Mercutians would be upon them. A simultaneous attack,
no doubt; the fliers dropping low to loose their deadly rays from
above as the land force attacked with their hardly less deadly hand
rays.

Hilary shot a last hasty glance aloft. His heart gave a great bound.
The thin insubstantial vapors of a little before had solidified, taken
on a grosser leaden hue. The sky was a sullen gray, shot through
intermittently with the broad flares of a sun valiantly struggling to
reassert its long undisputed sway. Little flickers of lightning played
around the ragged edges of the clouds.

To the most unobservant it was evident now that a storm was in the
making. But might it not be too late? The sun still shone, and as long
as its light pierced through, the weapons of the Mercutians held all
their deadly potency.

The alien invaders sensed the urgent necessity for quick action, for
the fliers were dropping now, hundreds of them, to within range.
Hilary heard the shouted orders of the Mercutians Cors, the crashing
forward of a mighty host, and then the front of the attack burst out
of the trees in an engulfing flood of gigantic unwieldy bodies and
gray warty faces.

A quick view of the stout ungainly Viceroy, Artok, another of the
coldly saturnine visage of Urga in the front rank, and with a roar of
gutturals, the attack was on.

* * * * *

Down from above came a myriad blinding flashes, turning the inclosed
valley into an inferno of heat and rocking, boiling, shattered ground.
Up the valley shot the massed hand rays of the hundreds as they swept
along in close-packed trot.

It seemed as if nothing could exist in that blazing, screaming hell.
Hilary, stunned, shaken, scorched, felt as if he were the only one
alive. Yet as the front of the attack washed up before him, he did not
hesitate. He sprang to his feet, swung the nicely hefted long-handled
ax he had picked up, uttered a war whoop that went back to remote
ancestors, and flung himself headlong into the boiling mass of
Mercutians.

As he did so, he caught a fleeting, comforting glimpse of Grim rising
to his full height on the other slope, huge hands raised, and crashing
down barehanded, silent, into the ranks of the enemy. A cheer went up,
a faint ragged cheer, and other figures popped up out of nowhere and
dropped feet first into the fray.

Hilary found himself engulfed in a welter of figures that towered
heads above him. His ax swung u