Chapter Eleven

Of Lahals After Battle

Fifty immense sailing skyships lifted out of Vondium and spread their wings and with a good breeze set course southeast. I had a mind to find out what was going on in that corner of Vallia. Crossing Hyrvond, the imperial province which extends a finger to the south alongside the Great River, we were over friendly territory and the people, looking up in wonder and seeing our flags, waved in greeting. Next came Valhotra, of which Genal Arclay was Vad. Continuing on with the breeze backing a trifle and making us slant our yards to catch the best of it, we crossed the Vadvarate of Procul. Procul, and the Vadvarate of Gremivoh to the southwest of it, lies at the heart of superb wine country. But our thoughts were not on fine wines as we neared the border with Mai Yenizar. This kovnate, which was then fairly large, extending from a wide loop of the Great River southwards to the coast, was firmly in enemy hands.

That enemy, we had reliable reports, consisted of a multiplicity of fortresses set up by the aragorn, lordly slave masters terrorizing the districts under their heels. They descended on weak and undefended places and set up their centers and decimated the countryside. The border had been patrolled by us and defended as best we could with the forces at our disposal, as I have related. I fancied we might drop down on an aragorn fortress or two, near at hand, and give the men a taste of real action. At the least, that operation would relieve some of the pressure.

North of that wide-ranging loop of She of the Fecundity, Vallia’s chiefest river, lay the imperial province of Bryvondrin. Over the River again and north and eastward lay lands held by our foes that interposed a buffer between us in the provinces around Vondium and our allies in the northeast. A goodly stroke might be brought about here if we did not become entangled. Always, the fear that mighty hosts converged on us had to be lived with, making my days, at the least, dark with the forebodings of coming disaster. We in Vondium were like blindfolded men who are attacked from out of the darkness and do not know in which direction to strike, for fear that a blow one way will expose the back to the deadly stab from another.

I had told Jilian this was a mere exercise, and the men believed that, and here was I already planning a miniature campaign in which real blows would be struck and real blood shed. From such shoddy stuff are emperors made.

Nath, who as the Kapt of the Phalanx, had insisted on his right to fly with us, said to me: “We fly well to the east, majister. Aragorn down there.”

“Aye, Nath. A visit from us might tone up their muscles.”

“Amen to that. But, I would suggest, before the suns set.”

“Assuredly. Have the captain signal preparation for descent.” I pointed over the rail. “There is a wide swathe of land all set out for us. And the trees are far enough away. There is not a sign of a habitation anywhere.” I looked at Nath as I spoke, and he braced up, knowing I summed him up.

“With respect, majister. I would prefer to land nearer the target.”

“When you see a damned aragorn fortress, Nath, you may descend. Be prepared to have your men disembark smartly. I am going below. Call me the instant anything happens.”

“Quidang, majister!”

As I went down the companionway I reflected that the exercise would reveal faults in the most glaring way. We proposed a disembarkation in sight of the enemy. Interesting. Most. The deep end is very often a capital way of learning to swim. Not always, though, and so as was to be expected I merely fretted and fumed in the stateroom, and could get scant comfort from a pot of superb Kregen tea.

The hails, floating in with a joyous raucousness, came as a blessed relief. But I waited before going on deck for Nath’s report.

When I stepped onto the quarterdeck with the wind blustering the canvas and the busy activity of bringing the ship in to land, I was struck by the similarities and the differences in this sailing ship of the air and all those other ships I have sailed on the seas of two worlds.

“Not so much a fortress, emperor!” sang out Nath, mightily pleased at his discovery. “More a whole stinking town of ’em!”

And, indeed, as I looked over the rail there was a town spread out below, slate-roofed, granite-walled, huddled behind battlements. Smoke rose from the evening meal cooking fires. A bell sounded, faintly, borne away by the wind. We could see flocks of cattle being driven along white roads toward the gates. The smells rose up, some appetizing, some bringing a gushing memory of slaughterhouses. I frowned. We had determined to drill the men in the evolution of disembarking as speedily as might be contrived. Then I had thought it would be salutary to teach the aragorn the lesson that Vondium still survived. And now Nath was bringing us down onto a town, where a full-scale battle could be expected, and where his beloved Phalanx would be of little use.

I expressed these thoughts to him.

He smiled triumphantly, and pointed past the long gray walls of the town below. Men rode toward the town. They were aragorn, haughty in their armor, proud with weaponry, and there were many of them. But the miserable crowds of slaves who lurched and staggered on numbered many many more, and we watched the end result of a slave drive here, a successful slave round-up that brought in the miserable wights from a very large area. I nodded, convinced.

“Churgur infantry to the town with a regiment of zorcas,” I said. “The Phalanx and the rest of the cavalry to form ready to stop those cramphs down there. Move!”

The signals hoisted away from the yardarms, scraps of colored bunting in true-blue navy style. I had taught my own aerial sailors much. Signaling, even then, was smart and accurate. The sword and shield infantry ships wheeled away, their canvas swinging free as they slipped sheets, heading down to the gray confusion of the town. The Phalanx ships dropped ponderously to a long sloping meadow. I watched the aragorn.

Their confusion must be expected to be immense. But in a very short space of time they had shaken out into line, formed, their spears all slanting, and their helmets catching the light of the suns. Whoever ran this town was a man who knew what he wanted and made damned sure he got it. The ships were touching down, massive argosies landing as light as thistledown. The men leaped out, running to form their files on their faxuls, their file leaders, each file of twelve men forming in twelve ranks to give the one hundred forty four brumbytes of the Relianch. The Relianchun stood at the head of the right hand file. As the Relianches formed they joined with others, so that six Relianches formed the Jodhri. Flanking them the Hakkodin fell in, and the archers took up their places in the intervals. It was all done with a smartness, a panache, a cracking sense of style and occasion. These men had never been in action before — only a few in positions of command — and so that had to be taken into consideration. All the same, they handled themselves well, and the solid bulk of the two Kerchuris was wonderfully reassuring.

I had the oddest feeling that I would have liked Delia to see the Phalanx in operation. Not fighting, but in maneuver.

“Send a totrix regiment back up to the town,” I yelled. “Volodu — signal Jiktar Karidge to keep his men back.” For that intemperate commander was edging forward and forward, ready to get a good smack at the aragorn before anyone else could get in. Volodu put his silver trumpet to his lips and blew Karidge’s Regiment and Hold Fast, and I saw the distant figure astride the zorca, all a glitter of gold and crimson, turn indignantly in the saddle and glare back. And I smiled.

It was quite clear that the aragorn, who are always completely assured of themselves, arrogant past arrogance, did not quite know what to make of this sudden descent from the sky. They were abruptly confronted by a thick body of men forming up into solid masses, and carrying damned great long spears. They were, by Krun, highly perplexed. They could understand the wings of cavalry, and being sensible fighting men would give great care and caution to the movements of our nikvove regiment. But, as for the stolid brumbytes, no. No, they didn’t know what to make of them.

One thing the aragorn did understand. If they attacked they won. Or, to be more accurate, those aragorn who had not so far lost had won. I fancied it was the turn of this little lot to experience defeat. The notion seemed pleasing to me to see what our new archers might do. Volodu blew Archers Forward and Log Logashtorio led his men out. The new Chodkuvax rode a zorca and gave signals with his very own Lohvian longbow. The bowmen spread out and, at the signal, drew and loosed, sweetly, as they had been taught.

The shafts glinted against the sky like shoals of barracuda. Up and over and down, they plunged, volley following volley. Chodkuvax Logashtorio’s Third Phalanx Archers shot five smashing volleys, and then they were running back, haring between the intervals of the Phalanx, pelting out to their new positions on the flanks. As a sheer demonstration of textbook drill and controlled shooting, it was masterful. But it did not stop the aragorn.

As that avalanche of cavalry smoked down the hill toward the Phalanx it was the turn of the brumbytes. The aragorn rode the usual mix of saddle animals, but they modified speeds and kept together, rank on rank, so I judged they had been fighting drilled troops at some time recently. That was not altogether a marked trait among the aragorn. They liked to raid and slave and pen their captives in barracoons. If they met drilled and disciplined opposition they would decamp and set up shop elsewhere. I sweated, suddenly.

Had I made a ghastly mistake? The onrushing host of aragorn were almost on the Phalanx now. The Phalanx was composed of green troops. Were these aragorn different from the usual? Were they about to topple my massed brumbytes into bloody ruin? I sat my zorca and I trembled. Pride, pride, what a stupid thing to do — and I had done it. I, Dray Prescot called Jak the Drang, Emperor of Vallia —

Emperor of Nothing!

But how splendid the Phalanx looked...

With fierce down-bent heads, their helmets all in line, plumes nodding, the pikes thrust forward into a glittering hedge of steel — yes, yes, the old words, the old words. But, by Zair! How they stood, clamped to the earth, like a primeval cliff face, adamant against the sea. A song rose from their packed ranks, a paean, a soaring battle hymn. The words were the old words, and they set the blood to pulsing. With the front rank pikes firmly bedded in the earth, the next thrust over the first, and the next in two-handed grips, shoulder high, twelve men deep, the Third Vallian Phalanx took the shock. As the rolling thunders of the ocean break in spume and fury against those weathered cliff faces, so the aragorn foamed against the pikes. A welter of uprearing steel, of screaming animals, of blood, of noise and bedlam and then of a receding wash of sound, as the recoiling waves break and flow and surge away, rippling, spreading, so those Opaz-forsaken aragorn, damned slavers to a man, broke and fled. The trumpets rang out, crashing notes of silver urgency.

The Phalanx formed, became a cohesive whole, surged upright, moved, advanced — charged!

And on the flanks the Hakkodin hacked and slashed and carved a path through the fleeing cavalry.

“Time for our cavalry, Volodu,” I said.

Volodu the Lungs blew Cavalry, General Chase.

The Vallian zorcas, totrixes and nikvoves leaped forward.

Spuming down in their turn like the returning tide, they roared on after the fleeing aragorn. Everything now could be left to Nath. And here came a zorcaman, red-faced, exhilarated, racing down from the town, roaring out that the place was in our hands. I acknowledged him, shouted, “Well done!”

and turned my zorca toward the mob of chained slaves crouched in long rows of misery. As I trotted carefully across I reflected that the aragorn had not known how heavily, man for man, we outnumbered them. The close-packed blocks of the Phalanx tended to conceal the numbers. But, for all that disparity, there had been a sizable crowd of slavers, and their captives stretched in row after row, chained, naked, hairy and filthy, crooning those soul-songs of misery and inwardness that pass beyond mere despair.

The naked bodies sprawled on the dirt in postures of abandonment. Calloused elbows and knees, sores, scars, the brutal signatures of whips, the matted forests of hair in which lice roamed, miniature denizens of miniature jungles, yes, the trademark of the slaver is far-removed from the fictions written and believed by the willfully blinkered. Looking at those bare, bruised and begrimed bodies, exposed in nakedness, I was reminded of Jilian’s comments outside the marquee of Fat Lango. And, also, of nakedness I recalled what a dowager, quivering in repulsion and outraged moral rectitude had said, speaking with that plummy voice of conscious refinement. “Going naked,” she had said, “is disgusting. Why, if God had intended us to go naked we would have been born like it.”

The contrast between these bundles of half-starved naked wretches in their filth and degradation, and the well-fed, smart and sumptuously-clothed men who had rescued them could not have been more marked. Everywhere the movement of crimson and yellow as the troops busied themselves about humanitarian tasks seemed — at least to me — to bring a glow of glory to the field. And my views on glory are well known and hardly repeatable in mixed company. Crimson is the imperial color. The cavalry attired in scarlet and yellow formed a kind of personal body — not a bodyguard — and the brave old scarlet struck a distinctive spark as Targon took the choice band trotting out. Karidge’s Regiment streamed past heading up to the town to make sure of the place. We knew it from our maps as Yervismot, and I was damned sure Nath knew what he was doing when he’d brought the aerial squadron here.

The totrix regiments and the nikvoves were distant figures under the slanting rays of the suns, dispersing the last of the aragorn. Their uniform colors varied, for according to long tradition the cavalry wore regimental colors distinct from those of the infantry. This practice had been allowed to continue. In the glittering group of riders surrounding me were representatives from all the regiments to act as messengers, in addition to my own aides de camp. So as I rode toward the slaves, where a fresh hullabaloo started up with a deal of chain swinging, I moved in the midst of a tapestry of color in which the scarlet and yellow predominated.

A group of Gons who habitually shave their heads to leave bare and shining skulls were frantically digging out handfuls of mud and plastering it into that bone-white hair of which they are so ashamed. A person’s beliefs are a private affair, and who would deride a man for removing his hat when he enters a church, or keeping his hat firmly on his head and removing his shoes?

There were so many slaves chained in their long rows that it seemed to me natural to guide my zorca toward the scene of the commotion. Here a fleeing posse of aragorn had tripped across outstretched chains. Steel against bare hands — well, there were dead bodies here, naked and bleeding; but, also, there were riderless animals and aragorn on the ground being beaten to death. The anger of slaves moves like a choked watercourse, a blocked drain, and when the obstructing filth is removed, the outburst smashes forth, unchecked.

Grimed naked bodies slashed iron chains. Heads burst and limbs broke and ribs caved in. But swords bit deeply in return and I urged my zorca on more smartly. To lose one slave after we had liberated them seemed to me to be offensive to the order of life.

The sword I drew was a Valkan-built weapon, brought by Delia from our arsenal in the stromnate. With master-smiths, and notably Naghan the Gnat, we had designed and built the brand. Owing much to the Havilfarese thraxter and to the Vallian clanxer, it also shared as much as I could contrive of the master-weapon, the Savanti Sword. Men called this new sword the drexer. I swung it forward as I rode, deeming it suitable for employment here, and jumped off the zorca to get in among a clumped group of aragorn who speared and slashed away at slaves who screeched and fell, bloodied and stumped, and could not break through to the slavers.

The men at my back broke out in yells of concern.

“Majister! Hold back. Wait for us.” And: “Emperor! You endanger your life.”

The last of the light flared deceptively as the twin suns speared their emerald and ruby fires erratically through tortured cloud castles. The aragorn were confident against the naked slaves and were busying themselves in collecting riderless animals. Those who caught a steed mounted up and galloped off, although slaves hung onto them and lapped them in chains, and brought some down. It was all a shadowy, bloody, confusing fracas, the kind of nonsense in which a fellow can get knocked on the head and never know he was dead.

Not all the slavers were apim, and I crossed swords with a Rapa, who went down as I jumped past. A bleg beyond him staggered back on his four legs, and a cham tripped him and another slashed his guts out, and I helped knock him down — for their four legs make blegs mightily resistant — and jumped on past to get at an aragorn who lifted a sword against two women, naked, screaming, hugging each other in a last paroxysm of terror.

