ne to an officer
of Giri-Vaaka," the officer said. His voice had the high pitched and
metallic quality typical of his race, and he bared his pointed teeth in
a not unfriendly grin, "but the torturers of the Lord Lansa will take
care of you soon enough. I am Toll, commander of a _strikka_ in the
border guards."

"Where are you taking us?"

Toll grinned wickedly.

"To the palace of Lansa, overlord of all Venus."

* * * * *

Gerry noticed that this countryside of Giri-Vaaka was very different
from the pleasant and cultivated fields of Savissa over which he had
passed the day before. The roads were dirt and half over-grown. Not much
of the country was under cultivation. Strange purple bushes with thorns
a foot long covered much of the land, crowding close on the patches of
forest where ten-foot ferns towered high overhead. Sometimes they came
upon a grazing herd of the yard-long giant ants, who would go galloping
away with their antennae waving in the air and their hard-shelled
leg-joints clicking loudly.

Depression hung on Gerry Norton's chest like a physical weight. It was
not alone the fact that every stride carried them deeper into a grim and
hostile land--prisoners whose doom was probably already sealed--that set
him biting his lower lip till he tasted the salt blood on his tongue.
Nor even the fact that Closana shared the same fate because she happened
to have been with him at the time of the raid. It was also the utter
strangeness of everything. Yesterday, in Savissa, the people and the
mode of life had been nearly enough to normal so that he was not deeply
conscious of the strange vegetation and the other things in which Venus
differed from Earth and Mars.

Now everything seemed different, and alien. The lowering yellow skies of
Venus were ominous. The hot winds brought strange smells and seemed to
carry a hint of doom. The one thought that gave him any real hope was
the fact that Portok the Martian had not been captured with the rest of
them. He must have missed them soon after the abduction. There might be
a chance that he and Steve Brent would bring the _Viking_ to look for
them.

* * * * *

They had begun to pass occasional small farms. These were scanty fields
carved out of the creeping masses of purple thorns, usually with a
roughly thatched hut in the center. On one such occasion the farmer and
his family stood apathetically at the roa