Talons of Scorpio (11 page)
How a blood-stained switch changed hands
The problems of my family and particularly of Dayra had to be pushed aside — yet again. The Star Lords overlooked my actions here in Bormark, even if they had not directly commissioned Pompino and me. Because I had defied them in the past they had banished me to Earth for twenty-one years. In those years Dayra and her twin brother Jaidur had grown to maturity. Useless to harp on what might have been...
I found Constanchoin the Rod in a small, black-hung chamber, superintending the chastisement of a slave girl. The under-flunkey I dragged along by an ear had let me know that I was sealing my doom by my actions. But he led me where I wanted to go, even if he dragged along after, his ear stretching.
The slave girl, naked, hung suspended by her ankles from a cross beam. She was past the shrieking stage, and blood ran down to drip from her forehead into her hair and so onto the iron floor. The Rapa who, stripped to the waist, wielded the switch, halted his blow as I bundled in.
Two Rapa guards immediately rushed across, their spears ready to degut me. I threw the junior flunkey at them and took time to take the switch away from the Rapa and hit him a belt across the head. His beak bent. I kicked him as he went down, thus proving the grand chamberlain at least half-right when he’d omitted to address me as horter.
The two guards disentangled themselves from the flunkey and heaved up. The grand chamberlain was shrieking out something about kill him, you fools, kill him. They charged with their spears low. They’d have killed me, too, I believe, even before anything had been sorted out. As it was I whipped the thraxter out, swished left, cut right, ducked away, got inside the second spear and thrust.
Two Rapa guards lay on the iron floor, bleeding messily.
Three naked and chained girls at the side did not scream. But their eyes were as wide as the Sunset Sea.
No doubt they were next in line for punishment. There had been enough time since the grand chamberlain had summoned us to the kovneva for just the one girl to be chastised.
The tendril-like antennae growing from her forehead and shrouded by her soft dark hair looked limp and woeful. Her small pinched face with the bruised eyes and the full yet small mouth made me kick the Rapa switch-wielder again, hard, and say to him: “Be thankful you are still alive, dom.”
The only other person in the chamber, a little six-armed Och in a brown tunic, crouched beside the chained slave girls. Mutely, he handed me the keyring. I did not take it.
“Unchain them,” I growled, and then dived for the grand chamberlain who was attempting to scuttle out.
“C’mere, grand chamberlain,” I said, and lifted him up by his fancy silver-worked blue robe so that he squeaked. I stuck my ugly old beakhead of a face into his and said: “Where’s the kovneva?”
“I don’t know!” He chittered it out, swinging with his toes scraping the floor. I shook him.
“You summoned me to see the Kovneva Tilda. She has left the Zhantil Palace. She had left long before you spoke to me. So, dom, where is she?”
His eyes were popping. There was foam on his lips.
“I don’t know!”
I did not hit him, for that would have solved nothing. I looked at him sorrowfully. I cocked my head at the beam and dragged him across. Holding him with my left fist I used the thraxter in my right to slash the girl’s bonds. She fell into the arms of her three companions who, unchained, were ready to help in this impossible and undreamed of situation. They were girls of spirit, then, and not broken slave grakvushis.
The girls were all trembling, as was natural, yet with that quick summation of their characters I surmised they had not been slave long. One was a Sybli, one a Sylvie and the other apim. They were all pretty, and I sighed.
Constanchoin went upside down with some ease and I looked at the girls.
“Two of you tie his ankles to the beam.”
The Sybli with her childish face just smiled and went on bathing the girl who had been beaten. The Sylvie and the apim girl leaped up, eagerly sorted out fresh bonds, and fastened Constanchoin upside down. I half bent to stare into his engorged face.
“You know what is going to happen, grand chamberlain. But, of course, you won’t let it happen. You’ll tell me where the kovneva is.”
He was hysterical now, shattered by shock and fright.
But he still chittered out: “I do not know! A great crowd of Twayne Gullik’s Iftkin came and took the kovneva away. I was not told—”
I frowned.
This had the ring of truth. That Twayne Gullik... Maybe Pompino was right and the Ift was an out and out rogue.
The Sylvie picked up the bloodstained switch.
