The spear point dipped in at the last moment in the thunder of the hooves. I swayed, not jumping, brushed the spear aside, swung my length of lumber crackingly against the fellow’s ribs. The timber broke across.

How many ribs broke I did not know. The radvakka’s yell burst out from him, and he swayed. I threw the rest of the wood at his head, heard it clang on that iron helmet, and then with a leaping spring was up on those narrow hindquarters of his benhoff. One arm went around his neck, and jerked back most cruelly. The other hand pushed his helmet forward and sideways. He slumped. After that I was able to slow the benhoff down and cast the radvakka into the dirt. I jumped down beside him. His armor he could keep. His weapons and his mount I would take. So, mounted up on a shaggy grey six-legged beast, with a broadsword, a shortsword, a spear, and the rapier belonging to the kovneva’s man Larghos, I trotted along after the fugitives toward the forest. I admit — to my shame, I suppose — I felt in a much more cheerful frame of mind. Six

Of the Scorpion and the Ring of Destiny

“And you believe this ring will solve all your problems, kovneva?”

“I am sure it will! I have been assured, personally assured, that the ring will restore all.”

We led our mounts along the forest trails. I had ridden in, not without a few quaint comments on the benhoff, and found the kovneva and her party. Larghos had taken his rapier back, and his face was a study. In the dead radvakka’s pouch I had found food, crude fare, rough bread and hunks of odoriferous cheese, and had wolfed it all down. Now we walked circumspectly through the forest to Thiurdsmot, a sizable town, larger than Cansinsax.

There we would find other regiments of the Hamalian army — and the kovneva’s comments on the conduct of the Hamalese curdled the air. She reviled them bitterly. She had been promised support and aid by the Hamalese and they had sent an army which had been frittered away. I listened. I knew what I knew about the charge of mailed cavalry against sword and shield men, even with crossbow support. One of the handmaidens had told Marta Renberg that she had recognized me as the man who had saved them in the draw. The girl had long eyesight. I passed the incident over; but the kovneva’s attitude changed subtly. I was still “my good man” to her; but she used my name now and then, condescendingly, and it was clear she was mightily puzzled why I, acommon oaf, should be so tender of the welfare of her skin, when I was not even of Aduimbrev.

“A paktun?” she said. “Well, you earn your hire.”

“May I enquire who told you of the powers of the ring?”

“You may not!”

“I am not, my lady, in your employment. You do not pay my hire.”

“Are you threatening me, Jak the Drang? Be very careful — I have powerful friends who have dark and sorcerous powers.”

“The necromancers of the North East can scarcely be your friends, since Aduimbrev has for many seasons been a buffer against them, against the Hawkwas. All along the area where now the Therduim Cut runs was a March — a bloody battlefield for season after season.”

“Once — but not now.”

“But they raid—”

“They used to raid, before the empire collapsed.”

“So, kovneva, you are all friends with the Hawkwas now?” I chanced my arm. “And Trylon Udo of Gelkwa? Perhaps he—”

“He is vanished, no one knows where. The High Kov of Sakwara has now come forward into the open as the true leader of the Hawkwas.”

I pricked up my ears. This was vital news.

And then, even as I opened my foolish mouth to speak, a thought hit me. A horrific thought. If this silly kovneva was mixed up with the Hawkwas, who had the support of the devil Phu-si-Yantong, perhaps it was he to whom she referred when she spoke of great sorcerous powers?

After a space, as though changing the subject, although you will readily perceive I but planned ahead, I said: “And your people, your retainers, your guards? They have not all deserted you, my lady?”

Her face bunched tightly at this, spitting fury and venom. “Those that fled from me are as good as dead. There are others loyal to their kovneva in Aduimbrev! I shall raise a host — paktuns, masichieri, the rasts of Hamal. Together we shall return and sweep the radvakkas away into the sea.”

“Caution, Marta,” said Larghos, from where he walked on her other side. I did not fail to notice his mode of address. “Caution, good Larghos? When the Hamalese promised so much for my aid, and fail to give me theirs ?”

Quickly, I said: “And your aid assisted them greatly, I think.”

Still shaken by her passion, she burst out: “Assist them? Did I not drive into Thermin and sweep them away, and cross into Eganbrev and drive that insolent numim, Fyrnad Rosselin, from his palace and into hiding, destroying his puny forces? Did I not faithfully adhere to the treaty in every part? Did I not materially contribute to the great victory and the destruction of the emperor? Did I or did I not? And now these cramphs of Hamalese fail me, fail me utterly and leave me to flee through the dismal forest with —

with—”

And here she paused in her outburst, and cast me a sidelong look, and clamped her mouth shut. She breathed heavily. The color flushed her face. She was silly, foolish, vindictive; but she was also a kovneva and this she had almost forgotten.

I said nothing but tramped on. I had learned much. So this headstrong woman — girl, really — had sided with the Hawkwas, with the Hamalese, and attacked her neighbors. It was a simple and effective method of taking out of play those people who would have rallied to the emperor. The Third Party had employed the stratagem before, and it would, I guessed, be used again. And, if this hoity-toity Kovneva of Aduimbrev had sided with and assisted the Hamalese, she had in that helped Phu-si-Yantong.

I still did not know the full commitment of the Empress Thyllis of Hamal to this invasion of Vallia. She would glee in it, of course, hating everything Vallian. But it was Yantong who pulled the strings here, and his the puppets that fought and struggled and died on Vallian soil. The aisles of the forest passed by. We saw only a few other fugitives. The green dimness about us savored far more of Genodras than of Zim. The day wore on and we walked and rode alternately. The nikvoves were not too happy about this nearness of the benhoff, for the two animals dislike each other’s scent; but by judicious management we kept them calmed down.

Marta Renberg maintained much silence after her outburst. She had nothing to fear from me, she would think, of course; but no doubt her own words scored into her mind, making her scratch over the sores of wounded pride, the feeling of being used. It would not have helped to have told her that ten regiments of the Hamalian Army, and a thousand cavalry, were no mean force. The absence of fliers and aerial cavalry puzzled me; but I understood later that the Hamalian aerial forces were very thin in Vallia and the local contingents were all centered on Thiurdsmot. As to fliers in private hands, I soon found out that all the airboats Vallia possessed had been confiscated by the victorious parties. The Hamalese took most; but the Hawkwas took many and many more remained in the hands of Layco Jhansi, who was continuing to fight on, despite crippling losses. All these things I learned, one way and another, and stored them all away and pondered.

Despite her personal anger and humiliation, Marta Renberg remained fully convinced that the new emperor, Seakon, would continue in power and subdue the forces still in arms against him. Seakon?

“A fine young man,” said Larghos, across Marta Renberg. “He has already defeated Layco Jhansi in open battle. But I do not think the Hawkwas and the Hamalese can remain in alliance for very much longer.”

From the way he spoke I saw at once that he thoroughly disliked the new emperor.

“What do you understand of these things, Larghos? You are supposed to be a fighting man — you have served as a paktun, have you not? Somewhere in Pandahem? Let me deal with politics.” The kovneva’s petulant words served to illuminate the depths of her personal frustrations and cares. I cocked an eye at Larghos. A paktun he might be; he did not look like one. There was not a scar on his body as far as I could see. But he was a spare, limber fellow, with a straight back and a cut about his jaw that showed there was more to him than Marta either allowed or recognized. He managed a light laugh.

“Oh, I am not a politician. I know that well enough.” He glanced across at me, a thing easy enough to do seeing that the kovneva reached up only to our shoulders. “But a paktun — no. No, I was never honored with the pakmort as were you, Jak the Drang.” He looked away. “Although I do not see you wearing the silver mortil-head at the moment.”

“When I turfed that pile of stones down after your coach I had less than I have now.”

The two handmaidens giggled at this.

I had offered no explanations. They would not get any, however much they might ask.

“This ring,” I said, harking back to a subject that intrigued me more by its infantilism than anything else.

“The Ring of Destiny, once owned by La-Si-Quenying, a mighty Wizard of Loh of the distant past. Quenying’s Ring. Once I have that in my hand no one will stop me.”

I did not smile.

“I know the Wizards of Loh hold great and mysterious powers,” I said. That was true enough, by Krun!

“I have heard of a great Wizard of Loh in these latter days. A most powerful man—”

“Can you call them men?” said Larghos. His face had lost a trifle of its color as he spoke. We moved forward into a small clearing where two fallen trees had intertwined their branches high above, leaning one against another, and a third lay along the ground, rotting quietly away. Beetles and ants and woodlice were busy about their own businesses. Here we rested for a space and they told me about the Ring of Destiny, Quenying’s Ring.

It seemed clear enough to me. Phu-si-Yantong it was whose murky schemes coiled about this possessed woman. She believed that if she could take possession of this so-called magical ring she would miraculously find all her problems solved. She could at a stroke dispose of the perils of the radvakkas, gain everything she coveted. As she spoke I saw more. From the way Larghos glowered, and then smoothed out his face, I saw the way this pretty little scenario was scripted. For the kovneva fancied her luck as empress. She would wed this Seakon, who was without a bride, and become Empress of Vallia. The ring would do this for her, as a mere part of its miraculous properties. And, to cap it all, I was absolutely sure it must be Phu-si-Yantong who had sold her this stinking kettle of fish. But she believed passionately.

She had been on the way to the fortress town of Nikwald in the kovnate of Sakwara when the radvakkas had attacked.

Nikwald was in Sakwara, Hawkwa territory. Now it was over-run by the radvakkas. The Iron Riders would not take kindly to the notion of a Vallian kovneva driving up to their encampments in search of a magical ring. I rubbed my nose.

The thought that occurred to me, to be instantly dispelled, also occurred to Marta Renberg. She turned from where she sat on a fallen branch and surveyed me, her head on one side. A shafting of the mingled light cast her face for a moment into a softer mold, with all the petulant lines smoothed away. She looked radiant, in that moment, almost beautiful. She was well aware of the impression she created. Larghos shifted and cleared his throat; he did not spit.

“Jak the Drang?”

I sat silent.

“You are a paktun, a renowned soldier of fortune. You could fetch me the ring.”

“Perhaps.”

“There would be a great reward in it.”

“Would not the ring itself—?”

“No!” She flared up, agitated. “No — for Phu — for I have been most solemnly informed that only I have the power to raise the magic within the ring. Only me! I have been told and it is true.”

Poor silly stupid girl!

She went on, and now she spoke in a breathless, winsome way she supposed must flatter me, overbear me, favor me with all the forbidden paradises known to Kregen. “Why have you been so good to me, Jak? You saved me from the Iron Riders. Then you saved me again from Cansinsax. You ride with us and are a good companion. Why do you do all these things?” She leaned down from her branch to where I sat with my back shoved against the wood. “Perhaps I can guess, Jak the Drang. Perhaps I know the secret of your heart.”

I couldn’t laugh; but the statement, the situation, demanded a great gut-bursting bellow of crude and raucous laughter.

What did she know of me? What, indeed!

“The ring is in Hawkwa country, and the Iron Riders—”

“You do not fear them. Do you not carry their weapons, ride their mount?”

About to bellow out some uncouth comment, I was struck dumb.

Among all the scuttering beetles and ants and tumbling woodlice under the rotting wood a bright orange-brown form waddled out. On eight hairy legs he poised, his arrogant tail upflung. I stared, feeling the bile rising. Larghos sat with his booted foot less than six inches from the scorpion, and did not move, did not see. He was not a scorpion. He was The Scorpion.

The forest fell silent. The leaves no longer chirred in the breeze. The very suns’ beams lay quiescent, with motes of dust trapped and motionless.

The arrogant stinging tail lifted and dropped. The Scorpion surveyed me very deliberately. So I knew. After a space of time very sinister to me, The Scorpion ambled to the flaking-barked log and disappeared. The breeze blew, the leaves whispered and the dust motes danced within the radiance of Zim and Genodras.

And not a word had the damned Scorpion spoken!

“Very well, kovneva. I will go to Nikwald and bring back the Ring of Destiny.”

Seven

In the Camp of the Iron Riders

Lumpy carried me jogging across Aduimbrev and over the Therduim Cut and so into Sakwara. I’d called this shaggy old gray benhoff Lumpy out of a mixture of disreputable feelings; but, truth to tell, he wasn’t all that bad. It is difficult to feel at odds with a faithful saddle-animal for very long. Seeing the kovneva and her party safely into Thiurdsmot, I had refused the offer of a flying mount from the Hamalian aerial cavalry squadron. They acted under the orders of Marta Renberg. People in Vallia were becoming more and more used to flying cavalry, great birds of the air being used as saddle flyers; but I refused the offer of a fluttrell since I considered that would attract more attention than a benhoff, attention I wished to avoid. I had insisted on going alone. Larghos had offered to accompany me, which made me look at him afresh; but I managed to convince him his duty lay with the kovneva. Truth to tell, he might have attempted to prevent my return with the ring, seeing that if Marta did as she intended then it would be a quick exit for Larghos.

