Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/81

 him as the four great forces of horse-men spurred forward.

The mighty host of footmen dropped from sight behind them as they galloped over the plain, Lopez and the trapper riding hard on either side of Ethan, in the van.

"Chiri! Chiri!" Ethan kept whispering as he rode. He couldn't lose her now.

The drum of rushing hoofs marked the passing of fatally slow minutes. And the sun was higher, higher

"Thar's Luun ahead!" yelled Hank Martin, pointing a buckskin arm.

"And the Luunians are starting to come out to meet us!" Lopez cried.

The domes and towers of the city had appeared on the horizon ahead. Ethan could clearly discern the mountainous square bulk of the fortress of the Masters.

And he could also see that companies of Luunian warriors were already beginning to march out of the city to meet the oncoming hosts of whose advance they had had warning.

"We'll ride right through them into the city!" he shouted.

He drew his sword, and as it flashed aloft in the sunlight, he turned and yelled to the hosts behind.

"Follow me into the city! Charge through these ahead!"

A chorus of wild yells answered him. His two thousand riders massed close together as they galloped onward at headlong speed.

The Luunians, commanded by a number of the Masters, were hastily forming in a long mass across their path, just outside the city. Before they could complete formation, Ethan's horsemen struck their line like a thunderbolt.

A delirium of contorted faces and flashing swords and spears whirled about Ethan at the moment of impact. He hacked and stabbed, heard Lopez swearing wildly as the Spaniard struck like a madman, felt the armored Luunians in front of them falling and being trampled under the hooves of their horses.

And then that reeling moment of terrific shock and battle was passed, and Ethan was aware that he and his hosts were through the Luunian forces, were galloping now right into the narrow streets of the great stone city.

"To the fortress!" he yelled to Lopez and Hank. "If I fall, lead the others straight there."

"We'll have to chaw through these devils to git there!" shouted the trapper, pointing ahead.

The narrow stone streets of Luun were filling with armored men, warriors who had been making ready to follow the others out of the city to oppose the coming host.

The Masters commanding them screamed orders in their shrill, inhuman voices. But the commands were lost in the crazy roar of battle shouts from Ethan's motley horde as they crashed into the streets of Luun.

"Saint Denis, and at them!" rose the deep shout of mailed Crusaders wielding swords arid battle-axes.

"Muhamad rasul Allah!" screamed the fanatic yell of the Arabs as their simitars flashed.

Ethan, as he fought forward, glimpsed his Mongols surging ahead in a parallel street. The swarthy little horsemen were forcing their shaggy ponies, stabbing viciously. And over the whole roar of combat rose the terrible,piercing war-whoop of the Sioux, the red savages clinging like cats to their mounts as their bows twanged and their tomahawks clove down through helmets and skulls.