Copyright © 1980, Kenneth Bulmer

Alan Burt Akers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

First published by Daw Books, Inc. in 1980.

This Edition published in 2007 by Mushroom eBooks, an imprint of Mushroom Publishing, Bath, BA1

4EB, United Kingdom

www.mushroom-ebooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 184319600X

A Victory for Kregen

Alan Burt Akers

Mushroom eBooks

A Note on Dray Prescot

Dray Prescot is a man above middle height, with brown hair and level brown eyes, brooding and dominating, an enigmatic man, with enormously broad shoulders and superbly powerful physique. There is about him an abrasive honesty and indomitable courage. He moves like a savage hunting cat, quiet and deadly. Reared in the inhumanly harsh conditions of Nelson’s navy, he has been transported by the Scorpion agencies of the Star Lords, the Everoinye, and of the Savanti nal Aphrasöe, the Swinging City, to the savage and exotic world of Kregen, under the twin Suns of Scorpio, four hundred light-years from Earth.

Here, in the unforgiving yet rewarding world of Kregen, struggling through disaster and triumph, Prescot has made his home. Called on to shoulder the burden of being the Emperor of Vallia and of freeing the islands from the cruel grip of invaders, he is determined, once the country is once more united and free, to hand all over to his son Drak. But the Star Lords have dispatched him on a mission for them in the southern continent of Havilfar, and Prescot and eight comrades have barely escaped with their lives from an underground labyrinth of horror. Now Prescot must battle his way home to resume his work for Vallia.

Dray Prescot relates his story on cassettes, and each book is arranged to be read as complete in itself.

Chapter one

Tyfar Wields his Axe

The gray-beaked fellow flourishing his bronze decapitator fondly imagined my name was written on that wicked curved blade. His one desire in life was to keep my head as a precious souvenir. He even provided himself with a wicker basket swinging at his belt all ready for the trophy.

“Hai! Apim — now you die!”

The path down the side of the artificial mountain led here under overarching branches and the mossy-trunked trees stretched about us, ancient and gnarled, patched and puddled in the light of the suns.

As is my custom in a fight, I do not waste breath replying to taunts or battle chants, unless base cunning indicates the advantage of an even more coarse taunt in return, so I bent my head beneath the horizontal slash of the decapitator. The sword in my fist thrust once. The wicker basket, the bronze-studded armor, the leather boots, and the decapitator all fell away to the side, sloughing like too-wet dough, slid off the path and away down the slope between the trees.

The fellow was not alone.

Other headhunters pressed on, yelling, screeching their taunts, seeking to take the heads of us nine —

who sought merely to escape off the mountain with our lives.

By chance it happened I led the descent of the mound and so these decapitating warriors met me first. They were not apim like me but those hard, gritty diffs men call Nierdriks, with coarse-skinned, high-beaked, hooded-eyed faces like killer turtles, and compact muscular bodies equipped with only two arms and two legs and no tails. Their bronze blades glimmered molten in the smoky shafts of crimson fire from the red sun, and their hides sheened muddy emerald in the fire from the green sun. With shrill yells of hatred they leaped for me.

My comrades were yelling, hullabalooing to get on along the path and at the Nierdriks. The first two attackers were seen off with no great difficulty. The shifting light and shade beneath the trees and the rutty slope of the path made the action precarious.

My foot turned on a knobby tree root snaking like a swollen vein across the path. I pitched headlong. My sword switched up instinctively and parried the flurry of blows. The ground came up — hard. The decapitators were held off easily enough; but I was on the ground and smelling the ages-old dust puffing up into my nostrils, feeling that damned tree root gouging into my back. With a slash measurably faster and more intemperate than those that had gone before, I slashed the nearest fellow’s ankles and then had to twist aside to avoid the thwunking great blow of his comrade’s head cleaver. There was no real danger. In the next instant I would be up, on my feet, and that bloodthirsty head-and-body parter would go tumbling down the slope spraying blood. There was no real danger — but, in the instant as I gathered myself, a shadow moved over me and two firm, muscular legs straddled me, and Tyfar was yelling and swinging his blade over my head.

“Hold, Jak! I’ll cover you!”

He was remarkably lucky I hadn’t chopped him. He stood over me, swinging and smiting, his shield well up, his axe a silver-stained blur in the dappled shadows.

This was a new and remarkable experience. The sensation intrigued me. Here was I sprawled on the ground in the middle of a fight, and this fine young prince Tyfar stood over me battling off our foemen!

Remarkable!

Also — highly amusing.

All the same, by Zair, comical though it was it could not be allowed to go on. I wriggled away and degutted the Nierdrik who sought to sink his brand into Tyfar’s unshielded side and then sprang up and clouted the next one over the head. His big turtle nose burst and sprayed purple fluids into the shadows.

“You are unharmed, Jak?”

“Aye. Aye, I’m unharmed — Prince.” And then, because he was young and vehement and very much your proper prince of honor, I said — and with warmth, “My thanks.”

More Nierdriks dropped from the trees upon us and for a space we had a merry set-to. In the confusing shadows, twinned in jade and crimson, we fought. Presently the headhunters drew off and gathered in a bunch a few paces below us on the path. Many bodies strewed the ground between, and they must have realized now that they had sought to slay and take the heads of a party unwilling to allow them that liberty.

Abruptly, one of the turtle-faces spun about, silently, and collapsed. Barkindrar the Bullet said, “They are real, then.” He took out another leaden slingshot and began to fuss with his sling.

Tyfar said, “Yes. It was in my mind they were mere phantoms.”

“Not phantoms,” said Deb-Lu-Quienyin. “I would have known.”

He would, too, not a doubt of it. The kharrna, the powers, of a Wizard of Loh would certainly have told Quienyin if we faced hallucinatory projections. He had taken no part in the combat, as was right and proper, and with a typical little hitch to his turban, setting it straight, he was visibly becoming a proper Wizard of Loh, respected and dreaded.

An arrow winged like a sliver of wrath and skewered a Nierdrik through that turtle neck.

“And,” quoth Nath the Shaft, “I’ll have that one back when we go past.”

“You didn’t see where my bullet went, Nath?”

“I did not. If you must sling lead then you must expect to lose it. If you must be a slinger then you must—”

“I’ll knock the next three over before you clear your quiver, you great fambly!”

Well, that was normal. Nath the Shaft and Barkindrar the Bullet arguing over their respective skills, and wagering any and everything on the outcome of their shots, provided a never-failing source of joy and amusement to us through the horrors we had endured. The Nierdriks clustered in a rocky clearing among the trees, a dozen yards or so below us, and the radiance of the Suns of Scorpio fell about them. They provided capital targets.

Another leaden shot and another feathered shaft flew.

“Ha! Your man is only winged!”

“He’ll never fly again, for sure!”

These two, archer and slinger, prepared to cast again. They were Prince Tyfar’s retainers, the only two he had left to him from his father’s expedition. But, for all the fun and frolic, we had to get down off this artificial mountain before nightfall, and that was not too far off... An abrupt shriek rent the air.

Two shrieks shattered past us as the Pachak twins bounded down the trail. Ordered, methodical, intensely loyal, Pachaks, but when they loose their yellow hair and turn berserk, then it is prudent for any man to guard himself. Screaming war cries, the twins hurtled down the path. Their weapons glittered. Like maniacal savages of a primitive time before the dawn of civilization, they burst in among the astounded head-hunters.

Barkindrar and Nath held their shots, and only just in time.

“We are with you!” shouted Tyfar. He started in running down the trail after the two Pachaks, whose right arms were going in and out twinkling with fighting fervor. The Pachaks’ two left arms apiece held their shields slanted expertly, and their tail hands swept razor-sharp steel in lethal slashes. The Nierdriks fell back, gabbling, some already turning to run.

So I lumbered down and saw off a man or two and, lo!, the path was clear.

“Well done!” panted Tyfar. “By Krun! That was a sight!”

The two Pachak brothers, Logu Fre-Da and Modo Fre-Da, bent to clean their weapons with methodical care on the scraps of cloth twisted around the corpses. Often it took a considerable time for a Pachak to regain normalcy from that fierce fighting frenzy; but I, like many men, considered that this berserk image of the Pachaks was carefully fostered, designed to impress and intimidate. It formed a part of their life-style only when they chose. All the same, there was no doubt that, often and often, something in that skirling onslaught got into their blood.

The Wizard of Loh, Deb-Lu Quienyin, was looking pleased. So was I. We had arranged with the two Pachaks to look out for the old wizard, and although they had not yet entered his employ and given their nikobi, which code of loyal service would have bound them, they were actively aware of their responsibility.

There were nine of us, nine adventurers seeking to escape from this artificial mound, this Moder which contained treasure and horror, and now I turned to look at my two rascals who came walking down toward us.

Nodgen, the tough Brokelsh, carried a bloodstained spear.

Hunch, the Tryfant, poked apprehensively at one of the Nierdriks, who flopped over, his arms limp.

“Are they all—?” began Hunch.

“You great fambly!” roared Nodgen, in his coarse Brokelsh way.

I did not smile. I was aware of the decline of the suns, and the lengthening jade-and ruby-tinged shadows beneath the trees.

“Let us get on.”

Yes, there were nine of us, and we wended down the side of the Moder and we kept a very sharp eye out for more unpleasantness.

We had chosen to descend by a path different from the one up which the expedition had toiled to the summit, and now as we went down, the sweet scent of twining plants filled our nostrils, and the tinkling sounds of hidden brooks made a mockery of the horror contained within the Moder. Hunch kept on casting glances back up the path. Well, that was fine. That meant we had our backs covered. To look at us as we came to the base of the descent and surveyed the belt of thorny scrub ahead would no doubt have occasioned either amusement or disdain in any splendid court of Kregen. We had outfitted ourselves with fresh clothes; but now these were ripped and torn and stained. But our weapons were sharp. I noticed with interest that Quienyin continued to carry his shortsword strapped to his waist. Perhaps his powers had not fully returned? He had lost his powers as a famed and feared Wizard of Loh, and within the lowest depths of the Moder he had regained them. But — perhaps he had not satisfied himself? It seemed to me he was not prepared to put full trust in himself or his powers just yet. That made sense, given the harsh and terrible nature of much of Kregen.

The sense of power being exercised wantonly, the crushing feeling of oppression, and the expectation of impending doom we had lived with during our time in the Moder did not magically lift the moment we stepped off the mountain. Naïve to expect it would. The Wizard of the Moder might have been tamed; now we had to face the terrors of the Humped Land, the sere and unforgiving land clustered and clumped with the artificial mounds, each containing fortune and horror. The land ahead of us and barring our escape would test us all.

“You two,” said Prince Tyfar with that habitual note of command tempered by the feelings of comradeship, “scout the entrance where we came in. It is just possible a few beasts have been left us.”

“Quidang, Prince!” said Barkindrar and Nath, and they took themselves off, moving very circumspectly among the foliage.

The members of the main expedition, from whom we had been parted in the depths of the Moder, would have been long since gone. They would be spurring back to civilization bearing the loot. I looked at Tyfar and he saw my quizzical glance.

“I know, Jak, I know. But we must try.”

“Yes.”

“Let me bustle around and make a fire while those two are gone,” said Hunch, the Tryfant. “I am famished—”

“Very well. Do I need to caution you over the fire?”

“No, no, Jak — I mean, notor — no need.” And Hunch shivered and looked across at the trees where there were more shadows than the last of the suns shine.

He had taken a sack stuffed with goodies from the abode of the wizard, after we had humbled that proud and cruel man — if the thing had been a man at all — and when the fire was going well within the little dell beneath a bank we had picked, Hunch shook out his sack. We all stood back. The stench offended.

“By Tryflor!” yelped Hunch. “The damned Moder lord—”

“The rast has tricked us!”

“The food — putrid!”

“Well,” I said over the hubbub. “Maybe it is just as well. That cramph of a Moder lord might have magicked the vittles in our insides. I do not care to contemplate that, by Krun!”

“You have the right of it, Jak,” observed Tyfar. “But we are hungry.”

“The Humped Land will not be so sere that we cannot find aught to eat.”

Tyfar made a face. He was a prince — admittedly, a prince of Hamal, which great empire was locked in deadly combat with my own land of Vallia — and the idea of chasing rodents and other lowly creatures for food did not appeal to him. Then he smiled.

“When you come to the fluttrell’s vane, Jak, one must do what one must. I shall not care for it, no, by Krun. But I will eat a green lizard when my guts rumble!”

“Nodgen,” I said, “do you go and see what fruits there are on those bushes.”

“Aye, Jak — notor — that will be something.”

These two, Hunch the Tryfant and Nodgen the Brokelsh, had been slave with me, and my trick of freeing them and giving them manumission before witnesses still had not quite overcome the old freedom of speech. It mattered nothing to me. But I fancied our deception had to pass muster, at least in the eyes of Tyfar. He was a man with high ideals, studious and yet quick with his axe; but he had been brought up in a culture in which slavery was a mere part of life. I wondered if he would ever be brought to understand what we were trying to do in Vallia, and if he shared the blind hatred of that island empire of his fellows. He thought I came from Djanduin. Well, I do, in a very real sense — but if he discovered I was a Vallian...

I brushed these tiresome thoughts away. We had to survive to cross the Humped Land. I had not forgotten the fearsome swarth riders, who infested the land between the Moders; but I forbore to mention them at that moment, for fear of what would happen to the water pot Hunch was carrying across to the fire.

We set watches and the suns sank and Barkindrar and Nath returned. They reported the compound was empty of life, not a riding animal to be seen. But they did bring a few crusts of bread and a packet of palines wrapped in leaves somewhat shriveled.

“Whoever dropped this and cursed for his loss did us a good turn, by Belzid’s belly,” quoth Barkindrar. By this I understood that he and Nodgen, Brokelsh both, were compatible.

“You did not believe the Wizard of the Moder had let us get away with his food, then?” said Quienyin. He was clearly interested in Barkindrar’s reasoning.

The slinger looked down, despite all his bluff toughness, discomfited by this direct interest in him by the Wizard of Loh.

“It was in my mind, San. We got away easy, like.”

“We put the damned Moder Lord down,” said Tyfar. “I still wonder if we did the right thing not to kill him. I see it was right and a kind of a small Jikai; but, all the same... He has played a scurvy trick on us.”

“It was right not to slay him, Prince.” I spoke briskly. “Now, if you agree, we will eat up this princely meal, stand our watches, and when the Twins rise we will set off.”

They all gaped.

“But — Jak—”

“I do not think you will enjoy travel in the heat of the suns. And if we are to find ourselves mounts, we must look to the future. Or do you wish to remain a heap of moldering bones here?”

There was no answer on Kregen under Antares to that.

After our exertions and despite our hunger and the conditions in which we found ourselves, we found sleep. The watches changed, and no one felt inclined for conversation. Our thoughts, I feel sure, dwelt on the confrontations of the morrow when we could expect to be visited by the swarth riders. They had shepherded the expedition to this particular Moder out of all the hundreds dotting the Humped Land. They were mysterious, enigmatic; but they were some kind of men and therefore amendable to the argument of steel.

But, for all that, they possessed the only riding animals that we could expect to lay hands on around this desolate place.

With the rising of the Twins, the two second moons of Kregen eternally orbiting each other, we rose also and gathered our weapons and set off marching across the Humped Land. Under the moon glitter, the dark and ominous shapes of the Moders rose from the plain about us. They stretched for mile after mile, set in patterns, and at random, some relatively small, others encompassing many miles of subterranean passages.

“D’you fancy going down another one to see what we can lay hands on, Hunch?” I overheard Nodgen speaking thus, and half-turned. Hunch spluttered a passionate protest.

“What! Has your ib decayed, Nodgen! Go down there again!”

“It was a thought,” said Nodgen, and he laughed in his coarse, bristly, Brokelsh way. The Pachak twins marched in silence, and their eyes remained alert and they scanned every inch of the way.

The slinger and the archer marched one each side of their lord, Prince Tyfar. He strode on, head up, breathing deeply and easily. Yes, I had seen much of goodness in this young man during those periods of horror; now, with our way ahead at least for the moment clear, I hauled alongside him and we fell into a conversation about — of all things — the state of theater in Ruathytu, the capital of Hamal.

“A few houses play the old pieces,” he said. He sounded aggrieved. “But by far the majority play these new nonsenses, all decadence and thumping and sensation. It is the war, I suppose.”

“Yes. Fighting men—”

“But, surely, Jak, a fighting man needs the sustenance of the inner spirit? Needs to have himself revitalized?”

“You mean, when he isn’t trying to stop his head coming off?”

Tyfar breathed in. He eyed me meanly. “You mock me, Jak.”

“Not so. I agree with you. But you are a prince—”

“I am! But — what has that to do with it?”

“Just that you have had the advantages and privileges of an education that was not primarily aimed at earning a living.”

I probed deliberately here. I had opened a gambit — in Jikaida I would have been opening the files for the Deldars to link ready for the zeunting — and he was aware that I meant more than I said.

“You know no man may inherit his father’s estates and titles as easily as he climbs into bed, Jak. You know that, one day, when — and I pray to all the gods it is a long and distant day — my father dies I shall be called on to fight for what is mine. You know that. The law upholds. But a man must uphold himself as well as the law. I have been trained as a fighting man, and much I detested it at the time.”

I had heard how he had always been running off to the libraries as a young lad, and how he had taken up the axe as a kind of reproach to those who taught him.

The conversation at my nudging came around to his axe and he repeated what the slaves had said. He preferred the knowledge that came from books; but he had become an accomplished axeman as though to proclaim his independence from that emblem of many things, the sword. I thought I understood. There was in this young prince an inner fire I found engaging. His diffident manner, so noticeable when in the company of his father, had all fallen away under the tutelage of the horrors of the Moder. He gave his orders with a snap; yet one was fully alive to his own estimation of himself and what he was doing, as though he saw himself acting a part on a stage of his imagination. Our conversation wended along most comfortably, and Quienyin joined us to debate again what we had discovered and our chances of the morrow. Our voices were low-toned. And we all kept a sharp lookout.

“We must seek to move from one point of vantage to another,” I said. “If we get our backs against good cover we can deal with the swarth folk. Once one of them is dismounted we will see what his mettle is on his own two feet.”

“Yes,” nodded Quienyin. “I fancied they did have only two legs apiece. Although, of course, you cannot be sure.”

“Quite.”

“I couldn’t make out what kind of diff they were,” said Tyfar. “There was something of the Chulik about them—”

“No tusks, though,” said Quienyin.

“No tusks. But something about the jut of the head.”

“We shall find out when the suns are up,” I said, and that tended to end the conversation for a space. The Moders rose from the rubbly plain something like a dwabur apart. Walking those five miles gave us an itchy feeling up the spine, traipsing as we were across relatively open ground. The trouble was, that open ground was probably safer than the areas in the immediate vicinity of the artificial mountains, the Moders, the tombs of the ancient dead and their treasurers and magics. The rosy shadows of the next Moder enfolded us, and Hunch, for one, let go with a sigh of relief.

“Still!”

Modo’s piercing voice reached us, thrown so as to tell us the position and not to reach to the danger he had spotted ahead. We stopped stock-still. A few scrubby thorn bushes threw splotchy shadows from the Twins. In this dappled shade we stood and watched the file of Nierdriks pad past. They looked like ghostly silhouettes, animated dark dolls against the radiance of the moons. Silently they padded past, one after the other. They were walking. I, for one, was content to let them go. Had they been riding, now, straddling any of the magnificent assortment of Kregan riding animals — why, then, I do not think my companions would have let them go...

When the last had gone, vanishing into the shadows of the Moder, we resumed our progress. And we kept even more alert, staring about even more vigilantly.

Quienyin kept up with us, struggling along without a murmur.

“Prince,” I whispered quietly so that the Wizard of Loh would not overhear. “I think we must rest for a moment or two—”

“Rest, Jak? I thought the plan was to march as far as we might in the light of the moons and rest in the heat of the suns.”

