Then, at last, he got a grip on a jagged fragment near the edge of the slot-like opening. With a final, spasmodic effort, he dragged himself up and sprawled on his belly across the masonry.
On the other side of the wall, spread out before him in the shadowy purple of the Ulnese night, lay the heart of the dead city. From this height he could see its plan, its prospect. There, ragged strips that once had been broad avenues radiated out from a central park. There, a spider-web of cross streets showed, linking the great arteries together.
And there, too, were the ruins Kyla called the Triad—the huge, three-winged structure that rose in the park's heart.
Somewhere beneath it lay the shrine of Xaymar, queen of storms, living goddess of all Ulna.
Awe gripped Haral. Silent, brooding, he stared across the fallen splendor.
Such splendor, so far fallen.
These others, who once had walked this mighty city in its day of greatness—they, too, had been strong. They, too, had felt the drive to power.
Now they lay in dust beneath his feet.
And here he sprawled, beset and wounded, driven by a dream on a madman's quest, mayhap to meet death himself in this silent city of the dead.
His weariness welled up once more; engulfed him.
How had Sark put it—"Why have you come so long a way to die?"
Sark, and a dream turned nightmare.
Yet he'd ridden other nightmares in his time, with less to gain and more to lose. That was the meaning of life; the challenge.
There below lay a living goddess; and a priestess waited to guide him to her.
A priestess.... He pondered. Already there was a bond between them, for she had a courage to match her beauty, and courage was one trait he gave full honor, no matter what the cause to which it rallied. And it had taken courage to stand in the bloody mud of that arena, defying Sark.
Sark?... Haral smiled. Sark, too, would have a role to play before this game was done.
Sark had pledged him death. Sark would keep that pledge, unless he fell before the might of Xaymar's vaunted secret.
And as for himself, Haral—?
The battle lines were drawn: On the one hand, power beyond his fondest dreams ... a living goddess ... a lovely priestess.
On the other, Sark and the coleoptera, defeat and death.
What more was there for a fighting man to ask? What better prize for a wanderer to strive for as he carved his way up from the asteroids' bleak want and bondage?
He laughed aloud. His weariness fell away.
Sitting up, turning, he once more gave attention to the swarming scarlet beetles far below him.
Fear of his light-lance was upon them now, it seemed. They hung back, spread out in a menacing arc that centered on his side of the pillar.
Directly below him, Kyla crouched as if frozen, the ray-gun ready in her hand. But as yet the beetles had not come close enough to find her.
Haral shifted.
Like lightning, a Q-ray speared up from an ebon crevice to one side of the shaft.
The range was too great. The beam burned out yards short of Haral. But a flicker of movement betrayed that one of the monster insects now was climbing along the other side. The next ray might strike home.
Again, Haral sought out the Triad, and the great arterial avenue that led to it.
The nearest of the roadways lay within a hundred yards of this column that was his vantage-point. A pylon still thrust its weathered peak skyward on the far side of the thoroughfare.
A pylon: the crumbling, truncated pyramid burned into Haral's brain like a beacon. The very sight of it sent recklessness surging through him.
To Kyla, below, he cried, "Come round the wall, priestess! Come round! Quick!"
Then, cat-like, he twisted, swinging his legs up and through the gap in the masonry. His body arched—catapulting out into space, hurtling groundward along the towering shaft's other face.
But as he plunged, he shifted the light-lance. Bracing it against his body, he gripped its head between his feet and triggered it on, full strength. Its broad force beam blazed forth, straight at the ground below.
Like a flexible, compressing shaft of radiant energy, it slowed his plunge. Balancing skillfully, he rode the beam on down.
The force of the landing made him wince. But at least, for the moment, he was free of the coleoptera, though even now he could hear the scurrying of their hairy feet in the dirt as they raced to head him off.
Whirling, he ran along the base of the shaft.
As he reached the corner, Kyla came stumbling toward him from the other side of the shaft, scrambling over the ruins, debris, in desperate haste. Two huge beetles, hot for the kill, bore down upon her from behind, closing the gap that separated them from her with every slithering step.
Haral drew back and whipped up the light-lance.
Running full-tilt, the slim girl burst from the shadows, the coleoptera close at her heels.
Haral triggered the light-lance. Its beam slashed through the night. The foremost beetle drew into a writhing ball under its impact, rolling crazily through the rubble. The second fell back, its forelegs half burned off.
The blue man pivoted and ran after Kyla. Catching her by the arm, he half-dragged her with him towards the avenue.
Ahead, the ground leveled off. The broad expanse that had been the roadway spread before them.
Beyond it loomed the pylon.
Behind, the rustle of coleopteron wing-sheaths, the furious fluttering of the vestigial wings themselves, came loud as the rasp of branches in a storm-tossed forest, closer and closer.
Haral shoved the priestess on towards the roadway. Then, boldly, he turned and brought up the light-lance.
The coleoptera broke. Scrambling wildly, they rushed for cover.
"What, yousabars? You fear to meet my lance?" Haral shouted the words, even though he knew the beetles could not hear nor understand. Laughter boiled up in him—the ringing, defiant laughter that was not so much mirth as lust for battle.
But already the insects' Q-ray tubes were blinking. He had no choice but to wheel and again run after Kyla.
And as he ran, a new sound slashed through to him: the familiar keening blast of space-ship carrier craft lancing through the night.
Haral shot one swift glance upward. He glimpsed slim, silvery streaks ... streaks that were carriers in flight.
Sark's carriers—?
Haral cursed aloud. Panting, staggering with fatigue and the weight of his heavy copronium armor, he stumbled through the avenue's broken stone. Once he fell. But Kyla's ray-gun blazed above him, holding back the beetles till he could lurch up and wallow onward.
Then, at last, there was the pylon ... the yawning entrance at its base.
"Hurry!" Kyla cried. "They gain upon us!"
A Q-ray sang its shining song of death too near at hand.
The blue man threw all his strength into one last effort. Together, he and the girl ran through the entry, into the blackness.
Haral turned. He laced his back-track with the light-lance's searing beam.
The beetles halted.
"This way," said Kyla. Her hand gripped Haral's. In silence, he followed her further and further into the pylon's pitchy depths.
Now they walked on a strange, entangling surface that crunched brittly beneath their feet.
Haral flicked on his lance's illumination cell just long enough to glimpse the scene about them.
A prickling ran up and down his spine. For they walked a corridor of death, a passage carpeted with bones ... the bones of those who once had ruled this mighty city. A thousand skulls stared up at them, a hollow-eyed horror. Skeletons spread in heaps and tangles, rising on all sides like some rank, evil fungus.
