Copyright © 1975, Kenneth Bulmer

Alan Burt Akers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

First published by Daw Books, Inc. in 1975.

This Edition published in 2006 by Mushroom eBooks, an imprint of Mushroom Publishing, Bath, BA1

4EB, United Kingdom

www.mushroom-ebooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 1843193884

Fliers of Antares

Alan Burt Akers

Mushroom eBooks

A Note on Dray Prescot

Dray Prescot is a man above medium height, with straight brown hair and brown eyes that are level and dominating. His shoulders are immensely wide and there is about him an abrasive honesty and a fearless courage. He moves like a great hunting cat, quiet and deadly. Born in 1775 and educated in the inhumanly harsh conditions of the late eighteenth century navy, he presents a picture of himself that, the more we learn of him, grows no less enigmatic.

Through the machinations of the Savanti nal Aphrasöe — mortal but superhuman men dedicated to the aid of humanity — and of the Star Lords, he has been taken to Kregen under the Suns of Scorpio many times. On that savage and beautiful, marvelous and terrible world he rose to become Zorcander of the Clansmen of Segesthes, and Lord of Strombor in Zenicce, and a member of the mystic and martial Order of Krozairs of Zy.

Against all odds Prescot won his highest desire and in that immortal battle at The Dragon’s Bones claimed his Delia, Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains, as his own. And Delia claimed him in the face of her father the dread Emperor of Vallia. Amid the rolling thunder of the acclamations of Hai Jikai! Prescot became Prince Majister of Vallia, and wed his Delia, the Princess Majestrix. Through the agency of the blue radiance sent by the Star Lords, the Summons of the Scorpion, Prescot is plunged headlong into fresh adventures on Kregen. Outwitting the Manhounds of Antares, he rescues Mog, a high priestess, and defeats the Canops who have invaded her country. Forced to fight in the arena of the Jikhorkdun of Huringa he rises to be a hyr-kaidur and at a climactic moment is rescued with Delia by his comrades in a magnificent airboat. Now they are on their way to Migladrin across the Shrouded Sea . . .

Alan Burt Akers

CHAPTER ONE

I swim in the Shrouded Sea

“By Vox!” yelled Vangar ti Valkanium above the clamor of the gale. “This would be no time for this flier to break down.”

From the forward starboard varter position I clung to a stanchion with my left hand and peered out and down. The sudden onset of the gale had cast a darkness over the bright day, and the twin Suns of Scorpio were dimmed. Through the drenching lash of rain and the erratic lightning-shot darkness I could see the lacerated surface of the Shrouded Sea. The wind slashed off the tops of the running waves, and the white roar below bellowed and flung wind-tossed spume flat and sheeting.

“This voller was built in Hamal, Vangar,” I yelled back at him. He could barely hear me. “She won’t break down like the rubbish they sell us in Vallia.”

We were both drenched with rain. The decks ran with water which spouted out, foaming, through the scuppers. I had full confidence in the flier, for my men had taken her from a crew of foolish raiders from Hamal, so that they could come to my rescue in the arena of the city of Huringa in Hyrklana; it was now very clear to me that the shipwrights of Hamal applied double standards to their work.

“She flies well, my prince,” shouted Vangar. He felt a particular concern for Delia and me, I well knew, for his appointment as captain of my flier brought him grave responsibilities as well as great joys. The sea below raged and roared. We were lower than I liked, for we had tried to outrun the gale on our way back to Migladrin to finalize the new arrangements in religious and political matters of that country, and this confounded gale had seized us in its grip as we sped across the Shrouded Sea. For a moment I lingered. The sea down there aroused strange emotions in me. The Star Lords had prohibited me from shipping in either swifter or swordship; but I admit that, despite the anger of that sea and the fierce and deadly power of wind and water, I stared a little hungrily at the element on which I had lived for so large a part of my life on the planet of my birth, four hundred light-years away.

“Get back to the helm-deldar, Vangar, and lift us. We will have to take our chances with the wind and storm higher up.”

Vangar did not argue but went at once.

To this day I cannot in truth say how it happened. I know the black thought of treachery crossed my mind, for until the conspiracy against the Emperor of Vallia, who was my father-in-law, had been completely crushed, we walked in perilous paths. And his peril also menaced his daughter, who was my wife, the Princess Majestrix Delia, my Delia of Delphond, of the Blue Mountains. The most probable explanation is that during that brave rescue of me from the arena when the flier was being shot at from all directions, a chunk of rock thrown by a varter had crunched into the stanchion, weakening it.

Now with my weight and the wind and the violent motions of the flier, the stanchion parted. Instantly I was tumbled headlong into thin air, spinning head over heels, gasping as the wind and rain struck and sent me plunging into that fearsome sea.

I surfaced and dragged in a huge lungful of air; then the waves smashed me over and down and so I began a protracted period of intense struggle to survive. As you know, I am a strong swimmer, and may dive deeply and long, and believe me when I say I needed every ounce of skill and endurance. The flier vanished, whisked away as a clump of thistledown is brushed by the breeze. I, Dray Prescot, of Earth and of Kregen, battled for my life with the sea — alone. There are techniques for keeping afloat and I used all my knowledge to remain near the surface and not allow the vicious violence of the sea to weaken and overwhelm me. That I survived is clear in that I am speaking to you on these tapes; but it was a near thing. When I felt myself at last at the end of my strength and saw there low against a level break in the clouds the long line of rocks marking a shore, I knew I had to make a supreme effort. I am not a man who will give in easily. I had been learning caution, and tried to contain that intemperate recklessness that had many times brought me kicks and cuffs, and, may Zair forgive me, so many times failed. But against the insensate violence of the sea I would exert everything of me that is me, that makes me Dray Prescot, and no other in two worlds. Gradually, with immense effort, I maneuvered myself toward the shore. For a moment or two I thought I would be flung end-over-end onto the black rocks that showed through the gouting spray like decayed teeth; but Zair aided me — for the damned Star Lords would not, and neither would the Savanti — and I felt myself picked up and flung between two jagged rocks and so hurled onto a tiered beach of coarse gray sand. I had to summon up all the reserves of strength I had left to prevent myself from just lying there, prey to the waves, and to force myself to crawl on hands and knees up above the high water mark. Then, between two crumbling rocks, I put my head onto that sand and passed out. The next thing I recall is being turned over gently and feeling soft hands examining my ribs and arms and legs. I lay still.

A girl’s voice, light and clear, said: “He has no broken bones, for which he may praise Mother Shoshash of the Seaweed Hair, when he awakes. Father Shoshash the Stormbrow has not been gentle with him. His ib is knocked fair out of him.”

Another girl’s voice, a little more giggly, answered. “Come away, Paesi. He looks monstrous ugly. And look at his shoulders!”

“Mmm,” said Paesi, in a way I decidedly did not like.

Thinking it expedient to regain consciousness, I let out a few grunts, heaved myself around, and opened my eyes.

Two Lamnias stared down on me. They had run back a few paces, and now stood, poised for instant flight. I have told you that certain races are famed upon Kregen for the beauty of their womenfolk, and the Lamnias, that gentle, shrewd, yellow-furred folk, are blessed with daughters who are as fair in the eyes of other races as any Fristle fifi, or apim girl, or aephar damsel of far Balintol. The two girls, Paesi and her companion, wore simple short-sleeved white blouses and knee-length skirts of apple-green, and they carried woven wickerwork baskets over their arms. They stood regarding me uncertainly, a monstrous great hairy apim risen from the sea. Shades of Odysseus and Nausicaa! I was as salt grimed and unkempt, clad only in my old scarlet breechclout, as any shipwrecked mariner. But the two Lamnias stood, open-eyed, regarding me, and beneath the white blouses their bosoms rose and fell perhaps a little faster as I slowly stood up, and stretched, and gave thanks to Zair that I still lived. Lamnias in youth possess that gorgeous laypom-colored dusting of fur upon their bodies that strokes as light as thistledown. Later in life the fur grows thicker and darker but seldom as thick as, for example, the fur of a Fristle. Now the two girls stared at me and the flush of blood beneath the skin showed clearly through that light yellow dusting of fur.

“I mean you no harm,” I said, trying to make my bear-like voice as friendly as possible. But when I spoke they both jumped and took a step back.

After some time I managed to convince them that I was a human being — and by that I mean a human being, as they were; and not merely apim, which they could see — and we set off to walk to their village. I had no means of knowing where Delia might be now. What I did know, unshakably, was that she would scour the sea until she found me. She knew of my mysterious disappearances, although not the cause of them, and this time the broken stanchion would show all too clearly what had happened. I fancied then, as I went with the two Lamnia girls up past the gorse-like bushes of the shoreline and through broad-leaved sough-wood trees, that very soon the flier would come ghosting in and my friends would yell and bellow for me and a rope ladder would come tumbling down and I would be rescued again.

If I mention, now, that the broken stanchion dumped me headlong into fresh adventures, I must add that the stanchion also contributed much to the destiny of the planet Kregen itself. The people of the village greeted me kindly. They must have observed the way I was constantly looking up into the sky as Zim and Genodras sailed past scattered clouds, shedding that streaming mingled opaz light, and perhaps they put down those searching looks to guilt against Havil, or to some religious doctrine, or even — and this would be the nature of the Lamnias — to a stiff neck I was trying to ease. My previous experiences of Lamnias, notably with Dorval Aymlo, the merchant of Ordsmot, had shown me that they were a gentle people, good merchants, shrewd at bargaining, not warriors. The village had a wooden stockade and was tucked neatly into the crook of a river with a bluff to defend it; but it was a poor place for all that, both in military might and in wealth. It was crowded with people all engaged in running about on tasks of the utmost importance to those performing them but incomprehensible to me at the time. I detected a note of competition in the air, and saw young girls dancing and singing in long lines, and young men running races and hurling blunted wooden javelins, throwing weapons quite unlike the formidable stuxes of Havilfar.

The Lammas seated on wooden stools at the entrance to the largest house, a two-story structure festooned with many varieties of flowers, I assumed to be the village council, and the headman, a shrewd and sad-looking fellow called Rorpal of Podia, greeted me with a punctiliousness I found touching.

“Llahal, stranger who has escaped from the house of Shoshash.”

“Llahal, Rorpal of Podia.”

Podia was the name of the village, and it was situated on one of the innumerable islands of the Shrouded Sea. On the other side of the river a steep, cone-shaped volcano emitted a lazy cloud of smoke. Perhaps the Lamnias thought I kept looking at He of the Yrium, the volcano, in my searching looks at the sky. Yrium is a word with profound meanings of force, meaning power, either power conveyed by office, or by strength of character, or given to a person in any way that unmistakably blesses — or curses — him with undisputed dominance over his fellows. To dub a natural phenomenon like a volcano as He of the Yrium was to convey in the most pungent way all the awful ferocity and power these people regarded as residing in the volcano. The Shrouded Sea is plagued with volcanic activity, as well as earth tremors and earthquakes.

“I am Dray Prescot,” I said. Then, I added, “Krozair of Zy,” because at times I am a boaster as well as an intemperate hothead, and I felt secure in the knowledge that they would not understand what I was telling them anyway.

“Llahal, Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy. You are welcome to Podia. Will you tell us your story?”

I did not smile at this, for that would have been impolite; I simply sat on the wooden bench indicated and, with a glass of fruit juice and a plate of palines at my side, I told them a little. I mentioned the Canops, that fierce, martial race of people who had been driven out of their island home because of its near-destruction by earthquake, and of their settling in Migladrin, but before I had a chance to say that the Miglas, with the help of my friends, had taken back their own country, the Lamnias reacted. To my surprise they were disappointed that the Canops had left the Shrouded Sea island of Canopdrin.

“They are honest traders,” said Rorpal, rubbing the laypom-colored fur beneath his chin. “Now there is no one to stand against the aragorn of Sorah.”

Well, as you know, I was acquainted with the evil ways of the aragorn. Slave raiders and slave-masters, the aragorn plunder their way to fortune over the agony and the blood of anyone unfortunate enough to be too weak to stand up against them. The valiant people of my island of Valka had driven out the aragorn of Vallia. I was in the midst of a political campaign to drive them out of Vallia altogether. And now, here in the continent of Havilfar, I found aragorn operating in the Shrouded Sea. This was not surprising. Slaves are required. Slaves are always needed. Slave-masters will always find a calling when there are weak people to be enslaved and strong and unscrupulous people to enslave them.

“You fear the aragorn of Sorah?”

“Aye, Horter Prescot. We fear them.”

I sat back and considered. I had chanced here because a weakened stanchion of an airboat had pitched me into the sea. I might have drifted anywhere, or been drowned and forgotten. I had not been sent here by the Star Lords. No blue radiance had enfolded me, no gigantic representation of a scorpion had borne me away to a desperate mission for the Star Lords. No. No, I had no business here. If I occupied myself in every small corner of Havilfar — let alone Kregen — interfering with the ways of life that had gone on for centuries, there would be no end to it. This business was not my business. All the same, I felt the thrill of blood through my arteries, and the word aragorn — remembering Valka and that great song, “The Fetching of Drak na Valka” — made my hands close as though they held a sword.

I now know I was wrong in shrugging off someone else’s problems. But you must remember that I was young according to Kregan standards, to which I have become adjusted, and I was newly married with baby twins, Drak and Lela. I wanted to go home to Valka and take my Delia in my arms and forget all about Star Lords and slavery and the other pressing problems of Kregen. I was even considering leaving off my search for the Savanti, those mortal but superhuman men of the Swinging City of Aphrasöe. It is not easy for a fighting-man to reconcile himself to the philosophy that teaches we are all responsible for each other, and that one person’s loss is a loss to all.

So I changed the subject and said: “I see you hold a great festival, Horter Rorpal. Your young men and your young girls compete against each other.”

Rorpal’s sad face looked sadder than ever and he leaned forward, about to answer me. An old Lamnia at his side put a hand on Rorpal’s arm. This Lamnia’s yellow fur showed silver tips, a clear indication of his great age, for I guessed he must be well past a hundred and seventy-five. He shook his head in warning.

Whatever Rorpal had been about to say, that hand on his arm and that shake of the head changed his mind.

“Yes, Horter Prescot.” He took a paline and munched it thoughtfully. I waited politely; but he said nothing more to enlighten me.

Although I wore my scarlet breechclout, cinctured up with a broad leather belt, and a sailor’s knife lay scabbarded back of my right hip, I felt naked. On Kregen, that marvelous world that is so heartbreakingly beautiful and so horrendously cruel, a man must carry a weapon if he wishes to remain free in so very many areas of the globe. The unarmed combat disciplines of the Krozairs of Zy could keep me out of much trouble, but I hanker always for the feel of a sword in my fist. The activities of the youngsters, which could be viewed with ease from this high verandah outside the headman’s house, came to a climax with much shouting and hullabalooing, and at last a group of about fifty youths and maidens, their dusting of yellow fur bright in the declining rays of the twin suns, clustered together, entwined with wreaths of flowers. Something of the sadness of Rorpal of Podia must have affected me, for these circlets of flowers could scarcely be wreaths. They must be the victors’ crowns. And yet the flowers, so brilliant, so beautiful, were linked together in long chains, so that the fifty were in very truth entwined about, bound, almost.

Masses of people moved away from the open space, laughing among themselves, and yet their laughter struck chill. I glanced at Rorpal.

He stood up. At his side a young man with as aggressive a cast of feature as any Lamnia might aspire to handed the headman his spear of office. Around the spear had been entwined flowers. Rorpal lifted the spear, and the gathering crowds below fell silent and shuffled into place before the verandah and the group of village elders, leaving the fifty bound in their flower chains some way off, isolated. Rorpal was about to say something that might explain these proceedings. A woman ran urgently up and past the crowd’s outskirts, pushed vigorously past the aggressive youth, who made no real attempt to halt her. She stopped in front of Rorpal. She looked agitated and yet determined, and her face, pleasant and mellow in the Lamnia way, set itself in lines of unfamiliar hardness.

“Rorpal! I call on you — Paesi — she it was — and it is decided that Polosi shall go!” She was stammering so much through her assumed hardness that she made no sense. At least, she made no sense to me. But Rorpal of Podia understood what she wanted.

He struck the butt of the spear on the wooden flooring three times. The silence became absolute, except for the evening breeze in the trees and a few dogs howling from the compound where they had been herded during the ceremonies. I noticed particularly, from my already vast experience, that no babies were crying.

“Very well, Mother Mala. Paesi it was, we all agree to that, it is attested.”

“It is!”

Rorpal gestured in a way that might have embraced this woman, Mother Mala, the crowds, the fifty youths in their flowery chains, the elders on the verandah — or me — and he banged his spear down again, four times. Abruptly everyone burst into shouts and cheering. But, even then, that cheering struck a somber note, there on the dusty compound of the little village of Podia. I noticed that most of the cheering came from the young men and women mixed in the crowds before the verandah. The fifty bound in flowers remained silent, although everyone looked toward the elders on the verandah. Then — one of those fifty burst into hysterical shouting. A young man broke the flower chain by a single movement of his hands and ran and ran and so was swept up into the arms of Mother Mala. I saw the girl Paesi, who had found me on the shore, also hugging and kissing both the boy and his mother. Lamnias passed among the crowds carrying large gourd-shaped vessels of pottery that are sometimes called amphorae, although they are not strictly of that shape or form, for they have a stoppered spout, and their more proper name is holc. They were mounted on wicker carrying baskets upon the men’s backs and it was remarkable with what nicety and skill the men could tilt the holc and direct a stream of wine into an outstretched cup without so much as spilling a drop. Fresh wine in fresh goblets was produced for the elders upon the verandah, and I took the goblet offered me. Rorpal of Podia banged his spear butt again, twice and a third time, and the silence fell.

Rorpal lifted his goblet.

Everyone raised their goblets or cups high into the air.

“Let us drink the parting toast!” called Rorpal. “The toast of da’eslam! The farewell and the greeting!

Da’eslam!”

“Da’eslam! Da’eslam!”

We all drank.

Then, as is the way with Lamnias, everything was over and the people shuffled away. I put the goblet down and looked for the fifty — no, the forty-nine — and saw they were gone from their places. Only the coiled chains of flowers lay there, abandoned, their petals wilting and losing their color. One function of the meaning of da’eslam, as I knew even then, rather like the vaol-paol, is the end and the beginning, and equally the beginning and the end. But whereas the circle of vaol-paol encompasses all things, da’eslam contains a narrower vision connected almost always with a person’s fate and destiny. The Lamnias had summed me up shrewdly.

In the last of the light streaming and mingling from the emerald orb of Genodras, which is called Havil in Havilfar, and the ruby orb of Zim, which is called Far in Havilfar, I saw a small group of men walk from the stockade past the last of the houses and so come out onto the open space before the verandah and the elders and the headman.

I saw their faces, and instinctively my right hand crossed my waist, groping for the hilt of a sword that was not there.

