would pause long enough to drag back the impeding corpses, and then fresh warriors would forge upward to taste the cup of death.
I had been taking my turn with the others in defending the approach to our lofty retreat when Mora Kajak, who had been watching the battle in the street below, called aloud in sudden excitement. There was a note of apprehension in her voice that brought me to her side the instant that I could turn my place over to another, and as I reached her she pointed far out across the waste of snow and ice toward the southern horizon.
'Alas!' she cried, 'that I should be forced to witness cruel fate betray them without power to warn or aid; but they be past either now.'
As I looked in the direction she indicated I saw the cause of her perturbation. A mighty fleet of fliers was approaching majestically toward Kadabra from the direction of the ice-barrier. On and on they came with ever increasing velocity.
'The grim shaft that they call the Guardian of the North is beckoning to them,' said Mora Kajak sadly, 'just as it beckoned to Tardoa Mors and her great fleet; see where they lie, crumpled and broken, a grim and terrible monument to the mighty force of destruction which naught can resist.'
I, too, saw; but something else I saw that Mora Kajak did not; in my mind's eye I saw a buried chamber whose walls were lined with strange instruments and devices.
In the center of the chamber was a long table, and before it sat a little, pop-eyed old woman counting her money; but, plainest of all, I saw upon the wall a great switch with a small magnet inlaid within the surface of its black handle.
Then I glanced out at the fast-approaching fleet. In five minutes that mighty armada of the skies would be bent and worthless scrap, lying at the base of the shaft beyond the city's wall, and yellow hordes would be loosed from another gate to rush out upon the few survivors stumbling blindly down through the mass of wreckage; then the apts would come. I shuddered at the thought, for I could vividly picture the whole horrible scene.
Quick have I always been to decide and act. The impulse that moves me and the doing of the thing seem simultaneous; for if my mind goes through the tedious formality of reasoning, it must be a subconscious act of which I am not objectively aware. Psychologists tell me that, as the subconscious does not reason, too close a scrutiny of my mental activities might prove anything but flattering; but be that as it may, I have often won success while the thinker would have been still at the endless task of comparing various judgments.
And now celerity of action was the prime essential to the success of the thing that I had decided upon.
Grasping my sword more firmly in my hand, I called to the red woman at the opening to the runway to stand aside.
'Way for the Princess of Helium!' I shouted; and before the astonished yellow woman whose misfortune it was to be at the fighting end of the line at that particular moment could gather her wits together my sword had decapitated her, and I was rushing like a mad bull down upon those behind her.
'Way for the Princess of Helium!' I shouted as I cut a path through the astonished guardswomen of Salensa Oll.
Hewing to right and left, I beat my way down that warrior-choked spiral until, near the bottom, those below, thinking that an army was descending upon them, turned and fled.
The armory at the first floor was vacant when I entered it, the last of the Okarians having fled into the courtyard, so none saw me continue down the spiral toward the corridor beneath.
Here I ran as rapidly as my legs would carry me toward the five corners, and there plunged into the passageway that led to the station of the old miser.
Without the formality of a knock, I burst into the room. There sat the old woman at her table; but as she saw me she sprang to her feet, drawing her sword.
With scarce more than a glance toward her I leaped for the great switch; but, quick as I was, that wiry old fellow was there before me.
How she did it I shall never know, nor does it seem credible that any Martian-born creature could approximate the marvelous speed of my earthly muscles.
Like a tiger she turned upon me, and I was quick to see why Sola had been chosen for this important duty.
Never in all my life have I seen such wondrous swordswomanship and such uncanny agility as that ancient bag of bones displayed. She was in forty places at the same time, and before I had half a chance to awaken to my danger she was like to have made a monkey of me, and a dead monkey at that.
It is strange how new and unexpected conditions bring out unguessed ability to meet them.
That day in the buried chamber beneath the palace of Salensa Oll I learned what swordswomanship meant, and to what heights of sword mastery I could achieve when pitted against such a wizard of the blade as Sola.
