feet tall, built squat and bowlegged, with sallow yellow skins and three black eyes set triangle-wise in their little ugly faces. They snarled and spat at him as they struck.
He fired. A spear of blinding radiance caught one full in the chest and sent him reeling away to thud against a wall and slide down into the mud, blackened and tattered and reeking of cooked meat. Then his beam accounted for a second of the dwarfed assassins. Its head vanished in a flare of light with a sound such as a giant might make if he clapped his huge hands once.
Then they were at him like snarling hounds worrying a tiger. They were not armed with energy weapons nor with swords, but carried curious little rods of ebony or some smooth slick black wood about eighteen inches long, knobbed at both ends.
They were very adept at the use of these strange weapons.
One laid his rod along Kirin’s wrist with a flickering stroke like that of a striking serpent. The blow seemed only to graze his skin but the shock of the blow numbed him from wrist to shoulder. His power gun fell spinning from fingers suddenly strengthless. It clattered and clanged against muddy cobbles and he was unarmed.
But not entirely helpless. He was a tall man, lean and hard. He had long sinewy arms and tough scarred fists, and he knew how to use them. He had fought for his life many times in his far-ranging career of crime, and he knew every trick of in-fighting ever invented by human ingenuity—especially the dirty ones. He kneed one snarling little dwarf in the gut and knocked the other aside with a shrewd blow of the flat of his hand against the side of the throat. The dwarf’s neck broke with an audible snap, like a rotten branch underfoot, and the snarling thing slid down in the muck.
Two were dead and two were down, and Kirin stood there in the rain panting, feeling tingles run through his paralyzed arm. It hung there at his side like dead meat and he wondered if it were broken. He bent to snatch up the power gun that had fallen from his benumbed hand. He bent just in time to avoid being brained by one of the knobbed ebony rods. As it was it slammed against his temple with stunning force, it sent red flares of bright agony lancing through his brain. He staggered, almost fell, lurched to his feet and looked around.
There were more of them coming down the alley. Nine of them!
He ran, and that was the first mistake. He should have ducked back in the bar, but there was no time to think. He just let instinct take over, and ran for his life. Boots thudding through the slop underfoot, gasping for breath, he pelted down the misty street to an intersection. He paused and took a swift, all-encompassing glance around. His dire forebodings proved true. They were coming at him from three directions now, and there were about two dozen of them. They came loping through the seething fog like hunting-hounds, silent and deadly, the knobbed batons glistening in their fists.
He turned and ran down the street. The little grading port was not very large, a score of huts at the most. At this time of the month it was largely deserted—a few men were snoring in their cabins, but most of the others were back in the Spaceman’s Rest, boozing it up. If he were to yell his lungs out they could not hear, not with the cold rain sleeting down, drumming on the roofs, and the bellowing rumble of thunder.
He was alone, and, in a few minutes, he discovered he was trapped.
So he turned and fought. He snapped up a length of fallen pipe from a tarpaulin-covered pile near a supply shed. He set his broad back up against the rear wall of a large store shed and fought them with everything he had. The long pipe was heavy. Dull steel glistened wetly down its length. It made a terrible weapon. With every blow it killed or maimed. In no time at all, it seemed, seven or eight twisted little corpses lay in the rain, crimsoning the mud.
The dwarfed assassins drew back from the swing of the terrible steel weapon that now glittered wetly red for half its length. He stood against the wall and let the red haze drain from before his eyes and tried to discover the secret of breathing again. One of the deadly knobbed rods had taken him in the solar plexus and his lungs were on fire with the lust for air.
He knew it was only a matter of time. He was far away from the cabins now. There was nothing on these streets but locked sheds and the landing field that lay beyond. He could see the hulls of the ships towering into the murky sky. His own little cruiser was among them. If he could reach it, he would have an impregnable fortress to protect him, for the little flying sticks could not get through a thirteen-inch hull-plate of ion-bathed steel. If…
Out of the fog a knobbed ebony rod flew. He jerked his head aside but a little too late. It smacked the side of his jaw with stunning force. The blow snapped his head back and made stars dance before his eyes. He fell, and the steel pipe rang against the cobbles and rolled out of reach.
Then they came at him again, silent and deadly as panthers. His boot-heel caught one full in the belly. The little monster fell backwards in the slop, gagging and spitting. Three more sprang at his throat. One he slew with a swift jabbing blow to the nerve-clump just below the base of the skull behind the ear—a stroke with stiffened fingers he had learned years ago from a Ghadorian nerve killer he met on Shimar in the Dragon Stars.
But more came at him through the mists. He fought them with everything he had. Never had he battled so desperately, not even that time the murderous priests of Zodah trapped him in the act of stealing the tiara of their harlot queen. But the little men with three eyes were the most deadly adversaries he had ever faced. They fought in utter silence with a grace and skill and economy of strength that was astonishing.
Then he knew them for what they were—trained killers! Members of the weird assassin cult of Pelizon across the cluster from Zha.
The Death Dwarves!
* * * *
Then, somehow, he was out in the open again. He had fought his way through them and the street lay open before him. He ran again, knee-high boots slipping on muddy cobbles, for the space field, and the safety of his ship.
And he almost made it.
A knobbed rod caught him in the back of the skull with staggering force and he went down on his face in the mud. This time he knew he could not rise in time, to turn and face them again. This was the end. Oddly, the thing that nagged at him was not the fact of death, but a question—why? Why were the little men from Pelizon after him? He had never been on Pelizon in his life, or near it for that matter. And even the fanatics of Shuthab, raving for his blood, could not purchase the service of the Death Dwarves. They fought only for their dark gods. They killed only the foes of those gods. Why, then, kill him?
They were almost on him when a shadowy figure loomed out of the mist to confront them. One yellow claw-like hand was at his throat when the mysterious figure stepped forward and intervened. Even as the little dwarf bent over the fallen Kirin, three black eyes glinting with malignant fires, the deadly rod poised for the death-stroke, a slender ivory wand came flickering through the driving rain to brush gently against the dwarf’s supple wrist.
It was a light, glancing blow. But it was enough. Suddenly the dwarf sucked in his breath like a hissing serpent and snatched back a hand. Kirin could see the agony in the three eyes. Scalding agony, as if the hand had suddenly been dipped full to the wrist in a beaker of molten lead.
The others fell back before that dancing ivory wand. For a long moment the stranger held them at bay while he reached down, puffing with exertion, and hauled the exhausted, groggy Earthman to his feet.
“That way—my ship,” Kirin panted. They backed up, the stranger half-dragging and half-supporting Kirin as his stumbling legs sagged under his weight.
The dwarves came forward through the mist in an ominous ring, circling
