. I can see you on it, and you can’t see me. I’m going to keep you here until the Kirghiz come up. I’ve still got Yasmeena’s symbol. They’ll listen to me.
“I’ll tell them Yogok is helping you to kidnap her; they’ll kill you all except her. They’ll take her back, but I don’t care now. I don’t need that Kashmiri’s money. I’ve got the secret of Mount Erlik Khan!”
Gordon fell back into the doorway and repeated what the Englishman had said. Yogok turned a shade greener in his fear, and all stared silently at El Borak. His bloodshot gaze traveled over them as they stood blinking, disheveled, and haggard, with lamps paled by the dawn, like ghouls caught above earth by daybreak. Grimly he marshaled his straying wits. Gordon had never reached the ultimate limits of his endurance; always he had plumbed a deeper, hidden reservoir of vitality below what seemed the last.
“Is there another way out of here?” he demanded.
Yogok shook his head, chatting again with terror. “No way that men and horses can go.”
“What do you mean?”
The priest moved back into the darkness and held a lamp close to the flank of the wall where the tunnel narrowed for the entrance. Rusty bits of metal jutted from the rock.
“Here was once a ladder,” he said. “It led far up to a crevice in the wall where long ago one sat to watch the southern pass for invaders. But none has climbed it for many years, and the handholds are rusty and rotten. The crevice opens on the sheer of the outer cliffs, and even if a man reached it, he could scarcely climb down the outside.
“Well, maybe I can pick Ormond off from the crevice,” muttered Gordon, his head swimming with the effort of thinking.
Standing still was making infinitely harder his fight to keep awake. The muttering of the Turkomans was a meaningless tangle of sound, and Yasmeena’s dark anxious eyes seemed to be looking at him from a vast distance. He thought he felt her arms cling to him briefly, but he could not be sure. The lights were beginning to swim in a thick mist.
Beating himself into wakefulness by striking his own face with his open hand, he began the climb, a rifle slung to his back. Orkhan was plucking at him, begging to be allowed to make the attempt in his stead, but Gordon shook him off. In his dazed brain was a conviction that the responsibility was his own. He went up like an automaton, slowly, all his muddled faculties concentrating grimly on the task.
Fifty feet up, the light of the lamps ceased to aid him, and he groped upward in the gloom, feeling for the rusty bolts set in the wall. They were so rotten that he dared not put his full weight on any one of them. In some places they were missing and he clung with his fingers in the niches where they had been. Only the slant of the rock enabled him to accomplish the climb at all, and it seemed endless, a hell-born eternity of torture.
The lamps below him were like fireflies in the darkness, and the roof with its clustering stalactites was only a few yards above his head. Then he saw a gleam of light, and an instant later he was crouching in a cleft that opened on the outer air. It was only a couple of yards wide, and not tall enough for a man to stand upright.
He crawled along it for some thirty feet and then looked out on a rugged slant that pitched down to a crest of cliffs, a hundred feet below. He could not see the ledge where the door opened, nor the path that led from it, but he saw a figure crouching among the boulders along the lip of the cliff, and he unslung his rifle.
Ordinarily he could not have missed at that range. But his bloodshot eyes refused to line the sights. Slumber never assai
ls a weary man so fiercely as in the growing light of dawn. The figure among the rocks below merged and blended fantastically with the scenery, and the sights of the rifle were mere blurs.
Setting his teeth, Gordon pulled the trigger, and the bullet smashed on the rock a foot from Ormond’s head. The Englishman dived out of sight among the boulders without pausing to find where the shot came from.
In desperation Gordon slung his rifle and threw a leg over the lip of the cleft. He was certain that Ormond had no firearm. Down below the Turkomans were clamoring like a wolf pack, but his numbed faculties were fully occupied with the task of climbing down the ribbed pitch. He stumbled and fumbled and nearly fell, and at last he did slip and came sliding and tumbling down until his rifle caught on a projection and held him dangling by the strap.