The aragorn turned to meet me. All about us men and women shrilled in horror, and chains clashed and the spears drove in. My men were still racketing away and coming on, for my last savage lunge astride the zorca had distanced them. The aragorn fancied himself as a swordsman; but I chopped him without finesse and saw another from the corner of my eye, and ducked, and swirled back. A naked figure, with a mass of dark hair and a superb body, leaped on the slaver and hauled a chain around his neck. Entangled like a wild beast trapped in iron nets, the slaver choked back. He went down and two more came at us, desperate now, determined to break past and get at the totrixes who stood, shivering in terror at the blood and noise. Together, the naked man and I met them. The drexer drank the life from one and the chains crushed the life from the other.

“Majister! Emperor!” The yells lifted and the men of my retinue were there, slashing aside a last frantic attempt by the aragorn. The light shifted, dying in an opaz haze. The dirt ran with blood. Naked flesh stained crimson. The slave with the dark hair and the body of a fighting man slumped, and he collapsed to his knees and I saw he was wounded, a jagged rent across his back.

Half-kneeling, he looked up.

The brilliantly attired soldiers of the new Vallia crowded about me. They were profuse in their expressions of concern. “Majisters” and “emperors” filled the evening air. And I looked at the slave, collapsed there in his blood and filth still gripping the harsh iron chains.

“Majister — the risks you take... Emperor, we are here to protect you...” Oh, yes, majister this and majister that, emperor and emperor...

The slave looked up and spoke.

“Lahal, my old dom,” he said. “I might have known you’d get here — given time.”

He coughed, then, and a spittle of blood trickled down his chin.

It was extraordinarily difficult for me to speak.

The babble of voices at my back, with their continual interlarded majisters and emperors... I straightened my shoulders. I found my voice.

“Lahal, Seg,” I said.

Chapter Twelve

Jikaida over Vallia

We flew back to Vondium. The odd little thought occurred to me that had I known it was Seg Segutorio struggling all naked with his chains, I would have unlimbered the Krozair longsword and gone in raging like a maniac.

And that was a demeaning thought, to be sure; but it adequately expresses my own confessed confusion in personal relationships.

“By the Veiled Froyvil, my old dom, but that is good,” said Seg as he took the goblet from his lips. His mouth shone with fine Gremivoh, and I instantly refilled the goblet for him. We sat in my study, with the books and the maps, and Seg looked more like my old friend than a sodden wrung-out chained-up slave. The doctors had seen to him and patched him up, declaring he needed rest. His first words after that typical greeting had been: “And Thelda?” Whereat I had shaken my head. “There has been no news of her, none at all.”

“I went up to Evir,” said Seg, now, as we brought each other up to date with our doings since we had parted on the way to the Sacred Pool of Baptism in Aphrasöe. “I went into that damned pool with Delia and the emperor and the others, and then I was back home in Erthyrdrin.” He drank again, and shook his head. “Mightily discomposing, I can tell you.”

“I know.”

He looked up. “Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”

“So you made your way back to Vallia and went to Evir?”

“Yes. If I’d been sorcerously transported home, then Thelda would, too — or so I thought.”

“You were right.” I told him a little of the power of Vanti, the Guardian of the Pool, enough to allow him to understand that we had been caught up in a wizardly manifestation. He seemed satisfied with my explanation.

“She’d been there. They told me. An uncouth bunch, all right, those Evirese.”

“And?”

He moved his left hand emptily.

“I went to Falinur, then. After all, I am supposed to be their damned kov. But, for me, they can keep their kovnate and their mangy ways. I was taken up by flutsmen, and escaped, and then, being a trifle down, was easy prey for the aragorn. We’d been marching for days on end. I think — I’m not sure — I escaped a couple of times. But the lot I was with when you came up were the last.”

“You are home now, Seg.”

He gripped that empty hand into a fist. A Bowman of Loh, Seg Segutorio, for my money the best bowman on Kregen, and a kov, the Kov of Falinur. Yet he was the truest friend a man can have, and be thankful to all the Gods of Kregen he may call a friend. Now he looked down, shrunken, fearful of the terrors the future must bring.

“Home — yes, Dray, I made Vallia my home. And, now — my wife, my children, where are they?”

“You have returned. They will, too.”

“I believe that. I have to believe that. But the whole business has been a nightmare.”

He had heard the news, how the emperor’s life had been saved by his immersion in the Sacred Pool, of how all those who had taken him there had been sorcerously dispatched to their homes, of how the emperor had at last been slain in the final moments of the Fall of Vondium. He had listened stony-faced as the story of Kov Layco Jhansi’s treachery was told, and of how Zankov, the mysterious agitator, had killed the emperor. He heard about Queen Lushfymi of Lome, and expressed no great desire to meet her, despite that she worked hard and devotedly for Vallia. I knew that Seg loved his Thelda very deeply. For all her faults she was a good comrade and I often castigated myself for my treatment of her, for the supposedly funny remarks I made about her. She tried desperately hard to be a good friend to Delia, and Delia loved her, too, in her own way.

And now she was missing and might be anywhere, not only in Vallia, either. Anywhere at all on Kregen...

Seg fetched up a sigh. “Well, Thelda always means well,” he said, at which I shot him a hard look. “I just pray Erthyr the Bow has her in his keeping.”

“Amen to that, Seg, and Opaz and Zair, too.”

The doctors having told me that the Kov of Falinur needed a proper convalescence, which was not at all surprising, I made Seg see sense. In addition to seeking Thelda he wanted to know what had happened to his children, Dray and the twins. From my own bitter experiences of the past, and more recently in attempting to trace Dayra, I knew the wait might well be a long and agonizing one before any news was received. And, all this time, the work of preparing Vondium and the provinces loyal to us to resist the coming attack had to go on.

I said to Seg: “I am particularly pleased that the Grand Archbold of the Kroveres of Iztar is now with us.”

Seg showed a flicker of interest.

“The Order has admitted a number of new brothers lately. The work goes on. It seems to me, as a mere member, seemly for the Grand Archbold to welcome the new brothers.”

“Yes, my old dom,” said Seg, but he spoke heavily. “You are right. I value your words in this. You made me the Grand Archbold — for my sins, I suspect, as you so often say. But I will perform my duty.”

He brightened. “Anyway, it seems to me a perfectly proper function of the KRVI to search out and rescue ladies in distress.”

“Ah!” I said.

If I thought then that this work with the KRVI might help Seg, I feel the thought to be just and proper. If, as I suspect may have been the case, I also thought it would get him out of my hair, the thought was not only unjust and improper — it was despicable. Still, as they say, only Zair knows the cleanliness of a human heart.

Seg did say, with a flash of his old spirit, that, as for the new army, they were a fine, frilled, lavendered bunch of popinjays with their laces and decorations and brilliance of ornamentation. “I mind the days when you and I, Dray, marched out with a couple of rags to clothe us. Provided our weapons were fit for inspection by Erthanfydd the Meticulous, we didn’t care what we looked like.”

“Ah, but, my old dom,” I said, somewhat wickedly, to be sure: “That was before you met Thelda.”

Which was, to my damnation, a confounded stupid thing to say.

Seg took himself off to meet the brothers of the Order and discuss plans and, no doubt, take a stoup or two, and I went back to the paperwork. Blue was a color not in favor in Vallia save in the northeast, where it had been adopted in provincial badges and insignia as a kind of silent insult to the south, and in certain seacoast provinces where the ocean gave ample reason for its inclusion. These color-coded badges and banded sleeves and insignia of Vallia can be lumped together under the general name of schturvals, and by the schturval a man wore you could tell his allegiances. Nath Orcantor, known as Nath the Frolus, came to see me, highly indignant, determined that the fine spanking regiment of totrixmen he was raising should wear blue tunics over their armor, and red breeches. Enevon Ob-Eye and Nath were in the room with me at the time, going over sumptuary lists, and they looked on, more than a little astonished.

“Blue?” said Nath. “In the Vallian Army?”

“And why not, Kapt Nath?” said Nath Orcantor the Frolus. “I am from Ovvend, as you very well know, and our colors were granted in the long ago by the emperor then.”

“Oh,” said Enevon, and he smiled. “You mean sky-blue.”

“Done, Jiktar Orcantor,” I said. “Your totrixmen may wear sky-blue tunics and red breeches — but let the red be more a madder, or a maroon, rather than a crimson.”

Nath Orcantor the Frolus nodded, well pleased. He was not a whit put out that his regiment could not wear the imperial crimson, for that was an understood part of the hoary traditions of Vallia. The emperor said what was what, and crimson was the imperial color, and Nath the Frolus was raising a private regiment — for which, I add with great emphasis, I was most glad. We needed every man with us in this fight.

And there, in this piddling little frivolous-seeming incident, was another example of the way the imperium was eating away at my brain.

Nath Perrin the Oivon was raising a regiment of light-armed infantry who would act as skirmishers before the main line. When Jiktar Perrin wanted to clothe his regiment in green no one could see any objection. So, neither could I. After all, as I have reiterated, green is a fine color — for some people and in some areas. So Jiktar Nath the Oivon’s five hundred drilled in a leaf-green tunic, with minimum armor and armed with stuxes, spears and swords only. They did not carry shields and, for a space, I was willing to allow that.

The army grew.

A regulation had to be promulgated setting the largest size of epaulettes it was permissible to wear. The normal male Vallian’s outfit in civilian life is the wide-shouldered buff tunic, with breeches and tall black boots. The size of these wings gives a fine dramatic effect. But now, with the blaze of uniforms to play with, and bronze or steel wings to clamp over the shoulders, the Vallians seemed to have gone mad. I saw a Hikdar with silver epaulettes stretching out a full hand’s length beyond his shoulder. A sensible size had to be established, for these enormous shoulder-boards with their fantastic decorations could seriously impede the sword arm, or the spear-wielding sweep, if unchecked. Truth to tell, the wide metallic wings of the soldiers became a kind of trademark of the Vallian army. No one wanted to be without bronze, iron or steel epaulettes, and their use was demonstrated in battle where they saved many a slashing blow from taking off an arm. They complemented the leather, bronze-studded jerkins admirably.

When the fellows of my choice band ceremoniously presented me with a golden pair, I caved in, and wore them when in a certain uniform which they suited. But how I thought of the days when, clad only in the old scarlet breech-clout, I went swinging off to the fight!

The food situation had now eased enormously. This was due in no small measure to the wise precautions we had taken to return agriculture and husbandry to their usual high state of efficiency. The pallans, that is ministers or secretaries, appointed to the various posts of government, functioned well. I had told them what was needed and they had done their best to do the job. In truth, Vallia, or that part of it still owing allegiance to Vondium, had been ruled by decree. Now, in conversations with the Lord Farris and the other pallans and responsible officials, I announced that the Presidio would be reformed. Farris was delighted.

“That takes a load off my shoulders!”

“Mayhap, Farris. But you are still the imperial Crebent Justicar — when I am away, the responsibility is yours.”

“Do you anticipate—?”

Farris could not be told of my real fears. I said, “I am fretful. Everything runs here in Vondium. We remain in the dark. Perhaps I will tour around the frontiers.” And, at that, we all felt the pain. Those frontiers were tightly drawn around us now, well inside what had once been a united country. And, again, I could not tell him that some itch in me, an ache in my bones, told me that I would soon have news from Barty.

Two fresh regiments of archers had been formed and their Jiktars besought me to present the standards and to inspect their men. Sitting at my desk — that infernal desk with its never-ending avalanche of papers — I looked up most pleased when Seg came in, smiling.

“You look — look better, Seg.”

“Aye. I have been working. I know Thelda will be found.”

“Good.” I nodded vigorously. “These bowmen this morning, Seg. I have to inspect them. Will you...?”

“Delighted. I shall, of course, say nothing.”

“You may say nothing to them or their Jiktars. But to me, you will speak and I shall take heed of your words.”

“Well, then, let me go to Loh and recruit Bowmen of Loh.”

“No!”

He was surprised at my tone.

“But, Dray — why not? Always Vallia has paid gold for mercenaries. And the Bowmen of Loh are the best archers in the world. Why not?”

“Vallia must free herself by her own efforts.”

“If there is not gold enough in the treasury, why—”

“Aye!” I said, and my bitterness shocked Seg. “Aye! If the mercenaries cannot be paid honestly, they may take their pay in loot.”

“From your enemies. That has always been the way of it.”

“You saw the Phalanx when we met again? Each brumbyte, each Hakkodin, is a free man of Vallia. They take their silver stivers in pay, and they know if they loot Vallian property they will dance on air for it.”

He shook his head. “But it is enemy—”

“Look, Seg. All Vallia is like a gigantic Jikaida board. The drins are set out, the squares colored, the men in action. We fight and struggle for possession of drins and advantageous positions. Men die in the real world, instead of being swept up and replaced in the Jikaida box. This is not a game. And, remember, this enormous Jikaida board is Vallia, all of it, all Vallian. When you destroy a town full of foemen you destroy a Vallian town.”

We had played Jikaida the evening before and Seg had lost disastrously. This game, which is just about the most popular board game among most Kregans, can become a disease, taking up all a fellow’s time and thoughts, move and counter-move obsessing his every waking moment. It is, in most people’s estimation, far superior to Jikalla. And the image it brought to mind, of men marching and counter-marching from square to square, of the player concentrating on every move and trying to outguess his opponent, was an image of our present position in Vallia. We played a real life flesh and blood Jikaida on the giant board of Vallia, and our opponents would have no mercy if we played a false move. And, as you shall hear, I was to play another and altogether more personal game of flesh and blood Jikaida. But, then, that lay in my troubled future.

Seg started to say in his forthright way, “Well, all right, my old dom, I can see that plain enough—” when the door burst open and Jilian ran in, laughing, excited, her pale face flushed with happiness.

“Jak, Jak — the Lady Franci’s rark has had puppies and here is — oh!”

She saw Seg, big, handsome, yelling at me, worked up at my stupidity in not hiring a strong force of the finest bowmen in the world, and Jilian halted and the rark puppy wriggled and squirmed against her breast.

Very mildly, I said: “Jilian, you should meet Seg Segutorio, the Kov of Falinur, who is a blade comrade and the truest of friends. Seg, this is Jilian, who is just Jilian and who I am sure would love to shoot a round with you.”

Seg stared at her. “A bowgirl?”

“Among other accomplishments.”

I had not told Seg about Ros the Claw. His daughter Silda had been mixed up with the wild gang with whom Dayra ran, and I was not sure quite what his reactions would be. He had hauled his daughter out of it; I had not.

