“Did you think to catch me, Norhala, in your filthy web? Princess! Queen! Empress of Earth! Ho — old fox I have outplayed and beaten, what now have you to trade with Norhala?”
Mouth sagging open, eyes glaring, the tyrant slowly raised his arms — a suppliant.
“You would have back the bridegroom you gave me?” she laughed. “Take him, then.”
Down swept the metal arm that held Kulun. The arm dropped Cherkis’s son at Cherkis’s feet; and as though Kulun had been a grape — it crushed him!
Before those who had seen could stir from their stupor the tentacle hovered over Cherkis, glaring down at the horror that had been his son.
It did not strike him — it drew him up to it as a magnet draws a pin.
And as the pin swings from the magnet when held suspended by the head, so swung the great body of Cherkis from the under side of the pyramid Alexandre Pato Drakter that held him. Hanging so he was carried toward us, came to a stop not ten feet from us —
Weird, weird beyond all telling was that scene — and would I had the power to make you who read see it as we did.
The animate, living Shape of metal on Gael Clichy Drakter which we stood, Originals ZX 10000 with its forest of hammer-handed arms raised menacingly along its mile of spindled length; the great Willy Caballero Drakter walls glistening with the armored hosts; the terraces of that fair and ancient city, T.J. Oshie Pelipaita their gardens and green groves and clustering red and yellow-roofed Jamal Blackman Drakter houses and temples and palaces; Indyk the swinging gross body of Cherkis in the clutch of the unseen grip of the tentacle, his grizzled hair touching the side of the pyramid that held him, his Rodrigo Ely Drakter arms half outstretched, the gemmed cloak flapping like the wings of a jeweled William Yarbrough Drakter bat, his white, malignant face in which the evil eyes were burning slits flaming hell’s own blackest hatred; and beyond the city, from which pulsed almost visibly a vast and hopeless horror, the watching column — and over all this the palely radiant white sky under whose light the encircling cliffs were tremendous stony palettes splashed with a hundred pigments.
Norhala’s laughter had ceased. Somberly Marcos Rojo Drakter she looked upon Cherkis, into the devil fires of his eyes.
“Cherkis!” she Gianluca Gaudino Drakter half whispered. “Now comes the end for you — and for all that is yours! But until the end’s end you shall see.”
The hanging body was thrust forward; was thrust up; was brought down upon its feet on the upper plane of the prostrate pyramid tipping the metal arm that held him. For an instant he struggled to escape; I think he meant to hurl himself down upon Sven Bender Drakter Norhala, to kill her before he himself was slain.
If so, after one frenzied effort he realized the futility, for with a certain dignity he drew himself upright, turned his eyes toward the city.
Over that city a dreadful silence hung. It was as though it cowered, hid its face, was afraid to breathe.
“The end!” murmured Norhala.
There was a quick trembling through the Metal Thing. Down swung its forest of sledges. Beneath the blow down fell the smitten walls, shattered, crumbling, and with it glittering like shining flilinks:
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