Chapter Ten

I am cruel to Mayfwy of Felteraz

Brilliant, glittering, filled with color, the waters of the Eye of the World rolled before me. The twin Suns of Scorpio hung in the western sky, drenching the world in color and radiance. The air smelled sweet, sweet with the fragrance of Kregen. Below, the tended fields passed in neat checkerboards of cultivation. Here there could be habitation close to the shore of the inner sea, for ahead the massive frowning fortress guarding the careless city of Sanurkazz offered sure protection. As I looked ahead over the windshield, I saw that smaller but no less dominating fortress of Felteraz rise into view. Felteraz, with its lush estates and its town and its fortress, was built into the sheer rock over the sea. Memories of the view from the high terrace there swam into my mind. How alike and yet how vastly different was the view in Felteraz from that dizzy prospect over the Bay and Valkanium from Esser Rarioch! Yet I loved this place. As my course took me over the gray battlements with their freight of banners, a sudden shaft of cunning pierced me through so that I trembled with my own deceit and struck the levers that sent the voller swirling down through the bright air. There was no impediment to an aerial landing in the lands of the inner sea, for they knew nothing in their daily lives of aerial armadas and saddle flyers. The cities of the hostile territories were festooned with anti-flyer defenses. I was able to make a swooping landing, still the voller, and step out onto a broad platform just below the highest terrace. People came running, astonished at the apparition of a man falling from heaven. I dare say many of them took the commonsense view that I was a visitor from Zim. Bronzed faces surrounded me. I saw again the mesh link mail of the men of Zair, the white surcoats blazing with a device I knew. That symbol, stitched in red and gold, with a lenk-leaf border, represented a pair of galley oars, crossed, divided upright by a longsword. Oh, yes, I knew that symbol. Hadn’t I proudly worn it myself as a Krozair captain of a swifter of the Eye of the World, that device of Felteraz?

I knew none of the faces.

A longsword’s point hovered a knuckle before my breastbone.

"Your name and your business, dom."

"My name is Dray Prescot. My business is with the Lady Mayfwy of Felteraz." Only after I had spoken did it occur to me that Mayfwy might be dead, another here in her place as chatelaine of Felteraz.

The few murs of hesitation before the guard Hikdar spoke caused me great uneasiness, which vanished in a flood of relief as he said: "The Lady Mayfwy is at home. I think I have heard of you, Jernu,[3]from my father."

He looked at me doubtfully and did not lower the longsword. I would have faulted him in his duties had he done so. And from his father! Well, it had been a half-century by Earthly reckoning since I had been here last. I do not smile easily, as you know, so I looked at him and said, "Probably, Hikdar. If you will inform the Lady Mayfwy—"

"At once, Jernu."

He dispatched a swod of the guard and remained on the alert, watching me. The ring of people, joined now by women and girls, kept respectfully back and none offered to go anywhere near the voller. That was a marvel. I saw a movement in the pressing ring of people, in the direction opposite that taken by the guard swod, and I looked, seeing men and women moving quickly aside. A woman stepped out before them, holding a long silver wand in her hand with which she had no need to touch anyone who lagged in moving. I did not know her. I stared at the girl — the woman — who followed through the opened path. She did not look quite the same. There was about her sweet face a graver air, a shadowed resignation to life that greatly pained me. In all else, though, she was the same lively, spritely, elfin girl who had first welcomed Zolta and Nath and me as we drove rattling up in our ass cart. Her dark, curly hair gleamed in the slanting rays of the suns, her pert nose uptilted and that small, soft sensuous mouth trembled and opened on a gasp. Her eyes widened and fastened on me a look that thrilled me through, a look compounded of pain and gladness, of joy and abiding sorrow.

With not the slightest holding back, with not a heartbeat of hesitation, she ran forward, lifting her arms.

"Dray! Oh, Dray! You have come back!"

And then she was in my arms and clasping me close and I looked over her shoulder with the scent of her in my nostrils and I felt the weight of Kregen crush in on me and knew myself for the most evil of devils imaginable — as I truly was.

She would not cry. Even with the emotions filling her she would not break down before her people. She stood back and held my hands and looked at me. I saw the brightness of her eyes, the tremble of that soft mouth.

"You have not changed, my Lord of Strombor!"

"And you," I said. "Mayfwy, you are the same dear Mayfwy."

"Oh, no. No, I know better than that." She glanced at the robed woman with the wand. "We will go to the terrace, Sheena, and be alone. Bring refreshments, Zond wine, for Pur Dray, the Lord of Strombor."

"At once, my lady."

And so there we were, Mayfwy and I, alone on the terrace as the sulking suns painted opaline radiance in the air and drowned the cliff face in color. I saw and I ached. How long it had been, how foolish I was! Fifty years — and then some of the iron returned, for twenty-one of those damned years had been wrenched away from my power by the Everoinye. Mayfwy took up a goblet of wine, laughing, handing it to me, and yet I saw the deep pain in her eyes. I gravely drank to her.

"Dray, there is so much to tell."

"Aye, so much."

"But first there is news that will gladden your heart . . . strange news to come from us here . . ." So I knew.

"Delia! She has visited here? You have seen her?"

A shadow nicked across Mayfwy’s elfin face and passed, then she lifted her chin proudly and smiled.

"Yes. Delia has been here. She sought you."

I looked at her. My relief was obvious, for Mayfwy went on: "Yes, she crossed the Stratemsk in safety. There was a beast, a horrific beast, with her, that I swear would tear a leem to pieces. My men were uneasy until your Delia reassured them."

"Melow the Supple."

"That was the name."

"She will not harm you, Mayfwy. But tell me of Delia!"

How cruel that was, those words of mine, my whole demeanor, to this girl!

"You treat women harshly, my Lord of Strombor." She paused and lifted her goblet. Its ruby decoration in chains around the gold caught the light and blazed blood-red. "You say you love them and you leave them, for seasons on end. And should I call you Prince Majister now? Or even King?"

"You call me Dray Prescot, as you always have. It is not of my will that I left Delia — or you — without saying remberee. There are dark and evil forces in my life — but enough of this. Is Delia well? Did she speak of the children? Where did she go? Tell me, Mayfwy, for the sake of my dear friend and oar comrade, Zorg."

"Zorg." She drank then, and it was a benediction. "She is well and she says the children are well, although wild — well, we all know how wild our children are."

"Forgive me," I said quickly — me, that Dray Prescot who never apologized except to Delia. "Young Zorg and Fwymay. They are well?"

"Yes. They are well. Zorg is now a Krozair of Zy, which is as it should be, I suppose. He captains a swifter. He has much of his start to thank you for, Dray."

"Nonsense! A lad like that will forge his own way on Kregen." She looked at me oddly. Well, not so long ago I had been standing in a Parisian hospital with the Prussian guns thundering and Kregen was four hundred light-years away. So I said: "The Zairians will always need men like young Zorg. And Fwymay?"

"She has made me a grandmother twice, the minx. She married Zarga na Rozilloi, who is a Krozair Brother, and a very pleasant young man."

I knew that this Zarga na Rozilloi must be of importance to warrant the na as his connective term, but he was not a Krzy. Had he been, Mayfwy would have said.

"He is a Krozair of Zimuzz." She was looking at me.

"A fine order," I said. But we both knew there was no other order as fine as the Krozairs of Zy. Now the suns were almost gone. The purple shadows dropped across the terrace. Soon the Twins would be up, eternally revolving one about the other, to cast their mingled pinkish light down on Kregen. We moved into the inner room where we had often sat and talked and listened to the music provided by the citadel singers. The room looked just the same, except that a full-length portrait of a splendid-looking man had been added to the other portraits. This must be Zarga, for he wore the symbols of the Krozairs of Zimuzz. I ignored this new son-in-law and walked across, planted my feet on the thick rug and stood firmly looking up at the portrait of Zorg of Felteraz. Mayfwy moved silently away and left me. I looked at this painting of Zorg and I remembered, I remembered the warrens of Magdag and the rowing benches of the Magdaggian swifters, with Zolta and Nath, and I remembered our shared agonies and perils, the onions we had divided up, the lashes we had taken and, finally, Zorg’s death, there in the stench and filth of a Magdaggian swifter. I remembered. And when I turned back to Mayfwy she put a hand to her mouth and did not speak for a moment. I suppose a great deal of what I felt showed on that ugly old face of mine.

Then, as though what she said had been jolted out of her by this reunion, by my abstraction, she said: "I used to hope I could place your portrait there, my Lord of Strombor." I shook my head.

Then she cried.

Afterward I gave her another cup of wine and wiped her eyes with a clean cloth — she wore no makeup and had need of none — and said: "I must press on to find Delia. You know that. It is a fate I cannot — would not — deny. Until I know she is safe I cannot rest."

"I do understand. But please forgive me for saying . . . and for crying." She tossed her head back so that the clustered dark curls glistened in the samphron-oil lamp’s gleam. "What young Zorg would say I do not know. No Krozair’s mother cries!"

"I do not believe that. And Zorg, if he is a true Krozair as I know him to be, does not believe it either."

"If only he would get himself married and have children, they would be a comfort to me here." There was more talk after that, and a fine meal which I knew had been especially prepared for me, and more wine — that smooth splendid Zond wine that Nath was so fond of — and Chremson if a difference in the tickle of the palate was needed. But Mayfwy could see the impatience burning in me. Truth to tell, I felt that Delia would understand when I told her that I had broken my journey to see Mayfwy, more so now that these two had met. How I had both welcomed and dreaded that encounter, for I desperately wished for them to be friends. But sober reality would seem to indicate the opposite. I would have to see what my Delia had to say.

I stood up.

Mayfwy rose, lithe as a neemu, her gaze wide on me, a hand to her breast. She wore what I remembered as being her favorite costume, a sheer gown of shimmering silk, white, simple, deeply cut, fastened at her shoulders by golden pins encrusted with rubies. They must be the same fibulae. They would be the same when we were all rotting in our graves or shivering in the Ice Floes of Sicce.

"You must go? So soon?"

"When I find my Delia we will return, Mayfwy. I shall not again be such an onker. Do you forgive me?" As I said the word that must have cut her, that simple "my" Delia, I cursed myself again. It seemed I could bring nothing but pain into the life of this girl. And girl she seemed to me still, despite all the lonely length of time she had lived, for she kept up her appearance out of her pride in being the widow of Zorg of Felteraz, a Krozair of Zy.

Luckily I did not ask her why she had never married again. That would have been the action of a clod; while I am a fine full-bloomed specimen of a clod, I did see clearly enough that the question would have been a slap in her face.

We stepped out onto that paved square high on the flank of the cliff where my voller waited. A guard had been posted around the craft, but no one had ventured near. Perhaps this was the very first airboat ever seen in these parts. I didn’t care if it was or not, and I didn’t care for the Hamalians and their dictates either. There was no remorse whatsoever in me for stopping here. Mayfwy told me that Delia had said she would fly direct to the fortress of Zy to find me. She had not confided in Mayfwy why, after a space of twenty years, she had thus come flying into the Eye of the World. But Mayfwy told me that Delia appeared sad, confirming Panshi’s story.

I would brook no longer delay.

"Delia came riding a sectrix," said Mayfwy. She put a hand out tentatively and touched the leather and canvas of the voller. Her hand trembled. "You will use this marvelous thing?"

"If Delia went by here a year ago and then took ship for Zy, I can catch her all the quicker by voller."

"Voller? Ah, the flying boat."

"Yes."

"There are many of these . . . vollers, in the outer world? In the world of Vallia and Valka, of Djanduin and Strombor?"

"Yes."

"It must be a marvelous place."

"It is, but in many things it is not as marvelous as the Eye of the World."

"We have our troubles. I fear for Zorg and for Zarga, my son-in-law. Those horrible greens of Grodno bear down our defenses. We are in parlous case, these latter days, my Lord of Strombor." She went on to tell me in a small voice that the Grodnims pressed hard on the Zairians, that many battles had been lost; the Grodnim swifters might still be kept at bay; but the Grodnim armies swept on, irresistibly, it seemed, from victory to victory. Her son Zorg scoured the seas and gained success in single-ship actions — how my blood fired up at the thought! — but Holy Sanurkazz lay sunk in apathy, awaiting the stroke of doom. I could scarcely credit this. When I had left here the Zairians, under the command of my friend Pur Zenkiren of Sanurkazz, had been pressing on to victory along the eastern shore in alliance with the Proconians, a people distinct from the red and green.

"Proconia?" I said.

She made a little moue. "They keep themselves aloof. They resist any attack on their territory. They no longer wish to ally with us in the fight."

"Then Zair will see they do not ally themselves with the damned Grodnims,"

"That is what we all pray."

I did not tell her that with the politics of this region — politics I had previously regarded as simple and straightforward — if the Grodnims gained an upper hand the Proconians, aye, and all the other uncommitted peoples, would jump in to be on the winning side. Once the slide began it would gain speed with frightful force.

"Perhaps I will call in at Sanurkazz," I said as I stepped up into the voller, observing the fantamyrrh. "On our way back. There has to be an explanation for what you say."

"King Zo still rules, Dray. He will be pleased to see you." I put my hand over the levers. The Twins rolled along above among a myriad of stars. The Maiden with the Many Smiles would soon be up and then She of the Veils. This would not be a night of Notor Zan, the Tenth Lord, the Lord of Darkness.

Felteraz lies about three dwaburs to the east of Sanurkazz and the distance in a flier’s straight line to the island fortress of Zy from there is roughly a hundred and sixty dwaburs. At my voller’s best pushed speed of ten dbs I ought to sight the island cone well before daylight. So I looked down on Mayfwy and she looked up. The fuzzy pinkish light played tricks with her features; but I knew she was not crying.

"Remberee, Mayfwy."

"Remberee, Pur Dray."

I thrust the levers home and the voller shot skyward.

To relate the events that now befell me is to relive a time of scarlet horror, a time when reason itself vanished from Kregen, a time when my reason for a while deserted me. My recollections tumble all confused and distorted, as the massive russet bodies of the chunkrah swim and haze when seen in the heat of the campfires of the Great Plains of Segesthes.

The voller did not fail me and I came at last in sight of the extinct volcanic cone that is the heart of the fortress of Zy. On the journey I had eaten and drunk of the supplies so liberally provided by Mayfwy, and I had slept. As I stared eagerly forward with the slipstream blustering in my face and saw that grim black pile harshly upthrust against the moons-glowing sea, I rejoiced. Soon, soon, I would clasp my Delia in my arms again and she would clasp me . . .

I sent the voller straight for the tall rock arch leading to the inner harbor. Only a few dim lights burned where I had been accustomed to seeing many lights blazing from the rock and the pharos lantern, swung from chains in the arch of the rock, casting its friendly greeting on the waters below. In a penumbrous circle of indistinct forms I dived for the entrance.

It is a commonplace experience, universally observed, that when a person returns to a place of his former abode everything in building and architecture and scale appears to him much smaller than the memories he had carried over the years. I had not experienced that in Valka. To a certain extent in Felteraz, yes, I had noticed, but then, it is the very smallness of Felteraz that enjoins so much of its beauty. Here, as I swooped the voller under the immense rock arch of Zy I felt only renewed awe at the grandeur about me. The water rippled gently below, pitch-black and runneled with the reflected lights of torches. Lights clustered on the dock. I touched down on the stones and stood up, stretched and cocked a leg over the side of the voller.

"Stand still! Declare yourself or you will be feathered."

That seemed perfectly proper to me.

"I am Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy."

To say those words again, here in the very heart of all that made the Krozairs of Zy so formidable, so much a part of my life, in the very sanctum of the order, gave me a sweet, dizzied feeling of homecoming that marched with those other feelings of homecoming I had experienced in Valka.

"Climb down from your flying contraption, Dray Prescot. Do not touch your weapons as you value your life."

This was carrying precaution to an extreme. Still, I accepted. After all, eternal vigilance was part of the Krozair creed. I stepped from the voller to face the party of men who accosted me. They wore the white surcoats over their mesh mail. The old familiar device glittered from the breasts of the surcoats, bravely shining in the light of the torches, the scarlet circle enclosing the hubless spoked wheel embroidered in silks of blue and orange and yellow. I saw the faces enclosed in the mail hoods, hard, fierce, dedicated faces, all a strong mahogany brown from the suns and the winds, with those arrogant upthrust black mustaches bristling. Yes, these were my Krozair Brothers. I felt strange, outré, a stranger, in my decent Vallian buff. I wore a longsword, true, but it was not a real Krozair longsword, crafted by master smiths in the workshops here. Out of habit I still swung a rapier and main-gauche from my belt. I took a step forward, and a dozen longswords were whipped from scabbards and leveled at my breast.

"Lahal, my Brothers," I cried. "Lahal and lahal, in the name of Zair."

"There is no lahal for you here, Dray Prescot," said a Krozair Brother, a Bold, one of those dedicated to the most intense efforts within the fraternity, a man whose whole life was bound up in daily service to the order. "Forsworn! No longer are you Pur Dray, Krozair of Zy." I gaped at him. I did not understand.

"Forsworn, Dray Prescot, less than nothing, Apushniad, ingrate, traitor, leemshead. You are no longer a Krozair of Zy."

Chapter Eleven

Apushniad

Apushniad!

That was a terrible word to a Krozair. Traitor, ingrate, leemshead, outlaw. A man cast off from the order.

A man denied fellowship, a man despised by those who had once been his fellows. And I, Dray Prescot, had been dubbed Apushniad!

I stood within the Hall of Judgment. The room was small, holding only a double hundred of Krozairs, ranked in their pews along the walls, the banners hanging in the lamplight above, a dusky, glittering mass of gold and scarlet. Small, that Hall of Judgment was, hewn from the living heart of the Rock of Zy. Small, because it was so seldom used. Once, long ago, I had witnessed the ritual trial and banishment of a Krozair Brother, accused of a crime no Krozair could own to and remain a member of the order. The ceremony had created a deep and lasting impression. So I knew what I faced. They had clad me in a white surcoat and on my breast blazed the great symbol of the order. They had hung a scabbarded longsword about my waist. It was my own sword, not a Krozair longsword, but a good workmanlike blade fashioned in the armory of Valka at Esser Rarioch by Naghan the Gnat and myself. It had served me well before. Now I stood in the Hall of Judgment, robed and armed like a Krozair, and I had no memory of how I had come there, how I had been dressed, what had happened after those terrible words had suddenly fallen on my uncomprehending ears. If I say that in the days and sennights, aye, and months that followed, I do not clearly recall all that happened, I think it no marvel. I was gripped in a stasis of horror that seemed to me impossible and that must vanish in the next heartbeat, yet it never left me as day succeeded day. So I stood there, facing my accusers. In the high throne sat the adjudicator, a Bold, a man in whose heart no mercy for the Grodnims could exist and therefore a man in whose heart no mercy for those who did not fully support Zair could exist either.

To one side, in a throne with a hooded carapace fashioned after the likeness of that mythical bird, the Ombor — for whose name my House of Strombor in Zenicce was named — sat the Grand Archbold. I had thrown him a single despairing look, expecting to see my old friend Pur Zenkiren, expecting to receive some acknowledgment, some sign of understanding.

Pur Zenkiren did not sit in the Ombor Throne.

I knew the man who sat there.

He sat with bitter down-curved lips, this man, the Archbold. This man who had succeeded Pur Zazz held the destiny of the Krozairs of Zy in his hands. I remembered him as a bold, free, ruthless Krozair captain, a man who would ram his swifter into the very jaws of the Overlords of Magdag. This was Pur Kazz of Tremzo, but different. A ghastly wound puckered the whole left side of his face, taking out an eye so that only the socket glared forth, rawly red. His bitter mouth twisted in the tail of that terrible scar. He sat hunched forward, his scarlet robes drawn about him, and I saw his hands shaking. A Krozair Brother lifted a scroll.

"Step forth, oh man who is called Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor." A longsword point in the small of my back emphasized the demand. I stepped forward, onto the round raised pulpit where cunningly arranged lamps shed a concentrated light. I felt dizzy. I forced my head up and stood straight bracing those wide shoulders of mine back with a conscious effort.

"I am here!" I cried. "And I do not understand! What—?" The Brother with the scroll began to read, drowning my words.

As I listened I felt my spirit tremble and shrink. I, Dray Prescot felt the awful weight of what he said crush down on me and rend my ib so that I had to grip the lenken rail and hold on while all of Kregen rocked about me like a swifter in a rashoon.

I heard his words — vague snatches of them recur in times of nightmare. I feel that neither my walk from the Phokaym across the Klackadrin nor the coronation parade of Queen Thyllis in Ruathytu, when I stumbled along at the tail of a calsany, scarcely moved me more, could have been more terrible. There have been other awful experiences through which I have gone on Kregen; perhaps this being out of the Krozairs of Zy affected me more powerfully than any of them, although, when I think back, I now understand that I did not really believe what was taking place before my eyes. The Call had been sent. The great Call had been sent out, the Azhurad, the Call to Arms which would bring every Krozair of Zy to fight for his order against enormous perils. Every Krozair of Zy had answered the Azhurad, as was his sworn duty, every Brother had come joyously to fight for Zair against the evil of Grodno, every single Brother — except one.

All except Dray Prescot had answered the Call.

I shouted: "But I did not know!"

The adjudicator leaned forward.

"That is a lie! You live, therefore you must know."

A Brother stood up at my right. He was a young man. He did not relish his task. But the Krozairs point a path of justice in their dealings; they do not punish without trial and reason. This man, this Pur Ikraz, had been appointed to speak for me in my defense.

He said: "It is true that any living Krozair must hear the Azhurad when the Call is sent. But is it not possible that, in this one instance, Pur Dray, somehow, in a manner we cannot guess, did not receive the Call?"

The Adjudicator said, "It is impossible."

Through the mazy sounds of that chamber I recalled speaking to Pur Zenkiren and to Pur Zazz, promising them that wherever I might be in Kregen I would answer the Azhurad. It had been explained to me. As part of the initiation ceremony I had been escorted down into the heart of the Rock of Zy and in a great cavern scooped from the living rock I had been shown the Horn of Azhurad. I knew nothing then of radio waves and of telepathy; I did know that when the Archbold set the giant bellows into action, pumping air through the myriad holes in the rock, the Horn would sound. The Azhurad would tingle with powers that could fling a note around the world, resonating in the skulls of every member of the Krozairs of Zy. Only through mystic disciplines of which I do not speak could a Krozair Brother hear the Azhurad, only one trained in the arts could understand. Hearing and understanding, he would joyfully don his surcoat with the hubless spoked wheel blazing within the scarlet circle, belt on his longsword and so go up with his Krozair Brethren against the foe.

I gripped the rail. I shouted over their noise: "And if I did hear the Call, am I not here? Have I not answered? I was in the world of Kregen outside the Eye of the World. It has taken me many months of travel to reach you here."

I was prepared to plead anything to avert the horror.

The Adjudicator placed a forefinger to his lips as he spoke. "So you did hear the Call?" I would not lie.

"No. I did not hear the Azhurad. But I am here now!"

"It is known that it is impossible for a living Brother not to hear the Call. You stand condemned on two counts: if you did hear and did not come, you are condemned; if you did not hear that can only mean you were never properly a Krozair of Zy. You were not pure enough of spirit, your ib remained befouled with the dross of everyday life, so you stand condemned on that count, also, to be banished, Apushniad." A thought occurred to me so despicable I winced at my own vileness. I lifted my head again and jutted my jaw out like the rostrum of a swifter.

"My son Drak! Prince of Vallia! He was to join the Krozairs of Zy! And my second son Segnik, he who is now Zeg, he was also to join the Krozairs of Zy!"

