THE PLACE OF THE MEETING WAS arranged.
It lay in one of the plazas in the area controlled by the forces of Sarm.
Misk was to come alone to the plaza, to be met by myself and Sarm. No one was to bear arms. Misk would surrender himself to Sarm and I, theoretically, would then be allowed to go free.
But I knew that Sarm had no intention of keeping his part of the bargain, and that he intended to slay Misk, destroying hopefully thereby the effective leadership of the opposition, and then either keep me as a slave for Vika or, more likely, killing me as well, even though that might disappoint the expectations of vengeance nourished in the bosom of his pet Mul.
When I was unchained I was informed by Sarm that the small box he carried activated my control net and at the first sigh of disobedience or difficulty he would simply raise the power level—literally boiling my brain away.
I said that I understood.
I wondered what Sarm would say if he knew that Parp and Kusk had not actually implanted me.
In spite of the agreement about arms, Sarm hung from the back of his translator strap, invisible from the front, a silver tube.
To my surprise his pet Mul, Vika of Treve, demanded to accompany her golden master. I supposed that she feared he might slay me, thus depriving her of her revenge for which she had waited so long. He would have refused her, but she pleaded so earnestly that at last he agreed that she might accompany us. ‘I wish to see my master triumph!’ she begged, and that argument seemed to sway golden Sarm, and Vika found herself a member of our party.
I myself was forced to walk perhaps a dozen paces in front of Sarm, who held his grasping appendage near the control box which would, he supposed, activate the golden net he believed to be fused into the tissues of my brain. Vika waled at his side.
At last I saw, far across the plaza, the slowly stalking figure of Misk.
How tender I felt toward the golden giant in that moment as I realised that he, though a Priest-King, had come to give his life for mine, simply because we had once locked antennae, simply because we were friends, simply because there was Nest Trust between us.
He stopped and we stopped.
And then we began to walk slowly towards one another again across the square tiles of the plaza in the secret nest of Priest-Kings.
When he was still out of range of the silver tube of Sarm but close enough, I hoped, to be able to hear me, I ran forward, throwing my hands high. ‘Go back!’ I cried, ‘It is a trick! Go back!’
Misk stopped in his tracks.
I heard Sarm’s translator behind me, ‘You will die for that, Mul,’ it said.
I turned and I saw Sarm, his entire golden bladelike form convulsed with rage. Two of the tiny hooklike appendages on his foreleg spun the power dial on the control box. ‘Die, Mul,’ said Sarm.
But I stood calmly before him.
It took Sarm but an instant to realise he had been tricked and he hurled the box from him and it shattered on the tiles of the plaza.
I stood ready now to receive the blast of Sarm’s silver tube which he had whipped from its place of concealment and trained on my breast.
‘Very well,’ said Sarm, ‘let it be the silver tube.’
I tensed myself for the sudden burst of fire, that incandescent torrent that would burst and burn the flesh from my bones.
The firing switch was depressed and I heard the soft click but the tube failed to fire. Once again, desperately, Sarm pressed the firing switch.
‘It does not fire!’ came from Sarm’s translator and his entire frame was startled, shaken with incomprehension.
‘No,’ cried Vika, ‘I discharged it this morning!’
The girl ran to my side in a swirl of many-colored silks and from beneath the Robes of Concealment she withdrew my sword and kneeling at my side lowered her head and placed it in my hand. ‘Cabot my Master!’ she cried.
I took the blade.
‘Rise,’ I said, ‘Vika of Treve—you are now a free woman.’
‘I do not understand,’ came from Sarm’s translator.
‘I came to see my Master triumph!’ cried Vika of Treve, her voice thrilled with emotion.
Gently I thrust the girl to one side.
‘I do not understand,’ came from Sarm’s translator.
‘That is how you have lost,’ I said.
Sarm hurled the silver tube at my head and I ducked and heard it clatter across the tiles of the plaza for perhaps a hundred yards.
Then to my amazement Sarm turned and though I was but a human he fled from the plaza.
Vika was in my arms weeping.
In a moment we were joined by Misk.
The War was at an end.
