Masks of Scorpio (15 page)

Pompino was hard after them.

I fancied Pompino and the others had the situation well in hand now. Straight for the needlewoman I jumped.

She tilted her head to regard me and the mask caught the lamplight and gleamed dully.

“You would slay me, then?”

“Only if you deserve to be slain.”

I backhanded a fellow off who tried to stick a short sword into my side, and he yowled and fell away, his sword arm shredded.

“You are a needlewoman?”

“That is why I sit here and do not take up a sword to strike you Unbelievers down.”

I regarded her in that tumult of action and blood and death.

The fight was just about over. I do not believe I could have abandoned my comrades in the midst of action had they not been so signally successful. The sheer scale of our surprise had granted us the victory from the moment we had unsheathed swords and leaped.

Pompino was leading the lady Dafni back.

Her silver mask dangled from its straps. Her face was distraught. She sobbed in convulsive, ugly heavings, and she twisted and struggled and Pompino, gentle with her, guided her to a seat.

“Bring wine for the Lady Dafni!”

So she was being attended to.

I called across.

“Hai! What of that rast Murgon?”

“Like the flat rock-basement inhabitant that he is, he escaped through a secret door in the masonry.”

“It closed up and snatched my sword away,” yelled Mantig the Screw, and he went busily off to find a fresh weapon.

“So your great chief,” I said to the needlewoman, “abandons you. That is his honor.”

“If I repeat a proverb, you will understand.”

She had spirit, this lady doctor.

“Oh, aye. He’ll run to fight another day. And when he does, he may be killed, or he may run again. But you are here and—”

“And in your power!”

I looked down. She could see my golden zhantil mask. She could not see my expression, as I said:

“Yes.”

Her head jerked back.

“What do you want of me?”

“There is a man sore wounded. I need your skills and your arts to attend him.”

The leem mask swiveled sideways. She regarded that luxurious banqueting hall where the blood stank rich and smoking upon the yellow napery, upon the floor, upon the bright tapestries. Bodies lay in grotesque positions.

“There are many who need my ministrations.”

“Probably. But this man, you will attend first.”

I held out my hand to assist her to rise, and she disdained that brown and clutching claw and stood up.

With a flick she adjusted the brown robe.

I pointed to her silver-banded balass box.

“I will carry that for you, sana.”

She laughed.

That startled me.

She laughed at my use of the honorific of sana, which gave her the honor due to a sage, a mistress, in the arts of healing.

But, natheless, I picked up the box which would contain her unguents and her acupuncture needles and the medicines in which she would be skilled. I guided her sedately over a few corpses and around the spilled blood and so brought her into the kitchens where Rondas the Bold lay.

“Your name, sana?”

“I am called Shula the Balm.”

“Well, Mistress Shula, here is your patient.”

“He is a Rapa!”

I bent my head to glare at her, the zhantil mask glittering.

“He is a Rapa. I would suggest you remove that vile silver leem mask before you attend him. He is likely to thrust a dagger through your guts if he sees that obscenity above him.”

Her hands, very white, very nervous, fluttered; then she began to unclasp the fastenings of the mask.

Well, even on Kregen you sometimes expect the ordinary, which is a foolish fault.

The capacious brown robes with their silver embroidery concealed and disguised her bodily form. I’d expected an apim woman.

I was wrong.

She was hiosmim. Oh, yes, her face bore resemblances to an apim face; but the pixie look, the width of the high cheekbones, the curve of the chin, the spacing of the eyes, all spoke eloquently of hiosmim blood. Her skin was white with a creaminess to the coloring vastly different from any chalk-white semblance. Her hair of a pale blue was confined in a silver band. About her clung an aura of calm, of competence, of that certain sureness of inner certainty that normally arouses complete trust.

In these moments her racial characteristics aroused in me only horror.

That such a woman, devoted, sure, blessed, should have been swayed by the cult of Lem!

But I would not allow doubt to enter my mind.

Or, if I did, it was to be refuted instantly by what I knew of the habits of the Lemmites.

Wordlessly, I pointed at Rondas.