Yes, the Lamnias understood men, even apims, even apims like myself. The newcomers stood in the opaz radiance, their shadows long upon the packed dust where the feet of the Lamnias had so lately shuffled. I saw those damned faces. Thick black hair, greased and oiled and curled, hung about their evil faces. These beings were not apim. They were of a race of diffs I had not encountered before, and they were beast-men and men-beasts of so forbidding an aspect I truly thought that a Chulik might think twice before offending one of their number. Low were their brows, low and wide, above flaring nostrils and gape-jawed mouths in which I saw snaggly teeth bared in grins of anticipation. Their eyes were wide spaced, brilliant, yet narrow and cold. These halflings wore armor, scale armor that was as commonplace as any I had seen. They wore close-fitting helmets which I then thought were brass, and only later discovered to be gold over iron. They carried weapons of the fighting-man of Havilfar — thraxter, stux, shield. Apart from the impression of evil upon their faces, they would not have occasioned in me any further interest outside my usual fascination with the myriads of types and species upon Kregen, but for their tails. I saw at once that these tails were probably their most formidable armament. Long and whiplike, the tails were carried high and arrogantly, curved over the right shoulder. And every tail ended in a razor-sharp curved blade. The glinting light from the twin suns caught the serried blades, upflung on the flaunting tails, and glittered like a field of diamonds.

The faces of diffs are passing strange in the eyes of a man from this Earth. Some are beautiful, some are ugly, some misshapen in our estimation, others quite unremarkable. Yet how difficult it is to say with complete surety that a certain expression upon the face of a man who is not apim — is not a member of Homo sapiens — means exactly what you think it means. I took the gloating faces to portray evil at that moment, and although I was proved right — to my cost! — the assumption was made so rapidly, so much from instinct, that immediately I forced myself to relax and to believe that an alien’s face cannot show what a man’s face of this Earth would show and necessarily mean the same thing. Below the scaled corselet each man wore a brilliant scarlet kilt. I stared. I suppose that, too, influenced me, like any onker. The diffs wore the old brave scarlet, the color that had in so many ways become associated so closely with me and mine upon Kregen.

They advanced with a steady step and I saw that they kept in step and to a wedgelike formation. The leader, broad and bulky, wore a multitude of feathers and silks, not on his helmet but about his person. He halted below the verandah and looked up. Once more I had to control myself, to make myself relax. Was I not learning the ways of quietness and peace upon Kregen under Antares?

“Is all ready, Rorpal?”

“All is ready, Notor.”

“Then bring them out, you rast, or I’ll sink my stux in your belly.”

I straightened up at these words, for I understood a little of the thinking behind such uncalled-for insult and arrogance. As I straightened, I felt a hazy qualm or dizziness pass, as though my brain had moved within my skull, fractionally later than I had intended.

So then it was that I understood how easily the Lamnias had read me, how shrewdly they had taken stock of me, and what they had done. I understood now what had transpired here. There was no need for Rorpal of Podia to lean regretfully toward me as I stumbled, and clutched at the railing, and so, stupidly, collapsed to the wooden floor, and for him to say: “We express our deep regret, Horter Prescot. But we are driven by devils. We must send fifty of our youths and our maidens, and the aragorn will welcome you exceedingly in place of Polosi, the son of Mala and sister of Paesi, who found you and so had claim upon you.”

Then Rorpal, who had the good of Podia at heart, called to the aragorn leader: “This apim is a great warrior, a Hyr-paktun. In him you will be well pleased.”

Then the drug in the wine felled me utterly and Notor Zan engulfed me in blackness.

CHAPTER TWO

Delia begins a story

It seemed to me that Delia was telling young Dray, the Strom of Balkash, a story. The Strom of Balkash was the son of Seg Segutorio, Kov of Falinur, and Thelda, the Kovneva. Delia sat curled up in a heaping pile of cushions whose glowing silks and embroideries could not compare in any way with the glory that was my Delia. The story was well loved in Vallia, and Delia, herself, enjoyed the retelling of it.

“Under a certain moon,” she began, which is a way of saying Once upon a time, “a great and cruel Vad ruled a country and all the people groaned and were unhappy. Now it happened that in that country, at a place where a wooden bridge crossed a stream and silver fishes leaped into your hand, lived a poor man who had a beautiful daughter whose name was Ama of the Shining Hair. It chanced that the great and cruel Vad went a-hunting leem, which had been troubling the ponshos of the people in those parts.”

Something tickled me in the ribs and I stirred and moved and then sank back on my cushions to listen to Delia. As for young Dray, who was Seg Segutorio’s son, his little face was puckered up in absolute concentration and he was holding all his body tightly with expectation and glee at this marvelous story from this marvelous aunt.

“But one of the ponsho farmers was a young man who could talk to his ponsho-trag and who loved nothing better than to sport all day in the fields with his friend, as you would with your friends. Now this ponsho farmer’s name was—”

The nudge in my side was less gentle, far from gentle. It was a positive kick. I rolled over, ready to find out who would thus dare to desecrate the enjoyment of the Prince Majister of Vallia’s entranced absorption in a story told by the Princess Majestrix of Vallia, and a thudding kick bounced off my ribs, and a course and unlovely voice roared in my ear.

“Get up, you rast! Yetch! On your feet!”

I opened my eyes.

An aragorn drew his booted foot back ready to drive it into my ribs again. I rolled away, feeling a terrible pain in my gut, and tried to catch that wicked boot. I could not move my hands.

“Nulsh! On your feet!”

The kick landed. I got my feet under me. The pink-lit shadows of the Kregan night lay between the loom of trees, and I heard the susurration of the night wind. My hands were bound.

“You cramph,” I said. “I wanted to hear that story.”

My voice slurred horribly and I could feel the solid ground going up and down like the deck of a swordship in a gale off the Hoboling islands.

The aragorn brought his whiplike tail around and laid the flat of the curved blade against my head. That thick skull of mine rang as though all the bells in Beng-Kishi sounded off with maniacs at the clapper ropes.

“Get into line or I’ll flay your hide off!”

He was genuinely annoyed. The pink moonlight from She of the Veils flowed over his gold-on-iron helmet, scaled armor, and brave scarlet kilt. I could see the vague shadows of Lamnias all about and I could hear the harsh orders to move, and so I understood that no great time had elapsed since Notor Zan had taken me entire. The aragorn were taking the young Lamnias selected for them, and, shrewd in their way, the Lamnias of Podia had saved one of themselves and thrown me in as a prize specimen of a slave.

Under the conjoined forces of the tail-blow on the head and the surgings of the solid earth beneath my feet and the rumblings of my gut, I staggered half a dozen paces beneath the trees. They had had the forethought to bind my wrists with thongs and had carried me out and dumped me among the forty-nine sacrifices.

The thongs were not lesten hide.

I broke them with a single savage surge, twisted, got the aragorn around the throat, and, ducking my head beneath his instinctive slash of the tail-blade, started to choke a little respect into him. I had no desire to kill him. I was still ensnared in the repression of my savage and intemperate nature; but enough was enough. He garbled and choked trying to yell. Others of the slave-masters came running, and so I threw this specimen at them and turned to dash into the moon-shadowed trees. Oh, yes, I was perfectly resigned to leave them unharmed and to run away. I had some of the most important aspects of my life worked out now; as you would say today, I had my priorities almost right. Delia would not welcome a dead husband lying rotting beneath the mud of some putrid island of the Shrouded Sea.

But these aragorn were cunning in the ways of man-management. Twining iron links whirred through the air and snagged my arms and legs, brought me down with a crash. Once the thongs had proved useless to hold me, they merely clamped chains upon me. I tested the iron. It would take long and long — if ever

— for me to break the weakest link.

After that it was a question of being prodded along the track between the trees. The aragorn I had maltreated took some delight in prodding me with his stux. I clashed my chains at him, but he laughed evilly and avoided the swinging bight and struck me again.

“Leave off, you onker, Reterhan!” The leader strode up, and his anger made of his ugly face a devil’s mask very like the face of the Devil of the Ice-Wind who guards the north shore of Gundarlo.

“He attacked me, Notor!”

“When he is sold — when we have golden deldys for him — you may take your own payment, then, Reterhan. Until then, by the Triple Tails of Targ the Untouchable, you will care for the merchandise as you care for your tail!”

“I obey, Notor.” Reterhan shrank back from his lord’s anger.

We marched again through the forest, and I guessed we went to another village of the island where more people would be rounded up. I trudged on under the weight of the iron chains until gradually my senses returned and my gut stopped rumbling. I was now ready to pull a few tails.

“That was nobly done, Horter Prescot.”

The young Lamnia looked like them all, yellow furred, meek in appearance, slightly built. I could barely envisage him hurling javelins so well as to out-throw some of the other Lamnia youths of Podia.

“These aragorn,” I said. “They need to be cleansed.”

“Aye, Horter Prescot. But we of Podia are not destined for that great work. We are too few and too weak.”

The youngster said his name was Fanal and as we walked along he spoke to me softly, and I answered with a guiding grunt or question. I learned more, then, of the tangled politics of the Shrouded Sea, and of how these aragorn of Sorah wreaked their horrors upon the islands. They were of the race of diffs called Kataki, and they held their tails in especial esteem. I was not surprised at that. I saw the fashion of helmet they wore, close-fitting and smooth, without embellishment or ornament. They could whip their tails about over their shoulders and around their heads, lashing forward in lethal sweeps. They would make interesting antagonists. I wondered why I had not encountered any in the Jikhorkdun, the arena, of Huringa; but Fanal explained that the aragorn took good care that they themselves were not sold into slavery and thus avoided the fate of fighting in the arenas of Hyrklana or Hamal. The Katakis gave most of the islands a bad time. The Canops, of whom I have told you, had forged themselves into a fighting nation of soldiers to resist them. My estimation of the Canops changed once more. And now I understand a little more of the fear-filled lifestyle of the Lamnias of Podia. Forced to live as slave-fodder, they had worked out a modus vivendi with the Katakis of Sorah, and with their accustomed Lamnia shrewdness had agreed period by period to supply a stipulated number of slaves, both youths and maidens.

The games I had witnessed sorted out the strongest and fittest young men, and the most beautiful and graceful of the young maidens. But then — and I admit I ricked my lips up in what might have passed as the semblance of a grin — the Lamnias sent as slaves to the aragorn their failures, the least agile young men, the least graceful young women. All the winners, the best athletes, the most beautiful girls, were hidden away out of sight. This made so much sense that I marveled it had not occurred with more frequency, given that those willing to take the risks of fooling aragorn must be shrewd and smart and cunning bargainers.

“And what is to become of you, Fanal, once you are a slave?”

“I do not know.” He looked apprehensive, as well he might. “I pray the eye of Lomno-Niarton may never close over me, so that I am spared the Jikhorkdun or the Heavenly Mines.”

This Fanal had been a loser, one who had not been able to keep up with his fellows in the races, who had not hurled his javelin as far, had not jumped as agilely, with the consequence unfortunate for him that he had been packed off as slave. I did not envision him coming out well from his experiences as a coy in the arena; as an apprentice he would not, I judged, last long. His reference to the Heavenly Mines I then took to be an oblique way of talking about death. I was wrong in that, as you shall hear, dreadfully wrong, and the word heavenly embodied a great deal of that typical Kregan aptitude for mockery and deadly sarcasm.

The gale that had wrought my original destruction had blown itself out and She of the Veils rode free of cloud wrack. The trees swayed gently and the night breeze blew cool. Very soon we were ordered to halt and to wait while the Kataki aragorn went about their business.

“The village of Shinnar,” Fanal told me bitterly. “Ochs live there, gentle enough and not overly bright in matters of trade. They supply fifty young people, as do we, every period.”

Shortly thereafter we marched on, and the slaves were now a hundred in number. The next village yielded up twenty strong Rapas. I felt a mild surprise, for the Rapas are renowned for — apart from their smell, to which I was by now becoming accustomed — their ferocity and viciousness. But the Kataki aragorn stood no nonsense. I sensed that these Rapas did not come with quite the same willingness as the Lamnias and the Ochs. Maybe there was capital to be gained there . . . One of Kregen’s lesser moons swung low over the trees as we came out onto the shore where the waves glimmered pink in long, surging lines of foam and the wind blew free. Again I stared with hungry longing upon the waters, for with a vessel under me and goodly spread of canvas I would be as free as the breeze. But now, quite apart from the Star Lords and the Savanti, the Kataki prevented me from taking ship and departing this sorry little island. Its name was Shanpo, and it was one of a multitude of islands in the Lesser Sharangil Archipelago. It seemed to be more obvious now why the Canops had not settled themselves on some other island grouping when their own land of Canopdrin had been so disastrously destroyed. The Katakis were a people either to avoid or to destroy.

“What happens now, Fanal?”

“We will be taken to Sorah — an evil place!” And he shivered — for the night breeze blew a trifle chill, I admit. “From there we will be sold to whoever will pay the Katakis’ price.”

There was the thwarted businessman’s acumen in that.

The stars now showed through the tattered cloud wrack, brilliant constellations that had become familiar to me over the seasons of my life on Kregen. The Zhantil and Sword; the Leem and Shishi; Onglolo; the Headless Risslaca; many more, twinkling away up there with a fine disregard of me and my problems. Of them all, the Zhantil and Sword meant the most, for I was as sure as I could be — and still I am quite certain — that in this fabulous constellation glittered the star that is the sun of my planet of birth, our old Earth.

Perhaps old Sol is not visible at all from Kregen. But I prefer to believe it is, and that it twinkles there at the tip of the sword in the claws of the Zhantil’s right paw.

The Shrouded Sea is named not out of mere fancy, and the horizon mist was enough to blot out a great part of the constellation of the Zhantil and Sword, for it is visible north and south, according to season. And so, looking up, I glimpsed the bulk of an airboat drifting among the stars, a tiny mobile constellation of its own.

Instantly every nerve in my body told me that aloft there, in that voller, flew Delia and my friends. They had to be there! I gazed up and the little grouping of lights swung lower. Others had seen the flier, and with harsh orders the Katakis beat us back to the treeline. I mused on this even as I ran in my chains. So the Katakis were wary enough of fliers to take these precautions!

My immediate reaction of resistance was speedily overcome as the chains were hauled up, I tripped and, helpless, fell off balance, to be dragged through the sand and shells and scrub and gorse into the trees.

With a curse I clawed my way up and stared into the sky.

The flier dropped lower, swinging toward us, so that the lines of her illuminated ports disappeared and only the fore lights showed. She dipped. The breeze had now sunk to a mere whisper in the leaves. I could hear the hoarse breathing of men and women all about me — men and women! — even if I was the only apim there.

“Absolute quiet!” The voice of the Notor cut into the silence, like a risslaca hiss. At my side I felt Fanal go rigid with fear of the lash.

The flier swung down. I stood up. I shouted.

“Delia! Seg! Inch! Down here! There are foemen—”

That nurdling cramph Reterhan hit me then. He laid the flat of his tail-blade against my head and, although I broke most of its force with my arm, the thing smashed into my temple with force enough to admit the near presence of the Notor Zan and his blackness. I had been so intent on putting a quarterdeck bellow into my voice, as I would hail the fore-top of a squally night, that I had broken one of my own cardinal rules. It nearly broke my arm, too. I went over sideways and lay for a moment on the sandy grass, cursing my own folly.

By the time they dragged me to my feet and the procession of slaves started up again, the flier had gone. Either she had not been the flier with Delia aboard, or my people had not heard me. I was as sure as I could be about anything that had she been our flier, my people could not have heard me, for if they had they would have been here by now, with longbows flashing and swords chunking. For the rest of that miserable night we lay confined in the next fishing village. Its inhabitants had been turned out for us. They were apim, but small and meek; their fishing boats were simple open affairs, the fishing grounds no more than a league offshore, and I felt — with no emotions I could feel ashamed of —

that they would have difficulty in actually killing their catch. The Katakis took a few slaves from here, a few of the young girls; the rest were sent to spend the night as best they might on the beach. This, to me, exemplified the aragorn’s contempt for them.

The crockery of the villagers was pressed into use and we were fed a thin fish gruel. As you know, I am not enamored of fish, but I forced myself to eat the revolting stuff, for like any sensible fighting-man I eat when I can against the certain privations in store in the future. There were no palines, which was an affront, but we got the word that there might be squishes in the morning — if we behaved ourselves. The morning came with the twin Suns of Scorpio rising out of the Shrouded Sea wreathed in a flamboyant mantle of green, gold, and orange. We sat upon the packed dirt of the village square, yawning and knuckling our eyes. Everyone was thonged up, one to another; I wore the iron chains. More fish gruel was followed by a muttering clamor among the slaves.

“Where are the squishes? Where is some bread?” The new slaves were distinctly upset and, this early in their slave careers, annoyed. “We cannot live on this fish—”

The Katakis went about with their whips, right merrily, and soon no one was asking where the promised squishes were.

I confess I looked on my fellow prisoners with not a little superiority — foolish, I know, but understandable. They were just beginning the life of slaves. I had been a slave many and many a time, high and low, pampered and flogged, as stylor and as miner. They would find out. Slavery is an evil, and I grew every season more and more sure that the reason I had been brought to Kregen was to stamp out that evil. I was only partly right in that, as you shall hear if these tapes last out . . . An aragorn ran into the square yelling and waving his arms. Instantly the square was filled with the sounds of blows and yells as the Katakis whipped and bludgeoned the slaves out of sight. A string of calsanys was prodded beneath the long verandah of the headman’s house, and, being calsanys, they did what calsanys always do when upset.

It was now clear with the daylight that there were more Katakis than those who had brought us in, and there were more slaves. This miserable village had been taken over and was being used as an entrepôt for slaves, a barracoon on a grand scale. Katakis armed with crossbows ran across the square. Reterhan came rushing toward us, his tail high, its curved blade glinting in the suns. He carried a long strip of cloth. In all the hustle and bustle I saw what was being done.

The village was being returned to its original innocent state. Not a Kataki in sight. Not a calsany that would look out of place. Not a weapon. All the fish-gruel bowls were collected and dumped into the nearest hut. Soon — in mere murs only — the village lay under the rising suns looking like just another poverty-stricken fishing village.

I looked up.

A flier cruised into sight.

I recognized her. I had seen her first in the arena of the Jikhorkdun in Huringa, when I had fought the boloth. Her decks were crowded with people. I would have known who those people were anywhere. And I would have known the flags that fluttered from her masts — every flag the scarlet field with the yellow cross. Old Superb! My flag! Oh, yes, my heart leaped when I saw that voller come flying so serenely over the fishing village.

Then Reterhan and a comrade wrapped the length of cloth about my mouth, ramming a chunk of wood between my lips so that my teeth grated, and knotted it tightly behind my head. They did not wish to knock me out, for we would be marching soon. I thought that — fool that I was!

“Silence!” The Kataki Notor waved his tail-blade to impress on us the seriousness of the moment.

“Absolute silence, all you rasts! I’ll hang and jerk the first of you who cries out!”