They made pappattu and exchanged Llahals and then Lahals.

Seg eyed me.

“So, and pardon me, Jilian, for finishing this subject, you will not, Dray, hire Bowmen of Loh?”

“No.”

“And if they are brought against us by our enemies?”

“Then the Archers of Vallia must outshoot them.”

“Impossible.”

“I know. But it will be done.”

Jilian watched us, stroking the puppy. She wore a laypom-colored tunic with silver edging, one of Delia’s, and the four pin holes made a square punctuation, empty of the brooches usually pinned there. The moment was broken as the puppy at last broke free and, a lightning-fast ball of ginger fur, led us a dance around the room before we caught him. Jilian gathered him up, crooning to him, stroking his fur. I smiled.

Seg saw the smile.

“These two regiments of these marvelous archers of yours?”

I glanced at the clepsydra.

“Yes. Time to go. You will excuse us, Jilian?”

She put her head on one side, her hair dark and low over that broad white forehead, and all her intent look returned.

“I think, Jak, that I shall raise a regiment of Jikai Vuvushis. We can fight for Vallia.”

Seg looked at her, and then at me, and I said: “That would be interesting, anyway. They have Battle Maidens up in the northeast who have declared for our foemen. It would be — both amusing and horrible — to see Jikai Vuvushis in line against one another.”

Jilian tossed her head. She laughed. “That will be no new thing.”

“Kregen,” I said, but to myself. “Kregen...”

As we went out I noticed Jilian’s sandals. Light and airy, they were thonged with golden straps to the knee. Those sandals were never Delia’s.

Jiktars Stormwill and Brentarch met us on the parade ground and the inspection went off faultlessly. Everyone knew the Kov of Falinur was a Bowman of Loh, and the ranks stiffened up wonderfully. Their shooting was good. It was not excellent; just good, and I knew Seg would be highly dissatisfied. But these were green regiments, and must learn. Their Jiktars would keep them at training, making sure the Hikdars ran their pastangs firmly and fairly, and the Deldars would run along the ranks bellowing and shouting as all Deldars bellow and shout.

The standards were presented, the trumpets blew, and a band from the Second Archers, a seasoned outfit, played stirring marches. By my express wish they played “The Bowmen of Loh.” Seg looked at me. Then he looked away. Well, in this life we all have to learn, and it is always the hard way, and painful.

The parade marched off to the strains of “Old Drak Himself,” which was by way of being a growing habit, and would soon be a tradition, when a flier circled across the rooftops, obviously searching. Seg had been given a Lohvian longbow by Log and his other comrades, for he felt naked without, and the great bow was out of its scabbard, strung, and an arrow nocked at a speed which would have dizzied the green archers marching off the parade ground.

I saw the schturval painted up on the side of the flier. Gray, red and green, with a black bar.

“Lower your bow, Seg. Those are the colors of Calimbrev. The flier is from Barty Vessler.”

Seg lowered the bow; but he only half unbent it and he kept the shaft ready in that casual, superbly competent way of a true Bowman of Loh, the master archers of Kregen. The men in the voller spotted us. What with Cleitar holding my own flag aloft, and with Ortyg the Tresh lifting the new flag of Vallia, and the blaze of scarlet and gold about, it was pretty clear where stood the Emperor of Vallia.

Targon the Tapster and Naghan ti Lodkwara, who had rejoined after his wound had half-healed, exchanged remarks. The others of my choice band, also, expressed opinions. I sat, looking forward and up, stony-faced. These staunch companions of the choice band and Seg had lived and worked with me in different times, and, it seemed, times centuries apart. Seg was not himself. If anyone questioned me, and no one did, I was prepared to be reasonable on the point. But Seg Segutorio meant a great deal, a very great deal, as you will know. As, to be sure, did every single one of the choice band. The flier landed and Hikdar Douron jumped down and ran across, saluting as he hauled up before me.

“Majister!”

“Spit it out, Hikdar Douron.”

“The strom begs to report,” he started off. I killed my smile. That, for a certainty, was not the way Barty had given his message.

“Yes?”

“The — person — he sought has left certain signs so that the Strom is confident he knows where she is. But the strom has been wounded and is mewed up in the fortress of the Stony Korf. He cannot leave our wounded.”

I said: “Why did you not all leave in the flier?”

“We have been joined by freedom fighters — we could not bring them all and the strom would not abandon them. Honor—”

Barty’s honor! Well, the lad was in the right of it.

I turned to speak and Seg said: “Stony Korf! I know that devil’s eyrie. It is in Falinur, that is supposed to be my kovnate, may it rot in the Ice Floes of Sicce.”

The decision was made without thinking about it.

Farris was told he was to take over. No attack was imminent, everyone was sure. I would take a pruned down group of the most ferocious desperadoes of my band. Seg would come. We were at last going to find my daughter Dayra. We were going to talk to Ros the Claw. And about time, too.

Chapter Thirteen

A Bowman Topples a Blazing Brand

To be free of the cares of empire! Once more to ride the winds and with a cutthroat band of loyal companions to hurtle across the face of Kregen, speeding beneath the Moons, and sword in hand once more to plunge into headlong adventure. Ah! This was the old Dray Prescot, a fellow with whom I had barely been on nodding acquaintance lately.

We had packed Barty’s flier with men and supplies and, Hikdar Douron having assured us we were adequate for the job ahead, I had not pressed Farris to release any more vollers from his small and hard-pressed fleet. Our sailing skyships would be, by days, too slow. Now in fading light, Douron pointed ahead, where a jagged line of peaks rose against the star-glitter. This was an uncomfortable little corner of Seg’s kovnate, a sour, dull place inhabited by sour, dull people. They insisted on keeping slaves and all Seg’s attempts had failed to convince them otherwise. I knew that toward the end, before the Time of Troubles, he had been at his wits’ end, unwilling to use the force at his disposal against the people of his new kovnate, and yet, sharing my views, desperate to end the blasphemy against human nature that slavery was, in very truth, in our eyes.

“I remember this fortress,” said Seg. He wiped his lips and peered ahead. “When I asked its chief, a bent-nosed rascal called Andir the Ornc, to manumit his slaves, he threw my messenger out, a fine young fellow, Naghan Larjester, and sent him back to me with a nose as bent as his own. It was a jest. I was screwing up my mind to march on him with my people and make an example of him, when the emperor was poisoned.”

“I think, Seg,” I said with some gravity as we flew down, “I really do think you are well out of Falinur. It is a kovnate of which much may be made. But slavery has to be ended. And there has been far too much water under the bridge.”

“If you mean, Dray,” said the Kov of Falinur, “that you wish to strip my kovnate from me, why, then, I will be the first to throw my hat in the air.”

“I will do what you wish. You are still a kov, that is something useful to be in this world, as you know. And a kov must have estates. There is a province ready for you, once—”

“Aye,” he said, his wild blue eyes bright in that mingled light. “Aye, dom! I know! Once we have cleared out whatever bunch of rasts is sucking it dry now.”

“Aye. And there will be a lot of that, by Krun.”

He did not ask where away this new kovnate of his might be and, truth to tell, I was in nowise sure myself. But, I was firmly convinced, unalterably convinced; Seg Segutorio was a kov and would have a kovnate.

He told me something of conditions he had found north of the Mountains of the North when he had gone seeking Thelda in Evir, the northernmost province. A fellow had taken over up there and was calling himself the King of Urn Vallia. He controlled Durheim and Huvadu although running into some trouble from the High Kov of Erstveheim. Venga, of which the hapless Ashti Melekhi had been the vadnicha, had been invaded and her twin brother, the vad, was on the run. It was all a mess up there, and, that was true of the southwest and the southeast and the mountains, also. There was no profit in worrying over those broader problems now when the stone fortress below rushed up toward us as the flier dropped, and we saw the men waving below, waiting for us.

We were in enemy territory here. That was a foul note, to be sure. Enemy territory, in Falinur, one of the heartlands of Vallia!

Almost, we got through unobserved. Almost...

As we skimmed for the stone ramparts a volley of arrows whisked up toward us. Campfires burned in a circle about the fortress of the Stony Korf. A few shafts punched into the flier; but no one was hit. Varter bolts lanced the dusky air. We even saw two catapult stones come arching up, like balls tossed high in sport, and curve over and so fall away. But the arrows persisted. Seg perked up, taking a professional interest.

“Undurkers,” said Seg. The fascinating information in his comment was the comparative lack of contempt. I wondered what scrapes he’d pulled out of since we’d parted that might have given him this new outlook. Certainly, he was scathing enough about the short bow, as was I. “Undurkers. Well, my old dom, we’ve seen them off before.”

“And will again, despite that we have no Bowmen of Loh with us, save yourself.”

He did not laugh. The voller whooshed air over the crumbled stone battlements and circled once, losing speed, before dropping to a mossy patch of stone at the center of the tower. That was just about all this place was, a tower. Seg said, quietly, as the besieged folk came up: “You may not be a Bowman of Loh; but you’d give most of them a run for their money.”

Well, of course, from Seg Segutorio, that was high praise.

Then we were exchanging Lahals and jumping from the flier and I was being led off to where Barty sat under a canvas awning, looking most disgruntled, with an arrow-wound in his shoulder. The people clustered around, their bearded grimy faces reflecting villainously in the torchlights. They were smiling a little, now, thinking rescue had reached them. The scene was like a witch’s coven. Barty waved a hand.

“The emperor and I would speak in private.” He had not risen to greet me — and the reason for that was plain enough. His people backed off. My own desperadoes were busily engaged in estimating the defenses and getting an idea of the enemy out there in the darkness that shut down with the last of the suns. It was not a night of Notor Zan; but for a space the star glitter and two of Kregen’s smaller moons gave the impression of a night darker than it really was. Seg stood at my shoulder. Barty looked up. His face looked odd; his usual high color had fled; but his pallor was made more leaden by the red stains under the skin, high on each cheekbone. He looked at Seg.

“I said the emperor and I would be alone.”

Seg did not move.

I said, “Seg, this handsome young man who has fallen so low is Barty Vessler, the Strom of Calimbrev. And, Barty, you have the honor and pleasure of meeting Seg Segutorio, the Kov of Falinur.”

Barty opened his mouth, shut his mouth, extended his hand as the pappattu was made. My new friends had said harsh words about Falinur and its kov. But, as always, I could not be harsh on Barty. So I added, casually, “Seg is with us in this.” Here I had to trip daintily around certain subjects. “He is aware of the problem and—”

“Oh, them,” said Seg. “My girl Silda wanted to go off and be some kind of Jikai Vuvushi. But Thelda didn’t like the idea and I had to bring Silda home.” He glanced at me, and, amazingly, laughed. “She is not at all pleased that Drak has gone off adventuring in Faol.”

So ho, I said to myself, so the weathervane spins that way, does it...?

Barty’s news was both stimulating and depressing. Dayra had most certainly been seen and then the local gang of mercenaries who held the district for Layco Jhansi had mewed him and his men up here, together with the local Freedom Fighters. And, one of these, the guerilla chief, was in a right state over his wife. I said: “Dayra first. Then the others, all of them, as many as we can contrive.”

“I agree. But Dayra isn’t with this bunch of cramphs trying to burn us out.” His words were not idle. Every now and then a varter bolt tied with burning flax would arch up and over and fall into the tower. Sand was flung in strewed winnowed falls to quench the flames.

“Well, young Barty! Where the hell is she, then?”

At this he spread his hands helplessly, and winced, and looked more gray and drawn than I liked.

“My spies got wind of what she came for. That kleesh Zankov has been thoroughly rejected by the Northeast Parties, and so he is seeking an alliance with Jhansi.”

Seg ran a hand along his longbow. “It will be interesting to meet this Zankov.”

“But now,” I said. “Right now!”

“Majister,” said Barty, and his voice shook. “I do not know.”

“These cramphs are getting troublesome,” said Seg, brushing sparks away as a blazing bolt hit and bounced near us.

“Where was she last seen, Barty?”

“Trakon’s Pillars. Jhansi was supposed to be meeting her at a summer villa the old kov had there.”

“Him,” said Seg, and sniffed. “I’d as lief Naghan Furtway had his Opaz-forsaken kovnate back again.”

“You know the place, Seg?”

“Yes. Damned degenerate pest hole. Furtway was a great Jikaida player — you know that, Dray —

and the whole place was built like a Jikaida board. Most odd. And devilish, too. I can take you there. But our friends outside grow impatient.”

A few words soon showed that the mercenaries outside the tower had been reinforced after Hikdar Douron had left for Vondium. We had brought men, yes; but had we brought enough to break through the ring? Barty was all for getting up and bashing on. There were saddle animals stabled in the lower floors. But the Jiktar who ran his guards, a man who could have sat for a portrait to represent the professional, life-time fighting man, shook his head.

“In my view we are still too few,” said Jiktar Noronfer.

“Um,” said Seg.

“We must break out!”

Barty sank back on the blankets. He looked in bad case.

Then Jiktar Noronfer, with the infuriating ability of the professional to state a situation as though it was not a matter of life and death affecting him no less than anyone else, said: “They will break in before the flier can return to Vondium for help.”

Another iron-headed bolt arched over the ancient stone battlements and hit, bouncing. The flames from the tar and bitumen-soaked flax blazed up. The brand skated across the stones straight for us like a comet on a collision course.

Barty let out a feeble yell. Jiktar Noronfer dived out of the way. The caroming bolt leaped, like a fractious zorca, spat sparks, sizzling with a noise like a cage full of serpents. It roared directly at us. I leaped for Barty. Seg — the infernal idiot! — seized up Noronfer’s dropped spear and swung toward the blazing brand. Even as I got Barty up and scrambled him out of the way so Seg with a beautifully lithe skip and jump got the spear point under the iron head of the bolt and heaved. Then he, too, jumped for safety. His cloak was alight. He landed and rolled and I put Barty down as gently as I could contrive and as the flaming bolt reared up and spilled over the stones at our back I leaped on Seg. With my bare hands I batted at the flames and got his cloak ripped off and tossed aside. I was not burned, thank Zair

— well, not much, not enough to notice.

Seg sat up.

“Thanks, my old dom. We’ve enough light as it is without using me as a living torch.”

“You maniacal Erthyr nitwit! Why didn’t you jump out of the way?”

“Never thought you’d get the youngster out of it in time. You were damned quick.”

“Not as quick as you, you—”

Seg’s face drew in with pain. His eyes misted. Torchlight hung shadows along his jaw and his cheeks hollowed.

“Get that tunic off! And the kax! Your wound, when you were slave—”

“Aye, Dray, aye. It’s plaguing me, devil take it.”