A different route from the one I had followed previously swung me a trifle to the north. The same gradual trending of the land from forest to grassland to the sere plains progressed. On a bright morning I broke camp and set off and just before the Hour of Mid observed a dark mass approaching over the plain. Lumpy and I took ourselves as quickly as might be into a hollow. I watched. These people were Vallians. They wore Vallian buff and their colors were a mixture of many of the provinces of the North East. But they were no advancing army bent on conquest. Carts were piled high with homely possessions. Women strode along with children clinging to their skirts. The men rode guard on the flanks. They were Hawkwas, well and true; but they were refugees, seeking to escape from the wrath of the Iron Riders. They passed away traveling west. I mounted up again and set off eastwards. If ever I could say about the island empire, as I often say about other places, my Vallia — then my Vallia was in sorry shape. And I was pattering off on a footling errand for a silly ambitious woman who wanted to be empress, searching for a confounded ring said to be possessed of magical properties. Almost, I drew rein and turned back. But The Scorpion had left me in no doubt. I had to get that damned ring. It was a quest of the most farcical kind; but however ludicrous that side of the quest might be, the reality on the other side was dark and horrifically serious.

Despite all the appearances to the contrary, this was no splendid game of quest in the high tradition I played. I fought and gambled for stakes far greater than those of a simple quest. I have no desire to go into the full details of all that went on during that search for the Ring of Destiny. Marta had given me all the information she had on its whereabouts, and this proved highly accurate. Phu-si-Yantong would not fail on that. I guessed he used this ploy to distract the poor woman, seeing that his iron legions of Hamal had failed. He, like any other man, had to work through the tools available. In Yantong’s case the tools were more often than not other men and women. But the Hamalese had been humiliated in the field. No doubt Yantong in his insane ambitions would assemble other forces; for the moment he kept this woman working for him by means of a transparently dishonest folk tale. The defeat suffered by the Hamalian Army outside the walls of Cansinsax was not the first time they had been bested by the Iron Riders; but they would not face the humiliating fact that all their expertise, their professionalism, their famous Laws, could not withstand the mailed cavalry charge delivered by the radvakkas astride benhoffs. The talk in Thiurdsmot had been of a fresh battle with flyers and vollers to give aerial support and with batteries of varters to supplement the crossbows. The job could be done, of course; I did not know if I wanted to be there at the time to witness the horror and the splendor of it. The shrill battle cries of the Hamalese as they clashed with their enemies — the vicious, shrilling, demanding: “Hanitch!” “Hanitch!” — had rung with a desperation, almost an hysteria, over that stricken field outside the walls of Cansinsax.

Nikwald bore the marks of its altered status. Many of the brick buildings and wooden outhouses were mere shells and charred skeletons. But a central section remained around a kyro with pretensions to architectural respectability, and here the radvakkas stabled their benhoffs, set up their cooking arrangements and their armory and generally conducted themselves in the way of bombastic barbarians two worlds over.

Originally there had been four temples in Nikwald, the chiefest being dedicated to Junka, a manifestation of godhood well thought of in the North East. The second, which should rightfully have been the first in view of the real importance of Opaz for all the genuine self-negation that is a small part of that belief, was dedicated to the Invisible Twins. Both had been partially destroyed. Benhoffs and calsanys were tethered within the shattered walls.

Shuffling along leading Lumpy, an old shaggy pelt flung over my shoulders, I passed well enough for a radvakka slave caring for his master’s steed. Other slaves went about their businesses, and all wore that hangdog defeated look of the oppressed when in private, and all put on that inane cheerful look of happy subservience when their masters bellowed at them.

All I saw convinced me that the radvakkas had sailed from Segesthes and landed in Vallia in strength. The fate of the eastern islands concerned me profoundly — what had befallen Veliadrin, Zamra and Valka? Had my people managed to hold out against this new threat? The moment the Star Lords were satisfied, I knew where I was going — before, even, I thought, Strombor. The temple of brick and wood erected to the greater glory of Mellor’An, a local god of agriculture, husbandry and fertility in general, was of altogether lesser proportions and only a part had burned. Men moved about purposefully and I saw they had set up a forge in the outer court where benhoff shoes were repaired and where the iron fittings of gear and equipment might be made good. The armories did not share the same fires and anvils as this blacksmithing work. I meandered along past the outer wall. In a crumbled corner of brick I took a swift look around. No one watched me. The town hummed with activity. Working with a deceptive smoothness I probed a nail loose in Lumpy’s middle offside hoof. I already had a broken chain, and cursed it. I walked Lumpy lumpily back to the smithy. Inside, the radvakkas in charge bellowed slaves about their work. “Here, slave, hurry!” rumbled one at me as I approached. Then he spat out that vicious, cutting order: “Grak!”

So, being sensible in these things, I grakked and handed the broken chain across. Radvakkas, like many barbarians, set no store by money; when it fell into their hands they melted it down for the precious metals to be used in ornamentation. Communal work was done on a communal basis. The radvakka blacksmiths grasped whips instead of hammers, and beat their skilled slaves into the work. The broken chain would be mended as a mere part of maintaining the military equipment of the whole band. Then I led Lumpy around to have his shoe fixed.

For the moment freed of observation I wandered away from the busy activity of the fires, as though seeking a corner where I might eat my bread and cheese and, if I was fortunate, munch on an onion. A hierarchy existed among slaves. Those attending personally to radvakka masters were a cut above the poor devils tending the fires or bashing iron. A group sat on sacks in a corner, and they called out to me to join them in their game of knucklebones, as they waited for repairs to be completed.

“I have had the luck of Ernelltar the Bedevilled lately, doms,” I called across. “Give me leave to sit awhile and eat. Mayhap later I will chance a round or two.”

They made crude remarks at this, all of them pleased for the moment to be on a duty that gave them a trifle of spare time so rare and precious in their lives. I moved on into the shadows past where the altar to Mellor’An had once lifted and now lay in shards of broken brick and pottery and charred wood. Without a shred of modesty I can claim that no ordinary Vallian would have escaped detection for a moment. But I was a Clansman — a Clansman of Felschraung and Longuelm and now of Viktrik. If Hap Loder had not been out collecting obi from other clans, also. I knew the ways of the radvakkas passing well. Talk of Ernelltar the Bedevilled raised uncouth and sarcastic comments, for all knew that runs of bad luck were attributed to him in North Segesthes.

The space at the rear of the altar was badly broken down. In a cavity within the pediment below the altar, Marta had said. I kicked charred timbers aside and swiped at the clouds of dust and ashes. The rumble of voices and the clang of the smithies’ hammers resounded comfortingly from the exterior. I poked around. There was a crevice, a slot in the baked bricks. I reached down. A box? Something hard-edged. I got my fingers around it and then took a quick look back. I was still alone. With a grunt and a heave the box came out. Sturmwood, scuffed, with a brass lock and hinges, it looked nothing special. It went under the shaggy pelt as a warvol devours flesh. Then I yawned and wandered back to the knuckle-bone players.

For the look of the thing I played a few hands, and lost one of the daggers, and felt too amused even to curse.

The slaves laboring at the fires, at the bellows, hammering the iron, would slide liquid envious glances in our direction. Hardly slaves at all, these fellows who so liked to lord it over the less fortunate, cowed before their masters. In a sense they were more like the militarily employed helots of the Spartans. With good and faithful service and the signal proof of courage they might even be given a kind of manumission and join the hard-riding ranks of the radvakkas. The process was continuous, Iron Riders in the making. Not all the slaves were apim. There was a marked brutality in the treatment the radvakkas meted out to the diffs. They would in their rough uncouth ways stand far more from an apim slave than a diff. I saw a Rapa knocked headlong into a fire. A little Och whose job was to bring water for quenching was tripped and his bucket upended over his head and rammed down around his ears. The Iron Riders were intolerant of diffs, that was known.

Many diffs bore the savage marks of barbaric punishments.

“Here, slave!” bellowed a radvakka, and he cracked his whip. “Your work is done. Now schtump. Grak!”

I detest that hateful word grak. As the radvakka yelled so the slaves all jumped, quite automatically, when the vicious cutting word of command bit into the stifling smoke-filled air. As humbly as might be contrived I took Lumpy and the chain and went out. The air smelled sweet after the singing stink of the smithy.

All this time I had been alert, strung-up, making myself appear relaxed, expecting detection at any moment. Now, as I led Lumpy out along the street, with Nikwald filled with the clamor of the Iron Riders about me, I thought I had done it. I was set. Clear away. I had only to mount up and ride. That would have been a disastrous mistake.

Since when would a slave, even a master’s slave, a helot, dare to ride his master’s steed back from the smithy in the barbaric encampments of the Iron Riders?

“By Getranchi’s Iron Fist!” bellowed a radvakka as he kicked heartily at a Khibil carrying a sack of flour. “Grak, you useless worm. Or I’ll cut your hide to pieces.”

They were but a pair acting out the lunacy of their respective social positions, one swaggering, the other staggering. Perforce, I had to look the other way. One day, Opaz willing, we’d have sanity back in Vallia and do away with slavery for good and all. I led Lumpy on and ground down the instinct to whip out the broadsword and lay the flat against the arrogant Iron Rider’s skull. A hullabaloo broke out ahead, with people shouting and running, so I guided Lumpy into the shadows of a tumbledown shack at the side of a ruined house. Men were pointing up. So up I looked, shielding my eyes against the declining rays of the suns. Up there, high, three vollers fleeted across the sky, traveling southwest and going fast. They were mere petal-shaped outlines; but they were Hamalian and they were scouting radvakka Nikwald. Judging from the comments of the Iron Riders, they thirsted for the chance to drive a spear into the marvelous flying craft up there, and were stumped as to how to do it. An odd sound as of a piece of wood striking the palm of the hand, although heavier, meatier, floated from the ruined building. I ignored it. In this concealment seemed a good time for me to discard the sturmwood, brass-bound box, which was too awkward for easy carriage. I took the ring out. The Ring of Destiny. It looked an ordinary enough ring, with two emeralds, a ronil and an indeterminate whitish stone, not a diamond, all fastened with gold claws. I stuck it down safely into my breechclout. The slapping noise continued and I pushed further back and looked through where once a window had been and where now a gap stretched from ground to sky. The tamped earth space within was clearly illuminated by the angled rays of the suns. I saw.

The foul bile of disgust rose into my throat.

A circle of radvakkas stood with whips, with pieces of wood, with iron bars. They surrounded a stake. Tethered by his tail to the stake a man stood and was struck and struck again. The game was to make him run round and round the stake, his tail fastened to an iron ring that enabled him to circle, to duck, to dodge and weave. At the side a radvakka was totting up the bets on a wooden slipstick. The Iron Riders sweated over their work; but they did not call out or make any noise. So I guessed there were bets on the shrieks of pain of their victim, also, and they would not wish to miss these. In a corner lay the corpses of a number of men — all diffs.

The fellow who was now being tortured for sport did not run. He stood there, his four arms bound at their four elbows into his back. His face — his face showed a dark and passionate hatred of these radvakkas, a tawny-haired face, with tawny moustaches and a golden beard, a savage, noble, suffering face. But he did not cry out. He stood there and I marveled at the way he moved himself, shifting on his feet with a litheness that reminded me of the way great unarmed combat men fight in their disciplines — a fluid shifting grace of movements that avoided many of the blows. But many more struck home. His naked body, banded with muscle and yet slender and limber, bore the bloody marks, the weals and cuts, the bruises.

He was a marvel, this man. He was of the Kildoi, a race of diffs not very well known mainly inhabiting Balintol. The immensely powerful physique, the fluid shifting movements, the slide and rope of muscles, all added to the clear and intelligent anticipation of a blow, enabled him to last out in his suffering where lesser men would have been shrieking in shredded agony. But — there was about his anticipation of a blow more than mere intelligence. Much mumbo jumbo is spoken and written about the mystic means whereby a man may judge a blow although blindfolded, and there is great truth in this. Certainly I know what I know of many Disciplines. The Krozairs, chiefest of all, of course, and the Khamster syples of the Khamorros, the Velyan techniques of the Martial Monks of Djanduin, and many more. Much foolishness is written and believed about mysticism in combat; but the kernel of truth remains. In this fellow, this Kildoi, I saw a man who was a High Adept, a True and Proven Master. This was no business of mine. So why did I stand there?

This was something of a different order from that radvakka who had so thoughtlessly kicked his Khibil slave up the rear. That was of the daily nature of a slave’s life and a vileness I and Delia would try to end as soon as we might — a thankless and difficult task, Opaz knew. But this obscenity before me was something else again. Still and all, all the same, without doubt — it was nothing to do with me. So, you see, I prevaricated.

