City of the Beast

(Warriors of Mars)

Michael Kane Book 1

by Michael Moorcock

Contents

Chapter One

MY DEBT TO M. CLARCHET

Chapter Two

THE ASTOUNDING TRUTH

Chapter Three

THE INVADERS

Chapter Four

THE ATTACK

Chapter Five

A DESPERATE PLAN

Chapter Seven

THE PURSUIT

Chapter Eight

THE CITY OF THIEVES

Chapter Nine

BURIED ALIVE!

Chapter Ten

INTO THE CAVES OF DARKNESS

Chapter Eleven

QUEEN OF THE ARGZOON

Chapter Twelve

THE PIT OF THE N'AAL BEAST

Chapter Thirteen

AN UNEXPECTED ALLY

Chapter Fourteen

SWEET JOY AND BITTER SORROW

Epilogue

Chapter One

MY DEBT TO M. CLARCHET

THE Matter Transmitter is both villain and hero of this story (began Kane), for it took me to a world where I felt more at home than I shall ever feel here. It brought me to a wonderful girl whom I loved and who loved me—and then took it all away again. But I had better begin nearer the beginning.

I was born, as I told you, in Ohio—in Wynnsville—a small, pleasant town that never changed much. Its only unusual feature was in the person of M. Clarchet, a Frenchman who had settled there shortly after the First World War. He lived in a large place on the outskirts of town. M. Clarchet was a cosmopolitan, a Frenchman of the old school—short, very straight-backed, with a typically French, waxed moustache and a rather military way of walking.

To be honest, M. Clarchet was something of a caricature to us and seemed to illustrate everything we had learned about the French in our dime novels and comic books. Yet I owe my life to M. Clarchet, though I wasn't to realize it until many years after the old gentleman had passed on, and when I found myself suddenly transported to Mars ... But again I am getting ahead of myself.

Clarchet was an enigma even to me though, as boy and youth, I probably knew him better than anyone else. He had been, he said, a fencing master at the Court of the Tsar of Russia before the Revolution and had had to leave in a hurry when the Bolsheviks took over.

He had settled in Wynnsville directly because of this experience. It had seemed to him at the time that the whole world was in chaos and was being turned upside down. He had found a small town that was never likely to change much—and he liked it. The way of life he led now was radically different from the one he had been used to, and it seemed to suit him.