Merrick yelled, stopped with Jurul and Narna. A great shape was swooping like a dark hawk out of the night, an airboat whose guns were hailing charges on the rushing Cosps. As they recoiled from its unlooked-for attack the craft swept low and Narna and Jurul leapt to its deck, Merrick felt Holk’s great arms pulling him after them as the craft darted upward again.
“Out of here!” Merrick cried. “There’ll be a hundred airboats after us in a minute!”
The craft shot like a thing alive up into the night with great poison-sprays from wall and city wheeling to dart their deadly jets toward it. Behind, they glimpsed Cosp ships beginning to rise from the city’s top and the metal around it. But the whole panorama of the aroused city of the spider-men vanished behind them as their craft shot at immense speed northward through the darkness.
“We have escaped!” Narna cried. “The first Corlans ever to win clear of the Cosp city once they had entered it!”
“Yes, but I thought there was going to be some fighting to it!” Holk complained. “All my life I’ve been hoping for a raid down here and when I finally get here all I do is wait up there in the cold like some bird!”
Narna and Jurul laughed at him, but Merrick, who had been peering back as they flew on, dawn beginning to rift the darkness eastward, turned an anxious face to them.
“You may have your fighting yet, Holk,” he said. “Look back there—what are those?”
A wide string of dark dots was becoming visible far behind, extending across the reddening dawn sky and moving after them. Holk gazed, Narna looking back anxiously at Merrick’s side, and then the big veteran nodded grimly.
“Cosp airboats! They’re not going to let us get away so easily, it seems.”
“It is Jhalan,” murmured Narna. “He will never see me escape.”
“I begin to think that Jurul was right about killing Jhalan,” said Merrick grimly. “Well, they’ll not catch us without a chase—head straight north for Corla.”
When the huge crimson sun flamed up eastward it disclosed the fact that the Cosp craft far behind were massing more closely and had settled down to a relentless chase. They seemed of no greater speed than the Corlan craft, though as the next hours passed it seemed that some of them were drawing closer.
For all of that day, while the great sun wheeled across the sky, the Corlan craft and its pursuers fled on high over the vast fungus forest. By sunset it was plain to all that the Cosp craft were much closer, though whether they could overtake their prey before reaching Corla remained doubtful. They would pursue, Merrick knew, to the city itself, being more than a hundred strong and no doubt having their great darkness-projectors on some of their craft.
With the coming of night, the great moons of Kaldar lifting one by one as though to view the chase, the Cosps drew still closer. Through the night as through the day the pursuit held grimly after them. And when Merrick woke from an hour’s exhausted sleep on the airboat’s deck to find dawn blood-red in the east, it was to find the spider-men’s ships a bare half-mile behind. Ahead by then loomed the great wall of the black mountains, beyond which Corla lay, but rapidly now the Cosps were drawing closer.
Merrick could make out the erect figure of Jhalan on one of the foremost airboats and he cursed his squeamishness in sparing the traitor. At the same time he was aware that he would do the same again in like case, and as he caught Narna’s eyes he saw her smile bravely at him.
He waited until the Cosp ships were hardly more than a thousand feet behind before ordering the Corlans of his crew to open fire. With Holk directing them, Jurul at the controls, they poured back for a few moments a deadly fire of shining charges that confused and slowed the Cosp pursuit, sending a half-dozen craft whirling down. The others then split into two portions, long lines, one of which swept to either side to pass and surround the fleeing Corlan ship and hold it in their circle. They were passing over the great mountains by then, low over the giant metal peaks, and Merrick saw at last the two lines of Cosp craft joining ahead, a great circle of them holding the fugitive Corlan ship.
“They’ve got us,” Merrick said quietly to Narna. “We have brought you from the Cosp city only to death, it seems—better had our rescue failed.”
She shook her head quietly. “Better here with you, O Chan,” she said.
Merrick turned to Holk and Jurul. “Hold all our charges until they close in on us,” he told them. “Just before they get into range with the poison-sprays let them have it—I just want to get Jhalan before they end us.”
They were still flying forward, the circle of the Cosp ships contracting now upon them. They might destroy a dozen of the spider-men’s craft, Merrick knew, but the others would in that time have their deadly sprays in range. It seemed a strange end—Narna’s calm eyes and the tense figures of Holk and Jurul and the others, and the black range beneath and huge red Antares above, a kaleidoscope of impressions as the moment approached. The Cosp ships were nearer, poison-tubes raising, and he had on his lips the order to fire when from Holk burst an inhuman, exultant yell.
Airboats in a great mass were rushing toward them from ahead, and instantly their guns were raining deadly charges on the ring of Cosp ships!
“Corlan ships!” Merrick cried. “They may save us yet!”
Jurul shook his head sadly. “They can not fight the darkness-projectors of the Cosps,” he said. “See—!”
For the Corlan airboats, rushing fiercely upon the craft of the spider-men, had so surprised them that for a moment the battle had been a mere wild chaos of struggling craft in which deadly sprays and shining charges thronged thick the air. Outnumbered, the Cosp ships were blasted in dozens in that first shock of battle, but in a moment had recovered from their surprise and darting back and brought their darkness-projectors into play. Great areas of black lightlessness engulfed the Corlan craft, the spider-men turning their sprays upon these instantly.