At once, she opened her medical box and set to work.

“So much for his share of my agio!”

Jespar the Scundle crawled out from under a table and stood up. He chewed on a chicken bone. He was not the least whit abashed that he had not charged in with us and struck a blow. I, for one, could hardly fault him for that.

Shula the Balm looked up. Difficult, of course, to translate the facial expressions of one race into a meaning to another — did that wrinkling of the brow indicate anger, fear, contempt, amusement?

She said, “Tump. Hold this.”

Jespar jumped.

He had been a free tump, a mining man, and then he had been slave. His instincts had been sufficiently overlaid by discipline to make him instantly reach forward and do as he was bid.

The woman barely acknowledged him.

The “this” he was requested to hold was the hideously blood-smeared dart embedded in Rondas the Bold. Acupuncture needles festooned our comrade and, thankfully, all his pain was eased away. He closed his eyes as the needlewoman began with her sliver of knife on his wound.

As she worked with an exactitude I found pleasing, she spoke: “If I save this man I assume I have your promise of my life?”

I pondered this — oh, the answer leaped fully formed into my head at once, of course — but I had no wish to allow any thoughts of mercy to devalue her due recognition of her position. This was not the shameful attitude it might be thought to be in a company of knights errant — any persons who followed Lem the Silver Leem put themselves beyond the pale of civilization at a stroke...

Then: “Your life is of no consequence beside that of this man and of my comrades.” I could hear myself mouthing the words — and I refused to regard them as despicable — and I went on in that grating tone:

“But I am not in the habit of wantonly slaying little girls in white dresses or of offering up their hearts, still beating, to a filthy silver statue. You may perhaps live if you serve well.”

Her fingers did not quiver. But her head bowed a trifle lower under the onslaught of my words.

She said, “It is time. Help the tump.”

So with the keen knife easing the way, Jespar and I drew the cruel barb from Rondas.

His feathers were blood-spattered. The wound gaped.

“Hand me the box.”

Jespar jumped to obey.

She took out unguents, bandages, began to dress the wound with a skill I admired.

“The bleeding will stop very soon. I have removed all the detritus. But the dressings must be changed frequently—”

“You will be alive, Shula the Balm, to see to that.”

“I would suggest that you and your comrades bathe as soon as possible.” Suddenly she turned that pixie-like face up, and the tiny nose wrinkled. “You stink.”

“Aye.”

Footsteps on the flags of the kitchen heralded Pompino. As usual he was brilliant and heady, brushing up his whiskers, a fine foxy Khibil, master of the situation.

“They never knew what hit ’em!”

“Quite. I think Murgon merely evades his fate. The Lady Dafni?”

“A strange one, that. Oh, and she has stopped her eternal chatter for a space. She was confused. She resisted her rescue because of the golden zhantil masks.”

“I see.”

Pompino dangled his mask. The gold caught the lamplight, glimmering in that chamber of culinary splendor.

“The fanshos are tired, yet we can march back to the airboat. Can Rondas travel?”

I turned to the needlewoman.

“It would be better not to move him—” she said.

“Better, perhaps. But can we carry him safely?”

She hesitated.

I said: “I have conditionally promised this person her life, even though she is a Lemmite. She—”

“No lover of Lem should be allowed to live and breathe the same air as honest folk!”

Again, was that a shadow across her face, a minuscule flinching back? I could not fathom this doctor —

yet.

“Nevertheless, she will go with us to attend Rondas. Now, Pompino — are there more wounded?”

He grunted.

“Poor Faplon the Chuckle took a spear through the guts, and as he fell a sword half-removed his head.

And Nath Kemchug lost half his pigtail—”

“I hate to think of what befell the wight who did that monstrous deed!”

“Bits of him lie here and there.”

“As for Faplon the Chuckle — a pity. He was always cheerful, and a good Fristle.”

“Yes. Otherwise, apart from a few scratches, we were too fast for them, thanks be to Horato the Potent.”

True to their calling, our mercenary comrades now busily occupied themselves in collecting up all the plunder displayed on the tables and spilled onto the floor.

