The Adversary - 4 Read Free

Tanu.
    A great manhunt had been mounted by the Tanu after the prisoner revolt. Basil Wimborne and most of his contingent were recaptured and sent to Finiah. Its city-lord, Velteyn, led a Flying Hunt himself over the Vosges in search of the other escapees; but they were safe with Madame and her Lowlives, listening incredulously to the old woman's scheme for freeing humanity from the Tanu yoke, which would utilize the rather reluctant cooperation of the exotic Firvulag.
    Hundreds of kilometres east of the Rhine River lay the socalled Ship's Grave. There the titanic space-going organism who had carried both Tanu and Firvulag from the Duat Galaxy to our own had plunged to Earth, creating a huge crater. Tanu and Firvulag passengers in the Ship, led by its spouse, a woman named Brede, had escaped from the dying organism in small flying machines before it impacted. Later the two groups of exotics had left the flyers parked around the rim of the crater after their two greatest heroes, Shining Lugonn of the Tanu and Sharn the Atrocious of the Firvulag, fought a ritual battle in honour of the defunct Ship. Ceremoniously entombed within one of the flyers-which were presumed to be still at the crater after a thousand years-was the body of Lugonn, together with his laserlike weapon, the Spear.
    Madame proposed to lead an expedition of Lowlives to the Ship's Grave crater and retrieve this Spear for use against the very Tanu who held it sacred. And if the flyers were still operational, as seemed likely, the expedition would attempt to bring one back to participate in a joint Lowlife-Firvulag attack on Finiah, a Tanu stronghold.
    After many vicissitudes, this first phase of Madame Guderian's great plan for the liberation of Pliocene humanity was successful. The Tanu were forced to abandon Finiah, thus losing their only barium mine, which had produced an element vital in the making of all torcs. Felice, who showed increasing symptoms of a severe psychosis, obtained a golden torc for herself from the ruins of Finiah. The mental amplifier unlocked the stupendous powers of coercion, psychokinesis, and creativity that had been latent in her brain, and fuelled the girl's fierce desire for revenge upon the Tanu.
    The next phase of Madame's plan involved an infiltration of the torc factory in the Tanu capital, Muriah, and a parallel operation that had as its objective the permanent closing of the time-gate.
    Madame and ten other conspirators, including Felice, Claude, Sister Amerie, and Basil Wimborne-who had been rescued during the fall of Finiah-now set out on a long trip south. They took with them the laserlike Spear of Lugonn. Its energies had been totally discharged during the Finiah operation, but they hoped that their clever Group Green companion, Aiken Drum, would be able to recharge it when they appealed to him for assistance down in the Tanu capital.
    Aiken-together with Elizabeth, Bryan, Stein, and the other privileged captives-had encountered an utterly different face of the Many-Coloured Land upon their arrival in Muriah some weeks past. They were presented to the Tanu aristocracy at a lavish feast, where they were treated at first like honoured guests instead of slaves.
    Elizabeth was told by Thagdal, the King, that she would first be initiated into Tanu ways by Brede Shipspouse, the enigmatic guardian of both exotic races. When this was accomplished, she and the King would found a new dynasty of torcless, fully operant Tanu-human hybrids. (Queen Nontusvel seemed entirely agreeable to this plan, in spite of the fact that her own large brood of powerful adult children would undoubtedly be overshadowed by Elizabeth's offspring.) Bryan the anthropologist was ordered to make a study of the impact of humanity upon the Tanu socioeconomy. King Thagdal believed that human genes and human innovation had been a boon to the Tanu, and he expected Bryan's survey to vindicate his policy encouraging interbreeding and the adoption of certain human