The girl lurched to her knees. But she could not rise. Another coleopteron rushed in to seize her.
Haral'shwalonlunged to her. Catching her up in one mighty claw, it dragged her close and stood above her, defying the beetles with all the menace of its fangs and talons and horrid, hook-beaked head.
Haral whipped round his light-lance just as the pursuing insect flicked on its Q-ray. The savage jolt of the beam striking home rocked him in the saddle. But the heavy copronium armor's breastplate held. He triggered the lance.
The beetle spun crazily, legs kicking, as the life seared out of it.
Thehwalonlifted Kyla. Swinging forward, heedless of the other Q-rays that now appeared close about him, the blue man caught her and dragged her up beside him.
Already, thehwalonwas backing and pivoting with the amazing agility of its kind.
Again and again, Haral triggered the light-lance, clearing a path for them. They raced back up the valley in the same direction from which they'd come.
The two coleoptera of the rear guard, close in now, made one futile effort to cut them down. But the furious rush of the blue man and his dragon was too much for them. They broke, scrambling desperately for safety.
Then Haral, girl andhwalonwere out of the narrow part of the valley. The broad expanse where travel was easier and faster lay before them.
But instead of taking it, the blue man turned the dragon back into the bleak, craggy hills. Grimly, he urged his mount on deeper and deeper into the wild mountains, all ups and downs and steep rock ledges. He still had not spoken to the slim youngShamonpriestess.
He wondered if it were because he was afraid to put into words the thoughts that gnawed within him.
But now she turned to him. "Where do we go, Haral?"
He shrugged and gave her a twisted smile. "Where is there to go, Priestess Kyla? To the city, the spaceport. It's our only hope."
"The spaceport—?"
"If we stay on Ulna, sooner or later Sark or Xaymar or the coleoptera will hunt us down. We've got to blast off, somehow, and that quickly."
She looked at him for a long moment, and it suddenly came to him that he had never realized before that her eyes were blue.
Blue, and calm, and very steady.
She said quietly, "I'll never leave Ulna, Haral."
There were the words he'd feared, already spoken. They tied a knot of tension in him.
"Not even after all this? Not even with your life at stake?"
"No, Haral. Not even if it means death in Sark's arena."
He smiled again, wryly, because he knew that if he didn't smile, the dark thoughts that came with his tension would boil over. "It's up to you. But I've no taste for Sark's tender mercies, and even less for Xaymar's."
She said, "I'm sorry," and would have turned away. But now he would not, could not, let her. He lashed out:
"What do you mean, you're sorry? Sorry for what? That not everyone's fool enough to want to die on your crazy rockpile planet?"
Her eyes flashed. "Are you so afraid of death, then, blue man?"
"You ask it?" His fury ate into his words like acid. "Youdareto ask it, after the blood I've shed just to save your lovely neck?"
The blue eyes lost their fire. "Haral, I'm sorry. Truly sorry—"
But the rage that was in him now would not let him take up the peace he knew she was trying to offer.
"What do I care for dying? I've gambled my life a thousand times, a thousand ways. But curse me for achitzaif I want to die for nothing! What would it gain me or anyone else if I stayed here and drowned in my own blood in Sark's arena? If I perish, at least let it be somewhere along the road to empire, not here in the backwash of this pest-hole you call Ulna!"
The words quenched his fire, and as it died a strange confusion churned within him, a discomfiture that seemed to come only when he spoke with this slim girl, Kyla. Furiously, he riveted his gaze straight to the pathless wilderness ahead, trying to lose himself in scrutiny of the rocky course thehwalonfollowed.
But Kyla asked, "Is that, then, your only dream, Haral? A dream of empire? Is that the height of your ambition?"
"What—?" He turned in the saddle to stare at her, as much for her tone as for her words. He thought he almost caught a note of sadness.
Or perhaps it was disillusion.
In spite of him, it brought back the old, hot-blooded, restless, reckless fever: the fever that had carried him through all these years of blood and battle.
He threw out his challenge fiercely:
"What better dream can a fighting man have than one of empire, priestess? What higher ambition?"
She bit her lip. Her eyes fell before his onslaught.