Kyla's voice came through the darkness: "You wonder why we hate all aliens, warrior? Once, a thousand years ago, this was our proudestShamoncity. Then the first ships came out of space to Ulna. They hurled down bombs, and my people sought to hide here from them. But gas came with the bombs—a heavy gas, and deadly. It seeped into these ancient tunnels, and those who survived the blasts, the radiation, died by thousands—yes, by millions...."
The girl's voice broke.
Her horror, her pain, pressed in on Haral. But he dared not let himself think of them.
He said sharply: "This is no time for talk! Any moment, the coleoptera may be upon us. Those ships that passed above us, too—they may have been Sark's. If Namboina's told where Xaymar lies, Sark's men may beat us to her. If we're to find her first, we must go quickly—"
"Yes, quickly!" Again Kyla's trembling hand seized his. She led the way down a long, steep ramp, then on through what seemed endless blackness. "The old books say these tunnels end beneath the Triad. And then, below that—there lies our sleeping goddess, Xaymar!"
On they toiled, and on. Twice, in the ebon murk, they heard the muffled rattle of coleopteran mandibles. Once, the beetles' acrid stench rose rank and close into their nostrils.
"Pray to your gods, warrior, that they do not guess our goal in time to head us off," Kyla whispered hoarsely.
"Pray to your own, and my light-lance!" Haral answered harshly. He shifted, striving to ease the pain that still throbbed out from his wounded shoulder. Numbly, he wondered how much longer he could go on.
They came out of the tunnel, then, into a vast, echoing subterranean chamber.
"Now we must have light to find our way," the priestess said. "Already we are beneath the Triad."
Haral flicked on his lance's illumination cell.
The room stretched as far as its beam would throw. Other tunnels debouched from the walls on every side.
"This way," said Kyla. "Xaymar's shrine lies beneath the central staircase."
Together, they picked a path through more jumbled bones to the middle of the vast concourse, then descended down the stair they found there in spiral after spiral.
As they went down, the stink of the coleoptera grew steadily stronger.
"If this should be a trap—" Haral began.
"There is no other way," the priestess answered.
The staircase ended in a circular room. High ledges lined its walls. In the center stood a great bronze ball, high as a tall man's head and set in a base of polished stone. Markings were etched upon it, markings that matched the configurations of this wild outlaw world of Ulna.
But slashing even deeper were other markings—the stylized images of the lightning that were Xaymar's symbol.
"A strong man can roll the globe within its base," Kyla told Haral. She studied the markings, chose a spot. "Here is the place. Now spin it upward."
New uneasiness came upon Haral. The muscles along the back of his neck felt stiff and drawn with tension.
He wondered if it could be his weariness, his wound.
But he could not shrug it off.
He said tightly. "This smells of danger, Kyla. There's trouble here."
Once more, he swept the lance's illumination beam across the room.
A long smear on the floor shimmered. Haral dropped to one knee, touched it. "Look! This is wet, and not with water! It's more like the blood of the coleoptera!"
A tremor ran through Kyla. "Then hurry! Quick! Spin the globe!"
The blue man straightened. Narrow-eyed, uneasy, he laid the lance aside. Then, bracing himself, he put his unwounded shoulder to the globe and heaved at it with all his might.
It moved a bare inch; then another.
He strained again.
Slowly, the great sphere turned. The edge of a slot cut in its under side came into view—a crack that widened as the globe rolled within the base, till an oblong orifice lay exposed like a tunnel mouth leading down into the footing.
Haral started to step back.
But, of a sudden, a faint sound came—the muffled ring of metal against stone.
Haral lunged for the light-lance.
But a harsh, unfamiliar voice slashed in upon him—a voice from atop the high, flat ledge that lined the walls: "Drop it,chitza! Drop the light-lance!"
From a different angle, another voice rang: "Quick! Drop it!"
A third: "Just one false move...."
An icy knot gathered in the pit of Haral's stomach. He let the lance fall.
To his right, aPervodrose into view upon the ledge, ray-gun murderously ready. A squat, tentacled Thorian appeared to his left. Sounds told him others were getting up behind him.
Desperately, he looked to Kyla.
But she stood rigid, fists clenched at her sides. The ray-pistol he'd given her had disappeared.
He turned back to thePervod. "Well, finish it!" he cried. "You're here to burn us down. Get it done and be on your way!"
But thePervoddidn't answer.
Instead, there was laughter ... ghoulish, obscene laughter, laughter Haral had heard before.
A chill shook the blue man.
He wished he could be sure it was only his wound.
Again the laugh echoed; again. It came from the staircase, swelling louder and louder with each passing second.
And then, there were morePervods, more Thorians, moreMalyasand Martians and mutants. There, too, wasGarSark's famed Uranian riding-chair sweeping into view on its anti-gravitational direction beam.
There was Sark.
He leered at Haral. Never had the menace stood out in his fat face more sharply.
"Burn you down—?" He repeated the blue man's words as if he liked their flavor. "No, no, youstarbo. I'd not do that. Not now; not ever. It's far too quick a way for you to die."
"You'll do your worst, so do as you like." Haral forced himself to shrug despite the pain.
Sark smirked. "Of course. But first there's another task we must attend."
"Another task—?"
"Yes, now that you two have opened up the way." Sark chuckled, deep in his throat. His fat-rimmed eyes gleamed like tiny, vicious stars. "We go now to waken the living goddess, Xaymar, queen of storms, so that she can deliver her secret into my hands!"
CHAPTER V
There lay the woman!
Xaymar. Woman and death, the end of a madman's quest.
The great crystal globe that cased her rested atop a dais in the center of an echoing, high-roofed chamber. Pulsing, aglow with strange life, its radiance fought back the crypt's impinging gloom.
Haral swayed for a moment under the impact of the sight, his wounds forgotten. Excitement raced through him.
But Sark's men held him by either arm, and others penned him in front and behind, and Sark himself sat in the riding-chair mere feet away, his hand never straying from the cymosynthesizer switch.
And there was Kyla, pale and forlorn, in a Thorian's tentacled grasp.
The end of a quest, indeed. The bitter end.
Sickness came to Haral.
Yet because he was the man he was, such a mood could not last long even here, even now. Thoughtfully, he gazed about—taking in the vaulted roof; the walls, honeycombed with coleopteran burrows; the expressions with which Sark's mongrel crewmen tried to mask their awe.
Above all, he looked upon the woman.
Sark's eyes, too, were gleaming. Drawn as by some mighty lodestone, he sent his riding-chair scudding forward to the dais on which the globe encasing the sleeping goddess rested. His web-fingered hand reached out to touch the crystal.
