Finally all was silence, but whether the Formians had all been slain or had merely retired to some nook from which to rush out again and renew the conflict, could not be told. There was no time, however, to stop and find out.
“Quick!” the earthman shouted, “we must follow the usurper!”
Whereat all the party started groping about to try and discover an exit.
A shout of “Here is the door!” from one of them, and all pressed in his direction, Cabot merely following with the crowd, since his antennae gave him no clue as to the source of the cry. The door opened into a passageway. In silence the party threaded the dim corridors beneath the stadium, until a sudden turn brought them out into the daylight, facing the city. And, as they debouched, they saw, just out of reach, a kerkool which bore Yuri, Formis and Lilla toward Kuana.
Out of the other exits were pouring a fighting, seething crowd of Cupians and Formians, as on that other day not so long ago, when Prince Yuri had assassinated King Kew at the Peace Day exercises, and had thus made himself King. But this time the red pennants of Kew outnumbered the yellow of Yuri and the black of Formis combined.
Other kerkools were standing beside the stadium. Without awaiting the outcome of the fighting, Cabot and those with him seized the nearest cars and sped after the fleeing king.
Straight for the palace drove Yuri, and straight for the palace drove his pursuers. Yuri arrived there first, entered the capitol ground and barred the gates, whereat the Kew faction surrounded the entire group of buildings on the top of Kuana hill. They were quickly augmented by the victorious reds from the stadium. Then Cabot and a handful of the more intrepid of his faction battered down one of the palace gates and forced their way inside.
As the door crashed in, the assaulting force was met by a volley of shots, but it had been a bit premature and so most of the bullets went wild. Within the doorway stood rank upon rank of the palace guard, Cupians of unquestioned loyalty to the usurper Yuri, his own personal bodyguard, who had been recruited from the unspeakables of the city by Trisp, the bar-mango of Kuana. They were armed with rifles.
But before they could recover from their surprise sufficiently to fire a second round, the assaulting party swept in and engaged them in hand to hand combat. Some of the guard possessed revolvers as well as the longer weapon, and so were able to defend themselves manfully at close range, but they were merely thugs who fought for the love of fighting, whereas the attackers were inspired by the enthusiasm of an ideal, the ideal of Cupian freedom which had been engendered by Cabot, the Minorian, in the first War of Liberation, and which now had been born anew in the second. Their onrush proved irresistible, and soon the few remaining survivors of Yuri’s guard had fled into the interior of the palace.