Then came news that the Formians at the Third Gate had been flanked by some of our men who had surmounted the pale with scaling ladders. The Third Gate fell into the hands of Cupia. Our victorious armies were on enemy soil.
It was war to the hilt! And the fact that the Formians had invaded and attacked first, satisfied the sporting sense of all Cupia.
A special detachment of Mooni-trained aviators and mechanics had gone at once to the three planes as soon as we had shot them down, and now one of them arose into the air fully repaired.
The moment had arrived for the final master stroke in the new Cupian national game—war. For the second huge machine in the courtyard of the Department of Mechanics was a sixteen inch barbette coast artillery rifle, which had been trained upon the Imperial City of the ant queen, by exact elevation and azimuth, carefully computed by Buh Tedn.
The huge gun boomed forth. Again and again it boomed, as our spotting plane reported for adjustment of fire. Finally, just at nightfall, the signal came to cease firing. The Imperial City, from which Queen Formis had been directing her troops, had been totally destroyed, and with it presumably the queen and her friend and ally, the renegade Yuri.
Our armies still pressed forward into Formia, protected from air attack by the three repaired planes and by the anti-aircraft gun, which had been sent forward by kerkool. I was jubilant. But not so, apparently, King Kew.
“What is the matter, sir?” I asked. “Why do you look so sad on this glorious day of deliverance? Are you thinking of our poor boys who have fallen?”
“No,” he replied, “I did not dare tell you before, for fear that your well known impetuosity would disrupt our plans. But now you can know. The Princess Lilla has been missing since morning. The fact that all of her clothes are intact, except her sleeping robe, leads me to think that she must have been kidnaped during the night.”
“My God!” I ejaculated in English. Then turning the command over to Hah Babbuh, and instructing him to move his headquarters to the Third Gate in the morning, I hastened to the apartments of my sweetheart.
Bthuh met me there in tears and said: “My princess is dead! My princess is dead! Last night, through connivance with me, Prince Yuri drugged her with saffra root and spirited her away to the Imperial City of Formia. I knew all your plans, except the purposes of your two huge cannons, or I should have warned Yuri of those, too. I thought merely to spoil your victory and so gain my revenge. The old king, too, had spurned my amorous advances, and so I declared war on Cupia. But Cupia has won in spite of me, and as a punishment for my guilt my beloved mistress has been killed.”