CHAPTER 17
THE BATTLE—AND AFTER
Six days after that momentous meeting of the council, a mighty fleet of air-boats rose and circled above the city. The character of the invisible force-shield above the city had been altered to allow the passage of any air-boat through it, and now no less than five hundred of the air-boats hovered over Kom. In design they were much like the ones I had vaguely glimpsed in the city of cylinders, long and flat and narrow, pointed at either end and with a low wall around their sides for the protection of their occupants.
The people of Kom had worked wonders in those six days, thus to construct half a thousand of the flying cars, and to equip them with a time-wave apparatus like our own. Every car was thus equipped, the apparatus on each being a direct copy of that in our own car. Lantin and I still clung to our own car, however, which had been overhauled for us by the scientists of Kom after our crash, and which was unhurt by the collision. And most of our time, during that period, had been engaged in directing the manufacture of the time-traveling apparatus, and teaching a selected few the operation of it. These few, in turn, taught many others, and by the time we were ready for our start, there was at least one man on each air-boat who understood the time-wave mechanism.
The plans of our expedition were simple enough. We were to drop down on the city of cylinders, destroy it utterly, and annihilate both the Kanlars and the Raider, if possible. I think that in reality none of the members of our expedition had any real desire to meet the Raider, but I knew that in spite of the fear they had of him, they would obey the orders of Kethra without faltering.
I knew but little of the weapons which the scientists of Kom had furnished to the occupants of the air-boats. Kethra had spoken to us of a sound-ray, an intense beam of sound-vibrations which, directed on some object, could be changed in frequency until it matched that object's frequency of vibration, which would result in the destruction of the thing so focused on. It was the principle of two tuning-forks, which will cause each other to vibrate across a great distance, if of the same period of vibration. I had heard mention of other weapons, also, designed to combat the Raider, but had seen none of these.
Now, as the great fleet hovered and circled above the white city of Kom, with our own time-car poised above the fleet, a single large air-boat drove up through the mass of the others and hung beside us. It was the car of Kethra, a long, black one, and near its pointed prow stood the white-robed leader himself.
He bent, spoke an order into a mouthpiece, and then his car slanted up and northward, with swiftly increasing speed, while the great fleet below did likewise, his order being communicated by a form of radio to every air-boat. Still hanging beside the car of Kethra, our own time-car raced along, since we were to guide the fleet toward the city of cylinders.
By the time Kom had disappeared behind us, the fleet was flying almost two miles high, in wedge-shaped formation, with our time-car and the air-boat of Kethra at the wedge's apex.
It was late morning when we flashed high over the colossal metal wall that held back the ice-flood. It soon vanished behind us, and we were again flashing north across the ice-fields.
The sun's rays slanting down almost vertically on the ice far below set up a dazzling glare that was almost blinding. Looking back, I saw an air-boat behind and below us crash into the one ahead of it, and both plunged down to destruction on the ice. Some half-dozen cars spiraled down toward the wreckage, but the main body of the fleet swept on, unheeding of such accidents.
All of that day the fleet raced on, while, in the time-car, Lantin slowed our pace to keep beside them. Sunset came, an arctic sunset, with a crimson globe of fire falling down behind the boundless steppes of ice, suffusing the sky with a glare like blood. Abruptly Lantin uttered a low exclamation, seized binoculars and gazed north through the window beside him.
I sprang to his side, and when he handed me the glasses I saw, far ahead, a little cluster of black dots that stood out jet-black against the crimson sunset. But already Kethra too had seen them, and a score of cars leaped forward from the main body of the fleet, in pursuit, our own time-car among them.
We flashed up toward them, and they grew in size, resolved themselves into air-boats much like those around us. As we neared them, they turned and fled north. Two of them, much swifter than the others, were out of sight almost in a second, safely beyond our pursuit, but the others, seven in number, saw that escape was impossible, so they turned to fight.
For a moment, the fight was on their side, for they turned quite unexpectedly and raced straight toward us, in a solid mass. Lantin's hands flashed over the controls and our car slanted up above the onrushing seven with the speed of lightning, but as it did so a blue flash leapt from the foremost of them and barely missed us.
The air-boats behind us were not so fortunate, for as the streaks of blue light from the enemy touched them, four plunged down to the ice, in flames. The seven attackers, unscathed thus far, passed under them in a swooping dip, turned, and came racing back for another blow.
But now the surprize of our forces was gone, and they struck back. A sudden sound smote our ears, even in the time-car, a low thrumming sound that rose in pitch higher and higher. I could see the men on our air-boats pointing blunt-nosed metal objects toward the oncoming cars of the enemy, and abruptly the significance of it struck me, and I understood that they were using the sound-ray Kethra had mentioned.
