[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy August 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV Legends spoke of Earth's glorious past, of freedom and greatness. But this was the future, ruled by god-globes, as men g

The day that Revel killed a god, he woke early. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, and a pain in his ear where somebody'd hit him during a shebeen brawl the night before. He rolled over on his back. The bed was a hollowed place in the earth floor, filled with leaves and dried grass and spread with yellow-brown mink skins sewn into a big blanket; he'd slept on it every night of his twenty-eight years, but this morning it felt hard and uncomfortable. The water gourd was empty. In the cold gray

When Revel was due for a rest space, he went through the blue-tinged dusk of the mine, cleaned his arms and face at the washers, scrubbing the coal dust from his big hands, and climbed the ladders, up and up, till day shone in his face. He stood beneath the cross-beam of the entrance, sucking in clean air. The red and blue buttons shone in the sun; far down the valley a globe passed between trees, bent on some private business. Another floated by him into the mine; under it trotted a zanph, one

The Lady Nirea thought a moment—she never attacked any new problem without thinking beforehand—and then she began to struggle. This rucker who had her over his shoulder, with a death-grip on her legs and her head hanging down his back, was plainly insane. No man of his low position was ever insane enough to actually harm a squire's daughter; so if she kicked and bit, he would either drop her or— Well, it was the "or." He reached up and slapped her on the rear. Hard. She opened her eyes wide. No

Revel was sitting beside the hole in the wall, now filled with rocks, of course; he had replaced the four small guns in his belt and found, by breaking open the chest they'd lain on, a number of boxes of ammunition, with which he'd stuffed his pockets. Experiment had shown him how to load, and tradition of the ruck told him that to shoot, one pointed the end at something (or someone, he told himself grimly) and pulled the small curved projection. The woman should have helped him, but she was sul

Revel saw the lead horse, a piebald brute with hoofs like mallets, coming at him. The squire atop it was leaning down with the mane whipping his cheeks, smirking at Revel as he drove his steed forward. He made the fastest decision of his life. He could roll and save himself, for he was quick as a lightning bolt; or he could keep hold of the wench and try to preserve them both. He could never have told what prompted him to decide to save the Lady Nirea. At any rate, he threw himself atop her, cla

There were seven hundred silent men in the amphitheater of the forest, and more came in each minute, slipping from the trees without a sound, taking seats on the sloping grass. Miner's lanterns, the marvelous contraptions that hung in the shafts beside the veins of coal or pockets of diamonds, glowing with a dull penetrating radiance, had been filched from the mines one by one over years, and now illumined the strange hall like blue glowworms spaced around a pit. Revel sat, uneasy, on the sward

Lady Nirea was puffing and blowing and clawing her way through endless miles of creepers, thorns, and brushwood. She wished Revel were carrying her now, even if it meant the loss of her clothing again. Now she appreciated what a job he'd done, for naked though she'd been, not half as many scratches had marred her skin on their first journey. Ahead of her, the giant called Rack was doing his best to break trail for her; and in front of him, with a rope under his arms which the red-bearded man hel

Revel was plowing through the brush like a wound-crazed bear. Jerran came behind, shouting directions, for Revel's impatience would not be stilled enough for him to follow anyone, especially the small Jerran, whose head rang, he said, from the skull-cracking blow he'd been given by Rack, and who was slowed as a consequence. Revel got farther and farther in advance, tearing with his pick at vines and creepers, trampling small trees, making enough noise for seven men. Dimly he remembered much of t

They took Revel to the top of a hill just behind Ewyo's mansion. He was stripped to the buff, but on his feet were stout sandals of horsehide in triple thickness, so that he could run well and give them a good hunt. On the crest they untied him, and he stood naked in a ring of the horsed gentry, rubbing his wrists and glaring at them. Beside him were Jerran and the mutilated Dawvys, who both wore their customary shirts and trousers. Running his eyes over the squirachy, Revel saw with a strange t

The squire was clad in a sky-blue velvet coat, long and loose with a row of big silver buttons down the front, a cabbage rose on each flared lapel, a thick fall of silver lace over an olive-green weskit, lime breeches in white calf boots. His blunderbuss was tilted carelessly up over one crooked elbow, for he trusted to the iron-shod hoofs of his hunting stallion to smash the rebel into the muck of the valley. He was a portly, floridly handsome man of some thirty summers, and he would not live t

As night fell, Lady Nirea left her father's house by the servants' door. She was dressed in the miner's clothes she had worn the previous day, and carried a gigantic portmanteau, so heavy she could scarcely lift it. In the bag were her favorite gowns, numbering sixteen; two coats she especially loved; some bracelets set with diamonds—the rarest gem of any, for though they were mined extensively throughout the country, the globes took all but a very few for their own mysterious purposes—and an an

"Read it again," said Revel, bending his scarred face beside the girl's sleek one, staring hard at the printing as if by concentration on it he could learn to read right there, and drag the hidden meaning from the words. "Read slowly. Rack, you're no slouch at thought, even though you have been in the toils of the false gods. Give this your best brainwork. Jerran, concentrate! You three men, try to cull the sense from these words. Begin!" In the light of half a dozen lanterns she began to read.

Revel the Mink and his eight troops crouched in the dark entrance of the mine. The night was black, clouds had obscured the moon, and only the occasional pinpoints of globes drifting between the buttons above them broke the gloom. "What are they doing?" hissed Nirea. "Why haven't we been attacked long since?" "The globes move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform," muttered John Klapham. "I'll wager there's something like that in the Globate Credo." "Almost those words." Revel glanced at

John staggered to his feet. "Brother! Maybe I was wrong. That was an atomic city-buster if I ever heard one—and when the Tartarians were over here, I did. Maybe the coal isn't so important to your damned orbs after all." He went reeling to the open night. Revel and Nirea were beside him now. Off to the west beneath the lurid light of the globes' buttons rose another of the dark twin clouds. "If they were trying to smack us, they could stand a refresher course in pin-pointing ... let's get the th