With the feeling a man gets when he realizes the bottom of his ship has been ripped out on a coral reef I saw that the situation had now overtaken me. What I had begun in so febrile a manner would be continued and probably finished by others with their own interests to slake. I bent again to Constanchoin the Rod.
“If you know, tell me. These girls will not be easy on you.”
“I do not know!”
“Well, where would Gullik most likely take her?”
“His kin have a castle at Igbolo, deep in the forest—”
The Sylvie whistled the switch around with a hiss and the grand chamberlain yelped although not touched. His blue robes hung around his head, but I felt sure the girls would remove the rest of his clothes before they started.
“Igbolo,” I said. “That is not much help.” Igbolo was like saying Greentree. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“I can take you there — I think.” He spoke with a rush, seeing a way out of his predicament. I wasn’t at all sure I could stop these poor girls once they’d started.
“What do you mean, you think?”
“The way is guarded by traps. It is lost in the forest. I have never been there—” He regretted saying that instantly. He tried to cover. “But I have been told.”
By this time I felt reasonably confident that he didn’t know where the kovneva was. She might be at Gullik’s Iftkin’s castle of Igbolo. But she might not be. Gullik would know for sure that the search would be prosecuted there.
“Anywhere else?”
“No! I don’t know — save me, save me, Horter Jak!”
I did not smile.
“If you insist on tying up girls and having them beaten painfully with a switch, you surely cannot complain if girls tie you up and reciprocate? Is there not justice in that?”
“As you love Pandrite, save me!”
“Horter,” said the Sylvie. “I do not know who you are; but I am growing tired of waiting.”
“We take turns,” said the apim girl.
“Of course, Natalini, we take turns. Only I go first.”
“You always do get first go at the men, Sharmin.”
“And this time it will be different, by Shiusas the Insatiable, vastly different.”
As all Kregans know, if anyone is cognizant of insatiability, it has to be the Sylvies, of whom most men are strangely ignorant — or, perhaps not strangely, seeing that they wish to remain on speaking terms with their own womenfolk. Or, so it is said.
Constanchoin fell into an incoherent mumble, interlarded with prayers and pleadings. The broken-beaked Rapa slumbered. The two guards lay in their own blood. The Och had vanished. There seemed to me nothing left here for me, except a difficult decision. Why did I have to become embroiled? I’d told this damned grand chamberlain that, hoisted with his own petard as he was, he could expect no other punishment than that which he had meted out. But was this a civilized action? It was not, certainly in many areas of Kregen. Just as I had decided — and, I might add, with some reluctance — to halt the girls in their revengeful beating after each had had a whack or two, the whole problem was terminated in an unsurprising and typical way.
The black-hung chamber echoed to the clash of iron-soled sandals on the iron floor and a mob of guards burst in.
Since I stood in front of the upside-down grand chamberlain hanging from the beam, all the newcomers would see of him would be his ankles bound up. They took as little interest in those as they did in the wounded and unconscious Rapas. Most of the guards were Fristles. They looked at the Sylvie.
I said in a hard voice: “Have you seen the kovneva, Framco the Tranzer?”
The cadade hauled up and looked at me. He recognized me.
“The kovneva? No, of course not. We had report of a disturbance, of a wild man — what’s going on, Horter Jak?”
“Why, only that that rogue of a Twayne Gullik has kidnapped the kovneva. As for the business here, your grand chamberlain was about to taste his own switch. But I think that may not be necessary now.”
The Fristle cadade peered around. He saw what had been going on. I readied myself for a bout of handstrokes; but what I’d said worried him far more than the plight of the grand chamberlain. It was not difficult to guess that Constanchoin had given Framco a hard time in the past.
“Gullik’s kidnapped the kovneva! You are sure? It is a most serious allegation.” Framco did not pull his whiskers. He looked competent, on a sudden, in his mail. “Forgon — cut down the grand chamberlain. Catch him before he falls.” To the Och, who ran in grimacing and ducking his head: “You, Nathamcar, see these girls back to their quarters.” To an ob-Deldar whose whiskers were dyed blue: “Anfer, take two men and guard them. I’ll question them, if ever I get around to it... Now, Horter Jak, perhaps you’d best tell me all about it from the beginning.”