He saw my gaze fixed on Quienyin, who had not turned to stare back at us but was doggedly ploughing on over the rubbly surface.

“Ah — yes, of course. It is thoughtless of me.”

Tyfar hurried ahead and checked the Pachaks in the vanguard.

We all rested, although of us all only Quienyin needed the break. Again I pondered on Prince Tyfar. Many a haughty prince would simply have gone on, ignoring anyone else’s discomfort. That Quienyin was a Wizard of Loh was now known to my companions; but that had not caused Tyfar to call a brief halt.

We discussed the fate of our dead fellows of the expedition, and we expressed ourselves as confident that the survivors had escaped. We had seen them emerging into the sunshine before we had been trapped within the Moder, and Tyfar, it was clear, could not countenance any thoughts that his father and sister had not escaped to safety.

“And, Jak, do not forget. Lobur the Dagger was there and he is mighty tender of my sister Thefi.”

“As is Kov Thrangulf.”

“Oh, yes, Kov Thrangulf.”

That pretty little triangle had its explosion due, all in Zair’s good time. When we set off again Quienyin unprotestingly marched stoutly with us. Dawn was not far off. The sweet smell of the air, only faintly tinged with dust, the host of fat stars, the glistering glide of the moons, all held that special pre-dawn hollowness, that waiting silence for the new day. I began to spy the land with more stringency, seeking a strong place where we might rest. What I needed was precise and as we dipped down into a little groove or runnel in the ground, with thorn-ivy crowned ridges each side, I felt we had come as near as I could hope for. This was not perfect; it was as precise as we would find.

“Here, I think, Tyfar.”

He stared about. I watched his face, wondering if he would suffer a character change now that we were out in the fresh air.

The thorn-ivy, vicious stuff that flays the unwary, clustered thickly on the two ridgeways bordering the runnel. This was the real spiny ivy of Kregen. The Kregish for ivy is hagli. If we kept low we would be out of sight of a rider approaching at right angles. We chose a kink in the runnel so we could arrange one avenue only to watch. The clumped bushes shone a lustrous green and the thorns prickled like an army of miniature spearmen.

“You think so, Jak?” Tyfar looked uncertain.

The three principals stood together. The other six would not offer their opinions until asked, although the two Pachaks had every right to speak up.

Presently, Tyfar called, “Barkindrar, Nath. We camp here.”

I nodded to myself.

That was the way it ought to be done. Confidence. The two Pachaks said nothing; silently they got on with cutting thorn-ivy and fashioning a form of boma around the open angle of the kink in the runnel. Old campaigners, these two Pachak hyr-paktuns, capital fellows to have along with you in a chancy business.

“I am quite fond of bright-leaved hagli around the door,” said Quienyin. “But this stuff is murderous.”

We hauled the thorn-ivy around, using sticks and weapons and not touching the stuff, and so fashioned the boma. I spied the land in the first flush of light. Jumping out, I walked a way off, turned to check the look of our hide.

It looked innocent enough.

Going back along the runnel I felt a burst of confidence.

We could hole up there all day and never be spotted unless some damned rider fell on top of us. If that was what was in Tyfar’s mind, it most certainly was not in mine. Hunch was in no doubt.

“We can hole up here all day,” he said to Nodgen. “We’ve water to last us and we can march on to the next stream tonight.” He yawned. “I think I shall sleep all day.”

“The dawn wind will blow our tracks away,” said Nodgen. “But you’ll stand your watch like the rest of us, you skulking Tryfant.”

“At least I don’t always need a shave—”

“Quiet, you two,” I said.

They froze.

“All of you — still!”

As the light brightened with the rising of the red sun, Zim, and the green sun, Genodras, and the shadows fleeted across the sere land, specks drifted high against the radiance. We squinted our eyes. Yes —

Flutsmen. They were flutsmen up there, sky flyers sweeping across the land on the lookout for prey. True mercenaries of the skies, the flutsmen serve for pay in various armies; but they mostly enjoy reiving on their own account. And no man is safe from them.

We remained perfectly still.

High and menacing, the wings of their flyers lifting and falling in rhythm, the flutsmen circled twice, rising and falling, and then lined out and headed north.

“May the leather of their clerketers rot so they fall off and break their evil necks,” said Hunch. He shut his eyes tightly. “Have they gone?”

“They’ve gone, you fambly — you can stop shaking.”

“The trouble is,” said Hunch the Tryfant, opening his eyes and looking serious. “I couldn’t run away then, and you know how it upsets me not to have a clear run.”

There spoke your true Tryfant. But Hunch had proved a good comrade, despite his avowed intention of running off if the going got too tough.

We composed ourselves for the day. I positioned myself so that my head was just under the lowest prickly branch of a thorn-ivy bush, where I had to be careful. The view afforded lowered down — the dusty surface, ocher and dun, blowing a little with the dawn wind, and the prospects of the Moders, massive artificial mounds that gave the Humped Land its name of Moderdrin, spotting the landscape for as far as I could see. Slowly, the Suns of Scorpio crawled across the heavens. And we waited and sweated.

The first sign came, as so often, in a patch of lifting dust.

I narrowed my eyes against the glare. The dust plumed white streamers and grew closer. A body of men rode out there. Logu Fre-Da, who was on watch, called down gently, “Swarths.”

We remained still. The dust neared.

Dark shapes, fragmentary, appearing and disappearing, thickened beneath the dust. We waited.

“How many, Logu?”

An appreciable pause ensued before he replied.

“At least a dozen, notor — perhaps as many as twenty.”

“They will ride nearer.”

“Yes.”

Perhaps twenty — twenty of those hard dark riders who had hounded our caravan toward one particular Moder. Their swarths, agile, scaled risslacas with wedged-shaped heads, fanged, terrible, would carry them in a thumping rash if they spotted us. They would have no mercy, seeing we were not an expedition but merely victims for their sport — or so it was easy to believe. For very many of the mysterious races of Kregen that is just how it is, no matter that there are many splendid races on Kregen who regard that kind of bestial behavior with abhorrence. There was no mistake with this little lot. If they spotted us they’d seek to have sport with us before they slew us.

“Not a squeak out of you,” said Prince Tyfar. “Or you’ll be down among the Ice Floes of Sicce before you’ve finished yammering.”

Not one of these men crouching with noses in the dust would make so much as a bleat. Now we could hear the soft shurr and stomp of the swarths. From their angle of approach they were making for the nearest Moder. They would pass within three hundred paces of our little thorn boma. They’d never see us. Not from where they would pass, avoiding the line of thorn-ivy. All we had to do was remain perfectly still and silent and we’d be safe.

Gently, making no fuss over it, I stood up.

I climbed out past the edge of the thorn-ivy.

“Jak!” screeched Tyfar. I heard the others cursing.

I walked a few paces forward, toward the swarth riders. I lifted my arms high. I shouted.

“Hai! Rasts! Over here! You zigging bunch of cramphs — what are you waiting for?”

Chapter two

Of the Testing of a Wizard of Loh

Hunch’s agonized wail floated up at my back.

“He’s mad! Oh, may the good Tryflor save me now!”

The ground felt hard and rocky underfoot. The air tasted sweet. The brightness of the day fell about me.

“Hai! Rasts of the dunghill! Why do you tarry?”

Sharp-edged, brittle, black against the radiance, the swarth riders crowded forward. They saw me, standing clear of the thorn boma. I stood alone. The runnel led directly toward me. The vicious heads of the swarths jerked around, dragged by reins in equally vicious fists. White dust drifted away downwind. The smell of tiny violet flowers crowning spiky bushes, shyly hiding in crevices along the crumbly sides of the runnel, reached me. The suns shone, the wind blew, the flowers blossomed — and I, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, challenged this glorious world of Kregen to do what it could against me...

As Hunch the Tryfant had said, shocked, I must be mad. Well, he was not above four foot six tall, and a Tryfant, and so there were excuses for him. I took a step forward, seeking a secure purchase for my gripping toes, and I drew forth the Lohvian longbow.

The saddle dinosaurs were coated in that white dust, but as they moved and jostled the sheen of their purply-green scales glittered against the thorn-ivy. They began to move, urged on by the riders perched on their backs. All those long, thin lances descended from the vertical, slotting into the horizontal, and lethal steel point was aimed for my heart.

Four abreast — that was all the runnel would allow. There was some jostling and cavorting for positions. Each swarth-man was determined to be in the front rank of four, knowing that those following on would have only tattered rags and blood to take as an aiming point.

I banished my comrades from my mind.

Now the Lohvian longbow mattered — the great longbow was the only thing that mattered, that and the shafts fletched with the blue feathers of the king korf of Erthyrdrin. The longbow I had found in the crystal cave that provided what I lacked and its arrows fletched with the rose-red feathers of the zim korf of Valka had vanished with all the other phantasmal artifacts of the Moder. This longbow, these shafts, came from the Mausoleum of the Flame, and they were real.

The bow drew sweetly. The first shaft sped. The second was in the air, and the third was loosed before the first struck. The fourth followed instantly.

Four honed steel bodkins drove in to a cruel depth.

The shrieks and the bedlam, the racket of crashing swarths and hurtling riders, might sound sweetly, but there was no time to contemplate them. Two more shafts sped and then I was up and through the little gap in the thorn-ivy we had made dragging bushes down for the boma. Out on the lip of the runnel I could flank those harsh riders. More shafts arched.

The dust swirled. The uproar boiled. Now Nath the Shaft, using his composite bow, joined in. Barkindrar the Bullet swung and hurled.

The dust obscured much of the tangle.

We shot into the mess.

Three swarths cleared the obstacles to their front. They raged down the runnel, heads outstretched, scales glittering between the dust streaks. The lances reached forward. The riders, heads bent in metallic helmets, short cloaks flaring, bellowed down the slot.

One I took. One Nath took. One Barkindrar took.

Nodgen was up and leaping about, waving his spear.

“Leave some for me!”

The two Pachaks were running forward, their tail hands stiff above their heads, the daggered steel brilliant.

“They run!” yelled Tyfar, beside himself, running on with his axe poised. Four swarths galloped madly away; and one carried a dead rider lolling from the saddle, one sped with empty saddle, and the other two were being urged on with whip and spur. These two last were shot out by Tyfar’s retainers. I had thrown down the Lohvian longbow which had served so well and, ripping out the thraxter, the straight cut and thrust sword of Havilfar, leaped headlong into the dust.

It was all a bedlam of heaving scaled bodies and wicked fangs and lashing blades. Some of the Chulik-like riders attempted to claw their weapons free. They could be given no chance to fight back, of course, and we set on them with a will. We had seen what they had accomplished, and we did not wish to suffer a like fate. The fight was quick and deadly. The thraxter slimed and lifted, struck and thrust, withdrew with more ominous streaks along the dulled blade.

Tyfar fought with a wild panache, his axe blurring in short lethal strokes. The two Pachaks fought as Pachaks fight. And Nodgen’s thick spear thrust with all the power of his bristle body. And — there was Hunch, his bill cunningly slanted, cutting the legs away from the riders who attempted to smite down on him. Yes, Tryfants will put in a wild, brave, skirling charge, magnificent in attack. It is the retreat, in the withdrawal, when doubts arise, that Tryfants rout so easily. The suddenness of the attack, the ambush that had shot them into pieces, and then the headlong rush of fighting men undid these swarthmen. None escaped. Modo Fre-Da, curling his tail cunningly out of the way, leaped astride a swarth. He seized up the reins and jammed in his heels. The animal shot ahead. Furiously, the Pachak hyr-paktun galloped after the dead rider lolling in the saddle of his fleeing swarth. We others gathered up the reins of the surviving animals, quieting them in the dust and turmoil, sorting them out and calming them. No one was bitten, which was a thankfulness. The saddle dinosaurs were middling-quality mounts, with two among their number of superior breed. These two had the thickened scale plating over their eyes, which were fierce and arrogant, and their tails were triple-barbed. Once you know how to handle a swarth, he is a tractable enough mount. Mind you, I would take a zorca or a vove any day of the week.

“Did you see—”

And: “That fellow bit on the shaft!”

And: “He went over backward and his head—”

We looked at the corpses of the swarth riders.

“Muzzards,” said Quienyin, walking up and standing, his head on one side to balance his turban before he pushed it straight. “Ugly customers. There are a lot of them down south in the Dawn Lands.”

They did look a little like Chuliks, at that. They did not have the oily yellow skin of the upthrust tusks, but their build and thickness and stance — when they were alive — suggested the Chulik morphology to our eyes.

Their skins carried a leaden hue, which had not been caused by death, and they exuded a musky stink I, for one, found unpleasant. Modo returned with the dead warrior still lolling in the saddle, and so we nine stood, looking down on the dead. The living animals clustered farther along the runnel and began tentatively to rip off the thorn-ivy, munching it up quite oblivious of the thorns. Tough, your Kregan swarth — although their trick is simply to twist their fanged mouths around to get the thorns in sideways and then get their masticating dentures at the sharp spines.

This, as I saw it, was just another example of that peculiarly Kregan marriage of convenience between conflicting demands. The omnivorous animal comes equipped with two sets of implements. At the time I was still, despite my conversations with a Savapim, unsure if these Kregan eccentricities were part of natural evolution — either on Kregen or some other world — or if they were the result of artificial interference with nature’s handiwork.

“Cut-price, unsophisticated Chuliks,” said Logu Fre-Da, nodding to his brother. “These Muzzards.”

“They bear harness and weapons, brother.”

“Aye, brother.”

The Pachaks were mercenaries. I, too, have been a paktun in my time. We were not long in stripping harness and weapons and collecting the loot in a pile. The bodies we left for the carrion-eaters of the Humped Land to dispose of, in nature’s way. I know I did, and I am sure some of the others must have also, said a short prayer to Zair for the well-being of these lost souls in the Ice Floes of Sicce. Then we crawled into the shade beyond the boma and contemplated the pile of harnesses and weapons.

“Which, Jak,” said Tyfar, “reminds me you never did change your scarlet breechclout.”

“Why, no,” I said. “But we were rather — busy.”

“Yes.”

“I shall keep it, as I am sure there is nothing hygienic on these Muzzards. But I admit I am not averse to a stout coat of leather, studded with bronze. And a helmet, too, although—” and here I picked one up and turned it on my hand— “they are poor specimens, of iron bands and leather filling.”

“They put the wind up me, I can tell you.”

“Is that all they put up you, Hunch?” Nodgen guffawed. “Then you’re lucky.”

Because the two Pachaks were hyr-paktuns, wearing the golden pakzhan at their throats, I knew they would be able to handle the long lances from swarthback. I said to Hunch, “Can you manipulate a lance?

Or would it be a waste for you?”

“A waste, notor,” he said at once, without preamble. “I like a long-staved weapon; but these are ill-balanced, as I judge.”

And, by Vox, he was right.

“Let me cut an arm’s length off the end,” said Nodgen. “Then I’ll have a capital long-spear.”

“Each man to his own needs,” I said, and looked at Tyfar. “Prince?”

He smiled.

“I will stay true to my axe.”

In the saddlebags we found comestibles of a hardtack kind, such as a warrior would carry. There was also wine in leather bottles. Tyfar and I exchanged glances.

“Water for now,” I said. “I’ll answer for Nodgen and Hunch.”

“And I for Barkindrar and Nath.”

Quienyin said, “The brothers Fre-Da will, I think, answer for themselves, as is right and proper.”

The Pachaks lifted their tail hands in acknowledgment.

“When the suns are over the yard arm,” I said, although in the Kregish it was not what I said at all. We lay back, munching hardtack, sipping water sparingly, and every now and then a white gleam in Hunch’s face told of his roving eyeballs gazing fondly on the wine skins.

Truly, Moderdrin is an amazing and forbidding place. The mountains stud the plain with their humps, crowned by jumbles of towers and domes and walls, smothered in vegetation, with tumbling waterfalls and bosky avenues in which, as we knew, were to be found savage denizens. But, those denizens were nowise as monstrous as the horrors within the artificial mountains. We dozed and kept watch, and the water remained stoppered in the bottles. Prince Tyfar showed signs of wishing to protest, after the first sips had ceased to refresh him.

“Prince,” I said, and I spoke evenly, “if you drink now you will simply sweat the precious liquid away, wasting it. Wait until the worst of the heat goes.”

“But my mouth is afire—”

“Suck a pebble.” I nodded at the Pachaks. The cheeks on each hardy Pachak face bulged. He did as I bid; and he had the sense to see the sense in it. I felt he was a young man, prince or no, who grasped the uses of sense in a way that would be approved, at least, by men who thought as I did. For your full-bloodied, rambunctious hell-for-leather rampant princeling, Prince Tyfar was altogether too much of an intellectual — and a superb axeman, withal.

He had gone raging into the Muzzards. There was no dilly-dallying there. I fancied he was more of a proper prince than most of that ilk in Hamal.

Three times during that day we spotted flights of flutsmen, and we stayed close. The swarths were lying down and dozing against the heat, shivering their scaly tails every now and then. We were not observed by those sky reivers.

That night we drank sparingly, mounted up on nine of the animals, and led the remaining six bundled up with all we thought necessary to take. The ground scavengers had been at work on the corpses, but our presence had deterred the warvols from swooping down on rustling wings to join in the devouring. By morning there would be left only bones.

At my insistence, Tyfar and Quienyin rode the two superior swarths. Tyfar, I noticed, just took the best one without even thinking about it. Quienyin looked across at me, and it was then I insisted he take the beast.

So, mounted up, not quite as thirsty as we had been, we set off again across the Humped Land, the Land of the Fifth Note. The strong probability was that the Moder Lords organized these Muzzard swarth riders, and agreed among themselves which mound the arriving expeditions of gold-and magic-hungry adventurers should be directed into. Well, the wizards had their fun running poor crazed folk through their tombs, torturing them and extracting the last jot of enjoyment from their anguish. As for the magic items we had taken, they had been expended in our troubled ascent to the surface and escape. There would be no spells of paralysis, no more burning drops, no more tail-shrivelers for us now. Now we must rely on steel and muscle to see us through.

That night passed and toward dawn we ventured to close one of the mounds where we filled the bottles at a stream and set up, stalked, and slew our supper. Everyone cheered up.

“If it means steering out of here from Moder to Moder—”

“Aye, Jak!” said Tyfar. He beamed. “We will be back into the grasslands in no time. And then we will hear word of my father and sister, I am sure.”

I looked at the Wizard of Loh, who sat by the fire munching a leg of one of the birds brought down by Barkindrar the Bullet.

Again we had chosen a strong place for our camp, beneath a rocky outcrop where the fire was shielded by cut branches of thorn-ivy. The swarths rested after their exertions of the night, and I fancied they were well content that their new masters rode them at night and rested them by day here.

“I feel sure you are right, Tyfar. We follow their tracks, I believe, although the wind wipes them out smartly enough.”

“Once I am back in Hamal — once we are both there, Jak — you do not forget my invitation to a bladesman’s night out in the Sacred Quarter?”

“I do not. I anticipate it with relish.”

By Vox! Did I not!

What, I wondered, would he say if I said, quite casually, “Oh, and, Prince Tyfar of Hamal, by the way, I am Dray Prescot, Emperor of Vallia, the chief of your country’s sworn enemies?”

That, I felt, would repay in the glory of his face much discomfort. But, of course, he would not believe me.

How could he?