Then, abruptly, he halted. Slowly, he withdrew his hand and wheeled the chair about. His eyes sought Haral, and his lips parted in a leer.
He said: "Ulna has little love for strangers,chitza."
Haral said nothing.
"Perhaps they thought to trap a few with this pretty bauble," the raider chief remarked. His smile was sinister. "Perhaps Namboina told the things he told too easily, in order that he might laugh in hell because I, too, had died."
Haral shrugged. "You talk in circles,starbo."
"You came here seeking to waken Xaymar, did you not?" Sark smirked. "I merely meant that you should have the chance to do it."
His smile vanished. His words crackled: "Go to the dais,chitza! Awaken Xaymar!"
Haral's captors shoved him forward. Numbly, he clumped across the floor.
Sark and his men drew back to the protection of the archway. Kyla stood in the shadows, pressed against a wall.
For the fraction of a second, the blue man thought of calling out to her to draw the ray-gun she'd hidden in her garments, and blast the raiders with it.
But the fascination that lay in the sleeping goddess pulled even stronger.
He ran his tongue along dry lips. It could be as Sark had guessed—that this was a trap for the unwary; that the first time he touched the bubble would also be the last.
Yet still he stepped onto the dais. Then, breathing deep, he wiped a window through the dust that shrouded the shining globe.
Nothing happened.
A mass of valves and tubes and coils of unfamiliar pattern were mounted high inside the bubble. To one side, a cord like a bell-pull hung nearly to the floor.
But Haral gave the equipment scant heed. He had eyes only for the woman known as Xaymar.
Her body gleamed smooth and sleek in this eerie light—voluptuous, lithe-limbed, perfect. Motionless, naked save for the short, jeweled veil that masked the top half of her face against a nimbus of jet-black hair, she lay like some lovely manikin, frozen in a sleep as deep as death itself. Yet, somehow, there was a warmth and texture to her skin that seemed to reach out even through the crystal; a melding of curves and hollows that cried out that once she, too, had been alive.
And might still live!
The blue man sucked in air. Pivoting, he studied the panel set in the great globe's base.
The switch was there, just as Kyla had described it.
And the secret prayer, the call to waken—?
Only the soul of dead Namboina could chant it now.
Haral clutched the lever. Then, stiff with tension, he jammed it shut.
Seconds crept by on leaden feet. He felt a lone drop of icy sweat slide down his spine.
Then, inside the bubble, greenish mist began to rise. It filled the crystal casing. Eddying, swirling, it thickened till the woman's recumbent form grew dim and blurred.
In the vibrant stillness, Haral could hear his own heart beat.
Slowly, the mist within the great globe thinned again. A tube set high above the woman flashed on. Waves of pale violet light washed over her smooth, nude, perfect body.
In spite of himself, Haral's tension soared.
Now—abruptly, without warning—a wild, shrill, keening sound rose thinly. A new light blazed above the woman. Like lightning striking, a shining, silvery beam lanced down out of a queerly-shaped projector.
A sheet of crackling silver flame encased the woman. Her body went suddenly rigid. She jerked spasmodically, lifting half clear of her cot in a writhing, twisting arch.
Then, sharply, light and sound cut off again.
The woman fell back limply and lay still.
It dawned on Haral that his nails were rasping against the crystal.
Through an interminable moment, the woman within sagged inert as any corpse. Then, almost imperceptibly, her lips quivered. The bare breasts stirred as she drew a shallow, sobbing breath.
In the same instant, it seemed to Haral that he could see her lids open beneath the veil. But he could not be sure.
She tried to lift herself; fell back.
Fiercely, Haral slashed at the crystal with his elbow.
The heavy copronium elbow-piece of his armor tore through the globe—puncturing, not shattering. Haral stabbed at the bubble again, and it ripped, in the manner of some flexible, transparent plastic. Forcing a hand into the gash, the blue man tore a great chunk loose, clear to the floor: then another.
Stepping inside, he bent over the woman—gripping her shoulders; straining for her whisper.
"Quick! The flagon—!" Her hand stretched out in a feeble gesture.
Haral followed the movement to a holder beside the cot. It held a flask. Snatching up the container, he tore away the seal, then lifted and held the woman while she drank in great, greedy gulps.
When at last the flask was empty, she sank back once more. But now color was flowing to her face. Her breathing steadily grew deeper and more regular.
Haral let his weight rest on the edge of the cot. Very gently, he reached to lift the goddess' veil.
Spasmodically, her hands came up. "No—!" Nails dug into his wrist.
He started at the tempestuous violence of her; the sudden strength. Then, wearily, he drew back his hand.
In the same instant Sark's voice lanced in: "Leave her alone,chitza!"
Haral turned.
The raider chief and his men were back, now. They poured into the crypt in a rush. Sark himself swept toward the dais in his riding-chair as on the crest of a wave, ahead of all the others. His thick lips were working, his eyes hot with excitement.
But his fingers never left the cymosynthesizer switch.
Haral clenched his fist in frustrated fury. Of a sudden his wounds, his weariness, hung heavy on him.
He glimpsed Kyla. Hesitantly, she, too, was coming towards the goddess. Her lips were parted as if to cry out in protest against this whole bizarre affair. Deep lines of strain marred the pale loveliness of her face.
Sark cried: "Back,chitza! Stand clear of Xaymar!"
For an instant Haral stiffened. Then, painfully, he forced himself to his feet.
But now a new voice interrupted, imperious and vibrant:
"Who are you to give commands, fat beast, here in the innermost sanctuary of Xaymar, queen of storms?"
Haral pivoted.
The woman on the cot now sat erect, her very stance a mirror of haughtiness and pride.
Anger flamed in Sark's puffy cheeks. "Who dares to question? I am Sark—"
"Yes. He is Sark," Haral cut in. He poured savage irony into his words. "They say you are a goddess, Xaymar. But he—he is Sark,garof the space-raiders, a being so fierce and brave he does not even dare to waken you himself!"
"Silence,chitza!" shrieked the raider chief.
Haral mocked him: "He seeks your secrets, Xaymar—if he can pay the price with someone else's life, and not his own! As for commands—what does he care that others call you goddess? He is the greatGarSark—"
Sark cried: "Kill thestarbo—!"
Now, for the first time, the woman men knew as Xaymar gave the gross raider heed. Twisting, she faced him. Her hand touched the cord that hung down beside the cot on which she rested, and even that simple gesture was somehow pregnant with a nameless menace that halted Sark and his crewmen in their tracks.
In a voice suddenly cold as Pluto's ice-things, she said, "If he dies, creature, you die with him!"
