Chapter 11

Escape under the Moons of Kregen

The rapier went back into the scabbard with a snick.

I said, “If you shout loudly enough, Rees, you fambly, the whole camp will know we have escaped.”

“By Krun!” said the Trylon Rees of the Golden Wind, stepping forward and looking around him. “You are a changed man from our days in Ruathytu, so help me Opaz!”

“And you, too, Rees, old fellow. Has Opaz then conquered you? What of Havil the Green?”

“This is no time to argue theology, Hamun! For the good graces of Hanitcha the Harrower, let us get out of here!”

This was to be expected. The plan that had instantly flown into my head demanded a few murs alone, and yet I should have known that Rees, that glorious golden Numim who — I counted myself fortunate

— was a friend as well as an enemy, would be full of energy and resolve. He wouldn’t hang around when he could escape.

I said, “I am overjoyed to see you, Rees, by Krun! I did not know you were with the army here.”

“And I had no idea you were either, old fellow. Now where are you going?”

“I will fetch weapons and clothes.” I had seen he wore the wreck of a uniform, and he carried a stone in his hand with which he had knocked the Chulik out. “Wait quietly!”

“Don’t be long. They are as efficient a pack of scoundrels here as any I’ve known.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “These rasts of Tomboram are a fine fighting bunch.”

“Tomboram? These are cramphs of Vallia!”

So that meant I’d blown up one pretty little scheme.

Still, I would not have my friend Rees slain out of hand. He and I had ruffled it together in the Sacred Quarter of Ruathytu, when I was spying in Hamal; with Chido we had had some fine old brawls and roistered the night away. He thought I had been captured and escaped, as he had. Now I would put that to my advantage, for there were outstanding items in Hamal.

You may imagine the speed with which I ran.

“Tom!” I said into his ear, and he was awake on the instant. “I am going to Hamal. Do not question. You and Kytun must do what we planned with the army. I trust you. If there is any difficulty at all with the rast of a King of Tomboram — any difficulty at all — then pull out. Use the transports and the vollers and get the men safely away. No questions. Tell Kytun. Tell him I trust you both and if you argue too much, one with the other, I’ll knock both your heads together.”

“But Dray—!”

But I was gone.

In my own tent I ripped out a clean blue shirt for Rees and a loincloth. I snatched up a fine matched pair of rapier and main-gauche and then, on my way out, paused. I turned back, snatched up the longsword, and at top speed again fled into the moonlight.

I saw Rees hiding in the shadows of the tent. As I came fairly close to him a Chulik guard stepped out into the fuzzy pink and golden glow of moonslight. He started to snap his spear across in salute and to bellow out, “All’s well—” He would have finished that with, “My Prince!”

I leaped for him, took him by the throat, hissed in his ear: “Silence! Shut up! Stand still!” Then I tapped him alongside the head, just under the brim of his helmet. “Fall down and lie still, my friend!”

He fell down and he lay still.

Rees got up and whistled. “A different man from that Amak Hamun I rescued from the Rapas and the burning building, by Krun!”

“Here are clothes, here are weapons. Now let us find a voller.”

Rees stared at the longsword. “That bar of iron — is that a weapon?”

“I found it in a tent and thought it might serve.”

“I fancy I might wield it passing well.”

“I fancy so, too. But for now I think I will carry it. It pleases me.”

Rees shook that golden head of his so that his mane fluttered under the golden moonsglow. “A different man.”

We crept cautiously away.

“Not so, Rees. I am still the same Hamun ham Farthytu, the Amak of Paline Valley. But I have been in a battle and I see things a little differently now.”

We reached the voller lines. I had to be far more careful now than even Rees realized. I most certainly would not slay one of my own men, not even for a scheme of importance, but Rees would be elated if he could dispatch a hated Vallian to the Ice Floes of Sicce.

A thought occurred to me, so, as we eased up to a voller with our eyes glaring out at the guard, a Rapa who paced some fifty yards away, I said: “And Chido? Is he here, too?”

“Now, old feller! D’you think I’d sneak off and leave old Chido a prisoner? No, he was not taken, thanks to Opaz.”

I noted this use of Opaz by a Hamalian who in theory should stick to his state religion of Havil the Green, and who by belief and predilection professed Krun. I shook my head.

“Of course not. I am glad he is safe.” I was sincere.

How can a man be friends with men who are enemies of his country? It is a puzzle and a torment. In any event we stole a voller — not a prime example, I was glad to see — and we made good our escape, successfully eluding the guards. Much though this pleased me — we had not had to fight, so I was saved the agony that would have caused me — I was also hotly angry that my guards had allowed it. On one hand my pleasure was genuine as we flew swiftly through the pink-streaming moonslight, and on the other I was ragingly angry at the slackness of discipline. I would have something to say to the guard commanders when I got back, that I promised. To jump ahead, and also to explain much of what had happened, I should now say that Tom Tomor had sprung out of his bed, rushed out, and seen my attack on the Chulik. The Chulik had repeated my words. So Tom gave immediate orders that a mock pursuit was to take place. He understood just enough to assume I knew what I was doing, maniacal though that appeared. But then my chiefs of Valka are accustomed to a maniac leading them . . . In my own overweening pride I had decided that any attempt to fake the escape would alert Rees. Probably, in one way, that was right. But now I think that if Tom had not given his orders, Rees and I would never have escaped so easily.

During that flight through the night sky of Kregen with the moons casting down their pinkish golden light, Rees told me what had happened in his life since I had last seen him, a gravely ill man, near death’s door. He spoke of his daughter Saffi, the glorious golden lion-maid, and his thanks for her rescue were given in gruff, harsh tones, but simple, direct, and from the heart. She had reached Ruathytu safely with Doctor Larghos the Needle and Jiktar Horan. She had been full of her escapade when, kidnapped by Vad Garnath and his Kataki Strom, she had been taken as a bargaining counter to the Manhounds of Faol. Apparently she had described the fight in the voller, when I had just about keeled over from loss of blood, to her father as a High Jikai. Well, it had been a little Jikai, I suppose; I remember nothing of it, as I said.[3]

Rees looked back. “Those yetches of Vallia do not follow.” As he turned to me his golden face with that fierce lion-look glowed in the moonslight. “Hamun, old son. I owe you much, so much that I know I can never repay you, but—”

“You can repay me, Rees.”

“How?”

“Promise me you will hold out your hand in friendship to me.”

“Well, of course! May Hanitcha harrow me else!”

“In friendship, Rees, no matter what happens.”

“By Krun! This makes me glad to promise.”

Would a promise, the feeling of gratitude to me for the life of his adored daughter, weigh in the balance when he discovered I was a hated enemy, a Vallian and, much worse, the damned Prince Majister of those cramphs of Vallians? I wondered.

And, at that moment, I felt a great partiality for Rees, for hadn’t he dragged me off from poring over figures and plans — fascinating in themselves, of course — and hauled me into headlong action, haring over the surface of Kregen into more adventures, flying under the moons?

What Rees had to say about the Battle of Tomor Peak intrigued me, but he clearly did not relish talking about it. This, at least, was a comfort, because I only had to mumble something about joining at the last minute by voller, not really knowing Rees was there but finally wishing to join his regiment, and being caught up in the battle. I could not forbear adding, “And how did the regiment behave?”

His fists clenched. He looked unhappy and guilty, which pained me.

“You always hinted, more than hinted, about my beautiful zorcas. My lovely regiment! We trotted out, every lance aligned, all in perfect formation — oh, Hamun, the regiment looked grand!”

I did not speak but busied myself unnecessarily with the voller controls. Presently Rees went on in a slow, leaden voice, reliving those moments of scarlet horror.

“We were trotting out, ready to charge, having those yetches on the run. The infantry was attacking. We picked up speed, yelling: “Hanitch! Hanitch! Hamal!” in the old way. And then . . . then a crazy mob of maniacs astride animals — nikvoves, I believe they are called — smashed at us. My beautiful zorcas!”

He did not go on. He could not, I think, go on.

I said, “But the totrix regiments were smashed, also.”

“Aye. It is a sad day for us. What the Queen will say . . .”

“Will you reform the regiment?”

“Again?”

“The war still goes on.”

“Aye, old fellow, the damned war still goes on. And the Queen will not be pleased. We have suffered a reverse. And I think her treasury does not have a never-ending supply of deldys.”

This was heartening. I prodded. “Do you think she would come to some arrangement? Not sue for peace, but desist from the fighting while arrangements are made?”

“Now that the rasts of Vallians have come in, maybe that will stay her hand. She has a fear of Vallia, for all they are a miserable lot, too stupid to build their own vollers.”

By Vox! It was true!

“And,” went on Rees, visibly growing warmer, “did you see the crazy man who led the charge? A big man, broad in the shoulder like you. His face was covered by a blazing golden mask. He came in at the head of the nikvoves like Hanitcha himself.”

I said, with perfect truth, “No. I did not see him.”

A breeze of alarm touched me. That golden mask was a mere toy, designed to mark me out so that my own men might know and follow. It had served here in that Rees had not seen my face. But suppose some imp of memory stirred, some mannerism betrayed me? Then common sense reasserted itself. How could the Trylon Rees possibly equate his bumbling friend Amak Hamun, for all he had picked up a few sworder’s tricks lately, with the puissant majesty of the Prince Majister of Vallia?

For Rees knew who that man riding like the thunderclouds in his golden mask was.

“A feller called Prescot. Prince Majister of Vallia. I’d like to have him at the point of my rapier!”

I coughed and twitched the controls. The airboat flew up and swooped, and Rees, thrown off balance, yelped, “What in the name of Hakki are you playing at?”

“A shadow, there under the moon . . . It is gone now.”

He peered but could see nothing. “We should be up with the remnants of the army soon.”

“Would you give the Jikai to the Vallians for their victory?”

He looked at me as though I had sprouted devil’s horns.

“The Jikai? To nulshes of Vallia! Are you off your head?”

“They beat us, fair and square.”

He chewed on that. His hand brushed his golden mane. He did not like the thought. I pressed on relentlessly. “If they march to fight the main army, they might overthrow that, also. Kov Pereth—”

Luckily he burst in then, interrupting me, fortunately concealing my lack of up-to-date knowledge out of Hamal.

“Yes! The Queen threw Kov Pereth into a dungeon in the Hanitch! That idiot Kov Hangol is Pallan of the armies of the north now. I know him! A bungler, but he knows how to fawn on the Queen, Havil take him!”

“She’ll run out of Kovs soon.”

“You may jest, Hamun. But you have a sorry truth in the jest.”

“Then she may turn to a Trylon, perhaps the Trylon of the Golden Wind.”

“She knows I have never toadied to her, and dangerous that has been, fool that I am. No, old friend, I think we know each other well enough by now for me to tell you that the King himself frowns on his wife’s follies. Of course he is powerless, but one day . . . who knows?”

“The King?” I said, surprised. “But he is a mere puppet.”

“Today, yes. If the war goes on . . . then tomorrow, who’s to say?”

As you may imagine, I digested all this very thoroughly. It would not be as easy as all that. Queen Thyllis was seated very firmly on the throne — she and the Opaz-forsaken manhounds that lolled on her golden steps. The King her husband was a mere cipher. If the Queen was to be deposed, I hoped for little from the King. Anyway, as soon as a great and suitable opportunity arose, a mighty victory, for instance, then Queen Thyllis was going to hold her triumphal procession and have herself crowned Empress of Hamal. She was hard, and evil, and power-crazed.

Mind you, she would make exactly the same insults about the Emperor of Vallia and his son-in-law. I could guess.

Rees pointed down over the wooden coaming.

“There they are. We’ll have to go down at once, before they shoot at us.”

I swung the flier around and set the control levers for a rapid descent. In the vitals of the craft the sturm-wood orbits would be turning and the silver boxes would be rotating around each other, their power directing and upholding the flier. Down we plunged. I still had plans about vollers and silver boxes in Hamal, and this time I would not be put off by a miserable farce of dirt and air. No, by Zair! For this time I was armed with knowledge I believed had been sent to me by direct intervention of the Star Lords or the Savanti.

Any help from them was like a gallon of water in the Owlarh Waste — something not to be believed. But this time I believed, the water was no mirage.

So we slanted in and landed, quickly ringed by fierce, hot-eyed men of Hamal, soldiers who had lost a battle and did not care for the experience. Units were mixed up, but discipline still held together, and we were passed through to the Chuktar who had taken command after the general had been slain. These remnants were on their way north and west to join up with Kov Hangol, the new commander in chief. Our story excited little comment, even though we were the only two to escape after being made prisoner, as far as I could determine. I’d have something to say to my own men later if there had been others.

