Chapter Nine

Into the Hostile Territories

Delia sang.

As we marched along Delia sang.

My chest itched.

As soon as Thelda had recovered herself and seen the weals crisscrossing my chest she had cooed and pursed up her fat lips and gone off to pick some brilliantly-mauve wild flowers which she bashed and mixed into a paste. Delia had wondered across and bent down and looked closely at the flowers and at Thelda’s intensely absorbed face as she pounded and stirred, and had smiled slantingly at me, and gone off, humming.

Now Thelda had splattered the mauve paste all over my fiery chest, saying: “This will do you the world of good, Dray! It’s an old Vallian remedy and wonderfully efficacious. Why, these little vilmy flowers will have your poor dear chest healed in no time!” The confounded paste was irritating and fretting me like a hive of bees fastened to my chest.

And Delia marched on at the head of our little caravan and sang.

She sang wonderfully. Gay, rollicking airs that sped our feet over the grass, sad little laments that made me, for one, think back on all the great times and powerful men I had known who were now no more, silly little catch-phrase songs in which we all joined — Thelda with a self-important air of consciousness of the effect she was creating, Seg with a most powerful and musical tenor that truly delighted me, and me with my own wild and savage bellowings that always made Thelda jump and Delia sing on superbly. But that damn chest itched until I could stand it no more.

“May the Black Chunkrah take it!” I yelled. I ripped the whole sticky mauve plastery mass off and flung it into the grass and jumped on it “My chest’s on fire!”

“Really, Dray!” sighed Thelda, sorely tried by my ingratitude. “You must persevere. You must give it time to work its healing magic.”

“Healing magic nothing!” I shouted at her. “You try it! You stick it on your own imposing chest and see what it feels like!”

“Dray Prescot!”

“We-ell—”

The tinkling of a stream a short distance off by a line of salitas trees gave me the excuse not to exhibit further my sullen disgrace. I ran across and dived in and if all the monsters from the fabulous book called the Legends of Spitz and His Enchanted Sword that had been popular at the time I’d spent in Zenicce had started for me with gnashing jaws and talons I’d have scrubbed that confounded chest of mine clean first. Since Delia and I had taken that baptism by immersion in the sacred pool on the River Zelph in distant Aphrasöe — distant! No one knew where Aphrasöe, the City of the Savanti, was located! — we seemed to have picked up the valuable attribute of not only remaining healthy and with a promised life span of a thousand years but also of recovering with remarkable rapidity from wounds. We never seemed to get sick.

I rejoined them and I heard Delia, in a musing kind of voice, talking about a little blue flower she had picked.

“How pretty it is, Seg! See the petals, and the stamens, and the curious little silverish shape on each petal, like a heart—”

Thelda said “Oh!” and put a hand to her mouth.

“You are not well, Thelda?” inquired Seg, most anxiously.

“Oh! How silly — Oh, Dray, what you must think of me!”

“Now I’ve got rid of that debased paste from my chest I don’t think anything,” I said. I saw Delia’s face, all glowing and glorious and I knew Something Was Up —

“Oh, Dray!” wailed Thelda. “What I picked was not vilmy at all! It didn’t have the silver heart — I forgot! It was fallimy, that we use to scour cisterns clean — and I put it on your chest! Oh, Dray!”

I looked at her.

She put her hands over her face and started to sob, so I had to yell at her: “You silly girl — it doesn’t matter! I’m not mortally wounded — oh, for the sweet sake of Zim-Zair, stop that infernal racket!”

“Say — say you — will forgive — me! I’m so — so stupid!”

“Now, now, Thelda!” said Delia, rather more sharply than I expected. Seg tried to put his arm around the lady companion’s shoulders, but somehow she eluded him and the next moment she was up against my abused chest and snuggling up to me, crying: “I am such a silly girl, dear Dray! What you must think of me — but—”

“Thelda!”

Delia hefted her pack and nodded at Seg.

“It’s time we marched!”

I couldn’t have agreed more. I managed to tuck Thelda somewhere around my left hip bone — she clung on — and started off after the other two.

Oh, how my Delia had joyed in all that! She was no white-skinned flaccid lump of lard who would lie back motionlessly. She was lithe and vibrant, a sprite, alive, full of mockery and yet absolutely dedicated and honest and fearless in our love. We had met and loved and we formed the perfect whole, meeting on all levels, profound and ethereal — no, there is no woman in two worlds like my Delia of the Blue Mountains.

The country closed in soon after that into a series of knobby rounded hills through which we followed the bank of the stream. Thick vegetation choked the hills but we found animal tracks beside the river and made good progress, always on the alert for the makers of these trails. Insects tended to be a nuisance, but Delia found a herb of pale and delicate green which, when she had crushed it and made a clear syrupy liquid seemed to my eyes a better proposition than poor Thelda’s thick mauve paste. With this smeared over our faces and bodies the insects left us severely alone; I quite liked the scent of it. Once more the country opened out and now we could see distant mountains — mere knobs on the ground compared with The Stratemsk; but nonetheless for that mountains through which we must find a way, walking. Numerous species of wild deer roamed the plains and I sighed for a fleet zorca between my knees. As it was Seg did some crafty stalking and with a single arrow provided us with our supper. We selected carefully-chosen campsites, for the horrific stories of the Hostile Territories, although so far nowhere borne out in what we had encountered, still rang in our minds. And so we proceeded across the land toward the far-off mountains. Twice we saw smoke rising from distant elevations in the plain, but these places we avoided.

Who — or what — lived here we did not know and had no desire to make their acquaintance. An earnest of the wisdom of that decision came on a morning when the twin suns of Scorpio flamed into the sky and threw slanting sunshine gloriously through fluffed and meandering clouds above. We broke camp and strapped up and set off. The trail we were following dipped through a defile and so, naturally, we detoured that, clambering over scrubby hillsides and around thorn-ivy bushes. Ambushes are no places to take the girl one loves.

“Look—” said Seg in a low voice.

Ahead of us, in a crevice in the hillside that trended down to the defile below, something glittered. We approached with the silent tread of the hunter — Seg’s learned in his mountains of Erthyrdrin and mine with my Clansmen in Segesthes.

Two dead bodies lay there. They were not men. Neither, for that matter, were they members of any of the races of half-men of Kregen with which I was at that time acquainted, Fristle, Och, Rapa, Chulik, Sorzart, or other — and my companions had never met these people before. Of medium height, they possessed two legs and two arms. Their faces reminded me of the hunting dogs of some of the clans that roamed the Great Plains of Segesthes, but there was a considerable admixture of the leem there, too. I was struck by the vast forward-thrusting lower jaw and the dewlaps that hung down. Mind you, the bodies were decomposing and the flies — they get everywhere — were busy. The girls moved back, out of range of the stink, but Seg and I were professionals and we knew what we had to find out. Weapons first: Short thrusting swords like the short swords of my Clansmen. Long and slender lances with many-barbed tips. Tomahawk-like axes. Knives. Metal: From the mixture of steel and bronze, we judged these people to be in much the same area of development as the people of the inner sea where steel would be used if it could be come by, and bronze if not. Armor: Practically nonexistent, consisting of leather arm-guards, a leather cap, and a leather breastplate with strips of some pretty hard substance stitched into it. Seg thought this was a bone or a horn of some kind. Clothes: Minimal, breechclouts as worn all over Kregen, with a padding vest beneath the breastplate. No shoes or sandals. Accouterments: The usual leather belts and pouches.

Then we both looked at what had killed these beast-men.

From the face of each one protruded a long arrow. An exceptionally long arrow. Working carefully with his knife Seg got the arrows out. He gave a grunt and lifted the points for my inspection. They were not the steel piles I would have expected.

“Flint,” Seg said. His tanned face screwed up. “Seems I have relations around here.”

He did a few quick flip-overs of his outstretched fingers, measuring the shaft, and then he whistled.

“They’re from a master-bow.” I knew that the esoteric of toxophily dominated much of Seg’s life. Various grades of bow each had its name, every part, every action, every function, had its name and its ranking. The necessity of this was obvious. Seg, during our time together, had taught me much of the longbow, as I had swapped details with him of the compound bow of my Clansmen and the crossbow I had introduced to my old vosk-skulls. He had built himself a number of longbows, none, of course, from Yerthyr wood, and we had shot together in friendly rivalry. As was to be expected, at first he had outshot me by a margin. Then, as I got the hang of the longbow and mastered the transition from the compound reflex bow with which I was thoroughly familiar, as I have mentioned, I gave him a run for his money. They say you must start to train a longbowman by beginning with his grandfather. Once the society exists, however, and a man like myself with a lot of time to devote to the practice of arms is dropped into it, with the necessary requirements of an archer already existing, a great bowman may be made of him — as I had demonstrated on the Plains of Segesthes.

“You recognize the flight, Seg?”

He shook his head. “An expected master-set.” He mentioned the technical jargon for the way the feathers were cut and set, the angle of the cock-feather, the twining and slotting. “Whoever loosed these knew his business.”

“Whoever he was, he was ambushed and dealt with it.”

“But good.”

“These beast-men have no missile weapons. They must have flung them—”

“Much good it did them — nothing,” said Seg Segutorio, “can stand against the longbow of Loh.”

We marched on. All we took were the two arrows. The other weapons would merely weigh us down, although I regretted leaving them.

As we walked through this land, wary and always alert, we were able to talk. I believe you must have realized that having Delia with me had released my tensions, had loosened me up so that more than once I was astonished to find myself in the midst of a rib-straining laugh. A genuine laugh, at a joke, a witty remark, a funny situation. So we talked and joked and sang as we walked on toward the east coast of Turismond and Port Tavetus from whence we would ship to Vallia.

Thelda wore out the first pair of shoes and then the second. She persisted in her bright eager chattering and her pushing concern over me, but with Delia walking so lithely at my side I could put up with far worse than a boring woman. Seg and I grew closer together, too, as we joined in hunting for our sustenance. I remember those days as we walked steadily eastward away from The Stratemsk across the eastern plains of Turismond with a warm affectionate nostalgia. My search for Delia had been accomplished; we were together again. Vallia could wait, and as for Aphrasöe, to which Swinging City I fully intended to return some day, that was of the distant future. Everything was of the present. The journey itself was the adventure, the joy, the laughter, the zest.

Seg told me of Erthyrdrin, that country of his, that convulsed mass of mountains and valleys occupying the northern tip of Loh and peopled by a highly individualistic kind of person. The valleys resounded with song and the mountain peaks with the music of the harp. There were cliff-top strongholds everywhere, mere single towers of stone, some of them. Others had grown into battlemented fortresses of four or five towers linked by walls, and all were fiercely independent and devoted to protecting their crops and their flocks from neighboring raiders. Many of the young men hired out as mercenaries, for their longbows which had been developed over the centuries as hunting weapons proved mighty and invincible in battle. The Yerthyr trees were revered on the score of the quality of bow-staves they could produce; but it was considered a man’s prerogative to cut his stave from the best tree he could find, wherever he could find it. The Yerthyr trees contained a deadly poison that killed any animal who ate of its leaves, and only, according to Seg, were the thyrrixes protected by virtue of their second stomach.

“We men of Erthyrdrin were the backbone of the armies of Walfarg. I doubt not but the bowman whose handiwork we witnessed came in the long ago from Erthyrdrin. Walfarg was a mighty country — it still is

— but in its great days it ruled an empire over all Loh, and Pandahem to the east and south, and Kothmir and Lashenda, and over the eastern portions of Turismond. Only The Stratemsk halted the onward flow of the empire of Loh to the west.”

“So all these so-called Hostile Territories were once a part of the empire of Loh?”

“Yes. I hold nothing in my heart for Loh as a country. They failed because they failed. Then the raiding barbarians from northern Turismond moved in, fiercer and ever more fierce. What are now the Hostile Territories became walled off to the east by barbarous tribes of men and half-men and nowadays only a scattering of cities and trading posts on the eastern seaboard remain open to the men of the outer ocean.”

He gestured about him. “As for what goes on in the Hostile Territories now — who knows?”

Seg Segutorio would sing of the old days of Loh as well as his own high-flavored culture. I do not care to render into English the words of his songs. They roared and rattled and boomed in my head — and I can sing them now — but they are of Kregen.

They echoed with deep rolling sounds — “oi” and “oom” and reverberating drumrolls and profound bassoon-like resonances, with the splatter of hard syllables like hail against taut canvas. One of his songs of which he was particularly fond reminded me instantly of “Lord Randolph My Son” and I believe the frontier and border cultures of both worlds hold much in common.

We saw occasional hunting parties roaming the wide plains but we invariably went to earth until they had passed. Strange beasts riding strange beasts — how those words recalled another time and another place to me! — were of no concern of ours now. Although I sensed a growing need in Delia for us to push on. She wanted to get back to Vallia.

“I cannot contract a legal marriage outside Vallia, Dray. It is all part of this silly business of my being the Princess Majestrix — you know.”

“I can wait, my Delia — just.”

“We must soon be there.” She glanced at me quizzically as we threaded the aisles of a forest which appeared to bar our approach and around which we had been unable to trek. “If you have any—” and then she stopped, to start again: “If you feel somewhat—” And again halted.

“I know little of Vallia, Delia. All I know is that I wish our union to be one in which you will take pride. I know your father is the emperor and I have heard of the puissance of his island empire. Maybe—”

“Maybe nothing! You will be my husband and the Prince Majister! Have faith, Dray. It will not be so great an ordeal.”

“As to that,” I said, somewhat offhandedly and a little thoughtlessly, as I realized afterward, “We have to reach there yet.”

“We will, dear heart! We will!”