For an instant there was a silence that echoed vibrant tension. Then, calmly, Xaymar turned again to Haral. "And you, blue one—?" she queried. "What of you? Why do you seek me?"
Haral let her words hang for a moment. He looked out across the crypt ... past Sark, the crewmen, Kyla....
Kyla. She, too, rode with destiny; but it was a different destiny than his, a destiny that tolled her doom already. The lines that etched her face seemed even deeper now, set off by the contrast with the shimmering spun gold of her hair. There was more than beauty in her. There was spirit, also, born of stark courage, and all at once the very sight of her brought a poignancy that stabbed him like a knife.
But he pushed it back, and let his laugh ring out. "I seek the only thing in the void worth seeking!" he slashed recklessly. "I seek power, Xaymar—the power to fulfill my destiny and carve an empire. But I never thought to find the key to it locked in the brain of a woman as beautiful as you, or I'd have sought it sooner!"
Xaymar's ripe lips parted. "Your tongue is skilled, blue man! It alone should carry you to your empire!"
"But does that skilled tongue have truth, too, my goddess? Or is it so practiced that now it lies by instinct?" It was Kyla who lashed out, from a place close by the dais. Passion had brought hot color to her cheeks.
"They lie, my goddess! All these aliens lie!" she rushed on fiercely. "Hate and greed are the only creed they know. Already Ulna lies drenched in the blood they've shed—the blood of your followers, ground down by these monsters to slaves or less. Now, still thirsting for more wealth, more power, they seek you, too, my goddess! They would make you their slave—tear your secrets from you, that they may use the power that lies within the lightning to reach out across the void for yet more worlds to conquer—"
The woman who was the living goddess Xaymar, queen of storms, stared coolly down at her slim young priestess, Kyla.
"You are of theShamon, are you not?" she interrupted, and open condescension was in her tone.
"Yes, my goddess—"
"A race of stuffy fools, theShamon."
"My goddess—!"
"You prove my point. Who but a race of stuffy fools would try to pass off a sleeping woman as a goddess? That is, unless they were knaves, instead, seeking some gain by their deception."
"But these aliens would destroy us—"
"And why not, if the best you can do is pray to me for succor? The blue one spoke true. Power is the only thing in all the void worth seeking—for without it, man and race alike are doomed!"
Kyla stood very still. But, watching her, Haral could see her lips begin to tremble. The color was draining from her face again. Her features had taken on a stiff, unnatural set.
"Then ... Xaymar, queen of storms, deserts her faithful ones for aliens? She casts off myShamonpeople ... me, her priestess—?"
Xaymar tossed her head. "I tire of this dreary prattle!" she cried, and gestured to a massive, tentacled Thorian at Sark's side. "You! Take thisShamondrab away!"
For the fraction of a second the Thorian's great saucer eyes rolled from Xaymar to Sark to Kyla. Then, wordless, he undulated towards the shrinking girl.
And Haral, too, stared, still not quite believing that this incredible creature, be she woman or devil or goddess, could so take command even of Sark's own men.
Then, again, he glimpsed the stiffness in Kyla's face, and a strange uneasiness gripped him. Perhaps it was the way she stood, almost as if waiting for the Thorian, with no thought of retreating.
The Thorian whipped a tentacle towards her.
But in the same instant Kyla, too, was moving. Her hair shimmered like quicksilver as she slid beneath the Thorian's snake-like member. Her hand darted beneath her filmy outer garment, then out again, jerking forth her ray-gun. Her body twisted as she stabbed the weapon close to the Thorian's monstrous bulk.
Then she was blasting, at so short a range that the raider's flesh burst asunder under the impact of the beam.
The Thorian's tentacles lashed out in frenzy. But already the girl was leaping back beyond his grasp.
Now, she was turning; springing up onto the dais. Her voice rang with a fury born of outrage:
"Die, traitor! Die for theShamonand for Ulna!"
She blazed a ray straight for Xaymar's naked body.
Haral threw himself forward, between the two women. Desperately, he tried to knock Kyla's ray-gun up with one hand while he swept Xaymar from her cot with the other.
But his wound-stiffened shoulder caught. The ray-gun's energy bolt burst on his own chest-plate. Its impact smashed him down. For a split second he saw the crypt as a blazing kaleidoscope of action, a maelstrom swirling in on a pain-wracked vortex that was his brain. He caught the madness in Kyla's eyes; the sudden panic in the way that Xaymar fell. Beyond them, the space-raiders' faces merged in a weird blurred jumble.
Then Sark was roaring, "Now! Now! Seize them—!"
Frantically, Haral tried to tear clear of pain and shock and debris.
But before he could move, Xaymar caught the cord that hung beside her. Spasmodically, she jerked it down.
He knew, somehow, that it was an alarm, even though the sound of its signal was pitched too high and thin for human ears.
The sight that followed was one of the strangest he had ever seen.
For out of the thousands of coleopteran burrows that pock-marked the walls of this hidden crypt, a horde came leaping—a horde of great scarlet beetles that hurtled down upon Sark and his raiders before they could so much as turn. A living wave, they burst over the crewmen and the dais—clutching the aliens, bearing them down; yet holding them, not killing.
Haral found himself flat on his back, pinned there by two monstrous coleoptera. Kyla, too, lay prone, shaking under the touch of another of the beetles.
Haral twisted, looking for Xaymar.
Alone out of all the throng, she stood erect, untouched. A horde of the coleoptera had grouped themselves about her. Now they bent low in weird attitudes of genuflection.
The woman waved them back with a quick, impatient gesture. Swiftly, she picked her way to Haral.
The beetles that held him gave way before her. Gripping the blue man's hand, she helped him to his feet.
"You see, warrior—?" She lifted her hand in a sweeping, all-inclusive gesture. "I know what power means—a power greater than any the void has ever seen. I, too, have carved an empire: the empire of these silent ones, the coleoptera. To them, I am truly goddess. They are mine to command."
Haral swayed a little. Tiny waves of nausea washed over him, rising like vapors out of the pain flowing from his wound. With a sort of dull detachment, he observed that blood had begun to drip from his left hand's fingers once again.
A trifle thickly, he said, "I hear your words. But what good is your beetle empire? Where can it lead you? How far can you go?"
The woman called Xaymar smiled a smile that was old when this outlaw world was young. "Did you not say I held the key to your fate, blue one? The coleoptera are my workers and my warriors. Because I saw the role that they might play, I helped them gain the power of thought; so now they help me turn my dreams to destiny."
"Dreams?" Haral muttered. "Dreams indeed! They say you've lain here sleeping a thousand years."