One of the radvakkas slashed his whip and the Kildoi slid the blow easily and instantly swayed the other way and avoided a lashing blow from an iron bar. He was very very good. In the event, before I turned away — for I hewed to my main task and would not imperil that even for so marvelous a fellow as this

— one of the Iron Riders threw his wooden bludgeon to the ground in disgust.

“You see?” he bellowed. “By the Iron Helm of Getranchi. Did I not say so?”

“Maybe you were right,” said another. “But he affords sport.”

“Sport? I have hit him once only. Once! You call that sport?”

“Maybe,” put in a third. “You cannot hit straight.”

I rather hoped they’d start a brawl at this; but they went on arguing. The Kildoi stood, poised, lithe, his bruises hard and shining upon him, the blood trickling down that plated chest. I felt for him. And, although this was no business of mine, I did not go away.

“Give him another few murs,” said the aggrieved radvakka at last. “It was a waste of time exchanging him. He must be kept in chains all day — he’s far too dangerous for a good slave. A waste of time.”

“A few murs, then. I own, he is worse than a Kataki.”

They started it up again, hitting and slashing, and despite all the wonderful alacrity of the Kildoi he took blows. The blood shone upon his tawny skin.

Of course this was no business of mine — a strange diff, a camp of enemies, in a part of Vallia hostile to the center — what possible business was it of mine, who had urgent business with a ring and a willful kovneva and the commands of the Star Lords? And those just for starters — with all the rest of my problems looming and gibbering at me?

Emperor of Vallia. That was just a laugh. But, just suppose I was the emperor. Then the concerns of all Vallia were mine, and the concerns of all the people in the empire. And, anyway, I’d taken a great liking to this tailed, four-armed marvel who stood, shining with blood, yet golden and still defiant. He was a man I fancied I could understand. No business of mine — this situation was the business and concern of all men.

So, not reluctantly, but joyfully, I hauled out the broadsword and stepped silently into the ruined building. Eight

Korero

This was no time for chivalry. No time for the honored traditions of combat. This was going to be nip and tuck.

I hewed through the necks of the first two radvakkas, just above the iron corselet rims, back-handed a third across his face, chunked the reeking broadsword into the eye of a fourth. But there were ten of them, nine in the circle and the slipstick man taking the bets. The others roared at me, raving, ripping out their swords.

The first two fell smoothly enough, and I leaped across their collapsing bodies to get at the last three. The slipstick man tried to throw a knife. Well, he threw it, but the aim was deflected by my left arm. The broadsword went in and out, swung left-handed, and there was just the one left facing me. He was mumbling something incoherent about a devil; but I smacked his blade away sharply and chunked him down into the tamped earth floor. The slipstick man was almost at the ruined window-opening, shrieking, getting away.

The broadsword lifted into the air, I caught it at the point of balance. I drew back, let fly. Point first the blade skimmed across that dolorous room, burst into the back of his neck, spouted on out. He stopped shrieking and staggered forward and sideways, collapsing in a quivering heap. The dagger whipped out and a swift succession of four slicing cuts freed the Kildoi’s arms. The rope around his handed tail chained to the ring slashed and fell away. I managed to force a smile for him.

“Llahal and Llahal, dom. Let us get out of here, sharpish.”

“Llahal, dom. You are very — welcome — whatever kind of demon you may be.”

I padded across to the window and retrieved the broadsword. I looked outside. Someone must have heard the racket and be coming to investigate. I swung back.

“Devil I may be. But we’re both consigned to the Ice Floes of Sicce if we don’t use our noodles. Here

— help me strip this fellow. He looks big enough.”

Between us we got the riveted iron from the corpse and I shrugged it on. A helmet from the pile in the corner slammed on my head. The cunning metal plates flapped into place before my face. I slung the shaggy pelt over my shoulder and looked through the eye slits in the metal mask. The Kildoi had snatched up a shaggy pelt and draped it about himself. We stepped through the shattered window opening and I leaped up onto Lumpy.

“Take the reins. Lead us along — gently. Keep your head down.”

He said nothing but did as I bid. Sitting astride the benhoff, led by a cowed slave, I rode sedately out into the street. A few radvakkas were riding up to find out what the racket was. One of them reined across and started to speak.

“A pestilential fellow,” I said, making my gruff old voice harsher and more malignant still. “By the Iron Fist of Getranchi! He took a long time to die.”

“Hai!” quoth this Iron Rider. “Did you win?”

“Aye. I won.”

We rode on.

As quickly as possible I guided us away from the main street and away from the campfires. Nikwald was only so big and we would never avoid eventual discovery once the hunt was up. We had to get clean away, and the suns would not be gone for a bur yet. I kept listening for sounds that would indicate the massacre had been discovered; but as we approached the broken-down wall of the onetime fortress town nothing sounded apart from the familiar noises of warriors encamped. We found the second benhoff at the lines under the wall. One radvakka who wanted to know why we took the beast fell down. I did not think he would get up again. The Kildoi mounted up, and I noticed that he fought the stiffness of his cuts and bruises with the phlegmatic calm of one inured to hardship and the injustices of life.

“We must wait until the suns are gone. She of the Veils will give us a bur before she rises. In that time—”

“Aye, dom. We ride.”

“Just so. Until then, we keep out of sight.”

That was not too difficult in a brawling barbarian camp, even when the racket broke out that told the discovery had been made. Parties of Iron Riders began galloping in all directions. Useless to try to disguise this Kildoi in the time available; I decided we had to try. Dismounted, we stood in the shadow of the crumbled wall, ready to ride out. A radvakka had the misfortune to approach, without seeing us, to investigate the breach in the wall at this point. The suns were almost gone. Mingled jade and crimson light speared through the gap and threw opaline-bordered shadows across the detritus. I was about to reach out for the Iron Rider when the Kildoi said: “Mine, I think, dom.”

“My pleasure.”

His tail hand, so much like that of a Pachak, whipped out. It fastened on the throat of the radvakka, choking off his cry, hauled him from the saddle. He crashed to the ground with a savagery that told me much. There was no need to silence him after that. The Kildoi was halfway through trying to fit his artfully articulated shoulders into the riveted iron when the patrol rode up. We two froze. In the shadows, we ought to escape detection; but if one of our benhoffs reacted to the presence of the others... Our hands fondled the benhoffs, massaging the rolls of fat, giving the benhoffs pleasurable sensations, keeping them quiet.

The riders drew off. I let out a breath.

The suns were nearly gone, drowning in an opaline glory.

“Close,” I said. I stared at the shadows that chingled with iron as they rode away.

“Close. I am Korero, dom. Your name?”

My mind was on those damned Iron Riders. I said: “I am Dray—” And then I caught myself, and said, swiftly: “I am Jak the Drang. Lahal, Korero.”

“Lahal, Jak the Drang.”

He passed no comment. But, even then, I fancied he had heard that confounded stupid word “Dray” and stored it away.

The dying radiance of the Suns of Scorpio stained across the sky of Kregen. In silence we mounted up. He was an old hand, this Korero, a fellow used to the kind of nefarious business we were about. He made no fuss about what had to be done but got on with it. An old campaigner, and yet he was young, I judged, although tall for a Kildoi, being a good four inches taller than me. He moved with a contained muscular alertness, a springiness, a limber strength. And his reflexes were quicksilver, I had witnessed that.

We rode away from Nikwald, very quietly, into the shadows before She of the Veils rose to shed her fuzzy pink and golden light across the land. I made sure the Ring of Destiny still snugged in my breechclout. We rode. If pursuit there was we saw nothing of it.

We spoke very little, aware how sound traveled at night over the plains. I taxed Korero on the absence of any appellation to his name, whereat he half-smiled, and said: “You are Jak the Drang. I have been Korero this and Korero that, from time to time. Mayhap, one day, I will tell you.”

We rode companionably back the way I had come and in due time reached Thiurdsmot. Carrying the ring I found the kovneva.

Nine

Bird of Ill Omen

Thiurdsmot girded itself for the fray, everyone engaged in a grim preparation for the coming conflict, and Marta Renberg, Kovneva of Aduimbrev, was in raptures over the Ring of Destiny. She turned it this way and that, holding it out at arm’s length, admiring it as it glittered on her finger.

“Splendid!” she declared. “With this ring all my troubles are over.”

Larghos looked at me, and away, and said nothing. We stood in the wide window embrasure of a tower given over to the kovneva’s use. The trappings and furnishing were luxurious, as was to be expected. The handmaidens were flushed of cheek and brighter of eye. All in all, absolute confidence radiated about the walls and turrets of Thiurdsmot and nerved the ranks of the Hamalian army and their mercenary allies. Standing respectfully before the kovneva I looked out through the window. Troops marched in their strict formations in the kyro far below. The colors of Hamal and Aduimbrev floated everywhere, mingled with the colors of the freelances and the paktuns with their own bands. A fluttrell formation winged past, the big birds keeping a beautiful precision of formation, the flyers on their backs leaning into the windrush. Vollers sailed down to land at the vollerpark. These I eyed with a covetousness I trusted did not show on my savage old leem-face. One of those — one of those airboats I’d have this night and be away, or my name was not Dray Prescot. Zamra, Valka and Veliadrin, to scout, to discover, to do what might be done. And then — Strombor and Delia. Yes, my course was plain.

Marta was transported with pleasure. She had not actually said thank you or commended me on my action and this did not surprise me. As far as she was concerned my usefulness to her had finished and one did not expect civility from a great noble, male or female, in these circumstances. Had she wished to employ me again no doubt she would have remembered to toss me a crumb of some tawdry kind as a reward. Mind you, this forgetfulness of favors is not confined to the nobility or the gentry alone. The poor people, for all there are a great many of them, often share the same distressing character defect. To carry out Phu-si-Yantong’s demands in this part of Vallia a Chuktar had been appointed in command. He was an ord-Chuktar, and therefore an important man in almost any army. He and Marta appeared to get along together and as she began to tell him just how the ring would discompose the mailed cavalry of the Iron Riders I was able to ease away out of their notices. This Chuktar Nath ham Holophar was a strom, the Strom of Warhurn, and I’d been ready to take action in case he recognized me. But that was highly unlikely, for the desperado Jak the Drang did not look much like Hamun ham Farthytu, the Amak of Paline Valley.

Their plan was one of the obvious ones, given the circumstances. Once the ring had exerted its power, controlled and directed by the kovneva, the army of Hamal would ride over what was left of the radvakkas. The aerial might they could bring to bear would finish them off. They saw no problems. Scouts brought in details of the radvakka’s movements. The battle was imminent, and I intended to be long gone before that.

The only note that ought to have indicated caution to the Hamalese sounded in the increased numbers of Iron Riders. Reports estimated at least three bands had joined, making nine thousand. Chuktar ham Holophar had thirty regiments of infantry, foot and crossbows, and five thousand totrix and zorca cavalry, together with a strong varter force. With the aerial wings that ought to be enough to see off the Riders — so ham Holophar said, with some grimness — without the magical influence of the ring. Myself, I owned with a matching grimness that I’d as lief see the paired opponents mutually exhausted, Hamalese and radvakkas alike, so that honest Vallians could claim back their own land. Filled with her busy plans Marta Renberg saw me as I crossed to the door. Her face clouded and then brightened.

“You will fight in the battle, Jak the Drang?”

Standing with my hand on the door, aware of the guards posted at either side, I felt the need for a little gentle stirring...

“Mayhap, kovneva. I remember a certain promise, made upon a fallen log in a clearing.”

She flushed up, as she did so easily, and her lips tightened.

“I have warned you aforetime, eeshim. I do not forget old scores.”

“But promises?”

“I do not wrangle in public with a rast like you. Guards! Seize the insolent cramph—”

I went through the doorway before the guards could react and slammed the heavy lenk shut. I was down the stairs of the tower and out into the inner ward, the outer ward, and the kyro swallowed me up in its busy activity long before anyone got a glimpse of my departure. Silly woman! Well, she had her Ring of Destiny. I almost felt sorry I would not be here to see how efficacious it was in action. Just how serious this petulant kovneva was about having me taken up I was not sure; but it appeared a wise plan to keep myself out of sight until evening. The parallel between this action and the action of hiding in radvakka Nikwald occurred to me, you may be sure, and with an unpleasant reminder of the evil days fallen upon Vallia, a sprightly young Hamalian Air Service man went to sleep in a side alley, perfectly unharmed save for a headache when he awoke and a chilly feeling around his nether regions, because his smart uniform was missing. Wearing that uniform and almost busting the stitching, I sat myself down in a tavern, in a dark corner, to await my chance. Thus placing myself in the jaws of the beast, as it were, seemed the safest course.

These men were off duty, and in the nature of off-duty soldiers or airmen they drank and gambled and chased the girls and sang. They sang the songs of Hamal. Well, I’d sung them, in my time. I listened, not joining in, marking down a weasely little fellow with the insignia of a shiv-Deldar who was trying to sing and could only manage a croak or two because he was so far gone, half-falling off his bench, lolling foolishly near me.