Whenever we saw flying specks in the sky we took cover at once and instinctively, without stopping to think.

Through this forest we did not expect to find impiters or corths and so we trod along with a firmer tread. As night dropped with the refulgent sinking of the twin suns spearing in topaz fire through the intertwined branches we sought a resting place and soon enough ran across a series of old caves sunken into an earth bank. Gnarled tree roots thrust forth, naked and shining. The leaves around looked untrodden, the dirt trails unmarked. Seg nodded. We set about gathering wood and preparing camp. I felt a slight twinge of concern lest Delia consider I was chary of visiting her notorious home and of meeting that powerful man, her father the emperor. Well, it was something I would have to do if I wished to claim Delia before the world, and having said that, that was sufficient. Nothing would stop me from doing just that — nothing. . .

Settling down for the night in our sleeping bags we had fashioned from the soft Sanurkazzian leather with plenty of luxurious silk for linings I lay back for a moment reflecting as I often do before sleep. I could well understand Delia’s desire to return home. As for me, now, my home was on Kregen and with Delia. But, still and all, I had felt very much at home riding with my wild Clansmen, and I acknowledged the surge of barbaric pleasure that savage and free life could always invoke in me. Seg had mentioned the barbarians who had swarmed down out of north Turismond to ravage and destroy the remnants of the empire created by Walfarg. I wondered if they were more violent and more barbaric than I and my Clansmen could be. . .

As I was sinking into sleep I heard a tiny scraping sound from the rear of the cave. Before the sluggish reactions of a city dweller of Earth would have prised his eyelids open in yawning query I was up out of the sleeping bag and with my naked long sword in my fist facing at a crouch whatever menace lurked there in the cave.

Seg said: “What?”

He stood beside me, a sword in his hand. Delia said: “Do not make a sound, Thelda,” and I heard the squashy sound of a palm over fat red lips.

Again the noise reached us and then the whole back end of the cave fell outward. We had searched the place carefully before taking up our occupation; we had not expected this. Pink light from the moons of Kregen washed in with a reflective uncanny glow.

In that wash of pink radiance I could see the squat ovoid outline of something moving. I saw two squat legs bending to bring the bulk of the body into the cave, and I saw the array of tendril-like arms bunching from arched shoulders. The thing’s head was hunched down and in the darkened silhouette was invisible to me. The thought occurred as such thoughts will that perhaps the thing had no head at all. It kept emitting a wheezing hiss, rather more like a faulty deck pump than a snake but nerve-chilling for all that.

Seg shouted. “Hai!” and charged, his sword high.

He brought the sword down in a brutal butchering blow and a tendril uncurled and caught his forearm and snapped straight. The long sword poised immobile over the thing’s bunched tendrils. Two more grasped Seg about the waist, lifted him, began to draw him forward into the pink-tinged shadows. I did not yell but ran forward fleetly, my head bent to avoid the overhang, and sliced the two gripping tentacles away.

They fell to the floor and writhed away into cracks in the rocks like snakes. The thing shrieked — whether of rage or pain I did not know — and Seg managed to get his sword-arm free.

“The point, Seg!”

As I yelled I ran in again and buried my own weapon up to the hilt into the thing’s body. Everything had happened fast. I know now that these things are inimical to most living beings and the thing had been clearly bent on surprising us by its trick back-end to the cave. Quasi-intelligent, the morfangs, quick and treacherous and incredibly strong. As the beast lay on the ground we could all see in that streaming light from Kregen’s moons the gaped mouth with its serrated rows of fangs, the tiny malicious eyes, the thin black lips, the slit nostrils where a nose should be. It hissed as it expired. We found out about these morfangs later on; what we did not know then was — they habitually hunted in groups. From the dimmer radiance at the mouth of the cave where the overhang cast shade, figures moved with unhurried purpose. I leaped for the opening. A quick glance showed me six of the tendriled beasts. Thelda was heaving and moaning and Delia was holding her down. I had no time for Thelda now. My Delia was in mortal peril.

“Seg! Gather what we need. Grab the girls! Hurry!”

I checked the back exit to the cave where the surprise had come from. Quasi-intelligent, these things, but clever. We were supposed to run screaming from its sudden surprise appearance — run straight into the tendrils of its fellows waiting outside. The back, which opened into a small shaft filled with moons-light, was clear.

“Seg!” I said again, harsh and dominating. “Take the girls out the back way — hurry—”

He tried to argue and I beat him down with a snarl and a look.

Thelda was clutching herself and rocking and moaning. Seg hoisted her up beneath the armpits and half carried her. Delia took our gear and as she went out she cast a look back and stopped, ready to throw down the sleeping bags and the food and the medicines and jump to my assistance, a long jeweled dagger in her hand.

“For my sake, Delia! Go — Hide and then create a little noise — not much, enough to draw them off —

you understand?”

“Yes, Dray — oh, my—”

I didn’t give her time to finish but waved her off with a most ugly look. Then I turned to face the front opening of the cave.

Chapter Ten

Great beasts of the air

The noise from the cave had not been what these tendriled monsters expected. In a body they headed for the entrance to the cave.

Pink moonlight lay thickly on the leaves, on the spilled earth, limned the branches of the trees, weaved and twisted with purple shadows in the coiling and uncoiling tendrils. I stood at the entrance. I could feel my feet thrusting at the earth, the dirt of Kregen four hundred light-years from the planet of my birth. I could feel my heart thumping with a regular anticipatory pulse, kept unpanicked by the disciplines so carefully and painfully learned from the Krozairs of Zy. I could feel the heft of the long sword in my fist, and the balance of it, and the beginning movements that would turn that bar of cold steel into a palely glimmering instrument of pallid destruction until the clean steel glitter fouled and slicked with blood.

As I stood there I must have presented a wild and terrible picture, with the defiance that would not be beaten down because the girl I loved was in peril, with my ugly face ricked into an expression I am sure would have prevented me from shaving had I seen it in a mirror, with my muscles limber and lithe and ready instantly to bunch and exert all the monstrous power of which — sometimes to my shame — they were capable.

These morfangs were quasi-intelligent, as I learned later; that they clearly were not fully-intelligent is obvious. Had they sense enough they would have run from me, shrieking. But not unintelligent — as soon as they saw me they halted in their advance and their hissing increased. One bent, picked up a stone, and threw it. I struck it away with my sword as one makes an on-drive to mid-on. The ringing clang acted as a gong-like signal. The half dozen of them, hissing and screeching, leaped toward me and the lashing forest of tendrils writhed above my head seeking to trap me and draw me into the fanged crevices of their jaws.

And now I struck and struck again and the keen edge bit and sliced and any pity or sorrow I might have had for these voracious beasts burned away in the fire of action. Only the sword could have saved me. Their intent was quick and deadly and obvious. Those tendrils clustered in seeking, groping, twining bunches, with immense coiled power striving to drag me into the crag-like sharpnesses of their mouths. Unarmed, I know I would not have lasted five minutes.

As it was I was forced to hack and skip and jump and strike again as though I were some phantom woodsman fated to hack his way through an animate mobile forest. All the time they kept up their jangling-nerved hissing screeching; and, too, I became convinced that shrilling was of anger and fury and not of pain. For the severed tendrils looped up with muscular strength and writhed like the furious contents of an overturned snake basket. And, too — instead of writhing off into the woods as the severed tendrils had wriggled into crevices in the cave, these serpent-like tendrils writhed toward me. They crept over the ground and began to drag themselves up my legs. I could feel their clammy coils lapping about me, constricting my muscles, and as I stepped back and chopped them free so each new severed portion began instantly to coil sinuously toward me over the leaves and the dirt. Only one way waited for me if I wished to escape.

With full force I brought the long sword down onto the head of the nearest creature. That head split and gushed ichor and brain and the sword sliced on past the coat-hanger-like shoulders with their five-a-side ranks of lashing tentacles, drove cleaving on down into the ovoid body. The thing fell backward and I had to exert tremendous strength to jerk the sword free.

In that instant of hesitation tendrils lapped my neck.

Instantly my left hand whipped the main-gauche across and the razor-edged steel — razor-edged because when I shaved I found this weapon a useful implement on my stubble — sliced down the bunched coils. It left a thin scarlet line on my own neck, too.

This could not go on.

Now two of the beasts were down and then a third staggered away on one leg. I breathed in with long deep breaths, timing them to the swing of the sword. The main-gauche went into the eye of an attacker on my left — too deeply, for I was again hung up on the withdrawal and only barely managed to fend the sword blade above my head, shearing tendrils. More tentacles looped me from behind and I felt myself toppling backward off balance.

“Hai!” I yelled — a complete waste of breath and yet a psychological reminder. I twisted as I fell and thrust the sword up so that the beast in falling into me fell instead on the sword with its pommel thrust hard into the ground.

Dragging myself clear I shook my head. Two left, if the others were truly hors de combat, and a host of writhing wriggling tentacle-remnants like a pit of snakes from hell; long odds they were, yet. Then I heard a shout — Seg’s voice: “Hai!”

The remaining beasts hesitated. Quasi-intelligent they were, knowing when to stop fighting as well as when to go on with unintelligent viciousness to death. Had they been armed . . . I shouted.

“Hai! Jikai!”

I leaped forward.

The sword blurred. Left, right, left, right. I struck now with the impassioned zeal of a man who knows he must finish it fast.

The two morfangs dropped and I dragged the smeared sword back. Now, with the death of the last two, all the free snake-like tendrils wriggled away into the moon-drenched forest. I guessed then, and was later proved right, that they would grow each into a new morfang beast-monster. Moments later I had rejoined my comrades, guided by their voices, able to reassure them. We began a night march at once to clear the confines of this accursed forest.

There had been only six. They had given me more trouble than twice their number of armed men. One of the reasons lay in those coat-hanger shoulders, each with five whipping tendrils. Even allowing a man two arms, which on Kregen is usual although by no means universal, the count was as though I had fought thirty men. I touched the hilt of the sword. I had lived then, by the sword. The balance of the thought lay leaden and ugly in my mind, and I did not speak as we marched through the pink-shot moonlight of the Kregen night.

After that we redoubled our vigilance and only through extraordinary good fortune were we able to avoid similar encounters. The tendril monsters roamed over a goodly-sized portion of the land here and we found ourselves traveling in constant apprehension. A considerable extent of badlands worked its way in from the south as we trended east, forcing us to carry on in a slanting angle to the east-northeast. Delia shook her head and remarked that she did not recall flying over this kind of country at all when she’d come in from Port Tavetus. Although the feeling was marginal, I had, with that sea officer’s sense of navigational direction, felt we had veered to the north during our passage through The Stratemsk and the attack by the impiters had further driven us off course.

But I did not express my concern, thankful that we were still alive and still fit to travel. Thelda was hardening, and Delia positively glowed with the fresh air and exercise. The climactic shadow of The Stratemsk lay to our rear now, the forests indicated that, and the badlands must be an effect of absence of soil or presence of minerals and poor soil and the millennia-long erosion. The mountains had been traversed and although we did not know their names we were conscious of their puniness in contrast to The Stratemsk; all the same, they were arduous on foot, and we near froze a couple of times. On the eastern side the whole country changed in character. Now we were hard-pressed to avoid cultivated areas, to bypass towns and villages, to keep off the highroads that intersected at towns and posting stations and gave us clear indication that this land was populated.

We would scout with the minutest attention to every detail of the land that lay ahead. From whatever eminence we could climb we would plot our passage. Some of the towns we saw and avoided were nearer cities than towns. Many times we lay in hedgerows while cavalcades of armed men and trundling wagons rolled along paved roads. The roads were, indeed, objects of wonder. I was reminded of the old Inca or Roman roads, and I suspected that they were still in such good condition only through the skill of their builders, for the present inhabitants of this land looked hard and brutal and contemptuous of labor, lusting after silver and gold and the good things of life.

“They remind me of my own people in their hardness,” said Seg. “These cities and towns must be constantly warring one with another.”

“I agree,” said Delia. “The roads link them, but between each city and its surrounding cultivation lies barrenness.”

More than once we saw high-flying birds or winged beasts, and concealed ourselves, for we knew what to expect.

Now we began more fully to understand why all the continent lying between The Stratemsk and the eastern coast of Turismond had been dubbed the Hostile Territories. The true hostility came from men and not from nature or the animals of the wild.

I continued to feel concern over the northerly drift of our course; but in the nature of things with an infuriating obstinacy events conspired to force us more northerly still. I knew that Turismond extended in a bold out-thrust promontory into the Cyphren Sea and if we were traveling eastward we could march as much as five hundred unnecessary miles to the east with the sea away down to our south. But I was not prepared to risk an encounter with the inhabitants of these pinnacled cities, these battlemented fortresses, for I sensed from what we saw of them that they differed in kind from those peoples I had already met on Kregen.

More than once we bypassed cities inhabited by beast-men, half-men of races with which none of us was familiar, although given the strangeness of human nature I felt a comical sense of relief when the semi-humans of these cities turned out to be Ochs or Rapas, much though I distrusted the former and detested the latter — emotions which, I hasten to add, were germane to my continued existence at the time, whatever subsequent changes a long life and a great experience have brought. None of us had the slightest hesitation in giving the widest of wide berths to the sprawling city filled with Chuliks upon which we almost stumbled as we came down out of a hill-cleft into a wide valley. We crawled back up into the hills again and when I tried to lay off a course southerly we were halted by a river on the banks of which a string of guard-towers had been built. Perforce we struck northward once more.

