Sometimes, unfortunately, the men of other lands did not always properly welcome the gentlemen and it was essential to overcome their hostility, and to divide their lands and their women among those who had come only in friendship and unity against the natural (or unnatural) enemies of the whole race of mankind. But these battless and diversions did not long prevent mankind from wiping out its alien enemies, nest by nest and camp by camp; tracking them down and spying them out and destroying them with their own weapons. Eventually, of course, there were no more of the blue fire-heads. But by that time the Kar-chee who lived afar off in the cold night in their lairs around the Ring Stars had coldly decided to cease sending replacements: there were other mineable planets with more tractable native life-forms, and thenceforce there and there only the Kar-chee concentrated their attentions. Only working Kar-chee had ever been sent to Earth, only neuters, incapable of reproducing themselves; and this decision of their own home worlds was thus the final death sentence.
The dragons, on the other hand, multiplied, and their eggs and chicks and cockerels were known in every woodland … but they seemed more and more subject to the control of man as their former masters died off. Liam delighted to watch the dragon hunts as he grew older and less active, and many of them were held specially in his honor.
Mother Nor still maintained her few followers and continued to preach her moralistic ideals, but without the rigidity and discipline it had been subjected to under the regime of old Father Gaspar the sect of the Knowers continued to diminish. Further, it was unable to compete with the attractions of the vigorous and continually exciting adventure of life as led by Liam’s gentlemen. But he himself would never allow the old woman to be mocked or abused and it was by his generous consent that she and her handful of impractical followers were allowed to settle in a land all to themselves. There were those who suspected that it was there that Fateem went secretly after her disappearance in later years, but no one ever knew for sure; Liam neither spoke nor allowed it to be spoken of.
Thus humanity renewed its strength and developed its newest ways of life upon its oldest world, forgotten by its distant children for many centuries yet to come. And as for what happened after the other worlds remembered, this is not the place to recount that; and as for the later and the last years of Liam, how he bore all before him, his slaying of the Great Kar-chee who held the daughter of the Chief of Bran a captive in his hidden cave and how Liam took her, too, to wife, and of all his deeds and triumphs and those of Lors and Duro and Tom, these are to be found wherever songs are sung among men and wherever tales are told among women.
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Copyright © 1966 by Ace Books, Inc.
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4588-X
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4588-7
The Kar-Chee Reign Page 16