Scorpio Invasion (21 page)

“I Remain Doubtful. Still. And, yes, I do bring some bad news.”

I waited stoically.

What had happened was bad but nowhere near as bad as it could have been. The severe hold up of production of the materials for the silver boxes in Hamal coupled with the blackening of many of the boxes already installed in vollers and skyships meant a drastic reduction in aerial strength. The bad situation in Pandahem, where the Bloody Menahem continued their senseless and merciless attacks, drained aerial strength away to that theatre. A contingent had flown to Mehzta and I could not in all conscience object, for those fliers would be directly fighting Shanks.

My Guard Corps had, having become at last impossible to hold back, taken a gaggle of vorlcas and gone sailing off south.

“And there were no vollers in the fleet, Deb-Lu?”

“One.A small eight placer for emergencies.”

Contrary winds had driven my lads well off course. They’d struggled back and become embroiled in a fight with a small squadron of Shanks. I gave thanks the Fish Faces were in small numbers; their black-hulled fliers could dance rings around our vorlcas, dependent as the latter were on the breeze for forward motion. The fight ended indecisively and our fleet had landed to effect repairs. They would not take long, Deb-Lu said, to get airborne again.

“So that means the armada from Hamal will arrive first.”

Deb-Lu gave me their composition and numbers and I shook my head.

“This was what we did not want. Forty-five ships — h’mm. It may be needful, Deb-Lu, for you to contact Kapt Hamish ham Thanstrer.” I hated what I was saying, I detested the words as they fell from my lips. “I think it will be necessary to hold off the Hamalese Armada until all our ships can strike as one.”

By these words I was condemning myself to longer sennights of this hell.

And, of course, it wasn’t just me. If we wanted to gather all our forces to strike together then we’d all suffer, all of us here, suffer under the Opaz-forsaken lash of the Shanks, Djan rot ’em!

“
Grak!
Grak!”

The hateful word cracked out over the meaty sounds of whips and cries of pain. The thoughtless cruelty all about had driven many folk insane. The survivors worked and did what was commanded — and ate.

There is quite enough cruelty in two worlds. There is no need for me to belabor the point in my narrative, no need gratuitously to add to the catalogue of horrors poor suffering mankind and womankind must endure.

When you have seen two naked women, both mothers of young babes, fighting, clawing, scratching, biting, over a rotten fish head in the gutter, then, my friend, you do not lightly talk of horrors.

The Shank guards had evidently been chosen from those Fish Faces who by threatening gesture and the use of a few words of command in Kregish could keep control of the slaves and indicate their tasks. The dominant factor obsessing everyone was food. To control a populace into doing your bidding the plan is first to weaken them so that a revolt will be doomed before it has begun and then so to keep them half-starving and subjected that they will slave until they drop for a morsel to pass between their lips.

There were many, in truth, and I saw them, who simply refused to accept the situation, refused to work and so starved to death if they were not earlier shipped off to the Ice Floes of Sicce with a Shank trident through their guts.

Having a trade in your hands in Taranjin those days was like having a passport through hell to life.

Even so, Lao-Chan the Staver was summarily dispatched because he built one too many longbows that would not shoot true.

What Moglin the Flatch, our comrade Fristle Bowman, had said remained true. I caught a glimpse, one day when I was delivering a parcel of bowstaves, of a squad of Fish Faces trying to shoot in their longbows. They were making a sorry hash of the business. Shafts stuck in the log wall at the far end of the butts and precious few even stuck in the straw targets. I kept as quiet as a woflo and delivered the staves and so scuttled back out of the barracks. The building had once been a proud palace of a riffim noble.

That was the day’s work of the evening, I remember, when I called the Brokelsh, Bargrad the Pellin, the Fristle, Foke the Clis, and the apim, Nath the Rumpador, to meet in that dolorous little hut. These three, it seemed to me, were the most promising.

I told them an Armada was on its way. I had to arrange for a signal to be made to the Freedom Fighters outside Taranjin. On the Day, I said, on the Day of Deliverance, we must strike.

“The people will not rise,” said the Brokelsh in his uncouth way. His black body bristle looked gray. “They are broken in the ib.”

“That may be true. But the Shanks are not Pazzians. Already we have discovered little ways to trick them. If they can be shown to be fallible, the people will take heart.” I slammed a fist on my knee. “They must!”