Sarm had disappeared and with his disappearance, and presumed death, the opposition to Misk evaporated, for it had been held together only by the dominance of Sarm’s mighty personality and the prestige that was his in virtue of being First Born.
The Priest-Kings who had served him had, on the whole at least, believed that what they were doing was required by the law of the Nest, but now with Sarm’s disappearance Misk, though only Fifth Born, acceded to the title of highest born, and it was to him now, according to the same laws of the Nest, that their allegiance was now owed.
There was a greater problem as to what to do with the former Muls who had deserted to join the forces of Sarm, for the blandishments he had offered, and because they had thought that his side was the one which was winning. I was pleased to see that here were only about seventy-five or eighty wretches in this latter category. About two-thirds of them were men, and the rest women. None of them, interestingly enough, were Gur Carriers, or from the Fungus Chambers or the Pastures.
Al-Ka and Ba-Ta arrived with two prisoners, female Muls, frightened, sullen girls, lovely, clad now only in brief, sleeveless plastic, who knelt at their feet. They were joined together by a length of chain that had been, by means of two padlocks, fastened about their throats. Their wrists were secured behind their backs by slave bracelets.
‘Deserters,’ said Al-Ka.
‘Where now,’ asked BA-Ta of the girls, ‘is your gold, your jewellery and silks?’
Sullenly they looked down.
‘Do we kill them now?’ asked Al-Ka.
The girls looked at one another and trembled in fear.
I looked at Al-Ka and Ba-Ta rather closely.
They winked at me. I winked back at them. I perceived their plan. I could see that neither of them had the least intention of injuring one of the lovely creatures in their power.
‘If you wish—’ I said.
A cry of fear escaped the girls.
‘Please don’t!’ said one, looking up, pleasing, and the other pressed her head to the floor at Ba-Ta’s feet.
Al-Ka regarded them. ‘This one,’ he said, ‘had strong legs,’
Ba-Ta regarded the other. ‘This one,’ he said, ‘seems healthy.’
‘Do you wish to live?’ asked Al-Ka of the first girl.
‘Yes!’ she said.
‘Very well,’ said Al-Ka, ‘you will do so—as my slave,’
‘—Master!’ said the girl.
‘And you?’ asked Ba-Ta sternly of the second girl.
Without raising her head she said, ‘I am your slave girl, Master.’
‘Look up,’ commanded Al-Ka, and both of the girls lifted their heads trembling.
Then to my surprise Al-Ka and Ba-Ta, from their pouches, produced golden collars, only too obviously prepared in advance. There were two heavy, short clicks and the lovely throats of the two girls were encircled. I gathered it was the only gold they would see for some time. On one collar there was engraved ‘Al-Ka’ and on the other ‘Ba-Ta’.
Then Al-Ka unlocked the throat chain worn by the female Muls and he went off in one direction and Ba-Ta in the other. No longer did it seem the two former Muls were inseparable. Each departed, followed by his girl, her wrists still bound behind her back.
‘And what,’ laughed Vika of Treve, ‘is to be my fate?’
‘You are free,’ I reminded her.
‘But my fate?’ she asked, smiling at me.
I laughed. ‘It is similar to that of the others, ‘ I said, and swept her from her feet and carried her, Robes of Concealment swirling, from the room.
Misk and I had been trying to decide, for the past five days, how to organise the nest in the wake of the War. The simplest matters had to do with restoring its services and its capacity to sustain both Priest-Kings and humans. The more difficult matters had to do with the political arrangements that would allow these two diverse species to inhabit peaceably and prosperously the same dwelling. Misk was quite ready, as I was afraid he might not be, to allow humans a voice in affairs of the Nest and, moreover, to arrange for the return to their cities of those humans who did not wish to remain in the Nest.
We were considering these matters when suddenly the entire floor of the compartment in which we sat seemed to buckle and break apart. At the same time two walls shattered and fell crumbling in rubble to the floor. Misk covered my body with his own and then with his great strength, reared up, stones falling from his back like water from the body of a swimmer.
The entire Nest seemed to shiver.
‘An earthquake!’ I cried.