Xaymar laughed softly, tauntingly. "And why do you suppose I slept so long, blue warrior? Believe me, it was not out of boredom. No; I, too, like you, reached out for power. But first I had to fill my legion's ranks. I needed time for my coleoptera to breed and multiply, in preparation for my day of conquest...."
She paused, and the jewels with which her veil was set seemed to gleam so bright that Haral closed his eyes against them. Once again the air of nameless menace he'd felt before crept through the crypt.
Xaymar's voice came as from afar: "We shall ride together, warrior, you and I! You've saved my life, and you have a will that matches mine. I've longed this thousand years and more for a man like you to share my dreams...."
The words went on and on, but Haral could no longer hear. The sickness in him grew. He knew of a sudden that he was going to fall.
Words and more words—an incoherent jumble. He was toppling now, yet there was nothing he could do to stop it. In great, languorous spirals, the floor of the dais was roaring up into his eyes.
But as it approached, somehow, it grew dimmer ... dimmer ... dimmer....
Then new words came. Or, rather, old words, thundering out of the black sack of his memory.
Kyla's words:
"Each night she took a different lover—and then, at the dawn, at her command, each one was slain!"
The blackness closed in....
CHAPTER VI
Haral woke in the glow of a wondrous iridescent warmth that pulsed through every nerve and fiber of his body. The pain and weariness were gone. Surging strength, new vigor, flooded through him.
Slowly, still not quite believing his own senses, he opened his eyes.
He discovered that the iridescence was no mere metaphor, no figment of his imagination. For he lay in what seemed a boundless sphere of light that painted his naked body with an interweaving, continually changing tapestry of glowing color.
He would have reached up to touch the wound in his shoulder, then, but when he tried, he found he could not move; that his whole body was somehow gripped in invisible bonds of force that held and molded him at will. They twisted him, turned him, flexed and stretched his muscles. Apparently without support, he moved through space and time—now flat on his back; now curled first on one side and then the other; now upright, upside down, cramped or contorted into an infinity of positions.
When his head rotated as under the pressure of unseen fingers, he at last glimpsed his shoulder. With a shock, he saw it had grown well and whole. No wound was visible, no scar apparent.
The blue man relaxed, content to bask unresisting in this wondrous healing bath of radiant energy.
Then, slowly, the radiance dimmed. Haral felt himself sinking gently. His back brushed what might have been resilient fabric, and he came to rest. The last of the light had faded. He lay in utter darkness.
Xaymar's voice reached out of the blackness close at hand: "Is the pain gone from your body, warrior?"
"Yes. All gone."
"Yet this unit that gives out life and strength is but one of the least of all my secrets!" The voice of the woman-goddess took on a deeper, more vibrant timbre. "There are so many things I know—so many secrets of life and death—But come! You shall see them with me!"
A switch clicked as she spoke. Light came—a strange, halo-like glow without visible source, utterly unlike the shimmering radiance that had gone before. It formed a lambent wall against the blackness.
Haral sat up. He found himself on a cot much like the one on which the queen of storms herself had lain, back in the crypt.
She was here beside him now, her lips curved in a smile of welcome below the veil. She wore a close-fitting, high-necked garment of some unique material that matched the glistening blue-black of her hair. Yet, though the raiment masked her body's ripe curves with fabric, the overall effect became one of accent rather than concealment.
It made Haral suddenly conscious of his own nude frame. He shifted.
Xaymar laughed. "There's a cloak on the rack beneath your cot, my blue one." She turned. "Follow me."
The note of mockery in her tone jabbed at Haral beyond all reason. But he swept the cloak about him with one swift, incisive movement and fell in beside the woman.
He wondered where this road would take him. Whether it led to destiny ... or death.
Instinctively, at the thought, he shot a narrow-eyed glance at Xaymar, and his blood quickened. The momentary irritation fell away. Perhaps even death would not be too high a price to pay for a night as this strange creature's lover.
But why a single night? Why did she kill when the new day came?
Above all, why did she wear that weird jeweled veil?
For the moment, at least, he could not hope for answers. Shrugging, he turned his attention elsewhere.
The light was moving with them as they walked, like a torch afloat in an encroaching sea of blackness. The echo of their footsteps told the blue man that they must be in some vast, high-ceilinged chamber—a cave, a hall.
Yet they stood alone. There was no sign of life about them.
Haral said: "What happened to the others?"
"The ... others—?" Xaymar's voice held a curious note of hesitation.
"Sark and his men. The priestess, Kyla."
It was the woman's turn to shrug. "I let Sark go, on his promise that he'd blast off within the hour he reached his ships."
"You let him go—?" Haral stared. His tension and temper soared. "Are you mad, woman? Sark's word's worth nothing. He'll blast off, yes—but only to roar down on you here and smash you!"
Xaymar stopped short. Before Haral realized what she was doing, she lashed a slap out at him. Fire flashed through his face beneath her fingers. "Have a care who you call mad, blue warrior!" she cried in fury. "Men have died for less—as you can die—"
The sight of her anger lit a spark within Haral. Of a sudden he did not care whether this was death or destiny. Before she could escape, he caught the hand with which she'd slapped him and jerked her to him.
"The blood runs hot in others' veins as well as yours," he rasped out tightly. "You've gone too long with your arrogance unchallenged. But I'm the man to break that habit."
Her nails raked bloody paths along his sides. Her feet beat at his shinbones.
Haral cursed her—and then, bringing her face to his by sheer brute strength, he kissed her.
Her body went limp against him. Her bruised lips welcomed his.
He breathed deep; straightened. "And now—we'll see what's hidden beneath that veil!"
Her body went rigid again. She twisted as he clutched for the jeweled mask. "No, blue man—"
He caught the veil and ripped it off.
In the same instant, before he could see her face, the light snapped out.
They stood there in the darkness, then, adventurer and goddess, bodies tight together, the silence broken only by the hoarse rasp of their breathing.
Then Haral said, "I can wait as long as you can, Xaymar."
She laughed softly. "You leave no doubt about your daring, do you, warrior? Nor am I even angry with you for it. I like a man with the strength to take what he desires. But not quite yet. You'll have to wait a little while."
"Then you'll wait, too—till the light goes on again."
"Must I?" The mocking note crept back into her tone. "Don't press the gods of chance too far...."
"You'll wait," Haral said.
As he spoke, he felt something touch his backbone a little above his waist.
The next second two great claws clutched him just below the ribs.
He stiffened.
Xaymar laughed again. "We'll wait!" she mocked him. "We'll wait till the light goes on—or a coleopteron rips out your backbone!"