I wondered if he would do that, for a slave with crippled arms is scarcely a salable commodity. But it impressed the cowed Lamnias, and Ochs, and Rapas.

Reterhan leered at me, his face filled with an evil I now recognized as being a true reflection of his evil mind.

“Lem rot you, apim! You may watch and suffer, but you cannot cry out!”

Now I understood exactly what ghastly scene was to be enacted here. Lines of Kataki crossbowmen leveled their weapons. They knelt under the cover of houses, in fishing-net sheds, behind walls. They would be invisible from the air. The voller ghosted down, her flags brilliant in the morning suns-glow, and descended to a landing in the village where the hard-packed dust made a descent inviting. Delia, Inch, Seg, and the others were looking for me, and they were searching here. But when they touched down they would be deluged with a sudden, treacherous sleeting of crossbow bolts. Those who survived would be swept up as slaves. All my friends — so soon to be murdered or enslaved!

And I was bound and helpless in iron chains, gagged so that I could not cry out a warning!

CHAPTER THREE

Of the pulling of a Kataki tail

The flier was in truth a magnificent vessel. She moved with a sure steady grace over the village huts, and her people were hanging overside and staring down, and some of them waving . . . The iron chains about me bit into my flesh as my muscles bulged. Futile! I tried to gnaw through the wooden chunk in my mouth; but the wood was balass and I merely bit down with teeth-crunching agony. I writhed about in the violence of my movements and the iron chains clanked. Reterhan looked most evilly upon me, and placed his foot on my neck, and pressed. Sparks darted and flashed before my eyes; but they were clear enough to see the flier turning, the scarlet and yellow flags dropping to their flagstaffs now as way came off. I stared. Then I dragged my gaze away. The flier had to be warned.

Vangar ti Valkanium, as the flier Hikdar, was bringing her in smoothly and gently, a perfect landing approach. Those people up there would see below them merely a sleepy, poor and innocent fishing village, with precious few people about at this time of morning.

They would not expect serried lines of crossbowmen.

Here in the continent of Havilfar, south of the equator, we were far from our homes in Vallia and Valka. But Havilfar was accounted the most progressive, the most modern, of the four continents that made up this grouping upon the face of the planet. Around the shores of the Shrouded Sea men had settled here first, long ago, and in the tumbled ruins of long-forgotten empires, in the artificial features of the landscape, in the admixtures of blood within the different species and races, were to be seen clear evidence of that long history of civilization here.

Seg, that wild and reckless bowman of Erthyrdrin, was up there in the flier. He and I had fought our way through the Hostile Territories. He would never in ordinary circumstances be taken unawares in ambush. Likewise Inch, that seven-foot-tall ax-man from Ng’groga so obsessed with his taboos, and I had battled through adventures. He, too, was a seasoned campaigner.

And — and up there on the high quarterdeck stood Delia, my Delia of Delphond!

At any moment now the voller would touch down. And then the cruel steel-tipped bolts would flash in a raining cloud of destruction.

Reterhan’s foot pressed with jovial power upon my neck.

Up in the flier was Korf Aighos, the leader of the rascally but loyal Blue Mountain Boys. Up there was Turko the Shield, that superbly muscled Khamorro of the magical murdering hands; but I felt his great shield would offer some protection, and I prayed Zair he would slap it across before Delia when the bolts whickered in. Tom ti Vulheim and his Valkan Archers were there, ready to be cut down before they could draw bow. Obquam of Tajkent, the flying Strom, would be there, and I longed for his slender powerful form to flash out on his narrow wings to scout this innocent-seeming deathtrap. Also, up there in the voller, were those new friends who had saved me in the arena by their selfless devotion: Naghan the Gnat, armorer superb; Balass the Hawk, who had earned the distinction of becoming a hyr-kaidur, Tilly, my little golden-furred Fristle fifi; and Oby, that young rascal who had aspired to greatness in the arena, but had had his dreams shattered, to be replaced by a vision of a greater future — and who must, I suspected, figure in the shadowy schemes of the Star Lords. All of them might in the next few murs be lying dead, pierced through and through with arbalest quarrels. Or they might be staggering up to be chained as was I and be carried off into slavery. Oh, Delia, my Delia!

I rolled my eyes at the Lamnia youth, Fanal. He saw me looking at him. I could not cry out. But he could. He could warn the airboat. Across my face that old evil look of power and arrogance passed, and my eyes glared with a mad berserker brilliance, so that he flinched away. But he turned his head, and would not look at me, and he did not cry out a warning.

No one would shout voluntarily.

So I must do something horrible.

Reterhan’s foot slid from my neck as I squirmed. I got my linked chains up and swung the small bight they had allowed me, and so snared that curved blade mounted at the end of his whiplike tail. Metal splines ran down from the blade to give stiffening and protection to the end two feet of tail. The chains snagged beneath the blade where it curved from its socket I rolled and lurched and staggered up and I pulled.

I pulled Reterhan’s tail.

It was not a gentle pull. It was a savage, barbaric sinew-and-muscle-bursting jerk. Reterhan yelled.

He could not stop himself.

The Kataki opened his mouth and yelled blue bloody murder.

His shout of agony bellowed across the open space.

I was not content.

Circling, I twisted the tail about me and jerked again with utmost vicious force. The Kataki leaped and toppled toward me, and I truly think had he not done so I would have wrenched his tail out all bloody by its roots.

His agonized screaming knifed through the air where the mingled streaming light of the Suns of Scorpio threw twin shadows of the flier across the packed dirt.

The chains so cunningly bighted around by ankles and knees would not allow me to walk, let alone run, and that stumbling circle was the only progress I could make. I fell to the dirt and tried to roll myself like a barrel of cheap dopa out into the cleared area. A warning! My brain blazed with the single desire to warn my comrades in the voller.

The rolling did not get me far, but it saved my life, for two crossbow bolts sizzled into the earth, gouting clods, where I had been.

Covered in sweat and caked dirt I dragged in a lungful of breath and glared at Reterhan, who was crouching up, his left hand clamped bone-white across his mouth, his right hand feeling his injured tail. He was in no position to hit me again for some time.

The flier halted its descent. It hovered a dozen feet above the open space. The rows of heads that had been showing over the bulwarks had all vanished, and I heaved a great gasp of relief. Those men of mine up there were alerted! They would not know what was going on down here, but now they would not come down meekly to be massacred and enslaved. I had expected a sheeting storm of crossbow bolts to rise toward the flier, and I was confident enough in her armoring to know it would take more than a hand-held arbalest to drive through. A good-sized varter would be needed, and the Katakis, as far as I knew, did not dispose of varters here. But this Kataki Notor was a cunning lord. He also held his men under a strong controlling rein, for he had not given the order to shoot, and so no one loosed.

No one shot at me, either, so I guessed the Notor had a scheme afoot. I saw him giving swift orders; then he divested himself of his war-gear. Off came the scaled tunic, the greaves, the close-fitting helmet. His thraxter and stuxes were grasped by an attendant. Two more worked rapidly on his tail and soon they unstrapped that wicked curved blade. The Notor snatched up a net-needle and its spool of thread from a draping net by a wall. Clad only in his breechclout — that scarlet kilt! — he walked slowly, bent over and shuffling, into the central plaza. He shaded his eyes and looked up.

“You are most welcome, whoever you are!” he called up. “We are but a small village and poor. We have nothing for aragorn to plunder or for slave-masters to covet, for all our strong young men and beautiful girls are gone in the plague.”

Reterhan was still totally absorbed in his concern for his tail, but his comrade stifled a little gust of merriment at his Notor’s words.

I felt the chill of despair.

Vangar ti Valkanium leaned over the quarterdeck rail and bellowed.

“We wish you no harm, old man. The plague, you say?”

“The dropping sickness and the purple buboes. It is a visitation from Chezra-gon-Kranak for our sins, though we know not how we have offended the Great Ones.”

I’ll give this evil Kataki lord his due; he made a convincing liar.

“We will come and assist you, old man,” yelled down Vangar. “We have medicines—”

I was on tenterhooks.

The Notor waved his tail, all innocent and naked as it was.

“I thank you, Notor, but we are few and the sickness passes.”

Some further conception came to me then of the way these Kataki aragorn operated. The Notor could see the crowded decks and the glitter of weapons, he could see the varters ranked along the broadsides, all fully manned. He could not fail to understand that this flier and these men were a most formidable opposition. All surprise had been lost. A shower of crossbow bolts now would do little damage, and then the varters would loose and the return arrows would come in . . .

To give him his due, he preferred to go around terrorizing the villages and taking plunder and slaves without trouble. Much though the Katakis liked a fight, they would not fight if the odds were against them. There was no profit in tangling with this powerful adversary — or so I read his thoughts.

“You’re sure you do not require assistance?”

That was Seg Segutorio, leaning over the rail, his black hair brilliant in the suns-glow.

“We do not, Notor.”

An incredibly tall figure with waist-length yellow hair stood beside Seg. Inch lifted his battle-ax.

“You have food? Wine? Can we not help you, old man?”

“I thank you, Notor. But we have what little we need.”

And then Delia stood on the quarterdeck. I could stare up and see her, there, above my head, leaning over the rail, radiant, glorious in her beauty, the true princess of an island empire, and yet, as I well knew, so softly firm and tender and filled with love for me and for our twins.

“Have you seen a man washed up from the sea?” She called down. “A man—” She paused then, and whether it was sob or laugh I did not know. “A strange man with brown hair and brown eyes, with shoulders that — with broad shoulders — a man of power, a man with an aura. Have you seen such a man — who would be very violent, I am afraid, if you or anyone tried to maltreat him.”

“Is this man a Hyr-notor, my lady?”

“Oh, yes, and a great villain besides. He is my husband and I search the Shrouded Sea for him—”

“I have seen no man as you describe, my lady.”

I was writhing in my chains and trying to break the iron links, trying to roll out into the open, trying —

oh, trying to send my passionate thoughts winging from my mind into the mind of my beloved as she stood above me, looking down, her lovely face troubled and darkly shadowed by her grief — her grief for me!

Reterhan had assured himself his tail was still attached to him. He stood up in the shadow of the huts and the trees, and he strutted toward me, holding his tail in his left hand. So close! So near at hand were my friends, just a tiny distance away! That just one of them might see me! I rolled and clashed my chains and Reterhan stood over me, his greave-clad legs wide-spread. He took out his thraxter. If I was to die now, then in what a fashion I was to go! This was no way that my Anglo-Saxon forebears would relish as dying well. I rolled onto my back and glared up murderously. The gag stifled me. I saw Reterhan lift the thraxter and I saw his wrist turn so as to bring the flat alongside my head.

The twin suns of Kregen and the seven moons all spurted up and were gobbled down into the blackness of Notor Zan.

The last thing I saw was the glorious and divine face of my Delia as she stared out, so woefully troubled, over the quarterdeck rail.

If I was to go down into the great darkness and find my way to the Ice Floes of Sicce, then I would take with me that last look of longing that contained all of love. So I fell into the blackness, and the darkness was irradiated for me by Delia, Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains.

CHAPTER FOUR

The ways of the aragorn

I, Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy and Lord of Strombor — and much else besides — came back to consciousness sluggishly packed among my fellow slaves in an open flier. The stink and the groans and the shrieks were all familiar to me, not from this Earth but from Kregen, and I knew I must endure. I was still alive, which surprised me only a little, for slaves equate with money. We were worth many golden deldys and silver sinvers almost anywhere in Havilfar.

A dead Och lay at my side, his four little arms shriveled and wrapped around his wasted body. The flier remained firm and solid in the sky with that peculiar way of a certain kind of voller which travels independently of the wind, and there was no pitching and rolling to add to our discomfort. The flier was of that kind I was to come to know well later, but which until then I had not encountered. She was long and wide in the beam, but shallow, being open and without a deck. A tiny cabin had been perched amidships to house the controls and crew. The slaves lay jammed like logs. They call these barge-like vollers weyvers in Havilfar, and sometimes they refer to them as Quoffas of the Sky. They are designed simply to cram as much cargo as possible into a flat space, without niceties of careful loading in tiers. The slaves were mere lumber.

Fanal lay miserably at my other side.

He would not meet my eye when I stirred.

He understood what I had asked of him, back there in the fishing village, and he had failed. I could not blame him. All men are not built in the same way, and Kregen, let alone the Earth of my birth, would be a strange place if all men were alike. And as for all women . . . !

Presently he said in a whisper, “I am glad you are not dead, Horter Prescot.”

“What happened to the flier?”

“The Kataki Notor convinced them he was a harmless old fishing man, who needed no assistance with the plague. They flew away.”

They flew away.

Well. It was a disappointment, but also it was a relief. I had, in the instant of awakening, been horrified that I would turn and see my people, my Delia, wrapped in chains and thongs and wedged in among the mass of slaves.

“The flier flew well?”

“I have not seen many vollers. She flew low away to the west, as though she were searching for this Hyr-notor — this man with the yrium — of which the lady apim spoke.”

He looked at me then, a real Lamnia look, shrewd, sizing me up anew.

“You are the man they sought, Horter Prescot?”

“Yes, Horter Fanal. I am the man.”

“I think perhaps if the aragorn realize this they will sell you for ransom.”

“It would be paid,” I said. I did not boast. I knew what I knew. To my shame, I knew that the coffers of Valka and Can-thirda, of Zamra and Delphond and the Blue Mountains, would pour forth gold and jewels and treasures if by those means my Delia could once more clasp me in her arms. And if they were not enough, then Seg’s Falinur and Inch’s Black Mountains would bring more gold and jewels. And, if necessary, Delia would go to Strombor, my enclave in Zenicce, aye! and to the Clansmen of Felschraung and Longuelm to take of their treasures for my release. These thoughts brought me no elation. I knew that the treasure of a country is not bought without sweat and blood and the labors of the working people who are the real originators of wealth. The comfort was that I could perhaps give of myself in after days so that my people, and my friends’ people, could quickly recoup their losses and once more live comfortable lives, as I wished. No mention of ransom was made then or thereafter, and maybe the aragorn of Sorah had no real belief in it, not recking of lands so far away across the equator as Vallia and Valka, of which they had barely heard.

Sorah itself was a large and prosperous island of the Shrouded Sea. Canopdrin lay not too far to the north. The weyver touched down inside the cleared central area of a vast barracoon, and we were herded out and given more revolting fish gruel. Then after washing in water lightly sprinkled with vinegar, our hair was cropped, and, stark naked, we were prodded into lenk-wood cages. There was much shouting and cursing and belaboring with balass sticks. The Kataki also used their tails upon us most vilely, but in all this brutality they were careful not to mark or cut too severely the merchandise by which they made their evil living.

Rumors swept the barracoon as was to be expected.

A Rapa said positively that he would slit his throat with a sharpened flint before he would go to the Jikhorkdun of Hamal or Hyrklana. He refused to discuss the possibility of being sold into the Heavenly Mines or the pearl fisheries of Tancrophor.

The women were segregated; they would be sorted out into classes so that they might be sold to the best advantage. The men were also sorted, and here I parted with Fanal of Podia. He kept himself cheered by the thought that he might end up as a stylor or perhaps a steward upon an important estate. The art of reading and writing had once before brought me an easier task among slaves;[1]but here in Havilfar the art was much more common. If I was sent to the Jikhorkdun of Hamal life might be interesting. There are many arenas in the Empire of Hamal, and there is more than one in the realm of Hyrklana. If I was sold as a coy to the Jikhorkdun of Huringa I scarcely relished what Queen Fahia would do. Had I not contemptuously tossed the bloody tail of the silver-collared leem in her face? Had I not shamed her in the arena before all her people, and, at the end, had I not slain the boloth and escaped? Queen Fahia and her neemus would be overjoyed to see me back in the Jikhorkdun. So it was that as the rumors swept the packed barracoon I determined that I would not be sold back to the amphitheater in Huringa, the capital city of Hyrklana, to be fresh sport for that foolish, fat, and yet nasty little Queen Fahia.

Bunches of slaves were taken out from time to time to be oiled and cleaned up and paraded for prospective buyers.

Sorah is a large island and her slave pens are notorious. The aragorn do a good trade. They charge high prices for their merchandise and traders come from all over Havilfar. A group of Shaslins was herded out one morning after fish gruel. They were just about the only people there who relished the foul stuff, for the Shaslins are a sea-people; they look not unlike what some wild mating of a human with a seal might produce, with their sleek streamlined heads, their sloping shoulders, and their arms and hands, legs and feet, beautifully adapted for swimming and diving. Their pelts gleamed in the sunlight, for the food was good for them. But they set up a tremendous racket, screaming and shrieking, and had to be dragged out to the waiting fliers of their buyers.

“They have been sold to Tancrophor and will dive until they die in the pearl fisheries.”

The man who spoke to me, a Brokelsh, looked as annoyed as any slave has a right to be. His dark body bristles stiffened.

“But they are a fishing folk,” I said, somewhat unwisely.

“Aye! The Shaslins can swim well. But the devils of Tancrophor drive them to their limits, and they cough blood and their heads split with the ringing of the bells of Beng-Kishi. I am glad I do not go to the pearl fisheries of Tancrophor.”

This Brokelsh was sold with others to a Notor who owned many kools of land in Methydria. Other slaves were sold, and then it was my turn. I spent less than a day in the Sorah barracoon and I took no pride from the price I brought. I had taken one simple precaution during the ritual questioning of my abilities. I lied. I said I knew nothing of swords and battles and fighting, and whether or not the record-keeping Kataki believed me, I do not know. But he sold me to an agent from Hamal buying workers for the Heavenly Mines.

You have probably heard it said more than once that if you can keep your head when others all around you are losing theirs, then maybe you do not fully understand the situation. There were two brothers, two apims, fine young men with strong shoulders and sinewy backs. When the understanding hit them that they were sold to the Heavenly Mines, they looked into each other’s eyes and, with a previous arrangement clearly agreed between them, placed their hands on each other’s throats. The two brothers stood there, facing each other, gazing one at the other in brotherly love, and choked each other to death. Guards bustled through with their balass sticks lashing and dragged the two apart. The finger-marks glared lividly upon their throats. One of the brothers was dead. The other was revived, and when he realized what had happened he sat in a ball, his hands over his head, crooning. He had become insane, and if I thought that would disqualify him from laboring in the mines of Hamal I was mistaken. This young man, Agilis, was taken out with the rest of us to the waiting fliers. Many of us fought. The guards brought their balass sticks down viciously now, now that we were sold. I kept a wary lookout for Reterhan, but I did not see him — luckily for him.

“Treat them carefully, you onkers!” The agent from Hamal, a Rapa, screeched at the Kataki guards, and he tried to protect his merchandise without letting them beat him over the head. I joined in. After all, I knew the outcome of this; the slaves would be battered into submission and be dragged aboard the fliers. But I admit I wanted to get in a few whacks before that.

A surprised Kataki felt his tail pulled, and as he swung toward me, roaring, I took the balass stick away and clouted him over the head with it. Then I jumped into the melee. Well, foolish as I was then, and stark stupid as I am now if I still recall some pleasure in laying about me at those evil Kataki faces, I feel only a little shame in saying that I enjoyed thwacking that long ebony stick down and stretching a few of the aragorn senseless.

