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Updated: June 6, 2025
Back in a moment; and with them a flushed man one of Tarrano's guards flushed and flattered at their attention. His hat was gone, his robe disheveled, as the girls fought for him. They stopped quite close to me; and I saw that one of them was Alda. "You shall not have him!" she shouted to her companions. "He is mine! He loves me none of you!"
Elza screamed. Tarrano's hand was leaving his belt. I reached him; flung out my fist for his face. But in that instant the weapon in Tarrano's hand was brought upon me. My paralyzed muscles made my arm and fist go wide. My blow missed him; he stepped aside; and like a man drunk with baro-wine, I stumbled past him, halted, swayed and struggled to keep my footing.
He still hoped to win Georg to his cause, by giving him the Princess Maida, if for no other reason. And with Maida married to Georg and Georg in Tarrano's service Maida herself would turn her influence in Venus to consolidate her people to Tarrano. These, in part, were Tarrano's present plans and motives. They were working out well.
A quivering beam of yellow light; then Elza saw that upon occasion, as Tarrano's finger slid a lever, the beam narrowed, intensified to a bright lavender. And now where it struck, the vegetation withered. Blackened, sometimes burst into tiny flame, and parted thus before them as they advanced.
The jungle was silent; yet, as Elza listened, beneath the crackle of the burning twigs she could hear the tiny myriad voices of insect life. Startled voices as the heat of Tarrano's beam struck them. Rustling leaves; breaking twigs; things scurrying and sliding away, unseen in the darkness. Once or twice a crashing some monster disturbed in his rest plunging away.
The quality of abandonment in it turned me cold. Did I see Tarrano's hand move back to his belt? Was he intoxicating her? Then I saw Maida make a gesture wave something from beneath her cloak at Elza. A scent to sober her? It seemed so, for Elza looked confused; and I saw Maida flash her a look of warning. Abruptly, from an alcove near me, a group of girls rushed out.
Occasionally we made a tentative tower attack which came to nothing. Tarrano waited; his barrage remained the same. We tried to provoke a move from him, but could not. The snow-plain where I was stationed here was similar to the other side, save that there were no mountains. From the power house to Tarrano's wall there was a dip, so that the wall stood upon higher ground.
He knew too that she was now aware of it; and that behind the confidence of his words that was the confession he was making. Tarrano's last stand! There seemed to her then something illogically pathetic in it all. This man of genius so short a time ago all but the Emperor of three worlds.
I think that the height of Tarrano's power was reached that day on the eve of the Water Festival when he made his triumphant entry into the Great City. Venus was his at that moment; all of Venus. Mars was his; the Hairless Men savages who had fallen readily to his wiles, had conquered the civilized, ruling Little People.
Everywhere around me I saw our men and girls struggling with it, fighting to keep away, but closing in a ring around it ... faster, continually more helpless until at last, their bodies out of control whirling end over end, they were sucked in like water rushing into a turbine.... One of our weakened towers attacked it; but some of the remnants of Tarrano's projectors caught the tower and darkened it.
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