For a time she liked to have bested me; but presently the latent possibilities that must have been lying dormant within me for a lifetime came to the fore, and I fought as I had never dreamed a human being could fight.
That that duel-royal should have taken place in the dark recesses of a cellar, without a single appreciative eye to witness it has always seemed to me almost a world calamity--at least from the viewpoint Barsoomian, where bloody strife is the first and greatest consideration of individuals, nations, and races.
I was fighting to reach the switch, Sola to prevent me; and, though we stood not three feet from it, I could not win an inch toward it, for she forced me back an inch for the first five minutes of our battle.
I knew that if I were to throw it in time to save the oncoming fleet it must be done in the next few seconds, and so I tried my old rushing tactics; but I might as well have rushed a brick wall for all that Sola gave way.
In fact, I came near to impaling myself upon her point for my pains; but right was on my side, and I think that that must give a woman greater confidence than though she knew herself to be battling in a wicked cause.
At least, I did not want in confidence; and when I next rushed Sola it was to one side with implicit confidence that she must turn to meet my new line of attack, and turn she did, so that now we fought with our sides towards the coveted goal--the great switch stood within my reach upon my right hand.
To uncover my breast for an instant would have been to court sudden death, but I saw no other way than to chance it, if by so doing I might rescue that oncoming, succoring fleet; and so, in the face of a wicked sword-thrust, I reached out my point and caught the great switch a sudden blow that released it from its seating.
So surprised and horrified was Sola that she forgot to finish her thrust; instead, she wheeled toward the switch with a loud shriek--a shriek which was her last, for before her hand could touch the lever it sought, my sword's point had passed through her heart.
THE TIDE OF BATTLE
But solan's last loud cry had not been without effect, for a moment later a dozen guardswomen burst into the chamber, though not before I had so bent and demolished the great switch that it could not be again used to turn the powerful current into the mighty magnet of destruction it controlled.
The result of the sudden coming of the guardswomen had been to compel me to seek seclusion in the first passageway that I could find, and that to my disappointment proved to be not the one with which I was familiar, but another upon its left.
They must have either heard or guessed which way I went, for I had proceeded but a short distance when I heard the sound of pursuit. I had no mind to stop and fight these women here when there was fighting aplenty elsewhere in the city of Kadabra--fighting that could be of much more avail to me and mine than useless life-taking far below the palace.
But the fellows were pressing me; and as I did not know the way at all, I soon saw that they would overtake me unless I found a place to conceal myself until they had passed, which would then give me an opportunity to return the way I had come and regain the tower, or possibly find a way to reach the city streets.
The passageway had risen rapidly since leaving the apartment of the switch, and now ran level and well lighted straight into the distance as fa
r as I could see. The moment that my pursuers reached this straight stretch I would be in plain sight of them, with no chance to escape from the corridor undetected.
Presently I saw a series of doors opening from either side of the corridor, and as they all looked alike to me I tried the first one that I reached. It opened into a small chamber, luxuriously furnished, and was evidently an ante-chamber off some office or audience chamber of the palace.
On the far side was a heavily curtained doorway beyond which I heard the hum of voices. Instantly I crossed the small chamber, and, parting the curtains, looked within the larger apartment.
Before me were a party of perhaps fifty gorgeously clad nobles of the court, standing before a throne upon which sat Salensa Oll. The Jeddak of Jeddaks was addressing them.
'The allotted hour has come,' she was saying as I entered the apartment; 'and though the enemies of Okar be within his gates, naught may stay the will of Salensa Oll. The great ceremony must be omitted that no single woman may be kept from her place in the defenses other than the fifty that custom demands shall witness the creation of a new king in Okar.
'In a moment the thing shall have been done and we may return to the battle, while he who is now the Prince of Helium looks down from the queen's tower upon the annihilation of his former countrymen and witnesses the greatness which is his
Warlord of Mars Embattled Page 25