Masks of Scorpio (16 page)

Brisk, efficient, Pompino said: “We have a needlewoman with us, Larghos. A Mistress Shula. She will treat your old wound, even if she is a misbegotten Lemmite.”

Larghos did not look well. His face held a grayish cast I, for one, did not like.

“I welcome that, horter Pompino. There have been only those two Brokelsh who came by. No one else.

I own I am glad to see you.” He peered at the stretcher. “Rondas?”

“A bad stroke; he will survive. Let us all go along to the airboat.”

Cap’n Murkizon took a firm grasp on Larghos, supporting him, and as we covered the last few paces out to the suns shine, started to tell him of our adventures.

Out in the yard, with the early light, palest lemon and shimmering apple-green, suffusing the stones with a luminescence, we stopped.

We looked about, gaping.

There was no voller there waiting for us.

Pompino quelled the outcry.

He gestured widely, fingers stabbing upwards.

“What a pack of famblys!” He laughed, expansively. “The lady Ros heard Larghos the Flatch dealing with those two stupid Brokelsh. She has taken the airboat up to be on the safe side—”

Larghos pushed himself straight from the embracing grip of Murkizon’s arm.

“No, horter Pompino. No.” He wet his lips. “After I dispatched them I went back to the flying boat. It was still here, and the lady Ros was talking to the lady Nalfi—”

A buzzing arose then, of unease. Quendur stepped up.

“And Lisa the Empoin?”

Larghos shook his head.

“I did not see her. The lady Ros said she had ventured down a passageway again—”

“Again!”

“Aye. She was most wroth that you had forbidden her to accompany you. The lady Ros and she went down this passage and came back. Then the lady Lisa the Empoin went again. The lady Ros went after her as I came back to my post.”

“This I do not like,” quoth Pompino. He brushed at his whiskers; but the gesture was far removed from his usual confident flourish.

I looked up and about the morning sky. A few clouds offered some cover; I did not think they would have concealed a voller for the time I searched the sky.

No sign of the airboat — and no sign of Dayra.

In a hard and exceedingly unpleasant voice, Quendur the Ripper said: “Which way, good Larghos, did the lady Empoin take? Which particular passage?”

Larghos gestured.

“That one.”

Without another word, Quendur started off for the indicated passage leading from the yard at right angles to the one we had adventured down. Instantly, I was at Quendur’s side. Together, we plunged into the dimness.

A few slotted windows at the side were mostly blotted by choking festoons of spiders’ webs. A little light seeped through, mottling the dusty floor with ruby and vermilion.

Quendur’s sword snouted forward. His fist looked hard and knobbly, and the patterned light painted a trick upon his face, so that he looked like a puppeteer’s dangled nightmare. I paced him.

Shouts reached us as we moved along, distant at first, and as Quendur — recognizing those calls for help

— broke into a frantic sprint, growing louder every second. We found Lisa the Empoin neatly entrapped.

Cobwebbed spider strands engulfed her, strands cunningly interwoven with thongs and slender iron-linked chains. The whole lot had fallen upon her from the ceiling as she brushed through.

She saw Quendur and the color rose in her face.

Quendur put his hands on his hips and his sword angled up alarmingly.

“So, my lady, this is how you amuse yourself when I am away—”

“Stop jabbering, you great buffoon, and get me out! Oh, and there are spiders about as big as soup plates you would do well to avoid — or squash instantly.” She glanced to the side.

She’d squashed one of the creepy horrors, fairly pulping him. A thin yellowish ichor trailed from the broken body. The thing
was
as big as a soup plate.

As Quendur, tight-lipped, started to cut Lisa free, I peered around, sword and feet ready to pierce or squash.

“The chains—” she said. And then: “My love — I am—”

“Save your breath, Lisa the Empoin.”

“But, my heart–”

“You—” Quendur let rip a long groaning sigh. “You are the most obstinate of women!”

“Yes.”

“And you are right. I cannot break the chains.”

“There are no skeletons that I can see lying about,” I pointed out, helpfully. “So they did not expect to leave a victim entrapped here. Perhaps those two Brokelsh were patrolling this way—”

“Probably.”