"They spell out power, my priestess!" he cried in bitter triumph. "Power, do you hear? Without it, a man's as nothing—sport for the rabble, fair game for every passing knave. With it—"
"With it, you can be a butcher and a tyrant!" the girl slashed in upon him. He could see the lines of strain and inner tumult etch deeper into her face. "You can carve your bloody way like Sark himself, till some worse monster topples you from your throne!"
Haral clenched his fist. He threw his words like thundering boulders.
"Strength rules the void, woman! Give me the strength to carve my way and I'll ask no more!"
The girl's face whitened. Her lips trembled. Passion echoed in her voice: "But ... is strength enough? Can you find the things you really seek in strength alone?"
"With power, I can do anything!"
"No! Power is not enough—"
"It is! It is!" He could not hold down his heat, his fervor.
But how could he tell her? How could he make her understand?
And why did he care?
He clutched the saddle and stared bleakly off across the crags. A flood of memories washed through him. And because their roots struck so very deep, he knew before he spoke that in spite of all his efforts, his words were going to come out as cold and hard as the stones of these barren mountains.
He said tightly: "I was born on Pallas. My ancestors came out to the asteroid belt from Earth as colonists, in the days when Earth still was mighty."
He could see the girl's eyes widen. "Then ... you are of Earth—?"
"Of Earth?" Haral laughed harshly. "Call it that if you will. But what place is there for any colonist, anywhere, when the mother planet falls? The first of my people came out three hundred years ago. But by the time Earth at last was vanquished, no one cared from whence they came, or what happened to them. They were left on their own, to stay and face their troubles. The weak died; the strong survived."
He broke off, and looked away. The memories were roaring now. Emotion choked him. But it was as if he were a witness, speaking out in behalf of all his hopeless, derelict kind. Coldly, brutally, he forced himself to speak on:
"I grew up watching theMalyascome, and theChonyas, and a hundred mongrel raiders. When I was twelve, Ibarak's killers cut my father down, so Ibarak could add my mother to his harem."
He heard Kyla's low gasp of horror, and the shock that was in the sound stabbed him with a feeling that held both pain and, somehow, a fierce, vindictive pleasure.
He said harshly: "It was his mistake. She slit his throat, and then her own."
"Oh, no—!"
"Yes!" He swung round, and looked squarely into the slim, lovelyShamon'seyes. "I swore an oath that day, my priestess—because that day I saw that nothing mattered save the power to take and hold. Love, honor, duty—what did they count? What had they done for my father, my mother, a million others like them? So I swore I'd live to see the time when no living creature in all the universe would dare to strike a blow against me. I swore I'd have the might to smash them, one and all!"
There was silence, then, for a vibrant moment, broken only by the scraping of thehwalon'sclaws as they moved over rock and slides of gravel.
At last Kyla said, "What can I say, Haral?" And now pain was in her voice, too.
Wordless, tight-drawn, Haral nodded and turned away.
But then the girl spoke again: "I have long been Xaymar's priestess, blue one, and a priestess learns many things. Namboina himself it was who taught me to read men's hearts from the words they speak and the things they do, no matter how confused and torn they themselves might be."
Haral shrugged, not turning. Dimly, the priestess' words drifted to him through the haze of his own dark thoughts and feelings:
"Your life has been bitter, warrior—as empty as the void itself. But the thing you've sought, the thing you seek, is not an empire, no matter what you think. Even if fate should give you the power of which you dream, its savor would turn to ashes in your mouth."
A welling anger touched the blue man, and he twisted in its clutches. He'd saved this slimShamongirl from the coleoptera; thrown away his own chance at destiny for her. Why could she not now let him be?
Yet still she spoke, almost as if she'd read his thoughts:
"You care nothing for destiny; not really. For if you did, you'd not be here with me now. What you truly seek is an excuse for living, a warmth to fill the void inside you. There lies the root of your recklessness, your mad ambition."
The anger grew in Haral, and sweat drenched him inside his armor. The very rocks through which they rode seemed out of shape, distorted.
"Do you think me a fool or a child, then, not even able to see my own self straight? Or perhaps you believe me mad. Is that it?" He spat. "Why did you bother to come with me? Why didn't you stay with your thrice-cursed beetles?"
But Kyla's voice stayed calm ... so calm it sent new fury through him.
