Flash Gordon 5 - The Witch Queen of Mongo (6 page)

They learned to make stone of great beauty out of desert minerals; they learned to make pills that contained all the nourishment of the universe; they learned to make vapors and gasses that kept them young and vigorous forever. For that reason the country of Azuria became known as the Kingdom of the Blue Magic, with penetration into the secret area tantamount to sudden death for any trespasser.

In the winding walkways of the fantastically beautiful palace of Azuria strolled a statuesque and bounteously endowed black-haired woman of extreme physical beauty. She wore a band of platinum inset with beryl, turquoise, and sapphire, which gave off brilliant facets of light in the subdued bluish vapor that swirled throughout the Caverna Gigantea.

She wore a filmy lavendar cape on her bare back, clasped together at her throat with a chain of the finest gold and silver. Her garment covered her upper body in a tight, contoured sheath, clinging to her waist and hips with a luminescent glitter. Shoulder-length gloves of the same material covered each of her lovely arms and her feet were clad in tiny sea-blue sandals.

Queen Azura was deep in thought. Lines of care, not usually on her forehead, marred the singular beauty of her face only to a minor degree as she continued to mull over the latest news she had received from her secret agents working in Arboria.

“So,” she said to herself as she walked along, “Prince Barin thinks he can seal off the tunnels to the xanthillium mines, does he? I’ve made up my mind about him. He and the Free Council of Mongo will rue the day they forced me to take action against them.”

Queen Azura did not realize she was speaking out loud. She had been worrying about the xanthillium supply for months now, knowing that Prince Barin would eventually put a stop to Azuria’s raids on the mineral. Xanthillium was a jellowing element peculiar to Mongo which, mixed with oceanite, formed duraplast, an almost indestructible metal equivalent to steel in strength and only one tenth its weight.

But all the xanthillium on Mongo was located in an enormous lode under the forest of Arboria in Prince Barin’s territory. For years Queen Azura’s miners had worked from the subterranean vaults dug by past dynasties to bring xanthillium down into Azuria, the Kingdom of Blue Magic, but Prince Barin had finally discovered the pilferage and had brought the matter before the Free Council of Mongo.

Naturally, the Free Council had debated the case with Azuria’s representative, a half-breed who could stand the sun’s rays, arguing for Queen Azura. And just as naturally, the Grand Council had decided to forbid Queen Azura’s miners from pulling out any more xanthillium.

Prince Barin had sought to enforce the ruling.

With Azuria and Arboria living almost side by side in a state of uneasy equilibrium, the tension had mounted, and Queen Azura’s secret agents had made forays at night into the City of Wood—all of which had not pleased Prince Barin in the least.

In fact, the entire matter of xanthillium and mining rights was but the tip of the iceberg as far as Queen Azura was concerned. For years she had been working on a scheme to bring down the government of the Free Council of Mongo by sending her soldiers against Arboria and the nations allied with Arboria. And that scheme, she was happy to realize, waited only for one final element to bring it into play. A catalyst was the term her war minister used. A catalyst to force a showdown between the troops of Azuria and Arboria.

Just today, she had heard from one of her agents that Prince Barin was mounting an army of security troops to patrol the area of the mine, particularly the fissures in the planet’s crust through which Azurian geologists took out the xanthillium.

This might be the catalyst, Azura knew, and yet she did not quite like the thrust of events. The catalyst should give her side extra leverage, so the war that would be precipitated would be to her advantage, not the opposition’s.

It was a perplexing problem. Yet the right time might never come. Perhaps it was the hour—the do-or-die day!

“All right,” Queen Azura said finally. “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll do it, using him, and Prince Barin has only himself to blame!”

“Him,” an exiled personage whom she had been hiding for years in the kingdom for just this purpose, was an unknown quantity, and a potential danger whom she had never really been able to completely master or even analyze. She was reluctant to use him, but . . .

She turned on her heel and started to hurry back to the glittering entrance to the palace. She was startled to find she was not alone in the crushed-rock walkway that led through the garden of mineral formations.

“Qilp!” she exclaimed, frowning. “What are you doing on this forbidden pathway?”

