The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond Hamilton
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I can’t—”
“Poison!” hissed Golden Wings. “Theyare using poisoned arrows. It’s a trick I’ve heard of the Nameless Men of the far north.”
Khal Kan stared unbelievingly. “Even the Bunts wouldn’t use such hideous means! Yet my uncle is ruthless—”
Red rage misted his brain, and his voice was an unhuman roar as he turned and shouted to his tensely waiting horsemen.
“Our men are being slain by foul magic!” he yelled. “Down upon them—we strike for Jotan!”
It was as though he and Golden Wings were riding the forefront of a human avalanche as they charged down the steep slope to the battle.
They smashed home into the flank of the Bunts. The green men gave way in surprise and momentary terror. Kahl Kan’s sword whipped like a lash of light among ugly green heads and thrusting spears. As always, in a fight, he moved by pure instinct rather than by conscious design.
Yet he kept Golden Wings a little behind him. The girl was fiercely wielding her light sword against those on the ground who sought to hamstring Khal Kan’s horse with spear or sword. His riders were yelling shrilly.
* * * *
The crazy confusion of the battle took on definite pattern. The Bunts had recoiled from the unexpected attack, but Egir was reforming them.
Khal Kan shouted and spurred to get at Egir. He could see his uncle’s giant form, his cynical, powerful face under his helmet, and could hear his bull voice directing the reforming of the Bunt columns.
But he could not smash through the mad melee toward Egir. And now poisoned Bunt arrows were falling, dropping men from their saddles.
Brusul had reached him, was shouting to him. “Prince, your father is slain—one of those hellish arrows.”
Khal Kan’s heart went cold for a moment. He hardly heard Brusul’ s hoarse voice, shouting on.
“We can’t face those poisoned shafts here in the open! Unless we fall back, they’ll cut us down from a distance like grain in harvest-time!”
Khal Kan groaned. He saw the dilemma. They could not hope to smash the Bunt lines that Egir had reformed—and in a long battle the new poisoned arrows of the green men would take heavier and heavier toll of them.
The safety of Jotan was now a crushing weight on his shoulders. He was king now, and the dire responsibility of the position in this mad moment left him no time even for sorrow for his father. A battle lost here now meant that Jotan was defenseless before Egir’s horde.
With a groan, he ordered a trumpeter to sound retreat.
“Fall back toward Jotan!” he ordered. “March the footmen back on the double, Brusul—we’ll cover your withdrawal with the horsemen.”
Through the long, hot hours of that afternoon, the bitter righting retreat surged back northward to Jotan. The Bunt columns followed closely, the green men howling with triumph.
Ever and again, Khal Kan and his riders charged back against the pursuing Bunts and smashed their front lines, making them recoil. Each time, empty saddles showed the toll of the poisoned shafts.
Sunset was flaring bloodily over the Dragals when they came back by that bitter way to the black towers of Jotan. Footsore, reeling with fatigue, Brusul’s spearmen marched through the gate into the city.
One last charge back at the Bunts made Khal Kan with the horsemen. He rode back then with Golden Wings, who was swaying in her saddle. They two were the last of the riders to enter the city.
The great gates hastily ground shut, as sweating men labored in the dusk at the winches. Through the loopholes of the guard-towers, Khal Kan looked out and saw the Bunt hordes outside spreading to encircle the whole land side of Jotan.
“They have now four fighting-men to every one of ours,” he muttered through his teeth. “We are in a trap called a city.”
He was staggering, his face grimed and smeared with sweat and dust and blood. Golden Wings pressed his arm in complete faith.
“It was only the foul trick of the poisoned arrows that defeated tis!” she exclaimed. “But for that, we’d have rolled them into the sea.”
“We have Egir to thank for that,” rasped Khal Kan. “While that man lives, doom hangs like a thundercloud over Jotan.”
He stepped to the window and sent his voice rolling out into the gathering darkness.”
“Egir, will you settle this man to man, sword to sword? Speak!”
Back came a sardonic voice from the camp of the Bunts.
“I am not so simple, my dear nephew! Your city’s a nut whose shell we’ll soon crack and pick, so rest you.”
Khal Kan set guards at every rod of the wall. Jotan’s streets were dark under the two moons, for no torches had been lit this night. The sound of women’s voices wailing a requiem for his dead father brought his numbed mind a sick sense of loss.
No one else in Jotan spoke or broke the stillness. Awful and imminent peril crushed the city’s folk. But from the darkness outside the walls came the sound of distant hammering as the Bunt hordes began making scaling-ladders for the morrow.
* * * *
From a window of the palace, before he collapsed in drugged sleep of exhaustion, Khal Kan saw the Bunt fires hemming in the whole landward side of the city in their crescent of flame.…
Henry Steven’s wife had been worried about him all day. He had been acting queerly, she thought anxiously, ever since he had awakened that morning.
He had been pale and stricken and haggard since he had awakened. He had not gone to the office at all, a tiling unprecedented. And he had spent most of the day pacing to and fro in the little house, his haunted eyes not seeming to see her, his whole bearing one of intense excitement.
Henry was afraid—afraid of the dread climax to which things were rushing in the other world of Thar. He knew the awful peril in which Jotan now stood. Once those hordes of Bunts got over the wall, the city was doomed.
“I’ve got to quit driving myself crazy about it,” he told himself desperately that afternoon. “It’s just a dream—Thar and Khal Kan must be only a dream.”
But his feverish apprehension was not lessened by that thought. No matter if Thar was only a dream, it was real to him!
* * * *
He knew Jotan and its people, from the nightly dreams of his earliest childhood. Every street of the black city he had known and loved, as Khal Kan. Even if it were only a dream, he couldn’t let the old, lovely city and its people be overwhelmed by Egir and his green barbarians.
If Thar was the dream, and the city Jotan was taken and Khal Kan was slain—there would be an end to his precious dream-life, forever. Only the monotonous existence of Henry Stevens would stretch before him.
And if Thar happened to be the reality, then it was doubly vital that Khal Kan’s people be saved from that menace.
“Yet what can I do?” Henry groaned inwardly. “What can Khal Kan do? The Bunts will surely break into the city—”
The poisoned arrows, new to the Jotanians, gave Egir’s green warriors a terrific advantage. That, and their outnumbering hordes, would enable them to scale the walls of Jotan and then the end would be at hand.
“Damn Egir for his deviltry in using those arrows!” Henry muttered. “I wish I could take a dozen machine-guns across. I’d show the cursed traitor.”
It was a vain and idle wish, he knew. Nothing material could traverse the gulf between dream-world and real world, whichever was which. His own body, even—Henry Stevens’ body—never crossed that gulf. AH he took into Thar each night were his memories of Henry Stevens’ life on Earth during