‘Sarm is not dead,’ said Misk. Dusty, covered with whitish powder, he looked about himself disbelievingly at the ruins. In the distance we could hear the domed side of a complex begin to crumble, raining down huge blocks of stone on the buildings beneath. ‘He is going to destroy the Nest,’ said Misk. ‘He is going to break apart the planet.’
‘Where is he?’ I demanded.
‘The Power Plant,’ said Misk.
I climbed over the fallen stones and ran from the room and leaped on the first transportation disk I would find. Though the path it had to travel was broken and littered the cushion of gas on which the disk flowed lifted the vehicle cleanly, though bucking and tilting, over the debris.
In a few moments, though the disk was damaged by falling stone and I could barely see through the powdery drifts of rock hanging in the collapsing tunnels, I had come to the Power Plant and leaped from the disk and raced to its doors. They were locked but it was only a moment’s work to find the nearby ventilator shaft and wrench away the screen. In less than a minute I had kicked open another grille and dropped inside the great domed room of the Power Plant. I saw no sight on Sarm. I myself would not know how to repair his damage so I went to the doors of the chamber, which were locked on the inside, and thrust up the latching mechanism. I swung them open. Now Misk and his engineers would be able to enter the room. I had scarcely thrust up the latch when a burst of fire from a silver tube scorched the door over my head. I looked up to see Sarm on that narrow passage that traced its precarious way around the great blue dome that covered the power source. Another flash of fire burned near me, leaving a rupture of molten marble in the floor not five feet from where I stood. Running irregularly, dodging burst of fire, I ran to the side of the dome where Sarm, from his position somewhere above, would not be likely to be able to reach me with his fire.
Then I saw him through the sides of the blue dome that covered the power source, far above, a golden figure on the narrow walkway at the crest of the dome. He fired at me, burning a hole in the dome near him, exposing the power source, and the same flashing burst of fire tore at the area of the dome behind which I stood. The burst had spent itself and only managed to scorch the dome, but the next, fired through the hold already made above, might do more damage, so I changed my position. Then Sarm seemed to lose interest in me, perhaps thinking I had been slain, more likely to conserve the charge in the silver tube for more important matter, for he then began, methodically, to fire at the paneling across from the dome, destroying one area after another. As he was doing this the entire Nest seemed to shift and the planted convulsed, and the fire spurted from the paneling. Then he fired a burst directly down into the power source and it began to rumble and throw geysers of purple fire up almost to the hole which Sarm had burned in the globe. To one side, though I scarcely noticed it at the time, I saw a vague, domelike golden shape, one of the Beetles, which, undoubtedly confused and terrified, had crept into the room of the Power Plant from the tunnel outside, through the door I had opened for Misk and his Priest-Kings. Where were they? I surmised the tunnels might have collapsed and they were even now trying to cut their way through to the Chamber of the Power Plant.
I knew that somehow I must try to stop Sarm but what could I do? He was armed with a silver tube and I with nothing but the steel of a Gorean sword.
Sarm kept firing long, persistent bursts of fire at the paneling against the walls, undoubtedly attempting to destroy the instrumentation. I hoped that such firing might exhaust the charge of the weapon.
I left cover and rushed to the walkway and was soon climbing up the narrow path that crept around the surface of the globe that now barely contained the frenzied, bubbling fury, the turbulence of the hissing, erupting substance that leaped and smote against the smooth enclosing walls.
I climbed the walkway rapidly and soon could see Sarm clearly at the very the very top of the some, whence he had once displayed tome the majesty of the Priest-Kings’ accomplishments, where he had once indicated to me the modifications of the ganglionic net by means of which his people had won to the enormous power they possessed. He was not yet aware of my approach, perhaps not believing I would be fool enough to climb the exposed walkway in pursuit.
Then suddenly he wheeled and saw me and seemed startled but then the silver tube flew up and I threw myself rolling back down the walkway, the steel stairs bubbling away following me. Then I had the curve of the dome between me and the Priest-King. His weapon fired again, slicing through the top of the dome in his vicinity and striking beneath me, melting a hold in the dome below me. Twice more Sarm fired and twice more I scrambled about on the walkway trying to keep the two surfaces of the globe between myself and his weapon. Then angrily I saw him turn away and commence firing again at the panelling. As he did so, I began to climb once more. As I climbed, to my elation, I saw the tube’s flame sputter and stop and knew the weapon was at last discharged.