Chido said that, by Krun! he’d given Rees up for dead. Of course, dear old Chido, he said Wees for Rees. He stared at me as though I was a ghost. He goggled at me, his cheerful, flap-eared, chinless face alight with fellow feeling.

I said, “Chido, you old rascal. How happy I am to see you alive!”

We spent two miserable days with these miserable men, and then a merker came with orders for Rees to take himself and what remained of his officers back to Ruathytu. I went also. I believed Rees would have need of friends. Other officers who had fought and lost were also to report back. The men were to rejoin the main army and then be distributed into other regiments. The flank force had been wiped out. On the flight back no one spoke much. They all acted like a bunch of misbehaving midshipmen up on first lieutenant’s report — only those poor devils suspected heads would roll. It is, I assure you, a painfully curious and sobering experience to share the suffering of men who go to meet a harsh and unjust fate, knowing you are the prime mover, the person responsible for their suffering. Believe me.

There also flew with me the memory of the blood, smoking and hot, which had been so lavishly spilled on the battlefield of Tomor Peak. I had seen men pierced through, men whose limbs had been hacked half off; I had seen zorcas screaming in agony; I had seen whole regiments smashed away to a red pulp. In the arrow storm I had watched all this — and sitting in the voller on the way to Ruathytu, capital of Hamal, I wondered just how much of the reality a vindictive queen could comprehend. What she saw in her foul Jikhorkdun paled beside the reality of a battlefield.

How many of these officers would end up in the arena, spilling their guts in the Jikhorkdun for the sadistic pleasure of the crowd and their evil ruler?

So, of course, the danger rose in my mind and mocked me.

I had borne at least three names in Hamal that could identify me, clean or dirty, bearded or clean-shaven: Chaadur. Bagor ti Hemlad. Amak Hamun Farthytu.

Well, I was Hamun now and had no wish at all to be Bagor ti Hemlad again, for he had run afoul of Queen Thyllis and for a time had been her plaything. That cramph of a King Doghamrei had attempted to have Bagor slain by setting him alight and dumping him out of a Hamalese skyship down onto the decks of a galleon of Vallia. One galleon had burned. This crazy onker Bagor, with his trousers on fire had wrecked the two Hamalese skyships in a midair collision, and then had taken passage aboard the other galleon to further adventures.[4]

All this I knew. My rear still itched when I thought of that fight and my trousers burning. As for Chaadur, it was wrongly said that he had slain the Kovneva Esme, when he had in reality merely set that despicable woman — for whom one could only feel a tiny pang of pity — in silver chains, as she had kept her own girls in chains that galled them. The Kov her husband had raged after Chaadur, who had been a gul working in the voller manufactory of Sumbakir, run by Ornol ham Feoste, the Kov of Apulad. I had never met Ornol ham Feoste in Ruathytu, for Sumbakir lay at a considerable distance, but I had always been on the lookout for him — he would know Chaadur when he saw him.[5]

Also, a minor worry: those two rascals Avec and Ilter who had named Chaadur knew that Chaadur’s real name was Dray Prescot.

Ruathytu looked pretty much as that sinful brawling city had always looked, except for a pervasive air of dinginess, dustiness, a down-at-heels lethargy that, product of the war though it was, depressed me. We were carried swiftly from the voller landing park to the north of the River Havilthytus in a procession of zorca riders silent except for the clitter-clatter of polished hooves against the stones. The Queen allowed only the most important people and super-urgent messengers to land on her palace island where the evil pile of Hammabi el Lamma rose in spires, peaks, and turrets against the sky. The whole northern area of Ruathytu through which we passed was given over to the soldiers’ barracks. There had once been a merry little fire up there . . . another story. At the river we were ferried across to the palace island, the boats thunking into the ocher flood. The rowers at the oars were being reminded that they were slaves by the lashes in the hands of the whip-Deldars. I noticed there were far more diffs in Ruathytu now. The Queen was spending the country’s money prodigiously in hiring mercenaries. The emperor in Vallia was having to dig deep, too, to counter all this.

There were few preliminaries at the palace before we were shuffled into line and ushered through into the Hall of Notor Zan. This was not the impressive audience chamber in which I had encountered Queen Thyllis before. That chamber had been dominated by the enormous crystal throne, the golden steps, the golden-chained Chail Sheom, and, perhaps most of all, dominated by the somnolent but savagely vicious forms of the jiklos, Manhounds of Faol used as throne-step pets. There also lay in that resplendent high-ceiled chamber a hole in the marble floor beneath which grew a syatra, that leprous-white man-eating plant.

It soon became clear that Queen Thyllis had no intention of thrusting these officers down to her pet syatra.

The Hall of Notor Zan opened before us and we shuffled through to stand in a bunch on the left of the tall balass doors. The whole chamber was robed in black. The ceiling was not very tall, as such things are measured in palaces, and the room was out of proportion to the extent that its length was overly long to its width. Black cloths cloaked the ceiling and black drapes covered the walls. Samphron-oil lamps shed a clear, unwavering light. There were no windows. At the far end, sitting on a giant black basaltic throne, the Queen clenched her arms on the fur coverings — a dramatic and dynamic picture of a woman/queen worked up to a pitch of anger. There were no Chail Sheom in evidence here for the grim work ahead, but three manhounds dozed on the black and shining steps. I sniffed. Incense burned, and incense is calculated to make a man throw up.

The Queen’s guard stood to either hand beside the throne in close mesh mail. Marshals and chamberlains, all dressed in sober black, fussed around, ready to open the proceedings. And the Queen? Queen Thyllis? She sat erect and leaning a little forward, dressed all in black — as she had been when I first saw her during that little folly, clutched in the grip of flutsmen. Her face blazed white now, her green eyes diamonds to match the fire of Genodras. That rich red mouth of hers which could firm instantly to killing hardness was set now like a trap, with a corner of her lip caught up between her white pointed teeth.

She had never failed to make an impression, this Queen Thyllis, the Empress of Hamal. The stillness held. I admit to feeling the effectiveness of the stage-setting. If I had been a Hamalese officer laden with guilt for having lost a battle, no doubt I’d have felt as sick as these poor devils around me.

A marshal spoke to us after a while, a prickly, stupid little man, waving a sheet of paper.

“When your name is called out go forward. The Queen will hear the charge against you and give judgment. If you are adjudged not guilty return here and stand to the right of the door. Although, for myself, I think she will send you all to the Jikhorkdun.”

The names were called. Men went forward. They were mostly regimental commanders, Jiktars, or pastang commanders, Hikdars. Of the first ten only one was reprieved to go stand by the right of the door. Seven were condemned to the Jikhorkdun and one was condemned to a hanging. One was given

— there and then! — to the jiklos, who arose in fearsome bestiality and tore him to pieces. The blood was left to shine greasily on the black marble of the floor in front of the throne. About then the thought occurred to me, for I had been absorbed by the Queen’s flummery in overawing her soldiers, that my name would not be on the paper prepared according to the rigid laws of Hamal. I had not been a member of the army and so could not be written down. Eventually, everyone else would be called forward to face their judgment. I would be left to stand alone!

Then, surely then, the evil Queen could not fail to recognize in this man claiming to be Hamun ham Farthytu, Amak of Paline Valley, that same wild leem Bagor ti Hemlad who had rescued her, then refused to bend to her whims, and one day disappeared from her dark palace of Hammabi el Lamma!

How she would smile when she had me once more in her clutches!

Chapter 12

In the Hall of Notor Zan

As that macabre and horrific scene went on, I stood there calculating my chances. Although I did not sweat I grew decidedly warm. Another screaming wretch was thrown to the manhounds. These jiklos had been well trained, for they disposed of him in a cat-like, playful, obscene way. When he was dead they did not eat him, crunching on his bones with their jagged teeth; instead they pushed the mangled body aside and looked up, sniffing, their tongues lolling, waiting for the next victim.

“The army does not deserve this!” breathed a Jiktar next to Rees.

Rees the lion-man said, “The army lost. We were defeated. That is a personal affront to the Queen.”

I carefully edged a little away from Rees and Chido. Our weapons had been taken from us, but we had been tricked out in fancy new uniforms. Our baggage, what there was of it after the rout of the army, had been brought back and warehoused in the soldiers’ quarters. I had stuffed the longsword down into a roll of blankets and swathed a military cloak around the whole.

The feel of that longsword hilt in my hands would have been highly comforting now. The mailed guards, the manhounds . . . if I fought, it would most likely be my last fight of all. There had to be a better way to get out of this than simple fighting. Brains and cunning rather than swords and brawn, now . . . The Queen would rejoice to humiliate and torture this Bagor ti Hemlad, who was me, and her revenge would surpass the terror of the manhounds.

In accordance with the strict laws of Hamal the offending officers were called up in alphabetical order —

needless to say the Kregish alphabet does not begin with an a and end with a z — with the pastang Hikdars grouped after their Jiktar. The Chuktar who had taken command after the death of the commanding general featured in the group of many men whose names began with h. He went forward, upright, dour, already believing himself condemned.

“I think, Chuktar Hingleson,” said the Queen after the man’s supposed crimes had been read out, “that you deserve great ill at my hands.”

“We fought, Majestrix. We were defeated.”

“I am minded to let my pretty jiklos try their teeth on you.”

“As the Queen commands.”

He was a brave old fellow, if somewhat lacking in the knowledge needful in a successful commander. He held himself upright in that black room of horror, and he did not flinch.

“Because of you my army was beaten.”

He didn’t dare contradict her, except for his life. He said, “The army was already defeated when I took command. This I swear, my Queen, by the light of the Silver One.”

I knew what he was talking about.

Lem the Silver Leem!

That foul religion wormed its way into the very heart of evil societies and now held sway over the Queen. And this Chuktar was a devotee. Maybe, just maybe he would come out of this with a whole skin. I watched, fascinated. I remembered the scene so vividly, the men around me shaking in their shoes, the black light-absorbing drapes on the walls, the tall, unwavering flames of the lamps, the black throne, and the hideous forms of the manhounds slavering for more now they had tasted blood. And over all, the vibrant form of the Queen, all in black, with her white face brooding on her judgments, her green eyes emerald fires of hatred and power!

“You may go to stand by the right of the door, Chuktar Hingleson. You will report to me when I send for you. Hold yourself in readiness.”

“My Queen!” He bellowed it out in parade-ground fashion, and that snapped my mood. I realized I had to do something or else be faced with the prospect of forming a manhound’s supper, if nothing worse. The Chuktar stomped back and it was the turn of the next Jiktar. Rees would be next. I realized how selfish I had been in thinking only of my own skin, when Rees and Chido would be striding over the black marble to their destinies. I saw the Chuktar halfway back. All eyes were fixed on him as he turned and performed the full incline bow. I moved very quietly and very smoothly from the left of the door to the right. The man to whose side I stepped moved forward to see better as the Chuktar straightened up. He murmured, so low the words were a mere hum. “He is a dead man.”

I said nothing. The Chuktar joined us at the right of the door. In the ensuing shuffle so that he might stand at the front, I became integrated with the others who had been reprieved. When Rees stepped forward I sent up a prayer to Zair for him.

Zair, that deity who inhabits the red sun Zim, smiled; Rees was discharged from obloquy and, with his officers, including Chido, was sent to stand at the right of the door. Then it was over and we could escape into the fresh air of Ruathytu and Rees could say to me, puzzled,

“I did not hear your name called, Hamun.”

To which I replied, “I think many of us missed a great deal when the names were called. Did you see the Chuktar?”

The question set him off and, with Chido, we went to find a wet, talking away about the experience like a drove of fluttrells. We all knew we had brushed death by, there in the black Hall of Notor Zan in the Hammabi el Lamma.

I did not know whether or not the little ant that had crawled on my boot when I mounted Stormcloud to lead the charge in the Battle of Tomor Peak had survived. Perhaps he had tumbled off somewhere in the trampled grass and run to hide among the corpses. Well, perhaps something of his stature belonged to me during those moments in the Hall of Notor Zan. I had taken a crazy chance, for if a man had been seen crossing from the left to the right, he would have been arrested instantly to face all manner of unmentionable horrors. But there had been nothing else to do. Yes, I hoped that little ant had lived, as I had.