The seven air-boats rushed on toward our own, and I had a flashing glimpse of their decks, crowded with armored guards and with a few of the brilliant-robed Kanlars directing them. Blue flashes leapt again from the seven, and two more of the air-boats of Kom cometed down in bursts of fire, but now, as the seven dipped again under the air-boats of the Khluns, the thrumming, high-pitched sound increased sharply in intensity, and I saw five of the seven Kanlar cars literally break up into small pieces and fall, tumbling down toward the ice-fields below them in a shower of men and small pieces of metal. It was the power of sound, which causes a steam-whistle to shake a house to its foundations, a thousand times amplified by the apparatus devised by the men of Kom.
The remaining two air-boats of the Kanlars attempted to flee, but in a moment they too broke up and fell, as the men of Kom altered the vibration-frequency of their apparatus to affect the two remaining cars.
Behind us, now, the great main fleet of our air-boats was coming up, and there was a short halt in midair. Kethra's air-boat swept up beside us, and I opened the door in the top of our time-car, and stood up to hear him.
"Those were scouts," he cried to us, "a patrol of the Kanlars' air-boats. And two got away! They'll warn the Kanlars of our coming."
"But what do you intend to do?" I asked. "You'll not give up the attack?"
"No!" he shouted. "We'll go on, and meet them if they come out. But there will be no surprize now."
"But what of our friends?" I asked. "We were to rescue them from the pit."
"We'll send an air-boat for them," he said. "It can speed up to the city of cylinders, and since the Kanlars will come down to meet us now, it can sink down into the shaft you spoke of without interference, and get your friends. I will need you with me, to guide us to the city of Kanlars, in case their fleet doesn't come out to meet us."
And so we swiftly decided. At an order from Kethra, an air-boat slanted up toward us and hung beside us. We gave the pilot of it, and his two assistants, precise information that would enable them to reach the temple and get down to the pit, where they could rescue our comrades from the roof-top where they would be awaiting us. The pilot was instructed to race up toward the city of cylinders in a wide circle, to avoid meeting any of the Kanlars' air-boats, and when the city was deserted by guards and Kanlars, as we were confident it would be, he could easily penetrate to the temple and the pit. He promised to carry out our instructions faithfully, and sped away into the gathering dusk toward the northwest.
Night was falling now, and with an order from Kethra, the fleet again began to move, speeding toward the north, but going warily now, with a fringe of swift scouts flying above and far ahead, and with Kethra's car and our own soaring at the point of the fleet's triangular formation.
On we sped, into the darkness, showing no lights and progressing entirely by compass. Midnight came and passed, while we raced north over the limitless ice-fields, and it began to seem that the Kanlars had no stomach for fighting, now that we had come to attack them. I relieved Lantin at the controls of our car, an hour after midnight, and while he caught a little sleep on the car's floor, we soared smoothly on.
The soundless, mighty fleet of air-boats moving steadily along behind me, the monotonous, endless ice below, and the hour after hour that passed without any attack materializing, all of these smoothed down the fears in my mind and lulled me into a temporary lassitude. Half drowsing at the controls of the car, I kept beside the air-boat of Kethra, speeding on into the thick darkness. A glance at a dial told me that we were within a hundred miles of the ice-field's end, and the thought pulled me up somehow from the sudden weariness that had gripped me. Then, a half-mile ahead of me, there was a blinding glare of azure light, a crash that came loudly to my ears even from that distance, and then silence.
Through the mighty fleet behind me pulsed a sudden murmuring sound, a whisper of excitement, of expectancy. Lantin, aroused by the crash, jumped up and was at my side.
"One of the scouts," I cried to him; "the Kanlars are attacking them, and one was destroyed."
Even as I spoke, two more blue flashes jetted out of the darkness ahead, and two air-boats that were racing back to us went down in flames. And then, rushing toward us out of the darkness, came the Kanlar fleet.
In the very van of our own fleet, I had a twisted, misty vision of myriad dark shapes that rushed toward us; then, instinctively, I slanted our time-car up and sped up above the battle. We were weaponless, for the sound-rays could not have been used through the walls of our closed car, and so to remain in the very center of the conflict was to invite purposeless destruction.
For a moment, the world was filled with crashing sounds, as the two oncoming fleets met, their air-boats crashing here and there into air-boats of the opposing fleet. Then the battle resolved itself with sudden decision into myriad individual combats.
Stretching far away into the night, all around us, lay the two fleets, inextricably mixed and mingled with each other, and incapable of acting in two single units. Flashes of blue lightning burned from the air-boats of the Kanlars, and car after car of the Khluns was going down to death on the ice two miles below. By the light of the flashes, and the ensuing flames, the scene below us was ghastly, the air-boats, filled with brazen-armored guards and bright-robed Kanlars, or with the white-clad Khluns, grappling there in midair, plunging down to destruction, or swooping giddily upon one another. There was a chorus of humming sounds that rose even above the roar of the battle, and here and there the air-boats of the Kanlars were disintegrating and falling, spilling forth their occupants in midair. It was well that the Khluns had constructed their own air-boats of a material immune to their own sound-rays, since mixed as the battle was, many of their cars would have been downed by their own allies' weapons.