Seg’s wound had opened and the bloody mess made me go cold. Barty’s needleman was summoned and we kept everyone else away and I made up my mind.

I made up my mind not as the Emperor of Vallia, not as Dayra’s father, not as a friend to young Barty. I made up my mind because Seg needed immediate and expert attention which the needleman here was not equipped to give. He could insert his acupuncture needles and dull Seg’s pain. But that was not enough. This was just another obstacle and, like all obstacles, must be evaluated and the best course chosen.

Seg protested vehemently. But I would not be swayed.

“And Jiktar Noronfer,” I said with emphasis, my face I am sure as hard and merciless as it had ever been. “I see you are a shebov-Jiktar. If you wish to gain the remaining three steps in the Jiktar grade to make zan-Jiktar and, if you are lucky and live, ob-Chuktar, you had best pick up the spear you dropped and fight with us.”

“I will fight, majister. I do not seek to excuse my conduct.”

“Make it so.”

I thought he would come through and fight well, better than well, after the spectacle he had made. But I would keep my eye on him.

Barty and Seg, of course, both of them, kicked up a frightful indignant racket. But I was prepared in this to be high-handed, very high-handed, even going to the ridiculous length of reminding them that I was, for Vox’s sake, the Emperor of Vallia. Thankfully, it did not come to that sorry pass and they agreed. I turned on Jiktar Noronfer.

“Wheel me up the leader of the local Freedom Fighters, Jiktar. He ought to know his way around.”

“Quidang, majister!” barked Noronfer, very businesslike, and clattered off down the stairs to the lower stories.

Seg looked mighty sullen. Because he, like me, had dipped in the Sacred Pool of Baptism he would live a thousand years and his wounds would heal swiftly and cleanly, leaving no scars. But nature will not always be baulked and his wound had been far more serious than I evidently had realized. He would heal. But that last foolhardy, heroic act had burst the fragile adhesions of the wound’s surfaces. He needed proper rest and attention and that, by Krun, was that. As Kregans say, the situation was Queyd-arn-tung! No more need be said on the subject.

Barty, too, as I say, had to have his lines read to him. The two wounded men lay side by side, Seg on his side, and glowered at me. At last Seg said, “That flint-fodder outside. You have a good longbow?

Mine—”

“Rest easy and stop chaffering like a loloo over chicks!”

“Thelda—”

“I know. In this short time we’ve been away there could be news in Vondium. The whole world can change in an instant.” By Zair! But wasn’t that right! I knew, perhaps none better, how in a twinkling life can make a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, and stand you on your head, gasping, with nothing ever the same again. “And you can go see if Delia is back, too.”

“I will. And getting out of here?”

“The plan calls for us to rush ’em and knife through. It will knock over a dermiflon.” Which is a cast-iron guarantee of success. “Now shut your great fanged wine-spout and let yourself be loaded aboard the voller. And, Seg—”

“Yes, my old dom?”

“Take care of yourself. You hear?”

His smile might be a wan ghost of his old reckless fey laugh; but he mustered up a smile for me. “I hear.”

And then, being Seg Segutorio and the best comrade a man could have on two worlds, he barbed in a cutting: “Majister!”

I winced, and then they came and took Seg and Barty and the other wounded and loaded them into the voller.

As the flier rose into the air I saw a dark hunched shape lift in an embrasure and the thin pencil mark of a great Lohvian longbow being fully drawn. That was Seg Segutorio for you. Despite his lacerated and bleeding back he was up there and ready to cast down a few deadly shafts to help us. The cramphs out there were flint-fodder, no doubt of it, and I crossed to the battlements and looked down. Three dark figures spun away, arms wide, screeching soundlessly as She of the Veils rose through wreathing mists and shed her fuzzy pink and golden light. Now we would have light enough to see by, light enough to kill by — if we were unlucky or unskilled, light enough to die by.

The voller vanished into the night and another besieger toppled with a long Lohvian arrow through him. Four times, Seg had shot. I do not think there was another archer in the whole world who could have loosed three — and hit with every shot.

Losing Seg like this naturally made me think of Inch and Turko and Balass and Oby and the rest. By Krun! Devil take these troubles consuming Vallia. I ought to be out scouring Kregen for my friends. Going down to the lower stories I found them choked with saddle animals and calsanys. Jiktar Noronfer was just about to climb back up. He looked annoyed.

“Beg to report, majister! The local chief — Lol Polisto ti Sygurd — has just got back.” He paused, waiting. I did not amuse him by bursting out with a hot-headed: “Back from where, by Vox!” I looked at him. Noronfer wet his lips, suddenly, and finished in a rush: “His wife has been taken by these rasts and they sent a message. He tried to fight through; but was beaten back.”

I said: “Was he wounded?”

“No, majister.”

I looked again at Noronfer, and, again, he wet his lips.

I wondered what Barty was coming to. Noronfer was a mercenary, although not yet a paktun despite his rank of Jiktar, and he must have seen the way we were ceasing to employ mercenaries in Vallia. Yes, more than an eye would have to be kept on this one...

Lol Polisto ti Sygurd lay exhausted on a straw pallet, smothered in blood, not his own, and looked savage and wan and distraught and, also, a useful-appearing fighting man. As the leader of the local resistance fighters warring in guerilla fashion against the minions of Layco Jhansi he must have a fair amount of the yrium, the power to move men to actions of which they deem themselves incapable. I did not smile; but I bent down to shake hands, saying: “Lahal, Tyr Lol Polisto. Tell me; their numbers, their strengths — their weaknesses?”

“Cramphs, the lot of them!” He struggled to stand up; but I pushed him down, gently. He whooped in a breath. He was a fit, limber man, with dark hair and he reminded me, with Seg in my mind, very much of that master bowman. Now he got out: “At least two hundred of them, swordsmen and Undurkers. Layco Jhansi is determined to have my head and uses the Lady Thelda as bait. By Opaz the Deliverer! I pray she is still safe, she and the child they took with them, the Opaz-forsaken kleeshes.”

My response was instant, particularly as thinking of Seg’s Thelda brought the plight of this man more sharply into focus. He was clearly suffering anguish. If Jhansi had taken Lol Polisto’s wife Thelda as a hostage, I, for one, had no sanguine hopes for her survival, hers or the child’s. I told Lol Polisto the plan and he expressed the opinion that as a plan it would sieve greens very well, which warmed me to him; but that if we swung our swords right merrily enough we should break through with the warriors I had brought. We had, as yet, no wounded to worry our heads over. The saddle animals were made ready, a mixed bunch, and I was found a zorca who, although his single spiral horn was broken, appeared a spirited-enough beast and anxious to get out of the dark and fetid hole in which he found himself penned. We mounted up and the rest grasped the stirrup leathers. Talk about the 92nd charging on the stirrups of the Scots Greys at Waterloo! The big lenken double doors were thrown open with a smash and golden moonlight splashed in. Then we were out, a dark mass of men and animals, roaring out and slap bang into the surprised mercenaries opposite us. It was all a sheerly onward-surging mass tumbling the foe left and right.

We racketed on, leaping shadows, swarming on, sweeping away in an instant a line of Undurkers who were thrown down and shattered, sent reeling, before they could pull string to chin. We hit the mercenaries and pulped them and then went on, striking fiercely left and right, leaving a trail of bloody corpses bleeding on the churned up dirt.

The drexer proved admirable for this foul work; and, to be sure, I did my share. But I kept both Lol Polisto and Jiktar Noronfer in my sights as we galloped fiercely on. A quick bellow to Polisto directed him to lead on. I hauled my maddened beast up, his polished hooves striking the air, swung him about. The tail of our company pressed swiftly on and now the mercenary cavalry was reacting. Totrixmen appeared like lumbering phantasms from the golden-fretted shadows.

“Jhansi! Jhansi!” They screeched as they came on. The golden glitter of moonlight ran down their blades.

“You make a man twist to follow you!” exclaimed Korero, hauling his twin shields up. Only a few arrows sported down. Dorgo the Clis reined up beside me, and Naghan and Targon the other side. Others of the choice band clumped. We formed a small but very knobbly afterguard, a nut these cramphs of mercenary totrixmen would find extraordinarily hard to crack.

Dorgo had reported on the blasphemies he had witnessed in Dogansmot. These men we faced tonight were very different from that fatuous army of Fat Lango’s, which had sat down and vegetated after the death of its leader; but they shared the same avariciousness for rapine and pillage. We were sharp set for them. On they came, heads bent, weapons glittering, and we faced them, and if I say we were the more vicious and savage and barbaric, well, I think that to be true if understandable, Zair forgive us. The two lines clashed and there was a moment of tinker-work before we belted them, belted them in true style, hip and thigh. The totrixmen turned and fled. Someone set up a cheer, but I bellowed out intemperately: “Stow your gab! There will be more of ’em. Now, ride. Ride!”

We swung our mounts’ heads and gladly galloped off into the golden-tinged darkness.

Chapter Fourteen

Lol Polisto ti Sygurd

Having outdistanced the pursuit we eased our mounts. We intended to be long away from this neighborhood by dawn. We had suffered six casualties, and carried with us ten or so who bore wounds, light or serious. Not one, thank Zair, of my choice band had taken so much as a scratch. They were by way of becoming your well-accomplished band of desperadoes, to be sure. Lol Polisto said with a matter-of-fact simplicity that carried more chill conviction than any amount of loud-mouthed bragging: “The cramphs have my wife Thelda and our child and I am going to get them out.”

“Where?” I said to him, just as quietly.

“In a camp they’ve set up at Trakon’s Pillars.”

“Ah!”

“You know of the accursed place? Surrounded by bogs, deep and dark and treacherous. And decadent too, once you get there. They were proud and gleeful in their triumph.” He held out a bracelet, a heavy silver thing engraved with strigicaws and graints. “This is a trinket I gave to Thelda, in remembrance of our adventures and our love. They flung it into the fortress of the Stony Korf, with a note tied to it. See.”

The note was obscene. It mentioned Trakon’s Pillars. I understood the feelings torturing Lol Polisto.

“We will ride there, Lol. I think we can perhaps pay a call they do not expect.”

“Majister!”

“Aye,” I said. “Aye. Of all Vallia. A thing I do not easily forget.”

We rode hard all the rest of that night and rested up a couple of burs before dawn. The wounded with a strong escort went off to one of the hide-outs the freedom fighters had set up. Among them was a lop-eared rascal with a lewd grin exposing snaggle-teeth, by name Inky the Chops, who, having been born hereabouts laid claim to a working knowledge of the treacherous pathways through the quagmire of Trakon’s niksuth, the bog area surrounding Trakon’s Pillars. There was no holding Lol, who appealed to me as a fighting man battling for his homeland and his people, and a family man tortured by fears for his wife and child. It was clear that he loved them both deeply, and, I could see, the love was returned. So, in daylight, we pressed on into the bog.

Mists wreathed the pewter-placid waters and green scum floated and laid carpets for our feet that would have pitched us into the stinking depths had we been foolish enough to trust them. Bladderworts burst, it seemed, just as we passed them, in succession like a royal salute on Earth, and the smells clashed and stank. We wrapped scarves around our noses and pressed on along the spongy ways, with lop-eared Inky the Chops loping ahead. He prodded with a long tufa-tree stick he had slashed off, and every now and again he stopped, and sniffed, and picked his nose, and heaved up a gob, and spat, and then started off along a fresh trail. I put my trust in Zair and followed on, letting the zorca sink his feet where he would, knowing he had sense enough in this.

Ashy-trees hovered over the ways, their spectral branches splotched, dripping with green and orange slime, like Spanish moss. Clumps of scraggy rusty-black birds rose, squawking in indignation at our trespass. These last I eyed with exasperation and concern. A watchful sentry could mark our progress by those betrayers. They were, in very truth, not unlike the magbirds of Magdag, inhabitants of the land of betrayal and treachery, as I considered them.

Presently Inky the Chops halted. The way, such as it was, stretched ahead between water-grasses and bulrushes and clumps of floating weeds. The stink offended man and beast alike. Mist wreathed and there was nothing silvery in that oily, greenish-black effluvium.

“Well, Inky?”

“It gets a bit tricky hereabouts,” said Inky, flashing his snaggle teeth. “There’s risslaca in some of these stretches of open water. Real nasty ’uns.”

The risslacas come in a fantastic variety of sizes and shapes, and only some are akin to Earthly dinosaurs. I could see the wriggle of a leepitix as it chased a fish in a pool to our left. Oily mist swirled down on the other side, and a vast and creaking giant of an un-named tree hung over the squelchy trail. I cocked an eye at Inky.

“Do you wish me to lead?”

He had no time to answer before Korero — and Targon and Naghan and Dorgo and Magin — were up and pushing to get to the point position. I let the corner of my mouth twitch.

“Go on, Inky. You will have spears to protect you.”

“Spears!” He spat — most accurately, overwhelming a dragonfly. “If’n you get a real big ’un — don’t git in my way when I runs!”

“I won’t,” I promised him. An engaging rascal, Inky the Chops, in the style of Kregen rascals I have known.

We pushed on for a space in this fashion, my men taking it in turns for the dubious honor of leading out. I made good and sure I was up near the head of the column. The beasts did not like it at all, and were growing increasingly restive. What happened, when it did, at last, happen, reflected scant credit on any of us. The labyrinth of boggy pathways and precarious footholds along the compacted dirt gathered between tree roots, mazed in its complexity. Inky seemed to know where he was going. We reached an open space that bore the marks of solid land. Trees bowered it in that green and orange dangling slime, and mist coiled, and no birds sang.

But the risslacas were waiting.

Equally at home on land or in water, they charged us with clawed and webbed feet expanded to give them perfect support on the treacherous boggy surface. Squamous hides gleamed in orange and green, camouflage colors, and bright and glittering eyes measured us for size. Talons raked. In an instant we were battling desperately with spear and sword against talon and fang. The noise spurted. Ichor smoked as sword strokes opened up reptilian innards. We were fortunate in only one thing; they had attacked head on instead of lying in wait.

With the drexer slicing away and the zorca a live coal between my knees I was forced to pirouette away, and felt the beast sliding dangerously, hock-deep, into slime. With a convulsive heave he was up and out of the muck. On a semblance of dry ground he gathered himself. Lol Polisto had stayed near me throughout this nightmare journey. His zorca collided with mine. Both animals squealed their fears. As though impelled by the same evil spirit they took to their heels. Heads down, spiral horns thrusting, they bolted.

No effort of sawing on the reins would halt my zorca. He went baldheaded up the trail, brushing past Inky, and I got in a good thwack at a reptilian head, all scales and eyes and fangs, as we racketed past. Lol led. We were both carried on and away and into the shrouding mists and we left the sounds of that desperate combat far in our rear.