Haral stood motionless. His hands all at once were slick with sweat.
Xaymar's ripe body came full against him. Her hands touched his face, pulled his lips down to hers. Then—fiercely, brutally—as he had kissed her, she kissed him.
Her words came, a vibrant whisper: "You are the one who's mad, blue man! But it is a madness that can lead you to your own dark destiny—if you live!"
She twisted free.
There was a moment of black silence. Then the light snapped on. Once more the veil masked Xaymar's face as it had before.
The mandibles let go of Haral. Stiffly, he looked around.
Half a dozen of the great scarlet beetles stood within the lighted circle, watching him with cold, multi-faceted insectile eyes.
He shuddered.
As if there had been no interruption, Xaymar said: "You wonder why I let Sark go. But I had no choice. He told of a thing called a cymosynthesizer with which he could destroy our planetoid of Ulna."
"And if he lied—?"
"He did not. I looked into his brain and saw he spoke the truth as best he knew it."
"You ... looked into his brain?"
"I have that power." Xaymar's smile was cryptic, whether with dark mirth or ancient wisdom Haral could not say. "Thoughts to me are things to grasp like tools or weapons. When I focus my brain I can turn another mind inside out and drain it dry."
An uneasiness chilled Haral's spine. "You speak in jest...."
"You mean—you wish I did?" The woman laughed aloud, and the light glinted in her hair as on dark waters. "In jest, then—I looked into Sark's brain, and when I saw the things I saw, I turned him and his crewmen free."
Haral grimaced. "And he'll come back."
"Of course. I saw that, too. But I do not care." Again Xaymar smiled her cryptic smile. "Now, come! You shall see why I await him without fear!"
They walked on again. Then, at last, there was a door ahead and, beyond it, a long, dark passageway.
Haral frowned as he strode through the murk beside the woman. Once more, as he had a dozen times before, he thought of Kyla, with her dreams and rippling golden hair and slim young body. She was so different from this dark voluptuary who was a living goddess. Yet she, too, had shared the dangers of this adventure with him.
What had happened to her? He wondered. But something told him to make no query.
Another door loomed. Xaymar cried, "Behold my warriors!"
She flung the portal wide.
Haral stared.
For here were no coleoptera. Here lay what appeared to be a mausoleum, instead—another vast, echoing chamber, dim-lighted and stretching out as far as the eye could see, with banked, sealed crypts rising row on row from floor to ceiling, like some monstrous, many-celled honeycomb.
Xaymar asked: "Now do you see why I slept so willingly for a thousand years, my warrior? In each cell here is sealed an egg, preserved secure from harm and the ravages of time. From each egg, when the time to strike has come, will spring one of my fighting coleoptera—"
She broke off; hurried the blue man up a ramp to another level.
Here were stacked Q-ray tubes, light-guns, and blasters, piled high in bins by millions upon millions.
"Come! There is still more!"
They climbed another ramp.
At the top, before a heavy door, a huge coleopteron waited.
The woman who was the living goddess Xaymar paused, head tilted. It was as if she were listening to some silent message. Then she turned, half towards Haral, and her lips curved in a strange smile that was somehow infinitely evil. She spoke no word, but even the blue man could feel the hammering, affirmative impact of her thought-waves: "Yes ... yes ... yes...."
The great scarlet beetle moved swiftly off down another corridor.
Xaymar moved close to the door. Like magic, it opened before her.
She said: "Beyond this door, no being but me has ever gone, blue warrior! But now you, too, shall enter!"
Haral followed her across the threshold.
The door swung shut behind them.
The room in which they stood was cramped and box-like, with walls and floor and ceiling of dully gleaming metal. As the portal closed, a feeling of motion pulled at Haral's vitals. It dawned on him that they had entered some sort of carrier that even now was hurtling them upward with the speed of lightning.
Then the feeling left him. The door opened once more, and they stepped out into the hot yellow light of an Ulnese day.
Shielding his eyes against the sudden glare, Haral looked about.
Above them rose a gigantic crystal bubble, a dozen times as large as the one beneath which Xaymar had lain sleeping. Set high amid craggy grey and green and purple peaks, it thrust up like a beacon, a watch-tower, into the yellow sky. Concentric circular tracks on which were mounted banks of strange, snub-nosed projectors, each set at a different angle, ran round the globe above his head. Control boards, a mass of indicator dials and switches, were set at intervals along the metal-walled, chest-high base.
Xaymar touched his arm. "Your trappings, blue man...."
He turned to her gesture. There, stacked in a niche beside the shaft up which they'd come, lay his light-lance, his armor, the clothes he'd worn.
"Your steed, too...." The woman pointed through the crystal, down the slope.
Haral stared. His great blue Mercurianhwalondragon moved restlessly to and fro in a narrow natural yard bounded on three sides by steep rock walls less than half an Earth mile from them. Two coleoptera stood guard along the open side.
Narrow-eyed, Haral turned back to the woman. "But why? What made you bring my gear here, and myhwalon?"
"Is it not plain?" shrugged Xaymar. "You are a warrior, and I have need of such to lead my beetle hordes to battle."
"To battle—?"
"My day has come. In a little while I shall reach out and seize all Ulna. You know the ways of the aliens who now hold it, so you shall be in the van of my advancing legions. You'll show them when and where to strike; how best to meet the alien weapons."
Haral tried to probe the blankness that was her veil; to fathom the mind of this strange woman who hid her beauty behind its jewel-sprayed folds.
At last he said: "You've picked the wrong man, Xaymar. I'm a warrior, yes—but not such a fool that I'll try to lead your ground-bound hordes out to battle against space ships. The wars of the void are fought in the air, not down in the muck and mire of a pygmy planetoid. Sark would butcher your beetles from above before they'd marched a mile."
Xaymar's lips curved. The clash of cymbals, of swords and shields, was in her laugh.
"This one war will be different, blue man! We'll fight to seize and hold the ground till Ulna's taken. Then will be time enough to talk of ships that slash across the void, and battles for planets fought in deep space."
"But Sark's fleet—"
"Sark will have no fleet!" the woman slashed back fiercely. Her whole body swayed, and even here, in the full light of the blazing yellow sky, her hair showed black as a Martiankoboc'ssinister hood. "You came here seeking my secret, warrior. I mean that you—"
Close at hand, a bell rang shrilly.
Xaymar halted in mid-sentence. Whirling, she flicked a switch on the nearest of the control boards.
A plate like that of a visiscreen flashed on. Swiftly, the woman adjusted dials.
Blurs on the plate resolved into a horde of rising silver ships. Like screaming meteors, they lanced into the sky.