The battle had met and joined in less than a minute, while we hung above it. So far the fighting had been even, but now a thing occurred that tipped the scale in the Kanlars' favor.
Without warning, every air-boat of the Khluns suddenly glowed with misty light. Shouts of surprize and rage came up to us. The cars of the Kanlars were as dark as ever, and now, swooping out of the darkness upon the shining air-boats of the men of Kom, they sent them reeling down in flames by the dozens.
"Look!" cried Lantin, pointing up through the window in the car's top.
Far above, high over even our own car, were some twenty round, glowing circles of light, a light that was identical with the misty light that glowed from the cars of the Khluns.
"The Kanlars!" Lantin shouted. "There are air-boats up there, with apparatus that makes the Khluns' cars shine, while their own remain dark! They must be destroyed, or it is all over with our forces!"
I looked around for Kethra, but he was lost to view in the battle that raged below. Nor was there any of our allies' cars around us, so I turned our own time-car and sent it racing up toward those glowing circles above.
Straight toward them we sped, with the power opened wide, and I braced myself for the shock. Our car struck the first glowing circle with a staggering shock, and ripped through the air-boat above it as if it were paper. We slanted on up, and looking down, I saw the car we had struck reeling down toward the battle below, broken and afire. I turned our car, hovered like a poised hawk for a second, and then flashed down again on the line of air-boats.
A dozen flashes of blue flame burned up toward me, but the tremendous swiftness of our car carried us out of line before they reached us. Flashing down on a long slant, I pointed the car's steel prow toward the center of the line of cars, and this time we plowed across two of them in our resistless, ramming swoop.
As we sped away into the darkness, I heard other crashes behind me, and when I again turned the car, it was to see the last of the Kanlar air-boats carrying those glowing circles go tumbling down to destruction. For below us the Khluns had seen and guessed the meaning of our attack, and had sped up to finish off those who had escaped us. And with the destruction of that score of hovering Kanlar cars, the strange glowing light that emanated from each of the Khlun cars ceased. What that light was, we never knew. Undoubtedly the Kanlars had devised some method of causing our own air-boats to become light-emitting, while theirs remained dark. Possibly a ray like the fluorescent "black light" of the World War, from which they had guarded their own cars by special means. Whatever the nature of it, the light was a deadly weapon in such a night battle, causing the Khluns' air-boats to stand out as shining marks for the blue flashes, while the cars of the Kanlars hovered invisibly about them in the darkness. But now, with the disappearance of that light, the battle tipped in favor of the men of Kom. Their deadly sound-rays filled the air with thrumming, and in groups, in masses, the air-boats of the enemy disintegrated, broke up, poured down to earth in a mixed shower of men and metal. Finally but a scant thirty cars remained of the Kanlar fleet, while around them circled almost two hundred of the Khlun air-boats, striking at them with the deadly sound-ray.
As we hovered above the battle, a single air-boat drove up toward us, and I saw that in it was Kethra. He stopped his car beside our own, and I opened the door of our car, while Lantin leaned out and shouted to him.
"You've won!" cried Lantin, pointing down to the night below us, where the thrumming of sound-rays and jetting flashes of blue showed the dwindling conflict.
"We've won," he replied, "but where is the Raider?"
"Lurking in the temple," replied Lantin, "and it is there we must go now, to rescue our friends and destroy the Raider."
"We'll do that," replied Kethra, "but first—" Abruptly he stopped speaking, and seemed to be listening tensely. I, too, was listening, and over the crash of air-boats and the humming sound-rays a sound came to my ears that beat in them like the drums of doom.
A little whisper of wind, a whisper that grew swiftly louder, that shrieked, that roared, that bellowed. Up from beneath came a gust of wind of such force that our car heeled around under it, and with it came a piercing whistling to our ears, an eery chorus of wind-shrieks that changed to a thundering gale. Then, a hundred feet below us, there flashed into being—the Raider!
A moment he hung below us, a thing of whirling mists, the three orbs of green glowing radiantly through the darkness. Then he had dropped down onto the battle, expanded, extended his own misty form until it held within it the score of air-boats in which were the survivors of the Kanlars' forces.
A second it continued thus, its vaporous form enveloping the remaining cars of the Kanlars, and then, out from the green, radiant triangle of orbs there burst flash on flash of green light, aimed at the surrounding cars of the Khluns. The cars touched by that green light vanished, simply disappeared from view, leaving a little cloud of radiant sparks which dimmed and vanished likewise.
