Captive Scorpio (16 page)
As was becoming increasingly my habit these days when I met fresh acquaintances, I studied this hunter with the Kroveres of Iztar in mind. Would he or would he not be found worthy to be admitted to the Order? Already I had been impressed by his manner. As for Barty, that young man for all his virtues had some way to go yet before the Order would consider him.
We pressed on again while the golden and pink moonlight gave us illumination, She of the Veils and the Twins lighting the way through the broken country. Ever upward we trended. The six-legged totrixes were an uncomfortable ride; but I am used to their waywardnesses and, deprived of a zorca, made the best of them.
We traveled for the rest of the night and as the last small hurtling moon vanished in the haze off to our left Uthnior indicated we should make camp again.
The fire we built was small, compact, shielded by a rocky overhang. When full daylight came we doused it and sat, resting, looking about as the light brightened. Barty could not rest for long.
“Can we not push on, Uthnior?”
The guide pulled a grass stem from the corner of his mouth.
“You hired me to guide you to the camp of the Hawkwas. I know the area they frequent — and avoid it. In general terms I can take you straight there. You will be observed closely over the last dwabur or so.”
Listening quietly to him I made no comment; but I guessed accurately what he would say next.
“Complete directions can be given you. I will be happy to do that. But you must go on by yourselves at the end. I shall wait three days for you. No more.”
Of the Pride of a Rapa Paktun
The mizzle of rain eased and a wan grayish daylight seeped through the massed clouds. Hillsides, woods, bushes, open swards dripped water. Barty swung off his hooded cape and the water sprayed. The totrixes ambled along in that skewed six-legged gait. Uthnior slid his cape off expertly and let the water drain off into the grass.
Gray clouds hung about the mountains. The pass ahead glinted with a waterfall’s sudden silver.
“Five burs ride beyond the pass,” said the guide, pointing. “Then I leave you to go on. There is a cave. Three days I shall wait. After that—”
“You needn’t go on!” exclaimed Barty. “If we don’t come back in three days we’ll be dead. I know.”
Uthnior had little experience of airboats, for his hunter clients liked to get into the saddle as soon as possible, and at the time I took at face value his assertion that fliers would be useless in the maze of valleys and gullies and hilly peaks around us. The Kwan Hills were no place to crash in, that was certain. Our six-legged mounts ambled along and the twin suns struggled to pierce the thick cloud layer above.
That pass ahead, with its thread of silver, the dark sodden slopes on either hand, the cavernous bellies of the low-lying clouds above — my fingers began to twitch.
Fingerspitzengefuhl.
Yes, the Germans had the word for it, the twitch in the finger tips. The old breeze up the spine. I rolled my eyes about, looking up the slopes, seeing clumps of vegetation dripping with moisture, vague pale blurs of wan sunshine trying to strike glints from the drops and producing glimmering pearls.
“Here they come!” I bellowed and ripped out the longbow.
They bounded down the slopes screeching like demons, leaping from tussock to tussock, waving their weapons, ragged bands of men and women, their armor and harness dun-earth in color and wet, wet with the wet ground on which they had lain in ambush.
“Hawkwas!” yelled Uthnior, and his bow was in his hand.
Reflex compound bow and Lohvian longbow spat as one.
Barty’s bow slapped out a little later, as the hunter and I loosed again.
In this kind of sudden fierce attack as fighting men and women roar at you, screeching, aiming to top you, you have to assume that, have to understand they are hostile and react to that, and not hang about wondering if this is merely a too-enthusiastic welcome. We shot to stop the attack. Men screamed with shafts feathered through them. They tumbled down the wet hill-slopes, tattered bundles, arms and legs flopping.
The arrows we loosed took their toll, and then it was handstrokes.
All the old clichés about letting the mind divorce itself from the corporeal body, the sword being held and not held, the mysteries of the Disciplines, all these things chunked into place.
Because I was mounted and because I was in a hurry to get through these Hawkwas I used the Krozair longsword. The brand flamed in the weak sunlight Hawkwas shrieked and fell away. Blood splattered. Barty was slashing about with the clanxer I had insisted he bring, the straight cut and thruster more use in this kind of work than a rapier. Uthnior struck mighty sweeping blows with a polearm, a scythe-like blade mounted on a staff, an overgrown version of the glaive my people of Valka know so well how to use. We urged our totrixes on, the baggage animals tethered to the saddles following willy-nilly, and we broke through the screeching mob. The Hawkwas fought us, for they saw we were but three and there were nineteen or twenty of them. But the deadly arrows had cut them down and the swords completed the task.
