The Days of Glory Read online

  Robert Hornwing came into the square with Judson Deathdancer and James Starflare by his side and a mixed force of Phocides, Felides, and Humans spilling out of the narrow roadway behind him. As the pale-skinned man saw what was happening, he involuntarily called out to Stormwind.

  Equally involuntarily, Stormwind’s head turned and his eyes flicked sideways.

  Starbird acted, knowing that he would not get a better chance. He sprang up, balancing on his heels, and yanked as hard as he could at the sword trapped beneath, the Beast lord’s foot. Stormwind, taken slightly aback, leaned all his weight on to the one foot and poised his left hand to stop Starbird if the Human tried to roll forward over his sword and tumble him on to his back.

  The sword bent like a spring and snapped back, jerking free of Starbird’s hand as it did so. Starbird reacted instantaneously, with panic-guided inspiration. His hand lashed up to brush Stormwind’s aside, and he launched himself upwards in a long, slanting dive. His head crashed into Stormwind’s abdomen just beneath the waist, and the Beast lord was hurled a long way backwards, momentarily incapacitated as the blow hurt him.

  Both men staggered back to their feet, Stormwind giddy with pain and hardly able to see, Starbird dazed and moving drunkenly. The Human went for the sword that was no longer covered by Stormwind’s boot, but the Beast got there first by a fraction. Stormwind could not get hold of it, but retained the presence of mind to get rid of it. He lacked it as far as he could and began to fold up again as the movement renewed the waves of pain.

  Starbird swung his left fist in a wild blow that missed more because of poor aim than Stormwind’s belated attempt to avoid it. The two men, balanced precariously on their feet, stood facing each other for a few seconds without making any meaningful movement while their sense and strength returned.

  Stormwind was the first to reopen the assault, although he was probably the less completely recovered. He stabbed with splayed fingers at Starbird’s face as though he were wearing a talon. Starbird jerked his head aside and took the blow on his ear. It was painful but it did not knock him out He grabbed Stormwind’s hand with his own and attempted to pull the Beast off balance.

  Then, the ability to think suddenly gaining impetus again, he flapped the cloak into Stormwind’s face. Stormwind jumped back like lightning, more startled than hurt, snatching his hand away. Starbird turned away and ran back for the sword. He snatched it up and turned, expecting Stormwind to have come diving after him. Instead, Stormwind had backed up even further, and was running to his left.

  Starbird thought the Beast was trying to get round to his own sword, and moved in to intercept him, ducking low under the twin metal rails that stretched up into the sky above his head.

  But he had mistaken Stormwind’s intention. The tracks slanting up into the sky were high above the Beast lord’s head as he went beneath them. Stormwind leapt and grabbed for one rail with his hand. Starbird, still moving to intercept him, was too late to turn away. Both Storm-wind’s boots came up. One carried the light sword-blade away and the other hit Starbird on the point of his chin.

  The Human was catapulted away, and the sword flew clear again to land several feet away. Stormwind swung back and then forward again in a prodigious leap which took him to where the sword had landed. He braced his legs for the landing and came down with all his weight on his right bootheel.

  The ground gave way beneath him and he disappeared before Starbird’s frightened eyes.

  ABOVE GROUND

  There was a sudden surge forward. Starflare, Hornwing , and several others ran to where the surprised Starbird was climbing unsteadily to his feet.

  “What happened?” demanded Starflare.

  Starbird walked slowly forward, then slipped to his hands and knees. He tore up large clods of grass and loosely bound turf to reveal a large iron grating rusted away so badly that it had completely fragmented over the central area when Stormwind’s weight had come down heavily upon it.

  “It must have been a ventilation shaft,” said Starbird. “Or an old opening into the mine. It’s too deep to see him.” He stood up again, carefully moving back from the edge of the grille. “Get a rope,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Starflare, taken aback.

  “Do as I say!”

  Starflare stayed where he was, but another of the Humans moved quickly away to fetch one of the ropes that had been used to climb Stormwind’s fortress.

  “I want to go down,” said Hornwing .