There was a great shout from behind us, and down toward the Raider, from the car of Kethra, there dropped a thing like a black, enveloping net, queerly tenuous-seeming in the one glimpse of it I had. It was like a net of black force, dropping down on the Raider, but before it reached its objective, the Raider and the cars it held within it had abruptly vanished.
"The Raider!" cried Kethra. "He's gone on into time, with the surviving Kanlars! Follow, follow, follow!"
From the scores of air-boats below us came a savage yell, and there was a second's pause, a second's silence, and then our car was struck by a gale that nearly overturned it, and we hung alone in space. Kethra and his air-boats had followed the Raider on into time, with the time-wave apparatus we had showed them how to use. I knew, too, that at that moment half the air-boats were speeding into the past and half into the future, in search of the Raider, for that had been our plan in case we had need to pursue the Raider into time.
"Shut the car-door!" I cried to Lantin. "We'll follow, too."
"Wait!" he shouted, his head out of the circular door, peering away to the north.
The gray light of dawn was welling up in the east, and by it I saw, away to the north, a black speck that rushed down toward us. It raced on, and now I saw that it was a Khlun air-boat. It sped on toward us, and now I recognized it as the one we had dispatched to rescue our four friends from the pit.
The car sped on toward us, and I saw that on it were the pilot and his two aides, but not our friends. Even before the pilot shouted to us a premonition of disaster filled me.
"The pit!" cried the pilot, bringing his car up beside us.
"What of the pit?" I shouted. "What of our friends?"
"They're safe, for the time," he answered, "but the hordes are coming out of the pit!"
"What?" I yelled.
"They're coming out," he repeated. "I went straight to the Kanlar city, as you had instructed, and found that the Kanlar fleet had sped south to meet you. The city was in confusion, with all of the Kanlars and the guards gone with the fleet, and only the slaves and the women still there. I took my car straight into the temple, and found the shaft open that leads down to the pit. I went down that shaft, and picked your four friends up from the roof you designated, and they told me that after all the guards on the stair had left, with the fleet, the hordes in the pit began battering at the gate of the stair. I saw them doing that, hovering above them in the darkness. They are mad, thirsty for loot and blood and battle. They cry among themselves that they will seize the flying-platforms on top of the temple and go south to loot Kom."
I gasped. The merciless hordes of the pit, sweeping down on unprotected Kom! I knew that there were men in the pit capable of operating the flying-platforms, if they reached them. They would sweep down upon the city beyond the ice in an avalanche of death and destruction. And Kethra and all his men were somewhere in time, pursuing and battling the Raider!
"Where did you leave our friends?" cried Lantin.
"At the pit's edge, in the temple," answered the other, and we exchanged swift glances, the same thought coming to us at the same time.
"They asked to be left there," added the pilot.
Lantin spoke swiftly to him. "Go after Kethra!" he told him. "You have the time-wave apparatus on your air-boat?" And when the other nodded, he said, "Then go on into time and bring back Kethra and his forces! If the hordes get to the temple's top and seize the flying-platforms, it is the end for all at Kom!"
The pilot hesitated. "And you?"
"Wheeler and I are for the temple," Lantin told him; "with our friends, we'll try to hold the hordes in the pit until you come back with Kethra and his forces. Go, man!"
The pilot cried assent, clicked a switch, and his car had disappeared, speeding into time after Kethra and his men. And now, under my control, our own car sped north toward the city of cylinders.
I think that of all our trips in the car, we attained our highest speed then. Rocketing low above the ground, the landscape beneath us, the endless billows of ice, seemed to pass beneath us in a white blur. We shot across the sky like a comet, and in a few minutes the green land of the Kanlars' country replaced the ice, and then there hove into view the gleaming white city of cylinders.
I swept down toward the great cylinder that was the temple, and brought the car to earth in the shelter of a little clump of trees outside the great building. We sprang out, raced up the ramp, and down the tunneled entrance into the temple's interior.
The metal floor was not in place, and before us yawned the abyss that was the shaft leading down to the pit. Away across the temple, standing on the ring of black flooring that was the shaft's rim, was a group of men, seemingly tiny, toylike figures there in the empty temple's immensity. We ran around the black rim toward them.
It was Denham and his three companions, and they ran forward to meet us, gripped our hands warmly.
"Where are your forces?" asked Denham. "Where are the people of Kom? The hordes are getting ready to come up from the pit, man! Listen," he commanded, and I walked to the shaft's edge and looked down.
From far below, muffled by the great distance, yet coming with force to my ears, there rose a dim roar, the savage shout of thousands of mad warriors. And above that dull roaring there was the clangor of metal smiting on metal.
"They're beating down the gate," Denham said, "and in a few minutes they'll be pouring up that stair. But where is the aid you were to bring?"