He would think I jested with him, and in damned poor taste, into the bargain. He knew nothing of me, save what I had told him, and that was going to have to be altered, soon. He would ask what on Kregen the Emperor of Vallia, the great rast, was doing down here in the Dawn Lands of Havilfar. That was, by Vox, a good question. Tyfar knew nothing of the Star Lords and their engaging habit of putting me into situations of peril in order to affect the future course of the world. Well, I had done the Star Lords’ bidding here and was now free to return home to Vallia. I longed to get back, to see Delia again and my comrades and what of my family deigned to show up when their grizzly old graint of a father returned from one of his wild jaunts over the world. There was so much still to be done in Vallia it defied all common-sense evaluation. The island was split by war and factions; the people had called on me, had fetched me to be their emperor, and I was in duty bound to honor that trust and that demand. The island would be united and healed. Then I would hand it all over to my fine son Drak, and with a thankful sigh shake the reins of empire from my sticky hands. And, make no mistake, this was what I intended to do.

All the same, Drak was in Vallia now, and I had many outstanding councilors and generals. I could leave the country to get on well enough without me for a space.

For — I had other fish to fry.

Down here in the Dawn Lands I was not too far away from Migladrin, from Herrelldrin, from Djanduin. Also, in the opposite direction lay Hyrklana. In all these lands I had business.

“Jak!”

I did not jump. I realized I had been sitting brooding on the Wizard of Loh.

“By the Seven Arcades, Jak! You were far gone in your thoughts — I did not pry,” he added, quickly. I did not wish to understand just what he meant, although the gist was plain enough. I did not smile; but I was aware of an easing in the graven lines on my craggy old beakhead of a face.

“Yes, Quienyin, I was thinking. Prince Tyfar would like news of his family and friends, and I do not doubt the others of us nine would, also.”

“And you?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, half to himself.

“You miss Hyrklana, Jak?”

Before I could open my mouth — for thus suddenly had come up the change in the story of myself that Prince Tyfar of Hamal must know — the prince spoke.

“Hyrklana? That nest of pirates? What has that to do with you, Jak of Djanduin?”

I sighed. There, displayed before me, was the reckoning for the sin of lying about one’s origins and playing at cloak and dagger for the fun of it. I had told Quienyin I hailed from Hyrklana, that large and independent island kingdom off the east coast of the continent of Havilfar, and I had told Tyfar I came from Djanduin, the remote, massive peninsula in the far south and west of the continent. And, as you know, I had not lied in saying I was from Djanduin. I never forget I am King of Djanduin. Usually, it is not particularly helpful in maintaining a good cloak and dagger cover to say you come from a country you know nothing of and have never visited.

Dressed up in a disguise and wearing a gray mask, I had successfully convinced Lobur the Dagger, one of Tyfar’s father’s retinue, that I was of Hamal. Other priorities had supervened in my description of my place of origin, and I felt it high time I sorted out the tangle.

Looking about as the suns smote down, shedding their streaming mingled lights, I sighed. How we practice to deceive and then come a cropper in the nets of our own weaving!

“Well, Jak?” Tyfar, your proper prince, was a trifle tart. “Are you from Djanduin? Or Hyrklana?”

“Would it make any difference, Tyfar?”

He waved a hand. “No. I think we have been through enough together by now — I think I know you —

I thought I knew you. But Hyrklana. You know what they think of the Hamalese there.”

“I do. I have visited Hyrklana and I have unfinished business there.”

“But,” interposed Quienyin. “You are not Hyrklanian?”

“No.”

“So you are from Djanduin?”

I could have left it there. Djan knew, I was well enough cognizant of all Djanduin to claim it completely as my country. As long I had fought for that beautiful land against her enemies and won.

“I have land in Djanduin,” I said. “I love the place — it is unspoiled so far.”

“So you are a notor of Djanduin, as we believe?”

“Yes.”

Tyfar was continuing to stare at me. “You know that because of the war waged by the Empress Thyllis, Hamal is not much cared for in many lands of Havilfar. This is simple knowledge. Perhaps you are from a land that has been invaded by Hamal. Perhaps, Jak my friend, you conceive yourself as an enemy to me?”

I had waited on his last words in some trepidation. But I was able to relax. He had said, “enemy to me.”

Had he said, “enemy to my country” my reply must, in all honor, have been different. The trouble was, Tyfar was quite right. Mad Empress Thyllis had alienated just about every country within reach of her iron legions.

And, also, I had the feeling, substantiated only by intuition and a few scraps of idle converse, that Tyfar’s father, Prince Nedfar, was both not happy with Thyllis and not in her good books. And I had suggested to Lobur the Dagger that I worked secretly for Empress Thyllis. I squared my shoulders.

“I cannot tell you, Tyfar, all that I would wish to tell you. Suffice it to say that I know the Sacred Quarter, I can walk it blindfolded, I have ruffled many a night away as a bladesman. I have wide estates in the country — well, not so much wide as passing fair and rich — and I work for the good of the country.”

That was true.

He was surprised.

“You are Hamalese?”

I have estates in Hamal. I am called there Hamun ham Farthytu, the Amak of Paline Valley. But I was not Hamalese. If anything, I was Vallian, not being born on Kregen. These things I could not tell Tyfar — or Quienyin.

“I work for the good of Hamal,” I said. Again, I spoke the truth, even though, perhaps, Vallia would have to put down the worst excrescences of Hamal, chief of whom was the Empress Thyllis. “I deplore what the empire is doing to neutral countries—”

“So do I, by Krun!”

That declaration, by a prince whose father was second cousin to the empress, really was nailing his colors to the mast.

I managed a smile.

“Then we see eye to eye in that, Tyfar. Do not press me further. Only remember: what I do I do for the good of Hamal and for all of Paz. For the eventual good.”

“And you will not confide in me?”

“Not will not.”

He frowned and then banished the scowl and replaced it with a smile, uncertain, but a smile nonetheless.

“I — see.”

And Deb-Lu-Quienyin, that puissant Wizard of Loh, sat looking at me, and he had stopped gnawing on his bone.

“Hyrklana, Djanduin, or Hamal,” he said briskly, waving the bone, “it does not matter, not to me. I have gone through so much with Notor Jak that if he came from some hellhole in Queltar — where no man should have to exist — by the Seven Arcades, he is a man and a friend—”

“Well said, San.” Tyfar stood up. Now he did smile. “I see you are about secret business, Jak. Well and good. That is your affair and none of mine. You have given me your word that you work for Hamal. I, too, work for Hamal, as does my father. I trust we do not work in opposition.”

I shook my head. “Now, now, Prince. You will not worm it out of me like that!”

He laughed. Some princes I knew would have called on their retainers to spit me there and then. So, because I did not wish to drop into a maudlin scene, I took up the thought that had been in my mind when this scene began.

“We would all like to know that our families and friends are safe.” I addressed myself to Quienyin directly. “You know what I talk about, San. It is nothing new. But we have no rights to your kharrna, no claims—”

“Come now, Jak — do not belittle what we nine mean one to the other!”

I nodded. “So be it. If you go into lupu you can tell us what is happening far off. I think Tyfar would more than welcome news that his father and sister are safely out of this desolate place.”

We all sat, still and silent, looking at the Wizard of Loh.

He stared at me. I could guess what he was thinking. He had sustained a nasty accident and had lost his powers and now he had recovered them, or most of them, in the lowest zone of the Moder. He had explained that the Wizard of the Moder had no real conceptualization of what awful powers he had locked up in the lowest zone. An ordinary wizard, one Yagno, a sorcerer of the Cult of Almuensis, mightily puffed up with pomp and pride in his own prowess, had ventured down into the lowest zone and had never returned. This was not so much a useful gift to us in telling us what we wanted to know. This was much more the testing moment for Quienyin himself.

And he saw that very clearly.

How strange, thus to read the riddle of a Wizard of Loh!

They are rightly feared and respected; but they are mortal, human men, and many a mighty warlord and king has his own Wizard of Loh to serve him as he sees fit. My own Wizard of Loh — although it is foolish, really, to call any Wizard of Loh as a normal retainer — had been sent back to Loh. No man unless he has other powers will willingly cross a Wizard of Loh. They are rumored to be able to do terrible things. And, in Zair’s truth, I have seen wondrous deeds. And, here we were, calmly realizing that a Wizard of Loh was on trial with himself.

What other proof could be required to show how our experiences had made of us nine a special band of brothers?

Speaking with all that old bumbling hesitancy completely banished, Quienyin said, “Very well.”

Very carefully, he made his preparations.

Some Wizards of Loh I have known were able to go into lupu very quickly, with a minimum of fuss, and so send a spying eye out to reveal what transpired at a distance. Others go through a rigmarole of mental agility, physical activity, and magical mumbo jumbo to achieve the same result. Deb-Lu Quienyin was, as it were, starting from scratch. He was like a novice wizard, seeking to insert his mind along the planes of arcane knowledge. Very sensibly, he went back to basics and set about going into lupu with all the trappings that thaumaturgical art form required. Equally, just as Tyfar’s attitude to us had been tempered from princely choler by our mutual experiences and new-found comradeship, so Quienyin’s wizardly contempt for ordinary mortals had been modified. We watched him in no sense of judgment whatsoever; rather we actively sympathized with him and wished him well and in however minor a way sought to partake of his struggle. But, when all is said and done, the ways of Wizards of Loh of Kregen are passing strange...

We could only sit and stare.

Deb-Lu-Quienyin composed himself. He sat cross-legged, his head thrown back, and his eyes covered by his hands. I noticed how the veins crawled on the backs of his hands; yet his hands were plump and full-fleshed. He remained perfectly still, silent and unmoving.

Respecting Quienyin’s preliminary insertion of his kharrna into unspecified but occult dimensions, we also sat still.

Quienyin began to tremble.

His whole plump body shook. His shoulders moved. He brought his hands down slowly from his face. His eyeballs were rolled up, and the whites of his eyes glared out in a sightless blasphemy of a gargoyle head. Hunch choked back in his throat. We sat, enthralled, knowing how Quienyin battled himself as he sought to hurl his kharrna through realms unguessed of by ordinary men. Breathing almost at a standstill, Quienyin appeared to gather himself, as a zorca gathers himself at an obstacle. With a wavering cry he rose slowly to his feet. His arms lifted, rising out from his sides, lifting to the horizontal. His fingers were stiffly outthrust. Gently at first, and then faster and faster, he revolved, whirling about, his arms razoring the air.

As always, my mind conjured the vivid impression of a whirling Dervish, a maniac cyclone, a hurricane-whirled scarecrow.

Abruptly, Quienyin ceased to whorl about so madly. He sank to the ground and resumed that calm pose of contemplation. Both his hands rested flat on the ground.

And then he looked up at us and was ready to answer our questions. Rather, he was ready to speak to Prince Tyfar.

What the Wizard of Loh had to say reassured the young prince. Had it not done so, I own, I would have found the subsequent confusion inconvenient.

Yet, even as I relate these events, I am touched by the weirdness of it all. Here Quienyin sat, and he was aware of and could tell us of events transpiring dwaburs away across the land. Just how far a Wizard of Loh can see in lupu is a matter of serious conjecture. They, for sure, give nothing of their secrets away to the casual inquirer. True, in conversation with Quienyin I had learned much. But, then, that was before he had recovered his powers. I wondered, as he spoke to Tyfar, if he would recall with displeasure what he had said, and seek in some nefarious and occult way to rob me of the knowledge.

“Is it possible, San—?” began Modo Fre-Da.

“May we crave, San—?” began Logu Fre-Da.

Both spoke together.

So Quienyin told them what they wished to know. I listened, for I needed to learn of my comrades, bearing in mind what I half-purported toward them. They asked for their mother, for their father was long dead, having met his end gallantly on an unmarked battlefield. She lived in Dolardansmot, whereaway that was I did not know, and they were very tender toward her. They made inquiry about no other person.

Nodgen and Hunch, Barkindrar and Nath, all received news, good or bad — Barkindrar’s younger brother had died of a fall down a disused well, which depressed him for a space, until he reflected, half aloud, that what the Resplendent Bridzilkelsh ordained must be accepted as one accepts the needle —

and they all turned to look at me.

“Well, Jak,” said Quienyin, kindly, although he looked tired, “and where in the world of Kregen shall I seek for your loved ones?”

Chapter three

The Bonds of Comradeship

Before replying, I pulled off the boot taken from a dead Muzzard and chucked it down. The boot was not so much either too tight or too loose as badly fitting; it was well enough for riding, but walking in it and its mate would be agonizing. I wriggled my bare toes. The eight pairs of eyes regarded me expectantly. I scratched under my anklebone.

“Well, Jak? And is there no one in the whole wide world?”

“Without disrespect, San — you are clearly tired. Your exertions have exhausted you.” I pulled off the other boot and wriggled those bare toes in turn. “And, you are quite clearly possessed of very great powers indeed, for you have been able to give us news of our relations, people you have never met or seen. This, I know, is unusual—”

“Yes, Jak. Although I do not think I am fully recovered, I am able to do more in lupu than many Wizards of Loh.”

Deb-Lu-Quienyin spoke simply. There was no boasting here. Also, in the comradeship forged between us nine in the horrors through which we had successfully fought, Quienyin’s own history had been, at least partially, revealed.

“Come on, Jak,” spoke up Tyfar. “If San Quienyin is willing, then surely you must long to know.”

Interesting how, when the Wizard of Loh displayed his supernatural abilities, we’d all resumed calling him San.

“Or is it that you do not have any blood relatives still alive?”

Again I scratched my foot.

“There is a man whose whereabouts I would like to establish. If I know him aright he will be tossing people about like split logs. He is a Khamster, A Khamorro, a high Kham. No doubt he will be in Herrelldrin now.”

“And he cannot then be any kin to you.”

“No. A good comrade. As we are down—”

And then I hauled myself up, all canvas flapping. By Krun! I’d been about to say, “down here in Havilfar,” which was a perfectly logical thought to a Vallian, or anyone from the northern hemisphere of Kregen. But if I claimed Hamal, which was the most powerful empire in Havilfar, the southern continent, I’d hardly talk about being “down here.” So I scratched my foot again and reached over for a small piece of meat clinging to a leaf platter, and said, “down not too far it will be convenient for me to go to Herrelldrin and seek him out. If he is there. If you can scan him, San.”

“No blood relation?”

“No.”

He sat quite still for a moment, looking on me. He had put his ridiculous turban aside after the last items of news had been passed on in lupu, and his red Lohvian hair stuck out like the feathers of the rooster with the wind up his tail. His old face had lost many of the lines and wrinkles, and had filled out, and his clear and piercing eyes looked astonishingly young. And I felt he was looking at me as though I were a glass of crystal-clear water.

Sink me! I burst out to myself. I had too much at stake in Kregen to allow a tithe of my secrets to be spilled here, even despite the special comradeship we nine felt.

“No blood relation, this fearsome Khamorro. I suggest you sleep now, Quienyin, and then we can talk on this matter later.”

“You are very desirous of finding this man?”

“Yes.”

“Then I will sleep for a space. Wake me at the hour of mid, when the suns burn in the zenith. I may be able... Well, no matter, Jak the Sturr. I did you a pleasant repose.”

And with that Deb-Lu-Quienyin rolled over onto his side on the spread cloths and seemed immediately to fall into a deep slumber. I chewed my morsel of meat and gazed at the Wizard of Loh. I did not mind if he read some of my riddles. And the six retainers, also, were men amenable to reason of one kind or another. But Prince Tyfar, this brave, bright, bonny princeling of Hamal, my country’s bitter enemy?

What would he say, what do? No. I must continue with my deceptions. And, by Krun, they were not petty deceptions, either!

Tyfar shook his head, smiling.

“I am mightily glad my father and sister are safe. I thank Havil the Green for that. The news for you will be as good, Jak — and did you notice the sudden formality of Deb-Lu-Quienyin? He called you Jak the Sturr, which you claim is your name.”

“And, Tyfar, I notice you do not give a warm thanks to Havil the Green. Mayhap, Krun of the Steel Blade merits a greater gratitude?”

We trod thin ice here.

He eyed me.

“Aye, Jak the Sturr. Aye.”

“So be it.”

Havil the Green presided as the chief god of many lands of Havilfar. He had, in the past, represented to me all that was evil and to be destroyed. I was over those impulses now, and could even come out with a good rolling Hamalian prayer or two addressed to Havil the Green. All the same, fighting men tend toward Krun... as must be clear from the conversations peppered with his name.

“And also, Jak, the Sturr — I do not think your name can be Sturr. It does not fit.”

I lifted an eyebrow. Sturr is the slang name given to a louche fellow, a morose, silent, boorish kind of chap who is all left feet and ten thumbs. “No? I thought it suited me.”

“The Lady Ariane nal Amklana dubbed you Jak the Unsturr.”

“She — let us not talk of her.”

“Willingly.”

The Lady Ariane nal Amklana, of Hyrklana, had not turned out quite as we’d expected during our recent adventures. I had thought Tyfar was inclined to become romantically attached to her. Now I knew he was not. He deserved a far finer mate than Ariane.

“Let us take up the question of your name, Jak.”

“Before that, I will just say that one should not be too hard on Ariane. She was sore pressed. By Krun!

But she does have fire—”

“A fire that is inwardly directed only.”

“Let us talk of our plans to get out of here—”

“The Sturr — or the Unsturr?”

I just looked at him. We sat in the grateful shadow and the watch was set and the others were lying back and no doubt reviewing what Quienyin had told them and, an ob would bring a talen, wishing they were out of Moderdrin and safely back with their loved ones. Although — well, there were arguments about that, also...

Once a young man sets his feet on the mercenaries’ path and seeks to become a paktun and then a hyr-paktun, he must banish foolish longings for home. He will return in the fullness of time, bearing his scars and the choicest items of his loot — if he is lucky — and take a wife and settle down and raise more fine young men to go off adventuring across Kregen. But daydreaming of home is weakening. Thanks to Opaz — men are weakened every day doing that!

“Should, Jak, I call you—” said Tyfar. He was half-laughing. “Should I dub you Muzzardjid?”[1]

“I think not.”

“It is a fairly won name.”

“Maybe. Not for me.”

“I just do not like Sturr. I am a prince and empowered to confer names upon the worthy. You are —

although you have not said — I guess, of a middling rank of nobility?”

The name of Hamun ham Farthytu had been conferred upon in all honor; it was not just another alias. And the rank of Amak is at the bottom end of the higher nobility; there is the wide range of the lesser nobility, of course. But caution held me. Even in this, the old harum-scarum, rip-roaring Dray Prescot who would go raging into a fight without an ounce of sense in his head, would have held back. The Amak of Paline Valley was an identity, a real identity, that I did not wish to reveal as yet. So, leaning back on an elbow, I said, “It is of no matter, Tyfar. What concerns me is the slow progress we make.”

He looked as though he was going to carry on with his thought; but he must have changed his mind, for he contented himself with, “Very well, Jak. But as soon as the time is ripe I shall dub you with a name more fitting. So you have been warned.” He wiped his lips with a cloth and closed his eyes in the heat.

“As to our making better progress, I think it still too risky to travel in daylight. But, if we must—”

“Think of Quienyin.”

“I am.”

“Given an opportunity, we can change our mode of travel. But it will be chancy—”

So we talked, low-voiced, and then ceased this prattling and sought the deeper shade and tried to sleep. We had ample water, thanks to the stream from the Moder, and our swarths were cared for. We had food, meat, and fruits. But we all felt the screaming need to get out of this damned place. Promptly on the hour of mid Quienyin woke up and, reaching for his turban, looked around our little camp. He saw me. He opened his mouth and I spoke quickly, quietly.

“Tyfar is asleep. I would prefer not to awaken him.”

He nodded and then caught his turban and slapped it down, hard. The blue cloth was dusty and cracked, and many of the fake pearls and brilliants had been lost. But it still gave him that aura of omniscience so necessary for the credulous folk.

“Do you wish...?”

“When the suns are gone down a little more.”

“We will see what a Wizard of Loh can do, then.”

“Remember, Quienyin, I do not ask this of you, do not beg or plead. I know nothing of the cost to you; but, I—”

“There is no need to go on. Of course I shall do all I can. Are not we all comrades?”

This was, truly, a most strange way for a feared Wizard of Loh to talk. But, by the insufferable aroma of Makki Grodno’s left armpit — he was right.