As I say, little credit to any of us — and least of all to me.

By the time we had the zorcas under control once more we were well and truly lost.

“Well,” said Lol. “I am not giving up.”

“Nor me. There is a — girl — who was at Trakon’s Pillars. She may have left there by now; but I hope to find someone who saw her, who perhaps knows where she has gone.”

“And I will fetch my Thelda and the child out of that filthy den.”

“Then let us go forward. This lead looks promising.”

We led our mounts for a space, quieting them down, and walked with careful feet along the shuddery trail between quagmires. We walked with naked steel in our fists, and, because I was now afoot, considered it more fitting to unlimber the Krozair longsword. Lol stared.

“I know I am in the best of company with Jak the Drang,” he said. His own clanxer glimmered. “Men have heard of the deeds of Jak the Drang.”

“And you?”

“I was tending my estate of Sygurd when the Troubles began. I had no truck with politics. But in evil times a man must turn his hand when he can. And then I was able to help my Thelda, and we married and we carried on the fight as guerillas. At times, I think, you could almost call us drikingers.”

“I have used bandits, Lol. Properly motivated they are just people — it is those who seek only self-gratification who pose the problems.”

“Aye. We have been fighting Layco Jhansi’s men for a long time now, and never seem to gain an advantage.”

“And the Kov of Falinur? How stands your allegiance?”

“He is dead—” Lol started to say and then he swung about sharply and the clanxer flashed and a tendrilous mass of fleshy pseudopods writhed onto the trail. In the next instant we were fighting together, shoulder to shoulder, almost, to clear the path as bulbous growths, half-flesh, half-plant, descended on us from the dank recesses of the overhanging trees. I say almost shoulder to shoulder. I like to stand with a free space so as to get a good swing with the longsword. So, together, as comrades in arms, we fought, and cleared a passage through for ourselves and our zorcas.

When at last we burst free, Lol drew the back of his hand across his brow, and ichor dripped from the blade of the sword.

“That weapon, Jak the Drang, is incredible.”

“It has been called an old bar of iron.”

“Would we had a thousand such to face Jhansi and his lurfings.”

“We shall deal with Jhansi, if the Racters have not done so first, in due time. What d’you know of this fellow Zankov?”

“Only that he is a devil. He seeks an alliance with Jhansi. There is some foeman they both fear — apart, that is, majister, from you.”

“Aye, me. They mock me, I know.” I told him about Yantong and his crazy schemes. “If Zankov has fallen out with his Hyr Notor, he is in parlous case and must seek fresh allies.”

“They could form a powerful combine across the center of Vallia. If—”

“You said, Lol, you were not a political.”

“I said, if you will pardon me, majister, that a man must turn his hand to the business of the moment in evil days.”

“And so you did, Lol, so you did. And what is that, striking a hard corner through the mist?”

On the instant we halted and remained perfectly still and silent.

Strands of spiderweb drifted from tree to tree, intertwined bundles of gold-glinting threads like gilded thistledown floating on the breath of the breeze, and at the center of each small aerial maze the darkly red body of the spider, crouched and ready, feeling the currents of the air upon his senses and the trapped thrashings of insects on his hairs. Beyond the drifting spider-silk puffballs and the down-drooped trees, beyond the last curl of orange and green mist, the hard outline of a blockhouse thrust a manmade objection into the running deliquescence of the marsh.

“The first outpost,” breathed Lol. I barely heard him. “Now may Opaz be praised.”

“Amen to that. D’you know the best place to hit ’em?”

“No. But I guess we should circle around—”

“They’ll be wary of that trick, I’d guess. Mantraps, stavrers, spikes. Let’s just stroll up to the front door and knock. What say you, Lol?”

His features brightened and took on a fierce look of joy. He moved his sword, freely, liberated from worry over trivialities. “By Vox, majister! I am with you!”

So, as calm as you please, we strolled up to the front door of the blockhouse, leading our zorcas. Yes, we were an impudent pair, or a foolhardy pair; but we did it.

A Rapa stepped out, a dwa-Deldar, big and vulture-like in his leather and bronze harness. His sword pointed at us.

“Llanitch!” he shouted when we were within a dozen paces. “Llanitch!” Which is by way of being an intemperate order to halt.

We moved on a full four paces before we hauled up and I said: “Llahal, dom. This bog! It is enough to give the Reiver of Souls a touch of the black dog. Layco Jhansi is expecting us.” Then, as though that little halt had fully obeyed his order and as though it was the most natural thing in the world, still speaking, I started to move on. “This bog — it tires the sword arm and that is the truth, by Krun!”

The Havilfarese oath must have gone a little way to reassure him, perhaps, even to soothe him, for he lowered his sword and half turned to call back into the blockhouse.

I sprang. I was on him like a leem. He went down, unconscious, gathered under the black cloak of Notor Zan, and Lol and I were into the ominously gaping doorway.

There were four others inside, lolling on bunks, and another two who contested fiercely over Jikalla. We dispatched them all after a short and not very bloody struggle. We did not slay them all. I was pleased at the way Lol worked. Short, efficient strokes, a minimum of fuss, and a neatness about his fighting told me he might have been a peaceful farmer before the Time of Troubles but, like so many Vallians, he had been forced to take up the sword instead of the ploughshare and found in the new occupation an aptitude that, while it must please him, left him also with that dark and hollow feeling of self-disgust and despair. We surveyed the interior of the blockhouse, then Lol went out and dragged the Rapa in. The Rapa’s big cruel beak of a nose was dented in where he had hit the dirt face-down. It had been his misfortune to find a solid chunk of earth instead of the ubiquitous mud.

“This one is half-conscious,” I said, and hauled the fellow up. He was an apim, like us, and wore a fine fancy uniform of leather and bronze with a short and ridiculous cloak of ochre and umbre in checkerboard style.

“Wha—?” he said in immemorial stupid question.

“We did,” I said, cheerfully.

“Uh?”

“I assume you were asking who or what hit you?”

It was a little too much for him. He decided to tell us what we wanted to know when Lol, very casually, asked which portion of his anatomy he fancied he could best do without. The trail opened out past the blockhouse, becoming firmer and less treacherous and there were no more risslacas. That, at the least, was good news. The openness was something else again. We put him to sleep, gently, and bound and gagged all those still alive and, going out and bolting the door and wedging it with a half-rotten log covered with woodlice and limpet-like sucking slugs, we took ourselves and our zorcas off along the trail to Trakon’s Pillars.

Presently Lol, who had been showing acute symptoms of earnest thought, said: “Why not take a couple of their uniforms? We could pass muster for guards, you and I.”

“Aye, Lol. We could. I think you have been a farmer and a guerilla. Those guards back there — their uniforms. They are outpost men, exterior details. If Jhansi is still as slippery as I think, he will have arranged first-rate and differently accoutred guards for inside.”

“Oh,” said Lol. Then, “I see.”

“We’ll try the same trick again, and this time say we have been passed on by the outpost guards. It should serve to bring us within range for handstrokes. I’m loath to shaft ’em without warning.”

The wide-eyed and incredulous gape Lol favored me with indicated, truly enough, the flabbiness of this my later self and the unwelcome realization that I would have to stiffen up, brassud! in the near future. To attempt some limping explanation of my words and thus reveal my hopeless confusion seemed to me an enormous task and one from which I shrank. I was saved further emotional turmoil of that nature by the simple-minded and cunning lie the guard we had questioned had told us, seeking in his professionally loyal way to encompass our downfall. He had said there were no more risslacas. Quite evidently, the beastie which hopped up out of the bog, dripping slime and stinking like a Rapa barracks the night after, had not heard the guard. He opened his gapers and charged, hissing.

“My Vall!” shouted Lol. He let go of his zorca and swung his sword forward. I stepped up to his shoulder on the narrow trail and held the longsword, two-handed, pointed front and center. There was no room to dodge, no time to run and only a squidgy and slime-sucking death in the swamp on each side. So we had to face the monster.

His clawed and webbed feet slapped like suction pads against the ground. His hisses were boiler-punctures. His fetid breath hit us like a furnace blast from hell. His fangs glinted yellow and green, choked with bits of rotting flesh. Without a coherent thought I took a step forward and swung the Krozair brand.

That magnificent steel bit. It chunked solidly alongside the risslaca’s head and then I was knocked lengthwise. The mud sprayed. I near choked on the slime and was on my feet and hacking at the beast’s underside. His back was armored with spines a foot long, draped with trailing weeds. Lol had struck and was down and stabbing away from underneath. Green ichor flowed, bubbling. Together we worked on the dinosaur, hacking and spearing, and avoiding the desperate tramplings and slashings of his feet. Luckily — and I mean that fervently — he was a four-footed fellow, and so we did not have that extra or those two extra pairs of death-dealing talons to worry about. He sagged to his chest, and we stood to either side, hacking away as though we chopped down trees in a primeval forest. Lol took a razor slash along his thigh, and cursed, and set to again with a will. We did not shout or rave; just got on with the disgusting job.

By the time the beast decided he had had enough and attempted to evade us, sliding like a parcel of rotten cabbages into the marsh, we, too, had had our fill.

Lol sagged back. His face showed a greenish pallor.

“By Vox! He nearly had us.”

“And the zorcas have gone, Drig take it.”

“Yes.” And Lol Polisto laughed. “Now Thelda will have to walk out. She will not like that, if I know her.”

“Well, let us go on. Now we look enough like half-crazed fugitives from the niksuth to make our story watertight.”

“Which,” observed Lol with another laugh, “is more than that sorry beastie is right now.”

As I say, Lol Polisto was quite a character when he got a head of steam up. We padded on soundlessly with ready weapons as the mist gyrated and swung oily green and orange streamers about us, mingling in confusing gossamers with the trailing slime from arching tree branches. We met no more risslacas. The trail gleamed like a cobbled street after rain. The smells lessened. The mist still clung, dank and miasmic; but the way opened ahead and the next guard was, most unfortunately, a bleg. He and his companions came trotting along in that weird jerky way of the four-legged blegs, and while they were no doubt anxious to traverse the trail through the bog and reach the outpost where they would relieve the guards on duty there, we were as anxious that they should not betray us. The unfortunate circumstance lay in that they were blegs. With their Persian Leaf Bat faces and four legs like Chippendale chairs, they were clad in uniforms that, although we might make shift to don, would never serve to fool another guard. So we fought and passed on, and looked always ahead. A parcel of slaves lurched lugubriously across a side trail. They were burdened with sacks and staggered as they struggled on under the whips and goads of Och guards. One tends to talk of slaves in this context in terms of parcels; no disrespect is meant by it. The Och guards were disposed of and the slaves, dully incurious, went on their lurching way. We walked on into the mist. A Fristle astride a totrix came lolloping along singing a song, his feet jutting out at arrogant angles. He went whiskers first into the quagmire. Lol stood back and put his hands on his hips.

“I,” he said, “just do not believe this.”

“You may ride, Lol,” I told him. “We’re bound to run across a couple of decent uniforms soon.”

We found the uniforms stretched across the broad backs of three Chuliks. These diffs were a different proposition, and we had a nice little set to before we could claim their garments for ourselves.

“I see what you meant about the uniforms and gear,” observed Lol as we dressed in the fancy ochre and umbre and buckled up the lesten-hide harness. The sleeves were ochre and white — the serving swod’s approximation to Layco Jhansi’s kovnate colors of ochre and silver — and the accoutrements of the men were of good quality. I nodded and stowed the longsword and longbow and quiver over my shoulder, draping a checkerboard cloak across them.

“We’ll penetrate a good long way dressed like this. But do you keep your own sword, also.”

“I understand.”

When we reached the artificial lake surrounding Trakon’s Pillars and surveyed the narrow wooden bridge that connected the pillared stronghold to the land — so-called — we realized what a foolhardy errand we were on. But there was nothing else for it now but to press on as cheerfully as might be. So, singing that silly little ditty about Forbenard and the Rokrell, we pushed on over the bridge. At the far side under the overhanging wooden gateway a Fristle guard awaited us.

“Six of ’em, majister,” said Lol, leaning down from the saddle. “I’ll rush ’em, and then—”

“Hold, Lol! You may rush ’em, with my blessing. But I shall feather three of them for you as you ride. And, once inside, make for the deepest darkest dirtiest shadow and await me. I shall not be long.”

“Majister!” He looked stricken. “I did not mean—”

“I know what you mean, Lol Polisto, and I welcome your thought. Now, as you love Vallia, do as you are bid.”

He grunted, and said, softly, “As I love my Thelda and my son.” But he waited until I had unlimbered the bow. Then he clapped in his heels and was away and I hauled back the string and snapped three arrows across the gap, whistling past Lol’s down-bent head. Three of the Fristles coughed bright blood and collapsed. Lol took two more and the last turned to run. Lol’s totrix, tangling his stupid six-legs, stumbled the wrong way. The Fristle, screeching, his whiskers flaring, would escape and arouse the castle — all I could do was call on Seg’s Supreme Being, Erthyr the Bow, and cast a last shaft. It sped true.

Lol spurred on swiftly, as we had agreed, and I ran in after him, hurdling the fallen men, for the Fristles may have cat-faces, but they are men and can prove it. Inside the gateway the wooden walls stretched, and ahead showed shadows under brickwork, arches and galleries. That looked promising and so I ran

— fast, you may be sure — expecting an arrow to float silently down any mur and knock my brains out. I reached the brick, gray with age and round-edged, and ducked into the shadows. A totrix snuffled and Lol said, “All clear.”

“Well done. Now let us get on.”

From previous experience of the uniquely Kregen architecture of palace and castle I expected us to be able to move about with comparative freedom provided no alarm was raised. The alarm was going to be raised in no uncertain fashion the moment the first of the Fristle guards was discovered. So we must tailor our cloth to suit the narrowness of our movements.

This rat’s warren of Trakon’s Pillars turned out to be something of a surprise, in the end, for we ventured through courts of moldering brick and past colonnades of gilded wood where every motif shrieked of one thing and one thing only.

Jikaida.

Our bedraggled appearance which had served to give us time to fell the Chuliks had vanished with the donning of their guard uniforms provided by Jhansi. We moved smartly, with that unmistakable swagger of the mercenary drawing swift, half-averted glances from serving wenches, free and slave alike. For a space we could proceed unmolested. The totrix was like to be a hindrance but we were loath to part with the steed against his immediate and urgent need in the near future. Past tumbled ruins, past brand-new buildings, freshly lime-washed, we went, seeking always to come to the center. There, we both felt, lay the answers to our dual questions.

