I gathered that I had arrived too late to save Vika of Treve.
Deep in the unlit tunnels of the Golden Beetle, those unadorned, tortuous passages through the solid rock, I came upon her body.
I held the Mul-Torch over my head and beheld the foul cavern in which she lay on a bedding of soiled mosses and stems.
She wore only brief rags, the remains of her once long and beautiful garment, torn and stained by what must have been her terrified flight through these dark, rocky tunnels, running, stumbling, screaming, futilely trying to escape the pursuing jaws of the implacable Golden Beetle.
Her throat, I was pleased to see, no longer wore the collar of a slave.
I wondered if her collar had been the same as that placed on the girl I had seen. If the sizes matched I supposed it would have been. The Priest-Kings often practice such small economies, jealously conserving the inanimate resources of the Nest.
I wondered if the removal of the collar meant that Vika had been freed before being closed within the tunnels of the Golden Beetle. I recalled vaguely that Misk had once said to me that in deference to the Golden Beetle it was given only free women.
The cavern in which she lay reeked of the spoor of the Golden Beetle, which I had not yet encountered. Its contrast with the fastidiously clean tunnels of the Nest of Priest-Kings made it seem all the more repulsive in its filth and litter.
In one corner there were scattered human bones and among them the shards of a human skull. The bones had been split and the marrow sucked from them.
How long Vika had been dead I had no way of judging, though I cursed myself for it would not have appeared to be a matter of more than a few hours. Her body, though rigid in the appearance of recent death, did not have the coldness I would have expected. She was unmoving and her eyes seemed fixed on me with all the horror of the last movement in which the jaws of the Golden Beetle must have closed upon her. I wondered if in the darkness she would have been able to see what had attacked her. I found myself almost hoping that she had not, for it would have been more than enough to have heard it following in the tunnels. Yet I myself I knew would have preferred to see the assailant and so I found myself wishing that this brief, terrible privilege had been Vika of Treve's, for I remembered her as a woman of courage and pride.
Her skin seemed slightly dry but not desiccated.
Because of the lack of coldness in the body I listened for a long time for a heartbeat. Holding her wrist I felt for the slightest sign of a pulse. I could detect neither heartbeat nor pulse.
Though I had hated Vika of Treve I would not have wanted this fate to be hers, nor could I believe that any man, even those whom she had injured, could have wished it to be so. As I looked upon her now I felt strangely sad, and there was nothing left in my bosom of the bitterness with which I had earlier regarded her. I saw her now as only a girl, surely too innocent for this, who had met the Golden Beetle and had in consequence died one of the most horrible of deaths. She was of the human kind and whatever might have been her faults, she could not have deserved this grotesque, macabre fate, the jaws and cavern of the Golden Beetle. And looking upon her I now realised too that somehow, not fully understanding, I had cared for her.
'I am sorry,' I said, 'I am sorry, Vika of Treve.'
Strangely there did not seem to be severe wounds on her body.
I wondered if it were possible that she had died of fear.
There were no lacerations or bruises that might not have been caused by her flight through the tunnels. Her body and arms and legs, though cut and injured, were neither torn nor broken.
I found nothing that could have caused her death unless perhaps a small puncture on her left side, through which some poison might have been injected.
There were, however, though I could not conceive of how they could have killed her, five large round swellings on her body. These extended in a line along her left side, reaching from the interior of her left thigh to her waist to a few inches below her shoulder. These swellings, hard, round and smooth, seemed to lie just beneath the skin and to be roughly the size of one's fist. I supposed they might have been some unusual physiological reaction to the poison which I conjectured had been injected into her system through the small, livid puncture, also on her left side.
I wiped the back of my forearm across my eyes.
There was nothing I could do for her now, save perhaps hunt for the Golden Beetle.
I wondered if I could bury the body somewhere, but dismissed the thought in view of the stony passages I had just traversed. I might move it from the filth of the Golden Beetle's den but it, until the creature itself was slain, would never be safe from its despoiling jaws. I turned my back on Vika of Treve, and carrying the torch left the cavern. As I did so I seemed almost to hear a silent, horrible, pleading shriek but there was of course no sound. I returned and held the torch and her body was the same as before, the eyes fixed with the same expression of frozen horror, so I left the chamber.
I continued to search the stony passages of the tunnels of the Golden Beetle but I saw no sign of the creature.
I held my sword in my right hand and the Mul-Torch in my left.
When I made a turn I would take the hilt of the sword, in order to protect the blade, and scratch a small sign indicating the direction from which I had come.
It was a long, eerie search, in the blue light of the Mul- Torch, thrusting it into one crevice and another, trying one passage and then the next.
As I wandered through these passages my sorrow for Vika of Treve struggled with my hatred for the Golden Beetle until I forced myself to clear my head of emotion and concentrate on the task at hand.
But still, as the Mul-Torch burned lower and I yet encountered no sign of the Golden Beetle, my thoughts turned ever and again to the still form of Vika lying in the cavern of the Golden Beetle.
It had been weeks since I had last seen her and I supposed it would have been at least days since she had been closed in the tunnels of the Golden Beetle. How was it that she had been captured only so recently by the creature? And if it were true that she had only been captured so recently how would she have managed to live in the caverns for those days?
Perhaps she might have found a sump of water but what would there have been to eat, I wondered? Perhaps, I told myself, she, like the Slime Worm, would have been forced to scavenge on the previous kills of the Beetle but I found this hard to believe, for the condition of her body did not suggest an ugly, protracted, degrading battle with the worms of starvation.
And how was it, I asked myself, that the Golden Beetle had not already feasted on the delicate flesh of the proud beauty of Treve?
And I wondered on the five strange protuberances that nested so grotesquely in her lovely body.
And Misk had said to me he thought I would be too late for it was near hatching time.
A cry of horror from the bottom of my heart broke from my lips in that dark passage and I turned and raced madly back down the path I had come.
Time and time again I stumbled against outcroppings of rock and bruised my shoulders and thighs but never once did I diminish my speed in my headlong race back to the cavern of the Golden Beetle. I found I did not even have to stop and search for the small signs I had scratched in the walls of the passages to guide my way for as I ran it seemed I knew each bend and turn of that passageway as though it had suddenly leaped alive flaming in my memory.
I burst into the cavern of the Golden Beetle and held the torch high.
'Forgive me, Vika of Treve!' I cried. 'Forgive me!'
I fell to my knees beside her and thrust the Mul-Torch into a space between two stones in the floor.
From her flesh at one point I could see the gleaming eyes of a small organism, golden and about the size of a child's turtle, scrambling, trying to pull itself from the leathery shell. With my sword I dug out the egg and crushed it and its occupant with the heel of my sandal on the stone floor.
Carefully, methodically, I removed a second egg. I held it to my ear. Inside it I could hear a persistent, ugly scratching, sense the movement of a tiny, energetic organism.
I broke this egg too, stamping it with my heel, not stopping until what squirmed inside was dead.
The next three eggs I disposed of similarly.
I then took my sword and wiped the oil from one side of the blade and set the shining steel againsts the lips of the girl from Treve. When I removed it I cried out with pleasure for a bit of moisture had formed on the blade.
I gathered her in my arms and held her against me.
'My girl of Treve,' I said. 'You live.'
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