Then, with a gurgle, some blood welled from the prince’s mouth and trickled down his chin.
With one supreme effort his antennae radiated the words, “Curse you!”
Then the rifle dropped clattering from his nerveless hands, and his body slouched forward prone on the floor at the foot of the dais. From the right side of his back there protruded the jewelled hilt of a dagger.
Behind the couch, between parted curtains, stood a wild-eyed Cupian woman, her face hideous with pent-up hate and triumph.
For a moment Myles stood rooted to the spot; then, tearing his feet free, he rushed to his fallen enemy and plucked out the dagger. From the wound there gushed bright cerise-colored blood, foamy with white bubbles. Myles turned the body over, and listened at the right side of the chest. Not a sound. Then, the Prince’s chest collapsed, with a sigh, a little more blood welled out of the mouth, and all was still once more.
Prince Yuri, the most highly developed specimen of Cupian manhood—but a renegade, traitor, rejected wooer of the Princess Lilla, pretender to the throne of Cupia—Prince Yuri was dead!
And such an ignominious death for one of his high spirit to die! Stabbed in the back by a woman.
Cabot rose and faced her, the jeweled dagger still in his hand. “Who are you?” he asked. “And why did you do it?”
“I am Okapa,” she replied in a strained voice—“Okapa from the mountain village of Pronth. Do you remember how in the Second War of Liberation you found Luno Castle deserted and a slain infant lying on the royal bier?”
“Can I ever forget it?” he answered, his mind going back into the past. “Naturally I thought it was my baby son, whom I had never seen. Therefore I fought all the harder against the usurper Yuri until I drove him and his ant allies southward, rejoined Lilla in Kuana, and learned that little Kew was safe, and that the dead child was but an orphan baby whom Lilla had substituted for our own baby for fear of just such an outcome.”