We did not feel like patronizing the Golden Talu, for the atmosphere in that high-class tavern, as I have said, was most respectable. We sought out a much more robust, coarse, hard-drinking den — not a dopa den — and swung together through the low portals of the Scented Sylvie. With the jug upon the sturm-wood table and our glasses filled, Chido had a fit of the shakes, remembering. Rees, too, looked unhealthily sallow. They were suffering from the aftereffects of what they had been through, and I suffered with them. With a few coarse oaths and more drink, and the sight of the dancing girls — marvelous Fristle fifis of incredible lissomness and lasciviousness — they perked up. We sat back to carouse the night away.

This did not suit my plans, but I wanted to ask questions anyway, and I might find loosened tongues in a low tavern where men grew merry. The quality of the company was not low — there were two Kovs and three Trylons there — but the atmosphere was conducive to erratic behavior, hard drinking, wenching, and a fuddlement of the senses. As I had found out, when you act as a spy you must employ what weapons come to hand.

Looking around the low-ceiled tavern with the wine-drenched tables, the scurrying serving wenches, the flushed faces of boisterous revelers, I found it extraordinarily difficult to realize all that had happened to me since I had spent my nights in Ruathytu in just this fashion. But not whole nights — when the others had staggered off to their homes I had gone leaping over the rooftops, my cloak flaring, a mask covering my features, a rapier glittering ready to spit the first person who tried to stop me. Now I was going about exactly the same task in a different way.

And only because I had rescued Rees’s daughter, the glorious lion-maid Saffi, from a hideous death in Far Faol.

The mad dash to save Saffi had not been a hindrance to my plans, had not been an interruption in my search for the secrets of the vollers. If I had not gone after Saffi I would not have come into possession of the information I had through a narrow air shaft, a fragment of a conversation between that cramph Vad Garnath and his agent, the Chuktar Strom, Rosil na Morcray who was a vile Kataki, and Phu-si-Yantong, a Wizard of Loh, a man of whom I was to know far more later, to my cost. For one thing, this Wizard of Loh fancied he was going to take over Hamal from Queen Thyllis; that is, if I had heard him correctly. And he intended to use me, Dray Prescot, as his pawn in taking secret command of the Vallian Empire when the Emperor was gone. This was megalomania. At least, that is what I thought then. Later I came to know this Phu-si-Yantong better and to understand he was in deadly earnest.

Yantong had also said I was not to be assassinated, so he had not sent the stikitches who had attacked Delia, the twins, and myself in our walled garden of Esser Rarioch. He had mentioned the Nine Faceless Ones of Hamal as appointing the nobles to their duties in connection with voller manufacture. The secrets were well understood to be secrets and were well kept. I believed exactly the same precautions were taken in Hyrklana, where Queen Fahia would have me dragged into her arena and butchered for the crowds if I showed myself. So, with the smell of spilled wine about me, men arguing in half-drunken ways, the girls dancing, and the air filled with shouts, there in the Scented Sylvie, I marked one of the Kovs talking to a Trylon. Both were of Hamal, hard men, filled with the vigor of full growth. Their faces severe even as they felt the wine working on their senses, they were men who knew their high positions and would not tolerate a single infringement upon their pride or their dignity. The pride of a noble is fanatical in most countries of Kregen. This I knew.

Outside in the moons-shot darkness they would have their preysany litters waiting with their link slaves and a retinue of guards, fierce predatory men — diffs, apims — who would delight in smashing a few heads to clear a path for their master.

The tavern was well patronized by diffs, I noticed and, even as Rees turned to me, I saw a fresh party of Kataki officers stride in, their tails bare, laughing, shouting, clearly already very merry from previous taverns. Other halflings sat at the sturm-wood tables, Chuliks, Rapas, Blegs — many and many a member of the diffs on Kregen, many of races I have not even mentioned yet, for the reason that they have not figured largely in my story up to this time. This was clear proof, if proof was needed, that Queen Thyllis had been pouring out her coffers to hire mercenaries. Bankers like Casmas the Deldy had lent her vast sums, to be rewarded by patents of nobility, favors or prerequisites within an administration which was corrupt despite all the rigid laws of Hamal. This reeking tavern, the Scented Sylvie, had evidently become a favorite haunt of the halflings in Ruathytu.

“Damned diffs,” the Kov was saying, his face a deep plum purple, as he lifted his glass. Rees saw my look and turned to me, saying, “You don’t want to take too much notice of what old Nath the Crafty says, but, by Krun, you must watch your back if you cross him.”

“Nath ham Livahan,” said Chido, and bent his goggle-eyed face back to his glass. “Kov of Thoth Uppwe. We call him old Nath the Crafty—”

“And, by Krun,” chipped in Rees, “never a man better deserved it!”

“He don’t like diffs,” Chido said, laughed, and drank.

Well, there were many men on Kregen who disliked every other man not of their race. This was inevitable, I suppose, given xenophobia. A Chulik does not get on with a Fristle. A Rapa gets on with very few other races. Blegs will draw swords against Mystiges without excuse. And apims like Chido and myself — there probably being more apims than any other race on Kregen — often came in for hatreds from every quarter.

The presence of so many Katakis intrigued me, for previously, as far as I was aware, they had seldom ventured far from their homes in the Shrouded Sea and elsewhere. The only reason I could advance for their presence was the prospect of enormous hauls of slaves, for Katakis are slave-masters par excellence.

The noise racketed on and the girls danced; wine and beer were spilled, and men cursed by a medley of gods and spirits. More than once, listening, I heard the name of Lem spurt from the seething mass. Rees touched me on the forearm.

“Leave him be, Hamun. He is in a nasty mood.”

For quite humorous reasons, I could not explain to Rees that I wished to discuss the problems of the Nine Faceless Ones and the secrets of the vollers with this Nath the Crafty, this Kov of Thoth Uppwe, so I sat back in the chair. Nath the Crafty suddenly jerked up as his arm was jogged, and a stream of wine — the best the house afforded although not Jholaix — spattered the front of his gray shirt and the ling fur of his pelisse. Kov Nath leaped to his feet, his harsh features convulsed. He dragged out his thraxter.

The Bleg who had jostled him, about to apologize, snapped into the fiercely angry rage of that race and whipped his sword out in turn.

“Cramph!” bellowed Kov Nath. “Rast! You will pay for that!”

A Kataki about to sit at the next table, his tail curved over his shoulder, whipped a hand into his sash and flashed out a wickedly bladed dagger. The thing was strapped to his tail in a twinkling. Other diffs were brandishing weapons. The moment spurted a dark and horrible fire.

“To me, apims!” screeched Nath the Crafty. What craftiness there was now about his conduct I couldn’t see.

A Rapa hurled a knife. A Kataki whistled his bladed tail. “Kill the apim yetch!” yelled a Chulik, his tusks catching the oil lamps’ gleam and glistening.

In the next mur the tavern turned into a boil of action and fighting, a frenzied, murderous brawl. We three, Rees, Chido, and myself, sat at our table shoved up against the wall. I said, “If an apim tries to stick you, Rees, we will help you dispose of him.”

“And,” said Rees, “if a Numim does likewise, likewise.”

The tavern exploded with action. Men were reeling around, many more than half drunk, blinded by the glitter of sword and rapier. Daggers thunked home. The Katakis whistled their tails about and the wicked blades sliced and slashed. I sat still. I meant what I had said to Rees for one thing. For another, every man slain here meant a fighting man less for Hamal to fling against my country. A Numim staggered from the press, a rapier still transfixing his body, and reeled to crash full-length on our table.

Rees pushed him off to die on the floor.

“Naghan Largismore,” he said. “He should have known better.”

Blood sprayed from an apim as he sprawled past, his neck efficiently slashed by a Kataki tail. The Kov of Thoth Uppwe, this Nath ham Livahan men called Nath the Crafty, fought with a terrible cold fury which had swiftly succeeded his hectoring words and hot-tempered anger. But there were more diffs than apims. Another apim sprawled to the floor, grasping his neck and looking surprised as the blood spurted between his fingers. The Kataki who had flicked his tail with such virulent purpose swerved to get at another young apim whose thraxter glistened with fresh blood. It was increasingly difficult for me to sit. I cannot analyze my feelings. I glanced at Rees. He looked disgusted with the whole proceedings. I wondered . . . suppose Rees had been with other Numims this night, instead of two apim friends? How often we behave so vastly differently with different company!

But I felt I could not sit much longer and watch young apims being slaughtered by Katakis and Chuliks. A man stood in the doorway. I had not seen him enter. I looked at him from the tail of my eye — and I knew! I knew!

I knew what he would do and I knew the brand he wielded. Under an enveloping black cloak he wore hunting leathers, with the addition of a gray shirt. As he burst forward into the fray I saw his sword, that Savanti sword of superb balance and inconceivably cunning design, fashioned of steel far surpassing anything we have so far forged.

A man serving the Savanti! He had not been thrown out of Paradise, as I had. He had gone through all the tests and had been proved fit to be numbered among the elect. Now he worked with great purpose for the Savanti in their high designs for Kregen.

I admit I felt all the pangs I had thought dead and buried as I watched this man go about the business for which he had been selected, tested, and trained: to alter fate.

Once on a beach in Valka I had seen a young man try to do what the Savanti required, and fail. And so I had come into the possession of Alex Hunter’s Savanti sword. Do you wonder that I gazed at this man who had come from the Swinging City, and hungered for his blade?

Oh, yes, of course there were all the other reasons. But although I did not harbor a grudge against the Savanti for so contemptuously dismissing me from Aphrasöe, the Swinging City, I felt under no obligation to go out of my way for them; rather I would go on doing what I had always done, knowing that much of it paralleled what the Savanti were attempting to do on Kregen.

The fight did not last too long after that. This man was no novice, no amateur like Alex Hunter. He kept his eyes open and ducked the thrown knife, the wickedly flicking tail. He had been trained well. And he had a great deal of experience.

Soon the diffs were calling it a day and running. The tavern’s occupants boiled out into the street, here in the Sacred Quarter where brawls were a way of life, running and shouting and hullabalooing. In any second the watch and the police would be here, and the laws of Hamal would swing into action. I stood up.

“Right gladly, Hamun,” said Rees.

Kov Nath stood, shaking a little, staring around at the carnage. The Trylon with him, holding a bloody arm, looked sick.

Rees and Chido made for the door. Going with them, for I had no wish to tangle with the law again, I watched the man sent by the Savanti. He walked quickly to the door, waited for Rees and Chido to pass out — had he raised his marvelous blade against Rees he would have been a dead man, for my rapier was loose in the scabbard — and swiftly followed. I went after them. The street, indifferently lighted here, with the moons casting enough light to see sufficiently well not to trip over the first corpse on the doorstep, showed blank and empty. The link slaves had run. The guards had fought among themselves. I may be cynical, but I felt sorrow over that. Fully prepared to make my own opening, Chido saved me the gambit.

“Warm work, dom,” he said in his shrill voice.

“Aye,” said this man, swirling his black cape about him, “for a tavern fight.”

“Do you hate us so much then?” Rees spoke heavily.

“It were better you did not ask that question, Numim.”

Walking up, I said, “Do you have a bed for the night, dom?”

“No. I am but newly arrived.”

I could believe that.

“I have rooms,” I said. “You would be welcome.”

Rees stared at me. I hated to hurt him, but I fancied he would remember our words in the voller. No explanation was possible.

The man from the Savanti hesitated only a moment, then said, “I am grateful, dom.”

“As for me, I am for home,” said Rees.

“And I,” piped up Chido. “I will walk with you.”

Rees did not say good night or Remberee. I was grateful for that. What I was about to do would betray Hamun ham Farthytu, and I had spent a lot of time and pain building up that young man. When Rees and Chido had gone we walked the other way. We had gone perhaps six paces when I heard the shouts and I yelled, “Run!”

He ran without question. The Savanti train well.

We eluded the watch and the patrols and so walked to my old inn, the Kyr Nath and the Fifi. Absences in time of war are a common occurrence, and Nulty had seen to payment for the rooms. How was he faring in Paline Valley? We went up to my room and I closed the door. The man from the Savanti unclasped his cape and threw it swirling on the bed. I looked at him. He smiled. He was apim, of course, with thick fair hair and a square-set face, exceedingly grim as to the set of the jaw. I liked the brightness of his eye and the laugh lines at the corners of his mouth. Strongly built, as, of course, he must be, he looked like what he was, a powerful, professional fighting man. I said, “Happy Swinging. And how are things in Aphrasöe?”

Before I had even finished, that superb, deadly Savanti blade had flashed from the scabbard and the point pricked my throat.