The walkways around the palace were taboo to commoners. Qilp was minister of intelligence, but he was not of royal blood. He did not seem to be concerned at his trespass. There was great excitement on his face.

“Your Majesty!” he cried, his squeaky voice high and resonant in his throat. “We’ve got something on the scanner!”

Queen Azura stared at Qilp. He was only four feet high, his head just above her waist. The skull was enormous, with no hair growing on it at all. He had light-blue skin, with electric-blue eyes and strange teeth that seemed translucent. His neck was the size of a rope, and his arms and legs were thin and bony. He wore a body stocking of indigo from his neck to his knees, and on his abnormally large feet he wore fiat sandals of plastic alloy.

“Go back to the palace,” said Queen Azura. Scanner! He was using scientific terms again. Azuria’s scanner was an ancient one, leftover from the early days of Azuria’s existence on Mongo. While the latest scanners in use aboveground on the planet were of the vacuum-tube variety, the early ones were simple crystalline globular formations. Actually, the crystalline formulation caught vid-impulses perfectly and were not always in need of repair or replacement. But the vacuum tube had replaced the crystalline globules for all practical purposes.

But to Queen Azura, it was much more in keeping with the magic of the Kingdom of Blue Magic to call the scanner a crystal ball, rather than to admit it was simply a scientific device like everything else in the kingdom.

Qilp scampered for the door, his enormous feet splaying out and scattering crushed blue stones in all directions. Azura passed the bubbling fountain that sprayed blue water down over stalagmites of orange, green, and yellow, and finally reached the door to the palace.

In moments, she was inside the “I” Chamber of the palace. “I” for “eye,” she told everyone. In actuality, it was “I” for “Intelligence.”

The crystal sat on a stand in the corner of the room. When Azura entered, she found she was alone except for Qilp. She gestured him imperiously to a couch at one end of the room. He scampered off and sank into it, grinning hugely.

Heavy draperies of turquoise and aquamarine hung from the walls, with no windows in sight. Indirect lighting filtered out of the joints where the walls joined the ceiling. This light was captured on photosensitive plates at planet level, piped down by wire to the Caverna Gigantea, and there released by rheostat to the various photoelectric cells hidden within the walls of the palace and the houses of the kingdom. Because the illumination came indirectly, it did not matter that it was actually transformed sunlight. The blue pigmentation of the Azurians was not adversely affected by indirect rays.

The scene in the crystal was very clear. Azura stood by it, peering down in fascination.

She saw the hooded figures—her own agents, wrapped in hoods and robes and masks to protect them from the sunlight—and a strange blond man and a teenage boy.

“What is this?” she asked aloud. “My guards? And who is that young man?”

It was at that moment that Willie froze the guards into time and roused Flash from his paralysis.

“Oh-ho!” cried Azura. “It’s Flash Gordon. And here on Mongo again. How delightful.”

Qilp giggled on the couch and bounced up and down gleefully.

Azura paid him no heed. Her mind was traveling swiftly into the past, and as she remembered she felt her heart beat violently in her breast.

The sight of Flash Gordon still brought her to a kind of trembling ecstasy. She had met him some years ago, when he had been on Mongo, fighting at the side of Prince Barin.

“I loved you, Flash Gordon, beloved enemy,” she said softly. “I suppose I’ll always love you and here you’ve come back to me!” She smiled broadly.

Yes. She had loved him and he had refused her. She had offered him everything. The Kingdom of Blue Magic. Her own self as his queen. All the riches in the palace. Everything he wanted, just to be her king.

He had refused her.

It was that silly Earth girl, Dale Arden, Azura knew. But it did not matter what reason he had. The fact that he had refused her was what rankled in her heart. She had sworn vengeance.

But he had escaped in that tricky way of his on the eve of the night set aside for their glorious wedding.

He had left her, and she had been the laughingstock of the entire palace entourage—not that she had seen anyone laughing at her in her shame. But she had put them all to death anyway, because she knew they wanted to laugh.

And she had killed them the slow, painful way: producing a toxic gas in the air that paralyzed them, keeping them fully awake, conscious, and sensitive to every touch on their bodies. Then she had alternately frozen them in below-zero centigrade dry air and boiled them in above one-hundred centigrade steam, until they had expired many hours later.