  Starbird turned to stare into the taller man’s bright green eyes. “You don’t understand,” he said. “This duel isn’t over yet. It won’t be finished until I’ve made sure that he’s dead. I’m going to go down and kill him.”

  Hornwing stepped back, bewildered.

  Starbird kicked dirt and vegetation away from the lip of the hole, sending some cascading over the rim to follow Stormwind into darkness. But the grating showed no sign of further breakage.

  “Where shall I tie the rope?” asked the Human, who had just returned.

  Starbird pointed at the rail on which Stormwind had swung. “Up there. It carried his weight—it should carry mine. But leave a long loose end and two of you hang on to it, just in case. If the track starts to give way, hang on tight.” He walked over to Stormwind’s sword and picked it up. His own had disappeared into the shaft with Stormwind. He sheathed the weapon and began to lower himself into the mouth of the hole. Another of the Humans leaned forward to give him a flashlight as he descended from view.

  UNDERGROUND

  Stormwind clawed madly for the edge of the grating, as it gave way, and missed. He shot out his one hand to the wall in a desperate attempt to halt his fall and kept scraping and scratching all the way down. He tried to hang on with his right arm too, but that one no longer existed.

  It was a long way to fall. By the time he reached the bottom, the fingernails and most of the fingers were gone from his left hand, and the charred stump of his right arm had left black scars for some distance down the shaft and red ones after that. But it bled only sluggishly.

  Those were the least of his injuries. Both legs sustained multiple fractures of the ulna and tibia. His coccyx was shattered. Bits of bone had been shoved clean out of his lower legs, and one long splinter had driven its way up on the inside of the right patella and jammed against the base of the femur.

  But he shed very little blood. The femoral arteries were twisted and cracked but not severed. The lower abdomen was somewhat crushed but did not leak too badly. The rib cage and its precious contents were totally uninjured. Richard Stormwind was dying, but it would take time.

  In the meanwhile, he was fully—almost feverishly—conscious. He could feel his breath whining in and out of his lungs in long, racking sobs. He could feel dull, instant pain throbbing like the beat of a giant drum. He could feel cold, pervasive wetness against his back and thighs, and glutinous warmth at the base of the spine and below the knees.

  A gentle rain of dust fell on his face, and he could hear the particles rustling as they fell. Everything he experienced was strangely distinct. There was no blanketing effect concerned with the intense pain. He was wholly alert—even hypersensitive. Impressions were rushing in with a clarity that engraved them deep into his memory. He knew they were the last memories he would ever collect, and he was glad that his perception was so clear.

  He thought: I won the fight. Starbird couldn’t kill me. It was an act of the gods. The gods were against me. The gods are always against you, but sometimes you can cheat them. I didn’t cheat them this time. I loved you, Saul. I killed Blackstar for you. I’d have killed Starbird and Star-flare and Rainstar and Starcastle himself, with only one arm, if it hadn’t been for that one misplaced bootheel. I loved Astarte. But I wanted to kill her too. And Starbird, because Starbird looked so much like her. For you, Saul, I listened to the stars. I am the greatest warrior the galaxy has known. Even Alexander Blackstar was worth only one of my hands—a few pounds of flesh. It took a trap laid te
n thousand years ago to kill me. It was fated, because I went back on my word. I cheated myself instead of the gods. I deserve to die—for you, Saul. And for myself.

  He flinched from a hail of dirt which fell into his open, searching eyes. He could not wipe them clean, but he blinked away the particles which had stuck to his eyeballs.

  Suddenly, there was light. It was mere feet above his head, shining into his eyes. He could see a rope dangling to the side of him.

  He saw also what had been done to him by the fall. He looked at his legs and his arms with wonderment and horror. He realized for the first time what the drumbeat of pain signified. He tried to move but could not. Even his jaw refused to move. Only his eyelids fell and rose, and his tongue moved rhythmically back and forth inside his mouth. He felt a sudden claustrophobia.

  Then Starbird dropped from the rope and shined the light at his own face so that Stormwind could see who it was.

  Stormwind made absolutely no sign of recognition or fear. Starbird played the torch around, but there was nothing to see. He was simply on the floor of an arch-shaped tunnel which led from darkness to darkness, with two metal-lined grooves set into the floor. There was not even much dirt except for the debris which Stormwind had brought down with him.

