Flash Gordon 5 - The Witch Queen of Mongo (7 page)

Zarkov growled, “I don’t hear a thing. What happened to Flash and Willie?”

Dale shook her head. She was worried. “We’d better hurry, Doc. Maybe they were outnumbered.”

“I don’t have a weapon of any kind,” Zarkov said sourly. “And neither does Flash.”

“It can’t be helped. Come on.”

“Darn that Willie,” cried Zarkov. “I’d like to—”

Dale started to ran along the trail that led into the bluish rock formation.

Zarkov stared after her, and then began to follow.

The trail was steep, but they soon found themselves at the top of the rise, staring down onto the cliff face at the point where Flash and Willie had been attacked by the hooded figures.

The summit of the mountain spine was deserted.

“Hey, Doc!” said Dale, kneeling on the ground and pointing into the dust. “Look at that.”

Zarkov leaned over her shoulder. “What? I don’t see anything.”

“The print. It’s Flash’s bootprint.”

“How do you know?”

“I bought them for him, silly. You see the circle and the square? That’s a special brand Flash likes.”

Zarkov rose and peered off into the distance across the vast wilderness that spread out from the foot of the cliff. “Well, if he’s gone on from here, I don’t know where he is at all.”

Dale rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She peered around at the rocks and the trail. “Doc,” she said slowly, “if anybody wanted to ambush us, this is the place they would hide, isn’t it?”

Zarkov glanced about. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Then maybe someone did ambush Flash and Willie.”

“There’s no doubt about it,” Zarkov said worriedly. “But then where did the ambushers take them? The trail seems to end here.”

Dale stared at the rocks. Suddenly, she moved her head and waved her hand at Zarkov.

“Doc! Look over there!”

She had seen the mouth of the cave. Zarkov came over and stood beside her, and he, too, saw the entranceway past the rocks.

“I’ll be darned,” Zarkov said. “It’s a cave.” His face paled. “Dale!” He grabbed her arm. “Look, we’ve got to get out of here right now!”

“What is it, Doc?” Dale asked in surprise. “I want to take a look at that cave. Flash may be in there, along with Willie.”

“I know they’re in there,” Zarkov said in a whisper. He was pulling Dale along with him, retreating down the trail onto the other side of the mountain spine.

“But the cave—” Then Dale understood. “The cave leads to the Kingdom of Blue Magic.”

“Exactly,” whispered Zarkov. They were running now, down the mountainside. “We’ve got to get out of here, or that hussy will be sending out her hooded agents to grab us, too.”

“But Doc we’ve got to help Flash. We’re pretty sure he was fighting with some of Queen Azura’s guards. And we’ve got to get to him.”

“No way,” snapped Zarkov. “We’ll need a lot of help if we mean to force our way into the Caverna Gigantea—you know that. I’d say we’ve got to make it out of here to Arboria and get Prince Barin to help us mount an assault on the cave.”

“Doc, that’s a long way from here. How are we going to be able to help Flash now?”

Zarkov stopped running and sank down on a rock to rest. Dale stood beside him.

“We’re exactly two days from Arboria, if that’s the entrance to the Kingdom of Blue Magic,” said Zarkov. “I remember that from one of Prince Barin’s maps. And it’s a long, hard walk.”

“But what about Flash and Willie? They’re probably in great trouble. Are we just going to leave them there?”

“What else can you suggest?” Zarkov asked stubbornly. “If we blunder in there, they’ll simply capture us too.”

“I suppose so,” Dale agreed reluctantly. “I just hope we don’t get to Prince Barin too late to do Flash and Willie any good.”

“I agree,” Zarkov said grumpily. “But I can’t think of any other way to help them now.”

“Nor I,” Dale said dismally.

With Zarkov leading the way during the light of day, the two of them set off in a northwesterly direction from the site of the cave.

By nightfall, they had traversed quite a few Mongo miles, but still had not caught sight of any habitation.

“Of course,” Zarkov said, “it’s all desert here. This is the Great Mongo Desert’s western border. We’re lucky it isn’t the eastern or southern border. The sun is fierce there, with no water anywhere.”

“Is there water here?” Dale asked wearily. “I’m thirsty.”

Zarkov burst out laughing. “Don’t you hear the sound of a running brook, Dale?”

Dale listened. Her face broke into a happy smile. “Yes! Oh, Doc, you’ve been trying to fool me.”