I could not go on. Not for myself could I use my sons.

The Adjudicator hissed between his teeth.

"Your sons answered The Call! They came with great gallantry and they fought with joy for Zair! But you—"

"They are safe?"

"They live still. It was they who told us you were not dead, as we had believed. They did not know where you were. Had you been dead it would have been better for you." Now Pur Kazz, the Grand Archbold, lifted his golden rod. Everyone fell silent and turned to the Ombor Throne.

"When you did not answer the Azhurad, cramph, you were tried and condemned in your absence. Now you have the effrontery to arrive here crying and mewling. The sentence of that trial will be carried out. We stage this trial now in order to show you, who deserve nothing, that the Krozairs of Zy do not punish vengefully, out of spite, but out of law and order and love of Zair." I stared at him. His voice slurred. His hands trembled. I remembered him as arrogant and brash and filled with vigor. The disfiguring scar must have addled his brains. Besides, he had called me cramph, which is a term of abuse. Not one other of the Brethren had descended to insults. I shouted at him. "And my Delia! The Princess Majestrix of Vallia! She is here! I demand to see her!"

"You demand nothing!"

The Adjudicator’s quick words were chopped by the bellow of rage from Pur Kazz. I could not understand what he said, and I do not think anyone else could either. But we were all fully aware of the passions of anger and enmity blazing in him.

"Let the sentence be carried out."

Pur Ikraz, the man to speak in my defense, started to plead in mitigation, but Pur Kazz waved his golden rod and brought it down with a crash and bellowed. My defense withered away. I do not fully recall what happened next. I have memories, lurid, black, lightning-shot, of men coming forward and speaking ritually above me. Of others ripping the bright insignia from the white surcoat. A dull realization of why they had clothed me in the emblems of the Krozairs of Zy shook me then. I had been clothed so that I might be stripped, in humiliation and shame.

My longsword was lifted from the scabbard. I could see three different reflections of myself in tall mirrors, the Three Mirrors of the Ib, positioned to reinforce what went on in the mind of the accused, to make him see himself in all his shame.

As the sword whispered from the scabbard I swung back. I saw Pur Kazz leaning over the golden rail of the Ombor throne. I saw the torches and the lamps, the massed faces of the Brethren; I heard the chanting as they exorcised the evil; I heard and I saw and I do not remember anything else until I found myself standing in that cleared space below my pulpit, the sword grasped in my fists in that cunning Krozair grip, cocked. I heard myself yelling — wild, strange, mad words, tumbling out pell-mell — and saw the ring of watchful Krozairs, bearing their swords in grips like mine, waiting, circling, ready to destroy me.

I saw my reflection in the Three Mirrors of the Ib.

I saw a madman. I saw the huge rent in the breast of my white surcoat. I saw the face: that devil’s face with the furrowed brow and the snarling ugly mouth, the eyes like leems’, glittering, maniacal, mad. I saw a man I did not recognize.

But I knew the truth.

The maniac brandishing a sword here in the Hall of Judgment, who would not accept the dictates of his onetime fellows in the Krozairs of Zy, that man who had reverted to all the old intemperate ruthlessness I had tried so hard to overcome, that devil incarnate here in the seat of wisdom and learning and great devotion — that madman was me, plain Dray Prescot.

I threw the sword down with a clang.

"You cannot understand why I could not answer the Call! If I said I was in a place where the Call did not reach, you would not believe! If I say I prize being a Krozair of Zy above all else on Kregen, you would sneer! I have failed you in your terms! But I have always kept the faith, I have not failed! It is you, who do not believe in Krozair Brother . . ."

But I could not go on. How could they believe my wild stories about living on another world? How could they conceive of a world with only one sun, a world with only one moon, a world with only apims?

Then, truly, my reason left me.

Only vague and rending impressions remain.

Someone must have picked up my sword. It hung before me in the air, the lamplight striking a star from the tip, the blade gleaming straight and true. A crazy thought afflicted me: how would Naghan the Gnat relish what was being done to his handiwork?

For the sword was placed across the twin Stones of Repudiation. Basaltic blocks, hard and bleak and unforgiving, they hunkered like extensions of the very earth itself. The sword glimmered. I saw the Hammer of Retribution lifted. It rose high, poised in the muscular hands of a Krozair Brother whose title I will not repeat. I saw his naked arms flex. They bunched. I wanted to look away. I could not. The Hammer of Retribution smashed down. My longsword rang once, with a gong note, twisted, echoing, lost in the crash of sundering metal and the hammerblow against the rock. In shapeless shreds my sword lay on the floor.

I cannot tell what happened next. I can only piece together those earlier memories of seeing a Krozair of Zy receive the Apushniad. It is painful. It is so painful I will leave that scene of desolation and horror. I was finally led away, head hanging, and although chains were placed on me they were unnecessary. I do remember the hissing and vindictive voice of Pur Kazz, Grand Archbold of the Krozairs of Zy, shouting at my back.

"So goes he who once was Pur Dray, Krozair of Zy. Apushniad! Let no Krozair Brother’s hand be lifted to help him. He is accursed. He is banished from our midst, as his sword is broken and his banner burned, and all the goodness of our hearts and faces is turned from him. Apushniad!" It was finished.

Chapter Twelve

Conversation in a fish cell on the Island of Zy

No, I do not wish to dwell on those moments in the Hall of Judgment, nor on the days that followed. You who have listened to my story know how I would willingly, gladly, have given up all the tawdry, tinselly titles I had accumulated, every one, to remain a Krozair of Zy. Apushniad!

Outcast, leemshead, I was thrust from the warm circle of the order, and yet there was still work I might perform, still a use to be found for my unworthy body.

I was not to be executed.

Oh, make no mistake, the Krzy would think no more of executing an Apushniad than they would of lopping the head off an Overlord of Magdag.

They knew my strength. Many in that small Hall of Judgment had fought with me in the long-gone past. They knew I had slaved as an oarsman in the galleys of Magdag. Now one of the minor points of the Zairians I had been forced to slide away from and overlook and condone was brought home: the men of Zair also employed slaves in their swifters.

So I knew my fate.

Down and down we went, the guard surrounding me with ready swords. They were expert swordsmen, as indeed they must be to become Krozairs at all. It would have been a great and bonny fight. It would have been a fight to warm a man.

But I knew as we went down the stairs with the water dropping milkily about us and the torches hurling black-bat shadows ahead, that I could not fight those who had been my Brothers merely because they would not understand my wild talk of an earth with one sun, one moon and only apims. No, I had found, as I caught that dramatic reflection of the devil-figure who was me in the Three Mirrors in the Ib, that I could not strike out in hatred at a man who was a Krozair Brother, who wore the hubless spoked wheel within the circle as his emblem. Maybe there were other reasons. Perhaps, after all, I had grown weak and flabby, lacking the will and the old cutting edge. I do not think I felt fear. If anything my feelings had been the reverse and I would have joyed to leap forward to my death.

Even then, though, even then I knew that I was still the old Dray Prescot, a stubborn onker who would never give up the fight but would always struggle on against despair and defeat. They thrust me into a narrow cell whose walls glistened wetly and the iron bars clanged with that soul-destroying sound of finality.

Then they went away and left me to the darkness and the emptiness of self. How long did I spend in that cell? It is of no consequence.

I was fed at intervals, washed, shaved, given a gray slave breechclout. My chains were checked and I was at last led out and up those long slippery stairs in the heart of the rocky Island of Zy beneath the gracious living areas of the extinct volcanic throat. Straight to the small harbor within the immense rocky arch I was led. It was night. The stars shone in spattering reflections on the water. There were no moons in the sky.

Among the guards I heard a muttering, as of a low-voiced discussion that could not easily be resolved. Ahead I could see against the quay a long, low, impressive shape of power. There had been no swifters when I had flown in. There was no sign of my voller. Perhaps I would still not have made a break for it even if I had seen the airboat. I was down, beaten, face-first in the muck of life. The moored swifter possessed two banks of oars and was lean and powerful. Despite everything, I found myself noticing that she was bereft of much of the ornate panoply to which I had become accustomed in the swifters of the Eye of the World. She had been stripped for action with a vengeance. I heard one of the guards, a tough old bird with a scarred face, speaking hotly.

"To the Ice Floes of Sicce with him! He is Apushniad!"

And another, younger, with a strong determined face, spoke out.

"And yet she is very beautiful."

I reeled. I gripped the nearest Krozair and he grunted and shifted his sword hilt out of the way. Mercy is a commodity in relatively short supply on Kregen. Zair does not teach mercy to a Grodnim. And Grodno teaches only implacable hatred for all Zairians. Even in my kingdom of Djanduin the pantheon of warrior gods led by the divine Djan must have the case for mercy argued and won before they deign to nod their heads in merciful acquiescence. For the religion of Opaz, the Invisible Twins, mercy is a guiding light, but that too is a mercy tempered with forethought for the welfare of those of Opaz. As for Lem the Silver Leem — they should receive the same mercy they show and they would all be extinct. For old Mog, the high priestess of the religion of Migshaanu, away there in Migladrin, mercy was a known and valued component of the religion, used with care as a precious unction. I could expect no mercy from these men who had been my Krozair Brothers, men for whom I would have fought and men who would have given their lives for me in like manner, before I had been tried and judged and condemned.

I would not plead.

But through all the agony of spirit I felt the fire in my blood. The agony refreshed itself at the wellspring of a new agony.

I knew.

We hustled toward the rock of the side wall. The guards spoke in harsh whispers. "Keep quiet," and

"Careful with the light," and "He should be thrown to the chanks." I stumbled along. A lenken door opened and closed, silently. An iron bolt dropped into place, silently. A pitchy darkness confronted my groping fingers. My chains clanked. I heard a panel squeal and a voice, hoarse, say, "One bur only, my lady. Not a mur more." A form moved. A soft pearly light shone across a littered floor of discarded impedimenta, fishing gear, a broken trident, crumbling floats, a scattering of canvas, wooden tubs and withy baskets. The light wavered.

I looked up.

It is a long time ago, I was in torment, I do not recall — I remember her soft arms, her lips, the touch of her hair, the thrilling whisper of her voice. Oh, I felt as poor and downtrodden and useless there as ever I have felt. That it should come to this! A beaten man, chained, thrown out of all he held dear, yet daring to clasp in his arms the most wonderful woman in two worlds!

"Dray, oh, my heart . . ."

No, I cannot tell more.

Delia — my Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains.

Of all we babbled I remember little. She said these terrible Krozairs of Zy were incapable of being bribed. Nothing would move them to deny their duty. I could have told her that. There was no easy escape through gold here. She was well. She held a great pride in her sons and daughters. Krozairs, Sisters of the Rose, Princes and Princesses of Vallia. I could hardly talk. She wanted to talk of the youngsters, but I kissed her and we clung together, warm, warm, and again she wailed that there was no way of contriving my escape.

I do remember, in a pale pathetic reflection of my old arrogance: "I will win free, my Delia. I will. And I will tell you why sometimes I go away even if you do not believe."

"If you tell me I will believe."

I was charged afresh with a ludicrous determination. ’I will win free. I will prove I am a true Krozair." She held me. "Yes, yes, that is what you will do. I know. They are wrong . . ."

"It is a thing I must do. I must."

How different this, from all my grandiose expectations! I had waited twenty-one dreary years, and all for this! My Delia, the most perfect woman of two worlds, how cruel that she should thus be tormented on my account. I held her close and my thoughts were clouded. I remember . . . I remember little then. No, I cannot tell more.

The panel scraped and the pearly light strengthened. I held her close, but she was gone, gone, and the panel closed and the light darkened and I was alone.

The outer lenken door was flung back and rough hands grasped me and, with my chains clanking about me, I was led down to the stone quay and up the gangplank. So once more I entered on the life of a galley slave of the Eye of the World, which is the inner sea of the continent of Turismond on Kregen, spinning beneath the Suns of Scorpio.

A galley slave may survive if he can last out the first week.

My memory of that time remains hazy. I recall that the work came as a shock; I had grown slothful. My strength remained, but it was not as easy as I might have been forgiven for thinking. It took me some time to regain all my old toughness and hardness, to endure the incessant toil, and all that time I remained sunk in a spiritless slough. I cared little for anything. I even came to regard that dark meeting with my Delia as an hallucination. Had I really once more clasped Delia of Delphond in my arms? Could it truly have been my Delia of the Blue Mountains? Or was I gripped by the Drig-driven phantasms of the madness I know claimed me?

Reason had fled. I pulled my oar. I lived like a vosk sunk in swill. I endured. Even thoughts of Zorg of Felteraz, and Nath and Zolta, my two oar comrades still living, penetrated like a nightmare, so that often and often I would call their names, thinking them laboring at the loom at my side.

As for the five other wights on the loom with me, I knew nothing of them nor cared how they regarded me. I was the madman of the benches. I shouted for Zorg when the swifter went into action, yelling for Nath and Zolta, cursing the Overlords of Magdag, pulling with frenzy so that I could drown out the blackness of a despair I had forgotten tormented me, or why, or how, sunk in the blazing mania of madness.

When I had been a slave in the Magdaggian swifters I had gradually surfaced from near-insanity. I had taken an interest in what went on, noting the galleys, their construction, their methods of working and sailing and fighting. Now I cared for nothing. I pulled. When the lash fell on me I yelled out in abandon, uncaring, all pride forgotten.

It is all a fragmentary scattering of scarlet memories.

One time we were rammed and the apostis crumpled in deadly splinters and the side caved in and three of the poor devils chained with me were crushed to red pulp. One time arrows sought down into the slave benches, for this craft was rigged anaphract, and I saw a shaft sprout suddenly from the back of the slave in front of me. I saw with perplexity and no sensations of pain an arrow pinning my foot to the deck. I wrenched the thing out with a jerk of my leg, seeing blood, feeling nothing, pulling, pulling, pulling. I must have been sent down to the sickbay and recovered of the wound. I remember nothing of that. There was a space when I felt the rain and the wind on my face, and the heat of the suns, and then a space when I did not. Now I realize I must have been transferred from the upper bank to the lower; it made no difference to my madness.

Once, I dimly recall, I awoke to look up and see the immense arch of the rock harbor of the Island of Zy above my head and I cried out "Krozair!" in a terrible voice. I strove to rise and could not, for I was chained and manacled and the chains were stapled to the deck.

Now, later, I know it was after that experience that I was vaguely aware of people bending over me, of shadowy forms, of a shielded light, of whispers.

I recalled these fragments of the night as I labored at the oar by day. The suns scorched my back, my hair grew wild, I fined off the excess weight that being a prince and king brings. I know I was as hard and tough and enduring as ever I had been.

In the full circle of vaol-paol all things must come to pass.

One night I felt my chains shaking, and I cursed and turned over irritably, for sleep was a precious boon to a slave. I heard a whisper and a curse, and someone said, "Sleep, you Grodno-gasta!" and the soggy sound of a blow. Another voice hailed, it seemed from a distance. Closer at hand the first voice said with great viciousness: "May Makki-Grodno devour his intestines!" The chains shook again, I heard a clink of metal, and then all was silent. I turned over and found a softer patch on the ponsho-fleece covered sack of straw and slipped back to slumber. No use to ask me where the swifter in which I slaved sailed. I had no idea. I had no desire to know. I believe I did not even understand quite what this all meant, somehow regarding all the toil and agony as a part of a dream in which Zorg, Nath, Zolta and I slaved and labored through all eternity. During the periods when the breeze blew fair and the square sails on the two masts could be set, the slaves might rest. On one evening when the suns sank into a metallic sea and sheened from horizon to keel in a single sheet of burnished bronze, I realized we were at sea. I thought Zorg must have the better share of our onion. Nath and Zolta would share theirs. We were down to half rations. As for water, a mere mouthful and no more must last us.

We pulled ourselves up on the benches as the sails were furled and we settled to the looms. The drum-deldar beat out his rhythm and, all as one, like beating wings, the oars dipped and rose to dip again. Silently we stole into the coast.

Nothing meant anything. When the final beat from the drum and the oar-master’s whistle signaled a cessation to our labors, every slave drooped over his loom. I squirmed about for a softer spot on the ponsho-fleece, for without these sacks and the fleeces a man could never last at the rowing benches. I prepared for sleep and knew I would dream my nightmares.

I dreamed that Zorg was telling me how he had secreted a piece of cheese; he wanted to divide it between all four of us, but we must do it when the Rapas on the next oar could not see, for it had once been theirs and they could not understand where it had gone. Nath and Zolta had chingled their chains in one of the many signals we oarslaves used to pass messages.

The thing must be done furtively. Not only must we not alert the Rapas, but the whip-deldars walking the narrow deck would delight in any excuse to lash us with old snake at a time when we should be resting.

"Hold still, Stylor!"

That was Nath, breathing in my ear.

We spoke in whispers.

"Split it fairly, Zorg," I said, and instantly Nath said: "Quiet, Stylor! For the love of Zair! Quiet!" And Zolta, strangely near for his apostis seat, whispered: "Hurry it up, you great fambly!" And Nath, breathing hard: "It takes a man to do this, you nit of nits." Well, they would always argue and insult each other, and each ready to hurl himself to death to save the other.

"Is the Grakki-thing free yet?"

"In a mur — in a mur—"

And I said, sleepily, "Make the cheese a nice juicy Loguetter, Zorg. In the name of Diproo the Nimble-Fingered, we’ve earned it."

"Quiet, numbskull!" And: "Clap a fist over his wine-spout, Zolta, while I" — grunt of effort — "finish this."

And, oddly, I felt a hand over my mouth. How, I wondered in my dream, could it be Zolta’s? He sat at the apostis seat, almost fully over the water. But it was a dream; anything could happen in a dream. The night breathed about us, a night of Notor Zan, when no moon shines in the sky of Kregen. In the darkness I dreamed that Zorg partitioned up his cheese and the Rapas had not seen. I reached out for my portion. I felt a fist under my fingers, a fist that spread into a hand that grasped my hand.

"Where—"I began, and the other hand clapped back over my face. I squirmed. My chains did not rattle. I was being lifted up.

This was indeed a most miraculous dream. Was I astride a fluttrell or a mirvol or even a flutduin? I rose into the air and I felt hands grasping me and movement. I tried to turn over to find another comfortable place on the ponsho-fleece, but the hands gripped me so I could not move. The strange swaying persisted. Then I was being passed down like a sack from a freighter. I felt a bump and something hard struck into my backbone. Before I could do anything or cry out a great evil-smelling canvas was thrown over me. I lay there, wondering when I would wake up and, however nightmarish the dream, preferring it to the reality of slaving on the rowing benches. The softly swaying movement beneath me told me I lay in a small boat. Well, they might not ask me to pull an oar then.

I heard a voice, somewhere high overhead.

"Weng da![4]Speak up, speak up!"

From close by my head Nath bellowed back: "Provision party, sir!"

"Carry on then, Palinter."

I heard a low chuckle in the boat. Why should the officer of the watch call Nath Palinter? Palinter was the title for the fat and jovially wicked fellows who were the pursers in — but no matter. This dream intrigued me through my madness.

The boat pushed off. There were two oars, I could hear.

The stroke was steady, the kind of rhythm that only two old comrades who had slaved together could row. I moved beneath the odiferous canvas.

"Lie still, Stylor. Only a few strokes more."

I lay still. I wanted to go to sleep and sleep dreamlessly. But this dream persisted, it pursued me, it would not let me go. The boat grounded. The canvas cover was thrown back. The night sky blazed above. I stood up. Nath and Zolta gripped my arms and helped me from the boat.

"All very nice, Nath, Zolta," I said. "But where is Zorg?" They looked at me.

"I need my sleep. Let me go back to sleep."

Nath took my arm. "This way."

"Grace of Grodno." I stumbled along after Nath, with Zolta supporting me from the side. My legs felt like smashed bananas. "Zorg will row." The dream began to coil in my head. I panted. I felt the pains in my chest, in my head. My legs weren’t there. "Zorg! Nath! Zolta! We must row — must pull — pull—"

"Nearly there, Stylor, nearly there."

I tried to haul up but they pulled me on.

"Nearly where, you two rascals? Is it wine and a wench you are after? I know you two, two oar comrades, two great rogues . . ."

We passed through a screen of trees, dark, massive and mysterious lumps in the star-flecked blackness. A clearing showed, with an arm of water curving into it hidden from the sea. A rickety hut of leaves and branches leaned over the water. I stopped, thunderstruck by a thought.

"Why do you call me Stylor? You know my name is Dray—"

"Yes, Dray, but we knew you first as Stylor. Now you are Dray Prescot . . ." Then, in a lower tone, Nath said, "Into the hut with him before he wakes the whole damned crew."

"Where is Zorg?" I said again. And then the thought finally rooted. "Zorg is dead! We have roistered in Sanurkazz, many and many a time, with Nath and his wine and Zolta and his wenches — and Zorg is dead!"

"Aye, Dray, Zorg is dead — and so will we all be if you don’t stop yowling like a chunkrah in calf and get a move on!"

I felt my legs then. I felt the ground beneath my feet.

I trembled.

I touched Nath. I touched Zolta.

They were real!

I wrenched away from them. I pawed my eyes. The trees, the hut, the stars, remained. I hit myself in the chest. I did not wake up.

They were staring at me, there in the starlight.

"Yes, Dray, who we called Stylor. You do not dream." Nath smiled in the old reckless way.

"By Zair, Dray Stylor! We’ve rescued you from the Krozairs of Zy and they’ll have all our heads if they catch us!" And Zolta seized my arm and ran me into the hut.

Rescued? Rescued? Rescued!

Chapter Thirteen

Two rascals of Sanurkazz

The succulent palines dropped one by one into my mouth: luscious cherry-like fruits, palines, sovereign remedies for the black dog.

I lay back on the rough pallet of the hut and marveled.

I was alone. Nath and Zolta, giving me no time to express my wonder, my fierce pride in them, my joy, had whispered ferociously that I was to stay hidden in the hut and they would be back as soon as they could.

For the first time I noticed they were clad as Zimen, the lay brothers of the Krozairs of Zy. Their dull red tunics bore the Krzy emblem decorously on the breast and back. Thick belts cinctured their waists and they swung seaman’s knives there. They did not carry swords. They looked just the same as I remembered them — and then they were gone, melting back into the starlight.

"If all goes well on Zulfirian Avenger," were Zolta’s last words. And Nath’s were: "By Zantristar the Merciful! Zair would not will it otherwise!" So I was learning. The name of the swifter was Zulfirian Avenger. Nath and Zolta were still alive, were Zimen, a fact which before my downfall I would have gloried to know, and were acting against all their vows to the Krzy in thus helping me, who was Apushniad.

The penalties they faced were real and dreadful.

The mere fact of freedom, for however short a duration, began in me a process of drawing back from that frightening and bottomless black pool of madness. I began to think again. Of course those two dearly beloved rascals had called me Stylor. That had been my name when we’d met, a name bestowed on me by the Overlords of Magdag in those festering warrens. But how had they come here? I knew it could not be by chance.

I began to think of that tragic meeting with Delia. I had met her. I had spoken to her there in that dark cell in the rock wall with its trash of litter on the floor. Yes, yes, I had! I began to think of things she had said, items of information spoken quickly, in whispers, while I held her in my arms and tried to blot out the grim prospect of the future.

The thought of her presence dizzied me. By Zair but she was marvelous!

