Chapter VI

Haral woke in the glow of a wondrous iridescent warmth that pulsed through every nerve and fiber of his body. The pain and weariness were gone. Surging strength, new vigor, flooded through him.

Slowly, still not quite believing his own senses, he opened his eyes.

He discovered that the iridescence was no mere metaphor, no figment of his imagination. For he lay in what seemed a boundless sphere of light that painted his naked body with an interweaving, continually changing tapestry of glowing color.

He would have reached up to touch the wound in his shoulder, then, but when he tried, he found he could not move; that his whole body was somehow gripped in invisible bonds of force that held and molded him at will. They twisted him, turned him, flexed and stretched his muscles. Apparently without support, he moved through space and time--now flat on his back; now curled first on one side and then the other; now upright, upside down, cramped or contorted into an infinity of positions.

When his head rotated as under the pressure of unseen fingers, he at last glimpsed his shoulder. With a shock, he saw it had grown well and whole. No wound was visible, no scar apparent.

The blue man relaxed, content to bask unresisting in this wondrous healing bath of radiant energy.

Then, slowly, the radiance dimmed. Haral felt himself sinking gently. His back brushed what might have been resilient fabric, and he came to rest. The last of the light had faded. He lay in utter darkness.

Xaymar's voice reached out of the blackness close at hand: "Is the pain gone from your body, warrior?"

"Yes. All gone."

"Yet this unit that gives out life and strength is but one of the least of all my secrets!" The voice of the woman-goddess took on a deeper, more vibrant timbre. "There are so many things I know--so many secrets of life and death--But come! You shall see them with me!"

* * * * *

A switch clicked as she spoke. Light came--a strange, halo-like glow without visible source, utterly unlike the shimmering radiance that had gone before. It formed a lambent wall against the blackness.

Haral sat up. He found himself on a cot much like the one on which the queen of storms herself had lain, back in the crypt.

She was here beside him now, her lips curved in a smile of welcome below the veil. She wore a close-fitting, high-necked garment of some unique material that matched the glistening blue-black of her hair. Yet, though the raiment masked her body's ripe curves with fabric, the overall effect became one of accent rather than concealment.

It made Haral suddenly conscious of his own nude frame. He shifted.

Xaymar laughed. "There's a cloak on the rack beneath your cot, my blue one." She turned. "Follow me."

The note of mockery in her tone jabbed at Haral beyond all reason. But he swept the cloak about him with one swift, incisive movement and fell in beside the woman.

He wondered where this road would take him. Whether it led to destiny ... or death.

Instinctively, at the thought, he shot a narrow-eyed glance at Xaymar, and his blood quickened. The momentary irritation fell away. Perhaps even death would not be too high a price to pay for a night as this strange creature's lover.

But why a single night? Why did she kill when the new day came?

Above all, why did she wear that weird jeweled veil?

For the moment, at least, he could not hope for answers. Shrugging, he turned his attention elsewhere.

The light was moving with them as they walked, like a torch afloat in an encroaching sea of blackness. The echo of their footsteps told the blue man that they must be in some vast, high-ceilinged chamber--a cave, a hall.

Yet they stood alone. There was no sign of life about them.

Haral said: "What happened to the others?"

"The ... others--?" Xaymar's voice held a curious note of hesitation.

"Sark and his men. The priestess, Kyla."

It was the woman's turn to shrug. "I let Sark go, on his promise that he'd blast off within the hour he reached his ships."

"You let him go--?" Haral stared. His tension and temper soared. "Are you mad, woman? Sark's word's worth nothing. He'll blast off, yes--but only to roar down on you here and smash you!"

* * * * *

Xaymar stopped short. Before Haral realized what she was doing, she lashed a slap out at him. Fire flashed through his face beneath her fingers. "Have a care who you call mad, blue warrior!" she cried in fury. "Men have died for less--as you can die--"

The sight of her anger lit a spark within Haral. Of a sudden he did not care whether this was death or destiny. Before she could escape, he caught the hand with which she'd slapped him and jerked her to him.

"The blood runs hot in others' veins as well as yours," he rasped out tightly. "You've gone too long with your arrogance unchallenged. But I'm the man to break that habit."