We skirted several courts laid out as Jikaida boards of various sizes. Not one was in use this early in the morning. An ob-Deldar moved bulkily out of an arched doorway and bellowed at us, and we ignored him and marched on as though about the kov’s business. Later on we were accosted again, this time by a thin-nosed and supercilious Hikdar. His misfortune was that he snapped at us in an alleyway between ochreberry bushes, and so had no protection from inquisitive eyes as we clapped him down in his cape and sat on him. He struggled like a landed fish.

“Dom,” I said, very friendly. “Tell us where the captives are stowed away and you may live.”

He started to bluster and then to yell as soon as Lol took his clamping hand away. Lol tapped him alongside the skull, gently, put his fist back over the fellow’s mouth, and, leaning down with a fierceness that perfectly complemented my apparent gentleness, said, “If you do not instantly tell us what we wish to know, and do so quietly, you will miss—” Well, what he would miss would make him miss a lot of life hereafter. The Hikdar was happy, most happy, to tell Lol what he wanted to know. Leaving the Hikdar stuffed under the ochreberry bushes we led the totrix through ways advised us until we passed a neat little pavilion reflected in a goldfish pool. Past a tall yew hedge a gravel path led to a small wicket set in a creeper-bowered brick wall. Here the sentry eyed us as Lol, most officiously, said:

“We have news for the kov, dom. You had best not keep him waiting.”

The guard — one of that nameless band of heroes whose sole function, as I have pointed out before, seems to be to stand all puffed in gold and silver finery, with a spear, and to be knocked on the head —

was inclined to argue. He was also incautious enough to open the wicket to make his point with great vehemence. Lol hit him, whereupon he ceased to be an obstacle and we were able to pass inside.

“Now where?”

“We must ask again, and keep asking, until we get the answer we seek.”

“You have, majister, I think,” said Lol, “done this before.”

“On and off,” I said. “On and off.”

But, the truth is, and will remain, that no two occasions are ever the same. And, every time, the old gut-tightening sensations afflict you and you have to keep a damned sharp lookout behind you. Damned sharp.

The bustle of the place was refreshing after the dolorous dragging down effect of the bogs. Slaves and servants and guards moved about and we were able to make our way forward. A swod with purple and green sleeves told us that, he thought, the prisoners were confined in dungeons where the rasts nested and the schrafters sharpened their teeth on the bones of corpses.

“The lady prisoner, cramph!”

The swod rolled his eyes down, trying to focus the dagger pressing into his throat. “In the Lattice House,” he squeaked.

So we went to the Lattice House.

This turned out to be a brick-built structure whose bricks were still sharp-cornered, and whose roof was tile rather than wood or thatch. We stopped by the corner of a gravel path, where brilliantly plumaged arboras strutted, and took in the prospects of breaking in. Lol was shaking.

“Easy, Lol. We are almost there.”

“Aye. I haven’t even thought of getting out.”

“One thing at a time.”

A dozen guards sweating with effort ran past, and their Deldar bellowed at them to spread out and search the Ladies Quarter. I frowned. “The hunt is up.”

“Just let us break in. Then—”

We glared from the shadows of the foliage, and I saw that Lol’s shaking had stopped. I rather fancied he would make a good companion, even a member of the KRVI, if we got out of this in one piece apiece, so to say. For the life of me I couldn’t take it seriously, and this, I vaguely realized, was because Lol was the kind of fellow to make you do things you wouldn’t dream of doing in more staid moments. He was a lot like Seg, and Inch, in that...

“Bluff,” I said. “It will work if you believe it will.”

With that and giving Lol no time to argue I straightened up, gave the stolen uniform a flick, and marched very arrogantly toward the entrance door. This was of lenken wood with bronze bolt heads, and each side stood an apim swod, brilliant in the ochre and white livery of Layco Jhansi.

“Llahal, doms,” I called out. “There are two madmen at large and the kov has sent us to protect the prisoners. Let us in and be quick about it.”

The two rankers frowned at us, and their swords twitched up. You couldn’t blame them. Now I have been accused, here and there, of saying that a certain man was a fool to draw a sword against me, and this has been alleged against me as proof positive of my overweening self-pride and pompousness. This is not so, as you who have heard my story will know. The truth is rather that I sorrow at his foolishness and take no pride from it whatsoever — how can one man take pride in the exposure of another? These two swods would have fallen into the category of fools, but that Lol stepped in first, feverish with frustrated impatience, and belted them, one, two, and knocked them flying.

“Very pretty,” I said. “Now we must drag them in and find someone else to ask where away is your lady wife.”

“We will,” he growled. As we dragged the guards in through the doorway I reflected that Lol was picking up my ways with a pleasing aptitude.

The lenken door closed with only the wheezingest of groans and as the wood latched shut a posse of Rapa guards ran past, swords and spears at the ready. I cursed them and turned to follow Lol into the interior of the Lattice House.

The place was lushly furnished, carpeted, lit by skylights well out of reach of even my Earthly muscles. We found a Fristle fifi who was eager to tell us where the captives were. Captives. I frowned. We padded along on the carpets, past statuary of an erotic and convoluted kind, up stairways where candelabra branched, unlighted now, and tall mirrors reflected us as two stikitches, murderous with intent, stalking their prey. I fancied the mirrors did not entirely lie... This Lattice House contained a distinctive smell compounded of sweat and scent, of heavily perfumed flowers and that sharp aroma that Jilian would call armpit-smell. There were mirrors and statues, paintings and tapestries everywhere. I wondered if Seg had ever been here, and, if he had, why the place still stood.

The Fristle fifi hurried ahead. Her fur was of that sweet honeydew melon color so highly-prized by connoisseurs, most of whom deserve chains themselves. She led us along a purple velvet draped corridor toward a balass door. No guards stood there. Lol pushed on ahead, eagerly, and thrust the door open. The Fristle let out a little squeal of surprise, and half-turned to me. Lol yelped. He vanished. His yelp broke up in a startled bellow, and echoes caught it, twisting and magnifying it into a booming hollowness. I caught the Fristle by her upper arm and held her gently and so looked down into the pit. The shaft was black and unpolished by a single shard of light save what few rays fell from the lamp over the door. No sound reached me from that ebon pit.

I said, “How far did he fall?”

The Fristle was sobbing and squirming, terrified. At last she got out, “There is straw below. He is not killed.”

“You should, fifi, be very thankful for that.” I saw that the pit extended from jamb to jamb. “How do we reach the bottom of the pit?”

“You cannot. It is guarded by werstings. The handlers will come later and—”

“Show me the way.”

“I cannot! I cannot!”

The scene was not pretty. I said, “I think you can — I think you will, Fristle.”

She wailed and sobbed but began to lead me back and along a side corridor covered in pink brocades. I carried the drexer naked in my right fist, and my left hand clamped the fifi’s arm. She wore a copper bracelet there, and that should have warned me, onker that I am.

The likelihood was that she was more terrified that I did not rave and shout, and my calmness in a situation she must know was one of frightful horror for me, unnerved her. She led me along the corridors and I sheathed the blade only three times so as to avoid suspicion as we passed people. The girl Fristle made no attempt at raising the alarm at these times and, to my sorrow, I realized she imagined she would be the first to die.

At the next corner of the corridor, where an ivory statue of a talu swirled multiple arms in exotic frozen dance, she hung back. The tears glistered pearl-like on her face.

“Go on, girl.”

“There are guards—”

I pushed her back, still holding her, and stuck my head around the corner. Four apim guards lounged outside a door. Clad like the others in ochre and silver, bearing swords and spears, they yet, for all their lounging, looked alert and a cut above the usual run. One revealed the glitter of a silver pakmort at his throat.

“The lady captive,” I said to the Fristle fifi. “She is in there?”

“Yes. She and the child.”

I pondered.

No harm seemed to have come so far to Thelda Polisto and her child. The priority appeared to me to get Lol safely out of that black pit, then rescue his Thelda, and so make our break out. I did not wish to be lumbered with a woman and a baby going down against Werstings. So I hitched my left fist around the girl’s arm, very friendly, and said to her a few home truths, whereat she trembled anew, and so started off with a confident swing, my story all ready for the guards.

Well, men grow corn for Zair to sickle.

Somewhere a harp was being played, long muted ripples of sound pouring through the close confines of the corridor where the lavender drapes and the pictures set an incongruous note against the harsh armor and weapons and the passions. For I was wrought up, and the Fristle was half-dead with fear, and the guards to relieve the tedium were mindful for a little fun.

We walked along as sedately as a pair of candidates for the Dunmow Flitch. But these idle-bored-half-witted guards! The antics of people attempting to relieve the tedium by teasing and taking pleasure from baiting others have always repelled me, and, by Krun, always will. These four started the usual nonsense and I walked on with a stony face which, in their ignorance, they failed to observe. The Fristle gasped. When the buffoonery became too coarse, for they halted us with a lazily dropped spear to bar the passage, and the Fristle, shivering with a paroxysm of terror, fell half-swooning, and the guards moved in with more intent purpose, there was nothing else left for that onker of onkers, Dray Prescot, to do but prevent them.

They went to sleep peacefully enough, all four of them.

“The devil take it!” I was wroth. Now, as there had been nothing for it when the guards started to have their idiot nasty fun, so now there was nothing for it but to go in and bring Thelda Polisto and her son out. The guards’ slumbering bodies would soon be noticed. If we dragged them in and locked the door their absence would soon be noticed. And if we simply left them they would recover and they would soon give notice.

So, in we went.

The revolting behavior of the guards outside should have given me some warning. Of the four, one had been a paktun. Their Hikdar inside the prison chambers was also a paktun, an apim and a damned handsome fellow in his own eyes with his curly brown hair and striking eyes and smooth easy swagger. The woman he held in his arms in an alcove struggled silently with him. He had begun his little antics early. I wondered if Layco Jhansi was aware, and realized instantly that he could not be. Or, he might — and not give a damn. Provided Lol’s wife was still alive to act as a bargaining counter, Jhansi wouldn’t care what tortures she went through. The two were in partial shadow. I let go of the Fristle, who swooned clean away, and crossed the rugs in half a dozen strides, knocking an ornamental table with spindly legs over on the way. The baby lay in a crib to the side and Thelda’s dress was disarranged and I guessed she had been putting the infant to sleep after his morning feed. I felt inclined to put this rast of a Hikdar to sleep, also.

I hit him with a certain force under the ear.

He collapsed, face first, soundlessly, onto the carpets at the woman’s feet. Her face blazed up. She swayed. Her hand went to her breast.

“Dray! Oh, Dray — it is you!”

I stared, appalled.

Chapter Fifteen

I Postpone a Problem

Sometimes a man will leap out of bed after a vile dream with a cry of horror on his lips, and his hand will reach out for the sword scabbarded conveniently on the bedpost.

Well, I could not stop the anguished cry from bursting past my lips. And I already held a sword in my fist.

But I knew I could not awake from this nightmare.

Seg!

“Dray, oh, Dray!” Thelda lurched toward me, her arms out and I could only take her into my arm, and hold her and feel how she trembled, like a hunted beast in a snare. She was trapped, horribly trapped, and she did not know it.

“Thelda,” I said, stupidly. Then, “We’ll get you out of this. Now, love, brace up.”

Her face lifted and she looked at me. Tears spangled her cheeks. She was just as I remembered her, just as beautiful, just as plump and happy, just as self-oriented with all her outward devotion to her friends, like puppy-love. Yes, this was Thelda, whom I have mocked and laughed at, who was a good comrade to Delia and me, and who was Seg’s wife and the mother of his children. I moved a little back in a gentle attempt to free myself from her embrace and swung about a little; but she clung to me, her naked arms about my neck, her tear-stained face reaching up to mine. I did not kiss her. I do not think I ever had. Standing thus so closely-entwined I could feel the warmth of her, the perfume, and I saw the door open with a smash and a man burst in. I started to hurl Thelda away and then there was no need.

Lol Polisto stood there, disheveled, the sword in his fist caked with blood to the hilt and blood splashed most horridly over that smart Chulik uniform. He saw us.

The instinctive and fierce flash of jealousy that burst up like flame into his face was instantly quelled as I spoke.

“Thank Opaz you got out of that pit, Lol. Here is Thelda and safe. The baby too. Now, for the sweet sake of all we hold dear, let us get out of here.”

“Yes, yes,” cried Thelda. There was no pretense in the way she freed herself from me and flung herself at Lol all blood-caked as he was. I stood there and the brains in my old vosk-skull felt as though they were frizzling. Didn’t Thelda know Seg was still alive? And, if knowing, did she care? Then I remembered what Lol had said, off-handedly, that the Kov of Falinur was dead. Thelda must believe that, too. She must ...

“Now, my heart,” said Lol, holding Thelda close, stroking her back, her hair, soothing her in an old familiar way that spoke eloquently of their intimate relationship. “The emperor and I will get you out of here, and our son, and then—”

Thelda drew back a little, her face flushed; but she still clasped Lol with a fierce and supplicating grasp.

“Is the emperor here with an army, then? After all I have done for him and his family that is the least he could do for us.”

And, I swear it, I laughed.

Wasn’t that Thelda — to the life?

The puzzlement in Lol’s tough face added to my amusement.

“Here is the emperor, Thelda, my heart, so do be — polite.”

“I do not see him, Lol. What—?”

“Come on, you two,” I broke in. “If you must gabble, gabble as we run.”

Leaving the unconscious and unharmed Fristle where she lay a-swoon, and the Hikdar, of whose conduct I felt it best not to apprise Lol, draped across the carpets, we went out. Thelda carried the baby on her breast. Lol’s protective instincts were now so fully aroused I had not the slightest query to make how he had got out of the pit. As we went quickly along the corridor he told me that he had chopped a couple of werstings, those ferocious hunting dogs of Kregen, and a couple of slave handlers, too, the cramphs. At this I lost my smile. He had arrived here from the other direction, the way the Fristle was leading me, and seeing the guards guessed at once he had arrived at where he needed to be. He had also, he said, breathed a quick prayer to Opaz before flinging the door open and bursting in. At the first stairway we went up, for Thelda told us there was a small and private flier park on the roof of the Lattice House. This was the means by which she had been brought here. The next flight of stairs was guarded by two Fristles, lounging and yawning, and they yawned in a more ghastly way after Lol was through with them. The stairs were no longer carpeted with lushly decorative patterns, merely a plain ochre weave. Our footsteps remained soundless. Near the top an alcove held a silver lamp shaped in the form of an airboat, its tall single flame unwavering. The quietness struck oddly after the racket below. Thelda paused, and gasped, and half-laughing said: “Give me leave to rest awhile, my love.”