They sang “Anete ham Terhenning,” a stupidly tragic song about poor Anete who for the love of a stalwart cross-bowman of the emperor’s guard hurled herself from the Bridge of Sicce. I felt easier when they passed on to the good old favorite: “When the Fluttrell Flirts His Wing.” The shiv-Deldar lurched and slopped his ale and I moved smoothly across and caught him, supported him up against the wall. He waggled his head at me, owlishly.

“Whereaway, dom? The old voller’s in a real hurricane—”

“Rest easy,” I said. “Have another drink.”

So we sat and drank companionably and he talked. He was not at all sure he’d been as clever as he’d thought, volunteering for the Army against Vallia. I learned that the Hamalese regiments and aerial wings and cavalry were not regular units of the Hamalian army; they’d been given the chance of volunteering and, as the shiv-Deldar, who was called Naghan the Boxes, said, the Empress Thyllis wasn’t paying them. Their regimental cash boxes were filled by prompt and regular payments from the person he called the Hyr Notor. The High Lord. I did not have to be told that was what Phu-si-Yantong had adopted as a cover name for himself in dealing with Thyllis and her people and army. Vallia was being cut up into different areas, dominated by the forces of different factions and nobles. His lot had been run out of the North East and they did not like it. Come the morrow, said Naghan the Boxes, and drank deeply, come the morrow and they’d chuck their firepots down on these nurdling Iron Riders and crisp ’em in their iron.

You may judge of my joy when, by casual enquiry, I discovered that the Deldar actually knew of Rees and Chido, and could assure me they yet lived and were hale and hearty. This pleased me greatly. Other things I learned, which you shall hear when they are germane to my narrative. The Deldar blinked at my broadsword. “Naughty,” he said. “Where’s your thraxter? Your Hikdar will not allow non-squadron equipment.” He belched. “He’ll mazingle you as the Law allows.” By mazingle he meant discipline. The uniform I had acquired was that of a simple aerial soldier, a voswod, so I forced a smile and nodded and offered another drink.

The conversation came around to the vollers of the squadron and I learned what I needed to know. So I excused myself and the suns having set and my appetite for the moment satisfied by the ingestion of a superb vosk pie, I sauntered out into the moonslit darkness. Now, as you know, I have some skill in the art of stealing airboats. It is not a gift of which I am particularly proud; but I console myself with the reflection that I practice the art only to use a voller when the need is dire. It is not a skill used for mere self-gratification.

As I left the tavern with the lights shining from the windows the swods were singing “Black Is the River and Black Was Her Hair,” another farcical tragical ditty. They’d roar and roister until the patrols hoicked them out, and they’d maybe have sore heads in the morning; but I knew they were Hamalian swods and they’d fight like demons when the Iron Riders charged.

I hummed a few bars of “The Bowmen of Loh,” in a manner to redress the balance, and went up to the vollerpark. I took a voller. I hurt no one. The flier lifted into the moonshot dimness as one of the lesser moons of Kregen hurtled across the sky. The night air breathed sweet about me. I turned the airboat’s head eastwards. I was on my way home.

Looking back, I realize the futility of anger. I should have known. That dratted Scorpion had not crawled out from under a rotting log and given me implicit instructions to let me get away so easily now. The tempest boiled up in a maelstrom of whirling winds that buffeted the craft this way and that, that scythed me with a pelting blast of hail, that drove the voller swooping and skimming to the ground. I hauled at the controls; but the voller flattened out and skidded along the ground, less than two ulms from the town. The noise racketed about my head.

And then — and then the noise and the tempest vanished in a heartbeat, and the Gdoinye flew down, arrogant and bright in his power, and perched on the coaming.

I glared at that gorgeous bird whose plumage sheened with metallic luster in the moonlight as She of the Veils rose.

“Dray Prescot, onker of onkers.”

My harsh old lips clamped shut. Confound the bird! The raptor would get no change out of me...

“Do you not understand what the Everoinye demand of you?”

So, my resolution flung to the winds, I burst out: “By Vox, you brainless bird! Do they know themselves?”

“They know, onker, and they know you are the man to fulfill their desires and to obey their commands.”

The Gdoinye stuck his head on one side and regarded me balefully from one bright avaricious, beady, knowing eye. “A crossbow bolt was loosed at me—”

“I wish to Zair it had pierced your foul heart!”

“You do not. And you know you do not. Now, hearken! You will stop the Iron Riders. The Star Lords command. You will halt the radvakkas and drive them back over the sea to whence they came. This, Dray Prescot, king of onkers, you will do.”

I laughed. “Stop them? With what? How am I supposed to halt that mailed cavalry?”

“You saved the Miglas and halted the Canops, I remember.”

“Sarcasm, Gdoinye, ill becomes you. And to fight the Canops I brought my Freedom Fighters from Valka and mercenaries from Vallia. You know Vallia never has had a national army—”

“Do not prevaricate, onker! You know the answer. We do not ask you to perform a deed beyond your powers, puerile though they be.”

“If they are so puerile, by Makki-Grodno’s diseased tripes, then you should be able to do it all yourself!”

The Gdoinye let out a squawking cackle, of amusement, of scorn, I didn’t know or care. I glared and shook my fist.

“I’m going back to Strombor—”

“Your empress is safe, Dray Prescot, safe in the Heart Heights of Valka surrounded by your Freedom Fighters. They take a heavy toll of those who invaded Valka.”

“She is safe? Delia is safe?”

“Assuredly. Now, emperor of onkers, do as you must and drive back the radvakkas. And then, why you may do as you wish with Vallia. For a space.”

I opened my mouth to ask what the damned bird meant by a space; but he ruffled his feathers, struck his wings and soared aloft. In an instant he was a dot against the face of She of the Veils, and then he was gone.

So I, being in truth the onker of onkers the Gdoinye dubbed me, cursed and cursed again. I would have to do as the Star Lords commanded. And, of course, I’d mightily enjoy discomfiting the radvakkas. But I had to admit I would far rather tilt at the Iron Riders on my own account. Back to Thiurdsmot I flew and replaced the voller. Scowling ferociously, I took myself off. Only one thing pleased me, and that tempered by parting. Delia was safe. I hungered for her and I knew she yearned for me. The quicker I saw the Iron Riders to the Ice Floes of Sicce the quicker I’d see Delia again.

Ten

“Give me your sword, jen, and you would see!”

I, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, hunkered down under a thorn-ivy bush with a crossbow bolt through my thigh and could no longer curse. There was another bolt through my arm; but I was able to break off the leather flights and draw the confounded thing through and wrap a chunk of breechcloth around to check the bleeding.

All about me the yells and screams and moans of wounded and dying men beat fearfully into the lowering sky. The Suns of Scorpio were sinking over the field of carnage, and already the scavengers were out, slinking like gray wolves from body to body — if the body was not dead at first, it soon became dead after.

“You will fight in the battle, will you not, Jak the Drang?” that stupid Kovneva Marta had said, and so I had, and had fought and this was the result. The Iron Riders had ridden. They had ridden well. They had ridden clear over the ranked regiments of Hamal and the mercenaries, ridden slap bang through the cavalry, gone rampaging on to Thiurdsmot itself, which was the prize they coveted. As for the famed aerial cavalry and the squadron of vollers, they had made no impression, and were long gone. Only the Hamalian varters had put any real impediment in the way of the radvakkas, and that had been for a short space only, the artillery being swept away in the rout.

And the ring? The damned Ring of Destiny?

Opaz knew what the woman had done. She believed fervently in the magical properties of the ring. Well, they hadn’t worked. If she knew Phu-si-Yantong as I was beginning to know the devil, she should not have been surprised. Poor old Chuktar ham Holophar — if he still lived he’d not lightly put his trust in a silly woman’s belief in a magical talisman again...

The quarrel through my leg was a nuisance. It had to come out and the wound attended to. The crossbows the radvakkas had used had been shot off with a fine abandon, much jollity must have been evinced as the barbarians played with these toys of civilization. Their own bows were puny, mere flat arcs of wood and sinew, and the captured crossbows were, for all the mockery, rather wonderful to them. Anyway, some dratted barbarian idiot had sent a quarrel into me, and his mate had slapped a second to follow the first. Mind you, I must blame only myself. Being hit by a flying arrow or bolt in the midst of a hectic battle is a chance all fighting men must take.

Not wishing to dramatize my predicament unduly, I will only add that here I was, wounded, without transport, abandoned on a stricken field, surrounded by implacable foemen — and with the stricture laid on me to defeat and drive out of Vallia the very enemy who was now so triumphant. Well. It was a task. It was a challenge. I fancied I would go into the task with a greater zest now. First things first...

The bolt drew out of my thigh with a deal of unpleasantness. The breechcloth had to be wrapped and pulled tightly. I peered out from under the thorn-ivy. She of the Veils was not yet up but in the last dying wash of light of the suns set the Twins rose in the east, eternally orbiting each other, lurid with a ruddy light. The wind blew soughingly. The yells and screams had mostly died away now and only occasionally a long groan broke that whispering silence.

I crawled out and stood up — very shakily.

The broadsword had snapped across in the melee and the shortsword had been carried off wedged in the breastbone of a radvakka whose iron corselet had been burst through. It had been hot work there, in the press.

Vague ideas of what I was going to do had already formed in my vosk-skull of a head; but I fancied I’d have to walk in on my own two feet — as I have done before, Zair knows. So, grumbling and cursing, I started off, hobbling along. That dip in the Pool of Baptism of the River Zelph in far Aphrasöe would most certainly speed my recuperation and leave me whole and unscarred; but the process of recovery was none the less highly fraught for all that.

Half-under a corpse of an infantryman I found a thraxter.

One of the gray scavengers approached and I showed him the blade, lurid in that ruddy light, and snarled, and he withdrew.

One hell of a racket was breaking up out of Thiurdsmot as I skirted the town. The townspeople would have made good their escape — or I devoutly hoped they had — the moment they had realized the battle was lost. The rout would have been a Cansinsax on a greater and more ghastly scale. Now the barbarians whooped it up in best barbarian style. I flung a few ripe curses at them as I hobbled past in the dappled moons light.

The three water bottles I had picked up were soon emptied and I had to cast about for a stream. I was ragingly thirsty.

The light of a small fire twinkled ahead. Carefully I scouted the little camp. These were Vallians — all of them natives of Vallia, I judged, and not a Hamalese among them. They sat hunched around their fire by the stream and their conversation, low-voiced, made me realize just how low-sunk we Vallians had become.

When I made my presence known the first awkwardness when fists grasped knives was overcome in a quick pappattu. They saw my wounds and one of them, Wando the Squint, helped me bathe them and dress them again. There were about twenty men here, mostly tradesmen of Thiurdsmot of that sturdy class who although employing slaves yet did much of the manual work themselves, being masters at their trades. I gathered their womenfolk had gone back over the Great River a few months ago. And, with them, was the blacksmith with whom I had fled from Cansinsax. When I asked him what had happened, his face clouded over and he beat that thewed arm and iron fist onto his knee.

“The Opaz-forsaken radvakkas! They slew my family — all of them they slew, and I could do nothing.”

His agony pierced me. “But I shall have them.” He spoke quite rationally, this Cleitar the Smith. “I shall wreak my vengeance on them all.”

Very carefully, for I had an inkling of what they purposed, I said: “You pitch your camp perilously close to the town.”

“Aye,” said the fellow who was clearly their elected leader. Tall, darker-complexioned than most Vallians, he lowered down on me, a deep scar furrowing down his left cheek from eye to lip. “Aye. We shall take any stragglers, and send them one by one to the Ice Floes of Sicce. They have conjured up great evil and a greater than they can imagine shall punish them.”

“Amen to that,” I said. “But—”

This Dorgo the Clis broke in: “We were told the iron men of Hamal were our new friends and allies. The kovneva told us. Well, we did her bidding. And Opaz punished us and sent the Iron Riders to destroy the men of iron. It is just. Now we shall avenge ourselves, as is just.”

“Oh, aye,” I said. “I’m all for slitting a few radvakka throats. But, as you see, I am in no case for running. And you will have to run — if you can.”

They weren’t too happy about this. They had a few weapons apart from their knives. One had a bow, a compound arm barely stronger than the bows of the radvakkas. Dorgo the Clis and another hulking fellow had swords, Vallian clanxers. Some of the others had spears, and Cleitar the Smith hefted his hammer. I tried to reason with them — uselessly.

“We may be honest tradesmen and no warriors. I think you are a paktun, Jak the Drang. Well, your paktun comrades ran and were cut down in the battle, as the Hamalese were. Now it is the turn of us to—”

“Listen, Dorgo! What do you know of fighting? I mean real fighting, as a warrior fights, in battle, with edged weapons? You have your town brawls with cudgels and a knife or two. But a real battle is a vastly different affair, by Vox!”