Her nails raked bloody paths along his sides. Her feet beat at his shinbones.

Haral cursed her--and then, bringing her face to his by sheer brute strength, he kissed her.

Her body went limp against him. Her bruised lips welcomed his.

He breathed deep; straightened. "And now--we'll see what's hidden beneath that veil!"

Her body went rigid again. She twisted as he clutched for the jeweled mask. "No, blue man--"

He caught the veil and ripped it off.

In the same instant, before he could see her face, the light snapped out.

They stood there in the darkness, then, adventurer and goddess, bodies tight together, the silence broken only by the hoarse rasp of their breathing.

Then Haral said, "I can wait as long as you can, Xaymar."

She laughed softly. "You leave no doubt about your daring, do you, warrior? Nor am I even angry with you for it. I like a man with the strength to take what he desires. But not quite yet. You'll have to wait a little while."

"Then you'll wait, too--till the light goes on again."

"Must I?" The mocking note crept back into her tone. "Don't press the gods of chance too far...."

"You'll wait," Haral said.

As he spoke, he felt something touch his backbone a little above his waist.

The next second two great claws clutched him just below the ribs.

He stiffened.

Xaymar laughed again. "We'll wait!" she mocked him. "We'll wait till the light goes on--or a coleopteron rips out your backbone!"

Haral stood motionless. His hands all at once were slick with sweat.

Xaymar's ripe body came full against him. Her hands touched his face, pulled his lips down to hers. Then--fiercely, brutally--as he had kissed her, she kissed him.

Her words came, a vibrant whisper: "You are the one who's mad, blue man! But it is a madness that can lead you to your own dark destiny--if you live!"

She twisted free.

* * * * *

There was a moment of black silence. Then the light snapped on. Once more the veil masked Xaymar's face as it had before.

The mandibles let go of Haral. Stiffly, he looked around.

Half a dozen of the great scarlet beetles stood within the lighted circle, watching him with cold, multi-faceted insectile eyes.

He shuddered.

As if there had been no interruption, Xaymar said: "You wonder why I let Sark go. But I had no choice. He told of a thing called a cymosynthesizer with which he could destroy our planetoid of Ulna."

"And if he lied--?"

"He did not. I looked into his brain and saw he spoke the truth as best he knew it."

"You ... looked into his brain?"

"I have that power." Xaymar's smile was cryptic, whether with dark mirth or ancient wisdom Haral could not say. "Thoughts to me are things to grasp like tools or weapons. When I focus my brain I can turn another mind inside out and drain it dry."

An uneasiness chilled Haral's spine. "You speak in jest...."

"You mean--you wish I did?" The woman laughed aloud, and the light glinted in her hair as on dark waters. "In jest, then--I looked into Sark's brain, and when I saw the things I saw, I turned him and his crewmen free."

Haral grimaced. "And he'll come back."

"Of course. I saw that, too. But I do not care." Again Xaymar smiled her cryptic smile. "Now, come! You shall see why I await him without fear!"

They walked on again. Then, at last, there was a door ahead and, beyond it, a long, dark passageway.

Haral frowned as he strode through the murk beside the woman. Once more, as he had a dozen times before, he thought of Kyla, with her dreams and rippling golden hair and slim young body. She was so different from this dark voluptuary who was a living goddess. Yet she, too, had shared the dangers of this adventure with him.

What had happened to her? He wondered. But something told him to make no query.

Another door loomed. Xaymar cried, "Behold my warriors!"

She flung the portal wide.

Haral stared.

For here were no coleoptera. Here lay what appeared to be a mausoleum, instead--another vast, echoing chamber, dim-lighted and stretching out as far as the eye could see, with banked, sealed crypts rising row on row from floor to ceiling, like some monstrous, many-celled honeycomb.

Xaymar asked: "Now do you see why I slept so willingly for a thousand years, my warrior? In each cell here is sealed an egg, preserved secure from harm and the ravages of time. From each egg, when the time to strike has come, will spring one of my fighting coleoptera--"

She broke off; hurried the blue man up a ramp to another level.

Here were stacked Q-ray tubes, light-guns, and blasters, piled high in bins by millions upon millions.

"Come! There is still more!"

They climbed another ramp.

At the top, before a heavy door, a huge coleopteron waited.

