His own dark destiny that had marked him out from day of birth to carve an empire....
As from afar, he heard Sark's furious voice lashing out at Kyla: "Defy me, will you? Then so be it!" The raider surged up, half out of the riding-chair. Savagely, he slapped the slim girl-priestess across the face, so hard that his webbed fingers left great welts of white and scarlet. "To the ring with her! To the ring!"
The Pervods jerked Kyla back. Roughly, they dragged her to the fenced ring that served as pit for the arena and threw her in.
In his turn, the blue man shifted. The tension was running high within him now, locked in the icy bands of iron-nerved control. Once more, he surveyed the howling crowd and Sark's mongrel raider crewmen, then smiled to himself with dark, reckless mirth.
Fat face still livid, Sark sank back into the depths of his riding-chair. "Who's first?" he cried. "Who wants to test the brave priestess?"
A shout burst forth from a hundred savage throats. A churning mass of nightmare forms of life thrust forward.
But before the raider chief could even make a choice, a huge, hairy, heavy-thewed Uranian dau was charging to the fence. Full seven feet tall he stood, and he bowled the others from his path like byul-balls, a living avalanche of lust. Leaping high in the air, he caught the top strand of the cable and swung up and over, dropping into the arena like some monstrous, many-armed Earth gorilla.
The girl called Kyla stared at the creature as if paralyzed with horror. She did not even raise her hands.
"I give you your last thought as a chaste priestess!" Sark cried, taunting. "You shared your secret with another—the high priest, him they call Namboina! He, too, knows where Xaymar's crypt lies hidden! So all your stubbornness has gained you nothing, for I'll tear the truth from him even though you die here!"