In a red mist he saw Ormond break cover, with a tulwar that he must have found in the cavern, and in a panic lest the Englishman climb up and kill him as he hung helplessly, Gordon braced his feet and elbows against the rock and wrenched savagely, breaking the rifle strap. He plunged down like a plummet, hit the slope, clawed at rocks and knobs, and brought up on shelving stone a dozen feet from the cliff edge, while his rifle, tumbling before him, slid over and was gone.
The fall jolted his numbed nerves back into life again, knocked some of the cobwebs out of his dizzy brain. Ormond was within a few steps of him when he scrambled up, drawing his scimitar. The Englishman was as savage and haggard in appearance as was Gordon, and his eyes blazed with a frenzy that almost amounted to madness.
“Steel to steel now, El Borak!” Ormond gritted. “We’ll see if you’re the swordsman they say you are!”
Ormond came with a rush and Gordon met him, fired above his exhaustion by his hate and the stinging frenzy of battle. They fought back and forth along the cliff edge, with a foot to spare between them and eternity sometimes, until the clangor of the swords wakened the eagles to shrill hysteria.
Ormond fought like a wild man, yet with all the craft the sword masters of his native England had taught him. Gordon fought as he had learned to fight in grim and merciless battles in the hills and the steppes and the deserts. He fought as an Afghan fights, with the furious intensity of onslaught that gathers force like a rising hurricane as it progresses.
Beating on his blade like a smith on an anvil, Gordon drove the Englishman staggering before him, until the man swayed dizzily with his heels over the edge of the cliff.
“Swine!” gasped Ormond with his last breath, and spat in his enemy’s face and slashed madly at his head.
“This for Ahmed!” roared Gordon, and his scimitar whirled past Ormond’s blade and crunched home.
The Englishman reeled outward, his features suddenly blotted out by blood and brains, and pitched backward into the gulf without a sound.
Gordon sat down on a boulder, suddenly aware of the quivering of his leg muscles. He sat there, his gory blade across his knees and his head sunk in his hands, his brain a black blank, until shouts welling up from below roused him to consciousness.
“Ohai, El Borak! A man with a cleft head has fallen past us into the valley! Art thou safe? We await orders!”
He lifted his head and glanced at the sun which was just rising over the eastern peaks, turning to crimson flame the snow of Mount Erlik Khan. He would have traded all the gold of the monks of Yolgan to be allowed to lie down and sleep for an hour, and climbing up on his stiffened legs that trembled with his weight was a task of appalling magnitude. But his labor was not yet done; there was no rest for him this side the pass.
Summoning the shreds of his strength, he shouted down to the raiders.
“Get upon the horses and ride, sons of nameless dogs! Follow the trail and I will come along the cliff. I see a place beyond the next bend where I can climb down to the trail. Bring Yogok with you; he has earned his release but the time is not yet.”
“Hurry, El Borak,” floated up Yasmeena’s golden call. “It is far to Delhi, and many mountains lie between!”
Gordon laughed and sheathed his scimitar, and his laugh sounded like the ghastly mirth of a hyena; the Turkomans had taken the road and were already singing a chant improvised in his honor, naming “Son of the Sword” the man who staggered along the cliffs above them, with a face like a grinning skull and feet that left smears of blood on the rock.
Three Bladed Doom
I
KNIVES IN THE DARK
It was the scruff of swift and stealthy feet in the darkened doorway he had just passed that warned Gordon. He wheeled with catlike quickness just in time to see a tall figure lunge at him from that black arch. It was dark in the narrow, alley-like street, but Gordon glimpsed a fierce bearded face, the gleam of steel in the lifted hand, even as he avoided the blow with a twist of his whole body. The knife ripped his shirt and before the attacker could recover his balance, the American caught his arm and crashed the long barrel of his heavy pistol down on the fellow’s head. The man crumpled to the earth without a sound.
Gordon stood above him, listening with tense expectancy. Up the street, around the next corner, he heard the shuffle of sandalled feet, the muffled clink of steel. They told him the nighted streets of Kabul were a death-trap for Francis Xavier Gordon. He hesitated, half lifting the big gun, then shrugged his shoulders and hurried down the street, swerving wide of the dark arches that gaped in the walls which lined it. He turned into another, wider street, and a few moments later rapped softly on a door above which burned a brass lantern.