In a tremendous smother of white, Quendur emptied out a flour sack. He darted back into the main hall and there he would quickly stuff the flour sack with golden cups and dishes, silver knives, ornate candlesticks. Strom Murgon did not stint himself when it came to the good things of life — in this instance the lavish furnishing for his table.

“Those two hirelings of Murgon’s were not among the dead,” said Pompino. “I turned the bodies over with them particularly in mind. Chekumte the Fist and Dopitka the Deft could not have been here. I’m certain sure no one else escaped with Murgon, apart from a hairy Brokelsh with one arm hanging off.”

“Aye. He carried a leather sack. Murgon almost ran him down escaping through that devilish slit in the wall.”

Jespar the Scundle had, like me, received a liberal blessing of Rondas’s blood when the dart pulled free.

Now, as we went across to the sinks to wash, he looked nervous.

“My second cousin’s wife’s brother — Tangle the Ears. Masters — did you see a disgusting tump lying in his own blood among the corpses out there?”

Pompino laughed.

“No, Jespar.”

“Hmf,” sniffed Jespar. “It would be like him to be found dead drunk in the wine cellar.”

Our two girl varterists had found a splendid tapestry which they were arguing over.

Wilma the Shot said: “It should be cut lengthwise.”

“Not so, sister,” said Alwim the Eye. “Cut it across.”

“If you cut it across you will part the pictured peoples’ heads from their bodies.”

“But if you cut it down you leave almost all the gold thread in one half—”

“Maybe so. But it is more artistic—”

“Then who is to have the golden-heavy half?”

“Why,” said Wilma, cheerfully: “You may have the golden section, sister. The picture is the important thing.”

So, their argument settled in sisterly fashion, they chopped the priceless tapestry down the middle.

I wiped myself on a fluffy yellow towel and looked about.

“Time we were moving on, Pompino. I begin to fret over the airboat up aloft—”

“Agreed. We may have to thwack our rascals to make them move.”

“They’ll move.”

A very few words proved sufficient to convince our comrades that it was time to go. A party carefully carried Rondas on an improvised stretcher. After a last look around that chamber of death, we started our march back to the voller.

Shula the Balm walked with a lissom swing beside Rondas’s stretcher. She had applied unguents to bruises and stuck a few needles in furry hides, here and there, to ease the pain of wounds. But, mercifully so, we had suffered miraculously few injuries.

Jespar’s relative, Tangle the Ears, had not been discovered, drunk or sober. The little tump knew a straight way from the banqueting hall to the yard above. He mumbled something about generations of tumps coming here to pay their taxes to the Marsilus family, damned iniquitous taxes, he said, and we strode on feeling more and more confident.

Although we kept a sharp lookout we saw no sign of Strom Murgon.

Nothing Pompino or the crew had been able to do had opened the secret panel in the wall. No doubt dusty passageways led through the fabric of the building to a hidden doorway. By this time Murgon should be well away.

No one minded that too much.

That villain would run upon his fate soon enough.

For the time being he must be considered out of the game. We had rescued the Lady Dafni — again! —

and before long she would be reunited with Pando.

So up we went and entered the last corridor that would take us to the yard upon the roof.

The various unpleasant traps Jespar pointed out, we were thankful to avoid. We would have had a much harder journey of it this way, even, than we had going the tortuous route we had followed.

Two guards, Brokelsh both, lay on the stone, their hairy bodies slack in death.

At the far end of the corridor the opening glowed with a penumbra of light. Outside, the twin suns of Scorpio were rising, casting down their mingled streaming light upon the world of Kregen.

From the shadows a voice, hard and yet gasping, said: “Hold! Stand fast, or you are dead men!”

We had seen the shafts transfixing the bodies of the Brokelsh guards.

“Hai!” called Pompino. “It’s us! Hold fast your shaft, Larghos.”

“Quidang! You are well met—”

We hurried forward, alarmed by the hoarseness of Larghos’s voice.

He stood in the shadows of a groined arch, his bow lifted. As we approached he lowered the weapon.

“It’s this stupid wound I took when we snatched the treasure upon the quay. It bothers me.”