In a few words I explained the battle we had taken part in, and the pursuit of the Raider into time by Kethra and his men. "We must hold them in the pit, somehow," I told them, "until Kethra and his forces come back. If those hordes once get to the temple's roof and seize the flying-platforms, it means hideous death for all at Kom!"
"Couldn't you close the metal floor of the temple?" suggested Lantin. "Swing it back in place and close the shaft?"
"But how?" asked Denham. "We've searched but can't find the secret of the floor, or how it is moved."
"But the collapsible stair!" I put in; "you can fold that back! Lantin and I did, the night we escaped!"
"Look!" ordered Denham, pointing toward the spot where the little folding stair had been. I looked, and despair rushed over me. For the stair had been removed, and instead of it, steps had been cut into the side of the shaft itself, leading from the spiral stairway in the shaft to the ring of black flooring on which we stood.
"The guards must have cut those steps after you escaped," said Denham, "probably because they would not allow anyone to play on them again the trick you did. We heard of your exploit, in the pit."
Up from the shaft was coming now an increasing clamor, and the battering on the gate far below had increased in fierceness.
"But how, then, are we to hold them in the pit?" I asked, despairingly. "A messenger has gone into time after Kethra and his forces, and if we could only check these hordes until he comes—"
Abruptly the Aztec spoke, calmly, gravely. "We are five," he said, "five strong swords. And the stair is narrow."
There was a moment of silence, for the idea he broached was stunning in its audacity. Then D'Alord laughed in sheer delight. "Good!" he cried. "Why, 'twill be easy! Ixtil is right. We are five blades here, and the stair is narrow. We'll show them sword-play, eh?"
A sudden reckless excitement burned through me like fire. "Good enough!" I cried. The Roman broke in on us. "Down the stair, then, at once! We'll meet them at the very bottom, if possible, and then when they do force us back up, it will give us a long enough delay for the aid you speak of to get here."
We ran toward the steps cut in the shaft, but Denham halted us by an exclamation. "Look!" he cried, pointing some distance along the wall of the temple. "There are suits of the guards' armor, hanging up. We'll need them, before we are through today!"
We saw the wisdom of his suggestion, and hastily acted on it, donning suits of the brazen armor and helmets to match. The Roman alone, who was already attired very similarly, did not join us.
And now we rushed toward the steps in the shaft's side, and down them to the beginning of the spiral stair. Down the stair we ran, recklessly throwing ourselves around the curves of that airy, high-flung pathway. Looking down, I saw that the light in the pit was growing, as the dawn began to flame in the world above, and I glimpsed vaguely through the rising mists a great horde that eddied and swirled about the bottom of the stairway. Up to our ears, stronger and stronger, came the clanging of heavy metal objects striking the barred gate, while there rose at the same time a savage roar from the pit's blood-thirsty hordes.
We raced on, down and down until I was near to dropping with exhaustion. And still the Roman sternly spurred us forward, with the cheering assurance that the farther down we went, the farther up the hordes would need to press us back. Finally we reached the fourth curve of the spiral stair above the ground, a height of perhaps two thousand feet above the pit's floor. And there the Roman halted us.
"We'll make our stand here," he said. The clangor and the roaring below were deafening, now, and for a few minutes we lay upon the steps exhausted, then rose to our feet, one by one. Fabrius stood a step below the rest of us, his heavy shortsword in his hand, calmly looking down toward the pit. I drew my own rapier, my heart thumping wildly, but I strove to appear as calm as the Roman. Denham, with elaborate unmindfulness of the roaring mobs below, drew forth a snuff-box containing a few grains of the brown powder, and offered us each in turn a pinch, which we refused, then daintily took some himself.
"Ha, Ixtil," cried D'Alord, slapping the Aztec on the back gleefully, "this should be a better fight even than those in the pit, eh?" The chieftain smiled darkly, shifting his saw-toothed sword from hand to hand, but made no other answer, and the Frenchman turned to me.
"What of him?" he demanded, pointing to Lantin. "He has no sword."
I turned in dismay, for I had forgotten my friend, almost. "You'd best go back up to the temple's top," I told him. "Wait for the coming of Kethra, and guide him down to us. You can be no good here, you know, so don't risk yourself."
The others seconded my suggestion, warmly urging Lantin to return to the temple's top and await the aid from Kethra, but he refused. "I have this," he said, showing us an automatic which he had snatched up when we sprang from the time-car. Finally we compromised by placing him on the stair some distance behind and above us, where he could use the few but precious shots in his weapon when it was most necessary to do so.
Now we turned from him, for with a sudden mighty clang the great gate below went down. There was a tremendous shout, a savage roar of triumph, and then the tramping of thousands of feet as the hordes in the pit flooded toward the overturned gate and raced up the stair.