I wondered what more Sarm could do now.
Nothing from his position at the top of the globe, though it had been an ideal vantagepoint for firing the tube into the instrumentation.
I wondered if he regretted wasting a large part of his weapon’s charge on firing at me. To do more damage he would now have to descend the walkway and reach the paneling itself, perhaps that on the other side of the room, but to do this he would have to pass me, and I was determined that I should not, if possible, allow that to happen.
Slowly I climbed the walkway, stepping with care past the ruined portions of the steel steps leading to the crest of the dome.
Sarm seemed in no hurry. He seemed quite content to wait for me.
I saw him toss the silver tube away, and saw if fall through one of the great holes he had blasted in the globe and disappear in the violent, bubbling purple mass seething below.
At last I stood not more than a dozen yards from the Priest-King.
He had been watching me approach and now his antennae focused on me and he drew himself up to his full golden height.
‘I knew you would come,’ he said.
One wall to the left began to crumble, fitted stone from its sides edging outwards and breaking loose to clatter down the ramps and tumble even to the floor so far beneath.
A drift of dust from the rubble obscured Sarm’s figure for a moment.
‘I am destroying the planet,’ he said. ‘It has served its purpose.’ He regarded me. ‘It has sheltered the Nest of the Priest-Kings but now there are no more Priest-Kings—only I only Sarm is left.’
‘There are still many Priest-Kings in the Nest,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘there is only one Priest-King, the First Born, Sarm—he who did not betray the Nest, he who was beloved of the Mother, he who kept and honoured the ancient truths of his people.’
The bladelike figure of the Priest-King seemed to waver on the walkway and the antennae seemed blown about as though by the wind.
More stones fell from the ceiling of the chamber now, clattering and bouncing off the surface of the blue, scarred seething dome.
‘You have destroyed the Nest,’ said Sarm, looking wildly down at me.
I said nothing. I did not even draw my sword.
‘But now,’ said Sarm, ‘I will destroy you.’
The weapon left my sheath.
Sarm reached to the steel bar that formed the railing to his left on the walkway and with the incredible strength of the Priest-Kings with one motion twisted and tore free a length or perhaps eighteen feet. He swung this lightly, as easily as I might have lifted and moved a stick of wood.
The bar he wielded was a fearsome weapon and with it he could strike me, his antennae curling, ‘but fitting.’
I knew I could not retreat back down the walkway for Sarm was much faster than I and would be upon me perhaps even before I could turn.
I could not leap to the sides for there was only the smooth sheer curve of the blue globe and I would slide to my death and fall like one of the stones from the roof above to the dusty, smoking rubble below.
And ahead of me stood Sarm, his club ready. If his first blow missed perhaps I could get close enough to strike but it did not seem probable his blow would miss.
It did not seem to me a bad place to die.
If I had dared to take my eyes from Sarm I might have looked about at the wonder of the Nest and the destruction in which it was being consumed. Drifts of rock powder hung in the air, fitted stone tumbled to the flooring far below, the walls trembled, the very globe and walkway fastened to it seemed to shift and shudder. I supposed there might be tidal waves in the distant Thassa, that crags in the Sardar and the Voltai and Thentis Ranges might be collapsing, that mountains might be falling and new ones rising, that the Sa-Tarna fields might be broken apart, that towers of cities might be falling, that the ring of black logs which encircled the Sardar might rupture and burst open in a hundred places. I imagined the panic in the cities of Gor, the pitching ships at sea, the stampedes of animals, and only I, of all humans, was at the place where this havoc had begun, only I was there to gaze upon the author of the destruction of a world, the golden destroy of a planet.
‘Strike,’ I said. ‘Be done with it.’
Sarm lifted the bar and I sensed the murderous intensity that transformed his entire being, how each of those golden fibres like springs of steel would leap into play and the long bar would slash in a blur toward my body.
I crouched, sword in hand, waiting for the blow.
But Sarm did not strike.
Rather to my wonder the bar of steel lowered and Sarm seemed frozen suddenly in an attitude of the most rapt perception. His antennae quivered and tensed but not stiffly and each of the sensory hairs on his body lifted and extended. His limbs seemed suddenly weak.
