“Aye, yer lordship,” rascally little Glypto piped up in his rasping tones, “even as were that illusion what masked the door to Kuur itself, right over there in they great cliffs―the which were not good enough to fool the nose of yon hulking beast at yer side!”
Crouched at the Earthling’s feet, Bozo, the mighty othode whose heart Lankar had won, and who had accompanied the Earthman all the way from the trackless jungles of the Grand Kumala to the gray shores of Dragon River, raised his ferociously ugly head to have the loose purple fur behind his ears scratched. It was as if the faithful brute, reminded of his important part in finding the hidden entrance to Kuur, signified his willingness to accept yet further thanks in the form of a caress from the hand of the Earthman upon whom he had bestowed all the doglike devotion of his bottomless heart.
The door to Kuur in truth stood visible, a triangular opening cut in the smooth stone of the cliffs that ran for some distance along the borders of the black river. Once it had been cunningly concealed by telepathic illusion, masked by a thought-projection which made it seem that the opening was but a solid continuation of the stony surface. Now it yawned blackly open in the clear, golden light, and through it emerged warriors by the score, the uninjured assisting their wounded comrades.
“Pass that there bottle o’ quarra back here again, neighborl” said Glypto of Tharkol. “An’ let me an’ his lordship here sample atween us what little be left after yer guzzlin’.”
The fat little geographer flushed guiltily, his scarlet visage assuming an even deeper shade. Brusquely, he handed the bottle over and Glypto upended it, his head tilted aloft, and his two companions watched as the Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, up and down, as a truly prodigious draft of the fiery, brandylike beverage poured down that scrawny throat.
“Ahhh,” breathed the rascally little guttersnipe, finishing his drink. “That do cut th’ dust, it truly do! Here we go, yer lordship, take aboard a little more o’ this―here Soraban Courage. We have surely earned our quarra with this day’s work, I warrant, and among them prodigious deeds o’ valor these eyes o’ mine ‘aye seen terday, not the least o’ ‘em were committed by yerself, armed with that―there great staff, aye, and the burly brute at yer side!”
The Earthling smiled, thinking back over the day’s fighting. For a fortyish and quite sedentary author, used to little more physical exertion than it takes to walk a dog down the streets of a Long Island town of an evening, he felt comfortably weary. True, there were aches in every muscle, and a knee that would limp a bit for a week or two, and a cut on the back of one wrist that would leave an ugly white scar, never to fade, remaining a permanent souvenir of the battle for Kuur and his slight role in it; but on the whole, it had been an exciting adventure.
He had described sword-fights in a score of novels, had Lankar of Callisto. But this was the first time he had ever been in one!
TOWARD the center of the beach I, Jandar, stood in conversation with Zantor and Thuron and the two other captains of the flying galleons of the armada, the Zarkoon and the Avenger. I was just suggesting to my officers that it might be wise to leave a fair-sized force of fighting-men here behind in Kuur, to make certain we had this nest of vipers cleared out. Zantor looked past me to the doorway cut in the rock.
“Here comes Lukor with the death-roster,” the former Sky Private and Zanadarian gladiator observed. The spry and nimble little Ganatolian masterswordsman came up to where we stood, bearing in one fist a scrap of parchment. The other hand held a slimbladed rapier, dyed crimson with gore from hilt to point. He saluted with the blade carelessly.
“How goes the count now, Master Lukor?” inquired Zantor in his deep, somber voice.
“Fair enough, my Admiral,” Lukor smiled cheerfully. “I have myself examined the corpses, and no fewer than thirteen of the yellow devils are accounted for.”
“I gather your total does not include the naked brain in the case, slain by the boy Taran, or the one in the floating chair struck down by Prince Lankar’s othode,” Zantor mused.
“Quite right,” the silver-haired master-swordsman nodded. “That raises the total of dead Mind Wizards to fifteen. You said there were only seventeen of the fiends in all, lad?”
I shook my head, thoughtfully.
“Sixteen,” I corrected him. “Bozo the othode slew one at Gates of Kuur just before Lankar was captured. That means there is only one Kuurian left alive…”
“Well, lad, he’s down there in that nasty warren somewhere, and our men will smoke him out ere long,” Lukor said.
“Let’s hope so,” I remarked wearily. “We’ll not be able to rest easy until the last of them is dead and the entire race has been exterminated. What about the flesh robots? Are all of them dead?”
“A half-dozen were taken alive, the poor creatures) Better if they had gone down fighting, for I doubt their minds can ever be restored to them. Mayhap we had best put the unfortunate creatures out of their misery…”
“Well, we can decide on that later,” I shrugged. It was not a decision I was looking forward to making. I am perfectly willing to kill men in battle, when they are my enemies, but to cut down men in cold blood is a bit more than I can comfortably stomach. I am a warrior, not an executioner. Still, there was probably nothing else to do with them. If we didn’t give the zombielike former servitors of the Mind Wizards a quick, clean death by the sword, they would die lingeringly and horribly later on from starvation, for I doubted the flesh robots could tend to themselves without mental commands. The Kuurians had destroyed their will entirely, whether by drugs or surgery or telepathic means, I don’t know.
Just then Prince Valkar of Shondakor, my nephew-in-law, if there is such a term (and there was, on Thanator at least, for the denizens of this world have an extremely complex system of genealogy, to which they adhere scrupulously), came striding up to the command post where we stood talking.
With him was Koja the Yathoon, the tall, chitinclad, insect-man who had been the first friend I ever made on the jungle Moon, and also Zamara of Tharkol, our royal ally, who was disheveled, and flushed, clad in tattered scraps of a once gorgeous gown, with a scratch on her cheek and a smudge on her nose, and her long black hair floating about her exquisitely beautiful face in complete disarray. For all that, she looked like the proverbial cat that ate the canary. A glance at the dripping sword she held carelessly in one hand―a weapon she had wielded with remarkable dexterity and obvious grim pleasure―told me why. The proud and fiery Princess of Tharkol had been busy exacting a little personal revenge for the discomforts she had endured as a captive of the Mind Wizards. With her were two young officers, her own lieutenant, Karan, and one of mine, a fellow called Sojan.
We greeted them, and Valkar inquired as to my instructions on the disposal of the captured Kuurian weapons and instruments.
“We have thus far discovered an entire armory of the hand-weapons and the gas-receptacles,” he explained, by the latter term referring to the containers of sleep-gas the defenders of the underground city had employed so effectively.
I told him they should all be destroyed, and the equipment in the Kuurian laboratories, too. “The devilish science of the Mind Wizards must die with the last of their race,” I said. “Never again must these devices be used against our kingdoms.”
“I agree,” said Zamara. “The warriors of Thanator need no devil-magic to defend their cities against whatever foes shall rise to threaten us in the future. Our gallant fighting men have proved here this day that simple courage, armed with simple steel, can overwhelm even the evil science of Kuur. Let everything be destroyedl”