“You have never been to Loh, Jak?”

“I paid a fleeing visit to Erthyrdrin, and—”

“Well, they are a strange, fey lot up there, and hardly call themselves Lohvians at all.”

“That is sooth. You have traveled widely?”

“Mainly in this continent of Havilfar. I, I must confess, regard travel as a means of arriving somewhere.”

“As we did in that caravan across the Desolate Wastes?”

“Grim though it was, the time had its pleasant moments.”

“You have been to Hamal?”

“I shall not return to that empire.” His gaze twitched to the sleeping form of Tyfar, and then away. I would have to ask Deb-Lu-Quienyin what had chanced in Hamal. I felt he did not care for the place. “I did make a quick trip to Pandahem; but that was not successful.”

“And Vallia?”

He glanced up at me.

Was there a special note in my voice, a tremor, an inflection, as I spoke the name of the country of which I was emperor? Did he truly see so much more than ordinary mortals?

“Vallia? No, Jak. I have never been there.”

I took a breath. Tyfar slumbered. The others were either asleep, dreaming, or standing watch. I summoned my courage.

“I think, Quienyin, if you visited Vallia you would be received with proper respect. You would like it there.”

“Oh? You speak with — authority — of the empire at war with the empire of Hamal.”

“You remember I asked you about the Wizard of Loh called Phu-Si-Yantong?”

“I do. San Yantong is a most puissant adept — I was sorry to have missed him.”

I jumped, startled. “You mean — he was there — in Jikaida City?”

“I thought so. I am not sure. His kharrna is very powerful, superb, superb. I did not press too hard.”

I swallowed down. By Vox! That devil Phu-Si-Yantong, so near! Yet — could he have been and not struck a blow at me?

“When I asked you of Yantong before you said he was marked for great things. You expressed the hope that he would prosper. You also said nothing about his little difficulty.” I know my old beakhead of a face had grown grim and like a leem’s mask as I spoke, and I could do nothing about that. One cannot always hide emotions behind a placid countenance. I went on and the words ground out like vosk skulls being crushed in the grinders. “Do you still harbor good wishes toward Yantong? Have you learned nothing of him since we spoke?”

He was abruptly intense, concentrated. He looked at me and those lines that had been vanishing on his face deepened and grooved. The force of his power shocked out.

“You speak in a way that could offend a Wizard of Loh, Jak. I will not be offended. But it is necessary that you explain yourself.”

Given the awesome powers of the Wizards of Loh, given their aloofness from the petty concerns of normal men, given that they regard others as, if not inferior beings, then beings without the same necessities of the inner life — what Deb-Lu-Quienyin said to me was perfectly rational. Any man of Kregen would tremble if a Wizard of Loh spoke to him thus.

“By Hlo-Hli! Jak! Speak!”

“If you seek—”

“No ifs, Jak, by the Seven Arcades!”

“Seek the truth of Yantong. I promise to speak then. Although—” and I glowered down on my comrade, Deb-Lu-Quienyin “—although, my friend, my words will then be unnecessary.”

“You speak now in riddles.” He breathed in and then out, deliberately. This was an exercise in self-control. I waited.

Presently he said, “I will do as you suggest — and only because of our comradeship, which is something precious to me because it is something I could never fully experience as a Wizard of Loh. This is a matter I do not expect you to understand.”

“I do understand something, probably more than you realize. I have had dealings with Wizards of Loh before.”

“Then let me go off a ways and try my newfound kharrna.”

The shadows lay very short now, mere blobs of reddish and greenish discoloration under the thorn-ivy. Everything possessed two shadows. Quienyin and his two shadows went off to crouch down by the rock face. He took up a position which, although I had no idea of its significance, I recognized to be a position of ritual. He looked exceedingly uncomfortable, too.

Four times during the course of the day skeins of flutsmen had sailed over us, high and distant, mere forbidding specks, potent with disaster. They worried me. I looked up now as Quienyin sat so uncomfortably, and up there another wedge of flutsmen winged over. Slotted like nits in a ponsho fleece as we were down here, we were not likely to be espied easily. But the worry remained. The flutsmen were active and I wondered what caused that. Something, of a surety, had stirred them up. Common sense indicated that I should try to catch some sleep. I did doze off for a few burs. I was awakened by Nath and Barkindrar coming off watch and the two Pachaks going on. I decided not to raise a ruckus over their waking me up; I know I sleep lightly, ready to leap up almost, it seems, before the danger that stalks me would leap for my throat. It is an old sailorman’s trick. The Shaft and the Bullet were not too sleepy, and were carrying on with great vehemence the argument that had absorbed them during their watch.

“Jikaida! Now you can take your Jikaida and—”

“Now, Barkindrar! What you say against Jikaida can be said against Vajikry. Do not forget that!”

They wrangled on about the merits or otherwise of Jikaida, which is the preeminent board game of Kregen, and of Vajikry, which is of not quite so universal acceptance but which is, as I know to my sore cost, highly baffling and irritating and calculated to arouse the itch in any man or woman. Vajikry takes a special kind of twisted logic, I suppose, to make a good player.

So, with that as a starter, I found myself running an old Jikaida game through my head, move and countermove, and so I closed my eyes and, lo! I was being shaken awake and the shadows were measurably longer. Thus does abused nature force her just demands on the physique. The hand shaking me, the footstep, the low voice, were all devoid of menace. I sat up.

“Time to go on watch, Jak — notor.”

I looked at Hunch.

He licked his lips. “You said — you said you would stand a watch, Jak.”

“Aye. I did and I will. And I could wish you and Nodgen did not have to keep up with this notor nonsense.”

Nodgen said, “We have talked about this, Jak. We were all three slave together. You escaped. You have made something of yourself and have manumitted us before Prince Tyfar. But we think you are truly a notor, a great lord.”

“That’s as may be. But your freedom is very real to you, because the word of Tyfar, Prince of Hamal, is worth much.”

“Oh, yes, we will take the bronze tablets. But we still believe you to be a great lord, and therefore we do not mind calling you notor. Only,” and here Hunch screwed his Tryfant face up, “only, sometimes, Jak, it is hard to remember.”

“By the disgusting diseased tripes of Makki Grodno! I do not care. But you will have the outrage of an offended princeling if you forget in his hearing.”

“Aye, that we will.” They both sounded marvelously little alarmed. This special sense of comradeship developed between us, and the terror of the Moder worked on us all, paktun, retainer, escaped slave, wizard, and prince.

And, as though to underline those thoughts, the voice of Deb-Lu-Quienyin, who was privy to Hunch’s and Nodgen’s secret, reached us. He sounded troubled.

“Tyfar would overlook that lapse,” said Quienyin. “Jak, I must speak to you — and at once—”

“Assuredly.” I stood up. Quienyin stood back in the shadows, so that I could not discern his expression. He wore his turban. A fierce bellow cut the air from the thorn-ivy.

“Vakkas! Riders heading for us!”

I spun to look. Tyfar was sinking down behind the thorns and the others were flattening out, steel in their fists.

Beyond them, across the flat and clear in the slanting rays of the suns, a party of riders broke from a clump of twisty trunks, the crinkly leaves down-drooping and unmoving in the breathless air. The men rode totrixes, zorcas, hirvels. There was not a swarth among them. They rode hard, lashing their beasts on, and the dust rose in a flat smear behind them, hanging betrayingly in a long yellow-white streak. I looked up. Up there the flutsmen curved down, the wings of their flyers wide and stiff, and the glint and wink of weapons glittered a stark promise of destruction over the doomed party of riders below.

Chapter four

Dead Men Pose Puzzles

Straight for the rocky outcrop and running at lung-bursting speed, the forlorn party rode on. They were making for the shelter we had chosen. There, it was clear, they hoped to make a stand against the reining sky mercenaries. Now the sound of the hooves beat a rattling tattoo against the hard ground.

“They’ll never make it.” Tyfar stared hotly through the thorn-ivy. If that young prince decided to stand up and run out to assist those doomed jutmen, I, for one, would seek to stop him. He was become precious to me, now, as a comrade. I would not relish his death. I had seen too much of death.

“Jak—” whispered Quienyin.

“Yes?”

“I have sought out—”

“See! They shoot!” Tyfar was panting now, and his lithe body humped as though about to leap out. I said, “We cannot allow Tyfar to throw his life away. We will do what we can, but—”

Quienyin looked vaguely through a chink in the thorns.

“Those poor people will never reach here alive.” He looked back at me. “There is much we must talk about.”

“I agree. But, I think, it will have to wait the outcome of this mess out here.”

“You are right. But I will say I am — am shattered—”

“So you descried a little, then, and understand more?”

“Indeed! Indeed!”

“Nath the Shaft!” called Tyfar in a low, penetrating voice.

“My Prince!”

“Shaft ’em, you onker! Shaft ’em!”

“Nath,” I said. My voice jerked his head around, and his reaching fingers stilled as they touched the feathers of the shaft in his quiver.

“Jak, Jak!” said Tyfar. “What? You cannot abandon them!”

“No. No, I suppose not. But they are done for — there are ten of them and twenty-five or thirty flutsmen. We can—”

“We can shaft them from cover — and we must hurry!”

His face blazed eagerness at me. I sighed. What can one do with these high and mighty princelings whose honor code rules them to death and destruction? And yet — Tyfar was a man of better mettle than mere unthinking bludgeoning.

“You don’t have to let those flutsmen know we are here, do you?” said Hunch. His voice quavered. Nodgen hefted his spear. He could throw that with skill and power, even though it was not a stux, the stout throwing spear of Havilfar. “I have four spears,” he said. His voice growled. “That’s four of the cramphs.”

“They are too far away for you, Nodgen, you onker!”

“They’ll come nearer, once the arrows fly.”

“That,” I said, “is true.”

“I will not wait any longer.” Tyfar shouted it. He started to stand up. I moved forward. What I was going to do Opaz alone knows. I was confused, knowing I ought to help those poor folk out there against those rasts of flutsmen, and knowing, also, that my responsibilities were wider by far than this mere stupid little fracas in the Humped Land.

The flutsmen swooped down.

The great Lohvian longbow snugged into my grip. The blue-fletched arrow nocked home sweetly. I lifted the bow and stood up. By Zair! The stupid things I have done in my time on Kregen! But — Kregen is a world where anything may happen and frequently does.

Together, Nath the Shaft, Barkindrar the Bullet, and I, Dray Prescot, prince of onkers, let fly. Three flutsmen sagged and dropped from their clerketers, the leather flying thongs holding their bodies dangling from the big birds as they struggled to stay aloft with the limp, dragging weight frightening them and hauling them down.

Again we shot, and again. Someone of us missed the third time; who it was I do not know. Now the flutsmen were veering like gale-tossed spindrift, swirling over toward our rocky outcrop. The rear ten or so fell straight down, the fluttrells settling with a flurrying uproar and updriven billows of dust about the galloping jutmen. The fight sprawled over there across the flat. We shot again as the leading flyers chuted down toward us. The two Pachaks and Hunch brought the short bows taken from the Muzzards into action. Those damned flutsmen astride their fluttrells, all a mass of glitter and waving clumped feathers and brandished weapons, looked massive and indomitable. They looked as though they could fly right through us. That is the impression they seek to convey. The leading flyers were close enough for Nodgen to hurl his spear. The thick shaft burst through the leather and feathered flying gear of his target, and the flutsman screeched, a thin, high wail of despair cutting through the din. He went smashing back against his wicker saddle, slipped sideways, making despairing, jerking grippings with his hands, which slid off to dangle.

“Where’s the next?” raved Nodgen.

The flutsmen circled. We shot, a rolling flighting of steel birds that wreaked cruel damage on the flesh-and-blood birds aloft. Spears sliced down to rattle against the rocks. But, as so often happens when a man afoot shoots it out with a man aloft, the man on the ground has all the advantages. A barbed spear grazed past Tyfar’s arm, and he cursed, and shook his axe.

We kept low, cocking our bows up steeply, using the rocks as cover, keeping in the shadows of the thorn-ivy. The fluttrells would not come near that, for they are canny birds when it comes to self-preservation.

A flung stux whipped in toward me and I flicked it away with an outthrust arm. The men up there must have loosed their crossbows against the jutmen out on the flat, and thinking to finish the thing quickly, had not reloaded. In this they were poor quality flutsmen, quite unlike the band in which I had served. The dust smothered across the fight out on the flat and only a thin and attenuated yelling told us that men were still left to battle it out. We had taken the major part of the force attacking the vakkas and they would have to fend for themselves until we had seen off the reivers attempting to slay us. So — we fought.

Now your true-blue mercenary of the skies knows when to fight from his natural perch, astride the back of a bird or flying animal, or when to alight and get on with handstrokes on the ground. We had seen off a sizeable gang of this bunch; now the rest forced their fluttrells in to haphazard landings and leaped off their backs, swords and spears brandished. They leaped toward us over the dust between the rocks. Nath the Shaft calmly shot two of them out even as they cocked their legs over the wicker saddles and the sheening feathers.

The rest of us shot methodically, and then we were at the tinker’s work. The flutsmen they were close to proved to be a surprise. They were the usual mixture of diffs and apims, a Rapa, a Fristle, a Brokelsh. They were clearly still unaware quite of their losses. They ran in and started to fight bravely enough. But when half their number fell, screaming, with not one of us so much as scratched, they abruptly came to a realization of the situation. As I said, they were of poor quality. They were, if you will pardon the conceit, masichieri of the skies.

When this raggle-taggle band broke back for their birds, I shouted the orders it was necessary to give and see obeyed instantly.

The Pachaks raced forward first. They were, after all, hyr-paktuns, with the golden pakzhan at their throats. They were more used to what goes on in the aftermath of battles than Tyfar’s two retainers, or the Tryfant Hunch. But Nodgen, who had been a mercenary in his time — almost made paktun —

understood swiftly, and was out of the rocks and running after the two Pachaks. Tyfar yelled to me. “The people out there!”

“Let us go over, by all means.”

So the rest of us ran past the end of the thorn-ivy and quitted the shelter of the rocks. We ran toward the boil of dust marking the fight. Long before we reached it, the flutsmen were lifting away, the birds’

wings flapping with vigorous downstrokes to gain takeoff speed.

Then I let out a roar.

“The famblys! Come back! Come back—”

But the jutmen, freed of the horror of the flutsmen all around them, simply clapped in their spurs and went haring away across the flats. They galloped in a string and they had their heads down and I do not doubt that most of them had their eyes shut, also.

So we stopped running, and stood and watched the folk we had rescued simply flee in panic.

“The stupid onkers!” said Tyfar. He breathed in, and then made a grimace of distaste, and spat. The dust drifted in, clogging our mouths, flat and unpleasant on the tongue. Among the drift of detritus of the fight — dead animals, dead birds, dead flutsmen, dead jutmen, and a scatter of weapons — an arm lifted.

“One of them,” I said, “at least is alive.”

We ran across.

He had been a strong fighting man, clad in bronze-bound leather, with a neat trim of silver to the rim of his helmet. His face, heavily bearded, was waxen now, all the high color fled. His lips were ricked back. Near him lay a young man, dressed in clothes and armor of exceeding richness, and this young man’s neck was twisted and ripped, and he could have looked down his own shoulder blades, had his eyes still possessed the gift of sight.

“He — is dead — the young lord,” gasped the bearded, dying man. “So — best — I die, too...”

“Who was he?” said Tyfar. He spoke in a hard, contained voice.

The bearded lips opened but only a gargle sounded.

I bent closer.

“Rest easy, dom. You are safe now—”

“Flutsmen — lord, my lord — you must—” His head fell sideways, and those craggy, bearded lips gusted a last breath.

I stood up.

“I,” said Tyfar, “wonder who they were.”

“It does not matter. They are dead or fled.”

We stared about on that unpleasant scene.

Presently, Hunch said, “Can we go back to the rocks now, please?”

“Not before you and Barkindrar and Nath have collected what is useful to us. And be quick about it. There may be other flutsmen about.”

Hunch looked sick.

“Do we have to?”

“Assuredly you do. Now — jump!”

Tyfar nodded. “Nath, Barkindrar, set to it.”

I ploughed in to help select anything we thought would be of use to us. But, as a prince, Tyfar moved a little way off. He did not help us strip the dead of the rich armor, or rake through the satchels, or lift up the blood-caked weapons. But he did not walk away. He stood nearby, and if any further flutsmen showed up, why, then he would show what being a prince involved.

The bulky, bearded man bothered me. He had given his life, and that had not been enough. His young lord was dead. I surmised they were part of an expedition out to venture down a Moder after treasure and magic, and had been separated from the main body by the Muzzard vakkas. Then the flutsmen, ever avid to pick up morsels like that, had attacked.

Twisted under a fine zorca that had been shafted — I took a single look and then looked away. The vile things that happen to faithful saddle animals at the hands of men is a sore subject with me, as with many other men on two worlds. Twisted under this poor dead zorca, as I say, lay the body of a large man who had been pitched from the saddle. His neck had broken.

I studied his face, calm, lined, filled with the remnants of a vigor that had sustained him in life and was now deserting him in death. He wore magnificent armor. It had not stopped his neck from being smashed. I sucked in my breath and went to work.

He was not the bearded servitor’s young lord, and I guessed he was a lord in his own right, gone adventuring on his own account. The expedition of which we nine were the last to escape from Moderdrin had contained nine separate expeditions within our ranks. The armor came off easily, for it had been well cared for. I hoisted it on my back and took his weapons and then trailed off after the others who were hurrying back to the rocks.

I saw Prince Tyfar looking at me.

He said nothing.

I said, “When you have been adventuring out in the wild and hostile world, Tyfar—” And then I stopped myself.

He would not understand. He might learn — if he lived long enough. But I knew enough to know that his ideas of honor could not comprehend my motives.

“Just, Tyfar, one thing.”

“Yes, Jak?”

“Do not think the less of me. I hazard a guess that you have never starved, never been flogged, never really wanted in all your life. These things give a man a different view of the values in life and, yes, I know I am being insufferable and almost preaching, but I value your comradeship and would not see it spoiled over so small a matter.”

And, even then, that was the wrong note. The matter was not small when it touched the honor of a prince of Hamal.

Then he surprised me.

“I have a deal to learn — everything is not contained in books or the instructions of axemasters. I shall don this poor young lord’s armor, which Nath and Barkindrar carry back for me — when it is necessary.”

I felt, I admit, suitably chastened.

When he reached the outcrop, the others had finished up their work and had secured the surviving fluttrells. The big birds were chained down by their wing chains, and had found it suddenly restful in the shade.

I nodded. “Well done.”

“And, what do we do with the swarths?”

“Cut them loose,” said Tyfar. “They will fend for themselves and, eventually, find their way to fresh employment.”

“Agreed.”

The night would soon be upon us and although we could fly quite easily by the light of the moons, we judged it better to give the fluttrells a time to recuperate. Hunch busied himself brewing up tea, that superb Kregan tea, for a supply was discovered in the saddlebags we had taken from the dead animals. Also, we found something that told us who at least some of these folk had been. Modo brought the package across and we opened it and read the warrant in the last of the light.

“Rolan Hamarker, Vad of Thangal — most odd.” Tyfar looked up from the paper. “That is a good Hamalese name. Yet I do not know of anyone called that. Thangal has no Vad. It is a Trylonate.”

“Due northwest of Ruthmayern,” I said.

“Yes. This is, indeed, a curiosity.”

“And this came from the effects of the young man?”

“Yes, Jak,” said Modo.

“Well, there was nothing with the other lord to identify him. And that, to me, is stranger still.”

“You are right, by Krun!” said Tyfar.

“Perhaps,” said Quienyin in his mellow voice. “They did not wish to give their true names when they ventured into Moderdrin.”

“Of course.” Tyfar beamed on the Wizard of Loh. “You have the right of it.”

“Probably,” I said.