"Sark's ships?" the woman who was a fleshly goddess asked Haral coolly.
He nodded. "Yes. Carriers. Light craft, small and slow enough to fight close-in on a world the size of Ulna."
"But not all Sark's fleet?"
"No. His great raiders would have no room here to maneuver."
"Then Sark himself still lingers at the spaceport, waiting to see how I'll meet this latest challenge."
"What—?"
Xaymar laughed. "He fears me, blue man. I read it in his brain as he sat there in my crypt. And I learned more: this weapon of his you call a cymosynthesizer is useless once he's in the air. So he'll leave it on the ground and then stay with it for the sake of the protection that it offers, instead of risking his own fat neck in one of the ships he sends against me."
The ships on the screen were looming ever larger now. Streaks of silver light set against dullness, they hurtled closer ... closer....
Forcing casualness into his voice, Haral gestured to them. "And what will you do when at last they reach us?" He touched what appeared to be some sort of triangulation finder. "At the rate they're moving, they should be here within another minute."
Turning, not answering, Xaymar stepped to a huge switch-box set in the center of the bubble's floor and threw a lever. An eerie, whining sound rose, and with it a faint smell of ozone.
The woman threw a second lever. A third. A fourth.
The whining grew louder, the odor stronger.
Xaymar moved back to the control board. Almost idly, she said: "They call me queen of storms."
Haral stayed silent. But of a sudden his heart was pounding.
"Do you know the power of the lightning, blue man? Can you vision the force that lies locked within it?"
The whining continued to rise. It was almost a thin scream now.
Still Haral waited, wordless.
Xaymar twisted dials again. The warrior saw that her knuckles showed white through the skin. Her voice took on new intensity, new vibrance:
"You dream of power, blue man—but never can you have imagined power such as this!" She laughed, a little wildly. "I cannot pretend to explain these things so you can understand them. But a thousand years ago I learned how to create what I choose to call an ionic vacuum—an electrolytic vortex that sucks in electrons from the atmosphere's neutral atoms. The very process sets up a storm condition. Wind, rain, turbulence—they all come with it."
Like an echo to her words, a shadow fell across the inverted crystal bowl in which they stood.
Incredulously, Haral shot a fast glance skyward. An icy knot took form deep in his midriff.
Where mere seconds before he had gazed up into the bright, clear yellow of the Ulnese day, now clouds were swirling! Before his very eyes, they grew and darkened.
Through his haze of shock, Xaymar's words came dimly:
"A storm is a dynamo, blue one—a dynamo greater than it lies within man's power even to conceive! It generates the lightning. Mighty bolts crash from it down to earth—spent, wasted. But these projectors,"—she gestured to the massed banks that lined the tracks overhead—"these projectors can direct its fury! They focus its shafts, throw out magnetic targets for it...."
Now the whole sky above them had grown dark. For as far as Haral could see, the storm-clouds gathered. The roar of thunder drowned out the shrilly keening whine that filled his tortured ears. Lightning leaped in blinding sheets and chains and flashes.
With an effort, the blue man tore his eyes from the violence overhead and looked again to the viewer plate by the control board.
It blazed with the glint of Sark's carrier ships. A rushing silver wall of death, they hurtled ever nearer.
"Twenty seconds more!" Xaymar cried into his ear. "Twenty seconds—and they perish!"
The hurtling ships overflowed the screen. Hulls blotted out the sky.
"Ten seconds!"
The plate blurred, out of focus.
"Look! They come!" shrieked Xaymar, and there was a vindictive triumph in her scream that whispered of something close to madness.
Haral followed her sweeping gesture—up, to the sky itself, and the rocket-borne death that dwelt there.
There were Sark's ships—a fleet, a horde. Now they lanced downward on their final strike. The roar of their rockets slashed through the storm.
In spite of himself, Haral felt the clutch of fear.
Overhead, the projector banks were tracking. The lightning was a blinding, continuous flash.
"Is it power you want?" screamed Xaymar madly. "I'll show you power, blue warrior!"
Her hand darted out and pressed a button.
The heavens exploded.
Desperately, Haral kept his eyes on the raider fleet. Through the blaze and glare, he saw great, jagged bolts spear down upon it. Some ships were split, some torn asunder. A hundred smashed themselves to atoms on the cruel crags of the mountains.
Others simply disappeared in mid-air.
In ten seconds not one was left still in the sky.
Haral sagged limp against an upright.
How many battles had he seen across the void? How many ships gone down in blood and flame?
But beside this, all the rest were nothing. Where they left off, this cataclysmic holocaust began.
It was the answer to his dream of power, his pact with destiny. Given this weapon—yes, this weapon only—the universe was his!
He swayed in the grip of his mad ambition. His heart was a driving, hammering piston.
Xaymar said: "Throw the switches, blue one. Let the storm pass."
Numbly, Haral stepped to the box and slammed down the four heavy levers.
The whining died away. The smell of ozone faded.
The woman came close to him. "We shall rule the universe together, warrior...."
He looked at her ... at raven hair and ripe, half-parted lips and slender fingers ... the temptation, incarnate, that lay in her perfect body.
She whispered: "Kiss me, warrior!"
A tremor ran through him. He pulled her to him.
Her head went back. Her lips were trembling.
Breathing deep, Haral kissed her. The softness of her mouth made him a little giddy. Her lips clung to his. He could feel her arms about him, the pressure of her breasts against him.
But the jewels in her veil gouged his cheek.
What did that bizarre mask hide?
And there were Kyla's words again:
"Each night she took a different lover—and then, at the dawn, at her command, each one was slain!"
He lifted his head, then, and the living goddess whom men called Xaymar laughed softly, still in his arms.
"How many men have sought my kisses, warrior? Yet I ask you to claim them!"
Haral did not speak.
Her midnight hair brushed his face. "There will be nights without number, blue one—nights when you'll forget even your ambition in my arms!"
"Yes."
She drew back a fraction. "Why, then, are you so silent? Am I not beautiful? Can you not feel the warm fire I promise you?" Her voice took on a sudden edge. "Or—is it that you would rather hold that blondeShamon tirotthey call Kyla in your arms?"
With an effort, Haral held his face immobile. "Now you speak as a woman, not a goddess. Kyla was your priestess. I sought her only to guide me to you."
Xaymar pushed back from him. "Have a care how you lie to me, blue man! I looked into your mind while you lay unconscious. She was there, that Kyla! Your first thoughts were of her!"
Haral let his words go harsh and angry: "You still talk like a jealous woman! She gave me only trouble. I care nothing for her."