“Yes,” spat the Fristle. “We trick them and steal food from the warehouses. But the costs are high.”

I said: “A good fire ought to help.”

“Burn the shints out.” Nath the Rumpador nursed a swollen jaw where the butt end of a Shank trident had smashed him. “Yes, I like that!”

We talked and argued and eventually decided to burn a certain barracks which housed a company of particularly unpleasant Schtarkins.

“It must look like an accident.” I sounded heavy and tired. “If these rasts suspect it was arson, sabotage—”

“The retribution will be frightful.” Nath the Rumpador nodded.

“We’ll fix it,” growled Bargrad the Pellin. “I’ll get old Palandi the Iarvin to design a device. He’s a sneaky Khibil, full of himself—”

“And much reduced, much reduced,” said Foke the Clis.

“Broken in the ib,” confirmed the Brokelsh. “But I will speak to him.”

Having settled that, I produced a half loaf, only a little moldy, and divided it up. I’d had that off a tray going past on a wagon.

Well, we burned the barracks.

A fine hullabaloo followed; but the incendiarism was put down to accident. For the next three days it rained hard. We did no more burning for a sennight, and then we burned a smithy where arrow heads were forged. That, too, given the danger of the fires, was put down to chance.

Because the Shanks couldn’t tell one person from another of the same race of diffs we were able to work some schemes that in any other context would not have been possible. I was able to join a work gang in place of somebody else. The Shanks simply counted how many of us there were in any one gang, and kept checking that number. By this means I and my companions could move about Taranjin relatively freely. We needed to get the word out and spreading that the Day was coming. And to be ready. By this means, also, I was afforded the opportunity to take stock of the Shank forces. They were formidable. Clearly, however, this was the bridgehead for an Invasion. The forces gathered in Taranjin were not of the size to resist a concerted attack delivered by even a small proportion of the strength we could muster. The problem was mustering that strength.

When I’d worked my way around to joining a group of apim armorers, I had the layout pretty well firmly fixed in my head. Shan-lao Ortyghan at first resented my presence. He ran the shop and he was well aware that if he did not produce what the Shanks required he’d get no food, or he’d be stuck through with a trident. He was a bulky apim, with a stomach shrunken away from its former protuberant glory.

He had lost the skills of Naghan the Hammer and I had to convince him I was a competent armorer in all branches of that abstruse science before he would accept me as a substitute for Naghan the Hammer. Then he became more friendly.

When I said I required a sword he just turned away.

When I persisted, he said: “Those Shank shints can count, you know.”

“So we cabbage a little metal from here and from there. You, Shan-lao Ortyghan, will provide enough good quality metal that the Fish Faces won’t miss for me to forge a sword.”

I will not go into the details necessary in the Convincing of Shan-lao Ortyghan the Armorer. Suffice it to say that he grunted out: “Very well, Prince Chaadur, we will cabbage the metal for you. And may the True Trog Himself bless our endeavors. For if we are caught—”

“We will not be. The Shanks can be fooled. Have we not proved that?”

“Aye.” He had to admit that, grudgingly. We could bamboozle the Fish Heads. It was risky; it was just about our only weapon at this time.

On a gray day of wind and rain and black clouds billowing a new reinforcement of Shank flying ships soared in from the sea. We counted the squadrons. There were five squadrons of thirteen ships each. Also, these ships were, again, of a different style from those which we were accustomed to see flying over Taranjin on patrols.

“By the Resplendent Bridzilkelsh!” swore Bargrad the Pellin, staring up with the rain beating on his pugnacious Brokelsh face. “The shints!More of ’em. That upsets the balance, Prince Chaadur!”

“Aye.”

The flying ships in their rigid lines through the bluster circled and lowered past the outskirts of the port, vanishing past the roofs, landing in the field allotted to them. This did, indeed, alter the balance.

The next time Deb-Lu contacted me, I’d have to make stronger representations through him to Drak, Emperor of Vallia, to release more vollers from the Vallian Air Service. Yes, very well, I knew they were committed and needed elsewhere. I’d just have to try to convince Drak that we needed them down here.