We now had a plethora of weapons and armor and equipment. So we could take our pick. Any good Kregan will take as many weapons along with him as the situation warrants, or the situation that might arise the day after tomorrow will warrant.

As I picked up the dead lord’s sword, I looked across at Tyfar and said, “But that warrant, made out for Rolan Hamarker, gives him authority to arrest anyone he sees fit to question. It is exceedingly wide. And, of course, you observe the signature and the seal?”

“I do. It is the seal of King Doghamrei. Although the scrawl is so bad it could have been signed by any damned slave who had stolen the seal cylinder.”

“King Doghamrei,” I said, and I fell silent, my mind choked with memories: of Ob-Eye, his one optic quite mad, trussing me up and stuffing me into a metal cage, of the cage being swung over the bulwarks of the massive Hamalian skyship Hirrume Warrior, of Ob-Eye thrusting the torch into the mass of combustibles piled around my bound form, of the cage being readied to drop onto the decks of the Vallian galleon Ovvend Barynth on the sea below. They’d set my pants alight, all right. Somehow, because I was a Krozair of Zy, as I truly think, and because I did not wish to be parted from Delia, I had gotten out of that scrape. But — all those vile things had been done to me not on the orders of the Empress Thyllis — Queen Thyllis as she was then — but of King Doghamrei. Oh, yes, I recalled him with some clarity.

And so, because of all those old memories ghosting up, I said, “By Krun! I’ve half a mind to feel sorry he’s still alive.”

Then I looked at Tyfar.

He smiled.

“Then in that you do not stand alone, Jak. He never did succeed in his plot to marry the empress — her poor doting husband still mopes away in some fusty tower or other — and King Doghamrei is still only a servile king in fee to the empress.”

“Well, I was incautious in my sentiments. Perhaps, one day, you will understand my feelings.”

“My father once fought a duel with Doghamrei—”

“Ha! Then I’ll wager Prince Nedfar acted as a true horter and let the rast off — more’s the pity.”

“He did and it is. But that is smoke blown with the wind.”

“Your father, Tyfar, is a prince for whom I cherish the most lively affection and respect. Now, why couldn’t he be a king — or even an emperor?”

Tyfar drew his cheeks in. He looked suddenly grave, all the banter fled.

“You run on leem’s tracks hastily, Jak.”

“I will say no more. I have said too much.”

“Yes. But, I think — I know — your sentiments are not yours alone.”

“Ah!”

Now, of course, all this sentiment was sweet in the ears of a Vallian. Anything to discomfit Hamal until that empire was willing to talk decently to her neighbors must be to the advantage of Vallia. All the same, what I had said about Tyfar’s father, Prince Nedfar, was true.

What a plot it would be to depose Thyllis and set up Nedfar as emperor of Hamal! I fancied I could talk to him, get him to see reason, see that all the countries of Paz had to unite to face the menace of the shanks, who raided and spoiled from over the curve of the world. For I felt sure their depredations, raids at the moment, would develop into a mass migration, a gigantic attempt to invade our lands. And that, we of Paz could not in honor allow. The fish heads would not be satisfied until every one of us, diff and apim, man, woman, and child, was exterminated.

We made our selections of weapons and armor and equipment and stuffed ourselves with the food in the saddlebags. Then we decided to let our meal go down and set off astride the fluttrells in exactly two burs. Sitting with my back propped up against a folded cloak on a rock, I popped palines into my mouth, chewing the luscious berries contentedly. Quienyin sat down by my side and I offered him the yellow berries, extending the dish.

He chewed. Tyfar walked across and we passed the dish around. We felt relaxed, comfortable, perfectly confident that now that we had flying steeds we would be out of Moderdrin in no time. Quienyin coughed.

“Prince Tyfar. This war between you and your neighbors, which has extended into Vallia—”

“Yes. Vallia is recalcitrant. The Hyr Notor has the command there. But the news is — odd, to say the least. We have had to recall a number of regiments.”

“So I believe. They have a new emperor up in Vallia now, do they not? Tell me, Tyfar, what are your views on this new and fearsome emperor of Vallia, this Dray Prescot?”

Chapter five

“Dray Prescot, Vile Emperor of a Vile Empire!”

One of the tethered fluttrells let out a squawk, and Hunch gentled him with quick, sympathetic skill. A small branch broke and fell from the fire. Nath and Barkindrar suddenly laughed, and I caught a coarse reference to Vajikry. The light of the moons shone exceedingly brightly upon the dusty land.

“The Emperor of Vallia?” said Tyfar, Prince of Hamal. “Well, now. A hyr-lif might be written about that great devil.”

“Tyfar,” I said, “did you see this great devil Dray Prescot paraded through the streets of Ruathytu lashed to the tail of a calsany? In the Empress Thyllis’s coronation procession?”

“Aye, Jak, I did.”

“And, Tyfar,” said Quienyin, and he looked at me as he spoke to the Prince, “your thoughts on that occasion?”

Tyfar poked at the fire with a stripped branch.

“This Emperor Dray — it was just, that he should be brought down and humbled, but the way of the doing of it...”

Quienyin took his penetrating gaze from my leem’s-head of a face and stared questioningly at Tyfar.

“Yes?”

“By Krun! The rast deserved what he got, did he not?”

“He deserves all he gets,” I said.

“But, all the same...” And, again, Prince Tyfar did not complete his sentence. I wondered if he was unwilling to face the consequences of his own thoughts, or unwilling to reveal them to us. He pulled his shoulders back and threw the branch on the fire.

“Anyway, Quienyin. Why do you question me, now, about the great devil Dray Prescot?”

The nasty suspicion gathered in my mind that I knew the answer to that. But, then, why was it nasty? If Deb-Lu-Quienyin had discovered the truth about Phu-Si-Yantong, then surely he would understand the horrendous problems confronting Paz? Yantong’s insane dream was to encompass all of Paz, to take over and control and dominate all of the grouping of continents and islands on our side of the world of Kregen. He had made a start with Pandahem and other places, was destroying Vallia even now, even though we Vallians fought back, and had, under the alias of the Hyr Notor, achieved much with Hamal. If Quienyin knew all this, as I now suspected he did, then of a certainty he must see the justice of the fight being waged by those opposed to Phu-Si-Yantong.

One of the chiefs of that opposition to the maniacal Wizard of Loh was Dray Prescot, Emperor of Vallia. This, I believed, was what Quienyin was leading up to, what he was telling me in this way. And, cunning old leem-hunter that he was, he had his reasons.

“Well, Quienyin? I fly to join my people. We have been through much together, surely you can find a more enjoyable subject of conversation?” Tyfar stood up and stretched his legs. “By Krun! When Princess Thefi hears what has been going on—”

“Will you join the army of Hamal, or the Air Service, and fight in Vallia, Tyfar?”

Quienyin’s question drew a down-drawn and hesitating look from Tyfar.

“We are comrades, Quienyin, and therefore — for anyone else to question me thus would touch—”

“Your honor?”

And then, characteristically, Tyfar laughed. “I do not know! My whole view of the world has changed. What is honor? It can get you killed, that is sure, certain sure.”

I said, “But that knowledge would not stop you from acting in honor, Tyfar? You would not let those vakkas be hounded to death by the flutsmen without an effort to help them.”

“That is true. It was foolish. But Jak, and you know it, I would do it again.”

“Then,” said Quienyin, “as your comrade — and thus taking full advantage of being rude or overweening to you — I would counsel you most seriously not to go to Vallia to fight.” He shook his head and his turban did not so much as quiver. “No, Tyfar. I am a Wizard of Loh — and I say to you with all the force at my disposal, do not go to fight the Vallians.”

“Why?”

That was your Prince Tyfar for you. Straight out, direct, to the point. It was a damned good question and a damned hard one for Quienyin to answer.

I studied their faces by the lights of the moons and the erratic flickers of ruddy light from the fire. Quienyin and I were wrapped up in what underlay our words; Tyfar was in the middle and slowly becoming aware of what was not being openly spoken of. He could become exceedingly angry, a prince being treated like a child. But he was Tyfar. He spoke evenly.

“You have no answer for me, Quienyin? I think you are being mysterious on purpose — but what is your purpose?”

“It is simple. It is to save you much grief.”

Tyfar sucked in his cheeks. Then: “So it is true. You Wizards of Loh can see into the future?”

“Perhaps.”

At that I smirked. No Wizard of Loh was going to reveal any of his secrets, and the worse that was thought of them the more their power and the dread they invoked in the hearts of ordinary folk.

“You spoke of Dray Prescot, the vile emperor of a vile empire. Why should I not go up there and chastise him for the evil he has wrought?”

“Do you know of this evil? Can you show it to me?”

Tyfar spread his arms. “Well — all men know—”

“All men hear tales. Dray Prescot has the yrium, he has that special power, that charisma that marks him out among men and—”

“The yrium!” Tyfar was incensed. “Rather he has the yrrum, the evil charismatic presence, the vile leading the vile, rotten clean through, decadent—” He was panting. I said, and I spoke gently, “I think the Empress Thyllis would joy to hear you speak thus, Tyfar.”

That sobered him.

He stared toward Quienyin and then toward me. I say toward. I don’t think he saw us, not then, for he was looking with his inward eye at past events and conversations and trying to grapple with the problems he now saw more clearly than, probably, he had ever seen in his life before. At last he said, and his words were still breathless, “So you tell me Dray Prescot has the yrium and not the yrrum, that he is not evil clean through, that he has not brought shame and misery to Hamal, that—”

“I tell you, Tyfar,” interrupted Quienyin, “only to search your own ib for the truths in these things.”

“And I,” I said, “tell us all it is time we departed.”

Whatever was going through Quienyin’s mind would have to wait. He was Up To Something, as he would have said in his Capital Letter Days. But I banished all that from my own mind as we rose into the air.

Ah! To fly free on the back of a great bird, soar through the sweet air of Kregen, with the blaze of the stars and the fat, serene moons shining down! She of the Veils and the Maiden with the Many Smiles shone refulgently, pink and gold, shining down on the fleeting surface of Kregen passing swiftly below. The windrush in my face, blowing through my hair... The feel of the rhythmic rise and fall as the fluttrell bore me on with wide pinions beating... The whole sublime sense of flight and motion and headlong movement... Yes, flying over the face of Kregen beneath the moons, there is very little in two worlds to equal that, by Zair!

And, as for the fluttrells themselves, they were the big birds with the silly head vanes that were always in the way, it seems. Well, there is a simpleminded saying among the simple folk of Kregen that sums up the magic in simple terms. Of the birds’ flight through the air, they say: “They can do it because they think they can do it.” A pathetic little bit of philosophy, perhaps. But it rings, all the same, it rings... Our flying mounts skeined through the air and we drove on through the moons-washed night. When by the feel of the birds’ motion and the little draggling skip to the wings we knew they had had enough, we descended in a grove of tuffa trees, for we had flown past the end of the Humped Land and left that desolate landscape astern. The fluttrells had been hard-driven by their former owners. It is the habit of flutsmen to use their mounts to the utmost. We had a distance to travel and wished to husband the fluttrells’ strength.

All of us, I feel, had been touched by that night flight.

We spoke softly, doing what had to be done in the way of caring for the birds and of brewing up. Then the wine was passed around. We spoke quietly, not just because we were somewhere in Havilfar none of us knew and therefore must expect the eruption of danger at any moment. As I say, we had been impressed by that flight under the moons.

Prince Tyfar did not raise our previous subject of conversation. I, for one, by Vox, was happy to let it lie.

Nodgen, as a bristly Brokelsh, was content to dunk his head in the stream and splash water vigorously all over himself. Hunch, being a Tryfant — and you know how foppish they can be on occasion — had to go the whole hog and give himself the full treatment. Mind you, although I say I have no feelings one way or the other for Tryfants, I had seen enough of Hunch by now to have summed him up better, I fancy, then he guessed or knew himself. And Nodgen shared my opinion. Hunch was a Tryfant, sure enough, not above four foot six in height and full of quivers and quavers and always with an eye open for the nearest bolt hole — but he had gone with us through the horrors of the Moder.

“Jak,” said Quienyin as I turned away from the stream, shaking myself like a collie.

“Aye,” I said, blowing water. “Aye, Quienyin. What you have to say is overdue.”

“Come a little way apart. Much Is To Be Said.”

Those capital Capital Letters, as it were, alerted me. I followed the Wizard of Loh into the shadows of the tufa trees and we settled down, facing each other so that we might keep an eye open on each other’s back.

I said, bluntly, “You have sussed Phu-Si-Yantong and you do not care for what you have found.”

He rubbed his fingers through that reddish hair, shoving the turban aside, uncaring if it fell to the ground.

“We Wizards of Loh set store by certain standards. We have power and we try not to abuse it. Certainly we lust after gold and gems and suchlike baubles — or some of us — but it is the pursuit of knowledge and its manipulation that is our goal and that sustains us. We do not seek petty princely dominion.”

“But...”

“But, Jak the Sturr, I have been overcome. I entertain the liveliest respect and admiration for San Yantong. He represented all that was fundamentally encouraging about us Wizards of Loh. He would make a stir in the world, we all said—”

I stared at Quienyin. “He was your tutor.”

Quienyin did not flinch back. “No. We do not work on that basis in Loh, where we are trained. Not at all. And, also, we never discuss this training. But our comradeship down the Moder has—”

“It seems to me, Quienyin, there has been altogether too much talk about this comradeship. Methinks there is too much protestation going on.”

He would not know my source for the adapted quote; but Nalgre ti Liancesmot expresses similar sentiments in Part Three of the Seventh Book of The Vicissitudes of Panadian the Ibreiver. He nodded again; but it was not an unthinking nod. Rather, it was the expression of a man who has reached a conclusion.

“Now that I am a little aware of the quality of person I am to do business with, I agree with you.”

“So you think you know who I am?”

“Certainly. You are Jak, calling himself the Sturr, claiming to hail from Hamal — or Djanduin or Hyrklana if the mood takes him — a paktun, probably a hyr-paktun. Is there any other quality you would wish me to assume you possess?”

The old devil was thrusting the gimlet right in, well enough. I warmed to him.

“I have had dealings with Wizards of Loh before. I respect their arts. I respect their integrity insofar as I have met with it. I own to a grievous debt outstanding to a Wizard in Ruathytu—”

“You refer to San Rening? Que-si-Rening who was resident and secret Wizard of Loh to Queen Thyllis?”

I shook my head in amazement. “I do. He assisted me and I promised to aid him, and I have not done so.”

“Do not trouble your head over San Rening—”

“No!” I said. “He is not dead?”

“No. He effected his escape. It was prettily done. I did not know you knew him. He lives now in safety and practices at a small court in the Dawn Lands. It is not a useful thing for you to know which—”

“No. I agree. But I am glad he is a free man again.”

“But San Yantong...”

“Do you also know Khe-Hi-Bjanching?”

Bjanching was that certain Wizard of Loh with whom Delia and I and others had gone through the adventure of the doors and the test — and the pit, too, by Vox! — and he had taken up residence in my home of Esser Rarioch. Now he had been banished back to Loh by superior sorcery and I wondered if he was well, as I wondered if all my friends who had been sent sorcerously packing off to their homes were well.

“I have heard the name, only. He is a new and young adept and has his name to make.”

“If you contact him on whatever astral plane you go wandering in when you are in lupu, tell him he is missed.”

He inclined his red-haired head.

“As you please.”

“And now — about this kleesh Yantong.”

He talked, slowly at first and then warming to his subject as his indignation overcame him. Yantong had been defying the sacred tenets of the Wizards of Loh. Always the Sans exercised their power from the background, from the shadows. Now Yantong wanted to strut forth and hog the limelight, to take the power and be seen to take it. slaying all who stood in his path. Quienyin was quite clearly shattered. He told me a few things I did not know; but generally he merely recited what I knew of Yantong’s sins against humanity.

“And yet,” I said, “he is a man. There must be something of good in him. Surely, everything has not been thrown away?”

“I would like to think that, Jak. But if there is aught of goodness left in him, I have not descried it.”

I let out a breath.

“Well. I’ll put a blade through his guts if we meet, if I can; but I’ll still like to think he’s not all evil. Can there be such a thing as a totally evil man?”

“Theory says not. But we have to test that theory.”

“Yes — and my Khamorro?”

“You mean, of course, Turko the Shield?”

I refused to be amazed.

“You know much. I accept that, and I respect your still tongue and your friendship. Yes, I mean Turko.”

“He quitted Herrelldrin. You will not be surprised if I tell you he attempted to reach Vallia—”

“Attempted?”

“He is down in South Pandahem. As a Khamorro he works in a booth in a fairground—”

“My Turko!”

“It is a common occupation for the Khamsters—”

“Aye, it is. And they do not like anyone but themselves calling them Khamster.”

“So I believe. He is well, and seems to be resigned to his fate. There is a girl and a man — but they veil their emotions.

If you go to South Pandahem you will find him at the Sign of the Golden Prychan in Mahendrasmot.”

“I’ve never been there. But I shall go.”

Quienyin shifted around. He licked his lips. If he weren’t a Wizard of Loh I’d have thought he was nerving himself to ask something. We spoke a little, then at random, waiting for the burs to pass so that we might resume our flight. At last he said, in a straight, fierce voice, “And if I went to Vallia, you believe I would be well received?”

If he wasn’t going to come out with it, neither was I.

“Yes. Go to Vondium. Go to the Imperial Palace. You have the presence to gain audience of the empress. She will receive you kindly, if you tell her — certain things she will wish to know.”

“Thank you — Jak. The prospect pleases me.”

“You will be right royally welcome, Quienyin.”

Tyfar was moving about down by the fluttrells and a general animation stirred our little camp as we prepared to carry on.

“Of course,” I said. “The empress may not be in Vondium. She is often away about her own affairs. Then ask to see the Prince Majister, Drak. Or Kov Farris. You will, I am sure, know just who best to see.”

“I shall — Jak.”

I stood up. I stretched. Then, sharply, I said, “And my friends in Hyrklana?”

“I shall attempt to obtain news.”

“Good. Now it seems we are moving on.”

Chapter six

We Fly Over the Dawn Lands

We reached Astrashum, the city from which expeditions set out for the Humped Land. In this place Hunch, Nodgen, and I had been auctioned off on the slave block. The man who had bought us, Tarkshur the Lash, a Kataki, had ventured into the Moder filled with avarice. He had been left with his tail fast gripped in the uncuttable tentacle of one horrific kind of Snatchban. The decision seemed to me sound to banish memories of the Moder from my mind.

Prince Nedfar and his party had gone on to Jikaida City. The other principals alive of our expedition had taken their leave and gone home. Kov Loriman, the Hunting Kov, was reported as being in fine fettle. Ariane nal Amklana had set off for Hyrklana with her small imperious head lifted in regal disdain. Folk in Astrashum expressed themselves as vastly surprised there had been as many as three survivors from the original nine. Quienyin and I kept very low, and we set off at once for Jikaida City. Nedfar, Quienyin warned us, had left immediately for Hamal. Fresh airboats from Hamal had been flown in for his party. Their passage home would be swift.

“I joy that my father and sister, and all the others, are safe,” said Tyfar. But he bit his lip, and added:

“But I view with alarm what the empress will say. My father did not conclude the embassy with Prince Mefto and we have no great store of armies on which to call. She knows he does not see eye to eye with her war policy. I call on Krun of the Steel Blade to watch over him.”

“And I, too,” I said. “We follow?”

“As fast as our fluttrells can fly.”

“Prince,” said Nath the Shaft, respectfully, “flyers are scarce, as we all know. We must take care of them, lest they are stolen away from us. Their value is above price.”

“That is the war—”

“Aye!”

“Can you tell why Thyllis entrusted your father with the task of making the alliance with Mefto?” I wanted to know.

“He is known to be above party politics, seeking only the welfare of Hamal. If we can win the war quickly, then much grievous loss will be spared us. Thyllis knew this.”