“Speak, rast! What do you know of Aphrasöe? Speak quickly and speak the truth — or you are a dead man!”

Chapter 13

Of a Savapim and the Savanti

Could I take this man? A fighting man trained by the Savanti, in as ferocious form as I had seen a man on a hair-trigger of violence? And, moreover, a man armed with that Savanti sword which is, I truly believe, the most perfect sword on the face of Kregen, not excepting the fantastic Krozair longsword?

Could I take him?

“Hurry, rast! My patience wears thin! Speak up!”

I jerked my head back. I saw — a mere glance in passing — a drop of my blood on the gleaming blade he had so thoroughly cleaned on dead men’s clothes.

He took that as a signal of treachery and drove in instantly.

I had only a rapier and main-gauche. There was scarcely time to explain to him that I was not in the habit of speaking up with a sword at my throat — not, that is, unless absolutely no other course lay open. The other course here was starkly plain. I could get my fool self killed. I skipped back and the main-gauche came out of its scabbard seemingly of its own volition; his blade screeched against it. The following rapier thrust — the rapier had leaped into my hand, out of the scabbard, and pointed at him as though alive — passed through thin air. He danced away.

“You fight well. But I think you are a dead man.”

Could I possibly face a man armed with a Savanti sword? I had never done so before except in practice in Aphrasöe, and that, clearly, was a different kettle of fish.

“Damn!” I burst out. “You’re a bunch of rogues in Aphrasöe these days! Can’t a fellow wish you Happy Swinging without a sword at his throat?”

“Tell me what you know of Aphrasöe and I will not slay you.”

“And if you don’t speak civilly I’ll have to teach you a lesson! Do you know Maspero?”

“Yes.” The brand gleamed in the lamplight as he let it drop a fraction.

“He was my tutor.”

“You are a Savapim?”

I had never heard the word before. It must mean a man who was an agent of the Savanti. Boldly, then, lying in my teeth, I said, “Of course, you damned great onker! What is your name?”

“Oh, no. You tell me your name, onker.”

Well, at least we were past the sword stage and to the probably more fruitful arguing stage. I did not laugh. I do not laugh easily outside the company of Delia, my children, and a few close friends, as you know.

Anyway, what confounded name should I give? The old and always amusing question popped up again. The Savanti could not have realized I was in the tavern when they had dispatched this man — one of their Savapims — to sort out the quarrel. Unlike the Star Lords, who dumped me down in the middle of a problem of life and death stark naked and weaponless, the Savanti at least equipped their agents with clothes and weapons. The Star Lords are altogether a starker group, starker, darker, and far more deadly.

This fellow could always make a few inquiries here and quickly discover I was the Amak of Paline Valley. Always assuming, of course, that I let him live that long.

So I said: “I am the Amak Hamun ham Farthytu.”

“An Amak! You must have gone through Aphrasöe before my time.”

“You get a thousand years,” I said meaningfully.

“Yes. I am Wolfgang . . .” Then he paused. After a moment he went on, “Wolfgang. That is enough. And where is your sword?”

“Wolfgang?” I said. “My sword is in another place.” And, by Zair, that was true!

“You would not understand Wolfgang. The name is strange to you, I have no doubt.”

If he was about to launch into a garbled explanation that he came from one of the lights in the sky and a place there called Germany, he would be badly trained. He did not.

“Very strange.” I prodded. “Where is your home, then, before you came to Aphrasöe down the River Aph?”

This seemed to reassure him. He did not enlighten me apart from a vague reference to a “distant place.”

“I am from Hamal,” I said. “And my labors are here. You?”

“I cannot understand why you were not used. I am tired lately, I have been very busy.” He grumbled on about the missions which had occupied him while he put the sword up and I found some wine —

reasonable stuff Nulty had left, a middling Stuvan — and we drank. The tension lessened. He explained that he had been in so many fights lately that he’d upset his tutor, a man he called Harding, because of the great quantity of deaths he had caused. I wondered, as you may imagine.

“My training taught me that life is sacred.”

“Of course! That is just the point! It is a dispute that cannot be resolved. Kregen must be civilized, as the Savanti decree.” He waxed excited and perhaps the wine did the trick.

‘The doves watch well.” He sat on my bed cradling the wine glass. I kept it hospitably filled. He was talking about the white Savanti dove that had flown over me many times on Kregen to spy on me and report back to the Savanti. “There are so many diffs on this terrible world . . .”

I prodded, for I had not completed the course in Aphrasöe.

“The halflings live here as well as we apims.”

“But have they always? I am considered high in the Savapim. This mission was given to me as an emergency, at the last minute. I should be in Aphrasöe now, happily swinging. But as for the diffs, of course there are many of them, how could it be otherwise? This is not Earth—” He checked himself, put the glass down, and added, “My home.”

“Earth?” I said. “Is that in Havilfar?”

“You would not understand.”

“Maybe not. Tell me about the latest reports in Aphrasöe concerning the diff question. The problem is acute.”

We talked for a while about Aphrasöe, that marvelous city in the lake of the River Aph, and of the pool of baptism in the River Zelph where a dip will confer a thousand years of life, tremendous resistance to disease, and rapid recovery from wounds. I fully demonstrated that I knew what I was talking about, and his guard slipped; he drank a little more. Of course there were many different kinds of halflings, beast-men, men-beasts, on this world. It was an alien world. Would you expect to find men exactly the same as Madison Avenue advertising executives if you penetrated the jungles of Central America, the ice floes of the north? Some idiot might cavil at so many different kinds of men; the variety of nature is so enormous that it is this Earth with only one kind of dominant man that is strange and odd. Here on Kregen one kind of man had not obtained an ascendancy over all the others. And, too, this Wolfgang also believed that many of the species and races had come from other planets, as we had done ourselves, although I did not tell him that.

In an alien setting only the most stupid of blinkered idiots could say that they would not expect to see many different kinds of life. Differences in numbers of arms and legs, in facial and skull structures, are the most common ways in which diffs vary from apims, but they are only the outward show. The most significant differences are those of psychology rather than physiology, of racial outlooks rather than morphology. At least this Wolfgang was not such an onker as to be eternally surprised at the multifarious faces of nature.

And suppose the Star Lords had scoured the galaxy to find different forms of life and placed them all here arbitrarily? What was their purpose? Why did they use me, Dray Prescot? One day, I promised myself, one day I’d find out.

Wouldn’t a Pachak, with his tail hand, think an apim a most crippled mortal? Wouldn’t a Djang, with his four powerful arms, think an apim practically armless? Who is to say who differs from whom?

The closed mind is always the most frightening horror in any world.

“Anyway,” said this Savapim, who came from Germany on a spot of dirt circling a spot of light all but invisible from Kregen, “I am tired and it is late. Tomorrow I must continue my task. I envy you resident Savapims.” He glanced at me sharply. “Although, if you are doing your job properly, why was I needed here at all?”

“There are many fresh diffs in Ruathytu just now,” I said diplomatically. He could sleep in Nulty’s room. I saw to his wants, and he stretched out. “As I say,” he said, yawning,

“we now believe that the distribution of diffs and flora and fauna has clearly been carried out deliberately. And with a lot of snarl-ups. Has it been done to plan or arbitrarily? Has the initial distribution been completed, or is it a continuous process? And how long ago was it begun?” He yawned again. “And is evolution taking care of those species placed down in locales not suitable for them?”

I nodded. “I think that must be so.”

Wolfgang licked his lips as I went to the door.

“It’s all a puzzle.” His voice softened and slurred. “Thank you for your hospitality. I welcome it. Kregen is a world very hard on the stranger at times. I have found many strange peoples in many places and I have already assumed they must have been placed here; at least it is a strong possibility, and only an idiot would comment adversely on the continuing occurrence of new peoples on a new world.”

I did not point out to him that he was talking to a man who said he came from Havilfar and therefore to whom Kregen would hardly be a new world. As I closed the door he said through a huge and final yawn,

“So who the devil is putting these damned diffs here on Kregen, anyway?”

And that made me, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, smile. It was a hard, cynical smile. I thought the Star Lords controlled Kregen. I could be wrong, but at least I knew a little more than this Savapim.

The gaining of my information had been extraordinarily painful, that I will admit. When I awoke in the morning and looked into Nulty’s room, Wolfgang the Savapim was gone. Pinned by one of my daggers to the wall was a note. I tore it down. The paper — ah, the paper! Savanti paper! Of first quality, beautiful, crisp, white. I had not asked Wolfgang about the Savanti paper and its important function. Now it was too late. The note was brief.

“Lahal Amak: Thank you for the wine and the bed. We will go hunting the graint together, on the plains.”

It was written in that beautiful flowing Kregan script, very pure, and instead of the usual Remberee was written Happy Swinging.

“Happy Swinging to you, too,” I said, and burned the note.

Chapter 14

How Rees and Chido assisted the Star Lords

Chido said, “Y’know, old feller, Wees ain’t half cut up about last night.”

“Did he roar?”

“By Krun! He roared like a chunkrah with hoofache!”

“Let us go and take the Baths of the Nine.”

So we went to the best establishment in the Sacred Quarter. The Baths of the Nine are extraordinarily decadent and luxurious in Ruathytu, as you may imagine, and we steamed and soaked. We found Rees moodily stretched on a slab with a Numim girl carefully brushing his glorious golden fur.

“Huh,” he said when he saw us. “You apims and your naked skins! Oil and strigils! Barbarous!”

So we imagined he was back to form, which was a relief.

“Anyway, Hamun!” he bellowed. “Who was that Havil-forsaken man?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “He cleared off quickly this morning before I was up. He didn’t speak much.”

“I’ll bet he didn’t.”

We stretched out next to Rees and two Fristle fifis started in on us with oils, unguents, and scrapers. I leaned my head close to Rees in the warm scented room.

Now nine is one of the most sacred numbers on Kregen. I was to perform wonders with the aid of a magic square based on nine, but that remains to be told. So I leaned toward Rees and I said, “The Nine have been asking questions.”

He looked at me blankly.

I said, “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“No, by Krun! I do not.”

If he knew about the Nine Faceless Ones, he might not vouchsafe that information, bound by prior vows.

I said, “They are faceless, Rees.”

“Faceless! Bodiless! Specters! I need a drink!”

Later, as we sat on the terrace overlooking the largest pool and watched the swimming and diving, I said, very lazily, acting my part as a chinless goggler like Chido, “Do, you know anyone connected with the vollers, Rees?”

“Only that cramph Vad Garnath, and if he shows his face I shall kill him.”

Now I did not think Garnath was involved with voller manufacture. He had mentioned that he might form a skyship flight or a voller squadron. That was not what I wanted.

I tried for what I promised myself would be the penultimate time.

“I don’t mean that, Rees. I mean making the damned things.”

He looked over at me, his glass half raised. “Now, old son! You don’t want to go around talking about these things. It ain’t healthy.”

“Downright unhealthy,” said Chido, going red.

“I thought I could help the war effort.”

“If they want you to help, they’ll ask you to help.” He drained his glass and bellowed, “Fill her up, you little fifi! Run!” And, to me: “You ought to join the regiment. I’m reforming. Better than ever. This time no damn regiment of monstrosities will overset us—”

“Zorcas?”

He chuckled and watched as the Fristle girl filled the glass.

“No, Hamun. Totrixes! Damn contrary beasts, the most uncomfortable ride, apart from sleeths, that is.”

So how could I not say I would ride with him in his fine new regiment?

To get around that I shouted for more to drink. It was not wine but the fine sherbet-like drink much favored in the warmer parts of Havilfar. It was called sazz, from the fizzing, I suppose, and I drank half of it off before I spoke.

“Let me first go to Paline Valley. Nulty might welcome a visit.”

Chido snorted. “Since when has a Crebent ever welcomed a visit from his master?”

“Ah,” I said, “but Nulty is a special kind of Crebent.”

This was a mere interlude. I could not simply idle time away in Ruathytu now, ruffling and roistering, drinking and singing, carousing from tavern to tavern. Nor could I go with Rees and the new regiment he was forming, even though they were now to be mounted on totrixes. I knew my nikvove squadrons would have cut through Rees’s regiment at the Battle of Tomor Peak, totrixes or no totrixes, as they had in fact scythed down the three totrix regiments Hamal already had mounted. Poor Rees! This great blustering Numim, this Rees ham Harshur, Trylon of the Golden Wind, loved a good fight and a good laugh. This great golden lion-man had worn the Queen’s colors and fought for her during the rebellion which had seated her on the crystal throne, and now he was badly out of favor with that evil, scheming woman. Yes, indeed, poor Rees, for he had lost his way. I knew that. I do not think Chido could see it as clearly, for he saw with different eyes; but as we ate miscils and caught the crumbs as those tiny delicious cakes melted in our mouths, as we lazily picked up palines and savored them, I saw that Rees was troubled. Oh, he was forming a regiment and this time of totrixes, not zorcas. But for all the feeling I had for him I ached to see him acting so vivaciously to maintain his habitual lion-like bellowing and roaring.