“I heard the sound a few moments ago. We’ll rest up there, Dale, and go on in the morning.”

“I wish I’d brought something to munch on,” Dale said ruefully.

“Well, you never knew you were coming this far,” Zarkov said with a frown. “Drat that Willie, anyway.”

They came over the brow of the hill and there before them was an oasis of palm trees and green grass, still and quiet in the starlit night. The seventh moon of Mongo had not yet risen, but the stars were brilliantly reflected in the silvery water of the oasis.

The two of them moved over toward the water and drank slowly.

Dale lay down, looking up at the stars.

Zarkov muttered to himself.

“What is it, Doc?”

“I’m making calculations, that’s all.”

“Calculations?”

“Navigational calculations,” he explained. “It’s a lot more accurate steering by the stars, you know. In the morning, we’ll go out in that direction,” he said pointing, “and continue across the plains. We’ll be heading directly for the woods of Arboria.”

“At least it’ll be cooler walking in the shade of the trees,” said Dale.

“We’ll get up early and walk before the sun gets high in the sky,” Zarkov said, lying down beside the oasis. “Now get some sleep. I’ll wake you before dawn.”

Zarkov roused Dale while the moon was still in the sky, and they rose and started across the sandy expanse of desert. In a few minutes, they were walking through a fairly green plain that seemed a welcome relief from the sandy desert over which they had walked the afternoon before.

“What do you think of the Witch Queen, Doc?” Dale asked.

Zarkov grinned. “I think she’s a very beautiful demon lady.”

“Men!” snapped Dale. “Always thinking about looks!”

“Don’t you?” Zarkov asked teasingly.

“I think of her as an evil woman,” snapped Dale.

“Sure. An evil woman with Flash Gordon in her arms.”

Dale flushed. “Stop it, Doc. It’s not funny.”

“Of course it isn’t funny. You asked me what I thought of Queen Azura. She’s beautiful—but she is a menace.”

“And dangerous,” said Dale.

“And dangerous. Now don’t worry. We’ll get to Arboria and Prince Barin will help us rescue Flash.”

“You don’t have much confidence in Flash’s ability to get out of the Witch Kingdom, do you?”

Zarkov thought about that. “Queen Azura has a way with her, Dale. Don’t forget she’s got the best scientists on Mongo working for her. I think they’ve come up with every drug imaginable. And I think they can do almost anything scientifically. That’s why she’s so dangerous—and why we have to stop her. I’m surprised that the Free Council of Mongo, under Prince Barin, hasn’t blasted her and that rough bunch of Azurians out of Inner Mongo yet.”

“Maybe they haven’t been able to,” Dale suggested.

“Since Ming the Merciless was killed, there hasn’t been any real need for fighting,” Zarkov said. “The last interplanetary missive I received from Prince Barin said that Mongo had embarked on the most successful and prosperous era in the history of the planet.”

“We’re not even sure Flash has been taken to Azuria,” Dale said apprehensively.

“We heard that shouting and crying,” prompted Zarkov.

Dale nodded. “And we couldn’t find him.”

“The odds are he’s been taken there along with Willie.” Zarkov shook his head.

“Doc,” Dale said uneasily after a moment.

Zarkov frowned. “What’s the matter?”

She came up close to him and began to whisper. “I’ve got a funny feeling we’re being followed.”

“Who could it be?” scoffed Zarkov. “We’re in the middle of the Great Mongo Desert!”

“I still have the feeling someone is watching us, or perhaps following us.”

Zarkov glanced at the sky. He saw a large bird circling about in the distance, above the oasis they had just left. He turned to Dale. “There’s a bird there. Is that what you’re spooked by?”

Dale glanced into the sky, which was now growing more and more orange as the sun moved up toward the horizon.

“No,” she said, shivering slightly. “I do feel it, Doc.”

Zarkov slowed down. “I’ll grant there is a kind of sense of a presence out there in back of us.” He straightened. “But if there was someone there, why didn’t they attack us in our sleep? It doesn’t make sense that they would simply wait and follow us in the daylight.”

“No,” Dale agreed slowly.

They walked along in silence while the sky grew much lighter all around them.

“Doc!” screamed Dale, clutching Zarkov’s arm.

Zarkov turned in shock and then stared past Dale’s shoulder.