* * * * *

The woman who was the living goddess Xaymar paused, head tilted. It was as if she were listening to some silent message. Then she turned, half towards Haral, and her lips curved in a strange smile that was somehow infinitely evil. She spoke no word, but even the blue man could feel the hammering, affirmative impact of her thought-waves: "Yes ... yes ... yes...."

The great scarlet beetle moved swiftly off down another corridor.

Xaymar moved close to the door. Like magic, it opened before her.

She said: "Beyond this door, no being but me has ever gone, blue warrior! But now you, too, shall enter!"

Haral followed her across the threshold.

The door swung shut behind them.

The room in which they stood was cramped and box-like, with walls and floor and ceiling of dully gleaming metal. As the portal closed, a feeling of motion pulled at Haral's vitals. It dawned on him that they had entered some sort of carrier that even now was hurtling them upward with the speed of lightning.

Then the feeling left him. The door opened once more, and they stepped out into the hot yellow light of an Ulnese day.

Shielding his eyes against the sudden glare, Haral looked about.

Above them rose a gigantic crystal bubble, a dozen times as large as the one beneath which Xaymar had lain sleeping. Set high amid craggy grey and green and purple peaks, it thrust up like a beacon, a watch-tower, into the yellow sky. Concentric circular tracks on which were mounted banks of strange, snub-nosed projectors, each set at a different angle, ran round the globe above his head. Control boards, a mass of indicator dials and switches, were set at intervals along the metal-walled, chest-high base.

Xaymar touched his arm. "Your trappings, blue man...."

He turned to her gesture. There, stacked in a niche beside the shaft up which they'd come, lay his light-lance, his armor, the clothes he'd worn.

"Your steed, too...." The woman pointed through the crystal, down the slope.

Haral stared. His great blue Mercurian _hwalon_ dragon moved restlessly to and fro in a narrow natural yard bounded on three sides by steep rock walls less than half an Earth mile from them. Two coleoptera stood guard along the open side.

Narrow-eyed, Haral turned back to the woman. "But why? What made you bring my gear here, and my _hwalon_?"

"Is it not plain?" shrugged Xaymar. "You are a warrior, and I have need of such to lead my beetle hordes to battle."

"To battle--?"

"My day has come. In a little while I shall reach out and seize all Ulna. You know the ways of the aliens who now hold it, so you shall be in the van of my advancing legions. You'll show them when and where to strike; how best to meet the alien weapons."

* * * * *

Haral tried to probe the blankness that was her veil; to fathom the mind of this strange woman who hid her beauty behind its jewel-sprayed folds.

At last he said: "You've picked the wrong man, Xaymar. I'm a warrior, yes--but not such a fool that I'll try to lead your ground-bound hordes out to battle against space ships. The wars of the void are fought in the air, not down in the muck and mire of a pygmy planetoid. Sark would butcher your beetles from above before they'd marched a mile."

Xaymar's lips curved. The clash of cymbals, of swords and shields, was in her laugh.

"This one war will be different, blue man! We'll fight to seize and hold the ground till Ulna's taken. Then will be time enough to talk of ships that slash across the void, and battles for planets fought in deep space."

"But Sark's fleet--"

"Sark will have no fleet!" the woman slashed back fiercely. Her whole body swayed, and even here, in the full light of the blazing yellow sky, her hair showed black as a Martian _koboc's_ sinister hood. "You came here seeking my secret, warrior. I mean that you--"

Close at hand, a bell rang shrilly.

Xaymar halted in mid-sentence. Whirling, she flicked a switch on the nearest of the control boards.

A plate like that of a visiscreen flashed on. Swiftly, the woman adjusted dials.

Blurs on the plate resolved into a horde of rising silver ships. Like screaming meteors, they lanced into the sky.

"Sark's ships?" the woman who was a fleshly goddess asked Haral coolly.

He nodded. "Yes. Carriers. Light craft, small and slow enough to fight close-in on a world the size of Ulna."

"But not all Sark's fleet?"

"No. His great raiders would have no room here to maneuver."

"Then Sark himself still lingers at the spaceport, waiting to see how I'll meet this latest challenge."

"What--?"