She said: "I have no quarrel with you, warrior; and the thing you did for me is worth more credit than your words would ever give it. That is why I say that power will never fill the hunger in you. What you need is a cause to fight for and to live for, not greed and blood and booty."
"So you'd like to see me play the fool for Ulna! You want me, single-handed, to take on Sark and Xaymar and the coleoptera!"
As Haral lashed out, thehwalontopped another ridge.
In the distance loomed the squat buildings of the shabby spaceport town that was their destination.
Haral forgot his fury. Frowning, he headed the dragon down a steep ravine.
A gnawing doubt was growing in him. This was all so smooth, so easy....
Grimly, he debated the chance of ambush before they reached the town.
Kyla said: "Truly, Ulna needs a champion—"
Haral bared his teeth and cursed aloud.
And as he cried out, the world exploded.
He didn't even see the blaster that knocked him down.
CHAPTER VIII
They dragged Haral out of his cell just after noon.
Wearily, he raised his eyes from his shackled wrists and, squinting at the sudden glare, looked up into the yellow Ulnese sky.
He wondered, bleakly, if he'd ever get another chance to taste its freedom.
Then aPervodtook one arm, adauthe other. Roughly, they hurried him into the central park with shoves and buffets.
A shout went up from the lusting crowd—a shout for blood, a shout for slaughter. A Martian leaped forward to trip him. A Thorian slapped a tentacle savagely across his face, and he knew from the blinding pain that flesh had torn away under its suction.
Then he was stumbling through the blood-soaked sand of the arena to the bank of seats where the raider chieftains waited.
And there was Sark, just as before, sprawled out like some great, slimy slug in his ornate Uranian riding-chair.
The raider's fat-rimmed eyes gleamed bright with murderous triumph now. He bared his teeth in a sinister smirk, and his whole gross body shook with a cruel laughter.
But his hand never left the cymosynthesizer switch.
There, too, sat Xaymar: living goddess, queen of storms, the prize that had drawn Sark here to Ulna.
Even now, standing there before her, Haral felt the spell of her vibrant, voluptuous loveliness. With wrenching force, it came to him what a fool he'd been to go against her; to toss away her favor and all it stood for in order to take his own mad road.
Her ripe lips curved into a smile.
He wondered if she were laughing at him behind the jeweled veil that masked her.
But if she were, what did it matter? What difference could it make to him, in this last hour of his bitter odyssey?
Then, half-unconsciously, he straightened. His thoughts, at least, were still his own. No one need know that regret, despair, welled high within him. He could die as he'd lived, by the warrior's creed, head high and neck unbending.
It was as if the very gesture rekindled some near-dead spark within him. A little of his feeling of hopelessness and black dejection seemed to fall away. Coolly, almost, he gazed about him.
It dawned on him, now, that the mob gathered here to watch his downfall was not quite the same as the one he'd faced that other day when he'd first blazed his path across Sark's devilish drive for conquest.
For now coleoptera were massed along one side of the arena. A rustling, eddying sea of vivid scarlet, they crowded close by the chieftains' stand, as if drawn to the incredible woman who was their ruler by a magnet.
Then a new, wild shout roared up from the crowd.
Haral shot a quick glance back across his shoulder.
The yelling mob was parting. Two more crewmen drove through the throng, dragging along another prisoner.
A lovely prisoner.
Kyla.
Or did her beauty now lie only in his own eyes?
Blood ran down her face. Her features were drawn to a mask of anguish. When she stumbled, one of the raiders caught her by the hair and jerked her upright.
In the stand, Sark rocked with laughter.
Then she was standing, swaying, in the crewmen's grip, beside Haral.
Sark's laughter died. He leaned forward, thick lips working. His fat face was a study in sadistic fury.
A hush fell over the crowd.
He cried: "So,chitzas! Now you die!"
The silence rolled like thunder.
Haral stood wordless. He could barely see Kyla, out of the tail of his eye.
She did not move. She did not speak. Only the way her breasts rose and fell too fast whispered of the conflict that churned within her.
Or was it exertion, sheer weariness, that made her breathe so hard?
Now, savagely, Sark turned on the blue man.
"You, warrior!" He spat, and his face contorted. "Warrior? I'll teach you to call yourself a warrior,starbo! You talked bold, youzanat, when you rode in here with yourhwalonand your armor and your light-lance. But there'skabatin your veins instead of blood. Now you'll learn to crawl, and beg for death!"