Once again concern over a friend had seduced me from my true work. Concern over an enemy had made me forget he was a Hamalian, an enemy, a man who was fighting the men of my own country of Vallia. Curse all wars!

So, speaking, I admit, with a greater heaviness than I wished to show, I said, “I’ll ride out with you, old fellow, as soon as can be. We’ll see what a totrix regiment can do.”

It doesn’t matter, we are told, if you lie to your enemy. I’d lie and cheat and do the dirtiest tricks possible on my enemies to assist my friends. As we sat in the scented air overlooking the pool with the happy sounds of splashing and diving, though, and I looked across as Rees took up a handful of palines and I saw his pleased look, knowing I had lied to him, I had no love at all for the life of a spy. I must get on with spying, though . . .

I had been in Ruathytu less than a day. Adding on our travel time from Pandahem I fancied Tom Tomor and Kytun would have the army on the move heading northwest, I judged they would only have gone a short distance. As for Pando and Tilda, they must wait on the icy slab of anticipation for my return. I had not shaved this morning, and resisted the attempts of a charming little apim girl to shave me during the bathing ritual.

Rees stood up, flinging the last paline into the air and catching it in his lion-mouth, his golden mane flowing. “You look as scruffy as the back end of a quoffa, Hamun!”

Chido guffawed and, in his turn, stood up.

But all the same, as Chido rose his eyes caught mine and he made a face which said, very clearly, “Poor old Wees is badly off color.”

The cause might be that idiot called Nath the Crafty and his obsessive hatred of diffs, but I was not at all sure of that. It could just be that Rees felt more than a little humiliated that his gorgeous regiment of zorcamen had failed again so disastrously. The first zorca regiment he had raised had been tumbled over by a regiment of Pandahem hersanymen. It could be.

Well, it was no use trying to saddle a fluttrell before you catch it. And, equally, I had my own zhantil to saddle.

Many of our old friends and acquaintances of the Sacred Quarter had gone off to war, and the place festered with a sleazy gaiety that displeased me, notwithstanding the place was the capital city of an enemy country. The presence of so many diffs also posed an unsettling problem: there were many more fights centered on racial differences than there had ever been. At the time — I admit with all due shame, now — this had no power to worry me. The more fighting men of Hamal who were put hors de combat at their own hands, before they got to battle with my warriors of Valka and Djanduin, the better. By Krun! Yes!

A fistfight broke out among a noisy group of bathers below the terrace as we turned to leave. Shouts and yells spurted up, bouncing from the high fire-crystal roof. Other people avoided the ugly scene, knowing the guards would quickly arrive. Rees turned back, looking down with hot eyes. Chido let out a tchh of annoyance.

“There is that onker Gordano! He only came in from his volgendrin last night, for he called on me and left a note, and here he is brawling with Fristles.”

“He should have found you last night at the Scented Sylvie,” said Rees, his voice growling. “Maybe a damned Kataki would have slashed his throat open with his tail blade.”

I did not like this at all. But I caught at that word Chido used, volgendrin. I had heard men speak of them, as I have indicated, but I had not bothered, being busy about other pursuits. But the word must have a meaning over and above what I supposed.

Chido turned back and leaned over the terrace parapet. The fight down there waxed warm and two men went headfirst into the pool. From one of them redness drifted into the water, chill and ominous.

“Run, Gordano, you fambly!” yelled Chido. “Run!” But, being Chido, he shouted, “Wun!”

Rees shouted something, but in such a way that his meaning was lost. He strode out, flinging his towel around his golden mane. I looked with Chido down at the poolside, at the greenery growing lushly in ceramic pots and hanging from the multi-planed rafters supporting the fireglass roof. A pot smashed, and an apim and a Numim, fighting furiously, rolled into the water in an almighty splash. I did not know which of the men fighting down there might be Gordano. I looked back over my shoulder. Rees had gone. Then Chido gripped my arm.

“By Krun, Hamun! The guards have them!”

The guards sorted out apim and diff and trundled them off in different directions. Chido let go my arm and wiped his forehead. “And Gordano’s arrested. The law will deal with him, the great onker.”

“What does he do?” I said to Chido as we trailed after Rees.

“Gordano has some sort of job — Havil knows what — over on his volgendrin. He doesn’t talk about it. Mysterious feller, even if he is my cousin and a Vad.”

I pondered. When I had heard those three evil men plotting with their voices rising to me through the bronze grill there in the fortress of Smerdislad in Faol, I had more particularly marked their plans for me, for Vallia, for Hamal. They had said they would recruit more guards, if necessary, to take care of the volgendrins. Why should they do that? I had been taken to that fateful meeting only because I had followed Saffi to rescue her.

I truly believed I had done that because the Star Lords — or the Savanti — had arranged it. Now I felt strongly again that the Star Lords — or the Savanti — had arranged this poolside fight purely for my benefit. Much was to grow from that fight. So much that it was no coincidence but must have been a carefully arranged scenario for the furtherance of the plans of the Star Lords — scarcely the Savanti —

and an opportunity I must not miss. The Star Lords, of whom I then knew just about nothing at all, normally cared for me not one whit. But some force had put me in the way of overhearing that conversation in Smerdislad, and some force had directed that fight with its consequences to take place as I sat on the terrace directly above.

Chido and I walked off to the guardhouse to find out what we could of his cousin Gordano. The Hikdar in charge, fat and imposing behind a balass desk, peered at us myopically, and then back to the ledger before him. “Gordano? No, Horters, no Gordano has been brought in.”

Chido made a face and turned away, clearly considering that his cousin had managed to run from the guards. The fight had resulted in deaths, so the laws of Hamal would come into full force. The bleak local guard building, an unhappy piece of architecture, solid-walled and squat, had been designed to withstand a siege. One could see why. I walked off after Chido and saw him pause, then start to walk on again. Only this time he turned off the corridor down a side passage. I followed.

“Quiet, old feller. There’s that fambly Gordano, and he’s up to something.”

If the fight was indeed no coincidence but the chance I believed given to me by the Star Lords, it would be a single chance. From now on I must work alone. If I failed in this, I might easily be hurled back to the Earth of my birth, flung in a blue radiance fashioned after the likeness of a monstrous scorpion, sent packing four hundred light-years away from all I held dear on Kregen. No wonder I stepped lightly!

This Gordano, rapidly and fluently talking to a somewhat thick-headed guard, a dwa-Deldar, looked far more like the usual Hamalian than ever young Chido could. I could not hear what he was saying, but I saw the wink of silver as a handful of dhems passed, to be clutched and stuffed away with practiced ease.

Chido opened his mouth. Gordano saw him and his voice rose to continue effortlessly: “Lahal, Nath!

I’ve just been telling this good fellow that as I am Naghan Lamahan it is essential I write a letter. Now that you are here you can deliver it for me.”

Chido gaped. I could imagine the wheels revolving in his mind. He was no Nath, by Krun! And this was Gordano ham Thafey, the Vad of Unlorlan, the son of Chido’s father’s brother, and who in a Herrelldrin hell was this Naghan Lamahan?

“Lahal, Naghan,” I answered. “Nath and I will see your letter safely delivered.”

This Gordano ham Thafey, the Vad of Unlorlan, gave me a pretty close stare, I can tell you. My dirty wisp of chin beard could not have impressed him, but the guard and Chido both spoke at once, then, and we had to sort out the babble.

“You must hurry, Horters. The Hikdar will be yelling for me any mur!”

“Very well. A mur only, then.” Gordano drew Chido aside.

At that moment a bull voice roared along the passage. “Deldar! Where in Havil’s name have you got to, you cramph of an onker!”

“By Havil!” gasped the Deldar. He bolted across the corridor to grab Gordano. That worthy, a dark-skinned man with a smooth complexion and exceedingly bright eyes, still wearing the lounging clothes he had donned after his arrest at the pool, smiled with a wide glitter and went peacefully. I saw Chido stuffing a piece of paper into his back pocket. So we walked back out of the guard station with blank and highly respectable citizens’ faces covering our thoughts. You have probably already guessed what ensued. Again, I stress, I did not think this was coincidence. Chido showed me the letter. Heavily sealed, it had clearly not just been written and was not a plea for help from a man in prison. “Gordano says it must reach the hands of Pallan Horosh in person, and at once; if it does not then Gordano will be stuck down in a dungeon of the Hanitchik and never see the lights of day again.”

“There is no problem there. Let us take it to this Horosh and then—”

“But, Hamun! I am contracted to join Rees’s new regiment. He is going to his estates of the Golden Wind tomorrow.”

I did not fully understand yet, you see, so I made some observation into which Chido broke fretfully:

“But Pallan Horosh will be at the volgendrin — Gordano says it is the Volgendrin of the Bridge. Rees cannot wait that long. You know how he is. He feels for the defeat his regiment suffered.”

“I know that.” I had to be a trifle careful here, for all that Chido was a chinless goggler he might think it strange that a fellow Hamalian, a fellow noble, did not know of the volgendrins. To get out of that and to take two korfs with one shaft, as Seg would say, I spoke with gravity, impressing Chido: “I will take the letter for your cousin. It is the least I can do out of friendship. Just give me full instructions on how to reach Pallan Horosh and I will go.” I added as an afterthought, “Doubtless there is a password to bring me directly to him.”

“We-ell,” said Chido.

“Come on, old son, hand it over and tell me.”

By Makki-Grodno’s worm-infested intestines! I said — but to myself — wild risks must be taken to get my itchy fingers on a letter like this. It had to be important. I just knew it had to be. Otherwise why the coincidences that were not coincidences?

Chido hesitated. “Gordano said he didn’t dare go through the official channels — he’s not supposed to be here in Ruathytu at all, only came for some fun, get-onker that he is — and I’m supposed to say he’s been taken ill. Can’t let him down. We had a few good romps when we were young.”

“I won’t let you down, old feller.”

Well, I said these things and planned what I would do, and I took no joy from it. Except — and here the joy welled fierce and deep — except that I was absolutely certain I was on to a further revelation of the silver boxes, the vaol and the paol boxes that powered fliers.

In the end, with many cautions, Chido handed the letter over. We were walking along in the blue shadows of the colonnades of the Kyro of the Vadvars, and out in the blinding light of Antares the zorca riders and the young onkers astride sleeths and all the many varieties of carriages and litters passed and repassed.

The light burned into my eyes and I looked back to see Chido as a red-limned blur. “Well, and how do I find this Horosh?”

He gave me my directions, and I realized that the volgendrins lay to the west, right up to the Mountains of the West and the sparsely populated lands there.

“And, Hamun, you won’t get a voller now. The Queen has commandeered every last one for military and governmental use.”

“Well, by Krun!” I said. “I don’t fancy a fluttrell. I’ll buy or hire a mirvol.”

Neither of us even so much as contemplated my getting a clepper of any kind; all the fluttcleppers and volcleppers would be pressed into military service. And the little money I had left would not run to a zhyan. So, in any event, it was arranged. I did not see Rees before I left. I sent him my best felicitations by Chido and then, having gone up to the barracks to collect my gear including at least one most important article, I took off for the Mountains of the West.

Chido did not call Remberee. Instead, just before the mirvol bashed its wings down in that powerful muscular beat at the beginning of a flight, he called out, “By Krun, Hamun. May the Light of Opaz shine on you.”

One of the handlers in the voldrome looked somewhat curious, so to cover all that and warming to Chido, I yelled down: “May the Greenness of Havil cover you in benediction!”

Then I was up and away, soaring out over Ruathytu with the familiar streets, avenues, and boulevards spread below, with the Kyros and their radiating arteries of traffic, the Jikhorkduns doing brisk business, the merezos with the races already beginning. All the domes, arcades, and towers speared up, then fell away and away and the wind rushed in my ears and the mirvol bore me high up into the sky of Hamal.