A last remnant, three men, turned to run back, casting aside their weapons. Uthnior slapped his polearm away and took out his bow. He shot cleanly into the back of the nearest fugitive.
He must have sensed my thoughts, for he bellowed savagely at me.
“They will bring their Opaz-forsaken friends, koter!”
As he dispatched the penultimate wretch, I, with some compunction and self-disgust, loosed at the last.
Practical matters despite all other concepts had to reign here. I valued my daughter Dayra above these bandits of the hills. It was horrible and messy; it was, as I took it, inevitable.
There was no point in gathering up the scattered weapons.
We rode from that accursed spot as quickly as we could move the totrixes along, after I had recovered my arrows.
And the rain came drifting back.
“You have, I think, fought before,” observed Uthnior as we jogged along.
“Yes.”
“Did you see that one—” began Barty.
“Not now, Barty,” I said.
We drew our cape hoods up and slouched in the saddles and rode through the valley and past the feathery glinting waterfall and so came out to the saddle beyond, where the land lifted away from us, misty, clouded by rain veils, gray and wet.
Barty said, with an oath: “What I would give for a piping hot cup of tea — right now — vydra tea, for that is what I like best.”
“I, too, am fond of vydra tea,” said Uthnior.
I hauled out a wine bottle and passed it across. “You will have to make do with wine, Barty. For now.”
“I suppose so.”
When we reached the cave of which the guide had spoken we reined in. The rocky face of the cliff closed down, and the uneven track wound down toward thickly wooded and much cut up land beyond. The veils of rain blew across like vertical sweeps from gigantic sword blades.
Uthnior hesitated.
“To wait here, now, will not be advisable.”
“Our tracks will be washed out.” I said tentatively.
“Assuredly, koter. But the bodies of the Hawkwas will be found. Their friends will search. It will not be difficult to find a lone man hiding in a cave.”
“So you—” began Barty.
“Ride with us until you find a secure hide,” I said.
Barty swung to face me, annoyed; but he saw my face and did not pursue the argument. We rode on.
The sense of desolation that depressed me here in these Kwan Hills lightened a little as the rain eased. I knew the atmospheric feelings were mine, that in other circumstances I would have joyed to explore here. Barty relapsed into a hurt silence, unable to comprehend why my companionship had so sadly fallen away. Uthnior led on, alert, sniffing the wind, his eyes forever scanning the distant prospects that opened up with each turn in our winding progress through the hills.
We had decided to approach the areas where the Hawkwas camped from a different direction. That, at least, was all we could do to divorce ourselves from the fight. If we were connected to that massacre at a later date, that was in the lap of the gods. So the way took longer, and we spent the next day jogging across cross-grained country and feeling the spirits of the land invading our ibs. Barty was now most unhappy.
We fell in with a wandering man, wild of aspect, half mad, whose shriveled face and white hair told eloquently that he suffered from that dread disease I have spoken of. A normal Kregan looks forward to better than two hundred years of happy, vigorous life. This disease, this chivrel, shortens a lifespan by a handful of years only, depriving people of that lovely golden autumn of life; but it destroys their strength and their appearance, aging them obscenely, shattering their powers.
Kregans hold in their hearts a deep horror of this particular disease; yet as far as anyone knows it is not transferable and people live in close contact with sufferers without ill effects. The disease strikes at random, it seems.
The camp we made beside a brook with crags above and trees massed about cheered me a little. Uthnior’s desires I respected. Barty would come round once I got this black dog off my back. Dayra would be found. As for the wider problems of the empire, these weighed most deeply on my mind, fretting at me, worrying me in that I was traipsing about in some damned back hills instead of acting my part in Vondium and trying to thwart evil schemes against the emperor and keeping him safely on his throne.
Who knew what was going on in Vondium now?
A single dagger thrust can change the destiny of nations.
The old fellow waved his arms about, his lank white hair flying, his wrinkled face parchment brittle. His coarse sacking garment was hitched up by a rope girdle; but he carried beside the usual stout pipewood bamboo stick, a sword blade mounted into a pole, the steel broken and resharpened into a foot-long blade. He said his name was Yanpa the Fran — a suitable name given the pallor of that shriveled face and the whiteness of his hair.