Looking down, we saw them ascending toward us, coming in such close-packed order that many were crowded from the low-walled stair and dashed down to death below. But still they came on, a bellowing, blood-thirsty mob, until they were winding around the stair just across the spiral from us.
Denham drew his sword, now, and we stepped down so that we stood in a single line across the stair, the Roman at the center, with D'Alord and Ixtil on his left side and Denham and me on the other.
And now the hordes surged around the bend of the stair, racing up toward us. A sudden cry went up from them as they glimpsed us, and momentarily the human wave sucked back, and the close-packed mob halted. A moment there was silence, while they stared up at us. I stole a glance at my companions. The face of Fabrius was stern but unperturbed, and he gripped his sword firmly, eyeing the mob below with eagle gaze. D'Alord's face was darkly flushed, his eyes gleaming. Ixtil leaned forward in a tense, tigerish crouch, while Denham, beside me, lounged negligently, leaning on his rapier and regarding the crowd below us with a mocking, contemptuous smile.
Only a moment that silence lasted, while the hordes gazed up at us. Then, as they saw that we were but five, a beastlike roar went up and they raced up toward us, vying for the honor of slaying us.
Up, up they came, a sea of ragged figures, a storm of flashing weapons. A catlike Egyptian and a giant Chinaman were first of that mob, with behind them the massed weight of the hordes in the pit, pushing up from far below, to win up to the flying-platforms that would carry them to the loot of Kom.
As though in a dream, I saw the fierce faces coming up toward us, and then there was a clash of steel on steel that brought me to my senses. D'Alord and Fabrius had each leapt forward a step and with two strokes that were like darting flashes of lightning had struck down the Egyptian and the Chinaman. Over their bodies came the others, and for an instant the air seemed thick with darting sword-blades, at which I whirled and thrust and parried.
A brutal-faced man in medieval chain-armor was my nearest opponent, and as I realized the fact, he swung up his heavy sword for a crashing stroke. But while he raised the cumbrous weapon, I darted out my rapier and he fell with a spreading red stain at his throat. A white-robed, sallow man thrust at me with a long spear, over his body, but the sword of the Roman flashed down and cut the head from the spear, then flashed again and the man went down. A dozen blades glinted off my armor and helmet, and I thrust out savagely and blindly, felt the blade pierce through flesh and blood, once, twice. And now, shaken by our first fierce resistance, the mob fell back a little, while we stood panting, surveying the scene of that first clash.
At our feet lay a dozen or more men, dead or dying. As yet none of us had been wounded, with the exception of D'Alord, who was bleeding from a cut on the back of his wrist. The narrowness of the stairway had been our salvation, since only a few men at a time could come at us, and these were hampered by the press of those behind them.
But I saw that the battle had only begun. The mob was again surging up toward us, more fiercely than before. I glanced back up the stair, but there was no sign of Kethra's forces. Then I turned my attention back to the oncoming hordes, for already our blades were clashing with theirs.
A succession of savage faces appeared before me, confused and changing, and I thrust until my wrist was tired to numbness. I heard, even above the clash of blades and shouts of our opponents, the voice of D'Alord, who was mocking his opponents in rapid French, disparaging their skill and crying out when he beat down their guard. And, soaring high over all the other sounds of the battle, rose a weird, piercing cry, the battle-cry of the Aztec.
"Alalala!" he shouted. "Alalala! Alalala!"
The stairs at our feet became slippery with blood, choked with bodies, and we gave back a few steps. This gave us further advantage, for we stood on firm, dry footing, while those who came at us slipped and fell on the smooth metal of the steps below us, smeared as it was with the life-blood of their fellows. Yet they came on, ever on, forced us around and around the spiral, up, up, ever up the stair.
We were forced up until we had entered the shaft and the wall on our right gave us added support. In the semi-darkness of the shaft, too, it was harder for those coming at us to see us, while they were more plainly visible to us against the light of the pit below.
A ragged, squint-eyed little man crept under the legs of those battling us, and jabbed at me with a javelin. In the confusion of battle we had shifted in position until I was now next to the low wall that kept us from the abyss. Now, as the javelin stabbed up at me, I stooped swiftly beside the low barrier, and with a flashing stroke across his neck, finished my squint-eyed opponent. But as I started to rise again, a great figure loomed above me, a giant black who swung up above his head a heavy, horn-hafted ax. He was standing on the low wall itself, balancing himself for a crashing down-stroke of the ax, which I could not resist.
He uttered a fierce cry, whirled the ax about over his head, and swung it down toward me, but as his arm started that downward motion there was a sharp crack from the stair above, and he toppled down into the abyss. In the very nick of time, Lantin's shot had saved me.