The door opened almost instantly and Gordon stepped quickly inside.
“Lock the door!”
The tall bearded Afridi who had admitted the American shot home the heavy bolt, and turned, tugging his beard perturbedly as he inspected his friend.
“Your shirt is gashed, El Borak!” he rumbled.
“A man tried to knife me,” answered Gordon. “Others followed me.”
The Afridi’s fierce eyes blazed and he laid a sinewy hand on the three-foot Khyber knife that jutted from his hip.
“Let us sally forth and slay the dogs, sahib!” he urged.
Gordon shook his head. He was not a large man, but his appearance was impressive. Thick chest, corded neck and square shoulders presented a compactness which hinted at almost primordial strength and endurance, and he moved with a supple ease that betrayed capabilities for blinding quickness.
“Let them go. They’re the enemies of Baber Khan, who knew that I went to the Amir tonight to urge him to pardon the man.”
“And what said the Amir?”
“He’s determined on Baber Khan’s destruction. The chief’s enemies have poisoned the Amir against him, and then Baber Khan’s stubborn. He’s refused to come to Kabul and answer charges of sedition. The Amir swears he’ll march within the week and lay Khor in ashes and take Baber Khan’s head, unless the chief comes in voluntarily and surrenders. Baber Khan’s enemies don’t want him to do that. They know the charges they’ve made against him wouldn’t stand up, with me defending his case. That’s why they’re trying to put me out of the way, but they don’t dare strike openly.
“I’m going to see if I can’t persuade Baber Khan to come in and surrender.”
“That the chief of Khor will never do,” predicted the Afridi.
“Probably not, but I’m going to try. Baber Khan is my friend. Wake Ahmed Shah and get the horses ready while I throw a pack together. We’re starting for Khor right away.”
The Afridi did not comment on night-travel in the Hills, or mention the lateness of the hour. Men who rode with El Borak were accustomed to hard riding at all ungodly hours.
“What of the Sikh?” he asked as he turned away.
“He remains at the palace. The Amir trusts Lal Singh more than his own guards, and wants to keep him as a body-guard for awhile. He’s been nervous ever since the Sultan of Turkey was murdered by that fanatic. Hasten, Yar Ali Khan. Baber Khan’s enemies are probably watching the house, but they don’t know about that door that lets into
the alley behind the stables. We’ll slip out that way.”
The huge Afridi strode into an inner chamber and shook the man sleeping there on a heap of carpets.
“Awaken, son of Shaitan. We ride westward.”
Ahmed Shah, a stocky Yusufzai, sat up, yawning.
“Where?”
“To the Ghilzai village of Khor, where the rebel dog Baber Khan will doubtless cut out all our hearts,” growled Yar Ali Khan.
Ahmed Shah grinned broadly as he rose.
“You have no love for the Ghilzai; but he is El Borak’s friend.”
Yar Ali Khan scowled and muttered direly in his beard as he stalked out into the inner courtyard and headed for the stables. These lay within the high enclosure, and no one but the members of Gordon’s “family” knew that a hidden door connected them with an outer alley. So all the shadowy figures that lurked about his house that night were watching the other sides when the small party moved stealthily down the black alley. Within half an hour from the time Gordon rapped at his door, the clink of hoofs on the rocky road beyond the city wall marked the passing of three men who rode swiftly westward.
Meanwhile in the palace the Amir of Afghanistan was proving the adage concerning the uneasiness of the head that wears the crown.
He emerged from an inner chamber, wearing a pre-occupied expression, and absently returned the salute of a tall, magnificently-shouldered Sikh who clicked his booted heels and came to military attention. The Amir turned up the corridor, indicating with a gesture that he wished to be alone, so Lal Singh saluted again and fell back, resuming his station by the door, one hand absently caressing the sharkskin-bound hilt of his long saber.
His dark eyes followed the Amir up the corridor. He knew that his friend El Borak had been closeted with the king for several hours, and had left with an abruptness that hinted at anger.