The whole land was cut up into city-states. Antiquaries say there were ninety city-states of the ancient Minoan civilization in Crete. They must have been very small. Here the city-states sprawled over vast areas of land, or huddled around a natural fortress-holding on a hill within a valley. The state of savagery of the intervening areas can best be judged if I tell you that Seg and I had often to cope with sudden attacks from leem, those eight-legged demons, furred, feline, and vicious, whose fangs in their wedge-shaped heads can strike through lenk. And, too, we met graints, those wonderfully vital and obstinate animals I had met and battled outside Aphrasöe with the magical swords of the Savanti that did not kill but merely stunned. These, and other wild animals, were not in the usual way to be found anywhere close to settled human or half-human habitations.

‘According to my calculations,” Delia said to me as we rested in a fold of gentle, grass-clad hills, eating the rich flesh of a deer-like animal Seg had brought down and the girls had cooked, “I figure we have something like two hundred dwaburs between The Stratemsk and Port Tavetus.”

“Yes.”

“We must have covered that by now — we’ve been walking for ages—”

“Yes, Delia. But we are north of our course—”

“Oh, yes, I know you have been concerned. . .” She pondered. Then, briskly, she said, with that defiant tilt to her chin: “All right, then. The airboat carried us a good way, and we have marched a long way. We do not seem to be able to head south — so we must go on. I think we will find the next Vallian port city up the coast will be Ventrusa Thole. There are port cities of Pandahem, but I think we would be wise to avoid them.”

Pandahem, I knew, was a great rival of Vallia’s in the carrying trade and in business of the outer oceans. But there was a quiet animosity in Delia’s tones that startled me.

“Do you hate them so much, then, my Delia?”

“Hate? No, not really. We both seek to enrich ourselves on the leavings of the empire of Loh. We both maintain settlements on the eastern coast of Turismond. We both try to extend our business contacts to the west—”

“And a fat lot of good that does!” broke in Thelda. She pushed up on an elbow. Thelda had lost weight on our journey and her figure had trimmed off into statuesque beauty that poor Seg found mightily disturbing. “By Vox!” she said, with some force. “I heartily wish all the devils from Pandahem a watery grave!”

“Quite still!” said Seg. His voice cracked. The green radiance of Genodras lay on his face and turned that lean tanned visage into a ghoul-skull newly-risen from the grave with the grave-mold crumbling upon it.

We all remained absolutely still.

Now I could hear the beat of many wings. From the sky that susurration floated down, ominous, breath-catching.

Shadows flitted across the grassy hills, twinned-shadows from the twin suns, at first in ones and twos, and then in clumpings until the whole sky darkened. We did not look up. Delia still looked at me and I at her, and her face remained calm, her eyes bright and mocking on my face, and I yearned to take her in my arms. But we lay there rigid and unmoving. And now I could hear a strange clinking from the sky, mixed with the massive gusting as enormous wings beat at the air.

The noise dwindled and the fleeting shadows drifted away again into twos and threes. Seg touched me on the arm, for he had been able to watch everything.

“Gone.”

We looked and saw the host of flying beasts like a low cloud vanishing beyond the farther hills. Seg’s face remained grave and serious, despite Thelda’s babblings of relief.

“What is it, Seg?” asked Delia.

“I have heard the tales — all men of Loh have heard the tales of our great empire that Walfarg forged on Turismond. The legends that creak with age and are hung with cobwebs. But—” He wiped a hand over his forehead and I saw the sweat slick there. “But I never thought to see them come to life!”

“What do you mean?”

“They were impiters. But — they carried men upon their backs!”

At once I remembered what Pur Zazz, the Grand Archbold of the Krozairs of Zy, had spoken to me when we had said Remberee. “I would welcome news, Pur Dray, of your adventures and the sights you encounter. Men say that beyond the mountains, in the Hostile Territories, there are whole tribes who fly on the backs of great beasts of the air.”

And so there were.

Of course, when one considers that men on this Earth have tamed horses and camels and donkeys and ride them as a mere fact of everyday life, and on Kregen men and half-men ride zorcas and voves and sectrixes and yulankas and many more wonderful animals, and given that the impiters and corths we had seen were large enough to support a man’s weight in the air, the wonder would be if there were not men flying birds and beasts, the miracle would be if men did not form aerial cavalries. And so it was that I felt no surprise at Seg Segutorio’s words.

“They did not see us,” I said, “thanks to Seg’s sharp eyes. But, by Zim-Zair, had we four of those flying beasts we could manage this journey to Port Tavetus or Ventrusa Thole with less damage to our feet.”

Delia looked at me sharply. Her surprise was understandable; she knew how much this leisurely progress meant to me and then she smiled as the realization that I really did want to go to Vallia pleased her. And yet, she still felt doubts of the outcome, that I knew. Her father’s reputation was a frightening reality.

“Aye!” said Seg, leaping up. “And we’d soon unravel the knot of how to fly the beasties. They must be well-trained.”

“Assuredly,” I said, “otherwise the riders would either fall off or hang upside down between the beasts’

legs.”

So saying, we gathered our belongings and took up our weapons and continued our journey. Below us, in the valley, an army marched.

At once we sank down below the crest. We looked out and down onto infantry and cavalry and artillery

— different types of varters and catapults — and I heard Seg whistle softly between his teeth.

“Tell me, Seg.”

“It is as though I am Loh-borne again,” he said. His eyes stared with a fey hunger on the marching host.

“It is as though I am looking through the illuminated scrolls of my people — for I tell you, Dray Prescot, that army marching there is an army from the past!”

I said nothing, respecting the mood that had overtaken him. He had told me of the pictures in the illuminated scrolls of his people. They were artifacts common in lands where literacy was not high or widespread, and conveyed stories by many thousands of pictures stretching along scrolls that might be, when rolled up, as thick around as a chunkrah thigh. Many men dedicated their lives and the contents of their paint-pots to producing these items, and many of them were objects of great beauty in their own right, irrespective of the story they told.

Now Seg drew in a shuddery breath. “An army from the past, an army of Loh, marching in all the glory of the empire of Walfarg!”

In my time on Earth and on Kregen I have seen many armies on the march, and there are ways to assess the qualities and the strengths as well as the weaknesses of hosts of marching men. These men below me marched with a swing, in step and in ranks, their spears all slanted at identical angles. Cavalry rode picket. Artillery — strange-looking varters to me, used to the ballistae of the inner sea — all arranged in a neat symmetry. I studied the way in which the army marched, and came to certain conclusions. But it was Delia, watching with us that army of something like ten thousand men, who pointed out the most important observation of all.

“I feel like swearing just like Thelda!” said Delia, crossly. “For — do you see? — they are marching in exactly the same direction as the way we wish to go!”

And — as I said with a nice round Makki-Grodno oath — they were.

There was nothing for it but to wait out their progress and then follow along with the utmost caution, for as Seg and I observed, their scouts were very good.

“Although,” I said, with a trace of dubiousness, “they seem a little too good.”

“How come?”

“Well — they scout ahead, checking every knoll and defile, and they’re spread to the flanks. But it seems to me, somehow, done by rote, as though each man has a drill book in his hand.” The English word was: mechanical. “For instance — if I was commanding that army I would want to know if four desperadoes were lurking on a neighboring hill — there might be more.”

Thelda looked alarmed for an instant, and then she laughed, and tapped me on the bicep, and said, “Oh, Dray! You mean — us!”

Very gravely, I said, “Yes, Thelda.”

As we trailed them Seg relaxed his first incredulous disquiet and told us that the uniforms worn by the soldiers were those of three hundred years or so ago, and I was quite prepared to believe him, for in the main the uniforms of Kregen are colorful, practical affairs that change slowly. Although life and culture on Kregen varies widely from place to place, in general culture is outward-looking and thrusting forward, new lands opening up, new kingdoms raised, new empires being formed. Many new peoples were lifting their fortunes on the debris of the empire of Loh, and here in the Hostile Territories we had stumbled across an army constituted as Loh would have organized it.

“For a moment,” said Seg, and his laugh did not sound genuine to me, “I thought they were an army of ghosts!”

The truth was that in the collapse of the old empire and the inrush of barbarian hordes, fragments of culture from Loh, Lohvian attitudes and customs, had survived. Clearly, this army belonged to a city-state that had retained its Lohvian character. I confess, now, that at that moment the idea cheered me. With a civilized people we might find shelter in this crazy patchwork of Hostile Territories and rest and relax. Why then, do you ask, did I not run down and introduce myself to the army commander?

My friend — whoever you are listening to this tape — if you think that, you have not listened well to my tale of Kregen.

Since the eclipse of the green sun Genodras by the red sun Zim — an event that had entailed direful consequences for me in distant Magdag — the green sun preceded the red in sunrise and sunset. When we camped that night in the amber rays of Zim falling slanting across the land we could see the campfires of the army like a miniature flame-filled reflection of the stars above us. In the morning the army formed up in a welter of heel-clicking and rigidly correct lines; there was much drilling about, parading, and wheeling past fluttering colors before they at last set off. My suspicions of the army spread out below me grew — and shattering confirmation came when that ominous low cloud dashed into sight above a crest a dwabur away.

We watched, fascinated.

The fight was not our concern and we wanted nothing of it. We sheltered in the lee of a crest and watched. We had drunk refreshingly from an upland lake, a little tarn, and we had palines to munch, and we did not wish to become embroiled in what was going on between the Lohvian army and the boiling mass of wing-beating animals and ferocious men. The flying armada came on with cloud-driven swiftness and immediately began a long series of diving attacks on the men on the ground. These reacted with all the strict order of men obeying the rule book. And this was where I saw the weaknesses I had suspected revealed. Their dispositions for combating the aerial attack were excellent, but the manner in which they carried out their instructions left them shattered and confused.

The flying beasts were impiters, right enough, possibly the same group we had seen before, possibly another tribe. The men perched on their backs were too distant to discern properly, but I guessed they would possess some, at least, of the attributes of humanity along with their obvious bestiality.

“Look at them!” screamed Thelda, and Seg had to reach up a hand to drag her down, so carried away by excitement was she.

The flying beasts would swoop down and the men on their backs would loose arrows or fling javelins. Then they would zoom up again and reverse to swoop again. The Lohvians were shooting upward, and many flying beasts fell, but the army was split, segments were running wildly. The whole confused area before us became covered with hundreds of separate combats.

“No, no, no!” Seg was saying, over and over. His eyes betrayed his excitement. His hands kept gripping into fists and relaxing, gripping and relaxing. He held his longbow now, and I said, softly: “Seg?”

He looked at me with blank, drugged eyes. He breathed very quickly.

“They are of Loh!”

“You are of Erthyrdrin, Seg. But, if you will it. . .”

I started to bend my longbow and Delia said: “No!”

“No, Dray! This is madness! Suicide!”

“Oh, Dray!” wailed Thelda.

Only one woman in two worlds could hope to sway me in any decision I make, right or wrong. I, Dray Prescot, hesitated. . .

And then a dark shadowed shape gusted above us and there were a dozen great winged beasts circling us and circling, too, the dazed little group of riders who had spurred their mounts at the hill in the hopes of riding beyond it to safety.

The riding beasts were nactrixes, cousins of the familiar sectrixes, with their six legs and their blunt heads; but they were deeper of chest and taller, with an altogether more hardy look about them. Their slatey-blue hides were covered with a more profuse coat of hair, which was trimmed and cropped. The riders were officers, with sumptuous saddle gear and brocaded cloths, with as much finery about their mounts as about themselves. Some attempted to shoot their arrows aloft, but absolute concern over their own safety drove them on and the shafts flew wide of their marks. Thelda screamed.

Seg cursed. He drew, let fly, and his shaft hurtled true to bury itself in the body of one of the aerial attackers.

Even as the screech rang out and the great body pitched from the sky my own shaft winged its way to its mark.

At once Seg and I were in action. All about us beat the massive pinions of the impiters, shining and heavy, feather-flurried in the wind of their smiting. We dodged and ducked and avoided the flung javelin and the loosed shaft. In return our own shafts plunged home in wing and belly, in breast and head. I saw three of the barbaric riders shriek and topple from their high saddles, to swing wildly from restraining straps as their mounts struggled to stay aloft.

“Your back, Dray!”

Delia’s voice.

I swung about and ducked and saw the monstrous talons graze past my head. They swerved with the swaying of the impiter’s body and closed about the head and shoulders of a man upon a nactrix and dragged him screaming upward. Seg loosed and a blast of air from a slashing wing deflected his shaft. I saw another swooping flying-monster, and the creature upon its back, vicious, with narrow-set eyes and square clamped mouth, whose hair floated freely aft of his blunt head in a waving mane, dyed all a brilliant indigo. I saw the maleficent glare in those close-set eyes and I dodged the flung javelin, seizing it as it spun past in the empty air, and reversing it and hurling it back so that its flint head smashed into the leem-skin pelt and copper and bronze ornaments on the man’s chest. The impiter swerved away, but I saw its rider jerk and open that square mouth and cough a bright stream of his life’s blood. A nactrix trailing its intestines galloped madly past. Its rider fell sprawling at my feet, and I bent and lifted him as an arrow feathered into the grass beside us. His young, pale face sheened with sweat; one eye was closed and swelling purple-black and his fiery-red hair clotted into a great wound across his scalp.

“Take your sword and fight them off!” I said, twisting him upright. His eyes widened and the horrified look of absolute panic on his face creased away into the semblance of sanity amid an insane world. He drew his sword — a toothpick compared with the great long swords worn by Seg and myself — and put himself into something of the stance of a fighting-man. Thelda was still screaming.