Haral stood very still. A haze seemed to hang over the leering crowd, the blood and dirt, the yellow sky.
How had Sark said it, that other time? "Why have you come so long a way to die?"
Here it had begun. Here it was ending.
This was his destiny.
And here was Kyla. Here was Xaymar....
Xaymar, most beautiful of women, with a body to tempt a man to hell. Paradise, and infinite evil. His chance for power and glory.
Xaymar, in a clinging scarlet gown.
The smile still lingered on her lips.
How had Sark lured her here, after all his treachery?
But then, hatred made strange partners.
And they were waiting for him to crawl.
Recklessly, then, he laughed aloud. With a twist and a jerk, he tore free from the grasp of the raider crewmen and strode forward.
He could see Sark's web-fingered hand knot convulsively on the cymosynthesizer switch.
He laughed again, and made his voice ring: "Bring on your torture,stabats! I'll show you how a warrior dies!"
A spasm of rage shook Sark's gross body. His face grew purple as Ulna's peaks. "Youchitza—!" His voice rose crazily, shrilly. "Throw him in the ring! Let the beetles tear his flesh from his bones! Stake him out and let them feast upon him before he dies!"
A clacking of mandibles rose, a hideous, castaneting rattle. A thousand protuberant, multi-faceted insectile eyes drew into focus.
In spite of himself, Haral felt the hair on his nape go stiff.
The crewmen moved in to seize him.
"Die with this thought, you fool!" Sark shouted. "Xaymar has pledged herself to share her secret with me! I'll have the lightning for my weapon! Die thinking of me with the universe in my power, Haral! Die! Die—"
And then, for the first time, Xaymar spoke: "No, Sark." Her tone was flat, decisive, final.
The raider chief went rigid in his riding-chair. His bulbous head swiveled. "What—?"
She smiled, a lazy, mocking smile. Her hand came up in an easy gesture. "I said no, he does not die. Not till he's heard a thing I have to say. That is the only reason that I've come here." Her voice dropped a note. "Perhaps ... he need not die at all."
"No!" Sark shouted, and even through the fat, muscles stood out along his neck and jaws. "He dies, I tell you! Here, now, in this arena—"
The woman's lithe body seemed to draw together like that of a tigress crouching. "I say he lives!" she slashed back fiercely. And then, with swift, deadly emphasis: "Or ... wouldyourather die?"
Grey came to Sark's puffed, blubbery face, washing out the purple. Flecks of foam formed at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were suddenly diamond-bright with hate and fear. Snarling, incoherent sounds bubbled in his throat.
"You may make the choice," said Xaymar smoothly. "Which shall it beGarSark?"
The harsh sounds ceased. The raider chief sank back into his chair.
Still smiling, the woman men called Xaymar turned once more to Haral; and of a sudden the strange, dark, nameless evil of her reached out to him in throbbing, vibrant waves.
"Would you live, blue warrior?" she asked softly.
Narrow-eyed, wary, he tried to read her face through the masking veil. His nerves all at once were like groping tendrils, so sharply tuned his whole body ached with tension.
He said: "Let me hear the price before I answer."
"It is not high...."
"Let me hear it!"
The ripe lips parted. Her sleek, voluptuous body seemed to reach out to his till, eerily, it was almost as if he could feel it pressed against him.
She said: "Never before you have I met a man with fire to match my own, blue warrior! Always, my lovers fawned and flattered, whimpering phrases that were half fear, half weakness."
"The price!"
"But you—you waded through your own blood to find me! You would have taken me by force! You dared to strike me down!"
She came to her feet in one lithe movement. Her voice took on new vibrance.
"You still may have me, warrior—both me, and my secrets! I'll give them gladly, if I can only share your destiny, travel with you...."
She paused, and the feeling of dark sin and horror that radiated from her wound round Haral—enveloping, all-pervasive. He swayed, caught up in the surging power of it as by bonds of steel.
Her words came, dim and distant:
"Grant me only one favor, blue man ... only one, and all shall be yours!"
Haral did not speak.
"Give me the woman, warrior! Give me theShamonpriestess to do with as I will, to prove that you are truly mine!"
The horror was no longer nameless. The evil took form in words of fire.