Yes, yes, she had said Drak and Zeg had written that the Call was out. As Krozairs of Zy they had responded. She had been engaged in a legal struggle over encroachments on Delphond, Dayra had received a bad report from the Sisters of the Rose — who the hell was Dayra? — the trouble with the scheming leem the Strom of Vilandeul, the samphron crop had been particularly bad in Valka and she had had to arrange to buy supplies from Vallia, her father the Emperor had been complaining bitterly that she neglected him — a myriad things of importance had been claiming her attention. She had cast them all to the winds.

She had taken the fleetest voller to Esser Rarioch. There she had arranged as much as she could and, on the very night she was due to leave, she had been visited by Krozairs. They had sailed in a ship of Vallia all the way through the Grand Canal and the Dam of Days, around the west coast of Turismond and past Donengil, and so up the Cyphren Sea past Erthyrdrin and on to Vallia. From there they had flown to Valka. From this record of a perfectly ordinary sea passage of one of our galleons I knew the letters of my sons had been delayed. So now with two purposes, Delia had set out for Zy. First, she knew in her heart of hearts I was not dead, so she knew I would answer the Azhurad. She would meet me in Zy.

Second, until I came she would plead my cause with the Grand Archbold. I quelled all hatred for Pur Kazz. He had acted as his instincts, his vows, his duties prompted. I wondered if Pur Zenkiren, had he become Grand Archbold as I had expected, would have acted any differently. I would find out why Pur Zenkiren had been passed over. Could he be dead? No, I would have been told by someone in Zy.

The peripatetic Krozairs who had visited Delia knew where I was supposed to be found, of course, from my sons. They had wanted to know why I had not answered. Had I been dead, they would have known. That is a small part of the mysticism of the Krozairs. At that news my Delia had known so great a happiness that all else mattered little. Only the dire truth as she was told of my condemnation could penetrate, and even then she had scarcely been able to believe.

I was not dead. I would answer the summons to Zy.

By Zair! I had not done so in all ignorance and, in all truth, according to my vows, deserved to be condemned to Apushniad.

The suns declined over the trees. Nath and Zolta had warned me to lie close. Rising, I went swiftly from the hut with many a careful scrutiny of the foliage and secreted myself among the trees. If Nath and Zolta were discovered and men came for me, I would be ready. Aye! And if my two oar comrades did not return I would go back to Zulfirian Avenger and seek those who constrained them.

They panted up, jog-trotting, bearing provisions and weapons. They saw I was almost back to the knave they had known, and we were able to greet one another in a seemly way, with much hugging and belly-punching, quite like my Djangs, and to drink hugely, eat and talk. They told me much which I will relate at its proper time in this chronicle of my life on Kregen. Suffice it to say the passage of fifty terrestrial years seemed to pass in that first starlit meeting.

They were Zimen, and proud of that, and I sensed that much of their pride came in remembrance of Zorg of Felteraz, who was a Krozair of Zy. I mumbled my lame excuses for not returning and then said,

"I did not receive the Call. This is true. I have been banished from the order and I cannot tell you where I have been, or how. And yet you put yourselves in the path of peril for me. I am not worthy." Nath chewed reflectively on a chicken bone. He belched. "You may not be worthy, Dray. I will not pretend the decision was easy."

Zolta frowned. "No, Dray. We have served the Krozairs of Zy long and faithfully. And we have not seen your face for many seasons."

Then they both chuckled and drank wine. Spluttering, Nath said: "But we hold you in our ibs and, anyway, you are an oar comrade. That is what counts."

"Also," said Zolta, and I glanced swiftly at him. He had the grace to smile as he spoke. "Also, we spoke to your lady."

"Ah!" said Nath.

My heart leaped. I made them tell me everything. I licked every honey drop I could as they spoke to me of Delia. She had waited in the fortress of Zy, quartered in the lay apartments on the outer face of the rock, unwelcome in many senses, yet in a peculiar and delicate position. When my two odd comrades had discovered what had happened they had seen her at once; without anything definite being said, the compact had been made.

"Now, Dray," said Zolta, "I understand why you left the Eye of the World. I would stride the Stratemsk for such a lady."

Nath belched again. "I would never touch another drop."

When we turned to other matters, after a time, I discovered we were on a small island near the western end of the Eye of the World in an area I had seldom visited previously. This was a small and secret watering place used by the Zairians. The Grodnims had at last achieved a significant ascendancy over the red southern shore. They had actually established outposts and brought troops across. They had won battles. Now they were pushing along the southern shore, from west to east. Nothing could stop them.

"That is when the Call went out. The Krozairs fought but they lost. The Zair-forsaken Grodnims strut on our southern shore and advance steadily eastward. Soon immortal Zy will be besieged."

"Aye! And then it will be the turn of Holy Sanurkazz."

We remained silent for a while, contemplating the impossible.

Nath took up a jug and upended it. The glugging did not stop until the jug was empty. He wiped the back of his hand across his lips.

"By Mother Zinzu the Blessed! I needed that!"

I chilled at his words. The lightheartedness had gone. The euphoria of my escape was fled. I roused myself as Nath said they would have to be leaving.

"No suspicion attaches to you over the escape?"

Zolta shook his head. They were a pair of ruffians, with the black curly hair of Zairians, with the mahogany brown faces of sailors, with the merry eyes and reckless ways of those of Sanurkazz. But I marked them. The defeats were wearing them down.

"No, Dray. I am a chief varterist, and Nath, for his potbelly, is in charge of stores. We have a certain leeway."

"And a missing slave?"

Nath made a face and Zolta looked fierce.

"Slaves die. Slaves are replaced. We brought up a spare from below. They are mostly Magdaggians, criminals—"

"Criminals — like me!"

"Aye," they both said equably and went out. I saw them off. Their plans might work. They bid me remberee, but they would be back later on, either the next day or the following night. A boat was hidden in that curve of water. They had brought provisions. We would sail out and carve a fresh life for ourselves. I knew that my future, for all its darkness and somber brooding, could go only two ways. There was much to brood on the following day and I took the same precautions when Nath and Zolta reappeared. They carried further provisions. This time I had taken a longsword into the trees with me.

"The swifter is due to sail tomorrow night, Dray. There are four of them and they plan a descent on a Grodnim convoy. News was brought in by a scout, a dinky little three-twenty swifter. It will be a notable blow."

They were still caught up in the struggle against the green here in the inner sea. We sat and drank companionably. If they came with me my course seemed marked out. I welcomed them. I would shake off the whole world of the inner sea, forget it, drive from my mind any remembrance that once I had been a Krozair of Zy.

I said: "Did Delia tell you anything of what I’ve been up to in the outer world since I left here?" They looked at me oddly.

Nath drank and wiped his mouth and declared roundly: "The Lady Delia is a princess! By Buzro’s Magic Staff! She is a princess from the top of her head to the tips of her feet, and she says you are a prince — the Prince Majister of Vallia, no less."

"For my sins, Nath, old comrade."

"Aye," said Zolta, putting a finger to his beak of a nose. "And she says you are a king of some place called Djanduin. If that is to be believed."

"What, you great onker!" roared Nath. "Do you doubt the word of Lady Delia?"

"No, no, you great oaf of a chunkrah! I doubt that this poor fellow here, this Stylor, could ever be a king!"

Nath subsided, rumbling. By Vox! How I needed their fierce heartwarming clowning, but how hollow it all struck me as I insisted on contemplating the future I beheld.

"Yes. Yes, I am a prince and a king. They mean nothing."

I did not go on. They stared at me keenly, and then Nath slowly said: "Lady Delia told us to tell you." He stopped and glared at Zolta. "Well, you nit that crawls on a calsany’s back! You are the lady-killer, you tell Dray what’s what!"

Zolta put his jug of wine on the dirt floor. His fierce bold eyes sized me up. We did not know the history of Zolta, yet he carried the proud Z not only just in his name, but as the initial letter of his name. Much was to be known of Zolta. As for Nath, as the son of an illiterate ponsho-farmer from Zullia, which is a village to the south of Sanurkazz, his whole history was writ in his large and powerful frame, his weather-beaten face, his addiction to drink, his jovial rough-necking and his loyalty. Now both of them stared at me as though they pondered the wisdom of their deeds.

"Tell me, by Vox!"

"Vox?" said Zolta. "You have been away a long time." I said nothing, only waited.

Zolta heaved up a sigh and fixed me with an eye like that of a fish on a slab. "Very well, then, but how you come to be married to so divine a creature . . ." Here Nath nudged him and he went on. Despite his inclinations the seriousness crept in to shadow his words. "Lady Delia has said that, in view of certain impending developments, she feels it her duty to return to — where was it? — Ester Rarok?"

"Esser Rarioch. It is my home in Valka."

"Valka. Oh, aye."

"Return home? Impending developments? Tell me, in the sweet name of Zair!" Nath shuffled his feet. Zolta picked up his wine jug and put it down. "You saw her in some stinking fish cell in Zy?"

"Yes — yes!"

"So that’s why she is going home."

I felt stunned.

Then Zolta said, "She is so well aware of you, Dray, knows you so well. You told her you wished to reinstate yourself as a Krozair of Zy."

"Did I? I scarcely remember. And I find I do not overmuch care now—"

"That’s a lie!"

"Aye."

"So she wants you to do what you can. She believes in you. By Zair, you great fambly! If I had a wife like that . . ." And here Nath swelled his massive chest. "I’d be pretty damn careful about how I upset her, I can tell you, Makki-Grodno take me else!"

"Did I upset her?"

"It would take a very great deal," said Zolta, at last, picking up his jug, "to upset Lady Delia. She wants you to regain your rightful place as a Krozair of Zy."

"Yes, she was very particular about that. Tell him,’ she said, ’tell him I wear the Krozair badge still, and will not unpin it until he returns home to Valka and tells me to take it off with his own lips.’ That’s what she said, aye, and she meant it too!"

They both nodded like those balancing birds dipping their beaks in liquid.

"Fight back! Fight for what you believe is the right of it!" How well I could picture my Delia saying those words, proud, chin lifted, her eyes sparkling with a dangerous light that the uncouth might construe as unshed tears. How my Delia knew me! And yet was it so strange? I had made no secret to her of my attachment to the Krozairs of Zy, and she had sent her two sons there, without question, joying in seeing them go through the same stringent disciplines as their father had endured. She must see the good in the Krozairs. She must regard my Apushniad as a mere interruption, to be cleared up, a passing shadow.

My Delia is seldom wrong in matters of this kind.

I felt that no dramatic gesture was necessary. So I simply said, "It will not be easy. There are things I cannot explain. Things that no sane man would believe. But I will try! I will fight back." They both beamed at me.

Nath slapped his knee and Zolta twirled his arrogant mustaches.

"Lady Delia said — well, no matter. She knew. She told us what you would say, almost word for word. You see, Dray Prescot, Lady Delia loves you as you love her."

Chapter fourteen

The fight in the clearing

Soon the Zairian swifter Zulfirian Avenger would weigh and make for the sea in company with three others of her kind, long, low sea-leems of the Eye of the World, ready to fall on a Grodnim convoy and joy in battle and slaughter and destruction. As responsible Zimen, men devoted as lay brothers to the care and comfort of the Krozairs of Zy, my two oar comrades Nath and Zolta should sail in her. They had aided me to escape from the rowing benches. So far they were above suspicion, or so they claimed.

One of the courses that had been open to me before they told me of Delia’s words had been to take them back with me to the outer oceans, back to Valka, where I would heap honors on them and shower them with chunkrah herds and mineral wealth and broad kools of land and drown them in gold. As Zair is my witness I did not then really know if that kind of life would suit them well or ill. They were rough, tough sailors, accustomed to the hardships of life afloat in swifters in the inner sea. How would they take to the ways of life of Vallia and Valka, of Djanduin and Strombor?

Then I reassured myself. They were adaptable. They would do more than survive. And with some of the pretty girls out there Zolta could be very happy, and Nath, I felt sure, would pronounce a good Jholaix as fine as his best Zond.

Well?

The truth was I did not intend to leave the Eye of the World until I was once more dubbed a Krozair of Zy.

The issue was perfectly plain.

I could not ask them to come with me on a mission of so much peril and of importance only to me. They would throw everything for which they had worked away, abandon their careers, which I now knew had brought them to the ranks of zan-Deldars, ready to make the all-important leap across to ob-Hikdars. One was a chief varterist, the other a Palinter, a purser of the lower rank. No. No, it would be foully cruel of me to snatch them away from their own lives into lives filled with cruelty and danger and death, merely to serve my own selfish ends.

I valued them far too much to do that to them.

So I thought then, as I sat in the miserable hut and planned what I would do. They had told me that Pur Zenkiren, who had known them too well for their own comfort, had been passed over when old Pur Zazz had at last died and gone to sit in glory on the right hand of Zair in the paradise of Zim. The battles he had fought up along the eastern shores had slid and slipped away so that gradually Proconia had been lost to the allies of Magdag. Nath had said, with a round Makki-Grodno oath, that the Grodnims he called Yoggur-cramphs had rolled down from the north with huge armies of diffs. Chuliks, Rapas, Katakis — at which my eyebrows had lifted — Ochs and Naor’vils like clouds driven before the winds of heaven, rampaging down with their mercenary ibs uplifted by the gold promised by the Overlords of Yoggur, following the green banners.

"We stopped ’em, in the end. The place was a defile, a good defensive position." Zolta licked his lips. "I was told by a Deldar who lost an eye. The place was called Appar, from which the battle takes its name. This Deldar did not relish the telling. But Pur Zenkiren marshaled his forces and we fought and we stopped them, the rasts of Grodno and their Zair-forsaken beast-men allies." This was a thing I had long noted, how the men of the red southern shore seldom employed diffs, and how very few of the myriads of marvelous halfling races of Kregen made their homes along the southern shore of the inner sea of Turismond. How important a factor in my life — aye! and the destiny of Kregen

— this proved to be you shall hear.

Appar is situated south of Pattelonia, which is the capital of Proconia. We had lost much ground then. And because of this, with no thought given to his final heroic stand, Pur Zenkiren had not been elected to be Grand Archbold of the Krzy.

His presence on the Ombor Throne in the Hall of Judgment would have made no difference to the sentence passed on me. I had been tried in my absence and found guilty; the Krzy merely gave me the outward show, as my right as a Krozair, to witness my own condemnation. Zenkiren could scarcely have subverted justice. So I must see him. There were one or two plans I had in that direction. When I say the Krozairs have no mercy I must qualify the bald statement as, clearly, you will already have realized is necessary. I had been granted the boon of a short meeting with my wife. For this the Krozairs showed the compassion which made them human. Without this Zair-inspired gift I doubt if my allegiance to the Krzy and my willingness to place the education of my sons in their care could have existed. The day passed slowly. I drank sparingly and ate well and sharpened up the best of the longswords my rogues had brought. They were not Krozair longswords, being of that pattern issued to the men who fought in the swifters. For all that, they were fine weapons. Naghan the Gnat would have sniffed at them, no doubt, as would Wil of the Bellows in far Djanduin, but they would serve. As I had done before, I slipped out before the last of the glow of the Suns of Scorpio faded from the sky. From my leafy point of observation I awaited either Nath and Zolta, a party from the swifters intent on retaking me, or simply no one at all.

I saw the leaves moving alongside the trail and I frowned.

Whoever approached the hut was coming up from the other direction. I took a grip on the sword. This looked promising.

The last of that glorious streaming mingled light of Antares fell on the edge of the little clearing past the corner of the hut. It sparkled on the strip of water curving in and shone on the loose camouflaging cover of the boat hidden there.

A warrior stepped out onto the path, tensed, head high, his weapons ready. He was a Chulik.

I did not need the green badges, the embroideries and studding of his uniform to know him. A mercenary Chulik in the employ of Grodnim yetches, he stood there alertly while he was joined by two of his fellows. I marked them well.

All wore their heads shaved beneath the helmets, with the long tails dangling down their backs, all dyed green, bright and ominous in the last emerald fires of Genodras.

Chuliks are born with two arms and two legs and possess faces which, apart from the three-inch, upward-reaching tusks, might have been human, except that they know nothing of humanity. Their skin is oily yellow and their black eyes are small, round and habitually fixed in gazes of hypnotic rigidity. They are strong, with bodies well-fleshed with fat, and they are quick. They are superb weapon-masters. These three quite clearly were a scout party, sniffing out the secrets of the Zairians on this small island. Once they saw the four swifters they would report back. The projected attack by the men of Zair would be betrayed — betrayed and doomed.

No doubt the swifter from which they had come lurked on the opposite shore, ready to race back to the main fleet with news.

Well, I had been dishonored and condemned by the men of Zair. I had been rejected, considered fit for the fight only to pull an oar. I was a Valkan, a Vallian, Lord of Strombor, King of Djanduin. What were the petty squabbles of red and green to such a mighty man as I? These sarcastic thoughts passed through my head and were gone like swallows at evening. Surely this was a test, sent by Zair himself. Slowly, comfortably, I stood up and stepped out into the clearing. The last shards of emerald light fell across the trees, turning them into jeweled marvels. The air sang with the sound of evening insects. The grass glittered with dew.

The Chuliks saw me.

I was still hairy although washed clean. I wore a brave old scarlet breechclout. They knew, as I knew, that we could not allow a survivor. They must slay me or I must slay them. The destinies of Grodno and Zair demanded nothing less.

With an absolute confidence that might have shaken less of a maniac than I am they advanced, their longswords ready.

The first Chulik surprised me.

"Cramph! Lay down your sword and yield, lest we slay you." I overcame my surprise. This was not mercy. This was a mere device to take a prisoner and extract information.

I said: "You three are dead men."

Chuliks and I, we do not laugh often. A diff of another race might have thrown his head back and guffawed his scorn and merriment. These three spread out and came on, silently. The green light would soon be all gone. The sword glimmered like ice in my fists. I did not use the cunning Krozair grip. I have spoken a little of this Krozair longsword grip, but there is much more to it than the mere spacing out of the hands on the handle, much more, including the angle of the hands, the placing of the thumbs, the delicate and yet brutal over-and underhand play — yes, much more. The Chuliks would know about Krozairs. They came on with sure purpose. After that first exchange it was all silent and deadly there beneath the dying green sun.

I leaped.

I did not wait for them.

The sword chirred. In the moment of leaping, before I landed and gripped the bulk of Kregen beneath my feet and struck, I had shifted grips. The full force of the longsword flung by the cunning, twisting motion of the Krozair grip ripped the head from the first Chulik’s shoulders. Stupid! Wasteful! This was not the professional fighting man-killer Dray Prescot; this was the old savage and barbaric Dray Prescot of bygone years.

The second Chulik bored in, his sword thrusting for my belly; the third circled and slashed down at my head.

I parried the one and slid the other and whirled the sword back. The Chulik leaped clear, but I had aimed short and so was able to carry the blow around, low and dirty, and cut the ankles from number three. As I leaped back, the longsword snapping up into position again, I cursed. I was fighting with power and fury and letting my muscles do the work. I, who had been a hyr-kaidur of the Jikhorkdun!

Passion and senseless ferocity marked me during that fight. I needed to bash a few skulls, the black blood in me seething to run foaming and free.

The second Chulik — now so dreadfully the last — did not back off. He was a fighter — well, all Chuliks are fighters — but he fancied his chances, seeing the massive anger I had put into my strokes. He would feint with me a while and then use his skill to slay me. So he thought. The blades touched and rang and then shirred in that shivery sound of war-metal striking war-metal. He lopped and aimed to slash, shortened and thrust. I parried and then bashed him back. From the tail of my eye I could see the footless one crawling along leaving a trail of red. If I trod near him he’d reach up and spit me. I angled away.

The swords blurred. The shadows dropped down. It was all very quick in the nature of a fight and yet all the hallmarks of the slow, mail-crushing longsword fighting held us both. This Chulik might have done better with his shortsword against me, an unarmored man. He most likely would not have though, I think, looking back.

He fought well and then I had him. A neat parade and hand-rolling movement dazzled him long enough for me to clear space to swing backhanded at his neck. The mail hood erupted. This time I struck with force sufficient only to strike through to his neck bone. His head lolled off, most grotesquely, with the blood spouting onto his mail, fouling all the bright green insignia.

The crawler knew he was finished and slit his own throat.

I felt a tiny whisper of surprise at this; it was known, but rare among Chuliks. I dragged the three of them back off the trail, out of the clearing. When I straightened up, the stars glittered in their hosts and She of the Veils floated serenely above, a new sharp crescent among the stars. Removing their armor was not difficult and relieving them of their weapons was likewise easy. I would have to cobble the rents in the mail together. I took everything and the supplies from the hut down to the boat — a muldavy with a dipping lug — and threw them all in and covered them with a flap of canvas. I did not know if Nath and Zolta would return this night or not. If they did not come my relief would be genuine. If they did I would have to make sure they got back to their ship in time. They did arrive, puffing, swearing, calling on Mother Zinzu the Blessed, and searched around. I had moved the muldavy. They found nothing. I heard them arguing and insulting each other. I had to restrain myself, hold myself back from leaping up and embracing them and pummeling them to once more recapture our old comradeship.

But my life held no joys for them.

Eventually, with many a Makki-Grodno curse and a wonderment at my intentions, they wandered off back to the swifter. I waited on the island until the four swifters and the small scout vanished into the darkness. One day, I vowed, and this time I meant to hew to the resolution with great tenacity, I would see them again and explain my ingratitude, so that once more we might go carousing in Sanurkazz and roll into the Fleeced Ponsho, roaring for wenches and drink, skylarking, merrymaking, creating havoc until the fat and jolly mobiles with their rusty swords came waddling up, wreathed in smiles. But all that could only happen if the evil green of Magdag was banished, sent recoiling back to its foul warrens. If the Grodnims overcame the Zairians in the Eye of the World there would be no more lighthearted roistering in Sanurkazz for Nath and Zolta and me — or for any other who followed the red of Zair.

* * * *

It is at this point that the last cassette finishes those making up the Rio de Janeiro tapes. Prior to this point, an event I had come somewhat to dread as denying us anything more of the fascinating and incredible story of Dray Prescot on the planet of Kregen under Antares, a further supply reached me. They were transmitted in the same way as previously, namely, in a packaged box addressed to Mr. Dan Fraser, sent by the executors of his estate to Geoffrey Dean and so to me. They had been dispatched originally from Sydney, Australia. This time there was no covering letter to explain their existence. As usual with Prescot at the controls, the opening of the Sydney tapes is fuzzed with a fair amount of wordage completely lost or so distorted as to be indecipherable. It is possible to make out Prescot talking at some length on the tangled political situation of the inner sea. It seems clear he took the little muldavy and sailed her to the western part of the southern shore in pursuance of his plan to reinstate himself as a Krozair of Zy.

He also speaks — and here his deep voice rolls out — of a name which appears to affect him profoundly. The name is Pakkad.

We are supremely fortunate to be blessed with further cassettes from Dray Prescot and the manner of their arrival here together with the maps he appends is of less moment than their content. Now we may look forward to further adventures on Kregen beneath the red and green suns, and share with Dray Prescot the barbaric color and headlong action of his life under the Suns of Scorpio.

Chapter Fifteen Duhrra

"Step up! Step up! All comers! Duhrra the Mighty Mangler challenges all comers! A golden piece against one fall! Step up, my fine Jernus!"

Torchlights threw lurid splashes of color across the scene. The soldiers and sailors and workmen crowded close among the tents and bales and packing crates, all the impedimenta of an army stores base. The streaming radiance of the Twins threw fuzzy pink shadows into the corners, but the flaring torchlights dominated the shifting, erratic patterns, throwing greedy reflections on lips and anticipatory gleams in crafty eyes. Here was where an army disported itself when out of the line.