The two of them looked wide-eyed at the sky, where an enormous, man-sized bird was slowly swooping down toward them—a bird with an enormous wingspan and talons that resembled human hands with claws on the ends of its fingers.

Then, as they stared in anguish at the sky, another of the giant birds swooped in from another direction.

“Dale! Run! Run for your life!” screamed Zarkov, beginning to bolt as fast as he could for a clump of rocks nearby.

Dale panted after him.

Then, as they approached the rocks, with the big birds moving steadily nearer them, they were disheartened to see something rise in front of them.

Two more birds, bigger than those behind them, were standing on the rocks, looking at them. Six feet high from their heads to their talons, their wingspans. at least sixteen feet fully open, they had enormous beaks and what appeared to be bald heads.

“Their faces,” whispered Dale. “They’re—they’re—human beings!”

“Bird beings,” Zarkov whispered back. “Not human beings.”

The birdmen folded their wings, crossed their taloned arms over their chests, and waited. Dale saw their strange covered-over eyes, resembling racing goggles, through which the birdmen seemed to be studying them.

“What do they want?” Dale asked in a croaking voice.

Zarkov spoke, his voice shaking just a bit: “Us.”

F
lash Gordon was conscious once again, but he could not move. He had been standing up when he had lost consciousness in the rocky pass outside the mouth of the cave to the Kingdom of Blue Magic.

Now he lay flat, placed on a vehicle of some kind, and he found himself stripped to the waist. He saw a great deal of activity going on around him. His young companion, Worriless Willie, also lay on the same vehicle, which was a large, open-bed carrier.

Hooded figures scurried about near him, and then, quite suddenly, the vehicle started to move. It rose into the air, turned once, descended, and entered the mouth of the cave.

Flash knew that he and Willie had been paralyzed by a formulation of nerve gas. The gas was the fog they had seen roll out of the mouth of the cave. He had been too stupid to move quickly enough to get Willie away from the dangerous vapor.

Trust Queen Azura to develop and use nerve gas, Flash thought. It was just possible that she had seen him and Willie in that crystal ball of hers. Magic! It was simply a matter of scientific vidscreen surveillance.

The vehicle they were lying on floated through the luminescent terrain of the enormous cave called the Caverna Gigantea by Mongo scientists. Flash remembered that within the core of the planet a gravity sled had been developed by Azurian technicians which had become their means of propulsion through the caverns of the underground kingdom.

The enormous grottoes that opened out above him were beautiful. Indirect lighting—stored sun’s rays transmitted from the outside world into small storage cells—formed weird shadows on the green-and-orange ceilings of the caverns through which they passed.

It was extremely quiet in the inner core of Mongo. Pools of water with scarcely a ripple on the surface lay on both sides of the cavernway through which they floated. Small eyeless fish shot through the waters. Flash did not know the names of any of them; undoubtedly Doc Zarkov would!

Amphibians from an earlier era of life stalked about on the distant rock shelves, their oversized eyes gleaming in the ill-lighted environment as they peered out at the human beings invading their private realm.

The gravity sled swooped past an enormous waterfall, over which plunged sparkling torrents of clear water for the people in the Kingdom of Blue Magic. A group of engineers in the traditional skintight leotards of indigo blue, worn by all of Azuria’s people in the underground kingdom, paused in their work to eye the gravity sled bearing Flash and Willie.

Flash remembered the wealth of minerals embedded in the core of the planet that surrounded the Caverna Gigantea. It was a vanity of Queen Azura’s to own it all, to dress herself in sparkling gems and to flaunt her riches to all strangers, to lord her wealth before all the peoples of Mongo.

The gravity sled took a turn and swooped downward swiftly, passing through several thousand feet of elevation in a few moments. On the lower levels of Azuria, the caverns widened out and led into a big valley. At the end of the valley, dappled with tiny pools of water and gardens of vegetation like algae and seaweed that did not need sunlight, Flash saw the jeweled spires of the city of Azuria itself, and, dominating the city, the spiraling tower of Azura’s palace.

The sled zoomed over the valley and into the confines of the city. Sounds of bustling activity surrounded him, but Flash could not see below the sled.

They entered the palace through an oval slot that opened in a wall and immediately the gravity sled settled to the stone floor. The hooded drivers of the vehicle removed their cloaks and hoods and stretched their arms in the freedom of their iridescent indigo leotards.