“The chains—”

“I am going back to the yard,” I said. Before they had time to register their surprise or disapproval, I went on briskly: “If Cap’n Murkizon will lend us his axe—”

“Hurry, Jak Leemsjid,” Quendur said.

I hurried. Murkizon came back personally and hacked Lisa free of the chains. As she staggered forward into Quendur’s arms, the gallant Captain Murkizon said: “The notches in my blade are well bought for the sake of so fine a lady, aye, by the scabrous belly and verminous hair of the Divine Lady of Belschutz!”

“I will buy or obtain the finest axe for you, Cap’n Murkizon,” said Quendur. “And with it goes my thanks.”

He did not look at me.

I knew the unspoken thoughts seething away in Quendur’s mind, as they must soon seethe away in all my comrades’ skulls when they heard this tale.

Lisa cut that knot — thankfully.

“The lady Ros tried to make me return with her — and I would not. Quendur — I own sometimes I am headstrong and foolish — but—”

“You are,” quoth Quendur the Ripper, firmly.

We walked back along the passageway and Murkizon trod flat-footed upon a scuttling spider, and thought nothing of it. I swallowed and said: “Lisa — the lady Ros?”

“When I would not go back to the yard with her she said that the Lady Nalfi was probably more at risk than I was.

“She was perturbed, and I shall apologize to her, for I put her in a difficult position.”

“If she has returned in the flier.”

That meant Quendur had to explain our predicament to Lisa.

“Ros Delphor would never desert us.” Lisa spoke as firmly as Quendur. “I have talked with her, as she with me. She is a lady — oh, I know how we all laugh. But it is sooth. There must be another explanation for her absence...”

She stopped herself speaking then.

By Krun! Didn’t I know there could be another explanation! A dark, horrible and altogether unbearable explanation...

Pompino, twirling his whiskers, said, “I have not burned a temple for some time and I am beginning to feel chilly.”

Pando, bright, arrogant, hugely relieved, said: “I thank you again for the safety of the lady Dafni. I am at your disposal when it comes to burning the Lemmites’ temples.”

We’d marched down from Korfseyrie and met up with Pando’s force, flushed from their forced march.

We had slept off the effects of our adventure, we had eaten enormously, and Pompino was fretting to be up and about and doing.

Of course, I shared his views. But my concern of a father for Dayra fretted away at me.

Pompino scoffed at my fears.

“Ros Delphor can look after herself, Jak! Perhaps the airboat — wonderful though it truly be —

developed some defect and drifted off with the wind.”

“The lady Ros,” said Pando, “is a formidable lady, in all Pandrite’s truth.”

“So—” I began.

They wouldn’t hear of querulous hearts.

Larghos the Flatch was so down in the mouth we all guessed that his concern for the lady Nalfi weighed on him far more than the aftereffects of his wound. Shula the Balm treated him, so he would recover; he shared with me the agonies of not knowing what was befalling a loved one.

The camp we’d made in the woods served us well enough for the time we recouped our strength. Now Pompino, mindful of the long journey entailed in reaching the nearest likely site of a temple, itched to be off.

Rondas the Bold made a terrible scene when we told him he’d have to go along with Kov Pando’s party back to Plaxing.

“I do not skulk when there is work to be done, by Rhapaporgolam the Reiver of Souls!”

He appealed with Rapa fervor to Shula the Balm, his feathers whiffling, his beak snouting, his crest wild.

“If they tie you upon a beast so you do not fall off, you might go, Rapa. I would not answer for your life.”

“I do not ask you to, Lemmite! That commodity, precious though it is, is now back in my keeping.”

“So be it.”

Rondas the Bold, therefore, would come with us.

Nath Kemchug, a dour, hard, merciless Chulik, said, “If you fall off, Rondas, I will catch you.” Then, with a thumb along a tusk, glistening it up, he added, “And I’ll tie you back on so tight your eyeballs will pop.”

We were all glad that Rondas had recovered so speedily. He expressed his gratitude to us. In our turn we chaffed at him — for Rapas do, indeed, possess their own weird brand of humor — and the moment that might have become mawkish passed in amiable insult.

The crafty Ift, Twayne Gullik, spent only the briefest of times at the camp, and then he went back at once to Plaxing with his people, claiming that his duties called him.

Jespar stared after the cavalcade.

“And good riddance,” he said, unknowing that he was overheard.

