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[ 14 ]
John Carter studied the massive, rectangular wall of stone and mortar a short distance ahead. Inside the huge enclosure was the dreaded Ceylonese maximum security prison the natives feared so much they averted their eyes rather than look at it.
Welikada Prison, where the hangmen were so busy they worked in shifts, and guards doled out beatings and torture by the hour. One executioner had worked at the prison for eleven years, and averaged hanging ten men per week for that time. Everyone called him The Black Hood, and he was said to relish his job. The prison’s capacity was thirteen-hundred inmates, but had two thousand prisoners living in squalid, overcrowded conditions. The inmates were in constant agony from beatings, malnutrition and illness. The unsanitary conditions left a fetid smell that never left the air. A tangible sense of misery and despair hung over the prison like an invisible fog.
Carter checked his brace of pistols, the new ones the Maharaja had given him for saving the Princess from four Thuggees attempting to murder her. Their shape was somewhat like the customized Winchester pistols that Western men called Mayor’s Legs, with a brass Winchester-type cocking lever under an egg-shaped black steel receiver inlayed with beautiful gold and onyx charging tigers.
But where the barrel of a Mayor’s Leg was merely a cut down Winchester rifle barrel, the Maharaja’s barrels were made of three slender, separate tubes that spiraled around a center barrel and, two inches from the end, fused into a single barrel. The effect was not for beauty, but for function, for the Tiger Pistols, as the Maharaja called them, shot pulses of energy rather than bullets. They were accurate and deadly, and the only two of their kind in the world
.
The New Delhi gunsmiths and scientists that worked five years in absolute secrecy to develop them were dead in the explosion that demolished the lab and left nothing of substance behind.
He slid the weapons back in their holsters, then checked his cavalry saber. He looked at his crew and said, “My spies say that the executioner will hang our quarry on the high gallows this morning. I think we will deprive them of that task today.” The men murmured their assent. The prison wall was mere yards ahead. John looked at the crew, “I’m glad to be with you men. Now let us cry ‘Havoc!’ and let loose the dogs of war!”
The Wraith floated low over the wall and sailed thirty feet above the crowd of guards and viewers gathered at the foot of the high gallows platform. John saw The Black Hood, the executioner, standing beside a small young woman and a slender young man. A Westinghouse robot stood beside him, holding on to the steam-operated lever that dropped the gallows floor.
John studied the female prisoner. Hair the color of cocoa hung to her shoulders in finger-thick braids. Her skin, of which so much was visible, was the color of fresh cinnamon. Her exposed legs were lean, but muscular, as were her arms. She was short, but well-formed, he thought, and maybe twenty years at most. The Black Hood placed a noose around her neck, then stepped behind Avi and slipped the second noose around the slender young man’s neck, but he didn’t place the knot at the side of Avi’s neck to give him a quick end. The hangman purposely placed the knot at the back of Avi’s neck so that death would be slow and painful by strangulation. John knew that it could take half an hour to die that way. At that moment, the first rays of light bathed the frigate with a yellow fire. A few guards looked up.
John looked at his men and said, “Toss them, boys!”
[ 15 ]
The people looking up were at first confused when eight large baskets tilted over the sides of the shark-gray frigate above them, but the confusion turned to screams of terror as an avalanche of scaled, writhing, hissing death fell upon them.
Eight-hundred king cobras fell through the air and upon the tightly-packed throng. The large snakes flared their hoods as they hissed and struck at everyone around them over and over, lightning fast, while their coils wrapped around the necks and heads of screaming men and held them at face level for the strikes
John and his men dropped their lines overboard and slid down to the melee, with John and Ian swinging to land on the gallows. The Black Hood pulled two wicked, curve-bladed khukuri, the knives favored by Gurkhas, and wove them in a practiced martial arts movement. John raised his pistol to shoot the hangman, but Ian placed his hand on his friend’s forearm, “Nay, brother, I’ll take out the trash, but ye can have the iron one.”
John shot the robot and the bright green pulse flashed into its chest, knocking it far off the platform to the ground below. He holstered his pistol and went to Avi and the woman as Ian unsheathed his long, two-handed claymore.
The Black Hood stepped toward Ian and said in a muffled voice, “I will feed your pieces to the dogs, Scottish scum.” Ian moved very fast, dropping to one knee when he was close. He swung the blade sideways so it chopped off both legs above The Black Hood’s knees.
The executioner screamed and collapsed to the wooden platform. Ian stood and kicked the khukuri off the platform. He took an empty noose and placed it around the screaming man’s neck. The Highlander said, “Dinnae be hangin’ aboot, ye dobber,” and shoved the man onto the trapdoor, then pulled the lever to drop him into space.
The rope snapped taut and swung slowly, creaking with every pendulum movement. The Black Hood was silent, the knot at the side of his neck.
Bixie picked up the executioner’s legs and dropped them through the trap door, dusting off her hands as she walked to Avi’s side. She looked off the platform as chaos reigned below. The men of the Wraith cut down the prison guards like scythes cutting ripe wheat, and the snakes struck poison into those the crewmen missed. It was over in minutes. She smiled at Avi, “I told you.” She had dimples, Avi saw, and her eyes were an imperial jade so deep it was striking.
John said to them, “Ian will stay with you until I climb on board the Wraith and lower her so you can board.
Bixie said, “We can climb.” She and Avi grabbed the ropes and went up them to the frigate. Bixie went very fast, then helped Avi onto the deck.
Ian said, “Age before beauty,” and offered the rope to John. Carter looked at the heavens and shook his head, then took the rope and started to the ship with Ian beside him on the other rope.
As the two men pulled themselves on the deck, John saw a massive presence lifting from a smoky area in the slums. It rose quickly into the air and sailed toward them. Two huge freighters with dirigibles of black and red above them sailed in tandem with an enormous burden tethered between them that was cloaked in black canvas.
“Trouble,” Ian said. He moved to the stern and the air anchor as John hurried to the wheel.
The freighters were two hundred feet higher in altitude than the Wraith, and only fifty yards from the prison walls. Bixie yelled, “It be dah sea monster!”
The air began to hum with a low sound so deep and powerful it seemed to fuzz the air. Birds near the frigates fell from the sky and John’s heart vibrated in his chest. The canvas between the two freighters dropped away and the two huge ships untethered the lines and veered sharply away left and right.
Hovering in the air where the canvas had been was an enormous, torpedo-shaped airship that had no sails and no dirigibles to keep it aloft. An ugly snake-green light throbbed audibly at the ship’s stern. Its surface was as black as obsidian, and colors undulated along its sides like those on oily water. Deep red lines traced patterns along the flanks and bottom and they seemed to glow, as if made of colored glass. The stern rudders were like flukes on a great squid, and glowed with the green light. Two large glass observation windows resembling great eyes were high on the bow. As those on the Wraith watched, the rounded nose of the bow opened like the petals of a black flower.
Out of the dark opening a dozen writhing metal tentacles crawled and waved in the air like blind things searching for prey. Two of them, much larger than the others, were flattened like paddles on the end, and John saw spinning silver suckers on them as large as dinner plates.
From the initial sighting to the present took only seconds, and now the black ship was high above the wall. Colors of red and pink and green pulsed along the ship from stern to bow, and the red lines brightened. Then side panels rolled up, and weapons appeared, pointing down at the prison grounds.