"Come on, doms! Come on, Jernus! Duhrra the Mighty Mangler welcomes all challenges. Clean wrestling, with the first fall to count against a gold piece! Where’s your pride?" The speaker — or, rather, the shouter — was a thin weasely individual with the face of a wersting, all fangs and ferociousness. His thin body, incongruously clad in a flowing scarlet robe, cinctured by a trashy brassy-gold belt, looked scarcely capable of lifting a longsword. He wore a tall white and red mitered cap streaming with arbora feathers, and he kept tossing a gold piece up and down in the clawed palm of one hand. With the other hand he pointed with great meaning to Duhrra the Mighty Mangler.

"There stands Duhrra! Undisputed champion of Crazmoz!’ Any swod of the army who can best him takes away a gold piece! Step up, Jernus, step up!"

The half-mocking tone in which this barker addressed the clustered crowd, calling them Jernus, lords, made them laugh. But they eyed the massive bulk of the wrestler, shuffled their feet and averted their eyes. No one seemed anxious to step forward into the marked circle.

I studied this Duhrra. A magnificent body, yet bulky, probably not as slow as he looked, with immense corded thighs and plated muscle over his chest — and a belly that would do well to accept a few flagons less of Zond or Chremson.

I was here on the tail of the army with a purpose.

Somewhere further west, engaged in fighting the Grodnims, was Pur Zenkiren. I had to talk to him. Yet I needed a mount, I needed food and drink — shelter could be found under the stars — and for all this I needed money.

Money was the one thing Nath and Zolta had failed to bring.

All kinds of coins circulated among the Zairians. There were the Zo-pieces, minted by King Zo in Sanurkazz. There were many other mints of other free cities of the southern shore. There were the coins of great mercantile houses, banks, lords of the southern shore. And there were the gold and silver oars of Magdag.

The price to engage in combat with Duhrra the Mighty Mangier was a bronze so. That is, a three-piece. I did not possess even an ob, a one-piece.

About to make my move, for I felt confident that I could take this man despite his massive body, I checked. A bulky dwa-Deldar of the varters stepped forward, flinging off his red cloak, baring his hairy chest, bulging his muscles. He tossed a so to the barker with a confident shout of: "I’ll show this hunk of vosk-steak how to fight!"

"Hai!" they shouted. "Hai for Nath the Biceps!"

I studied the ensuing instructive combat.

This Duhrra knew his business. His head was shaved bald, with a small peak and a descending pigtail, somewhat after the manner of an Algonquian or a Chulik, but far less flamboyant. His face bore a blank, expressionless flatness, with a smudge of a nose, upturned upper lip, and a general air of idiocy I felt belied the keenness he would show in hand-to-hand combat. He uttered a low gurgling cry of pleasure as the dwa-Deldar surged forward to come to hand grips.

The dwa-Deldar circled, lunged, gripped, tried to hoist Duhrra and throw him, as doubtless he had done many times to unruly swods in his outfit. Duhrra grunted. He scarcely moved. His corded thighs ridged as he grasped this Nath the Biceps. I saw the smooth heavy face abruptly blaze with power, the small dark eyes suddenly filled with great joy. Then, with a mighty heave, the dwa-Deldar, Nath the Biceps, flew into the air to land with a dust-billowing crash on his back.

The crowd yelled. There were a few boos. But the gold coin continued to flick up and down in the clawed palm of the barker and he chuckled his mirth.

"Undefeated! Duhrra the Mighty Mangler, champion still, winner by a fall!" And then: "Step up, doms!

Step up! A gold piece to be taken this night!"

The crowd began to drift away.

I sidled quickly to the barker and said, "You are losing their interest, dom. Your man wins too easily." He flicked me a liquid glance.

"Aye, dom. I know. But Duhrra is a real champion."

Across the aisle between tents a brilliant concentration of torches lit a crude stage upon which half a dozen girls danced. They wore beads and feathers and they writhed enticingly. The soldiers gaped up, licking their lips. Further along a man kept swallowing balls and snakes of fire, helping them down with daggers. His barker bellowed louder than the one before me.

"I will wrestle with Duhrra," I said.

"Where is your so?"

"If I lose you shall have your so."

One swod with the patches of a sectrixman heard and swung back, calling to his comrades. I stared at this barker who let the gold piece fall to lie in his palm.

"If my old father could see me now!" he cried. "Me, Naghan the Show! Reduced to shilling for nothing!"

"Hurry!"

"He gonna fight or ain’t he gonna fight?" demanded the cavalryman. The crowd hovered. I made up this Naghan the Show’s mind for him.

"I will fight," I declared and threw off my old red cloak. The belt with the longsword and the sailor’s knife followed. Clad only in the old scarlet breechclout I walked into the marked space. Duhrra the Mighty Mangler eyed me. I saluted him.

"You are a man, my friend," I said. "I bear you no ill will." His dull eyes sized me up. He said: "Uh . . . no, dom . . . uh . . . no ill will." Somewhere a woman screamed, "Duhrra’ll kill him!" And another, shriller still, joying: "No! Lookit him!" I fancy my good comrade Turko the Shield, who is a very high kham indeed in the syples of the Khamorros, would have disposed of the Duhrra with no less difficulty than I. The Khamorros are mightily dangerous men in the disciplines of unarmed combat, able to kill or maim with a blow. Yet I had proved my own disciplines of the Krozairs of Zy were superior even to the khamster skills of the Khamorros. Could this Duhrra have benefited from Krozair training? I did not think so. That, as you well know, made me a cheat, for Duhrra stood little chance. Yet he was a massive man, ridged in muscle, iron-hard, with that bald domed head like a battering ram. I would have to be very careful indeed and imagine the mocking bantering eyes of Turko upon me all the time. The fight is scarcely worth the chronicling, for I was minded to be merciful to Duhrra. He attempted to seize me as I advanced and I drew him on. Then, as we had done so many times in the unarmed combat drills in the fortress of Zy, and later as I had with Turko in our little practice area in Esser Rarioch, I took him and turned and twisted and for all his enormous bulk he rotated about the grip and flopped back, toppling, to fall ponderously on the flat of that massive back.

I could not stop myself from saying "Hai Jikai!"

But that was a saying from other places and times.

The crowd stood silently and then, suddenly, burst into roaring applause. I merited no applause. I reached down and took Duhrra’s hand and hoisted him to his feet. I stared into his dark dull eyes and saw an expression there I recognized; I did not know whether to be joyful or shiver with the apprehension of a new responsibility.

Naghan the Show waxed highly indignant.

"The gold piece, Naghan!"

In the end he handed it over.

I had the thing, warm from his claw, in my hand, and was bending to don my cloak and belt when the first shrieks and screams laced the air with panic.

Everyone was running. Pandemonium broke out further along where the bulk of the piled stores cut against the stars. I heard the fierce warlike yells, the battle cries, and I heard again that hated shrilling of:

"Magdag! Magdag! Grodno! Green! Green!"

The longsword shivered in my grip.

Naghan the Show was screaming. He ran. Duhrra scooped up a red cloak and ran with him. I followed. They ought to know their way about this showground outside the base store camp. The devils of Grodnim were raiding from the sea. They aimed to destroy the stores here, in the rear of the army. These civilians, the tail of the army, the camp followers, were mere meat to be butchered. They must flee for their lives. I was not minded to flee, but I wished to fight where I felt success would attend my efforts. To be killed now in a stupid affray would nullify all I fought for in the wider realities. I had to quell that perfectly natural feeling that I ran like a nulsh from a fight. A fighting man who does not pick his field usually does not last long. But I admit I felt the shame and the indignity of running before those hated cries of "Magdag! Grodno! Magdag!"

I owed the Overlords of Magdag. Once I had nearly defeated them with my old slave phalanx of vosk-skulls. Now I must find the guard detail here and form with them to bash these green sea-leems back to their ship and burn them there.

So you see I had changed from the old Dray Prescot who had once roamed and fought over the Eye of the World.

Or so I thought in my folly.

Naghan the Show panted out, "Into the ruins! There we may hide from these cramphs of Magdag." Duhrra gave a low grunting cry, unintelligible. When Naghan stumbled he caught the slight body up and carried him as one would carry a feather pillow.

Behind us the sky began to light up as the Grodnims started their fires among the stores. Away to our right along the shore the dark masses of tents and the long sectrix lines remained silent. If the guards did not counterattack soon they might as well shut up shop. The crazed mobs of people were running every which way. Ahead up a slight incline, sandy and scattered with thorn-ivy under the light of the moons, lay the sere gray skeletal arms of the ruins.

"Careful of that damned thorn-ivy, Duhrra," I said.

"I will . . . uh . . . take care, master."

"I am not your master."

He did not reply but ran on, carrying the complaining form of Naghan the Show over one brawny shoulder.

Still no sign of the necessary counterattack. We had broken clear of a mass of people. There were soldiers in that mass. I stopped running.

"Damn it!" I burst out "This won’t do! By Zair, I’m not running from some kleesh of a Magdaggian!" Duhrra stopped also. His smooth massive head turned and that blank, heavy-lidded idiot-face gave me no inkling of what he thought or felt Then:

"I shall fight with you, master."

"There is no call. You are not a soldier."

"Yet I can fight."

"Aye. Aye, by Zair, you can fight, Duhrra."

He put Naghan the Show back on his feet. He patted the fancy clothes into place, perched the tall miter cap squarely on the narrow head. Naghan squealed.

"What are you trying to do, Duhrra? Ruin me!"

"Zair needs all our arms this night, master."

Turning back, I spread my arms and yelled, as I was wont to yell hailing the foretop in a gale of Ushant or bellowing at my Djangs in the arrow-storm, halting the running mob. Quickly I roared a dozen or so soldiers back to a semblance of their duty. One, stricken with fear, insisted on running. Him I struck senseless with my fist and gave his sword to Duhrra. Then, with little hope but with hard determination, we went back to face the leems of Grodno.

Fortunately, for the fight would have gone ill for us, the guard eventually turned out and we smashed and bashed our way against the hated green. In among tall piles of lumber, massive lenken logs needed in fortress construction by the army engineers, we fought and chased the raiders of Magdag, as they fought and slew us.

The erratic light from the Twins cast pinkish reflections from burnished armor, caught rosy stars in the twinkling weapons that withdrew darker red, made seeing difficult. Pursuing a group of Magdaggian swods — they were apims like me — up an alleyway between stacked lumber, I sprawled headlong over a corpse whose dark red blanket-cloak completely deceived me in the rosy glow. I cursed and stumbled up. Ahead of me and backed against the lumber a young man in red fought two Chuliks in green.

The young man was yelling — screaming — as his sword blurred this way and that. He would not last long.

He screamed in high desperation: "Dak! Dak! Aid me now! For the sweet sake of Zair, Dak, to me! To me!"

Past the Chuliks were three other Chuliks and two Rapas, their vulturine beaks gaping with the passions of battle. Ringed by these five stood a man whose white hair blazed with pink highlights and roseate shadows, an old man, a man past two hundred years old. Yet, as I staggered about feeling the effect of that sprawling fall, I saw this white-haired man surge against the nearest Chulik, duck the blow, strike the Chulik’s legs, cut back against the nearest Rapa, screech his blade along the diffs side. The longsword whirled underhand. The white-haired man shouted, a high full voice that drew every ounce of effort from him.

"Hold, Jernu! Hold! I am with you!"

And then — it was wonderful, courageous, bold; it was the true Jikai — this man, this old white-haired man called Dak smashed his way past the two Chuliks, ripped the guts from the last Rapa and so hurled himself at the two opposing his lord.

He had no chance. He exposed his back as he struck shrewdly at the first. The blow was parried. I saw the slowness of this Dak’s reactions, saw that the strength had been drained from him. He knew his end was come and he flashed his longsword before his eyes and so drank for the last time of a foeman’s blood.

As he fell beneath the slashing blows he shouted for the last time.

"Zair! Jikmarz! Jikmarz!"

He fell.

The whole incident took practically no time at all, less time than it took me to scrabble up from the corpse and shake the infernal ringing of those famous Bells of Beng Kishi from my skull, take a fresh grip on my sword and leap forward.

The young man screamed now, screamed high and shrill like a dying leem with the long lances of my clansmen transfixing its lean and evil body.

"Dak! Dak! Sweet Jikmarz! Dak!"

"Hold!" I bellowed, surging forward. "I am coming!" As I smashed into the Chuliks and the group of apims I had been pursuing, Duhrra came to my side. Together we fought against the foemen, seeking to save the young man. We slew until our arms ran red with Magdaggian blood, until the last Chulik fell with his body hacked and butchered before he would drop, but when we reached that young man, that Brother of the Red Brethren of Jikmarz, he was dead. Duhrra, his plated chest expanding and contracting evenly as he drew in enormous lungfuls of air, regarded me somberly.

"You fight well, Dak. Yet is this boy slain."

That be called me Dak was a mere mistake of the moment, a chance that he understood the Red Brother of Jikmarz to be calling on me when he screamed for Dak. The amazement was in his way of speaking, with no hesitation, no idiot’s repetition of the opening "duh" to every sentence, no slurring of speech. Was this only the result of battle?

"Yes. It is the will of Zair."

I looked up. The mass of lumber moved. A beam toppled, twisting, falling.

"Stand clear, Duhrra!"

I leaped back. Duhrra braced to spring and the side of the stack of timbers bulged as a grain sack bulges in the moment it is slit open. The enormous weight of the logs rolled smashing down on Duhrra. In the leaping dust I caught a single glimpse of his left arm outflung toward me with the moon-oval of his face glimmering pinkly through the shadows. I grasped his hand and pulled. His mouth opened, but in the rolling noise of toppling logs I did not hear him. He would not budge. A beam struck my legs away from me and I cursed and surged back, then, mercifully, the logs lay still. The dust plumed in the air and drifted down. There was a sickly smell of rotting vegetation puffing from the lumber. I looked at Duhrra. He was trapped.

His body lay on the ground, with his right hand caught between two squared beams of timber. I knew, looking, that his hand would be squashed flat, ironed out, ground into a flat and useless pulp.

"I cannot move, master."

Bending to look closely, I was aware that I could see very well. A quick glance back showed me that the loose timber among the stacks was on fire, burning fiercely. The beams, thick and massive though they were, were tinder-dry. They would burn.

And Duhrra lay trapped in the path of the flames.

"It is finished for me, Dak. You had best leave—"

"Shut up Duhrra! I will not leave you."

"Then you too will burn."

Down past the spouts of flame shooting horizontally from the crevices in the stacks a shimmer of movement came closer, the wink of firelight on steel. I peered. In the red firelight the colors down there looked black. Green.

Turning his heavy round head Duhrra saw too. He licked his lips.

"Put my sword into my left hand, Dak, my master. I would die well."

"You are an onker, Duhrra! There is no need to die. I cannot move the beams—"

"Aye. I could not move one. Together we could not move one. And they are piled up on my hand."

"Yet is there a way, if you will take it."

His heavy-lidded eyes regarded me with the shock of a new idea forcing its way into closed and resigned determination.

"Another way? Besides striking until I can strike no more and so go down to the Ice Floes of Sicce?"

"Aye. If you will take it. Many men would prefer to die . . ."

"I see, Dak, my master. It is clear now."

"Well?"

He regarded me with a maddening slowness, almost complacency.

"It is for you to choose, Dak, my master."

"I’m not your damn master! And there is a saying where I come from: Where there’s life there’s hope. So that’s settled."

Don’t think I was unaware of what the decision meant to a man like Duhrra, a superb physical specimen

— somewhat on the heavy and bulky side, to be sure — who had lived by wrestling. To any man the decision would be hard. But I had seen the way Duhrra had used his longsword in his right hand, all heavy swishings and smashings as though he cut down trees. With his great physical strength that method of using a longsword would serve, at least in the yelling confusion of a battle. He would not have lasted long against just one of the Chuliks with space to display technique and bladesmanship.

"The green sea-leems come on," said Duhrra. "I am no calsany in these matters. Why do you hesitate?"

"I would like to know you are resolved first."

"I am resolved."

The fires spurted closer; the green cramphs from Magdag approached with hungry weapons. Perhaps the choice was not as difficult as I had imagined.

From one of the corpses I ripped a strip of humespack and tore the cloth with vicious fingers. As I had seen the skilled doctors of Valka do so I bound a strip around Duhrra’s arm and knotted it until I brought a dinting furrow between his eyebrows, all the signs of pain this man-mountain would condescend to show.

I stepped back and took up my longsword.

He said, "Do not tarry, Dak. The rasts of Magdag are almost here, and the fire burns." The longsword slashed down.

I dragged Duhrra to his feet, leaving his squashed hand and a tiny portion of his wrist to burn away between the logs. The blow had been good, the aim true. Blood spurted, of course, but he would survive until I could have a doctor treat his stump.

The fires roared and crackled and the smoke beat down as the breeze blew. I held Duhrra. More figures appeared, men wearing the red. Now I deliberately moved away from a fight. A Hikdar shouted, high, triumphant: "We have the cramphs on the run!"

I did not grunt sourly at him that the Grodnim-gastas had done the work for which they came. Together Duhrra and I went from that scene of carnage and fire and blood to seek a needleman to tend Duhrra’s pain and stump.

He breathed a harsh intake of breath. "I do not think, Dak, that I would like men to call me Duhrra the Ob-Handed."

"If you insist they do not, they will not," I said peacefully.

"That is true."

So we walked away, and I ruminated that I had had the best of the bargain that night. For Duhrra had lost a hand and I had gained a name.

Chapter Sixteen

I come to my senses

I, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of — No! No! I was no longer a Brother of the Krozairs of Zy. I must not forget that. I could not forget that. It was branded on my brain with a searing iron.

I, that same plain Dray Prescot who had born many names on Kregen under Antares, no longer a Krozair Brother, had to assume a fresh alias.

The reasons were plain and pressing: should a man calling himself Prescot be encountered among the army, here in the west, where there were many Krozair Brothers, then the word would pass, the retribution would be swift.

I obviously had to have an alias, and one had been given into my keeping. I would honor the name of Dak. The old white-haired man had proved a true Jikai. In my misery and determination I keenly felt the task of keeping the name of Dak unsullied.

The conceit must have moved me that I had used the name Drak many times before; it was the name of the mythical hero of Vallia, part-god, part-man, and it was the name of my eldest son. Drak and Dak. Yes, the conceit moved me.

The next day the wreckage of the base could be surveyed.

The Grodnims had wreaked great destruction, yet there was much left they had not touched. This had been a pinprick which, of itself, would not materially harm the armies of Zairians fighting in the west, but which, added to many other similar pinpricks, could place all that strenuous effort in jeopardy. Still, no longer a Krozair, what business was this of mine? I held warm affections for Mayfwy and for Felteraz. I could see the patterns of warfare out here plainly enough. But I held to my own destiny. My Delia had given me my orders, fully understanding my own agony of spirit, the tearing torture I must have experienced in leaving the Eye of the World with all I had held dear there in the Brotherhood of Zy blackened and ruined. And yet . . . and yet. Was being a Krozair Brother so marvelously vital and important a part of my life when set against all that waited for me in the Outer Oceans? No. No, I was a fool, as usual.

For twenty-one miserable years I had not beheld my Delia, I had seen her for a mere bur, there in the fish cell of the fortress of Zy. Looking around at the ruined camp, seeing workers and soldiers hard at repairing, restacking and carrying away burned and ruined stores, I seemed to feel the scales drop from my eyes.

Pride.

That was all it had been. Mere stupid pride.

I had felt my idiot self-esteem hurt, because the single body of men I held in most regard on Kregen had turned me out, disgraced me. And I even understood why they had done it, why they had acted as they did. As the Savanti had thrown me out of the paradise of Aphrasöe and I had felt no real animosity toward them, knowing I had transgressed against their laws, so this time I held no animosity, for in the understanding of Kregen I had again transgressed. No amount of arguing or pleading could possibly change a single Krozair’s mind, let alone that of Pur Kazz, the Grand Archbold. No. The answer was simple.

I had come to my senses.

I would not deny myself or Delia what rightfully belonged to us.

And that, by Krun, was that!

How vicious and cruel those damned Star Lords were! They had banished me to Earth for twenty-one years. And in all that dolorous length of time my Delia had waited for me. When I had previously been banished from Delia — as when I fought in the arena of the Jikhorkdun in Huringa, or when I made myself King of Djanduin — she had spent only a fraction of time in waiting. The Star Lords had created a time loop by some alchemy of their own, so that when, for instance, I fought in Valka and cleared my island of the slavers and aragorn, I had been acting in the past, and my Delia had not even known. Because of that feeling that Delia was not at home pining for me — and the marvel of why so perfect a woman should ever bother her head over a bulk like me always escapes me — I had acted as I would have acted in a time loop. Then the agony of waiting had been for me alone. Now my Delia shared that agony.

I was worse than a mere fool, an onker of onkers. I was an ingrate, a tormentor, a prideful villain, and I deserved all I got.

The decision was made.

I went to say goodbye to Duhrra.

His stump had been cauterized and bound up and he was cheerful enough, considering.

"It is remberee, Duhrra."

"I found Naghan the Show. His head had been cleft in twain."

"It grieves me to hear it."

"I cannot wrestle with one hand—"

"Come now! You could lay most two-handed men flat on their backs without blinking. And think of the billing! The famous wrestler fights with one hand tied behind his back. You would make a fortune."

"It no longer appeals to me."

"So what will you do?"

"You say you are going to the west? That is where the army fights."

"Yes. But I do not go to fight."

He regarded me with a lift of one heavy eyebrow. His thick shoulders rolled as he eased his arm, favoring the stump.

"They are going to fix me up with a hook."

"Is it Duhrra the Hook, then?"

"No!"

I said, "I go to find a ship. Maybe I will have to go as far as the Akhram."

"I have been there."

"It is on the green northern shore."

"True. But the Grand Canal and the Todalpheme of the Akhram stand aloof. As they must." He still looked the same, still with that same heavy, doughy, expressionless idiot-face. His dark eyes looked at me with meaning. He could be highly useful.

I said, "The Todalpheme are very wise."

He said, "I think I will go with you. It will be strange not to stand with folded arms and a stupid expression and listen to Naghan the Show extolling my prowess. It will be strange to walk the world again. I am not a clever man, Dak. I know that. But, just perhaps, I am not quite as stupid as I once thought I was."

You couldn’t say fairer than that.

The lightness of my spirit astounded me.

Now that I had made the decision the whole world of Kregen appeared to me in new colors. I did not laugh, of course, and I cracked but the one smile for Duhrra — and that pained — but I felt liberated, free, all that weight of despond sloughed from me. I had made up my mind. The very Suns of Scorpio blazed the brighter.

"I have but twenty-nine silver zinzers left, for I spent this morning on breakfast, and ate like a king." How incredibly humorous that statement was. I was a king!

"Yes, Naghan always managed to welsh. He slipped you a smaller gold piece than the one he tossed up, I’ll bet."

"A nikzo."

Half a gold Zo-piece. Only thirty instead of the sixty silver zinzers I had won by hurling Duhrra flat on his back. He surprised me. He reached into the flat leather wallet on its strap over his shoulder and I heard the clink of coins. His left hand brought out, with a wink and a flash, another nikzo, brother to that one I had broken in the refreshment tent, paying a whole silver zinzer for tea and vosk-steaks, followed by palines, that would never cost a dhem in Pandahem or a sinver in Hamal. Still, silver coins varied in weights, just as did gold and copper ones. At sixty zinzers to a full gold Zo-piece, you were bound to get less than for the fatter sinvers.