Pompino and I, who had gone a little way off, ignored that. Tump and Ift — well, the up and the down, the dark and the light — and perhaps the twain never would meet.

Pompino started, suddenly, and he looked up with such an involuntary look of apprehension, my sword was halfway out of its scabbard before I, too, saw what had startled him.

Up there, floating in tight hunting circles, the giant golden and scarlet raptor of the Star Lords looked down upon us.

That bird was undeniably beautiful. Its golden feathers gleamed with a brilliance outshining mortal gold.

The scarlet of its coat of feathers emphasized that glitter of gold around its throat and eyes. The wicked black talons outstretched, scarlet tipped, golden tipped, raked down as though to seize us up and rend us to pieces.

The Gdoinye up there circled, his head tilted, surveying us. He was the messenger and spy of the Star Lords. They watched us, those superhuman near-immortal men and women, they watched us.

Pompino, I often fancied, must have fallen to his knees when first the Gdoinye appeared to him, and spoke, and gave him orders. Now he remained standing; but he remained stiff, quiveringly alert, receptive, a perfect tool in the hands of unknowable despots.

My own relations with the Gdoinye had been of an entirely different character — altogether on a coarser plane. My reactions and antics alarmed my Kregoinye comrade.

Both of us were well aware that no one else in our company could see or hear the messenger from the Everoinye.

The bird swung lower, cutting across the face of Zim, the giant red sun, and so turned himself into a wedge of blackness against the light. He volplaned out, turned, glinting in radiance, arrowed down for us.

“Scauro Pompino, known as the Iarvin!”

The Gdoinye’s hoarse croak reached us with clarity as he circled, hovering.

“Dray Prescot, Onker of onkers!”

“Aye, you rascally, injurious, supercilious bird of ill omen!” I roared back. And, in the old way, I shook my fist up at him.

He croaked a squawk that might have been a laugh.

“Jak! Jak!” Pompino fairly bristled with anxiety.

“We are on our own time now,” I said. “We choose to oppose Lem the Silver Leem because it appears a seemly thing to do. We know the Everoinye also oppose the Lemmites; but we were not sent here by the Star Lords—”

“Cease your stupid babble, Onker!”

I glared up at the bird. Pompino put a hand to his whiskers; but for some reason failed to brush them up in the old arrogant way.

“Jak!” He almost writhed in his alarm and embarrassment. Then he tilted his foxy head back and called up: “We obey your commands. We burn the temples of Lem — what—?”

“Yes, Pompino the Iarvin, there is yet more!”

“Certainly!” I bellowed up. “Certainly, there is always more! And what help do we ever receive from you?”

“
Jak!
”

“You do not understand the help you are given. You are human. I am not here to bandy words. I am here to warn you of a summons. Prepare yourselves.”

“Damned considerate of you!”

Well, it was, really, given the Star Lords’ usual endearing habit of plunking me down naked and unarmed in a devilish tricky spot to pick their hot chestnuts out of the fire.

The Gdoinye winged up, a blurring of gold and scarlet.

“Prepare for the Scorpion!”

His blunt head pointed up, those powerful wings shredded the air, in a smother of wingbeats he lifted away, dwindled to a dot against the brightness of the sky, vanished.

“Humph!” I said. I did not spit.

“Jak — you run hard upon a leem’s nest!”

“Oh, the Gdoinye and I have sharpened many a rapier together. I admit that talking to him is like saddling a zhantil — but, all the same, he has warned us.”

“I believe this will make our task, as it were, official in the eyes of the Everoinye. Thanks be to Pandrite the All-Glorious.”

“It was official enough for me before, by Chusto!”

The others in the camp were going about their duties without taking the slightest notice of us. The Star Lords were perfectly capable of putting the whole of Kregen under a spell if they wanted to, I did not doubt. That they did not do so, that they worked toward the fulfillment of their plans through fallible human tools like us, was all a part of their mystery. I did not think — then — that I would ever penetrate that mystery. I persuaded myself that it did not concern me. I refused to worry over it. By Vox! I had enough worries of my own, what with Dayra going off and Opaz-alone knowing where she was. All the same, there had in these latter days been a growing rapport between the Star Lords and myself I had viewed with interest — with unease, of course, and with confidence for the future.