Chapter 15

I sing with swods

Wind-bluster battered past my ears. The close-fitting leather flying cap was devoid of feathers or ornamentation. I bent low to the neck of the mirvol as we hurtled on through the air over Hamal, the fields and watercourses passing away below in a long stream of checkered browns, reds, and yellows threaded with blue. Forests sprawled beneath, the trees mere toy lumps of greenery. This mirvol was a sturdy beast, not overly fast, but I had picked him out in the voldrome with an eye to reliability and stamina. His deep keel chest indicated he would fly well and for a long time. His coloring, too, was a mere speckled brown, with nothing of the flamboyance of some flying animals of Havilfar. I liked him, and his name was Liance.

Chido had not been standing at my side all the time I had made my preparations. But, even so, I had not opened the letter. He could easily have asked to see it before I took off, just to make sure I had it. He had not done so, but might have. My way lay south of west, almost three hundred dwaburs away. In theory the mirvol could cover that vast distance in something like forty-eight burs, the length of the Kregan day-and-night cycle. But that was in theory only. The beast would need to rest and eat, for a flying animal consumes enormous quantities of energy and must replenish its vital faculties with adequate supplies of food. Mirvols, like many flying animals, eat some meat, but the nut of the tsu-tsu tree and those fat and nourishing beans the Hamalians call dyrolains are the favorites of the mirvols; those and a sweet thick syrup they like dripped on just about anything they eat, including meat. Feeding flying animals is often more involved than merely turning them out to graze, although they forage on their own account most efficiently. I thought of the groves of dyrolains growing in my Delia’s estates of Delphond. Vallia could feed her aerial cavalry when the time came.

Planning to reach the Volgendrin of the Bridge just after the suns set on the next day, I touched down at a tiny dusty mining town where the local inn turned out to be surprisingly well stocked on beers and sazz, if not wine. I partook of an enormous meal there and saw to it that Liance filled his belly also. I relied on the cunning strength of his wings.

The plans went well and I slanted down from the sky with all the forward horizon sheets and pinnacles of color as the twin suns sank beyond the Mountains of the West. The mountains bulked against that glowing sky, black edges of menace. The coruscations of fire, all ruby and emerald with orange and yellow shooting through in a glowing pyrotechnic display that formed one of those breathtaking suns’

settings of Kregen, could not diminish the stark jaggedness of those peaks; neither could the beauty conceal the horrors I knew lurked beyond the mountains ready to fly in to lay waste and destroy. Was I not the Amak of Paline Valley?

The letter had been opened and read.

I had not done this at the mining camp, which I left with much good-humored abuse ringing in my ears, but later, coming to earth by a grove of trees where a river edged the beginning of the barren plain that led up to the mountains here. Much of the eastward face of the mountains and the land immediately below it is smothered in heavy forest, subtropical, dangerous country. But equally as dangerous were the areas where the rivers did not run, where the rain shadows caused barrens. Where I was going, following Chido’s instructions, was clearly a semi-desert.

I opened the letter with some skill, although the seal was broken in the process, for I was over-hasty. I would deal with that problem when it arose. A single sheet of paper, yellow and finely made by hand, folded in half, rewarded my larceny. It was covered with rows of figures. Apart from the heading which read The First Month of the Maiden with the Many Smiles, that was all. It seemed fairly clear what the figures must be. If my suspicions were right — and I was going on a mishmash of whispers, overheard conversations, and coincidences that were not coincidences, but engineered by the Star Lords; and also on the very reasons I was here at all — then these figures must refer to production targets. I believed they would be targets, for completion reports would be flying in the opposite direction. And, that being so, the product of which these figures were the subject must be connected with the silver boxes, must in all probability be a mineral, and, if I was lucky, one of the four minerals we in Vallia had not identified and so had been unable to use. If I could discover what the actual stuff was, instead of merely giving San Evold Scavander a name he did not recognize, then we might produce vollers which would travel and steer instead of merely float up in the air. The paper, correctly folded, went back into the wrapper. I pushed the split seal together, then I threw the packet on the ground and jumped on it. A few crumples and bashings and it looked as though it had gone through a charge by wild chunkrahs.

So, as I slanted down looking for the Volgendrin of the Bridge, I had to believe that Pallan Horosh would take my story for gospel. I’d have a bit of swordplay on my hands if he did not, unless they killed me first.

The feel of the great longsword on my back came as a comfort.

With a final outburst of orange fire streaked with the stained green, the Suns of Scorpio sank beyond the mountains. In the dying moments of that burning glow I saw the marker I looked for: a gigantic cleft in the rock shone and coruscated in flashing reflections of the sunset, flaming in orange, red, and jade fires for murs after the suns had vanished beyond the peaks.

What happened next was so typical of Kregen, and happened just as Chido had told me Gordano had explained to him, that I felt my craggy old lips thin out into a semblance of a smile. The air around me filled with the rustling forms of flying beasts. They curved in with swift and brutal efficiency, swerving to hem me in so that escape without a fight was not possible. I knew these beasts and their riders.

These were the same bandy-legged diffs, squat, malefic with energy, with square, clamped mouths, who had welcomed me when I’d been flown into that hellhole called the Heavenly Mines. These were the Gerawin of Gilarna the Barren. They flew with consummate skill on tyryvols whose glistening black and ocher scales were dulled now by the onset of night. But I knew the Gerawin well enough, and knew the efficiency with which they guarded slaves for the Empire of Hamal.

Parked like a slice of vosk in a sandwich of Kregen bread, I flew on. We did not fly down to land. We flew on straight for the mountains. A black mass, indistinct and vague in the darkness, loomed above. My mirvol, Liance, behaved perfectly, for all that a tyryvol with its whip tail and scales can unsettle practically any other flying animal or bird. We were landing. The ground felt soft and spongy as, with a soothing word to Liance, I alighted.

The Gerawin did not land with me but curved up and away, their tridents dark lances of menace, circling like upthrown leaves away into the enveloping gloom. Men advanced toward me. I held up my hand in greeting. “Lahal,” I said, speaking firmly and loudly. “Lahal. I must see Pallan Horosh at once.”

A slender luminousness pervaded the scene as She of the Veils rose in the eastern sky. For that little space we had been living through a period of Notor Zan. The Tenth Lord would not rise tonight, for after She of the Veils the Twins would rise and we would have light enough. If I do say so myself, I had timed my arrival nicely.

‘This way.” The voice was cold and businesslike. A torch flared. The guard party were apims, clad in normal Hamalese armor, bearing stuxes, swords, and shields. She of the Veils touched the black and ocher plumes of their helmets, the same colors at that time favored by the Gerawin. I went with them. The ground possessed an odd and unsettling feeling and I could not quite accustom myself to land again. I felt like a sailor stepping ashore for the first time after six months at sea. And this was strange, for I had not experienced this when I’d touched down on the way here. Vague fancies about earthquakes and rockslides took me as we went through an overhanging forest of branches, hanging with fruits I did not know. The path squelched. Everything was conducted as I had expected it would be, with the full ritual observance of the dread laws of Hamal.

All the same, the deadliness of the effect, the hardness, the queasy feeling underfoot, the silence of these men and the odd surroundings, affected me . . . affected me powerfully, so that my hand rested on the pommel of my rapier and I wriggled my shoulder blades to make sure the longsword still hung there. The tunnel-like avenue through the hanging branches and the dependent fruit broadened and we came to a wooden guardhouse. Torches were flaring, soldiers talking, and there was the smell of food cooking. I could eat again, having grown accustomed to Kregen ideas on the correct number of meals per day. I wore a dark cloak which I left hanging over my left shoulder; it was pushed back and clipped on the right, just in case.

On my right shoulder under the cloak I wore a sheath containing six terchicks, the deadly throwing knives. Six men would die before I drew the longsword . . .

Nothing of these bloodthirsty thoughts showed on my ugly old face as the Hikdar walked out from the wooden hut to inspect me. He carried a chicken bone in his hand. He saw I did not wear a uniform beneath the cloak and was prepared to be unpleasant. He was an ord-Hikdar, which meant he was of pretty high rank to catch guard duty, or so I thought then.

“Now, then, by Barfurd! What have we here?” He walked around me, peering, exaggerating. Any soldierman gets tired and irritated on distant guard duty; I did not blame the Hikdar for acting like this, for it was in his nature, but I gave him up to the time I counted ten, then I would deal with him.

“Pallan Horosh, Hikdar,” I said. “The password is Thyllis the Magnificent.” Then I forgot all about counting to ten and added with a look that made him drop the chicken bone, “And if you don’t jump, onker, and un-glue your wings you’ll be a swod with a brush and pan in your fists!”

There was little delay after that. The nearest an Earthly expression can get to the flavor of “unglue your wings” in the Havilfarese flying culture is “get the lead out of your pants!”

I will not go into the various substances often alluded to as causing the gluing up of wings. The moons now cast enough light for me to see the undulating plain-like expanse, covered with a thick growth of yellow grass, which extended from the guard hut to a bulging hill about half an ulm off. There was something almighty strange about this land. Away in the distance the moons shone on the Mountains of the West, the whiteness of their peaks glazed with gold and pink. I went with the detail toward the humped hill. A door opened in the Vine-like growth and we went inside. The place had been constructed, I thought, from beams and crossties of wood in the natural state, that is, the bark had not been removed and the wood had not been split or sawn. Canvas coverings formed the walls. Carpets covered the floor, which alone had been constructed from carpentered wood. The noise of habitation came up with the familiar sensations an old soldier experienced on entering barracks. The strains of song wafted along as we went through to a door guarded by two Pachaks. The song was, I remember, Tyr Korgan and the Mermaid. As we passed between the two Pachak guards to enter the Pallan’s opulent quarters, those swods down there had reached the fourth verse, where Tyr Korgan draws his fourth great breath and dives to take the mermaid’s hand. The Pallan’s quarters were those with which one would expect a man of culture and refinement to furnish himself on a distant assignment in a rough and barren land. This Horosh liked his comfort. All the evidences of hedonistic living met my gaze, and perhaps only the predominance of black and purple — in rugs and feathered hangings — indicated any particular local affiliations. I stood looking at the Pallan, who sat at a balass-wood desk, gilt and enamel in the panels, writing with a quill. He glanced up. Pallan Horosh’s look reminded me of the malefic face of the Devil of the Ice-Wind who guards the north shore of Gundarlo.

“Your name?”

His voice grated like an unoiled wheel.

“Naghan Lamahan.” It amused me to give the name Gordano had used in the police watch station. His head went up. His nostrils pinched, whitely.

“You address me as Notor, nulsh.”

I, Dray Prescot, Prince Majister of Vallia and King of Djanduin — and much else besides — remained fast. I did not blink an eye. I said: “Notor.”

“Give me the letter.”

When he saw its condition he opened his mouth and I said, smooth and quick, “There was an accident. Flutsmen.” I would have gone on but he waved me down and took the letter. His hands were long and slender, missing the middle finger of the left hand.

“I care nothing for your experiences.”

He did not have to break the seal. He threw the wrapper to the carpet and fell to reading the figures. After a space he looked up, saw me, growled out, “You still here, nulsh? Get out.” He added, quite unnecessarily, “Schtump!”

I said, “Notor,” turned, and marched off.

I had enjoyed myself — maybe you can understand a little more now the coldness which was entering my heart when I dealt with these heartless men of Hamal.

My plans were really no plans. I had followed coincidences, believing them not to be coincidences. Here I was, in the Volgendrin of the Bridge. I had had one chance and I’d taken it with both hands. Here, with the moons sailing past above and the night breeze redolent with the scents of secretly opening flowers, I went with the detail to my assigned quarters. What to do now? One thing remained certain in a shifting world: I should not tarry here over-long. If the Star Lords had thrown me this gnawed bone and refused me the meat, then I would fly back to my little army and joy in seeing Tom Tomor and Kytun once more. Naghan Lamahan. In Hamal that was like saying Charles Robinson on Earth. The detail left and I waited for half a bur before going off prowling, with all my gear still on me. I wandered down to the corridor where I’d heard the strains of song. Down there they’d begun on the Canticles of the Rose City, that famous song-cycle celebrating the mythical doings of the man-god Drak. When I pushed through into the mess they were still nowhere near the end. Apart from one or two flushed faces turned in my direction, the men went on lustily bellowing it out, all of it, taking a great joy in their singing. Of course, much of the mythical story followed different forms, for the legendary Drak is very much a god-hero of Vallia, and these Hamalians changed things accordingly. I settled down and a Matoc shoved an earthenware pot into my hand. I thanked him and drank the beer and so joined in the singing. This, to me, assuaged a great drought. Why is it that, in general, the ordinary common soldier, when he is not drunk on alcohol or the red killing fury of battle, is such a quiet, cheerful, decent sort of fellow? Maybe it is because, as so many would-be pundits have said, a good soldier is devoid of imagination. I tend to doubt that, but it is unfortunately so often true as to have become a byword.