One of the men, a fellow who hefted a spear meanly, said: “My son was always reading the great stories, the legends, tales of the heroes. He ran away to be a mercenary, seeing, as he said, Vallia gave no place for a soldier in his native land. I have heard from him once. He is now a paktun, and fought in a place called Khorundur, wherever in the Light of the Invisible Twins that may be.”

I did not tell him that Khorundur was a nation of the Dawn Lands of Havilfar. His son had traveled widely.

“And what is the meaning to your words, Magin?” demanded Dorgo the Clis.

“My son is not here to fight. But I shall. I shall stick my spear into the guts of a radvakka, at the least.”

The real meaning behind Magin’s words was there, plain as a pikestaff; but he had not yet teased out what he meant himself. He and his comrades, like the great mass of the people of Vallia, had not yet fully understood what they felt, had not yet come to a comprehension of what they must do. And what they must do had ramifications quite beyond the immediate knocking of a few Iron Riders over the head. Trying to tell them to wait was like trying to melt the Ice Floes of Sicce with a half-ob candle. In the end, when I had told them I intended to raise a proper army to fight the Iron Riders and they were properly incredulous — not to say suspiciously contemptuous of any such grandiose concept — I said: “I am for Therminsax. If you can, join me there.”

Dorgo the Clis stroked a broken thumbnail down his scar.

“It is certain you can be of no help to us, Jak the Drang. So we wish you well. But I do not think we shall meet in Therminsax.”

“I think perhaps you will,” I said. “May the light of Opaz go with you.” And so, regretfully, I hobbled off into the night.

That journey recurs now, not, perhaps, with the frightfulness of other journeys I have undertaken on Kregen but, certainly, with a certain frisson. I hobbled. Thoughts of the Hamalese intruded along with all manner of nonsenses as I labored on. Rees and Chido, thank Krun they were safe. Even then I recalled how the Hamalian Army had been suspect against a heavy cavalry charge. Rees being overset by a hersany charge in Pandahem; our own wild charge at Tomor Peak... With an irony I did not relish I had to face the unpalatable fact that in this section of Vallia the only hope for Vallia at the moment was her enemy, Hamal. Nothing stood between the radvakkas and the soft heartlands of Vallia but the Hamalian Army. If I could find someone to listen to me — and I’d do it in the guise of the Amak Hamun nal Paline Valley — we’d strew caltrops, we’d dig ditches, we’d set ambushes, we’d smother the Iron Riders with bolts. It could be done; but at a price. Then I brightened up. That price, by Krun, would be paid by the Hamalese! Capital!

But, no — as I hobbled on through the night to the nearest canal, I knew that was a base thought. Good men would be sacrificed and die and I could take no pleasure from that. Therminsax lay in a north northwesterly direction and altogether too near the border of Sakwara for comfort. But all reports spoke of the city as holding out so far against the radvakkas. The treacherous attack by the Kovneva of Aduimbrev against her northern neighbor and the subsequent occupation by the Hawkwas and the forces of Hamal had gone through very rapidly. What conditions would be like now I had no idea. So I pushed on and curved around and at last found the Therduim Cut and a little group of canalfolk anxiously pushing on to Thermin. They had seen parties of Iron Riders crossing the cut; but so far had been unmolested.

All the North East must lie under the iron heel of the radvakkas. Layco Jhansi and the provinces he had taken with his own forces and the mercenaries he had hired would be the next on the list. What was going on up in the north, down in the southwest, in the southeast, was anybody’s guess. Vondium, the capital and the surrounding provinces, owed allegiance to this new emperor, Seakon, and if the radvakkas or Layco Jhansi did not deal with him, then I would. Vallia was a disturbed ants’ nest these days, with every man’s hand, it seemed, turned against every other man’s. We glided along the cut and as my wound healed so I helped haul. The canalfolk accepted me as one of themselves, as I was able to drink the canalwater, a true test. The kutven of this group was Rordam na Therduim, a brawny, cheerful fellow much cast down by the evil days and the disreputable state of the cut. Often we had to drop over the side of the lead narrow boat and with spades slice a way through the mud fallen in to make a passage. Once we halted in the shade of a group of missals as a long line of radvakkas passed, and with them wagons hauled by benhoffs, wagons no doubt containing much plunder.

“If only there was some way of getting back at them,” said Rordam, wiping his forehead, frowning.

“There will be, kutven. We have to plan and organize.”

“Plan what? Organize with what?”

“Once we get to Therminsax we’ll be able to see better what to do.”

But, I own, my own words sounded hollow even to me. Of the towns and villages along the cut it were best not to speak. This canal, as I have said, ran for much of its course through border-land, march country, and men had not in the old days built anything other than frontier forts. With the establishment of the empire by Delia’s ancestors, the need for forts had gone; but the land was barely suitable for anything other than desultory grazing. The few towns were uniformly abandoned, looted and destroyed by the Iron Riders. We did meet other canalfolk and with them hauled on to Therminsax. Approaching the city the land took on for a space a much wilder aspect, with rocky outcrops and precipitous descents alternating with broader open rides of grassland. The canal scythed through between cutting walls. Then, when Kutven Rordam said Therminsax lay half a day’s haul away, the country opened out into the broader fields and pastures I remembered from my previous visits to the city. We hauled on lustily.

It fell to my lot to take the turn at striding out ahead along the towpath, well in front, to scout our safe passage, when we ran into the fight.

Standing immobile in the shade of the trees fringing the towpath I watched the scene on a grassy bank near a tumbledown village. Men fought and struggled there, and yet I saw they struck at one another with wooden cudgels, and fists, and feet, and bellowed and roared their mutual fury. There were two sides to the combat, and one side wore the blue and green of the high kovnate of Sakwara, and the other side wore the colors of Thermin, an emperor’s province, colors of crimson and brown. I thought of the Iron Riders and felt my fury rising. This was a nonsense.

The city could only be an ulm or two beyond the next curve in the cut and when I barged out into the fight and grabbed a man wearing the crimson and brown and hoicked him out of it, he confirmed my suspicions of what was happening here. He saw my face and the thraxter, and he was very ready to talk.

“Yes, jen, yes. The devils of Hawkwas tried to cross and we must stop them—”

I shook my head.

“Who is in command of your men here?”

He squirmed around in my fist. The fight raged, with men staggering away holding their heads, and the dust lifting, and the uproar bellowing on. He pointed. “Yonder. Targon the Tapster.” Targon, bellowing, struck wildly with his cudgel at a beefy individual who ducked and struck back. I turned on the fellow I gripped and stuck my face into his. “Just you stand here, dom, peaceably, whilst I sort this out.”

He nodded his head frantically, almost choking. I let him go and waded into the fight, got a grip on a Hawkwa. The question to him produced a string of swear words; but he sobered up quickly enough after I spoke to him, and he said: “There. With the black beard. Naghan ti Lodkwara—”

So, for the third time, I plunged into the fight. Men fell as I barged through. I hit Targon on the chin and dragged him along by my left arm, heaving struggling men away, pounding on, took Naghan ti Lodkwara by the neck. I hauled them both back out of the scrum and plunked them down against a ruined wall. I glared at them as they stared up, quite unable to understand what had hit them.

“Now, you two hulus. Listen and listen well. You may be of Therminsax and you may be a Hawkwa. I can guess why you are fighting. You stupid onkers! Haven’t you heard of the Iron Riders?”

“These cramphs of Hawkwas stole six ponshos!”

“They wandered about, lost — we but gave them a home—”

“Aye! In your swag bellies!”

They’d have started up again; but I waggled the thraxter at them.

A couple of men spun out of the fight, saw me and their respective leaders, and came over to lend a hand. I was forced to stretch them upon the ground, where they slumbered. I glared at these two, this Targon the Tapster and this Naghan ti Lodkwara.

“Now, you two, you hulus. Call off your men. Stop this fight. Or, by Vox! I’ll go in there and really thump a few heads.”

Targon looked pretty sullen. “We are not used to fighting with swords—”

“So tell your men, sharpish. Bratch!”

In the event, between us we managed to sort out the confusion. Men sat on the ground, panting, holding their heads. Others leaned on one another, gasping. They were a sorry looking bunch, and no mistake. I stood up and shouted at them. Shouting at people seems to be an occupational disease; but needs must when the devil drives — in this case, far more devils than the immediate deviltry of the Iron Riders.

“The Iron Riders are coming to sack your city—”

“They are way down south,” objected Targon sullenly.

“They drove us out,” shouted Naghan viciously. “That is why we run and take your skinny ponshos.”

“Our ponshos are fine and fat! We do not need nit-stinking Hawkwas to tell us about our ponshos.”

“You will all be ponshos in the jaws of the leems,” I bellowed at them. I went on in fine style, rhetoric, threats, not blandishments so much as promises of what lay in store for them when the radvakkas had been seen off and peace and prosperity once more enfolded Vallia. I watched their faces. “You are all Vallians. The North East is the northeast of Vallia. The Hamalese—”

At this a chorus of curses and blasphemies and threats of what they’d like to do to the Hamalese broke out. Kovneva Marta had wrought well with her mercenaries in Thermin, and these men were not likely to forget.

“Do the Hamalese hold Therminsax?”

“Aye, dom—” began Targon.

“I am Jak the Drang,” I said, and, as though that was a kind of signal allied to what I had done and said, they at once started calling me jen, which is Vallian for lord. I let it pass. If I was to do what I had to do, then any additional slender threads of authority were useful, no matter how ludicrous or despicable in my eyes.

The Hamalian Army was represented in Therminsax chiefly by a regiment of foot and a regiment of crossbowmen. The balance of the forces was made up of paktuns and masichieri, and of men hired by Aduimbrev. That would have to be sorted out. Also, there was a mercenary force of flutsmen.

“If I know flutsmen,” I told these men who were stanching their cuts and rubbing their bruises, “they will fly off the moment the going gets tough. After all, Therminsax means nothing to them, nor does Vallia and the North East. They are not Vallians. But, doms, you are.”

“Maybe,” spat out Naghan ti Lodkwara. “But we have no money to hire mercenaries to fight for us.”

I let his words hang. I wanted these men to examine them. I repeated what he had said. Then, putting contempt into my voice, I said: “Gold — you pay gold for other men to fight for you. If you see your wife and child about to be killed and your house burned, you hold out a purse of gold and pray someone will come along and save your family, your home. Is that it?”

“No — no!” shouted some. They were growing warm. “It is not that at all,” shouted others. They were all struggling with preconceived notions. Ordinary citizens just didn’t go out and fight as common soldiers. Foul-mouthed mercenaries did that, and got paid to do it.

I pointed at Targon. “If you stood in your house and saw your wife and child about to be murdered—” I thought a subtle or not so subtle notion might enhance my argument here, and so I said: “Assuming any girl has been misguided enough to wed you—” which brought a few guffaws out. “And you had that cudgel you’ve been trying to brain these Hawkwas with — would you not strike down the assassin?”

“Well,” flared out Targon, mightily angry. “Of course!”

“So when the Iron Riders get here — will you hit their iron with a wooden club?”

I was surprised to hear a few guffaws at this, and realized I was making headway.

“Give me your sword, jen, and you would see!”

I let out a sigh. About to speak, perhaps to come to the crux, I halted as a man yelled and pointed up.

“There are the flutsmen,” he shouted. “What do they want? Have they seen the Iron Riders?”

The mercenaries of the skies, self-centered, wheeled on their wing-fluttering birds, circling the village. Then they descended steeply through the bright air. I saw the way they handled their weapons. I knew flutsmen of old.

“Take cover!” I bellowed, furious, seething. “They are true devils. They will slay us all for mere sport!”

Eleven

Sport for Flutsmen

“No, no, jen,” quoth Targon, easy, assuming a superior attitude at my ignorance. “They have not troubled us so far — or, at least, no more than any rasts of mercenaries trouble honest men.”

“They’ll have you all as slaves—”

The other men of Therminsax made little attempt to conceal their amusement at my agitation. What a fuss I was making, and all over a patrol of flutsmen out scouting. It was clear enough that, detest the Hamalese and the treachery of Aduimbrev though they might, they had adapted and come to terms with the new order.

The flutsmen steepled down through the thin air, seven of them, the clotted clumps of feathers streaming back from their leather flying helmets, their long toonon-like weapons slanting down. They did not intend to shaft us with their crossbows, then. Sport — that was what they were after, sport... Then I remembered just why I was here. The narrowboats! I was supposed to be scouting for Kutven Rordam and the canalfolk.

Naghan ti Lodkwara pushed up from the wall. He stared up and scratched that black beard. “Flutsmen. They are very devils—”

“Get your Hawkwas into the houses, at least, Naghan. I must back to the cut—”

I started off running, waving my arms, haring along the towpath. The narrowboats were just in view. There were two parties of people and both claimed my attention.