I saw Seg loose three arrows so fast that all were in flight together before all three smote their targets, and three more of the indigo-haired aerial attackers shrieked and slumped in their flying straps. My own bow sang and another square-mouthed man astride his impiter sagged back, and, writhing horribly, slid down and under his mount’s neck so that its wings smashed remorselessly into his body as it sought to struggle upward.

Around us the sward was splashed with blood, nactrixes lay dead, with the bodies of their riders; but the young man whom I had forcibly pushed back from the pit of madness waved his sword, his red hair bright under the morning suns, and shouted brave, silly, vain words of defiance. Seg gasped and loosed again and an impiter in its flight went straight on, with extended wings, straight on into the ground with the arrow imbedded through its eye into its brain. I started across to deal with the rider, who leaped free very nimbly, and drew a long and thin sword. His leem pelt glowed with the dyes lavished upon it, his bronze buckles and buttons burnished to a blazing brilliance blinded me in the brilliant suns-shine. Still with my longbow in my left hand I drew my long sword with my right. He faced me most determinedly, aware that he had only to fight me off to be saved by his companions. Over his shoulder I saw one of his comrades shake the reins of his flying beast, drive in his leather-wrapped legs and feet, and wheel that monstrous bulk toward me, and I prepared myself to face two enemies at once.

“Hai!” yelled my man on the ground, and charged.

Meeting his blade with a solid shock, I caught that sliver of fine steel, looped it around, and thrust and with the thrust went on with my lunge, doubling up and jerking the brand free from his belly, doubling up and rolling over on the ground. I felt the beat of immense wings and felt the cold downrush of air. Almost, I made it; but a raking talon smashed searingly down my side, knocking the breath from my lungs and sending gouts of racking pain through me.

I could understand and deal with pain. I staggered up, gasping for air, still clutching my sword, and turned to see Delia being whisked aloft in the cruel clutching talons of an impiter. I shouted — something, I know not what — as I saw my Delia being whipped up. The attackers were retreating now, unwilling to lose more men to these merciless foemen below. Then, from somewhere, a blow sledged down on my head and I pitched forward into the bloodied grass. I rolled over sluggishly. Then I could not move. I lay there, seeing Seg topple as a last flung javelin bounced from his leg. I lay there and watched that accursed impiter as it sailed away bearing my Delia fast-clenched in its claws. The thing upon its back waved its spear and screeched in a high mocking crow of victory and revenge.

My Delia was gone, snatched away by as vile and merciless a being as any I had seen. Lost and gone, my Delia of Delphond, lost and gone. . . With the blackness that closed over me closed also complete and utter despair.

Chapter Eleven

Assassins in the corthdrome

The performance of Sooten and Her Twelve Suitors presented in the covered theater aroused intense enthusiasm from the audience, and although I quite admired this tragedy known almost over the entire Kregen world of culture, the action irritated me, the words seemed trite, the melodious phrases mere cant. The crack on my skull had healed with the customary rapidity of wounds inflicted on my carcass, a useful by-product of my immersion in the pool of baptism of the River Zelph that had given me the promise of a thousand years of life.

But of what use or goodness or value were a thousand years if my Delia of the Blue Mountains was not there to share them with me?

A kind of psychic numbness had overtaken me. Seg had been wounded, also, and was being nursed back to health and strength in this city of Hiclantung, which he appeared to regard in much the same way as a denizen of my own time living in a remote corner of Cornwall would regard a recreation of Chaucer’s London. As for Thelda, I had to resort to lies and trickery to obtain some respite from her constant lamentations and protestations and tears. At this moment she was under the impression I was lying fast asleep in the apartments given over to our use in the villa of red brick and white stone situated on a southern declivity of the city just a comfortable ten murs’ walk within the walls. Sooten, in her interminable trickeries of the clamoring suitors — something, I fear, of a Kregan Penelope — wearied me in my numb and dissociated mood. All savagery and wild anger had shriveled. Without Delia the whole universe meant nothing.

If you marvel that we, three friendless wanderers, had so fallen on our feet as to have a comfortable villa in the Loh style given over to our use, I can remember my feelings then. The young man I had snapped into a semblance of sanity had, as was clearly evident from his trappings and hauteur, a high post in the army of Hiclantung. Young Hwang — for such was his name with the very necessary additions of many sonorous titles and ranks and indications of estate-holdings — was the nephew of the Queen of the city, and although we had made her acquaintance in the most formal of ways she yet remained a stranger to us. Yet, it was she who in gratitude had given orders that we were to be well-treated. Seg had wrinkled up his nose about this Queen, but he refused to comment when Thelda chided him. There is no real coincidence in this train of events. Any fighting-man knows that on an open battlefield if he renders some distinguished service to a man dressed in brilliant uniform or otherwise marked for a man of distinction, then the gratitude of the powerful can be expected — ceteris paribus — and he may expect to benefit from that action. We had saved the Queen’s nephew. So we were rewarded. I would gladly have consigned all the Queen’s nephews in the whole of Kregen to the Ice Floes of Sicce to have my Delia back.

A hand touched my arm.

“You are bored with the entertainment, Dray Prescot?”

“I know the piece well, Hwang, and admire the dexterity of construction — after all, I am told there are fragments of this play extant on clay tablets dating from five thousand years ago. But no; it’s not the play. I am at fault.”

Hwang, despite his somewhat foppish manner and his desperate loss of identity on a battlefield, was nonetheless for that a fine young man from whom something better than average might be made given the lad was conceded a chance. Now he laughed and said: “I can show you more full-blooded sport if you wish.”

I had declined this sort of offer before in Zenicce, and so I said, simply: “I thank you; but no. I will walk a while.”

Outside the covered theater the largest moon of Kregen — the maiden with the many smiles — sailed clear of clouds. The whole city lay floating in pink moonlight. Presently the two second moons would rise, eternally orbiting each other, the twins, to add their luster to the scene. As we walked along in this tide of radiance dark figures detached themselves from shadowy alcoves and fell in to our rear. Young Hwang’s bodyguard, provided by the Queen, an insurance that her line would continue, and an infernal nuisance to a man like myself who wanted to be alone.

Every house and building in Hiclantung possessed a roof which stoppered the night air, every roof-garden had its sliding ceiling panels, and they were unfailingly closed each night. Over the roofs thin strong wires stretched, wires patiently drawn by hand and forged and hammered hour after hour. Metal spikes projected in serrated and ugly fans at every vantage point of cornice and ledge. All the architecture had been designed to offer no single vantage point unprotected. Tall and thin columnar towers rose everywhere, and at their summits they broadened like tulips into minor fortresses with pointed roofs — tulip-shaped, onion-shaped, domed and spired, but never flat. No canopies with gilt-spearheaded posts projected with their awnings, as were everywhere visible in the other cities I had visited. Nothing was provided that could offer a perch.

“The dancing girls at Shling-feraeo are exceptionally fine,” said Hwang. I was well aware that he had not yet summed me up; he didn’t yet know what to make of me. Had I cared what he thought or did not think of me I still would not have bothered to worry over his enlightenment.

“Thank you, Hwang. But dancing girls, no matter how fine, do not suit my mood this night.”

Under that moon-glow Hwang’s red hair gleamed a curious color, rich and thick and curled. He was a good-hearted young fellow, I thought, amazingly friendly given the circumstances of his upbringing. He would benefit from a season or two with Hap Loder and my Clansmen of Felschraung out on the Great Plains of Segesthes.

He it was who had filled in the background picture of this city, this anachronism, this civilized survivor in a wilderness of barbarity. When the great empire carved out by Walfarg had fallen through dissension at home in Loh, here, in eastern Turismond, the cities had drawn their own culture tightly about them and resisted to their best the invaders from the north, away past the northern outskirts of The Stratemsk. Some had fallen and were now mere shells, inhabited by leem and plains-wolves and risslaca. Others had survived as cities but were now the homes of barbarians, of beast-men and half-men. And yet — some, some had retained all their old Lohvian culture and civilization and went on their own paths as cities and city-states, islands of light amid a sea of darkness.

Of Loh, they now knew nothing.

Legends and fables, garbled histories, and the occasional venturesome traveler alone provided any link with their ancient homeland.

I could foresee that both Vallia and Pandahem, the new, lusty, sprawlingly-vigorous powers establishing themselves on the eastern coast, would not find this country easy, their penetration a mere matter of barter and sword.

Hwang, to do him justice, tried to jolly me out of this mood of black depression.

“If not dancing girls, then come with me to the nactrix stables. I have had to buy fresh mounts—” He stopped talking, and coughed. I knew well enough why he was forced to buy fresh nactrixes.

“I thank you, Hwang — but—”

He halted me with an upraised hand. His bodyguard froze behind us in the shadows. Living was an everyday precious affair for the Lohvians of Hiclantung; they valued continued existence, always struggling against the seas of barbarism beating upon their ancient walls. These robes we wore now, old but finely woven and superbly maintained, were a part of that tradition. Loh had withdrawn and there was no way home for these people through the Hostile Territories occupied by beast and barbarian

— even had they wished to leave their own homes and hearths. So I was not as hard on young Hwang as I might have been. No other thoughts had much place in my skull at that time except agonized fears and mocking, now they were gone, memories of Delia of Delphond.

“Then,” said Hwang with youthful force, “we will go to see the corths that rascal Nath is trying to sell me.”

I perked up at once; then reality supervened. Nath is a common name on Kregen — already in my life at this time there had been Nath the Thief from Zenicce, and my old oar comrade Nath of Sanurkazz, and I was to meet more.

This Nath was a fat but jolly man with a stub-nose and liquid eyes and a kind of loosely-rolled turban that slanted down over one ear in which a whole pagoda-like construct swung dwarfing any normal earring. His robes were new, embroidered in the Lohvian way with serpentine risslaca and orchids twining with the moon-blooms, and his slippers — to my intense disappointment — were mere plain squat-ended herring-boxes. He should have worn slippers flaunting extraordinarily long and up-curled points.

“Lahal, Dray Prescot,” he said, when what passed for pappattu had been made — I did not have to fight him or give him obi as was customary on other portions, equally civilized, of Kregen — and he rolled his girth around and resumed his seat on a pile of trappings, cushions, gear, and flying silks. Hwang was already inspecting the corths, all securely chained up by wing and leg to their perches, beneath the arched roof of the corthdrome.

“A couple are to my liking, Nath,” he said, without any attempt at bargaining. They began to talk prices, and I wandered across to take a closer look at the representatives of the flying monsters who had menaced our flight through The Stratemsk.

The corth is a truer bird than the impiter, although not as large or fierce — I believe that only two other flying animals of Kregen better the impiter — and in general will carry no more than two passengers. These birds possessed the large round eyes, the sleek feathered heads, the deep chests and wide wings of faithful fliers, their legs short and sturdy and varying as to the amount of feather-covering in different species. Now they shifted from side to side and cocked their heads to stare at me first down one side of their beaks and then the other. In color they ranged through the spectrum, with patterns of variegated feathers lending a powerful beauty to their forms. Compared to the fanged and whip-tailed impiters with their coal-black plumage, the corths were indeed beautiful.

On a question from me, Nath laughed so that his array of chins and stomachs shook. “Oh dear me, no!

We would not allow our beautiful corths to perch on a bar outside our windows! Why — the barbarians would simply dive on them and kill them and then they would have the perch on which to land freely provided for them. We make it difficult for fliers to land in Hiclantung.”

“I had noticed.”

The corthdrome had been built at the summit of a high building on one of the hills of the city, on the southern declivity of which our villa lay. I thought of Seg, slowly recovering, of Thelda, keeping as she thought a vigilant night-time watch over my sick bed. They were good comrades. When we quitted the place, to Nath the Corthman’s wheezy: “Remberee, Dray Prescot!” and the chinkling of the fresh golden coin in his wallet, I was ready to turn in.

Hwang held me back. His face tautened. Looking down the long flight of stairs that led to the street, each section of twenty treads with a separate side wall looped for arrow-slits, I saw a body of armed men climbing the white stone that glimmered duskily pink and purple in the moons-light, for the twins were now wheeling across the sky after the maiden with many smiles.

Hwang suddenly laughed softly and I was aware of the rapid putting away of the longbows in the hands of his bodyguard.

The two parties met

“You are abroad late, Hwang.”

“Yes, Majestrix.” Hwang inclined. They inclined in Zenicce, and I had never liked the custom, so, as before, I merely bowed. Queen Lilah of Hiclantung looked upon me, there in the fuzzy pink moonslight.

“It seems I have pierced two impiters with a single shaft. I came to haggle for corths from that fat corthman Nath, and now I find the pleasure of meeting you, Dray Prescot. I had planned a more formal meeting, for I fear I have not thanked you enough for saving the miserable skin of my foolish nephew.”

Against that kind of polite nonsense, a plain sea officer and a fighting-man is usually out of his depth. I merely bowed again and said: “The pleasure is mine, I assure you.”

How long the inanities would have gone I do not know. This Queen Lilah stood very tall, her dark eyes on a level with my own brown ones, and her red hair had been coiffed into a high pile resplendent with gems and strings of pearls. Her dark blue gown, thickly embroidered and stiff with bullion and gold and silver threads, gave no hint of her figure; but her face was very white, unlined, her eyes picked out with kohl and her mouth painted into a cupid’s bow of allure. She gazed at me most intently as we spoke, and I gathered something of her power and her majesty, the immediate response she could always elicit, for that pallid face tinged with the pink radiance from the moons of Kregen and those darkly glittering eyes held a kind of hypnotic power, emphasized by the shadowing beneath her cheeks and the upslanted eyebrows, the widow’s peak of red hair over her forehead.