No one would ever laugh at Queen Azura!

Now he had returned. Flash Gordon, her love, her hate.

She wheeled from the crystal. “Qilp! What are you dreaming for?”

“Your Majesty!” Qilp cried, bouncing to his feet and padding over to her with his shambling gait.

“Get on those nozzle controls, will you?”

“Yes, oh, Queen Azura,” Qilp said, running across the room to a curtain. He ripped the drapes aside and revealed a console in the wall with many gauges and dials.

“The jets,” Azura snapped, moving over to stand behind him. “Quickly!”

Qilp reached out.

Azura was at the crystal again. She saw Willie and Flash take the axes and throw them away. She saw her hooded guards spring to life again. She saw the ensuing fight, and then she cried over to Qilp: “Now! Turn on that paralysis mist!”

“Yes, oh, Queen Azura,” Qilp said, giggling.

The gas formed in the mouth of the cave at which Flash Gordon and Wordless Willie were staring, and swept out along the ground over the rocks toward them.

With a faint smile, Queen Azura watched. She knew they would not guess what it was at first: a gas that would turn them both into unconscious automatons in a split second.

She laughed.

“Blue Magic!” she whispered gleefully, rubbing her hands together and staring at the crystal with relish.

She saw Flash freeze, and then the teenage boy. She turned and gazed at Qilp with a kind of mad gloating.

“They are ours, Qilp. Ours!”

D
r. Zarkov was fuming. He was fuming and puffing and talking at the same time, which took a little doing. Mainly, he seemed to be cursing, to himself under his breath.

“That darned kid,” he muttered again, kicking at a stone on the trail ahead of him.

Dale laughed. “Well, it serves you right, Doc. You played tricks on us to get us out to your place. Just because Willie’s played tricks on you is no reason to take it out on him.”

Zarkov raised his fists into the air and waved them about for a moment. “Maybe you’re right,” he growled suddenly. “But this is taking me away from my experiments.”

“Your experiments with Willie, I suppose you mean,” Dale said thoughtfully.

“That’s right. Without Willie, I could not do the experiments, anyway.” He looked at Dale and laughed in his booming way. “This whole thing is just one big long experiment, isn’t it?”

Dale nodded. “So you’d better relax and enjoy it.”

Zarkov slapped his hands together and looked around. “Dale, we’re not getting anywhere on this trail. I think Flash and Willie took the right one.”

He peered at the rocky crags ahead of him.

“This stuff is apparently some schist formation without any kind of geologic interest; the other formation, where we first arrived on Mongo, was much more exciting.”

“The oceanite?”

“Right.”

“What is oceanite, anyway?”

“It’s a kind of blue igneous rock,” Zarkov said. His eyes lighted up. “Hey!” he boomed. “That’s what I was trying to remember. It’s the rock formation of the Caverna Gigantea.”

“What’s that?” Dale asked.

“The Kingdom of Blue Magic.”

Dale’s eyes opened wide. “You mean Queen Azura’s lair?”

“I don’t know if it’s a lair or not,” Zarkov said, smiling, “but it’s Queen Azura’s land, all right.”

“She always had her eye on Flash,” Dale said darkly.

“Yeah.” Zarkov grinned. “You two never did seem to hit it off, did you?”

“She always wanted to claw my eyes out.”

“And you? What did you want to do to her?” asked Zarkov.

“No comment.”

Zarkov shook his head. “Dale, I vote we go back and meet Flash and Willie. Maybe the four of us can find our way out together. Now that we know where we are—”

“What was that?” Dale asked, turning her head to one side and listening.

“What?” Then he heard the distant sound of garbled cries.

“It’s Flash and Willie!” snapped Zarkov, grabbing Dale’s arm. “Come on. They’re in some kind of trouble.”

The two of them raced back along the trail they had taken. The pathway twisted down the side of the sliding schist formation, switchback after switchback. Dale had to slow down at every turn, or stumble over into the rocks that bordered the narrow trail.

Zarkov kept fuming and cursing the dust that rose from their boots.

The trail straightened out and soon they came to the spot where they had separated from Flash and Willie.

“Hold it,” Zarkov called.

Dale stopped.

“Listen.”

There was no sound at all.