Swords of Waar Read Free Page A

back flip. Against a Ty-D-Bol blue sky, a big, square-jawed hero wearing nothing but a loincloth and an armored sleeve was fighting two half-man half-tiger centaurs, while a hot purple-skinned chick looked on all wide-eyed in the background. I turned it over. A sentence on the back jumped out at me. “Stranded on Mars, which its inhabitants call Wharr…”

CHAPTER THREE
    HOPE!
    I stared at the word for for a full minute, my mind spinning like a stripped clutch, then flipped the book over again and stared at the cover for another minute. The cen-tigers in the painting looked absolutely nothing like Aarurrh. They looked more like zebras with tiger-faced men where their necks should be, but combined with the armored sleeve, the purple chick in the corner, and motherfucking “ Wharr” on the back cover, it was kinda hard to buy that it was all just some crazy coincidence.
    I looked up at Eli, my jaw hanging by one hinge. “What is this? What the fuck is this?”
    He sat back down in his chair. “That’s the story you been tellin’. Except it was written in 1909 or so, by the guy whose name’s on the cover, Norman Prescott Kline.” He chuckled. “I still don’t know how you got your hands on one of those. There ain’t many copies around anymore.”
    “I’ve never seen this before. I told you.”
    “Well then maybe you heard someone talking about it some time.” He nodded toward the book. “Lancer brought that out in the mid ’60s, hoping to ride the Conan wave, but it tanked. Everybody thought it was just another Burroughs rip-off. Thing is, a lot of the hard-core fans think Burroughs ripped off Kline.”
    “Uh, who’s Burroughs?”
    Eli rolled his eyes. “You never heard of Edgar Rice Burroughs? The guy who invented Tarzan, and John Carter of Mars, and Carson of Venus? One of the fathers of science fiction?”
    I shrugged. I’d heard of Tarzan, of course, but the rest of it meant nothing to me. I was more of a true crime gal. “I guess I have.”
    “Kline wrote Savages in 1909 and it was serialized in some crap pulp magazine, and Kline fans claim Burroughs must have read it before he wrote his own Mars stories.” He sipped his tequila. “Anyhow, Kline’s version didn’t see the light of day again ’til Lancer Books went searching for old pulps to repackage in the sixties. Like I said, it didn’t do too well for ’em—though it’s a collectable now.”
    I shook my head, wishing I hadn’t had quite so many shots on top of so many beers. It felt like the world had just pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and I couldn’t figure out the trick. Had I made it all up after all? Had I heard somebody talking about this cheap-ass book back in the day, and just dug it out of my subconscious? I could swear I’d been to Waar. Hell, I had the scars to prove it, didn’t I? But were they proof? I could’a got those scars anywhere. Maybe I’d hit my head when those dogs swarmed in and I fell in the cave. Maybe I’d spent the last six months in some kind of schizophrenic dream and I’d just now came out of it. But, no. That would mean Lhan wasn’t real, and I wasn’t ready to believe that. Not yet.
    I held up the book. “Can I read this?”
    Eli raised his glass. “Enjoy. Just go easy on the spine. It’s the only one I got.”
    I got up, then realized I was being rude. “Uh, sorry. I—I just—I really want to…”
    Delia waved a hand. “Go ahead, Jane. Go on. There’s a bed made up in the Airstream. We’ll see you in the morning.”
    I gave her a grateful look, then saluted Eli with the book. “Thanks, Eli. I don’t… Well, goodnight.”
    “Night, Jane.”
    “Get some rest, girl.”
    ***
    I didn’t get any rest. I read that book cover to cover in about six hours, then turned off the light inside the Airstream around 4am, but that don’t mean I slept. I didn’t. I lay there staring at the curved metal ceiling of the trailer until the sun came up, seven little words running through my head on an