A man with her, elegant in dark green robes — dark green! — and with a powerful bearded face and eloquent hands adorned with many rings on the carefully tended fingers, was speaking of the lack of news of the scouts sent out to track the destination of the flying tribe who had so sorely bested the Hiclantung army and carried off Delia.

“But in a day or two they will return,” said this man, one Orpus, a councilor high in the Queen’s confidence. “Then we will know what to do.”

“I doubt not but they were employed by those rasts of Chersonang. Soon, now, our plans will be ready and then—” The Queen did not finish her words, and the inanities might have turned into some conversation more welcome to my ears, for Chersonang was a city-state of great power whose borders marched with those of Hiclantung and with whom, as was to be expected, there was constant friction, had it not been for the sudden and wholly unexpected slaughter caused by a shower of arrows that whistled down about our ears.

At the same instant a body of men in dark garments rushed upon us. The next second I was fighting for my life.

“Stand firm!” roared a Hikdar and went down screeching with a cloth-yard shaft in his breast. An arrow hissed by me and buried itself in the back of a bodyguard who had swung around to face the oncoming assassins. Hwang was yelling and tugging at the Queen’s sleeve. I saw her face, pale and pinkly-illuminated in that streaming radiance, and she looked firm and powerful, and yet haggard and ill, all at the same time. And, too, I saw the harsh lines curving about that painted mouth and understood more of the burdens she carried and the absolute intolerance with which she carried out what she conceived of as her duty.

Then, to what must have appeared as the seal of our doom to those attacking us, a cloud of impiter-mounted men swooped from the sky and gusting in over the walled stairway fell upon us with all the impetuosity of a chunkrah charge.

If we were to come out of this alive not a moment could be lost. Hwang had still not budged the Queen, who stood, tall and straight in those heavy brocaded garments. Her bodyguard fell about her, and now it was clearly apparent that these night raiders had planned this assault to carry off the Queen.

“The Queen!” someone shouted.

“To the death!” screeched the defiant answers from the bodyguard.

Hwang’s little sword flickered in and out very expertly. My own great long sword, suddenly clumsy in this civilized company, swept away three of the attackers, lopped heads and arms; but they pressed me back and soon Hwang and I were left isolated with the Queen at our backs, pressed against the stairway wall.

I felt cramped in, hemmed and penned. I had not used a rapier and main-gauche as a pair in a long time, the Jiktar and the Hikdar, and all the advantages of a long sword were being lost to me.

“We must break through and reach the corthdrome,” I shouted at Hwang. If only Seg were here! I felled a man who lunged at me, skipping aside from his glittering point with accustomed unthinking skill. “You must force the Queen—”

‘They will never take me alive.”

Queen Lilah of Hiclantung held a dagger, jeweled and ornate, but needle-sharp for all that. I knew that dagger would plunge into her breast when the end came. Somehow, in my agony for my Delia I found a strange sense of outrage that another beautiful woman should die.

I leaped forward, whirling my sword in tremendous overhand circles, rather in the fashion of the Clansmen of Viktrik with the Danish ax, and cleared a space in which the ghastly slashed trunks and sliced heads of my opponents sank down bloodily. Moving now very rapidly, even for me, I scooped up Queen Lilah, hoisted her under my left arm, and with a great yell to Hwang to follow, bounded up the stairway.

Two, three, four of the dark-clad assassins I slew as I raced up the steps. I forced my breathing to fall into that old familiar regular rhythm. The only thing that would stop me now would be an arrow through the spine. Even then, such was my wrath, that I believe I would have reached the lofty doors of the corthdrome with a quiver-full of arrows feathering in my back.

Just as we reached those arched doorways a figure scuttled out and the doors began to close. In seconds they would slam in our faces. From below us on the wide stairway the beast yells lifted and the rapid patter of feet and the clink of steel eloquently told of what fate lay in store for us there. I let rip with a furious, atavistic, enraged yell and bounded up the last flight, shoved my shoulder against those closing valves, and thrust vigorously.

A frightened squeak answered from within, and then we were through and Nath the Corthman and three or four of his stable slaves were pushing frantically at the doors again. Hwang pitched in to help them.

“Put me down, you great oaf!”

I had forgotten the Queen, bundled up under my arm. As I set her on her feet, she called out in her most imperial way: “The bar, you fools! Put the bar across! By Hlo-Hli — hurry!”

Nath the Corthman was dancing around and wringing his hands and sobbing. “My beautiful corths!

These barbarian beasts will take them all, or slay them, my flying wonders of the sky!”

“Cease your babbling, cramph, or I will nick your ears!”

Nath bobbed and bowed before the Queen as we struggled to close the doors, our feet slipping on the tessellated paving, our muscles bulging, our breaths clogging in our throats. Flint-headed spears thrust through the slit opening between the two valves. Arrows flew through. We could hear the yelling outside, the whip-like crack of orders, and hear the bestial grunting of the assassins as they sought to thrust the doors wide and rush in upon us.

Behind us the corths, whose unease manifested itself in a great whistling chirruping, had now begun to emit their strange feathery-dusty odor. I glanced up. Long before we could unchain a corth and open the ceiling valves, which drew back in segments, the assassins would have completed their work. As we surged against the doors Queen Lilah stood back from us, tall and regal, her embroidered robes falling in sheer lines to her feet, her face as waxy white as a votive candle, the dagger in her hand catching the light from torches in their wall brackets and splintering strange and disturbing colors over the scene.

“The defense wires had been removed from this stairway,” she said. Her voice cracked as flat and hard as a falchion blade. “There were men waiting in hiding. Oh, Orpus, unhappy man! If you have survived it were better had you not!”

If the high councilor had been a party to the plot then he wouldn’t hang around Hiclantung; if he had not been then he would be lying on the stairway weltering in his own blood. The doors groaned as weights thrust unequally against them. Their bronze hinges squealed. Slowly, the stable slaves and Hwang and I were being thrust back. It was a mere matter of moments before the murderers broke in.

All my natural instincts urged me to fling wide the doors and with my sword in my fist to hurl myself upon these beast-men.

Such a course — which is deplorable in itself — often seems to me the most natural one in two worlds in circumstances like those when I fought the assassins in the corthdrome of Hiclantung. I can wait for an attacker to expose himself and then counter-strike. I can charge headlong and carry the fight to him. But now — such a course would mean the inevitable deaths of Hwang and Queen Lilah. I glanced back at the torchlit interior of the corthdrome.

Beyond the ranked perches where the corths whistled and shrilled and ruffled their feathers beneath the arched roof a narrow stair ran winding around the interior wall. At its summit a narrow door of lenk wood gave ingress to the windlass room, where were situated the necessary drums and levers and apparatus for opening the roof. I shouted at Hwang.

“Hwang! Do not argue! Take the Queen up there — at once!”

Before Hwang could reply she had stamped her foot and rejected the suggestion in an icy manner of high hauteur.

“If you do not go, Lilah,” I said, “I shall put you under my arm again, and this time I shall beat you.”

“You would not dare!” Her eyes flamed at me. “I am the Queen!”

“Aye — and you’ll be a dead Queen, by Zim-Zair, if you don’t do as I say! Now — go!”

She looked at my face in the vivid light of the torches and I must have been wearing that old ugly look of demoniac power that transfigures my features into a devil’s mask, for she shuddered and turned away.

“Go!”

With what I took to be either a curse or a sob she lifted the heavy brocaded hem of her robe and I saw her slippered feet twinkling as she ran across the floor between the perches and started on the lung-bursting climb.

“After her, Hwang!”

“But you!”

“If I am to die, then this is as well a way to go as any other.” I shooed him away and the doors squealed as they opened further. To the stable slaves in their gray slave breechclouts I said: “When I give you leave — run! Hide! These evil men do not desire to kill you!”

“Aye, master,” they wailed, thrusting with their lean naked arms, the sweat running down their lined faces.

I stripped off the gorgeous Lohvian robes with their rich and encumbering embroidery. Against a long sword the cloth mass I bundled around my left arm would be useless, but these flying men used long and thin swords — not rapiers — and I could perhaps deflect them enough to strike back. From a natural nostalgia I had selected a brilliant scarlet loincloth and I own I felt a thrill of the old pride in the color nerve me — vain young words and feelings, to my shame!

Also, I kicked off the elegant sandals provided by my Lohvian hosts in Hiclantung. The long swords we had picked up here and there on our travels had not been the great long sword of the Krozairs — but Zenkiren had graciously given me a real Krozair long sword when we had parted in Pattelonia. Its handle was a full four fists’ width in length, perfectly balanced for single-handed work, deadly when counterpoised by the left fist beneath the pommel with all that leverage that could be exerted. It was, perhaps, when wielded by a practiced and expert two-handed swordsman even faster than a single-hander — I knew this, yet I needed some protection for my left arm initially, and I could wield the sword two-handed even with the embroidered cloth bundled about my left arm.

“Now — go!”

With frightened shrieks the stable slaves scampered away from the doors and vanished into the shadows.

I poised, ready, and I felt the night breeze upon my naked chest and thighs, the floor hard and firm beneath my feet, the grip of the Krozair sword in my fist.

Yes — my Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains — if I was to die then this was the way I would go. The doors smashed back.

Like an indigo tide the assassins poured in and I met them headlong, with a bestial roar that stopped them in their tracks. I was among them, smiting, thrusting, before they were aware, and they recoiled as though from some inhuman monster of legend.

“Hai!” I roared, leaping and slashing. “Hai, Jikai!”

We were too close-packed for them to bring the mighty Lohvian longbows into action. I swung the sword in economical strokes now, aiming for targets, smiting them to the ground. Twice I was able to wrest the thin sword from the grip of a surprised man, and, leaping forward, grasp him about the throat with my left hand and, after throttling him, hurl him back among his fellows. How long I might have gone on thus I do not know. Not forever, that is certain. But then I heard a high-pitched, cracking voice from the interior of the corthdrome.

“Dray!”

And I knew Hwang and the Queen had reached the door to the windlass room. For an exit I surged into the nearest man, hoisted him over my head, flung him horizontally into the men jostling to get in through the doors over the bloodied bodies of their comrades. Swiftly, then, for I did not relish this part, I turned and ran. I, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor, turned and ran. But I ran with a set purpose. I reached the foot of the stairs before they had recovered and I went up in gigantic leaping strides that must surely have confused those men of Kregen who had never witnessed an Earthman’s muscles exerting their full power against the fractionally weaker gravity of their planet. Halfway up I judged to be the moment of danger, and a yell from Hwang from above confirmed that. I swung about, the Krozair sword lifted, and I beat away the arrows as we used to do in those strict and demanding disciplines on the island of Zy in the Eye of the World.

Up again, and a turn, and more arrows to be dodged or beaten away with sword or robes, and up yet again.

Now the indigo-haired men were at the foot of the stairs and were racing up, their swords slivers of steely glitter in the torchlight. They wanted the Queen; they would dare anything for that end. At the top I struck sideways an arrow that would have found Hwang, and then we were through the small lenk door.

I slammed it and barred it. I breathed deeply and easily, aware of the sweat shining on my chest and thighs, runneling down between the ridged muscles. Blood dripped thickly from my sword and gobbets and gouts of it matted the hair on my chest.

“You—” stammered Queen Lilah of Hiclantung.

A new and stronger roaring began outside the barred door and the first few blows upon its stout lenk wood were the only ones. We could hear, distantly, the shouting of men and the clash of steel.

“The guards!” exclaimed Hwang. His face radiated a fresh and sudden confidence. “We are saved!”

I grunted.

I put my hand to the bar.

Queen Lilah stood, and I could see the heaving tumult of her bosom thrusting now against the concealing stiff brocade. “Dray—” she began, then, again: “Dray Prescot?”

I looked at her, eyes on a level with eyes.

“You have witnessed what few have ever seen,” I told her, unaware then of the irony of it. “You have seen Dray Prescot run from his foes. Now I go back to settle with them.”

Of course — that evil and fascinating blood fever was upon me then. I lifted the bar.

She put a small white hand on my arm.

“No, Dray Prescot. There is no need. The guards will deal with those rasts of assassins. But — I would not wish you wounded now, perhaps killed.”

“You would have me skulk behind a locked door?”

She shook her head angrily, her dark eyes filled with a reflected torchlight that made of them a dazzlement and a glory.

“I would have you live, Dray Prescot — and do not forget, I am the Queen! My word is law! You would do well not to cross me, Dray Prescot — stranger!”

“I agree — and I would do even better to obey my own wishes!”

And I lifted the bar and opened the door and ran down the stairs.

Chapter Twelve

The Queen of Pain

“Oh, Dray Prescot!” said Thelda. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do with you!”

We stood in the sunny morning room of the villa and Thelda regarded me with her head on one side, her ripe red lips pursed up and her hands on her hips. She wore a scarlet — because she thought that would please me — breechclout and a simple silvery-tissue blouse that was as near as made no difference to being transparent. Her dark brown hair had been meticulously coiffed by one of the house slaves we had been obligated to accept — we had no powers to free them, as Seg and I would have instantly done —

and the lush coils sparkled with gems and pearls. Her fingernails and toe-nails had been lacquered a pleasant scarlet. Her face received such care and attention as it had surely never known since leaving Vallia. She did look alluring and lovely and voluptuous, no question of it, now that her fat had been worked off and the natural firm and Junoesque lines of her figure could be seen. She stood with her legs braced, her hands on her hips, and she regarded me as a risslaca regards a rabbit.

“You, Dray Prescot, recovering from a terrible wound, go slallyfanting about the city at the dead of night

— getting into fights — rescuing the Queen — oh, Dray — look out for her! She is a deep and devious one. I know, for Seg has told me of the notorious Queens of Loh—”

“I know,” I said. “I have heard. They call her the Queen of Pain. But only when she cannot overhear them.”