“Get inside and bolt the doors!” I bellowed. “Hurry! Flutsmen!”

The haulers eased up and the tows slacked. Kutven Rordam appeared shouting questions. I bellowed over the uproar. “Bolt the doors. If you have weapons, use them,” Then I went pounding back up the towpath again past the concealing clumps of bushes toward that stretch of greensward. On the edge of the village I skidded to a halt. The flutsmen had landed. Naghan must have shuffled his men into the houses, for the colors in badge and favor of the men huddled into an apprehensive and gesticulating ring were all crimson and brown. The flutsmen prodded them with their long polearms, cunningly adapted to aerial work, the narrow blade and curved axe on a shaft that might be anything from seven to fifteen feet in length, the infamous ukra cowed these men of Therminsax. I had faced the toonons of the Ullars in Turismond and the ukras of flutsmen in Havilfar and I was in no mood to be cowed by these rasts before me now.

Two of the flutsmen carried volstuxes, the aerial throwing spear. They were not all apim, there being a Rapa and a Brokelsh in their number.

Reiving mercenaries of the skies, flutsmen, and they accept any man into their bands, apim, diff, it does not matter providing he swears allegiance to the flutsman band, and obeys their harsh protocol and discipline which, despite their savage ways, control their wild and barbaric way of life. I stepped out into the open and I did not draw my thraxter.

“By Barflut the Razor Feathered!” shouted the nearest flutsman, an apim, with a volstux poised. “Here is one who gapes like an onker! Rast! Get with the others, whilst we decide how you shall die. Bratch!”

“Barflut?” I said, not moving. “A cramph of cramphs, so I am told. A nulsh.”

They went mad at this, their enjoyable conversation on just how these onkerish prisoners were to die so rudely interrupted. Some had wanted to tie ropes to the wrists and ankles of a man and then fly aloft with him attached to two fluttrells. How long, the game went, how long would he last before he was torn asunder. Now they heard the name of one of their sacred patron spirits defiled. They foamed with rage. The apim cast his volstux. I stepped aside. The shaft flew and no doubt stuck somewhere into the ground. I did not turn around to look.

The other one with a volstux, the Rapa, cast also, and again I moved. Leaving three of their number to guard the prisoners, the other four rushed on me. Two ukras and two thraxters whipped toward me. I drew the thraxter. The swordsmen first, for I slid past the long polearms and crossed steel with the Rapa. He came at me in fine fettle with his sword; but, somehow, his thraxter was not where it should have been, and mine was through his throat above the feather-adorned corselet. Withdrawing, I grabbed an ukra in my left hand and swung its owner around into his comrade. The other swordsman died as he tried to degut me and then I could turn my attention to the last two. One had the sense to drop his ukra and go for his sword; but he was too late and too slow. The other one tried to run and I had to do as I dislike and chop him from the rear. But, then, even as he went down, he would understand that if a fighting man runs then his back becomes the target. The remaining three shrilled their rage and raced for their fluttrells. They were going for their crossbows; they were not intending to fly away.

And then — and then an arm reached out from the mass of prisoners and fastened on the neck of a flutsman. Targon the Tapster lifted him and shook him and the ukra fell, to be immediately snatched up by another Therminsaxer. The two flutsmen reached their birds. The crossbows came out of their boots with twinkling speed and the next instant they were leveled at me. The two bolts sped. Because flutsmen habitually shoot from flying birds their crossbow bolts are short and heavy. I had no Krozair longsword. So, not wishing to take any chances, I hurled myself forward and hit the ground. The bolts hissed past overhead. When I sprang to my feet again the two flutsmen were whipping out their thraxters, determined to finish me once and for all.

A chunk of rock flew and hit the Brokelsh in the stomach. He grunted. Quite apart from his armor, his Brokelsh guts were strong enough to withstand a blow twice as hard. With his companion he charged for me, ignoring the rabble who were now throwing rocks with abandon.

I bellowed, high and hard. “Targon the Tapster! Tell your men to capture the fluttrells — the flying birds

— before they fly away! Hurry!”

Then the two flutsmen were on me and it was a fine old skip and dance before I thunked them both down. I swirled away to the fluttrells and let out a yell of disappointment. Six great saddle birds winged high into the air, disdainful of the half-scared, ineffectual attempts of the Therminsaxers to arrest them. Only one remained, and he fluttered his wide wings and kicked up an enormous stink, tugging at his clerketer which was held by half a dozen of the men, all hauling as though they dragged a narrow boat up a vertical cut. I laughed.

“By Vox! A single fluttrell, and you act as though you would chain a city down.”

“We know nothing of these outlandish beasts!” And, and I swear, one of them, a little squiffy-eyed fellow with a broken nose, snapped out furiously: “If Opaz had meant us to fly he’d have given us wings when we’re born.”

In the end, more laughing than anything else, I got the fluttrell under control, and then an arrow winged in past my shoulder and buried its steel head in the fluttrell’s breast. Outraged, I swung about. What my face looked like I do not know. But the canalfolk, running up, abruptly fell back. A tall limber lad, a good hauler, lowered his bow. He looked perplexed. Kutven Rordam, wielding an axe, strode up.

“We saved you in time, Jak the Drang! By Vaosh, it was close.”

So, I couldn’t flare out at them for onkers, for idiots, for hulus — I needed the fluttrell, and now the poor bird was dead, and these canalfolk thought they had saved my life. I shook my head. I would tell them the truth, by Krun, yes! But not right now...

But Targon the Tapster had no such inhibitions. Panting, disheveled, with a raking claw scratch on his arm, he pushed up to Rordam. “You stupid calsany! We risk our lives to capture the bird — and you strut up and kill it! Onker!”

I pass over the next few murs in painful silence.

In the end they were sorted out, and their ruffled feathers soothed. I’d lost the fluttrell. But we had gained a small arsenal. And, more importantly, these people understood a little more of what was asked of them in the future, of what I would demand of them.

Three different cultures were represented here. The canalfolk, fiercely independent, with a way of life peculiarly their own, reserved, withdrawn from the hurly burly of the political life of Vallia, doing their job and proud of that and their heritage and traditions, the canalfolk formed, as it were, the powerful skeleton of Vallia.

The Hawkwas, wilder than the general run of Vallian — if you excepted those howling Blue Mountain Boys of Delia’s — driven from their lands just when they believed they had struck a blow for freedom, the Hawkwas harbored a savage sense of repression and injustice.

And the Therminsaxers, townsfolk, for many years accustomed to city ways and an ordered existence, habituated to a way of life centered around their city and its trade, their guilds and societies, the full living of the good life in a wealthy imperial province of Vallia, these citizens were bemused by the catastrophe that had befallen them.

When I had first come to Therminsax, flying in an ice voller, the place had been ranked as a market town. Now it was a city, the dignity conferred by the emperor in recognition of the place’s growing size and importance and wealth.

“Gather up all the weapons. You—” and I singled out the man I had first dragged out of the fight, Yulo the Boots — “go and find the volstux that went into the bushes. You—” and I gestured to the Hawkwa I had first questioned, he who swore over-abundantly, Foke the Waso, for he was the fifth child — “go and retrieve the two bolts.” They caught the urgency I felt, and all obeyed without question — at least, for the moment. This dominance, this habit of taking command and giving orders, is often hateful; but in the present circumstances a lead had to be given and I am, as you know, blessed or cursed with the yrium, that charismatic power that bedazzles men into total acceptance and loyal following — well, some men and some of the time, as you will have learned.

“Naghan ti Lodkwara,” I said. “Targon the Tapster. Stand before me.” In the busy bustle of men scouting around finding the fallen weapons and collecting the gear from the dead flutsmen the two leaders did as I bid. “Now,” I said. “These ponshos.”

They both started in a-yelling and I quieted them and glared at Naghan. He scraped a foot. “We are hungry. My people have marched many dwaburs without provender. Anyway, the ponshos were wandering—”

“That,” pointed out Targon, breathing deeply, “is why we are out here looking for them.”

“They are safe,” said Naghan. He looked up, half-defiant, half-abashed. “In yonder broken-down house.”

So we went to look. The ponshos were tied up with cloths around their heads. When we loosened the bindings the poor beasts set up a great baaing and bleating. Targon beamed, pleased to see his ponshos still alive and not eaten.

“Your people?” I said to Naghan.

“Aye, jen. We heard what the radvakkas mischiefed in the south and we came north. Some would have asked the burghers of Therminsax for food and help; but others preferred to take what we could and press on.”

By south he meant the southern borders of Hawkwa country. And by some who preferred to take what they wanted, he meant himself, I did not doubt.

“You lead them?”

“Aye, jen. They wait for the ponshos we would have brought a few ulms off—”

There was no doubt in my mind of the correct course. So, in the fullness of time and loaded down with the gear stripped from the flutsmen, we set off for the city. It was not far; and, indeed, Therminsax looked mightily refreshing with its red and white houses sheltered behind the long walls. Those walls were in poor shape now, and suburbs had sprung up outside.

“They will not welcome us, jen,” said Naghan.

“Leave that to me,” I said.

He and Targon, both, looked at me oddly.

Foke the Waso had been sent off to fetch in the rest of the Hawkwas. The Hawkwas I had run across, down in Gelkwa, had been a tough wild raffish lot. I did not doubt that those living in Sakwara were just as hard-bitten. Their reduced circumstances spoke volumes for the impetuous overawing effect of the Iron Riders.

When Udo, Trylon of Gelkwa, subsidized by Phu-si-Yantong with Hamalese money and arms, had set off to attack Vondium, the High Kov of Sakwara had sat still, biding his time. Now he was the acknowledged leader of the Hawkwas, in fact as well as by rank. So Naghan ti Lodkwara had not been involved in the earlier fighting. That, I admit, afforded me a little pleasure. In Therminsax I anticipated making the first real opposition to the radvakkas, as I was commanded by the Star Lords. There might only be a handful of Hamalese there; but there were many mercenaries, paid by that damned Wizard of Loh. His wealth would be colossal, seeing he controlled all of Pandahem as well as much of Hamal and what other lands besides Opaz alone knew. So the reality of what had happened hit me shrewdly. I felt the shock. We had all seen the dust clouds to the south and west, and marked their progress as we came into the city, wondering what they portended. Now I knew.

The Vallian citizens of Therminsax stood about their charming city, wringing their hands, wailing and crying. I did not see any guards of the Hamalian Army, nor did I see any sign of mercenaries. The reason was simple. The Hamalian Army and their mercenary allies had taken every saddle animal, every draught animal and every cart, and had gone. They had marched out, to the safety of the Great River some one hundred and fifty miles due southwest. And long before the citizens could think to abandon everything they could not carry and hurry after the deserting forces, young Wil the Farrow had ridden in on a preysany with the frightful news that the radvakkas had closed in from the south, and had cut off direct escape. Even as we assimilated this information and Naghan’s Hawkwas hurried into the city, almost unnoticed, so more dust clouds rose ominously from east and north. The city was ringed. We were cut off.

Abandoned by all the professional fighting men, the citizens of Therminsax faced a future filled with horror, with sack and rapine and death. There seemed to them to be nothing else left to them in the whole wide world of Kregen.

Doomed, they shouted, screaming, distraught, crazed. Doomed.

Twelve

We Shut the Gates

Useless to shout and attempt to calm the frenzied mobs who ran, shrieking and wailing, this way and that. Here and there men stood, alone, in groups, who did not scream but clenched their fists and scowled and knew not what to do. Pushing my way through and being buffeted about and trying not to retaliate unthinkingly, I led the Hawkwas to a central kyro I knew beside the Vomansoir Cut. This joined the Therduim Cut in a sizable basin, with wharves and slips, and here Rordam would bring his people to tie up. I headed for the palatial palace of the Justicar, the emperor’s governor of the city. Damn these Opaz-forsaken radvakkas! The Iron Riders had drifted westward across North Segesthes in comparatively recent seasons, although it seemed we Clansmen had been resisting them for ages. Where they had come from no one could be sure, for most of Eastern Segesthes was completely unknown to us, save for a few coastal free cities and the islands of the east. Once Hap Loder had said to me that I could weld all the clans of the Great Plains together into a single mighty fighting force, and I had chided him, my right-hand man, my good comrade, asking of him who the enemy would be we would fight. Well, in these latter days we knew who that foe was, and rued the knowledge. The mobs thickened about the streets as I approached the kyro before the imperial Justicar’s palace. I pushed through and worked my way toward the front. People were shrieking and tearing their hair, some had fallen onto their knees, their arms lifted imploringly to the facade of the palace. They shrieked to the imperial Justicar to save them, to find some way of salvation, to prevent their destruction at the cruel hands of the Iron Riders.

