King of Swords (The Starfolk) (35 page)

The barge twisted through another highway. “It’s a long way to Tarazed?” he asked.

“Of course. How many starfolk would link their domains directly to such a bestiary?”

He should have seen that. “And the other ten percent? Cockatrices who aren’t dazed?”

“You move one link down the food chain.”

“I do have a fireball amulet but I don’t know how to use it.”

“Stars bless me!
I cannot understand why Talitha didn’t manage to find a better helper than an ignorant boy. Ignorant youth, if you insist.”

“Because she trusts me more than anyone else. Instruct me.”

“Fireballs are easy. You have a ring with a large violet stone?”

“Yes.” He raised his free hand. No colors showed in the moonlight, but there was only one large stone on his left hand. “This one.”

“You press on the stone with your thumb and move your hand as if you’re throwing something. Do
not
practice in here.”

Saidak
lurched again. The moon disappeared. Now the barge trembled and rolled like a real boat, and Rigel could hear storm winds raging. Rain beat on the windows.

“So who imagined Tarazed?” he asked the gloom. “Why tolerate such a horrible place?”

“Tarazed is where nightmares grow. It’s as old as Naos. No one knows who started it, but once imagined, things cannot be consciously unimagined, and it is best to confine them in one spot as much as possible.”

The barge dropped, then slammed upward again. Cheleb bounced on her bench and the unconscious Talitha began to
slide out of Rigel’s embrace. Plunged into pitch darkness, he slithered to the carpet, taking Talitha with him as gently as he could. Although he made sure that she ended up on top, they landed just as the barge hit another updraft and the double impact knocked him flat, crushing all the air from his lungs. As the lamps began to glow, he wriggled free, sat up, and arranged her as comfortably as possible in his arms. She did not wake up. Thump! Severe turbulence, no seat belts. He wondered how
Saidak
compared to a Boeing in terms of structural strength.

Cheleb had also taken refuge on the deck.

“How does one ride a cockatrice?” he asked, thinking how bizarre that question would have seemed to him only four days ago.

“You sit on its back and hang on by wrapping your legs around its neck. Don’t let them dangle, or it will bite them off.”

“Reins? Stirrups?”

“No. A cockatrice has a fleshy comb and wattles, like a rooster. You control it with those. If you push its head down it cannot fly. If you tug on a wattle, it will turn to that side, and so on. The tricky part is dismounting.”

The next highway threw
Saidak
into wild gyrations. Storm winds thundered rain against the windows, blurring vague shapes of red fire.

“We’re here!” Cheleb said.

Rigel kissed Talitha’s forehead. “Time to wake up, darling. We’re at Tarazed.”

“Thanks.” She opened her eyes, perked up her ears, and yawned. Then she squealed in alarm as
Saidak
rolled. Rigel happily tightened his grip.

Cheleb opened her satchel to find one of the basilisk masks. “Put this on, halfling. Go and see if Saidak thinks she can let us off. She has her hands full.”

The mermaid must have her hands full just staying aboard, for the barge was pitching like a rodeo bronco. Reduced to crawling on his hands and knees, Rigel had trouble reaching the stairs at all, and when he slid open the hatch, a bathtubful of water was dumped on his face.

He had never experienced weather like this, not even the great Pacific storm that had blown in while he was in Ahousaht. He clung desperately to the hatch with one hand while reaching for the railing with the other, feeling at times as if his legs were flying free or the deck was higher than he was—and well aware that in a few seconds he would be thumped hard on the deck again. Rain was rushing by like a river, icy cold even by Starlands standards. Explosions of fire in the background cast a fitful glow over a jumble of rocks, but he was being bounced so much that he could not judge whether they were boulders or mountains. Terrified that his fingers would freeze and lose their grip on the wet wood, he clamped both hands tight around the railing in the bow, close by one of Saidak’s much larger ones. Even in that monsoon downpour, her hair streamed out like a golden flag.

“It’s raining,” he bellowed.

She turned her great head to look up at him, and he was astonished to see that she was grinning. “Good exercise. Enjoying it?” Despite the known power of her lungs, he could barely hear her.

“Interesting experience!”

“What?”

He leaned closer. “Can you let us off?”