“They were terrible — the Queens of Loh! The things they did turned my stomach over when Seg merely hinted at them. And this one is right in the line. I wouldn’t like to inquire into just how many husbands — husbands! That’s a laugh! — how many poor silly believing men she’s toyed with and discarded and had tortured to death. . .”

“Thelda! It’s you who are slallyfanting, not me.”

“But surely you can see why I am so worried about you, Dray!”

“No. And, anyway, since the Walfarg empire crumpled Loh has left only some of its culture behind here

— why, the women don’t wear veils, as they do in their mysterious walled gardens of Loh.”

“You have been to Loh, Dray?”

“No. But I have heard of it—”

She was standing straight and firm, but now she seemed to melt and flow, the tenseness leaving her thighs and calves, her shoulders, and she bent and flowed and moved against me so that she pressed into my chest. I was wearing a plain white loincloth, having come straight from the bath, with my hair still wet, and I could feel the warmth of her through the silver tissue. Quite evidently she expected me to put my arms about her as she put hers about me, tilting her head to gaze up at me, her lips half parted, moist and clinging in that way that can madden almost any man of sensibility. I kept my arms away from her.

“Oh, you fond, silly, silly man! Don’t you know why I worry so over you, so that my heart seems to burst right out of my bosom?” She unclasped one hand, and grasped my fingers. “Feel my heart, Dray, and you will know how passionately it beats—”

I had had enough of this. I simply didn’t let my arm bend in, and I said, gently: “I think Seg is up and about. His wound mends well—”

She flounced away, her lips plainly wanting to rick into a snarl and yet forced by a will I was coming to recognize to curve into a fetching pout.

“It is no good thinking of Delia, Dray—”

“What?”

She wouldn’t be checked now.

“Why — didn’t you see? I thought you knew—”

I was at her side and I gripped her by the shoulders, crumpling the silver tissue, dragging her half upward so that she staggered up onto her toes. I glared down on her upturned face where now that silly pouting look vanished to be replaced by a sudden startlement.

“Knew what, Thelda?”

She gasped as my fingers dug into her shoulders.

“Dray — you’re hurting—”

I let her down, but I still held her hard.

“Tell me!”

“Delia — the Princess Majestrix — the impiter dropped her, Dray — I thought you knew! It dropped her into a pond — you know, one of the little tarns that you find all over the uplands — and I screamed

— why did you think I was screaming, Dray, for myself?” She wriggled and licked her lips. “I knew Delia was dead, and I was screaming in fear for you, Dray!”

I let her drop so that she went down in a flurry of silver tissue with the brave scarlet breechclout sprawling in an ungainly back-slide, and turned away, and Seg said: “I did not see Delia fall from the impiter! By the veiled Froyvil — she cannot be dead! It would not be allowed!”

He came into the room with most of his old reckless air still about him; his limp had almost gone. He was better, he was the old Seg again, with the reckless laugh and the damn-you-to-hell manner.

“No,” I said, my voice a croak. “No — it would be unthinkable — it could not be allowed. My Delia, she is not dead—” I swung to Thelda, who raised herself on her arms, the silver tissue bulging and crumpling with the force of her breathing. “What tarn was it, Thelda? I will go to this pond and see for myself!”

Nothing would stop me.

When Hwang pointed out the dangers, that travel between cities anywhere in this land was beset with peril, that the winged host might still be in the vicinity, that wild beasts would rend me, I brushed all that tomfoolery aside. I donned my scarlet breechclout, buckled on my long sword, and I found a blanket roll, and some odd items of food. I took my new longbow in my hand, slung the quiver over my shoulders, mounted a borrowed nactrix, and I was off.

As I had expected Seg soon spurred up to ride at my side.

By the time we had ridden back over that ground and found the site of the battle — massacre, really —

where the bones lay white and bleaching under the suns of Scorpio, Hwang and a regiment of his own cavalry were hard on our heels. I had heard from the Queen’s nephew something of the reasons for that disastrous battle in the valley; that the men cherished their traditions and fought in disciplined bodies held together by rules sacrosanct with age. That the treacherous councilor Forpacheng — and not Orpus whom the Queen had suspected and who had miraculously escaped the ambush on the stairway — had led the troops into the valley, and had then let them be cut to pieces. That the discipline had broken under Forpacheng’s malicious and contradictory orders. Now, Hwang had said, a new army was being forged from the remnants and new recruits, and they would not repeat the mistakes of the past. The pool lay black and ominous beneath the suns.

I dived. I dived and swam beneath the water until my lungs burned and all the suns of the universe flamed before my eyes; I did not find my Delia.

Memories of that time blur. I remember men talking to me and urging me not to continue; and of myself taking deep agonizing breaths and cleaving the dark water of the tarn and swimming, swimming, swimming, and always that nightmarish expectancy that my groping hands would close on the obscenely bloated, water-logged, half eaten body of my Delia of Delphond.

Exhaustion had no place in my scheme of things. I would search every single square inch of the bottom of the pool, and every cubic inch of its water; and if I did not find my Delia, then I would begin all over again. I did not want to find her there, God knows; but I did not want to leave the task unfinished and be haunted for the rest of my days.

Perhaps, in the end, I was only saved from insanity by the arrival of Orpus and more soldiers. They seemed to my dulled senses smart enough, Zair knows. With them rode a man whose hair was dyed a deep indigo.

I reared up and from somewhere my long sword was in my fist and I started for this man with the indigo hair and I heard Seg shout and his hand gripped my arm.

“No, no, Dray! He is of Hiclantung — his hair is dyed because he has been scouting—”

“A spy,” I said stupidly.

“Yes, yes — and listen! He believes he has found where Delia is held captive!”

When I had somewhat recovered my senses and the news had been expounded, my next step was obvious.

The name I now focused on with an intensity of purpose at once hateful and vengeful and obsessional was — Umgar Stro.

The spy, one Naghan, a common name on Kregen, had been clever; clearly he was a courageous and resourceful man. Charged with the task of discovering who had instigated the nighttime attack upon the Queen he had begun by making inquiries in Chersonang, the rival city-state of Hiclantung, only to discover that the whole political situation had changed. A new force had entered this area of the Hostile Territories. From far to the northwest a fresh barbarian horde had swung southward as they had done when the empire of Walfarg in Loh had fallen. From the windy heights past The Stratemsk they had flown astride their impiters and corths and zizils, intent on carving a new land for themselves. They had taken over a country inhabited by Rapas, killing the vulturine people by the thousand, installing themselves as overlords. And here their leader, this Umgar Stro, had suborned and paid the traitor Forpacheng. But now — Umgar Stro had announced his intentions of dominating the entire section of nations centering on his new capital of Plicla, that had once been Rapa, and then of taking over the whole of the Hostile Territories, and the eastern seaboard with its scattering of settlements of nations of the outer ocean, and, so he had said, boldly, he would also march across The Stratemsk and attack whatever lay beyond. Of course, the inner sea, the Eye of the World, was unknown to these people except in the vaguest of myth and legend.

“And Delia is held in a tower in Plicla. May the veiled Froyvil guard her and keep her from harm!”

“You are sure?” I asked Naghan as Seg’s anxious words died.

“I cannot be certain that the girl captured is the princess you seek,” said Naghan, omitting all forms of ceremonial or obsequious address. “I never saw her.” He was short and strong, with a faded look around his eyes. He had built his face up into a blunt profile with oiled clays, but no one would think him one of Umgar Stro’s half-men in any kind of decent light. He had taken his life in his hands to bring me this information, and I was grateful to him. “I can give you all the information of the tower you require; externally, that is. Once inside—” He spread his hands.

Umgar Stro.

The whole area between The Stratemsk and the eastern seaboard had been turned into a place containing a very large number of petty kingdoms. The so-called Hostile Territories were places where a series of nations each followed its own destiny. There were tracts where the original inhabitants remained, there were barbarian nomads, there were cities of half-men and beast-men, there were nations of half-civilized barbarians, there were the cities which had managed to retain much of their Lohvian heritage. The whole was a great quilt of conflicting cultures.

Umgar Stro.

With the legacies left by Walfarg — the long well-constructed and surfaced roads, a common currency, the use of arms, a common law that the barbarians naturally disrupted, a religion based on worship of the female principle in life and the interesting ramifications following on that — all these elements of existence held in common had in an ironic way helped rather than hindered the dissolution and conquest of the land by factions. A raiding army could move rapidly down the roads, but they would be exposed to attack at known places by the flying hosts.

Umgar Stro.

“Once I am inside Umgar Stro’s tower,” I told Naghan, the spy, “I shall be satisfied.”

He looked at my face, and turned away, and fidgeted with his sword.

“What is the name of this barbarian nation that flies its impiters against Hiclantung?”

“They come from Ullardrin, somewhere north of The Stratemsk and they are called the Ullars.”

“We’ll need to fly, Dray,” said Seg.

“Yes,” I said. “I hear the men of Hiclantung do not really relish flying — the corths are few and far between in the city.” This was true. Corth-flying was in the nature of a sport for the nobles and the high councilors; the ordinary people and the soldiers hated all flying beasts, and one could well understand why. Their ancestors had waged ceaseless war against the aerial barbarians, and it still went on today. They had developed effective tricks and weapons they could deploy against impiters and corths and only through Forpacheng’s treachery were they deprived of them on the day of the army massacre. We hurried back to the city.

Thelda with tears and protestations tried to stop me from going. She had seen Delia fall into the tarn and if I went to this dreadful Umgar Stro’s high tower I would surely be killed. There was much to be learned about riding a corth and I put her aside and shouted for Seg. Hwang had insisted on putting his two best birds at our disposal, and we went along to fat Nath the Corthman to find out all we could.

Everyone treated us as though we were mad, and everyone was careful to make full, polite, and emotional Remberee of us before they let us go.

I told Seg I did not want him to accompany me.

He laughed.

“I’ll grant I’ve never seen a swordsman like you, Dray — no, and never likely to! But I know that however good you may be with the longbow, you cannot best me; and bows will be needed, you will see. Consequently, I shall come with you.” He stared at me and I warmed to the look on his lean, tanned face, the light of understanding and resolution in his blue eyes, the wild mane of black hair. “And,” he said, offhandedly, “I, too, value your Delia Majestrix.”

I couldn’t speak for a moment, and grasped his hand. I was not fool enough to say what I had been about to say, namely, that I had thought he would welcome the opportunity to stay with Thelda. She had been worrying me, and I wished she would turn to Seg, although I wouldn’t have wished her on my comrade for the world — either one — had he not devoutly wished that disaster for himself. In the confused tangling of politics going on all around me as Queen Lilah sought for strength and allies against the menace of the Ullars, I was conscious only of one objective: I had to reach Umgar Stro’s high tower and bring my Delia safely back to me.

I called her “my Delia” and she called me “my Dray” but neither one of us regarded it as selfish possession in thus speaking; rather we recognized we were but halves of a complete whole. To add to our normal weapons and accouterments we took warm flying furs and silks, extra quivers of arrows, and a couple of heavy flint-headed spears. I packed a complete set of warm clothing for Delia. I had no doubts, now.

That evening I went up to the palace — imposing but, because of the absolute necessity not to allow any perching place for birds or animals, somehow spiritless and without that fantasy of architecture so beloved by the builders of Kregen — to pay my respects to the Queen. Lilah received me in a small withdrawing room in which the lamps picked out the sumptuous furnishings, the furs and rugs, the weapons on the walls, the leather upholstery and all the crystal wink and glitter, the golden glows and the silver sheen of absolute luxury. The Queen of Pain, men called her, behind their hands. I had heard dark stories about her wayward manner with men; how she used them and tossed them aside. I had met, as I then thought, women of her stamp before. Those fabulous Queens of Loh, notorious, sadistic, cruel, had a devoted disciple in this tall woman with the widow’s peak of dark red hair, the upslanting eyebrows, the shaded cheekbones, and the small firm mouth. She welcomed me kindly and we drank purple wine of Hiclantung, and munched palines. She wore a jeweled mesh of clothes so that her white skin gleamed through the interstices. Lovely and desirable she looked; and yet, hard and remote, a true queen with destinies and cares above the mere carnal satisfactions of the flesh. I had the thought that my Delia, however greater an empire she might one day rule, would never take on that hard, polished, ruthless look of despotism.

“You have saved my life, Dray Prescot, and now you rush off to risk that life, precious to me, in the wayward service of another woman.”

“Not any woman, Lilah.”

“And am I not any woman! I am the Queen — I have told you; my word is law. You flouted my wishes, there in the windlass room of the corthdrome. Many men have died for less.”

“Mayhap they have. I do not intend to die for that.”

She drew in a breath and the gems about her body winked and flashed in the lamplight. Gracefully she stretched out a white arm and lifted her goblet. The wine stained her lips for an instant, turning them purple and cruel.

“I need a man like you, Dray Prescot. I can give you any thing you desire — as you have seen. Now that the Ullars are forcing themselves on us, I need a fighting-man to lead my regiments. They are well-disciplined, but they do not fight well. The barbarians scorn us.”

“Men will fight if they believe in what they fight for.”

“I believe in Hiclantung! And I believe in myself!”

I nodded.

“Sit upon my throne alongside me, Dray! I implore you — and there could be a great sweetness between us — more than you can imagine.” She was breathing faster now, and her mouth opened with the passions she felt. I — what did I think, then, when every fiber of my being shrieked to be off and away in search of my Delia of the Blue Mountains?

“You honor me, Lilah. Indeed, you are beautiful.”