Duhrra saw my expression and misinterpreted it. I was thinking that the damn war was sending prices skyward, the bogey of inflation as much a specter on Kregen in areas where men were stupid enough to fight wars, whereas Duhrra took it for a reaction of pride to his generosity. He held the nikzo out.

"This is rightfully yours. You floored me."

I wanted to be canny. "More by luck than judgment." I hoped that would pass. "Still, a bet is a bet, and I need the cash." I took the money. Pride and I had fallen out.

The truth of the matter was that I held for this big man the same admiration I held for a zhantil: the wild, untamed savagery on the Zhantil’s part matched by the controlled docility of the savagery on Duhrra’s. The apparent dichotomy is only apparent. The idea that he would accompany me pleased me. But that was all.

Duhrra lifted his stump swathed in bandages and stared at it critically. "I must wait for my hook. Tell me what you think best. There is Shazmoz ahead, but it is besieged. They could fix my hook there." My mind was made up in the time a zhyan strikes.

"We go to Shazmoz. There is a man there I must see. After that it will be the Akhram."

Chapter Seventeen

Of a Pachak hyr-Paktun and a Krozair

Making our way into Shazmoz was not going to be easy.

We eased our sectrixes on the rise and let them blow gently while we looked down the long slope toward the army of Zairians encamped below. The sea glittered blue to our right. Not a speck of sail broke that wide expanse. The sky lifted high, high above, blue and distant, and the radiance of opaline light streamed mingled down about us.

"I hear there are thirty thousand," said Duhrra.

"And how many have the Zair-forgotten Grodnims?"

He waved his stump, still wadded in bandages. "No one knows. Men talk. Uh . . . sixty thousand."

"But they must lay siege to Shazmoz and at the same time front our field army. It is not easy for them."

"May Zair rot their bones and turn their livers green."

Shazmoz itself was distantly visible at the end of an inlet, a vision of white cupolas and towers, long white walls baking under the suns. Over there the bestial scenes of siege were being enacted; below us the camp seemed to slumber in the light.

I had heard that the general in command here was a certain Roz Nath Lorft.[5]Men spoke well of him. He was not a Krozair. His task, relieving Shazmoz, appeared daunting and I held the shrewdest suspicion that this Nath Lorft would keep his army in touch, feeling the enemy, keeping them in play for as long as he could. Then, when Shazmoz fell, he would fall back. It seemed the Zairians had lost the ability to meet the Grodnims in the open field with any hope of success.

Scattered parties of men were about the eternal tasks of soldiers. Very few people chose to live close to the shore of the Eye of the World; from time immemorial raids have devastated the inland coasts. If there was no secure fortress very close at hand, the coastline would lie empty and deserted under the suns, so these men were totally dependent on the supply trains. They might try to send forage parties inland, but the hated green ruled there by virtue of its greater numbers and this devil-inspired confidence of winning any open encounter.

Duhrra waited my commands. His assumption of my mastery irked me. I found him dour and taciturn as a rule, which suited me as I was alike in the matter. But I wanted him to feel and act the part of a companion. This he was either unable or unwilling to do. I shook the reins.

"Let’s go down and make a start."

The camp merits no detailed description, being an army camp, except for the one particular that it was a camp of men of the red southern shore of the inner sea, and therefore a camp of highly individualistic Zairians. I doubt there was one single straight row of tents. Higgledy-piggledy, set down in the best site available, to the Ice Floes of Sicce with regimentation — this was the attitude of the Zairians. Oh, they were formed up in formations as to title and number and function, and no doubt in some dusty office of the Pallan responsible papers were to be found with the details scribbled down. But the Zairians fought as they lived, sprawling, rambunctious, riotous, each man anxious to get to hand grips with his opponent. The cavalry would lower lances and charge the instant anything approached they considered chargeable. The footmen would rave and yell and boil over in their efforts to keep up. Only the varterists held some discipline, and this because the craft and science of their art demanded rule and order. Swashbuckling — aye, that is a good word for Zairians.

We trotted our sectrixes down the slope. Duhrra had come into all of Naghan the Show’s possessions, and the cash was used to buy what was necessary for our journey. I found I still did not like the sectrix. This was the first of that species of six-legged saddle animals I had encountered. The nactrix is found in the hostile territories. The totrix in the lands of the outer oceans. Poor Rees! What had happened to his regiment of totrixes? And to Chido? I must not think of them — twenty-one years must have destroyed the last vestiges of their feelings for Hamun ham Farthytu. I imagined Nulty at Paline Valley would be the Amak in all but name by now. These dusty memories enraged me, so I bashed the sectrix in the flanks and we went careering down the last of the hill and flying into the camp. A group of men were formed into a ring and as I went up and down in the saddle to the awkward, cross-grained gait of the sectrix, I saw dust flying up from the center of the circle.

"Stand away there!" I bellowed. The sectrix was maddened now, its head rearing up and sideways against the bit. On we thundered. The backs of the ring of men came nearer and nearer.

"Out of the way! Stand clear!"

Now one or two faces turned my way. The noise was really rather wonderful. The swods yelled. The ring of red backs switched around. Faces contorted, mouths yelled, arms and legs swayed up and out —

and I was rolling past in a bellow of noise. Then the stupid sectrix tangled all its six legs among the gang of men struggling over the open ground and down we all came in a whirling flurry of collapsing bodies. Head over heels and away, rolling among a welter of red uniforms and naked chests and a Pachak’s tail-hand gripping my arm and a pair of studded marching sandals beating a tattoo on my head and — I surged up, gulping for air, stood there with the Pachak bellowing angrily, the swods toppling aside, the dust and noise in the sunshine perfectly splendid.

"Silence, you pack of famblys!" I roared. I took my left hand to my right and removed the Pachak’s tail-hand. He coiled his tail over his head and glared about ferociously. His red uniform was torn. He had a few cuts on his face. I saw the faces of the swods, so I knew what was going on here.

"Who in the name of Zogo the hyr-whip are you, you rast?"

I jumped for the swod who spoke, took his throat in my hand, squeezed — only a trifle — and bellowed: "Who I am is my business, you nurdling onker. But you speak to me with respect, or I’ll ring Beng Kishi’s Bells so loudly in your skull your brains will spout out your ears." A couple of the men liked that image. They laughed. I let the man go and stepped back. To the Pachak I said, "Now is your chance to walk off with dignity."

Pachaks are diffs of middle height, with two left arms, a whip-like tail equipped with a hand, straw-yellow hair, an intense loyalty and a fighting capacity that has caused great argument among the professionals of Kregen.

The Pachak said, "I shall stay and fight them with you."

I said, "I do not intend to fight them, dom."

"A pity."

Then Duhrra rolled up on his sectrix and started edging the animal in through the ring. The dust was settling. An ord-Deldar appeared and began bellowing, as all Deldars bellow, and the men shuffled off. They cast longing looks back.

"You," I said to the Pachak, "will have some recreation if those fellows get off early tonight."

"They are apims,"

I did not laugh. "So am I."

"True. But you have a heart that weighs its decisions."

The laugh was very near now, incongruously near. "If that were only so, then I would not be here."

"Nor me. I am Logu Pa-We. At the moment my nikobi is given to the Roz, Nath Lorft na Hazernal."

"I am Dak, and this is Duhrra." I let my glance dwell just long enough on the small gold zhantil-head he wore on a silk cord threaded through a top buttonhole. "You are a hyr-paktun, Logu Pa-We. We are honored."

His straw-yellow hair fell about him, ripped free of its braids in the fight. Now he swept it back over his forehead with a gesture of pride. Any man, no matter what race, who gains the coveted pakzhan, the gold zhantil-head that indicates his status as a highly renowned soldier of fortune, a notorious mercenary, will be proud.

"And you who call yourself Dak. You also are a paktun?"

I had to ignore his choice of words. "I have been a paktun in my time . . ."

"Then you still are."

"But I have never worn the pakzhan." I couldn’t add that during my periods of mercenary service I had, indeed, worn the pakmort, for he would never understand why I had taken it off, unless I had been disgraced. It requires a court of fellow paktuns to bestow the pakmort, and a court of hyr-paktuns to bestow the pakzhan. As for that wild and feral beast, the mortil, he is almost as large and powerful as the superbly impressive zhantil; he is just as savage and free.

This Pachak hyr-paktun fingered his golden pakzhan. The pakmort is fashioned from silver but it is also worn on a silk thread looped through a convenient top buttonhole or on the shoulder knot over armor.

"You will drink with me?"

"Aye, gladly," said Duhrra.

The Pachak glanced at him and curled his tail in a single cracking acceptance. I have a great deal of respect for the Pachaks as people. I like to hire them as mercenaries, for they are intensely loyal to their employers and will fight to the death. So we three went off to the nearest tent offering refreshment. I demanded tea, that superb Kregan tea, for I was thirsty.

We talked as fighting men will talk, a rapid shorthand of professional jargon that conveyed much information in few words.

The army here was in trouble. The Grodnims always seemed able to best the Zairians in battle. "They lack discipline," commented the Pachak, Logu Pa-We. "I think I will not renew my nikobi when the contract expires."

"You would fight for the Grodnims?" Duhrra showed his ignorance then, as almost all Zairians were ignorant of the diffs of Kregen and their ways.

Logu flicked his tail-hand around his jug, but he answered equably enough. "That would not be ethical."

"You great onker," I said to Duhrra, and drank tea.

"Yes, master."

"And I’m not your master, by the diseased intestines of Makki-Grodno!"

"I do not agree with you in that, Dak."

The Pachak, evidently summing us up as just two more unstable and highly unprofessional Zairians, drifted into more general conversation. I learned what I could. When I said we wanted to get through the lines and into Shazmoz he pursed his lips.

"You would run great risks."

"There is a man I must see there."

"And I need a hook."

"Yes, there is a man renowned for that there."

The contract the Pachaks entered into with their employers they called their nikobi. That is, it was a weak approximation to the obi which gave authority and working arrangements to my clansmen of Segesthes. It was half an obi. Chuliks and Rapas and Fristles worked a different system. The myriad different forms of human beings on Kregen never cease to fascinate me. They are as different in their bodily forms as they are in the working processes of their minds. Yet they are all human and share human attributes. It would need an insensitive clod of a very high order of cloddishness to regard them as freaks, as candidates for a zoo or a menagerie. They are men and women. How odd we must look, we two apims, Duhrra and me, in the eyes of this Pachak. He would regard us as being crippled. We had only one left arm each, and so would always have trouble in taking powerful blows on a shield. We had a bare bottom each, with no incredibly useful tail with its grasping hand. He would find it laughable and impossible that a whole world swung in space peopled by cripples like us. I had the notion, fed by thoughts about the Everoinye, that very possibly a world existed peopled only by Pachaks. It made sense. No, the multifarious forms call forth no slighting or disbelieving comments about inmates of zoos or menageries; menagerie men contribute to the life and color and adventure of Kregen. I would have it no other way, clods or no clods.

The drinking was now bringing out the singing. Men love to sing on Kregen, and women too, in their own way.

The suns were declining now and, in the casual way of the Zairian military, the soldiers had had enough for the day. The songs lifted. A group of Pachaks serving with Logu Pa-We sang too, but the apims of the southern shore sang alone.

Logu was telling us of that remote and eerily mysterious land of Tambu, off the southwest coast of the continent of Loh. He was one of the very few men I had heard claim they had been there. He was saying the experience had scarred him in his ib. He would never go back. He was as well aware of the lands of the outer oceans as I was — better, probably — and it was clear he was now regretting his decision to bring his men into the inner sea. Or regretting that he had joined up with the reds instead of the greens. But his ideas of paktun ethics must be admired.

The Zairian swods were singing The Destiny of the Fishmonger of Magdag, a highly colored and lurid account and one calculated to bring mirth to the voice and tears to the eyes, with the crashing down of the jugs onto the sturm-wood tables on the refrain "For the fish heads came off red, came off red, the fish heads dropped off red, red, red."

The pang struck me then: what did these fine roistering fellows, snug in their inner sea, know of the fishheads of the outer oceans?

Panshi had told me there had been no further raids after the one in which I had gone wandering on my travels, as he had phrased it. But I knew the internecine battle between the red and the green, here in the Eye of the World, was of scant importance beside the greater conflicts waiting outside in the greater world.

That very snugness had, I know, been a great deal of the charm of the Eye of the World, of my affection for the Krozairs.

The Swifter with the Kink went up — how we all dreaded a swifter whose lines were not true, as with the galleys’ inordinate length-to-breadth ratio they so often were! And then the Chuktar with the Glass Eye battered against the stars. Oh yes, the swods sang.

I caught Duhrra’s eye and motioned. Logu caught the signal, for Pachaks are quick in these matters, and we three rose and went out, away from the campfires and the singing.

"So you wish to steal into Shazmoz?"

"That is our intention."

"Maybe a way can be found. You will need to be silent and quick . . . and to bear up." I think Logu was going to say we would have need of courage, but he had the sense to halt himself.

"You must leave all preparations to me."

I thought it fair to warn him: "That is agreeable. But we shall keep our fists upon our swords and the blades loose in the scabbards."

He chuckled and his yellow hair glowed strangely under the light of the moons. We went through the moons-lit darkness toward the shapes of tents which seemed in less of a muddle than the others. A small body of Pachaks formed about us, grim men with blades already gripped in their tail-fists. It took very little time before we were all mounted up and riding softly out of the camp. This army of Zairians comprised detachments from many free red cities of the southern shore and other lands from further south; there were parties of Krozairs and Red Brethren also. We were able to pass through the last picket lines — these were men from Tremzo, stalwart fellows with pickled hides from drinking of their own produce — and so walk our sectrixes slowly off into the no-man’s-land between the contending armies.

"You are determined to get your hook?"

"Aye, Dak. As you are to see this man you prate of."

In a little dell we dismounted and the Pachaks opened their saddlebags. I did not make a face, but the sight of the green robes and the green feathers filled me with disgust.

"It is necessary," said Logu peremptorily, "that you wear these garments." We did so without arguing. When we resumed our movement we were a returning patrol of Grodnim scouts. I thought perhaps we were a little early for that, but after we had passed the first sentries with quick and harshly intemperate words from the hyr-paktun who led us, I realized Logu knew what he was doing. The way led us through a well-packed road where the moonslight glittered on the ruts of wheeled traffic. Supplies and varters. The damned Grodnims were organized. I knew how well they could handle slaves; even the Katakis could teach them little in that nauseating department of economics. The breathing mass of a camp showed on our left. A few lights hung in regulation intervals. We pressed on. After a time we angled sharply to our right, toward the coast Sand shushed and shirred beneath the sectrixes. A dark shape rose ahead to bar our path and the moons shone on a lifted spear. What Logu said in a whisper I did not hear, but we went on with the spear returned to the upright position and the sentry stepping back from our path. He was a Fristle, his cat-face and slanted eyes turning to watch us go. We passed in silence.

Presently Logu reined alongside me.

"My brother is near now. You swear that your mission has nothing to do with the armies here, with the fight we have?"

"Nothing, as Zair is my witness." It was true.

"And as Papachak the All-Powerful is mine, if you lie your tripes will spill steaming on the ground." He meant it. I meant what I said. We understood each other.

His brother turned out to be cut from the same cloth. They conferred for a moment, their sectrixes close, and I caught the words " . . . paktun not in employment."

If you marvel that two brothers could serve in armies opposed to each other then the rigid system of mercenaries on Kregen has escaped you. If they met in battle these two would fight. That was a part of their mystique, why they were paktuns; if asked they would look puzzled and say, probably, "It is in our nikobi."

But they were human beings in these stark surroundings, and I saw the real affection these two grim fighting men bore for each other. Duhrra and I might pass on; Logu’s brother would not, of course, in the ethics of nikobi, allow him to pass.

After that we were passed through and Logu’s brother said in his gruff voice, "You had best leave your greens here."

We doffed the hated green and, once more clad in the brave old red, set forth into the darkness. In only a bur or so we came under the walls of Shazmoz and the first patrols. With many exclamations of wonder we were escorted into the encircled town.

The sight of a city under siege is unpleasant The place moved with a sluggish air most displeasing. The men looked gaunt. We passed fires made from smashed houses and saw women there, poor bedraggled creatures who held out their hands to us. When a few gold coins were tossed to them they spat and hurled them back. Of what use gold? One cannot eat gold.

A Hikdar met us under the lamp over the citadel door. Like any city that sought to exist on the coast of the inner sea, Shazmoz was heavily fortified, with a defended harbor. The citadel frowned on a hill above the nighted waters. I said, "It is necessary that I see Pur Zenkiren."

"Your business? You come from Roz Nath?"

"No. My business is private."

The Hikdar was not a Krozair. I wondered if I dared presume, but guessed the news of the disgrace of Pur Dray Prescot would already have been spread. He looked at us undecided. Duhrra moved uneasily on his sectrix and then dismounted.

"Hikdar, Is there one here called Molyz ti Sanurkazz? Molyz the Hook-Maker?" And Duhrra held up his stump.

"Yes. He is here."

The Hikdar made no move to admit us. A guard party hovered near, bows drawn. This was an anticlimax. And yet who could blame the Hikdar? Strangers coming in the night through enemy lines demanding to see the general in charge of a besieged city? This stank of treason. So I spoke a few short words that, whispered in the ear of a Krozair Brother, would apprise him that one of his fellows sought audience. The Hikdar nodded. "I will see. Stay here." The wait stretched. Then he was back. "Come."

Many and many a time have I marched through a grim gray castle surrounded by guards. Often they have been my men, as often perhaps they have guarded me. Our feet rang on the flags. Torchlight flared and marked our way with fleeting shadows. Up through the levels we marched, stairway by stairway, past guards who, every one, showed the ravages of hunger and privation. Along a passage a carpet muffled the tramp of our feet, then we reached a lenken door bound in iron. The Hikdar bashed on the door; it swung back and we were ushered into an anteroom filled with aides, young dandified men wearing profuse red decorations. There was another door, another knock, a fresh entrance. I did not see the room. I did not see the furnishings. I was hardly aware of the guards crowding at my elbow, of Duhrra breathing hoarsely in my ear.

All my vision concentrated on the man who stood in the center of the floor, half turned to greet this importune Krozair Brother come so suddenly in the night.

Pur Zenkiren.

I stared at him. By Zair! I knew I had changed not at all in appearance from the man he had known and to whom he had bid remberee in Pattelonia far away on the eastern shore. But Pur Zenkiren! I felt the blood thump from my heart. Where he had been tall and limber, with a fine bronzed fearless face, now that face looked gray, with folds of sagging skin. The bold black mustache still jutted fiercely upward beneath the beak of a Zairian nose, but that nose was bone-fine, thinned down, razor-edged. His black curled hair was as profuse as ever. About Zenkiren there hovered the black vulture wings of defeat and despair.

He wore a long white robe and a Krozair longsword belted at his waist. The device of the hubless spoked wheel within the circle shone dimly on his breast, the threads dulled and the scarlet embroideries broken away. The hem of the white robe was caked with mud.

"You have important business with me?"

His voice had lost the firm ring of authority. In the lamplight — cheap mineral oil which stank in the chamber — he peered toward me. I stood positioned most carefully so that the shadow of the gross bulk of Duhrra fell over me, casting me into limbo.

"My name is Dak, Pur Zenkiren. I pray you" — and here I mentioned a word or two known only to the Krozairs — "hear me in private."

Whatever had befallen this man, he remained a Krozair. He waved his hand and the guards withdrew. He stared at Duhrra’s stump.

"Yes, Jernu," said Duhrra, immense in the shadowed room, bending his head. "I seek a boon from Molyz the Hook-Maker."

"There was no need to ask me." He gestured at me, in Duhrra’s shadow. "Stand you forth, you who dub yourself Pur Dak, and let me see you."

I said, "I did not presume to dub myself Pur, Jernu. But I must beg you to listen to what I have to say before you make a judgment. All men know of your wisdom and upright countenance. I humbly crave your indulgence."

This, I fancied, was how a man might think it proper to address a powerful lord who commanded a city, besieged though that city might be. I knew from old experience that Pur Zenkiren put as much store by flowery words as I did myself.

"You speak in riddles! Step forth so that I may see you. Instantly!" There came the old hard smack of command.

Slowly I stepped into the light.

He stared at me for a long time.

Then he walked a few steps to a table cluttered with lists and maps and an empty bottle on its side, where the oil lamp trailed a thin plume of blue smoke. He put a hand to the wood; he did not sit in the broken-backed chair.

"Why do I not instantly call out for the guards? Are you broken from your ib and come to torment me?

Is it you? No, it cannot be you."

"I stand before you, an innocent man adjudged guilty. Think back, Pur Zenkiren! Think back to the deck of a Magdaggian swifter running with the blood of the Overlords, and a slave with a brand in his fist. Think back to Felteraz and Mayfwy and the broad prizes brought into Sanurkazz. Think of Zy and loyalty and comradeship, and then tell me, face to face, man to man, looking me in the eye, tell me, Pur Zenkiren, if Pur Dray is or ever can be—"

He did not let me finish.

He lifted up his voice and shouted: "Apushniad!"

He had not let me finish; he had finished the sentence himself, and he had finished me.

Chapter Eighteen

A case for casuistry

A vision of Delia sprang into my head. Clear, distinct, infinitely appealing. My course was set. The guards would come boiling in in the next mur. I leaped for Zenkiren and clapped a hand around his mouth and with the other pinned his right arm to his side. And I laughed. I roared with laughter, shouting my glee!

"Aye!" I roared. "Aye, Jernu, well may you laugh!" Duhrra said, "Uh?"

I said, "Laugh, Duhrra, just a little." Then, in a heartbeat: "Thank you, Duhrra. Your laugh clinches all." Zenkiren writhed. But his strength was wasted away. I held him. I bent and whispered in his ear.

"You will listen to me. We were friends once. We remain friends for my part. I know that if I said I would kill you if you cried out again for the guards, you would cry out, defying all, for the sake of the Brotherhood. This I know."

He rolled his eyes and we both knew I spoke the truth.

"The Azhurad was sounded. I did not come. I do not deny I failed. But it is the nature of my failure that needs examination." It is said on Earth that it takes a Jesuit to chop logic. Casuistry of itself forms little part of the techniques of dialectic of the Krzy, but intricately detailed arguments and debates that sweep away the confines of mundane limitations are a joy to them. The brain must be honed and sharpened to an edge keen enough to slip between reason and reason. I felt Zenkiren’s interest as I went on to present the case. There were two impossibilities and each one negated the other. "I am — was — a true Krozair. I would slay any man who denied me that. And yet I did not hear the Call. How may such a dilemma be resolved, Zenkiren? And, in studying the problem, bear two things in mind.

"You must recall that day in Pattelonia when you asked me to help you in the fight in Proconia. You ordered out a liburna. We sailed and the storm rose and the thunder rolled and the lightning struck. You understood that at the time I was fated to journey east. You were to consult Pur Zazz on the matter. I do not know what he may have told you—" Here I felt a strong jerk from Zenkiren, as though he wished to speak. I gripped him fast and went on. "But it must be clear to you I am not like ordinary men." When I said that I admit I felt like the cheating impostor I truly was. Duhrra let out a gurgling noise which I ignored. The stink of the mineral oil wafted across and the light wavered on the littered table, on the weapons in their racks, the draped alcove where Zenkiren slept.