The song finished and my earthenware pot was replenished. The wooden walls reverberated to the strains of Sogandar the Upright and the Sylvie. The first lines of this go something like: “Now Upright Sogandar had no idea at all, and thought the Sylvie wanted just to see his Painted Hall,” and from then on it is all downhill. There is much jocose repetition of “No idea at all, at all, no idea at all.” This always sends these tough old warriors into fits of laughter at the naiveté of Sogandar the Upright. One thing was certain: these Hamalians wouldn’t sing The Bowmen of Loh. I talked to them as the jugs went around between songs, the apims and the Numims, the Pachaks and Brokelsh. Chuliks usually regard singing as a decadence. A little Och staggered up and gave us a charming solo: The Cup Song of the Och Kings. He fell flat on his face just before he finished, his six limbs twitching. A black-bristle Brokelsh poured a jug of beer over him as he lay; he did not stir. Talking to them, lazily asking questions so it appeared I had no interest in the answers, drinking and singing, I spent the best part of three burs in the swods’ mess. The Matoc — a very low grade of noncom — who had pressed the first beer on me, had been grumbling away, in between singing, and I had understood him to be worried about what he called the drift.

A Numim, his golden fur somewhat torn and his mane in shreds, belched and said, “Aye, dom! The drift this time has been real bad. Them mountings is a sight mortal close.”

“If I know the way of it,” said the Matoc, grumbling. “The binhoys will be late. By Kuerden the Merciless! I’d as lief be sent to the northern front.”

“Yes,” agreed an apim, leering. “Plenty of loot up there.”

Reaching over the jug, I said in a companionable voice, “I hear tell the army’s bogged down, up in Pandahem.”

They were interested. I managed to avoid the immediate charge of being a peace-monger, but I sowed a few seeds I hoped would grow to the discomfort of Hamal. But they were back to the drift again, cursing the Volgendrin of the Bridge.

They were also most crude in their comments about flyers they called exorcs. They wondered in their cheerfully rough way if the exorcs’ parents — which they called cows — would be blown away, and hoping by Krun they would. They had no time, that was very plain, for these exorcs. The wooden mess hall shuddered abruptly. I heard the noise of the wind, which had been steadily growing in volume, rising now with unmistakable ferocity. Again the wooden walls shook. The Matoc drained his jug and threw it aside, making no effort to refill it. “May Kuerden the Merciless take ’em all!”

he burst out. “It’ll be fencing for us this night, mark my words.”

“I never understand it,” said the Brokelsh, shaking his head. “The damned vo’drin’s not supposed to care about wind.”

“No more it don’t,” said the apim who wished to go to the northern front. “It’s just the drift and our bad luck.”

“Anyway,” shouted the Numim, scratching his torn fur. “Who’d be a Gerawin on a night like this, huh, lads?”

They all chuckled at this, most evilly, I thought, and I realized they were taking some sour pleasure from thinking of other swods worse off than themselves.

An ob-Deldar stuck his head in the door and bellowed.

That, after all, is what ob-Deldars exist to do.

“All out! Wenda!”[6]In the lamplight the ob-Deldar’s face exhibited an incipient case of apoplexy. The swods scrambled for the door. They took only their thraxters for weapons, leaving their stuxes and shields. They knew what they were being called out for.

The ob-Deldar saw me.

“You! Nit that crawls on a fluttrell’s back! Out!”

I went across to him and looked at him.

“I am not a soldier, dom. Hurry about your business. The Hikdar appeared to me to be a man of hasty temper.”

“By Kuerden the Merciless! You are right, he is a very devil.”

The wooden walls shook — no, the floor shook!

The Deldar took a fresh grip on his thraxter and pushed his helmet straight. “Look out for yourself,” he said. “You messengers don’t know half of it.” He ran out, already bellowing fearsomely for the men to get topside.

When I reached the door the men were already gone. I stepped out and gasped. The wind reached for me with burning fingers. Flat and level, the wind coursed across the ground, swirling dead leaves and twigs, scraps, rubbish, dust. I bent my head into it and tried to see what was going on. The four major moons were up, but drifting clouds broke the light and threw intermittent shadows on the earth. The wind blew with the furnace breath of the desert. I peered through slitted eyes and saw the trees bending. I also saw, but did not realize then the full significance of what I saw, the unripe fruit being torn from the trees and hurled through the air, squashing and dripping, wasted. A fresh party of soldiers ran up and the Hikdar, having lost all appetite for chicken, was bellowing them on. He saw me and was about to push past. I said, “I will help.”

“You will be welcome. We go to mend the windbreaks. The fruit is being destroyed.”

I could understand that. Heads down, our capes billowing, we struggled against the wind across that fruit-strewn ground. And I thought — I thought! — the ground moved beneath me with the violence of the wind.

After a time the fences showed before us. Tall constructs of wood and lath, they were tightly woven to give shelter to the fruit trees. Now there were grinning gaps torn in their orderly ranks. Even as we came up a whole section a full hundred paces long ripped away and flailed concertina-like for a moment, then broke and splintered. The air was filled with the whirring, deadly slivers of wood.

“On! On!” yelled the Hikdar, as though he led a regimental charge against swordsmen. A number of low huts against the fence contained repair materials. We were going to have to rebuild the damned fence if the gale persisted much longer. Soon I was employed lugging out lengths of lumber and running with them to the men propping the fences, reinforcing the props that had snapped, reweaving fresh withes between the uprights and diagonals to form fresh panels. It was damned hot work with that biting, burning wind scouring the air in the lungs and frying the eyes in the head. And, over all, the moons of Kregen shone down through the gale-torn gaps in the clouds. It did not rain.

Other men were there helping, and I realized that reinforcements had been brought up from somewhere, for these new arrivals were slaves. They were lashed into the work, while the soldiers labored through their own discipline.

A voller sliced down from above, riding on an even keel and without discomfort in the shriek of the gale. It was very clearly of that class of flier that moves independently of the wind, the forces in its silver boxes surrounding the voller with its own sphere of influence. A man in a blue cape gestured and the anger in his gesture was plain. The Hikdar yelled more fiercely over the wind and the slave overseers plied their whips.

Staggering up carrying a timber balk against the wind I cannoned into a Brokelsh who, with the crudity of that race, grabbed me for mutual support. He seized the other end of the balk and together we ran it across to the soldiers where they struggled to hold up a section of fence against the wind. In the lee of the half-raised fence the cessation of violence, streaming wind, and blattering noise cut and snuffed, I paused for a quick breather. The Brokelsh spat.

“These onkers’ll never get a section as big as this up. Look at ’em . . . onkers!”

“It’s a tough one,” I said. A few paces further along the fence lay flat on the ground, rippling with the wind flow. Men clustered like flies on a honeyed rope as they sought to shove the fence up with their poles. A pole slipped from the upright against which it thrust. It ripped through the withes, tearing them like tissue as wind pressure smashed the fence down. Men jumped out of the way and the wind hit us again.

Ropes lay neatly coiled here and there. I had once been a sailor on the seas of Earth and had long experience in handling enormous weights and dealing with wind pressures, with the only power at my disposal the muscles of men.

The blustering yell of the wind made normal speech impossible. If I started to do what I intended, others would follow . . . that is always the way. Once a man takes the lead there are always those who will follow. It just needs the right man in the right place at the right time. How all the gods of Kregen must have guffawed! How the Star Lords and the Savanti, if they were watching, must have snickered!

They say pride comes before a fall.

I, Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, jumped up and ran head-down into the wind. I snatched up the end of a coil of rope and sprinted for the flat section of fence. Once over that I could loop the rope around an upright and then, with the men I knew would follow my example, we could haul back and so raise the fence in proper shipshape fashion.

I saw the Deldar waving his arms at me, his face a most wonderful color, much like an overripe shonage, and his mouth opening and opening as he bellowed all silently in the wind rush. I waved my arm back, reassuringly. The rope felt thick and bristly in my hands. It felt wonderfully reassuring, also, bringing back many salty moments of the past. Running forward, bent over, I scarcely heeded where I was going. Just to get around the end of the fence and loop the rope up onto an upright, that was my task. I’d show these onkers of Hamal how a sailorman handled the wind!

As I say, pride goes before a fall.

I lurched against the wind past the end of the fence and for a moment I put my hand against the wood. I looked down.

To this day, as I sit here talking into this microphone, I can recall the utter shock of disbelief that thrilled through me.

The wind shrieked past my ears, the wood felt thick and sleazy in one hand, and the rope thick and bristly in the other — and I looked down. I stood on the very lip of a precipice. The edge of ground broke sheer away. At that instant the clouds parted. The four great moons of Kregen shone forth. And I saw.

I saw.

Far far below I saw the ground. I saw the ground moving past below. The sharp edge of the precipice did not join that ground; I stood on ground that soared above the earth like a flier. I yelled. The very shock of it, the incredible fact of it, hit me shrewdly. Land that flew through the air!

Volgendrin!

And then I slipped and pitched forward, spinning out into thin air.

Chapter 16

The Volgendrin of the Bridge

I fell.

The wind smashed at me. The world spun upside down and right side up, with the moons hurtling between my feet and the volgendrin Catherine-wheeling above me and then the hard earth far far below flicking into view over my head.

The rope burned through my hand.

My other hand came across as though I drew my rapier to face a treacherous attack from a Bravo fighter, and gripped. My two hands pained with a tearing agony that lanced up my arms and into my brain, but I held on. I held on and dangled. Now the distant earth was below me and above me the volgendrin showed its sheer side and the black rock crust. Above that the moons cast down their mingled pinkish light and I was rising and lifting in the air as willing hands hauled me back from death.

“By Havil!” said the Brokelsh as they hauled me over the lip. “And how were the Ice Floes of Sicce?”

“Cold.”

They landed me as a fisher lands a fish and I rolled over on the ground, getting my breath back. The wind had sensibly decreased in violence. The longsword poked out awkwardly as I sat up sideways and so rose to my feet.

“That is a strange cross on your shoulder, dom,” said the Brokelsh. The Deldar moved up, shouting, and we could hear what he was saying, the usual farrago of obscenities and orders to get back to work.

“Aye,” I said. “And here is the obbie.”

The ob-Deldar lashed his men on and, in that remarkable way these men have, requested me most politely, although at the top of his voice, if I would mind lending a hand. So we pitched in to re-erect the fences.

The whole time, as we labored and the wind dropped, sighed a few fitful gusts, then died altogether, I marveled at just where I was. So the word volgendrin held a precise meaning! I had not suspected the full truth, but, looking back, and with a little hindsight, I realized I had been blind. In all probability you who listen to these tapes will long ago have fathomed out just what a volgendrin is. No one went to their beds that night until the last fence had been firmly staked, lashed, and propped. It was now clear why the wind had risen so rapidly and then so rapidly died away: the volgendrin had passed from the lee of one mountain into the open maw of a pass before reaching the shelter of the next peak. Those barren, burning wastes of arid mountainsides with the wind tunneling through had poured that burning gale on us. Now the volgendrin in its eternal circling movement would swing around and away from the mountains before its course once more brought it back into the funnel of the wind. Just how high up we soared through the air was not too easy to determine; I thought we held the thousand-foot mark. With the earliest light of the next day I was up, ostensibly to fly back, in actuality to find out as much as I could about this marvel, this flying island, this volgendrin. And the first thing I saw with the suns was another flying island an ulm away, floating through the air like a cloud.

Beyond that floated others. I had no idea how many there were or how far they extended. The land below, barren and poor, would not reveal by stunted growths the path of the islands’ shadows. One thing was very clear: the agency which held these masses in the air must be closely allied to the forces within the vaol and paol boxes. The wind had no effect on them in the sense that they floated independently of it, although it could wash across them, as we had seen last night. I spent some time just walking around the flying island, following the perimeter fence and climbing up to the watchtowers studding the rim. I saw why this volgendrin had been given its name.

From its northern side the next volgendrin was joined by a seething mass of writhing vegetation, from bottom to bottom. That undulating floor of creeping vines stretched between the two volgendrins, and I judged it to be at least a hundred feet thick, against the apparent three hundred foot thickness of the islands themselves. Across the gap stretched the bridge.

A thin, spidery construction, it looked frail and flimsy. It was still there, though, after the wind of the previous night.

