Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 02.djvu/27

 Khal Kan awoke with that thought from his dream vibrating in his mind like an ominous tolling.

"The last day of Jotan!" he whispered. "By all the gods—no!"

Fiercely, the tall young prince rose and buckled on his sword. It was just dawn, and sea-mists shrouded all the city outside in gray fog.

Golden Wings still lay sleeping, Khal Kan heard a persistent hammering from out in the fog, as he went down to the lower level of the palace. Brusul, in full armor, came stalking up to him.

"All's quiet," reported the brawny captain. "The Bunts are still working away at their cursed scaling-ladders. When they are ready, they'll dear the walls of our men with their damned poisoned arrows, and then come over."

Khal Kan went out with him and inspected their defenses. As he supervised the placing of their fighting-men around the wall, and gave the white-faced people rough encouragement, something oppressed Khal Kan's mind. Something he should be doing for the defense of the city—

When he got back to the palace with Brusul, Golden Wings' slim, leather-clad figure came flying into his arms.

"I dreamed the Bunts were already in the city!" she cried. "And then I awoke and found you gone—"

Khal Kan, soothing her, suddenly stiffened. Her words had recalled that vague, forgotten something that had oppressed him.

"My dream!" he exclaimed. "I remember now—in the dream, on that other world, I learned how to make a weapon against the Bunts."

It had all come back to him now—the dream in which Henry Stevens had feverishly memorized a formula out of the science of that dream-world of Earth, to help him in his struggle against the Bunts.

For a moment, Khal Kan clutched at new hope. Then his eagerness faded. After all, that was only a dream. Henry Stevens and Earth and its science were only an insubstantial vision of his sleeping mind, and nothing that he learned in that could be of any value.

"I could wish you'd dreamed away the Bunts entirely," Brusul was saying dryly. "Unfortunately, they're still outside and it won't be many hours before they attack."

Khal Kan was not listening. His mind was revolving the simple formula that Henry Stevens had desperately memorized, in the dream.

"It wouldn't work," he thought. "It couldn't work, when there's no reality to all that—"

Yet he kept remembering Henry Stevens' desperate effort to help him. That timid, thin little man he was in his dream each night—that little man had prayed that Khal Kan would not ignore his help, would try the formula.

Khal Kan reached decision. "I'm going to try it—the thing I learned in the dream!" he told the others.

Brusul stared. "Are you wit-struck? Dreams won't help us now! How could a dream-weapon be of any use?"

"I'm not so sure now it was a dream," Khal Kan muttered. "Maybe this is the dream, after all. Oh, hell take all speculations—dream or reality, I'm going to try this thing."

He shot orders. "Bring all the charcoal you can find, all the sulphur from the street of the apothecaries, and all of the white crystals we use for drying fruits. Those crystals were called 'saltpeter' in the dream."

CARED, wondering men brought the materials to the palace. There, Brusul and Zoor and Golden Wings watched mystifiedly as Khal Kan supervised their preparation.