"But how did you come to arrive in the garden at this particular moment?" Gerry asked.
"The forces of Giri have forded the river and are marching overland, but I came ahead with a hundred picked cavalry mounted on swift saddle-dolphins. We saw a crude type of underwater craft moving in this direction, and followed it at a distance. You know the rest. After bringing down the sentries that Lansa had posted below, we left our dolphins and our water helmets down at the main drain and crept up through the passages to this place."
"When do you think the rest of the Green Folk will come?" Closana asked.
"Within a few more hours, Princess. They will not be in time to save your city, but they will be in time to protect the survivors."
"If there are any of us left by then!" the girl said bitterly. Gerry suddenly pointed upward.
"Look there! The worst is over now!" he shouted. The Viking was streaking across the sky in a burst of yellow rocket flame.
The big space-ship dropped down over the beleaguered city, her powerful ray-tubes flashing. Other murky beams stabbed up to meet her, but her duralite hull was impervious to the rays and Angus kept her high enough so that the helicopters were protected by the curve of the hull. One after another the ray casters and heavy gas-guns of the Scaly Ones went out of action. When the ship's beams had silenced the artillery and commenced to rip black holes in the ranks of the Reptilian warriors themselves, they suddenly broke and fled.
The war drums of the Scaly Ones were silent at last, while the trumpets of Savissa raised a long-drawn paean of vengeance. Out of the ruined and flaming city fled the Reptilian men, while troops of swift-footed Amazons hung on their flanks and rear with twanging bows. Back across the plains toward the border they fled—and ran squarely into the grim thousands of the Green People who tore them apart with the savagery of an oppressed race just finding their souls again. The few that survived, out of the powerful army that Lansa the mad Earth-man had brought eastward to attack Savissa, were a handful who fled back across the land of Giri and vanished into the desolate Vaaka marshes from which their people had first emerged generations before.
The Golden City was hopelessly afire, past saving, and the survivors gathered on a level field outside the northern wall. Gerry and Sarnak and Rupin-Sang were standing together as the Viking dropped down to land on the edge of the field. McTavish stepped out, red bearded and jovial but showing the effects of sleepless nights himself.