Haral choked. "No! Not Kyla—!"
"Sit here beside me as my lover, while my children feast upon her body—" Xaymar's gesture took in the whole blank-eyed, slithering, lusting beetle horde. "Bind yourself to me with this one sacrifice of passion—"
"No!" screamed Haral. "No, no—!"
The words came from his throat, but it was not his voice. The world rocked. His body shook, and he could not stop it.
Xaymar's hands, her voice, reached out to him, cajoling: "What can her one life mean to you, who have carved your destiny in blood? What can she matter, thisShamonscum?"
"No—!"
"Look deep within you, warrior! Look to your dreams of empire, your ambition! Look to me—"
As she spoke, with one tempestuous sweep, she flung wide her scarlet gown and stood before him naked, as she had lain beneath the crystal bubble in her deep-sunk vault. Her hand moved sensually over the sleek curves of her perfect body. Her midnight hair rippled in the breeze.
"Look at me, blue man! Look—and then tell me you can reject me for another!" Her voice swelled with a richer timbre. "I am yours, warrior—and I know you want me, for I have looked into your brain! It was I who reached out across the miles and found you, through yourShamongirl's unguarded mind, so that Sark could seize you and bring you here. I've been inside you all the time you've stood in this arena—thinking your thoughts, feeling the things you felt. I know you better than you know yourself. I know how many times you've cursed yourself for giving me up to save this other creature. Now, at this very moment, you waver. Why should you die with her, when you can live and see your dreams of power come true and have me, Xaymar, queen of storms, most beautiful of women?"
Haral could not make the world stop rocking. His body was a numb, unfeeling thing. His brain ... his brain—He clutched his head between his shackled hands and tried to fight, to think, to slash the haze away.
Xaymar cried: "Come to me, warrior!"
Numbly, dumbly, he stared at her, swaying.
She raised her hands. "Come...!" And as she spoke, it was as if her fingers had reached into his mind—twisting it; pulling....
He stumbled towards her, a single step.
"Come!"
This time the word was in his brain itself, not in his ears. He took another step. Another.
"Come... come... come...."
It was like that other night—was it a million years ago?—the night he'd heard the coleoptera calling.
But the thing the beetles called was "Kill! Kill! Kill!"
Kill the man-things.
He staggered forward.
And there was Xaymar, ripe lips smiling. He felt her arms go tight about him, the pressure of her naked body on him.
He tried to think of Kyla.
But what was Kyla? Why should he die for a girl called Kyla when he could live and have his dreams and Xaymar?
Kill the man-things.
Blonde hair, and a slim young body. Courage, and a head held proudly.
Xaymar. Power, and ripe lips, hot with passion.
Kill the man-things.
"Kiss me, warrior." A jeweled veil-mask.
What did it hide?
Kill the man-things!
But Kyla.... No—! Not even for power could he give up Kyla! Not send her to her death, to the coleoptera—!
Something snapped inside Haral. The world went mad. His brain was on fire, on fire, twisting and turning, turning and burning, pulled through his skull by sensuous fingers.
He couldn't think. His body was a bursting entity of anguish.
Kill the man-things!
Jewels glinting in a filmy mask.
Spasmodically, he jerked away. Convulsive, clutching, without volition, his hands clawed up into Xaymar's face and snatched away the veil.
The fire in his brain went out. The torment ended. Staggering, he saw the world without the haze.
Now Xaymar's hands were before her face; her fingers masking, shielding.
Savagely, he caught her wrists and jerked them down ... stared into her eyes.
He almost screamed aloud.
Because her eyes were not humanoid eyes.
Faceted, fixed, protuberant, glassy, they wereinsectile!
The eyes of a beetle, a coleopteron!
A phrase she'd used came back: "...while my children feast...."
Through the horror and shock that froze him, he heard Sark shouting: "Seize him! Seize him—!"
Hands clutched his arms. They jerked him back and pinned him down.
Xaymar said; "So at last you know ..." and now her voice crawled with hate and fury.
Haral did not answer.