We fought in a small enclosure at the side of the main barracoon, with a lenk-wood fence beyond. The gates were closed and the fliers from Hamal waited, hovering, to pick us up. The thought of escape flashed across my mind with considerable shock. At once I began to fight in earnest, bashing now with intent and working my way through to the nearest flier. But, as I have said, the Kataki are good man-managers, like so many of the aragorn and slave-masters I have met on Kregen. At a raucous shout the fliers lifted out of reach, and reinforcements of Katakis pounded into the small enclave. They must have gone through this scene or similar scenes a hundred times. I guessed they did not bother to practice a deception on the slaves and tell them nothing of their destination because they wished to enjoy the sufferings and anticipatory horror of the slaves. I saw at last that any further joyous slashing and bashing would get nowhere and so I tripped a Kataki, kicked him in the belly, hurdled his screeching form, and dived into the safe shadows by the lenk fence.

When it was all over I walked out, unruffled.

I, Dray Prescot, had stood calmly and watched a fight going on and made no further effort to interfere

— and that, mark you, a fight between slaves and aragorn! Truly, I was either growing old and stupid or old and wise. It is my experience that being a father is a wonderfully sobering device. I most certainly did not bother to observe the fantamyrrh as I stepped aboard the Hamalian slave flier. I fancied I’d let the rasts take whatever sorrow their pantheon of gods and devils might care to hand out. The flier was a simple, practical, no-nonsense vessel with ample capacity below decks for slaves and with enough armament above decks to repel any expected normal attack by volroks or laccapins or volleem, or any combination of flying mount and rider. I understood that the free-flying brethren of the air, the flutsmen, might well be operating in the vicinity, for there had been unrest around the Shrouded Sea; the flutsmen, the mercenaries of the skies, had been called in by more than one worried ruler. The slaves slumped down on the low tween-decks, a thoroughly subdued lot. Their terror remained, for they had heard lurid stories of the Heavenly Mines of Hamal, although when I asked more probing questions it soon turned out all the information anyone had was mere hearsay, mere rumor circulating and magnified. There was one very good reason why information of this monstrous kind should be by hearsay only; and this will become all too apparent as I speak to you. So the slaves lay moaning and groaning and nursing their bruises and bumped heads as we flew on north-northeast over the Shrouded Sea. The flier carried a fair-sized crew of slavers, men of a number of different races. We were given water to drink, chunks of bread — which the first mouthful told me had been baked from dilse, that almost useless yet common cereal — and thin, stringy strips of vosk. Again there were no palines, although there was a small supply of overripe malsidges, those melon-sized, somewhat tart fruits that, at the very least, keep the scurvy off a man. We were thrown sections of the malsidges and we scrabbled for them as they flew among us, and I, at least, sank my teeth into the sharp pulpy flesh with its flushed green color, eating right down to the brown and wrinkled skin.

The journey from the island of Sorah to the Heavenly Mines of Hamal is about three hundred and fifty dwaburs. I calculated roughly that the speed of the voller could not be above ten db — that is, ten dwaburs per bur. So we could expect to reach our destination in something like twenty-four or so Terrestrial hours. I settled down to a patient negation of everything outside me, willing to start more trouble when we reached these notorious mines.

The only incident of any interest occurred after we had crossed the coast up toward Methydria and could see in the far distance on our larboard side the hazy snowglint of a giant range of mountains. Two rofers appeared above us, beating through the air with massive strokes of their enormous wings, their necks outstretched. The flying animals, sailing past, looked calm and majestic, and we could see that each carried seating for a family of Fristles, six or so, with the little ones perched high at junction of neck and body craning over to look at us.

Although the root syllable flut does not appear in its name, the rofer is a kind of bird. Not so the tyryvols which, with their riders brandishing welcoming tridents, surrounded us as we settled into a gigantic basin in the foothills. These tyryvols are large flying animals, with whip tails, wicked, intelligent eyes, and bodies clad in flexible scales that evolution has not yet changed into feathers; although their wings — given another few million years or so — will sprout true feathers, I shouldn’t wonder. They come in different colorations, although the most favored color chosen by the aerial riders of Hamal is a lustrous mottle of black and ocher, with scarlet claws and bands of multicolored scales around their necks. They impressed me, these tyryvols, who had seen impiters and corths of the Hostile Territories, not to mention fluttrells and mirvols of Havilfar.

Their riders were short squat diffs with thin bandy legs. Their faces reminded me of the Ullars of Ullardrin of Northern Turismond, although there was none of that indigo dyed hair. There was, however, the same savagery about the square clamp of their mouths. At this time they habitually wore black and ocher scaled clothing made from the skins of the tyryvols, and they carried those damnably sharp tridents, and the thin flexible sword of the aerial fighter. These are the Gerawin of Gilarna the Barren in the Empire of Hamal. They proved to be immensely efficient guards and watchdogs over the Heavenly Mines for the Hamalese.

Around us stretched the barrens. The foothills trended up steadily toward the west and northwest. The task of escape from the mines on foot would be a daunting enterprise and one not to be considered without many days’ food and water and, inevitably, a weapon of defense against the frightful dangers infesting all such spots.

The Hamalese are an efficient people. The dominant species happens to be apim; but the many species of diffs take a full part in government, industry, commerce, and all the other branches of activity that make up a thriving empire. Hamal was an ambitious and outwardly thrusting empire. They made airboats and sold them to Vallia and Zenicce and other favored customers, although they would not sell to Pandahem or Loh. That efficiency took us in, cleansed and fed us, and let us rest for a space. Then we were issued picks and shovels. An example was made of a Gon who wanted to shave his hair and so made trouble; the cold, calculating discipline administered to him chilled all the slaves’ blood, and then that harsh impersonal discipline, that massive adherence to law and order, imposed its full weight on us. We marched down to the mines and went through the artificially illuminated passageways cut in the rock, and so came out to a vast and echoing space in the mountain. Here we set to work to hack the rock away and fill baskets with the broken stuff. The baskets were drawn on a track by calsanys, to the opening where crushers and refiners went to work, powered by the arms and backs of slaves. That efficiency saw that every slave worked to the uttermost of his strength. Everything was regulated down to the last drop of water. Rock was cut, drawn out, crushed, refined, and parceled up into fliers to be sent somewhere in Hamal of which we had no knowledge then.

The whole process was inhuman.

The last ounce of effort was taken from every slave.

It was possible to survive, for I saw old men still laboring away, although the turnover was rapid, for the labor simply wore a man down until he saw no good reason to go on living. Absolute inhumanity reigned here. Work — slaving work — filled every day. Rest periods were calculated out with a nicety that allowed a man to recuperate just enough energy to return with his shift to work the next time around. By comparison, the Black Marble Quarries of Zenicce, in which I’d spent some time, seemed to have been run by amateurs.

Order, law, discipline, rule. The lash, starvation, deprivation of water so that thirst tore a man’s spirit and made of him a tool in the hands of the Hamalese, all these things conspired together to make of the Heavenly Mines a place that proved Agilis knew what he was doing when he strangled his brother and would have allowed his brother to strangle him in return . . .

So I entered another period of my varied life on Kregen that, even now, fills me with a most profound horror, a revulsion of spirit that brought me face to face with the man I thought I was, the man Dray Prescot, shorn of all titles and petty ranks and symbols. It was just me, Dray Prescot, pitted against inhuman will and discipline.

I knew only one thing.

I would not give in.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Heavenly Mines

Everything had a number.

Every pickax carried its number burned into the haft and punched into the ax. Every shovel carried its number burned and cut. Every drinking bowl. Every spoon. Every eating bowl. A number was branded on the hide of every calsany. Each tunnel, each chamber, each working face, every one possessed its own number.

We slept in rock shelters set against an old and abandoned cut’s side. Each rock hut had a number painted above the open door, which was provided with no blanket or hide. We slept on packed earth and each little space had a number scribed in the earth. We each possessed a single thin blanket, and this miserable covering had its number also.

And, as was inevitable, every slave had his own number.

Dray Prescot scarcely existed any longer.

The slave, number 8281, stood in his stead.

The number was branded on my chest and on my back for all to see.

The Hamalese used the common Kregish numbering and in normal times that linear script form is most beautiful. Here they had adopted the square and blocky numerology, so that my chest and back shouted aloud to the indifferent world that I was 8281.

The weird distortion of reality that must take place in surroundings of this nature and under psychological pressures so matter-of-fact and ingrained caught me up, so that I became completely habituated to think of myself as 8281. Whereas I might have taken violently against the number, instead I embraced it. For the number was me. I was the number. Eight-two-eight-one was Dray Prescot. Eight-two-eight-one existed.

By thus rushing forward and embracing my numerical alter ego I was able to dissociate myself from the almost psychotic anger of some of my fellows, who would not answer to their numbers until beaten, who refused to think of themselves as a number because of the lessening of simple human dignity. I knew a little about human dignity; but I wished to survive.

I had witnessed the punishment of the Gon who wanted his head to be shaved, as is the fashion of Gons, through what I consider to be a foolish matter of shame over their white hair. He was not thrashed unmercifully, for the Hamalese guards and overseers had nothing written down in their laws and rules about mercy. He was simply punished as the law ordained for refusing to do his quota of work. The summary court which sat on the matter dismissed his reasons as untenable. He was beaten with the regulation number of strokes each day he refused to work. Everything was carried out with the punctilio and observance of the law that I had seen so many times aboard a King’s Ship, when a hand was triced up to the gratings and given a red-checked shirt at the gangway. His crime placed him into most serious jeopardy, so that it was lawful to jikaider him, that is, flog crisscross. After he had been flogged jikaider for the regulation fifty lashes he would be cut down and then the medical men would see to him, as was required by law. His back would be doctored and the medic would pronounce him unfit to work for the period his back would take to heal. Then, when he refused to work again, he would be jikaidered again.

This went on until he died.

And when he died that long and flowing white hair of the typical Gon glittered silver and brave in the dying light of the suns.

He had been number 8279, and that was how I remembered him.

I lost count of the days, and that alarmed me. But the apathy of work and of numbers held me in a grip I could not break. Fresh fliers brought fresh slaves. A Bleg came into our hut with the numbers 8279

branded on his breast and back over the atrophied carapace, and I shook my head and called him that, although I did not forget the Gon.

The question of what was mined here teased me at the beginning; but gradually I grew indifferent. The mountains existed. We must chop them down and break them up and shovel them into the wicker baskets, they would be carried to the chaldrons, and the calsanys would draw them out to the crushers. The refiners, powered by a sickly green stream flowing over a bluff and falling into a scummy pool, rich in minerals, would do their work; then what was left over would be packed in wooden crates, lined with leather, and loaded aboard fliers. When the quota dropped, the law permitted an increase in working burs. A bur is forty Earth minutes long. It grew so that at the face a bur seemed to stretch to a Terrestrial hour. And still I had no idea what the refined rock was needed for, what the Hamalese, Zair rot ’em, did with it, why they forced this agony on fellow human beings.

The tailings stretched for dwaburs along the base of the foothills, ulm after ulm of them, spreading a powdery and ashlike detritus. What the refiners did, what sort of rock this was, what was taken from it

— all these things I did not know and gradually came not to care about. Early on I had said to a man, an apim, laboring alongside me, “What do they want the rock for, dom?”

“I do not know,” he had said, bashing his pick so that chips flew. “I only wish I could choke the rasts with it.”

“Amen to that,” I said, striking with my pick.

No one knew.

Every day we labored. There were no rest days.

The knowledge that if I did not escape soon I might forget that escape existed drove me on. While loading the fliers one day — for the Hamalese rotated tasks according to their rules — a man was discovered secreted in one of the leather-lined wooden boxes. Where guards of other peoples perhaps would have had sport with him — for example, taking him aloft so that he thought he was escaping, and then pitching him overboard; or weighing the box and declaring it was short-weight and so pouring rock upon him until he was crushed — the guards at the Heavenly Mines acted strictly according to the law. The Hamalians — or Hamalese, either term is quite correct — took him in chains to a summary court, where he was found guilty — for he was certainly that, having tried to escape — and sentenced to the prescribed punishment.

There are always sedentary jobs to be done in a mining complex like this, work that can be performed quite well by a man who cannot walk, by a man, say, who has no legs. They found him that employment. The law had no wish for extra severity and would not take his life. Slaves of quality were hard to come by in great quantity, and would not be wasted, only refuse being sent as victims to the arenas. And only tough fighters would do as coys, apprentice kaidurs. This man, number 5763, sat all day at his task, his stumps beautifully bandaged. He had shouted that he came from Hyrklana; but that did not help him.

If he tried to escape again, the law would be more severe on him; and, as was written down, at the third attempt would then demand his life.

He would be hanged in the most strict ritual procedure.

I witnessed only two hangings, one for a third-time escape attempt, incredible though that may be, and one for a slave who had struck an overseer.

This slave was a Chulik.

Had he killed the overseer the law admitted that the next of kin, or the dead man’s superior officer failing a next of kin, might stipulate what punishment the murderer would suffer before death. They were colorful in their thinking in those areas, were the bereaved in Hamal. And there was no revenge, no bloodthirsty shrilling anger in all this. It was all written down in the laws of the land . . .

A new slave, number 2789 — for they filled up the old roster numbers with new slaves at the Heavenly Mines — said to me, “Eight-two-eight-one! I must escape! I’ll go mad!”

I said to him, “Two-seven-eight-nine. To escape is so difficult it is scarcely worth the attempt. Better for you to go mad.”

Only later, as I sat eating my chunk of bread — made from good corn, for the Hamalese wished to keep up our strength — and coarse pudding of vosk and onion, with a finger over the gregarian at the side of my bowl, was the truth of what I had said borne in on me.

I, Dray Prescot, unwilling to contemplate escape?

Number 8281 knew the truth. Dray Prescot was an empty boaster, a bladder of wind. Eight-two-eight-one knew the truth.

It took me a day to think of the subject again. We were opening up a new seam far down into the guts of the mountain. The rock we wanted held a gray metallic sheen which differentiated it from the yellower rock all around. Yet it held no mineral I could tell. We simply took all the gray rock, irrespective of minor differences. This seam was narrow, and an overseer, a little Och holding with his four limbs a lamp, a wax notepad, a stylus, and a prodding stick, waddled up on his two lower legs to supervise. We were all crouched down, for the roof pressed close, and the oil lamp — it was not samphron-oil — smoked a little. I smelled the lamp; but, also, I smelled another nostril-tickling odor. In that confined space in the grotesque shadows of the lamp, the little Och prodding and writing, a Rapa guard with a spear bending almost double ready to spit the first one of us who did anything against the law — for the law would hold a guard within his rights if he killed protecting a Hamalian — I picked up the unmistakable scent of squishes.

Memories of Inch flashed into my mind, of his insatiable hunger for squish pie, and of the taboos he held in so great honor, and of that limb of Satan, Pando, taunting poor Inch with rich, ripe juicy squish pie. The Och squeaked and backed away.

“All out!” He shouted so loudly some of the slaves jumped and a trickle of rock slid from the overhang.

“All out at once! Guard, prod ’em along, you onker!”

We scuttled out.

We did not go back to that seam again.

Although I can recall that scene in all its clarity now, at the time with the same depressing grayness of days it passed from my mind; the little flicker of the idea of escape guttered like a candle in the opened stern-lantern of a swifter of the Eye of the World.

Number 2789 harked back to the idea of escape himself, and so forced me to contemplate reality. Was not 8281 also Dray Prescot? Was I not Pur Dray, Krozair of Zy? The Lord of Strombor? Prince Majister of Vallia? Kov of this and that, and Strom of Valka? Zorcander? Was I not? No title would help me now, but a Krozair brother is never beaten until he is ceremoniously slipped into the sea over the side of his swifter — if he can be buried decently by his brothers of the Order of Krozairs of Zy instead of dying in some stinking prison or under the longswords of those Grodnim cramphs of Magdag. Despite all the horrendous difficulties, there had to be a way of escape. The sheer efficiency of the Hamalese would make any attempt enormously difficult. Probably escape was impossible. I wondered about it then, and I freely admit it, if it was possible for one man, even a Krozair of Zy, to escape from the Heavenly Mines of Hamal. But, from somewhere, I found the determination to make that attempt. I did not care how foolhardy it might be. I knew, and I believe I understood at last, that merely staying alive was not enough. My Delia, my Delia of Delphond — who so far had not been called Delia of Strombor, as she had once wished —

could not pine for me longer if I was dead than if I remained in these Opaz-forsaken mines. So the decision was taken.

I would try to escape.

Number and order and law had worn me down. If you have listened to these tapes of my life upon Kregen you will know with what a hearty zest I detest and despise petty authority exercised in heartless and evil ways, without thought for those who are weak and unable to defend themselves. Discipline is necessary in life — sometimes it is a necessary evil — but excessive discipline is a perversion.

Law dominated the men of Hamal.

I would turn their law against them.

Number 2789 would help. There were others, almost always newly arrived slaves who retained some shred of their old spirit. The Heavenly Mines in their soul-destroying regularity broke spirits as boys break twigs in sport.

I must have a plan ready to broach to the others, and then make it work. I worked out a scheme. Simplicity. Speed and simplicity. The seizure of a flier, for we would never walk out, offered our only chance, and the fliers were always well guarded. Strength. Well, we were strong from our unceasing and strenuous labors and the coarse but filling food.

The plans tumbled into my head and always the glorious face and figure of my Delia smiled at me, and her gorgeous brown hair with those outrageous tints of gold and auburn glinting filled me with uplifting determination. I collected a few loose scraps of jagged rock, for the law proscribed a slave possessing anything that might be used as a weapon when he came off shift, and all the picks and shovels with their numbers were checked into the stores.

In the hut I lay on the earth and drew my blanket about me. I turned over to think and I saw a reddish-brown scorpion scuttle out from a crack in the rock and stare at me, his tail high. If you have listened to these tapes I believe you may have some faint inkling of my feelings then. In that reedy scratchy voice I had heard before on the Battlefield of the Crimson Missals, the scorpion spoke to me.

“You get onker, Prescot!”

I knew no one else could hear that voice, or mine, in reply.

“I know.”

“There is no escape from the Heavenly Mines of Hamal.”

“You may be a messenger from the Star Lords, you and the Gdoinye; but I will escape.”

The scorpion waved his tail mockingly. “The Star Lords know you, Dray Prescot; they know you are a fool, a get onker, an onker of onkers. They know many things. They know you are such a stupid onker you might succeed where noone else has succeeded before.”

“Believe it, scorpion.”

“The Star Lords have a use for you, Prescot. A use far from here in space and time.”

Sheer terror hit me then, for if the Star Lords banished me back to Earth, as they could (as they could!), I might never be returned to Kregen beneath Antares. I started up, sweating, prepared to defy the Star Lords and all their superhuman power once again.