There were no guards. I guessed the small honor guard maintained here in normal times had been suppressed by the Hamalese. I was able to push through the throngs who surged into the inner courtyards and up the ornate stairways and into every room and chamber. The noise would have been upsetting to a man of stone. And, still, there were these knots of citizens who did not scream out, but clenched their fists emptily, and scowled, and did not know what to do. Eventually I found the Justicar, standing with his back to a tall window where the crimson drapes shadowed the brilliance of the suns. He looked shriveled. I knew him. He was Nazab Nalgre na Therminsax — an honor title adopted on his appointment. He stood there, created a Nazab by the emperor, trembling, holding his head, surrounded by a few loyal servants and slaves, quite unable to answer the imploring shouts and frantic pleas of the citizenry.

Without ceremony I ripped out the thraxter and angled it so that the light caught the blade and runneled an ominous glitter into the faces of the citizens. I bellowed over their cries.

“Out! Outside! Stop this caterwauling. Let the Nazab have time to think and plan. Out — or I’ll crop your ears.”

Dazed, abruptly panic-stricken in an altogether more personal way, the people in the chamber hustled to the door, pushing, crying that a madman had arrived, yelling — oh, it was all a bedlam, and not very splendid, either.

I glared at the slaves.

“Out! Schtump!”

They scuttled.

I was left alone with the Justicar of Therminsax, Nazab Nalgre. He recognized me. He stopped shaking. His eyes grew round. He put a hand to his lips. I slammed the door and, swiftly, yanked it open and bellowed along the carpeted corridor.

“If anyone hangs about by this door I’ll blatter him!”

Slamming the door again I swung back to Nazab Nalgre.

“Lahal, Nalgre. You know me. My name is Jak the Drang. Do you understand?”

“Yes — No, my prince—”

“Jak the Drang, onker!”

“Yes, yes, majister — Jak the Drang.”

I lowered my voice. “Not prince, not majister. Jak. Now, Nazab Nalgre, we have work to do.”

“Work? We are doomed. The soldiers have all gone. The Iron Riders approach — what work can we do but pray to Opaz?”

“I’ll show you,” I said, and hustled him to his desk. “Write at my dictation. A proclamation. Have your stylors copy it out, fair, and have it displayed all over the city. By Vox! We’re Vallians. We do not run screeching like a pack of witless vosks when cramphs sniff around our city! Write!”

“Yes, majis— pri— Jak.”

So I drew a breath and told him what to write. It was all good rousing stuff and I will not repeat it word for word. Briefly, I told the citizenry that the city would not fall, that we would outface these miserable radvakkas, that we’d see them all buried in their damned iron armor, and anyone who skulked would have his ears cropped, if not worse. Then I went on to give orders the import of which will become plain as I go on with my tale. Very quickly, the stylors were summoned and began to copy out the proclamation for distribution.

Then I ran Nazab Nalgre out onto the balcony fronting the kyro and by gesticulations we obtained a quietness in the mobs.

I shouted. I put forth that old fore-top hailing voice and reached out well into the square, and waited between sentences so that they might be repeated to those farther back. Again I will not repeat all I said. It was perilously near boasting.

“People of Therminsax. Vallians. Hearken. Your Justicar, Nazab Nalgre, has given me the high honor and duty of resisting the Iron Riders, of saving Therminsax, and of burying every radvakka in a plot of soil. Those that are not burned to a crisp, that is. Think how a radvakka would broil in his armor! All the gates will be closed. Now. Those men who wish to shut the gates they know best — shut them. Those men who have iron bars to hand place them in the canals under the gateways so that no skulking radvakka may gain entrance there.” I went on bawling, detailing work to be done, seeing groups of men running to obey. I scaled the work so that the most obvious tasks were performed first. Soon I was able to finish with a resounding burst of oratory, rousing stuff, and then go to meet the leaders of the city. The masters of the guilds, the heads of each ward, the magistrates, the Hikdars of the Watch, the chief of the fire service and, most important, the high priests of the various temples. Therminsax is well-served with temples, fine imposing buildings, and the priests held great if tenuous powers. With this collection of frightened men in the main chamber of the palace I called for quiet and then told them, simply and forcefully, that Therminsax would not fall, that if they obeyed me they would be saved, what unpleasant things would happen to them if they did not obey, and finished off with a direct statement. “You are Vallians. Do not forget that. You have a pride in your city and your land. These rasts of Iron Riders are uncouth barbarians, illiterate. They have no idea how to lay siege to a city. All they know is charging in their mail, brainless. Obey me and you will be saved.”

Then it was a matter of giving each group its orders.

All weapons must be gathered up for ordered distribution. If a man possessed a favorite sword — or spear, for they were spearmen of a sort — he might keep that, if he would use it. The weapon most used by the tumultuous townsmen was the stave with the cudgel held ready in the belt. The spears were used in vosk-hunting, and this was not done for a living but as a sport. The wild vosks were vicious beasts, as all men know, and quite unlike the domesticated vosks from which come such succulent rashers. I already had ideas on the old vosks, as you may imagine. Then I took myself off on a circuit of the city. The suburbs built outside the walls were a handicap, no doubt of that. Barriers were erected across the ends of the streets, from house to house, where we could. In other places I gave orders for awkwardly placed houses to be pulled down. Now that the citizens had a task to do, had been given some hope, and had an intolerant devil to goad them, they saw fresh hope where all hope appeared dead. They worked. City folk are accustomed to working together, in disciplined order, their habits of mind are orderly. They work together, each relying on the next. That is for work. For play they are a wild tearaway bunch, of course, given the opportunity. Both these traits would be used by me in the defense of Therminsax.

The herds of vosks and flocks of ponshos were being driven into the city through the gates specially left ajar for the purpose. Cattle were brought in. The drovers had, perforce, to work afoot, for the only saddle animal in the entire city was young Wil the Farrow’s preysany. At my direction stylors were making a count of food. Well and well — for now. If the siege was protracted — and I did not think it would be — then would come the time to search out hidden hoards.

The iron bars under the gates through which the canals flowed were fixed firmly, and I checked them all, ducking down into the water, conduct which brought knowing nods, and whispers that this Jak the Drang was a canalman, then...

A small but cheerfully clear stream ran chuckling through the city, flowing on across the country to swell other streams and eventually to empty into a tributary of The Great River. Along both sides of this little stream, called the Letha Brook, grew tall stands of the letha tree, well mixed with a kind of beech. The letha tree gives a tough, elastic wood, very white, much used for the handles of agricultural implements. The leaves of the letha are light green, frondulous, very pleasant, and afford a pleasing contrast to the red and black buds and flowers. In the bed of the Letha Brook I made sure the iron bars were firmly fixed against the flow of water. The Iron Riders were perfectly capable of pulling off their iron armor and wading up the stream into the city.

These preparations, rushed though they were, filled in the time until the approach of the radvakkas signaled the time for me to go up onto the wall facing their serried ranks. They ringed the city in metal, sitting their benhoffs lumpily, watching us, and an embassy rode forward, under a great banner of benhoff tails, and trumpets blew for a parley.

Chivalric ways of warfare were not for the radvakkas, and a parley to them meant nothing like what it would mean to a professional soldier of more civilized lands. So I did not go outside the gates to parley. A fellow clad in iron with much gilding and a profusion of feathers and benhoff tail plumes spurred forward. He bellowed.

I heard him well enough.

I was pretty sure they were perplexed that an army had not ridden out to meet them and, in the familiar and highly satisfactory fashion they had established in this new land, be crushed to powder beneath their iron hooves. This fellow wanted us to open the gates pronto, to stand aside as the radvakkas rode in. He made no promises. His absolute confidence was, in truth, somewhat amusing. I guessed this band — an offshoot of the westward horde — had heard of the prowess of their fellows down south and burned to emulate them here. The city lay before them, open and defenseless, for they were well aware that an army had marched out — had run off. Their astonishment that we did not let them in abruptly ceased to amuse me. It affronted me. I leaned over the battlements and bellowed back. Well — I cannot repeat what I said. It might burn out the machinery of this tape recorder. But I let fly with a choice selection of insults nicely calculated to upset these haughty and brainlessly arrogant barbarians.

I finished: “And any one of you can enter the city any time he likes, horizontally with his guts hanging out.”

For a moment a dead silence hung over the assembled host.

Then a deep and passionate diapason of fury burst out from the crowded ranks. A cloud of arrows flew up. Every one fell short. The Iron Riders set spurs to their steeds, put their heads down, and charged. In a thundering roaring mass of iron they hurtled on.

Nazab Nalgre standing next to me took a few paces back across the ramparts. I stood watching the oncoming avalanche and I half-narrowed my eyes, studying them, thinking, scheming, imagining standing on the ground and facing that little lot...

Of course, the radvakkas had to halt as they reached walls and buildings. Some tried to hack through the barricades we had erected across the ends of the outer streets; but the men I had stationed there reported that the defenses held against this passionate, headlong, ill-considered charge... The riders began to mill, some fell back, others started to gallop around the city seeking an entrance. All the time they were blowing trumpets and horns, yelling, kicking up the devil of a racket. Looking down on them I longed for a great Lohvian longbow and an inexhaustible supply of clothyard shafts. Presently, the band drew off, waving their spears, shouting, reforming their ranks. They had no real organization apart from the war band clustered about a leader, and of discipline their ideas were that anything they did to an inferior was lawful, and if an inferior objected then they’d strapado him or do something equally unpleasant. Sheer brute force was their guiding principle. Everyone in the city was fully aware of the horrors that would ensue if the radvakkas took the place. For the rest of the day they surged about, like aimless waves, rushing forward, recoiling, riding about, showing off, attempting to awe us. Steadily the citizens improved the barricades. The radvakkas were cavalry — heavy armored cavalry. They had many camp followers and slaves, who walked or rode in the band’s wagons. Of infantry they had none. The concept of a man attempting to conduct fighting standing on his own feet was to them not so much ludicrous as insane. Mind you, in the last idea, my Clansmen shared much. They did fight on foot, for they had experience of the occasional necessity of that on the Great Plains. But any Clansman would regard saddleback fighting as the normal fashion.

When the suns began to decline the radvakkas hauled off and rode back to their camps, which ringed the city, and the fires blazed up. They were finished for the day. The morrow would bring fresh problems, and I would be up nearly all the night organizing.

At meetings with the various civic leaders their questions were all the same and my answers uniformly simple.

“How can we resist them?”

“They cannot break into the city.”

“But they will starve us out.”

“If we let them. We have food for six or seven months of the Maiden with the Many Smiles. In that time we shall organize. Do as I tell you. Obey me. Have courage. Have confidence.”

“But, Jen Jak—”

“Buts are not wanted here, koters. You are citizens of a great city. You have the skills, the discipline, the power. I shall channel that. Believe in me. And, always, remember you are Vallians.”

“Vallia is destroyed, the empire fallen — even the emperor is dead.”

“So I am told. So we fight for Vallia through the pride you have in your city of Therminsax. Are you not a city of an imperial province?”

“We obey the Justicar through habit, we think, and we tremble for the fearful evils—”

“Enough!”

In one fashion or another the meetings ended on the same note.

“Enough babbling like witless onkers, like wailing women. You are men. Vallians. From Therminsax we will destroy these Iron Riders who camp so uselessly outside our walls. And then we shall march and destroy the remainder. I have spoken. Do as I command — in the name of Vallia!”

Thirteen

The Raid Against the Radvakkas

Clouds sped erratically across the faces of the Twins and the Maiden with the Many Smiles. The land breathed with the quietness of a country night. At our backs the bulk of the city rose against the sky, ill-defined, speckled here and there with lights. The civic leaders were carrying out strict instructions to make sure their people stood an alert watch along the walls and at the barricades. I stole silently across the sleeping land, heading for the nearest radvakka camp. With me came a choice band of desperadoes from Naghan ti Lodkwara’s Hawkwas, and a few lively spirits from the city. The days had been spinning past and I had already set in motion many of the measures needful for the safety of the city and the prosecution of the war against the Iron Riders. Although it had seemed to me everything lay to my hand; the task was not easy. I had already fashioned a number of armies for specific purposes on Kregen — Fetching the young people of Valka out of the Heart Heights to defeat the slavers and aragorn; creating an army for the Miglas to defeat the Canops; forming the phalanx of my old vosk-skulls from the slaves and workers of the warrens in Magdag; and others I have not mentioned. But now when I thought the task would be relatively simple I was finding odd, stupid, little impediments.

Naghan whispered. “There is a camp, jen.” We approached cautiously upwind so as not to alarm the benhoffs, tethered out in long lines. We carried flint and steel and armfuls of combustible. We were a grim and deadly bunch and were not a party to be met with lightly on an overcast night. Stealing on we passed the first rows of leather tents. We left them strictly alone. A sentry, riding his benhoff, for no self-respecting radvakka would walk when he could ride, was dealt with, silently. A leap onto those skinny hindquarters — hind-sixths — and a grip around his mouth, a heave and a thump. We pressed on. And all the time I was only half there in this raid to create mayhem, for my thoughts kept going to the preparations to be made.