Xaymar laughed. "He fears me, blue man. I read it in his brain as he sat there in my crypt. And I learned more: this weapon of his you call a cymosynthesizer is useless once he's in the air. So he'll leave it on the ground and then stay with it for the sake of the protection that it offers, instead of risking his own fat neck in one of the ships he sends against me."

* * * * *

The ships on the screen were looming ever larger now. Streaks of silver light set against dullness, they hurtled closer ... closer....

Forcing casualness into his voice, Haral gestured to them. "And what will you do when at last they reach us?" He touched what appeared to be some sort of triangulation finder. "At the rate they're moving, they should be here within another minute."

Turning, not answering, Xaymar stepped to a huge switch-box set in the center of the bubble's floor and threw a lever. An eerie, whining sound rose, and with it a faint smell of ozone.

The woman threw a second lever. A third. A fourth.

The whining grew louder, the odor stronger.

Xaymar moved back to the control board. Almost idly, she said: "They call me queen of storms."

Haral stayed silent. But of a sudden his heart was pounding.

"Do you know the power of the lightning, blue man? Can you vision the force that lies locked within it?"

The whining continued to rise. It was almost a thin scream now.

Still Haral waited, wordless.

Xaymar twisted dials again. The warrior saw that her knuckles showed white through the skin. Her voice took on new intensity, new vibrance:

"You dream of power, blue man--but never can you have imagined power such as this!" She laughed, a little wildly. "I cannot pretend to explain these things so you can understand them. But a thousand years ago I learned how to create what I choose to call an ionic vacuum--an electrolytic vortex that sucks in electrons from the atmosphere's neutral atoms. The very process sets up a storm condition. Wind, rain, turbulence--they all come with it."

Like an echo to her words, a shadow fell across the inverted crystal bowl in which they stood.

Incredulously, Haral shot a fast glance skyward. An icy knot took form deep in his midriff.

Where mere seconds before he had gazed up into the bright, clear yellow of the Ulnese day, now clouds were swirling! Before his very eyes, they grew and darkened.

Through his haze of shock, Xaymar's words came dimly:

"A storm is a dynamo, blue one--a dynamo greater than it lies within man's power even to conceive! It generates the lightning. Mighty bolts crash from it down to earth--spent, wasted. But these projectors,"--she gestured to the massed banks that lined the tracks overhead--"these projectors can direct its fury! They focus its shafts, throw out magnetic targets for it...."

* * * * *

Now the whole sky above them had grown dark. For as far as Haral could see, the storm-clouds gathered. The roar of thunder drowned out the shrilly keening whine that filled his tortured ears. Lightning leaped in blinding sheets and chains and flashes.

With an effort, the blue man tore his eyes from the violence overhead and looked again to the viewer plate by the control board.

It blazed with the glint of Sark's carrier ships. A rushing silver wall of death, they hurtled ever nearer.

"Twenty seconds more!" Xaymar cried into his ear. "Twenty seconds--and they perish!"

The hurtling ships overflowed the screen. Hulls blotted out the sky.

"Ten seconds!"

The plate blurred, out of focus.

"Look! They come!" shrieked Xaymar, and there was a vindictive triumph in her scream that whispered of something close to madness.

Haral followed her sweeping gesture--up, to the sky itself, and the rocket-borne death that dwelt there.

There were Sark's ships--a fleet, a horde. Now they lanced downward on their final strike. The roar of their rockets slashed through the storm.

In spite of himself, Haral felt the clutch of fear.

Overhead, the projector banks were tracking. The lightning was a blinding, continuous flash.

"Is it power you want?" screamed Xaymar madly. "I'll show you power, blue warrior!"

Her hand darted out and pressed a button.

The heavens exploded.

Desperately, Haral kept his eyes on the raider fleet. Through the blaze and glare, he saw great, jagged bolts spear down upon it. Some ships were split, some torn asunder. A hundred smashed themselves to atoms on the cruel crags of the mountains.

Others simply disappeared in mid-air.

In ten seconds not one was left still in the sky.

Haral sagged limp against an upright.

How many battles had he seen across the void? How many ships gone down in blood and flame?

But beside this, all the rest were nothing. Where they left off, this cataclysmic holocaust began.