In answer to our questions he said he searched for the fabled Cher-ree. At this, Barty was all set to burst out laughing; but he caught my eye and subsided at my quick shake of the head. In this, Barty was prepared to accept my admonishment. After all, it was patent that Yanpa the Fran was makib, insane, and therefore entitled to pursue a will-o’-the-wisp search.
As my Djangs would say, Yanpa chased after Drig’s Lanterns.
“But there are too many Junka-forsaken warriors bashing about the Hills,” Yanpa complained. His hands shook. “They march everywhere, spoiling. They drive the spirits away.”
“Warriors?”
“Aye! Hundreds — thousands. They gather to the war drums and the trumpets. The banners fly. A band chased me yesterday—”
“Hawkwas?” demanded Uthnior. His lean face jutted aggressively forward.
“Also. Many mercenaries, many warriors, many paktuns.”
“Where is their camp?”
“Camp? Camp?” His withered old arms windmilled. “There are many camps. The leathers fill the valleys.”
“The chief camp?”
His eyeballs rolled. If this moment of lucidity passed before he answered we would be no better off. But he licked his cracked lips, the spittle shining, and laughed and hugged himself. “They meet at Hockwafernes. I saw the temple. I saw and they did not know.” He hugged himself in glee.
Uthnior pulled an earlobe. “Hockwafernes. I know it. Some would call it a place blessed and others a place damned. It is certain devils reside there.”
“Devils!” tittered Yanpa the Fran. “Aye! Junka has taken them all up into his hand and some spilled through his fingers and scuttled away and hide and tremble in Hockwafernes.”
“And others say, old man, that the devils wait there for the tombstones to be lifted, for the funeral pyres to suck in the smoke and flame, for the Ice Floes of Sicce to melt—”
“May Opaz the Light of Days protect us all!” exclaimed Barty, on a breath. He shivered, and looked across the fire into the enveloping trees.
A clatter of stones along the bank of the brook brought us about, instantly. Barty stared toward the source of the noise, hidden beyond a bend in the stream and a stand of trees. Uthnior looked about. I nodded, grim-faced, to the trees and we eased back into their cover. Yanpa came with us, casting a nervous glance back at his riding preysany and his pack calsany. The animals cropped grass alongside our totrixes.
The Rapa who trudged into view, walking sullenly along the river bank, was a fighting man, a warrior, clad in war harness and carrying a monstrous blanket-wrapped bundle on his shoulder. He muttered to himself as he walked, casting dark savage looks from side to side. The instant he saw the camp and the animals he threw the bundle down and the sword appeared in his fist in a twinkling glitter of light. He glared about, uncertain.
I called: “Llahal, dom. We mean you no mischief.”
He was confident enough. Where he stood he commanded our approach and before we could get to him he could make the decision to fight or run. I caught the silver glint at his throat, above the armor, and guessed he would not run.
How he would withstand a cloth-yard shaft driven straight at him was another matter entirely.
I did not test him. I stepped out and held up my empty hand.
“Llahal, dom,” he said in his surly way. People say all Rapas stink. This is not so. He turned his massively beaked face to regard me. He was of that family of Rapas with brilliant red feathers around the beak, and bands of red and black feathers running aft, and white feathers circling the eyes. His fierce vulturine face leered at me. I went forward.
After we made pappattu and learned he was Rojashin the Kaktu, a paktun, on his way to join Trylon Udo na Gelkwa who was raising an army and employing many mercenaries, Rojashin said with a surly curse: “And my confounded zorca fell and smashed two legs. I have walked two dwaburs like a common slave.” His predatory eye fastened on our animals.
Uthnior’s hand tightened on his sword hilt.
“You are mercenaries, also? I see you are not full paktuns.”
He spoke with some contempt, this Rojashin the Rapa. The little silver mortilhead gleamed at his throat, the pakmort, proud symbol of mercenaries who have achieved the coveted status of paktun. Of course, the word paktun is used loosely these days for almost any mercenary, and usage is changing. Kregen is a world that is not static, that is not stamped into an unchanging mold. Customs, habits, traditions evolve. It was becoming the fashion to call all high-quality mercenary warriors paktuns, and those with the pakmort consequently were called mortpaktuns. Hyr-paktuns, who wore the pakzhan, would then be dubbed zhanpaktuns. But it would be foolish to call a youngster newly left the farm and run off to be a mercenary a paktun. So new hands, green fighting-men, coys, tended to be called a variety of unflattering names, of which paktunik is perhaps the least offensive.