To give a revoltingly crude image, imagine two thick slices of bread resting on a plate of spaghetti, with a hair stretching between them — there you have the volgendrins, the undulating mat of vines, and the bridge spanning that horrific gap.

Men were continually crossing the Bridge carrying burdens, or marching from slave quarters to work in the orchards. Near at hand a gang worked a chain pump fetching water up from the cavernous reservoirs deep below. The orchards thrived. The land below burned barren and desiccated under the Suns of Scorpio and under the eternal orbiting of the volgendrins around a continually shifting locus. The volgendrins remain in their orbits, like planets circling a sun, although for them the locus is an invisibility. The wind cannot move them. They remain there, close to the Mountains of the West of Hamal. There are other volgendrins on Kregen, which I was to visit in the fullness of time, but I do not believe any of them shocked me with such a sense of wonder as that one time when I discovered the Volgendrin of the Bridge.

Why had the chain of events instigated by the Star Lords brought me here?

When I went along to see about food, I felt it politic to go to the swods’ mess. That Hikdar might have thought about the way I had treated him. As it happened, the Matoc in charge of the group I had sung with was not at all surprised to see me. He smiled a snaggle-toothed smile as I helped myself to roast ponsho and momolams — not as fine as those served in Delphond, but tasty all the same — with a right-angled section of squish pie which I took with what memories and hopes you may imagine. I truly felt that I had not wasted my time here so far, for a recce is always valuable. But time was running out. Soon I must return to Pandahem and the army. If the Star Lords had given me this one chance and I was too blind and too stupid to see in which direction I must go, then I must once again trust myself to Oxkalin the Blind Spirit.

So I said: “Tell me, Matoc, has production been good recently? The war makes heavy demands on us all.”

He wiped his plate clean with a chunk of bread, the heavy somewhat doughy bread much favored in Hamal, and stuffed the dripping mass into his mouth. With the flavorsome chunk pushed into his cheek, bulging and shining, he said, “I thought you merkers knew all the secrets in the world.”

I made myself laugh. “Oh, aye, Matoc. That is what is said.”

He gave a few perfunctory chews and swallowed with a fine acrobatic display from his Adam’s apple. Already he was pulling out a wad of cham wrapped in its leaves from his pouch. “Well, now, this wind won’t do production any good. The pashams were rolling every which way, like Ochs’ heads after a cavalry charge.”

That image made him laugh in his turn.

I said, “Yes. I saw plenty of fruit rolling around in the wind.” I had to contain myself. Who the blazes was interested in their fresh fruit production? I wanted to know about the mineral that went into the silver boxes of the vollers. I opened my mouth and started to say, “That’s all very well, but the army of Hamal requires bigger production. How many binhoys can you fill in—” And then I paused. Could it be?

He had the cham in his mouth now and was working it up into a succulent wad that would last him through better than two burs.

So it was somewhat indistinctly that he said: “What they do with ’em I do not know, by Krun! They taste like the sweepings of a totrix stable. And you never see ’em sold in the markets.”

This emboldened me to say, “I’ve never seen any pashams in the markets of Ruathytu.”

“I come from Dovad. I’d sooner be there than here.”

“I know Dovad,” I said. “A charming town and the waterfall is most impressive.”

“Ah!” he said, chewing. “Many’s the time I’ve taken a pretty little shishi on a trip to the falls. Well, no one then believed you could ever go as far as the Mountains of the West.” He spat, the cham working up nicely. “And they’re right, by Havil’s Greenness! I’ve no wish to serve on a vo’drin, and that’s a fact.”

There was no difficulty at all in picking up a pasham. The slaves were being flogged into clearing up and I simply walked past the collecting bins. The bins were running with a green juice that had called forth all manner of obscenities, for the fruit was not ripe and was useless. The juice ran down, smelling of old sweaty socks. I picked up a reasonably undamaged pasham, making a face, and wrapped it in leaves. This I stowed away in the lower pockets of the green dolman I wore slung over my left shoulder under the cloak.

The fruit looked to be as large as a grapefruit and would probably swell into melon size — honey melon, that is — when ripe. If it was not edible and yet was so assiduously cultivated and provided with soldiers to act as guards, then it must be connected to voller production. It could simply be that the pasham was pressed for oil, for lubrication, for example. But I hankered after my unfounded belief in the Star Lords. They had used me as their puppet and I had resisted them. Of late they had left me alone. I knew that at any minute I could find myself caught up in the mistiness of that radiant blue scorpion and go head over heels back four hundred light-years to Earth. But, despite the aloofness of the Everoinye, I persisted in my notion that they had sent me here for a purpose connected with the vollers. That being so, pashams had to be the answer.

From my previous experiences with the management of voller production in Hamal I surmised that the people here would simply grow and pack the pashams. After that the binhoys, those huge flat barge-like fliers, would take the fruits to be processed at another plant. Then they would go on somewhere else and then — the thought occurred to me with no excitement but only a dull feeling of my own ineffectiveness

— they could be dried and ground into a powder, a powder I had previously thought of as a mineral. There were four minerals we had not found in Vallia, for all San Evold Scavander’s researches and the field trips of Ornol. The iron-masters of Vallia did not know. Coal was known and used; the coal-masters did not know. Nor did the masters of the various chemical works, all in a relatively primitive state, to be sure, know. The dyers threw up their hands and shrugged. So perhaps one of the mystery minerals was no mineral at all, but a dried and powdered fruit.

In the past, Vallia had bought everything she required except her navy from the traders of the world of Kregen under Antares.

Now the Hamalians were clamping down, and it was high time I returned to my army in Pandahem. There was one other question, and then I would be off.

The binhoys were late, as the Matoc had foretold. I wandered down to the lowest open sections of cliff face, fenced in, and looked down at the writhing mat of vines and tendrils below, stretching out to join the other volgendrin which was, really, a part of the whole, the whole Volgendrin of the Bridge. Away to my left another volgendrin drifted along, partly shielded by the island across the Bridge. I walked along the rail walkway above the mat of vines, walking quietly, coming up to the Hikdar who stood there, overseeing his overseers as they flogged on a line of slaves hard at work. I did not know what they were doing. The Bridge extended out from the cliff face above our heads, casting two pencil-thin lines from the twin suns. Something glittered on the distant flying island and I looked across, between the two halves of the Volgendrin of the Bridge.

The Hikdar saw me.

“That’s where we’d all like to be, Naghan Lamahan. Over there having a good time.”

I nodded and forced a grimace of a smile. It looked like a town over there on the other island, with domes and towers.

“About time the binhoys were here,” I said, leaning on the wooden rail at his elbow and looking down at the slaves.

“Aye, Havil take ’em!”

“The ripe crop . . .”

He laughed, a bitter laugh. “What there is of it. We have little enough to show, and the other vo’drins not much more, I’ll wager.”

As I asked my next question I was fully prepared to upend him over the rail and see him well on the way to his death before I raised the alarm and shouted the equivalent of “Man overboard!”

“What about the other end?” I said. “The destination of the binhoys, they’ll be going mad.”

“Well, let them! Hanitcha may harrow them for all I care. If they don’t know our troubles we don’t give a fluttrell feather for theirs!”

“I believe you. You’ve never been there?”

He fleered a look at me. “Who has? And I wouldn’t have the knowledge you have in your heart, Horter. I remember my vows. I want to know nothing more beyond my duties here.”

He seemed to bear me no ill will for the way I had treated him when I’d first arrived. He would have put all that down to the high and mighty ways of merkers, who notoriously consider themselves above the normal ruck of men, having access to secrets.

So I commented on the slaves and he grunted and said the wind had weakened a guy rope of the Bridge. If that was not put right — now! — Pallan Horosh would be dealing out a few of the nasty punishments of Hamal, and every one legal. I spent a few more murs in conversation so that those exchanges dealing with the destination of the binhoy loads of pashams would not stand too starkly in his memory, and then bid him Remberee.

In a culture as hard and authoritarian as Hamal, and many another country of Kregen, there are of necessity many cruel words shouted at slaves and workers, words that mean hurry up, get a move on, and all that intemperate display of power being ruthlessly used. So far I have adhered to English, but one word the Hamalians favored is, in the Kregish, grak . I can tell you the air above the Volgendrin of the Bridge resounded with “Grak! Grak! You yetches! Grak!” It is an ugly word, harsh and unpleasant, and I have seen a slave jump as though scalded with the lash when the overseer bellowed “Grak” at him. The shout of “Grak!” and the crack of the lash are inseparable.

The sky-god of draft beasts in Magdag is called Grakki-Grodno, as you know, and those Grodnims of the northern shore of the inner sea know what they are doing when it comes to making slaves run and haul and work. Among the megaliths of Magdag, as among the warrens and the swifters, the yells of

“Grak” resound to the misery of those in bondage. Well, one day I would revisit the Eye of the World away there to the west of Turismond, and how I would joy to see my two oar comrades again, Nath and Zolta! How we three would roister through all the succulent taverns of bright Sanurkazz!

I do not forget I am a Krozair brother, a Krozair of Zy.

There were family plans to be made . . . and when I thought of what Delia would say to what I proposed I hastily turned to thinking about something else.

These volgendrins floated in the air like massy clouds, drifting in their own silent rhythms in vast orbits for dwabur after dwabur that covered many a kool of land beneath. The sight of their blocky hardness against the real white clouds high above, the wind catching a tree here or a high platform there, the very implacable nature of their onward progress, all these things combined to impress the volgendrins most forcibly on my brain.

We had drifted far enough now to leave the worst of the barrens to the north and the Mountains of the West a good few dwaburs off; below us a river tumbled along, still white and rapid from the hills. Scattered vegetation showed, gradually clumping and thickening. One could find a living down there, but I saw no single sign of any habitation. The volgendrins moved, I judged, at about five knots. At that speed they would tire a man on foot to keep up. The speed also meant that their shadows, never exactly the same on any following orbit, did not stunt or destroy the vegetation below. Before I went to report to Pallan Horosh for orders I saw four separate clumps of Gerawin flying high, their tridents winking brilliantly in the streaming light of the suns. They were watchful, prowling, on patrol. I noticed that every soldier from time to time cocked his head aloft and searched the bright bowl of the sky.

I, the Amak of Paline Valley, had no need to be told for whom — or what — they watched so carefully. As I went through into the Pallan’s quarters, the Pachaks passing me through without comment, I heard Horosh talking about that selfsame threat to a man who stood with his back to me.

“Three times like leems, during the last month of the Maiden with the Many Smiles!” Horosh sounded fretful, angry, and a little fearful. I fancied he was not frightened of the wild men who flew over the Mountains of the West from the Wild Lands beyond to lay waste. Rather, he was frightened of the queen in Ruathytu when his production schedules slipped. “My Gerawin fight bravely; indeed, they are fearsome warriors. And my soldiers are brave, as is any soldier of Hamal. But those wild ones still attack us, like werstings foaming at the mouth.”

“I know about werstings,” said the man with his back to me.

I stood stock still. I knew about werstings, also, and I knew this man who stood talking about them. The last time I’d heard him he’d been bellowing and screeching at the door of a voller manufactory, blaming me for the death of his wife, the Kovneva Esme, and threatening to let his pack of slavering werstings rip me limb from limb, until he’d thought of a better way of dealing with me.

“Come out, you Kovneva-murdering rast! Come out so I can plunge my hands into your guts and rip out your evil stinking heart!” That’s what this man, this Ornol ham Feoste, this Kov of Apulad, had shouted and screamed at me there in Sumbakir.

He would know me as Chaadur, the gul, the worker on vollers.

I half turned to leave but Pallan Horosh, looking past Ornol ham Feoste, called, “Ah, Horter Lamahan. You are late, sir! Here are the reports! Use your best speed back.”

Half turned, I hesitated. There was a chance . . .

And those reports would be going to the place where they processed pashams. The risk was worth the prize, for Vallia . . .

Swinging back and hunching my right shoulder a fraction against the Kov of Apulad, I went to the desk. Horosh lifted the wrapper with its shining seal.

The Kov of Apulad said, “As Malahak is my witness! Chaadur! The murdering nulsh who slew my wife!”

His thraxter cleared the scabbard with a screech of steel.

I made a grab for the wrapped report; Horosh jerked it back as he stumbled to his feet with a startled oath. The thraxter lunged for my midriff. I knocked it away with my right hand and, there being two Pachaks at my back, whirled away intending to grab that report and then do what was necessary. Action exploded in that sumptuous apartment.