"Trouble? That was all she gave you?" Xaymar taunted. Her lips twisted. "Then you'll be happy to hear what I've done with her, warrior!"
"What you've done—?" Haral's words came blurted. In spite of himself, tension rolled up within him. "What do you mean? Where is she?"
"You'll laugh with me, blue man! She tried to kill me, yet I was merciful, as a goddess should be. Instead of tearing her heart out, I freed her, and found a mate to woo her."
"A mate—?"
"A mate fit for her kind oftirot." Xaymar laughed, and of a sudden the spell of nameless menace and infinite evil Haral had caught before rang in the sound. "I gave her to Sark."
"Sark—!" Haral reeled.
"Yes, Sark." The woman moved back one sinuous step, then another, like a great cat toying with its prey. "He asked that I let him take her away from Ulna with him. I said no. But then, later, it came to me that I could devise no greater suffering for her, so I sent her to him."
"You ... sent her to that creature?"
"Yes. Already she's on her way there." A fiend would have envied Xaymar's smile. "That was why the coleopteron was wailing for me at the shaft below here. He sought my last decision—and I said, 'Yes. Good riddance. Let Sark have her.'"
Through a scarlet haze, Haral cried out, "Curse you, Xaymar!"
He was moving forward in the same instant, lashing out at her, and he saw her mouth go slack with shock at his sudden onslaught.
Then his fist hammered home on her jaw: The force of it lifted her and slammed her back across the bubble, to land in a heap on the floor, crumpled and unconscious.
Then the haze cleared. Numbly, Haral stared down at her.
Why had he done it? What did he care whether Sark got Kyla? He'd meant it when he said she'd given him naught but trouble. His destiny lay here—here, with Xaymar, queen of storms; here, with the secrets that would give him the power to carve out his dream empire. This other was sheer madness—without sense or logic; without even volition.
Yet he'd done it.
And now—?
Already, out there in the green-grey-purple Ulnese mountains, a slimShamongirl was being dragged to a monster.
Almost without thinking, he looked to his armor.
He was half-way down the slope to hishwalonbefore it dawned on him that, with Xaymar unconscious and at his mercy, he'd still forgotten even to look beneath her veil.
CHAPTER VII
Bleakly, Haral looked down on the knot of coleoptera moving through the valley below.
There could be no mistake. This was the party. Even from here, sitting hishwalonhigh amid the barren crags above them, he could glimpse the shimmering gold of the captive Kyla's hair.
He pondered. Nearly a dozen of the giant beetles were in the party, guarding the girl on all sides.
Further, considering their mastery of mind-to-mind communication, it seemed impossible that they had not heard by now of his escape and mission.
Almost affectionately, he touched his own worn helmet. With it to insulate his brain, at least he had little to fear from the weird mind control that was their deadliest weapon.
As for the odds, what real difference did it make whether they were a dozen to one against him, or a hundred? From any angle, his course was madness, and no calculation could make it otherwise. He'd thrown out logic when he struck Xaymar down and blasted the two beetles on guard over hishwalon. Now his fate lay with the gods of the void and his own right arm.
Laughing harshly, he wheeled the dragon. Then, light-lance raised and ready, he moved on down the rock-strewn defile for a closer survey of the situation.
When he came out of the gorge, he'd quartered the distance between him and his quarry. Thoughtful, narrow-eyed, he studied the group in more detail from the cover of a boulder.
But the coleoptera were obviously on guard. Two ranged ahead as scouts. Another pair closed up the rear, while one held to either side of the procession's line of march as outriders. The rest of the party stayed close-grouped about the girl.
Again the blue man checked the rugged terrain, searching for some accident of ground that would give him the chance he needed.
Ahead, the valley narrowed sharply, then divided. One of the two spurs, that on the left, was cramped and tortuous, a cleft-like gully. The other, smoother and wider, had walls so steep that it could not but force in the beetles covering the company's flanks.
Haral breathed a fraction faster. Spurring thehwalonforward, following the high ground and taking advantage of every rise and rift and clump of cover, he headed full-tilt for the narrow left spur of the divided valley, racing to reach it ahead of the coleoptera.
His mount strained to the task. Clawing through broken stone, around boulders, up a dozen near-sheer rock faces, it matched the pace of the beetles as they hurried along the infinitely smoother road that was the valley. Then, slowly, it began to pull ahead. Rear guard, main group, scouts—one after another, they were lost to the blue man's view as the great dragon surged to the fore.
The last rise loomed. Haral pressed thehwalonup it.
A moment later, they were plunging perilously down the steep wall of the left spur.
At the bottom, Haral wheeled the dragon to the right, back towards the spot where the two spurs came together. Riding swiftly to its mouth, he took up a position in a side crevice where boulders permitted him a view of the valley's main course, while at the same time screening him from the view of the coleoptera.
A rattle of stones, the rustle of wing-sheaths, warned him of the beetles' approach. Seconds later, the two advance scouts came into view.
Haral sat statue-still in thehwalon'ssaddle. He shifted his grip closer to his lance's trigger.
The scouts came abreast his hiding-place, so close he could catch their smell and see their ray-tubes' glitter. He held his breath.
Then they passed on. Haral let out air.
Mandibles clacking like deadly castinets, the outriders moved up.
Again Haral froze.
But they, too, passed, unheeding.
Now louder sounds drifted to him. There was a whispering of hairy feet on sand; a slither of insectile bodies.
And, through it, a silvery voice rose, singing.
The main body of the coleoptera appeared. Kyla pocketed among them.
Her hair was mud-caked now, and streaked and straggling. Her garments, too, were torn, and bruises and cuts showed through the rents.
Yet still she sang herShamonsong, head high and back unbending. And if she reeled and stumbled as she walked, it was weariness and not defeat that caused it.
It came to Haral in that moment that even madness had its glory ... that even death could be worthwhile.
He leaned forward, lance poised and focused on the coleoptera that shoved and buffeted her along.
But the time was not yet. Savagely, he fought down the rage that seethed within him, waiting while the beetles and their captive moved on past the spur that hid him and thehwalon.
Then, swiftly, before the rear guard could appear, he drove his great blue dragon forward—out of the crevice, out from behind the screening boulders, out of the spur canyon itself.
Like a thunderbolt, then, he charged, straight at the rear of the knot of huge scarlet beetles. His shout rose, a battle-cry of fury. Thehwalon'srush drummed a death-roll.
A glad cry burst from Kyla's lips. She tried to dart to Haral.
But fatigue slowed her. A coleopteron sprang upon her from behind, and she crashed to the ground. Great mandibles reached out to crush her.
Haral blazed with his light-lance. The beetle died.