‘Kill it,’ he said. ‘Kill it.’
I thought he might be telling himself to be done with me, but somehow I knew this could not be.
Then I too sensed it and I turned.
Behind me, inching its way up the narrow walkway, clinging with its six small legs, slowly lifting its heavy domelike golden body a step at a time came the Golden Beetle I had seen below.
The mane hairs on its back were lifted like antennae and they moved as strangely, as softly, as underwater plants might lift and stir in the tides and currents of the cold liquid of the sea.
The narcotic odour emanating from that lifted, waving mane shook even me though I stood in the midst of free air on the top of that great blue globe.
The steel bar fell from Sarm’s appendage and slid from the top of the dome to fall with a distant crash far below in the rubble.
‘Kill it, Cabot,’ came from Sarm’s translator. ‘Kill it, Cabot, please,’ The Priest-King could not move. ‘You are human,’ said the translator. ‘You can kill it. Kill it, Cabot, please.’
I stood to one side, standing on the surface of the globe, clinging to the rail.
‘It is not done,’ I said to Sarm. ‘It is a great crime to kill one.’
Slowly the heavy body with its domed, fused wings pressed past me, its tiny, tuftlike antennae extending towards Sarm, its long, hollow pincerlike jaws opening.
‘Cabot,’ came from Sarm’s translator.
‘It is thus,’ I said, ‘That men use the instincts of Priest-Kings against them.’
‘Cabot—Cabot—Cabot,’ came from the translator.
Then to my amazement when the Beetle neared Sarm the Priest-King sank down on his supporting appendages, almost as if he were on his knees, and suddenly plunged his face and antennae into the midst of the waving manehair of the Golden Beetle.
I watched the pincerlike jaws grip and puncture the thorax of the Priest-King.
More rock dust drifted between me and the pair locked in the embrace of death.
More rock tumbled to the dome and bounced clattering to the debris below.
The very globe and walkway seemed to lift and tremble but neither of the creatures locked together above me seemed to take the least notice.
Sarm’s antennae lay immersed in the golden hair of the Beetle; his grasping appendages with their sensory hairs caressed the golden hair; even did he take some of the hairs in his mouth and with his tongue try to lick the exudate from them.
‘The pleasure,’ came from Sarm’s translator, ‘The pleasure, the pleasure,’
I could not shut out from my ears the grim sound of the sucking jaws of the Beetle.
I knew now why it was that the Golden Beetles were not permitted to live in the Nest, why it was that Priest-Kings would not slay the, even though it might mean their own lives.
I wondered if the hairs of the Golden Beetle, heave with the droplets of that narcotic exudate, offered adequate recompense to a Priest-King for the ascetic millennia in which he might have pursued the mysteries of science, if they provided an acceptable culmination to one of those long, long lives devoted to the Nest, to its laws, to duty and the pursuit and manipulation of power.
Priest-Kings, I knew, had few pleasures, and now I guessed that foremost among them might be death.
Once as though by some supreme effort of will Sarm, who was a great Priest-King, lifted his head from the golden hair and stared at me.
‘Cabot,’ came from his translator.
‘Die, Priest-Kings,’ I said softly.
The last sound I heard from Sarm’s translator was—’The pleasure.’
Then in the last spasmodic throb of death Sarm’s body broke free of the jaws of the Golden Beetle and reared up once more to its glorious perhaps twenty feet of golden height.
He stood thusly on the walkway at the top of the vast blue dome beneath which burned and hissed the power source of Priest-Kings.
One last time he looked about himself, his antennae surveying the grandeur of the Nest, and then tumbled from the walkway and fell to the surface of the globe and slid until he fell to the rubble below.
The swollen, lethargic Beetle turned slowly to face me.
With one stroke of my blade I broke open its head.
With my foot I tumbled its heavy body from the walkway and watched it slide down the side of the globe and fall like Sarm to the rubble below.
I stood there on the crest of the globe and looked about the crumbling Nest.
Far below, at the door to the chamber, I could see the golden figures of Priest-Kings, Misk among them. I turned and retraced my steps down the walkway.
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