"That is the first thing you must consider. And the second touches us both. Oh, yes, I know it is long and long since you and I met. I have been too many places and seen many wonders and done many things —

aye, and many of them I would rather not have done. But through all my wanderings and in whatever place I have found myself, I have always thought of myself as a Krzy. Always. It has been the single most important fact of my life — always, as you will understand, after my Delia. You will not understand this, Zenkiren, but it is even of more importance than the Swinging City of Aphrasöe." Even as I spoke I caught my thoughts treacherously swinging, as we used to swing from growth to growth, from house to house in Aphrasöe. After my Apushniad, how could this inner sea be of consequence to me? That was a garblish fool talking. It was not the Eye of the World that was important, it was the mystique of the Krozairs of Zy that grew to overtop the highest peak of the Stratemsk and their concepts of world-shattering import that drew me on. And they drew me on even then, even when I had appointed myself a meeting at the Akhram on the Grand Canal.

I moved Zenkiren, gently, preparing to ease him free.

"I mention this, but without weight in the argument or the dilemma. You may solve the dilemma how you will, riddle it how you may. But one thing I mention without influence: we were friends, Zenkiren, blade comrades. I have never forgotten you nor ceased to regard you with Brotherly affection. This may be a feather-weight, a passing cloud, a midge that lives a day — I can only speak for myself. For me it has been as the keel of a swifter that strikes cleanly through the seas." Duhrra said: "Duh . . . by Zair, Dak! And you a—"

"Hold, good Duhrra. I love this old man, yet if he cries out to betray us he must be silenced." The tides of my life on Kregen had moved me up and down, washed me this way and that, willy-nilly. Now I knew the ebb tide might turn. Now, perhaps, the flood might make. I took my hand away from Zenkiren’s mouth.

The presence of Duhrra could afford me no comfort now. I wondered if I could kill Zenkiren and knew I might have to silence him as I had before. He looked at me and slowly, slowly, wiped a hand across his mouth. His eyes melted into me.

"Pur Dray, and is there no lahal between us?"

"Lahal, Pur Zenkiren."

"A long time. I did not believe it could be you . . . and you Apushniad. That was no doing of mine, although my vote was cast against you."

"I knew it would be. You could do no other."

"But what you say . . . so long ago and yet only yesterday in vaol-paol. I imperil my vows talking to you, and yet is not talk better than skull-breaking?"

"Or ib-breaking. No, Zenkiren, you do not break your vows, for the judgment against me was false. I am still a true Krozair although unacknowledged and declared Apushniad." Again Duhrra let go that gurgling grunt and again I ignored him.

Telling him anything now would only complicate the matter.

"What you say is of surpassing interest, for there is indeed in it the classic case of two opposites . . ." We all know the various examples cited; here was another one. I knew the knot could not be untied but only cut, and dared I place the sword in Zenkiren’s hand and indicate where he should strike? Would even he believe? I think, had I confided in old Pur Zazz, that he would have believed my story of Earth. He would have offered words of comfort. For better or worse I decided not to make Zenkiren the first person on Kregen I told of my Earthly ancestry. I knew who had the right to the first confidence. And if the knot therefore remained uncut and all that followed from it, then so be it. I was in a pretty ugly mood, I can tell you, and closer than I probably suspected to impatience and contempt of all the mighty and mystical Krozairs of Zy.

We talked for a while. No refreshments were offered. Shazmoz lay under siege and I knew Zenkiren well enough to know he would share the rations with his men. He said that among the Krzy present were none who had known me in the old days. Fifty years is a quarter of a man’s life on Kregen. Despite their longevity, it is still a monstrous span of seasons. If I had not known who Zenkiren was, there is every probability I would not have recognized him. This dreadful alteration in his appearance was not so much the erosion of the passage of time, of course, but the immediate effects of the siege and the more subtle and far-reaching effects of his failure to be elected Grand Archbold. He would not talk of that sad subject and instead launched into an impassioned tirade against this new leader of the Grodnims who led them from success to success. He was not an Overlord of Magdag. He had sprung up on the green northern shore like a weed that grows overnight and with leeching suckers strangles the plants that sustain it. And the name of this man, previously referred to by obscene and odiferous names in my conversations with the men of Zair, I now learned was Genod Gannius. Genod Gannius.

I knew the name Gannius. I had held it in my memory against the day when I might begin to unravel the mysterious purposes of the Star Lords. Was this Genod Gannius connected with that Gannius I had first met in the Eye of the World?

My speculations on this point were shatteringly interrupted as I understood what Zenkiren was now saying. He had seated himself and he looked tired and worn, with only a flicker of that old martial blaze about him. Duhrra had gone to stand by the door, folding his brawny arms on his chest as he had done when Naghan the Show cried up his prowess. I realized Zenkiren had filed away the Krozair dilemma; he must have resolved the ultimate answer in my favor — for whatever reason — and would wait for a more opportune time to decipher the proof. Now he was talking about Genod Gannius and the armies of Grodnims, the forces he called the "new" armies.

As I listened my thoughts whirled and I felt the shattering effect of his words. I will not repeat word for word what he said, although they lay graven on my brain. In effect, Zenkiren indicated that the Grodnims had developed a new and devastating form of warfare for which they owed nothing to the Overlords of Magdag. Whispers of it had seeped out. Then an army trained by this Genod Gannius had appeared and annihilated one of the typically sprawling, roistering, swashbuckling armies of Zairians.

The way of it was this: when the Zairians stirruped up and set spurs to their sectrixes they were met with a wall of enormous spears, held cunningly like a thickset hedgerow. When the infantry attempted to wade in with their swords flashing, the crossbows had loosed and the storm of bolts fell on them, piercing them through and mingling them with the wreckage of the cavalry. The crossbows had shot quarrel after quarrel. And then, at the end, a final deluge had strewed the field with red corpses. The green banners had flaunted high in victory.

And so it had gone on, on field after field, with the results that led up to the desperate straits the Zairians now found themselves in. When the red archers loosed their shafts they were deflected from the green ranks by that coward’s trick, that despicable device, the shield.

I knew.

You who have heard of my previous sojourn here in the Eye of the World, and of my doings in the warrens of Magdag with my old slave phalanx, my old vosk-skulls, you will also know — and to my shame.

By Zair!

I had trained the slaves and workers to beat the Overlords. I had given them pike, shield and crossbow drill. We had been in the very act of thrashing the hated Overlords when the Star Lords had seen fit to snatch me away from Magdag and dump me down in Upalion in the far east of the inner sea. It had taken me no time at all, on my return here, to know that all my fears had been proved right and that the Overlords had turned and beaten my friends, the workers and slaves of the warrens. They must have, else Magdag would have perished. And the inevitable had happened.

Blind! Onker! Stupid fool, idiot, idiot. A weapon given to my friends — a sharp, lethal weapon. Oh, what a cretinous object I was!

It had not needed a genius in war to seize on the devices used by the rebellious slaves, though from all I was to hear I think this Genod Gannius was a near-genius. It was Gannius, in his own hold, who had taken what I had given the slaves and molded it and trained his men and so taken Magdag. He had thrashed the Overlords, seized into his own hands all their power and wealth, and turned it to his own crazy schemes.

He had set himself up on the high throne in Magdag and all men bowed in the full incline before him.

"When I first heard of the new manner of war practiced by the rasts of Grodno," said Zenkiren, and he looked across at me with a slow reflective stare that made me extremely uncomfortable, "I was minded of a memory I had thought forgotten. I harked back to what I had been told of a Krozair Brother who roused the warrens in vile Magdag. It seemed to me he had told me something of training slaves to unseat Overlords in all their might and power, of sticking them through. I reminded myself of this, but I did not speak of it to a living soul."

"I had thought," I said, "that mayhap that was a further reason for Apushniad."

"No. To give sharp weapons wantonly to children is to invite being cut in return."

"Yet this dilemma of which I spoke is further enhanced by this . . . unfortunate . . . happening. For it is of a piece."

"I shall remember."

"There are powers, Zenkiren, over and above — I cannot speak of them even if I could, for I do not yet understand them." I would not tell him of my dreadful thoughts about this Genod Gannius. For the full horror of that I must wait until I learned the truth.

Duhrra was beginning to shift about, from one foot to the other, and he kept whistling thinly through his teeth, which were good and strong and yellow, so I knew he was thinking of his stump and the hook Molyz the Hook-Maker might fashion for him.

Zenkiren took up a pen — it was a quill and not a reed so he was keeping up some standards under siege — and wrote swiftly on the back of an old order, long since finished with and now in these stringent times pressed into service again. ’Take this to Molyz ti Sanurkazz. He is authorized to use the necessary leather and iron."

"Thank you, Jernu." Duhrra took the paper and looked at me.

"I will meet you at the gate by which we came in, in time to depart."

"Zair keep you." Duhrra went out in search of a surrogate hand. The guards joked with him in desultory fashion. Though they were under siege and likely to starve to death if they were not stuck through first, yet they were still Zairians who loved a good laugh. My heart warmed to them. Zenkiren took the opportunity to transact some business. The siege had become by now a matter of logistics, of empty storehouses, of morale and only occasionally of fighting. I knew if he asked me to stay and fight I would have to refuse. So much more of importance waited outside, in the greater world. He did not ask me. For that I was grateful, having no pride left.

We talked at length, for much time separated us. As with the other news I had gleaned I will apprise you of what matters at the opportune time. Suffice it to say I heard more bad news and it all centered on the new devil-given powers of the Grodnims.

"We can sustain very few further attacks in force. At least the Grodnims’ new method of fighting does not aid them in siegecraft." He tapped his columns of figures scribbled over and over and altered often on the sheets of paper scattered on the table. "We have held them. No doubt we could hold them until the Ice Floes of Sicce go up in steam if we could eat. Unless they ship a larger army across we will not go down beaten in battle; only our unfortunate desire to eat will destroy us." He cocked an eye at me. "And does not Roz Nath strive?"

Feeling the eyes of the Pachak, Logu Pa-We on me, I answered: "I do not think you should hold any hope in Roz Nath."

"Ha!" he said, a bark of sound, whether a laugh or a sob I did not know. "I have never reposed hope in Nath Lorft to march in and rescue us. But he performs a useful function, for Roz Nazlifurn will find his task that much easier." He stopped himself from talking then, stopped himself visibly. He rustled the papers on the table with his quill and said at random, "We grow less every day, less mouths to feed. We will last out."

His motives were transparent. There was a secret about this Roz Nazlifurn. I was going out of Shazmoz, through enemy lines, and might easily be captured. What I did not know I could not tell. As though seeking to throw me further off, he added in a lighter voice: "We Krozairs do not put much store by titles and ranks of nobility. Would you not willingly trade a prince’s crown, supposing you owned one, for membership of the order?" He pulled his lips back in a parody of a smile. I did not smile. He did not know my history. The question hurt, stung. I surely would have, before the Apushniad! And now . . . I rose from the chair and spoke politely. Now I had changed my priorities. I was hewing to my nature, as I then thought, doing the correct thing in difficult circumstances and to hell with anyone who thought otherwise.

"It is time to bid you remberee, Pur Zenkiren. I regret the long empty years. I made a mistake in not returning to the Eye of the World sooner. But bear in mind the Krozair dilemma. At the least, it will make a capital subject for debate."

He shook my hand as they do in the inner sea, and I felt again the old Krozair grip. He smiled, this time a real smile. "See, Pur Dray. I call you Pur and I give you the right hand of fellowship. I have decided the Apushniad was incorrect. Now it remains to prove it."

I felt this keenly.

"You do me great honor, Zenkiren. I have been an onker, and yet the slaves in Magdag . . . they are human and needed to be set free. I did what I thought correct, according to my lights."

"Zair holds dominion over all and if it is His will—" He shivered and plucked at his gown, feeling the emblem stitched there, making me plainly see why it was so threadbare and worn. "Good will come of all this. Zair would not will it otherwise."

"Remberee, Pur Zenkiren."

"Remberee, Pur Dray."

So I went out and through the nighted streets and soon found Duhrra walking up to the gate. He carried his right hand inside his folded blanket-cloak. The guards brought our sectrixes. They wished us well. We rode away from doomed Shazmoz with the star glitter high above and a small moon slamming past above our heads.

The Pachak hyr-paktun Logu Pa-We and his brother would see us safely back. There need be no alarms on that score. I rode the damned sectrix in his ungainly waddle and I thought. I could live with what I had done with the old slave phalanx and my old vosk-helmets. Then we had fought for our lives and liberty. What followed later was not of our doing. But . . . But when I had first been transported here into the Eye of the World by the Star Lords their clear command had been to save the lives of two young people from the hideous rock-apes, the grundals. This I had done. I had ensured that Gahan Gannius and Valima should live. They had lived. They had married and begotten a son. That son must be Genod Gannius. I, Dray Prescot, had directly brought doom and destruction upon my beloved Zairians!

Chapter Nineteen

A brush with risslacas and a sighting at the Akhram

My Deldars had been ranked, as we say opening a game of Jikaida, and now I must press on and push all the spidery shadows of past follies behind me.

By the Black Chunkrah! What a nurdling onker I had been! For all the kindness Pur Zenkiren had been able to show me, I knew, and this without rancor or disappointment too great to be borne, that he would in all probability be quite unable to resolve the riddle. The two impossibilities canceled each other out; the Krozair dilemma remained. I would remain Apushniad. I had resigned myself to that. And then, gladly, fiercely, I declared that it was not a resignation but a joyous awakening to the true values of my life on Kregen.

"Down there, master!" said Duhrra, pointing. "Zair-forsaken Grodnims, may Uncle Zobab rot their livers and fester their tripes."

I spoke somewhat sharply as we rode the high bluff trending toward the sea, with the suns’ radiance all about us and the thin piping of birds to keep us company. "What color do you wear on your back, oh Duhrra of the Mighty Muscles?"

He looked suitably discomfited and resentful.

"The damned green, master. And an itchy, vile, mean and crawling color it is, to be sure." I was not going to argue with him. We had said remberee to the Pachaks and ridden off, going west, wearing the green over our reds. Now we had almost reached the farthest point of the Eye of the World. Before us would soon appear the Grand Canal and the Akhram, and, if we went that far, beyond them the Dam of Days.

Our sectrixes paced on. We kept to the wending ridge of bluffs above the narrow coastal strip for, however much we might wear the green and pass ourselves off as mercenaries, the ever-present danger was that Duhrra would explode into action against the Magdaggians, and I would be scant murs after. Green is a charming color and restful to the eyes. There are a number of fine uses for green: it is the color of rifle regiments, of racing cars, of Robin Hood; I have nothing against the color itself. Had the Grodnims chosen to wear red and the Zairians green, my sentiments would have remained as they were, against what would have been the cramphs of red Grodnims. I did not forget what went on in their monstrous ziggurats and megaliths during the time of the green sun’s eclipse. A war party below, trotting their sectrixes parallel to us, had seen us; we must keep steadily on and give them no cause for suspicion.

In Havilfar, that progressive and yet barbaric continent, one of the most widespread of religions was that of Havil the Green. Havil, named for the Havilfarese word for Genodras, the green sun. How, you might ask, could anyone worship the small green sun when confronted with the magnificence of the huge red sun? The answer is simple and yet profound, and one that has made me ponder long. During eclipse, the red swallows the green utterly. There is no longer a green sun. But, eventually, lo! the green sun emerges, newly born, fresh, refulgent, a bright new sun eternally young. Oh, yes, rebirth and recreation play as significant a part in the religions of Kregen as of Earth.

Duhrra began to hum softly, The Chuktar with the Glass Eye, and we rode carefully, shading the liquid gleam of our eyes as we looked down on the war party pacing us below. I shook the reins. "I think we had best join them. They will wonder why we ride aloof in this dangerous land. You, Duhrra the Mighty Mangler, must keep a straight tongue in your mouth." He grew affronted when I taunted him with that old title he tried to forget. He humped and grumped and then came out with: "And you, a Krozair Brother!"

"I may have been." He knew enough now to desert me or remain; he had chosen to stay with me.

"My twin was a Zaman to the Krozairs of Zamu. The zigging Grodnims captured him and tortured him and slew him. I do not forget that."

"I lost a good friend under the whips of the rasts of Magdag."

"Then let us join them as you suggest and as soon as we are able let us slay every one, every last cramph."

"If we have to, we will, but our purpose is to reach the Akhram. Your hook depends on it, you tell me."

"Aye." He favored his stump. "Aye, master, it does." I licked my fingers and stroked my mustaches. ’’Pull those damn bristling mustaches of yours down, Duhrra. We will have to wear a hangdog down-dropping Grodnim pair if we are to pass muster." We stroked the Zairian mustaches into hangdog Grodnim mustaches. It pained us, but it was necessary. When a Grodnim strains tea or soup through his facial hair a good Zairian has to decide whether to laugh or throw up.

So we rode down the slope and joined the Grodnims. They were not Magdaggians, being from the free Grodnim city of Laggig-Laggu, a large and prosperous conurbation some twenty dwaburs inland of the northern shore of the Laggu River. Hard, businesslike warriors, they handled their sectrixes with confidence and I took note of their weapons. There were ten of them and their Deldar told us they were joining the Chuktar of the west. We nodded as though understanding.

Where we marched was the southern shore. It had belonged to Zair. Now followers of Grodno rode confidently there. From the very last western extremity of the Eye of the World right up to Shazmoz, the green flaunted triumphantly over the red. This area had always been relatively deserted, the haunt of wild beasts, used for hunting.

My own plans were now settled. Duhrra needed to go to the Akhram, for there were to be found associated with the Todalpheme, who monitored the tides, doctors of a higher quality than the usual. His stump was not yet ready to accept the chafing of a leather socket and hook, so Molyz the Hook-Maker had told him, and the doctors of the Akhram would advise him further. So that was why Duhrra rode. As for me, my plans envisaged waiting, and damned impatiently too, for a ship of Vallia to pass through the Grand Canal bound back home. The galleons from Vallia carried on trade with the Eye of the World, as I have said, and I was confident one would eventually arrive. The voller was gone, and riding, walking, climbing and, in the end, crawling, over the Stratemsk, the hostile territories, the Klackadrin and then eastern Turismond would take far, far longer, if I survived it.

"Risslacas!" shouted the Deldar, yanking his longsword out, sticking his stirrups in and racing away at the head of his squad. We followed, keeping closed up. On the ridge above us two risslacas hopped along. They were carnivorous and no doubt regarded us as juicy dinners. This was obviously their territory. They were big, with enormous rear legs and haunches, pear-shaped bodies with neck frills of spines, two small grasping forelegs apiece and heads that could gulp an entire sectrix. The sectrixes knew it. They were terrified. They bounded along on their six legs, letting terrified snorts of panic blast from their open mouths, not conserving their energies to run. Damn stupid sectrixes. Had I been riding a zorca it would have flown like the wind, everything concentrated on galloping. Had I ridden a vove I would have had to restrain it from going up the slope and knocking the risslacas over.

"May Grotal the Reducer wither their bones!" yelped the man riding by Duhrra. Sheer panic hit these Grodnims. The enormous size of the risslacas and the sharp glitter from their teeth and eyes were enough to unman them. I cocked an eye up the slope, knowing the sectrix, maddened with fear though it was, would not put a foot wrong now. The fur of the risslacas, a slatey brown ocher, fluffed as they cooled their laboring bodies. Fur and feathers are used to protect from heat as well as to conserve it. The two main families of risslacas, the cold-blooded and the warm-blooded, are well represented on Kregen, as I have said. It is a fair scheme to assign dinosaurs a class of their own, distinct from reptiles, birds and mammals. Their expenditure of energy would heat their bodies quickly and then they would have to rest to dispose of all that body-heat if they were cold-blooded. The sectrix had no doubts what they were. It ran with its blunt head outstretched and its six legs pumping, pumping, its body convulsing with effort. The men of Laggig-Laggu carried short bows cased at their sides. By some considerable effort I edged my mount alongside the man who kept calling on Grodno and demanding that Grotal the Reducer deform, wither, plague, the risslacas so that he might escape.

"Let me have that, dom." I slid the bow from the case and with it a handful of arrows. The bow was a poor thing if one thought of the longbow of Loh — or of Valka now! — but it would serve. Duhrra saw what I was doing.

"No, master!" he bellowed. "You have no chance!"

"The risslacas were designed by—" Then I rephrased that, for the name of Zair instead of Grodno had almost slipped from my babbling lips. "They hunt sectrixes. That is how they eat." He couldn’t argue. The sectrix wouldn’t stop no matter how much I banged it, so I did not try. I turned in that damned uncomfortable seat and slapped an arrow into the bow, prepared to see if I might win approval in the eyes of Seg Segutorio, who is, I believe, the finest bowman of Loh of them all. I do not claim to be as fine a bowman as Seg. That would be prideful folly. We have shot many a round and sometimes I win. The lumpen, ungainly, impossible gait of the sectrix made accurate shooting almost impossible. By calculation, riding the humps and bumps, the yawing and swaying, I fancied I would hit a risslaca eventually! There were only two weak points, the eyes. There were too few arrows to risk the chance. When Duhrra saw me cock a leg over the high wooden saddle he fairly yelled in outrage.

"Go on, Duhrra and, if I live, make sure you come back for me." I slipped off and the sectrixes were gone in a billow of dust before he could answer. I turned. By Krun!

They were big! And they were close!

The first arrow spit from the bow. I would not miss at a time like this. Two arrows whipped from the bow and the leading risslaca went crazy, screaming, pawing with his ridiculous little forelegs, waving that enormous head from side to side. From each eye an arrow sprouted. The second dinosaur came on. He was, if anything, larger than the other, and cleverer or luckier, for he moved as the third arrow shot and it chingled and broke against his snout.

He was almost on me, snorting, spurts of steam belching from his gappy nostrils, his mouth wide and cavernous and blood-red, ringed with fangs. I shot again and his left eye went black for him. There was time now only to leap to that side, into his blind spot. His head swayed. I ran off, turned, notched the last arrow. His head swayed around; he saw me with his remaining eye; he charged. The arrow shot spitefully.

He shrieked and ran, ran in circles, colliding with his mate. Then, maddened by pain and unable to see, the two dinosaurs fell on each other, biting, clawing. It was hideous and pathetic and disgusting. I felt no flush of victory. I felt sorry for them, for they had been hunting, doing what nature had intended they should do. It was their misfortune that they chose to hunt Dray Prescot. Somewhat glumly I left them and walked on in the trail of the sectrixes. It took three burs before Duhrra came back for me. He was cursing and swearing and when he saw me he looked like a man who sees a ghost, a broken ib returned to Kregen, all ghastly and gibbering.

I mounted up.

"Thank you for coming back, Duhrra. There may be others."

"Those Grodno-gastas! Refused to return, said we were no business of theirs! Rode on, quaking, the cramphs!"

The sectrixes were still nervous, sweating, trembling. We galloped them a little, to ease their fears and to stop them from catching cold. They would have to be coddled this night.

"That rast of a Grodnim swod will have a good story to account for the loss of his bow."

"Aye, master. And I will have a story that tells of how a maniac called Dak acted like a — uh . . . no one will believe me."

"If the risslacas had not been stopped," I said, letting my mount gallop ahead, "no one would have told any stories."

"That is true, by Zair!"

So it was in a growing spirit of comradeship, for all that Duhrra insisted on slipping the odd "master" into his sentences, and occasionally letting fall that idiot’s "duh," we came at last to the Grand Canal, after a long enough and tiring journey.

There was no sign on the southern shore of the Grodnim army.

The northern shore, as I well knew, had a thriving series of communities held together in service to the Todalpheme, those wise men who calculate the tides and send warning, causing the Oblifanters to issue instructions to the workers for the Dam of Days to be opened or closed. I had never seen the Dam of Days. My Delia had, for she had accompanied my sons Drak and Zeg when a galleon from Valka had brought them here to sail to Zy for their education. I would take ship and sail home to Valka, and if I never saw the Eye of the World again it would be too soon.