* * * * *

It was the answer to his dream of power, his pact with destiny. Given this weapon--yes, this weapon only--the universe was his!

He swayed in the grip of his mad ambition. His heart was a driving, hammering piston.

Xaymar said: "Throw the switches, blue one. Let the storm pass."

Numbly, Haral stepped to the box and slammed down the four heavy levers.

The whining died away. The smell of ozone faded.

The woman came close to him. "We shall rule the universe together, warrior...."

He looked at her ... at raven hair and ripe, half-parted lips and slender fingers ... the temptation, incarnate, that lay in her perfect body.

She whispered: "Kiss me, warrior!"

A tremor ran through him. He pulled her to him.

Her head went back. Her lips were trembling.

Breathing deep, Haral kissed her. The softness of her mouth made him a little giddy. Her lips clung to his. He could feel her arms about him, the pressure of her breasts against him.

But the jewels in her veil gouged his cheek.

What did that bizarre mask hide?

And there were Kyla's words again:

"_Each night she took a different lover--and then, at the dawn, at her command, each one was slain!_"

He lifted his head, then, and the living goddess whom men called Xaymar laughed softly, still in his arms.

"How many men have sought my kisses, warrior? Yet I ask you to claim them!"

Haral did not speak.

Her midnight hair brushed his face. "There will be nights without number, blue one--nights when you'll forget even your ambition in my arms!"

"Yes."

She drew back a fraction. "Why, then, are you so silent? Am I not beautiful? Can you not feel the warm fire I promise you?" Her voice took on a sudden edge. "Or--is it that you would rather hold that blonde _Shamon tirot_ they call Kyla in your arms?"

With an effort, Haral held his face immobile. "Now you speak as a woman, not a goddess. Kyla was your priestess. I sought her only to guide me to you."

Xaymar pushed back from him. "Have a care how you lie to me, blue man! I looked into your mind while you lay unconscious. She was there, that Kyla! Your first thoughts were of her!"

* * * * *

Haral let his words go harsh and angry: "You still talk like a jealous woman! She gave me only trouble. I care nothing for her."

"Trouble? That was all she gave you?" Xaymar taunted. Her lips twisted. "Then you'll be happy to hear what I've done with her, warrior!"

"What you've done--?" Haral's words came blurted. In spite of himself, tension rolled up within him. "What do you mean? Where is she?"

"You'll laugh with me, blue man! She tried to kill me, yet I was merciful, as a goddess should be. Instead of tearing her heart out, I freed her, and found a mate to woo her."

"A mate--?"

"A mate fit for her kind of _tirot_." Xaymar laughed, and of a sudden the spell of nameless menace and infinite evil Haral had caught before rang in the sound. "I gave her to Sark."

"Sark--!" Haral reeled.

"Yes, Sark." The woman moved back one sinuous step, then another, like a great cat toying with its prey. "He asked that I let him take her away from Ulna with him. I said no. But then, later, it came to me that I could devise no greater suffering for her, so I sent her to him."

"You ... sent her to that creature?"

"Yes. Already she's on her way there." A fiend would have envied Xaymar's smile. "That was why the coleopteron was wailing for me at the shaft below here. He sought my last decision--and I said, 'Yes. Good riddance. Let Sark have her.'"

Through a scarlet haze, Haral cried out, "Curse you, Xaymar!"

He was moving forward in the same instant, lashing out at her, and he saw her mouth go slack with shock at his sudden onslaught.

Then his fist hammered home on her jaw: The force of it lifted her and slammed her back across the bubble, to land in a heap on the floor, crumpled and unconscious.

Then the haze cleared. Numbly, Haral stared down at her.

Why had he done it? What did he care whether Sark got Kyla? He'd meant it when he said she'd given him naught but trouble. His destiny lay here--here, with Xaymar, queen of storms; here, with the secrets that would give him the power to carve out his dream empire. This other was sheer madness--without sense or logic; without even volition.

Yet he'd done it.

And now--?

Already, out there in the green-grey-purple Ulnese mountains, a slim _Shamon_ girl was being dragged to a monster.

Almost without thinking, he looked to his armor.

He was half-way down the slope to his _hwalon_ before it dawned on him that, with Xaymar unconscious and at his mercy, he'd still forgotten even to look beneath her veil.