But the scorpion was growing, was glowing now with that damnable blue radiance, was bloating into a gigantic blue shape that filled the hut and burst the rock walls and so engulfed the night sky and all the stars and tumbled me headlong into that radiant blue confusion.

CHAPTER SIX

The Star Lords blunder

Often and often had I cursed that I was merely a puppet, a mere hank of hair and blood and bone, dangling on the strings so callously pulled by the Savanti and the Star Lords. Well, that might be true, in its own way. But as you know I had been developing ways and means of circumventing the Star Lords. Oh, yes, they could still hurl me back four hundred light-years to the planet of my birth, perhaps never again to summon me to Kregen. They could forever sunder me from Delia, the only woman in two worlds that means anything to me — and I say that in due deference and love for all the other women who have been and are my friends. But this construction of artifices had more than once before kept me on Kregen. The Star Lords could be manipulated.

But this time the transition came with blinding suddenness. I yelled out, once again, in my own old intemperate bellow: “I will not return to Earth! I will stay on Kregen!”

I swear I heard a ghostly chuckle, and a voice that was in all probability in my head and not gusting from the blue radiance surrounding me, as I thought, say: “You get onker, Prescot! You would stay on Kregen even in the Heavenly Mines!”

“I would escape even where they say escape is impossible!”

“Maybe you would, Prescot, you wild leem. Maybe you would. But there is work under your hands, work for the Everoinye. And, Dray Prescot, you fail at your peril!”

I opened my eyes and the blue radiance fell away.

Above me blazed the twin Suns of Scorpio.

And — the red sun preceded the green across the sky!

Immediately I knew I was caught once more in a time loop cast by the Star Lords. Once again I had been thrown into the past. I could take great comfort from that, for my Delia was not waiting for me now in trembling apprehension, and whatever I had to do here — wherever here was — could be done and I might then rejoin my beloved and she would not have spent a single extra day in sorrow over my fate. Also, I knew, and the knowledge brought a shivery feeling of insecurity over me, that somewhere on the face of Kregen, I, Dray Prescot, was at this very minute fighting or drinking, slave or free, struggling on or living it up in luxury. At this very minute somewhere over the horizon a Dray Prescot that was me was walking and talking, fighting, and, perhaps, loving, and I own I found it all most weird, to be sure. Then — why then the obvious thought occurred. If I was back to certain times past, there might be two Dray Prescots battling on the surface of Kregen!

In Valka I had been thrown into a time loop.

I could be in the Hostile Territories right now, fighting on in our long journey with Seg, Thelda, and glorious Delia at my side; and at the same time I could be in Valka, fighting to free my island from the aragorn — and, at the same time, here I was, naked and weaponless as usual, ready to undertake some great new task.

I shivered a little at the power of the Star Lords.

I, Dray Prescot, who called them onkers and rasts and cramphs!

From my experiences in the Heavenly Mines I had emerged in reasonable condition, completely hairless, for the Hamalians with their rigid adherence to the rules shaved the slaves once a sennight, and without the brands on chest and back. I had to acknowledge that forethought to the Star Lords, although as I knew my dip in the Pool of Baptism in the River Zelph of Aphrasöe as well as giving me a thousand years of life and phenomenal powers of recuperation also enabled my skin to slough off brand marks. Sometimes, as when I had been a hauler for the Emperor’s barges, that had not been too comfortable an attribute.

Unlike most of my previous transitions to various unfriendly locations of Kregen, this time I had not landed slap bang in the midst of danger, action, and headlong adventure. Around the Heavenly Mines stretched the Barrens, a deadly waste of desert and near-desert. All food had had to be imported. I stood up slowly, taking stock of my situation. Around me now extended broad fields, heavy with corn, with brilliant flowers blooming in the hedgerows alongside narrow lanes. A house or two showed red-tiled gables, and smoke drifted lazily from tall twisted chimneys. A flock of birds —

ordinary Earth-like birds — swooped and squawked about a clump of trees remarkably like elms. Had the two brilliant suns of Antares not blazed down from the sky above I might have thought myself back at home, in a rich and golden autumn with all the goodness of the harvest to be gathered in. This situation, then, was like no other that had confronted me on arrival on Kregen. I could see at once the dangers here, the difficulties. Perhaps, if the truth was told, more danger for me existed in this apparently peaceful scene than in the damned Heavenly Mines of Hamal. Did I tread the soil of Havilfar? Had I been taken back to Vallia, or to Turismond? Segesthes, perhaps?

Or, a continent I had touched only at the tip of Erthyrdrin, Loh? The thought crossed my mind that I might have been deposited in one of the remaining three continents; but I had no information of value on them, and no one of the people of this grouping knew much of them; they were foreign and strange beyond the understanding of ordinary men and women.

A mirvoller flew out from the trees and passed across the sky and, without having to think, I took cover in a hedge. The mirvol flew effortlessly, and I caught the wink of weapons from its rider. The flyer passed out of sight.

As far as I knew mirvols were found only in Havilfar. So I felt reasonably sure I was still in Havilfar. If this was a game the Star Lords were playing with me, I knew only too well it was a deadly game, and failure would result in death or a fate worse than death, if you will pardon the expression, in my return to Earth.

Perhaps, the treacherous whisper crossed my mind, perhaps I was still in the rock hut of the Heavenly Mines, and I had imagined I had seen and spoken with the scorpion, and all this was pure hallucination. A quoffa cart rumbled along the road, and the apim sitting in the front with a straw in his mouth and a wide hat pulled low over his forehead looked real enough. Naked as I was, I must accost him. He wore a shirt and trousers, a fashion quite often seen on Kregen, and I would face some quizzing, I felt sure. But it had to be done.

The white dust of the road puffed under the six pads of the quoffa, and his huge, patient, wise old face cheered me as I stepped out. This was a crossroads. A tall tree stood in one corner of the cross, and a blackened thing hung from a branch, chained and gruesome. I perked up. Directly across the angle of the road stood an inn, whose white walls and red roof leaned lazily against the sunlight, the windows winking in the sun. A table and a bench stood outside. I fancied I might find information there, if I could not stand a drink and a piece of vosk pie.

The red roof of the inn was new, for the tiles were unpitted and still full of color, but the far end gable roof showed older tiles, darkened and cracked here and there.

This was a mystery, this whole occurrence, so unlike anything that had happened before. The peacefulness of the scene, the calmness of the surroundings, even the thing in the gibbet to indicate that law was upheld and troubles past, all drew together to make me believe that something strange was happening.

I stepped out and opened my mouth to shout to the apim in the quoffa cart — and a blue radiance swept about me and a violent wind seemed to whirl me head over heels. I was still standing upright and on the same spot, but my impressions whirled chaotically. I saw the quoffa cart spin around, the tree bend and sway, the fields ripple and run as though a great and silent wind scored them flat. I struggled to draw breath in that glowing azure radiance.

I gasped.

The quoffa cart had gone. The tree had changed, for its foliage was now of early season, and not of autumn. And the inn! Its roof was now old all over, darkened cracked tiles where before had been new tiles. The fields had shrunk, for instead of ripe and golden grain they now showed the beginning shoots of new garden growths.

The Star Lords sent their blue radiance about me and I felt myself falling; I thought in my terror that I had failed to accomplish what I had been sent here to do. And I knew the Everoinye would punish failure with instant dismissal. I was on my way back to Earth!

“No!” I screamed out. This was not fair! This was to set a task without clue, without sign, without hope. Then I could scream no more. For the solid ground returned once more under my feet, the old inn, the new shoots in the fields, the burgeoning tree, all flashed again before my eyes. But now there was a change, a drastic change.

The inn was on fire. Flames shot from the roof, cracking and tumbling the tiles away as beams fell. The windows glowed with the violence of the fire within. All about me rose that horrid screeching of men locked in mortal combat.

I had no time to thank Zair. For this — this horror, this screaming and screeching, this clang of iron weapons on armor, this noise of battle — this scene was my scene, may Zair forgive me. Now I knew I was where I must be in order to fulfill my destiny on the world four hundred light-years from the world of my birth.

Diffs were attacking the inn.

They pranced about it, shooting quarrels into the fire through the smashed windows, running and laughing and cutting down other diffs who struggled to break a way through that iron ring. Any thought that I might be hurling myself into the fight on the wrong side had to be dispelled. The Star Lords had tested me in that way before; I had been tested through my own stiff-necked pride, and had hitherto had the good fortune to pick the right side. Now I felt that the devils so wantonly attacking the inn must be my adversaries. Those within might have been a coven or a gathering of criminals, but I doubted it. As I had struck when I had taken Sosie na Arkasson from her tree of suffering, so I struck now. I ran into the fray.

The diffs pranced and screeched, but I was able to trip one in half-armor and gaudy orange robes, to thump him as he went down, and so possess myself of a thraxter.

Is it a sin to confess, as I do, that the feeling of a sword-hilt once more in my fist uplifted me, gave me a thrilling sense of completeness? This proves without the shadow of a doubt that I am an incomplete man, a shadow man, a weakling, dependent on the shallow symbol of a sword for my moral and spiritual sustenance. Oh, yes, all that — but on Kregen a sword means life to its owner. Or, as is the way of two worlds, death . . .

My prowess as a fighting-man gives me pleasure only when that skill may be used to ends which are in themselves worthy. The protection of the weak has seemed to me to be such a worthy end. But the judgment of worthiness remains with me, alone, and therefore in the eyes of everyone else must be suspect.

I saw these four-armed diffs attacking the blazing inn. I heard the shrieks and yells from within, and witnessed other four-armed diffs attempting to break out, and being shot down as they ran and stumbled; so it seemed right to me that I should assist those trapped in the inn. All these thoughts of a schoolboy philosophy flashed through my mind in the moment that I scooped the thraxter, blocked a blow from a yelling halfling who tried to decapitate me, and thrust him through above his lorica. I turned swiftly, ducking my head so that a crossbow bolt flicked by above, and leaped for the clump who were attempting to smash down the door, almost enveloped in a blaze of sparks and flame. They had a tree trunk and they ran and swung with great and agile viciousness. These four-armed halflings were superb fighting-men.

The lenken door groaned back from bronze hinges. Then I was into the battering-ram group, laying about me, and catching them completely unawares. They dropped the log. They carried thraxters in their right upper hands; but their other three hands had been occupied with the log, and it seems to me now that small fact perhaps saved my life. They were fantastic fighters. I had to skip and jump, to parry and block more than I could hack and thrust. But they went down, first one and then two, and two more as I caught the knack.

Others came running, holding shields balanced high on their two left arms. The streaming light of the twin Suns of Scorpio poured down on the scene and the blaze of the burning inn shed a ghastly wavering light into that sunshine. There would be no quick and easy escape into the shadows. As I fought I took stock of these four-armed diffs.

“He is only apim, by Zodjuin of the Rainbow!” A magnificent halfling yelled his anger that his men were being thus thwarted. He wore an iron-banded lorica that had been let out to its full extent, and a pair of gray trousers, with a broad, orange cummerbund wrapped around his waist, and a swirling orange and blue cloak fastened by jeweled golden brooches. He wore no helmet and his coppery hair gleamed in the light, cut into a helmet-shape itself, with a fillet of silver confining the curls across his forehead. He waved his thraxter with his upper right hand and hurled a stux with his lower right. He threw the stux with great skill and precision. I slipped it and cut down a diff who attempted to run me through. Things were becoming more interesting by the mur, by Zair!

A man I had chopped at and who had slid his thraxter across barely in time, so that instead of having his head laid open had been merely slashed down his face, yelled back hoarsely.

“He may only be apim, Kov Nath, but he fights like a devil of the Yawfi Suth!”

“Stick him, you yetches, and have done!” This Kov Nath whirled his sword at me, commanding, demanding. “We must break in and make sure Ortyg Fellin Coper is truly dead. His men will be here soon! Hurry, you rasts, hurry!”

A blazing mass tumbled from the roof then, falling from the porch, and we all skipped aside. Kov Nath yelled savage commands. His men closed in. There were something like twenty of them, and I knew this was no longer a pleasant muscle-exercising afternoon’s romp. Twenty diffs with four arms each meant something more than eighty to two, for the combinations offered by the four-armed configuration are interesting and deadly. So I fought and leaped and jumped and kept the door. Stuxes hissed past me, and those I did not snatch from the air and return from whence they came in best Krozair tradition thunked splinteringly into the lenken door. How much longer could this go on? My thraxter gleamed a foul and bitter red, now, with the blood of these diffs. They did not seem to reck the consequences of attack; they bore in vengefully, and only by the utmost exertions could I stop the final lethal thrust.

A crossbow bolt tore into my side. I ignored that. Kov Nath, raging, rushed forward. He had snatched up a shield and grasped it in his two larboard hands, while his two starboard fists wrapped around a sword that was, I swear, longer than those great Swords of War of the Blue Mountains in distant Vallia. A window broke outward and a four-armed diff sprang out, wielding a sword, cursing, followed by two more. They charged into the attackers. All thee of them were smoldering, their cloaks and trousers smoking.

“Now by the blood of Holy Djan-kadjiryon!” yelled Kov Nath. “You will all die!”

He charged.

Even in the shock of the engagement I thought he would do better to grip that unwieldy longsword in his two upper fists, or his two lower, so as to get the triangular leverage so important in two-handed play. But he was skilled and quick and vicious, and I skipped and parried and gonged my thraxter uselessly on his shield. He tended to keep the shield covering him and did not use it, as I taught my men, to thrust out and so use as an offensive weapon in its own right.

He, like them all, had taken no notice of my appearance. I had two arms only, and was therefore apim. My nakedness, my shaved head, my hairless body, appeared to them as merely a part of the custom of my people. We circled, and against my will I was forced from the door. I leaped in with a fierce and savage lunge, ducked, felt that damned great sword go whistling over my head, and tried to stick him through the thigh. But the shield rim clanked across, and that rim was bound in iron, not brass.

“By Zodjuin of the Rainbow! You fight like a leem!”

I did not waste breath answering but got myself back to the splintered door and held him off yet again. I had to allow my fighting instincts full play. There had to be a way of beating him. While he leaped and sprang so agilely before me and I ducked and weaved in my turn his men would not chance a stux throw or the loosing of a bolt. This gave me heart.

The three men who, on fire, had charged into the fight were fully occupied. They were yelling and screeching strange oaths at one another, calling on outlandish gods and devils, and the way these four-armed diffs fought filled me with admiration. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation and wherever on Havilfar I might be, I had landed in a country of warriors, by Vox!

Kov Nath drew back a space, and I saw a face at the window at my side. At first I imagined a monstrous mouse-face looked at me. There were brilliant dark eyes, a trembling tender nose above wide white whiskers, and a small mouth which showed small even teeth in evident terror at the fire-filled scene outside. A scarlet velvet cap with a jaunty white feather stuck lopsidedly in it covered this diffs head. He squeaked.

“May all the Warrior Gods of Djanduin aid you now, apim!”

So now I knew where I was. And, as before, the very sound of that name, Djanduin, struck a responsive chord in me. I had experienced the same uncomprehending but thrilling spark of uplift when I had first heard the name Strombor and the name Valka. And now — Djanduin!

Perhaps all that has happened in the intervening years has given me a false hindsight; perhaps the names of Strombor and Valka and Djanduin and — but they must wait for now — ring and thunder in my head so much, enough to echo back over the years. All I know is that as the mouse-faced little diff yelled at me, the name Djanduin struck shrewdly. These four-armed diffs were Djangs. I had used their national weapon, the djangir, on a notable occasion in the arena of Huringa.

A crossbow bolt shattered into the window frame and the little diff jumped, squealing.

“Get your head down, onker!” I roared at him, and with the thraxter belted a stux out of the air. The keen iron point would have pierced him just where his whiskers joined beneath the quivering nose and above the trembling mouth.

“Mother Diocaster!” he yelped, and vanished.

The fire-fanned flames lay their burning hair across the inn and more of the roof fell in; but I was heartened to note that the splintered lenken door and the smashed window with the crossbow bolt embedded in the frame lay upwind. Here was a tiny portion of hope for the cause in which I fought. That I had no idea what that cause was all about added a spice I — thinking of the Star Lords — did not relish.

The far end of the inn was now doomed. I continued to fight, keeping a circle about the door, and with an evil cunning drawing Djangs in for combat so that they would screen me with their own bodies from their comrades’ shooting.

Kov Nath, with his smooth helmet-head of coppery hair, tried again to get at me with that confounded great sword of his and I had to leap and then bend double to avoid the crunching back-handed swing. I circled him to his left, flickering the thraxter in and out like the tongue of a risslaca of the Ocher Limits, and then darting back and trying to cut him up in his right side. But those two damned right arms of his kept whacking the great sword about so that I had to take it on my blade and let a supple wrist twist slide it free. When, with the fighting-man’s instinctive attack following defense, my blade merely scraped across his shield I grew hopping mad.

“Sink me!” I burst out. “You’re a bonny fighter, Kov Nath!”

“Aye, apim,” he said merrily, and came at me again. “And I’ll split your head on my sword to prove it.”

We clashed and banged and every now and then I had to jerk away and flick my thraxter up to swat a quarrel off or snatch at a flying stux. It seemed to me then that this could not go on much longer. I did not take a stux cleanly with my left hand and the broad iron blade scored up my forearm, at which I let out a curse.

“By the Black Chunkrah, Kov Nath! Let you and me settle this between ourselves, like true Horters.”

He laughed.

“I am no Horter, apim. I am Nath Jagdur, the Kov of Hyr Khor!”

That betrayed him. For although I am not a gentleman, and do not pretend to be, having seen too much of their nasty ways, I do know that the Horters of Havilfar and the Koters of Vallia and all the other gentlemen of Kregen consider themselves Opaz-elect. Any noble considers himself a gentleman, by birth and right, except in those cases or men who — like myself — fought and struggled to become Notors from lowly origins, and then they are nobles by right only. But, such is the custom of Kregen, birth means far less than achievement in the eyes of most peoples.

As we thus struggled before the lenken door of the blazing inn a Djang screeched and ran out from the streaming smoke.

“Kov Nath! They come! They come!”

Kov Nath went mad. His great sword whirled into a silvery-blue blur, for he had not tasted blood with it as yet. He bellowed his anger.

“By Zodjuin of the Stormclouds! I’ll spit you yet, yetch!”

His face congested with blood. Apart from his four arms he looked exactly like an apim, and his face was darkly handsome, with bright merry eyes, a thin black moustache, and a chin that jutted with a dark bristle to show he had not shaved that morning. He bore down on me again even as his men yelled and began to decamp.

“Rast!” he yelled at me, and spittle flew. “I’ll degut, debrain, dissect you, you two-armed weakling!”

“By Vox!” I ducked a swing and surged up to him and so took his throat into my left hand and dragged his handsome head forward. I glared into his congested face. “You’ll know you’ve met me, Kov Jagdur the Boaster!” And I slashed the thraxter down. The blow would have finished any ordinary man. But this Kov Nath Jagdur was a Djang. He had four arms. The shield came around and caught me in the side, just beneath the ribs, and I grunted and let him go, and he brought the great sword around and down to finish me.

