John Norman - Priest-Kings of Gor

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.

“IT IS THE END,” SAID Misk, “the end.” He frantically adjusted the controls on a major panel, his antennae taut with concentration reading the scent-needle on a boxlike gauge.

Other Priest-Kings worked beside him.

I looked to the body of Sarm, golden and broken. Lying among the rubble on the floor, half covered in the powdery dust that hung like fog in the room.

I heard the choking of a girl next to me and put my arm about the shoulders of Vika of Treve.

“It took time to cut through to you,” said Misk, “Now it is too late.”

“The planet?” I asked.

“The Nest — the World,” said Misk.

Now the bubbling mass inside the purple globe began to burn through the globe itself and there were cracking sounds and rivulets of think, hissing substance, like blue lava, began to press through the breaks in the globe. Elsewhere droplets of the same material seemed to form on the outside of the globe.

“We must leave the chamber,” said Misk, “for the globe will shatter,”

He pointed an excited foreleg at the scent-needle which I, of course, could not read.

“Go,” came from Misk’s translator.

I swept Vika up and carried her from the trembling chamber and we were accompanied by hurrying Priest-Kings and those humans who had accompanied them.

I turned back only in time to see Misk leap from the panel and rush to the body of Sarm lying among the rubble. There was a great splitting sound and the entire side of the globe cracked open and began to pour forth its avalanche of thick, molten fluid into the room.

Still Misk tugged at the broken body of Sarm among the rubble.

The purple mass of bubbling fury poured over the rubble toward the Priest-King.

“Hurry!” I cried to him.

But the Priest-King paid me no attention, trying to move a great block of stone which had fallen across one of the supporting appendages of the dead Sarm.

I thrust Vika behind me and leaped over the rubble, running to Misk’s side.

“Come!” I cried, pounding my fist against his thorax, “Hurry!”

“No,” said Misk.

“He is a Priest-King,” said Misk.

Together Misk and I, as the blue lavalike mass began to hiss over the rubble bubbling towards us, forced aside the great block of stone and Misk tenderly gathered up the broken carcass of Sarm in his forelegs and he and I sped toward the opening, and the blue molten flux of burning, seething, hissing substance engulfed where we had stood.

Misk, carrying Sarm, and the other Priest-Kings and humans, including Vika and myself, made our way from the Power Plant and back toward the complex which had been the heart of Sarm’s territory.

“Why?” I asked Misk.

“Because he is a Priest-King,” said Misk.