At this time, too, by cunning if simple appeals to the natural cleverness inherent in any Khibil’s opinion of himself, I’d stiffened up old Palandi the Iarvin’s resolve. In a pathetic attempt at the usual cutting superior manner of any Khibil, he said: “I have made the device, prince.” He showed me the little wooden box. I was at pains to admire his handiwork.

Truthfully, the thing was a little marvel. In the box a fruit would be connected at each end to rods which held a powerful twisted cord in rest. He’d suggested a gregarian, anything of a similar nature would have done, an orange, an apple, anything that would rot away. When the fruit rotted enough it released the cord which unwound like a spring. This struck sparks from a flint and toothed wheel. The sparks fell on the prepared tinder. The rest of the box was packed with combustibles. We had, therefore, if not a time bomb, then a timed incendiary device.

“Dondo!” I said, congratulating Palandi.

“Oh, aye,” he sniffed, brushing up his whiskers from which the red had faded to a dull gray. “She’ll burn ’em, may Bil the Khib frizzle ’em.”

The necessity was to select a fruit in the last stages of decomposition. Now, remember, food was so valuable, was so difficult to obtain, that to dedicate a whole fruit to our incendiarism was so altruistic as to be beyond credence.

“A fish head,” I said, firmly. “Any fruit is beyond our powers.”

“Even a stinking fish head,” grumped Foke the Clis, “will be difficult.”

So, and of course, in the event I donated a fish head out of a garbage pail outside a Shank barracks. You had to fight to get the garbage, too.

What with this scheme and that burning, this reconnaissance and that listing of forces, that horrendous time passed.

Through this period we discovered further ways of fooling and tricking the Shanks.

Shan-lao Ortyghan proved to be not only a fine armorer but an excellent engraver. He could produce the most wonderful patterns along a sword blade. When a party of Shank officers discovered examples of his work in a back room of the smithy they became, as Shan-lao expressed it: “Beside themselves with wonder and admiration of the workmanship.” Nothing would suffice but that they must have their own swords beautifully etched with patterns of fish and ships and clouds, and the whirling Celtic lines that made a blade an artifact of art and beauty.

“I’d a’ refused ’em,” said Shan-lao, bitterly, “but they’ll pay extra food.”

“Quite right,” I said.

“But, prince—?”

“You’ll need acid. Strong acid. You and your assistants will beautify the swords of the Fish Faces.”

Here I was piercing two birds with a single shaft.

First of all, if we could get out hands on acid, then Palandi the Iarvin could use the method of having acid bite through a membrane for a timing device instead of a rotten fish head.

In the second place, as I said to the armorer: “You will execute the most wonderful designs upon the blades of the Shank weapons. If it is to become a fashion with them, then we’ll use that to our own advantage.”

“It sits ill with me, prince, to pander to a damned Fish Face.”

“Assuredly. You will, good Shan-lao, cut the patterns deep. Very deep. The color will conceal the depth the acid has bitten. You see?”

“Oh, aye, I see. And when the swords break in a fight, they’ll march around for me and stick a trident through my guts.”

“When the fight happens, we’ll all be in there fighting. If we don’t we don’t deserve to succeed. When we’ve scored the victory, the depth of the acid will not be an issue. Of course, if we do not win on the Day, then little will matter thereafter.”

“By the Divine Tears of the True Trog Himself! You speak sooth there!”

“Then let the acid bite deeply, Shan-lao, and curse all the Shanks down to their hellish hell.”

“Quidang to that, prince!”

In a similar fashion I persuaded a lithe rascal who swore by Diproo the Nimble-fingered to go along with a scheme I’d concocted in a moment, I suppose, of divine madness.

This Luan-Chi the Flexible joined Bargrad the Fellin and myself in an argument over a suitable use to which we might put Palandi’s incendiary device.

“Barracks are fine,” I said. “But if we burn a food warehouse—”

Luan-Chi
, a Thanko with a mop of dusty dark hair and the long and drooping nose of his race, said quickly: “That would not be clever.”

“I’d burn the lot of ’em,” growled Bargrad in his pugnacious uncouth Brokelsh way. “But Luan-Chi speaks true, prince. If we destroy food we reduce the amount the Bolsted-rotten Shanks will give us.”

“Anyway,” amplified the thief, “it is reasonably difficult to burn.”