Before I could go on she had thrown herself upon me, her arms were about my neck, and I could feel the gems upon her person pressing into my flesh beneath the white robe I wore. Her mouth, all hot and moist, sought mine. I recoiled.

“Dray!” she moaned. “If I were a true queen I would have had you quartered for what you did! So bold, so reckless, so impious — you defied me, the Queen of Hiclantung. And yet you live and I am prostrate at your feet, imploring you—”

“Please, Lilah!” I managed to disengage, and she slumped to the floor on the gorgeous rugs and stared up lustfully at me. She was breathing in great gasps now, her body convulsed with her own passions.

“Please, you are the Queen and a great one. You have wonderful deeds to accomplish for your city, and I will help you — that I swear—”

“You—?”

“I must go to Umgar Stro’s tower, Lilah. If I may not do that then I will not do anything else.”

She jumped up, her eyes murderous upon me, and I knew that in an instant I might be struck down on that carpet before her, my head rolling and spouting blood over her pretty jeweled naked feet. She opened her mouth and a palace slave — a pretty girl with the gray slave breechclout edged in gold lace, and a pair of enormous dark eyes that fairly danced in a goggling kind of amazement at the scene within — put her curly head in at the door and started to say: “The Lady Thelda of Vallia—” when she was pushed aside and Thelda marched in.

The tableau held. It held, I confess, until despite all my lack of laughter I wanted to roar my mirth at these two.

For these two were standing up very straight and erect, bosoms jutting, chins up, hands held quiveringly at their sides, their eyes darting and flashing like rapiers crossing, so charged with emotion were these two ladies — and over a hulking great brute of a man with an ugly face and shoulders wide enough to have encompassed the pair of them — a man, moreover, who wanted nothing so much as to be rid of the pair of them and wing into the night to seek his true love.

So much for the tantrums of beauty!

They did not fight, or spit, or scratch — and, indeed, it would have been an overmatched contest — but the danger signals that flashed between them crackled with eloquent if silent rivalries. Queen Lilah seemed perfectly to accept Thelda’s arrival. I suppose she could, if she wished, have tossed us both into some dank dungeon and had us tortured to death, licking her lips over us the while. As it was, Lilah simply said with devastating regality: “Does this — woman — mean anything to you, Dray?”

The question differed entirely from that question of like meaning put to me by the Princess Natema on her garden rooftop in the Opal Palace of the Esztercari hold in Zenicce. Then I had lied to save my Delia’s life. I did not need to lie now to save Thelda’s. And yet — she did mean something to me, although not what either she longed for or Lilah suspected.

“I have the highest respect for the Lady Thelda,” I said, with crude formality. The image of the night sky and a rushing wind and the tower of Umgar Stro reared into my mind’s eye. I could not wait longer. “I hold her in the same deep and cherished affection as I hold your esteemed and regal person, Lilah. No more — and no less.”

“Oh — Dray!” The wail could have come from either woman.

“I must go.”

I laid my hand on my sword hilt. An almost instinctive gesture, it brought a flush to Lilah’s pallid countenance. Such boorish behavior, clearly, was unknown in her civilized palace. Thelda started across and took my arm. She glared haughtily upon the Queen.

“I am responsible for the safe-keeping of my Lord of Strombor,” she said. “Now that his betrothed, the Princess Majestrix of Vallia, is dead.”

I would not let her say any more. I turned my wrist and took her hand in my own and crushed it, and smiled at Lilah, the Queen, and said firmly but without rancor: “I am eternally in your debt, Lilah, for your goodness to me and my friends. Now I must go to seek out this Umgar Stro and, if necessary, kill him. I believe I am doing you a good favor, Lilah, in doing that, so do not hurt Thelda here or hinder me. I am a good friend — I would not wish you to understand the depth of my enmity.”

This was all good fustian staff, but it had its effect.

As though coming to a decision, the Queen nodded, and the stiffness went out of her poise. Her figure was good, if a trifle on the thin side, but this merely added to the regality of her presence. She put a hand to her breast, over her heart, and pressed it in. Distinctly, I saw a gigantic diamond, scintillant and brilliant in the lamplight, cut into her flesh.

Her gasp forced its way past psychic, mental levels of pain completely unknown to her body.

“Very well, Dray Prescot. Wreak your vengeance on Umgar Stro. I shall not forget. I shall be here when you return. Then we will talk more; for what I have spoken to you I sincerely mean.”

“I am sure you do.”

“As for you, my Lady Thelda, I would advise a more circumspect tongue. Do you understand?”

Before Thelda, whose blood was up, could answer, I dug my fingers into her hand, so that she winced. Then I dragged her off.

Lilah, tall and resplendent in the jeweled lamplight, called after me: “I wish you well, Dray Prescot. Remberee!”

“Remberee, Lilah!” I called back.

As we got outside, Thelda jerked free and spat out: “The female cramph! I could scratch her eyes out!”

Then, and with some bewilderment, I admit, I chuckled.

Chapter Thirteen

I go swinging at the tower of Umgar Stro

That image of a dark night and a rushing wind I had experienced in the scented withdrawing room of Lilah’s palace had come true.

Seg and I had taken off before the twins — the two second moons of Kregen eternally orbiting each other — had appeared above the horizon and with the maiden of many smiles sinking over the western rim of the world. By her dying light we saw the sleeping city beneath us, all its watchtowers spiring into the sky where restless men kept their long vigils, and only the faint lamp-glow falling from their arrow slits to tell of life within.

We passed over the manufacturing quarters where in the enclosed atrium-style houses the work-people lay asleep, and all the long alleyways between the houses lay silent and deserted beneath the stars. Down there the forge fires softly sloughed away into grayness and cold, the hammers stilled, the bellows silent from their slave-driven wheezing. Bronze and copper and iron for implements and weapons of war, silver and gold and nathium for trinkets and objects of art, all lay quietly in their racks awaiting the morrow’s labors, for the Queen maintained her industry at a thriving rate against the tide of barbarism. Farther off lay the tanners’ quarters, and the potters’ and the glaziers’; great cities do not exist as mere palaces and villas, streets and temples, without visible means of support. As soon as Genodras flooded down in the morning the gates would open and the country folk, ever-fearful of barbarian raids, would trundle in their carts, pulled by asses or calsanys, or trudge stolidly with great burdens swinging over their shoulders at either end of long supple poles of tuffa wood, all seeking to find the best and most advantageous places within the covered markets to display their produce. The city slept; save for its guardians in their spires and along its walls. On the morrow it would awake to a new day and fresh life, and would thank its pagan female goddesses that it still survived.

I wondered, not without real concern for Seg, if we two would still live to welcome that morrow. The corths Hwang had provided, not without a deal of cutting sarcasm directed against Nath the Corthman, were docile but sturdy beasts. Their wings beat steadily and we rose and fell in the night air in a strong and soothing rhythm. They were well-trained, as any flying mount for a man must be, and we felt confident that they would do all that we required of them. We rode two and I had attached the long leading rein of the third to my flying saddle. Warmly clad in furs and silks, we lay in a semi-prone position just abaft the birds’ heads. We had to be clear of the arc the powerful wings cut in the air. A bird shaped, say, like a falcon or a hawk would be difficult if not impossible to ride; a saddle bird must needs possess a neck of some strength and length if its rider’s legs are not to smash catastrophically against its wings.

The sensation of flying thus, of hurtling through the level air, exhilarated me. This was very different from aerial navigation aboard a flier from Havilfar. I began to wonder if we would have stood a better chance of negotiating The Stratemsk astride an aerial monster like the corth, or the impiter which was so much bigger, fiercer, and more powerful.

We winged on our way following the faint glimmer of the road beneath that ran almost straight from Hiclantung. We had been given our instructions — briefed, you would say — and we had no fears of failing to find Plicla, the city of the Rapas that was now the city of Umgar Stro. Plicla was situated amid a mass of broken hills and dales, good flying country with its updrafts, and yet dangerous with its sudden precipices and vortices of air. The city had been founded by Rapas who had drifted into the area as slaves or mercenaries in the long ago, employed by Loh no less than her foes, and who now had banded together to found their own Rapa nation. Umgar Stro and his Ullars had altered all that.

We saw the high towers, the craggy cliffs supporting the massive walls, with their tops raking for the sky. A suspicious, smelly, unpleasant race, the Rapas, so I thought then, when I was young and new to Kregen and had only unpleasant experience of them to judge them by. Their bird-like faces, their fierce agile ability, made them valued as guards and mercenaries, no less than slaves. I wondered what they would be like as mere citizens of their own city-state.

Natural caution among mercenary-employing nations impelled them to hire mercenaries from many different races. Chuliks, Rapas, Ochs, Fristles — of those I had already met on Kregen — and all the other strange half-men and beast-men I was to encounter, also, when employed by a single government would rest secure in the knowledge that each individual detachment of mercenaries would scarcely ever allow itself to be cozened into a rebellion in association with any other detachment. Mutual suspicion would keep the hired soldiers apart. And no single detachment would of itself be powerful enough to topple the hiring government, when all the others would leap in to combat the first hint of insurrection. In general, then, mercenaries on Kregen can be trusted to earn their hire. But — there were always the exceptions. And I, Dray Prescot from Earth, took a perverse delight in finding those exceptions and turning them to the general good.

Now Umgar Stro and his Ullars from far Ullardrin with their indigo-dyed hair ruled in Rapa Plicla. Naghan the spy had given us exact directions.

We could not, of course, converse at the distance apart the wingspread of the corths forced us to fly, and into the teeth of the blustering wind; but at my pointing spear Seg nodded, and we did as we had been taught with the simple reins of the birds and began to glide down. The tower seemed to grow in size and girth as we floated down to it. Away to the north we could make out the stone-piled enclosures surrounding the Yerthyr trees to keep out the animals of the city. Seg had reported to me on the quality of the trees of Hiclantung. Wherever we went in our travels it was noticeable how Seg’s expert appraising eye dealt with the forestry details. Hiclantung’s Yerthyr trees, according to Seg, were excellent and the bows with which we had been furnished brought a smile of delight to Seg’s lips.

This first rapid approach was to be a reconnaissance. Our corths, which would never be mistaken for impiter or yuelshi, could no more make a landing on the tower or its battlemented curtain walls on either hand as could one of the Ullars’ mounts land on a roof in Hiclantung. The same rules of elementary tactics applied. My corth — a fine fellow with the boldly delineated eye and pigment streaks running from it that distinguish the Earthly cormorant — wheeled with easy power, swooping past the tower and so away again with a giant rustling of wings off into the concealing darkness. A couple of Kregen’s lesser moons were in process of hurtling across the nighted sky, but until the twins rose we had the comforting concealment of semidarkness.

I suppose it is a natural part of nature’s progress that more than one species should exist simultaneously

— many hundreds insure the survival of at least some — and it would have been extraordinary if Kregen had developed through the years only one kind of flying animal or bird. Think of the enormous multitude of birds on Earth, and given the much greater size of the Kregish fliers, partially due, I imagine, to the slightly lessened gravity, it would be unthinkable for only one kind of giant flying animal to exist on Kregen beneath Antares.

The twins would soon roll above the eastern horizon and flood their pinkish light down over the jagged hills and the gaunt towers of Plicla. Seg knew exactly what he had to do, the doing of which as I had ordered being the only reason I had accepted his insistent offer to come along. I knew he would have come, anyway; I just didn’t want to get him killed unnecessarily.

I made a sign to him in the wind-rushing darkness and I saw his wild head nod against the starlight. Swerving my corth back toward the tower of Umgar Stro I began my final preparations. No normal landing was possible. So the abnormal became necessary.

All my old sailor skills surged up afresh as I knotted the leather thongs. The Hiclantung leather was good, even though I considered it not so fine as that of Sanurkazz. The corth’s reins were extended in length. From the flying saddle I unwound the already-prepared thongs and dropped them to swing madly in the rushing wind of our flight. At their ends the trapeze and the loops did not look particularly inviting. I took a breath and then unfastened the flying straps and bands that held me to the saddle and slid over the side. My feet kicked wildly for an instant, then I had control and was able to lower myself down until I sat astride the trapeze, my hands in the loops above me and gripping the ends of the long extended reins that ran over crude blocks on the saddle bow.

An overwhelming nostalgic sweep of memory carried me back to my days in Aphrasöe, the city of the Savanti, and to the swingers. How I had joyed then in swinging in wild free hurtling flight from plant to plant! Now I was swinging again — although this time I clung beneath the hooked talons of a giant flying bird and swung not from pleasure but to save the life of the girl I loved. The cold struck at me shrewdly, but I took no notice.

Umgar Stro’s tower seemed to me to swing and sway before my eyes. I fought to make my reeling senses understand that the tower remained still, that it was me, Dray Prescot, swinging so sickeningly. Long practice over the years in straddling out along the topgallant yardarms saved me, then, and I could estimate distance and force my senses to compose themselves.

Seg’s corth billowed in from the side, the fingerlike wing-tip feathers altering angles and curvatures as with superb aerial control the great bird matched velocities with my own corth and the led bird. Seg would have to grab the reins of my mount — somehow — and keep it ready for our departure. The roof of the tower spiked up toward me.

I pulled on the reins gingerly, and the world tilted; then the tower became perpendicular and I could see the fans of cruel iron spikes, the trip wires, the slanting lines of tiling that gave no secure perch anywhere. I inched forward on the trapeze as the wind bellowed past my head, whipping my hair back, lacerating my eyes and cheeks.

Closer — closer — would the corth never haul up?