“Gladly, if I knew what the hell was going on.”
Constanchoin, cut down, was carried past, moaning.
Framco said: “You’ll have to answer as to what has happened to the grand chamberlain. Although if he’s in the plot I’ll be the first to string him up again.”
At the time I found nothing unusual in the cadade’s immediate acceptance of my story. That there was strong animosity between him and Twayne Gullik was obvious, and that antipathy extended to the grand chamberlain. Also, Framco the Tranzer was no hired paktun. He came from Pando’s estates, and would be expected in the normal way to be loyal, given fair dealings. That he had been chosen to be the captain of the guard indicated something of his mettle.
The girls walked past, the antennae of the fanpi drooping as she was carried by two men.
The Sylvie, bold, stopped by me and looked up.
“You deprived me of my revenge, horter.”
I said: “You will be thankful, one day, that you did not take your revenge. When I see the kovneva I will buy you and your friends—”
She showed her teeth.
“I would not willingly be slave to you—”
“I do not keep slaves. I will manumit you all. That is a promise.”
Her face changed color.
“What is the name of the fanpi who was beaten?”
“Tinli, horter.”
“I shall remember the four of you, and see you are freed, for you can face nothing but pain here now. Tinli, Suli, Natalini — and Sharmin. I shall remember.”
“If you do, horter, then Shiusas the Insatiable will surely reward you.”
Framco said: “We have to find the kovneva first.”
“Aye. But where has Gullik taken her? And,” I said, for I was still unsure, “It could be he has merely taken her to another place of refuge...”
“That is a possibility, of course. But I know that rogue Gullik.”
“Suppose he mistrusted us?”
“Had you wished to kill the kovneva, I am sure you would have done so long ago, and run no further risks in bringing her into the Zhantil Palace. By Odifor! I may be wrong in this, but my whiskers tell me I am right!”
The smiling Sybli girl with her childish face turned as she passed. They are simple folk, the Syblians, but not as simple as they look.
“The mistress wanted to take me to the estate at Plaxing, if that helps, horter. She told me so last night.”
I looked at her, said thank you and she smiled, her babyish face rosy and now free from worry, for she, like any truly sensible person, might look into the future but refused to worry over it, unlike most of us.
“Tilda spoke to her last night, when she was supposed to be unwell.” I could hear the edge in my voice. “There has been a plot at work here.”
“Yes,” said Framco, agreeing. “But I do not think Gullik would take the kovneva to her estate at Plaxing.”
“You agree there is a plot. Tell me what you think has been going on.” For my money the cadade knew nothing, and Twayne Gullik had, following his name, gulled him. “You’d better send some of your men to make inquiries. A party of Iftkin with a chair or a coach may have attracted attention.”
The carriage Pompino and I had seen leaving might belong to the plot. When I mentioned it, Framco sent to make inquiries. Then we went off to find Pompino.
On the way through the corridors with scared slaves keeping out of the way, Framco told me that if there was a plot, as he now believed, he knew nothing of it. He’d always mistrusted the Ift from the day Pando took him on as castellan. No doubt Pando had his motives in the appointment; I could not guess what they were. Some of Pando’s estates consisted of entire stretches of forest. Maybe that was the answer.
We found Pompino and the rest of the people from
Tuscurs Maiden
fuming.
“Kept me waiting like some cur dog!” Pompino started off. “No formality, no courtesy—”
He quieted down when I cut in to explain what had happened. Then he broke out afresh.
“We’ll scour every street, every tavern, every hole and corner! Someone, somewhere, will know where the kovneva has been taken.”
“That,” I said, “will take time.”
“If only Mindi the Mad were here,” said Framco. I noticed that he’d started pulling his whiskers again. “She has the power. I am confident she would be able to spy out the kovneva’s whereabouts.”
“A witch?” demanded Pompino.
“A good witch, a female wizard, a sorceress, a seer, yes.”
“You trust her?”
“Oh,” said Framco the Tranzer, “no.”
Towards the hour of mid when we thought of taking a little light refreshment, one of Framco’s men reported back that a party of Ifts with three wagons had been observed leaving the Inward Gate, which led out into the hinterland.