Well, that made sense in a nonsensical world.

Honest men are used by the cunning of two worlds — as I know, having been used and user in my time. Flying over the Dawn Lands of Havilfar reveals their haphazard splendor. They are like a patchwork quilt of countries. There are scores of tiny Stromnates and trylonates, larger vadvarates and kovnates, and broad princedoms and kingdoms. Here was where the first men to reach these shores settled, around the Shrouded Sea. Now all this wide land was in ferment as the looming monster of Hamal, to the north, sent tentacles of force to rip them apart and take all. Truly, the Empress of Hamal, this Thyllis, was besotted with a crazed ambition.

In this she shared the maniacal notions of Phu-Si-Yantong. Always, as you know, I wavered and hesitated over my own role in these great affairs of state. For, was not I, this new Emperor of Vallia, also caught up in these mad power politics?

To reach Hamal we flew something east of north. I was content in this, for to fly direct to South Pandahem would have occasioned flying over the Wild Lands of Northwestern Havilfar, and no man, unless he be mad, a fool, or uncaring, willingly ventures there. Once we hit Hamal I’d bid remberee to my comrades and fly on out over the sea and then take a sharp left turn along the northern shore of Havilfar, by the Southern Ocean, and skirting the island of Wan Witherm, reach Pandahem. That was the theory, one of those famous theories I had been promulgating and failing to perform just lately.

Mind you, had I not been with this band of eight comrades, I would probably have flown westward, visited Migladrin and Djanduin, and then flown north to Pandahem up the South Lohvian Sea between Havilfar and Loh.

I am glad, now, that I did not...

Prince Tyfar was eager to press on.

“I wonder what Princess Thefi took from the Mausoleum of the Flame,” he said. “As for that scamp, Lobur the Dagger — he and I will buffet each other when we meet.”

“And,” I said, turning the blade in the wound, “do not forget Kov Thrangulf.”

“No. Who could forget him — save the entire world? He is hard put upon and there is something in the man finer than the world sees, struggling to get out. I wish Lobur was not so hard on him.”

“We will soon be in Hamal and then your worries will be over. Also, it is there that our ways will part.”

“I grieve for that, Jak. Cannot you stay in Hamal? After all, it is your country.”

“I am under duress — wen, you know I may not talk of that, save to assure you as I have.”

“If ever you need a friend in Hamal — you know where they are.”

“Aye. Thank Krun I do, Tyfar!”

The southern border of Hamal is marked off by the majestic River Os. This wends its regal way from the Mountains of the West which spine the center of the continent there, to the Ocean of Clouds in the east. Its mouth divides to run around the country of Ifilion, which is fiercely independent and had not been overrun by the iron legions of Hamal.

South of the Os the countries had been invaded and subjected and Clef Pesquadrin, Ystilbur, Frorkenhume, had all felt the oppression of the iron legions. And still Thyllis’s ambitions were not slaked, and she sent her iron legions farther to the south still. And, down in the Dawn Lands, the opposition to her and her schemes grew.

Flyers cannot sustain the long hauls that fliers may, and we had to descend periodically to rest and feed our fluttrells. Naturally, we chose places well out of the way. We were not disturbed as we flew north. The land opened out into a broad and pleasant prospect, and although we skirted towns and hamlets, we saw them, gleaming like lilies across the green fields.

At one halt in the shade of missals, Quienyin told me that my friends in Hyrklana were alive. I felt the leap of relief. Balass the Hawk, Oby, Naghan the Gnat, and Tilly were dear to me. The Wizard of Loh struck a note of alarm when he said they were involved in the Jikhorkdun again. I frowned.

“That bloody arena of Huringa should be—”

“Not while human nature is as human nature is, Jak.”

“As soon as I meet up with Turko — but, no. I have other things to do which supervene — I think.” The truth was, by Zair, I was all at sea. Vallia called. Yes, yes, the country was in good hands. But — well, easy enough to sense my feelings even if they do me no credit as your cool and hardheaded adventurer. I wanted to see Delia. I wanted to know that my home was not once more a sea of flames. Emotion and feeling rule us, whether we will it or not. “As soon as I have done what I must do, it is Hyrklana for me, and the Jikhorkdun of Huringa.”

Quienyin nodded sympathetically.

“They are all perfectly safe, I assure you.”

“In the Jikhorkdun?”

“Yes.”

The old sayings have fallen into disrepute on Kregen as on Earth. I had to do what I had to do. There was no easy way out for me. But we all smirk when we hear the words, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” They are trite, stupid, meaning nothing out of overuse and unthinking repetition. But, they do mean a great deal. I had to go back to Vallia, first, and stopping off for Turko was an indulgence to my sensibilities. By Zair! What it is to be an emperor, what it is to be a man!

“South Pandahem is a more or less direct route through to Vallia,” said Quienyin. “Hyrklana is not.”

I stared at him. He knew who I was all right. But we kept up the pretense. I really think — I know —

he had been so profoundly shocked at his discoveries of the antics of his old friend Phu-Si-Yantong that he was still in something of a state of shock. And he had not asked me what I was doing down in the Dawn Lands. I could not tell him that, of course. He could know nothing of a power that had sent me here in the first place, a power immeasurably greater than all the powers of the Wizards of Loh combined.

From northwest to southeast the Dawn Lands stretch for something just under three thousand miles. From northeast to southwest the breadth is of the order of one thousand five hundred, reaching a little more past the Western Mountains.

The whole place is like a beehive of energy.

Kingdoms rise and fall, borders stretch and contract. Racial, religious, political differences hold the frontiers. Geography plays its part, so that rivers and mountains form natural barriers. We flew on north and east and so passed the massive lenk forests of Shirrerdrin. Ahead lay Khorundur.

“We approach areas where runs the writ of Hamal,” said Tyfar. He sounded half angry and ashamed along with his pleasure.

I knew why.

So I took no notice. We made a frugal camp and decided what to do. Now you can shoot a paly and feast on succulent roast venison. You can slingshot a bird down and eat that. And you call pull fruit off trees and enjoy the succulent flesh and juices. But you cannot easily come by bread, or tea, or wine out in the wilds.

“I will go in,” said Nath the Shaft. “With Barkindrar. We have money, good gold which these folk of the city will exchange for food—”

“Wine,” said Hunch.

“Shall we go in, Hunch?” said Nodgen.

“Me? Why? Barkindrar and Nath offered, didn’t they?”

“Buy only enough to last us over Khorundur. Beyond that kingdom we will be among friends and may ask for all we need,” Tyfar told his retainers.

“Quidang, Prince!”

So the two went off and we waited and waited and when so much time had elapsed that we knew they were not coming back, Tyfar said, “They have been taken up. I shall go in after them and fetch them out. They are loyal men — and comrades.”

Standing up, I looked at Tyfar, and there was no need for words.

Hunch quavered out: “You are going off and leaving me here, Jak!”

“You will be safe enough, Hunch. After all, Nodgen has his spear — and you have your bill, I see.”

The two Pachaks started laughing, and then Hunch, staring around, laughed, too. But it was a dolorous sound, for all that.

The city stood beside the banks of a pretty little river which wound between wooded slopes. Built of a bright yellow brick, this little city of Khorunlad. That yellow is a fine, strong color, yet not harsh, not offensive... The yellow of just that tint is called tromp in Kregish, a fuller tone than the more subtle yellow called lay. Domes were burnished with copper, green and glowing, and the avenues opened out into stone-flagged kyros where striped awnings promised refreshment for thirsty throats. We two, Tyfar and I, walked in past the open gates. They were stout, fabricated of bronze-bound lenk, and the watchtowers were manned. Many of the roofs of buildings uplifted landing platforms for airboats. I perked up.

We had both chosen to wear the armor taken from the dead lords destroyed by the flutsmen. We looked a resplendent pair. That was all to the good, for we had to get to Nath and Barkindrar before anything too unpleasant occurred to them.

Tyfar was all for going up to the magistrates and asking.

I pursed my lips.

“We-ell, Tyfar, we are strangers. D’you see the looks we got from the guard? And they looked handy fighting men, not your local city militia at all.”

I considered it odd that we had not been questioned, were not already in some iron-barred cell charged with some nameless crime, and our weapons gone and our pockets emptied. The armor I wore was of that superb supple mesh link manufactured in some of the countries of the Dawn Lands. Armor of the highest quality is usually made to fit the wearer. I was glad that the dead lord had been large across the shoulders. All the same, I had had to let the shoulder thongs out to their fullest extent to get the harness on. Tyfar’s dead lord’s armor was of the plate variety, a kax of exceptional beauty which snugged on Tyfar’s brawny yet supple frame. We wore the green and yellow cloaks that came with the outfit, our helmets glittered in the suns, our weapons jutted with a fine panache, and, in short, we presented a splendid spectacle of two of the lords of the land. Well, maybe that had not been such a good idea, after all.

Maybe had I done as I so often did, and padded in barefoot with a breechclout and weapons, I would have avoided the mischief. But, then, I would have avoided an adventure that afforded me enormous joy

— even though I was not aware of it at the time.

Chapter seven

Of a Meeting in a Hayloft

The first kyro to which we came was a plaza of pleasing proportions. The flags were uniformly arranged in blue and white hexagons. Tyfar stopped and stared at the tables beneath the bright umbrellas outside a tavern with the promising name of The Bottle and Morrow.

“Ronalines,” he said, and smacked his lips. “I have a penchant for them — and with thick, clotted cream.”

I sighed. People in clean and colorful clothes sitting at the tables were spooning up the ronalines smothered in thick cream. Ronalines are very much your Kregan strawberry, and highly tasty, too. Tyfar strode across and started opening his scrip ready to dole out money. Deb-Lu-Quienyin suddenly appeared at my elbow.

A wash of coldness shriveled in the heat of the day.

“Jak — our two comrades. They are lodged in a hayloft in Blue Vosk Street. Barkindrar is injured.”

I could see right through Quienyin.

One or two people at the tables were beginning to look more closely toward me. The Wizard of Loh had gone into lupu back in our camp and had thrown his astral projection to advise and warn us. How many times I had been hounded by the infernal projection of Yantong!

“Thank you, San. We will hurry. Best you—”

But Quienyin’s projection moved into the shadows by the far wall of the tavern — and vanished. His going was a matter of the supernatural; I just hoped the clients spooning up their ronalines and cream would disbelieve the evidence of their eyes and believe common sense. I started after Tyfar.

He sat down and leaned back in the wooden chair and looked around. Before the little Fristle fifi in her yellow apron could reach him I stormed up and whispered in a modulated bellow in his earhole, “Tyfar!

Our comrades are in trouble and Barkindrar is injured. You’ll have to forgo your ronalines.”

He stood up at once, quelling the flash of fury on his face.

“That Barkindrar! Let us go, then, Jak — and mayhap we can stop here on our way back. By Krun!

Ronalines and cream!”

We walked smartly off.

A Rapa slave in the gray slave breechclout stepped out of our way as we rounded the comer out of the kyro. He carried an enormous table on his back, and his beak was thrust forward. Perched on the table was a wicker basket and in the basket, wrapped in soft moss, lay two tiny Rapa babies. The Rapa lowered his eyes as he walked by.

“Rapa,” I said, “tell me where is Blue Vosk Street.”

He could only have been able to see our lower halves; but he could see the polished boots, and the sword scabbards, and the ends of the expensive cloaks.

“Masters,” he quavered. He dare not straighten up for the babies would slide off the table. “Masters. Straight along the Avenue of a Thousand Delights, and turn left — no, masters, turn right — a hundred paces along, by the river.”

I found a copper ob and pushed it into his hand.

“Thank you, Rapa.”

What he said I did not know, for I went off quickly, with Tyfar tailing along. We walked up the Avenue of a Thousand Delights, and while there might only have been nine hundred ninety-nine on display, the place warranted the trademark of a thousand. Following directions we turned a hundred paces along by the river, which here was confined by wooden stakes and a mass of overgrown foliage, and so entered Blue Vosk Street. Here, it was clear, lived the folk who catered to the customers for the thousand delights.

Tyfar put a hand to his sword hilt.

“Ignore the cutpurses,” I said, “and slit the throats of the cutthroats — first.”

“What a place! I did not know such a place could exist.”

“You mean because it is a hundred paces or so from refinement and civilization?” The stink didn’t bother me; Tyfar put a kerchief to his nose with his free hand. “No, Jak. I did not mean that.”

But I fancied I knew what he did mean. He was a prince and had not rubbed shoulders with the poor of the world. Many of the shacks were simply moldering away. Those built of the soft mud, hardened by a kiss of fire, were sloughing their footings into the mud in which they were set. People moved about their business, and three-quarters of that, I’ll warrant, was highly illegal. I drew my cloak around that splendid mesh mail. Tyfar saw the movement.

“Do you likewise, Tyfar. We are too brightly decked for this neighborhood. And keep your weather eye open.”

“Where is this pestiferous hayloft?”

A string of calsanys blundered past, their backs obscured by swaying lashings of straw. The Rapa leading them shuffled, head down, a wisp of straw sticking out from under the vulturine beak. Farther along a pair of hirvels drew a cart which lurched over the ruts, its fragile wheels appearing as if they would burst asunder at every forward plunge. Slaves were not too much in evidence. The people here were on the breadline, no doubt, and villainy kept their stomachs apart from their backbones. Khorundur was one of the countries of the Dawn Lands in which airboats were manufactured. These fliers were in nowise as splendid or efficient as those made in such secrecy by Hamal or Hyrklana; but they were functional, although small and oftentimes chancy of operation. No doubt the voller builders of Khorundur had not mastered all the secrets of the various ingredients contained in the silver boxes that uplifted and powered vollers.

Six taverns stood cheek by jowl, so that when a drunk was thrown out of the first, he could work his way along the rest without having to walk too far. Beyond them a cluster of stores displayed dusty goods, and then a hostelry lifted two stories. A beam and ropes jutted from a double door in the gabled front.

“There,” said Tyfar, and he would have pointed had I not cautioned him swiftly. “Yes, Jak, you are right. They are a cutthroat lot down here.”

“And quiet. Too quiet. Something is going on.”

He did not have the ruffianly experience of an old adventurer to give him the scent of mischief. The string of calsanys had gone, the cart vanished up a dolorous side alley. The people were taking themselves off the street. Although the surface was pockmarked with potholes and rutted, this street for these people would serve as their open-air gathering place. One would expect it to be filled with chaffering throngs, and also one would be certain that we two, our expensive cloaks betraying us even though the armor was concealed, would have been subjected to more than simple horseplay. In all probability as many attacks as there were paces would have been launched against us.

So that meant just one thing.

You have to have the nose for authority if you wish to stay alive in many of the more raffish and desperate places of Kregen.

Zair knows, I’d kicked against authority enough in my time.

“Just rest a moment in the shade of this awning, Tyfar.”

“But we must press on! Barkindrar—”

“Watch.”

He glared at me. Something in my manner showed him I did not counsel thus without reason. More probably, although it pains me to report this, something about my manner must have told him I was in no mood to be argued with. He was a prince; but he subsided and we stood in the shadows, looking keenly out onto that doleful street.

A neighborhood gets to know when trouble is on its way.

In a tightly controlled voice, Tyfar said, “We should have gone straight away to the magistrates. Or even the king. His palace may be a moth-eaten dump; but he is a king and would have received me as a prince.”

About to find a diplomatic way of reminding Tyfar of his country of origin, I closed my mouth. The tramp of iron-studded soles and the swish and clang of a party of soldiers kept us both stock still. I said in a voice that just carried, “This is the reason, Tyfar. Bide you still.”

The soldiers were paktuns, clearly enough, a mixture of races, all clad in a semblance of uniform. They were a hard-bitten lot. At their head marched their Jiktar, and I can say I did not care for him at first glance. I would not like to serve as a paktun in his pastang. He had not brought his whole pastang, a company which might be eighty strong; but only three audos, three sections of eight men each. The iron-studded boots stomped the rutted road.

The mercenaries approached from the direction we had come, and I said to Tyfar, “Quickly, now!

Around the back of the stables and in the rear window. Sharp!”

We ran between the wooden wall of the stables and the sagging mud wall of the nearest store. At the back a lumberyard showed with an adobe wall beyond. Thick trees cut off the view. At the back of the hostelry an aromatic yard piled with dung and straw and a few broken carts gave us access to the back of the building. There were a few calsanys in their stalls and a hirvel twitched his snout at us, his cup-shaped ears flicking forward, his tall round neck curving. The air hung unnaturally quiet, and the buzz of flies sounded like miniature ripsaws.

“In this window — quick and quiet!”

The sill was rotten and I shoved the wooden leaves open cautiously. The interior of the place stank. The floor was cumbered with shadow-shrouded impedimenta of the animal trade. Stalls lined both walls with a ladder beyond. Most of the stalls were empty. In the one nearest to the ladder a freymul, the poor man’s zorca, suddenly looked splendid as he tossed his head in a shaft of the suns’ light breaking in through a crack in the dilapidated walls. His fine chocolate-colored coat with those brave streaks of tromp beneath gleamed, and he showed his teeth and neighed.

“That’s done it,” I said. “Up the ladder!”

I sprang up the ladder four rungs at a time. If one of the treads snapped beneath my boots... But they held. I reached the landing at the top and faced a half-open door in which the light of a mineral-oil lamp glowed. Shadows moved.

In the hayloft, Quienyin had said.

Tyfar sprang up the ladder after me.

Three paces took me to the door.

My hand reached out to push the door open.

Abruptly, it was snatched back.

I stared into the oil lamp’s radiance. Hay piled up to the pitch of the roof. A woman stood facing me, the bow in her hand bent and the steel head of the arrow aimed directly at my breast. The man who had flung the door open appeared. It was nicely done. In a single instant the bow could loose and the arrow drive through me.

“Hold still, dom,” said the man. He was apim, strongly built and with a brown beard, trimmed to a point. His eyes were dark and his face, big-boned, powerful, held a look of such savage anger I knew I would have to treat him with the utmost caution. “One move — one — and you’re spitted.”

“Stand quite still,” said the woman.

Her voice was mellifluous, very pleasing in other circumstances. She wore a russet tunic and russet trousers, cut tightly, and her slender waist was cinctured by a wide brown belt, and the gold buckle glittered in the light. As to her face, that lay in shadow; but I caught the impression of a firmness there, the shape conveying that sense of strength as her head half-turned to stare along the shaft. Her eyes fastened upon me, large and brown and luminous above the bar of shadow from her left arm.

“We shall all have to move very—” I began.

The man spat out a curse.

“You speak when you are spoken to, dom, not before. You are very near death.”

“Oh, aye,” I said. “And so are we all—”

The man lifted his fist. His nostrils pinched in.

“Kaldu!” The voice of command as the woman spoke smoked into the room. She was used to telling people what to do and seeing them do it. “Quiet, Kaldu. No chance has brought these two horters here.”

“They mean us mischief, my lady. Let me—”

I said, “Stop clowning about, Kaldu. Listen to your mistress. And we must all get out of here. The watch is on the way. Where are — where is the injured man and his comrade?”

The bow was held in a grip that did not tremble by so much as an eyelash. The bow was a big, compound reflex weapon that pulled enough to let a man know he held a bow; the girl gripped it and held the arrow in such a fashion that told me she knew exactly what she was doing. One thing was sure, this mysterious woman was a superb archer.

“You know? How could you? The watch—?”

“Come on, Kaldu,” I said. “Close your mouth. We must get out of here at once.”

“I believe you,” the woman said. She lowered the bow.

I heard Tyfar let out a shaky breath. He did not put as much trust as I did in the bowmanship of this girl.

“Which way is the watch coming?”

