Read Online 2 - Blades of Mars by Edward P. Bradbury - Free Book Online Page A

darkened chamber, straight at the corpse-white creatures!
                   They gibbered and fell back for a moment, a
terrible twittering noise, like that of thousands of bats, filling the air and
echoing on and on through the complex of chambers.
                   Bac Puri's sword swung to left and right, up
and down, slicing off limbs, stabbing vitals, piercing the unnaturally soft,
clammy bodies.
                   And then he was, as if by magic, a mass of
spears. He howled in his pain and madness as javelins like the one we had seen
earlier appeared in every part of his body until it was almost impossible to
distinguish the man beneath.
                   He fell with a crash.
                   Seeing the creatures were at least mortal, I
decided we should take advantage of Bac Puri's mad
attack and, waving my sword, I leapt through the entrance, shouting:
                   'Come - they can be slain!'
                   They could be slain, but they were elusive
creatures and sight and feel of them brought physical revulsion. With the
others behind me, I carried the attack to them and soon found myself in a
tangle of soft, yielding flesh that seemed boneless.
                   And the faces! They were vile parodies of
human faces and again resembled nothing quite so much as the ugly little
vampire bat of Earth. Flat faces with huge nostrils let into the head, gashes
of mouths full of sharp little fangs, half-blind eyes, dark and wicked - and
insensate.
                   As I fought their claws, their sharp teeth and
their spears, they slithered about, gibbering and twittering.
                   I had been wrong about them. There was not a
trace of intelligence in their faces - just a demoniac blood-hunger, a dark
malevolence that hated, hated, hated - but never reasoned.
                   My companions and I stood shoulder to
shoulder, back to back, as the things tore at us.
                   When we saw that our heavy swords could affect
them -and had in fact already despatched dozens of them - our spirits rose.
                   At length the ghouls turned and fled, leaving
only the wounded flopping on the floor. We slew these. There was nothing else
we could do.
                   We attempted to follow them through the far
door, but it closed swiftly and, when we opened it, the creatures had passed on
through the complex.
                   The light stud worked and showed us the dead
creatures better.
                   Bac Puri, in his madness, had undoubtedly
helped save our lives. In attacking the creatures he had taken most of their
javelins into his body.
                   These inhabitants of the underground complex
were slightly smaller than me and seemed, though this was incredible, to
possess hardly any skeleton at all. Our weapons had sliced through flesh and
muscle, had drawn blood - if the thin yellow stuff that stained our blades could
be called blood - but had met no resistance from bone.
                   Steeling myself to inspect the corpses closer,
I saw that there was a skeleton of sorts but the bones were so thin and brittle
that they resembled fine, ivory wires.
                   What strange, aberrant branch of the
evolutionary tree did these creatures spring from?
                   I turned to Hool Haji.
                   'What race is this?' I asked. ‘I think you had
guessed earlier.'
                   'Not the Sheev,' he said with a faint, ironic
grimace. 'Nor the Yaksha, either - and I suspected that it was the Yaksha
before I saw them. These pitiful things are no real threat, unless it be to the mind!'
                   'So you thought they were a race called the
Yaksha -why?'
                   'Because the language on
their spears and on their instruments