But, astoundingly, after that first instant of darkness the lightless areas seemed to waver, to be broken by darting rays, and then to vanish! And as the Corlans again swooped toward their enemies, the Cosps, astounded at the failure of the weapon that for ages had given them supremacy, became a confused, stunned mass of ships into which the others poured a deadly fire. Merrick glimpsed the craft of Jhalan at the center of that terrific inferno of blasting death, saw it whirl down with dozens around it. Then the remainder of the shattered Cosp fleet had turned, was racing away in mad flight southward, half the Corlan ships in hot pursuit.
“Beaten!” Holk bellowed. “The first time in history that Corlan has met Cosp on equal terms, and we’ve beaten them!”
Narna’s eyes were shining. “Look, Murna’s airboat coming toward us!” she cried.
Merrick saw the craft driving level with their own, and then from it the white-bearded Murnal stepped to their own. His face flamed with the victory, and as he saw Narna beside Merrick his eyes widened.
“The victory is yours, Chan Merrick!” he cried. “Your suggestion for neutralizing the darkness-projectors worked perfectly, and with some airboats equipped with neutralizers we were starting south to see if we might find you.
“Corla will be mad with joy,” the old noble added, “not only that we have shattered the supremacy of the Cosps, but that its Chan has returned safely and brought with him her for whom he went.”
In moments the Corlan ships, their own in the van, were flying back over the metal mountains, swift scout-boats going ahead to give to the people of Corla the great news. When at last their fleet dipped down over the city of mighty black pyramids they found streets and terraces jammed with madly rejoicing throngs. The great plaza was packed solid with hoarse-voiced humanity, and it was down among them and beside the dais of the Chan that their airboat landed.
A deafening thunder of voices greeted them when Merrick and Narna stepped from the airboat, Holk and Jurul and Murnal behind them. And when Merrick stepped up onto the dais there was an intensifying of the deafening storm of acclamation. Merrick, wit
h Narna’s shining eyes upon his, raised his hand and the massed humanity about him grew silent.
“People and nobles of Corla,” he told them, “for ages have Cosp and Corlan battled, but never until today on equal terms, the spider-men having always the advantage. But today, with that advantage gone, we have fought them and have beaten them, have sent their shattered fleet reeling back to their city in defeat and have broken their power for ever! And what we have done to the Cosps today we can do again. We can meet and beat our enemies until on all Kaldar no race shall dare attack Corla and its people. Chan of Corla, I say it!”
There was silence still for a moment, and then out from the countless masses about him there crashed up to him a terrific shout of “Chan!”
But as it sounded there was a thunderous roaring in Merrick’s ears and he seemed shaken in every atom by awful force. As swift memory came to him in that moment he cried out and saw Narna, white-faced, run with Holk and Jurul and Murnal toward the dais. But for the merest instant only he saw them, since in the next they and the city around him and the huge red sun above vanished from around him as he was whirled into lightless blackness.
VIII : EPILOGUE
MERRICK whirled out of that black unconsciousness of instants to find himself staggering suddenly in a room, a long, white-lit, roofless room at whose center upon a square metal platform he stood. Dynamos and other apparatus were throbbing about him and elderly men were crowding excitedly toward him. He stood dazed for the moment, a strange figure among them in his black metal tunic with light-sword and light-gun swinging still at his side.
“You made it!” they were crying. “What did you find there?”
“Three days!” The cry broke from Merrick as he remembered. “Three days!”
“Yes,” they nodded excitedly, “the three days are up, and at two exactly we turned on the projector’s force and drew you back across to earth.”
Merrick was stunned. In the wild rush of events on Kaldar, his strange kingship, Narna and Jhalan and the attack of the Cosps, his venture to the spider-city and desperate flight from it, he had forgotten wholly his agreement to return to earth in three days. And chance had made him take his place on the dais where first he had found himself on Kaldar, at the exact moment when the projector’s force stabbed across the void to that one spot to draw him back to earth!
“I’ve got to go back!” he cried. “I never meant to return to earth—it was only accident. I tell you I have a people out there—you’ve got to send me back now!”
They were astounded. “Impossible,” said their spokesman. “It will take weeks to charge the condensers again with enough force to operate the projector.”
Merrick was dazed, the nine scientists bewildered. “But we can send you back then if you want to return,” they told him.
“You’ll send me back, then?” Merrick cried.
“If you want to go, surely. But where did you get those things?—what is that world like that you reached?—what did you find there?”
Merrick for the moment did not answer their excited questions. He was gazing up through the room’s open top to where among the brilliant stars great Antares swung. His mind, travelling back out across the gulf toward the huge sun, seemed to have before it again its world of Kaldar. Kaldar—with Corla and its people, his people—with Holk and Jurul and Murnal, with Narna—Narna—with all Kaldar’s great unhuman races and unending war and strange monsters, with all its mystery and horror and unearthly beauty. The men around Merrick saw him smile. “I found—my world,” he said.
Swordsmen in the Sky Page 21