I rolled away and my thraxter came up just in time and slid that long wicked blade. The steel bit into the turf.

A crossbow bolt went whirr-chunk against the great blade. The double hilt was violently wrenched from Kov Nath’s fists. The sword spun across the turf.

He roared and straightened up and another bolt hummed past his ear. From the smoke more Djangs appeared, running and loosing crossbows, holding their shields high, their thraxters low. At their belts swung djangirs.

“Now by all the devils in a Herrelldrin hell!” bellowed Kov Nath.

He hesitated — he stood there, balanced, ready to lunge one way for his sword and the other in flight. A bolt pranged glancingly from his lorica, and that decided him; with a final blood-curdling curse he ran around the far end of the inn. Moments later the thud of animal hooves sounded and the band of rogues burst into view, racing with straining necks and heads low, riding fast away along the white dusty road. I looked up into the point of a stux.

The Djang holding the stux looked as though he would like nothing better than to thrust down. Just as I was about to teach him the error of his ways in thus treating a Krozair of Zy, four arms or no four damned arms, the little diff with the mouse-face came running out of the inn, squeaking. His whiskers were all a-twitch as he pushed the stux aside and dropped on a knee at my side.

“Apim! You still live! Now may Mother Diocaster be praised!”

I did not fail to notice the offhanded way this little fellow thrust the stux aside, nor the way the Djang soldiery stiffened up at sight of him. These were signs I recognized. He was most solicitous.

“You are hurt, sir, you are hurt. You bleed!” He leaped up and tore into the gathered newcomers.

“Deldar! Take this Horter into the unburned room and care for him. Bandages, water, needles, palines.”

He swung about. “Sinkie! Sinkie! I am coming, my love! It is all right now, the Opaz-forgotten leemsheads are gone! You may come out from under the table now.”

I had to let myself be hoisted up to keep a smile off my face. Lord knew, I needed a smile then!

As we went into the unburned end of the inn I observed how the Djangs were going about dousing the flames, working with a swift eager efficiency that heartened me. Hauling water from the well in the rear courtyard, they had the fire under control very soon. Truth to tell there was little left of that end of the roof. The little fellow pranced at my side very solicitously.

“I have the honor to present myself to you, sir. I am Ortyg Fellin Coper, Pallan of the Highways.”

He looked at me expectantly, his bright eyes alert, his whiskers quivering. He wore rich robes of a dark blue material liberally splattered with gems and silver lace. His scarlet velvet hat with its white feather looked now a sumptuous part of his costume. He wore no weapons, apart from a small silver secretarial knife in a silver sheath at his belt.

All naked and bloody as I was — although a cloak had been flung across me as I was half-carried in —

I pondered what answer to make. This, I thought, must be the man the Star Lords had sent me here to rescue. I had done that, for if I had not stood before the door and prevented the leemsheads from getting at him before his bodyguard came up he would have been a dead man. If I was, as I sincerely believed, in my own past, then perhaps I was not Strom of Valka yet; certainly I was not the Prince Majister of Vallia.

“I am Dray Prescot, the Lord of Strombor, Pallan.”

“Well, you are right well and heartily met, as Mother Diocaster is my witness!”

He introduced his wife, a charming little lady whose whiskers added, if anything, to her coy beauty. Her clothes, too, although simple were richly jeweled. I could not fail to notice the affection between these two, and, also, the affection and respect accorded them both by the tough warrior Djangs. O. Fellin Coper handled them with the casual unthinking courtesy of a man habituated to absolute authority tempered with concern for those that fate had put into his hands. Also in the unburned room were two other mouse-faced diffs like himself, lesser in rank and importance but still treated with grave gruff respect by the Djangs, and a Djang woman, very much pregnant and very near her time, as I judged. She lay on a pallet, pale-faced, her long fair hair damp, her face streaked with sweat. She was still beautiful, despite the difficulty of the birth. Three Djang women were attending her but there was no doctor with acupuncture needles in attendance. This did not seem right to me and so I mentioned it to O. Fellin Coper. His gerbil-like head twisted.

“You are quite right, Notor Prescot. But when Mother Diocaster calls forth the babe at the appointed hour — why, then, the babe has to come whatever the circumstances.”

A great bustle began as preparations were made for the Pallan to leave the inn. The pregnant Djang woman was not of his party. Her husband had been burned in the fighting and had died. For a moment I pondered, and then Ortyg Coper called to me from his decorated carriage which his men had brought up.

“I am returning to Djanguraj, Notor Prescot, and if the city was your destination before you fell among these leemsheads, I would be most honored — my wife and I would be most honored — if you would deign to take advantage of our carriage for the journey.”

It was nicely said, and it explained why no one had commented on my nakedness. They assumed I had been set on and was fighting the leemsheads to get my clothes and money back. To dispose of another problem here and now, they also took me for a member of the Martial Monks of Djanduin, which would explain my hairlessness.

My wounds had been seen to, and I was busy as any old mercenary would be. The dead Djangs yielded clothes, weapons, and money. I rifled the dead men with as much compunction as I would sweep the table of breadcrumbs. A paktun is a paktun, when all is said and done. So it was that when I walked toward Ortyg Coper’s carriage at the far end of the yard I was suitably clad in a pair of gray trousers with an orange cummerbund and a white shirt. A lorica was collapsed and slung over my shoulder. In a pouch lay enough shivers and obs to last, and there were three golden deldys. No one, I thought, had seen that quick rifling of the dead. For weapons I took a thraxter, a pair of stuxes, a djangir and a shield, which I draped about myself. At the last moment I picked up Kov Nath’s enormous sword, and so stepped into Ortyg Fellin Coper’s elegant carriage for Djanguraj.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Pallan O. Fellin Coper of Djanduin

“We do not see many apims in Djanduin, Notor Prescot. Nor many other diffs, come to that.” Ortyg Coper glanced at me obliquely as the carriage rolled along the road and left a wide swath of white dust in its wake. His bodyguard rode up front and well astern. I had noticed they rode totrixes, the awkward six-legged riding animal of Havilfar, and carried long slender lances upright in boots attached to their stirrup irons. “So,” went on Coper, looking out of the window at the passing fields of corn and marspear and crops I did not recognize, “it seems you are the Lord of Strombor and so therefore cannot be a Martial Monk of Djanduin.”

“I lay no claim to being a Martial Monk, Pallan Coper.”

The dangers here were obvious. This man was a Pallan, a chief minister of state, and, as he had told me, one charged with the upkeep of the highways. He held a very real power. To judge by other parts of Kregen I knew he would think nothing of having me thrown into a dungeon if it suited him or his master the king, and the fact that I had saved him from the swords of Kov Nath’s leemsheads would mean nothing. So I had to tread warily, for all that he seemed a pleasant enough little fellow. He brushed his whiskers in a finicky fashion.

“Tell me of Strombor, Notor.”

Had I been a man given to empty gestures I might have smiled then, for this was so clearly a cunning opening ploy in a conversation designed to trap me into giving away my secrets. No further mention of my nakedness — its fact lay there between us — but it was: “Tell me of Strombor.”

I considered. If this past was far enough back he would not have heard of Strombor, for that enclave had been taken over by the Esztercaris in distant Zenicce. Had he heard of Zenicce? Had he heard of Segesthes?

“You know the continent of Segesthes, Pallan? The great enclave city of Zenicce?”

He inclined his head.

“Indeed. We have records in our libraries.”

I said easily, “Strombor is an enclave in Zenicce,” and then I went on matter-of-factly. “I, naturally, consider Strombor the most beautiful and the best, even if not the greatest; but we are a rich people and I am fortunate to be their prince.”

His wife, Sinkie, fluttered up at this, but Coper gave me a sly sideways look and said: “You saved my life, Notor Prescot, and for this I am in your debt. I shall not forget. But there will be those in Djanguraj who will — ah — wonder what a noble prince of a great house of Zenicce is doing, wandering naked and hairless in Djanduin, so far from home.”

Well, you couldn’t say fairer than that.

“How are arguments that touch a man’s honor settled in Djanduin, Pallan Coper?”

“With the sword.”

“That will be quite suitable.”

He chuckled then, this little mousy fellow, and stroked his whiskers in high good humor.

“You are apim, Notor Prescot! You have, like me, but two arms. How do you think to face a Djang champion, who has four arms?”

About to say, “I had thought you had witnessed that,” I paused. To make that remark would be boorish, despite its other and intended meaning.

So I said something about fighting as Zair willed (he like most Kregans accepted strange gods, devils, and saints without turning a hair) and so we rolled on for a space in silence. I found that to suggest I had been shipwrecked, an obvious stratagem, would not work, as the inn and crossroads were dwaburs from the sea. I told a part of the truth, and said I had tumbled off a voller. Like the Horter he was, he did not refer to it again.

In the southwest corner of Havilfar the sea surges in a cleft that, looking at the map, reminds me of the Bristol Channel, except, of course, that the scales are vastly greater, for Havilfar is a broad continent. The northern promontory sweeps out boldly south of Loh, with a ruggedly indented coastline and a wide and sheltering band of islands, some quite large, running off the northwestern shore. At the tip of the channel is sited the town of Pellow in Herrelldrin. Sometimes the smot[2]of Pellow is referred to as standing in a bay, but the bay shape begins farther out, below the Yawfi Suth. The Yawfi Suth is a frightful area of bog and fen, of marsh and quagmire, penned between a tonguelike intrusion of the sea to the north, and treacherous ground to the south, alongside the channel. Here, also, is the Wendwath, that vast, misty lake of magic and superstition, and, too, of a strange, haunting golden beauty when the twin suns slant through the mists upon the water. They call the Wendwath the Lake of Dreaming Maidens. The promontory that extends westward south of the channel — that same Tarnish Channel — curves southward to the southernmost land of Havilfar: Thothangir. Off the jagged and wind-eroded cliffs there lies the Rapa island that had once been the home of Rapechak, the Rapa with whom Turko the Shield and I, with those two silly girls Quaesa and Saenda, had escaped from Mungul Sidrath. Rapechak had not surfaced in our sight above the waters of the River Magan. It hurt me still to recall that, but I did not believe he was truly dead.

But we were in the northern promontory, near its far western extremity, rolling along toward Djanguraj, the capital of Djanduin, which is situated at the head of a wide, island-protected bay notched into the southwestern corner, above the Tarnish Channel.

To the west, as far as man could know, stretched the Ocean of Doubt. So I was in the southwest of Havilfar. Now I had to prove myself acceptable to the Djangs, and I had to see about organizing transport back home to Valka.

Then I froze.

I knew the Star Lords would never let me leave here until time had once more caught up with the present I had left at the Heavenly Mines. I had had experience of their ways before. A great storm would arise, supernatural lightning and thunder would bar my path, as rashoons had done on the Eye of the World, as gales and typhoons had penned me in Valka, as I had been prevented from leaving Huringa in Hyrklana.

It was no use cursing and crying and calling out against the injustice of it all. Where I was I must stay until the time was up, until once more the green sun preceded the red across the sky — and I knew where else on Kregen I would be when that happened! I took the only comfort I could from the fact that Delia would not share this enforced and lonely exile. To her, when I returned — for I would return! — it would seem I had but minutes before tumbled out of the voller.

This would be.

How I was to make the Star Lords keep their part of the bargain I did not know. I had only the haziest idea what their plans were, but I suspected they wished me to do something drastic about the omnipresent slavery of Kregen. Very well, while I sweated out my sentence in this prison of time I would amuse myself. I would take what satisfaction I could get from upsetting as many unpleasant people as I could. I would do the aragorns’ business for them, if any came my way, or I would dot a few eyes for the flutsmen, or show the cramphs of Gorgrendrin the error of their ways. By Zim-Zair!

I would!

But — how long? How long?

On the thought I cocked my head out of the carriage window and, shading my eyes as best I could, squinted up to get an idea of how far apart were Zim and Genodras. They looked a long way, a damned long way, apart. I remembered how in the warrens of Magdag and in the Emerald Eye Palace — which was the second best palace in all Magdag — I had waited and watched for the red sun to eclipse the green. When it had happened I had not been in either the warrens or the palace; and then — as you must guess — I felt that old life surge back. What were we all doing now, Zolta and Nath, my two oar-comrades, my two wonderful rogues of Sanurkazz?

If you think in those first few moments of understanding I grew overly maudlin, you are probably right. But I missed Nath and Zolta, oh, how I missed them!

And Mayfwy, the widow of my oar-comrade Zorg. And Pur Zenkiren. The inner sea knew little of the outer oceans and cared less. Would that I were there now, if I could not be in Valka!

“You look troubled, Notor Prescot.”

“I was thinking of old times, and that ill becomes a man, as I know to my cost.”

Sinkie, the Pallan Coper’s wife, gave a little cry.

“Oh, my dear Notor Prescot! Pray, do not alarm me so! You looked so stern and — and — oh!” And she buried her quivering little nose in her lace handkerchief that had come all the long way from Dap-Tentyrasmot across the Shrouded Sea.

We trundled on and the conversation came back to normal patterns. As is my usual custom I will tell you the details of this land of Djanduin — and fascinating they were, at least to me — as and when they are relevant to my story.

The Djangs with their four arms, powerful bodies, and great muscular agility were superb fighters, and they were conscious of their good fortune. Their land of Djanduin was walled off in the southwestern promontory of Havilfar by first the Yawfi Suth and the Wendwath and second by a dangerous and difficult range of mountains barring the path of an invader. But the Djangs had not won their independence lightly. Constantly over the seasons the Gorgrens mounted invasions. Gorgrendrin, the land of the Gorgrens, stretched inland from the head of the Tarnish Channel. The Gorgrens had carved themselves fresh living space and captured many slaves from the lands and free cities of the area. The smot of Pellow, in Herrelldrin, lay under their heel.

Turko the Shield, my Khamorro comrade, came from Herrelldrin, and now I understood fully, for he had always been reticent, that the Gorgrens had indeed enslaved Pellow. The Khamorros had developed their syple disciplines of unarmed combat because they were, in truth, not allowed weapons. And the Gorgrens sought always to march into Djanduin and serve the Djangs as they had served the people of Herrelldrin.

Trouble, it seems, is endemic in any culture where peoples fret and struggle and seek to expand their frontiers.

The only problem with the Djangs was — and here Pallan O. Fellin Coper exercised exquisite tact as he sought to explain to me in a way that would not demean the Djangs in my eyes — that they were, in very truth, exceptionally fine soldiers, but they were seldom entrusted with high command. To be brutally frank about it, the Djangs were bonny fighters in the blood and press of the field, but were not overly bright when it came to the higher command. Tactics — yes, they were superb. Strategy — no. They were duffers.

“Up to Jiktar rank, and you will scarcely find a better soldier. But give a Djang a brigade and he sweats and groans and worries, and wants to go up to the front line to see how his men are getting on every bur instead of thinking and planning what they ought to do. There are Djang Chuktars; very few.”

“And you, Pallan Coper?”

“Oh, I am a civilian administrator. I deal with the roads.” At that moment the carriage gave an almighty jolt and pitched and swung on its simple leaf springs so that we were rattled about like a Bantinko dancer’s peas in his gourd.

“Now may Djan rot the road!” burst out Coper and immediately turned in alarmed contrition to his wife, who let out a little shriek and waved her perfumed handkerchief.

When I discovered she was horrified at his outburst and not the shuddering of the carriage I felt my lips rick up. These two were likely to make me laugh before I realized!

When all was settled Coper explained that his own people handled all the affairs that demanded planning and higher administration for the Djangs. He called himself a Djang, too. He was an Obdjang, that is, a First Djang. He told me frankly that although his race of diffs were clearly not the same as the Djang diffs, no one had any memory of when their partnership had begun, and no records existed in their libraries. Always, so Coper said, the Djangs had fought and the Obdjangs had directed. Each respected the other. Each knew they could do nothing without the other.

“Except—” And here Coper looked as troubled as I had seen him so far. I chanced a guess.

“This Kov Nath Jagdur na Hyr Khor,” I said. “The leader of the leemsheads. He would prefer to lead instead of being led.”

Coper nodded rather forlornly and his whiskers drooped. “That is so, Notor Prescot. You are quick.”

“You have to be quick to stay alive on Kregen.”

“Those yetches of Gorgrens are quick, also. We have certain intelligence that they plan a new campaign

— and that will play merry hell with my roads — and I am summoned to the palace. The king will need counsel. Chuktar Naghan Stolin Rumferling will be there, I am glad to say. He is a good friend and a great warrior. My part will be a civilian’s, which pleases me, also.”

“Yes, Ortyg.” His wife spoke up. “Better for you to be a civilian and let the soldiers and the warriors fight. Chuktar Naghan is a very great warrior indeed.”

“He knows the approaches the Gorgrens will probably take. You see, Notor Prescot, our frontier is protected by the Yawfi Suth and the Wendwath; but there are ways through and between these natural obstacles and an army must be so positioned as to cover all eventualities.”

“You have to outguess your opponent,” I said. “Yes, I know.”

I had done a deal of campaigning with my fierce clansmen on the Great Plains of Segesthes. That time we had burned our foemen’s wagons in the Pass of Trampled Leaves had been a great bluff and counter-bluff. They, too, had had an alternative set of routes, and Hap Loder and I had guessed right. Perhaps, the thought occurs, if we had not had the skill and generalship to pick the right answer, I would not be here now. My bones might be moldering away on the plains, my blood and flesh long since gone to feed the grasses grazed upon by the chunkrah.

Coper glanced at me and I saw the quick intelligence on his gerbil-like face.

“I know you are a great fighter, Notor Prescot, although I do not think you would have lasted much longer against the leemsheads — and I compliment you, sir, I compliment you — but may I take it you also have knowledge of the art of strategy? Of generalship? Of the maneuvering of armies?”

Somehow, whether from my need to be independent and free or from a resentment of being pushed, I said, “Oh, as to that, Pallan Coper, I have been a fighting-man for a long time. I am content to leave the higher command in the hands of those who believe they are masters at that game.”

He sank back in his seat. He rubbed his whiskers and pulled his scarlet hat over one ear, and so we fell into a silence that, at least for me, came with unwelcome desolation. I had the uncomfortable feeling that there was more to O. Fellin Coper.

Over the rumble of the carriage wheels we did not hear the beat of wings, and an escort Djang thrust his head through the window as the carriage shuddered to a halt.

“Well, Deldar Pocor! What is it, what is it?”

“A messenger from Chuktar Stolin Rumferling, Pallan.”

The door was opened and, fussing and complaining of delays, Coper and his wife alighted. The other carriage with its Obdjang attendants pulled up also and the escort sat their totrixes with the blind indifference of the soldier wanting to get back to barracks and the local inn. A fluttclepper curved through the air in a barrage of swift wing-beats to land beside the road. The rider, a young and athletic Djang wearing flying leathers of orange and gray, leaped off. A long flexible staff whipped aft of his saddle and flew a multicolored flag with many tails. This, I guessed, was a badge and the reason the guard Deldar had known the messenger came from Chuktar Rumferling.