The rapier and left-hand dagger were the arms of the gentlefolk of Vallia at that time, and the clanxer —

the common clanxer, as it was called — was coming more and more into favor as the people witnessed the execution of the Hamalese thraxter, which the clanxer resembled. I had with Naghan the Gnat designed new styles of weapons in the armories of Valka, and the new sword we had developed from the thraxter, the clanxer and the shortsword, now equipped the regiments of Valka. Those regiments had been dispersed through the orders of the emperor and the wiles of Ashti Melekhi and Layco Jhansi. Well, much good it had done them...

But Therminsax was not plentifully supplied with iron and steel. We must husband all we had. The women and girls were busily making arrows, and we were using flint heads, for flint is often sharper than steel and is never scorned by even the famed Bowmen of Loh. The bows themselves were compound, fashioned from horn and wood and sinew; but even then our numbers of men who could use a bow were limited. We were fortunate in having Larghos the Bow with us, for his family had been making bows for generations for the city and the districts around.

Now we approached the compound where the slaves were quartered. The meanest of the slaves would be chained up for the night. Those more privileged, those whom I, probably erroneously, call helots, would sleep nearer their masters.

Cautiously, we stole into the compound and started our work.

Slaves — well, there were many slaves in Therminsax, and they were going to prove a problem. Because of the ease with which the Iron Riders had ridden over and through the legions of Hamal, it was clear to all that a relatively thin line of sword and shield men would never stop a radvakka charge. We had no aerial cavalry and no fliers. We did have one preysany, though... At that comical thought I came back to the present and heard Naghan whispering fiercely to the freed slaves. I did not think they would wait until we had fired the tents before they broke out; but we had to try. Just as Foke the Waso struck a light and blew on the tinder the Maiden with the Many Smiles broke free of cloud wrack and cast her fuzzy pinkish light over the sleeping camp. We froze. The freed slaves, taking this sudden appearance of the Moon as a sign, broke out. Yelling and screaming and whirling their chains, they surged in a tide of vengeance against the leather tents. I cursed.

“Time to go, Naghan. Pull your men back. Chuck the fire pots and let us get out of here.”

“Quidang, jen!” The firepots flew, setting the nearer tents afire. The dried leather burned clammily, belching smoke. But fire shot up satisfactorily from piled stores. We ran from tent to tent, hurling firepots, which contained combustibles and were surer for this work than simple firebrands. We reached the benhoff lines. The animals were restless, stamping their hooves, tossing their heads, letting rip with that raucous whinnying belching sound they have.

“Up with you, Hawkwas all!”

There was only fractional hesitation.

“If you can ride totrixes and hirvels in Sakwara, you can ride benhoffs in Thermin. Mount! Ride!”

There is a fellow in North Yorkshire in England who has trained bulls to be saddled and ridden and jumped. To a Kregen the idea of riding any sort of suitable animal is natural. The Hawkwas mounted up and, bareback, we belted out of the camp.

Uproar rose behind us. Flames leaping, slaves shrilling, radvakkas roaring in rage and tumbling out, women screaming.

We left them to it and racketed back across the land toward the gate of the city where a guard waited to open for us.

I twisted around to look back. By Krun! Following the lead we gave a whole bunch of benhoffs charged out of their lines, pelting along in our wake. Their hooves thundered. We sped along. Clouds obscured the Moon for a space and then shifted across, intermittent shafts of pinkish light flooding down as the Twins rode free. In that hallucinatory light I saw a group of riders bearing in from the side, aiming to join us.

Naghan shrilled a warning, and then the newcomers were yelling: “Vallia! Vallia!”

Well, that is an old trick. I hefted my thraxter, ready to fend them off. My only object this night was to cause confusion to the radvakkas, as much damage as we could, but, mainly to let them know they fought warriors and their task ahead was going to be difficult and unpleasant. The riders raced along on our flanks. There were totrixes, hirvels, a couple of nikvoves, and a few zorcas. Fleetly, the riding animals closed with us. I saw the fierce dark faces, the flash of eye and teeth, the glitter of weapons.

Now the radvakkas were swarming out of their camp, like a swarm of enraged bees, racketing over the plain after us. In a bunch, we raced ahead of them.

“Vallia!” yelled a man on a zorca, riding with that long-legged, loose style. “Let us into the city!”

As to that, I said to myself, we will see... I didn’t like the way he said Vallia, the way his tongue twisted around the word. I kept a wary eye on the newcomers as we fleeted toward the walls. Riding the benhoffs bareback my people jerked and swayed, gripping on, grasping their mounts convulsively. The zorcas moved ahead with their superb speed, and their riders eased them back to pace the slower totrixes. To pace the slower anything, I should say, for, indeed, the four-legged, close-coupled zorca with his single central spiral horn is an animal of fire and spirit and enormous heart and gusto, superb, superb... We crashed on and the radvakkas shrilled in pursuit.

By the time we neared the gate and saw the busy figures of Therminsaxers swinging the lenken portals wide I had more or less convinced myself that the riders who had so unexpectedly joined us were in truth Vallians. Riding as we were without saddles, we would have been easy meat for these men settled firmly in their saddles, booted feet thrust deeply into stirrups.

In a mob we avalanched through the gate. Nodgen the Potter was in charge of the gate detail, and he had sense enough to allow the following benhoffs through as I yelled to him. The three Moons now chose to shine forth at last free of the clinging clouds. We saw the mass of Iron Riders pelting along, the pink light gleaming and sheening on their armor, their shaggy pelts flaring in the wind of their passage. The last free benhoff lumbered through and Nodgen the Potter yelled to his men to slam the gates and set the bolts and bars. He was a potter, a master of his khand, his guild, and violently resentful of being called Nodgen the Pots. The gates slammed in the furious faces of the Iron Riders. Some of the citizens on the walls above called down taunts and insults, catcalls that infuriated the radvakkas even more, and gave me heart. We’d do it, yet, despite the difficulties. If we did not, we’d all be miserably dead or even more miserably slave.

Half a dozen dark desperate figures dropped off the last free benhoffs. Before my men could start in prodding with their spears I yelled.

“Do not harm them! They are escaped slaves — welcome them.”

Well, we sorted out that little problem. These men had chosen what was, in truth for them, a sensible course, and clambered onto benhoffs to ride after us rather than wander about outside, in the almost certainty of being taken up. I spoke a few heartening words to them and then turned my attention to the group of riders who had joined us.

They were a mixed bunch of apims and diffs — and one diff I recognized at once, now I could see them by the light of a torch bracketed to the wall of the guard tower. I knew him. He was unmistakable.

“Hai, Korero,” I said, walking across. “Lahal and Lahal. You are most welcome.”

The Kildoi flexed his four arms and his wicked tail shipped over his head. His golden beard bristled. “If I am welcome, Jak the Drang, I would welcome an overflowing tankard of good Thermin ale. Lahal and Lahal. I joy to see you still alive, for I do not forget what passed in Nikwald.”

“As to that, the joy was to me. How came you here? These others—” And I looked at them. Well. Of course I had immediately noticed Korero. But the others — I had told them I was going to Therminsax, and they had shuffled that off, down by that stream outside Thiurdsmot with a crossbow bolt hole in my thigh. Cleitar the Smith still held his hammer, and the head was darkly stained. Dorgo the Clis, his scar livid, spoke for them all.

“We came to Therminsax, because you said so, Jak the Drang.” He shook his head, puzzled. “Although why we should do so is a mystery. “But you are in poor case, it seems. We bided our time out there, wondering how best to chop off a few radvakka heads, when you sallied. So—”

“And right welcome you are, Dorgo, all of you. We need fighting men here. And we have ale and wine

— the city fathers will bless you and see you have full cups for tonight.”

Two men rather in the background, holding zorcas with a bunch of diffs, now moved forward. Dorgo looked and said: “We met these paktuns on the way here. They tell us they are all that is left of an army sent against the radvakkas.” He shook his head again and I guessed he was wondering why on Kregen he had come to Therminsax instead of hightailing it for South Vallia. Among the diffs were Khibils, Pachaks, Brokelsh, a Rapa and a Fristle. They were all hard-bitten professional fighting men, paktuns, mercenaries. One of them, one of the four Chuliks, stepped forward. He looked mightily impressive in his armor and military insignia, his tusks thrusting arrogantly up from his cruel curved mouth. He surveyed me.

“I am Shudor Maklechuan, called Shudor the Mak. I command here. If you wish us to fight for you, I will draw out a contract. Our fees are high, for we are mighty men.”

“I might have expected it, by Vox,” I said. I’d been having trouble with the city fathers and the khands over similar monetary arrangements. “No doubt you are capable of bearing arms. As to payment, I am prepared to give you a trial period. I see you wear the mortilhead, so you are a paktun. How many other of your men wear the pakmort?”

“Me!” and “Me!” rose from his men. There were thirty or forty of them, and of that number no fewer than ten were real paktuns. There was not a hyr-paktun, however.

The two men I had noticed gentling the zorcas, caring for them, seemed to be arguing away over some private matter. Their fierce whispers were intended for their own ears; but the heat of the matter made them speak louder and louder. Shudor the Mak turned his head and bellowed: “You two arguing again?

May Likshu the Treacherous be my witness! Zarado — cease mewling and leave well alone.”

The two men withdrew and they did not stop arguing. They were shadows in the angle of a buttress and so I could not distinguish the details of their accoutrements or weapons. The Chulik paktun swung back to me, very grim, very fierce.

“As to a trial period, dom, that remains—”

“I am called Jak the Drang and you call me jen,” I butted in, very sharpish, very prickly. “I hold the commission of command from the emperor’s Justicar here. I do not doubt you are lusty fighting rogues; but in these evil days one may be forgiven for suspecting masichieri calling themselves paktuns.” Before he could get another word in I went on forcefully: “Now take your men and the city fathers will find you quarters. We are in bad case here; but the radvakkas cannot break in. Soon we will sally out and defeat them utterly. In that day I expect you, Shudor the Mak, and your men, to earn your hire.”

He took a good look at me, sizing up my mettle. Then he nodded. If I thought this confrontation was over I was mistaken. One of the Pachaks stepped forward. He wore the pakmort. He spoke in that precise, elegant and yet firm manner of the Pachaks.

“We may take nikobi, jen Jak, if the contract is drawn out properly. Our last nikobi was shattered on the field of battle.”

“I welcome you, paktun. Your name?”

“I am Logu Na-Pe, paktun, at present tazll but willing to take employment in a good cause — if the cash is right.”

“The cash will be right, and the nikobi, Logu Na-Pe.”

So I saw them off to their quarters in a comfortable inn and felt a little cheered. They were hard fighting men, all of them, professionals. They were a valuable addition to our forces. But they were few, very few...

There was a great deal to be seen to; well, there always is, by Vox, but particularly so when you not only conduct the defense of a city but also seek to create an army from nothing. So I was kept busy. The saddle animals we had acquired would be useful in a sally; and if the time for the great offensive was long delayed and the fodder ran out, then we’d most likely end up eating these fine steeds. That would be a great pity. But it would be done, that was true, by Zair!

The great advantage of a citizen army is the habit of working together, of order and discipline, ingrained into city folk, as distinct from the wilder and more independent mind of countrymen. We were citizens arrayed against barbarians. Well, if we couldn’t beat that illiterate mob outside we had no right to call ourselves citizens, or to inhabit so fine a place as Therminsax. Numbers, solidity, strength; these were our tools for the job, our weapons of war.

Toward morning, wandering back to the imperial Justicar’s palace where I had set up headquarters, I passed the inn where the paktuns had been quartered. This was The Golden Ponsho . I thought a little quench would do me good before I turned in, and I might find some of the paktuns about to talk to and find out a little more of their history. So I went in, ducking my head under the old blackwood beams. Two men in white tunics sat at a table, their slippered feet stuck out, arguing away. One, I knew, was Zarado. I helped myself to a flagon of wine and sat down near them. A few other paktuns were still drinking; most had turned in.

“Oh, yes,” this Zarado was saying. “The Iron Riders are a fierce-looking bunch, Zunder. I know, I know. But I wonder how they would fare, say, against the overlords—”

“I’d like to see it!” burst out this Zunder, a man with dark moustaches, fiercely-brushed up. “By Zim-Zair! I’d relish the sight of these Grodno-Gastas charging the Overlords of Magdag!”

Fourteen

News of Pur Zeg, Krzy and Pur Jaidur, Krzy

The flagon halted before my lips. I did not move — could not move.

“May Zantristar the Merciful smile on us! The city is filled with hulus — fambly ready for the reaping. We should never have left the ship in the first place—”