At once full of contrition, Lol halted and Thelda sat down in the alcove and began to fuss with the baby. I stood with my back against the wall below and Lol above on the stairs. Thelda wanted to talk and she asked again about the emperor and his army. I said, “You found yourself in Evir, Thelda. So what then?”

Being Thelda and being faced with something she found incomprehensible, she had simply blotted the incident out as though it had not happened. From the Sacred Pool of Baptism in far Aphrasöe she had been magically transported to her homeland of Evir. She had at once started for Falinur where she was the kovneva and her husband, Seg Segutorio, was the kov, however unwilling a kov he might be. She had arrived just in time to be caught up in the Troubles.

“Oh, it was terrible, Dray! The burning and the looting and—”

I could not help noticing how Lol kept jumping each time Thelda called me by name. Despite all my own views on the idiocy of protocol and suchlike fripperies, I do not accept into the circle of those who may call me by my given name everyone who may imagine he or she has the right. So — beware! And for Lol Polisto it was very clear I should be addressed as majister. So, to smooth one difficulty and to skirt another, I said: “Thelda and I are old friends, Lol. And, it is clear she does not know of Jak the Drang.”

“Who?” said Thelda.

Lol started to say something, but I went on speaking, asking Thelda to tell us the rest before we pushed on. From below stairs no sounds reached us. And Thelda was still in a state of shock, too abruptly released. And, also, I wanted to scout the roof before we burst out. She had been through a lot in her kovnate of Falinur, where she had been thoroughly detested. And, in the way of things, Lol Polisto had come along and rescued her from a particularly nasty scrape. And nature had taken its course. She firmly believed Seg was dead. She had been told so by taunting officers of Layco Jhansi before Lol took her away from them.

The inevitable had happened. For, as she said quite simply: “Seg wasn’t there when I needed him.”

By Zair, he wasn’t! He was busy trying to escape the lash and the chains of slavery with a damned great wound in him, that had healed only to be broken again and again, and now this last breaking would be attended to, or my name wasn’t Dray Prescot. The machinations of the Savanti nal Aphrasöe through their creature, Vanti of the Pool, ensured that Seg could not be in the same place as Thelda when she needed him, for he had been pitchforked back to his homeland of Erthyrdrin in Loh. Never had fate —

and fate had been employed, this time, by the Savanti — played a much dirtier trick. By the way in which these two looked at each other, the way they touched, by what they said, I could see with limpid clarity they were deeply in love. Well, that was all very fine. I knew that Seg and Thelda had loved each other very deeply, also. Some people aver that it is possible to love more than one person at the same time; love, I mean, in the intimate, sexual union properly belonging to man and wife. Monogamy was the fashion in Vallia, never mind what exotic goings-on occurred in other parts of Kregen. To love more than one person in sequence, that is understandable, else widows and widowers would never escape happily out of their state. But — at the same time? I was not sure. It is a knotty one, and demands scrutiny. Total love, well, by its very nature that cannot be given to more than one at a time. Can it?

Equally, although I had known Lol Polisto for a short time, a very short time, I fancied I had summed him up as a courageous, upright, honest man, who fought for what he loved and believed in. There was nothing here in this new union of the moist-mouthed contemptible underhand way of Quergey the Murgey, the arch-seducer. The obvious way out meant it was all down to Thelda. For the time being I would not, could not, tell her that her husband still lived.

Lol did not know, for he had been out on his fruitless bid to break through the ring of besieging mercenaries when Seg and I had arrived in the fortress of the Stony Korf. So why destroy the happiness of these two now? Anyway, despite his immersion in that milky fluid that gave such tremendous recuperative powers, Seg might still die of that ghastly wound. And we were not out of the wood yet. Lol might die. Thelda might die. We might all die. I pushed away from the wall and, saying, “Bide a space here while I scout the roof,” went on up the stairs.

What a situation! Maybe it is not new on two worlds, maybe it seems trite to the blasé, I could feel for my comrade Seg, and feel for Thelda, and, by Vox, I could feel for Lol, also. Emotions twist a fellow’s guts up in a positively physical way, putting him off his food, making him lean and irritable. And I was feeling highly wrought up as I shoved the door open and stepped out onto the roof, the naked brand in my fist.

The roof was empty.

A single small flier stood chained down, and a tiny wind blew miasmic odors in from the niksuth. I went back through the doorway and motioned to them to come up. Thelda carried the baby up first, and Lol guarded the rear. We stood on the roof and looked at the flier.

“That is a single place craft...” Lol stated the obvious.

“Hum,” I said, for I had nothing helpful to add.

“It is very clear you must go,” said Lol, speaking with a tightness to his lips that, while it warmed me, made me angry, also. “As for us, we will—”

“Thelda and the baby will go, Lol, and you will ride the coaming. That voller will take you both, I know. I have built the things.” I walked across, not prepared to have any further argument. Lol wouldn’t have it. “But—” he began.

I took Thelda’s arm as she came up and swung around to face Lol. “In with you, Thelda. Careful of the baby. Now, Lol, stretch out here, on the coaming, and we will strap you tightly.”

“But there is room for you—”

I shook my head, “The way they build these things is a disgrace. All Vallians know that. But this will be built by Hamalese for Hamalese and so should not fail. But she won’t take us all. Now, Lol, get aboard!”

“But you! How will—?”

I lifted Thelda bodily and plumped her into the narrow cockpit of the flier among the flying silks and furs. She held the baby with a care that was completely genuine. I faced Lol.

“Do you wish to argue, Tyr Lol?”

His face betrayed the emotions of rebellion, fear for his wife — for the woman he believed was his wife

— and loyalty to Vallia represented by me. I wanted to smile at his confusion; but time was running out. I jerked my head at the voller. “In with you.”

“But it isn’t right—”

“I am perfectly prepared to knock you over the head,” I told him. “But would prefer to say, simply, that your emperor commands you. Would you disobey a lawful command of your emperor?”

“Emperor?” said Thelda, looking up from the child.

“I’d obey any damn command, lawful or unlawful,” said Lol, feelingly, on a gust of expelled breath.

“But—”

“Go!” I bellowed. “And buckle the straps tightly.”

So, still loath but his conscience clear, Lol climbed onto the coaming. The straps were fastened, Thelda took the controls, the baby started crying, and the voller took off.

“Well,” I said as the airboat lifted away. “Thank Zair that little nonsense is over. What a to-do!”

But what the to-do would be when Thelda discovered Seg still to be alive was past me. It was all down to her, it would have to be all down to her. No one else could dictate what she should do. I found all my feelings for Thelda rising and tormenting me, for she had been a good companion, as you know. So, feeling treacherously free of the problem, for I had merely shuffled it off for a space, I went back to the stairs and started to think about getting myself out of this dolorous place.

Chapter Sixteen

The Carpeting of Ros the Claw

Before I could do that desired thing there was another task to my hand. I had not failed to ask about Dayra as well as Thelda on the way in; and had received no useful answers. At the time, with Lol along, Thelda had been our main concern, and rightly so, for Dayra was here not as a prisoner but as an embassy, bringing offers of alliance from that bastard Zankov.

It seemed to me perfectly proper to find another guard with a fancy uniform, a pakmort and the rank of Jiktar, take what I wanted from him, clean myself up, and then go looking for my wayward daughter. All this I did, and as a smartly turned out Jiktar, with the silver mortil head on its silken cord at my throat, went through from the slave quarters to the inner recesses of Trakon’s Pillars. This stronghold within its encircling bogs was an open place covering a fair amount of ground. Much of it was on stilts, some on mats, and the hard ground was reserved for the highest of the high. The Pillars from which the place took its name were volcanic extrusions, tall separately trunked obelisks of naked tufa, pitted and worn, rising like unformed Easter Island statues in a clump at the center. They provided a pivot around which the busy stronghold revolved.

In lifting terraces below, the palaces had been built, each one more grand than the last. White columns, pavements and walls blinded in the suns as I climbed leaving the dank mists below. I was not stopped, was not even questioned. A Jiktar is a reasonably exalted rank, and the insignia told observers that I was an ord-Jiktar, having risen eight steps in the grade. The pakmort carried more weight, even, than that, here where gold still bought swords.

Now, just because a Jiktar is a pretty high rank, the holder usually commanding a regiment, the disguise took me through the lower ways up to the palaces. But once there I would have to find a swod’s gear; for all Jiktars would be known and recognized. A party of men marched across and the dwa-Deldar in command saluted me. I returned the compliment. They were archers, and their bows were long and hefty, round staves of a certain length. They were Bowmen of Loh.

Finding one on his own was not easy; but eventually I was buckling up the leather gear of a Bowman of Loh and settling the bronze helmet on my head. I kept my own bow. Then I went boldly into the first palace, a sea-green confection profuse with satyrs and nymphs carved on the walls. The quondam owner of the archer’s gear had told me that the embassy from Zankov was housed in this place, the Palace of the Octopus. So, in I went. In for a zorca, in for a vove. Layco Jhansi had been the old emperor’s chief pallan and had run things in Vondium most tightly. He had subverted the allegiance of the Crimson Bowmen of Loh. So there were plenty of Lohvians with their red hair about, as well as dark-haired archers from Erthyrdrin. My brown hair, being Vallian, did not attract undue attention. Five-handed Eos-Bakchi, that mischievous Vallian spirit of luck and good fortune, favored me unduly. A Deldar spotted me and bellowed and soon I found myself marching in a three-deep column of Bowmen, en route to provide a guard. Well, the ploy got me in well enough. Five-handed Eos-Bakchi, however, did not see fit to arrange for me actually to attend in the reception for Zankov’s embassy. That would have been to ask too much. We were stationed at intervals along the corridors and the tessellated pavements, and I drew a billet at the head of some stairs that led down to what depths I did not know. I stood there, alert, looking the very personification of one of those guards I have detailed as being fancifully dressed, spear-bearing and ripe for knocking on the head. Now it is perfectly true that most people inhabiting palaces staffed with a plethora of guards barely notice their guards at all. Old rogues like myself who have served their time do notice; but we are in a pitiful minority. No one noticed me. I’m damn sure they’d have noticed had I not been on duty, like a pickled gherkin at my post.

And so my daughter Dayra walked along the corridor and past the stairs, deep in conversation with that foresworn scoundrel, Tyr Malervo Norgoth, him who had once come with an embassy from Jhansi to me and set his sorcerer, Rovard the Murvish, on me. I just stood there, lumpen, my face shadowed by the ornate helmet. Malervo Norgoth with his gross body and spindly legs looked much as I remembered him. He wore loose robes of a sickly green color, with much gold and silver embroidery. But Dayra — Dayra looked magnificent.

She wore a long dress of the imperial style, all in sheerest sensil, that finer silk of Kregen, of a pale oyster color that shimmered as she walked. Her carriage was that of an empress. There were feathers in the golden circlet around her brown Vallian hair. Her face glowed with conviction and passion as she talked. Her figure was a knock-out. Yes, I well realize the dignity and impudence of that; but it fitted. Fitted perfectly. For I had seen this glowing girl when she had been clad in black leathers, with her long legs flashing, driving wicked steel with her right hand, and her left taloned in those vicious raking claws. Her jewelry glistered and blinded. She wore far too much. I fancied the massed iridescence of gems was genuine. Just whose gems they were seemed to me — her father — as a matter of moment. But, not for the moment. Why she wore so much jewelry might have been puzzled out by an earthly psychologist, with a glib theory that it reflected rebellion against her mother’s elegant and refined taste, which leant more to small and costly items of quality, rather than a massed and vulgar display. I did not think so. This was Kregen. Dayra flaunted the gems so as further to convey the power she represented as embassy from Zankov.

Malervo Norgoth was saying as they walked along: “... doesn’t mean a single damn thing, my dear, and it would be best if you did not forget it.”

The reply Ros the Claw would make to that insulting comment intrigued me; but she simply said: “Yet Zankov’s new allies do mean a damn thing. They mean very much. No one is going to stand before them, you may believe me.”

“There are many dwaburs between the east and Vennar.”

“They can be crossed. Zankov would cross them in friendship.”

“A friendship which he values highly in terms of what he asks in the way of gold...”

They walked on, wrangling, and a few personal guards followed them, whereat I drew up even straighter and angled the helmet to shadow my face even more. Rovard the Murvish trailed along at the rear, emitting his unmistakable effluvium of dead rats and sewers, and shaking his morntarch with a reflective gesture. His furs and bangles and shaggy hair lent him a wild and grotesque appearance. The party moved on and I breathed out and glanced back along the line of guards. The Deldar was nowhere in sight. Not one of those ramrod guards would move if I walked off. That was a racing certainty. So, shouldering the spear I had taken from the archer, an ornate and highly-polished piece with tufts of white and ochre ribbons, I marched off after Malervo Norgoth, Dayra and the rest.

The search for the two madmen who had broken into Trakon’s Pillars from the bogs continued and so I assumed no one had yet discovered the absence of that single-place voller. That pleased me, for it meant no pursuit would take off after Lol and Thelda. So, feeling ready for what might come, I followed the embassy into a cross-corridor where tall windows threw diamonds of brilliance across the carpets and where Norgoth led Dayra into a room through an ochre and silver doorway. The thought occurred to me that both Zankov and Jhansi were avid for an alliance. Both felt their own weakness and needed additional strength. And both, it was clear, would seek to dominate their partnership. It seemed to me clear-cut that I should do all I could to upset that understanding between them and prevent the alliance. That fitted in with my plans for Dayra. I fancied it was high time that minx answered to her mother and father. That her answers might make the sweetest of sense I have already indicated, and I was fully prepared to take her side in all things, if it came to it, bar, perhaps, a coherent understanding of the man who had slain her grandfather. And, even there, reasons impelled him that were sound, even honorable, to him. I owed him that much. Zankov might not be the black-hearted scoundrel everyone said he was. The odds were against it; but the chance remained. And, as I walked up with a swagger toward the two Bowmen who guarded the ochre and silver door, I recognized in my thoughts the bias I owed to the condemnation of Zankov that stood in my brain like a lighthouse in stormy seas. I was prejudiced against him — for good reason — and must attempt in justice to take that into account in my dealings with him.

“Lahal, dom,” I sang out to the first guard, scraping up a frozen grimace that might pass muster for a smile, and nodding to his companion. “You’re in luck, by the Seven and Two.”

“Oh?” spoke up the first worthy, flicking a glance to his comrade. “And, dom, how are we so fortunate?”

“Why, to be sure. Here am I come to stand your watch while you have fun chasing after these madmen who have broken in. I wish you well of it, although I could do with loosing at fair game rather than the butts.”