“You still want to try?”

“Yes.”

“You are one crazy imp. I’ll try to find a sheltered spot. Alright?”

“Yieee!
” He had almost been torn loose. “Right, I mean.”

“Tell the starfolk to stand by,” Saidak bellowed. “When I drop my gangplank, you go first. Then you catch them. I’ll only have a few seconds between gusts.”

“Right.” What else could Sir Lancelot say?

The first problem was getting back to the hatch, but
Saidak
solved that for him by tilting her bow upward, or perhaps Saidak herself did it; he had trouble distinguishing between barge and bargee. He slid, grabbed, and arrived more or less unbroken at the bottom of the companionway. A minor lake was swilling back and forth across the saloon.

“Passengers stand by to disembark,” he yelled. “I’ll go first and try to catch you. We’ll only have a few seconds, she says.” He crawled back up the steps and the two starborn followed him with no greater dignity than his.

He let ripples of rainwater chute him across the deck to the gate where the gangplank would appear. There he clung for dear life, sternly telling himself that Lancelot and Galahad had never succumbed to seasickness.

In moments when he was not blinded by wind and rain, volcanic explosions lit the scene for him like strobe lights. As the barge descended, he saw more and more steaming rocks all around them. He wondered if the rain had cooled the ground to a bearable temperature or if contact with it would boil his feet. Off in the distance, he saw breakers and waves leaping up cliffs. By the time he could work out an idea of scale from the rate at which they fell back, the rocks and white water were perilously close. Saidak was taking a serious risk by edging the barge’s great bulk lower in search of shelter from the wind.

She found it in the lee of a towering sea stack, just above a rocky shore. The wind slackened, the gangplank unfolded, and Rigel forced his hands to slacken their deadman’s grip on the railing. He half scrambled, half fell down the plank and flew off the end like a spitball flipped from a ruler. He landed on one foot, one hand, and a shin, and was instantly blown onto his back by a screaming gust of wind, which carried away his howl of pain and
Saidak
also. The gangplank, with either Talitha or Cheleb clinging on the end of it, went soaring away into the darkness.

Sir Lancelot was now marooned on the island of cockatrices.

H
e tried to sit up and rapidly decided that standing would be a lot more comfortable, provided that the rambunctious wind would let him stay upright. His shinbone was not broken, but it hurt even more than his back, which was bleeding in at least two places. The storm was fiendishly erratic, going from dead calm and salty-tasting mist one minute to hurricane winds driving needle-sharp rain the next. He could make out white surf on one side, which he decided to call north, and red fire on the other, although the source of the flames was hidden by a nearby ridge. The ground was jagged, painful even for elfin feet, and it trembled constantly. He could not tell if it was being shaken by the volcanoes or the impact of the surf or both.

Shelter would definitely be a good idea, and an impenetrable blackness at the base of the nearest rock pile looked like it might be a cave. He hobbled across the jagged lava in that direction, struggling to keep his balance as the wind wrestled and needled him. Happily the cave was real, and deeper than he had expected. Unable to see the ground in front of him, he took three cautious steps into the opening, and then stopped to think.
Nice to be out of the wind and rain, even if the air stank most horribly of sulfur.

But now what?

One of his amulets might help, if he knew which one and how to use it. Cockatrices attacked on sight, Cheleb had said, but nothing would be able to see very well on a night like this, unless of course its dinner volunteered by coming to stand in the front door, silhouetted against what little light there was outside. He looked back uneasily. Nothing was visible inside the cave, but of course that meant little.

He was doomed unless
Saidak
returned, and it could not possibly locate him unless Starborn Cheleb had some magical means of doing so. He could not remember if he had spoken his helmet’s name since he’d last put it on, but if he had he’d be invisible to any magic the mage might use. He removed Meissa and replaced it.

“Where did you come from?” asked a quiet voice behind him.

He painfully stubbed a toe in his haste to turn around.

The girl was sitting on a stool five or six meters deeper into the cave. She was on lower ground than he was and visible only because she was faintly luminous.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Were you carved out of moonlight, or do you bathe in phosphorescent seas?”

She laughed. “You must know who I am, or you would not have risked coming here. Why are you blindfolded?”