“In the direction of the Avenue of a Thousand—”

“Very well. We must go over the roof to the bakery beyond. Kaldu, fetch Barkindrar. Tell Nath.” She swung to face Tyfar and me. “I do not know who you are — yet. But if you are traitors—”

“Barkindrar and Nath are my men,” spoke up Tyfar. “Lady. I trust they are not badly hurt—”

“They can run.” Tyfar flinched back.

“Then,” I said, “for the sake of Havil the Green, let us all run!”

The girl flashed me a look. “Havil,” she said. “You are Hamalese?”

“Yes—” began Tyfar.

I said, “Havil is known over all Havilfar. Now enough shilly-shallying.” Barkindrar and Nath appeared, helped along by Kaldu. He loomed over them. “Come on, you two famblys. We must run for it.”

They started to speak and an enormous battering began on the door. The noise burst up from front and back of the building.

“The watch!” said Kaldu. “We are too late!”

“No!” flared the girl. She looked like an enraged zhantilla, fiery, incensed, splendid. “It’s never too late, until you’re dead!”

Chapter eight

An Arrow in the Swamp

The bakery leaned against the stables for mutual support. They propped each other. The aroma of baking bread fought with the dungy whiffs from the yard at the back of the barn. As we prepared to run through the opposite door to the bakery, the woman looked at Barkindrar. The Brokelsh was clearly in pain; but in that sullen, mulish, Brokelsh way he refused to acknowledge the fact. The woman placed her hand on Barkindrar’s forehead.

The hand was shapely, firm, clearly the hand of a woman and yet I knew that hand could accomplish warrior deeds. Her face relaxed for a betraying moment from her tough no-nonsense pose and revealed the compassion she felt. Then she swung back to us, hard and imperative.

“They take their time. They will never see us past the bakery.”

She wore a rapier and main gauche. The bow went up on her shoulder out of the way. Her brown hair, trimmed neatly and rather too short, shone bravely in the light of the suns. I looked past the jut of the stable roof as we went out. If some damned inquisitive mercenary took it into his head to move well out into the yard, he could not fail to see us. Once they had broken into the building they’d be up the stairs like a pack of werstings, all fangs and ravagings. The bakery was a single-story affair and we ought to scramble down easily enough. I judged there would be no need to set a rear guard, and Nod the Straw, out on the roof, would have warned us if a mercenary did stroll out too far.

Nod the Straw, a wispy little fellow who worked in the stables, waited for us on the roof. His pop-eyes and thick-lipped mouth expressed no surprise that there were two more people suddenly appearing from the shelter of his barn. But he was savagely annoyed and kept brandishing a cut-down pitchfork.

“I know who it was,” he raved. “That crop-eared, no-good kleesh of a Sorgan! He must have betrayed us — and they’ll give him a dozen stripes quicker’n a dozen silver sinvers.”

“Never mind about who betrayed us now, Nod,” said the woman. “Help get Barkindrar down off your roof.”

Tyfar said, “Do you all go on. I shall hold the roof and delay them—”

The woman threw him a glance that I, for one, would not welcome. Although, by Krun, that self-same look that says what a great ninny you are has been thrown at me in my time.

“Leave off, Nod,” said Kaldu. “I will take Barkindrar on my back.”

“You great dermiflon!” jibed Nod the Straw. But he desisted in his efforts, and Kaldu took Barkindrar up and bore him swiftly down over the roof of the bakery. Nath the Shaft followed with Nod the Straw.

“What are you waiting for?” said Tyfar. He drew his sword. “I can hold them off for long enough—”

“You think, then,” said this woman in her imperious way, “that you are some kind of Jikai?”

Tyfar’s color rose up into his cheeks.

“I think I know where honor—”

“Honor!” She laughed, and, even then, even in all that thumping racket from below, and the peril in which we stood, that laughter rose, pure and untrammeled, and exciting.

“Go on, Tyfar,” I said. “There is time to get across into the shadows of the bakery.”

“I shall not precede this — lady.”

“Then,” I said, and if you are surprised you still do not understand that old reprobate, Dray Prescot,

“then I shall go at once myself and leave you two to wrangle it out between you.”

And, with that, I jumped down onto the adjoining roof and crabbed deuced swiftly across to follow the others as they clawed their way down a crumbling wall to the alley. I had no compunction. I knew Tyfar’s honor would make him follow me, wasting no more time. If the woman wished to be last, no doubt following some obscure honor code or discipline of her own, then we’d only hold things up by further wrangling.

Tyfar breathed down my neck as I jumped for the alley.

“That woman! Insufferable! Vosk-headed! Stubborn as a graint!”

“Charming, though, you must agree.”

“Yes, yes, of course. I noticed her at once. Although I would not say charming — in fact, charming is the last word I’d use. Attractive, alluring, beautiful — yes, she’s all those. But who can put up with seductiveness cloaked with superciliousness?”

I peered suspiciously at Tyfar. “Isn’t that San Blarnoi? Although, to be sure, I think the quote phrases it somewhat differently from ‘put up with’.”

“San Blarnoi knew what he was talking about. That woman!”

“Yes?” came that smooth mellifluous voice, sweet as honey and sharp as a rapier. “What woman would that be, horter?”

Tyfar spun about. I was facing him, and he swung back to stare accusingly at me. His whole stance, his shining face, screamed out: “You might have warned me!”

I said, “Why, some shrewish fishwife who landladied it at our last inn. Now, we had best hurry. Those paktuns looked as though they know their job. And if Sorgan did betray you they’ll know we have an injured man.”

“Yes,” she said, instantly forgetting the pettiness of impending annoyance at Tyfar’s incautious words.

“We must get on. Kaldu! Make for Horter Rathon’s.”

“Quidang, my lady.”

We all ran down the alley, and we ran away from Blue Vosk Street and headed for the thick stand of tall timber.

“There is a section of bog in here, lady,” said Nod the Straw. “No one ventures here.” His eyes rolled.

“I do not like to go in — but—”

“Needs must when you come to the fluttrell’s vane, Nod.”

“Aye, my lady.”

“This Rathon,” I said, “to whom we are all running like a flock of ponshos. Did Sorgan know of him and his house?”

“No,” said Kaldu.

Tyfar wanted to bristle up at the incivility. But I restrained him with a quiet word. How odd it is that a prince will stand for uncouthness when an arrow is aimed at his heart, and prickles up when it is not!

Although, to give Tyfar his dues, he wasn’t the least afraid of arrows in the normal course of things. That a beautiful and well-formed woman had been the person aiming the shaft at us — that, I think, had thrown him off balance.

The trees closed over us, a mixture of the beautiful as well as the ugly in Kregan trees. The path became distinctly moist. I looked back. Our footprints were perfectly legible to the eyes of a tracker.

“It gets a lot stickier ahead,” said Nod. “Unfortunately.”

“There is a boat,” said the woman. She spoke briskly. “We can cross the river without trouble, and lose ourselves in the Aracloins.[2]Horter Rathon will give us shelter.”

“Why did you not go there first, instead of to Blue Vosk Street?”

She gave me a withering look.

“That was nearest. We did not know who Barkindrar and Nath were when the watch tried to take them up. When we realized they were Hamalese, of course, we stepped in.”

“You are revolutionaries?”

The moment I spoke I heard the fatuity of my question.

She said, “Kaldu! Watch your step.”

He did not answer but plunged on with Barkindrar slung over his back. The Bullet had taken a nasty cut along the leg. The wound was bound — and bound expertly, too, the handiwork as I guessed of this surprising woman.

Along by the edge of the river where this boggy section was difficult to tell from river itself, we threaded along the narrow path. Nod the Straw led, and he was not at all happy. In any niksuth, any small marshy area, of Kregen you are likely to find uncooperative life. Teeth and fangs, spines and stings, they hop up out of the bog and seek to drag you down for a juicy dinner. Even in a city like Khorunlad. Aware of this delightful fact of Kregan bogs, I loosened my thraxter in the scabbard.

“If no one comes here,” I said. “The watch will not think we have. There is no need to hurry, they will not know how long we have been gone from the stables.”

“There was a quantity of blood spilled on the straw,” she said.

“I see. Then we had best hurry.”

“Jak,” called Tyfar.

I swung about to look.

He was half off and half on the path, and one leg was going deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling stink of blackness. Tendriliferous vines snaked over the oozing mud. But he got a grip on a clump of weed and arrested his sucking-in.

He had been following up last. The girl at my side said, “The oaf!” She spoke tartly. Tyfar got a better grip and started to haul himself in.

A head appeared over his shoulder, one of those snouting, fanged heads of Kregen, all scale and tendrils and gape-jaws. The eyes were red slits. It hoisted itself a little free of the ooze with two broad paddle-like forefeet. In the next instant it would open and close that fearsome set of jaws, and Tyfar’s head would provide the dinner the thing craved.

The girl took a single step forward. She was splendid.

The bow came from her shoulder as a skater comes off the ice. The arrow nocked, was drawn back —

to the ear — and the shaft flew. Straight and strongly driven, that shaft. It pierced cleanly through one of those red slit eyes. The steel point must have gouged on, deep into the minuscule brain. I could not watch the death throes of the beast any more. A mate to the first appeared almost soundlessly beside me and the jagged-fanged jaws thrust for the girl in her russets, who stood ready with a second shaft aimed for the monster by Tyfar.

My thraxter swept around and then straightened. Point first it drove into a red-slitted eye. The thraxter would not have cut the thing’s scaly neck deeply enough. But the solid steel punched through eye and head and into brain. I jerked back. Like its mate, it thrashed and screeched. The girl gave a single convulsive jump back.

Her bow lifted, the arrow pulled — then she summed up the picture and did not loose.

“I give you my thanks for saving Tyfar,” I said.

He was off the ooze now and safely on the path. His leg sheened with the muck. He waved his sword at us and then started to run along the treacherous path to catch us up. I own I felt enormous relief knowing that he was safe.

The woman looked at me. Woman? Girl? She was young, around Tyfar’s age, I judged, although men and women change so slowly over their better than two hundred or so years of life on Kregen. Sometimes she had the airs of a queen, and at others those of a roistering tavern wench, and both were nicely calculated. She was controlled in her emotions; but her emotions were real and could break out fiercely—

“By Krun, Jak! That beastie nearly had me — and you!”

“You were busy saving Tyfar, for which my thanks again.”

“You are his father?”

“No, no. He is a good comrade.”

“Then you have my thanks, for what they are worth, for my life—”

“Do not, I beg you, say, for what that is worth.”

“Sometimes my life has meant a great deal to me, and sometimes nothing at all.”

Tyfar panted up then, and started in at once thanking the girl. Then he said, “And I do not know to whom I owe my life.”

“You may call me Jaezila.”

We started off along the path again, and I felt it prudent to hang back. I did this to guard against pursuit and, also, as I realized with a sly amusement, so that they might have it out between them.

“Jaezila,” said Tyfar, rolling the syllables around his mouth as though they were best Jholaix. “And is that all — my lady?”

“No. It will do for you — Jikai.”

She cut him with that great word, used as she used it, in mockery of his warrior prowess.

“Jaezila,” persisted Tyfar, and I own I was impressed by his refusal to become warm. After all, he was a prince. “And no more — you are Hamalese?” He sounded doubtful.

I thought I detected a wary note in Jaezila’s voice.

“Hamalese — does it matter? I seek to aid you, who are Hamalese. Is not that good enough?”

“I accept that.” Tyfar passed on, following her beyond the end of a screen of curly-fronded ferns where the dragonflies, as big as chickens, flitted and flurried on diamond wings. “And what brought you to Khorunlad?”

“Your breeding left much to be desired, dom.”

Tyfar bridled up like a spurred zorca. To be accused of poor breeding, and a Prince of Hamal! And to be addressed so familiarly as dom, the common greeting! I watched it all, enthralled. Then I jumped forward.

My Val! We had been growing very chummy with these people, with stubborn Kaldu and this enigmatic woman styling herself Jaezila. But we did not know them. I didn’t want Tyfar labeling himself a prince —

particularly a Prince of Hamal — until we knew them a great deal better.

“You may be surprised to know—” Tyfar was saying with his voice as frosty as the caverns of the Ice Floes of Sicce. He was going to put Jaezila properly in her place by telling her that she had the honor of addressing a prince, I didn’t doubt that. I burst in, quite rudely.

“Come on, come! Don’t stand chaffering. I think there were sounds of pursuit along the path.”

Tyfar immediately swung about and lifted his sword.

Jaezila simply looked at me. “You think there is pursuit?”

She missed nothing, this girl, nothing...

“And if there is not, that is still no reason to stand lollygagging about. By Krun! Let us get out of this bog and onto firmer ground.”

“Fifty paces will bring us to the bank. If you can call it a bank. I scouted this area—”

I said, “You are not from Khorunlad, Jaezila. Hamalese? Maybe. But I do not inquire why you help us from Hamal.”

“Do you think that the Empress Thyllis will conquer all the Dawn Lands, Jak?”

That was a confounded question!

It suited my purposes to be thought a Hamalese. Yet it went against the grain to have to say that, yes, mad Empress Thyllis would overrun all the Dawn Lands, one after the other.

“She might,” I said. “If her throat is not cut first.”

She drew her breath in. The others showed up ahead waiting under a grove of drooping missals. Beyond them the river glimmered blue as the summer sky.

“You spoke of revolution,” said Jaezila. “Now, I see—”

I interrupted, swiftly but courteously: “My lady Jaezila, do not misunderstand me.” Zair knew, I’d taken long enough getting myself accepted as a Hamalese, and this girl quite clearly was more than she appeared. She could go running back to Hamal with a tale that would destroy my plans. I had to dissimulate. “I spoke figuratively. We all serve the empress, do we not? Hamal is set on the road of conquest, is not this so?”

“By Jehamnet! Hamal is set on the road to conquest!”

Her voice contained emotions I couldn’t fathom. She swore by Jehamnet, a spirit of harvest time associated with crop failures and similar disasters, and who is known as Jevalnet in Vallia, and Jegrodnet and Jezarnet in the Eye of the World. But she had said Jehamnet, which is Hamalian. He is known as Jehavnet in most of Havilfar. I fancied she was Hamalese and therefore, down here, out doing skullduggery for Thyllis. I held my tongue.

We gathered by the boat, a little skiff that would just about take us all and give us a hand’s-breadth freeboard. The river rippled gently in a small breeze. On the opposite bank the walls and roofs of the jumbled Aracloins offered shelter. We pushed off and Kaldu and I pulled the oars, taking it gently. There were a sizeable number of other boats on the river. A low pontoon bridge spanned the river lower down, and this impediment assisted in the formation and continuance of the boggy area upstream. So, moving cautiously but with purpose, we successfully reached the safety of Horter Rathon’s questionable establishment.

Chapter nine

We Strike a Blow for Hamal

“By Havil! I don’t intend to sit here mewed up like a blind bird!”

“I agree. And I’ll tell you something else, Tyfar. If we’re not back at the camp before very soon, the Pachaks will come in after us. Or even, Krun forfend, Hunch might—”

“What!” And Tyfar lay back on the pallet and roared.

Horter Nath Rathon joined in the laughter, although he wasn’t at all sure what the jest might be. He was like that. He was a jolly, fat, smiling, hand-washing little man, clad in a long green and red gown with a silver chain around his neck and depending from it a bunch of keys reposing on the proud jut of his belly. He had sent one of his servants out to spy the land.

This fellow, Ornol — a massive Gon whose shaven head gleamed brilliantly from the application of unguents, a fashion some of the Gons have — came back to report not the hair or hide of a Havil-forsaken mercenary to be seen.

Nath Rathon burbled and jingled his keys.

“Excellent, Ornol. Now go and keep watch.”

Ornol went off, his pate glistening, and I looked carefully at Tyfar. Young Prince Tyfar was high of color, and a trifle breathless, and given to wider gestures than usual. He was not drunk. The nearness of his escape from death in the little swamp was beginning to work on him, and he was going through the shakes like a true horter. Also, I fancy the idea that he had been saved and his life preserved to him by the quick and skillful actions of a girl came as a novel surprise.

“You will assuredly have to wait until the suns set,” cautioned Nath Rathon.

“That is a pesky long way off,” grumbled Tyfar.

“I think,” I said, “our friends will wait until nightfall.” I did not add that I felt it highly unlikely they would venture into Khorunlad before Quienyin had sussed the city in lupu for us. There might well be a period of fraught explanation if his apparition appeared, ghostlike, to scare the others half to death.

But, then, I had come to the conclusion that it would take a lot more than that, a very great deal more than that, to scare this mysterious young lady Jaezila witless.

She had tended to Barkindrar’s wound, and the Bullet had declared stoutly that he was fit to walk out with us. The situation was complicated — some situations are and some are not and most times they are resolved by death but not always — and we understood that while the official policy of Khorundur toward Hamal was neutrality, factions inevitably arose. The common folk labored under the delusion that if the Empress Thylliss took over their country they would miraculously inherit a better life, with free food and rivers of wine and not a day’s work in a sennight. If this is pitching the stories they believed too high, think only of the slaves that would come onto the market after a successful invasion and conquest. Hamalian gold was in this.

Rathon clinched that for me when he said to Jaezila when she walked in, smiling, “I fear, my lady, you will buy no vollers now.”

She frowned, quickly, losing that smile on the instant, whereat I surmised her mission to buy vollers for Hamal was a secret one. Thyllis had been prodigal with her treasure and had given patents of nobility for gold. She had lost many fliers. Clearly, she was desirous of purchasing what she could not make.

“Why so, Horter Rathon?”

“You were seen when — these two Hamalese — It were best you left the city, my lady. It is hard enough work as it is.”

He might smile and jingle his keys; but he was a man for Hamal, and if the common folk welcomed invasion, the better-off did not. That was obvious. They had hired bands of mercenaries, and because paktuns were hard to come by had had to hire men who were not of the top quality, or even of the second or third quality. I did not think the paktuns who had chased us were as low as masichieri; but I was told that masichieri, mere bandits masquerading as mercenaries when it suited them, were in the city in large numbers to keep order.

This, as you will readily perceive, placed me in a quandary.

I was opposed to Hamal, although pretending to be Hamalese. The poor folk were deluded. But those who were opposed to Hamal employed means I did not much relish. I would not strike a blow willingly against folk who stood up in opposition to mad Empress Thyllis. So, as I listened to the others debating what best to do, I felt myself to be shoved nose-first into a dilemma.

“My work must be completed,” Jaezila was saying, and her composure remained. There was the hint, the merest hint, of her true feelings boiling away.

“How, my lady?” Rathon spread his hands. “You will be taken up by the watch. These mercenaries the nobles have hired, they are little better than drikingers, bandits who will slit your throat for a copper ob.”

“And, my lady,” put in Kaldu, “the voller manufacturers here are all rich.” His brown beard tufted.

“Well, that follows, by Krun, does it not? They will not welcome you.”

“And it was all arranged!” said Jaezila. Her face — what a wonderful face she had! Broad-browed, subtle, perfect of curve of cheek and lip, illuminated by a passionate desire to esteem well of life — I felt myself drawn to her. As for Tyfar, he was goggling away. “Everything was going splendidly,” she said. Some lesser girl would have been crying by now. “And then these people against Hamal seized the power, and the vaunted neutrality of Khorundur — where is it now?”

“I and my associates will get the common folk out into the streets,” said Rathon. “But that is going to take time. And there will be a great deal of blood spilled.” He lifted his keys and then let them jingle against his gut. “Well, they are common folk and so ’tis of no matter.”

I turned away from him, and took my ugly, hating old beakhead of a face off out of the way. By Vox!

But wasn’t that the way of your maniacal, empire-puggled Hamalese bastard?

Tyfar followed me.

“What ails you, Jak? Your face — you look as though you have fallen among stampeding calsanys.”

“No matter,” I said. Control returned to me, and with it common sense. “I think it would be a good plan to take a few vollers for ourselves.” I did not add that I would fly mine to South Pandahem and then Vallia.

“Capital!” Tyfar brisked up. “Let us make a plan.”