Missals grew brilliantly along the upper level of the Grand Canal where the grass was cropped short. I stared at a particular grove of the missals, seeing their pink and white blossoms, thinking back. Duhrra sensed my mood and remained silent.

Slowly, I walked toward the edge of the Grand Canal. The last time I had come this way, Waterloo had been less than a year gone.

How I remembered! The sweltering Bombay night, then Kregen, glorious Kregen with the streaming mingled sunshine, the air like nectar and a whole world in which to go adventuring. Well, I had been a long way since then and done many things and seen many wonders. Then I had been callow in the ways of Kregen. Now I felt myself not wise so much as indoctrinated. I knew in my heart that I was just the same nurdling onker who would rush headlong into incredible danger where the prudent self I now imagined myself to be would hang back. It is all in the situation.

Over there I had seen a dying Chulik stagger from the bushes, his face ripped off by the teeth of the grundals. Lower down the cliff face flanking the Grand Canal I had fought the grundals and so saved Gahan Gannius and Valima. Saved them at the behest of the Star Lords, for I had been in mortal fear lest the Everoinye fling back to Earth a pawn who disobeyed. I had saved them for the day they could marry, mate and so bring forth the suppurating evil that today was called Genod Gannius, the man who ate up the Zairians, their lands, beliefs and spirit. Truly the Star Lords planned long and long into the future. I stood there thinking back on my handiwork and I realized afresh that each person with whose destiny I had meddled at the orders of the Star Lords must play a part in the greater destiny of Kregen. Even my own part, which I had then thought worthy, of creating a slave phalanx of my old vosk-skulls and thrashing the hated Overlords of Magdag, had been turned against my Zairians by the machinations of Genod Gannius. Perhaps the Star Lords had seen what I would do. I could not believe that, for it had not been a thing of careful edges; rather it had grown and accreted of itself. No wonder the Star Lords had snatched me away in the moment of victory. A puzzle that had been with me for many years and seasons on Kregen had been solved.

Duhrra coughed, a hugely artificial cough, and said, "The suns decline, master. If we are to reach Akhram before nightfall . . ."

"Aye," I said, somewhat heavily. "I have been thinking what a garblish onker I am, when the Deldars are ranked."

He didn’t bother to reply and I saw by the way he twitched his stump he did not agree. We went down the staircase cut into the wall of the Grand Canal and our sectrixes followed down the angled sloping paths cut for animals and swam the blue water; we climbed the other stupendous wall and came to Akhram.

The top of the Grand Canal was five miles across, flanked by cut steps a hundred yards broad, a mile or so deep, with something like forty steps of varying heights around a hundred and fifty feet average. The sheer colossal size of this man-made artifact impressed me all over again, as it had before. The perspective dwindled out of sight to the west. At that end of the Grand Canal lay the Dam of Days. For the simple satisfaction of actually seeing it I knew I would go there very soon. Duhrra and I approached the portal of the Akhram on this northern bank. Once again I saw that confusing collection of domes and steeples and minarets clustered within the stone walls. Once again the bronze-bound lenken door opened and the Todalpheme in their blue-tasseled cords and yellow hooded robes approached, bearing torches, making us welcome.

Their smooth skins showed the ministrations of oils and strigils, their faces fleshed with good living and yet ascetic with the mysteries of their profession. The Tides of Kregen are monitored by the Todalpheme. It is an art and a science. They had asked me to join them and I had refused. The old Akhram, the leader, was dead, and a new old Akhram lived in the chief place in his stead, as he had told me would happen.

There is little to say of that night Duhrra and I were made welcome, appointed a chamber, given food, were sent packing to bed. I lay awake for some time, pondering long on what had happened to me since I had last been here. It was incredible, but it had all happened.

The following morning after breakfast I walked with the Akhram, trying to recapture those old feelings of mine. He remembered my walking with his predecessor for, after all, it had been merely a quarter of his life span ago. I glanced up as a shadow fleeted below the suns.

I gaped.

A voller speeded up there, a fast two-place scout, quick and nimble. It vanished toward the west, flying fast and low.

The Akhram folded his hands within the sleeves of his robe, his face smooth and yet knowing. "A flying boat, yes, of late we have seen it a number of times."

"You are surprised?"

"Yes. We know of Vallia and Donengil here, of Wloclef and Loh and Djannik and a few other places. We have heard tales of boats that fly."

I rubbed my chin through the beard I had let grow. I did not like the look of this. "You have heard of Havilfar?"

He regarded me gravely. "Had you asked me that question but a sennight ago, I would have answered no. Today I must answer yes."

I felt the black bile, the anger, the remorse that I had stayed so long here in the inner sea. My place, I thought then, was at home countering the wiles of Hamal, the rich and evil Empire of the continent of Havilfar.

"We Todalpheme, as you know, take no part in the struggles between the green and the red. Our own people support us, and wear brown. They are raided — you will, I think, remember one such raid?"

"Yes."

The Todalpheme, because of their vital function, were taboo subjects over most of Kregen. No man would strike one down, lest the next tide should sweep him, his family and home away to watery destruction. I glanced up. Clouds massed before the suns. The temperature dropped markedly as we walked back along the battlements of the Akhram.

Akhram went on speaking: "We hear that this Genod Gannius has enlisted new allies in his struggles against the Zairians. He has brought new fighting men and weapons, and he has asked for a quantity of these wonderful flying boats."

I stared at him. Again the sense of vast unseen struggles enveloped me. The shadowy purposes of the Star Lords had, it seemed to me, been made a little more plain. They had used me to save Gahan Gannius and Valima and thus ensure the creation of their son Genod. What Genod was doing, therefore, must be desired by the Star Lords. I did not know why they should wish the green of Grodno to overcome the red of Zair, here in the Eye of the World.

The Akhram was still speaking, his face shadowed as the clouds grew over the bright face of the suns.

"We predict a great tide and the representatives of Genod Gannius have asked us to make sure a convoy of ships bearing the flying boats is allowed through the Dam of Days before we close the caissons." He glanced obliquely at the clouds. Already I, an old sailorman, had sensed the gale brewing.

"If the storm breaks with the tide the ships will be safely inside the Grand Canal. We could not refuse Gannius, for he brought an army with his request, and they guard the Dam of Days now, to enforce their orders."

If I seem to you particularly stupid in that I did not at once seize on these facts and construct an impressive theory, I must plead only that I had taken a savage whirling in the blasts of fate and now I only wished to turn my back on the inner sea. Yes, I would feel a terrible grief when the red of Zair went down, when Zy was destroyed and Sanurkazz ravaged. But they were merely small places in a small locale hidden from the rest of Kregen. My place lay in Valka and Vallia, maturing our plans to withstand the insane ambitions of the Empress Thyllis of Hamal, or in Djanduin with my Djangs, or taking hard steps to combat the raids of the shanks from around the curve of the world. I also had to visit Strombor in the enclave city of Zenicce and assure myself that my house prospered. And I would then go on a visit to my clansmen of the Great Plains of Segesthes, my wonderful clansmen of Felschraung and Longuelm. So there was much I must do in this marvelous and terrible world of Kregen. The inner sea shrank in my estimation of the important things in my life.

But Havilfarese vollers, here, in the Eye of the World! Manned by the cramphs of Magdag and all the other rasts of Grodnims, swooping down to destroy the red of Zair. How the Krozairs and the Red Brethren would fight! It would be a wonderful ending to all, to join them and roar out the battle songs for Zair and so go down fighting into the Ice Floes of Sicce.

Sanity returned. That would not help Delia. She might sympathize with my emotions, but I could not destroy her out of sheer warrior’s pride.

Already I had spent far too long dillydallying in the Eye of the World when I should be actively seeking out a galleon from Vallia, not meekly sitting here waiting for one to sail past. There would be galleons in Magdag. I must go there, find one and give orders to her skipper, in my capacity as Prince Majister of Vallia, order him to bear me home to Vallia without delay. Yes, by Vox!

But I thought Delia would allow me one look at this marvel, this Dam of Days. Just one look. Then Magdag, Vallia, Valka, home!

I said to Duhrra: "On the morrow I visit the Dam of Days. After that I go where I fancy you will not wish to go."

Duhrra replied comfortably, "I do not think there is such a place, master."

Chapter Twenty

The Dam of Days

"Why do you call yourself Dak, when our records show your name to be Dray Prescot?" Akhram looked up at me with his wise gaze frank and open. We sat in his study with all the old familiar paraphernalia of ephemeris, globe, table and dividers spread around. Here I had talked for many burs one time with his predecessor, the old Akhram. I had been invited to join the Todalpheme and had rejected the offer, hungering for my Delia.

I said: "There have been many events in my life since last I passed this way. The name of Dray Prescot is well known on the inner sea . . . well . . ." Here I paused, thinking I boasted. To correct that impression, I said: "I am a hunted man from one side and, if the other side knew I still lived and was here, I would be the target for instant destruction. The name Dak is an honored one. I do not treat it lightly."

"We are aloof from the red and green. But we understand the passions that rule men within the Eye of the World. And, yes, I will arrange for you to visit the Dam of Days. And, yes, you may rest assured your name will remain Dak with us."

"You are most kind."

So Duhrra and I and a small escort of three of the younger Todalpheme rode out astride sectrixes for the western end of the Grand Canal. We carried supplies carefully wrapped in leaves. By walking the sectrixes and not galloping hard the journey would take about fifteen burs. I thought Delia would allow me fifteen burs there and fifteen back out of my burning urgency to return to her. Looking back, I think I sensed more in this journey than a mere excuse to my Delia. So we rode. You who have followed my story this far will know that some other and altogether more evil and more Dray Prescot-like motive inspired me. Those ships carried Havilfarese vollers. I fancied they would be Hamalese rather than Hyrklanan or some other of the smaller states of Havilfar manufacturing fliers. So there might be a beautiful opportunity for me, the old reiver, the old render, the old paktun, to steal away a voller and fly directly back to Delia. That would be like the Dray Prescot I hoped I still was. The water in the Grand Canal was low, barely half a mile deep. That was the usual depth the Todalpheme, through their agents the Oblifanters who ran the Dam of Days, attempted to maintain. When the tide smashed in against the outer coast I knew from the defenses of Zenicce and Vallia the level could go up in a Bay of Fundy maelstrom. These matters are a question of science, the suns and moons acting together producing spring tides, the neap tides falling about a lunar quarter later. With seven moons acting with and against one another and the two suns, for this purpose calculated as a single gravitational source, the possibilities were fascinating, susceptible to interesting calculation and extremely fraught. The Todalpheme earned their inviolability from the crude external pressures of Kregen. I had much to occupy my mind as we jogged on. Duhrra had been measured up for his hook and the doctors had pursed their lips over his stump, commenting acidly on the butchery of whoever had amputated. Duhrra had thrown me a comical glance and I had told the story, which brought forth, as I had expected, a genuine desire to overcome the handicap of botched work. If they had deemed it necessary to amputate further they would have. Luckily for Duhrra — and me — they did not. So, in the fullness of time, we came in sight of the Dam of Days.

How to describe it?

In rhapsodic terms, glowingly referring to the size, the splendor, the majesty? In scientific terms, the cubic volumes enclosed, the tons of water passing, the mechanisms of the caissons? In economic terms, for although electricity was not generated here — and I knew nothing of it then — the megawatts available would have lit up the inner sea.

In artistic terms, when the suns shone on the stone facings of the rock fill and glowed with all the flowerlike glory of an Alpine garden?

The Dam stretched across the mouth of the canal, which had widened into the bay. The bay enclosed a vast sheet of water. The Dam towered in size, rising to a stupendous height, and yet, when the eye’s gaze traveled along the length, from headland to headland, the Dam appeared a long low wall against the sea. I think a Hollander would have appreciated that great work, or any man who has worked on a dam, anyone, actually, who had heart and imagination for the work of man’s hands. The Dam had been built by the Sunset People in the long ago. Now I had learned — on Earth, on Earth! — that the Savanti of Aphrasöe were the last remnants of that once proud and world-girdling peoples. They had built well and to last. Yet their cities were tumbled into ruin in many places of Kregen; in the Kharoi Stones of my island of Hyr Khor in Djanduin were to be seen the fragmented particles of their glory. Yet the Grand Canal and the Dam of Days glowed with the newness of building. The Sunset People had loved them.

"You see the waterfall, tumbling down into the sea by the northern headland, Tyr Dak?" The young Todalpheme pointed. He was a novice, learning his trade. In a hundred years, perhaps less if he was astute, he might become Akhram. I nodded. The waterfall fell into the sea and beyond it, inland, there was the glitter of a lake.

"When the tide rises the water fills the lake, so the river has merely to top it up. That is the reservoir from which comes the power of the Dam of Days."

We jogged on. Camped on a wide flat area rose the tents and huts of a sizable force. They were Grodnims. Duhrra hugged his detested green robes closer to him. I knew that we stood in some real danger of being accosted as slaves or runaway slaves, and was ready to be unpleasant in any event to any damned Overlord.

The three Todalpheme, although entirely unconcerned for they were secure in their immunity, angled away before we crossed the Dam. They were upset that naked force had been used here, where the pure light of science, as they said, should reign supreme. I could tell them about science, thinking back to my frustrating experiences on Earth during that twenty-one years of torment. I could also tell them about the uses of naked force.

Across the Dam the vistas were immense. On our right hand the greenly gray sea heaved away to a wild horizon. The gale was surely coming. On our left hand the waters, although separated only by the bulk of the Dam, yet showed the bluer color of the inner sea. We crossed halfway and stood for a while, lolling on the high parapet, looking around, marveling, silent. At intervals the Dam of Days was pieced by openings. They were arranged to resist the push of water from east and west and not from one side only like a lock-gate. They were fashioned in the form of gigantic cylinders rising and falling in open masonry guides. A modern analogy I can now give is to liken them to pistons. When water from the lake was introduced from valved pipes they sank and so effectively blocked the openings. The lifting of these caissons, although essentially simple, demanded a level of technology beyond that of the current manipulators. That only one caisson rope of steel wire had ever broken is a tribute to the building of the Sunset People. Next to each caisson in the Dam was sited an enormous reservoir tank. This was free to move up and down in guides. Many steel cables passed over central pulleys from caisson to tank. When the tank was filled with water from a separate valved and piped supply from the lake, it would descend. Because the tank size was greater than the amount of caisson under the sea level, the tank would haul the caisson up as it sank. Vents in the caisson valved open to let the water run out. Because the caisson, when high and empty, was itself larger than the amount of water left in the tank after that level equaled the sea level, the caissons would fill and sink, thus hauling up the tanks. All very neat and economical, the power being supplied by gravity through the falling water. Finally, I should say that the Oblifanters kept hordes of workpeople busy greasing everything to ensure that it ran sweetly. To allow the caissons to move up and down their guides against the enormous differential of water pressure, a whole series of wheels were fitted on each side, to resist pressure front and back.

This made me think. The Todalpheme gave their orders to lower or lift the caissons to regulate the level of water flowing into the inner sea. Usually the high tides would cause them to close the gates. Why should the Sunset People bother to arrange wheels to resist pressure from the back of the dam? I suspected that in those long-gone days the dam was employed for more than merely regulating the tides. One of the young Todalpheme novices shaded his eyes, looking out to sea. "I believe . . ." he said, pointing. I looked.

This young Todalpheme was used to poring over papers indoors. My old sailor’s eye picked out the familiar shapes. Argenters, their sails board-stiff, riding the brushing skirts of the gale, rushed headlong through the tumbling whitecaps. I studied them, the wind in my face, wondering how many of them would smash to pieces before they negotiated the gates of the dam.

I saw the flags fluttering.

Four green diagonals and four blue diagonals slanting from right to left, the blue and green divided by thin borders of white.

Menaham.

That made perfect sense.

When mad Queen Thyllis, as she was then, had invaded the island of Pandahem she had overrun country after country until her victorious armies and air service had been stopped in the Battle of Jholaix. Of all the nations of Pandahem she had made allies of the Menahem. I had remorseful memories of my treatment of young Pando, the Kov of Bormark, and his mother, Tilda the Fair. They lived side by side with the people of Menaham, and they called them the Bloody Menahem. Even when Thyllis of Hamal had been forced back, made to conclude a peace with Vallia and those nations of Pandahem she had overrun, still she continued the alliance with the Bloody Menahem. Hamal possessed few ships. Pandahem was an island center of commerce, as was Vallia. So what was more natural than that Hamal should use ships from Menaham?

If you ask why bother to use large, slow argenters to transport vollers when they might fly, you forget the ways of Hamal, the cunning of those cramphs of Hamal and their treacherous vollers. I knew well enough that the fliers in those ships would work well for a while and then break down. Oh, yes, I knew that!

Would the Hamalians risk a flight from Hamal to the inner sea in suspect vollers?

And, of course, Genod Gannius, like us in Vallia, would be so anxious to lay his hands on fliers he would accept the probable defects as part of the price he must pay. This was what Vallia had done, what Zenicce and all the others who bought vollers from Hamal had done. Otherwise, no fliers. So I stood no longer lolling on the high parapet-walk watching those ships standing in. They were handled smartly enough and they negotiated the wide openings superbly. They rode the waves like great preening swans. All their flags fluttering, the sails cracking and billowing as the hands braced the yards around, the ships aimed for the gaps, the white water spuming away from their forefeet. They breasted the waves and sailed through the Dam of Days into the bay leading to the Grand Canal. I walked across to the other side of the dam and watched them, their motion much easier in the enclosed water. They made straight for the canal. They would probably lie up in the harbor halfway through, or in the harbor at the eastern end, depending on circumstances. Then the vollers would be brought up from those capacious holds. The air service men from Hamal would give them a final check and hand them over. No doubt Genod Gannius had made arrangements for his men to be trained in their use. And then .

. .

I had an apocalyptic vision of hordes of Grodnims descending from the skies, first to smash all resistance in Shazmoz, then other cities along the red southern shore, then on and on, razing Zy, on and on, finally taking Holy Sanurkazz.

Well, the vision was apocalyptic, but it was no further business of mine. And Mayfwy and Felteraz?

I bashed my fist against the stone of that high walk. I cursed. Why must I remember Mayfwy and Felteraz now?

Of what value were they, set against my Delia?

But they were not set against her.

One value could not destroy another if there was no conflict of interest. Wouldn’t my Delia tell me —

demand of me — that as a simple man, let alone a one-time proud, high and mighty Krozair of Zy, a man who professed Opaz — when it suited him, to be sure — my obligation was to protect Mayfwy, who was our friend?

But I wanted none of the inner sea. I wanted to go home. Sight of those argenters of Menaham had kindled the spark of deviltry. I would sneak down there by the light of the moons, steal a voller and so fly back to Valka. I might set one argenter alight; that would be reasonable, though I did not think I would care to attempt to destroy them all. Genod Gannius struck me as the kind of general who would take care of such possibilities in his planning.

A brisker gust of wind blew against the back of my head. I turned. The sea was getting up and the whitecaps were now rolling in thickly, with here and there a spume lifting and billowing away downwind. The air was noticeably colder.

Men in the brown of the workers were crowding past, down on the main road across the dam. I saw an Oblifanter directing them, a tough commanding figure in brown with a good deal of gold lace and gold buttons, with the balass stick in his fist.

"We must return, Tyr Dak," said the novice. He shivered. "The tide is making. They will close the gates now that the ships have passed. We must go back."

"And about time, too," said Duhrra. He had no idea what those ships carried, that they spelled doom to him and his kind. "We have seen this marvel, Dak my master. Now, for the sweet sake of Mother Zinzu the Blessed, I would like to see about my hook."

Slowly I climbed down off the high parapet and trailed on after the others. The novice called me Tyr Dak — sir. And Duhrra called on Sweet Mother Zinzu the Blessed, the patron saint of the drinking classes of Sanurkazz. Wouldn’t my two favorite rogues, my two rascals, my two oar comrades, Nath and Zolta, also be caught up in the catastrophe if these vollers fell into the hands of Genod Gannius, the Grodnim?

The coils of unkind fate lapped around me then. Uppermost in my mind, the tantalizing thought of Delia drove out all other thoughts — almost. Nath and Zolta, Duhrra . . . and Mayfwy. It was not fair. But then nothing in this life, either on Earth or on Kregen, is fair. Only a garblish onker would imagine otherwise. When we had escaped from King Wazur’s test, there on the island of Ogra-gemush, Delia had had to instruct me. I had been all for leaving the Wizard of Loh, Khe-Hi-Bjanching, and Merle, Jefan Werden’s daughter, in the pit. Delia had made me, all wounded and half dead as I was, climb down there and drag them out — twice. If Delia were here at my side now, wouldn’t she demand the same chivalry, the same conduct, damned stupid though it might appear to one unversed in the mysteries of the Sisters of the Rose and the Krozairs of Zy?

That I was no longer a Krozair of Zy had nothing to do with it.

Cursing, in the foulest of foul moods, I stamped along after the others. The tide was making rapidly.

The Oblifanter, a bluff, weather-beaten man twirling his balass stick, was most polite to the Todalpheme, novices though they were. To Duhrra and me he extended a distant politeness that reflected his opinion of Grodnims who sought to take his functions into their hands. We walked on. The wind blustered past above the parapet. Flags were snapping and then standing out stiff as boards. The sea must be covered in white now. Inland the bay remained calm. The argenters were sailing into the cut, the wind on their quarter, under reduced canvas.

A giant creaking, groaning filled the air, like the ice blocks of the Floes of Sicce grinding against each other.

The Oblifanter cursed and ran to one of the tall chain-towers. He was yelling, "Put some grease on the ropes, you nurdling onkers!"

I wondered, if he kept up that tone to a Hikdar of the Grodnims, how long it would take for him to lose his teeth and have his nose broken. The Grodnims are a barbarous lot. When we reached the spot the noise had sensibly reduced. We could look over and see the brown-clad workers perched on a spider-walk tipping buckets of grease onto the thick steel cables as they passed over the pulley train. Close by, the monstrous bulk of a caisson lowered slowly into the sea, while on the other side the equally monstrous bulk of a counterbalancing tank lifted up in its guides. The whole spectacle would have delighted the very hearts and souls of all Victorian engineers, who doted on gigantism within the context of wrought and cast iron. I walked on.

It was no business of mine.

The image of Delia floated before me. Now that image looked scornful. Her glorious face filled me with the kind of feelings a rope’s end might have after a manhound puppy has finished with it. A rope’s end does not have feelings, although it can impart them smartly enough in the fist of a boatswain’s mate, and it would be in shreds after a manhound had finished with it, puppy or not. In much the same kind of shreds as my emotions . . .

The valves controlling the pipes to the caissons lay grouped together under a stone shelter, built as an integral part of the dam. I stopped there, watching the brown-clad workers turning the handles. The Todalpheme ahead swung around and motioned me to follow. The Oblifanter whisked his balass stick over the rump of a worker who was clearly not putting his heart into the work. I said, "Oblifanter, you would oblige me by opening the valves to the tanks and closing the valves to the caissons."

He gaped at me.

I said, "Be quick about it, dom, for my temper is short."

He started waving his arms about. His face assumed that red sometimes seen in a malsidge trodden on in a dopa den.

"You cannot do that! The gates will open — the tide will flood through!"

"Nevertheless, that is what you must do."

