Mytor's car was only a few feet away but before he could reach it he was shoved aside by one of the Venusian's guards. At the same moment the night flamed with the blue-yellow glare from a dozen blasters. Ransome raised his own weapon, staring into the shadows, seeking his attackers.
"That's our job. Get in," said one of the guards, wrenching open the car door.
Then the firing was over as suddenly as it had begun. The guards clustered at the opening of an alley down the street. Mytor's driver sat impassively in the front seat.
When the guards returned one of them thrust something at Ransome, something hard and cold. He glanced at it. A long knife.
There was no need to read the inscription on the hilt. He knew it by heart.
"Death to him who defileth the Bed of the Dark One. Life to the Temple and City of Darion."
Once Ransome would have pocketed the knife as a kind of grim keepsake. Now he only let it fall to the floor.
In the brief, ghostly duel just over he had neither seen nor heard his attackers. That added, somehow, to the horror of the thing.
He shrugged off the thought, turning his mind to the details of the plan by which he would save his life.
It was quite simple. Ransome had been in space long enough to know where the crewmen went on a strange world. Half an hour later he sat with a gunner from the Hawk of Darion, in one of the gaudy pleasure houses clustered on the fringe of the city near the spaceport and the desert beyond.