At the last moment to the savage jerking of the reins the bird abruptly fluttered his wide vulture-like wingspread. His body reared up into the air exposing his underside, his legs and claws stabbed forward and down. The trapeze hit the tiles with an almighty thump and I pitched off and rolled. As I rolled and slithered to the sheer drop to the cliffs beneath, the corth, without alighting, fluttered hugely and was airborne. The led corth followed and the two birds wheeled away. I had no time to hope that Seg would catch them.

The lip of the slanted roof was coming up at me with frightening speed. If I went over that there would be nothing anymore — no Delia, no Vallia, no Aphrasöe. . .

My hand smashed numbingly into an iron fan spike. My fingers curled and gripped without conscious volition. I hung there, spread-eagled on the roof, blatted at by the wind, seeing only the faint star-shot shadows all about me.

After a moment I had breath enough to draw myself up into a posture less exposed. The trapdoor through which inspection parties must come to check the roof defenses opened after I gave it a taste of my long sword. I dropped down, bent-legged, my sword in my fist. Only dust, cobwebs, litter. . . From the attic I found the ladder leading below and descended wondering, for the first time, at the silence of this place.

So far the information given me by Naghan, the spy, had proved correct. But he had not penetrated here. From now on I entered unknown dangers. For me, Dray Prescot, that is not an unusual hazard. It seemed to me that the stone wall and floors of the chamber within the tower still reeked faintly of the distinctive Rapa odor. I padded on, guided from one dim pool of illumination in the palpable darkness to the next where torches guttered low. Desperately I sought to convince myself that my mission had not already proved in vain. But the atmosphere here smelled of abandonment — and then I tensed. Voices, ahead of me, talking lazily, in half grumbling, half resigned accents brought all my senses alert as I crept stealthily upon the two Ullar guards.

“By the violet offal of the snow-blind feister-feelt! I swear my throat is more parched than the ripe-rotten south lands themselves! Nath! Fetch me a pannikin of that Chremson.”

The voices were those of Ullars, fierce, resonant, the voices of men accustomed to shouting across the windy gulfs as their impiters crossed the sky. But — Nath!

“Aye,” answered he who was named Nath. “And I’ll drink you swallow for swallow, Bargo, and see you carried out heels first.”

I crept closer in the gloom. The guardroom had been situated within a circular enclosure jutting out from the main bulk of the tower, and from this aerie the guards could obtain an unimpeded view. My sword did not tremble in my hand. The sound of wine gurgling from a leather wine-bottle reassured me.

“When they left us on guard they did us a mortal mischief, my cloth-headed dom.” More drinking sounds. “I’ve not missed a sack since we left Ullardrin—”

“No more have I, Bargo, no more have I.”

A gulping and then a resonant belch. Now I was up to the corner, ready to swoop in through the half open door of lenk. I could just catch a glimpse of them, or one of them, with his indigo-dyed hair flowing from that blunt head, that square mouth pursed to the upended blackjack. The handle of a pannikin showed, moving up and down, up and down, as the other Ullar drank. They were so nearly men, so much more like men than the Rapas they had chased from this tower. They wore leather studded with bronze and copper, and as I moved in, slowly and more slowly to bring them both into view, I could see how much alike they were, fierce, belligerent, habitual conquerors and masters of the sky. Each had a bundle of leather thongs cunningly draped and knotted about his waist, and, although I knew little of the ins and outs of their mystique then, I knew enough to know this was the clerketer, the meticulously maintained harness with which they fastened themselves to their impiters and on which their lives would depend in the air.

“More wine, Nath, by the ice needles of Ullarkor, more wine!”

I had feathered shafts into men like these and seen them screech and swing out to dangle from that restraining harness, the clerketer.

Each of these — Nath and Bargo — carried himself with a swagger, that was clear enough. On a bench near them lay the leem pelts with which they kept warm in flight. Their long narrow swords were tucked up, thrusting, important, intended to scare and impress by their very angles of attack when seen against the chunky body, the blunt head and those close-set narrow eyes, that luxuriant mane of indigo hair. I judged the time was ripe.

I entered the room very fast, and struck Nath upon that mane of indigo hair with the hilt of my sword, so that he dropped to the stone and blood burst from his nostrils and mouth. To the one called Bargo I showed the sword point, pushed against the leather over his heart. I leaned on the blade and it punctured leather and skin. Bargo’s square harsh mouth clamped down. He glared at me, and there was death in my face, and he read it there, and he scowled back in savage defiance.

“Where is the prisoner, Bargo?” I spoke roughly, yet in a normal voice. I believe that frightened him more.

He gave me back look for look; then he lowered indigo-stained eyelids over his eyes and said:

“Below—”

The wild leap of my heart must be quelled, instantly. . .

There were no other occupants of the guardroom. Leaning against the wall behind the opened door stood two of the bamboo-hafted, gladius-bladed, and single-edge bitted toonons, the personal weapon of the Ullars, favored by them over all others when in the air. Each bamboo haft was twelve feet in length; with a two-handed grip on that, well-spaced, an Ullar could wield a wide swath of destruction about him in the air. The idea of carrying a short sword aloft was incongruous and ludicrous; what the Ullars had done was to mount the short sword upon this extended haft, reinforce it with a single ax-edge, narrow and deeply curved, and thus bring swordplay into a semblance of possibility aboard the back of a bird, albeit they had in reality constructed a kind of halberd.

Bargo’s narrow and deeply-set eyes were focused upon my sword as its point thrust against the leathers over his chest. He wore a brave gold-laced sash about his waist. His legs, clad in the bound leather and cloth that gave him protection when in flight, were quivering. I knew that a moment’s relaxation of watchfulness with him would be enough; he would be upon me like a plains leem.

“Lead, Bargo.” Again I spoke almost normally.

The only precaution I took with him as I shifted the sword so that he could precede me from the guardroom was to relieve him of his sword. The blade was exceptionally long and thin. It was steel, flexible, keen, suited to the kind of blows a man must deliver if he fights from impiter back. I threw it down into a corner. I fancied my Krozair long sword would overmatch these impiter blades. Bargo’s torch sputtered redly.

As we walked steadily down the winding stairs noises hitherto unheard became audible at the lower level. The distant sound of laughter, shouting, music from the single-bagpipes and the wilder, melancholy strains wrenched from the triple-bagpipes; I could even hear, I fancied now and then, the chink of bottles and the rattle of the dice cups, the tinkle of money. We went down the stairs in perfect silence. Bargo understood that his life meant nothing to me.

So confident was I of success that I could worry about Seg now, and hope he could keep clear of the impiter patrols the Ullars would have flying about Plicla.

The stones were old with that distinctive Rapa odor upon them still. We entered a corridor where dust lay thickly, marked by a central trail of darker footprints. At each cell door the dust lay undisturbed, at each one — save one!

To this Bargo unhesitatingly led.

“Open it, Bargo.”

This he did, in silence, with the keys from his belt; great clumsy wooden keys they were, each a good nine inches in length, cunningly cut from lenk. The door opened, creaking. I looked inside, my emotions held tightly under, and—

An old man rose from his filthy bed of straw, gazing up with weak eyes, blinking, his near-lipless wrinkled mouth working, trying to distinguish us in the torchlit gloom.

“I have told you, and told you,” he said in a voice that quavered as much from age as fear. “I cannot do it — you must believe me, Umgar Stro — there are some things forbidden and some things impossible for the Wizards of Loh.”

I took Bargo by the front of his leather tunic and I lifted his feet from the floor. My sword point nestled into his throat. He was very near death, then, and he knew it.

“Where is she, you fool? The prisoner, the girl — tell me, quickly!”

He gargled. He managed to spit out words. “This is the prisoner! By the snow-blind feister-feelt, I swear it!”

“There is another, rast! A girl — the fairest girl you have ever seen. Where?

He shook his head weakly, and his blunt snout wrinkled with his fear. His indigo hair hung lankly down his shoulders.

“There is no other!”

I threw him down and my sword struck like a risslaca; but in the instant of striking I turned the blade so that the flat took him across the head and he pitched forward and lay still without uttering a sound.

“You are not of the Ullars, Jikai.” The old man stood more firmly now, clutching his rags about him. His eyes in the random light from the fallen torch caught reflections and glowed like spilled wine drops in the wrinkled map of his face. His nose was long and narrow, his lips nonexistent, and the hair that wisped about his temples was still as red as any man of Loh’s. It looked blue-black in that half light, but I knew it was red.

“Have you seen another prisoner, old man, a girl, a girl so wondrous—”

He shook that head and I wondered why it did not creak as the cell door had creaked.

“There is only me, Lu-si-Yuong. Have you means to escape from this accursed tower, Jikai?”

“Yes. But I do not go without the girl for whom I came.”

“Then you will spend eternity here.”

In all the clamor of thoughts echoing in my skull I think I knew, then, that Delia was not here.

“You have been here long, old man?”

“I am Lu-si-Yuong, and you address me as San.”[3]

I nodded. The title of San was ancient and revered, bearing a meaning akin to master, dominie, sage. Clearly, this representative of the Wizards of Loh not only considered himself an important personage, but was indeed truly so. I do not mind using a title when it is earned.

“Tell me, San, please. Have you any knowledge of the girl captured by Umgar Stro and brought to this tower?”

“I, alone, of the prisoners was spared. The Ullars know of the powers of the Wizards of Loh and they thought to avail themselves of my services. All the other prisoners were slain.”

I stood there, I, Dray Prescot, and heard this old sage’s thin voice whispering words that meant the end of everything of importance to me in two worlds.

I wanted to leap forward and choke a denial from his narrow mouth, to grip his corded throat in my two hands and wrench words I must hear from him. I think he saw my distress, for he said, again: “I cannot help you in this, Jikai. But I can help in — other — ways if you will rescue me—”

For a moment I could not answer him, could not respond. My Delia — surely, she could not have been so wantonly killed? It did not make sense — who could callously snuff out so much beauty?

San Young was whispering again, bending stiffly to pick up Bargo’s spluttering torch. “They revel tonight, below. There are many of them, fierce, bold barbarians of the skies. To fight your way through them, Jikai, is a superhuman task—”

“We go up,” I said, and I was short with him. All my instincts clashed there, in that cobwebby tower cell of Umgar Stro, torturing me with indecision, with doubt, with a mad and futile rage. She must be here!

She must! But everything pointed to the opposite being true. This Wizard — why should he lie? Except, to cozen me into rescuing him!

I faced him. He had recovered his composure now, had drawn himself up so that the torchlight flowed over his gaunt features, over those wine-dark eyes, that long supercilious nose, that near-lipless mouth. He looked at me, clutching his rags, and he was well aware of the horror and superstitious awe in which common folk held the Wizards of Loh.

Indeed, there was power about him in an aura no one could overlook. Many and many a time have the Wizards of Loh performed deeds any normal man would dub impossible, and what their secrets may be are still a mystery to me. They demand and obtain instant obedience from the common folk — of whom, Zair be praised, there are many sturdy souls — and for the lordly of the land they reserve a kind of watching, cynical and amused tolerance, an armed truce of checks and balances of interest. Umgar Stro, for instance, could torture this old man to obtain his services, and his men might murmur but, being barbarians, they would not react in the same way that a man of Walfarg might. Once having obtained his services, Umgar Stro would have to kill him; for, judging by all the stories I had heard, if he did not then a retribution as horrible as it was inevitable would overtake him as surely as Zim and Genodras rose with each new day.

So it was that this Wizard of Loh, this Lu-si-Yuong, thought he could now safely dictate what was to occur.

He stared at me and I saw the torchlight flicker over his grimed yet pallid face. He took a step backward.

“Listen to me, San. If you speak true, if there is no girl prisoner here, then swear it be so by all you hold sacred of Loh. For, Lu-si-Yuong, if you lie to me then you will die — as surely as anything you know of in your world!”

His tongue rasped those wrinkled sandpaper edges of his mouth.

“It is true. I swear to you by Hlo-Hli herself and by the seven arcades, I am the only prisoner here.”

We stood facing each other for what seemed a long time.

I was scarcely aware when I lowered the sword point from his shrunken breast.

“Very well.” I could not break out, not now; I could not allow myself to despair and to abandon myself to my grief. Not now, not when faithful Seg orbited outside awaiting me, in mortal danger. “Come, old man. Pray to all your pagan gods you have spoken the truth — and yet, and yet I wish you lied!”

We left the cell and walked on the footprinted way between the dust and so up the spiral stairs, past the guardroom and up to the attic. For me, Dray Prescot, this was a skulking, an undignified way, of tackling my foes.

Thelda had told me Delia had dropped into a tarn and been drowned. San Yuong told me she was not here. Did they both lie?

I told Lu-si-Yuong to wait and went back to the guardroom and took up the two toonons. The bamboo was not a true bamboo but came from the Marshes of Buranaccl. I wondered what Seg would make of the weapon. My mind was beginning to function again.

Seg was mightily joyed to see us. He brought the corths in with supple skill and I bundled up onto the trapeze with the fragile form of the Wizard tucked under my arm. We swung away into the Kregan night and the glow from the twins rolled across the eastern horizon laying pink icing across the towers, battlements, and roofs of Rapa Plicla.

The strong vulturine-shaped wings of the corths beat up and down, up and down, and we rode the sky levels away from the fortress of Umgar Stro until we could alight in a clearing among tuffa trees and so rearrange ourselves for our flight back to Hiclantung.

Seg was very quiet.

He did say, savagely: “I would have welcomed an opposition back there. We need a fight, Dray.”

“Aye,” I said. And let it lie there.

I did not believe my Delia was dead. Not after all we had been through. Only when I held Umgar Stro’s throat in my fists and choked the truth from him would I believe. And, even then, even then, I would go on hoping. . .