vessel at our disposal." He was playing again, the music weaving an unearthly spell in muted minors; it rose and sank in a shower of notes that sped like living, winged things under his caressing touch. Only it was an instrument on which no human being could ever hope to play, for Kleg had four flexible arms, and slender, tendril-like fingers on his four narrow hands that flashed with vertiginous rapidity, as he probed deliberately with the unholy scalpel of his satanic music the emotional depths of the Terran and the Panadur.

"Rot! Permitted indeed! You dragged us here with some magnetic device. Tell your vampiric overlords, we acknowledge only One Divinity—the Absolute." Bill's eyes were barely open, mere electric-blue lines above his high cheek bones, while in his right hand he held the deadly Power-rapier, and an electronic-flash in the other.

Kleg turned slightly from the piano-like instrument, with its three separate keyboards, with a curiously fastidious motion, and on the strange thin face with its knife-like nose and chill, transparent eyes the barest semblance of a smile parted slightly the cruel curve of the faintly outlined lips. He let his four flexible arms with their slim hands and long, sensitive thumbs fall from the keyboards of the instrument, and rose to his towering height of over seven feet in one sinuous motion of faultless elegance. His exaggerated slenderness made Bill's superb physique seem primitive—barbaric.

Suddenly the Cinnabarian's transparent eyes went black and without warning a coruscating lance of living energy shot from his lips. But in the infinitesimal fraction of time, Freml, the Panadur, had acted. The awful energy potential he'd been generating in the involved processes of his being flashed like a thunderbolt of power and met the Cinnabarian's in mid air. A hellish flare of incandescence blinded them as the universe seemed to explode before their eyes. Reeling apart with dazzled eyes, they sensed the emergence of a new foe, and Bill's power rapier wove a vortex of electronic disintegration as he twirled it before himself and the Panadur; after a while, although their sight was ringed with a myriad rainbows and prismatic rings, they could see several ape-like homunculi at bay, darting before them, seeking an opening whence they might reach the Terran and the Panadur. The Cinnabarian stood back, leaning against the immense instrument, limp and deathly white, as if drained of energy, which indeed he was. He eyed the Aurean girl hungrily, but Bill was between him and the helpless slave.

Nardon's sword sang in his hand.

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