Using a steel key strung on a golden chain around his neck, Coper unlocked the flat balass box the messenger proffered. He took out a narrow strip of paper and broke the seal with a practiced flick of his left thumb. He unfolded the paper and read. His whiskers quivered and then stood out, stiff and rigid. He crumpled the paper in his small hand.

“Very good, merker. A verbal reply. ‘Returning in all haste.’ Now get airborne.”

“My wings are yours to command,” said the merker in the rote fashion of the messenger and leaped aboard his fluttclepper and took off immediately. Coper ushered us back into the carriage and squeaked up very hotly at Deldar Pocor.

“We must hurry, good Pocor! Great things are afoot in Djanguraj. I expect us to reach the city by sunset.”

“By sunset, Pallan. Very good, Pallan.”

Sinkie fluttered at her businesslike husband.

“Oh, Ortyg! Whatever can be the matter?”

Coper shot that shrewd look at me and then leaned forward and patted his wife’s knee.

“This is terrible news, Sinkie, and you must be brave. I will tell you now, for Notor Prescot is not of Djanduin and is not concerned with our affairs, for all that he is a guest and will be made truly welcome in our house.”

“Of course, Ortyg! Notor Prescot saved us from those horrible leemsheads and I am very fond of him. But, my dear, the news . . . ?”

The news was, in truth, enough to shake any Pallan of the kingdom.“The king and queen have been assassinated. Chuktar Naghan has certain news of the Gorgrens’ invasion. The two terrible events are linked. Now, Sinkie! You must be brave. We will win through, in the end, as we have always done before.”

“Oh, the poor dear king! And the queen—” Sinkie burst into tears that shook her little body. She looked absolutely woebegone, with the tears dripping from the ends of her drooping whiskers. Coper looked at me meaningfully.

“You are our honored guest, Notor Prescot. I can judge a man, even if he is apim, and I know you to be a Horter and a Notor. You will not divulge any of this until it is generally known?”

“You may rely on me, Pallan Coper. And, as you say, this is not my business. I have no wish to become involved.” I had just been brought from the horror of the Heavenly Mines, and had fought damned hard, and I meant what I said. In my prison of time I intended to live it up and have a good time — nothing more.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In Djanguraj

I, Dray Prescot, of Earth and of Kregen, fell into low ways and low company. I make no excuses.

The taverns I explored, the dopa dens, the theaters, the fighting arenas (Djanduin is mightily contemptuous of the Jikhorkduns of Hamal and Hyrklana and instead flocks to see real fighting by professionals that almost invariably results in no one dying at all), the dancing girls I gawped at, the zorca races and the sleeth races, the dicing, the gambling, the drinking! Money came in, for I have skills at certain of the hairier games of Kregen, and I never went hungry or thirsty — or, at least, not often. Pallan Coper and his charming wife Sinkie had shown me tremendous hospitality and they had been horrified by my antics and pleaded with me to give up such a terrible life. But they would not hear a word spoken against me.

And the cause of all this wanton debauchery?

As I have told you, calendars and dates are highly individual idiosyncrasies on Kregen, and every people and every race and every country keep some kind of time in their own way, and to the Ice Floes of Sicce with everyone else’s.

By the expenditure of a great deal of time and effort and by constant application at the observatory of the Todalpheme of Djanduin — a small and humble group compared with other Todalpheme I have known — I calculated out dates. The Todalpheme are those austere and dedicated men whose charge it is to work out the tides of Kregen, and give timely warning. So I worked on my figures and when I had finished I stared in appalled horror at the final figure, under which I scrawled a great slashing red line. Ten years.

Ten Terrestrial years, it was going to take, for the present in which I now lived to catch up with the time I had left the Heavenly Mines.

I did not go mad; after all, this was a mere matter of waiting, and patience is a virtue, even for me, sinner that I am. And I would wait in as much comfort and pleasure as I could contrive. My only true comfort was that Delia would not know of my durance, and her sufferings could, if I ranked my Deldars correctly, be curtailed or obviated altogether.

So I plunged into the heady nightlife of Djanguraj and found most of the strong young men gone off to war, and their womenfolk moping after them, and war and talk of war filling everyone’s horizons. This suited me ill.

Chuktar N. Stolin Rumferling had gone off to war.

Seeing him briefly before he flew off I was struck by the cunning way nature can produce entirely different end products from the same original material. Imagine a meek and mild little clerk, with contact lenses and a sinus drip, hunched over a computer in a glass-walled office in a great city of Earth, weak-chested, scrawny-armed, flabby where it would do the most harm, prim and precise — there, to slander him, you have a defamatory picture of O. Fellin Coper. Imagine a fullback, bulky, powerful, superbly muscled, charging head-down into a mess of footballers in his way, chunking them aside with massive energy — there you have a not unflattering picture of Chuktar N. Stolin Rumferling. They are both men. They both come from the same stock. But what a difference between them!

“This will be a bloody business, Notor Prescot.” Rumferling spoke in a gruff way that told me he was perfectly capable of cowing the roistering, rough-and-tough barbaric Djangs he would command. “Those cramphs of Gorgrens must be taught a lesson, once and for all.”

“They will return and return, Naghan,” squeaked Coper. “We all know that, Djan rot ’em!”

There was no gentle Sinkie present to protest his language.

So the fighting-men went off to war and I frolicked about town, enjoying what I could of the fleshpots. Ten years! Ten long damned years!

I witnessed the new king’s coronation. It was a rushed affair, with a hushed and spartan wartime atmosphere. This king was a nonentity, the old king’s nephew by marriage, and he would not, I fancied, last long in some places of Kregen I had been — Sanurkazz or Magdag, for example, or Vallia herself. He did not last.

A palace revolution was the first upheaval and that placed another nephew on the throne. He was strong, but a fool. He was murdered after a season and the Chuktar of the palace crowned himself as king. He lasted until the next Chuktar of the palace bribed enough of the king’s personal bodyguard and overthrew him. His body was dragged though a pool of fighting fish, something like piranha, and the new king was crowned.

All this time I caroused and drank and sang and watched the dancing girls — for they were dancing girls, unlike those fine free girls of my clansmen who danced for us beneath the moons of Kregen — and they were very skilled in the arts of the dance. Their four arms weaved arabesques of beauty, and their oiled bodies and gleaming masses of silver bangles and golden bells, of waving fans and swirling silks, charmed me even as they bored me.

I would have none of them.

Ten godforsaken years!

My Delia — I had to get the disaster that had overtaken me in proportion. My overriding duty lay to Delia, and through her to Vallia, and to my people of Valka because I was their Strom. Also I owed a duty to Strombor and my clansmen of the Great Plains. But Gloag in Strombor and Hap Loder with the clans did everything right, as I well knew, and my duty was fully and freely carried out by them. Delia —

I had to think of other things. Like the teasing arguments we indulged in so often over the merits and demerits of the wonderful zorcas of her Blue Mountains’ blue-grass grazing estates as against the fabulous zorcas of my clansmen.

So with some of my ill-gotten winnings I went to the zorcadrome to buy myself the best zorca I could. The zorcas of Djanduin are fine animals. But then, it is difficult to find a zorca that is not a fine animal, for of all the animals of Kregen, I believe, it is the zorca who most nobly fulfills its ancestral breeding. This is not to gainsay the superb quality of the vove, that fearsome steed of the Great Plains. But voves — real voves — are found only there in the natural state, while zorcas are found in many areas of Kregen. Passing the totrixdrome — as you know I have never been fond of the sectrix, the nactrix, or the totrix, or of any other of the trix family — and hurrying on with Khobo the So chattering away in my ear as he guided me through the throngs of people who seem forever to wander and push and shout through the markets of two worlds, we came out to a wide dusty space fenced in with lenken rails. A pair of zorcas were racing up toward us, having completed a circuit of the oval, and they were neck and neck. Even at speed like that a clansman can point a zorca, and the faults of both these were at once apparent. But a fat cortilinden merchant, sweating happily as he paid out golden deldys, bought them for his son, who looked as though a quick belt on the backside would suit him better than a zorca saddle. They were Lamnias, and so the merchant should have known better.

“Rubbish!” Khobo whispered in my ear. He was a jaunty rogue, a carousing companion I had rescued from a brawl and who had stuck to me since. “I know old Planath the Zorca. He will not cheat me.”

I grimaced at the name of Planath’s, for although it is common on Kregen for the occupation to decide the label — and very colorful that is, to be sure — there were places I knew where to be called anything at all to do with zorcas meant much effort and sweat, not a little blood, and general approbation from one’s peers. As for that genial rascal Khobo, he was called the So for obvious reasons. He’d been in the army and as a young man had had his upper left arm lopped off. As so is Kregish for three, thus Khobo was the So.

As I casually inspected the zorcas on display — for some reason I have always disliked the use of the word horseflesh for horses and zorcaflesh for zorcas — I was vividly reminded of what my father used to tell me as he doctored up a lame horse, or patted a strong chestnut neck, his eyes filled with the love of horses. It was with a nostalgic thought or two that I came at last to a magnificent pair held by two Djang grooms of Planath the Zorca’s establishment.

“Wonderful animals, Notor, wonderful!” Planath babbled on, but cunningly. “See their quarters, their fetlocks, see their teeth—” At this, like two rat-traps, the lads opened up the zorcas’ mouths. “Both are guaranteed perfect! Never, I swear by Holy Djan Himself, have there been two such zorcas as these.”

Khobo rolled spittle around his mouth and spat into the dust. He laid a finger on the soft nose of the larboard one.

I shook my head.

“This one, I think, Khobo.”

At this everyone began to wrangle, thoroughly enjoying themselves in the dust and the summer suns-shine, having supple Djangi girls bring them beaker after beaker of that sherbet drink called parclear that tickles the nose and is a sovereign thirst-quencher. Khobo, I knew, had not spotted that tiny divergence in the shoulder blades of the zorca he chose so confidently. That one was a splendid snow-white and, indeed, was a magnificent animal. But the one I wanted, and would give no reason for so doing beyond a stubborn foolishness, was the one a clansman would have selected, for all that he was a dusty shabby gray color. But I liked the look of him, the bright light of intelligence in his eyes.

“So you rush upon disaster, good Notor! Well, I can say no more!” And Khobo the So threw up his three hands in despair. “Choose this Dust Pounder, Notor, and have done, then.”

So, astride Dust Pounder, thrilling again to the feel of a blood zorca between my knees, I rode back to the tavern at which for the moment I stayed. This was The Paline and Queng, run by a fat and happy Obdjang who knew exactly where every last ob came from and went to, and who made the best vosk pie in all Djanguraj. I downed some of his better wine, a clear yellow vintage from east, beyond the Mountains of Mirth, and bade Khobo sup up, and roared out that now I would challenge all comers in the zorca races.

This, as you will see, was a highly cunning way for a Krozair of Zy to earn his daily bread. But as I have said, I felt bitter and betrayed and desolated, in those early days in Djanduin. Well, I will not weary you with a recital of my daily doings, as those doings wearied me. Suffice it to say that I raced Dust Pounder, and we won handsome sums of golden deldys; and I made the acquaintance of my Lady Lara Kholin Domon, who herself raced zorcas and who, perhaps, felt annoyance that she had lost, and who yet concealed that annoyance because she fancied some affection for me. The Lady Lara — oh, yes, she was a girl with fire and spirit, who rode like the east wind over the Sunset Sea. Yet she had a humility that was totally amused each time some proud Djang buck proposed to her. Her middle name — Kholin — proclaimed to all Djanduin that she came of a most powerful and wealthy tan

— or House or clan or tribe — of Djanguraj. The Fellins and the Stolins were not in the same class as the Kholins.

We raced our zorcas against each other, and old Dust Pounder carried me to victory, for I would not shame her by pulling on his rein and so allowing her a hollow victory. Her wild coppery hair blazed under the suns as we rode, her lithe and lissome form, clad in gray leathers, bent urgently over the neck of her zorca, whispering in his ear, entreating, pleading, urging, commanding him to run faster, faster, faster! Fast enough, at any rate, to beat Dust Pounder. But Dust Pounder had an aversion to running with another zorca’s hindquarters in his view. Her four supple arms, rounded and aglow with beauty, could not aid her once she mounted a zorca. But when she wrestled with me, stripped, I found her a most slippery customer. We wrestled for our own private amusement — not as we raced, as professionals for gain — and I could not bring myself to use the disciplines of the Krozairs of Zy upon her and so hurl her flat upon her back, panting, and place my foot upon her neck. She did this to me, though, many times, laughing down on me, her eyes dancing with mischief, her vibrant form outlined above me, her coppery hair in disarray, superb.

“Now, Dray Prescot, who says four arms are not better than two!”

“I won’t argue, Lara. But for the sweet sake of Djan Himself, take your foot off my windpipe so I can breathe!”

They knew of the Khamorros of Herrelldrin here, of course, being not all that far distant from Pellow, and their own Martial Monks were reputed masters of bloodless combat as well as more serious work with pointed and edged weapons. My hair was growing back and I was shaving, as I sometimes did, leaving my arrogant old brown moustache to thrust its way up from my lip. I wondered what Turko the Shield would make of my thus throwing a combat with a four-armed girl — and so cursed and groaned as again the realization of ten infernal years to serve in my prison of time brought me back to reality. So the time passed in Djanguraj, capital of Djanduin.

Chuktar Rumferling had guessed right about the attack route of the Gorgrens. I knew there would be more of sagacity and experience than sheer guesswork in this decision as to which pass to throw most of his weight. The first of this fresh invasion from Gorgrendrin was hurled back. I stood silently in the crowded streets to watch the wounded come in. On that day the new king was fished from the river, its yellow mud disturbed by his finery and his jewels, and a new king installed himself. The main strength of the army lay carefully positioned along the frontier under the cover of the Yawfi Suth and the Wendwath; those left at home in Djanguraj struggled to keep the country on its feet. This period proved near-disastrous to the Djangs. Before the troubles there had been three kings who had ruled for over a hundred years each, and before that there had never been this weakening rapid succession. Djang and Obdjang had ascended the throne in the sacred court of the warrior gods at the center of the Palace of Illustrious Ornament. No continuity could be achieved, it seemed, and even the expedient of the Obdjangs and Djangs failed in allowing a diff of another species to ascend the throne. A Rapa, a Chulik, and a Bleg succeeded one another with the rapidity of utter ruin. I saw Coper when the Bleg was cut down from the rafters of his own country house, and the Pallan of the Highways looked exhausted, shrunken. Sinkie was lying down.

“It is good to see you, Notor Prescot. These are evil days in Djanduin.”

Rather too carelessly, I said, “The army will have to return to set a strong king upon the throne. You, my dear Pallan, or Chuktar Rumferling, or one of your friends who see eye to eye with you.”

At this Sinkie sat bolt upright with a shriek.

“Notor Prescot! I consider you a good and valued friend! But to speak thus! Would you condemn my poor dear husband to a terrible fate — do you want his blood to stain the faerling throne?”

“Of course not, Lady Sinkie, as well you know. But there must be a man of courage and strength and sound common sense. The markets complain of the prices of food. Ships from countries overseas do not wish to trade because we cannot guarantee either their safety or payment. Why, I can only make a living by winning in the zorca races—”

“We have heard, Notor Prescot.”

They were a straitlaced pair, these two, and yet I liked them much. We talked more and I believe it was then that Pallan Coper began to come around to the dreadful idea that perhaps Naghan Rumferling, or one of their circle, would have to chance his life as king. I was shown out by their personal servant, Dolar, a massive Djang of ferocious appearance and childlike mind, a man of enormous courage and strength and utmost loyalty. He had been the first of those Djangs who, on fire, had leaped from the burning inn to fight the leemsheads.

Back at The Paline and Queng I made a frugal supper of bread — not done in the bols fashion, I may say — butter a little too long out of the icebox, and a ponsho chop that had seen better days. I had the money to buy better provender; the troubles had dried up markets and the country folk were frugally storing food against worse days to come. The whole countryside was in unrest, for the leemsheads now openly waylaid and slew any Obdjang they could find. If the Kov of Hyr Khor thought he would frighten Djangs like Chuktar Rumferling by these tactics, he was well out in his calculations. But Sinkie and Ortyg Coper were two worried Obdjangs.

At one time ships from Ng’groga used to call regularly at Djanguraj. The first time I had seen one of the tall, fair-haired Ng’grogans I had jumped forward with joy, expecting to find Inch; and then sober sense returned. Here in Djanguraj we were a mere three hundred or so dwaburs almost due south from Ng’groga. But the ships, simple single-decked brig-rigged craft, seldom reached in past the pharos of Port Djanguraj now.

The days of my enforced imprisonment limped past. And each day it seemed to me the state of the country worsened. If the army suffered a reverse now, Djan Himself knew what would happen. The Lady Lara Kholin Domon still wrestled me and one day, so occupied was I with my miserable thoughts, I forgot what I was doing, and caught two of her wrists. I twisted and pulled and sent her flying beautifully through the air to land with an almighty thump upon the mat. Three of her hands punched down to spring her back to her feet while the fourth rubbed her bottom, and then I was on her and tying her in knots and pressed my foot on her windpipe.

She glared up in a fury, and so, remembering, I let my foot slip and then she was on me like a leem and belted me down until I yelled quarter.

Even the zorca races were poorly attended, the lavish hippodrome, which they call merezo on Kregen, sparsely filled and the bets poor.

Lara had introduced me to her cousin, Felder Kholin Mindner, who was a Jiktar of the aerial forces and therefore as highly placed as a Djang had any right to expect in the military services. He had been wounded in an affray and was home convalescing. What he told me of the army convinced me that if the emergency at home was not speedily ended, then the army would simply march on the capital and compel some sense into the politicians. What that would do as regards the Gorgrendrin situation was not something any Djang would wish to contemplate.

There were few fliers in Djanduin, but the Djanduin Air Service, being manned by Djangs, was as smart and efficient as any other. Felder Kholin Minder was a Jiktar of the flyers,[3]riding a saddle-bird peculiar to Djanduin, called a flutduin, a powerful bird with wide yellow wings and a vicious, deadly black beak. We discussed the military situation; but he burst out with the usual realistic Djang observation: “May all the devils in a Herrelldrin hell take me if I understand strategy, Notor Prescot! How Chuktar Naghan does it I’ll never know. But he peers down at his maps and he measures up with his ruler, and walks his dividers across, and then he thinks, and then, by Djan! we’re all flying off helter-skelter and, as neat as you like, there are the Opaz-forsaken rasts of Gorgrens all lined up ready for us to belt into! I tell you, Notor Prescot, these Obdjangs are powerful clever fellows!”

“Both races of Djanduin get along well,” I said. “I feel it a great shame that the country suffers so. If you Djangs accept the Obdjangs, as they accept you—”

“Absolutely right, Notor Prescot! We do and they do!”

