"You know me better than that, Jat Or," I said. "You will go to your death calmly, knowing what is in store for them?" "We must do something," he said "we must save them." The Jeddak, Ul Vas, is keeping them for himself." "Because they would prefer death to what is in store for them. "Why do you say unfortunately?" he asked, puzzled. "And the princess and Zanda, too?" he demanded. The Jeddak and his Jeddara sat upon the thrones that seemed vacant to you, and the Jeddak passed the sentence of death upon all of us-we are to die on the seventh day." "There was no silence," I replied "and the room was crowded with people.
"Why did we stand there in silence in that empty chamber before those vacant thrones?" "What was it all about, Vandor?" demanded Jat Or. The others seemed mystified I could read it in the puzzled expressions upon their faces. We did not speak until the door had closed behind the escort that had been invisible to all but Umka and myself. Umka and I were not returned to the cell in which we had previously been incarcerated but were taken with Jat Or, Gar Nal, and Ur Jan to a large room in the Turquoise Tower. It could only result in my own death, and thus would be removed her greatest, perhaps her only, hope of eventual succor and so I went quietly, as they led me away with my fellow-prisoners, my last memory of the audience chamber being the veiled gaze of Ozara, Jeddara of the Tarids. I thought then to leap upon him and strangle him with my bare hands, but my better judgment told me that that would not save Dejah Thoris from the fate for which she was being reserved. "Confine the men in the Turquoise Tower, and take the women to the Tower of Diamonds." To them it was only an empty chair for me it held a creature of flesh and blood-a mortal whose vitals the point of a keen blade might reach.Īgain Ul Vas was speaking. It could not help her to know the fate that was being reserved for her, and it could only cause her needless anguish had she heard the death sentence pronounced upon me.Īll my companions, having seen nothing and heard nothing, stood like dumb cattle before the throne of their cruel judge. I was glad that she was mercifully deaf to what I had heard.
Life is sweet and when I heard the words of doom fall from the lips of the jeddak, Ul Vas, the words that condemned five of us to die on the seventh day, I must naturally have experienced some depressing reaction but I was not conscious of it, in view of the far greater mental perturbation induced by the knowledge that Dejah Thoris's fate was to be worse than death.
Chapter 19: Ozara Copyright© 2012 by Edgar Rice Burroughs