Rathon began at once to put all manner of obstacles in the way — the sentries were alert, we had no chance of reaching a landing platform, didn’t we have gold to buy a voller, it was madness. Jaezila looked fierce. “The plan is good!”

I was not so sure. This lady, if she was not Hamalese, at least worked for my enemies. I felt drawn to her and she was, in truth, splendid. But she was an enemy. Well, poof to that. Were not Chido and Rees enemies, and were they not good friends, Bladesmen, comrades? In this, at least, we could work together.

I noticed that this Jaezila had an odd little habit of suddenly turning her head, and looking slightly to her side and rear, as though expecting to find someone there.

Now, in this enterprise going forward I had to think most carefully. We were a bunch of desperadoes, yes. But we purposed taking a voller from folk who were aligned against us in the political arena, and folk who were fighting against my enemies. It was a puzzle. In the end I did the only thing I could do, and went along and placed the outcome in the hands of Zair.

Barkindrar the Bullet would have to be figured into the calculations. Eventually we persuaded Nath Rathon to apprise us of the best location for picking up vollers, and he said that the bright sparks flew in from the outlying districts and parked on the roof of The Rokveil’s Head.

“They’ll be inspecting the undersides of tables with Beng Dikkane[3]long before the hour of midnight.”

And he laughed.

I forced myself to be polite to him.

“Then, good Nath Rathon, you will show us this place a few burs before that.”

“Me? Oh, no, dom. I will send Ornol—”

Jaezila and Tyfar looked questioningly at me.

“Oh, no, dom,” I said, “you will show us.”

He spluttered indignant protests. What my face looked like I do not know; but I do know I fought for control. I made myself relax. Just why I acted as I did, Zair forgive me, you may more readily perceive

— now — than I did — then.

“I wish that you, Nath Rathon, should show us The Rokveil’s Head. I do not think you will argue.”

He blinked. His keys jangled. He opened his mouth, looked at me, closed his mouth. His face, fat and plump and merry, on a sudden looked amazingly long. He shut that glistening mouth. Then, weakly, he said, “As you wish. I shall lead you.”

“Good,” I said. And I smiled most genially.

Our preparations made, we ventured out when She of the Veils cast her rosy golden light over the nighted city. The way was not far. We walked as a party of roisterers, out for a good time, and we made no bones about singing a few ditties. There was no problem as to who was to fly the vollers. Retainers of nobles and adventurers as we were, flying air-boats was a mere matter of normal occupation. The Rokveil’s Head turned out to be an imposing place, lit up with many lanterns, pillared and porticoed, and doing a humming business. Tyfar and I, allowing our expensive cloaks to conceal our armor, had no difficulty in entering. That mark of the notor we now realized had brought us with the ease that had puzzled us into the city. The lords ran this city. And the common folk looked to Hamal for relief. Truly, that was a colossal and vile joke on innocent people, to be sure!

Nath Rathon had dressed himself in popinjay fashion, which we assumed to be normal for him. Jaezila had borrowed a demure but still devastating evening gown, all sheer peach-colored sensil. Rathon had taken it from one of the women of his establishment, and with the gown a display of gems. They were all fakes. And Kaldu wore a sober evening lounging robe of dark green. We all wore weapons — except Jaezila, outside our clothes — and this was a mere natural part of evening attire. The flunkeys wanted to bustle about and take our wraps and cloaks; but Rathon assured them that this was not necessary as he had just happened to meet this party and they were desirous of patronizing the best establishment in the city and so he had just gone out of his way to bring them here. No, they were not friends of his and he did not know them, and now he must take himself home to his house and family in the eastern suburbs.

The majordomo thanked Rathon for bringing him the custom; but Rathon, whose hand hovered now continually at his mouth, smiled and bobbed and went off very quickly. We did not know if his deception would pass muster.

As we went up the wide balustraded stairway with the carved statues of sylvies flanking the treads, Tyfar said, “I am not sure that was a clever move, Jak. It seems to be you may have placed Rathon in some jeopardy if he is recognized.”

“Oh,” I said, airily, “he will get away with it.”

Privately, I would have no sorrow if Rathon were discovered and thrown out of Khorundur. That would be one agent of Hamal the less. So we went on up. The halls were palatial. There were many slaves, all stupidly dressed in feathers and bangles and little else. Much wine was in evidence. The sounds of laughter and horseplay reached us from the various magnificent chambers. We passed a room in which Jikaida was in full swing, with great piles of gold wagered on the outcome. Jikalla too was being played, along with Vajikry. We saw no rooms devoted to the Game of Moons and that surprised no one. People were staggering about, this early already the worse for wear. And so, steadily, we passed on up the wide stairways until we reached the top floor.

Sometimes I have swift attacks of nostalgia for remembered struggles. Sometimes; usually I am too bound up with the struggle going on at the moment. We found the door leading to the roof and stepped out under the stars of Kregen.

“We take three if we can,” said Tyfar. “Is that agreed?”

He was brilliantly excited, keyed up. “We strike a blow for Hamal tonight! Do not forget that.”

“How can we forget it?” said Jaezila.

Tyfar colored up again, and then shook himself, dark in the starlight, and we padded off in search of a suitable voller for the first of us to fly away. Our first port of call would be to pick up Barkindrar and Nath, and then we’d make for the camp and pick up the others. Then it was Hamal... The airboats were parked neatly and the guards moved about, dim silhouettes against the stars. Tyfar crept forward with Kaldu at his elbow.

Jaezila and I, for the moment, waited in the shadows.

“That one, I think, Jak, for me.”

“Yes. A fleet craft. But you cannot trust a voller from Khorundur as you would trust one from Hamal.”

“No — yes. You are right. But, I am not sure if I should go to Hamal. My work here has been spoiled—”

“You’ll never obtain fliers now that the lords are against Hamal. Is there nowhere else you can try?”

“You mock me, of course. I find your manners — uncouth.” She used the word sturr. I laughed. Oh, yes, I laughed.

“You have the right of it, my lady. That is my name. Jak the Sturr.”

She gazed at me. And then she, too, laughed. The look of her, the way her head tilted, the star-gleam in her eyes . . . I felt my stupid old heart give a leap. She was magnificent, and she worked for my enemies. Quietly, the laughter still bubbling away but held now within her poised manner, she said, “I shall not forget the way you dealt with that beastie that sought — it was quick.”

“No quicker than the way you loosed to save poor Tyfar.”

“Poor Tyfar! Indeed! He is a ninny, is he not?”

“No . . . No. He is a gallant young man a little out of his depth.”

And, a ghost rising to torment me, I carried on the thought in my head — like Barty Vessler.

“Well, Jak the Sturr,” she said, and there was the bite of decision in her voice, “you are not out of your depth in this midnight murder and mayhem, that is very sure.”

“I hope there is no murder.”

“So do I.”

A low whistle cut the dimness. We moved forward. Kaldu stood over the unconscious body of a Khibil guard. A Fristle slumbered at his side. Kaldu held his sword very purposefully.

“There are two vollers, my lady. And the third for the hyr-paktun.”

She looked at me, swiftly. “Kaldu dubs you a hyr-paktun and he has an eye for these things. Do you wear the pakzhan at your throat, Jak the Sturr?”

“I have done so, in my time, my lady.”

“So be it. Then let us board — and woe betide the laggard!”

“Now, just a minute—” began Tyfar.

She turned on him like a zhantilla turning to meet the rush of a leem.

“Tyfar! Fambly! Get aboard and fly — the guards will not wait for your waiting.”

“My lady, you treat me hard—”

“Now Krun save me from a pretty-speechifying ninny!” she said, and swung her leg over the voller’s coaming. That fancy sensil robe split down and revealed her long russet-clad leg. She was in the voller in a twinkling and Kaldu at her side.

I said to Tyfar, “Take your voller, Tyfar, and let us go.”

“What a — a girl!” stuttered Tyfar.

What a girl, indeed!

Chapter ten

The Brothers Fre-Da Give Nikobi

As the three vollers touched down on the grass and then ghosted in under the trees out of chance sight from the air, I felt relief that we had carried it off successfully. Tyfar leaped down from his craft, leaving Nath to assist Barkindrar. Such is the way of unheeding princes. I was watching Tyfar. A shadow moved under the trees and the moons’ glitter caught on the blade that pressed against his breast.

I started to leap down, dragging the thraxter free, when Tyfar said, “What? What? Oh — yes, I understand, Modo.”

The Pachak’s tail hand quivered and the blade vanished in shadow. I came up with them, pretty sharpish, and Modo, seeing me, said, “Jak. A word from San Quienyin. He wishes you to call him Naghan and not to let these new people know he is a Wizard of Loh.”

“Very well. If it is his wish.”

The others crowded forward and Hunch and Nodgen came up, and the pappattu was made, and Quienyin had forsaken his blue robes and doffed that turban, and stood forth in a simple brown tunic —

admittedly, there was a touch of silver braid at throat and hem — to be introduced as Naghan.

“Naghan what?” said Jaezila in her sweet voice, not at all rudely. She smiled and charmed old Quienyin clean through.

“Naghan the Dodderer, some folk call me, my lady. But, for you, the name Naghan the Seeing is more seemly. If it pleases you, my lady.”

I marveled. Such humbleness from a Wizard of Loh!

“It pleases me, Naghan the Seeing. And I am famished—”

“My lady!” And Hunch was there, grimacing away, filled with enormous desires to be of help to this imperious and lovely lady, who had appeared at our camp from the shadows. We ate the viands we had, and none that we had brought from Khorunlad, alas.

“We rest for two burs,” declared Tyfar. “And then we fly. And we will let our fluttrells go free. They will bring joy to whoever finds them.”

“If they do not fly wild, Tyfar, as anyone would who had to support your—”

“Whatever happens to the fluttrells,” I said, “they deserve well of us. Now, rest us all — and I shall stand the first watch.”

Tyfar and Jaezila glared hotly, one at the other. I sighed. Bantam cocks — and a bantam hen, by Krun!

The Maiden with the Many Smiles shed down her fuzzy pink light as we took off into the soft night air. Tyfar expressed himself as mightily pleased that Jaezila elected to fly with me.

“For if I have to endure the barbs of her tongue,” he said, “I swear by the names I shall—” And then Jaezila, climbing up beside me, smiled down, and Tyfar was struck dumb. So we flew over the sleeping face of Kregen beneath the moons. Two of the lesser moons hurtled close by above. The night air breathed sweet and cool. The windrush in my face, my hair blowing, ah, yes —

and a glorious girl at my side! Well, she was not Delia, my Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains; but I felt then they would be well-matched, and that, in all soberness, by Zair, was a strange feeling for me.

She talked a little, small inconsequential matters, of her mother whom she loved dearly, and her brothers and sisters, although she did not mention their names. It would have been all too easy to slide into confidences, and to have spilled out my own near-despairing feelings about my own children. But I did not. I purported to come from Hamal, and must therefore watch my tongue. Hunch and Nodgen sat in the body of the voller. We fleeted on our way north and east toward the empire of my enemies.

And I had to make a decision. I was going to stop by South Pandahem and drag Turko the Shield out of his fairground booth. Then I would look in on Vallia, just, I assured myself, to make sure the place was on an even keel. I felt a traitor even to think it might not be with Drak at the helm. And then it would be Hyrklana for me.

“You are pensive, Jak the Storr.”

“Aye, my lady. I am thinking that I shall have to leave you and Tyfar soon.”

“Oh!” she flared. “Why link my name with that ninny’s?”

“Now, young lady,” I said, and I heard my voice harden, “you are altogether too harsh on Tyfar. He is a young man with high ideals and great notions of honor—”

“Like to make a laughingstock of himself—”

“That is true. But, at the least, laughingstock or no, he will not be shamed.”

She cocked her head at me. The moons’ light caught her hair and sheened soft brown and fuzzy pink.

“No. I think you are right. But he is so — so—”

“Gallant?”

“Very well.” And she laughed, her head thrown back. “A gallant ninny!”

We flew on into the blaze of dawn when the twin suns, Far and Havil, rose and the land came alive with color. Tyfar, in the lead voller, pointed down. Below us a small stream wended between wooded uplands. Some two dwaburs ahead, almost lost to sight, the towers of a city or fortress rose from the trees. Below us, by the stream, a clearing offered a landing place. Down we went. Making camp, with the vollers pulled into the shelter of the trees, and a circumspect fire going, we surveyed our paltry rations and resigned ourselves to going hungry. The Pachaks glided into the woods to find game. Hunch brewed tea. Barkindrar, wounded leg or not, went off by the river to sling at birds. Nath the Shaft and I stood watch.

Presently this Deb-Lu-Quienyin, whom we now called Naghan the Seeing, approached. He looked thoughtful.

“Tyfar and Jaezila and Kaldu are for Hamal. I would like very much now to go to Vallia. But — what of you, Jak?”

“You know. South Pandahem.”

“Yes. I followed your adventures in Khorunlad, a little, a few quick observations in lupu to make sure you were all right. I can tell you I was heartily glad you came out safely.”

I favored him with a searching look. His face that had, since he’d regained his powers, lost a deal of those lines and wrinkles, was now down-drawn in fatigue. The smudges under his eyes, bruised purple, were new.

“You are tired, Quienyin?”

“Aye, Jak. By the Seven Arcades! Since our little trip with Monsters and Moders I do think... I need to sleep in a soft bed for a whole season.”

“That can be arranged in Vallia.”

“So? I shall go, and, I sincerely trust, with your blessing. But you?”

“Give me a look out, from time to time,” I said, lightly, thinking nothing of the words, trying to jolly him along. He was very down and I wondered why. “I shall pull out with a whole skin, never fear.”

He shook his head.

“From anyone else, I would take that as boasting, Jak—”

I was dutifully repentant. “And from me, also, I confess.”

“Mayhap.”

I drew a breath. “I have known other Wizards of Loh. Some I account good friends and others, as you know, as foe-men. But for none have I felt... Even Khe-Hi... It is strange. I would never have believed it of a Wizard of Loh. But it is, and I joy in the gift.”

He smiled. “And I, too — Jak.”

Again, that hesitation before the name. A deliberate hesitation? Yes, by Vox, I said to myself. Oh, yes... The Pachaks came back with game, and Barkindrar with a half-dozen birds, and Hunch got busy by the fire. Nodgen helped. Barkindrar stretched out with a grunt of relief, sticking his wounded leg before him like a crutch itself. Nath bent to him and Jaezila came across, imperious and commanding, ordering this and that, and mightily tender as she unwrapped the bandages to attend to the Bullet’s leg. I noticed that Kaldu remained always near his lady, ready to leap instantly to her defense. As a retainer, he was invaluable. Tyfar stood by as Jaezila worked on his man, and the cooking smells began to waft up. It was a pretty scene, there in the woodland, not quite Arden, perhaps, but very much a scene as I would like it on two worlds.

Now appeared a good opportunity to inspect the vollers we had liberated. I used this euphemism quite deliberately, to cloak the mischief we might have wrought in the desperate straits of our own needs. Two of these craft would go eventually to Vallia, and only one to Hamal. The Khorundese craft bulked far more blockily than the petal-shaped vollers of comparable size manufactured in Hamal or Hyrklana. They were profusely ornamented. I had felt the handling of the example I had flown to be clumsier than I was used to, not so quick in response to the levers of control. But, more primitive though they might be, they flew.

The food was served and we ate, a quite unbalanced diet; but succulent. Then I drew the Pachak twins aside.

“Brothers Fre-Da,” I addressed them seriously. “San Quienyin is for Vallia. Would you consider accompanying him?”

They looked, one at the other, each waiting a sign.

I went on, “I can assure you he will be received with honor in Vondium. As will you.”

“Will there be honorable employment for us there, Jak?”

I pulled my lip. “I am told the Emperor of Vallia no longer employs mercenaries to fight for his country.”

“This word,” said Logu Fre-Da, “we have heard.”

“With acrimony among the paktunsa,” elaborated Modo Fre-Da.

“It would not be seemly to allow the San to travel alone. I think if you give your nikobi, Vallia will welcome you royally. And there are many Pachaks who now call Vallia home.”

The twins looked at each other again and the looks said it all. They nodded. “This we will do.”

“Good.” I felt relieved. “Then that is settled.”

Nodgen returned to camp then bearing two huge armfuls of paline branches, and we all fell on the yellow cherry-like fruits with delight. So the day passed. Any good Kregan likes his eight good square meals a day — six at a pinch. But, as I say, our meals were woefully unbalanced. The suns began to sink. The ostentatious way in which Prince Tyfar and Jaezila each avoided the other’s company amused me. We were given a demonstration again of her prowess with the bow, for she hauled the bow off her shoulder, nocked the shaft, and let fly, and the bird that had been fleeting across the clearing fell plump down alongside Hunch. He jumped a foot.

“By Tryflor!” He grabbed the bird by the neck and swung it about, so that the arrow whirled. “It would not surprise me if the bird descended already plucked and stuffed for the fire!”

We all laughed.

Shadows of russet and sea green lay across the clearing. The Suns of Scorpio plunged into banks of ocher and rose clouds, and the broad bulk of Kregen rolled up to enfold them once more in night. The vollers were brought out from under the trees.

Barkindrar the Bullet declared roundly that, by the Resplendent Bridzilkelsh, he could get his leg up into the voller without assistance. He climbed in awkwardly. Nath the Shaft hovered over him. Tyfar was in the cabin stowing away his armor. At the second voller the Pachaks were stowing their gear and organizing the meticulous arrangements for their new employer to whom they had given their nikobi, and Quienyin was leaning on the coaming watching me walk across to him. I made up my mind.

“Hunch! Nodgen!”

“Jak?”

“You will fly with San Quienyin.”

“But—!”

“I shall see you soon. But I value the protection you, together with the twins, can afford the San.”

“Oh, of course,” said Hunch, crossly. “We can look after him all right.”

“So long as there is somewhere to run away, eh, Hunch?” And Nodgen guffawed. But there was no malice in him. He had seen how his comrade Hunch could fight, as had I.

“Up with you,” I said.

The good-byes were made. Tyfar came over with the others and we all called the Remberees... Quienyin and those four men to look after him lifted away in the voller into the darkling shadows. The suns were nearly gone.

Tyfar hurried back to finish stowing his armor. He had picked up a fine harness and cared for it. Jaezila and Kaldu stood looking over the coaming of the foredeck beside the control levers. I started for the remaining flier. Then I halted and swung back. I wanted a final word with Jaezila and Tyfar both, some jumbled notions in my old vosk skull of a head of trying to get them to see reason, one with the other. When Jaezila arrived in Ruathytu that young lady would discover that the gallant ninny Tyfar was a Prince of Hamal.

A twinge of disappointment that I would miss that entertaining spectacle afforded me resigned amusement.

From under the shadows of the trees men broke in a long savage line of twinkling steel and bared teeth. They yelled war cries as they charged. They raced for the voller where Jaezila’s bow slapped into her fist. I stood halfway between the voller and the thrusting line of foemen.

“Run, Jak!” screamed Jaezila.

There was no time to reach either of the fliers.

I unlimbered the thraxter and swung about.

“Take off!” I bellowed.

The men running in with such headlong ferocity were a mix of races. I cast a swift look back. Jaezila was about to leap over the coaming to join me. There was no sign of Tyfar. In a buffeting of wings, scores of mirvols catapulted over the trees, fell toward the voller. The flying animals bore flyers on their backs, counterparts to the footmen advancing against me. Weapons flamed in the last of the suns.

The trap had been sprung. But the cramphs were too late to take Quienyin’s airboat. Just before I swung about to start hammering at the running men I saw Kaldu seize Jaezila and draw her back into the voller. Heartbeats later the voller lifted into the air, smashing through the fluttering wings of the mirvols. She turned, she lifted, two mirvols collided and fell away in a smashing clawing of wing and talon, and then the voller soared away over the trees.

I was left to face the savage onrush of naked steel.