  The Beast lord was a broken heap on the floor, his head just in the angle between floor and wall, so that it was tilted a little. Starbird shone the light into his eyes again. Stormwind stared back, unblinking.

  “You’re hard to kill,” said Starbird. His voice echoed strangely in the tunnel, which had been abandoned well over ten thousand years before.

  Stormwind found his jaw free of its paralysis now that he had a use for it. “I’m dead now,” he said.

  “I want to kill you,” said Starbird.

  “Why?”

  “You killed my brother.”

  “He murdered my friend.”

  “He never murdered anyone.”

  There was a pause. Stormwind did not reply.

  “It doesn’t matter,”. said Starbird. “It wouldn’t matter if he had. It’s all part of something else. It doesn’t end with your death.”

  Stormwind laughed—an honest laugh, not scarred by a groan or mediated by a sneer. “It started without me, it will end beyond me. But it ends here as well.”

  “I loved somebody,” said Starbird. “Perhaps it started even further back than that. I was bom. The Beasts were created. There were too many people on Home. Someone discovered the wheel. An ape grew an opposable thumb.” “And now I die. Was ten million years of evolution just for that? As far as I am concerned, I suppose it was.” Stormwind again lapsed into silence.

  Starbird drew his sword and knelt down. By now it was practically a mercy killing, but he had to do it, whatever the reason. He put the point of the blade to Stormwind’s neck, just above the head of the sternum, in the middle of the circular crosspiece of the crux ansata. He pressed it in, and Stormwind stopped breathing.

  Then he drew it out again, and watched blood welling out of the wound and covering up the birthmark. Star-bird glanced briefly at the fleshless bones of Stormwind’s only hand. The thing they had been fighting about appeared to have gone. But that, of course, was only an optical illusion.

  ACE SCIENCE FICTION DOUBLES

  Two books back-to-back for just ¢

  06707 The Blind Worm Stableford

  Seeds of the Dreamers Petaja

  11560 The Communipaths Elgin

  The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy Trimble

  13793 Dark of the Woods

  Soft Come the Dragons Koontz

  24100 Flower of Doradil Rackham

  A Promising Planet Strike

  27235 Gallagher’s Glacier

  Positive Charge Richmond

  27400 The Gates of Time Barrett

  Dwellers in the Deep O’Donnell

  51375 The Mad Goblin

  Lord of the Trees Farmer

  52180 Masters of the Lamp

  A Harvest of Hoodwinks Lory

  76096 The Ships of Durostorum Bulmer

  Alton’s Unguessable Sutton

  78400 The Star Virus Bayley

  Mask of Chaos Jakes

  81610 To Venus! To Venus! Grinnell

  The Wagered World Janifer & Treibich

  Available wherever paperbacks are sold or use this coupon.

  ace books, (Dept. MM) Box 576, Times Square Station;

  New York, N.Y. 10036

  Please send me titles checked above.

  I enclose …Add 10¢ handling fee per copy.

  Name…

  Address…

  City…State…Zip…

  The World’s Best Award-Winning Science Fiction

  Comes from Ace

  03300 The Atlantic Abomination Brunner 60¢ _

  10410 Children of Tomorrow Van Vogt 95¢

  13795 Dark Piper Norton 60¢

  17261 Dune Herbert $1.25

  22811 The Far Out Worlds of A. E. Van Vogt 75¢

  33700 High Sorcery Norton 60¢

  73440 The Rolling Stones Heinlein 95¢

  79170 Swords And Deviltry Leiber 75¢

  80691 This Immortal Zelazny 60¢

  84000 Uncharted Stars Norton 75¢

  87180 The War Against the Rull Van Vogt 75¢

  91357 World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970 Edited by Wollheim & Carr 95¢

  Available wherever paperbacks are sold or use this coupon.

  ace books, (Dept. MM) Box 576, Times Square Station New York, N.Y. 10036

  Please send me titles checked above.

  I enclose …Add 10¢ handling fee per copy.

  Name….…

  Address…

  City…State…Zip…

  Please allow 4 weeks fpr delivery