He laughed, embarrassed. “In case you turn out to be a cockatrice in disguise.” He left the basilisk mask on.

“Are you elf or Greek?” Her voice was so soft that it should not have been audible over the storm and the volcanic activity. Her image kept flickering and changing—one minute she had elfin ears, the next she seemed more like a young human. Her clothing kept flickering back and forth between a full-length
gown and nothing whatsoever. In earthly terms she might be fourteen.

Greek? Her stool had three legs. “You’re a pythia!”

“The
Pythia!”

“One of a kind? Like the Minotaur? You expect me to believe you are the same ancient priestess who sat on a tripod in Delphi in Greece, to prophesy for kings and rulers of cities? Don’t answer that,” he added hastily. Prophecies were traditionally limited to either one or three per person, so he must not ask the wrong question by mistake. What was the
right
question? “I suppose the same immortal essence of prophecy could materialize in more than one place, especially if some elf imagined you here after he… or possibly she, you understand, no offense intended… Where was I? Don’t answer that either. I mean you could be an imagined replica, like Canopus isn’t the same Canopus.”

“You are quite the strangest petitioner to come calling on me in ages,” the Pythia said, solidifying slightly to peer up at him. She floated closer. “And I do mean ages. Where is your rich offering to Apollo?”

Thunder rumbled in the storm outside.

“I think I must have left it behind,” Rigel said vaguely. There was something he ought to be thinking about, if he could only remember what. “Apollo will have to do without, poor guy. I was going to ask you something, but it escapes me. Hadar escaped me. Probably it was about
Saidak,
the royal barge or royal mermaid. Or both. I need to know if she’s going to come back and pick me up. That was a rhetorical question. There’s no point in asking you that, is there? If she or they either isn’t or aren’t going to come and get me then I’ll die as soon as the cockatrices or basilisks or creepy crawlies find me. I ought to ask
you something useful. Ask something useful, I mean, something that you can answer usefully. Usefully for me.”

“I like your helmet! Alcibiades had one just like it. The brush was red, though.” The Pythia rippled unsteadily, like a reflection in water.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “You’re making me queasy. Didn’t you answer questions for the sphinxes last night?”

“Is that really what you want to ask me? Either way, I do wish you would hurry up and then go away. You look awfully sexy in that helmet, Rigel Estell, and I’d hate to see you die here.”

“You really can foretell the future?”

The Pythia laughed again. Her laugh was very loud and bold for someone so insubstantial. “I foresee that I won’t answer that. I usually give indecipherable answers that would be very useful if you happened to understand them in time.”

“I thought you just spoke gibberish, and the priests interpreted however they fancied. I read a book that said you sat on a tripod in the temple of Apollo and breathed in a seepage of ethylene gas, which made you hallucinate.”

The Pythia boomed out her great laugh again. “Are you sure you’re not hallucinating now, young Alcibiades? You’re kneeling there on all those sharp rocks and babbling about inhaling gas. Hydrogen sulphide paralyzes your sense of smell, you know? It’s as poisonous as cyanide gas, but at least it keeps you laughing.”

“Not laughing gas. Ethylene. Male version of ethyl gas.”

“It echoes like Dionysius’s Ear. Now, do you want to ask me for a prophecy, and then go, or will you just lie there and die?”

Wasn’t sulfur-hydrogen-whatever heavier than air? Rigel struggled to his feet again. “All right, let’s presume or assume that I’m going to be rescued, okay? Because if I’m wrong it
won’t matter. Isn’t that logical, Pythia? Take that for granite. Prophesy for me, pretty Pythia. Peanut butter sandwiches. Tell me how best I can serve my adored Talitha Starborn, because I really do want to get laid as soon as possible?”

“That’s a very honest question,” the Pythia said, clapping her hands inaudibly. She was fading to black. “So I’ll give you an easy answer:
It is mightiest in the mighty.
Now get out of here, Rigel Halfling-Estell, because the barge is returning, and this is your last chance.”

A
few minutes out in the storm cleared Rigel’s head, leaving behind a thundering headache and an overpowering sense of shame. How idiotic could a man be to crawl into a volcanic crevice and not remember that H
₂
S was poisonous? Not to mention the millions of other gases that were no doubt down there.