But on came the hordes, pushing us up and up by sheer weight of numbers, until it seemed madness that five men should thus stand against thousands. Around and around the up-spiraling stair they forced us, so that sometimes we fought on one side of the shaft and sometimes on another. Now and then, sated with fighting, they would draw back for a few moments, and this gave us precious intervals of rest, but always they came on again, always they pushed us up. Man after man of them hurtled down to death in the pit, for as the hordes came on they threw their own dead and dying over the rail into the abyss, so that the stair might be unencumbered.
We were very near to the temple floor by now, and I was bleeding from a dozen flesh-wounds, nor were the rest of us in better case. Ixtil had a great cut in one cheek, and Fabrius had been wounded in the leg by a thrown spear. D'Alord, too, was a bloody figure, and had ceased to jeer at his adversaries, fighting now in grim silence. Alone among us, Denham remained virtually unscathed, and he fought on unchanged. His slender, needlelike rapier flashed here and there with wonderful speed and precision, always stabbing at the exact right spot, with the exact force needed. And he still smiled scornfully as his blade dealt death.
A half-dozen times Lantin's pistol had saved one of us from death, barking out a grim message when we were pressed too close. But now we were becoming ever more weary, were being pressed ever more swiftly up by fresh opponents, with the weight of the hordes behind them. All down the great spiral, clear to the floor of the pit, the stair was crowded with the hordes, pressing us ever upward, their own weight and numbers hampering with deadly effect those who were nearest us, and who were pushed forward with no chance for choosing their thrusts.
At last we reached the stair's end, and stood on the black ring of flooring around the abyss. When we could no longer hold them from emerging onto that flooring, we suddenly turned and ran toward the other spiral stair which circled the interior of the cylindrical temple, winding from balcony to balcony up to the building's roof.
And there our fight began anew, for when the hordes emerged into the temple they did not stream outside into the city, as I had hoped, but continued to press us up toward the roof, where were the flying-platforms that would carry them to the rich loot of mighty Kom. They could have had freedom, but it was not enough. They were thirsty for the riches awaiting them at Kom. So not a man of them left the temple, all combining to force us up the narrow stair that spiraled up the temple's interior, a replica of the one in the shaft, though much smaller, and the only road to the building's roof.
They were pressing us closely, now, and we could hardly keep to our feet. Then, a hundred feet from the ceiling of the great building, a shout of triumph went up from the hordes, for D'Alord went down, stunned by a blow on the head from a great mace. Fabrius rushed forward to drag him back, and was himself struck down by a blow from the same club. It seemed that our fight was over, then and there, when there came a sharp rattle of shots from behind and some six or seven of our opponents went down, felled by the last shots of Lantin's pistol.
Involuntarily the mob fell back for a few steps, and we seized the opportunity to drag D'Alord and the Roman to their feet. Fabrius was unhurt and D'Alord had only been stunned, quickly reviving. And now, as the mob below hung for a moment hesitant, not knowing how many more shots Lantin had at his disposal, two men sprang out of their number and faced us.
One was a lithe, brown-skinned Malay, who waved a gleaming kris aloft and called to the rest to resume the attack. But the other it was who held my gaze, a blond giant with long, waving hair, who shouted fiercely and waved a battle-ax aloft, calling to his companions to follow him to the attack.
It was Cannell!
Cannell, for whom we had come across the centuries! Cannell, whom we had seen seized by the Raider and taken, whom we had searched for in vain in the city of the pit. There was a great, half-healed wound on his temple, and his eyes were alight with blood-lust, so that I could see that he knew us not.
I was brushed aside, and someone sped by me from above. It was Lantin, and before we could stop him he had passed us and had raced down the intervening steps toward Cannell, his face alight at seeing the friend we had come through time to rescue.
"Cannell!" he cried, rushing toward him with hands outstretched. We looked in that instant to see him slain, but no blow was struck, the mob seeming paralyzed by astonishment. I saw Lantin reach out to Cannell, saw the blood-lust leave him; his eyes cleared as he looked at Lantin, the past coming back to him over his time in the bloody pit.
He dropped his ax and took a step toward Lantin, his face alight with recognition. Then we uttered a helpless groan, for the Malay, who stood at the low rail behind Lantin, had recovered from his surprize and now swept up his curved blade over Lantin's head.
I shouted, and started down toward Lantin, but knew myself too late to ward off that blow. Cannell looked, saw the upflung, menacing blade, and uttered a great shout. He had no weapon in his hand, but with one great bound he leapt up toward the Malay, gripped him in his arms, and then the two swayed, toppled, fell, hurtled down into the abyss, twisting and turning, locked in a death-grip, down through the temple's interior, down into the darkness of the vast shaft below, down to the pit-floor far beneath.
I was down to Lantin now, grasped him and dragged him back, and before the massed hordes recovered from their astonishment, he was behind us. They turned now, saw, and howled their rage, racing up toward our waiting swords.