The guard favored me with a hard look. But I had slipped the longsword on its strap down my back so that the checkered cloak covered it, and although the sword of the Bowmen of Loh was usually the Walfargian lynxter, many of them preferred other weapons picked up in their mercenary trade, so that my drexer passed muster. The second guard let a broad and happy smile part his whiskers.

“That is good news. Come, Nath, let us go and feather a few rasts and earn our hire.”

“Gladly, Naghan. I am with you.”

And, with that jaunty mercenary swing, they marched off with a perfunctory: “Rember!” and a laugh. I stood by the door and breathed out and considered.

To break in would be easy. To slay a few of the cramphs in there probably also not too difficult. But Ros the Claw would fight. She had fought before, although sparing me in the end. I did not wish once more to face my daughter with naked steel between us.

A subterfuge of the simple-minded kind was called for.

No food had passed my lips for far too long, a most unhealthy and anti-social attitude that, for Kregen, by Krun, and I had not slept much lately, either. But one must accept the needle. I pushed the door open and slanted my head so that the helmet brim shadowed my face. The small chamber beyond was an anteroom, with doors in three walls, fast closed, and a rumble of voices reached me from the door with a strigicaw head in half-relief above the architrave. I put my ear to the wood and listened. A rumble of voices in which no words were clear left me, as ever, it seemed of late, no alternative. My hand reached out for the latch fashioned after a pair of entwined totrixes and then I halted, dumbstruck at my own stupidity. My hand withdrew and I looked about swiftly. The next door along, the one with the chavonth head above it. Yes — another alternative had presented itself, and the simple-minded stratagem had become positively imbecile.

The door opened soundlessly. Two young fops, all lace and embroidery, playing Jikaida, looked up with guilt stamped all over their asinine faces. They went to sleep peacefully and I pressed my ear against a grille in the wall adjoining the strigicaw room. The voices spurted, not particularly clear; but I heard enough to make me feel that my daughter was a scheming minx and a half, a worthy daughter to her mother.

“...voves! Nothing will stand before them.”

“So you say, Lady Ros. But the distances and the gold speak against you.”

“The clans are with us in this. Their hatred of Vovedeer Prescot is as the prairie fire. It rages up fiercely and is all-consuming. Beware lest you and your master are broiled in the blaze.”

“Threats?”

Dayra laughed, that ringing, silvery, contemptuous laugh of Ros the Claw. “You have put these chambers at my disposal, good Norgoth. How sits a threat against you here?”

“I am glad you remember this.”

Then another voice broke in, a more distant rumble, and scraping sounds indicated the movement of chairs so I took it the conversation was ended. A few strides took me back to the door and I peered through the crack. Norgoth and Rovard and their retinue sailed out like galleons of Vallia, proud and puffed and supremely conscious of their superiority. I waited.

When they had gone I eased across to the door of the strigicaw and tried the totrix-latch. The door was locked. I rapped my knuckles on the wood. How formal one becomes in these moments! The door made clicking sounds of sliding metal and opened a fraction and a young, handsome, boy’s face showed, slightly puzzled, perhaps a trifle apprehensive. I pushed up and spoke in a swod’s metallic bark.

“Message to be delivered personal to the Lady Ros.”

“She does not wish to be disturbed. She will not see anyone save the lord—”

“I think,” I said, “she will see me.”

The boy jumped, and his face twitched, and he closed the door and went away, whereat I smiled. Presently he returned, the door was opened, and I went in. My right hand rested at my side. The hilt of the drexer angled across most conveniently. If Ros came at me with a rapier or her damned steel claw I’d have to skip and dance a measure, and no mistake...

The room led onto another chamber of some refinement and luxury, with rugs and hangings and golden lamps on chains. A zhantil-skin pelt was strewn artfully across a couch whose strigicaw-head legs rested on ochre and white rugs. Long curtains at the far end parted and Ros walked in. She was in the process of buckling up a war-harness over her black leathers, and her face was tight with annoyance.

“Who demands to see me so intemperately?” She struggled with a bronze buckle which refused to close.

“There can be no more messages to which I will listen unless they bring firm promises of gold.” She looked up, breathing hard, and saw the Bowman of Loh who stood ramrod straight but submissively before her, as she must have seen so many in her time.

“Voves,” I said. “So you bring voves into Vallia.”

She jumped as though I had struck her.

Her naked left hand struck up before her face. The fingers extended. She wore no rings. Her nails were trimmed and polished, unpainted, neat. That left hand clawed at the air in reflex so automatic it left her gasping.

“Yes, Ros,” I said.

To give her credit she did not gasp: “You!” like some ignoramus of a heroine from one of the operettas of the flea-pits of Vondium. I enjoy operetta. She lowered that lethal left hand, naked of its lethal weapon, and gazed on me and her look passed from astonishment through anger to a brooding puzzlement. Then:

“What am I to do with you?”

“Nothing. It is what I am to do with you. Boy!” I turned to the lad, who was not yet full grown, a dimpled handsome boy wearing a rose-colored tunic and with a pretty little dagger swinging from silver chains at his waist. His brown Vallian hair tumbled in locks about his ears. “Boy! Pull out that carpet —

that long wide one with the silken tassels and spread it out on the floor.”

She knew at once.

“You would not dare!”

“How much do you hate me, Ros?” I kept to this name of hers, instead of Dayra, out of an instinctive feeling for the moment, where Ros the Claw was at home and Dayra not.

“Hate you? More than you can imagine — more than the whole world can encompass!” She had not moved since that first instinctive gesture. Her face — beautiful, ah, yes, beautiful and passionate, willful, stubborn, marked with a pride I could sigh over, and marked, also, with a vicious sadness I found desolating — her face bore now the high flush of a controlled anger. “Are you not deserving of all the hate and all the contempt of the whole wide world?”

“Yes.”

Her hand went to her throat, above the rim of the black leathers. She was surprised. “But—”

“Turn around, Ros the Claw, and I will fasten up your wrists. Stand, boy!” For the lad made to draw his toy dagger.

The footfall at my back was soft. It was not soundless. I should not speak to you had that footstep been soundless. I ducked and turned and the drexer was out and the giant who slashed a giant sword at me staggered on with the violence of his blow. He was quick. Off balance, before I could get back and the drexer into him he swung around, the giant sword sweeping. I hurdled it and landed cat-footed and so faced him.

Well, he was big. He was broad and wide and bulky and he went up and up and up, his thatch of straw-yellow hair overtopping me by seven good inches. He wore a bronze-studded leather kax, and arm-bands of beaten gold, and a war-kilt of ochre and bronze, pteruges which swung to his knees. His sandals would have carried a landing party from ship to shore. And his sword — massive, thick through and wide, with a solid pommel shaped like a zhantil-head — that sword was like no other I had seen on Kregen. I rather fancied it would be slow, even for him, even with his enormous muscles. Dayra laughed her silver tinkle.

“You have not met Brun before. I think the meeting opportune.” She was enjoying this. “Do not slay him Hyr Brun. His mangy hide has a certain value in certain quarters. We will grow fat on his profit.”

Despite the gross proportions of that sword, Brun carried it one-handed and the hilt was close, not fashioned for two-handed work, not even for hand-and-a-half. I took three quick backward steps. Brun’s cheerful face, open, mellow, clean-shaven and with a few spots on one cheek, broke into a delighted smile. His reactions were those of a cat stalking a mouse. The drexer snapped away into the scabbard. I reached around.

“So, master, you give in?” Brun’s voice carried a clarity of sound amazing, until you realized the enormous cathedral-cavity of his lungs. “That is wise of you. The mistress is to be obeyed in all things.”

“I don’t know where you got him, Ros,” I said, as I put my hand on the hilt of the Krozair brand. “But I’d like to make friends with a thousand or so. What a bonny regiment they would make for Vallia!”

“For my Vallia!” she spat at me. “Never yours!”

“Well, my girl, you are going into that carpet, and this Hyr Brun is going to carry you out. You had best reconcile yourself to that.” I whipped the longsword out and it sparked a shard of light into that chamber as it swung out into line. “As for you, friend Brun. I shall not slay you, as you would not me. But carry your mistress in the carpet you will.”

He boomed a gigantic laugh and rushed.

The fight was not pretty — or extraordinarily pretty — depending on your personal viewpoint. He had a knack of swinging the huge sword around in his fist as though it was a length of rope so that it wove a circle of light. The trick was effective. Besides demonstrating his strength it confused his opponent. Inch had a similar trick with his long Saxon-pattern axe. Again I do not wish to dwell on the fight. It was interesting. Brun wore a leather strap around his head which confined his thatch of yellow hair. The Krozair brand met the gigantic sword and the metal rang and the jolt belted up my arms and across my shoulders. But the Krozair Disciplines held and the blows slanted and glanced, and, like a striking risslaca, the longsword licked out and sliced neatly through the leather fillet. Not a drop of blood was drawn, the skin was not marked. But the leather fell away and Brun’s yellow hair dropped down before his face.

Before he had time to brush it away I stepped in and clouted him over the head with the flat. He dropped. I do not think there can be many men born of women who will not drop when struck by a Krozair brand.

Before he hit the carpet I had leaped aside and swung the flat around horizontally and the boy was swept away, his toy dagger spinning up like a comet of diamonds in the lights. Ros leaped for me and she wore her talons.

I ducked, put my shoulder into her stomach, clapped my left arm about her back and hugged her. Horizontally she thrashed her legs wildly. I felt the kiss of the talons against the back of my thighs, and so banged her — gently, gently! — on her bottom with the hilt.

“Stay still, daughter, or I shall tan you, but good.”

“You—!”

“Yes.”

Presently we were sorted out. Ros, with wrists and ankles fastened with the silken cords from the curtains, lay rolled in the ochre and silver carpet with the silk tassels. Brun said to me: “You would not really slay the boy?” I stood with a dagger at the boy’s throat, the rest of my armory scabbarded. I said, “Do you wish to find out? Pick up your mistress and we will walk out of here, all friendly and nice. Boy, do you walk quietly and not wriggle.” I took the dagger from his throat and flapping a corner of the cloak over it, pressed it into the small of his back. “You walk before death.”

Well, it was detestable; but he believed me. And, believing, said, “You may kill me, master, if you desire. But I will not betray my mistress.”

“Well spoken lad. Your name?”

“I am called Vaxnik.”

I was astonished. Vax was the name used by Jaidur in the Eye of the World. And Jaidur was Dayra’s twin. I would ask the boy his history when we were safely away. Now, I said, “You have my word as a koter that no harm will befall your mistress. Despite her seeming hatred of me, I love her more deeply than you can understand. I would be cut down before harm should come to her. Now, lead on.”

Brun rumbled: “Do you speak sooth, master?”

“Aye, Hyr Brun, I do.”

“You are a Jikai, master, that is plain. And we do not do well in this evil place. But—”

“Carry your mistress out of here. All will be revealed.”

Cheap and easy words; but they were true, by Vox.

A serving man — for Brun was clearly no slave — carrying an expensive carpet, and an important boy to strut his office, and a dour professional mercenary to guard them, excited no attention in the busy warren. We saw parties of guards searching for those who had broken in. We walked solemnly on and were not challenged all the way down from the Pillars to the beginning of the mists rising and stinking from the niksuth.

Besides the carpet in which was rolled Ros the Claw, Brun carried a leather sack hastily stuffed with portable food, a few bottles of wine, and a curtain stuffed down on the top. He could, I thought, have carried a whole wagon-load of supplies without visible effort. So we walked on and passed parties of guards still searching and began to discern a pattern in the search for the intruders. I fancied we might run into serious trouble at the gates, and Vaxnik led on with an eager step. Now it appeared to me improbable that the outpost guards would have an expensive carpet delivered to their blockhouse. So we would have to re-arrange ourselves for the next step. I halted us in the shadows of a half-ruined building fronting the open space before the gate Vaxnik had chosen, and stared out as Bowmen and churgur guards moved about, parties coming and going, with Deldars yelling and a group of totrixmen spurring across in a swirl of dust and blown leaves. H’mm... There was a double enceinture here, where Vaxnik had led us, and I chalked a mark up to him, the cunning little devil.

Waiting until the open space was completely free of guards would take too long. Time pressed. Norgoth as Jhansi’s lieutenant would be raging with impatience that the intruders had not been found, and I suspected that some, at least, of those unfortunates who had been knocked on the head had recovered to add further to the alarm. So, once more, there was nothing for it. I settled the longsword more conveniently to hand. The shadows lay blue and bright. The suns shone. And then tendrils of oily mist wafted and the whole scene dulled to a dun mange, and a chill descended.

“March straight, Hyr Brun. And you, too, boy. I have a story for those guards yonder.”

A party of diffs wearing the gray slave breechclouts passed in a straggling line. They carried obese pots on their shoulders, no doubt water for the baths of those up in the palaces, if they’d run out of milk. I made a face, and we stepped out.

Two parties of guards approached. That to our right rear was composed mainly of Rapas, with a few apims and Brokelsh. They carried their spears all at the regulation slope and were mercenaries, skilled fighting men. The party advancing through the gate wore the ochre and white, and were armed with a medley of weapons which spoke again of mercenaries, although not the regimented and disciplined kind. I frowned.

Walking along a couple of paces in rear of Brun I readied myself. We attracted no attention from the guards with the spears. They were commanded by their Deldar and would do as he directed. We made a picture that held no menace for him.

A movement caught the corner of my eye and I looked forward again. The open end of the carpet was moving like the trunk of an elephant. How she had done it I do not know. Dayra’s head appeared, and an arm ripped free of the binding silks. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked murderous. She saw the guards. She yelled. She yelled good and loud.

“Guards! Guards! Here is the man you seek! Guards, ho!”

Her triumphant face bore on me, bright, vindictive, filled with passion. Vaxnik squeaked. Brun dropped the carpet.

I saw the guards running on. Their Deldar bellowed and they turned toward us. The other party of guards, attracted by the shouts, also turned toward us. We were trapped between them.

“You’re done for, now, you villainous rast!” shouted my daughter at her father. I ripped the longsword free. Two-handed I gripped the Krozair blade.

“Done for!” shrieked Dayra. “They will not kill you. But you may wish they had.”

“I do not hate you,” I said, stupidly, spreading my fists along the hilt of the longsword.

“Throw down your sword, cramph! Oh that I could get free and sink my talons in you!” And her left hand at last broke free from the swathing carpet and the suns shone through the drifting mist and glittered most vilely upon that curved and cruel claw.

I saw the spearmen charging toward me. I half-turned and saw the guards from the gate pressing swiftly on, their weapons drawn.

And I said, very gently: “I do not think your guards will take me, Dayra. But it was a nice try.”