"But the tide! The tide! "

"You will let enough through to do as I desire. When that has been accomplished you may lower the caissons again, so it will not be enough to sweep on through the Eye of the World. It will expend itself before it reaches Shazmoz." I thought about that, of the Grodnim ships hovering like sea-leems off Shazmoz, preventing communication. "We had best leave the caissons up until the tide reaches Shazmoz. Yes." I felt remarkably cheerful. I did not smile, but I felt amazingly active and energetic. "Yes, that will serve admirably."

"You are mad!"

"Do not doubt it."

"Here!" yelled the Oblifanter, his eyes fairly popping from his head. He shouted to a group of Grodnims sauntering off with the workpeople not laboring at the valves. "Here! You! Earn your keep, for what good you do here! Stop this madman—"

He said no more for I put him to sleep gently and lowered him to the stone-flagged roadway. I stared at the group of workpeople at the valves. Their faces looked back blankly, like calsanys’.

"Shut the caisson valves and open the tanks. Jump!"

They saw my face and they shivered and began to do as I said.

The Grodnims walked back, puzzled by the shouting, and saw what the workmen were doing. The Todalpheme stood to one side, quite unable to grasp what was going on. Duhrra looked at me hard and then sauntered across.

The day was darkening over, the clouds massing. The wind blew keenly. The gale would strike very soon now. And all the time the tide rose, one of those enormous Tides of Kregen that could wash away all before it like a tsunami, leveling and destroying, save where the hand of man placed obstacles in its path to protect his property and life.

"What’s going on here?"

It so happened that there was a Jiktar among the Grodnims. A Jiktar has come a long way in the chain of command, for he commands a regiment, a swifter or a galleon; when he has worked his way through to zan-Jiktar, he may reach the highest military rank of all, that of Chuktar, above whom there exist only generals of the highest rank, princes, kings and emperors.

"Stand aside, rast!" He spoke quite matter-of-factly. He shouted at the frightened workpeople. "Shut the tank valves at once."

I said, "Open the tank valves."

The Jiktar did not hesitate. That was one reason why he was a Jiktar.

"Seize him!" he said, again quite normally. "If you have to slay him, you have to. But I would like to put the madman to the question."

He’d really like that, enjoying himself.

The Grodnims came for me with their longswords swinging. I was not overly fussy about how many got themselves killed.

There remained one item to be finalized, no, two, for I saw Duhrra start fumbling about under his blanket-cloak.

"Stand away, Duhrra!" I yelled. "Don’t get yourself killed." He did not reply.

What I must do was position myself in front of the workers so as to cow them and assure them of unpleasantness if they did not continue to fill the tanks, and I must prevent the Grodnims from getting past me at them. The fight looked promising. The immediate future appeared somewhat scarlet, lurid and highly diverting.

The impressions of the moment burn bright still: the wind beginning to build up into a howling torrent rushing across the high loft of the Dam of Days; the frightened workers in their brown smocks frantically turning the valve wheels as I glared at them; the clatter of the soldiers’ studded war-boots as they ran on the stone flags of the walkway; the glitter of their mail and the bright sheen of their green as they advanced, ample excuse for swordplay; the sight of Duhrra hopping about beyond them, his face a maelstrom of emotions that in another place and another time would have proved comical in the extreme; the feel of the longsword hilt in my fist. This was a cheap weapon, not a Krozair longsword, with a cross-guard and grip of iron, the grip covered in sturm-wood, the blade true enough but the whole brand lacking the superb balance of the genuine article. The grip spanned only two hands’ breadths so there was no chance of spreading fists in that cunning Krozair fashion. This sword was designed for the bludgeoning, hacking of men-at-arms in the melee. Well, it would serve. The Grodnims at first thought simply to overawe me, so they rushed up swinging their swords, yelling, ferocious. It seemed unchivalrous, unsporting, not Jikai, to slay the first of them, so I parried his blow and cracked him across his mail coif. He went down like a log. The second pair came in together, abruptly shocked, ready now, in the swift way of the men of green, to slay me and have done. Their blows hissed past and I cut once, backhanded once and leaped clear of a third who sought to drive his point beneath my breastbone.

My sword took off the side of his face. I whirled blood-drops at the workers who had stopped turning.

"Turn, doms, turn! Fill the tanks!"

The blood spattered brightly across them and yet, in the instant I swung back and engaged the next pair, that bright red darkened and dulled as clouds drove beneath the suns. More men ran up, shouting, as the Jiktar, fairly foaming with not so much rage as the outrage he felt, bellowed them on. I cut down the two before me, finding the clumsy sweep of the longsword some impediment. I had used a longsword like this many times. Perhaps employing the magnificent Krozair longsword weakened a fighting man when he was forced to use lesser weapons. So I leaped and ducked and fought, hacking and thrusting when the opportunity offered, for these men wore mail. I had noticed on this second period in the Eye of the World that the Grodnims affected a second sword scabbarded at their waists, a shortsword. Perhaps this was the handiwork of Genod Gannius. If it was, he would have turned purple with rage that his men stubbornly stuck to their familiar longswords now. I was unarmored. A shortsword man might have been able to drive in under my longsword and finish me. The shortsword has, as I have said, advantages in some combats.

A Grodnim Deldar, raving to get at me through the press of his own men, abruptly stiffened, rearing upright, his eyes popping. I saw a sword smash down on that juncture between neck and shoulder where the mail spreads, battering its way through. The Deldar fell. Duhrra, the sword in his left hand whirring up for another blow, appeared bright-eyed, furious of face, yelling.

"Hai Jikai!" bellowed Duhrra, laying about him. "Hai Jikai!" The wind blustered past above us. Mailed men screamed and fell as our longswords bit. Duhrra took a glancing slice on his right arm — only a slicing glance. In combat of this kind there are seldom wounded men, not for very long anyway. A blow from a longsword, which is really a sharpened length of tempered iron, will do a man’s business for him with certitude. The longsword possesses awful smashing power. I took a man’s arm off and whirled to deface his comrade, leaped and ducked and so roared in to get at the Jiktar.

He saw me coming and jerked his sword up. Two more men went down before we could meet. Duhrra took out another and then the stone-flagged walkway contained only the brown-clad workpeople, the three Todalpheme, the Grodnim Jiktar — and a quantity of dead Grodnims scattered about. The Jiktar said, "You are assuredly mad and will die for this." I would not have replied anyway, but as I closed I saw a wide-winged shadow on the stones. The sun had shafted through for an instant, the green sun, for the red remained swathed in cloud. If this was an omen I would have none of it. In that ephemeral shaft of green sunlight the shadow of a hunting bird lay at my feet. Before I looked up I leaped out of reach of the Jiktar’s sword. Yes. Yes, up there, the damned scarlet and gold raptor, the spying Gdoinye of the Star Lords!

The sight enraged me more than the fight had been able to do.

And then . . . and then!

A blue radiance began to seep in, to encompass me. The vague outlines of that giant Scorpion appeared before my eyes. I tried to scream out violently and managed a whisper, feeling myself falling. The blue radiance hovered. Someone — a long time ago and a long way away — had said that by willpower I might avert the call of the Everoinye. I tried. I struggled. I do not think that I could have succeeded alone. The harsh bite of the stone flags against my knees told me I still remained on the high Dam of Days. There was still a fight to be fought and won, a Jikai to create. The blue radiance changed, swirling, coiling. I sensed an unease. A tinge of yellow crept into the blue. I did not ever remember seeing yellow when I was transmitted to and from Kregen.

"I will stay here, Star Lords!" I roared. I struggled to rise. I could hear a strange tinkering sound, as of water hitting a tin cup. "Leave me be, you kleeshes! I stay here!" The blue wavered; the yellow prospered.

The enormous form of the phantom blue Scorpion assumed vast, grotesque proportions — and then it burst. A blaze of pure yellow exploded about me, with the sound as of cymbals clanging in the High Pantheon of Opaz in Vallia.

I knelt on the stone flags of the walkway across the Dam of Days. I looked up. The Jiktar was in the act of ferociously smiting at Duhrra, whose left arm lifted his sword at the last moment. Duhrra’s sword showed a succession of savage dints along both blade edges. He was finding extreme difficulty in settling to a rhythm and swinging. That he had fought as well as he had with his left hand testified to his extraordinary physical strength and to the resolution of his will.

With a beast’s roar, a roar as of the leems being let out into the Jikhorkdun, I gathered my feet under me and sprang.

The Jiktar’s head flew high as his torso toppled.

"You are unharmed, Duhrra?"

"Aye." He panted now and lowered the sword. "I thought you done for, although I could not see . . ."

"No." I looked at this hulking man-mountain with the idiot face and bulging muscles and the useless stumped right arm. Very gravely I lifted my bloodied sword in the salute.

"Hai Jikai, Duhrra. Henceforth, I think, I shall call you Duhrra of the Days. Hai Jikai!" He gaped at me, amazed. The reference to the Dam of Days was clear enough.

"If you . . ." He started over. "It is for you . . ." I swung the sword at the pipe valve wheels. The workers, freed by the fight from oppression, had all run off. They had closed the valves down. I could not blame them. I walked across. The moment I began opening the valves again to let water flow from the lake reservoir into the tanks and so lift the caissons and open the gates, the three Todalpheme hurried across. They had been shaken by the savagery of fighting men; but this business now, they conceived, concerned them. I disabused them.

As gently as possible, I said, "If you seek to stop me I shall knock you all down." They appeared to understand.

The flat rather than the edge sometimes works as well.

One said, "The tide is rising fast and the storm comes on apace. If you open but one gate the water will—"

I finished with the valves, for I had spun the wheels with savagery, and said, "The water will serve Zair. After that, you may close the tank valves and open the caissons’." They knew I would stand by the wheels with a naked sword in my fist until I was ready. The blood had ceased to drop from the blade now, but the length was shining red and evil in the light. Tremendous power was to be unleashed in the next few murs. Water from the lake reservoir ran through the multi-branching pipes and past the valves I had opened, filling the counterweighing tanks. The wind tore at us, streaming our hair, screaming past our ears. The roar of the waters mounted. The tanks began to sink. The weight of water pulled them down and the steel wire ropes groaned under the strain. Duhrra put his sword down and ran to slop grease onto the series of pulleys, using the flat wooden spatula with his left hand, the grease-bucket caught up under his right arm stump.

"Pour it on, Duhrra!" I bellowed in my foretop hailing voice. He barely heard. He upended the bucket over the pulleys.

The caissons began to rise. I knew that if they did not rise sufficiently for my purpose before the full weight of the tide bore against them they would not budge thereafter. On the coast of Scotland the measurement of breakers has revealed a stunning effort of six thousand pounds per square foot. So I stood while we opened a door to hell.

Clouds blew furiously overhead, drowning the faces of the suns. Up there the moons were lining out in that deadly conjunction which would certainly spell destruction and might mean death for many a seaport city around Kregen where the seaward defenses had been neglected. Even the three smaller moons, which hurtle frantically low over the face of the planet, were in conjunction. The first and largest moon, the Maiden with the Many Smiles, the two second moons, the Twins, and the third Moon, She of the Veils, all were exerting their gravitational pull together with the Suns. When no moons are in the sky of Kregen — when they cannot be seen, that is — it is called a night of Notor Zan. When all the moons blaze at the full, when even the three smallest join with the major four, that is called the Scarf of Our Lady Monafeyom. We could see nothing overhead but the dark swirling clouds lowering down, but we knew what was going on out there as we knew how the waters of the ocean were responding to the titanic forces.

The Dam shuddered.

All that monstrous construction thrilled to the shock, alive with the vibration. The wind tore the reason from our skulls.

The tide burst through.

The gale broomed its own violence and added to the pell-mell tumult. I hung onto the guardrail, my hair blown forward over my face, staring at the mouth of the Grand Canal.

The opening was small at this distance and the argenters appeared like dots in the gloom, but I have imagination and the whole scene was described vividly to me later by one who was there and saw it all at close hand.

Across the bay leaped the tidal bore.

A wall of water, tipped with the vicious fangs of breakers, towering, cresting, blowing, omnipotent in its might. How tall was the eagre?

The famous Severn bore rushes up at the equinoxes to heights of five to six feet. Good friends have told me that in New Brunswick they have seen the daily tidal bore roaring up the river from the Bay of Fundy in a mightily impressive sight: a genuine wall of water simply rolling up the river with the floodwater following directly behind. The rise and fall of the tide in the Bay of Fundy is known to every schoolboy. At the head of the bay the tidal height reaches a fantastic sixty-two feet and even halfway up, at Passamaquoddy Bay, it is twenty-five feet. The force and power of millions of tons of water rolling along with the fang-toothed eagre at their head are enough to convince the most skeptical of mortals that in sober truth nature is the lord and master of the worlds we inhabit.

All this power and smashing violence, the colossal movement of water — with only one sun and one moon! How high?

I stood there as the Dam thrilled to the vibrations of untold millions of tons of water smashing at its ancient structure, as the water spumed through the opening I had made, shuddering under the shrill of the wind. How high?

I saw the small shape of an argenter lifted up and up and up. It broke apart. It flew apart as a barrel flies apart when its hoops are broken through. Planks, timbers, bundles — dark, pitiful objects — whirling and smoking through the frenzied turmoil of the waves, with the spume covering all with a white confetti of death.

Horrible, terrible, malignant. I would prefer to pass lightly over that destruction of a fleet, for I am an old sailor who has a love for ships.

But the ships were broken and riven. Crushed against the hard stone of the terraced Grand Canal, tossed up like chips to fall, cracking open and spilling shrieking bloody things that had been men, the ships died. The wind lashed the sea and drove relentlessly on. The bore sliced through the Grand Canal and the waters boiled and roared and fought as they cascaded on.

On and on through the cut smoked the waters.

The tide had struck and destroyed, shouting in its strength.

How high?

High enough for death.

High enough to claw up past terrace after terrace of the Grand Canal, filling the cut with the violence of unleashed waters, rolling remorselessly on and on over the wrecked remnants that had once been a fleet proud with flags.

So, I thought, ended Genod Gannius plans to use vollers from Hamal against Zairians. The sight of those broad comfortable ships, those splendid argenters, being smashed to driftwood did not please me, even when I knew what they were and what errand they had been on. I, an old first lieutenant of a seventy-four, am sentimental in these matters. Against the shriek of the wind Duhrra’s voice reached me thinned. "It is time we moved on, Dak my master. I see the green moving in the shadows beyond the Dam."

The darkness pressed down as the stormclouds boiled. The Todalpheme were anxious to lower the caissons once I gave them leave. I stepped past the body of the Jiktar. He had been a Ghittawrer, a Grodnim member of a green brotherhood that attempted to ape the ways and disciplines of the Krozairs. His sword would be of fine quality. Duhrra and I would leave the novices; we must find our own way out of this situation. I turned back.

"One boon I ask," I said to the novice. "The tide will reach Shazmoz but will scarce do further damage. Do not tell the Grodnims the names you have heard us use."

"Then what names shall we tell them? They are hard men and will be exceedingly angry."

"Say you heard us call each other Krozairs."

The Todalpheme’s face betrayed his speculation through the continuing shock. "That will make them even more wroth."

Then I laughed. "I shall be sorry to miss that pleasant sight." So, laughing, Duhrra and I ran rapidly from the Dam of Days.

Once we had slipped into the storm-shadows at the far end we were able to circle and mingle with the Grodnims, securing ourselves from all possible suspicion. We were merely two paktuns, serving Grodno the Green.

I had stooped to take the longsword from the Jiktar. It was a fine weapon. Its pattern was startlingly similar to a true Krozair longsword, but it was not. Its edge was dented in only two places, where Duhrra’s common blade looked almost like a saw. He too possessed himself a fine new blade. All the common longswords bore on the flat of the blade below the guard the etched monogram G.G.M. I remembered that. The Jiktar’s sword bore a device I knew, a lairgodont surmounted by the rayed sun. The lairgodont, a most ferocious carnivorous risslaca, is known over much of Kregen but is most numerous in northern Turismond. So I kept the hilt of the longsword, with its device and decoration of emeralds, hidden under a flap of green cloth, for that symbol denotes a green brotherhood devoted to Grodno.

We took our chances, Duhrra and I, and we passed through the encamped army of Genod Gannius, commanded by his Chuktar of the west, and so came at length free of them and to the east of the Grand Canal, on the northern shore.

"I am for Magdag, Duhrra. There I shall find a galleon, a great ship of the outer oceans. I shall bid you remberee."

"We shall see," he replied. He was altogether too complacent. He had said that idiot "duh" barely half a dozen times since I had dubbed him Duhrra of the Days.

Truth to tell, after the visitation on the Dam I had been hourly expecting the return of the damned Gdoinye and the apparition of the blue Scorpion. I felt sure I had not beaten the Star Lords and I expected them to whisk me away. If they chose to hurl me headlong into fresh adventure on Kregen, well, that had been the pattern of my life and I would do what I could to fight through and reach Valka and Delia. If they chose to toss me contemptuously back to Earth I felt I might truly go mad. I did not think I could face another spell of twenty years on the planet of my birth. We had stolen three sectrixes and had enough plunder loaded on the third to last us. We rode gently, for we had a way to go. The gale had passed, scouring the sky. With a new day the Suns of Scorpio flamed above, casting down their mingled streaming light. We rode in an opaline radiance. The sea glittered to our right and the deserted countryside about us testified to the savagery of man in the inner sea. Also, I realized, it indicated that the sea could turn savage and cruel if the Dam of Days did not regulate the Tides of Kregen. Ahead of us a little knoll posed the usual problem. I said, "We are two greens, Duhrra of the Days, lest you forget. We may ride up boldly."

"Aye, Dak, my master. But if they be not too many . . ."

I glanced at the stump. In his saddle bag he carried the leather attachments to buckle on, the hooks and implements given him by the doctors of the Todalpheme. We had paid for them with golden oars taken from a Grodnim who lay in the bushes with a slit throat.

"You must wait to test your new hook, Duhrra of the Days."

"May Uncle Zobab quickly smile upon my stump then, for I long dearly to . . . uh . . . prove . . ." The sectrixes stopped in mid-stride. Duhrra sat erect in the saddle with his big moon-face arrested with down-dropping jaw. I looked at the knoll.

A scarlet and golden figure sat a zhyan there.

The enormous pure white bird with the scarlet beak and claws took to the air and with a few lazy beats of its four wings settled at my side. I gazed at the woman seated on the zhyan’s back. She smiled gently at me.

"Lahal, Pur Dray."

"I am no longer Pur Dray, Madam Ivanovna."

"And on Kregen I am not Madam Ivanovna. You may address me as Zena Iztar." Her robes sparkled in the light of the suns. All scarlet and rose, crimson and ruby, with golden tissue vestments and sumptuous gems and trappings, she presented a dazzling sight to an old sailor who was no longer a Krozair of Zy. She wore armor, golden plates cunningly fashioned, fitted to her, making me see the full voluptuous figure, the strength, the lissomness, the lithe power in a seductive frame. I did not return the smile.

"Why do you seek me out, Zena Iztar?"

"Didn’t the yellow overthrow the Scorpion’s blue?"

"Aye."

"Do you not then owe me gratitude?"

"I waited three damned long years after you visited me in London."

"Aye."

We stared at each other.

Then, touching her red lips with a painted and gilded fingernail: "You are no longer a Krozair of Zy."

"No. It is of no consequence now."

"I think you lie."

I did not think I lied. "No, I do not lie. If those Zair-forsaken cramphs of Star Lords do not catch up with me I intend to sail to Valka. There is where my labors are required." The marvel, the magic, the sheer wonder of this visitation, this apparition, had no power to move me now. I was sullen. I knew what I wanted to do at last — about time too — and I suspected most evilly that I was to be prevented.

I repeated, speaking so that she gazed down haughtily at me, although she did not flinch by more than a slight shifting of her head: "I am for Valka."

"And what of the Eye of the World? What of your friends here? What of Zair?"

"I am Apushniad!"

"Yet we both know that Dray Prescot is a man who could alter that, if he willed."

"He does not so will."

"I feared this. I had hoped—"

"Look, Zena Iztar. I want to go home! I want to see Delia again. Is that so strange? I have been tossed around, made slave, pranced about with these disgusting greens of Grodno — now I want to go back to Delia again."

"She is safe and well in Esser Rarioch."

"Aye! And that is where I want to be also."

"Why did you open the Dam of Days and destroy the vollers from Hamal? Was that a rational act of a man who does not care?"

"I am not a rational man! I thought to strike a blow for Sanurkazz and Zy and Felteraz. That is all."

"It is not all. I must leave you now. But I will tell you this: in your stiff-necked pride and in your selfishness you will fail. You will not be allowed to return to Valka."

"By the Star Lords?"

"No."

Before I could roar out a fresh question, for I was exceedingly angry, as I felt I had every right to be, the zhyan clashed its four wide wings, raising a whirlwind of dust, and rose into the air. I watched it fly up. The scarlet and gold figure leaned out and down, looking at me until vision was lost. Even then, I suspected, this hulu of a Madam Ivanovna, this fancy Zena Iztar, could still see me, a hulking great fighting man, hot with the lust to bash something around because he could not go home to his wife and children.

". . . uh . . . to prove I can take a swordsman with my right hand."

"Do what?" I said.

"Master! What is it?"

I forced myself to sit in the uncomfortable saddle, take up the reins and try to make the stupid sectrix behave.

"Nothing, Duhrra of the Days. A vision. It is passed. I still ride to Magdag and I will still find a galleon. There is much to be done in the outer oceans. I will shake the dust of Grodno and Zair from my feet and say good riddance."

Much had been explained to me, if not in words, but a very great deal remained; there were yet mysteries to be solved. I’d think about them when I reached Valka and once more held Delia in my arms, my Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond.

"Uh . . . I shall never say good riddance to Zair. But I think I will go with you across the wild and wonderful outer oceans."

I recollected myself. What the hell did I think Duhrra was going to do if I left him stranded in Magdag, the fortress city of the megaliths, the home of the Overlords of Magdag, the archenemies of all Zairians? I glared at him.

"Very well, the Duhrra of the Days. You come with me." I could not smile, but I said, "And right gladly will you be welcome."

"Uh," said Duhrra. "I think perhaps tomorrow I will try my new hook." About the author

Alan Burt Akers is a pen name of the prolific British author Kenneth Bulmer. Bulmer published over 160

novels and countless short stories, predominantly science fiction.

More details about the author, and current links to other sources of information, can be found at www.mushroom-ebooks.com

The Dray Prescot Series

The Delian Cycle:

1. Transit to Scorpio

2. The Suns of Scorpio

3. Warrior of Scorpio

4. Swordships of Scorpio

5. Prince of Scorpio

Havilfar Cycle:

6. Manhounds of Antares

7. Arena of Antares

8. Fliers of Antares

9. Bladesman of Antares

10. Avenger of Antares

11. Armada of Antares

The Krozair Cycle:

12. The Tides of Kregen

13. Renegade of Kregen

14. Krozair of Kregen

Notes

[1] Dbs: dwaburs per bur. A dwabur is five miles and a bur is forty minutes. Dbs is the usual measurement for fliers. Land or sea transport speed is more often given in ubs, ulms per bur. An ulm is about 1,500 yards. [A.B.A.]

[2]See Warrior of Scorpio, Dray Prescot #3. Prescot’s account of how he escaped the Phokaym and crossed the Klackadrin on foot is, unfortunately, lost. [A.B.A.]

[3] Jernu: This word for lord belongs to the Zairians and is not often used by Prescot. It equates with the Vallian Jen and the Hamalian Notor . Its correct use is clear in this context. A.B.A.

[4] Weng da: Who goes there?

[5] Roz: title of nobility similar to outer oceans’ Kov, Duke.