A torrent of raging swords, they pushed us up until we stood at the stair's end. Behind us was a high, vaulted room, and at its other side the stair continued, leading still up. We turned, ran across that room, the triumphant horde behind us, and when we reached the stair at the room's other side, turned again and faced them.
Up through a half-dozen such rooms they forced us, through dim, great halls with patterns of fire on their walls, with unguessed, looming mysteries lurking in their shadows, vaguely glimpsed by me as we ran through them. The lair of the Raider, those dim halls, I knew. And, at last, the narrow stair from one of them emerged onto the roof itself, and we stood at the point where that stair opened onto the great, flat roof, barring the way of the hordes in our final stand.
Behind us, on the great expanse of the roof, were low-walled, oval platforms of metal, great of size, stacked one upon another. Enough flying-platforms, I knew, to carry all the hordes below us down to the loot of Kom. And the foremost of our opponents saw them also, and yelled with savage triumph.
If we had fought fiercely before, we battled like supermen now, in a last spurt of energy. Our swords clicked and flashed like swift shuttles, weaving strands of death from enemy to enemy, as we used all the mad strength of despair to hold back the hordes for a last moment.
"Mordieu!" shouted D'Alord. "This is the end, comrades!"
I turned to answer him, then halted. From above, from the sun-flooded air of early morning, had sounded a long, rising shriek of wind, a piercing whistle of a rising gale. A fierce burst of wind struck us, and cold, ice-cold, flooded through my heart. There was a thundering of wind-sounds above, another buffeting gust of cold air, and then appeared abruptly, a hundred feet above us, the Raider!
"God!" muttered Lantin, behind me. The blades of our enemies and ourselves had ceased to clash, and with a common impulse we gazed up. The Raider's swirling mists contracted suddenly, his three orbs of green changed to purple, and he drifted gently, tauntingly, down toward us.
A howl of triumph went up from the hordes on the stair. Away down and around the spiraling stairway it went, down all their packed masses, down into the shaft to the pit itself, all taking up and passing on that savage, exultant shout.
For we had lost. Kethra had lost. The Raider had somehow eluded him, in time, and had come back to destroy us and to loose his hordes on the flying-platforms, to send them down to Kom in a rain of death, while Kethra vainly searched time for the Raider. We had lost.
Slowly, slowly, the Raider came down toward us, while the hordes below us watched with delighted expectancy. Spinning, twisting, it sank down until it hung a scant twenty feet above us, and we waited, helpless, for the destroying flashes from the central orbs.
Suddenly D'Alord stepped forward, and uttering a yell of defiance, he picked a sword from the floor, whirled it around his head and sent it hurtling spear-wise up toward the Raider.
It fell back, missed by yards. And now the gray, shapeless mass of the Raider spun and laced with inconceivable rapidity, while down upon us darted flash on flash of purple, destroying fire, from the central orbs.
The flashes fell short! Between us and the Raider was hanging a veil of transparent black, a tenuous black net that was suspended in midair above us, and against which the purple flashes splashed and stopped. I turned swiftly, and a little behind and above me was hovering the air-boat of Kethra. It moved toward us, and we stepped on it. And in that same instant, there appeared in the air all around us, above and around the temple and the Raider, score on score of the air-boats, crowded with the men of Kom.
From them darted a hundred black nets like the one that hung before us. The black veils closed upon the Raider, contracted, and while he spun and changed and twisted with mad speed, the veils contracted still until they were a black ball five feet across, in which he was prisoned. Then, from Kethra's air-boat and from all around us, there darted flash on flash of orange flame, which struck the black ball, burned fiercely for a moment, and then vanished. In the air there drifted only a shining mist, and then that too was swept away!
Now, from all the hovering air-boats came the thrumming of the sound-rays, directed at the temple and the city, from all the scores of cars that hung above that city. The ground beneath pitched, heaved up torturedly, and then the city collapsed, sank down with a thundering, ear-splitting roar into the great pit that lay beneath, the earth over the cavern being shattered by the disintegrating vibrations of the sound-rays.
All the city, with the great temple below us, crashed down, and vanished in a mighty cloud of dust. The dust hung, cleared, disappeared. And beneath lay nothing but a great depression in the earth, a vast, raw bowl in the earth's surface, with here and there a white fragment showing in the brown earth. Under that huge sunken bowl, I well knew, lay the city of the cylinders, with its Kanlars and soulless slaves, and under it, too, lay the city of the pit, and the people of the pit, the thousands of fierce warriors who had pressed us up the stair so savagely, seeking to carry destruction and death down to a peaceful city.
Standing there on Kethra's car, we surveyed the scene in silence. And there was silence all around us, for from all the massed cars came no word or shout, the men on them gazing down into the torn depression below as though loth to believe that their victory was won at last, the evil menace of the Raider crushed forever. So we looked, there in the hushed silence.
In the east, the sun was rising higher ... higher.…