She raved at him: "Yes! I am of the coleoptera—a mutant, and a hybrid! Now you know how I gave them the power of thought! Those that think are my own children, my descendants! And now you know, too, why I took a thousand human lovers, and slew each one before the dawn. For I have human passion hot within me, but no man could forbear to look beneath my veil, and with my brain close-tuned to theirs, I felt the horror well up in them—the same disgust and loathing that even you cannot conceal. So I killed them, that they might never tell my secret—"
She broke off. Her hands clenched till blood spurted where the nails gouged through the palms. Her voice rose—hysterical, vindictive. "Throw him alive into the arena! Yes, let my children feast upon him—!"
The crewmen jerked Haral to his feet again. The coleoptera surged forward. He glimpsed slim Kyla, with horror written on her lovely face.... Sark, doubled over, gloating and laughing ... the seething fury that dwelt in Xaymar.
But now his brain was clear again, the shadow of the nameless evil gone. Fire surged in his veins, and wild, reckless daring.
Thedauand thePervoddragged him towards the beetles.
He cried, "I'll meet my fate standing, youchitzas!" and kicked with all his might for thePervod'sfragile reptilian ankle.
He heard the bones snap over all the tumult. ThePervod'sshriek rang like the scream of a sky-shell.
He snatched for its ray-gun.
Thedau'sgreat arms caught him as the weapon tore loose from the holster. He felt his ribs cracking as it lifted him—crushed him.
Desperately, he triggered the beam square into its belly.
The hairy arms dropped him. Thedausprawled back, dying.
Haral spun round, still firing.
The beam caught the first of the onrushing beetles. It seared through a second. A third reeled and stumbled.
Haral lunged for the chiefs' stand.
Sark stood there, stiff-frozen. Xaymar lurched back in terror.
Haral cried: "Die, curse you!"
He whipped up the ray-gun. But Sark shrieked, "Wait, blue man—! You and all Ulna die here with me!"
His gross body twisted, and Haral saw the fat fingers still locked on the cymosynthesizer switch.
In the same instant the raider chief's other hand darted beneath his tent-like tunic, incredibly fast, snatching out a Venusianxlan-tube.
Blue fire belched at Haral.
He threw himself flat. But it was the end. It could be no other way.
This was where destiny and the road to empire at last had led him.
To failure. To death. To his blood in the dirt of Sark's arena.
Why had he picked such a road to travel? What good did it do to die, when even death was empty, without meaning?
Unless, perhaps, he could save Ulna....
He triggered the ray-gun as the fire seared down his back.
But not at Sark. His target was the cymosynthesizer switch; the cable.
Through a haze of pain, he saw them fuse; saw Sark's hand, too, turn to sifting ashes.
The raider screamed and surged forward.
Haral triggered a final beam.
It tore Sark's bulbous head from his shoulders.
The roar of the mob, lunging in for the kill, came dimly to the blue man's ears.
He was glad. They'd at least put an end to his agony.
But the roar seemed to die again, and he wondered if perhaps some dark corner of his brain still functioned in its way after consciousness had left him.
Then hands touched his face; soft hands, caressing.
With a tremendous, wrenching effort, he opened his eyes, and there was Kyla, with tears on her cheeks and soft lips atremble.
But where was the crowd, the beetles, the cutthroat crewmen?
Another face came ... the face of Xaymar.
As from afar, her words came fiercely: "I hate you, warrior, for you spurn me for a stupidShamonchild! But I am of Ulna, and again you have saved my life and planet. So, now, my coleopteran legions shall protect you till my science can give back your daring and make your body whole once more. My projectors, too, my secrets of the wind and rain, the lightning—I leave them in your hands to help you guard this world of mine, till my own day to strike shall come. But for myself, I must go back to frozen sleep again, for another thousand years, lest I should rise and slay you in my fury!"
Her face, her voice, faded into distance; and he wondered if it were only in his mind that he seemed to hear a final, gentler whisper: "... And I shall dream of you a thousand years, my warrior...."
Then Kyla's tears were on his cheeks, too; her soft lips pressed against his. And there was peace in him at last, and he was at one with his dreams, his destiny.
Naked, still as death, the veiled woman-goddess men called Xaymar rested on a gold-draped dais within a great, glowing, crystal ball.
Xaymar, passionate goddess, queen of storms. Ruler of rain and wind and lightning, empress of all the surging forces that spread their tumult across the sky. Sainted monster, evil savior. Old as time, and young as folly. Born of woman, damned of men, wise with dark wisdom gone astray....