“—then it seems that Kov Nath Jagdur is a mischievous man.”

“I’d like to see him in the Ice Floes of Sicce!”

The use of the name Djang for either of the two peoples is quite correct; the little gerbil-faced fellows are often called Obdjangs. Very seldom are the four-armed warriors called Dwadjangs, which is a name to which they are entitled.

Eventually I came to find out why I had not come across a crossbow when I had rifled through the dead outside the inn on the occasion I had arrived in Djanduin. The Djangs use the curved compound reflex bow, a very similar weapon to those used by my clansmen and by my archers of Valka. The crossbow is a weapon they manufacture; not well, and they generally import examples for their crossbow regiments. So an arbalest is one of the first weapons a Djang soldier will snatch up on the scene of battle. We went swimming in a scented indoor pool and Lara’s parents joined us, laughing and splashing. I was invited to stay for supper, an invitation I accepted with alacrity, for although I had a sufficiency of money I had no influence, and the Kholins had both, and so could secure supplies. We were halfway through an extremely fine meal, although Lara’s father, Vad Larghos, would keep apologizing for the meanness of his table, and her mother, a woman still beautiful with her coppery hair bound with silver moon-bloom petals, kept throwing him reproachful glances as though the emergency and lack of the usual abundance of food were all his fault, when the majordomo announced a messenger.

“For the Notor Prescot, Lord of Strombor!” he boomed out.

Dolar stumbled in. His gray trousers, his dark blue cloak, the shirt visible beneath his lorica, were hideously splashed with blood. He looked exhausted. We all leaped up and I pressed a golden cup of wine into his hands. He drank like a leem.

“The Pallan!” he cried out, when he could get his breath. Then, remembering his manners, he said:

“Lahal, Notor Prescot. The master and mistress! They send for you. Chuktar Naghan Rumferling is dead, assassinated, and they need all loyal help.”

CHAPTER NINE

“You hairy graint, Dray Prescot!”

Wild alarums and excursions and mad dashes through the night sky of Kregen, well, they have been a pretty constant part of my life on that beautiful yet terrible world. The Maiden with the Many Smiles floated high above us as we saddled up, strapping the clerketers tightly over our flying silks and leathers, and sent the flutduins lunging into the air.

Chuktar Naghan Rumferling, who was now dead, had been visiting a base camp at Cafresmot, halfway to the Mountains of Mirth. Pallan Coper and his wife had visited him there; I wondered, as I stretched forward along the neck of the giant flying bird and battled through the rushing air, if that visit had to do with a kingly crown and throne.

Pink moonlight washed over the steadily beating wings of the flutduins, and their sharp black beaks jutted forth ready, it seemed, to impale any obstruction. We flew on, with a steady remorseless wing-beat to lull us into a false sense of security. Wounded though he was, although much recovered, Felder Mindner had insisted on coming with us. Lara, too, had borne down all opposition, and her father, the Vad, had thereupon announced that he valued Naghan Rumferling highly, and the Pallan Coper, also, and would come with us, Nundji take him if he didn’t!

Dolar, the faithful servant to Coper, in his turn hadinsisted on rousing the other loyal friends he had been bidden to summon. Much of the blood spattering him, dried and caked as it was from his flight from the Mountains of Mirth, was not his own. He had merely said, “They would have prevented me leaving, Vad,” when Vad Larghos questioned him.

Truly, the Djangs have thews of iron and a simplistic view of life!

So we knew there were others in the sky this night, outward bound for the base camp of the army of the east.

If the Gorgrens got wind of this night’s doings, and decided to attack, who would there be capable of reading their plans and scheming to defeat them? So many of the Obdjangs had been slaughtered by this maniac, Kov Nath Jagdur, that the High Command was decidedly thin on the ground — or in the air. Cafresmot stood a good long way from the fighting front, the Mountains of Mirth rise something like halfway between the Yawfi Suth and Djanguraj and have in the past proved the final insurmountable obstacle to armies invading from the east. That is why they are called what they are. How many and many a time, so I had been told with a chuckle, had proud and confident armies burst through one of the tortuous routes around the Yawfi Suth or the Wendwath and marched through Eastern Djanduin, full of hopes of easy conquest and glory now they had broken into the country. And then, they had seen rising before them the sharp and narrow peaks of a mountain range that extended north and south and curved in a bow that faced them. Not overly grand or full of hauteur, the Mountains of Mirth, standing no comparison whatsoever with The Stratemsk, and yet many and many a time they halted enemy invasions in relatively poor country, and turned them back. The shock had proved disastrous to many armies, not least the Gorgrens on the single long-ago occasion when they had managed to reach the mountains; and the men of Djanduin had roared their merriment.

Truly, they were the Mountains of Mirth!

From Djanguraj to the outermost western limits of the Yawfi Suth is about a hundred and seventy dwaburs. So this night we had to fly approximately fifty dwaburs, for the Mountains of Mirth stand roughly a hundred dwaburs from the capital, roughly seventy from the Yawfi Suth. The firm steady beat of the flutduin I rode impressed me. I have ridden impiters, corths, fluttrells, mirvols, and many other of the marvelous saddle-flyers of Kregen, and it is difficult to choose the absolute best, for all have their good points as well as their weaknesses. We passed over the sleeping countryside and as She of the Veils rose before us and we blustered on against the rushing wind, the night filled with the pinkish moons-radiance. We followed the pink-glimmering reflections of the River of Wraiths. This river rises in the Mountains of Mirth and curving boldly southward flows westward through Djanduin and so to the Bay of Djanguraj where the Tarnish Channel meets the Ocean of Doubt. On that river stands Djanguraj, and also Cafresmot, our destination. Up and down, rising and falling with the long smooth wing-beats, we hurtled on through the level air and all about us fell the pink moons-light. This part of Djanduin is rich in agriculture and husbandry, and we passed over the wide fields and the farms and the carefully tended grazing, and presently we saw beneath us the darker splotches of shadow against the pink glimmer, and so knew we had reached Cafresmot. The town is small but active, with a good cattle and ponsho market and with a thriving trade in corn and other staples. Felder Mindner, who knew the area well, had received directions from Dolar, and we swung a little north and swooped down toward a lightless ranch house set among missals. The night wind rustled the branches as Felder Mindner dropped his flutduin beyond the trees and we settled to the earth screened from the house by the missals. Cautiously we crept along a track rutted by cart wheels and pocked by the hooves of calsanys. No one spoke. We were aware of the need of surprise, and I was quite content to let this Jiktar Mindner lead, for he seemed to know his business. Also, and the real reason, was that I recognized I was here only as a friend of Coper’s. Dolar had been to other houses in Djanguraj and aroused friends of the Pallan. Chuktar Naghan, visiting here, had been met by Pallan Coper, but had been treacherously slain by disaffected members of an army unit stationed here, well back from the front. If Kov Nath had instigated this murder, and we had yet to prove that, he had struck a shrewd blow. It would have been useless for Dolar to have flown eastward to summon assistance from the army of the east, for, as he had told us, Coper suspected treason among them. If an army mutiny was to be added to the troubles of Djanduin I could see little hope for the country.

This troubled me as I crept forward through the pink radiance from the moons, my sword in my fist. A Horter of Havilfar will carry his thraxter with him as a mere matter of dress; but I had taken nothing else in the way of weapons to what should have been a pleasant evening of swimming and feasting with the Demons, and so they had lent me a soldier’s gear. The thraxter gleamed silvery pink. The shield I held high on my left shoulder. At my waist swung a djangir. Some of Vad Larghos’ men carried crossbows, the others the compound reflex bow. We padded on like a wild hunting pack of drangs, scenting our quarry.

No lights, no sounds, came from the ranch house.

We passed the corrals on our left and heard the sleeping snorts of joats and the restless snuffling of totrixes. Mindner waited for us to come up and he spoke in a whisper to Vad Larghos and me.

“I fear we are too late, Vad. If the Pallan was not dead there would be sounds of fighting—”

“If you are right, Felder—” Vad Larghos took a shuddering breath. “If you are right, my boy, we must take our revenge upon these mad leem!”

As you know I am not a man much concerned with revenge. Justice — of a suitable kind — usually satisfies me. But I own I shared a little of the Vad’s anger. Punishment must be seen to be inflicted, for the country was falling to pieces and good men were dead.

We crept on and reached the final packed-earth space before the row of tall windows fronting the house. I looked carefully in the streaming moonlight and could see no sign of movement. The Vad waved his men to left and right and, their bows nocked, they spread out. Lara stood close to me, breathing in quick excited gasps, her face pale in the moon-glow. I put my hand on her left upper arm, and pressed, and she turned quickly to me and would have spoken, but I took my hand and the thraxter away swiftly and touched the hilt to my lips. I was indicating silence upon her; I think, now, she understood that little gesture differently.

Those around me were aware of the tense and jumpy business this was. At any moment a storm of arrows and bolts might spurt from those dark windows and cut us down. Someone had to go up to the front door and find out the truth of the situation.

Why I did what I did, I think, is easy to explain. Such boredom, such bitterness, such hellish misery had been my portion ever since I had been parted from Delia that a kind of fey recklessness had overtaken me. As I marched up to the door with my shield high and thraxter low I knew — I knew — the ranch house would be deserted when I broke in.

I am not given to having my nerves racked by the various frightful experiences that befall me from time to time and which make life on Kregen so fascinating. If a bolt flicked toward me I would take it on my shield. I wanted to know what had become of Coper and Sinkie. I marched up to the door and kicked it in and smashed my way inside.

The darkness was partitioned by the long angular parallelograms of pink moonlight from the windows, paired from She of the Veils and the Maiden with the Many Smiles, softer and stronger, as one is the fourth and the other the first moon of Kregen. I padded in, vicious and ready for instant combat. The house was empty.

Mindner followed me in and then the Vad and Lara and we searched, and gradually, with the lighting of torches and the shouting and running of feet, we made a nice little hullabaloo, as the Vad’s men turned the house upside down.

“You take great chances, Notor Prescot,” said Jiktar Mindner. He flexed his four arms meaningfully.

“Perhaps. Where will the rasts have taken the Pallan and the Lady Sinkie?”

“We must find them!” exclaimed Lara. “Poor Sinkie! Think what may be happening to her!”

“I fear they must all be dead, daughter,” said her father, the Vad, somewhat gruffly.

“If they are, Vad,” I said, in my old surly way, “I will not believe it until I see them lying before me —

dead.”

“Oh!” said Lara, and she put her sword down as though suddenly aware of what it was.

“Jiktar!” I said and I saw them all jerk up at my tone. I had spoken as I would have spoken to a Jiktar of the army of Vallia or Valka, or a wild clansman who had not jumped immediately when I asked a question.

“I think—” Mindner began, a little hazily.

“By Vox! Spit it out!”

“If, as Dolar said, this terrible thing was done by the local army unit, they might have gone back to their barracks.”

“Are the Dwadjangs then so envious of the Obdjangs?” As he opened his mouth to make some sort of answer I chopped him off. “No matter. I know what I know of the Djangs. We fly at once to the barracks. Jiktar Mindner! You lead!”

“Yes, Notor Prescot.”

And so once more we mounted our flyers and took the wide-winged wind-eaters into the night sky of Kregen.

As we hurtled through the rushing air I considered how strange it was that these big rough fighting-men, the Djangs, so desperately needed someone to tell them what to do in moments like this. In a battle or an affray Mindner would never have been at a loss. If I say that the Djangs fight in such wise as to turn even Chuliks a little more yellowly pale than usual, I do not exaggerate. But they need leaders!

They would have all gone flying off to the barracks, whooping, to plunge down into as bloody an affray as you could wish; I had had to tell Mindner to detail a man to stay at the deserted ranch house to warn the following flights.

Yet this was only a tactical move, nothing clever in it, and I suspected there were as many degrees of intuitive intelligence as well as learned skill among the Djangs as among any other diffs. A number of the young fighting-men of Djanduin would go off to become mercenaries; but the vast majority stayed at home to work the soil and serve as soldiers in their own army, constantly menaced by the Gorgrens. Therefore the formidable fighting shape of the four-armed Djang was seldom encountered in the empires and kingdoms and free cities of Kregen. Djanduin is a rich kingdom, and yet it holds itself aloof from the rest of Havilfar, secure behind its treacherous bogs of the Yawfi Suth, the mysterious waters of the Wendwath, and the serried peaks of the Mountains of Mirth.

There was action aplenty at the barracks.

We saw the lights flaring and heard the yelling and shouting, whoops of ferocious merriment, the discordant clanging and banging of gongs and punklinglings and drums, and the wailing of flutes, the brazen notes of razztorns and trumpets.

We touched down out of sight and Mindner looked over a screen of thorn-ivy bushes forming a kind of natural boma around the barrack area, and he looked as delighted, as fierce, as obsessively pleased, as any fighting-man has any right to be casting his avaricious gaze on his foemen.

“They are Dwadjangs of North Djanduin, very fine doughty warriors, and I have no doubt that the madman Nath Jagdur has besotted their minds with evil promises.”

If it came to a fight between Djangs, as I knew, they’d fight, by Zair, they’d fight!

I wished to avoid bloodshed. Oh, I was bitter and savage enough in my self-misery not to care who got themselves killed; but I suppose the devil was working his dark and devious plans in me even then. We could see Coper and Sinkie, with other Obdjangs and a few Dwadjangs who must have remained loyal to them, sitting in a corner of the compound, the light from the two moons bright upon them. They had been bound with thongs. They looked dejected and frightened, as they had every right to be. And yet I saw Coper leaning toward his wife, and the way her little body jerked upright, her whiskers quivering, and I could guess with what sweet and reasonable fire he was putting courage back into her. He was a fine man, Pallan O. Fellin Coper!

The noise came from a drunken band of soldiery who had broken out the musical instruments; each man with a piece that would make a noise was making a noise, and each man was playing a different tune from his neighbor. Other men sang and laughed and jumped, and continually they drank deeply of the liquor that poured from great barrels turned on their sides and wedged up on trestles. I sniffed. Dopa. Well, no wonder they were making this racket. Dopa is a fiendish drink guaranteed to make the coolest headed man fighting drunk in a second, if he takes it neat. The dopa dens usually water or soft-drink their dopa in the ratio of ten to one.

“Drunk!” said Vad Larghos, with great distaste.

“I think, Vad, that Kov Nath Jagdur has made them drunk, for otherwise it is doubtful, even though they are Northern Djangs, that they would do what they have done.” Mindner looked a little sick, as he looked on this betrayal of the army in which he served.

“They may be too drunk to notice us,” I said. I merely tested the wind as I spoke, for I was forming theories about the Djang fighting-man.

“The hulus!” said Mindner. “They’re drunk enough to tangle with a leem. They’ll see us.”

There had to be a way around this. There were ten in the party of captives, and at least a hundred drunks cavorting about. Mindner had called them hulus. Well, here on Earth we apply insulting names, in amused despair, to idiots who are doing something wrong that we know, in normal circumstances, they would not do. It is all in the tone of voice, as when you call a man a bastard or a ratbag you can mean many different things. On Kregen one such term is hulu. And it summed up these onker-rasts perfectly, for they were more villainous at the moment than a simple stupid onker, and yet not quite as outrightly villainous as rasts.

I said to Mindner, “You will, on my signal, keep them occupied here. I am going to get them out with the flutduins.” He started to huff up at this, but I was brutal with him. “Don’t get yourself killed, Jiktar. And keep an eye open for the Lady Lara and her father. If you have to run away — aye! — run away from them, then run. Just give me a few murs in there, that is all.”

He managed to get out, “I shall accompany you, Notor Pres—”

“Do not be a nurdling onker! You keep those hulus occupied in there, and, by the Black Chunkrah, they won’t know a thing has hit ’em.”

I gave him no time to argue. Back into that moon-spattered night I went, and the Lady Lara pattered along with me, and I turned my look on her, and I knew — Zair forgive me! — what my face looked like then. “Go back, Lara, and keep out of the way. If you do not, I shall tan you so that you won’t sit a zorca for a sennight!”

“You hairy graint, Dray Prescot!”

And then I — Dray Prescot — chuckled. It was not in me to laugh, not then. “I have been called a hairy graint before, Lara, many and many a time — to my eternal joy!”

“Oh — you!” she said, and swung about and marched back to the distraction party outside the boma. Managing the flutduins was not as difficult as I had expected, and they followed me into the air on leading lines, a smoothly rhythmical flight that slotted them into a pattern that economically took up the minimum space their wide yellow wings required. We passed over the boma and that was the signal Mindner awaited. As I went streaking over the packed earth I twisted to look at Mindner and his party. They were putting up a brave show, loosing arrows, yelling and shrieking, and they’d thought to twist up quick torches from clumps of grass which they tossed cunningly down just the other side of the boma. These served before they burned out to illuminate the boma and the drunken soldiery and, by contrast, to drown the pink light of the two moons and throw Coper and the captives into shadow. The flutduins were birds that could not be easily hidden. I had no stupid ideas that I would not be seen. But the Vad’s marksmen were aware of the importance of Coper. So many Obdjangs had been killed that the Pallan of the Highways was now a most exalted personage. Vad Larghos’ men would shoot, and they would shoot to kill.

The flutduins landed and I was off the back of my bird and at Coper and Sinkie with a hunting knife. Their thongs sliced free.

“Oh! Notor Prescot!”

“Up, Ortyg!” I yelled, as Sinkie, calling on her husband Ortyg, fainted into his arms. “Grab Sinkie and get on a flutduin! Move!

Savage slashes that, I confess, drew blood, released the other captives and I herded them onto the remaining birds. The flutduins rose into the sky. A crossbow bolt sheared past my arm and vanished into the shadows. I whirled. Half a dozen drunken soldiers were staring at me, and shouting and gesticulating. One of them was trying to wind his arbalest, but the ratchet kept slipping and he kept falling over his own feet. Another drew his thraxter, waving wildly, and charged.

I knew what they would have done to Coper and Sinkie when Kov Nath Jagdur arrived, and so I could resign myself to cutting this hulu down. He fell without a screech. The flutduins were aloft now, their yellow wings powerful in the pink moons-shine. I jumped for my bird, the last remaining one, and took off without strapping myself up in the clerketer. I found the ready bow and I drew and loosed six deadly shafts before we rose past the boma, and six of those less drunk than their fellows, who were trying to shoot up, fell, screeching.

Out over the boma we whirled and a darkness descended as the crude torches flared and died. Then eyes adjusted and I was seeing my comrades rushing for the flutduins and mounting up. Each bird can carry three people, at push of pike, and we were not overloaded as we winged off into the Kregan night. No surprise at all, none whatsoever, that the Lady Lara contrived to leap up before me and let me grasp her around the waist as the flutduin belabored the air. She leaned back and her coppery hair brushed my cheeks.

“I declare, Notor Prescot! Hai Jikai!”

We flew off, and, I think, perhaps that had been a good Jikai. Not a High Jikai. But, still, a Jikai to remember.