Golden Blood by Jack Williamson

seemed impossible. But he had seen the golden tiger, and its yellow riders, had fought with Malikar, and followed the tiger’s trail for grim long days. Now here was the mountain, with its crown of gold. Impossible. But was it, like so many impossible things, true?
    He goaded the staggering, grumbling hejin to its feet, climbed into the saddle, and rode on, toward the mountain. Aysa had been taken there, he knew, upon the golden tiger, by her yellow captor. And there he was going after her. It might not be easy to find her and set her free, but he was going to do it. If he himself failed, there was yet the Durand luck.
    All day he went on toward the mountain. Sometimes the camel reeled and staggered. Then he dismounted and stumbled along on foot, driving it for a distance, until it could rest.
    The grim lava tableland seemed to stretch out as he advanced. But at sunset he could distinguish the towers and spires of the glittering castle, shimmering, splendid, drawing him with resistless fascination.
    Once more he toiled on, far into the night. At dawn the black rock seemed no nearer, but merely larger. Its black walls, of columnar basalt, frowned precipitously grim. They seemed unscalable. Price, in the more lucid periods of his brain-fevered advance, wondered how the castle could be reached.
    A crenellated wall of black stone skirted the top of the cliffs—a wall apparently useless, for half a mile of sheer precipice hung below it. Within rose the piles of the unattainable castle. The blazing fulgor of gold, and the brilliant white of alabaster. Twisted domes and turrets. Slim towers. Balconied minarets. Broad roofs and pointed spires. Yellow gold, and white marble.
    The high castle was not all of gold. But even so, the value of the yellow metal blazing from it was incalculable, Price knew. The treasure before his eyes might rival in value the monetary gold in the vaults of all the world.
    But gold meant nothing, now, to Price Durand. He was fighting back the mists of madness, battling vision and delirium, ignoring the tortures of exhaustion, of thirst that parched his whole body. He was seeking a girl. A girl with gay violet eyes, whose name was Aysa.
    Again he was riding on. The bloody, implacable sun rose once more, on his right, and flooded the lava plain with cruel light. The brief sanity of the dawn deserted, and madness of thirst rode back upon stinging barbs of radiation.
    It was some time later in the day that the hejin lifted its white, snake-like neck, and looked eastward, with more of life than it had displayed for days. Thereafter it tried continually to turn aside. But Price, with merciless mas’hab stick, drove it on toward the mountain.
    After a time he could make out men standing upon the high black walls. Tiny dolls in blue. Little more than moving blue specks. But he thought they were jeering at him, taunting him with Aysa’s captivity, with their walled security upon the cliffs. He found himself cursing them, in a voice that was a whispering croak.
    Then, again, when he was nearer the mountain, men rode to meet him. Men in hooded robes of blue, upon white racing-camels. Nine of them, armed with long, yellow-bladed pikes, and golden yataghans.
    Price drove his staggering hejin on toward them, whispering insane curses. He knew that they were branded with the mark of the golden snake, that they were the human slaves of the golden man, of Malikar, who had stolen Aysa.
    They stopped on the bare lava before him, and awaited his coming.
    With a thin arm he lifted the golden ax that was slung to the pommel of his saddle. Trying in vain to goad his dromedary to a trot, he advanced, croaking out the syllables of the ax-song of Iru.
    And abruptly the nine whirled, as if in consternation, before this gaunt, golden-armored warrior upon a reeling skeleton of a camel, and fled back toward the mountain, and around it.
    Price’s mount was still trying to turn off toward the right, but he followed on after the nine.