'He was to meet me here at this hour,' I said. 'I instructed him to be here.'
'You instructed Sov to be here!' The fellow laughed. 'Who are you to give instructions to Sov?'
'I am the ongyan, Moosko,' I replied.
* * * * *
The man looked at me in astonishment. 'I do not know where Sov is,' he said, a little sullenly, I thought.
'Well, never mind,' I told him; 'he will be here presently; and in the meantime, open up the gate, for we shall want to hurry on as soon as he arrives.'
'I cannot open the gate without orders from Sov,' replied the sentry.
'You refuse to obey an ongyan?' I demanded in the most ferocious tones I could command.
'I have never seen you before,' he parried. 'How do I know you are an ongyan?'
I held out my hand with the ring of Moosko on the index finger. 'Do you know what that is?' I demanded.
He examined it closely. 'Yes, Ongyan,' he said fearfully, 'I know.'
'Then open the gate, and be quick about it,' I snapped.
'Let us wait until Sov comes,' he suggested. 'There will be time enough then.'
'There is no time to be lost, fellow. Open up, as I command. The Vepajan prisoner has just escaped, and Sov and I are going out with a party of warriors to search for him.'
Still the obstinate fellow hesitated; and then we heard a great shouting from the direction from which we had come, and I guessed that the fellow who had passed us in the corridor had discovered the dead body of Moosko and given the alarm.
We could hear men running. There was no more time to be lost.
'Here comes Sov with the searching party,' I cried. 'Throw open the gates, you fool, or it will go ill with you.' I drew my sword, intending to run him through if he did not obey.
As finally, he turned to do my bidding, I heard the excited voices of the approaching men grow louder as they neared us. I could not see them yet for the rain, but as the gate swung open I glimpsed the oncoming figures through the murk.
Taking Duare by the arm I started through the gate. The sentry was still suspicious and wanted to stop us, but he was not sure of himself.
'Tell Sov to hurry,' I said, and before the man could bolster his courage to do his duty, Duare and I hastened into the outer darkness and were lost to his view in the rain.
It was my intention to reach the coast and follow along it until daylight, when, I hoped and prayed, we should sight the Sofal off shore and be able to contrive a means of signaling to her.
We groped our way through the darkness and the rain during all that terrible night. No sound of pursuit reached our ears, nor did we come upon the ocean.
The rain ceased about dawn, and when full daylight came we looked eagerly for the sea, but only low hills and rolling country dotted with trees and a distant forest where we had thought the sea to be rewarded our straining eyes.
'Where is the sea?' asked Duare.
'I do not know,' I admitted.
Only at sunrise and at sunset, for a few minutes, is it possible to differentiate between the points of the compass on Venus; then the direction of the sun is faintly indicated by a slightly intensified light along the eastern or the western horizon.
And now the sun was rising at our left, when it should have been upon our right were we going in the direction that I believed the ocean to be.
My heart sank in my breast, for I knew that we were lost.
Chapter 5—Cannibals
DUARE, WHO HAD been watching my face intently, must have read the truth in the despair of my expression.
'You do not know where the sea lies?' she asked.
I shook my head. 'No.'
'Then we are lost?'
'I am afraid so. I am sorry, Duare; I was so sure that we would find the Sofal and that you would soon be out of danger. It is all my fault, the fault of my stupidity and ignorance.'
'Do not say that; no one could have known the direction he was going during the darkness of last night. Perhaps we shall find the sea yet.'
'Even if we could, I am afraid that it will be too late to ensure your safety.'
'What do you mean—that the Sofal will be gone?' she asked.
'There is that danger, of course; but what I most fear is that we may be recaptured by the Thorists. They will certainly search along the coast for us in the locality where they found us yesterday. They are not so stupid as not to guess that we will try to reach the Sofal.'
'If we can find the ocean, we might hide from them,' she suggested, 'until they tire of the search and return to Kapdor; then, if the Sofal is still there, we may yet be saved.'
'And if not, what?' I asked. 'Do you know anything about Noobol? Is there not some likelihood that we may find a friendly people somewhere in this land who will aid us to reach Vepaja again?'
She shook her head. 'I know little about Noobol,' she replied, 'but what little I have heard is not good. It is a sparsely settled land reaching, it is supposed, far into Strabol, the hot country, where no man may live. It is filled with wild beasts and savage tribes. There are scattered settlements along the coast, but most of these have been captured or reduced by the Thorists; the others, of course, would be equally dangerous, for the inhabitants would consider all strangers as enemies.'
'The outlook is not bright,' I admitted, 'but we will not give up; we will find a way.'
'If any man can, I am sure that it is you,' she said.
Praise from Duare was sweet. In all the time that I had known her she had said only one other kind thing to me, and later she had retracted that.
'I could work miracles if only you loved me, Duare.'
She straightened haughtily. 'You will not speak of that,' she said.
'Why do you hate me, Duare, who have given you only love?' I demanded.
'I do not hate you,' she replied, 'but you must not speak of love to the daughter of a jong. We may be together for a long time, and you must remember that I may not listen to love from the lips of any man. Our very speaking together is a sin, but circumstances have made it impossible to do otherwise.
'Before I was stolen from the house of the jong no man had ever addressed me other than the members of my own family, except a few loyal and privileged members of my father's household, and until I should be twenty it were a sin in me and a crime in any man who should disregard this ancient law of the royal families of Amtor.'
'You forget,' I reminded her, 'that one man did address you in the house of your father.'
'An impudent knave,' she said, 'who should have died for his temerity.'
'Yet you did not inform on me.'
'Which made me equally guilty with you,' she replied, flushing. 'It is a shameful secret that will abide with me until my death.'
'A glorious memory that will always sustain my hope,' I told her.
'A false hope that you would do well to kill,' she said, and then, 'Why did you remind me of that day?' she demanded. 'When I think of it, I hate you; and I do not want to hate you.'
'That is something,' I suggested.
'Your effrontery and your hope feed on meager fare.'
'Which reminds me that it might be well for me to see if I can find something in the way of food for our bodies, too.'
'There may be game in that forest,' she suggested, indicating the wood toward which we had been
